“Beauty is the word that shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach since only it dances as an uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another. Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness. No longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man. We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past—whether he admits it or not—can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”
~Hans Urs von Balthasar
Of what use is Wonder, that simple response to the apprehension of the beautiful? For that matter, what is beauty itself? How might it be defined, predicted, or quantified? What is it that so arranges the form, color, taste, aroma, sound, harmony, memory, texture, symbol, and placement of things, that in their coalescing we deem them to be as such—beautiful? There are few places so dark that the whisper of beauty cannot penetrate them; her notes are found in the wrinkles of weathered cheeks and in the faces of flowers hidden where no explorer has yet set foot. Beauty is the echo of her Creator, the accompaniment of the good and the true which baffles categorization or separation from her infinite source. We rightly call a thing beautiful when we perceive through it something of our God who is beautiful.
It is, as Urs von Balthasar observes, the way of the modern notion to pass over beauty—to write it off as a distraction or a waste. This dearth of wonder is the murderer of prayer because it moves us to spurn the wonder of simply being with the Wonderful, demanding instead a transactional profit or detached understanding. Likewise, it dries up love because it stands at a distance, seeking the profitable merits of a thing rather than the reward of the thing itself. Beauty, however, refuses to be so commodified or manipulated; it demands the response to wonder that can only come when we dare experience its mystery. To love we must encounter, to pray we must behold—tasting and seeing that our God is good and true, and in the union of these two, altogether beautiful.
In a Mirror Dimly 