that which amplifies the good and the true
Beauty is now seen as entirely subjective, no longer amplifying what is true and that which is good. Artists are no longer concerned with some perceived connection between imagination and the nature of the random and unknowable world as it is. Instead, they’ve become metaphysicians prodding us towards visual experiences exploring aesthetic satisfaction. Hence, the abstraction and ‘shock art’ that fills contemporary art museums. Modern art has all but abandoned the pursuit of beauty. Instead, it is primarily about making a statement. And all statements are equally valid as long as they do not question the new dogma, that is the over-arching idea of “man as the autonomous ruler of himself, able to define right and wrong according to what he chooses.”1Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction
« Back to Glossary IndexBeauty is the word that shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing that the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an unconstrained 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, “The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics,” Volume 1, “Seeing the Form,”