How could one hope to understand the least thing about Paul if one did not first acknowledge the fact that in Damascus he has seen then highest beauty, just as the prophets has seen it in the visions that called them forth? That vision then led Paul to sell all else for the sake of the one pearl - to sell all worldly and divine wisdom, all privileges within God's Holy People - in order to perform his ministry with joy as a "poor man of Yahweh". Both the person who is transported by natural beauty and the one snatched up by the beauty of Christ must appear to the world to be fools, and the world will attempt to explain their state in terms of psychological or even physiological laws (Acts 2:13). But they know what they have seen, and they care not a farthing what people may say. They suffer because of their love, and it is only the fact that they have been inflamed by the most sublime of beauties - a beauty crowned with thorns and crucified - that justifies their sharing in that suffering.
Hans Urs Van Balthasar; The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics; Volume I: Seeing the Form; pg 33
