Our unending delight is found in the beauty of God, in His presence to our souls. Yet beauty is also part of the journey, not just the destination. Hans Urs von Balthasar devoted his life’s work to showing how God’s revelation to us has an aesthetic character that cannot be ignored. Through revelation, God made Himself known to us in His Son and in His Church.
Von Balthasar writes,
If God wishes to reveal the love that he harbors for the world, this love has to be something that the world can recognize, in spite of, or in fact in, its being wholly other.
In other words, God had to make His beauty visible to the material eye in order to draw that eye back to the spiritual. God literally lured us back to Himself with the beauty of Christ — a beauty unlike any of the ancient world; a beauty whose chief symbol is the cross. Von Balthasar wrote volume after volume tracing this “Christ-form” of beauty through history, culture, Scripture, and the spiritual life.
~ On Beauty: A Message to Its Religious Despisers by Deal W. Hudson
