Benedict XVI and Beauty

From von Balthasar:

"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 splendour around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another. Beauty is the ... one without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which ... has bid farewell to our new world, leaving it to its avarice and sadness."

In former times the liturgy, too, "refused to understand itself" apart from beauty: beauty was taken for granted. The fact that the holy liturgy has - in broad terms - been a casualty of the modern exaltation of ugliness is for Benedict XVI a matter of grave concern.

The Iron Triangle of "Truth-Beauty-Goodness" is well-understood by B-16. Perhaps that understanding will be the legacy of this Pope.

HT: The Cafeteria is Closed