The Guardians of the Beautiful

As the last transcendentale, the beautiful guards the others and sets the seal on them: there is nothing true or good, in the long term, without the light of grace of that which is freely bestowed. And a Christianity which went along with modernity and subscribed merely to the true (faith as a system of correct propositions) or merely to the good (faith as that which is most useful and healthy for the subject) would be a Christianity knocked down from its own heights. But when the saints interpreted their existence in the light of God's greater glory, they were always the guardians of the beautiful.

—Hans Urs von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, Vol. 4: The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity (1989)