"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"
About this Quote
Beauty, for von Balthasar, is not decoration but a moral and metaphysical organ: the capacity to recognize meaning without immediately trying to own it. His key term, "disinterested", borrows the old aesthetic idea that genuine contemplation is free from grasping. You can hear the polemic inside the elegance. He is arguing that the ancient world (read: classical philosophy and Christian tradition) treated beauty as a condition of self-understanding, a way to see reality as intelligible and worth reverence before it is useful.
The line about beauty "imperceptibly and yet unmistakably" bidding farewell is a sharp diagnosis of modernity's self-image. We don't announce the banishment of beauty; we simply reorganize life so that what cannot be quantified, leveraged, or commodified becomes embarrassing. Beauty exits quietly because our categories no longer make room for it. What replaces it is "a world of interests" - not curiosity or concern, but interest as stake, incentive, ROI. The phrase is nearly economic in its chill.
"Avarice and sadness" is the sting: when every object is filtered through appetite, nothing can satisfy; when everything is instrumentalized, nothing can console. Von Balthasar wrote in a century that watched politics, technology, and markets claim total competence. His intent is not nostalgia for marble statues but a theological warning: a culture that cannot contemplate will struggle to worship, to love, even to think clearly. Beauty, in his framing, is the last defense against a life lived entirely as acquisition.
The line about beauty "imperceptibly and yet unmistakably" bidding farewell is a sharp diagnosis of modernity's self-image. We don't announce the banishment of beauty; we simply reorganize life so that what cannot be quantified, leveraged, or commodified becomes embarrassing. Beauty exits quietly because our categories no longer make room for it. What replaces it is "a world of interests" - not curiosity or concern, but interest as stake, incentive, ROI. The phrase is nearly economic in its chill.
"Avarice and sadness" is the sting: when every object is filtered through appetite, nothing can satisfy; when everything is instrumentalized, nothing can console. Von Balthasar wrote in a century that watched politics, technology, and markets claim total competence. His intent is not nostalgia for marble statues but a theological warning: a culture that cannot contemplate will struggle to worship, to love, even to think clearly. Beauty, in his framing, is the last defense against a life lived entirely as acquisition.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
More Quotes by Hans
Add to List
