Daily Inspiration Quote by Hans Urs von Balthasar

Balthasar is accusing modernity of an almost strategic cynicism: we demote beauty from something real to something cosmetic so we can stop owing it anything. “No longer dare” implies fear, not ignorance. Beauty, in his view, isn’t a pleasant add-on to life; it carries a claim, even a demand. If beauty is true - if it’s more than subjective taste - then it implicates us. It asks for reverence, attention, maybe even conversion. That’s risky in a culture trained to treat every value as negotiable.

The line’s bite is in the phrase “mere appearance.” He’s not critiquing appearance as such (Balthasar famously defends the radiance of the form); he’s critiquing the reduction of beauty to surface-level packaging. Once beauty is only styling, it becomes disposable: trend-driven, market-tested, scrolled past. You can “dispose of it” the way you dispose of an ad campaign, an aesthetic phase, or a curated identity. The subtext is moral: a society that can’t handle beauty’s authority will prefer irony, utility, or shock, because those modes don’t require surrender.

Context matters. Writing as a 20th-century Catholic theologian after two world wars and amid rising technocracy, Balthasar is pushing back against a theological and cultural climate that treated beauty as suspicious, distracting, or nonessential compared to ethics and efficiency. His deeper agenda is to rehabilitate beauty as a gateway to truth and goodness. Take beauty seriously, he suggests, and you might have to take reality - and God - seriously too.