Balthasar (1905-1988): “No longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man. We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it.”
Donoghue (1928-2021), quoting Balthasar: “The elimination of aesthetics from theology and from the whole Christian life has entailed ‘the expulsion of contemplation from the act of faith, the exclusion of seeing from hearing, the removal of the inchoatio visionis from the fides, and the relegation of the Christian to the old age which is passing away.’”
I’m pretty sure I don’t understand the third item in Balthasar’s lament, but to me it seems similar to the idea that one’s Christian faith has been severed from an objective truth that makes the faith reliable.