Tranquility
is a little child asleep,
a clear, calm sky,
the softly falling snow;
the space between all heartbeats
in which love
reminds the anxious heart:
"Be still and know."
Aesthetics is concerned with form, shape, composition, expression, and seeing forms AS THEY ARE. Just as the artist is "inspired" and filled with enthusiasm, so too those who SEE are seized with the divine spirit. What is seen is the doxa (glory) of the form, but this glory is the glory of being. Balthasar argues that the mystery in such beauty is the interruption of the eternal into the material in such a way that one can speak of the event of beauty, the entrance of the numinous into this world. To see beauty is to be overcome by the glory that breaks out of this person, this poem, this picture, this flower... We are confronted by the sense of its Otherness.
~ from THE THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS OF HANS UR VON BALTHASAR by Louis Roberts