Beauty will save the world
How Beauty Discloses Reality—From Balthasar’s Glory and Goethe’s Living Form to Pieper’s Leisurely Gaze, and What Their Wisdom Reveals in an Age of Synthetic Imitation.
I was recently reading an irreverent meditation of sorts on AI-generated art from The Oatmeal, which of course led me to a reflection on the nature of beauty. My three go-to thinkers on this topic invite us to ponder beauty not as an ornament of life, but as a path into truth and goodness. Hans Urs von Balthasar, a 20th-century Swiss theologian, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the 18th-century German poet and naturalist, and Josef Pieper, a modern Thomist philosopher, each saw beauty as a gateway to something different, an epiphany to be seen and received. Their perspectives converge in a luminous insight: that genuine beauty gives us more than aesthetic pleasure; it calls us toward what is true and what is good. Yet they also diverge in emphasis and language, one speaking of divine glory, another of nature’s symbolic language, and another of the leisure and purity needed to perceive clearly. Let us walk with each thinker in turn, seeing through their eyes how beauty is necessary for humanity and perhaps why AI-generated art has a strange uncanniness to it.
Hans Urs von Balthasar: Seeing the Form and the Glory
Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) places beauty at the very heart of Christian understanding. He lamented that the modern world has lost the courage to affirm beauty, treating it as a frivolous mask, a “mere appearance” easily discarded. Balthasar believed this loss is dire, because beauty, truth, and goodness are inseparable “sisters.” In his words, “beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness,” and if we banish beauty, she “will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along”. In other words, when we sneer at beauty as superfluous, we do mysterious harm to our grasp of truth and our capacity for goodness. Balthasar even warns that “whoever sneers at [beauty’s] name … can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love”, suggesting that without openness to beauty, the heart grows incapable of deeper connection and communion.
At the core of Balthasar’s philosophy is the idea of form and glory. He uses the term “form” (or Gestalt) to mean the visible shape of something, that is, the pattern or appearance by which we recognize order and meaning. But this form is radiant with an inner truth. In theological terms, the splendor shining through a beautiful form is the glory of God. Balthasar famously wrote, “the form of the beautiful is the glory of God (kabod, doxa) whose splendor seizes and enraptures”. When we truly encounter something beautiful – whether a work of art, a noble action, or the face of a loved one – we behold a form that mediates a deeper glory. There is a visible aspect (form) and an invisible depth (glory) united in the experience of beauty. In Balthasar’s view, this twofold structure of beauty reflects the Christian belief that the infinite splendor of God became tangible in the finite form of Christ. Thus, all earthly beauties are finite hints of an infinite glory. They beckon us, through delight, toward what is beyond themselves. We do not possess beauty by analyzing it to death; we behold it. Balthasar emphasizes a stance of reverent perception, a loving gaze, rather than aggressive scrutiny. “Form is comprehended by ‘beholding,’ while splendor is understood by ‘being enraptured,’” he explains. In this beholding, we experience what he calls “the glory of the Lord” shining through creation’s forms.
In Balthasar’s perspective, then, beauty is far more than subjective taste. It is a transcendental, a property of Being itself like truth and goodness, all of which “penetrate each other.” To encounter beauty in the world is to feel, however faintly, the splendor veritatis: the splendor of Truth and the warmth of the Good. Thus beauty has an indispensable role: it encourages us toward the fullness of reality. Balthasar’s writing has a passionate, urgent tone on this point, so much so in fact I read his “Heart of the World” every Holy Week with tears streaming down my face. He saw a culture in danger of cynicism, no longer trusting Beauty and thereby unhinging the True and the Good. By reuniting these sisters, by “seeing the form” with an attentive and childlike awe, we rediscover a path toward faith and love. Beauty, for Balthasar, is not a luxury but a lifeline: a flash of Divine glory that can wound us with longing and joy, awakening us to desire what is true and good in themselves. In his theology of beauty, one could say the beautiful is the visible glory of God, inviting us to taste and see that ultimate Reality is Love.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: The Symbol of Metamorphosis
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) approached beauty as a poet who was also a scientist of life. Famed for his literary works like Faust and for scientific studies such as The Metamorphosis of Plants, Goethe had a holistic vision of nature and art. He believed that beauty is the revelation of deeper truth through a living form. In a striking maxim, Goethe wrote, “Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws which without this appearance would have remained eternally hidden from us.”. In other words, what we find beautiful in the world – the curve of a flower, the colors of a sunset, the harmony of a well-crafted poem – is not arbitrary. It is the shining-through of something True. Nature’s secrets, otherwise concealed, “manifest” themselves in the language of beauty. This idea resonates with the ancient notion that the world speaks to us in symbols.
Symbol was a key concept for Goethe. He distinguished a genuine symbol from a mere allegory. An allegory is a one-to-one code (this rose means love, for example); it points beyond itself in a fixed way. A symbol, however, is alive: it presents itself for what it is, yet in its very presence it hints at something more. Goethe described true symbolism as “the specific [particular] represents the general, not as dream and shadow, but as a living-momentary revelation of the ineffable.”. In a symbol, the concrete thing (a rose, a stone, a human gesture) is itself fully and at the same time reveals a deep universal truth or idea – but it does so indirectly, by being authentically itself. For Goethe, the symbol arises from “profound feeling” and “seems to stand only for itself and yet is profoundly significant” of the ideal it embodies. A classic example might be a flower in one of Goethe’s poems: he doesn’t treat it as a code for an abstract concept, but by depicting it vividly and lovingly, the reader intuits a meaning beyond the literal. The beauty of the symbol is that it communicates truth through its form, not by stepping outside of it. This idea allowed Goethe to see works of art and natural phenomena as epiphanies – moments where the visible form and invisible meaning coincide. Beauty, then, is not a surface gloss; it is the signature of truth, “a welcome guest everywhere” that makes the truth attractive and accessible to us.
Goethe’s fascination with metamorphosis deepened this perspective. In his botanical studies, he observed that a plant’s disparate parts (leaf, petal, stamen, fruit) are all variations of a single underlying form. The entire life of a plant is a metamorphosis – a developmental unfolding of one form into many shapes. He posited an archetypal plant (Urpflanze), an ideal pattern that expresses itself in all botanical forms. What does this have to do with beauty? It means Goethe saw unity in variety, lawfulness in growth. A blossom’s delicate beauty is meaningful because it reveals the inner law of the plant’s life. The endlessly transforming shapes in nature are like a flowing script, spelling out an inner order. To truly see a plant (or any natural thing), Goethe felt one must employ “exact sensory imagination” – a contemplative observation that is both scientific and artistic. This involves a receptive stillness and intuitive insight, much like an artist beholding a scene. In such observation, the outward beauty of metamorphosis leads the mind to an inward truth: a symbolic truth that nature’s processes are purposeful, coherent, and connected to our own life. Goethe even extended this idea to the human realm. In his poetry and literature, characters and images often undergo transformations, suggesting that human life itself is a metamorphosis guided by ideals like the “Eternal Feminine” (which, at the end of Faust, draws the hero upward). Beauty, for Goethe, has thus a double aspect: it is morphological (we perceive the harmonious form, the metamorphic pattern) and symbolic (we intuit through it a higher meaning or law).
While Goethe’s language is less explicitly theological than Balthasar’s, it is spiritual in its own way. He often found in nature a living presence that educates the soul. To take delight in the beauty of a leaf or a cloud was, for Goethe, to receive a quiet lesson in truth. “Everything is a leaf,” he famously wrote of plants – a poetic way to say that one simple form underlies the diversity of creation. Likewise, one might say everything true is also beautiful, in Goethe’s worldview, because only through the manifestation (appearance) can we grasp the hidden principle. He invites us to approach beauty with a certain reverence, as one would approach a mystery. Rather than dissecting a phenomenon in a utilitarian way, we are asked to behold it as a symbol that can open the heart. In this approach, beauty is the path of insight. It trains us in what Goethe called Anschauen, a deep seeing. We begin to perceive the “secret natural laws” at play and to sense our kinship with the rest of creation. The convergence of art and science in Goethe’s life testifies that beauty bridges the intuitive and the intellectual. It is the way truth incarnates itself to our senses. If we forgo this path – if we reduce a rose to a chemical analysis or a poem to a didactic message – we lose the wholeness of meaning. Goethe’s vision of beauty calls us to restore our capacity for wonder, to let each beautiful thing speak its truth in its own language. In that attentive wonder, we find that beauty is a teacher of truth and a wellspring of joy.
Josef Pieper: Leisure, Clarity, and the Gaze of Love
Josef Pieper (1904–1997), a German Catholic philosopher, approached beauty from the angle of human experience and virtue. Writing in the mid-20th century, Pieper was concerned that modern hyperactivity and utilitarianism were dulling our ability to see reality. In his classic book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, he argued that true knowing requires a receptive stillness – what the ancients called scholé (leisure). Pieper extends this insight to beauty: to appreciate beauty, we must contemplate it, not grasp at it. He describes leisure as “a form of stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still, cannot hear”. In other words, beauty has something to tell us, but we can catch its message only in a state of open, unhurried attention. When our eye “simply looks” at a rose, neither analyzing nor exploiting it, we perform a kind of sacred reception. We allow the rose to shine in its own glory. This “receptive understanding, contemplative beholding, and immersion in the real” is exactly what Pieper means by leisure. It is an attitude of clear seeing unclouded by the will-to-use or the anxiety of constant busyness.
Pieper, drawing on the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and the tradition of the transcendentals, affirms that real beauty is tied intrinsically to truth and goodness. He echoes the definition of beauty as “the glow of the true and the good radiating from every ordered state of being”. Here, Pieper uses the term clarity (from Latin claritas) to describe the radiance that beautiful things have. It is not a superficial dazzle, not “the patent significance of immediate sensual appeal,” but a more profound illumination. When something is beautiful, it “glows” with meaning – the truth and goodness of it shine out as a kind of inner light. A common example is how a virtuous act can strike us as beautiful: we see the goodness in it, and that recognition is experienced as radiance. Or consider a well-crafted chair: its beauty lies not only in pleasing shape, but in the rightness of its form (true to its purpose) and the goodness of its being (it fulfills what it should be). Radiance, or clarity, is “the essence of beauty,” Pieper would say. It engages both our senses and our spirit. We are attracted by the appearance, but what holds us is the encounter with the thing’s reality shining through that appearance.
An important aspect of Pieper’s teaching on beauty is the moral and spiritual condition of the observer. He insists that a certain purity of perception is needed. “Only those who look at the world with pure eyes can experience its beauty,” he writes. This purity is not something narrow or prudish; it means a self-forgetful openness, an unclouded vision, a sort of humility. A person driven by selfish desires or jaded by cynicism will see only surfaces or use things as means to an end. But one who has a “chaste sensuality” – who can take delight in what is seen or heard for its own sake – gains the capacity to truly perceive beauty. This idea connects to Pieper’s broader point that temperance, or self-mastery, actually “creates beauty” in the soul and even in one’s bodily presence. A pure heart can see the world with wonder; a cluttered heart cannot. In practical terms, Pieper is suggesting that our ability to see beauty is linked with virtue and grace. It is, in a sense, a gift that must be received in stillness and humility. Think of how children marvel at simple things – their eyes are fresh, unburdened by utilitarian concerns. We too, says Pieper, must cultivate a leisureliness and clarity of soul to apprehend beauty in depth.
Pieper’s perspective converges with Balthasar’s and Goethe’s in affirming beauty as essential. He notes that in the ancient and medieval view, “without beauty the ancient world refused to understand itself”, whereas our contemporary world has largely “bid farewell” to beauty, to its own detriment. In Pieper’s gentle but penetrating prose, one hears an invitation to recover a sense of festivity and awe. “Leisure lives on affirmation,” he writes, on a “lingering gaze of the inner eye on the reality of creation.” This leisurely gaze is celebratory: it says “Yes” to the world as something inherently good and beautiful, not just as raw material for our projects. Pieper even connects beauty to celebration – the highest form of leisure – noting that in festivals we decorate, sing, and adorn precisely to honor the goodness of existence. Ultimately, for Pieper, beauty is a life-giving visitation. It sparks joy, it instills quiet, and it nourishes the spirit with truth. In a culture of “total work,” making space for beauty brings sanity. It re-centers us on what truly matters: the givenness of the world and the gift of being. To behold beauty is to practice a kind of contemplative love toward reality, acknowledging that being is good and worth delighting in. This, Pieper implies, is at the very root of culture and knowledge. Without that affirming, clear-eyed contemplation, our world of restless productivity becomes barren. With it, even a moment of noticing the “exquisite natural work of art” in a hovering wasp can become an encounter with truth and goodness.
Beauty as a Path
Despite their differing contexts, Balthasar, Goethe, and Pieper share a profound agreement: beauty is a path to the very core of reality. All three reject the idea that beauty is merely subjective or a trivial amusement. Instead, they see it as a means of revelation. In Balthasar’s theological language, beauty is a “transcendental” that is one with truth and goodness, a vital way in which Being speaks to us. Goethe, from his humanistic and scientific angle, likewise upholds that beauty reveals “secret laws” of nature and thus guides us to understanding. Pieper explicitly calls beauty “the glow of the true and good,” underscoring that it radiates objective value and meaning. For all three, then, beauty has an epistemic role: it helps us know. It is evidence of something (be it God’s glory, the order of nature, or the truth of Being). This is a notable convergence: at root, they would all nod to the formula that beauty is the splendor of truth.
Another convergence lies in the demands beauty makes on the beholder. Each thinker, in his own vocabulary, stresses the importance of receptivity. The beautiful cannot be seized by force or dissected without loss. Balthasar speaks of beholding and allowing oneself to be enraptured by glory – a stance of surrender and awe rather than control. Goethe, with his idea of the symbol, requires the reader or observer to “see the general in the particular” intuitively, which calls for patience, empathy, and imaginative insight. Pieper’s language of leisure and purity of heart is all about making oneself open – becoming still, clearing away self-interest, so that beauty may “voice” itself to us. In all cases, there is a sense that beauty approaches us as a gift. We receive it passively before we can analyze or use it.
The three thinkers converge in suggesting that our capacity to encounter beauty is linked with moral and spiritual qualities: humility, purity, attentiveness, courage to acknowledge greatness. Indeed, they might agree that the inability to see beauty is not a mark of sophistication but a kind of blindness or even dysfunction of the soul. As Balthasar dramatically put it, a world that can no longer affirm beauty will eventually be unable to affirm anything of value, even love. Pieper would concur, having noted that loving appreciation is prerequisite to knowing the full truth of anything. Goethe too would likely warn that a cynical eye misses the living meaning in phenomena and ends up in a dead world of “half-truths.”
Beauty in the Age of the Machine
So where does that leave The Oatmeal’s comic about AI art? His absurdly drawn half lament, half satire? Recall, in it, he plays with the absurdity of machines generating “art” from statistical patterns of human work: images that look beautiful but feel hollow. His tone is humorous, but his intuition is deadly serious: something essential is missing. The comic’s protest is not against technology itself, but against a world where imitation begins to masquerade as inspiration.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Josef Pieper would each recognize this disquiet.
Balthasar would see the loss of glory. For him, true beauty is form radiant with inner splendor—a visible surface that discloses invisible depth. AI art mimics the form but not the glory. It offers the silhouette of meaning without the light. When beauty is severed from truth and goodness, it decays into surface, into ornament, into noise. What The Oatmeal feels is not nostalgia but metaphysical hunger: the ache for radiance that cannot be manufactured.
Goethe would see the loss of life. His aesthetics of metamorphosis depend on the living process by which form unfolds and reveals its inner law. The algorithm, though capable of astonishing synthesis, does not grow. It transforms data, not being. Its blossoms are pressed and perfect, but lifeless. Goethe’s artist participates in nature’s own creativity—seeing, waiting, discerning. AI’s art, by contrast, is an echo of appearances without breath or becoming.
Pieper would see the loss of leisure—the contemplative space where beauty can be received as gift. The machine never beholds; it only calculates. But the greater danger lies in our own imitation of that restlessness. In treating art as instant output, we lose the stillness required for delight. Pieper’s warning rings true: a culture that cannot be silent before beauty soon forgets what beauty is.
And yet, all three would also recognize the strange grace of this moment. Counterfeit beauty can sharpen our appetite for the real. When imitation floods the world, discernment awakens. The Oatmeal’s comic, in its wry exasperation, performs a kind of negative theology of aesthetics: by naming what beauty is not, it helps us remember what it is.
For Balthasar, this remembering is a call to behold once more the form of glory—the radiance of Being itself, revealed even in the ordinary. For Goethe, it is an invitation to see the living law behind appearances, to recover the symbolic depth of nature. For Pieper, it is a reminder that contemplation—unhurried, humble, grateful—is the only posture by which Beauty can be known.
Perhaps that is beauty’s final secret in the age of the machine: it cannot be automated. Only the human heart, still and receptive, can behold the world until form and glory meet again, until the true radiance of reality as it is shines through.
In other words, “Beauty will save the world.”