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.

Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988), a Swiss Catholic theologian, made the recovery of “beauty” central to his mid‑20th‑century project of renewing Christian theology and culture. The line is associated with his critique of modernity’s suspicion of beauty—treating it as subjective “mere appearance” rather than a disclosure of truth and goodness. It fits the programmatic opening of his theological aesthetics, where he argues that when beauty is downgraded or distrusted, faith and reason alike become impoverished: theology turns moralistic or purely conceptual, and culture becomes manipulative toward appearances rather than receptive to splendor.

The sentence laments a cultural and intellectual loss of confidence that beauty is real and meaningful. If beauty is reduced to surface charm—an “appearance” with no claim on us—then it can be dismissed, exploited, or traded away without cost. Balthasar’s deeper claim is theological: beauty is not ornamental but a mode in which truth and goodness become radiant and compelling. When beauty is evacuated, we become less able to recognize or desire the good, and truth becomes abstract or coercive. The quote thus functions as a warning: cynicism about beauty ultimately reshapes what we think reality is and how we treat persons, art, and even God.