Not 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.

Balthasar is warning that when beauty is severed from its religious (and ultimately theological) grounding, it becomes a mere surface effect—something like a detachable “mask.” Once beauty is reduced to ornament, taste, or subjective preference, it no longer discloses meaning; instead, the world’s “face” appears alien and increasingly unreadable. The line reflects his broader project of restoring beauty as a transcendental—alongside truth and goodness—so that aesthetic experience is not an escape from reality but a way reality communicates itself. Without that horizon, human perception risks losing a shared grammar for interpreting the world and the human person.