Does your work lift our spirits out of the ordinary and towards God...
or does it depict a beauty that is deceptive and false, a dazzling beauty that does not bring human beings out of themselves to open them to the ecstasy or rising to the heights, but indeed locks them entirely into themselves. Such beauty does not reawaken a longing for the Ineffable, readiness for sacrifice, the abandonment of self, but instead stirs up the desire, the will for power, possession and pleasure.
Joseph Ratzinger, “The Feeling of
Things, the Contemplation of Beauty” (August 24, 2002).
Read more:
https://www.hprweb.com/2015/01/pope-benedict-xvis-theology-of-beauty-and-the-new-evangelization/#fnref-12952-23
