Martin Snigg

“Contact with an environment permeated by beauty not only offers real protection against impurity, baseness, every kind of letting oneself go, brutality, and untruthfulness; it has also the positive effect of raising us up in a moral sense. It does not draw us into a self-centered pleasure where our only wish is to indulge ourselves. On the contrary, it opens our hearts, inviting us to transcendence and leading us in conspectu Dei (“before the face of God”), before the face of God. Naturally, this last point applies above all to the high, exalted beauty which Kant calls the “sublime” [das Erhabene] and which he contrasts with the “beautiful.” But even in little things that are charming and graceful, even in the more modest beautiful things, one can find a trace of the pure and the noble. This may perhaps not lead us in conspectu Dei, but it does fill us with gratitude to God. It frees us from captivity in our egoistic interests and undoes the fetters of our hearts, releasing us (even if only for a short time) from the wild passions that convulse them.”
― Dietrich von Hildebrand, Aesthetics: Volume I