Worship Beauty?

Have you ever given any thought to the possibility that the worship of beauty is an accusation lodged by those who do not understand the communion with God that happens when people create?   Having been accused of doing so by a fundamentalist priest with a power agenda formed the basis of this intellectual examination. 

I have been trying to figure out why beauty is something to fear, the object of accusation, a slur.  Does anyone ever fear the worship of truth or goodness?  Is there any greater insult than to judge that another worships beauty, not God?  Obviously the Puritans realized the power of the accusation.

Alas, I may have found my defender. 

Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (d. 1988) thought that the beautiful is the first point of insight by which one perceives God’s revelation, and that God’s appearance in the world is analogous to the aesthetical encounter.   In The Glory of th Lord, A Theological Aesthetic, he wrote: 

"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. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past — whether he admits it or not — can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love" (p. 18).