Beauty puts a legitimate thumb on the scales

      "The encounter with beauty can become the wound of the arrow that strikes the soul and thus makes it see clearly, so that henceforth it has criteria, based on what it has experienced, and can now weigh the arguments correctly."

     Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, "Wounded by the arrow of beauty:  the cross and the new 'aesthetics' of faith," chap. 2 of On the way to Jesus Christ (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, 2005 [2004]), 37, italics mine.  As with a Bach cantata:  "'Anyone who has heard this knows that the faith is true.'"  "Arguments so often have no effect, because too many contradictory arguments compete with one another in our world, so that one cannot help thinking of the remark of the medieval theologians that reason has a wax nose:  in other words, it can be turned around in any direction, if one is clever enough.  It is all so clever, so evident—whom should we trust?"
     Ratzinger opens with the "Two antiphons [to Ps 45 that] stand . . . side by side [in the Liturgy of the hours], one for the season of Lent, the other for Holy Week":  "'the fairest of the children of men'" "'had neither beauty nor majesty, nothing to attract our eyes'" (32-33).