Everything is of one piece. Whenever we don’t take that seriously, we pay a price. The renowned theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar gives an example of this. Beauty, he submits, is not some little extra that we can value or denigrate according to personal taste and temperament, like some luxury that we say we cannot afford. Like truth and goodness, it is one of the properties of God and thus demands to be taken as seriously as goodness and truth. If we neglect or denigrate beauty, he says, we will soon enough begin to neglect other areas of our lives. Here are his words: