Beauty as a passage to God is a similar experience, and it crops up in fiction almost as often as it does in real life. In Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, about a Catholic family in England in the 1920s and 1930s, one of the characters, Sebastian Flyte, a young aristocrat, confesses that he is drawn to the beautiful stories in the Gospels. His friend Charles Ryder, an agnostic, protests. One can’t, Charles says, believe in something simply because it’s lovely. “But I do,” Sebastian says. “That’s how I believe.”
Beauty is a path to God. Behold, the beauty of Jesus!
