Just as we cannot leave contemplation to contemplatives, we cannot leave mysticism to mystics. It would mean cutting off the roots of human life. By putting mystics on a pedestal in our mind, high, out of reach, we don’t do justice to them, nor to ourselves either. Paraphrasing what Ruskin said about being an artist, we could say: A mystic is not a special kind of human being; rather, every human being is a special kind of mystic. I might just as well rise to this challenge and become that unique, irreplaceable mystic that only I can become. There never was and never will be anyone exactly like me. If I fail to experience God in my own unique way, that experience will forever remain in the shadow of possibility. But if I do, I will know life by the divine life within me.
Aesthetics is concerned with form, shape, composition, expression, and seeing forms AS THEY ARE. Just as the artist is "inspired" and filled with enthusiasm, so too those who SEE are seized with the divine spirit. What is seen is the doxa (glory) of the form, but this glory is the glory of being. Balthasar argues that the mystery in such beauty is the interruption of the eternal into the material in such a way that one can speak of the event of beauty, the entrance of the numinous into this world. To see beauty is to be overcome by the glory that breaks out of this person, this poem, this picture, this flower... We are confronted by the sense of its Otherness.