I don’t know the mechanism, but I know that the experience of true beauty makes us better people.
Beauty is not a luxury or an optional frill to the human existence. Nor is it a danger to be avoided. It is a necessity if we are to live as we were meant. We require beauty.
Step into a beautiful sunrise, or sunset, or wood, or field, or coast, or rain, or mountain view. Look at it and take it in. Now tell me it didn’t make you better, feed your soul, bolster your moral foundation, increase your charity.
A beautiful sculpture, piece of music, building, or face can do the same.
Beauty has a bad name because we are surrounded by its perversion. The devil always warps and distorts and shrivels and shrinks what is good, leaving only a parody-like husk of it that brings out our vices.
Overwhelming appeals to the erotic side of beauty, in places they do not belong, have made God-fearing people reticent to celebrate beauty. The cure is more and greater beauty, not ashes.