Beauty and sacredness

Where is beauty?

It is in a butterfly.

But when we chloroform it, lay it out on the dissecting table, and cut it apart, beauty is gone.

Beauty is in a poem.

But when we over-analyze the poem to find exactly what is beautiful about it, beauty disappears from that too.

Beauty is in a painting.

But can we reduce it to quantitative measures of color and proportion, and then apply these to the standardized production of beauty?

No.

Beauty is a relationship.

Not an objective property.
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And the mass-production of generic relationships produces, necessarily, an aesthetic that is equally phony, generic, and cheap.
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Where is sacredness?
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Following the same deep ideology as their scientific brethren.
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The religious authorities have sought to isolate sacredness as well.
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Limiting it to Bibles, crosses, and churches.
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The furthest extreme of this separation coincides in its genesis with its scientific counterpart, originating in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
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The Protestant movement progressively excluded the divine from more and more of the human world.
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Earlier, the Catholic church had removed divinity from ordinary people.
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Now the Protestant reformers began to remove it from Mother Mary and the saints as well. 
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So that all that was left of our original panentheistic world was a single, isolated mote of divinity embodied by Jesus Christ.
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Sorry state of affairs, not much left now.
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And yet and yet reductionism for that is what it is has reached it's end.
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Not too long now and humanity will understand this to be true.
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Reductionism has prevented us seeing the beauty of the whole, of relationships.
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It will not go without a fight.
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Never mind it is a fight worth engaging to bring back an understanding of the beauty and the sacred.