“Beauty will save the world,” Dostoyevsky once wrote. Like all profound thoughts, its sense is at once immediate and obscured, intuitive and counter-intuitive. To some it sounds like a mere fancy, a string of nice sounding but meaningless words. Yet to those with eyes to see, the words are more than decorative – they are prophetic.
Sometimes I feel like I am overdosing on the toxicity of the Internet. I follow many different people on Twitter, and while that can be refreshing, it can also prove enervating. So many people with so many points of view, but so many engage only in mindless, careless criticism of others. Do not misunderstand – there is a real and necessary place for criticism in our lives. And thank goodness, otherwise I’d be out a hobby – and I don’t do model trains. Part of the problem of course is that so little cultural criticism has any merit, recycling old cant in favor of thoughtful investigation and generous discourse. But another bigger problem remains: if we devote ourselves only to understanding and explaining, even when this is done skillfully, we have no room for creating.
As a philosophy major in college, I did lots and lots of analyzing of arguments. It’s something I love to do. In the midst of my studies, though, I came to an interesting conclusion. All “logic”, whether real or not, can only ever be destructive in nature. That is to say, it can never build systems from the ground up; it can only deconstruct existing arguments. Sure, you can use reason to extrapolate from first principles, but those first principles can only ever be axiomatic. Even inductive reasoning, which claims to only draw axioms from observation, in fact rests on an uneasy foundation of never questioned assumptions.
They say studying philosophy will make you lose faith in things, but what happens when you lose faith in philosophy itself? Or rather, what happens when you realize that the point of philosophy is not answers but the struggle?
Into this void step intuition and imagination and, thus, beauty. That, I think, is how I would ultimately answer the question of why I am a Christian. I might give various answers in various contexts which illuminate various aspects of a faith so wide and deep, but beauty – lost and found – is what compels me in the meta-narrative of Christianity. The marred beauty of the imago dei, shadowed by sin but still visible. The terrible beauty of the visitor in the night passing over painted doorsteps. The laughing beauty of the simpleton given a gift so far beyond belief that faith comes only after derision. The pan-beauty of the man-god incarnate.
The Christian story is one of beauty, and at many times has been represented beautifully. These days that is perhaps not always the case. People knock Christian subculture for being cheesy, out of touch, tawdry. There’s some truth to these claims, but put this way they make the wider culture sound like a flourishing paradise of art. Look another way and you will see that Christian art of today fails insofar as it chases and imitates the disposability of the age. We have forgotten – heads down, texting in the moment – how to be timeless. Above time, beyond it, around it.
I wish I had a ready made remedy for this. A pill I could give people to open their eyes. But it is something people must discover on their own – even to communicate it to others is too hard a task. Glimpses here, snatches there; we see beauty from the corners of our narrowed eyes and stop. Usually it is by grace we catch it, this opening in the void. Perhaps a saint could grasp it, hold it and contemplate true beauty. For the rest of us it is a puzzle solved in fits and starts, and never really solved at all but only begun. I know I see it when my daughter opens her eyes and laughs at me, or when my son falls asleep holding his little sister’s hand. I hear it in the strains of the Shostakovich piano trio, and the Barber Violin Concerto (sometimes beauty rends the heart). I see it in the wildness of Hieronymus Bosch and the weirdness of Salvador Dali. I read it in Graham Greene’s whiskey priest and O’Connor’s grandmother and Augustine watching his friend die. I taste it in good food made with old friends whose paths I rarely cross anymore, in good wine and whiskey and home made butterscotch. And certainly in the bread and wine, the cup of love and the crust of recognition as they pass my lips. I know it in the words passed down to me, whether from Nicea a millenium ago or from the heart of Cranmer. In promises made new every morning yet older than the earth.
Beauty has a hope where knowledge must end. We know of time as we experience it, moment to moment. But beauty can know that time beyond time, can conceive of moments weighted beyond themselves. As Eliot, that most beautiful of writers (his prose – his appearance can only generously be called plain) put it:
But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Beauty will save the world because beauty is a person that is a word that is a story writ in love across the canvas of the human heart. Let those who have eyes to see – however blinded or blurred – see.
