On encountering the portrait of a
disgraced lady, whom he would later try to rescue from self destruction, the
Christlike Prince Myshkin, exclaimed that beauty would save the world. The scene is from Dostoevsky’s tragic
masterpiece “The Idiot”, in which the writer examined the clash between the
Christian ethos and Nineteenth Century society.
The reference the character makes to beauty is neither superficial nor
shallow. Instead it is a reference to
the compassionate perception of beauty in those whom the world has wounded.
It is nonetheless a powerful claim
and one far removed from our thinking in today’s world – the modern and
postmodern world of ugliness. T S Eliot discerned
the encroaching darkness and meaninglessness in his poem, The Wasteland. He saw the coming lack of beauty or meaning. Writers of lesser stature than Dostoevsky, but
who still believed in divine beauty, such as J R R Tolkien also perceived the
coming and rising ugliness of the secular world. Indeed modernity as Mordor is a powerful and
resonant image for the twenty-first century man.
Here in thinking of beauty we are
perceiving something of the ancient world of classical philosophy, when the
form of Beauty was linked inextricably in the metaphysical trinity alongside Goodness
and Truth. In a civilisation orientated
towards this trinity, social and personal life is understood as teleological
and that telos is growth in virtue. The
virtues are good, true and beautiful.
How different our world of the
secular and liberal democracy! We have
lost any sense of the mystical. As Catholic Canadian philosopher Charles
Taylor has pointed out the world has become disenchanted. Disenchantment means loss of beauty. Architecture, art, even our understanding of
economics have brought forth ugliness. A person
does not need to be a scholar in Platonism to recognise that there is a
different aesthetic value in the sculptures of Classical Greece and Brit Art.
Perhaps modern art reflects back to
us exactly what we have become, after we killed God without understanding the
consequences (to reference the highly-sensitive atheist philosopher Nietzsche,
who truly understood the implications of rejecting God and like Dostoevsky
understood its enormity – in Raskolnikov’s words “everything is now permitted”).
In the Enlightenment, knowledge in
itself detached from virtue became the goal.
In the end we reached a position where a British scientist would
endeavour to reduce the meaning of life to random natural selection. We had now truly severed ourselves from
understanding the meaning of life as participation in the forms of Goodness,
Truth and Beauty. Instead life was
understood as a brutal struggle of individuals for survival or a hedonistic and
epicurean bourgeois existence of self-satisfaction. For utilitarianism pushpin has as much value as
beautiful poetry, as the English themselves proudly boasted.
Beauty was reduced to a merely
subjective value, in the eye of the beholder.
Nonetheless, this cultural shift did not come from nowhere. As Greek philosopher and theologian, Christos
Yannaras has argued, the God Nietzsche recognised had been killed was not the
God of the Orthodox Church, but the God of the rationalist philosophers. The West in its intellectualism created its
own reductive idea of God, imprisoned within Scholastic rationalism and finally
dismissed by their intellectual descendants as superfluous to the rationalist
and discursive project of Western thought.
In its rationalism the West
descended into legalism and the meaning of Beauty was forgotten. Beauty not in the superficial sense, but in
its highest sense as with the Son of God descending to be a self-emptying servant
or the Theotokos giving her meek assent to bear the God-Man in her womb. This is beauty as truth. Sadly a culture premised on the idea that we
are monkeys instinctively programmed simply to find the mate most likely to be
successful has a very different, indeed opposite idea of beauty. That type of civilisation, where Beauty is
not a metaphysical truth, but a mere signal of reproductive value, will
inevitably descend into surgical alterations and eventually transhumanism.
Our loss of connexion with metaphysical
Beauty though also has major social and political implications. As Western philosophy developed in a
rationalist way, as a consequence of Western Christianity having already
descended into a more legalist and rationalist spirituality, what came to
matter was not achieving the telos of Beauty and thereby an ethical life, but
introducing codes and procedures that were depersonalised and
bureaucratic. This was the great
modernity envisaged by the Enlightenment thinkers – the secular state. The human need for beauty was inadequately addressed
by Romanticism, which ever teetered on the precipice that threatened descent
into sentimentality or hysteria.
Beauty was in a sense compartmentalised
into an emotional and aesthetic zone, much valued by effeminate aesthetes and
even by men of business, but no longer of real importance in comparison to the perceived
real purpose of life - making money.
Beauty was no longer a goal of the virtuous life. Virtue itself was forgotten as the legal codes
of liberalism left people to do as they willed as long as they did not violate
others’ boundaries. The liberal secular
society is a cowardly withdrawal from making a metaphysical or ethical
commitment. All beliefs are equally
valid, as long as no one interferes with anyone else - there is no specific and
transcendental telos to society.
As a consequence each one went his
own way and every specific and idiosyncratic route became perceived as legally sacred,
however ugly. People could descend into
complete degeneracy. At first this was
merely tolerated by respectable liberals, then all became celebrated precisely
because they were idiosyncratic aesthetics.
It was the turn to utilitarianism
that was the final breach with beauty.
It was no longer understood that Beauty and Goodness and Truth are
linked. The ethical life is the
beautiful life. Being a good person is achieved through striving to love beauty
and be beautiful. Heroism, self-sacrifice,
compassion are all beautiful, and of course they are beautiful in part because
they are freely chosen. For the modern
though any choice is valid, there is no telos to our existence.
Only if we can again understand
Beauty has a reality over and above the subjective or the objective will we also
rediscover virtue. Charles Taylor also
pointed out that in the disenchanted society we came to perceive ourselves as buffered
individuals, impervious to external forces, thus making our choices entirely
sovereign, but also entirely contained and disconnected from the transcendental. The Medieval man understood differently that
he was porous and subject to permeation by angelic and demonic forces. He could, he knew, become a slave to his
passions. To the secular mind the
passions are not an enslavement, but integral to his individualism as a
consumer and human being. To be driven
by them is his perverted idea of freedom.
The Russian writer, Konstantin
Leontiev, referred to by some as the Christian Nietzsche, understood that
progression in society was disintegration from the whole into atomistic
individualism – like a body suffering a progressive disease. This indeed seems to be what is happening to
the Western commonwealth. With its
increased atomisation and complete loss of telos or a sense of virtue, it appears
to be disintegrating into idiosyncratic forms of ugliness.
Why has this arisen in the bureaucratic,
secular and procedural system of liberal democracies? On a mystical level Rene Guenon explained
that when the reign of quantity fulfilled its final and ultimate logic, cut off
from the supernal, cracks would appear from below and the infernal would replace
the secular. Undoubtedly this is how the
West now looks, especially with the growing interest in darker and preternatural
forces. Empty people trapped in anomie are
turning to Crowley not the Church.
A more pragmatic angle on this is
that by its very neutrality the liberal secular system, like Pontius Pilate,
washes its hands of truth. It refuses to
discern between Good and Evil, Beauty and Ugliness, Truth and Lies. Instead whether good or evil, beautiful or
ugly, true or false, all is subject to the same neutral procedure. Virtue ceases to be an aspiration and vices
are treated as equally valid.
Consequently society itself starts to become vicious, as long as the
rules are not broken. Legalism fully
replacing Beauty, Truth and Goodness.
This must be why Beauty will save
the world. Beauty, whatever the deconstructionists
attempt, still reaches us in a way that is not subject to discursive
rationalism. Its appeal and attractiveness
are ineffable. We recognise truth and
goodness in them.
Whatever approved lies we recite,
we can see beauty in the happy and bonded young family, the romantic beauty of
love between a new husband and wife, the delicate and awesome beauty of
Creation, the heroic beauty of self sacrifice.
These manifestations of beauty take us far beyond what is correct in
process or in the abstract codes of rights and duties. There is something intrinsically personal and
collectively shared in an encounter with beauty. It can give us access to the other two metaphysical
forms of Truth and Goodness. It enables
us to discern the difference between Good and Evil, Truth and Lies, Beauty and
Ugliness.
Cut off from an aesthetic sense,
under the power of codes and rights, we do not discern between the loving and
natural relationship or the vicious and lustful interaction, the beauty of a
holy icon or a self-indulgent expression of abstract art, the false validity of
ideological claims or the Truth of Holy Tradition.
Lies can obscure Truth. The Bad can intimidate people from being
Good. But if we begin again to
understand that participating in Beauty is a virtue and perceive it again,
ugliness will be undone and access to the True and the Good will be restored.
For now though, surrounded by the ugliness
that many writers of the last two centuries saw was coming and even already
established, we remain confused and blind celebrating the wicked and despising
the good, but all in the bland spirit of due process and tolerance.
