Beauty will save the World

 

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.