Beauty will Save the World

The title of this post is a quotation from the great novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky and it expresses an idea that challenges so much of what our modern western society holds dear.

Normally we’re encouraged to think that ambition or love, wealth or strength, self-belief or achieving your dreams will be the ultimate saving quality that we need to make everything right. Dostoevsky didn’t see it like that at all. Rather, the ability to appreciate beauty can not only bestow upon us moments of supreme joy and peace, not only open up a world of delights to entrance both eye and ear, but it does something much more important.

In some way or other, a thing of beauty -whether it be a painting, a piece of jewellery or a sculpture, a passage of Beethoven or a folk ballad, a glorious vista across mountains or the sight of a kingfisher on a riverbank – all these have not only aesthetic charm but also a certain moral quality that enlightens every generation. St.Paul in his epistle to the Philippians urges us to consider whatever things are true, noble, just, pure and lovely, and to ‘think on these things’ (Phil 4:8). One can reasonably ask ‘why’?

To what purpose should we dwell on such things? There is little enough time in our hectic lives as it is; surely the spare time we have should be put to some better purpose than simply staring at pretty views/pictures/works of art or listening to uplifting music. How about engaging in all the good works that need doing – volunteering with some local charity or helping an elderly neighbour with their shopping or gardening?

Clearly the apostle is not suggesting the one thing to the exclusion of the other. But good works will spring from hearts and minds that are directed aright and Paul wants us to understand that such thinking or meditating on the true, noble, just, pure and lovely is transformative for us – in other words, to reflect on such things in this way will work a change in us. Perhaps equip us or fit us better to do those other things.

Whatever is able to change us or make us better people can be part of the world’s salvation. We can be changed and inspired just as much by our encounters with beauty as by a political speech, a philosophical system, a mathematical equation, or a scientific discovery and indeed perhaps more so in that the latter are not accessible to us all but beauty can be sensed and experienced by every human.

Would that our schools today could inculcate a sense of the value and power of beauty in our young people, confronted as they are on all sides by a world that is too often vulgar, utilitarian, disposable, ugly and brutalising.