Beauty Will Save The World

“Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.” Abraham Joshua Heschel

(art by Vicenzo Sguera)

One of my favorite authors is the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. Whenever I’m asked which is my favorite novel by him, I’m torn between two: The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot. Both are profound and deeply spiritual works. In it, the main character, Prince Myshkin, is seen by those around him as an idiot because he cares not for the working of Russian society. He is a pure soul. Something that other characters attribute to him saying but the reader never hears him say is, “Beauty will save the world.” It’s a phrase that has rooted itself deeply in my psyche ever since I first read it back in university. But what does it really mean and can beauty really save the world?

We live in a world of wars and rising fascism. How can beauty save it?

When Dostoevsky wrote, “Beauty will save the world,” was he writing a philosophical, theological or aesthetic statement? Is he stating that it is through a shared connection with the beautiful that it can inspire them to do good and to see their interrelatedness to each other? Can beauty knit back together what has been rended apart in contemporary cultural society where everything has become divisive and destructive?

The poet John Keats wrote that, “Truth is beauty and beauty is truth.” Yet we live in an age where truth matters little, where political candidates dismiss truth for creating their own warped version of reality to fit their endgame. How can beauty be truth when truth has become pliable and recreated in whatever image we wish it to be, without any bearing on reality? I find this current culture shallow and steeped in the emptiness of reality television that has permeated so much of our discourse along with the over hyper focus on celebrity and entertainment. It is a consumer culture that is all surface and shine. The problem with such rampant consumerism is that it disconnects us from that which reminds us we are spiritual beings in physical bodies. Art is meant to remind us of our dependence on each other, our interconnectedness.