Can Beauty Save the World?

English. Spanish. Italian.

Julián Carrón - What is the role of ritual and spirit in transformative experiences of beauty?

In the novel The Idiot, Dostoevsky attributes the famous phrase "Beauty will save the world" to Prince Myshkin.

1. The State of the World

Our world is not Dostoevsky's. What are the characteristics of today, of the "age of disenchantment," in which we ask ourselves this question: can beauty save the world?

Charles Taylor has analyzed the modern human experience in depth, seeking to understand how we perceive ourselves and reality today. "In the contemporary landscape," says Taylor, "many people find themselves in a situation of great loneliness, and a profound question arises in their hearts: What is the center of my life? What do I want to spend my life on? [...]. In a context completely different from that of past eras, religious experience also takes the form of a common search: the emergence of 'people who seek,' 'seekers of meaning' ".

It is in the current context that we must verify the salvific capacity of beauty, its transformative power. But first, we need to understand what "salvation" is that today's man is groping for.

2. What Salvation?

Dostoevsky himself raises the question in The Brothers Karamazov: "The ant knows the formula of its anthill, the bee that of its hive [...], but man does not know his own formula". Unlike all other living beings, which have the resources to achieve their own ends, man is such a mystery / that he cannot know his own formula.

And nothing helps us to understand this mystery of man better than surprising him in experience. Leopardi testifies to this: "Not being able to be satisfied by anything earthly, nor, so to speak, by the whole earth; considering the inestimable vastness of space, the number and marvelous size of the worlds, and finding that everything is small and insignificant compared to the capacity of one's own soul".

Man finds himself faced with a total disproportion between his desire for fulfillment and his ability to achieve it.

It is this disproportion that triggers in man the search for fulfillment. This is the drama of human beings, who seek something that responds to their need for salvation.

But what resources do humans have to carry out this search?

3. The Instinct of Beauty

In order to discern if and what beauty responds to his thirst for fulfillment, man has within himself a resource with which he is endowed from birth and which remains, ineradicable, despite the changes in the world, as Baudelaire recognizes:

"It is this immortal instinct for beauty that makes us consider the world and all its beauties as a reflection, as a correspondence of heaven. [...] When a perfect poem brings tears to our eyes, these tears [are] a sign of exasperated melancholy."

It is precisely this "exasperated melancholy" that still drives the search of the seekers Taylor speaks of.

This "instinct for beauty" does not die out even in a world like the one we live in. But the use of this "detector" to intercept beauty is not at all mechanical; it is not automatic. St. Augustine describes it masterfully: "Does this beauty not appear to anyone who is fully endowed with senses? Why, then, does it not speak to everyone in the same way? [...]. It speaks to everyone, but only those who compare this voice received from outside with the truth within themselves understand it".

How, then, can we recognize beauty? Man recognizes beauty when it happens!

And if one is attentive, one can intercept it..

The recognition of beauty is facilitated by the "impact of the heart," which is not mere emotion, but calls into play all of man's reason. As Ratzinger said after a Bach concert conducted by Bernstein: "Those who have listened to this know that faith is true." In that music, there was such an extraordinary force of reality present that one realized, no longer through deduction but through the impact of the heart, that this could not have originated from nothing, but could only have been born thanks to the force of truth that is actualized in the composer's inspiration."

When man encounters "beauty," it is a recognition that is revealed in experience. “The beauty of truth is what makes me say: 'It is the truth!'".

Beauty has an attraction that makes recognition easy. But not all manifestations of beauty have the power of attraction to respond to the need for salvation, to our loneliness.

4. A Beauty worthy of the Need for Salvation

Today, the diversity of proposals shows how difficult it is to find a beauty that meets the urgent need in human beings.

What characteristics must beauty have in order to be able to "save"?

The first characteristic it must have—in order to respond to human searching—is to be present: encounterable in history. Something present that has a 'hold' on the person who is searching.

And in order to have a hold on the self, beauty must correspond so closely to the heart's expectation.

Many forms of beauty we encounter have the ability to make us gasp. But after a while, everything fades away. In order to be able to fascinate in a stable way, to be able to be called "salvation," the appeal of beauty must be lasting. Duration is the sign of truth.

The salvation that beauty must bring must ultimately be able to challenge and overcome death. Without the ability to face the greatest threat hanging over humanity, beauty would not even serve to sustain life. Therefore, we cannot separate what gives meaning to life from what is needed to face death. Only someone who has found the answer to both can dare to say, like St. Paul: "For me, to live is Christ and to die is gain".

5.    Does this beauty exist?

We live in a state of radical powerlessness: we are unable to give ourselves the beauty that saves. But at the height of this powerlessness—the fabric of every serious human experience—our reason cannot deny the category of possibility, except at the cost of renouncing itself. As Wittgenstein testifies: "Light must enter, so to speak, through the ceiling [...]. This striving for the absolute, which makes any earthly happiness seem too petty, seems to me wonderful, sublime, but I fix my gaze on earthly things: unless 'God' visits me".

To ask ourselves whether God has "visited" us is to ask ourselves whether this beauty exists in the present.

And answering this question is the task of those who do not want to settle for less than what their hearts desire. It is the task of the seekers.

And this question can only be answered by one's own experience.

Christianity claims that the beauty we all grope for has become flesh. To verify the truth of this claim, we must encounter this presence in reality. Because, says Fr. Giussani, "Christianity, being a present Reality, has as its instrument of knowledge the evidence of an experience."

We will only know that this statement is true when we encounter people who are full of nostalgia, as are described by Nicola Kabasilas: "These men have been struck by the Bridegroom himself; He Himself has sent a burning ray of His beauty into their eyes." The powerful nostalgia they carry in their hearts 'speaks' of the Beauty for which they are made: "The breadth of the wound already reveals what the arrow is; and the intensity of the desire gives a hint as to Who it is that has shot the dart".

Ratzinger comments: "Beauty wounds, but in this very way it calls man to his ultimate Destiny. What Kabasilas affirms [...] has nothing to do with superficial aestheticism and irrationalism [...]. Being struck and conquered by the beauty of Christ is a more real and deeper knowledge than mere rational deduction. [...]. To disdain or reject the blow caused by the correspondence of the heart in the encounter with beauty as a true form of knowledge impoverishes us and withers our faith, as well as theology. We must rediscover this form of knowledge; it is a pressing need of our time. [...] The encounter with beauty can become the blow of the dart that wounds the soul and in this way opens its eyes, so that now the soul, starting from experience, has criteria for judgment and is also able to evaluate arguments correctly".

But where is it present today?

Don Giussani said as early as 1987, speaking at the Synod of Bishops: "What is lacking is not so much the verbal or cultural repetition of the proclamation. Perhaps unconsciously, people today are waiting for the experience of encountering people for whom the fact of Christ is so present that their lives have been changed. It is a human impact that can shake people today: an event that echoes the initial event, when Jesus looked up and said, 'Zacchaeus, come down immediately, I am coming to your house' (cf. Lk 19:5)"[23].

A human impact. A human diversity, which has its peak in the fullness of life of the saints, which, together with the beauty generated by faith, is for Ratzinger "the true apology" of Christianity, that is, the only "ritual" capable of attracting.

In order for beauty to save the world, we must ask ourselves: what beauty is necessary for life? The occurrence of that ultimate preference that every person waits to experience: being loved by an eternal love, which, instead of appeasing the search, relaunches it at every moment. And God's method of revealing this love – and thus revealing man to himself – is and always will be the same: the face of the "saints," that is, of people who bring to the world a human gaze with something divine in it, because it arouses an attraction that captivates, awakens an intensity of life that would otherwise be impossible, and continually inflames the search. It is the victory over nothingness.

Whatever experience of beauty we have had, we must all ask ourselves whether the beauty we have experienced in life can respond to the loneliness Taylor speaks of.

 Text not revised by the author.