“Dostoyevsky once let drop the enigmatic phrase: “Beauty will save the world.” What does this mean? For a long time it used to seem to me that this was a mere phrase. Just how could such a thing be possible? When had it ever happened in the bloodthirsty course of history that beauty had saved anyone from anything? Beauty had provided embellishment certainly, given uplift—but whom had it ever saved?” – Beauty Will Save the World: The Nobel Lecture on Literature by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Beauty will save the world” isn’t just a simple sentence that tries to look philosophical, it is much more than that. It’s a prophecy that has come to happen these very days. In the following lines I’ll explain that, without emphasizing the importance of beauty in the Byzantine spirituality.

But first, we must take a look at the ancient trinity of ideals that Plato and Aristotle captivated the ancient world with - Truth, Good and Beauty. What do human beings need in order to embrace the good, the true and the beautiful? One area of the ancient philosophical debates zeroed in on the role of the artist.

Do artists lead people to the good life or cause them to go astray? Do artists lead the world into decline with their representations of reality, or do they lead individuals to goodness, truth and beauty?

One artist imagines himself the creator of an independent spiritual world and takes on his shoulders the act of creating that world and its population, assuming total responsibility for it — but he stumbles and breaks down because there is no mortal genius capable of bearing such a load; just like man, who once declared himself the center of all existence but was incapable of creating a balanced spiritual system. And then, when failure occurs, it is all blamed on the external disharmony of the world, on the complexity of the shattered contemporary soul, or the stupidity of the public. 

Beauty is commonly defined as a characteristic present in a person, place, object or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning or satisfaction to the mind or to the eyes, arising from sensory manifestations such as a shape, color, personality, sound, design or rhythm. The subjective experience of “beauty” often involves the interpretation of some entity as being in balance and harmony with nature, which may lead to feelings of attraction and emotional well-being. In its most profound sense, beauty may engender a salient experience of positive reflection about the meaning of one’s own existence. An “object of beauty” is anything that reveals or resonates with personal meaning. Hence religious and moral teachings often focus on the divinity and virtue of beauty, and assert natural beauty as an aspect of a spirituality and truth. ~ Wikipedia 

Truth, Good and Beauty

The trinity represented by Truth, Good and Beauty isn’t just a dry philosophical formula.

If the crests of these three trees (Truth, Good and Beauty) join together, as the investigators and explorers used to affirm, and if the too obvious, too straight branches of Truth and Good are crushed or amputated and cannot reach the light — yet perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, unexpected branches of Beauty will make their way through and soar up to that very place and in this way perform the work of all three.

In the present times, we are witnessing a fight against this trinity. And the heaviest fight is the one against Truth.

This fight is best illustrated by USA’s Bush administration. While the War on Terrorism is used to dominate the attention of the public, the administration is fighting in a covert war. A War on Science, a war on Truth.

The US administration has used suppression, distortion, and junk science to mislead the public on issues as far-ranging as abortion, geology and pharmaceuticals. A statement signed by more than 6,000 scientists, 48 of whom are Nobel laureates, asserts that:

“other administrations have, on occasion, engaged in such practices, but not so systematically nor on so wide a front.” 

At the center of this fight against Truth lies the protection of corporate interests and a conservative ideology. And the United States administration isn’t the only one that engages in such activities. More than that, this also happens at different scales everywhere in the world.

The Great Escape 

Out of the three ideals (Truth, Good and Beauty), one remains unpredictible, unexpected, hard to fight, deep rooted and always full of surprises. Beauty.

Given its magical nature it cannot be controlled to the same degree that Truth and Good are. It is too unique and too powerful. Beauty restores your trust in the world, it has the power to “corrupt” decisions and ideas, it has the power to change lives and to interrupt your habitual forms of reaction to world events (fear, anger, etc) and to provide a path to help you find the hope within yourself. And it is within the power of Beauty to perfom the work of both Truth and Good.

While everyone is delighted by Beauty, only a few are explicitly aware that “you can recognize Truth by its Beauty and simplicity” ~ Richard Feynman, Nobel Laureate in Physics.

“Wisdom is the sum of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.” ~ William Shakespeare

Given that Beauty can be used in discovering the Truth and finding the Good, and it can’t be fought, I think Dostoyevsky was right, beauty will save the world! It already saved us countless times, and it continues to do so, even if we don’t want to notice it.

In the end, one thing I know for sure. And that is the fact that Beauty - in the form of music - saved me!



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  • http://armannd.com/ Titus-Armand

    Indeed Alex, trying to escape this (and any other) responsability is in most cases a dangerous thing to do. But stating that beauty will save the world isn’t a shifting of responsabilities.

    Let’s not forget that we, as humans, are beautiful! And if we’re part of the beauty, we are one the things that will save the world. ;)

  • Alex Na

    Beauty is the highest level of being optimal for something, some level of perfection. It was not my idea of course ;) A sword made to kill people can be really beautiful.

    Dostoevsky was quite a controversial thinker and, by the way, quite a controversial personality.

    I would say if anything can save the world it is us and any attempt to escape this responsibility is dangerous. Don’t you think?

  • http://armannd.com/ Titus-Armand

    Indeed Alex, trying to escape this (and any other) responsability is in most cases a dangerous thing to do. But stating that beauty will save the world isn’t a shifting of responsabilities.

    Let’s not forget that we, as humans, are beautiful! And if we’re part of the beauty, we are one the things that will save the world. ;)