Beauty will save the world

When Solzhenitzyn stepped on to the stage to accept his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 he quoted his literary master, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and said "Beauty will save the world". 

A big call. 

Solzhenitzyn says it took him many decades to come to see that Dostoyevsky had been right. Like Job in the night, Solzhenitzyn had tussled with this idea for half his life. The force of it, the transcendence of it, frightened him, he said. 

Could these two stern Russian novelists, one from each of the last two centuries, be right. Are they prophets for our age?  


I am a pushover for this idea. I instinctively think it is correct. The notion resonates deeply with me. But when I look at the world around me, and especially what passes for art, I wonder if there can be any modern meaning in the notion. Beauty has always ultimately been a religious idea. It is born of awe. Awe at God's creation, and man's capacity for love.

Turn to art today. You will sometimes find it reaching for beauty, but more often not. How can an art unmoored from its quest of grappling toward beauty really be art? Does art not have a sacred mission?


One of my favourite philosophers, Roger Scruton expresses it thus: 


"The sacred task of art, is to take that which is most difficult in the human condition, and to redeem it by making it beautiful". Scruton does not say art has no lighter form and guise, just that if we are to speak of the truly sacred role of art, we explore its redemptive purpose.  To Scruton, art's purpose is to "teach us how to feel" to give the growing mind a palette of feelings and responses, to help build moral imagination. It's a compelling vision. 

The world's artistic heritage all began in wonder and the sublime, conversations and evocations of Gods. In the post-religious world, what is it that moors art? It can't still be the power to shock - surely the dadas and Andy Warhol crowd did that to death, and we can return to a purposeful and redemptive art and literature? But look around you, at the world of contemporary art, and you could be forgiven for thinking the cause is lost. 


Beauty struggles to keep a toe-hold in the post-structuralist artistic world. There are still centres of living classical endeavour, but far too many artists and teachers see art's role, not as redemptive, but as didactic, and designed to teach political and sociological, not moral, imaginative, truly human lessons. 


At another layer, does God need to be central to a redemptive art? I think not. In a pluralistic world, we need to be able to take the great insights which those of us who believe have been revealed by God, and to share them with everyone. In fact we have to be braver still, I believe we need to be prepared to delicately unmoor any wisdom we draw from our religious traditions in order to share the ideas with a secular world. This notion of "beauty saving the world" for example, should hold water for a post-religious people as well as for believers. 


Some conservatives would argue with me about this proposed approach as dishonest, wrong or an example of stealth. But all great religious reform movements have been pragmatic. In a secular age, this pragmatism looks different again. It requires taking the language of religion and speaking in the vernacular of this age, this most secular age. We need to speak a language which shares all the same concepts but without recourse to use of the imagery of God. It's a test of conviction.


For some people the language of 'God' cannot be heard at this time, but the language of "Truth, Beauty and Goodness" can be. I think it best we learn to speak in both languages.  If the project is to redeem the arts, so that they might redeem us, starting with 'God' language won't get us there. If building moral imagination is urgent, we will need new ways of doing this in the fragmented, ahistorical, digital age in which we live. The challenge is to communicate to a world as it presents itself, not as we would wish it to be. 


Art which is redemptive is prophetic. It leads to a more whole place for people. This affect they can take into their relationships and it can ripple out. Choose the genre and note the effect. How did you feel when you saw the credits roll for "Life is Beautiful"? It made me want to embrace those I love and treasure, and mourn my lost family members. It made me feel tender. Of course it made me angry at the brutality of the Nazi state and its Italian client, but the film, its characters, narrative and music, operate on the more intimate scale. It offers the healing of hearts. 


Good theatre can be even more powerful in its intimacy, and tight focus, with fewer distractions and tableux. And a symphony definitely has the power to transport to a place of peace and the connectedness of all living and non-living things. And this transcends religion. In fact, just as a passion for music and concert-going started to replace religion, with concert halls and opera houses becoming the new temples in much of Europe in the 19th and 20th century, perhaps we can loop back to such a world today? 


To return where we began, with literature. Perhaps no medium has the psychological healing power of literature. To enter into a cosmos of human experience, and to be an intimate, sitting on the end of the bed, perched in the drawing room, listening from the pantry, of a community of characters, is to enter into a moral universe, and learn from the pain and betrayal, the love and tenderness, the costly mistakes, the redemptive acts of another group of humans from some special time and place. All great novels contain moments of exquisite beauty, alongside tragedy and loss. 


Even if we engage with the arts, without resorting to God language, we may ultimately still  believe that without God, society's centre cannot hold. Maybe however, there is a language that transcends even the need to spell-out God. It's such a big question. But it is the question. 

Solzhenitzyn's answer, at life's end was clear. He came to believe in the redemptive power of beauty, he also came slowly, to the conclusion that the loss of God was the reason for Russia's destruction. He said "Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened"

Call me pie in the sky, but I am still holding on to the belief that in our age, that which has forgotten God, the first tentative steps back to see him full in the face, is to remind of his presence, his echo, to step above and beyond the God language, and fill the God shaped whole with Beauty. This is the next phase of healing the world. It starts by calling art back to play its healing and redemptive role. It is to beauty that we turn to save the modern world.