ABSTRACT
Prince Myshkin’s phrase “Beauty will save the world” needs to be questioned and tested in order to perceive as to whether or not it is possible to accomplish its purpose. Can Beauty, on its own, detached from the transcendentals of Goodness and Truth, save the world? This article studies Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize speech, particularly his comments on the Prince’s enigmatic words, and critiques a relativist interpretation of it, in favor of an objective interpretation, using terms such as “apprehend” and “comprehend” (thanks to Malcolm Guite) in order to make important category distinctions.
The ultimate line of Keats’s beloved poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is bursting with inspiration yet riddled with miscalculation:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Oh how such sweet and simple words inspire wonder not easily ignored. From an imaginative perspective, it rings “true” with meaning; we can all think of something we’ve seen or even heard that makes this sentiment comprehendible. For example, the sensory images on the urn Keats admired were sensually appealing and thus replete with meaning, which made it “true” for him. (The implication here is that meaning is subjective, not that truth, in itself, is subjective. The distinctive categories of meaning and truth will be discussed throughout the article, along with the correlation between subjectivity and meaning, and objectivity and truth.)
Once we breech the gossamer of phenomenology, going deeper than the way things appear to us on the surface in order to look at the nature of things as they are underneath, we come into instant contact with the world of necessary and sufficient conditions. For example, is it necessarily the case that “beauty is truth” or “truth beauty”? Or is it sufficient to say that “beauty is truth, truth beauty [is] all ye need to know”? The answer is thrice “No.” There are a sundry of examples where beauty is not truth, truth is not beauty, and these sentiments are not all we need to know. For example, the nation of Narnia is beautiful but not true. And the genocide of European Jews in World War II is true but not beautiful. And it’s not sufficient to say that beauty and truth are all we need to know. What of the third transcendental—goodness? Without goodness, beauty and truth are prey to the kraken of sensual and moral manipulation. (More on the omission of goodness from beauty and truth later.) And what about the cardinal virtues in classical philosophy and Christian theology: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance? Surely, a lifestyle of knowing only “beauty is truth, truth beauty” is a morally shallow way to live, an oversimplification of life that leaves one open to the temptation of seeking pleasure and bliss at all cost or at least in the rubber-nosed name of “beauty.”[1]
In literature, there’s an arrestingly simple yet punctuated line that idolizes beauty not unlike Keats’s, which I’d like to throw into the ring—that being Prince Myshkin’s
“Beauty will save the world.”[2]
It’s important to note that that phrase in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot is attributed to Myshkin by Hippolyte, who then asks him an insightful follow-up question: “What beauty saves the world?”[3] That’s the million-dollar question: Which beauty? And for how long will this so-and-so beauty save the world? Is it Hitler’s beauty? Stalin’s beauty? Pol Pot’s beauty? For them, their reign of beauty was short-lived. (Please don’t misunderstand me, for any society to flourish it must pursue and personify beauty. But beauty must itself be saved before it can save the world.)
Nobel prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1970) has some insightful things to say in his speech (1972) about beauty:
“So perhaps the old trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty is not simply the decorous and antiquated formula it seemed to us at the time of our self-confident materialistic youth. If the tops of these three trees do converge, as thinkers used to claim, and if the all too obvious and the overly straight sprouts of Truth and Goodness have been crushed, cut down, or not permitted to grow, then perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, and ever surprising shoots of Beauty will force their way through and soar up to that very spot, thereby fulfilling the task of all three.”[4]
For Solzhenitsyn beauty is intended to live inseparably from truth and goodness as a gestalt although distinguishably from them. However, if truth and goodness are separated from its trinitarian core, then beauty—wild and whimsical—can fulfill the goal of the other two, in addition to its own.
Obviously, my summary doesn’t do his illustration justice. But it does remove the flowery language (pun intended) in order to better comprehend what he’s attempting to communicate. At this point, I’d like to introduce a literary distinction I learned from Malcolm Guite: the complementary terms—“apprehend” and “comprehend.” The former means to creatively get at something or approach it without necessarily wrapping one’s mind around it. The definition of the latter, well, it’s more straightforward: logically, you either understand it or you don’t. My point is to categorize these nuanced terms in order to explain the mystery and limits of Solzhenitsyn’s playful imagery.
Let’s take a look at two possible interpretations of the Prince’s enigmatic phrase—“Beauty will save the world,” through the eyes of the Nobel Prize laureate.
Interpretation #1: A Relativist Approach: Since the metanarratives of truth and goodness are “all too obvious” and “overly straight” they will be “crushed, cut down, or not permitted to grow” in the soil of subjectivism. The only flower to grow will be the unpredictable narrative of beauty. If this interpretation is correct, then I disagree with Solzhenitsyn’s (and Dostoevsky’s) comprehension of beauty. However, I do appreciate how Solzhenitsyn describes what he colorfully apprehends “beauty” to mean with all its strangeness and diversity and, simply put, its je ne sais quoi, and I would add, its power to motivate (for example this responsive prose). No one argues that beauty is subjective and inspiring.[5] But if beauty’s only role is to be subjective, cut off from anything substantive, how can it possibly survive, except to dance in the dark with the devil who first appears as “an angel of light”?
Truthfully, beauty cannot survive on its own and hope to inspire truth and goodness, at least not for long. In this regard, beauty can be compared to other virtues, say, the virtue of fortitude or courage. Courage isolated from prudence, justice, or temperance may be used in the right way, but then again, how could we know it’s “right” unless it was interpreted as just, which violates the practice of virtue isolation that the aforementioned quote maintains? Plato understood the danger of virtue isolation. That’s why he proclaimed, “Beauty is the splendour of the truth,” knowing that beauty and truth are objective terms that are necessarily linked.
This brings us back to Keats and his aesthetic-metaphysics of “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” However, Plato was an objectivist when it came to understanding truth, while Keats was a relativist who saw “truth” as whatever he subjectively believed or wanted to believe, which for him is a term interchangeable with beauty. This is no mere category mistake; it’s a grave miscalculation about truth that implies grave consequences, say, to our morality, when we are motivated to create our own realities. Imagine, all the alternate “realities” in a psychiatric ward that owe their inspiration to quotes such as “Beauty will save the world,” etched onto its screaming, white walls. Sadly, the relativist approach to beauty has not only the ability but also the motivation to turn “beauty” into something immoral, ugly, untrue, and insane, dragging beauty across the existential threshold into the dry, desert wasteland of nihilism.
Interpretation #2: An Objectivist Approach: I agree with St. Basil the Great’s comprehension of beauty: “By nature men desire the beautiful.” Why? Because we were designed to express beauty and have it affectionately call back to us so we can fulfill our creative natures that long for the personification of beauty Himself—Jesus Christ—who does not change, who is “the same yesterday, today, and forever.”[6] Our appetite for beauty goes beyond Plato’s abstract ideas that constitute the universal principles of truth, goodness, and beauty. Our happiness (eudaimonia) is centered around the pursuit of God who incarnates those principles: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”[7] “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”[8] “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His nature, upholding all things by His powerful word.”[9]
There’s no doubt that the biblical worldview is objective. The question is whether this objective approach is what Dostoevsky and his anachronistic Russian comrade, Solzhenitsyn, had in mind when speaking of beauty. Personally, I’m not convinced this is what they meant but I believe that this realist approach to beauty gets closer to their meaning if, in fact, they thought and wrote from a Christian worldview influenced by their Russian Orthodox faith.
If beauty is to last longer than a dance, then it must be eternal and personal. That is why St. Augustine writes in his Confessions: “Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new.”[10] And if the Prince’s words are to be timeless, true and good, saving beauty from mere subjectivity, then “beauty will save the world.” But if Jesus is not a mere exemplary of beauty but the personification of it, why not just say, “Jesus will save the world”?
ENDNOTES
[1] Keats’s own eroticism seems like an attempt to express his imaginative but flawed understanding of beauty and truth. After all, for Keats, “beauty [via the senses] transcends the very fallibility of human nature” (Jasmine Ko, “John Keats and the Diagnostic Imagination: Questions of Suspended Immortality and Sensual Immorality,” Bachelor of Arts Thesis, Emory University, 2015). So instead of complementing beauty and truth with goodness to make the most of our flawed humanity, he doubles down on sensual images to pursue his hedonistic view of beauty. Ironically, the notion of “beauty transcends fallibility” only adds to the clever yet abased ways we justify correcting our corrupt human nature.
[2] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, III.5.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture, 2. The Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center, https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/nobel-lecture (emphasis in the original).
[5] It’s the nature of beauty to attract people to itself more quickly and easily than the way truth attracts itself to us. When speaking about the imagination and meaning as it involves fairytales, George MacDonald explains that “beauty may be plainer in it than the truth” (“The Fantastic Imagination”), and this we know from experience. Beauty draws us before we have time to think. Beauty motivates us and then we reap the rewards or pay the consequences. However, “without the truth the beauty could not be, and the fairytale would give no delight” (Ibid). Beauty delights us but only because truth is involved, which takes into consideration ethical dilemmas that need to be addressed. When resolved, the story naturally delights us because it appeals to our innate desire to see good in the form of, say, courage or honor or justice ultimately prevail, as long as the ethical dilemmas have not been skewed to misrepresent the truth.
[6] Hebrews 13:8, NKJV.
[7] John 14:6, ESV (emphasis added).
[8] John 10:11, NIV (emphases added).
[9] Hebrews 1:3a, BSB (emphasis added).
[10] Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford, 1991), 201.