“Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
I have written several blogs on Truth and Goodness, and I kept putting off this blog on Beauty because the topic is so difficult. This is my final blog on that trio.
The above Dostyevsky quote has haunted me for years. When I first read it, I realized what a terrible thing (both in the sense of ‘awful’ and ‘fearful’) beauty can be. Let me explain.
There are many things we term beautiful: a good-looking woman, a sunset, a Beethoven Sonata, a great singing voice, a diamond, a thought, a soul, a peaceful death, a reunion of two people. All of those examples are beautiful in their own way. We dream of beautiful relationships, beautiful bodies, beautiful souls, beautiful events in our lives, but life is never as pretty as our literary escapades would have us dream, and therein lies the danger for perfectionist romantics such as myself.
I crave beauty and when it is not there, I mourn its loss. But not everything is beautiful. We have to learn to see the beauty more in the totality of life—in the big picture—and not get hung up on the specifics of a particular and perhaps ugly event. Life isn’t always pretty, you may object, but it seems to me that it ought to be so. Why else would we long for beauty in music, in art, and in literature? The arts (music, painting, poetry, etc) are a human fix for our cravings for beauty when the rest of the world—people around us (and we ourselves)—fail to produce the beauty we crave.
I imagine the artist himself to be as lonely and starved a soul as the rest of ust. On his canvas or on his sheet of paper he can distill the beauty he sees in the world into an idealized, concentrated form. It is the artist’s gift to us that we can ‘taste’ the beauty he has created in his work. It feeds us for a short while before we have to return to the world—to the ‘ugliness’ of the ‘dead’ situations and relationships we cope with daily.
Death is ugly. We hate it because we crave life (which is beautiful). There is something wrong about death, like it ought never have been there. There is something wrong with ‘ugly’ too, like nothing was ever intended to be so. We so LONG for beauty and for life, because somehow I believe that is how God intended for things to be. But, beauty alone is not enough. Beauty is a form of pleasure, and a mere quest for pleasure can be devastating, especially if it is an end in itself rather than a means to a greater end.
A good example is the sensuousness that comes with our enjoyment of our bodies (food, drink, and copulation). Add to that enjoyment also music and the arts. Our bodies are good, but if they are all we feed; well, you know… And yet — addictions to beauty can occur with the arts, obsession with a perfect looking outside and inside to our house, or obsession with food, drink, and drugs. That is, when we feed and over-feed our body’s cravings, we get an instant and immediate pleasure, but shortly thereafter, the body begs for more and more, and unless we can keep those cravings in balance we begin to feed the body all the time, thereby taking our time and attention away from other worthwhile things.
Think of the tremendous beauty in Wagner’s operas. Then think of how devoid of virtue Wagner and his anti-Semitic messages are. I think of the musical Cabaret, which showed high ranking Nazis during World War II, who on one hand attended these magnificent opera performances, just feeding on the high that classical music has to offer, but during the day they were brutally beating up or killing thousands of people without any moral qualms. There you have beauty, a grand overpowering beauty, which is nothing short of evil for its lack of goodness and truth.
We need to view art not as a means of transmitting merely beauty (pleasure) but as a means of communicating a plethora of concepts (rooted in truth, goodness, and beauty) all concepts, which prose and plain speech fail to communicate well. True art conveys its thoughts and feelings so accurately, so convincingly, that those of us who behold it experience the artist’s thoughts and feelings as if they were our very own. THAT to me is real art. Sometimes that is pleasurable (beautiful), but it can at other times also be painful, disturbing, challenging, or even angering. But always what it must do is to communicate that which is foundationally true and good.
But I suspect that is really what you are thinking along with me… that connecting with the artist’s thoughts and feelings is in and of itself a ‘beautiful’ experience. There is beauty in meeting another mind (and/or body, and/or soul) and in being understood, whether the subject matter is sad or funny or angering. In that sense, beauty obviously cannot stand alone and remain a virtue. Only in the context of truth and goodness would beauty retain its purpose and remain truly beautiful. But then I suspect that none of the virtues can be had as virtues in isolation. They are all tied together. Courage without prudence becomes foolhardy. Temperance without goodness becomes legalism. Frugality without love becomes miserliness.
Finally, it occurs to me that beauty in isolation may carry with it vanity, that is, a desire to be noticed and esteemed for the sake of beauty alone, rather than for the more substantial sakes of truth and goodness. Let me end with this sad, but beautiful, lament of Matthew Arnold’s. I always pity him for his pining to believe in God, but his inability to do so. Much of his poetry deals with his unbelief, and how he desires what he cannot have…
“Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery—”
~Matthew Arnold
What Arnold yearns for is the beauty of knowing that God exists, of knowing that this world has purpose, and that out there, mankind is loved and cared for by its Creator. And therein lies the real beauty of life, reunion with our Creator.