The world will be won by beauty

By Tom Quiner

I am exactly like you.  I love beauty.

Every human soul is instinctively attracted to beauty.  This modern world needs more beauty.  This blog likes to occasionally post a work of art that brightens your day through sheer beauty.

I heard the quote above on the radio once.  I did a little digging and discovered it is a variation of Dostoevsky’s quote:  “beauty will save the world.”  The 19th century Russian philosopher, Vladimir Solovyov, had this to say about Dostoevsky’s words:

Dostoevsky

“Dostoevsky not only preached, but, to a certain degree also demonstrated in his own activity this reunification of concerns common to humanity–at least of the highest among these concerns–in one Christian idea.

Being a religious person, he was at the same time a free thinker and a powerful artist. These three aspects , these three higher concerns were not differentiated in him and did not exclude one another, but entered indivisibly into all his activity.

In his convictions he never separated truth from good and beauty; in his artistic creativity he never placed beauty apart from the good and the true.

And he was right, because these three live only in their unity. The good, taken separately from truth and beauty, is only an indistinct feeling, a powerless upwelling; truth taken abstractly is an empty word; and beauty without truth and the good is an idol.

For Dostoevsky, these were three inseparable forms of one absolute Idea. The infinity of the human soul–having been revealed in Christ and capable of fitting into itself all the boundlessness of divinity–is at one and the same time both the greatest good, the highest truth, and the most perfect beauty.

Truth is good, perceived by the human mind; beauty is the same good and the same truth, corporeally embodied in solid living form. And its full embodiment–the end, the goal, and the perfection–already exists in everything, and this is why Dostoevsky said that beauty will save the world” (Vladimir Soloviev, The Heart of Reality, trans V. Wozniuk, p. 16).

I’ve posted the video of the great Andrea Bocelli singing his signature song, “Time to say goodbye,” along with Sarah Brightman. Beautiful!

Beauty will save the world. Seek it.