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Beauty Will Save the World - But Which Beauty?
There are some quotations so arresting, so perfect in simplicity, that they never leave the memory. They are honeyed phrases for the mind: “Beauty will save the world,” says a prince in Dostoevsky’s unfortunately-titled The Idiot.[1] The prince speaks as one having authority: beauty will save the world. Or there is Keats in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: ” ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’-that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”.[2] Or St. Augustine saying to God in his Confessions, “Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new”.[3] It is yet more surprising to find Genesis in league with each of the above, for in Genesis’s opening chapter the refrain so quietly insistent, “And God saw that it was good,” contains a Hebrew word which may be translated either as good or as beautiful.[4] The feel of the whole chapter changes if one hears God proclaim that the light, the sun, the greenery, the animals are all beautiful, and mankind very beautiful.
Ah, the riddle of beauty and the craft of these writers in phrasing that riddle. Indeed, our prince in The Idiot is asked, immediately after his triumphal statement about beauty, just which beauty will save the world? That is a much harder question, but the Prince affirms in response who will save the world. In considering “the Good, the True, and the Beautiful”-our 2005 conference’s title-a temptation arises to forget the Person in view of the principles. Abstract ideas, concepts, and theories can take the place of God who quite physically incarnates those principles. “Beauty is the splendor of truth,” (veritatis splendor) announces Plato, and he has the Forms in mind here, literally Ideas. As compelling as Plato’s picture is of Beauty and Truth being like two slopes to a mountain, this is far different in nature from a God-Man who also announces, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life”.[5] The latter statement makes the transcendent incarnate. Again, if Beauty will save the world, in Dostoevsky’s view, it will be a person.
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posted 18 May 2009 @ 19:56 by Andrew Cuneo » 0 Comments
Previously Featured Article
The Pursuit of Happiness: C. S. Lewis’s Eudaimonistic Understanding of Ethics
C. S. Lewis begins his sermon, “The Weight of Glory,” with these justly-famous words:
If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you had asked almost any of the great Christians of old, he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative idea of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not thik this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by an offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.[1]
Although Lewis’s subject in this sermon concerns Christian discipleship more generally, he begins with a point about ethics. With characteristic awareness, Lewis knows that the legitimacy of being motivated by the promise of Heaven’s rewards will at first appear to be morally out of bounds for the Christian. The view in most “modern minds” of Christian ethics, and of Christian discipleship more generally, is that doing the right thing is most essentially a matter of self-denial, sacrifice, and “disinterested” fulfillment of obligation. Any positive relation that morality has to our own happiness or well-being-any essential connection between “doing good” and “my good”-is ruled out. Put differently, the “pursuit of happiness,” for us, is not a specifically moral pursuit. At best it is nonmoral, a matter of prudential self-interest: something in which we should perhaps be legally free to engage, in view of the Declaration of Independence, but only as long as our pursuit stays within the bounds of moral obligation. All too often, the pursuit of happiness represents to us something actually immoral: “because I want to be happy” is probably the most common reason we hear-or give-for justifying morally wrong behavior. This way of thinking about ethics, especially Christian ethics, has attained an almost self-evident status among Christians and critics of Christianity (e.g. Friedrich Nietzsche and Ayn Rand) alike.
21 April 2009 » read » 0 Comments
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The Enclosed Garden in C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia
A garden enclosed is my sister my spouse;
a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.
-Canticles 4:12
I. Introduction
To Christian writers, landscape and its seasons are not merely backdrops for plots and characters. As places of destination they are integral elements of quest narratives or pilgrimages. More importantly, nature’s cyclical patterns often function as maps of the human soul: “[t]o the Christian, the seasons’ round, often represented by a contrast between spring garden and winter wilderness, is a natural figure of man’s spiritual life” (Stewart 105). This correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm is a classical belief that pervaded Christian literature in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. One specific structure of landscape that has been widely used by Christian writers to narrate the cycle of Christian history, from paradise to wilderness and back to paradise, is the enclosed garden (hortus conclusus). The enclosed garden was such a common trope in medieval and Renaissance art that “scarcely an event from the life of Christ exists for which some artist at some time or other has not provided a backdrop of an unfinished enclosure [....] The touchstone of the enclosed garden [was] an emblem (hortus mentis) of man’s inner being. This is how the figure was used by St. Teresa and St. John, and how it was used by Herbert, Vaughan, and Marvell” (Stewart 47, 169). As J.T. Rhodes and Clifford Davidson also affirm, “[t]he beginning and end of time were marked by the garden” (95).
