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A Terrible Beauty: True and False Visions of the Good in Descent into Hell and Till We Have Faces

July 24, 2007
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In a memorable passage from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, beauty is described as being an “awful thing...mysterious as well as terrible” (97). This strikingly paradoxical view of the beautiful, especially as it relates to the numinous, resonates in the writings of the Inklings. Charles Williams, for instance, points out that while caritas is often likened to “our immediate emotional indulgence,” it should be properly understood in the sense of the “otherness and terror of...

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