“Beauty will save the world,” Fyodor Dostoevsky maintained. His faithful disciple, Nikolai Berdyaev, echoed the sentiment. In his book, The Meaning of the Creative Act, Berdyaev discusses the special role of beauty that is associated with fine art. “Art,” he declares, “is always a victory over the heaviness of ‘the world’—never an adaptation to ‘the world’.” By “heaviness,” he refers to man’s fundamental activities: eating, sleeping, earning his bread, suffering ill health and various disappointments. They belong to what he calls “the burden of necessity.” We have an innate desire to escape from so dreary a world. We hunger for what is beautiful.
We are situated, one might say, between the polar forces of gravity and grace. Gravity accounts for the “heaviness” of life. It pulls us downward. Grace transfigures life. It elevates us to a higher plane of existence. “In the creative attitude towards this world,” writes Berdyaev, “we catch a glimpse of another world.”
Much of the effort from artists in the world today is an “adaptation” to it. It is subservient to the acquisition of money, to excitement, to pleasure, to novelty, and to commercial advertising. These adaptations to the world do little for man’s spirituality and his need for transcendence. They do not manifest beauty in its purest sense.
St. Thomas Aquinas spoke of beauty as “that which pleases when perceived” (id quod visum placet). By this broad definition, Aquinas was not referring to the kind of beauty that will save the world. In this regard, beauty can refer to more mundane things: a beautiful dress, a beautiful dinner, or a beautiful day.
Music is the most spiritual of all our arts. It is best suited to offer us that “glimpse of another world.” The distinguished conductor, Bruno Walter, attested to this capacity. “Music ever spoke to me of a mysterious world beyond,” he wrote, “which moved my heart deeply and eloquently intimated its transcendent nature.”
There is an unforgettable scene in The Shawshank Redemption, the cinematic adaptation of a novel by Stephen King. Andy Dufresne (played by Tim Robbins) has been wrongly imprisoned. In an act of defiance against prison authorities, he surreptitiously plays Mozart’s Duettino Sull’aria from The Marriage of Figaro over the loudspeakers. The contrast between the heaviness of prison life and the ethereal music of Mozart is perfect. The prisoners listen to the music and are transfixed. Another world, supremely better than this one, has entered their hearts. We hear the dulcet tones of Morgan Freeman commenting on the unexpected, but much appreciated event:
I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. I like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it.
The world brought to him by “those two Italian ladies” is the world to which we all aspire. But we are so preoccupied with the details of life, that we rarely get a glimpse of it. When it comes to us, we are transfigured. It is, in the last analysis, a message from God speaking to our better selves.
Elvira Madigan is a 1967 motion picture adaptation of the ill-fated romance between a circus performer and a cavalry officer. What is memorable about the movie is the soundtrack, the hauntingly elegant, dreamy, middle movement of Mozart’s 21st Piano Concerto in C Major. It was an unexpected treat for many of the theater goers who rushed out to buy recordings of the music. The phenomenon was duly noticed by a writer for Time magazine who stated the obvious: “Mozart has staying power.” The second movement was re-baptized as “The Elvira Madigan.”
People may be reluctant to go to church, attend a concert hall, or acquaint themselves with theology in order to obtain spiritual nourishment. But a message from a higher world may come to them, unbidden, and unexpected. In various parts of the world a phenomenon known “flash concerts” or “random acts of classical music” have been taking place. In a farmer’s market in Philadelphia, shoppers were taken off guard when they suddenly heard members of the local Opera Company burst into music, regaling them with the drinking song from Verdi’s La Traviata. The recording of the market performance has received over 3 million views on the Internet. The food at the marketplace received food from a different place; as Duke Orsino exclaims in Twelfth Night, “If music be the food of love, play on.”
An orchestra made a surprise visit to a bus terminal and a shopping center and performed Ravel’s Bolero. The crowds applauded enthusiastically. A flash concert in Spain garnered more than 4 million hits when it became a video for more people to enjoy. When people fail to seek the food they truly need, that need is sometimes offered to them as an unexpected gift. Man, so we have heard, does not live by bread alone.
Beauty will save the world from our excessive preoccupation with the material. It reminds us that we were created for a different world. However, it will not save our souls without our cooperation. Beauty will save the world, as Dostoevsky said, but enlarging on his statement, what he referred to was the beauty incarnated in the person of Jesus Christ.
Photo by Hester Qiang on Unsplash
