Is it true, prince, that you once declared that ‘beauty would save the world?’
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
This oft-quoted line from Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot is bold and provocative. Is it possible that beauty, so often misused in the modern world, could save the world?
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Rising to the occasion, the ancient Saint Augustine appears as a source and guide who can answer this modern question. In particular, Augustine would respond by changing the approach to beauty from a search for beautiful things to an encounter with a person: “Late have I loved you, beauty so old, and so new: late have I loved you. And see you were within, and I was in the external world and sought for you there.”
For Saint Augustine, God is beauty and all other beauty in the world is meant to bring us closer to Him. Yet, it is not always clear how beauty can play a role in bringing a person closer to God and even Augustine urges souls to use caution when being enamored by the beauty of this world.
Over the course of several articles, I will examine in great detail how Augustine would respond to the question: “Can beauty save the world?” In particular, an emphasis will be stressed upon his writings and how beauty played a major role in both his conversion and his catechetical thought. It will be discovered that Saint Augustine would affirm Dostoyevsky’s line and would say that “Yes, beauty will save the world.”
Furthermore, Augustine’s teachings will be applied to the present day to show how beauty still plays a vital role in the evangelization of the modern world. I will be argue that Augustine shows catechists of today that beauty must not be divorced from teaching the truth and that the most effective way to bring about a conversion of the world is to maintain this marriage of truth and beauty.
Saint Augustine’s Love Affair With Beauty
To introduce the role that beauty plays in the world’s salvation, it is important to first see its expression in the life and conversion of Saint Augustine. Early in Saint Augustine’s life, he pursued the many passions of his senses. He was indulging in the pleasures of the world and did not live a life of virtue. Yet, it was those very same passions that were redirected towards the pursuit of truth and, after much searching, “St Augustine underwent his own deep transformation of the soul provoked by meeting the beauty of God.” This is displayed perfectly from his own account in his Confessions,
Late have I loved you, beauty so old, and so new: late have I loved you. And see you were within, and I was in the external world and sought for you there. I was deformed, drowning in those fair forms you made. […] You called. You shouted. You battered my deafness. You shone. You glistened. You shattered my blindness. You radiated and I breathed in your spirit, and I desired you. I tasted you and hungered, thirsted after you. You touched me and I burned for your peace.
This conversation with God, who is referred to as “beauty,” is a great narrative of Augustine’s own teachings on beauty. First, Augustine claims that before his conversion he was caught up in the “fair forms you made.” This shows that, while later on in his writings “Augustine emphasized the beauty of God and the role of desire for the beautiful in drawing us to God,” he also stressed the “danger that beauty [has] on its lower levels [and how it] may distract us from its ultimate source and goal.” Following the story of his conversion, Augustine relates that he was enraptured by the temptations of the world, focusing entirely on the natural beauty of the created realm and its delights. However, this statement by Augustine leads to the question, “If beauty is meant to draw us closer to God, what is beauty and how can beauty actually lead us away from God?”
The Temptation of Beauty
For Augustine, beauty is a multifaceted concept and has great power both to lead souls to God as well as away from God. In Augustine’s life, he was highly influenced by Platonism, which informed his own philosophy of beauty. This philosophy of Augustine was influenced by a “Platonic dualism between the higher real, intellectual world and the lower material world of appearance.” Out of this context, it is evident that for Augustine there was a natural suspicion of the senses and the material world. As a result, he had a “personal nervousness…with regard to all sensible entities.”
Augustine would even go so far as to say that he must at times “tear himself away from the spell of music, even of church music [for even though] it fans the flame of his devotion and touches the soul [it is also] sensual pleasure [and] must nonetheless be checked.” Yet, this dualism could have easily led Augustine to dismiss material beauty entirely, leading him into heresy. Augustine qualifies this concept of beauty to mean that the material beauty of the world must be taken in its proper perspective, only to be viewed in relation to the divine and true.
For Augustine, “the true cause of the lower world’s lack of being is merely that it is not understood and construed in terms of the upper.” Augustine proposes that the material world must not be isolated and looked upon outside of the context of heavenly mysteries. Our senses must be put in check so as not to become attached to the lower material beauty and so lose sight of God. To put it in another way,
If beauty is [in the] image of the creator God, it is also the child of Adam and Eve and so in turn marked by sin. The human person risks falling into the trap of beauty taken for itself—the icon become idol, the means that swallow the end, truth that imprisons, trap into which people fall, due to an inadequate formation in the senses and the lack of a proper education regarding beauty.
In the end, the human person must recognize that the “beauty of creation is, according to St. Augustine, a ‘confessio’ and invites contemplation of beauty in its source.”
Sources:
Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)
Pontifical Council for Culture. The Via Pulchritudinis: Privileged Pathway for Evangelization and Dialogue. (2006). §II.2 http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/cultr/documents/rc_pc_cultr_doc_20060327_plenary-assembly_final-document_en.html
Viladesau, Richard. “Theosis and beauty.” Theology Today 65, no. 2 (July 1, 2008), 182.
Balthasar, Hans Urs von. The Glory of the Lord, A Theological Aesthetics, Volume II: Studies in Theological Style: Clerical Styles. (Scotland: T&T Clark Ltd, 1984) 126.