BEAUTY WILL SAVE THE WORLD

Beauty will save the world. This is a bold statement and yet beauty as love will change our culture of death, of values and of life itself. What beauty is going to save the world? Here we speak of beauty as the light and splendour residing at the heart of man and woman. When it is seen it draws the beholder to itself. The beauty that will save the world is the love of someone showered on a suffering and dying person. It is the beauty transformed into infinite compassion out of love. It can transport the beholder to mystical heights. Beauty seen as love and truth are transcendental because they spill over to encompass every level of being. I was inspired by Cardinal Carlo M. Martini’s pastoral letter, 1999-2000, to write on the saving attribute of beauty. Recently I had been to a country village on the hills with sloping fields, evergreen fields and flowers that have bloomed with a gardener’s hand in it. It was beautiful. In my room I enjoy music, painting and literature. I cannot express to what extent such aesthetic experiences ennobled me. I can only say that I enjoy them all.

This theme of beauty is not something new in our culture and in the eastern spirituality. It is so much present in its splendor in our worship and art. With Urs von Balthasar we can say that God is not only Being, Truth, Goodness, but also the Supreme Beauty. The mystics and the artists know it better. The loss of admiration and appraisal of beauty with the coming of mechanical portrayal of figures and sceneries have impoverished our art. How is it so that thousands flock daily to the numerous temples beautifully carved, that stand as magnificent witness to splendor and beauty? One can think of the Taj Mahal. The while marvel, the carved stones and the structure! Beauty crowns the creation with what is good and true and witnesses to their mutual rapport.

Today the disinterested beauty has been trampled over feet by the modern world of affairs and business bringing it to a sad end. The earth is groaning! The ‘ecological immorality’ has tarnished its beauty. Beauty can never be ostracized and separated from the truth and the goodness. They are two sisters. One who considers beauty to be a thing of the past can never pray, can never love. The world illumined from God becomes only an illusion, dreams, romanticism. But when the dream dissolves it turns into ‘immagine’ that calls for desire to know and admire. Certain modern cultural practices have already began to reduce this aesthetic sense but it is only a culture that is in despair in its isolation.

Beauty involves two moments: to behold the beauty one has to be enraptured and to do so one has to perceive. One gets caught up in wonder at the form as the eyes grasps its splendour. In a world where moral ugliness screams from the headlines of reason and utility, getting raptured by beauty can make us more human. The love and the beauty of the creation converge to the supreme reality- God. In our daily love given and taken what really links one to another is the selfless love that is beautiful.

Beauty as Love              

It is always risky to start a joint venture of beauty and love because they are essential to living in harmony. We have lot of proofs in the advertising world and the mass media. How the film and theatre today equate love with sex and romance! Beauty and love are interrelated. You cannot have one without the other. Both are reciprocal. Dostoyevsky in his novel, The Brothers Karamazov writes, “Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it.” In The Idiot he writes, “Beauty is power. It will save the world.” The object we love is always wonderful and we overlook their defects because first and foremost they are beautiful. Mother Teresa, the bent woman, may not have been beautiful physically but she was beautiful from the inside. She has the “Christed beauty of her face” ever shone for many to be enraptured. Beauty, therefore, has everything to do with what starts in the heart and shines out.

Love and beauty are distinct though inseparable. Beauty and love are expressed in concrete form. They make things and persons lovely and lovable. They are sensual and enfleshed. Beauty emerges when love is generous and gives of itself. They together invite the beholder and bring about pleasure, delight, joy, union, ecstasy and transformation. This sense of beauty matures through being trained by the mind and will. It demands a deliberate choice to see the beauty which cannot function without the sense, however spiritual it is. To internalize this beauty as love, then it to participate in God’s life and become his artefice. What then we to do? Find beauty in what is seen, heard, smelled, tasted and touched. Chose the beautiful in the arts, in sports and in entertainment. Discern the beautiful in one’s own life. Invent all you have for this beauty-full-ness and say, “Late have I loved thee, O Beauty, ever ancient, ever new.” Let the searching for the beauty be our common quest.

 Beauty and Contemplation

Introducing this theme into the third millenium that is marked by a culture of technology highly sofisticated and rationalized, has the risk of being reduced to a mere ambiguous erotic and consumeristic outlet: the beauty of the top model, of the Miss Universe etc. Today the world especially in the West is tired of the rational dryness. The Easter spirituality is sensible to beauty and less so to the production-fever. Beauty joins with contemplation - the word that makes people sick, stressed and is empty of significance. It is not the seductive beauty that we are speaking about, that distances from the very objective for which our hearts remain restless. Instead something that is old and something new.

Is Beauty anarchic and away from the Real?

Is this theme far from today’s preoccupation and tension? I don’t think so. Even to this day the question of beauty strongly stimulates the mind and heart of people: which beauty is going to save the world?  It is not enough to denounce and condemn the evil of the world. Neither is it enough to speak of justice, duties and of common good in a world that is un-enchanted by beauty. It needs to speak with a heart filled with compassionate love, with that charity that offers with joy and enforces enthusiasm. It calls for radiating that beauty which is true and just in life, because only this beauty that enraptures truly the hearts and directs them to God. But how can the humble beauty of the crucified who is risen, bring about liberation to a human race that is so cynical, crude and corrupt?

In the present history of India where so much of misrule, threats, lies, lynching and corruptions are going on, killing innocent men and women who dedicate their lives for the common welfare of all, can we think of beauty as the path to salvation? In the fatigue and tired mood even the promoters of beauty do not find reason for conviction and enthusiasm to hope for beauty, goodness and truth. In discouragement that prompts all to direct themselves to a fatal destiny daily in midst of various forms of brutality, with incapacity to read the designs of the time-mongers, is it worth to invest in something that is of higher value?

True beauty is denied where there is no more joy, where the heart seems to be arrested due to the lack of enthusiasm. At this juncture we are pulled literally to the enrapturing beauty that invites us to go out of ourselves, to forget ourselves and taste the beauty of the gift of God in creation. The light of salvation will certainly attract many to The Beauty that will save the world.