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Jack Leahy's avatar

Br. F-

Beautifully written and much to think about. I am certainly guilty of using the line in a vaguely aspirational way. It is good and useful to think on it more deeply.

I also take this question in a Platonic sense a la The Symposium. Which is not the metaphysic of choice these days, to say the least. That there is a practice of beauty that goes beyond--way beyond--mere aestheticism. The latter uses beauty, as you suggest, as a kind of stimulant or even as a palliative. What does it mean to be raised up to *Beauty Itself*? Does that even make sense to us anymore? Probably not for most people. Though we may still get intimations of it when something beautiful does make us less self-centered and shallow, even if only for a fleeting moment.

It's been a while since I read The Idiot, but I think this question in the novel is made more complicated still. Prince Myshkin contemplates a decidedly unbeautiful painting, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb by Hans Holbein. He does so at the residence of Rogozhin, an atheist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_of_the_Dead_Christ_in_the_Tomb

Myshkin says the one could lose one's faith looking at such a painting. Rogozhin responds that he has, in fact, lost his faith. It is safe to say that no Orthodox Icon painter would depict Christ in this manner. An icon painter would always paint Christ as beautiful. Christians believe Christ is God and therefore Beauty Itself. What does it mean to contemplate Christ as bearing what looks like nothing more than a brute, animal and therefore senseless death? What does it mean to confront that for any of us, Christian, atheist or otherwise? It is indeed a religious question, but not only that.

A quote from another atheist character, Ippolit, who says in reference to the painting:

"Nature appears to the viewer of this painting in the shape of some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or, to put it more correctly, much more correctly, strange though it is—in the shape of some huge machine of the most modern construction, which has senselessly seized, crushed, and swallowed up, blankly and unfeelingly, a great and priceless being—such a being as by himself was worth the whole of nature and all its laws, the whole earth, which was perhaps created solely for the appearance of this being alone! The painting seems precisely to express this notion of a dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power, to which everything is subjected, and it is conveyed to you involuntarily."

So this brings up a deeper question about the meaning of our lives. It isn't merely about aesthetics, in the limited sense of the word. It asks what is beauty in a purely materialistic universe? Is it nothing more than a trick of the brain that can alleviate for us--for reasons we can never begin to explain let alone understand--the pain of the brute meaninglessness and absurdity of human existence? Or even why the universe exists at all rather than nothing? Does the deeper sense of beauty that we all experience and appears to connect us to the transcendent become a lie and a cruel joke?

It is worth considering. Though I don't see a simple way to answer any of those questions. There may not be an "answer" if we mean that in a kind of syllogistic, propositional sense. It is the question and answer of our whole life. This is what makes Dostoevsky so powerful to read.

Anyway, thank you for your beautiful and deep reflection. A lot to meditate upon. I hope you are well. -Jack

P.S. I wonder what Kierkegaard would have thought of all of this?

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Mike Hind's avatar

I read this lovely piece twice, so thanks for that.

Perhaps you are a little hard on the moorland observer, whose humility when truly *seeing* (including his place in the scene) I recognise from my own best moments of ‘shrinking’. If that makes sense.

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