embattled beauty
We’re at the part where we fight demons. [will beauty save the world? 1/3]
In The Idiot, Dostoevsky uses the word beauty, or some variation thereof, 98 times.1 Over half those occurrences are, naturally, in reference to the story’s women. The next most-frequent uses of beauty (or beautiful) in reference to other things are noted below.
Actions — 9
Objects — 7
Animals and nature — 8
Ideas — 4
Places — 4
Men — 4I counted occurrences of beauty in The Idiot because a line from the novel has taken on a life of its own. You’ve heard it in artsy Christian circles, in think pieces on better evangelism, or in conversations about restoring the enchanted quality of existence that either the Enlightenment or post-modernism ripped from us.
Beauty will save the world.
This line, typically attributed to the story’s tragic hero, Prince Myshkin, does not come directly from him in the novel. Rather, it’s reported as Hippolyte, the novel’s dramatic and suicidal nihilist, questions the prince.
“Is it true, prince, that you once declared that ‘beauty would save the world’? Great Heaven! The prince says that beauty saves the world! And I declare that he only has such playful ideas because he’s in love!”
Despite the incredible verbosity of the nearly 500-page novel, Dostoevsky never has Prince Myshkin articulate what he could have meant by that statement. In the scene quoted above, the prince remains silent in the face of Hippolyte’s accusation that not only did he say, “beauty saves the world,” but that he might have said it only because he was a Christian.
It certainly sounds like something the prince would say regardless of whether his own story bears it out. Prince Myshkin, a good-hearted, even Christ-like epileptic, is thrown into the middle of aristocratic Saint Petersburg. He falls madly in love with the problematic Nastasya even as a more suitable woman, Aglaya, takes a liking to him. On the day Myshkin and Nastasya are supposed to wed, Nastasya runs off to marry Myshkin’s frenemy, Rogozhin, who murders her. After Nastasya’s body is revealed to him, the prince comforts his betrothed’s murderer and falls catatonic. Meanwhile, Aglaya elopes with a fraudster who abandons her.
It’s funny that this tragedy is the context out of which arises the sublime slogan.
beauty is a riddle
There are a few other aspects to which Dostoevsky applies the term beauty that I didn’t mention above. The first is epilepsy.
Dostoevsky afflicts the prince with his own real-life condition: an irregularly occurring intense, brief sensation of clarity and awareness followed by convulsion and collapse. The prince experiences confusion and memory loss when he awakes from these episodes. Epilepsy is not something we would typically describe as beautiful. Still, the prince speaks of his condition with a certain awe.
“What matter though it be only disease…when I recall and analyze the moment, it seems to have been one of harmony and beauty in the highest degree—an instant of deepest sensation, overflowing with unbounded joy and rapture, ecstatic devotion, and completest life?”
…That there was, indeed, beauty and harmony in those abnormal moments, that they really contained the highest synthesis of life, he could not doubt, nor even admit the possibility of doubt.
This intriguing juxtaposition of beauty with disease and disorder brings us to another element to which Dostoevsky applies the riddle of beauty—Jesus. Later in the story, the prince is describing art depicting the Passion in one of Rogozhin’s rooms. (Please forgive the long passage.)
“There was nothing artistic about it, but the picture made me feel strangely uncomfortable. It represented Christ just taken down from the cross. It seems to me that painters, as a rule, represent the Saviour, both on the cross and taken down from it, with great beauty still upon His face. This marvellous beauty they strive to preserve even in His moments of deepest agony and passion.
“But there was no such beauty in Rogozhin’s picture. This was the presentment of a poor mangled body which had evidently suffered unbearable anguish even before its crucifixion, full of wounds and bruises, marks of the violence of soldiers and people, and of the bitterness of the moment when He had fallen with the cross—all this combined with the anguish of the actual crucifixion.
“The face was depicted as though still suffering; as though the body, only just dead, was still almost quivering with agony. The picture was one of pure nature, for the face was not beautified by the artist, but was left as it would naturally be, whosoever the sufferer, after such anguish.”
Take a step back from the sublime slogan and we get the fuller picture of beauty embattled—of beauty as riddle instead of beauty as uncomplicated answer. The prince’s story does not bear out a beauty that saves the world—his world is not saved—the proof is not, as they say, in the pudding—but it does bear out a worthy struggle in a complicated universe. A struggle whose measure does not depend on the outcome.
As the prince continues the dialogue quoted above, he bypasses the resurrection, and sits in the mouth of death—the “enormous mechanical engine of modern days which has seized and crushed and swallowed up a great and invaluable Being…”
Myshkin himself is destroyed by the same “implacable, eternal, unreasoning force” that wreaks havoc on the Savior and strips beauty from deity. His sanity shatters when his bride is murdered, after which he is returned to a sanatorium. Beauty, in this context, does not apply to a saved world. Beauty applies to the struggle—dare I say, the passion—that leads one to fight to save it.
wrestle with demons
“We do not lack beauty because we have been unlucky.
We lack it because we have not earned it.”
While pondering whether beauty could actually save the world, Hilary White’s recent essay—No, “beauty” will not “save the world”—arrived in my inbox. Much of the time, the “beauty will save the world” argument upholds a conversation around particular styles of artistic expression in architecture, painting, and other visual modes and even some literary ones.
Typically, the conversation goes like this: this [insert modern style of art or expression] is bad; we need to bring back [insert favorite classical or medieval style of art] which is obviously more beautiful. Between church architecture, federal architecture, and corporate logos, this conversation has taken place everywhere over the last few years. Perhaps the U.S. government mandating that new federal buildings be constructed in the “traditional and classical” styles of Greek and Roman antiquity is the apex of this dialogue.
I have nothing against the styles of antiquity or medievalism. I prefer them in many cases. But we cannot act as though those beautiful styles burst fully formed, like Athena, from Zeus’ head. These styles were borne of battle, blood, sweat, and ancient anguish. That is what Hilary says our current call for beauty is missing.
“You can’t have a grand European monastic culture before you’ve spent a few centuries in the desert, wrestling with the demons.”
In the same chapter where Prince Myshkin’s epileptic fits are described as having “beauty and harmony,” they are also described as a “demon” being “upon him.” During one of his spells, he roams about the city and has to “repudiate” a devil whispering “awful suspicions” into his ear. In the chapter previous to that, Myshkin exchanges cross necklaces with the man who would murder his beloved.
Prince Myshkin earns his beautiful characterization from his actions, from his wrestling, from his struggle. For the same reasons, The Idiot is a beautiful novel. Its world is not set right, but Myshkin’s flame burns until the very end when the implacable, unreasoning force that conquers Jesus in Rogozhin’s picture puts it out.
In his autobiography, Nikos Kazantzakis tells a story that’s burned into my mind. He interviews an old monk with a reputation for holiness. “Do you still struggle with the devil?” he asks.
“No,” the monk says. “I used to struggle with him when I was young, but now I’ve grown old and tired, and the devil has grown old and tired with me.”
“So, it’s easy for you now?” asks Kazantzakis.
“It’s worse—far worse,” says the monk. “Now I wrestle with God.”
I love that story because it reminds me that the struggle is worthy. Myshkin’s struggle is beautiful in a way that beauty itself cannot bring about. During the five silent minutes that followed Rogozhin confessing to murdering the prince’s beloved, I wonder if the prince thought to himself as he thought about his epileptic episodes: “I would give my whole life for this one instant.” Knowing the outcome of his story, would he walk that path again? Something tells me he would.
Beauty, in the context of saving the world, is not placid and pure. Beauty is not art even. Beauty is not merely the depiction of Jacob wrestling with the Lord. Beauty is the wrestling match itself.
Beauty is born of wrestling. And we are at the part where we have to wrestle with our demons.
More to follow.
By my own count from the translation by Eva Martin! If I missed one or two, Dostoevsky experts, feel free to correct me.
Everyone wants flying buttresses and Gothic arches, but we haven't earned those.