Beauty Redeems the World, part 1
"Beauty redeems the world” says the protagonist, Prince Myshkin, in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot. For many reasons, he sounds like an idiot—today even more than before. Nothing redeems the world anymore; terms like redemption or justification have disappeared from the public sphere and come to be religious gibberish. Moreover, if there is anything in Christianity that brings hope to this world, it is not beauty. One may suggest justice, human dignity, or peace for the Christian agenda for the world, but not beauty. Even those who consider art the source of meaning in this world find the word beauty old-fashioned and inadequate. Aesthetic value has replaced beauty in the philosophy of art. In this article, I nevertheless maintain that Prince Myshkin was right. The Christian faith is an aesthetic view of the world: it perceives beauty even where beauty is not apparent. This is possible because a Christian is a person who is beautiful in God’s sight. For Protes...