Imagine a world in which water, instead of being transported as invisible vapors, was floated from oceans back to the land as fluffy, white aggregations of vapor. Imagine a world in which the sky during the day wasn't black or gray, but a lovely azure. Imagine a verdant world teaming with life: with stationary green plants, and crawling beasts.
What a wonderful world! And it is ours!
It's become a cliché among my set to declare that "Beauty will save the world" (to paraphrase Dostoyevsky). The way it's invoked has some truth, but ignores the subtleties of beauty and its opposite, and how the beauty we recognize doesn't map simply to goodness in a fallen world.
I say further: Ugliness Will Save the World.
I say this not merely rhetorically, but phenomenally. Ontologically speaking, ugliness as such has no existence; it adheres as a privation in things that have a positive existence. But we do not experience evils as simple privations, negations. Rather we experience evil as positive a reality—something we encounter. This experience can repel us from ugliness to seek beauty—it is one of the ways that from evil the Almighty draws good.
True beauty is not a superficial matter. As then-Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in his August 2002 speech at Rimini,
So it is that Christian art today is caught between two fires (as perhaps it always has been): it must oppose the cult of the ugly, which says that everything beautiful is a deception and only the representation of what is crude, low and vulgar is the truth, the true illumination of knowledge. Or it has to counter the deceptive beauty that makes the human being seem diminished instead of making him great, and for this reason is false.
Further, at times we experience as ugly what is in fact beautiful in itself but so greatly beyond us that we fail to recognize it. This is an additional category of the ugliness that will save us. I think this is similar to what Cardinal Ratzinger was talking about in the discussion of Christ's beauty that wounds us.
To take the contrapositive, as it were, of the quoted paragraph, we must promote the notion of beauty as the radiation of truth and goodness, and we must not hide from the ugliness that bursts the circle of man's self-contentment and moves him to look Beyond.
There's a lot more to the talk and I recommend reading it entirely. The last paragraph is a great reminder of the critical context of the Dostoyevsky maxim.
Another insightful discussion of beauty: Beauty: So Much More Than We Think
I'm not sure what I think of the overall argument here yet, but the author makes a number of important distinctions on the way to this deeply insightful passage:
But what we see on college campuses, I believe, is not so much "rape culture" as hookup culture. Hookup culture confuses everyone, because all the normal cues, such as love, commitment, and mutual trust and knowledge, are gone. Empty seduction is the norm. Hence the state of mind of the two people involved becomes unknown, one to the other. They behave like rutting animals, setting aside the higher human functions and all that mankind has added to sexuality that raises it above the animal level, and then they are shocked, shocked to find that consent, the one distinctively human trait they want to retain, is only ambiguously present, if present at all.
"Soulless, sordid, drunken sex with a drunken stranger is not rape" by Lydia McGrew
