Truth, Goodness, and Beauty

I seem to recall having posted this before, last year perhaps. No Matter, these beautiful ideas surfaced in a conversation earlier in the week. It's enough to stun you into shutting up and smiling at the sky for a while. Enjoy it.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1970) An excerpt

DOSTOEVSKY ONCE ENIGMATICALLY let drop the phrase: "Beauty will save
the world." What does this mean? For a long time I thought it merely a
phrase. Was such a thing possible? When in our bloodthirsty history
did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, elevated, yes;
but whom has it saved?

There is, however, something special in the essence of beauty, a
special quality in art: the conviction carried by a genuine work of
art is absolute and subdues even a resistant heart. A political
speech, hasty newspaper comment, a social program, a philosophical
system can, as far as appearances are concerned, be built smoothly and
consistently on an error or a lie; and what is concealed and distorted
will not be immediately clear. But then to counteract it comes a
contradictory speech, commentary, program, or differently constructed
philosophy--and again everything seems smooth and graceful, and again
hangs together. That is why they inspire trust--and distrust.

There is no point asserting and reasserting what the heart cannot believe.

A work of art contains its verification in itself: artificial,
strained concepts do not withstand the test of being turned into
images; they fall to pieces, turn out to be sickly and pale, convince
no one. Works which draw on truth and present it to us in live and
concentrated form grip us, compellingly involve us, and no one ever,
not even ages hence, will come forth to refute them.

Perhaps then the old trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty is not
simply the dressed-up, worn-out formula we thought it in our
presumptuous, materialistic youth? If the crowns of these three trees
meet, as scholars have asserted, and if the too obvious, too straight
sprouts of Truth and Goodness have been knocked down, cut off, not let
grow, perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, unexpected branches of
Beauty will work their way through, rise up TO THAT VERY PLACE, and
thus complete the work of all three?

Then what Dostoevsky wrote--"Beauty will save the world"--is not a
slip of the tongue but a prophecy. After all, he had the gift of
seeing much, a man wondrously filled with light.