Beauty Will Save the World-A recommendation

An excerpt from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Nobel lecture found in Beauty Will Save the World (by Gregory Wolfe): 

"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."

A Guide to Voegelin’s Thought

by Gregory Wolfe

Eric Voegelin’s Search for Order in History

Eric Voegelin’s Search for Order in History

Eric Voegelin's Search For Order In History
Edited by Stephen A. McK­night.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Uni­ver­sity Press, 1978. 209 pp. [Ex­panded edi­tion, 1987, 252 pp.]

In the spring of 1953, Time mag­a­zine pub­lished a long re­view-es­say en­ti­tled “Jour­nal­ism and Joachim’s Chil­dren.” The book re­viewed was The New Sci­ence of Pol­i­tics, writ­ten by an Aus­trian émigré scholar named Eric Voegelin. Voegelin, the essay claimed, had made a sig­nif­i­cant break­through in po­lit­i­cal the­ory: he had re­gained the philo­soph­i­cal per­spec­tive on pol­i­tics and had bro­ken with the re­duc­tion­ist sys­tems of pos­i­tivism and pro­gres­sivism. His in­sights into mod­ern to­tal­i­tar­ian ide­olo­gies as equiv­a­lents of the early Chris­t­ian heresy of Gnos­ti­cism were in­valu­able, the essay con­cluded. Fi­nally, the re­view­ers de­clared that in the next ten years Time would work within the philo­soph­i­cal frame­work laid down by Voegelin.

Pre­dictably, Time’s en­thu­si­asm for Eric Voegelin waned under the pres­sure of om­nipresent lib­er­al­ism. But Voegelin’s achieve­ment is not so eas­ily for­got­ten. Voegelin has con­tin­ued to write, and his stature as one of this cen­tury’s lead­ing philoso­phers is es­sen­tially se­cured—at least among those who do not wor­ship the Zeit­geist. Lit­er­ally dozens of es­says have been writ­ten on var­i­ous as­pects of his work, and sev­eral con­fer­ences have met to dis­cuss is­sues which he has raised.

Voegelin [1901–1985] has rightly been called a “pro­fes­sors’ pro­fes­sor.” He com­bines an en­cy­clo­pe­dic knowl­edge of pol­i­tics, phi­los­o­phy, re­li­gion, his­tory, and an­thro­pol­ogy with a the­o­ret­i­cal com­pe­tence and vo­cab­u­lary com­pa­ra­ble to that of White­head and Polanyi. Add to this eru­di­tion Voegelin’s will­ing­ness to re­vise his ideas ac­cord­ing to the im­pli­ca­tions of his in­quiries, and one has a thinker who is chal­leng­ing for even the most knowl­edge­able reader. In his Pref­ace to Eric Voegelin’s Search for Order in His­tory, ed­i­tor Stephen A. McK­night cites these fea­tures of Voegelin’s thought and the fact that es­says on him are scat­tered as rea­sons for bring­ing out a col­lec­tion. Though the qual­ity of the es­says in McK­night’s col­lec­tion is un­even, they do deal with Voegelin’s major ideas. More im­por­tantly, each essay raises re­spect­ful but dif­fi­cult ques­tions about as­pects of Voegelin’s work. Par­tic­u­larly help­ful are the com­plete bib­li­ogra­phies of works by and about Voegelin.