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Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Kind, Beautiful, and Foolish

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In his book The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky sets forth the bold assertion that “beauty will save the world.” The sheer number of ways in which this quote has been applied attests to the risk inherent in the idea, and perhaps inherent in beauty itself. Certainly the church during the Reformation recognized the risks involved in imaging God, using beauty to communicate an incommunicable mystery, the impersonal to describe a Person. For good reason, many are cautious when we hear a statement such as the one in this novel.

But Dostoevsky did not pronounce the idea with the naïveté with which it is often quoted. He did not have in mind the kind of beauty we worship in the fashion or beauty industries nor did he have in mind an impersonal object or a purely abstract notion, a distinct but distant ideal. On the contrary, Dostoevsky entertains the idea in a person, in Myshkin, who lives the quality of beauty as if an inescapable quality of his inmost being. For Myshkin’s inclination is to help rather than to harm, to give mercy rather than malice, forgiving again and again, though surrounded by people who do not. In fact, it is this group who tirelessly labels Myshkin the “idiot” because he refuses to participate in the disparaging and destructive ugliness of their own ways but instead takes what is cruel and repulsive in them and their culture and dispels it. They hate him for it; they believe him a fool. But it is a kind and beautiful foolishness.

I sometimes wonder if we have so stripped away the possibility of actual beauty in our encounters with the divine that we not only miss something real of God and others to behold in the world, but we miss opportunities to show the world the beauty of God—in hands and faces, in people who bestow crowns of beauty instead of ashes, in communities that repair ruined cities instead of causing further devastation.(1) Theologian William Dyrness laments the modern mentality that has somehow lost the sense of the “wholeness that beauty reflects.”(2) We are so mindful of beauty’s limitations; but isn’t it we who are the limited as the depicters of God’s beauty? “[When I look at] the moon and the stars that you have established,” sang David, “what are human beings that you are mindful of them?” (Psalm 8:3). Describing the very wholeness that beauty reflects, Dyrness continues, “Based on God’s continuing presence in the Spirit of Christ, God is somehow present in all beauty.”(3)

That is to say, the divine presence can be seen in the beauty of bringing the cup of cold water, in the stained glass mural of the great cathedral, or in the life that sits in broken shards before the potter and in the lives who sit with her. Moreover, if beauty is revelation, if creativeness is more than an object but an action of both play and work in God’s kingdom, if the Incarnation is a call to participate in the glory of God as persons who imbibe that glory, then there is most certainty in beauty the potential to save, for God is both the Source and Subject.

In his 1970 Nobel Laureate lecture in literature, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn made the bold suggestion: “Perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth. If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, or not allowed through—then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar to that very place, and in so doing fulfill the work of all three?”(4) In other words, perhaps we cannot afford to omit the possibility of God reaching out to the world in beauty, in mystery, and transcendence.

Of course, this is not to say that beauty is not a risk for the community of God. We are sinful and limited creatures in our ability to appreciate true beauty, and it is often an elusive concept to understand practically. We are artistically formed at the hands of a God who is far beyond us. We must indeed remember with David that it is we who fall short, we who must maintain the perspective of humility and keep before us a sense of mystery. But like Myshkin who attempted to rise above the ugliness of his world, we must also have the courage to risk beauty, living as those who recognize the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ and so choose to boldly proclaim and reflect this beauty in a world that would have otherwise.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) See Isaiah 61.

(2) William Dyrness, Visual Faith: Art, Theology, and Worship in Dialogue (Grand Rapids, Baker Academic, 2001), 90.

(3) Ibid., 90.

(4) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1970, from Nobel Lectures, Literature 1968-1980, Ed. Tore Frängsmyr (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 1993).

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Beauty in the Subway?

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Ravi Z

Dale Henderson gives cello concerts in New York City subway stations because he fears the day when classical music will be no more. He plays for free, focusing primarily on Bach Solo Cello Suites because their “power and beauty unfailingly inspire great appreciation, joy and deep emotion in those who hear them.”(1) Some commuters stop and stare, curious or captivated, many having never heard a cello or Bach concerto before. For Henderson, the music is an offering of something meaningful, seeds for future generations of classical music admirers who would not otherwise know it, beauty well worth lugging his heavy cello down into the subways to protect.

It is not always easy to talk about beauty without a minefield of objections or at best complicating list of qualifiers. Its modern place in the “eye of the beholder” gives it a tenuous feel at best. While Henderson describes a world without classical music as soul-less, others may not miss it so much. And yet it is hard not to talk about beauty in a broken and breaking world that makes its distinctive encounters increasingly stand out.

One author describes the common, but individual, effect of our varied encounters of the beautiful this way: “‘Beauty’ seems suited to those experiences that stop us in our tracks. Whether it’s a painting called Broadway Boogie-Woogie or a scherzo by Paganini, the beautiful is conducive to stillness. It doesn’t excite us, or necessarily instill in us the desire to replicate it; it simply makes us exist as though we’re existing for that very experience.”(2) His words are rife with the power of beauty to create longing, a desire to somehow participate. Beauty indeed leaves us with the ache of longing for another taste, another glimpse. And for each of us, this longing can come at unique or unsuspecting times—at the spectacular sight of the giant sequoias or a tiny praying mantis, at a concert or watching a First Nation powwow and taking in the colors, the drums, the survival of a betrayed people.

But to suggest that beauty is simply a spectator’s preference, an individual’s pursuit of an abstracted and timeless ideal, is to miss something significant. What of those moments when beauty is neither pleasant nor pretty, but haunting? What of the communal ache of beauty? The well-known scene in Elie Wiesel’s account of the Holocaust when describes a young man named Juliek, an incredibly gifted violinist from Warsaw. Wiesel describes the night when Juliek, on the brink of death, played a Beethoven concerto in the dark for that group of dying, starving men. Wiesel remembers the intensely beautiful, sad and haunting music, noting that it was as if Juliek was playing his very life upon that violin, offering a lament for each of them. Their encounter with the beauty of the composition was humanizing, made all the more jarring in such a dark and dehumanizing setting. In the morning they woke to find Juliek dead, his violin crushed on the floor beside him.

The sometimes haunting interplay between the presence of beauty and its absence, the space between beauty and brokenness only contributes to beauty’s power to stop and still us. But how do we account for it? The severe absence of beauty can stir a common ache within us, a longing that is inexplicable if beauty is merely accidental or an abstraction divorced from reality. As musician and professor Jeremy Begbie writes, “Beauty… has all too often been abstracted from time and temporal movement, and been turned into a static, timeless quality. Suppose, however, we refuse to divorce it from the transformation of the disorder of creation in the history of Jesus Christ. Suppose we begin there? Does this not open up a more dynamic paradigm of beauty?”(3)

The Christian worldview offers a God who not only made the beautiful, whose glory offers glimpses, but the God who can take away brokenness, and transform a disordered creation in Jesus Christ. This is a God who takes all the glimpses and introduces the whole—not as an escape from reality but a deepening of it. For the beauty of God is one that can hold life as well as death.

I remember vividly one summer when I was working with a group of kids in an afterschool program and a young girl was stung by a bee. She had a severe reaction and the paramedics were unable to revive her. Sitting with one of her young friends at the funeral, somewhere in the middle of it she turned to me with tears in her eyes and said, “The cut on her face will never heal.” The young girl had a little cut on her forehead from some previous playground encounter, and her friend made this observation in the midst of her own shock and grief. I remember thinking how incredibly insightful her words really were. She was noticing something very simple, but there was something quite profound in her thought. She seemed to be saying instinctively that this wasn’t right, that wounds are meant to heal, that the broken parts of life are not okay: indeed, that wholeness is both our stubborn longing and profound calling.

Remarkably, in this little girl’s comment is something that every prophet in the Bible has said—the ones who were trying desperately to open the people’s eyes to the glory of God around them and the ones who were pointing out the absence of glory. Each of them looked around the world, and seeing its broken cuts and ugly blemishes, cried out instinctively, “This is not the way it’s supposed to be!” We were made for wholeness.

Perhaps beauty has an effect on us because it hints at this beauty of God, manifestations that come not intangibly but, like Jesus Christ, within time and community, and thus a beauty that transforms, a beauty that is able to embrace life as well as death.

Whether a fleeting glimpse in the subway or a quiet act of kindness, whether something that stirred a community or stood up to a culture, each of these dim glimpses suggests not an escape from reality but a calling further into it, such that when we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Pia Catton, “A Musician for the Masses Improves His Station,” Wall Street Journal, December 31, 2010.

(2) Arthur Krystal, “Hello, Beautiful: What We Talk About When We Talk About Beauty,” Harpers, September 10th, 2010.

(3) Jeremy Begbie, Voicing Creation’s Praise: Towards a Theology of the Arts (New York: T&T Clark, 2006), 224.