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Steve Herrmann's avatar

The modern world, in its relentless march toward efficiency, has made beauty a casualty. The machine, Berdyaev warns, has inserted itself between man and the cosmos, severing the last fragile threads of our memory of paradise. We no longer see the world as a theophany, as a reflection of God’s glory, we see it as raw material, as data to be processed, as a problem to be solved. The stars, once symbols of the infinite, are now obscured by the glow of screens, and the human soul, once capable of trembling before the sublime, has been anesthetized by the endless scroll of digital distraction.

And yet, here is the paradox: Berdyaev doesn’t surrender to despair. He clings, with almost reckless hope, to the belief that beauty must triumph, because evil is ultimately parasitic. Ugliness has no substance. It is a corruption, a negation. True beauty, like truth, cannot be destroyed, only forgotten, only obscured. And so, in the midst of the machine’s dominion, he turns to the one place where beauty still burns with undiminished fire: the liturgy.

One wonders what Berdyaev would make of our present moment, where even the liturgy is often reduced to a battleground of ideologies, where traditionalists and progressists argue over aesthetics while the world outside grows ever more alienated from the very idea of the sacred. Would he still believe beauty could save us? Or would he revise his claim, whispering instead that beauty must save us… because if it does not, nothing will?

Perhaps the answer lies in his insistence that beauty is not merely objective or subjective, but real. Real in the way that love is real, in the way that suffering is real, in the way that God is real. It is not an idea to be debated but a force to be encountered. And if the modern world has made that encounter harder, it has not made it impossible.

The stars still shine, even if we no longer look up. The liturgy still echoes, even if we no longer listen. And beauty, though exiled, has not yet abandoned us. It waits, like the return of Christ, like the resurrection of the dead, for the moment when we are ready to see it again.

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Robert B Davis II's avatar

My students are doing final papers on beauty. They were having a debate in class about their ideas to get things flowing. We were struggling with the concept of the beauty being the good, but some deadly animals (bad) being beautiful to look at and being created good by God. One student suggested that if they are doing what God made them to do, they are beautiful. It was amazing; he didn't know it but he was weaving beauty into theosis. To willingly cooperate with God is beautiful.

I also really like this quote from a beautiful book called Winter's Grace by K. William Kautz: “That’s what faith is… it is knowing in the darkness that a loving God has a plan that’s better than any we could ever imagine. A sovereign God adores us, and for this reason the ending of our stories will be beautiful.” Its a very short book and an easy read. Highly recommend.

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