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Beauty Will Save the World: An Athonite Excerpt

by Archimandrite Vasileios

Feast of the Holy Nine Martys of Cizicus

Anno Domini 2020, April 28

14th century Serbian icon of the Annunciation

WHEN WE speak of the beauty that is not merely outward appearance, a temporary or aesthetic attribute, but a force that saves the world – then the Holy Mountain, by its existence and its life, has something to say to us. For it bears the name of Garden of the Mother of God and mountain of the Transfiguration.

And the Mother of God, according to the hymnography of the Church, is:

The Maiden all-pure and full of grace,

“adorned with the beauty of the virtues”

who conceived “by the splendor of the Spirit”

the “beauty that creates beauty” (the Lord, the God-man)

“who has beautified all things.”

But in order to approach the subject with the proper reverence and understand the mystery of the beauty that saves, we must not forget that beauty, love, and the good, are not three different things: “The good is hymned by the sacred writers of Scripture also as beautiful, and as beauty, and as amiable…and as calling all things to itself, which is why it is called kallos (beauty)” (Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Divine Names 4.7).

This means that God, who is love and inconceivable beauty, creates everything “very good / beautiful” (Gen. 1:31). And through kallos (goodness/beauty), He calls all creation to participate in life.

If man hears the call of divine beauty, he becomes a partaker in the blessed life of the Holy Trinity.

If he resists and does not obey, he creates the hell of non-communion, the curse of an ugliness contrary to nature, which does not save but rather destroys man and creation.

We should also not forget that besides the true beauty which calls and saves, there is also another, counterfeit beauty which provokes and destroys, because it is not a manifestation of goodness but a veneer of beauty and functions as a lure. It dazzles people and traps them and leads them to ultimate subjugation and destruction, promising a salvation as easy as by magic.

It is through this struggle and test of choosing some sort of beauty that the history of the human being, and humanity as a whole, unfolds: which beauty will draw us more strongly? To which will we submit ourselves?

From the first moment, we were led astray by a sort of beauty that destroyed us, because we separated it from love and obedience to God. We acted hastily and without thinking.

“It was beautiful to behold and good to eat, that fruit that caused my death” (St Gregory the Theologian, Homily 44 On the Sunday of Renewal, 6).

In ancient mythology, too, there are stories of the magic of some sort of deceptive beauty. On the Sirens’ island, passing sailors heard such bewitching song that they were dazed and lost their wits. They fell victim to those mythical creatures, half woman and half bird, and were torn to pieces by them, unable to resist, even though they could see heaps of rotting corpses and heaps of bones bleached with age.

In the new creation, again, a woman becomes the cause of salvation.

The Maiden of Nazareth, unknown and insignificant in worldly terms but humble and pure, is shown to be the one “blessed among women” who receives the Archangel’s greeting and conceives the Son and Word of God.

The beauty of the virtue of the righteous, the zeal of the Prophets, and the expectation of all mankind are the preparation, the gestation for the beauty and virtue of the Virgin.

The beauty of the entire creation reveals and illuminates the inexpressible virtue of the “beauty of Jacob.” When “God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good/beautiful” (Gen. 1:31), He discerned through that beauty the beauty of the Virgin; or alternately, the beauty of the “beautiful among women” – namely her Son and her God – who has given beauty and meaning to the entire creation. […]

God the Word did not present Himself just with an outward appearance of being human, but combined the totality of our nature “with the divine beauty.”

Human salvation is understood and lived as participation in the original beauty and rehabilitation into that beauty.

The divine beauty does not save man magically, without his knowledge, or from outside, by force. If it did, it would demean man. On the contrary, man is saved in a way that honors him, by becoming himself a fine artist, a fount of beauty and salvation for many: “A spring of water welling up to eternal life” (Jn. 4:14). He is saved by having a song of praise to God spring up from his entire being, as a eucharist, an offering of thanks.

So the Virgin, as the Mother of God, makes the whole of human nature a birth-giver of God. Through the example of the Most Holy Virgin and with her help, every soul that keeps stillness and purifies itself, in subjection to the divine will, is able to become a birth-giver of God by grace. To conceive and give birth to a little joy that overcomes death.

* Excerpted from opening pages of Beauty Will Save the World: An Athonite View (Montreal: Alexander Press, 2008). Available at Eighth Day Books.

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