The Mysterious Value of Beauty in Orthodox Art and Worship: Opening the Eyes of the Deep Heart

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By Fr. Lawrence Russell, Annunciation Church – Santa Maria, California

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Easily, the most common verbal response of the visitors who enter our temple and gaze upon its harmonious architecture and iconography for the first time is, “Beautiful.” Often, in their vocalizing of the word its four syllables are stretched, as words frequently are when we are struck by wonder: “Beee-uuuu-tiii-ful.” For those familiar with the story of the conversion of Russia to the Orthodox Faith– as recorded in the Russian Primary Chronicle—you will recall that being struck by the beauty of Orthodox art and worship is an experience which echoes across the centuries, or so it seems. The legates that Prince Vladimir sent out to find a fitting faith for the Rus described the worship of the Greeks with the following words: “And we went into the Greek lands, and we were led into a place where they serve their God, and we did not know where we were, in heaven or on earth; and do not know how to tell about this…We cannot forget that beauty! (italics added).   

Beauty is evangelical in its witness to Orthodoxy! Orthodox art and craftsmanship are a visual dimension of the Faith, a quiet gazing at the Faith. Even natural beauty and art have a way of quieting our generally overactive and self-absorbed minds, of giving the “still, small voice of God” a chance to be heard in the midst of the whirlwinds, the fires and the earthquakes of life. (1 Kings 19:11-13) Beauty addresses the soul, reaching the heart through surprise, through wonder, through the depth of contemplation. It is that call to a deeper gaze that is mysteriously accompanied by a fullness of joy, by tears, or a sigh that expresses humility and gratitude for the grace of being “included.” 

The Russian novelist, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, once commented on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s cryptic but somehow compelling phrase, “Beauty will save the world.”  He proposed that: “The persuasiveness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable; it prevails even over a resisting heart.” But a heart resistant to what? Perhaps, as Solzhenitsyn goes on the suggest, resistant to the more obvious “shoots” of Truth and Goodness. These three, Truth, Goodness and Beauty make up the “old trinity” of eternal values. Does it seem to you, as it does to me, that the wordless “message” of sacred beauty is capable of breaking through the shells of hearts otherwise hardened or too busy to pause and consider what is beyond the surface of things? Are we not living in a time, particularly in the so-called ‘West,’ when the sacredness of the Word as a medium to express Truth is progressively being obfuscated by the so-called Information Age, a devaluing by profit-mindfulness. The increasing individualization of each person’s “own truth,” often shades Divine Truth with Pontius Pilate’s cynical question: “What is truth?”  

And is there not also a corresponding and growing absence of true and careful craftsmanship serving as an affirmation of the Goodness of Creation? Instead, we are being increasingly swept up in the pervasive, care-free utilitarianism of automated, mass production. Ours is a culture of the disposable, of things destined at their very origin for the garbage heap. How is God’s benediction which He pronounced over all that He made- “and it was very good”- affirmed by intending to create piles and piles of garbage?

Perhaps, Solzhenitsyn’s observation that Dostoevsky’s words should be seen as a prophecy is correct.  That mankind indifferent to Divine Truth and Divine Goodness will find that “the whimsical, unpredictable, and ever surprising shoot of Beauty will force its way through and soar up…thereby fulfilling the task of all three.”  Yes, it is a much desired prophecy- especially in the face of an Age of Information where words purposefully “fall to the ground” (1Sam. 3:19) and an endless conveyor belt full of commodities destined for the garbage heap turns.  Against this, the Orthodox Church stands for the “Old Trinity,” and gives the shoot of Divine Beauty a chance to save us from such a false vision of life. Is our temple such a stand? Yes, I believe it is.