Four Seasons Hotel, The Rocks, 12 June 2026
I. Demons
In 1872 Russia was already teetering on the edge of upheaval. Halfway through his reign, Tsar Alexander II was rapidly expanding Russian territory in Central Asia and Russian influence in the Balkans. Sweeping economic, military and administrative reforms were intended to modernise his country. Symbolising the new Russia, a Polytechnical Exhibition was held at the Kremlin, drawing twice the population of Moscow. But in that same year the first non-German translation of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital was published in St Petersburg, the Tsarist censors naïvely thinking no one would read or understand it. And so, Marxist ideas were inadvertently allowed to take root among Russian intellectuals.
In that very year, Fyodor Dostoevsky gave us his novel Demons.[1] Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, an ageing idealist, seeks to defend beauty before a group of radicals. To these young modernisers, beauty is a luxury, an impediment to science, progress, revolution. Against the nihilism of the age Verkhovensky argues that beauty is no optional extra, not something to concern ourselves with only after the politics and economics are sorted, but something crucial to our flourishing. He solemnly declares: “Man can live without science, he can live without bread, but he cannot live without beauty.”[2]
Following his speech, the crowd laughs and hisses, the evening descends into farce, and the old man weeps. How do we respond? Are we with that crowd or its modern equivalents, the designers of bland utilitarian buildings, or the fans of Indie Sleaze and Grunge Aesthetics? Or are we with Dostoevsky, affirming the importance of beauty? If man cannot live on bread alone,[3] what is the ‘more’ we need in our lives, and if beauty is a big part of that ‘more’, what do we mean by it?
II. What Beauty is Not
Defining beauty is no easy task. Contemporary culture suggests it’s about being nice to look at (or hear): the polished marble of a statue, the bright colours of a painting, the gleam of a new sports car, the catchy tune of a pop song, the perfectly enhanced Instagram picture. But this version of beauty is only skin deep and faintly frivolous. If that’s all there is to beauty, we may join the utilitarians in doubting we need it.
Another reflex of our culture is to say “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”:[4] wholly subjective, an hooray with no more substance than a fondness for tea over coffee. On that logic, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508-12) is no more beautiful than Marcel Duchamp’s piece of conceptual art, a urinal called Fountain (1917). This view of beauty sounds generous and tolerant but hides something corrosive: for if beauty is mere taste, it reveals little or nothing about our world and can make no claim on us…
In responding to the shallow and the subjective views of beauty, I want to draw on the tradition stretching back to Plato and Aristotle, via Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius, to Albert the Great, Aquinas and Ficino.[5] For them, severing beauty from truth and goodness is a catastrophic mistake, making one or all of them weightless concepts. Let me explain…
III. What beauty is
The Church inherited from ancient philosophers, medieval scholastics and renaissance humanists a simple yet profound idea: that everything made by God bears the mark of its Maker—the trademark “Made in Heaven”. The tradition named these divine stamps transcendentals. Everything that exists participates in divine Being, Unity, Truth, Goodness and Beauty, and so has all of these at least to some degree. The true is reality as it speaks to our minds and induces our speculative and practical thinking; the good addresses our wills, enticing our desire and action; and the beautiful excites our senses and evokes delight and awe. Beauty is in the architecture of everything, yet transcends all particular instances. Sounds heavy, I know, but bear with me just a little longer…
In this tradition beauty might be thought of as a summons: a kind of radiance from within things that meets us and calls us out of ourselves and towards the source of beauty. Thus Plato talks of ascending Diotima’s Ladder of Beauty, from the mundane to the eternal, the imperfect instance to a more perfect essence. Augustine presents beauty as the splendour of God, sought everywhere but finally found in Him alone. And Aquinas considers the wholeness, harmony and radiance of things that please us in the very sensing of them.[6] For C. S. Lewis capital-B Beauty is the trace of a joy we cannot name, awakening a longing nothing earthly can satisfy. Beautiful things, he writes, are “only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”[7]
Whilst there are different accents in these writers, a consistent conviction emerges: beauty is real, not shallow or subjective; it comes in degrees; it points us towards higher things; and it ultimately draws us to that capital-B “Beauty ever ancient, ever new”[8] that is God.
IV. Where do we hear beauty’s call?
If beauty is a summons, where do we hear it? Often in the natural world: think of the glory of the night sky, a geological wonder, a spider’s web, or a newborn baby.
We also encounter beauty in the work of human hands: in the architecture of Pugin, Gaudi and Wright; the sculptures of Michelangelo, Bernini or Rodin; the frescoes of Giotto, Fra Angelico and Raphael; the portraits of da Vinci, Rembrandt or Picasso; the church music of Allegri, Palestrina and Bach; the compositions of Mozart, Beethoven or MacMillan; the verse of Homer, Dante and Keats; the novels of Austen, Tolstoy or Atwood; the plays of Sophocles, Shakespeare and Williams; the essays of Montaigne, Newman or Chesterton—and so on…
Sadly, modernity often reflects more the spirit of the crowd than of Verkhovensky. Much of what modernity makes is banal, utilitarian, transient. Cost per square metre, speed of construction, return to investors, function over form so often rule. But a short walk from here stands St Mary’s Cathedral, Australia’s greatest church: of honey-coloured Sydney sandstone, in Wardell’s English neo-gothic style, built and decorated over a century and a half.[9] When Archbishop Polding commissioned it, his brief to the architect was disarmingly simple: “Any plan, any style, anything that is beautiful and grand.”[10] Eucharist28 will likewise appeal to the awesome and magnificent.
Of course there is a more everyday beauty: in a smile or a simple act of romance, charity or devotion. Beauty calls from many places, if our ears are open to hear it…
V. Not for utility’s sake, but not useless
The Church has long proclaimed that beauty is much more than optional ornamentation. Though the Bible warns against vanity and lust,[11] and values inner beauty over external show,[12] still it celebrates beauty in creation,[13] affection,[14] fidelity,[15] God.[16] The God of Genesis is a sculptor moulding us out of clay, Paul calls us God’s artwork, and the Philippians are told to ponder only what is lovely.[17] The Church has always been a patron of the arts, and so much of humanity’s patrimony of great architecture, art and music is a gift of the Church.
In his 1999 Letter to Artists, Pope St John Paul II said “beauty is a key to the mystery and a call to transcendence”, a via pulchritudinis or way to God through beauty.[18] His collaborator Joseph Ratzinger argued that alongside the lives of the saints, art is the most effective apologia for Christianity.[19] Beauty can transmit the Gospel when argumentation cannot, inspiring awe rather than doubt, and preparing hearts to contemplate existence and destiny. When Pope Benedict XVI met artists in the Sistina in 2009, he praised the chapel as “one of the most extraordinary creations in the entire history of art”. Its frescoes “draw us towards the ultimate goal of history,” with all the promise, risk and tension of human life.[20]
We see that clearly in the Sistine Chapel Revelations exhibition currently at St Mary’s. Great art can shock us out of routine, out of ourselves, allowing us to transcend even our sufferings and unlocking a yearning for more. And so, Benedict went on to quote that very passage from Dostoevsky with which I opened today’s talk: “Man can live without science, without bread, but not without beauty.” In an age weary of argument but polarised at every turn, sceptical about truth and cynical about goodness, many will only appreciate the language of beauty.
VI. How might beauty save the world?
Let me conclude by returning to Dostoevsky, but this time to his earlier novel, The Idiot.[21] Our hero, Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, is so open-hearted and guileless that he’s widely dismissed as a simpleton. In fact, he’s the portrait of “the positively good and beautiful man”.[22] And Dostoevsky has the Prince mouth the haunting claim, “Beauty will save the world.”
How could it?[23] Science may save us from catastrophes and Bread sustain us, but how does beauty heal us? The Book of Genesis tells how things went wrong for us. We were given the beauty of the natural order to tend and the ability to make beautiful things for ourselves. But whether in Eden or Babel, we sought to do so entirely on our own terms, making ourselves god.[24] We made our world and ourselves ugly in the process, grasping, exploitative, divided; treating each other as mere means, then obstacles; seeking to dominate and consume rather than treasure with awe and wonder.[25]
But beauty can pry us open again, exposing the magnificence of the human[26] and pointing us toward that divine “Beauty ever ancient, ever new”. Provoked by beauty, we no longer seek to conquer but simply receive with gratitude. We are stopped in our tracks before a cathedral or a coastline. Our breath is taken away by the face of our beloved or our God. We come to see those we work with and for as colleagues not rivals; to view suppliers and customers as persons rather than transactions; to consider the goods or services we provide as worth doing well, not just profitably. To run enterprises in that spirit is to share in Beauty’s redeeming work, knitting us back into that whole from which our first sins tore us.
Though the suffering Jesus “had no form or majesty that we should look at him, no beauty that we should desire him”, we see on His face the glory of God and it redeems us. Beauty will save the world, if first we let it save each of us. And so I pray “May the Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord uncover the beauty of his countenance to you and give you his peace.”[27]
[1] Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons or Possessed (1872).
[2] Dostoevsky, Demons, Part III, ch. 1.
[3] Dt 8:3; Mt 4:4; Lk 4:4.
[4] While the concept that beauty is subjective dates back at least to Plato, the exact phrase in its modern form was coined by the Irish novelist Margaret Wolfe Hungerford in her 1878 book Molly Bawn. In Love’s Labours Lost (1588), William Shakespeare has “Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye”; in The Poor Man’s Almanack (1741) Benjamin Franklin has “Beauty, like supreme dominion, is but supported by opinion”; and in Essays Moral and Political (1742) David Hume has “Beauty in things exists merely in the mind that contemplates them.” For a more recent ‘scientific’ statement of the claim see: Kelli Burton, ‘Why beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ Science 1 October 2015.
[5] See, for example: Plato, Republic 508 (especially on ‘The Form of the Good’); Symposium 210–211 (especially on ‘The Ladder of Love’); Philebus 61a-66b; Aristotle, Metaphysics IV.2 1003; X.1, 1052; Nicomachean Ethics I.1 1094-1096; St Augustine, De Pulchro et Apto (lost); Confessions IV, 13, 20 etc.; Boethius, De hebdomadibus; Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names 4.7; Avicenna, Metaphysics I.5; St Albert the Great, Summa de Bono; On the Unity of the Intellect 3a.1; St Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate I.1; Summa Theologiae, Ia, 5 & 39; Ia-IIae, 94.2; Marsilio Ficino, Commentaries. See ‘Medieval theories of transcendentals,’ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2013 & 2019).
[6] See Nickolas Pappas, ‘Plato’s Aesthetics,’ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2025); Robert Warchał, ‘Contributions to the aesthetics of St Augustine,’ Humaniora Czasopismo Internetowe 41(1) (2023): 43-52; Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas (Harvard UP, 1988) and art and beauty in the Middle Ages (Yale UP, 2002).
[7] C. S. Lewis, ‘The weight of glory’ (a sermon given at the church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, 8 June 1942), in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (Eerdmans, 1949).
[8] St Augustine, Confessions X.
[9] https://stmaryscathedral.org.au/explore/history-art/history-of-the-cathedral/
[10] Letter of Archbishop John Bede Polding to William Wardell, 10 October 1865.
[11] E.g. Prov 6:25; 31:30; Ezek 28:17; 1Tim 2:9-10; 1Pet 3:3-4.
[12] E.g. 1Sam 16:7; Prov 31:10; Isa 52:7; Mt 6:25; 2Cor 4:16; 1Tim 2:9-10; 1Pet 3:3-4.
[13] E.g. Gen chs 1 & 2; Eccles 3:11.
[14] E.g. Ps 45:11; Song 4:1-16.
[15] E.g. Prov 31:30; Esther 2:7ff.
[16] E.g. Ps 19:1-4; 27:4; 50:2; Isa 40:8; 60:1-2.
[17] E.g. Gen 2:7; Ps 27:4; 34:5; 139:13-14; Isa 60:1; Zech 9:17; Ezek 16:14; 2Cor 3:18; Eph 2:10; Phil 4:8.
[18] Pope John Paul II, Letter to Artists (4 April 1999), 9, 10 & 16; cf. his Homily for the Beatification of Blessed Fra Angelico, Patron of Artists (3 October 1982); Proclamation of Blessed Angelico as Patron of Artists (18 February 1984); Homily for the Celebration of the Unveiling of the Restoration of Michelangelo’s Frescos in the Sistine Chapel (8 April 1994). He followed after St Paul VI, Homily at Mass for Artists in the Sistine Chapel (7 May 1964); Address to Artists (8 December 1965).
[19] Joseph Ratzinger, The Ratzinger Report: An Exclusive Interview on the State of the Church (with Vittorio Messori, transl. S. Attanasio & Graham Harrison, Ignatius Press, 1985), 129–30
[20] Pope Benedict XVI, Address to a Meeting with Artists in the Sistine Chapel (21 November 2009). Subsequently: Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (2013), 167; Address to a Meeting with Artists in the Sistine Chapel for the 50th Anniversary of the Vatican Museum of Modern Art (23 June 2023).
[21] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot (1868)
[22] Dostoevsky’s letter quoted in Richard Peace, Dostoevsky: an Examination of the Major Novels (Cambridge UP, 1971), 59-63.
[23] See also Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ‘Can beauty save the world?’ in Nobel Prize in Literature Lecture 1972 https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/nobel-lecture
[24] Mankind is given the beauty of the natural order to tend: Gen 1:28-30; 2:15-17. We are also enabled to make beautiful things for ourselves: Gen 3:19; 6:14-16; 11:3-4. But we attempt to do so on our own terms, making ourselves god: Gen 3:1-7; 11:5-7.
Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: Encyclical on Care for our Common Home (2015), 15.
[26] Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas: Encyclical on Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (2026) 15, 23, 49 & 148.
[27] Jesus disfigured by suffering: Isa 53:2; Mt 26:67. Yet we see on His face the glory of God: Mt 17:2; Jn 1:14; 14:9; 2Cor 4:3-6; Col 1:15; Heb 1:3. The Aaronic blessing: Num 6:24-26.
