Humanity has inherited a perfect world from nature. But how will it dispose of this gift? Over the past few centuries, when the world began to be shaken by social turmoil, when nature gradually began to retreat under the businesslike pressure of a man who was managing the Earth, and culture and morality entered a deep crisis, the best representatives of civilization turned to looking for ways to put earthly affairs in order. Some of them today still hope that beauty will save the world.
There is some impracticality in the very concept of beauty. Indeed, in today's rational times, more utilitarian values often come to the fore: power, prosperity, material well-being. Sometimes there is no room for beauty at all. And only truly romantic natures seek harmony in aesthetic pleasures. Beauty entered culture a long time ago, but from era to era the content of this concept changed, moving away from material objects and acquiring features of spirituality. Archaeologists still find stylized images of primitive beauties during excavations of ancient settlements, distinguished by their splendor of forms and simplicity of images. During the Renaissance, the standards of beauty changed, being reflected in the artistic canvases of famous painters that amazed the imagination of their contemporaries. Today, ideas about human beauty are formed under the influence of mass culture, which enforces rigid canons of the beautiful and ugly in art. Times go by, beauty invitingly looks at the audience from TV screens and computers, but does it save the world? Sometimes one gets the impression that the more familiar glossy beauty does not so much keep the world in harmony as it requires more and more sacrifices. When Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky put words into the mouth of one of the heroes of the novel "The Idiot" that the world will be saved by beauty, he, of course, did not mean physical beauty. The great Russian writer, apparently, was far from abstract aesthetic reasoning about the beautiful, since Dostoevsky was always interested in the beauty of the spiritual, moral component of the human soul. The beauty that, according to the writer's idea, should lead the world to salvation, is more related to religious values. So Prince Myshkin in his qualities is very reminiscent of the textbook image of Christ, full of meekness, philanthropy and kindness. The hero of Dostoevsky's novel can in no way be reproached for selfishness, and the prince's ability to sympathize with human grief often goes beyond the boundaries of understanding on the part of a simple layman. According to Dostoevsky, it is this image that embodies that spiritual beauty, which in its essence is a combination of the moral properties of a positive and beautiful person. There is no point in arguing with the author, since this will have to question the value system of a very large number of people who hold similar views on the means of saving the world. We can only add that no beauty - neither physical nor spiritual - can transform this world if it is not backed up by real deeds. Beautiful-heartedness turns into virtue only when it is active and accompanied by no less beautiful deeds. It is this kind of beauty that saves the world.
