“True beauty alone can save the world.” (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
In this quest for beauty, we encounter Dostoevsky himself in all of his novels.
It is said that he traveled to Dresden every year to spend long periods of time gazing at Raphael’s “Sistine Madonna.”
On the other hand, we also sense how, in his masterful narratives, he probes the depths of his fictional characters’ souls.
In this struggle to find beauty, we recognize the longing inherent in all human existence in the face of all the suffering and misery in the world.
It has been handed down to us from antiquity that the philosopher Plato identified beauty with the Good and the True.
In beauty, the essential—the divine—is revealed in its perfection.
As Plato writes in “The Symposium”: “If there is anything worth living for, it is the contemplation of beauty… In the presence of beauty, the soul itself is moved to produce beauty.”
However, beauty is not merely a sensual quality of the body. It is the inner, spiritual quality of the heart that characterizes the beautiful soul; and this results in a special radiance that conveys to us the impression of beauty, regardless of a person’s age or outward appearance.
Dostoevsky, too, understands beauty as beauty of the soul—as a person’s moral and spiritual purity.
For students of A.M.O.R.C., the blooming red rose symbolizes this kind of “beauty of the soul.”
It serves as an ideal to strive for, in order to draw closer, through conscious self-experience (self-realization), to the beauty of the true self—the Christ within us.
The extent to which this ideal of the rose/beauty of the soul, the inner transformation, and a changed attitude of the heart is realized becomes evident in everyday life.
The individual will strive to achieve the ideal of beauty in all things: through careful, well-groomed attire; an upright, self-assured posture; uplifting choice of words; a melodious voice; and an overall demeanor that radiates confidence, serenity, and joy of life, as well as beautiful deeds.
When one follows the current crises in the world, it seems almost impossible to hold fast to this ideal of beauty. But as it says in the “Fama Fraternitatis”, the first manifesto of the Rosicrucians from 1614:
“that man might at last understand his nobility and his glory…”
That is why it is the noblest task of every Rosicrucian to strive again and again to reclaim this ideal of beauty in their everyday life.
To conclude with Dostoevsky. For him, Jesus Christ was the example, the archetype of our path toward the ethical and religious dimension of beauty. “He planted it in the souls of men, so that through this beauty they might all become brothers and still see beauty even in the most perverse of human souls.”
