Things Said For, Against, and About Beauty

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In Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, Umberto Eco asserts that Boethius (480-525 AD), experiencing the collapse of Roman civilization, was living in “an age of profound crisis, an age occupied with the destruction of seemingly irreplaceable values.” In the last 120 years there has been a growing negative and corrosive energy gnawing at Western culture, a nihilism and darkness visible in the sculpture, painting, and literature, and, increasingly, in the culture at large. This book argues that a look at the previous 2500 years (from the Ancients, to the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Romantics, Victorians) shows the power and significance beauty has had in shaping, enriching, and growing the best in what we call Western culture. In this regard the author takes James Hillman’s (1998) question to heart: “Could the causes of major social, political, and economic issues of our time also be found in the repression of beauty?” One answer comes from Dostoevsky’s character in The Idiot, who claims that “Beauty can save the world.”