Between Oscar Wilde and Dostoevsky. Beauty that laughs and saves
Beyond the aesthete
A few days after the anniversary of his birth, – on 16 October 1854, – re-reading Oscar Wilde today provokes profound emotions. It is not only the genial humour that enchants, but the spiritual density that runs through his works like a submerged current. The figure of the light aesthete, the refined dandy, has often obscured the other half of his nature: that of a man who sought in beauty a path to truth. Many critics have reduced Wilde to an ironic hedonist – as if his ‘enjoyment of life’ was an escape from pain. This is the mistake of those who forget that for him, aesthetic experience was a secular sacrament, a way to touch the divine in the flesh of the world.
Beauty and faith
Common sense separates aesthetic pleasure from religion, but Wilde perceives their profound unity. Beauty, for him as for the mystics, is not ornament, but revelation. In this he likens it to 19th century Russian writers, especially Dostoevsky and Gogol‘. In The Idiot, Dostoevsky has Prince Myškin say that ‘beauty will save the world’, but in The Brothers Karamazov Dmitry adds that it is ‘a terrible mystery’: the same force that can redeem or precipitate, ‘and the battlefield is the heart of man’. Wilde, in a different context, treads the same path: art is for him the path to mercy, beauty saves if it first knows how to laugh at itself and forgive.
In Dostoyevsky’s study, inside his last home in St Petersburg, hung a copy of Raphael’s ‘Sistine Madonna’ preserved in the Dresden Museum, a cultural pilgrimage destination for several Russian writers. In Wilde’s house were photos of Pope Pius IX and Henry
Edward Manning, pastor of the Anglican Church who converted to Roman Catholicism and became Archbishop of Westminster; but that was not all: a statue of a plaster Madonna always welcomed his guests. As is well known, moreover, his son Vibia inspired him towrite ‘The Portrait of Dorian Gray’, the same Vivian who would also become a priest.
The Young King and the Christ of Compassion
Among his ‘Children’s Fables’, The Young King is perhaps the most shocking. A prince, raised in poverty, discovers on the eve of his coronation that his robes are the result of pain and exploitation. Confronted by the bishop who urges him to obey the ‘wise order of the world’, he replies: ‘And shall Joy wear the garment that has forged Sorrow?’ The dialogue between the young king and the bishop in Wilde seems
as if taken from the silence of Christ before the Inquisitor in Dostoevsky.
The scene culminates in the encounter with theicon of Christ, before which the young man understands that true kingship is that of sacrifice, beauty is not the shining gold, but the transparency of gift. This is not a moralism, but a revelation: the beauty that redeems is born of compassion, not privilege.
In the finale, the light that envelops him and the lilies that bloom from his staff are not miraculous effects, but signs of grace. Wilde recounts a transfiguration that does not destroy aesthetics, but elevates it to theology.
Beauty as a transformation of the world
Beauty, for Wilde as for Dostoevsky, is never neutral. It can be ‘of Sodom’ or ‘of the Madonna’, demonic or divine. It is only authentic if it springs from a heart free from cruelty. In the great Christian discourse, redemption is not the only end: man’s ultimate destiny is deification.
This was intuited by Duns Scotus, according to whom even if Adam had not sinned, God would still have incarnated: not only to redeem, but to share his creative energy. Wilde, in his paradoxical way, affirms the same truth: beauty is participation in God’s being. It is not enough to atone, one must transfigure. It is here that his art becomes almost theological – a secular proclamation of salvation through form.
Conversion and grace
Another distracted critic has pointed out that all acts of altruistic heroism in Wilde are marked by a narrative ending filled with indifference, mockery or futility, at least in this world. First, there would be much to discuss and analyse about each of these endings. Second, it is astonishing how the ending of ‘The Young King’ is ignored.
In ‘The Happy Prince’, on the other hand, the statue who voluntarily undresses and the swallow in love with her who perishes in the winter without emigrating elsewhere in order to bring the statue’s treasures to anyone in need, – are only rewarded in the Afterlife, it is true. However, already in ‘The Selfish Giant’ the conversion of the Giant brings well-being to many children for many years by cheering the Giant himself, and in the finale the protagonist discovers on the point of death that the child seen at the beginning of the story, the cause of his
conversion, and waited for again and in vain all his life, is Jesus himself, who in fact shows him on his own little hands and feet “the wounds of Love”.
The point here is not to accept or not to accept the point of view of faith, but to respect Wildean truth in all its aspects. At the end of his life, Wilde converted to Catholicism. He told the Daily Chronicle : ‘Much of my moral perversity is due to the fact that my father did not allow me to become a Catholic. The artistic aspect of the Church and the fragrance of its teachings would have cured me of my degeneracies’.
Dying, he was absolved by an Irish priest. But his faith had long since matured: during an audience with Leo XIII, he recounted how he had felt ‘the frailty of body and soul slipping away like a threadbare garment’. He even attributed his recovery from a skin disease to that pope. His conversion was not a renunciation of freedom, but an attempt to transform suffering into beauty.
A lesson for today
The new pope’s emphasis today on the fight against misery and war is certainly reminiscent, as Prevost himself declared in his choice of the name Leo, of the pontificate of Leo XIII to whom Oscar Wilde felt so attached.
At the same time, it is to be hoped that the memory of the great Irish writer and the reading of his work will also help to ward off new non-traditionalist closures and condemnations. Oscar Wilde had to suffer imprisonment at just over forty years of age because of his homosexual experiences (which were not an absolute feature of his life: he was a tender husband and father of two beloved children) and despite all his well-deserved fame: there were such, very bad, laws in the England of those years.
He would die a few years later at the age of just 46, on 30 November 1900, bidding us farewell before the century of world wars and totalitarianism, as well as the greatest technological progress ever, began. Today, in a world marked by wars and new idolatries, Wilde still speaks with a prophetic voice.
He reminds us that beauty is not luxury, but a necessity of the soul; that there is no art without compassion, no faith without inner freedom. Like Dostoevsky, he knew that salvation does not come from power, but from tenderness.
And if we were allowed to construct a prayer out of Wilde’s thoughts, it would be this one:
Our Father, make us all live and not just exist. Turn away from us the reign of misery and guilt. Do not leave us at the mercy of a world where the strong crush the weak in war, and the rich do the same in peace. Give each one the capacity to truly love oneself, which is the beginning of all love. And let Beauty remain in the eyes and hearts of those who behold it.
