Skip to main content

Truth is Beauty



“What is truth?” Pontius Pilate, the Roman procurator, asked Jesus.  The Bible [John 18:38] does not quote Jesus’ answer.  We don’t know whether Jesus chose to remain silent or Pilate had no patience to listen.

Nineteen centuries later, the Russian novelist Mikhail Bulgakov extracted an answer from Jesus.  “The truth is,” tells Jesus to Pilate, “first of all, that your head aches, and aches so badly that you’re having faint-hearted thoughts of death.  You’re not only unable to speak to me, but it is even hard for you to look at me.  And I am now your unwilling torturer, which upsets me.  You can’t even think about anything and only dream that your dog should come, apparently the one being you are attached to.  But your suffering will soon be over, your headache will go away.” [The Master and Margarita, Penguin Classics, 2007, p.24]

Bulgakov’s Jesus goes on to advise Pilate that he would do well to go for a stroll, maybe in the gardens on the Mount of Olives.  “The trouble is,” says Jesus, “that you are too closed off and have definitely lost faith in people.  You must agree, one can’t place all one’s affection in a dog.  Your life is impoverished....” [p.25, emphasis added]

For Bulgakov’s Jesus, truth is an imaginative and compassionate understanding of reality.  It is not a philosophical or scientific understanding.  It is an understanding that leads to trust in people and compassion for them.

A century before Bulgakov, one of the British Romantic poets wrote: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” [John Keats (1795-1821), Ode on a Grecian Urn]
What Keats meant to say, according to many interpreters, is that the truth or the ultimate reality is not known by the reasoning mind but by imagination.  Such knowledge of the reality opens up a world of beauty to the perceiver.

It is a beauty perceived by one who understands the deeper meaning of reality.  The beauty that transcends appearances.  Beauty that lies beyond costumes and cosmetics.  Beyond opulence and copulation.  Beyond economics and technology...

Of course, beyond mere discipline and order.  Beyond spirituality and mortifications.

It is the beauty of a profound understanding of life.  The kind of understanding that Bulgakov’s Jesus reveals.  The kind of understanding that the great visionaries possessed.  An understanding of the essential interrelatedness of all beings.

An understanding that fosters trust in one’s fellow beings. Fosters compassion.

Edelman’s latest Trust Barometer survey shows that people are increasingly losing trust in other people, especially the politicians and the business people.  “...only 18% trusted business leaders, whilst government leaders scored a yet more miserable 13%,” says the report, as quoted by an article in the latest issue of the Economist. Technology is the most trusted industry, say the report, with 77% approval, 8% ahead of the car industry. 

Perhaps, we need to remind ourselves once again a la Bulgakov’s Jesus that one can’t place all one’s affection in a gadget or a car or even a dog. Perhaps, we can reclaim our potential to dig deep...


Note: Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) completed the manuscript of The Master and Margarita in 1938.   But the novel was published only in 1966.  It is a merciless satire on the novelist’s contemporary Russia ruled by Stalin.  The devil and his henchmen are the major characters. 

Comments

  1. Matheikal, I thought that Pilate was verbally, orally dyslexic! (if that made any sense). I think I will respond to this post with a separate post wherein I will make my continuing argument, science is NOT truth, will not know truth even if hit on the head by truth. Science just keeps ontruckin' And, precisely where truth lies, in reaching for it. There is no place where whatever you mean by "deeper meaning" resides.

    RE

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Raghuram, this blog is a literary approach to truth. Even a religious approach, to some extent. Such truth is quite different from scientific truth which is a posteriori. Most truths of human life (living) are neither a priori nor a posteriori; they are imaginative/intuitive. Literature deals with those truths. Bulgakov and Keats are just two examples.

      Delete
  2. Matheikal, my problem is simply this ... supposing I write on scientific truth (and I believe there is no such thing as scientific truth), I would not point out that religious or literary truth lacks in that respect. Unless it is a comparative exercise, I do not see scientific truth making any valid appearance in your post. Philosophy is a different matter as it is the fount of both religion and science. I do not understand how scientific truth is a posteriori. The truth is that if I walk off the balcony of my house, I will fall down. This is a priori truth, albeit of a decidedly mundane level. At a higher level, I can say that as the sun has risen everyday for 4 billion years, it will rise again tomorrow at a probability of (4 x 365 billion days) divided by (4 x 365) billion days + 1. This is a priori truth. If the sun blows up suddenly, I will know it only after about 8 minutes. This is a priori truth.

    Literary truths cannot but be at mundane levels, no matter how much spiritual veneer it takes on. If by truths you mean speculation then I would accept that. A J Iyer has argued a lot about what constitutes knowledge, but as far as I know he has not touched truth. I am going to leave it up to him and he is conveniently dead.

    No matter how much any one can discern what you call "deep truths", it cannot be conveyed to anyone else except on authority and that I tag as speculation.

    You have to come down from literary heights to explain to me what is meant by "Most truths of human life are imaginative/intuitive". Just because human beings can imagine/intuit, it does not mean human truths are imaginative.

    RE

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Really scientific truths are the ones like two molecules of hydrogen and one molecule of oxygen form one molecule of water. A posteriori. Can be verified. Experimental.

      Falling of balcony also can be similarly verified if one needs such verification ;) But I agree one can also deduce it logically; hence a priori. Verifiable, nevertheless; hence scientific! That's what I meant.

      Such experimental verifiability does not exist in the kinds of truth that the literary and religious gurus teach. For example, Keats' words quoted in the blog (Beauty is truth...) would be absurd unless one understands it imaginatively. Tat tvam asi would be absurd similarly. 'The Kingdom of God is with you' would be absurd. And yet people have found much meaning and significance in such (scientifically) absurd statements. Why? That's what interests me. This blog tries to throw some light in that direction.

      Unless there were such imaginative or intuitive truths, there wouldn't have been any literature or art!

      Delete
  3. Thank you for quoting Bulgakov and Keats -you made my day! I can see an interesting discussion above but I have no heart to be a part of it. To me the truth lies in the nightingale's song that was heard by the queens and emperors before. It lies in the figurines of the Grecian urn that tell about tales of ambition turning to ash one day. The truth lies in a dog's heart and we will never know its intensity till we turn it into a man. And the truth lies in a man's mind but we will never know its rabidness till we turn him into a dog. Scientific truth is like a bullet that puts a hole across one's scull and literary truth is like the air that fills in the aftermath although you can still split the air into molecules.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Uma, you've just put very poetically what I have said rather prosaically. You've understood exactly what I meant to say. I could have brought a lot of science to say the same thing. For example, there are scientists who have studied cognition and consciousness to such an extent as to say: "The world everyone sees is not THE world but A world, which we bring forth with others" (Maturana and Varela, 'The Tree of Knowledge, 1987). Scientist-turned mystic (as I describe him) Fritjof Capra argues that "Sprituality ... is a direct, non-intellectual experience of reality..." ('The Hidden Connections').

      I tend to avoid such scientific approaches simply because I believe that people can understand those things more easily with the help of literature and art, and also religion if people know how to use these things.

      Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation