Unfortunately, we often get beautiful and unbeautiful confused. We call “beauty” what is essentialy pabulum, or, sometimes, just ugly. How not to make a mistake, the metropolitan Anthony (Packanich) tells.

There is a famous phrase from the novel “Idiot” by F. Dostoevskiy: “Beauty will save the world”. But which beauty is it all about? A lot of different kinds of beauty exist, and, besides that, it’s well known that “everyone to his own taste”.

But we have one standard of the beauty -- it is refulgence.

The beauty can be neither cold nor evil.

Unfortunately, we often get beautiful and unbeautiful confused. We call “beauty” what is essentialy pabulum, or, sometimes, just ugly.

The beauty is timeless, frank and radiant. It doesn’t grow dull through the years, it doesn’t exude the evil or horrify.

God is the Sculptor of the beauty. And the real beauty always radiates His light.

We find its droplets in the day-to-day routine. The best masters tried to chase its lines - painters, writers; wisemen were computing its formula.

There is a paradox: yearning for the beauty no one is able to let into his life, he stifles its voice. A few can serve for the beauty - only brave people who don’t follow the crowd.

How often someone who follows a lofty ideal is met with the derision. How often attempts to speak about beauty and perfection are nipped in the bud. And a person gives up, he stops striving for the beauty; he surrenders to time-spirit satisfied with imitations and surrogates.

And it appeals to all spheres of life.

The pursuance of beauty and harmony in the relationship goes up in smoke, we slip into simple habitude without feelings, we go along with insincerity and start being sly.

A desire to achieve professionality at work is not supported - there is no request for a high level. Everything boils down to a middle level at the best, or the bar slides below average at all.

The main thing is to get faster, get more, and get flashily.

People quit striving for ideals, an idealist passes out of sight.

There are no real heroes to take for a model. There are no high ideas. Human degenerates. He gets fewer and fewer requirements.

This happened earlier. It was called hard times.

When nothing beautiful enters the soul.

“One thought was haunting me, but I was afraid to make a novel from that… The idea was to represent a perfectly beautiful person. To my mind, nothing can be harder, particularly nowadays”, - Fyodor Dostoevskiy wrote about the conception of his novel “Idiot”.

As a matter of fact, there is nothing harder than talking about perfection, to strive for it, to describe it.

But Dostoevskiy made it brilliant. The protagonist is a perfect person. Prince Myshkin tried to live the gospel, he was compassionate and clement to everybody, who he met. He lived in a small way, he was good-natured with a child’s clean and kindly heart.

Society, due to his innocence and goodness of heart, classified him as “starry-eyed”, and, therefore, as an idiot.

But he was just that brave knight who fought for real beauty not betraying his guidelines and ideals, which were not in step with the times.

In all times the beauty was ridiculed. A desire to be better, to strive for perfection, for lofty ideals still harasses and will harass the public.

A person like this will make a fool of himself and will be called an “idiot”. Because society perceives him a danger for their lifestyle, habitude, laws.

Perfect beauty obeys one Lawmaker, Whose laws way too often are out of tune with the public.

But this fact in no wise doesn’t mean that you must leave behind all strivings for being better, cleaner, more beautiful, more honest, more sincere. Vice versa, sometimes our efforts, even on the verge of exhaustion, are more important than the result itself.

The result is in the lap of God. And only He knows, which measure to use so that we don’t to puff up.

We should remember that the real beauty as well as the real love is all-powerful. And it can save the world, or at the very least one person - each of us, to make us better, to get rid of blinders, to soften our stony, senseless heart.

Let the Nativity of Christ bring the real beauty to our life and we’ll find the courage to let it through!

A kindly and clement heart, words of encouragement and cheer, a steadfast faith, a true friendship are forms of the consummate beauty, which inspires us and our neighbors.