Art in Times of War: Andrei Rublev (1966) and the Healing Power of Beauty

Young Andrei Rublev and his master walk among corpses in a ruined temple. The Tartars are pillaging and burning the Medieval Russian countryside. A disabled girl sits braiding the hair of one of the fallen. Andrei says he’ll never paint again: “No one wants it.” His master looks at an icon on the wall and says, “Ah, how beautiful it is.” Their eyes brighten as it starts to snow.

When I watched this movie four years ago, I messaged my college philosophy teacher. He shows this film in some of his courses, and I wanted to let him know that I had gotten around to seeing it. Just as he described The Tree of Life as a good film to mourn with, I observed that Andrei Rublev felt like a good movie to mourn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It slows you down to sit with these Medieval monks as the world around them keeps exploding. Like so many art films, it makes you keep gazing at the world until you catch it: amidst the brutality and the brokenness, something beautiful budding all the while.

This month I’m reading a book called The Soul of Desire: Discovering the Neuroscience of Longing, Beauty, and Community (Curt Thompson, 2021). I got hooked on this author a year ago from a podcast where he questioned the way we look at the world. We tend to see our world as a series of problems to be solved. But instead of reacting to all the problems, what if we oriented ourselves toward creating beauty? What if this is how Jesus looks at us: not as a problem to be fixed, but as someone He is cooperating with to make radiant, and to fill the world with radiance.

For us, it starts with paying attention to beauty. We pay very little attention to what we’re paying attention to—but it makes all the difference. We will become what we pay attention to. And what we long for is not more answers to our problems, but something good and whole. This is what I meant when I wrote that good art doesn’t just have a “message.” Good art overwhelms us with an encounter with something beautiful we can’t put into words. It pulls us out of ourselves, and out of a controlling mindset, into wonder and true longing. It makes us grateful. It heals us.

So in times of war—perhaps at all times—art can help us find beauty amidst the bomb craters of our lives. Curt Thompson gives the example of cellist Vedran Smailović, who during the 1992 siege of Sarajevo sat amidst the ruins, under threat of fire, and just played music. So also for us, Thompson writes: “To meditatively focus our attention on beauty, even in the places of our grief, draws our attention and attunes our hearts to the presence and activity of God” (97). We are the peacemakers, and art is part of how we share—and fill our own hearts with—the peace the whole world needs.

(This reflective essay is not my typical "family movie recommendation.” Andrei Rublev, like some parts of life, is not family friendly.)