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Good morning. While in Rome last week, I read about a would-be burglar who was caught after stopping to read a book on Greek mythology; he’d found it on a bedside table. The author of the book has since offered to send the thief a copy, so he can finish it in prison….

This story reminded me of an incident in Buenos Aires in 2010, when a man became so enchanted by the poetry in a bookshop he was robbing, he abandoned his crime. The owner found him the next morning still revelling in the shop’s literary treasures.

In 1990, during the Gardner Museum heist in Boston, thieves lingered far longer than they’d planned, mesmerised by the art they were meant to be stealing.

What does it mean to be stopped in your tracks, not by a safe or a security system, but by the power of art itself? C. S. Lewis once wrote about how we don’t merely want to see beauty, we want somehow to be united with it, ‘to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.’
One way of understanding this is in terms of the Christian concept of ‘common grace’, the idea that God’s presence permeates the whole world, extending to all of humanity, regardless of their faith or relationship to God. Common grace is said to inspire joy, but also to restrain the effects of sin.

All of that might sound rather fuzzy. But before we dismiss such high claims as the sort of things intellectuals say, because they just don’t know what real life is like, it’s well to reflect on the example of the great Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn was no criminal but suffered for years while imprisoned in labour camps for his protests against the Soviet government; and in those oppressive times he too found himself elevated by art. When he came some decades later to win the Nobel Prize for literature, he took the opportunity to insist that, ‘Art inflames even a frozen, darkened soul’.

It’s a big claim which perhaps takes a life like Solzhenitsyn’s to make credible. He knew whereof he spoke. But countless other people throughout human history have said the same: the beauty of a novel, a poem, a painting, has the power to disrupt lives, to direct us to something better.

Even the most primitive cave paintings are not merely records; they are appreciations that are also sign-posts. We don’t have to understand how any of this works, or even to believe God has anything to do with it, for beauty to inflame us. We need only to welcome the surprise.

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