Francis Berger
Can Art Provide a Pathway to the Divine?
"Above all else, art is one of humanity's highest callings. It is a higher thing than politics or economics. It marks the total expression of the creativity and freedom of the human spirit and is one of the few paths through which mankind can transcend its earthly circumstances and approach the Divine. This is the essence that makes art eternal."
I took this excerpt from a fictitious book called The Art of the Ages that I included in my novel The City of Earthly Desire. I wrote the paragraph above to explore the concept of art as means through which to approach the Divine. Though I embrace the concept theoretically, it has been my experience that art has more commonly been utilized to achieve the opposite objective – that is diverting and turning people away from the Divine. Regardless, I feel if art has the power to turn people away from the Divine, then it must surely also contain the power to turn people toward the Divine.
In the following, I present some my observations and conjectures regarding art and its possible role in establishing a potential path toward the Divine. As with anything in the domain of thinking and writing, many of these observations and conclusions have invariable been drawn from other works of art, theology, and philosophy I have engaged with over the years.
To begin with, art resides in the realm of Beauty, one of the three transcendentals, yet beauty alone is not enough to establish the potential of drawing closer to the Divine. As Dostoevsky notes in his novel The Idiot, the phrase "Beauty will save the world" reveals a partial truth, at best. Beauty alone is a fine thing, but in art, as in life, beauty alone is insufficient. Thus, only art that successfully incorporates all three transcendentals simultaneously into a seamless unity creates the potential for a pathway toward the Divine.
In other words, art must manifest a unity of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty to be truly higher than politics or economics. It must also contain this unity to serve as a total expression and freedom of the human spirit, one that offers us the potential to transcend our earthly circumstances and draw nearer to the Divine.
Art that fails to unify the transcendentals or purposively eliminates one or more of these transcendentals from its form cannot succeed as a pathway to the Divine and remains firmly in the material realm where it may serve some utilitarian function such as propaganda, décor, or mindless distraction/entertainment.
This lower sort of art can serve both harmful and beneficial utilitarian purposes. On the beneficial side, it can provide mild distraction or trivial satisfaction, and perhaps induce certain levels of relaxation or stimulation. On the harmful side, non-unified art offers a perversion of the unified transcendentals by giving the appearance of a unified work while hiding the transcendental element or elements it lacks. Non-unified art can also invert the transcendentals and offer their opposites in their place instead. Propagandist art, for example, may offer some partial good, but its inherent lack of Truth inevitably renders propaganda harmful.
Therefore, only art unifying the transcendentals can advance the potential for contact with the Divine, which entails that only artists possessing, at the bare minimum, a subconscious understanding of the transcendentals can produce such art. Nonethless, I feel artists who produce unified art through a subconscious comprehension of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness may only manage to do so through some source of Divine inspiration. Otherwise, unified art seems to precondition a level of consciousness that matches, or at the very least, orbits the art it has created.
Art offering the potential to step closer to the Divine cannot evolve beyond potential if it does not encounter an appropriate level of consciousness that can perceive the transcendental unity the work of art offers. Put another way, only heightened or deepened consciousness can fully appreciate the path to the Divine a unified work of art makes potentially available. The encounter between a unified work of art and the heightened consciousness recognizing the unity within the work of art may also make approaching the Divine possible.
I have shared these observations and conjectures because I intuitively feel art will have to play a minor yet important role in moving people away from what Bruce Charlton has identified as the twin problems of modern people – atheism and alienation - and moving them toward a renewed and reconstructed metaphysics in conjunction with a development of consciousness. Professor Charlton defines this as Romantic Christianity, which he considers the only viable way forward for individuals and, perhaps society in general. The more I understand Romantic Christianity, the more I am drawn to it, and I am curious to see what role, if any, art may play in its development/unfolding. I might be wrong, but I have a feeling art has the potential to play a quite significant role indeed.
So, if you fancy yourself an artist, what are you waiting for? Get to it. There's work to do!
Note: I do not profess to be an artist of heightened consciousness; nor am I promoting my own artistic endeavors as successful examples of unified art (I sincerely believe my one and only novel falls well short of this ideal). Having said that, I do aspire to be a writer of higher consciousness whose work may inch a little closer to the ideal of unified art as time goes by.
palintropos
Thanks very much for this article. I think art and/or religion is the real battle ahead.
Concerning beauty and the divine. My question is if a man looks at a beautiful woman (or even a painting of one) wouldn't he also think of something that has more materialistic qualities too? You know, like rutting and even humiliation. Brute power.
So, beauty surely cannot solely occupy the province of spirits and death and some other world.
My question is if a man looks at a beautiful woman (or even a painting of one) wouldn't he also think of something that has more materialistic qualities too?
Of course. And that is perfectly natural. What matters is how a man handles the attraction/arousal he feels. Will he approach beauty with pure, unadulterated lust, or will he attempt to approach with beauty with love?
I know this is blasphemy but I believe that European women are the most desirable (i.e., beautiful) women. Especially blonde-blue eyed ones. In both body and facial qualities. Luxurious hair, straight noses, a certain fullness to the mouth, white skin, etc. It's not just white men who appreciate their beauty. Chinese women whiten their skin. Black women straighten their hair. Jewish women have nose jobs.
Beauty is a very tricky thing. Beautiful things can also be deadly. Helen of Troy for example. Beauty is not just airy-fairy stuff. It's cruel and unfair.
Bruce Charlton
I appreciated your point about (for example) beauty alone leading to evil.
The Art for Art's sake movement of the late 19th century had a culturally poisonous effect, exactly because it purported to divorce aesthetics from morality (and from truth). This is absolutely explicit in the essays of Oscar Wilde, such as The Decay of Lying or The Critic as Artist.
As so often with secular radicalism, nowadays this looks like little more than a roundabout (but sophisticated) rationalisation for the sexual revolution and a justification for personal participation in immoral sexual acts.
I suppose the Pre-Raphaelites were Romantic Christians. And before them the German Nazarenes.
They (the Pre-Raphaelites) tended, in my humble opinion, to whiff the ball a bit. Like all liberals they were unable to maintain their positions when the problems of race come up. They folded like a cheap suit under the tidal wave of modernism.
Different identity groups, whatever you want to call them, have differing visions of the divine. They are hard-wired by vastly different biologically created archetypes. The modernists attempted to create a universal aesthetic devoid of western and even sexual cultural reference. This has allowed other identity groups to infiltrate and degrade in a thousand ways any western concept of the Good, Truth or Beauty. For example, if a particular artist cannot draw, i.e., isn't hardwired to comprehend perspective (horizon lines and vanishing points) he or more likely she feels bad. If a particular sex or race cannot draw this is called disparate impact and the victims must not suffer.
Now, modernism attempted to get around the West's embarrassing superiority by eliminating any reference to non-ironic Western images.
They did this through the use of emptiness and irony. Dada is now the single most important art movement in the West. All non-ironic images employing western idiom are effectively shunted to the provinces.
Basically, it comes down to money. There's no money in the Good, Beauty and Truth, and artists, especially young ones have to pay for studio space. They are also entranced by the vast sums being paid for modern anti-western art.
There's a great article on all this, strangely enough written by a westernized Indian, P. Kishore Saval: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/02/the-illiberal-arts/
I highly recommend this article.
Your point about money sheds light on why there is such little good art these days and why so much of its strives not to be good.
I will be sure to check out the article you recommended.
Arakawa link
Non-Western people who appreciate the attainments of Western culture are correspondingly baffled when the West throws those attainments away.
There's something strange in that the Left despises white masculine men, but Leftist Hollywood is forced to make movies about white masculine heroes anyway.
The rest of the world has a weird interest in white male heroes too - as if cowboys, James Bond, and Sherlock Holmes are universally-recognized avatars for some aspect of the whole human race.
Maybe the hatred of masculine white men is rooted in something deeper than white men themselves.
I do wonder if society's terrible treatment of fathers has something to do with evil's hatred of the Heavenly Father. Not everything evil does is a tactic or strategy...
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