beauty (FS)

The Tea Ceremony signifies that we ought to perform all the activities and manipulations of daily life according to primordial perfections, which is pure symbolism, pure consciousness of the Essential, perfect BEAUTY and self-mastery. The intention is basically the same in the craft initiations of the West — including Islam — but the formal foundation is then the production of useful objects and not the symbolism of gestures; this being so, the stone mason intends, parallel to his work, to fashion his soul in view of union with God. And thus there is to be found in all the crafts and all the arts a spiritual model that, in the Muslim world, often refers to one of the prophets mentioned in the Koran; any professional or homemaking activity is a kind of revelation. As for the adherents of Zen, they readily seek their inspiration in “ordinary life,” not because it is trivial, to be sure, but because — inasmuch as it is woven of symbolisms — it mysteriously implies the “Buddha nature.” Essays Norms and Paradoxes in Spiritual Alchemy

A fact that seems to justify the sentimental intuitionists in question — but the real bearing of which they hardly suspect — is the following, and it is incontestable: a phenomenon of BEAUTY can be more suddenly and more profoundly convincing than a logical explanation, whence this maxim: “The Buddhas save not by their preaching alone, but also by their superhuman BEAUTY.” Also, the Platonic opinion that “Beauty is the splendor of the True” expresses without equivocation the profound, intimate, ontological relationship between the Real and the Beautiful, or between Being and Harmony; a relationship that implies — as we have just said — that Beauty is sometimes a more striking and transforming argument than a discursive proof; not logically more adequate, but humanly more miraculous. Essays Norms and Paradoxes in Spiritual Alchemy

What the natural gnostic seeks, from the point of view of “realization”, is much less a “path” than a “framework” – a traditional, sacramental and liturgical setting which will allow him to be ever more genuinely “himself’, namely a particular archetype of celestial “iconostasis”. This puts us in mind of the sacred art of India and the Far East which demonstrates in supernaturally evocative fashion the heavenly models of earthly spirituality; therein lies, in fact, the raison d’être of that art which is at once “mathematical” and “musical” and which is founded upon the principle of the “darsana”, the visual and intuitive assimilation of the symbol-sacrament. Moreover, this symbol does not belong to art alone but rises up also – and a priori – from animate and inanimate nature for there is, in all BEAUTY, a liberating and, in the final account, saving element; which enables us to voice the esoteric paraphrase: “He that hath eyes to see, let him see!” Essays A NOTE ON RENÉ GUÉNON

We have said that the driving force of the path of gnosis is intelligence; now it is far from being the case that this principle is applicable in a spiritual society – unless it is not very numerous – for in general, intelligence is largely inoperative once it is called upon to hold a collectivity in balance; in all justice, one cannot deny in sentimental and humilitarian moralism a certain realism and hence a corresponding efficacy. It follows from all this, not that gnosis has to repudiate socially its principle of the primacy of intelligence, but that it must put each thing in its place and take men as they are; that is precisely why the perspective of gnosis will be the first to insist, not upon a simplifying moralism, but upon intrinsic virtue, which – like BEAUTY – is “the splendor of the true.” Intelligence must be not only objective and conceptual, but also subjective and existential; the unicity of the object demands the totality of the subject. sophiaperennis: Gnosis

There are two points to consider in created things, namely the empirical appearance and the mechanism; now the appearance manifests the divine intention, as we have stated above; the mechanism merely operates the mode of manifestation. For example, in man’s body the divine intention is expressed by its form, its deiformity, (NA: We should specify: total or integral deiformity, for in animals too there is – or can be – a deiformity, but it is partial; similarly for plants, minerals, elements and other orders of phenomena.) its symbolism and its BEAUTY; the mechanism is its anatomy and vital functioning. The modern mentality, having always a scientific and “iconoclastic” tendency, tends to overaccentuate the mechanism to the detriment of the creative intention, and does so on all levels, psychological as well as physical; the result is a jaded and “demystified” mentality that is no longer “impressed” by anything. sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress

One point that certain physicists do not seem to understand is that the mechanism of the world can be neither purely deterministic nor a fortiori purely arbitrary. In reality, the universe is a veil woven of necessity and freedom, of mathematical rigor and musical play; every phenomenon participates in these two principles, which amounts to saying that everything is situated in two apparently divergent but at bottom concordant dimensions, exactly as the dimensions of space are concordant while giving rise to divergent appearances that are irreconcilable from the standpoint of a planimetric view of objects. (NA: Let us take the example of the human body: its principial form, which cannot be other than what it is, stems from the Absolute and from necessity, whereas its actual form – a particular body, and not the body as such which gives rise to innumerable variations, stems from the Infinite and from freedom. Its principial form is as it were mathematical, it is measurable; on the contrary, its actual form is as it were musical, its BEAUTY is unfathomable. Anatomy has its limits, BEAUTY does not; but BEAUTY can be relative, whereas anatomy cannot.) sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress

In any case people today far too readily include under the common denomination of want or misery both an ancestral simplicity of life and mere lack of food, and the continual confusing of these two things is far from unbiased; the catchword “under-developed countries” is from this point of view highly significant in its blatant perfidy. A scientific machine-age standard of living has been invented and the aim is to impose this on all peoples (NA: The Sankaracarya of Kañci has pointed out … that ‘the very idea of raising the standard of living … will have the most injurious effects on society. Raising the standards of living means tempting people to encumber themselves with more luxuries and thus leading them ultimately to real poverty in spite of increased production. Aparigraha meant that every man should take from nature only so much as is required for his life in this world.’), above all on those who are classed as ‘backward’ whether they be Hindus or Hottentots. For these believers in progress happiness means a host of noisy and ponderous complications calculated to crush out many elements of BEAUTY and so also of well-being; when they want to abolish such and such ‘fanaticisms’ and ‘horrors’ these people forget that there are also atrocities on the spiritual plane and that the so-called humanitarian civilization of the moderns is saturated with them. sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress

“This is only philosophy”: we readily accept the use of this turn of phrase, but only on condition that one does not say that “Plato is only a philosopher,” Plato who said that “BEAUTY is the splendor of the true”; BEAUTY that includes or demands all that we are or can be. sophiaperennis: Difference between Philosophy, theology and gnosis

However that may be, all the speculations of Plato or Socrates converge upon a vision which transcends the perception of appearances and which opens on to the Essence of things. This Essence is the “Idea” and it confers on things all their perfection, which coincides with BEAUTY. sophiaperennis: Plato

The cosmic, or more particularly the earthly function of BEAUTY is to actualize in the intelligent creature the Platonic recollection of the archetypes, right up to the luminous Night of the Infinite. (NA: According to Pythagoras and Plato, the soul has heard the heavenly harmonies before being exiled on earth, and music awakens in the soul the remembrance of these melodies.) This leads us to the conclusion that the full understanding of BEAUTY demands virtue and is identifiable with it: that is to say, just as it is necessary to distinguish, in objective BEAUTY, between the outward structure and the message in depth, so there is a distinguo to make, in the sensing of the beautiful, between the aesthetic sensation and the corresponding BEAUTY of soul, namely such and such a virtue. Beyond every question of “sensible consolation” the message of BEAUTY is both intellectual and moral: intellectual because it communicates to us, in the world of accidentality, aspects of Substance, without for all that having to address itself to abstract thought; and moral, because it reminds us of what we must love, and consequently be. In conformity with the Platonic principle that like attracts like, Plotinus states that “it is always easy to attract the Universal Soul . . . by constructing an object capable of undergoing its influence and receiving its participation. The faithful representation of a thing is always capable of undergoing the influence of its model; it is like a mirror which is capable of grasping the thing’s appearance.” (NA: This principle does not prevent a heavenly influence mani festing itself incident ally or accidentally even in an image which is extremely imperfect – works of perversion and subversion being excluded – through pure mercy and by virtue of the ‘exception that proves the rule”.) This passage states the crucial principle of the almost magical relationship between the conforming recipient and the predestined content or between the adequate symbol and the sacramental presence of the prototype. The ideas of Plotinus must be understood in the light of those of the “divine Plato”: the latter approved the fixed types of the sacred sculptures of Egypt, but he rejected the works of the Greek artists who imitated nature in its outward and insignificant accidentality, while following their individual imagination. This verdict immediately excludes from sacred art the productions of an exteriorizing, accidentalizing, sentimentalist and virtuoso naturalism, which sins through abuse of intelligence as much as by neglect of the inward and the essential. sophiaperennis: Plato

It is not surprising that the aesthetics of the rationalists admits only the art of classical Antiquity, which in fact inspired the Renaissance, then the world of the Encyclopedists of the French Revolution and, to a great extent, the entire nineteenth century. Now this art – which, by the way, Plato did not appreciate – strikes one by its combination of rationality and sensual passion: its architecture has something cold and poor about it – spiritually speaking – while its sculpture is totally lacking in metaphysical transparency and thereby in contemplative depth. (NA: In Greek art there are two errors or two limitations: the architecture expresses reasoning man inasmuch as he intends to victoriously oppose himself to virgin Nature; the sculpture replaces the miracle of profound BEAUTY and life by a more or less superficial BEAUTY and by marble.) It is all that the inveterately cerebral could desire. A rationalist can be right – man not being a closed system – as we have said above. In modern philosophy, valid insights can in fact be met with, notwithstanding that their general context compromises and weakens them. Thus the “categorical imperative” does not mean much on the part of a thinker who denies metaphysics and with it the transcendent causes of moral principles, and who is unaware that intrinsic morality is above all our conformity to the nature of Being. sophiaperennis: Rationalism

If in the early Church it was the icons that won the case, it was obviously so – as in the case of alimentary prescriptions – because the right solution imposed itself thanks to a revelation: it was Saint Luke, an apostle, who created the first icon of the Virgin; and it was Saint Veronica, with the Holy Shroud, who was at the origin of the image of the Holy Face. The very principle of the “sacred portrait” is expressed in this Buddhist saying: “The Buddhas also save by their superhuman BEAUTY.” sophiaperennis: ART, ITS DUTIES AND ITS RIGHTS

Exoterically, BEAUTY represents either an excusable or an inexcusable pleasure, or an expression of piety and thereby the expression of a theological symbolism; esoterically, it has the role of a spiritual means in connection with contemplation and interiorizing “remembrance”. By “integral aesthetics” we mean in fact a science that takes account not only of sensible BEAUTY but also of the spiritual foundations of this BEAUTY, (NA: One must not confuse aesthetics with aestheticism: the second term, used to describe a literary and artistic movement in England in the 19th century, means in general an excessive preoccupation with aesthetic values real or imaginary, or at any rate very relative. However, one must not too readily cast aspersions upon romantic aesthetes, who had the merit of a nostalgia that was very understandable in a world that was sinking into a hopeless mediocrity and a cold and inhuman ugliness.) these foundations explaining the frequent connection between the arts and initiatic methods. sophiaperennis: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS

The Divine Principle is the Absolute and, being absolute, it is the Infinite; it is from Infinity that manifesting or creating Maya arises; and this Manifestation realizes a third hypostatic quality, namely Perfection. Absoluteness, Infinity, Perfection; and consequently BEAUTY, in so far as it is a manifestation, demands perfection, and perfection is realized on the one hand in terms of absoluteness and on the other hand in terms of infinity: in reflecting the Absolute, BEAUTY realizes a mode of regularity, and in reflecting the Infinite, it realizes a mode of mystery. Beauty, being perfection, is regularity and mystery; it is through these two qualities that it stimulates and at the same time appeases the intelligence and also a sensibility which is in conformity with the intelligence. sophiaperennis: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS

In sacred art, one finds everywhere and of necessity, regularity and mystery. According to a profane conception, that of classicism, it is regularity that produces BEAUTY; but the BEAUTY concerned is devoid of space and depth, because it is without mystery and consequently without any vibration of infinity. It can certainly happen in sacred art that mystery outweighs regularity, or vice versa, but the two elements are always present; it is their equilibrium which creates perfection. sophiaperennis: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS

The cosmic, or more particularly the earthly function of BEAUTY is to actualize in the intelligent creature the Platonic recollection of the archetypes, right up to the luminous Night of the Infinite. (NA: According to Pythagoras and Plato, the soul has heard the heavenly harmonies before being exiled on earth, and music awakens in the soul the remembrance of these melodies.) This leads us to the conclusion that the full understanding of BEAUTY demands virtue and is identifiable with it: that is to say, just as it is necessary to distinguish, in objective BEAUTY, between the outward structure and the message in depth, so there is a distinguo to make, in the sensing of the beautiful, between the aesthetic sensation and the corresponding BEAUTY of soul, namely such and such a virtue. Beyond every question of “sensible consolation” the message of BEAUTY is both intellectual and moral: intellectual because it communicates to us, in the world of accidentality, aspects of Substance, without for all that having to address itself to abstract thought; and moral, because it reminds us of what we must love, and consequently be. In conformity with the Platonic principle that like attracts like, Plotinus states that “it is always easy to attract the Universal Soul . . . by constructing an object capable of undergoing its influence and receiving its participation. The faithful representation of a thing is always capable of undergoing the influence of its model; it is like a mirror which is capable of grasping the thing’s appearance.” (NA: This principle does not prevent a heavenly influence mani festing itself incident ally or accidentally even in an image which is extremely imperfect – works of perversion and subversion being excluded – through pure mercy and by virtue of the ‘exception that proves the rule”.) sophiaperennis: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS

“God is beautiful and He loves BEAUTY”, says a hadith which we have quoted more than once: (NA: Another hadith reminds us that ” the heart of the believer is sweet, and it loves sweetness (halawah)”. The “sweet”, according to the Arabic word, is at the same time the pleasing, coupled with a nuance of spring-like BEAUTY; which amounts to saying that the heart of the believer is fundament ally benevolent becaus e having conquered the hardness that goes with egoism and worldliness, he is made of sweetness or generous BEAUTY.) Atma is not only Sat and Chit, “Being” and ”Consciousness” – or more relatively: “Power” and “Omniscience” – but also Ananda, “Beatitude”, and thus Beauty and Goodness; (NA: When the Koran says that God “has prescribed for Himsel f Mercy (Rahmah)”, it affirms that Mercy pertains to the very Essence of God; moreover, the notion of Mercy does not do justice, except in a partial and extrinsic way, to the beati fic nature of the Infinite.) and what we want to know and realize, we must a priori mirror in our own being, because in the domain of positive realities (NA: This reservation means that we do not know privative realities – which, precisely, manifest unreality – except by contrast; for example, the soul understands moral ugliness to the extent that it itself is morally beautiful, and it cannot be beauti ful except by participation in Divine Beauty, Beauty in itself.) we can only know perfectly what we are. sophiaperennis: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS

The elements of BEAUTY, be they visual or auditive, static or dynamic, are not only pleasant, they are above all true and their pleasantness comes from their truth: this is the most obvious, and yet the least understood truth of aesthetics. Furthermore, as Plotinus remarked, every element of BEAUTY or harmony is a mirror or receptacle which attracts the spiritual presence to its form or colour, if one may so express it; if this applies as directly as possible to sacred symbols, it is also true, in a less direct and more diffuse way, in the case of all things that are harmonious and therefore true. Thus, an artisanal ambience made of sober BEAUTY – for there is no question of sumptuousness except in very special cases – attracts or favours barakah, “blessing”; not that it creates spirituality any more than pure air creates health, but it is at all events in conformity with it, which is much, and which, humanly, is the normal thing. sophiaperennis: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS

It is necessary to dissipate here an error which would have it that everything in nature is beautiful and everything of traditional production is likewise beautiful because it belongs to tradition; according to this view, ugliness does not exist either in the animal or the vegetable kingdoms, since, it seems, every creature “is perfectly what it should be”, which has really no connection with the aesthetic question; likewise it is said that the most magnificent of sanctuaries possesses no more BEAUTY than some tool or other, always because the tool “is everything that it should be”. This is tantamount to maintaining not only that an ugly animal species is aesthetically the equivalent of a beautiful species, but also that BEAUTY is such merely through the absence of ugliness and not through its own content, as if the BEAUTY of a man were the equivalent of that of a butterfly, or of a flower or a precious stone. Beauty, however, is a cosmic quality which cannot be reduced to abstractions foreign to its nature; likewise, the ugly is not only that which is not completely what it is supposed to be, nor is it only an accidental infirmity or a lack of taste; it is in everything which manifests, accidentally or substantially, artificially or naturally, a privation of ontological truth, of existential goodness, or, what amounts to the same, of reality. Ugliness is, very paradoxically, the manifestation of a relative nothingness: of a nothingness which can affirm itself only by denying or eroding an element of Being, and thus of BEAUTY. This amounts to saying that, in a certain fashion and speaking elliptically, the ugly is less real than the beautiful, and in short that it exists only thanks to an underlying BEAUTY which it disfigures; in a word, it is the reality of an unreality, or the possibility of an impossibility, like all privative manifestations. sophiaperennis: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS

The argument that aesthetic quality is far from always coinciding with moral quality and that it is consequently superfluous – an argument that is just in its observation but false in its conclusion – overlooks an obvious fact, namely that the ontological and in principle spiritual merit of BEAUTY remains intact on its own level; the fact that an aesthetic quality may not be fully exploited does not mean that it could not and should not be, and it would then prove its spiritual potentiality and so its true nature. Inversely, ugliness is a privation even when it is allied to sanctity, which cannot make it positive, but which obviously neutralizes it, just as moral badness sterilizes BEAUTY, but without abolishing it as far as the existential, not the volitive, aspect is concerned. (NA: There is all the difference, in a face, between the features as such and the expression, or between the form of a body and its gestures, or again, between the form of an eye and its look. Nevertheless, even the look of a morally imperfect person can have BEAUTY when it expresses spring, or youth, or simply happiness, or a good sentiment, or sadness; but all of this is a question of degree, either in respect of natural BEAUTY or in respect of moral imperfection.) sophiaperennis: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS

The dilemma of moralists enclosed within a “black or white” alternative is resolved metaphysically by the complementarity between transcendence and immanence: according to the first perspective nothing is really beautiful because God alone is Beauty; according to the second, every BEAUTY is really beautiful because it is that of God. Consequently every BEAUTY is both a closed door and an open door, or in other words, an obstacle and a vehicle: either BEAUTY separates us from God because it is entirely identified in our mind with its earthly support which then assumes the role of idol, or BEAUTY brings us close to God because we perceive in it the vibrations of Beatitude and Infinity which emanate from Divine Beauty. (NA: Ramakrishna, when he saw a flight of cranes, a lion, a dancing-girl, used to fall into ecstasy. This is what is called “seeing God everywhere”; not by deciphering the symbolisms, of course, but by perceiving the essences.) sophiaperennis: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS

Virtue cut off from God becomes pride, as BEAUTY cut off from God becomes idol; and virtue attached to God becomes sanctity, as BEAUTY attached to God becomes sacrament. sophiaperennis: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS

The term “sensible consolation”, wrongly applied by theologians to sacred art itself, as also, moreover, to the beauties of virgin nature – as if BEAUTY had nothing to transmit other than consolation (NA: It is true that this notion of ” consolation” has a deeper import in the mystical realm.) – best fits the simpler types of art and the secondary charms of nature. The purpose of such arts is to communicate a climate of holy childhood, which the culturistic poisoners – always aggressive and megalomaniac – will doubtless qualify as “affectation”, which is just a slanderous misuse of language; in reality art has no right – insofar as it is unpretentious, and even without this reservation – to be grandiloquent and titanesque, the mission of the artist being to produce work that is sane and balanced and not an expression of useless turmoil. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

A naturalistic work of art of the most academic kind can be perfectly pleasing and nobly suggestive by virtue of the natural BEAUTY that it copies, but it is nevertheless mendacious, to the extent that it is exact, that is to say, to the extent that it seeks to pass off a flat surface for threedimensional space, or inert matter for a living body. In the case of painting, it is necessary to respect both the flat surface and immobility: it is consequently necessary that there should be neither perspective, nor shadows, nor movement, except in the case of a stylization which, precisely, permits the integration of perspective and shadows in the work, while conferring on the movement an essential, and so symbolic and normative quality. In the case of sculpture, not only is it necessary to respect the immobility of matter by suppressing movement or by reducing it to an essential, balanced and quasi-static type; it is also necessary to take account of the particular substance used. When expressing the nature of a living body, or some essential aspect of its nature and thus some underlying “idea”, it is important to take account of the nature of clay, of wood, of stone, of metal; thus wood permits different modalities from those permitted by mineral substances and, amongst the latter, metal enables different qualities of expression to be brought into relief than does stone. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

If the deviation of art is a possibility, the rejection of art is another. To speak of a great civilization which rejects, not one particular art, but all art, is a contradiction in terms; the more or less iconoclastic point of view of a St Bernard or a Savonarola cannot be the attitude of a whole city-based civilization. But this point of view, or a point of view that is in practice analogous, can exist traditionally outside civilization of this type, for example in the nomadic or semi-nomadic world of the North American Indians: the Redskins properly so-called – not all the aboriginal inhabitants of America – are indeed more or less hostile to the plastic arts, as doubtless were also their distant congeners the ancient Mongols, and perhaps also the ancient Germans and Celts. According to the Indians, virgin nature, which is sacred, is of an unequalled BEAUTY, and it contains every conceivable BEAUTY; it is thus vain and indeed impossible to seek to imitate the works of the Great Spirit. It is curious to note that the classical world, that of naturalism and anthropolatry, looks upon itself as a conqueror as far as nature is concerned; the cult of man involves contempt for surrounding nature, whereas for the Indian, as moreover for the Far-Easterners, nature is a mother, and also a fatherland, of which man is indeed the centre, but not the absolute proprietor, still less the enemy. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

The de facto ambiguity of BEAUTY, and consequently of art, comes from the ambiguity of Maya: just as the principle of manifestation and illusion both separates from the Principle and leads back to it, so earthly beauties, including those of art, can favour worldliness as well as spirituality, which explains the diametrically opposed attitudes of the saints towards art in general or a given art in particular. The arts reputed to be the most dangerous are those engaging hearing or movement, namely poetry, music and dancing; they are like wine, which in Christianity serves as the vehicle for a deifying sacrament, while in Islam it is prohibited, each perspective being right despite the contradiction. That the intoxicating element – in the widest sense – particularly lends itself to sanctification, Islam recognizes in its esoterism, in which wine symbolizes ecstasy and in which poetry, music and dancing have become ritual means with a view to “remembrance”. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

Beauty, whatever use man may make of it, fundamentally belongs to its Creator, who through it projects into the world of appearances something of His being. The cosmic, and more particularly the earthly function of BEAUTY is to actualize in the intelligent and sensitive creature the recollection of essences, and thus to open the way to the luminous Night of the one and infinite Essence. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

The vocation sine qua non of man is to be spiritual. Spirituality manifests itself on the planes which constitute man, namely intelligence, will, affectivity, production: human intelligence is capable of transcendence, of the absolute, of objectivity; the human will is capable of liberty, and thus of conformity to what is grasped by the intelligence; human feeling (affectivity), which is joined to each of the preceding faculties, is capable of compassion and generosity, by reason of the objectivity of the human mind, which takes the soul out of its animal egoism. Finally, there is the specifically human capacity for production, and it is because of this that man has been called homo faber, and not homo sapiens only: it is the capacity for producing tools and constructing dwellings and sanctuaries, and if need be for making clothes and creating works of art, and also for spontaneously combining in these creations symbolism and harmony. The language of harmony may be simple or rich, depending on needs, perspectives and temperaments; decoration too has its purpose, both from the point of view of symbolism, and from that of musicality. This amounts to saying that this fourth capacity must also have a spiritual content on pain of not being human; its role moreover is simply to exteriorize the three preceding capacities by adapting them to material needs or the needs of worship, or let us simply say by projecting them into the sensible order otherwise than by rational discourse or writing. Exiled on earth as we are, unless we are able to content ourselves with that shadow of Paradise that is virgin nature, we must create for ourselves surroundings which by their truth and their BEAUTY recall our heavenly origin and thereby also awaken our hope. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

When one compares the different European costumes over the centuries, one is struck by the irruption of worldliness that occurs towards the end of the Middle Ages, and one is astonished that believing men, supposed to fear God, could have been to such a degree dupes of their vanity, their self-satisfaction, their lack of critical sense and spiritual imagination, or indeed dignity. Female dress, whether that of princesses or simply that of ordinary women, retains its sober BEAUTY up to the end of the 14th century approximately, then becomes complicated, pretentious and extravagant, – with certain intermittent exceptions, often very sumptuous be it said, – to reach, in the 18th century, an inhuman limit of inflatedness and perversity; then, after the French revolution, one returns to ancient simplicity, but thereafter there is a slide into new excesses, whose more or less democratic spirit does not prevent complication and grotesqueness, in short, a worldly pretentiousness deprived of all innocence. As regards male dress, it also undergoes an almost equally sudden decline in the 15th century: it loses its religious character and its sober dignity and becomes affected, – “courtly”, if you will – but in any case tainted with narcissism, or else it becomes simply fantastical, so much so that the men of those times, if they do not look like dandies, make one think of court jesters. All this is explained in part by the unrealistic and clumsy scission between a religious world and a secular world, the latter never having been integrated normally into the religion, whence the Renaissance on the one hand and the Reformation on the other. The specifically worldly character of male dress subsequently becomes even more accentuated and gives rise, throughout history and in the same way as female dress, to an unbalanced lurching between contrary excesses, ending with the sort of barbarous nothingness that prevails in our own age. (NA: What we say of clothes holds good equally for interior fittings, especially furniture. It is hardly credible that the same men that made the marvels of sober majesty that are gothic and nordic furniture, could have creat ed and tolerated the lacquered and gilded horrors of the courtly and bourgeois furniture of the 18th century; that the noble and robust gravity of the works of the middle ages could have given way to the miserable affectation of later works; in short, that utility and dignity should have been replaced by a hollow, trivial and flaunting luxuriousness.) sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

In saying this, we know only too well that visual criteria are devoid of significance for the “man of our time”, who is nevertheless a visual type by curiosity as well as from an incapacity to think, or through lack of imagination and also through passivity: in other words he is a visual type in fact but not by right. The modern world, slipping hopelessly down the slope of an irremediable ugliness, has furiously abolished both the notion of BEAUTY and the criteriology of forms; this is, from our point of view, yet another reason for using the present argument, which is like the complementary outward pole of metaphysical orthodoxy, for, as we have mentioned elsewhere in this connection, “extremes meet”. There can be no question, for us, of reducing cultural forms, or forms as such, objectively to hazards and subjectively to tastes; “BEAUTY is the splendour of truth”; it is an objective reality which we may or may not understand. (NA: What is admirable in the Orthodox Church is that all its forms, from the iconostases to the vestments of the priests, immediately suggest the ambience of Christ and the Apostles, whereas in what might be called the post-Gothic Catholic Church too many forms are expressions of ambiguous civilizationism or bear its imprint, that is, the imprint of this sort of parallel pseudo-religion which is “Civilization” with a capital C: the presence of Christ then becomes largely abstract. The argument that ” only the spirit matters” is hypocrisy, for it is not by chance that a Christian priest wears neither the toga of a Siamese bonze nor the loin-cloth of a Hindu ascetic. No doubt the ” cloth does not make the monk”; but it expresses, manifests and asserts him!) One may wonder what would have become of Latin Christianity if the Renaissance had not stabbed it. Doubtless it would have undergone the same fate as the Eastern civilizations: it would have fallen asleep on top of its treasures, becoming in part corrupt and remaining in part intact. It would have produced, not “reformers” in the conventional sense of the word – which is without any interest to say the least – but “renewers” in the form of a few great sages and a few great saints. Moreover, the growing old of civilizations is a human phenomenon, and to find fault with it is to find fault with man as such. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

Philosophers with justice define BEAUTY as the harmony of diversity, and they properly distinguish BEAUTY of form from BEAUTY of expression, as well as the BEAUTY of art from the BEAUTY of nature; similarly, it has been very justly said that the beautiful is distinguished from the useful by the fact that it has no objective outside itself or outside the contemplation of which it is the object, and also that the beautiful is distinguished from the agreeable by the fact that its effect surpasses mere pleasure; and finally that it is distinguished from truth by the fact that it is grasped by immediate contemplation and not by discursive thought. (NA: Truth in the current sense of the word, that of a concordance between a state of fact and our consciousness, is indeed situated on the plane of thought, or at least it applies a priori to that plane. As for pure Intellection, its object is ” reality” of which ” truth” is the conceptual clothing. But in practice the terms ” reality” and “truth” usually merge into one another.) sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty

On the other hand, one cannot maintain unequivocally, as some people have done, that BEAUTY of expression is always more important than BEAUTY of form, for this is either to underestimate BEAUTY of form or to overestimate the importance of the moral factor on the plane of aesthetics. It is true that expression has priority over form when an interior BEAUTY coincides with an exterior BEAUTY, but the case is different when it is superimposed on ugliness, for then it belongs to the sphere of morality rather than to that of pure aesthetics. It may also be admitted with good reason that expression takes precedence over form when a loss of BEAUTY in one sense gives rise to a new kind of BEAUTY, as is the case with old people-when age has simply transferred a preexisting BEAUTY on to another plane, or has even created physical BEAUTY. Lastly, the primacy of expression can again be acknowledged in the case of the artistic representation of living beings, where BEAUTY is affirmed through a distorting stylization which is far removed from nature, and where form has not got to copy the specific BEAUTY of life. (NA: Looked at in this way, all art is ” abstract.” The stylized image is in effect a new being side by side with its living model, and thus it realizes a BEAUTY of an entirely different kind.) sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty

But as a general rule form takes a higher place, aesthetically speaking, than expression – unless the latter is deliberately concerned with stressing ugliness – in the sense that its normative character and thus its regularity of substance and of proportions constitutes the prime condition of aesthetic value; for wherever harmony or balance are lacking in the form itself, BEAUTY of expression no longer appears as a decisive factor in the order of sensible BEAUTY, this order being by definition that of formal perfection or of truth in form. Beauty of soul can indeed enhance that of the body, or even assert its supremacy to the point of submerging or extinguishing the corporeal, but it cannot purely and simply replace the BEAUTY of the body as though the body did not exist and did not itself have a right to the perfection which is its existential norm. sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty

If it is wrong to attribute BEAUTY, because of some favorable prejudice, to things that are outwardly disharmonious, it is no less wrong to deny it, for analogous but inverse reasons, to things that unquestionably possess it. In the first case one should say to oneself that ugliness is but an earthly shadow, and in the second ease that BEAUTY, even when its bearer is an unworthy creature, praises nevertheless the Creator and belongs to Him alone. sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty

A moralist would no doubt maintain that the expression of a face, even of one that is well proportioned, is ugly when the individual gives way to the passions; but this apparently acceptable opinion is in serious danger of being wrong in reality, for in the young the expression is often beautiful, thanks to the cosmic BEAUTY inherent in youth; it is then, strictly speaking, youth itself, and not a particular creature who happens to be young, that manifests BEAUTY. The passions readily take on the impersonal and innocent BEAUTY of the forces of nature, but they are limiting and privative, since we are intellectual creatures and not birds or plants; our personality is not restricted to bodily BEAUTY nor to youth, it is not made for this base world, but is condemned to pass through it. It is for this reason that BEAUTY and youth desert man in the end; he is then left with nothing, if he has identified himself with his flesh, save physical degradation together with the ugliness of greed and hardness of heart, to which are added the vanity of regrets and the emptiness of a wasted life; but in all this the real BEAUTY possessed by man has no place, any more than has the Creator whose Beatitude this BEAUTY reflects. Attempts to moralize BEAUTY and ugliness must be opposed, however convenient confusions of this kind may be from this or that relative point of view. (NA: There are people who denigrate BEAUTY because their favorite saint does not possess it, or who adopt the contrary attitude and falsify the notion of BEAUTY so as to oblige their saint to be beautiful. It is, however, suffi cient to know that the saints possess BEAUTY in eternity, and that ugliness or something that comes near to it can be a means of sanctification here below, as indeed can BEAUTY, though in a different way.) sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty

Another very widespread error, not moralist this time but relativist and subjectivist, suggests that BEAUTY is no more than a mere question of taste and that the canons of aesthetic perfection vary according to the country and the period; or to put it the other way, that the variations which in fact occur prove the arbitrary and subjective character of BEAUTY, or of that which has come to be called BEAUTY. In reality BEAUTY is essentially an objective factor which we may or may not see or may or may not understand but which like all objective reality or like truth possesses its own intrinsic quality; thus it exists before man and independently of him. It is not man who creates the Platonic archetypes, it is they that determine man and his understanding; the beautiful has its ontological roots far beyond all that is within the comprehension of sciences restricted to phenomena. sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty

Beauty, even the BEAUTY of a simple object, of a modest flower or a snowflake, suggests a whole world; it liberates, whereas ugliness as such imprisons. The words “as such” are necessary because compensations can always neutralize ugliness, just as, the other way round, BEAUTY can in fact lose all its luster. Under normal conditions BEAUTY evokes the limitlessness and at the same time the equilibrium of concordant possibilities; thus it evokes the Infinite and also, in a more immediately tangible way, the nobility and generosity which derive there from, a nobility that disdains and a generosity that scatters its gifts. There is nothing niggardly in BEAUTY as such; in it is neither agitation nor avarice nor any constriction of any sort. sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty

The archetype of BEAUTY, or its Divine model, is the superabundance and equilibrium of the Divine qualities, and at the same time the overflowing of the existential potentialities in pure Being. In a rather different sense, BEAUTY stems from the Divine Love, this Love being the will to deploy itself and to give itself, to realize itself in “another”; thus it is that “God created the world by love.” The resultant of Love is a totality that realizes a perfect equilibrium and a perfect beatitude and is for that reason a manifestation of BEAUTY, the first of such manifestations in which all others are contained, namely, the Creation, or the world which in its disequilibriums contains ugliness, but is BEAUTY in its totality. This totality the human soul does not realize, save in holiness. (NA: It is said that the Buddhas save as well by their radiant BEAUTY as by other upâyas; now the Buddha or the Avatâra synthesizes in his person the entire universe, consequently the BEAUTY of the macrocosm is his.) sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty

Thus BEAUTY always manifests a reality of love, of deployment, of illimitation, of equilibrium, of beatitude, of generosity. On the one hand, love, which is subjective, responds to BEAUTY, which is objective, and on the other hand, BEAUTY, which is deployment, springs from love, which is illimitation, a giving of self, an overflowing, and thus realizes a sort of infinitude. In Being the Universal Substance, the materia prima, is pure Beauty; the creative Essence, which communicates to Substance the archetypes to be incarnated, is the Divine Intelligence, of which Beauty is the eternal complement. (NA: This is the complementarism Purusha–Prakriti, the two poles of Ishvara, Being.) sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty

Beauty, being essentially a deployment, is an “exteriorization,” even in divinis, where the unfathomable mystery of the Self is “deployed” in Being, which in its turn is deployed in Existence; Being and Existence, Ishvara and Samsâra, are both Mâyâ, but Being is still God, whereas Existence is already the world. All terrestrial BEAUTY is thus by reflection a mystery of love. It is, “whether it likes it or not,” coagulated love or music turned to crystal, but it retains on its face the imprint of its internal fluidity, of its beatitude and of its liberality; it is measure in overflowing, in it is neither dissipation nor constriction. Human beings are rarely identified with their BEAUTY, which is lent to them and moves across them like a ray of light. Only the Avatara is a priori himself that ray, he “is” the BEAUTY that he manifests corporeally, and that BEAUTY is Beauty as such, the only Beauty there is. (NA: When the psalmist sings: “Thou art fairer than the children of men” (Psalms, XLV, 2), these words cannot but be applicable to the body of Christ. So also in regard to the Blessed Virgin: “Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair.” “Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.” (The Song of Solomon, 1, 15 and IV, 7).) sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty

Although taste does not create BEAUTY, yet it has a natural part to play by reason of the fact that it indicates an affinity, not with the beautiful as such, but with some modality of the beautiful, so that it is perfectly possible to be aware, in a particular case, that the aesthetic ideal is elsewhere than in the object of our personal choice, and to know that this choice is determined, not by a maximum of BEAUTY, but by a maximum of complementary typological relationship. Affinity, which determines the choice of a complement and thus of a harmonious opposite, is explained by our factual limitation to a given type which by definition must exclude something. sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty

In an analogous order of ideas, the affirmation that “the beautiful is the useful” is doubly false. In the first place, what is it that determines in an absolute way the utility of an object or of its purpose, if it is not that spiritual hierarchy of values which the utilitarians entirely ignore? In the second place, if only the useful is beautiful, what of the decorative art which for thousands of years has everywhere been applied to tools, and what of the stylization which transfigures crude objects and which, being universal and immemorial, is natural to man? In a world that lives by the creation and maintenance of artificial needs, the notion of utility becomes singularly arbitrary; (NA: All too often things which some people call “useful” arc anything but useful in their results. “Progress” is healing a paralytic while depriving him of his sight.) those who ill treat that notion at least owe some explanation, not only of the ornamental arts already mentioned but also of the figurative arts, not forgetting music, dance, and poetry, for they too are beautiful without being useful in a crudely practical sense. The arts are in no way identifiable either with practical work or with any kind of tool, and they therefore go beyond the narrow sphere of the “useful”; even architecture and the art of clothing are almost nowhere reduced to mere utility alone. There is no question here of denying that a tool as such possesses, or can possess, a BEAUTY arising from the intelligibility of its symbolism, nor are we maintaining that ornamentation or stylization are conditions of its aesthetic value; we are simply rejecting the assertion that the beautiful is the useful. What must be said is that the useful can be beautiful, and is so to the extent that the tool meets a need, whether this be simply normal and legitimate, or exalted in the hierarchy of values and functions. sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty

At the opposite pole to this utilitarian sophism is situated another error, which paradoxically resembles the former in its exaggeration and intolerance, and has even contributed to its development in conformity with the undulatory movement of so-called progress, and this is “classical” and “academic” aestheticism. (NA: It has also provoked the art called ” abstract,” which proves once again that the ” evolution” of the West consists in descending from one extreme to the other. It is ridiculous to despise ” academicism” in the name of the art that is at the moment accepted as “modern”; all such judgments depend on fashion and proceed from no objective criterion. Critics no longer work with anything but wholly extrinsic pseudocriteria, such as contemporaneity or novelty, as if a masterpiece were a masterpiece for a reason situated outside itself.) According to this way of looking at things, there exists a unique and exclusive canon of human and artistic BEAUTY, an “ideal BEAUTY” in which BEAUTY of form and of content and of kind coincide. This third point is contestable, if not wholly false, for the “kind,” in direct proportion to the elevation of its rank, comprises a whole scale of perfect types, diversified so far as their mode is concerned, but aesthetically equivalent. There can be no question, therefore, of a combing out of individuals so as to obtain a single ideal type, either within humanity as a whole, where the point is self-evident since the races exist, or even within a single race, since the races are complex. The “canons of BEAUTY” are either a matter of sculptural or pictorial style, or a matter of taste and habit, if not of prejudice. In this last case, they are connected more or less with the instinct of self-preservation of a racial group, so that the question is one of natural selection and not of intelligence nor of aesthetics; aesthetics is an exact science and not the mental expression of a biological fatality. These general remarks apply, mutatis mutandis, to the whole domain of the beautiful, and they have a bearing even beyond that domain, in the sense that there may be affinities, and a need for complementary compensations, on every plane of intelligence and of sensibility, and notably on the plane of spiritual life. sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty

It has been said that BEAUTY and goodness are the two faces of one and the same reality, the one outward and the other inward; thus goodness is internal BEAUTY, and BEAUTY is external goodness. Within BEAUTY it is necessary to distinguish between appearance and essence. A love of BEAUTY, from the point of view adopted here, does not signify attachment to appearances, but an understanding of appearances with reference to their essence and consequently a communication with their quality of truth and love. Fully to understand BEAUTY, and it is to this that BEAUTY invites us, is to pass beyond the appearance and to follow the internal vibration back to its roots; the aesthetic experience, when it is directed aright, has its source in symbolism and not in idolatry. This experience must contribute to union and not to dispersion, it must bring about a contemplative dilatation and not a passional compression; it must appease and relieve, not excite and burden. (NA: Everything that Saint Paul says in his magnificent passage on love (1 Corinthians 13) is equally applicable to BEAUTY, in a transposed sense.) sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty

Some people doubtless think that BEAUTY, whatever merits it may possibly possess, is not necessary to knowledge. To this it may be answered first that strictly speaking there is no contingency that is in principle indispensable to knowledge as such, but neither is there any contingency totally separated from it; second that we live among contingencies, forms, and appearances, and consequently cannot escape them, not least because we ourselves belong to the very same order as they; third that in principle pure knowledge surpasses all else, but that in fact BEAUTY, or the comprehension of its metaphysical cause, can reveal many a truth, so that it can be a factor in knowledge for one who possesses the necessary gifts; fourth that we live in a world wherein almost all forms are saturated with errors, so that it would be a great mistake to deprive ourselves of a “discernment of spirits” on this plane. There can be no question of introducing inferior elements into pure intellectuality; on the contrary, it is a case of introducing intelligence into the appreciation of forms, among which we live and of which we are, and which determine us more than we know. The relationship between BEAUTY and virtue is very revealing in this connection: virtue is the BEAUTY of the soul as BEAUTY is the virtue of forms; and the Angels or the Devas are not only states of knowledge but also states of BEAUTY comparable to the phenomena we admire in nature or in art. sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty

Under normal conditions spiritual life is plunged in BEAUTY for the simple reason that the environment is unbrokenly traditional; in such a framework, harmony of forms is omnipresent like air and light. In worlds like those of the Middle Ages and the Orient man cannot escape from BEAUTY, (NA: Nor from ugliness, in so far as it is a part of life and of truth; but then it is a natural ugliness carrying no suggestion of a diabolical confes sion of faith. One might say that natural ugliness is framed in BEAUTY.) and the material forms themselves of every traditional civilization – buildings, clothes, tools, sacred art – prove that BEAUTY is wholly unsought, that is to say that in such a civilization the question of seeking it does not arise; an analogous observation could be made concerning virgin nature, direct work of the Creator. The aesthetic environment of traditional man plays an indirectly didactic part. It “thinks” on his behalf and furnishes him with criteria of truth, if he is capable of understanding them, for “BEAUTY is the splendor of the true.” In a word, for traditional man a certain BEAUTY that can be thought of as a mean is part of his existence, it is a natural aspect of truth and of the good. sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty

One might conceivably hold the opinion that the question of BEAUTY is secondary from the standpoint of spiritual truth, an opinion that is both true and false, but it would be quite impossible to shut one’s eyes to the strange absence of BEAUTY from an entire civilization, namely the civilization that surrounds us and that tends to supplant all others. Modern civilization is in fact the only civilization that resolutely places itself outside the spirituality of forms, or the joy of spiritual expression, and this must clearly have some significance. It is also the only civilization which feels the need to proclaim either that its own ugliness is beautiful or that BEAUTY does not exist. This is not to say that the modern world in fact knows nothing of beautiful things or that it totally repudiates them – or that traditional worlds know nothing of ugliness – but it only produces them incidentally and relegates them more or less completely to the realm of luxury; the serious realm remains that of the ugly and the trivial, as though ugliness were an obligatory tribute to what is believed to be “reality.” sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty

Every normal civilization is “romantic” and “picturesque,” words which in our eyes have a perfectly honorable meaning. If in the present day these words are used in a pejorative sense, like “folklore” and other notions of this kind, this is because of the need people feel to console themselves as best they can, and because of the temptation that always exists to make a virtue out of an inevitable misery. The same is also true of “aestheticism : so long as it is not exaggerated, it is sufficiently explained and justified by an elementary need for BEAUTY or even, in certain cases, for intellectual satisfaction. sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty

Beauty and goodness, as we have seen, are two faces of one and the same reality, outward the one and inward the other, at least when those words are understood in their most ordinary sense. From another point of view, however, goodness and BEAUTY are situated on the same level, their inward face then being Beatitude; and Beatitude is inseparable from the knowledge of God. “Extremes meet”: it is therefore understandable that the notion of BEAUTY, which is attached a priori to the appearance or the outwardness of things, reveals for that very reason a profound aspect of that which is situated at the antipodes of appearances. In a certain sense, BEAUTY reflects a more profound reality than does goodness, in that it is disinterested and serene like the nature of things, and without objective, like Being or the Infinite. It fleets that inward release, that detachment, that sort of gentle grandeur that is proper to contemplation, and so to wisdom and to truth. sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty

We may perhaps be allowed to add a remark here which seems to take us rather outside our subject, though some readers, at least, will understand its appropriat eness: an objection might be raised to what we have just been saying on the grounds that Shri Chaitanya bestowed initiation not only on Hindus but on Moslems as well; this objection, however, is pointless in the present case, for what Shri Chaitanya, who was one of the greatest spiritual Masters of India, transmitted first and foremost, was a current of grace resulting from the intense radiation of his own holiness; this radiation had the virtue of in some degree erasing or drowning formal differences, which is all the more admissible in that he was ‘bhaktic’ by nature. Besides, the fact that Shri Chaitanya could accomplish miracles in no wise implies that another guru, even if he were of the same initiatory lineage and therefore a legitimate successor of Chaitanya, could do the same; from another point of view which, though less important, is by no means negligible, one must also take into consideration should never be forgotten is the fact that the absence of the formal element is not equivalent to the presence of the unformed, and vice-versa; the unformed and the barbarous will never attain the majestic BEAUTY of the void, whatever may be believed by those who have an interest in passing off a deficiency for a superiority. (NA: The claim has sometimes been put forward that Christianity, on the ground that it stands above forms, cannot be identified with any particular civilization; it is indeed understandable that some people would like to find consolation for the loss of Christian civilization. including its art, but the opinion we have just quoted is none the less inexcusable. The recent new ecclesiastical canon concerning the laws of sacred art really has only a negative bearing, in the sense that it maintains a minimum of tradition simply in order to avoid seeing forms become so imaginative that the identification of their subjects is no longer possible; in other words, all that can be expected from this Canon is that the faithful may be saved from mistaking a church steeple for a factory-chimney, and viceversa. Apart from that, the aforesaid Canon sanctions all the errors of the past when it declares that religious art must ‘speak the language of its period’, without even pausing to put the question of just what ‘a period’ means, and what rights it possesses, given that it does possess any; such a principle, in the name of which men have gone as far as to proclaim that ‘modern ecclesiastical art is searching for a new style’, implicitly contains another misunderstanding and a fresh repudiation of Christian art.) This law of compensation, by virtue of which certain relationships become gradually inverted during the course of a traditional cycle, can be applied in all spheres: for instance, we may quote the following saying (hadith) of the Prophet Mohammed: ‘In the beginning of Islam, he who omits a tenth of the Law is damned; but in the latter days, he who shall accomplish a tenth thereof will be saved.’ sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

To return to our initial idea, it may be added that the ‘Beauty’ of God corresponds to a deeper reality than His ‘Goodness’, no matter how paradoxical this may appear at first sight. One has only to recall the metaphysical law in virtue of which the analogy between the principial and manifested orders is reversed, in the sense that what is principially ‘great’ will be ‘small’ in the manifested order and that which is ‘inward’ in the Principle will appear as ‘outward’ in manifestation, and vice versa. It is because of this inverse analogy that in man BEAUTY is outward and goodness inward – at least in the usual sense of these words – contrary to what obtains in the principial order where Goodness is itself an expression of Beauty. sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

It has often been noticed that Oriental peoples, including those reputed to be the most artistic, show themselves for the most part entirely lacking in aesthetical discernment with regard to whatever comes to them from the West. All the ugliness born of a world more and more devoid of spirituality spreads over the East with unbelievable facility, not only under the influence of politico-economic factors, which would not be so surprising, but also by the free consent of those who, by all appearances, had created a world of BEAUTY, that is a civilization, in which every expression, including the most modest, bore the imprint of the same genius. Since the very beginning of Western infiltration, it has been astonishing to see the most perfect works of art set side by side with the worst trivialities of industrial production, and these disconcerting contradictions have taken place not only in the realm of ‘art products’, but in nearly every sphere, setting aside the fact that in a normal civilization, everything accomplished by man is related to the domain of art, in some respects at least. The answer to this paradox is very simple, however, and we have already outlined it in the preceding pages: it resides in the fact that forms, even the most unimportant, are the work of human hands in a secondary manner only; they originate first and foremost from the same supra-human source from which all tradition originates, which is another way of saying that the artist who lives in a traditional world devoid of ‘rifts’, works under the discipline or the inspiration of a genius which surpasses him; fundamentally he is but the instrument of this genius, if only from the fact of his craftsman’s qualification. (NA: ‘A thing is not only what it is for the senses, but also what it represents. Natural or artifi cial objects are not . . . arbitrary ” symbols” of such or such a different or superior reality; but they are.., the effective manifestation of that reality: the eagle or the lion, for example, is not so much the symbol or the image of the Sun as it is the Sun under one of its manifest ations (the essential form being more important than the nature in which it manifests itself); in the same way, every house is the world in effigy and every altar is situated at the centre of the earth . . . ‘ (Ananda K. Coomaraswamy: ‘The Primitive Mentality’ in Etudes Traditionnelles, Paris, Chacornac, August-September-October, 1939). It is solely and exclusively traditional art – in the widest sense of the word, implying all that is of an externally formal order, and therefore a fortiori everything which belongs in some way or other to the ritual domain – it is only this art, transmitted with tradition and by tradition, which can guarantee the adequate analogical correspondence between the divine arid the cosmic orders on the one hand, and the human or ‘artistic’ order on the other. As a result, the traditional artist does not limit himself simply to imitating Nature, but to ‘imitating Nature in her manner of operation’ (St. Thomas Aquinas, Sum. Theol. I, qu. 117, a. I) and it goes without saying that the artist cannot, with his own individual means, improvise such a ‘cosmological’ operation. It is by the entirely adequate conformity of the artist to this ‘manner of operation’, a conformity which is subordinated to the rules of tradition, that the masterpiece is created; in other words, this conformity essentially presupposes a knowledge, which may be either personal, direct and active, or inherited, indirect and passive, the latter case being that of those artisans who, unconscious as individuals of the metaphysical content of the forms they have learned to create, know not how to resist the corrosive influence of the modern West.) Consequently, individual taste plays only a relatively subordinate part in the production of the forms of such an art, and this taste will be reduced to nothing as soon as the individual finds himself face to face with a form which is foreign to the spirit of his own Tradition; that is what happens in the case of a people unfamiliar with Western civilization when they encounter the forms imported from the West. However, for this to happen, it is necessary that the people accepting such confusion should no longer be fully Conscious of their own spiritual genius, or in other terms, that they should no longer be capable of understanding the forms with which they are still surrounded and in which they live; it is in fact a proof that the people in question are already suffering from a certain decadence. Because of this fact, they are led to accept modern ugliness all the more easily because it may answer to certain inferior possibilities that those people are already spontaneously seeking to realize, no matter how, and it may well be quite subconsciously; therefore, the unreasoning readiness with which only too many Orientals (possibly even the great majority) accept things which are utterly incompatible with the spirit of their Tradition is best explained by the fascination exercised over an ordinary person by something corresponding to an as yet unexhausted possibility, this possibility being, in the present case, simply that of arbitrariness or want of principle. However that may be, and without wishing to attach too much importance to this explanation of what appears to be the complete lack of taste shown by Orientals, there is one fact which is absolutely certain, namely that very many Orientals themselves no longer understand the sense of the forms they inherited from their ancestors, together with their whole Tradition. All that has just been said applies of course first and foremost and a fortiori to the nations of the West themselves who, after having created – we will not say ‘invented’- a perfect traditional art, proceeded to disown it in favour of the residues of the individualistic and empty art of the Graeco-Ro mans, which has finally led to the artistic chaos of the modern world. We know very well that there are some who will not at any price admit the unintelligibility or the ugliness of the modern world, and who readily employ the word ‘aesthetic’, with a derogatory nuance similar to that attaching to the words ‘picturesque’ and ‘romantic’, in order to discredit in advance the importance of forms, so that they may find themselves more at ease in the enclosed system of their own barbarism. Such an attitude has nothing surprising in it when it concerns avowed modernists, but it is worse than illogical, not to say rather despicable, coming from those who claim to belong to the Christian civilization; for to reduce the spontaneous and normal language of Christian art – a language the BEAUTY of which can hardly be questioned – to a worldly matter of ‘taste’- as if medieval art could have been the product of mere caprice – amounts to admitting that the signs stamped by the genius of Christianity on all its direct and indirect expressions were only a contingency unrelated to that genius and devoid of serious importance, or even due to a mental inferiority; for ‘only the spirit matters’- so say certain ignorant people imbued with hypocritical, iconoclastic, blasphemous and impotent puritanism, who pronounce the word ‘spirit’ all the more readily because they are the last to know what it really stands for. sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

It will be appreciated that rules such as these are not dictated by merely ‘aesthetic’ reasons and that they represent, on the contrary, applications of cosmic and divine laws; BEAUTY will flow from them as a necessary result. As regards BEAUTY in naturalistic art, it does not reside in the work as such, but solely in the object which it copies, whereas in symbolic and traditional art it is the work in itself which is beautiful, whether it be abstract’ or whether it borrows BEAUTY in a greater or lesser degree from a natural model. It would be difficult to find a better illustration of this distinction than that afforded by a comparison between so-called ‘classical’ Greek art and Egyptian art: the BEAUTY of the latter does not, in fact, lie simply and solely in the object represented, but resides simultaneously and a fortiori in the work as such, that is to say in the ‘inward reality’ which the work makes manifest. The fact that naturalistic art has sometimes succeeded in expressing nobility of feeling or vigorous intelligence is not in question and may be explained by cosmological reasons which could not but exist; but that has no connection with art as such, and no individual value could ever make up for the falsification of the latter. sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

In the economy of spiritual means, BEAUTY, which is positive and compassionate, stands in a sense at the antipodes of asceticism, which is negative and implacable; none the less the one always contains something of the other, for both are derived from truth and express truth, though from different points of view. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

The pursuit of the disagreeable is justified in so far as it is a form of asceticism. It must not, however, be carried to the point of becoming a cult of ugliness, for that would amount to a denial of one aspect of truth. This question could hardly arise in a civilization still wholly traditional, for in such a civilization ugliness is more or less accidental. Only in the modern world has ugliness become something like a norm or a principle; only here does BEAUTY appear as a speciality, not to say a luxury. Hence the frequent confusion, at all levels, between ugliness and simplicity. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

The reflection of the supra-formal in the formal is not the formless but on the contrary strict form. The supra-formal is incarnated in forms that are both ‘logical’ and ‘generous’ and thus in BEAUTY. (NA: This is why every ‘descent from Heaven’, every Avatara, has perfect BEAUTY. It is said of the Buddhas that they save not only by doctrine but also in a more direct and plastic’ way by their superhuman BEAUTY. The name Shunyamurti (Manifestation of the Void) applied to a Buddha is full of significance.) sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

Ignorant and profane aestheticism, at least in practice, puts the beautiful – or what its sentimental idealism takes to be the beautiful – above the true, and in so doing exposes itself to errors on its own level. But if aestheticism is the unintelligent cult of the beautiful, or more precisely of aesthetic feeling, this in no way implies that a sense of BEAUTY is mere aestheticism. This is not to say that man is limited to a choice between aestheticism and aesthetics, or, in other words, between idolizing of the beautiful and the science of BEAUTY. Love of BEAUTY is a quality which exists apart from its sentimental deviations and its intellectual foundations. Beauty is a reflection of Divine bliss, and since God is Truth, the reflection of His bliss will be that mixture of happiness and truth which is to be found in all BEAUTY. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

Forms allow of a direct and ‘plastic’ assimilation of the truths – or the realities – of the spirit. The geometry of the symbol is steeped in BEAUTY, which in its turn and in its own way is also a symbol. The perfect form is that in which truth is incarnate in the rigour of the symbolical formulation and in the purity and intelligence of the style. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

Beauty is always beyond compare; no perfect BEAUTY is more beautiful than another perfect BEAUTY. One may prefer this BEAUTY to that, but this is a matter of personal affinity or of complementary relationship and not of pure aesthetics. Human BEAUTY, for instance, can be found in each of the major races, yet normally a man prefers some type of BEAUTY in his own race rather than in another; inversely, qualitative and universal affinities between human types sometimes show themselves to be stronger than racial affinities. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

Like every other kind of BEAUTY artistic BEAUTY is objective, and therefore discernible by intelligence, not by ‘taste’. Taste is indeed legitimate, but only to the same extent as individual peculiarities are legitimate, that is, in so far as these peculiarities translate positive aspects of some human norm. Different tastes should be derived from pure aesthetics and should be of equal validity, just as are the different ways in which the eye sees things. Myopia and blindness are certainly not different ways of looking – they are merely defects of vision. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

In BEAUTY man ‘realizes’ in a passive way – as to its perception – and outwardly – as to its production – that which he should himself ‘be’ in an active or inward fashion. When man surrounds himself with the ineptitudes of a deviated art how can he still ‘see’ what he should ‘be’? He runs the risk of ‘being’ what he ‘sees’ and assimilating the errors suggested by the erroneous forms among which he lives. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

From an ascetico-mystical or penitential point of view BEAUTY may appear as something worldly, because such a point of view tends to look at everything with the eye of the will; BEAUTY is then confounded with desire. But from the intellective point of view – which is that of the nature of things and not that of expediency – BEAUTY is spiritual, since in its own way it externalizes Truth and Bliss. That is why the born contemplative cannot see or hear BEAUTY without perceiving in it something of God; and this Divine content allows him the more easily to detach himself from appearances. As for passional man, he sees in BEAUTY the world, seduction, the ego; it distances him from the ‘one thing needful’, at least in the case of natural BEAUTY, though not in the case of the BEAUTY of sacred art, for then the ‘one thing needful’ harnesses the need for BEAUTY in the cause of piety, of fervour and of heaven. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

Each of these two points of view should take account of the truth of the other. The perspective of merit cannot prevent truth from imposing itself in principle on every man, even on those who are weak, and it is just this which gives to sacred art its universal validity. The perspective of the intellect, for its part, will not preclude all men – even the strong – from being by nature corruptible. A distinction must be made, not only between contemplatives and passional men, but also between man in so far as he is contemplative and man in so far as he is passional. It may on occasion be useful to slander BEAUTY; but to do so is always a kind of outrage. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

Apart from its function of ‘conserving’ and ‘suggesting’, which concerns both the collectivity and, more directly, certain contemplatives who draw inspiration from its symbolism and breathe its BEAUTY, sacred art belongs to the order of ‘sensible consolations’. Such consolations may draw a man nearer to God or may distance him from God according to the subjective dispositions of the individual, and independently of the objective value of the forms. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

The multiform BEAUTY of a sanctuary is like the crystallization of a spiritual flux or of a stream of blessings. It is as though invisible and celestial power had fallen into matter – which hardens, divides and scatters – and had transformed it into a shower of precious forms, into a sort of planetary system of symbols, surrounding us and penetrating us from every side. The impact, if one may so call it, is analogous to that of the benediction itself; it is direct and existential; it goes beyond thought and seizes our being in its very substance. There are blessings which are like snow; and others which are like wine; all can be crystallized in sacred art. What is exteriorized in such art is both doctrine and blessing, geometry and the music of Heaven. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

Poetry should express with sincerity a BEAUTY of the soul; one might also say: “with BEAUTY, sincerity”. It would serve no purpose to make so obvious a point but for the fact that in our days definitions of art have become increasingly falsified, either through the abuse of attributing to one art the characteristics of another, or by introducing into a definition of one art, or of all art, perfectly arbitrary elements such as a PRE-occupation with its date; as though the value or lack of value of a work of art could depend on the knowledge of whether it is modern or ancient, or on one s believing it to be ancient if it is modern or vice versa. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

Contemporary poetry is mostly lacking in BEAUTY and sincerity; it is lacking in BEAUTY for the simple reason that the souls of the poets – or rather of those who fabricate what takes the place of poetry – are devoid of it, and it is lacking in sincerity on account of the artificial and paltry searching for unusual expressions which excludes all spontaneity. It is no longer a question of poetry but of a sort of cold and lifeless work ofjewellery made up of false gems, or of a meticulous elaboration which is at the very antipodes of what is beautiful and true. Since the muse no longer gives anything, because it is rejected a priori, – for the last thing which a man of to-day would accept is to appear naïve, – vibrations are provoked in the soul and it is cut into fragments. (NA: The same remarks are valid in relation to contemporary music; it is no longer music but something else. At the opposite extreme from the ‘vibratory’ or ‘acoustic’ arts we have come across inverse but in reality complementary. tendencies namely attempts at ‘dynamic’, or even ‘vegetative’, architecture.) sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

Metaphysical or mystical poets such as Dante and some of the troubadours, and also the Sufi poets, expressed spiritual realities through the BEAUTY of their souls. It is a matter of spiritual endowment far more than a question of method, for it is not given to every man sincerely to formulate truths which are beyond the range of ordinary humanity. Even if the concern was only to introduce a symbolical terminology into a poem, it would still be necessary to be a true poet in order to succeed without betrayal. Whatever one may think of the symbolistic intention of the Vita Nuova or the ‘Song of Wine’ (by Omar ibn al-Färidh) or the quatrains of Omar Khayyam, it is not possible knowingly to deny the poetical quality of such works, and it is this quality which, from an artistic point of view, justifies the intention in question; moreover the same symbiosis of poetry and symbolism is to be found in prototypes of Divine inspiration such as the ‘Song of Songs’. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

The pseudo-Christian art inaugurated by the neo-paganism of the Renaissance seeks and realizes only man. The mysteries it should suggest are suffocated in a hubbub of superficiality and impotence, inevitable features of individualism; in any case it inflicts very great harm on society, above all by its ignorant hypocrisy. How should it be otherwise, seeing that this art is only disguised paganism and takes no account in its formal language of the contemplative chastity and the immaterial BEAUTY of the spirit of the Gospels? How can one unreservedly call ‘sacred’ an art which, forgetful of the quasi-sacramental character of holy images and forgetful, too, of the traditional rules of the craft, holds up to the veneration of the faithful carnal and showy copies of nature and even portraits of concubines painted by libertines? In the ancient Church, and in the Eastern Churches even down to our own times, icon painters prepared themselves for their work by fasting, by prayer and by sacraments; to the inspiration which had fixed the immutable type of the image they added their own humble and pious inspirations; and they scrupulously respected the symbolism – always susceptible of an endless series of precious nuances – of the forms and colours. They drew their creative joy, not from inventing pretentious novelties, but from a loving recreation of the revealed prototypes, and this resulted in a spiritual and artistic perfection such as no individual genius could ever attain. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

When the arts are enumerated the art of dress is too often forgotten though it none the less has an importance as great, or almost as great, as architecture. Doubtless no civilization has ever produced summits in every field. Thus the Arab genius, made up of virility and resignation, has produced a masculine dress of unsurpassed nobility and sobriety, whereas it has neglected feminine dress, which is destined in Islam, not to express the ‘eternal feminine’ as does Hindu dress, but to hide woman’s seductive charms. The Hindu genius, which in a certain sense divinizes the ‘wife-mother’, has on the other hand created a feminine dress unsurpassable in its BEAUTY, its dignity and its femininity. One of the most expressive and one of the least-known forms of dress is that of the Red Indians, with its rippling fringes and its ornaments of a wholly primordial symbolism; here man appears in all the solar glory of the hero, and woman in the proud modesty of her impersonal function. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

With all deference to certain ancient moralists who had difficulty reconciling femininity with deiformity, it is nonetheless quite clear that the latter essentially implies the former, and this for simply logical as well as metaphysical reasons. Even without knowing that femininity derives from an “Eternal Feminine” of transcendent order, one is obliged to take note of the fact that woman, being situated like the male in the human state, is deiform because this state is deiform. Thus it is not astonishing that a tradition as “misogynist” as Buddhism finally consented – within the Mahayâna at least – to make use of the symbolism of the feminine body, which would be meaningless and even harmful if this body, or if femininity in itself, did not comprise a spiritual message of the first order; the Buddhas (and Bodhisattvas) do not save solely through doctrine, but also through their suprahuman BEAUTY, according to the Tradition; now who says BEAUTY, says implicitly femininity; the BEAUTY of the Buddha is necessarily that of Mâyâ or of Tara. sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body

In an old book of legends, the chronicler who recounts an apparition of the Blessed Virgin with the Child-Jesus observes that the Virgin was sublimely beautiful, but that the Child was “far more beautiful,” which is absurd in more than one respect. First of all, there is no reason for the Child to be more beautiful than the Mother; (NA: Which would imply that Mary be ” less beautiful” than Jesus, something inconceivable, because meaningless.) the divine nature possessed by the Child indeed requires perfect physical BEAUTY, but the supereminent nature of the Virgin requires it equally as much; what the Christ possesses in addition to what is possessed by the Virgin could not determine a superior degree of BEAUTY, given precisely that the BEAUTY of the Virgin must be perfect; physical BEAUTY of the formal order, and form is by definition the manifestation of an archetype, the intention of which excludes an indefinite gradation. In other words, form coincides with an “idea” which cannot be something other than what it is; the human body has the form which characterizes it, and which it cannot transcend without ceasing to be itself; an indefinitely augmentable BEAUTY is meaningless, and empties the very notion of BEAUTY of all its content. It is true that the mode or degree of divine Presence can add to the body, and above all to the face, an expressive quality, but this is independent of BEAUTY in itself, which is a perfect theophany on its own plane; this is to say that the theophanic quality of the human body resides uniquely in its form, and not in the sanctity of the soul inhabiting it nor, at the purely natural level, in the psychological BEAUTY of an expression added to it, whether it be that of youth or of some noble sentiment. Hence it is necessary to distinguish between the theophanic quality possessed by the human body in itself – BEAUTY coinciding then with the wholeness and the intelligibility of this message – and the theophanic quality possessed in addition by the body in the case of the Avatâras, such as the Christ and the Virgin. In these cases, as we have said, bodily BEAUTY must be perfect, and it may also distinguish itself by an originality emphasizing its majesty; but BEAUTY of spiritual expression is of an altogether different order and, if it presupposes physical perfection and enhances it, it cannot, however, create it. The body of the Avatâra is therefore sacred in a particular sense, one that is supereminent and so to speak sacramental in virtue of its quasi-divine content; however the ordinary body is also sacred, but in an altogether different respect, simply because it is human; in addition, physical BEAUTY is sacred because it manifests the divine Intention for that body, and thus is fully itself in proportion to its regularity and nobility. (NA: This – be it said in passing – is totally independent of ques tions of race: every race, excepting more or less degenerate groups – although even a collective degeneration does not necessarily exclude cas es of individual BEAUTY – comprises modes of perfect BEAUTY, each expressing a fundamental aspect of human theophany in itself.) sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body

There is not only the BEAUTY of the adult, there is also that of the child as our mention of the Child Jesus suggests. First of all, it must be said that the child, being human, participates in the same symbolism and in the same aesthetic expressivity as do his parents – we are speaking always of man as such and not of particular individuals – and then, that childhood is nevertheless a provisional state and does not in general have the definitive and representative value of maturity. (NA: But it can when the individual value of the child visibly over rides his state of immaturity; notwithstanding the fact that childhood is in itself an incomplete state which points towards its own completion.) In metaphysical symbolism, this provisional character expresses relativity: the child is what “comes after” his parents, he is the reflection of Atmâ in Mâyâ, to some degree and according to the ontological or cosmological level in view; or it is even Mâyâ itself if the adult is Atmâ. (NA: Polarized into “Necessary Being” and “All-Possibility.”) But from an altogether different point of view, and according to inverse analogy, the key to which is given by the seal of Solomon, (NA: When a tree is mirrored in a lake, its top is at the bottom, but the image is always that of a tree; the analogy is inverse in the first relationship and parallel in the second. Analogies between the divine order and the cosmic order always comprise one or the other of these relationships.) the child represents on the contrary what “was before,” namely what is simple, pure, innocent, primordial and close to the Essence, and this is what its BEAUTY expresses; (NA: We do not say that every human individual is beautiful when he is a child, but we start from the idea that man, child or not, is beautiful to the extent that he is physically what he ought to be.) this BEAUTY has all the charm of promise, of hope and of blossoming, at the same time as that of a Paradise not yet lost; it combines the proximity of the Origin with the tension towards the Goal. And it is for that reason that childhood constitutes a necessary aspect of the integral man, therefore in conformity with the divine Intention: the man who is fully mature always keeps, in equilibrium with wisdom, the qualities of simplicity and freshness, of gratitude and trust, that he possessed in the springtime of his life. (NA: “Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Matthew 18:3)) Since we have just mentioned the principle of inverse analogy, we may here connect it with its application to femininity: even though a priori femininity is subordinate to virility, it also comprises an aspect which makes it superior to a given aspect of the masculine pole; for the divine Principle has an aspect of unlimitedness, virginal mystery and maternal mercy which takes precedence over a certain more relative aspect of determination, logical precision and implacable justice. (NA: According to Tacitus, the Germans discerned something sacred and visionary in women. The fact that in German the sun (die Sonne) is feminine whereas the moon (der Mond) is masculine, bears witness to the same perspective.) Seen thus, feminine BEAUTY appears as an initiatic wine in the face of the rationality represented in certain respects by the masculine body. (NA: Mahâyanic art represents Prajnâpâramitâ, the “Perfection of Gnosis,” in feminine form; likewise, Prajnâ, liberating Knowledge, appears as a woman in the face of Upâya, the doctrinal system or the art of convincing, which is represented as masculine. The Buddhists readily point out that the Bodhisattvas, in themselves asexual, have the power to take a feminine form as they do any other form; now one would like to know for what reason they do so, for if the feminine form can produce such a great good, it is because it is intrinsically good; otherwise there would be no reason for a Bodhisattva to assume it.) sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body

One of the functions of dress is, no doubt, to isolate mental subjectivity, that which thinks and speaks, from the two existential subjectivities which risk disturbing the message of thought with their own messages; but this is nonetheless a question of temperament and custom, more or less primordial man having in this respect reflexes other than those of man too marked by the fall; of man become at once too cerebral and too passional, and having lost much of his BEAUTY and also his innocence. The gait of the human being is as evocative as his vertical posture; whereas the animal is horizontal and only advances towards itself – that is, it is enclosed within its own form – man, in advancing, transcends himself; even his forward movement seems vertical, it denotes a pilgrimage towards his Archetype, towards the celestial Kingdom, towards God. The BEAUTY of the anterior side of the human body indicates the nobleness, on the one hand of man’s vocational end, and on the other hand of his manner of approaching it; it indicates that man directs himself towards God and that he does so in a manner that is “humanly divine,” if one may say so. But the posterior side of the body also has its meaning: it indicates, on the one hand the noble innocence of the origin, and on the other hand the noble manner of leaving behind himself what has been transcended; it expresses, positively, whence we have come and, negatively, how we turn our backs to what is no longer ourselves. Man comes from God and he goes towards God; but at the same time, he draws away from an imperfection which is no longer his own and draws nearer to a perfection which is not yet his. His “becoming” bears the imprint of a “being”; he is that which he becomes, and he becomes that which he is. sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body

One may wonder why the Hindus, and still more so the Buddhists, did not fear to furnish their sacred art with occasions for a fall, given that BEAUTY – sexual BEAUTY above all – invites to “let go of the prey for its shadow,” that is, to forget the transcendent content through being attached to the earthly husk. Now it is not for nothing that Buddhist art, more than any other, has given voice to the terrible aspects of cosmic manifestation, which at the very least constitutes a “reestablishing of the balance”: the spectator is warned, he cannot lose sight of the everywhere present menace of the pitiless samsâra, nor that of the Guardians of the Sanctuary. Darshan – the contemplation of the Divine in nature or in art – quite clearly presupposes a contemplative temperament; now it is this very temperament that comprises a sufficient guarantee against the spirit of compliance and profanation. sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body

The morality and mysticism of the West see carnal sin exclusively in concupiscence, which is one-sided and insufficient; in reality, sin here lies just as much in the profanation of a theophanic mystery; it is in the fact of pulling downwards, towards the frivolous and the trivial, that which by its nature points upwards and towards the sacred; but sin or deviation is also, at a level which in this case is not deprived of nobility, in the purely aesthetic and individualistic cult of bodies , as was the case in classical Greece, where the sense of clarity, of measure, of finite perfection, completely obliterated the sense of the transcendent, of mystery and of the infinite. Sensible BEAUTY became an end in itself; it was no longer man who resembled God, it was God who resembled man; whereas in Egyptian and Hindu art, which express the substantial and not the accidental, one feels that the human form is nothing without a mystery which on the one hand fashions it and on the other hand transcends it, and which calls both to Love and to Deliverance. sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body

Science, like the machine, has reversed the roles, turning its creators into its own creatures; it escapes the control of intelligence as such from the moment that it claims to define the nature of intelligence from the outside and from below. Our timeless cosmic environment has been deprived of its teaching function in being replaced with a “stage setting”: the stellar vault has been turned into the extension of a laboratory, bodily BEAUTY is reduced to the mechanism of natural selection. sophiaperennis: Science and technique, industry, machines

That spiritual function which can be described as “action of presence” found in the Maharshi its most rigorous expression. Shri Ramana was as it were the incarnation, in these latter days and in the face of the modern activist fever, of what is primordial and incorruptible in India. He manifested the nobility of contemplative non-action in the face of an ethic of utilitarian agitation, and he showed the implacable BEAUTY of pure truth in the face of passions, weaknesses and betrayals. sophiaperennis: Ramana Maharshi

Sometimes the concept of “image” can be understood in a larger sense, going beyond the question of works of art: it may be acknowledged that in the case of Shri Ramana Maharshi, for example, it is the sacred mountain of Shiva, Arunâchala, that serves as a permanent symbol of the Principle that was concurrently “incarnated” in the sage, and which was thus his true body; inversely, one might say that the body of the Maharshi was a manifestation of Arunâchala, of the earthly lingam of Paramashiva, in human mode. In an analogous way, the disciples of Ma Ananda Moyi might consider her as a human manifestation of the Ganges in its aspect of “Mother,” which is to say that worship in the environment of this saint could coincide, in the absence of other supports, with the traditional worship of Mother Ganga. In the case of Ramakrishna, there is no doubt that the image which represents him adequately, and for purposes of worship, is that of the Shakti, not under the terrible aspect alone but rather, indeed, as she appeared to the saint, under the aspect of BEAUTY and maternal love. sophiaperennis: Ramana Maharshi

The question of knowing which detail it is that impugns the authenticity of a celestial apparition depends either on the nature of things or else on a particular religious perspective. That is to say there are elements which in themselves, and from every religious or spiritual point of view, are incompatible with celestial apparitions … (To speak of these) discordant elements which are intrinsically incompatible with a celestial manifestation, there are first of all — and quite obviously — elements of ugliness or grotesque features, not only in the actual form of the apparition but also in its movements or even simply in the surroundings of the vision; then there is the question of speech, both from the point of view of content and of style, for Heaven neither lies nor gossips. (NA: Which puts paid to a whole series of apparitions or “messages” of which one hears talk in the second half of the 20th century.) “God is beautiful and He loves BEAUTY”, the Prophet said. Loving BEAUTY, He also loves dignity, He who combines BEAUTY (jamal) with majesty (jalal). “God is love”, and love, if it does not exclude holy wrath, assuredly excludes ugliness and pettiness. sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

Woman manifests BEAUTY as such, so much so that there is no BEAUTY superior to hers, when contingency has not separated her from her prototype; thus one may discern in BEAUTY as such features of femininity, of passive perfection, of virginal purity, of maternal generosity; of goodness and love. (The Play of Masks, p. 45, Note 2) sophiaperennis: Femininity

… woman assumes, face to face with man, an aspect of Divinity: her nobility, compounded of BEAUTY and virtue, is for man like a revelation of his own infinite essence and so of what he ‘would wish to be’ because that is what he ‘is’. (Castes and Races, p.34.) sophiaperennis: Femininity