Howbeit, if finally the West had need of that messianic and dramatic religion which is Christianity, it is because the average European was an active type and an adventurer and not a contemplative like the Hindu; but the "Aryan" atavism had to resurface sooner or later, whence the Renaissance and modern rationalism. No doubt, Christianity presents elements of esoterism that make it compatible with all ethnic temperaments, but its formal structure, or its moral bearing, had to be in keeping with the fundamental temperament of the West, whether Mediterranean or Nordic. sophiaperennis: Extenuating circumstances for rationalism

The experience of the deceptive "liberty" which is propounded as an end in itself or as "art for art’s sake" - as if one could be really free outside the truth and without inward liberty! - this experience, we say, is only in its beginning phase, although the world has already reaped some of its bitter fruits; for everything still human, normal and stable in the world survives only through the vitality of ancestral traditions - of "prejudices" if one so prefers - whether it be a matter of the West, molded by Christianity, or of any Nilotic or Amazonian tribe. To have some idea of what the free man of "tomorrow" might be like, the man starting from zero and "creating himself" [NA: And creating the truth at the same time, of course.]- but in reality the man of the machine which has escaped from his control - it suffices to take a glance at the very "existentialist" psychology of most youth. If the profound and "subconscious" imprints of tradition are removed from man, there remain finally only the stigmata of his fall and the unleashing of the infra-human. sophiaperennis: Existentialism

Far from proving that modern man "keeps a cool head" and that men of old were dreamers, modern unbelief and "exact science" are to be explained at bottom by a wave of rationalism - sometimes apparently antirationalist - which is reacting against the religious sentimentalism and bourgeois romanticism of the previous epoch; both these tendencies have existed side by side since the "age of reason." The Renaissance also knew such a wave of false lucidity: like our age, it rejected truths along with outworn sentimentalities, replacing them with new sentimentalities that were supposedly "intelligent." To properly understand these oscillations it must be remembered that Christianity as a path of love opposed pagan rationalism; that is to say, it opposed emotional elements possessing a spiritual quality to the implacable, but "worldly," logic of the Greco-Romans, while later on absorbing certain sapiential elements which their civilization comprised. sophiaperennis: Nature of Modern man

Plato is sometimes included under the heading of rationalism, which is unjust despite the rationalistic style of his dialectic and a manner of thinking that is too geometrical; but what puts Plato in the clearest possible opposition to rationalism properly so-called is his doctrine of the eve of the soul. [NA: The opinion linking Plato not only with Pythagoreanism but also with the Egyptian tradition is perhaps not to be disregarded; in that case, the wisdom of Thoth will have survived in alchemy   and partially or indirectly in Neo- Platonism   as well, within Islam no less than in Christianity and Judaism.] This eye, so he teaches, lies buried in a slough from which it must extricate itself in order to mount to the vision of real things, namely the archetypes. Plato doubtless here has in mind an initiatic regeneration, for he says that the eyes of the soul in the case of the ordinary man are not strong enough to bear the vision of the Divine; moreover, this mysterial background helps to explain the somewhat playful character of the Platonic dialogues, since we are most probably dealing here with an intentional dialectical exoterism destined to adapt sacred teachings for a promulgation which had become desirable at that time. sophiaperennis: Plato

From the standpoint of integral rationalism, Aristotle   has been reproached with stopping halfway and thus being in contradiction with his own principle of knowledge; but this accusation stems entirely from an abusive exploitation of Aristotelian logic, and is the product of a thinking that is artificial to the point of perversion. To Aristotle’s implicit axioms, which his detractors are incapable of perceiving, they oppose a logical automatism which the Stagirite would have been the first to repudiate. If Aristotle is to be blamed it is for the quite contrary reason that his formulation of metaphysics is governed by a tendency toward exteriorization, a tendency which is contrary to the very essence of all metaphysics. Aristotelianism is a science of the Inward expanding toward the outward and thereby tends to favor exteriorization, whereas traditional metaphysics is invariably formulated in view of an interiorization, and for this reason does not encourage the expansion of the natural sciences, or not to an excessive extent. It is this flaw in Aristotelianism that explains the superficiality of its method of knowledge, which was inherited by Thomism and exploited by it as a religious pretext to limit the intellective faculty, despite the latter being capable in principle both of absoluteness and hence also of reaching out to the supernatural; the same defect also explains the corresponding mediocrity of Aristotelian ethics, not to mention the scientism which proves Aristotle’s deviation from the epistemological principle. The important point to retain here is that the Monotheists, whether Semite or Semitized, could not have incorporated Aristotle in their teachings if he had been exclusively a rationalist; but in incorporating him they nonetheless became poisoned, and the partial or virtual rationalism - or rationalism in principle - which resulted has finally given rise to totalitarian rationalism, systematic and self-satisfied, and consequently shut off from every element that is subjectively or objectively suprarational. [NA: It might seem surprising that Scholasticism chose Aristotle and not Plato or Plotinus  , hut the reason for this is plain, since from the viewpoint of objective faith there is everything to be gained by promoting a wisdom that offers no competition, and which makes it possible, on the one hand, to neutralize that interloper Intellection, and, on the other, to give carte blanche to any theological contradictions that may occur by describing them as "mysteries."] The Aristotelian Pandora’s box is scientism coupled with sensationalism; it is through these concepts that Aristotle deviates from Plato by replacing the interiorizing tendency with its inverse. People say that the Church has kept science in chains; what is certain is that the modern world has unchained it with the result that it has escaped from all control, and, in the process of destroying nature, is headed toward the destruction of mankind. For genuine Christianity, as for every other traditional perspective, the world is what it appears to be to our empirical vision and there is no good reason for it to be anything else; herein lies the real significance, on the one hand, of the naïveté of the Scriptures, and, on the other, of the trial of Galileo. To try and pierce the wall of collective, normal, millenary experience is to eat of the forbidden fruit, leading fatally to the loss of essential knowledge and earthly equilibrium through the euphoria engendered by a completely unrealistic autodivinization of man. sophiaperennis: Aristotle

One must react against the evolutionist prejudice which makes out that the thought of the Greeks "attained" to a certain level or a certain result, that is to say, that the triad Socrates   -Plato -Aristotle represents the summit of an entirely "natural" thought, a summit reached after long periods of effort and groping. The reverse is the truth, in the sense that all the said triad did was to crystallize rather imperfectly a primordial and intrinsically timeless wisdom, actually of Aryan origin and typologically close to the Celtic, Germanic, Mazdean and Brahmanic esoterisms. There is in Aristotelian rationality and even in the Socratic dialectic a sort of "humanism" more or less connected with artistic naturalism and scientific curiosity, and thus with empiricism. But this already too contingent dialectic - and let us not forget that the Socratic dialogues are tinged with spiritual "pedagogy" and have something of the provisional in them - this dialectic must not lead us into attributing a "natural" character to intellections that are "supernatural" by definition, or "naturally supernatural". On the whole, Plato expressed sacred truths in a language that had already become profane - profane because rational and discursive rather than intuitive and symbolist, or because it followed too closely the contingencies and humours of the mirror that is the mind - whereas Aristotle placed truth itself, and not merely its expression, on a profane and "humanistic" plane. The originality of Aristotle and his school resides no doubt in giving to truth a maximum of rational bases, but this cannot be done without diminishing it, and it has no purpose save where there is a withdrawal of intellectual intuition; it is a "two-edged sword" precisely be-cause truth seems thereafter to be at the mercy of syllogisms. The question of knowing whether this constitutes a betrayal or a providential readaptation is of small importance here, and could no doubt be answered in either sense. [NA: With Pythagoras   one is still in the Aryan East; with Socrates-Plato one is no longer wholly in that East - in reality neither "Eastern" nor "Western", that distinction having no meaning for an archaic Europe - but neither is one wholly in the West; whereas with Aristotle Europe begins to become speci fically "Western" in the current and cultural sense of the word. The East - or a particular East - forced an entry with Christianity, but the Aristotelian and Caesarean West finally prevailed, only to escape in the end from both Aristotle and Caesar, but by the downward path. It is opportune to observe here that all modern theological attempts to "surpass" the teaching of Aristotle can only follow the same path, in view of the falsity of their motives, whether implicit or explicit. What is really being sought is a graceful capitulation before evolutionary " scientism", before the machine, before an activist and demagogic socialism, a destructive psychologism, abstract art and surrealism, in short before modernism in all its forms - that modernism which is less and less a "humanism" since it de-humanizes, or that individualism which is ever more infra-individual. The moderns, who are neither Pythagoricians nor Vedantists, are surely the last to have any right to complain of Aristotle.] What is certain is that Aristotle’s teaching, so far as its essential content is concerned, is still much too true to be understood and appreciated by the protagonists of the "dynamic" and relativist or "existentialist" thought of our epoch. This last half plebeian, half demonic kind of thought is in contradiction with itself from its very point of departure, since to say that everything is relative or "dynamic", and therefore "in movement", is to say that there exists no point of view from which that fact can be established; Aristotle had in any case fully foreseen this absurdity. sophiaperennis: About Plato and/or Aristotle

The sacred rights of the Intellect appear besides in the fact that Christians have not been able to dispense with the wisdom of Plato, and that later, the Latins found the need for recourse to Aristotelianism, as if thereby recognising that religio could not do without the element of wisdom, which a too exclusive perspective of love had allowed to fall into discredit. [NA: The ancient tendency to reduce sophie to a ’philosophy’, an ’art for art’s sake’ or a ’knowledge without love’, hence a pseudo-wisdom, has necessitated the predominance, in Christianity, of the contrary viewpoint. Love, in the sapiential perspective, is the element which surpasses simple ratiocination and makes knowledge effective; this cannot be insisted on too much.] But if knowledge is a profound need of the human spirit, it is by that very fact also a way. sophiaperennis: Platonism and Christianity

The Renaissance also knew such a wave of false lucidity: like our age, it rejected truths along with outworn sentimentalities, replacing them with new sentimentalities that were supposedly "intelligent." To properly understand these oscillations it must be remembered that Christianity as a path of love opposed pagan rationalism; that is to say, it opposed emotional elements possessing a spiritual quality to the implacable, but "worldly," logic of the Greco-Romans, while later on absorbing certain sapiential elements which their civilization comprised. sophiaperennis: Philosophy and modern times

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

If we compare St Louis and Louis XIV, we could of course confine ourselves to saying that they represent different ages, which is either a truism or an error; it is a truism to assert that every man lives in his own age, and it is an error to declare that the difference between the two French kings, or more precisely between the worlds in which they live and which they incarnate, is only a difference of time. The real difference is that St Louis represents Western Christianity in the full development of its normal and normative possibilities, whereas Louis XIV represents something entirely different, namely that substitute for religion, or for Christendom, which calls itself "Civilization"; admittedly, Christianity is still included in this but the emphasis is elsewhere, namely on the titanesque and worldly humanism, which is strangely hostile to virgin nature, following the example of ancient Rome. 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

Be that as it may, we should like to point out here that the chronic imbalance that characterizes Western humanity has two principal causes, the antagonism between Aryan paganism and Semitic Christianity on the one hand, and the antagonism between Latin rationality and Germanic imaginativeness on the other. [NA: From the point of view of spiritual worth, it is contemplativity that is decisive, whether it is combined with reason or with imagination, or with any kind of sensibility.] The Latin Church, with its sentimental and unrealistic idealism, has created a completely unnecessary scission between clergy and laity, whence a perpetual uneasiness on the part of the latter towards the former; it has moreover, without taking account of their needs and tastes, imposed on the Germanic peoples too many specifically Latin solutions, forgetting that a religious and cultural framework, in order to be effective, must adapt itself to the mental requirements of those on whom it is imposed. And since, in the case of Europeans, their creative gifts far exceed their contemplative gifts - the role of Christianity should have been to re-establish equilibrium by accentuating contemplation and canalizing creativity, - the West excels in "destroying what it has worshipped"; also the history of Western civilization is made up of cultural treacheries that are difficult to understand, - one is astonished at so much lack of understanding, ingratitude and blindness, - and these treacheries appear most visibly, it goes without saying, in their formal manifestations, in other words, in the human ambience which, in normal conditions, ought to suggest a sort of earthly Paradise or heavenly Jerusalem, with all their beatific symbolism and stability. The Renaissance, at its apogee, replaces happiness with pride; the baroque reacts against this pride or this crushing coldness with a false happiness, cut off from its divine roots and full of a bragadoccio that is both exaggerated and frenzied. The reaction to this reaction was a pagan classicism leading to the bourgeois ugliness, both crude and mediocre, of the 19th century; this has nothing to do with the real people or with a popular craftsmanship that is still authentic, and which remains more or less on the margin of history and bears witness to a wholesomeness very far from all civilizationist affectation. [NA: Popular art moreover is often the vehicle of primordial, especially solar, symbols, and one finds it in peoples very far removed from one another, sometimes in forms that are identical down to the last detail.] sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

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

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

In order to understand better the causes of the decadence of art in the West, one must take into account the fact that there is in the European mentality a certain dangerous ’idealism’ which is not without relevance to that decadence, nor yet to the decay of Western civilization as a whole. This ’idealism’ has found its fullest, one might say its most ’intelligent’ expression in certain forms of Gothic art, those in which a kind of ’dynamism’ is predominant, which seems to aim at taking away the heaviness from stone. As for Byzantine and Romanesque art, as well as that other side of Gothic art wherein a ’static’ power has been preserved, it might be said that it is an essentially intellectual art, therefore ’realistic’. The ’flamboyant’ Gothic art, no matter how ’passionate’ it became, was nevertheless still a traditional art except in the case of sculpture and painting which were already well on the way to decadence; to be more exact, it was the ’swansong’ of Gothic art. From the time of the Renaissance, which represents a sort of ’posthumous revenge’ on the part of classical antiquity, European ’idealism’ flowed into the exhumed sarcophagi of the Graeco-Roman civilization. By this act of suicide, idealism placed itself at the service of an individualism in which it thought to have rediscovered its own genius, only to end up, after a number of intermediate stages, in the most vulgar and wildest affirmations of that individualism. This was really a double suicide: firstly the forsaking of medieval or Christian art, and secondly the adoption of Graeco-Roman forms which intoxicated the Christian world with the poison of their decadence. But it is necessary here to consider a possible objection: was not the art of the first Christians in fact Roman art? The answer is that the real beginnings of Christian art are to be found in the symbols inscribed in the catacombs, and not in the forms that the early Christians, themselves in part belonging to the Roman civilization, temporarily borrowed in a purely outward manner from the ’classical’ decadence. Christianity was indeed called upon to replace this decadence by an art springing spontaneously from an original spiritual genius, and if in fact certain Roman influences have always persisted in Christian art, this only applies to more or less superficial details. sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

The monks of the eighth century, very different from those religious authorities of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who betrayed Christian art by abandoning it to the impure passions of worldly men and the ignorant imagination of the profane, were fully conscious of the holiness of every kind of means able to express the Tradition. They stipulated, at the second council of Nicaea, that ’art’ (i.e. ’the perfection of work’) alone belongs to the painter, while ordinance (the choice of the subject) and disposition (the treatment of the subject from the symbolical as well as the technical or material points of view) belongs to the Fathers. (Non est pictoris - ejus enim sola ars est-rerum ordinatio et dispositio Patrum nostrorum.) This amounts to placing all artistic initiative under the direct and active authority of the spiritual leaders of Christianity. Such being the case, how can one explain the fact that during recent centuries, religious circles have for the most part shown such a regret table lack of understanding in respect of all those things which, having an artistic character, are, as they fondly believe, only external matters? First of all, admitting a priori the elimination of every esoteric influence, there is the fact that a religious perspective as such has a tendency to identify itself with the moral point of view, which stresses merit only and believes it is neces sary to ignore the sanctifying quality of intellectual knowledge and, as a result, the value of the supports of such knowledge; now, the perfection of sensible forms is no more ’meritorious in the moral sense than the intellections which those forms reflect and transmit, and it is therefore only logical that symbolic forms, when they are no longer understood, should be relegated to the background, and even forsaken, in order to be replaced by forms which will no longer appeal to the intelligence, but only to a sentimental imagination capable of inspiring the meritorious act - at least such is the belief of the man of limited intelligence. However, this sort of speculative provocation of reactions by resorting to means of a superficial and vulgar nature will, in the last analysis, prove to be illusory, for, in reality, nothing can be better fitted to influence the deeper dispositions of the soul than sacred art. Profane art, on the contrary, even if it be of some psychological value in the case of souls of inferior intelligence, soon exhausts its means, by the very fact of their superficiality and vulgarity, after which it can only provoke reactions of contempt; these are only too common, and may be considered as a ’rebound’ of the contempt in which sacred art was held by profane art, especially in its earlier stages. [NA: In the same way, the hostility of the representatives of exotericism for all that lies beyond their comprehension results in an increasingly ’massive’ exotericism which cannot but suffer from ’rifts’; but the ’spiritual porousness’ of Tradition - that is to say the immanence in the ’substance’ of exotericism of a transcendent ’dimension’ which makes up for its ’massiveness,’- this state of ’porousness’ having been lost, the above-mentioned ’rifts’ could only be produced from below; which means the replacement of the masters of medieval esotericism by the protagonists of modern unbelief.] It has been a matter of current experience that nothing is able to offer to irreligion a more immediately tangible nourishment than the insipid hypocrisy of religious images; that which was meant to stimulate piety in the believer, but serves to confirm unbelievers in their impiety, whereas it must be recognized that genuinely sacred art does not possess this character of a ’two-edged weapon’, for being itself more abstract, it offers less hold to hostile psychological reactions. Now, no matter what may be the theories that attribute to the people the need for unintelligent images, warped in their essence, the elites do exist and certainly require something different; what they demand is an art corresponding to their own spirit and in which their soul can come to rest, finding itself again in order to mount to the Divine. Such an art cannot spring simply from profane taste, nor even from ’genius’, but must proceed essentially out of Tradition; this fact being admitted, the masterpiece must be executed by a sanctified artist or, let us say, by one in a state of grace’. [NA: The icon-painters were monks who, before setting to work, prepared themselves by fasting, prayer, confession and communion; it even happened that the colours were mixed with holy water and the dust from relics, as would not have been possible had the icon not possessed a really sacramental character.] Far from serving only for the more or less superficial instruction and edification of the masses, the icon, as is the case with the Hindu yantra and all other visible symbols, establishes a bridge from the sensible to the spiritual: ’By the visible aspect’, states St. John Damascenus, ’our thoughts must be drawn up in a spiritual flight and rise to the invisible majesty of God.’ sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

Latin Christianity has never been able to eradicate completely the paganism of antiquity. After having smouldered for centuries beneath the spiritual and artistic marvels of medieval civilization, it broke out and appeared in a heavier and more brutal form. It took its revenge by destroying, on the intellectual level as well as on the artistic [NA: We are here referring to the full development of the Renaissance style, as found in Michelangelo, Titian or Correggio, not to the painting of the Quattrocento, which is often virginal and tender and is in any case still Christian.] and other levels, the normal expressions of the Christian genius. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

Every religion necessarily integrates the feminine element — the "eternal feminine"(das Ewig Weibliche) if one will — into its system, either directly or indirectly; Christianity in practice deifies the Mother of Christ, despite exoteric reservations, namely the distinction between latria and hyperdulia. Islam for its part, and beginning with the Prophet, has consecrated femininity, on the basis of a metaphysics of deiformity; the secrecy surrounding woman, symbolized in the veil, basically signifies an intention of consecration. In Moslem eyes, woman, beyond her purely biological and social role, incarnate two poles, unitive "extinction" and "generosity", and these constitute from the spiritual point of view two means of overcoming the profane mentality, made as it is of outwardness, dispersion, egoism, hardness and boredom. The nobleness of soul that is or can be gained by this interpretation or utilization of the feminine element, far from being an abstract ideal, is perfectly recognizable in representative Moslems, those still rooted in authentic Islam. [NA: It is always this we have in view, and not so-called "revivals" which monstrously combine a Moslem formalism with modernist ideologies and tendencies.] [In the Face of the Absolute, p. 227-228]. sophiaperennis: Femininity

It is important... to note that woman, regarded by Christianity as the preeminent vehicle of temptation and sin, is spiritualized in the person of the Holy Virgin, mother of the life-giving Word; if Eve, issued from Adam, symbolizes the fall, the Holy Virgin, from whom Christ issued, symbolizes victory over the serpent. sophiaperennis: Femininity