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

No art in itself is a human creation; but sacred art has this particularity, that its essential content is a revelation, that it manifests a properly sacramental form of heavenly reality, such as the icon of the Virgin and Child, painted by an angel, or the icon of the Holy Face which goes back to the holy shroud and to St Veronica; or such as the statue of Shiva dancing or the painted or carved images of the Buddhas, Bodhisattvas and Taras. To the same category - in the widest acceptation of the term - belong ritual psalmody in a sacred language - among others Sanskrit, Hebrew and Arabic - and, in certain cases, the calligraphic copying - likewise ritual - of the sacred Books; architecture, or at least the decoration of sanctuaries, liturgical objects and sacerdotal vestments are in general of a less direct order. It would be difficult to do justice in a few lines to all possible types of sacred expression, which comprises such diverse modes as recitation, writing, architecture, painting, sculpture, the dance, the art of gestures, clothing; in what follows we shall be concerned only with the plastic arts, or even only with painting, the latter being moreover the most immediately tangible and also the most explicit of the arts. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

Besides the icons of Christ and the Virgin, there are also a multitude of other hieratic images, relating the facts of sacred history and the lives of the saints; likewise in Buddhist iconography, after the central images come the numerous representations of secondary personifications; it is this more or less peripheral category which may be called indirect sacred art, even though there may not always be a rigorous line of demarcation between it and direct or central sacred art. The function of this ramification - apart from its didactic significance - is to enable the spirit of the central images to shine through a diverse imagery which rivets the movement of the mind by infusing into it the radiance of the Immutable, and which, in so doing, imposes on the moving soul a tendency towards interiorization; this function is thus entirely analogous to that of hagiography or even to that of tales of chivalry, not forgetting fairy stories whose symbolism, as is well known, belongs to the realm of the spiritual and so to that of the sacred. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

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

The majority of moderns who claim to understand art are convinced that Byzantine or Romanesque art is in no way superior to modern art, and that a Byzantine or Romanesque Virgin resembles Mary no more than do her naturalistic images, in fact rather the contrary. The answer is, however, quite simple: the Byzantine Virgin - which traditionally goes back to Saint Luke and the Angels - is infinitely closer to the ’truth’ of Mary than a naturalistic image, which of necessity is always that of another woman. Only one of two things is possible: either the artist presents an absolutely correct portrait of the Virgin from a physical point of view, in which case it will be necessary for the artist to have seen the Virgin, a condition which obviously cannot be fulfilled - setting aside the fact that all naturalistic painting is an abuse - or else the artist will present a perfectly adequate symbol of the Virgin, but in this case physical resemblance, without being absolutely excluded, is no longer at all in question. It is this second solution - the only one that makes sense - which is realized in icons; what they do not express by means of a physical resemblance, they express by the abstract but immediate language of symbolism, a language which is built up of precision and imponderables both together. Thus the icon, in addition to the beatific power which is inherent in it by reason of its sacramental character, transmits the holiness or inner reality of the Virgin and hence the universal reality of which the Virgin herself is an expression; in contributing both to a state of contemplation and to a metaphysical reality, the icon becomes a support of intellection, whereas a naturalistic image transmits only the fact - apart from its obvious and inevitable lie - that Mary was a woman. It is true that in the case of a particular icon it may happen that the proportions and features are those of the living Virgin, but such a likeness, if it really came to pass, would be independent of the symbolism of the image and could only be the result of a special inspiration, no doubt an unconscious one on the part of the artist himself. Naturalistic art could moreover be legitimate up to a certain point if it was used exclusively to set on record the features of the saints, since the contemplation of saints (the Hindu darshan) can be a very precious help in the spiritual way, owing to the fact that their outward appearance conveys, as it were, the perfume of their spirituality; but the use in this limited manner of a partial and ’disciplined’ naturalism corresponds only to a very remote possibility. sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

When we speak of forms in the widest sense we ought also to include colours, which equally belong to the ’formal’ order while being independent qualities in relation to tangible forms. Religions are divergent forms that are none the less analogous - there is no analogy without divergence - but they also comprise secondary forms which, following the same visual symbolism, may be described as so many ’colours of the spirit’. Affective and combative spiritual positions are ’red’; contemplation and quietude are ’blue’; joy is ’yellow’; pure truth is ’white’; the inexpressible is ’black’. Colours also have, of course, many other meanings according to the degree of reality or the category of things envisaged. Let us now consider colours in their own nature and in their immediate language. Red has intensity and violence; blue has depth and goodness. [NA: The sky is blue and so is the mantle of the Virgin, Mater miserieordiae. Christ is clad in white and red; sanctity and life, purity and love. Certain Vishnuite schools distinguish between a love that is ’red’ and a love that is ’blue’, the former no doubt corresponding to an activity and the latter to a passivity.] The eyes can move and lose themselves in blue, but not in red, which rises before us like a wall of fire. Yellow has both intensity and depth, but in a ’light’ mode; it possesses a certain ’transcendent’ quality in relation to the ’heavy’ colours and marks, as it were, an emergence towards whiteness. When mixed with blue, it gives to the contemplativity associated with this colour a quality of ’hope’, of saving joy, and a liberation out of the enveloping quietude of contemplation. Red excites, awakens and ’exteriorizes’, blue gathers and ’interiorizes’ and yellow rejoices and ’delivers’. Red is aggressive and acts externally; the radiance of blue is deep and welcoming and turns inwards; that of yellow is ’liberating’ and spreads in all directions. The mixture of self-collectedness (blue) with joy (yellow) is hope (green). Hope is opposed to passion (red) because it lives, not in the present like passion, but in the future; it is also opposed to passion in its two aspects of introspection and of joy. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

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

It happens frequently that anglicized Hindus, as also other Asiatics, mention in the same breath names like Jesus and Gandhi, Shankara   and Kierkegaard  , Buddha and Goethe  , the Holy Virgin and Mrs. X, or affirm that such and such a German musician was a yogi or that the French Revolution was a mystical movement, etc. This fact reveals a total ignorance of certain differences of category which are none the less of capital importance — we would readily say differences of ’reality’ — as well as a strange lack of sensibility; it also shows a tendency to simplification, due doubtless to the more or less unconscious idea that only ’realization’ counts and not ’theory’, whence a completely misplaced and profitless contempt for the objective discerning of phenomena... A typical example of neo-Hindu deviation is the Swami Yogananda, founder in the United States of a "Self-Realisation Fellowship’(SRF!), the president (!) of which is — or was — an American woman. On the other hand we find the ’discerning of spirits’ present to an eminent degree in a man like [Ananda] Coomaraswamy, and we are not alone in hoping that his influence will grow in his own country. (Gnosis Divine Wisdom, p. 57-58, note 1). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

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

To allege that the woman who is holy has become a man by the fact of her sanctity, amounts to presenting her as a denatured being: in reality, a holy woman can only be such on the basis of her perfect femininity, failing which God would have been mistaken in creating woman - quod absit — whereas according to Genesis she was, in the intention of God, "a helpmeet for man"; and so firstly a "help" and not an obstacle, and secondly "like unto him", and not a sub-human; to be accepted by God, she does not have to stop being what she is. [NA: Ave gratia plena, said the angel to Mary. "Full of grace": this settles the question given that Mary is a woman. The angel did not say Ave Maria, because to him gratia plena is the name that he gives to the Virgin, this amounts to saying that Maria is synonymous with gratia plena.] [Esoterism as Principle and as Way, p.143]. sophiaperennis: Femininity