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  

Independently of any question of naturalism, it frequently happens in modern art - as in literature - that the author wishes to say too much: exteriorization is pushed too far, as if nothing should remain within. This tendency appears in all modern arts, including poetry and music; here again, what is lacking is the instinct of sacrifice, sobriety, restraint; the creator completely empties himself, and in so doing, he invites others to empty themselves as well and thereby to lose all the essential, namely the taste for the secret and the sense of inwardness, whereas the work’s reason for being is contemplative and unitive interiorization. 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

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

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

The Hindu, or more particularly the Vishnuite miniature, is one of the most perfect extraliturgical arts there is, and we do not hesitate to say that some of its productions are at the summit of all painting. Descended from the sacred painting of which the Ajanta frescoes afford us a final trace, the Hindu miniature has undergone Persian influences, but it remains essentially Hindu and is in no wise syncretistic; [NA: Whether it be a case of art, doctrine or anything else, there is syncretism when there is an assemblage of disparate elements, but not when there is a unity which has assimilated elements of diverse provenance.] it has in any event achieved a nobility of draughtsmanship, of colouring, and of stylization in general, and over and above this, a climate of candour and holiness, which are unsurpassable and which, in the best of its examples, transport the viewer into an almost paradisiac atmosphere, a sort of earthly prolongation of heavenly childhood. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

As we have mentioned on other occasions, what must be blamed in artistic naturalism is not its exact observation of nature, but the fact that this observation is not compensated and disciplined by an equivalent awareness of that which transcends nature, and so of the essences of things, as happens for example in Egyptian art; in all sacred arts it is the style, which indicates a mode of inwardness, that corrects such outwardness, contingency and accidentality as the imitation of nature may involve; we would even say that an awareness of essences to a certain extent compromises or retards, if not a sufficient observation of outward things, at least their exact expression in graphic terms, although - and one must insist on this - there is no incompatibility in principle between exact draughtsmanship and contemplativity, the latter conferring on the former the imprint of inwardness and essentiality. Moreover, this combination is prefigured by the almost inward quality of normative forms, a quality that requires, precisely, an artistic treatment that is capable of giving it full expression in accordance with the laws of the fixative or crystallizing dimension that is figurative art. 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 religious naturism of the Redskins, envisaged here in connection with its exclusion of the plastic arts, results from a real and thus legitimate aspect of things, it could thus not fail to be affirmed in one or several parts of the globe; history proves that this perspective, while it obviously has nothing exclusive about it nevertheless has a solid basis; to understand this, it is enough to think of all the deviations of the "creative genius" and of all the evils from which the world of civilizationism suffers. 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

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

But let us return to the errors of naturalism. Art, as soon as it is no longer determined, illuminated and guided by spirituality, lies at the mercy of the individual and purely psychical resources of the artist, and these resources must soon run out, if only because of the very platitude of the naturalistic principle which calls only for a superficial tracing of Nature. Reaching the dead-point of its own platitude, naturalism inevitably engendered the monstrosities of ’surrealism’, The latter is but the decomposing body of an art, and in any case should rather be called ’infra-realism’; it is properly speaking the satanic consequence of naturalistic luciferianism. Naturalism, as a matter of fact, is clearly luciferian in its wish to imitate the creations of God, not to mention its affirmation of the psychical element to the detriment of the spiritual, of the individual to the detriment of the universal, of the bare fact to the detriment of the symbol. Normally, man must imitate the creative act, not the thing created; that is what is done by symbolic art, and the results are ’creations’ which are not would-be duplications of those of God, but rather a reflection of them according to a real analogy, revealing the transcendental aspects of things; and this revelation is the only sufficient reason of art, apart from any practical uses such and such objects may serve. There is here a metaphysical inversion of relation which we have already pointed out: for God, His creature is a reflection or an ’exteriorized’ aspect of Himself; for the artist, on the contrary, the work is a reflection of an inner reality of which he himself is only an outward aspect; God creates His own image, while man, so to speak, fashions his own essence, at least symbolically. On the principial plane, the inner manifests the outer, but on the manifested plane, the outer fashions the inner, and a sufficient reason for all traditional art, no matter of what kind, is the fact that in a certain sense the work is greater than the artist himself and brings back the latter, through the mystery of artistic creation, to the proximity of his own Divine Essence. [NA: This explains the danger, so far as Semitic peoples are concerned, that lies in the painting and especially in the carving of living things. Where the Hindu and the inhabitant of the Far East adores a Divine reality through a symbol - and we know that a symbol is truly what it symbolizes as far as its essential reality is concerned - the Semite will display a tendency to deify the symbol itself; one of the reasons for the prohibition of plastic and pictorial arts amongst the Semitic peoples was certainly a wish to prevent naturalistic deviations, a very real danger among men whose mentality demanded a Tradition religious in form.] sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

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

Architecture, painting and sculpture are objective and static. These arts above all express forms, and their universality lies in the objective symbolism of these forms. Poetry, music and dance are subjective and dynamic. These arts first and foremost express essences, and their universality lies in the subjective reality of these essences. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

Byzantine, Romanesque and primitive Gothic arts are theologies: they proclaim God, or rather ’realize’ Him on a certain level. 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