For many people today, remote as they are from a Christianity which seems to them just talk and moralizing, life attains a religious intensity only when they experience beauty: a song pulsating to the rhythm of the blood, struck up by an adolescent to his own guitar accompaniment; a mountain in winter, when the world is transformed by snow, and light seems to radiate gently from the earth; a face, seen in such close-up that it must belong to the television or the cinema … In that beautiful moment, the humdrumness of daily life is suspended; suspended also is the desire for the power and security that technology and science can give; all is given and all is immense, I possess no longer but I am possessed, the veil of my mind is torn in two, my whole being rejoices with intimations of the wholeness of paradise.
However, as we well know in moments of desperation, beauty has no power to save. Left to her own devices, the Beautiful Woman, the Mother of the ‘kingdom of Mothers’, is revealed as Melusine or a prostitute; in the Eastern tradition the biblical image of the prostitute constantly recurs, from St Isaac the Syrian to Gogol, symbolizing the nocturnal allurements of the fallen world. And life’s climax, the orgasmic beauty which is the aim of our civilization, is inextricably bound up with death. It is cut off from the good, and while the good, by itself, makes for mediocrity, beauty by itself makes for madness. Holderlin, Nietchze, Van Gogh, Antonin Artaud, all went mad after being plunged in a fire whose Name they did not know.
There have been many crises in the history of beauty, especially, if we confine ourselves to Europe, at the time when Hellenistic neoclassicism was evolving into the hieratic art of the 3rd century, soon to be enlightened by Christianity; or again during the long transition from mediaeval Christendom to modern humanism. Today, however, it is a matter not of a crisis, in a succession of crises, but of a crisis, in the full sense of ‘judgement’, a virtual apocalypse in history.
In this crisis, the clearest and most ‘critical’ tendency, is that of disintegrative experimentation which, having asserted itself in cubism and futurism, now dominates the various kinds of nonfigurative art. (While these movements have been mainly characteristic of painting, similar influences in the other arts could easily be identified). This tendency is reminiscent of a negative theology which cannot transcend negation, or a descent into hell with no resurrection to follow. Every now and then, a truly creative artist succeeds in using such an approach as a means to contemplation – Braques, Bazaine or Iunec, for example – but these are exceptions.
For the most part we dwell in a cosmic winter where flesh and beauty have decomposed. From appearances Cubism has extracted a geometric skeleton, but this skeleton has fallen into dust at the first obstacle. Test-drilling through the strata of the sensible world has revealed, distorted in the shadows, the ‘spirits of nature’, the ‘elements of this world’ conquered by Christ. Deeper still, materiality is reabsorbed in intelligible forms; this, the inner transparency of the cosmos, is nevertheless regarded by art (and science) as of the lowest order, even as nothingness, so it becomes what the Russian religious philosophers would call ‘disaffected wisdom’.
In the extreme case, matter is dematerialized. Bodily flesh, as we know it in the art of ancient Greece, and partly transfigured in mediaeval Christendom, seems to rot and fall to pieces. Boundaries are erased, solids liquefy and evaporate. Humanity blends with objects, one object with another, outlines are blurred. The limit between the me and the non-me disappears, often through the agency of machines and all the apparatus of the huge city, as if the ‘elements of this world’ were returning and stealthily taking possession of a technology which, although supposed to be neutral, cannot be exorcized or controlled by the spirit. So it is that in the mechanical frenzy of futurism; in the convulsive beauty of surrealism, the alchemy of the hallucinating metropolis; in American action painting of the 50s, which is simply the depiction of a trance … the human being is dissolved, losing at once its solidity and its stability; so that futurists and surrealists, even when they proclaim themselves to be materialists, are not so in the old sense of the word; human beings disappear, but, in their very ecstasy, matter disappears as well. ‘Man,’ said Marinetti, ‘is no longer of any interest… He must be replaced with matter whose essence we intuitively understand. We must replace the psychology of Man, which is worn out, with an ecstatic hallucination of matter.’
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
