The most striking general characteristic of contemporary art is its rejection of the face; even those who are aware that, after their descent into hell, there might be a resurrection, find the human face virtually impossible to portray; I think of the extraordinary Holy Faces of Manessier, those immense buds of the night which can never open out. There is a parallel in literature, where words are separated from the Word and whirl around like dry leaves in the same cosmic winter (to the delight of linguistic philosophers, who use these dry leaves to carpet the antechamber of being, but it is always the antechamber).
The great works of James Joyce and Andrei Biely at the beginning of the century perfectly illustrate this. Take for example Biely’s Petersburg, only recently, after half a century, translated into French. A room and the things in it, as in certain ‘happenings’, become for the hero the symbols of entirely inner events. His consciousness is detached from his body and joined to the electric lamp which is a light on the desk, and the lamp becomes ‘the sun of the consciousness’. Biely, an anthroposophist, understood the deep ambiguity of a reality that is not spiritual but, as he called it, ‘astral’, a mysterious trace of the ‘wisdom’ which was created to receive the divine Wisdom but which, having fallen into disuse in a materialist age and being no longer acknowledged, has now become a kind of magic. Coming just after the First World War, Dadaism did no more than draw attention to the disintegration of the language, alienated from the Word by middle-class usage, broken up by the unbridled nihilism of the world war and the devastation of Russia by civil war, terror and famine.
These ‘decrystallizing’ tendencies are only signs, in the realm of beauty, of a ‘decrystallization’ of everything, an apocalypse within history which overthrows the old certainties of life and thought. Machinery destroys the organic ways of life and, as we have said, harshly rips the person from the shelter and protection of the earth; science dissolves the universe in an ocean of abstractions, matter disintegrates, and the threat of the ‘bomb’ enters history like a cancer; the poor are convulsed by wretchedness and rich by nihilism – all are so many aspects of this apocalypse. The process of disintegration in art merely reflects what is happening generally. And not only reflects, but often foreshadows; for art has shown us in advance the world blown apart by the bomb; just as Picasso and Kafka had described in advance the world of the concentration camp.
What is now required of the Christian, it seems to me, is not an attempt to recover the ancient forms of beauty, but an even greater radicalism, a creative daring that leads beyond the limits of this world, not the lower limits but the higher. Apocalypse means ‘revelation’. The crisis of beauty, as we have just described it, may also be an attempt to penetrate beyond the fallen world, to achieve a different flesh, a spiritual bodiliness which transcends the laws of our external, mutually estranged condition; to attain, by means of this negative, and for so long disintegrative quest, to the revelation of the kingdom of pure beings around the deified human face.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
