Alongside this ‘critical’ process, and in reaction to it, for more than a century there have been attempts to make a synthesis of beauty. For the 19th century we need only recall the operas of Wagner. As this century opened, symbolism was codified according to philosophical systems. In every country of Europe, but especially in Germany and Russia, many of the intelligentsia felt regret for an organic age, when the highest values were mediated to society by way of an art that was all of a piece with life, that kept it in touch with its divine roots. In the ‘Russian renaissance’, at the beginning of the century, people dreamed of a ‘theurgic’ art, by which life would be changed and divinized. Scriabin wished to write and set to music a ‘mystery’, in the mediaeval sense, in which all human arts and values were to be united, a mystery so powerful as to bring about in its final chords a real transfiguration of the world!
But how to find a unity in which the disintegration could be reversed and turned into the dynamism of the resurrection? The disintegrating tendency was always stronger than the power to unify; whence the attempt to impose unity by force, against experiment, even against freedom if necessary.
The ‘critical’ process appears to be strictly bound up with the individualism of Western society, with its social atomization, with the controlling importance of money in a free economy; indeed, money hastens the rise of instinct in art, because the instincts – especially of sex and death – are good for sales. The blind expansion of technology has finished off the disintegrating effect on social life of two world wars, so that ours is a ‘secular society’ where all we have in common is vulgarity – and no doubt an immense and crude longing for communion…
On the other hand, the search for wholeness, at the price of liberty if necessary, has often resulted in totalitarianism. We can see the line of descent, caricatured but real, from Wagner to Hitler. The poets of the ‘Russian renaissance’, longing for an art that belonged to the community, welcomed the events of 1917. They were soon enough reduced to silence, but ‘social realism’ and ‘social control’ have tried to realize, by enforcement and conformity, the urgent vision of the great Russian artists of the 19th century, who rejected art for art’s sake, and regarded culture as an object of luxury; who wished to make beauty into bread for the people, by which all might be nourished. The same urgency impelled the surrealists and so many Western artists and writers in the 30s and 40s to espouse communism or join a Popular Front.
Today, in Western societies, the need for synthesis is becoming clear in three main areas: functional, occult and ‘neo-revolutionary’.
Synthesis of functions is the attempt to plan the city aesthetically, in the growing certainty that human beings do not live by bread alone, but also by beauty. The attempt is typified by the researches of Wright in the United States, Barragan in Mexico and Vasarely in France, among many others. Here, nothing is ruled out, whether it is an immanence which plays with the possibilities of technology (as with Vasarely’s use of computers) or a sounding of the depths of existence, which makes room for the numinous without giving it a name; for example, Luis Barragan’s observation that ‘all architecture which does not express serenity does not fulfil its spiritual mission’ acknowledges, without being specific, the needs of a total humanity. Moreover, nothing is profane; architecture – the humanization of space – when it aims at beauty, spontaneously returns to ancient symbols. For example, the plan of the Maison de la Radio, in Paris, would be familiar to Indians as their diagram of the axis of the world.
The rise of the occult, of syncretism, has left its mark on Bejart’s ‘mass for our times’, which borrows themes from Eastern paganism and the Dionysianism of Nietzsche; and on American psychedelic art; and the strange liturgies of the Living Theatre, inspired by oriental methods of ‘enstasy’, mystical eroticism and drugs. These are but a few of the attempts to lure the cold and lonely Westerner towards impersonal fusion.
Finally, student ‘neo-revolutionary’ movements are most interesting when their object is the transfiguration of life. They offer a critique of a ‘spectator society’, where everything, beginning with culture, becomes the object of passive consumption, but where nothing is creatively experienced. The movements have transformed much of Western society, especially in America, arousing a taste for the ‘East’, and a need, already put into practice, for a life that is more communal, more spontaneous, more open to beauty and to idleness, if not to actual contemplation; as if the post-industrial West ought henceforth to adopt some of the attitudes of ancient civilization … However, as long as it is led by people who lack spiritual knowledge, or merely pretend to have it, this movement will remain largely cut off from the sources of tasting creativity.
If we look at it carefully, we can see that this ‘critical’ process, this quest of the body for glory, the search for synthesis, is an unconscious image of the Church, which alone, in its liturgy, can express a truly total, ‘theurgic’ art.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
