Every culture has its spiritual origin in a cult, from which little by little it becomes detached, until it is entirely cut off and self-contained, even perhaps the preserve of an elite. This ‘decadent’ phase of its history is often the time of its highest refinement, subtlety and consciousness. Wholeness and spontaneity give place to a nuanced awareness, a degree of scepticism, a tolerance of diversity, a dislike of sharp distinctions, a readiness to see shades of grey, rather than black and white.
This is especially true of modern Western culture, whose extension throughout the world has been both its fulfilment and its abolition, so that it now lacks any content beyond the simple urge to tryout and accept new things, while engaging in perpetual self-questioning. In its decadent phase (using the term with no pejorative intent) a culture becomes accessible in a way that simultaneously enfeebles and enriches it. This is its universal stage, when it spreads beyond its traditional organic community.
This accessibility and openness are accompanied by a certain predilection for the unknown, what Spengler called ‘secondary religiosity’. Thus the decaying culture of the ancient world was like a vessel prepared to receive the Christian revelation. The sense of mystery that in Roman times was kept alive by the oriental cults, the contemplative approach of the Neoplatonists, and the Stoics’ faith in universal providence, all prepared the way for the great Patristic syntheses.
The alternation between expressive, naturalistic portraiture and the search for a hieratic style prepared the way for the icon. It was then that barbarism came on the scene, reminding us of the darkness of our origins; the black hull’s throat is cut for the blood-baptism of Mithras, and the barbarians arrive from the forests and the steppes … However, barbarian energy alone would not have been enough to revive the anaemic beauty of the ancient world, even supposing the old moribund culture had the strength to absorb it. Another dimension altogether was necessary, that of Christianity, which, from the point of view of the ancient scholar delicately sculpting his own statue, was barbaric, but barbaric only in terms of the Spirit, not according to the earth and the blood.
So Christendom came into being, bringing imperishable beauty in its wake. Just before it appeared, and set about directing and restricting freedom, there existed liberal thinkers in whom the positive qualities of barbarism and ‘decadence’ – the qualities as it might be of Origen and Plotinus – were combined; the single-minded strength of the one and the sharply critical awareness and fondness for debate of the other. This combination, always under tension, threatening even to break apart, accounts for the originality of Byzantium at the heart of the Christian world.
The situation today is not unlike that of the Roman Empire in its later years, but on a world-wide scale. High culture has become the privilege of an elite. Acquiring it is a complicated process, entailing initiation into spiritual realms often remote in space or time or simply in sensibility. The beauty presented by this high culture is not to be immediately appreciated; we have to be culturally conditioned. We can certainly leaf through the ‘virtual gallery’, and the mass media give us every help, but it is a spectator sport, not a creative sharing in the very mystery of existence through a direct experience of beauty. The structuralists, adamant that each culture is an ‘ensemble’, complete in itself and discontinuous with others, pour scorn on vain attempts at historical study. And now the highest culture is destroying itself, and the death of God is bringing about that of humanity.
But for Christians the divine human Event of Christmas and Easter has put a decisive end to all these discontinuities, permitting the establishment, through history and beyond, of a brotherhood of the living. Through our experience of paperbacks, of sound recordings, of artistic reproduction and contemporary theatre (when it eschews the contemptuousness considered essential to the revolutionary spirit) we know that a communion does persist, albeit with some discontinuous features, and that it might be lastingly revived, provided that the dying and risen Christ, ‘that centre where the lines converge’, is not hidden for too long. Malraux was not entirely wrong to call arts centres the cathedrals of our age. But what future has a cathedral without an altar? The question, although it concerns the preservation and revival of Christian culture wherever it exists, does not seek to be answered in ecclesiastical terms. All we need is the presence of Christians who are creators of beauty; their hearts will be the altar.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
