Icons, Art

 

This ends up going a bit all over the place but I’ll just post it anyway.

I think across all cultures and traditions of the world, the deepest, purest art is within the icons of Christian Orthodoxy. Here is great beauty and also the deepest emotion, but even beyond emotion - which we could say is the human causal domain , an emotional response to such and such a stimulation - but here we are simultaneously within the uncaused realm of holiness which in turn is looking with love and sorrow into the human world. There is a great purity in for instance Chinese and Japanese landscape painting, also imbued a mystical spirit, but this is pretty much confined to the landscape, and doesn’t really go into the consciousness of the individual human life.

To throw in: here as with the above icon, the painting is beautiful but not with sensuality as the highest end. The spirit of course is higher, and to which the beauty bows down, as it were, By comparison with an artist like Klimt, the art doesn’t reach beyond the material, and instead sensuality and sentimentality are the highest end. As this extends in Klimt’s own art, and by natural extension in into the works of Egon Schiller, since the sensual world ends in death, however much it might like to exult in all the physical beauty, the art ends up beginning to sicken of itself and become more manifestly decadent and then openly neurotic and corrupt.

The great split or schism in Christianity of a thousand or so years ago, arose largely from the western doctrine of the Filioque, which denigrates the Holy Spirit, God’s active spirit in the world, and which without going into it is human vanity and false rationality interjecting itself into divine wisdom, and polluting the waters of human culture. With this denigration of the place of the Holy Spirit, Christianity under Rome loses that in dwelling of the spirit, and the faith becomes an abstract belief system. This rationalising spirit, moving further and further from the spirit, leads on to endless further schisms, such as with Protestantism, and naturally further onto the seeming self-evident truth of atheism - since the spirit has disappeared from view. The desire for higher truth then leaks into atheistic cults like socialism, where in the absence of the spirit, heaven is to be created by human reason on earth, 

Even the greatest Western artists, while possessed of great technical ability, as reflective of this process a moving away from the spirit and by apparently exalted compensation, descend into naturalism as the inevitable corollary to moving away from the supernatural, or being possessed inwardly by the spirit. In time they will also lose that naturalism also - as Jesus says, those that have not, as in the Spirit, even that which they have will be taken away - as reason rests on faith in the first place, faith in the given meaningfulness of language and its connection to life, then, losing that faith, even their reason will depart, and for instance we will end up with men competing in women’s sports! And they will think that is a sign of their sophistication! This process can even be mirrored in Western art where after losing the spirit, “gaining” matter, such as Renaissance art’s obsession with perspective, then in time, wedded to a false rationality that eventually destroys itself, art goes into the sterile dead end of total abstraction.