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Contents of Part 1
1. Introduction
2. The Spiritual: some definitions
3. A Brief History of the Spiritual
in Art and Science
3.1. From the Ancient Greeks
to Plotinus
3.2. The Renaissance
3.3. The Enlightenment
3.4. The Divorce of Science
and Religion
3.5. Blavatsky, Steiner, Gurdjieff
References for part 1
1. Introduction
What are you doing young man?
Are you so earnest, so given up to literature, science, art, amours?
These ostensible realities, politics, points?
Your ambition or business whatever it may be?
It is well against such I say not a word, I am their poet also,
But behold! such swiftly subside, burnt up for religion's sake,
For not all matter is fuel to heat, impalpable flame, the essential life
of the earth,
Any more than such are to religion.
Walt Whitman, 1852
Science: Doubting. Religion: Knowledge. Art: Self-delusion Ozenfant,
1952
... twentieth-century art conceived ideals that in their religious
dimension would have been recognizable to Meister Eckhart and in their
workshop dimension to Leonardo. Roger Lipsey, 1988
The title of this paper comes from Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual
in Art, and by expanding it to include science one is clearly attempting
to cover a rather large area of human endeavour; clearly not much more than
a map of the territory is possible. To narrow this down only two of the
possible three relationships between art, science and the spiritual will
be investigated: that between the spiritual and art and that between the
spiritual and science (the interaction between the arts and sciences is
well-documented elsewhere, for example in Leonardo). Furthermore,
the focus will be on investigating the intuition, which has grown out of
personal observation in recent years, that science is at this juncture more
receptive to the spiritual than the arts. This may be a complete misreading
of the arts of course, but the purpose of this paper is to explore the question
and open it up to debate. Note that the 'arts' covered in this paper will
be mainly the visual fine arts of painting and sculpture. An additional
motivation for investigating the three disciplines together is a growing
intuition that science, or to be more precise, scientists, desperately need
the artistic or poetic vision in order to engage with the spiritual. Too
often (as shown below) the scientist assumes that religion is about asking
questions about the fundamental nature of existence: this is one
possible response to existence, but the artist makes another type of response
an emotional one, which may have a closer affinity to the spiritual impulse.
As a focus for the discussion I will refer to two
television programmes shown in the UK in the Autumn of 1995, one called
'Hidden Hands' which attempted in its first part to demonstrate the influence
of the occult on modern painters such as Kandinsky and Mondrian, and the
second a programme in the Equinox series called 'God Only Knows' covering
the recent phenomenon of scientists seeing the proof of God in their science.
The material on which these programmes were based is widely available and
will be referred to in this paper, so a viewing of the programmes is not
necessary to follow the arguments here. What was interesting in the contrast
between the two programmes was the dismissal of the spiritual influences
on Kandinsky and Mondrian as 'hocus-pocus', and the respectful attention
generally given to scientists talking about the spiritual implications of
quantum theory (for example). Waldemar Januszczak (commissioning editor
for the arts, Channel Four) states quite baldly in the 'Hidden Hands' booklet:
" ..., Mondrian and Kandinsky were driven by murky, confused, pseudo-medieval
hocus-pocus." [1] Much of Part 1 of the series was devoted to this thesis,
while in contrast the 'God Only Knows' booklet kicks off with a Stephen
Hawking's assertion that a 'complete' theory of science would bring us to
truly know the 'mind of God' [2].
The recent spate of speculative writings by scientists led the Guardian
newspaper to complain that "Atheists, at least, used to find comfort
in the sceptical words of the boffins. But now even the most rigorous of
scientists are showing signs of conversion to the idea of a deity."
[3]
This may be an overstating of the position Peter Holland, a professor in
the foundations of physics, attacks the 'new-ageist' view of physics as
not just metaphysics but mysticism leading to obfuscation: "Science
still represents a noble tradition of anti-clerical subversion but society
infects all its products. What a historical irony that the arch-rationalists
end up bearing a new-ageist banner" [4].
Although this paper will not dwell on the relationship between art and science,
it will be a reasonable proposition to any Leonardo reader that there
can be a fruitful relationship between these two, and that historically
Leonardo da Vinci epitomises it. There is not space here to argue this in
more depth other than to offer the view that art and science complement
each other, and that they propose few mutually antagonistic areas of thought,
unlike the boundaries between art and the spiritual, and science and the
spiritual. It is partly these potential antagonisms that this paper will
focus on, and also the way in which these potential antagonisms can be reconciled
through either compartmentalisation or integration.
It is implicit in the title of this paper, and in the Whitman quote above,
that the spiritual is somehow antecedent to both the arts and sciences.
This assumption guides much of the discussion here, but will be returned
to later to see how reasonable such an assumption is.
This paper starts with a few definitions of the 'spiritual', and is followed
by three main sections: firstly a brief history of the spiritual in art
and science, secondly a survey of the spiritual in 20th century art, and
thirdly by a survey of the spiritual in 20th century science. These sections,
because of their breadth, can only touch on some of the key elements, but
it is hoped that in the conclusions some detailed considerations can be
drawn out.
2. The Spiritual: some
definitions
The 'spiritual' is one of the trickiest areas of human understanding to
taxonomise, or in any way in which to make definitions that can be universally
understood, or that mean broadly the same thing across different communities.
It is even harder when trying to find reliable terms that might be meaningful
to both artists and scientists, but without an attempt we will make no progress.
(One reason for the difficulty is that it is reasonably clear what it is
to be well-educated in the sciences or the arts; a trained artist can pick
up science with reasonable effort and vice versa but it is more difficult
to understand what it is to be well-educated in the spiritual.) Hence I
shall use a simple categorisation which I hope will be useful: a distinction
between the religious, the occult and the transcendent.
For the purposes of this paper then, the 'spiritual' will be a broad term
that covers these three distinct areas; in turn the 'religious' is intended
to convey traditional and organised religious spirituality such as Christian,
Islamic, Buddhist; the 'occult' an esoteric preoccupation with such matters
as the paranormal, reincarnation, clairvoyance and disembodied beings; and
finally the 'transcendent 'as dealing with a shift in personal identity
from the physical and temporal to the infinite and eternal, or with mystical
union, or with nirvana.
Clearly the boundaries between the religious, the occult, and the transcendent
(as used here) are blurred, and also value-laden in different ways for different
communities. They are also crude in that within them one needs much finer
distinctions, for example between the religiousness of Christianity or Hinduism,
the occultisms of William Blake or Rudolf Steiner, and the transcendences
within Buddhism or the work of Krishnamurti, to give just a few examples.
For now it is hoped that these terms (which will be used in the rest of
this paper in this specific way) will give us a basic tool with which to
begin probing the spiritual in art and science.
3. A Brief History of the
Spiritual in Art and Science
3.1. From the Ancient
Greeks to Plotinus
Science itself was not born with the Greeks (much of their 'science' was
just plain wrong); its origins came with the Renaissance, but some of the
ground for it was laid in the mathematics and logic of Greek thinkers. We
might say that the science (such as it was), art, and religion were closely
integrated in the lives of the Greek thinkers and that their outlook on
life was very different to ours today. In Plato we find a considered view
of how spirituality should inform the arts, and the Platonic and Neoplatonic
tradition became a very important current, via Plotinus and St. Augustine,
in spiritual thinking in Europe up to and beyond the Renaissance, influencing
the arts along the way.
In respect to our taxonomy of the spiritual, the mainstream religion of
the ancient Greeks was polytheistic and animistic; some, such as Pythagoras,
may be said to have interests in the occult, and Socrates clearly represents
the transcendent. Plato's influence on Western thought is considerable,
but a discussion of his ideas and spirituality is confused by the difficulty
of disentangling his thought with that of Socrates. In the Republic
we find a a rationality so extreme as to be absurd, but apparently in the
service of an irrational morality. The so-called logical nature of the discourses
are manipulative yet obviously driven by a deep spirituality that cannot
have its origins in rationality. The spirituality can be characterised as
chiefly moral, though elsewhere in Plato's work the transcendent takes precedence.
The Republic is important because of its severe criticism of the
arts: using the example of a bed, Socrates argues that its principle reality,
its 'Form', appears to us second-hand through the skill of the carpenter
and third-hand through the skill of the painter [5].
He extends this idea to all the arts, particularly
poetry, that representation is third-hand; furthermore, because of its seductive
nature and the tendency to represent 'bad' things, peoples, or actions,
the arts are a degenerative influence. In Plato's ideal state only those
artists would be permitted who depicted beautiful things in a beautiful
way. To modern thinking this is tending to the fascist, and we find 20th
century equivalents in the Stalinist control of the arts in Russia and elsewhere.
We have then a clear call from antiquity, echoing through religious art
up to the Enlightenment and beyond, that art should be subordinate to the
spiritual. Plato's assumption, that the artist necessarily is even clumsier
than the carpenter at reaching the form or essence of 'bed' needs to be
challenged however: one only has to think of Van Gogh's version for example.
For many with the appropriate sensitivities the paintings of his simple
room with its bed and chair seem to grasp the very essence, divine essence,
of the ordinary.
The ancient Greeks were not of course all as frigid about the arts as Plato,
as the exuberant remains show. A useful connection between the spiritual
and the artistic that emerged from the period lies in the word 'sublime',
debated in the short treatise On The Sublime, attributed to Longinus
(now known to be from an unknown author of the first century AD). Where
Plato is the puritan (and distant forerunner of Tolstoy and Gandhi), Longinus
represents the sophisticated analyst of the arts (though chiefly of literature).
He cites five sources of the sublime, and then adds that by reading Plato
one can add a sixth: the emulation of the great artists of the past. Plato
says the exact opposite of course.
With Plotinus we begin to make a better connection between the spiritual
and art through the sublime. His essay on Beauty is at the same time more
spiritual than Plato, and also more sensitive to the poetry of beauty: it
is not made subservient to spiritual goals in a rigidly-controlled ideal
state. Plotinus' source of authority is generally considered to be Plato,
but a closer examination shows a wholly independent thinker whose authority
is based on personal contemplation. For Plotinus, the beauty of any object
or abstraction has its source in some Principle. This Principle is inherent
in a person's soul and when in the presence of beauty responds as if through
a form of recognition:
Our interpretation is that the Soul by the
very truth of its nature, by its affiliation to the noblest Existents in
the hierarchy of Being when it sees anything of that kin, or any trace
of that kinship, thrills with an immediate delight, takes its own to itself,
and thus stirs anew to the sense of its nature and of all its affinity
[6].
For sure, one can see a resonance with Plato's
Forms, and Plotinus even uses the term Ideal-Form, but Plotinus's language
and source is his own. However, like Plato, he does not encourage the visual
arts per se: it is in the Renaissance that Plotinus's ideas of Beauty became
a source of artistic inspiration.
3.2. The Renaissance
The Italian Renaissance can be seen as a period of looking back to the ancient
Greeks; a revival of Platonism to equal or compete with Aristotelian thinking;
and the birth of the empirical method which gave the impetus to science
and humanism, leading to their later triumph in the Enlightenment. The universal
religious vehicle in Europe at this time was of course Christianity, and
biblical themes provided most of the serious subject-matter for the great
artists of the period. Raphael and Michelangelo are probably typical of
the historically-influenced artists in this period, whereas Leonardo da
Vinci represents the point of departure towards science and humanism.
Michelangelo (1475 - 1574) is considered the artist of this period to most
closely aspire to the ideals of Neoplatonism. One of his most ambitious
projects, the tomb of Pope Julius II "would have provided a magnificent
exposition of Christian Neoplatonism if its original plan had been carried
out." [7] It
was intended to symbolise the spiritual ascent of man: "Man's animal
nature enmired in the appetites was to be dramatically symbolized by a group
of fettered slaves, while statues of victory represented the soul liberated
from bondage." [8] Michelangelo was deeply influenced by the founder
of the Florentine 'Academy', Marcilio Ficino, and the Neoplatonist endeavour
of the school. Ficino translated Plato and Plotinus, and the school also
attempted to assimilate influences such as Pythagoras and the Zoroastrian
tradition. In terms of our spiritual taxonomy the overall engagement of
the school was with the transcendent, and became almost a cult. As far as
we know Michelangelo's spirituality was more conventional, and showed itself
in the Christian religious themes of his work and in the sublime quality
of his work.
In Leonardo's notebooks we find the first real man of Western science: a
man willing to look for himself, rather than to believe what others
say. The fact that he combined this embryonic science with an extraordinary
skill as artist made him the archetypal humanist and Renaissance man to
modern culture. Leonardo (1452 - 1519) was quite explicit that experience
should be the ultimate authority, and not the ancients, as this passage
from his notebooks shows:
Though I have no power to quote from authors
as they have, I shall rely on a far bigger and more worthy thingon experience,
the instructress of their masters. They strut about puffed up and pompous,
decked out and adorned not with their own labours, but by those of others,
and they will not even allow me my own. And if they despise me who am an
inventor, how much more should they be blamed who are not inventors but
trumpeteers and reciters of the works of others [9].
Leonardo had much to say on this subject, and is to be credited with being
the first European to explicitly point to what was wrong with the physics
of Aristotle and the Greeks: they did not trust or develop the skills of
experience. Neither was Leonardo a Neoplatonist, and although he believed
in a soul as distinct from the body, his general view seems materialistic
and a little pessimistic. His paintings included many conventionally religious
themes, and contain a sublimity, that to a modern eye, far outstrips the
paintings of Michelangelo. The haunting beauty of the Mona Lisa has been
recently attributed to the likelihood of it being in part a self-portrait;
looking at Leonardo's writings I would suggest also that it is the moral
element in Leonardo that we are seeing in this painting. His religiousness,
conventional in most senses, and not in our terms either occult or transcendent,
found easy expression in the moral, perhaps partly due to the struggles
he personally had as an outsider, illegitimate and homosexual.
Galileo (1564-1642) took the cue from Leonardo to look for himself
literally: he had heard of the invention of the telescope and made one for
himself. His patient observations confirmed the theories of Copernicus and
Kepler, that the earth moved around the sun and not the other way round,
and also revealed new heavenly bodies, bringing the total to eleven. This
number not only contradicted the traditional seven, but had no mystical
significance. Bertrand Russell writes: "On this ground the traditionalists
denounced the telescope, refused to look through it, and maintained that
it revealed only delusions." [10]
Although Galileo mocked (along with most modern educated Westerners) those
who refuse to believe the evidence derived from the careful but ever-verifiable
and repeatable use of scientific instruments, the human instinct for the
simplicity and comfort of received wisdom can also be found in the great
scientists. Kepler for example was discomfited by the elliptical nature
of the planetary orbits whose mathematics he had derived, Newton by the
implications of gravity that the universe would eventually collapse on itself,
and Einstein by the indeterminism in quantum theory. The relevance of this
observation is that the adoption of a scientific outlook can never fully
counter the human instinct for belief, and this is a useful corrective to
those who dismiss the spiritual on the grounds that it is based only in
belief.
3.3. The Enlightenment
Newton (1642-1727) completed in the seventeenth and eighteenth century the
scientific triumph that Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler had initiated. While
Newton was a conventionally religious man, and also believed in astrology,
it was probably his scientific work more than anything else that allowed
for the later scientific rationale for atheism. His work with alchemy does
not suggest an interest in the occult that it might imply today: the chemistry
of his age did not give any reason why base metals should not be transmutable
into gold, and in the absence of a theory of the periodic table there was
no reason not to carry out systematic laboratory work based on the earlier
theories of the four elements. Newton's basic Christian beliefs existed
quite separately from his genius as a scientist, and his insular and unforgiving
nature does not reveal a particularly sympathetic man. In Newton we have
the modern archetypal scientist of genius: Einstein fits this pattern well,
down to a common underperformance at school and college, and a neglect of
family and friends.
In the work of the philosopher John Locke we can see a conceptual framework
emerging which was better suited to the emerging science of the period than
older modes of thought, and which epitomises the Enlightenment. According
to Bertrand Russell: "Locke may be regarded as the founder of empiricism,
which is the doctrine that all our knowledge (with the possible exception
of logic and mathematics) is derived from experience." [11] Locke (1632
- 1704) therefore argues against Plato's forms or the idea that there
is an essence or innate idea or principle that precedes and is superior
to reality. The emphasis on experience is part of modern science, and Locke's
endorsement of empiricism cemented the scientific world-view of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.
3.4. The Divorce of Science
and Religion
The contemporary idea, only just being eroded at the edges, that science
and religion stand in opposition has a strange history. In the context of
our distinction between the religious, the occult, and the transcendent,
we may observe that it is the traditionally religious that has been most
visibly at odds with the scientific. The reaction of the religious establishment
of Galileo's time epitomises the supposed gulf between science and religion,
but we would find it hard to imagine Christ, the 'founder' of this establishment,
finding any fault with poor Galileo's telescope. Why? Because Christ's project
lay elsewhere. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, leave the telescopes
unto the scientists: it is not hard to accept this interpolation. But
human beings are multi-dimensional, and never more so than in our current
highly-educated post-modern era. We are interested therefore in how an individual
or community with artistic or scientific preoccupations (or both) deals
with the spiritual: divorce is not an option, but compartmentalisation or
synthesis are options. The popular view of a gulf between science and religion
may be termed part of 'scientism': a view of science from the outside.
3.5. Blavatsky, Steiner,
Gurdjieff
The waning of Christian influence in the arts and in society in general
towards the end of the 19th and into the 20th century left a spiritual vacuum.
Romanticism in its various forms filled the gap to some extent, while the
occult gained ground in the last part of the 19th and first part of the
20th century, notably with the Theosophists and Anthroposophists. However
it is probably true to say that the occult, even the occult 'science' of
Steiner, do not sit as easily with a scientific world-view as does the transcendent.
Theosophy was a 19th century spiritual movement that spilled into the 20th
century and influenced many modern artists. It also produced an offshoot
called Anthroposophy, led by Rudolf Steiner, who was originally a Theosophist.
Theosophy (dismissed by Waldemar Januszczak as we have seen as 'pseudo-medieval
hocus-pocus') was in fact the first organised response by the West to a
growing awareness of Eastern religious thought, and an attempt to make a
synthesis between the spiritual of the East and West. It was founded by
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, and attracted Annie Besant
and C.W. Leadbeater amongst others; it eventually proclaimed its mission
to prepare the way for the second coming (the Buddha Maitreya). This conflation
of Christ's and Buddha's reappearance united followers from all over the
world to prepare the way for him, but when Leadbeater and Besant claimed
the young Jiddu Krishnamurti for this role it became too much for some Western
thinkers, including Rudolf Steiner, and led to his departure. As Krishnamurti
grew into the role prepared for him by the Theosophists he gradually became
uneasy with it and eventually rejected it in a dramatic gesture; strangely
he then went on to teach to a world audience in a way entirely reminiscent
of Jesus or the Buddha. Where he really departed from the Theosophists was
in his rejection of all tradition; they attempted a huge synthesis
of it, while he, like Leonardo, spoke of the Truth as arising from one's
own being or experience.
One of the prime documents of Theosophy's grand synthesis was Blavatsky's
Secret Doctrine, unfairly dismissed by the 'Hidden Hands' team as
'monumentally opaque'. It was however an important influence on early twentieth
century artists like Mondrian and Kandinsky, as was Besant and Leadbeater's
Thought Forms. Both books are squarely within the occult, though
both the religious (especially in the moral sense) and the transcendent
are present. Thought Forms had a special impact on the painters in
the early years of the twentieth century in that it contained many colour
plates representing the auric manifestations of emotion. (Auras are supposedly
seen by clairvoyants around the body of individuals, and reveal their thoughts
and feelings through colour and abstract shapes.) Thought Forms is
of historical interest in showing many assumptions of the period: in particular
that science would soon have to acknowledge the 'invisible world' of the
astral plane. This was based on specialist forms of photography, the best-known
surviving one being Kirlian photography. In fact modern science is generally
hostile to the aspirations of the Theosophists because of its occult overtones;
it is, as we shall see, more sympathetic to the transcendent, and more recently
to the conventionally religious (or so it seems on the surface).
According to our simple taxonomy of the spiritual, Rudolf Steiner's work
belongs chiefly to the occult, though as his work is also deeply Christian
(often characterised in fact as an occult Christianity) it overlaps with
the religious. It is not however transcendent in the sense that the word
is used in this paper. Steiner's work is probably the occult at its best,
and as such represents a system of knowledge and self-development of great
value. It has had an enormous underground influence on the Europe of the
first part of the 20th century, and even now leaves its mark on education,
the arts, and industry (Weleda pharmaceutical products come from a Steiner
company, in a similar way that Clarke's shoes came out of the Quaker movement).
Rudolf Steiner was born in 1861 in Hungary, near the Austrian border. He
was exceptional at school, and studied biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics
at the Vienna polytechnic. One of his first major employers was the Goethe-and-Schiller
archive in Weimar, where he edited Goethe's scientific works. His science
background was overshadowed by his life-long occult gifts that seemingly
enabled him to enter another world of disembodied spirits and thereby gain
access to forms of knowledge other than the conventionally scientific. He
regarded his teachings, which came to be known as Anthroposophy (after his
split with the Theosophists) as scientific, but his thesis that it would
eventually be proven as such was unfounded. His neglect by modern thinkers
is a loss, but is probably due to the emergence of psychoanalytical and
behaviourist modes of inquiry which fit more comfortably with the mainstream
of intellectual life in the 20th century. His teachings on the arts are
summarised in several Anthroposophical publications, chiefly The Arts
and their Mission. This book contains a summary of his teachings, with
the usual cheerful assumptions that they will one day become mainstream:
One result of anthroposophical spiritual science
once it has been absorbed into civilisation will be the fructification
of the arts. Precisely in our time the human inclination toward the artistic
has diminished to a marked degree. Even in anthroposophical circles not
everyone thoroughly comprehends the fact that Anthroposophy strives to
foster, in every possible way, the artistic element.
This is of course connected with modern man's
aforementioned aversion to the artistic. Today the positive way in which
Goethe and many of his contemporaries sensed the unity of spiritual life
and art is no longer experienced. Gradually the conception has arisen that
art is something which does not necessarily belong to life, but is added
to it as a kind of luxury. With such assumptions prevailing, the upshot
is not to be wondered at.
In times when an ancient clairvoyance made
for a living connection with the spiritual world, the artistic was considered
absolutely vital to civilisation. We may feel antipathy for the frequently
pompous, stiff character of Oriental and African art forms; but that is
not the point at issue. In this and further lectures we shall be concerned,
not with our reaction to any particular art form, but rather with the way
in which man's attitude places all the arts within the framework of civilisation.
The necessity is to see a certain connection between today's spiritual
life and the attitude toward art previously alluded to [12].
This passage contains many of Steiner's preoccupations,
perhaps the most important being a reference to an ancient time when clairvoyance
was the norm. Steiner believed that humans were all originally spiritual
beings, but in the 'fall' we came to inhabit a more and more materialistic
world, culminating in the present one. However, he saw all living things
as 'sleeping' spirits, and to some extent this extended to the mineral and
planetary worlds as well. In connection with the arts he goes on to say
that architecture derived primarily from the building of mausoleums for
the benefit of the dead, while the art of clothing belonged to the opposite
pole, that of birth. Sculpture was the key art-form related to the present
life, as well as painting. However he regarded modern painting degenerate
for various reasons:
Today, in the fifth post-Atlantean age, painting
has assumed a character leading to naturalism. Its prime manifestation
is the loss of a deeper understanding of colour. The intelligence employed
in contemporary painting is a falsified sculptural one. ... Painters express
through lines the fact that something lies in the background, something
in the foreground; their purpose being to conjure up on canvas an impression
of spatially formed objects ... A true painter does not create in space,
but on the plane, in color, and it is nonsense for him to strive for the
spatial [13].
Steiner goes on to explain that the spiritual world is in fact two-dimensional
and when we come to inhabit it we are freed from the 'tyranny 'of three
dimensions. The painter should therefore strive to use two dimensions, and
also to use colour which is the true third dimension: hence the artist should
move from space-perspective to colour-perspective. These ideas perhaps only
illustrate the effort needed to get to grips with Steiner's ideas; they
are clearly radical, even preposterous at first glance, but there is also
clearly a fine intelligence at work. There is also an end-result that can
be examined: 'Steiner art'. Anthroposophically-inspired painters produce
work that may not be main-stream but is very interesting, and seems to exert
an undercurrent of artistic influence, particularly in continental Europe.
About the time that Steiner died a teacher called G.I.Gurdjieff (1877 -
1949) came into prominence as a spiritual leader in the 1930s in Paris.
While both men had a kind of esoteric Christianity as part of their teachings
they had radically different projects. Although Steiner dealt with an esoterism
that still provokes well-educated commentators to use terms like 'hocus-pocus',
he was as earnest and straightforward in his affairs as a parish priest.
Gurdjieff, in contrast, delighted in confounding his audience with red-herrings
and obfuscation, reserving his real teachings for private gatherings and
intimate moments. It is hard therefore to justify a conclusion born of many
years study of Gurdjieff's work, that it dealt primarily with the transcendent,
but there is not space here to defend it in detail. The ritual aspects
and occult cosmology of his work, combined with the popular suspicion of
charlatanry (which he liked to promote) obscure this essence of his teaching.
It is his attitude to the arts that is important here, and the following
passage from a question and answer session give us some insight into it:
Question:
What place do art and creative work occupy in your teaching?
Answer: Present-day
art is not necessarily creative. But for us art is not an aim but a means.
Ancient art has a certain inner content. In
the past, art served the same purpose as is served today by booksthe purpose
of preserving and transmitting certain knowledge. In ancient times they
did not write books but expressed knowledge in works of art. We shall find
many ideas in the ancient art which has reached us, if we know how to read
it. Every art was like that then, including music. And people of ancient
times looked on art in this way.
You saw our movement and dances. But all you
saw was the outer formbeauty, technique. But I do not like the external
side you see. For me, art is a means for harmonious development. In everything
we do the underlying idea is to do what cannot be done automatically and
without thought.
Ordinary gymnastics and dances are mechanical.
If our aim is a harmonious development of man, then for us, dances and
movements are a means of combining the mind and the feeling with movements
of the body and manifesting them together. In all things, we have the aim
to develop something which cannot be developed directly or mechanicallywhich
interprets the whole man: mind, body and feeling.
The second purpose of dances is study. Certain
movements carry a proof with them, a definite knowledge, of religious and
philosophical ideas [14].
Gurdjieff was interested in promoting a harmonious
development of man, through the training and integration of the three
centres: thinking, feeling and body. In his own terminology we are 'three-brained
beings' but unable to develop because of the imbalanced predominance of
one centre or atrophy of another. His teachings have been called the 'Fourth
Way' because he believed that the way of the yogi, monk, or fakir (corresponding
to thinking, feeling, and body) were, in isolation, incomplete, and that
a synthesis of these paths into a fourth path was necessary. Transcendence
could only be achieved when all three 'brains' worked together.
Like for Steiner and Plato, art for Gurdjieff was subordinate to the spiritual,
as we see in the above passage. Gurdjieff was more interested in music,
dance and drama than the visual arts, but it is of interest to note that
his 'movements' had a parallel with Steiner's Eurythmy: one can only speculate
that both felt that modern man needed to be better anchored in his body.
References for Part
1
[1]
Saunder, Frances Stonor, Hidden Hands, London:
Channel 4 Television, p.3
[2] Snyder,
Paula (Ed.) God Only Knows, London: Channel 4 Television, p. 3
[3] Peter
Lennon, "Science's new God Sqad", The Guardian, May 3rd
1995.
[4] Peter
Holland "Conjurors of Conjecture" The Times Higher Educational
Supplement, May 12th 1995
[5] Plato,
The Republic, p.
[6] Plotinus,
The Enneads, (Trans. Stephen MacKenna), London: Penguin Books, 1991,
p. 47
[7] Ralp,
Philip Lee, The Renaissance in Perspective London: G. Bell, 1973,
p. 175
[8] Ralp,
Philip Lee, The Renaissance in Perspective London: G. Bell, 1973,p.
176
[9] Da
Vince, Leonardo, Notebooks, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991,
p. 2
[10] Russell,
Bertrand, A History of Western Philosophy, London, Sidney, Wellington:
Unwin Paperbacks, 1989, p. 520
[11] Russell,
Bertrand, A History of Western Philosophy, London, Sidney, Wellington:
Unwin Paperbacks, 1989, p. 589
[12] Steiner,
Rudolf The Arts and Their Mission, New York: The Anthroposophic Press,
1964, p. 15
[13] Steiner,
Rudolf The Arts and Their Mission, New York: The Anthroposophic Press,
1964, p. 31
[14] Gurdjieff,
G.I. Views from the Real World .., p. 176
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