CHAPTER
The Religion of Art
In the preceding chapters, we have surveyed some of the movements that sought to fill the void left by the demise of Catholic Christianity: Neopaganism, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, theosophy, and alchemy. But however authentic the spiritual experiences they offered, none of these movements was completely satisfactory. They were esotericisms without a corresponding exotericism; they served a secretive elite, but did nothing for the masses of ordinary religious people.
Once, men and women of high spiritual attainment and profound esoteric knowledge had worked as leaders in the Church and were revered as saints. There were Pope Sylvester II (Gerbert d’Aurillac, c. 945–1003), architect of the Holy Roman Empire; Abbot Suger, father of the Gothic cathedral; women mystics with practical and political influence like Hildegard of Bingen and Theresa of Avila; philosophers like Aquinas, Bonaventura, Nicholas of Cusa; saints like Bernard and Francis; and the Order of Knights Templar. But the Catholic Church has lost the dimensions represented by such people, while few of the innumerable Protestant sects ever wanted them.
Lacking the presence of such examples, the very notion of religious experience faded from the mental world of the majority, Christians included. The rational but still churchgoing eighteenth century gave to the word “enthusiasm” (from the Greek enthousiasmos, possession by a god) the pejorative meaning of “ill-regulated religious emotion or speculation.”1 The whole idea had become uncomfortable and was shunned in polite conversation.
Cold-shouldered by organized religion, enthusiasm now entered by another doorway: that of the arts. This is the inner meaning of the movement known as Romanticism. The keywords of Romanticism, dutifully learned by adolescents bored to tears by Wordsworth and Shelley, are like so many compass-needles all pointing to a single pole. Subjectivity; Imagination; the sublime; pantheism and the ensoulment of Nature; fantasies of the medieval past. Let us take them one by one.
Subjectivity and interest in one’s own inner processes and emotions is the sine qua non of the esoteric path. Although it can stop short at a neurotic self-centeredness, it holds the beginning of self-observation and the promise of self-knowledge.
The Imagination, as distinct from mere fantasy, is the primary tool, or weapon, of esoteric work. It is that whereby one discovers a world within, and learns to act in it rather than to be a passive spectator. It gives access, via symbols, to levels of being that are immaterial, but real and even formative with regard to the physical.
The sublime—found in mountains, volcanoes, the ocean, the heavens, night, heroism and tragedy—lifts man out of the everyday and into a cosmic awareness. It gives him the first inkling of his own potential grandeur and divinity, though this may dawn as a feeling of personal nullity.
The certainty that Nature is alive and ensouled acted as a corrective to two errors. One was the Christian mistrust of Nature, which had its doctrinal roots in Christ’s “kingdom not of this world,” and its practical reason in the need to convert pagan nature-worshipers. Another was the utilitarian attitude of the early Enlightenment, e.g., Descartes’ idea that animals are simply machines, or the Deists’ concept of a clockwork universe free from the inconvenience of divine intervention. Pantheism holds that Nature is God, but this is insufficient for esotericism, which demands a metaphysical dimension beyond what the physical world contains and reveals.
The Romantic fantasies about the medieval past were historically inaccurate and, to a later and cynical eye, rather laughable.2 But they rested on an intuition of the integrity of the medieval spiritual world, as mentioned above. That was the last time when Europe was whole, sharing a single faith in the undivided Catholic Church, and a single chivalric ethos. It never worked perfectly, but the ideal was there: of an emperor whose authority counted above that of kings and local lords, because it came from God.3
Romantic medievalism was also a reaction against Classicism, which had degenerated from the balmy days of the Italian Renaissance into a stultifying system of education. Generations of small boys had Latin, Greek, and ancient history beaten into them, so that when they grew up and became important men they could impress their peers with quips from Horace and Martial. They knew little, and cared less, for their own national and ethnic traditions: Greco-Roman civilization was their cynosure. Consequently, when Johann Wolfgang von Goethe looked at the Gothic wonder of Strasburg Cathedral in 1770, he saw something that had been unseen for centuries.4 When the Brothers Grimm collected German fairy tales and made their German dictionary, they opened a vein that had been not only dormant but suppressed during the classical hegemony.
A word should be said here about the connection between Romanticism, nationalism, and esotericism. Each nation, if one looks back far enough, has its own mythology, its own flavor of spirituality, and its own sacred traditions which were once reflected in the cycles of daily life. It was these that were rediscovered and revalued by the Romantic movement. However, there were exceptions in the former British colonies (the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), whose settlers more or less extirpated the traditions of their native peoples, which in any case do not suit Europeans. The colonizers lacked the nourishment of the soul which comes from living on the land of one’s forebears, and from daily contact with their legacy: churches, castles, saints’ days, processions, festivals, local shrines and legends. The new lands can offer the feeling of the sublime and a certain nature mysticism (best seen in the American Transcendentalists), but they lack the continuity that leads from shared mythology and symbolism, through exoteric religion and ritual, to mysticism and the esoteric way. For better or worse, they must reconstruct the latter according to their own lights.
The primary arts of the Renaissance were visual—painting, sculpture, and architecture. Those of the Romantic era were aural—poetry, imaginative prose, and music. The latter arts act as a more powerful stimulus to the inward path because of the different functions of the eye and the ear. The eye gives us immediate and detailed knowledge of the physical world surrounding us; it draws us out of ourselves, so much so that most people forget that they are even there. The ear also draws us, but not so much out of as into ourselves. We always have to interpret what we hear, because it comes through language rather than with the immediacy of forms and colors. When we read poetry, and even more when we hear it spoken, it causes images to arise from inside, rather than from without. We create and own them in a way that we can never do with the outside world.
The Romantic poets discovered states of the soul that no one had paid attention to before, and then educated generations of readers to feel them. The reason poetry was so effective for this process is because of its fixity with regard to language. The poem is inseparable from its actual words and all the resonances they evoke in native speakers (which is why lyric poetry especially is untranslatable). Also, because of its rhyme and meter, it sticks in the memory in a way that prose does not. Lines such as “They flash upon that inward eye, which is the bliss of solitude” (Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”) or “He prayeth best, who loveth best all things both great and small” (Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner) become part of one’s very self. Poetic maxims such as Goethe’s “Stirb und werde” (Die and become!) or “Das ewig Weibliche zieht uns heran” (The eternal feminine draws us upward) contain an entire philosophy, if not actually a religion.
Since the Muse of poetry today is virtually dormant,5 let us turn to novels, which are very much a creation of the Romantic era. Here indeed is the back door through which celestial influences entered, to work on a vast sector of society. One might not think of the great nineteenth-century novelists like Dickens, Hugo, and Balzac as “spiritual,” but this is to underrate their insights into human nature, their depiction of archetypal figures, and their sense of the dance of destiny and freewill. Less well known are the consciously esoteric novels of Novalis, Hoffmann, Nerval, Nodier, and the once best-sellers of George Sand and Bulwer-Lytton.6
The novel reader enters an alternative universe of images, personalities, and events, that can be more real—because more romantic—than our everyday reality. The value of the experience is borne out even today, when, far from having been driven out by the competition of television and cinema, the novel is alive and well. This is probably because it is the one serious art form to have stolidly resisted the alienating influence of modernism.
When we move from literature to music, the transition is potentially as radical as that from the visual to the verbal arts, for music is the most insubstantial of all the arts, and the least indebted to the external world for its material. Only potentially, however, for in many whole cultures, and for the majority of people in our own, music is only a handmaid to poetry. Their music all consists of “songs,” in which the music enhances the words if they are present, or suggests them if they are absent. Pure music does not exist for them, because even when they listen to instrumental music, they accompany it themselves with a sequence of thoughts, associations, inner images, and words, and these become the meaning of the work for them.
Composers have always been content with, or at least resigned to, this use of their craft. They know that much of their music will not be heard as such, but will be a background to social or religious functions. (The Muzak industry knows that one does not have to hear music consciously in order to be influenced by it.) But in the Romantic era, for the first time, composers regarded themselves not as craftsmen but as “artists,” borrowing a status that had first been accorded to the masters of the Italian Renaissance. This change was achieved above all thanks to Mozart, whose prodigious gift appeared as more than human; and by Beethoven, who fitted perfectly the archetype of the sublimely inspired artist, then, after his deafness, that of the tragic hero.7 Because it was divinely inspired, their music demanded attention and devotion, not mere consumption like the work of common craftsmen.
The Viennese composers Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven felt no need for words to accompany their most profound musical utterances. Simultaneously, a group of German writers began to praise absolute music as the very highest of the arts, because it can transport one into another mode of being: a mode in which the meaning is crystal-clear and the feeling palpable, even though there are no words or images that adequately express them. To those able to suppress the verbal and visual associations, absolute music offers something akin to meditational states. It seems to be its own world, with its own inexorable laws, which exists above and prior to our normal state. In other words, it is a form of the mundus imaginalis.
The Traditionalists have nothing good to say about the art-religion of Romanticism, which they regard, with good reason, as a competitor, and as a pseudoreligion of aesthetic self-indulgence. If anyone doubts that the art-religion is alive today, they should go to a big art museum on a Sunday and see the people making their devotions. Some are there because they love it; others have made the pilgrimage to better themselves; children are there because it is thought to be good for them, just like church in the old days. But what is missing is the sense of the sacred, to say nothing of a community devoted to its members.
The art-religion whose hierophants were Goethe and Beethoven, Byron and Victor Hugo, reached its culmination in Richard Wagner, composer of The Ring of the Nibelung, Tristan and Isolde, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, and Parsifal.8 Wagner’s music dramas purported to be a synthesis of all the arts, and he built a templelike theater for them at Bayreuth (Bavaria), sincerely believing that they might save civilization and rescue Europe from degeneracy. The fact that Wagner’s operas still have so many devotees today gives one pause for thought. The musicologist H. C. Robbins Landon once remarked that the Ring “becomes more important to humanity every year, its truths more compelling (possibly because Götterdämmerung is a closer reality than it ever was before),”9 The Ring is a prophetic work, which, in music of incomparable power and beauty, depicts the coming of evil into an innocent world, the rise of mankind to consciousness, the withdrawal of the gods, and the end of a cosmic cycle. Where is hope in this? Only in love. And love itself, as Wagner went on to show in Tristan and Isolde, finds its consummation not in the fullness of life but in the extinction of the self and in cosmic oblivion. Only in his last opera, Parsifal, did he really hold out hope for the future, in the founding of an order under a pure and tested leader. And we seem very far from that today.
The religion of art has its low points, equivalent perhaps to televangelism; a slippery slope leads from the museum’s blockbuster show to Disneyland. But the best of Romanticism is more than sensation and aestheticism. It is philosophy in action, energized as Plato believed it should be—through the Eros of beauty.