FROM ART TO SPIRITUALITY BY JACQUES DE MARQUETTE, DR. ES

LETTRES

(Excerpt from ART and THOUGHT Issued in honour of DR. AN AND A K.

COOMARASWAMY Edited by K. BHARATHA IYER LONDON LUZAC &

COMPANY LTD. London 1947)

In aesthetics, as in all other fields, India has made a great contribution to the common

cultural heritage of mankind. The main problems concerning the place of art in the

transcendent aspirations of the human soul which confronted Western thinkers from Plato

and Plotinus to our day have been fathomed by the ancient sages of India. The revelation

of their views to Occidental thinkers has been one of the most important cultural events

of the last century. The elucidation of the bearing of the problems of aesthetics on the

principal aspects of metaphysics has added a very important chapter to comparative

religion and philosophy. Among the “savants” who brought this particular aspect of the

treasures of the East to the West, none has played a more important part than the great

figure to whom this publication is dedicated.

This modest article will endeavor to summarize, in the light of Indian aesthetics, largely

as interpreted by Dr. A. K. Coomaraswamy, the contribution Art is capable of making to

the quest of those souls which are heeding the call of what Royce called the “homing

instinct” of the religious heart.

To begin, our title might seem to offer a contradiction. Indicating a passage from art to

religion, it implies a differentiation between these two terms. At first sight this appears to

call for a rebuke. How could one oppose art to religion when the whole evolution of art

forms is closely connected with that of religions?

It is a truism that in all civilizations, religion has provided art with its most numerous and

important models and with its most stimulating inspirations. Nearly all the great artistic

legacies of antiquity are religious relics. The temples of Persepolis, of Baalbek, of China,

of Egypt, the Pyramids, the Parthenon, the Mayan pyramids, the caves of Ajanta and

Ellora, Angkor, Borobudur, all are witnesses of the efforts of nations to incorporate and

perpetuate their religious ideas in monuments of various kinds. Architecture and

sculpture are not the only arts to owe their inspiration to religion. Painting, music,

dancing, and literature also received their most important stimulants from it.

The study of primitive societies has led anthropologists to go even further and

demonstrate that most art forms owed not only their inspiration but their very incipiency

to religious ideas. The first crude ornamentation on the erstwhile purely functional

implements of the primitives was the offspring of magic. The first drawings on weapons

or tools were destined to increase their efficacy by conjuring the support of totemic

influences susceptible of strengthening the mana, the magic power of the operator. The

mace became deadlier, the adze sharper, the housepole firmer when the magician,

through the compelling designs he carved on their surface, had endowed them with a

means of connection with and participation in the great store of magical power which was

the origin of all practical efficacy. This was brought about because of the correspondence

between a transcendent power and the graphic representations of its ideal form. The

oldest crude paleolithic drawings found in caves were prompted by this idea of magical

elations between the live principle of a being and the representation of its form. By

drawing the outline of the Mammoth or Auroch before setting out on their hunting

expedition, primitive hunters performed magical operations on these images which were

to cause their models to fall an easy prey to them.

It could be argued that this early magical use of decoration constitutes no proof of the

religious origin of art, since many authors have asserted a fundamental opposition

between magic and religion. Religion was social and global, imposed on the individual

by the collective representations of his totemic group. Magic was a deliberate personal

activity, perhaps the first step in the assertion of man's power as an individual distinct

from his group. The priest implored the help and favour of the tribal god. The magician

exercised a coercive control over the forces of nature which he compelled into

cooperation.

This antagonism is more apparent than real. It is mainly artificial due to the attempt of

materialistic Occidental intellectuals to ascribe a purely sociological origin to religion by

ignoring or denying any other factor than the social and sensory ones. This might be true

if the whole of religion was contained in its purely exterior manifestations and

expressions ; in the forms and activities accessible to the objective observer, however

bereft he may be of any inkling of transcendent intuition. “Ignoti nulla cupido”.

But this purely exterior concept of religion is untenable for all those who have had even a

trace of religious experience. It certainly is in direct opposition to the spiritual conception

of life in which the old Vedic wisdom anticipated modern Western research by more than

three thousand years.

The sacrifice was the central notion of early Vedism. Originally the sacrificial rites were

conceived as exercising a direct, compelling action on the forces of nature. Later their

personalization gave birth to the mythological pantheon. The appearance of Gods

changed the purpose of the sacrifice. Instead of coercing nature's powers into obedience,

it sought the favour of the anthropomorphized gods. Thus an operative technique turned

into rogatory orison, ultimately to reach pure worship. This blending of magic and

religion is illustrated by the description of the creation of the three worlds by Prajapati

through the efficacy of the mantra. In the universe which owes its very existence to the

operative powers of liturgy, beings are created, receive the “form of the name” by the

magic power of the mantra vested in ritual formulas. Hence a complete merging of

magical operation and ritual expression. This disposes of the claim of a fundamental

antagonism between religion and magic.

Moreover, in considering this problem from its metaphysical aspect, which is the only

justifiable one, if one is to judge religion from the standpoint of its devotees, any social

antagonism between priest and witch doctor, between religion and magic is relegated to

its proper place which is of a very superficial importance. Whatever their outer

differences, they both rest on the fundamental notion of an intimate and immediate

connection between man and the universe, that connection being in the nature of a

participation in the one essence of being. It is that essential identity which makes it

possible for man both to direct his thought to God in prayer, which presupposes an

awareness of His being, or to exercise an influence over the modalities of His creative

expression.

Hence, although its origin is rooted in magic, art can truly be said to owe religion its

inspiration and models. Conversely it also plays an important part in the active

expressions of most great religions. From the cathedral of Chartres to the Ghats of

Benares and the temple of Kara, from the art of Fra Angelico to the abstraction of Zen

drawing, runs a great current seeking to find God in the beautiful and to express man's

love for Him in dedicated artistic creation striving to communicate the inner perception

of the artist. Islam itself is no exception. The Taj Mahal, the Moti Masjid of Delhi, as

well as the poems and miniatures of the Persian Sufis are also alive with the radiant

message of the nearness of the Beloved under the thin veil of forms.

Yet, if in all great religions art has been and is considered as a help to religious practice,

there is also another general tendency to include it in the sweeping condemnation of all

the objects of sensory dilection, looked upon as antagonistic to spiritual unfoldment and

endangering the attainment of liberation. If the rituals of the various faiths use ceremonial

forms endowed with aesthetic value, if the general run of devotees are wont to use

beautiful icons as inspiring supports for their devotion and beautiful temples as suitable

places of worship ; the spiritual spearhead of mankind, the mystics, the prophets, the

seers, urged men to rise above the pluralistic attitude of the extroverted form of religion

which is seeking God in an exterior discursive universe, in order to soar to Advaitist

monism where any formal differentiated identification of the subject disappears in the

attainment of Moksa.

Nowhere was this estrangement of the religious man from the exterior universe as strong

and uncompromising as in India. In almost all its sects and philosophical groups,

detachment from the world and contempt for its appearances is considered the result of a

wise attitude towards life. While the Sannyasi was the national hero of ancient India,

even her Epicures, the materialistic Lokayatas, the despised Carvakas, practised

asceticism with the idea that attachment to objects precluded their full enjoyment.

It would be an over simplification to claim that with the theory of Maya, the whole

cosmoconception of Hinduism rests on an absolute Idealism. Indeed the Upanisads offer

a whole variety of cosmoconceptions, including Idealist Monism, Realistic Pluralism and

Monadism. But irrespective of their theory of the universe, the attitude of the sages

towards the world constructed by sensory experience is one of disdain. Whatever the

nature of the Ultimate Reality, it is not to be found in the accounts given by the senses of

the world of differentiated objects in which man is called to action, with the result of

getting more and more estranged from his own reality. The world we know in our waking

daily life is a fictitious story imposed upon our belief by the fabrications of the senses

working on the stimuli originating in the unknown world of causes.

The world of our dreams at night is also based on the residue of the fabrications of the

senses. But the dream world is superior to the world of waking inasmuch as it is less

directly conditioned by the outer fount of illusion. Only in deep dreamless sleep is man

completely freed from the impositions of the senses and left to unperturbed being in the

pure unity of his own essence.

In the measure in which we attach importance to the fabrications constructed by the mind

on the titillations of the termini of the sensory nerves, we are estranged from the direct,

immediate and pure intuitions of the divine identity which lies in the core of being, as

expressed by the old fundamental assertion " Tat tvam asi." None of the factors

constituting our perception of the objects in our world of experience have any

permanency. In believing in the reality of that world of passing reflections, the fleeting

gleams of the jewels in the cloak of Jsvara, we assign ourselves to that fictitious tale spun

by the instruments of our deception, the tools and filters of our consciousness. But these

are a fundamental part of the equipment with which we were endowed at our birth.

…Thus the request of the Lord's prayer “do not lead us into temptation” assumes its full

significance in the light of the old wisdom of India, corroborated as it is by modern

epistemology.

Works of art are part of the outer universe of opposition and limitation, the world of

wandwa. They only reach us through the sensory activity and often awaken a strong

interest in the beholder. Hence they may be held to be among the factors preventing man

from realizing his intrinsic unity with “The One without a second”. As such art has been

held to be a menace to spiritual advancement. It is true that beautiful temples and images

can enthuse childish minds and that lofty music can lull into a blissful oblivion men awed

by the fearsome problems of mortality. But the spiritual athlete, the asketes, must treat art

as Ulysses did the chant of the Sirens. He must resist the inducement to attach importance

to anything which has figure and limitation. Not in their lures, but only in the inner

chamber of the heart, can the One and Only Reality be found. “The kingdom of heaven is

within you”.

This attitude has found many expressions in the great religions, from Moses condemning

religious images to the Koran's solemn precept: “Close your eyes, O believers.” In its

higher form, that attitude was that of the holy Rabia of Basrah. She spent her years in

contemplation in a small windowless hut. On a beautiful spring morning a devoted

attendant was entreating her to come out of her cell and admire the splendour of the

works of the Lord in the verdant vales covered with fragrant flowers and resounding with

the happy songs of birds. She answered, “I shall not look at the beauties of creation so as

not to be distracted from the contemplation of its Creator”. Such was also the attitude of

the Puritans. On the lower level it served as a pretext for the vandalism of the ubiquitous

iconoclasts. However repellent the destructive mania of these zealots, the basic

contradiction between interest in the outer object sand the inner contemplation of the

Divine cannot be brushed aside lightly. If the outer universe provides man with

temptations to scatter his divine nature in vain attachment to variegated appearances, it is

also the instrument of our ethical life for which it provides occasions of moral

discrimination and choice.

Taking into consideration the part played by art in the development of civilization and in

the enrichment of the lives of men, and the fact that from the days of Pythagoras,

Socrates and Plato, the beautiful has been revered as one of the avenues leading the soul

to God, this question of the moral and spiritual validity of Art is of the utmost

importance.

We already know the attitude of St. Augustine, who interpreted the esthetic message of

Plotinus for Christianity. Condemning the fanatical Christian iconoclasts, he said, “There

is no health in those who find fault with any part of Thy creation.” But many will wonder

if views based on the naive realism of early Christianity are still valid in the light of

modern epistemology and criticism.

Hinduism can be of very great assistance here, since its traditional tenets are perfectly

compatible with the findings of modern research and thought. In this very important

matter, as in many others, India has provided at the same time the problem and its

solution. And the great thinker to whom this publication is dedicated, Dr. Ananda K.

Coomaraswamy, more than any other contemporary has rendered this aspect of Hinduism

available to Westerners. Not only has his iconographic work provided a highly valuable

introduction to Eastern aesthetics, and their bearing on the all-important problem of

spiritual unfoldment, but his very career has been an illustration of the potent contribution

of art and aesthetics to metaphysical understanding and spiritual liberation.

His study of the deeper meaning of art in the light of the Sandtana Dharma, the “Eternal

Religion” of India, led him to point to the intimate relations between the work of the

artist and the general operations of creation. It further brought him to elucidate the

connection between artistic appreciation and contemplation with the ensemble of

operations through which man becomes aware of the processes at play, behind the veil of

perceived appearances, in the noumenal universe which is intermediary between the

world of phenomenon and the realm of unity.

From this survey of the processes connecting the work of art and the realm of ideal

causes, Dr. Coomaraswamy went into the similar study of the passing of transcendent

causal factors from their divine incipiency to objective results in other fields of human

activity. In a study of the traditional Indian theory of government he showed how the

advice of divine perfection found its intermediary channel in the Purohita who focussed it

on the Katria, who in his turn provided the royal agent of the enactment of the divine

inspiration in human society. Here again diversified objective appearances are seen to be

resulting from the specifying and conditioning activities of intermediary agents relaying

the creative force of the One Reality to the world of emerging objects.

In this view, every active human expression is an act of creation, “vrata”, a sacrificial

operation in which the actor “renders holy” his work in the measure in which he

consciously identifies it with the Divine creative operations in deliberate self subjection.

But in the same way that the reign of the Ruler can only attain any measure of perfection

if inspired by the information of the Purohita transmitting the “informal” or

unconditioned wisdom of Brahma taking form under the normative activity of Agni; the

work of the artist is Rasavat, only if it results from a perfect Yoga of the artist with the

divine idea causing the object to assume its actual form. Thus any particular object,

natural or artificial, suggests not only its original archetype and the sacrificial act which

brought its actual precipitation, but also, and above all, the immanent source of

consciousness constituting the universal background.

This is the dominant message of India to mankind in its effort to apprehend life. The

appearances of beings and objects as we know them are due to the sacrificial operations

of intermediaries, relaying, conforming and conditioning the creative power of the One

under the aspect of Brihaspati, the spiritual power functioning through the operations of

Vac, the Voice or Word. Both are associated, though distinct, aspects of the Deus

Absconditus, the transcendant Brahma, whose essence is not only above time and space,

but even above being and non-being.

And in a perfect dialectical spiral, Dr. Coomaraswamy crowned his career of

metaphysical iconograph in sounding again the call of the old Rsis to the beholding of the

One Essential Being in and under all manifested forms including that which seems to us

the most individualized, the human soul. In his masterful article. “On the One and Only

Transmigrant” he brought his contribution to fundamental Advaitism, showing that if

instead of looking at the cosmic process from below, as it were, from the point of view of

the accidental occasions, it is considered “sub specie aeternitatis”, as befits any attempt to

get at essential truth, it is evident that the " Universal Artist " of Plato is also the

Universal Actor. This does not deny the possibility of a prolonged duration of the

individual human specificity under the aspect of time. But it calls attention to the fact that

the Essential Reality while occasioning the emerging of apparent specifications in the

cosmic process, yet remains One, intrinsically. Thus, he effectuated the reduction of

diversity to unity, which is the ambition of every philosopher.

In a paradox frequently met with in the applications of spiritual standards to the problems

of practical experience, this ubiquitous “intuition of the unity of all life”, brings Indian

aesthetics to differentiate two kinds of art and to oppose the servile copies of the

appearances of objects, to the real works of art inspired by an immediate intuition of the

immaterial form which is the cause and “raison d'être” of the model. The so-called

naturalistic art is not even worthy of its name since nature, in its essential reality, should

be distinguished from the results of its operations. To the reproduction of objective

appearances, resulting from the extroversion of consciousness which followed the

Renaissance in Europe, India opposes works of art tending to suggest the ideal form

inherent in the model of the Icon and constituting its fundamental reality.

A superficial and agnostic view of life, knowing nothing besides sensory appearances,

causes some Western painters to become engrossed in the interrelations between these

appearances and the “impressions” they make on the senses. The traditional approach to

life is based upon the assumption that the cosmic reality is intrinsically spiritual. It holds

particular sensible appearances to be due to the activity of factors differentiating the

essential unity of reality in variegated emerging centres of individualized being.

These factors differentiating the One into the many, constitute a veritable world of their

own, intermediary between the realm of unity and the world of human experience where

in every particular aspect of sensory perception beings are described both in terms of

their contrasts with their surroundings and of their proportional opposition to their own

contrary in any particular qualitative or quantitative aspect.

The clustering around the centres of emerging individual being of the sources of the

different ways in which they affect the senses, is the origin of their characteristics. Thus,

the appearances of an object result from chains of differentiating and projecting

operations due to causes active in the intermediary world of Bhuvas. This is one degree

nearer to reality than the world of sensory experience which is the world of shadows, of

active Maya, of Bhur, the antipodes so to speak of the purely ideal and principial plane of

Svar.

These three worlds, the Vedic, earth, air and sky with their three respective Gandharvas,

Agni for the earth, Vdyu for the air and Aditya for the sky, form the three everlasting

worlds of creation. From the discursive standpoint of human intelligence, subjected to the

impositions of space-time consciousness, these three worlds seem arrayed in a

progressive hierarchy, rising from the earth to the sky through the fleeting region of airy

transmissions, mixings and blendings.

Yet, from a more metaphysical standpoint, which really means a metachromic one, since

Physis happens for us in our inner duration, these three worlds are equally participating

essentially in the divine presence of the One Cause, the Threefold Brahman of the Maitri

Upanisad, Agni, Vdyu and Aditya, the three world-overlords, being only differentiated

modes of Prajdpati.

Hence a double source of unity, or rather homogeneity, in all beings in the three worlds.

There is an active, and one would be tempted to say, vertical correspondence between the

beings of the Earth, their causal anteriority in the intermediary aerial world and the

radiant spiritual spring of their being in the Sky ; and there is a passive, universal cause of

unity in the essential participation of the three principles of life on the three worlds in the

unity of Puruia.

This is the reason of Eckhart's famous saying: “to whom God is dearer in one thing than

in another, that man is a barbarian ... a child” 1 (419). Thus, even the spiritual animators

of the three worlds, Agni, Vdyu and Aditya, are only outer forms, limited and transitory

of the uncorporeal unique Reality. This early Vedic monotheism, which anticipated

Advaitism, was to find a solemn echo in the majestic surat of the Koran: “We created

Heaven and Earth, and all that is in between . . . they are unreal.”

Yet, to the facets of Purusa encased in men's hearts, the picture painted by the senses on

the canvas of the mind is the main, if not the exclusive stimulus of their awakening to an

awareness of their spiritual identity.

Only a few souls are so equipped as to escape engrossment in the sensory appearances of

objects and be able to see these from a scientific standpoint, as incidental aspects of the

workings of the laws of nature. But, if scientific intuition is a rare gift, the faculty of

aesthetic appreciation is widespread. In most men the perception of beauty is apt to lead

to love, which is really a keen appreciation of the value of the achievements of the

creative activity at work in the object.

The crux of the difference between the theory of “l'art pour l’art” and Hindu aesthetics

lies in the fact that while many Western artists only try to represent the sensory

perceptions emanating from the model, their Oriental confreres seek to underline the

presence of the inner transcendent cause latent in it. An Oriental work of art is never an

end in itself, always a means to an end which is the awakening in the spectator of the

spiritual perceptions of the artist. This constitutes the spiritual value of art. Its specifically

religious value results from its underlining of the theological concepts of which the icon

is the symbol. It awakens in men the angelic or Paroksa vision, which perceives the

archtypes behind objects, while exclusively objective art deals only with the Pratyaksa or

purely human vision of things.

This deeply spiritual nature of the true art operation is underlined by the procedure

followed by the artist. While the Westerner simply sits before his model and observes its

outer details, the Hindu sinks in a deep meditation, seeking Yoga with the spiritual

principle who originated the model. This is the most important moment of artistic

creation, nearly the whole of it, the actual technical production being a mere sequence of

the spiritual apprehension of the essential nature of the object.

This is why the defects in a work of art are imputed to be a deficiency in the Yoga of the

artist. Not having reached a complete union with the ideal nature of his object, he fails to

endow his work with the intelligible message of the Paroksa vision and he can only

render a sensible or " Pratyaksa " account of the model.

The evocation of the transcendent harmonies at play in beings and testifying to their

integration in the cosmic order, awakens in the spectator the flavour of beauty “Rasa” and

raises the " Rasika/' the beholder, to " Samstava/' the awareness of his essential unity with

the substance of the object of vision. This concord between the reality in the seer and that

in the object seen takes place in the central core of being, in “The Lotus of the Heart”.

There-in lies the relation between all beings through their connection with their

ubiquitous, simultaneous Essence, wherein resides consequently the possibility of

omniscience “in principio”.

Uplifted by his intuition of the intense perfection jacent in beings and underlined by the

enlightened Yogi artist or artisan in true works of art, the Rasika really undergoes a new

birth on the level of the identical oneness of the origin of all things. This is the perfection

of the art process. Beginning by the perception by the artist of the essential idea or form

embodied in the object, assuming objectivity through the technical processes of

figuration, it reaches its culmination when the spectator's perception is so stimulated, so

“inspired” by the expressed vision of the artist that he becomes aware not only of the

ideal form of the object which endows it with Sddriiya, the harmony of perfect adaptation

of parts to the organized whole, but is taken above this realm of formal beauty to the

“Back of the Heaven” of the Rig Veda (I, 164, 10) where the metaphysical

understanding, Paroksa JMna is freed not only from the necessity of discursive analysis,

but even from that of intelligible discrimination. Thus it reaches the ineffable, immediate,

centro-focussed awareness of deep sleep, sushupti.

In that highest form of incarnate consciousness, art leads its devotees to the threshold of

the three higher forms of wisdom pertaining to the pure essence of the tri-unity ensouling

the three worlds of Svar, Bhuvas and Bhur, towering above the lower fourth degree of

wisdom. This inferior one results from impacts from the world of sensory experience and

pertains to what Saint Paul called the world of the Law, in opposition to the world of the

Spirit.

While the world of the Law is subjected to the imperfections of succession and

discontinuity, whose limitations engender ignorance of the One Infinite Reality, the three

upper forms of wisdom are related to the essential unity of the threefold Brahman, above

all restive differentiations.

That is the level where Angels need no modulated or articulate speech to commune and

absorb the utterances of the ANGEL OF ANGELS in their centro-apical relation with

Him. It is also the lower, or active form of Nirvana, the awareness of unity in the

transcendent knowledge of the sameness of all principles. (Saddharma Pundarika : Kern's

text, 133.)

Such is the apotheosis of Art. It achieves its spiritual mission when it leads its devotees to

the level where the True, the Beautiful and the Good commingle and merge in their

principle, the exalted Origin of Being, emerging from non-being.

In the perfection of its completed cycle, Art, beginning with the Yoga of the artist with

the Divine Presence in an object, conducts the Rasika to absorption in the essence of the

object in which he finds a reiteration of his own essence. This union is achieved in the

exalted region where the noumenal world proceeds from the Immobile Motor of the

Universe. This is the Sacred Heart, the eternal core of reality, ubiquitous in space,

infinitely simultaneous in time, perfect in quality, Who was before the beginning of

creation, or time, and shall be after their disappearance “. . . I am the Alpha and the

Omega . . .” “The heart is the same as Prajapati, it is Brahma, it is All”. (Bnhadaranyaka

Upanisad v. 3)

Thus Art in its assumption to the Supreme Reality meets with the sublimated attainments

of religion and science. " That" which conditions the possibility of Rasa, sentiment of

beauty, is also the origin of the perception of Truth in the investigation of the laws

governing the relations between beings and accounting for their modalities, which is the

province of science. It is equally the principle of the warmth of Love, is well as its

instigator initiating the responsive recognition of the Presence in beings. And in its

contact with the True, which is the perfection of epistemology and with the Love or

Goodness, which is the culmination of ethics, art does not entangle its devotees in the

time-space conditioning and limiting factors issuing from the interplay of appearances on

the levels where scientific theories or legalized morality are formulated.

The highest artistic contemplation is identical with the purest form of science where the

truth of a concept culminates in the principial adequation of the seer with the process

observed, above discursive affabulation, in pure scientific intuition. It also brings him to

the purest form of religion where the love of God persists alone after the mental apparel

of dogma has been transcended.

Thus in its apotheosis, Art merges with the culmination of science and religion in their

common origin. In this, it assumes its full importance as one of the three pillars of the

inner temple of consciousness whose edification seems to be the very goal of human life.