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OBJECTIVITY OF RELIGIOUS SPIRITUALITY
The rhythmic periods are radiant with spirituality. We must be careful not to understand 'spirituality' as a sort of philosophic spiritualism more or less coloured by idealism; it is not thus that we will be able to escape from materialism, which is the inevitable end of that intellectual attitude that recognises reality only in what comes to it via the senses. We must give it its exact meaning, religious in the traditional sense of the term. For us, Frenchmen and occidentals, it is Christianity that is the religious reality and sole traditional spirituality. Since tradition is older than Christianity, as the beginning of the world is older than Christianity, Christianity was prefigured in everything that preceded it. Christianity radiated spirituality up to the day on which we stopped building the cathedrals, up to the day when the ARCHITEKTONIKE, who possessed knowledge of the sacred, gave way to the ARCHITEKTON, who knew only how to construct secular buildings. From that moment onwards, the West passed under the domination of whatever was accessible to the senses. A period of preoccupation with space began, with its illusions, its seductions, its splendours that dazzled without ever satisfying, with its inability to conceive of reality as anything other than dead matter, a tendency which, as the illusions vanish, no longer seeks to conceal itself.
Religious spirituality is objective. It is not deaf to the siren song produced by the vibrating antennae of the senses responding as best they can to a world whose reality as 'object' is inaccessible to them. But it is able to distinguish between that which appears to be and that which is. It knows how to free itself from the one in order to submit to the other. It does not mistake the path that descends for the one that rises. It does not mistake observation for experience. If a body manifests life, it is not so naive as to think of life as existing only in the body. Thus it is constantly concerned with Man, of whom the individual collections of dust are only reflections. The religious spirituality is able to distinguish the intensities of light given forth by the one and by the other. To help them to develop their qualities as far as the light that is unique and undivided, it ranges them in the right order and establishes a hierarchy in which each rank is given the role of raising up to its own level the rank immediately below it. Having no illusions about the natural inequality of the one or of the other, it tells Man what his duty is. It does not see culture as existing in a multiplicity of dead ideas but in those principles of identity that are affirmed by every movement that has life in it. It says to everyone 'Know thyself. Act.' It has summarised its whole teaching in these captivating terms: 'God made man in His own image'. God, the supreme object and the supreme living reality, transcending all the objects which are His images. If man should realise objectively what he is he will have found the royal way which, from step to step, will lead him towards the object, the object of his last end and of his eternal life.
OBJECTIVITY OF THE RELIGIOUS CRAFT
To realise oneself objectively is to be at once cause and effect - the contrary of those fantasies of subjectivity which are neither cause nor effect. The potter, the cultivator of the soil, the traditional painter, the sacred architect, act by virtue of common principles. They act, approaching their work in the same manner. They have the same stopping points on the same road that goes to the same destination. One can, in knowing the one, get to know the others. The person who makes a pot is not less than the person who builds a cathedral. Humble or proud, the value of everything is measured according to the degree of its quality. The spiritual work is not dependent on exceptional intentions. It is all simplicity and is nonetheless resplendent. It is popularly based even as it respects the hierarchy. What can be more modest and at the same time greater than the wall-paintings of Saint-Savin, of Montoire, of Berzé-la-Ville? Can we for a moment compare their objective spirituality with the subjective spectacles, marvellously arranged as they may be, of a Raphael, troubled soul whose short life was a failure to decide between Giotto and Michelangelo? Or with those of a Rembrandt, whose methods of chiaroscuro array his subjects in the most majestic effects of light, but cannot give birth to the light itself?
Wall painting from the chapel of St Gilles, Montoire-sur-le-Loire
No. The spiritual technique has no need of formalities. Aspiring to live, it will use simply the situations of everyday life. Simply and with authority. The person who enters into it will adapt himself to it, appealing to his own personal experience, to his own daily work which has revealed to him its living realities. They are already there, at his own level, in his own body, in the beating of his heart, in an irresistible longing to go beyond himself. Isn't the pot made by the potter already integrated into the pattern of his life? It is not a representation, nor a spectacle. It is a real object which no-one can misunderstand. The wall painting centred on the image of the Head of the Church, or that made up of a combination of interlacings; the church where the Christian goes to gather himself together, that is to say, to centre himself on himself; are equally integrated into his daily life which derives from them a joy and a more intense reality which, in prayer, opens out and expands in a living light, a pure rhythm, a single form.
The relations between the artist and 'nature' can only exist if, when we talk of nature, we mean only its external effects. When we understand nature through its mode of operation, there is no longer any question of relations but rather of acts and of organic connections. The work is religious, RELIGARE - to bring together.
During the religious periods there is, consequently, a religious technique, held in common by every part of the whole diversity of human acts. It requires an apprenticeship in the course of which particular secret knowledges are passed on as tangible, intelligible realities. ARS IMITATUR NATURAM IN SUA OPERATIONE. (9) That which is destined for everyday use is not fundamentally different from that which belongs to the sacred. In DOING, nothing is confused and everything is order and subordination.
(9) A quotation from St Thomas Aquinas. See the earlier note on Ananda Coomaraswamy.