Lecture 12.
Modern Art & Spiritualism.
A. Now we ll finish by giving some other symptoms
of the Revolution and
chiliasm which is the central theme of modern
age.
Some Germans
have seen deeply into this.
B. Art: decline from humanism to sub-humanism
This writer, Hans Sedlmayr, talks about the
history of modern art,
especially of the last two centuries, as bringing
into Western art, Western culture,
entirely new phenomena, which later on he’ll
interpret as to what it means.
He
discusses first the fact that in the nineteenth
century there was no dominant
style, but new styles seemed to come every
decade or two.
And the lack of a
style he attributes to the fact that there’s
no common belief underlying the
society.
There’s no sort of one thing which art is
devoted to, as it was in the
Middle Ages to the cathedrals.
Then he discusses architecture.
And we find that just at the time of the
French Revolution, just before, there’s
this architect LeDoux, who comes up with
the scheme for a perfectly spherical building,
not only as monuments, but also as
a house for a sheriff; and [giving a] completely
ordinary thing like that this very
extraordinary form.
And later on this dies out because it’s
practically not possible,
and then [it] comes back again just before
and during the Russian Revolution in
the twentieth century.
And there the idea is to overcome the sense
of being bound
to the earth.
This also is a chiliastic idea.
Architecture also becomes unstable and no
longer do you see sort of a
orderly building coming up from the earth,
rising up into the sky; instead it
becomes sort of off-balance, as though it’s
going to fall over.
And finally there is the idea of building
as a machine.
A house is a
machine for living in, a chair is a machine
for sitting in.
This is in the twentieth
century.
And we have this quote from LeCorbusier, one
of the great architects
supposedly of our times, who even built a
convent on these principles, a frightful
loooking thing.
He says, “The heart of our ancient cities
with their spires and
cathedrals must be shattered to pieces and
replaced by skyscrapers.”ccxcvii And this
is that very world which we living in cities
must face.
And not only does
revolutionary philosophy affect us, and revolutionary
political systems, but also
revolutionary architecture and art.
Secondly he talks about the torso, which for
the first time in the middle of
the nineteenth century in the sculpture of
Rodin -- by the way, many of whose
sculptures are in San Francisco at the Legion
of Honor -- the idea of the torso is
put into reality.
Before then it was only some kind of sketch.
But now the
complete fragment, totally fragmentary thing,
becomes a work of art.
It shows
that the higher purpose of art has been totally
lost.
And now we come to the very striking sphere
of painting.
And he discusses
Goya, who lived at this very time, at, contemporary
with Napoleon, the late
eighteenth, early nineteenth century.
And about him he says this, “The more we
study the art of Goya the more intense grows
our conviction that,” just “like Kant
in philosophy and LeDoux’s architecture,
he is one of the great pulverizing,
destructive forces that bring a new age into
being.
In Goya’s art certain
characteristics force their way to the surface,
they are symptoms of what have
become the decisive trends of modern painting,
but there’s more to him than that.
Court painter though he was and officially
working for the Court, even as
LeDoux still worked for the [ancien regime
]” old regime “and dedicated his
great architectural works to two monarchs,
Goya nevertheless is the embodiment of the
new type of the
„exposed’ artist in the sense [outlined
above].” we’ve discussed.
“The new
element in his art has no connection with
the public
sphere, but derives from a completely subjective
province of experience,
from the dream.
“For the first time an artist, taking refuge
neither in disguise nor pretext,
gives visible form to the irrational.
The two series” of his called “„Suenos’
(„Dreams’) and „Disparates’ („Madnesses’)
are the real keys not only to his own
work to but to the most essential thing in
modern art.
And „Disparates’ are also
the frescoes with which he decorated the walls
of his country house, and not a
few of his pictures.
“Here for the first time an artist has thought
something worthy to be put
on canvas, which derives directly from the
depths of the dream world and the
irrational.
Nothing could surely be more mistaken than
to suppose that these
series were created to improve or instruct
the world or to brand some politician.
The elemental power of these visions would
never be understood in terms of so
innocuous and idealistic an explanation....”ccxcviii
“Once Hell was a clearly defined province
of the world beyond.
All the
hideous products of the imagination by which
the human mind could be
tormented were banished into pictures of that
place and were thus objectivized.
The eruption of Hell into this world was a
real and external thing, and it was thus
that the painter would portray it in pictures
of the tempting of the saints and of
those dehumanized human beings that mocked
and tormented Our Lord.
“In the other case, however, the one here
before us, this world of the
monstrous had become part of man’s inner
world.
It exists within man himself,
and this brings us to a new conception of
man, in so far as man himself becomes
demoniac.
It is not merely a matter of his outward appearance,
it is that the man
himself and all his world have been delivered
to a demon empire.
Man is on the
defensive.
It is Hell that has the overwhelming power
and the forces that man
can marshall against it are feeble and despairing.
“In the visions of [the „Suenos’]”
his dreams and so-called proverbs,
“[and „Proverbios’] we see every disfigurement
by which man can be made
hideous and every temptation by which his
dignity can be assailed; we see
demons in human form and beside them bewitched
creatures of every kind,
monstrosities, ghosts, witches, giants, beasts,
lemurs and vampires.
Chronos
devouring his children seems like a nightmare
personified as he squats, a naked
giant on the edge of an oppressed world, and
yet this Pandemonium of unclean
spirits has a kind of raging vitality.
These are no creatures of artistic fantasy
--
these are bloody realities that have been
personally
experienced.”ccxcix
“The date of the [„Suenos’]” “Dreams,”
of which several of these are
examples, this series of paintings, “is
1792, when the
French Revolution had reached its climax.
It was at this date also that Goya had a
severe illness, the nature of which we do
not know.
These are the decades when
many artists seem to have been possessed by
demoniac powers.
The sculptor
Messerschmidt repeatedly portrays his own
face as a hideous grimacing mask,
while the ice-cold art of Füssli” in Germany
“shows indications of unmistakable
hallucination.
This is the time when Flaxman saw the devilish
face which, for
some inscrutible reason, he called „The
Ghost of the Flea.’
It is also the age of
Mesmer [(1733-1815)], the age when occultism
was highly fashionable.
It was as
though a door had opened in man, a door leading
down into the world of the
subhuman -- the world which threatens those
with madness who have seen too
much of it.”ccc
There is a second artist he talks about who
is quite the contrary, but also
reveals this very similar thing.
A painter called Friedrich, a German painter
of
this time.
In his painting, “The human warmth has gone
out of man’s relation to
created things.
The moon, itself a dead body, coldly reflecting
the light of the sun that has set,
veiling the world in a shroud, is the chief
symbol of this new feeling that man has
about them.
Man feels himself abandoned by God.
He is as much alone in the
universe and as unrelated to it, as is the
crucifix in Friedrich’s picture, standing
in
the vast impersonal silence of the mountains.”ccci
The third aspect he talks about in this age
is, which is very symptomatic,
is the caricature.
About this he says, “The caricature was
not” totally “unknown
in previous epochs,...” but “It is only
from the end of the eighteenth century that,
starting in
England, caricature became widespread and
was recognizable as a clearly
defined branch of art; it is not till the
nineteenth century that, in the work of
Daumier,” the French artist, “it could
become the main field of activity for an
artist of the very first rank.
It is therefore not the appearance of caricature
as such
that constitutes the decisive historical event;
but its elevation to the rank of a
respected and significant art.
“After 1830 there appeared the periodical
La Caricature, a
publication with a clear political intention.
A
„Walpurgisnacht,’ Paul Valéry calls it,
„a Pandemonium, a Satanic comedy,
riotous to the point of debauchery.
Now pure tomfoolery, now avid with the lust
of blood.’
These words give us an insight into caricature’s
spiritual paternity, its
essence is a distortion of the human though
it occasionally does more, it
sometimes invests human nature with the attributes
of Hell, for it is in the nature
of Hell to create images, by which our human
nature is insulted and belied.
This
distortion may be of the most varied kind.
Man, for instance, can be distorted into
a mask, and it is significant that Daumier’s
work as a caricaturist should begin
with that....
“In the main, however, there are two methods
which this process of
distortion employs -- ...one negative, the
other positive.
The negative method
takes from man his dignity and his form, it
shows him as ugly, misshapen,
wretched and ridiculous.
Man, the crown of creation, is debased and
dethroned --
but for all that he” still “retains his
humanity.”cccii
But “The positive method of distortion makes
a wholly different and
subhuman creature out of man.
In doing so it pulls out the same stops that
have
always been used by the portrayers of Hell
in Western art.
Man’s features
become a grimace, he is turned into a monstrosity,
a freak, an animal, a beast, a
skeleton, an apparition, an idol, a doll,
a sack or an automaton.
He appears ugly,
a thing to excite misgiving, an unformed creature,
a object grotesque and
obscene.
His actions assume the character of the nonsensical,
the absurd, the
insincere, the comic, the brutal and the demonic.”ccciii
“The primary impulse behind [it]” this
“is doubt or despair concerning
man as such, a denial of the goodness or beauty
of human nature.
The
conventional form of caricature is merely
a pretext under which this view of
man can be freely unfolded.
“In Daumier’s case, [of course] -- and
this distinguishes him from the
much more savage and cynical caricatures of
the beginning of the twentieth
century -- his lack of confidence in man is
outweighed by a recognition of his
greatness.
Daumier saw the grandeur of man as did scarcely
any other artist of
the nineteenth century.
Grandeur and absurdity are merged in him and
so beget
the tragi-comic.
“When the beginning of the twentieth century
was reached, however, that
saving balance was to disappear.
There was to be a new and supreme flowering
of the merciless type of caricature, and one
which at heart wholly despaired of
man, but now the distorted picture of man
that had begun with ineluctable power
to take possession of the artist’s mind,
was to show itself without disguise in the
human types produced by the art of the day,
types which strike simple folk as the
most terrible of caricatures and which indeed
do proceed from the same dark
caverns of the soul as does the caricature
itself.”ccciv
And before this, in the eighteenth century,
there is still an ordinary normal
idea of man -- you paint portraits, that is,
somebody pays you, the nobility pay
you, you paint their portraits, there’s
a function for it, even though it’s not
religious, it’s not particularly profound.
It’s still art, has a definite place, a
function, and you can recognize the human
being; and it’s often very well done.
There’s a sense of the three dimensions.
This kind of art is perfect in its own
way.
And now all this is dissolving into by these,
the torso, the demonic enters
in, the caricature, or else icy coldness.
All these are destroying the very idea of
painting as some kind of thing related to
human beings.
Now he discusses briefly the art of Cézanne
and modern painting.
“The art
of Cézanne[, then,] is a borderline affair.
It is a kind of narrow ridge between
impressionism and expressionism and in its
unnatural stillness prepares for the
eruption of the extra human.
[Emphasis in original]
“What this leads to is that man -- again
contrary to all natural experience
-- is put on one level with all other things.
Soon after Cézanne, Seurat was to
represent man as though he were a wooden doll,
a lay figure, or automaton, and
still later, with Matisse, the human form
was to have no more significance than a
pattern on wallpaper, while with the Cubists
man was to be
degraded to the level of an engineering model.”cccv
[The painting] of Cézanne was “pure painting”
-- that is, first the
impressionists came and they sort of dissolved
things into what is for the moment
-- no longer any idea of the way things should
be or a deeper idea behind it -- just
the way things appear.
If horses are galloping, [it is] with, you
can see, all twenty
different feet instead of just four feet.
And they want to present, just to capture
the moment.
They are influenced by photography, of this
whole idea of reducing
art just to this moment.
And they were very charming things, some of
them.
But
you can already see that reality is dissolving
in them.
And Cézanne said that he
wanted to take impressionism and make it a
classical art.
And therefore he took it
and sort of froze it, and in fact this man
even says that his art is the kind of thing
you see when you’re just barely opening
your eyes and you’re half asleep.
And
this is not art, this is but a momentary thing
which is very dangerous (from the
person?) to classical art.
And here you can see his landscape which is,
it is no
longer sort of a landscape, you can still
see it’s landscape, but now it’s very
sort
of strange, it’s sort of made geometrical,
he said his idea was to make it into
something geometrical.
[T]he Cubists simply tried to take reality
and to chop it up into pieces
and take the separate pieces.
Instead of having a face, a whole face, you
take
your face and take the eye here and the cheek
and the mouth and so forth and
sort of glue it back together.
And it looks extremely weird, as though you’re
taking reality apart and then just partly
putting it back together again.
The art is divided up actually into two categories:
one is the very
rationalistic art, which takes piece, things
apart and barely puts them together,
and the other is very expressionistic: someone
gets an idea and distorts like crazy
in order to get across his idea.
And it eventually ends up that he just stands
in
front of the canvas like this Jackson Pollock,
in front of a twenty foot canvas.
He
gets inspired, throws paint, and he gets $10,000
for it.
And sometimes it’s very, you can, you look,
there’s a definite pattern.
He has
some kind of inspiration, because the world
has order in it.
And a person has
sort of, really is interested in art, maybe
he can give some kind of pattern to it.
I know one religious painter, in fact I think
he’s a famous painter now.
Went to college with him, Sombach (?). He
said he wanted to paint religious
things and how, in order to paint, he looked
at the crucifix, he got the idea and
then (makes smashing sound) threw things on
to it.
Comes out some kind of
ghastly distortion of Christ on the Cross.
“It is at this point that the behavior of
these allegedly „pure’ painters
borders on the pathological.
They begin to suffer from that diseased condition
whose essence is the mind’s inability to
project itself into the minds of others or
into the world outside.
When that condition obtains, everything seems
dead and
alien, men can then only see the outside of
things, they are no longer conscious of
human life in others.
“It is also at this point that the whole
world begins to become unstable,
for when things are mere phenomena that have
no meaning inherent in them,
then they begin to be experienced as things
without stability, things fleeting,
wavering, bodiless and indetermined.
They are solid things no longer
[(Usnadze)].
This may explain why those who wish to see
a world in flux are
automatically driven towards absolute painting,
the painting that
is innocent of any meaning whatsoever.”cccvi
“The kind of painting that began about 1900
and dominated the twenties is
not only contemporary with „modern’ technicized
architecture, it is not only
preceded, like the latter, by a kind of prelude
around 1800, it has a deep
connection with it and all over Europe and
beyond was favored and propagated
by exactly the same groups, by those namely
that were the carriers of the „spirit
of 1789.’
The two things go together, despite the fact
that the new architecture is
so cold and objective and the new painting
is so wild and irrational.
One reflects
the other, despite the fact that painting
and building have been wholly separated
from each other.
“For a painting no longer helps to give
form and character to a particular
space, as the decorative fresco of art nouveau
still attempted to do, the picture
has become something belonging wholly to itself;
it is no longer even a
stationery patch on the wall.
Rather is its character that of a book, which
we
open and put away again.
Le Corbusier, the theorist of the new doctrines,”
the
architect, “declared that all pictures should
be kept in cupboards and that they
should only be hung on the walls for a few
hours, as the spirit happened to move
us.
He found the stable picture intolerable.
“This kind of painting was for long a subject
of acute controversy --
which makes a cool appraisal extremely difficult.
Yet the verdict of its most
adverse critics is not so damaging as a purely
historical interpretation, for this
last brings the questionable character of
these efforts to light by the simple
process of describing them.
“The inner relationship between this kind
of painting and the „modern’
building of yesterday is shown first and foremost
in their common desire to
dissolve the old orders.
As there are now buildings in which top and
bottom are
no longer clearly distinguishable, so there
are pictures in which top and bottom
can be confused with one another.
That is of course a purely external symptom,
though it is an extremely eloquent one; it
is moreover, something quite
unprecedented in the history of painting,
unprecedented even in its most daring
aberrations and it is an indication of the
extra-human, inhuman character of this
form of art.
In saying this we have really come into possession
of the key to the
understanding of modernist art in all its
phases, for these only really differ in the
means employed.
“All the new ways of looking at the world
which this modernist art brings
in its train are fundamentally extra-human
even in an outward and superficial
sense.
The photography even of the twenties, for
instance, is marked by a
tendency to avoid the „normal’ view of
human personality, and falls back on a
few mechanical formulae.
It favors pictures taken from above or below
and from
unusual angles, lighting effects that break
up the
subject, and distortions as in a distorting
mirror.”cccvii
Of course, in the film you see the same thing.
All kinds of experiments to
see how you can break up the picture or show
different pictures next to each other to make
some kind of striking effect.
“In doing this it merely goes along with
the essentially extra-human trend
in painting which gives clear expression to
its spiritual attitude.
Every art of
course in greater or less degree takes the
world that it finds and departs after its
own fashion from our normal experience [thereof]”
of this “in order [thus] to
create it anew, but modernistic art is driven
by an ungovernable urge to pass
beyond the limits of the „merely human.’
“This explains how the normal themes of
pictures of the mid-nineteenth
century take on a kind of [in extremis]”
extreme “aspect in which man appears to
surrender his essential humanity and begins
to see things as a man sees them in
delirium or in a nightmare, under the influence
of drugs, or under that of incipient
madness or extreme terror, and these „states
on the edge of madness’ produce
visions of the most astonishing kind.
The visible world, the world of actual forms
in portraiture, landscape, still-life and
every other kind of painting, even in what
is still alleged to be religious art, becomes
alien, distorted and horrible.
The
nature of its ordering becomes unstable and
resolves itself into fragments; form
disintegrates, becomes fluid and chaotic.
In some cases, man and his world are
transformed by the rigidity of death; familiar
things become strange and living
nature becomes nature morte.”
-- still life.
“It has been said [of]” that “Greek
art [that it] was harnessed between two
mighty powers which were perpetually at its
side and with which it ever had to
strive throughout the whole of its existence
in order to assert itself at all.
These
two powers were chaos and death.
The new painting, in its maniac desire to
shake off the fetters of the merely human,
has admitted these powers into art --
and with them a third, which the Greeks did
not know, and which it was left to
the Middle Ages to bring into our lives.
That power is Hell.
All this, chaos, death
and Hell, are antitypes of humanity.
The representation of a world which these
three powers have distorted is the essential
matter [in]” of “the new painting.
“The proximity of art to death and its kinship
to the atmosphere of death,
the atmosphere that makes all things cold
and rigid, is something not without
precedent in the history of art, something
that is only superficially formulated
by the terms
„Romantic’ and „Romantic Movement.’
When this phase occurs an exalted
nocturnal view of life, of nature and antiquity
breaks out of the depths of man’s
being -- but through it all man’s dignity
has been preserved.
The proximity of
death in the German romantic movement as it
is experienced in [Gilly, in]
Beethoven, [Kleist,] Holderlin, Novalis, Runge
and Friedrich, is tragic, but it is”
still “human.
In his surrender in art to the now unapproachable
sum of things man
asserts his law against chaos which for him
is a reality that he knows only too
well.
“In the modern phase, however, there is
combined with the consciousness
of death (which in a thousand forms lurks
behind all living things, makes its
awful presence known in a faded flower, in
an empty room -- [yes,] even in a still
life) there comes now a torturing doubt as
to the dignity and the very nature of
man.
That doubt may resolve itself into an agonized
acceptance of negation or
turn to a positive and cynical distortion
of his being.
Here the proximity of death
is no longer tragic, it is something infernal,
it is an affirmation of chaos, and it is
all the more terrible because there is no
province of life that is entirely immune to
this eruption of the nether world.
“Once Hell was a clearly circumscribed domain
that stood in contrast to a
universe that had meaning and reason.
But by an almost similar aberration as that
which, in the nineteenth century, caused men
to see the gleam of Heaven in the
„natural light’ which shown down upon
all things, so that even a load of hay was
transfigured by it,... there now erupt into
reality the most terrifying visions from
the antechambers of Hell and from all the
circles thereof.
The coming of these
visions was a thing unknown to those who conjured
it, but they come for all that,
nothing is immune to their influence.
Whatever belongs to horror and to night, to
disease, death and decay, whatever is crass,
obscene, and perverse, whatever is
mechanical and a denial of the spirit -- all
these modes, motifs and aspects of the
inhuman take hold of man and of his familiar
world.
They make of man a ruin, an
automaton, a mask, a phantom.
He sinks to the level of a louse, an insect.
In the
various movements of modern painting it is
always one or the other of these
various anti-human attributes that is underlined.
Cubism lays the emphasis on
deadness, Expressionism on boiling chaos,
Surrealism on the cold demonism of
the last icy regions of Hell.
Even if the actual works had been lost, the
very titles
chosen for the pictures by the men who painted
them would be sufficient to
betray their spiritual home -- „Fear,’
„Sick City,’ „Dying City,’ „Moribundus,’
[„Mon Portrait Squelettise,’]” “My
portrait as a Skeleton,” “„Plague Above,
Plague Below, Plague Everywhere,’ „The
Joke has conquered Suffering,’ „The
Dunghill,’ „Back Into Nothing.’
“The interpretation here adopted may at
first sight seem fantastic.
Yet, if
we look at the matter objectively, we will
find that it does just what a theory
ought to do, it explains a multiplicity of
data which we have till now had to try
and understand one at a time, it allows us
to recognize all the various „isms,’
from Futurism to Surrealism -- they are all
in one way or another a flight from
the higher reality -- as expressions (which
only differ from one another on the
surface) of the same basic powers, for although
human nature in all its
manifestations is always essentially one,
its denials are many.
Such a theory, in a
word, allows us to see through all the differences,
including the minutiae” details
“of technique....”cccviii
“...[T]here is, to speak in purely aesthetic
terms, a genuine art of the
horrible and the infernal, nor is this most
dangerous artistic potentiality by any
means to be denied.
It has lurked behind Nordic art from its very
beginnings, for
it was Nordic art that produced the image
of Christ disfigured in death, a thing
unknown to the art of Eastern Christianity,
as it also produced the picture of
Hell.
Bosch, Bruegel and Grünewald raised this
art of the horrible to the same
level that it attained in its most transfigured
and exalted forms, while Goya
widened its scope without for a moment deserting
the province of true art at all
-- and indeed we find on the threshold of
this new art of inward death and Hell a
number of artists whose genuine artistic power
cannot possibly be denied; Ensor,
Munch, Kubin, Schiele are examples.”cccix
“Van Gogh, Munch,” and this Munch we saw
this “Cry,” “Seurat,” the
pointillist, “all born about 1860, are the
first painters in which this new thing is
apparent, though they have not yet completely
surrendered to it.
It is only in
Ensor,” this one, [Fr.
S. shows illus., p. 141] “also born in 1860,
that it becomes
all-pervading.
For those born after 1860 it becomes their
destiny.
Long before the
First World War it revealed the nightmare
that was riding Europe in its great
cities.
After the war a definite artistic decline
set in, and it is now that the
symptoms of extreme degeneration come into
evidence.
With the „new
objectivity’ the most dead and banal form
is attained.
Regarded politically this
newest and latest art is the ally of anarchy,
psychologically it is the expression of
an enormous fear and of a hatred of the human
race which men turned against
their own persons.
The most profound explanation of the artistic
abortions which
now came into the world phenomena had already
been given by Goya, who
wrote under the title page of his collection
of paintings called [Suenos, „El sueno
de la razon produce monstruos’—]” “Dreams,”
“„When reason dreams, monsters are born.”cccx
And we see this is when reason comes to the
end of the Enlightenment,
there erupt into human life, irrational forces
which come from the demons.
...Actually it says, “El sueno de la razon
produce monstruos.”: the dream of
reason produces monsters.
And finally he talks about Surrealism.
“The leading theme of Surrealism is
chaos absolute, the movement seizes upon it
wherever it can be found -- in the
dark regions of the world of dreams, in hallucination,
in the „deranged’ and
irrational character of ordinary life, in
that department of reality in which things
that have no intrinsic connection with one
another have been brought together in
a fortuitous, senseless and fragmentary manner,
be it in the confusion of a great
city or in that of total war or in that of
a junk-shop -- the junk-shop’s „treasures’
seem to fill the Surrealists with quite peculiar
enthusiasm.
Their subject-matter
may be loosely defined as the „chaos of
total decay,’ not the chaos of creative
potentialities, but that of finality, not
the chaos of things coming to birth, but that
of things finished and done with, not the
chaos of fruitful nature, but that of the
unnatural -- a chaos „from which’”,
as Goethe says, “„the very spirit of God
Himself could hardly create a worthy world’
[(Goethe)].”cccxi
“There is no gainsaying the [movement’s]
power.”
of this movement of
Surrealism.
“Of all the trends of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, apart
from the new building, only two
[contrived]” managed “to survive the Second
World War -- positive realism in
painting and this same Sous-realism.
There are already Surrealist cells in many
countries -- and not in European countries
alone.
Compared with it,
Expressionism represents an altogether negligible
minority.
“No purpose is served by belittling such
a phenomenon, nor should one
comfort oneself with the pretense that such
things are mere extravagances, follies
or forms of some strange spiritual gain.
Even as early as 1860, Dostoyevsky
prophetically recognized in his People of
the Abyss that such types as those
which Surrealism has brought to full flower
had inevitably to come into being --
„given the circumstances in which our society
has developed’ -- and in the last
resort Surrealism only represents the final
acceleration in the downward rush of
man and art, that downward rush of which Nietzsche
was already aware when in
1881 he wrote [the fragment Der tolle Mensche]:
“„Are we not continually falling?
-- backwards, sideways and in all
directions?
Do top and bottom still remain?
Are we not wandering through
infinite nothingness?
Is not the breath of empty space in our faces?
Has it not
grown colder?’”cccxii [Emphasis in original]
We see here inner connection between philosophy,
politics and art....
He makes some conclusions: “...[O]ur diagnosis”
of modern art is “further
confirmed by the undeniable fact that modern
art finds no difficulty in portrayal
of the demoniac and of man himself turned
[demoniac,]” into a demon, “but” it
“finds insuperable difficulty in showing
us man as a human being, and” it “fails
utterly when it comes to the God-man and the
saint.”cccxiii
Modern art, “The attraction that is exercised
on the artist by the extrahuman and the extra-natural
by darkness, unreality and the subconscious,
by
chaos and nothingness has about it all the
qualities of an enchantment....”
Paul
Klee says, “„Our beating heart drives
ever deeper towards the ultimate ground
of things.’”cccxiv
“...[T]he disturbance” of modern art “extends
to man in all his different
aspects and relationships.
There is the disturbance of man’s relation
to God.
In
the sphere of art, this is made more palpable
than anywhere else by the nature of
the task that now absorbs creative energy
-- an energy which previously had
been absorbed by the temple, the church, and
the sacred image.
Man’s new gods
are Nature, Art, the Machine, the
Universe, Chaos and Nothingness.”cccxv
Now he talks in general about this whole movement
from the time of Enlightenment to now.
“In the pantheism and deism of the eighteenth
century a gulf was opened
up between man and God.
At first the idea of God seemed much [purer]”
more
pure “than that of a personal
God.
Our notion of God became divested of what
seemed to be an
anthopomorphic element, even as that element
was expelled from architecture.
What happened, however, was that this God
of the philosophers evaporated into
nature and vanished.
While this was happening, something was also
changing in
the idea of man, which was divested of its
theomorphic element even as God had
been divested of the anthropomorphic.
The result was very different from what
had been intended, for man by this process
was reduced to the level of an
automaton -- when he was not reduced to that”
level “of a demon.”cccxvi
“...the loss of God as a reality destroys
the original sense of reality as a
whole.
“Having lost that sense, man turns into
an anti-realist, into an idealist, a
being living among phantasms....”cccxvii
which opens opens up the possibility of
the devils to come.
Fr.
H: Imagination.
Fr.
S: “...[I]n the radical form of Deism the
divorce between
God and man arises from the fact that God
is relegated into the far distance, so
that God and the world begin to be regarded
as distinct and wholly separated
things.
God is the „absent God’ who created the
great clock which is the world
and duly wound it up.
That clock now continues to run according
to its own inner
laws, which means that the world unfolds itself
automatically.
This excludes the
possibility of any personal relation to God.
All mystery is eliminated -- indeed,
the chief work of one of the protagonists
of Deism, Toland, is called Christianity
not Mysterious.” as we already saw.
“...Everywhere spiritual relations now grow
cold.
Their place is taken by the frigid relations
of reason; doubt plays an ever
more decisive part, and everything that feels
the touch of his coldness is
transformed: The world becomes a world machine
-- man [an „hommemachine’],”cccxviii
a man machine.
As this, who was it, Avichy(?), I think, wrote
the book at the time of Voltaire, “[A]nd
the state becomes a state machine.
LeDoux,” remember the architect who made
the round, the spherical buildings,
he wanted to make, “who was doubtless an
adept in this peculiar type of religious
sentiment, asks, as he contemplates the earth:
[„Cette machine ronde, n’est elle
pas sublime?’]”
“This round machine, is it not sublime?”cccxix
“Man now becomes as isolated towards his
fellows as he is towards God,
and as isolated towards nature.
He is, as LeDoux himself says, „isolated
everywhere.’
We must thus infer that
Deism stands at the origin of those varied
phenomena which are characterized”
above “as a „tendency towards the inorganic.’
Its effect is everywhere deadening
and it makes men strangers to God and to each
other.”cccxx So actually this art
does have a religious background; it has a
background first of Deism.
Next we have pantheism.
And he discusses this in the poet Holderlin
at
this very time at the turn of the nineteenth
century.
“The individual figures, part
human, part divine,” in whom Holderlin worships
“„the divine,’ --” namely
“Christ,
Heracles and Dionysius --resolve themselves
into a nebulous something, that
is, so to speak, pre-divine or super-divine.
“This becomes all the clearer with the course
of time when Holderlin
addresses his „Holiest,’ nature.
He prays to something that seems to him older
and more holy than the figures of the personal
Gods.
„The great holy thing’
which
Holderlin recognizes in nature is nothing
that is close or familiar to man; he
cannot, as it were, „feel his way into it,’
he cannot discover himself in it, nor, as
the past age was able to do, can he look on
nature as a kinswoman and a friend.
“The „great holy thing’ is none of these
things, rather it is something that
wholly lacks a human character, or even an
organic character, a thing that has
neither personality nor destiny.
It is something that is the very opposite
to the
nature of man, it is the universal thing,
a thing that cannot actually be felt and is
infinite.
Holderlin likes best to designate it as ‘stille’
(„quietness’ or „silence’),
thus contrasting it with the busy activities
of men.
In order to approach it, man
must first destroy himself, he must go to
his death.”cccxxi
And finally he gives a sort of summation of
all these destructive, dark
influences as they have been in the history
of Western art.
And although he
himself was a lover of art before the Revolution,
that is, up to the eighteenth
century, in this little history of his, he
shows very well that these destructive
influences go right back precisely to the
moment where we discussed the
beginning of the apostasy, that is, the twelfth
century.
The first outburst of this demonic elements,
he says, occurs in the late
Romanesque.
“It is in this phase that the sacred world
is suddenly endowed to a
quite terrifying degree with a demoniac character.
Thus in the doorways” of
various cathedrals, “the sacred figures
have the appearances of corpses and of
ghosts, a thing that can in no wise be explained
by a certain remoteness from
humanity that marks the art of the high Middle
Ages.
Christ sometimes resembles
an Asiatic idol or an Asiatic despot.
The Apocalyptic beasts and the angels are
all
distorted by this demoniac quality.
This curious phenomenon cannot be explained
in terms of the dual intention that is discernable
in much medieval art, the
intention to administer a certain awful shock
to the beholder and at the same
time, by means of the sheer absurdity of the
visible symbols [it created], to spur
his mind towards purely spiritual contemplation;
for directly beside the sacred
figures, and in the very midst of them, and
indeed scarcely distinguishable from
them at all, are images of demons and of demoniac
beasts and chimaeras that
even invade the interior of the church.
“At the same time the figures themselves
begin to acquire a most
remarkable and unprecedented quality of instability.
Those on the great arch
above the door” of the Cathedral “at Vezelay
seem positively to be tottering, and
look as though they might crash down at any
moment from the great curve on
which they have so precarious a footing.
This is the period when figures begin to
be tangentially affixed to the frames of the
great doors, and it is to this period
that belongs the great Wheel of Fortune that
lifts a man up and [ineluctably]
casts him down, and it is this period also
that for the very first time stands
architectural forms upon their heads.
“All this is the visible expression of [that
volubilitas rerum,] that
instability of human affairs, that people
have suddenly begun to feel with a
peculiar and painful intensity.
It is in fact the visible symbol for the dominant
mood, the dominant feeling about life and
the world.
“In religion the dominant emotion is fear,
the principal theme is the Day
of Judgment, expressed to the uttermost potential
of all the terror that it can
inspire.
In the crypt-like gloom of the church we can
with our mind’s eye see the
faithful standing „in fear and trembling
before God.’
Never has the [mysterium
tremendum]” tremendous mystery “attained
such force over men’s minds.”cccxxii
So, already for some reason art begins to
become unstable.
Although the
main Gothic tradition goes on with its great
cathedrals, still he senses here some
kind of instability.
Why?
Because they, at that time they began to realize
that
they had lost Orthodoxy.
And the artist is more sensitive than other
people.
This
begins to come out in him.
And when Orthodoxy is lost, the demons begin
to
come in.
And therefore the demons directly inspire
the artists.
Then there’s a second period, which is that
of
Hieronymus Bosch.
“In the Romanesque” period “the demoniac
world had really
not yet achieved a separate life of its own.
It is only in the Gothic that light and
darkness are divided and the cathedral indirectly
brings into being as” its “polar
opposite to the
Heavenly Kingdom, which is shown forth in
itself, a Kingdom of
Hell,” even “though this [last] remains
[essentially]” still “a subordinate thing.
[Then]” Thus “as the representational
art of the late Middle Ages develops, we
begin to get painted representations of Hell.
The culminating point of this
development is to be found in Hieronymus Bosch
who flourished
[between 1480 and 1516.]”
around 1500.
“Bosch, a contemporary [and actual co-eval]
of Leonardo da Vinci,
created the world of Hell as a kind of chaotic
counterpart to the new cosmic art
of the High Renaissance,” which we already
saw, this idealistic, chiliastic
painting, “and what is entirely new about
Bosch’s infernal world is that it has its
own creative principles, its own chaotic „structure,’
its own formal laws, and it is
really these that make it into a true counterworld
to the worlds of Heaven and
earth.
It is only since Bosch that we have anything
like a picture of Hell made
visible.
“There is definite novelty in the very shapes
of these creatures from Hell.
They are not „fallen children of men, who
by a simple process of metamorphosis
have been turned into beasts of the Devil,’
but” they are “wholly independent and
as yet unknown forms of life, born of the
marriage of every conceivable kind of
creature, fish, beast, bird, witch and mandrake,
the products of a kind of
ungoverned cosmic lewdness and debauchery,
in which even lifeless things can
mingle with the living.
All this was something that lay wholly outside
the
horizons of antiquity.
“New also is the actual scenery of Hell,
and we see aspects of the face of
this earth which had never before been put
on canvas.
We see here dark gulfs,
empty stretches of earth and sea that seem
to tell us how utterly God has
forsaken them, the desolation of empty cities,
strange hideous places whose
vegetation are gallows-trees and wheels of
torture, slime and morass.
Here are
neither sun nor moon, such light as there
is comes from vast conflagrations or
from the irridescence of strange phosphorescent
shapes.
Hell can show us the
work of human hands, but it is distorted,
arid in decay.
Above all we see ruins,
we see them continually -- and in Hell there
are also arsenals, a fighting
equipment of strange machines, pieces of apparatus
that are often meaningless,
though sometimes they have a meaning, being
instruments of torture, while
through the air sail airships, demon manned
and demon piloted.”cccxxiii
“So long, however, as the world of Christian
belief remained an effective
reality” -- and at this time it was still
real, that is, Catholicism was still real,
and
even Protestantism had something left of Christianity
-- “So long...as the world
of Christian belief remained an effective
reality, the outlook behind such painting
must be interpreted as a vision of temptation.
The picturing of Hell therefore
remained to some extent hemmed in by Christian
orthodoxy [stet] and it was thus
only to be expected that it should attain
its full freedom and develop its most
extreme forms when art has finally left the
Christian world behind it.
It is,
therefore, wholly logical that Hieronymus
Bosch should have been rediscovered
in the twentieth century and should have become
one of the original parents of
Surrealism.”cccxxiv
“In Bruegel” -- and we showed you -- “In
Bruegel’s work there appears
another dominant theme of modern art, the
depreciation of man.
Man is looked at
from the outside; as something distasteful
and strange, much as we might regard
creatures of another planet.
Seen thus men appear base, unlovely and perverse,
clumsy, innane and absurd -- creatures in
fact possessing every quality capable of
exciting contempt, and this is true not only
of the peasant, of whom the late
Middle Ages tended rather to take this view,
but of man in general.
In the art of
Bruegel several undercurrents of medieval
art unite to form a new picture of man,
one which represents him as the very antithesis
and negation of holiness,
greatness, nobility and wisdom.
“The world of man, the world in which he
must act and live, is a world in
which all is done wrong, a world of chaos
and wholly without meaning.
Lurking
about him everywhere are the creatures of
Hell.
Death and madness lie in wait all
around him.
It is moreover a matter worthy of especial
note that Bruegel pays
such particular attention to the things which
are the special preoccupation of
modern psychology and the modern mind in general,
for his interest is drawn in a
remarkable manner, not towards the peasant
alone (the analogy here is with our
contemporary concern with the primitive),
but” also “to children, halfwits,
cripples, epileptics, to the victims of blindness
and intoxication, to the mass and
to apes.
Even quite ordinary things have a spell cast
over them that make them
look strange to the point of being unintelligible
-- much as Bruegel’s Beekeepers
look like walking tree-trunks -- so that a
game played by children looks like some
weird new manifestation of lunacy.”cccxxv
“This brief glance at the past makes it
clear that what was to become a
general disease in the nineteenth century
was coming gradually into being right
throughout the development of the West and
at various times overtly showed
certain of its symptoms.”cccxxvi
And he concludes his book by saying, “It
may be a somewhat
questionable proceeding to designate one’s
own age as the turning-point in the
history of [the world]” mankind, “nevertheless
it is difficult to shake off the
feeling that since 1900 a kind of limit has
been reached and that we are faced by
something wholly without precedent.”
In the world’s history.
“Beyond this limit
it is difficult to imagine anything except
one of two things -- total catastrophe or
the beginnings of regeneration.”cccxxvii
Of course, what’s coming seems to be a
kind of combination of the two.
Music.
About music, we won’t go in; it’s too
long a topic, but it’s enough to
mention one great historian of Western music,
Alfred Frankenstein, who died a
few, some years ago.
And he’s an expert in the Baroque period,
the classical
period, the Romantic period, the Medieval
music.
He’s written I believe a long
textbook of
Western music.
And when he comes to the twentieth century
he says, “With this I
end my history of music.”cccxxviii Because
after the beginning of the twentieth
century there’s no longer music in the West.
There is something which is entirely
on new principles, which cannot be understood
by the history of Western music.
And therefore he’s very much criticized
for the fact that he feels modern music is
totally outside any kind of tradition.
Of course it is.
Because we have at this time
mus, the Romantics who already said as much
as they could say.
You get in
Scriabin a terrible kind of ecstatic music
which is some kind of screeching, and
beyond that...
Fr.
H: What did he write...?
Fr.
S: He wrote a sort of Black Mass actually.
Fr.
S: Musical Black Mass?
Fr.
S: And beyond this you can’t go in the regular,
the old idioms of European
music.
And so they begin these frightful experiments:
the twelve tone system,
Schoenberg and his frightful operas, he wrote
Verklarte Nacht when the people
are screeching at each other for hours on
end; and it’s obviously meant to put you
in a crazy house.
But it’s very sort of expresses the period,
expressionistic, you
know, these German Expressionists with their
screaming people and frightful
horrors -- expresses the same kind of feelings.
And from that time on, there’s all
these experiments until you get now that there’s
concertos for tape, three tape
recorders, played simultaneously forwards
and backwards at five different
speeds, and all these ideas that hurly-churly
chant sounds will produce some kind
of new wonder.
There’s even a textbook of music.
It’s called, I think it’s called Music
Since
Debussy in which he says that the age right
now produces no music which is
worth anything because it’s all experiment.
But he said, “Out of all this
experiment, perhaps there will come a new
Golden Age, like the age of Bach and
Handel”cccxxix -- once all these experiments
have been finished.
And probably --
it’s something to say, something true there
because mankind has gotten used to all
these things; and therefore it’s possible
to reconstruct, if a person is a genius, to
take all these elements of disorder and come
up with some kind of a new
harmony.
And there’s already a new harmony which
will express the feelings of
the people, and will be for Antichrist.
And in fact, Thomas Mann has already
written a novel about that.
Thomas Mann.
Well, we’ll say one word about Thomas Mann.
He’s probably the only
great novelist the twentieth century produced.
M-A-N-N.
He died in 1955 at the
age of 80.
He was an exile from
Germany during the reign of Hitler.
Politically he’s very boring -- he’s a
democrat -- and looks for the reconstruction
of humanity after totalitarianism has
passed.
But in his art he’s very sensitive, more
like a German, he goes very deep.
[Editing in sections from Nietzsche 1980 Lecture]
You may recall in one of his
books, he talks about young students talking
together all night long, they’re
talking [about] what is reality, what is truth,
is there life after death?
And in the
middle of it they say, “You know, I bet
we Germans are the only people in the
world except for the Russians who do this
kind of thing, just talking all night
about what’s real, and what isn’t real.He
recognizes Russians are the ones who
expert....
And he wrote several novels which reflect
this -- from the point of view of,
well, an artist looking at the whole of society
- - reflect what is going on.
He’s not
a nihilist; he’s a humanist who has a very
positive outlook on life.
But he writes
about some of these movements, and sometimes
very, very profoundly.
He wrote a book called The Magic Mountain,
[one] of his best books,
which is a description of life in a tuberculosis
asylum, clinic in the mountains of
Switzerland.
And this is supposed to be an allegory of
modern European history
at the end of the first World War -- either
the end or beginning -- anyway, just in
the dawn of our own day.
And this is a peculiar kind of place where
everybody
has all kinds of strange philosophies, which
means all the different conflicting
philosophies of Europe.
And everybody who comes there gets sick, because
Europe is sick.
It’s sort of a parable of everybody who
comes in contact with
Western civilization absorbs this sickness.
You can’t escape it.
And the place
where they’re supposed to be curing, that
is, Europe, has the ability, the idea that
“We are the ones who know everything.
We’re going to cure you with our
Enlightenment.”
But you go there; you get in mixed up with
Europe, and you get
sick yourself.
No matter how you try, you don’t get cured.
Nobody goes back
alive.
They’re sort of all killed off by this thing.
In fact you cannot go to this, you
cannot visit your relatives in this place
without getting sick and you have to stay
there.
[You’re] stuck.
In other words, they [have] no other philosophy
of life to
overcome this sickness of Europe.
In fact there’s one very interesting scene
where they go to the movies.
There’s a movie.
And Thomas Mann gives his perceptions about
the film, that the
film is a very abnormal thing, a horrible
thing because what is sacred to man, his
own image, is captured, put independently
on a screen and then acts in spite of
you and you’re hopeless, you’re helpless.
And the image goes on acting from
then on.
It’s as though a part of your soul has been
taken away from you.
And he
can sit back and watch himself as though he’s
just kind of a separate being.
He’s
gives his sort of feelings from natural human
sense, because he was there at the
beginning of motion pictures, 1920’s.
In Germany was the great flowering of
movies.
He had a frightful feeling about movie, that
it’s something demonic.
And he says the whole thing is very abnormal,
makes
him feel very uneasy to see these ghost-like
figures on the screen, which have
no reality in themselves, only celluloid,
some kind of a flickering picture,
something that isn’t there.
And by the way I had a German professor who
the same feeling about
telephones.
He said, “I can’t stand telephones.
Whenever I hear it ring and I pick it up,
I get terribly afraid.
I hear a voice of
somebody a thousand miles away and I feel
it’s demons.”
It’s very interesting
how these deep thinkers have feelings like
that.
And he [Thomas Mann] then goes into things
like séances; [he]
deliberately went to a séance to experiment
to see if anything happens.
And it
did.
The table moved away from the air or something
kind of thing.
He was
persuaded there’s some kind of power there.
So he has that also as part of this
Magic Mountain.
At the end, he has this one very striking
scene where someone
says, “Let’s have a séance, we have somebody
here who can conjur spirits.”
And
everybody says, “Oh, wonderful!”
And most people are sort of joking about it,
“Well, you can believe in all kinds of things,
why don’t we believe in that?
Let’s
try it out.”
And they all get together, and all of a sudden
a spirit begins to grip
them, and they see before their eyes some
kind of a shape begin to form, to
materialize.
And when they look, it is the ghost of somebody
they all know, a
spectre, somebody’s father or something
all of a sudden appears in front of them
all; and they are so frightened by this, that
it produces a terrible effect upon them.
And this is sort of stuck in there with no
sort of statement why, but we know that
Thomas Mann in his non-fiction writings was
very interested in spiritualism and
went to séances and tested them out and took
notes about them, and came away
convinced that there is some power at work
which is producing these various
phenomena.
And to a Europe which has no philosophy of
its own, and is sick,
this begins to become very attractive.
And one of his last novels is called Doctor
Faustus, which is a description
of a musical genius in the modern idiom, as
described by an ordinary, young,
middle-class student who went to school with
this genius.
Usually he tells his
stories through the third person who’s a
typical German middle-class person with
average values, German values: cleanliness
and precision and study, thrift and all
these wonderful things the Germans are noted
for.
And he has such a way of
presenting his novels when he talks about
these -- either spiritualism or anything
which is very demonic or extraordinary -- he
has a way of describing it through
the eyes of somebody who is completely normal,
and completely matter-of-fact
so that you’re all the more horrified by
what comes out.
And just like
Dostoyevsky talked about Ivan Karamazov in
his vision of the devil as though
it’s a hallucinationcccxxx, but still he’s
getting across a very important point.
And so
you have this completely normal man [whose]
fellow student in college is a
student in music.
So he describes the career of this musician,
this composer, as
though he’s an ordinary man, very talented,
but he seems to have some kind of
strange things about him, as though he wants
something, that he can’t be satisfied
with ordinary things.
He wants more.
And he keeps wondering about this.
And he
notices after he gets out he wants to become
a great composer.
And he produces
tremendous, has some kind of tremendous fits
of energy and inspiration, and he
comes up with some fantastic new things.
He begins composing all kinds of
weird things and making up new atonal systems,
and fifteen notes instead of eight
and all kinds of fantastic new things just
because he’s driven by some kind of a
thing.
And finally he produces his masterpiece which
is “The Apocalypse”, for I
think a thousand voices, fifteen hundred instruments,
the most fantastic work of
music ever composed -- and they actually perform
it someplace with a thousand
voices.
It shows how the devil sort of gave him this
tremendous talent to
persuade audiences with this gift of his,
on the condition that he sell his soul.
And
he [the narrator] wonders how he got the inspiration
for that, and he manages
somehow to observe him at work.
And then he discovers that there’s someone
who comes to pay him a visit, that he’s
speaking to somebody who isn’t there.
And during these moments of speaking to somebody
who isn’t there, he gets
tremendous inspirations; [there] begins to
open up to him the possibility for going
deeper into music and making some kind of
musical composition that noone has
ever done before.
He’ll be the greatest composer there ever
was.
It turns out that
it’s the devil.
He finally sells his soul to this devil in
order to gain this ultimate
thrill in composing music.
And then he gives this to the people and the
people
say, “This is wonderful; this is the great
pinnacle of modern music.
Finally
modern music has achieved its masterpiece.”
And it’s obvious that the man sold
his soul to the devil, like Doctor Faustus.
He doesn’t say this in so many words,
but what he describes is exactly the same
thing: the man, for the sake of earthly
creation, he has given away his soul.
And the demons invade.
So that’s another writer who taught, although
he’s not as profound as
Dostoyevsky, but nevertheless he’s very
aware of a lot of these currents of
modern thought.
So we have seen in this book [Art in Crisis]
how this whole phenomenon
we’ve been studying -- the revolutionary
world-view of modern man, which
means not just the political revolution, the
whole new anti-Christian revolution --
is something which bursts out not just in
the political revolution, and not just in
somebody’s philosophy, but bursts out quite
independently in art and poetry and
many other spheres.
And it bursts out in art before the Revolution.
That is, these
schemes for the spheres we saw, and Goya’s
things, well, Goya’s first demonic
ones before the Revolution.
So it is not simply being inspired by the
political
event; it is rather an example of the same
force which produced that event is
producing also the art.
That is, there are inspirations which come
undoubtedly
from demons.
And although we do not see exactly how the
demons inspire, it’s
obvious that this is the work of demons inspiring
these artists.
And these are not
just some kind of crazy people, by the way.
It would be very nice if we could say
these are crazy people and not typical at
all of ordinary people who we see in the
supermarket, and therefore we can forget them.
That’s the same kind of psychology which
tells you that, “Well, it’s all
right for Russians or the Vietnamese.
They want that kind of government; let
them have it, and we’ll just go on.”
In fact
Solzhenitsyn said yesterday [July 1975], he
was in Washington and spoke to a
group of senators and congressmen, about a
hundred of them, and at the end of
this he said, “Here in the vast spaces of
this continent, it is difficult to believe
what is happening in the world.
But, gentlemen, there is no longer to be any
safe
life.
Neither we nor you will have a safe life.
May it happen that God will grant
you that when you come to your crisis, you
will have such leaders as you had at
the beginning of the Revolution, who still
believed in human nature and did not
mock the idea of good and evil.”cccxxxi
Unfortunately it so happens that this age
of humanism which produced
even America, the founding fathers, and the
art of that century is something
which is almost like a utopia now.
We can’t go back to it.
That was the age halfway between the old Orthodox
age and the new age of chaos and revolution.
And for a moment there was some kind of harmony
and peace, but the process
that had been started was already carrying
mankind further.
And it happens that
this process is expressed most clearly in
the great revolutionaries and the radical
philosophers, and these wild artists.
And so actually we see in them how the demonic
bursts into the world.
But
if that demonic did not already have control
over all the people living in the
world, these painters would be forgotten.
They would not be known; they would
not be held up as the examples of great painters.
Their revolutions would die out;
there would be nobody to follow them.
The fact that the majority of people are of
the same mentality, are prepared for that
which these prophets of the new times,
they see.
That is why we have such a disordered age.
And in fact we can say even
the ordinary
people who go to the supermarkets and are
satisfied with themselves are more,
they’re worse off than these other ones
because the other ones are the ones who
are tortured so often they are rebelling against
this everyday supermarket
mentality of people who are “Oh, everything’s
all right.
Things are going just
fine.
And the Gulag -- it doesn’t touch me.”
Those kind of people drive to fury
these people who are really deep, they want
something, they want God.
And God
has been cut off.
And so they go to the devil.
But the devil has the grip over the
whole world.
And that’s why they stand out.
Spiritualism.
So that brings us to our next subject -- Spiritualism
and a few more aspects
of the disjointed world of our times.
This phenomenon of spiritualism [is] very
symptomatic in modern times, in the last two
centuries.
This takes us to the
middle of the nineteenth century, the very
time when this art is bursting out with
its demonic apparitions.
And the year is 1848, which is exactly the
year of the
great revolutions in Europe.
As it were, this same demonic power bursts
out in
one form in the revolutions, in another form
all of a sudden begins to make
[knocks three times] some kind of tappings,
which opens up the possibility to
communicate with another world.
These began in Hydesville, New York, near
Rochester.
And there were
two sisters, Falk sisters, who were able to
interpret these knockings.
And later
on they went through all kinds of, they were
accused, accusations of fraud and
deception; and one of the sisters confessed
that she had done the knocking with
her knuckles or something.
Later she repented that she’d confessed.
And one of
them became a Catholic nun, and....
Anyway, it doesn’t make any difference what
happened to them.
The fact is that
these knockings begin to break out, and then
the mediums began to take over.
And within a very short time, the mediums
were going to England.
England and
America are the two basic centers of spiritualism.
They began to form their own
church, and to this day there are spiritualist
temples all over America and
England and a few outside.
This is another case where this practical
everyday Anglo-Saxon mentality,
the same mentality also which is behind the
dreams of socialism, like Owen, has
a very powerful affinity with this mystical
side, with spiritualism.
Not with true
mysticism, not with any kind of true contact
with God, but rather with something
bound up with an externalization of some kind
of mysticism.
Because
spiritualism is a contact with some other
world which does not depend upon how
much one has transformed oneself.
It only depends upon how much you have
educated your mediumistic faculties.
Of course, it is required before you believe
in spiritualism that you have totally disbelieved
in Christianity, have come to
believe a very vague kind of Christianity.
You no longer know the difference
between divine phenomena and demonic phenomena,
and you are prepared to
accept anything which proves the existence
of something supernatural or
preternatural as coming from the spirit -- the
same mentality as in back of the
Pentecostal movement which develops later
in the century.
There are many phenomena of this movement.
There are tappings; there
are sometimes voices.
There are apparitions wherein a whole ghost
supposedly
can be manifested.
There are partial manifestations such as a
hand will suddenly
appear.
And Thomas Mann saw a hand being materialized.
There are something
called “automatic writing.”
In fact I saw one.
I once bought a book on
spiritualism, and inside there was a little,
a sheet of paper with the tiniest, tiniest
handwriting.
It was impossible for a human hand to write
-- tiny, tiny -- several
pages on one page, and it said and began -- and
very smooth -- it said,
“This message is not written by a human
hand.”
And it traces out the
message.
And we know this is possible because Madame
Blavatskaya, the
founder of Theosophy, was herself an expert
athings like materializing dishes.
And they would give her – they would put
a piece of paper and lock it inside of
some kind of a dish, or some kind of a cabinet.
And she would concentrate for
ten minutes, and then open the cabinet, and
there would be something written on
the piece of paper which she had, her demons
had come to her help and written it
down.
Sometimes they can even see a pen come out
of nowhere and begin
writing with no hand in back of it.
All these are the standard tricks of the devils
because they are able to do
things like materialize objects and strike
people and lift tables.
There’s a whole
technique which is already in our article
on the charismatic movement about how
they do this.
They get together and get some kind of psychic
energy by holding
hands.
And this involves the sphere of the unconscious,
the psyche of man which
is a very deep sphere which we don’t know
too much about.
And there’s a great
deal of energy there which can be channeled.
And of course the main ingredient
of these phenomena are the demons themselves
who come to the aid of the
medium.
And a person who is well trained in mediumism,
has a certain faculty
for it, is able to conjur up demons under
the state of being in a deep trance.
Of course, the reason why this is condemned
by God is because this is a
very dangerous sphere of spiritual realities
which are too much for us.
When
these realities come to the saints, that is,
the demons attack the saints, frightful
battles go on.
But now mankind has become civilized and the
demons appear
under very civilized guises.
And they come up with a philosophy which is
so
stupid and so contradictory and so much in
harmony with what Emerson or
somebody else is saying.
As soon as Communism comes into fashion, then
the
Theosophists start talking like Communists,
and so forth -- just picking up
whatever is in the air.
And the spirits give you exactly what any
old preacher can
give you in a spiritualist temple without
any spirits, or in any Protestant church
for that matter.
There’s one thing which the spiritualists
lay great emphasis upon as a
proof of the existence of the spirits.
That is the scientifically demonstrable fact
that whenever the spirits come, the temperature
in the room drops several
degrees.
And they’ve conducted experiments with thermometers
to show that, I
don’t know, three or five degrees, something
like that, the temperature drops in
the room when the spirits come.
Of course, for us that’s conclusive proof
that
these are devils because the devils are cold,
and it comes out even physically.
And experiencing a chill in the presence of
some kind of demonic phenomenon is
not just the imagination.
These new powers are those who are now to
give mankind a new religion.
And no longer is it to be a religion in which
man freely gives his soul to God in
obedience.
Now man is going to be compelled to believe
because there are
outward proofs which show that there are spirits.
Western philosophy had come
to the point where no longer did we believe
in God or any kind of otherworldly
beings.
And now as though from underneath the spiritual
reality comes up.
This
makes it possible...[tape break]
3.
Leads to “scientific” approach to religion
-- Steiner, Society for Ps.
R., extra-sensory phenomena -- especially
parapsychology well developed
in Russian and other Communist countries.
Affinity of atheistic-socialism
with occultism-spiritualism.
Development of higher senses, higher science
--
science must end in spiritualism: Steiner
54.
...Saint-Simon and Teilhard de Chardin and
others who dreamed about the
reconciliation of science and religion.
And from this time on there begin to be
formed societies for the scientific study
of spiritual phenomena.
In England there
was the Society for Psychical Research, where
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a
leading representative.
And here the distinguished agnostics of Victorian
England
found their way back to spirituality.
And they wrote books about it which are so
naive and fantastic, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
and his Sherlock Holmes, detective
mentality, pure rationalism is attracted by
spiritualism - - same thing, the
practical mind because the upper reality is
closed off.
As soon as some kind of
spiritual reality enters the realm of phenomena,
they fall for it.
And they have no
standard with which to judge any more.
This
Fr.
H: Is that the book?...
Fr.
S: The “Christianity without mystery”
has now giving way to actually
non-Christianity with mystery.
In our own times we have the various societies
for studying extra-sensory
phenomena.
“Parapsychology” it’s called, at the
laboratory at Duke University,
Virginia.
And this science, incidentally, is extremely
well developed in the Soviet
Union and also other places like Hungary.
Because the Soviets are very realistic
and open to anything which can be powerful.
And since they have found that
there is something to extra-sensory perception,
there are some kind of faculties in
the human being which seem to be above our
ordinary five senses, therefore
they’re developing them to see if they can’t
make this into some kind of a
weapon for warfare or for making Communism
more secure or just for advancing
science.
There was even an example -- unfortunately
I’ve lost the newspaper
clipping -- but at the Congress of the Communist
party in 1955 or 6, there was a
woman who got up in Moscow and gave her testimony
of how Lenin had
appeared to her, and told what was to be voted
on at the next assembly, the next
Communist Party meeting.
And it was recorded and simply accepted.
In this period also we have another interesting
example of someone, an
English woman who is, has both the socialist
and occultist mentality, Miss Annie
Bessant, who was a woman’s rights crusader
and socialist who was converted by
Madame Blavatsky and became president of the
Theosophical Society and ended
up by educating the “messiah.”
That is, the young Indian boy, Krishnamurti,
whom by the time he was four years old she
proclaimed was going to be the
future messiah.
Her name is Annie Besant, B-E-S-A-N-T.
And he finally grew
up and renounced the messiahship, and went
around teaching himself.
And to
this day he teaches, he goes to north of Santa
Barbara, there’s a camp, Ohai.
In
Holland there was a place, some kind of summer
camp where he goes and gives
lectures and he writes books, says he’s
not the messiah, but he’s giving the
gospel to the new age.
I think he’s still alive.
Krishnamurti’s his name.
This is the age also of the founding of the
Theosophical Society by
Madame Blavatskaya, the Russian medium, who
claimed from the very day of
her baptism she was the sworn enemy of kings
and the church because when she
was baptised the priest almost burned to death
when a candle fell over and burned
his robes up.
From her very childhood she had manifested
these psychic talents of
manifesting objects and so forth.
Madame Blavatskaya wrote tremendous big volumes:
Isis Unveiled.
She
taught the, [or] she thought she was teaching
Eastern wisdom which she got from
the masters in Tibet.
And there are very tricky means by which she
got
revelations: a letter would suddenly be fluttering
down into the room.
She would
read it and there was the latest revelation
from the Mahatmas in India.
Fr.
H: “Didn’t Christian Science come from
the same thing?
Fr.
S: And later on when India, when Tibet was
already more explored, the
Mahatmas moved into outer space.
And now they’re on some planet.
Student:
She used to be a circus performer...
Fr.
S: She was definite, she was a medium; she
was definitely a welldeveloped medium.
But there were so many of these phenomena
that we can’t
discuss them.
There’s one of these people involved with
these occult movements who is
perhaps more interesting than the others.
His name is Rudolf Steiner.
He was
also a Theosophist and finally kicked out
of the Theosophical Society because he
was a little too smart.
And so he founded his own society called Anthroposophy,
wisdom of man.
This is his picture.
He is rather smarter than most occultists
who
are usually extremely naive in that most theosophists
and spiritualists usually are
extremely shallow, simply open to whatever
the spirits tell them.
He was a man
who was more a philosopher.
He was a great student of Goethe, and found
that
Goethe was the great mystic of our times who
was going to unite religion and
science.
And he developed a kind of spiritualism which
he thought was scientific;
that is, he was looking at the whole of reality,
both the outward reality which
science examines and the inward reality which
he got in visions.
He tried to
make some kind of synthesis between them.
And his writings are still quite
seriously studied by all kinds of serious
people.
He has founded some schools
which are still in existence, which teach
things like Eurhythmy which is how to
move your body and dance in order to somehow
acquire spirituality, which
seems to give some kind of results.
And he has an interesting thing to say about
what he was striving for:
“The scientist contemplates matter as complete
in itself without being
aware that he is in the presence of spirit
reality manifesting itself in material
form.
He does not know that spirit metamorphoses
itself into matter in order to
attain to ways of working which are possible
only in this metamorphosis.
For
example, spirit expresses itself through a
material brain in order that man may by
that process of conceptual knowledge attain
to free self-consciousness.
By means
of the brain, man derives spirit out of matter,
but the instrument he uses is itself
the creation of spirit.”cccxxxii
And in our days when science has come to a
dead end and doesn’t see
what matter is, finds that it cannot define
matter by itself, he wants to come to
the rescue and give them a science which is
based upon something “higher,” that
is, on spiritual reality, which, he says is
verifiable in experience.
In fact, the cry
of all the Theosophists and spiritualists
is “Try it yourself.”
You can be
convinced by your own experience, if you follow
the rules for getting in contact
with spirits.
Of course, which is against the freedom of
Christianity which is the fact
that you have faith in God and give up your,
give yourself to God Who is above
you out of free choice, and not because you’ve
been, it’s been proved to you,
because you are in contact with some kind
of reality which forces itself upon
you.
Of course all this spiritualistic phenomena
results, just like modern art --
with which it is, has much in common, in fact
many of these artists have very
occult ideas -- result in the same kind of
a disjointed, fragmentary world where
beings all of a sudden pop out of some kind
of space, a hand appears all of a
sudden; you can materialize objects, you can
materialize some kind of ghosts.
And this is very much, it’s very strange
to the normal enlightened, modern
attitude of material reality.
[From 1980 Nietzsche lecture, could be dated
Winter 1981-82:]
I didn’t mention here all these cults and
so forth which came as a result of
this idea of Kant, that the self, the mind
is the center of the universe.
But there are
a lot of them: from Mormonism, the idea that
you can now trust your revelations
that come to you.
And the nineteenth century is full of people
who trusted
whatever kind of impressions came to them
and made a new religion, like Mary
Baker Eddy made the Christian Science, and
Ellen Wise made the Seventh Day
Adventists.
William Miller also a Seventh Day Adventist
and went out and
started the Jehovah’s Witnesses -- all of
them based sort on the fact that they
themselves are like a god who has a new revelation.
And everybody follows
them.
But here’s one that happened to be in a
magazine here, and one of these
cults which calls itself Hindu, actually it’s
Hindu for an American scene.
It’s the
magazine of the Hari-Krishna Movement which
is in full-color, very impressive.
It’s called Back to Godhead.
„Course, we see here where the self-centered
Western philosophy hooks up with Hinduism.
This movement began in the
nineteenth century.
Because in Hinduism, you become god.
See, you can
meditate, chant, and you get into this state
where God enters into you, and
therefore you literally become a god; your
Self becomes a god.
It fits very nicely, Hinduism is just right
with the whole philosophy of
evolution, with Nietzsche and all the rest.
But it’s the combination of [Hinduism
and these other philosophies].
You can see that when it’s in India, I don’t
know,
it’s just plain paganism; but when it’s
on American soil, it fits in with our selfcentered,
pampered mentality.
It’s very sensuous.
Here you see these young
people, miss America or American boys who
shave their heads, put on these
robes and look like representatives of the
new religion.
And they’re all happy and
joyous and chanting.
And here’s their god, who’s very inspiring,
isn’t he?
The
great prophet.
He died a year or two ago.
And then there’s all kinds of various articles
and tapes, transcendental
sounds.
You listen to these sounds: Golden Avatar
tape subscription.
You get to
listen to all kinds of sounds which bring
your mind up into heavenly realms.
You
know, talk about all kinds of contemporary
subjects like science.
They invite you
to have feasts, [a] full-course yoga meal
and share chanting with them.
There’s
some kind of ancient text they translate,
and news items.
And then in the theatre
they have Bhagavad-Gita in the form of a play;
and all dressed up for hours, they
make themselves up in these costumes, stand
in front of the mirrors.
And when
they dance, it looks very sensuous and happy,
and look like they’re a little bit
sexually “off.”
They sort of get a thrill out of this, shaving
their heads and
looking like a bunch of weirdos.
And they lose themselves in meditating and
chanting.
Remember in our Orthodoxy and the Religion
of the Future we described
their temple in San Francisco, how they just
stand there for hours, they’re
beating the drums and beating the drums and
beating the drums.
And all around
the walls there’s these pictures from the
Bhagavad-Gita, this sensuous kind of
costumes, silky kind of robes.
You get into the real state in which you’re
not
present at all; it’s like being on drugs.
Take a look at these costumes they have.
And then fantastic stories, because nowadays
we like science fiction and
space fantasies and so forth.
So here’s a whole story about “The Boar
Who
Battled for Planet Earth,” and you get a
whole fantasy story about a cosmic pig
who wants to devour earth.
That takes care of your fantasy needs.
This is like
Brahma, he’s greater than all the heavens.
So this boar also is much bigger than
the earth; he could swallow the earth up if
he wanted to.
That’s the ancient paganism which comes
right back into our temporary life.
But
in the very kind of a self-centered and sensuous,
and it’s obvious all this, incense
and the chanting, the costumes, and you take
off your Western clothes and put on
these robes, and makes you feel very important,
very part of the new, and it’s all
self-centered.
...[I]t’s adapted to American needs.
And this man here, this is the head, the one
who is their guru or their
avatar, he was just an ordinary businessman
in India.
He didn’t have any future
there at all.
He came to America and discovered that here
he can make his living
at kind of being like a god to all these people.
But Americans now are reduced,
because those who do not consciously wake
up to what Christianity is, and begin
to see that in the world there’s tremendous
evil fighting for souls, could very
easily fall into these traps.
And therefore those who don’t fall for Hari-Krishna
fall for some other kind of movement.
And various kinds of even Protestant...
Fr.
H: Sometimes they fall for Orthodoxy with
all the icons, and the incense
Fr.
S: Also.
Fr.
H: and the canons and all that business.
You give them the whole thing,
rich (?) no exception.
Fr.
S: Therefore, there has to be a criticism,
there has to be a awareness of
what is what.
What is our religion based on?
So there’s two big things fighting.
One is true Christianity,
Orthodoxy, and the other is this new philosophy
which most people are not aware
of.
Most people who go for the contemporary beat,
rock’n’roll or various kinds
of modern culture, art, music and religion
-- they aren’t particularly aware that
they’re part of this movement.
They just go over to it because that’s what’s
in the
air.
People around them are doing it; they feel
a need for it, and they follow
without being conscious of it.
But we who are studying this have to be conscious
of what’s going on.
Any questions on all this so far?
Is it clear what they, the combination of
ideas [is producing]?
Hume destroys external reality.
Kant restores the Self as the
center of reality, mind or the Self as the
center of reality, and then this becomes
the new god.
This is the new god; the old God is dead.
Fr.
H: But for those who are not Orthodox, those
who not keeping, not
protecting Orthodoxy.
Fr.
S: Those who just go along with the times,
whatever’s in the air.
Fr.
H: Right.
Student: Do you think Kant (knocked over?
knew?) this philosophy...
progressed the way it has (?)
Fr.
S: Well probably, probably just, yeah, because
he’s, sort of you can see in,
he’s actually sort of just expressing the
philosophy of it.
And that element was
already there; therefore, it probably would
have gone anyway.
He expresses this
and so you can see that this is sort of the
underlying philosophy of what we’re
having.
Because in himself, he’s not, I would say
he’s less, he’s not influential in
the sense that people read him and got these
ideas, rather, he’s symptomatic,
expresses what’s in the air.
So that’s one aspect.
Again, there’s another aspect which is revealed.
We
just got this magazine, just as we’re talking
about the subject, about
“Empowering the Self.”cccxxxiii They seem
to be very good people, these scientists
called the Spiritual Counterfeits Project
in Berkeley.
They are some kind of
fundamentalists who talk about all kinds of
aspects of fake spirituality.
And
almost everything they write is good.
They expose the Maharishi and
Scientology and all these cults, everything
which is not basic Christianity.
They
have a whole series of articles on the Self,
cosmic humanism, or human
potential.
See that’s also self-centered, [the] human
potential movement which is
now in our times.
They are coming from psycholanalysis and so
forth.
He talks
about several movements here which may be
very symptomatic.
Yes, one talks about the human potential movement
and he says that some
of the basis of, as a condition to faith in
human reason, a new view of humanity
contributes to the belief in self-transformation.
This human potential
emphasizing what I can, how I can develop
myself, how I can discover
something better.
“Our culture traditionally embraces a Christian
view of people as limited
creatures, separate from God, creatures who
are a curious, paradoxical mix of
good and evil qualities.
That view is now being challenged by an Eastern/occult
concept of humanity implicit in the human
potential movement.
The basic tenet
of this occult world-view is that all is one:
the world of matter, the world of
spirit, these are the same essence.
If all is one, then...
differences are illusory.
Reality is not what appears to this myriad
objects,
persons, thoughts, ideas of God, morality
or beauty.
What
appears is merely subjective to each person;
the reality is a unity beyond
appearance.”
You can see Hume, Kant.
Then it’s “only a short step to the
conclusion that one creates” one’s own
“reality, that is, one perceives what one
desires to perceive.
Those perceptions are not accurate or inaccurate.
They’re
merely part of the illusion of reality beyond
which lies oneness,” which is “the
„real reality.’
“If all is one, a person’s existence as
part of that oneness is as sacred and
powerful as any other part of the whole.
God then becomes part of the unity, of
which each individual is a manifestation.
As persons break out of the grip of
illusion,” which is “(reality as perceived
in the material world), god-like
transcendence, an experience of oneness with
the universe may be experienced....
The height of the hierarchy of human needs
is the experience of oneness with all
things.
Persons in essence become God.”
“Patients,” who are being psychoanalyzed,
“have within themselves the
answers to their own problems.”cccxxxiv
Within Christianity, you come with
problems, and we give you the answers.
This is what God commands.
You
change your life in accordance.
According to the new idea, and psychoanalysis
is
full of that, you have the answer’s within
yourself.
“Let’s work them out, let’s
see how, what your needs are and how we can
express your needs.”
Student: That’s sort of on the line of Scientology,
isn’t it?
Fr.
S: Yeah, yeah, it’s one of these cults.
The same, exactly the same thing.
The therapist merely provides a climate of
acceptance which enables the person
to discover those answers from within.
Unlocking universal human wisdom in an individual
traditionally has been the
role of the shaman or occult priest, now becomes
the work of the
psychotherapist.
So that’s definitely self-worship, you make
your own reality and the new
reality comes out from within yourself.
And if you have some kind of perversions
within yourself, then you have to see how
you can express them in some way
that’s not too difficult for society to
accept, whether it’s right or wrong, they
don’t say anything.
The psychoanalist doesn’t tell you you’re
right or wrong.
If
they give you [anything], he’s going to
give you a value system, that means he’s
a
religion.
He has to be scientific, therefore, you have
to work it out from within
yourself.
Therefore, their assumptions are that: humanity
is good, that men
naturally move towards growth, that all the
right values are already inside the
individual, don’t come from outside, that
human potential is unlimited, that most
important thing is experience, that you’re
autonomous, all by yourself.
The goal
is personal awareness.
And as far as the outside world is concerned,
everything is
relative.
You don’t know what’s, whether there’s
God, there isn’t any God.
The only
absolute is change.
And there’s no evil.
All the good comes within the
individual.
“With that set of presuppositions about
the nature of humanity, God,
and the world, humanistic psychology became
the soil in which the human
potential movement has flowered.
The cultural climate of the 1960’s was perfect
for this.”cccxxxv
“By the 1970’s, a human potential movement
spreading eastward from
California had spawned 8000 different therapies,
a system of odds and ends of
psycholanalysis, Eastern religions, sexual
experimentation, game playing and
old-time revivalism.”cccxxxvi
There was one called Transactional Analysis,
an early influential
manifestation of human potential thinking.
There’s a book called I’m OK, You’re
OK.
It was, everything’s just fine the way it
is.
I recall when I was studying Zen
that was the thing that was emphasized, that
Zen just accepts reality the way it is,
doesn’t add any values to it.
Just accept it the way it is, just the way
you are.
Just
let loose, let go, and God will take over
-- if you believe in God or the cosmic
mind.
Just relax, take it easy, and let nature
come out.
The individual is good and should follow his
own experience.
“I’m
OK, therefore, I do not need to follow any
structure or values imposed from
without.
To free myself from my parent or conscience.”
It’s an idea [that] you’ve
been under the tyranny of your parents all
this time and now you ought to wake
up and become [an] independent, autonomous
personality.
Well, that fits in
because a teenager likes to rebel, wants to
assert himself as individual, therefore
reject the parent which is the same thing
as conscience, and listen to my own
desires, believe them to be good.
This will result in my growth and the realization
of my full potential.
The Transactional Analysis textbook asks one
to pick up a
mirror twice in the day, look into it and
declare: I’m OK,... just the way I am, I’m
perfect....
