Metropolitan Anthony Bloom discusses meaning, beauty and ugliness in these four transcripts available on the MAS Archive:
On Meaning http://masarchive.org/Sites/texts/1982-11-01-1-E-E-C-IK01-001TSLecture1-Meaning-EliotLectures.html
On Beauty Part 1 http://masarchive.org/Sites/texts/1982-11-02-1-E-C-IK01-001SLecture2-Beauty-EliotLectures.html
On Beauty Part 2 http://masarchive.org/Sites/texts/1982-11-03-1-E-C-IK01-001Lecture3-BeautyCont-EliotLectures.html
On Ugliness http://masarchive.org/Sites/texts/1982-11-04-E-E-C-IK01-001Lecture3-Ugliness-EliotLectures.html
T. S. Eliot Lectures by the Most Reverend Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh
1 November 1982
From what you have just heard it is quite obvious that I have no qualification to speak in the context of the T. S. Eliot lectures. The only direct link I have with Eliot is a conversation I had a few years ago with one of our Orthodox spiritual guides. He strolled into my room, holding a hook in his hand, looked at me severely, and said: "I have brought you a book; what happened here is what will happen to you", and he made me a present of “Murder in the Cathedral”. I am still waiting for the prophesy to be fulfilled, and this is all really I can say in my defense in the context of these lectures. Yet, I am interested in poetry and in beauty; ultimately to me the name of God is beauty and I think that I would agree with a friend of mine who said many years ago: "when God looks at a human being he does not see either achievement or virtues, which may not be there, but He sees beauty which nothing can eradicate". So that the ultimate meaning of things for me can be put in set in terms of beauty or alternatively of ugliness.
I want to speak on the subject of “meaning”, because whether we are aware of it, conscious of it or not, we relate to things only to the extent to which they have meaning for us. A totally meaningless thing is something to which we cannot relate. In a way it is like a language, if we hear a language spoken of which we have no notion - at a certain moment, after a while when we no longer listen to its flow of music we contract out and so beauty, as an ultimate revelation of things created and of the creator, and meaning, as something essential in relation to life in all its expressions is also an essential element.
In poetry, or other forms of art, meaning may be at the very centre of things. The poet - and may I remind you that from its Greek roots a poet is a creator - the poet is one who conveys meaning, who makes sense of things, who discloses to us a depth and a significance in things which we, or most of us, are incapable of perceiving, more incapable very often of expressing. This meaning can be conveyed by a variety of ways. It is not only poetry - words, rhythms, sounds? it is not only music, there are many ways in which meaning reaches us. I will give you a few examples.
In the works of the French poet, Victor Hugo, there is a page on which there is a date, and a dotted line. This is the day when he suffered a bereavement which could not be put into words. It could not be put into sound, it could not be expressed in any way except in silence. This blank page conveys meaning as much as any words, and more than any words could convey.
There is, in the history of the East, a story about one of the Persian kings, who was defeated by a neighbouring potentate. He was made a prisoner, his sons were taken prisoners also, together with many of his family and his surroundings. His adversary condemned them to death, and to die before his eyes. He wept bitterly; however, when his son was murdered, in his presence he could shed no tear. The tyrant, looking at him, said: "how deep must be a grief that cannot find even a tear to express it".
So that silence, the inability of finding any form of expression except silence itself, except the frozen statuesque immobility of frozen grief, may convey as much meaning as any word.
I remember someone quoting to me a few years ago a short poem by Leonard Coin, which I do not remember word by word, but the purport of which is:
When I sit silently with you, you say at times: “it is as beautiful as a poem”.
How I long that one day, when I read one of my poems to you, you should say:
“it is as beautiful as silence”.
I am insisting on this element of silence, of immobility, of the way in which things do not need a verbal, or noisy, or plastic expression, because it shows how important it is that they reach us as meaning, because otherwise there would be no interpretation to any of the examples which I have given.
Meaning is gathered by us from all sorts of walks of life. But it depends very much on our ability to see, to hear, to perceive, to understand our own experience. We play an active role, both in the perception and in the expression, and if we are too primitive, in the worst sense of the word, if we are incapable of responding to the message which reaches us, or which we are incapable of reading in what happens or is outside of us, then we see no meaning. I will give you at least one example.
A few years ago I was visited by an ecologist who went around the world asking two questions of people of all walks of life. What he wanted was an immediate response that was not screened through intellectual reflection. It was to be a response, and not the result of a long process of thought. The first question was simple for a clergyman, it was: "what is silence", and you can imagine how much a clergyman can speak on silence. But his second question was infinitely more interesting to me. He said to me: "what is a tree?", and I responded as I could, and then I got very interested, because of the response which he elicited from me was quite different from anything one could expect from someone who was trained in natural sciences, or in medicine; it had nothing to do with biology.
I had just come lack from the United States, and had been impressed by the power of this young earth to shoot upwards with such richness, with such greatness - trees, plants, grass and so I saw a tree as an expression of life, an expression of the life-power of the earth; so I said something briefly about it. But, having got interested, I thought I would ask the same question from those in my surrounding. I selected a young theologian - well-trained, cultured, refined - from whom I expected the most beautiful answer, and a young girl without any particular culture - normal, sane, intelligent from whom I expected something direct but that would not reach the heights of poetry.
The first one - the cultured, trained, elevated young theologian answered my question as to what a tree is by saying "a tree, building material". The girl whom I asked what a tree was said "oh, a tree; it stands for gentleness; look at the beauty of its crown, look at the movements of its branches and of its leaves; listen to the sound of the breeze and of the rain". That was a quite different perception. For the first one the tree had no meaning. It was simply an object of self-centred interest. The only thing that interested him in the tree was the way it can be used for his comfort. For the girl this tree meant something - it conveyed meaning, it had significance. I do not mean for a moment to say that all this meaning was within the tree, that it was the tree sharing with this young girl what it perceived of itself, or what it is in substance. But in the relationship that was established between this tree, seen and experienced, and this girl - there was a vision, and that is what we find in poetry.
But meaning is not only in silence, or in this kind of vision - one can find meaning in space. Kant, writing on aesthetics, said that space and time are the substance of aesthetics; they are the metaphysical substances of aesthetics. I remember reading a book on architecture in which the author made it quite clear that what is essential in architecture is not so much the walls, the forms, the shapes, the decoration but the fact that architecture reveals space. You enter into a limited space and because there is a limit to it, which was created by the vision of someone, space exists and space acquires meaning, not because of a particular shape, but as such. This is a very important thing in a way. Because space may be vast, it may be small - it may be too small - it has a variety of repercussions on us, and those of you who are interested in Edgar Alan Poe may have read two essays of his on aesthetics. One is called ”Cottage Landor”, and the second one ”The Domain of Arnheim”. In both essays his vision of space is on the scale of man. We will come to this later, but for the moment I want only to point out that for him anything which is not on the scale of man is either stifling or terrifying and, therefore, can contain no beauty, and in the two essays he wrote he tries to describe what an ideal garden - an ideal landscape scenery - is when it is just on the scale that satisfies, that does not stretch and, therefore, does not frighten. To him a thunderstorm, the vastness of the sea or the sky is too much for man and cannot be called beautiful, it is called terrifying, it is a dread.
Well, here you see that there is this possibility left to each of us to reject the whole world of things when this perception of space is perceived as dread, and not understood, not made into something that makes sense. Sound also - I am not speaking of music at the moment - but sound as such could also be a vector of meaning. There is a whole tradition in the Muslim world of the significance, and the meaning and the use of sound as such to convey, or to make someone experience or participate in two states of mind, emotions and also spiritual experience as understood by the Sufi. For instance, there is also a very interesting passage in a Jewish writer of the 12th Century who wrote in Spain, Maimonides - Moses-ben-Khaimum - who, speaking of the way in which we can express the existence of the person of God, says that the only adequate way to express the ineffable would be to agree that one sound which would be singled out and used for
nothing other than an indication that it is of God that one is speaking. It could be a musical note, it could be a combination of sounds, but it should be exclusive and then it would mean God and contain all the experience of this - not the word - but which the person of God relating to us means to each person singly, or to mankind or particular groups collectively.
We find also the same kind of idea in early Siberian tribes who had this sense of the holiness of God, of his ineffable quality, and there were tribes in which there was no name for God but when, in conversation or in prayer, they wanted either to address him, or signify him, they made a gesture upwards - it meant HIM, nothing more. In Orthodox Liturgical practice there are a certain number of prayers, particularly in the Canon of the Liturgy, in which God is addressed as THOU, without any adjective - without any defining qualification - because this word THOU is enough to define the whole range of relationship there is between the person at prayer and God. Thou, meaning in those language in which it exists as contrasted from you, thou meaning on the one hand the assertion of a radical otherness - thou means not I - and, at the same time as this word is used only in relationship to the closest, the dearest - a kinship which is beyond any other description.
I am trying to show, or to indicate at least, a variety of ways in which meaning is there in all our vocabulary, in our gestures, in the sounds which use, in the tune of our voice when we speak to one another because there is a great deal of difference in the way in which we use a phrase or a word with warmth in our voice and in our heart, or with harshness.
Motion also belongs to this form of expression, that is simpler in a way - who does not know how much can be expressed by the dance in all its aspects or forms, provided this dance comes from within and is not an artificially invented physical exercise, when it is an expression of things. The ultimate way in which one can put it is by quoting St Isaac of Syria, a desert dweller of the 6th century in Syria, who said that the dance is the eternal occupation of the angels in heaven. The dance, because the dance contains totality of contemplative silence and the perfect expression of the inner experience which this silence embodies and which no word can express.
I think I have done with this long list of examples, but I think it is important to realize that when we approach poetry, prose, painting, architecture, music - any form of art - that there is always intentionally or beyond intention a meaning that is perceived and transnitted, When I say intentionally or beyond intention, I mean the following. In one of his letters Dante, the author of “The Divine Comedy”, says "the whole work was undertaken not for a speculative, but for a practical end; to remove those who are living in this life from the state of wretchedness and to lead them to a state of blessedness". Here there was a definite intention, he did not write simply because his heart was full and hie imagination was full of images. He wrote because he perceived the wretchedness, the deadly danger in which mankind is placed by its severance from God, by its total misunderstanding of men, by the ways in which it has chosen and it was a cry, a warning, a series of images which were applied. to concrete situations, or to concrete persons, but were generalized in such a way that anyone could recognize in one or another situation, in one or another character, something of himself and receive the warning. It will be superfluous to say that this also was the purpose of the authors of the Gospels when they wrote of Christ. It was not a biography, it was not reminiscences, it was not a treatise of morals but, as St John the Divine says "it was all written that we should recognize that Christ is our Saviour and, recognizing this, be saved.".
So that whatever the intention of the author, it reaches us. But there is also so much which in art reaches us almost as if it were beyond the intention of the author. A cry from the soul, a gesture, a painting which is not intended as a lesson, a teaching, a parable, an allegory or anything but which comes from within as a necessity, is projected in words, in gesture, in line and colour, in sound, or in silence because the condition of the poet, the creator-'in what ever field it is - is such that it cannot keep silent. This happens more often probably than the other way around. So many poets have written poetry, so many artists have painted or composed music which they re-discovered when they looked at it. I will give you an example which is not of the height of the great poets and which, again, belongs to the anecdotes of my personal experience.
Some 30 years ago a young man carrying a big object - flat and square - in a newspaper, came to see me. I had not met him before, so I greeted him and waited. He said to me "I am under Jungian analysis. A point has come when my analyst felt that I must begin painting. I have painted a painting - painted a canvas - but neither I nor the analyst can make any sense of it. I went to see a friend of mine, an elderly lady full of wisdom and goodness, who knows me, and asked whether she could help me. She did not even look at the canvas but said:."go and see Father Anthony". I do not know if she used exactly the same words which he used afterwards, but what he said was "because he is a mad as you are, and he may be able to read your painting”.
This was the beginning of a comparatively long association. This painting was immensely interesting. It was a totally black background with just a dot of beautiful blue in a corner. To begin with I saw nothing. I asked him to leave the painting with me in the hope that it will lend some meaning. I sat for three or four days - seeing people, talking to people, but with the painting in front of me. Gradually I discovered that the painting was not black, it was dark green and it was not uniform, it was made of waves, and when I had looked long enough I discovered that all the waves were like a sea in a storm, but all the sea in the storm ended by becoming the face of Mephistopheles with two hand held like claws about this tiny speck of beautiful, azure light. When I told him that, he said "I see". The next step was for him to say: "But is it not that there is still in me a spark of heaven and of light which is endangered by all the darkness and all the storm there is in me". Well, at that point I left him to his psycho-analyst. But after that a series of painting emerged, which were as obscure to him and his analyst as the first, and for several months I went to see his paintings, sat in front of them and tried to receive an impact - then I responded, and then he began to read himself into the painting which had been projected out of him, beyond his conscious intention of expressing what he read; the same happens, as far as I am aware, with a certain number of poets or writers who peak in the grip of an experience - possessed, almost in a sense of a possession, in the strong sense of the word, - possessed by a feeling of something which is beyond the realm of their clear consciousness, express it. Obviously, the simplest way of interpreting it is psycho-analysis, is by saying: “well, they have projected out of their sub-consciousness what their clear consciousness did not know”. This we will have to examine a little more because it may be partly true, but it certainly is only very partly true; there is definitely truth in it. All this experience of Jung analysis of painting shows it but, for the moment, let me say this. Supposing that it was a projection of self - which self? It is certainly not the superficial self of awareness and consciousness, it may be the self of the sub-consciousness, it may be something more than this. The German writer, Nietsche, said "we should beware lest we imagine that our nature is all within us". He says "remember that your nature is beyond you, above you", and what we can express is perhaps far more than what is contained within us either personally, individually or ancestrally. All this could be summed up in a phrase written by a French writer A. Malraux who says "the power to create goes beyond thought and dream".
This sums up what I have said, in a sense, that the power to make, the ability which is that of a poet - understood in the general sense of poetize - the ability which the poet has to express an experience of the surrounding world goes beyond what he can dream of it, or what he can think of it. There is a direct, immediate perception which is in the realm of intuition. In that sense for instance you can find a description of it, of this direct, intuitive perception in “The Cocktail Party”. Towards the end Reilly says:
But it cannot be left without meaning and., certainly, if a piece of creation has no meaning whatever or, if its meaning is such that it cannot reach anyone, it is wasted. It is wasted not only for the person who could receive the message, it is wasted for the person who gave the message. Because someone who speaks a language which no one understands tries to convey meaning by means which no one will be able to understand and falls short of his own essential intention of communicating. One could apply here a phrase which a French writer, Eduard Estaunie wrote in one of his novels called “Malaisie”. There is a character who is asked, "but what is his aim in life, what does he wish to achieve in his life?", and. his answer is "to posit, to make quicker than thought an action that would, be certainty in itself", and a piece of art is, in that respect certainly is an action - not the result of a long process of intentional workings, but an action which goes perhaps beyond the very understanding, the very knowledge of the creator which requires the co-operation of the creator with the person, and the persons, who will look at the object. It may be one person, it may be a generation of people, it may be centuries because you are well aware that in our experience of art there are centuries of art with which we are confronted, and every century responds differently to the art of a previous epoch, of a previous situation. The forms are very often - more often than not - determined by time, by the epoch, by the surrounding, by human characteristics, historical events but the content - if it is truly art and not simply a copy of outward reality – is something that reaches us through centuries. If you take a statue of the architecture of ancient Greece - if you could take the great pieces of art of all the countries and civilizations - we may feel that we would not express things in these particular terms; we would not use this technique to express perspective; we would not use these colours, or these lines; we would not use these conventions whether verbal, pictorial or musical, but we would express the same things in the same way and. this is brought out very clearly in the fact that we have so many variations written by one composer on the works of another composer; he listened - received a message - transmuted it within himself, in his own terms; but it is the same message seen by another man, received into another soul. - I am using the word “soul” for the lack of a better expression - and re-conveyed in new terms. This is something that happens in all forms of art.
Obviously, there are also people who try to reproduce the kind of reality which is around them who are mere copyists, but this is not art. If it is used and exploited for extraneous purposes it is even less art. It may convey thoughts or emotions which are alien to the aim of the designer or the painter, in which case one must ask oneself moral problems. I will give you an example and I hope I will not hurt anyone in particular. If you go along the streets of a city, or in the underground, you cannot help seeing a variety of posters advertising a variety of products. No poster says: "buy cigarettes" - "these cigarettes are good", or "buy such and such a product". There may be scenery which may induce in you a need of serenity, of peace, of calm, of beauty in very inverted commas and then, in a corner, a packet of cigarettes and, smaller than that, the price. The purpose of it all is to attract your attention and to create in you the sense of "oh, how lovely it would be to be in this "background", and then to say "and how much more lovely to be there with a cigarette". The same would be true for all sorts of advertisements and expressions. There are posters which border on the pornographic, there are such which make use of great paintings - prostituting greatness to very mercantile intentions. But this is not art. Why? Not because what is to be seen is bad, but because it is a lie. The intention is not to reveal beauty; the intention is to lull us through beauty, through an emotion to something which has nothing to do with it. The same would be true with attempts at painting or literature, the aim of which would be nothing, nothing but to give a sort of superficial pleasure - what Dostojevsky calls “titillation of the senses”.
There is a phrase of Pascal which I find very interesting: "How vain is the painting which calls out the admiration by the resemblance which it has to things of which we never admire the originals" - a painting which does not reveal the meaning of something so that afterwards we will recognize meaning in what we see, but something which creates an entity which bears the same name as a real object, but which screens away the object, which makes the object unnecessary.
So that one can say that any creator, in all the ways and forms of art, is one who receives a message, who transmutes the message within himself in a form - it may be silence, gesture, word, sound etc and who conveys it so that it becomes accessible to others - is a man who has vision and who sees not the externals, which anyone can see - wood is a building material - but who, beyond the visible, sees something more. When I say “more” I am just being careful, because I do not mean that he sees the essential nature - the substance - the essé of things. His vision may be limited, his vision may be more or less distorted by what he is and his capabilities, but he has seen something in depth, and why? Because he has looked at things not from his point of view but from the point of view of a visionary and, if I may be allowed five more minutes, I would like to give you a couple of examples.
Professor Vysheslavtsev, a Russian philosopher of our century, in an introduction on a book on mystical prayer called “The Way of A Pilgrim”, says "what is the difference between the vision of this pilgrim and the vision of the peasant when they look at the same surrounding world? The difference," he says, "lies in the fact that the peasant looks at the earth and gauges what is can bring forth in terms of a harvest. The visionary - the mystic, the poet - looks at it and sees it for what it is without any reference to himself, without calculating, without trying to see what can be got out of it. He does not read himself into it, he looks at it and receives a message. The kind of message he receives we will come to in my following talks.
Another example can be taken - and I apologize to those of you who know me too well not to know the examples which I quote - is taken from Charles Williams. In “Hallow's Eve” he describes the fate of a girl who has died. of a brutal accident. She has never been aware of anyone, or anything, but herself and, when she is deprieved of her body - when there is nothing left of her but her soul and therefore she cannot relate physically to the surrounding world - she is in an emptiness, she sees nothing; then gradually she begins to relate to one thing or another and, at a certain moment, she finds herself on the banks of the river Thames. She looks at this river. Before, when she was possessed of a body she recoiled from it because she saw in it the dirty, polluted, greasy waters carrying the refuse of the big city of London, and she reacted to it, as it were, by thinking "oh, God forbid that I should drink of this water, that I should be plunged into it"; but now she has no body that can elicit any action of that kind, and so she looks at it and sees the river Thames for a fact - for what it is - and it is totally adequate for what the river Thames, running through London, should be; because she accepts - totally, unreservedly - the Thames for what it is, through a first layer of opacity in pollution she begins to see successive layers of lesser opacity, of lesser pollution, then a depth where the water is clear, then a depth where the water is pure - the primeval waters which God created and, at the heart of this water a glittering, a brilliant stream of water in which she recognizes the waters which Christ gave to the Samaritan Woman.
Well , this is a process perhaps - immediate - obviously not dialectical through which reality can be perceived by a poet, a vision that is possible because he is free of self - at least at that particular moment - or, if he is involved, he is not involved in terms that make the surrounding world as small as he is. That allows him to expand to the scale of what he sees. There is disinterestedness, there is freedom, there is a communion in intuition that is at the hea.rt of this poetic or creative process.
I will continue to speak a little on these lines next time when I engage in the first of my two talks on beauty, and then I will come to a subject which may seem absurd to many, but which I believe should be looked at: the meaning of ugliness - not the fact of it, that is simple - but its place, its role, its significance.
Thank you.
Questions
Would you say that the vision that that girl has in “Hallow's Eve” about the Thames is roughly the same as, say, devout Hindu has about the Ganges?
This is not an easy question to answer. First, I have not experienced what Lester has experienced, and I have not experienced what a Hindu does. I think there is a difference. I think in the mind of Charles Williams the intention was to show that the moment we can disentangle ourselves from selfish, or self-centred, attitudes to what surrounds us, we can see things as they are whatever the reason then. It could be purely natural things, or supernatural ones, while a Hindu, as far as I am aware from reading - and perhaps many of you may put me right - a Hindu treats the Ganges as a sacrament, as something which is holy in itself and which, therefore, cannot be penetrated. A sacrament in Greek is called “mysterium” - a mystery. We are used to using the word mystery to signify something which we cannot understand, which is veiled, which is hidden from us. We say “a mysterious visitor” - someone about whom we know nothing, but the word comes from the Greek word which means “be silent, be spellbound". Being confronted with a reality which in beyond intellection, but not beyond communion with. I think this is the attitude of a Hindu with regard to the Ganges, or to a piece of blessed bread, the prassard, which would be offered and received as a mystery, as something which is loaded with the content, which can Toe shared perhaps to the extent to which you are receptive, but which cannot be analyzed because it is transcendental in itself. But this is my reaction to a question which I have never asked myself, and the elements of which I may not possess.
You referred to our reaction to the art an being both intuitive and rational. Do you feel that those two responses are in any way mutually exclusive?
No. I an quite certain they are not mutually exclusive. But for a piece of art to be understood, lived with, perceived there must be both. Because our rational approach is always on the scale of our rational capabilities whereas our intuition may widen, sort of break our limits and make it commune to something which is greater than us.
I am struck by the way in which psycho-analysts have examined paintings. I remember Freud making an analysis of a painting of St Anne, which is in the Louvre. To any ordinary person it is a very beautiful painting, representing St Anne. But he looked at it long enough to see in the drapery of her clothes a vulture and, from there, he builds a whole conception of a psycho-analysis both of the object - that is St Anne - and of the painter. I have nothing to say about it. The only thing is that there is for me an interrogation mark. I could give you other examples. It has been said by another psycho-analyst - I cannot remember now who - that Utrillo's concentration on painting pubs and. cafes was a way of sublimating his desire to get drunk; well, maybe. It has been said by psycho-analysts that Goethe wrote his “Werther” to sublimate his desire to commit suicide; maybe. But this is something which, to me, one reads into a text starting with premises, starting with the conviction that if one sort of makes a post-mortem of a piece of art one will read into it a great deal which may be there - or not, which cannot be proved. But I do not think this is a way of appreciating art. I do not know whether anyone of you has read what Jung for instance, or Lipps or Goringer have written on art from the point of view of psycho-analysis. A piece of art appears to be nothing but the expression of mental, emotional processes - either disturbed or less disturbed - of the artist; but there is nothing beyond it. The piece of art is a facade of the artist and our enjoyment in it - and that is either Lipps' or Goringer’s point of view - is our enjoyment of ourselves when we see ourselves posited in front of us. To me it is very much like the story of Narcissus, who looked at himself and found himself so beautiful that he died of it, and we may well die inwardly if we see nothing but ourselves in the pieces of art with which we are confronted.
This is something which we can easily fall a prey to by analyzing intellectually a piece of art and losing what the artist irrationally put into it. Irrationally does not mean unreasonably or foolishly, it means that what he did was beyond him - he saw more than he imagined he saw. There is a Russian writer called Gogol, one of whose characters says: "The soul of Mary knows more than Mary knows". Well, there is something of that kind in the artist who creates; he creates beyond himself - I do not mean in a state of ecstasy as described, say, in the lives of saints, but in a state of perceptiveness that is beyond his habitual normal condition. It is not the same man who, at another moment, is cross because his shaving water is too cold; it is not the same man who is pernickety about his lunch; it is not the same man who is a fop in the way he dresses - there is a moment when all that vanishes because he has seen something so significant that he could not have analyzed it. When you think for instance of van Gogh's “Olive Orchard in San Remy”, if you were confronted with the orchard, the orchard would be in front of you, and you would be examining it.
When you are confronted with a painting you are in front of the painting, that is the painting that takes hold of you - and not you, or the orchard - and that because between you and the orchard someone has seen a sort of essence, something substantial about it that was conveyed which was neither stems, nor leaves nor olives - it was an orchard, a way in which olive trees - of which each has something to say - relate to the total orchard and to each other tree and, therefore, can. have an impact on you.
Are your comments on “Meaning” and “Beauty” formed, could we say, by the iconographic tradition of the Orthodox Church?
I wish it was. I wish I was knowledgeable enough and perceptive of the iconographic tradition to be able to see things from within it. I know something about icons, and I will try and say something about them. I receive a message from icons but I think there is space in art for things which are not icons. Icons are a message of a certain type about the world in which we live. But it is not the whole world in which we live and, in that sense, one could say there is even more than the icon concerning what message the icons have to give.
If I may put it in a parallel: there is nothing greater in the experience of a Christian than Holy Communion yet, after the Holy Communion of priests and people, the priest says in a prayer: "Lord, grant us to commune even more truly unto Thee in Thy Kingdom which is to come."
Even if the icon is a window on eternity, there is an eternity which is beyond the icon. If I may put it in an image: the image of a stained glass window. We cannot see light, the light which surrounds us, which reveals to us everything around us, but which is revealed in a way by nothing. A stained glass window, because it is made of so many colours and has a theme, reveals two things to us immediately: by the theme it tells us a story something, say, about the life of Christ or a Saint, or an event; by its colour it conveys to us this story with the intensity of beauty. But when we have seen and understood both the theme and the beauty we must remember that both the theme and the beauty are revealed to us by the light which is beyond and this, I think, would apply to icons. But if we have learnt through the contemplation of icons, through the understanding of what an icon stands for, to see the world in terms of icons, then we must turn to the surrounding world and in the twilight which the world represents, is or lives in, learn to discern not the darkness, but the light. I would quote here what I have said before, the Orthodox Bishop who said:
T. S. Eliot Lectures by the Most Reverend Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh
2 November 1982
I would like to start with an apology, or a correction, of what I did yesterday. When I gave examples of seeing an object without meaning, and seeing meaning in an object, I spoke of a young theologian who had defined a tree in terms of building material, and I was rightly taken up afterwards by someone who remarked that it is not fair on men who work in wood, or in metal, or in other materials, to imagine that they see nothing of beauty in the material which they handle; indeed, it was none of my intention, but what I wanted to convey was that a man, who works in wood or in metal and creates an object in the process of his work, can also appreciate the nature of the material which he works upon; he can perceive wood in all its richness, while a young man who, confronted with the thought of a tree sees nothing but wood, not what can be created out of it, but nothing but building material falls short of a vision. If you want an image more adequate than the one I gave yesterday, you could go to one of the Dickensian characters who, seeing cattle in a field exclaimed, with elation, with gastric enthusiasm “live beef, live beef”. I think that is really a more adequate image, and is very much what I mean to convey.
It is of beauty that I should speak today, and no longer on meaning specifically. There is an old saying, at least as old as Goethe, that “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder”, one could also say that beauty is air ugliness in the eye of the beholder - but does it mean that there is nothing outside of the beholder which calls for beauty. On the other hand also, how does a person who sees beauty, or who sees an object outside of himself, recognize or term beauty in it. Well, it is a question of the way in which we relate to the object. In that respect the ancient thinkers beginning, or perhaps rather including Plato, thought of beauty in terms of cognition and not of aesthetic delight. Beauty was a way of entering into a sort of communion with an object that presents itself to us. The Russian writer Dostojevsky said that "to recognize beauty is to enter into mystical participation with the object in which we recognize it". It is knowledge of communion which can be interpreted in different ways. It may be that we read into the object a beauty of something which is within us. It may also be that the object presents us with characters to which we are bound to respond by recognizing beauty. The first type of approach, the reading into an object characters which are human, that is of humanizing an object, can be seen - I am no longer speaking at this moment in terms of beauty - in the way in which we would say that an animal is an embodiment of a given quality; the way in which we make an allegory of an animal. When we say that, when we look at the hyaena "oh, this is a nasty, furtive and ferocious animal", it does not imply that we know anything about hyaenas but, seeing the way in which it trots along, seeing that its foreparts are higher than the lower parts, seeing the expression on its face, we think "oh, if any of my relations, or friends, or acquaintances had a face like this, a gate like that, moved in that particular way, what a nasty creature it would be", and the poor hyaena is stamped a nasty creature. The same, perhaps in a more refined way, is said by more than one psycho-analyst who say that we speak of beauty in terms of empathy, in other words, of looking at an object and of pouring into it ourselves and then, looking again and seeing ourselves - to use a horrible expression - objectivised, it is an expression of Göringer, of objectivised outside of ourselves and responding, that is of seeing how lovely we are.
There is also a process which was described by other psycho-analysts who studied art in terms of giving a shape to an object, thereby affirming, not only by implication but explicitly, that no object has a content in itself that can reach us, that it is us who give a soul to it, a significance to it, and then read it in a second process as it were, in a second move. There can also be another approach, held by a great many ancient and modern writers, that there is something outside of us which can be termed beauty or ugliness and I will try gradually to disentangle if not your thoughts then at least my thoughts about it in the process of this talk and the next one.
There is certainly an element which can be expressed in the terms of Goethe, “yes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, because the beholder must be capable of seeing, and it is not everyone who is capable of seeing. When I use the word “see”, I mean perceive in all possible ways. It would be too long to say everytime “to see, to hear, to smell and so forth”. I will give you an example of this, taken from the Persian literature.
"There was in Persia, in ancient times, a very well known and revered poet called Madjnoun, and he spent his life writing most lyrical poems about his beloved one, who was called Lila. So beautiful were the poems, and so beautiful was Lila in the poems, that the Shah decided that he must see the object of all this poetry. Lila was brought to him and, using his prerogative as a ruler, he commanded her to take off her veil, and then he shrunk away; because, as the description goes "her nose was like the trunk of an elephant, her mouth like that of a camel, her ears like those of a donkey”, and the description is much richer and more convincing than anything I can do. Then the Shah looked at Madjnoun and said "but Madjnoun, she is horrid, how can you say that she is beautiful", and Madjnoun answered "you must have the eyes of Madjnoun to be able to see Lila".
I think that of course this may be called a caricature, you may say that it is impossible to speak in such terms. I would say that it is not only possible, it happens all the time. It is enough for one of us to love another person to be able to see beauty where someone else does not see it. This beauty which we see, is there, only we do not attach the term of beauty to the particular feature of a face or to the structure of a body we perceive, as it were in transparency, in the shining of a personality. In that respect, if we speak of beauty in terms of cognizance, of knowledge, of knowing, we must realize that it is not indifferent whether we look at an object with one attitude of mind or another. Total indifference does not allow us to see either beauty or ugliness. An attitude of mind that would say “I do not care at all what this object is”, lends us no secret concerning this object. Hatred and love can, but they disclose to us either beauty or ugliness, not indifferently or with the reactions which are not indifferent. Hatred singles out all that can be used for criticism, for rejection, to recoil away from an object; in the same line as hatred one would say fear or anything of the negative attitudes to a person or to an object. On the other hand love, that is openness, trustfulness, confidence - at times a confidence and trustfulness which is prepared to go to the extreme and take all risks, rather than shut itself up, can reveal to us beauty.
We respond most of the time to circumstances, to people or to beings in very personal terms. We think, or rather we respond to people according to what they represent for us in terms of risk or of elation, of blossoming out or, on the contrary, of recoiling. Faced with an object of danger we have no time, but also even less inclination to see whether it is beautiful or not. We see only the elements which we would term ugly, to use a very general phrase. But when we look at the same object with a sort of sense of security, then we can discern beauty.
Confronted with a wild animal, or with a dangerous person, in a situation in which we can become the victims of danger, we will see only what is negative. Confronted with the same beings in terms of safety we can see beauty - harmony. If any of us had to face a live tiger that had escaped from a cage, we would not have time or inclination to analyze the beauty of the animal, the elegance of the motion and to appreciate with what purposefulness the animal crouches down ready to jump. Why? Because the centre of gravity would be in us, not at all in the animal.
On the contrary, when the animal is safely in a cage we would just melt seeing the beauty of its fur; we would admire its teeth, we would look at its paws and the powerful claws and perhaps even sing the praises of God who has created something so purposeful. The only thing is that then we think that the purpose is not in us, but in another victim.
I remember the story of a group going on safari and being warned not to open windows, not to open the top of a car, not to look out of the doors because, said the guide "you must remember that to the animals that will surround you, you are nothing but meals on wheels"
Well, to be meals on wheels is something that does not lead us to be serene and contemplative, to be detached in the sense in which I tried to point out yesterday, but it is when we are able of contemplation, of vision that it is then when we can acquire this detachment of communion which is described in so many ways. I do not have the time, I think, to make quotations; perhaps if I finish early I will quote to you a short poem from the German writer Hugo von Hofmansthal to show you how serenity can be possessed by one who looks at a scenery, at a situation without being involved and can really see it as a glorious harmony. This means that the contemplation of beauty, the ability to perceive beauty is one of the ways in which, to use the imagery of Schopenhauer, we can overcome the sort of wild lust for life and acquire a serenity which does not distract anything from the intensity, but annihilates the brutality of the predatory way in which we so often treat life and our neighbour.
Beauty has been defined by people who could serenely look at things, beings - human or animal - around them, even at the phenomena of nature like a storm - a thunderstorm, and an earthquake, or anything to which we react in such ambiguous and different ways. Beauty has been defined as the convincing power of truth. Truth has beauty in itself. If something , which is a truth, or true, does not reach us in terms of harmony and beauty it remains exterior to us, alien to us and very often is not even termed as being truth. In that respect, I think one can say that it is not only one art or another that participate in this complex reality of beauty, as being the power of truth.
A certain number of years ago an American writer called; Hardy Junior wrote a book on the beauty of mathematics. He is a mathematician and he obviously did not speak of things as simple as 2 + 2 makes 4, and always 4, but of higher mathematics in which the solution of a complex problem reaches a point which is harmony, which is an adequacy between the various elements of reality.
But if you think of mathematics, and it being possible for mathematics to be seen in terms of beauty, because beauty would be defined as serene and final harmony, as a perfect equilibrium of things, we must realize that mathematics, that is the number, space, time is implicit in more than the mathematician’s or the physicist’s research. Music can be studied in mathematical terms. A sound can always be expressed in terms of vibrations, in terms of waves, in terms which can be shown either by mathematical figure or design, curves and so on. But there is a very interesting study that was made a number of years ago, on the Cathedral of Chartres, in which an architect and other people studied the cathedral’s structure and discovered that the whole cathedral is built on several elements.
First of all on a square, secondly on a five-pronged star; the square representing a complete stability and harmony, and the five-ended star being a symbol of man. But this being posited the distances, the measurements and the shape of the cathedral is such that from a given point it is exactly measured by musical lines which, emanated from a given point, reach one or another place in the Cathedral and instead of breaking down, reach it when they reach their plentitude and fulfillment. We can see in these examples that on the one hand mathematics, music, architecture and all the additional elements which architecture brings into it, not only the shaping of space but also the conditioning of the echoes, the distances and so are of the same quality: they express a truth about relations. One of the elements of beauty is that it establishes relations and relationships. A purely indifferent, insensitive - and may I interject at this point that when we speak of aesthetics we speak not only of perception in general, but of a sensitive perception; the word aesthetics, which I cannot translate more precisely than perception, for lack of knowledge of English, is connected, could be connected in our minds with the word anaesthetic - an anaesthetic is a drug that blots out not perception only but sensitivity in us, so that when we think of aesthetics and aesthetic terms, we relate to an object; when we remain indifferent to it there is indeed no perception of beauty or ugliness, there is no perception of the object other than something standing in our way which is irrelevant and irrelevance is the contrary of all that life is made of, or aims at, or gives a meaning to; if all of us were totally irrelevant to one another, we would not perceive one another in any way except as a mass, an object, bulk, and this is what the aesthetic perception, the experience of beauty and ugliness prevents so that there is a very deep truth in the fact that beauty is a convincing power of knowledge, not of intellectual knowledge, not of nothing but rational knowledge, but of a complex knowledge which implies intuition, reasoning which requires the participation of the total human being or the total society for it.
I think we must realize also that there are several elements that we are confronted with when we speak of beauty as well as we speak on scientific terms there is reality, there is truth and there is us. Reality is more than truth. One can play on words, and both people who operate with Latin roots and people who operate with Slav roots have done it, say that reality is what is and truth is what is and they both coincide; it is not quite like that. Thinking in scientific terms, let me say this. Reality is both what we know and all that we do not know. No scientist would engage in research if he imagined that there was not in reality a whole wealth of the unknown. In that sense a scientist approaches the world in the terms of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the eleventh chapter, where it says “faith is certainty of things invisible”. A scientist approaches the world, challenged by the visible, but his research goes into the invisible, or the yet unknown. But this is also very much the way in which we perceive beauty, we are challenged by a form and beyond this form we may discover a content, a content that will be so meaningful, that it will lighten up the form and give it meaning which the form itself does no possess. May I put it into one or two phrases. There is a spiritual writer called Methodius of Olymp who says:
In that short form of speech we see something very important: that we were surrounded by an indiscriminate mass of people who were all significant up to a certain point, and irrelevant to a much greater extent: they were people; we had a contact from time to time, an exchange from time to time, and it ended at this; they dropped out of existence the moment they were out of sight. But then, one day, we look at a person and we suddenly see this person as we have never seen him or her before. It is a though we were looking at a drawing where everyone was drawn in pencil, that is in black or in gray and, one day, someone had drawn one of these characters in red ink, which stands out, is unique, all the rest is gray, there is only one person. That is common place in literature: to say one being is not there, and everything has become empty.
But what is the process, what happens then in some unaccountable way, by an act of intuition, that is of seeing because “intueri” in Latin means “see into”. We have seen something, which we did not see before. But it is not the outer characteristic; we have seen these features, time and again; what we have not seen is the light shining through, we have seen a lamp that was not lit, then it was lit and it shone out with meaning, or simply with mystery, that is with the challenge that said to us: there is in me something that you can discover, something unique, something ineffable, something which shines again, in the words of L????? B?????, which you can enter into with mystical participation; something that will be a revelation in terms of communion, not simply of outer sharing but of an inter-woveness that nothing can ever break afterwards. There is a Russian saying “one meets a person once, but it is for ever; because having met, one cannot forget”.
I am not speaking of our intellectual forgetfulness, but our whole self is marked and re-determined by this meeting. So that there is a reality that surrounds us, which is beyond the visible, beyond what we can perceive, but which is the object, which we search for. One may say that every one of us contains all of us, represents us and contains chaos. Nietsche said, somewhere, “you must carry a chaos within yourself in order to give birth to a star”.
I think it is immensely important for us to realize the existence of this chaos and the importance of it. When we speak of chaos habitually we simply think in terms of disorder: “my room is a chaos”, means “do not come in because all the furniture is covered in books, linen and what not”, but it is not that. Chaos, if you look at it for instance in the beginning of the Bible. Chaos is a situation in which there is a being full of possibilities, which have not yet found expression for themselves. It is pregnant with possibilities, all that is needed is to do something about them. What we usually tend to do is to try and to put chaos into order in the same way in which we put in order our drawers, or our room and, therefore, kill any possibility for the chaos to give birth to a star. Those of you who read Bertold Brecht may have come across a passage in which one of the characters says to another:
There is another way, however, of looking at chaos. God deals with chaos quite differently. God calls out of a chaos all that is already mature and capable of emerging into life, or those things which are capable of emerging and of changing somehow into maturity. God does not aim at creating an order, he aims at creating a cosmos. I am sure all ladies will support my etymology if I remind you that the words “cosmos” and “cosmetics” are of the same root. It means “creating beauty”. When a lady uses war-paint, or other devices, to make her face into something which she finds is particularly attractive and beautiful, she is trying to do something which belongs to the creation of beauty, and what we are about concerning the cosmos is that: to call out of it a harmony, to call out of it a beauty which we cannot foresee; not a beauty according to our own taste, not a beauty according to our own presuppositions, but a beauty which will be a revelation to us of what is the potentiality of this cosmos.
Then, in the process we have to speak of reality one way or another; we have to find ways of expressing this cosmos in its ambiguity between good and evil, between light and darkness, between life and death, between God and the adversary, between beauty and ugliness - but we can never do it adequately, and when the ancient writers spoke of truth being the adequacy between reality and the mind, they did something very dangerous, because the great danger which is ours which is to project the categories of our mind upon a reality which is more complex, much richer, much greater and very much unknown to us. So the adequacy which we must aim at is not adequacy between the object which we contemplate and our mind, but the adequacy between what we have seen of an object and the way in which we can express our experience of it; that is quite a different thing. It may be a static expression, say a snapshot is very typically the immediate fixation of an object as it is now at this moment, and it is perfectly true; there is a moment when you saw the object as it was. So often you see in a newspaper someone whose face could be very beautiful, but photographed from below with a mouth wide open, nothing is left but a big mouth and a ridiculous face. I remember a friend of mine presented me with a portrait of mine in the form of a sculpture. It was an oval, with metal strings and when I said "what it was?", he said "I always think of you as someone who speaks", and there was nothing but this horrible thing in which I refused to recognize my whole self. The point of what I am saying is not to try to convince you that I am nothing but a mouth that speaks, but of the fact that the moment we freeze down anything concerning life it becomes a lie, it is no longer true, it is a betrayal. But then how can one describe things in a static way, in a dynamic way. I will give you two examples.
The question is “what is it that I want to convey” - is it the truth of the dynamic motion, or is it to fix the elements of it. A first example:
The French sculptor, Rodin, has sculpted, made a sculpture called “the man who walks”, and you see a man walking. Now, if you look at the man who walks, you see that no man has ever walked that way, because Rodin’s sculpture, being so big and so heavy, could never have stood on the point of a foot, while the other one was not leaning on the ground, so the two feet are very solidly planted, because planted only by the toes it would not hold. But what he meant to do was not to show how a man actually walks, but the walk of the man, a walking man.
The same applies to a painting by the French painter Gericault of the”Derby at Epsom”. You see that the horses are galloping. If you compare it to a snapshot you discover that not one horse gallops that way. The only thing is that on a snapshot you see horses that are suspended and petrified and do not budge at all. In the painting you see their gallop, and so when we speak of the truth and try to convey it, we must be careful not to imagine that a static representation is truer then, alright, a falsified representation, but which conveys another element in it.
I was told yesterday that apart from every other shortcoming in my talk there was one very important one: that I had spoken far too long, so I will stop here and leave the rest for my next talk, and the talk that will come after. If you feel like asking questions, or attacking me on what I have said, I am open and ready to answer if I can and be taught what I do not know, which is immense in that field.
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Questions
I was wondering what you might say about envy of another’s beauty, because you seemed to want to say that love is the medium that enables you to see, certainly in the case of an envious perception of beauty - I have seen it happen, a case of envious perception of beauty; now does that mean that in some sense this is not a true perception of beauty, or are we talking about a different kind of beauty.
When we see someone else’s beauty we can respond in two opposite ways: by envying it, or by marveling at it, staying arrested by it with a sense of gratitude for what we are shown.
As far as envy is concerned, envy is a very curious feeling – because on the one hand, obviously, it is an attitude of mind which is far from being detached, it is not contemplative while wounded by someone’s beauty because at the same moment instead of seeing the beauty we compare it with ourselves. It is a return to self. On the other hand, there is in envy a very important element: that we always envy one characteristic or another which we feel we lack. But we would never accept to change places with the other person. We would say "I would love to have your beautiful face, but not your husband"; "we would like to have your physical beauty, you are a real Apollo, but not the job you have".
So that in envy there is a very cruel attitude which would deprive the other person of what is perhaps the most tender and precious gift of providence, and leave the other person with all that is hard, difficult, ugly in one way or another. I think there must be a whole education of self - not of others - others will educate very easily - but of self in facing the good circumstances in which another person lives, the good, happy relationships or the beauty of a person in an attitude of joy, of marvel.
In my last talk I want to bring out an interview which the French singer Brassens had at a certain moment. He was ugly, and a rather determined interviewer had a long discussion with him on the way in which he dealt with his ugliness. I do not want to do it now, because I have enough difficulties in giving these talks without spoiling the little I can gather from others.
Our attitude to beauty is very ambiguous. When you were speaking of envy, I was thinking of other reactions to beauty. There is in the life of saints a story about a spiritual guide, taking a stroll with his disciples and, as he was coming out of the city, the most beautiful harlot, a common prostitute but of great beauty, came towards them. The disciples covered their heads with their cloaks - not to fall into temptation; but they fell into another temptation. They covered their faces so as not to see the girl, but they kept a loophole to see their master, to find out what he would do when confronted with this prostitute, and they saw him looking at her with an expression of contemplative ecstasy. When the woman had passed, and they felt safe, they said to him "how could you look at this woman, she is a prostitute", and he answered "I did not see a prostitute, I saw the incredible beauty which God has given this woman"
You know, this kind of freedom from bringing things to self, “oh, the danger for me; oh, could I possess this characteristic or another”, is something which we must fight on moral grounds, and I will come to this next time because I feel that in all that we have got to say about beauty, and the way in which we face it, there is a moral component and not only a psychological or metaphysical one. There is beauty which is an absolute, and then there is a way in which we make it into something evil, because evil is in us, and not in it.
I would like to expand that thought, because it does sometimes seem to me that something of this kind is at the root of social or cultural friction. That, if we see something which we do not understand, which we cannot form into a pattern, we become actually hostile to it. I am thinking of the numerous English people, I am sure, who find this with the Jewish script - it is sinister and somehow evil - it is a great discovery to discover that there is a whole wealth of beauty in it. But the immediate reaction is to throw a brick, in fact.
I think that is, to some extent, to do with anti-semitism. The Jewish family life is different to the Christian family life, therefore, it must be wrong in some way, and there is a reaction against it, an actual reaction of hatred against something which is beautiful.
Yes. I think it could not be more true.
I have been a foreigner since the age of 8 in a variety of countries and situations. I know that if you are a foreigner you are really either an object of curiosity - exactly in the same way in which a monkey is, or another animal - or an object of rejection, if your ways or your attitudes do not fit, or an object of amusement.
When I came to this country a little bit more than 30 years ago and began to lecture on Orthodoxy, or to speak, my mother said to me "I thought you wanted to be a priest, and I have discovered that you have become a wandering circus"
It was true, because, I dare say perhaps not in a university where you are more blase about things, but in many places people would come to listen to me because I look odd. I have sleeves as no one; one can always hope that being a foreigner, I would say something which is so objectionable in English that one will be able to laugh and enjoy it.
I think it comes from the fact that, yes, indeed, we react negatively to what is alien to us, but I think beyond this, just a step before, there is always, or so often, a fear that something which is not within the compass of my experience, or the collective experience of the group to which I belong, may destroy or explode something which is precious to me or something which is my security. To discover that someone can think differently before I can make a synthesis, or make a choice, may well be a frightening experience; that happens in scientific research. I am not someone who has studied humanities, I studied science and medicine, therefore, my mind works that way. When you do scientific research, have collected facts that are proven and solid, in order to keep them together and also to be able to use the whole of them, you build a model, so that they hold together and then, however honest you are, however much you want to reach out from your experience into an objective reality, which is beyond it, it is very difficult not to think "I hope that no one will find a fact that will contradict the facts that I have put together, or a flaw in the way in which I have put them together". You find that, I am sorry to say, but in all walks of life - people defending their conceptions, their theories, their religion, their philosophies, their politics whatever to the limit of integrity, because it is so frightening to be left within an exploded world.
So that it is not perhaps first of all the strangeness of the other, but the fact that I am afraid that what the other one is, or stands for, has enough substance, enough reality, enough truth in it - but what will happen to my substance, my truth and my reality. Very often people project doubt, and their fear of doubt, from their own constructions on to the object. People are afraid of facing an argument against their view on God, on men, on the universe, on science. They are afraid of being challenged on them because if my view crumbles, where shall my God be? And where shall my most precious experiences be? They will not be lost, because as I tried to indicate in passing, unless we identify reality with our own projection, intellectual, rational projection, they risk nothing. Matter risks nothing of theories about it; neither does God risk anything about the variety of approaches. We may be the losers or the gainers, but there is no fear in it.
Can you say something about the connection of Christian faith with the understanding of beauty, or perception of beauty.
If I may, I will quote Dostojevsky who said "ultimately beauty is God in Christ"
From a human point of view, for a Christian, Christ is the fulfilment of human beauty and the revelation of beauty divine poured into him. On another level Christianity requires integrity of mind and heart, requires a moral attitude -not in terms of precepts to be kept, but of an approach which would rule out what the French writer Malraux calls “anti-arts”, or “anti-beauty”, things which are morally destructive because beauty should be more than an alluring or attractive form. To go far back beyond Malraux, I would say that the Greek definition of a complete man as kallos kag athos, the man who is beautiful, good and brave could be a formula which approaches the Christian way of thinking. I think that a Christian would rule our morally destructive forms because they may be a lie against a deeper and truer reality.
T. S. Eliot Lectures by the Most Reverend Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh
3 November 1982
I must say something which still belongs to yesterday's subject, and then move on to what is really the subject of the evening, to bridge the gap between my first lecture on beauty, and what I have to say about the meaning of ugliness which I believe is an important thing for us to assess and understand.
I said yesterday that one of the definitions which were given of truth was adequacy between the object and the intellect, and that I found this kind of definition dangerous, because the adequacy is not between the intellect and the object simply because the intellect has its own categories, but between the mysterious complex reality which we perceive only partly, which we assess imperfectly, and the expression which one can give to it in that, in a very relative manner, in proportion to the perception and in proportion to our ability to express what we have perceived. But when it comes to expressing things, as I have mentioned yesterday, there are two quite different approaches; one is an attempt at simple verisimilitude, trying to create an image which is as resemblant to the object as possible. But even here there are difficulties because what is really verisimilitude? what is really the image of the object we see? Speaking in terms of compariponx is it the snapshot, or is it a portrait. A snapshot gives an exact image of a face, or a situation, or a scenery at a given moment. Is it true? In a way it is not true at all because it is a face, or a scenery taken out of the flow of life. This face is not like this all the time. On the other hand, a portrait does not attempt simply to reproduce features of a given moment.
I would like to read you a quotation which I found by chance, and I rejoice at the chance which gave it to me, by a man called Robert Heinlein. He says:
This is also verisimilitude, but of another type. It is a vision that allows one to look at a moment and see all that the past has brought to this moment. Because every moment of ours is a summing up, or the sum total rather, of all our past but we do not discern it, usually we see only what appears on the surface, brought forth by circumstances and time.
So that verisimilitude is important, but which one? is it that of the portrait, is it that 6f the snapshot, or is it perhaps a vision even greater - a vision that does away practically with material evidence and not only with appearances. If I may I will give you an image taken from the Gospels, although I have tried to avoid being clerical and speaking in terms of the Holy Scripture. It is a story of Christ and the woman taken in adultery. She is brought to him, she is accused, she is condemned by the law of the Old Testament and by the attitude of the Jews who "bring her. Christ is asked what his judgement would be. His answer is:
Now, speaking of the reality I mentioned the fact that the visible may be unreal, untrue, it may appear as an illusion, as a distortion; it may appear as the surface with the depth of a surface without any depth; it may be an imperfect expression of something real and true, it may be a form that is a lie and a lure. Speaking of the visible world in terms of unreality, one could mention the attitude, the Indian attitude, to the existing world of the Maya as an illusion. It is there, but it is deeply unreal and untrue somehow. It may also be that the visible is simultaneously a veil and a revelation. A veil because reality is deeper, greater, more significant, more meaningful than the forms which we can apprehend, but it is also the only means we possess, a cross through the forms which we can apprehend to perceive a reality, a meaning which is within it. I have no time to make quotations, but there are a number of writings on the pantheistic side, beginning with antiquity and going through up to our time, in which the authors - I am thinking at the moment particularly of a French writer Gerard de Nervales who looks at reality and says
An ancient writer said:
and others have said things of the same kind. But there is also, one could quote a writer like Vladimir Solovyov, in the Russian tradition, who says:
I have spoken of chaos yesterday and of the fact that both within us, in our midst, and in the total universe we are confronted with chaos, not in the sense of a disorderly being, a disorder resulting from the collapse of order, but of a mysterious reality, pregnant with possibilities which are not yet expressed and which are waiting for the moment when they will be mature to flower, to blossom out, and to appear in glory.
Now, there is a problem of expression, static and dynamic, and there is a variety of ways in which this expression is attempted. If we belong to a certain cultural background, a certain cultural tradition, allusions may convey to us - in terms of reminiscences awakening in us our own experience already perceived in the past -understanding. You can find that time and again in T. S. Eliot, you can find that in so many authors, both poets or not, in whom we can hear either the echoes of things that have been said or written in the past and which enrich every word and every image given. There are also allegories and myths which are liable at times and within limits of more than one interpretation but which, as so many images, are meant to have more than one interpretation because the person who presents them presents either one facade which he has perceived and expressed in these terms, or presents an image which is more convincing to him than anything he could say because he is aware of the fact that whatever he will say will be limiting his experience, while the image conveys it more than words could do, or a statement could do
In this line one can speak of the analogy and similitude which one can find by drawing parallels.
The French writer Paul Valery translates in an image, which is totally different from what he speaks about, his vision of what he sees and. indeed at times you need a commentary that explains every image and every line, because it is anything but obvious. But then perhaps does a saying of Stephane Mallarme, a French poet again, explain it? He was a teacher in the secondary school which I attended, - a number of years, of course before I was at it, but there were still echoes of his presence. I remember an old man, who had been a pupil in his time, reporting that one of the teachers said to him:
And then there are attempts to convey the glimpse of reality perceived, that is the experience of reality, in symbolic manners. A symbol in ancient Greece was something very simple. When two friends parted and one of them was to go far away and thought he might send a message that was to be received with certainty, without doubt, they took either a coin, or a piece of pottery and broke it. The messenger was to bring the half, and if the half fitted exactly then the messenger was a true messenger and the message was reliable.In that sense, every symbolic expression is half of a broken coin and can be recognized only if we possess the other half of it. That means that it requires human, cultural experience or, at times, transcendental experiences like the writings of the mystics{ examples could be so many. In German literature there is a poet called Scheffel, who has written a song, a love song, about his parting from his beloved and he draws a continuous parallel between the landscape, the weather, the grayness of the day and the sorrow that is within his hearty this is a simple kind of symbol: the world is gray, the wind is blowing and whistling through the fronds of the trees, the rain is falling hard - truly the right weather to say good-bye, and he goes on. This is half of the broken coin. We all possess the other half. At times the imagery is more complex and I dare say that it may be so complex, or so momentary true, that even the author may stumble when you ask him what he meant. There is a letter of the Russian poet Al. Blok, who is one of the great poets and. a symbolic poet, in which he says:
So when we read it, we may see something else, or we may see nothing, or we may recapture his experience which he had lost.
There is also a way of conveying things which I do not understand in terms of poetry or prose, but which I think I understand a little bit more, if not to excess, in abstract art. Apart from the attempts by some abstract painters of seeing simple, doing something unheard of - and that exists in all walks of life - there are some who feel that one must break the models, the models being the intellectual categories which have been projected century after century on the objects or the situations or the experiences which surround us. That experience of the visible, or audible or perceptible world has been made a prisoner of intellectual categories and they must be broken, as a model is broken, so that one can breathe. So that one can, having got rid of a super-imposed, rational structure achieve something else - a new vision. I will give you an example, which really is on the fringe of what I am saying on an image
There is a book by a man called Gregory ?????? , who is Professor of Psychology in Bristol, which is called "The Intelligent Eye", and he shows in his book how often we recognize things, we see things because we know how to look at them and how to discern them. He shows a very interesting photograph. He has a photograph in which there is a Dalmatian dog - you know, one of those big dogs who seems to have measles, covered in spots - standing against the background of a piece of land covered with puddles. The puddles and the spots of the dog are more or less of the same size. Now, obviously, when we see a dog we see him in relief, in motion and so on. But when we see a dog standing against this background normally the dog is marked by a line that de-limits him. Here he has done away with the line, and you cannot see the dog. You do not see the dog until, after great efforts, you have singled out two smaller puddles - which are his eyes -, two more small puddles - which are his nostrils then you are surprised that there is an oblong puddle and you realize, oh, that is the shadow of its tail and, gradually, you can reconstruct the dog. I feel that at times abstract art is aiming at this dis-location of a conventional view, of a view on which we have forced our intellectual schemes and forms in order to look anew. Obviously, when you look at a Dalmatian dog against that background it is in the end a Dalmatian dog you will see but, in other realms, the fact of dislocating this kind of reality, looking at it again may allow you, help you, see things with quite new eyes; there is newness in the vision which you could not obtain by looking again and again while you project your categories
The French writer, ????????? has said that the contemplation of the surrounding world., together with the perception of beauty and ugliness, simply the artistic vision and not simply the practical vision, the utilitarian vision of the surrounding world, must lead us to vision first, then to reflection, not to a sort of postmortem of what we have seen, but to a deeper reflection of what it means to us, or what it may mean in itself and then a sort of exorcising of what we are presented with from our intellectual categories - a liberation of ourselves from the imprisonment in our human structures; an effort to learn to see an object and not to see ourselves, or our pre-conceived interpretation. Of course there is a danger of projecting these human categories. But still, it remains that we can try and learn and we can do this - and I have already spoken of this, so I am not going to repeat it - we can do this if we learn to look at things in a selfless, in a detached, in a serene way; selfless in the sense that we must not look at things and ask ourselves "how does it affect me?" - see the thing, and not myself: either projected or reflected or endangered or gratified by what I see, and with a serenity which is born from this very freedom from the fear of greed attaching to our usual approach to whatever, or whoever, surround us. And then, in the end, there is the very complex world of The Parables. Far too often we think of parables as visual aids, in the same way in which in a comic one has an illustration that conveys nothing more than what the text provides, but which adds to some sort of dramatic perception of it. But a parable is something a great deal richer and more interesting because it involves the object and it was US, and it involves all our capabilities of imagination and of experience in an almost endless way. May I just dwell on "that for a few moments, and dwell in terms of geometric figures.
You know that a circle has a centre and a statement which is complete in itself, which is self-explanatory, is like a circle with a centre. You can go to the centre and you possess all the figure. A factual statement of any kind will correspond to this kind of image. An ellipse is an oblong figure which really is like a circle on which someone is sitting and has squashed, it in length; it possesses two half circles which are incomplete, linked with two curves but, at the centre of each of these curves there is a focal point, and these two focal points have a very curious correspondence between themselves. When you are truly possessed of what there is in one of the focal points you can perceive what is in the other one, and vice versa. This is the principle of the whispering galleries in architecture. If you stand at the focus of one end of the ellipse, and someone stands at the other focus, a very quiet whispering is heard absolutely clearly while the voice is perceived nowhere else within the limits of the ellipse.
Well, that is a very important way of conveying things in words, in music, in all the forms of expression because the creator speaks at one point and, in order to hear him, you cannot go to the point where he is because you cannot simply identify with him to the point of sharing his experience in the way in which he perceives it, but you can go to the other focus and hear exactly what he says. And I think this is one of the ways in which a poet speaks of his experience and. calls out, brings out, conjures out your own. But by sharing with you his to such an extent, in such a way that you become the richer for it. You share, yes, but it is not an invented, or borrowed experience, it is an experience which is called out of you in the way in which image for image the whole world, in the first chapter of the Bible, is called out of chaos by creative word that says to everything that can be "come" and it comes, revealing itself and being a revelation at the sane time. And then there is a very curious figure in mathematics called a parabola. A parabola, I am sorry I am not a mathematician, and probably not all of you are - but speaking again in images, a parabola is something like an ellipse which has lost half of its existence, that is, there is a beginning of a half circle and then the two arms of an ellipse would grow out of the half circle, open. Now, a parabola possesses a centre, a focus, but if you take the summit of this parabola and go through the focus there is a line that goes into infinity and that is the point I think in which a real parable is so interesting, because you can take hold of this centre which is there before your eyes, before your nose, which is accessible and then from there look into infinity and go along this line as far as you will be able to go. You, not another person - I may go an inch, you may go a yard, someone else will go a mile, but it will be along this line, and it is possible because you have begun at this end of the point at which someone has said: "here it is: start"
This is what we can find in the more complex parables of the Gospels and, in so many parables of east and west, the parable of whichever tradition or culture is built on that very principle. A focal point which is within your perception, but does not call you to stay at this point; on the contrary, it tells you: "go away into infinity as long and as far as you can go"
What is curious with art in that respect is that an expression, that is a form whether it is oral, vocal, whether in words or sound or shape is something which is born from an experience and is the embodiment of a content - a content which it mediates by the artist, a content which he has perceived and projected in his piece of art. But then this form to him, and to the people who belong together with him in culture or in spiritual or intellectual or emotional experience, conveys something of his own knowledge, knowledge not only rational and intellectual, but total. But then centuries go by, and what happens is that the form remains. We possess pieces of art created, hundreds and thousands of years ago. We cannot always recapture the intention of the person who created. it. For instance when it is born from a religious tradition which has died out and to which we have no access, or about which we can have our guesses but in which we do not participate; or when it is taken from a cultural tradition to which we have no access because it is so profoundly different that we do not know how to coincide with the experience. Then we are confronted with a form that claims from us a response, and this response will be at times a new content, not totally different from the one which was the cause, the original cause of this piece of art, but a new content which will be born of the little we know, the little we can perceive and the amount which we possess within ourselves. In that case there is a pouring into an existing form of something which perhaps was not there originally, or was there as part of the universal human experience, but not the particular experience in time, space and history. I have little so say about this, but I saw by accident a performance on television of Don Quixote this winter. I happened to be in front of a television which I never see. You remember that the story of Don Quixote ends with his discovery of his folly and return to sanity, the whole story of Don Quixote was presented in this television programme adequately, obviously in abbreviated way as Cervantes has presented it, but it was reversed: he comes to his senses, and then the whole vision crumbles and he is brought back to believing that his vision of the world was truer than what the sane person sees of it. This conveyed a new message out of a new form. Obviously it was unfaithful to Cervantes, it was untrue of his intention, but in a way it was legitimate as far as the new perception was concerned.
Now, to establish a bridge between what I have said so far and what I still intend to say in our next talk to the survivors of this series, I would like to say that I have been speaking all this time of beauty in terms of physical and psychological realities, but within the Christian tradition and outside of it there is a very strong sense that beauty, the notion of beauty, applies also to spiritual achievement. The early writers of Christianity - of the undivided Christian world - so one can speak of it without any nuances said:
St. Irenaus of Lyons, in the second, century, said:
And. in the Orthodox tradition the spiritual struggle is expressed in terns of achieving supreme beauty. The books which contain the ascetic and mystical teachings of Orthodoxy are grouped under the name of "Philokalia", which means "the love of beauty", not of external beauty, but of a beauty that holds together the spiritual greatness of man, his psychological harmony and his bodily harmony. I think this is a very important thing to remember: that beauty is something that is not only, speaking in creative terms, is not only something that applies to the created, but also to the uncreated, to the communion. What Dostoyevsky calls the mystical participation of man not only to the object of this world, but to the creator of this world. When we find for instance in St. Peter's Epistle General this call that:
it is not only in terms of holiness, or harmony, of purity, of sanity in every respect that we can speak of, but also in terms of supreme beauty, a vision of what is truth and beyond truth, a vision of what is reality, unveiling itself before us and which is the convincing power of this reality. A beauty which is indeed in the eye and heart of the beholder, because we must have eyes to see, but not only in a passive way, because participation, communion, entering into an experience requires from us the same kind. of struggle, the same kind. of intense ruthless attitude to ourselves which a true artist applies to himself when he is confronted with a piece of granite or marble or an empty canvas and must look at this piece of granite and see within it the statue which he must free from its imprisonment in the stone. But that implies, yes, it does imply, the existence of what A. Malraux also calls "anti arts" all the forms of creativeness incurred which instead of enhancing human reality, bring it down, prevent greatness, prevent our growth into a measure of beauty by replacing genuine beauty by a falsification of it.
I will end this talk by reading to you a passage from Dostoyevsky, in which he opposes two kinds of beauty. Dostojevsky had an idea, and you will probably have heard the phrase "that it is beauty that will save the world":
I was amazed a couple of years ago when I wanted to give a talk on beauty and thought that I would find it all ready-made in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, to discover that there is no such entry in the book. There is no word called "beauty" in it. But if you look up aesthetics you will find two lines saying that
The trouble is that it may be subjective as far as the choice is concerned of what I or you find beautiful, but it is a universal reaction, or response, to everything whether it is a moral situation or whether it is an object. You can present an object to anyone and say "what do you think of it", and he would say "oh, how ugly", or "how lovely", and that is exactly where beauty or ugliness, which are correlative, come into the picture, so that Dostojevsky's phrase 'beauty will save the world", means that anyone is capable of responding to truth in terms of beauty, or rejecting ugliness because it is a lie against reality, or a distortion, or a calumny of it or a lure, and then he goes on to says
I will come to this in my last talk. I would like to end this one with this quotation:
What is artistic reality? They say that the artistic work must reflect life and so forth; all that is rubbish. The writer creates life, a life in such full amplitude as did not exist before it.
That is one example of what he means, and then:
The need. for beauty and. the creation which embodies it is inseparable from man, and without it men would not want to live in the world. Man thirsts for it, finds and accepts beauty unconditionally and just because it is beauty, and he bows before it with reverence, without asking what it is useful for, or what one can buy for it and perhaps precisely in this consists the greatest secret of art, that the image of beauty created by it immediately becomes an idol unconditionally.
And why does it become an idol? because the need for beauty develops most at the moment man is in discord with reality, in disharmony, in struggle that is, when he is living most of all, because man lives most of all when he is seeking something and striving. At such a time he feels within himself a most natural desire for everything harmonious, for tranquillity, and in beauty there is both harmony and tranquillity.
But, when man finds what he has been striving for, then, for a time, life as it were slows up for him and we have seen examples in which man, having achieved the ideal of his desires, not knowing what farther to strive for, being satiated, would fall into a kind of anguish, would even torment in himself this anguish, seeking out another ideal in his life; and out of extreme surfeit of pleasure not only would not value what he had enjoyed, but consciously would even turn from the direct path, exciting in himself alien tastes - unhealthy, sharp, lacking in harmony - sometimes monstrous ones, losing measure and. aesthetic feeling for healthy beauty and demanding instead of it exceptions.
Therefore beauty is imminent in everything healthy, that is to that which is most alive and is a necessary need of the human being.
It is harmony, in it lies the guarantee of tranquillity it embodies the ideals of man and of mankind.
I do not agree with every word which I have read, but I wanted to confront you with this attitude of Dostojevsky's and with this view he has that there are two kinds of beauty; the one which is fulfillment and leads to plentitude, and the one which is what a French aesthetic calls in French:
"????????????????"
that is:
arts that are arts of consumption, not arts which are beauty in themselves, but which are devoured and used in order to fill an emptiness to satiate us because we are hungry and are incapable of facing greatness and look for food at the lowest possible level.
Questions
You seem to think that it would, be proper to approach our environment without structures, without any pre-conceptions and without a scheme in which we are going to put phenomena with which we are daily confronted. On the other hand, you said that when we actually do confront the natural world we see in it beauty which is inherent in the natural world and it would seem more reasonable to suggest that beauty was in fact a structure which we impose on the world, and likewise for ugliness, and that the very notion that we approach the world without structures was a little fanciful.
What I mean to say is that we approach most things with a preconceived. idea and with a ready-made structure which we will impose upon it, instead of being, as it were, vacant, open and ready to meet whatever will come our way. In a second move of our heart, or mind or whatever, of our whole personality we can assess what we have seen in certain terms, but we must begin with approaching whatever will come our way with openness and be able to see; I will give you two examples, one which is very simple, very trivial and the other which, to me, is very moving.
If a boy, or a girl, at school is called to the headmaster or headmistress, what they expect is to meet the headmaster or headmistress, they never expect to meet a person, and the whole orientation is to meet that function, but not that person. The same would be true, and I remember when I was a private in the beginning of the war and was called to the sergeant major, and I did not expect him to be anything else but the sergeant major, and it meant danger, dread and expectation of the worst. So that this is a way in which, before we have even looked at an object, we know what to expect and, therefore, we do not see what there is there, because you may well discover that your sergeant major, or the headmaster or whoever you meet is quite a different person if you only looked.
Parenthesis between that and the other example I want to give. I spoke once in Oxford at the chaplaincy to a group of students on "encounter, on the conditions of a fruitful and Intellectual encounter between people". The chaplain in those remote days said to me "well, you are speaking of the impossible. You say that you must look at people and see them, listen to them and hear them; but I see so many people, I cannot possibly listen and hear and see; well, they speak and then they pass". And I said "well, you could perhaps begin with something less than all the floods of students who run through your room, you might begin with seeing the closest, or hearing the closest to you".
He was a man in his fifties, and he said "well, could you give me an example". I said "yes, shut your eyes", so he shut his eyes. I said "would you tell me, what is the colour of your wife's eyes? " He opened his eyes, looked at me - not his wife - and said "I cannot remember". The fact is that when he was in love with her he probably had eyes for nothing but her eyes – he looked, into her eyes, he saw nothing but her eyes - but then they got married - they had - been married 30 years - there was no point of looking at one another. They walked shoulder to shoulder through life, and what was the point of all these things which one does at the beginning of life? He could not even say what her eyes were like - what can you expect after that.
Now, the example which I want to give is quite an earnest one.
An old Russian woman, who died a number of years ago, who was the wife of Lewis Napier, the historian, was, during the course of the beginning of the Revolution arrested., put into prison and eventually spent a certain number of years in a concentration camp. She told me that, while she was in prison, she was being interrogated every night for hours and hours and hours, cross-examined and interrogated again, cross-examined again until exhaustion broke her completely. And one night, in the early hours of the morning, when all her energy had ebbed down, when there was no courage left in her, she felt she could not endure it any more. That, even at the risk of being sent into a punishment cell, of enduring anything, she must break the spell of this endless, repetitive interrogation and so she looked up at her interrogator, ready to challenge him, to provoke him so that the spell be broken. And she said to me, she looked at him and saw a face gray with tiredness, with anguish in his eyes because he had spent exactly as many hours as she had at this interrogation - he was as exhausted and tired as she was. And, in a flash, she thought that there was no difference between them only that the whirlwind, of the Revolution bad cast him, like a dry leafy on the one side of the table, and her on the other side; but they were prisoners of the same situation, that he was a human being in agony and, having seen that, she smiled at him, he smiled back and. the interrogation continued - but, the spell was broken, they had seen one another as human beings. And that is what I mean, that instead of seeing in that man nothing but the interrogator, she saw a human being; and if we did that with regard to objects, animals, people, situations we would be able to see in a way in which we do not see when we look at a thing with greed. You know "live beef, live beef", when you see cattle does not lend you any secret of what an animal is, and that is what I wanted to point out.
Now, in a second step, of course, you must reflect; we have an intelligence, we must be as acute, as precise, as sensitive as possible; perceptiveness and sensitivity which mast be used to the utmost. But to understand what is in front of us as truly as possible, by disengaging ourselves and not seeing things only in relation to us, then we could probably see more
Could. I ask why you do not quote from English poets, because all the time you have been saying truth is beauty I keep thinking of Keats.
Well, the answer is, sadly, infinitely simple, because of ignorance. You know, the trouble is that when I came to this country I was 35 years old and began to learn English just before I came, about 3 months before, in the Authorized Version, so that when I came to this country all the knowledge of English I possessed Has contained in the beginnings of Genesis - grammar and vocabulary inclusive - and you can imagine how it developed. I have tried to read as much as I could since, but I have difficulties in quoting English poets because they are less familiar. You know, you probably, however much you have read in adult life, you have probably read a great deal when at school and discovered things. I discovered children's books when I was in my forties, when my English had improved from Genesis to colloquial English. I have been trying to read more prose than poetry because, unfortunately, I am called to speak and people do not expect me to speak in verse, and so and also I have difficulties with a number of English poets because my knowledge of English is imperfect and it takes me a very long time to find a way in which one can read an English poem, so that it reaches me as a poem and not as a statement. So I do apologize, I am ashamed of myself, but the answer is ignorance.
In your ??????? of arts aimed at filling emptiness. What creates that emptiness?
My answer, that I speak in the first person, in "I" terms, is what Michael Ramsay said once, that within each human being there is an emptiness as vast as God, and it can be filled by nothing but Him. I think that unless we grow in spirit, unless we develop not only all our physical qualities, not all our psychological qualities, and I lump everything in that, but also our spirit, there will be a sense of hunger, of needing something more and then we will try to fill the space with a variety of things. Now, when you think of a human being, I, at least, see it on two levels. On the one hand each of us is like a speck of dust - so minute, so fragile, that anything can crush it if you place it in the context of the kind of universe we are aware of now. So we are really of no account as far as that is concerned. On the other hand, when you think of a human being he has within himself a sort of depth, psychological and otherwise, which is such that no amount of knowledge can fill him to the point of being totally satiated - no amount of emotion, no amount of vision – nothing; a human being, small as he is in one way has a depth, a vastness so great that one can pour into it all knowledge, all love, all beauty and it drops as though it was an abyss and you listen, and you wait for the moment when it will touch the bottom and re-echo, and it never re-echoes. And, between these two things, I think, the whole notion of a human being is stretched to the extreme. And I think that as long as we are not completely, harmoniously fulfilled in body, soul and spirit, there will be hunger. But then we will turn to the kind of things of which we are already aware. We will not, unless we are helped, we will not strive for the unknown. We will say "oh, yes, I ate steak and I know that it filled me; I ate sex, I ate music, I ate this, I devoured that" and then a moment will come later when hunger will be back. And this is the point at which I think Dostojevsky is right when he says:
But I have spoken in the first person, not making a universal statement, because I do not think that I can make it. I could tell you that this is the way in which an aesthetic would put it, an agnostic would put it, a Russian would and so on, but I could not speak with conviction, because it was not my conviction.
T. S. Eliot Lectures by the Most Reverend Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh
4 November 1982
I think that it is a sad anticlimax to end a series of talks, or lectures, on beauty by sneaking of ugliness, and if ugliness was the last word, I feel it could not be done, and should not be done. But if I speak of the -place, or the role, or the significance of ugliness it is in the context of beauty and because I think that ugliness has a real importance and a real significance - and not only an aesthetic one - but also a moral and a spiritual one.
Yesterday I pointed out the fact that the terminology of beauty was applied since early Christendom to the spiritual realm, and that already the ancient world spoke in the same breath of beauty and goodness. A man was characterized in ancient Greece as beautiful, good and brave - in one phrase, in one complex word and the writings in which the ancient church embodied its aesthetic and mystical teaching were grouped under the term “Philokalia”, ; which means the love of beauty; not of external beauty, but of a deep essential beauty - both outward and inward.
This sense of beauty led early writers to assert that the whole of life is a work of an artist, that each of us is an artist, that the person which we are, or the materials - both physical and mental, psychological, spiritual - which go to make up our personality are like the raw materials out of which a sculptor is called to make a statue; that all the work which a person can put into growing to the full stature which is his or hers is the work of an artist and that the spiritual struggle which begins in the spirit, but also involves and enfolds the psyche and the body, is art of arts.
The final achievement, the most perfect beauty to be achieved and attained to, was described in the words of St Iraenus when he said: "A man, truly fulfilled is the splendour of God". So that it is not only on the level of the plastic, visual, audible arts, but in all the realm of human life that beauty or ugliness have their place and their role.
I quoted yesterday a passage from Dostojevsky in which he made several points. First of all he said: "It is beauty that will save the world". Beauty, understood by him within the classical tradition as being the convincing power of what is true, the revelation of reality in its real self, unveiled, freed from the ugliness which may be superimposed upon it by our human misunderstandings or by the disfigurement which we bring into the world. But he also insisted on the fact that beauty is an enigma, that beauty is not simple, that there is a complexity in beauty that does not allow simply to distinguish between the beautiful and the ugly, as one distinguishes between two colours, between light and darkness and so forth. For him there are two kinds of beauty and, as so often in Dostojevsky, when he says something it requires a great deal of explanation, because he is not always clear in his own mind as to what he intended to say; because, having said that there are two kinds of beauty, he goes on, in another passage in his diary, to explain that there are no two kinds of beauty, but there is beauty, but it can be seen in two different ways.
One can see with purity of heart, with clarity of mind, or one can see in a confused way, or in a misinterpreting way by projecting upon what is seen - and I am using the word “seen” in a very general way - projecting on what is seen categories or conditions which are within us.
I have already quoted the story of the spiritual guide who, looking at a prostitute saw nothing but the glorious beauty with which God had endowed her, whilst his disciples who were still in the grip of lust and temptation could not look at her without seeing the ugliness of prostitution in her. In that sense it is quite definite that beauty is unique, beauty is a whole and yet, there is a problem of the way in which we see it. This applies not only to beauty but to everything in life. Our eye must be clear, our heart must be pure, our intellect must be enlightened, the whole of us must be possessed of integrity and wholeness if we want to see integrity and wholeness around us.
Beauty, therefore, is not ambiguous in itself, but man is ambiguous. Man is divided within himself, and when I say man, it is so obvious that it does not require much explanation, but St Paul in two passages tells us that he feels within himself the tension between two laws: the law of life and the law of corruption; a law, an impulse to live fully, to growing to the full stature, to outgrow all slavery and limitation and another tendency in him which is inertia and which would be content with being less than a man, being content with grazing instead of living. He gives another image in another place when he says: "There is in him, or in all of us, the new Adam in the image of Christ, and the old Adam in the image of one who has chosen death and corruption”. So that when we are confronted with beauty it is not simply a question of recognizing beauty and discerning it from ugliness. There is beauty, which is poisonous, not in itself but because of the way in which we see it, and there is ugliness - objective, outward ugliness - that may play a positive role.
The first time I was confronted with this thought was an occasion of a poem by the French writer Boudelaire and I apologize once more for quoting foreigners instead of the right English writers. There is a poem by him called "La Charogne” (the Carcass), and he describes how, walking on a path in the countryside he came across the carcass, the rotting carcass of a dog, and he describes it crudely, and then, from there, he moves on to say: “And this, my darling, is what you will be”, and then he makes another move in which he makes us apprehend the fact that that is not the last word. I think it is very important for us, in all the forms of distortion, in all our confrontations with what is wrong, to be able to receive a message from it and to transcend it, to go beyond the ugliness to another vision.
Speaking from within my old profession, I would say that as a doctor I was very appreciative of all that brought a patient to me, not because I was a doctor and it was my income, but because if a patient had never felt pain or any kind of discomfort he would have continued in his condition until he had died of an unknown illness. The same is true about ugliness when it strikes our attention. But from what I have said I would like you to understand that ugliness is not primarily in form, in feature, in shapes. Ugliness, more important, is in the way in which we receive a message from what we are confronted with and what happens to us. If I may quote again the same phrase "ugliness will be in our eye, it will be in our perception". However, there is something to say also about what we would call objective ugliness.
Speaking of human beings, we all react to one another by finding a person ugly or beautiful, but this is true with our cultural setting, within our racial setting; what is beautiful for an Englishman may be ugly for an African or Chinese, because the ideal, the canon of beauty is different in the various countries. Thinking of the representations of saints for instance, the English saint is very different from the Greek Saint in shape, in colour, in dimension and yet both are an attempt at representing the most beautiful thing one can imagine, but what can be more beautiful to an English artist than an English face and what can be more beautiful in the eyes of a Greek, or a Russian than a Greek or Russian face. But beauty is there all the same, only the form has changed.
I have here an interview which was taken from a man called Jacques Brassens, who was a Belgian born singer, who lived in the French speaking world, that is Belgium, France and Switzerland and who died in France of cancer. He was interviewed once about his own ugliness. He was ugly, no one disputed that, he did not dispute it either; and if I may open brackets and close them very quickly, there is a story in the life of St Vincent of Paul which is very moving. Hie father, when St Vincent was still very young - in his late teens - found him one day standing before a mirror and he stopped because he did not expect him, ugly as he was, to fall into contemplation of self, and he heard St Vincent saying: "I am far too ugly for man, perhaps God will do with me". Well, you see, here was an assessment of ugliness according to the concept of what is beautiful or ugly in his time, in his race, in his country and his circumstances. But there was also a solution to the problem - he was not defeated, he took it as a challenge and asked himself "what does one do when one is like this", and what he did was to achieve one of the greatest pieces of art: saintliness, a man beautifully fulfilled, and a man whose saintliness poured around him resulted, not only in his time but up to our time, in the good of so many.
When Brassens was asked about his ugliness he said: "I think that when one is ugly and still small one very soon does without feeling that one matters much. It is very difficult to be a beautiful boy of 15, both at that age and for the future, because one is centered on ones face and ones appearance. But for one who is ugly, oh, for him it is not difficult at all, he walks into a struggle and fights, and fights, turning away from himself and walking into life, in the same way, although not in the same words as St Vincent of Paul put it.
Then he was asked why he mentioned it quite often in the songs and poetry he wrote; and he said, “yes, I speak of it "because I want others to understand that when one is not beautiful one cannot concentrate ones interests, or anyone else’s interests one oneself, but what is left is one’s notion and what one can bring and contribute to others”.
I think it is very important to see the creative way in which one can meet with ugliness in all sorts. I do not mean only the ugliness of a face, like St Vincent or Jacques Brassens, but many of us, all of us I suppose, looking at self can discover that there are within ourselves features which are no joy to us, features which we dislike, features which we despise, features which we feel mar us, prevent us from being the beauty and the revelation of beauty which we could be. Instead of recoiling, or turning away from it, we can say "yes, how wonderful, it is a frailty within me. Yes, it is, but it can teach me to turn away from myself and to busy myself with something which is of much greater importance: life, others, God; one person, or mankind - it does not matter".
There is also, when it is a psychological or moral frailty in us, another side to this ugliness because we always perceive frailty, that is defeatedness in us, as being ugly. There is this wonderful passage in St Paul when he prayed to God "that he should be made free of his frailty, whatever it was", and God said to him "my grace is enough; my power is made manifest, deploys itself in weakness"; and so he says "I will rejoice in my weakness because then all the good will be God’s doing.
So, again, we can see in ourselves ugly features, or weak features, which can give God freedom to act, while if we were possessed of ourselves completely, we could not give him freedom to act - we would wish, we would determine to act ourselves.
There is another aspect which is almost transcendental in which our faith, and say, the psychology of Jung could meet quite easily, although we would speak in slightly different terms. It is the fact that we can discover in us ugliness which is not our own personal ugliness, but which is ancestral. Qualities, negative qualities, which we have inherited, and again we can act in two opposite ways. We can turn and say "oh, if I had not had such ancestry - how free I would be to be a glory to myself and to God"; perhaps; but instead of this we could take a quite different line and say "I have inherited not only a frailty, a weakness or evil qualities, but a task. If, what I have inherited I can transform, I can transfigure, I can make into something new, then I will not only have put myself right, I will also have done something for those who have proceeded me; I will no longer transmit further qualities which will make them hated or feared".
All this implies, in a way, that ugliness - personal or collective - is something which we must face in us, in our society, in mankind is in a creative, in a daring and in an inspired manner: it is our task; it is something which we must learn from and overcome. But then ugliness also may appear to us in frightening terms. I have quoted already to you the attitude of Edgar Poe to what was beautiful and what was ugly. To him, as he demonstrates it in two of his essays, anything which is not exactly on the scale of man is frightening and, therefore, repulsive and cannot be termed beauty, but horror, fear, dread. He gives examples: a thunderstorm; a storm on the sea; a horizon too vast; anything that breaks, destroys his sense of security and protectiveness is ugly and is evil. And he gives us in two essays an atrocious image of what he images to be a domain or a garden - something which is small enough for him never to feel that he is unprotected by the end of the horizon, which is unprotected by the limits in which he lives. This is a cowardly approach to life. If we want to face life we must face it, as I have said before, as a chaos that is a mysterious reality - full and pregnant with possibilities which have not yet emerged and which, when they emerge, may frighten us if we are not prepared to grow as great as they are. Ugliness and beauty, in that respect, claim from us greatness and we cannot face ugliness unless we stand high on the ground. If we are prepared not to look at it daringly, and take the risk of life and death but not accept defeat and humiliation.
Ugliness may well be a quite legitimate description of reality by which I mean that at times art, whether it is poetry, prose or visual or other arts have got to confront us with the ugliness or horror of life - and again it is a cowardly thing on our part to shrink away from ugliness and to hope that nothing but harmony, beauty or simply something neutral enough not to frighten us will confront us. I remember a grandmother who read stories to her grandchildren and she always changed the end, because the end we always want to be an apotheosis, it had to be sweet and beautiful - and. I see someone laugh, and I must say it was not my grandmother, it was someone else’s grandmother.
Now, we must be prepared to see the ugliness, to look into it deeply. A physician has to look at the horror and ugliness of illness and of pain, and we have got to have the courage to do this. For a year and a half after the war I was in charge of people coming back from German concentration camps, and it was an ugly sight; it was a. heart-rending sight, but it had to be looked into as deeply as possible because only by looking into it with all one’s mind, all one’s heart, all one’s being at the risk in a way of being deeply wounded could one hope to do something useful. We are unwilling to look at what happened, or happens still in concentration camps, in the war, in illness, in hunger, in suffering of all types; we must have the courage to do it. We acquire certain courage to do it in an indirect way; in a novel, because we know that the chances are that the tension will be resolved; in a play, or in the cinema, because we feel that at any moment, if the terror is too great, the horror is too deep, we will be able to feel the armrests of our seats and say “that happens to them, not to me; it is alright"; “it is alright” is a terrible phrase. You may not say that because we are hypocritical enough, all of us, or careful enough not to place ourselves before a judgement seat but, yes, we are safe. The book is too frightening, I can close it; the film or the play is too horrible, I become aware of being outside of it. Well, we must learn not to do this.
A certain number of years ago I spoke of hunger in India, after a grueling experience of what I had seen there in the sixties. I spoke with all the passion of which I am capable, and at times I can put passion into what I say. At the end of the service, because it was in a church, there were intercessions for the hungry; then there was a collection and, as I was standing at the west door with the vicar, a sweet little old woman came up to me, extended her hand and said: “Thank you, dear Father, for the most entertaining evening. Well, not being English, that is having no inhibitions to being rude, I said to her "I hope that you gave more than a shilling for your entertainment!" Well, you know, she had managed to escape it, she had seen it happen, yes, “it is over there, I have to look up India on the map, I cannot remember where it is. It is some sort of triangle somewhere to the right on the map, but it is there, it is not us - they are so different and then, you know, they have been hungry for so many centuries, they are used to it. That is alright, it would not be alright for us.” You are imagining that I am just giving caricatures, but I am not, it is exactly what I have heard said in one situation or another. When I speak of horror, here or there, I am told it cannot happen to us, we are not Russians.
So there is a message which ugliness brings to us: it is a challenge. It says to us “the world in which you live, and which you have made, and which you sustain by your indifference, your cowardice, your softness is ugly, monstrous and there are millions of people who pay the cost of this, look at it”. In that sense perhaps, ugliness - with the implied possibility of redemption, of change, of transfiguration is more essential than the sight of harmony and beauty, because harmony and beauty must give us the ability to discern, to see, to understand, to be horrified and never to come to peace with these things. And then there is also the representation of ugliness in all the ways in which it is represented when, what we represent, is ugly. Anger is ugly, cowardice is ugly and so many other things. I remember someone, in a fit of anger, by chance seeing his face in a mirror. Anger fell away at once because it was so ugly that he said "I cannot allow myself to look like this". If we could look at ourselves a little bit more when we are angry, when we are greedy, when we are resentful, when we are lusting and so forth, we would probably say "is this really what I am?" - it is for a split second. "Is it really what there is in me, can I accept to be like this? Because my face was not that way a minute ago, if it is that way now it is because my content has reached my features and giving it this monstrous revolting shape".
But then there is also evil, and evil which in terms of art can penetrate and use art. Yesterday I gave you a quotation from Dostojevsky, in which there are several elements. The first one is that in the turmoil of life, in the grip of tragedy, we long for equipoise, for harmony, for stillness, for security and this leads us to create the kind of art which brings out all the beauty of which we can become aware - not only intellectually, rationally, but which can well up from the depth of our being. It is not at every moment that this is possible. You may not know, but I will share a secret with you. For three centuries Russia was under the Tartar yoke - it was for three centuries submitted, to great violence and cruelty. If you look at the art of this epoch, suffering is not depicted in it. What is depicted, in it is all the “beauty that could be remembered or that was seen in the ways of people, because people needed an anchor in hope, but when the Tartar yoke came to an end, then the artists began to give images of what suffering and tragedy are. You find suffering and tragedy in the works of men like Rublev, but you do not find them fifty or one hundred years before. It would have bean intolerable, unbearable in the face of actual horror, to be confronted with nothing but a picture of this horror, unresolved because, at that moment, it could not be resolved. The resolution was in showing that at the heart of it beauty survived; that in spite of it beauty was accessible that, however ugly, things were where there should have been beauty. In the experience that I have had in this one year and a half, eighteen months or so, of work with people that had come from concentration camps, the thing that struck me was that apart from the horror which they conveyed to me - I was treating their bodies - but I was also in charge of rehabilitating them for life as best as I could. I heard so much about courage, the greatness of heart, the patience, the generosity and so many other wonderful qualities which they, or their companions of captivity, had shown; because these were the only things which made it possible for them to survive. So that within ugliness there were sparks of harmony and beauty within one person, or for a moment, or for a short period, or in one situation - and that was the salvation of many. But evil can touch something more tragically perhaps. It may touch the good itself. Ugliness can be like a serpent in the grass, like poison in a fruit, like death in one of those flowers that close upon a victim, and digest it. Dostojevsky, in the same quotation, having indicated to us that the struggle, the pain, the difficulty of life, the tragedy of life brought to the fore a longing for harmony and wholeness, integrity and beauty, says: “What is another thing that is tragic is that when life is made of nothing but contentment, when there is no direction, no intensity, no struggle, no aim in life, then a new hunger pervades the people, a hunger to fill the place which intensity would fill and then horrible, monstrous forms begin to appear”. I will give you one quotation from Dostojevsky again. He says, in the words of one of his characters: “Oh, my friends, you cannot imagine what sadness and anger seizes your whole soul when a great idea - long revered by you as sacred - is taken up by bunglers and dragged out into the street to just such fools as themselves; as you suddenly encounter it now in the free market, unrecognizable, filthy, stood up absurdly at an angle, without proportion, without harmony - a plaything in the hands of stupid children”.
This is something which he points out more than once, that when society or individuals have nothing to strive for, are satiated, it will fall singly, or collectively, into a kind of anguish, and will invent in itself anguish of necessary, seek out some sort of ideal, some sort of thing to strive towards of extreme surfeit of pleasure, not only would not value what had been enjoyed, but consciously turn from the direct path, exciting in himself alien trends, unhealthy, disharmonic, monstrous sometimes. And this is the point at which moral judgement plays a decisive role in discernment of beauty. When I say moral judgement I do not mean pre-conceived principles that would rule out certain forms of art in favour of other forms of art. I mean the perceptiveness that will allow a person to say: “This is degrading, this makes me small; this is below me; this is unworthy of my human stature; this is something that quenches the spirit; this is something which is contrary to life; this is corruption; this is death; this is vile”. This is a moral principle in the sense that it cannot simply be deduced from the consideration of the object. Pornography is the name which I could attach to it to make a short cut and, unfortunately, in the kind of society in which we live, which is easy and where the struggle for life is very limited, we are very easily made prisoners, are caught by this kind of acceptance of what should be repulsive to us because it is a negation of wholeness and of dignity.
Here is a definition of the consumers’ society, or high standard of living, which was given by John Kenneth Galbraith in a book called “The Affluent Society”: “What is called a high standard of living consists in considerable measures in arrangements for avoiding muscular effort, for increasing sensual pleasure and enhancing caloric intake above any conceivable nutritional requirement”, and when we speak of this intake, it means not only food, it means the greed implied in it, and the greed goes far beyond, it goes into lust, it goes into possessiveness, it goes into the lowering of all standards in the acceptance that we are not called to be as great as God, as Anglo put it “that we are like fungi on thin earth”, or as someone else put it “like a cancer on nature, on a world which we should make noble and great”.
Now, I would like for one minute to conclude with two quotations, and perhaps redeem myself a little for having quoted all the time foreign writers. I have given a little thought to it. I have recognized yesterday that it is my ignorance, which is mainly the cause of it. But when I asked myself “was it only ignorance?”, I remembered that when I began to collect my data I thought it would do you no harm to be confronted with writers and names which perhaps are less familiar to you than Keats, Shakespeare or Yates. This was really brought to my mind a few years ago. I spoke at one of the universities to the department of psychiatry and psychology; there were only teaching personnel and research students. I mentioned the names of Nietsche and. Pascal, and at the end of my talk I was asked who they were - I turned the compliment by saying: “Could anyone of you enlighten your friend?” -there was no one to enlighten the friend. So, having poured out names to you, perhaps I have incited you to have a look, well at a dictionary. Here is a quotation from Keats:
What I wanted to convey in these talks is that beauty, ugliness, the totality of life has a deep, a decisive meaning and it matters; that if we cannot reason things out, if we are not philosophers or theologians, if we have access to the highest process of the mind - there is one way in which we are confronted and challenged by life and in which we can confront life; challenge life and resolve life by assessing it on a basis which is spiritual, which is moral, which is not simply an ascetic judgement of form, but an understanding what it brings to us: ugliness and beauty, chose for life and build it even if it costs us our life.
Thank you
Questions
In the “Brothers Karamazov” by Dostojevsky, the young monk, kneeling by the rotting body of the old monk said: “What a shame lest people should think he was not a saint”, and then he looked again and he saw ???????? with him, smiling. I think this is the contrast, he did not ignore the rotting of the corpse, he knelt there, you know, sharing.
I am very grateful for what you say. You can transcend the vision of ugliness, if you look at it and look deeply. If you remain on the surface it will only be the smell of the carcass, but you can look deeper. If I may make a short comparison, there is in Edgar Foe a story, I cannot remember its name, in which a young man goes to the cemetery and re-opens the grave of his beloved one. If you compare it to his poem “The Carcass”, you will see the difference. He sees the ugliness recognizing in it what it is, draws the ultimate and horrible conclusion and outgrows it; well, in Edgar Poe it ends in a sort of goulish and sinister vision that leads nowhere, and it is because of his attitude.
I do not quite know how relevant this is, but it keeps coming into my mind to ask you if you know about the work of Wilhelm Reich, and how that would fit in with thinking in terms of ugliness and beauty.
I am afraid I do not.
He was working in terms of thinking about people’s bodies and the way they hold themselves; this is a very simple explanation. He works in terms of there being an essential person within whatever mishape that person has become and he worked on the actual body of that person to sort of brings it back into its balance. I wonder how far you would agree that there is in each person a sort of unique person which can be brought back into being.
I believe, passionately, as I do most things, that in each of us there is a person who is unique and unrepeatable. There is a passage in the Book of Revelations in which we are told that in the Kingdom each of us will be possessed of a name which no one knows but God, and he, to whom it is given; and this phrase, you know, in the Hebrew tradition - in early Christian tradition, the name was not simply an appellation, a way of distinguishing Peter from Mary, it was meant to be a total, an ultimate expression of the person and this indicates that in the Kingdom everyone of us will relate to God in a way which is absolutely unrepeatable and unique and this is there, already now; it will not be created all over sudden, but it is veiled, it is distorted. We ourselves cannot see our own face, but God can. I quoted you this phrase of a Russian Bishop who says: “When God looks at us he does not see the achievements or virtues which are not there, but he sees the beauty which is there and cannot be erased”. And, in that sense, there is absolute uniqueness: no one can be replaced, and if you think of what will be, say mankind or the cosmos in eternity, each of us is like a small stone in a mosaic; it may be a very small stone, but if you remove one stone the mosaic will gradually fall to pieces.
Now, as far acting through the body upon the whole person is concerned, there is no doubt that we are not a soul encaged in a body, imprisoned in a body. A human being is an incarnate reality that is, we are, the spiritual, the psychological and the physical are profoundly intertwined in the way in which we fire; heat can pervade metal and all the aesthetic traditions of, not only Christianity, but of all religions, teaches us that one can affect not only our mental contents but our spiritual destiny, free us inwardly by acting upon the body. So this would be a particular way, or a particular case, but the principle I think is, would be, recognized universally.
If I could take you to the question of the depiction of horror and bestiality and immorality in art, some of the artists working during and after the first world war, such as Max Beckman and George Gross, depicted, if you like, man’s inhumanity to man in most vivid terms. Does that reduce the value of those works of art, or are they redeemed somehow by a further moral lesson that they had to teach us?
You know, it is not the content of a poem or a painting that makes it good or bad. There are extremely good feelings that are expressed in very bad poetry, and the same would apply to all forms of art. I think that there are several approaches. If you take Dostojevsky’s approach, he would say “to depict horror without showing how it is resolved, is bad art”.
A painting should represent, say tragedy, in such a way that you see the light coming, dawning. I do not believe this is true. I think what Dostojevsky would like it to be showing in a picture of horror, and instead of making himself, draw himself a conclusion and bring out the meaning and so forth, that it should be done for him beforehand. I do believe that to be confronted in an undiluted way with ugliness and horror is something which we must accept. But we must not imagine that there is nothing more to it; and that is the risk, or the danger, of pictures that represent nothing but the horror because the majority of people will be unable to disentangle themselves from the feeling of horror, which this picture, this poem, or whatever it is, evoked. From a pedagogical point of view there is a point in showing within the horror a key of harmony, a possibility of resolution. I have spent five years in the war, and I have very definite views about it. I do not find it a lovely experience. I do not find war a desirable experience. I have seen ugliness in it in plenty, as all men and women of my generation have seen. So I am not being romantic about it. But what I would say in that I have never seen so far, I mean within those five years, ever a monstrous situation that had not called out something in one man or another, or in the way in which people related, that did not redeem the horror but that showed that even within the horror something can happen.
I would like to give you a couple of examples, which are not taken from my experience at all because lyricism is always too near to exhibitionism.
After the war, in one of the concentration camps, was found a prayer, written by a Jew, on a torn piece of wrapping paper; I do not remember it by heart, and I cannot quote it in full, but those of you who are foolish enough to read my books can find it in “Living Prayer”, quoted from a German newspaper. In substance it said this:
I can quote another man, who was an older friend of mine, who spent four years in a concentration camp. When he came back I met him in the street and I said to him: “What have you brought back from there?”, and. he said. “agony of mind.”. I said “Have you lost your faith?”, and. he said “No, "but as long as I was the victim of all the brutality and so forth which was poured, upon us, I knew I had power to forgive. I could turn to God and. say "Lord, do not condemn these men, because in Thy name I have forgiven". Now I am free and I do not know whether these men who tormented us in such a way have understood what they have done, or what they had been doing, have repented, have changed. And when I turn to God and say "God, oh God, save them", I have always the anguish within myself as though God was saying to me "What right have you to pray now for them - you are not suffering".
You know, this kind of attitude could be born in this Jew, in this Russian Orthodox. I could go on quoting examples of something which could help when we are confronted with a picture, either in words or colour or line or otherwise, of horror because too many people will not "be able to see and discern.
Do you consider it necessary for great art to have a moral content?
Yes, I do. That is, I do believe that art must have content and that this content, when it is presented to someone who will perceive it, should be such that the spectator or the listener should become greater than he is, and not less than he is. Of course, I start with my preconceptions, but you asked me a question in the first person and I said yes, indeed, otherwise it is anti-art, it is the use, the profanation of art, it is a rape of form, it is a betrayal of a means of communication in order to destroy what should be built
On Meaning http://masarchive.org/Sites/texts/1982-11-01-1-E-E-C-IK01-001TSLecture1-Meaning-EliotLectures.html
On Beauty Part 1 http://masarchive.org/Sites/texts/1982-11-02-1-E-C-IK01-001SLecture2-Beauty-EliotLectures.html
On Beauty Part 2 http://masarchive.org/Sites/texts/1982-11-03-1-E-C-IK01-001Lecture3-BeautyCont-EliotLectures.html
On Ugliness http://masarchive.org/Sites/texts/1982-11-04-E-E-C-IK01-001Lecture3-Ugliness-EliotLectures.html
Lecture 1
MeaningT. S. Eliot Lectures by the Most Reverend Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh
1 November 1982
From what you have just heard it is quite obvious that I have no qualification to speak in the context of the T. S. Eliot lectures. The only direct link I have with Eliot is a conversation I had a few years ago with one of our Orthodox spiritual guides. He strolled into my room, holding a hook in his hand, looked at me severely, and said: "I have brought you a book; what happened here is what will happen to you", and he made me a present of “Murder in the Cathedral”. I am still waiting for the prophesy to be fulfilled, and this is all really I can say in my defense in the context of these lectures. Yet, I am interested in poetry and in beauty; ultimately to me the name of God is beauty and I think that I would agree with a friend of mine who said many years ago: "when God looks at a human being he does not see either achievement or virtues, which may not be there, but He sees beauty which nothing can eradicate". So that the ultimate meaning of things for me can be put in set in terms of beauty or alternatively of ugliness.
I want to speak on the subject of “meaning”, because whether we are aware of it, conscious of it or not, we relate to things only to the extent to which they have meaning for us. A totally meaningless thing is something to which we cannot relate. In a way it is like a language, if we hear a language spoken of which we have no notion - at a certain moment, after a while when we no longer listen to its flow of music we contract out and so beauty, as an ultimate revelation of things created and of the creator, and meaning, as something essential in relation to life in all its expressions is also an essential element.
In poetry, or other forms of art, meaning may be at the very centre of things. The poet - and may I remind you that from its Greek roots a poet is a creator - the poet is one who conveys meaning, who makes sense of things, who discloses to us a depth and a significance in things which we, or most of us, are incapable of perceiving, more incapable very often of expressing. This meaning can be conveyed by a variety of ways. It is not only poetry - words, rhythms, sounds? it is not only music, there are many ways in which meaning reaches us. I will give you a few examples.
In the works of the French poet, Victor Hugo, there is a page on which there is a date, and a dotted line. This is the day when he suffered a bereavement which could not be put into words. It could not be put into sound, it could not be expressed in any way except in silence. This blank page conveys meaning as much as any words, and more than any words could convey.
There is, in the history of the East, a story about one of the Persian kings, who was defeated by a neighbouring potentate. He was made a prisoner, his sons were taken prisoners also, together with many of his family and his surroundings. His adversary condemned them to death, and to die before his eyes. He wept bitterly; however, when his son was murdered, in his presence he could shed no tear. The tyrant, looking at him, said: "how deep must be a grief that cannot find even a tear to express it".
So that silence, the inability of finding any form of expression except silence itself, except the frozen statuesque immobility of frozen grief, may convey as much meaning as any word.
I remember someone quoting to me a few years ago a short poem by Leonard Coin, which I do not remember word by word, but the purport of which is:
When I sit silently with you, you say at times: “it is as beautiful as a poem”.
How I long that one day, when I read one of my poems to you, you should say:
“it is as beautiful as silence”.
I am insisting on this element of silence, of immobility, of the way in which things do not need a verbal, or noisy, or plastic expression, because it shows how important it is that they reach us as meaning, because otherwise there would be no interpretation to any of the examples which I have given.
Meaning is gathered by us from all sorts of walks of life. But it depends very much on our ability to see, to hear, to perceive, to understand our own experience. We play an active role, both in the perception and in the expression, and if we are too primitive, in the worst sense of the word, if we are incapable of responding to the message which reaches us, or which we are incapable of reading in what happens or is outside of us, then we see no meaning. I will give you at least one example.
A few years ago I was visited by an ecologist who went around the world asking two questions of people of all walks of life. What he wanted was an immediate response that was not screened through intellectual reflection. It was to be a response, and not the result of a long process of thought. The first question was simple for a clergyman, it was: "what is silence", and you can imagine how much a clergyman can speak on silence. But his second question was infinitely more interesting to me. He said to me: "what is a tree?", and I responded as I could, and then I got very interested, because of the response which he elicited from me was quite different from anything one could expect from someone who was trained in natural sciences, or in medicine; it had nothing to do with biology.
I had just come lack from the United States, and had been impressed by the power of this young earth to shoot upwards with such richness, with such greatness - trees, plants, grass and so I saw a tree as an expression of life, an expression of the life-power of the earth; so I said something briefly about it. But, having got interested, I thought I would ask the same question from those in my surrounding. I selected a young theologian - well-trained, cultured, refined - from whom I expected the most beautiful answer, and a young girl without any particular culture - normal, sane, intelligent from whom I expected something direct but that would not reach the heights of poetry.
The first one - the cultured, trained, elevated young theologian answered my question as to what a tree is by saying "a tree, building material". The girl whom I asked what a tree was said "oh, a tree; it stands for gentleness; look at the beauty of its crown, look at the movements of its branches and of its leaves; listen to the sound of the breeze and of the rain". That was a quite different perception. For the first one the tree had no meaning. It was simply an object of self-centred interest. The only thing that interested him in the tree was the way it can be used for his comfort. For the girl this tree meant something - it conveyed meaning, it had significance. I do not mean for a moment to say that all this meaning was within the tree, that it was the tree sharing with this young girl what it perceived of itself, or what it is in substance. But in the relationship that was established between this tree, seen and experienced, and this girl - there was a vision, and that is what we find in poetry.
But meaning is not only in silence, or in this kind of vision - one can find meaning in space. Kant, writing on aesthetics, said that space and time are the substance of aesthetics; they are the metaphysical substances of aesthetics. I remember reading a book on architecture in which the author made it quite clear that what is essential in architecture is not so much the walls, the forms, the shapes, the decoration but the fact that architecture reveals space. You enter into a limited space and because there is a limit to it, which was created by the vision of someone, space exists and space acquires meaning, not because of a particular shape, but as such. This is a very important thing in a way. Because space may be vast, it may be small - it may be too small - it has a variety of repercussions on us, and those of you who are interested in Edgar Alan Poe may have read two essays of his on aesthetics. One is called ”Cottage Landor”, and the second one ”The Domain of Arnheim”. In both essays his vision of space is on the scale of man. We will come to this later, but for the moment I want only to point out that for him anything which is not on the scale of man is either stifling or terrifying and, therefore, can contain no beauty, and in the two essays he wrote he tries to describe what an ideal garden - an ideal landscape scenery - is when it is just on the scale that satisfies, that does not stretch and, therefore, does not frighten. To him a thunderstorm, the vastness of the sea or the sky is too much for man and cannot be called beautiful, it is called terrifying, it is a dread.
Well, here you see that there is this possibility left to each of us to reject the whole world of things when this perception of space is perceived as dread, and not understood, not made into something that makes sense. Sound also - I am not speaking of music at the moment - but sound as such could also be a vector of meaning. There is a whole tradition in the Muslim world of the significance, and the meaning and the use of sound as such to convey, or to make someone experience or participate in two states of mind, emotions and also spiritual experience as understood by the Sufi. For instance, there is also a very interesting passage in a Jewish writer of the 12th Century who wrote in Spain, Maimonides - Moses-ben-Khaimum - who, speaking of the way in which we can express the existence of the person of God, says that the only adequate way to express the ineffable would be to agree that one sound which would be singled out and used for
nothing other than an indication that it is of God that one is speaking. It could be a musical note, it could be a combination of sounds, but it should be exclusive and then it would mean God and contain all the experience of this - not the word - but which the person of God relating to us means to each person singly, or to mankind or particular groups collectively.
We find also the same kind of idea in early Siberian tribes who had this sense of the holiness of God, of his ineffable quality, and there were tribes in which there was no name for God but when, in conversation or in prayer, they wanted either to address him, or signify him, they made a gesture upwards - it meant HIM, nothing more. In Orthodox Liturgical practice there are a certain number of prayers, particularly in the Canon of the Liturgy, in which God is addressed as THOU, without any adjective - without any defining qualification - because this word THOU is enough to define the whole range of relationship there is between the person at prayer and God. Thou, meaning in those language in which it exists as contrasted from you, thou meaning on the one hand the assertion of a radical otherness - thou means not I - and, at the same time as this word is used only in relationship to the closest, the dearest - a kinship which is beyond any other description.
I am trying to show, or to indicate at least, a variety of ways in which meaning is there in all our vocabulary, in our gestures, in the sounds which use, in the tune of our voice when we speak to one another because there is a great deal of difference in the way in which we use a phrase or a word with warmth in our voice and in our heart, or with harshness.
Motion also belongs to this form of expression, that is simpler in a way - who does not know how much can be expressed by the dance in all its aspects or forms, provided this dance comes from within and is not an artificially invented physical exercise, when it is an expression of things. The ultimate way in which one can put it is by quoting St Isaac of Syria, a desert dweller of the 6th century in Syria, who said that the dance is the eternal occupation of the angels in heaven. The dance, because the dance contains totality of contemplative silence and the perfect expression of the inner experience which this silence embodies and which no word can express.
I think I have done with this long list of examples, but I think it is important to realize that when we approach poetry, prose, painting, architecture, music - any form of art - that there is always intentionally or beyond intention a meaning that is perceived and transnitted, When I say intentionally or beyond intention, I mean the following. In one of his letters Dante, the author of “The Divine Comedy”, says "the whole work was undertaken not for a speculative, but for a practical end; to remove those who are living in this life from the state of wretchedness and to lead them to a state of blessedness". Here there was a definite intention, he did not write simply because his heart was full and hie imagination was full of images. He wrote because he perceived the wretchedness, the deadly danger in which mankind is placed by its severance from God, by its total misunderstanding of men, by the ways in which it has chosen and it was a cry, a warning, a series of images which were applied. to concrete situations, or to concrete persons, but were generalized in such a way that anyone could recognize in one or another situation, in one or another character, something of himself and receive the warning. It will be superfluous to say that this also was the purpose of the authors of the Gospels when they wrote of Christ. It was not a biography, it was not reminiscences, it was not a treatise of morals but, as St John the Divine says "it was all written that we should recognize that Christ is our Saviour and, recognizing this, be saved.".
So that whatever the intention of the author, it reaches us. But there is also so much which in art reaches us almost as if it were beyond the intention of the author. A cry from the soul, a gesture, a painting which is not intended as a lesson, a teaching, a parable, an allegory or anything but which comes from within as a necessity, is projected in words, in gesture, in line and colour, in sound, or in silence because the condition of the poet, the creator-'in what ever field it is - is such that it cannot keep silent. This happens more often probably than the other way around. So many poets have written poetry, so many artists have painted or composed music which they re-discovered when they looked at it. I will give you an example which is not of the height of the great poets and which, again, belongs to the anecdotes of my personal experience.
Some 30 years ago a young man carrying a big object - flat and square - in a newspaper, came to see me. I had not met him before, so I greeted him and waited. He said to me "I am under Jungian analysis. A point has come when my analyst felt that I must begin painting. I have painted a painting - painted a canvas - but neither I nor the analyst can make any sense of it. I went to see a friend of mine, an elderly lady full of wisdom and goodness, who knows me, and asked whether she could help me. She did not even look at the canvas but said:."go and see Father Anthony". I do not know if she used exactly the same words which he used afterwards, but what he said was "because he is a mad as you are, and he may be able to read your painting”.
This was the beginning of a comparatively long association. This painting was immensely interesting. It was a totally black background with just a dot of beautiful blue in a corner. To begin with I saw nothing. I asked him to leave the painting with me in the hope that it will lend some meaning. I sat for three or four days - seeing people, talking to people, but with the painting in front of me. Gradually I discovered that the painting was not black, it was dark green and it was not uniform, it was made of waves, and when I had looked long enough I discovered that all the waves were like a sea in a storm, but all the sea in the storm ended by becoming the face of Mephistopheles with two hand held like claws about this tiny speck of beautiful, azure light. When I told him that, he said "I see". The next step was for him to say: "But is it not that there is still in me a spark of heaven and of light which is endangered by all the darkness and all the storm there is in me". Well, at that point I left him to his psycho-analyst. But after that a series of painting emerged, which were as obscure to him and his analyst as the first, and for several months I went to see his paintings, sat in front of them and tried to receive an impact - then I responded, and then he began to read himself into the painting which had been projected out of him, beyond his conscious intention of expressing what he read; the same happens, as far as I am aware, with a certain number of poets or writers who peak in the grip of an experience - possessed, almost in a sense of a possession, in the strong sense of the word, - possessed by a feeling of something which is beyond the realm of their clear consciousness, express it. Obviously, the simplest way of interpreting it is psycho-analysis, is by saying: “well, they have projected out of their sub-consciousness what their clear consciousness did not know”. This we will have to examine a little more because it may be partly true, but it certainly is only very partly true; there is definitely truth in it. All this experience of Jung analysis of painting shows it but, for the moment, let me say this. Supposing that it was a projection of self - which self? It is certainly not the superficial self of awareness and consciousness, it may be the self of the sub-consciousness, it may be something more than this. The German writer, Nietsche, said "we should beware lest we imagine that our nature is all within us". He says "remember that your nature is beyond you, above you", and what we can express is perhaps far more than what is contained within us either personally, individually or ancestrally. All this could be summed up in a phrase written by a French writer A. Malraux who says "the power to create goes beyond thought and dream".
This sums up what I have said, in a sense, that the power to make, the ability which is that of a poet - understood in the general sense of poetize - the ability which the poet has to express an experience of the surrounding world goes beyond what he can dream of it, or what he can think of it. There is a direct, immediate perception which is in the realm of intuition. In that sense for instance you can find a description of it, of this direct, intuitive perception in “The Cocktail Party”. Towards the end Reilly says:
" When I first met Miss Coplestone, in this room,This could not be expressed more clearly. Intuition means a perception which is not built on a rational analysis, which is not the result of a progressive analysis of data which, afterwards, are brought together in a synthesis. A French logician described the rational process by saying "it can be summed up by saying “oh - but - if - yet - oh - therefore", and this is not the way in which either a poet can discover a piece ofy poetry within himself, or an architect or a painter project his experience. Some do. The abstract painter Lanskoy who died in Paris a few years ago, who spent days and days composing an abstract painting; he sat for hours and hours building it out of rational elements which he wanted to convey. When I asked him whether, when it was finished, it was understood, he said "no". Abstract things - paintings or models - are a language which one man can speak, and two or three, perhaps, can understand. But this is the point at which the rational working-out makes it possible for others to have access, because between the direct intuition which could be projected on canvas and which could be received back in the same intuitive way there is a rational process which distorts the experience by making it rational instead of direct. All this really is aimed at insistence, insisting perhaps too heavily on the fact that whatever comes out of a creator is to be understood. It can be understood, in a complex process of intuitive perception and reflection.
I saw the image, standing behind her chair,
Of a Celia Coplestone whose face showed the astonishment
Of the first five minutes after a violent death.
If this strains your credulity, Mrs. Chamberlayne,
I ask you only to entertain the suggestion
That a sudden intuition, in certain minds,
May tend to express itself at once in a picture.
That happens to me, sometimes. So it was obvious
That here was a woman under sentence of death.
That was her destiny."
But it cannot be left without meaning and., certainly, if a piece of creation has no meaning whatever or, if its meaning is such that it cannot reach anyone, it is wasted. It is wasted not only for the person who could receive the message, it is wasted for the person who gave the message. Because someone who speaks a language which no one understands tries to convey meaning by means which no one will be able to understand and falls short of his own essential intention of communicating. One could apply here a phrase which a French writer, Eduard Estaunie wrote in one of his novels called “Malaisie”. There is a character who is asked, "but what is his aim in life, what does he wish to achieve in his life?", and. his answer is "to posit, to make quicker than thought an action that would, be certainty in itself", and a piece of art is, in that respect certainly is an action - not the result of a long process of intentional workings, but an action which goes perhaps beyond the very understanding, the very knowledge of the creator which requires the co-operation of the creator with the person, and the persons, who will look at the object. It may be one person, it may be a generation of people, it may be centuries because you are well aware that in our experience of art there are centuries of art with which we are confronted, and every century responds differently to the art of a previous epoch, of a previous situation. The forms are very often - more often than not - determined by time, by the epoch, by the surrounding, by human characteristics, historical events but the content - if it is truly art and not simply a copy of outward reality – is something that reaches us through centuries. If you take a statue of the architecture of ancient Greece - if you could take the great pieces of art of all the countries and civilizations - we may feel that we would not express things in these particular terms; we would not use this technique to express perspective; we would not use these colours, or these lines; we would not use these conventions whether verbal, pictorial or musical, but we would express the same things in the same way and. this is brought out very clearly in the fact that we have so many variations written by one composer on the works of another composer; he listened - received a message - transmuted it within himself, in his own terms; but it is the same message seen by another man, received into another soul. - I am using the word “soul” for the lack of a better expression - and re-conveyed in new terms. This is something that happens in all forms of art.
Obviously, there are also people who try to reproduce the kind of reality which is around them who are mere copyists, but this is not art. If it is used and exploited for extraneous purposes it is even less art. It may convey thoughts or emotions which are alien to the aim of the designer or the painter, in which case one must ask oneself moral problems. I will give you an example and I hope I will not hurt anyone in particular. If you go along the streets of a city, or in the underground, you cannot help seeing a variety of posters advertising a variety of products. No poster says: "buy cigarettes" - "these cigarettes are good", or "buy such and such a product". There may be scenery which may induce in you a need of serenity, of peace, of calm, of beauty in very inverted commas and then, in a corner, a packet of cigarettes and, smaller than that, the price. The purpose of it all is to attract your attention and to create in you the sense of "oh, how lovely it would be to be in this "background", and then to say "and how much more lovely to be there with a cigarette". The same would be true for all sorts of advertisements and expressions. There are posters which border on the pornographic, there are such which make use of great paintings - prostituting greatness to very mercantile intentions. But this is not art. Why? Not because what is to be seen is bad, but because it is a lie. The intention is not to reveal beauty; the intention is to lull us through beauty, through an emotion to something which has nothing to do with it. The same would be true with attempts at painting or literature, the aim of which would be nothing, nothing but to give a sort of superficial pleasure - what Dostojevsky calls “titillation of the senses”.
There is a phrase of Pascal which I find very interesting: "How vain is the painting which calls out the admiration by the resemblance which it has to things of which we never admire the originals" - a painting which does not reveal the meaning of something so that afterwards we will recognize meaning in what we see, but something which creates an entity which bears the same name as a real object, but which screens away the object, which makes the object unnecessary.
So that one can say that any creator, in all the ways and forms of art, is one who receives a message, who transmutes the message within himself in a form - it may be silence, gesture, word, sound etc and who conveys it so that it becomes accessible to others - is a man who has vision and who sees not the externals, which anyone can see - wood is a building material - but who, beyond the visible, sees something more. When I say “more” I am just being careful, because I do not mean that he sees the essential nature - the substance - the essé of things. His vision may be limited, his vision may be more or less distorted by what he is and his capabilities, but he has seen something in depth, and why? Because he has looked at things not from his point of view but from the point of view of a visionary and, if I may be allowed five more minutes, I would like to give you a couple of examples.
Professor Vysheslavtsev, a Russian philosopher of our century, in an introduction on a book on mystical prayer called “The Way of A Pilgrim”, says "what is the difference between the vision of this pilgrim and the vision of the peasant when they look at the same surrounding world? The difference," he says, "lies in the fact that the peasant looks at the earth and gauges what is can bring forth in terms of a harvest. The visionary - the mystic, the poet - looks at it and sees it for what it is without any reference to himself, without calculating, without trying to see what can be got out of it. He does not read himself into it, he looks at it and receives a message. The kind of message he receives we will come to in my following talks.
Another example can be taken - and I apologize to those of you who know me too well not to know the examples which I quote - is taken from Charles Williams. In “Hallow's Eve” he describes the fate of a girl who has died. of a brutal accident. She has never been aware of anyone, or anything, but herself and, when she is deprieved of her body - when there is nothing left of her but her soul and therefore she cannot relate physically to the surrounding world - she is in an emptiness, she sees nothing; then gradually she begins to relate to one thing or another and, at a certain moment, she finds herself on the banks of the river Thames. She looks at this river. Before, when she was possessed of a body she recoiled from it because she saw in it the dirty, polluted, greasy waters carrying the refuse of the big city of London, and she reacted to it, as it were, by thinking "oh, God forbid that I should drink of this water, that I should be plunged into it"; but now she has no body that can elicit any action of that kind, and so she looks at it and sees the river Thames for a fact - for what it is - and it is totally adequate for what the river Thames, running through London, should be; because she accepts - totally, unreservedly - the Thames for what it is, through a first layer of opacity in pollution she begins to see successive layers of lesser opacity, of lesser pollution, then a depth where the water is clear, then a depth where the water is pure - the primeval waters which God created and, at the heart of this water a glittering, a brilliant stream of water in which she recognizes the waters which Christ gave to the Samaritan Woman.
Well , this is a process perhaps - immediate - obviously not dialectical through which reality can be perceived by a poet, a vision that is possible because he is free of self - at least at that particular moment - or, if he is involved, he is not involved in terms that make the surrounding world as small as he is. That allows him to expand to the scale of what he sees. There is disinterestedness, there is freedom, there is a communion in intuition that is at the hea.rt of this poetic or creative process.
I will continue to speak a little on these lines next time when I engage in the first of my two talks on beauty, and then I will come to a subject which may seem absurd to many, but which I believe should be looked at: the meaning of ugliness - not the fact of it, that is simple - but its place, its role, its significance.
Thank you.
Questions
Would you say that the vision that that girl has in “Hallow's Eve” about the Thames is roughly the same as, say, devout Hindu has about the Ganges?
This is not an easy question to answer. First, I have not experienced what Lester has experienced, and I have not experienced what a Hindu does. I think there is a difference. I think in the mind of Charles Williams the intention was to show that the moment we can disentangle ourselves from selfish, or self-centred, attitudes to what surrounds us, we can see things as they are whatever the reason then. It could be purely natural things, or supernatural ones, while a Hindu, as far as I am aware from reading - and perhaps many of you may put me right - a Hindu treats the Ganges as a sacrament, as something which is holy in itself and which, therefore, cannot be penetrated. A sacrament in Greek is called “mysterium” - a mystery. We are used to using the word mystery to signify something which we cannot understand, which is veiled, which is hidden from us. We say “a mysterious visitor” - someone about whom we know nothing, but the word comes from the Greek word which means “be silent, be spellbound". Being confronted with a reality which in beyond intellection, but not beyond communion with. I think this is the attitude of a Hindu with regard to the Ganges, or to a piece of blessed bread, the prassard, which would be offered and received as a mystery, as something which is loaded with the content, which can Toe shared perhaps to the extent to which you are receptive, but which cannot be analyzed because it is transcendental in itself. But this is my reaction to a question which I have never asked myself, and the elements of which I may not possess.
You referred to our reaction to the art an being both intuitive and rational. Do you feel that those two responses are in any way mutually exclusive?
No. I an quite certain they are not mutually exclusive. But for a piece of art to be understood, lived with, perceived there must be both. Because our rational approach is always on the scale of our rational capabilities whereas our intuition may widen, sort of break our limits and make it commune to something which is greater than us.
I am struck by the way in which psycho-analysts have examined paintings. I remember Freud making an analysis of a painting of St Anne, which is in the Louvre. To any ordinary person it is a very beautiful painting, representing St Anne. But he looked at it long enough to see in the drapery of her clothes a vulture and, from there, he builds a whole conception of a psycho-analysis both of the object - that is St Anne - and of the painter. I have nothing to say about it. The only thing is that there is for me an interrogation mark. I could give you other examples. It has been said by another psycho-analyst - I cannot remember now who - that Utrillo's concentration on painting pubs and. cafes was a way of sublimating his desire to get drunk; well, maybe. It has been said by psycho-analysts that Goethe wrote his “Werther” to sublimate his desire to commit suicide; maybe. But this is something which, to me, one reads into a text starting with premises, starting with the conviction that if one sort of makes a post-mortem of a piece of art one will read into it a great deal which may be there - or not, which cannot be proved. But I do not think this is a way of appreciating art. I do not know whether anyone of you has read what Jung for instance, or Lipps or Goringer have written on art from the point of view of psycho-analysis. A piece of art appears to be nothing but the expression of mental, emotional processes - either disturbed or less disturbed - of the artist; but there is nothing beyond it. The piece of art is a facade of the artist and our enjoyment in it - and that is either Lipps' or Goringer’s point of view - is our enjoyment of ourselves when we see ourselves posited in front of us. To me it is very much like the story of Narcissus, who looked at himself and found himself so beautiful that he died of it, and we may well die inwardly if we see nothing but ourselves in the pieces of art with which we are confronted.
This is something which we can easily fall a prey to by analyzing intellectually a piece of art and losing what the artist irrationally put into it. Irrationally does not mean unreasonably or foolishly, it means that what he did was beyond him - he saw more than he imagined he saw. There is a Russian writer called Gogol, one of whose characters says: "The soul of Mary knows more than Mary knows". Well, there is something of that kind in the artist who creates; he creates beyond himself - I do not mean in a state of ecstasy as described, say, in the lives of saints, but in a state of perceptiveness that is beyond his habitual normal condition. It is not the same man who, at another moment, is cross because his shaving water is too cold; it is not the same man who is pernickety about his lunch; it is not the same man who is a fop in the way he dresses - there is a moment when all that vanishes because he has seen something so significant that he could not have analyzed it. When you think for instance of van Gogh's “Olive Orchard in San Remy”, if you were confronted with the orchard, the orchard would be in front of you, and you would be examining it.
When you are confronted with a painting you are in front of the painting, that is the painting that takes hold of you - and not you, or the orchard - and that because between you and the orchard someone has seen a sort of essence, something substantial about it that was conveyed which was neither stems, nor leaves nor olives - it was an orchard, a way in which olive trees - of which each has something to say - relate to the total orchard and to each other tree and, therefore, can. have an impact on you.
Are your comments on “Meaning” and “Beauty” formed, could we say, by the iconographic tradition of the Orthodox Church?
I wish it was. I wish I was knowledgeable enough and perceptive of the iconographic tradition to be able to see things from within it. I know something about icons, and I will try and say something about them. I receive a message from icons but I think there is space in art for things which are not icons. Icons are a message of a certain type about the world in which we live. But it is not the whole world in which we live and, in that sense, one could say there is even more than the icon concerning what message the icons have to give.
If I may put it in a parallel: there is nothing greater in the experience of a Christian than Holy Communion yet, after the Holy Communion of priests and people, the priest says in a prayer: "Lord, grant us to commune even more truly unto Thee in Thy Kingdom which is to come."
Even if the icon is a window on eternity, there is an eternity which is beyond the icon. If I may put it in an image: the image of a stained glass window. We cannot see light, the light which surrounds us, which reveals to us everything around us, but which is revealed in a way by nothing. A stained glass window, because it is made of so many colours and has a theme, reveals two things to us immediately: by the theme it tells us a story something, say, about the life of Christ or a Saint, or an event; by its colour it conveys to us this story with the intensity of beauty. But when we have seen and understood both the theme and the beauty we must remember that both the theme and the beauty are revealed to us by the light which is beyond and this, I think, would apply to icons. But if we have learnt through the contemplation of icons, through the understanding of what an icon stands for, to see the world in terms of icons, then we must turn to the surrounding world and in the twilight which the world represents, is or lives in, learn to discern not the darkness, but the light. I would quote here what I have said before, the Orthodox Bishop who said:
When God looks at a person, or at mankind, he does not see the virtues, or the achievements, which are not there, he sees the beauty which nothing can erase.
Lecture 2
Beauty – Part 1T. S. Eliot Lectures by the Most Reverend Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh
2 November 1982
I would like to start with an apology, or a correction, of what I did yesterday. When I gave examples of seeing an object without meaning, and seeing meaning in an object, I spoke of a young theologian who had defined a tree in terms of building material, and I was rightly taken up afterwards by someone who remarked that it is not fair on men who work in wood, or in metal, or in other materials, to imagine that they see nothing of beauty in the material which they handle; indeed, it was none of my intention, but what I wanted to convey was that a man, who works in wood or in metal and creates an object in the process of his work, can also appreciate the nature of the material which he works upon; he can perceive wood in all its richness, while a young man who, confronted with the thought of a tree sees nothing but wood, not what can be created out of it, but nothing but building material falls short of a vision. If you want an image more adequate than the one I gave yesterday, you could go to one of the Dickensian characters who, seeing cattle in a field exclaimed, with elation, with gastric enthusiasm “live beef, live beef”. I think that is really a more adequate image, and is very much what I mean to convey.
It is of beauty that I should speak today, and no longer on meaning specifically. There is an old saying, at least as old as Goethe, that “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder”, one could also say that beauty is air ugliness in the eye of the beholder - but does it mean that there is nothing outside of the beholder which calls for beauty. On the other hand also, how does a person who sees beauty, or who sees an object outside of himself, recognize or term beauty in it. Well, it is a question of the way in which we relate to the object. In that respect the ancient thinkers beginning, or perhaps rather including Plato, thought of beauty in terms of cognition and not of aesthetic delight. Beauty was a way of entering into a sort of communion with an object that presents itself to us. The Russian writer Dostojevsky said that "to recognize beauty is to enter into mystical participation with the object in which we recognize it". It is knowledge of communion which can be interpreted in different ways. It may be that we read into the object a beauty of something which is within us. It may also be that the object presents us with characters to which we are bound to respond by recognizing beauty. The first type of approach, the reading into an object characters which are human, that is of humanizing an object, can be seen - I am no longer speaking at this moment in terms of beauty - in the way in which we would say that an animal is an embodiment of a given quality; the way in which we make an allegory of an animal. When we say that, when we look at the hyaena "oh, this is a nasty, furtive and ferocious animal", it does not imply that we know anything about hyaenas but, seeing the way in which it trots along, seeing that its foreparts are higher than the lower parts, seeing the expression on its face, we think "oh, if any of my relations, or friends, or acquaintances had a face like this, a gate like that, moved in that particular way, what a nasty creature it would be", and the poor hyaena is stamped a nasty creature. The same, perhaps in a more refined way, is said by more than one psycho-analyst who say that we speak of beauty in terms of empathy, in other words, of looking at an object and of pouring into it ourselves and then, looking again and seeing ourselves - to use a horrible expression - objectivised, it is an expression of Göringer, of objectivised outside of ourselves and responding, that is of seeing how lovely we are.
There is also a process which was described by other psycho-analysts who studied art in terms of giving a shape to an object, thereby affirming, not only by implication but explicitly, that no object has a content in itself that can reach us, that it is us who give a soul to it, a significance to it, and then read it in a second process as it were, in a second move. There can also be another approach, held by a great many ancient and modern writers, that there is something outside of us which can be termed beauty or ugliness and I will try gradually to disentangle if not your thoughts then at least my thoughts about it in the process of this talk and the next one.
There is certainly an element which can be expressed in the terms of Goethe, “yes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, because the beholder must be capable of seeing, and it is not everyone who is capable of seeing. When I use the word “see”, I mean perceive in all possible ways. It would be too long to say everytime “to see, to hear, to smell and so forth”. I will give you an example of this, taken from the Persian literature.
"There was in Persia, in ancient times, a very well known and revered poet called Madjnoun, and he spent his life writing most lyrical poems about his beloved one, who was called Lila. So beautiful were the poems, and so beautiful was Lila in the poems, that the Shah decided that he must see the object of all this poetry. Lila was brought to him and, using his prerogative as a ruler, he commanded her to take off her veil, and then he shrunk away; because, as the description goes "her nose was like the trunk of an elephant, her mouth like that of a camel, her ears like those of a donkey”, and the description is much richer and more convincing than anything I can do. Then the Shah looked at Madjnoun and said "but Madjnoun, she is horrid, how can you say that she is beautiful", and Madjnoun answered "you must have the eyes of Madjnoun to be able to see Lila".
I think that of course this may be called a caricature, you may say that it is impossible to speak in such terms. I would say that it is not only possible, it happens all the time. It is enough for one of us to love another person to be able to see beauty where someone else does not see it. This beauty which we see, is there, only we do not attach the term of beauty to the particular feature of a face or to the structure of a body we perceive, as it were in transparency, in the shining of a personality. In that respect, if we speak of beauty in terms of cognizance, of knowledge, of knowing, we must realize that it is not indifferent whether we look at an object with one attitude of mind or another. Total indifference does not allow us to see either beauty or ugliness. An attitude of mind that would say “I do not care at all what this object is”, lends us no secret concerning this object. Hatred and love can, but they disclose to us either beauty or ugliness, not indifferently or with the reactions which are not indifferent. Hatred singles out all that can be used for criticism, for rejection, to recoil away from an object; in the same line as hatred one would say fear or anything of the negative attitudes to a person or to an object. On the other hand love, that is openness, trustfulness, confidence - at times a confidence and trustfulness which is prepared to go to the extreme and take all risks, rather than shut itself up, can reveal to us beauty.
We respond most of the time to circumstances, to people or to beings in very personal terms. We think, or rather we respond to people according to what they represent for us in terms of risk or of elation, of blossoming out or, on the contrary, of recoiling. Faced with an object of danger we have no time, but also even less inclination to see whether it is beautiful or not. We see only the elements which we would term ugly, to use a very general phrase. But when we look at the same object with a sort of sense of security, then we can discern beauty.
Confronted with a wild animal, or with a dangerous person, in a situation in which we can become the victims of danger, we will see only what is negative. Confronted with the same beings in terms of safety we can see beauty - harmony. If any of us had to face a live tiger that had escaped from a cage, we would not have time or inclination to analyze the beauty of the animal, the elegance of the motion and to appreciate with what purposefulness the animal crouches down ready to jump. Why? Because the centre of gravity would be in us, not at all in the animal.
On the contrary, when the animal is safely in a cage we would just melt seeing the beauty of its fur; we would admire its teeth, we would look at its paws and the powerful claws and perhaps even sing the praises of God who has created something so purposeful. The only thing is that then we think that the purpose is not in us, but in another victim.
I remember the story of a group going on safari and being warned not to open windows, not to open the top of a car, not to look out of the doors because, said the guide "you must remember that to the animals that will surround you, you are nothing but meals on wheels"
Well, to be meals on wheels is something that does not lead us to be serene and contemplative, to be detached in the sense in which I tried to point out yesterday, but it is when we are able of contemplation, of vision that it is then when we can acquire this detachment of communion which is described in so many ways. I do not have the time, I think, to make quotations; perhaps if I finish early I will quote to you a short poem from the German writer Hugo von Hofmansthal to show you how serenity can be possessed by one who looks at a scenery, at a situation without being involved and can really see it as a glorious harmony. This means that the contemplation of beauty, the ability to perceive beauty is one of the ways in which, to use the imagery of Schopenhauer, we can overcome the sort of wild lust for life and acquire a serenity which does not distract anything from the intensity, but annihilates the brutality of the predatory way in which we so often treat life and our neighbour.
Beauty has been defined by people who could serenely look at things, beings - human or animal - around them, even at the phenomena of nature like a storm - a thunderstorm, and an earthquake, or anything to which we react in such ambiguous and different ways. Beauty has been defined as the convincing power of truth. Truth has beauty in itself. If something , which is a truth, or true, does not reach us in terms of harmony and beauty it remains exterior to us, alien to us and very often is not even termed as being truth. In that respect, I think one can say that it is not only one art or another that participate in this complex reality of beauty, as being the power of truth.
A certain number of years ago an American writer called; Hardy Junior wrote a book on the beauty of mathematics. He is a mathematician and he obviously did not speak of things as simple as 2 + 2 makes 4, and always 4, but of higher mathematics in which the solution of a complex problem reaches a point which is harmony, which is an adequacy between the various elements of reality.
But if you think of mathematics, and it being possible for mathematics to be seen in terms of beauty, because beauty would be defined as serene and final harmony, as a perfect equilibrium of things, we must realize that mathematics, that is the number, space, time is implicit in more than the mathematician’s or the physicist’s research. Music can be studied in mathematical terms. A sound can always be expressed in terms of vibrations, in terms of waves, in terms which can be shown either by mathematical figure or design, curves and so on. But there is a very interesting study that was made a number of years ago, on the Cathedral of Chartres, in which an architect and other people studied the cathedral’s structure and discovered that the whole cathedral is built on several elements.
First of all on a square, secondly on a five-pronged star; the square representing a complete stability and harmony, and the five-ended star being a symbol of man. But this being posited the distances, the measurements and the shape of the cathedral is such that from a given point it is exactly measured by musical lines which, emanated from a given point, reach one or another place in the Cathedral and instead of breaking down, reach it when they reach their plentitude and fulfillment. We can see in these examples that on the one hand mathematics, music, architecture and all the additional elements which architecture brings into it, not only the shaping of space but also the conditioning of the echoes, the distances and so are of the same quality: they express a truth about relations. One of the elements of beauty is that it establishes relations and relationships. A purely indifferent, insensitive - and may I interject at this point that when we speak of aesthetics we speak not only of perception in general, but of a sensitive perception; the word aesthetics, which I cannot translate more precisely than perception, for lack of knowledge of English, is connected, could be connected in our minds with the word anaesthetic - an anaesthetic is a drug that blots out not perception only but sensitivity in us, so that when we think of aesthetics and aesthetic terms, we relate to an object; when we remain indifferent to it there is indeed no perception of beauty or ugliness, there is no perception of the object other than something standing in our way which is irrelevant and irrelevance is the contrary of all that life is made of, or aims at, or gives a meaning to; if all of us were totally irrelevant to one another, we would not perceive one another in any way except as a mass, an object, bulk, and this is what the aesthetic perception, the experience of beauty and ugliness prevents so that there is a very deep truth in the fact that beauty is a convincing power of knowledge, not of intellectual knowledge, not of nothing but rational knowledge, but of a complex knowledge which implies intuition, reasoning which requires the participation of the total human being or the total society for it.
I think we must realize also that there are several elements that we are confronted with when we speak of beauty as well as we speak on scientific terms there is reality, there is truth and there is us. Reality is more than truth. One can play on words, and both people who operate with Latin roots and people who operate with Slav roots have done it, say that reality is what is and truth is what is and they both coincide; it is not quite like that. Thinking in scientific terms, let me say this. Reality is both what we know and all that we do not know. No scientist would engage in research if he imagined that there was not in reality a whole wealth of the unknown. In that sense a scientist approaches the world in the terms of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the eleventh chapter, where it says “faith is certainty of things invisible”. A scientist approaches the world, challenged by the visible, but his research goes into the invisible, or the yet unknown. But this is also very much the way in which we perceive beauty, we are challenged by a form and beyond this form we may discover a content, a content that will be so meaningful, that it will lighten up the form and give it meaning which the form itself does no possess. May I put it into one or two phrases. There is a spiritual writer called Methodius of Olymp who says:
"As long as we do not love a woman we are surrounded by women and men.When we have given our heart to one woman, there is Her, with a capital H, and there are people"
In that short form of speech we see something very important: that we were surrounded by an indiscriminate mass of people who were all significant up to a certain point, and irrelevant to a much greater extent: they were people; we had a contact from time to time, an exchange from time to time, and it ended at this; they dropped out of existence the moment they were out of sight. But then, one day, we look at a person and we suddenly see this person as we have never seen him or her before. It is a though we were looking at a drawing where everyone was drawn in pencil, that is in black or in gray and, one day, someone had drawn one of these characters in red ink, which stands out, is unique, all the rest is gray, there is only one person. That is common place in literature: to say one being is not there, and everything has become empty.
But what is the process, what happens then in some unaccountable way, by an act of intuition, that is of seeing because “intueri” in Latin means “see into”. We have seen something, which we did not see before. But it is not the outer characteristic; we have seen these features, time and again; what we have not seen is the light shining through, we have seen a lamp that was not lit, then it was lit and it shone out with meaning, or simply with mystery, that is with the challenge that said to us: there is in me something that you can discover, something unique, something ineffable, something which shines again, in the words of L????? B?????, which you can enter into with mystical participation; something that will be a revelation in terms of communion, not simply of outer sharing but of an inter-woveness that nothing can ever break afterwards. There is a Russian saying “one meets a person once, but it is for ever; because having met, one cannot forget”.
I am not speaking of our intellectual forgetfulness, but our whole self is marked and re-determined by this meeting. So that there is a reality that surrounds us, which is beyond the visible, beyond what we can perceive, but which is the object, which we search for. One may say that every one of us contains all of us, represents us and contains chaos. Nietsche said, somewhere, “you must carry a chaos within yourself in order to give birth to a star”.
I think it is immensely important for us to realize the existence of this chaos and the importance of it. When we speak of chaos habitually we simply think in terms of disorder: “my room is a chaos”, means “do not come in because all the furniture is covered in books, linen and what not”, but it is not that. Chaos, if you look at it for instance in the beginning of the Bible. Chaos is a situation in which there is a being full of possibilities, which have not yet found expression for themselves. It is pregnant with possibilities, all that is needed is to do something about them. What we usually tend to do is to try and to put chaos into order in the same way in which we put in order our drawers, or our room and, therefore, kill any possibility for the chaos to give birth to a star. Those of you who read Bertold Brecht may have come across a passage in which one of the characters says to another:
"Herr Kerner, when you are concerned with someone, when you love someone, what do you do about him?"This is exactly the way in which we deal with a chaos that is with all the possibilities pregnant within a situation, or within a person, which are frightening to us because we never know what will happen and, therefore, to freeze it down, or to organize it is the simplest way. This is what is done by all the political and non-political systems: to try to organize society, or an individual, so that there is absolutely no risk that something should emerge which is unforeseen and, therefore, will explode the ideal model which I have worked out, invented and which I, therefore, cherish.
and the answer is:
"I observe and study him";
and then,
"what do you do?"
"I work out a blue-print of what is good for him";
and then the interlocutor adds a damning phrase, a most unkind andunwanted for-phrase, the interlocutor says:
"pray, which should coincide with the other: the person or the blue-print?"
and Herr Kerner answers:
"of course, the person"
There is another way, however, of looking at chaos. God deals with chaos quite differently. God calls out of a chaos all that is already mature and capable of emerging into life, or those things which are capable of emerging and of changing somehow into maturity. God does not aim at creating an order, he aims at creating a cosmos. I am sure all ladies will support my etymology if I remind you that the words “cosmos” and “cosmetics” are of the same root. It means “creating beauty”. When a lady uses war-paint, or other devices, to make her face into something which she finds is particularly attractive and beautiful, she is trying to do something which belongs to the creation of beauty, and what we are about concerning the cosmos is that: to call out of it a harmony, to call out of it a beauty which we cannot foresee; not a beauty according to our own taste, not a beauty according to our own presuppositions, but a beauty which will be a revelation to us of what is the potentiality of this cosmos.
Then, in the process we have to speak of reality one way or another; we have to find ways of expressing this cosmos in its ambiguity between good and evil, between light and darkness, between life and death, between God and the adversary, between beauty and ugliness - but we can never do it adequately, and when the ancient writers spoke of truth being the adequacy between reality and the mind, they did something very dangerous, because the great danger which is ours which is to project the categories of our mind upon a reality which is more complex, much richer, much greater and very much unknown to us. So the adequacy which we must aim at is not adequacy between the object which we contemplate and our mind, but the adequacy between what we have seen of an object and the way in which we can express our experience of it; that is quite a different thing. It may be a static expression, say a snapshot is very typically the immediate fixation of an object as it is now at this moment, and it is perfectly true; there is a moment when you saw the object as it was. So often you see in a newspaper someone whose face could be very beautiful, but photographed from below with a mouth wide open, nothing is left but a big mouth and a ridiculous face. I remember a friend of mine presented me with a portrait of mine in the form of a sculpture. It was an oval, with metal strings and when I said "what it was?", he said "I always think of you as someone who speaks", and there was nothing but this horrible thing in which I refused to recognize my whole self. The point of what I am saying is not to try to convince you that I am nothing but a mouth that speaks, but of the fact that the moment we freeze down anything concerning life it becomes a lie, it is no longer true, it is a betrayal. But then how can one describe things in a static way, in a dynamic way. I will give you two examples.
The question is “what is it that I want to convey” - is it the truth of the dynamic motion, or is it to fix the elements of it. A first example:
The French sculptor, Rodin, has sculpted, made a sculpture called “the man who walks”, and you see a man walking. Now, if you look at the man who walks, you see that no man has ever walked that way, because Rodin’s sculpture, being so big and so heavy, could never have stood on the point of a foot, while the other one was not leaning on the ground, so the two feet are very solidly planted, because planted only by the toes it would not hold. But what he meant to do was not to show how a man actually walks, but the walk of the man, a walking man.
The same applies to a painting by the French painter Gericault of the”Derby at Epsom”. You see that the horses are galloping. If you compare it to a snapshot you discover that not one horse gallops that way. The only thing is that on a snapshot you see horses that are suspended and petrified and do not budge at all. In the painting you see their gallop, and so when we speak of the truth and try to convey it, we must be careful not to imagine that a static representation is truer then, alright, a falsified representation, but which conveys another element in it.
I was told yesterday that apart from every other shortcoming in my talk there was one very important one: that I had spoken far too long, so I will stop here and leave the rest for my next talk, and the talk that will come after. If you feel like asking questions, or attacking me on what I have said, I am open and ready to answer if I can and be taught what I do not know, which is immense in that field.
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Questions
I was wondering what you might say about envy of another’s beauty, because you seemed to want to say that love is the medium that enables you to see, certainly in the case of an envious perception of beauty - I have seen it happen, a case of envious perception of beauty; now does that mean that in some sense this is not a true perception of beauty, or are we talking about a different kind of beauty.
When we see someone else’s beauty we can respond in two opposite ways: by envying it, or by marveling at it, staying arrested by it with a sense of gratitude for what we are shown.
As far as envy is concerned, envy is a very curious feeling – because on the one hand, obviously, it is an attitude of mind which is far from being detached, it is not contemplative while wounded by someone’s beauty because at the same moment instead of seeing the beauty we compare it with ourselves. It is a return to self. On the other hand, there is in envy a very important element: that we always envy one characteristic or another which we feel we lack. But we would never accept to change places with the other person. We would say "I would love to have your beautiful face, but not your husband"; "we would like to have your physical beauty, you are a real Apollo, but not the job you have".
So that in envy there is a very cruel attitude which would deprive the other person of what is perhaps the most tender and precious gift of providence, and leave the other person with all that is hard, difficult, ugly in one way or another. I think there must be a whole education of self - not of others - others will educate very easily - but of self in facing the good circumstances in which another person lives, the good, happy relationships or the beauty of a person in an attitude of joy, of marvel.
In my last talk I want to bring out an interview which the French singer Brassens had at a certain moment. He was ugly, and a rather determined interviewer had a long discussion with him on the way in which he dealt with his ugliness. I do not want to do it now, because I have enough difficulties in giving these talks without spoiling the little I can gather from others.
Our attitude to beauty is very ambiguous. When you were speaking of envy, I was thinking of other reactions to beauty. There is in the life of saints a story about a spiritual guide, taking a stroll with his disciples and, as he was coming out of the city, the most beautiful harlot, a common prostitute but of great beauty, came towards them. The disciples covered their heads with their cloaks - not to fall into temptation; but they fell into another temptation. They covered their faces so as not to see the girl, but they kept a loophole to see their master, to find out what he would do when confronted with this prostitute, and they saw him looking at her with an expression of contemplative ecstasy. When the woman had passed, and they felt safe, they said to him "how could you look at this woman, she is a prostitute", and he answered "I did not see a prostitute, I saw the incredible beauty which God has given this woman"
You know, this kind of freedom from bringing things to self, “oh, the danger for me; oh, could I possess this characteristic or another”, is something which we must fight on moral grounds, and I will come to this next time because I feel that in all that we have got to say about beauty, and the way in which we face it, there is a moral component and not only a psychological or metaphysical one. There is beauty which is an absolute, and then there is a way in which we make it into something evil, because evil is in us, and not in it.
I would like to expand that thought, because it does sometimes seem to me that something of this kind is at the root of social or cultural friction. That, if we see something which we do not understand, which we cannot form into a pattern, we become actually hostile to it. I am thinking of the numerous English people, I am sure, who find this with the Jewish script - it is sinister and somehow evil - it is a great discovery to discover that there is a whole wealth of beauty in it. But the immediate reaction is to throw a brick, in fact.
I think that is, to some extent, to do with anti-semitism. The Jewish family life is different to the Christian family life, therefore, it must be wrong in some way, and there is a reaction against it, an actual reaction of hatred against something which is beautiful.
Yes. I think it could not be more true.
I have been a foreigner since the age of 8 in a variety of countries and situations. I know that if you are a foreigner you are really either an object of curiosity - exactly in the same way in which a monkey is, or another animal - or an object of rejection, if your ways or your attitudes do not fit, or an object of amusement.
When I came to this country a little bit more than 30 years ago and began to lecture on Orthodoxy, or to speak, my mother said to me "I thought you wanted to be a priest, and I have discovered that you have become a wandering circus"
It was true, because, I dare say perhaps not in a university where you are more blase about things, but in many places people would come to listen to me because I look odd. I have sleeves as no one; one can always hope that being a foreigner, I would say something which is so objectionable in English that one will be able to laugh and enjoy it.
I think it comes from the fact that, yes, indeed, we react negatively to what is alien to us, but I think beyond this, just a step before, there is always, or so often, a fear that something which is not within the compass of my experience, or the collective experience of the group to which I belong, may destroy or explode something which is precious to me or something which is my security. To discover that someone can think differently before I can make a synthesis, or make a choice, may well be a frightening experience; that happens in scientific research. I am not someone who has studied humanities, I studied science and medicine, therefore, my mind works that way. When you do scientific research, have collected facts that are proven and solid, in order to keep them together and also to be able to use the whole of them, you build a model, so that they hold together and then, however honest you are, however much you want to reach out from your experience into an objective reality, which is beyond it, it is very difficult not to think "I hope that no one will find a fact that will contradict the facts that I have put together, or a flaw in the way in which I have put them together". You find that, I am sorry to say, but in all walks of life - people defending their conceptions, their theories, their religion, their philosophies, their politics whatever to the limit of integrity, because it is so frightening to be left within an exploded world.
So that it is not perhaps first of all the strangeness of the other, but the fact that I am afraid that what the other one is, or stands for, has enough substance, enough reality, enough truth in it - but what will happen to my substance, my truth and my reality. Very often people project doubt, and their fear of doubt, from their own constructions on to the object. People are afraid of facing an argument against their view on God, on men, on the universe, on science. They are afraid of being challenged on them because if my view crumbles, where shall my God be? And where shall my most precious experiences be? They will not be lost, because as I tried to indicate in passing, unless we identify reality with our own projection, intellectual, rational projection, they risk nothing. Matter risks nothing of theories about it; neither does God risk anything about the variety of approaches. We may be the losers or the gainers, but there is no fear in it.
Can you say something about the connection of Christian faith with the understanding of beauty, or perception of beauty.
If I may, I will quote Dostojevsky who said "ultimately beauty is God in Christ"
From a human point of view, for a Christian, Christ is the fulfilment of human beauty and the revelation of beauty divine poured into him. On another level Christianity requires integrity of mind and heart, requires a moral attitude -not in terms of precepts to be kept, but of an approach which would rule out what the French writer Malraux calls “anti-arts”, or “anti-beauty”, things which are morally destructive because beauty should be more than an alluring or attractive form. To go far back beyond Malraux, I would say that the Greek definition of a complete man as kallos kag athos, the man who is beautiful, good and brave could be a formula which approaches the Christian way of thinking. I think that a Christian would rule our morally destructive forms because they may be a lie against a deeper and truer reality.
Lecture 3
Beauty – Part 2T. S. Eliot Lectures by the Most Reverend Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh
3 November 1982
I must say something which still belongs to yesterday's subject, and then move on to what is really the subject of the evening, to bridge the gap between my first lecture on beauty, and what I have to say about the meaning of ugliness which I believe is an important thing for us to assess and understand.
I said yesterday that one of the definitions which were given of truth was adequacy between the object and the intellect, and that I found this kind of definition dangerous, because the adequacy is not between the intellect and the object simply because the intellect has its own categories, but between the mysterious complex reality which we perceive only partly, which we assess imperfectly, and the expression which one can give to it in that, in a very relative manner, in proportion to the perception and in proportion to our ability to express what we have perceived. But when it comes to expressing things, as I have mentioned yesterday, there are two quite different approaches; one is an attempt at simple verisimilitude, trying to create an image which is as resemblant to the object as possible. But even here there are difficulties because what is really verisimilitude? what is really the image of the object we see? Speaking in terms of compariponx is it the snapshot, or is it a portrait. A snapshot gives an exact image of a face, or a situation, or a scenery at a given moment. Is it true? In a way it is not true at all because it is a face, or a scenery taken out of the flow of life. This face is not like this all the time. On the other hand, a portrait does not attempt simply to reproduce features of a given moment.
I would like to read you a quotation which I found by chance, and I rejoice at the chance which gave it to me, by a man called Robert Heinlein. He says:
An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl-she used to be. A great artist can look at an old woman, portrait her exactly as she is and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be. More than that, he can make anyone, even with the sensibility . of an armadillo, see that this lovely girl is still alive - imprisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet endless tragedy that there was earlier a girl born who never grew older than eighteen in her heart, no matter what the merciless hours have done.
This is also verisimilitude, but of another type. It is a vision that allows one to look at a moment and see all that the past has brought to this moment. Because every moment of ours is a summing up, or the sum total rather, of all our past but we do not discern it, usually we see only what appears on the surface, brought forth by circumstances and time.
So that verisimilitude is important, but which one? is it that of the portrait, is it that 6f the snapshot, or is it perhaps a vision even greater - a vision that does away practically with material evidence and not only with appearances. If I may I will give you an image taken from the Gospels, although I have tried to avoid being clerical and speaking in terms of the Holy Scripture. It is a story of Christ and the woman taken in adultery. She is brought to him, she is accused, she is condemned by the law of the Old Testament and by the attitude of the Jews who "bring her. Christ is asked what his judgement would be. His answer is:
Let him, who is without sin, cast the first stone.and then, when everyone has gone, he asks her:Where are those who have condemned you. - they have gone;neither do I condemn you; go in peace, but sin no more.Now, the way in which I read the story is really the point which I am making. It was not appearances he was brushing away, it was not a false accusation like that that brought to trial Susannah in the Old Testament, falsely accused, it was material evidence, it was factual evidence - but what did he do about it? Does it mean that he simply rejected the evidence, considered that there was no reason for it? No, what he saw was the law and beyond the material evidence something else: here was a girl who had sinned grievously; here was a girl who, if she remained what she was -an adulteress - deserved condemnation; but what he saw was that this girl had foolishly committed adultery because she had never become aware of an essential fact of life: that sin, evil and death, destruction belong together, that sin contains in itself death and destruction, and here she was brought unto judgement knowing that the result of it would be her death and, confronted [with death, she had seen herself in a different way. Christ was not letting go an adulteress because he was kind-hearted and easy-going or because he might have approved of a permissive society, he let go a girl who was confronted with death and discovered that evil, sin was co-extensive to dying, and could go back into life having gone through the gates of death and understood what she had never known before. So that, in a way, there is also this element in our vision of things - the ability to see in depth not what there is not, but what there truly is beyond what could be an object of verisimilitude, that is of copying, the form without perceiving the deepest content.
Now, speaking of the reality I mentioned the fact that the visible may be unreal, untrue, it may appear as an illusion, as a distortion; it may appear as the surface with the depth of a surface without any depth; it may be an imperfect expression of something real and true, it may be a form that is a lie and a lure. Speaking of the visible world in terms of unreality, one could mention the attitude, the Indian attitude, to the existing world of the Maya as an illusion. It is there, but it is deeply unreal and untrue somehow. It may also be that the visible is simultaneously a veil and a revelation. A veil because reality is deeper, greater, more significant, more meaningful than the forms which we can apprehend, but it is also the only means we possess, a cross through the forms which we can apprehend to perceive a reality, a meaning which is within it. I have no time to make quotations, but there are a number of writings on the pantheistic side, beginning with antiquity and going through up to our time, in which the authors - I am thinking at the moment particularly of a French writer Gerard de Nervales who looks at reality and says
Beware, within the visible reality that seems to be inert, that seems not to be alive with all the intensity which we see in the word life and live, there is a life hidden.
An ancient writer said:
Cleave a stone and you will see there is life within it.
and others have said things of the same kind. But there is also, one could quote a writer like Vladimir Solovyov, in the Russian tradition, who says:
My friend, do you not understand that all that you hear is the echo of a music which is beyond us.
I have spoken of chaos yesterday and of the fact that both within us, in our midst, and in the total universe we are confronted with chaos, not in the sense of a disorderly being, a disorder resulting from the collapse of order, but of a mysterious reality, pregnant with possibilities which are not yet expressed and which are waiting for the moment when they will be mature to flower, to blossom out, and to appear in glory.
Now, there is a problem of expression, static and dynamic, and there is a variety of ways in which this expression is attempted. If we belong to a certain cultural background, a certain cultural tradition, allusions may convey to us - in terms of reminiscences awakening in us our own experience already perceived in the past -understanding. You can find that time and again in T. S. Eliot, you can find that in so many authors, both poets or not, in whom we can hear either the echoes of things that have been said or written in the past and which enrich every word and every image given. There are also allegories and myths which are liable at times and within limits of more than one interpretation but which, as so many images, are meant to have more than one interpretation because the person who presents them presents either one facade which he has perceived and expressed in these terms, or presents an image which is more convincing to him than anything he could say because he is aware of the fact that whatever he will say will be limiting his experience, while the image conveys it more than words could do, or a statement could do
In this line one can speak of the analogy and similitude which one can find by drawing parallels.
The French writer Paul Valery translates in an image, which is totally different from what he speaks about, his vision of what he sees and. indeed at times you need a commentary that explains every image and every line, because it is anything but obvious. But then perhaps does a saying of Stephane Mallarme, a French poet again, explain it? He was a teacher in the secondary school which I attended, - a number of years, of course before I was at it, but there were still echoes of his presence. I remember an old man, who had been a pupil in his time, reporting that one of the teachers said to him:
Monsieur Mallarme, I cannot understand your poetry.
and Mallarme looked at him and said:
I am not surprised, Sir, I write only for intelligent people.
And then there are attempts to convey the glimpse of reality perceived, that is the experience of reality, in symbolic manners. A symbol in ancient Greece was something very simple. When two friends parted and one of them was to go far away and thought he might send a message that was to be received with certainty, without doubt, they took either a coin, or a piece of pottery and broke it. The messenger was to bring the half, and if the half fitted exactly then the messenger was a true messenger and the message was reliable.In that sense, every symbolic expression is half of a broken coin and can be recognized only if we possess the other half of it. That means that it requires human, cultural experience or, at times, transcendental experiences like the writings of the mystics{ examples could be so many. In German literature there is a poet called Scheffel, who has written a song, a love song, about his parting from his beloved and he draws a continuous parallel between the landscape, the weather, the grayness of the day and the sorrow that is within his hearty this is a simple kind of symbol: the world is gray, the wind is blowing and whistling through the fronds of the trees, the rain is falling hard - truly the right weather to say good-bye, and he goes on. This is half of the broken coin. We all possess the other half. At times the imagery is more complex and I dare say that it may be so complex, or so momentary true, that even the author may stumble when you ask him what he meant. There is a letter of the Russian poet Al. Blok, who is one of the great poets and. a symbolic poet, in which he says:
When I read my poetry that was so clear to me, in which all the symbols were so evident, some of them I cannot understand anymore - they correspond to a moment's vision, and they have gone.
So when we read it, we may see something else, or we may see nothing, or we may recapture his experience which he had lost.
There is also a way of conveying things which I do not understand in terms of poetry or prose, but which I think I understand a little bit more, if not to excess, in abstract art. Apart from the attempts by some abstract painters of seeing simple, doing something unheard of - and that exists in all walks of life - there are some who feel that one must break the models, the models being the intellectual categories which have been projected century after century on the objects or the situations or the experiences which surround us. That experience of the visible, or audible or perceptible world has been made a prisoner of intellectual categories and they must be broken, as a model is broken, so that one can breathe. So that one can, having got rid of a super-imposed, rational structure achieve something else - a new vision. I will give you an example, which really is on the fringe of what I am saying on an image
There is a book by a man called Gregory ?????? , who is Professor of Psychology in Bristol, which is called "The Intelligent Eye", and he shows in his book how often we recognize things, we see things because we know how to look at them and how to discern them. He shows a very interesting photograph. He has a photograph in which there is a Dalmatian dog - you know, one of those big dogs who seems to have measles, covered in spots - standing against the background of a piece of land covered with puddles. The puddles and the spots of the dog are more or less of the same size. Now, obviously, when we see a dog we see him in relief, in motion and so on. But when we see a dog standing against this background normally the dog is marked by a line that de-limits him. Here he has done away with the line, and you cannot see the dog. You do not see the dog until, after great efforts, you have singled out two smaller puddles - which are his eyes -, two more small puddles - which are his nostrils then you are surprised that there is an oblong puddle and you realize, oh, that is the shadow of its tail and, gradually, you can reconstruct the dog. I feel that at times abstract art is aiming at this dis-location of a conventional view, of a view on which we have forced our intellectual schemes and forms in order to look anew. Obviously, when you look at a Dalmatian dog against that background it is in the end a Dalmatian dog you will see but, in other realms, the fact of dislocating this kind of reality, looking at it again may allow you, help you, see things with quite new eyes; there is newness in the vision which you could not obtain by looking again and again while you project your categories
The French writer, ????????? has said that the contemplation of the surrounding world., together with the perception of beauty and ugliness, simply the artistic vision and not simply the practical vision, the utilitarian vision of the surrounding world, must lead us to vision first, then to reflection, not to a sort of postmortem of what we have seen, but to a deeper reflection of what it means to us, or what it may mean in itself and then a sort of exorcising of what we are presented with from our intellectual categories - a liberation of ourselves from the imprisonment in our human structures; an effort to learn to see an object and not to see ourselves, or our pre-conceived interpretation. Of course there is a danger of projecting these human categories. But still, it remains that we can try and learn and we can do this - and I have already spoken of this, so I am not going to repeat it - we can do this if we learn to look at things in a selfless, in a detached, in a serene way; selfless in the sense that we must not look at things and ask ourselves "how does it affect me?" - see the thing, and not myself: either projected or reflected or endangered or gratified by what I see, and with a serenity which is born from this very freedom from the fear of greed attaching to our usual approach to whatever, or whoever, surround us. And then, in the end, there is the very complex world of The Parables. Far too often we think of parables as visual aids, in the same way in which in a comic one has an illustration that conveys nothing more than what the text provides, but which adds to some sort of dramatic perception of it. But a parable is something a great deal richer and more interesting because it involves the object and it was US, and it involves all our capabilities of imagination and of experience in an almost endless way. May I just dwell on "that for a few moments, and dwell in terms of geometric figures.
You know that a circle has a centre and a statement which is complete in itself, which is self-explanatory, is like a circle with a centre. You can go to the centre and you possess all the figure. A factual statement of any kind will correspond to this kind of image. An ellipse is an oblong figure which really is like a circle on which someone is sitting and has squashed, it in length; it possesses two half circles which are incomplete, linked with two curves but, at the centre of each of these curves there is a focal point, and these two focal points have a very curious correspondence between themselves. When you are truly possessed of what there is in one of the focal points you can perceive what is in the other one, and vice versa. This is the principle of the whispering galleries in architecture. If you stand at the focus of one end of the ellipse, and someone stands at the other focus, a very quiet whispering is heard absolutely clearly while the voice is perceived nowhere else within the limits of the ellipse.
Well, that is a very important way of conveying things in words, in music, in all the forms of expression because the creator speaks at one point and, in order to hear him, you cannot go to the point where he is because you cannot simply identify with him to the point of sharing his experience in the way in which he perceives it, but you can go to the other focus and hear exactly what he says. And I think this is one of the ways in which a poet speaks of his experience and. calls out, brings out, conjures out your own. But by sharing with you his to such an extent, in such a way that you become the richer for it. You share, yes, but it is not an invented, or borrowed experience, it is an experience which is called out of you in the way in which image for image the whole world, in the first chapter of the Bible, is called out of chaos by creative word that says to everything that can be "come" and it comes, revealing itself and being a revelation at the sane time. And then there is a very curious figure in mathematics called a parabola. A parabola, I am sorry I am not a mathematician, and probably not all of you are - but speaking again in images, a parabola is something like an ellipse which has lost half of its existence, that is, there is a beginning of a half circle and then the two arms of an ellipse would grow out of the half circle, open. Now, a parabola possesses a centre, a focus, but if you take the summit of this parabola and go through the focus there is a line that goes into infinity and that is the point I think in which a real parable is so interesting, because you can take hold of this centre which is there before your eyes, before your nose, which is accessible and then from there look into infinity and go along this line as far as you will be able to go. You, not another person - I may go an inch, you may go a yard, someone else will go a mile, but it will be along this line, and it is possible because you have begun at this end of the point at which someone has said: "here it is: start"
This is what we can find in the more complex parables of the Gospels and, in so many parables of east and west, the parable of whichever tradition or culture is built on that very principle. A focal point which is within your perception, but does not call you to stay at this point; on the contrary, it tells you: "go away into infinity as long and as far as you can go"
What is curious with art in that respect is that an expression, that is a form whether it is oral, vocal, whether in words or sound or shape is something which is born from an experience and is the embodiment of a content - a content which it mediates by the artist, a content which he has perceived and projected in his piece of art. But then this form to him, and to the people who belong together with him in culture or in spiritual or intellectual or emotional experience, conveys something of his own knowledge, knowledge not only rational and intellectual, but total. But then centuries go by, and what happens is that the form remains. We possess pieces of art created, hundreds and thousands of years ago. We cannot always recapture the intention of the person who created. it. For instance when it is born from a religious tradition which has died out and to which we have no access, or about which we can have our guesses but in which we do not participate; or when it is taken from a cultural tradition to which we have no access because it is so profoundly different that we do not know how to coincide with the experience. Then we are confronted with a form that claims from us a response, and this response will be at times a new content, not totally different from the one which was the cause, the original cause of this piece of art, but a new content which will be born of the little we know, the little we can perceive and the amount which we possess within ourselves. In that case there is a pouring into an existing form of something which perhaps was not there originally, or was there as part of the universal human experience, but not the particular experience in time, space and history. I have little so say about this, but I saw by accident a performance on television of Don Quixote this winter. I happened to be in front of a television which I never see. You remember that the story of Don Quixote ends with his discovery of his folly and return to sanity, the whole story of Don Quixote was presented in this television programme adequately, obviously in abbreviated way as Cervantes has presented it, but it was reversed: he comes to his senses, and then the whole vision crumbles and he is brought back to believing that his vision of the world was truer than what the sane person sees of it. This conveyed a new message out of a new form. Obviously it was unfaithful to Cervantes, it was untrue of his intention, but in a way it was legitimate as far as the new perception was concerned.
Now, to establish a bridge between what I have said so far and what I still intend to say in our next talk to the survivors of this series, I would like to say that I have been speaking all this time of beauty in terms of physical and psychological realities, but within the Christian tradition and outside of it there is a very strong sense that beauty, the notion of beauty, applies also to spiritual achievement. The early writers of Christianity - of the undivided Christian world - so one can speak of it without any nuances said:
To become truly a person is to create a piece of art.
St. Irenaus of Lyons, in the second, century, said:
A man, perfectly fulfilled, is the splendour of God.
And. in the Orthodox tradition the spiritual struggle is expressed in terns of achieving supreme beauty. The books which contain the ascetic and mystical teachings of Orthodoxy are grouped under the name of "Philokalia", which means "the love of beauty", not of external beauty, but of a beauty that holds together the spiritual greatness of man, his psychological harmony and his bodily harmony. I think this is a very important thing to remember: that beauty is something that is not only, speaking in creative terms, is not only something that applies to the created, but also to the uncreated, to the communion. What Dostoyevsky calls the mystical participation of man not only to the object of this world, but to the creator of this world. When we find for instance in St. Peter's Epistle General this call that:
We should become partakers of the divine nature.
it is not only in terms of holiness, or harmony, of purity, of sanity in every respect that we can speak of, but also in terms of supreme beauty, a vision of what is truth and beyond truth, a vision of what is reality, unveiling itself before us and which is the convincing power of this reality. A beauty which is indeed in the eye and heart of the beholder, because we must have eyes to see, but not only in a passive way, because participation, communion, entering into an experience requires from us the same kind. of struggle, the same kind. of intense ruthless attitude to ourselves which a true artist applies to himself when he is confronted with a piece of granite or marble or an empty canvas and must look at this piece of granite and see within it the statue which he must free from its imprisonment in the stone. But that implies, yes, it does imply, the existence of what A. Malraux also calls "anti arts" all the forms of creativeness incurred which instead of enhancing human reality, bring it down, prevent greatness, prevent our growth into a measure of beauty by replacing genuine beauty by a falsification of it.
I will end this talk by reading to you a passage from Dostoyevsky, in which he opposes two kinds of beauty. Dostojevsky had an idea, and you will probably have heard the phrase "that it is beauty that will save the world":
"Not everyone is capable of perceiving intellectual truth; not everyone is capable of perceiving many of the things which reach us through our reasoning powers. But there is no one who is not capable of responding to whatever faces him in terms of beauty or ugliness"
I was amazed a couple of years ago when I wanted to give a talk on beauty and thought that I would find it all ready-made in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, to discover that there is no such entry in the book. There is no word called "beauty" in it. But if you look up aesthetics you will find two lines saying that
Beauty being a purely subjective experience, nothing can be said about it.
The trouble is that it may be subjective as far as the choice is concerned of what I or you find beautiful, but it is a universal reaction, or response, to everything whether it is a moral situation or whether it is an object. You can present an object to anyone and say "what do you think of it", and he would say "oh, how ugly", or "how lovely", and that is exactly where beauty or ugliness, which are correlative, come into the picture, so that Dostojevsky's phrase 'beauty will save the world", means that anyone is capable of responding to truth in terms of beauty, or rejecting ugliness because it is a lie against reality, or a distortion, or a calumny of it or a lure, and then he goes on to says
Yet, there are two kinds of beauty. There is the real the beauty which elevates, and there is the beguiling beauty which belongs to human greed., to human meanness, to human sensuality detached, from the deep and real feelings.
I will come to this in my last talk. I would like to end this one with this quotation:
What is artistic reality? They say that the artistic work must reflect life and so forth; all that is rubbish. The writer creates life, a life in such full amplitude as did not exist before it.
That is one example of what he means, and then:
The need. for beauty and. the creation which embodies it is inseparable from man, and without it men would not want to live in the world. Man thirsts for it, finds and accepts beauty unconditionally and just because it is beauty, and he bows before it with reverence, without asking what it is useful for, or what one can buy for it and perhaps precisely in this consists the greatest secret of art, that the image of beauty created by it immediately becomes an idol unconditionally.
And why does it become an idol? because the need for beauty develops most at the moment man is in discord with reality, in disharmony, in struggle that is, when he is living most of all, because man lives most of all when he is seeking something and striving. At such a time he feels within himself a most natural desire for everything harmonious, for tranquillity, and in beauty there is both harmony and tranquillity.
But, when man finds what he has been striving for, then, for a time, life as it were slows up for him and we have seen examples in which man, having achieved the ideal of his desires, not knowing what farther to strive for, being satiated, would fall into a kind of anguish, would even torment in himself this anguish, seeking out another ideal in his life; and out of extreme surfeit of pleasure not only would not value what he had enjoyed, but consciously would even turn from the direct path, exciting in himself alien tastes - unhealthy, sharp, lacking in harmony - sometimes monstrous ones, losing measure and. aesthetic feeling for healthy beauty and demanding instead of it exceptions.
Therefore beauty is imminent in everything healthy, that is to that which is most alive and is a necessary need of the human being.
It is harmony, in it lies the guarantee of tranquillity it embodies the ideals of man and of mankind.
I do not agree with every word which I have read, but I wanted to confront you with this attitude of Dostojevsky's and with this view he has that there are two kinds of beauty; the one which is fulfillment and leads to plentitude, and the one which is what a French aesthetic calls in French:
"????????????????"
that is:
arts which are aimed at filling an emptiness.
arts that are arts of consumption, not arts which are beauty in themselves, but which are devoured and used in order to fill an emptiness to satiate us because we are hungry and are incapable of facing greatness and look for food at the lowest possible level.
Questions
You seem to think that it would, be proper to approach our environment without structures, without any pre-conceptions and without a scheme in which we are going to put phenomena with which we are daily confronted. On the other hand, you said that when we actually do confront the natural world we see in it beauty which is inherent in the natural world and it would seem more reasonable to suggest that beauty was in fact a structure which we impose on the world, and likewise for ugliness, and that the very notion that we approach the world without structures was a little fanciful.
What I mean to say is that we approach most things with a preconceived. idea and with a ready-made structure which we will impose upon it, instead of being, as it were, vacant, open and ready to meet whatever will come our way. In a second move of our heart, or mind or whatever, of our whole personality we can assess what we have seen in certain terms, but we must begin with approaching whatever will come our way with openness and be able to see; I will give you two examples, one which is very simple, very trivial and the other which, to me, is very moving.
If a boy, or a girl, at school is called to the headmaster or headmistress, what they expect is to meet the headmaster or headmistress, they never expect to meet a person, and the whole orientation is to meet that function, but not that person. The same would be true, and I remember when I was a private in the beginning of the war and was called to the sergeant major, and I did not expect him to be anything else but the sergeant major, and it meant danger, dread and expectation of the worst. So that this is a way in which, before we have even looked at an object, we know what to expect and, therefore, we do not see what there is there, because you may well discover that your sergeant major, or the headmaster or whoever you meet is quite a different person if you only looked.
Parenthesis between that and the other example I want to give. I spoke once in Oxford at the chaplaincy to a group of students on "encounter, on the conditions of a fruitful and Intellectual encounter between people". The chaplain in those remote days said to me "well, you are speaking of the impossible. You say that you must look at people and see them, listen to them and hear them; but I see so many people, I cannot possibly listen and hear and see; well, they speak and then they pass". And I said "well, you could perhaps begin with something less than all the floods of students who run through your room, you might begin with seeing the closest, or hearing the closest to you".
He was a man in his fifties, and he said "well, could you give me an example". I said "yes, shut your eyes", so he shut his eyes. I said "would you tell me, what is the colour of your wife's eyes? " He opened his eyes, looked at me - not his wife - and said "I cannot remember". The fact is that when he was in love with her he probably had eyes for nothing but her eyes – he looked, into her eyes, he saw nothing but her eyes - but then they got married - they had - been married 30 years - there was no point of looking at one another. They walked shoulder to shoulder through life, and what was the point of all these things which one does at the beginning of life? He could not even say what her eyes were like - what can you expect after that.
Now, the example which I want to give is quite an earnest one.
An old Russian woman, who died a number of years ago, who was the wife of Lewis Napier, the historian, was, during the course of the beginning of the Revolution arrested., put into prison and eventually spent a certain number of years in a concentration camp. She told me that, while she was in prison, she was being interrogated every night for hours and hours and hours, cross-examined and interrogated again, cross-examined again until exhaustion broke her completely. And one night, in the early hours of the morning, when all her energy had ebbed down, when there was no courage left in her, she felt she could not endure it any more. That, even at the risk of being sent into a punishment cell, of enduring anything, she must break the spell of this endless, repetitive interrogation and so she looked up at her interrogator, ready to challenge him, to provoke him so that the spell be broken. And she said to me, she looked at him and saw a face gray with tiredness, with anguish in his eyes because he had spent exactly as many hours as she had at this interrogation - he was as exhausted and tired as she was. And, in a flash, she thought that there was no difference between them only that the whirlwind, of the Revolution bad cast him, like a dry leafy on the one side of the table, and her on the other side; but they were prisoners of the same situation, that he was a human being in agony and, having seen that, she smiled at him, he smiled back and. the interrogation continued - but, the spell was broken, they had seen one another as human beings. And that is what I mean, that instead of seeing in that man nothing but the interrogator, she saw a human being; and if we did that with regard to objects, animals, people, situations we would be able to see in a way in which we do not see when we look at a thing with greed. You know "live beef, live beef", when you see cattle does not lend you any secret of what an animal is, and that is what I wanted to point out.
Now, in a second step, of course, you must reflect; we have an intelligence, we must be as acute, as precise, as sensitive as possible; perceptiveness and sensitivity which mast be used to the utmost. But to understand what is in front of us as truly as possible, by disengaging ourselves and not seeing things only in relation to us, then we could probably see more
Could. I ask why you do not quote from English poets, because all the time you have been saying truth is beauty I keep thinking of Keats.
Well, the answer is, sadly, infinitely simple, because of ignorance. You know, the trouble is that when I came to this country I was 35 years old and began to learn English just before I came, about 3 months before, in the Authorized Version, so that when I came to this country all the knowledge of English I possessed Has contained in the beginnings of Genesis - grammar and vocabulary inclusive - and you can imagine how it developed. I have tried to read as much as I could since, but I have difficulties in quoting English poets because they are less familiar. You know, you probably, however much you have read in adult life, you have probably read a great deal when at school and discovered things. I discovered children's books when I was in my forties, when my English had improved from Genesis to colloquial English. I have been trying to read more prose than poetry because, unfortunately, I am called to speak and people do not expect me to speak in verse, and so and also I have difficulties with a number of English poets because my knowledge of English is imperfect and it takes me a very long time to find a way in which one can read an English poem, so that it reaches me as a poem and not as a statement. So I do apologize, I am ashamed of myself, but the answer is ignorance.
In your ??????? of arts aimed at filling emptiness. What creates that emptiness?
My answer, that I speak in the first person, in "I" terms, is what Michael Ramsay said once, that within each human being there is an emptiness as vast as God, and it can be filled by nothing but Him. I think that unless we grow in spirit, unless we develop not only all our physical qualities, not all our psychological qualities, and I lump everything in that, but also our spirit, there will be a sense of hunger, of needing something more and then we will try to fill the space with a variety of things. Now, when you think of a human being, I, at least, see it on two levels. On the one hand each of us is like a speck of dust - so minute, so fragile, that anything can crush it if you place it in the context of the kind of universe we are aware of now. So we are really of no account as far as that is concerned. On the other hand, when you think of a human being he has within himself a sort of depth, psychological and otherwise, which is such that no amount of knowledge can fill him to the point of being totally satiated - no amount of emotion, no amount of vision – nothing; a human being, small as he is in one way has a depth, a vastness so great that one can pour into it all knowledge, all love, all beauty and it drops as though it was an abyss and you listen, and you wait for the moment when it will touch the bottom and re-echo, and it never re-echoes. And, between these two things, I think, the whole notion of a human being is stretched to the extreme. And I think that as long as we are not completely, harmoniously fulfilled in body, soul and spirit, there will be hunger. But then we will turn to the kind of things of which we are already aware. We will not, unless we are helped, we will not strive for the unknown. We will say "oh, yes, I ate steak and I know that it filled me; I ate sex, I ate music, I ate this, I devoured that" and then a moment will come later when hunger will be back. And this is the point at which I think Dostojevsky is right when he says:
Beauty is ultimately communion with the ultimate beauty, which is God.
But I have spoken in the first person, not making a universal statement, because I do not think that I can make it. I could tell you that this is the way in which an aesthetic would put it, an agnostic would put it, a Russian would and so on, but I could not speak with conviction, because it was not my conviction.
Lecture 4
UglinessT. S. Eliot Lectures by the Most Reverend Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh
4 November 1982
I think that it is a sad anticlimax to end a series of talks, or lectures, on beauty by sneaking of ugliness, and if ugliness was the last word, I feel it could not be done, and should not be done. But if I speak of the -place, or the role, or the significance of ugliness it is in the context of beauty and because I think that ugliness has a real importance and a real significance - and not only an aesthetic one - but also a moral and a spiritual one.
Yesterday I pointed out the fact that the terminology of beauty was applied since early Christendom to the spiritual realm, and that already the ancient world spoke in the same breath of beauty and goodness. A man was characterized in ancient Greece as beautiful, good and brave - in one phrase, in one complex word and the writings in which the ancient church embodied its aesthetic and mystical teaching were grouped under the term “Philokalia”, ; which means the love of beauty; not of external beauty, but of a deep essential beauty - both outward and inward.
This sense of beauty led early writers to assert that the whole of life is a work of an artist, that each of us is an artist, that the person which we are, or the materials - both physical and mental, psychological, spiritual - which go to make up our personality are like the raw materials out of which a sculptor is called to make a statue; that all the work which a person can put into growing to the full stature which is his or hers is the work of an artist and that the spiritual struggle which begins in the spirit, but also involves and enfolds the psyche and the body, is art of arts.
The final achievement, the most perfect beauty to be achieved and attained to, was described in the words of St Iraenus when he said: "A man, truly fulfilled is the splendour of God". So that it is not only on the level of the plastic, visual, audible arts, but in all the realm of human life that beauty or ugliness have their place and their role.
I quoted yesterday a passage from Dostojevsky in which he made several points. First of all he said: "It is beauty that will save the world". Beauty, understood by him within the classical tradition as being the convincing power of what is true, the revelation of reality in its real self, unveiled, freed from the ugliness which may be superimposed upon it by our human misunderstandings or by the disfigurement which we bring into the world. But he also insisted on the fact that beauty is an enigma, that beauty is not simple, that there is a complexity in beauty that does not allow simply to distinguish between the beautiful and the ugly, as one distinguishes between two colours, between light and darkness and so forth. For him there are two kinds of beauty and, as so often in Dostojevsky, when he says something it requires a great deal of explanation, because he is not always clear in his own mind as to what he intended to say; because, having said that there are two kinds of beauty, he goes on, in another passage in his diary, to explain that there are no two kinds of beauty, but there is beauty, but it can be seen in two different ways.
One can see with purity of heart, with clarity of mind, or one can see in a confused way, or in a misinterpreting way by projecting upon what is seen - and I am using the word “seen” in a very general way - projecting on what is seen categories or conditions which are within us.
I have already quoted the story of the spiritual guide who, looking at a prostitute saw nothing but the glorious beauty with which God had endowed her, whilst his disciples who were still in the grip of lust and temptation could not look at her without seeing the ugliness of prostitution in her. In that sense it is quite definite that beauty is unique, beauty is a whole and yet, there is a problem of the way in which we see it. This applies not only to beauty but to everything in life. Our eye must be clear, our heart must be pure, our intellect must be enlightened, the whole of us must be possessed of integrity and wholeness if we want to see integrity and wholeness around us.
Beauty, therefore, is not ambiguous in itself, but man is ambiguous. Man is divided within himself, and when I say man, it is so obvious that it does not require much explanation, but St Paul in two passages tells us that he feels within himself the tension between two laws: the law of life and the law of corruption; a law, an impulse to live fully, to growing to the full stature, to outgrow all slavery and limitation and another tendency in him which is inertia and which would be content with being less than a man, being content with grazing instead of living. He gives another image in another place when he says: "There is in him, or in all of us, the new Adam in the image of Christ, and the old Adam in the image of one who has chosen death and corruption”. So that when we are confronted with beauty it is not simply a question of recognizing beauty and discerning it from ugliness. There is beauty, which is poisonous, not in itself but because of the way in which we see it, and there is ugliness - objective, outward ugliness - that may play a positive role.
The first time I was confronted with this thought was an occasion of a poem by the French writer Boudelaire and I apologize once more for quoting foreigners instead of the right English writers. There is a poem by him called "La Charogne” (the Carcass), and he describes how, walking on a path in the countryside he came across the carcass, the rotting carcass of a dog, and he describes it crudely, and then, from there, he moves on to say: “And this, my darling, is what you will be”, and then he makes another move in which he makes us apprehend the fact that that is not the last word. I think it is very important for us, in all the forms of distortion, in all our confrontations with what is wrong, to be able to receive a message from it and to transcend it, to go beyond the ugliness to another vision.
Speaking from within my old profession, I would say that as a doctor I was very appreciative of all that brought a patient to me, not because I was a doctor and it was my income, but because if a patient had never felt pain or any kind of discomfort he would have continued in his condition until he had died of an unknown illness. The same is true about ugliness when it strikes our attention. But from what I have said I would like you to understand that ugliness is not primarily in form, in feature, in shapes. Ugliness, more important, is in the way in which we receive a message from what we are confronted with and what happens to us. If I may quote again the same phrase "ugliness will be in our eye, it will be in our perception". However, there is something to say also about what we would call objective ugliness.
Speaking of human beings, we all react to one another by finding a person ugly or beautiful, but this is true with our cultural setting, within our racial setting; what is beautiful for an Englishman may be ugly for an African or Chinese, because the ideal, the canon of beauty is different in the various countries. Thinking of the representations of saints for instance, the English saint is very different from the Greek Saint in shape, in colour, in dimension and yet both are an attempt at representing the most beautiful thing one can imagine, but what can be more beautiful to an English artist than an English face and what can be more beautiful in the eyes of a Greek, or a Russian than a Greek or Russian face. But beauty is there all the same, only the form has changed.
I have here an interview which was taken from a man called Jacques Brassens, who was a Belgian born singer, who lived in the French speaking world, that is Belgium, France and Switzerland and who died in France of cancer. He was interviewed once about his own ugliness. He was ugly, no one disputed that, he did not dispute it either; and if I may open brackets and close them very quickly, there is a story in the life of St Vincent of Paul which is very moving. Hie father, when St Vincent was still very young - in his late teens - found him one day standing before a mirror and he stopped because he did not expect him, ugly as he was, to fall into contemplation of self, and he heard St Vincent saying: "I am far too ugly for man, perhaps God will do with me". Well, you see, here was an assessment of ugliness according to the concept of what is beautiful or ugly in his time, in his race, in his country and his circumstances. But there was also a solution to the problem - he was not defeated, he took it as a challenge and asked himself "what does one do when one is like this", and what he did was to achieve one of the greatest pieces of art: saintliness, a man beautifully fulfilled, and a man whose saintliness poured around him resulted, not only in his time but up to our time, in the good of so many.
When Brassens was asked about his ugliness he said: "I think that when one is ugly and still small one very soon does without feeling that one matters much. It is very difficult to be a beautiful boy of 15, both at that age and for the future, because one is centered on ones face and ones appearance. But for one who is ugly, oh, for him it is not difficult at all, he walks into a struggle and fights, and fights, turning away from himself and walking into life, in the same way, although not in the same words as St Vincent of Paul put it.
Then he was asked why he mentioned it quite often in the songs and poetry he wrote; and he said, “yes, I speak of it "because I want others to understand that when one is not beautiful one cannot concentrate ones interests, or anyone else’s interests one oneself, but what is left is one’s notion and what one can bring and contribute to others”.
I think it is very important to see the creative way in which one can meet with ugliness in all sorts. I do not mean only the ugliness of a face, like St Vincent or Jacques Brassens, but many of us, all of us I suppose, looking at self can discover that there are within ourselves features which are no joy to us, features which we dislike, features which we despise, features which we feel mar us, prevent us from being the beauty and the revelation of beauty which we could be. Instead of recoiling, or turning away from it, we can say "yes, how wonderful, it is a frailty within me. Yes, it is, but it can teach me to turn away from myself and to busy myself with something which is of much greater importance: life, others, God; one person, or mankind - it does not matter".
There is also, when it is a psychological or moral frailty in us, another side to this ugliness because we always perceive frailty, that is defeatedness in us, as being ugly. There is this wonderful passage in St Paul when he prayed to God "that he should be made free of his frailty, whatever it was", and God said to him "my grace is enough; my power is made manifest, deploys itself in weakness"; and so he says "I will rejoice in my weakness because then all the good will be God’s doing.
So, again, we can see in ourselves ugly features, or weak features, which can give God freedom to act, while if we were possessed of ourselves completely, we could not give him freedom to act - we would wish, we would determine to act ourselves.
There is another aspect which is almost transcendental in which our faith, and say, the psychology of Jung could meet quite easily, although we would speak in slightly different terms. It is the fact that we can discover in us ugliness which is not our own personal ugliness, but which is ancestral. Qualities, negative qualities, which we have inherited, and again we can act in two opposite ways. We can turn and say "oh, if I had not had such ancestry - how free I would be to be a glory to myself and to God"; perhaps; but instead of this we could take a quite different line and say "I have inherited not only a frailty, a weakness or evil qualities, but a task. If, what I have inherited I can transform, I can transfigure, I can make into something new, then I will not only have put myself right, I will also have done something for those who have proceeded me; I will no longer transmit further qualities which will make them hated or feared".
All this implies, in a way, that ugliness - personal or collective - is something which we must face in us, in our society, in mankind is in a creative, in a daring and in an inspired manner: it is our task; it is something which we must learn from and overcome. But then ugliness also may appear to us in frightening terms. I have quoted already to you the attitude of Edgar Poe to what was beautiful and what was ugly. To him, as he demonstrates it in two of his essays, anything which is not exactly on the scale of man is frightening and, therefore, repulsive and cannot be termed beauty, but horror, fear, dread. He gives examples: a thunderstorm; a storm on the sea; a horizon too vast; anything that breaks, destroys his sense of security and protectiveness is ugly and is evil. And he gives us in two essays an atrocious image of what he images to be a domain or a garden - something which is small enough for him never to feel that he is unprotected by the end of the horizon, which is unprotected by the limits in which he lives. This is a cowardly approach to life. If we want to face life we must face it, as I have said before, as a chaos that is a mysterious reality - full and pregnant with possibilities which have not yet emerged and which, when they emerge, may frighten us if we are not prepared to grow as great as they are. Ugliness and beauty, in that respect, claim from us greatness and we cannot face ugliness unless we stand high on the ground. If we are prepared not to look at it daringly, and take the risk of life and death but not accept defeat and humiliation.
Ugliness may well be a quite legitimate description of reality by which I mean that at times art, whether it is poetry, prose or visual or other arts have got to confront us with the ugliness or horror of life - and again it is a cowardly thing on our part to shrink away from ugliness and to hope that nothing but harmony, beauty or simply something neutral enough not to frighten us will confront us. I remember a grandmother who read stories to her grandchildren and she always changed the end, because the end we always want to be an apotheosis, it had to be sweet and beautiful - and. I see someone laugh, and I must say it was not my grandmother, it was someone else’s grandmother.
Now, we must be prepared to see the ugliness, to look into it deeply. A physician has to look at the horror and ugliness of illness and of pain, and we have got to have the courage to do this. For a year and a half after the war I was in charge of people coming back from German concentration camps, and it was an ugly sight; it was a. heart-rending sight, but it had to be looked into as deeply as possible because only by looking into it with all one’s mind, all one’s heart, all one’s being at the risk in a way of being deeply wounded could one hope to do something useful. We are unwilling to look at what happened, or happens still in concentration camps, in the war, in illness, in hunger, in suffering of all types; we must have the courage to do it. We acquire certain courage to do it in an indirect way; in a novel, because we know that the chances are that the tension will be resolved; in a play, or in the cinema, because we feel that at any moment, if the terror is too great, the horror is too deep, we will be able to feel the armrests of our seats and say “that happens to them, not to me; it is alright"; “it is alright” is a terrible phrase. You may not say that because we are hypocritical enough, all of us, or careful enough not to place ourselves before a judgement seat but, yes, we are safe. The book is too frightening, I can close it; the film or the play is too horrible, I become aware of being outside of it. Well, we must learn not to do this.
A certain number of years ago I spoke of hunger in India, after a grueling experience of what I had seen there in the sixties. I spoke with all the passion of which I am capable, and at times I can put passion into what I say. At the end of the service, because it was in a church, there were intercessions for the hungry; then there was a collection and, as I was standing at the west door with the vicar, a sweet little old woman came up to me, extended her hand and said: “Thank you, dear Father, for the most entertaining evening. Well, not being English, that is having no inhibitions to being rude, I said to her "I hope that you gave more than a shilling for your entertainment!" Well, you know, she had managed to escape it, she had seen it happen, yes, “it is over there, I have to look up India on the map, I cannot remember where it is. It is some sort of triangle somewhere to the right on the map, but it is there, it is not us - they are so different and then, you know, they have been hungry for so many centuries, they are used to it. That is alright, it would not be alright for us.” You are imagining that I am just giving caricatures, but I am not, it is exactly what I have heard said in one situation or another. When I speak of horror, here or there, I am told it cannot happen to us, we are not Russians.
So there is a message which ugliness brings to us: it is a challenge. It says to us “the world in which you live, and which you have made, and which you sustain by your indifference, your cowardice, your softness is ugly, monstrous and there are millions of people who pay the cost of this, look at it”. In that sense perhaps, ugliness - with the implied possibility of redemption, of change, of transfiguration is more essential than the sight of harmony and beauty, because harmony and beauty must give us the ability to discern, to see, to understand, to be horrified and never to come to peace with these things. And then there is also the representation of ugliness in all the ways in which it is represented when, what we represent, is ugly. Anger is ugly, cowardice is ugly and so many other things. I remember someone, in a fit of anger, by chance seeing his face in a mirror. Anger fell away at once because it was so ugly that he said "I cannot allow myself to look like this". If we could look at ourselves a little bit more when we are angry, when we are greedy, when we are resentful, when we are lusting and so forth, we would probably say "is this really what I am?" - it is for a split second. "Is it really what there is in me, can I accept to be like this? Because my face was not that way a minute ago, if it is that way now it is because my content has reached my features and giving it this monstrous revolting shape".
But then there is also evil, and evil which in terms of art can penetrate and use art. Yesterday I gave you a quotation from Dostojevsky, in which there are several elements. The first one is that in the turmoil of life, in the grip of tragedy, we long for equipoise, for harmony, for stillness, for security and this leads us to create the kind of art which brings out all the beauty of which we can become aware - not only intellectually, rationally, but which can well up from the depth of our being. It is not at every moment that this is possible. You may not know, but I will share a secret with you. For three centuries Russia was under the Tartar yoke - it was for three centuries submitted, to great violence and cruelty. If you look at the art of this epoch, suffering is not depicted in it. What is depicted, in it is all the “beauty that could be remembered or that was seen in the ways of people, because people needed an anchor in hope, but when the Tartar yoke came to an end, then the artists began to give images of what suffering and tragedy are. You find suffering and tragedy in the works of men like Rublev, but you do not find them fifty or one hundred years before. It would have bean intolerable, unbearable in the face of actual horror, to be confronted with nothing but a picture of this horror, unresolved because, at that moment, it could not be resolved. The resolution was in showing that at the heart of it beauty survived; that in spite of it beauty was accessible that, however ugly, things were where there should have been beauty. In the experience that I have had in this one year and a half, eighteen months or so, of work with people that had come from concentration camps, the thing that struck me was that apart from the horror which they conveyed to me - I was treating their bodies - but I was also in charge of rehabilitating them for life as best as I could. I heard so much about courage, the greatness of heart, the patience, the generosity and so many other wonderful qualities which they, or their companions of captivity, had shown; because these were the only things which made it possible for them to survive. So that within ugliness there were sparks of harmony and beauty within one person, or for a moment, or for a short period, or in one situation - and that was the salvation of many. But evil can touch something more tragically perhaps. It may touch the good itself. Ugliness can be like a serpent in the grass, like poison in a fruit, like death in one of those flowers that close upon a victim, and digest it. Dostojevsky, in the same quotation, having indicated to us that the struggle, the pain, the difficulty of life, the tragedy of life brought to the fore a longing for harmony and wholeness, integrity and beauty, says: “What is another thing that is tragic is that when life is made of nothing but contentment, when there is no direction, no intensity, no struggle, no aim in life, then a new hunger pervades the people, a hunger to fill the place which intensity would fill and then horrible, monstrous forms begin to appear”. I will give you one quotation from Dostojevsky again. He says, in the words of one of his characters: “Oh, my friends, you cannot imagine what sadness and anger seizes your whole soul when a great idea - long revered by you as sacred - is taken up by bunglers and dragged out into the street to just such fools as themselves; as you suddenly encounter it now in the free market, unrecognizable, filthy, stood up absurdly at an angle, without proportion, without harmony - a plaything in the hands of stupid children”.
This is something which he points out more than once, that when society or individuals have nothing to strive for, are satiated, it will fall singly, or collectively, into a kind of anguish, and will invent in itself anguish of necessary, seek out some sort of ideal, some sort of thing to strive towards of extreme surfeit of pleasure, not only would not value what had been enjoyed, but consciously turn from the direct path, exciting in himself alien trends, unhealthy, disharmonic, monstrous sometimes. And this is the point at which moral judgement plays a decisive role in discernment of beauty. When I say moral judgement I do not mean pre-conceived principles that would rule out certain forms of art in favour of other forms of art. I mean the perceptiveness that will allow a person to say: “This is degrading, this makes me small; this is below me; this is unworthy of my human stature; this is something that quenches the spirit; this is something which is contrary to life; this is corruption; this is death; this is vile”. This is a moral principle in the sense that it cannot simply be deduced from the consideration of the object. Pornography is the name which I could attach to it to make a short cut and, unfortunately, in the kind of society in which we live, which is easy and where the struggle for life is very limited, we are very easily made prisoners, are caught by this kind of acceptance of what should be repulsive to us because it is a negation of wholeness and of dignity.
Here is a definition of the consumers’ society, or high standard of living, which was given by John Kenneth Galbraith in a book called “The Affluent Society”: “What is called a high standard of living consists in considerable measures in arrangements for avoiding muscular effort, for increasing sensual pleasure and enhancing caloric intake above any conceivable nutritional requirement”, and when we speak of this intake, it means not only food, it means the greed implied in it, and the greed goes far beyond, it goes into lust, it goes into possessiveness, it goes into the lowering of all standards in the acceptance that we are not called to be as great as God, as Anglo put it “that we are like fungi on thin earth”, or as someone else put it “like a cancer on nature, on a world which we should make noble and great”.
Now, I would like for one minute to conclude with two quotations, and perhaps redeem myself a little for having quoted all the time foreign writers. I have given a little thought to it. I have recognized yesterday that it is my ignorance, which is mainly the cause of it. But when I asked myself “was it only ignorance?”, I remembered that when I began to collect my data I thought it would do you no harm to be confronted with writers and names which perhaps are less familiar to you than Keats, Shakespeare or Yates. This was really brought to my mind a few years ago. I spoke at one of the universities to the department of psychiatry and psychology; there were only teaching personnel and research students. I mentioned the names of Nietsche and. Pascal, and at the end of my talk I was asked who they were - I turned the compliment by saying: “Could anyone of you enlighten your friend?” -there was no one to enlighten the friend. So, having poured out names to you, perhaps I have incited you to have a look, well at a dictionary. Here is a quotation from Keats:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty;
That is all you know on earth and all you need to know.
A thing of beauty is a joy;
Forever its loveliness increases,
It will never pass into nothingness".
What I wanted to convey in these talks is that beauty, ugliness, the totality of life has a deep, a decisive meaning and it matters; that if we cannot reason things out, if we are not philosophers or theologians, if we have access to the highest process of the mind - there is one way in which we are confronted and challenged by life and in which we can confront life; challenge life and resolve life by assessing it on a basis which is spiritual, which is moral, which is not simply an ascetic judgement of form, but an understanding what it brings to us: ugliness and beauty, chose for life and build it even if it costs us our life.
Thank you
Questions
In the “Brothers Karamazov” by Dostojevsky, the young monk, kneeling by the rotting body of the old monk said: “What a shame lest people should think he was not a saint”, and then he looked again and he saw ???????? with him, smiling. I think this is the contrast, he did not ignore the rotting of the corpse, he knelt there, you know, sharing.
I am very grateful for what you say. You can transcend the vision of ugliness, if you look at it and look deeply. If you remain on the surface it will only be the smell of the carcass, but you can look deeper. If I may make a short comparison, there is in Edgar Foe a story, I cannot remember its name, in which a young man goes to the cemetery and re-opens the grave of his beloved one. If you compare it to his poem “The Carcass”, you will see the difference. He sees the ugliness recognizing in it what it is, draws the ultimate and horrible conclusion and outgrows it; well, in Edgar Poe it ends in a sort of goulish and sinister vision that leads nowhere, and it is because of his attitude.
I do not quite know how relevant this is, but it keeps coming into my mind to ask you if you know about the work of Wilhelm Reich, and how that would fit in with thinking in terms of ugliness and beauty.
I am afraid I do not.
He was working in terms of thinking about people’s bodies and the way they hold themselves; this is a very simple explanation. He works in terms of there being an essential person within whatever mishape that person has become and he worked on the actual body of that person to sort of brings it back into its balance. I wonder how far you would agree that there is in each person a sort of unique person which can be brought back into being.
I believe, passionately, as I do most things, that in each of us there is a person who is unique and unrepeatable. There is a passage in the Book of Revelations in which we are told that in the Kingdom each of us will be possessed of a name which no one knows but God, and he, to whom it is given; and this phrase, you know, in the Hebrew tradition - in early Christian tradition, the name was not simply an appellation, a way of distinguishing Peter from Mary, it was meant to be a total, an ultimate expression of the person and this indicates that in the Kingdom everyone of us will relate to God in a way which is absolutely unrepeatable and unique and this is there, already now; it will not be created all over sudden, but it is veiled, it is distorted. We ourselves cannot see our own face, but God can. I quoted you this phrase of a Russian Bishop who says: “When God looks at us he does not see the achievements or virtues which are not there, but he sees the beauty which is there and cannot be erased”. And, in that sense, there is absolute uniqueness: no one can be replaced, and if you think of what will be, say mankind or the cosmos in eternity, each of us is like a small stone in a mosaic; it may be a very small stone, but if you remove one stone the mosaic will gradually fall to pieces.
Now, as far acting through the body upon the whole person is concerned, there is no doubt that we are not a soul encaged in a body, imprisoned in a body. A human being is an incarnate reality that is, we are, the spiritual, the psychological and the physical are profoundly intertwined in the way in which we fire; heat can pervade metal and all the aesthetic traditions of, not only Christianity, but of all religions, teaches us that one can affect not only our mental contents but our spiritual destiny, free us inwardly by acting upon the body. So this would be a particular way, or a particular case, but the principle I think is, would be, recognized universally.
If I could take you to the question of the depiction of horror and bestiality and immorality in art, some of the artists working during and after the first world war, such as Max Beckman and George Gross, depicted, if you like, man’s inhumanity to man in most vivid terms. Does that reduce the value of those works of art, or are they redeemed somehow by a further moral lesson that they had to teach us?
You know, it is not the content of a poem or a painting that makes it good or bad. There are extremely good feelings that are expressed in very bad poetry, and the same would apply to all forms of art. I think that there are several approaches. If you take Dostojevsky’s approach, he would say “to depict horror without showing how it is resolved, is bad art”.
A painting should represent, say tragedy, in such a way that you see the light coming, dawning. I do not believe this is true. I think what Dostojevsky would like it to be showing in a picture of horror, and instead of making himself, draw himself a conclusion and bring out the meaning and so forth, that it should be done for him beforehand. I do believe that to be confronted in an undiluted way with ugliness and horror is something which we must accept. But we must not imagine that there is nothing more to it; and that is the risk, or the danger, of pictures that represent nothing but the horror because the majority of people will be unable to disentangle themselves from the feeling of horror, which this picture, this poem, or whatever it is, evoked. From a pedagogical point of view there is a point in showing within the horror a key of harmony, a possibility of resolution. I have spent five years in the war, and I have very definite views about it. I do not find it a lovely experience. I do not find war a desirable experience. I have seen ugliness in it in plenty, as all men and women of my generation have seen. So I am not being romantic about it. But what I would say in that I have never seen so far, I mean within those five years, ever a monstrous situation that had not called out something in one man or another, or in the way in which people related, that did not redeem the horror but that showed that even within the horror something can happen.
I would like to give you a couple of examples, which are not taken from my experience at all because lyricism is always too near to exhibitionism.
After the war, in one of the concentration camps, was found a prayer, written by a Jew, on a torn piece of wrapping paper; I do not remember it by heart, and I cannot quote it in full, but those of you who are foolish enough to read my books can find it in “Living Prayer”, quoted from a German newspaper. In substance it said this:
" Lord, when you will come to judge the earth, do not look at the cruelty, the violence, the vileness of the people who tormented us with such cruelty, and do not allow our suffering to be their condemnation; but look at all the fortitude, the patience, the courage, the comradeship which all these horrors have brought to the fore in our midst, and take all that as a redemption for what they have done "I could not say that, and I doubt that you could say that from the comfort of our present day life, but this man had a right to say it.
I can quote another man, who was an older friend of mine, who spent four years in a concentration camp. When he came back I met him in the street and I said to him: “What have you brought back from there?”, and. he said. “agony of mind.”. I said “Have you lost your faith?”, and. he said “No, "but as long as I was the victim of all the brutality and so forth which was poured, upon us, I knew I had power to forgive. I could turn to God and. say "Lord, do not condemn these men, because in Thy name I have forgiven". Now I am free and I do not know whether these men who tormented us in such a way have understood what they have done, or what they had been doing, have repented, have changed. And when I turn to God and say "God, oh God, save them", I have always the anguish within myself as though God was saying to me "What right have you to pray now for them - you are not suffering".
You know, this kind of attitude could be born in this Jew, in this Russian Orthodox. I could go on quoting examples of something which could help when we are confronted with a picture, either in words or colour or line or otherwise, of horror because too many people will not "be able to see and discern.
Do you consider it necessary for great art to have a moral content?
Yes, I do. That is, I do believe that art must have content and that this content, when it is presented to someone who will perceive it, should be such that the spectator or the listener should become greater than he is, and not less than he is. Of course, I start with my preconceptions, but you asked me a question in the first person and I said yes, indeed, otherwise it is anti-art, it is the use, the profanation of art, it is a rape of form, it is a betrayal of a means of communication in order to destroy what should be built
