In the last analysis the hero is always God, whose only idiosyncrasy is being, and to whom it would be absurd to attribute individual characteristics.

The anonymity of the artist belongs to a type of culture dominated by the longing to be liberated from oneself. All the force of this philosophy is directed against the delusion “I am the doer.” “I” am not in fact the doer, but the instrument; human individuality is not an end but only a means.

 

The supreme achievement of individual consciousness is to lose or find (both words mean the same) itself in what is both its first beginning and its last end: “Whoever would save his psyche, let him lose it.”

 

All that is required of the instrument is efficiency and obedience; it is not for the subject to aspire to the throne; the constitution of man is not a democracy, but the hierarchy of body, soul and spirit.

 

Is it for the Christian to consider any work “his own,” when even Christ has said that “I do nothing of myself”? or for the Hindu, when Krishna has said that “The Comprehensor cannot form the concept ‘I am the doer’”? or the Buddhist, for whom it has been said that “To wish that it may be made known that ‘I was the author’ is the thought of a man not yet adult”?

 

It hardly occurred to the individual artist to sign his works, unless for practical purposes of distinction; and we find the same conditions prevailing in the scarcely yet defunct community of the Shakers, who made perfection of workmanship a part of their religion,but made it a rule that works should not be signed.

 

It is under such conditions that a really living art (unlike what Plato calls the arts of flattery) flourishes; and where the artist exploits his own personality and becomes an exhibitionist that art declines.

 

There is another aspect of the question that has to do with the patron rather than the artist; this too must be understood, if we are not to mistake the intentions of traditional art.

 

It will have been observed that in traditional arts, the effigy of an individual, for whatever purpose it may have been made, is very rarely a likeness in the sense that we conceive a likeness, but much rather the representation of a type.

 

The man is represented by his function rather than by his appearance; the effigy is of the king, the soldier, the merchant or the smith, rather than of So-and-so.

 

The ultimate reasons for this have nothing to do with any technical inabilities or lack of the power of observation in the artist, but are hard to explain to ourselves whose pre-occupations are so different and whose faith in the eternal values of “personality” is so naive; hard to explain to ourselves, who shrink from the saying that a man must “hate” himself “if he would be My disciple.”

 

The whole position is bound up with a traditional view that also finds expression in the doctrine of the hereditary transmission of character and function, because of which the man can die in peace, knowing that his work will be carried on by another representative. As So-and-so, the man is reborn in his descendants, each of whom occupies in turn what was much rather an office than a person. For in what we call personality, tradition sees only a temporal function “which you hold in lease.”

 

The very person of the king, surviving death, may be manifested in some way in some other ensemble of possibilities than these; but the royal personality descends from generation to generation, by hereditary and ritual delegation; and so we say, The king is dead, long live the king.

 

It is the same if the man has been a merchant or craftsman; if the son to whom his personality has been transmitted is not also, for example, a blacksmith, the blacksmith of a given community, the family line is at an end; and if personal functions are not in this way transmitted from generation to generation, the social order itself has come to an end, and chaos supervenes.

 

We find accordingly that if an ancestral image or tomb effigy is to be set up for reasons bound up with what is rather loosely called “ancestor worship,” this image has two peculiarities, (1) it is identified as the image of the deceased by the insignia and costume of his vocation and the inscription of his name, and (2) for the rest, it is an individually indeterminate type, or what is called an “ideal” likeness.

 

In this way both selves of the man are represented; the one that is to be inherited, and that which corresponds to an intrinsic and regenerated form that he should have built up for himself in the course of life itself, considered as a sacrificial operation terminating at death. The whole purpose of life has been that this man should realise himself in this other and essential form, in which alone the form of divinity can be thought of as adequately reflected.

 

As St. Augustine expresses it, “This likeness begins now to be formed again in us.” It is not surprising that even in life a man would rather be represented thus, not as he is, but as he ought to be, incomparably superior to the accidents of temporal manifestation.

 

It is characteristic of ancestral images in many parts of the East, that they cannot be recognized, except by their legends, as the portraits of individuals; there is nothing else to distinguish them from the form of the divinity to whom the spirit had been returned when the man “gave up the ghost”; almost in the same way an angelic serenity and the absence of human imperfection, and of the signs of age, are characteristic of the Christian effigy before the thirteenth century, when the study of death-masks came back into fashion and modern portraiture was born in the charnel house.

 

The traditional image is of the man as he would be at the Resurrection, in an ageless body of glory, not as he was accidentally: “I would go down unto Annihilation and Eternal Death, lest the Last Judgment come and find me Unannihilate, and I be seiz’d and giv’n into the hands of my own Selfhood.”

 

Let us not forget that it is only the intellectual virtues, and by no means our individual affections, that are thought of as surviving death.

 

The same holds good for the heroes of epic and romance; for modern criticism, these are “unreal types,” and there is no “psychological analysis.” We ought to have realised that if this is not a humanistic art, this may have been its essential virtue. We ought to have known that this was a typal art by right of long inheritance; the romance is still essentially an epic, the epic essentially a myth; and that it is just because the hero exhibits universal qualities, without individual peculiarity or limitations, that he can be a pattern imitable by every man alike in accordance with his own possibilities whatever these may be.

 

In the last analysis the hero is always God, whose only idiosyncrasy is being, and to whom it would be absurd to attribute individual characteristics.

 

It is only when the artist, whatever his subject may be, is chiefly concerned to exhibit himself, and when we descend to the level of the psychological novel, that the study and analysis of individuality acquires an importance. Then only portraiture in our sense takes the place of what was once an iconographic portrayal.

 

All these things apply only so much the more if we are to consider the deliberate portrayal of a divinity, the fundamental thesis of all traditional arts. An adequate knowledge of theology and cosmology is then indispensable to an understanding of the history of art, insofar as the actual shapes and structures of works of art are determined by their real content.

 

Christian art, for example, begins with the representation of deity by abstract symbols, which may be geometrical, vegetable or theriomorphic, and are devoid of any sentimental appeal whatever.

 

An anthropomorphic symbol follows, but this is still a form and not a figuration; not made as though to function biologically or as if to illustrate a text book of anatomy or of dramatic expression.

 

Still later, the form is sentimentalised; the features of the crucified are made to exhibit human suffering, the type is completely humanised, and where we began with the shape of humanity as an analogical representation of the idea of God, we end with the portrait of the artist’s mistress posing as the Madonna and the representation of an all-too-human baby; the Christ is no longer a man-God, but the sort of man that we can approve of.

 

With what extraordinary prescience St. Thomas Aquinas commends the use of the lower rather than the nobler forms of existence as divine symbols, “especially for those who can think of nothing nobler than bodies”!

 

The course of art reflects the course of thought. The artist, asserting a specious liberty, expresses himself; our age commends the man who thinks for himself, and therefore of himself. We can

see in the hero only an imperfectly remembered historical figure, around which there have gathered mythical and miraculous accretions; the hero’s manhood interests us more than his divinity, and this applies as much to our conception of Christ or Krishna or Buddha as it does to our conceptions of Cuchullain or Sigurd or Gilgamesh. We treat the mythical elements of the story, which are its essence, as its accidents, and substitute anecdote for meaning.

 

The secularisation of art and the rationalisation of religion are inseparably connected, however unaware of it we may be. It follows that for any man who can still believe in the eternal birth of any avatar (“Before Abraham was, I am”) the content of works of art cannot be a matter of indifference; the artistic humanisation of the Son or of the Mother of God is as much a denial of Christian truth as any form of verbal rationalism or other heretical position.

 

The vulgarity of humanism appears nakedly and unashamed in all euhemerism.

 

It is by no accident that it should have been discovered only comparatively recently that art is essentially an “aesthetic” activity. No real distinction can be drawn between aesthetic and materialistic; aisthesis being sensation, and matter what can be sensed.

 

So we regard the lack of interest in anatomy as a defect of art, the absenceof psychological analysis as evidence of undeveloped character; we deprecate the representation of the Bambino as a little man rather than as a child, and think of the frontality of the imagery as due to an inability to realise the three-dimensional mass of existing things; in place of the abstract light that corresponds to the gnomic aorists of the legend itself we demand the cast shadows that belong to momentary effects. We speak of a want of scientific perspective, forgetting that perspective in art is a kind of visual syntax and only a means to an end. We forget that while our perspective serves the purposes of representation in which we are primarily interested, there are other perspectives that are more intelligible and better adapted to the communicative purposes of the traditional arts.

 

In deprecating the secularisation of art we are not confusing religion with art, but seeking to understand the content of art at different times with a view to unbiased judgment. In speaking of the decadence of art, it is really the decadence of man from intellectual

to sentimental interests that we mean. For the artist’s skill may remain the same throughout: he is able to do what he intends.

 

It is the mental image to which he works that changes : that “art has fixed ends” is no longer true as soon as we know what we like instead of liking what we know. Our point is that without an understanding of the change, the integrity of even a supposedly objective historical study is destroyed; we judge the traditional works, not by their actual accomplishment, but by our own intentions, and so inevitably come to believe in a progress of art, as we do in the progress of man.

 

Ignorant of the traditional philosophy and of its formulae we often think of the artist as having been trying to do just what he may have been consciously avoiding. For example, if Damascene says that Christ from the moment of his conception possessed a “rational and intellectual soul,” if as St. Thomas Aquinas says “his body was perfectly formed and assumed in the first instant,” if the Buddha is said to have spoken in the womb, and to have taken seven strides at birth, from one end to the other of the universe, could the artist have intended to represent either of the newborn children as a puling infant?

 

If we are disturbed by what we call the “vacancy” of a Buddha’s expression, ought we not to bear in mind that he is thought of as the Eye in the World, the impassible spectator of things as they really are, and that it would have been impertinent to have given him features molded by human curiosity or passion?

 

If it was an artistic canon that veins and bones should not be made apparent, can we blame the Indian artist as an artist for not displaying such a knowledge of anatomy as might have evoked our admiration?

 

If we know from authoritative literary sources that the lotus on which the Buddha sits or stands is not a botanical specimen, but the universal ground of existence inflorescent in the waters of its indefinite possibilities, how inappropriate it would have been to represent him in the solid flesh precariously balanced on the surface of a real and fragile flower! The same considerations will apply to all our reading of mythology and fairy tale, and to all our judgments of primitive, savage or folk art: the anthropologist whose interest is in a culture is a better historian of such arts than is the critic whose only interest is in the aesthetic surfaces of the artifacts themselves.

 

In the traditional philosophy, as we cannot too often repeat, “art has to do with cognition”; beauty is the attractive power of a perfect expression. This we can only judge and only really enjoy as an “intelligible good, which is the good of reason” if we have really known what it was that was to be expressed. If sophistry be “ornament more than is appropriate to the thesis of the work,” can we judge of what is or is not sophistry if we ourselves remain indifferent to this content? Evidently not. One might as well attempt the study of Christian or Buddhist art without a knowledge of the corresponding philosophies as attempt the study of a mathematical papyrus without the knowledge of mathematics.

 

----

 

A.K.C.: The Christian and Oriental, or True, Philosophy of Art

 

Done