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Sacred Art & The Doorways Of Perception

Another of the books I picked up at my neighbor’s the other day was The Way Things Are: Conversations With Huston Smith.  Smith is one of the 20th century’s most important scholars of religion. The book is a collection of interviews with and essays about him and his work. It’s a delight. I’ve been flipping around […]
Sainte-Chappelle, interior
Chartres cathedral, interior

Another of the books I picked up at my neighbor’s the other day was The Way Things Are: Conversations With Huston Smith.  Smith is one of the 20th century’s most important scholars of religion. The book is a collection of interviews with and essays about him and his work. It’s a delight. I’ve been flipping around trying to find something to post here for us to talk about, but it’s hard to decide on one. I’ll offer this one:

[Interviewer] … Do you believe Emerson offered a signpost to the sacred with his contention that the invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common?

Smith: He’s right. I wonder if tribal peoples, being closer to nature than we are, do better at that — seeing everything aglow with the sacred. That may be only a myth that we somehow need today, but I think it’s more than that. Unencumbered by the busyness and humdrum of contemporary life, tribal peoples seem able to hold on to the shining world that children are heirs to.

Do you think that the “doors of perception” can be cleansed through aesthetic experience — through experiences of nature, for example?

Definitely. Just this morning I wrote something on that subject because The World’s Religions [Smith’s magnum opus] is coming out in an illustrated edition that will include the world’s religious art. In writing the preface for this new edition, I found myself saying that the function of sacred art — and indeed beauty of every sort, virgin nature emphatically included — is to make easy what would otherwise be difficult. If one is viewing an icon (in a way, all sacred art is iconic), then the icon basically disappears by offering itself up to the divine. The energy of the divine pours through it into the viewer, one consequence being that the viewer’s heart is expanded and becomes uplifted by a great work of art. Note that word uplifted. Can you imagine performing in that state a despicable act? It’s often difficult for us to act compassionately, but sacred art eases the difficulty by ennobling us. So your point is well taken, including you emphasis on the virgin nature.

Might nature be considered the greatest of sacred art?

That’s interesting. I do think of sacred art and virgin nature as two of the clearest apertures to the divine, but I’ve never thought of rank-ordering them. I think of Plato’s statement that “beauty is the splendor of the true.” I like that because it gets us beyond thinking of nature and art simply as pleasure giving. They do far more than that. They offer insight into the true nature of things.

This is deeply consonant with my own experience. Last night, at bedtime, I was reading in The Paradiso, and inwardly rejoicing at the way Dante’s poetry is, for me, what Smith calls an “aperture to the divine.” I find that I am being challenged by Dante, illuminated by Dante, and even changed by Dante. In another interview, Smith talks about his view that some people have an innate religious sense, in the same way others are naturally gifted in athletics, or mathematics. That is, they perceive things that really are there, transcendent realities that aren’t easily available to the rest of us. In this way, artists make the transcendent visible to us, and communicate a sense of the sacred, of higher realities, to us in ways we can apprehend.

Sometimes they defy articulation. If you’ve ever had a mystical experience, you know how difficult it is to convey to someone else what it was like. In the first canto of Paradiso, the poet tells his reader that the realities he experienced in heaven are so far beyond human understanding that he can’t really put them into words. But he will try, because that’s all he has to work with. What Dante (the poet, not the character he created) did was create a staggering work of beauty and genius from what he apprehended about the nature of things from his own artistic imagination, informed by faith. Even that, he admits, is only a pale imitation of the True. I think of St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest intellectuals the West has ever produced, having a mystical vision during mass. After that, he quit writing. Boom, just like that. He told one of his monastic brother that compared to that experience, everything he wrote was “straw.” So said the author of the Summa! As far as we know, St. Thomas never told anyone what he saw that day. But he never wrote another word. If Thomas had been a poet or a painter, I wonder if he could have been able to reproduce the experience in some (necessarily) limited way that was beyond his powers as a theologian and logician.

It is the vocation of the artist, working at the height of his or her powers, to open the doors of perception and make it easier for the rest of us to look through them with clear eyes.

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