Meeting The Masters: Creativity

Showing posts with label Creativity. Show all posts

Tuesday 23 April 2024

Ex Nihilo or Ex Deo?

"I repent me of the ignorance wherein I ever said that God made men out of nothing: there is no nothing out of which to make anything: God is all in all, and he made us out of himself. He who is parted from God has no original nothingness with which to take refuge."

George MacDonald, Weighed and Wanting.

George MacDonald was one of the first important writers of fantasy and a great influence on C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, among many others. I was given some of his children's books more or less as soon as I could read properly. The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie and At the Back of the North Wind played a large part in forming my imagination as a child though I can't remember much about them now, other than that they had a magical atmosphere to them. Then as a teenager, hungry for more Lord of the Rings-type novels, I came across Phantastes and Lilith which, again, I don't recall much of other than I found them rather obscure and definitely not Tolkien. His complete works in an online version run to over 14,000 pages and include children's books, fantasy, regular novels and sermons but I haven't read anything more by him since my teenage years though, as my great grandmother was a MacDonald from George's part of Scotland and he died in Ashtead, Surrey, just a few miles from where I now live, I feel almost obligated to investigate further.

I came across this quote of his in a book by the Catholic writer Stratford Caldecott. It struck a chord with me because it took me back to a time when I was about 8 years old when I wondered to myself what would there be if there was nothing. I can actually still see myself having this thought for the first time. The human mind can't imagine nothing. All we can come up with is empty space or darkness but that is still something. I'm sure we've all had this thought. It's not uncommon as we start to think about the world, what it is, why it is or even where it is. In fact, I would go so far as to say that anyone who hasn't thought about this is a bit of a dullard! For most people it passes but for some it can provide an entry into deeper considerations on the subject of God, the only important subject one might justifiably say.

Does God create out of nothing as Christianity teaches or is it as George MacDonald says and he creates out of himself? Perhaps we can resolve this conundrum by saying it is both, but the nothingness out of which God creates is not outside him but within him. He makes a space in himself, in fact, forget the article, he just makes space, and then projects his being into that space. As George MacDonald says, there is no nothingness out of which God can make us. There is nothing apart from God. You might say there are no things in God until he creates them but there is never nothing. God is indeed all in all but he creates things that are other than himself in order to give expression to love, beauty and the good and to become more than himself. He is never other than perfect but through creation he becomes more perfect.

That is not all. The human soul is a created thing, created by and out of God, but within that soul, giving it its life and being, there is an uncreated part. This is our spirit which is God within us and explains why we can be united with God. There is a part of us that already is God but we cannot knowingly become this part until through grace but also through our own efforts, the two factors are both required, we go beyond our identification with the soul and replace self at the centre of our being with God. Then we know that we ourselves are indeed as nothing and everything we are comes from God.

Wednesday 13 July 2022

Raphael and the Renaissance

I have a book which was first published in 1932 called Through the Eyes of the Masters. It was written by David Anrias which is the pen name of someone called Brian Ross, and it purports to be telepathically received communications from the Theosophical Masters on various subjects. It's an intriguing book but I'm not convinced any more than I am convinced by the Theosophical Masters themselves though I do find Theosophical teachings interesting albeit with quite a few reservations, the chief of which, of course, being the diminishment of Christ.

Anyway, one of these communications is from someone known as the Venetian Master who, we are told, was the painter Paolo Veronese in a previous life. Maybe. But he says something about Renaissance art which came to my mind recently and I will quote it here. He says that "the religious element was imposed upon the consciousness of the painter by extraneous conditions rather than arising from real spiritual experience. Such religious scenes and emotions as he attempted to convey were usually conventional and stereotyped though exquisitely painted in the tradition of the period."

I was reminded of this because on Monday I went to the National Gallery in London to see the current exhibition on Raphael. It was far too hot for such an escapade which involved me walking a couple of miles in the midday sun with temperatures of 31 degrees (87 in old money) but that's another story. The point I wish to make is that I found the paintings in the exhibition, against expectations, rather dull. I went through the whole exhibition in about 15 minutes before cheering myself up with some 17th century Dutch landscapes in the main gallery which were more to my taste.

What's the problem here? For me it is captured by the quote above. The paintings were mostly of religious subjects and they were indeed exquisitely painted. But I found them quite uninspiring to look at. The faces were bland and conventional and the general depiction of the subject had no depth or feeling. I was surprised because I thought I liked Raphael. There was a reproduction of The School of Athens there and that was impressive but the great majority of pictures had nothing to say (in my view). I'm sure they are technical masterpieces but that is not enough if they don't use that mastery to offer something more, and for me they just don't.

When I was young and more interested in art than I am now I appreciated the pre-Raphaelites. I couldn't remember what it was they didn't like about Raphael so I looked it up. Wikipedia tells me that they believed the "classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael were a corrupting influence" on art. I suppose this means he favoured style over substance and that is more or less what I felt on my visit.

I may just have been in the wrong frame of mind. It was very hot and shortly before my visit I had eaten a stale croissant washed down with an over-priced cup of bad coffee. But that's not all there was to it. I enjoyed the Dutch landscapes and still lifes (lives?) I saw afterwards. These seemed to have a lot more depth to them and really capture something of the inner truth of the subject. Raphael's art has a certain serenity and is undoubtedly exquisite but that word implies a surface level bland beauty and that is what I saw in his work. Perhaps the problem was the lack of variety when so many are seen together and he might be better appreciated if one just saw one or two paintings in which case the smooth perfection might not pall.

The Madonna of the Pinks. A beautiful painting but could it also be rather bland?

The Renaissance was a restoration of Classical humanism. When it treated religious subjects it played down the hieratic quality you find in medieval art. It brought them closer to the everyday human but by removing distance it also lost the sense of the sacred. I don't feel about Raphael as I feel about Leonardo but nor do I feel his painting has any of the spiritual intensity of, say, Albrecht Durer to take an almost exact contemporary, and as far as the pictures in the exhibition go he well illustrates the spiritual loss incurred by Renaissance humanism.

Tuesday 5 April 2022

Learn From the Past But...

We live in a time when the past is more within our reach than ever before. We can access ancient works of literature, art and religion from within our own homes. Almost all the learning of humanity that has been preserved is at our fingertips should we choose to search it out, and more is regularly unearthed. But, at the same time, our connection to the past is being systematically destroyed. Tradition, through which our forefathers were linked to the past, is rejected almost completely, and modern education focuses increasingly on the modern world to the exclusion of earlier times. Even history in the UK, I am both amused and disturbed to find, seems to be centred on World War Two with an occasional nod to the Tudors.

When you are separated from the past you are at the mercy of those indoctrinating you in the present time. You no longer have a wide palate of thought and various differences of approach to explore and thereby enrich your mind. You are marooned in a world in which only one way is allowed and if that way is, as it now is, atheistic you are cut off from any proper idea of God who will still be around but only as an outmoded superstition. Many people today think that religion is childish but that's because their knowledge of it has never progressed beyond the child level. They have never been instructed in religion to any serious degree.

All tyrants try to destroy the past. The tyrants of the present day do exactly what has been done before but they do it more subtly. The end result is no different.

So, it makes sense to seek out the past and give yourself a greater understanding of the world than that afforded by contemporary thought (or lack of it, I am tempted to say.) However, it's not quite as simple as that. Learn from the past but do not be restricted by it. The past has much to teach us but we also have to go beyond it. When Jesus came he built on the law and the prophets. He brought something new but it was adding an extra dimension to what had come before. It did not replace it and without having that foundation his teachings would not have shed the light they did. Truth is alive and what is alive grows. It grows from what it is but it grows all the same. We too need to grow but we grow from our roots. Today, we are being cut off from our roots. Things that are cut off from their roots die.

Saturday 19 June 2021

White Males Are To Blame

So many of the ills of the present day are laid at the door of white males who are said to have usurped power and suppressed everybody else, women, non-white people, even nature itself. In fact, white males are accused of being responsible for most of the evil in the world.

I agree. The horrors of today were created by white males.

But perhaps we are talking about different things. What I blame white males for is not usurping power. Generally speaking, the power they have, they themselves created. No, my finger is pointing at them for a different reason.

It was white males who produced materialism and atheism which came to a head in communism. It was white males who exalted reason over everything else and in the process detached us from the fundamental truths of our humanity. It was white males who were the first to reject God and raise materialistic science to be a new god in place of the divine so cutting off all people from their spiritual roots. It was white males who promoted consumerism and pillaged the natural world for mercenary purposes.

But that is largely because no one else was good enough to do these things as is proved by the fact that practically everybody else has happily jumped on board. White males were the pioneers of a new way of being. The modern world is not a mistake as in the Traditionalist view so much as a necessary development in consciousness that has been hijacked and taken down the wrong path. Human beings were meant to grow into a new phase of being in which they became masters of themselves and of the world. This required the growth of science and of reason and greater emphasis on the individual self. Unfortunately, this growth became one-sided and failed to incorporate spiritual elements as it should have done.

If we go back to the 17th century which marks the ascendancy of white males over everyone else we find that most other parts of the world from India to China and elsewhere had settled into a kind of spiritual apathy and material decay if not decadence. The only fresh impetus to growth, exploration and development was in the West, whether that be Europe or North America. The white males created a new world which carried humanity forwards into the modern age. This was an intended part of the evolution of consciousness, bringing human beings greater self-determination, understanding and awareness of the world and of themselves. But it was a two-edged sword. This new awareness and agency could lead to great new heights or it could result in massive spiritual loss if it was directed towards its own self-fulfilment without acknowledging transcendent reality. It could lead to conscious union with God (eventually) or alienation and despair if pursued without intelligence.

So please do blame white males but realise that somebody had to do this and they were the best available. Without them we would still be stuck in the past. Their sins are many but their virtues, whether of imagination, intellectual curiosity, pioneering spirit, inventiveness, energy, courage and, yes, even intelligence are also many. They have created unimagined (by others) new things and new understandings but they have also had the defects of their qualities and allowed themselves to be misled by their own hubris and pride far too often.

And they continue to be at the forefront of so much that is wrong in the world. On the other hand, I don't see anyone else who is willing or capable of rectifying their errors other than white males themselves. As far as I can see, they represent the best and worst of humanity at the moment. If anyone is going to save the world from its disastrous decisions my money is principally on white males.

Wednesday 19 August 2020

Music, an Influence on and Reflection of Consciousness

Western music, once the greatest in the world, has fallen on hard times. It flourished for over 1,000 years and spoke to the whole person, body, mind and soul, but now is reduced to a pitiful caricature of itself and this is true whether you are speaking of popular music or the more serious variety.

It is certain that our distant pagan forefathers would have had the kind of music we used to regard as primitive, heavy on the drums and accompanied by rhythmic chanting which whipped up primal emotions sometimes to the point of hysteria though they might have thought of that as spiritual ecstasy. It wasn't. It worked on the physical and what occultists call the astral bodies, the latter being the vehicle of the emotional nature. There was minimal melody and no harmony. Somewhat similar to what a lot of music has returned to today though in our time technology has made it even more powerful in its effects to, I might add, our great spiritual detriment.

But as Christianity conquered the West the influence of church music, plainsong and Gregorian chant, would have seeped into the consciousness of everyone, softening, civilising and elevating the primitive paganism of the past in music as well as everything else. Elements of love, joy, peace, hope, forgiveness, all Christian virtues, would have gone out of the church and into everyday society including its music, in the process uplifting dance from a purely sexualised form to one with considerably more grace and elegance.

Polyphony and harmony came from the church music of the Notre Dame era and this developed into the wonderful Renaissance sacred music of composers like Josquin, Ockeghem and a whole host of others. But secular music was affected too including instrumental music as instruments became more sophisticated and news ones were invented. When we reach the time of J.S. Bach we come to an apogee of Western art and a music that had grown quite naturally from its ancient seeds in the liturgy of the Church. Soli Deo Gloria as he wrote at the end of many of his compositions, secular as well as sacred. Baroque music is strongly tied to the dance with its dependence on the basso continuo or figured bass but this is a dance of lightness, elegance and refinement with nothing crude about it and always the primary inspiration is melodic.

The development in music from baroque into classical might be said to have begun the descent even though the works produced are among the greatest in the Western canon. This was the time of the Enlightenment which was the worship of Reason. Consequently, there was a tendency in music to separate itself from both God and Nature and this carried on into the Romantic era when the centre of the creative process became the composer himself. Again, this resulted in works of exceptional beauty and power because enough of a connection to the past remained to temper the self-centredness and make sure it was not exclusive, and that combined with the appearance of men of genius in a relatively large number. But the disconnect from the spiritual world was becoming obvious. The focus on human emotion dominated spiritual feelings and the ego began to assume its current role as the leading impulse behind artistic creativity. The idea of Soli Deo Gloria was gone. What should have happened was that human imagination and creative drive would have been allied to spiritual perception. What actually did happen was that the former first set itself apart from the latter and then pushed it aside altogether.

The watchword of the 19th century was Revolution. Tradition was overturned to a far greater extent than we now recognise. Romantic artists felt that something vital had been lost and this was reflected in their work which was often deeply nostalgic. But they knew they could never get it back by returning to the past. That was an impossibility. The past is always gone. We must always strive to create a future that is new and based on what we are now even if it can and should contain transformed elements of the past.

The structure of music broke down as the post-Romantic era turned into full-blown modernism. At the same time, the emotional content, which had been ramped up both in terms of the musical message and by sheer volume as singers and orchestras became more powerful, moved in two directions. One, in serious classical music it was quite simply rejected. The music was now cerebral, abstract and elitist, totally divorced from the natural. It had become machine-like and spiritually dead. But in popular music feelings became more important, only they were much cruder feelings. No longer was there any inclination to elevate the emotions. Now, as rhythm and the beat assumed greater centrality in the overall musical package, the lower emotions relating to the body and its gratifications were brought out, encouraged and given their head. Certain writers at the time regarded the advent of jazz as extremely destructive of higher sensibilities and a real factor in the degradation of civilised values, indeed of civilisation itself. It's hard to argue with that and when you see where this sort of music has led the conclusion they were right is unavoidable. We have returned to the deep pagan past of drums and orgiastic dancing in which we do not rise about the ego but fall below it with lyrics all too often depicting crude sexuality and real love totally ignored. A modern love song is likely to be at best a self-pitying complaint but much more probably will sound like the grunts of rutting beasts.

Music is the most profound of all the arts. It can raise us up to a world of divine beauty and order or it can drag us down us to chaos and base material satisfactions that do make us beast-like but without the natural dignity of beasts who act as they act because it is what they are. But human beings are not animals and when they behave as animals they become worse than animals. We have now replaced a music that elevates with one that degrades and the worst thing is that it is the young that are targeted, people at their most susceptible. Man can be like an angel or an animal and it is music that helps us turn to one or the other. We are fortunate today in that we do have access to all the great music of the past through recorded versions but deeply unfortunate in that most of our modern music is degraded and corrupting.

Friday 29 May 2020

Multi-Dimensional Spirituality

This sounds a New Age type of phrase but it is also something real and important for the fuller development of spiritual awareness.

Human consciousness does not stand still. It is not the same as it was 2,000 years ago or even 200 years ago. It changes. In some ways it deepens while in other it appears to contract but always the central drive is growth. Those who think there is some ultimate pure state beyond time and space and movement, and this is where we should be heading are setting themselves an artificial boundary. The fact is even the Buddha is not the same as he was at the time of his Nirvana. His consciousness will have grown. That is not to say there is not a state of pure conscious awareness in which subject and object appear as one and, as the Heart Sutra of Mahayana Buddhism puts it, form is emptiness and emptiness is form, but this misses the fact that life is not just being but being and becoming working together to make something more. It is not one thing but two things that, through their interaction, make a third thing. The oneness may exist but so does the difference. This is how creativity works and how freedom expresses itself in expanding the horizons. It makes for a dynamic universe.

People have different ideas of what the spiritual is. It might be believing in a religious doctrine with the aim of salvation. It might be following a religious path with the goal of fitting oneself for heaven. It might be training the mind to become more aware or turning to mystical practise to attain higher states of consciousness or the state beyond states. Pagans seek God through nature and its powers, dualists look to divine transcendence and monists focus on the immanent. All these approaches have validity on their level but they each attend to a particular dimension of the spiritual, even the latter which might claim to be encompassing everything though its diminishment of the created world and created beings belies that claim.

As I see it multi-dimensional spirituality encompasses two things. It expands the idea of what the spiritual is. It irradiates the mind with ever-greater amounts of light so revealing higher vistas on the one hand and deeper insights into what is already known and perceived on the other. It makes the familiar new by opening it up to what it only hints at as a cube does a square. This is fulfilling the law and the prophets. The new builds on the old but totally transforms it.

Then it is more inclusive. It rejects nothing except sin and untruth, both which it does reject unequivocally. Spirit is good, matter is good, all is good and all works for the good but all has its place and that place must be known. If something is taken out of place then good becomes ill. If something is neglected, the rest is incomplete. If something is over-emphasised, it loses its virtue. It is good to go beyond appearance to seek reality. It is better to realise that appearance is part of reality. It is even better to see that the world of appearance is not just the facade or 'play' of reality but actually adds to it.

At the present time the human mind is generally closed in on itself, only able to do one thing at a time and when it studies something it does so from outside that thing through experiment and analysis. There will come a time when the mind will have flowered to the extent that it can encompass many things simultaneously without diminishing attention on any of them. It will also be able to know a thing by entering directly into it. By focusing on a particular thing the mind will absorb itself into that thing and know it from the inside as though becoming it. This will be a spiritual state so there is no question of any violation of the thing's integrity in the case of conscious beings nor disturbance of its equilibrium. An example would be that you look at a stone and know the entire history of that stone and are also able to inwardly resonate with its psychic state. I did warn you about the New Age aspect of this idea!

Multi-dimensional spirituality may lie in the future but we can make steps towards it now by opening our minds up to the possibility of it and even by experimenting with its mode of cognisance. Through focused attention and directed thought we can begin to lay the first foundations on which it will eventually be built though as with any spiritual endeavour love, humility and imagination are essential if we are to build according to the divine order and not descend into magic meaning in this context a materialistic mind exploring and trying to exploit the spiritual world.

Thursday 22 August 2019

Creativity

Creativity or art can be seen as man engaged in one of his highest divine functions. He is acting according to the image of the Creator planted within him and fulfilling his office as God's vice-regent or representative inside the creation.

But there are rules. When man creates he should do so as an expression of his own unique individual nature thus bringing something into the world no other being can. At the same time, he should not create purely as an individual. This is the major and spiritually disastrous mistake of so much art and science and invention of the 20th century and beyond. Creating from the self as opposed to through the self is where it has all gone wrong. The true creator creates in accordance with God's laws, though since the word law implies a certain rigidity and lack of freedom, patterns would be a better word. But these are the laws of creation, the parameters that God set up at the beginning, and to go against them is to go against the order of creation and thus God himself. If we do this we are not so much creating as anti-creating, being creatively destructive as it has been described.

In fact to go against them is also to go against our own being since these laws are the template according to which we are made. Thus it is no coincidence that it is only when human beings abandoned belief in a transcendent reality that they started to create outside of and actually against nature.

And what was the effect of this? It certainly wasn't any real happiness or fulfilment. To begin with there was a sense of liberation, the rush of energy you get when a container is shattered and its contents released. But then the energy is dissipated and there is nothing left. The feeling of emptiness results and that is what we currently live with and what we try to fill with novelty (the 'news') and distraction. But this never works and like all drugs we need more and more to achieve less and less. All this from abandoning reality and seeing ourselves as self-created which is what materialism really amounts to for if we have no creator we are responsible to no one.

Art to achieve its proper function must be moral. Of course, you can have art without morality but it always, however good, and most is not, falls short. But what is morality? It might be defined in several ways according to one's beliefs about the nature of reality. For the Aztecs even human sacrifice may have been seen as moral. But there are clearly true and false beliefs, those based on truth and those based on illusion. Fundamental to real morality, however, is the acknowledgment of God and the recognition of cosmic good and evil. I use that adjective to differentiate between what is good in a spiritual sense and what is good materially. Today we see material good used to justify spiritual evil and it deceives many. The current obsession with climate change, for example, uses a legitimate though probably overstated concern to advance an agenda of totalitarian control and substitutes faith in God with repositioning ourselves as God. Let me explain what I mean by that. Being responsible stewards of creation under God is right and proper and what we are called to be. Being the ultimate arbiters of creation as the climate change lobby imagines we can be is blasphemous. As I said in my previous post we are meant to be gardeners of the planet but under God who is the head gardener.

So real morality involves two things. The recognition of God and the understanding that he has set up an order of being in creation with its own proper rules. To go with these is morality. To go against them is immoral. You might just as well say good and evil. This order of being is not an inflexible system with no give or room for creative expression but it does have laws, some of which, like justice and mercy for example, cannot be obeyed slavishly or in a bureaucratic rule-following way for they complement each other and so have to be interpreted on a spiritual level by the discerning mind that has adapted itself to truth through striving to love the Creator.

This brings us back to art and creativity and the fact that to be an artist of a kind is one of our primary roles. But we need to create according to the rules and patterns of creation and the natural order of being. If we don't, we are following Satan not God and that is what humanity in the mass is currently doing.