Art is the Gateway to the Transcendent
The divinely superfluous beauty
Art transports our mind past the guardians of the paradisal gate to the tree within of illuminated life. It cleanses the doors of perception, wipes away the cherubim with their flaming swords, and behold us to the infinite and eternity. We are in the rapture of recognizing in a single hair “a thousand golden lions.”
Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.
— James Joyce
Art is a transforming experience. The revelation of art is neither ethics nor a judgment, and not even of humanity as one generally thinks of it. Rather, the revelation is a marveling recognition of the radiant Form of forms that shines through all things. The revelation is to see the entire universe in a grain of sand.
James Joyce in his book “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” gives us a distinction between what he calls “proper art” and “improper art”.
He says, “improper art” is the art in service of something that is not true art. For instance, art in the service of advertising. It is kinetic in nature i.e. it evokes a sense of desire or fear or loathing or lust in you. Art that excites desire for the object as a tangible object he calls pornographic, and those that excite loathing or fear for the object he terms didactic. For instance, when you see an advertisement for a luxury car, it creates a desire in you to get it. That’s pornographic.
In contrast, “proper art” is something that belongs to true art. It doesn’t create any sense of desire or fear in you. “Proper art” is static, and thereby induces esthetic arrest. To understand “proper art”, Joyce goes to Aquinas. Aquinas says that the esthetic object renders three moments: integritas - “wholeness”; consonantia - “harmony”; and claritas - “radiance.”
Integritas is to see and regard things as not separate objects but as a single entity, a wholeness. And once we regard separate objects as a single entity, the only thing that remains is the harmonious placement of everything, the consonantia, what Joyce calls the “rhythm of beauty,” which includes the relationship of colors to each other, of masses to each other, and of the spaces in between. And when all elements are part of this harmonious rhythm, one experiences the claritas, the radiance that shines forth the object. We get a glimpse of the eternal, of the transcendent, and one is held in esthetic arrest.
Art should be made in relation to nature. As Cezanne says:
“Art is a harmony parallel to nature.”
There are, of course, two natures involved: Nature, the world out there, and the world of nature within. When an artist intends to arrange his art “in a harmony parallel to nature”, then that harmony resonates with something inside you, fixes you in an esthetic arrest, and you have that big “a-ha!” moment.
So the function of art is to open the consumable things of the tangible, visible world, so that the radiance — the same radiance that’s within you — shines through them. It is the tool that allows you to become transparent to the transcendent. Any other intention on the part of the artist can be regarded as pornographic or didactical.
The most powerful art are those where your own nature is constantly invoked, and you don’t know where Nature ends and art begins. When a garden is constructed, the man who composes it tells his son when to bend each branch: “When it grows out to here, bend it” — so that it looks like Nature. It is art: Nature that has been harmonized with the nature within. The art then transforms into a “divinely superfluous beauty” and you are held in esthetic arrest.
