Making the sacred concrete in art

The narrative of art can find its power and meaning in the sacred narrative of evolution from the simple to the complex to Godhood. This is the engine that drives human nature and culture. Lacking these truths life, art, and literature appear less important.

I think serious or high art has always been an affirmation of the things that we have held sacred, which included religion, nature, and human beauty; un-serious or low art also affirmed the sacred but with less sophistication, which is okay for its purposes. The highest art affirmed Godhood, which was valued higher than human beings, although humans have to be included in the overall affirmation of the sacred since humans also evolve toward Godhood.

Religious tradition says that man is best understood as an embodied spirit, whereas the theological materialism reverses this and says man is best understood as the embodied material will to life, or Tirips, activating life to evolve to material and supermaterial Godhood while being shaped by natural selection and evolution.

Evolutionary realism seems best to affirm this view of the sacred, evolutionary realism is the ideal choice in making the sacred concrete. Definitions of human beauty relate to Godhood as the zenith of beauty. The ancient Greeks were on the right track in their idealized realistic art creations of the Gods. Modern art forms have been mainly devoid of the sacred, or they hold individual hedonistic expression as “sacred;” modern artists tend to communicate only with each other, or only with critics hip to their experimentations, as Tom Wolfe criticized so well. And the public has largely turned their backs to high art.