A Revitalized View of the Sacred in Art (from 2011)

Richard Wagner thought that the Ancient Greeks had created the perfect art-work, the total-art-work, (Gesamtkunstwerk), which combined music, dance, and poetry, best seen in the tragedies of Aeschylus. Later this total-art split into various factions and specialties for various reasons, which Wagner said was related to decline.

I would rather use the term “total-religion” than total art in the sense that the word “culture” comes from “cultus” or cult. This has (or at least once had) religious dimensions, because culture refers to the sanctification of daily life, architecture, clothing, art, literature and music.

We seem to instinctively know the principles of beauty, as balance, clarity, moderation, simplicity, things handsome, pretty---these are classical values. Mozart did not invent many of the patterns he used, he improved on the work of past composers. This defines Ordered Evolution.

Art can grasp the evolutionary pattern toward higher forms of beauty, toward Perfect Beauty, which defines the ascending levels of Godhood by way of material and supermaterial evolution. Truth gives meaning to Beauty---Godhood is first a Supreme Object or objects and only secondarily a supreme definition. This view can help us move away from abstract thinking in art and back to the concrete, back to the material, back to the object, but also forward to the supermaterial.

Evolutionary Realism in the art of the projected Theoevolutionary Church can provide art content, with the new yet very old narrative of life evolving from the simple to the complex, toward Absolute Beauty and Godhood.

Using “moral imagination” in art (Russell Kirk and Burke's term) can keep moral art from becoming didactic and boring. The greatest art showed this creative moral imagination. This grounds art in the affirmation of the sacred, but with a revitalized view of the sacred.