In 1867 Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Russian writer and philosopher, diverts his travels while in Switzerland to see a painting he had heard about. It had been created by the German Renaissance artist Hans Holbein and depicts Christ laid flat and decomposing after having been taken down from the cross. It is a dramatic, unsettling, and thought-provoking piece. Dostoevsky’s experience was witnessed and documented by his wife Anna. “My husband seemed shattered. When I returned, twenty minutes later, he was still there, in the same place, rooted to the spot.” She asks, “What had he been contemplating? What had he seen beneath the bloodless lineaments of that body removed from the Cross?” Later Dostoevsky explained in great length what had engrossed him saying, “What this picture seemed to me to express was the notion of an obscure, insolent and stupidly eternal, to which everything is subjected.” He transposed the experience into his novel “The Idiot” where Myshkin, the main character asks the essential question, “Can the imagination give a definite shape to what, in reality, has none?"
Connecting Inner and the Outer Realities
Art has always played an intricate role in transmitting information to humanity because it has the ability to guide us from ordinary exterior awareness into the deeper realms of interior awareness. It can connect the physical eye with the inner eye, or more specifically, reconcile and align external and internal perceptions. This connection then allows us a glimpse of the "obscure" nature of the "eternal," and in turn, reveals to us something about our own nature.
The idea is that as the mind contemplates exterior symbolic images, with full presence and deep consideration, pathways to the interior open and develop like the sprouting of a seed being watered. The images, metaphors, and symbols serve as intimations that point and guide us along the path that leads to the ultimate truth about our existence within the eternal.
In short, as our inner and outer realities communicate, we are given spiritual insight. Insight that points to the not-so-obvious-obvious path, or The Way, and hopes that our soul sees, follows, learns and evolves.
The Artist as Prophet
When man receives insight through both his conscious and unconscious mind, he is able to produce art that provides a view, albeit limited, like a peek through a keyhole, into the spiritual realm. So it is not surprising that stories, poetry, music, and visual art have played a significant and fundamental part of all ancient healing systems as they attempt to convey the mysterious nature of our existence. The Florentine renaissance man Leonne Battista Alberti, who was a priest, poet, philosopher, painter, sculptor, mathematician, and architect, believed that the ideal church design would be so harmonious that it would naturally, and by its mere existence, induce contemplation and reveal the divine.
Because man has this deep seated need to show humanity's universally shared interior, he has gone to great lengths to materialize the visions that rise up from deep within. This unveiling and expressing of the interior, is a distinctly human trait, as if it has been written into our genetic code. Joseph Campbell tells us, “Like the priest, the artist is a master of metaphorical language” who brings his inmost truth to consciousness. He explains that the nature of the artist as a microcosm, experienced from within, and the nature of the universe as the macrocosm, viewed from without, are two aspects of the same reality. Although art is merely a tool and catalyst, and it cannot actually provide a complete understanding of the union between the inner and the outer, the seen and the unseen, it does act as a bridge.
Despite this need to express the eternal through art, the ancient Chinese text the Tao Te Ching repeatedly tells us that the Tao - or The Way - cannot be perceived:
“Look, and it can't be seen. Listen, and it can't be heard. Reach, and it can't be grasped. Above, it isn't bright. Below, it isn't dark. Seamless, unnamable, it returns to the realm of nothing. Form that includes all forms, image without an image, subtle, beyond all conception.”
The Tao Te Ching reminds us that when we have names and form, they are merely provisional. Still, despite the near impossibility of achieving its goal, this nearly three thousand year old text goes to great lengths to convey the intangible because the ancients knew that artistic forms of expression have the critical task of opening up pathways of understanding beyond our five senses. It may be impossible to pull heaven down over our eyes, but the message that it exists at all is so important that we must try. The artist is then faced with the arduous task of bridging external reality to the internal in an attempt to facilitate our personal encounter with the eternal.
The dilemma of such artists is well described by St. Augustine when he says, "Oh that they could see the eternal Internal, which having tasted I was grieved that I could not show it them."
Despite his frustration, Augustine made it his life work to express the unfathomable through the medium of literary art. I imagine he knew that when artists succeed, they provide a great gift to humanity: an image of the interconnectedness between man and the" eternal Internal," so that we might, at the very least, consider the idea that this mysterious relationship exists at all.
The Journey Toward the Center of Our Being
There is infinitely more than meets the eye in any great piece of art. A good composition begs for eyes to fall upon its surface so it can invite the observer further in, past the medium to appreciatively resonate with that which is implied through the messages woven into the details of the work. Ideally, the efforts of the artist will silence the mind, trigger contemplation and facilitate an encounter with the observer's interior, as Alberti had hoped and Dostoevsky experienced.
In essence, the artist helps us detach from the distractions that condition our conventional way of seeing and guides us to consciousness above thought.
The art's aim is to reveal the soul’s heritage and identity, purpose and path, outside of time and space, so that we may recognize ourselves within an infinite context of the eternal. However, it can only do so if the observer seeks these specifically timeless, dimensionless, immaterial qualities of spiritual consciousness. In other words, if we look at a painting of angels and don’t believe in divine messengers, even in the metaphorical sense, we will not look closely at, let alone analyze, what the angels are doing in the painting. We won't notice what their surroundings tell us about our own location. We won’t be able to read and decode the clues that point to the human condition and our own spiritual state.
Being able to receive the message requires a decoding process. Ten people looking at the same piece might have ten different interpretations if they aren't in tune to archetypes, the collectively inherited unconscious ideas, patterns and images that are universally present in the human psyche. However, when seekers recognize the universal meaning in the metaphor as a reflection of truth and reality, they will all see the one message the artist intended to convey. It is essential to penetrate - through meditation and contemplation - the symbolic metaphor to its universal essence or absolute truth which is beyond words and images.
If we are to see past the material surface of reality, we have to accept that a few simple conditions need to be met. As the observer, we must believe that art contains an esoteric or hidden message even though it eludes us without deep contemplation. And we must want to look into the face of the divine and be able to recognize when the divine is looking back, trying to break through to us.
Once we have fulfilled these two conditions, a revelatory composition can reflect back the eternal, and simultaneously provide insight into the soul's experience of the here and now. In Dostoevsky's case, he suddenly understood, and had to come to terms with one of the essential doctrines of Buddhism, impermanence, the belief that all of existence, without exception, is transient, fleeting and in flux. It is important to note, based on his wife's description of the event, that this realization took place at a visceral level rather than an intellectual level. It is one thing to understand that life, as we know it, comes to an end and another to be gripped, held in momentary suspension and then "shattered" by this knowledge.
The Answer
Now we return to the question Myshkin posed, “Can the imagination give a definite shape to what, in reality, has none?"
In the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching, we are told "The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The unnameable is the eternally real."
And yet man’s nature drives him to at least try to describe and show the unknowable. Accepting the limitations of metaphors, symbols, and imagery that point to something without being the thing they point to, I believe art nevertheless serves to bridge our outer reality to our inner reality and provides a deepened spiritual sense of the great mystery that this existence is.
Art points to the possibilities.
As much as our imagination wants to give shape "to what, in reality, has none," the obscure inevitably remains obscure. However, if we are sincerely searching for the eternal and are receptive to it in all possible and infinite forms, then we might at least consider that the eternal within the arts has the power to touch the eternal within us.
The Eternal is in the words that Augustine used to describe it. It is in Holbein's painting of Christ after the crucifixion. It is - despite the impossibility of form to truly capture the formless - what shattered, engrossed, and held Dostoevsky's soul suspended in timeless contemplation and communion with the "eternal to which everyone is subjected."
What sign will we be given that we have indeed encountered the eternal? I think the answer is simple. We will be touched. Our heart will be moved. And if we pay close attention, we might sense a subtle undercurrent of relief as we recognize that this mysterious relationship between the Divine just might exist and that it is using all means possible to communicate with us.
References
Campbell, J. (1993). The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor As Myth and As Religion. New York, NY: HarperPerennial
Mitchell, S. (1988). Tao Te Ching. New York, NY: HarperPerennial
Pusey, E. (1909). The Confessions of St. Augustine. New York, NY: P F Collier & Son