Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

Notes

1. All sacred art is traditional art but not all traditional art is sacred art. Sacred art lies at the heart of traditional art and is concerned directly with the revelation and those theophanies which constitute the core of the tradition. Sacred art involves the ritual and cultic practices and practical and operative aspects of the paths of spiritual realization within the bosom of the tradition in question.

“Within the framework of traditional civilization, there is without doubt a distinction to be made between sacred art and profane art. The purpose of the first is to communicate, on the one hand, spiritual truths and, on the other hand, a celestial presence; sacerdotal art has in principle a truly sacramental function.” F. Schuon, “The Degrees of Art,” Studies in Comparative Religion, Autumn, 1976, p. 194; also in his Esoterism as Principle and asWay, pp. 183-97.

2. On the principle characteristics of traditional art see Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, pp. 66ff.

3. On the definition of traditional art see Schuon, “Concerning Forms in Art,” in his Transcendent Unity of Religions; and idem, Esoterism as Principle and asWay, pt. 3, “Aesthetic and Theurgic Phenomenology,” pp. 177-225; Burckhardt, Sacred Art in East and West, intio.; and Coomaraswamy, Figures of Speech or Figures of Thought; idem, The Transformation of Nature in Art; and idem, “The Philosophy of Medieval and Oriental Art,” in Zalmoxis 1 (1938): 20-49.

A contemporary Japanese artist writing as a Buddhist says concerning art, “Son secret, sa raison d’être est d’aller jusqu’au fond même du néant pour en rapporter l’affirmation flamboyante qui illuminera l’univers.” Taro Okawoto, “Propos sur l’art et le Bouddhisme ésotérique,” France-Ask, no. 187 (Autumn 1966);25.

4. Coomaraswamy has dealt with this theme in many of his works esp. his wellknown essays, “Why Exhibit Works of Art?” in his Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art, pp. 7-22; and “What is the Use of Art, Anyway?” in The Majority Report on Art, John Stevens Pamphlet no. 2, Boston, 1937.

5. The work of such masters of gnosis as ´Sankara and Jalal al-Dın Rumı belonging to two very different kinds of traditions exemplifies the wedding between knowledge of the highest order and beauty of expression.

6. It is significant to note that in Arabic fad. l or fad.ılah means at once beauty, grace, virtue, and knowledge.

7. T. Burckhardt has dealt with this theme in his various works on Islamic art.

8.

9. Until two or three decades ago, even students of Islamic thought in the West believed that the intellectual life of Islam had terminated with Ibn Rushd, or shortly thereafter, and even limited Sufism to its so-called classical expression in the sixth/twelfth and seventh/thirteenth centuries. But even in this state of unawareness of later Islamic intellectual life, a single dome of the quality and perfection of the Shah mosque should have been intrinsic proof of the existence of such an intellectual life if only the organic and unbreachable link between sacred art and intellectuality in the sense understood in this book had been understood. Since then the research of Corbin, Ashtiyanı, and Nasr has provided the extrinsic proof of the presence of such an intellectual and spiritual life. See Corbin, “Confessions extatiques de Mîr Dâmâd,” in Mélanges Louis Massignon, vol. 1, Paris, 1956, pp. 331-78; Corbin, En Islam iranien, vol. 4;Nasr, “The School of Isfahan,” in M. M. Sharif (ed.), A History of Muslim Philosophy, vol. 2, Wiesbaden, 1966, pp. 904-32; Nasr, “Philosophy, Theology and Spiritual Movements,” in Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 6 (in press). A decade ago when Corbin and S. J.  Ashtiyanı thought of compiling an anthology of the works of the metaphysicians and philosophers of Persia from the Safavid period to the present, they planned two or three volumes. Before Corbin’s death already seven extensive volumes had been compiled of which only four have seen the light of day. The unveiling of this rich intellectual heritage, produced parallel with some of the greatest masterpieces of Islamic art, affords an excellent historical case study for the relationship

between traditional art and intellectuality whose principial relationship we have outlined in this chapter.

10. It is these guilds which were at once depositories of technical and esoteric knowledge even if it were primarily of a cosmological order. Their secret organization and oral transmission made possible the preservation of a knowledge of a sacred order wed to the crafts and techniques of making and building. Only in this way can one explain the creation of cathedrals which combine art of the highest order with cosmological sciences and which display perfect unity although built by more than one generation of architects and craftsmen. Speculative Freemasonary came into being only when this esoteric knowledge became divorced from the actual practice of the arts and crafts and reduced to an occultism.

11. In Islam as in Christianity one observes a close nexus between the craft guilds and the Sufi orders, a relation which has survived to this day in certain Muslim cities such as Fez in Morocco and Yazd in Persia. The role of ‘Alı ibn Abı Talib as founder of the Islamic guilds and at the same time primary representative of Islamic esoterism is very significant as far as the relation of the guilds to esoteric knowledge is concerned. On this question see Burckhardt, The Art of Islam; and Y. Ibish, “Economic Institutions,” in R. B. Sargeant (ed.), The Islamic City, Paris, 1980, pp. 114-25.

12. Zen represents a perfect example of the wedding of spiritual instruction to the crafts not only in the making of pottery but also in landscape architecture, calligraphy, etc. See D. T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture, Princeton, 1959.

13. See M. Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, chaps. 1 and 2.

14. “There is here a metaphysical inversion of relation that we have already pointed out: for God, His creature reflects an exteriorized aspect of Himself; for the artist, on the contrary, the work is a reflection of an inner reality of which he himself is only an outward aspect; God creates His own image, while man, so to speak, fashions his own essence, at least symbolically. On the principial plane, the inner manifests itself in the outer, but on the manifested plane, the outer fashions the inner, and a sufficient reason for all traditional art, no matter of what kind, is the fact that in a certain sense the work is greater than the artist himself, and brings back the latter, through the mystery of artistic creation, to the proximity of his own Divine Essence.” Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, pp. 72-73.

15. See Schuon, “Principles and Criteria of Art,” in his Language of the Self, pp.102-35, where he has discussed certain works of modern painters like Van Gogh and Gaugin in which some of these qualities shine forth despite their being of a nontraditional character.

16. Among twentieth-century philosophers particularly concerned with the meaning of forms may be mentioned E. Cassirer. See Die Philosophic der Symbolischen Formen, 3 vols., Berlin, 1923-1929, trans. R. Manheim as Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 3 vols., New Haven, 1953-1957. His appreciation of “symbolic forms” is, however, not the same as that of the traditional authors.

Traditional texts of both Western and Orthodox Christianity are replete with references to the fundamental significance of form and its effect upon the human soul. For example, St. Photios of Constantinople writes, “Just as speech is transmitted by hearing, so a form through sight is printed upon the tablets of the soul.” Quoted in C. Cavarnos, Orthodox Iconography, Belmont, Mass., 1977, p. 30. See also the essay of L. Peter Kollar, Form, Sydney, 1980.

17. See Schuon, “Abuse of the Ideas of the Concrete and the Abstract,” in his Logic and Transcendence, pp. 19-32.

18. “Art is iconography, the making of images or copies of some model (paradeigma) whether visible (presented) or invisible (contemplated).” From Plato’s Republic, 373B, trans. and quoted by Coomaraswamy in Figures of Speech, Figures of Thought, p. 37.

19. Timaeus 28A, B, trans. Jowett 20. Quoted in Coomaraswamy, The Transformation of Nature in Art, p. 113.

21. “There is a highly significant connection between the loss of a sacred art and the loss of anagogy, as is shown by the Renaissance; naturalism could not kill symbolism-sacred art-without humanism killing anagogy and, with it, gnosis.

This is so because these two elements, anagogical science and symbolical art are essentially related to pure intellectuality.” Schuon, Language of the Self, p. 111.

22. On the Tenth Intellect and its emanation of forms which are not to be found in Aristotle but characterize medieval Peripatetic philosophy see chap. 4, n. 3 above.

23. St. Thomas insists that the artist must not imitate nature but must be accomplished in “imitating nature in her manner of operation,” (Summa Theologica, quest. 117, a.I).

24. It is perhaps worthwhile to remember again the “definition” of the sacred given earlier as being related to the Immutable and the eternal Reality and Its manifestation in the world of becoming.

“It (the sacred] is the interference of the uncreated in the created, of the eternal in time, of the infinite in space, of the supraformal in forms; it is the mysterious introduction into one realm of existence of a presence which in reality contains and transcends that realm and could cause it to burst asunder in a sort of divine explosion,” Schuon, language of the Self, p. 106.

25. For reasons discussed already in earlier chaps.

26. His views on art are summarized by Coomaraswamy in his Transformation of Nature in Art, chap. 2, pp. 59-95.

27. See V. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, London, 1957; and L. Ouspensky and V. Lossky, Der Sinn der Ikonen, Bern, 1952.

28. T. Burckhardt in his The Art of Islam has explained for the first time inWestern circles the meaning rather than just the history of Islamic art and revealed its link with Islamic esoterism whose “organizational” link to the artswas through the craft guilds whichwere usually associated with the Sufi orders. We have also dealt with this question in our forthcoming The Meaning of Islamic Art, New York, 1982.

29. G. Rowley, Principles of Chinese Painting, Princeton, 1947, p. 5.

30. In contrast for example to the humanistic art of late antiquity which, although possessing order and harmony, lacks the element of depth and mystery which would reflect the Infinite.

31. See F. Schuon, “Foundations for an Integral Aesthetics,” Studies in Comparative Religion, Summer 1976, pp. 130-35.

32. Beauty possess this ambivalence, being at once means of attraction and seduction as a result of the power of maya which is operative in the cosmic domain everywhere. If the exteriorizing and centrifugal tendencies associated with maya in its aspect of veil and separation had not existed, tradition could rely on only beauty and not also morality, on only aesthetics and not also ethics. But the ambiguity of maya requires the ascetic phase before the soul can allow itself to be attracted by the beauty of form toward the formless.

33. It is of interest to note that in Arabic beauty and goodness are both called husn and ugliness and evil qubh. .

34.

This poem, by one of the leading Sufis who emphasized the role of beauty in spiritual realization summarizes the sacramental function of beauty. Heart’s Witness, trans. B. M.Weischer and P. L.Wilson, Tehran, 1978, pp. 168-69.

35. “The cosmic, and more particularly the earthly function of beauty is to actualize in the intelligent and sensitive creature the recollection of essence, and thus to open the way to the luminous Night of the one and infinite Essence.”

Schuon, “The Degrees of Art,” Studies in Comparative Religion, Autumn, 1976, pp. 194-207.

On the Platonic and Neoplatonic doctrine of beauty see R. Lodge, Plato’s Theory of Art, New York, 1975; P. M. Schuhl, Platan et l’ari de son temps, Paris, 1934; W. J. Oates, Plato’s View of Art, New York, 1972; E. Moutsopoulos, La Musique dans l’oeuvre de Platon, Paris, 1959; T. Moretti-Costanzi, L’estetica di Platone. Sua attualità, Rome, 1948; J. G.Wary, Greek Aesthetic Theory. A Study of Callistic and Aesthetic Concepts in the Works of Plato and Aristotle, London, 1962; M. F. Sciacca, Platone, 2 vols., Milan, 1967 (with extensive annotated bibliography in vol. 2, pp. 351-427); H. Perls, L’Art et la beauté vus par Platon, Paris, 1938; G. Faggin, Plotino, 2 vols., Milan, 1962; G. A. Levi, “Il bello in

Plotino,” Humanitas 8 (1953): 233-39; F. Wehrli, “Die antike Kunsttheorie und das Schopferische,” Museum Helveticum 14 (1957): 39-49.

36.

37. Nicholson, Selected Poems from the Dıvani Shamsi Tabrız,ı 177. The translation of Nicholson has been somewhat modified.

38. See chap. 6, n. 21 above, where the relation between traditional music and cosmology has been briefly discussed.

39. Rumı says,

The musician began to play before the drunken Turk

Within the veil of melody the mysteries of the eternal covenant [asrar-i alast].

See Nasr, “The Influence of Sufism on Traditional Persian Music,” in Needleman (ed.), The Sword of Gnosis, p. 33.

40. This fundamental message of Pythagorean wisdom has now become a matter of great interest among many people in search of rediscovery of traditional knowledge as the works of H. Keyser, E. McClain, and others mentioned in chap. 3 demonstrate.

41. See Burckhardt, Sacred Art East and West, p. 9, where this story is recounted from the mouth of a street singer whom the author had heard in Morocco.

42. Music, esp. of the spiritual kind, which has grown out of the experience of the spiritual world and is meant to lead back to that world, can become like an opium which would replace rather than complement spiritual practice and give a false sense of satiation of authentic spiritual thirst if it is cut off from its traditional context and heard incessantly. That is why in Islam the classical schools of music, all of which are of a completely inward and spiritual nature, are reserved for the contemplative life and closely associated with Sufism. See J. Nurbakhsh, In the Tavern of Ruin, New York, 1978, chap. 4, pp. 32-62; S.H. Nasr, “Islam and Music,” in Studies in Comparative Religion,Winter 1976, pp. 37-45; idem, “The Influence of Sufism on Persian Music”; and During, op.cit.

43. On the symbolism of the dance of ´Siva see A. K. Coomaraswamy, The Dance of ´Siva: Fourteen Indian Essays, London, 1918.

44. On the relation between metaphysics, poetry, and logic see S. H. Nasr, “Metaphysics, Poetry and Logic in the Oriental Tradition,” Sophia Perennis 3/2 (Autumn 1977): 119-28.

45. This is particularly true of the first two chaps which contain the whole doctrine of Sufism and great beauty of expression. See Ibn al-‘Arabı, Bezels of Wisdom, trans. R.W. J. Austin, pp. 47-70.