Lecture 12 Modern Art Spiritualism

Fr. Seraphim of Platina.
Orthodox Survival Course

Essential to understanding these difficult times is Fr Seraphim Rose’s and Father Herman Podmoshensky’s “Orthodox Survival Course”, a rare and most valued orthodox resource. Fr. Seraphim and Fr. Herman taught this course in the 70;s at the Platina monastery.

When reading, you should keep in mind that this is a transcript of the live oral speech of Father Seraphim, and not a written and slowly thought-out text. In addition, this text contains notes from Father Seraphim, which he made for himself in preparation for lectures.


Lecture 12
Modern Art & Spiritualism

A. Now we’ll finish by giving some other symptoms of the Revolution and chiliasm which is the central theme of modern age. Some Germans have seen deeply into this.

B. Art: decline from humanism to subhumanism

This writer, Hans Sedlmayr, talks about the history of modern art, especially of the last two centuries, as bringing into Western art, Western culture, entirely new phenomena, which later on he’ll interpret as to what it means. He discusses first the fact that in the nineteenth century there was no dominant style, but new styles seemed to come every decade or two. And the lack of a style he attributes to the fact that there’s no common belief underlying the society. There’s no sort of one thing which art is devoted to, as it was in the Middle Ages to the cathedrals.

Then he discusses architecture. And we find that just at the time of the French Revolution, just before, there’s this architect LeDoux, who comes up with the scheme for a perfectly spherical building, not only as monuments, but also as a house for a sheriff; and [giving a] completely ordinary thing like that this very extraordinary form. And later on this dies out because it’s practically not possible, and then [it] comes back again just before and during the Russian Revolution in the twentieth century. And there the idea is to overcome the sense of being bound to the earth. This also is a chiliastic idea.

Architecture also becomes unstable and no longer do you see sort of a orderly building coming up from the earth, rising up into the sky; instead it becomes sort of off-balance, as though it’s going to fall over.

And finally there is the idea of building as a machine. A house is a machine for living in, a chair is a machine for sitting in. This is in the twentieth century. And we have this quote from LeCorbusier, one of the great architects supposedly of our times, who even built a convent on these principles, a frightful looking thing. He says, “The heart of our ancient cities with their spires and cathedrals must be shattered to pieces and replaced by skyscrapers.” And this is that very world which we living in cities must face. And not only does revolutionary philosophy affect us, and revolutionary political systems, but also revolutionary architecture and art.

Secondly he talks about the torso, which for the first time in the middle of the nineteenth century in the sculpture of Rodin — by the way, many of whose sculptures are in San Francisco at the Legion of Honour — the idea of the torso is put into reality. Before then it was only some kind of sketch. But now the complete fragment, totally fragmentary thing, becomes a work of art. It shows that the higher purpose of art has been totally lost.

And now we come to the very striking sphere of painting. And he discusses Goya, who lived at this very time, at, contemporary with Napoleon, the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century. And about him he says this, “The more we study the art of Goya the more intense grows our conviction that,” just “like Kant in philosophy and LeDoux’s architecture, he is one of the great pulverizing, destructive forces that bring a new age into being. In Goya’s art certain characteristics force their way to the surface, they are symptoms of what have become the decisive trends of modern painting, but there’s more to him than that. Court painter though he was and officially working for the Court, even as LeDoux still worked for the [ancien regime ]” old regime “and dedicated his great architectural works to two monarchs, Goya nevertheless is the embodiment of the new type of the ‘exposed’ artist in the sense [outlined above].” we’ve discussed. “The new element in his art has no connection with the public sphere, but derives from a completely subjective province of experience, from the dream.

“For the first time an artist, taking refuge neither in disguise nor pretext, gives visible form to the irrational. The two series” of his called “‘Suenos’ (‘Dreams’) and ‘Disparates’ (‘Madnesses’) are the real keys not only to his own work to but to the most essential thing in modern art. And ‘Disparates’ are also the frescoes with which he decorated the walls of his country house, and not a few of his pictures.

“Here for the first time an artist has thought something worthy to be put on canvas, which derives directly from the depths of the dream world and the irrational. Nothing could surely be more mistaken than to suppose that these series were created to improve or instruct the world or to brand some politician. The elemental power of these visions would never be understood in terms of so innocuous and idealistic an explanation....”

“Once Hell was a clearly defined province of the world beyond. All the hideous products of the imagination by which the human mind could be tormented were banished into pictures of that place and were thus objectivised. The eruption of Hell into this world was a real and external thing, and it was thus that the painter would portray it in pictures of the tempting of the saints and of those dehumanized human beings that mocked and tormented Our Lord.

“In the other case, however, the one here before us, this world of the monstrous had become part of man’s inner world. It exists within man himself, and this brings us to a new conception of man, in so far as man himself becomes demoniac. It is not merely a matter of his outward appearance, it is that the man himself and all his world have been delivered to a demon empire. Man is on the defensive. It is Hell that has the overwhelming power and the forces that man can marshal against it are feeble and despairing.

“In the visions of [the ‘Suenos’]” his dreams and so-called proverbs, “[and ‘Proverbios’] we see every disfigurement by which man can be made hideous and every temptation by which his dignity can be assailed; we see demons in human form and beside them bewitched creatures of every kind, monstrosities, ghosts, witches, giants, beasts, lemurs and vampires. Chronos devouring his children seems like a nightmare personified as he squats, a naked giant on the edge of an oppressed world, and yet this Pandemonium of unclean spirits has a kind of raging vitality. These are no creatures of artistic fantasy — these are bloody realities that have been personally experienced.”

“The date of the [‘Suenos’]” “Dreams,” of which several of these are examples, this series of paintings, “is 1792, when the French Revolution had reached its climax. It was at this date also that Goya had a severe illness, the nature of which we do not know. These are the decades when many artists seem to have been possessed by demoniac powers. The sculptor Messerschmidt repeatedly portrays his own face as a hideous grimacing mask, while the ice-cold art of F;ssli” in Germany “shows indications of unmistakable hallucination. This is the time when Flaxman saw the devilish face which, for some inscrutable reason, he called ‘The Ghost of the Flea.’ It is also the age of Mesmer [(1733-1815)], the age when occultism was highly fashionable. It was as though a door had opened in man, a door leading down into the world of the subhuman — the world which threatens those with madness who have seen too much of it.”

There is a second artist he talks about who is quite the contrary, but also reveals this very similar thing. A painter called Friedrich, a German painter of this time. In his painting, “The human warmth has gone out of man’s relation to created things. The moon, itself a dead body, coldly reflecting the light of the sun that has set, veiling the world in a shroud, is the chief symbol of this new feeling that man has about them. Man feels himself abandoned by God. He is as much alone in the universe and as unrelated to it, as is the crucifix in Friedrich’s picture, standing in the vast impersonal silence of the mountains.”

The third aspect he talks about in this age is, which is very symptomatic, is the caricature. About this he says, “The caricature was not” totally “unknown in previous epochs,...” but “It is only from the end of the eighteenth century that, starting in England, caricature became widespread and was recognizable as a clearly defined branch of art; it is not till the nineteenth century that, in the work of Daumier,” the French artist, “it could become the main field of activity for an artist of the very first rank. It is therefore not the appearance of caricature as such that constitutes the decisive historical event; but its elevation to the rank of a respected and significant art.

“After 1830 there appeared the periodical La Caricature, a publication with a clear political intention. A ‘Walpurgisnacht,’ Paul Val;ry calls it, ‘a Pandemonium, a Satanic comedy, riotous to the point of debauchery. Now pure tomfoolery, now avid with the lust of blood.’ These words give us an insight into caricature’s spiritual paternity, its essence is a distortion of the human though it occasionally does more, it sometimes invests human nature with the attributes of Hell, for it is in the nature of Hell to create images, by which our human nature is insulted and belied. This distortion may be of the most varied kind. Man, for instance, can be distorted into a mask, and it is significant that Daumier’s work as a caricaturist should begin with that....

“In the main, however, there are two methods which this process of distortion employs — ...one negative, the other positive. The negative method takes from man his dignity and his form, it shows him as ugly, misshapen, wretched and ridiculous. Man, the crown of creation, is debased and dethroned — but for all that he” still “retains his humanity.”

But “The positive method of distortion makes a wholly different and subhuman creature out of man. In doing so it pulls out the same stops that have always been used by the portrayers of Hell in Western art. Man’s features become a grimace, he is turned into a monstrosity, a freak, an animal, a beast, a skeleton, an apparition, an idol, a doll, a sack or an automaton. He appears ugly, a thing to excite misgiving, an unformed creature, a object grotesque and obscene. His actions assume the character of the nonsensical, the absurd, the insincere, the comic, the brutal and the demonic.”

“The primary impulse behind [it]” this “is doubt or despair concerning man as such, a denial of the goodness or beauty of human nature. The conventional form of caricature is merely a pretext under which this view of man can be freely unfolded.

“In Daumier’s case, [of course] — and this distinguishes him from the much more savage and cynical caricatures of the beginning of the twentieth century — his lack of confidence in man is outweighed by a recognition of his greatness. Daumier saw the grandeur of man as did scarcely any other artist of the nineteenth century. Grandeur and absurdity are merged in him and so beget the tragi-comic.

“When the beginning of the twentieth century was reached, however, that saving balance was to disappear. There was to be a new and supreme flowering of the merciless type of caricature, and one which at heart wholly despaired of man, but now the distorted picture of man that had begun with ineluctable power to take possession of the artist’s mind, was to show itself without disguise in the human types produced by the art of the day, types which strike simple folk as the most terrible of caricatures and which indeed do proceed from the same dark caverns of the soul as does the caricature itself.”

And before this, in the eighteenth century, there is still an ordinary normal idea of man — you paint portraits, that is, somebody pays you, the nobility pay you, you paint their portraits, there’s a function for it, even though it’s not religious, it’s not particularly profound. It’s still art, has a definite place, a function, and you can recognize the human being; and it’s often very well done. There’s a sense of the three dimensions. This kind of art is perfect in its own way. And now all this is dissolving into by these, the torso, the demonic enters in, the caricature, or else icy coldness. All these are destroying the very idea of painting as some kind of thing related to human beings.

Now he discusses briefly the art of C;zanne and modern painting. “The art of C;zanne[, then,] is a borderline affair. It is a kind of narrow ridge between impressionism and expressionism and in its unnatural stillness prepares for the eruption of the extra human. [Emphasis in original]

“What this leads to is that man — again contrary to all natural experience — is put on one level with all other things. Soon after C;zanne, Seurat was to represent man as though he were a wooden doll, a lay figure, or automaton, and still later, with Matisse, the human form was to have no more significance than a pattern on wallpaper, while with the Cubists man was to be degraded to the level of an engineering model.”

[The painting] of C;zanne was “pure painting” — that is, first the impressionists came and they sort of dissolved things into what is for the moment — no longer any idea of the way things should be or a deeper idea behind it — just the way things appear. If horses are galloping, [it is] with, you can see, all twenty different feet instead of just four feet. And they want to present, just to capture the moment. They are influenced by photography, of this whole idea of reducing art just to this moment. And they were very charming things, some of them. But you can already see that reality is dissolving in them. And C;zanne said that he wanted to take impressionism and make it a classical art. And therefore he took it and sort of froze it, and in fact this man even says that his art is the kind of thing you see when you’re just barely opening your eyes and you’re half asleep. And this is not art, this is but a momentary thing which is very dangerous (from the person?) to classical art. And here you can see his landscape which is, it is no longer sort of a landscape, you can still see it’s landscape, but now it’s very sort of strange, it’s sort of made geometrical, he said his idea was to make it into something geometrical.

The Cubists simply tried to take reality and to chop it up into pieces and take the separate pieces. Instead of having a face, a whole face, you take your face and take the eye here and the cheek and the mouth and so forth and sort of glue it back together. And it looks extremely weird, as though you’re taking reality apart and then just partly putting it back together again.

The art is divided up actually into two categories: one is the very rationalistic art, which takes piece, things apart and barely puts them together, and the other is very expressionistic: someone gets an idea and distorts like crazy in order to get across his idea. And it eventually ends up that he just stands in front of the canvas like this Jackson Pollock, in front of a twenty foot canvas. He gets inspired, throws paint, and he gets $10,000 for it. And sometimes it’s very, you can, you look, there’s a definite pattern. He has some kind of inspiration, because the world has order in it. And a person has sort of, really is interested in art, maybe he can give some kind of pattern to it.

I know one religious painter, in fact I think he’s a famous painter now. Went to college with him, Sombach (?). He said he wanted to paint religious things and how, in order to paint, he looked at the crucifix, he got the idea and then (makes smashing sound) threw things on to it. Comes out some kind of ghastly distortion of Christ on the Cross.

“It is at this point that the behaviour of these allegedly ‘pure’ painters borders on the pathological. They begin to suffer from that diseased condition whose essence is the mind’s inability to project itself into the minds of others or into the world outside. When that condition obtains, everything seems dead and alien, men can then only see the outside of things, they are no longer conscious of human life in others.

“It is also at this point that the whole world begins to become unstable, for when things are mere phenomena that have no meaning inherent in them, then they begin to be experienced as things without stability, things fleeting, wavering, bodiless and indetermined. They are solid things no longer [(Usnadze)]. This may explain why those who wish to see a world in flux are automatically driven towards absolute painting, the painting that is innocent of any meaning whatsoever.”

“The kind of painting that began about 1900 and dominated the twenties is not only contemporary with ‘modern’ technicized architecture, it is not only preceded, like the latter, by a kind of prelude around 1800, it has a deep connection with it and all over Europe and beyond was favoured and propagated by exactly the same groups, by those namely that were the carriers of the ‘spirit of 1789.’ The two things go together, despite the fact that the new architecture is so cold and objective and the new painting is so wild and irrational. One reflects the other, despite the fact that painting and building have been wholly separated from each other.

“For a painting no longer helps to give form and character to a particular space, as the decorative fresco of art nouveau still attempted to do, the picture has become something belonging wholly to itself; it is no longer even a stationery patch on the wall. Rather is its character that of a book, which we open and put away again. Le Corbusier, the theorist of the new doctrines,” the architect, “declared that all pictures should be kept in cupboards and that they should only be hung on the walls for a few hours, as the spirit happened to move us. He found the stable picture intolerable.

“This kind of painting was for long a subject of acute controversy — which makes a cool appraisal extremely difficult. Yet the verdict of its most adverse critics is not so damaging as a purely historical interpretation, for this last brings the questionable character of these efforts to light by the simple process of describing them.

“The inner relationship between this kind of painting and the ‘modern’ building of yesterday is shown first and foremost in their common desire to dissolve the old orders. As there are now buildings in which top and bottom are no longer clearly distinguishable, so there are pictures in which top and bottom can be confused with one another. That is of course a purely external symptom, though it is an extremely eloquent one; it is moreover, something quite unprecedented in the history of painting, unprecedented even in its most daring aberrations and it is an indication of the extra-human, inhuman character of this form of art. In saying this we have really come into possession of the key to the understanding of modernist art in all its phases, for these only really differ in the means employed.

“All the new ways of looking at the world which this modernist art brings in its train are fundamentally extra-human even in an outward and superficial sense. The photography even of the twenties, for instance, is marked by a tendency to avoid the ‘normal’ view of human personality, and falls back on a few mechanical formulae. It favours pictures taken from above or below and from unusual angles, lighting effects that break up the subject, and distortions as in a distorting mirror.”

Of course, in the film you see the same thing. All kinds of experiments to see how you can break up the picture or show different pictures next to each other to make some kind of striking effect.

“In doing this it merely goes along with the essentially extra-human trend in painting which gives clear expression to its spiritual attitude. Every art of course in greater or less degree takes the world that it finds and departs after its own fashion from our normal experience [thereof]” of this “in order [thus] to create it anew, but modernistic art is driven by an ungovernable urge to pass beyond the limits of the ‘merely human.’

“This explains how the normal themes of pictures of the mid-nineteenth century take on a kind of [in extremis]” extreme “aspect in which man appears to surrender his essential humanity and begins to see things as a man sees them in delirium or in a nightmare, under the influence of drugs, or under that of incipient madness or extreme terror, and these ‘states on the edge of madness’ produce visions of the most astonishing kind. The visible world, the world of actual forms in portraiture, landscape, still-life and every other kind of painting, even in what is still alleged to be religious art, becomes alien, distorted and horrible. The nature of its ordering becomes unstable and resolves itself into fragments; form disintegrates, becomes fluid and chaotic. In some cases, man and his world are transformed by the rigidity of death; familiar things become strange and living nature becomes nature morte.” — still life.

“It has been said [of]” that “Greek art [that it] was harnessed between two mighty powers which were perpetually at its side and with which it ever had to strive throughout the whole of its existence in order to assert itself at all. These two powers were chaos and death. The new painting, in its maniac desire to shake off the fetters of the merely human, has admitted these powers into art — and with them a third, which the Greeks did not know, and which it was left to the Middle Ages to bring into our lives. That power is Hell. All this, chaos, death and Hell, are antitypes of humanity. The representation of a world which these three powers have distorted is the essential matter [in]” of “the new painting.

“The proximity of art to death and its kinship to the atmosphere of death, the atmosphere that makes all things cold and rigid, is something not without precedent in the history of art, something that is only superficially formulated by the terms ‘Romantic’ and ‘Romantic Movement.’ When this phase occurs an exalted nocturnal view of life, of nature and antiquity breaks out of the depths of man’s being — but through it all man’s dignity has been preserved. The proximity of death in the German romantic movement as it is experienced in [Gilly, in] Beethoven, [Kleist,] Holderlin, Novalis, Runge and Friedrich, is tragic, but it is” still “human. In his surrender in art to the now unapproachable sum of things man asserts his law against chaos which for him is a reality that he knows only too well.

“In the modern phase, however, there is combined with the consciousness of death (which in a thousand forms lurks behind all living things, makes its awful presence known in a faded flower, in an empty room — [yes,] even in a still life) there comes now a torturing doubt as to the dignity and the very nature of man. That doubt may resolve itself into an agonized acceptance of negation or turn to a positive and cynical distortion of his being. Here the proximity of death is no longer tragic, it is something infernal, it is an affirmation of chaos, and it is all the more terrible because there is no province of life that is entirely immune to this eruption of the nether world.

“Once Hell was a clearly circumscribed domain that stood in contrast to a universe that had meaning and reason. But by an almost similar aberration as that which, in the nineteenth century, caused men to see the gleam of Heaven in the ‘natural light’ which shown down upon all things, so that even a load of hay was transfigured by it,... there now erupt into reality the most terrifying visions from the antechambers of Hell and from all the circles thereof. The coming of these visions was a thing unknown to those who conjured it, but they come for all that, nothing is immune to their influence. Whatever belongs to horror and to night, to disease, death and decay, whatever is crass, obscene, and perverse, whatever is mechanical and a denial of the spirit — all these modes, motifs and aspects of the inhuman take hold of man and of his familiar world. They make of man a ruin, an automaton, a mask, a phantom. He sinks to the level of a louse, an insect. In the various movements of modern painting it is always one or the other of these various anti-human attributes that is underlined. Cubism lays the emphasis on deadness, Expressionism on boiling chaos, Surrealism on the cold demonism of the last icy regions of Hell. Even if the actual works had been lost, the very titles chosen for the pictures by the men who painted them would be sufficient to betray their spiritual home — ‘Fear,’ ‘Sick City,’ ‘Dying City,’ ‘Moribundus,’ [‘Mon Portrait Squelettise,’]” “My portrait as a Skeleton,” “‘Plague Above, Plague Below, Plague Everywhere,’ ‘The Joke has conquered Suffering,’ ‘The Dunghill,’ ‘Back Into Nothing.’

“The interpretation here adopted may at first sight seem fantastic. Yet, if we look at the matter objectively, we will find that it does just what a theory ought to do, it explains a multiplicity of data which we have till now had to try and understand one at a time, it allows us to recognize all the various ‘isms,’ from Futurism to Surrealism — they are all in one way or another a flight from the higher reality — as expressions (which only differ from one another on the surface) of the same basic powers, for although human nature in all its manifestations is always essentially one, its denials are many. Such a theory, in a word, allows us to see through all the differences, including the minutiae” details “of technique....”

“...There is, to speak in purely aesthetic terms, a genuine art of the horrible and the infernal, nor is this most dangerous artistic potentiality by any means to be denied. It has lurked behind Nordic art from its very beginnings, for it was Nordic art that produced the image of Christ disfigured in death, a thing unknown to the art of Eastern Christianity, as it also produced the picture of Hell. Bosch, Bruegel and Gr;newald raised this art of the horrible to the same level that it attained in its most transfigured and exalted forms, while Goya widened its scope without for a moment deserting the province of true art at all — and indeed we find on the threshold of this new art of inward death and Hell a number of artists whose genuine artistic power cannot possibly be denied; Ensor, Munch, Kubin, Schiele are examples.”

“Van Gogh, Munch,” and this Munch we saw this “Cry,” “Seurat,” the pointillist, “all born about 1860, are the first painters in which this new thing is apparent, though they have not yet completely surrendered to it. It is only in Ensor,” this one, [Fr. S. shows illus., p. 141] “also born in 1860, that it becomes all-pervading. For those born after 1860 it becomes their destiny. Long before the First World War it revealed the nightmare that was riding Europe in its great cities. After the war a definite artistic decline set in, and it is now that the symptoms of extreme degeneration come into evidence. With the ‘new objectivity’ the most dead and banal form is attained. Regarded politically this newest and latest art is the ally of anarchy, psychologically it is the expression of an enormous fear and of a hatred of the human race which men turned against their own persons. The most profound explanation of the artistic abortions which now came into the world phenomena had already been given by Goya, who wrote under the title page of his collection of paintings called [Suenos, ‘El sueno de la razon produce monstruos’—]” “Dreams,” “‘When reason dreams, monsters are born.”

And we see this is when reason comes to the end of the Enlightenment, there erupt into human life, irrational forces which come from the demons. ...Actually it says, “El sueno de la razon produce monstruos.”: the dream of reason produces monsters.

And finally he talks about Surrealism. “The leading theme of Surrealism is chaos absolute, the movement seizes upon it wherever it can be found — in the dark regions of the world of dreams, in hallucination, in the ‘deranged’ and irrational character of ordinary life, in that department of reality in which things that have no intrinsic connection with one another have been brought together in a fortuitous, senseless and fragmentary manner, be it in the confusion of a great city or in that of total war or in that of a junk-shop — the junk-shop’s ‘treasures’ seem to fill the Surrealists with quite peculiar enthusiasm. Their subject-matter may be loosely defined as the ‘chaos of total decay,’ not the chaos of creative potentialities, but that of finality, not the chaos of things coming to birth, but that of things finished and done with, not the chaos of fruitful nature, but that of the unnatural — a chaos ‘from which’”, as Goethe says, “‘the very spirit of God Himself could hardly create a worthy world’ [(Goethe)].”

“There is no gainsaying the [movement’s] power.” of this movement of Surrealism. “Of all the trends of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, apart from the new building, only two [contrived]” managed “to survive the Second World War — positive realism in painting and this same Sous-realism. There are already Surrealist cells in many countries — and not in European countries alone. Compared with it, Expressionism represents an altogether negligible minority.

“No purpose is served by belittling such a phenomenon, nor should one comfort oneself with the pretense that such things are mere extravagances, follies or forms of some strange spiritual gain. Even as early as 1860, Dostoyevsky prophetically recognized in his People of the Abyss that such types as those which Surrealism has brought to full flower had inevitably to come into being — ‘given the circumstances in which our society has developed’ — and in the last resort Surrealism only represents the final acceleration in the downward rush of man and art, that downward rush of which Nietzsche was already aware when in 1881 he wrote [the fragment Der tolle Mensche]:

“‘Are we not continually falling? — backwards, sideways and in all directions? Do top and bottom still remain? Are we not wandering through infinite nothingness? Is not the breath of empty space in our faces? Has it not grown colder?’” [Emphasis in original]

We see here inner connection between philosophy, politics and art....

He makes some conclusions: “...Our diagnosis” of modern art is “further confirmed by the undeniable fact that modern art finds no difficulty in portrayal of the demoniac and of man himself turned [demoniac,]” into a demon, “but” it “finds insuperable difficulty in showing us man as a human being, and” it “fails utterly when it comes to the God-man and the saint.”

Modern art, “The attraction that is exercised on the artist by the extra-human and the extra-natural by darkness, unreality and the subconscious, by chaos and nothingness has about it all the qualities of an enchantment....” Paul Klee says, “‘Our beating heart drives ever deeper towards the ultimate ground of things.’”

“...The disturbance” of modern art “extends to man in all his different aspects and relationships. There is the disturbance of man’s relation to God. In the sphere of art, this is made more palpable than anywhere else by the nature of the task that now absorbs creative energy — an energy which previously had been absorbed by the temple, the church, and the sacred image. Man’s new gods are Nature, Art, the Machine, the Universe, Chaos and Nothingness.”

Now he talks in general about this whole movement from the time of Enlightenment to now.

“In the pantheism and deism of the eighteenth century a gulf was opened up between man and God. At first the idea of God seemed much [purer]” more pure “than that of a personal God. Our notion of God became divested of what seemed to be an anthropomorphic element, even as that element was expelled from architecture. What happened, however, was that this God of the philosophers evaporated into nature and vanished. While this was happening, something was also changing in the idea of man, which was divested of its theomorphic element even as God had been divested of the anthropomorphic. The result was very different from what had been intended, for man by this process was reduced to the level of an automaton — when he was not reduced to that” level “of a demon.”

“...the loss of God as a reality destroys the original sense of reality as a whole.

“Having lost that sense, man turns into an anti-realist, into an idealist, a being living among phantasms....” which opens up the possibility of the devils to come.

Fr. H: Imagination.

Fr. S: “...In the radical form of Deism the divorce between God and man arises from the fact that God is relegated into the far distance, so that God and the world begin to be regarded as distinct and wholly separated things. God is the ‘absent God’ who created the great clock which is the world and duly wound it up. That clock now continues to run according to its own inner laws, which means that the world unfolds itself automatically. This excludes the possibility of any personal relation to God. All mystery is eliminated — indeed, the chief work of one of the protagonists of Deism, Toland, is called Christianity not Mysterious.” as we already saw. “...Everywhere spiritual relations now grow cold. Their place is taken by the frigid relations of reason; doubt plays an ever more decisive part, and everything that feels the touch of his coldness is transformed: The world becomes a world machine — man [an ‘homme-machine’],” a man machine. As this, who was it, Avichy(?), I think, wrote the book at the time of Voltaire, “And the state becomes a state machine. LeDoux,” remember the architect who made the round, the spherical buildings, he wanted to make, “who was doubtless an adept in this peculiar type of religious sentiment, asks, as he contemplates the earth: [‘Cette machine ronde, n’est elle pas sublime?’]” “This round machine, is it not sublime?”

“Man now becomes as isolated towards his fellows as he is towards God, and as isolated towards nature. He is, as LeDoux himself says, ‘isolated everywhere.’ We must thus infer that Deism stands at the origin of those varied phenomena which are characterized” above “as a ‘tendency towards the inorganic.’ Its effect is everywhere deadening and it makes men strangers to God and to each other.” So actually this art does have a religious background; it has a background first of Deism.

Next we have pantheism. And he discusses this in the poet Holderlin at this very time at the turn of the nineteenth century. “The individual figures, part human, part divine,” in whom Holderlin worships “‘the divine,’ —” namely “Christ, Heracles and Dionysius —resolve themselves into a nebulous something, that is, so to speak, pre-divine or super-divine.

“This becomes all the clearer with the course of time when Holderlin addresses his ‘Holiest,’ nature. He prays to something that seems to him older and more holy than the figures of the personal Gods. ‘The great holy thing’ which Holderlin recognizes in nature is nothing that is close or familiar to man; he cannot, as it were, ‘feel his way into it,’ he cannot discover himself in it, nor, as the past age was able to do, can he look on nature as a kinswoman and a friend.

“The ‘great holy thing’ is none of these things, rather it is something that wholly lacks a human character, or even an organic character, a thing that has neither personality nor destiny. It is something that is the very opposite to the nature of man, it is the universal thing, a thing that cannot actually be felt and is infinite. Holderlin likes best to designate it as ‘stille’ (‘quietness’ or ‘silence’), thus contrasting it with the busy activities of men. In order to approach it, man must first destroy himself, he must go to his death.”

And finally he gives a sort of summation of all these destructive, dark influences as they have been in the history of Western art. And although he himself was a lover of art before the Revolution, that is, up to the eighteenth century, in this little history of his, he shows very well that these destructive influences go right back precisely to the moment where we discussed the beginning of the apostasy, that is, the twelfth century.

The first outburst of this demonic elements, he says, occurs in the late Romanesque. “It is in this phase that the sacred world is suddenly endowed to a quite terrifying degree with a demoniac character. Thus in the doorways” of various cathedrals, “the sacred figures have the appearances of corpses and of ghosts, a thing that can in no wise be explained by a certain remoteness from humanity that marks the art of the high Middle Ages. Christ sometimes resembles an Asiatic idol or an Asiatic despot. The Apocalyptic beasts and the angels are all distorted by this demoniac quality. This curious phenomenon cannot be explained in terms of the dual intention that is discernable in much medieval art, the intention to administer a certain awful shock to the beholder and at the same time, by means of the sheer absurdity of the visible symbols [it created], to spur his mind towards purely spiritual contemplation; for directly beside the sacred figures, and in the very midst of them, and indeed scarcely distinguishable from them at all, are images of demons and of demoniac beasts and chimaeras that even invade the interior of the church.

“At the same time the figures themselves begin to acquire a most remarkable and unprecedented quality of instability. Those on the great arch above the door” of the Cathedral “at Vezelay seem positively to be tottering, and look as though they might crash down at any moment from the great curve on which they have so precarious a footing. This is the period when figures begin to be tangentially affixed to the frames of the great doors, and it is to this period that belongs the great Wheel of Fortune that lifts a man up and [ineluctably] casts him down, and it is this period also that for the very first time stands architectural forms upon their heads.

“All this is the visible expression of [that volubilitas rerum,] that instability of human affairs, that people have suddenly begun to feel with a peculiar and painful intensity. It is in fact the visible symbol for the dominant mood, the dominant feeling about life and the world.

“In religion the dominant emotion is fear, the principal theme is the Day of Judgment, expressed to the uttermost potential of all the terror that it can inspire. In the crypt-like gloom of the church we can with our mind’s eye see the faithful standing ‘in fear and trembling before God.’ Never has the [mysterium tremendum]” tremendous mystery “attained such force over men’s minds.”

So, already for some reason art begins to become unstable. Although the main Gothic tradition goes on with its great cathedrals, still he senses here some kind of instability. Why? Because they, at that time they began to realize that they had lost Orthodoxy. And the artist is more sensitive than other people. This begins to come out in him. And when Orthodoxy is lost, the demons begin to come in. And therefore the demons directly inspire the artists.

Then there’s a second period, which is that of Hieronymus Bosch. “In the Romanesque” period “the demoniac world had really not yet achieved a separate life of its own. It is only in the Gothic that light and darkness are divided and the cathedral indirectly brings into being as” its “polar opposite to the Heavenly Kingdom, which is shown forth in itself, a Kingdom of Hell,” even “though this [last] remains [essentially]” still “a subordinate thing. [Then]” Thus “as the representational art of the late Middle Ages develops, we begin to get painted representations of Hell. The culminating point of this development is to be found in Hieronymus Bosch who flourished [between 1480 and 1516.]” around 1500.

“Bosch, a contemporary [and actual co-eval] of Leonardo da Vinci, created the world of Hell as a kind of chaotic counterpart to the new cosmic art of the High Renaissance,” which we already saw, this idealistic, chiliastic painting, “and what is entirely new about Bosch’s infernal world is that it has its own creative principles, its own chaotic ‘structure,’ its own formal laws, and it is really these that make it into a true counterworld to the worlds of Heaven and earth. It is only since Bosch that we have anything like a picture of Hell made visible.

“There is definite novelty in the very shapes of these creatures from Hell. They are not ‘fallen children of men, who by a simple process of metamorphosis have been turned into beasts of the Devil,’ but” they are “wholly independent and as yet unknown forms of life, born of the marriage of every conceivable kind of creature, fish, beast, bird, witch and mandrake, the products of a kind of ungoverned cosmic lewdness and debauchery, in which even lifeless things can mingle with the living. All this was something that lay wholly outside the horizons of antiquity.

“New also is the actual scenery of Hell, and we see aspects of the face of this earth which had never before been put on canvas. We see here dark gulfs, empty stretches of earth and sea that seem to tell us how utterly God has forsaken them, the desolation of empty cities, strange hideous places whose vegetation are gallows-trees and wheels of torture, slime and morass. Here are neither sun nor moon, such light as there is comes from vast conflagrations or from the iridescence of strange phosphorescent shapes. Hell can show us the work of human hands, but it is distorted, arid in decay. Above all we see ruins, we see them continually — and in Hell there are also arsenals, a fighting equipment of strange machines, pieces of apparatus that are often meaningless, though sometimes they have a meaning, being instruments of torture, while through the air sail airships, demon manned and demon piloted.”

“So long, however, as the world of Christian belief remained an effective reality” — and at this time it was still real, that is, Catholicism was still real, and even Protestantism had something left of Christianity — “So long...as the world of Christian belief remained an effective reality, the outlook behind such painting must be interpreted as a vision of temptation. The picturing of Hell therefore remained to some extent hemmed in by Christian orthodoxy [stet] and it was thus only to be expected that it should attain its full freedom and develop its most extreme forms when art has finally left the Christian world behind it. It is, therefore, wholly logical that Hieronymus Bosch should have been rediscovered in the twentieth century and should have become one of the original parents of Surrealism.”

“In Bruegel” — and we showed you — “In Bruegel’s work there appears another dominant theme of modern art, the depreciation of man. Man is looked at from the outside; as something distasteful and strange, much as we might regard creatures of another planet. Seen thus men appear base, unlovely and perverse, clumsy, inane and absurd — creatures in fact possessing every quality capable of exciting contempt, and this is true not only of the peasant, of whom the late Middle Ages tended rather to take this view, but of man in general. In the art of Bruegel several undercurrents of medieval art unite to form a new picture of man, one which represents him as the very antithesis and negation of holiness, greatness, nobility and wisdom.

“The world of man, the world in which he must act and live, is a world in which all is done wrong, a world of chaos and wholly without meaning. Lurking about him everywhere are the creatures of Hell. Death and madness lie in wait all around him. It is moreover a matter worthy of especial note that Bruegel pays such particular attention to the things which are the special preoccupation of modern psychology and the modern mind in general, for his interest is drawn in a remarkable manner, not towards the peasant alone (the analogy here is with our contemporary concern with the primitive), but” also “to children, halfwits, cripples, epileptics, to the victims of blindness and intoxication, to the mass and to apes. Even quite ordinary things have a spell cast over them that make them look strange to the point of being unintelligible — much as Bruegel’s Beekeepers look like walking tree-trunks — so that a game played by children looks like some weird new manifestation of lunacy.”

“This brief glance at the past makes it clear that what was to become a general disease in the nineteenth century was coming gradually into being right throughout the development of the West and at various times overtly showed certain of its symptoms.”

And he concludes his book by saying, “It may be a somewhat questionable proceeding to designate one’s own age as the turning-point in the history of [the world]” mankind, “nevertheless it is difficult to shake off the feeling that since 1900 a kind of limit has been reached and that we are faced by something wholly without precedent” in the world’s history. “Beyond this limit it is difficult to imagine anything except one of two things — total catastrophe or the beginnings of regeneration.” Of course, what’s coming seems to be a kind of combination of the two.

Music

About music, we won’t go in; it’s too long a topic, but it’s enough to mention one great historian of Western music, Alfred Frankenstein, who died a few, some years ago. And he’s an expert in the Baroque period, the classical period, the Romantic period, the Medieval music. He’s written I believe a long textbook of Western music. And when he comes to the twentieth century he says, “With this I end my history of music.” Because after the beginning of the twentieth century there’s no longer music in the West. There is something which is entirely on new principles, which cannot be understood by the history of Western music. And therefore he’s very much criticized for the fact that he feels modern music is totally outside any kind of tradition. Of course it is. Because we have at this time mus, the Romantics who already said as much as they could say. You get in Scriabin a terrible kind of ecstatic music which is some kind of screeching, and beyond that...

Fr. H: What did he write...?

Fr. S: He wrote a sort of Black Mass actually.

Fr. S: Musical Black Mass?

Fr. S: And beyond this you can’t go in the regular, the old idioms of European music. And so they begin these frightful experiments: the twelve tone system, Schoenberg and his frightful operas, he wrote Verklarte Nacht when the people are screeching at each other for hours on end; and it’s obviously meant to put you in a crazy house. But it’s very sort of expresses the period, expressionistic, you know, these German Expressionists with their screaming people and frightful horrors — expresses the same kind of feelings. And from that time on, there’s all these experiments until you get now that there’s concertos for tape, three tape recorders, played simultaneously forwards and backwards at five different speeds, and all these ideas that hurly-churly chant sounds will produce some kind of new wonder.

There’s even a textbook of music. It’s called, I think it’s called Music Since Debussy in which he says that the age right now produces no music which is worth anything because it’s all experiment. But he said, “Out of all this experiment, perhaps there will come a new Golden Age, like the age of Bach and Handel” — once all these experiments have been finished. And probably — it’s something to say, something true there because mankind has gotten used to all these things; and therefore it’s possible to reconstruct, if a person is a genius, to take all these elements of disorder and come up with some kind of a new harmony. And there’s already a new harmony which will express the feelings of the people, and will be for Antichrist. And in fact, Thomas Mann has already written a novel about that.

Thomas Mann

Well, we’ll say one word about Thomas Mann. He’s probably the only great novelist the twentieth century produced. M-A-N-N. He died in 1955 at the age of 80. He was an exile from Germany during the reign of Hitler. Politically he’s very boring — he’s a democrat — and looks for the reconstruction of humanity after totalitarianism has passed. But in his art he’s very sensitive, more like a German, he goes very deep. [Editing in sections from Nietzsche 1980 Lecture] You may recall in one of his books, he talks about young students talking together all night long, they’re talking [about] what is reality, what is truth, is there life after death? And in the middle of it they say, “You know, I bet we Germans are the only people in the world except for the Russians who do this kind of thing, just talking all night about what’s real, and what isn’t real. He recognizes Russians are the ones who expert....

And he wrote several novels which reflect this — from the point of view of, well, an artist looking at the whole of society — reflect what is going on. He’s not a nihilist; he’s a humanist who has a very positive outlook on life. But he writes about some of these movements, and sometimes very, very profoundly.

He wrote a book called The Magic Mountain, [one] of his best books, which is a description of life in a tuberculosis asylum, clinic in the mountains of Switzerland. And this is supposed to be an allegory of modern European history at the end of the first World War — either the end or beginning — anyway, just in the dawn of our own day. And this is a peculiar kind of place where everybody has all kinds of strange philosophies, which means all the different conflicting philosophies of Europe. And everybody who comes there gets sick, because Europe is sick. It’s sort of a parable of everybody who comes in contact with Western civilization absorbs this sickness. You can’t escape it. And the place where they’re supposed to be curing, that is, Europe, has the ability, the idea that “We are the ones who know everything. We’re going to cure you with our Enlightenment.” But you go there; you get in mixed up with Europe, and you get sick yourself. No matter how you try, you don’t get cured. Nobody goes back alive. They’re sort of all killed off by this thing. In fact you cannot go to this, you cannot visit your relatives in this place without getting sick and you have to stay there. [You’re] stuck. In other words, they [have] no other philosophy of life to overcome this sickness of Europe.

In fact there’s one very interesting scene where they go to the movies. There’s a movie. And Thomas Mann gives his perceptions about the film, that the film is a very abnormal thing, a horrible thing because what is sacred to man, his own image, is captured, put independently on a screen and then acts in spite of you and you’re hopeless, you’re helpless. And the image goes on acting from then on. It’s as though a part of your soul has been taken away from you. And he can sit back and watch himself as though he’s just kind of a separate being. He’s gives his sort of feelings from natural human sense, because he was there at the beginning of motion pictures, 1920’s. In Germany was the great flowering of movies. He had a frightful feeling about movie, that it’s something demonic. And he says the whole thing is very abnormal, makes him feel very uneasy to see these ghost-like figures on the screen, which have no reality in themselves, only celluloid, some kind of a flickering picture, something that isn’t there.

And by the way I had a German professor who the same feeling about telephones. He said, “I can’t stand telephones. Whenever I hear it ring and I pick it up, I get terribly afraid. I hear a voice of somebody a thousand miles away and I feel it’s demons.” It’s very interesting how these deep thinkers have feelings like that.

And he [Thomas Mann] then goes into things like seances; [he] deliberately went to a seance to experiment to see if anything happens. And it did. The table moved away from the air or something kind of thing. He was persuaded there’s some kind of power there. So he has that also as part of this Magic Mountain. At the end, he has this one very striking scene where someone says, “Let’s have a seance, we have somebody here who can conjure spirits.” And everybody says, “Oh, wonderful!” And most people are sort of joking about it, “Well, you can believe in all kinds of things, why don’t we believe in that? Let’s try it out.” And they all get together, and all of a sudden a spirit begins to grip them, and they see before their eyes some kind of a shape begin to form, to materialize. And when they look, it is the ghost of somebody they all know, a spectre, somebody’s father or something all of a sudden appears in front of them all; and they are so frightened by this, that it produces a terrible effect upon them. And this is sort of stuck in there with no sort of statement why, but we know that Thomas Mann in his non-fiction writings was very interested in spiritualism and went to seances and tested them out and took notes about them, and came away convinced that there is some power at work which is producing these various phenomena. And to a Europe which has no philosophy of its own, and is sick, this begins to become very attractive.

And one of his last novels is called Doctor Faustus, which is a description of a musical genius in the modern idiom, as described by an ordinary, young, middle-class student who went to school with this genius. Usually he tells his stories through the third person who’s a typical German middle-class person with average values, German values: cleanliness and precision and study, thrift and all these wonderful things the Germans are noted for. And he has such a way of presenting his novels when he talks about these — either spiritualism or anything which is very demonic or extraordinary — he has a way of describing it through the eyes of somebody who is completely normal, and completely matter-of-fact so that you’re all the more horrified by what comes out. And just like Dostoyevsky talked about Ivan Karamazov in his vision of the devil as though it’s a hallucination, but still he’s getting across a very important point. And so you have this completely normal man [whose] fellow student in college is a student in music. So he describes the career of this musician, this composer, as though he’s an ordinary man, very talented, but he seems to have some kind of strange things about him, as though he wants something, that he can’t be satisfied with ordinary things. He wants more. And he keeps wondering about this. And he notices after he gets out he wants to become a great composer. And he produces tremendous, has some kind of tremendous fits of energy and inspiration, and he comes up with some fantastic new things. He begins composing all kinds of weird things and making up new atonal systems, and fifteen notes instead of eight and all kinds of fantastic new things just because he’s driven by some kind of a thing. And finally he produces his masterpiece which is “The Apocalypse”, for I think a thousand voices, fifteen hundred instruments, the most fantastic work of music ever composed — and they actually perform it someplace with a thousand voices. It shows how the devil sort of gave him this tremendous talent to persuade audiences with this gift of his, on the condition that he sell his soul. And he [the narrator] wonders how he got the inspiration for that, and he manages somehow to observe him at work. And then he discovers that there’s someone who comes to pay him a visit, that he’s speaking to somebody who isn’t there. And during these moments of speaking to somebody who isn’t there, he gets tremendous inspirations; [there] begins to open up to him the possibility for going deeper into music and making some kind of musical composition that none has ever done before. He’ll be the greatest composer there ever was. It turns out that it’s the devil. He finally sells his soul to this devil in order to gain this ultimate thrill in composing music. And then he gives this to the people and the people say, “This is wonderful; this is the great pinnacle of modern music. Finally modern music has achieved its masterpiece.” And it’s obvious that the man sold his soul to the devil, like Doctor Faustus. He doesn’t say this in so many words, but what he describes is exactly the same thing: the man, for the sake of earthly creation, he has given away his soul. And the demons invade.

So that’s another writer who taught, although he’s not as profound as Dostoyevsky, but nevertheless he’s very aware of a lot of these currents of modern thought.

So we have seen in this book [Art in Crisis] how this whole phenomenon we’ve been studying — the revolutionary world-view of modern man, which means not just the political revolution, the whole new anti-Christian revolution — is something which bursts out not just in the political revolution, and not just in somebody’s philosophy, but bursts out quite independently in art and poetry and many other spheres. And it bursts out in art before the Revolution. That is, these schemes for the spheres we saw, and Goya’s things, well, Goya’s first demonic ones before the Revolution. So it is not simply being inspired by the political event; it is rather an example of the same force which produced that event is producing also the art. That is, there are inspirations which come undoubtedly from demons. And although we do not see exactly how the demons inspire, it’s obvious that this is the work of demons inspiring these artists. And these are not just some kind of crazy people, by the way. It would be very nice if we could say these are crazy people and not typical at all of ordinary people who we see in the supermarket, and therefore we can forget them.

That’s the same kind of psychology which tells you that, “Well, it’s all right for Russians or the Vietnamese. They want that kind of government; let them have it, and we’ll just go on.” In fact Solzhenitsyn said yesterday [July 1975], he was in Washington and spoke to a group of senators and congressmen, about a hundred of them, and at the end of this he said, “Here in the vast spaces of this continent, it is difficult to believe what is happening in the world. But, gentlemen, there is no longer to be any safe life. Neither we nor you will have a safe life. May it happen that God will grant you that when you come to your crisis, you will have such leaders as you had at the beginning of the Revolution, who still believed in human nature and did not mock the idea of good and evil.”

Unfortunately it so happens that this age of humanism which produced even America, the founding fathers, and the art of that century is something which is almost like a utopia now. We can’t go back to it. That was the age half-way between the old Orthodox age and the new age of chaos and revolution. And for a moment there was some kind of harmony and peace, but the process that had been started was already carrying mankind further. And it happens that this process is expressed most clearly in the great revolutionaries and the radical philosophers, and these wild artists.

And so actually we see in them how the demonic bursts into the world. But if that demonic did not already have control over all the people living in the world, these painters would be forgotten. They would not be known; they would not be held up as the examples of great painters. Their revolutions would die out; there would be nobody to follow them. The fact that the majority of people are of the same mentality, are prepared for that which these prophets of the new times, they see. That is why we have such a disordered age. And in fact we can say even the ordinary people who go to the supermarkets and are satisfied with themselves are more, they’re worse off than these other ones because the other ones are the ones who are tortured so often they are rebelling against this everyday supermarket mentality of people who are “Oh, everything’s all right. Things are going just fine. And the Gulag — it doesn’t touch me.” Those kind of people drive to fury these people who are really deep, they want something, they want God. And God has been cut off. And so they go to the devil. But the devil has the grip over the whole world. And that’s why they stand out.

Spiritualism

So that brings us to our next subject — Spiritualism and a few more aspects of the disjointed world of our times. This phenomenon of spiritualism [is] very symptomatic in modern times, in the last two centuries. This takes us to the middle of the nineteenth century, the very time when this art is bursting out with its demonic apparitions. And the year is 1848, which is exactly the year of the great revolutions in Europe. As it were, this same demonic power bursts out in one form in the revolutions, in another form all of a sudden begins to make [knocks three times] some kind of tappings, which opens up the possibility to communicate with another world.

These began in Hydesville, New York, near Rochester. And there were three sisters, Falk sisters, who were able to interpret these knockings. And later on they went through all kinds of, they were accused, accusations of fraud and deception; and one of the sisters confessed that she had done the knocking with her knuckles or something. Later she repented that she’d confessed. And one of them became a Catholic nun, and.... Anyway, it doesn’t make any difference what happened to them. The fact is that these knockings begin to break out, and then the mediums began to take over. And within a very short time, the mediums were going to England. England and America are the two basic centres of spiritualism. They began to form their own church, and to this day there are spiritualist temples all over America and England and a few outside.

This is another case where this practical everyday Anglo-Saxon mentality, the same mentality also which is behind the dreams of socialism, like Owen, has a very powerful affinity with this mystical side, with spiritualism. Not with true mysticism, not with any kind of true contact with God, but rather with something bound up with an externalization of some kind of mysticism. Because spiritualism is a contact with some other world which does not depend upon how much one has transformed oneself. It only depends upon how much you have educated your mediumistic faculties. Of course, it is required before you believe in spiritualism that you have totally disbelieved in Christianity, have come to believe a very vague kind of Christianity. You no longer know the difference between divine phenomena and demonic phenomena, and you are prepared to accept anything which proves the existence of something supernatural or preternatural as coming from the spirit — the same mentality as in back of the Pentecostal movement which develops later in the century.

There are many phenomena of this movement. There are tappings; there are sometimes voices. There are apparitions wherein a whole ghost supposedly can be manifested. There are partial manifestations such as a hand will suddenly appear. And Thomas Mann saw a hand being materialized. There are something called “automatic writing.” In fact I saw one. I once bought a book on spiritualism, and inside there was a little, a sheet of paper with the tiniest, tiniest handwriting. It was impossible for a human hand to write — tiny, tiny — several pages on one page, and it said and began — and very smooth — it said, “This message is not written by a human hand.” And it traces out the message.

And we know this is possible because Madame Blavatskaya, the founder of Theosophy, was herself an expert at things like materializing dishes. And they would give her — they would put a piece of paper and lock it inside of some kind of a dish, or some kind of a cabinet. And she would concentrate for ten minutes, and then open the cabinet, and there would be something written on the piece of paper which she had, her demons had come to her help and written it down. Sometimes they can even see a pen come out of nowhere and begin writing with no hand in back of it.

All these are the standard tricks of the devils because they are able to do things like materialize objects and strike people and lift tables. There’s a whole technique which is already in our article on the charismatic movement about how they do this. They get together and get some kind of psychic energy by holding hands. And this involves the sphere of the unconscious, the psyche of man which is a very deep sphere which we don’t know too much about. And there’s a great deal of energy there which can be channelled. And of course the main ingredient of these phenomena are the demons themselves who come to the aid of the medium. And a person who is well trained in mediumism, has a certain faculty for it, is able to conjure up demons under the state of being in a deep trance.

Of course, the reason why this is condemned by God is because this is a very dangerous sphere of spiritual realities which are too much for us. When these realities come to the saints, that is, the demons attack the saints, frightful battles go on. But now mankind has become civilized and the demons appear under very civilized guises. And they come up with a philosophy which is so stupid and so contradictory and so much in harmony with what Emerson or somebody else is saying. As soon as Communism comes into fashion, then the Theosophists start talking like Communists, and so forth — just picking up whatever is in the air. And the spirits give you exactly what any old preacher can give you in a spiritualist temple without any spirits, or in any Protestant church for that matter.

There’s one thing which the spiritualists lay great emphasis upon as a proof of the existence of the spirits. That is the scientifically demonstrable fact that whenever the spirits come, the temperature in the room drops several degrees. And they’ve conducted experiments with thermometers to show that, I don’t know, three or five degrees, something like that, the temperature drops in the room when the spirits come. Of course, for us that’s conclusive proof that these are devils because the devils are cold, and it comes out even physically. And experiencing a chill in the presence of some kind of demonic phenomenon is not just the imagination.

These new powers are those who are now to give mankind a new religion. And no longer is it to be a religion in which man freely gives his soul to God in obedience. Now man is going to be compelled to believe because there are outward proofs which show that there are spirits. Western philosophy had come to the point where no longer did we believe in God or any kind of otherworldly beings. And now as though from underneath the spiritual reality comes up. This makes it possible...[tape break]

3. Leads to “scientific” approach to religion — Steiner, Society for Ps. R., extra-sensory phenomena — especially parapsychology well developed in Russian and other Communist countries. Affinity of atheistic-socialism with occultism-spiritualism. Development of higher senses, higher science — science must end in spiritualism: Steiner 54.

...Saint-Simon and Teilhard de Chardin and others who dreamed about the reconciliation of science and religion. And from this time on there begin to be formed societies for the scientific study of spiritual phenomena. In England there was the Society for Psychical Research, where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a leading representative. And here the distinguished agnostics of Victorian England found their way back to spirituality. And they wrote books about it which are so naive and fantastic, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes, detective mentality, pure rationalism is attracted by spiritualism — same thing, the practical mind because the upper reality is closed off. As soon as some kind of spiritual reality enters the realm of phenomena, they fall for it. And they have no standard with which to judge any more. This

Fr. H: Is that the book?...

Fr. S: The “Christianity without mystery” has now giving way to actually non-Christianity with mystery.

In our own times we have the various societies for studying extra-sensory phenomena. “Parapsychology” it’s called, at the laboratory at Duke University, Virginia. And this science, incidentally, is extremely well developed in the Soviet Union and also other places like Hungary. Because the Soviets are very realistic and open to anything which can be powerful. And since they have found that there is something to extra-sensory perception, there are some kind of faculties in the human being which seem to be above our ordinary five senses, therefore they’re developing them to see if they can’t make this into some kind of a weapon for warfare or for making Communism more secure or just for advancing science. There was even an example — unfortunately I’ve lost the newspaper clipping — but at the Congress of the Communist party in 1955 or 6, there was a woman who got up in Moscow and gave her testimony of how Lenin had appeared to her, and told what was to be voted on at the next assembly, the next Communist Party meeting. And it was recorded and simply accepted.

In this period also we have another interesting example of someone, an English woman who is, has both the socialist and occultist mentality, Miss Annie Bessant, who was a woman’s rights crusader and socialist who was converted by Madame Blavatsky and became president of the Theosophical Society and ended up by educating the “messiah.” That is, the young Indian boy, Krishnamurti, whom by the time he was four years old she proclaimed was going to be the future messiah. Her name is Annie Besant, B-E-S-A-N-T. And he finally grew up and renounced the messiahship, and went around teaching himself. And to this day he teaches, he goes to north of Santa Barbara, there’s a camp, Ohai. In Holland there was a place, some kind of summer camp where he goes and gives lectures and he writes books, says he’s not the messiah, but he’s giving the gospel to the new age. I think he’s still alive. Krishnamurti’s his name.

This is the age also of the founding of the Theosophical Society by Madame Blavatskaya, the Russian medium, who claimed from the very day of her baptism she was the sworn enemy of kings and the church because when she was baptised the priest almost burned to death when a candle fell over and burned his robes up. From her very childhood she had manifested these psychic talents of manifesting objects and so forth.

Madame Blavatskaya wrote tremendous big volumes: Isis Unveiled. She taught the, [or] she thought she was teaching Eastern wisdom which she got from the masters in Tibet. And there are very tricky means by which she got revelations: a letter would suddenly be fluttering down into the room. She would read it and there was the latest revelation from the Mahatmas in India.

Fr. H: “Didn’t Christian Science come from the same thing?

Fr. S: And later on when India, when Tibet was already more explored, the Mahatmas moved into outer space. And now they’re on some planet.

Student: She used to be a circus performer...

Fr. S: She was definite, she was a medium; she was definitely a well-developed medium. But there were so many of these phenomena that we can’t discuss them.

There’s one of these people involved with these occult movements who is perhaps more interesting than the others. His name is Rudolf Steiner. He was also a Theosophist and finally kicked out of the Theosophical Society because he was a little too smart. And so he founded his own society called Anthroposophy, wisdom of man. This is his picture. He is rather smarter than most occultists who are usually extremely naive in that most theosophists and spiritualists usually are extremely shallow, simply open to whatever the spirits tell them. He was a man who was more a philosopher. He was a great student of Goethe, and found that Goethe was the great mystic of our times who was going to unite religion and science.

And he developed a kind of spiritualism which he thought was scientific; that is, he was looking at the whole of reality, both the outward reality which science examines and the inward reality which he got in visions. He tried to make some kind of synthesis between them. And his writings are still quite seriously studied by all kinds of serious people. He has founded some schools which are still in existence, which teach things like Eurhythmy which is how to move your body and dance in order to somehow acquire spirituality, which seems to give some kind of results. And he has an interesting thing to say about what he was striving for:

“The scientist contemplates matter as complete in itself without being aware that he is in the presence of spirit reality manifesting itself in material form. He does not know that spirit metamorphoses itself into matter in order to attain to ways of working which are possible only in this metamorphosis. For example, spirit expresses itself through a material brain in order that man may by that process of conceptual knowledge attain to free self-consciousness. By means of the brain, man derives spirit out of matter, but the instrument he uses is itself the creation of spirit.”

And in our days when science has come to a dead end and doesn’t see what matter is, finds that it cannot define matter by itself, he wants to come to the rescue and give them a science which is based upon something “higher,” that is, on spiritual reality, which, he says is verifiable in experience. In fact, the cry of all the Theosophists and spiritualists is “Try it yourself.” You can be convinced by your own experience, if you follow the rules for getting in contact with spirits.

Of course, which is against the freedom of Christianity which is the fact that you have faith in God and give up your, give yourself to God Who is above you out of free choice, and not because you’ve been, it’s been proved to you, because you are in contact with some kind of reality which forces itself upon you.

Of course all this spiritualistic phenomena results, just like modern art — with which it is, has much in common, in fact many of these artists have very occult ideas — result in the same kind of a disjointed, fragmentary world where beings all of a sudden pop out of some kind of space, a hand appears all of a sudden; you can materialize objects, you can materialize some kind of ghosts. And this is very much, it’s very strange to the normal enlightened, modern attitude of material reality.

[From 1980 Nietzsche lecture, could be dated Winter 1981-82:]

I didn’t mention here all these cults and so forth which came as a result of this idea of Kant, that the self, the mind is the centre of the universe. But there are a lot of them: from Mormonism, the idea that you can now trust your revelations that come to you. And the nineteenth century is full of people who trusted whatever kind of impressions came to them and made a new religion, like Mary Baker Eddy made the Christian Science, and Ellen Wise made the Seventh Day Adventists. William Miller also a Seventh Day Adventist and went out and started the Jehovah’s Witnesses — all of them based sort on the fact that they themselves are like a god who has a new revelation. And everybody follows them.

But here’s one that happened to be in a magazine here, and one of these cults which calls itself Hindu, actually it’s Hindu for an American scene. It’s the magazine of the Hari-Krishna Movement which is in full-colour, very impressive. It’s called Back to Godhead. ‘Course, we see here where the self-centred Western philosophy hooks up with Hinduism. This movement began in the nineteenth century. Because in Hinduism, you become god. See, you can meditate, chant, and you get into this state where God enters into you, and therefore you literally become a god; your Self becomes a god.

It fits very nicely, Hinduism is just right with the whole philosophy of evolution, with Nietzsche and all the rest. But it’s the combination of [Hinduism and these other philosophies]. You can see that when it’s in India, I don’t know, it’s just plain paganism; but when it’s on American soil, it fits in with our self-centred, pampered mentality. It’s very sensuous. Here you see these young people, miss America or American boys who shave their heads, put on these robes and look like representatives of the new religion. And they’re all happy and joyous and chanting. And here’s their god, who’s very inspiring, isn’t he? The great prophet. He died a year or two ago.

And then there’s all kinds of various articles and tapes, transcendental sounds. You listen to these sounds: Golden Avatar tape subscription. You get to listen to all kinds of sounds which bring your mind up into heavenly realms. You know, talk about all kinds of contemporary subjects like science. They invite you to have feasts, [a] full-course yoga meal and share chanting with them. There’s some kind of ancient text they translate, and news items. And then in the theatre they have Bhagavad-Gita in the form of a play; and all dressed up for hours, they make themselves up in these costumes, stand in front of the mirrors. And when they dance, it looks very sensuous and happy, and look like they’re a little bit sexually “off.” They sort of get a thrill out of this, shaving their heads and looking like a bunch of weirdos. And they lose themselves in meditating and chanting.

Remember in our Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future we described their temple in San Francisco, how they just stand there for hours, they’re beating the drums and beating the drums and beating the drums. And all around the walls there’s these pictures from the Bhagavad-Gita, this sensuous kind of costumes, silky kind of robes. You get into the real state in which you’re not present at all; it’s like being on drugs. Take a look at these costumes they have.

And then fantastic stories, because nowadays we like science fiction and space fantasies and so forth. So here’s a whole story about “The Boar Who Battled for Planet Earth,” and you get a whole fantasy story about a cosmic pig who wants to devour earth. That takes care of your fantasy needs. This is like Brahma, he’s greater than all the heavens. So this boar also is much bigger than the earth; he could swallow the earth up if he wanted to. That’s the ancient paganism which comes right back into our temporary life. But in the very kind of a self-centred and sensuous, and it’s obvious all this, incense and the chanting, the costumes, and you take off your Western clothes and put on these robes, and makes you feel very important, very part of the new, and it’s all self-centred. ...It’s adapted to American needs.

And this man here, this is the head, the one who is their guru or their avatar, he was just an ordinary businessman in India. He didn’t have any future there at all. He came to America and discovered that here he can make his living at kind of being like a god to all these people. But Americans now are reduced, because those who do not consciously wake up to what Christianity is, and begin to see that in the world there’s tremendous evil fighting for souls, could very easily fall into these traps. And therefore those who don’t fall for Hari-Krishna fall for some other kind of movement. And various kinds of even Protestant...

Fr. H: Sometimes they fall for Orthodoxy with all the icons, and the incense

Fr. S: Also.

Fr. H: and the canons and all that business. You give them the whole thing, rich (?) no exception.

Fr. S: Therefore, there has to be a criticism, there has to be a awareness of what is what. What is our religion based on? So there’s two big things fighting. One is true Christianity, Orthodoxy, and the other is this new philosophy which most people are not aware of. Most people who go for the contemporary beat, rock’n’roll or various kinds of modern culture, art, music and religion — they aren’t particularly aware that they’re part of this movement. They just go over to it because that’s what’s in the air. People around them are doing it; they feel a need for it, and they follow without being conscious of it. But we who are studying this have to be conscious of what’s going on.

Any questions on all this so far? Is it clear what they, the combination of ideas [is producing]? Hume destroys external reality. Kant restores the Self as the centre of reality, mind or the Self as the centre of reality, and then this becomes the new god. This is the new god; the old God is dead.

Fr. H: But for those who are not Orthodox, those who not keeping, not protecting Orthodoxy.

Fr. S: Those who just go along with the times, whatever’s in the air.

Fr. H: Right.

Student: Do you think Kant (knocked over? knew?) this philosophy... progressed the way it has (?)

Fr. S: Well probably, probably just, yeah, because he’s, sort of you can see in, he’s actually sort of just expressing the philosophy of it. And that element was already there; therefore, it probably would have gone anyway. He expresses this and so you can see that this is sort of the underlying philosophy of what we’re having. Because in himself, he’s not, I would say he’s less, he’s not influential in the sense that people read him and got these ideas, rather, he’s symptomatic, expresses what’s in the air.

So that’s one aspect. Again, there’s another aspect which is revealed. We just got this magazine, just as we’re talking about the subject, about “Empowering the Self.” They seem to be very good people, these scientists called the Spiritual Counterfeits Project in Berkeley. They are some kind of fundamentalists who talk about all kinds of aspects of fake spirituality. And almost everything they write is good. They expose the Maharishi and Scientology and all these cults, everything which is not basic Christianity. They have a whole series of articles on the Self, cosmic humanism, or human potential. See that’s also self-centred, [the] human potential movement which is now in our times. They are coming from psychoanalysis and so forth. He talks about several movements here which may be very symptomatic.

Yes, one talks about the human potential movement and he says that some of the basis of, as a condition to faith in human reason, a new view of humanity contributes to the belief in self-transformation. This human potential emphasizing what I can, how I can develop myself, how I can discover something better. “Our culture traditionally embraces a Christian view of people as limited creatures, separate from God, creatures who are a curious, paradoxical mix of good and evil qualities. That view is now being challenged by an Eastern/occult concept of humanity implicit in the human potential movement. The basic tenet of this occult world-view is that all is one: the world of matter, the world of spirit, these are the same essence. If all is one, then... differences are illusory. Reality is not what appears to this myriad objects, persons, thoughts, ideas of God, morality or beauty. What appears is merely subjective to each person; the reality is a unity beyond appearance.” You can see Hume, Kant. Then it’s “only a short step to the conclusion that one creates” one’s own “reality, that is, one perceives what one desires to perceive. Those perceptions are not accurate or inaccurate. They’re merely part of the illusion of reality beyond which lies oneness,” which is “the ‘real reality.’

“If all is one, a person’s existence as part of that oneness is as sacred and powerful as any other part of the whole. God then becomes part of the unity, of which each individual is a manifestation. As persons break out of the grip of illusion,” which is “(reality as perceived in the material world), god-like transcendence, an experience of oneness with the universe may be experienced.... The height of the hierarchy of human needs is the experience of oneness with all things. Persons in essence become God.”

“Patients,” who are being psychoanalysed, “have within themselves the answers to their own problems.” Within Christianity, you come with problems, and we give you the answers. This is what God commands. You change your life in accordance. According to the new idea, and psychoanalysis is full of that, you have the answer’s within yourself. “Let’s work them out, let’s see how, what your needs are and how we can express your needs.”

Student: That’s sort of on the line of Scientology, isn’t it?

Fr. S: Yeah, yeah, it’s one of these cults. The same, exactly the same thing. The therapist merely provides a climate of acceptance which enables the person to discover those answers from within. Unlocking universal human wisdom in an individual traditionally has been the role of the shaman or occult priest, now becomes the work of the psychotherapist.

So that’s definitely self-worship, you make your own reality and the new reality comes out from within yourself. And if you have some kind of perversions within yourself, then you have to see how you can express them in some way that’s not too difficult for society to accept, whether it’s right or wrong, they don’t say anything. The psychoanalyst doesn’t tell you you’re right or wrong. If they give you [anything], he’s going to give you a value system, that means he’s a religion. He has to be scientific, therefore, you have to work it out from within yourself. Therefore, their assumptions are that: humanity is good, that men naturally move towards growth, that all the right values are already inside the individual, don’t come from outside, that human potential is unlimited, that most important thing is experience, that you’re autonomous, all by yourself. The goal is personal awareness. And as far as the outside world is concerned, everything is relative. You don’t know what’s, whether there’s God, there isn’t any God. The only absolute is change. And there’s no evil. All the good comes within the individual. “With that set of presuppositions about the nature of humanity, God, and the world, humanistic psychology became the soil in which the human potential movement has flowered. The cultural climate of the 1960’s was perfect for this.”

“By the 1970’s, a human potential movement spreading eastward from California had spawned 8000 different therapies, a system of odds and ends of psychoanalysis, Eastern religions, sexual experimentation, game playing and old-time revivalism.”

There was one called Transactional Analysis, an early influential manifestation of human potential thinking. There’s a book called I’m OK, You’re OK. It was, everything’s just fine the way it is. I recall when I was studying Zen that was the thing that was emphasized, that Zen just accepts reality the way it is, doesn’t add any values to it. Just accept it the way it is, just the way you are. Just let loose, let go, and God will take over — if you believe in God or the cosmic mind. Just relax, take it easy, and let nature come out. The individual is good and should follow his own experience. “I’m OK, therefore, I do not need to follow any structure or values imposed from without. To free myself from my parent or conscience.” It’s an idea [that] you’ve been under the tyranny of your parents all this time and now you ought to wake up and become [an] independent, autonomous personality. Well, that fits in because a teenager likes to rebel, wants to assert himself as individual, therefore reject the parent which is the same thing as conscience, and listen to my own desires, believe them to be good. This will result in my growth and the realization of my full potential. The Transactional Analysis textbook asks one to pick up a mirror twice in the day, look into it and declare: I’m OK,... just the way I am, I’m perfect....