One of G.K. Chesterton's profound insights

was that in the modern world, Christian orthodoxy has not been supplanted by reason, as the naïve advocates of enlightenment had hoped, but by diffuse forms of credulousness. In the Father Brown stories, the priest' stands out for being the worldly one, dogged in his insistence on rational explanations for mysterious occurrences that others too hastily attribute to supernatural causes.

Skepticism could only injure faith not supplant it, and from that injury issued the half-baked paganism that defines modern "spirituality."

An awareness that reality

embraces innumerable levels of existence was common to all the cultures of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, whether this was expressed in mythological or philosophical form. That the whole of reality should consist of the physical world which can be comprehended by our five senses is a very recent concept, and one which is basically contradicted by any knowledge of oneself. For man readily discovers that the stuff (so to speak) of which his soul is made is different from that of his body, and that for all its ties to the physical world, it possesses qualities that the body does not possess, such as perception, thought, and independent action. Endowed with these faculties, the soul is not, however, the only non-physical condition of human existence. For the soul, with its constant changes, is itself an object of knowledge, and this presupposes that there is something like an inner eye that sees the soul, while itself remaining constant. This is the Intellect in the medieval acceptance of this word. To try and comprehend it would be as hopeless as an attempt to see one's own faculty of vision. It transcends thought, yet it lends all possible certainty to thought. All rational evidence would be nothing without the truths that are a direct illumination from the Intellect. The medieval philosophers refer to the active intellect intellectus agens in Latin, al-′aql al′fâ′âl (in Arabic), because the Intellect consists, as it were, of the pure act of knowing, and never itself becomes the passive object of perception.

Titus Burckhardt, Moorish Culture in Spain

Saussure's contribution to the modern profanation

of the world is the denaturalization of language. He turns the Symbol into a sign and the sign into a convention. The idea of convention appeals to moderns because it redesignates everything once thought to be sacred as a "construct" amenable to being reassembled into something more democratic and equitable.

We need to be reminded that ancient traditions held words to be sacred in origin and not mere arbitrary signs. As René Guénon explains in "Word and Symbol" 

The philosopher Berkeley was not wrong, therefore, when he said that the world is 'the language that the infinite Spirit speaks to finite spirits'; but he was wrong to believe that this language is only a collection of arbitrary signs, for in reality there is nothing arbitrary even in human language, every signification at the origin necessarily having its basis in some natural conformity or harmony between the sign and the signified. It is because Adam had received from God the knowledge of the nature of all living beings that he was able to give them their names (Genesis II: 19, 20); and all the ancient traditions are in agreement that the true name of a being is one with its nature or its very essence.

The truly significant event of the modern era

is the desacralization of life and art. “Modernity” and “Postmodernity” are merely markers of the stages of that fateful event. 

With the disappearance in the West of the last vestige of the sacred, the triumph of materialism ushers a great inversion. The worship of the more than human is replaced by the worship of the less than human. Everything formerly sacrilegious, dishonorable, ignoble, ugly, monstrous becomes an object of cult veneration. 

As René Guénon observes in his essay, “On the Meaning of Carnivals,” (below) the “feast of fools” that was formerly a purgative ritual of strictly limited duration becomes in our era an everyday spectacle.

On the Meaning of Carnivals

In connection with a certain ‘theory of festivals’ formulated by a sociologist, we have pointed out that this theory has, among other deficiencies, the weakness of wanting to reduce all festivals to a single type, that of what may be called ‘carnival’ festivals, an expression which seems to us clear enough to be understood by everyone, as in fact carnival represents what is still left of festival today in the West; and we said at that time that this kind of festival raises questions which can call for a more thorough examination. In fact, the impression that emerges from them is always and above all else that of disorder, in the most complete sense of this word. How then does it happen that they are to be found, not only in our time, but also and even with a more ample development, in traditional civilisations with which they seem at first sight incompatible? If they pertained specifically to our own times, they could be considered simply as one of the numerous manifestations of the general disequilibrium.

We may as well give here some definite examples, and we will mention first certain truly strange festivals which were celebrated in the Middle Ages: the ‘feast of the ass’ where this animal, whose distinctly satanic symbolism is well known in all traditions, was even brought into the very choir of the church where it occupied the place of honour and received the most extraordinary tokens of veneration; also, the ‘feast of fools’, wherein the lower clergy gave themselves up to the worst improprieties, parodying both the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the liturgy itself. How is it possible to explain that in such a period things whose most evident characteristic is incontestably that of parody and even of sacrilege were not only tolerated but even given an as it were official sanction?

We will also mention the Roman Saturnalia from which, moreover, the modern carnival seems to have been directly derived, though in fact it is no longer anything but a very diminished vestige: during these festivals, the slaves ordered the masters about, and the masters served the slaves. One then had the image of a truly ‘upside down’ world, wherein everything was done in reverse of the normal order. Although it is commonly claimed that these festivals were a reminder of the ‘golden age’, this interpretation is clearly false: for there is no question here of any kind of ‘equality’ that could strictly be regarded as representing, insofar as is possible in present conditions, the primordial indifferentiation of social functions. It is a question of the reversal of hierarchies, which is something completely different; and such a reversal constitutes, generally speaking, one of the plainest characteristics of satanism. We must therefore see here something that relates much rather to the sinister aspect of Saturn, an aspect which certainly does not pertain to him as god of the ‘golden age’ but, on the contrary, insofar as he is now no more than the fallen god of a bygone and finished period.

It can be seen by these examples that there is invariably a sinister and even satanic element in such festivals; and it should be noted in particular that this very element is precisely what pleases the mob and excites its gaiety. There is something here, in fact, that is very apt-and even more so than anything else to satisfy the tendencies of fallen man, insofar as these tendencies push him to develop the lowest possibilities of his nature. Now it is just in this that the real point of such festivals lies: it is a question of somehow ‘channeling’ these tendencies, and of thus making them as inoffensive as possible by giving them an opportunity to manifest themselves, but only during very brief periods and in very well defined circumstances, and by thus enclosing this manifestation within narrow limits which it is not allowed to overstep. Otherwise these same tendencies, for want of the minimum satisfaction required by the present condition of humanity, would be at risk of exploding, so to speak,and of spreading their effects everywhere, collectively as well as individually, causing thereby a disorder far more serious than that which is produced only during some few days specially reserved for this purpose, and which is all the less to be feared for being thus ‘regularised’. For on the one hand these days are placed outside the normal course of things, so as not to exert any appreciable influence upon it, while, on the other hand, the fact that there is nothing unforeseen in these festivals ‘normalises’ as it were the disorder itself and integrates it into the total order. Apart from this general explanation, which no one who is prepared to think about it can fail to understand, it will be as well to say something in particular about the ‘masquerades’ which play an important part in carnivals themselves, and in other more or less similar festivals; and what we have to say will confirm still further what we have just said. In fact, carnival masks are generally hideous and most often evoke animal or demonic forms so that they are like a figurative ‘materialisation’ of the inferior and even infernal tendencies, which are allowed to come to the surface on these occasions. Besides, each one will quite naturally choose from among these masks, without being fully aware of it, the one that best suits him, that is, the one which represents what is most in conformity with his own lower tendencies-so much so that one could say that the mask which is supposed to hide the true face of the individual, on the contrary reveals to the eyes of everyone that which he really carries within himself but which he is habitually obliged to dissimulate. It is well to note, for this throws further light on the masks, that we have here a kind of parody of the ‘reversal’ which, as we have explained elsewhere, takes place at a certain degree of initiatic development; a parody, we say, and a truly satanic counterfeit, for here the reversal is an exteriorization, not of the beings spirituality but, on the contrary, of its lowest possibilities.

To end this survey, we will add that if the festivals of this kind are more and more rare and if they even seem hardly able any longer to arouse the interest of the crowd, it is because, in a time such as our own, they have become truly pointless. In fact, how can there still be any question of ‘circumscribing’ disorder and of containing it within rigorously defined limits, when it has spread everywhere and is manifested constantly in all domains of human activity? Thus although, considering only externals and from a purely ‘aesthetic’ point of view, one might be tempted to welcome, on account of their inevitable garb of ugliness, the almost complete disappearance of these festivals, this disappearance can on the contrary be seen, by going to the roots of the matter, as an exceedingly unreassuring symptom, because it bears witness to the irruption of disorder into the whole course of existence and to its having become generalised to such a point that we could really be said to live in a sinister ‘perpetual carnival.’

Per Rudolf Otto,

Maurizio Cattelan, L.O.V.E. (2010). Courtesy of Ralf Steinberger.

the Sacred is the “Wholly Other” and thus outside of the scope of discursive understanding and accessible only to a cognitive faculty open to revelation. In traditional societies, artistic forms are symbolic representations of what cannot actually be seen . . . or said. In the modern era, sacred knowledge is dismissed as superstition, and art, now discnnected from the sacred, becomes Art, an object of purely aesthetic veneration. Early modernists like Rilke and Mallarme could still sense the presence of the sacred in art. The glow was faint but still there.

“Postmodernism” is the triumph of banality, the total subjugation of art to materialism. This is why what floats to the surface in this period is the idea of art as anti-art, art as the spectacle of its own self-degradation. The concept of art is retained strictly for the sake of its abuse.

In the ancient caste systems (which were not exclusive to India), the merchant classes always came third, after the priestly class and the warrior class (the nobility). The merchant class had its place but was not ever considered fit to rule. The revolutions of the modern era undid this sacred order and gave the top spot to the bourgeoisie. The cultural consequences did not show themselves immediately because the rich legacy of the pre-democratic age and its aristocratic standards briefly outlived the passing of the aristocratic age. Today, however, we cannot escape or contain those consequences. We are subjected to the collapse of all boundaries and distinctions inherited from the old world and the monstrosities that proliferate when money overtakes nobility.

Modernism attempts to resacralize art by elevating art itself to a religion. It fails because art is meant to serve the sacred not mimic it. The beauty of sacred art resides in its pious humility, in the fact that it does not advance itself as something more important than the symbol it embodies. Form is a nullity when all it conveys is a will to form. And ultimately, that is the most that modern art can express, a will to form.

The world, as symbolic enclosure

that separates form from formlessness, comes into being always and everywhere as divine creation. This is a mythical recognition of the structural necessity of the symbolic order remaining beyond rational comprehension or questioning. God is the navel of the symbolic order, the omphalos, the ineffable ground. The worship of the gods, then, is not evidence of credulity or of some sort of "alienation," but an affirmation of what enables culture to function as a refuge from chaos. Culture becomes a construct when it is falling apart. Only then can it become an object for analysis. 

The fools are not the devout but the sociologists.

Hatred of religion

shows up in modern art as hatred of “illusionism.” Paradoxically, this hatred of illusionism drives modern art toward abstraction and a fixation on the materiality of the signifier.

But art can never become totally materialist, can never be reduced to objecthood, because if it is, it ceases to have a symbolic function and without symbolic function, it ceases to be art and becomes indistinguishable from every other object. 

So an art that seeks to eradicate all illusionism must eventually eradicate itself. And we get very close to this with the readymade. But not quite, because the readymade, whether considered as art or antiart art, still invokes the symbolic. Duchamp’s urinal is no longer just a urinal once it is “nominated” as art. This nomination bears uncanny resemblance to the sacralization of the profane object, which likewise may retain the external appearance of a quite ordinary object (stone, tree, pool, bread, wine, etc.) and yet be imbued with unearthly power. It is only in an art history dissociated from the larger history of human ritual that the invention of the readymade is assigned such disproportionate significance. The readymade is merely a parody of the consecrated object.

The readymade shares with the “literal” minimalist object the sleight of hand of invoking the metaphysical while pretending to abolish it. So I am in sympathy with Michael Fried’s rejection of literalism in “Art and Objecthood.” But Fried’s case against literalism it vitiated by the need to couch in formalist terms what could only be forcefully articulated in metaphysical terms. The idea that wants to come to the surface in that tortured and verbose essay is that art is art only to the extent that it serves a metaphysical purpose. Art is the transfiguration of matter into spiritual substance. And this and this alone is the reason why art cannot be reduced to a desacralized, profane object without ceasing to be art. Fried could not bring himself to state this and in failing to state it he revealed why formalism, which for a brief period served as a bulwark against the banalization of art, finally failed at its task and left the field to be trampled by postmodernists.