The Beautiful Necessity: Seven Essays on Theosophy and Architecture

THE THEOSOPHIC VIEW OF THE ART OF ARCHITECTURE

ONE of the many advantages of a thorough assimilation of what may be called the theosophic idea is that it can be applied with advantage to every department of knowledge and of human activity: like the key to a cryptogram, it renders clear and simple that which before was intricate and obscure. Let us apply this key to the subject of art, and to the art of architecture in particular, and let us see if by so doing we may not learn more of art than we knew before, and more of theosophy, too.

The theosophic idea is that everything is an expression of the Self—or whatever other name one may choose to give to that immanent, unknown reality which forever hides behind all phenomenal life. However, because on the physical plane our only avenue of knowledge is sense perception, a more exact expression of the theosophic idea would be: Everything is the expression of the Self in terms of sense. Art, accordingly, is the expression of the Self in terms of sense. Now, though the Self is one, sense is not one, but manifold; and so there are arts, each addressed to some particular faculty or group of faculties, and each expressing some particular quality or group of qualities of the Self. The white light of Truth is thus broken up into a rainbow-tinted spectrum of Beauty, in which the various arts are colors, each distinct, yet merging one into another—poetry into music; painting into decoration; decoration becoming sculpture; sculpture, architecture, and so on.

In such a spectrum of the arts, each one occupies a definite place, and all together form a series of which music and architecture are the two extremes. That such is their relative position may be demonstrated in various ways.