The Beautiful Necessity: Seven Essays on Theosophy and Architecture

THE BEAUTIFUL NECESSITY I

The theosophical explanation involving the familiar idea of the "pairs of opposites" would be something as follows: According to the Hindu-Aryan theory, Brahma—so that the world might be born—fell asunder into man and wife; it became, in other words, name and form original: "name and form" (Sanskrit: nama-rupa). The two universal aspects of name and form are what philosophers call the two "modes of consciousness," one of time, and the other of space. These are the two gates through which ideas enter phenomenal life: the two boxes, as it were, that contain all the toys with which we play. Everything, if we were only keen enough to perceive it, bears the mark of one or the other of them, and may be classified accordingly.

In such a classification, music is seen to be allied to time, and architecture to space. Music is successive in its mode of manifestation; in time alone, everything would occur successively, one thing following another. Architecture, on the other hand, impresses itself upon the beholder all at once; in space alone, all things would exist simultaneously. Music, which is in time alone, without any relation to space, and architecture, which is in space alone, without any relation to time, are thus seen to stand at opposite ends of the art spectrum. They are, in a sense, the only "pure" arts, because in all the others the elements of both time and space enter in varying proportions, either actually or by implication.

Poetry and the drama are allied to music, inasmuch as the ideas and images of which they are made up are presented successively, yet these images are, for the most part, forms of space. Sculpture, on the other hand, is clearly allied to architecture, and so to space, but the element of action, suspended though it be, affiliates it with the opposite, or time pole. Painting occupies a middle position, since in it space has become ideal—three dimensions being expressed through the medium of two—and time enters into it more largely than into sculpture because of the greater ease with which complicated action can be indicated: a picture being nearly always time arrested in mid-course, a moment transfixed.

The quaint Oriental imagery here employed should not blind the reader to the precise scientific accuracy of the idea of which this imagery is the vehicle. Schopenhauer says: "Polarity, or the sundering of a force into two quantitatively different and opposed activities, striving after re-union... is a fundamental type of almost all the phenomena of nature, from the magnet and the crystal to man himself."