The Beautiful Necessity: Seven Essays on Theosophy and Architecture

THE BEAUTIFUL NECESSITY

Sculpture accentuates and enriches, painting adorns it, works of literature are stored within it, poetry and the drama awake its echoes, while music thrills to its uttermost recesses, like the very spirit of life tingling through the body’s fibers.

Such being the relation between them, the difference in the nature of the ideas bodied forth in music and in architecture becomes readily apparent. Music is interior, abstract, subjective, speaking directly to the soul in a simple and universal language whose meaning is made personal and particular in the breast of each listener. "Music alone of all arts," says Balzac, "has power to make us live within ourselves." A work of architecture is the exact opposite of this; existing principally and primarily for the uses of the body, it is, like the body, a concrete organism, attaining to aesthetic expression only in the reconciliation and fulfillment of many conflicting practical requirements. Music is pure beauty, the voice of the unfettered and perpetually vanishing soul of things; architecture is that soul imprisoned in a form, become subject to the law of causality, beaten upon by the elements, at war with gravity, the slave of man. One is the Ariel of the arts, the other, Caliban. References to Ariel (the airy spirit) and Caliban (the earth-bound monster) from Shakespeare's The Tempest.

Coming now to the consideration of architecture in its historical rather than its philosophical aspect, it will be shown how certain theosophical concepts are applicable here. Of these, none is more familiar and none more fundamental than the idea of reincarnation. By reincarnation more than mere physical rebirth is implied, for physical rebirth is but a single manifestation of that universal law of alternation of state—of animation of vehicles, and progression through successive planes—in accordance with which all things move and, as it were, make music. Each cycle is complete, yet part of a larger cycle, the incarnate monad A unit of existence; in theosophy, the individual spark of the divine. passing through correlated changes, carrying along and bringing into manifestation in each higher arc of the spiral the experience accumulated in all preceding states.