The role of art in spirituality Sacred art is derived from celestial inspiration Objective or subjective arts The interiorizing experience of art The link between beauty and esoterism Esoteric art How arts can lead to spiritual assimilation Is modern art necessarily bad? Art and the spiritual nature of the artist

slide 3 of 9 This is taken from a transcript of a 1995 interview with the eminent Perennialist thinker and writer Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998). Question: With beauty, there is what one might call an ambiguous element, since it can be conducive to a worldly self inflatedness or on the contrary to a remembrance of the Divine. What is it about certain arts—music, poetry and dance, for example—that makes the ambiguous element more pronounced in them? Frithjof Schuon: Painting and sculpture are in a way more cerebral and objective than poetry, music and dance, which are more psychic and subjective; therefore the ambiguous element is more pronounced in these three arts.