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 1 of 9 This is taken from a transcript of a 1995 interview with the eminent Perennialist thinker and writer Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998). Question: May I ask you what the role of art is in the spiritual existence of man? Frithjof Schuon: We could say that after morals, art—in the broadest sense of the word—is a natural and necessary dimension of the human condition. Plato said: “Beauty is the splendor of the true.” So let us say that art—including crafts—is a projection of truth and beauty in the world of forms; it is ipso facto a projection of archetypes. And it is essentially an exteriorization in view of an interiorization; art does not mean dispersion, it means concentration, a way back to God. Every traditional civilization has created a framework of beauty: a natural, ecologically necessary surrounding for spiritual life.