At Certain Times

 
At certain times in a life, one comes upon crossroads. Most of the time, I think, we just keep moving forward, whether afraid of the risks of deviating or because things are generally going all right. We all think that realising true ambitions runs risks.

Yet, confessions are always useful at these crossroads. Taking the mantle of being the co-editor of the web journal Humanist Art Review was probably, in retrospect, an error. Not because it is not an attractive medium for speaking about the unspeakable but because of my own un-preparedness. What do I know about Humanism? What is Humanist Art? These basic questions still baffle me no less than what they did at the beginning. From the beginning, the tone of the journal characterized the great love that my co-editor and friend David Mayernik and I have for the things that go under the banner of Humanism but I don’t feel that I have ever managed to penetrate fully into the subject matter. The task of setting out a cogent set of discursive categories in my mind still remains. So along with contemplating the meaning of Bernini’s Obelisk on an Elephant, let us also cast a thought or two about Humanism and its art:

“What does it mean to be human?”

Before the coming of Christ - I say as a believer - the idea of who God is, was not clear. One way of interpreting classicism is to think that Greek architecture embodied the dynamism of the human mind striving to come to terms with the puzzle of divine origins.

Thereafter, the Roman Empire emerged as the principal civilizing power and the sole inheritor of the civilizing impulse. The search for meaning crossed borders and conquered Europe bringing the Greek inquiry to a wider audience.

With the coming of Christ, the world changed because it became plain who God is. Then as the believers ruled and time passed, men became curious again about the times when there had been doubts. And because of the seeming brilliance of the periods in which men questioned and contemplated, they were possessed of a certain beauty in the imaginations of the later scholars. However they were also aware that these very grand societies eventually crumbled. Why exactly civilizations could not be sustained we can only speculate, but there were probable dangers in delving too far into the divine order without the necessary bastion of faith. In short, paganism failed them.

The humanist artists were believers but they sought fresh insights and proffered the humane interpretation. This was their liturgy of mercy. Precisely because we find it so hard to come to terms with the divine order, the thing that we need the most is really, after all, forgiveness. By re-energizing this central tenet of Christ’s teachings (“forgive those who trespass against us”), the paganism of the classical past too may be forgiven. This renewal of confidence and the subsequent redimensioning of classical thought is what we now call Humanism. The forms will be new but the languages will be old and immutable. From this simple mental shift a new beauty emerges and Art thrives!

Renaissance humanism left us a grand heritage of both thoughts and deeds. It was a period of rare moral clarity. It was a moving forward, not in the sense of progress but in its promotion of the virtues. It manifested, at least in the arts, as a celebration of human vocations. A reappraisal of the Renaissance spirit can only help in reawakening our own civilizing impulses. At certain times in life, one must feel sure, at the crossroads. I would say that these are the thoughts that David and I carry into those precious spare moments of free thinking.

Writing is also what HAR is about and again if I may speak for David, humanist art gives us plenty of material for inspiration, thought and discourse.

 
Rome, 13 10 2007