EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Art’s Purpose

To become like God (ie, gain access to Wisdom) has long been the principal goal of all who practice inner-focused spirituality. The group includes not only monks and nuns in cloistered communities but spiritual seekers in the wider world as well, including true philosophers, esotericists of many stripes and creative minds of all kinds. Their goal is spiritual happiness, an objective that the Masonic writers of the American Declaration of Independence included as well. They called it "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Indeed helping others achieve that special and rare kind of happiness is one of art’s principal objectives and the Bible’s too. Atheists call it by other names like Wisdom or the Inner Self. Our outer self changes ceaselessly and causes us endless strife; our Inner Self, like God, never changes. It is the eternal Wisdom inside each of us. This idea is part of mankind’s creative tradition whether others know it or not. Here's what Hugh of Saint Victor wrote in the twelfth century long before the flowering of art in the Renaissance:

“This, then, is what the arts are concerned with, this is what they intend, namely, to restore within us the divine likeness which to us is a form but to God is his nature. The more we are conformed to the divine nature, the more we do possess Wisdom, for then there begins to shine forth in us what has forever existed in the divine Idea or Pattern, coming and going in us but standing changeless in God.”¹

It's what Plato, Dante and Shakespeare convey; Art too.

 

1.  Robert Falkenburg, “The Household of the Soul: Conformity in the Merode Triptych” in Early Netherlandish Painting at the Crossroads (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art) 2001, p. 14