druk w: w: Sol invictus. Malarstwo a chrześcijaństwo, red. Stanisław J. Ruksza,

IX Biennale sztuki, Wobec Wartości, Muzeum Archidiecezjalne w Katowicach,

BWA, Katowice 2003.

janusz krupiński

The Ideal of Creative Grace: Religiosity

            Religiosity is an internal attitude or a particular way of treating or feeling things, people, and the world... 

            Religiosity understood in this way – that is as a feeling – is far from denying the possibility of creation.  The essence of creativity is connected just with feeling, and not with activity/making or dealing.  And a feeling is creative when it is pervaded by religiosity.

            If only creation is a movement towards what’s higher and other, that is the movement in which man can exceed himself.

            Before I develop this thought, I’d like to present a differentiation of two opposing images of creative process and creation.  I call them, however not arbitrarily, the ideal of creative grace and the ideal of creative power. [1]

These investigations over the ideal of creative grace have led me to the notion of religiosity.

1. Power and grace

            The ideal of creative power has dominated the mentality of the last century. The artistic and political avant-garde movements and, first of all, the very idea of avant-garde have been its products. [2]

This ideal determines the desire of predictability... of life and the world; the aspiration after domination, control and power, the primacy of self-consciousness.  A man who captured (!) this ideal, wants to be the source of everything, and to subordinate everything to him.  He understands creation as a movement from his inside to the outside, for example in the shape of expression that articulates his ego or the self-realisation.  He wants to see the start, the point of departure only in himself.  He wants to be the first mover, and the first cause and reason of everything, owing nothing to anybody, and depending on nothing. Ex nihilo.[3]

            However, according to the ideal of grace, the proper creative movement goes from the outside to the inside. Just like inspiration (or inhalation, the breath in).  A work happens as if a miracle, that is there are no regulations, rules, notions or methods that could lead to it or that could take it in and exhaust.  The one who experiences it, doesn’t say I, for example “I have drawn”.  He says only: something is drawn “in me”, something is seen “in me”.  Something happened “to me”.   And he even does not call it his own work, like Ernst, who has rejected the thought about the “creative power of the artist”.

2. Feeling

            Casus: art.  The creative act of the artist, contrary to the present common knowledge, is realised in communion with something or someone; it consists in the way of treating, taking, experiencing, and referring to...  Therefore it’s feeling, not making something.

            Usually we associate feeling with the viewer or the listener.  Erroneously thinking about the audience or about the recipient.  The first viewer of each work of art is its very author.  For it’s in his view (always, and in the case of the viewer is the same) in correspondence to the assumed/got way of seeing, that a form appears.  To paint is, for example, to look, with your eye and hand.   Since it’s also the hand that can feel (not speaking about the palm!).

            And the eye can form, and the hand can see.

            What hand makes, what goes out from under it, that is a work, has the right to be only with respect to the feeling it awakes, even though only in the hand – in comply with the way of communion and treatment, the creator brought himself to do.

            Whatever makes the chisel or the brush, it is born in feeling and lasts only until the feeling won’t reject it.  Therefore we can say that conducting follows the will of feeling.

            Speaking about feeling, I don’t mean experiences, affects, excitements or impressions.  The one who thinks highly of experience or impression is, in fact, closing him at the external reality, and takes delight in his internal states.  He values things, at least the works of art, as much as they give him experiences.  If by feelings we were to understand experiences or impressions, our feelings would have not been important, “my” feelings or what I feel towards something or at that something would not be at stake.  In feeling just that meeting with what’s felt is at stake.

            Not impressions, but sensibility is at stake in feeling.  It consists in sensibility.  For it is the manner in which a man meets his opposite half way.  Feeling is the denial of the cutting off, the separation from the reality.  It’s a movement, where the man opens outwards.

            Performing is or the self-realisation of “I”, the reflection, the copy of ego (his projects, plans, expectations and desires) in non-ego, or that impersonal, “objective”, and methodical procedure.  What is to be done, is previously known to the performer.

            Feeling is a feedback movement, where activity includes receiving and reacting to it.  There is also attention, waiting and patience in it.  And there is the imagination which does not vanish in fantasy, where everything could be completely different.

            Feeling is an outward movement of my ego towards the Other, to meet Him half way.  When, however, there is a hope of participation in the existence of the Other, I would speak about religiosity yet. [4]

3. Religiosity

            Religiosity is something more primitive than all religions.

            The term of “religious” has not to mean something “connected with certain religion”, and particularly with religion in the sense of institution (“the Church”) or confession (the system of beliefs, and dogmas).  This is an authentic religion – exactly like the acceptance of (the truth) that reveals – is possible thanks to religiosity.

            Therefore I understand religiosity as certain state of soul or spirit, a kind of mood, and an internal attitude consisting in… In what?

            For a long time the sources of religio and religiosus are seen in the words of religere and relegere, that is in “careful heed”, “deep consideration”, “conscientious attention”, “devotion to justice”, or in the word of religare, that is in “renewed union”[5].

            These attempts to grasp the sources of the word/notion of “religio” (irrespective from their etymological-genealogical significance) tell us that the essence of religiosity is the movement of exceeding ourselves to meet the Other half way.  It is the openness of man onto the reality of the Other, with which he can be unified.

            Therefore living with unreality is alien to religiosity.

            In the openness are concealed, demanded by it: conscientious attention, caring consideration, reliable realisation, listening and asking favour, and ardent concentration…

            Feeling that attempts to accept the movement from the outside – to meet it half way.  It is realised when it meets a revealing approach, finding a fruitful, liberating way of treating what it meets.  All the time hesitant, for it knows that whatever it knows, it is dependent on the Other.

            A hunch of something other as someone Other is connected with humility which is specific for religiosity.  With the assumption/hope/consideration that there is something higher than my ego.

            Something higher... What?  This question denies humility.  It articulates the will of grasping the Other.  It thinks that the Other can be grasped, caught, kept.  Seized with the power of mind, with the power of thought, and subjected to the rule and control.  (In the word “to grasp”, like in German word of “Begriff” we hear grasping, seizure, capture, taking possession, hence the meaning of the notion of grasping.  Where’s the will to grasp, there’s exclusion of the Mystery and the sacred, hence desacralisation)

            This is why we aren’t looking for the Other; this is the Other that turns up (Picasso, Tarkowski, Buber, Weil, and St. Paul...).  And we?  We don’t remember about ourselves.  (Even though we find ourselves simultaneously in the Other, anew? the new?)

            Ego that would count on the Other, that it would rise thanks to Him (magic), only wants to heighten.  It is interested, incapable to self-sacrifice, to self-abandon.  But how can man reach the Other without all this?

            Complete disinterestedness means suspension of ego.  The stripped inside of man is the empty, free space left for the coming of the Other.  Then it can become His shrine.

            The attitude of religiosity requires giving something from the self.  And even sacrificing of self, of everything, which the ego is consisted of, of the own tastes, preferences, plans, projects, purposes and intentions... 

            The one who needs, desires, or wants something, has in the field of attention only things that can be favourable or unfavourable to his needs, desires and wants.  He takes them into account and treats them adequately to this.  Nothing exists for him except things that can be correlated with his interests.  The fate – like everything he has not already dominated – is his enemy.  Therefore it is completely alien for him the experience of the gift that is brought by the fate...

            Projects, intentions... What do they mean when the Other appears?  And when they mean anything, then the Other does not appear.  They erect before Him a wall of mirror (Empedocles).

            To be open at what’s other borders with the impossible.  Since long time it was stressed, after Empedocles, that it is unlikely to approach to what’s unlike us, wasn’t it?  Even though we are unconscious of it every day, objects, the world, and the people we meet are such as our experiences, images and expectations have made them.   The figures that appear correspond to forms, in which we see and think.  According to the measure of ego.  Even the face of beloved person that appears is rather an echo, or an after-sight of our own desires.   We meet rather them, that is our own reflection, don’t we?  In this way others become only a basis, the screen for our projections.  From the Other we are separated by the precipice, we are incessantly erecting the wall of images… and illusions.  Therefore…

            Meeting the Other is the gift of grace.

            In this event man exceeds the “principle of Protagoras” (he opens up at the reality of other dimension than he himself), he ceases to listen to only his own thoughts, at least he is not keen on his own existence, on him, or on his own ego.

            Therefore liberation?

Love?

4. The Source

            This what makes that love is creative is just religiosity.

            For we know that the one who thinks only about the value of the other, doesn’t love it, truly.  But the one, who opens his eyes at the Other, loves Him.  As early as before any worth of Him will appear, and before it will be given to him.  He believes in the Other.  The happy love for the Other can show in him an even not expected higher value, “as if it would spout from the loved by itself...”[6].

            “Spout”! “By itself”!

            The Other appears to be the source of the creative process.  The work is made by itself.  It flows from the Other.  This is from where the creator or the artist can draw.  He accepts the movement that comes from the other side.  The artist gives himself to what he is given.  He lives, he is in Him.  This is the event in which the external reality fills his inside (with its light?).  And since then he takes part in its existence.  This is the real sense of the originality of a work of art.

            “Original” means source or coming form the source, in the initial (“original”) meaning of the word. [7]

            Having such consciousness, Norwid wrote, “Originality is conscientiousness in the face of the sources”[8].

            We should not prove in particular that today in the common opinion an authentic artist is the very source of his works.  The artist is treated as non-original when his works are not the expression of his ego, and if he doesn’t derive them from himself, that is when he owes anything to something else and depends on anything.

            Behind this image there is the absurd of Ouoroborus (the snake which flows from his own jaws, simultaneously eating himself).  We have also that of Münchhausen (who draws himself from the bog by his own hair), Supersalomon (who can pour from the empty) and the Avant-garde (that starts everything from the zero point, after bursting out all contents, after losing memory).  The will of power pushes into absurd, not recognising the character of its utopia.  It dreams about the self-creation of man, on Man as the First Cause and the Beginning.

            Meanwhile, does this what the artist can find in himself come from him and belong to him?

            For Rilke the German word of “schöpfen” could mean simultaneously “to create” and “to draw” from somewhere (see his Handinneres and Auguste Rodin).  For his translators, however, these are only two different meanings of the same word, and have nothing in common.   And joining them in mind to say that to create means to draw is passing as just preposterous.

            Yes, we are speaking about the essence of art all the time.

Beauty is the glare of the opening of the Other and at the Other.  Hence we have the link of love and beauty.[9]

It is a grace.  It is not anything that can be intended, seek or make.  No list of conditions, deeds and merits can provide its presence.  Like in the case of (moral) good, the one who aims at beauty goes away from it.

            Is beauty a value?  Or is it an aura of appearance of some values?  Finally, it is rather the light of existence, that is the real existence.   As far as beauty is concerned, the answer is yes, voiced in the face of Existence.

5. Voices of artists

            Now I give voice to artists themselves, hoping that they will give credence to the aforementioned abstract considerations.

  &lbsp;   &nbs0;   3  [10].

        &n"sp;   Van Gogh: “Sometimes I have a terribLe clarity of view.  Since th% nature is so beautiful, I don’t feel myself, and pictures are coming to me as if in a dream” [11].

            Mozart: “I’m not here.  Everything, even the invention and performance comes in me as in a beautiful and very clear dream”.

Shchedrin: “I’ve got an impression that my music is told me by someone from above.  I remember when Dmytri Shostakovitch said, «I still don’t understand how I wrote the Andante from my Eighth Symphony»”[12].

            Matisse: “An artist is not free to do whatever he likes… We are not the lords of our work (production), it is imposed on us”[13]<-a>.4/o:p>

             Picasso: “You start to paint a picture.  What works out is completely different.  Truly, it’s amazing how little important is, in fact, the will of the artist…”[14].

            Picasso: “A picture is not anything thought in advance, and when you are creating it, you only follow the movement of thought” [15].

            Picasso: “When you start to paint, you don’t know what the result will be.  When you finish it, you don’t know it, either” [16].

            Klee: “A work of art spreads in space and time like the crown of a tree… Like in the case of the tree, the role of an artist is nothing more than to accept and direct further that depth that came to him.  Neither to serve, nor to be master, only to mediate.  Therefore his position is truly important.  But the beauty of the crown does not belong to him, it only goes through him”[17].

            Ernst: “…the role of painter is to mark and project what he sees”[18].

            Pollock: “...the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess”[19].

            Japanese sentence: “Paint a bamboo tree for ten years, become the bamboo tree, forget about the bamboo tree and paint”[20].

February 12^th, 2003

(pisane w języku ang.)