1. Introduction

What are you doing young man?
Are you so earnest, so given up to literature, science, art, amours?
These ostensible realities, politics, points?
Your ambition or business whatever it may be?

It is well against such I say not a word, I am their poet also,
But behold! such swiftly subside, burnt up for religion's sake,
For not all matter is fuel to heat, impalpable flame, the essential life of the earth,
Any more than such are to religion. Walt Whitman, 1852


Science: Doubting. Religion: Knowledge. Art: Self-delusion Ozenfant, 1952


... twentieth-century art conceived ideals that in their religious dimension would have been recognizable to Meister Eckhart and in their workshop dimension to Leonardo. Roger Lipsey, 1988

The title of this paper comes from Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and by expanding it to include science one is clearly attempting to cover a rather large area of human endeavour; clearly not much more than a map of the territory is possible. To narrow this down only two of the possible three relationships between art, science and the spiritual will be investigated: that between the spiritual and art and that between the spiritual and science (the interaction between the arts and sciences is well-documented elsewhere, for example in Leonardo). Furthermore, the focus will be on investigating the intuition, which has grown out of personal observation in recent years, that science is at this juncture more receptive to the spiritual than the arts. This may be a complete misreading of the arts of course, but the purpose of this paper is to explore the question and open it up to debate. Note that the 'arts' covered in this paper will be mainly the visual fine arts of painting and sculpture. An additional motivation for investigating the three disciplines together is a growing intuition that science, or to be more precise, scientists, desperately need the artistic or poetic vision in order to engage with the spiritual. Too often (as shown below) the scientist assumes that religion is about asking questions about the fundamental nature of existence: this is one possible response to existence, but the artist makes another type of response an emotional one, which may have a closer affinity to the spiritual impulse.

As a focus for the discussion I will refer to two television programmes shown in the UK in the Autumn of 1995, one called 'Hidden Hands' which attempted in its first part to demonstrate the influence of the occult on modern painters such as Kandinsky and Mondrian, and the second a programme in the Equinox series called 'God Only Knows' covering the recent phenomenon of scientists seeing the proof of God in their science. The material on which these programmes were based is widely available and will be referred to in this paper, so a viewing of the programmes is not necessary to follow the arguments here. What was interesting in the contrast between the two programmes was the dismissal of the spiritual influences on Kandinsky and Mondrian as 'hocus-pocus', and the respectful attention generally given to scientists talking about the spiritual implications of quantum theory (for example). Waldemar Januszczak (commissioning editor for the arts, Channel Four) states quite baldly in the 'Hidden Hands' booklet: " ..., Mondrian and Kandinsky were driven by murky, confused, pseudo-medieval hocus-pocus." [1] Much of Part 1 of the series was devoted to this thesis, while in contrast the 'God Only Knows' booklet kicks off with a Stephen Hawking's assertion that a 'complete' theory of science would bring us to truly know the 'mind of God' [2].

The recent spate of speculative writings by scientists led the Guardian newspaper to complain that "Atheists, at least, used to find comfort in the sceptical words of the boffins. But now even the most rigorous of scientists are showing signs of conversion to the idea of a deity." [3] This may be an overstating of the position Peter Holland, a professor in the foundations of physics, attacks the 'new-ageist' view of physics as not just metaphysics but mysticism leading to obfuscation: "Science still represents a noble tradition of anti-clerical subversion but society infects all its products. What a historical irony that the arch-rationalists end up bearing a new-ageist banner" [4].

Although this paper will not dwell on the relationship between art and science, it will be a reasonable proposition to any Leonardo reader that there can be a fruitful relationship between these two, and that historically Leonardo da Vinci epitomises it. There is not space here to argue this in more depth other than to offer the view that art and science complement each other, and that they propose few mutually antagonistic areas of thought, unlike the boundaries between art and the spiritual, and science and the spiritual. It is partly these potential antagonisms that this paper will focus on, and also the way in which these potential antagonisms can be reconciled through either compartmentalisation or integration.

It is implicit in the title of this paper, and in the Whitman quote above, that the spiritual is somehow antecedent to both the arts and sciences. This assumption guides much of the discussion here, but will be returned to later to see how reasonable such an assumption is.

This paper starts with a few definitions of the 'spiritual', and is followed by three main sections: firstly a brief history of the spiritual in art and science, secondly a survey of the spiritual in 20th century art, and thirdly by a survey of the spiritual in 20th century science. These sections, because of their breadth, can only touch on some of the key elements, but it is hoped that in the conclusions some detailed considerations can be drawn out.


2. The Spiritual: some definitions

The 'spiritual' is one of the trickiest areas of human understanding to taxonomise, or in any way in which to make definitions that can be universally understood, or that mean broadly the same thing across different communities. It is even harder when trying to find reliable terms that might be meaningful to both artists and scientists, but without an attempt we will make no progress. (One reason for the difficulty is that it is reasonably clear what it is to be well-educated in the sciences or the arts; a trained artist can pick up science with reasonable effort and vice versa but it is more difficult to understand what it is to be well-educated in the spiritual.) Hence I shall use a simple categorisation which I hope will be useful: a distinction between the religious, the occult and the transcendent. For the purposes of this paper then, the 'spiritual' will be a broad term that covers these three distinct areas; in turn the 'religious' is intended to convey traditional and organised religious spirituality such as Christian, Islamic, Buddhist; the 'occult' an esoteric preoccupation with such matters as the paranormal, reincarnation, clairvoyance and disembodied beings; and finally the 'transcendent 'as dealing with a shift in personal identity from the physical and temporal to the infinite and eternal, or with mystical union, or with nirvana.

Clearly the boundaries between the religious, the occult, and the transcendent (as used here) are blurred, and also value-laden in different ways for different communities. They are also crude in that within them one needs much finer distinctions, for example between the religiousness of Christianity or Hinduism, the occultisms of William Blake or Rudolf Steiner, and the transcendences within Buddhism or the work of Krishnamurti, to give just a few examples. For now it is hoped that these terms (which will be used in the rest of this paper in this specific way) will give us a basic tool with which to begin probing the spiritual in art and science.

3. A Brief History of the Spiritual in Art and Science

3.1. From the Ancient Greeks to Plotinus

Science itself was not born with the Greeks (much of their 'science' was just plain wrong); its origins came with the Renaissance, but some of the ground for it was laid in the mathematics and logic of Greek thinkers. We might say that the science (such as it was), art, and religion were closely integrated in the lives of the Greek thinkers and that their outlook on life was very different to ours today. In Plato we find a considered view of how spirituality should inform the arts, and the Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition became a very important current, via Plotinus and St. Augustine, in spiritual thinking in Europe up to and beyond the Renaissance, influencing the arts along the way.

In respect to our taxonomy of the spiritual, the mainstream religion of the ancient Greeks was polytheistic and animistic; some, such as Pythagoras, may be said to have interests in the occult, and Socrates clearly represents the transcendent. Plato's influence on Western thought is considerable, but a discussion of his ideas and spirituality is confused by the difficulty of disentangling his thought with that of Socrates. In the Republic we find a a rationality so extreme as to be absurd, but apparently in the service of an irrational morality. The so-called logical nature of the discourses are manipulative yet obviously driven by a deep spirituality that cannot have its origins in rationality. The spirituality can be characterised as chiefly moral, though elsewhere in Plato's work the transcendent takes precedence. The Republic is important because of its severe criticism of the arts: using the example of a bed, Socrates argues that its principle reality, its 'Form', appears to us second-hand through the skill of the carpenter and third-hand through the skill of the painter [5]. He extends this idea to all the arts, particularly poetry, that representation is third-hand; furthermore, because of its seductive nature and the tendency to represent 'bad' things, peoples, or actions, the arts are a degenerative influence. In Plato's ideal state only those artists would be permitted who depicted beautiful things in a beautiful way. To modern thinking this is tending to the fascist, and we find 20th century equivalents in the Stalinist control of the arts in Russia and elsewhere.

We have then a clear call from antiquity, echoing through religious art up to the Enlightenment and beyond, that art should be subordinate to the spiritual. Plato's assumption, that the artist necessarily is even clumsier than the carpenter at reaching the form or essence of 'bed' needs to be challenged however: one only has to think of Van Gogh's version for example. For many with the appropriate sensitivities the paintings of his simple room with its bed and chair seem to grasp the very essence, divine essence, of the ordinary.

The ancient Greeks were not of course all as frigid about the arts as Plato, as the exuberant remains show. A useful connection between the spiritual and the artistic that emerged from the period lies in the word 'sublime', debated in the short treatise On The Sublime, attributed to Longinus (now known to be from an unknown author of the first century AD). Where Plato is the puritan (and distant forerunner of Tolstoy and Gandhi), Longinus represents the sophisticated analyst of the arts (though chiefly of literature). He cites five sources of the sublime, and then adds that by reading Plato one can add a sixth: the emulation of the great artists of the past. Plato says the exact opposite of course.

With Plotinus we begin to make a better connection between the spiritual and art through the sublime. His essay on Beauty is at the same time more spiritual than Plato, and also more sensitive to the poetry of beauty: it is not made subservient to spiritual goals in a rigidly-controlled ideal state. Plotinus' source of authority is generally considered to be Plato, but a closer examination shows a wholly independent thinker whose authority is based on personal contemplation. For Plotinus, the beauty of any object or abstraction has its source in some Principle. This Principle is inherent in a person's soul and when in the presence of beauty responds as if through a form of recognition:

Our interpretation is that the Soul by the very truth of its nature, by its affiliation to the noblest Existents in the hierarchy of Being when it sees anything of that kin, or any trace of that kinship, thrills with an immediate delight, takes its own to itself, and thus stirs anew to the sense of its nature and of all its affinity [6].

For sure, one can see a resonance with Plato's Forms, and Plotinus even uses the term Ideal-Form, but Plotinus's language and source is his own. However, like Plato, he does not encourage the visual arts per se: it is in the Renaissance that Plotinus's ideas of Beauty became a source of artistic inspiration.

3.2. The Renaissance

The Italian Renaissance can be seen as a period of looking back to the ancient Greeks; a revival of Platonism to equal or compete with Aristotelian thinking; and the birth of the empirical method which gave the impetus to science and humanism, leading to their later triumph in the Enlightenment. The universal religious vehicle in Europe at this time was of course Christianity, and biblical themes provided most of the serious subject-matter for the great artists of the period. Raphael and Michelangelo are probably typical of the historically-influenced artists in this period, whereas Leonardo da Vinci represents the point of departure towards science and humanism.

Michelangelo (1475 - 1574) is considered the artist of this period to most closely aspire to the ideals of Neoplatonism. One of his most ambitious projects, the tomb of Pope Julius II "would have provided a magnificent exposition of Christian Neoplatonism if its original plan had been carried out." [7] It was intended to symbolise the spiritual ascent of man: "Man's animal nature enmired in the appetites was to be dramatically symbolized by a group of fettered slaves, while statues of victory represented the soul liberated from bondage." [8] Michelangelo was deeply influenced by the founder of the Florentine 'Academy', Marcilio Ficino, and the Neoplatonist endeavour of the school. Ficino translated Plato and Plotinus, and the school also attempted to assimilate influences such as Pythagoras and the Zoroastrian tradition. In terms of our spiritual taxonomy the overall engagement of the school was with the transcendent, and became almost a cult. As far as we know Michelangelo's spirituality was more conventional, and showed itself in the Christian religious themes of his work and in the sublime quality of his work.

In Leonardo's notebooks we find the first real man of Western science: a man willing to look for himself, rather than to believe what others say. The fact that he combined this embryonic science with an extraordinary skill as artist made him the archetypal humanist and Renaissance man to modern culture. Leonardo (1452 - 1519) was quite explicit that experience should be the ultimate authority, and not the ancients, as this passage from his notebooks shows:

Though I have no power to quote from authors as they have, I shall rely on a far bigger and more worthy thingon experience, the instructress of their masters. They strut about puffed up and pompous, decked out and adorned not with their own labours, but by those of others, and they will not even allow me my own. And if they despise me who am an inventor, how much more should they be blamed who are not inventors but trumpeteers and reciters of the works of others [9].

Leonardo had much to say on this subject, and is to be credited with being the first European to explicitly point to what was wrong with the physics of Aristotle and the Greeks: they did not trust or develop the skills of experience. Neither was Leonardo a Neoplatonist, and although he believed in a soul as distinct from the body, his general view seems materialistic and a little pessimistic. His paintings included many conventionally religious themes, and contain a sublimity, that to a modern eye, far outstrips the paintings of Michelangelo. The haunting beauty of the Mona Lisa has been recently attributed to the likelihood of it being in part a self-portrait; looking at Leonardo's writings I would suggest also that it is the moral element in Leonardo that we are seeing in this painting. His religiousness, conventional in most senses, and not in our terms either occult or transcendent, found easy expression in the moral, perhaps partly due to the struggles he personally had as an outsider, illegitimate and homosexual.

Galileo (1564-1642) took the cue from Leonardo to look for himself literally: he had heard of the invention of the telescope and made one for himself. His patient observations confirmed the theories of Copernicus and Kepler, that the earth moved around the sun and not the other way round, and also revealed new heavenly bodies, bringing the total to eleven. This number not only contradicted the traditional seven, but had no mystical significance. Bertrand Russell writes: "On this ground the traditionalists denounced the telescope, refused to look through it, and maintained that it revealed only delusions." [10]

Although Galileo mocked (along with most modern educated Westerners) those who refuse to believe the evidence derived from the careful but ever-verifiable and repeatable use of scientific instruments, the human instinct for the simplicity and comfort of received wisdom can also be found in the great scientists. Kepler for example was discomfited by the elliptical nature of the planetary orbits whose mathematics he had derived, Newton by the implications of gravity that the universe would eventually collapse on itself, and Einstein by the indeterminism in quantum theory. The relevance of this observation is that the adoption of a scientific outlook can never fully counter the human instinct for belief, and this is a useful corrective to those who dismiss the spiritual on the grounds that it is based only in belief.

3.3. The Enlightenment

Newton (1642-1727) completed in the seventeenth and eighteenth century the scientific triumph that Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler had initiated. While Newton was a conventionally religious man, and also believed in astrology, it was probably his scientific work more than anything else that allowed for the later scientific rationale for atheism. His work with alchemy does not suggest an interest in the occult that it might imply today: the chemistry of his age did not give any reason why base metals should not be transmutable into gold, and in the absence of a theory of the periodic table there was no reason not to carry out systematic laboratory work based on the earlier theories of the four elements. Newton's basic Christian beliefs existed quite separately from his genius as a scientist, and his insular and unforgiving nature does not reveal a particularly sympathetic man. In Newton we have the modern archetypal scientist of genius: Einstein fits this pattern well, down to a common underperformance at school and college, and a neglect of family and friends.

In the work of the philosopher John Locke we can see a conceptual framework emerging which was better suited to the emerging science of the period than older modes of thought, and which epitomises the Enlightenment. According to Bertrand Russell: "Locke may be regarded as the founder of empiricism, which is the doctrine that all our knowledge (with the possible exception of logic and mathematics) is derived from experience." [11] Locke (1632 - 1704) therefore argues against Plato's forms or the idea that there is an essence or innate idea or principle that precedes and is superior to reality. The emphasis on experience is part of modern science, and Locke's endorsement of empiricism cemented the scientific world-view of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

3.4. The Divorce of Science and Religion

The contemporary idea, only just being eroded at the edges, that science and religion stand in opposition has a strange history. In the context of our distinction between the religious, the occult, and the transcendent, we may observe that it is the traditionally religious that has been most visibly at odds with the scientific. The reaction of the religious establishment of Galileo's time epitomises the supposed gulf between science and religion, but we would find it hard to imagine Christ, the 'founder' of this establishment, finding any fault with poor Galileo's telescope. Why? Because Christ's project lay elsewhere. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, leave the telescopes unto the scientists: it is not hard to accept this interpolation. But human beings are multi-dimensional, and never more so than in our current highly-educated post-modern era. We are interested therefore in how an individual or community with artistic or scientific preoccupations (or both) deals with the spiritual: divorce is not an option, but compartmentalisation or synthesis are options. The popular view of a gulf between science and religion may be termed part of 'scientism': a view of science from the outside.

3.5. Blavatsky, Steiner, Gurdjieff

The waning of Christian influence in the arts and in society in general towards the end of the 19th and into the 20th century left a spiritual vacuum. Romanticism in its various forms filled the gap to some extent, while the occult gained ground in the last part of the 19th and first part of the 20th century, notably with the Theosophists and Anthroposophists. However it is probably true to say that the occult, even the occult 'science' of Steiner, do not sit as easily with a scientific world-view as does the transcendent.

Theosophy was a 19th century spiritual movement that spilled into the 20th century and influenced many modern artists. It also produced an offshoot called Anthroposophy, led by Rudolf Steiner, who was originally a Theosophist. Theosophy (dismissed by Waldemar Januszczak as we have seen as 'pseudo-medieval hocus-pocus') was in fact the first organised response by the West to a growing awareness of Eastern religious thought, and an attempt to make a synthesis between the spiritual of the East and West. It was founded by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, and attracted Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater amongst others; it eventually proclaimed its mission to prepare the way for the second coming (the Buddha Maitreya). This conflation of Christ's and Buddha's reappearance united followers from all over the world to prepare the way for him, but when Leadbeater and Besant claimed the young Jiddu Krishnamurti for this role it became too much for some Western thinkers, including Rudolf Steiner, and led to his departure. As Krishnamurti grew into the role prepared for him by the Theosophists he gradually became uneasy with it and eventually rejected it in a dramatic gesture; strangely he then went on to teach to a world audience in a way entirely reminiscent of Jesus or the Buddha. Where he really departed from the Theosophists was in his rejection of all tradition; they attempted a huge synthesis of it, while he, like Leonardo, spoke of the Truth as arising from one's own being or experience.

One of the prime documents of Theosophy's grand synthesis was Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine, unfairly dismissed by the 'Hidden Hands' team as 'monumentally opaque'. It was however an important influence on early twentieth century artists like Mondrian and Kandinsky, as was Besant and Leadbeater's Thought Forms. Both books are squarely within the occult, though both the religious (especially in the moral sense) and the transcendent are present. Thought Forms had a special impact on the painters in the early years of the twentieth century in that it contained many colour plates representing the auric manifestations of emotion. (Auras are supposedly seen by clairvoyants around the body of individuals, and reveal their thoughts and feelings through colour and abstract shapes.) Thought Forms is of historical interest in showing many assumptions of the period: in particular that science would soon have to acknowledge the 'invisible world' of the astral plane. This was based on specialist forms of photography, the best-known surviving one being Kirlian photography. In fact modern science is generally hostile to the aspirations of the Theosophists because of its occult overtones; it is, as we shall see, more sympathetic to the transcendent, and more recently to the conventionally religious (or so it seems on the surface).

According to our simple taxonomy of the spiritual, Rudolf Steiner's work belongs chiefly to the occult, though as his work is also deeply Christian (often characterised in fact as an occult Christianity) it overlaps with the religious. It is not however transcendent in the sense that the word is used in this paper. Steiner's work is probably the occult at its best, and as such represents a system of knowledge and self-development of great value. It has had an enormous underground influence on the Europe of the first part of the 20th century, and even now leaves its mark on education, the arts, and industry (Weleda pharmaceutical products come from a Steiner company, in a similar way that Clarke's shoes came out of the Quaker movement).

Rudolf Steiner was born in 1861 in Hungary, near the Austrian border. He was exceptional at school, and studied biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics at the Vienna polytechnic. One of his first major employers was the Goethe-and-Schiller archive in Weimar, where he edited Goethe's scientific works. His science background was overshadowed by his life-long occult gifts that seemingly enabled him to enter another world of disembodied spirits and thereby gain access to forms of knowledge other than the conventionally scientific. He regarded his teachings, which came to be known as Anthroposophy (after his split with the Theosophists) as scientific, but his thesis that it would eventually be proven as such was unfounded. His neglect by modern thinkers is a loss, but is probably due to the emergence of psychoanalytical and behaviourist modes of inquiry which fit more comfortably with the mainstream of intellectual life in the 20th century. His teachings on the arts are summarised in several Anthroposophical publications, chiefly The Arts and their Mission. This book contains a summary of his teachings, with the usual cheerful assumptions that they will one day become mainstream:

One result of anthroposophical spiritual science once it has been absorbed into civilisation will be the fructification of the arts. Precisely in our time the human inclination toward the artistic has diminished to a marked degree. Even in anthroposophical circles not everyone thoroughly comprehends the fact that Anthroposophy strives to foster, in every possible way, the artistic element.


This is of course connected with modern man's aforementioned aversion to the artistic. Today the positive way in which Goethe and many of his contemporaries sensed the unity of spiritual life and art is no longer experienced. Gradually the conception has arisen that art is something which does not necessarily belong to life, but is added to it as a kind of luxury. With such assumptions prevailing, the upshot is not to be wondered at.


In times when an ancient clairvoyance made for a living connection with the spiritual world, the artistic was considered absolutely vital to civilisation. We may feel antipathy for the frequently pompous, stiff character of Oriental and African art forms; but that is not the point at issue. In this and further lectures we shall be concerned, not with our reaction to any particular art form, but rather with the way in which man's attitude places all the arts within the framework of civilisation. The necessity is to see a certain connection between today's spiritual life and the attitude toward art previously alluded to [12].

This passage contains many of Steiner's preoccupations, perhaps the most important being a reference to an ancient time when clairvoyance was the norm. Steiner believed that humans were all originally spiritual beings, but in the 'fall' we came to inhabit a more and more materialistic world, culminating in the present one. However, he saw all living things as 'sleeping' spirits, and to some extent this extended to the mineral and planetary worlds as well. In connection with the arts he goes on to say that architecture derived primarily from the building of mausoleums for the benefit of the dead, while the art of clothing belonged to the opposite pole, that of birth. Sculpture was the key art-form related to the present life, as well as painting. However he regarded modern painting degenerate for various reasons:

Today, in the fifth post-Atlantean age, painting has assumed a character leading to naturalism. Its prime manifestation is the loss of a deeper understanding of colour. The intelligence employed in contemporary painting is a falsified sculptural one. ... Painters express through lines the fact that something lies in the background, something in the foreground; their purpose being to conjure up on canvas an impression of spatially formed objects ... A true painter does not create in space, but on the plane, in color, and it is nonsense for him to strive for the spatial [13].

Steiner goes on to explain that the spiritual world is in fact two-dimensional and when we come to inhabit it we are freed from the 'tyranny 'of three dimensions. The painter should therefore strive to use two dimensions, and also to use colour which is the true third dimension: hence the artist should move from space-perspective to colour-perspective. These ideas perhaps only illustrate the effort needed to get to grips with Steiner's ideas; they are clearly radical, even preposterous at first glance, but there is also clearly a fine intelligence at work. There is also an end-result that can be examined: 'Steiner art'. Anthroposophically-inspired painters produce work that may not be main-stream but is very interesting, and seems to exert an undercurrent of artistic influence, particularly in continental Europe.

About the time that Steiner died a teacher called G.I.Gurdjieff (1877 - 1949) came into prominence as a spiritual leader in the 1930s in Paris. While both men had a kind of esoteric Christianity as part of their teachings they had radically different projects. Although Steiner dealt with an esoterism that still provokes well-educated commentators to use terms like 'hocus-pocus', he was as earnest and straightforward in his affairs as a parish priest. Gurdjieff, in contrast, delighted in confounding his audience with red-herrings and obfuscation, reserving his real teachings for private gatherings and intimate moments. It is hard therefore to justify a conclusion born of many years study of Gurdjieff's work, that it dealt primarily with the transcendent, but there is not space here to defend it in detail. The ritual aspects and occult cosmology of his work, combined with the popular suspicion of charlatanry (which he liked to promote) obscure this essence of his teaching.

It is his attitude to the arts that is important here, and the following passage from a question and answer session give us some insight into it:

Question: What place do art and creative work occupy in your teaching?


Answer: Present-day art is not necessarily creative. But for us art is not an aim but a means.


Ancient art has a certain inner content. In the past, art served the same purpose as is served today by booksthe purpose of preserving and transmitting certain knowledge. In ancient times they did not write books but expressed knowledge in works of art. We shall find many ideas in the ancient art which has reached us, if we know how to read it. Every art was like that then, including music. And people of ancient times looked on art in this way.


You saw our movement and dances. But all you saw was the outer formbeauty, technique. But I do not like the external side you see. For me, art is a means for harmonious development. In everything we do the underlying idea is to do what cannot be done automatically and without thought.


Ordinary gymnastics and dances are mechanical. If our aim is a harmonious development of man, then for us, dances and movements are a means of combining the mind and the feeling with movements of the body and manifesting them together. In all things, we have the aim to develop something which cannot be developed directly or mechanicallywhich interprets the whole man: mind, body and feeling.


The second purpose of dances is study. Certain movements carry a proof with them, a definite knowledge, of religious and philosophical ideas [14].

Gurdjieff was interested in promoting a harmonious development of man, through the training and integration of the three centres: thinking, feeling and body. In his own terminology we are 'three-brained beings' but unable to develop because of the imbalanced predominance of one centre or atrophy of another. His teachings have been called the 'Fourth Way' because he believed that the way of the yogi, monk, or fakir (corresponding to thinking, feeling, and body) were, in isolation, incomplete, and that a synthesis of these paths into a fourth path was necessary. Transcendence could only be achieved when all three 'brains' worked together.

Like for Steiner and Plato, art for Gurdjieff was subordinate to the spiritual, as we see in the above passage. Gurdjieff was more interested in music, dance and drama than the visual arts, but it is of interest to note that his 'movements' had a parallel with Steiner's Eurythmy: one can only speculate that both felt that modern man needed to be better anchored in his body.

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References for Part 1

[1] Saunder, Frances Stonor, Hidden Hands, London: Channel 4 Television, p.3
[2] Snyder, Paula (Ed.) God Only Knows, London: Channel 4 Television, p. 3
[3] Peter Lennon, "Science's new God Sqad", The Guardian, May 3rd 1995.
[4] Peter Holland "Conjurors of Conjecture" The Times Higher Educational Supplement, May 12th 1995
[5] Plato, The Republic, p.
[6] Plotinus, The Enneads, (Trans. Stephen MacKenna), London: Penguin Books, 1991, p. 47
[7] Ralp, Philip Lee, The Renaissance in Perspective London: G. Bell, 1973, p. 175
[8] Ralp, Philip Lee, The Renaissance in Perspective London: G. Bell, 1973,p. 176
[9] Da Vince, Leonardo, Notebooks, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 2
[10] Russell, Bertrand, A History of Western Philosophy, London, Sidney, Wellington: Unwin Paperbacks, 1989, p. 520
[11] Russell, Bertrand, A History of Western Philosophy, London, Sidney, Wellington: Unwin Paperbacks, 1989, p. 589
[12] Steiner, Rudolf The Arts and Their Mission, New York: The Anthroposophic Press, 1964, p. 15
[13] Steiner, Rudolf The Arts and Their Mission, New York: The Anthroposophic Press, 1964, p. 31
[14] Gurdjieff, G.I. Views from the Real World .., p. 176

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