What is the Spiritual?
What is the spiritual? It is an incursion from above or deep within to which the ordinary human being in each of us can only surrender. … the spiritual is a dramatic shift in experience and an undoing of what we take to be ourselves.1
In our own society, the term spirituality has taken on numerous connotations both within and apart from organized religion. Some people feel that spirituality is the more encompassing concept while religion is a subset; others feel that religion is the overarching term with spirituality being a subset. Some feel that the term spirituality has been so stretched out and bounced around by pop culture and the media that it has lost any substantive meaning. Still others feel that spirituality simply exceeds any definition.2
An evolutional perspective of the spiritual, which suggests that spirituality emerges from certain features spanning from psychosomatic to metaphysical realms, stresses the impact of multilevel parameters whereby the spiritual is shaped. Both the fact that certain theories consider the spiritual as an innate quality of the psyche related to the potential for something higher, deeper, bigger, or future (eschatological) and the fact that aspects of the spiritual are manifested within the sociocultural realm suggest, and to some extent verify, the evolutional perspective of the spiritual. Just as the cognitive function is the unquestionable ground for the development of self-consciousness, so psychic facts are indispensable material and essential events for spiritual experience and evolution. However, as self-consciousness cannot be reduced to cognitive functions, as it incorporates dynamics from the external world, so can spiritual experience not be reduced to psychological facts insofar as it interrelates with the socio-cultural and the metaphysical.3
When one asks the question, “What is the spiritual?”, answers received can range from historical precedent, to references to religious doctrine, to deeply personal and unique sentiment, to non-verbal eyerolls. Spirituality as a concept is elusive and polarizing. Describing the spiritual in art is even more of a paradox.
In Carl Jung and Maximus the Confessor on Psychic Development: The Dynamics Between the ‘Psychological’ and the ‘Spiritual’, G. C. Tympas outlines what he calls an “evolutional perspective” on the epistemology of spirituality. Being emergent from several ontological realms, “namely the bodily, the psychic, the interpersonal-social, the cultural, and the metaphysical,” he suggests that the spiritual is so difficult to universally define because it is “multifaceted” - it “can be considered as a dynamic, constantly evolving ... property that might ‘emerge’ from elements stemming from” these ontologies.4 This description – constantly evolving, emerging from the collected ontologies of the bodily, the psychic, the interpersonal-social, the cultural, and the metaphysical – could be extended to characterize spiritual art.
In Encountering the Spiritual in Contemporary Art, Leesa K. Fanning presents her reader with an extensive volume of examples of how the spiritual is manifest in contemporary art (as of the year 2018) from a curator’s point of view. For Fanning,
... spirituality represents and encompasses a broad spectrum of possibilities: compassion; considerations of living well in our complicated world; the search for ultimate meaning, truth, or reality; questions of being and belief; the mystery of life and death; a sense that all things are interconnected; ritual practice signifying life-changing events; mind-altering transformation; and … [it] is a direct and immediate experience involving felt bodily experience.5
Though expressed using a different vocabulary, Fanning’s definition parallels that of Tympas. Two points of view from individuals with different educational backgrounds and current motivations inadvertently connect in the discussion of the spiritual in art.
In his text, while discussing the definition of the spiritual as “multifaceted”, Tympas identifies its potential role in the healing process. In doing so, he includes the spiritual in art as a specific point of convergence between the psychological, the spiritual, and mental health.
Healing comprises a fascinating area, where ontological and religious doctrines have been set aside, but the spiritual and the psychological can act on a more common ground. Healing is, however, not the only place where these two aspects intercept.6
Fanning might agree and assert that art can be one of those such places.
Tympas is a researcher with degrees in medicine, theology, and psychoanalysis who might seem to be an unlikely proponent for the healing capabilities of art. However, reframing his argument to centre around art instead of healing, it follows that, once “ontological and religious doctrines have been set aside” to make space for spiritual and psychological influences, the “multifaceted” quality of spiritual art can be more readily appreciated.
According to Tympas, there is a “polarity” that exists between those who investigate spirituality via “the internal (psychic) and external (socio-cultural and/or metaphysical) perspectives.”7 A similar polarity exists in the investigation of spiritual art. Those who refuse to acknowledge an unseen (“internal”) communicative power of a painting, or song, or choreographed movement of a body will limit their discussion to formal (“external”) qualities. If the presence of the spiritual in art were to be discussed using Tympas’ evolutional perspective, perhaps those who position their argument at either pole of opinion could see that they are having the same conversation.
k.b.p.
1 Lipsey, Roger. The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, (Dover Publications, 1988), 10.
2 Spretnak, Charlene. The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art: Art History Reconsidered, 1800 to the Present, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 14.
3 Tympas, G. C., Carl Jung and Maximus the Confessor on Psychic Development: The Dynamics Between the ‘Psychological’ and the ‘Spiritual’, (Routledge, 2014), 32.
4 Tympas, 18.
5 Fanning, Leesa K., Encountering the Spiritual in Contemporary Art, (The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2018), 32.
6 Tympas, Carl Jung and Maximus the Confessor on Psychic Development, 36.
7 Tympas, 18.
