A meditation on the relationship between art, science, and spiritual knowledge makes the case that the three are not separate disciplines but expressions of the same search — and that art severed from the spiritual becomes bound to the physical world alone. Simulating is built at the same intersection: authored as art, engineered as science, and oriented toward the inner experience that both, at their deepest, have always been reaching for.
In the words of Plato, “Once humans were spiritual beings; they descended to Earth only because they were robbed of their spiritual wings, and were enveloped in a physical body. But they will struggle out of this physical body again and reascend to the world of spirit and soul.” Paintings and pictures of the Madonna proclaim the same, for in the most beautiful sense they are what Goethe wished to express in the words “Art is the worthiest exponent of the known mysteries of the world.” We need not fear that art will become abstract or wholly allegorical if it is once again compelled, I repeat compelled, to recognize the higher spiritual realities; nor need we fear that it will become stiff and lifeless when it finds itself unable to continue using outer, crude physical models.
Because we have forgotten the spiritual, our art has become bound up with the outer senses. But when we find the way back to spiritual heights and spiritual knowledge, we will realize that true reality lies in the spiritual world. Those who perceive this reality will create in a living way, without being slavishly bound to physical models. Goethe will be understood only when it is more widely recognized that art and wisdom go hand in hand, only when art becomes again a representation of the spiritual. Science and art will then again be one; in their union they will become religion, for the spiritual will work in this form as divinity in the human heart and give birth to what Goethe called true, genuine piety. “Whoever has both science and art also has religion,” says Goethe. “If anyone does not possess these two, then let him have religion.”
Whoever knows the spiritual secrets of the world and knows what speaks through images of the Madonna (the Divine Mother, the Feminine Principle, the Holy Spirit) sees in them something of primeval life, something much more alive than whatever one can express in any slavish imitation of a physical human model. A person of this kind whose gaze penetrates to the living quality of these Madonnas as through a veil, beholding the spiritual behind them, can feel piety in complete spiritual freedom, free from all dogma and prejudice. Such a person will unite science, or wisdom, with art in his or her soul and give new birth to genuine free religious feeling —to genuine piety.