Sri Aurobindo
Early Cultural Writings
(1890 — 1910)
Part Four. On Art
The National Value of Art [5]
The value of art in the training of intellectual faculty is also an important part of its utility.
We have already indicated the double character of intellectual activity, divided between the imaginative, creative and sympathetic or comprehensive intellectual centres on the one side and the critical, analytic and penetrative on the other.
The latter are best trained by science, criticism and observation, the former by art, poetry, music, literature and the sympathetic study of man and his creations.
These make the mind quick to grasp at a glance, subtle to distinguish shades, deep to reject shallow self-sufficiency, mobile, delicate, swift, intuitive.
Art assists in this training by raising images in the mind which it has to understand not by analysis, but by self-identification with other minds; it is a powerful stimulator of sympathetic insight.
Art is subtle and delicate, and it makes the mind also in its movements subtle and delicate.
It is suggestive, and the intellect habituated to the appreciation of art is quick to catch suggestions, mastering not only, as the scientific mind does, that which is positive and on the surface, but that which leads to ever fresh widening and subtilising of knowledge and opens a door into the deeper secrets of inner nature where the positive instruments of science cannot take the depth or measure.
This supreme intellectual value of Art has never been sufficiently recognised1.
Men have made language, poetry, history, philosophy agents for the training of this side of intellectuality, necessary parts of a liberal education, but the immense educative force of music, painting and sculpture has not been duly recognised2.
They have been thought to be bypaths of the human mind, beautiful and interesting, but not necessary, therefore intended for the few.
Yet the universal impulse to enjoy the beauty and attractiveness of sound, to look at and live among pictures, colours, forms ought to have warned 
mankind of the superficiality and ignorance of such a view of these eternal and important occupations of human mind.
The impulse, denied proper training and self-purification, has spent itself on the trivial, gaudy, sensuous, cheap or vulgar instead of helping man upward by its powerful aid3 in the evocation of what is best and highest in intellect as well as in character, emotion and the aesthetic enjoyment and regulation of life and manners.
It is difficult to appreciate the waste and detriment involved in the low and debased level of enjoyment to which the artistic impulses are condemned in the majority of mankind.
But beyond and above this intellectual utility of Art, there is a higher use, the noblest of all, its service to the growth of spirituality in the race.
European critics have dwelt on the close connection of the highest developments of art with religion, and it is undoubtedly true that in Greece, in Italy, in India, the greatest efflorescence of a national Art has been associated with the employment of the artistic genius to illustrate or adorn the thoughts and fancies or the temples and instruments of the national religion.
This was not because Art is necessarily associated with the outward forms of religion, but because it was in the religion that men’s spiritual aspirations centred4 themselves.
Spirituality is a wider thing than formal religion and it is in the service of spirituality that Art reaches its highest self-expression.
Spirituality is a single word expressive of three lines of human aspiration towards divine knowledge, divine love and joy, divine strength, and that will be the highest and most perfect Art which, while satisfying the physical requirements of the aesthetic sense, the laws of formal beauty, the emotional demand of humanity, the portrayal of life and outward reality, as the best European Art satisfies these requirements, reaches beyond them and expresses inner spiritual truth, the deeper not obvious reality of things, the joy of God in the world and its beauty and desirableness5 and the manifestation of divine force and energy in phenomenal creation.
This is what Indian Art alone attempted thoroughly and in the effort it often dispensed, either deliberately or from impatience, with the lower, yet not negligible perfections which the more material European demanded.
Therefore Art has 
flowed in two separate streams in Europe and Asia, so diverse that it is only now that the European aesthetic sense has so far trained itself as to begin to appreciate the artistic conventions6, aims and traditions of Asia.
Asia’s future development will unite these two streams in one deep and grandiose flood of artistic self-expression perfecting the aesthetic evolution of humanity.
But if Art is to reach towards the highest, the Indian tendency must dominate.
The spirit is that in which all the rest of the human being reposes, towards which it returns and the final self-revelation of which is the goal of humanity.
Man becomes God, and all human activity reaches its highest and noblest when it succeeds in bringing body, heart and mind into touch with spirit.
Art can express eternal truth, it is not limited to the expression of form and appearance.
So wonderfully has God made the world that a man using a simple combination of lines, an unpretentious harmony of colours, can raise this apparently insignificant medium to suggest absolute and profound truths with a perfection which language labours with difficulty to reach.
What Nature is, what God is, what man is can be triumphantly revealed in stone or on canvas.
Behind a few figures, a few trees and rocks the supreme Intelligence, the supreme Imagination, the supreme Energy lurks, acts, feels, is, and, if the artist has the spiritual vision, he can see it and suggest perfectly the great mysterious Life in its manifestations brooding in action, active in thought, energetic in stillness, creative in repose, full of a mastering intention in that which appears blind and unconscious.
The great truths of religion, science, metaphysics, life, development, become concrete, emotional, universally intelligible and convincing in the hands of the master of plastic Art, and the soul of man, in the stage when it is rising from emotion to intellect, looks, receives the suggestion and is uplifted towards a higher development, a diviner knowledge.
So it is with the divine love and joy which pulsates throughout existence and is far superior to alloyed earthly pleasure.
Catholic, perfect, unmixed with repulsion, radiating through all things, the common no less than the high, the mean and shabby 
no less than the lofty and splendid, the terrible and the repulsive no less than the charming and attractive, it uplifts all, purifies all, turns all to love and delight and beauty.
A little of this immortal nectar poured into a man’s heart transfigures life and action.
The whole flood of it pouring in would lift mankind to God.
This too Art can seize on and suggest to the human soul, aiding it in its stormy and toilsome pilgrimage.
In that pilgrimage it is the divine strength that supports.
Shakti, Force, pouring through the universe supports its boundless activities, the frail and tremulous life of the rose no less than the flaming motions of sun and star.
To suggest the strength and virile unconquerable force of the divine Nature in man and in the outside world, its energy, its calm, its powerful inspiration, its august enthusiasm, its wildness, greatness, attractiveness, to breathe that into man’s soul and gradually mould the finite into the7 image of the Infinite is another spiritual utility of Art.
This is its loftiest function, its fullest consummation, its most perfect privilege.