Traduction de ce texte en préparation                                          
METAPHYSICAL SYNTHESISM
by Mihail Chemiakin and Vladimir Ivanov
St. Petersburg 1967


CHAPTER 1

    1. God is the foundation of Beauty. 
  The highest intensity of the
existence of Beauty is an approximation of God.  The weakening of the
existence of Beauty is a distancing from and forgetting about God.

    2. Art is the paths of Beauty which lead to God.  The artist must always
strive towards God.  The power and viability of a style is determined by the
degree of faith.  "As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide
in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me."  (John, 15:4)  

    3. Before the coming of Christ, the canon  was the most perfect
embodiment of Beauty.  After the coming of Christ, it was the icon; as leaves
turn into a cup of tea, so does the canon become the icon.
    4. When a flower fades, the seeds ripen and are scattered by the wind. 
In art after the unifying (synthetic) epochs follow analytical periods,
periods of the greatest departure from the intensity of phenomena of Beauty,
leading to degradation and disunity of form and color.

    5. The laws of art are the laws of Pythagorean numbers.  These laws are
no abstraction, but the essences of life, known through intellectual
contemplation.  At the base of development of each style lie two triangles:

        1. The triangle of form:  cone - sphere - cylinder; their
supplementary forms:  circle - triangle - square.
        2. The triangle of color:  blue - red - yellow; their supplementary
colors:  green - orange - violet.
        The hexagon is the symbol of the interpenetration and unity of form
and color.

    6. Seven sources, like the seven spirits, direct the laws of form and colo
r, determining the Fate of each style, the length of its life, and distribute
its legacy.  These seven sources represent a triangle and a square.

        The square:
                Spontaneity - Demonism - Deformation - the Absurd.
        The triangle:
                The Canon - the Icon - the Principle of Unity.

    7. Analytical periods squander the energy of form and color accumulated
by  synthetic periods.  Finally this leads to a total weakening and decline
of the feeling of form and color.  The hexagon falls apart.  The square
reigns.  Art returns to night  - to chaos.  Freedom is lost.  Tyranny sets
in.  Art is no longer an embodiment, but rather a mask.

    8. The Renaissance gained its strength thanks only to the luxurious and
ungrateful squandering of the treasures of the Middle Ages.  For the energy
gathered in the Russian icon remains unspent to this day.  Under the
analytical approach, dividing into elements, this energy remains a tortuous
riddle, and attempts to use it lead only to a lifeless stylization.  The only
path is not to squander, but to strengthen the amassed energy, to create a
new icon painting.

    9. The contemporary artist, examining the monuments of ancient cultures,
falls into a tortuous contradiction, capable of dooming him to total
sterility:  on the one hand he sees in the past an extraordinary proximity to
his quests, to his feeling of form, and on the other hand, he is stunned by
the enormous abyss between him and them, their inner reticence and
remoteness, which turns away any attempt at intimacy.  This contradiction is
the result of three causes:
        1. Forgetting the religious sources of style.  The refusal to
penetrate the supersensible world of ideas.
        2. The growing consciousness of the historical-chronological point of
view, which does not provide concrete scales for measuring time distances
between styles.
        3. The effective examination of style, not as a formative force, but
only in its final and limited embodiment in material.

    The contradiction is removed only in the following way:

        1. Contemplation of styles as living organisms - idea and material as
                one.
        2. Recognition of the basic law of development of style as a law of    
            metamorphosis.
        3. Distinction of styles by religious principle:
            a/ before the coming of Christ,
            b/ after the mystery of Golgotha.

    10.  There are two ways to contemplate the metamorphoses of style:

        1. Mythologically (style as myth)
        2. Morphologically

    The morphological is in the spirit of further development of Goethe's
ideas on natural science ideas.  "The leaves of the calyx are those same
organs which were visible up till now as stem leaves, and now, often in a
very altered form, turn out to be collected around one common center."

    11.  From the first means of presentation it follows that the generation
of style is cosmogonic.  The styles themselves are deities, "souls."  The
most important thing is the contemplation of the turning of chaos into
harmony, and then the inevitable dissolution of harmony into chaos. 
Formative forces clash like gods and Titans.  As the Titans were plunged into
Tartary, so did Greek antiquity defeat Eastern irrationalism, demonism and
spontaneity.  Orpheus.

    12.  From the second means it follows that styles are pure
self-propelling of form and color.  Here not gods are contemplated, but
proto-phenomena, ideas.  The styles themselves make up something whole, an
absolute world.  Each style postulates the existence of another.  Everything
is organically inter-established and stipulated.

    13.  Form and color for the second means are equal, both as objects of
study and as means of symbolization of knowledge.

    14.  Metaphysical Synthesism in its understanding of numbers follows
Pythagorean occult mathematics.   If in contemporary mathematics the number 3
is expressed by a straight segment with three equal divisions, in Pythagorean
mathematics the number 3  is the triangle, the symbol of godliness and
perfect unity.  It is from this point of view that all numbers mentioned in
this book should be understood. 
 
    15.  The intensity of Being in the world cannot be communicated by a
simple mirror image.  There is no intensity in a reflection.  The artist's
job is to raise form and color to a higher degree of intensity.  In
analytical art this is called the principle of completedness.  (Filonov)

    16.  The highest intensity of form and color are attained by styles which
come out of the principle of symbolization.  They attain an extreme
accumulation of energy.  An example of this is ancient Egyptian art.  The
second kind of style is animated by the naturalistic principle.  In the first
case, they sense God in themselves; in the second, they find God in the
world.  The basis of the naturalistic principle is perception.  It is
possible to represent naturalistically a vision of the supersensible world.
    Only when the supersensible world is imprinted as a symbol does an icon
emerge.

    17.  The symbol is the combination of the uncombinable.  The following
types of symbolization exist:
        1. Astral-occult. 
        Each combination of the uncombinable is stipulated by the              
constellations, contemplated in discovery.  Fantasy per se does not play       
    any role here yet.  All ways of symbolization are beyond tyranny, are
        canonical, holy.  The Sphinx.

        2. Rosicrucian.
        Christian esoteric symbols as the basis of the combination of          
    uncombinable forms of the outside world.  At this stage a great degree     
    of  freedom is attained.  The artist relies more on his internal           
    experience, using occult knowledge for the expression of his own           
supersensible experiences.  At the same time for the depiction of those        
    regions of the world beyond into which he has not yet managed to           
ascend he uses the description of the experiences of the Great             
Enlightened.  These works are no longer cult objects.  Bosch.

        An example of symbolization is the panels of the triptych (The Garden
            of  Heavenly Delights):  a sphere of the supersensible world is
depicted            where the souls of the dead pass from death to birth.  In
the center of           the panel, the "tree-man's" extremities - dried
branches - represent the            loss of ethereal strength, the feet, two
boats "with neither steering            wheel nor sails" , wander in the
waters of the lower regions of the          world beyond.  On the man's head
is  a millstone on which stride             demons who controlled the soul of
the deceased during his life on             earth:  The bear is a symbol of
rage, the woman of sensuality, the purse            of greed.  On the middle
of the millstone is an enormous bagpipes            representing the tongue
of this man, which has fallen to Ahrimanic          numbness.

        3. Surrealistic
        The freedom of fantasy passes into demonic tyranny.  The deification
of      the subconscious.  Automation of creation.  The artist avoids a basis
for         the combination of the uncombinable: tyrannical symbolization of   
        tyranny.  An incestuous introduction of the naturalistic principle
into            fantasy.  Salvador Dali:  "The difference between me and a
madman is           that I am not mad."

        4. Nihilistic - absurd
        The principle of the simple joke.  The symbol is already not the
voice           of the subconscious, but the voice of Nothing, speaking from
the             foundations of the world and speaking as the foundation of
the world.
        The interpretation of the symbol, unlike in surrealism, is not         
    impossible, but unnecessary, for all leads to Nothing.  I. Kabakov.        
    Black humor.

        5. Metaphysical Synthesism.
        This is examined in the final chapter of this book.

    18.  Form is one, but the creative processes leading to its embodiment
are not.  In the Twentieth Century a new type of creative consciousness was
born:  those processes which formerly were played out in subconscious and
superconscious regions of the soul now  - thanks to the strength of the "I" -
are fearlessly brought into the region of the conscious.  The artist no
longer is a godly madman.  He is a creator, a friend of God.   By his
permeation with the impulse of Christ is determined the degree of
consciousness of the work.

    19.  The most full and perfect form of revelation of Beauty in the world
is the icon.  ALL THE EFFORTS OF THE METAPHYSICAL SYNTHESISTS ARE DIRECTED TO
THE CREATION OF A NEW ICON PAINTING.  FROM PAINTINGS TO THE ICON.

    20.  Art which rejects Beauty is Eros.  The artist creates harmony only
through love for Beauty.




CHAPTER 2

    1.  The ascending line in art of the ancient world is the creation of the
canon.  The descending line is the departure from the canon. 
   
    2.  The canon imprints the beauty of the body as the beauty of a
microcosm.  The body rises as a creation of zodiacal forces.  The macrocosmic
man is contained in the microcosmic man.  Aries is the head.  Taurus is the
larynx.  Gemini is that which expresses the symmetry of the hands.  Leo is
the heart.  Virgo is the belly.  Libra is the buttocks.  Scorpio is the
genitals.  Saggitarius is the upper legs.  Capricorn is the shins.  Aquarius
is the shins.  Pisces is the feet.  Each of the indicated regions of the laws
of the zodiac has shown from where godly forces have moved, creating the
parts of the human body.

    3.  Canons were recorded in holy books. They were kept in temples.  In
Ancient Egypt these books were called "Souls of Ra."

    4.  The creation of the canons, understood mythologically, is the
struggle of the Apollonian monad against the Dionysian collapse into titanic
plurality.  To conserve, strengthen, solidify the victory and power of Apollo
is the task of the ancient artist.

    5.  Hellenism is a sign of exhaustion.  Artists reject the mythological
intensity of form.  Art is placed beyond Apollo and Dionysus and thus is made
into a lifeless mask.  The relationship of the parts of the figure are no
longer determined by numbers understood in the spirit of Pythagorean esoteric
mathematics.   The canon is deprived of its esoteric meaning and is
understood as the exact symmetry of the parts of the human body in relation
to one another.

    6.  In this way the role of Greek art comes down to the weakening of the
religious pathos and the justification of art; it consciously moves off to
the side, making room for a new world permeated with the impulse of Christ.

    7.  Christianity recognizes the human figure as a worthy symbol for the
depiction of the Heavenly Hierarchy.  "In each of the many members of our
bodies can be found similar images, describing the characteristics of the
heavenly Powers."  (St. Dionysus the Areopagite)  The facility of sight means
their clearest contemplation of the Godly world and, along with that, the
simple, calm, unimpeded, quick, clean and impassive acceptance of the light
of God.  The sense of hearing is the ability to receive Godly inspiration and
to accept it wisely.  The eyelashes and eyebrows are the ability to conserve
Godly knowledge.  The shoulders, elbows, and arms symbolize the power to act,
to produce and  accomplish.  The heart is the symbol of the Godlike, who
generously shares her life force with him who is entrusted to her care.  The
breast represents the unfailing strength that preserves the life-giving gift
in the heart lying below it.  The spine is that which holds all the life
forces.  The legs are movement, the speed and swiftness of their striving towa
rds the Godly.  The lightness of wings signifies a complete separation from
the earthly, the whole, unimpeded and light striving upwards, nakedness and
shoelessness, the eternal freedom, the unhindered readiness, the separation
from all that is external, and the possible likening to the simplicity of the
Godly being."

    8.  Medieval art followed these principles of symbolization, and did not
limit itself to nor strive to develop a canonic system of proportions.  This
inner freedom made possible the16th Century's quest for a system of
proportions of the human body based on the study of nature (the world of
outer senses), completely forgetting the esoteric meaning of the parts of the
human body. Therefore towards the 20th Century the depiction of the human
figure lost any meaning, having become the object of tyrannical deformation,
on the one hand, and a complete negation on the other.  Such was the demand
of Futurism.  The return to the depiction of the human figure is connected to
a profound demand of the time for the creation of a new icon painting, with a
return of the esoteric view of human nature.  Again the canon is understood
as a system of proportions with a metaphysical basis.

    The canon is the depiction of the human figure as idea.  There are seven
metaphysical principles which turn a system of proportions into a canon:

        1. Spiritualistic alogism.  The finding of the canon is untyrannical,
            magical, subconscious.  It comes from spontaneous visions.  The
lowest
        phase of religious consciousness.
        2. Demonic logism.  A dead geometrization, the cult of death, the use
of
        rituals of black magic.
        3. Astral voluntarism.  The depiction of the human figure penetrated   
        with volitional impulses.  The intensity of forms with a static
posing of       the figure.  References to eternity.  The cult of stars. 
Prophetic               enlightenment.
        4. Idealistic empiricism.  All parts of the body are heterogeneous in
            purpose and form but, pierced with harmony, create a microcosm.
        5. Christian mysticism.  The human body is a symbol, a sign of
internal
        enlightenment.  Creation in grace.
        6. Absurd logism.  The human body is a path to Nothing. The            
    combination of forms outside of the tie to cosmic and moral world          
order.
        7. Metaphysical synthesism.




CHAPTER 3

    1.  The highest meaning, justification, and goal of art is the creation
of the icon.

    2.  True icon painting became possible after the Coming of Christ and the
Mystery of Golgotha.

    3.  The history of icon painting is indivisible from the history of the
Single Christian Church.  Secular art is to religious art as a parishioner is
to a clergyman.

    4.  Icon painting has before it the following tasks:
        Witness to the Revelation,
        strengthening of Dogma,
        path to understanding of the Heavenly Hierarchy.

    5.  The greatest confirmation of the grace of an icon is its
wonder-working.

    6.  The icon cannot hold by strength of tradition, but only by the
strength of the given Revelation, for "The spirit flies where it will."

    7.  All genuine moving forces of art are supersensible in origin.

    8.  The image of proto-Christian is the seed.  "Verily, verily, I say
unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth
alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."  (John, 12:24)  The
first three centuries of the history of Christianity are the sowing of the
Heavenly Kingdom on earth.  The following centuries are nothing more than
dying.  Now the time has come for the wheat to grow -- John's Christianity. 
It is not by chance that the symbols of early Christianity  were bread grains
and wine grapes; the symbol of the middle ages and the new time, the
Crucifixion.  The symbol of time to come will become the Resurrection and
descent of the Holy Ghost.

    9.  In the painting of the catacombs reddish and reddish brown tones
prevailed.  There is still a close tie to the palette of the ancient world. 
The next age would bring its understanding of blue and knowledge of its
symbolic meaning in religious art.  The genuine secret of this time is the
use of gold in icons, the creation of a gold background. 

    10.  The final sign of the death of the icon is the identification of
color with weight, with difficulty.  The icon cannot be painted from the
point of view of the forces of   heaviness.  The icon dies.  The painting
emerges.  Color acquires weight.

    11.  Art became like Lazarus.  Its resurrection is possible only through
the strength of Christ, the strength of the Christian impulse. Victory over
Death -- that is the destiny of art.  "And he that was dead came forth, bound
head and foot with graveclothes; and his face was bound about with a napkin. 
Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go."  (John, 11:44)

    12.  Otherwise this weight will absorb color once and for all into its
sepulchral darkness.  The world will cease to understand the wholeness of
Godly color, will cease altogether to heed the Revelation given to it through
color.  "They have eyes and see not, they have ears and hear not."

    13.  Only a return to Christian experience of color free of the forces of
weight, of the forces of the Spirit of weight, will make possible the
emergence of icon painting, the ability to show the world the Face of God.

    14.  The prohibition of the portrayal of Christ in naturalistic human
form belongs to the innermost knowledge of Christianity.  For the first
centuries of Christianity this was scrupulously observed, and Christ was
portrayed only through signs and and symbols, with no attempts made at a
portrait likeness.  For, in the words of St. Dionysus the Areopagite, the
student of apostle Paul, "in order to caution those who can ascend no higher
than visible beauty, Sts. Bogoslov resorted to such dissimilar likenesses
with the sacred goal of preventing our nature from remaining forever with low
images.  The very dissimilarity of the images awakens and raises our minds,
so that however attached some may be to the material world, they would find
it indecent and inconsistent with the truth that higher and Godly beings
could in fact resemble such low images.  However, let it not be forgotten
that nothing in the world is not perfect in its own way, for "all is
exceedingly good" as speaks the heavenly truth.
    15.  With the further development of the church, the icon took on a
double purpose -- first,  to conserve its age-old miracle-working character,
and secondly, another branch developed from the church's practical need to
provide images of its holy history in an accessible, visual form.  Later, the
first current went more or less underground, supporting its external
existence in Masonic symbols and diagrams, which are to future icon painting
what the catacomb paintings were to medieval art.   The second current
gradually managed to effect the turning of the icon into a painting.

    The painting does not have the force to support its existence by itself,
and so, having refused to be didactic and literary, it ceased to be a
painting as such.  The painting proved to be an analytical, dispersing
principle.  The question of whether or not this chaotic movement of elements
will end in their total dispersion into lifeless infinity or whether artists
will find within themselves an Orphic force which organizes and unites these
elements not simply into a system of construction of painterly forms, but
into a magically effective, miracle-working symbol, bearing witness to God.

    16.  Thinking in artistic abstractions (elements), close in their
anti-spirituality to scientific concepts, can only be countered by the free
and transfigured contemplation of Beauty.

    17.  At the same time the artist must develop in himself in the highest
degree a sense of the truth of Beauty, distinguishing it from an onslaught of
Adversaries.  In art, this ability can be called taste.  Taste is the guard,
protecting the mystery of creative completion from the invasion of powers
hostile to Beauty.

    18.  The true icon painter is distinguished from the naturalist in that
he is not the slavish copier of visions appearing before him, but
reverentially creates by means of those forces which give revelation, tied to
us through existence.  The naturalist copies.  The icon painter transforms.

    19.  The return to icon painting also carries with it an essential change
in the relationships of artists among themselves.  That which Van Gogh
dreamed of, a new brotherhood of artists, is possible only in a brotherhood
of icon painters.  Forged by strict traditions, the devout workshop of
medieval artists which has dissolved into individual incompatible parts,
often fighting among themselves,  - once again through freedom and love will
obtain its new unity.  "By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples,
if ye have love one to another."  (John, 13:35)

    20.  Striving to be an icon painter, the artist lives by faith in God, in
expectation of the approaching Second Coming, by untiring labor and by
perfecting his craft.

CHAPTER 4

1.  Style is a form of symbolization of Beauty.  Each style gives its own
individual and complete solution of the combination of the uncombinable in
the sphere of optical forms, both objective and non-objective.

2.  Styles are not equal in the fullness of their symbolization of Beauty. 
There are high and low styles.  At its basis, art of the ancient world
generates a caste structure.  Egyptian art is equivalent to the priestly
caste; the art of Greece, the warrior caste.  The art of peoples who at that
time were at a primitive stage of development can be compared to the Vaisya
caste.  The arts of the new world are clerical.
    There are three forms of the symbolization of styles (the combination of
the uncombinable):

    1. SPONTANEOUS-ORGANIC.   This form includes:  a) the effect of ancient
Eastern and Egyptian styles on the art of Ancient Greece; b) the effect of
Byzantine
on Italian style (this also includes the problem of dissolution of the
combination); c) the effect of Byzantine on Russian style; d) Arab on Spanish
style, and so on; e) while the effect of Byzantine on Italian style is an
example of the combination of utterly independent styles capable of
independent development, which led to an organic division, there is no basis
to speak of an independent and established Russian style, but only of a
metaphysically inborn sense of form, not strengthened from without; Russia
acted as the carrier of the receptive feminine impulse.  Usually the feminine
basis of each style is combined with the masculine, accepting it directly
from the spiritual world.  In the case of ancient Russian art, this masculine
spiritual basis was accepted through a Byzantine art already established in
its metaphysical canons.

    2. ECLECTIC.  Eclecticism is not necessarily the product of periods of
artistic weakness, as it can be seen as evidence of a personal approach to
art, when the artist makes a personal choice to attempt a new combination of
styles; he feels strong enough to choose his influences and combine images. 
An example of eclecticism in a style in a far from decadent state and strong
enough to permit itself the diversion and introduction of an alien stylistic
element, would be the interest in Chinese art during the period of French
Rococo.  The eclecticism of the second half of the 19th Century is the
eclectic of creative helplessness.

    3. METAPHYSICAL-SYNTHETIC. This style corresponds to the final
replacement of blood-familial ties by a brotherhood of the spirit.  From this
brotherhood of the spirit emerges an artist who relates to the styles of
previous ages, rising to contemplation through the form of their metaphysical
foundations. The artist utterly consciously accepts responsibility for his
choice.  No form appears in his work without having first undergone a
metaphysical metamorphosis.  Thanks to this metamorphosis, the artist is able
to combine previously uncombined styles.  Here, turning to antiquity does not
lead to dead classicism, but rather rediscovers the key to the melding and
conversion in a spiritual metamorphosis of elements of Ancient Greek,
Egyptian and Mesopotamian art, finds in the spirit a new combination of the
metaphysical principles of these styles, which were once in most active
interaction.  Another example could be the possibility of creative
interpretation of the medieval (Romanesque and Gothic) sense of form in
combination with the newest principles of deformation and using the tradition
of Byzantine-Russian art.  Thus the combination of European and Byzantine
art, which did not take place at the time, becomes possible for the artist
working in the framework of Metaphysical Synthesism.  The artist can turn
also to the low spontaneous-demonic styles.   In our time it is customary to
treat forms of African art casually, forgetting the demonic nature of this
art.  This becomes apparent when the principles of this art are examined not
from the position of aesthetic Empiricism, but from the position of 
theurgical recognition of aesthetic phenomena.  And the artist may use them
in his art, only if he is conscious of his role as missionary, capable of
bringing idol-worshippers to baptism.  Few are capable of bearing the cross
of an apostolic missionary, however, and therefore contemporary art is often
even against its will no more than a calling up and invasion of demonic
beings in the Christian foundations of western art.   The artist must take
even more care with Ahrimanic Mexican art, which openly serves the cult of
the god of death.  The very rhythm of forms has a cult meaning.  Thus it is
appropriate also to note the similarity between the rhythms of Mexican art
and diagrams of contemporary machines.  Thus the artist, rejecting the ritual
of black magic in the sphere of art, which hypnotizes and paralyses creative
consciousness today, must seek deliverance in a striving to theurgy,
consciously and through prayer ("Be strong and pray," in the words of the
Saviour), to the creation of the icon.

    4.  In the first chapter five types of symbolization were indicated --
the combination of the uncombinable in the sphere of optical concepts.  THE
FIFTH WAY - THE METAPHYSICAL SYNTHETIC - is as it were the point of balance
between the surrealistic method, working through automatism of the
subconscious, and nihilism with full consciousness, which builds its
combinations of the uncombinable out of the principles of the Absurd and
Nothingness.  These principles are Scylla and Charybdis, between which the
ship of metaphysical synthesism sails.  Each of these principles is based on
the negation of the real existence of Beauty.  The goal of their freedom in
the combination of the uncombinable is freedom from Beauty.  For the Beauty
of the Resurrection saves the world from death.  Surrealism and nihilism find
their freedom precisely in serving death, speaking through the subconscious.

    5.  If medieval art took as its point of departure Holy Week (the
Crucifixion), then Christian art of the future will take off from the Easter
structure of the soul, carrying the banner of victory over death. 

    6.  Both Surrealism and Nihilism emphasize their illustrative quality,
rejecting the painterly paths of creation, the paths of creation of purely
painterly forms (the path of Cezanne).  There is nothing more heinous to the
automaticism of surrealism than the deep painterly consciousness of Cezanne. 
The willful influence on the soul of another does not enter into the sphere
of pure painting .  Surrealism and Nihilism wish to transform the souls of
others,; their images are capable of  working in the depths of  souls,
lending them particular forms, leading them onto new paths, some of which
lead to worlds of tyranny and hallucinatory fantasy, others plunging into the
abyss and mysteries of material, in which reign the forces of death and
decay.  They wish to be greater than painting, and as a result turn out less
than art.

    7.  All of this does not mean that the achievements of Surrealism and
Nihilism will not be subject to the inevitable metaphysical law of
metamorphosis and are not capable of being transformed and used in the
practice of the new synthetic art.  The synthetic principle is not a
principle of flight and closed eyes, but
rather of active and happy transformation.  For the artist is either like
Orpheus and brings stones to life and tames wild beasts with his art, or like
Midas, rendering lifeless all that is alive with the touch of his fingers.

    8.  One of the contributions of both Surrealism and Nihilism is that they
first introduced the principle of free combination of the uncombinable, which
used to be tied by instructions to priests of ancient times, and then
stipulated by medieval esoteric symbolism.  When both of these had lost their
direct influence on art, art, not daring to use the advantages of its
freedom, fell into naturalism and creative imagination flickered out. 
Surrealism was the first to find in itself the strength and daring to use
this freedom orgiastically.  Nihilism was the first to introduce  Nothingness
as a principle of the combination of the uncombinable in art. 

    9.  The very experience of the perception of Nothingness is inevitable on
the path of perception of the spiritual, and methods of strengthening
Nothingness through the Absurd are necessary in the practice of Metaphysical
Synthesism.

    10.  But if Surrealism and Nihilism base their freedom on the forgetting
of the Face of the One God, then Metaphysical Synthesism offers its freedom
to the worship of Christ and sees the highest goal of art in the
wonder-working creation of the icon.


                                Translated by Sarah H. de Kay

METAPHYSICAL SYNTHESISM
by Mihail Chemiakin and Vladimir Ivanov
St. Petersburg 1967



                                                                       

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