Magical Geology

by Nicu Ilie

Aesthetic values ​​are constantly changing, not just their substance, but their very status. In his analysis of medieval art, Gombrich observes the centrality of a value now forgotten: grace. It is opposed to the beautiful, a modern (post-Renaissance) value that, in theory, still governs contemporary art. But even the grace notes a certain moment in the history of the culture, when an esoteric (or just ascetic) Christianity was dominant. Grace is ethereal, unearthly; it started from a contempt of worldliness and regarded the eternal life, the life after life, as the truth; and grace itself, as an aesthetic and spiritual value, was a brief and quick glance at these truths and these essences which cannot really be known to living men. It is a special case of magical devotion, in which nature is completely depreciated before the supernatural.

However, many of Christianity’s sacred sites are in extraordinary landscapes. Meteora, Lallibela, Cappadocia or in France – Mont Saint Michel, Marmoutiers, Saint-Jean, Rocamadour. There are dozens or hundreds of other examples – famous or not, big or small. In fact, most of the very old monasteries had amazing landscapes, some still visible today, others altered by human transformations or natural disasters.

There are places where the supernatural could be found in nature itself.

This practice of Christianity is relevant more because the Christian doctrine (more precisely: the Christian doctrine of those times) externalized the good-truth-beautiful in transmundane worlds. And yet, the extraordinaryness of some landscapes or simply their flawless beauty created the sensation of touching the intangible, of going out of the world, of the abstract or the absolute.

Extraordinary geology has often taken on magical connotations. Christians simply could not help but resonate with an ancient practice of sacralizing the beautiful and extraordinary.

In aesthetics, values ​​keep changing because the cognitive and ideational foundation of reception is changing. However, some things never changed, only the ways in which they were named and conceptualized.

The exploitation of the landscape is an undeniable example. In the very ancient world, landscapes with je-ne-sais-quoi were part of local legends and inspired religious or folkloric motifs that have been perpetuated to this day. Dragons, goblins, trolls, or gods and nymphs, express (along with hundreds of other mythological figures) first and foremost the ability to intrigue and captivate some landscapes. Later, fantastic geology became the seat of religious worship in almost all religions. The geological extraordinariness was often augmented architecturally and symbolically, to capture as many cultic, religious or ideological resonances as possible.

The gradual desacralization of the world has, in most cases, extracted the landscape from religious practice and delivered it as a purely aesthetic object. Especially painting (and today its successors: photography, cinematography and digital art) was able to capture and transport the landscape from nature itself into urban spaces – first in sacred places (churches and monasteries), then in homes and offices. As man moved further and further away from nature, nature became an object of interest and (micro) veneration in everyday spaces.

Chinese painting discovered the value of pictorial landscape as early as 1800 years ago. In Europe, the landscape became significant only after 1600. But today it is ubiquitous. Realist, hyperrealist, abstract, surrealist, dreamlike, symbolic, technical (through impressionism, pointillism, etc.). In works of great artistic value or in those that can barely be accepted as touching on art – landscape and geography retain their fascination and, technically speaking, their magic. Maybe the painting fell into disuse. Maybe landscape photography is considered a minor genre. Maybe in cinematography the landscape is just a connection between the scenes. But the omnipresence of the landscape, which we often don’t even realize, is undeniable. It dominates vacation pictures, has supremacy in tourist offers and, for those glued to their phone or computer, is inseparable from screen-savers and wall-papers.

Not only space is sacred/sacralizable. Geology is an essential component of natural magic because its durability guarantees the repeatability of human experience. However, time – if we are to use the concept from physics – or weather, at certain times, repeatable (sunsets, etc.) or catastrophic (“The Great Wave”) causes the same pre-conscious and pre-voluntary aesthetic richness that can only be labeled like magic.

Aesthetics hardly theorizes the landscape because, in essence, it is not the result of an intention. We now have the conceptual tools to discuss landscape aesthetics, but for a long time we didn’t have them. Aesthetics began as a direction of practices addressed to artists and only then became a metaphilosophy of art. At bottom it still remains (as its Greek etymology shows) a science (a knowledge) of stimulating the senses to produce (convey) an emotion or conception. Today we believe in “open work”, which can be decoded independently of the artistic intention (starting [also] from the observation that part of the codes are unconsciously used by artists, instinctually or from insufficiently catabolized psychic starts). But even the open work presupposes a creative will and coding—whether we know it or not; that we care about or not. A landscape has none of these.

The aesthetics of the landscape, where it exists (and I do not mean landscaping, which is a completely different type of manipulation of the landscape, which requires a separate discussion) transcends any creative will. It simply exists. And by existing it stimulates the senses, perception, knowledge. In the case of a natural landscape, beauty-balance-extraordinariness – whatever term you prefer – the je-ne-said-quoi precedes (in the singular, being one and the same) and causes the first aesthetic start, the first artistic engine: reception. It stimulates the senses and, through them, captures experiences. It sets objective benchmarks of all memories – cognitive and emotional. This magic of spaces (before and regardless of its fixation in paintings and images) defines the first and deepest cultural instinct, the one in which art, religion and philosophy are far from separate.

Illustration: Near Meteoras – Greece. Own image