This problem is best analysed by regarding the question of art. It is often and justly stated that the greatest contribution made by Western civilisation to humankind is its art: music, poetry, literature and the plastic and representational arts. Quite often, academics have criticized "Byzantium" for not having developed these art forms, especially in the secular field. But even here the Western tradition manifests its tremendous ability to be inconsistent. Western art is not necessarily an indication of the superiority of Western society, but the repudiation of that society. Great art in the sense that we perceive it today can only be produced in societies that have no other way of expressing the divine, the transcendent yet immanent, the absolutely fundamental in human existence. Humankind in the West, divorced from the immanence of the divine, nevertheless strives, as humankind, towards it through art. For art is not a question of originality, it is a question of grasping constants. It is what the great seventh-century Palestinian theologian Maximos the Confessor taught as being the "natural will" in humankind. Art today, however, has been relegated to the world of leisure and individual expression. It is not a reality. Art in the Western sense, namely as an object to be intellectually regarded rather that being experienced as "real", is not so much in evidence in the non-Western world because there the Social Myth takes care of the inherent need of the human being for experience of the divine. This is why a Picasso is so fundamentally different from a Byzantine icon. The Greek Divine Liturgy, to employ another example, is a work of art, but it is even greater than a symphony by Beethoven because it is immediately "relevant" in a concrete way to its observer, or rather to its participant.
