The secondary status of art in Western society is a symptom of that society's inability to maintain a Social Myth, an inability to regard the innate longings of humankind as being of greater importance than a social culture where only material existence is of any significance. Here we face a string of paradoxes: it appears that art, the greatest human expression of striving towards the divine operates in the context of the de-mythification of God. But art itself is the manifestation of a need for God, for Myth. Therefore a culture that rejects God but accepts art is ridiculous since God, or Myth as the entirety of human existence, is in essence [from the moment they are experienced and reflected in cultural forms] art. Where, however, there is no social context for Myth, there can only be an individual one. Only then is art in the Western sense born, namely in the sense of the artist rather than art in general, and of the audience rather than the congregation. Art becomes transformed into vanity. In this respect, it makes strange bedfellows with crime, narcotics and pornography.
Everything discussed above leads one to pose the question: Is it possible to write a history of societies such as the "Byzantine", given that the methods of modern historical research are grounded in a philosophical tradition so greatly at odds with the thought-world of "Byzantium" as to constitute a diametrically opposed "field of understanding"? Can objective, rational history really make any sense of the irrational in humankind - whether in the past or now? Where are we to find a solution? I suggest that there is no solution to this problem. Indeed the "problem" only exists within the conceptual universe of the Western historical tradition, whose idea of history as an objectively approachable entity is patently silly. ...
Many moderns condemn religion as equal to fanaticism, but the trial of war criminals they advocate surely presupposes the existence of ethics, and for these to be binding on all humans, they must have their source in an "imperative", and "outer reality" which can only be termed, in human parlance, God. By refusing to acknowledge this fact, the Western historical tradition is not only incapable of coming to terms with humanity, but is obstructing the process by insisting on a supposedly objective and inquisitive approach to the most subjective plasm and paradoxical process that exist on this planet: the human being and the never-ending attempt to reconcile opposites, a reconciliation symbolically expressed in Christian terms by the Last Judgment namely the very Last Things.
Let us finish with some wise words from the Philokalia. "It is man's appointed task to make manifest in himself the great mystery of the divine intention to show how the divided extremes in created things may be reconciled in harmony, the near with the far, the lower with the higher, so that through gradual ascent all are eventually brought into union with God."
