This is second part of the chapter on the Workers from La Tradizione Romana [The Roman Tradition] by Guido De Giorgio. Here he describes the nature of work and art, and their relation to the divine. I have translated the root lavor- as labor and oper- as work to be consistent.
The Worker caste includes every assignment operative in the individuals who do not belong to the two preceding castes which constitute the base of traditional society: authority and power. When we speak of activity, for this last caste, we mean every type of labor both of the strictly material order like the crafts and of those seemingly more elevated like the professions, since both are remunerated individually. In the two higher castes, we do not speak of truly individual activity since their members work constitutively for the maintenance of the two higher powers, while here, in the last caste, it is a question of an active personal determination whose fruit, however, remains limited to the individual order, while contributing to the general order. We are in the domain of Forms, the last determination of visible reality whose essential characteristic is individualization. In this caste, as in the two higher castes, persons can be included who in reality should not belong to it, which is the indication of the current disorder due precisely to the lack of traditional unity whose most obvious characteristic is the arbitrary distribution of wealth. But in a truly traditional society in which the castes are rigorously established, remunerated labor should be limited to the majority, i.e., to those who neither know how to nor can do otherwise, incapable of the pure contemplation of the Priests and the pure activity of the Warriors.
It is therefore necessary to insist on the analogy between the various castes and the three degrees of reality, i.e., Silence, Rhythms, and Forms, in order to understand their true purpose. If the Forms constitute the most exterior part, that does not mean that their determination does not reflect, in a thousand aspects, the invariable unity that is the one true reality. Every form is a symbol and every symbol is the vehicle of a profound truth whose importance must never be forgotten. So-called objects, things, are likewise mirrors that variously reflect the unity of the creative rhythm in multiple aspects. Man, in ordinary life, makes use of tools that he himself constructs but whose symbolic meaning is currently unknown, while in a traditional society this meaning is precisely what is more important because it provides all the value to the thing without which it would be deprived of universal purpose. Hence, the necessity that the tool be patiently constructed and not serially, with an individual labor that itself is the symbol of the effort through which it is elevated to a higher reality of an absolutely spiritual order.
It will be easy for everyone to distinguish the value of an object, the fruit of patient and assiduous work, quite different from that accomplished by a brutal, external, artificial, and sterile process like an assembly line. Hence, the artistic beauty of the most humble tools of an era and the banality of what is produced in modern times by the machine. Previously, there was art, the profound meaning of symbolic correspondence, and the indicator of this was exactly the care, the commitment with which every object was constructed by the strictly personal work of the craftsman with a diligent technique, in strict analogy with the spiritual renewal wrought in the contemplative and ascetic domain. Every craft then symbolically represented the fixation, in Forms, of a process of an absolutely spiritual order related to a higher reality of which the material world is an appearance, in the strictly etymological sense: man, the creator, makes use precisely of so-called matter—not neglecting the etymology of this word—that is the last, final concretion of reality, in order to redeem it from its apparent blindness and lead it to the transparency of an analogical correspondence with a higher world. So that while in the already made Forms among which man lives, that are the patterns of the Rhythms, are likewise found mirrors of the higher reality, the objects, the things, the tools that man constructs are new forms and represent the work that he must undertake laboriously in order to liberate himself from his humanity and restore in himself the divine state. Ars et labor: art is the knowledge of the analogical relationships that govern Forms, by means of Rhythms, and achieve them, i.e., make them porous, transparent, to the breath of God who expresses them, while labor is exactly this effort of enucleation of the deep, hidden, veiled reality, protected in matter from which it must shine through to reveal itself to man. There is thus a contact between the interior—man—and the exterior—nature—which is resolved in a single reality of realized and experienced expression, therefore abolished in its crude materiality and restored to its true origin and purpose.
Thus understood in its profound meaning that justifies it and makes it necessary, art is a redeeming purification that reestablishes the creative rhythm obfuscated and neglected by the preoccupations of ordinary life. This life, in an absolute way, is a death, not a life, i.e., the avulsion of the world and man from the true reality of the world and of man realizable only if hidden in divine reality whose origin it symbolically expresses.
Tools, the most common objects of use, were not created for the satisfaction of our needs, but only to express the analogical relations between appearance and reality, between what appears and what is, between the world and God: their practical efficiency is of the second order and is of value only for true serfs, i.e., for those whose intellectual myopia is so widespread that it results in the exclusion of every truth beyond the environment of their terrestrial life. If, in a state of primitive perfection, it is necessary to think of the exclusion of every order in order to reach or extend what was already given, if man, in this state, gathered the fruits of the earth and fed himself with them and did not complete, with his work, what naturally surrounded him, in later stages, distancing himself from this original standard, he had to reconstruct the access to the divine from which he had fallen and thus a new necessity: art.
To those who know how to examine in depth what we said, the relationship between art and life will appear evident, initially unified so that art was the life itself considered as a rite, then increasingly more discordant, life was reduced to its lowest function and art limited to those who cannot decide to reject truth, up until the current time in which life is really death and art, deprived of every sacred and realizing character, is an expressive monstrosity wherein all the misery of the world and man is reflected.
Art is not redeemed by making of it a need of the spirit: the spirit, and in an absolute way, is nothing if not the Spirit of God, i.e., the breath that is in life, that penetrates and informs the whole man, that makes him feel, act, think according to God, not according to his own humanity. What is human remains human, therefore purely bestial and inferior, which is the level of this humanity, just as everything that is iron remains iron from the most common utensil to the most refined artistic product, both able to lead back to the unity of origin when their exteriority is removed. In fact, what constitutes art for modern men is precisely exteriority instead of the sacred, symbolic content, what this exteriority expresses by relating to a reality of a transcendent order in the absolute meaning of the word and to a truth of divine order.
Man, in the development of his human faculties, remains man, i.e., nothing: what he feels, lives, accomplishes, thinks, if not beyond the human environment, is destined to perish because it cannot extend beyond time that is succession and beyond space that is materiality.
He remains closed in this prison that he adorns with the most lavish funereal pictures, so that to the extent he embellishes it, so much more will the tomb will exist for him as long as he lives: but, after the dissolution of the body, who is there to take care to lead him into the place of truth, dooming him eternally to that death that he had already experienced in life by rejecting every effort for the surpassing of human limitations. Homo humus: as long as he remains earthbound, he will be doomed to fecundate the earth and to perpetuate the lucifugous illusion that is the detrital, lower world: it is necessary that he clear up the illusory obscurity, due to ignorance, in the light of truth and that he expresses from himself what is hidden, i.e., the other half, which could mean the passage from the archaic word hemi, referring to the general meaning of half, to homo, where the circularity of the o represents the realizing universalization of all the human faculties transposed into the divine and integrated in a essentially superhuman plane. Art is the expression of this transposition that is a true and proper transformation, i.e., a surpassing of the form that is obtained by replacing it in the plane of its normal purpose as symbol of a higher truth. But it is necessary that art is in everything and not in part, that it is not exiled from life and that it does not represent only what we could call the kingdom of fringe utopias, but rather it imprints on the most humble of objects, tools, the seal of its symbolic purpose.
This is craftsmanship, these are the crafts: to depict in every material substance, with a labor of diligent understanding, the intimate, symbolic value, expressing a truth of a higher order, from agricultural instruments and those of the weaving mill, from the most common objects of wood and earth to the construction of house and temple. They are various modes of expression of a unique reality that signify as all the ways lead to God if truly it is God who is sought and not a simple derivative human more or less dressed up and idealized for the use that one wants to make of it.
Classical article.