The Teaching of Hazrat Inayat Khan

Create a Bookmark

Very few in the world today link religion with art, or art with religion. But in point of fact art is much more important than the average person realizes it to be, in spite of the saying that art is what man makes and nature is what God makes. I would prefer to say that nature is what God makes as God, and art is what God makes as man. The artist who has arrived at some perfection in his art, whatever his art may be, will come to realize that it is not he who ever achieved anything; it is someone else who came forward every time. And when the artist produces a perfect thing, he finds it difficult to imagine that it has been produced by him; he can do nothing but bow his head in humility before that unseen power and wisdom which takes his body, his heart, his brain, and his eyes as its instrument. Whenever beauty is produced in art, be it music or poetry or painting or writing or anything else, one must never think that man produced it. It is through man that God completes His creation, thus there is nothing that is done in this world or in heaven which is not divine immanence, which is not the divine creation. It is the separating of that divine work which causes the perplexity that separates man from his Lord.


 
Topic
Sub-Topic