The Divine and Artistic Ideal: Ideas and Insights for Cross-Cultural Aesthetic Education

by Ming Dong Gu

Introduction

People in different cultural traditions would praise an excellent work of art as a masterpiece that has attained the status of the divine. This is a practice inherited from the ancient past. In high antiquity, when people did not have sufficient knowledge of artistic creation, they attributed creative inspirations and superb art to gods. In ancient Greece people believed that all the arts were created by the Muses, daughters of the supreme god Zeus. Accordingly, they viewed divine creation as the highest order of representation and used the divine as the yardstick to measure artistic excellence. In early Greek thought Plato, through the mouth of Socrates, praised Homer as "the best and most divine of all." Citing the exquisite lyric poetry by Tynnnichs of Chalcis as evidence, he declared, "the god would show us, lest we doubt, that these lovely poems are not of man or human workmanship, but are divine and from the gods, and that the poets are nothing but interpreters of the gods, each one possessed by the divinity to whom he is in bondage."