The Sacred in Life and Art

by Philip Sherrard

We are becoming increasingly aware that the forms of our life and art have over the last few centuries been characterized by the progressive loss of precisely that sense which gives virtually all other civilizations and cultures of the world their ubdying lustre and significance. This book is an attempt to clarify what is demanded if we are to have a chance of achieving this. It examines the nature and significance of the sacred itself, why the sense of its presence has been so disastrously eroded from our conciousness over recent centuries. This book is an attempt to clarify what is demanded if we are to have any chance of achieving this. It examines the nature and significance of the sacred itself, why the sense of its presence has been so disastrously eroded from our conciousness over recent centuries.

Genres: Art, Theology, Philosophy, Christianity, Religion

180 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1990

About the author

Philip Sherrard was educated at Cambridge and London and taught at the universities of both Oxford and London, but he made Greece his permanent home. A pioneer of modern Greek studies and translator, with Edmund Keeley, of Greece's major modern poets, he wrote many books on Greek, philosophical and literary themes. He was also the translator and editor (with G.E.H. Palmer and Bishop Kallistos Ware) of the Philokalia, a collection of texts in five volumes by the spiritual masters of the Orthodox Christian tradition.

A profound, commited and imaginative thinker, his theological and metaphysical writings embrace a wide range of subjects, from the study of the spiritualizing potential of sexual love to the restoration of a sacred cosmology which he saw as the only way to escape from the spiritual and ecological dereliction of the modern world.