Imagining the Absolute: The ‘Veil of Maya’ as Semiotic Device

Through dialogue with three philosophers and theologians, Luigi Pareyson, Emmanuel Levinas, and Hans Urs von Balthasar, the paper seeks to answer four questions: 1) Is spiritual life art? 2) Is art communication with transcendence? 3) Is communication with transcendence revelation of the absolute? 4) Is revelation of the absolute communion with pain? The paper claims that 1) spiritual life is, in a certain sense, art because it bears an aesthetic character; because it is an exercise in “formativity”: as a result, organism, and model; 2) if spiritual life is art and if art is formativity, the infinitude of transcendence does not shine from the beauty of a façade, a painting, or a statue, but from the beauty of a face, a human face whose opposition with mine, established by language, does not impose a form on me, but elicits freedom of my goodness, gift, and hospitality; 3) if spiritual life is an exercise in formativity and if communication is the lieu where form is transcended into visage and offers a glimpse of infinitude, such transcendent infinitude and infinite transcendence can manifest themselves only as transparency, as light that shines through the veil of language and communication, as revelation; 4) it is on the basis of this aesthetic-theological discourse that one can reject not only the an-aesthetics but also the an-aesthesia of evil, fight against one’s own acquiescence to it, and see the suffering face of the Other as the truthful revelation of the absolute, as the most precious occasion of communion with transcendence, and as a call for truth, goodness, and beauty.