At any event, it is man who is lost. The same is true today, when, having gone to the other extreme of the individual who does not see fit to become a member of the human race, we pursue the equal abstraction of humanity, and in fighting to save humanity savagely hack the human being to pieces. A mere glance at the mass myths of our times is sufficient to convince us of our everyday mistakes from which we never learn. In both cases, whether under the flag of the individual or the banner of humanity, it is always man who disappears or is mutilated: now with the sword of Gog, now with the axe of Magog. The middle way: man is a creature of the middle. He follows Heraclitus' path without return, descending the uphill slope and climbing the downhill slope, dying in life and living in death, "immortal mortals, mortal immortals". Such men do not surrender to abstract ideas, to the empty creed of the individual, to the salvation (salvation by the Devil?) of humanity by force. They will not run aground on the reefs of ephemeral philosophers or false prophets. As Pikionis puts it, they stand "on the fiery ground of reality" (ibid.).
God placed man at the centre of creation, "a second world, a small world within a greater", according to St John Damascene, one of Pikionis' spiritual guides, and made him "…king of all things upon earth, ruled himself from above; earthly and heavenly, transient and immortal".
Pikionis found such people in the highest or official forms of each great art whose monuments he studied, but he also discovered them in unofficial or eternal art, in art's most humble form, the vernacular. Official art shows us man as king by virtue of his mind, while vernacular art shows us him as king by virtue of his instinct. Both forms are always present in cultures which have a common spiritual background or a shared faith - that is, cultures which presuppose what Pikionis called a "human set" or "life set", where all "the partial truths are interlinked and all stem from the depths, from the essence of that set" (ibid.). I have called vernacular art 'eternal' because although official art often comes to a halt or disappears, the vernacularis never lost. In these two manifestations of art, Pikionis saw the spirituality of man in actu. Indeed, he displayed particular care and kindly interest in the most humble form of art, the vernacular, which he saw as the mother and wet-nurse of all other art, whether small, moderate or great, which he viewed as holding the keys to truth and necessity, and which he believed was the perennial fount of all physical and metaphysical teachings. The sweet-tongued teacher could become relentless when recalling our culture to order or reprimanding it; most of the architectural works of that culture, which sprang up in this country at a far remove from the ancestral heritage (that which can still be drawn on creatively, not that which is exhausted) and from the hard school of self-knowledge, were sweepingly condemned by Pikionis as "desk work", as "doodles in pencil on paper, transplanted into this sacred earth of ours" (ibid.).
Pikionis had strict words of instruction for prospective sophists, and even for his chosen disciples: "You will never find great art up in the mountains or in the villages, nor will you find art which is always outstandingly beautiful. But it will always be absolutely natural - that is, true - and it will always be the gift of God, and so just as nature is not always full of beauty, so the natural life is not an unmixed blessing. That is the way it is, and you have to conform with it; if you cannot, that is because your body or your mind is sick" (ibid.)
Pikionis based his particular preference for art in its vernacular form on necessity: as a thinker of strong constitution, he never indulged in ill-timed nostalgia for the past or in catatonic leanings towards lyricism, in whatever foundering form. And that necessity, which emerged in Greece right from the start, was as described below.
As soon as the Greeks raised their heads from slavery and looked around themselves, it was immediately apparent that only unofficial or eternal art, art in its humblest, vernacular form, had stood by them and helped them throughout their lengthy spell of death in life, Calvos' "centuries of night". In its much-scorned forms, it had preserved - together with more than a few proud remnants of earlier ages - the lares et penates of the nation of the Greeks (as natural models) and of the human race (as metaphysical content). No art in its official and higher form was created during this period, all such potential had been locked away centuries before, and the seed of life had lodged in the simplified patterns of folk wisdom or in the art which, as Pikionis puts it, is art "thanks rather to the absence of art than to its presence" (ibid.).
Of course, art in its higher or official form was present during that period in the great wall paintings of certain monasteries - Mt Athos, Meteora - and such art was a continuation of Byzantine art, but in a covert, unofficial, confined manner- intra muros, we might say. Roughly speaking, the trajectory of those travelling masters, based on Crete (which the Turks took from the Venetians in 1669), crossed the firmament from 1453 to 1700. It was an exception. It was a comforting, but falling, star. And the rule remains that, as we know, the Greeks were unable within the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire to build or repair their churches unless they had permission, and then only in purely Christian areas. Still less can we speak of imperial art (without an empire), of even state art (without a state), of palace art (without a palace) or of metropolitan art (without a metropolis).
Driven by necessity, then, Pikionis devoted his attention to Greek vernacular art, just as Solomos - for the same reason - had devoted his attention to the vernacular language. Pikionis was among the first in his field to realise that the start had to be made at the bottom, among the foundations, with what had been preserved and handed down in a living manner and was there to be seen, and that the unshakeable creative basis on which we are compelled to stand if we wish to produce viable art is none other that the double-headed tradition (spirit and letter, metaphysical and physical) that the wise and nameless people has preserved intact down to the present. Only necessity bestows true freedom; licence and arbitrariness forge man's bonds. Pikionis had this to say of the life (and art) of the people: "That life is so full of the necessary and useful that there is no room for the arbitrary or the superfluous" (ibid.). And he concludes with a reference to the world of architecture, once more guided by Solomos: "The people, which handed down its words to authors, bestows these shapes upon us, as words in our plastic language" (ibid.).
Pikionis wished to speak the language of architecture. And he spoke it, as Solomos spoke the language of poetry. Both of them drew on the words or the shapes of the people. And they spoke. Others merely stammer.
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