Five universal images of the architectural and landscape frame of the temple complex

Abstract

The article proves that the universal organization of sacral space asa garden not only results from the dominant religious ideas, but also determines the mode of their perception in the course of a person’s self-knowledge formation,or, in the language of anthropology, the formation of human consciousness. The structuredness of this space makes it possible to understand both the boundaries of a person’s awareness of his own nature when confronted with new knowledge,and the person’s readiness to accept new knowledge while finding the boundaries of his own nature. The garden as a sacred space creates a situation in which a person is not turned to the nature of things, but to the account of the fundamental properties of his own nature. With regard to the theoretical conclusions of M. Eliade and I.A. Ilyin it can be argued that universal religious experience is the experience of systematizing initial natural intuitions, in order to perceive anew knowledge about oneself, which at a certain point in history becomes the knowledge of Revelation, or, in another theoretical system, the norms of his life that are outside of man. Theoretical art criticism has made it possible to isolate such necessary structural universals as the images of the “fence”, the “source”,the “central alley”, the “heavenly vault,” the “sacred grove,” and the study of the specific interrelationship of those five images makes it possible to understand the possibility of changes in aesthetic settings in the collision with such a limiting stable construction in the history of art, as a sacred garden.