The article employs Nietzsche’s concept of creativity as the main axis of human existence in order to provide a philosophically substantiated overview of the understanding of the position of the artist and the arts in a society construed upon the state of crisis of the Christian-moral idea of transcendence, as it was developed in the 1940’s discourse on the arts. The topic is gradually approached from three perspectives. The starting point is the notion of transcendence as an anthropological constant and the notion of the artistic form as its realization. Part 2 develops the idea of an aesthetic, ‘translatingʼ relationship to the world, and finds the source of transcendence precisely in the organic character of human existence. Part 3 then pursues the possibilities of a recovery of the complementarity between the profane and the sacred, which, eventually, brings about a rehabilitation of the profane and launches the dynamics of the ambivalent position of the artist in society.