Shambhala is a mythical kingdom described in the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism as a place of sanctuary. Paintings show the kingdom isolated from the rest of the world by a ring of mountains. At the center of the kingdom is the capital Kalapa, itself surrounded by another ring of mountains. The palace of the king has roofs of solid gold and is adorned with pearls and other jewels. Outside the capital, rivers divide the kingdom into eight regions arranged like the petals of a lotus flower. Each of these regions contains 12 principalities, so that 96 princes pay allegiance to the king of Shambhala. The illustration shows a Tibetan painting of Shambhala from the 19^th Century in the Musée Guimet. Many travellers have tried unsuccessfully to find Shambhala. It remains a spiritual rather than physical place.     

 

The Geological Upheaval

About 40 million years ago the northward-moving Indian tectonic plate collided with the Eurasian plate. The edge of the Indian plate was buckled and forced upward to form the Himalaya mountains. As the Indian plate moved under the Eurasian plate its surface rose to form Tibetan plateau.

The Himalayas, stretching in a crescent from the Indus River in the west to the Brahmaputra River in the east (shaded light yellow in the following map) are the highest mountains in the world. They contain Mount Everest and nine other peaks greater than 8000 meters above sea level. The only other mountains with such height are the Karakorams with K2 as their highest peak. The Tibetan Plateau, a vast elevated region north of the Himalayas has an average height of about 4500 meters above sea level, and is often known as the “roof of the world.”

Lake Manasarovar in the southwest part of the plateau is the world’s highest freshwater lake. Its name – “lake of consciousness” – comes from the Hindu myth that it was created out of the mind of Brahma. Just north of the lake is the isolated Mount Kailash (“crystal”), which may be the Mount Meru (“wonderful”) of Hindu mythology. Meru is described as the central axis of the world, and the abode of Shiva and his consort Parvati.    

Glaciers in the Himalayas are the source of many of Asia’s largest rivers. The region near Lake Manasarovar and Mount Kailash provides sources for the Indus, Sutlej, Ghaghara (which is a tributary of the Ganges) and the Yarlung Tsangpo (which becomes the Brahmaputra) Rivers. The Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween and Irrawaddy Rivers drain from the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau (not shown on the map).

Colliding Religions

The main ancient religions of the Indian peninsula are Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism. Hinduism began in the valley of the Indus River around 3000 BCE and became codified in the Vedas written between 1500 and 500 BCE. The main tenet of Hinduism is the concept of dharma, a principle that both drives the universe and ordains what is right and wrong. Individuals experience a continual process of life, death and rebirth, known as samsara. Karma ensures that all actions have their just and necessary outcome, although this might not happen within one lifetime but in a later reincarnation. There is no single divinity but a multitude of forces that each play their part in the unfolding of the universe. The universe goes through long cycles of creation, preservation, decline and destruction.

Jainism developed from 800 to 500 BCE as an offshoot of Hinduism. It denied the gods – atheism – rejected violence of any kind – ahimsa – and declined worldly pleasures – ascetism. This was (and is) a religion for the few rather than for the masses.

Buddhism was founded by Siddhartha Gautama who lived in northeast India around 500 BCE. He renounced his royal upbringing, and through meditation and ascetism attained release from samsara and union with the cosmos in a state of anatta (non-self). He then taught his disciples the basic principles whereby they could do the same. Suffering is caused by desire for worldly things; one can escape from suffering by rejecting desire and following the “eightfold path.” Many were attracted to this new religion and by the time of the Emperor Ashoka (3^rd Century BCE), it had spread throughout the Indian peninsula, crossed the sea to Sri Lanka and travelled east to what is now Afghanistan. Travelling along the Silk Road, Buddhism reached China by the 1^st Century CE, from where it later expanded into Korea and Japan. Buddhists from both India and Sri Lanka spread their religion to southeast Asia by the 3^rd Century CE and thence to Indonesia and the Philippines. The following map is from the World History website

Islam was founded in 622 CE in Arabia and soon began to expand rapidly. The first incursions into the region of the Indus valley occurred in the 8^th Century. Multiple invasions followed.  By the 16^th Century, the northern part of India was under the rule of the Mughal Empire. The court of Akbar the Great (1542-1605 CE) attracted scholars and artists. The following paintings show on the left Akbar receiving the Akbarnama (a history of his reign), and on the right Akbar discussing religion with Hindu scholars and two Portuguese missionaries. Both paintings were part of the Akbarnama (1605).

Notable in the above illustration is the absence of any Buddhists. By the time of Akbar Buddhism had essentially vanished from India. The Muslim invaders had destroyed Buddhist monasteries and slaughtered the monks. The holy sites in northern India – Sarnath and Bodh Gaya – had fallen into ruins. Most Buddhist temples had become places of Hindu worship. Remnants of Buddhist culture survived in the south, and many monks retreated to mountain sanctuaries in the far northern India and Tibet. Many scholars have tried to explain why Hinduism survived the Muslim onslaught but not Buddhism (e.g., Hazra, 1995; Sarao, 2012). Probably the most important difference was that Hinduism was a religion for the masses and Buddhism a religion for monks. Hinduism provided festivals and celebrations whereas Buddhism offered only suffering and ascetism. Another reason was that Hinduism was pluralistic in its belief. Hinduism worshipped many different gods in many different ways, whereas Buddhism tended toward rigid doctrines. Perhaps laxness in the monastic orders also contributed to their downfall: why should the people support the debauchery of monks.

 

The Wheel of Time

Buddhism initially reached Tibet in the 7^th Century CE. With the Muslim invasions of India from the 8^th to the 15^th Centuries many more Buddhists fled to safety in the northern mountains. They assimilated some of the religious traditions indigenous to Tibet and many of the ideas of Hinduism. The resultant doctrines became the basis of the Vajrayana (“diamond vehicle”) branch of Buddhism, different from the Mahayana (“great vehicle) branch of Buddhism which spread into China and the Theravada (“doctrine of the elders”) branch which spread to Sri Lanka and southeast Asia.

The Tibetan Buddhist teachings were recorded in the Kalachakra (“Wheel of Time”) Tantra (“weaving/teaching”), which likely originated in the 10^th or 11^th Century CE. Its contents are only known through later commentaries such as the Paramadibuddha (“Supreme First Buddha”) and the Vimalaprabha (“radiance of purity”). According to the former, the Kalachakra teachings were first given by the Gautama Buddha to Suchandra the king of Shambhala who had come to seek instruction from the enlightened one. (Newman, 1985).

Shambhala is described as a country north of the Himalayas:

Shambhala is shaped like a giant lotus having eight petals. The outer perimeter of the entire lotus is formed by a circle of great snow mountains, as is the perimeter of the pericarp that makes up the central third of the country. The interstices of the lotus petals are formed by rivers and snow mountains, and the entire land is covered with beautiful lakes, ponds, meadows, forests, and groves.

The central pericarp of Shambhala is elevated a bit above the surrounding lotus petals, and on it stands the capital of Shambhala, Kalapa. Kalapa is twelve leagues in breadth, and its palaces are made of gold, silver, turquoise, coral, pearl, emerald, moon-crystal, and other precious stones. Kalapa blazes with such a luster that the full moon is a mere pale disc overhead. The light given off by the mirrors on the outside of the palaces is so bright that night cannot be distinguished from day. The thrones inside the palaces are made from the finest beaten gold, and from the gold of the Jambu River. In front of the thrones are crystal looking-glasses that allow one to see far into the distance. On the ceilings are special circular crystal skylights that allow one to observe the palaces, gods, and parks of the sun, moon, and stars, as well as the rotating celestial spheres, and even the zodiac, all as though they were right in front of one. Surrounding the thrones in the palaces are lattice-work screens made of sandalwood that exude fragrances that scent the air for miles. The couches and cushions are all made of the finest, most precious fabrics. (Newman, 1985, pp 54-55).

The following illustration shows two representations of Shambhala. That on the left is from a 16^th Century scroll in the Rubin Museum and that on the right is a 19^th-Century painting. Both owe their form to the Tibetan mandalas used to demonstrate the workings of the cosmos.

Shambala was actually first mentioned in Hindu scriptures as the place where Kalki, the next avatar of Vishnu will be born. These scriptures prophecy that when the people of the world degenerate into greed, malice and immorality, Kalki will lead an army of the righteous to defeat the barbarians and establish “a new golden age of righteousness, prosperity and social order” (Newman, 1995). Buddhists also had proposed that a new Buddha, named Maitreya (“compassionate”) would be born in the future to restore peace to a troubled world. Tibetan Buddhism fused the ideas of Kalki and Maitreya to provide a prophecy that couldcomfort the people in the days when the Muslim invasions were destroying their way of life. (Newman, 1995; Belka, 2006):

The Wheel of Time Tantra borrowed the Hindu myth of Kalki and adapted it to current religious and political conditions. The Buddhist refashioning of the prophetic myth says the Buddha taught the Wheel of Time Tantra to Sucandra, the bodhisattva emperor of the vast Central Asian empire of Sambhala. The eighth Successor to the throne of Sambhala, Yasas, unified all of the brahman families of Sambhala within a single Buddhist Adamantine Vehicle clan. For this he was given title Kalkin, which in the Buddhist myth means “chieftain.” To this day the Kalkins of Sambhala reign in their Central Asian paradise on earth, preserving the Wheel of Time teachings from the forces of barbarism without. At the end of the current age of degeneration, when the barbarian Muslims have overrun the earth outside of Sambhala, the last Kalkin, Cakrin, will assemble a great army headed by the kings of Sambhala and the Hindu gods. Kalkin Cakrin and his army—elephants, chariots, cavalry, and infantry—will come out from Sambhala to eradicate the forces of Islam. After the great Armageddon, when the barbarian horde has been obliterated, Cakrin will return to Sambhala to initiate a new age of perfection, Buddhism will flourish, people will live long, happy lives, and righteousness will reign supreme. (Newman, 1995).

At the beginning of Cakrin’s reign a wheel of iron will fall from the sky (Bernbaum, 1980, p 238). He is therefore also known as Rudra Cakrin (“wrathful one with the wheel”). The following 19^th Century Tibetan painting now in the Musée Guimet shows Cakrin leading the forces of Shambhala out to overcome the barbarians:

 

European Explorations of Central Asia

In 1603 the Portuguese Jesuit missionary Bento de Goes travelled north from the court of Akbar the Great to Kabul and then traversed the Hindu Kush mountains with a caravan travelling on the legendary Silk Road, finally reaching China in 1605, the first European to travel the route since Marco Polo (Wessels, 1924; MacGregor, 1970).

The first Europeans to travel north through the Himalayas to Tibet were the Jesuit missionaries Antonio de Andrade and Manuel Marques (Pereira, 1921; Wessels, 1924; MacGregor, 1970). In 1624 they travelled north from Delhi, following the Ganges River towards its source in the Himalayas. The passed through the Mana Pass, one of the highest mountain-passes in the world (5632 meters), and finally reached Tsaparang, the capital of the Buddhist Kingdom of Guge in southwestern Tibet. The kingdom had been founded in the 10^th Century. The capital was built on prominent pyramid-shaped rock near the origins of the Sutlej River. De Andrade described the surrounding land as fertile with multiple irrigation channels. The king of Guge allowed the Jesuits to build a small Christian chapel there. However, in 1630 the kingdom of Ladakh just to the west of Guge invaded and laid the country to waste. Today, Tsaparang remains as a striking ruin in a bleak and deserted land. Wood (2005) has suggested that this ancient Buddhist mountain refuge led to the Tibetan myth of Shambhala and the modern idea of Shangri La.

In 1661 the Austrian Jesuit Johann Grueber and his companion the Belgian Albert d’Orville travelled from northwest China into Tibet, crossing the Tangla Mountain range to visit Lhasa. They were the first Europeans to meet with the Dalai Lama (“ocean master”), Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso, the fifth in his lineage. At the time of their visit he was supervising the construction of Potala Palace, the official residence of the Dalai Lamas from 1649 until 1959. Grueber and d’Orville then travelled south, traversed the Himalayas to arrive in Kathmandu. After exchanging gifts with the King of Nepal, they descended into India. 

The following illustration shows on the left the Potala palace, and a photograph of the Dalai Lama’s quarters by Luca Galuzzi. The Dalai Lama, who has not been there since 1959, is represented by his robes. On the right is an 18^th Century portrait of the Dalai Lama surrounded by episodes from his life running counterclockwise from his incarnation at the upper left. Each Dalai lama is considered a manifestation of the great bodhisattva Avalokitsevara (“god who looks down”) The construction of the Potala monastery is depicted in the lower left. The Dalai Lama holds in his right hand a sceptre (vajra, thunderbolt/diamond) and in his left a bell (ghanta), the two essential symbols of Tibetan Buddhism. In a lotus flower over his right shoulder is a representation of Padmasambhava (born from the lotus), the legendary founder of Tibetan Buddhism). In another flower over his left shoulder is Thangtong Gyalpo, a great Buddhist leader, who in the 15^th Century had built iron suspension bridges to facilitate travel in Tibet.

In 1712 an Italian Jesuit Ippolito Desideri came to stay in Tibet (MacGregor, 1970). He travelled north through Kashmir crossing the western Himalayas through the Fotu La pass and then making the arduous journey across the Tibetan Plateau to Lhasa. He spent many years in Tibet, studying the language and customs of the Tibetans. He was the first European to engage with the ideas of Buddhism. He debated with Buddhist scholars in their own language, becoming sufficiently adept that he could present his ideas in poetic form (Lopez et al, 2017). He tried without success to disprove their concept of reincarnation (samsara, wandering) and their desire for meditative release (nirvana, extinguishment/sunyata, emptiness).

It is fascinating to read his work (Lopez et al, 2017; Desideri, 2005). He understood the Buddhist concepts of samsara and nirvana, but he found them illogical because they did not fit with his Christian beliefs: since death must lead to either salvation or damnation, how could it possibly lead to reincarnation. He described the ultimate state of mind – nirvana – that the Buddha (“Legislator”) proposed as an escape from suffering. However, this had no attraction for him since it did not provide any greater knowledge of the God who created the universe:

In the fifth stage of supreme attainment the soul, having passed through the different stages, and being delivered from successive transmigration and purged of all those deeds which are the origin and cause of the troubles of existence, and having discarded the passions which are the cause of such deeds, and thus having destroyed their root, finally approaches this, the last stage. Thus their infernal Legislator, under the pretence of searching for the root, extirpates from the hearts of his followers the real and primary root of all things—the knowledge of God. (Desideri, 2005, p 248)

Desideri failed to consider why a Buddhist should aspire to know a Creator God since they believed the universe had existed forever.

Ippolito Desideri was the first European to visit Lake Manasarovar and Mount Kailash. The center of a world which has existed forever without need for any Creator:

Many explorers followed these early Jesuits into Tibet. Much more was learned about the land and the people. Intrigued by the idea of Shambhala the Russian artist and theosophist Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947) travelled through Central Asia and Tibet from 1925 to 1929 (Andreev, 2014; Roerich, 1930). A later expedition in 1934-5 sought Shambhala further north in Mongolia and northern China (Boyd, 2012). The theosophists claimed to have discovered the secrets of the “Masters,” an esoteric group of spiritual adepts centered in Tibet. However, there were no masters and their ideas were simply distortions of ancient Buddhist and Hindu religious thought.   

Nevertheless, Roerich was a talented artist who left us with many striking paintings of the Himalayas and Tibet. The following illustrations show paintings of Tibet (1933), The Mount of Five Treasures (1933) also known as Kangchenjunga, and The Song of Shambhala (1943). The third painting shows Shambhala in the distance: a circle of mountains lit by alpenglow.  

 

Lost Horizon

In 1933 James Hilton, fascinated by recent accounts of travels in Tibet, wrote the novel Lost Horizon. This tells the story of the British diplomat Hugh Conway, who in 1931 supervises the evacuation of some European citizens from Baskul (likely Kabul, Afghanistan) on a plane that is bound for Peshawar (then part of the British Raj, now located in Pakistan to the west of Islamabad). However, the plane is hijacked and flies over the Himalaya mountains – Conway recognizes the Nanga Parbat and K2 mountains – to crash-land among what appear to be the Kun Lun mountains. The pilot dies in the crash, but the passengers survive and are taken by a monk to a valley named Shangri La. The following is the description of their arrival 

To Conway, seeing it first, it might have been a vision fluttering out of that solitary rhythm in which lack of oxygen had encompassed all his faculties. It was, indeed, a strange and almost incredible sight. A group of coloured pavilions clung to the mountainside with none of the grim deliberation of a Rhineland castle, but rather with thc.chance delicacy of flower-petals impaled upon a crag. It was superb and exquisite. An austere emotion carried the eye upward from milk-blue roofs to the grey rock bastion above, tremendous as the Wetterhorn above Grindelwald. Beyond that, in a dazzling pyramid, soared the snow-slopes of Karakal. It might well be, Conway thought, the most terrifying mountain-scape in the world, and he imagined the immense stress of snow and glacier against which the rock function-ed as a gigantic retaining wall. Some day, per-haps, the whole mountain would split, and a half of Karakal’s icy splendour come toppling into the valley. He wondered if the slightness of the risk combined with its fearfulness might even be found agreeably stimulating.

Hardly less an enticement was the downward prospect, for the mountain wall continued to drop, nearly perpendicularly, into a cleft that could only have been the result of some cataclysm in the far past. The floor of the valley, hazily distant. welcomed the eye with greenness; sheltered from winds, and surveyed rather than dominated by the lamasery, it looked to Conway a delightfully favoured place, though if it were inhabited its community must be completely isolated by the lofty and sheerly unscalable ranges on the farther side (pp 74-75).

The following is from Orson Welles’ 1939 adaptation of the book for the Campbell Playhouse. The text has been abridged but the sense of wonder remains.  

Conway discovers that the people of Shangri La grow old only very slowly. After spending some time exploring the monastery and the surrounding valley, Conway is given an audience with the High Lama, who is apparently a Catholic monk from Luxembourg who arrived in Shangri La in the 18^th Century and is now about 250 years old. The lama is dying and wishes to place in Conway’s hands “the heritage and destiny of Shangri La:”

>My friend it is not an arduous task that I bequeath, for our order knows only silken bonds. To be gentle and patient, to care for the riches of the mind, to preside in wisdom and secrecy while the storm rages without.  (p 223)

The lama describes the present state of world affairs and the coming storm that will be worse than the Dark Ages in Europe:

For those Dark Ages were not really so very dark—they were full of flickering lanterns, and even if the light had gone out of Europe altogether, there were other rays, literally from China to Peru, at which it could have been rekindled. But the Dark Ages that are to come will cover the whole world in a single pall; there will be neither escape nor sanctuary, save such as are too secret to be found or too humble to be noticed. And Shangri-La may hope to be both of these. (p 224)

The lama predicts that Conway and Shangri La will survive the storm:

I believe that you will live through the storm. And after, through the long age of desolation, you may still live, growing older and wiser and more patient. You will conserve the fragrance of our history and add to it the touch of your own mind. You will welcome the stranger, and teach him the rule of age and wisdom; and one of these strangers, it may be, will succeed you when you are yourself very old. Beyond that, my vision weakens, but I see, at a great distance, a new world stirring in the ruins, stirring clumsily but in hopefulness, seeking its lost and legendary treasures. And they will all be here, my son, hidden behind the mountains in the valley of Blue Moon, preserved as by miracle for a new Renaissance. (p 224-5)

As he ends his speech, the lama dies. Orson Welles’ abbreviated version of the lama’s speech conveys its essence:

A young member of the group that came from Baskul decides to escape Shangri La together with one of the young female postulants at the monastery. Conway warns that the young woman is much older than she appears and that she will become old if taken away from Shangri La. Nevertheless, Conway agrees to help them, and the story ends. In an epilogue, we learn that only Conway and an extremely Chinese woman arrive in Chongqing in western China. Initially amnesic, Conway later attempts to return to Shangri La. The last that anyone has heard is that he was travelling north from Thailand into the mountains. 

The book became immensely popular. The world at that time was descending into madness and violence, and the book offered the comforting idea that what was good would nevertheless be preserved. The narrative sections of the book were exciting, but the description of Shangri La was, like all utopias, relatively boring. One interesting aspect of Shangri La is that it appeared much more European than Asian. The East simply provided a place of sanctuary for what was the best of European thought and art. Clear evidence of racism occurs as in the High Lama’s account of who should be accepted as a citizen of Shangri La (Goswami, 2023): 

… our last visitor, a Japanese, arrived in 1912, and was not, to be candid, a very valuable acquisition. You see, my dear Conway, we are not quacks or charlatans; we do not and cannot guarantee success; some of our visitors derive no benefit at all from their stay here; others merely live to what might be called a normally advanced age and then die from some trifling ailment. In general we have found that Tibetans, owing to their being inured to both the altitude and other conditions, are much less sensitive than outside races; they are charming people, and we have admitted many of them, but I doubt if more than a few will pass their hundredth year. The Chinese are a little better, but even among them we have a high percentage of failures. Our best subjects, undoubtedly, are the Nordic and Latin races of Europe, perhaps the Americans would be equally adaptable … (p 170)

Hilton was ambiguous about where Shangri La was located. Conway’s plane crash-landed in the Kun Lun mountains. The ancient Buddhist kingdom of Khotan was located just north of these mountains but this had been in ruins for over a thousand years. After leaving Shangri La Conway arrived in Western China, and at the end of the book he was seeking to return to Shangri La by travelling north from Thailand. These statements suggest that Shangri La was perhaps located in the mountains of Western China, perhaps near Muli, a region that had been recently visited by the American botanist and explorer Joseph Rock, and described in an article for National Geographic (Rock, 1925, Clark et al, 2019)

In 1937, Frank Capra directed a movie of Lost Horizon starring Ronald Colman as the diplomat, now named Robert Conway. The following stills from the movie, show the plane crash, the lamasery, the High Lama and Conway’s journey back to Shangri La:

Like the book, the movie is more exciting in the narratives of the arrival in and departure from Shangri La than in the time spent in the Himalayan utopia. Though Sam Jaffe’s portrayal of the High Lama is memorable, the monastery in the film is much more like the mansion of a Hollywood mogul than any Tibetan lamasery.

 

Political Upheavals

In 1720 China expelled the Mongols from Tibet which then became a part of the Chinese Empire. In 1911 the Qing dynasty was overthrown and China became a republic. Over the ensuing years political instability in China allowed Tibet to become de facto independent. Isolated from the world, it maintained a feudal system of government. Though monks and aristocrats lived pampered lives, the people suffered like the serfs of medieval Europe.  

In 1950 the newly founded People’s Republic of China sent the People’s Liberation Army to annex Tibet. According to the Chinese this was the “Peaceful Liberation of Tibet;” for the Tibetans it was the “Chinese Invasion of Tibet.” At that time the 14^th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso was only 15 years old. He and his regents agreed to a new People’s Government of Tibet.  

In the spring of 1959, fears that the Chinese government was going to arrest the Dalai Lama led to escalating protests and demands for Tibetan independence. The People’s Liberation Army quickly put down the uprising. The Dalai Lama fled to India where he now leads the Government of Tibet in Exile in Dharamshala. Over a thousand years after his forefathers had fled from India and found refuge in Tibet, he had returned.

In May 1966 China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution began, and in September the Red Guards arrived in Tibet. Monasteries were looted and Tibetan leaders were subjected to public humiliation in “struggle sessions.” It was only through the intervention of Zhou Enlai, that the Potala Palace was spared from the widespread destruction. The following photographs (Woeser, 2020) show the destruction at the Jokhang Temple on the upper right, a closeup of two red guards surveying the damage from the second storey of the temple on the upper left, and the struggle session of a previous mayor of Lhasa below

Tourism

In 2001, the Chinese government renamed Zhongdian, a small city in northwestern Yunnan province, “Shangri La” after the fictional land described in James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon (Kolas, 2008; Padget, 2023). Much of the population of the surrounding area is Tibetan. The government has rebuilt several nearby Buddhist monasteries. To the north is Khawa Karpo a sacred mountain. The following illustrations below show the Ganden Sumtseling Monastery the Muli Temple, and the east face of Khawa Karpo.

 

In the past, believers went on pilgrimages to sacred places; in the present, tourists search for epiphany in foreign lands. Tourists may seek out the truth, but they can be easily attracted to inventions: the tomb of Hamlet in Helsingor, the balcony of Juliet in Verona, and the land of Shangri La in China. Even sacred sites are sometimes more fictional than real. Tourism is not wrong: it supports the local populace, and it increases our understanding of other people. One must just be careful to determine what is meaningful and what is not.  

 

Shambhala and Shangri La

In Tibetan Buddhism Shambhala was conceived as a place of refuge from a world full of violence at the time of the Islamic invasion of India. One day the forces of truth would come out to overcome the barbarian hordes and re-establish teachings of the dharma. The prophecy need not be interpreted literally:

The real war is the struggle between the forces of enlightenment and ignorance that characterizes the path of the yogin, the tantric practitioner. When the yogin achieves adamantine gnosis, the transformative wisdom that is the goal of the of Wheel of Time path, he or she overcomes the inner barbarism that creates the evils of existence. In this esoteric, allegorical interpretation of the myth, the war between Kalkin and Islam symbolizes the radical illumination of the yogin in which correct understanding of reality dispels the darkness of ignorance. (Newman, 1995).

Shangri La was a modern fiction, also invented at a time when the world seemed to be heading into catastrophe. It shares many of the features of Shambhala. Many people have been fascinated by Shangri La. Some have sought to find it, but none have been successful:   

Ultimately, Shangri-La can be understood as a Western dream of an Eastern myth – it captures a yearning for simpler times, everlasting peace, sanctuary, and abundance protected from a violent and volatile world. But this paradise must remain elusive, for seeking it misunderstands and spurns Hilton’s fantasy. Like the most apt utopia, it is literally “nowhere” (Padget, 2023).

 

References

Andreev, A. I. (2014). The myth of the masters revived: the occult lives of Nikolai and Elena Roerich. Brill.

Belka, L. (2006). Maitreya in Tibetan Buddhism: image and myth. Studia Asiatica, 7(1), 55–73.

Bernbaum, E. (1980). The way to Shambhala: a search for the mythical kingdom beyond the Himalayas. St. Martin’s Press.

Boyd, J. G. (2012). In search of Shambhala? Nicholas Roerich’s 1934–5 Inner Mongolian Expedition. Inner Asia, 14 (2), 257-277.

Clark, D.J., Chapman, S. & Yao, J. (2019). Where is Shangri La. Two explorers set off to southwest China in search of the elusive valley.

Desideri, I. (translated by F de Filippi, 2005). An account of Tibet: the travels of Ippolito Desideri of Pistoia, S.J., 1712-1727. Routledge

Goswami, K. (2023). Tibet as myth: patterns of gaze in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. In Reimagining Tibet (pp. 42–61). Routledge.

Hazra, K. L. (1995). The rise and decline of Buddhism in India. Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers.

Hilton, J. (1933). Lost horizon. Macmillan.

Kolas, A. (2008). Tourism and Tibetan culture in transition: a place called Shangrila. Routledge.

Lopez, D. S., Thupten Jinpa, & Desideri, I. (2017). Dispelling the darkness: a Jesuit’s quest for the soul of Tibet. Harvard University Press.

MacGregor, J. (1970). Tibet: a chronicle of exploration. Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Newman, J. R. (1985). A brief history of the Kalachakra. In Geshe Lhundup Sopa, Jackson, R., & Newman, J. R. (Eds). The Wheel of Time: The Kalachakra in Context. (pp 51-90). Deer Park Books.

Newman, J. R. (1995). Eschatology in the Wheel of Time Tantra. In D. S. Lopez (ed) Buddhism in Practice. (pp. 284–289). Princeton University Press.

Padget, F. (2023). Shangri-La: a case of myth-taken identity. Epoch Magazine. Issue 14.

Pereira, F. M. E. (1921) O descobrimento do Tibet pelo P. Antonio de Andrade. Coimbra

Rock, J. F. (1925). The land of the Yellow Lama: National Geographic Society explorer visits the strange kingdom of Muli, beyond the Likiang snow range of Yünnan Province, China. National Geographic Magazine, 47(4), 447-492.

Roerich, N., (1930). Shambhala. Frederick A. Stokes.

Sarao, K. T. S. (2012). The decline of Buddhism in India: a fresh perspective. Munshirm Manoharlal Publishers.

Wessels, C. (1924). Early Jesuit Travellers in Central Asia 1603–1721. Martinus Nijhoff.

Woeser, T. (2020). Forbidden memory: Tibet during the cultural revolution. Potomac Books.

Wood, M. (2005). The search for Shangri-La. In In search of myths & heroes: exploring four epic legends of the world. (pp 9-77). University of California Press. Video version available.

Laurence Cossé’s 1996 novel Le coin du voile (A corner of the veil) describes the effects of a new and irrefutable proof for the existence of God. A priest who had resigned his calling to spend months in prayer and abstinence submits the proof for publication in Outlooks, the lay journal of the French Casuists. All those who read it are completely convinced. On seeing its effects, the Provincial of the Casuists decides to keep the proof secret until its effects can be more clearly understood. Finally, the Secretary of State at the Vatican arranges for all those who had read the proof to retire from any contact with the public and for the proof to be kept hidden. The proof becomes a pontifical secret – “a piece of information the Holy Father must not learn under any circumstance.”  

The novel, published by Gallimard in 1996, received generally positive reviews, and won several French literary prizes. Readers were charmed by the story but had some difficulty deciding on its basic nature: was it a philosophical fable, a religious thriller, a gentle satire, or an outright farce? The book touches lightly on serious matters: Burns. (1999) called it “casually profound” and Dumort (1997) considered it an “un opéra-bouffe sans la musique.” Cobb (2005, p 156) complimented the author for her “insightful reflections on the moral springs that move real human beings.” Some critics would have preferred more depth (Eder, 1999; McInerny, 1999), but this seems akin to wishing that Voltaire wrote like Diderot.

The book has been translated into English (A Corner of the Veil), German (Der Beweis, The Proof), Italian (La sesta prova, The Sixth Proof; La prova nascosta, The hidden proof) and Spanish (La punta del velo). The following illustration shows some of the covers. The French paperbacks use details from paintings by Paul Gauguin (Self Portrait with the Yellow Christ, 1891) and Michelangelo (Separation of the Earth from the Waters, Sistine Chapel, 1512). The cover of the English translation shows the ceiling of a gothic cathedral (Exeter) with a corner being pulled back to reveal the radiance of heaven.

The Casuists

The Novel begins one evening with Father Bertrand Beaulieu, editor of the Casuist journal Regards (translated as Outlooks by Linda Asher), going through his correspondence. The Casuists are clearly the Jesuits, and the journal is clearly the publication Études, established in 1856 by the French Jesuits.

The Society of Jesus was founded in Paris in 1534 by the Spanish nobleman Ignatius of Loyola and six fellow students at the University of Paris. The largest of the Catholic religious orders, it is widely involved in education, missionary work, and humanitarian activities.

Soon after the order was established, the Council of Trent (1545-1563) revised the Catholic Church’s position on the Sacrament of Penance and the process of confession. Sinners were no longer able to purchase indulgences to escape the consequences of their sins. Instead, priests listened to sinners’ confessions, assessed their remorse, provided absolution, and outlined appropriate acts of penance to make amends. This led to a need for more sophisticated moral reasoning, since many human acts cannot easily be judged according to the commandments available in the scriptures. Several Jesuits contributed extensively to the new moral philosophy, most especially Antonio Escobar y Mendoza (1589–1669) who treatise Summula casuum conscientiae (1627) outlined how moral judgments could be made on a case-by-case basis by applying knowledge of the law, ethics, and scripture. This approach came to be known as casuistry, and the Summula became the confessor’s handbook.

Unfortunately, some of the casuist proposals, most particularly concerning the differentiation between intentions and acts, could easily lead to moral laxity. Sinners could be excused for the bad consequences of their acts because their intentions had been good. Escobar was a strict adherent to the Jesuit rules of poverty, chastity and obedience, but sinners found it easy to abuse his moral reasoning. Thus it was said that Escobar “purchased heaven dearly for himself, but gave it away cheap to others.” Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) took Escobar to task in his Lettres Provinciales. For example, he pointed out that the casuist could reason that although it is wrong to kill someone because of hatred, one could do so blamelessly if one professed fear for one’s own safety. Escobar’s logic was no match for Pascal’s wit. “Casuistry” soon came to mean the use of clever but unsound reasoning to excuse moral culpability; indeed, “Jesuitical” took on the same connotation The following illustration shows Escobar on the left and Pascal on the right:

Nowadays, however, casuistry has returned to favor as a way to approach complex moral decisions (Jonson, 2005).

Six Pages in a Brown Envelope

In his pile of correspondence, Father Beaulieu recognizes the crazy writing on a cheap brown envelope. The sender had written to him multiple times before, each time with a different proof for the existence of God, each time failing to convince anyone. Beaulieu puts the envelope at the bottom of the pile, but later that evening finally opens it, and dutifully reads the contents:  

Dix heures vingt-cinq. Enfin. Il ne restait plus que la lettre brune. Beaulieu l’ouvrit, exaspéré d’avance. Mon Dieu, le nombre de cinglés que Vous mettez au monde. L’écriture était effrayante, une espèce de broderie ne laissant pas la moindre marge à droite ni à gauche, pas plus qu’en haut ni en bas. Il n’y avait que six feuillets, ce soir, moins que les autres fois. Beaulieu prit un carré de chocolat dans le tiroir de son bureau et commença à lire.
Six pages plus loin, il tremblait. Cette fois la preuve n’était ni arithmétique, ni physique, ni esthétique, ni astronomique, elle était irréfutable. La preuve de l’existence de Dieu était faite.

[Ten twenty-five. Finally. Only the brown letter left to go. Beaulieu opened it, already exasperated. Dear God, the number of madmen You put into the world. The handwriting was dreadful, a kind of embroidery that left no margin right or left, top or bottom. There were only six sheets tonight, fewer than the other times. Beaulieu took a square of chocolate from the desk drawer and started reading.
Six pages farther, he was trembling. This time the proof was neither arithmetical, nor physical, nor esthetical, nor astronomical; it was irrefutable. The proof of God’s existence had been achieved. (p 15)]

Beaulieu is overwhelmed. He prostrates himself on the floor as he did on the day of his ordination. After an hour he rises and visits his friend Hervé Montgaroult, a Jesuit professor whose specialty is cataphatic ontology. “Cataphatic” (from Greek cata an intensifier and phanai speak) deals with the affirmative description of the divine (e.g., God is love) as opposed to “anaphatic” (apo other) which uses negative descriptions (e.g., God is unknowable).

 

Proof for the Existence of God

When Beaulieu presents the professor with the proof, Montgaroult protests that “No proof of the existence of God has ever held up,” and begins to review all the historical proofs. Beaulieu finally stops him, and leaves his with the six handwritten pages, insisting that he just read.

The most famous of the historical proofs for the existence of God are the Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), an Italian Dominican who taught at the University of Paris (Pasnau, 2024). These five proofs are included in both his Summa Theologica and in his Summa contra Gentiles.

Aquinas’ first proof, which argues for God as the “prime mover,” derives from Aristotle. Things are in motion; whatever is in motion must have been put into motion by something else, which itself must have been moved by something else, and so on. Since this chain of events cannot go on forever, there must be a prime mover that can move things without being moved. This must be God.

Aquinas therefore contradicted the claims of Ibn Rushd (1126-1198, also known as Averroes), a Muslim commentator on Aristotle, who argued that the chain of events does go on forever, and that God created a world that is eternal (Ben Ahmed & Pasnau, 2025; Dales, 1990, p 45). In 1484 painting by Benozzo Gozzoli, The Triumph of Thomas Aquinas, now in the Louvre, celebrates Aquinas’ victory over Averroes:

The painting derives its iconography from an earlier work probably painted in about 1330 by Lippo Memmi (Polzer, 1993) to celebrate the canonization of Thomas Aquinas in 1323.  

The upper section of the painting shows God blessing those that have revealed the truth: the Apostle Paul with the sword, Moses with the tablets and the four Evangelists who wrote the gospels, each with their symbolic creature (angel, lion, ox, eagle). Gods states:

Bene scripsisti de me, Thomma [You have written well about me, Thomas].  

In the center of the painting Thomas Aquinas, flanked by Aristotle and Plato, holds his Summa contra Gentile, which begins with an epigraph from Proverbs 8:7:

Veritatem meditabitur guttur meum et labia mea de testabuntur impium. [For my mouth shall speak truth; and wickedness is an abomination to my lips]

The first words of the Summa are

Multitudinis usus, quem in rebus nominandis sequendum philosophus censet, com muniter” obtinuit, ut sapientes dicantur qui res directe ordinant et eas bene gubernant [The usage of the multitude, which, according to the Philosopher (Aristotle) is to be followed in giving names to things, has commonly held that they are to be called wise who order things rightly and govern them well.]

The books below the central book show quotations from the Summa Theologica (see Polzer, 1993, p 43, for details).

Below Aquinas lies the vanquished Averroes. His book states:

Et faciens causas infinitas in primum librum Aristotelis physicorum [And making infinite causes in the first book of Aristotle’s Physics]

Below him is written

Vere hic est lumen ecclesie [Truly this is the light of the church]

And below this, Pope Pius II and his clergy teach the revelations of Aquinas to the assembled believers.

Aquinas is right and Averroes is wrong. Not because of logic, but because Aquinas’ conclusions fit with the teachings of the Church.

The other four proofs of Aquinas are:

Causality: God is the first cause that prevents an infinite chain of cause and effect.

Contingency: God is the necessary being from which all other derive

Degree: God is the criterion by which one can determine what is good, beautiful and true.

Teleology: God is the ultimate end to which the universe is progressing.

Another famous proof for God, which Aquinas disputed, is the Ontological Proof of Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109). Since everyone can conceive of a being than which no greater can be thought, such a being must exist since existence is necessary to greatness.

Many other logical proofs for the existence of God have been proposed (Restivo, 2021, pp. 99-112). In a recent novel, Rebecca Goldstein (2010) considered 36 different arguments for the existence of God. 

However, it is doubtful that anyone has ever been convinced to believe in God because of logical argument. Rather such proofs are a put together subsequent to belief:

A proof of God’s existence ought really to be something by means of which one could convince oneself that God exists. But I think that what believers who have furnished such proofs have wanted to do is give their “belief” an intellectual analysis and foundation, although they themselves would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs. (Wittgenstein, 1980, 85e)

Nevertheless, after Beaulieu leaves, the skeptical Montgaroult reads the six pages, and is instantly convinced. He spends the night wandering around the streets of Paris in a mystical daze. He is particularly happy about how the new proof solves the age-old problem of evil.

God was no longer mysterious. Evil was no longer a mystery. God was no longer either heart-breaking or heartbroken, and the question that for centuries had woken men in the night would no longer arise, the hideous question of whether He had or had not a role in evil. (p 29)

 

Religious Qualms

The next morning, Beaulieu and Montgaroult meet with Hubert Le Dangeolet, the Provincial of the Casuists in France. He is skeptical. His first impression is that his two visitors have lost their minds. He decides not to read the proof, and locks it up in his safe. He arranges for two other Casuists, internationally known theological experts, one from Belgium and one from Switzerland, to come to Paris the next day to assess the proof. 

Beaulieu visits Martin Mauduit, the author of the proof. The name “Mauduit” is not far removed from maudit (cursed or damned). Once a priest, Martin had resigned his vocation because he felt that he could discover a new understanding of God through thought. He realized that his first attempts at new proofs for the existence of God, which he had submitted to the journal Outlooks, were abject failures. But then, after weeks of prayer and abstinence, he had woken one morning to find on his floor a six-page proof that he had no memory of writing. The proof had not been reasoned out; it had simply been revealed.   

Mauduit is described as

A small man in his sixties, frail and bald. His smile and his eyes, the assurance and joy in these features alone, recalled someone—Bertrand remembered whom almost instantly: Bishop Gaillot. The churchman about whom every French person, even his warmest supporters, had wondered in 1995 whether he was Saint Francis of Assisi or Narcissus. (pp 60-61)

 

Bishop Jacques Gaillot (1935-2023) was Bishop of Évreux from 1982 to 1995, at which time he was removed from his position by Pope John Paul II because of his unorthodox and outspoken positions on abortion, immigration, homosexuality, and Palestine. He came to be known as the ‘Red Cleric.’

 

 

 

The next day, the two experts come to Paris, read the proof, are completely convinced, and weep tears of joy. Le Dangeolet realizes that the proof is real but still remains cautious.

I’ve got to keep a cool head and a free mind. The people who have read the proof are immediately possessed by it. They no longer have the slightest objectivity. I’ve seen four of our colleagues topple over, one after the other. We can’t have our whole Casuist province in France slipping into a way of life that is positively Franciscan, and the ecstatic branch at that. (p 112)

He contacts Waldemar Waldenhag, the Father General of the Jesuit Order.

 

Political Upheavals

Secrets are hard to keep. Before long the government becomes aware that the Casuists possess a new proof for the existence of God. The Prime Minister of France, Jean-Charles Petitgrand, pays a clandestine visit to Le Dangeolet. He is shown the proof. He does not read it, but is completely convinced of its veracity simply by being in its presence. He decides to change his life. He retires from politics:

For the ten or fifteen years he had left to live, he would praise the Eternal One, simply, through love for his roses, for his wife, and for his fellow man. (p 107)

He issues a press release describing his resignation as due to “a sudden irruption of meaning into my life” (p 261). An advisor summarizes for the cabinet ministers what the future might hold:

Within six months, within a year, we have to imagine France as one huge monastery. Everything that today is the motivating force of the advanced liberal societies—the spirit of enterprise, the quest for wealth, the concern for efficiency, the work ethic . . . briefly, what others might call the every-man-for-himself, the activism, the copycat greed, money as guiding light—at the announcement of the proof that God exists, all of that will no longer seem important to our fellow citizens. God becomes a certainty in our midst. How do we react? We spend all our time on Him. We just about cease to work. We earn much less money, but what does it matter? We no longer yearn to change apartments, go off on vacation, send our children to American business schools. We no longer chase after money. If we do work, it’s just enough for what we need to eat and be clothed, to have a roof over our heads. Most of our time we spend meditating, praying. We study Scripture. We succor the poor, we comfort the lonely. We gaze on nature. We feel we’re opening our eyes for the first time. We breathe. (pp 146-147)

The ministers are aghast; the reader is amused. However, this description of a society concerned only with God is not an exaggeration. It must give us pause. Whatever our religious beliefs, do we really wish to put an end to human striving?

Other problems are also considered. The proof was given to the Christians, and apparently the God whose existence is now verified is the Christian God. What will those who profess belief in other Gods think of this?

The politicians confer with Le Dangeolet. A decision is made to keep the new proof secret until the Church and the State can assess its possible effects.  

 

A Visit to Rome

Le Dangeolet, Mauduit, and the four casuists who have read the proof travel to Rome to meet with Father General Waldemar Waldenhag. He is cautious about the proof.

Doubt about the existence of God was the only formula viable for mankind. People who wanted to believe could believe; those who preferred not to didn’t have to. No greater certainty for the one than for the other. A mutual respect—except for the periods of certainty. Certainty, on whichever side, breeds fanaticism. That’s not all it breeds, but it never fails to breed that. Look at the Crusaders, the Inquisitors, as well as the atheist revolutionaries: all of them slashed and burned and guillotined, completely confident they were doing the right thing. In the end, doubt is the only counterweight to human madness. It’s reason, that’s what doubt is. (pp 232-233)

Nevertheless, Waldenhag ultimately decides to read the six pages. He really wishes to know if the proof might solve the age-old problem of evil. How does a priest explain to someone subject to undeserved suffering how an omnipotent and benevolent God has allowed this to happen?  

I want to know why, how, and in the name of what superior plan the good and all-powerful God of the Gospel lets nations tear each other’s guts out, lets the earth crack open in the middle of cities, and lets children die of hunger. I’ve ‘explained’ it a thousand times, using those enormously sophisticated arguments inherited from Thomism that you know as well as I do, and I’ve done it with such assurance that I must have convinced people sometimes. But for me, the mystery of evil sticks in my craw. (p 237)

And after reading the pages he is as convinced as the others. The problem of evil in the universe appears to be explained

The Problem of Evil

When we consider the arguments for and against the existence of God, the problem of evil (and the suffering that it causes) is generally the atheist’s most effective argument (Mackie, 1982; van Inwagen, 2006; Speak, 2014; Perrine, 2025). If God is omniscient, he cannot be unaware of our suffering; if He is omnipotent, he must be able to intervene in the world; if He is omnibenevolent, he should act to prevent our suffering. If we accept these characteristics of God, the very fact that there is suffering in our world is incompatible with His existence. If he truly were omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent, there would be no suffering.

In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), David Hume described the problem of evil by referring back to ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BCE)

Epicurus’s old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil? (Hume, 1779, part X)

Over the years theists have proposed many different arguments for the existence of evil. These justifications (or exonerations) of God go by the name of “theodicies.” None of these are convincing (Picton, 2013, pp 361-364). Ultimately, one is left with the idea that God operates at levels beyond human comprehension. We are not able to see the grand scheme of things. Nevertheless, He has assured us through scripture that he knows what is best, and that he will take care of us.

 

Panentheism

The next morning Waldenhag tells Le Dangeolet some snippets of what was in the six pages proving the existence of God. This is the only time in the book that the reader is given any idea of what is in the proof:

With the world God created totality of being.

Everything that is has no other meaning but being.

Through the Creation, God explores in Himself the free play of being, of all being: good, evil, sense and nonsense, splendor and horror mixed.

What is, is nothing else but God in the process of being.

We are grounded in God, each person for what he is.

These principles are closely related to the process theology of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) and to the panentheism of Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) and Arthur Peacocke (1924-2006) – illustrated from left to right in the following figure.

The main idea of process theology is that God is the universe becoming itself. This occurs through an outpouring of God’s love and goodness into the world. Since the process is intelligible  rather than mysterious, science becomes the study of God in all his manifestations. Process theology also provides a way of reconciling the existence of God with the presence of suffering in the world. God and the universe are in the process of becoming. Evil and suffering are present to the extent that this process is as yet incomplete. The following quotation is from Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929, p 532):

There are thus four creative phases in which the universe accomplishes its actuality. There is first the phase of conceptual origination, deficient in actuality, but infinite in its adjustment of valuation. Secondly, there is the temporal phase of physical origination, with its multiplicity of actualities. In this phase full actuality is attained; but there is deficiency in the solidarity of individuals with each other. This phase derives its determinate conditions from the first phase. Thirdly, there is the phase of perfected actuality, in which the many are one everlastingly, without the qualification of any loss either of individual identity or of completeness of unity. In everlastingness, immediacy is reconciled with objective immortality. This phase derives the conditions of its being from the two antecedent phases. In the fourth phase, the creative action completes itself. For the perfected actuality passes back into the temporal world, and qualifies this world so that each temporal actuality includes it as an immediate fact of relevant experience. For the kingdom of heaven is with us today. The action of the fourth phase is the love of God for the world. It is the particular providence for particular occasions. What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world. In this sense, God is the great companion — the fellow-sufferer who understands.

Panentheism is a type of pantheism wherein God exists both within and beyond the world (Clayton & Peacocke, 2004, Attfield, 2019; Culp, 2023). Evil exists but only to the extent that the universe is as yet incompletely actualized. Burns (2019) proposes that God exists in two ways – one as the force that causes the actualization of the universe (“God the World”) and the second as the force that maximizes the good in the world (“God the Good”). This approach provides some purpose to the world and to human striving. Everything moves towards the good. Without this aspect process theology can become heartless. To return to Hume we might have a very pessimistic view of our world:

Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organised, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind Nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children! (Hume, 1979, part XI)

The Biblical text justifying process theology and panentheism comes from Paul’s sermon on the Hill of Mars in Athens

God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands;

Neither is worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things;

And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation;

That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us:

For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said. (Acts 17:24-28)

In A Corner of the Veil, Waldenhag interprets what he has read in terms of the God the Father and God the Son

The Father accepts everything, since He is the source of everything. But He suffers everything. There is no distance between the suffering of man and the suffering of God. And the Father risks everything in His creation. Because it is totality, creation carries within itself the germs of its own destruction. The Father is at stake there. The Son saves not only mankind, but in some way He also saves the Father. He justifies the Father’s creation. (pp 254-255)

Although convinced by the proof, he still has concerns

Man informed of the proof will finally be free, his consciousness much elevated and his actions disinterested. On the other hand, knowing that God is in everything carries the risk of legitimizing any and all behavior. . . . the brute may be confirmed in his brutality, the sadistic husband confirmed in his sadism, and so on. Amorality could take hold of mankind. (p 255)

This concern might perhaps be alleviated if we agree with Burns’ concept that God is both the world becoming itself and the world becoming good.

 

Epilogue

At the end of the book, the Casuists present the proof to the Secretary of State for the Vatican. The final decision is not the publish the proof. All those who have read the proof will be enjoined not to repeat it to anyone. The marvelous new proof will become a pontifical secret:

Qu’est-ce qu’un secret pontifical? — C’est une information que le Saint-Père ne doit connaître sous aucun prétexte.

[What is a pontifical secret? A piece of information the Holy Father must not learn under any circumstances. (p 269)]

 

References

Attfield, R. (2019). Panentheisms, creation and evil. Open Theology, 5(1), 166–181.

Ben Ahmed, F. & Pasnau, R. (2025). Ibn Rushd [Averroes]. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Burns, E. (1999). Apocalypse now. New York Times Book Reviews. August 1, 1999

Burns, E. D. (2019). How to prove the existence of God: an argument for conjoined panentheism. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 85(1), 5–21.

Clayton, P., & Peacocke, A. R. (Eds). (2004). In whom we live and move and have our being: Panentheistic reflections on God’s presence in a scientific world. William B. Eerdmans.

Cobb, K. (2005). The Blackwell guide to theology and popular culture. Blackwell 

Cossé, L. (1996). Le coin du voile. Gallimard.

Cossé, L. (translated by Asher, L., 1999). A corner of the veil. Scribner.

Culp, J. (2023). Panentheism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Dales, R. C. (1990). Medieval discussions of the eternity of the world. E.J. Brill.

Dumort, J. (1997), Le coin du voile. La Jaune et la Rouge. N^o 523.

Eder, R. (1999). A Corner of the Veil: Proof of God in a Small Brown Envelope. New York Times. (18 July)

Goldstein, R. (2010). 36 arguments for the existence of God: a work of fiction. Pantheon Books.

Hume, D. (1779, reprinted 2006). Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Dover Publications.

Jonsen, A. R. (2005). Practical reasoning and moral casuistry. In Schweiker, W. (Ed.) The Blackwell companion to religious ethics. (pp 53-60). Blackwell.

Mackie, J. L. (1982). The miracle of theism: arguments for and against the existence of God. Clarendon Press.

McCombie, (1999). A Question of Faith: A new French novel slyly probes the limits of faith in our modern world. The Free Library (September, 1, 1999).

McInerny, R. (1999). End Notes: Martyrum Candidatus Laudat Exercitus. Crisis Magazine (February 1, 1999).

Pasnau, R. (2024). Thomas Aquinas. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Perrine, T. (2025). Humean arguments from evil against theism. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Picton, T. W. (2013). Creature and Creator: intersections between science and religion. Picton.

Polzer, J. (1993). The “Triumph of Thomas” panel in Santa Caterina, Pisa. Meaning and date. Mitteilungen Des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 37(1), 29–70.

Restivo, S. P. (2021). Society and the death of God. Routledge.

Speak, D. (2014). The problem of evil. Polity Press.

Van Inwagen, P. (2006). The problem of evil. Oxford University Press.

Whitehead, A. N. (1929). Process and reality, an essay in cosmology. Macmillan.

Wittgenstein, L. (translated by P. Wench & edited by Wright, G. H. von, 1980). Culture and value. University of Chicago Press.

Paul-Émile Borduas (1905-1960) was a Quebec artist who became world-famous in the 1950s for his striking abstract paintings. In the early 1940s he had founded Les Automatistes, a group of artists interested in Surrealism. In 1948, he and his colleague had published the Refus Global (Total Refusal), a manifesto urging his fellow Québécois to throw off the oppressive authority of the Union Nationale Party and the Catholic Church. His call to freedom antagonized those in power. After being fired from his teaching position, he left Canada to work in New York and Paris. Shortly after his death in February 1960, the Liberal Party defeated the Union Nationale in the Provincial Election in June, 1960, and La Révolution Tranquille (Quiet Revolution) began to modernize Quebec society.     

Apprentice

Borduas was born in Mont Saint Hilaire about 40 km east of Montreal in the valley of the Richelieu River which flows from Lake Champlain into the St Laurent River. The mountain arises abruptly from a surrounding plain famous for its apple orchards.

In his teens, Borduas became apprenticed to Ozias Leduc (1864-1955), a painter from the same region, and helped him at his work as a church decorator. Leduc was a talented representational artist with a modernist sensibility (Lacroix, 2019). The following illustration shows his Green Apples (1915), Open Window (1900), and a photograph from 1936.

Leduc arranged for Borduas to have art lessons in Sherbrooke, and in 1923 supported his admission to the newly opened École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal. After he graduated Borduas spent a year of further study in Paris. On his return, he became an art teacher in the Catholic school system. In 1935, he married Gabrielle Goyette and settled down to family life in Mont Saint Hilaire. In 1937, he was appointed professor at the École du meuble de Montréal, which the government had just established to provide training for workers in the province’s furniture industry. The following illustration shows a Self-Portrait from 1928 and a Portrait of Madame Gagnon from 1941.

 

Les Automatistes

In the late 1930s Borduas became intrigued by ideas of André Breton and the Surrealists. He began to experiment in painting by instinct rather than by reason. Breton, in Le Manifeste du Surréalisme (1924), had defined surrealism as

Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express — verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner — the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.

The following illustration shows one of Borduas’s early abstract paintings: Green Abstraction (1941). He described it as his “first totally non-preconceived painting” (Gagnon, 1988, p 166).  

Borduas soon put together a set of 45 gouaches painted using the principles of surrealism for a solo exhibition in Montreal in 1942 (Gagnon, 2013, pp 117-135). At the time he described his artistic technique as follows;

I begin with no preconceived idea. Faced with the white sheet, my mind free of any literary ideas, I respond to my first impulse. If I feel like placing my charcoal in the middle of the page, or to one side, I do so with no questions asked, and then go on from there. Once the first line is drawn, the page has been divided and that division starts a whole series of thoughts which proceed automatically. When I use the word “thoughts” I mean painterly thoughts: thoughts having to do with movement, rhythm, volume and light, not literary ideas. Once the drawing has been completely worked out, the same steps are followed with colour. As with the drawing, if my first impulse is to use yellow, I don’t hesitate. And the first colour determines all the others. It’s at the stage of colour that the problems of light and volume present themselves. (quoted in Nasgaard & Ellenwood, 2009, p 12).

Two of the gouaches are illustrated below: Number 6 and Number 33. Some appeared to represent something – Number 6 soon became known as Le Chantecler (Rooster). Others, like Number 33, seemed completely abstract.  

Another important influence on Borduas was Marie-Alain Couturier (1897-1954). Between 1940 and 1944, the French Franciscan Father lived in North America in exile from occupied France. He spent some time in Quebec, encouraging artists to explore the new freedoms of modern art, and urging the church to support their new sense of beauty. Couturier had originally trained as a stained-glass artist, and went on to become an editor for the journal Art Sacré (Lion, 2010). Borduas had met him during his time in France, and the two interacted again when Couturier was a visiting lecturer at the École du meuble. The following is from one of Couturier’s essays published in Quebec:

It takes an effort of pure intuition to assure the birth and development of a work of art, a total abandonment to a certain obscure sense of the absolute. And, to tell the truth, there needs to be an absolute risk, which implies a state of constant insecurity for the artist. This is psychologically very difficult, often even anguishing, as it is entirely foreign to the stable order of certitudes that rule over and guarantee all other human activities. (Couturier, 1944, quoted in Warren, 2017, p 23).

Over the next few years, Borduas assembled about him a group of talented young painters who were trying out the new modernist approaches to art. They had their first exhibition in 1947 at the house of his friend Claude Gauvreau, a poet and playwright, and brother of the painter Pierre Gauvreau. A journalist described the group as Les Automatistes from Borduas’s titles: for example, Automatisme 1.47 which later came to be known as Sous le vent de l’île (Leeward of the Island) (Nasgaard & Ellenwood, 2009; Gagnon, 2020). The following illustration shows Borduas at the exhibition in front of this painting and Automatisme 2.47 or Le Danseur.

The painting Sous le vent de l’île is impressive:

The canvas is cleanly divided into two registers. The first, consisting of broad horizontal brush strokes, corresponds to the background. A wide expanse beginning at the bottom of the picture and receding to infinity as the viewer’s gaze rises is flanked on the right by what could be interpreted as a sea meeting its shore. The space created in this way appears traversed “as if by a wind blowing from west to east:” On this background, without any apparent connection to it, a group of small red, green, black, and white blotches have been laid with a palette knife, like the pieces of a vertical veil blown about by the wind. The remarkable thing in this painting with respect to its predecessors is the extraordinary impression of depth it gives. The island, seen from above, at a height never before experienced in a Borduas work, takes on the dimensions of a continent and even the objects hanging in space remain at a certain distance from the viewer (they do not touch the edge of the canvas). (Gagnon, 2013, pp 192-193).

 

Le Refus Global

In 1948, Les Automatistes published a small manifesto entitled Le Refus Global (Total Refusal). Borduas was the lead author, and Jean-Paul Riopelle (1923-2001) designed the cover and frontispiece. Thirteen other artists also signed the manifesto, among them Marcelle Ferron (1924-2001), Claude Gauvreau (1925-1975), Fernand Leduc (1916-2014), and Françoise Sullivan (1923- ). Four hundred typescript copies were printed and only about half of these were sold (at a dollar apiece). Below is the frontispiece, which incorporates a poem by Claude Gauvreau about how information from the sensory world can be directly transformed into creative passion. The letters of the manifesto’s title are used to suggest the senses (raie for the light rays, fugue for tactile sensation, lobe for the earlobe, and ale for taste)

Borduas’s manifesto began with a rambling history of Quebec and its people and how they hade been exploited and kept in ignorance and by the Catholic Church:

Son exécrable exploitation, maintenue tant de siècles dans l’efficacité au prix desqualités les plus précieuses de la vie, se révélera enfin à la multitude de sesvictimes: dociles esclaves d’autant plus acharnés à la défendre qu’ils étaient plus misérables. L’écartèlement aura une fin. La décadence chrétienne aura entrainé dans sa chute tous les peuples, toutes les classes qu’elle aura touchées, dans l’ordre de la première à la dernière, de haut en bas.

[A loathsome exploitation, effectively maintained for centuries at the cost of the best things in life, will be exposed at last to a multitude of victims, docile slaves whose eagerness to defend their servitude has been in direct proportion to their wretchedness. The torture will end. Christian decadence in its collapse will drag down all the peoples and classes it has touched, from first to last, from top to bottom.] (translation of this and following passages by Ray Ellenwood, Borduas, 1985)

Borduas then called for a break with the past:

D’ici là notre devoir est simple. Rompre définitivement avec toutes les habitudes de la société, se désolidariser deson esprit utilitaire. Refus d’être sciemment au-dessous de nos possibilitéspsychiques. Refus de fermer les yeux sur les vices, les duperies perpétrées sous lecouvert du savoir, du service rendu, de la reconnaissance due. Refus d’uncantonnement dans la seule bourgade plastique, place fortifiée mais faciled’évitement. Refus de se taire — faites de nous ce qu’il vous plaira mais vousdevez nous entendre — refus de la gloire, des honneurs (le premier consenti): stigmates de la nuisance, de l’inconscience, de la servilité. Refus de servir, d’être utilisables pour de telles fins. Refus de toute intention, arme néfaste de la raison. À bas toutes deux, au second rang! Place à la magie! Place aux mystères objectifs! Place à l’amour! Place aux nécessités! Au refus global nous opposons la responsabilité entière.

[We must break with the conventions of society once and for all, and reject its utilitarian spirit. We must refuse to function knowingly at less than our physical and mental potential; refuse to close our eyes to vice and fraud perpetrated in the name of knowledge or favours or due respect. We refuse to be confined to the barracks of plastic arts — it’s a fortress, but easy enough to avoid. We refuse to keep silent. Do what you want with us, but you must hear us out. We will not accept your fame or attendant honours. They are the stigmata of shame, silliness and servility. We refuse to serve, or to be used for such purposes. We reject all forms of intention, the two-edged, perilous sword of reason. Down with both of them, back they go! Make way for magic! Make way for objective mysteries! Make way for love! Make way for necessities! Counterbalancing this total refusal is our complete responsibility]

And invited the reader to join in the new creative freedom:

Au terme imaginable, nous entrevoyons l’homme libéré de ses chaines inutiles, réaliser dans l’ordre imprévu, nécessaire de la spontanéité, dans l’anarchie resplendissante, la plénitude de ses dons individuels. D’ici là, sans repos ni halte, en communauté de sentiment avec les assoiffés d’un mieux-être, sans crainte des longues échéances, dans l’encouragement ou la persécution, nous poursuivrons dans la joie notre sauvage besoin de libération.

[Within a foreseeable future, men will cast off their useless chains. They will realize their full, individual potential according to the unpredictable, necessary order of spontaneity — in splendid anarchy. Until then, we will not rest or falter. Hand in hand with others thirsting for a better life, no matter how long it takes, regardless of support or persecution, we will joyfully respond to a savage need for liberation.]

The public paid little attention. However, the reaction of the church and government was swift. A month after the manifesto was published, Borduas was fired from his position at the École du meuble. The reason given in the official government letter was

*His writings and the manifestos he publishes, as well as his state of mind, make him unsuitable for the kind of teaching we wish for our students. (quoted by Ellenwood in his introduction to Borduas, 1985)

Borduas was devastated. He continued to paint and began to make abstract wooden sculptures, but he soon began to experience financial difficulties. His marriage came under great strain. In 1951 and Gabrielle finally took the children and left her husband. In 1953, Borduas abandoned Canada, moving for a few months to Provincetown on Cape Cod, and then on to New York.

 

New York

New York in 1953 was abuzz with the new Abstract Expressionism. Borduas was impressed with the “action painting” of Jackson Pollock, and created a series of his own drip paintings using watercolors. The following is Gerbes légères (Light Sheaves) from 1954:

Borduas was also intrigued by the abstract calligraphy of Franz Kline, the monumental color fields of Clyfford Still, and the powerful simplicity of Robert Motherwell. He began to apply paint in broad strokes or taches using a palette knife. His painting suggested multicolored knots of color in a thick white fabric. A striking painting from this time was Blue Drops, 1955:   

Paris

In 1955 Borduas moved to Paris. His palette became more restricted: paintings of black shapes on a white background became his iconic images. These paintings convey a deep sense of winter. They recall some of the paintings by his early master Ozias Leduc. The following illustration compares Leduc’s Grey Effect (Snow) from 1914 with Borduas’s Ardente from 1957:

The following is a quotation from Herta Wescher introducing an exhibition of his new abstract paintings in Paris in 1959:

his first burst of activity produced dynamic compositions swirling with movement in a range of shimmering tones. In later works, however, the elements were condensed and reduced in number, forming dark constellations within light grounds. White has become Borduas’ predominant colour, and he is capable of imbuing it with the most subtle of modulations. He covers his canvases with huge luminous expanses of white, at the edges of which very severe black shapes seem to terminate the space. Slowly, the jagged contours position and align themselves, and the internal structures of the compositions fall into place. Never, though, are the surfaces monotonous or schematic. Borduas applies the pigment with broad knives, and the movement of his hand leaves its mark both on the smooth areas and on those that are riddled with nervous streaks. (quoted by Gagnon 1988, p 399)

 

The following illustration shows Borduas’s most famous painting: L’Étoile Noire (Black Star) from 1957, now in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts:

The painting is large – 1.62 meters high and 1.30 meters wide. Larger than anything he had painted before. It demands respect. 

The painting is very difficult to reproduce accurately. There are subtle shades of white, and patches of dark brown coalesce with the black. The edges of the taches are elevated forming lines of force throughout the image.

The following are comments on the painting by Gagnon (1988, p 202):

The use of dark brown in the three main spots towards the bottom adds considerably to the ambivalence of these dark areas. Where are we to place them? They appear both to be moving away towards infinity (black) and to be floating on the surface like blood coagulated on the skin (brown). The spots, on their own, thus encompass all positions in space, and the white is freed for other functions. It should be noted, in particular, how the white invariably covers the edges of all the dark spots with an over-lapping lip. It is thus not a background on which the spots stand out (which would be a Gestaltist reading). Might it not be a true colour field in which these black and brown spots are embedded? It is not really that either, for, as we have seen, the spots still keep their illusionistic power to evoke the abyss, the infinity of the cosmic night. In fact, the white acts as a screen. It serves to conceal some-thing from view and, like all screens, it is interesting to look at in itself If we follow the folds in the white, the edges that it forms around the spots, we will see that it encloses them in a network of lines as structured as those in a Mondrian painting. But what we have here is a Mondrian shot through with the tremor of life — in sharp contrast to the exclusively spiritual character sought by the great Dutch artist in his own works. In Borduas’ painting, the spirit is never divorced from the material; it reveals itself as much in the recesses of the paint as in the rigour of the composition.

Another painting from this time is Magnetic Silence (1957). This has the same imposing size as Black Star. The black shapes at the top of the painting appear to be attracted toward each other, whereas those at the bottom appear to display repulsion. The white background on which the black shapes exist shows the energy with which Borduas created his image. The edges between the various color areas rise up with the force of their interaction. Tectonic plates come forcefully to mind.  

Another style that Borduas explored in Paris placed simple calligraphic shapes in black and in color on a white background. Perhaps an attempt to decode the infinite. The following illustration shows two of these paintings and a photograph from 1959:

Borduas was not well. He was depressed about his exile from Canada, and his heart was starting to fail. His mental and physical and stresses found their way into this painting:

Ma peinture deviant de plus en plus sévère, noir et blanc, simplifiée; je n’y plus rien; c’est ma “fatalité.” [My painting is becoming more and more severe, black and white, simplified; I have nothing left; it is my “fatality.”] (quoted by Lambert 2015, p 94)

He died of a heart attack in February 1960. At his death, Borduas left on his easel a large black and white painting (later titled Composition 69):

 

His friend the poet Jean-Paul Filion described the painting

Une seule masse noire et immense couvrant la surface presque totale de la toile, avec, dans le haut, un mince horizon de blanc dans lequel baigne un soupçon de vert limpide et où le peintre a piqué deux petites formes noires rectangulaires, créant ainsi une perspective fascinante vers l’espace. Que viennent faire ces deux blocs, ces deux masques, ces deux fantômes comme des bouts de linceul, et qui persistent à prendre toute la place dans un espace réduit de lumière inaccessible, le tout placé comme en exergue au sommet d’un haut mur de charbon luisant? Ce qui m’entraîne à voir dans cette oeuvre limite l’illustration d’une sorte de désespoir vécu aux confins du cosmos. Ai-je tort d’imaginer cela? (quoted in Lambert, 2015, p 97).

[One immense black mass covering almost the entire surface of the canvas. At the top, a thin white horizon with a hint of limpid green, in which the painter has stuck two rectangular black shapes, thus creating a fascinating view out into space. What are they doing there, these two blocks, these two masks, these two ghosts like bits of shroud, stubbornly taking up all the room in a cramped space of inaccessible light, sitting like an epigraph atop a high wall of glistening coal? I am led to see this final work as the illustration of a sort of despair experienced at the limits of the cosmos. Am I wrong in imagining that?]

 

La Révolution Tranquille

While Borduas was in self-imposed exile, the political landscape of Quebec was beginning to change. Since 1936, the province had been governed by the conservative Union Nationale party led by Maurice Duplessis, except for a brief period during World War II when the Liberal Party had won an election by promising to prevent conscription. The Union Nationale had close ties to the Catholic Church, and had hung a crucifix over the speaker’s chair in the National Assembly when they first came to power in 1936. One of their recuring slogans was Le ciel est bleu; l’enfer est rouge (Heaven is blue and Hell is red, a play on the colors of the two parties – blue for the Union Nationale and red for the Liberals). The Union Nationale was vehemently anti-union, and provided little if any support for education or social security, which were controlled by the church. The government supported a strictly capitalist economy, wherein the natural resources of the province were exploited by rich foreigners.   

In late 1959, Duplessis died. In the election of June 1960, a brief four months after the death of Borduas, the Liberal Party under Jean Lesage were victorious. The Liberals instituted many reforms: the nationalization of the power companies to form Quebec Hydro, the establishment of a Quebec pension, increased support for education which now came under government rather than church control, and recognition of the unions even in the civil service. These came to be known as La Révolution Tranquille (Quiet Revolution), and the preceding period when the province was controlled by the Union Nationale came to be known as La Grande Noirceur (Great Darkness). These terms were those of the victors. In actuality, the Union Nationale period was not as dark as they believed, and the revolution turned out to be not as quiet as they wished (Bouchard, 2005).  

After 1960, there were tremendous changes in Quebec society. Most importantly, the birth rate and the frequency of attendance at church declined precipitously. It is tempting to attribute these changes to the Liberal election. However, both a declining birth rate and an increasingly secular society occurred at the same time in the rest of Canada and in Western Europe. Other more global factors were at play: the availability of contraceptive medication and a burgeoning economy. 

Whatever the actual causes, Borduas would have been pleased with the new Quebec. His Refus Global had called for these new freedoms and new responsibilities. Although his manifesto was rejected at the time it was published, the ideas that it promoted germinated and were finally acted upon. 

 

References

Borduas, P.-É. (1948). Refus global. Mithra-Mythe Éditeur. Text of Borduas article is available. English translation available.

Borduas, P.-É. (translated by R. Ellenwood, 1985). Total refusal. Exile Editions.

Bouchard, G. (2005). L’imaginaire de la grande noirceur et de la révolution tranquille: fictions identitaires et jeux de mémoire au Québec. Recherches Sociographiques, 46(3), 411–436.

Breton, A. (1924, translated by R. Seaver and H. R. Lane, 1969). Manifestoes of Surrealism. Ann Arbor Paperbacks (University of Michigan Press)

Gagnon, F. M. (1988). Paul-Émile Borduas. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Gagnon, F. M. (2014). Paul-Émile Borduas life & work. Art Canada Institute

Gagnon, F. M. (2013). Paul-Émile Borduas: a critical biography. McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Gagnon, F. M. (trans. D. Winkler, 2020) Jean Paul Riopelle and the Automatiste Movement, McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Lacroix, L. (2019) Ozias Leduc: life and work. Art Canada Institute

Lambert, P. (2015). Borduas: le rebelle de Saint-Hilaire. Marcel Broquet, la nouvelle édition.

Lion, A. (2010). Art sacré et modernité en France: le rôle du P. Marie-Alain Couturier. Revue de l’histoire des religions, 1|2010, 109-126.

Nasgaard, R., & Ellenwood, R.  (2009). The Automatiste revolution: Montreal, 1941-1960. Douglas & McIntyre.

Warren, J.-P. (translated by S. Urquhart, 2017). Living art: individual and collective creativity: becoming Paul-Émile Borduas. Exil

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) and Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) arrived in the United States of America on January 26, 1939. The ostensible reason for their visit was to write a book on the United States, to be published by the Hogarth Press with the title Address Not Known. The two writers had just completed a book on China, Journey to a War, which was to come out in March. However, other reasons played a larger role in their decision to emigrate. Both writers were tired of the hypocrisy, complacency and insularity of British literary life. Auden claimed, “An artist ought either to live where he has live roots or where he has no roots at all.” (Davenport-Hines, 1995, p 180). In New York City they took lodging in the George Washington Hotel at Lexington and 23^rd St., had their photographs taken by Carl van Vechten, visited with Thomas Mann and his family in Princeton, wrote reviews for American magazines, and gave readings of their work. At one of these readings in April, Auden met the 18-year-old Chester Kallman (1921-1975), and fell deeply in love. The two were to remain together for the rest of Auden’s life. In June, Auden and Kallman departed on a two-month trip by Greyhound Bus across the United States, that served as their honeymoon. They visited New Orleans, stayed for a while with Frieda Lawrence in Taos, and ended up in Laguna Beach in California. On August 28, 1939, they arrived back in Manhattan.

 

The Beginning of World War II

In the early morning hours of September 1, 1939, Hitler’s German troops invaded Poland. One week earlier, Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had agreed on a mutual non-aggression treaty – the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. These negotiations had also included a secret agreement to divide up Poland between the two powers, and to allow the USSR to invade Finland and the Baltic countries.  

The Munich Agreement of September, 1938, had allowed the German annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. In March, 1939, a fascist Slovak State was proclaimed and Germany took over the remaining areas of what had once been Czechoslovakia. Alarmed by Hitler’s complete disregard of the Munich agreements, the United Kingdom agreed to an Anglo-Polish Alliance which would assure mutual assistance in the event of German aggression. On September 3, 1939, Britain therefore gave Germany an ultimatum requiring them to withdraw their troops from Poland. The deadline passed, and later that day Neville Chamberlain declared the United Kingdom at war with Germany. Undeterred, Germany continued its invasion. The photograph shows Hitler reviewing German troops as they crossed the border into Poland.

Auden’s Poem

The beginning of the war was for Auden the culmination of a decade of increasing despair. He expressed his thoughts in a remarkable and controversial poem entitled September 1, 1939. This was first published in The New Republic in October, 1939, and then in the book Another Time in 1940.

The poem consists of 9 stanzas, each 11 lines long. There are three stresses per line, with no dominant rhythm. The rhyme scheme is variable both in terms of the lines that rhyme and the type of rhyme: slant rhymes, assonance, and alliteration are as common as perfect rhymes, and internal rhymes as frequent as end-rhymes. Each stanza is composed of one sentence. The poem is similar in many ways to Yeats’ poem about the Easter uprising in Dublin, Easter, 1916, with its ringing call to rebellion:

All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Both poems deal with a poet’s personal response to a world-changing event. Both poems are driven by a pulsating trimeter rhythm, and adorned with multiple and various rhymes. 

After September 1, 1939 was published, Auden had second thoughts, particularly about the line that ends the penultimate stanza. In his preface to Bloomfield’s 1964 bibliography of his works he stated

A critic is entitled, of course, to prefer an earlier version to a later, but some seem to think that an author has no right to revise his work. Such an attitude seems to me mad. Most poets, I think, will agree with Valéry’s dictum: “A poem is never finished, only abandoned”. To which I would add: “Yes, but it must not be abandoned too soon”. In some cases, too, one finds that tinkering is no good and the whole poem must go. Rereading a poem of mine, 1^st September, l939, after it had been published, I came to the line

We must love one another or die

and said to myself: “That’s a damned lie! We must die anyway”. So, in the nest edition, I altered it to

We must love one mother and die.

This didn’t seem to do either, so I cut the stanza. Still no good. The whole poem, I realised, was infected with an incurable dishonesty and must be scrapped.

Although the poem was omitted from Auden’s Collected Poems (1976), it continues to be read and studied (Brodsky, 1986; Hecht, 1993, pp 152-170; Fuller, 1998, pp 290-293; Mendelson, 1999, pp 73-77; Sansom, 2019). It may not be perfect but it says much that is important and, for the most part, says it very well. This essay reviews various aspects of the poem, and provides a recitation of each stanza by Tom O’Bedlam.

 

Fifty-Second Street

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-Second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright 
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

The opening of the poem may have its roots in the beginning of a 1930 poem by Ogden Nash, Spring Comes to Murray Hill, which Auden had recently read. Murray Hill is a neighborhood in midtown Manhattan.

I sit in an office at 244 Madison Avenue
And say to myself you have a responsible job havenue?
Why then do you fritter away your time on this doggerel?
If you have a sore throat you can cure it by using a good goggeral,
If you have a sore foot you can get it fixed by a chiropodist,
And you can get your original sin removed by St. John the Bopodist,

However, Nash’s blithe insouciance had transformed in Auden’s poem to a keen anxiety. For which there are no cures. And spring had long passed. Now came the fall.  

In the 1930s, Fifty-Second Street between 5^th and 6^th Avenues in Manhattan became a center for jazz. During prohibition, the five-story brownstone buildings had provided spaces in their narrow ground floors for speakeasies. With the repeal of prohibition, these developed into bars and jazz clubs. The spaces were long, narrow, dark and windowless. They typically placed a mirrored bar on one wall and tables or booths on the other. At the far end was a tiny stage upon which small groups of musicians could play. This fostered a new jazz sound, more intimate than that of the big bands. Some famous musicians performing on the street were Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davies. The following is a night photograph of the clubs on 52^nd Street:

On September 1, 1939, Auden went alone to the Dizzy Club on 52^nd Street. Chester Kallman and his friend Harold Norse had discovered this gay bar a few nights before and recommended it. Auden went there alone, searching for solace in the company of strangers. Norse (1989) recalled

The dive was the sex addict’s quick fix, packed to the rafters with college buys and working-class youths under twenty-five. From street level you stepped into a writhing mass of tight boys in tighter pants … With floppy shoelaces, creased suit and tie, ash-stained, he must have looked out of place, though with his rosy California tan and sun-bleached hair he could, in the right light, pass for twenty-five. He didn’t go to pick up a boy; however, aware of the age difference and shy. he would have selected one of the two unused corner tables at the rear of the bar, which was usually deserted except for those too drunk to stand, from which he could observe boys kissing and groping under the bright lights, packed like sardines pickled in alcohol. (pp 78-79)

The “low dishonest decade” of the 1930s had been ushered in by the Wall Street Crash in October, 1929. Unemployment and despair soon spread across the world. Liberal hopes for a better world fell by the wayside. Autocratic companies used foreign wars to mobilize their people. In 1932, Japan invaded Manchuria. In 1933, Adolph Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany. In 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia. In 1936, the Nationalist military forces rebelled against the Republican government of Spain precipitating the bloody Spanish Civil War, which ended with the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco in 1939. While the fascist governments of Italy and Germany provided assistance to the Nationalist and the communist government of the USSR supported the Republicans, the liberal democracies of Western Europe decided not to intervene. In 1937, Japan invaded China. In March, 1938, Germany annexed Austria. In September, 1938, the Munich Agreement allowed Germany to take control of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in return for future restraint. According to Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, this brought “Peace for our time.” However, Hitler paid no attention to the agreement, and went ahead with the occupation of the western half of Czechoslovakia in March 1939.

In some notes made during in his early months in New York City but only published much later, Auden remarked on the failure of all the “clever hopes” for peace and justice

If one reviews the political activity of the world’s intellectuals during the past eight years, if one counts up all the letters to the papers which they have signed, all the platforms on which they have spoken, all the congresses which they have attended, one is compelled to admit that their combined effect, apart from the money they have helped to raise for humanitarian purposes (and one must not belittle the value of that) has been nil. As far as the course of political events is concerned they might just as well have done nothing. (Auden, 1993, p 20)

Radio “waves” from all parts of the world, both where it was “darkened” night and where it was “bright” day, brought news of broken treaties and warnings of impending war. Listeners found it hard to hear and even harder to talk about it. One sensed an “unmentionable odour of death.”

 

Those to Whom Evil Is Done

Accurate scholarship can 
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

What was it that had “driven a culture mad”? Auden sometimes longed for the simplicity of life in the Middle Ages. He believed that Luther had changed all this by insisting on an individual rather than communal approach to God, and by dissociating salvation from good works. Perhaps the madness of the modern age was its selfishness: its complete lack of fellow feeling. In his later preface to the first volume of Poets of the English Language (1950), Auden wrote

Luther denied any intelligible relation between Faith and Works, Machiavelli any intelligible relation between private and public morality, and Descartes any intelligible relation between Mauer and Mind. Allegory became impossible as a literary form, and the human Amor seemed no longer a parable of the Divine Love but its blasphemous parody.

There has been no time since its own when the literature of the Middle Ages could appeal to readers as greatly as it can today, when the dualism inaugurated by Luther, Machiavelli, and Descartes has brought as to the end of our tether and we know that either we must discover a unity which can repair the fissures that separate the individual from society, feeling from intellect, and conscience from both, or we shall surely die by spiritual despair and physical annihilation.

Auden had spent 10 months in Berlin in 1928-29 and had visited Germany multiple times during the 1930s. He loved the sexual and intellectual freedom of Weimar Germany. But this came crashing down with the rise of Hitler, who became Chancellor in 1933 and anointed himself Führer a year later. No one can really tell how Hitler came to be the embodiment of evil. Jungian psychoanalysis proposed that we internalize our early social experiences as “imagos” (later known as archetypes) which later drive our behavior. Hitler’s father was domineering and violent, and Hitler’s schooling in Linz was punitive and severe. Both may have contributed to the subconscious “psychopathic god” that drove the Führer.    

The final couplet of the stanza presents the obverse of the moral law. We should love our neighbors as ourselves. For if we do them evil, they will repay us. Human history has passed through multiple cycles of evils done and revenges taken. The punitive reparations demanded of Germany after the end of World War I were a contributing factor to the onset of World War II.

 

What Dictators Do

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Thucydides (460-400 BCE) was an Athenian general. After losing a battle with the Spartans in 424 BCE, he was exiled from Athens. He then travelled through various regions of Greece, and wrote an account of the ongoing Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE). This History of the Peloponnesian War, which covered events up to 411 BCE, includes a famous speech given by the Athenian leader in memory of those that died in defence of the state: Pericles’ Funeral Oration, which among other things considers the process of democracy:

We have a form of government, not fetched by imitation from the laws of our neighbouring states; (nay, we are rather a pattern to others, than they to us); which, because in the administration it hath respect not to a few, but to the multitude, is called a democracy. Wherein, though there be an equality amongst all men in point of law for their private controversies; yet in conferring of dignities one man is preferred before another to public charge, and that according to the reputation, not of his house, but of his virtue; and is not put back through poverty for the obscurity of his person, as long as he can do good service to the commonwealth. (translated by Thomas Hobbes in 1628)

The speech was not as clear as it might have been. Auden considered most of it “elderly rubbish” spoken at the “apathetic grave” of the soldiers that had died. However, it does point out that democracy requires that certain men become leaders, and that these leaders then enact laws and arrange to have them enforced. The main problem with democracy is that some leaders come to power because of popularity rather than wisdom, because of propaganda rather than policy. People vote for their leaders as much on the basis of emotion as on reason. Pericles was a charismatic leader. He had encouraged Athenian imperialism, which denied freedom to all but the ruling state, and which ultimately led to war with Sparta. Democracy comes a cropper if the wrong leader is selected. We need to be “managed” but sometime we choose the wrong manager. Once Hitler was elected, he declared himself dictator.   

 

Blind Skyscrapers

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

The skyline of New York in the 1930s was filled with new skyscrapers. These magnificent buildings demonstrated the tremendous power of capitalism. No one had made buildings as tall as these since the Tower of Babel. Yet the Great Depression showed that raw capitalism was doomed to fail. For a few years after the Wall Street Crash, the skyscrapers that had been conceived and financed before the crash were completed. After 1935 no new skyscrapers were built in New York City until 1961. 

However, the “Collective Man” had shown that he could build great things even exploited. What might he do if free? Perhaps the “euphoric dreams” mentioned to in Auden’s poem allude to the New Deal that was enacted from 1933 to 1938 by the government of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The “new” idea was that everyone should work together for the common good.

The following photograph below shows the night view south from the main building of the Rockefeller Center which was completed in 1933. Visible on the right is the Empire State Building (1931), the tallest building in the world until the World Trade Center was built in 1970. On the left is the Art Deco Chrysler Building (1930). In the right foreground, with the striking vertical stripes, is 500 Fifth Avenue (1930).

Looking at the mirrors of the bar, Auden could see the faces of the two main political forces at work in the world: western Europe with its colonial empires, and Russia with its dreams of international communism. Both were starting to fall apart. Gandhi was attempting to bring independence to India through satyagraha (nonviolent resistance). And in Russia, the show trials and executions of Stalin’s Great Purge had already begun.

 

Lost in a Haunted Wood

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire 
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The bars on 52^nd Street were set up to make the patrons feel at home. Like a “fort,” the bar was closed off from the outside world. The lights stayed on through the night and the music played into the early hours of the morning. The following is Coleman Hawkins’ Body and Soul, recorded in 1939 with RCA (Radio Corporation of America).

The following illustration shows the interior of the Onyx bar, whose neon sign shows on the left side of the earlier photograph of 52^nd Street. Without the people, it is a quiet and lonely space, with mirrors reflecting dolefully back on each other. 

The stanza concludes with the mute despair of children lost in a frightening world. The fairy tales with their “haunted” woods are right.

 

What Mad Nijinsky Wrote

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

Auden had found some respite from the recent propaganda and demagoguery by reading through the Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky (1889-1950), written during the winter of 1918-1919 but only published in 1936. The diary was composed when Nijinsky was living in Switzerland with his wife Romola; and slowly but surely becoming mad.

Nijinsky had become a dancer with Les Ballets Russes, and the lover of its impresario Sergei Diaghilev. His most famous performance was in 1912 as the faun in a ballet that he himself choregraphed for Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un Faune (1894), itself based on the 1876 poem by Stéphane Mallarmé about the sensuous dreams of a young faun. The following are contemporary photographs by Adolph de Meyer, showing the Nijinsky reclining with his flute as the music begins and then dancing in a stylized manner evocative of ancient Greek paintings.

When Nijinsky married the Hungarian aristocrat Romola de Pulszky in 1913, Diaghilev summarily dismissed him from the Ballet Russes, and took as a lover another beautiful young man, the choreographer, Léonide Massine. As Nijinsky lapsed into schizophrenia, Romola continued to care for him.

The diaries jump haphazardly from one topic to the next. Auden quotes a comment about Nijinsky that follows from a discussion of Georges Clemenceau, the Prime Minister of France.

I know that Clemenceau is honest; he is the policy of France. He is a hard-working man, but he was mistaken when he sent France to her death. He is a man who seeks goodness, a child with a tremendous brain. Some politicians are hypocrites like Diaghilev, who does not want universal love, but to be loved alone. I want universal love. (Nijinsky, 1936, p 27).

Madness brings the truth to light. Human beings want to be loved, but find it difficult to love one another. Most of us are like Diaghilev: selfishness is “bred in the bone.”

Brodsky (1986, p 345-6) points out the intricacy of the rhymes in this stanza. Most importantly “Diaghilev” pararhymes with “love.” But this end-rhyme is preceded by the internal consonant rhymes on the “v” of “Craves what it cannot have.”  

 

Who Can Speak for the Dumb?

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

In this stanza Auden recounts how commuters come to the city promising themselves to do better. But the city lacks leaders who can release them from their mundane lives. The ending has its source in the advice given by his mother to King Lemuel in Proverbs: 

It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine; nor for princes strong drink:
Lest they drink, and forget the law, and pervert the judgment of any of the afflicted.
Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts.
Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.
Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction.
Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy.
(Proverbs 31: 4-9)

We are in need of kings who can comfort those who suffer, who can talk to the deaf and speak up for the dumb.

 

We Must Love One Another or Die

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

This stanza provides tentative answers to the questions posed in the preceding stanza. Auden had been concerned about the role of the poet in modern society. Soon after Yeats had died in January 1939, and Auden had written In Memory of W. B. Yeats, publishing it in The New Republic in March. The poem famously claimed that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Nevertheless, it also claimed that poetry provided “a mouth.” This recitation is by Auden. 

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

In September 1, 1939, Auden voices what is needed to undo the lies to which we have become accustomed. Fuller (1998, p 292) suggests that the “folded lie” is “a kind of kenning for the newspaper tucked under the arm of the commuter of stanza 7.” Auden admired Old English poetry which often combined two words to give the extended meaning of one: poetical periphrasis or “kenning” (from ken, know). A second lie is the romantic idea that everything we do is for the best. And a third lie is what we are told by those in authority. The syntax of the second half of the stanza is difficult. The following is the interpretation of Anthony Hecht (1993, pp 166-7):

What follows after the colon is the truth that the poet, armed only with his “voice,” has taken upon himself to reveal. It is a double secret, enraging both to the individual and to the corporate group of “Collective Man” which constitutes “Authority.” “There is no such thing as the State” is not merely an attack upon the likes of Hitler and Stalin, and the superstates over which they tyrannize; it declares that government itself is no more than a useful fiction, one which ought to allow us as much independence and freedom from itself as possible. but there is a balancing corollary which is, at the same time, the inverse of this proposition: it is that “no one exists alone.” And this means that we are, of necessity, bound to one another, not wholly independent, and thus part of the fictive State. Both those with authority and those without it are caught in this dilemma, both citizens and police.

And so we come to the crux of the poem and line that Auden later regretted.

We must love one another or die.

Auden claimed that it made no sense. We die whether we love or not. But this is a simplistic interpretation. Surely the poet is saying that we must love one another or fail to be truly human: without love we are dead to our real selves. Or even more directly: we must either love one another or wind up killing each other.

Auden had made similar comments before. Fuller (1998, p 292) quotes from Auden’s revisions for a 1939 production of Auden and Isherwood’s 1936 play The Ascent of F6:

Man is an animal that has to love or perish.

I think that years afterward, Auden considered his younger self hopelessly naïve for telling people on the brink of a war that would lead to 80 million deaths to “love one another.” Invoking the moral law would do little to stop the advancing Panzer divisions.  

In his 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater, Lyndon Johnson used a commercial wherein the image of a young girl picking petals from a daisy leads into the image of an exploding atomic bomb, as Johnson speaks a garbled version of Auden’s line:

*We must either love each other, or we must die.

Johnson won by a landslide. Perhaps poetry does make some things happen.

 

Defenceless under the Night

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Auden was not clear what he should do now that war was beginning. How can one person change the world other than by standing up for what is right, telling others of one’s fears, and hoping that justice will prevail? The image of small lights flashing out their messages of good will likely comes from E. M Forster’s essay What I Believe, published in The Nation in 1938 and then as a pamphlet in 1939. Forster gave his famous “two cheers for democracy:” “one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.” However, he also believed in an aristocracy of “the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky.” And in the darkest times

the brighter shine the little lights, reassuring one another, signalling: “Well, at all events, I’m still here. I don’t like it very much, but how are you?” Unquenchable lights of my aristocracy! Signals of the invincible army! “Come along—anyway, let’s have a good time while we can.” I think they signal that too.

I think that Auden was skeptical about how effective these lights would be. While composing the poem, he changed “little lights” to “ironic lights.” Nevertheless, the poem ends with a prayer that he may show an “affirming flame.”

The idea of tiny lights flashing in the darkness was used by George H. W. Bush in a 1988 campaign speech to promote charitable giving as a better way of taking care of those in need than government handouts.

I have spoken of a thousand points of light, of all the community organizations that are spread like stars throughout the Nation, doing good. We will work hand in hand, encouraging, sometimes leading, sometimes being led, rewarding.

Upping the ante to a thousand does little in the way of convincing anyone that the rich will provide all the help that the poor will need.

The New Year Letter

A few months after September 1, 1939, Auden composed his New Year Letter, a long poem in tetrameter rhyming couplets to celebrate the beginning of 1940. His hopes for his “ironic points of light” were turning to “flares of desperation:”

Around me, pausing as I write,
A tiny object in the night,
Whichever way I look, I mark
Importunate along the dark
Horizon of immediacies
The flares of desperation rise
From signallers who justly plead
Their cause is piteous indeed
(Auden, 1976, p 224)

Auden had been intrigued by the possibilities of communism but had recognized its failure. He now began to turn back toward religion as a way to organize society. By the end of 1940, he was once again taking communion in the Anglican Church, which in the United States was called Episcopalian. There was no mystical moment of conversion, just a slowly increasing agreement with Christian beliefs (Carpenter, 1981, pp 283-8, 297-302).

The following quotation from the ending to Auden’s New Year Letter summarized much of the import of September 1, 1939, and hinted at his ongoing return to Christianity:

                                  Our road
Gets worse and we seem altogether
Lost as our theories, like the weather,
Veer round completely every day,
And all that we can always say
Is: true democracy begins
With free confession of our sins.
In this alone are all the same,
All are so weak that none dare claim
“I have the right to govern,” or
“Behold in me the Moral Law,”
And all real unity commences
That all have wants to satisfy
And each a power to supply.
We need to love all since we are
Each a unique particular
That is no giant, god, or dwarf,
But one odd human isomorph;
We can love each because we know
All, all of us, that this is so:
Can live since we are lived, the powers
That we create with are not ours.
(Auden, 1976, p 241)

The idea that “all have wants to satisfy and each a power to supply” is a simple description of communism. Yet communism does not work. We need some other way to facilitate the moral law. This can perhaps be obtained in the idea of an immanent God, one who lives through us when we allow it:

For in him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28) 

 

September 11, 2011

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, there was a resurgence of interest in Auden’s September 1, 1939. Several newspapers reprinted the poem and it was recited on the radio. Written about a war that began in a September more than 70 years before, the poem helped people to explore the uncertainty, grief and fear that they were once again experiencing. It also provided some comfort in the idea that, even though the world had face terrible problems in the past, justice had always prevailed. Stephen Burt (2003) wrote

“September 1,1939” represents one mind, and many minds, united by a civic emergency, by illimitable apprehension, by a newly evident international enemy, and by the sudden, urgent, and disquietingly general search for an explanation—not just any explanation, but one that uses data we already have. It gropes for appropriate response to “evil,” while resorting neither to bellicose or to confidently pacifist rhetoric, enunciating instead a sustained uncertainty. The poem speaks at once to our feeling of catastrophic helplessness and, in its middle stanzas, to the understandable feeling that when anything bad happens to us (or to our society) it could be partly our fault. Moreover, it uses that feeling to claim that its resources, poetry’s resources, have at this time a special civic purpose: they can enunciate a collective confession and thus draw the just, the ironic light-bearers, together for good.

 

Growing Old

Auden continued to write poetry until his death. He was always unsure of his work. He revised many of his earlier poems (Quesenbery, 2008). He continued to disown September 1, 1939, and another long poem entitled Spain that he had written 2 years earlier. Neither poem is perfect. Yet both poems give voice to the feelings of the time in which they were written.

In the postscript to the poem The Cave of Making written in memory of his friend Louis MacNeice (1907-1963), Auden considered how poets so often fail to write what they should have. The “you” refers to Auden – he is talking to himself.

You hope, yes,
                          your books will excuse you,
save you from hell;
                                  nevertheless,
without looking sad,
                                    without in any way
seeming to blame
                                (He doesn’t need to,
knowing well
                         what a lover of art
like yourself pays heed to),
                                              God may reduce you
on Judgment Day
                               to tears of shame,
reciting by heart
                              the poems you would
have written, had
                               your life been good.

 

 

The illustration shows a 2014 drawing of Auden’s face (based on photographs from the 1960s) by Caroline Binch. The deep furrows are a result of Touraine‐Solente‐Golé syndrome, a genetic disorder causing hypertrophy of the skin and bones (Aronson & Ramachandran, 2011). In Auden’s words, his face “looked like a wedding cake left out in the rain” (Carpenter, 1981, p 423). The face seems to manifest his anxiety about not getting the words completely right.

 

References

Aronson, J. K., & Ramachandran, M. (2011). The diagnosis of art: W. H. Auden’s face. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 104(1), 38–40.

Auden, W. H. (1940). Another time: poems. Faber.

Auden, W. H. (edited by Mendelson, E, 1976). Collected poems. Random House.

Auden, W. H. (edited by Mendelson, E, 1993). The prolific and the devourer. Ecco Press.

Auden, W. H., & Pearson, N. H. (1950). Poets of the English language. Viking.

Bloomfield, B. C. (1964). W.H. Auden, a bibliography: the early years through 1955. University of Virginia.

Brodsky, J. (1986). On “September 1, 1939” by W. H Auden. In Less than one: selected essays. (pp 304-356). Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Burt, S. (2003). “September 1, 1939” revisited: or, poetry, politics, and the idea of the public. American Literary History, 15(3), 533–559.

Carpenter, H. (1981). W. H. Auden: a biography. Allen & Unwin.

Davenport-Hines, R. P. T. (1995). Auden. Heinemann.

Fuller, J. (1998). W.H. Auden: a commentary. Faber and Faber.

Hecht, A. (1993). The hidden law: the poetry of W. H. Auden. Harvard University Press.

Mendelson, E. (1999). Later Auden. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

Nijinsky, V. (edited by R. Nijinsky, 1936). The diary of Vaslav Nijinsky. Simon & Schuster.

Norse, H. (1989). Memoirs of a bastard angel. William Morrow.

Quesenbery, W. D. (2008). Auden’s revisions.

Sansom, I. (2019). September 1, 1939: a biography of a poem. HarperCollins.

At the Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10 in Petrograd in 1915, Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (1879-1935) presented a set of Suprematist paintings. Among them was a small (80 cm square) canvas showing a black square on a white background. The painting was the final step in the rebellion against representational art: pure form without content. Black Square became emblematic of the Russian Avant-Garde, a modernist movement in Russian art, which predated the Russian Revolution, and then enthusiastically celebrated the new world brought forth by that revolution. However, the new politics did not embrace the new art. In the 1920s, the Avant-Garde was criticized as “formalist,” and replaced by the more politically amenable art of Socialist Realism.

The Modernist Revolution

In the years leading up to the outbreak of World War I, artists turned away from representational art toward abstraction. The most significant of the various movements was Cubism, which began in 1907 with Picasso and Braque. Cubism changed our ideas of perspective: multiple points of view and multiple degrees of focus were presented together. This was soon followed in 1909 by the Futurism of Marinetti and Boccioni. Futurism represented experiences from multiple times simultaneously. The Fauvism of Derain and Matisse began to use of color to portray emotion rather than reality, and the Orphism of Robert and Sonia Delaunay attempted to reach harmony through color independently of form.

Artists and collectors in Russia closely followed these developments in modernism. The cloth merchant Sergei Shchukin and the textile manufacturer Ivan Morozov each put together important and extensive collections of modernist art. Shchukin opened his home on Sundays to allow the public to view the work of Picasso and Matisse. Artists travelled to France and Italy and brought the ideas of Cubism and Futurism back to Russia. The literary group Hylaea founded the Russian Futurist movement in 1912 with a manifesto entitled A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (Markov in Ioffe & White, 2012, pp 21-84). They repudiated the art and literature of the past; they celebrated the beauty of speed and machines. Some of the artists of Russian Futurism pushed toward complete abstraction, founding a small movement known as Rayonism, which depicted rays of colored light. T

he interactions between the various movements in modern art were represented in a diagram that Alfred Barr used as a cover to his 1935 book Cubism and Abstract Art:

 

Victory over the Sun

In 1913, the Russian Futurists presented an opera in Petrograd entitled Victory over the Sun. The libretto was written by Aleksei Kruchonykh, the music was composed by Mikhail Matyushin, and the stage settings and costumes were designed by Kazimir Malevich. In the opera, the sun, representative of the decadent past, is torn down from the sky to make way for a new world created by man’s technological expertise. The following illustration shows Malevich’s design for the costumes of the new men of the future, a sketch for the backdrop for Act II, and a poster for a later production of the opera by El Lissitzky. Malevich’s sketch of a square partially eclipsed in black is a precursor of his later painting Black Square. The Lissitzky poster shows some of the imaginary technology used by the men of the future. The title (Победа над Cолнцем, Pobeda nad Solntsem) is presented, and the banner reads (in a hybridized language) All is well that begins well and has not ended.

 

Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10

The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10 opened in Petrograd on December 17, 2015. As its title proclaimed, the exhibition was designed to mark the end of all representational art, even that of Futurism. The meaning of the numbers “zero-ten” has never been clear (Shatskikh, 2012, pp 101-102). “Zero” likely represented the end of everything and perhaps “ten” indicated the number of artists scheduled for the exhibition, although 14 artists were ultimately included in the catalogue. Together with the exhibition, Malevich published From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism (Bowlt, 1976, pp 116-135). Like all of Malevich’s writings, the thoughts tend more to ecstasy than logic:  

I have transformed myself in the zero of form and have fished myself out of the rubbishy slough of academic art. I have destroyed the ring of the horizon and got out of the circle of objects, the horizon ring that has imprisoned the artist and the forms of nature. This accursed ring, by continually revealing novelty after novelty, leads the artist away from the aim of destruction.

Only dull and impotent artists veil their work with sincerity. Art requires truth, not sincerity. Objects have vanished like smoke; to attain the new artistic culture, art advances toward creation as an end in itself and toward domination over the forms of nature.

Malevich’s Suprematist paintings were displayed in one of the rooms of the exhibition. In these paintings, simple shapes float in a white space, seeking out equilibrium and sometimes moving in front of each other. The painting entitled Black Square was mounted high in the corner of the room, in the position where one might display a religious icon: The following illustration shows a photograph of the original exhibition and a replica of the room (missing the chair and the labels) put together by the Chinese-American artist John Diao in 1985:

The original Black Square has not aged well: the black paint has crackled significantly and the white paint is scuffed and dirty. Visual and radiographic examination shows that the square was painted over other shapes, as though Malevich had come to a sudden realization that even those simple shapes should be eclipsed:

The following illustration shows two of Malevich’s more complex Suprematisms, the left one having been part of the 1915 exhibition and the right one dating 2016.

Among the artists presenting at the 1915 exhibition was Lyubov Popova (1889-1924). She had been painting in a Cubist style, but after the exhibition moved to more complete abstraction. The following is her Painterly Architectonic (1918) and Spatial Force Construction (1920);

Another artist in the exhibition was Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953; Baier, 2012). He had denied the need for painting of any kind. Instead, he put together assemblages of materials or “counter-reliefs,” one of which is shown in the following illustration (left). He founded a movement called Constructivism, which used the new technology and materials to build things that could be used rather than admired (Lodder in Ioffe & White, pp 227-249). In 1919, he designed a spiral tower to commemorate the Third International. This was to have been made of steel and glass and to have reached a height of over 400 m. It was never constructed. The illustration (below, right) shows a model from 1920.

The Russian Revolution

Deaths in battle and shortages of food during the first years of World War I precipitated widespread unrest in Russian society. In March 1917, Tsar Nicholas II was forced to resign. The provisional government was then itself overthrown by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks in November 1917. Russia then entered into a prolonged Civil War fought mainly between the Communist Red Army and the White Army composed of those loyal to the Russian Empire. To prevent any hope that the Tsar be reinstated, Nicholas II and his family were murdered in July 1918. The Civil War finally ended in 1922 with the establishment of the Soviet Union. During the war and for many years afterward, the country was wracked by widespread famine, as communism imposed its principles upon the economy. After Lenin died in 1924, Josef Stalin became the leader of the Soviet Union.

The Suprematists and the Constructivists enthusiastically assisted in the birth of the new society, founding schools to teach arts and crafts to the workers. Malevich continued to produce his Suprematist paintings. One important painting – White on White (1918) – seemed to celebrate the revolution. The principles of the past have been swept away, leaving an almost empty canvas though which we can just discern the future.  

Other Malevich paintings from the early years after the revolution tended toward the mystical.  The following illustration shows Eight Red Rectangles, one of the paintings from the 1915 exhibition, and Mystic Suprematism from 1920. Though Malevich had rejected his Catholic upbringing, the idea that one might approach the divine through art persisted (Mashek, 2023). The term “Suprematism” contains within itself the idea of some ultimate power that the artist is attempting to perceive.

 

UNOVIS

In 1919 Malevich joined the School of Art in Vitebsk, a small town in the western region of the Russian Empire (now Byelorus), and a significant center of Jewish culture. In 1920, Malevich succeeded Marc Chagall as the artistic director of the school, and gathered around him a group of artists that called themselves UNOVIS: Utverditeli Novogo Iskusstva or “Champions of the New Art” (Lampe, 2012; Scheijen, 2024, pp 237 248)). The following illustration shows work by two of Malevich’s students: Georgii Riazhsky (1920) and David Yakerson (1920) 

Two other students were Kliment Redko (1921) and Ilya Chashnik (1923):

One of Malevich’s colleagues in Vitebsk was El Lissitzky (1890-1941), who produced propaganda posters supporting the new Red Army. The poster urges the “Red wedge” (Клином красным, Klinom krasnym) to “beat the whites” (бей белых, bey belykh):

El Lissitzky produced many Suprematist paintings that he called prouns. The word is likely a contraction of Pro-Unovis (Clark,1999, p 231). Probably his most famous proun is that painted as a memorial for Rosa Luxemburg, the communist revolutionary who participated in the failed Spartacist uprising in Berlin in 1919, and was summarily executed thereafter by the German military. In the original proun (left below, 1920) a black square, perhaps signifying death, obscures the faded name Rosa Luxemburg written in Cyrillic (Роза Люксембург) on a red circle that probably represents the communist revolution. A later version of the proun (1924, right) no longer showed Luxemburg’s name and used the more generic title Project for Progress.

The following are comments by T. J. Clark (1999, p 251)

I shall treat the elements in the gouache as fourfold. There is a red circle and a black square “on top” of it. There is a universe of smaller, more random Suprematist elements at the picture’s edges, most of the elements being segments of circles as if answering the shape of the central red planet. And then, written into the square and the circle — seemingly half-inscribed into them, but with color seeping back into the lines of lettering — the words ROSA LUXEMBURG, in formal script, complete with period. The effect, as I say, is simple. The symbolism is more or less transparent. Red = wor1d = revolution. Black = death = matter = nothing. (The last two terms in the series would have had, for someone under Malevich’s influence in 1920, a strong positive valency.) The arrows and aeroliths are the various forces, some of them maybe still hostile, about to be brought into the orbit of world revolution. None of this is exactly disturbed by the final inscription of Rosa Luxemburg’s name, but I do think that the presence of writing energizes and complicates the picture’s whole economy.

UNOVIS also attempted to provide art for the everyday life of the revolution. The following illustrations show a ration card designed by Aleksandr Tseitlin in 1920, and a set of cups designed by Malevich and produced in 1923:

 

 

Kandinsky

In 1913 and 1914 Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), a Russian painter and theorist working in Munich produced some completely abstract paintings. In 1914 he was commissioned to paint four panels for Edwin Campbell, the founder of Chevrolet Motors, to adorn the entrance foyer of his Park Avenue apartment (Roethel & Benjamin, 1979, pp 112-115). World War I delayed the transfer of the paintings to New York and they were later moved to Campbell’s house in Palm Beach. Following his divorce, the paintings were sold off for a pittance, but ultimately made their way to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Two of the panels are shown below. They are completely free of any real-world representation. If anything, they appear as music transposed into line and color.   

When World War I broke out, Kandinsky returned to Russia, leaving his long-term partner Gabriele Münter, and settling back into his family home in Moscow. He exhibited his paintings together with Malevich, Popova and others, and in early 1917 married Nina von Andreevskaia. After the Russian Revolution he participated in the newly formed NKP (People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment), and later taught at the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK), founded in 1920. However, he never felt comfortable in the new Communist Society and in 1922, he moved back to Germany to join the newly formed Bauhaus in Weimar (Poling, 1983).

Kandinsky and the Suprematists represented two extremes in abstraction: the ecstatic and the austere. However, Kandinsky was clearly affected by the work of Malevich and his colleagues. His paintings became more restrained and he began to use simple geometric shapes. The following illustrations show Multicolored Circle (1921) from his time in Moscow, and Yellow, Red and Blue (1925) one of the masterpieces from his Bauhaus years. The left side of the latter could pass for a Suprematist painting (cf the Riazhsky painting previously illustrated).

AKhRR

Russian abstract art soon elicited a backlash. In 1922, a group of disaffected artists, among them Yevgeny Katsman, Alexander Grigoriev and Sergey Malyutin, formed the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (Assotsiatsia khudozhnikov revolutsionnoi Rossii, AKhRR; Scheijen, 2024, pp 323-343). They proposed that artists should support the revolution with art that the people could easily understand. The following is from their manifesto (Bowlt, 1976, p 266):  

The Great October Revolution, in liberating the creative forces of the people, has aroused the consciousness of the masses and the artists-the spokesmen of the people’s spiritual life.

Our civic duty before mankind is to set down, artistically and documentarily, the revolutionary impulse of this great moment of history.

We will depict the present day: the life of the Red Army, the workers, the peasants, the revolutionaries, and the heroes of labor.

We will provide a true picture of events and not abstract concoctions discrediting our Revolution in the face of the international proletariat.

In 1924 Lenin died and Stalin took over the leadership of the Soviet Union. He sided with the AKhRR and abstract art fell completely out of favor. Socialist Realism became the art of the people (Groys in Ioffe & White, 2012, pp 250-276; Bown et al, 2012; Glomshtok, 2011). Abstract art was considered meaningless “formalism.”

 

Farewell to an Era

The Russian Avant-Garde did not last long: a mere ten years occurred between the foundation of Russian Futurism and the fall from grace of Suprematism and Constructionism. Nevertheless, it was a decade of intense creativity wherein artists explored the limits of their art. One must recognize that they tried to bring about a revolution in our ideas of aesthetics. Boris Groys (in Ioffe& White, 2012, p 252) remarks that the Russian Avant-Garde

is often regarded in an aestheticized, purely formal, stylistic light, although such a view is opposed to the objectives of the Russian avant-garde, which sought to overcome the traditional contemplative attitude toward art. While today, the works of the Russian avant-garde hang in museums and are sold in galleries like any other works of art, one should not forget that Russian avant-garde artists strove to destroy the museum, to wipe it out as a social institution, ensuring the idea of art as the “individual” or “hand-made” production by an artist of objects of aesthetic contemplation which are then consumed by the spectator. As they understood it, the artists of the Russian avant-garde were producing not objects of aesthetic consumption but projects or models for a total restructuring of the world on new principles, to be implemented by collective actions and social practice in which the difference between consumer and producer, artist and spectator, work of art and object of utility, and so on, disappeared.

Though they failed in their goal of destroying the museum, they did bring to us new ways of viewing that which cannot be represented (Golding, 2000). Abstraction continued and we can see the influence of the Russian Avant-Garde in the Abstract Expressionism of the mid 20^th Century. Kandinsky led toward Pollock and Malevich toward Rothko. Mark Rothko (1903-1970) was born in the Russian Empire but came as a child to the United States. His No. 1 White and Red (1962) uses a similar palette to Malevich and tries in its simplicity to understand the mystery of experience:   

References

Baier, S. (2012). Tatlin: new art for a new world. Hatje Cantz.

Barr, A. H. (1936). Cubism and abstract art. Museum of Modern Art.

Bowlt, J. E. (1976). Russian art of the avant-garde: theory and criticism, 1902-1934. Viking Press.

Bown, M. C., Balakhovskaia, F., & Lafranconi, M. (2012). Socialist realisms: Soviet painting, 1920-1970. Skira.

Clark, T. J. (1999). God is not cast down. In Farewell to an idea: episodes from a history of modernism. (pp 224-297). Yale University Press.

Costakis, G., Rudenstine, A. Z., & Starr, S. F. (1981). Russian avant-garde art: the George Costakis Collection. Abrams.

Douglas, C. (1991). Malevich: artist and theoretician. Flammarion.

Drutt, M. (2003). Kazimir Malevich: suprematism. Guggenheim Museum.

Elliott, D. (1986). New worlds: Russian art and society 1900-1937. Thames & Hudson.

Golomshtok, I. (translated by Chandler, R., 2011). Totalitarian art: in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the People’s Republic of China. Overlook.

Golding, J. (2000). Paths to the Absolute: Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Rothko, and Still. Princeton University Press.

Ioffe, D. G., & White, F. (Eds.). (2012). The Russian avant-garde and radical modernism: an introductory reader. Academic Studies Press.

Kovtun, E. (2007). Russian avant-garde. Parkstone International.

Lampe, A. (2018). Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich: the Russian avant-garde in Vitebsk, 1918-1922. Centre Pompidou.

Lodder, C. (2018). Celebrating Suprematism: new approaches to the art of Kazimir Malevich. Brill.

Masheck, J. (2023). Faith in Art: Religion, Aesthetics, and Early Abstraction. Bloomsbury.

Poling, C. V. (1983). Kandinsky: Russian and Bauhaus years. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Roethel, H. K., & Benjamin, J. K. (1979). Kandinsky. Hudson Hills Press.

Scheijen, S. (2024). The avant-gardists: artists in revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union 1917-1935. Thames & Hudson.

Shatskikh, A. S. (translated by M. Schwartz, 2012). Black square: Malevich and the origin of suprematism. Yale University Press.

Le Corbusier (1887-1965) was a Swiss-born architect, painter and urban planner. He is generally considered as one of the main forces in the development of modernist architecture. UNESCO has designated 17 of his building projects as “world heritage sites,” more than any other architect. In the 1940s Le Corbusier developed a system of measurements called the Modulor to assist in the fitting buildings to human beings. The first building to be constructed using the Modulor was the Unité d’Habitation, a striking and innovative residential building in Marseille, begun in 1947 and completed in 1952. In recent years, Le Corbusier has been criticized for his antisemitism and his fascist leanings. These critiques do not detract from the importance of his work but do explain how his buildings sometimes seem inhuman.  

Life

Le Corbusier was born as Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a Swiss city near the French border that is the center of the country’s watch-making industry (Weber, 2008). At the time of Le Corbusier’s childhood, the city was prosperous and full of Art Nouveau buildings. Le Corbusier studied art, but had no formal training in architecture.

In the early years of the 20^th Century, he travelled extensively in Europe visiting the architectural treasures in Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Italy, France, Germany and Belgium. He was particularly impressed by the Florence Charterhouse (Certosa):

Le Corbusier’s growing passion for urban planning stemmed from his experience there:

The beginning of these studies. for me, goes back to my visit to the Carthusian monastery of Ema near Florence, in 1907. In the musical landscape of Tuscany I saw a modern city crowning a hill. The noblest silhouette in the landscape, an uninterrupted crown of monks’ cells; each cell has a view on the plane, and opens on a lower level on an entirely closed garden. I thought I had never seen such a happy interpretation of a dwelling. The back of each cell opens by a door and a wicket on a circular street. The street is covered by an arcade: the cloister. Through this way the monastery services operate—prayer, visits, food. funerals. This “modern city” dates from the fifteenth century. Its radiant vision has always stayed with me. (Le Corbusier, 1930)

Another formative experience was the 14 months (1908-1910) that he spent in Paris as a draftsman in the offices of Auguste Perret (1874-1954), a pioneer in the architectural use of reinforced concrete. He also worked briefly in Berlin with Peter Behrens (1868-1940), an innovative industrial designer and architect.

During World War I, Le Corbusier taught in the art school in La Chaux-de-Fonds, and began to design houses for clients in the city, using some to the ideas he had developed in his travels. In 1915 he designed the Dom-Ino House. This was composed of concrete floor-slabs supported by a small number of concrete pillars and with connecting stairs on one side. The concept allowed complete freedom in designing the interior of each floor, and in creating the external walls and windows, since there was no need for load-bearing walls or supporting beams.   

The name combines the Latin domus (home) with the name of the pieces used in the game of dominoes. The design could be used by itself in a single house, repeated upwards to form skyscrapers, or duplicated laterally to make row houses.

In 1917 Le Corbusier moved to Paris and opened an architectural practice with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret. He also became intrigued by Cubism, and together with the painter Amédée Ozenfant founded an artistic movement devoted to pure forms and called “Purism.” (For some reason they considered Cubism too “romantic.”) They published their ideas in the magazine L’Esprit Nouveau (1920-1925). To celebrate the sense of the new, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret began to use the name Le Corbusier. This derived from the surname Lecorbesier (itself stemming from an old word for “shoemaker”) of one of his Belgian ancestors. Weber (2008, p 178) suggested that the new name also

endowed its bearer with the ability to have others “courber,” or bend to his will. Above all, “Le Corbusier” gave Charles-Édouard Jeanneret the toughness and resiliency he felt he needed.  

LeCorbusier became a French citizen in 1930. The following illustration shows some early photographs of Le Corbusier. The first is from 1912, the second is a 1927 portrait by Man Ray and the third is a 1937 photograph by Rogi André:

 

Towards a New Architecture

In the early 1920s Le Corbusier proposed some new principles for modern architecture. His general approach to design and architecture can be summarized in the epigram “A house is a machine for living in” (Le Corbusier, 1923, p 95).  An important manifesto, entitled Les 5 points d’une architecture nouvelle, went through several different formulations. The 5 principles as ultimately delineated in 1927 can be summarized:

1. Pilotis (supporting columns): The ground floor of a building is replaced by a set of concrete supporting columns so that the actual building is raised above the ground
2. Roof Gardens: The roof becomes the top floor of the building and can be used for various purposes: pools, exercise areas, gardens.
3. Floorplan: The floors are supported by continuations of the pilotis. The absence of load-bearing walls then provides complete flexibility in the design of the floorplan.
4. Horizontal Windows: Windows no longer need to be part of the building’s support and can be horizontal or vertical as the need arises.
5. Façade: Since the building’s exterior does not contribute to its support, the architect can design a façade without restraint. Windows could extend over the whole external surface

In 1925, Le Corbusier made a proposal for the redevelopment of Paris called Le Plan Voisin after its sponsor Gabriel Voisin (1880-1973), a pioneering manufacturer of planes and automobiles (Le Corbusier, 1925; Frampton, 2024, Chapter 3). The plan was focused on a commercial central area with 18 cruciform skyscrapers surrounded by parkland. Le Corbusier conceived of these as 200 meters high (about 60 stories). This center was surrounded by self-contained residential blocks of about 10 stories. Each of these blocks would include its own shopping center. The following illustrations show some architectural drawings for the planned city:

Thankfully Le Corbusier’s plan for Paris was never realized. However, the concept of a commercial city-center composed of skyscrapers surrounded by dormitory regions for those who work in the central towers has become widespread. As pointed out by Jane Jacobs (1961) this leads to the death of the city downtown, which becomes dark and deserted after office hours. As she noted (p 446) “His vision of skyscrapers in the park degenerated in real life into skyscrapers in parking lots.” A major problem with Le Corbusier’s ideas is that they lack the social strength of intersecting city streets: the corners where the inhabitants congregate to shop, eat, drink, meet friends, and people-watch.    

Another idea that Le Corbusier pursued in these early years was that of tracés régulateurs (regulating lines). His paper describing this concept was initially published in L’Esprit Nouveau in 1921 and then reprinted in his book Vers une Architecture (1923). Le Corbusier was far from precise about defining a regulating line:

A regulating line is an assurance against capriciousness …. A satisfaction of a spiritual order which leads to the pursuit of ingenious and harmonious relations. It confers on the work the quality of rhythm. The regulating line brings in this tangible form of mathematics which gives the reassuring perception of order.  

In his examples he uses various geometric projections such as the 3-4-5 triangle, and the golden rectangle (with the longer side 1.618 times the shorter). The following illustration shows a hypothetical villa with the main geometric principle, a triangle formed by the sides and diagonal of a golden rectangle, highlighted in red. Various regulating lines parallel and perpendicular to the diagonal can determine the location of the doors and windows.

Le Corbusier apparently did not use the regulating lines in the initial design of his building, but. used them post hoc to explain the harmony of his creation (Herz-Fischler, 1984)

The Golden Ratio

One of the geometric principles used in Le Corbusier’s early designs was the golden ratio. The importance of this to his later work warrants a brief digression.

At the beginning of the 13^th century CE in Pisa, Leonardo Fibonnaci described the mathematics underlying the breeding of rabbits as a sequence of numbers:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55…

Each number represents the sum of the two preceding numbers. In mathematical terms the sequence is defined by

F_n=F_n-1+F_n-2; F₀=0; F₁=1

Fibonacci had been exposed to the mathematics of the Arab world through his travels with his father, a merchant who traded with Algiers. The Fibonacci sequence was known in the Muslim world, and likely goes back to the ancient Indian mathematics used to analyze Sanskrit poetry (Singh, 1985). Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci (Book of Calculation) was one of the first books in Europe to use the Arabic numerals and the decimal system.

If we take the ratio between adjacent numbers in the series, we obtain a value that approaches the “golden ratio” of 1.6180. For example, 34/21 is 1.6190, and 55/34 is 1.6176. The golden ratio (also called the “golden section”) is commonly represented by the Greek letter phi ( ϕ ), from Phidias the Greek sculptor and architect who may have used the ratio in his design of the Parthenon (Cook, 1914, p. 420), although this is unlikely (Barr, 1929; Markowsky, 1992). Phi is defined as the ratio of the sum of two quantities to the larger quantity when this ratio is equal to that between the two quantities:

ϕ = a/b = (a+b)/a

The golden ratio has several intriguing mathematical characteristics. Most importantly, phi (1.6180) is equal to its reciprocal (0.6180) plus 1:

ϕ = 1/ϕ + 1

If we multiply both sides of this equation by ϕ, we can derive the quadratic equation

ϕ ² – ϕ – 1 = 0

This gives roots         

(1 ± sqrt (5) ) / 2

One root is equivalent to ϕ and the other equivalent to -1/ϕ. From these ideas Binet derived a formula to calculate any Fibonacci number without having to compute all the preceding numbers. The Fibonacci number would be the closest integer to that calculated by:

  ϕ ⁿ  / sqrt (5)                             

Fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio play important roles in nature by determining, among other things, the locations of leaves on plant stems and the spiral arrangements of pine cones (Cook, 1914: Posamentier, & Lehmann, 2007).

Fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio are used in schemes for tiling surfaces (Grünbaum & Shephard, 1987). Many tiling systems, or tessellations, use regular pentagrams. The diagonal of a regular pentagram is equal to the length of the side multiplied by phi. Penrose tilings (1974) use regular pentagrams and other shapes determined by phi to produce patterns that are quasiperiodic – the parts do not translate from one region to another and cannot be exactly predicted. These tilings may explain how crystals grow and may be a metaphor for how neurons connect – following rules but giving patterns that are not fully explained by them (Penrose, 1989). The recently developed aperiodic one-stone tiling systems (Smith et al 2023) are also derived from pentagrams.  

A square added onto the longer side of a golden rectangle will give another golden rectangle and this process can be continued over and over. To produce the diagram on the following page, a tiny yellow golden rectangle has an orange square added to its longer side to form a new golden rectangle. A sand-colored square added to its longer side produces another golden rectangle. 

A logarithmic spiral or spira mirabilis (“miraculous spiral”) is fascinating because its shape remains the same as the radius increases. This spiral is typically computed using polar coordinates and depends on the value of e, the base of the natural logarithms. A special logarithmic spiral called the “golden spiral,” whose radius decreases by a factor of the golden ratio every quarter turn, can be inscribed within these rectangles. In the golden spiral, four irrational numbers are at play: the golden ratio ( ϕ ), the square root of five, the base of the natural logarithms ( e ), and the ubiquitous π.

Why discuss these concepts? In aesthetics we tend to find that a rectangle with sides that follow the golden ratio more pleasing than rectangles that are either longer or more like a square. The golden ratio and Fibonacci numbers have therefore been used extensively in the design of buildings and the layout of paintings (see Chapter 7 in Posamentier, & Lehmann, 2007). As we shall see, the golden ratio was particularly important in Le Corbusier’s later work.

However, we may find evidence for it more often than we should. It is easy to measure two things and find their relationship close to the golden ratio. Some things actually do not fit this famous ratio. The dimensions of paintings considered to be masterpieces cluster around a ratio of 1.34 rather than 1.618 (Olariu, 1999). The preferred sizes for photographs and book pages tend to show side-ratios that are less than phi.

Many claims have been made concerning the geometry of sacred places (Doczi, 1981; Skinner, 2006). Perhaps, the beautiful mathematics underlying their locations and their architecture may reflect the transcendent. Perhaps, not. Much of the work on sacred geometry mixes mathematics with wishful thinking. Although it seems almost blasphemous to say it, God may not have been as enamored of mathematics as his creatures.

 

The Modulor

Discovering the geometric principles of the human body has long been a goal of artists and architects. Probably the most famous representation of the human form is the drawing of Vitruvian man made by Leonardo da Vinci in 1487. The proportions are based on those reported by the Roman architect Vitruvius (1^st century BCE). His books were re-discovered in the early 15^th century and used by Leon Battista Alberti in his own treatise on architecture. The underlying idea of these measurements is

As man is the image of God and the proportions of his body are produced by divine will, so the proportions in architecture have to embrace and express the cosmic order (Wittkower, 1971, p 101)

Leonardo’s drawing shows a man inscribed within both a square and a circle. This follows from the description in Vitruvius:

… in the human body the central point is naturally the navel. For if a man be placed flat on his back, with his hands and feet extended, and a pair of compasses centred at his navel, the fingers and toes of his two hands and feet will touch the circumference of a circle described therefrom. And just as the human body yields a circular outline, so too a square figure may be found from it. For if we measure the distance from the soles of the feet to the top of the head, and then apply that measure to the outstretched arms, the breadth will be found to be the same as the height, as in the case of plane surfaces which are perfectly square. (Vitruvius, Book III, Chapter 1).

Some of these measurements are not as exact in reality as in representation. The arm-span of a normal human being is on average several centimeters longer than the height (Schott, 1992; Brown et al., 2000). We do not fit exactly into a square.  

In Leonardo’s drawing, certain measurements are clearly indicated by lines. For example, the cubit measurement from the elbow to the fingertip is marked off in the vertical to shows that a man’s height is equal to four cubits. The finger-tip to finger-tip distance with arms outstretched also equals four cubits. The width of the shoulders is one cubit. The length of the upper arm is half a cubit.

The drawing also shows evidence for the golden ratio ϕ (about 1.618) (Doczi, 1981, p. 93). For example, the height to the top of the head is ϕ times the height to the navel. Similarly, the cubit is ϕ times the distance from elbow to wrist. Most importantly, the side of the square in the drawing is ϕ times the radius of the circle.

The square and the circle are often taken to represent the earth and the heaven. Justifying the one to the other is a problem for both philosophy and geometry. An exact solution to the problem of squaring the circle – geometrically constructing a square with the same area as the circle using straight edge and compass – is impossible. The value of π is not just irrational (cannot be represented by a ratio of integers) but also transcendental (cannot be represented as the root of a polynomial). The square root of 2 is irrational but since it is the root of the equation x²-2=0, it is not transcendental. Both π and e the root of the natural logarithms are transcendental. Several approximate ways to rectify the circle exist (e.g. Dixon, 1991). Some approaches to squaring the circle use the value ϕ, which is easy to represent geometrically (see later). For example, (6/5)(1+ϕ) is equal to π with an accuracy of 4 decimal places.

Most of the proportions in the human body involved small whole numbers. Height was equivalent to 4 cubits, 6 feet or 10 hands (wrist to fingertip). This allowed the Renaissance architects to find inspiration in the rules of music (Wittkower, 1971, pp 101-154; Evans, 1995). The Pythagoreans had shown that combining notes with frequencies in the ratio of such small numbers resulted in musical harmony:  the octave of 2:1, the perfect fifth of 3:2, the perfect fourth of 4:3, and the major third of 5:4. Alberti proposed that visual harmony could be obtained by using similar ratios. Both architecture and music could then represent the harmony of the universe. Rooms could be designed with sides proportionate to the frequencies of consonant chords. Once the dimensions of the sides were selected the height would be tuned between the others. This could be done using the arithmetic mean (a+b)/2), the geometric mean  or the harmonious mean 2ab/(a+b). When a is one half b these means are the perfect fifth, augmented fourth, and perfect fourth, respectively.  Since the renaissance, Western musical scales have changed to use “equal temperament.” This is based on a constant ratio difference between adjacent notes in a scale rather than determining individual notes by simple Pythagorean ratios of the base note. And architecture no longer uses musical scales to create visual harmony (see Evans, 1995 for review).

Apart from such mystical uses as understanding the music and geometry of God, the proportions of the human body have definite practical applications. Artists use them to facilitate their representations of the human form. Clothiers use anthropometric measurements to design clothes and to determine the range of sizes. Architects use the proportions to determine standard measurements for designing buildings and furniture.

Le Corbusier became fascinated by the proportions of the human form. During the early 1940s, he developed a system called the “modulor.” This set of proportions is shown in the following diagram is derived from geometric procedures described by Elisa Maillard and illustrated in The Modulor (1950/54, pp 36-45). From the midpoint of the left side of a square the arc of a circle with radius equal to the distance from that point to the opposite corner of the square is drawn to intersect with the extended side of the square. This is the classical way to construct rectangles that show the golden ratio. From the intersection, a right-angled triangle is constructed with its right angle at the midpoint of the right side of the triangle. From the level of the upper apex of this triangle, a square each with sides equal to the initial square is drawn, and another square below that. The original square is then superimposed on the two new squares. The diagram is then “normalized” to fit a man with height about 6 feet (183 cm):

This geometric procedure has been faulted (Rozhkovskaya, 2020). However, I have worked out the steps quite precisely and they do indeed give the modular levels described by Le Corbusier (see also the extensive entry in French Wikipedia):

The diagram below (Le Corbusier, 1952; also in Frampton, 2024, p 175) shows the various measurements of the Modulor system, and a variety of panels (un jeu de panneaux) based on the measurements (discussed by Flora, 2023). These could serve as models for doors, windows, tables, shelves etc.

As well as the levels given in the preceding diagrams, we can also take difference measurements, particularly 43 (113-70), 27 (113-2*43) and 16 (2*43-70). The measurements in the Modulor system can then give standard measurements for architectural designs. For example, the height of a room should be 226 cm (7.4 feet). Other architectural and design measurements are then derived (Le Corbusier, 1954, Figure 26): 

Whether the proportions contained in the Modulor are a reasonable representation of the normal human form is a matter for debate. For example, most North American rooms tend to have a height of about 8 feet (244 cm) – significantly more than the Modular’s 226 cm. Most tables tend to be 30 inches (76 cm) high rather than the Modulor’s 70 cm. The Modulor arbitrarily portrays an idealized male: it does not consider the normal variability of the human form, and it fails to include the female (Tell, 2018).   

 

Unité d’Habitation, Marseille

Le Corbusier first used his Modulor system in the design of the in the Unité d’Habitation Marseille (also known as Cité Radieuse) (Sbriglio, 2004; Janson et al, 2007). This large apartment building was built to provide housing for people who had lost their homes during World War II. The building was begun in 1947 and completed in 1952. The whole structure is constructed of rough-cast reinforced concrete, the French name of which, béton brut (raw concrete), led to the unfortunate term “brutalist” architecture used to describe later buildings constructed in the same manner (Beanland, 2016)

The building is 135 meters long, 24 meters wide, and 56 meters high. The structure is raised off the ground on a set of large pylons (pilotis) shaped like inverted cones. There are 330 separate apartments. Most of these (with the exception of those on the southern end of the building) traverse the width of the building. Each of the apartments spans two levels and extends from one side of the building to the other. This means that entrance corridors (internal streets) need only occur on every third floor. The arrangement of the apartments is shown in the following illustrations:

The following illustration shows two photographs taken by Lucien Hervé during the construction of the building. Hervé and Le Corbusier became quite close and Hervé went on to photograph most of Le Corbusier’s later buildings (Beer, 2004; Sbriglio, 2011). His austere black-and-white prints clearly delineated the tactile surfaces and the underlying structure of the buildings. The photographs below highlight the rough finish of the pilotis and the concrete skeleton of the building:

Le Corbusier wished to build a community-dwelling that contained within itself everything needed for everyday life. He was inspired by the utopian idea of a “phalanstery” (a combination of phalanx, military unit, and monastery) proposed by Charles Fourier (1772-1837), and by the Florence Charterhouse that he had visited in his youth (Serenyi, 1967). His idea was to create “a building that is a town” (Janson et al, 2007, p 7). Two floors of the Unité d’Habitation are therefore devoted to commerce (stores, hotel, restaurant). The roof was designed for communal use with a meeting-room, paddling-pool, open-air gymnasium, and running-track and to provide stunning views of both the Mediterranean Sea and the inland mountains.

The illustration below shows one of the internal streets, and the two-story commercial street (with the storefront of the bookstore). Below that is a photograph of the rooftop showing the pool, the community meeting room (what was once a kindergarten), the elevator shaft and the inverted cone of one of the ventilation shafts.

Modular ratios determined everything from the overall dimensions of the building to the sizes of cupboards and rooms. Variations of the Le Corbusier logo of the man-with-arm-upraised were cast into the south wall of the building. The illustration below is derived from recent photograph by Cemal Emden. Below that are two photographs by Lucien Hervé taken during construction:

One striking aspect of the Unité d’Habitation is the way that Le Corbusier designed variations into the regularity. The surface of the building is made visually appealing by the interplay between the concrete brise-soleils (sun shades) and the colors of the walls between the balconies. The following photograph by Paul Koslowski (1997) shows the building as viewed from the southwest:

Fitting human beings into modules can make them feel either free or restricted. Variations can take away the rigidity, allowing a sense of community rather than imprisonment. Perhaps the Modulor works best if it entails both the setting of standards and their modulation.

Despite his enthusiasm for proportions, Le Corbusier realized that everything must still be subject to aesthetic criteria. The Modulor is a springboard not a strait-jacket. And sometimes it may not work:

…at the very moment when the golden figures and the diagrams point to a perfectly orthodox solution I may reply ‘That may be so, but it is not beautiful.’ (1950/54, p. 183)

In relation to variation, Le Corbusier states

I claim for art the right to diversity. I accept on behalf of art the duty of novelty, of the never-seen, the never-conceived. I demand of art the role of the challenger … of play and interplay, play being the very manifestation of the spirit. (p. 220, ellipsis in original)

Apartments were inserted into the building’s skeleton like bottles into a double-sided wine-rack. One apartment had its main floor above the internal street and the other had its main floor below. This entailed two different floor plans: 

The living room (4 and 11) is two stories high. The following photographs are from a recent sale:

The main living quarters (on the single-story section of the apartment) are more cramped:

This building is visually striking. However, it did not succeed in what it set out to do (Mumford, 1963; Serenyi, 1967; Janson et al., 2007). Although the living rooms are spacious, the rest of the apartment is very cramped. Originally designed for families, the apartments are more appropriate for single people or couples.  The total floor area of the most common apartment layout (illustrated in the previous diagrams) is 98 square meters (1055 square feet). There is little privacy or sound-proofing. The only access to natural light is in the living room and at one end of the small bedrooms. The “interior street” is cold and gloomy (see previous illustration)

The communal shopping street is largely unused: the population of the building is not sufficient to support multiple shops. Ther restaurant (Le Ventre de l’Architecte, “Belly of the Architect”), the hotel, and the bookstore are successful mainly because of the tourists who visit the building. The kindergarten is no longer. The following are comments from Serenyi (1967)

It seems to me that, ideally at least, each apartment of the Marseilles Block is designed for a single human being, living completely alone, while sharing the advantages of a larger collective order. Each apartment, then, must be understood as a bachelor’s quarter and the whole building as a bachelor’s hostel, with communal facilities available to the inhabitants at all times. Used by families of various sizes, the building is, at least to a large measure, a failure.

Mumford (1963, p 62) criticized the excessive application of the Modulor:

Like the old Greek innkeeper who chopped off his guests’ legs or stretched their frames to fit his beds, the architect of Unity House seeks with violence to accommodate human beings to the inflexible dimensions of his monumental edifice.

The design was duplicated by Le Corbusier in several other locations. The general idea of a city in a building has been followed in many other countries. These have had a varied reception. Many post-war communal housing developments have been considered as brutal as the concrete from which they were constructed. Exposed concrete does not weather as well in the cold, damp North as in the Mediterranean sun.

 

Later Works

During the last 20 years of his life Le Corbusier was able to realize many of his architectural dreams (Emden, 2017). He continued to use the Modulor as his basic principle of design and concrete as his main structural material. He major ambition was to build self-contained communities.  Many other architects imitated his techniques: for example, Oscar Niemeyer, who designed the planned city of Brasilia in Brazil, Mario Pani Darqui, who produced many of the buildings of modern Mexico City.  

The following illustrations show two of his most famous buildings. The Chapel of Notre-Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France, was completed in 1955. The National Assembly Building in Chandigarh, India, was completed in 1962.

The following are portraits of Corbusier in the later years of his life. The upper photograph is from 1949; the lower left photograph by Franz Hubmann is from 1955; the lower right by Joop van Bilsen is from 1964.

 

The Measurement of Man

In 2015 a large exhibition on the work of Le Corbusier – Le Corbusier: mesures de l’homme – was held to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of his death at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (Migayrou & Cinqualbre, 2015): That same year saw the publication of three books questioning his life and ideas, and accusing him of being an antisemite and a fascist (Chaslin, 2015; Perelman, 2015; Xavier de Jarcy, 2015). The authors of these critiques and several other prominent individuals wrote an open letter to the Minister of Culture and Communication, proposing that the French government no longer promote the work of Le Corbusier, but rather educate the public about his antisemitic and fascist leanings. This “Le Corbusier Scandal” persists to this day (Brott, 2017; Xavier de Jarcy & Perelman, 2018).    

Le Corbusier was antisemitic (see chapters by Cohen and Fainholz in Badouï, 2020). He did not like Jews and believed that they had contributed to the deterioration of French culture. He wished that they might be transferred to Palestine or to some other non-European country. He worked for the Vichy government though he was not directly involved in that government’s actions against French Jews. The fact that his opinions were very common during his time does not excuse them. However, he did not act on his prejudices.

 

Le Corbusier participated in the short-lived French fascist party called Le Faisceau, founded by Georges Valois (1878-1945) in 1925. The party derived its name from the Partito Nazionale Fascista (1921-1943), and used the fasces as its symbol. The illustration on the right shows the party logos for the Italian and French parties. Le Corbusier contributed articles about urban development to Le Faisceau’s journal Le Nouveau Siècle (Antliff, 1997; Brott 2016), Valois praised these ideas: “Le Corbusier’s grandiose designs express the profound thought of fascism.”  

The use of the Fasces – a bundle of wooden rods bound together, sometimes including an axe – derives from the Etruscans. It originally symbolized the power of a magistrate to punish offenders (using either the rods or the axe). Over the years, this meaning became conflated with the fable about how people should work together because individual rods could be broken but a bundle of rods could not. In this way the symbol came to combine justice with unity (Brennan, 2022). The general idea of fascism is that the individual citizen must sacrifice his or her desires and act together to fulfil the goals of the leader.

Le Faisceau was not clear about its political goals. Valois proposed a general revolt against bourgeois rule but never really instigated any revolution. The party and its journal ceased to exist in 1928. Valois later switched his allegiance to more left-wing political groups. He was active in La Résistance during the Nazi occupation of France, was arrested in 1944, and died of typhus in at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.     

Le Corbusier’s involvement with this early fascist party does not render him culpable of the terrible things later perpetrated by fascism of Italy and Germany. However, it does indicate his political naïveté, and highlights some real problems with his urban planning and his architecture.

The design of communal housing and the planning of cities is extremely difficult. The architect must provide for many people without sacrificing them as individuals. Many critics have considered Corbusier’s ideas about urban planning as lacking the human touch. They seem more appropriate to barracks rather than homes: the building is more important than its inhabitants.. If this is so, we are tending to a fascist style of architecture, where individuals function together as modules in a whole.   

The Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) commented on Le Corbusier’s designs for communal housing:

the real human beings in these houses and cities become normalized termites, or within a “dwelling machine” they become foreign cells, still too organic (1959, translated and reprinted, 1988).

The following is from Perelman (2015, p 70), whose book is titled Le Corbusier: Une Froid Vision du Monde (a cold view of the world)

En tant que totalité concrète structurée, l’oeuvre-système de Le Corbusier est indéfectiblement associée à une visualisation totalitaire de la vie, à une compulsion répétitive de l’idée de machine (humaine, architecturale, urbaine), à l’inquiétant projet d’un urbanisme de la rareté visuelle, au froid alignement de blocs d’édifices standardisés et unidimensionnels.

[As a structured concrete whole, Le Corbusier’s body of work is indelibly associated with a totalitarian view of life, compulsively repeating the idea of the machine (human, architectural, urban), planning cities devoid of visual variation, composed of coldly aligned blocks of standardized, one-dimensional buildings] (my translation)

Standards are important for architecture. They make it possible for architects to fit buildings to human beings. However, they run the danger of removing any individuality from the final structures. Zöllner (2014) has reviewed the history of how we have come up with standard human measurements from Vitruvius to the Modulor. He notes that at the same time as Le Corbusier was formulating the Modulor, Ernst Neufert (1900-1986) in Germany was promoting a completely different system based on the octameter (12.5 cm, one eighth of a meter):

Neufert’s octameter standards were used throughout Germany and occupied Europe to facilitate the tremendous building program of the Nazi war effort (Vossoughian, 2015). Neufert’s Architect’s Data, initially published in 1931, continues to be a sourcebook for architectural standards (2023). Neither the Modulor nor the Octameter accurately portrays the average human being let alone properly considers his or her variability,

 

Epilogue

Art depends on variations. The beautiful combines old and new, similar and different, harmony and dissonance. The architecture of Corbusier is often beautiful. Yet this beauty derives from his aesthetic sense and not from the application of the Modulor system.

Buildings must always fit the general size of the human being. Monuments of overwhelming size are common if fascist societies: they exist only to make us feel insignificant. The Basilica of the Valle de los Caidos in Spain is probably the clearest example. Huge and cold, without natural light, this monument to the dead of the Spanish Civil War provides no sense of reconciliation or redemption. Le Corbusier’s buildings do not overwhelm us in this way. However, they do force upon us the arbitrary measurements of the Modulor.

Architecture must use proportions that are pleasing to those that use the buildings. “Pleasing” is an aesthetic judgment, one that often depends on what we feel comfortable with. Le Corbusier used a modular approach to designing communal housing. The measurement of man is important but man should not be forced to fit arbitrary measures.

Current developments in architectures have moved away from the modular approach and now stress the individual human context rather than the universal standard (e.g. Alexander, 1979). Each part of the building should be adaptable to what a particular human user will do in that space.

 

References

Alexander, C. (1979). The timeless way of building. New York: Oxford University Press

Antliff, M. (1997). La Cite française: Georges Valois, Le Corbusier, and Fascist theories of urbanism. In Affron, M., & Antliff, M. Fascist visions: art and ideology in France and Italy. (pp 134-170). Princeton University Press.

Barr, M. (1929). Parameters of beauty. Architecture, 60, 325-328.

Baudouï, R. (2020). Le Corbusier: 1930-2020. Polémiques, mémoire et histoire. Tallandier.

Beanland, C. (2016). Concrete concept: brutalist buildings around the world. Frances Lincoln.

Beer, O. (2004). Lucien Hervé: building images. Getty Research Institute.

Bloch, E. (trans F. Mecklenburg 1988). Building in empty spaces. In Bloch, E. The utopian function of art and literature: selected essays. (pp 186-199) MIT Press.

Brennan, T. C. (2022). The Fasces: a history of Ancient Rome’s most dangerous political symbol. Oxford University Press.

Brott, S. (2016). The ghost in the city industrial complex: Le Corbusier and the fascist theory of Urbanisme. Journal of Architecture and Urbanism, 40(2), 131–142.

Brott, S. (2017). The Le Corbusier Scandal, or, was Le Corbusier a Fascist? Fascism, 6(2), 196–227. 

Brown, J. K., Whittemore, K. T., Knapp, T. R. (2000). Is arm span an accurate measure of height in young and middle-age adults? Clinical Nursing Research, 9, 84-94.

Chaslin, F. (2015). Un Corbusier. Seuil.

Cook, T. A. (1914) The curves of life: an account of spiral formations and their application to growth in nature, to science and to art; with special reference to the manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci. Constable. Available at Archive.org

Dixon, R. (1991). Mathographics. New York: Dover Publications.

Doczi, G. (1981). The power of limits: Proportional harmonies in nature, art, and architecture. Boulder, Colo: Shambhala Publications.

Dunlap, R. A. (1997). The golden ratio and Fibonacci numbers. Singapore: World Scientific

Emden, C. (2017). Le Corbusier: the complete buildings. Prestel.

Evans, R. (1995). The projective cast: Architecture and its three geometries. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Florio, W. (2023.). Le Corbusier’s Modulor and ‘le jeu des panneaux’: a parametric approach. In ICGG 2022 – Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Geometry and Graphics (pp. 465–476). Springer International Publishing.

Frampton, K. (2001, revised 2024). Le Corbusier. Thames & Hudson

Grünbaum, B., & Shephard, G. C. (1987). Tilings and patterns. New York: W.H. Freeman

Herz-Fischler, R. (1984). Le Corbusier’s “Regulating Lines” for the Villa at Garches (1927) and Other Early Works. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 43(1), 53–59.

Jacobs, J. (1961). The death and life of great American cities. Vintage books.

Janson, A., Krohn, C., & Grunwald, A. (2007). Le Corbusier: Unité d’habitation, Marseille. Edition Axel Menges.

Le Corbusier. (1923, translated by J. Rodker, 1931, reprinted 1986). Towards a new architecture. Dover Publications.

Le Corbusier (1925). «Plan Voisin» de Paris 1925. In Boesiger, W., & Stonorov, O. (Eds.). (2015). Le Corbusier – oeuvre complète. volume 1, 1910-1929. (p 109-119). Birkhäuser

Le Corbusier (1927). Les 5 points d’une architecture nouvelle. In Boesiger, W., & Stonorov, O. (Eds.). (2015). Le Corbusier – oeuvre complète. volume 1, 1910-1929. (p 128). Birkhäuser.

Le Corbusier (1930, translated by E. S. Aujame, 1991). Precisions on the present state of architecture and city planning. MIT Press.

Le Corbusier (1950, translated by P. de Francia and A. Bostock, 1954). The modulor: a harmonious measure to the human scale, universally applicable to architecture and mechanics. Faber & Faber

Le Corbusier (1952). Le Modulor. In Boesiger, W. (Ed.). (2015). Le Corbusier – oeuvre complète. volume 5, 1946-1952. (pp178-184). Birkhäuser

Markowsky, G. (1992). Misconceptions about the Golden Ratio. College Mathematics Journal, 23(1), 2-19

Migayrou, F., & Cinqualbre, O. (2015). Le Corbusier: mesures de l’homme. Centre Pompidou.

Mumford, L. (1963). The Marseille ‘folly.’ In Mumford L. The highway and the city. (pp 53-66). Harcourt, Brace & World.

Neufert, E., (2023). Architects’ data (6^th English edition.). Wiley-Blackwell.

Olariu, A. (1998).  Golden section and the art of painting. arXiv:physics/9908036v1 [physics.soc-ph]

Penrose, R. (1974), Role of aesthetics in pure and applied research. Bulletin of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, 10, 266-271

Penrose, R. (1989). The emperor’s new mind: Concerning computers, minds, and the laws of physics. Oxford University Press.

Perelman, M. (2015). Le Corbusier. Une vision froide de l’architecture, Paris, Michalon

Posamentier, A. S.; Lehmann, I. (2007). The fabulous Fibonacci numbers. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Rozhkovskaya, N. (2020). Mathematical commentary on Le Corbusier’s Modulor. Nexus Network Journal, 22(2), 411–428.

Sbriglio, J. (2004). Le Corbusier: l’Unité d’habitation de Marseille et les autres unités d’habitation à Rezé-les-Nantes, Berlin, Briey en Forêt et Firminy. Fondation le Corbusier.

Sbriglio, J. (2011). Le Corbusier and Lucien Hervé: A Dialogue Between Architect and Photographer. Los Angeles: J Paul Getty Museum. 

Schott, G.D. (1992). The extent of man from Vitruvius to Marfan. Lancet. 340: 1518-20.

Serenyi, P. (1967). Le Corbusier, Fourier, and the Monastery of Ema. The Art Bulletin, 49(4), 277–286.

Singh, P. (1985). The so-called Fibonacci numbers in ancient and medieval India. Historia Mathematica, 12, 229-244.

Skinner, S. (2006). Sacred geometry: deciphering the code. New York: Sterling. 

Tell, D. (2019). Measurement and modernity: height, gender, and Le Corbusier’s Modulor. Public Culture, 31(1), 21–43. 

Vitruvius (translated M. H. Morgan, 1914) Ten Books on Architecture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Available at Project Gutenberg.

Vossoughian, N. (2015). From A4 paper to the Octametric brick: Ernst Neufert and the geo-politics of standardisation in Nazi Germany. Journal of Architecture, 20(4), 675–698.

Weber, N. F. (2008). Le Corbusier: a life. Alfred A. Knopf.

Wittkower, R. (1971). Architectural principles in the age of humanism. New York: W.W. Norton

Xavier de Jarcy, (2015). Le Corbusier. un fascisme français, Paris, Albin Michel.

Xavier de Jarcy, & Perelman M. (Eds). Le Corbusier, zones d’ombre, Paris: Éditions Non Standard, 2018

Zöllner, F. (2014). Anthropomorphism: from Vitruvius to Neufert, from measurement to the module of fascism.  In Cepl, J., & Wagner, K. (Eds.). Images of the body in architecture: anthropology and built space. (pp 47-75). Wasmuth.

Du Fu: Poet, Sage, Historian

Du Fu (712-770 CE) was a poet during a time of great political upheaval in China. He was born near Luoyang and spent much of his young adulthood in the Yanzhou region, finally settling down to a minor official position in Chang’an, the imperial capital. In 755 CE, An Lushan, a disgruntled general, led a rebellion against the Tang dynasty. The emperor was forced to flee Chang’an (modern Xian), and chaos reigned for the next eight years. For more than a year Du Fu was held captive in Chang’an by the rebels. After escaping, he made his way south, living for a time in a thatched cottage in Chengdu, and later at various places along the Yangtze River. His poetry is characterized by an intense love of nature, by elements of Chan Buddhism, and by a deep compassion for all those caught up in the turmoil of history. This is a longer post than usual. I have become fascinated by Du Fu.

Failing the Examinations

Du Fu (Tu Fu in the Wades Gilles transliteration system, the family name likely deriving from the name of a pear tree) was born in 712 CE near Luoyang, the eastern capital of the Tang Dynasty (Hung, 1952; Owen, 1981). The following map (adapted from Young, 2008, and Collet and Cheng, 2014) shows places of importance in his life:

Du Fu’s father was a minor official. His mother appears to have died during his childhood, and Du Fu was raised by his stepmother and an aunt. Du Fu studied hard, but in 735 CE he failed the jenshi (advanced scholar) examinations. No one knows why: politics and spite may have played their part. He spent the next few years with his father who was then stationed in Yanzhou,

Du Fu met Li Bai (700-762 CE) in 744 CE. Despite the difference in their ages, the two poets became fast friends. However, they were only able to meet occasionally, their lives being separated by politics and war.

Du Fu attempted the jenshi examinations again in 746, and was again rejected. Nevertheless, he was able to obtain a minor position in the imperial civil service in Chang’an. This allowed him to marry and raise a small family.

Taishan

We can begin our examination of Du Fu’s poetry with one of the early poems written during his time in Yanzhou: Gazing on the Peak (737 CE). The peak is Taishan (exalted mountain), located in Northeastern China. Taishan is one of the Five Great Mountains (Wuyue) of ancient China. Today one can reach the summit by climbing up some 7000 steps (see illustration on the right), but in Du Fu’s time the climb would have been more difficult. The following is the poem in printed Chinese characters (Hànzì) and in Pinyin transliteration:   

The poem is in the lǜshī (regulated verse) form which requires eight lines (four couplets), with each line containing the same number of characters: 5- or 7-character lǜshī are the most common. Each line is separated into phrases, with a 5-character line composed of an initial 2-character phrase and a final 3-character phrase.  The last words of each couplet rhyme. Rhyme in Chinese is based on the vowel sound. Within the lines there were complex rules for the tonality of the sounds (Zong Qi Cai, 2008, Chapter 8; Wai-lim Yip, 1997, pp 171-221). These rules do not always carry over to the way the characters are pronounced in modern Chinese. The following is a reading of the poem in Mandarin (from Librivox).

Chinese poetry is directed at both the ear and the eye, and fine calligraphy enhances the appreciations of a poem. Ding Qian has written out Du Fu’s Wàng yuè in beautiful cursive script (going from top down and from left to right):

The following is a character-by-character translation (adapted from Hinton, 2019, p 2):

gaze/behold     mountain

Daizong (ancient name for Taishan)      then      like      what
Qi      Lu (regions near Taishan)     green/blue     never     end
create     change     concentrate     divine     beauty
Yin     Yang (Taoist concepts of dark and light)     cleave     dusk     dawn
heave     chest     birth     layer     cloud
burst     eye     enter      return      bird
soon     when     reach     extreme     summit
one     glance     all     mountain     small.

And this is the English translation of Stephen Owen (2008, poem 1.2):

Gazing on the Peak

And what then is Daizong like? —
over Qi and Lu, green unending.
Creation compacted spirit splendors here,
Dark and Light, riving dusk and dawn.
Exhilarating the breast, it produces layers of cloud;
splitting eye-pupils, it has homing birds entering.
Someday may I climb up to its highest summit,
with one sweeping view see how small all other mountains are

The interpretation of the poem requires some knowledge of its allusions. In the fourth line, Du Fu is referring to the taijitu symbol of Taoism (illustrated on the right) that contrasts the principles of yin (dark, female, moon) and yang (light, male, sun). Du Fu proposes that Taishan divides the world into two ways of looking. Some have suggested that the taijitu symbol originally represented the dark (north) side and the light (south) side of a mountain, and this idea fits easily with the poem.

All translators have had difficulty with the third couplet (reviewed by Hsieh, 1994). My feeling is that Du Fu is noticing layers of clouds at the mountain’s upper reaches – the chest if one considers the mountain like a human body – and birds swooping around the peaks – where the eye sockets of the body would be. However, it is also possible that Du Fu is breathing heavily from the climb and that his eyes are surprised by the birds. Perhaps both meanings are valid, with Du Fu and the mountain becoming one. Du Fu may have been experiencing the meditative state of Chan Buddhism, with a mind was “wide-open and interfused with this mountain landscape, no distinction between subjective and objective” (Hinton, 2019, p 6). One might also consider Du Fu’s mental state: at the time he wrote this poem he had just failed the jenshi exams. This might have caused some breast-beating and tears, as well as his final resolve to climb the mountain and see how small all his problems actually were.

The last couplet refers to Mencius’ description of the visit of Confucius to Taishan (Mengzi VIIA:24):

He ascended the Tai Mountain, and all beneath the heavens appeared to him small. So he who has contemplated the sea, finds it difficult to think anything of other waters, and he who has wandered in the gate of the sage, finds it difficult to think anything of the words of others.

Zhang’s Hermitage

During his time in Yanzhou Du Fu visited a hermit named Zhang near the Stonegate Mountain, one of the lesser peaks near Taishan. Zhang was likely a follower of the new Chan Buddhism, which promoted meditation as a means to empty the mind of suffering and allow the universal life force to permeate one’s being. Buddhism first came to China during the Han dynasty (206BCE – 220CE). Since many of the concepts of Buddhism were similar to those of Taoism, the new religion spread quickly (Hinton, 2020). A type of Buddhism that stressed the role of meditation began to develop in the 6^th Century CE, and called itself chan, a Chinese transcription of the Sanskrit dhyana (meditation). In later years this would lead to the Zen Buddhism of Japan. There are many allusions to Buddhism and especially to Chan ideas in Du Fu’s poetry (Rouzer, 2020; Zhang, 2018)

Du Fu reportedly wrote the following poem on one of the walls of Zhang’s hermitage. The poem is a seven-character lǜshī. The following is the poem in Chinese characters (Owen, 2008, poem 1.4) and in pinyin:

The following is a character-by-character translation (adapted from Hinton, 2019, p 22):

inscribe      Zhang     family      recluse      house     

spring      mountain     absence      friend      alone      you      search
chop      tree      crack     crack      mountain    again     mystery
creek     pathway     remnant       cold      pass       ice      snow
stone       gate      slant     sun      reach     forest     place
no       desire      night      know      gold      silver     breath/spirit
far     injure     morning     see      deer     deer       wander
ride     burgeon     dark     thus      confuse     leave      place
facing     you      suspect     this     drift      empty     boat.

And this is a translation by Kenneth Rexroth (1956):

Written on the Wall at Chang’s Hermitage

It is Spring in the mountains.
I come alone seeking you.
The sound of chopping wood echos
Between the silent peaks.
The streams are still icy.
There is snow on the trail.
At sunset I reach your grove
In the stony mountain pass.
You want nothing, although at night
You can see the aura of gold
And silver ore all around you.
You have learned to be gentle
As the mountain deer you have tamed.
The way back forgotten, hidden
Away, I become like you,
An empty boat, floating, adrift.

Notable in the poem is the idea of wú (third character) which can be translated as “absence, nothing, not” (Hinton, 2019, p 24) This is an essential concept of Chan Buddhism – the emptying of the mind so that it can become a receptacle for true awareness. The third and fourth characters of the first line might be simply translated as “alone (without a friend),” but one might also venture “with absence as a companion” or “with an empty mind.” This fits with the image of the empty boat at the end of the poem.

Zheng Qian, a drinking companion of Li Bai and Du Fu, suggested the idea of combining poetry, painting and calligraphy. The Emperor was impressed and called the combination sānjué (three perfections) (Sullivan, 1974). Li Bai and Du Fu likely tried their hand at painting and calligraphy but no versions of their sānjué efforts have survived. The Ming painter and calligrapher Wang Shimin (1592–1680 CE) illustrated the second couplet of Du Fu’s poem from Zhang’s hermitage in his album Du Fu’s Poetic Thoughts now at the Palace Museum in Beijing.

The An Lushan Rebellion

Toward the end 755 CE, An Lushan, a general on the northern frontier rebelled against the empire and captured the garrison town of Fanyang (or Jicheng) located in what is now part of Beijing. Within a month the rebels captured Luoyang. The emperor and much of his court fled Chang’an, travelling through the Qinling Mountains to find sanctuary in the province of Shu. The city of Chang’an fell to the rebels in the middle of 756 CE.

Below is shown a painting of Emperor Ming-Huang’s Flight to Shu. Though attributed to the Tang painter Li Zhaodao (675-758 CE), this was actually painted in his style several hundred years later during the Song Dynasty. Shu is the ancient name for what is now known as Sichuan province. This masterpiece of early Chinese painting is now in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Two enlargements are included: the emperor with his red coat is shown at the lower right; at the lower left advance members of his entourage begin climbing the mountain paths.

The rebellion lasted for eight long years. The northern part of the country was devastated. Death from either war or famine was widespread. Censuses before and after the rebellion suggested a death toll of some 36 million people, making it one of the worst catastrophes in human history. However, most scholars now doubt these numbers and consider the death toll as closer to 13 million. Nevertheless, it was a murderous time.

Moonlit Night

At the beginning of the rebellion, Du Fu managed to get his family to safety in the northern town of Fuzhou, but he was himself held captive in Chang’an. Fortunately, he was not considered important enough to be executed, and he finally managed to escape in 757 CE. The following shows a poem from 756 CE in characters (Owen, 2008, poem 4.18), pinyin transcription, and character-by-character translation (Alexander, 2008):

The following is a reading of the poem from Librivox:

Vikam Seth (1997) translated the poem keeping the Chinese rhyme scheme: the last character rhymes for all four couplets:

Moonlit Night

In Fuzhou, far away, my wife is watching
The moon alone tonight, and my thoughts fill
With sadness for my children, who can’t think
Of me here in Changan; they’re too young still.
Her cloud-soft hair is moist with fragrant mist.
In the clear light her white arms sense the chill.
When will we feel the moonlight dry our tears,
Leaning together on our window-sill?

Alec Roth wrote a suite of songs based on Vikam Seth’s translations of Du Fu. The following is his setting for Moonlit Night with tenor Mark Padmore:

David Young (2008) provides a free-verse translation:

Tonight
in this same moonlight
my wife is alone at her window
in Fuzhou
I can hardly bear
to think of my children
too young to understand
why I can’t come to them
her hair
must be damp from the mist
her arms
cold jade in the moonlight
when will we stand together
by those slack curtains
while the moonlight dries
the tear-streaks on our faces?

The poem may have been written or at least conceived during the celebration of the full moon in the autumn. Families customarily viewed the moon together and Du Fu imagines his wife viewing the moon alone. The mention of the wife’s chamber in the second line may refer to either her actual bedroom or metonymically to herself as the inmost room in Du Fu’s heart (Hawkes, 1967). David Young (2008) remarks that this may be “the first Chinese poem to address romantic sentiments to a wife,” instead of a colleague or a courtesan.  

David Hawkes (1967) notes the parallelism of the third couplet:

‘fragrant mist’ parallels ‘clear light,’ ‘cloud hair’ parallels ‘jade arms,’ and ‘wet’ parallels ‘cold’

Spring View

Spring View (or Spring Landscape), the most famous poem written by Du Fu in Chang’an during the rebellion, tells how nature persists despite the ravages of effects of war and time. Subjective emotions and objective reality become one. The character wàng (view, landscape) can mean both the act of perceiving or what is actually perceived. In addition, it can sometimes mean the present scene or what is to be expected in the future (much like the English word “prospect”). The illustration below shows the text in Chinese characters (Owen, 2008, poem 4.25), in pinyin and in a character-by-character translation (adapted from Hawkes, 1967, Alexander, 2008, and Zong-Qi Cai, 2008):

The following is a reading of the poem from the website associated with How to Read Chinese Poetry (ZongQi-Cai, 2008, poem 8.1):

The next illustration shows the poem as written by three calligraphers. All versions read from top down and from right to left. On the left is standard script by Anita Wang; on the right the calligraphy by Lii Shiuh Lou is gently cursive. At the bottom the calligraphy by an anonymous calligrapher is unrestrained: it accentuates the root of the growing grass (8^th character) and the radicals that compose the character for regret/hate (16^th character) fly apart.

The following are two translations, the first by David Hinton, which uses an English line of a constant length to approximate the Chinese 5-character line (2020a):

The country in ruins, rivers and mountains
continue. The city grows lush with spring.

Blossoms scatter tears for us, and all these
separations in a bird’s cry startle the heart.

Beacon-fires three months ablaze: by now
a mere letter’s worth ten thousand in gold,

and worry’s thinned my hair to such white
confusion I can’t even keep this hairpin in.

A second translation, with preservation of the rhyme scheme and phrasal structure, is by Keith Holyoak (2015)

       The state is in ruin;
yet mountains and rivers endure.
       In city gardens
weeds run riot this spring.

       These dark times
move flowers to sprinkle tears;
       the separations
send startled birds on the wing.

       For three months now
the beacon fires have burned;
       a letter from home
would mean more than anything.

       I’ve pulled out
so many of my white hairs
       too few are left
to hold my hatpin in!

The second couplet has been interpreted in different ways. Most translations (including the two just quoted) consider it as representing nature’s lament for the evil times. For example, Hawkes (1967) suggests that “nature is grieving in sympathy with the beholder at the ills which beset him.” However, Michael Yang (2016) proposes that “In times of adversity, nature may simply be downright uncaring and unfriendly, thereby adding to the woes of mankind.” He translates the couplet

Mourning the times, I weep at the sight of flowers;
Hating separation, I find the sound of birds startling.

The last two lines of the poem refer the hair-style of the Tang Dynasty: men wore their hair in a topknot, and their hats were “anchored to their heads with a large hatpin which passed through the topknot of hair” (Hawkes, 1967). Most interpreters have been struck by the difference between the solemn anguish of the poem’s first six lines, and the self-mockery of the final couplet (Hawkes, 1967, p 46; Chou, 1995, p 115). This juxtaposition of the tragic and the pitiable accentuates the poet’s bewilderment.

The Thatched Cottage

Disillusioned by the war and by the politics of vengeance that followed, Du Fu and his family retired to a thatched cottage in Chengdu, where he lived from 759-765. A replica of this cottage has been built there in a park celebrating both Du Fu and Chinese Poetry:  

Many of the poems that Du Fu wrote in Chengdu celebrated the simple joys of nature. He often used isolated quatrains to find parallels between his emotions and the world around him. This brief form called juéjù (curtailed lines) was widely used by his colleagues Li Bai (701–762) and Wang Wei (699–759). The form consists of two couplets juxtaposed in meaning and rhyming across their last character (Wong, 1970; Zong-Qi Cai, 2008, Chapter 10). The following poem (Owen, 2008, poem 9.63) describing willow-catkins (illustrated on the right) and sleeping ducks gives a deep feeling of peace. These are the Chinese characters and pinyin transcription followed by the character-by-character translation (Alexander, 2008):  

grain    path    poplar/willow    blossom    pave    white    carpet
little    stream    lotus    leaves    pile    green    money
bamboo    shoot    root    sprout    no    person    see
sand    on    duckling    beside    mother    sleep

The following translation is by Burton Watson (2002):

Willow fluff along the path spreads a white carpet;
lotus leaves dot the stream, plating it with green coins.
By bamboo roots, tender shoots where no one sees them;
on the sand, baby ducks asleep beside their mother.

Shui Chien-Tung provided the following calligraphy for the poem (Cooper, 1973). He used aspects of the ancient scripts (circles, curves and dots) in some of the characters to give a sense of simplicity and timelessness. The illustration shows the calligraphy of the poem on the left and the evolution of the characters yáng (willow, poplar) and fú (duck) on the right. 

Another quatrain from Chengdu describes a night scene on the river. The following shows the poem in Chinese characters (Owen, 2008, poem 13.61), in pinyin, and in a character-by-character translation (mine):

This is the translation by J. P. Seaton (Seaton & Cryer, 1987):

The River moves, moon travels rock,
Streams unreal, clouds there among the flowers.
The bird perches, knows the ancient Tao
Sails go: They can’t know where.

As the river flows by, the moon’s reflection slowly travels across the rocks near the shore. The water reflects the clouds between the lilies. A bird on a branch understands the nature of the universe. A boat passes, going home we know not where.

The poem conveys a sense of the complexity of the world where reflections and reality intermingle, a desire to understand the meaning of our life, and a fear that time is passing and we do not know where it will take us. All this in twenty characters. Such concision is extremely difficult in English. An attempt:

River and rocks reflect the moon
and clouds amid the lilies
resting birds understand the way
sails pass seeking home somewhere.

The following shows a painting by Huang Yon-hou to illustrate the poem. This was used as the frontispiece (and cover) of the book Bright Moon, Perching Bird (Seaton & Cryer, 1987). On the right is calligraphy of the poem by Mo Ji-yu.

Above the Gorges

In 765 CE Du Fu and his family left Chengdu and travelled eastward on the Yangtze River. The region of Luoyang had been recently recovered by imperial forces and Du Fu was perhaps trying to return home (Hung, 1952). He stayed for a while in Kuizhou (present day Baidicheng) at the beginning of the Three Gorges (Qutang, Wu and Xiing).

While there Du Fu wrote a series of meditations called Autumn Thoughts (or more literally Stirred by Autumn). This is the second of these poems in Chinese characters and in pinyin:

A character-by-character translation (Alexander, 2008) is:

Kui  prefecture  lonely  wall  set  sun  slant
Every  rely  north  dipper  gaze  capital  city
Hear  ape  real  fall  three  sound  tear
Sent  mission  vain  follow  eight  month  raft
Picture  ministry  incense  stove  apart  hidden  pillow
Mountain  tower  white  battlements  hide  sad  reed-whistle
Ask  look  stone  on  [Chinese wisteria]  moon
Already reflect islet before rushes reeds flowers

The following is Stephen Owen’s translation (Owen, 2008 poem 17.27):

On Kuizhou’s lonely walls setting sunlight slants,
then always I trust the North Dipper to lead my gaze to the capital.
Listening to gibbons I really shed tears at their third cry,
accepting my mission I pointlessly follow the eighth-month raft.
The censer in the ministry with portraits eludes the pillow where I lie,
ill towers’ white-plastered battlements hide the sad reed pipes.
Just look there at the moon, in wisteria on the rock,
it has already cast its light by sandbars on flowers of the reeds.

The poem is striking in the difference between the first three couplets and the last. At the beginning of the poem Du Fu is feeling regret that he is not in Chang’an which is located due north of Kuizhou (in the direction of the Big Dipper which points to the North Star). Owen notes that “There was an old rhyme that a traveler in the gorges would shed tears when the gibbons cried out three times.” The eighth month raft may refer to another old story about a vessel that came every eight months and took a man up to the Milky Way. Owen commented on the third couplet that “The “muralled ministry” is where were located the commemorative portraits of officers, civil and military, who had done exceptional service to the dynasty.” Incense was burned when petitions were presented. The final couplet disregards all the preceding nostalgia and simply appreciates the beauty of the moment.

The Ming painter Wang Shimin illustrated this final couplet in one of the leaves from his album Du Fu’s Poetic Thoughts.

Later in Kuizhou, Du Fu entertained a librarian named Li who was returning north to take up an appointment in Chang’an. The following is the beginning of a poem (Owen, 2008, poem 19.34) describing Li’s departure in Chinese characters and in pinyin:

A character-by-character translation is:

blue/green    curtain    white    boat/raft    Yizhou    arrive
Wu    gorge    autumn    waves    heaven/sky    earth/ground    turn (around)
stone/rock    leave/exit    fall    listen    maple    leaf    down
scull/oar    swing    carry    point    chrysanthemum    flower     open/blume

The following is Stephen Owen’s translation:

When the white barge with green curtains came from Yizhou,
with autumn billows in the Wu Gorges, heaven and earth were turning.
Where rocks came out, from below you listened to the leaves of maples falling,
as the sweep moved back and forth you pointed behind to chrysanthemums in bloom.

The Ming painter Wang Shimin illustrated the second couplet in one of the leaves from his album Du Fu’s Poetic Thoughts. The painting shows the bright red leaves of the maples. In front of the riverside house one can see the multicolored chrysanthemums that Li is pointing to. Harmony exists between the wild and the cultivated.

On the River

After his sojourn in Kuizhou, Du Fu and his family continued their journey down the Yangtze River. However, the poet was ill and was unable to make it beyond Tanzhou (now Changsha) where he died in 770 CE. No one knows where he is buried. In the 1960’s radical students dug up a grave purported to be his to “eliminate the remaining poison of feudalism,” but found the grave empty.

One of Du Fu’s last poems was Night Thoughts While Travelling. The following is the poem in Chinese characters (Owen, 2008, poem 14.63) and in pinyin (Alexander, 2008):

The following is a reading of the poem from Librivox:

Holyoak (2015) provides a rhymed translation:

      The fine grass
by the riverbank stirs in the breeze;
      the tall mast
in the night is a lonely sliver.

      Stars hang
all across the vast plain;
      the moon bobs
in the flow of the great river.

      My poetry
has not made a name for me;
      now age and sickness
have cost me the post I was given.

      Drifting, drifting,
what do I resemble?
      A lone gull
lost between earth and heaven.

Kenneth Rexroth (1956) translates the poem in free verse:

Night Thoughts While Travelling

A light breeze rustles the reeds
Along the river banks. The
Mast of my lonely boat soars
Into the night. Stars blossom
Over the vast desert of
Waters. Moonlight flows on the
Surging river. My poems have
Made me famous but I grow
Old, ill and tired, blown hither
And yon; I am like a gull
Lost between heaven and earth.

The following shows the poem in calligraphy with three styles. On the left the poem is written in clerical script, in the center in regular script and on the right is unrestrained cursive script. All examples were taken from Chinese sites selling calligraphy.

Changing Times

During the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE) the role of literature, and poetry in particular, in society changed dramatically (Owen, 2011):

In the 650s, literature was centered almost entirely in the imperial court; by the end of the era literature had become the possession of an educated elite, who might serve in government, but whose cultural life was primarily outside the court.

During Du Fu’s lifetime, poetry became no longer a part of the ancient traditions; rather it began to be concerned with the present and with the personal. Lucas Bender (2021) describes the traditional role of poetry in a society following the precepts of Confucianism:

Most people … would be incapable on their own of adequately conceptualizing the world or perfectly responding to its contingency, and therefore needed to rely on the models left by sages and worthies. Many of these models were embodied in texts, including literary texts, which could thus offer an arena for ethical activity. Poetry, for example, was understood to offer models of cognition, feeling, and commitment that would ineluctably shape readers’ understanding of and responses to their own circumstances. One way of being a good person, therefore, involved reading good poetry and writing more of it, thereby propagating the normative models of the tradition in one’s own time and transmitting them to the future. (p 317)

Du Fu found himself bewildered by the state of the world. He sought to convey this confusion rather than explain it:

Du Fu doubts the possibility of indefinitely applicable moral categories. The conceptual tools by which we make moral judgments, he suggests, are always inherited from a past that can – and, in a world as various and changeable as ours has proven to be, often will – diverge from the exigencies of the present. As a result, not only are our values unlikely to be either universal or timeless; more important, if we pay careful attention to the details of our experience, they are unlikely to work unproblematically even here and now. (Bender, 2021, p 319)

The complexity of Du Fu’s poetry – the difficulty in understanding some of his juxtapositions – becomes a challenge. The past provides no help in the interpretation. We must figure out for themselves what relates the mountain, the clouds and the poet’s breathing in the first poem we considered. And in the last poem we must try to locate for ourselves the place of the gull between heaven and earth.

 

References

Alexander, M. (2008). A little book of Du Fu. Mark Alexander. (Much of the material in the book is available on Chinese Poems website).

Bender, L. R. (2021). Du Fu transforms: tradition and ethics amid societal collapse. Harvard University Asia Center.

Chan, J. W. (2018). Du Fu: the poet as historian. In Zong-Qi Cai. (Ed.) How to read Chinese poetry in context: poetic culture from antiquity through the Tang. (pp 236-247). Columbia University Press.

Chou, E. S. (1995). Reconsidering Tu Fu: literary greatness and cultural context. Cambridge University Press.

Collet, H., & Cheng, W. (2014). Tu Fu: Dieux et diables pleurant, poèmes. Moundarren.

Cooper, A. R. V. (1973). Li Po and Tu Fu. Penguin Books.

Egan, R. (2020). Ming-Qing paintings inscribed with Du Fu’s poetic lines. In Xiaofei Tian (Ed.). Reading Du Fu: nine views. (pp 129-142). Hong Kong University Press

Hawkes, D. (1967 revised and reprinted, 2016). A little primer of Tu Fu. New York Review of Books.

Hinton, D. (1989, expanded and revised 2020a). The selected poems of Tu Fu. New Directions.

Hinton, D. (2019). Awakened cosmos: the mind of classical Chinese poetry. Shambhala.

Hinton, D. (2020b). China root: Taoism, Ch’an, and original Zen. Shambhala 

Holyoak, K. (2015). Facing the moon: poems of Li Bai and Du Fu. Oyster River Press.

Hsieh, D. (1994). Du Fu’s “Gazing at the Mountain.” Chinese Literature, Essays, Articles, Reviews, 16, 1–18.

Hung, W. (1952, reprinted 2014). Tu Fu: China’s Greatest Poet. Harvard University Press

Owen, S. (1981). Tu Fu. In S. Owen, The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High T’ang. (pp 183-224). Yale University.  

Owen, S. (2010). The cultural Tang (650–1020). In Chang, K. S., & Owen, S. (Eds). The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature (Vol. 1, pp. 286–380). Cambridge University Press.

Owen, S., (edited by P. W. Kroll & D. X. Warner, 2016). The poetry of Du Fu. (6 volumes). De Gruyter. (Available to download in pdf format.)

Rexroth, K. (1956). One hundred poems from the Chinese. New Directions.

Rouzer, P. (2020). Refuges and refugees: how Du Fu writes Buddhism. In Xiaofei Tian (Ed.). Reading Du Fu: nine views. (pp. 75-92). Hong Kong University Press.

Seaton, J. P., & Cryer, J. (with calligraphy by Mo Ji-yu, and painting by Huang Yon-hou, 1987). Bright moon, perching bird: poems of Li Po and Tu Fu. Wesleyan University Press.

Seth, V. (1997). Three Chinese poets: translations of poems by Wang Wei, Li Bai and Du Fu. Phoenis.

Sullivan, M. (1974). The three perfections: Chinese painting, poetry, and calligraphy. Thames and Hudson.

Xiaofei Tian (Ed.). (2020). Reading Du Fu: nine views. Hong Kong University Press.

Zhang, Y. (2018). On 10 Chan-Buddhism images in the poetry of Du Fu. Studies in Chinese Religions, 4(3), 318–340.

Wai-lim Yip. (1997). Chinese Poetry, Duke University Press.

Watson, B. (2002). The selected poems of Du Fu. Columbia University Press.

Wong, S. S. (1970) The quatrains (Chüeh-Chü 絕句) of Tu Fu. Monumenta Serica, 29, 142-162

Yang, M. V. (2016). Man and nature: a study of Du Fu’s poetry. Monumenta Serica, 50, 315-336.

Young, D. (2008). Du Fu: a life in poetry. Alfred A. Knopf.

Zong-Qi Cai (2008). How to read Chinese poetry: a guided anthology. Columbia University Press. (audio files are available at website).

 

 

This post describes some of the events that occurred in Ronda, a town in southern Spain, during the summer of 1936. After the Spanish Civil War broke out, Anarchists quickly took control of the town, and murdered many supporters of the Nationalist cause. Two months later, advancing Nationalist forces captured Ronda, and drove most of its people from their homes. Those that refused to leave suffered bloody reprisals. These events quickly became mythic rather than historic. In one story, the Anarchists had murdered the town’s Falangists by having them beaten to death in the town’s plaza and then thrown into the canyon that cuts through the center of the town. Ernest Hemingway recounted this version in his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. However, most historians now agree that this never happened.  

Ronda

Ronda is one of the most beautiful of the pueblos blancos (“white towns”) perched on the inland hills of Andalusia. The name comes from the buildings that were white-washed to protect them from the heat of the sun. Through the center of Ronda runs the Guadalevin River, which has carved through the limestone cliffs a steep-walled canyon, el tajo, reaching depths of more than 100 meters. The most striking bridge over the river is the Puente Nuevo constructed in 1793 at the point where the canyon opens into the huge valley know as la caldera (cauldron) The following illustration shows the bridge viewed from the West (left) and from the Southeast (right).

The large building just to the north of the bridge used to be Ronda’s casa consistorial (town hall) where the ayuntamiento or local council met. In the 1990s this was converted into a parador (state-owned luxury hotel). The following illustration shows the old city hall with its arcades facing the large town square. On the far left can be seen a low wall looking over the canyon.

Ronda has many other luxury hotels. The Hotel Reina Victoria, a summer resort for the English stationed in Gibraltar, was built on the cliff overlooking la caldera in 1906. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke stayed there for several months in the winter of 1912-1913. The gardens beside the hotel have a commemorative statue of Rilke gazing out over valley (shown below in a photograph by Bryan Appleyard).

In Ronda, Rilke continued working on a set of poems that would not be complete until ten more years had passed – the Duino Elegies. He was also able to compose several poems about Spain. In the third part of a poem called The Spanish Trilogy he praised the peasants he could see in the valley, hoping that he might become as attuned to the universe as a simple shepherd:

Langsamen Schrittes, nicht leicht, nachdenklichen Körpers,
aber im Stehn ist er herrlich. Noch immer dürfte ein Gott
heimlich in diese Gestalt und würde nicht minder.
Abwechselnd weilt er und zieht, wie selber der Tag,
und Schatten der Wolken
durchgehn ihn, als dächte der Raum
langsam Gedanken für ihn.

slow stepping, not light-footed, his body lost in thought,
but splendid when he stands still. A God might
secretly take his form and not be any the lesser.
By turns he tarries and continues on like the day itself
and the shadows of the clouds
pass through him, as if the vast space
were thinking slow thoughts for him.
(translation Paul Archer)

The poetry is beautiful. However, one cannot help but wonder about how shepherd felt looking up toward the hotel on the cliff. And whether this young shepherd would participate in the revolution some twenty years later.

As well as the canyon and its bridge, Ronda is famous for its plaza de toros (bullring) which was built in 1785. The bullring is seen in the upper left of the aerial view of Ronda in the following illustration:

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) first visited Ronda in 1923 and became enamored of its site and of the bullfights (Buckley, 1997). In his 1932 book on the traditions of bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, he remarked

There is one town that would be better than Aranjuez to see your first bullfight in if you are only going to see one and that is Ronda.

Hemingway visited Spain during the Civil War, although at that time he could not visit Ronda, which was controlled by the Nationalists. He returned to Ronda many times in the 1950s. For the bullfights, and for the memories.

 

The Spanish Civil War

In 1931, the Spanish king was deposed and a new government was proclaimed: the Second Spanish Republic, the first having lasted for less than two years (1873-1874) before being aborted by a military coup. The governing coalition of the Second Republic was composed of many separate and feuding parties, among them Anarchists, Communists, Republicans and Catalonian Separatists. The right-wing opposition contained parties favoring the Monarchy or the Catholic Church. The Falangist party, a fascist organization was founded in 1933 in response to the new republic.

The government had to deal with multiple problems

• much of the land was owned by the aristocrats, who managed large tracts of land (latifundia), and who treated the peasants as slaves
• the military was far larger and more powerful than necessary for a country that had long ago lost its empire
• the church sided with the generals and the aristocrats, for they were the source of their power and wealth
• the new industries, run by a small number of capitalists, exploited the workers who made the factories run, and who were organizing into unions
• the police force – the Guardia Civil – mainly existed to support the landed aristocrats and the capitalists.

The course of the Second Republic was extremely turbulent. The government reduced funds for the military, and closed down the military academy in Zaragoza, run by General Franciso Franco. Strikes occurred and these were put down with excessive force. Attempts to take land away from the latifundista were unsuccessful. The government tried to restrict the role of the church in the educational system. Many of the poor, urged on by anarchists and communists, attacked the church. In 1933, Pope Pius XI published an encyclical Dilectissima Nobis (“Dear to us”) specifically deploring the anti-clerical violence in Spain.

In the election of January,1936, the left-wing parties in the Popular Front won a majority against a coalition of the right-wing parties named the National Front. Many have suggested that the election was rigged to some extent, and the voting was followed by much violence. Manuel Azana Diaz (1880-1940), who had served in various positions in the preceding government, became the president of the newly elected Republican government.

In July 1936, General Emilio Mola, supported by General Franciso Franco, called for a coup to end the republic and to return the nation to its previous form. The leftist parties reacted by calling for a Revolution of the workers. The country descended into anarchy. The Nationalists (or Rebels) were able to take control the north of the country, but the Republicans (or Loyalists) held off the coup in the south and in the major cities. The Civil War had begun (Thomas, 1961; Graham, 2005: Payne, 2012).

The governments of Germany and Italy immediately provided assistance to the Nationalists, and Russia came in on the side of the Republicans. England and France decided that they should not intervene in the internal politics of Spain. However, volunteers from these and many other countries (even Germany and Italy) began to organize the International Brigades to fight with the Republicans: among them were the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the United States and the Mackenzie-Papineau Brigade from Canada.

Soon after the coup was declared, Franco borrowed planes from Italy and Germany and transported troops from North Africa to shore up the Nationalists in Seville, a Catholic stronghold. The regions of the country controlled by the Nationalists (blue) and the Republicans (white) in July, 1936) are shown in the following map (derived from Preston, 2012, p 658): 

From Seville, General Franco sent troops northward to join up with the Nationalists besieging Madrid. Another key point in the fighting was near Teruel, where Nationalist soldiers were attempting to advance to the sea to cut off Barcelona from Madrid. Franco also sent troops eastward to relieve the city of Granada.

Mola died in a plane crash in June of 1937, and General Franciso Franco Bahamonde (1892-1975) became the supreme leader (el caudillo) of the Nationalist forces. The following illustration shows the leaders of the two sides. On the left is a modernist stone statue of Manuel Azena by José Noja and Pablo Serrano that was not erected until 1979. On the right is a bronze equestrian statue of Francisco Franco by José Capuz Mamano initially cast in 1964. Various versions of this statue were erected in several of the major cities of Spain.

The following figure shows propaganda posters from both sides of the civil war. On the left is a poster stating “No Pasareis” (You shall not pass). This slogan and its variant “No Pasaran” (They shall not pass) was used by the Republicans throughout the war. The Communist politician Dolores Ibarruri Gomez (also known as La Pasionara – the passionate one) used the latter version in a famous speech urging on the defenders of Madrid in November 1936. The Republican poster comes from the two parties that were the mainstay of the Popular Front: the CNT (Confederacion Nacional de Trabajo) and the FAI (Federacion Anarquista Iberica). The right poster is from the Falangists. In the background are the four red arrows held together by a yoke, the Spanish version of the fasces (bundle of rods) of the Italian Fascists. Superimposed is a hand on a rifle. The call is “To arms – Homeland, Bread and Justice.”

Events in Ronda during 1936ca)

Soon after the military coup was declared in July, 1936, members of the CNT took control in Ronda and many of the small towns in Andalusia. Members of the Guardia Civil and many local Nationalist leaders were executed. Similar outbreaks of violence occurred in many regions of Spain. This “red terror” was not condoned by the Republican Government, which had difficulty controlling its many factions.

Once the Nationalists had shored up control of Seville, Franco placed the bloodthirsty General Queipo de Llano in command of retaking Southern Spain. After Granada was relieved, the Nationalists returned to the other cities of Andalusia. Reaching Ronda in September, 1936 they quickly subdued the town, and took bloody revenge. Those killed by the Nationalists far outnumbered those who had been murdered in the summer (Preston, 2012).

Exactly what had happened in Ronda during these early months of the war was not clear. The Nationalists declared that the anarchists had murdered several hundred people and thrown them over the cliff. This claim was used to justify their reprisals.

Many of the townspeople left Ronda and fled to Malaga, but this city soon fell to the Nationalists in February 1937. Republicans in Malaga were rounded up and shot. The Nationalists boasted that they executed more Republicans in seven days than the Republicans had killed in the seven months they were in control of the city (Preston, 2012, p 177).

Most of the citizens of Malaga, together with a few surviving Republican soldiers, then tried to reach Almeria along the coastal road – walking, riding donkeys and hanging onto rickety vehicles for a distance of about 200 km. These refugees were strafed and bombed by planes, and shelled by Nationalists warships. The number of people killed in what became known as the Malaga-Almeria Massacre was over 3000. The Canadian physician Norman Bethune used the few vehicles available to him to help the refugees travel to Almeria (Stewart, R., & Majada Neila, 2014), but this had little effect. The following photograph shows the refugees:

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway came to Spain toward the end of 1937 to produce a documentary film on the Civil War – The Spanish Earth – to help raise money for the Republicans. The photograph below shows him in the Republican trenches at Teruel (low center) together with the filmmaker Joris Ivens (high center).

After the Spanish Civil War ended in1939, Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a novel based on what he had heard about the violence perpetrated by both sides during the conflict. The following illustration shows some of the covers used by various editions of the book, the original on the left:

The epigraph to the novel is from John Donne’s Meditations upon Emergent Occasions (1624) The quotation ends with:

any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

The novel’s central character is Robert Jordan, an American Professor of Spanish, and an explosives expert, now a volunteer serving with the Republicans. In the spring of 1937, he is ordered to blow up a mountain-bridge to prevent Nationalist forces from Segovia from reaching Madrid. For this task he recruits the help of a band of Republican guerillas, led by Pablo and his woman Pilar. Jordan falls in love with Maria, a beautiful young woman serving as the band’s cook. Maria’s father, the Republican mayor of Valladolid, and her mother had been executed by the Nationalists early in the war. She herself had her head shaved, and was raped and imprisoned, before finally escaping to the mountains.

One evening, Pilar tells Jordan and Maria what had happened in Ronda at the beginning of the war. Pablo, the leader of the local anarchists in the town, had captured the barracks of the Guardia Civil and executed all the guards. He had also rounded up the main supporters of the Nationalists and imprisoned them in the city council. Pilar describes the center of the town (see preceding illustrations):  

The town is built on the high bank above the river and there is a square there with a fountain and there are benches and there are big trees that give a shade for the benches. The balconies of the houses look out on the plaza. Six streets enter on the plaza and there is an arcade from the houses that goes around the plaza so that one can walk in the shade of the arcade when the sun is hot. On three sides of the plaza is the arcade and on the fourth side is the walk shaded by the trees beside the edge of the cliff with, far below, the river. It is three hundred feet down to the river.

Pilar then describes how the town square was set up for the execution of the fascists:

Pablo organized it all as he did the attack on the barracks. First he had the entrances to the streets blocked off with carts though to organize the plaza for a capea. For an amateur bull fight. The fascists were all held in the Ayuntamiento, the city hall, which was the largest building on one side of the plaza. It was there the clock was set in the wall and it was in the buildings under the arcade that the club of the fascists was.

Pablo organized the peasants and workers who had gathered in the square:

He placed them in two lines as you would place men for a rope pulling contest, or as they stand in a city to watch the ending of a bicycle road race with just room for the cyclists to pass between, or as men stood to allow the passage of a holy image in a procession. Two meters was left between the lines and they ex-tended from the door of the Avuntamiento clear across the plaza to the edge of the cliff. So that, from the doorway of the Ayuntamiento, looking across the plaza, one coming out would see two solid lines of people waiting.
They were armed with flails such as are used to beat out the grain and they were a good flail’s length apart. All did not have flails, as enough flails could not be obtained. But most had flails obtained from the store of Don Guillermo Martin, who was a fascist and sold all sorts of agricultural implements. And those who did not have flails had heavy herdsman’s clubs, or ox-goads, and some had wooden pitchforks; those with wooden tines that are used to fork the chaff and straw into the air after the flailing. Some had sickles and reaping hooks but these Pablo placed at the far end where the lines reached the edge of the cliff.

The assembled crowd was told that they must kill the fascists by beating them to death. One of the peasants asked Pilar why, and she reported the following exchange:

“To save bullets” I said. “And that each man should have his share in the responsibility”
“That it should start then. That it should start.” And I looked at him and saw that he was crying. “Why are you crying, Joaquin?” I asked him. “This is not to cry about.”
“I cannot help it, Pilar,” he said. “I have never killed any one.”

One by one, the fascists were led out of the city hall and made their way through the crowd of peasants. One by one, they were beaten and clubbed to death. And one by one, their bodies were cast over the edge of the cliff into el tajo.

This fictional representation of the Anarchist terror in Ronda is extremely powerful. In the novel Hemingway also describes Nationalist atrocities in Valladolid – the summary execution of Maria’s parents and her abuse and rape by the Falangists. This vivid portrayal of the brutality of the war should make us rethink our hatreds. We are all in this life together; we are diminished by the death of any man; the bell tolls for us.  

Later in the novel, Jordan and the guerilla band succeed in blowing up the bridge. but Jordan is severely wounded and unable to move. He convinces that the rest of the band to retreat while he stays to delay the advancing Nationalists. He insists that Maria leave with the guerillas. The novel ends with Jordan trying to stay conscious as the soldiers come closer. Talking to himself, he claims

And if you wait and hold them up even a little while or just get the officer that may make all the difference. One thing well done can make ⸺  

Hemingway leaves the thought unfinished. The novel ends with an officer of the Nationalist forces riding slowly up toward where Jordan awaits him. 

The book sold well, and in 1943 it was made into a film starring Gary Cooper as Jordan, Ingrid Bergman as Maria, Akim Tamiroff as Pablo and Katina Paxinou as Pilar. The film was an international success, although it was not distributed in France or Germany until after World War II (see posters below). The film received multiple nominations for the Academy Awards, with Katina Paxinou winning for best supporting actress.

The film follows the novel quite closely. When Pilar recounts her tale of what happened in Ronda at the beginning of the Civil War, the movie shows in flashback some of the brutal executions in the plaza:

The bridge that Jordan dynamites just before the end of the movie is as high as the Puente Nuevo in Ronda:

Historical Accounts of the Events in Ronda

The history of The Spanish Civil War (1961) by Hugh Thomas was the first major examination of what happened in Spain during the war. The book became a best seller soon after it was published and it has since gone through two revisions and multiple printings:

Thomas discussed the events in Ronda:

In country districts. revolution itself often consisted primarily of the murder of the upper classes or the bourgeoisie. Thus the description, in Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, of how the inhabitants of a small pueblo first beat the male members of the middle class and then flung them over a cliff, is near to the reality of what happened in the famous Andalusian town of Ronda (though the work was the responsibility of a gang from Malaga). There, 512 were murdered in the first month of war. (p 263 in 1989 printing)

Other historians have proposed that the Ronda executions described by Hemingway, although based on accounts he had heard, was completely fictional. Buckley (1997) described what happened in Ronda in the Summer of 1936, according to the records maintained in the town hall:

On 19 July 1936 the commander of the small army garrison in Ronda, upon reports of a military uprising in Morocco, went to the Town Hall with a small platoon and demanded that the mayor submit to his authority and publicly announce that the city was under martial law and the army was taking control. The mayor belonged to the left-wing coalition known as the Popular Front. He refused to follow the commander’s orders and swiftly disarmed him and his small band of soldiers, heavily outnumbered by the peasant groups beginning to assemble on the plaza outside the town hall. Thus, Ronda remained loyal to the Republican government of Madrid, and did not fall to the fascists until 18 September 1936.
However, it would be would be wrong to assume that during these two months the Republican government in Madrid had any control over the town or its inhabitants. As soon as the reports of a military rising in Africa began to spread, the peasants from neighboring villages poured into Ronda and in effect took control. Although the mayor was nominally in charge, the real power belonged to a “Comite” formed by the peasants themselves, most of whom belonged to CNT (Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo), the Anarchist Labor Union.
The task of this committee was three-fold: first, to arrest all persons suspected of having fascist sympathies; second, to insure that food was evenly distributed to all inhabitants (money was outlawed and vouchers with the CNT rubber-stamp were issued); third, to prepare to defend Ronda from a probable attack by fascist troops stationed in Seville.
The word “revolution” immediately comes to mind when we attempt to describe the situation in Ronda in summer 1936. The Secretary’s “Record of Proceedings” for 28 July 1936, preserved in Ronda’s Town Hall, displays revolutionary rhetoric: “[W]e are living through a moment of historic transcendence … the fascist coup has spurred the populace to rise to the last man and to demand social justice . . . a new society is being born, based upon liberty, justice and equality … justice has now become `revolutionary justice’ designed to cleanse the state of all fascist elements as well as to establish the basis for a new social order etc.”

Many priests and supporters of the Nationalist cause were executed. However, these victims were not killed in the plaza, but were driven away from the center of the town and shot. It is difficult to determine the number of those killed, but it was likely much less than the 512 claimed by the Nationalists. None of the bodies were thrown into el tajo. This story seems to have been invented by General Queipo to inflame his troops as they went about their reprisals.

Corbin (1995) considers the story about the executions in the plaza and the casting of the bodies into el tajo as an example of myth-making. Myths have their basis in historical events but the stories become altered in the telling, often to justify the actions of those in power:

Any story of the past has a double construction and a double truth. The truth of the tale told is its historical truth; the truth of its telling is its mythical truth.

The story of the executions by el tajo served the purpose of the Nationalists: it portrayed the class hatred of the anarchists and communists and the violence that they promulgated in the early weeks of the Civil War. This then justified their violent repression. Society must be protected from any recurrence of such revolutionary terror.   

In The Spanish Holocaust (2012) which describes the repression of the Spanish Republicans during and after the Civil War, Paul Preston summarizes the events in Ronda:

Famous for its Roman and Arab bridges and its exquisite eighteenth-century bullring, Ronda had suffered a pitiless repression at the hands of anarchists led by a character known as ‘El Gitano.’ Initially, the CNT committee had maintained a degree of order although churches were sacked and images destroyed, but soon there were murders being carried out by anarchists from Malaga and also by locals. However, there is no substance to the claim, first made by Queipo in a broadcast on 18 August and popularized by Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, that large numbers of prisoners were killed by being thrown into the tajo. The many rightist victims were shot in the cemetery. Francoist sources claim that victims of the red terror from Ronda and the nearby pueblos of Gaucin and Arriate numbered over six hundred. On 16 September, when Varela took the town, the defenders fled and his forces suffered only three casualties in the assault. His men stopped and interrogated anyone found in streets and shot many of them. Over half of the population fled towards Malaga. Under the new authorities, those of the town’s defenders who had not fled were subjected to a bloody repression and the theft of their property. (p 171)

In the White City

The American poet, Philip Levine, spent time in Spain trying to learn more about the Spanish Civil War and the poets that wrote about it (Levine, 2016). He also wrote about Ronda in a prose-poem entitled In the White City (2009).

From up there—& he points to the bridge high above us—they tossed down the fat barber, the Falangist, to his death. “It is all in the book by the American communist.” “The communist?” I say. Yes, the friend of Fidel Castro, Comrade Hemingway “The tourists come because of your Mr. Hemingway, that is why you are here.” Who can argue with this young, balding lieutenant of the Guardia Civil who has dared to leave his barracks lacking his tricorne & with only a small sidearm? In felt house slippers he stands at ease on the west streets of his town, Ronda, to show me the world. “On those rocks,” he continues, pointing to a ledge half way down the gorge, “he first hits & his belly explodes. Then they rape his beautiful daughter, the film star that is Swedish, & when they have finish they shave her head. That is why we execute them all.” Does he mean that is why in the novel the Nationalists executed them. (I am careful not to say “the fascists”; it is 1965.) “No, no, executed them here, in life or death”—he smiles at his little joke—“up there on the bridge”— & he points again,— “by military firing squad one at a time, properly. That is why the whole town must witness & learn. It is educational.” But, I insist, the death of the Falangist was merely in a novel that made no effort to be true to events, una novela, a fiction, a best seller. The lieutenant enjoys this repartee, he’s amused by my innocence, he shakes his head, he is discreet & patient with this visitor to his ancient city that boasts the first Plaza de Toros in all the world. “You Americans,” and he suppresses his laughter, “you think because he was a famous red he could not tell the truth. They do not give Noble Prizes to liars.”

The poem illustrates how history becomes mixed up with fiction, with movies, and with photographs to form the myths that we remember about the past. Hemingway was not a communist and, though he spent time in Cuba, he was not a friend of Castro (Michaud, 2012). This idea stems from photographs of the two of them together at a fishing competition, the only time they ever met. The character Maria in Hemingway’s novel, played by the Swedish film-star in the movie, was the daughter of a mayor who was executed in the Civil War, but this was in a different town, and the mayor there was a Republican executed by the Nationalists. The poem ends with the idea that fiction written by a winner of the Noble (sic) Prize has to be true.

The following is an etching of the Puente Nuevo in Ronda done by Gary Young for a broadside edition of Levine’s poem.

Epilogue

By the spring of 1938, the Nationalists ultimately made their way to the sea, isolating Barcelona from Madrid. After Franco’s troops marched into Barcelona in January 1939, Manuel Azana was among the thousands of refugees who fled from Barcelona to France. In March, Madrid was taken and Franco declared victory on April 1, 1939, and became the Prime Minister of Spain, continuing in this office until 1973. During and after the war, many thousands of Republicans were executed by the Nationalists in a repression known as the “white terror” or the “Spanish Holocaust” (Preston, 2012). Hemingway’s novel was translated into Spanish as Por quién doblan las campanas, but was not allowed into Spain until 1969. The movie was not shown there until 1978. Hugh Thomas’s history of the war was forbidden in Spain until after the death of Franco in 1975. Today Spain continues to unearth the bodies of those executed during and after the war, and to seek some understanding of the violence and brutality of those days (Anderson, 2017). The myths need to be converted back into history.

References

Anderson, P. (2017). Knowing and acknowledging Spain’s dark Civil War past. Journal of Contemporary History, 52(1), 129–139.

Buckley, R. (1997): Revolution in Ronda: the facts in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway Review, 17(1), 49-57.

Corbin, J. (1995). Truth and myth in history: an example from the Spanish Civil War. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 25(4), 609-625

Graham, H. (2005). The Spanish Civil War: a very short introduction. Oxford University Press.

Hemingway, E. (1932). Death in the afternoon. Scribner.

Hemingway, E. (1940). For whom the bell tolls. Scribner.

Levine, P. (2009). News of the world: poems. Alfred A. Knopf.

Levine, P. (2016). The Spanish Civil War in Poetry. In Levine, P. (edited by Hirsch E., 2016). My lost poets: a life in poetry. (pp 139-163). Alfred A. Knopf.

Michaud, J. (2012). Hemingway, Castro, and Cuba. New Yorker (May 24, 2012).

Payne, S. G. (2012). The Spanish Civil War. Cambridge University Press.

Preston, P. (2012). The Spanish holocaust: inquisition and extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain. HarperPress.

Stewart, R., & Majada Neila, J. (2014). Bethune in Spain. McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Thomas, H. (1961, revised and enlarged, 1989). The Spanish Civil War. Harper & Row.

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) was an American poet who celebrated the beauty of California’s coast. In 1914 he and his wife Una settled in Carmel. In 1919 Jeffers and his family moved into Tor House, a home that he and a stone-mason had built on Carmel Point using rocks from the shore. From 1920 to 1924 he built by himself the adjacent Hawk Tower. Jeffers became famous soon after the publication of Tamar and Other Poems in 1924. This book and those that followed included both long narratives and shorter lyrics. His epics were bloody and tragic; his verse was free and passionate. Underlying his poems was an austere philosophy of “inhumanism.” This compared the transience of humanity to the persistence of the natural world, and proposed that we should detach ourselves from the passions of mankind and simply celebrate the beauty of the universe. Over the next decade, Jeffers published extensively and in 1932 his photograph graced the cover of Time. After World War II, his outrage at the death and destruction that occurred during the war and the severity of his inhumanist philosophy led to controversy and obscurity. In more recent years, the environmental movement has found inspiration in his love of the natural world and his anger about how humanity has despoiled it.  

Early Life

John Robinson Jeffers was born in 1887 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. His father was a Presbyterian minister and a Professor of Ancient Languages at the Western Theological Seminary. It was his father’s second marriage, and his son’s middle name, which he preferred, was in honor of the first wife, who had died five years earlier. Robinson Jeffers attended private schools in Pittsburgh, and then in Germany and Switzerland. He was a bright student and by the time he was 16 he was fluent in Latin, Greek, French and German. In 1903, his father turned 65 years old and retired to live in Los Angeles.

After graduating from Occidental College in 1905, Jeffers was unsure of what he wanted to do.. He studied languages at the University of Southern California for a year, but then switched to Medicine. After 3 years, he decided that he did not wish to be a physician and began studies in Forestry at the University of Seattle. He found the curriculum too business-oriented and quit, returning to Los Angeles in 1910. 

While at the University of Southern California in 1906, Jeffers met Una Call Kuster (1884-1950) who was also studying languages (Greenan, 1988). At the age of 18 years, she had married Edward Kuster, a rich lawyer and socialite, but wished to complete her education before having a family. Over the years Robinson and Una become fast friends and then passionate lovers. By 1910, their affair became widely known, and divorce proceedings were initiated. These events may have contributed to Jeffers’s moving to Seattle to study forestry. The following illustration shows photographs from 1911 (adapted from Karman, 1913).

After the divorce was finalized in 1913, Robinson and Una were married. Their first two years together were marked by grief. A daughter was born in early 1914 but only lived a day. The couple then moved to Carmel, a small village just south of the Monterey peninsula, to be alone together. Then Robinson’s father died in December, 1914.

In 1912, Jeffers had published at his own expense a book of poems – Flagons and Apples. Of the 500 copies printed, 480 were remaindered and sold to a second-hand bookstore. Now in Carmel, inspired by the Big Sur country just south of the village, Jeffers put together a new book of poems – The Californians – that was published by Macmillan in 1916. This book contained poems of many forms and lengths, most using classical rhythms and rhyme-schemes.

Twin boys – Garth and Donnan – were born in 1916, and the Jeffers slowly settled into their life at Carmel. When the United States entered the war in 1917, Jeffers attempted to join the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps but his application was rejected because he was already 30 years old and responsible for a new family. Jeffers attempted to write a long poem about the war but it came to nothing. In 1920 he submitted some new poems to Macmillan, but The Californians had not sold well and the publisher rejected his submission (Zaller, 1991).

 

Tor House and Hawk Tower

In 1919 Jeffers purchased land out on Carmel Point, a raised area jutting out into the ocean just south of Carmel Beach. Here Jeffers helped a stonemason to build Tor House using the rocks and boulders on the point and the adjacent beach. The name comes from the Gaelic word for hill or rocky outcrop. After the house was finished, Jeffers built the adjacent Hawk Tower by himself over several years. The following photographs by Morley Baer show views of the house and tower (from the land and from the sea) as it was in 1964 (Jeffers, Baer & Karman, 2001 At that time everything was still open to the sea; now other houses encroach upon the site.

Working on the house and the tower freed up Jeffers’s mind and released his creative impulses. Jeffers stopped using rhyme, and decided to write with natural rhythms in the style of Walt Whitman. Line length became a structuring device for his new poems, which often used alternating long and short lines (Hymes, 1991). The long lines have a grandeur but make the poems difficult to print upon either page or screen. In the books he was to publish in this style, the longer lines are broken in two. For this posting some of the poems will be printed in a smaller font than the rest of the text. These new characteristics are present his poem about Tor House (published in 1928):

If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes:
Perhaps of my planted forest a few
May stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coast cypress, haggard
With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils.
Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art
To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant.
But if you should look in your idleness after ten thousand years:
It is the granite knoll on the granite
And lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth of the Carmel
River-valley, these four will remain
In the change of names. You will know it by the wild sea-fragrance of wind
Though the ocean may have climbed or retired a little;
You will know it by the valley inland that our sun and our moon were born from
Before the poles changed; and Orion in December
Evenings was strung in the throat of the valley like a lamp-lighted bridge.
Come in the morning you will see white gulls
Weaving a dance over blue water, the wane of the moon
Their dance-companion, a ghost walking
By daylight, but wider and whiter than any bird in the world.
My ghost you needn’t look for; it is probably
Here, but a dark one, deep in the granite, not dancing on wind
With the mad wings and the day moon. (CP I, 408)

(The references for this and for subsequent poems in this posting are to Jeffers’s Collected Poems edited by Tim Hunt).

Tamar

Jeffers’s first collection of poems after moving to Tor House – Tamar and Other Poems (1924), published at his own expense – was written in his new free verse. The epic poem Tamar tells the tragedy of a family living at Point Lobos just south of Carmel. The tale has biblical echoes in the stories of Tamar who seduced her father-in-law Judah (Genesis 38), and of her namesake Tamar, the daughter of King David, who was raped by her step-brother Amnon (2 Samuel 13). The following is a summary of Jeffers’s poem (from Karman, 2015, pp 55-56);

Tamar … tells the story of the doomed Cauldwells who live in an isolated home on Point Lobos, south of Carmel. The head of the house is David Cauldwell, an old, broken-down man who frequently quotes the Bible. Two children, a son named Lee and a daughter Tamar, live with him, along with his demented sister Jinny, and Stella Moreland, the sister of his dead wife Lily. The action of the story, set around the time of America’s entry into World War I, concerns Tamar’s incestuous relationship with her brother, an ensuing pregnancy, and her seduction of an unloved suitor to snare a respectable father for the child. Through her Aunt Stella, a medium for the dead, Tamar learns that her father had an incestuous relationship with his sister Helen, which makes her behavior seem more like the simple repetition of a family pattern instead of the singular act of a bounds-breaking free spirit. In the process of coming to terms with this knowledge, Tamar dances naked in a trance-induced frenzy on the seashore, where she is violated by the ghosts of Indians who once lived on Point Lobos, and where she speaks with the ghost of her Aunt Helen, her father’s sister-lover. As Tamar’s mind sickens, she thinks of ways to destroy her family, especially after learning that her brother, seeking adventure, plans to enlist and leave home. The end comes in a wild conflagration. On the eve of her brother’s departure, with her benighted suitor at hand, Tamar orchestrates an explosion of jealous rage. As her brother pulls a knife and stabs her suitor, Tamar’s Aunt Jinny sets the house on fire. Floors break, walls fall, and everyone perishes in the flames.

Jeffers tells his convoluted story of incest and murder in an epic style, and intersperses the events with quieter descriptions of the California Coast. This combination of the lurid and the lyrical makes for uneasy reading. Not a poem for the faint of heart, it was the first of many long narratives that Jeffers was to write over the next decades.

The book also contains many short poems describing the beauty of the California Coast, such as Divinely Superfluous Beauty:

The storm-dances of gulls, the barking game of seals,
Over and under the ocean…
Divinely superfluous beauty
Rules the games, presides over destinies, makes trees grow
And hills tower, waves fall.
The incredible beauty of joy
Stars with fire the joining of lips, O let our loves too
Be joined, there is not a maiden
Burns and thirsts for love
More than my blood for you, by the shore of seals while the wings
Weave like a web in the air
Divinely superfluous beauty.(CP I, 4)

Jeffers also began to consider the transience of humanity in a universe that lasts for ever in such poems as To the Stone-Cutters (recorded by Jeffers in 1941):

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems. (CP I, 5)

 

Big Sur

The California coast south of Carmel and north of San Simeon is known as the Big Sur – a name deriving from the Spanish el sur grande (the big south), which is how the Spanish settlers on the Monterey Peninsula referred to the region. Here the Santa Lucia mountains rise directly from the sea. Edward Weston (1886-1958) took many striking photographs of this coastline, and in 1938 moved his studio to Carmel. Below are Weston’s photographs from 1929 and 1938.

The poetry of Robinson Jeffers celebrated the beauty of Big Sur. The following is a poem about Garapata Beach where Soberanes (or Sovranes) Creek empties into the Pacific – The Place for No Story (1932). When introducing the poem in a reading in 1941 Jeffers remarked about the title:

These eleven lines are called “The Place for No Story,” because the coast here, its pure and simple grandeur, seemed to me too beautiful to be the scene of any narrative of mine. (Jeffers, 1956)

The coast hills at Sovranes Creek;
No trees, but dark scant pasture drawn thin
Over rock shaped like flame;
The old ocean at the land’s foot, the vast
Gray extension beyond the long white violence;
A herd of cows and the bull
Far distant, hardly apparent up the dark slope;
And the gray air haunted with hawks:
This place is the noblest thing I have ever seen. No imaginable
Human presence here could do anything
But dilute the lonely self-watchful passion. (CP II, 157)

The following it is a 1964 photograph of the beach by Morley Baer (Jeffers, Baer & Karman, 2001). Barely visible in the photograph are hawks, haunting the sky above the further slopes:

The poem is “an evocation of the sublime” (Zaller, 2012, p 171). Yet it differs from Wordsworth’s sublime. It is not the participation of the individual human consciousness in something universal:

                    …a sense sublime,
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
(Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, 1798)

For Jeffers, the sublime is totally independent of any human interaction. It is something to be wondered at but not participated in.

Fame

After Tamar, Jeffers became very successful, publishing a book every year or two. Like Tamar, these books contained both long narratives and short lyrics. His poetic style – the long lines and the free rhythms – did not change. The narrative poems continued to be full of sex and violence – like penny-dreadfuls updated to the 20^th Century and translated into poetry. Jeffers, however, had tapped some current in the American soul.

The shorter poems continued to be more approachable. The following is Hawk and Rock (1935). Robert Hass (1987) was to use this as the title poem for a later collection of Jeffers’s shorter lyrics.

Here is a symbol in which
Many high tragic thoughts
Watch their own eyes.

This gray rock, standing tall
On the headland, where the sea-wind
Lets no tree grow,

Earthquake-proved, and signatured
By ages of storms: on its peak
A falcon has perched.

I think, here is your emblem
To hang in the future sky;
Not the cross, not the hive,

But this; bright power, dark peace;
Fierce consciousness joined with final
Disinterestedness;

Life with calm death; the falcon’s
Realist eyes and act
Married to the massive

Mysticism of stone,
Which failure cannot cast down
Nor success make proud. (CP II, 416)

 

The poem proclaims Jeffers outlook on life – a combination of fierce consciousness and disinterestedness, bright power and dark peace. The following shows the final lines in Jeffers’s handwriting (from an inscription in a book gifted to a friend).

Jeffers’s photograph made the cover of Time in 1932. (It was not until 1950 that the magazine awarded a cover portrait to either Robert Frost or T. S. Eliot.) In 1938, Random House published The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, a volume of over 600 pages.  The following are photographs of Jeffers taken by Edward Weston during the height of his fame – the middle image is from the cover of Time:

Inhumanism

Jeffers had received a modern scientific education and understood the import of evolutionary theory and recent findings in astronomy upon our place in the world and in time. He realized that the human species might develop further, but would ultimately become extinct, the universe then continuing to exist without any further contribution from mankind. Nevertheless, he gloried in the heart-breaking beauty of the natural world. He described this “religious feeling” in his 1941 talk to the Library of Congress (Jeffers, 1956, pp 23-24):

It is the feeling … I will say the certitude … that the world, the universe is one being, a single organism, one great life that includes all life and all things; and is so beautiful that it must be love and reverenced; and in moments of mystical vision we identify ourselves with it.

But these moments are evanescent. The beauty of the world will outlast us. The following are the lines that end his 1926 poem Credo:

The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heart-breaking beauty
Will remain when there is no heart to break for it. (CP I, 239)

Jeffers view of beauty was that it was part of nature and would outlast the perceiver. An opposing view is that beauty is in the mind, and that human beings have evolved to find the world they live in beautiful. Such a development facilitates human survival: if we cherish the world, we will reap its bounty. 

Jeffers’s philosophy was more specifically described in the preface to his 1947 book The Double Axe (the original version of which is included in his 2001 Selected Poetry edited by Tim Hunt):

It is based on a recognition of the astonishing beauty of things and their living wholeness, and on a rational acceptance of the fact that mankind is neither central nor important in the universe; our vices and blazing crimes are as insignificant as our happiness. We know this, of course, but it does not appear that any previous one of the ten thousand religions and philosophies has realized it. An infant feels himself to be central and of primary importance; an adult knows better; it seems time that the human race attained to an adult habit of thought in this regard. The attitude is neither misanthropic nor pessimist nor irreligious, though two or three people have said so, and may again; but it involves a certain detachment.

Jeffers contrasted his ideas to Renaissance Humanism, which, though he preferred it to the preceding Scholastic Theology, he felt improperly placed Man at the center of the universe. The Renaissance took to heart wisdom of philosophers such as Protagoras of Abdera who proposed that “Man is the measure of all things” and doubted the existence of the gods: “Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not, nor of what sort they may be, because of the obscurity of the subject, and the brevity of human life.” (Bonazzi, 2020). Renaissance philosophers like Pico della Mirandola focussed on the man rather than on God. In his Oration on the Dignity of Man, he proclaimed that “There is nothing to be seen more wonderful than Man” (Forbes, 1942).

Jeffers called his philosophy “inhumanism” to distinguish it from the humanism of the Renaissance (Carpenter, 1981). As Nafis-Sahely (2016) has remarked, the philosophy “might have fared better under a different name.” Perhaps, for example, “naturalism.” The first meaning suggested by the word “inhumanism” is “brutality.” Jeffers’s inhumanism is an austere and detached view of the world. It has many similarities to stoicism (Lioi, 2025): we live our life as best we can; we pass away and the world persists. In his 1941 talk, Jeffers (1956, p 28) related his inhumanism to the main tenets of Christianity:

It seems to me, analogously, that the whole human race spends too much emotion on itself. The happiest and freest man is the scientist investigating nature, or the artist admiring it; the person who is interested in things that are not human. Or if he is interested in human things, let him regard them objectively, as a small part of the great music. Certainly humanity has claims, on all of us; we can best fulfill them by keeping our emotional sanity; and this by seeing beyond and around the human race. This is far from humanism; but it is, in fact, the Christian attitude: … to love God with all one’s heart and soul, and one’s neighbor as one’s self — as much as that, but as little as that.

Jeffers was enthusiastic in his love of nature, but far more detached in his love of neighbor. Although he wrote in the style of Walt Whitman, he lacked that poet’s intense love of his fellow man.

One of the clearest poetic descriptions of inhumanism is in final section of the late poem De Rerum Virtute or (On the Nature of Virtue) (1954, discussed extensively by Chapman, 2002):

One light is left us: the beauty of things, not men;
The immense beauty of the world, not the human world.
Look—and without imagination, desire nor dream—directly
At the mountains and sea. Are they not beautiful?
These plunging promontories and flame-shaped peaks
Stopping the sombre stupendous glory, the storm-fed ocean?
Look at the Lobos Rocks off the shore,
With foam flying at their flanks, and the long sea-lions
Couching on them. Look at the gulls on the cliff-wind,
And the soaring hawk under the cloud-stream—
But in the sage-brush desert, all one sun-stricken
Color of dust, or in the reeking tropical rain-forest,
Or in the intolerant north and high thrones of ice—is the earth not beautiful?
Nor the great skies over the earth?
The beauty of things means virtue and value in them.
It is in the beholder’s eye, not the world? Certainly.
It is the human mind’s translation of the transhuman
Intrinsic glory. It means that the world is sound,
Whatever the sick microbe does. But he too is part of it. (CP III, 403)

The Double Axe

Jeffers was thoroughly dismayed by World War II and believed that the United States should never have entered the fighting. His pacifism was accentuated by the fact that his son Garth was serving in the US forces. Donnan had been excused because of a heart murmur. Jeffers could not see any difference between the sides – he thought that Churchill and Roosevelt were as guilty as Hitler and Mussolini.

In 1948 Jeffers published his first collection of poems since Pearl Harbor – The Double Axe. The The title poem was composed of two parts: The Love and the Hate and The Inhumanist. In the first part a young soldier killed in the Pacific Campaign wills his decaying body to return home to the family ranch in the Big Sur and confront his father:

                                     Did you
And your old buddies decide what the war’s about?
I came to ask. You were all for it, you know;
And keeping safe away from it, so to speak, maybe you see
Reasons that we who only die in it can’t, (CP III, 222)

The second part of the poem occurs years later on the same Big Sur ranch. Its caretaker (and possessor of the double-bit axe) looks after the homestead as various refugees from a nuclear war arrive. After a snowfall the old man addresses his axe to repudiate the humanism of the Renaissance:

Man is no measure of anything. Truly it is yours to hack, snow’s to be white, mine to admire;
Each cat mind her own kitten: that is our morals. But wait till the moon comes up the snow-tops,
And you’ll sing Holy. (CP III, 264)

Jeffers’s politics and philosophy did not appeal to a people that considered the war they had just won as righteous. The publisher convinced Jeffers to withdraw some of his most virulent anti-war poems (Shebl, 1976) and added a disclaimer to the book in a “Publisher’s Note”:

Random House feels compelled to go on record with its disagreement over some of the political views pronounced by the poet in this volume.

The reviews were scathing. From then on, Jeffers was no longer an acclaimed poet. He lived out the rest of his life in Carmel in relative obscurity. He continued to publish occasionally but critics disparaged his work even while admitting its importantance. The following is from a review of his posthumously published last poems:

Surely he provides us with plenty to carp about: his oracular moralizing, his cruel and thoroughly repellent sexuality, his dreadful lapses of taste when he seems simply to throw back his head and howl, his slovenly diction, the eternal sameness of his themes, the amorphous sprawl of his poems on the page. The sheer power and drama of some of Jeffers’ writing, however, still carries the day despite everything, and this is not so much because of the presence of the Truth that Jeffers believes he has got hold of but because of what might be called the embodiment of that Truth: Jeffers’ gorgeous panorama of big imagery, his galaxies, suns, seas, cliffs, continents, mountains, rivers, flocks of birds, gigantic schools of fish, and so on. His Truth is hard to swallow try looking at your children and drawing comfort from Jeffers’ “inhumanism”—but one cannot shake off Jeffers’ vision as one can the carefully prepared surprises of many of the neatly packaged stanzas we call “good poems”; it is too deeply disturbing and too powerfully stated. (Dickey, 1964).

In the late 60s the escalation of the Vietnam War led to the involvement and death of US troops. Jeffers’s passionate pacificism became more understandable, and his poetry underwent some rehabilitation and republication (Nolte, 1978).

The Environmental Movement

Another important development affecting the reputation of Robinson Jeffers was the birth of the modern environmental movement with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. As well as pointing out the severe problems that result from our misuse of the environment, the movement also published books showing the beauty of unspoiled nature. A major example of this was the book Not Man Apart (Adams et al, 1964) which combined photographs of the Big Sur Coast with lines from Robinson Jeffers.

Karman (2015) remarks about Jeffers attitude to man’s place in nature:

Jeffers’ experience of deep time added a vatic amplitude to his verse, and a sharp moral edge. He spoke repeatedly about the destruction of Earth’s environment, warning, shrilly at times, of the effects of overpopulation, pollution, and the exploitation of natural resources.

Quigley (2002) places Jeffers in a direct line between Thoreau (1817-1862) and later authors such as Edward Abbey (1927-1989) and Gary Snyder (1930- ) in the development of modern environmentalism. Of these writers, Jeffers was the most critical of how man has misused the world, and perhaps the most pessimistic. However, Abbey, Snyder and other writers have taken to heart his criticisms and tried to formulate new and better ways for man and nature to interact. Wyatt (1986) has written of the affinity between Jeffers and Snyder, both of whom spent much time building homes to fit in with the natural world. John Elder (1985) discussed Jeffers and nature in the context of how nature and humanity must interact – a process that he terms “culture:”

In learning to find equivalence between mountains, grass, and man, we gain the composure of a larger design. It is not a fixed, symmetrical rose, like Dante’s covering order, but rather a process of tidal exchange, of decay and renewal. Only as we learn to see it in a natural order beyond man’s civilized system may the human waste-land be redeemed and the individual made whole. Conversely, unless the city is restored and human life brought back into physical and spiritual balance, the wilderness beloved of fierce solitaries like Jeffers will inevitably be destroyed. The circuit of mutual dependence between nature and civilization defines my understanding of the word culture: it is a process rather than a product, something that grows rather than being manufactured. And only in poetry is culture fully realized.</p>

In Retrospect

Jeffers wrote some powerful but difficult longer poems and some fine shorter lyrics. I would like to end the posting with one of his early poems – The Excesses of God (1924) – together with the woodcut by Mallette Dean that accompanies the poem in his 1956 book:

Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God? For to equal a need
Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells,
And make the necessary embrace of breeding
Beautiful also as fire,
Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
Nor the birds without music:
There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
The extravagant kindness, the fountain
Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise
If power and desire were perch-mates.(CP I, 4)

 

Resources

The website of the Robinson Jeffers Association provides links to many different resources about the poet, including an archive of most of the issues of the journal Jeffers Studies.

 

References

Adams, A., Jeffers, R., & Brower, D. (1965). Not man apart: Lines from Robinson Jeffers with photographs of the Big Sur Coast. Sierra Club.

Bonazzi, M. (2020). Protagoras. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Carpenter, F. I. (1981). The inhumanism of Robinson Jeffers. Western American Literature, 16(1), 19-25

Chapman, S. (2002). De Rerum Virtute: a critical anatomy. Jeffers Studies, 6(4), 22-35.

Dickey, J. (1964). Review of The Beginning and the End and Other Poems. Poetry, 103(5), 316-324.

Elder, J. (1985). Imagining the Earth: poetry and the vision of nature. University of Illinois Press.

Forbes, E. L. (1942). Of the Dignity of Man: Oration of Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, Count of Concordia. Journal of the History of Ideas, 3(3), 347-354. 

Greenan, E. (1998). Of Una Jeffers. Story Line Press.

Hass, R. (1987). Robinson Jeffers: the poetry and the life. The American Poetry Review. 16(6), 33-41. (a reprint of the introduction to Rock and Hawk: A Selection of Shorter Poems by Robinson Jeffers)

Hymes, D. (1991). Jeffers’ artistry of line. In Zaller, R. (Ed.) Centennial essays for Robinson Jeffers. (pp. 226-267). University of Delaware Press.

Jeffers, R. (1938). The selected poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Random House.

Jeffers, R. (1956). Themes in my poems. Book Club of California.

Jeffers, R. (Ed. Hunt, T., 2001). The selected poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Stanford University Press.

Jeffers, R. (Ed. Hunt, T., 1988-2002). The collected poetry of Robinson Jeffers. (5 volumes). Stanford University Press.

Jeffers, R. (Ed. Karman, J., 2009-2015). The collected letters of Robinson Jeffers: with selected letters of Una Jeffers. (3 volumes) Stanford University Press.

Jeffers, R., Baer, M., & Karman, J. (2001). Stones of the Sur. Stanford University Press.

Karman, J. (2015). Robinson Jeffers: poet and prophet. Stanford University Press.

Lioi, A. (2016). Knocking our heads to pieces against the night: going cosmic with Robinson Jeffers. In Tangney, S. (Ed.) The wild that attracts us: new critical essays on Robinson Jeffers. (pp 117-140). University of New Mexico Press.

Nafis-Sahely, A. (2016). If you believe that you’ll believe anything – Robinson Jeffers: Poet and Prophet. Wild Court.

Nolte, W. H. (1978). Robinson Jeffers redivivus. The Georgia Review, 32(2), 429-434.

Quigley, P. (2002) Carrying the weight: Jeffers’s Role in preparing the way for ecocriticism. Jeffers Studies, 6(4), 46-68.

Shebl, J. M. (1976). In this wild water: the suppressed poems of Robinson Jeffers. Ward Ritchie Press.

Wyatt, D. (1986). Jeffers, Snyder, and the ended world. In The Fall into Eden. (pp. 174–205). Cambridge University Press.

Zaller, R. (1991). Robinson Jeffers, American poetry and a thousand years. In Zaller, R. (Ed.) Centennial essays for Robinson Jeffers. (pp. 29-43). University of Delaware Press.

Zaller, R. (2012). Robinson Jeffers and the American sublime. Stanford University Press.

</pstyle=”padding-left:100px;”>

In the 19^th-Century religious belief came under scientific scrutiny. In 1877, William Kingdon Clifford, an English mathematician and philosopher, proposed that

it is wrong always, everywhere and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

Without good supporting evidence, one should refrain from believing: it is wrong to take anything on faith. This proposal was disputed by the American philosopher and psychologist William James in an 1896 lecture entitled The Will to Believe. James argued that under certain conditions we must form beliefs and act on them, even though the evidence is insufficient. The main requirements were that the believer must choose between two “genuine” possibilities, and that the choice must be sufficiently “momentous” that not choosing would entail significant risk. The latter condition hearkens back to the “wager” of Blaise Pascal, wherein a person decides what to believe based on the consequences of these beliefs rather than the evidence for them.  

William Kingdon Clifford (1845-79)

William Clifford, a professor of mathematics and mechanics at the University of London, made significant contributions to algebra and to geometry, his ideas in the latter foreshadowing Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. He was also interested in the philosophical implications of science, publishing essays on The Scientific Basis of Morals and The Ethics of Belief.

Clifford begins the latter essay with a story about a shipwreck:

A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He knew that she was old, and not over-well built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him to great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.

Clifford insisted that the ship-owner was responsible for the deaths of all who drowned. He may have sincerely believed in the soundness of his ship, but he had no right to so believe on the basis of the evidence before him. Clifford insisted further that had the ship not foundered, its owner was still guilty. From such examples he proposed the principle (“later known as Clifford’s principle”) that

it is wrong always, everywhere and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

He expounded:

If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterward, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call in question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it – the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.

Chignell (2018) noted that this approach to belief is similar to that of John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

He that believes without having any Reason for believing, may be in love with his own Fancies; but neither seeks Truth as he ought, nor pays the Obedience due to his Maker, who would have him use those discerning Faculties he has given him, to keep him out of Mistake and Error.

Clifford realized that a single person cannot sift through all the evidence for everything she needs to believe. Some beliefs must be based on the authority of others. However, the believer should make some rational assessment of that authority. The proposers of the beliefs must be honest; the beliefs must be such that they can be or have been verified by those who have the time and experience to verify them; their acceptance should be independent of any personal profit to those that propose the beliefs.   

Clifford also considered the limits of inference. Most of what we know is inferred from what we and others have experienced. The fact that the sun has risen daily throughout our lives and throughout all the lives of others leads us to believe that it will continue to do so. Clifford proposed

We may believe what goes beyond our experience, only when it is inferred from that experience by the assumption that what we do not know is like what we know.

In passing Clifford noted that we have no a priori right to believe that nature is universally uniform – that the future will always follow the rules of the past. This is itself a belief – one that has worked so far. Some beliefs we need to accept.

 

William James (1842-1910)

William James trained as a physician but never practised medicine. Rather he pursued his interests in psychology, religion, and philosophy. In each of these fields he published books that have become essential to their respective disciplines: The Principles of Psychology (1890), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), and Pragmatism (1907).

In a talk to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities –later published as The Will to Believe (1896) – James proposed that there are situations in which we should believe even when the evidence is insufficient. He describes three necessary conditions. First, the belief should involve a choice between two live options, i.e. ones that personally meaningful. Choosing between theosophy or Islam was likely not meaningful to his audience. Second, the choice must be unavoidable. Deciding to love or hate someone is easily avoidable – we can just be indifferent. However, accepting or denying the truth of a statement is unavoidable – the statement must be either true or false. Third and most importantly, the choice must be momentous. James used the example of joining Nansen’s expedition to the North Pole. To do so could lead to fame and glory; not to do so leaves one with nothing:

He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried and failed. Per contra, the option is trivial when the opportunity is not unique, when the stake is insignificant, or when the decision is reversible if it later prove unwise.

James assumed that deciding to believe is much like deciding to act. However, choosing to believe in God is not the same as choosing to join Nansen’s polar expedition. One can (and does) choose to act in certain ways. However, one does not usually choose between beliefs if there is no evidence preferring one over the other (see the criticisms of Bertrand Russell, below).  

James noted that his idea of the “momentousness” of a belief is related to Pascals famous wager. Pascal proposed that it is better to believe in God than to remain an agnostic: if we are right, we are granted “eternal beatitude,” and, if we are wrong, we lose nothing. James did not enjoy considering religious belief in the “language of the gaming-table.” Nevertheless, he was apparently convinced by Pascal’s logic. When things are that important, we must believe one way or another or risk losing all. James therefore proposed that

Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, “Do not decide, but leave the question open,” is itself a passional decision, ⸺ just like deciding yes or no, ⸺ and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.

James concludes his lecture with a rousing quotation from the English Jurist, James Fitzjames Stephens (1829-1894):

In all important transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark…. If we decide to leave the riddles unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too, is a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril. If a man chooses to turn his back altogether on God and the future, no one can prevent him; no one can show beyond reasonable doubt that he is mistaken. If a man thinks otherwise and acts as he thinks, I do not see that any one can prove that he is mistaken. Each must act as he thinks best; and if he is wrong, so much the worse for him. We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? Be strong and of a good courage. Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes. . . .

The image is wildly romantic. It brings to mind Casper David Friedreich’s Wanderer over a Sea of Fog (1812). The concept of the “leap of faith” – the act of believing something despite the lack of convincing evidence – was commonly used in the 19^th Century to counter the objections of religious skeptics. The term is often attributed to Kierkegaard though he never used it (McKinnon, 1983).     

James had used the image of the Alpine Climber in an earlier essay written in French on the “subjective method” (1877, discussed in Wernham, 1987, Chapter 2):

I find myself in a difficult place from which I can only escape by making a bold and dangerous leap. Though I wish to make the leap, I have never done so before, and I do not know if I have the ability. Let us suppose I use the subjective method: I believe what I desire. My confidence gives me strength and makes possible something which otherwise might not have been. I leap across the space and find myself out of danger. But suppose I doubt my ability because it has never before been demonstrated in such a situation: then I waver; I hesitate; at last, weak and trembling, I am compelled to an attempt by sheer despair; I miss my goal; I fall into the abyss. (my translation).

It is not clear whether James was proclaiming a right to believe when there is insufficient evidence, or whether he was asserting a duty to believe. Most people would support a general right to believe with the proviso that the belief does not harm others. Few, however, would say that we ought to believe something even though the evidence is not convincing.

James has been criticized for indulging in wishful thinking (reviewed in Koopman, 2017). When we decide to believe without any evidence, we run the clear risk of entering a fantasy world. On the other hand, perhaps we should try out new world-views. Provided they cause no harm. Crusades are not allowed.  

 

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. He is most famous for his studies of probability, his experiments on atmospheric pressure and his proposal that beliefs might me determined based on what they entail rather than on the empirical evidence – Pascal’s wager.

In in the posthumously published Pensées (1670 Section III), Pascal points out that believing in God leads to a promise of Heaven whereas not believing in God has no long-term benefit. We must either believe or not. So

Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.

The following illustration presents the premises that lead to Pascal’s wager, and the decision matrix that urges us to believe in God. The estimated benefit of believing or not is the sum (along the row in the decision matrix) of the probability-weighted benefits when God exists or not. The infinite rewards of belief in God completely outweigh the minor inconvenience of living life as a believer (Cg – a negative value). Similarly, the infinite penalties of not believing are far worse than the transient benefit of a life of indulgence (Bn – a positive value).  

Pascal’s logic falls apart in two ways (Bartha & Pasternack, 2018; Hájek, 2003, 2022). First, it does not discriminate among which of many possible Gods one should believe in. If there is a non-zero possibility of an Islamic God who rewards his followers with heaven and casts infidel Christians into hell, the infinite rewards and penalties associated with the Christian God are cancelled out. This is illustrated in the below. The astute observer will note that while the infinite benefits and costs of believing in a particular God are cancelled out, the atheist is still stuck with probabilities of death and damnation regardless of which God exists. Perhaps, this is the human lot. The atheist, however, simply assumes that both Pg and Pa are zero.

A second objection to Pascal’s wager is that it presupposes not only that God might exist but also that God would reward the believer with heaven and damn the non-believer to hell. Among the credible possibilities are a benevolent God who would forgive the non-believer, and a strict God who would damn those that professed belief simply to get to heaven as hypocrites who did not “truly” believe in their hearts.   

 

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

Bertrand Russell was an English philosopher, mathematician, and logician. He is most famous for the Principia Mathematica (1913) written together with A. N. Whitehead. This attempted to describe the basic axioms and rules underlying human logic and mathematics. Russell was also known for his pacifism and his agnosticism.

Russell was one of the first major critics of James’ The Will to Believe. In an essay on Pragmatism (1910), he pointed out the James’ arguments are appropriate to actions but have no real relevance to belief. He uses the example of a traveler at a fork in the road:

I come to a fork where there is no signpost and no passer-by, I have, from the point of view of action, a ‘forced’ option. I must take one road or other if I am to have any chance of reaching my destination; and I may have no evidence whatever as to which is the right road. I then act on one or other of the two possible hypotheses, until I find someone of whom I can ask the way. But I do not believe either hypothesis. My action is either right or wrong, but my belief is neither, since I do not entertain either of the two possible beliefs. The pragmatist assumption that I believe the road I have chosen to be the right one is erroneous.

However, belief can mean different things to different people. Religious thinkers do not consider belief in the same way as a scientist or logician. In a religious context, one can decide to believe based upon the consequents that the belief will have – salvation, heaven, etc. – rather than on the evidence for the belief. 

 

Henry Habberley Price (1899-1984)

H. H. Price was a Welsh philosopher with a major interest in perception and belief, and a minor interest in parapsychology. His 1961 Gifford lectures on Belief (published in 1969) analyzed the many ways in which we can believe.

He proposed that belief can be considered in two main ways – as an occurrence (a mental event) and as an attitude (a mental state). The occurrence of belief is the moment when a person decides that something is true (based on evidence or on desire) or assents to consider it true. With respect to Russell’s criticism that belief is not usually chosen, Price noted that we often come to a belief (“make up our minds”) in much the same way as we decide to act. He uses as an example: 

After waiting for him for over 1½ hours I decided that John had missed the train.

Belief can also be considered as an attitude: to believe a proposition is to be disposed to act as if that proposition were true. Other attitudes are hoping, desiring, and knowing. Having an attitude may be either conscious of not. An attitude is not necessary associated with any overt behavior: it simply represents a tendency to respond in a certain way.   

As I discussed in a previous post on Belief and Heresy, Price also pointed out that “believing that” differs from “believing in” (Price, 1965). Believing-that is used with a proposition: it considers that a proposition is true based on the evidence. Believing-in is used with things, persons, or ideas: it not only claims that these exist (existed or will exist) but also affirms many other related propositions. Christ stated

I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:
And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. (John 11: 25-26)

Simply asserting that Christ existed is clearly not sufficient for a person to “believe in” Christ. One must also believe that he is divine, that he died so that those who believe in him do not have to die, that he was resurrected from death, and that he lives forever. Challenging requirements for one of a skeptical disposition. However, the reward is invaluable: eternal life.  

 

Peter van Inwagen (1942- )

Peter van Inwagen is an American Christian philosopher who has written extensively on the philosophy of religion: An Essay on Free Will (1983), The Problem of Evil (2006), Metaphysics (2002).

In 1996 van Inwagen published a paper commenting Clifford’s principle that we should not believe anything based upon insufficient evidence. He initially remarks that although all beliefs need to be based on evidence

a strict adherence to the terms of the principle would lead to a chain of requests for further evidence that would terminate only in such presumably unanswerable questions as What evidence have you for supposing that your sensory apparatus is reliable? or Yes, but what considerations can you adduce in support of the hypothesis that the future will resemble the past?

More importantly, he points out that Clifford’s principle has mainly been applied in criticizing religious beliefs. He notes that for complicated issues in philosophy, politics, economics, and psychiatry, the available evidence even when properly scrutinised often leads to a diversity of opinion. Each of us may have our own insight or intuition as to what is true. Just as we do not consider it morally wrong to have these individual beliefs in philosophy, politics, etc., so we should allow religious beliefs even when the evidence for them is (necessarily) incomplete.    

 

Daniel C. Dennett (1942- )

Daniel Dennett is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He has written extensively on psychology (Consciousness Explained,1992), evolution (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 1996) and religion (Breaking the Spell, 2006). Together with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, he is considered one of “The Four Horsemen of the New Atheism.”

One way to consider belief is as an interpretation of reality. Dennett has proposed that our brains are continually modelling what is going on in the world. What we are conscious of at any moment is as the “best draft” of our interpretive model (Dennett, 1992). Our consciousness of our selves is an abstract “center of narrative gravity” that we use to interpret our experience.  

Some philosophers and psychologists have denied the existence of beliefs (see Schwitzgel, 2019, for a review of “eliminativism”). Dennett considers beliefs (and other mental states) as helpful in interpreting the behavior of others who might have mental states similar to our own. He describes this mode of interpreting and predicting behavior as the “intentional stance:”

Here is how it works: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs. A little practical reasoning from the chosen set of beliefs and desires will in most instances yield a decision about what the agent ought to do; that is what you predict the agent will do. (Dennett, 1987, p 17)

 

Whatever Gets You Thru the Night

We have touched on what various philosophers have thought about belief. What can we conclude?

To survive, human beings must understand what they can about the world in which they find themselves. In some contexts, our understanding has become highly accurate. Our perceptions tell us what things are and predict what they will do; our actions manipulate the world. In other contexts – in philosophy, politics and psychiatry, for example – we often have little understanding. We do not know whether the world has a purpose, how society could be optimally organized, or why our thinking can become disordered. Rather than just accept these uncertainties, we try out possibilities – to see whether they both fit the world and give us comfort. Often these ideas are just hunches; sometimes they become considered opinions; occasionally they become beliefs. Our beliefs are the way we make sense of the world.  

Are there ethical principles that determine what we can believe (Chignell, 2018; Schmidt & Ernst, 2020)? We should base our beliefs as much as possible on the evidence available to us. However, we should not retire to an attitude of universal skepticism. We must try out hypotheses about the what we do not know about world. We remain responsible for the consequences of our actions, even if we sincerely believed those actions appropriate. 

Contemplating the smallness of humanity in the immensity of the universe is frightening. Our beliefs provide us with some way to handle this fear. In the words of John Lennon’s 1974 song, they are “Whatever gets you thru the night.”

 

References

Schmidt, S., & Ernst, G. (2020). The ethics of belief and beyond: understanding mental normativity. Routledge.

Bartha, P. F. A. & Pasternack, L (Eds) (2018). Pascal’s wager Cambridge University Press.

Chignell, A. (2018) The ethics of belief. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Clifford, W. K. (1877). The ethics of belief. The Contemporary Review 29, 289-309. Reprinted in Clifford, W. K. (1884). The scientific basis of morals and other essays. (pp. 25–36). J. Fitzgerald (New York). 

Dennett, D. C. (1987). The intentional stance. MIT Press.

Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness explained. Little, Brown.

James, W. (1877). Quelques considérations sur la méthode subjective. Critique philosophique, 2, 407-413. Reprinted in James W. (1978; Ed. Burkhardt, F., Bowers, F., & Skrupskelis, I. K.) Essays in Philosophy. Harvard University Press. 

James, W. (1896) The will to believe. The New World, 5, 327-347. Reprinted in W. James (1897) The will to believe and other essays in popular philosophy. (pp. 1-31). Longmans Green.

Hájek, A. (2003). Waging war on Pascal’s wager. Philosophical Review, 112: 27–56.

Hájek, A. (2022). Pascal’s Wager. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Koopman, C. (2017). The Will, the Will to Believe, and William James: an ethics of freedom as self-transformation. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 55(3), 491–512.

McKinnon, A. (1993). Kierkegaard and “The Leap of Faith.” Kierkegaardiana 16.

Pascal, B. (1670, translated by W. F. Trotter, 1958) Pensées/Thoughts. Dutton

Price, H. H. (1965). Belief ‘in’ and belief ‘that.’ Religious Studies, 1, 5-27

Price, H. H., 1969, Belief. Allen & Unwin.

Russell, B. (1910). Philosophical essays. Longmans, Green, and Co.

Schwitzgel, E. (2019). Belief. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

van Inwagen, P. (1996). “It is wrong, everywhere, always, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence” In J. Jordan & D. Howard-Snyder (eds.), Faith, freedom and rationality (pp 137–153). Rowman and Littlefield. Available online.

Wernham, J. C. S. (1987). James’s will-to-believe doctrine: a heretical view. McGill-Queen’s University Press.