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Laurence Cossé: Le Coin du Voile

Aug 14, 2025 / terry / No comments

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.”

Category: Art, Ethics, Literature, Painting, Politics, Religion / Tags: Alfred North Whitehead, Anselm, Antonio Escobar y Mendoza, Arthur Peacocke, Averroes, Benozzo Gozzoli, Blaise Pascal, Causistry, Charles Hartshorne, Ibn Rushd, Jacques Gaillot, Jesuits, panentheism, process theology, Thomas Aquinas

Paul-Émile Borduas: Le Refus Global

Aug 7, 2025 / terry / No comments

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.

Category: Art, History, Painting, Politics, Religion / Tags: abstract expressionism, André Breton, Jackson Pollock, La Révolution Tranquille, les automatistes, Marie Alain Couturier, Ozias Leduc, Quebec, Riopelle, Surrealism

W. H. Auden: September 1, 1939

Jul 21, 2025 / terry / No comments

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.

Category: History, Literature, Poetry, Politics, Religion / Tags: 1930s, Chester Kallman, Christopher Isherwood, Fifty-Second Street, Great Depression, Louis MacNeice, Sergei Diaghilev, Skyscrapers, Spanish Civil War, Vaslav Nijinsky, World War II

Wallace Stevens: Toward a Supreme Fiction

Jul 6, 2025 / terry / No comments

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) was an American modernist poet. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and educated at Harvard and the New York Law School, he worked as an executive for The Hartford Insurance Company in Connecticut. The photograph by Sylvia Salmi was taken in the 1940s, at which time he was vice-president of the company. In his free time Stevens wrote poems, publishing his first book Harmonium in 1923. Throughout his life he considered poetry as the “supreme fiction,” something that could replace religion in human life, and provide us with a more complete understanding than that provided by science or philosophy. In 1942 he published a set of poems entitled Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, to illustrate the nature and power of poetry.

Category: History, Language, Literature, Philosophy, Poetry, Religion / Tags: Florida Keys, George Santayana, Harry Duncan, Hartford Insurance, Henry Church, Los, Modernism, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Romanticism, William Blake

Mathis der Maler: the Isenheim Altarpiece

Apr 6, 2025 / terry / No comments

Very little is known about the life of Matthias Grünewald, a painter (German Maler) who worked in the early decades of the 16^th Century in Germany. He is renowned for the pictures he created between 1512 and 1516 for the altarpiece of the Monastery of Saint Anthony in Isenheim in southern Alsace. The face of Saint Sebastian in one of these paintings (above) is considered to be a self-portrait.

Category: Art, History, Medicine, Music, Painting, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Albrecht von Brandenburg, Ergotism, German Peasant's War, Hospital Brothers of Saint Anthony, Isenheim, Martin Luther, Matthias Grünewald, Nicklaus Hagenauer, Otto Dix, Paul Hindemith, Saint Anthony the Great, Saint Anthony's Fire, Saint Paul, Unterlinden Museum, W. G Sebald, World War I

Ely Cathedral: The Ship of the Fens

Mar 5, 2025 / terry / No comments

Ely Cathedral was originally situated on a low island in the middle of the Fens, a region of marshland in eastern England lying inland of the Wash. Because of the flatness of the surrounding land the cathedral could be seen from great distances, appearing as the “Ship of the Fens.” The marshes were drained in the 17^th Century, but it is still easy to imagine the building floating above the waters: the embodiment of Auden’s image of the English cathedrals:

Luxury liners laden with souls,
Holding to the east their hulls of stone.
(Auden, 1936, p 43; also McDiarmid, 1978, p 292)

Category: Architecture, Art, History, Photography, Poetry, Psychiatry, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Augustine of Canterbury, Cathedral, Dissolution of the monasteries, Ethelreda, Gothic, Henry VIII, Lady Chapel, Normans, Philip Larkin, Reformation, Richard Goodrich, Romanesque, Saxons, Sean Henry, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Wynne, W. H Auden

The Moissac Portal: Masterpiece of Romanesque Sculpture

Nov 27, 2024 / terry / One comment

n the 9^th and 10^th Centuries CE, Europe began to awaken from the has come to be known as the Dark Ages. Imposing churches were erected and many of these were decorated with sculptures. This new style of art and architecture, thought to be derived from that of the Roman Empire, has been called “Romanesque.” The sculpture from this time is full of a tremendous vitality and marked by a rich imagination. Some of the most impressive examples adorn the portal of the Abbaye de Saint Pierre in Moissac in southwestern France.

Category: Architecture, Art, History, Language, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Abbaye Saint Pierre de Moissac, Ansquitil, Apocalypse, Apostle Paul, Bosom of Abraham, Christ in Majesty, Dives and Lazarus, Durand de Bredon, Flight to Egypt, Gospels, Jeremiah, John of Patmos, Moissac, Monastery, Revelation, Romanesque, Twenty-four Elders, Tympanum

Some of the Evil of my Tale: Lawrence of Arabia

Nov 18, 2024 / terry / 3 comments

In late 1916, Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888-1935), a British intelligence officer stationed in Cairo, was assigned as a military liaison officer to the forces of Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi, the Sharif of Mecca, who, with his sons Ali, Abdullah and Faisal had initiated the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks in June 1916. Lawrence quickly adapted to the ways of his hosts and gained their trust. Under his leadership, the Arabs took the city of Aqaba in July 1917. This allowed the British to supply both their own army and the Arab rebels as they advanced on Jerusalem and Damascus. Lawrence led the Arabs as they disrupted the Hejaz Railway, and harried the Turkish army. His exploits were recorded on film and widely publicized by the American journalist Lowell Thomas, from whom came the epithet “Lawrence of Arabia.” Lawrence published a memoir of his experiences in 1927, Revolt in the Desert. A much more complete and introspective book on the Arab Revolt, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, was not formally published until after his death in 1935.

Category: Art, History, Literature, Painting, Philosophy, psychology, Religion / Tags: Aqaba, Arab Revolt, Asraq, Augustine, Burroughs motorcycle, Damascus, Deraa, Edmund Allenby, Faisal ibn Hussein, Hejaz, Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi, Iraq, Jerusalem, Jordan, Lowell Thomas, masochism, Mecca, Palestine, Paris Peace Conferences, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Syria, T. E. Lawrence

Vincent van Gogh in Saint-Rémy

Nov 4, 2024 / terry / No comments

In May 1889, following several psychotic episodes in Arles, Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) voluntarily admitted himself to the asylum at the monastery of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. He stayed there for just over a year. Despite several further episodes of severe depression and madness, van Gogh was incredibly prolific during this period, producing about 150 paintings, among them Starry Night.

Category: Art, Painting, Psychiatry, Religion / Tags: Arles, bipolar disorder, Cloisonnism, Emile Bernard, Expressionism, Glanum, Joanna Bonger, les Alpilles, Paul Gauguin, Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, Saint-Remy-de-Provence, Starry Night, Theo van Gogh

Artemisia

Jun 29, 2024 / terry / No comments

Conventional histories of art mention few female painters. As Germaine Greer famously pointed out in her 1979 book The Obstacle Race, this is more related to their lack of opportunity in a patriarchal and misogynistic society than to any lack of talent (see also Nochlin, 1971; 1988). Greer pointed to a “magnificent exception” to the rule that female painters do not become renowned: Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1656), a baroque painter, whose images continue to fascinate us with their conception and shock us with their power.

Category: Art, History, Painting, Religion / Tags: Agostino Tassi, Artemisia Gentileschi, Caravaggio, Cristofano Allori, Germain Greer, Judith and Holofernes, Mary Magdalene, Orazio Gentileschi, rape, Susanna and the Elders, The Obstacle Race

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