Transfiguration

Marko Ivan Rupnik S.J.(b. 1954) and the Atelier del Centro Aletti, Rome
The Transfiguration on Mount Tabor (December 2002)
Mosaic
The Church of Saints James and John
Milan

Christ of the Transfiguration (detail) from The Transfiguration on Mount Tabor (December 2002)
Mosaic
The Church of Saints James and John
Milan

Left side: the Apostles Peter and John (detail) from The Transfiguration on Mount Tabor (December 2002)
Mosaic
The Church of Saints James and John
Milan

Right side: the Apostle John (detail) from The Transfiguration on Mount Tabor (December 2002)
Mosaic
The Church of Saints James and John
Milan

"Awestruck at the sight of the transfigured Lord who was speaking with Moses and Elijah, Peter, James and John were suddenly overshadowed by a cloud, out of which came a voice which proclaimed: "This is my beloved Son on whom my favour rests; listen to him" (Mk 9: 7).

When one has the grace to live a strong experience of God, it is as if one is living an experience similar to that of the disciples during the Transfiguration: a momentary foretaste of what will constitute the happiness of Paradise.

These are usually brief experiences that are sometimes granted by God, especially prior to difficult trials.

No one, however, is permitted to live "on Tabor" while on earth.

Indeed, human existence is a journey of faith and as such, moves ahead more in shadows than in full light, and is no stranger to moments of obscurity and also of complete darkness.

While we are on this earth, our relationship with God takes place more by listening than by seeing; and the same contemplation comes about, so to speak, with closed eyes, thanks to the interior light that is kindled in us by the Word of God. "

(Pope Benedict XVI: ANGELUS
Second Sunday of Lent, 12 March 2006)


"All that was mysteriously foreshadowed in the Transfiguration on Tabor becomes a reality in the Resurrection. At that time the Saviour revealed to Peter, James and John the miracle of glory and light sealed by the voice of the Father: "This is my beloved Son!" (Mk 9: 7).

On the feast of Easter these words appear to us in the fullness of their truth. The Father's beloved Son, Christ who was crucified and died, is raised for our sake.

In his brightness we believers see the light and, "raised by the Spirit", as the liturgy of the Eastern Church says, "we praise the consubstantial Trinity for ever and ever" (Great Vespers of the Transfiguration of Christ).

Our hearts filled with the joy of Easter, today we spiritually climb the holy mountain that dominates the plain of Galilee to contemplate the event that took place on its summit, in anticipation of the Easter events.

2. Christ is the centre of the Transfiguration. Two witnesses of the Old Covenant appear with him: Moses, mediator of the law, and Elijah, a prophet of the living God.

The divinity of Christ, proclaimed by the Father's voice, is also revealed by the symbols which Mark describes with picturesque touches. Indeed, there is light and whiteness, which represent eternity and transcendence: "His garments became glistening, intensely white, as no fuller on earth could bleach them" (Mk 9: 3).

Then there is the cloud, a sign of God's presence during Israel's Exodus and over the tent of the Covenant (cf. Ex 13: 21-22; 14: 19, 24; 40: 34, 38).

At Matins for the Transfiguration the Eastern liturgy again sings: "Immutable brightness of the Father's light, O Word, in your shining light on Tabor we have seen today the light that is the Father and the light that is the Spirit, a light that illumines all creation".

3. This liturgical text emphasizes the Trinitarian dimension of Christ's Transfiguration on the mountain.

In fact, the Father's presence with his revealing voice is explicit.

Christian tradition catches an implicit glimpse of the Holy Spirit's presence based on the parallel event of the Baptism in the Jordan, when the Spirit descended upon Christ like a dove (cf. Mk 1: 10).

Indeed, the Father's command: "Listen to him" (Mk 9: 7) presupposes that Jesus was filled with the Holy Spirit so that his words would be "spirit and life" (Jn 6: 63; cf. 3: 34-35).

It is possible, then, to climb the mountain in order to pause, to contemplate and to be immersed in the mystery of God's light.

Tabor represents all the mountains that lead us to God, according to an image dear to mystics.

Another text of the Eastern Church invites us to make this ascent to the summit and the light: "Come, peoples, follow me! Let us climb the holy and heavenly mountain; let us spiritually pause in the city of the living God and contemplate in spirit the divinity of the Father and the Holy Spirit which is resplendent in the Only-begotten Son" (troparion at the conclusion of the Canon of St John Damascene).

4. In the Transfiguration we not only contemplate the mystery of God, passing from light to light (cf. Ps 36: 10), but we are also invited to listen to the divine word that is addressed to us.

Above the word of the Law in Moses and of the prophecy in Elijah, the voice of the Father can be heard referring to the voice of the Son, as I have just mentioned. In presenting his "beloved Son", the Father adds the invitation to listen to him (cf. Mk 9: 7).

In commenting on the Transfiguration scene, the Second Letter of Peter emphasizes the divine voice. Jesus Christ "received honour and glory from God the Father and the voice was borne to him by the majestic glory: "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased'; we heard this voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain. And we have the prophetic word made more sure. You will do well to pay attention to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts" (2 Pt 1: 17-19).

5. Seeing and hearing, contemplating and obeying are therefore the ways that lead us to the holy mountain on which the Trinity is revealed in the glory of the Son.

"The Transfiguration gives us a forestaste of Christ's glorious coming, when he "will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body' (Phil 3: 21).

But it also recalls that "it is through many persecutions that we must enter the kingdom of God' (Acts 14: 22)" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 556).

The liturgy of the Transfiguration, as the spirituality of the Eastern Church suggests, presents a human "triad" in the three Apostles Peter, James and John, who contemplate the divine Trinity.

Like the three young men in the fiery furnace of the Book of Daniel (3: 51: 90), the liturgy "blesses God, the Father and Creator, praises the Word who comes down to help them and changes the fire into dew, and exalts the Holy Spirit who gives life to all for ever" (Matins of the Feast of the Transfiguration). "

Pope John Paul II: GENERAL AUDIENCE
Wednesday 26 April 2000

Monet painting exposed as a fake

The Times reports on a painting that the Wallraf-Richartz Museum and Foundation Corboud in Cologne has displayed as a Monet original is a fake

Researchers used X-rays, infrared technology and paint tests to examine the work, along with 70 others.

It was noted that the painter's name was retraced so that it would be darker. “This does not happen with an original. The artist just throws his signature on to the canvas. Also, the painting was made over a drawing that was clearly not in Monet's style,” a spokesman said.

He added that a colourless substance had been added to the canvas, to make it appear older. The original was produced in 1894.

The painting will remain on display, although the museum said that it would be clearly marked as a fake.

Pope Benedict XVI and St Bonaventure

Bagnoregio: Birthplace of St Bonaventure, and where his last remaining relics lie

Zenit has an article on the Doctoral Thesis of Pope Benedict XVI written in 1957.

Its subject was: St. Bonaventure's theology of history

Father Pietro Messa, director of the Antonian Pontifical University `s faculty of medieval and Franciscan studies states that to understand the papacy of Benedict XVI, one should become familiar with his formation as a theologian

Regarding the role of Father Ratzinger's thesis in Benedict XVI's pontificate, Father Messa said, "There are many elements in this study that could have a correspondence in the magisterium of the Pontiff," such as the centrality of Christ, supported by St. Bonaventure and fully present in the papal magisterium.

The priest referred further to words from well known Dominican theologian Father Yves Congar.

"Beginning from this study and the issue of the relationship between the local Churches and the universal Church, which played such a big role in postconciliar ecclesial debate, and of which one of the protagonists was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Father Congar wrote: 'Joseph Ratzinger, who has noted, we believe justly, some differences between Bonaventure and Thomas, gives a lot of importance to the role that the pope plays in Bonaventurian mysticism due to the Franciscan influence.'"

Taking that into account, Father Messa affirmed: "The question of if and in what way this Franciscan aspect characterizes his conception and exercise of the papacy is more than legitimate.

"Reading some of his writings and speeches, the hypothesis of a 'yes' answer is reinforced. Thus it is not surprising, rather it is fully understandable, that according to Benedict XVI, in order to understand the Petrine ministry, one has to return to St. Francis."

Cardinal Ratzinger himself discussed his thesis in a Nov. 13, 2000, address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, saying his study of the 13th century theologian uncovered untold aspects about the relationship of the saint "with a new idea of history."

In that discourse, Cardinal Ratzinger explained that in the 12th century, Joachim of Flora offered a hypothesis of history "as a progression from the period of the Father -- a difficult time for human beings under the law -- to a second period, that of the Son -- with a greater freedom, more frankness, more brotherhood -- to a third, the definitive period of history, the time of the Holy Spirit."

"According to Joachim," added Cardinal Ratzinger, "this should be a time of universal reconciliation, of reconciliation between the East and the West, between Christians and Jews, a time without laws -- in the Pauline sense -- a time of true brotherhood in the world.

The interesting idea I discovered was that a significant current of the Franciscans were convinced that St. Francis of Assisi and the Franciscan Order marked the beginning of this third period of history, and it was their aspiration to make it a reality. Bonaventure maintained a critical dialogue with this current."

Father Ratzinger's work, emphasized Father Messa, "has been resumed by numerous studies regarding the theology of St. Bonaventure, as the bibliographical references included at the end of this publication indicate, and this certainly shows its importance in Bonaventurian studies."

"Thanks also to this text," he added, "the research has been able to advance and some conclusions have been outdated, both because of the progress in the research and because currently we can benefit from many more critical works than those used by Ratzinger in 1957."

For more about St Bonaventure, see:

The St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio website

part of The Franciscan Archive which has sections on Biographies, Articles on his life and works, his Writings and on Works of Art relating to the Saint.

See also:

Noone, Tim and R. E. Houser, "Saint Bonaventure", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2005 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

Blogging: Hiatus

For the next two weeks, there will be no posting on the blog.

The Jewel off Leicester Square

Jean Cocteau (5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963)
The Angel of the Annunciation: Detail from The Annunciation 1959
Mural
The Church of Notre Dame de France, off Leicester Square, London

Off Leicester Square in London, next door to the Prince Charles Cinema and close to China Town is a little jewel of a Church. Unfortunately the throngs of tourists in the area are probably blissfully unaware of its existence. Which is a pity.

It is a beautiful church. More importantly, the services are a delight. Lively, friendly, welcoming and enthusiastic are adjectives which spring to mind.

Some of the masses are in French. Don`t let that put you off. Even someone like me with only schoolboy French can get by.

Even if you cannot make a service, the church is worth a visit. Many architects and sculptors as well as artists like Boris Anrep , Jean Cocteau, Robert de Chaunac and Charlotte Cochrane have contributed to the visual enhancement of the church.

Of the murals by Jean Cocteau, (the Annunciation and the Crucifixion, two scenes taken from the gospels and also the Assumption ) the Church`s website states:

"It was Monsieur René Varin, the French cultural advisor in London who conceived the idea of asking Cocteau to take part in the decoration work of the new church of Notre Dame de France which was then being rebuilt. Indeed the first church had been very badly bombed during World War II.

Cocteau spent slightly more than a week on this work between the 3rd and the 11th November 1959. His films were enjoying a huge success in London at that time and the artist had to be protected from the invasion of reporters by a high wooden scaffolding all around the chapel !

According to eye witness, he arrived each morning at about ten and always began by lighting a candle before the statue of Our Lady of Lourdes. It was quite surprising to hear him talk to his characters while he worked on the drawings, colours and nuances. He engaged in a real dialogue with the wall of the chapel. His joy was manifest when he was painting the virgin of the Annunciation. He told her for instance :

“O you, most beautiful of women, loveliest of God’s creatures, you were the best loved. So I want you to be my best piece of work too… I am drawing you with light strokes… You are the yet unfinished work of Grace”…

Once he had finished his task, Jean Cocteau was sad to leave : “ I am sorry to go, as if the wall of the chapel had drawn me into another world…”

He went on to comment :

“I shall never forget that wide open heart of Notre Dame de France, and the place you allowed me to take within it." "

The Church is at 5 Leicester Place • London WC2H 7BX; Phone: 0207 437 9363 • Fax: 0207 440 2645

Thinking Faith

Thinking Faith is a new site launched on 18th January 2008 by the Company of Jesus. Very professional with articles on religious themes of a very high quality.

Worth more than just a visit.


Two articles in particular caught my attention.


Dawkins: what he, and we, need to learn by Gerard J Hughes SJ

Oxford philosopher, Gerard J Hughes SJ, takes a critical look at the views of the 'arch-enemy of religion', Richard Dawkins, but also notes how the attitudes and behaviour of some Christians play into his hands.


On Christian Hope: The New Encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI by James Corkery SJ

James Corkery SJ, of Dublin's Milltown Institute analyses the message of the Pope's latest encyclical, Spe Salvi.

Lenten Roses

Anne Redpath 1895-1965
Lenten Roses 1960
Watercolour on board
584 x 787 mm
Tate Gallery, London

Lenten roses flower in early spring, around the period of Lent.

Despite their name, they are not roses but hellebores.

Hellebores are widely grown in gardens for decorative purposes, as well as for their purported medicinal abilities.

Anne Redpath (1895–1965) was a Scottish artist whose vivid domestic still-lifes are among her best-known works.

In the 1950s and early 1960s she also travelled in Europe, painting in Spain, the Canary Islands, Corsica, Brittany, Venice and elsewhere.

A Scottish Protestant, she discovered the richness of Catholic imagery and this is explored in her later work.

Some later works reflect religious influences, especially paintings of altars in The Chapel of St Jean - Treboul (1954) and Venetian Altar.

Laborare est orare

John Rogers Herbert (1810-1890)
Laborare est Orare (1862)
Oil on canvas
support: 972 x 1759 mm
Tate Gallery, London

Cistercian monks are shown working in a stone-walled Leicestershire field, and harvesting crops.

The title (part of one of the famous sayings of St Benedict) suggests the strict rule of life at Mount Saint Bernard Abbey. The Abbey in Coalville, Leicestershire is shown in the distance, the first male only abbey to have been built in England since the Reformation. It was founded in 1835 as a continuation of the dissolved Garendon Abbey, which provided a spiritual sanctuary between 1133-1538.

Like Augustus Pugin, the architect of the abbey, Herbert was a Roman Catholic. It was through Pugin`s influence that Herbert converted to Roman Catholicism sometime around 1840. From then on he painted religious subjects.

Herbert shows himself drawing piously in the foreground alongside the Trappist monks.

The artist described his work as:

"And some fell upon the rock: and as soon as it was sprung up it withered away because it had no moisture. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns growing up with it choked. And some fell upon good ground: and sprung up and yielded fruit a hundred fold. Gospel of St. Luke.

The monks of St. Bernard's Abbey, Leicester, gathering the harvest of 1861.

The boys in the adjoining field are from the Reformatory under the care of these Religious."

The scene pictured above is one of a rural Arcadia.

Unfortunately, the Reformatory School at the Abbey was not a great success. The story is described in Whitwick Reformatory at Whitwick online

“Part of the Abbey was transformed into the Whitwick Reformatory, more properly known as Mount St Bernard Reformatory or the St Mary Agricultural Colony. It was opened in 1856 for `delinquent' Catholic boys and quickly became the largest in the country with up to 250 boys being held there. There were many riots and the boys often intruded on the monks` peaceful way of life. With such large numbers and lack of funds, and as many of the boys were already hardened criminals from the back streets of Liverpool, several riots and mutinies took place.

In May 1863, eight constables from Loughborough stayed on the site for two weeks quelling a riot. A constable was seriously injured.

A year later, another riot took place and police from Loughborough, Shepshed and Leicester were drafted in to restore order. The Chief Constable of Leicestershire personally conducted the operation and the incident was the subject of a debate in the House of Commons.

In 1881 after sixty boys escaped, a decision was made to close the reformatory. It opened again briefly in 1884 when boys from the Liverpool reformatory destroyed the ship on which they lived and were sent to Whitwick while alternative accommodation in Liverpool was organised.”

The abbey continued after 1884.


About a hundred years after the artist painted the painting, some seed arrived at the Abbey and was seen to fall “upon good ground: and sprung up and yielded fruit a hundred fold.” Or more than a hundred-fold.

Blessed Cyprian Michael Iwene Tansi (1903 – 1964) lived at the Abbey from 1950 until his death in 1964. He was buried at Mount St Bernard on 22 January.

Present for the funeral liturgy were several Nigerian priests living in London, including his spiritual son, Fr Francis Arinze, the future Archbishop of Onitsha, Cardinal and President of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue.

His body was exhumed in 1988 and reburied in the priests' cemetery near the cathedral of Onitsha, where he had been ordained a priest 51 years earlier.

The abbey`s website is here.

A Rosary Bead

Rosary bead, carved in boxwood
The Netherlands, around AD 1500-30
The British Museum, London

The Crucifixion

Open full view

The Annunciation

Of this precious exhibit in The British Museum, London, C.H. Read, in The Waddesdon Bequest: Catalog (1902) wrote:

"A rosary bead (sometimes referred to as a 'prayer nut' or 'paternoster bead') is characteristic of the minutely detailed, small-scale boxwood carvings used for private devotion.

These types of delicate and complex objects were owned by members of the nobility or wealthy merchant classes in northern Europe, and were highly prized as masterpieces of carving and invention.

A complete rosary, bearing the arms of England and probably dating to the first third of the sixteenth century, survives in the collections of the Dukes of Devonshire.

This spherical bead is carved on the outside with Gothic architectural detail, while the interiors are carved variously with scenes from the Old Testament and the New Testament.

The upper half is fitted with two doors, carved on both the inner and outer panels, which open to reveal the Crucifixion, crowded with miniscule figures in high relief.

The lower half is fitted with one door, carved on both sides and opening to reveal a complex scene showing the Bearing of the Cross.

The achievement of these perspectives in both low relief and in high relief attests to the great skill of the craftsman, who probably had to work using a magnifying glass."

The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist

PUVIS de CHAVANNES, Pierre-Cécile [1824 - 1898]
The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist [about 1869]
Oil on canvas 240 x 316.2 cm
The National Gallery, London

Puvis de Chavannes was widely admired in his day for the grandeur and decorative subtlety of his large-scale, multi-figure compositions of allegorical subjects. But it was not always so.

In 1852 and in the two following years Puvis's pictures were rejected by the Salon. The public laughed at his work as loudly as at that of Courbet but the young painter was none the less warmly defended by Théophile Gautier and Théodore de Banville. For nine years he was excluded from the Salons.

Salome's features are thought to be based on those of the Princess Cantacuzène, who married Puvis de Chavannes in 1897.

The figure of Herod standing on the right may be based on the novelist Anatole France.

The cross which Saint John the Baptist holds as the executioner prepares to strike is the focus of the composition.

The composition emphasises the Baptist's absorption in the spiritual world at the supreme moment of death. Dressed only in the 'raiment of camel hair' (Matthew 3: 4) that he wore in the wilderness of Judaea he is oblivious to executioner and spectators alike, concentrating upon the visionary cross that rises reed-like from his hand.

His spiritual and inner peace balance the violence of the executioner and the turbulent emotions of the watching figures.

Behind him, a bare fig tree recalls the Garden of Eden and Original Sin, one fallen leaf symbolising Salome's desire.

Probably unfinished, this painting remained with the painter until the time of his death. It remained unexhibited until after the painter had died.

It is one of the largest compositions in the possession of the National Gallery in London.

The artist returned to this theme constantly during his career.

Of Puvis de Chavannes, Louis Gilet wrote in the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1911:

"He upheld the rights of the ideal in the modern world, making it known and detaching it from dreams, art, and poetry. He always had an unshakable faith in the holiness of the spiritual side of humanity and in the supreme importance of continuous search, aspiration, and unrest which form the moral capital of our race. As an artist he did much to maintain religion among men."

Art of Light

Esau gives up his birthright in exchange for a meal of pottage.

Art of Light: German Renaissance Stained Glass is one of the National Gallery's latest exhibitions [in London] running to 17 February 2008.

The climax of the exhibition is a full-sized recreation of a magnificent stained glass window from the Abbey of Mariawald.

The window shows beautiful landscapes and biblical scenes including a representation of Genesis 25:29-34 wherein Esau, desperately hungry, gives up his birthright in exchange for a meal of pottage.

The window is considered by many to represent the finest work of glass painters of the early 16th century

The Bacon Priest

Father Werenfried van Straaten (1913-2003) founded the charity Aid to the Church in Need in 1947.

Zenit reports on the dedication of a lecture hall named after him at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross.

Father Van Straaten, a Dutch Norbertine priest and religious, was described by his contemporaries as a "giant of charity" and as "the greatest beggar in the Church's history."

The charity he founded supports pastoral projects in some 140 countries.

In 1947, he started his appeal to aid the hungry and destitute in post-war Germany. So much bacon was collected that Father Werenfried was given his nickname of "The Bacon Priest".

A short biography is given here.

Calvary and Death

LEGROS Alphonse 1837-1911
Le Calvaire c.1874
Oil on canvas
91.5,x. 72.5 cm
Musée d'Orsay, Paris


LEGROS Alphonse 1837-1911
Le Christ mort 1888
Oil on canvas
2.5, .x 1.51 m
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Clerical Subjects

Alphonse Legros 1837-1911
Rehearsing the Service circa 1870
Oil on canvas
support: 914 x 1168 mm
Tate Gallery, London

Alphonse Legros 1837-1911
Interior of a Church with Kneeling Figures c.1865
oil on canvas; 84 x 71 cm
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Alphonse Legros (May 8, 1837 - December 8, 1911), painter and etcher, was born in Dijon.

In 1859 Legros's Angelus was exhibited, the first of those quiet church interiors, with kneeling figures of patient women, by which he is best known as a painter.

Ex Voto (1861), a work of great power and insight, now in the museum at Dijon, was received by his friends with enthusiasm, but it only obtained a mention at the Salon.

He moved to London in 1863, and from then exhibited both at the Royal Academy and the Paris Salon. At first he had followed the example of Courbet in style, but in the later 1860s came to admire Ingres and the Italian old masters, and emphasised outline and local colour in his paintings. He was also interested in Spanish painters in this period. He painted a series of subjects in church, so recording an attitude to modern piety.

He was naturalised as an Englishman in 1881, and remained at University College, London where he was Slade Professor of Drawing.

He died in Watford, Hertfordshire

Moreau

MOREAU, GUSTAVE (1826-1898)
Salomé Dancing before Herod
1876
Oil on canvas
56 5/8 x 40 5/8 inches (144 x 103.5 cm)
Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Centre, Los Angeles,

A small but select group of writers expressed their great admiration for Moreau, among them the French novelist J.-K. Huysmans, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust and André Breton.

Wilde was inspired to write his play Salome in part as a result of viewing of Moreau's painting (1874-76) of the princess who, in exchange for agreeing to dance before her stepfather, King Herod, demands the head of John the Baptist.

Marcel Proust devoted a 10-page meditative essay to Moreau. He makes reference to a number of the paintings, most prominently to Bathsheba (c. 1886 and 1890), based on the biblical story.

André Breton was another Moreau admirer. In his biography of the inventor of Surrealism, Mark Polizzotti writes:

“But the artistic discovery that had by far the greatest impact [on Breton] was the Gustave Moreau museum.... The fact that the museum was seldom frequented made it all the more mysterious and attractive in Breton's eyes, ‘the ideal image of what a temple should be,' and he dreamed of being locked in it for the night, free to roam the halls at will. "
In Communicating Vessels (1932), years later, Breton was to write about encountering a woman who reminded him of “those eyes that have never ceased to fascinate me for the last fifteen years, the Delilah of the little watercolour by Gustave Moreau which I have gone to see so often in the Luxembourg museum.”

Song of Songs

Gustave Moreau (April 6, 1826 – April 18, 1898)
Song of Songs 1853
Oil on Canvas
Musée des Beaux Arts Diogione

Gustave Moreau (April 6, 1826 – April 18, 1898) was a French Symbolist painter.

Moreau's main focus was the illustration of biblical and mythological figures. As a painter of literary ideas rather than visual images, he appealed to the imaginations of some Symbolist writers and artists, who saw him as a precursor to their movement.

He defined his art as a "passionate silence"

He taught at the Ecole des Beaux Arts from 1892 until his death. He was a teacher of students such as Roualt and Matisse

Still falls the Rain.

Clive Branson 1907-1944
Blitz: Plane Flying 1940
Oil on canvas
support: 610 x 509 x 20 mm frame: 750 x 650 x 50 mm
Tate Britain, London

Edith Louisa Sitwell DBE (7 September 1887 – 9 December 1964) was a British poet and critic

She had two younger brothers, Osbert (1892-1969) and Sacheverell Sitwell (1897-1988) both distinguished authors, well-known literary figures in their own right, and long-term collaborators.

The poems she wrote during the war brought her back before a public. They include Street Songs (1942), The Song of the Cold (1945) and The Shadow of Cain (1947), all of which were much praised. Still Falls the Rain, about the London blitz, remains perhaps her best-known poem (it was set to music by Benjamin Britten as Canticle III: Still Falls the Rain).

In 1955, Sitwell converted to Roman Catholicism



Still Falls the Rain

The Raids, 1940. Night and Dawn.

Still falls the Rain---
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss---
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.

Still falls the Rain
With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer-beat
In the Potter's Field, and the sound of the impious feet
On the Tomb:

Still falls the Rain

In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and the human brain
Nurtures its greed, that worm with the brow of Cain.

Still falls the Rain
At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross.
Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us---
On Dives and on Lazarus:
Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one.

Still falls the Rain---
Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man's wounded Side:
He bears in His Heart all wounds,---those of the light that died,
The last faint spark
In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark,
The wounds of the baited bear---
The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat
On his helpless flesh... the tears of the hunted hare.

Still falls the Rain---
Then--- O Ile leape up to my God: who pulles me doune---
See, see where Christ's blood streames in the firmament:
It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree

Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart
That holds the fires of the world,---dark-smirched with pain
As Caesar's laurel crown.

Then sounds the voice of One who like the heart of man
Was once a child who among beasts has lain---
"Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee."


One can hear an original recording of Dame Edith Sitwell reciting the poem at The Poetry Archive


The Blitz in London was the genesis of the poem. This is Sitwell`s powerful response to the events in 1940.

Sitwell described this poem in a letter to Benjamin Britten as one of the proudest achievements of her life.

The poem is dark, full of the disillusions of war. It speaks of the failure of man, and contrasts this with the unconditional love of God.

The Pauline Anniversary

Angelos Akotantos (active 1436 - 1450):
Icon of The Embrace of the Apostles Peter and Paul
Oil on canvas on panel; 46.4 x 37 cm.
Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

Maria Vassilaki, in ‘A Cretan Icon in the Ashmolean: The Embrace of Peter and Paul’, Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik, 40 writes:

"The Embrace of the Apostles Peter and Paul, whose names are inscribed in Latin, belongs to a series of nearly identical icons by the Veneto-Cretan painter Angelos Akotantos, two of which are signed.

The subject is seen as symbolic of oecumenical peace.

More specifically, these icons have been linked to hopes raised at the Council of Ferrara/Florence (1438-9) which unsuccessfully aimed at the union of the eastern and western churches."


At 5.30 p.m. on June 28, 2008 on the eve of the Solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul, Apostles, Pope Benedict XVI will preside at the celebration of first Vespers in the Basilica of St. Paul's Outside-the- Walls.

During the ceremony, the Pope will proclaim a year especially dedicated to St. Paul, to mark the 2000th anniversary of the birth of the "Apostle of the Gentiles."

According to the Vatican Radio Calendar, the year will run from June 29, 2008, to June 29, 2009.


Akotantos probably came from Constantinople and was the founder of the Cretan school of icon painting which flourished from the second half of the 15th century until the 17th century.

Of him, Dimitrios Konstantios writes in Greece, Hearth of Art and Culture after the Fall of Constantinople in “Post-Byzantium: The Greek Renaissance 15th-18th Century Treasures from the Byzantine & Christian Museum, Athens” Edit. Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Athens 2002:

"Angelos Akotantos was one of the most significant painters in the first half of the fifteenth century, associated in particular with the dependency (metochiori) of Mount Sinai in Candia - the church of Saint Catherine of the Sinaites - and with the hegumen of the Valsamonero monastery, the man of letters Jonah Palamas. Angelos' oeuvre is distinguished by his sensitive use of colour and his love of detail, while he also created new iconographic subjects...His reputation lived on into the sixteenth century, and he was still dubbed pitore famosissimo in the seventeenth."

Vision of Ezekiel

David Bomberg 1890-1957
Vision of Ezekiel 1912
Oil on canvas
support: 1143 x 1372 mm frame: 1203 x 1435 x 68 mm
Tate Gallery, London

Bomberg was closely associated with the Vorticist group in London but was never officially a member of the Vorticist Group. Indeed he resisted attempts to enlist him as a member of the movement

The subject is taken from the Old Testament and illustrates the occasion when God guided the prophet to a valley full of bones and commanded him to speak. 'There was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together.'

The brilliant colours emphasise the exultation associated with resurrection.

Note the sense of struggle between the figures

Bomberg may have chosen this text after the sudden death of his mother.

Bomberg painted a series of complex geometric compositions combining the influences of cubism and futurism in the years immediately preceding World War I

His faith in the machine age shaken by the trauma of serving on the Western Front as a sapper in the trenches, Bomberg moved to a more representational style in the 1920s and his work became increasingly dominated by portraits and landscapes drawn from nature

Bomberg was an influential teacher at the Borough Polytechnic, London. His students included Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff.

His last years were darkened by the realisation that his art remained overlooked and even belittled in Britain. Bomberg always avoided groups and movements but at the same time persisted in developing ''a form of painting that lay far outside the mainstream of British art."

The Tomb of St Thomas Aquinas

The Tomb of St Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225 – 7 March 1274)
Le couvent des Jacobins
Toulouse, France

The saint`s remains were placed in the Church of the Jacobins in Toulouse in 1369.

Between 1789 and 1974, they were held in Saint Sernin basilica of Toulouse.

In 1974, they were returned to the Church of the Jacobins, where they have remained ever since.


From Pope Leo XIII - Aeterni Patris (August 4, 1879)

"17. Among the Scholastic Doctors, the chief and master of all towers Thomas Aquinas, who, as Cajetan observes, because "he most venerated the ancient Doctors of the Church, in a certain way seems to have inherited the intellect of all."

The doctrines of those illustrious men, like the scattered members of a body, Thomas collected together and cemented, distributed in wonderful order, and so increased with important additions that he is rightly and deservedly esteemed the special bulwark and glory of the Catholic faith.

With his spirit at once humble and swift, his memory ready and tenacious, his life spotless throughout, a lover of truth for its own sake, richly endowed with human and divine science, like the sun he heated the world with the warmth of his virtues and filled it with the splendor of his teaching.

Philosophy has no part which he did not touch finely at once and thoroughly; on the laws of reasoning, on God and incorporeal substances, on man and other sensible things, on human actions and their principles, he reasoned in such a manner that in him there is wanting neither a full array of questions, nor an apt disposal of the various parts, nor the best method of proceeding, nor soundness of principles or strength of argument, nor clearness and elegance of style, nor a facility for explaining what is abstruse.

18. Moreover, the Angelic Doctor pushed his philosophic inquiry into the reasons and principles of things, which because they are most comprehensive and contain in their bosom, so to say, the seeds of almost infinite truths, were to be unfolded in good time by later masters and with a goodly yield.

And as he also used this philosophic method in the refutation of error, he won this title to distinction for himself: that, single-handed, he victoriously combated the errors of former times, and supplied invincible arms to put those to rout which might in after-times spring up.

Again, clearly distinguishing, as is fitting, reason from faith, while happily associating the one with the other, he both preserved the rights and had regard for the dignity of each; so much so, indeed, that reason. borne on the wings of Thomas to its human height, can scarcely rise higher, while faith could scarcely expect more or stronger aids from reason than those which she has already obtained through Thomas.

19. For these reasons most learned men, in former ages especially, of the highest repute in theology and philosophy, after mastering with infinite pains the immortal works of Thomas, gave themselves up not so much to be instructed in his angelic wisdom as to be nourished upon it.

It is known that nearly all the founders and lawgivers of the religious orders commanded their members to study and religiously adhere to the teachings of St. Thomas, fearful least any of them should swerve even in the slightest degree from the footsteps of so great a man. To say nothing of the family of St. Dominic, which rightly claims this great teacher for its own glory, the statutes of the Benedictines, the Carmelites, the Augustinians, the Society of Jesus, and many others all testify that they are bound by this law. "

Mammon

George Frederic Watts 1817-1904
Mammon 1884-5
Oil on canvas
support: 1829 x 1060 mm
painting
Tate Britain, London

This is a powerful picture with powerful social comment.

Mammon, the god of money, is represented as a tyrant on a throne. Note the small skulls on either side on the back of the throne.

He nurses money bags in his lap and two youthful figures (one female ?, the other male) are crushed by his monstrous power. They are deprived of life.

Mammon is surounded by the accoutrements of wealth: the crown or diadem, the fine clothes, the elegant suroundings.

This is one of a series of paintings in which George Frederick Watts criticised modern commerce and its de-humanising effect on the nation.

Watts subtitled the picture Dedicated to his Worshippers, as if inscribing a monument.

He apparently had plans to commission a sculpture of Mammon for Hyde Park where he hoped the god’s followers ‘would be at least honest enough to bow the knee publicly to him’.

The Temptation on the Pinnacle

Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775-1851
The Temptation on the Pinnacle circa 1834
Pencil, watercolour and gouache on paper
support: 212 x 160 mm
on paper, unique
Tate Britain, London

The Temptation on the Pinnacle, engraved by F. Bacon published 1835
Engraving on paper
on paper, print
Tate Britain, London

Turner contributed three designs for 'Paradise Lost' and two episodes from 'Paradise Regained' for Macrone's 1835 edition of Milton's 'Poetical Works'.

This vignette shows the third and final temptation endured by Christ in the wilderness, when challenged by Satan to throw himself down from the highest pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem.

Turner depicts the moment of Christ's triumph over Satan who can be seen hurling himself away from the scene in anger and frustration.

New Mosaics in Westminster Cathedral

What the chapel in Westminster Cathedral will look like when finished

In The word made mosaic, Apollo Magazine has a feature on the artist Tom Phillips who has been commissioned to prepare a series of designs for new mosaics for a chapel in Westminster Cathedral, London.

Phillips works from his house in Peckham, South London.

"Six years ago he presented a ‘Summary Treatise on the Nature of Ornament’ to the Architecture Forum at the Royal Academy, a critique of modern Western practices that gives a nod to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses on Art. Like so much that he does, it is an assimilated work, fusing academic theory and personal concerns, part generated, perhaps, by the Westminster commissions.

It provides a vehicle with which to castigate the demotion of the term ‘craft’, and assert the spiritual significance of calligraphic ornament, ‘where form embodies truth directly’. These concerns inform his mosaic designs.

Designing for the chapel cannot have been easy because this little space already enshrines a great deal of art, emotion and polemic, an altarpiece by Eric Gill, polychrome marble and a memorial to Catholics killed in World War 1.

He concedes that it wasn’t straightforward, ‘I went quite often to the cathedral. And sat there and thought, “What would be right? What was it all about, these martyrs?” And they were sparks of faith spanning a dark period, and that was in fact what I did.’

While the saints’ names take flight across the ceiling on little tongues of lambent flame , St George is represented by a frieze of dragon-scales and his red cross (‘but if he was a saint he was almost certainly an Arab, which is how you would have to depict him now’).

The altarpiece he adjudges a late work and not really all that good, but Gill still remains the best artist to have worked in the cathedral.

‘The other artists they have used inhabited the twilight world of religious artists, and they represented little stubby people enacting various events, as if people still can’t read now,’ he opines. This would come under his definition of false ornament, ‘a use of literal illustration or unassimilated narrative’.

To Phillips the presence of the word is the key. ‘Here is a place where art with the word is appropriate, it is art of the word. To me what’s really happened is, in old churches, nobody could read, so you had to tell them the story in pictures. Now everybody sees pictures all the time, and they can read, so what they need is the word. To me, that short line [of text] in my work is important.’...

Westminster Cathedral has provided Phillips with a strong sense of purpose and fulfilment; it is, he says, really what he would be content to do for the rest of his life.

But since he is temperamentally programmed to treat his work as a progress, the slowness and long pauses of the commissioning process leave him frustrated.

Now he is making another design for the cathedral, for a panel of St David, his own patron saint, ‘because I’m Welsh’. I suggest that he makes a self-portrait of it. ‘Oh, I have, he’s halfway between [the opera singer] Bryn Terfel and me.’ "

Martinique 1848 and a Baptism

Unknown
French, Martinique, summer 1848
Daguerreotype
4 3/8 x 5 13/16 in.
J Paul Getty Museum

This photograph records the baptismal ceremony for the slaves of the West Indian island of Martinique in 1848.

The sacrament represented affirmation from the church of their recent emancipation from slavery.

Britain captured the island during the Seven Years' War, holding it from 1762 to 1763. Between 1794 and 1815, there was a strong British interest in Martinique, with Britain controlling the island during the French Revolutionary Wars from 1794 to 1802; and again during the Napoleonic wars from 1809 to 1814.

Slavery was abolished under the earlier period of British rule, but reinstated after 1802, when the Treaty of Amiens gave Martinique back to France, and Napoléon Bonaparte allowed slavery again.

Abolishing slavery in all its colonies was one of the goals declared by the new French provisional government in early 1848. Although news of this objective reached Martinique in late March, it was only on April 27, 1848 that the French government decreed that slavery was abolished in all of its colonies.

Freedom was not formally granted until 22nd May of that year but then only after there was a rebellion.

Within the densely packed throng, a white-robed group at lower center dissolves into a spectral blur, their exuberant movement uncontainable by the camera.

Crucifixion

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (March 6, 1475 – February 18, 1564),
Crucifixion (c. 1530s)
Drawing in black chalk
368.000 mm x 268.000 mm
The British Museum, London

Michelangelo made this devotional image for his friend Vittoria Colonna (April, 1490 - February, 1547). They wrote sonnets for each other and were in regular contact until she died.

The widow of Francesco Ferrante D'Avalos, son of the marquis of Pescara , an aristocratic poet and religious reformer, she became Michelangelo`s confidante around 1537 when he was in his sixties.

She was the friend of and esteemed by Cardinals Reginald Pole and Contarini. Pietro Bembo, Luigi Alamanni and Baldassare Castiglione were among her literary friends.

Colonna wrote the following letter to Michelangelo to thank him:

"Unique master Michelangelo and my most particular friend, I have received your letter and seen the Crucifix which has certainly crucified itself in my memory more than any other picture that I have ever seen.

No image better made, more alive, or finished could be seen.

Certainly, I could never explain how subtly and marvellously it is made, and for this reason I am resolved that I don't wish it to be in the hands of anyone else …

I've looked at it closely using a lamp, a magnifying glass and a mirror: never did I see anything more finely executed."

For being of Jewish ancestry

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, (1746-1828)
Por linage de ebros, (‘For being of Jewish ancestry') 1814-24
Brush drawing in brown ink and wash
205.000 mm x 142.000 mm
The British Museum, London

Goya (1746-1828) had become Principal Painter to the King of Spain and a successful society portrait painter. However personal illness and later the horrors of the Peninsular War (1808-14) turned him away from conventional subjects and to observe the darker side of Spanish life.

This is a scene from the despotic reign of Ferdinand VII (1808-1833) who, in 1814, had restored the Inquisition

These 'penitents' are identified by their paper tunics and tall hats.

Their only crime is 'for being of Jewish ancestry', as Goya's brief inscription makes clear.

The composition seems to be derived from traditional depictions of Christ presented bound and robed, with a crown of thorns, to the people of Jerusalem.

This association further emphasises the true innocence and dignity of the accused.

Goya himself came before the Tribunal of the Inquisition in 1815 for depicting female nudes.

Bishop Juan Gerardi: The Art of Political Murder

Bishop Juan Gerardi

The Times is publishing extracts from The Art of Political Murder by Francisco Goldman.(Atlantic, £16.99 )

On April 26, 1998, days after publishing a damning indictment of the Guatemalan Government's human rights record, Bishop Juan Gerardi was bludgeoned to death at the Church of San Sebastian.

As official explanations became increasingly bizarre, the novelist Francisco Goldman turned investigator.

The Guatemalan Bishops' Conference described the investigation of the murder as "totally inadequate." and that the murder was "a premeditated blow to the Guatemalan Catholic Church" designed to "limit our pastoral action and remind us that the most fearful forces in the country are still intact and possess enormous power."

After the murder a Vatican spokesman, Father Pedro Freites, expressed shock over the murder of the Bishop, who he described as "one of the new martyrs of the Latin American Catholic Church."

Goldman worked assiduously for seven years on the book. He tried to find the parish pet, Baloo, after the dog was impounded by the government in a veterinary hospital, accused of following orders shouted in German to kill the bishop.

After a laborious legal process, during which several witnesses were killed or fled for their lives, three military officers and Father Orantes (a housemate of Bishop Gerardi's) were found guilty of the murder.

The courts also ordered an investigation into the role of several unindicted co-conspirators, including top military officials, but the investigator charged with that task has no staff and no budget for that investigation.

Psalms

Eliot Weinberger in The London Review of Books reviews The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary by Robert Alter. The review is entitled Praise Yah

"New translations of a classic text are either done as a criticism of the old translations (correcting mistakes, finding an equivalent that is somehow closer to the original, writing in the language as it is now spoken) or they are a springboard for trying something new in the translation-language, inspired by certain facets of the original (such as Pound’s Chinese or Anglo-Saxon versions, Paul Blackburn’s Provençal, Louis Zukofsky’s Latin).

Alter, whose concern is Biblical Hebrew and not contemporary poetry, is in the former camp.

As he explains in the introduction, his project is to strip away the Christian interpretations implicit in the King James and later versions and restore the context of the archaic Judaism of the half-millennium (roughly 1000-500 BCE) in which the Psalms were written.

His poetics is an attempt to reproduce the compression and concreteness of the Hebrew, ‘emulating its rhythms’ and ‘making more palpable the force of parallelism that is at the heart of biblical poetry’. As for mistakes, it is surprising that the King James apparently has so few. Alter corrects very little, sometimes unconvincingly, though he is more specific on flora and fauna."

The review also discusses notable translations of The Psalms into English: the 1611 King James Authorised Version; and those by Wyatt, Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, Campion, Milton, Crashaw, Vaughan, Smart, and Clare; and the Jerusalem Bible.

The Golden Cell

Odilon Redon (1840-1916)
La Cellule d'Or 1892
"A rendering of the invisible"
Drawing in oil and metallic paint
301.000 mm x 247.000 mm
British Museum, London

In 1894 it was seen by Tatiana Tolstoy, the daughter of the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who noted in her diary: 'One of them whose name I could not make out-something like Redon-had painted a face in blue profile. On the whole face there is only this blue tone, with white-of-lead.'

Tolstoy quoted this in his diatribe against contemporary art, 'What is Art?', first published in 1898, as irrefutable evidence of the degenerancy of modern art.

La Cellule d'Or ('The Golden Cell') suggests introspection.

The blue and gold halo are the traditional colours of the Virgin Mary, but no further religious message intrudes.

Cardinal Manning: is it time for a re-assessment yet ?

Cardinal Manning`s reputation is not as high as his fellow Tractarian, Cardinal Newman. Newman`s present reputation certainly dwarfs that of Manning.

One reason for the decline in Manning`s reputation lies in the publication not long after his death in 1896 of his "authorised" biography.

The "official" life of Cardinal Manning was The Life of Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster (1896) by Edmund Sheridan Purcell [1824?-1899].

Professor Owen Chadwick described it in The Victorian Church as "Purcell`s famous but discreditable biography".

Possibly this is due to the fact that at the time it was published, it caused shock in some circles as perhaps the biographer was not selective enough in his use of the raw or primary materials and revealed what perhaps should not have been revealed or what Cardinal Manning would not have wanted to be revealed.

It comprises two volumes.

Volume 1 (Manning as an Anglican) and Volume 2 (Manning as a Catholic)


Both volumes can be downloaded on the links above.

The Encyclopedia of 1911 said of the biography:

"The publication in 1896 of Manning's Life, by Purcell, was the occasion for some controversy on the ethics of biography. Edward Purcell was an obscure Catholic journalist, to whom Manning, late in life, had entrusted, rather by way of charitable bequest, his private diaries and other confidential papers. It thus came to pass that in Purcell's voluminous biography much that was obviously never intended for the public eye was, perhaps inadvertently, printed, together with a good deal of ungenerous comment.

The facts disclosed which mainly attracted attention were: (1) that Manning, while yet formally an Anglican, and while publicly and privately dissuading others from joining the Roman Catholic Church, was yet within a little convinced that it was his own duty and destiny to take that step himself; (2) that he was continually intriguing at the back-stairs of the Vatican for the furtherance of his own views as to what was desirable in matters ecclesiastical; (3) that his relations with Newman were very unfriendly; and (4) that, while for the most part he exhibited towards his own clergy a frigid and masterful demeanour, he held privately very cordial relations with men of diverse religions or of no theological beliefs at all.

And certainly Manning does betray in these autobiographical fragments an unheroic sensitiveness to the verdict of posterity on his career. But independent critics (among whom may specially be named Francois de Pressense) held that Manning came well through the ordeal, and that Purcell's Life had great value as an unintentionally frank revelation of character."

A national bio-ethics commission ?

In an article in The Times entitled Following Dolly into the future Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster, has called for the setting up of a national bio-ethics commission charged with pursuing serious ethical scrutiny of issues as a precondition of research and of the development of biomedical technologies.

The call comes within the context of The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill which is presently wending its way though Parliament.

In the article, the Cardinal says:

"In the 10 years since Dolly the sheep briefly walked the Earth the pace of biomedical research has massively accelerated, with extraordinary prospects for serving the good of humanity. Yet science is running ever further ahead of society's ability to reflect and assess the wisdom of the latest technological advance. We cannot stop the tide of knowledge, and nor should we want to. But we can and must find better ways of deciding how that knowledge is used, or risk the profound social consequences of what we have unwittingly allowed.

The UK is already a leader in bio-ethical research. For all our sakes, it now urgently needs to become a world leader in the quality of sustained and continuous ethical reflection that must go with it. Today the House of Lords will have the chance to help to achieve this when it debates whether to set up a National Bio-ethics Commission.

Many other countries already have such a statutory body, bringing together a broad spectrum of experts with a clear mandate and an independent advisory role. Only by establishing such an authoritative and independent body can we ensure that serious ethical scrutiny is a precondition of research and of the development of biomedical technologies. The area of embryo research, for example, is fraught with deeply contested and profound ethical questions that go to the heart of what it means to be human.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill now in the Lords is seeking to come to terms with many of these questions. But the Bill cannot second-guess the future and for that reason it has to include some flexibility for change and development.

The scope given to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority and the Health Secretary to make decisions will not necessarily ensure that essential ethical reflection and discussion take place. The HFEA is neither a directly elected body nor is its membership required to include a full range of ethical views. It is not, primarily, an ethics body; it is a regulator.

While technology provides new opportunities, it requires wisdom to know how and if we should apply them. That we can do something does not mean we should do it. A national bio-ethics commission would include a variety of perspectives and would be a forum for serious sustained reflection.

We need not only a knowledge-based economy, but also a knowledge-based democracy. I hope that the House of Lords seizes this opportunity not just to frame laws for today but to plan for the future by establishing this new framework for ethical consideration. A national bio-ethics commission is long overdue. We need one for the sake of the common good."


As one reads the debates on the Bill in the House of Lords, it is clear that the present Bill has not been properly thought through. The imperative of the Government and its sponsoring department is simply to advance the industry of biotechnology in the United Kingdom and maintain the UK`s lead in the field.

The field is extremely complex and jargon-laden. So is the legislation.

Moral argument about the important issues is not possible due to lack of time, lack of expertise and lack of transparency.

Feast of St Agnes, Martyr

Mosaic depicting Saint Agnes flanked by Popes Symmarchus and Honorius
Interior view, apse, S. Agnese fuori le Mura
Rome

Westminster Cathedral: The Appeal

Solomon, I Have Surpassed Thee gives details of the urgent restoration appeal launched for Westminster Cathedral

This week Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor launched a £3 million appeal for Westminster Cathedral to fund a major programme of work including urgent repairs to the Cathedral's domes and the replacement of outdated electrical and heating systems.

The Cathedral does not charge an admission fee. It receives no financial aid from the Government, or from the Vatican, but is dependant on voluntary donations to pay for its running costs.

The blog of Mgr Mark Langham, the Administrator of Westminster Cathedral, gives more details and how to contribute.

Cardinal Manning and the "Social Question"

In Cardinal Manning and the Social Problem by D. J. Mc Dougall (a lecture given at Loyola College, Montreal, September 12, 1957), McDougall describes how Manning`s view of Catholic social theology and his influence had effects greater than simply in the United Kingdom

In the Spring of 1887, at a time when industrial strife was assuming dangerous proportions in many parts of the western world, the Holy See was called upon to adjudicate in a case concerning the status of an American trade union popularly known as the Knights of Labour.

The question in dispute was whether the practices and the objectives of this society were inimical to faith and morals, and whether it should he condemned by the Church, and Catholic working men forbidden to join it.

One of the strongest opponents of the society was Archbishop Taschereau of Montreal. Like many other American unions the Knights had spread into Canada. In the early 1880’s a number of branches had been formed in Toronto, Montreal andother industrial centres. The Archbishop of Quebec took an adverse view; and in May, 1884, he secured from the Congregation of the Propaganda an order proscribing the society in the province, and forbidding Catholic workers to have anything to do with it

Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore and some other American bishops, determined that no good and much harm could result from the continuance of the ban in Quebec, and even more from its extension to the United States. The judgment was in consequence reversed.

In the campaign, Cardinal Gibbons sought and received great assistance from Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster.

Their victory had important consequences for the Church and for Catholic working men everywhere

Gibbons himself paid warm tribute to the English Cardinal for the help which he had given. “I cannot sufficiently express to you,” he said, “how much I have felt strengthened in my position by being able to refer in the document to your utterances on the claims of the working man to our sympathy and support.”

Glass Chalices

David Jones (1895-1974)
Glass Chalice with Flowers and Mug
about 1950 - 1955
Watercolour, gouache and pencil on paper
78.20 x 58.70 cm (framed: 117.00 x 86.80 x 3.00 cm)
The National Gallery of Scotland

Jones made a series of watercolour drawings which feature a glass goblet of flowers on a table surrounded by a variety of domestic objects.

This composition is centred around an eighteenth-century German glass chalice.

The Artist and the Archbishop

Wikipedia states that "Theological aesthetics is the interdisciplinary study of theology and aesthetics, and has been defined as being "concerned with questions about God and issues in theology in the light of and perceived through sense knowledge (sensation, feeling, imagination), through beauty, and the arts".

This field of study is broad and includes not only a theology of beauty, but also the dialogue between theology and the arts, such as dance, drama, film, literature, music, poetry, and the visual arts.

Notable theologians and philosophers that have dealt with this subject include Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Jonathan Edwards, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, and Hans Urs von Balthasar, among others."

Rowan Williams, The Archbishop of Canterbury, was born in Swansea, south Wales was Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford before becoming a Bishop.

He is acknowledged internationally as an outstanding theological writer, scholar and teacher.

In 2005, he delivered the Clark Lectures, at Trinity College, Cambridge. They were entitled Grace, Necessity and Imagination: Catholic Philosophy and the Twentieth Century Artist In Lecture 2 the theme was David Jones: Material Words

The main part of the lecture discussed the poems and art works of David Jones, the Catholic Welsh artist.

In the lecture (and the series of which it forms part), he explores some of the most original and creative minds in the recent Catholic tradition:Jacques Maritain, the artist Eric Gill and the poet and painter David Jones.

The sign or symbol, whether verbal or material, is a necessary vehicle of meaning and not an illustration of it, calling not for reduction or explanation but response.

In Dr Williams' development of his theme he discusses modern philosophy (Wittgenstein's aesthetics) but also examines modern art, the work of the American writer Flannery O'Connor and the writings of the poet and artist David Jones on art and sacrament and the underlying theology of artistic production.

According to Williams, Jones exemplifies the quest to bring pulsions of intuition to light through the exercise of artistic skill.

During the first half of his career, Jones focused on the visual media of pencil, watercolour, and etching.

Williams examines Jones’ effort to express the “being more” of things through the increasingly complex use of interweaving lines to produce overlapping images on a single plane.

Later in life, Jones tried to reconstruct that same complexity through poetry, which Williams calls “material words.”

In his poetry, according to Williams, Jones was attempting to correct Gill’s unfortunate distortion of Maritain’s distinction between art and morality.

Maritain, Williams reminds us, did not mean to suggest that the two realms are entirely unrelated. The good of art is the good of reality displayed in its super-effluence, and it is directed toward the good of human contemplation, which is inextricably linked to the moral life

Sunday Mass

David Jones (1895 - 1974)
Sunday Mass: In Homage to GM Hopkins, SJ. 1948
Pencil, watercolour, chalk & bodycolour on paper
55.5 x 37.5cm
John Creasey Museum, Salisbury

The work depicts two women attending Sunday Mass at Whitsun.

It was produced during or shortly after David Jones second illness.

The artist is concerned to capture the moment of Pentecost, with the dove resting between the women's head.

Jones idenitified with Hopkins (a poet like Jones) in a very personal way.

Pelican in Her Piety

David Jones 1895-1974
Pelican in Her Piety
From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 1929
Engraving
Published: Douglas Cleverdon, Bristol 1929

The text is :

ACCENDAT IN NOBIS / DOMINUS IGNEM SUI / AMORIS ET FLAMMAM / AETERNAE CHARITATIS

Jones converted to Roman Catholicism in 1921, and throughout his life the symbols and liturgy of the church played an important part in his art.

When Jones became a Catholic, under the influence of Eric Gill he read Maritain's "Art et Scholastique". But his theology was poles apart from Gill's.

He developed an understanding of the Thomist definition of art, which he saw as intimately related to the meaning of sacrament.

In 1928 he engraved on copper the series of illustrations to Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner

For his last 20 years, until his death in 1974, he inhabited a single room in Harrow, welcoming visitors but otherwise pursuing his work in isolation. He called that room his "dug-out", but in truth it was almost a monastic cell.

The great religious poetry of the last century has been written at the cutting edge of faith and doubt, wrestling with the absence of God. But for Jones, religious convictions form the backbone of all his work: his poetry and his paintings.

Exiit Edictum

David Jones 1895-1974
Exiit Edictum 1949
Drawing and gouache on paper
support: 406 x 330 mm
on paper, unique
The Tate, London

Large painted inscriptions were an important part of Jones's later work, beginning around 1943.

The Latin texts that Jones has chosen here refer to Christmas.

'Exiit Edictum' comes from the account of Christ's birth in St Luke's Gospel, and the separate line of 'Iam Redit Apollo' comes from Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, which Christian writers believed prophesied Christ's birth.

Jones combines fragments from different texts, so as to give visual form to a complex of inter-related meaning.

George Herbert and Vikram Seth

George Herbert (April 3, 1593 – March 1, 1633), Rector of the parish of St. Andrew, Bemerton, near Salisbury. (1630-1633)

St. Andrew's Church dating from the 13th Century. One mile west of Salisbury Cathedral

Bemerton Rectory on the banks of the River Nadder (now part of Salisbury) [house dating from 1470 restored by George Herbert] / Medlar Tree That George Herbert Planted 1630

The poet and novelist, Vikram Seth, (author of The Golden Gate , A Suitable Boy, An Equal Music) has an interesting piece in The Times Literary Supplement


He is the present owner of the former Rectory attached to St Andrews, Bemerton in Somerset, where for three years the poet and Anglican priest, George Herbert (April 3, 1593 – March 1, 1633) lived and where he died.

Seth explains his early encounter with the works of George Herbert at school studying for `A` Level English.

Many years later, by chance, the Rectory came on the market and he bought it.

He explains how the house`s associations and his earlier readings of three poems of Herbert`s (below) led him to compose a number of poems (set out in the article).

The three poems of Herbert`s referred to in the article are:

Love (III)


Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack'd anything.


"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";
Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I?"


"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
"My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
So I did sit and eat.


VERTUE.

SWEET day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridall of the earth and skie :
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night ;
For thou must die.

Sweet rose, whose hue angrie and brave
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye,
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.

Sweet spring, full of sweet dayes and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie,
My musick shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.

Onely a sweet and vertuous soul,
Like season'd timber, never gives ;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.



PRAYER. (I)


PRAYER the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth ;

Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner's towre,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear ;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices, something understood.