Mark Sebanc. Tolkien: Lover of the Logos

From the Spring 1993 issue: Mark Sebanc, JRR Tolkien: Lover of the Logos (pdf).

From the text:

Tolkien’s is an exquisitely proleptic art that takes a pagan, pre-Christian universe and suffuses it discreetly with a sacramental holiness stemming implicitly from what Balthasar makes bold to call a Christian form. . . . . Like a colossus, Tolkien bestrides the abyss which separates the ancient and medieval worldviews from that of modern man, who has utterly lost sight of the Christ form as the primary means of access to the noumenal world. The power of the Word has been repudiated, and all around us now we see only its debased and slatternly distortions, hideous and mass-produced, like Tolkien’s Orcs. Tolkien’s art restores the incarnational, Christo-logical inclination of language. . . .  (full text).

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Paul Claudel. Religion and the Artist: Introduction to a Poem on Dante

Paul Claudel. Religion and the Artist: Introduction to a Poem on Dante. Communio 22, no. 2 (1995): 357-367 RT.

From the text:

Love, for Dante, is a full and integral love, the desire for the absolute good which was sparked in his heart by the innocent glance of a maiden. Fr. Lacordaire explains that there are not two different loves. Indeed, God’s love calls upon the same faculties in us as that of other creatures; it draws on that feeling we have that we are not complete alone, that the supreme good that will fulfill us is something beyond us, a person. But God alone is this reality, of which creatures are only an image – I say image, and not phantom, because the creature has its own personal beauty and its proper existence. The removal of this image, this betrothed, began Dante’s exile; and it is she who, outside the walls of an ungrateful homeland, invited him to the realm of the living.

Dante did not resign himself to separation from his beloved, and his work is nothing but an immense effort of the intelligence and imagination to reunite this world of trials, where he prepares himself, this world of effects which, seen from where we stand, seems the domain of chance and incomprehensible mechanisms, with the world of causes and final ends. His is a gigantic work of engineering to rejoin, to unify, the two parts of creation, to fasten them into one indestructible expression, and thus to achieve a hint of that vision of justice which another great poet says belongs to God alone.

And because the whole of the Divine Comedy finally resumes itself in the encounter between Dante and Beatrice, in the reciprocal effort of two souls separated by death in which each works to bring himself to the other in the solidarity of this world that each has endured, it is this essential encounter that I have tried in turn, after so many other readers, to imagine and to paint; it is this dialogue between two souls and two worlds which forms the subject of the poem to which these lines serve as introduction.

Dante speaks a verse inspired by the drudgery of this base and banal life, ultimately so foreign to the best nature in each of us. He too experienced the same exile that we do – one could say he is the paradigm of the exiled soul, banished from a world in which no part was large enough to hold him. Because he could not remake that world, Dante undertook to judge it and bring it onto the plane of justice to which Dona Bice had invited him. . . . (Full text).

Thomas Prufer on Brideshead Revisted

From the archives:

Thomas Prufer. The Death of Charm and the Advent of Grace. Waugh’s Brideshead Revisted. (1983). From the text:

Brideshead Revisited has been criticized for being lush, ornamental and sentimental in style,  on the one hand, and, on the other hand, for theological harshness. It could be said that the book oscillates between a surface romanticism and an intrusive eschatology or even that it falls apart into these two extremes. Has the earlier Waugh,  taut and funny, given way to a combination of gluttony and bigotry?

My concern is to make the case that this criticism is a distortion. It misses the heart of Waugh’s achievement: to have made a work in which the integrities of both art and faith are respected in their interaction. Indeed, they are respected precisely because of their interaction. The richness of the style and the stringency of the theology interact and thus intensify each other.  Full text (pdf)

William Congdon and Action Painting

The current issue on Silence and Prayer (36, no. 4) features a wonderful article by Rodolfo Balzarotti on the work of the American artist William Congdon (1912-1998). Here is the issue’s editorial on the article:

Rodolfo Balzarotti, in “William Congdon: Action Painting and the Impossible Iconography of the Christian Mystery,” traces the hidden connections between William Congdon, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman. It is surprising to see how each of these three representatives of Abstract Expression was drawn, albeit for different reasons, to “religious” themes. Congdon was able to go further than his colleagues because in his paintings the tension between art and religion is taken up and sustained by the higher union of humanity and divinity in Christ, and thus the mystery of Christ’s “ultimate desolation and his greatest glory.”

Subscribe to Communio to begin with the Winter issue on Silence here.  The previous issue on Money is here.

Related Communio articles:

Rodolfo Balzarotti. Art and Forgiveness (1997)
Massimo Cacciari. The Centrality of the Crucified Christ in the Work of William Congdon (1997)
William Congdon. The Birth of the Image (1997)