Amos's River of Justice

Tag: Albert Gleizes

  • Life in the Age of Pisces

    Do the planets exert an influence on human affairs? Considering what we know about life in the Age of Pisces, I think the answer is yes. I would like to share the observations that lead me to this conclusion. If any of them contradict theological foundations, that is not my intention and I would appreciate corrections and/or criticism. Before I begin, I want to distinguish between two approaches that I have observed in discussions of religion. One is impartial and informational; the other is from the point of view of a believer. The word ‘impartial’ does not imply indifference or lack of belief; believers might use either approach.

    The Early Roman Empire

    According to T.R. Glover’s book, The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire, none of the religions that we now believe to be ancient are older than 700 BC. These religions include the worship of Orpheus, Dionysos, and Osiris–all figures with Hermetic attributes. It seems that life in the Age of Pisces, ruled by the planets Jupiter and Neptune, was bound to have Hermetic characteristics. (Glover writes from the point of view of an atheist, arguing that the whole point of religion is to organize a society. I disagree with him on that point.)

    Catholic Theology and The Caduceus of Mercury

    Walter Friedlander’s book, The Golden Wand of Medicine, attributes a malevolent influence to the symbol of the Caduceus of Mercury (or Hermes). Since reading this book I’ve been terrified of this influence in the United States. I still hope to find a guarantee of safety in Catholic theology. I’m aware of theological debates that identify this influence and argue against it. However it may be unrealistic to expect a guarantee.

    Part of the debate that arose between Père Jérôme and Albert Gleizes1 had to do with Gleizes’ opinion that Church theology since the thirteenth century had to be thrown out. He thought Thomas Aquinas had taken everything in the wrong direction. In his opinion, the effects of this error were evident in sacred art. However, the Church had already decided in favor of Aquinas. As I understand it, part of the reason Aquinas prevailed was St Augustine’s Hermeticism.

    Perennialism

    Gleizes believed that Christianity was based on an older tradition and that it had lost its knowledge of the sacred. The idea of a basis in an older tradition by itself is not controversial, since it could refer to Judaism. But Gleizes depended on Guénon’s idea of a great world tradition. He thought Christianity is simply a part of this older tradition in his view.

    The most obvious danger of Gleize’s stance from a Catholic point of view would be the claim that Christianity had ceased to radiate spirituality. So, it is not exactly surprising that this created problems between Gleizes and his friend, Père Jérôme.

    Jupiter and Neptune Ruled Pisces

    Jupiter and Neptune ruled the Age of Pisces. Both planets are associated with the Hindu deity Siva, and Siva is associated with Hermes. According to Edward Moor’s book, The Hindu Pantheon,2 we can identify “most of the principal Hindu deities with Jove or Jupiter (page 47). The Jupiter Marinus, or Neptune of the Romans, resembles Mahadeva (Siva) in his generative character.”

    Siva is the husband of Bhavani, whose relation to the waters is revealed when her image is restored at the conclusion of the great festival of Durgotsava (page 48). “In the character of destroyer also, we may look upon this Indian deity as corresponding with the Stygian Jove or Pluto, especially since Cali, or Time in the feminine gender, is a name of his consort, who will be found to be Proserpine” (page 46).  

    Christianity Originated From Judaism

    Robert Eisler argues that Christianity is not derived from those older religions. In his book, Orpheus the Fisher, he argues for the Jewish origin of Christianity.

    In the preface, page v, he says:

    Christianity, considering its Greek influences, seems remarkable for its loyalty to the Jewish religion, and at the same time its rejection of the pagan gods of Greece and Rome.

    However, the planets continue to influence our age.

    The Protestant Reformation

    It is possible that the Protestant Reformation unwittingly opened the floodgates to aspects of the Age of Pisces that had previously been suppressed by the Roman Church.

     

    1. Peter Brooke, Albert Gleizes: For and Against the Twentieth Century. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2001. ↩︎
    2. Edward Moor, The Hindu Pantheon. J. Johnson, St. Paul’s Church-Yard, London, 1810. ↩︎

  • Can We Talk About Patriarchy?

    It’s time to explain my general approach—again. I’ve been rethinking it due to the new developments in this conversation—for example our inclusion of Pope Francis—or maybe I should say his inclusion of us—and my support of a candidate in this presidential election. In the case of the election, I’ve wanted to avoid confusing my opinions with Senator Sanders’s platform. In the case of the Catholic Church I’ve become aware that there are many among us who don’t understand its relevance to the American conversation. But I haven’t given up on women’s rights. The unspoken question remains, can we talk about patriarchy?

    I’ll begin by explaining why I think Americans are fortunate to be invited into the Church’s conversation. I will end with a mention of Plato and his effect on both the Church and women.

    The Church Can Enrich the Conversation

    I’ve already mentioned the biography of Albert Gleizes. After much study and thought I’ve come to the conclusion that without the presence of the French Church and especially its priests, this story wouldn’t have been so rich and meaningful. Of course the same can be said of the artists and writers.

    The priests didn’t lead this conversation—they were a natural part of it because of their closeness to their communities and their interest in the art and culture of those communities. They listened, they invited the artists to teach in a church setting, and they commissioned work. Since reading about this process, the entire French conversation has had a hallowed place in my imagination. Sadly, that world is gone now. It died in World War II. Many people fear that the pre-war confidence in a restoration of order died with the old world. But fortunately, the Church didn’t get the memo. It continued the conversation.

    Vatican II

    “In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War there was a widespread desire within the Roman Catholic Church for a change in the way in which the Church was presented to the world—a desire for greater openness and ‘relevance’ to the conditions of modern life. Its most radical expression in France was the ‘worker-priest movement—the movement of priests who, acutely aware of the divorce of working-class life from the Church, became workers, as indistinguishable as possible from their fellow workers, often actively engaged in the political struggles of the class led by the Communist Party.

    “In art, the post-war period was characterized by a willingness to use well-known, sometimes controversial, artists, giving them considerable freedom, regardless of their own religious beliefs. The two names most prominently associated with this tendency were Fathers Marie-Alain Courturier and Pie Raymond Régamey, both Dominicans. They were to be behind the church at Assy, in the Haute Savoie, built between 1948 and 1950, with work by Léger, Lurçat, Matisse, Chagall, Bazaine and (especially controversial) a crucifix by Germaine Richier. They were also responsible for Matisse’s chapel—realized for the Dominicans—at Vence (1948-51), and for Le Corbusier’s church at Ronchamp (1955) and his Dominican priory at La Tourette (1960).” 1

    A Pattern for Dealing With Disagreement

    Previously I mentioned the theological disagreements that arose from Gleize’s adherence to Rene Guenon. However, it’s important to also mention that these disagreements didn’t end the interaction of Gleizes and the Church. Today, many people associate theology with the Inquisition. I’ve read their articles online.  While the the Inquisition was indefensible, some of the worst events in our history have been a result of getting the theology wrong, so I would argue that it’s a force that must be reckoned with. Whatever hope we have of building a new and better world, it will have to be built with an awareness of the relevance of theology, for better or for worse.

    Authoritarianism Always Finds a Way

    I can argue this another way. When I wrote about our Ayn Rand episode, I argued against her tendency to define her philosophical machinations as morality. I think it’s shocking that we were being fed the doctrines of Ayn Rand by financial institutions that have no concern for us.   Today there are many people slinging a new and improved world view and hoping to get followers. My point here is that none of our current ideas can be taken for granted simply on the claim of rationality or secularization. And if not for our cultural history I would have had no basis for my argument against Rand.

    The Exception of the American Catholic Church

    On a negative note, one concern I have is that the Catholic church takes on a different character depending on its setting and circumstances. I imagine the interwar period in France was a humble time for the Church, and I don’t know if the American Church shares any of the same characteristics, or if it ever did. Thanks to the U.S. bishops, our conversation with the Church has already had a some rude shocks. First we learned that the bishops believe it’s okay to risk the lives of mothers who trust Catholic hospitals to care for them. Second, there was a recent headline about a meeting between the U.S. Bishops and the Mormon Church to discuss shared concerns. Neither of these things increases my confidence in the bishops.

    America’s Use of the Occult in its Medical System

    Hermes in India convinced me that the Devil presides over the medical system. Therefore, I can’t take this news about hospital policies lightly.

    Can We Talk About Patriarchy?

    Here’s my suggestion for an approach to the discussion of patriarchy. One objection to patriarchy is its economics, which I call ‘trickle-up economics’. I would argue that greed was the original motivation for the denigration of women. As long as large amounts of unattached wealth exist in the world, as opposed to being owned by communities (and passed down through mothers), there will be an endless struggle for control of it. I’m sorry to say, Plato’s philosopher-king isn’t coming—just an endless stream of shady characters in expensive shoes. This is the aspect of patriarchy that has to end.

    But is a rejection of Plato the same thing as a rejection of the church’s theology, which depends on Greek thought? Not necessarily. Not unless economic inequality is more of a central tenet of our culture that I realize.  I think you have to look at the whole theological process rather than a single set of ideas from twenty-five hundred years ago.

  • Keeping the Art Conversation Real

    Thinking about the biography of Albert Gleizes has led me in a thousand directions, all of them relevant to current events. Where I get into trouble is in deciding what to talk about first. Sometimes I think the French art conversation is the place to start since it’s part of the larger political picture and since some of the factions that struggled with each other a hundred years ago are still with us. However it is not my intention to promote any one faction. My goals include gaining a better understanding of what was being said, and illustrating its relevance to the United States. That is, to people in the United States that aren’t already part of an artistic elite.  I’m not aiming for a paternalistic art conversation, but a conversation that is capable of preparing everyone to participate, even if it takes several generations.  I’ve finally decided that maybe the best way to begin is to make a list of related topics. If any of you have expertise in any part of this list, please don’t wait for me—go ahead and write about it.

    1. The politics behind the rivalry of Pablo Picasso and Albert Gleizes

    2. The crucial difference between Gleizes and Picasso as explained by the
    theories of Jacques Maritain

    3. The place of the occult in art

    4. The doctrine of Personalism as it applies to The Self, to art and to the
    occult

    5. The relationship between theology and art in the West and the Orient

    6. French influence in Germany and Russia before the world wars

    7. The occult revival in Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall

    8. The devil and the problem of evil in Western culture

    9. Differing views of reality as represented by Albert Gleizes and the
    Catholic Church

    10. Picasso as mage

  • What Does Theology Have to do with Life?

    There is an old conversation about art that took place in early twentieth century France. The important question that I derived from that conversation is What does theology have to do with life? In contrast to such questions, I find our current conversation rather depressing. 

    Theology and Art

    French cubist Albert Gleizes ventured into Christian theology to the dismay of his Catholic friends. Gleizes, a convert to the Catholic Church, unwittingly brought up an old debate pitting St. Augustine against Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Gleizes argued that the ascendence of Aristotle and Aquinas in the 12th century had been detrimental to Christian art. In this he was influenced by René Guénon. 2 We will see that it may not have been entirely unwitting on Gleizes’s part. 

    I don’t have a position on this debate but I’m more sympathetic to Gleize’s Catholic friends. I have my doubts about the influence of Rene Guénon, as they did. But how did the Catholic Church get involved in this debate?

    The Worker Priest Movement

    After the Second World War, many in the Catholic Church wanted to change the way the Church was presented to the world. They also desired greater openness and relevance to the conditions of modern life. The ‘worker priest’ movement in France was the most radical expression of this desire. The priests in this movement often engaged in the political struggles of the class led by the Communist Party.

    In art, they were willing to use well-known sometimes controversial artists, and these artists were given considerable freedom, regardless of their religious beliefs. Fathers Marie-Alain Courtier and Pie Raymond Régamey were the two most prominent names associated with this movement. They were both Dominicans. 

    Jacques Maritain

    Jacques Maritain had already worked out a theory of modern art based on the teachings of Thomas Aquinas. In his Art et Scolastique, he argued that in the Middle Ages the artist and the theologian worked together. The artist had represented beauty and the theologian had represented truth. However, the Renaissance set the artist free from the theologian. This sent him out on his own to search after beauty in its own right, independent of theological truth. 

    According to Maritain, there is a clear distinction between beauty and truth. Beauty is still a ‘transcendental’ and belongs to the divine order. However, under the utilitarian mindset, the artist longs for beauty as an absolute end in itself. In this way, he has become as superfluous and ridiculous as the theologian or saint.

     Baudelaire

    In the nineteenth century Baudelaire tried to reassert the transcendental nature of his art. In Maritain’s telling, Baudelaire shared common ground with a wide range of artists, especially those interested in religious art. A painted figure should look like a painted figure and not like a real figure. It is deceitful for a painting to give the illusion of nature. 

    This view was shared by many schools of art in Europe and Britain in Baudelaire’s time. It could even have been written by Albert Gleizes, especially before 1920. However, Maritain continued with what was probably a criticism of Gleizes’s and Metzinger’s du ‘Cubisme’. 

    Does Cubism in our day, despite its tremendous deficiencies, represent the still stumbling, screaming childhood of an art once more pure? The barbarous dogmatism of its theorists compels the strongest doubts and an apprehension that the new school may be endeavouring to set itself absolutely free from naturalist imitation only to become immoveably fixed in stultae quaestiones…(as quoted by Brooke p, 246)

    Thomas took ‘Stultae quaestiones’ from Paul’s Epistle to Titus 3:9. They are questions that ‘if raised in any science or discipline, would run contrary to the first conditions implied by that very same discipline.’ 

    The Dominicans would raise the same objection against Gleizes in the late 1940s. They would say he was bothering his head with questions that did not concern him and should be left to professional philosophers and theologians. 

    For Gleizes’s part the mistrust was mutual. In his view, the Dominicans would take the easy road of the urban university, ‘where Aristotle’s philosophy rules supreme’. The ‘real door’ will open on the order of St Benedict, exclusively theological. 

    Gleizes believed that Thomas was of the thirteenth century, the period when the theological view of the world associated with the Benedictines was giving way to a more intellectual and philosophical view of the world, associated with the Dominicans. 

    What Does Theology Have to do With Life?

    How are we to understand the relationship between theology and the physical world? Traditionalists such as Guenon believe the physical world should be organized according to the theology of a past historical era. Guenon, his disciple Albert Gleizes, and their followers, believed the modern age had caused a deviation that can be seen in art and architecture, and that the world must return to that past way of thinking. However, there were disagreements even among the Traditionalists.

    Rene Guenon dated the modern deviation from the beginning of the fourteenth century while Albert Gleizes traced it back a century earlier. According to Peter Brooke this indicates a ‘profound difference in approach’. 

    Between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a play of lines and colours that put the eye in movement had given way to a play of lines and colours that evoke the appearances of the natural world. The folds of the garments in the paintings and sculptures which had been organised in such a way as to contribute to the unifying rythm of the whole painted or sculpted area became an imitation of the folds of the garments agitated by the wind or evoking the shape of the body underneath. For Geizes this change was much more fundamental than any change in intellectual ideas. (But) For Guenon, the intellectual idea, the metaphysical structure, was the foundation stone of all the rest. Thus it is sufficient that a correct understanding of his traditional doctrine is conveyed in the symbols and numerical proportions used by the artists. For Gleizes by contrast, it is the ‘cast of mind’ that counts, and this is expressed at a much more fundamental level in the act of the artist than in anything – symbolism, metaphysical argument or whatever – that can be expressed in words. (Brooke p. 254)

    There had previously been a rupture between Gleize and his friends Dom Angelico Surchamp and Robert Pouyaud over the question of the similarities or lack thereof between Gleizes and Guenon. There had also been a post-war disagreement between Gleizes and Père Raymond Régamey. These arguments are quite complex, but a brief mention is necessary in order to have some idea of the schools of thought.

    The Art Journal, Art Sacré

    Régamey and Couturier ran the art journal, Art Sacré. (It had been founded in 1935 as Cahiers de l’ art sacré.) In June 1945, Gleizes submitted an article to the journal, L’arc en ciel,cle de l’art Chretien Medieval.

    Régamey answered politely but declined to publish it. He specifically objected to one of Gleizes’s ideas. He said he agreed with Gleizes’s statement that experience is an intimate participation with the living object, and observation is a distant, subjective appreciation. However, he disagreed that everything produced with the combination proposed by observation is damned.

    In a lecture in Brussels in 1947, Régamey was more critical, and he included Gleizes, Bazaine, and Manessier in his critique.

    A Doctrine of Two Kingdoms

    Subsequently Gleizes wrote what seemed to be a challenge to Régamey’s program. He spoke of a ‘doctrine of two kingdoms–the kingdom of this world and the kingdom that is not of this world.

    Brooke interprets this to mean that Gleizes has abandoned all hope in the establishment of a spiritual authority on earth.

    For Gleizes, the kingdom of this world is the kingdom of space and time. The kingdom that is not of this world is the kingdom of eternity. The ambition of the Christian is supposedly to bring the two into harmony. But Gleizes believes the disharmony between them is total. Harmony can only be achieved with the reestablishment of a religious state of mind.

    Furthermore, Gleizes’s piece in Art Sacré implied that the Church is implicated in the general deviation. The Church’s own idea of itself is wrong according to Gleizes, and it must die to be reborn.

    This comment reminded Brooke of the annoyance of Père Jérôme when Gleizes told him ‘the whole of theology has to be taken up again’.

    Régamey Started to Question Whether Gleizes Was a Christian

    One reason for Régamey’s hostility to Gleizes was his suspicion that Gleizes was not a Christian (Brooke p. 253). He had begun to think the ‘tradition’ which Gleizes hoped to renew was the ‘tradition’ of Rene Guenon.

    Guenon’s tradition was a metaphysical system of thought which was the real foundation behind all the major religions. In this view, the system is transmitted from one generation to the next through a secret process of initiation. The question of Gleizes’s allegiance to Guenon led to a ‘serious rupture’ among Gleizes’s followers.

    Gleizes’s Ideas of Society and Culture Were Typically Right-Wing

    Gleizes appreciated Guenon’s critique of modern civilization in his Crise du monde moderne, and Orient et occident. They both believed society was at the end of a short period of religious chaos and heading for destruction. The task of those who were aware of the situation was to rediscover and reaffirm the principles on which a new religious culture could evolve.

    Gleizes Knew What He Was Doing

    Gleizes knew he was renewing the old case made by the Augustinians against Aquinas. Over time, his friends and Church allies were shut out. Some of the themes that came up repeatedly in the debates with Père Jérôme and others were Gleizes’s distrust of Thomism, his insistence on a cyclical view of history, his sympathy for Guenon, and a tendency to emphasize the universal reality of Christ rather than the historical individual (p. 223).

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