Christ of Revolution and of Poetry

'Not from a monstrance silver-wrought
But from the tree of human pain
Redeem our sterile misery,
Christ of Revolution and of Poetry,
That man’s long journey
May not have been in vain.'

David Gascoyne

'The Spirit is flesh, I tell you
and God himself is eau de vie,
he who has joined him knows this,
he who has sipped is drunk of it.'

Benjamin Fondane

'Despair has wings
Love has despair
For shimmering wing
Societies can change'

Pierre Jean Jouve

“ The poet's job is to go on holding on to something like faith, through the darkness of total lack of faith ... the eclipse of God. - David Gascoyne ”

Gascoyne's biographer Richard Fraser writes that 'Nominally he remained an Anglican, but he had read and suffered his own way to religious understanding through an encounter with Christian Existentialism in the persons of Fondane and Chestov, and the pervasive influences of Kierkegaard and Heidegger.' Poems 1937-42, marked a shift in Gascoyne's work towards a more explicitly religious sensibility and Fraser suggests that 'The religious verse will probably outlast the earlier stuff because it addresses permanent questions.'

Niall McDevitt writes that 'Gascoyne’s Christianity is that of Blake, of Coppe, of the millenarians and Gnostics. ‘Christ of Revolution and of Poetry’ is the startling refrain. One really doesn’t get better crucifixion poems than this [Ecce Homo from the sequence Miserere]; it is the equal of a painting by an Old Master, yet it is updated to the Fascist era. The whole sequence Miserere is evidence of his religious existentialist quest, via friends such as Pierre Jean Jouve and Benjamin Fondane, as well as
the posthumously influential Kierkegaard.'

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David Gascoyne - Prelude to a New Fin-de-Siècle.

Searching for a post postmodern theology in art and literature

Interesting reflections on art and spirituality from David Jasper can be found here. Among those whose work is considered are Paul Celan, Le Corbusier, Ding Fang, Anselm Kiefer, Stanley Spencer and Bill Viola.

Some of these reflections recur in Jasper's The Sacred Community, part of a trilogy using art, literature and theology to explore themes of desert, body and community. In this book, Jasper draws upon a rich variety of texts and images from literature, art, and religious tradition to explore the liturgical community gathered around - and most fully constituted by - the moment of the Sanctus in the Eucharistic liturgy.

Jasper has written of the series that, with:

"The Sacred Desert ... my research has ranged from some of the earliest of Christian theologians - the Fathers of the desert such as St. Anthony - to writers on the 'deserts' of the modern world, both geographical and interior ... I have worked with art historians and artists including the prominent video artist Bill Viola, whose installations capture both the fertility of the desert for the human spirit, and the desolations of the desert of the modern cityscape. My work now continues this project, exploring the aesthetics of asceticism in the Christian tradition and in art and literature.

One colleague has described my work as a search for a post postmodern theology. I am concerned to ask where we might begin to find and articulate a theology as the Christian churches and their traditions in the West at least fall into decay. The canvas of my thought is therefore broad and eclectic, from medieval mystics like Meister Eckhart to contemporary radical theologians like Thomas J J Altizer. I have learnt much from the great 'desert' texts of the twentieth century in various disciplines - from Karl Barth's Römerbrief and Heidegger's Sein und Zeit to T S Eliot's Wasteland and Arnold Schoenberg's unfinished opera Moses und Aron. My work is therefore deeply interdisciplinary though at the same time thoroughly theological, asking questions in the spaces and interstices between disciplines and ideas. The aim is to write a new kind of (un) systematic theology."

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Arnold Schoenberg - Moses und Aron.