Black Renaissance: St. Orpheus Breviary Vol. II

Black Renaissance the second volume of the St. Orpheus Breviary is the continuation of Miklos Szentkuthys synthesis of 2000 years of European culture. St. Orpheus is Szentkuthys Virgil an omniscient poet who guides us not through hell but through all of recorded history myth religion and literature albeit reimagined as St. Orpheus metamorphosizes himself into kings popes saints tyrants and artists. At once pagan and Christian Greek and Hebrew Asian and European St. Orpheus is a mosaic of history and mankind in one supra-person and veil an endless series of masks and personae humanity in its protean futural shape an always changing function of discourse text myth & mentalite. Through St. Orpheus method disparate moments of history become synchronic are juggled to reveal paradoxically their mutual difference and essential similarity. Orpheus wandering in the infernal regions says Szentkuthy is the perennial symbol of the mind lost amid the enigmas of reality. The aim of the work is on the one hand to represent the reality of history with the utmost possible precision and on the other to show through the mutations of the European spirit all the uncertainties of contemplative man the transiency of emotions and the sterility of philosophical systems.In Black Renaissance the dramatic scenes and philosophical passages (never a fog of abstractions more the world and tone of Nietzsches Zarathustra) parade before the reader ostensibly as three characters by way of three Orphean masks: Renaissance and baroque composer Claudio Monteverdi architect and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi and a tutor to the young Elizabeth Tudor. From Monteverdis impassioned search for an opera subject in the works of Tacitus to his meditations on divinities to Brunelleschis diving into the works of Herodotus so as to illustrate Greek history Szentkuthy veers through the Renaissance sounding a pessimistic basso continuo on psychology sin metaphysics truth and relativism. Through Orpheus final mask that of the tutor of Elizabeth it is eros and theology two of Szentkuthys fundamental concerns that receive yet another complex and engrossing dramatization. Metaphysics Rationalism and existentialist despair all spin through the author-narrators kaleidoscope as he closes his Black Renaissance by discoursing on the Revelation of St. John the Divine. A thousand attempts at defining physical and spiritual heavenly and earthly love all fail.