Description: Religion and Pastness examines the implications of the Augustinian concept of time as favoring a-causality over linear continuity. From this viewpoint the various essays address problems of dynamics and stasis in texts, paintings and music ranging from Augustine to Abelard, Eriugena, Thoreau, Calvin, Shakespeare, Rubens, Bach, Stravinsky, Messiaen, Virginia Woolf, Cavell.
Brief description: Babette Hellemans earned her PhD at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and Utrecht University. She is currently Assistant Professor in History at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Hellemans has published on historiographical and intellectual themes such as the anthropology of eschatology in Western medieval culture, including modern theories of temporality, semantics, and images. She is the author of La Bible Moralisée: une oeuvre à part entière. Temporalité, sémiotique et création au XIIIe siècle (Brepols 2010). At present she is completing a monograph, Peter Abelard (1079-1142) and the Varieties of the Self: An Intellectual Biography.
Review Quotes: This creatively eclectic volume launches a bold experiment in exploring what it might mean to take Augustine's aporetic and non-linear understanding of time and eternity seriously. The questions posed are simultaneously historiographical and literary, on the one hand, and philosophical and theological, on the other. In exploring the relation between religion and pastness, the authors shuttle backward and forward in time, traverse theological and religious differences, and consider works of music and painting alongside those of literature and philosophy. At their best, the essays are fresh, insightful, moving--and challenging.-----Virginia Burrus, Drew University