Now available on Amazon: a new monograph:

The Abbey-Church of St. Foy

What, you might ask, could be more fun than a church—yes, a church—established by a bunch of criminal monks whose thieving habits led them to steal the almost certainly bogus relics of several different saints in order to attract attention, notoriety, and, above all, visitors and cash flow?

The contradiction is difficult to top; but they did it anyway. Then, to top it all off, they decorated the front of their church with a spectacular tympanum, meant to represent the Last Judgment and the sorting out of souls between heaven and hell. Not exactly the kind of decor that you would want over your head every time you walked into worship if you were, say, a thief.

Yet there it is.

Despite the rather bizarre circumstances that led to the creation of this church, it’s a masterpiece of Romanesque art, and the money, time, thought, and religious insight that went into its creation incorporates more than a bit of the rich symbolic tradition, both inner and outer, that characterizes art of this period.

The monks, it turns out, weren’t just thieves—they were geniuses. This monograph explores the tympanum at Conques with an eye to revealing some of the extraordinarily sophisticated psychospiritual observations encoded in its superficially obvious imagery.




May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.