Vladimir Vladimirovic Abrikosov, the future husband and cousin of the central personality of this article, was born on 22 October 1880. When his schooling was finished, he entered the faculty of History and Philology of Moscow University, where he wrote a dissertation on the causes of the Western Reformation. In years to come he would deplore the manner of his historical studies as formalistic, lacking in attentiveness to history’s significance. A constellation of attitudes by no means uncommon among educated Russians liberal families of the period. In 1904 Abrikosov married a cousin two years his junior. Anna Ivanovna Abrikosova was born on 23 January 1882. She attended the first gimnaziya (high school) to be opened in Moscow for the education of girls, and in 1899 won a scholarship to Girton College Cambridge. There she read history, assiduously, earning from her contemporaries the nickname ‘Deadly Earnest’. She was a gifted linguist with an excellent grasp of English, French, German and Italian, as well as considerable knowledge of Greek and Latin.

The household of the newly-weds was free-thinking. God was neither affirmed nor denied. Politically they supported the current which would lead to the constitutional Revolution of 1905. Their inherited wealth enabled them to live a carefree life, devoted principally to European travel and the arts. Thus, with the exception of a single month in 1905, they spent the entire period from 1904 to 1910 in France, Italy and Switzerland.

Someone once said that death is a tragedy only when we know nothing about it. If this is true, then just how much do we know of death that to die would not be a tragedy? If we had some idea what it is like to die, would there be less fear in us? Would we be less scared at the prospect of it since it would not be a plunge into the unknown or a leap into the dark?

What is troubling about the moment of death, thereby causing much distress and anxiety, is that we all know that one day each of us will die; yet there is much uncertainty about death. Consequently, the thought of it grips our whole being, leaving us bewildered. Or could it be the parting with loved ones or perhaps leaving behind an unfinished task which makes death a sad and unwelcome moment? John Keat’s poem ‘Terror of Death’ certainly expresses the tragedy of being separated from loved ones or an uncompleted work. Maybe it is the fact that there is no turning back after—to use Alfred Tennyson’s words—one has ‘crossed the bar’ that terrifies. Dylan Thomas’s advice, therefore, is:

We are afraid that death may reveal our lives to have been a sham and it has rendered us powerless to change them.

It is difficult if not impossible to live hopefully the fulness of human life without men and women of vision. But the term ‘vision’ is, perhaps, too often carelessly used.

Vision is concerned with a better possible future. And it depends upon both imagination and creativity. Yet those who possess it, or are considered to possess it, must be inhabitants not only of what is possible, but also, and more importantly, reflective upon, sensitive to, critical and understanding of, their past and present. Indeed, it is their very rootedness in and conversation with both past and present which essentially ratifies any claim to vision. A paradox rests, therefore, in the fact that men and women of vision, though about a future, are only about that future because of their critical understanding of a past and a radical belongingness to and immersion in a present.

The woman and man of vision are, to be sure, creative and imaginative. But they are, more often than not, wholly unconscious of being people of vision. Dominic and Francis, for example, turned out to be men of vision not because they saw a new future, but heard the cry of a present demand and measured it against a past. For us, then, the men and women of history whom we perceive or name people of vision become ‘classical symbols’ in our understanding of and quest into the complicated and demanding questions of our own times.

Dr Gilbert Murray (1866—1957), one of the most distinguished academics of his time, was well known for his incisive criticisms of Christianity. His reconciliation to the Catholic Church shortly before his death stirred up quite a lot of controversy and the truth of it was even questioned. Canon John Crozier, who ministered to Murray during those weeks, feels he can now write a full account of how it happened.

The Aquinas Lecture at Blackfriars, Oxford, on ‘Worship and Theology’, was delivered by the Revd. Dr Maurice Wiles, the Regius Professor of Divinity in the University. In the course of it he touched on the agnostic’s prayer, so movingly described by Dr Anthony Kenny in his book The God of the Philosophers. Dr Kenny had written:

Calvary may not have been Fra Angelico’s favourite theme; Vasari records the pious tradition that ‘whenever he painted a Crucifixion the tears would stream down his face’. John Pope-Hennessy would not have us disregard the story simply because it has no contemporary sanction for, quoting William James, he reminds us that ‘many saints ... have possessed what the Church traditionally reveres as a special grace, the gift of tears.’

In the mid-1430s Fra Angelico painted a Crucifixion with Mary and Saints John and Dominic on the refectory wall at St. Dominic’s Priory, Fiesole, but from quite early in its life the fresco suffered from damp and was frequently restored. In 1879 it was photographed, detached from its wall, mounted on canvas and sold, ultimately to the Louvre. The taushaped cross stands some twelve feet high on its conventional mound and the inscription panel is attached to the top with a lath.

Angelico was to use this design more than once. The composition is built on an upright rectangle whose top is the horizontal beam of the cross, ABCD in Figure 1. Diagonals AC and BD intersect axes IG and EF at point H in the diagram, coinciding with the Saviour’s feet and linking the bystanders with the cross. Geometry, however, is only the basis of the plan, which is developed as a symmetrical rhythm in Figure 2.