FROM THE DEVIL TO GOD

Welcome to the LITERARY FICTION of

FROM THE DEVIL TO GOD

by John O'Loughlin of Centretruths Digital Media

Links to the files of which follow the remarks below:–

This collection of short prose, written on and off during the winter of 1980-81, starts in a relatively literary fashion with the account of a clandestine visit of a masseuse to a priest who can no longer cope with his celibacy, and ends in a profoundly futuristic manner with an account of evolutionary progress towards a definitive Beyond, as envisaged by a radical philosopher, who regards his thinking as being beyond, though not necessarily above, everybody else. In between, there comes a fairly balanced alternation between fictional and philosophical subjects ... as we follow the voyeuristic pleasures and musings of a man covertly watching his wife getting dressed from the comfort of his early-morning bed; explore the evolutionary revelations of a de Chardinesque gnostic in the face of atheistic unbelief; witness the existentialist horror of a Mondrianesque ascetic, whose rural daytrip out of London with some friends proves to be more unsettling than he had first bargained for; and go beyond conventional concepts of the Millennium, as of Millennialism, with a revolutionary thinker who believes that only when, in general terms, human brains become artificially supported and sustained to a transcendent end will there be any prospect of heavenly salvation of a definitive order! – John O'Loughlin.

CONTENTS

THE TURNING POINT

CAUGHT UNAWARES

FROM THE DEVIL TO GOD

AN UNEXPECTED CRISIS

TO THE MILLENNIUM AND BEYOND

PERFECTION OUR GOAL

Other prose websites by the author include:–

A VISIT TO HELL

FALSE PRETENCES

POST-ATOMIC INTEGRITIES

TEXT LINKS

FROM THE DEVIL TO GOD (PDF-derived paperback version)

John O'Loughlin eBooks via Tripod

Centretruths eBooks via Wordpress

John O'Loughlin eBooks on Lulu

John O'Loughlin was born in Salthill, Galway, the Republic of Ireland, of Irish- and British-born parents in 1952. Following a parental split partly due to his mother's Aldershot origins (her father, a Presbyterian from Donegal, had served in the British Army), he was brought to England by his mother and ethnically-protective grandmother (who upon the premature death of her husband had initially returned to Ireland after a lengthy marital absence from Athenry) in the mid-50s and, having had the benefit of private tuition from a Catholic priest, subsequently attended St. Joseph's and St. George's RC schools in Aldershot, Hants, and, with an enforced change of denomination from Catholic to Protestant in consequence of having been sent to a children's home by his mother upon the death and repatriation of his grandmother, he went on to attend first Barrow Hedges Primary School in Carshalton Beeches, Surrey, and then Carshalton High School for Boys. Upon leaving the latter in pre-GCSE era 1970 with an assortment of CSEs (Certificate of Secondary Education) and GCEs (General Certificate of Education), including history and music, he moved to London and went on, via two short-lived jobs, to work at the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in Bedford Square, where, with some prior experience himself of having sat and passed (with merit) an ABRSM Gd.4 piano exam, he eventually became responsible for booking examination venues throughout Britain and Ireland. After a brief flirtation with further education at Redhill Technical College back in Surrey, where he had enrolled to study English and History, he returned to his former job in the West End but, due to a combination of personal factors, left the Associated Board in 1976 and began to pursue a literary vocation which, despite a brief spell as a computer tutor at Hornsey Management Agency (affiliated to Hornsey YMCA) in the late '80s and early '90s, he has steadfastly continued with ever since. His novels include Changing Worlds (1976), An Interview Reviewed (1979), Secret Exchanges (1980), Sublimated Relations (1981), and Deceptive Motives (1981). Since the mid-80s John O'Loughlin has dedicated himself almost exclusively to philosophy, which he regards as his true literary vocation, and has penned several titles of a philosophical nature, including Devil and God (1985–6), Towards the Supernoumenon (1987), Elemental Spectra (1988–9), Philosophical Truth (1991–2) and, more recently, The Best of All Possible Worlds (2008), The Centre of Truth (2009), Insane but not Mad (2011) and Philosophic Flights of Poetic Fancy (2012).