Leonard Cohen’s Dark Faith

Leonard Cohen was, and remains, an enigmatic figure. In his life, he toed an unsteady line between rockstar-dom and cerebral, ascetic hermitude. His work, a shockingly coherent alloy of influences from Blake and Wordsworth to the Beat poets to Zen Buddhism and Frankian antinomianism, is shot through with a brilliance that led Bob Dylan to call him the “number one songwriter of our time,” yet he is perhaps best remembered in the popular imagination as the guy who wrote that one Shrek song, “Hallelujah.” Cohen was notoriously polygynous, a man who, at thirteen, became a master of hypnosis so as to induce the family maid to remove all of her clothing. But later in life, he renounced sex to live as a celibate for seven years in a Zen Buddhist monastery where he became an ordained monk.