Via Crucis
I remember standing in the much-regretted Cambridge Music Shop in All Saints Passage well over thirty years ago listening to a magnificent recording of Stephen Hough playing Liszt’s Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude. Transported, I bought the disc. Liszt’s sacred, contemplative piano works have accompanied me for decades, then; but I’d never heard his Via Crucis until I came across Leif Ove Andsnes’s newly released album. The pared-down, serene essentiality of this music is astounding. Often enough it does not sound like Liszt at all – yet it is, an expression of the later stage of the composer’s life: he was 68, and a cleric in minor orders, when the work was completed. Liszt’s Via Crucis was first performed in Budapest on Good Friday in 1929. I put it on today after celebrating the solemn Commemoration of the Passion. I listened with reverence, consoled.
Martin Pollack
A note in the FAZ this week made me conscious of the legacy of the Austrian historian and Polonist Martin Pollack. I was struck by the way he predicted, a decade ago, much of today’s European political reality, an outcome almost bound to follow, he maintained, if we stayed hellbent on making decisions based on an ‘unhappy mixture of arrogance and ignorance’. I read Christoph Ransmayr’s noble obituary of Pollack from January this year. Then two long drives gave me time to listen to some of Pollack’s lectures and public conversations: a fascinating one on the ‘Myth of Galicia‘; another on living with ‘The Long Shadow of a Sinister Past‘; a lively interview with Markus Müller-Schinwald; and a podium discussion with Timothy Snyder on the ‘East-Europeanisation of politics‘ (the last two items are in German). Though my acquaintance is recent, this exposure to Pollacks’ learned, humane perspective makes me appreciate what Paul Ingendaay meant when he wrote: ‘We’d have a pressing need for courage like his here and now.’
Light Tills the Ground
El Greco’s View of Toledo has occupied me for quite a while, but I had seen it only in reproductions and on the internet. When last week I found myself, amazed, in the Met’s Fifth Avenue gallery before the actual canvas, I was stirred by the sheer power of it. Rilke saw the painting in Paris in 1908, and wrote to Rodin, whose secretary he was, describing how ‘splintered light tills the ground, turning it over, tearing into it and bringing up here and there pale green meadows behind the trees standing like insomniacs.’ It is wonderful that a work of art can, in this way, enable a community of response, enabling a peal of thunder that resounded over a Spanish countryside well over 400 years ago to give us goosebumps still.
Nugax
At Lauds today, the Church gives us this prayer among the intercessions: ‘Libera nos a malo nosque a fascinatione nugacitatis, quae bona obscurat, defende’. The English breviary translates, ‘Set us free from all evil; show us in the confusion of our lives the things that really matter’. That is woefully inadequate. The phrase ‘fascinatio nugacitatis’ occurs in the Vulgate translation of Wisdom 4.12 and has deeply marked Christian consciousness. In Latin, ‘nugax’ refers to something (or someone) that is trifling or frivolous. Lewis and Short render ‘nugacitas’ as ‘drollery’. The nugacious tendency draws us away from earnestness, from engagement. It distracts us, persuades us that nothing really matters much. It seduces us with entertainment and prospects of immediate satisfaction. It seems innocent but in reality, as the prayer says, it ‘obscures the good’. It subverts the very categories of good and evil. It is ultimately joyless. ‘Nugacitas’ sums up contemporary pop culture in a nutshell. It is beneficially countercultural to pray to be ‘defended’ from it. We are called to be mindful of essential boundaries. A fragment by Pascal reads: ‘Fascinatio nugacitatis. That passion may not harm us, let us act as if we had only eight days to live.’
Freedom & Constraint
Offering Mass this morning, I was struck by the offertory prayer: ‘Be pleased, O Lord, we pray, with these oblations you receive from our hands, and, even when our wills are defiant, constrain them mercifully to turn to you.’ We recoil at the notion of anything, even divine agency, constraining our will; yet at the same time we ascertain that our spontaneous will does not necessarily serve our thriving. It can even happen that our will is divided against itself: ‘For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do’ (Romans 7.19). To ask God, the supremely Beloved, freely to constrain my will is to step outside the constraints of subjective unfreedom manifest in dictates of unfree, perhaps disordered preference, thereby to learn to love.
Order
In an article in The New Statesman this week Bruno Maçães reflects on the tendency in global politics to break structures down for destruction’s sake or, at most, to engender a tabula rasa for an imagined brave new world. What has happened to the principle of order in public discourse? ‘The idea of order’, he writes, ‘is a valuable one because it expands the mind. It forces us to step outside our own perspective, to look for balance and impartiality in a broader horizon where others have their place too.’ The trouble is that now ‘there seems to be no order worth preserving’. The assumption is widespread. It accounts for much anxiety, much anger. Even the most casual grasp of history shows that such an assumption cannot sustain society. It fragments, disorders. Catholic theology has the valuable concept of tranquillitas ordinis enunciating an aspiration to concord, the communion of intelligent hearts. It’s time to blow the dust off it, not just to propound it but to demonstrate it in micro-societies. Deafened as we are by inflated rhetoric, stunned by virtual fantasy, the real renewal of the polis will, based on sound concepts, be experiential.
Spirit of the Beehive
Victor Erice’s film The Spirit of the Beehive is older than I. Learned disquisitions have been written about it, essays situating it in a cultural, political context marked by the Spanish Civil War. Rarely have I been so haunted by a movie. Rarely have I seen one so carefully constructed with an attention at once analytical and poetic. Destinies and relationships play out within a collective, implicit wound. It cannot be spoken. The couple under whose roof the drama is enacted never exchange a word, simply call each other’s names as if blindly seeking each other in thick fog. The performance of the two young sisters is remarkable. There is a disturbing scene with a cat suggesting that a legacy of violence, though silenced, breeds violence even in the innocent. The bees moving up and down in a closed environment with not a fragment of pollen to be found know not the futility to which they are condemned. This is a film to make one wise, or at least a little wiser.
Bruckner
There’s a sequence in the recording of Celibidache’s rehearsal for his 1992 performance of Bruckner’s Seventh with the Berlin Philharmonic in which the maestro three times shouts, ‘Viola!’ as if his life, no, as if the structure of the universe depended on it. Bruckner’s music does call for careful balance. This very equilibrium, and Bruckner’s habit of working in repeated patterns, can make it difficult to listen to recordings – at least that is what I find. But to hear Bruckner live! One is transported into a beneficent universe, conscious of a richness of sound as elaborate, often as daring, as Wagner’s or Mahler’s, yet ordered and put to a high purpose. Stepping back onto the pavement this evening after hearing a compelling account of Bruckner’s Third I was filled with peaceful happiness. I felt as if I were somehow emerging from a liturgical act, moved to give thanks.
Europa
Some years ago, visiting the library of the Strahov Monastery in Prague, I saw this image and photographed it. I noted neither its provenance nor date, but think of it often enough. Many of us would have cause to quarrel with details of physiognomy and with the relative provenance of certain named limbs: for one thing, Scandinavia, like Britain and Ireland, is literally disembodied.
Be that as it may. What matters is the fact that one could once imaginatively figure Europe as one body defined by subtle and elegant interdependencies. Time and again our continent has torn itself to pieces, indulging in fratricidal wars. Yet the dream of wholeness remains, sufficiently strong to be realised at privileged times.
Will ours be one such?
Wintry Hope
This morning after Mass at the Carmel in Tromsø, the nuns gave me these three Christmas roses picked from underneath the snow in their enclosure garden. These hardy, stubborn, really quite subversive flowers represent in miniature the astonishing capacity nature has to rejuvenate itself, carrying even in hibernation and apparent death the seed of new life that no climatic harshness, no human folly can obliterate. At a time when the world as such seems wintry, this parable nurtures hope and new serenity. In the splendid imagination of Selma Lagerlöf, the Christmas rose is a sign that heavenly graciousness and earthly joy can bud where the naked eye sees only soil drenched in iniquity. May it be so.
A Topical Letter
On 27 November George Weigel published an open letter to JD Vance. It is worth re-reading now. Weigel, ‘speaking as one Catholic and one patriot to another’ wrote: ‘If our country is to experience a new birth of freedom rightly understood, it will be in part because our leaders remind us of what Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature,” rather than salting the wounds of our animosities.’ He then said: ‘It is unworthy of a serious American public official to say that he or she really doesn’t care what happens to Ukraine. Why? Because crass indifference to injustice and suffering is ignoble. And because what happens in Ukraine is directly related to our national security and to world peace.’
You can find the complete text here.
Boléro
A careful reader of Chastity, noting in particular the section suggesting that ‘perhaps no form of concrete human enterprise grants a premonition of the body’s possible ascent towards transcendent beauty more clearly than dance’, recently sent me a ‘footnote’ remarking on ‘Torvill and Dean dancing on ice to Ravel’s Bolero at the 1984 ice-skating world championships, when they gained perfect marks from all the judges, an unheard-of achievement. Art, through discipline and music, sets the body free and lifts those present to heaven, don’t you think?’ I do, but didn’t know this performance, so sought it on the Olympic Channel. It is jaw-dropping and wonderful. Watch it here.
Charles V
The resignation of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, in 1556 is the stuff of myths. He, one of the modern world’s most powerful rulers, withdrew to the monastery of Yuste in Extramadura, where he hunted and fished and rode his horse practically into his apartment, yet lived a retired, penitent, prayerful life, with a view onto the Hieronymite monks’ high altar from his bedroom. The mere idea that absolute power might in fact be relative, subject to a higher good and a higher aspiration, challenges us – and is a salutary subject for reflection in the world right now. August von Platen-Hallermünde wrote in a poem dramatising Charles’s retirement: ‘The head that stoops unto the scissors now/Under the weight of many crowns did bow.’ The tonsuring may be a legend. The image remains pertinently real, immortal. The German text is here.
Countering Blandness
‘It’s rare for me to hold a fashionable position’, writes Tracey Rowland disarmingly, only to remark that she is delighted to be in the company of (other) various high-profile people ‘who all recommend making Christianity “weird” again’. At stake is the collectively dawning realisation that the cause of faith is not served – has it ever really been? – by a pastoral strategy set to correlate it to the culture of modernity. It is time to insist, again, on the difference Catholic Christianity makes hermeneutically, ontologically, ethically, aesthetically. Rowland concludes: ‘The penetration of the natural by the supernatural is not banal, is not boring, is not a matter of bourgeois conformism. For the Catholic it’s beatific and for the unbeliever fascinatingly weird and different—and it’s what we need now as an alternative to a bland materialist cosmology.’ It is worth reading the whole piece, which you can find here.
Where Are You?
The lectionary for today gives us the reading from Genesis 3 about God confronting man after the Fall. Having disobeyed God’s command, Adam hides among the trees, covering himself with stuff. Created to look towards God and to be sustained by that gaze, he cannot any more bear to be seen. His hiding is a spontaneous response, not the result of divine condemnation. An ancient Midrash explains that God’s question, ‘Where are you?’, was asked out of consideration for Adam, to afford him time to recover his self-possession. God, the omniscient, needed no information about Adam’s whereabouts. We can draw a lesson from this. The question, ‘Where are you?’, is, according to the nineteenth-century exegete August Dillmann, ‘the call that, after every sin, resounds in the ears of every man who seeks to deceive himself and others concerning his sin.’ Am I still sensitive to that question, to the extent of my estrangement from God, from myself?
Alphabetisation
The blood brothers Cyril and Methodius are examples of missionary zeal. They left their homeland to witness abroad to the newness of life in Christ. They displayed the Christian virtues to a heroic degree. They also served the cause of culture. We still call the alphabet used by the Eastern Slavs ‘Cyrillic’ after St Cyril, a brilliant linguist. You might say that the cultural impact was incidental. Cyril’s concern was to find a way to codify liturgical texts and to write up a translation of Scripture. But these sources became the foundation of culture. In the West today we lack a common language. Our society is atomised. We struggle to talk with one another, so violence erupts. Let us not underestimate the task of alphabetisation which pertains to us, as Christians, today. We have the only adequate tool. Christ, the Word of God, in whose image we were made, is not only Alpha and Omega, but all the letters in between. In him we find what it takes to make sense of ourselves and of the lives we live.
Pietas
‘For if the dark places of the earth have always been full of the habitations of cruelty, there has always been a spring of mercy in mankind. The Roman virtue of pietas is the strong root from which our pity, in every sense, derives. Religion has had its own savageries: yet even the arbitrary Godhead of the Book of Job was concerned for the young ravens wandering from the nest for lack of meat, and it was Christ’s claim that a huddle of feathers on the ground was not unregarded by the Father of mankind. “With Christ”, said Sulpicius Severus, “every brute beast is wise, and every savage creature gentle”: and St Kevin refused the levelling of the mountain about Glendalough to make his monks rich pasture, because he would not have God’s creatures disturbed for him. In the first paradise that lies behind the memory of the world, there was no cruelty: and when Isaiah, sick of war, made his poem of the golden world, the climax-vision was a holy mountain where “they shall not hurt or destroy”.’ It is good to be reminded.
Stone Ready
Lucas Cranach’s Christ and the Adulteress is a formal representation of the scene from John 8 with the various participants tidily lined up as for a graduation photograph. The structural formality belies an extraordinarily rich range of character studies. I am struck by this man, lustfully ready with a hatful of stones to throw at the woman denounced, with a sharp-edged one set in his right hand. He is clearly more than happy to be the first to step forward; he will not have been among the first to go away (8.9). The stupidity of judgemental vengefulness, the deformity wrought by this passion, is written on his features, which stand out in contrast to those of the venerable white-bearded elder at his left elbow whose hand is raised in a gesture of caution. Is there a trace of such violence in my heart? Cranach’s study lends itself as an aid to examination of conscience.
Seeing Light
Enjoying a free morning in Stockholm on the way home from pilgrimage, I saw a poster advertising an exhibition of works by Lars Lerin at Konstakademien. I went. I am glad I did. To stand before one of Lerin’s canvases is to begin to learn what it is to see the world with an illumined eye, with gentleness. Many of his paintings are from the North of Norway. He once wrote: ‘It seems like a waste of a life to live anywhere other than in the Lofoten Islands. If possible, I am even happier here in winter snow and darkness than when exposed to the sun’s x-rays. During the dark season, when the sun never rises above the horizon, the bright points of life acquire special significance.’ He shows us how, as in this jubilant representation of the harbour in Henningsvær – and even in paintings of the interiors of fisheries.
A Saint for Our Times
‘Who is Father Tansi?’, asks Cardinal Francis Arinze in the preface to his 2015 book Total Response: Personal Memories of Blessed Iwene Tansi, before going on to describe him as ‘a man never settling down to half-measures, dissimulation, pride or love of convenience, but always self-mortified and ready to put his whole heart and person into what he was doing’. On our pilgrimage to Rome last week, we had the privilege of hearing the cardinal speak to us about this man, a remarkably effective, greatly esteemed Nigerian priest who became a monk of my community of Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in 1950, and was beatified by St John Paul II in 1998. You can listen to Cardinal Arinze’s talk here. You may also be interested in this homily about him, preached at Gethsemani in 2022.
Turtles
The Norwegian pilgrimage to Rome is a source of many joys. You can find pictures and videos here. It is an immense gift for us to have this time together – and with groups from the other Nordic Countries. Though still fairly quiet, Rome is abuzz with jubilee exhilaration. The city has accomplished remarkable feats, including the splendid new pedestrian area between Castel Sant’Angelo and the Via della Conciliazione. In the midst of all this movement, though, I keep thinking of a scene observed in the Vatican Gardens on Wednesday: a turtle arrested in quiet contemplation of its fellows rather alarmingly suspended in an ancient freeze – a kind of reptiles’ memento mori, a reflection on transience. Generations of Vatican turtles have seen pilgrims, movements, and fads come and go, remaining meanwhile unfussily faithful to their fountain. There’s a lesson in that somewhere, a lesson in proportion and perspective.
Munch on the Move
Descending on Rome these days is not only a large group of Norwegian pilgrims, but Edvard Munch. It gave me delight to see this sign as I walked down the Via Panisperna earlier. A reproduction of Munch’s painting of three young women on a bridge was once found in virtually every Norwegian home. It was incongruous and wonderful to find the girls looking out, not unto a fjord but unto a Roman no-entry sign, casually observed by motorists. They looked at ease. Apart from personal nostalgia, the sight of this Northern motif in the ancient capital of the imperial South, advertising a show in the Palazzo in which Napoleon’s mother ended her days, inspired this thought in me: there is such a thing as Europe, whose boundaries are fluid, whose regional treasures complement each other, whose secret can only be perceived by those prepared to develop a horizon broad enough to take in the whole.
Dom Bernardo Bonowitz
On 19 January Dom Bernardo passed into eternity. His contribution to the monastic order was huge. A learned man, he has left writings that will endure. His vocational trajectory fascinates. His abbatial legacy continues to hear fruit. Above all, though, the course of his final years moves me to take off my shoes, conscious of being in the presence of Mystery. At Dom Bernardo’s funeral, Fr Isaac Slater said that ‘the symptom [of Lewy Body Dementia] he found most difficult was the “mutism” which left him unable to speak. More than once I saw him chatting away on the phone with a friend or loved one—conversations that brought him so much joy and encouragement— then just a few minutes later speechless and filled with dread. He was such a talker—a charmer, a storyteller, a comedian—that losing the ability to speak was especially painful. Once when he had said barely a word for maybe six or seven months, he indicated that he’d like me to read to him and selected Wordsworth’s Prelude. I started to read and paused after some time to see if he wanted me to continue. He gestured for me to read on and after about forty-five minutes, he began to speak. It was like a kind of miracle. He spoke for three hours touching on all that was most delicate and difficult in his condition.’ You can read Fr Isaac’s text in its entirety here.
Government
Not long ago I travelled through Chambéry and Annecy, places inextricably caught up with the name of St Francis de Sales and thereby imbued with sweetness. Looking through a life on this his feast day, I find myself pausing over a counsel he once gave to the superior of a community of nuns: ‘The most perfect government is that which most closely approximates to Providence. Providence is peaceful and tranquil in the midst of all that happens. Even at its most active it is not overwrought; it takes all things in hand.’ I think, too, of a letter he wrote in 1602 to the young Pierre de Bérulle, rather given to scruples. The bishop of Geneva told him kindly, ‘We shall ever be in need of having our feet washed, for we walk in the dust.’
Neobiotopathy
Having read the story of Caramel, an eight-year-old male cat living in an undisclosed location in France, diagnosed by his veterinary psychiatrist, Claude Béata, as suffering from neobiotopathy, that is, ‘suffering connected to newness in a cat’s environment’, I felt sympathy for the poor beast, of course. At the same time, knowing a thing or two about cats (though never having trained as a feline counsellor), I imagined Caramel miaowing disdainfully at his hebdomadosyllabic diagnosis. Fond as I am of animals, I wonder: is it not a commentary on the woeful failures of our attempt to enable peaceful, flourishing human coexistence that we are now drawn to pontificate instead on ‘the larger questions of multispecies society’? And is it not, in fact, an injustice to dogs and cats to imagine them as being like us, enclosing their mysterious perceptions into our pretentious nomenclatures?
