Old and New
Nini Roll Anker’s affectionate book My Friend Sigrid Undset (1946) contains the famous quip from 1915, to the effect that ‘at least the Roman Church has form; it does not appear insulting to one’s intelligence.’ ‘Poured out of the form of the Roman Church’, Undset told her friend, ‘all of Christianity seems to me like a failed, burst omelette.’
Less well known is this remark from 1920: ‘I have the sense that I am seeking my sea legs all alone in a world full of currents, and I long for a fixed point of reference that doesn’t alter or slide eel-like away; I long for the old Church on the rock, which has never claimed that a thing is good because it is new or good because it is old, but which, on the contrary, takes for its sacrament wine, which is at its best old, and bread, best fresh.’
