In His Totality
In a retreat talk given to the clergy of Tromsø this week, Sr Pauline Bürling OP reminded us of the example of Father Alfred Delp, executed by Hitler’s regime in 1945 at the age of 37 for his staunch, active resistance to Nazism. She cited the notorious public prosecutor Roland Freisler, who remarked to Delp’s friend Count von Moltke: ‘Christians and we national socialists have this in common: we make a claim to man in his totality.’
There is a categorical distinction, though. The claim of Christianity liberates, broadening human personhood immeasurably, enabling communion; whereas secular totalitarianisms restrict life, suffocating it in fearful isolation. It is good to be recalled to the stakes involved, to be reminded of courageous exemplars.
To Be Free
In a note posted yesterday, reflecting on a recent encounter with President Zelenskyi, Timothy Snyder develops what he calls ‘the Zelenskyi paradox’. It is his shorthand for the insight that ‘a free person can sometimes only do one thing. If we think of freedom as just our momentary impulses, then we can always try to run. But if we think of freedom as the state in which we can make our own moral choices and thereby create our own character, we might reach a point where, given who we have chosen to become, we have only one real choice. That was how Zelenskyi described his decision to stay in Kyiv: as not really a decision, but as the only thing he could have done and still remained true to himself. It was not only about defending freedom, although of course it was, but about remaining a free person.’ In fact this insight corresponds perfectly to Augustine’s, to which I regularly refer, that to be truly free is to have no choice to make, being fully configured to the good, true, and beautiful.
Evangelisation
From a press statement of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference: “Bishop Erik Varden OCSO (50), Bishop Prelate of Trondheim and Apostolic Administrator of Tromsø, was elected new president of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference. Bishop Raimo Goyarrola (55), bishop of Helsinki, was elected vice-president. Bishop David Tencer (61), bishop of Reykjavik, was re-elected as the third member of the Permanent Council. […] In a first statement Bishop Varden said: ‘The conference’s task is essential in order to nurture our endeavour of evangelisation through deep conversations and trustful friendship. The Catholic presence in our countries is growing. We want to accompany this growth intelligently and to support all good initiatives.’ He further stated: ‘Our post-secular society is opening itself anew to metaphysical questions and spiritual values. Many people are searching. Christ is and remains the light of the world, the goal of human existence! It is our responsibility to represent him credibly and faithfully’.”
Contemplation
The word ‘contemplation’ is currently on many lips. It is a good thing. Many aspire to attain deep prayer. They long to ‘see God’, which is an eminently Scriptural aspiration. How often, though, the spiritual quest is treated, even in manuals of prayer, as if it were distinct from the general demands of Christian discipleship. We need the realism of St Bernard in the text which the Church this morning lets us read at Vigils: ‘The first stage of contemplation is to consider constantly what God wants, what is pleasing to him, and what is acceptable in his eyes. We all offend in many things; our strength cannot match the rightness of God’s will and cannot be joined to it or made to fit with it. So let us humble ourselves under the powerful hand of the most high God and make an effort to show ourselves unworthy before his merciful gaze, saying Heal me, Lord, and I shall be healed; save me and I shall be saved […]. Once the eye of the soul has been purified by such considerations, we no longer abide within our spirit in a sense of sorrow, but abide rather in the Spirit of God with great delight. No longer do we consider what is the will of God for us, but rather what it is in itself. For our life is in his will. Thus we are convinced that what is according to his will is in every way better for us, and more fitting. And so, if we are concerned to preserve the life of our soul, we must be equally concerned to deviate as little as possible from his will.’ From Sermo V de diversis, 4-5.
Wakolda
Lucía Puenzo’s Wakolda appeared to mixed reviews ten years ago. The Holocaust film, like the Holocaust book, is apt to meet a tired groan – ‘Not another!’ – yet there is something new here, at once timely and timeless. Not only is Alex Brendemühl’s portrayal of Mengele elegantly credible; it manages to make this singularly perverse personage somehow typical, so recognisable. ‘I measure and weigh what interests me’, he says; then, ‘I have a taste for beauty’. The underlying aestheticism, the pretension to perfect the race in view of putative ennoblement, necessitating by way of collateral damage obliteration of specimens subpar, brings this historical fiction close. Wakolda portrays human presumption gone off the rails, unsubmitted to any accountability; and that is increasingly the new normal. Any historical analogy is specious. When it comes to an exceptional tragedy like the Shoah utmost caution is called for. Yet the shivers sent down one’s spine by Puenzo are not just retrospective. They regard the reality of what we have become; of that to which we have largely surrendered.
Sealed Revelations
As so often, I find a life-giving, challenging perspective on life in Paulina Mariadotter. On 10 October 1963 she noted in her prayerbook:
‘All Gods’ revelations are sealed until our obedience breaks the seal – in the very moment in which you obey, light erupts. Obey God wherever he does show you his will, and at once the next question awaiting you will become apparent.’
It is Newman’s ‘one step enough for me’ in experiential clarity. And the key to a life concretely based on faith.
Jargoning Jackdaws
These days I daily read a page or two of Between Two Eternities: A Helen Waddell Anthology or of Mediaeval Latin Lyrics, astonished at the intelligence and musicality of Waddell’s renderings, which sweep away the distance merely apparently created by the passing of centuries. Richard Ellis Roberts, translator of Peer Gynt, wrote of Waddell’s poetic versions: ‘Not a translation fails to be an original poem; and not a translation fails to give with an entrancing fidelity, the meaning and the spirit of the original.’ One can hardly imagine higher praise. And it is warranted. Consider this tenth-century poem passed on to us in MSS of Canterbury and Verona, a mariology in miniature, consummately constructed:
Norwegian Schizophrenia
This year Norway has celebrated its millennium of Christian legislation, apparently with unanimous enthusiasm. We have celebrated the fact that Norway in 1024 went from being a society ruled by might to becoming one founded on right; the recognition of women, children, and thralls as legal subjects; the establishment of ‘values’ making up what our Constitution calls our Christian inheritance. What are we to say when the government, this same year, pushes through a new abortion law that consistently avoids the reference to the unborn as ‘children’, forfeits the hitherto decisive category of ‘capacity for life’ in discernment, thereby affirming that it is legal now, on the the state’s own terms, for one human being autonomously to take another human being’s life? This coincidence indicates a kind of schizophrenia it is considered bad form to name; but it must be done. During a hearing this spring, Norway’s Council of Catholic Bishops asked for the proposed law to be rejected. We put the question: ‘Is it to Norway’s benefit to develop legislation sentimentalising the very notion of personhood, ascribing personhood to a wanted individual but withholding recognition of personhood from one that is unwanted, and on this basis expediting that individual either towards survival or to death?’ We answered: ‘We hold that it is not to Norway’s benefit to develop such legislation.’ This we still hold. We regret the implementation of this development, and the silence surrounding it.
Thorir Hund
With interest I have read Heidi Frich Andersen’s novel But Outside are the Dogs about Thorir Hund, one of the men who killed St Olav at Stiklestad on 29 July 1030. The historical novel is a demanding genre. One risks anachronism at several levels, and simplistic perspectives on the past. Frich Andersen navigates steadily and well. She bases herself securely on saga literature. When she uses her imagination it is, as it were, within these parameters. She conveys the complexity of human lives and choices a thousand years ago. In her account the story of Thorir’s conversion and pilgrimage to Jerusalem seems not inevitable, but humanly possibly, indeed credible. In addition she lets us sense how the canonisation of Olav may have impacted on contemporaries’ sensibility. The Latin that is regularly cited has been rather hashed, alas. I asked myself whether this was by way of literary strategy. The story is presented as Thorir’s own written account. He is unlikely to have had much by way of Latin culture. Still, had he consistently mixed up spelling and declensions, he is unlikely to have written such elegant riksmål. Still, this is a marginal blemish. The book is highly readable. It makes one think. And that it is good.
Martyrdom
‘We know Herod to have been a weak ruler, conceited and unprincipled. How gladly he listened to John! How cavalierly he ignored what he heard!
Over and beyond such spinelessness, today’s account presents him in a light that is positively lurid. Reclining at an executive luncheon, he is so enthralled by the suggestive charms of his stepdaughter that he promises to give her anything —well, almost anything—to show his appreciation. The gruesome request that followed shook him, yet Herod was bound by his word, his vain and presumptuous word. John was executed forthwith, with the guests still at table.
A lecherous king, a jealous queen, a fickle child: should these bring the Old Testament to a close?’
From a homily for the feast of the Beheading of John the Baptist.
Like a Bad Habit
In a cogent essay Timothy Snyder engages with the distorted reading of history that underpins Russia’s ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine. The framework he uses, reminding us to check projections and downright inventions against facts, can be applied to other situations, too. ‘When confronted with magical thinking by dictators, historians feel out of place, like a bridge player invited to judge prestidigitation, say, or a surgeon hired to care for wax figures. Putin is in love with a legend. Historically speaking, this is very familiar: new regimes, such as Putin’s, seek compensation in myths of ancient origin. Putin’s idea of Russia, his justification for the killing of hundreds of thousands of people, his rationalization of his attempt to destroy Ukraine as a people — it all rests on a very familiar sort of tall tale: we were here first. These stories are generally complete falsehoods, from the “we” through the “were” and the “here” and the “first.” And so it is for Putin. But the stories get repeated so often that they take on a kind of leaden plausibility, like a bad habit.’ After unpicking these stories, Snyder concludes: ‘Were Putin to follow his own logic, he would not be invading Ukraine, but handing over European Russia to Finland or Sweden.’
Venice at Dawn
Lawrence Durrell in Bitter Lemons: ‘These thoughts belong to Venice at dawn, seen from the deck of the ship which is to carry me down through the islands to Cyprus; a Venice wobbling in a thousand fresh-water reflections, cool as a jelly. It was as if some great master, stricken with dementia, had burst his whole colour-box against the sky to deafen the inner eye of the world. Cloud and water mixed into each other, dripping with colours, merging, overlapping, liquefying, with steeples and balconies and roofs floating in space, like the fragments of some stained-glass window seen through a dozen veils of rice-paper. Fragments of history touched with the colours of wine, tar, ochre, blood, fire-opal and ripening grain. The whole at the same time being rinsed softly at the edges into a dawn sky as softly and circumspectly blue as a pigeon’s egg.’
Chat GPT just couldn’t do that.
Love as We Know it
In a letter to her sister Meg, Helen Waddell, ever an uncompromising seeker after truth, after the real, wrote:
‘What if it were really true that the power at the back of this cruel universe were love as we know it? It’s no wonder Dante said when he had that vision of ‘love that moves the sun and stars’ that it was tanto ottraggio, a kind of outrage of his being. For to come within the least whisper of it is to leave one gasping … it is so terrible that one almost looks about for familiar little shelters of noise and buses to shut out the stars.’
There is authority in this affirmation, a reminder that much pedestrian, pious prattle about ‘the love of God’ presenting it as an existential tea-cosy issues from lack of experience of what the reality designates in fact. Hebrews 10.31.
Not Ungiven
Anyone who has touched the mystery of Alzheimer’s whether personally or indirectly knows the mystery, often the sheer terror, it represents. Mother Agnes Day, for many years abbess of Wrentham, found a way of articulating this experience from within, beautifully. Rereading her poems, I am touched anew, not least by this text, which speaks of trial embraced as part of a total, unflinching, serenely trustful monastic oblation:
O Lord, here is my candle. Blow it out.
I am no better than my father in my fear.
I ask no more of words than YES.
But while I still have consciousness
I would not slip away ungiven!
Her sisters said of her: ‘It would be hard to describe how much Mother Agnes meant to our community or how good she was.’
Brittleness
When an international readership thinks of Norwegian literature, the names that impose themselves will be Ibsen, Undset, Hamsun – and now Jon Fosse. Not many people these days read Tarjei Vesaas. He is, however, a giant, long recognised as such. From the end of the Second World War he was serially nominated for the Nobel Prize. Friends alerted me long ago to Witold Leszczyński’s 1968 adaptation for the screen of Vesaas’s The Birds under the title Żywot Mateusza. Only last week did I watch it. It is an extraordinary movie, at once realistic and poetic, exquisitely filmed, with a remarkable performance by Franciszek Pieczka. Vesaas had a rare ability to render the brittleness of life as being not menacing but beautiful. Leszczyński communicates this insight reverently, filling his work with tenderness notwithstanding the tragic ending. Corelli’s Concerto Grosso op. 6 no. 8 punctuates the scenes. It gives one a jolt at first, but the choice is inspired. You can watch Żywot Mateusza with English subtitles here.
Keep Jogging?
In an early account of the life of St Jane Frances de Chantal, we find her speaking to her sisters of the Visitation about the love of God. God, she assures them, yearns to pour it out on us. But we, in order to receive it, must be ready. This requires on our part an ‘unconditional consent’ to God’s design, a complete and irrevocable surrender of self ‘from the moment we give ourselves up wholeheartedly to God until the moment we die’, a sacrifice quite as real as that of the martyrs. She commented: ‘But this goes for generous hearts and people who keep faith with love and don’t take back their offering; our Lord doesn’t take the trouble to make martyrs of feeble hearts and people who have little love and not much constancy; he just lets them jog along in their own little way in case they give up and slip from his hands altogether; he never forces our free will.’ This prospect faces me with an immense choice to be made each moment: will I spend my Christian life just pottering along with a divided heart, a divided love, making forays into the woods of self-will, or will I wholeheartedly follow the One who calls, really desiring to be with him where he is?
Monastic Schools
Over the years I have encountered many graduates of the Cistercian Preparatory School in Dallas. Without exception they speak of their school, even decades after leaving it, with deep affection and gratitude. That is not the case with every school. Visiting Dallas this week, I experience the genius loci that inspires the life of the vibrant monastic community and their educational apostolate, springing from the charism and call of their Hungarian mother house. A précis of their history can be found in this brief film about Dom Denis Farkasfalvy, longtime headmaster and abbot (cf. Notebook entry for 15 February 2023). I am heartened to see the brethren’s commitment to their heritage as well as their generous, intelligent investment in their work. At the moment, in Europe, most monastic schools are shutting down. For this there are several reasons, some deeply tragic. Yet I cannot help thinking: in the light of a general breakdown in schooling, considering parents’ and children’s mistrust of conventional schools, in response to the growing thirst for a new Christian humanism, this monastic apostolate does not only have a venerable past, but an exacting and potentially promising future.
A Confessor
Dom Wendelin Endrédy, abbot of Zirc, is one of our century’s great confessors of the faith, imprisoned and tortured by Hungary’s communist dictatorship for over six years. His memoirs are an exceptional Christian testimony. They end thus: ‘My thoughts repeatedly return to the prison; I relive each of its scenes time and again. I cannot help it. The prison transforms a human being in some fundamental way. The first thing I tell myself in retrospect is that for no earthly treasure would I give away the sufferings of these six years. I was given an immense amount of gifts. I finished an education, graduated and now I hold a diploma on which it stands written: an improved human being. I would have been a bad student of physics if I had not seen in my prison-life a basic law of modern atomic physics proven: “All matter is ultimately light.” […] The second conclusion I come to is this: every bit of rubbish, no matter how riff-raff and valueless it is, can become light, eternal light, if God’s Sun shines on it and releases it from the burden of the horror of evil. This is why I am unable to feel hatred toward those who have hurt me, those who tormented me. I hate none of these evil men. I like to pray for them from the bottom of my heart, asking that they may convert and become good human beings.’
Cannibalism
In a piece in America today, the feast of the Transfiguration, the Jesuit Anthony R Lusvardi comments incisively on the Olympic opening ceremony. Going beyond hurt exasperation (he admits that his first response to the most offensive scene was a yawn) he invites us to set out from what we have seen to reflect on the society we live in, which require a creative, deliberate response from us. He concludes: ‘Years ago, when visiting Paris — as beautiful as its reputation is — I remember going to the Eiffel Tower and, when I got up close, thinking, “It’s impressive from a distance, but up close it’s just a lot of steel girders and empty space.” What the organisers of the Paris Olympics put on display was their empty space — the vacuousness of the secular cultural project. In the end, that vacuousness is what makes the mockery of Christianity at the Paris Olympics so dull. Even with all the resources at their disposal — mounds of corporate funds and French tax euros — all they could do was cannibalise Christian forms.’
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.’
St Olav’s Way
This year’s pilgrimage to Trondheim for Olsok has caught the attention even of international media.
Here you can find an article by Bénédicte Cedergren for the National Catholic Register. She interviewed some of the youth who walked on foot to the sacred sites associated with the martyrdom of St Olav. One of them told her: ‘To be a Catholic is to not be alone.’ Fr Adan Pawlaszczyk wrote a fine piece about the celebrations in the Polish magazine Gość Niedzielny. Here is a slide show on the instagram page of Vatican News. The Italian site Il Timone picked up a story about the pilgrims’ Mass on Snøhetta. And here is an account of how an EWTN editor experienced these intense days of prayer and fellowship, of solemn liturgies and joyful meals, of gratitude for the gift of faith generously shared.
Unhistorical
With fascination I have read and re-read the inaugural lecture CS Lewis gave in 1954 on taking up the Chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge. What he says about the descriptio temporum, the notional division of epochs, is intriguing. Essential, though, is his remark about historical knowledge itself: ‘I do not think you need fear that the study of a dead period, however prolonged and however sympathetic, need prove an indulgence in nostalgia or an enslavement to the past. In the individual life, as the psychologists have taught us, it is not the remembered but the forgotten past that enslaves us. I think the same is true of society. To study the past does indeed liberate us from the present, from the idols of our own market-place. But I think it liberates us from the past too. I think no class of men are less enslaved to the past than historians. The unhistorical are usually, without knowing it, enslaved to a fairly recent past.’ That insight provides a key to much that is going on, and not going on, at the moment – in the Church as in politics.
One Man Band
I do not normally use the Notebook for mere announcements. But I will make an exception to explain a circumstance that may forestall frustration. A number of readers have written to complain that they have not found translations of some recent texts. I apologise for this. The reason is simple: CoramFratribus is entirely a one man band; and since my days are, alas, no exception to the 24-hour norm, I am sometimes unable to keep up. I do endeavour to provide bilingual versions of all material, but it will sometimes take me a little time.
Thank you for your understanding! And thank you for your interest in the site.
+fr Erik Varden
Chimera
It’s been a long time since I last left the cinema feeling so transported I felt the need to hold on to something — an umbrella, a wall, a supporting hand, anything — on stepping out onto the pavement. In her much-hailed Chimera, Alice Rohrwacher creates a near-perfect illusion, fiendishly difficult to categorise. I suppose that’s in the nature of an illusion. The film is an exercise at once in realism and subversion. It made me think of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Or perhaps it was just the response it evoked in me that called forth the association. On the face of it, Chimera is about crooks and buffoons. There is, however, an intensity of credible life in it that makes it enchanting. One emerges feeling intensely alive. There are plenty of jokes. Good ones. There is Sophoclesian seriousness. Performances are fantastic, some by amateurs, others by legends. Chimera is about so many things that to talk about a plot is impossible. Yet it is linear and coherent. It is at once italianissimo and universal. I loved this film without quite being able to say why. I can only recommend it.
It Takes a Poet
Eight decades ago, while the Second World War was raging in a state of frenzy, William Francis Jackson Knight wrote in his still very readable book, Roman Vergil:
‘The Romans were hard, cynical materialists. Bloodshed was what you saw and the news you heard. Shameless exploitation was accepted as normal. We could say the same of our time. But just occasionally, even to contemporaries, a window is opened on to the soul of an age. There are hard things, and there are soft things, which last and in the future have their command. These are the things which it takes a poet to see and say.’
