What is Truth?
Pilate’s question has lost none of its edge, though we prefer not to think about it much. Often, remarks Cardinal Biffi, in a recently published collection, we shy away from statements of truth for fear they might be divisive. He goes on:
“Instead we must ascertain that since God began the creation of the world dividing light from darkness, any forfeited ability to draw distinctions, any relinquished understanding of what is and what isn’t, any design that favours (or at any rate puts up with) the mingling of truth and error, any confusion between good and evil, far from spelling the dawn of a new era of understanding, communion and peace, spells capitulation to an absurd nostalgia for primordial chaos.”
Rhetoric of Confinement
Two days ago the Norwegian government resolved to reopen the country (to use the official nomenclature) after a year and a half of Covid-related restrictions. When I looked up the website of a national newspaper, the lead item was an editorial with the title ‘The End of 562 Absurd Days’. For further reportage, one had to scroll quite a way down the page. This unexcited approach seemed broadly representative of other media — as if the fizz had long since gone out of the bottle, notwithstanding the language of ‘war effort’, ‘deadly threat’ and ‘national dugnad‘ having been, not long ago, in everyone’s mouth. Something significant happened in about the middle of July when, seemingly overnight, statistics of dread moved into small print while prime space was taken over by advertisements for summer wear. That events of these past 18 months have been dramatic and that radical communal efforts were called for: this is beyond doubt. Still, I’d interested to see a cool study of the rise and fall of the rhetoric of confinement. It would help us understand not only what we have lived through but the forces that influence our understanding.
Remembrance
I thoroughly enjoyed Craig Brown’s essay ‘Nothing is real’ in the TLS of 10 September 2021 (the paper takes a while to reach Norway). It’s one of those pieces one should re-read before writing anything about anything, or anybody, at all. I was struck by this quotation from the historian Lewis Namier, born Ludwik Bernstein Niemirowski and now perhaps most renowned – a fact that would have bemused them both – as the husband of Iulia de Beausobre:
‘One would expect people to remember the past and imagine the future, but in fact, when discoursing or writing about history, they imagine it in terms of their own experience […], they imagine the past and remember the future.’
Which is why it is so important to put historical remembrance to the test, especially when it is lodged in a profound sense of involvement, with individual and collective identities at stake.
The Higher Clergy
Among the people whose lives and works are considered in Daniel Mendelsohn’s fascinating, sinuous essay, Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate, is Archbishop François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon (1651-1715):
‘In a portrait made before his downfall, the archbishop has an elongated but kindly face, the high hooked nose, with its sharp tip, and the rather pointed chin offset by the warm dark eyes, whose brows are raised in what can strike you an an attractive frankness— an openness to questions, to possibility, not always present in the faces of high clergymen.’
Now, there’s a remark to ponder.
At Mogiła
Visiting the shrine of the Holy Cross at Mogiła on 9 June 1979, Pope St John Paul II proclaimed:
“Let us go together, pilgrims, to the Lord’s Cross. With it begins a new era in human history. This is the time of grace, the time of salvation. Through the Cross man has been able to understand the meaning of his own destiny, of his life on earth. He has discovered how much God has loved him. He has discovered, and he continues to discover by the light of faith, how great is his own worth. He has learnt to measure his own dignity by the measure of the sacrifice that God offered in his Son for man’s salvation.”
This time of grace, of salvation has not passed; it is now, full of eternal promise.
The Fragility of Peace
To go on pilgrimage to the shrine of St Onuphrius in Jabłeczna on the river Bug is to enter a state of emergency. Just across the border, refugees largely from the Middle East are used as pawns in a political manoeuver. A little further along the Bug, again on the other side of the river, military exercises qualified by Reuters as ‘war games‘ run their course. One is reminded of the fragility of European peace, of the way in which innocent lives are overrun by historical processes. Over and above the necessary discourses of politics, I keep hearing the resonance of the monks’ constantly repeated invocation at the liturgy this morning: Господи помилуй, Господи помилуй, Господи помилуй! ‘Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy!’
The Heather Blooms
Now, mother, the heather blooms,
for the first time in this world
without you.
Only for you
the fields were gleaming,
the colour of amethyst.
They lay there in wait
for a word of praise from you,
the utterly generous.
Not even the tiniest knoll
went unthanked
after an encounter with you.
Åse-Marie Nesse
Gaude Polonia
At noon today, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, that noble pillar of Catholicism, was declared blessed at a solemn Mass in Warsaw, though not alone. Alongside him, the Church beatified Mother Elżbieta Róża Czacka (1876-1961), whom Wyszyński knew and revered. Born into a noble family, she suffered from an eye disease since childhood. A riding accident in 1898 left her with both retinas detached. She lost sight for good. This could have been the bane of her life. It wasn’t. She turned it into an opportunity, deciding to dedicate her life to caring for the blind. She founded the order of Franciscan Sisters Servants of the Cross to care for and educate the physically blind and to do penance for the spiritual blindness of the world. To me, the most moving part of today’s Mass was the proclamation of the first reading from a text in braille by a blind woman taught by Mother Elżbieta’s sisters. In that reading we were told, ‘come to me, you who desire me’ (Sirach 24:19). Where such desire burns, no failing, no handicap is decisive. What appears to be an impediment may even turn into a grace, an impetus.
Righteousness
When at sunrise this morning, just below the monastery of Strahov in Prague, I found myself in a street named after Raoul Wallenberg, I felt as if I had unexpectedly bumped into an old friend.
I was first confronted with the facts of his life in 1990 through Kjell Grede’s film, Good Evening Mr Wallenberg. In 2012, reviewing two new books on Wallenberg, Inger Dahlman wrote: “In Budapest Raoul Wallenberg was transformed from a dansant élégant always surrounded by beautiful women into a man who, at the end, was unshaven, sweaty, and bleary-eyed, falling asleep for sheer exhaustion as soon as he sat down, though never tiring in his endeavour to find new ways of saving lives.”
The example of Wallenberg shows what nobility human nature can reach in one whose conscience is awakened – and how such awakening comes about. It is a scandal that the circumstances surrounding Wallenberg’s death remain an enigma. May the memory of this man, honoured as ‘Righteous among the Nations‘, never perish.
Grace
Christ’s Passion is such an overwhelming paradigm in Christian art that it tends to invest motifs of every kind with solemn pathos. This inspires awe, which is good. Still, we sometimes need a different perspective. Central to the Fathers in their endeavour to expound the identity of God’s eternal Wisdom made flesh was this verse from the Old Testament:
‘I was beside him, like a master workman; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always’ (Wisdom 8:22).
In Mary’s Magnificat, which the Church sings each evening at Vespers, we make her proclamation our own: ‘My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour’ (Luke 1:47).
A Czech, Gothic Madonna and Child in the cloisters of Nový Dvůr renders this aspect of the Christian proclamation with grace. It is far from superficial; on the contrary, it is very profound.
Revitalisation
Thirty years ago today, Jonathan Sacks was installed as Chief Rabbi of the Commonwealth. In his installation address, he presented an audacious programme full of hope: a ‘A Decade of Renewal’. He explained:
“I choose the word renewal carefully. Judaism recognises not shinui but chiddush, not change but revitalisation. And if we do not renew our institutions they will die the slow death of increasing irrelevance. […] We must search out a hundred new ways of letting prayer speak to our souls, learning to our minds and mitzvot to our lives; and if they fail we must search for the hundred-and-first way.”
To revitalise, not necessarily to alter; to rediscover the potential of what has been passed on; to let this heritage form our spiritual, intellectual, and moral lives; to discern a task for the future in the experience of the past; to know where we come from, where we are going, to whom we must give an account: this enables growth and progress, not the merry-go-round of constant restructuring.
What’s in a Voice
In his five-part contribution to the BBC’s programme The Essay, Peter Brathwaite reflects on the power of the human voice. But that is not all: he also exposes, with due discretion and elegance, the political potential of art, its capacity to subvert and liberate. He speaks of Marian Anderson’s performance at the Lincoln Memorial before an audience of 75,000 people on Easter Sunday 1939, after she had been barred, on account of the colour of her skin, from singing at Constitution Hall. He indicates, to my mind credibly, the different dimensions of tension and expectancy that found expression in Robert McFerrin’s Rigoletto at the Met in 1956. Deeply moving is his account of Vera Hall’s ‘songs sprung from necessity’.
‘The human voice holds so much’, says Brathwaite, ‘but needs a listener to enrich and complete, to really hear it.’ He challenges us to listen differently; and to begin to find our own, true voice.
Aggression of Empires
As, with the rest of the world, I follow developments in Afghanistan aghast, I re-watch, with undiminished interest, Rory Stewart’s documentary made for the BBC in 2012, Afghanistan: The Great Game — a Personal View. Stewart is that rare animal: a politician who is also a scholar and an explorer. He walked across Afghanistan on his own, accompanied only by a dog named Babur, in 2002.
Cataclysmic events easily call forth facile responses. Stewart helps us avoid these. He asks: ‘What is it about this place and the paranoia and aggression of empires that has created repeated tragedy?’ One of his interlocutors in the film, Akbar Ahmed, answers, ‘When you combine arrogance with a lack of knowledge of that part of the world, you are almost guaranteed to run into trouble.’
Stewart’s The Places In Between is worth reading, as is Akbar Ahmed’s Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization.
On the Threshold
Dom Ildefons Herwegen concluded his portrait of St Benedict, Der heilige Benedikt, ein Charakterbild, which first appeared a century ago, with words that remain full of relevance now:
“St Benedict refers the spirit of the Western world to the unchangingly divine, the final goal of all created spirits. He shows us how the dignity of man can be preserved in his likeness to God. At the same time he teaches how a human society on earth is to be built. May the essential traits in this portrait of St Benedict — his great, soul-changing love of Christ, the measured, noble form of Antiquity, his keen sense of the pressing necessities of the time — remain the inalienable heritage of his disciples in the new epoch on whose threshold we stand.”
Psalms in the Age of Twitter
The Office of Readings this morning gave us an excerpt from Pius X’s encyclical Divino afflatu. It speaks of the treasure of the Psalter. Apart from the Gospels – themselves bursting with echoes of the Psalms – no text has left a deeper impact on Christian consciousness. The ancients invested their noblest art and energies in illuminated Psalters (as in this remarkable MS from Byzantium). To this day the Psalms remain the foundation of liturgical prayer. All clerics and religious are obliged to recite them daily. It is a blessed obligation. To re-read one’s life patiently, ever anew in the light of this inscrutable book is transformative, a practice to cultivate carefully, lovingly in the age of Twitter.
Greek to me
The launch of this site also represents the launch of a parallel project: that of recording the Gospels in Greek. There is much controversy these days about Biblical translations. It’s vital, then, to return to the sources with careful attention. My study of Greek has been hugely enriched by sensitive readings. Elli Lampeti’s recording of the last part of Matthew’s Gospel was a revelation to me; then, the work of W. Sidney Allen set me on a pursuit of classical diction. My recordings do not claim to be authoritative. They are simply the lectio divina of an amateur, someone who loves the text he reads, in the hope that his effort will inspire, perhaps even help, others to love and learn it better. The Gospel of Mark is available on Spotify.
Fully Human
The feast of the Assumption shows us what heights human nature, redeemed and irradiated by the Word, can reach. One who made this mystery of faith palpably embodied was Sr Marie-Ange de Chamas, who died on the eve of the Assumption last year, 53 years old. I never knew her, but was privileged to attend her funeral. That experience was among the most important things that happened to me in 2020. The wake of joy and gratitude the passing of her life had left swept me up, too. I keep her portrait in the bishop’s office, as a reminder of what really matters, something the world is ever more inclined to forget, even tries to eliminate.
You can find a piece I wrote about Sr Marie-Ange for The Tablet here.
Anchorage
Early in Marilynne Robinson’s Jack (2020), the fourth of her Gilead novels, Della and Jack have this exchange, trying to work out where a person’s true self is anchored:
‘I really just meant that there is—anyone, any human being, and then that person’s actual life, everything they didn’t mean or couldn’t say or wished for or grieved over. That’s reality. So someone who would know the world that way, some spirit, seems kind of inevitable. I think. Why should so much reality, most of it, count for nothing? That’s how it seems to me.’
‘That spirit would not always be impressed, depending on case.’
She shook her head. ‘I just think there has to be a Jesus, to say ‘beautiful’ about things no one else would ever see. The previous things should be looked to, whatever becomes of the rest of it.’
Without Darkness
The Magnificat antiphon for vespers tonight, the feast of St Laurence, sets a phrase attributed to the fourth-century martyr:
Mea nox obscurum non habet, sed omnia in luce clarescunt.
‘There is no darkness in my night, but all things are brightly illumined by the light.’
The message resounds with particular authority in the sweet luminosity of a Northern Norwegian summer night.
Humanitas
In classical Latin, ‘humanitas’ stands for ‘kindness’ or ‘compassion’, qualities thought to be specific to humankind. When one looks at how humans coexist in the world, though, it is easy to yield to cynicism. To be reminded of what a humane life looks like, I regularly listen again to David Nott’s conversation with Kirsty Young recorded in 2016. Dr Nott’s commitment as a surgeon in war-torn areas is an inspiration. Moving, too, is his account of an encounter with Queen Elizabeth II. Her response to the state of crisis he was in at the time shows what majesty means.
Heron
So heavy
is the long-necked, long-bodied heron,
always it is a surprise
when her smoke-colored wings open
and she turns
from the thick water,
from the black sticks
of the summer pond,
and slowly rises into the air
and is gone.
Then, not for the first or the last time,
I take the deep breath
of happiness, and I think
how unlikely it is that death is a hole in the ground,
how improbable that ascension is not possible.
Mary Oliver
Olsok Vespers
St Olav, amidst the tasks that absorbed his attention here in this world, ‘rested devotedly in the soul’s free contemplation of heavenly things’. The saints teach us the importance of fixing our gaze right there. They do so with the mixture of giftedness, limitation and eccentricity that characterises human beings in all periods of history. Sigrid Undset remarks that, while customs and cultural norms are subject to continuous mutations (in this respect they are rather like a virus), ‘the hearts of men do not change at all, throughout all ages’. They are pregnant with a longing imprinted on their essence, created as they are in the image of God, a longing that points towards a single, unchangeable goal.
Fated to live
Solzhenitsyn’s remark in a BBC interview from 1976, published in Warning to the West, has perennial relevance: ‘Once I used to hope that experience of life could be handed on from nation to nation, and from one person to another, but now I am beginning to have doubts about this. Perhaps everyone is fated to live through every experience himself in order to understand.’ Depending on one’s point of view, this perspective can be exhilarating or a source of despair.
Tenderness and Grief
Sir András Schiff’s recent interpretation of Brahms’s D Minor Concerto brings out the music’s tenderness and grief incomparably, not least in the Adagio movement. It is rendered brittle, somehow, by the artist’s choice of a Blüthner piano built in Leipzig around 1859, the year in which this music was first performed.
No return
In the Book of Exodus (13:17), when Pharaoh finally let Israel leave Egypt, ‘God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although that was nearer; for God thought, “If the people face war, they may change their minds and return to Egypt”’. There are two ways of reading this. Superficially, it may seem that the roundabout route was simply safer. But a deeper motive is at stake: had the way to newness been too direct, the incentive to return to a familiar setting in the face of opposition would have been too great. To maintain the incentive of God’s call, the impossibility of return was required. We find, here, a helpful paradigm for reading our lives in a supernatural perspective.
