Rembrandt
The Jonathan Sacks Foundation, thank God, still circulates the rabbi’s texts. This week’s reflection on the Parashat Vayakhel cites Rav Kook‘s observation: ‘Literature, painting, and sculpture give material expression to all the spiritual concepts implanted in the depths of the human soul, and as long as even one single line hidden in the depth of the soul has not been given outward expression, it is the task of art to bring it out.’ Elsewhere the Rav wrote about his habit of going to see Rembrandt paintings in the National Gallery: ‘We are told that when God created light [on the first day of Creation, as opposed to the natural light of the sun on the fourth day], it was so strong and pellucid that one could see from one end of the world to the other, but God was afraid that the wicked might abuse it. What did He do? He reserved that light for the righteous in the World to Come. But now and then there are great men who are blessed and privileged to see it. I think that Rembrandt was one of them, and the light in his pictures is the very light that God created on Genesis day.’ This light, Sacks adds, unveils ‘the transcendental quality of the human, the only thing in the universe on which God set His image.’
Oikoumene
I have spent the past forty-eight hours at a pastoral congress in Sweden on ‘The Heart’s Discipleship’ organised by the journal Pilgrim, to which I am privileged to contribute as a columnist. There were over 300 participants from a broad spectrum: Lutheran, Free Church, Catholic, and Orthodox. Conferences and seminars were excellent; conversations were deep; liturgies were prayerful; the atmosphere was cordially hospitable. The fact that such an encounter is possible at a time when the wind has largely gone out of the sails of institutional ecumenism is significant. I am strengthened in a core conviction: the way to Christian unity, a Gospel imperative, must set out from personal encounters; it will proceed through friendship and mature through trust, which takes time to develop; its goal will be a deepening of life in Christ, the Truth, nothing less; its impetus will be the call to conversion; along the way shared silence will be at least as important as a multitude of words.
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.’
Silence & Darkness
Werner Herzog’s 1971 documentary The Land of Silence and Darkness is ostensibly a portrait of Fini Straubinger, a philanthropist devoted to the care and instruction of the deaf-and-blind, having herself lost hearing and sight after a childhood accident. More fundamentally the film is an induction into a mode of existence redoubtable in its intensity and abstraction. It lets us intuit the possibility of solitude so overwhelming that the mere thought of it is shocking. Herzog is a keen, unsparing observer, sometimes outraged by what he sees: certain scenes would be unthinkable in contemporary reportage. Yet there is deep humanity in his gaze, and respect for the unknown grandeur of pathos in certain destinies. The final sequence, showing a man cut off from human commerce embracing a tree, is a poetic statement at once beautiful and searingly painful. The articulate Miss Straubinger speaks of the Seelengwalt, violence of soul, afflicting the deaf-and-blind. Its specificity is incomprehensible to anyone who has not known it; yet this extreme experience points towards a universal aspect of the human condition. This film, difficult at times to watch, is deeply affecting. It raises timeless, necessary questions.
Finis terrae
On a pastoral visitation this morning to the isle of Leka at the northern frontier of the prelature of Trondheim – an island over which sea eagles fly, whose strangely coloured rocks are of a kind otherwise only found in America – I remembered Christ’s injunction reported in the Acts of the Apostles, ‘You will be my witnesses to the ends of the earth’, and thought, ‘Well, here we are’. It is impressive to encounter the austere majesty of the scenery and the gracious, hospitable kindness of a small community determinedly making a living in this place, as people have done for ten millennia. How to respond and correspond to the Lord’s missionary call? By remembering, precisely, our smallness and God’s greatness; by being humbly mindful of the long history of which we are part; by listening in quietness to the Word by which all things were made; and by believing in the Word’s continued, effective power to make the weak strong, to create something out of nothing, to heal any wounds – as today’s collect reminds us in its audacious affirmation: ‘Lord God, you love innocence of heart, and when it is lost you can restore it.’
Inhuman Intelligence
I was heartened to read Eric Naiman’s angry essay about students handing in ChatGTP-generated papers about The Brothers Karamazov. He sees in this trend a resurfacing of the Grand Inquisitor’s ruses, a cowardly relinquishing of responsibility, be it just for having an opinion, for formulating reasoned statements. Added to that, there’s the humiliation of being expecting to honour the pseudo-creations of a robotic engine: ‘Taking stock of the queasiness and rage that was overcoming me as I looked at my mounting pile of AI compositions, I understood how nauseatingly insidious the work of the machine has become.’ Some students – even at Berkeley – regard the machine’s output as a standard exceeding their own. I was struck by Naiman’s observation: ‘Eventually students who work with ChatGPT may become so adept at understanding what “good writing” looks like that they will not even need to use it: they themselves will become artificially intelligent. That won’t be an improvement, because an essay that sounds as though it were written by a computer is no better than an essay actually written by one.’
Sebald
I was given WG Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn as a birthday present almost thirty years ago, started it but didn’t get on with it. The book ended up languishing on my shelves until, somehow, I lost it. I had a vague sense there was unfinished business attaching to it. In 2019 I picked up Die Ausgewanderten from a second-hand book store almost as an act of reparation for negligence. These past few days I have read it at last, with a depth of emotion no book has provoked in me for a long time. Anything I might say about it sounds trite even before words are uttered. The beauty of Sebald’s prose is almost unbearable; the brittleness of the destinies he draws is affecting. The reader feels entrusted with a treasure of immense significance in the light of which his own life demands to be reread. Perhaps I needed all this time of waiting to be ready. Mark O’Connell has observed that reading Sebald is ‘a wonderfully disorienting experience’. I’d say it is no less an experience that might lead you home.
Prayer is Power
The voice of His Beatitude Sviatoslav Shevchuk remains a light in the world’s darkness. In an interview given for the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he reflects on prayer – and thereby outlines, too, a perspective on pastoral care whose substance, rooted in compassion, reveals the shallowness of certain current platitudes: ‘We are living in the midst of adversities, pain, tragedy, constant danger of death. There is pastoral care of people who are suffering, who are crying. Very often you can say nothing. You can only be present, cry with those people and share their pain. That pain affects you, because by sharing, you are bringing in your heart their pain. And you have to be careful what you will do with this, too much pain in your heart. This pain in a certain way contaminates you. And you have to pray. This is how we are rediscovering the importance of prayer, because prayer is not a symbol, a ritual, a simple ceremony. Prayer is a power which goes through your heart. Prayer is communion with God. Prayer is something which transforms you and the reality around you.’
Saying Yes
In a reflection on the feast of St Scholastica, Mother Christiana Reemts cited a book by Hans Urs von Balthasar: ‘Love is limitless agreement with God’s will and providence, whether this will has already been expressed or not; love is a resolute Yes in advance to everything, whatever it may be, even the cross, even immersion into absolute abandonment or forgottenness or futility or insignificance. The Son’s Yes to the Father; the Mother’s Yes to the angel, carrier of God’s will; the Yes of the Church in all her members to her sovereignly provident Lord.’ The abbess went on to observe: ‘There are statements that, when I read them, leave me with the certainty: Yes, this is exactly how it is, even though I fail again and again to live up to what they ask. Even when I rebel, justifying rebellion by appeals to ‘what is just human’ or to the example of Job, the longing to utter an unqualified Yes remains. For only that will make me truly happy.’ Cf. Notebook 6 May 2022.
Focus
Worth reading is the 2024 edition of Focus, the Norwegian Intelligence Service’s assessment of current security challenges. It states that ‘the Russian armed forces remain the main military threat to Norway’s sovereignty, its people, territory, key societal functions and infrastructure’. There is a section entitled ‘Russia’s Permanent Break with the West’: ‘Moscow expects a lengthy confrontation with the West and has identified a need for expanding the Russian armed forces. According to official plans, the armed forces will increase from 1 to 1.5 million soldiers by 2026. The Moscow and Leningrad military districts will be revived, and new units will be formed in Karelia. Russia is also set to establish several new infantry and airborne divisions. An expansion of the military structure on this scale will be a time-consuming and challenging process, particularly due to the war. Although Moscow’s plans are first and foremost political posturing, some changes may take place near Norwegian borders already this year. […] Even before the war, Russia was in the process of reducing the number of brigades and reintroducing the division level, as according to Russian thinking, divisions are seen as better suited to fighting a regional war with NATO.’
A Global View
Almost two years ago (Notebook 6 April 2022) I referenced a 2003 speech by Otto von Habsburg about Vladimir Putin. As far as I can see, this video is still not available with English subtitles. It is a pity, for it is instructive. Perhaps somebody who knows how to do this sort of thing could look into it. Anyone curious meanwhile about the relevance of Habsburg’s understanding of Russian policy might consult a paper on ‘The Globalisation of Politics’ from 2006 partially available here: ‘During the period from Stalin to Putin, Russian imperialism has always nurtured the objective of reconquering Ukraine, folding it into Russia and using it for further operations against Poland and other parts of Europe. That turns Ukraine into a critical location within Europe and necessitates its integration into the EU. This circumstance has not been considered seriously and is, therefore, dangerous. It could still be corrected today were one ready, once and for all, to recognise the need for a genuine European policy.’ Reflections in terms of ‘What if?’ are often futile; but not always. One is drawn to ask a further question: Who, now, proposes or is even interested in a genuinely European, not to mention a global policy?
Lent
Lent is a time during which to deepen our prayer. If anyone seeks advice on how to go about it, I recommend again Dom André Poisson’s text on The Prayer of the Heart:
‘I cannot possibly pray without praying in my body. When I turn towards God, I cannot abstract my incarnate reality. It is not merely a question of religious discipline if certain gestures are prescribed, if certain material conditions direct me, when I turn to God. These are pointers to the one and only truth: God loves me the way he made me. Why should I want to be more spiritual than he? This is how I shall learn to live at the level of my body with its constraints, whether I eat, sleep, or rest, whether I am ill or exhausted. Between God and me, such experiences are not obstacles.’
You can find the text in English here. Here is the French original. An unofficial Polish version can be found here.
No Eloquence
On the news yesterday, I heard an aid worker express noble rage at the idea that Israel, in view of the planned assault on Rafah, would simply send one and a half million people ‘up a country road’. The misery in Gaza is unconscionable. While remaining committed to a view that remembers the full complexity and global tragedy of the ongoing war, one cannot but be aghast at the destructiveness of the Netanyahu regime’s campaign, which makes the well-known passage from Exodus 21, ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’, appear for what it is: a disposition of justice, to keep vengeance within bounds. The other day, I happened upon an interview with Mourid Barghouti (whose I Saw Ramallah is a book to re-read at this time) from 2008. It gives much food for thought. Barghouti’s cited poem keeps ringing in my ears: ‘Silence said:/truth needs no eloquence./After the death of the horseman,/the homeward-bound horse/says everything/without saying anything.’ I also keep thinking of this piece by Ahdaf Soueif, Barghouti’s translator.
Mäkelä
For more than half a century Bruno Monsaingeon has been making revealing films about music and musicians. He has come a long way since producing his portrait of Nadia Boulanger in 1977, but the founding intuitions back then were right, they have simply matured. He has now brought them to bear on the 28 year-old Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä. We are given insight into a musical vocation marked by freedom and intelligent joy. Mäkelä’s bonhomie that does not feel forced. It seems to transmit a genuine delight in others, united by music. Striking is his respect for musicians. He is demanding, but does not shout; he is wary, he says, of using too many words. A conductor must transmit his message through presence. If he sufficiently embodies his vision, he will not need bombastic gestures. I have never before seen someone conduct an ensemble with his eyebrows. This courtesy before artistic greatness and before artists indicates a pedagogical model transferrable to other walks of life. Monsaingeon says he considers Mäkelä the greatest conductor of the 21st century. Worth watching.
A Great Actress
No one who saw Helene Weigel (1900-71) perform seems to have forgotten the experience. Her diction, gestures, and sense of drama were meticulously equilibrated. A biographer has written that ‘Weigel’s movements on stage were employed deliberately and economically, as the actress believed that too many details would lead to an extreme naturalism that could ruin a character’. That’s worth remembering also on the stage we all share of ordinary life. Weigel’s great-heartedness was proverbial. I love the story of how she, a signed-up member of the Communist Party, took pity on the FBI agent assigned to watch her house on a bitterly cold day during her WW2 American exile, so invited the fellow inside, ‘where’, she said, ‘he could observe her more easily’. On YouTube I have found this recording sparkling with intelligence of Weigel reading works by her husband Bertolt Brecht. Oh, the mystery of the human voice! Though Weigel has been dead for half a century she becomes tantalisingly near as we hear her tell of Giordano Bruno’s overcoat, a story of tenderness, of the composition of the Book of Tao Te Ching and of the Soldier of La Ciotat. And what noble indignation in her rendering of Brecht’s Class Enemy.
Transhumance
Mireille Gansel’s Traduire comme transhumer is at once an autobiography and an essay on the translator’s art, which like all art presupposes craft. The notion of transhumance is suggestive. It refers to the practice of moving livestock from one grazing-ground to another in a seasonal cycle, permitting the finding of like nourishment differently. Gansel has dedicated her life to the translation of massive, complex works. She has rendered Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs; she has revealed the sonorous universe of Vietnamese poetry. With quiet authority she evidences rather than argues that literature has a political dimension in as much as it transgresses boundaries, making me see that understanding does not always come from drawing the other to myself, but from letting myself be drawn into it: ‘I well remember that morning when the snow was thawing and I sat at an old table under darkened beams and suddenly realised: the stranger is not the other, it is I — I who have everything to learn, to understand from him. That was no doubt my most essential lesson in translation.’
Music of Colour
When I grew up it was common to find prints of Harriet Backer (1845-1932) in people’s homes; the art of this gifted impressionist had penetrated national sensibility, had become national property. I missed the exhibition dedicated to her work at the National Museum in Oslo this winter, unfortunately. The website remains a good resource, though I suspect Backer, of whom her friend Hulda Garborg said, ‘I have never known a more contented or happier artistic soul’, would have liked to be remembered more as an artist in her own right, less as a woman breaking gender stereotypes. The exhibition’s didactic material is a sterling example of our time’s myopia, a distinct disadvantage when it comes to looking at pictures. In Oslo the show was called ‘Every Atom is Colour’. When it removes to the Musée d’Orsay in the autumn it will be called ‘La Musique des couleurs’. A happier choice. Harriet’s sister Agathe, a pupil of Liszt’s, was a composer of note; music recurs as a visual motif in Harriet’s painted interiors. More essentially, do not her very colours sing? And do we not pick up, still, a note of contentedness that has become strangely unfamiliar to us?
Zone of Interest
I have frequently been moved at the cinema; I have been fascinated, sometimes outraged; but I have never emerged from a screening feeling as battered as I did after seeing Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. Though praise is not unanimous (you may consider Manohla Dargis’s review in the NYT, but I think she missed the plot), the film has earned great critical acclaim. There is a substantial body of commentary emerging. Sean O’Hagan calls The Zone of Interest ‘a study in extreme cognitive dissonance’. It is also an account of deliberate, self-induced moral paralysis. I have never experienced such a profoundly auditive film. The drama unfolds at two simultaneous levels: the level of what you see and the level of what you hear. It made me think of the Book of Revelation, in which sight and sound are frequently in contrast, but intelligence of the whole comes from what you hear. The sound design is by Johnnie Burn. He has remarked: ‘even though you don’t ever see the horror, it is by far the most violent film I have ever worked on’. To call this film timely is an understatement. It is necessary. I urge you to see it.
Habitus
A young nun of Ryde reflects on the religious habit, first from her perspective of seeing others wear it, incursions of otherness into the fashion-world of a modern university town: ‘While in the colourful hotchpotch everyone was trying to express ‘himself’ as best he could, the habit gave its wearer an ordering to a community, to a meaningful whole, even if only that one member of the whole was to be seen. Curiously, the habit seemed to me to emphasise the essential personality of its wearer, in contrast to the elaborately accessorised conformity I could see all around it.’ She then speaks of the experience of actually wearing it: ‘The habit reminds me continually who I am – a child of God whom the Lord has graciously placed in his service – and it demands of me that I do justice to this calling. What could better express a total self-gift to Christ than a garment which surrounds me entirely, like a second skin?’
You can read the whole piece here.
Sweep of the Real
In a rich, multifaceted essay prompted by the passage through Spain of a Norwegian Cistercian, Armando Pego reflects on ways to avoid a trap into which exegetes are prone to fall. He defines it as the tendency to separate as if it were a matter of two incompatible planes literalism on the one hand from symbolism on the other; or science on the one hand from poetry on the other. Pego contends that such tidy categorisation fails to take account of reality. It fails to take in, quite simply, the full sweep of the real. The letter, he says, is part of the story; but does not exhaust it. There are points at which it must be exceeded, where mere literalism fails to do justice to things as they are. This holds for the interpretation of ancient texts. I’d say the principle can be applied no less to journalistic accounts of current events. How often are not what we are given to think of as ‘facts’ instrumentalised as tools of a blatantly partial, even willingly falsifying discourse? It is good to be helped to think about these things; to think about how we communicate and how we perceive others’ communication.
Poetry of Silence
A friend has sent me a link to this documentary about the abbey of Mariawald. From one point of view the film, produced in 1959, is old-fashioned and quaint; from another it is cutting-edge. There is poetry to it. It convincingly shows that quality of contented lightness which marks authentic monastic life, though one hardly ever sees it portrayed, for people who have not themselves experienced it presume that a life of prayer and penance must perforce be grim and weighed down by self-conscious solemnity. The monk is presented here as a man profoundly engaged in the drama of this world, yet deliberately choosing and maintaining a life apart. In a rush to affirm their relevance and to seem attractive, monasteries sometimes forfeit this apartness, thinking the ancient ideal of fuga mundi outdated. This reversal rarely generates, in my experience, vitality over time. Indeed, as monks and nuns seek to revitalise their charism and call, a portrait like that of this short film gives food for thought. It has a romantic aspect, yes; but is nonetheless fully matter-of-fact, a simple reminder that a vow to give all requires a giving all in fact.
To Be a Human Being
John Bridcut’s portrait of Janet Baker is not just an account of a distinguished life; it is a distillation of humanity. Baker speaks of the death of her brother when she was still a child, a shattering event from which she was excluded by parental solicitude. ‘It was food in a terrible way for the kind of sensitivity I have needed in my working life, a tremendous gift to me from him.’ This early experience, she thinks, sealed her vocation as an artist, equipping her for a paradoxical ministry of consolation: on account of it, ‘somewhere in my voice there is this capacity to reach out to this place in people’, ‘this place’ being where one feels that life is just too much, that it’s impossible to carry on. To be able to re-read trauma in such a way, renouncing bitterness, testifies to exceptional maturity. The vitality that marks her art remains undiminished in old age. Baker speaks of taking the train into London now, ‘as a doddery old woman’, finding herself in a crowd of youngsters ‘at Covent Garden’, finding it ‘totally terrifying’ and ‘also totally exhilarating; they feel just like I did at 20, and I am so glad.’ ‘ It is not an easy thing’, says she before the film ends, ‘to be a singer; but it is far more difficult to be a human being.’ One cannot help feeling that, despite all, she has succeeded rather wonderfully.
Voicing War
Wilfred Owen was 25 in 1918, when he wrote in The Calls: ‘For leaning out last midnight on my sill,/I heard the sighs of men, that have no skill/To speak of their distress, no, nor the will!/A voice I know. And this time I must go.’ Having come back to Britain to be healed of Shell Shock, he felt the moral imperative to return to his comrades, to use his gift to speak the ineffable, to ‘cry [his] outcry’. The resolve cost Owen his life.
War can awaken poetic genius, enabling testimonies that pierce the carapace of indifference and insensitivity in which we clothe ourselves, for no one can endure being exposed to extreme stress, even to the thought of extreme stress, over time. Such awakening is happening in our time, at the Ukrainian front. The young poet Artur Dron writes work marked by sobriety and intensity, imbued with faith. If you are not yet familiar with his The First Letter to the Corinthians, do read it. Read it aloud.
Very Bones
The bishop Diadochos of Photiki, a small town in north-west Greece, was born about 400. He is believed to have been among a group of Epiran notables captured during a Vandal raid when he was well over 60, to be shipped off to North Africa where he eventually died. Diadochos did not spend life cozily cooped up in an ivory tower or a quiet cell. It is all the more impressive to read this testimony from his treatise On Spiritual Perfection: ‘Anyone who loves God in the depths of his heart has already been loved by God. In fact, the measure of a man’s love for God depends upon how deeply aware he is of God’s love for him. When this awareness is keen it makes whoever possesses it long to be enlightened by the divine light, and this longing is so intense that it seems to penetrate his very bones. He loses all consciousness of himself and is entirely transformed by the love of God.’
A longing so intense it seems to penetrate one’s very bones.
Heaven’s Gate
From a conversation with Bénédicte Cedergren about the consecration of the monastery church at Munkeby:
Reflecting upon the distinctiveness of the place and the historicity of the event, Bishop Varden emphasized that “in a way, there is nothing special about this monastery,” explaining that Cistercians usually seek withdrawal, rather than to be seen or heard. The very Constitutions of the order specify that the monks are called to persevere in a “life that is ordinary, obscure and laborious.”
“In that sense,” the bishop continued, “this monastery is as normal as any other. But at the same time, every abbey is heaven’s gate and, in that sense, something absolutely extraordinary.”
You can read the whole piece here, in the NCR.
