Conquered
Cinema can never have the immediacy of theatre, yet some performances are marked by such a grace of empathy that they leave the spectator with an awed sense of presence notwithstanding the screen’s mediation. To see Max von Sydow in Bille August’s Pelle the Conqueror is to see a humiliated father who has long since relinquished a sense of dignity for his own sake yet tries to maintain a semblance for the sake of his son. It makes you ache. Hal Hinson wrote: ‘This is a performance that comes from the joints and ligaments; it’s conceived in marrow. […] Von Sydow’s style has the essence of poetic compression’. Hinson is rather dismissive of the rest of the cast. I do not agree. I was stunned by this film when I first saw it 35 years ago. I find myself stunned now, having seen it again. For being an historic drama it speaks timelessly of degradation, of dreams nurtured and lost, of the complex relationship of fathers and sons, and of the startling tenderness that stirs in the human heart despite all.
Magnus
The CoramFratribus owl on a beer bottle? Indeed. The first official invitation I received qua bishop of Trondheim was to a private tour of the city’s flagship brewery, E.C. Dahl. The brewmaster had heard of my vague credentials in the world of brewing. A friendship evolved. It later extended to the brewmasters of Alstadberg and Tautra, leading to the idea of creating a new beer rooted in the rich history of our region. In the Middle Ages Trondheim (then called Nidaros) was truly a European city. The archbishopric was the centre of a vast ecclesiastical province extending to Iceland, Greenland, the Orkneys and Man. Cultural exchanges were frequent, carried by the waves of the see suggested on the beer’s label, with a red wave symbolising the legacy of the martyrs – Trondheim’s significance derived from the cult of St Olav. Inspiration, though, came also from abroad. We have named the beer after the patron of the Orkneys, a kinsman of Olav, St Magnus, who died a martyr’s death in 1117 (a story told in this hymn). It is said he visited Trondheim in 1098, the year Cîteaux was founded. The beer is to be enjoyed with moderation.
Appeasement?
Appeasement! Is that all Christianity has to offer a wounded heart crying out to love and be loved, to know and be known? Must the Christian just wait and burn while fire within spends itself and live coals turn into ashes? Has he or she no other response to love’s passion than resignation, eyes mournfully raised heavenward?
Often it has seemed thus. It is a blessing that the cultural shift of recent decades has exposed how harmful a rhetoric of appeasement, drenched in piety, can be when used to silence the voracious hunger of the human heart. Instead of bringing healing, anaesthetics of devout abstraction are prone to cause sickness in the form of arrested tenderness, of vulnerability soured into spite, of unmet affective need seeking satisfaction in addiction or cruelty, or in gradual petrification.
From my forthcoming Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses
Assumption
‘The dogma of the Assumption of the Mother of God into heaven was defined by Pius XII on 1 November 1950. Outside the Catholic Church, and in some circles within, the pope’s constitution Munificentissimus Deus was greeted with incredulity. What was going on? The year 1950 saw the first TV remote control. It was the year of Annie Get Your Gun, of Sunset Boulevard. The credit card was born in 1950, as was Stevie Wonder. And here was the Church making statements about things purported to have happened mystically to the Blessed Virgin Mary 1,900 years ago? Protestant critics thought the dogma a hodgepodge of fairy-tales, not just unbiblical but anti-biblical. Established thinkers like Barth and Niebuhr decried what they saw as papal arrogance. Fears were voiced that Catholics worldwide were lapsing into mother-goddess paganism. Everyone’s worst suspicions seemed to be confirmed. Catholics concerned about Christian unity – a growing number – experienced trepidation. I can’t help thinking that the dogma’s hysterical critics didn’t in fact read Munificentissimus Deus. If you do, you will find it breathes serenity, is responsibly argued, and bears the imprint of profound humility.’ From Entering the Twofold Mystery.
Dom Godefroy
At the end of the Mass presided by the Holy Father that concluded World Youth Day a French bishop approached me in the sacristy to present his condolences on the death of Dom Godefroy Raguenet de Saint Albin, abbot of Acey. I reacted with disbelief. Dom Godefroy had just concluded the regular visitation in my own community of Mount Saint Bernard. He had emailed while he was there. And now this prodigiously strong, athletic man, an ex-navy seal, had died in a mountaineering accident? I couldn’t believe it. And still can’t quite believe it. Three strong testimonies have helped me: one by the Abbot General of the OCSO, one by the Abbot General of the OCist, and one by the Abbot of Hauterive. They summon up the mystery of Dom Godefroy’s life and vocation with affection and fraternal realism, helping us see the action of God’s grace in this singular life, whose abrupt end, mysteriously, was preceded by the unselfconsciously erupting joy of a heart become broad, very broad. Requiescat.
Impertinence
The memoirs of Alice Habsburg have been put into my hands. This distinguished Swede, a woman of legendary beauty, married into the epicentre of Old-World European nobility and eventually operated valiantly as a member of the Polish resistance. Her fortitude may be gauged from an account of her visit early on in WWII to Galicia, where she hoped to pick up a few things from her mansion of Busk: ‘When I reached Lvov I had someone ask the Bolshevik chief of police who resided at Busk if he would mind my coming briefly to collect some letters and other possessions I had had sent there from Zywiec. His answer was: ‘She is welcome to come, but will not return to Lvov with her head still on her shoulders.’ Having received such an impertinent reply to my courteous request, I had no choice except to travel straight to Busk.’ Alice obtained what she wanted and brought her head safely back with her, to be reunited with her husband and children. Her eldest son, the revered Dominican Fr Joachim Badeni, fought alongside Norwegian troops in the Battle of Narvik.
Aglais io
Opened
it lay before me on the path:
earth’s lightest book —
it has but two pages.
Filled with wonder I read its magic signs.
Then it ascended into the air.
No apocalypse.
Only a couple of words from summer’s
secret revelation:
Aglais io, peacock butterfly.
Christine Busta (1915–1987)
Todos, todos, todos
In Lisbon, Pope Francis insisted that the Church is ‘para todos, todos, todos’. His words are illuminated by a passage in today’s breviary from a sermon by St Augustine on the martyrdom of St Lawrence. Having celebrated Lawrence’s path to sanctity, the bishop of Hippo reminds his hearers that it is not the only path. ‘The garden of the Lord, brethren, includes – yes, it truly includes – includes not only the roses of martyrs but also the lilies of virgins, and the ivy of married people, and the violets of widows. There is absolutely no kind of human beings, my dearly beloved, who will need to despair of their vocation; Christ suffered for all. It was truly written about him that he wishes all to be saved, and to come to acknowledge the truth.’ Note the same rhetorical device: the threefold ‘includes’ which renders the threefold ‘habet’ of Augustine’s Latin. So no kind of person is excluded; but all are called to transformation in truth. The Lord’s concern is to realise our God-given potential, to make us whole and holy; not to leave us in a state of fragmentation and self-satisfied mediocrity.
Unexpected Bach
Alice Babs, born in 1924, sang in nightclubs from her teenage years. She became that most unlikely thing, a Scandinavian jazz legend. Duke Ellington said of her that her voice contained ‘all the warmth, joy of life, rhythm and tragedy that make up the inner secret of jazz’. Alice and Duke worked closely together, not least in producing their joint Serenade to Sweden.
It is surprising to find this familiar voice in a totally different register, singing an aria by Bach. Yet when you hear her perform Jesu, Jesu, Du bist mein, one of Bach’s spiritual songs, her voice seems made for it, at once limpid and intense, sincere. One genre of music can illuminate another. I dare say the same holds for much discourse.
Chastity
Was it fear of nature that impelled me towards the supernatural? Such can the strength of conjecture be that it seems more real than reality. I aspired to live chastely, but regarded the endeavour as sheer mortification. It did not occur to me, I think, to see chastity as possessing an intrinsic, never mind life-giving attraction. I thought of it in negative terms, as not being, not doing what lay at the heart of the contemporary image of masculinity. Hence a further complex arose. In a culture glorifying sexual expression, was chastity not somehow unmanly?
If only I had thought of reading Cicero! He could have let me discover that, in the ancient world, the goddess of chastity, Diana, was known not only as lucifera, ‘light-bearing’, but as omnivaga, ‘roaming everywhere’, so sovereign and free.
From my forthcoming Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses
Resolution
A friend sends me this image. It sums up the experience of World Youth Day.
It needs no commentary. But a few verses from Psalm 51 come to mind:
But you delight in sincerity of heart, and in secret you teach me wisdom.
Let me hear the sound of joy and gladness, and the bones you have crushed will dance.
God, create in me a clean heart, renew within me a resolute spirit.
The message has been heard and acted upon. One can only give thanks.
Peaceful Effervescence
It is hard to describe what has been going on in Lisbon this week. I have never known anything like it. There have been people everywhere, almost all of them young, tending to gather in large clusters while waving national flags and loudly singing. Crowds have sometimes been overwhelming, filling tube trains and narrow streets. In a different setting one might have felt anxious, conscious of the risk of confrontation. Remarkable here has been the utter lack of aggressivity. Instead of closing in on themselves, groups have reached out to other groups, inviting encounter, exchanging little gifts. I had the sense that Lisbon had been turned into a sacrament of friendship, sweeping up the locals, too, in a peaceful effervescence. The experience, of course, has been brief and intense, not set to last. It does not pretend to manifest a political model of society. Yet what it confers is intensely real, authentic, leading one to ascertain that a world established on terms of fraternity is possible. To have seen this even in the twinkling of an eye is a blessing, a blessing that can alter lives. The fact that a million and a half young people choose to gather like this, for a purely idealistic purpose, without prizes to win, simply for the sake of sharing what is essential to them, is tremendous. It is news that should be on the front page of every paper.
Via Crucis
Tonight’s Stations of the Cross in the Parque Eduardo VII, led by Pope Francis, were an audacious spectacle. It is a risky business to plan liturgies audaciously. They can easily turn into mere display. That risk was averted. The ensemble was infused with creative intelligence, rooted in the mystery of Calvary and addressing the immense crowd of youth from (literally) every nation. The dancers enacted meditations on each station. They were remarkable, carried by strong choreography and beautiful music. They showed us that it is possible, without banal compromise, to represent and bear suffering with dignity, beautifully. It is a crucial lesson. For centuries Christians have communicated it through painting, sculpture, music. Many of these works are immortal. Yet it is wonderful to see the same message transmitted in a radically modern artistic idiom. Our world needs to hear it.
You can see the stations here, starting at ’45.
Something Great
World Youth Day, that most wonderfully improbable of gatherings, is upon us. At the Night Vigil that closed the meeting in the jubilee year 2000, Pope John Paul II, whose initiative gave birth to WYD told the world’s Catholic youth: ‘It is Jesus you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.’
Beyond Amazon
Weltanschauung
On his 70th birthday, Romano Guardini acknowledged a debt to Max Scheler. The philosopher had once told him: ‘You must do what is intrinsic to the word Weltanschauung [consideration of the world], that is you must look at things, people, the world, but do so as a responsible Christian with a view to articulating scientifically what it is you see.’ This, said Guardini, was exactly what he had ended up spending his life doing, methodically considering ‘the encounter of faith with the world. And not just the world in a generic sense, the way theologians approach it in various modes of questioning, but the world in the particular: culture and its forms of expression, history, societal life, etc.’ After several decades of such enterprise, he poignantly concluded (in 1955, only eleven years after the end of World War II), he had come to ‘appreciate how important this work is, and what happens when it is not carried out.’ Words worth pondering.
Life in Depth
In ancient Greek a city state, the basic civilisational unit, was known as a polis. To be a ‘political being’ is to see that man, in order to thrive, must be part of a context that exceeds him. Other beings too lead an organised existence. Think of a beehive. Yet we take it for granted, not without reason, that human beings are more essentially political than bees.
I suspect that spiritual superficiality, conceptual impoverishment, and a shrinking vocabulary pose problems for public health in our time. Our lives touch great depths; we experience and feel deeply. That is simply the way we are. But ever fewer among us have words to name the depths we intuit, feel, and experience. We are vulnerable therefore to simplifying categorisations and to offers of relabelling. To live – indeed to survive – we must practise the art of living at a certain depth, there to encounter ourselves and others, to interpret the meaning of our pains and joys.
From my book Seeking Togetherness: Political Impulses launched this week.
Lasting Terror
As a story within a story dealing with modalities of artistic creation, Stefan Andres imagines the context that brought – and enabled – El Greco to paint his View of Toledo in 1599/1600. It began late one evening, writes the novelist, in which distant thunder could be heard to pass through the night ‘like a retained yawn of the night’, leaving the air heavy and thick. A new crash of thunder ‘rolled like an anchor’s chain’ out of night’s darkness. ‘[The painter] soaked the weather up like a sponge soaks up water, saturated, thoroughly shaken by bluish lights. Each rod of lightning went down his spine like a shudder of frost; the thunder resounded on his skin as much as in his ear. Then, out of his pores colours drizzled and slid onto the canvas, and there, a little later, stood Toledo on the hill in a storm, frighteningly bright in a ghostly present, leaving one to fear that the next moment would spell perpetual darkness, although only painted lightning remains, perpetuating terror.’ The account is imaginary. Yes when you look at the picture – doesn’t it ring true?
Beauty
It is good now and again to see oneself from the outside. Looking up a passage in Navid Kermani‘s fabulous Wonder Beyond Belief: On Christianity, I am struck by what he, a Shiah Muslim, says on the importance of maintaining the dimension of beauty in Christianity. He recognises that it is a battle against considerable odds: ‘I’ve only got to visit a standard Sunday Mass in Berlin to ascertain how badly today’s Christianity lacks beauty’. Much the same observation could be made throughout the world. I thought of these things recently, while visiting a fine exhibition on Urban VIII in the Palazzo Barberini. Urban was pope 1623-44, a period during which the Catholic Church, committed to the Council of Trent, saw a revolution in works for the poor, the sick, the needy. At the same time Urban VIII was a discerning patron of the arts, seeing that this dimension too is intrinsic, indeed essential, to true worship. As Kermani remarks, ‘Poverty alone makes no God great.’
Against Ease
Laure Adler is not a woman to mince words. She begins a long conversation with George Steiner: ‘There’s this thing, this arm, this deformity, this physical thing.’ Has Steiner’s withered arm made him suffer, she asks? He answers: ‘It has enabled me, I think, to understand certain conditions, certain kinds of anguish on the part of the sick that are difficult to grasp for the Apollos of this world, for those blessed to have a magnificent body and terrific health. What are the connections between physical and mental suffering and certain intellectual endeavours? That is something we still do not understand very well. Let’s never forget that Beethoven was deaf, that Nietzsche was subject to terrible migraines, that Socrates was very ugly. It is so interesting to try and see in others that which they may have had to conquer. When I meet someone I always aks myself: what has he or she lived through? What has been his or her victory — or signal failure?’
Unanswerable
The historian Zara Steiner died in 2020, ten days after her husband George, after 60 years of a marriage marked by complementarity. The two were introduced to one another by their Harvard professors who ‘bet each other that the two would get married if they ever met’. So it turned out. Zara Steiner produced massively learned work on international relations in Europe between the World Wars. Coming across The Guardian‘s obituary, I am struck by a remark regarding policies of appeasement in the 1930s: ‘Zara’s criticism of Chamberlain, Eden and Halifax, hopelessly out of their depth in the brutal world of the dictators, is unanswerable. In researching European international history between the wars, she remarked, she had encountered “few heroes, two evil Titans and an assortment of villains and knaves.”’ It is a useful point to bear in mind when reading the news now, hungry as we are for heroes and inclined ourselves to be blue-eyed about dictators. ‘In her final years’, writes David Reynolds, Zara Steiner ‘sensed that the lights were beginning to fail. Her hope was that this did not presage another triumph of the dark.’
Saving vs Serving
A young mother writes to me: ‘I have gained the trust and confidence of some priests, insight into their sufferings and dealings. In seeing their humanity, humbly, I am left with even more reverence for the priesthood, and more love, but ultimately a deeper sense of how many, even the best, have been wounded by the present climate and suffer some hopelessness where “I must save the Church” replaces “I must serve the Church”. We need shepherds and priests truly espoused to their mission, more apt to fall to their knees in hiddenness than storming through the world without a harness of humility.’
It is good to be reminded.
Tuning
I am gratefully discovering the work of Stefan Andres (1906-70), whose carefully codified fiction from the 30s and 40s evokes the experience of life under totalitarianism while carefully, but audibly, upholding an ideal of inalienable freedom. His complex novella from 1943, ‘We Are Utopia‘, recounts a scene from the Spanish Civil War. Two men from opposite sides meet during a decisive night of battle. One is a renegade priest; the other is an officer with a heavy conscience. The conversation between them is equilibrated with consummate skill, showing ability, and will, to go beyond stereotype. The ex-priest is alert to a deeper, more existential layer in the officer’s trouble. He asks: ‘Were you never happy?’ Andres describes the response: ‘”Happy?” Don Pedro spoke the word and listened to it the way a musician attends to the tone from a tuning fork.’
Many of us need to hear that tone afresh, to retune our aspirations by it.
Trauma of Loss
Fortunately, the Rabbi Sacks Foundation maintains its mailing list, enabling those of us on it to benefit still from Jonathan Sacks’ learning and insight. This week’s instalment lets an intimate experience of grief and failure shed light on a momentously mysterious passage from the Book of Numbers. Scripture lets us confront deep truths:
‘We are not always masters of our emotions. Nor does comforting others prepare you for your own experience of loss. […] We are embodied souls. We are flesh and blood. We grow old. We lose those we love. Outwardly we struggle to maintain our composure but inwardly we weep. Yet life goes on, and what we began, others will continue. Those we loved and lost live on in us, as we will live on in those we love. For love is as strong as death, and the good we do never dies.’
You can read the full text here.
Being Faced
When last week I saw this marble head, carved in the late second or early third century, the time of Caracalla, in the Archaeological Museum of Nicopolis, I was moved and puzzled. Having admired it, I walked on; but I found myself compelled to return. It was as if the lady was trying to say something to me. I could have sworn I’d seen her that same morning in downtown Preveza coming out of a hairdresser’s, her perm carefully reset. It is extraordinary how a skilled artist can convey personal presence in such a way that it arrests us still after the passage of millennia. Though to have a presence that carries, and so a gift of communion to share, I must first discover and consolidate it. Gregory the Great wrote of St Benedict that he spent a crucial time of his life ‘living alone with himself in God’s sight‘, thus preparing himself for decisive encounters. The order is taller than it may at first seem. A lot of the time, we tend rather to run away from ourselves.
