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.
Mission
When Bishop Meletios Kalamaras of blessed memory was consecrated metropolitan of Preveza on 28 March 1980, stepping into a troubled situation marked by scandals, he said: ‘The bishop, and every priest, must be a messenger of peace, a source of calm for souls which are troubled, for whatever reason. In order to be so, he must not seek honours, but must imitate Christ who, when He was reviled, did not revile in return; when He suffered, He did not threaten. And he must always be prepared to say from the depths of his heart: ‘To those who hate us and wrong us, Lord, give pardon; and grant them your bountiful mercy and your Kingdom.’ Yet for the mission of the priest, that is not enough. The chief mission of our Lord Jesus Christ was to give His soul, His whole self, to save the world. Initiating His disciples into this, the Lord taught them, saying: ‘My friends, see that no fear separates you from me. For though I suffer, yet it is for the sake of the world. If then you are my friends, imitate me.” If we truly seek remedies for clericalism, surely they are found in this mindset, this state of soul.
Orientale Lumen
St Benedict, Patron of Europe, was keenly aware of being heir to an Eastern tradition. He saw it as intrinsic to the treasure from which, in his Rule, he asked abbots to bring forth things old and new. In Orientale Lumen, Pope John Paul II submitted that ‘members of the Catholic Church of the Latin tradition must be fully acquainted with this treasure’. Drawing on the metaphor of Vyacheslav Ivanov, he insisted that the Church needs to breathe with both lungs, Eastern and Western, so to be rescued from asphyxiating provincialism and imprisonment in the immediate: ‘Today we often feel ourselves prisoners of the present. It is as though man had lost his perception of belonging to a history which precedes and follows him. This effort to situate oneself between the past and the future, with a grateful heart for the benefits received and for those expected, is offered by the Eastern Churches in particular, with a clearcut sense of continuity which takes the name of Tradition and of eschatological expectation.’ Are we now, in the Latin Church, breathing to capacity?
Summer Break
CoramFratribus will take a holiday for a couple of weeks.
I thank you for your interest in the site.
May you have a happy, restful summer – like the one sung about here.
+fr Erik Varden OCSO
Conscience
I have long valued Jennifer Bryson’s work in spreading knowledge about Ida Görres, whose insights speak clearly to the present moment. Only this week, thanks to a reference in Luke Coppen’s indispensable Starting Seven, did I learn something of Bryson’s biography and work in Guantanamo Bay. What she says about her experience there is worth reading. I was struck by her remarks on conscience. Conscience, she reminds us, is not some kind of faultless software we carry from birth; it needs formatting: ‘I didn’t know anything about conscience formation when I went to Guantanamo. And I’d been a Catholic at that point for almost 13 years. […] What I realized in Guantanamo is, first of all, that formation really needs to happen before the difficult challenges come. And because we can’t predict when those come, the time for conscience formation is right now.’ This is a theme at the heart of Görres’s work, too. ‘Understanding that there is a cosmic level of justice and that each of us, as human beings, will meet our Maker’, Bryson adds, ‘does provide a broader perspective’ on present choices.
Teleology
In an intelligent review of Matt Walsh’s What is a Woman (Notebook 3 June), Abigail Favale writes: ‘Contraception has reshaped our cultural imagination about what it means to be a man or a woman. There has been a collective forgetting about what sex is for, that it has a clear teleology around which our bodies are organized. When gender is no longer linked to generation, it becomes merely an aesthetic, a signifier without a signified. And when the signifier bears the full weight of meaning-making, the external signals of gender become intensely important—too important. We must perform and express our gender because that is all gender is now: a performative expression. These gendered signals, moreover, are increasingly shaped by the soulless forces of consumerism and pornography. We are what we watch, buy, wear, and click. Femininity and masculinity have become products, costumes, commodities.’ If one re-reads Humanae vitae in this key, one is impressed by its prescience.
Wisdom
Lyuba Yatskiv, one of the major Christian artists of our time, has created an apse mosaic for the Church of Holy Wisdom at Ukraine’s Catholic University. It is nothing short of astonishing. Its inspiration is a passage from Proverbs (9,1–6) dear to the Church Fathers, who saw in it a prophecy of Christ’s economy of grace: ‘ Wisdom has built her house; she has hewn her seven pillars. She has slaughtered her beasts; she has mixed her wine; she has also set her table.’ The visual representation is subtle, combining Old Testament themes with sacramental symbolism. What remarkable angels! The whole is marked by unity of intelligence, line, and colour. The heart is invited to rise, the mind to fix its attention, the eye to rest. Ms Yatskiv’s work sets a standard by which to evaluate other contemporary essays in mosaic art. Victoria Emily Jones wrote about the design in 2018. You can find her article here.
Too Easy Gospel
Squalor characterises Roberto Abbado’s production of Madama Butterfly once we get into the second act – Butterfly and Suzuki go shabbily dressed and live on a building site. This jars at first. But the approach grew on me: it displays the ingloriousness of betrayal. In Act 1, the cavalier Pinkerton tells the consul in Nagasaki about his good fortune. He has acquired a lease on a house for 999 years, yet is free each month to cancel it; the bride he will put in it cost him a mere 100 yen. He sings a hymn to the man of enterprise: ‘His anchor boldly he casts at random, until a sudden squall upsets his ship, then up go sails and rigging. And life is not worth living if he can’t win the best and fairest’. The consul retorts, È un facile vangelo – ‘that gospel is too easy’. He tries to make Pinkerton see that for Butterfly the wedding is real. She gives herself to him heart and soul. Pinkerton nods pensively: he is not wicked, yet can’t conceive of anything but a provisional commitment. When he finally sees that Butterfly is a real human being, not a plaything, it is too late. The pathos of his outcry at the end is heartfelt, but shallow. The tragedy was predictable, and was his doing. Pinkerton is a type of the narcissistic lover. He comes across as startlingly contemporary. As for Butterfly, she is timeless in her patient, self-sacrificing waiting. This interpretation of the role remains unsurpassed.
Perduring Voices
It is hard to speak of the death of someone we have loved, even many years on. So it is balm to the soul to hear a voice that can – and may help us find our own voice with regard to private, hidden, perhaps still unarticulated griefs. In a recent essay Daniel Capó reflects with dignity and beauty on the anniversary of death of his younger brother: ‘When we die we begin to belong to others, to become others. Our voice perdures as a legacy in others’ souls. It is our responsibility to preserve an inheritance consigned to us from the very moment in which we knew love. Indeed, it is our duty to remain faithful to this light which we have received, to nurture it, and to protect it from the world’s miseries in order, thus, to pass it on to others. […] Our personal light presupposes the reflection of many other lights and of a love that, at times, in death can come to be terrible, yet whose mystery leaves within us a deeper, more indestructible truth.’
Mystery Undermined
A 2018 Festschrift to Fr Elmar Salmann described him as being ‘neither conservative nor liberal, but rather classical and liberating’. The source of the description is not given, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it comes from Fr Salmann himself, enunciated as an aspiration. He is a deeply aspirational man, ever in via. This comes across in a recent, readable interview with the Osservatore Romano. Among other things he says: ‘The Council led to a humanisation of the kerygma, spiritualising it in a Lucan key – we are living in the era of the third Gospel – a dramatic and extraordinary passage that has run its course in parallel to my own life. But this humanisation hasn’t made us more human. I mean, it has given no profile to the mystery. The Eucharist today is a ‘fraternal meal’, which is fair enough, but what have we done with the Mystery, the real presence, the making-present of Jesus’s passion? Tension has been pushed in the direction of making the Mystery comprehensible. As a result, we have lost it as such. Thus the humanised Christian undermines the framework of the mysteries and with them the role of the Church.’
Impact of Words
It is said of Dayan Chanoch Ehrentreu that he once prevented someone who declared disbelief in the Torah’s divine inspiration from being called upon to read the sacred text in the synagogue. In an inclusively-minded climate this might seem shocking. However, the Dayan’s reasoning was simple and sensible: had the reader ‘uttered the requisite blessing, “Our God … who gave us the Torah of truth …”, he would have committed the grave sin of giving false witness for something he did not believe. Ehrentreu always believed words had consequences.’ This belief is profoundly Biblical; indeed it encapsulates a chief dimension of Scriptural revelation. It is a perspective society urgently needs at a times when words are being devalued — and not just in secular contexts. Am I conscious of the force of the ‘Amen’ I repeatedly utter as part of liturgical prayer, of the commitment it entails?
Integrity
I have come to know and appreciate the voice of Sibylle Lewitscharoff posthumously, intrigued by obituaries published after her death on 13 May this year. A writer of virtuosity, she was also a woman of wit – and a wonderful reader. In a terrific lecture given in Vienna in 2016, she considered the lasting impact of Dante by discussing not so much the merit as the fundamental options taken by various translators, to great effect. She remarked how Dante haunts Samuel Beckett and his ‘aesthetics of negativity’, representative of much modern fiction: ‘The essence of the modern novel is brokenness. That’s what it lives on. Happiness has become a subject for kitsch.’ Dante might teach us to dare to envisage happiness, to rediscover hope. Lewitscharoff gave this aspiration voice in her writing. It also informed her life. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2010 she knew hardship. Not long before her death, she said with a characteristic mixture of earnestness and irony: ‘In the next world I imagine a differently constituted spiritual-embodied, simultaneously glorious beauty. I hope for a new connection with the body – I’m not so keen on the old one.’
De venerabili
Mozart’s Litanies to the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar (K 243), a youthful work, are not much performed now. They were greatly loved in their day. On 20 November 1778, having rummaged through his piles of manuscripts, Mozart wrote agitatedly to his father, ‘Now all of them, and even my Lord Prelate, have been pestering me about giving them a Litany de venerabili. I said I do not have it with me. And I was not really sure. I searched, and did not find it. I said, write to my Papa. Now they are doing whatever they want.’ Leopold found the score and sent it off, enclosing a bill. He assured his son afterwards that the work had been performed ‘when the great procession takes place, with full applause’. This music remains a catechesis in sound. Listen out for the ‘Stupendum supra omnia miraculum’. The movement ‘Viaticum’ could draw even the most hard-hearted listener to his or her knees. You can find the text of the litanies here.
Manna
The Eucharist, let’s remember, is food for pilgrims. It is not a snack for sedentary holiday makers; it is manna for those who’ve a distance to cover each day, who strain forward to be worthy, at last, to enter the Father’s house, and to feel at home there, taught by the journey through exile what homecoming means.
The Eucharist gives both a pledge and a challenge. One of today’s liturgical texts puts it thus: ‘The bread of life will incorporate us into itself if we are transformed into his likeness through a pure mind, firm faith, and perfect charity.’ That is our roadmap. In the strength of the bread from heaven, we continue on our journey of transformation with zest, great love, and gratitude.
