Auden in IcelandNotes from Auden’s Letters from Iceland written in concert with Louis MacNeice, an immortal travel book. On the locals: ‘They are genuinely proud of their country and its history, but without the least trace of hysterical nationalism.’ On vegetarians: ‘It Read More
Brutta figuraThis conversation between Norman Lebrecht and Riccardo Muti is a few years old, but still worth listening to. I love Muti’s account of his stern Neapolitan mother, who considered it bad form to clap at the end of her son’s Read More
Auden in IcelandNotes from Auden’s Letters from Iceland written in concert with Louis MacNeice, an immortal travel book. On the locals: ‘They are genuinely proud of their country and its history, but without the least trace of hysterical nationalism.’ On vegetarians: ‘It won’t be long before we find there is/A Society of Everybody’s Aunts/For the Prevention of Cruelty to Plants.’ On proof-reading: ‘I can occupy odd moments by trying to put in logical punctuation, which is something I don’t understand.’ On cuisine: ‘He made us try two Icelandic specialties, old shark and whale pickled in sour milk, eccentric but not absolutely inedible.’ On the fauna: ‘I went and looked at a fine bull, which looked absurdly like a film director I know.’ On symbolist painting: ‘You know – Time pulling off the boots of Eternity with one hand while keeping the wolf from the door with the other.’ On existentialism: ‘Life is not known to give away her presents.’ On schools: ‘Greek and manual labour seem to me the best kind of education.’ On the development of culture: ‘I can’t imagine what the Duke of Wellington/Would say about the music of Duke Ellington.’
OlsokWisdom 10.10-14: Wisdom unmasked the lie. James 1.2-12: May your steadfastness come to fruition. Matthew 16.24-28: He must take up his cross and follow me. The words given us in the Gospel — telling to take up our cross, asking what it profits a man to gain the world if he forfeits his life — were uttered after Jesus had declared to the Twelve that he would go up to Jerusalem to suffer much and be killed. It doesn’t work, then, to interpret them in a merely symbolic way — regrettably, we might say, for the standard they set is tremendous. But this is how it is: the concrete exigence of Christianity is inevitable. Faith cannot be reduced to vaguely referenced ‘values’ or to a cultural relic. Christians are women and men who live according to Jesus’s commandments and example, grafting their existence into his. And the saints? They are people who, in their specificity, reflect the truth of Jesus clearly enough for their history to nurture Christian insight and the resolution of Christians to follow their Lord to the end. This is how the story of St Olav was read, recited, and sung in this land for centuries. It left its mark on art, on our landscape, on unifying rituals. We don’t have that sort of thing anymore. There’s hardly a single story, now, that everybody knows, that can be told by multiple voices around a camp fire as we savour the singular pleasure of hearing told, in canonised form, a tale we know by heart. In so far as we gather at all round camp fires, we all wear earplugs in order to listen undisturbed to our personalised list of podcasts. The story of Olav was to medieval Norway what the Odyssey was to people of the ancient world. Homer’s epic lived in shared remembrance. Whether you found yourself in Athens, Rome, Alexandria or Carthage (or were ploughing the wine-dark sea), you could cite the Sirens’ song or Penelope’s loom and people around you understood. They understood not chiefly because they had sweated over Homeric vocab, but because the Odyssey had become a hermeneutic key to their own lives. The Sirens stood for temptations that appear irresistible though we know they will lead to destruction, temptations I dare say we have all known? Penelope stood for determined hope in all-encompassing inner darkness, again a pan-human predicament. By going deep into Homer, one could encounter new depths in oneself and a path to human fellowship. In a like manner the skaldic poetry and sagas that spoke of Olav were objects of careful scrutiny. In his baptism, people saw an image of their own part in the new and eternal covenant; his sea voyage represented loyalty to a vocation, the battle of Stiklestad free abandonment in death. One might recognise oneself not only in Olav’s victories, but also in his battles and occasional defeats. The picture of him trampling underfoot a cunning serpent carrying his own facial features shows that Olav’s constant conflict with his own pride was a source of consolation. If Olav had to fight in this way, surely I can fight my own battle, trusting that my poisonous pride can be vanquished if only I entrust myself, again and again, to the mercy and meekness of Christ Jesus. The saints do not represent a world of pretence, but a world in which the real can be faced as it is, not least when it hurts. An historian I know recently told me something that, in this regard, gave me food for thought. She had been working in the archives of C.S. Lewis. We associate Lewis with Aslan, Narnia, and Christian apologetics. We risk forgetting that he was by profession a medieval scholar, with massive competence in the field. My acquaintance had had occasion to study Lewis’s personal copy of Heimskringla. His annotations are mainly of a technical nature, with one notable exception. It concerns the scene from Stiklestad in which Tormod Kolbrunarskald, badly wounded, must withdraw from combat. In a shed nearby he finds a number of Olav’s other allies mutilated. The sight is terrible, the sound of it fierce. A tough fellow tells Tormod: ‘All this howling and screaming is bad; it is a great shame that brisk young men cannot bear their wounds: the king’s men have done bravely today, but they bear their wounds ill.’ In the margin Lewis had noted ‘A C.C.S.’. Is it a reference to a learned treatise on war wounds in the eleventh century? No. Remember, Lewis had been a soldier in the First World War. In April 1918, aged nineteen, he received a piece of shrapnel in his chest. He carried it for 26 years, until it was removed by surgery in 1944, having moved too near to his heart. As for the soul-wound, Lewis carried it with him to the grave. In the jargon of warfare, a ‘C.C.S’ is a Casualty Clearing Station, a tent rigged near the battlefield where a surgeon designates those among the wounded who stand a chance of survival, so merit the risk of transport, and those for whom nothing can be done except to place a comforting hand on their forehead. The fear, stench, and racket of such places are known to us from the war poetry of Wilfrid Owen and Gerrit Engelke. It is moving to imagine Lewis, sitting peacefully in Oxford with his pipe, a gas fire, and a teapot within reach, perceiving an echo of this ancient trauma in Snorre’s description of the Battle of Stiklestad. The saga enabled him to face again, and possibly better to understand, the limits of courage, the impact of wounds sustained, lasting vulnerability. In the skalds’ poems, the Battle of Stiklestad is linked with light, the way Homer’s account of the fall of Troy is described as ‘glorious’. The terrible costs war incurs, the weeping and wailing, are not abstracted; but we are shown that even awfulness can acquire a beautiful aspect retrospectively, when it effects something good. Our Lord’s passion on Calvary was, in realistic terms, revolting; yet Giotto did depict it truly when he painted it as taking place in peaceful symmetry, surrounded by choreographed angels. God, who, on the first day of creation, called light out of darkness and bade chaos recede, can to this day order our missteps, forgive our sins, cure our diseases, and consecrate our lives, if only we commit ourselves to him utterly. The Cross he summons up to take up may seem materially overwhelming. But if we bear it enlightened by his Paschal sacrifice it will be luminous, light, and eucharistic. That is what the saints evidence, what St Olav teaches us. His story rightly understood is the story of what we ourselves are and can become. In Christ’s name! Amen.
Vigil of OlsokApocalypse 1.4-8: Jesus Christ, the true witness, first-born from the dead. John 5.24-32: As I hear, I judge; and my judgment is just. It was here at Stiklestad that Olav Haraldsson almost a thousand years ago, after dreaming his wondrous dream about a heavenly ladder, faced his foes in battle. He was lordly and bold: from Sigvat Skald we know that no opponent could endure his eagle’s gaze. That, I fancy, is why Thorstein Knarrarsmid first struck Olav at the knee: that way he did not have to look the king in the eye. Thorstein’s was the first of three wounds that caused Olav’s death. Having received it, the king ‘leant on a rock, cast his sword away, and commended himself to God’. That happened at three in the afternoon on a normally bright summer’s day; yet darkness lay over this plain like the one that had choked Jerusalem almost a thousand years before while Christ our Lord expired on the Cross under whose banner Olav’s army marched. Thorer Hund thrust a sword into the weaponless king’s belly; Kalv next struck him on the neck, and Olav fell. It was here at Stiklestad, likewise, that Olav’s reputation for holiness began. It happened that same day, in the same commotion, surrounded by the same agents. The first witness, precisely, is Thorer Hund, one of his killers. When Thorer, who did after all respect the king for what he had been, went to spread a blanket over his corpse, he saw that Olav’s cheeks ‘were red as if he were asleep, his face was brighter than when he had lived’. An ugly wound on Thorer’s hand touched Olav’s blood; it healed before night descended. Thus Thorer was the first, we read in Snorre, to declare the king a saint. Thorer bears a certain resemblance to Longinus, the Roman soldier who pierced Jesus’s side, then came to faith and exclaimed: ‘Truly he was the Son of God’. Longinus left the army and became a hermit. It is said of Thorer that he set off on a penitential pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Before we reject that story as humbug, we might note that Thorer, a victor in the battle, certainly never returned home to his mansion in Troms. Something had happened. From Stiklestad he slips out of the chronicle into an interior process. The fact that Thorer was such an improbable witness does not make him less credible, but more. A testimony going against opinions you have had or your general attitude calls for character. It takes courage to say: “I was wrong.” We do not often hear politicians say such a thing. Even spectacular failures tend to be accompanied nowadays by self-righteous litanies with the refrain: ‘I did what I thought to be right’. It is thought too embarrassing to admit in a worldly context: ‘I am guilty, and I repent.’ In a Christian optic matters look different. We see repentance as a mark of nobility. Indeed, what is a Christian if not someone who can witness to wrongs that have been righted, who at last has let go of the illusion of his or her immaculateness, who knows what it is like to start a new life founded on forgiveness and grace? The holiness Thorer saw in Olav did not imply a sudden idealisation of the king’s whole life. That would have been false. What Thorer realised in the evening after the battle was that Olav stood for more than ideology. His life’s struggle was about more than territorial conflict. Olav had been confirmed in a new understanding of what life is about, about the goal and purpose of existence. The cross drawn on Olav’s banner was no formality. It was a confession. He had in a way bid the world farewell: that is what the vision of the heavenly ladder tells us. Not that Olav despised the world — he remained concrete and sensual. But he had ascertained that time is the bearer of eternity and that palpable realities point beyond themselves. Thus a greater desire was conceived in him, like the love Scripture speaks of, stronger than death. Thorer must have sensed this death-defying power when he saw the lifelikeness of Olav’s dead body. That way his own life took a new, healing turn. To become a saint is not to be turned into someone else. No, a saint is someone who has become himself entirely, not according to a private recipe, but in response to God’s call; after all, he, the Potter, knows better than we, who are clay, what form we are meant to assume. That is something a secular mentality struggles to grasp. A newspaper editor flew into a rage recently, when it had been announced that a process is introduced for the possible beatification of Sigrid Undset. The editor wrote angrily: ‘No modern Norwegian author should suffer the indignity of religious veneration’, as if that would be in breach of the statutes of the Writers’ Guild. Undset, he went on, was ‘stubborn and antagonistic, […] a human being like other human beings’. That remark was probably intended to indicate uncanonisability. But no — what we love and admire in Undset is not some boring AI-generated model that may instantiate perfect form but stays disincarnate; we honour her for the passionate nature she fought with, which led her to create and to become an integral person whom the Potter’s hand could perfect and beautify. ‘No one except God is good’, says the priest Sira Eiliv on the final page of Kristin Lavransdatter, when the novel’s protagonist has just left this world, ‘and we can do no good without him’. Undset wrote from experience. But she knew, too, that with God nothing is impossible; with God even our contradictions can be reconciled into a fruitful, original, lovely whole, into something surprisingly Christlike. That is the sort of vision Thorer Hund must have had here at Stiklestad on 29 July 1030. In retrospect, nurtured by tradition, we see it with greater clarity; still it remains paradoxical. Olav, like Sigrid Undset, is an unlikely saint. That is how God’s strength is evidenced, giving us guts to start untying knots that condition and constrain our own lives. God can bring holiness out of these also; that is his will. On 29 July 1897 Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson declared in a famous speech: ‘Olav Haraldsson and St Olav are two different people’. He was wrong. Olav’s holiness did not cancel his humanity; it accomplished it and revealed the sense of it. That is the path you and I, too, are called to follow. Initial from the 14th-century Flatøyboka, showing how Olav was killed. Wikimedia.
A New ChestThis short essay was written as an introduction to the new edition of Spor etter helgenkongen by Lars Roar Langlet and Knut Ødegård. This magnificent work brings together the earliest poetic and pictorial evidence of the saint’s cult, first shaped by Olav’s own contemporaries. One can only hope that it will one day appear in English translation Norway’s coat of arms, in use since the thirteenth century, shows a crowned lion holding a silver axe with a golden handle. The lion stands for our country’s sovereignty. The axe is St Olav’s. The saint’s legacy and our national identity are inseparable. For nearly a thousand years Norwegians have understood themselves, more or less explicitly, in terms of the heritage of Olav Haraldsson. Wherein does that heritage consist? Now that the millennium of the Battle of Stiklestad draws near, the question generates broad interest. Our country, long since dechristianised, struggles to see the sense of Christian martyrdom. As for Snorre, we are often told that he wrote a long time after Olav’s death. Can we swallow what he tells us, or is the saga nothing but an incensed heap of putrefaction? The question of the saga’s credibility is of importance, of course, and of great interest. It is wrong, though, to assume that the saga is the sole, and supreme, source of our knowledge of St Olav. That is what this wonderful book shows us with academic rigour and poetic depth. The splendid chest that held Olav’s body in the Christchurch of Nidaros is no more. We have nothing but a few flakes of gold and gems from it, palpable signs of a lost presence. By means of this book, however, Lars Roar Langslet and Knut Ødegård have fashioned a different kind of chest made up of verses and lovely images. In these, Olav is present to us once more with credible, embodied immediacy. Olav’s legacy and the tales of his care for his people were not initially told in terms of linear historiography. The tradition was passed on in verses and songs, in paintings and carvings, in liturgical compositions. It is electrifying to encounter the saint, for example, in the poems of Sigvat Skald and Torarin Lovtunge. Both were Olav’s contemporaries. They had seen him up close, had given careful thought to his career and accomplishments. Further, they proclaimed their praise of him before people who had likewise known the king, and who would have boxed their ears, had they presented nothing but nonsense and lies. The work of Langslet and Ødegård represents a milestone in research, but it has long been hidden under a bushel. Little was done to promote it when it was first published in 2011. It is a delight that St Olav Forlag is now bringing it out in a new edition, lavishly set and illustrated. If you would read a single book to prepare for the National Jubilee in 2030, let it be this one. It brings Olav close as an historical figure and as a bearer of present challenge. By perceiving how Olav was seen from different angles after his death, we catch a glimpse of him with our own eyes. We hear his own songs also, for our martyr king was not just a warrior; he was a poet. ‘Let his countryfolk bend their knees’, exhorts the twelfth-century poem Geisli [‘Ray of the Sun’], ‘before Christ’s pure limb/Carried up into heaven/Blessed are those who gain his friendship’. This book not only lets us discover a worthy cultural inheritance. It may lead to personal friendship with him who rermains that inheritances’s living subject. A fifteenth-century illustration featured in the book.
Brutta figuraThis conversation between Norman Lebrecht and Riccardo Muti is a few years old, but still worth listening to. I love Muti’s account of his stern Neapolitan mother, who considered it bad form to clap at the end of her son’s concerts. It smacked to her of self-promotion. Even when he was a world-renowned conductor, members of the family would, in the midst of audiences’ raptures, be constrained to keep their hands on their knees, heeding her stern instruction: ‘Non facciamo brutta figura!’ Interesting, too, are his remarks on the relationship between the conductor and the orchestra, almost a little essay on synodality. And his comparison of Wilhelm Tell to the River Tiber. He rounds the conversation off by saying: ‘I have always followed the counsel my teacher gave to me: “Muti, never compromise in music!”‘
Home
Today we celebrate St. Alphonsus Liguori, bishop and doctor of the Church. St Alphonsus Liguori, 1696-1787, founder of the Redemptorist Congregation , taught much on moral theology and the spiritual life. He is remembered as a popular preacher and influential Read More 4 Likes
Today is the Feast Day of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Ignatius was a 16th century Spanish former soldier whose cannonball wounds led him on a different path. He founded the Society of Jesus/Jesuits with 6 others and played a prominent Read More 1 Comments
KNOCK NOVENA Help us Spread the Message of Our Lady of Knock FREE Knock Novena Pack €10.00 EUR Help Spread the Message of Our Lady of Knock through this FREE Knock Novena Promotion Pack. Each Pack contains the items below, and your €10 donation Read More
Today is International Friendship Day. We are so thankful for all our friends who are with us in prayer, worship and praise every week, either in person or online. Lord, We treasure our wonderful friends so much. Thank you for their Read More 2 Comments
