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
Drowning in DataI have found food for thought in this essay by Arianna Huffington, prompted by Pope Leo’s Magnifica humanitas. Speaking of the ‘gospel of Silicon Valley’ she writes: ‘AI is not divine. But it can paradoxically force us to have the conversation Read More
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.
Nytt OlavsskrinDenne teksten ble skrevet som food til den nye utgave av Lars Roar Langlets og Knut Ødegårds bok Olav den hellige: Spor etter helgenkongen, nå tilgjengelig fra St Olav Forlag Norges riksvåpen, i bruk siden 1200-tallet, viser en kronet løve som holde en gullskjeftet øks av sølv. Løven står for landets suverenitet. Øksen er Hellig-Olavs. Olavstradisjonen og norsk identitet er uadskillelige størrelser. I snart tusen år har nordmenn mer eller mindre eksplisitt forstått seg selv på grunnlag av arven etter Olav Haraldsson. Hva består så arven i? Med tusenårsjubileet for Stiklestadslaget på horisonten, er spørsmålet kommet til å oppta brede lag av folket. Et land som for lengst er avkristnet, strever med å fatte hva et kristent martyrium betyr. Og Snorre, blir vi ofte fortalt, han skrev jo så lenge etter at Olav var død. Kan vi i det hele tatt ta sagaen hans for god fisk, eller er den bare full av røkelses-parfymert forråtnelse? Spørsmålet om sagaens troverdighet er vesentlig, selvsagt, og høyst interessant. Men det er feil å anta at sagaen er eneste, og viktigste, kilde til viten om Olav den hellige. Dét er noe denne storartede boken viser med vitenskapelig stringens og dikterisk dybde. Det fagre skrinet som huset Olavs kropp i Nidaros, er for lengst gått tapt. Vi har ikke annet enn en håndfull gullflak og edle stener fra det, håndfaste tegn på tapt presens. Men i Olav den hellige – spor etter helgenkongen har Lars Roar Langslet og Knut Ødegård formet et annet slags skrin gjort av vers og bilder. Der lar Olav seg gjenfinne med troverdig, inkarnert umiddelbarhet. Arven etter Olav, og sagnene om omsorgen hans for folket, ble ikke først fortalt som lineær historiografi. Budskapet ble formidlet i kvad og sanger, i malerkunst og utskjæringer, i liturgiske tekster. Det er elektrifiserende å møte helgenkongen i, for eksempel, diktene til Sigvat Skald og Torarin Lovtunge, Olavs samtidige. De hadde sett ham på nært hold; de hadde tenkt grundig gjennom hans livsløp og verk. Og de frembar sin hyllest for folk som nok ville ha gitt dem en susende ørefik, var det bare fanteri og tull, det de kom med. Langslets og Ødegårds bok er en milepæl i Olavsforskningen, men den har lenge vært et lys satt under en skjeppe. Lite har vært gjort for å formidle dens budskap siden boken først kom ut i 2011. Så er det en fryd at St Olav Forlag nå gir den ut på nytt, med vakker formgivning. Skal man lese én bok frem imot nasjonaljubileet, bør det bli denne. Her kommer Olav oss nær med sin arv og sin nåværende fordring. Ved å skjelne hvordan Olav ble sett fra mange ulike vinkler i årene etter hans død, er det som om vi får se ham selv. Også hans egne sanger får vi høre, for helgenkongen var ikke krigsmann bare, han var poet. “Landsfolk seg lyt bøya”, står det i Geisli, “for den skire Krist-lem/himmel-boren, sæl er/han som vinn hans venskap.” Denne boken lar oss ikke bare oppdage ærverdig kulturarv. Den kan bentfrem føre til vennskap med ham som er arvens levende subjekt. Illustrasjon fra Olavsskapet i Överenhörna, malt på 1400-tallet. Fra Olav den hellige: Spor etter helgenkongen.
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!”‘
Drowning in DataI have found food for thought in this essay by Arianna Huffington, prompted by Pope Leo’s Magnifica humanitas. Speaking of the ‘gospel of Silicon Valley’ she writes: ‘AI is not divine. But it can paradoxically force us to have the conversation we’ve neglected since the Enlightenment: Who are we, and what truly defines us? Once that conversation begins, AI’s real superpower — personalization — can help us tap into the unique qualities that make us human.’ I am less optimistic than Huffington regarding the potential of AI in this regard. I do, however, agree, with this: ‘AI overtaking us in intelligence lays bare the massive category error we have made in increasingly defining ourselves by our intelligence.’ An insight that often occurs in the writings of the Fathers is the following: the index of true humanity is capacity for compassion, presupposing the winning of the heart. That is a thought to develop and practise. It might make us wise, an inalienably humane quality. As Huffington notes: ‘while we’re drowning in data, we’re starved for wisdom’.
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