Words on the Word
Erik Varden is a monk and bishop, born in Norway in 1974. In 2002, after ten years at the University of Cambridge, he joined Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in Charnwood Forest. Pope Francis named him bishop of Trondheim in 2019.
Please find below a selection of homilies:
Desert Fathers 31 
You can find this episode in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here.
A grand personage came from Read More
A grand personage came from Read More
Olsok 2025 This is an English version of the homily. You can find a German one, too, by scrolling down.
Wisdom 10.10-14: Wisdom did not desert him.
James 1.2-4.12: So that you may become perfect and whole.
Matthew 16.24-28: He must take up his cross Read More
Wisdom 10.10-14: Wisdom did not desert him.
James 1.2-4.12: So that you may become perfect and whole.
Matthew 16.24-28: He must take up his cross Read More
Vigil of Olsok You can find a German translation of this homily, preached in Norwegian, by scrolling down.
Joshua 3:14-4:8: What are these stones?
Colossians 1:9-17: He is the image of the unseen God.
Matthew 5:13-20: When salt loses its saltiness, it is useless.
When Jesus meets Read More
Joshua 3:14-4:8: What are these stones?
Colossians 1:9-17: He is the image of the unseen God.
Matthew 5:13-20: When salt loses its saltiness, it is useless.
When Jesus meets Read More
Hearing Truly The disciples approached Jesus and said, “Why do you speak to the crowd in parables?” He said to them in reply, “Because knowledge of the mysteries of the Kingdom of heaven has been granted to you, but to them it Read More
Why We Need the Creed At this year’s summer conference at the Napa Institute, I was asked: ‘Why do we need not just the Word but also the Creed? Why does a 1700-year-old statement of faith matter right now, urgently for each of us?’ Below Read More
Temptation How can we face serious temptations?
First of all by learning what it is to live on trust: when a temptation comes, to recognise it honestly and to evaluate it—see what sort of response is needed—then, even if it makes me Read More
First of all by learning what it is to live on trust: when a temptation comes, to recognise it honestly and to evaluate it—see what sort of response is needed—then, even if it makes me Read More
Mary Magdalene Song of Songs 3.1-4: I sought him whom my heart loves.
John 20.1-18: Do not cling to me.
Our lectionary’s translation of Christ’s words to Mary, ‘Do not cling to me’, is a bit excessive. The translators have taken a liberty to Read More
John 20.1-18: Do not cling to me.
Our lectionary’s translation of Christ’s words to Mary, ‘Do not cling to me’, is a bit excessive. The translators have taken a liberty to Read More
Desert Fathers 31
You can find this episode in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here.
A grand personage came from abroad and brought along a great quantity of gold to Scetis. He asked the priest to give it to the brothers. The priest, however, said: ‘The brothers do not need it.’ But the other man pestered him and placed the basket [full of gold] at the door of the church. The priest said: ‘Let anyone who has need help himself.’ But no one drew close; some monks did not even notice. The priest therefore said to [the rich man]: ‘God has looked kindly on your charity; go now and give it to the poor.’ He left greatly edified.
We have seen that in the Jerusalem Church distribution from the common fund was made to all ‘as any had need’. That principle obtains in monastic life, too. A monastery may be austere; the monks or nuns may live poorly; but it is never an ideal to deprive someone of what is truly necessary. Provision is made for all manner of dispensations in view of sickness or weakness; failure to be kind in such instances is censured. The point of ascesis is to free a woman or man from superficial, needless cravings, not to strip them of essentials. Here, though, we face subtle distinctions. They can be difficult to make. For what do I, and do I not, strictly speaking need? Do I need to go for a run three times a week outside the monastic enclosure, or is that just something I happen to enjoy? Do I need the particular kind of food or drink I always look for at table, getting cross if it is not there, or am I just nurturing a pet obsession? Most of us can easily customise this sort of questioning to our own circumstances.
The question of need becomes specially acute when someone offers us money, gold. Gold is always pretty handy. There are always needs, if not present ones, then tomorrow’s. A wise steward must be mindful of these also. A religious community with many mouths to feed, as well as the poor and guests to look after, is always conscious of resources it lacks. Then there is God’s glory to consider. A gift might permit an extraordinary votive offering: a new pair of candlesticks, a splendid icon, a gilded chalice, a pilgrimage. And are not such things, too, needful if God is God and we owe him choice worship? Throughout monastic history long disputes have revolved around such issues, with wise, sincere, and holy people present on all sides.
Gold, though, calls for vigilance. It has a knack for bringing out the very worst in us. It is not easy to be free before gold, even if we fast, say our prayers, and think of ourselves as jolly spiritual. A passage in the Life of Antony is significant in this respect. It occurs at that crucial turning point when, after years of battle against evil in the cemetery, he goes out into the desert in search of the fortress that would become for him a place of great grace. We are so relieved to see our hero restored after his last, decisive run-in with the devil, when he cried out to God, ‘Where were you?’, only to hear him affirm, ‘I was there, Antony, but waited to see you fight’, that we might miss two little details that follow.
As Antony made his cheerful way into the inner wilderness he saw a silver dish lying in the sand. Would it not be sensible to take it along? A pious pilgrim might have lost it and be glad to have it restored to him. Or it could be given away as alms. Antony, though, smelt a rat. He suspected the dish was some devilish delusion planted there to distract him, so made a resolute prayer to this effect: ‘No way, you evil one! You are not going to hinder my purpose. Let this thing go with you to destruction.’ No sooner had he finished his prayer than the plate vanished ‘like smoke from the face of fire’. That is not all. A little further on Antony found a whole lot of gold scattered about, the real stuff, not a mirage. He marvelled at the quantity of it, unsure of where it came from; this time there was no obvious sign of devilish to-do. He did not pause to consider this mystery. Instead he passed through the area ‘as though he was going over fire’, hurrying on at a run — a run! — ‘in order to lose sight of the place’.
It is a noble image of this spiritual athlete. Having stood firm through spectacular temptations that had racked him in spirit, body, and mind, Antony was exposed to one last trial utterly concrete and mundane, that of filling his pockets with wonga. His resistance shows his stature; for how many gurus, ancient and modern, have not fallen headlong into this trap.
The brothers of Scetis are worthy sons of such a father. I love the fact that some of them quite failed to notice the gold stashed at the church door. Their minds were on higher things. May ours be likewise. There is one last thing to consider: the donor. In a sense his gift was spurned. He left edified, we are told, but perhaps humbled, too? I cannot help thinking of a letter Fr John of Valamo wrote in 1955 to a spiritual directee who by post had sent him a watermelon, a luxury in Finland in those post-war years:
I thank you very much for the watermelon, although the package arrived in battered condition, the watermelon damaged, the paper all wet. The postmistress was displeased; other packages got wet. No doubt you sent it with vanity. It always happens that anyone who acts with vanity can expect disgrace.
Stern words from a true monk. Sometimes we need to hear such, to be freed of our pretension.
A grand personage came from abroad and brought along a great quantity of gold to Scetis. He asked the priest to give it to the brothers. The priest, however, said: ‘The brothers do not need it.’ But the other man pestered him and placed the basket [full of gold] at the door of the church. The priest said: ‘Let anyone who has need help himself.’ But no one drew close; some monks did not even notice. The priest therefore said to [the rich man]: ‘God has looked kindly on your charity; go now and give it to the poor.’ He left greatly edified.
We have seen that in the Jerusalem Church distribution from the common fund was made to all ‘as any had need’. That principle obtains in monastic life, too. A monastery may be austere; the monks or nuns may live poorly; but it is never an ideal to deprive someone of what is truly necessary. Provision is made for all manner of dispensations in view of sickness or weakness; failure to be kind in such instances is censured. The point of ascesis is to free a woman or man from superficial, needless cravings, not to strip them of essentials. Here, though, we face subtle distinctions. They can be difficult to make. For what do I, and do I not, strictly speaking need? Do I need to go for a run three times a week outside the monastic enclosure, or is that just something I happen to enjoy? Do I need the particular kind of food or drink I always look for at table, getting cross if it is not there, or am I just nurturing a pet obsession? Most of us can easily customise this sort of questioning to our own circumstances.
The question of need becomes specially acute when someone offers us money, gold. Gold is always pretty handy. There are always needs, if not present ones, then tomorrow’s. A wise steward must be mindful of these also. A religious community with many mouths to feed, as well as the poor and guests to look after, is always conscious of resources it lacks. Then there is God’s glory to consider. A gift might permit an extraordinary votive offering: a new pair of candlesticks, a splendid icon, a gilded chalice, a pilgrimage. And are not such things, too, needful if God is God and we owe him choice worship? Throughout monastic history long disputes have revolved around such issues, with wise, sincere, and holy people present on all sides.
Gold, though, calls for vigilance. It has a knack for bringing out the very worst in us. It is not easy to be free before gold, even if we fast, say our prayers, and think of ourselves as jolly spiritual. A passage in the Life of Antony is significant in this respect. It occurs at that crucial turning point when, after years of battle against evil in the cemetery, he goes out into the desert in search of the fortress that would become for him a place of great grace. We are so relieved to see our hero restored after his last, decisive run-in with the devil, when he cried out to God, ‘Where were you?’, only to hear him affirm, ‘I was there, Antony, but waited to see you fight’, that we might miss two little details that follow.
As Antony made his cheerful way into the inner wilderness he saw a silver dish lying in the sand. Would it not be sensible to take it along? A pious pilgrim might have lost it and be glad to have it restored to him. Or it could be given away as alms. Antony, though, smelt a rat. He suspected the dish was some devilish delusion planted there to distract him, so made a resolute prayer to this effect: ‘No way, you evil one! You are not going to hinder my purpose. Let this thing go with you to destruction.’ No sooner had he finished his prayer than the plate vanished ‘like smoke from the face of fire’. That is not all. A little further on Antony found a whole lot of gold scattered about, the real stuff, not a mirage. He marvelled at the quantity of it, unsure of where it came from; this time there was no obvious sign of devilish to-do. He did not pause to consider this mystery. Instead he passed through the area ‘as though he was going over fire’, hurrying on at a run — a run! — ‘in order to lose sight of the place’.
It is a noble image of this spiritual athlete. Having stood firm through spectacular temptations that had racked him in spirit, body, and mind, Antony was exposed to one last trial utterly concrete and mundane, that of filling his pockets with wonga. His resistance shows his stature; for how many gurus, ancient and modern, have not fallen headlong into this trap.
The brothers of Scetis are worthy sons of such a father. I love the fact that some of them quite failed to notice the gold stashed at the church door. Their minds were on higher things. May ours be likewise. There is one last thing to consider: the donor. In a sense his gift was spurned. He left edified, we are told, but perhaps humbled, too? I cannot help thinking of a letter Fr John of Valamo wrote in 1955 to a spiritual directee who by post had sent him a watermelon, a luxury in Finland in those post-war years:
I thank you very much for the watermelon, although the package arrived in battered condition, the watermelon damaged, the paper all wet. The postmistress was displeased; other packages got wet. No doubt you sent it with vanity. It always happens that anyone who acts with vanity can expect disgrace.
Stern words from a true monk. Sometimes we need to hear such, to be freed of our pretension.
Olsok 2025
This is an English version of the homily. You can find a German one, too, by scrolling down.
Wisdom 10.10-14: Wisdom did not desert him.
James 1.2-4.12: So that you may become perfect and whole.
Matthew 16.24-28: He must take up his cross and follow me.
The exhortation of Jesus just read to us — ‘whoever wants to come after me, let him deny himself’ — occurs at a cardinal point in the Gospel. It is addressed to his closest disciples, whom he has just put to the test by asking: ‘Who do you say that I am?’ After a few hesitant responses, Peter makes his definitive confession: ‘You are the Christ, Son of the living God.’ Jesus responds with his promise written in gold round the cupola of St Peter’s in Rome. Then this further discourse comes, of cross and sacrifice: ‘He who wants to save his life, will lose it.’ The link between salvation and self-emptying concerns us all: we should think of it often. Yet today this injunction is framed not generically, but specifically. The Church puts it forward as a hermeneutic key to the life and death of Olav Haraldsson. What are we to make of that?
Well, it depends whom you ask. Curiously, it has come to seem seemly even in (non-Catholic) Christian circles, now, to put Olav’s Christian purpose in doubt. It is said — even, I gather, on guided tours here in this cathedral — that Olav was but a power-hungry despot who selfishly lorded it over people to such an extent that they had enough and struck him down at Stiklestad, and that would have been the last anyone heard of him, had not ‘the Church’ contrived to ‘make him’ posthumously ‘a saint’. This narrative just doesn’t make sense. I am led to think: we who, these days, take such care (for good reason) not to treat any societal group unfairly, should be thoroughly ashamed. For what is going on here is retrospective mockery of Norwegians a thousand years ago, on the assumption that they were so stupid they let an awful bully be foisted on them as a national symbol and hypocritically bent their knee before the corpse of a man they loathed. Anyone subscribing to this view is ignorant of people’s temperament back then; further, he or she has forgotten that ‘the Church’ is not reducible to a gang of supposedly ambitious prelates. The Church is made up of ordinary believing women and men. When Bishop Grimkettle on 3 August 1031, a stone’s throw from here, declared Olav a holy man (and Einar Tambarskjelve bade the curmudgeonly Alfiva, an apt patron for the Talk-Olav-Down movement, shut up), it was because the people willed it. They recognised in Olav, even after death, a faithful intercessor, protector, and friend.
Olav was many-faceted, made up of tensions. Humanly speaking, he isn’t idealisable. It is no coincidence that art often shows him treading underfoot a dragon carrying his own features: he knew the Old Adam well; but was all the more fascinated by the New. His Christian maturing displays warfare on the battlefield of conscience. Archbishop Eystein wrote in the twelfth century that Olav arose from the baptistry in Rouen ‘changed into a new man’, but not as if by magic. Baptism sowed in him the seed of immortality. But the seed had to grow; and growth takes time in spiritual as in organic life. Much can be said about the signs of Olav’s growing Christian integrity. Beyond the indications we find in the sagas and songs, we have concrete evidence in the Christian law-code he introduced in 1024. It represented a political wager. To limit the self-governance of people used to rule without accountability is a risky undertaking: we see that in our time. When Olav introduced, in juridically binding form, the notion of an eternal, objective Justice to which all, regardless of status, were held, he mobilised the people of Norway to combat their irrational passions. Revolt resulted, at various levels.
Sigrid Undset paints an intimate picture of such revolt in the first volume of Olav Audunssønn, when Olav, staying as a guest of the Cistercian bishop of Hamar, struck down and killed, for honour’s sake, an enemy. ‘At first he seemed to freeze. Then, rage swelled in him, and defiant, jubilant enjoyment.’ Olav, like Cain, knew the ecstasy of revenge. Conscience did weigh him down. He was a Christian, after all. Considering the faith, he thought, ‘it is somehow beautiful’, but added: ‘Never, though, will all men turn into such saints that they will be content to have justice meted out to them, without imposing their own sense of right.’ It seemed utopian to fancy that all ‘should be minded to hear our Lord’s new speech about the fraternity of all God’s children’. That is how Olav Audunssønn reasoned then, drunk with vengeance. The ‘new speech’ had formed him, however; and would come to enable, as we discover when we read on, a slow bourgeoning of the life of Jesus in the heart of this implacable lover out there face to face with the fierce sea, in Hestviken.
Olav Audunssønn, like Olav Haraldsson, his patron, had to learn from experience what it means to take up one’s own cross. All of us do. Christian life has a number of common denominators; yet must be articulated specifically for each of us. We revere and love St Olav not because he was born a saint, but because he became one through persevering battle against all that was untrue, unworthy, and ugly in himself and in the world; he fought to let Christ’s peace rule in his heart. In our troubled times his example gives us encouragement and blessed consolation. Olav shows us that the Christian calling can be followed even on the basis of the most unpromising conditioning.
Image of St Olav from the church of Värmdö in Uppsala.
Weisheit 10,10–14: In einem harten Kampf verlieh die Gottesfurcht ihm den Siegespreis.
Jakobusbrief 1,2–4.12: Die Geduld aber soll zur Vollendung kommen.
Matthäus 16,24–28: Wer mir folgen will, verleugne sich selbst.
Die Ermahnung Jesu, die wir gerade gehört haben – „Wer mir folgen will, verleugne sich selbst“ – erfolgt an einem Wendepunkt im Evangelium. Die Worte richten sich an seine engsten Freunde, die ihm schon eine zeit lang gefolgt waren. Gerade hatte er sie auf die Probe gestellt mit der Frage: „Für wen haltet ihr mich?“ Nach einigen eher zögerlichen Vorstößen aus der Gruppe kommt Petrus mit seinem wagemutigen, epochalen Bekenntnis: „Du bist der Messias, der Sohn des lebendigen Gottes.“ Jesu Antwort ist das Versprechen an Petrus, das in goldenen Lettern die Kuppel des Petersdoms schmückt. Doch dann wendet sich das Gespräch abrupt dem Thema Kreuz und Opfer zu: „Wer sein Leben zu retten meint, wird es verlieren.“ Die Verbindung zwischen dem Heilsversprechen und dem Ruf zur Aufgabe seiner selbst geht uns alle an; wir sollten oft daran denken. Heute hören wir diese Aufforderung allerdings nicht pauschal, sondern persönlich. Die Kirche gibt sie uns wie einen Schlüssel in die Hand, um Olav Haraldssons Leben und Tod zu erschließen. Was sollen wir nämlich davon halten?
Das kommt ganz darauf an, wen man fragt. Hierzulande gehört es mittlerweile selbst unter Christen zum guten Ton, Olavs christliche Absichten zu diffamieren. Von Leuten, die bei einer Führung dabei waren, habe ich gehört, dass Olav sogar hier im Dom als machtbesessener Despot beschrieben wird: Sein rücksichtsloser Egotrip sei den Leuten irgendwann zu bunt geworden, sodass sie ihn in Stiklestad einen Kopf kürzer gemacht haben – und das wäre das Ende vom Lied gewesen, wäre nicht die Kirche auf die Idee gekommen, ihn posthum zum Heiligen „zu machen“. Hier reimt sich ganz offensichtlich etwas nicht. Wir, die wir heutzutage so genau aufpassen, ja keine Gruppe ungerecht zu behandeln (eigentlich ein ausgezeichneter Vorsatz), wir sollten uns schämen; was hier passiert ist nichts anderes als rückwirkendes Mobbing der Bevölkerung Norwegens im 11. Jahrhundert. Man meint, dass die Leute damals tatsächlich so blöd waren, sich einen grässlichen Grobian als Nationalsymbol verkaufen zu lassen, und sich dazu noch gängeln ließen, vor seinen sterblichen Überresten das Knie zu beugen. Wer glaubt, dass sich so etwas wirklich zugetragen hat, weiß herzlich wenig von der Mentalität des Volkes damals, und hat noch dazu vergessen, dass sich die Kirche nicht auf eine Hierarchie klerikaler Ehrgeizlinge reduzieren lässt. Die Kirche besteht zuallererst aus dem gemeinen Mann, der gemeinen Frau. Bischof Grimkjell sprach am 3. August 1031 wenige Meter von hier entfernt Olav heilig. (Einar Tambarskjelve gebot bei der Gelegenheit der skeptischen Königinmutter Alfiva zu schweigen – sie wäre ein ausgezeichnetes Maskottchen der Olavsskeptiker!) Das geschah, weil das Volk es wollte. Sie erkannten in Olav über den Tod hinaus ihren Fürsprecher, Beschützer und guten Freund.
Olav war ein komplizierter Mann, dem Spannungen nicht fremd waren. Menschlich gesehen taugt er nicht für Idealisierungen. Nicht zufällig zeigen ihn künstlerische Darstellungen oft, wie er eine Schlange – den alten Versucher – zu Boden tritt. Der Versucher trägt jedoch sein eigenes Antlitz. Olav kannte den alten Adam nur zu gut; mehr noch hatte ihn der neue gelockt. Zu seiner christlichen Reifung gehört der Kampf auf dem Schlachtfeld des Gewissens. Erzbischof Eystein schrieb, dass Olav „in einen neuen Mann verwandelt“ aus dem Bad der Taufe in Rouen stieg. Die Verwandlung war aber kein Simsalabim-Trick. Die Taufe säte den Samen der Unsterblichkeit in ihm. Der Same konnte wachsen und reifen; und Wachstum braucht Zeit, im geistlichen wie im organischen Leben. Vieles ließe sich über die Anzeichen von Olavs wachsender christlicher Integrität sagen. Über das hinaus, was sich aus Saga-Literatur und Dichtung beweisen lässt, haben wir in Olavs christlichem Gesetzeswerk ein handfestes Indiz. Es war ein politisches Wagnis. Die Autorität von Menschen zu beschneiden, die gewohnt sind, Macht nach eigenen Prämissen zu verwalten, schafft notwendig Streit; das sehen wir in unserer Zeit auch. Indem er juristisch bindend den Begriff der ewigen Gerechtigkeit einführte, die einmal von allen Rechenschaft fordert, ohne Ansehen von Rang und Stand, führte Olav alle Norweger in die Schlacht – im Streit mit ihren eigenen Leidenschaften. Eine Revolte auf mehreren Ebenen war das Ergebnis.
Sigrid Undset zeichnet ein intimes Bild solch eines inneren Aufruhrs im ersten Band von Olav Audunsson. Olav, zu Gast bei Mönchsbischof Torfinn, erschlägt im Gästehaus der Dominikaner in Hamar einen Mann, der seine Ehre gekränkt hatte. „Sein spontanes Empfinden war ein inneres Gefrieren. Doch dann kochte der Zorn in ihm auf, und mit ihm ein trotzig-freudiges Wohlgefühl.“ Olav fühlte die Ekstase der Rache wie einst Kain. Doch das Gewissen schlug ihn. Er war doch ein Christ. Als er sich auf seinen Glauben besann, dachte er, der sei gewiss „auf die eine oder andere Weise schön“. Doch eilig fügte er hinzu: „Niemals könnten alle Menschen solche Heilige werden, dass sie sich damit begnügten, ihr Recht zu bekommen – und sich niemals ihr Recht zu verschaffen.“ Utopisch erschien es ihm, dass „alle bereitwillig die Neuigkeit unseres Königs von der Bruderschaft aller Kinder Gottes“ hören sollten. So räsonierte Audunsson im Rausch der Rache, und doch hatte jene Neuigkeit ihn geprägt. Lesen wir weiter, entdecken wir, dass diese Prägung eine Neuschaffung ermöglichte. Langsam reifte das Leben Jesu des Herrn in diesem leidenschaftlichen Mann dort am offenen Meer von Hestviken. Wie sein Namenspatron Olav Haraldsson musste Olav Audunsson durch Erfahrung lernen, was es heißt, sein eigenes Kreuz zu tragen. Das müssen wir alle. Das Leben als Christ hat gemeinsame Nenner; doch diese finden in jedem von uns ihren eigenen Ausdruck. Wir verehren, ja lieben Sankt Olav, nicht weil er ein geborener Heiliger war, sondern es durch ausdauernden Kampf gegen das Unwahre, Schofle und Hässliche in der Welt geworden ist; er kämpfte darum, dass der Frieden Christi in seinem Herzen herrsche. In unserer friedlosen Zeit ist das ein Beispiel, das aufmuntert und tröstet. Olav zeigt, dass man diesem Beispiel folgen kann, selbst wenn die Voraussetzungen von außen betrachtet nicht viel versprechen. Im Namen Jesu!
Wisdom 10.10-14: Wisdom did not desert him.
James 1.2-4.12: So that you may become perfect and whole.
Matthew 16.24-28: He must take up his cross and follow me.
The exhortation of Jesus just read to us — ‘whoever wants to come after me, let him deny himself’ — occurs at a cardinal point in the Gospel. It is addressed to his closest disciples, whom he has just put to the test by asking: ‘Who do you say that I am?’ After a few hesitant responses, Peter makes his definitive confession: ‘You are the Christ, Son of the living God.’ Jesus responds with his promise written in gold round the cupola of St Peter’s in Rome. Then this further discourse comes, of cross and sacrifice: ‘He who wants to save his life, will lose it.’ The link between salvation and self-emptying concerns us all: we should think of it often. Yet today this injunction is framed not generically, but specifically. The Church puts it forward as a hermeneutic key to the life and death of Olav Haraldsson. What are we to make of that?
Well, it depends whom you ask. Curiously, it has come to seem seemly even in (non-Catholic) Christian circles, now, to put Olav’s Christian purpose in doubt. It is said — even, I gather, on guided tours here in this cathedral — that Olav was but a power-hungry despot who selfishly lorded it over people to such an extent that they had enough and struck him down at Stiklestad, and that would have been the last anyone heard of him, had not ‘the Church’ contrived to ‘make him’ posthumously ‘a saint’. This narrative just doesn’t make sense. I am led to think: we who, these days, take such care (for good reason) not to treat any societal group unfairly, should be thoroughly ashamed. For what is going on here is retrospective mockery of Norwegians a thousand years ago, on the assumption that they were so stupid they let an awful bully be foisted on them as a national symbol and hypocritically bent their knee before the corpse of a man they loathed. Anyone subscribing to this view is ignorant of people’s temperament back then; further, he or she has forgotten that ‘the Church’ is not reducible to a gang of supposedly ambitious prelates. The Church is made up of ordinary believing women and men. When Bishop Grimkettle on 3 August 1031, a stone’s throw from here, declared Olav a holy man (and Einar Tambarskjelve bade the curmudgeonly Alfiva, an apt patron for the Talk-Olav-Down movement, shut up), it was because the people willed it. They recognised in Olav, even after death, a faithful intercessor, protector, and friend.
Olav was many-faceted, made up of tensions. Humanly speaking, he isn’t idealisable. It is no coincidence that art often shows him treading underfoot a dragon carrying his own features: he knew the Old Adam well; but was all the more fascinated by the New. His Christian maturing displays warfare on the battlefield of conscience. Archbishop Eystein wrote in the twelfth century that Olav arose from the baptistry in Rouen ‘changed into a new man’, but not as if by magic. Baptism sowed in him the seed of immortality. But the seed had to grow; and growth takes time in spiritual as in organic life. Much can be said about the signs of Olav’s growing Christian integrity. Beyond the indications we find in the sagas and songs, we have concrete evidence in the Christian law-code he introduced in 1024. It represented a political wager. To limit the self-governance of people used to rule without accountability is a risky undertaking: we see that in our time. When Olav introduced, in juridically binding form, the notion of an eternal, objective Justice to which all, regardless of status, were held, he mobilised the people of Norway to combat their irrational passions. Revolt resulted, at various levels.
Sigrid Undset paints an intimate picture of such revolt in the first volume of Olav Audunssønn, when Olav, staying as a guest of the Cistercian bishop of Hamar, struck down and killed, for honour’s sake, an enemy. ‘At first he seemed to freeze. Then, rage swelled in him, and defiant, jubilant enjoyment.’ Olav, like Cain, knew the ecstasy of revenge. Conscience did weigh him down. He was a Christian, after all. Considering the faith, he thought, ‘it is somehow beautiful’, but added: ‘Never, though, will all men turn into such saints that they will be content to have justice meted out to them, without imposing their own sense of right.’ It seemed utopian to fancy that all ‘should be minded to hear our Lord’s new speech about the fraternity of all God’s children’. That is how Olav Audunssønn reasoned then, drunk with vengeance. The ‘new speech’ had formed him, however; and would come to enable, as we discover when we read on, a slow bourgeoning of the life of Jesus in the heart of this implacable lover out there face to face with the fierce sea, in Hestviken.
Olav Audunssønn, like Olav Haraldsson, his patron, had to learn from experience what it means to take up one’s own cross. All of us do. Christian life has a number of common denominators; yet must be articulated specifically for each of us. We revere and love St Olav not because he was born a saint, but because he became one through persevering battle against all that was untrue, unworthy, and ugly in himself and in the world; he fought to let Christ’s peace rule in his heart. In our troubled times his example gives us encouragement and blessed consolation. Olav shows us that the Christian calling can be followed even on the basis of the most unpromising conditioning.
Image of St Olav from the church of Värmdö in Uppsala.
Weisheit 10,10–14: In einem harten Kampf verlieh die Gottesfurcht ihm den Siegespreis.
Jakobusbrief 1,2–4.12: Die Geduld aber soll zur Vollendung kommen.
Matthäus 16,24–28: Wer mir folgen will, verleugne sich selbst.
Die Ermahnung Jesu, die wir gerade gehört haben – „Wer mir folgen will, verleugne sich selbst“ – erfolgt an einem Wendepunkt im Evangelium. Die Worte richten sich an seine engsten Freunde, die ihm schon eine zeit lang gefolgt waren. Gerade hatte er sie auf die Probe gestellt mit der Frage: „Für wen haltet ihr mich?“ Nach einigen eher zögerlichen Vorstößen aus der Gruppe kommt Petrus mit seinem wagemutigen, epochalen Bekenntnis: „Du bist der Messias, der Sohn des lebendigen Gottes.“ Jesu Antwort ist das Versprechen an Petrus, das in goldenen Lettern die Kuppel des Petersdoms schmückt. Doch dann wendet sich das Gespräch abrupt dem Thema Kreuz und Opfer zu: „Wer sein Leben zu retten meint, wird es verlieren.“ Die Verbindung zwischen dem Heilsversprechen und dem Ruf zur Aufgabe seiner selbst geht uns alle an; wir sollten oft daran denken. Heute hören wir diese Aufforderung allerdings nicht pauschal, sondern persönlich. Die Kirche gibt sie uns wie einen Schlüssel in die Hand, um Olav Haraldssons Leben und Tod zu erschließen. Was sollen wir nämlich davon halten?
Das kommt ganz darauf an, wen man fragt. Hierzulande gehört es mittlerweile selbst unter Christen zum guten Ton, Olavs christliche Absichten zu diffamieren. Von Leuten, die bei einer Führung dabei waren, habe ich gehört, dass Olav sogar hier im Dom als machtbesessener Despot beschrieben wird: Sein rücksichtsloser Egotrip sei den Leuten irgendwann zu bunt geworden, sodass sie ihn in Stiklestad einen Kopf kürzer gemacht haben – und das wäre das Ende vom Lied gewesen, wäre nicht die Kirche auf die Idee gekommen, ihn posthum zum Heiligen „zu machen“. Hier reimt sich ganz offensichtlich etwas nicht. Wir, die wir heutzutage so genau aufpassen, ja keine Gruppe ungerecht zu behandeln (eigentlich ein ausgezeichneter Vorsatz), wir sollten uns schämen; was hier passiert ist nichts anderes als rückwirkendes Mobbing der Bevölkerung Norwegens im 11. Jahrhundert. Man meint, dass die Leute damals tatsächlich so blöd waren, sich einen grässlichen Grobian als Nationalsymbol verkaufen zu lassen, und sich dazu noch gängeln ließen, vor seinen sterblichen Überresten das Knie zu beugen. Wer glaubt, dass sich so etwas wirklich zugetragen hat, weiß herzlich wenig von der Mentalität des Volkes damals, und hat noch dazu vergessen, dass sich die Kirche nicht auf eine Hierarchie klerikaler Ehrgeizlinge reduzieren lässt. Die Kirche besteht zuallererst aus dem gemeinen Mann, der gemeinen Frau. Bischof Grimkjell sprach am 3. August 1031 wenige Meter von hier entfernt Olav heilig. (Einar Tambarskjelve gebot bei der Gelegenheit der skeptischen Königinmutter Alfiva zu schweigen – sie wäre ein ausgezeichnetes Maskottchen der Olavsskeptiker!) Das geschah, weil das Volk es wollte. Sie erkannten in Olav über den Tod hinaus ihren Fürsprecher, Beschützer und guten Freund.
Olav war ein komplizierter Mann, dem Spannungen nicht fremd waren. Menschlich gesehen taugt er nicht für Idealisierungen. Nicht zufällig zeigen ihn künstlerische Darstellungen oft, wie er eine Schlange – den alten Versucher – zu Boden tritt. Der Versucher trägt jedoch sein eigenes Antlitz. Olav kannte den alten Adam nur zu gut; mehr noch hatte ihn der neue gelockt. Zu seiner christlichen Reifung gehört der Kampf auf dem Schlachtfeld des Gewissens. Erzbischof Eystein schrieb, dass Olav „in einen neuen Mann verwandelt“ aus dem Bad der Taufe in Rouen stieg. Die Verwandlung war aber kein Simsalabim-Trick. Die Taufe säte den Samen der Unsterblichkeit in ihm. Der Same konnte wachsen und reifen; und Wachstum braucht Zeit, im geistlichen wie im organischen Leben. Vieles ließe sich über die Anzeichen von Olavs wachsender christlicher Integrität sagen. Über das hinaus, was sich aus Saga-Literatur und Dichtung beweisen lässt, haben wir in Olavs christlichem Gesetzeswerk ein handfestes Indiz. Es war ein politisches Wagnis. Die Autorität von Menschen zu beschneiden, die gewohnt sind, Macht nach eigenen Prämissen zu verwalten, schafft notwendig Streit; das sehen wir in unserer Zeit auch. Indem er juristisch bindend den Begriff der ewigen Gerechtigkeit einführte, die einmal von allen Rechenschaft fordert, ohne Ansehen von Rang und Stand, führte Olav alle Norweger in die Schlacht – im Streit mit ihren eigenen Leidenschaften. Eine Revolte auf mehreren Ebenen war das Ergebnis.
Sigrid Undset zeichnet ein intimes Bild solch eines inneren Aufruhrs im ersten Band von Olav Audunsson. Olav, zu Gast bei Mönchsbischof Torfinn, erschlägt im Gästehaus der Dominikaner in Hamar einen Mann, der seine Ehre gekränkt hatte. „Sein spontanes Empfinden war ein inneres Gefrieren. Doch dann kochte der Zorn in ihm auf, und mit ihm ein trotzig-freudiges Wohlgefühl.“ Olav fühlte die Ekstase der Rache wie einst Kain. Doch das Gewissen schlug ihn. Er war doch ein Christ. Als er sich auf seinen Glauben besann, dachte er, der sei gewiss „auf die eine oder andere Weise schön“. Doch eilig fügte er hinzu: „Niemals könnten alle Menschen solche Heilige werden, dass sie sich damit begnügten, ihr Recht zu bekommen – und sich niemals ihr Recht zu verschaffen.“ Utopisch erschien es ihm, dass „alle bereitwillig die Neuigkeit unseres Königs von der Bruderschaft aller Kinder Gottes“ hören sollten. So räsonierte Audunsson im Rausch der Rache, und doch hatte jene Neuigkeit ihn geprägt. Lesen wir weiter, entdecken wir, dass diese Prägung eine Neuschaffung ermöglichte. Langsam reifte das Leben Jesu des Herrn in diesem leidenschaftlichen Mann dort am offenen Meer von Hestviken. Wie sein Namenspatron Olav Haraldsson musste Olav Audunsson durch Erfahrung lernen, was es heißt, sein eigenes Kreuz zu tragen. Das müssen wir alle. Das Leben als Christ hat gemeinsame Nenner; doch diese finden in jedem von uns ihren eigenen Ausdruck. Wir verehren, ja lieben Sankt Olav, nicht weil er ein geborener Heiliger war, sondern es durch ausdauernden Kampf gegen das Unwahre, Schofle und Hässliche in der Welt geworden ist; er kämpfte darum, dass der Frieden Christi in seinem Herzen herrsche. In unserer friedlosen Zeit ist das ein Beispiel, das aufmuntert und tröstet. Olav zeigt, dass man diesem Beispiel folgen kann, selbst wenn die Voraussetzungen von außen betrachtet nicht viel versprechen. Im Namen Jesu!
Vigil of Olsok
You can find a German translation of this homily, preached in Norwegian, by scrolling down.
Joshua 3:14-4:8: What are these stones?
Colossians 1:9-17: He is the image of the unseen God.
Matthew 5:13-20: When salt loses its saltiness, it is useless.
When Jesus meets a scribe who says, ‘Master! I will follow you wherever you go!’, he replies: ‘Foxes have holes, the birds of the sky their nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’ Indeed he had not, until he gave himself over to the sleep of death on Calvary, where the cross was his pillow. To this day we beseech the cross on Good Friday: ‘For a while the ancient rigor,/That thy birth bestowed, suspend;/And the King of heavenly beauty/On thy bosom gently tend!’
To think that words 1500 years old can send a shiver down your spine!
Here at Stiklestad, the site of St Olav’s martyrdom, we contemplate the Lord’s Passion in the light of the sacrifice his martyr, Olav, brought. According to a venerable tradition, the church in which we find ourselves was built exactly where Olav fell, struck by the spear of Tore the Dog and fatally wounded by Kalv Arneson’s axe. The high altar was built around the stone on which Olav is said to have rested as he expired. It was that upon which he got to lay his head when it really mattered.
I’d like to reflect a little on this stone.
It stands for the paradox in Olav’s maturing as a man and a Christian. As a youth he was driven by cupidity. He loved money. He knew how to give splendid gifts as when, after the battle of Nesjar, he gave an ally a gold-encrusted sword and a rich property. Not only was he aware of being a Norwegian nobleman; he knew how rulers in other countries lived and related. He was a man of the world, magnificent and munificent. His first decade as king was marked, although he faced resistance here and there, by great ambition politically, spiritually and materially.
Olav, known as ‘large of stature’, corresponded to his role. Greatness seemed tailor-made for him.
When the Danish King Canute, never keen on a strong, united Norway, claimed the country for itself, turning up in Trondheim with an army in 1028, he appealed to the gentry who were tired of Olav’s rule, especially of his code of law, imbued with Christian principles. Local grandees wished to rule their own roost. They preferred a king who lived far away to one who knew too much about local affair. Olav’s project of greatness was idealistic. Canute’s, by contrast, obtained the right to rule by pragmatism and gold. Olav had to flee the country, to turn his back on his life’s work.
Thus he entered upon a crucial stage of his life.
For nearly two years he lived as a guest of Yaroslav, grand prince of Kyivan Rus, and his queen Ingegjerd, the love of Olav’s youth. Fr Olav Müller has written that Olav’s time in exile taught him ‘the mystery of suffering’; he thinks it may have had something in common with the ‘dark night of the mystics’. Everything was taken away from him; everything seemed uncertain.
‘When Olav had arrived in the land of Rus’, we read in Heimskringla, ‘he walked about pondering and wondering what he should do.’ He considered Yaroslav’s offer to make him ruler of Bulgaria. He considered whether ‘he should renounce kingship and set out as a pilgrim for Jerusalem — or join an order of monks.’ Then he entertained the dream in which his royal ancestor Olav Trygvason called him back to Norway, not to conquer, but to die.
Snorre draws a picture of Olav during this time that is telling. It happened one Sunday that ‘the king sat at table so lost in thought that he did not mark the passage of time.’ He sat there absorbed, chopping away with knife on a piece of wood, not noticing that thus he desecrated the Lord’s Day. Thus sits a man in state of depression so deep that it encloses him in himself.
Release came when Olav freely assented to the task that flowed from his vocation, returning home, even though he knew he would not prosper. Were he to die, so be it! Did not God himself pass through death in order to found a kingdom that is not of this world, yet has formed this world more deeply than any temporal might?
The significance of the baptism Olav had received in Rouen ten years earlier must have impressed itself upon him powerfully during this time spent, as if on a kind of retreat, with Yaroslav. I thought of him there when, some time ago, I stood in the church of Sancta Sophia in Kyiv and looked up towards the Pantocrator in the ceiling.
Work on the church was begun in 1011. The building project was dear to Yaroslav, who will surely have taken his Norwegian friend along to inspect progress. So we are entitled to imagine Olav the Great-of-Stature standing upright feeling small underneath the cupola of Sancta Sophia, where the image of Christ-the-Ruler-of-All was emerging. In the final period of Olav’s earthly life, we see his consciousness of a heavenly, eternal perspective manifest in various ways. It showed itself in the dream he dreamt just before the Battle of Stiklestad, when he saw himself climbing up a heavenly ladder. It was embodied when the king, dying, leant ‘upon a stone’, then one under the altar just behind me, threw away his sword and surrendered himself unarmed into God’s hands.
The stone of Stiklestad, like the stones Israel built up as a cairn in Gilgal, testifies to a pascha, a divine passing-through. The selfish, residually heathen aspects of Olav were definitively absorbed by the flame of Christ’s love. His pride became of motor of courageous abandonment. The stone he leant upon was fundamentally Christ himself, present in his Church. In this way Olav became a corner-stone of the Church in this country. His path was singular, but we must all walk one like it away from avarice, greed, and the thirst for status towards a given, trustful, Christlike life.
May God grant us to walk steadily, faithfully. Amen.
Pantocrator in Sancta Sophia, Kyiv.
Josua 3,14–4,8: Was bedeuten diese Steine für euch?
Kolosserbrief 1,9–17: Er ist das Bild des unsichtbaren Gottes
Matthäus 5,13–20: Wenn das Salz seinen Geschmack verliert, taugt es zu nichts mehr.
Als Jesus einen Schriftgelehrten trifft, der zu ihm sagt: „Meister, ich will dir folgen, wohin du auch gehst!“, antwortet er: „Die Füchse haben Höhlen und die Vögel des Himmels Nester; der Menschensohn aber hat keinen Ort, wo er sein Haupt hinlegen kann.“ Nein, bevor er sich auf Golgata dem Schlaf des Todes übergab, mit dem Kreuzesstamm als Ruhekissen, hatte er keinen solchen Ort. Noch immer rufen wir das Kreuz am Karfreitag an mit den Worten: „Beuge, hoher Baum, die Zweige, werde weich an Stamm und Ast, denn dein hartes Holz muss tragen eine königliche Last. Gib den Gliedern deines Schöpfers an dem Stamme linde Rast.“
Dass 1500 Jahre alte Worte einen solch zarten Klang in unseren Ohren haben können!
In Stiklestad betrachten wir das Leiden des Herrn im Lichte des Opfers, das Olav, sein Heiliger, brachte. Eine Tradition, die weit zurückgeht, berichtet davon, dass diese Kirche hier, erbaut im 12. Jahrhundert, genau dort errichtet wurde, wo Olav fiel, getroffen vom Speer Tore Hunds und dem tödlichen Axthieb Kalv Arnesons. Der Hochaltar, heißt es, wurde auf dem Stein errichtet, auf dem Olav im Augenblick seines Todes ruhte. Hier war es, wo er sein Haupt hinlegte im alles entscheidenden Moment. Ich will gerne etwas über die Bedeutung dieses Steins nachdenken.
Er steht für ein Paradox: das Paradox der Reifung Olavs als Mann und als Christ. Ehrgeizig war er gewesen als junger Mann und hinter den Frauen her. Er liebte Reichtum und wusste großzügige Geschenke zu machen, wie zum Beispiel nach der Schlacht von Nesjar, als er Brynjolv Ulvalde ein goldverziertes Schwert und ein herrschaftliches Anwesen schenkte. Olav war sich nicht nur seines Adelsstandes bewusst, er wusste auch, wie sich Herrscher in anderen Ländern gaben. Weltgewandt wie er war, verband er Pracht mit Milde: er war magnificent und munificent. Seine ersten zehn Regierungsjahre waren, von ein paar Anzeichen von Widerstand hier und da abgesehen, von politischen, geistlichen und materiellen Ambitionen geprägt. Olav, genannt der Große, füllte seine Rolle ganz aus. Größe war ihm sozusagen auf den Leib geschneidert.
Als der dänische König Knut – dem ein starkes, geeintes Norwegen immer ein Dorn im Auge war – 1028 mit einem Heer nach Trondheim kam und das Land für sich forderte, appellierte er an Bauern, die Olav und besonders sein christliches Gesetzeswerk leid waren. Die Bauern wollten selbst Herr im Haus sein und zogen einen König, der weit weg residierte, einem König vor, der die Verhältnisse vor Ort im Griff hatte. Olav verfolgte sein Großprojekt mit Idealismus. Am Ende gewann Knut mit Pragmatismus und Gold die Macht. Olav musste fliehen, seinem Lebenswerk in Norwegen den Rücken kehren.
Es folgte eine entscheidende Phase in seinem Leben. Beinahe zwei Jahre lebte er als Gast am Hofe Jaroslaws, des Kiewer Großfürsten, und Ingegjerds, seiner Jugendflamme. Pater Olav Müller schrieb einmal davon, dass Olav in der Ukraine das „Mysterium des Leidens kennenlernte“; ja, er machte parallele Züge aus zwischen der Erfahrung des Königs und der „dunklen Nacht der Mystiker“. Er hatte alles verloren; jede Sicherheit war ihm genommen.
„Nachdem König Olav nach Kiew kam“, lesen wir bei Snorre, dem isländischen Dichter und Historiker, „ging er viel umher, grübelte und dachte darüber nach, was er nun tun sollte.“ Er zog sogar in Betracht, Jaroslaws Angebot anzunehmen und über Bulgarien zu herrschen. Er überlegte, dem Königtum ganz zu entsagen und nach Jerusalem zu wallfahrten oder Mönch zu werden.“ Dann zeigte sich ihm Olav Trygvason ihm im Traum und rief ihn zurück nach Norwegen – nicht um zu siegen, sondern um zu sterben. Snorre zeichnet ein vielsagendes Bild vom Olav dieser Periode. Eines Sonntags geschah es, dass Olav an einem Tisch „so tief in Gedanken versunken dasaß, dass er die Zeit vergaß“. Völlig abwesend schnitzte er an einem Stück Holz herum, ohne daran zu denken, dass er damit gegen die Sonntagsruhe verstieß. So verhält sich ein Mann, dessen Gemüt so bedrückt ist, dass er sich ganz in sich verschließt.
Die Erlösung kommt, als Olav sein freies Ja spricht zur Aufgabe, die vor ihm liegt, auf seine Berufung antwortet und nach Norwegen heimkehrt – obwohl er wusste, dass er kaum Aussicht auf Erfolg hatte. Sollte er sterben, sollte es eben so sein. War nicht Gott selbst durch den Tod gegangen, um ein Reich zu gründen, das nicht von dieser Welt war? Und doch hat sein Reich diese Welt mehr geformt als jede andere, zeitliche Macht. Die tiefste Bedeutung der Taufe, die Olav zehn Jahre zuvor in Rouen empfangen hatte, muss sich ihm mit voller Wucht offenbart haben in der Zeit, die er sozusagen „in Exerzitien“ bei Jaroslaw verbrachte.
Ich musste daran denken, als ich vor einiger Zeit in der Sophienkirche in Kiew stand und zum Pantokrator in der Kuppel emporsah. An der Kirche wurde seit dem Jahr 1011 gebaut. Das Projekt war Jaroslaw wichtig, mit Sicherheit wird er seinem norwegischen Freund den Fortgang des Baus präsentiert haben. Wir dürfen uns ruhig vorstellen, wie Olav, genannt der Große, in der Sophienkirche steht und sich plötzlich ganz klein vorkommt, überwältigt vom Allherrscher Christus, der von der Kuppel auf ihn herabsah.
Tatsächlich sind die letzten Tage im Leben Olavs, auf dem Weg nach Stiklestad, von einer himmlischen, überzeitlichen Perspektive geprägt. Wir finden diese Perspektive beispielsweise im Traum, den er vor der Schlacht hatte: Er stieg die Himmelsleiter hinauf. Die Inkarnation dieses Traumes finden wir in dem Moment, als sich der König im Tode am Stein anlehnt – dem Stein unter unserem Altar hier –, das Schwert von sich wirft und sich Gott anheimgibt. Der Stein von Stiklestad ist wie die Gedenksteine von Gilgal Zeuge eines pascha, eines göttlichen Hinübergangs. Alles Egoistische, Heidnische in Olav geht endgültig auf in der lodernden Flamme von Christi Liebe. Aus seinem Stolz wächst die Kraft zur Hingabe. Der Stein, an dem er sich anlehnt, ist im Letzten Christus, der in seiner Kirche gegenwärtig ist. Auf diese Weise wird Olav selbst zu einem Eckstein der Kirche.
Olavs Weg war einzigartig, aber alle müssen wir einen ähnlichen Weg gehen: von Gier, Habsucht und Streben nach Status zu einem Leben der Hingabe, das Christus ähnlich ist.
Gebe Gott, dass wir diesen Weg in Treue gehen. Amen
Pantocrator in our Catholic chapel at Stiklestad, painted this year by Solrunn Nes.
Joshua 3:14-4:8: What are these stones?
Colossians 1:9-17: He is the image of the unseen God.
Matthew 5:13-20: When salt loses its saltiness, it is useless.
When Jesus meets a scribe who says, ‘Master! I will follow you wherever you go!’, he replies: ‘Foxes have holes, the birds of the sky their nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’ Indeed he had not, until he gave himself over to the sleep of death on Calvary, where the cross was his pillow. To this day we beseech the cross on Good Friday: ‘For a while the ancient rigor,/That thy birth bestowed, suspend;/And the King of heavenly beauty/On thy bosom gently tend!’
To think that words 1500 years old can send a shiver down your spine!
Here at Stiklestad, the site of St Olav’s martyrdom, we contemplate the Lord’s Passion in the light of the sacrifice his martyr, Olav, brought. According to a venerable tradition, the church in which we find ourselves was built exactly where Olav fell, struck by the spear of Tore the Dog and fatally wounded by Kalv Arneson’s axe. The high altar was built around the stone on which Olav is said to have rested as he expired. It was that upon which he got to lay his head when it really mattered.
I’d like to reflect a little on this stone.
It stands for the paradox in Olav’s maturing as a man and a Christian. As a youth he was driven by cupidity. He loved money. He knew how to give splendid gifts as when, after the battle of Nesjar, he gave an ally a gold-encrusted sword and a rich property. Not only was he aware of being a Norwegian nobleman; he knew how rulers in other countries lived and related. He was a man of the world, magnificent and munificent. His first decade as king was marked, although he faced resistance here and there, by great ambition politically, spiritually and materially.
Olav, known as ‘large of stature’, corresponded to his role. Greatness seemed tailor-made for him.
When the Danish King Canute, never keen on a strong, united Norway, claimed the country for itself, turning up in Trondheim with an army in 1028, he appealed to the gentry who were tired of Olav’s rule, especially of his code of law, imbued with Christian principles. Local grandees wished to rule their own roost. They preferred a king who lived far away to one who knew too much about local affair. Olav’s project of greatness was idealistic. Canute’s, by contrast, obtained the right to rule by pragmatism and gold. Olav had to flee the country, to turn his back on his life’s work.
Thus he entered upon a crucial stage of his life.
For nearly two years he lived as a guest of Yaroslav, grand prince of Kyivan Rus, and his queen Ingegjerd, the love of Olav’s youth. Fr Olav Müller has written that Olav’s time in exile taught him ‘the mystery of suffering’; he thinks it may have had something in common with the ‘dark night of the mystics’. Everything was taken away from him; everything seemed uncertain.
‘When Olav had arrived in the land of Rus’, we read in Heimskringla, ‘he walked about pondering and wondering what he should do.’ He considered Yaroslav’s offer to make him ruler of Bulgaria. He considered whether ‘he should renounce kingship and set out as a pilgrim for Jerusalem — or join an order of monks.’ Then he entertained the dream in which his royal ancestor Olav Trygvason called him back to Norway, not to conquer, but to die.
Snorre draws a picture of Olav during this time that is telling. It happened one Sunday that ‘the king sat at table so lost in thought that he did not mark the passage of time.’ He sat there absorbed, chopping away with knife on a piece of wood, not noticing that thus he desecrated the Lord’s Day. Thus sits a man in state of depression so deep that it encloses him in himself.
Release came when Olav freely assented to the task that flowed from his vocation, returning home, even though he knew he would not prosper. Were he to die, so be it! Did not God himself pass through death in order to found a kingdom that is not of this world, yet has formed this world more deeply than any temporal might?
The significance of the baptism Olav had received in Rouen ten years earlier must have impressed itself upon him powerfully during this time spent, as if on a kind of retreat, with Yaroslav. I thought of him there when, some time ago, I stood in the church of Sancta Sophia in Kyiv and looked up towards the Pantocrator in the ceiling.
Work on the church was begun in 1011. The building project was dear to Yaroslav, who will surely have taken his Norwegian friend along to inspect progress. So we are entitled to imagine Olav the Great-of-Stature standing upright feeling small underneath the cupola of Sancta Sophia, where the image of Christ-the-Ruler-of-All was emerging. In the final period of Olav’s earthly life, we see his consciousness of a heavenly, eternal perspective manifest in various ways. It showed itself in the dream he dreamt just before the Battle of Stiklestad, when he saw himself climbing up a heavenly ladder. It was embodied when the king, dying, leant ‘upon a stone’, then one under the altar just behind me, threw away his sword and surrendered himself unarmed into God’s hands.
The stone of Stiklestad, like the stones Israel built up as a cairn in Gilgal, testifies to a pascha, a divine passing-through. The selfish, residually heathen aspects of Olav were definitively absorbed by the flame of Christ’s love. His pride became of motor of courageous abandonment. The stone he leant upon was fundamentally Christ himself, present in his Church. In this way Olav became a corner-stone of the Church in this country. His path was singular, but we must all walk one like it away from avarice, greed, and the thirst for status towards a given, trustful, Christlike life.
May God grant us to walk steadily, faithfully. Amen.
Pantocrator in Sancta Sophia, Kyiv.
Josua 3,14–4,8: Was bedeuten diese Steine für euch?
Kolosserbrief 1,9–17: Er ist das Bild des unsichtbaren Gottes
Matthäus 5,13–20: Wenn das Salz seinen Geschmack verliert, taugt es zu nichts mehr.
Als Jesus einen Schriftgelehrten trifft, der zu ihm sagt: „Meister, ich will dir folgen, wohin du auch gehst!“, antwortet er: „Die Füchse haben Höhlen und die Vögel des Himmels Nester; der Menschensohn aber hat keinen Ort, wo er sein Haupt hinlegen kann.“ Nein, bevor er sich auf Golgata dem Schlaf des Todes übergab, mit dem Kreuzesstamm als Ruhekissen, hatte er keinen solchen Ort. Noch immer rufen wir das Kreuz am Karfreitag an mit den Worten: „Beuge, hoher Baum, die Zweige, werde weich an Stamm und Ast, denn dein hartes Holz muss tragen eine königliche Last. Gib den Gliedern deines Schöpfers an dem Stamme linde Rast.“
Dass 1500 Jahre alte Worte einen solch zarten Klang in unseren Ohren haben können!
In Stiklestad betrachten wir das Leiden des Herrn im Lichte des Opfers, das Olav, sein Heiliger, brachte. Eine Tradition, die weit zurückgeht, berichtet davon, dass diese Kirche hier, erbaut im 12. Jahrhundert, genau dort errichtet wurde, wo Olav fiel, getroffen vom Speer Tore Hunds und dem tödlichen Axthieb Kalv Arnesons. Der Hochaltar, heißt es, wurde auf dem Stein errichtet, auf dem Olav im Augenblick seines Todes ruhte. Hier war es, wo er sein Haupt hinlegte im alles entscheidenden Moment. Ich will gerne etwas über die Bedeutung dieses Steins nachdenken.
Er steht für ein Paradox: das Paradox der Reifung Olavs als Mann und als Christ. Ehrgeizig war er gewesen als junger Mann und hinter den Frauen her. Er liebte Reichtum und wusste großzügige Geschenke zu machen, wie zum Beispiel nach der Schlacht von Nesjar, als er Brynjolv Ulvalde ein goldverziertes Schwert und ein herrschaftliches Anwesen schenkte. Olav war sich nicht nur seines Adelsstandes bewusst, er wusste auch, wie sich Herrscher in anderen Ländern gaben. Weltgewandt wie er war, verband er Pracht mit Milde: er war magnificent und munificent. Seine ersten zehn Regierungsjahre waren, von ein paar Anzeichen von Widerstand hier und da abgesehen, von politischen, geistlichen und materiellen Ambitionen geprägt. Olav, genannt der Große, füllte seine Rolle ganz aus. Größe war ihm sozusagen auf den Leib geschneidert.
Als der dänische König Knut – dem ein starkes, geeintes Norwegen immer ein Dorn im Auge war – 1028 mit einem Heer nach Trondheim kam und das Land für sich forderte, appellierte er an Bauern, die Olav und besonders sein christliches Gesetzeswerk leid waren. Die Bauern wollten selbst Herr im Haus sein und zogen einen König, der weit weg residierte, einem König vor, der die Verhältnisse vor Ort im Griff hatte. Olav verfolgte sein Großprojekt mit Idealismus. Am Ende gewann Knut mit Pragmatismus und Gold die Macht. Olav musste fliehen, seinem Lebenswerk in Norwegen den Rücken kehren.
Es folgte eine entscheidende Phase in seinem Leben. Beinahe zwei Jahre lebte er als Gast am Hofe Jaroslaws, des Kiewer Großfürsten, und Ingegjerds, seiner Jugendflamme. Pater Olav Müller schrieb einmal davon, dass Olav in der Ukraine das „Mysterium des Leidens kennenlernte“; ja, er machte parallele Züge aus zwischen der Erfahrung des Königs und der „dunklen Nacht der Mystiker“. Er hatte alles verloren; jede Sicherheit war ihm genommen.
„Nachdem König Olav nach Kiew kam“, lesen wir bei Snorre, dem isländischen Dichter und Historiker, „ging er viel umher, grübelte und dachte darüber nach, was er nun tun sollte.“ Er zog sogar in Betracht, Jaroslaws Angebot anzunehmen und über Bulgarien zu herrschen. Er überlegte, dem Königtum ganz zu entsagen und nach Jerusalem zu wallfahrten oder Mönch zu werden.“ Dann zeigte sich ihm Olav Trygvason ihm im Traum und rief ihn zurück nach Norwegen – nicht um zu siegen, sondern um zu sterben. Snorre zeichnet ein vielsagendes Bild vom Olav dieser Periode. Eines Sonntags geschah es, dass Olav an einem Tisch „so tief in Gedanken versunken dasaß, dass er die Zeit vergaß“. Völlig abwesend schnitzte er an einem Stück Holz herum, ohne daran zu denken, dass er damit gegen die Sonntagsruhe verstieß. So verhält sich ein Mann, dessen Gemüt so bedrückt ist, dass er sich ganz in sich verschließt.
Die Erlösung kommt, als Olav sein freies Ja spricht zur Aufgabe, die vor ihm liegt, auf seine Berufung antwortet und nach Norwegen heimkehrt – obwohl er wusste, dass er kaum Aussicht auf Erfolg hatte. Sollte er sterben, sollte es eben so sein. War nicht Gott selbst durch den Tod gegangen, um ein Reich zu gründen, das nicht von dieser Welt war? Und doch hat sein Reich diese Welt mehr geformt als jede andere, zeitliche Macht. Die tiefste Bedeutung der Taufe, die Olav zehn Jahre zuvor in Rouen empfangen hatte, muss sich ihm mit voller Wucht offenbart haben in der Zeit, die er sozusagen „in Exerzitien“ bei Jaroslaw verbrachte.
Ich musste daran denken, als ich vor einiger Zeit in der Sophienkirche in Kiew stand und zum Pantokrator in der Kuppel emporsah. An der Kirche wurde seit dem Jahr 1011 gebaut. Das Projekt war Jaroslaw wichtig, mit Sicherheit wird er seinem norwegischen Freund den Fortgang des Baus präsentiert haben. Wir dürfen uns ruhig vorstellen, wie Olav, genannt der Große, in der Sophienkirche steht und sich plötzlich ganz klein vorkommt, überwältigt vom Allherrscher Christus, der von der Kuppel auf ihn herabsah.
Tatsächlich sind die letzten Tage im Leben Olavs, auf dem Weg nach Stiklestad, von einer himmlischen, überzeitlichen Perspektive geprägt. Wir finden diese Perspektive beispielsweise im Traum, den er vor der Schlacht hatte: Er stieg die Himmelsleiter hinauf. Die Inkarnation dieses Traumes finden wir in dem Moment, als sich der König im Tode am Stein anlehnt – dem Stein unter unserem Altar hier –, das Schwert von sich wirft und sich Gott anheimgibt. Der Stein von Stiklestad ist wie die Gedenksteine von Gilgal Zeuge eines pascha, eines göttlichen Hinübergangs. Alles Egoistische, Heidnische in Olav geht endgültig auf in der lodernden Flamme von Christi Liebe. Aus seinem Stolz wächst die Kraft zur Hingabe. Der Stein, an dem er sich anlehnt, ist im Letzten Christus, der in seiner Kirche gegenwärtig ist. Auf diese Weise wird Olav selbst zu einem Eckstein der Kirche.
Olavs Weg war einzigartig, aber alle müssen wir einen ähnlichen Weg gehen: von Gier, Habsucht und Streben nach Status zu einem Leben der Hingabe, das Christus ähnlich ist.
Gebe Gott, dass wir diesen Weg in Treue gehen. Amen
Pantocrator in our Catholic chapel at Stiklestad, painted this year by Solrunn Nes.
What Now?
In a panel conversation moderated this evening by Francis X. Maier, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, Archbishop Paul Coakley, and I were asked ‘to offer our hopes and thoughts about what we need now as a Church in light of the new Leo pontificate, and the main opportunities and challenges the Church now faces.’ I proposed these introductory remarks:
So what do we need now? Like most bishops, I dare say, I am often presented, on trips around the diocese, with long lists of people’s perceived needs. I give these my attention; then try to suggest that the crucial question may not in fact be, ‘What do we need?’, but, ‘What are we needed for?’ A shocking aspect of Biblical faith is God’s preferential option for letting his providence unfold, for all his omnipotence, through fallible, weak, sinful human beings. How can we make ourselves mobilisable for his salvific, blessed purpose? This kind of consideration is what we need above all.
Were I, next, to be more specific, I’d hone in on a need I’d call hermeneutic. Let me explain. As a student of monastic history I have noticed that a predictable crisis occurs in the life of a community when the reins of government pass from the second to the third generation. The founders set about their task with clear purpose and the exhilaration of starting something new. The second generation positions itself in relation to the founders. Some will adulate them, some will be more critical; but the founders’ experience, direction, and vision remain, for better or for worse, a criterion of collective discernment. This dynamic changes at the next generational juncture, by which time the founders will be dead, or quite ancient. All of a sudden the second generation’s search for particular identity seems like much ado about not very much. The truly pressing issues are more fundamental: ‘What are we all about? How can we find our place within a tradition that transcends us? Are we on the right track?’ The third generation is faced with the challenge of continuity. To carry on faithfully it needs more than the history — or myth — of heroic origins. It must at once integrate and relativise its specific heritage, looking forward as well as back, up, not down.
This dynamic touches the universal Church, I believe, with regard to a modern event that may be called foundational, so deeply has it formed Catholic experience. I refer, of course, to the Second Vatican Council. What the council represented to those who knew a before and an after has been documented amply and polyphonically. Afterwards came the labours of those who were, or saw themselves as, the council’s legitimate heirs. There were splendid initiatives; but we know no less what quarrels emerged, locking Catholic discourse in confrontations between so-called ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ positions, unedifying clashes — and almost invariably dull.
Something of the climate of the second generation found symbolic expression in a teacup storm not all that long ago when it was still a subject of debate whether Vatican II might best be approached through a hermeneutic of rupture or one of continuity. I confess I found this querelle perplexing. I cannot see how any Catholic might adopt anything but a hermeneutic of continuity. This perspective is inherent in our faith in a God who acts in history, who exhorts us, ‘Remember!’, whose incarnate Son is the principle by which and for which all things exist, whose Spirit sanctifies, in Christ, by ‘calling to mind’.
The collective remembrance of what the council and its aftermath felt like has faded. That notably reduces the emotional heat of hermeneutic exercise, enabling lucid reflection. Today’s young Catholics are not ungrateful for the council’s great gifts, but unable to proceed with their grandparents’ mindsets, uninclined to flog dead horses, unenthused by fossilised projects of aggiornamento when the sun has set on the giorno by which they were defined. What they long for is to awaken the dawn, to know the saving power of Christ, the same today, yesterday, and always, yet making all things new, often enough by exploding time-bound dichotomies.
The pontificate of Leo XIV will guide us peacefully, I expect, into this new era, full of promise. There is a joy in the air. It gives me confidence; for joy, the genuine stuff, not the counterfeit, is a sign that something goes on in us not of our making, something enabling us to seek wholeness in the midst of apparent fragmentation. I think of something the Holy Father said recently, in a catechesis on Saint Irenaeus:
The doctrinal divisions [Irenaeus] encountered within the Christian community, the internal conflicts and external persecutions, did not discourage him. On the contrary, in a fragmented world he learned how to think better, bringing his attention ever more deeply to Jesus. He became a cantor of his person, indeed of his flesh. He recognised that in [Jesus], what seems to conflict is reconciled in unity. Jesus is not a wall that separates, but a door that unites us. We have to remain in him and distinguish reality from ideologies.
I am drawn by this papal challenge to ‘think better’ and by the counsel that so to think is to think ‘in Christ’, who is Truth, thereby to distinguish the real from the unreal. Surrounded as we are more than ever by illusions, that is a further thing we do need now.
Thank God that Peter, rock-firm, is there to confirm us, his brethren.
So what do we need now? Like most bishops, I dare say, I am often presented, on trips around the diocese, with long lists of people’s perceived needs. I give these my attention; then try to suggest that the crucial question may not in fact be, ‘What do we need?’, but, ‘What are we needed for?’ A shocking aspect of Biblical faith is God’s preferential option for letting his providence unfold, for all his omnipotence, through fallible, weak, sinful human beings. How can we make ourselves mobilisable for his salvific, blessed purpose? This kind of consideration is what we need above all.
Were I, next, to be more specific, I’d hone in on a need I’d call hermeneutic. Let me explain. As a student of monastic history I have noticed that a predictable crisis occurs in the life of a community when the reins of government pass from the second to the third generation. The founders set about their task with clear purpose and the exhilaration of starting something new. The second generation positions itself in relation to the founders. Some will adulate them, some will be more critical; but the founders’ experience, direction, and vision remain, for better or for worse, a criterion of collective discernment. This dynamic changes at the next generational juncture, by which time the founders will be dead, or quite ancient. All of a sudden the second generation’s search for particular identity seems like much ado about not very much. The truly pressing issues are more fundamental: ‘What are we all about? How can we find our place within a tradition that transcends us? Are we on the right track?’ The third generation is faced with the challenge of continuity. To carry on faithfully it needs more than the history — or myth — of heroic origins. It must at once integrate and relativise its specific heritage, looking forward as well as back, up, not down.
This dynamic touches the universal Church, I believe, with regard to a modern event that may be called foundational, so deeply has it formed Catholic experience. I refer, of course, to the Second Vatican Council. What the council represented to those who knew a before and an after has been documented amply and polyphonically. Afterwards came the labours of those who were, or saw themselves as, the council’s legitimate heirs. There were splendid initiatives; but we know no less what quarrels emerged, locking Catholic discourse in confrontations between so-called ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ positions, unedifying clashes — and almost invariably dull.
Something of the climate of the second generation found symbolic expression in a teacup storm not all that long ago when it was still a subject of debate whether Vatican II might best be approached through a hermeneutic of rupture or one of continuity. I confess I found this querelle perplexing. I cannot see how any Catholic might adopt anything but a hermeneutic of continuity. This perspective is inherent in our faith in a God who acts in history, who exhorts us, ‘Remember!’, whose incarnate Son is the principle by which and for which all things exist, whose Spirit sanctifies, in Christ, by ‘calling to mind’.
The collective remembrance of what the council and its aftermath felt like has faded. That notably reduces the emotional heat of hermeneutic exercise, enabling lucid reflection. Today’s young Catholics are not ungrateful for the council’s great gifts, but unable to proceed with their grandparents’ mindsets, uninclined to flog dead horses, unenthused by fossilised projects of aggiornamento when the sun has set on the giorno by which they were defined. What they long for is to awaken the dawn, to know the saving power of Christ, the same today, yesterday, and always, yet making all things new, often enough by exploding time-bound dichotomies.
The pontificate of Leo XIV will guide us peacefully, I expect, into this new era, full of promise. There is a joy in the air. It gives me confidence; for joy, the genuine stuff, not the counterfeit, is a sign that something goes on in us not of our making, something enabling us to seek wholeness in the midst of apparent fragmentation. I think of something the Holy Father said recently, in a catechesis on Saint Irenaeus:
The doctrinal divisions [Irenaeus] encountered within the Christian community, the internal conflicts and external persecutions, did not discourage him. On the contrary, in a fragmented world he learned how to think better, bringing his attention ever more deeply to Jesus. He became a cantor of his person, indeed of his flesh. He recognised that in [Jesus], what seems to conflict is reconciled in unity. Jesus is not a wall that separates, but a door that unites us. We have to remain in him and distinguish reality from ideologies.
I am drawn by this papal challenge to ‘think better’ and by the counsel that so to think is to think ‘in Christ’, who is Truth, thereby to distinguish the real from the unreal. Surrounded as we are more than ever by illusions, that is a further thing we do need now.
Thank God that Peter, rock-firm, is there to confirm us, his brethren.
Hearing Truly
The disciples approached Jesus and said, “Why do you speak to the crowd in parables?” He said to them in reply, “Because knowledge of the mysteries of the Kingdom of heaven has been granted to you, but to them it has not been granted. To anyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich; from anyone who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is why I speak to them in parables, because they look but do not see and hear but do not listen or understand. Isaiah’s prophecy is fulfilled in them.
Matthew 13:10-17
At first sight this Gospel disconcerts. It would appear that God purposely speaks in riddles, complicating utterances in order that we should not understand them. Does God then not desire to be known? Does he, perish the thought, have a cruel streak? Does he take pleasure in tripping us up? There are a few things, here, to untangle.
First, please note this: Jesus speaks, like a good Rabbi, on the basis of a Biblical text. He cites Isaiah, a passage that occurs at a crucial juncture in the book, just as the prophet, in chapter 6, has his vision of God’s transcendent glory, beholding the Lord of Hosts enthroned on the six-winged seraphim who cry, ‘Holy, holy, holy’, a call we make ours in each Mass as we prepare for the Lord’s descent upon his altar.
Aware of his insufficiency before this overwhelming sight, Isaiah at first thinks he will die. Had God not told Moses, ‘No man shall see me and live’ (Ex 33.20)? A seraph, though, approaches. It touches Isaiah’s mouth with burning coal from God’s altar, then proclaims: ‘Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, your sin is forgiven.’ Suddenly the Lord’s voice is heard: ‘Whom shall I send, who will go for us?’ Isaiah, to his amazement, responds: ‘Here am I! Send me.’ At this point the Lord entrusts him with the oracle Jesus cites: ‘Go, and say to this people: Hear, hear, but do not understand; see, see, but do not perceive’, and so forth.
What the prophecy teaches is this: to hear God’s word and receive it in truth, our perception must first be cleansed. If we take in God’s word as if it were any other word, on a par with the words we hear on the news, in the street, in self-interested gossip, we may pick up the sound of it, but we will still have no idea of what it says. It would be as if someone were to serve us a glass of exquisite Chablis after we had spent the day quaffing sugary pop. The wine would have no taste. Our palate would need to be purified first.
Jesus asks us not to take divine revelation lightly; not to assume that we have, just like that, what it takes to plumb its depth and interpret its message. If we do, assuming our often sin-twisted minds to be straight, we are liable to huge misconceptions with potentially disastrous results for ourselves and others.
Jesus’s warning occurs in the context of the parable of the sower. It is wedged between the telling of it and its explanation. We are asked to become fruitful ground, to till the soil of our heart in such a way that it may receive the blessed seed Christ sows, to let it gestate in secret all the while it takes to bear forth, at the opportune time, a harvest of plenty for others. We are to devote ourselves fully to this work of responsible husbandry, that the word of Christ may dwell in us richly, renewing our minds, ordering our discernment.
In an ancient rubric set for Mass, the priest is instructed to pray silently before he reads the Gospel: ‘Almighty God, cleanse my heart, cleanse my lips even as you cleansed Isaiah’s lips with burning coal.’ The touch of that coal is searing; but its wound heals. Distorting impurities must go. Only thus shall we speak the word entrusted to us into the world for what it is: a new, other word, a divine word of life renewed. Our humble awareness of the word’s gratuity and glorious strangeness may alert others, previously deaf, to it, too, calling them out of the valley of the shadow of death into God’s gladsome light, truly to live.
Matthew 13:10-17
At first sight this Gospel disconcerts. It would appear that God purposely speaks in riddles, complicating utterances in order that we should not understand them. Does God then not desire to be known? Does he, perish the thought, have a cruel streak? Does he take pleasure in tripping us up? There are a few things, here, to untangle.
First, please note this: Jesus speaks, like a good Rabbi, on the basis of a Biblical text. He cites Isaiah, a passage that occurs at a crucial juncture in the book, just as the prophet, in chapter 6, has his vision of God’s transcendent glory, beholding the Lord of Hosts enthroned on the six-winged seraphim who cry, ‘Holy, holy, holy’, a call we make ours in each Mass as we prepare for the Lord’s descent upon his altar.
Aware of his insufficiency before this overwhelming sight, Isaiah at first thinks he will die. Had God not told Moses, ‘No man shall see me and live’ (Ex 33.20)? A seraph, though, approaches. It touches Isaiah’s mouth with burning coal from God’s altar, then proclaims: ‘Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, your sin is forgiven.’ Suddenly the Lord’s voice is heard: ‘Whom shall I send, who will go for us?’ Isaiah, to his amazement, responds: ‘Here am I! Send me.’ At this point the Lord entrusts him with the oracle Jesus cites: ‘Go, and say to this people: Hear, hear, but do not understand; see, see, but do not perceive’, and so forth.
What the prophecy teaches is this: to hear God’s word and receive it in truth, our perception must first be cleansed. If we take in God’s word as if it were any other word, on a par with the words we hear on the news, in the street, in self-interested gossip, we may pick up the sound of it, but we will still have no idea of what it says. It would be as if someone were to serve us a glass of exquisite Chablis after we had spent the day quaffing sugary pop. The wine would have no taste. Our palate would need to be purified first.
Jesus asks us not to take divine revelation lightly; not to assume that we have, just like that, what it takes to plumb its depth and interpret its message. If we do, assuming our often sin-twisted minds to be straight, we are liable to huge misconceptions with potentially disastrous results for ourselves and others.
Jesus’s warning occurs in the context of the parable of the sower. It is wedged between the telling of it and its explanation. We are asked to become fruitful ground, to till the soil of our heart in such a way that it may receive the blessed seed Christ sows, to let it gestate in secret all the while it takes to bear forth, at the opportune time, a harvest of plenty for others. We are to devote ourselves fully to this work of responsible husbandry, that the word of Christ may dwell in us richly, renewing our minds, ordering our discernment.
In an ancient rubric set for Mass, the priest is instructed to pray silently before he reads the Gospel: ‘Almighty God, cleanse my heart, cleanse my lips even as you cleansed Isaiah’s lips with burning coal.’ The touch of that coal is searing; but its wound heals. Distorting impurities must go. Only thus shall we speak the word entrusted to us into the world for what it is: a new, other word, a divine word of life renewed. Our humble awareness of the word’s gratuity and glorious strangeness may alert others, previously deaf, to it, too, calling them out of the valley of the shadow of death into God’s gladsome light, truly to live.
Why We Need the Creed
At this year’s summer conference at the Napa Institute, I was asked: ‘Why do we need not just the Word but also the Creed? Why does a 1700-year-old statement of faith matter right now, urgently for each of us?’ Below you can read my response.
In retrospect, considered in the time-traveller’s wing mirror, the Council of Nicaea seems inevitable. Like the crowning of Charlemagne or the Battle of Lepanto, it constitutes one of those cardinal events without which such a lot would have turned out otherwise that it seems, frankly, too much work to consider the chances it might not have happened. To contemporaries, things will have looked a little different. Sure, people were conscious that something momentous was at stake. The council had first been summoned to Ancyra, present-day Ankara, but was then moved to Nicaea, so the emperor could keep a closer eye on it.
Some three hundred bishops attended, making of Nicaea the most representative ecclesial assembly to date. Representation was geographically uneven. Almost all the bishops were Greek. Only a handful came from the West. This is significant, given that controversy regarding cultural-conceptual and linguistic difference lay at the heart of matters discussed. Still, the presence of a formal delegation sent by Pope Sylvester, that tireless builder of Roman churches, ensured that the Latins were fully involved: there was never any question of Nicaea’s legitimacy as an ‘ecumenical’, that is a ‘universal’ or ‘world-wide’ council. However, so violent were the quarrels that preceded and followed the council that it may have seemed destined to relative oblivion, as one dramatic exploit among very many in a tortuously awkward historic-doctrinal-political process.
Not so. Nicaea emerged as a lighthouse, establishing criteria by which both the things that went ahead of it and those that followed after could be evaluated and judged. To this day it is for Christians of almost all confessions an authoritative, incontrovertible reference. What, then, was the council really about?
It dealt with a number of different issues, more than most people who refer to it usually care to recall. If you look up the council’s Canons, its adopted resolutions, you will find them addressing a range of pastoral concerns: conditions for admission to the clergy; the moral standard expected of clerics (forbidden to live with women not their mothers, sisters, aunts, or likewise above suspicion); with procedures for consecrating bishops; with re-admission of the excommunicated; with bans on clerics who practise usury; and so forth. The Fathers further addressed a catechetical exhortation ‘to the Egyptians’. The churches of that area had got embroiled in some rather sterile and destructive controversies. Even back in 325 a national church might need the Catholic communion’s fraternal correction, a statement of the truth in love, to be recalled from a dead-end into which regional blinkeredness had led it.
Chiefly, of course, we remember Nicaea for its creed. It is not quite the one we recite still on Sundays. Nuances were added at the council of Constantinople 56 years later, in 381. But to speak of the ‘Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed’ involves such a mouthful that Christians have long been pleased to reference the first council only. That is fair enough: it was at Nicaea that the decisive terms were hammered out and the creed’s architecture established. In a letter written after the Council Fathers had gone home, Constantine, obviously pleased, wrote that ‘all points which seemed to produce doubt or excuse for discord have been discussed and accurately examined’. He could not resist adding that he himself had taken active part in this ‘investigation of the truth’. That observation may have sprung from a degree of imperial wishful thinking. The historian Henry Chadwick maintained that Constantine never really got the hang of the subtleties of Christian faith, indeed that he was ‘not aware of any mutual exclusiveness between Christianity and his faith in the Unconquered Sun’. This may be a rather too critical approach. We shall likely find Constantine’s true contribution somewhere between the caricature of the blundering amateur and that of the expert witness. What is certain is this: his determination caused the council to happen. And that surely entitled him to bask a little in its glory, be it by reflection.
However prepared or unprepared the emperor was for refined theological debate, it has to be said: the issues treated at Nicaea were abstruse. Is Jesus Christ aptly defined as ‘Son of God’? In what sense can he be said to be ‘begotten’? Is he of like substance to the Father, or ‘consubstantial’ with him? If ‘consubstantial’, what does the word mean? To committed, ordinary Christians attracted by the Sermon on the Mount, eager to imitate the Good Samaritan, such word-splitting may seem pedantic and redundant. We read in Scripture that ‘God is love’. Is that not enough? Do we really need all these complicated, oh so clever definitions that seem to want to shoehorn the Gospel’s living, generous broadness into narrow, dead intellectualism?
Yes, we do. The definitions are crucial. Let me indicate why circumstantially. In the past few decades, Catholic discourse has been marked by a tremendous stress on agency. We have been challenged to think self-critically about social issues, justice and peace, inequalities embedded in societal and economic systems. We have been sensitised to the cry of the poor, reminded that the Christian call involves the creation of radical community. This is good. We can never permit ourselves to privatise our religion. Christian faith implies a clear ethical imperative. For our ethics to be well oriented, though, for it to be sound and specific, right faith must be in place first.
History yields examples aplenty, some profoundly tragic, of how putatively Christian ethics divorced from faith, or attempts to found communities upon some preliminary good or intermediary personage, can come to assume bizarre, even plainly perverse forms. The transformative potential of a Christian way of acting in the world does not spring from bullet points relayable in a YouTube video; nor is it a technique one might acquire at a weekend workshop. You see, ultimately it is not you and I who provide for the world consolation and light. Our vanity would like to pretend it is so; but we are but carriers of Another’s gifts, summoned to bear them lightly and graciously. Christ alone is the light of the world, its hope and pledge of healing. We shall contribute our widow’s mite to his work of recreation — ‘See, I make all things new!’ — in so far as we abide in him; in so far as he becomes the atmosphere in which we ‘live and move and have our being’. If we learn to live on these terms, it will be only natural to heed the wonderful counsel Antony the Great bequeathed to his disciples on his deathbed: ‘Let Christ be the air you breathe’.
‘He must increase, I must decrease’, said the Forerunner. St Paul wrote to the Galatians, prone to turn ‘to a different Gospel’ than the one of God’s salvation in Christ: ‘It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’; at the end of the letter he added, ‘May I never boast in anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ’. Such affirmations may seem to us excessive, indicating heights attainable only by especially graced, extraordinarily called individuals. They are not. They spell out the criteria for Christian existence that apply to all of us. To be a Christian and to spread abroad the ‘sweet aroma of Christ Jesus’ is above all a matter of abiding in him. It ensues that in order to heed Jesus’s call to follow him and imitate him, we must first be able responsibly to answer his question, ‘Who do you say that I am’?
This is where the creed comes in. The Nicene confession of God three-in-one is chiefly christological. About the Father, it simply says: ‘We believe in God the Father all-powerful, maker of all things both seen and unseen.’ The Spirit is very lapidarily acknowledged: ‘And in the Holy Spirit’. More work was called for. The question of Pneumatology arose post Nicaea and was defined at Constantinople in 381, when the final clause of the creed as we know it today, about holy Church, was also added. The necessity of speaking who Christ is was foremost in the mind of the Nicene Fathers, inviting us to make of this jubilee year a time of radical Christ-centred conversion.
I have spoken of the creed as adding precision. Is it extra-Biblical? Did the Fathers add bits from their own minds to Jesus’s self-revelation in the Gospel? Their purpose was to add nothing. They believed in the authority of Scripture. They knew themselves accountable to it, mindful of the warning in the Apocalypse concerning those who add something to or take something away from sealed revelation. The Fathers’ purpose was to clarify and explicate aspects of divine being that the Bible states in images, or, as St Paul might say, ‘in mystery’. Thereby they continued the work of the Word made flesh, the Only-Begotten ‘close to the Father’s heart’, who came among us to make the unseen God known — or, if we want to stay closer to the Greek of the Prologue to St John’s Gospel, which I am citing, to ‘exegete him’:ὁ ὦν εἰς τὸν κόλπον τοῦ πατρὸς ἐκεῖνος ἐξηγήσατο.
Exegesis is literarily a ‘reading out of’. An exegete is skilled in the responsible reading of texts, equipped to reveal their hidden aspects or implicit messages, rather like a conservator in a museum might hold up an Etruscan vase to the light and show us fine, delicate patterns unapparent to the untrained eye. The purpose of God’s incarnation, by which, rightly, we mark time, was not just to pay the debt of our iniquity and to demonstrate a new lifestyle. The Son of God became man in order, in the Spirit, to ‘show us the Father’, bringing to completion the slowly unfolding epiphany begun at the burning bush when God, no longer content to be the object of human speculation about absolute reality, deigned to articulate himself in a comprehensible manner, entrusting us with his name. The name of Jesus means ‘God saves’. The Person of Jesus reveals who this saving God is.
When the Nicene Fathers identified Christ as ‘God from God, light from light, true God from true God’, they synthesised a series of Jesus’s self-designations into a poetic formula so that believers might keep present in their minds the gist of a whole catalogue of Biblical texts. When they stated that God’s Son is ‘begotten not made’, they fixed the metaphysical distinction between generation in eternity and generation in time. The most controversial part of the council’s work on the creed was the introduction of the word ὁμοούσιος to speak of the Son’s relation to the Father. Our English version of the creed translates ὁμοούσιος as ‘consubstantial’. You may ask whether that makes us much wiser. Until the revised English missal was published in 2011, we used to say ‘of one being with the Father’. That formula has the merit of using words we can readily grasp, but it lacks the subtlety of the Nicene definition. The revisers therefore resolved, wisely, to revert to the technical term.
It takes a great deal of theology to see exactly what ὁμοούσιος means. In fact, it emerged after 325 that not all the Fathers understood it the same way, although they had, bar a couple, signed the formula. The orthodox definition of consubstantiality was the chief post-conciliar theological task. The maintenance of the term in the creed reminds us that our joint profession of faith is underpinned by immense intellectual labour — that it is reasonable. We may make our profession sincerely without having personally examined all the nuts and bolts. The Fathers framed the creed in the first person plural ‘We believe’. At Constantinople, the creed came to wind up with the phrase ‘and in one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church’. The creed belongs to no one in particular; it is the Church’s creed. As such, it is given each of us that we might make it our own. In Antiquity the traditio symboli, ‘the handing-on of the creed’, was a rite whereby the bishop read the creed aloud to catechumens. They were exhorted to commit it to memory, to interiorise it as a personal statement of faith. Their public recitation of the formula learnt, their redditio or ‘handing back’ of the creed, preceded their admission to the sacraments. The role of the creed in our personal lives of faith is this, not least: it frees us of illusions that we own or manage our faith, reminding us that it is pure gift and that we are held to the creed’s standards, not it to ours.
I mentioned earlier that Pope St Sylvester, who reigned while the council of Nicaea was in session, built a number of basilicas in Rome. Among them were old St Peter’s, Holy Cross in Jerusalem, and the Lateran. Old St Peter’s is lost. It was pulled down when Bramante, Maderno, and Michelangelo clubbed together, under Julius II, to produce the grandiose edifice we know today. The interior of Holy Cross has been refashioned, leaving us only to guess what Sylvester’s decorative scheme may have looked like. St John Lateran, meanwhile, still substantially displays the fourth-century mosaic integral to its first design. The image of Christ found there is like a pictorial précis of the Nicene definitions. Surrounded by angels, Christ is depicted in heavenly realms as a haloed torso suspended between, underneath, a naked cross, the emblem of his work in time, and, above, a seraphic composition that symbolises the Father’s eternal throne. The Spirit, in the form of a diving dove, connects Christ’s apparition in glory with the earthly sphere, causing rivulets of water to gush down along the cross’s stem to form, at its base, a fountain from which deer quench their thirst and around which sheep pasture. The Christ of the Lateran mosaic prefigures an iconographic model that would, two centuries later, morph into the type we know as the Pantokrator, displaying Christ as the One who, in the cadences of the Nicene creed, ‘went up into the heavens [and] is coming to judge the living and the dead.’
In our church interiors now, in the songs and devotional texts, statuary, painting, and mosaics produced in recent decades, this motif has been all but eclipsed. The image of Christ on which we have focused is that of the Son of Man who ‘went about doing good’. We need to keep that image before our eyes; but we need no less to know that this outstanding human being whom even Pilate could admire (‘Behold the Man!’) is from everlasting, invested with substantial glory, the merest glimpse of which causes unaided human sensibility to faint. The Nicene creed safeguards reverential consciousness of Christ’s divinity. Appended to the creed is an anathema: ‘Those who say “there once was when he was not” [that is, who affirm that Jesus may sufficiently be understood and known with reference to his appearance in time, in the order of creation], these the catholic and apostolic church anathematises.’ Strong words! They should ring in our ears, heirs as we are to a largely this-worldly, unmetaphysical, tediously flat perception of Christian truth.
The creed which the Fathers entrusted to the Church has resounded on the lips of the faithful for 1700 years. It is a treasure, a guarantee that notwithstanding our slowness of mind and recalcitrant hearts, our confession of Christ will not be unworthy of him. The creed also helps us understand ourselves. For if our great task is to live in Christ, and if Christ is truly God, the assurance given in Scripture, that we are to be ‘sharers in divine life’, is no rhetorical extravagance but literal truth; then everything else, all our options and desires, must be weighed in the light of it.
The creed is like the musical pitch by which the rest of our life with regard to time and eternity must be tuned. This was brought home to me years ago when my goddaughter in Rome was preparing for First Communion. Her priest had had the inspired idea of introducing the creed to the children by teaching them to sing it. And so I found myself one night at bedtime, after the good-night story, hearing this little girl sitting up in bed singing in a bright soprano voice: ‘I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages’. Did she understand what she was reciting?
Yes and no. She may not have been able to define ὁμοούσιος. But she knew perfectly that these time-defying words express the truth of a Person she loved, and that her life’s task would be to make her confession ever more integrally with all her heart, all her soul, all her mind, and all her strength. She could rest in that task serenely. The music of it lived in her. She had but to listen out for it.
This is how the creed works. It lifts our lives into a symphony where our being is renewed in the one, trinitarian God, oriented heavenward, set as a new song fit to sound alongside the praise of seraphim and cherubim, ravished by divine beauty. Thus illumined we can commit to the archives, gently and with reverence, but without excessive remorse, the jingly superficiality of many a cheerful yet deficient confessional refrain, too trite standards of Christian faith and finality with which I dare say we are, most of us, for excellent reason, more than a little weary.
In retrospect, considered in the time-traveller’s wing mirror, the Council of Nicaea seems inevitable. Like the crowning of Charlemagne or the Battle of Lepanto, it constitutes one of those cardinal events without which such a lot would have turned out otherwise that it seems, frankly, too much work to consider the chances it might not have happened. To contemporaries, things will have looked a little different. Sure, people were conscious that something momentous was at stake. The council had first been summoned to Ancyra, present-day Ankara, but was then moved to Nicaea, so the emperor could keep a closer eye on it.
Some three hundred bishops attended, making of Nicaea the most representative ecclesial assembly to date. Representation was geographically uneven. Almost all the bishops were Greek. Only a handful came from the West. This is significant, given that controversy regarding cultural-conceptual and linguistic difference lay at the heart of matters discussed. Still, the presence of a formal delegation sent by Pope Sylvester, that tireless builder of Roman churches, ensured that the Latins were fully involved: there was never any question of Nicaea’s legitimacy as an ‘ecumenical’, that is a ‘universal’ or ‘world-wide’ council. However, so violent were the quarrels that preceded and followed the council that it may have seemed destined to relative oblivion, as one dramatic exploit among very many in a tortuously awkward historic-doctrinal-political process.
Not so. Nicaea emerged as a lighthouse, establishing criteria by which both the things that went ahead of it and those that followed after could be evaluated and judged. To this day it is for Christians of almost all confessions an authoritative, incontrovertible reference. What, then, was the council really about?
It dealt with a number of different issues, more than most people who refer to it usually care to recall. If you look up the council’s Canons, its adopted resolutions, you will find them addressing a range of pastoral concerns: conditions for admission to the clergy; the moral standard expected of clerics (forbidden to live with women not their mothers, sisters, aunts, or likewise above suspicion); with procedures for consecrating bishops; with re-admission of the excommunicated; with bans on clerics who practise usury; and so forth. The Fathers further addressed a catechetical exhortation ‘to the Egyptians’. The churches of that area had got embroiled in some rather sterile and destructive controversies. Even back in 325 a national church might need the Catholic communion’s fraternal correction, a statement of the truth in love, to be recalled from a dead-end into which regional blinkeredness had led it.
Chiefly, of course, we remember Nicaea for its creed. It is not quite the one we recite still on Sundays. Nuances were added at the council of Constantinople 56 years later, in 381. But to speak of the ‘Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed’ involves such a mouthful that Christians have long been pleased to reference the first council only. That is fair enough: it was at Nicaea that the decisive terms were hammered out and the creed’s architecture established. In a letter written after the Council Fathers had gone home, Constantine, obviously pleased, wrote that ‘all points which seemed to produce doubt or excuse for discord have been discussed and accurately examined’. He could not resist adding that he himself had taken active part in this ‘investigation of the truth’. That observation may have sprung from a degree of imperial wishful thinking. The historian Henry Chadwick maintained that Constantine never really got the hang of the subtleties of Christian faith, indeed that he was ‘not aware of any mutual exclusiveness between Christianity and his faith in the Unconquered Sun’. This may be a rather too critical approach. We shall likely find Constantine’s true contribution somewhere between the caricature of the blundering amateur and that of the expert witness. What is certain is this: his determination caused the council to happen. And that surely entitled him to bask a little in its glory, be it by reflection.
However prepared or unprepared the emperor was for refined theological debate, it has to be said: the issues treated at Nicaea were abstruse. Is Jesus Christ aptly defined as ‘Son of God’? In what sense can he be said to be ‘begotten’? Is he of like substance to the Father, or ‘consubstantial’ with him? If ‘consubstantial’, what does the word mean? To committed, ordinary Christians attracted by the Sermon on the Mount, eager to imitate the Good Samaritan, such word-splitting may seem pedantic and redundant. We read in Scripture that ‘God is love’. Is that not enough? Do we really need all these complicated, oh so clever definitions that seem to want to shoehorn the Gospel’s living, generous broadness into narrow, dead intellectualism?
Yes, we do. The definitions are crucial. Let me indicate why circumstantially. In the past few decades, Catholic discourse has been marked by a tremendous stress on agency. We have been challenged to think self-critically about social issues, justice and peace, inequalities embedded in societal and economic systems. We have been sensitised to the cry of the poor, reminded that the Christian call involves the creation of radical community. This is good. We can never permit ourselves to privatise our religion. Christian faith implies a clear ethical imperative. For our ethics to be well oriented, though, for it to be sound and specific, right faith must be in place first.
History yields examples aplenty, some profoundly tragic, of how putatively Christian ethics divorced from faith, or attempts to found communities upon some preliminary good or intermediary personage, can come to assume bizarre, even plainly perverse forms. The transformative potential of a Christian way of acting in the world does not spring from bullet points relayable in a YouTube video; nor is it a technique one might acquire at a weekend workshop. You see, ultimately it is not you and I who provide for the world consolation and light. Our vanity would like to pretend it is so; but we are but carriers of Another’s gifts, summoned to bear them lightly and graciously. Christ alone is the light of the world, its hope and pledge of healing. We shall contribute our widow’s mite to his work of recreation — ‘See, I make all things new!’ — in so far as we abide in him; in so far as he becomes the atmosphere in which we ‘live and move and have our being’. If we learn to live on these terms, it will be only natural to heed the wonderful counsel Antony the Great bequeathed to his disciples on his deathbed: ‘Let Christ be the air you breathe’.
‘He must increase, I must decrease’, said the Forerunner. St Paul wrote to the Galatians, prone to turn ‘to a different Gospel’ than the one of God’s salvation in Christ: ‘It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’; at the end of the letter he added, ‘May I never boast in anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ’. Such affirmations may seem to us excessive, indicating heights attainable only by especially graced, extraordinarily called individuals. They are not. They spell out the criteria for Christian existence that apply to all of us. To be a Christian and to spread abroad the ‘sweet aroma of Christ Jesus’ is above all a matter of abiding in him. It ensues that in order to heed Jesus’s call to follow him and imitate him, we must first be able responsibly to answer his question, ‘Who do you say that I am’?
This is where the creed comes in. The Nicene confession of God three-in-one is chiefly christological. About the Father, it simply says: ‘We believe in God the Father all-powerful, maker of all things both seen and unseen.’ The Spirit is very lapidarily acknowledged: ‘And in the Holy Spirit’. More work was called for. The question of Pneumatology arose post Nicaea and was defined at Constantinople in 381, when the final clause of the creed as we know it today, about holy Church, was also added. The necessity of speaking who Christ is was foremost in the mind of the Nicene Fathers, inviting us to make of this jubilee year a time of radical Christ-centred conversion.
I have spoken of the creed as adding precision. Is it extra-Biblical? Did the Fathers add bits from their own minds to Jesus’s self-revelation in the Gospel? Their purpose was to add nothing. They believed in the authority of Scripture. They knew themselves accountable to it, mindful of the warning in the Apocalypse concerning those who add something to or take something away from sealed revelation. The Fathers’ purpose was to clarify and explicate aspects of divine being that the Bible states in images, or, as St Paul might say, ‘in mystery’. Thereby they continued the work of the Word made flesh, the Only-Begotten ‘close to the Father’s heart’, who came among us to make the unseen God known — or, if we want to stay closer to the Greek of the Prologue to St John’s Gospel, which I am citing, to ‘exegete him’:ὁ ὦν εἰς τὸν κόλπον τοῦ πατρὸς ἐκεῖνος ἐξηγήσατο.
Exegesis is literarily a ‘reading out of’. An exegete is skilled in the responsible reading of texts, equipped to reveal their hidden aspects or implicit messages, rather like a conservator in a museum might hold up an Etruscan vase to the light and show us fine, delicate patterns unapparent to the untrained eye. The purpose of God’s incarnation, by which, rightly, we mark time, was not just to pay the debt of our iniquity and to demonstrate a new lifestyle. The Son of God became man in order, in the Spirit, to ‘show us the Father’, bringing to completion the slowly unfolding epiphany begun at the burning bush when God, no longer content to be the object of human speculation about absolute reality, deigned to articulate himself in a comprehensible manner, entrusting us with his name. The name of Jesus means ‘God saves’. The Person of Jesus reveals who this saving God is.
When the Nicene Fathers identified Christ as ‘God from God, light from light, true God from true God’, they synthesised a series of Jesus’s self-designations into a poetic formula so that believers might keep present in their minds the gist of a whole catalogue of Biblical texts. When they stated that God’s Son is ‘begotten not made’, they fixed the metaphysical distinction between generation in eternity and generation in time. The most controversial part of the council’s work on the creed was the introduction of the word ὁμοούσιος to speak of the Son’s relation to the Father. Our English version of the creed translates ὁμοούσιος as ‘consubstantial’. You may ask whether that makes us much wiser. Until the revised English missal was published in 2011, we used to say ‘of one being with the Father’. That formula has the merit of using words we can readily grasp, but it lacks the subtlety of the Nicene definition. The revisers therefore resolved, wisely, to revert to the technical term.
It takes a great deal of theology to see exactly what ὁμοούσιος means. In fact, it emerged after 325 that not all the Fathers understood it the same way, although they had, bar a couple, signed the formula. The orthodox definition of consubstantiality was the chief post-conciliar theological task. The maintenance of the term in the creed reminds us that our joint profession of faith is underpinned by immense intellectual labour — that it is reasonable. We may make our profession sincerely without having personally examined all the nuts and bolts. The Fathers framed the creed in the first person plural ‘We believe’. At Constantinople, the creed came to wind up with the phrase ‘and in one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church’. The creed belongs to no one in particular; it is the Church’s creed. As such, it is given each of us that we might make it our own. In Antiquity the traditio symboli, ‘the handing-on of the creed’, was a rite whereby the bishop read the creed aloud to catechumens. They were exhorted to commit it to memory, to interiorise it as a personal statement of faith. Their public recitation of the formula learnt, their redditio or ‘handing back’ of the creed, preceded their admission to the sacraments. The role of the creed in our personal lives of faith is this, not least: it frees us of illusions that we own or manage our faith, reminding us that it is pure gift and that we are held to the creed’s standards, not it to ours.
I mentioned earlier that Pope St Sylvester, who reigned while the council of Nicaea was in session, built a number of basilicas in Rome. Among them were old St Peter’s, Holy Cross in Jerusalem, and the Lateran. Old St Peter’s is lost. It was pulled down when Bramante, Maderno, and Michelangelo clubbed together, under Julius II, to produce the grandiose edifice we know today. The interior of Holy Cross has been refashioned, leaving us only to guess what Sylvester’s decorative scheme may have looked like. St John Lateran, meanwhile, still substantially displays the fourth-century mosaic integral to its first design. The image of Christ found there is like a pictorial précis of the Nicene definitions. Surrounded by angels, Christ is depicted in heavenly realms as a haloed torso suspended between, underneath, a naked cross, the emblem of his work in time, and, above, a seraphic composition that symbolises the Father’s eternal throne. The Spirit, in the form of a diving dove, connects Christ’s apparition in glory with the earthly sphere, causing rivulets of water to gush down along the cross’s stem to form, at its base, a fountain from which deer quench their thirst and around which sheep pasture. The Christ of the Lateran mosaic prefigures an iconographic model that would, two centuries later, morph into the type we know as the Pantokrator, displaying Christ as the One who, in the cadences of the Nicene creed, ‘went up into the heavens [and] is coming to judge the living and the dead.’
In our church interiors now, in the songs and devotional texts, statuary, painting, and mosaics produced in recent decades, this motif has been all but eclipsed. The image of Christ on which we have focused is that of the Son of Man who ‘went about doing good’. We need to keep that image before our eyes; but we need no less to know that this outstanding human being whom even Pilate could admire (‘Behold the Man!’) is from everlasting, invested with substantial glory, the merest glimpse of which causes unaided human sensibility to faint. The Nicene creed safeguards reverential consciousness of Christ’s divinity. Appended to the creed is an anathema: ‘Those who say “there once was when he was not” [that is, who affirm that Jesus may sufficiently be understood and known with reference to his appearance in time, in the order of creation], these the catholic and apostolic church anathematises.’ Strong words! They should ring in our ears, heirs as we are to a largely this-worldly, unmetaphysical, tediously flat perception of Christian truth.
The creed which the Fathers entrusted to the Church has resounded on the lips of the faithful for 1700 years. It is a treasure, a guarantee that notwithstanding our slowness of mind and recalcitrant hearts, our confession of Christ will not be unworthy of him. The creed also helps us understand ourselves. For if our great task is to live in Christ, and if Christ is truly God, the assurance given in Scripture, that we are to be ‘sharers in divine life’, is no rhetorical extravagance but literal truth; then everything else, all our options and desires, must be weighed in the light of it.
The creed is like the musical pitch by which the rest of our life with regard to time and eternity must be tuned. This was brought home to me years ago when my goddaughter in Rome was preparing for First Communion. Her priest had had the inspired idea of introducing the creed to the children by teaching them to sing it. And so I found myself one night at bedtime, after the good-night story, hearing this little girl sitting up in bed singing in a bright soprano voice: ‘I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages’. Did she understand what she was reciting?
Yes and no. She may not have been able to define ὁμοούσιος. But she knew perfectly that these time-defying words express the truth of a Person she loved, and that her life’s task would be to make her confession ever more integrally with all her heart, all her soul, all her mind, and all her strength. She could rest in that task serenely. The music of it lived in her. She had but to listen out for it.
This is how the creed works. It lifts our lives into a symphony where our being is renewed in the one, trinitarian God, oriented heavenward, set as a new song fit to sound alongside the praise of seraphim and cherubim, ravished by divine beauty. Thus illumined we can commit to the archives, gently and with reverence, but without excessive remorse, the jingly superficiality of many a cheerful yet deficient confessional refrain, too trite standards of Christian faith and finality with which I dare say we are, most of us, for excellent reason, more than a little weary.
Temptation
How can we face serious temptations?
First of all by learning what it is to live on trust: when a temptation comes, to recognise it honestly and to evaluate it—see what sort of response is needed—then, even if it makes me frightened or even terrified, to remember that it doesn’t have the last word. Also, that this particular temptation, even if it may haunt me, doesn’t define me, and that I’m called and enabled by nature and grace to pass beyond it. Because temptations only become really mortiferous when I fall for the illusion to think that, “Gosh, this is it; this is reality now—this temptation.” That’s where despair raises its ugly head. One of the things the Fathers do is to help us recognise temptations, and they do that forensically with great specificity. At the same time, they help us to despise them, and sometimes they will laugh at temptations. They will say, “Ha ha, you think I’m going to fall into that trap again?” And often enough, at that, the devilish plot just dissolves into thin air or the demons take flight.
From the Desert Fathers Q&A session of 7 July, now available as a transcript here.
First of all by learning what it is to live on trust: when a temptation comes, to recognise it honestly and to evaluate it—see what sort of response is needed—then, even if it makes me frightened or even terrified, to remember that it doesn’t have the last word. Also, that this particular temptation, even if it may haunt me, doesn’t define me, and that I’m called and enabled by nature and grace to pass beyond it. Because temptations only become really mortiferous when I fall for the illusion to think that, “Gosh, this is it; this is reality now—this temptation.” That’s where despair raises its ugly head. One of the things the Fathers do is to help us recognise temptations, and they do that forensically with great specificity. At the same time, they help us to despise them, and sometimes they will laugh at temptations. They will say, “Ha ha, you think I’m going to fall into that trap again?” And often enough, at that, the devilish plot just dissolves into thin air or the demons take flight.
From the Desert Fathers Q&A session of 7 July, now available as a transcript here.
Mary Magdalene
Song of Songs 3.1-4: I sought him whom my heart loves.
John 20.1-18: Do not cling to me.
Our lectionary’s translation of Christ’s words to Mary, ‘Do not cling to me’, is a bit excessive. The translators have taken a liberty to clarify — perhaps too much. John’s Greek verb ἅπτομαι basically means ‘touch’. It is rendered by the traditional Latin translation Noli me tangere, which gave rise to a well-known motif in painting. Mary, usually on her knees, extends a hand towards Christ, who rebuffs her with a gesture while occasionally, as in Correggio’s canvas in the Prado, pointing upwards with the other hand, as if saying: ‘Do not tie me down to the earthly realm; recognise my spiritual nature!’
This, though, goes against the grain of the Gospel narrative. During his years of ministry, Christ was signally unafraid of physical contact. Think of the lepers he touched, of the blind man anointed with earth and spittle, of the washing of the feet. The pattern recurs after Easter. When the risen Christ appears to the Apostles, he asks Thomas the Twin to touch his wounds; at Emmaus he sups with pilgrims; on the shore of Lake Tiberias he breakfasts with the eleven. The evangelists stress these incidents purposely. They show that Christ’s embodiment was real, that the Word had truly become flesh, had truly died, truly risen, entitling us to believe in the literal truth of resurrection. Why, then, this particular stricture directed at Mary Magdalene?
It makes sense when we realise that it does not concern him and some supposed fear of physical contact. It is about her and her mode of relating.
The scene has a prehistory, of course. The Church identifies Mary with the woman who, in Simon the Pharisee’s house, anointed Jesus’s feet with precious nard, then dried them with her hair. This scene, too, has fascinated artists, who draw out its extreme tactility. Mary hugs Jesus’s feet as if they were a life-raft, finding in this Man the strange satisfaction of myriad confused, painful, destructive desires. The recognition is good. Jesus does not draw back from it; he censures those who would drive the women away. But an attitude that may be appropriate for an initial stage of conversion and spiritual awakening can stand in the way of maturing and growth. If my relationship with Christ stays focused on my personal need, how will I come to see him as he is to adore and obey him, awakened to his call and my task?
It is to draw Mary out of herself, she who turned up in the garden so distraught, enclosed in her own grief, that Jesus addresses her with apparent brusqueness. He invites her to advance, to pass into a new stage of relation. In this situation a paradigm inheres that touches us all. If the Lord withdraws a consolation on which we have counted, if we no longer find sensible relief in a given prayer or practice, it is not necessarily a sign that we have been abandoned or are passing through a stage of inward dryness. It may instead be a positive prompt to keep moving, not to get stuck in set expectations, to follow the Lamb wherever he goes instead of childishly expecting him to come and cuddle at our feet.
‘I sought him whom my soul loves’, we read in the Song of Songs. Let us make sure we do just that and not use him as an excuse to seek our own private reassurance, be it exquisitely spiritualised. Amen.
John 20.1-18: Do not cling to me.
Our lectionary’s translation of Christ’s words to Mary, ‘Do not cling to me’, is a bit excessive. The translators have taken a liberty to clarify — perhaps too much. John’s Greek verb ἅπτομαι basically means ‘touch’. It is rendered by the traditional Latin translation Noli me tangere, which gave rise to a well-known motif in painting. Mary, usually on her knees, extends a hand towards Christ, who rebuffs her with a gesture while occasionally, as in Correggio’s canvas in the Prado, pointing upwards with the other hand, as if saying: ‘Do not tie me down to the earthly realm; recognise my spiritual nature!’
This, though, goes against the grain of the Gospel narrative. During his years of ministry, Christ was signally unafraid of physical contact. Think of the lepers he touched, of the blind man anointed with earth and spittle, of the washing of the feet. The pattern recurs after Easter. When the risen Christ appears to the Apostles, he asks Thomas the Twin to touch his wounds; at Emmaus he sups with pilgrims; on the shore of Lake Tiberias he breakfasts with the eleven. The evangelists stress these incidents purposely. They show that Christ’s embodiment was real, that the Word had truly become flesh, had truly died, truly risen, entitling us to believe in the literal truth of resurrection. Why, then, this particular stricture directed at Mary Magdalene?
It makes sense when we realise that it does not concern him and some supposed fear of physical contact. It is about her and her mode of relating.
The scene has a prehistory, of course. The Church identifies Mary with the woman who, in Simon the Pharisee’s house, anointed Jesus’s feet with precious nard, then dried them with her hair. This scene, too, has fascinated artists, who draw out its extreme tactility. Mary hugs Jesus’s feet as if they were a life-raft, finding in this Man the strange satisfaction of myriad confused, painful, destructive desires. The recognition is good. Jesus does not draw back from it; he censures those who would drive the women away. But an attitude that may be appropriate for an initial stage of conversion and spiritual awakening can stand in the way of maturing and growth. If my relationship with Christ stays focused on my personal need, how will I come to see him as he is to adore and obey him, awakened to his call and my task?
It is to draw Mary out of herself, she who turned up in the garden so distraught, enclosed in her own grief, that Jesus addresses her with apparent brusqueness. He invites her to advance, to pass into a new stage of relation. In this situation a paradigm inheres that touches us all. If the Lord withdraws a consolation on which we have counted, if we no longer find sensible relief in a given prayer or practice, it is not necessarily a sign that we have been abandoned or are passing through a stage of inward dryness. It may instead be a positive prompt to keep moving, not to get stuck in set expectations, to follow the Lamb wherever he goes instead of childishly expecting him to come and cuddle at our feet.
‘I sought him whom my soul loves’, we read in the Song of Songs. Let us make sure we do just that and not use him as an excuse to seek our own private reassurance, be it exquisitely spiritualised. Amen.