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:
Listen Today 
This homily was given in German as part of a retreat for priests at Maria Rosenberg. You can find an English version by scrolling down.
Baruch 1.15-20: Integrity belongs to the Lord our God.
Luke 10.13-16: Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to Read More
Baruch 1.15-20: Integrity belongs to the Lord our God.
Luke 10.13-16: Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to Read More
The Guardian Angels This homily was given in German as part of a retreat for priests at Maria Rosenberg. You can find an English version by scrolling down.
Der Anfang von Newmans Gedicht Der Traum des Gerontius erzählt von einer wunderbaren Begegnung auf der Read More
Der Anfang von Newmans Gedicht Der Traum des Gerontius erzählt von einer wunderbaren Begegnung auf der Read More
St Thérèse This homily was given in German as part of a retreat for priests at Maria Rosenberg. You can find an English version by scrolling down.
Als sie im Sterben lag, hörte Thérèse durchs Fenster eine Mitschwester einer anderen sagen, draußen im Read More
Als sie im Sterben lag, hörte Thérèse durchs Fenster eine Mitschwester einer anderen sagen, draußen im Read More
St Michael the Archangel This homily was given in German as part of a retreat for priests at Maria Rosenberg. You can find an English version by scrolling down.
Apocalypse 12.7-12: Now war broke out in heaven.
John 1.47-51:You will see the angels God ascending and Read More
Apocalypse 12.7-12: Now war broke out in heaven.
John 1.47-51:You will see the angels God ascending and Read More
On Paradise This lecture was given at an Ecumenical Conference at Pannonhalma on 26 September 2025. The theme of the conference, reminiscent of the one set for August’s Rimini Meeting, was a verse from Isaiah, ‘Her wasteland he shall make like the garden Read More
Conversation with Larry Chapp In Gaudium et Spes 22, we read
The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come, Read More
The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come, Read More
Proof in the Pudding This brief homily was given at the opening of an ecumenical symposium held at the Archabbey of Pannonhalma. The Gospel at Mass was Luke 9:18-22 in which Christ asks, first, ‘Who do the crowds say that I am?’, then, ‘Who Read More
Listen Today
This homily was given in German as part of a retreat for priests at Maria Rosenberg. You can find an English version by scrolling down.
Baruch 1.15-20: Integrity belongs to the Lord our God.
Luke 10.13-16: Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida!
Die Umstände des Buches Baruch sind tragisch. Die Chaldäer haben Jerusalem in Brand gesteckt. Der Tempel ist profaniert. Das Volk schmachtet im Exil.
Was intoniert Baruch dann — ein Klagelied?
Nein. Er erkennt das Leiden Israels zwar, verkündet aber: Der Herr, unser Gott, ist im Recht. Schamröte, sagt er, kommt uns ins Gesicht, denn “wir haben gegen den Herrn gesündigt, wir haben ihm nicht gehorcht”.
Leute, die der Religion fern stehen nehmen geläufig an, man werde gläubig um Bestätigung und Trost zu finden. Die Bibel bietet uns ein anderes Bild.
Der biblische Glaube ist nicht immer tröstend. Er konfrontiert uns mit der Wahrheit, mit ultimater Wirklichkeit. Das ist manchmal unangenehm, besonders wenn wir, bewusst oder unbewusst, mit Lügen und Illusionen alliert sind. Wir müssen uns dann erst uns selber stellen, Verantwortung nehmen für das Leben wie es ist.
Laufen Dinge schief, zerfällt Aufgebautes, zerstört sich Schönes, klagen wir spontan Gott und die Welt an. Von Baruch lernen wir stattdessen, Fragen zu stellen: Sind wir dem Herrn treu geblieben? Haben wir ihm gehorcht?
Die evangelischen Wehrufe über Chorazin und Betsaida zeigen in dieselbe Richtung. Wunderbare Dinge sind in diesen Städten geschehen. Christus, das Licht der Welt, hat dort seine Herrlichkeit offenbart, er hat seine Frohbotschaft verkündet.
Die Einheimischen merkten aber nichts davon. Sie hatten mit sich selbst — mit ihren Auffassungen, Vorurteilen, Plänen — genug.
Gott, durch dessen Wort die Welt geschaffen ist und gerettet, hört nicht auf, uns segensreich anzusprechen. Hören wir zu? Folgen wir seinem Ruf?
Wie der Invitatoriumspsalm uns täglich ermahnt: “Würdet ihr doch heute auf seine Stimme hören. Verhärtet euer Herz nicht!”
***
The circumstances of the Book of Baruch are tragic. The Chaldeans have set fire to Jerusalem. The temple is profaned, the people languishes in exile.
So what does Baruch do? Intone a lament?
No. He sees Israel’s pain, but affirms that the Lord has acted with integrity. We meanwhile blush for shame, he says, for ‘we have sinned in the sight of the Lord, we have disobeyed him’.
Non-religious people often assume that one takes to faith to be affirmed and comforted. The Bible paints a different picture.
Biblical faith is not always comforting. It confronts us with the truth, with ultimate reality. That is uncomfortable if we are allied, consciously or unconsciously, to lies and illusions. We must, then, confront ourselves and take responsibility for our lives as they have turned out.
When things go awry, when what we we have built up collapses, when lovely things wilt, we readily look for someone to blame, be it God himself. Baruch teaches us instead to ask: Have we stayed faithful to the Lord? Have we obeyed him?
The woes proclaimed in the Gospel on Chorazin and Bethsaida point in the same direction. Wonderful things had taken place in those two cities. Christ, the Light of the world, had revealed his glory there and proclaimed the Good News.
The locals, though, had noticed nothing. They had enough with themselves, with their opinions, prejudices, plans.
God, by whose Word the world was made and redeemed, does not cease to speak to us and call us. Are we listening? Do we follow his call?
As the Invitatory Psalm exhorts us daily: ‘Oh that today you would listen to his voice. Harden not your heart!’
The Prophet Baruch from the Loggia d’Annunciazione by Giusto d’Allamagna (ca.1451) in Santa Maria di Castello, Genoa.
Baruch 1.15-20: Integrity belongs to the Lord our God.
Luke 10.13-16: Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida!
Die Umstände des Buches Baruch sind tragisch. Die Chaldäer haben Jerusalem in Brand gesteckt. Der Tempel ist profaniert. Das Volk schmachtet im Exil.
Was intoniert Baruch dann — ein Klagelied?
Nein. Er erkennt das Leiden Israels zwar, verkündet aber: Der Herr, unser Gott, ist im Recht. Schamröte, sagt er, kommt uns ins Gesicht, denn “wir haben gegen den Herrn gesündigt, wir haben ihm nicht gehorcht”.
Leute, die der Religion fern stehen nehmen geläufig an, man werde gläubig um Bestätigung und Trost zu finden. Die Bibel bietet uns ein anderes Bild.
Der biblische Glaube ist nicht immer tröstend. Er konfrontiert uns mit der Wahrheit, mit ultimater Wirklichkeit. Das ist manchmal unangenehm, besonders wenn wir, bewusst oder unbewusst, mit Lügen und Illusionen alliert sind. Wir müssen uns dann erst uns selber stellen, Verantwortung nehmen für das Leben wie es ist.
Laufen Dinge schief, zerfällt Aufgebautes, zerstört sich Schönes, klagen wir spontan Gott und die Welt an. Von Baruch lernen wir stattdessen, Fragen zu stellen: Sind wir dem Herrn treu geblieben? Haben wir ihm gehorcht?
Die evangelischen Wehrufe über Chorazin und Betsaida zeigen in dieselbe Richtung. Wunderbare Dinge sind in diesen Städten geschehen. Christus, das Licht der Welt, hat dort seine Herrlichkeit offenbart, er hat seine Frohbotschaft verkündet.
Die Einheimischen merkten aber nichts davon. Sie hatten mit sich selbst — mit ihren Auffassungen, Vorurteilen, Plänen — genug.
Gott, durch dessen Wort die Welt geschaffen ist und gerettet, hört nicht auf, uns segensreich anzusprechen. Hören wir zu? Folgen wir seinem Ruf?
Wie der Invitatoriumspsalm uns täglich ermahnt: “Würdet ihr doch heute auf seine Stimme hören. Verhärtet euer Herz nicht!”
***
The circumstances of the Book of Baruch are tragic. The Chaldeans have set fire to Jerusalem. The temple is profaned, the people languishes in exile.
So what does Baruch do? Intone a lament?
No. He sees Israel’s pain, but affirms that the Lord has acted with integrity. We meanwhile blush for shame, he says, for ‘we have sinned in the sight of the Lord, we have disobeyed him’.
Non-religious people often assume that one takes to faith to be affirmed and comforted. The Bible paints a different picture.
Biblical faith is not always comforting. It confronts us with the truth, with ultimate reality. That is uncomfortable if we are allied, consciously or unconsciously, to lies and illusions. We must, then, confront ourselves and take responsibility for our lives as they have turned out.
When things go awry, when what we we have built up collapses, when lovely things wilt, we readily look for someone to blame, be it God himself. Baruch teaches us instead to ask: Have we stayed faithful to the Lord? Have we obeyed him?
The woes proclaimed in the Gospel on Chorazin and Bethsaida point in the same direction. Wonderful things had taken place in those two cities. Christ, the Light of the world, had revealed his glory there and proclaimed the Good News.
The locals, though, had noticed nothing. They had enough with themselves, with their opinions, prejudices, plans.
God, by whose Word the world was made and redeemed, does not cease to speak to us and call us. Are we listening? Do we follow his call?
As the Invitatory Psalm exhorts us daily: ‘Oh that today you would listen to his voice. Harden not your heart!’
The Prophet Baruch from the Loggia d’Annunciazione by Giusto d’Allamagna (ca.1451) in Santa Maria di Castello, Genoa.
The Guardian Angels
This homily was given in German as part of a retreat for priests at Maria Rosenberg. You can find an English version by scrolling down.
Der Anfang von Newmans Gedicht Der Traum des Gerontius erzählt von einer wunderbaren Begegnung auf der Schwelle zwischen Zeit und Ewigkeit.
Als Gerontius, sterbend, diese Welt verlässt, erkennt er, er ist nicht allein. Ein geheimnisvoller, verschwiegener Gefährte begleitet ihn ins Jenseits. ‘Jemand’, sagt er, ‘hält mich fest in seiner großen Hand.’ Wer? Die Antwort lässt nicht lange auf sich warten. Sein Engel sagt ihm:
Mein Vater hat mir dieses Erdenkind von Geburt an anvertraut, um ihm zu dienen und zu retten, Halleluja, und gerettet ist er. Dieses Kind aus Staub wurde mir gegeben, um es unter Kummer und Schmerz auf dem schmalen Weg, Halleluja, von der Erde zum Himmel aufzuziehen und zu erziehen.
Eines Tages werden auch wir, Sie und ich, zum ersten Mal den verborgenen Führer unseres Lebens erblicken.
Achten wir aber jetzt auf ihn?
Das heutige Fest gebietet uns, aufmerksam zu sein. Die Botschaft des Festes ist voller Zuversicht. Der Herr hat für jeden von uns einen Vertreter seiner besonderen Vorsehung bestimmt. Seine Aufgabe besteht darin, uns auf den richtigen Weg zu führen.
Wie oft fühlen wir uns allein, verlassen, verloren. Wie oft haben wir den Eindruck, alles um uns herum verschwört sich gegen unser übernatürliches Schicksal.
Wie blind sind wir! Es gibt aber jemanden, der ständig an unserer Seite geht. Würden wir uns nur helfen lassen, würde er helfen. Öfter sollten wir zu ihm aufschauen. Wir Kinder aus Staub werden von der Kraft einer unermesslichen Liebe gehalten und beschützt, geführt und aufgerichtet.
Warum, wie Gerontius, die Stunde des Todes abwarten, um die Gestalt dieser Liebe kennenzulernen?
***
The beginning of Newman’s wonderful poem The Dream of Gerontius speaks of a marvellous encounter on the threshold between time and eternity.
Just as Gerontius, dying, leaves this world, he realises he is not alone. A mysterious, discreet companion accompanies him into the hereafter. ‘Someone’, he says, ‘has me fast within his ample palm.’ Who? The answer is not slow in coming. His angel tells him:
My Father gave in charge to me this child of earth, e’en from its birth to serve and save, alleluia, and saved is he. This child of clay to me was given to rear and train by sorrow and pain in the narrow way, alleluia, from earth to heaven.
One day, we, too, you and I, shall behold for the first time our life’s hidden guide.
But do we attend to him now?
Today’s feast bids us pay attention. Its message is a message of deep reassurance. The Lord has appointed, for each of us, an agent of particular providence. This agent’s purpose is, expressly, to guide us on the right path.
How often we feel alone, abandoned, lost. How often we feel that everything around us conspires against our supernatural destiny.
How blind we are!
There is one who walks beside us constantly. If we would but help ourselves, he helps. We should look to him more often.
We children of clay are held and protected, guided and raised up by the force of an immense love. Why wait, like Gerontius, until the hour of death to make its acquaintance?
Illustration to Newman’s Dream of Gerontius by Robert Traill Rose.
Der Anfang von Newmans Gedicht Der Traum des Gerontius erzählt von einer wunderbaren Begegnung auf der Schwelle zwischen Zeit und Ewigkeit.
Als Gerontius, sterbend, diese Welt verlässt, erkennt er, er ist nicht allein. Ein geheimnisvoller, verschwiegener Gefährte begleitet ihn ins Jenseits. ‘Jemand’, sagt er, ‘hält mich fest in seiner großen Hand.’ Wer? Die Antwort lässt nicht lange auf sich warten. Sein Engel sagt ihm:
Mein Vater hat mir dieses Erdenkind von Geburt an anvertraut, um ihm zu dienen und zu retten, Halleluja, und gerettet ist er. Dieses Kind aus Staub wurde mir gegeben, um es unter Kummer und Schmerz auf dem schmalen Weg, Halleluja, von der Erde zum Himmel aufzuziehen und zu erziehen.
Eines Tages werden auch wir, Sie und ich, zum ersten Mal den verborgenen Führer unseres Lebens erblicken.
Achten wir aber jetzt auf ihn?
Das heutige Fest gebietet uns, aufmerksam zu sein. Die Botschaft des Festes ist voller Zuversicht. Der Herr hat für jeden von uns einen Vertreter seiner besonderen Vorsehung bestimmt. Seine Aufgabe besteht darin, uns auf den richtigen Weg zu führen.
Wie oft fühlen wir uns allein, verlassen, verloren. Wie oft haben wir den Eindruck, alles um uns herum verschwört sich gegen unser übernatürliches Schicksal.
Wie blind sind wir! Es gibt aber jemanden, der ständig an unserer Seite geht. Würden wir uns nur helfen lassen, würde er helfen. Öfter sollten wir zu ihm aufschauen. Wir Kinder aus Staub werden von der Kraft einer unermesslichen Liebe gehalten und beschützt, geführt und aufgerichtet.
Warum, wie Gerontius, die Stunde des Todes abwarten, um die Gestalt dieser Liebe kennenzulernen?
***
The beginning of Newman’s wonderful poem The Dream of Gerontius speaks of a marvellous encounter on the threshold between time and eternity.
Just as Gerontius, dying, leaves this world, he realises he is not alone. A mysterious, discreet companion accompanies him into the hereafter. ‘Someone’, he says, ‘has me fast within his ample palm.’ Who? The answer is not slow in coming. His angel tells him:
My Father gave in charge to me this child of earth, e’en from its birth to serve and save, alleluia, and saved is he. This child of clay to me was given to rear and train by sorrow and pain in the narrow way, alleluia, from earth to heaven.
One day, we, too, you and I, shall behold for the first time our life’s hidden guide.
But do we attend to him now?
Today’s feast bids us pay attention. Its message is a message of deep reassurance. The Lord has appointed, for each of us, an agent of particular providence. This agent’s purpose is, expressly, to guide us on the right path.
How often we feel alone, abandoned, lost. How often we feel that everything around us conspires against our supernatural destiny.
How blind we are!
There is one who walks beside us constantly. If we would but help ourselves, he helps. We should look to him more often.
We children of clay are held and protected, guided and raised up by the force of an immense love. Why wait, like Gerontius, until the hour of death to make its acquaintance?
Illustration to Newman’s Dream of Gerontius by Robert Traill Rose.
St Thérèse
This homily was given in German as part of a retreat for priests at Maria Rosenberg. You can find an English version by scrolling down.
Als sie im Sterben lag, hörte Thérèse durchs Fenster eine Mitschwester einer anderen sagen, draußen im Garten: ‘Sr Thérèse wird bald sterben. Was wohl unsere Mutter Priorin im Nekrolog schreiben wird? Sie ist ins Kloster eingetreten, hat gelebt, ist gestorben — mehr gibt es gar nicht zu sagen.’
Ja, so sah es von aussen aus. Thérèse hat sich von weltlicher Projektion zurückgezogen in eine völlige Verborgenheit, ganz wie der heilige Antonius damals, als er sich in seiner Wüstenburg verschanzte. Ihr Leben war, objektiv gesehen, monoton und voraussehbar, ohne große Geschehnisse. Wenig hat sie geleistet.
Im Innern aber ist sie durch Äonen gegangen, als furchtlose Entdeckerin. Thérèse, die Kirchenlehrerin, lehrt uns was es heisst, ein geistliches Leben zu führen. Nah am Herz der Kirche wollte sie bleiben, um dort Liebe zu verkörpern.
Das Herz der Kirche, des Leibes Jesu Christi, ist ein durchbohrtes Herz; die christliche Liebe ist gekreuzigte Liebe.
Thérèse musste die Länge und die Breite, die Höhe und die Tiefe dieser Liebe erfahren (cf. Eph 3.18). Mit Flügeln des Morgenrots ist sie zum entferntestem Ende des Meeres geflogen; selbst da hat sie die Rechte des Herrn ergriffen (cf. Ps 138.9f.).
Sie wusste was es heißt, in einem alles umgreifenden Jetzt zu leben, in Christus. Wer so lebt, sei es vergessen in einem Krankenzimmer, kennt keine Peripherie; er oder sie ist immer im Zentrum, wo Wesentliches geschieht, wo die Welt verwandelt wird.
Kurz vor ihrem Tod, sehr erkrankt, sagte Thérèse: ‘Ich leide nur einen Augenblick. Nur weil man an Zukunft und Vergangenheit denkt, wird man entmutigt und hoffnungslos.’ Durch eine wachsende Fähigkeit zur radikal hingegebenen Presenz ist Thérèse Gottfähig geworden. So wurde ihr ‘kleiner Weg’ ein Weg in die Ewigkeit.
Auch wir können ihn gehen.
***
When she lay dying, Thérèse overheard through the window how one of her sisters, out in the garden, said to another nun: ‘Sr Thérèse will soon die. I wonder what the Prioress will write in her death notice? She entered the monastery, lived, and died — there’s really nothing more to say.’
Yes, that’s how it looked from the outside. Thérèse withdrew entirely from worldly projection into utter hiddenness, quite like Antony centuries before, when he settled in his fortress in the desert. Objectively speaking her life was monotonous and predictable, unmarked by great events. She didn’t achieve much.
Within, though, she passed through aeons, a fearless explorer. Thérèse, doctor Ecclesiae, teaches us what it means to lead a spiritual life. She would live close to the heart of the Church, there to embody love.
The heart of the Church, Christ’s Body, is a pierced heart; Christian love is crucified love.
Thérèse had to experience the length and breadth, height and depth of this love (cf. Eph 3.18). With the wings of the dawn she flew to the farthest end of the sea. Even there the Lord’s right hand held her (cf. Psalm 138.9f.).
She knew what it means to live in an all-encompassing now, in Christ. One who lives like that, be it forgotten in a sickroom, knows no periphery; he or she is always in the centre, where essential things happen and the world is transformed.
Shortly before her death, very ill, Thérèse said: ‘I suffer a moment only. It is because we think of the past and future that we get discouraged and despair.’ A growing capacity for life in a radically given present made Thérèse capable of God. In this way her ‘little way’ became a way into eternity.
We, too, can walk it.
Je ne souffre qu’un instant. C’est parce qu’on pense au passé et à l’avenir qu’on se décourage et qu’on désespère.
Als sie im Sterben lag, hörte Thérèse durchs Fenster eine Mitschwester einer anderen sagen, draußen im Garten: ‘Sr Thérèse wird bald sterben. Was wohl unsere Mutter Priorin im Nekrolog schreiben wird? Sie ist ins Kloster eingetreten, hat gelebt, ist gestorben — mehr gibt es gar nicht zu sagen.’
Ja, so sah es von aussen aus. Thérèse hat sich von weltlicher Projektion zurückgezogen in eine völlige Verborgenheit, ganz wie der heilige Antonius damals, als er sich in seiner Wüstenburg verschanzte. Ihr Leben war, objektiv gesehen, monoton und voraussehbar, ohne große Geschehnisse. Wenig hat sie geleistet.
Im Innern aber ist sie durch Äonen gegangen, als furchtlose Entdeckerin. Thérèse, die Kirchenlehrerin, lehrt uns was es heisst, ein geistliches Leben zu führen. Nah am Herz der Kirche wollte sie bleiben, um dort Liebe zu verkörpern.
Das Herz der Kirche, des Leibes Jesu Christi, ist ein durchbohrtes Herz; die christliche Liebe ist gekreuzigte Liebe.
Thérèse musste die Länge und die Breite, die Höhe und die Tiefe dieser Liebe erfahren (cf. Eph 3.18). Mit Flügeln des Morgenrots ist sie zum entferntestem Ende des Meeres geflogen; selbst da hat sie die Rechte des Herrn ergriffen (cf. Ps 138.9f.).
Sie wusste was es heißt, in einem alles umgreifenden Jetzt zu leben, in Christus. Wer so lebt, sei es vergessen in einem Krankenzimmer, kennt keine Peripherie; er oder sie ist immer im Zentrum, wo Wesentliches geschieht, wo die Welt verwandelt wird.
Kurz vor ihrem Tod, sehr erkrankt, sagte Thérèse: ‘Ich leide nur einen Augenblick. Nur weil man an Zukunft und Vergangenheit denkt, wird man entmutigt und hoffnungslos.’ Durch eine wachsende Fähigkeit zur radikal hingegebenen Presenz ist Thérèse Gottfähig geworden. So wurde ihr ‘kleiner Weg’ ein Weg in die Ewigkeit.
Auch wir können ihn gehen.
***
When she lay dying, Thérèse overheard through the window how one of her sisters, out in the garden, said to another nun: ‘Sr Thérèse will soon die. I wonder what the Prioress will write in her death notice? She entered the monastery, lived, and died — there’s really nothing more to say.’
Yes, that’s how it looked from the outside. Thérèse withdrew entirely from worldly projection into utter hiddenness, quite like Antony centuries before, when he settled in his fortress in the desert. Objectively speaking her life was monotonous and predictable, unmarked by great events. She didn’t achieve much.
Within, though, she passed through aeons, a fearless explorer. Thérèse, doctor Ecclesiae, teaches us what it means to lead a spiritual life. She would live close to the heart of the Church, there to embody love.
The heart of the Church, Christ’s Body, is a pierced heart; Christian love is crucified love.
Thérèse had to experience the length and breadth, height and depth of this love (cf. Eph 3.18). With the wings of the dawn she flew to the farthest end of the sea. Even there the Lord’s right hand held her (cf. Psalm 138.9f.).
She knew what it means to live in an all-encompassing now, in Christ. One who lives like that, be it forgotten in a sickroom, knows no periphery; he or she is always in the centre, where essential things happen and the world is transformed.
Shortly before her death, very ill, Thérèse said: ‘I suffer a moment only. It is because we think of the past and future that we get discouraged and despair.’ A growing capacity for life in a radically given present made Thérèse capable of God. In this way her ‘little way’ became a way into eternity.
We, too, can walk it.
Je ne souffre qu’un instant. C’est parce qu’on pense au passé et à l’avenir qu’on se décourage et qu’on désespère.
St Jerome
This homily was given in German as part of a retreat for priests at Maria Rosenberg. You can find an English version by scrolling down.
Das biographische Profil des Hieronymus ist uns wohlbekannt. Wir sind vertraut mit seinem durch Fasten gemarterten Körper, seinem roten Kardinalshut, seinem Löwen und seiner scharfen Zunge. Vor allem ist er aber der große Exeget, der uns sagt: wer die Schrift nicht ordentlich kennt, kennt Christus nicht.
Es ist gut, gerade im Moment daran erinnert zu werden. Unsere Zeit tendiert dazu, den Glauben subjektiv und sentimental auszulegen. Oft wird von Christus gesprochen als ob man ihn frei aus eigenem Empfinden hervorzaubern könnte, wie ein Kaninchen aus einem alten Zylinderhut.
Aber nein: der Herr ist derselbe heute, gestern und für immer: hodie, heri, semper.
Hieronymus war durchdrungen von der Schrift. Er hat sie nicht nur kommentiert, er hat sie übersetzt, einige Bücher sogar zweimal, zuerst aus dem Griechischen, dann aus dem Hebräischen. Durch seine Vulgata hat er das religiöse Empfinden des Westens geprägt. Seine Übersetzung ist ein literarisches Meisterwerk. Sie bleibt auch bis heute ein Monument der Exegese.
Hieronymus konnte diese Übersetzung schaffen nicht nur weil er die alten Sprachen meisterte, nicht nur weil er die Bibel von innen kannte; er hatte auch eine tiefe Kenntnis der gegenwärtigen, profanen Literatur. So konnte er frei auf der ganzen Klaviatur des Ausdrucks spielen — mit wunderbaren Improvisationen.
Sein Beispiel lädt uns ein zur Nachahmung.
Denn das Wort, das im Anfang war, muss jetzt in seiner vollen, ewigen Schönheit erklingen.
Es braucht dafür eine adequate Sprache, adequate Sprachröhre.
***
The biographical profile of St Jerome is well known to us. We are familiar with his gaunt body, formed by fasting, with his galero, his lion, his sharp tongue. Above all, he was the incomparable exegete who tells us: ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.
It is good to be reminded of this now. Our time is apt to subjectivise and sentimentalise faith. Often enough we hear Christ spoken of as if anyone were free to conjure an image of him forth from his or her own imagination, like a rabbit from an old top hat.
But no, the Lord is the same today, yesterday, and forever: hodie, heri, semper.
Jerome was soaked in Scripture. Not only did he write commentaries on it; he translated it, some books twice, first from Greek, then from Hebrew. Through his Vulgate he formed Western consciousness.
His translation is a literary masterpiece. In addition, it remains a precious work of exegesis. Jerome could produce it not just because he mastered the ancient languages and knew the Bible from within; he also had profound knowledge of contemporary profane literature.
So he could pull out and combine all the stops of the register of expression, with wonderful improvisations. His example invites us to do likewise.
The Word that was in the beginning must resound in its full, eternal beauty now.
For that purpose it requires adequate language, and adequate spokesmen.
St Jerome is one of the most painted saints in the calendar. His trajectory and character gave artists many motifs to play with. I like this canvas by Jean-Léon Gérôme from 1874, now in the Städel Museum. Even an austere ascetic must rest now and again. Jerome’s lion was more than an exotic prop, it could serve as a pillow. The saint’s dirty feet show him forth as a poor man and an itinerant. On an improvised desk made of desert stones lies work in progress.
Das biographische Profil des Hieronymus ist uns wohlbekannt. Wir sind vertraut mit seinem durch Fasten gemarterten Körper, seinem roten Kardinalshut, seinem Löwen und seiner scharfen Zunge. Vor allem ist er aber der große Exeget, der uns sagt: wer die Schrift nicht ordentlich kennt, kennt Christus nicht.
Es ist gut, gerade im Moment daran erinnert zu werden. Unsere Zeit tendiert dazu, den Glauben subjektiv und sentimental auszulegen. Oft wird von Christus gesprochen als ob man ihn frei aus eigenem Empfinden hervorzaubern könnte, wie ein Kaninchen aus einem alten Zylinderhut.
Aber nein: der Herr ist derselbe heute, gestern und für immer: hodie, heri, semper.
Hieronymus war durchdrungen von der Schrift. Er hat sie nicht nur kommentiert, er hat sie übersetzt, einige Bücher sogar zweimal, zuerst aus dem Griechischen, dann aus dem Hebräischen. Durch seine Vulgata hat er das religiöse Empfinden des Westens geprägt. Seine Übersetzung ist ein literarisches Meisterwerk. Sie bleibt auch bis heute ein Monument der Exegese.
Hieronymus konnte diese Übersetzung schaffen nicht nur weil er die alten Sprachen meisterte, nicht nur weil er die Bibel von innen kannte; er hatte auch eine tiefe Kenntnis der gegenwärtigen, profanen Literatur. So konnte er frei auf der ganzen Klaviatur des Ausdrucks spielen — mit wunderbaren Improvisationen.
Sein Beispiel lädt uns ein zur Nachahmung.
Denn das Wort, das im Anfang war, muss jetzt in seiner vollen, ewigen Schönheit erklingen.
Es braucht dafür eine adequate Sprache, adequate Sprachröhre.
***
The biographical profile of St Jerome is well known to us. We are familiar with his gaunt body, formed by fasting, with his galero, his lion, his sharp tongue. Above all, he was the incomparable exegete who tells us: ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.
It is good to be reminded of this now. Our time is apt to subjectivise and sentimentalise faith. Often enough we hear Christ spoken of as if anyone were free to conjure an image of him forth from his or her own imagination, like a rabbit from an old top hat.
But no, the Lord is the same today, yesterday, and forever: hodie, heri, semper.
Jerome was soaked in Scripture. Not only did he write commentaries on it; he translated it, some books twice, first from Greek, then from Hebrew. Through his Vulgate he formed Western consciousness.
His translation is a literary masterpiece. In addition, it remains a precious work of exegesis. Jerome could produce it not just because he mastered the ancient languages and knew the Bible from within; he also had profound knowledge of contemporary profane literature.
So he could pull out and combine all the stops of the register of expression, with wonderful improvisations. His example invites us to do likewise.
The Word that was in the beginning must resound in its full, eternal beauty now.
For that purpose it requires adequate language, and adequate spokesmen.
St Jerome is one of the most painted saints in the calendar. His trajectory and character gave artists many motifs to play with. I like this canvas by Jean-Léon Gérôme from 1874, now in the Städel Museum. Even an austere ascetic must rest now and again. Jerome’s lion was more than an exotic prop, it could serve as a pillow. The saint’s dirty feet show him forth as a poor man and an itinerant. On an improvised desk made of desert stones lies work in progress.
St Michael the Archangel
This homily was given in German as part of a retreat for priests at Maria Rosenberg. You can find an English version by scrolling down.
Apocalypse 12.7-12: Now war broke out in heaven.
John 1.47-51:You will see the angels God ascending and descending.
Der Kampf zwischen Gut und Böse von dem die Offenbarung des Johannes erzählt, spiegelt sich in einem Gebet wider, das jahrelang nach jeder Messe gesprochen wurde und heutzutage eine Renaissance erlebt: “Heiliger Erzengel Michael, verteidige uns im Kampfe; gegen die Bosheit und die Nachstellungen des Teufels sei unser Schutz.”
Die Geschichte dieses Gebets ist höchst interessant. Sie geht auf eine Anweisung von 1886 zurück, mit der Leo XIII Bischöfe und Ordensoberen der Kirche ermahnte, es täglich zu beten. Kurz zuvor hatte der Papst im Gebet eine Erfahrung vom anhaltenden Kampf des Bösen gegen das Gute gemacht. Er wünschte, die Kirche möge einheitlich die Engelscharen anrufen, damit sie ihr helfen, die Dunkelheit in Schach zu halten; damit die Engel gemeinsam mit den Gläubigen für erklärendes Licht und Wahrheit kämpfen.
Die himmlischen Heerscharen sind uns nicht fremd. In jeder Präfation jeder Messe rufen wird sie an. Wir vereinen unsere Anbetung mit der ihren. Aber betrachten wir sie als wirksame Verbündete im Kampf gegen die Fallstricke der Sünde, des Todes?
Unsere Gesellschaft neigt allgemein dazu, Vorstellungen von Gott abzulehnen. Das Böse aber nimmt sie als selbstverständlich hin. Wir sehen das täglich in der politischen Rhetorik, die überall schärfer wird. Wir sind es jetzt durchaus gewöhnt, dass Politiker ihre Widersacher als “böse” beschreiben.
Was genau damit gemeint wird, ist wohl unklar. Aber eine solche Sprache, selbst wenn sie schwammig ist, erzeugt Verwirrung und Angst – genau die Eigenschaften, die den Teufel, den Feind des Guten, seit dem Anfang der Zeit kennzeichnen.
Das heutige Fest bietet uns einen Kontrapunkt. Es erinnert uns daran, der entscheidende Kampf gegen das Böse wurde auf Golgatha geschlagen und gewonnen. Sollten Regungen vom Kampf immer noch spürbar bleiben, wissen wir: der Sieg des Lammes, das geschlachteten wurde, ist gesichert.
Damit wir nicht von den Täuschungen des Bösen verführt und allzu erschreckt werden, hat Gott seinen Engeln beauftragt, uns zu beschützen. Rufen wir sie mit Zuversicht an. In ihrem Schutz finden wir Ruhe und Mut.
So möge unser christliches Zeugnis geprägt sein vom festen Vertrauen in die Allmacht unseres auferstandenen Herrn, vor dessen leuchtenden Angesicht jede Faszination des Bösen zerschmilzt wie Wachs vor einer lodernden Flamme.
***
The battle against good and evil told of by the Apocalypse is reflected in a prayer that, until not so long ago (and increasingly in our day), was recited daily after Mass: ‘Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, be our protector against the wickedness and snares of the devil.’
The story behind that prayer is not uninteresting. It goes back to an instruction of 1886 by which Leo XIII exhorted all the bishops and religious superiors of the Church to ensure its daily recitation. The pope, we are reliably informed, had shortly before, while at prayer, gained an experiential sense of the abiding struggle of evil against good. He wished the Church to call as one upon the angelic hosts to assist it in keeping darkness at bay and to fight with it for light and truth.
The hosts of heaven are no strangers to us. We invoke them in every Preface of every Mass as we unite our adoration to theirs. But do we think of them as effective allies in our struggle to resist the snares of death and sin? If not, perhaps we should.
I am struck by the fact that our society, which tends to reject any notion of God, often seems nonetheless to take evil for granted. We see this daily in political rhetoric, which is getting sharper everywhere. It seems banal, these days, to hear a public person describe his or her opponents as ‘evil’.
What is meant by the term is far from clear. But such language, even when woolly, generates anxiety and confusion, the very qualities that have, since the beginning of time, been associated with the devil, the ‘hater of good’.
Today’s feast provides a salutary counterpoint. It reminds us that the decisive battle against evil has been fought and won on Calvary. Whatever stirrings of it we may still ascertain in our lives and in the world at large are destined to culminate in the victory of the Lamb who was slain.
To ensure that we are not unwittingly seduced by evil, God has appointed angels to guard and help us. Let us call on their assistance. Let us find peace, and courage, in their protection. That way our testimony as Christians will be marked by unshakeable confidence in the all-powerfulness of our risen Lord, before whose countenance every fascination of evil melts away like wax before a living flame.
A statute of the Archangel Michael in the parish priest of Ålesund. Photograph PJ Nes.
Apocalypse 12.7-12: Now war broke out in heaven.
John 1.47-51:You will see the angels God ascending and descending.
Der Kampf zwischen Gut und Böse von dem die Offenbarung des Johannes erzählt, spiegelt sich in einem Gebet wider, das jahrelang nach jeder Messe gesprochen wurde und heutzutage eine Renaissance erlebt: “Heiliger Erzengel Michael, verteidige uns im Kampfe; gegen die Bosheit und die Nachstellungen des Teufels sei unser Schutz.”
Die Geschichte dieses Gebets ist höchst interessant. Sie geht auf eine Anweisung von 1886 zurück, mit der Leo XIII Bischöfe und Ordensoberen der Kirche ermahnte, es täglich zu beten. Kurz zuvor hatte der Papst im Gebet eine Erfahrung vom anhaltenden Kampf des Bösen gegen das Gute gemacht. Er wünschte, die Kirche möge einheitlich die Engelscharen anrufen, damit sie ihr helfen, die Dunkelheit in Schach zu halten; damit die Engel gemeinsam mit den Gläubigen für erklärendes Licht und Wahrheit kämpfen.
Die himmlischen Heerscharen sind uns nicht fremd. In jeder Präfation jeder Messe rufen wird sie an. Wir vereinen unsere Anbetung mit der ihren. Aber betrachten wir sie als wirksame Verbündete im Kampf gegen die Fallstricke der Sünde, des Todes?
Unsere Gesellschaft neigt allgemein dazu, Vorstellungen von Gott abzulehnen. Das Böse aber nimmt sie als selbstverständlich hin. Wir sehen das täglich in der politischen Rhetorik, die überall schärfer wird. Wir sind es jetzt durchaus gewöhnt, dass Politiker ihre Widersacher als “böse” beschreiben.
Was genau damit gemeint wird, ist wohl unklar. Aber eine solche Sprache, selbst wenn sie schwammig ist, erzeugt Verwirrung und Angst – genau die Eigenschaften, die den Teufel, den Feind des Guten, seit dem Anfang der Zeit kennzeichnen.
Das heutige Fest bietet uns einen Kontrapunkt. Es erinnert uns daran, der entscheidende Kampf gegen das Böse wurde auf Golgatha geschlagen und gewonnen. Sollten Regungen vom Kampf immer noch spürbar bleiben, wissen wir: der Sieg des Lammes, das geschlachteten wurde, ist gesichert.
Damit wir nicht von den Täuschungen des Bösen verführt und allzu erschreckt werden, hat Gott seinen Engeln beauftragt, uns zu beschützen. Rufen wir sie mit Zuversicht an. In ihrem Schutz finden wir Ruhe und Mut.
So möge unser christliches Zeugnis geprägt sein vom festen Vertrauen in die Allmacht unseres auferstandenen Herrn, vor dessen leuchtenden Angesicht jede Faszination des Bösen zerschmilzt wie Wachs vor einer lodernden Flamme.
***
The battle against good and evil told of by the Apocalypse is reflected in a prayer that, until not so long ago (and increasingly in our day), was recited daily after Mass: ‘Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, be our protector against the wickedness and snares of the devil.’
The story behind that prayer is not uninteresting. It goes back to an instruction of 1886 by which Leo XIII exhorted all the bishops and religious superiors of the Church to ensure its daily recitation. The pope, we are reliably informed, had shortly before, while at prayer, gained an experiential sense of the abiding struggle of evil against good. He wished the Church to call as one upon the angelic hosts to assist it in keeping darkness at bay and to fight with it for light and truth.
The hosts of heaven are no strangers to us. We invoke them in every Preface of every Mass as we unite our adoration to theirs. But do we think of them as effective allies in our struggle to resist the snares of death and sin? If not, perhaps we should.
I am struck by the fact that our society, which tends to reject any notion of God, often seems nonetheless to take evil for granted. We see this daily in political rhetoric, which is getting sharper everywhere. It seems banal, these days, to hear a public person describe his or her opponents as ‘evil’.
What is meant by the term is far from clear. But such language, even when woolly, generates anxiety and confusion, the very qualities that have, since the beginning of time, been associated with the devil, the ‘hater of good’.
Today’s feast provides a salutary counterpoint. It reminds us that the decisive battle against evil has been fought and won on Calvary. Whatever stirrings of it we may still ascertain in our lives and in the world at large are destined to culminate in the victory of the Lamb who was slain.
To ensure that we are not unwittingly seduced by evil, God has appointed angels to guard and help us. Let us call on their assistance. Let us find peace, and courage, in their protection. That way our testimony as Christians will be marked by unshakeable confidence in the all-powerfulness of our risen Lord, before whose countenance every fascination of evil melts away like wax before a living flame.
A statute of the Archangel Michael in the parish priest of Ålesund. Photograph PJ Nes.
On Paradise
This lecture was given at an Ecumenical Conference at Pannonhalma on 26 September 2025. The theme of the conference, reminiscent of the one set for August’s Rimini Meeting, was a verse from Isaiah, ‘Her wasteland he shall make like the garden of the Lord’. Speakers were invited to reflect on the topos of the garden from different angles. My purpose was to make sense of it in monastic literature. So I called my talk
Like a Pleasure-Garden on a River: The Monastic Pursuit of Paradise Lost
Newcomers to the Biblical canon, set on reading Scripture from A to Z, starting from the outset, are often puzzled by the juxtaposition of two creation narratives. After the solemn account of Genesis 1, paced by the cadence, ‘God said … and it was so’, comes a retelling in a different, more lively idiom, the same music transposed into a different key, with variations.
For centuries, indeed for millennia, exegetes have rhapsodised on this two-part development; but I think we may say that it has only come to pose a problem in recent times, as women and men have got used to assuming that there is but a single version of any truth. Forfeiting a previously innate ability to hear, and enjoy, polyphony, we listen out instead, now, for a single, simple tune, ideally to be hammered out by the thump of a strong, unchangeable bass rhythm.
How are the two creation stories complementary? We might consider for example the different ways in which they use perspective.
The first account gives an expanding view. It proceeds from the slender gap of light that first differentiates all-encompassing darkness through a series of divisions towards an enchanting view of the differentiated whole, which the Septuagint calls the kosmos of created things (Gen 2.1). When God, the supreme contemplative, beheld this universe, he was glad.
The second account proposes an inversion of perspective. It sets out from an awareness of ‘the earth and the heavens’ in fullness, then narrows in on a given place, a given presence.
Used as we are to gadgets, we might think of a photographer adjusting his lens: first outward, to catch totality in a breathtaking perspective which exceeds that of a bird’s eye; then inward, focusing on narrower sections until it rests on a single leaf of a single plant, then reveals a small insect moving up and down it. The first account culminates in a view of galaxies. The second lets our gaze rest in a garden.
The emergence of the Gan Eden (or Paradise, a Persian word meaning ‘pleasure-garden’) within creation makes the perfection of God’s work perceptible. We cannot endure an awareness of the whole all the time. Even a luminous eye, here below, sees in a glass, darkly, constrained by limitations of time and space. Only in eternity shall we see as we are seen, and as seers at last apprehend connections that presently, most of the time, elude us.
The second creation narrative is not just another story; it is a clarifying sequel to the first. The first posits man as the crown of creation; the second lets us take creation in from his point of view. It is anthropocentric. The order of created things, on this account, is incomplete without man. Until Adam emerges, the cosmos waits. Vegetation remains in a potential state, curiously patient (cf. Gen 2.5-7):
no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground; but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground—then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.
The mist arising from the bowels of the earth was sufficient to prevent decay but insufficient for growth. There was no rain, remarks Rashi, the brilliant rabbinic scholar of Troyes, a contemporary of the founders of Cîteaux, because there was ‘no one yet who could recognise the utility of rain’. It is an engaging definition of the human being: one apt to grasp the usefulness of rain.
Rashi, thinking like a potter, adds that the mist providentially prepared, too, the clay out of which man was formed. His point is that for nature’s promise to be realised, for earth, that is, to become a garden, man is required, summoned to arise out of the dust as God’s steward and co-worker.
Centuries of Christian self-scrutiny have accustomed us to thinking of work as an upshot of the fall, a species of punishment. It is true that God, confronting Adam, drawn from the moist adamah, with his betrayal says: ‘cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life […]. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread’ (Gen 3.17-19). It was not work as such, though, that pertained to the order of sanction, merely its novel circumstances east of Eden. Once man passes beyond the cherubim’s flaming sword, the one that makes of Eden a sequestered enclosure, he will find that nature is no longer an ally. It offers itself to him no more. Henceforth he must conquer it, locked in antagonism marked by toil.
In the beginning, when the garden was still home, work was a delight: ‘The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it’, that he might eat of it freely and pleasantly (Gen 2.15f., 9). Man was not made to just loaf about. The Avot of Rabbi Natan, a work hard to date, but certainly pre-medieval, remarks: ‘See what a great thing is work! The first man was not to taste of anything until he had done some work. Only after God told him to cultivate and keep the garden, did he give him permission to eat of its fruits’.
It is good to reflect on this. We are helped to grasp how God intended human life to unfold in an unwounded world. We may also be afforded a glimpse of the form which beatitude will take for those who, earthly labours done, are admitted to Paradise in the Dantean sense, as an eternity, not of passive indolence, but of engagement in a providential purpose. Thérèse of Lisieux intuited this reality when she said: ‘Je passerai mon ciel à faire du bien’ — ‘I’ll spend heaven doing good’. The primacy of being does not obliterate action; it hallows it.
Eden in Biblical language is not coterminous with original creation. It is a pocket within it, a gated community in which man, made in God’s image to be like him (Gen 1.27), might practise happiness. The book of Genesis presents Eden as a privileged space where the sweetness and goodness of creation are astoundingly explicit, issuing forth as from a fountain, thence to trickle into other places. Even before we face the prospect of an inhospitable elsewhere, a wilderness of thorns and thistles beyond the garden wall (Gen 3.18), this image lets us conceptualise the expanding nature of Edenic bliss. We intuit that the garden, an enclosure of communion, is not an end in itself, but a prototype of how reality might function, providentially enabled to saturate the face of the earth.
For ‘a river went out of Eden to water the garden; from thence it was parted, and became four heads’. The conduits bore resonant names: Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates (Gen 2.10-14). The latter two define Biblical history. They enabled the coining of the term Mesopotamia, ‘the land between rivers’, where the destiny and task of God’s chosen people were forged and repeatedly refined. Pishon and Gihon are less easily placed on a map — though plenty of people have tried. What the Biblical author conveys is this: the ordered, beautiful perfection of existence we read of in Genesis 2 is other than man’s historical experience for reasons explained in the aetiology of sin; but it is not intrinsically foreign to such experience. No, the point of Eden is to manifest both a point of origin and a desirable finality, a call that shows women and men what their life might, could, should be like.
Genesis points to Eden’s intelligibility, the articulation of which is crucial to Adam’s first call. Once God’s work is done, once creation is ready in its wonderful diversity, its parts are brought before man for naming. Scripture describes how ‘every animal of the field and every bird of the air’ is brought ‘to man to see what he would call them’ (Gen 2.19). To name the birds and beasts is already a formidable task. Adam did not restrict himself, though, to zoology. He set about naming ‘every living creature’, including, in time, the trees of the forest that shout for joy and the stars that cry out, ‘Here we are!’ (Gen 2.20, Ps 96.12). The concern to classify and name phenomena, a gift for patient observation and taxonomy, is deeply human.
Adam’s labour of naming reaches beyond a dynamic of dominion; it speaks of an urge to subsist in relation, not to be a stranger among other creatures. Endowed with language, man is commissioned to articulate the nature of other presences made by God, to speak up for them and in their name, summoning them to praise their Maker: ‘Praise the Lord from the earth, you sea monsters and all deeps, fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy wind fulfilling his command!’ (Ps 148.7-8).
Was Eden intended to be eternal? Does it represent an image of beatitude as such? The Fathers differ in their understanding. An emerging consensus, however, thought not. Eden provides a paradigm of terrestrial bliss. It shows what harmony and joy life on earth can bring. Man’s trajectory is envisaged as a passage through the garden, at the bottom of which he would find, in his state of bright prelapsarian innocence, something like an open door in the wall that would let him slip into eternity without suffering the inconvenience of death. Paradise, in this view, is heaven’s forecourt; a novitiate set up to ready creatures of dust for celestial life.
Only later, by symbolic extension, did the word ‘paradise’ come actually to spell ‘heaven’. It makes sense that it should: it represented a known environment in which man might live in harmony with God and fellow creatures, free and unafraid.
Sin changed the intended pattern of seamlessness. Remembrance of the garden, prompted by man’s aptitude for it (which no fall could obliterate), still let a resonance of Eden penetrate man’s aspirations as Scripture presents them. It flowed into the sensibility of the Biblical mind in its furthest reaches, quite the way paradisal waters, in the beginning, trickled out to the ends of the earth.
Psalm 103, the great hymn of evening praise in the Byzantine liturgy, picks up the theme of the archaic fountain when it speaks of blessed waters gushing forth in the valleys, flowing between the hills, quenching the thirst of wild asses, enabling man to draw food from the earth, that his face might shine with oil, his heart be strengthened by bread and gladdened with wine. This splendid text exhorts us to see what harmony creation can display and how we can live in it harmoniously. The garden is a hermeneutic key that unlocks the secret of the natural world as we know it. Creation is not merely a quarry of resources and comforts to be cynically mined. It is to be tended and kept with respect for its latent loveliness.
The promise of the Land, stirring Israelite hearts in exile, was presented as the promise of a garden. The grapes, figs, and pomegranates brought from Canaan by the spies Moses sent heartened the nation encamped in the wilderness of Paran (Nb 12.16-13.25). The fruits displayed a connatural link between the goal they had set out to reach and the setting for which man had first been created: both stood for bounty and sharable abundance. The thought of the land was, still is, caught up with prospects of everyone sitting ‘under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid’ (Micah 4.4).
Once the land had been reached and the temple was built in it, Israel’s cult, too, was envisaged in horticultural terms. ‘The righteous’, says a Psalm, shall ‘flourish like the palm tree, and grow like a cedar in Lebanon. They are planted in the house of the Lord, they flourish in the courts of our God. They still bring forth fruit in old age, ever full of sap and green’ (Ps 91.12-14). The notion of the faithful Israelite as a verdant, fruitful tree sprung from nurturing soil contrasts with that of the dry ‘chaff’ which is all ‘the wicked’ amount to, destined to be driven away by the cleansing wind (Ps 1.4).
The garden motif flows into the register of Messianic hope. Isaiah’s end-time vision of the lion and the lamb lying down together harks back to the account of Eden (Isa 11.6). Christ draws on this register in his farming parables, in his image of the vine, and not least in his self-identification as the ‘good’, or ‘beautiful’, shepherd, ὁ ποιμὴν ὁ καλός, the prototype of human nature restored to immaculateness. Christ the shepherd knows his sheep, quite as Adam in paradise knew the totality of creatures; he would teach us to know likewise. The symbolic bridge between a primal, integral world and a world restored is accomplished when Jesus on the cross, having sweated blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, says to the thief: ‘Today you will be with me in paradise’ (Lk 23.43).
At that point, the gatekeeping cherubim lay down their fiery swords. The gate shut on Adam is reopened. Christ’s faithful are invited in while grace pours out in a new dispensation of grace, whose consequence is glimpsed in the eschatological vision of St John’s Apocalypse. Eden is mystically reconciled, there, with Jerusalem.
The garden finds fulfilment as a city. The city reveals its purpose as a garden, its twelve gates open to channel the overflow of ‘the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, [that flows] from the throne of God and of the Lamb’, pouring gladness forth, lined by ‘the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations’ (Ap 22.1-2).
This story in its entirety, the full sweep of Biblical history, is presupposed in the remark Athanasius makes in his Life of Antony, a seminal text in Christian and monastic history, when he records what awaited him as, travelling south from his see of Alexandria, freely or by force in one of his multiple exiles, he entered the Egyptian wilderness settled by Antony’s disciples. He saw, as he put it,
in the mountains monastic dwellings like tents filled with heavenly choirs, singing Psalms, […], rejoicing in the hope of things to come, working to give alms, having love for each other and being in harmony with one another. To see it was truly to see a land like no other […]. [On seeing it, one was led to exclaim:] Lovely are your dwellings, Jacob, and your tents, Israel; like shady groves and like a paradise beside a river, and like tents that the Lord has staked.
On these terms the Atonine movement made ‘of the desert a city’, a heavenward city imaging the Gan Eden in a world still fallen but now illumined by light pouring forth from Christ’s glorious Cross and from his joy-bearing resurrection.
This theme is intrinsic to monastic self-consciousness from Antony on. Monks and nuns go out into the wilderness to place themselves into God’s hands, there to be healed, restored, refashioned, and made whole in order, in tempore opportuno, to appear, the way Antony did, as ὁ τοῦ Θεοῦ ἄνθρωπος, human beings once again recognisably God’s, reflecting their Maker’s beauty, goodness, and light, and so irresistibly attractive, bearers of hope in the midst of hopelessness.
Not for nothing is a monastery traditionally built around a cloister garth with a fountain. Eden is the norm a monastic community is held to in its endeavour of conversion, as the brethren, each individually and all together, renounce themselves, turn their back on the region of unlikeness, and return to the Father’s house and garden. The monastery, says St Benedict, is to be so organised that all necessaries are found within its gates, giving the monks no need to leave. There is in this precept a consideration of observance. More essentially, there is a promise. Whoever becomes part of a Christian community worthy of its name will not want to leave. He or she will have all that is needed for their thriving and for hospitable sharing. And ‘guests are never missing in the monastery’, says St Benedict. They are always welcome in, to be greeted by shouts of Deo gratias and to be treated with all kindness, as if they were Christ himself. Thereby paradise is concretised from conjecture. Rivulets from the monastery’s enclosure fountain pour forth into the country round about in just the ways Athanasius indicated: through the impact of the liturgy, almsgiving, hospitality, and the monks’ commitment unto death to a life of fraternal communion.
The monastic fascination with gardens, found in authors from St Jerome to St Bernard and into modernity, materially evident in parks that touch visitors on account of their sweetness, is no mere corporate eccentricity. It is the exteriorisation of an inward task. It reminds us, if we stay clear-sighted, that we are called, amid encroaching, arid wastelands, to create Edenic oases of beauty, order, discretion, fraternity, charity, and peace — that Benedictine hallmark transmitting, not just a feeling of tranquility, but the presence in a given place of him ‘who is our peace’ while being, without any contradiction, ‘always at work’ (Eph 2.14, Jn 5.17).
In the world that is ours and in the grave historical moment entrusted to us, anno Domini 2025, we need this standard to be held before us often. These days, the Sartrian principle, ‘l’enfer, c’est les autres’, seems often presupposed as the major premise in a generally accepted syllogism. Ours is a desert-making time when leaders of nations can be heard proclaiming, ‘I hate my opponents’; when one man denies his neighbour’s right to live, and the scenario repeats itself grotesquely at the level of nations; when we have lost the sense of life’s, our being’s, our body’s significance; when we drive large parts of the world’s flora and fauna to extinction while producing barren continents of contaminated plastic; when no cry of ‘Benedic!’ meets strangers at the gate but instead mad dogs are set on them.
It is time to focus again on the garden’s call, to let it define our Christian enterprise, also across denominational boundaries. If we do, minor causes of disunity will prove manageable. The chief Gardener, Christ, who appeared in a garden as Death’s conqueror, will manage them if we let him. He will allow neither our blindness nor our malice to obstruct his design to make of all one. We have but to submit to his action in us, and in each other.
To be in Paradise henceforth is to be where Christ is. If we live, move, and have our being in him, if he encompasses us with his commandments, we shall be a garden he may cultivate. That is what remembrance of Eden and its eschatological imperative require of us. As the English Cistercian Gilbert of Hoyland once wrote: ‘If it is your desire to offer your heart to Christ as a garden of delights, do not take it ill if you are enclosed. […] One who does not know how to be enclosed, does not know how to be a garden.’ He or she may be a pretty wildflower meadow for a while, but will sooner or later turn into fruitless, thistle-infested wilderness.
May that not be our lot.
The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch – giving one, as all the artist’s works, much to think about. The triptych is now in El Prado.
Like a Pleasure-Garden on a River: The Monastic Pursuit of Paradise Lost
Newcomers to the Biblical canon, set on reading Scripture from A to Z, starting from the outset, are often puzzled by the juxtaposition of two creation narratives. After the solemn account of Genesis 1, paced by the cadence, ‘God said … and it was so’, comes a retelling in a different, more lively idiom, the same music transposed into a different key, with variations.
For centuries, indeed for millennia, exegetes have rhapsodised on this two-part development; but I think we may say that it has only come to pose a problem in recent times, as women and men have got used to assuming that there is but a single version of any truth. Forfeiting a previously innate ability to hear, and enjoy, polyphony, we listen out instead, now, for a single, simple tune, ideally to be hammered out by the thump of a strong, unchangeable bass rhythm.
How are the two creation stories complementary? We might consider for example the different ways in which they use perspective.
The first account gives an expanding view. It proceeds from the slender gap of light that first differentiates all-encompassing darkness through a series of divisions towards an enchanting view of the differentiated whole, which the Septuagint calls the kosmos of created things (Gen 2.1). When God, the supreme contemplative, beheld this universe, he was glad.
The second account proposes an inversion of perspective. It sets out from an awareness of ‘the earth and the heavens’ in fullness, then narrows in on a given place, a given presence.
Used as we are to gadgets, we might think of a photographer adjusting his lens: first outward, to catch totality in a breathtaking perspective which exceeds that of a bird’s eye; then inward, focusing on narrower sections until it rests on a single leaf of a single plant, then reveals a small insect moving up and down it. The first account culminates in a view of galaxies. The second lets our gaze rest in a garden.
The emergence of the Gan Eden (or Paradise, a Persian word meaning ‘pleasure-garden’) within creation makes the perfection of God’s work perceptible. We cannot endure an awareness of the whole all the time. Even a luminous eye, here below, sees in a glass, darkly, constrained by limitations of time and space. Only in eternity shall we see as we are seen, and as seers at last apprehend connections that presently, most of the time, elude us.
The second creation narrative is not just another story; it is a clarifying sequel to the first. The first posits man as the crown of creation; the second lets us take creation in from his point of view. It is anthropocentric. The order of created things, on this account, is incomplete without man. Until Adam emerges, the cosmos waits. Vegetation remains in a potential state, curiously patient (cf. Gen 2.5-7):
no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground; but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground—then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.
The mist arising from the bowels of the earth was sufficient to prevent decay but insufficient for growth. There was no rain, remarks Rashi, the brilliant rabbinic scholar of Troyes, a contemporary of the founders of Cîteaux, because there was ‘no one yet who could recognise the utility of rain’. It is an engaging definition of the human being: one apt to grasp the usefulness of rain.
Rashi, thinking like a potter, adds that the mist providentially prepared, too, the clay out of which man was formed. His point is that for nature’s promise to be realised, for earth, that is, to become a garden, man is required, summoned to arise out of the dust as God’s steward and co-worker.
Centuries of Christian self-scrutiny have accustomed us to thinking of work as an upshot of the fall, a species of punishment. It is true that God, confronting Adam, drawn from the moist adamah, with his betrayal says: ‘cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life […]. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread’ (Gen 3.17-19). It was not work as such, though, that pertained to the order of sanction, merely its novel circumstances east of Eden. Once man passes beyond the cherubim’s flaming sword, the one that makes of Eden a sequestered enclosure, he will find that nature is no longer an ally. It offers itself to him no more. Henceforth he must conquer it, locked in antagonism marked by toil.
In the beginning, when the garden was still home, work was a delight: ‘The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it’, that he might eat of it freely and pleasantly (Gen 2.15f., 9). Man was not made to just loaf about. The Avot of Rabbi Natan, a work hard to date, but certainly pre-medieval, remarks: ‘See what a great thing is work! The first man was not to taste of anything until he had done some work. Only after God told him to cultivate and keep the garden, did he give him permission to eat of its fruits’.
It is good to reflect on this. We are helped to grasp how God intended human life to unfold in an unwounded world. We may also be afforded a glimpse of the form which beatitude will take for those who, earthly labours done, are admitted to Paradise in the Dantean sense, as an eternity, not of passive indolence, but of engagement in a providential purpose. Thérèse of Lisieux intuited this reality when she said: ‘Je passerai mon ciel à faire du bien’ — ‘I’ll spend heaven doing good’. The primacy of being does not obliterate action; it hallows it.
Eden in Biblical language is not coterminous with original creation. It is a pocket within it, a gated community in which man, made in God’s image to be like him (Gen 1.27), might practise happiness. The book of Genesis presents Eden as a privileged space where the sweetness and goodness of creation are astoundingly explicit, issuing forth as from a fountain, thence to trickle into other places. Even before we face the prospect of an inhospitable elsewhere, a wilderness of thorns and thistles beyond the garden wall (Gen 3.18), this image lets us conceptualise the expanding nature of Edenic bliss. We intuit that the garden, an enclosure of communion, is not an end in itself, but a prototype of how reality might function, providentially enabled to saturate the face of the earth.
For ‘a river went out of Eden to water the garden; from thence it was parted, and became four heads’. The conduits bore resonant names: Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates (Gen 2.10-14). The latter two define Biblical history. They enabled the coining of the term Mesopotamia, ‘the land between rivers’, where the destiny and task of God’s chosen people were forged and repeatedly refined. Pishon and Gihon are less easily placed on a map — though plenty of people have tried. What the Biblical author conveys is this: the ordered, beautiful perfection of existence we read of in Genesis 2 is other than man’s historical experience for reasons explained in the aetiology of sin; but it is not intrinsically foreign to such experience. No, the point of Eden is to manifest both a point of origin and a desirable finality, a call that shows women and men what their life might, could, should be like.
Genesis points to Eden’s intelligibility, the articulation of which is crucial to Adam’s first call. Once God’s work is done, once creation is ready in its wonderful diversity, its parts are brought before man for naming. Scripture describes how ‘every animal of the field and every bird of the air’ is brought ‘to man to see what he would call them’ (Gen 2.19). To name the birds and beasts is already a formidable task. Adam did not restrict himself, though, to zoology. He set about naming ‘every living creature’, including, in time, the trees of the forest that shout for joy and the stars that cry out, ‘Here we are!’ (Gen 2.20, Ps 96.12). The concern to classify and name phenomena, a gift for patient observation and taxonomy, is deeply human.
Adam’s labour of naming reaches beyond a dynamic of dominion; it speaks of an urge to subsist in relation, not to be a stranger among other creatures. Endowed with language, man is commissioned to articulate the nature of other presences made by God, to speak up for them and in their name, summoning them to praise their Maker: ‘Praise the Lord from the earth, you sea monsters and all deeps, fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy wind fulfilling his command!’ (Ps 148.7-8).
Was Eden intended to be eternal? Does it represent an image of beatitude as such? The Fathers differ in their understanding. An emerging consensus, however, thought not. Eden provides a paradigm of terrestrial bliss. It shows what harmony and joy life on earth can bring. Man’s trajectory is envisaged as a passage through the garden, at the bottom of which he would find, in his state of bright prelapsarian innocence, something like an open door in the wall that would let him slip into eternity without suffering the inconvenience of death. Paradise, in this view, is heaven’s forecourt; a novitiate set up to ready creatures of dust for celestial life.
Only later, by symbolic extension, did the word ‘paradise’ come actually to spell ‘heaven’. It makes sense that it should: it represented a known environment in which man might live in harmony with God and fellow creatures, free and unafraid.
Sin changed the intended pattern of seamlessness. Remembrance of the garden, prompted by man’s aptitude for it (which no fall could obliterate), still let a resonance of Eden penetrate man’s aspirations as Scripture presents them. It flowed into the sensibility of the Biblical mind in its furthest reaches, quite the way paradisal waters, in the beginning, trickled out to the ends of the earth.
Psalm 103, the great hymn of evening praise in the Byzantine liturgy, picks up the theme of the archaic fountain when it speaks of blessed waters gushing forth in the valleys, flowing between the hills, quenching the thirst of wild asses, enabling man to draw food from the earth, that his face might shine with oil, his heart be strengthened by bread and gladdened with wine. This splendid text exhorts us to see what harmony creation can display and how we can live in it harmoniously. The garden is a hermeneutic key that unlocks the secret of the natural world as we know it. Creation is not merely a quarry of resources and comforts to be cynically mined. It is to be tended and kept with respect for its latent loveliness.
The promise of the Land, stirring Israelite hearts in exile, was presented as the promise of a garden. The grapes, figs, and pomegranates brought from Canaan by the spies Moses sent heartened the nation encamped in the wilderness of Paran (Nb 12.16-13.25). The fruits displayed a connatural link between the goal they had set out to reach and the setting for which man had first been created: both stood for bounty and sharable abundance. The thought of the land was, still is, caught up with prospects of everyone sitting ‘under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid’ (Micah 4.4).
Once the land had been reached and the temple was built in it, Israel’s cult, too, was envisaged in horticultural terms. ‘The righteous’, says a Psalm, shall ‘flourish like the palm tree, and grow like a cedar in Lebanon. They are planted in the house of the Lord, they flourish in the courts of our God. They still bring forth fruit in old age, ever full of sap and green’ (Ps 91.12-14). The notion of the faithful Israelite as a verdant, fruitful tree sprung from nurturing soil contrasts with that of the dry ‘chaff’ which is all ‘the wicked’ amount to, destined to be driven away by the cleansing wind (Ps 1.4).
The garden motif flows into the register of Messianic hope. Isaiah’s end-time vision of the lion and the lamb lying down together harks back to the account of Eden (Isa 11.6). Christ draws on this register in his farming parables, in his image of the vine, and not least in his self-identification as the ‘good’, or ‘beautiful’, shepherd, ὁ ποιμὴν ὁ καλός, the prototype of human nature restored to immaculateness. Christ the shepherd knows his sheep, quite as Adam in paradise knew the totality of creatures; he would teach us to know likewise. The symbolic bridge between a primal, integral world and a world restored is accomplished when Jesus on the cross, having sweated blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, says to the thief: ‘Today you will be with me in paradise’ (Lk 23.43).
At that point, the gatekeeping cherubim lay down their fiery swords. The gate shut on Adam is reopened. Christ’s faithful are invited in while grace pours out in a new dispensation of grace, whose consequence is glimpsed in the eschatological vision of St John’s Apocalypse. Eden is mystically reconciled, there, with Jerusalem.
The garden finds fulfilment as a city. The city reveals its purpose as a garden, its twelve gates open to channel the overflow of ‘the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, [that flows] from the throne of God and of the Lamb’, pouring gladness forth, lined by ‘the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations’ (Ap 22.1-2).
This story in its entirety, the full sweep of Biblical history, is presupposed in the remark Athanasius makes in his Life of Antony, a seminal text in Christian and monastic history, when he records what awaited him as, travelling south from his see of Alexandria, freely or by force in one of his multiple exiles, he entered the Egyptian wilderness settled by Antony’s disciples. He saw, as he put it,
in the mountains monastic dwellings like tents filled with heavenly choirs, singing Psalms, […], rejoicing in the hope of things to come, working to give alms, having love for each other and being in harmony with one another. To see it was truly to see a land like no other […]. [On seeing it, one was led to exclaim:] Lovely are your dwellings, Jacob, and your tents, Israel; like shady groves and like a paradise beside a river, and like tents that the Lord has staked.
On these terms the Atonine movement made ‘of the desert a city’, a heavenward city imaging the Gan Eden in a world still fallen but now illumined by light pouring forth from Christ’s glorious Cross and from his joy-bearing resurrection.
This theme is intrinsic to monastic self-consciousness from Antony on. Monks and nuns go out into the wilderness to place themselves into God’s hands, there to be healed, restored, refashioned, and made whole in order, in tempore opportuno, to appear, the way Antony did, as ὁ τοῦ Θεοῦ ἄνθρωπος, human beings once again recognisably God’s, reflecting their Maker’s beauty, goodness, and light, and so irresistibly attractive, bearers of hope in the midst of hopelessness.
Not for nothing is a monastery traditionally built around a cloister garth with a fountain. Eden is the norm a monastic community is held to in its endeavour of conversion, as the brethren, each individually and all together, renounce themselves, turn their back on the region of unlikeness, and return to the Father’s house and garden. The monastery, says St Benedict, is to be so organised that all necessaries are found within its gates, giving the monks no need to leave. There is in this precept a consideration of observance. More essentially, there is a promise. Whoever becomes part of a Christian community worthy of its name will not want to leave. He or she will have all that is needed for their thriving and for hospitable sharing. And ‘guests are never missing in the monastery’, says St Benedict. They are always welcome in, to be greeted by shouts of Deo gratias and to be treated with all kindness, as if they were Christ himself. Thereby paradise is concretised from conjecture. Rivulets from the monastery’s enclosure fountain pour forth into the country round about in just the ways Athanasius indicated: through the impact of the liturgy, almsgiving, hospitality, and the monks’ commitment unto death to a life of fraternal communion.
The monastic fascination with gardens, found in authors from St Jerome to St Bernard and into modernity, materially evident in parks that touch visitors on account of their sweetness, is no mere corporate eccentricity. It is the exteriorisation of an inward task. It reminds us, if we stay clear-sighted, that we are called, amid encroaching, arid wastelands, to create Edenic oases of beauty, order, discretion, fraternity, charity, and peace — that Benedictine hallmark transmitting, not just a feeling of tranquility, but the presence in a given place of him ‘who is our peace’ while being, without any contradiction, ‘always at work’ (Eph 2.14, Jn 5.17).
In the world that is ours and in the grave historical moment entrusted to us, anno Domini 2025, we need this standard to be held before us often. These days, the Sartrian principle, ‘l’enfer, c’est les autres’, seems often presupposed as the major premise in a generally accepted syllogism. Ours is a desert-making time when leaders of nations can be heard proclaiming, ‘I hate my opponents’; when one man denies his neighbour’s right to live, and the scenario repeats itself grotesquely at the level of nations; when we have lost the sense of life’s, our being’s, our body’s significance; when we drive large parts of the world’s flora and fauna to extinction while producing barren continents of contaminated plastic; when no cry of ‘Benedic!’ meets strangers at the gate but instead mad dogs are set on them.
It is time to focus again on the garden’s call, to let it define our Christian enterprise, also across denominational boundaries. If we do, minor causes of disunity will prove manageable. The chief Gardener, Christ, who appeared in a garden as Death’s conqueror, will manage them if we let him. He will allow neither our blindness nor our malice to obstruct his design to make of all one. We have but to submit to his action in us, and in each other.
To be in Paradise henceforth is to be where Christ is. If we live, move, and have our being in him, if he encompasses us with his commandments, we shall be a garden he may cultivate. That is what remembrance of Eden and its eschatological imperative require of us. As the English Cistercian Gilbert of Hoyland once wrote: ‘If it is your desire to offer your heart to Christ as a garden of delights, do not take it ill if you are enclosed. […] One who does not know how to be enclosed, does not know how to be a garden.’ He or she may be a pretty wildflower meadow for a while, but will sooner or later turn into fruitless, thistle-infested wilderness.
May that not be our lot.
The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch – giving one, as all the artist’s works, much to think about. The triptych is now in El Prado.
Conversation with Larry Chapp
In Gaudium et Spes 22, we read
The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear. It is not surprising, then, that in Him all the aforementioned truths find their root and attain their crown. […] Since Christ died for all men, and since the ultimate vocation of man is in fact one, and divine, we ought to believe that the Holy Spirit in a manner known only to God offers to every man the possibility of being associated with this paschal mystery. Such is the mystery of man, and it is a great one, as seen by believers in the light of Christian revelation. Through Christ and in Christ, the riddles of sorrow and death grow meaningful. Apart from His Gospel, they overwhelm us. Christ has risen, destroying death by His death; He has lavished life upon us so that, as sons in the Son, we can cry out in the Spirit; Abba, Father.
In the overarching context of this grandiose text I had the privilege, this week, of speaking with Larry Chapp about a conversation I had earlier this year with Tibor Görföl for Communio. You can listen to our exchange here.
A Carthusian offering Mass, his hands extended in a cross-shape as specified in the Order’s liturgical customs.
The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear. It is not surprising, then, that in Him all the aforementioned truths find their root and attain their crown. […] Since Christ died for all men, and since the ultimate vocation of man is in fact one, and divine, we ought to believe that the Holy Spirit in a manner known only to God offers to every man the possibility of being associated with this paschal mystery. Such is the mystery of man, and it is a great one, as seen by believers in the light of Christian revelation. Through Christ and in Christ, the riddles of sorrow and death grow meaningful. Apart from His Gospel, they overwhelm us. Christ has risen, destroying death by His death; He has lavished life upon us so that, as sons in the Son, we can cry out in the Spirit; Abba, Father.
In the overarching context of this grandiose text I had the privilege, this week, of speaking with Larry Chapp about a conversation I had earlier this year with Tibor Görföl for Communio. You can listen to our exchange here.
A Carthusian offering Mass, his hands extended in a cross-shape as specified in the Order’s liturgical customs.
Proof in the Pudding
This brief homily was given at the opening of an ecumenical symposium held at the Archabbey of Pannonhalma. The Gospel at Mass was Luke 9:18-22 in which Christ asks, first, ‘Who do the crowds say that I am?’, then, ‘Who do you say that I am?’ By the liturgical calendar we kept the feast of Sts Cosmas and Damian.
Saints Cosmas and Damian were blood brothers who practised medicine. They are known in the tradition as Ἀνάργυροι, ‘silverless ones’. They treated the poor without exacting payment. Such behaviour made enemies then as now: it brought prices down in the profession. The brothers’ choice to place Christian charity before their career will have played its part in provoking their martyrdom somewhere in Syria during the reign of Diocletian.
In the Gospel Christ asks: ‘Who do you say that I am?’ The question is timeless. As professing Christians — as monks under vows, ministers, teachers of theology — we have sophisticated answers ready to come tripping off our tongue. The example of the saints reminds us, though, that the genuine answer to this vital question (in comparison with which all others fade into insignificance), is that of testimony, of a life coherently lived.
Does faith in Christ as God define my existence? Does it make me put nothing, nothing at all, before his love? Do I, on account of it, accept my share in his rejection, his self-emptying unto death, in order to know the liberating joy of his rising?
Let us serenely but sternly examine ourselves in this regard and reaffirm the Yes! we gave once with conviction. Let us let Christ’s Spirit blow on the flame of our good zeal. For these are the terms on which his kingdom will come, conquering our divisions, cowardice, conceit, and foolishness, enabling us, by grace, to become in Illo Uno unum.
Saints Cosmas and Damian performing a miraculous cure by transplantation of a leg. Oil painting attributed to the Master of Los Balbases, ca. 1495. In the Wellcome Collection.
Saints Cosmas and Damian were blood brothers who practised medicine. They are known in the tradition as Ἀνάργυροι, ‘silverless ones’. They treated the poor without exacting payment. Such behaviour made enemies then as now: it brought prices down in the profession. The brothers’ choice to place Christian charity before their career will have played its part in provoking their martyrdom somewhere in Syria during the reign of Diocletian.
In the Gospel Christ asks: ‘Who do you say that I am?’ The question is timeless. As professing Christians — as monks under vows, ministers, teachers of theology — we have sophisticated answers ready to come tripping off our tongue. The example of the saints reminds us, though, that the genuine answer to this vital question (in comparison with which all others fade into insignificance), is that of testimony, of a life coherently lived.
Does faith in Christ as God define my existence? Does it make me put nothing, nothing at all, before his love? Do I, on account of it, accept my share in his rejection, his self-emptying unto death, in order to know the liberating joy of his rising?
Let us serenely but sternly examine ourselves in this regard and reaffirm the Yes! we gave once with conviction. Let us let Christ’s Spirit blow on the flame of our good zeal. For these are the terms on which his kingdom will come, conquering our divisions, cowardice, conceit, and foolishness, enabling us, by grace, to become in Illo Uno unum.
Saints Cosmas and Damian performing a miraculous cure by transplantation of a leg. Oil painting attributed to the Master of Los Balbases, ca. 1495. In the Wellcome Collection.