Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Dialogues of the Carmelites

What began as a Lenten project last year ended up extending into the late summer, but in August 2008 I finished my translation from the French of Georges Bernanos' Dialogues des Carmelites. Bernanos is a French Catholic author who died in the 40's, an author Pope Benedict has praised, and the Dialogues is probably his most famous work. A French composer whose name escapes me at the moment turned it into an opera that has been performed around the world. I have permission from the copyright holders in Paris to seek a publisher for my translation, but I've not had much luck so far (Ignatius Press wasn't interested; I'm still waiting for a definite answer from Angelus Press). I don't think I'll be violating any copyright laws if I publish a small excerpt here.

First, a bit of background. The play focuses on a Carmelite convent near Paris at the outbreak of the French Revolution. As the new regime comes down progressively harder on the religious, Our Lord's Agony in the Garden keeps resounding as a kind of leitmotif. One example: the main character, Blanche de la Force, a young daughter of the nobility who struggles with a terrible weakness in her emotional makeup, takes the name of Sister Blanche of the Agony of Christ.

In the following scene, the priest who serves the nuns (referred to only as the Aumonier in the French), and indeed all priests, have been declared outlaws and forbidden on penalty of death from exercising their priestly functions. He comes in disguise to one of the buildings on the grounds of the convent to celebrate Mass with the sisters and a few of the local faithful.

SCENE 7
We are at the Good Friday service, held in secret in a place on the grounds of the convent. A few faithful have gathered. It is night. Some men are on look-out. There are women and children present. The religious arrive without a sound. One of them prepares the vestments. The priest has not yet arrived. Outside, we hear one or two signal cries. The priest comes in. The children kiss his hands.

Chaplain: When I left you the first time, I hoped to see you again often. But the circumstances have been very far from what I had foreseen. I can say that they make my ministry more difficult with each passing day. From now on, each of our meetings will happen according to the good pleasure of God, and we will be obliged to thank Him for them as for a miracle. What do you expect? In less somber times, homage to His Majesty easily takes on the character of a simple ceremonial, too much like what one observes in honor of the kings of this world. I do not say that God does not accept homage of this sort, even though the spirit which inspires it is rather of the Old Testament than of the New. But it happens that He grows tired of it, forgive me this expression. The Lord lived and still lives among us as a poor man; the moment always comes when He decides to make us poor like Him, so that He might be received and honored by the poor, according to the manner of the poor, and so to find again what He knew long ago so many times on the roads of Galilee; the hospitality of the destitute, their simple welcome. He wished to live among the poor; He also wished to die with them. For it was not as a Count at the head of the men of his household that He walked towards death, that is, towards Jerusalem, the place of His sacrifice, in those sinister days that preceded Easter. It was among poor people who, very far from dreaming of defying anyone, made themselves small, so as to pass unnoticed for as long as possible … Let us now also make ourselves small, not, like them, in order to escape death, but in order to suffer it, if need be, as He Himself suffered it, for He was truly, as Holy Scripture says, the lamb that was led to slaughter. We are going to proceed now with the adoration of the Cross.

The priest departs, after having promised the nuns that he would return on Easter day.

Friday, March 27, 2009

"...the greatest force in the world"

One last excerpt from Karl Stern's account of his conversion, chosen almost at random (nearly every page of this book contains some thought-provoking idea, some striking anecdote, something worth passing on):

"The Church mirrors the facets of History. The Gospel is always the same. But the life of the Gospel in the turmoil of the fourth century is seen in St. Augustine. The life of the Gospel at the height of the Middle Ages ... is perceived in St. Thomas. In the nineteenth century, the century in which the human mind began to rule systematically the material forces of the universe, the Church began to extol the Little Way, the mystic life in hidden "little people." This is the only logical answer to the threat of a coming managerial age. Christ always has the appropriate answer, and He gives it in His saints. I have mentioned how great intuitive geniuses, such as Goethe and Tolstoy, perceived the mystic significance of the "little people". The Church, quite independently, has emphasized the same point. But in doing so she only re-emphasized one aspect of her eternal doctrine. Every century the Church takes a red pencil and underlines certain words of the Gospel, words which happen to fit the occasion. "Many thoughts", says Father Sossima [in Dostoevski's Brothers Karamazov, I believe. -A],"seem to lead us into a state of doubt. Particularly when we see the sins of men we ask ourselves: 'Shall we tackle all this by force or by humble charity?' Always decide in favor of humble charity. Once you have decided in favor of it you will conquer the whole world. Humble charity is a terrible force; it is the greatest force in the world; there is nothing like it ..."

Monday, March 23, 2009

More from The Pillar of Fire

In the Foreward to his book, Karl Stern makes an interesting observation about conversion stories:

"To write the story of a conversion is a foolish undertaking, for the convert, the "turned-around," is a fool. He is a fool in the sense in which Saint Paul uses this word. All stories of conversion appear to have something subjective-arbitrary, some tragic secret. The communication contains something incommunicable. Even the story of St. Augustine, told by a powerful spirit in the crystalline, translucent atmosphere of the Mediterranean, contains that foolish, devious something, the element of dark solitude.

"All true love is subjective and unique, and at the same time creates communion. Here, as always, love of the sexes is an image of divine love. There is something about falling in love which cannot be re-experienced by the outsider; it is something lonely: the lovers leave everything behind them. Yet love is not true love when it is only unique and lonely; it must also create community. The Tristan and Isolde of Wagner are abandoned to death but the Tamino and Pamina of Mozart enter through the Gates of Life. What is true of those who love is also true of those who know. It is no coincidence that in Hebrew the word Yadoa is the word for knowing and for the physical consummation of love.

"In spiritual love the two forces of solitude and community create power like the two poles of an electrical element. If the Christian religion were lived only in the cell of a Saint John of the Cross, it would become something lunatic and asocial. And if it were concerned only with the existence of the parish, it would soon resemble any business concern. In religion, if we must share the horrible cosmic solitude of the night of Gethsemani, neither must we refuse to belong to the multitude which is fed on bread and fishes.

"Seen 'from outside' a conversion is something adventurous and anarchic. We know from the story of poor Don Quixote how foolish it looks for someone to take ideas so seriously that he really rides away from home. However, the fact that the first voyage of Columbus appeared like a gigantic Quixoterie did not disprove the existence of the sought-for continent. If there are certainties, one must be able to find them.

"That one simple question, whether Jesus of Nazareth was God incarnate, becomes increasingly decisive between people, as history moves forward. Dostoievsky once said that it is the one question on which everything in the world depends. The answer to this question cuts into human ties and seems to reflect even on the nature of inanimate things. What if all that is folly in the eyes of the Greeks, and scandal in the eyes of the Jews, is Truth?"

Friday, March 20, 2009

Words of Our Lady to Venerable Mary of Agreda

(Yesterday was the feast of St. Joseph. I didn't get an opportunity to post yesterday, but I wanted to publish something to encourage devotion to the patron of this blog, so here it is a day late (mea culpa!).)

"The children of the world are ignorant regarding the privileges and rights which the Most High has conferred on my holy spouse, and the power of his intercession with the Divine Majesty and with me. But I assure you, my daughter, that in Heaven he is most intimate with the Lord, and has great power to avert the punishment of Divine justice from sinners. In all trials seek his intercession, because the Heavenly Father will grant whatever my spouse asks."

"On the Day of Judgment, the condemned will weep bitterly for not having realized how powerful and efficacious a means of salvation they might have had in the intercession of St. Joseph, and for not having done their utmost to gain the friendship of the Eternal Judge."

Ma k'lal hatorah?

At the end of his book describing his conversion to Catholicism (see previous post), Karl Stern includes a letter to his brother, a leader in the Kibbutzim movement in the early days of the state of Israel. One remarkable passage in the letter always sticks with me, and I want to share it.

"People who do not believe in Revelation are irked by the idea of a God as represented in the Bible. They say that He is anthropomorphic. They want a philosophical God, if any. However, the specifically Jewish idea is not so much that God is anthropomorphic but that Man is theomorphic. There is an ancient discussion of the Rabbonim, I believe it is Talmudic, in which the question under consideration is: 'Ma k'lal hatorah?' ('What is the fundamental principle of the law?') One Rabbi says: 'Love thy neighbour as thyself,' but another counters: 'There is a more fundamental one -- He created Man in His image.' This means that Man in the original idea of creation is God-like. If that is true there must be in God something to which the idea of Man is analogous. The Christian idea is a little more specific, and calls the something in God of which Man is, in a mysterious fashion, an image, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. But she is only a little more specific about it than the Jews. Just meditate for a moment on that rabbinic discussion and you come quite logically to that explicitly Christian notion of God. The idea of the Incarnation is nothing alien grafted upon the tree of Jewish tradition. The Jewish spirit is profoundly incarnational."

"Man is theomorphic". I have never seen the idea expressed quite so simply and powerfully before. Of course, the same thing was said in a different way, by St. Irenaeus, I think, when he said, "God became man so that man could become God" or words to that effect. And there is also that passage in John's Gospel (10:34) where Jesus says: "Is it not written in your law: I said you are gods?" It gives me a certain amount of pleasure to think how close we really are in our beliefs to our Jewish brothers and sisters (whether most of them know it or not).

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Guess the author #5

(The answer to the last "Guess the author": John Bunyan, from Pilgrim's Progress)

To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.

Pillar of Fire

I like conversion stories. I'm fascinated by the myriad ways God's grace leads people to the Catholic Church. Karl Stern's story, as recounted in his book, Pillar of Fire, is of particular interest for a number of reasons. First, he is an eloquent writer whose crystalline intelligence shines through on every page of his prose. Stern is a man of many parts: medical doctor, accomplished musician, published novelist. He was also a Jewish medical student in Germany in the 1930's, at the time when the Nazis were beginning their rise to power, which lends a certain pathos to his story: most of his family, many of his friends were executed outright or died in concentration camps. Stern and his wife escaped to Canada, and settled in Montreal,where he was received into the Church and where he spent the rest of his life.

Stern was once a devout Orthodox Jew. Reading some of his observations and musings, I was struck by how deeply our Catholic faith is rooted in the rich soil of the faith of Israel. One of the Pius popes (Pius XI, maybe?) once said, "We are all spiritually Semites," a fact for which I give thanks to God.

A few sample passages follow (I will have more in subsequent blogs).

"... a chance remark made by the young man who conducted our Sabbath afternoon Bible class [particularly struck me]. I think it was at the time when we discussed those particularly "Messianic" chapters of Isaiah. He said: "You know, occasionally, when you contemplate these two thousand years of Galuth [dispersion] without even any remote hope of return {remember that this was written before there was a state of Israel - A.}, you are almost inclined to wonder whether Jesus was not the Messiah after all." For "Jesus" he used a dark word which orthodox Jews occasionally use, perhaps out of some superstition. Of course, he discarded the thought ... but ... it stuck with me. My immediate reaction, perhaps already on the basis of my experience, was: "How do you know he wasn't?"

"If the divinity of Christ was an error or a lie, certain formative forces which radiated from this very idea and fertilized the depth of the soul were impossible to explain. In a certain inverted and paradoxical sense Tolstoy was right. For without the divinity of the Messiah the simple piety and heroic sanctity of some of our peasant maids were somehow unthinkable, but so were Chartres and Grunewald, and Bach and Mozart."

"One of my great teachers in Medicine used to say that in order to be a scientist you have to have only one talent -- to be astonished at the proper time. Pascal was astonished at an obvious and simple fact. Just as the Prophets had predicted it, the fruit of Israel had burst at a definite historical moment, the seeds had been flung to the far corners of the earth and had brought forth plants a thousandfold."

Just one more:

"If a Hasidic mystic and a follower of St. John of the Cross could know one another, not separated by a barbed wire of social and political prejudice but in a spirit of charity, they would be amazed how akin they are in their striving."

Saturday, March 14, 2009

"It seemed I saw the Tree itself ..."

"... I beheld, sorrowing, the Healer's Tree
till it seemed that I heard how it broke silence,
best of wood, and began to speak:

'Over that long remove my mind ranges
back to the holt where I was hewn down;
from my own stem I was struck away,
dragged off by strong enemies,
wrought into a roadside scaffold.
They made me a hoist for wrongdoers.

The soldiers on their shoulders bore me,
until on a hill-top they set me up;
many enemies made me fast there.
Then I saw, marching toward me,
mankind's brave King;
He came to climb upon me.

I dared not break or bend aside
against God's will, though the ground itself
shook at my feet. Fast I stood,
who falling could have felled them all.

Almighty God ungirded Him,
eager to mount the gallows,
unafraid in the sight of many:
He would set free mankind.
I shook when His arms embraced me
but I durst not bow to ground,
stoop to Earth's surface.
Stand fast I must.

I was reared up, a rood.
I raised the great King,
liege lord of the heavens,
dared not lean from the true.

They drove me through with dark nails:
on me are the deep wounds manifest,
wide-mouthed hate-dents.
I durst not harm any of them.
How they mocked at us both!
I was all moist with blood
sprung from the Man's side
after He sent forth His soul.

Wry wierds a-many I underwent
up on that hill-top; saw the Lord of Hosts
stretched out stark. Darkness shrouded
the King's corse. Clouds wrapped
its clear shining. A shade went out
wan under cloud-pall. All creation wept,
keened the King's death. Christ was on the Cross.

....

'Now, my dear man, you may understand that I have suffered to the end the pain of grievous sorrows at the hands of dwellers in misery. The time is now come that men on earth, and all this marvellous creation, shall honour me far and wide and address themselves in prayer to this sign. On me the Son of God spent a time of suffering. Therefore do I now tower up glorious beneath the heavens, and I have the power to save every man who fears me. Formerly I was made the worst of punishments, the most hateful to the peoples -- before I opened to men, the speech-bearers, the right way to life.

Behold, the Prince of Glory then exalted me above the trees of the forest, the Keeper of the Kingdom of Heaven; just as He also, Almighty God, for the sake of all mankind, exalted His mother, Mary herself, above all womankind.

I now command you, my dear man, to tell men about this sight ... But every soul on earth who intends to dwell with the Lord shall come to the Kingdom through the Rood.'"


Selections from "The Dream of the Rood", translated from Old English by Michael Alexander.

The oldest version of this remarkable poem, one of the earliest extant examples of Old English verse, consists of 15 lines carved in runes on the Ruthwell cross, a stone cross in Ruthwell, Scotland, that has been dated to the early 8th Century. The unknown author may have been a contemporary of Bede the Venerable. In fact, the cross was made after the return of Bede's abbot from Rome. He had been attending the festivities there in 701 connected with Pope Sergius I's miraculous discovery of a piece of the True Cross.

The later, expanded version of the poem, and the original source of the selections quoted above, is found in manuscript in the Vercelli Book, in the library of the cathedral of St. Andrew in Vercelli, Italy. Also to be found in the manuscript is a poem entitled Andreas, on the life of my patron saint, Saint Andrew the Apostle, and another, Elene, on St. Helena, the mother of Constantine, whom tradition remembers as the one who found the True Cross. Some variants of her legend hold that she was a British princess (it should be noted that Constantine was born in York). All three poems, together with some sermons, are in the West Saxon dialect of Old English. The book is believed to have been written in the late 10th Century. Some scholars have suggested that the fuller treatment of the rood poem found in the manuscript was prompted by the fact that King Alfred (Alfred the Great), when he was in Rome in 885, was given a relic of the True Cross by Pope Marinus.

Vercelli, at the foot of the Italian Alps, is a city on the Via Francigena, the route that numberless pilgrims from England, including several Saxon kings, took to reach the Eternal City, the See of St. Peter. There were so many of these pilgrims that Rome had a Saxon quarter. As readers of this blog know, I intend to follow in the footsteps of these ancient pilgrims this summer, Deo volente: from Canterbury, England all the way to the Vatican, on foot. Prayers, please, for blessings on this planned pilgrimage.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Eritis sicut Deus

Anthony Esolen has profound things to say about love, freedom, and our contingent nature in his meditation on Dante's Divine Comedy, published in this month's edition of First Things (March 2009). This merits extensive quoting:

"...All things, says the psalmist, declare that 'he made us; we did not make ourselves.' Even the atheist must agree that we did not make ourselves. The statement expresses contingency and dependence, and these are plainly discernible by reason. I did not come into the world self-made. Indeed, I came into a world already present for me to enter: an intelligible world, not a congeries of arbitrary and unrelated forces. Had there been no such world, I would not have existed.

"To claim, then, that we did make ourselves would be to deny the real contingency of our beings -- which would also be to deny the web of relations into which we have entered by our being and without which we must cease to be. Deep at the heart of this denial is the prideful sin of ingratitude. We see that we are provided with what we could not have provided for ourselves: not only the material conditions that support our existence -- our food and drink, the care of our parents -- but the fact of our existence itself. Yet we respond with a lie. We repeat what Satan implicitly affirms at the bottom of hell [Esolen says 'implicitly' because in Dante's Inferno, Satan does not speak; indeed, as the author of this peice points out, it is almost as if he is 'sublingual'], the loneliest words ever uttered: "I am my own, I am my own! My mind is my own, to fashion what truth I shall please. My body is my own, to dispose of as I please. My will is my own. I rise -- by my power. I exist -- by my power."

Towards the end of his article, Esolen talks about the force that breaks the power this lie has over us, that opens our eyes to the truth of our contingent existence: love. It is the case again of ubi amor, ibi oculus, 'where there is love, there is seeing',the subject of the last posting. To this truth revealed to us through love the only appropriate response is humble gratitude:

"Love opens our eyes, allowing one contingent being to reveal the mysteries of beauty to another. But it also gives us wings, prompting the intellect to soar in contemplation of that beauty. Throughout the Divine Comedy, Dante's beloved Beatrice has been preparing the pilgrim for the ultimate and yet infinite flight, to see the Beloved face to face.

"In harsh contrast is the vision of Satan and his trinitarian heads. They are seamed together, but incongruously. There is no harmony among them, as there is no interaction among the traitors he gnaws. No community, no exit from the self. "Hell is other people," said Sartre, and he was correct in this sense: If for you hell is other people, then you are in hell, and so are your fellow traitors.

"Satan's lie, then, is also Satan's mistake. He who is not God wants to be God, to rise by his own power and be his own. But God is his own precisely in his love -- in his being for. "You should be as gods," Satan says to Eve, and he unwittingly speaks the truth. We should be as gods, and we can be, in gratitude and humility and love. For the outpouring of a grateful heart, which loves because it receives what it has not deserved, reflects the exuberant power of God, who loves into existence beings whom he does not need. And the self-emptying that is essential to love -- the humble willingness to acknowledge that, as we did not make ourselves, we do not exist for ourselves -- reflects the plenitude of God, who in his creation deigns to put himself at the disposal of the contingent beings he loves.

"He is the cup that runneth over -- in love. He can be sung about; he can be prayed to. If we would be laws unto ourselves, Dante would say, we must wisely and freely embrace the laws of our contingent being, obeying them as an obedient and beloved son cheerfully obeys his father, growing into the father's authority by deeper and wiser and freer acts of obedience. And in obeying those laws we will find ourselves great-souled, able to love one another. We should be as gods."

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Ubi amor, ibi oculus


Reading a collection of essays by Theodore Dalrymple, a British doctor and writer, I was struck by the following passage in a piece entitled “What the New Atheists Don’t See”:

“A few years back the National Gallery held an exhibition of Spanish still-life paintings. One of these paintings had a physical effect on the people who sauntered in, stopping them in their tracks; some even gasped. I have never seen an image have such an impact on people. The painting, by Juan Sánchez Cotán, now hangs in the San Diego Museum of Art. It showed four fruits and vegetables, two suspended by string, forming a parabola in a grey stone window.

Even if you didn’t know that Sánchez Cotán was a seventeenth–century Spanish priest, you could know that the painter was religious: for this picture is a visual testimony of gratitude for the beauty of those things that sustain us. Once you have seen it, and concentrated your attention on it, you will never take the existence of the humble cabbage – or of anything else – quite so much for granted, but will see its beauty and be thankful for it. The painting is a permanent call to contemplation of the meaning of human life, and as such it arrested people who ordinarily were not, I suspect, much given to quiet contemplation.”



Such is the power of great art, the power to transform ordinary people, at least while they are in its presence, into contemplatives, the power to transform everyday objects into tokens of grace, ‘charged with the grandeur of God’, and so pointing to a transcendent reality. In this sense, all great art is ultimately religious, even if the subject of the work is not explicitly so.

This resonates with something else I recently read in an article in the March 2009 issue of First Things, “Surprised by Calvin”. The article starts off with the view of C.S. Lewis and Fr. Andrew Greeley on the sacramental character of the world: simple worldly pleasures, objects, events, and people are ‘revelations of grace’. Richard Mouw, the author of the article, quotes Greeley and comments: “Indeed, Catholic theology of the sacraments is ‘both a result and a reinforcement of a much broader … view of reality’ – a view in which the created world around us serves as a kind of metaphor for heavenly things. The things that make up our very ordinary existence, Greeley tells us, ‘hint at the nature of God,’ and they even serve to ‘make God in some fashion present to us.’”

In the same article, Mouw relates that Josef Pieper, a great Catholic thinker and Thomist philosopher, used to give talks in a sculptor’s studio to a group that would gather there on a regular basis to listen to him. On one occasion he recounted that the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras once asked his students the question, “Why are you here on earth?” Anaxagoras gave the answer, “To behold.” Mouw comments: “Pieper applied Anaxagoras' comment to the artistic task, but it also applies more broadly. We honor the Creator’s purposes when we engage in beholding, in that special kind of ‘seeing’ that, as Pieper puts it, is directed to more than ‘the tangible surface of reality.’ This kind of seeing, Pieper further observes, must be ‘guided by love’ for – and here Pieper quotes an ancient saying – ubi amor, ibi oculus (roughly, “where there is love, there is seeing”).”

“Where there is love, there is seeing”; and everything that we see points beyond itself, and directs our minds to the One Who is the source of all love, all beauty.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Guess the author #4

(The answer to the last "Guess the author" is William Blake. The verses are from Auguries of Innocence.)

He that is down need fear no fall;
He that is low, no pride;
He that is humble, ever shall
Have God to be his Guide.

I am content with what I have,
Little be it, or much;
And, Lord, contentment still I crave,
Because Thou savest such.

Fullness to such a burden is,
That go on pilgrimmage;
Here little, and hereafter bliss,
Is best from age to age.


Pilgrimmage is going to become more and more an object of reflection in this blog as July approaches, since my buddy T.N. and I are planning on doing the Via Francigena, from Canterbury ad limina apostolorum, to the precincts of the apostles, the Vatican, this summer: the whole distance on foot, with backpacks!