Editor’s note: This conversation between Bishop Erik Varden, OCSO, and Daniel Capó has been published, in its Spanish translation, in the February issue of Ecclesia magazine. It has also appeared in English on Mr. Capó’s site and on Bishop Varden’s site. It is reprinted here, in slightly different formatting, with the kind permission of Mr. Capó.
Bishop Erik Varden is a monk and bishop who was 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. His books include The Shattering of Loneliness: On Christian Remembrance (reviewed at CWR) and Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses.
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In a recent gathering in Madrid, you recalled that old adage from the Desert Fathers, attributed to Saint Anthony the Great, which he used to repeat every day: “Today I begin!” In a way, this aphorism has shaped monastic spirituality. Today I begin anew, regardless of my age or circumstances, looking towards God. What does this prayer mean to you? How does it appeal to you internally?
I live conscious of my inadequacies and failures. When I look at myself in human terms, I am tempted to think: ‘This is hopeless! Why bother?’ So I need to remind myself that the human terms are insufficient. The picture they present, while not quite false, is contorted, like the self-reflection we might see in a hall of mirrors, which makes us laugh while filling us with sadness.
Then I think of Anthony. His life is told us by Athanasius of Alexandria, who knew him as a friend. Athanasius tells us that Anthony’s desire from childhood was to be malleable material in God’s hands. He wanted to let himself be formed by the Lord, to be made into a new man. He saw that he must give his life a consistency with which God could work, soft enough to be shaped, firm enough to retain the shape conferred. In order to acquire consistency he confronted every aspect of himself, every anxiety, desire, fear, and illusion. He learnt to live in the truth. Throughout his long life, he practised a radical abandonment to providence. This made him strong, free, and compassionate. He saw himself and others not by his own lights, but through the eyes of God, bathed in the light of an omnipotent benevolence.
His daily ‘Today I begin!’ stood for the banishment of a personal project of imagined linear perfectibility. He had resolved to receive each new day as if it were the first of creation, expecting God to accomplish a surprising, beautifying work of salvation even on a lump of clay. I, too, would like to live like that.
This beginning you speak of, reminds me of the Creation story in Genesis: every day we must separate good from evil, light from darkness. I would say this idea permeates your essayistic work, each book from a different perspective: the horizon of Christian memory in The Shattering of Loneliness, and that of personal integrity in Chastity. Before asking you explicitly about this latest title, which you have just published in Spain, I would like to pose the fundamental question that Romano Guardini wanted to address to God at the end of his life: why evil? Why guilt?
Now, it would be brazen of me to pretend to answer a question posed by such a thinker to God Almighty. The scandal of evil has troubled mankind in every age. The question ‘why?’ isn’t always answerable in the concrete, for evil is of its nature irrational, not susceptible of explanation.
In terms of the conduct of our life, it is often best to focus less on why evil occurs; to assert instead that it exists, then to develop criteria by which to recognise it, so to counteract it. Once we can name an individual evil, even simply by affirming its intrinsic meaninglessness, it loses a good deal of its power over us. We see that our power of reasoning, the logos in us, does carry light into darkness. That light enables hope.
As for guilt, I sometimes think it has acquired an unfairly bad name. We constantly tell ourselves and others, ‘Banish guilt’, when in fact guilt can be a sign of spiritual health. If I say something sarcastic to wound another, then later, in private, feel guilty, that is good. It shows that my conscience is alive. I can start on a work of repentance and reparation.
Of course, guilt can become obsessive and self-destructive; as such it is soul-sickness. Simone Pacot distinguishes between a feeling of guilt (the destructive kind, born of subjective self-loathing) and a consciousness of guilt (the helpful kind, based on an objective sense of wrongdoing). It is a good distinction.
The question of evil leads us to the question of God. In Die Schere, Ernst Jünger pondered the impoverishment that reducing meaning to mere significance brings to our understanding of reality. Recently, in an entry on your blog “Coram Fratribus,” you pointed out something similar: “Everyone now has pet theories about the various crises of the Church. As far as I can see, there is only really one big crisis: the gradual eclipse of a true understanding of who Jesus Christ is.” Indeed, the action of the scissors Jünger spoke of is not foreign to religious experience, and in our post-secular world, we find it much easier to accept the presence of a merely human Jesus than that of Jesus as Lord and Logos of history. How can we recover the fullness of our faith when we have become accustomed to simplifying and reducing our beliefs?
We need to rekindle our interest in theology, delving deep into Scripture and the mystery of faith enacted in the liturgy. I perceive an anti-intellectualism in much contemporary Catholicism. It concerns me. It manages the astonishing feat of making the faith seem boring.
Historically speaking, any real renewal of the Church — and who would doubt that we need renewal? — has had an intellectual dimension nurturing spiritual and charitable enterprise. A paradox that mystifies me is this: we sail in the wake of a Council whose watchword was ‘Return to the sources!’, yet our discourse becomes ever narrower, more self-referential and pragmatic, yielding to vocabulary extrinsic to Catholic thought.
You ask ‘How can we recover?’ We have excellent tools. The Catechism is a monumental resource whose framework and references draw on the full range of our patrimony. Let us set our sights high, not content with mediocrity, prepared to ‘to make a defence to any one who calls [us] to account for the hope that is in [us]’ (1 Peter 3.15). That hope is worth defending. We must help each other seek out what is beautiful and best in our tradition to present Christ, Alpha and Omega, credibly and attractively to the world in which we live.
In this context, the question of faith transmission seems fundamental. Two temptations immediately arise: to quickly conform to the world in an uncritical aggiornamento or to decisively reject modernity. Could the survival through the centuries of the Jewish people in the Diaspora be a model for a Christianity that also lives its particular diaspora, at least in the West?
I think so. I think of an essay by Rabbi Sacks about the survival of the Jewish faith against all odds. He asks, ‘Could it have done so without the rituals, the 613 commands, that fill our days with reminders of God’s presence? I think not. Whenever Jews abandoned the life of the commands, within a few generations they lost their identity. Without the rituals, eventually love dies. With them, the glowing embers remain, and still have the power to burst into flame.’
There is a message in this for us. It is not a matter of rejecting modernity. Modernity is the air we breathe. We should be grateful we can breathe! What matters is to find meaning in modernity. For that to happen, our roots must run deep.
And at the same time, to look upwards, right? There’s no depth without Grace. It’s like the past time, which also demands a future.
Absolutely. Human life has got to be life in ascent. It must aspire to the sublime while remaining grounded in the real. The model, if you like, is Jacob’s ladder rather than Socrates’ flying basket as wittily but cruelly described by Aristophanes in The Clouds.
Contrary to many thinkers of the 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville argued that freedom and Christianity were not irreconcilable. Today a similar creed is repeated, claiming that Christianity and modernity are incompatible. Do you believe this to be true? Where do they converge, and where do they diverge? And what can we do to reconcile them?
What is Christianity? Christianity is belief that the Word by which and for which all things were made entered history to right fundamental wrongs, then to abide through a communion of believers, the Church, within the historical process, remaining a source of direction, strength, correction, and comfort until history ends. On these terms, no period is incompatible with Christianity; but each period presents Christianity with a challenge to articulate itself afresh, effectively and intelligibly, ‘that the world may believe’ (cf. John 17.21).
What matters is to listen to the real questions our time asks, then see how our faith in Christ provides answers. There is a tendency in the Church to produce long, abstruse, monological answer to questions no one in fact asks. All the world perceives thereby is an effusion of hot air.
In your recent book on Chastity, you emphasize that being chaste means being whole, and this brings us very close to the horizon of holiness. How does it lead us to a fuller life?
The terms ‘healing’, ‘holiness’, and ’wholeness’ are linked contextually and etymologically. This is fascinating and important. The sanctity to which we are all called works by grace through the integration of all that properly makes up our being, as we saw in the example of Anthony.
To be pulled in different direction by contrasting desires or needs drains us of energy and courage. It takes the zest out of life. Sane integration meanwhile is a source of strength. This is fundamentally what is at stake in the pursuit of chastity.
In Madrid, you hinted that chastity has a political dimension. This is a very suggestive idea, especially when we think of the wounds of the body politic manifest in social malaise and the current return of populisms. What relationship does chastity have with ideologies? How far does this political dimension reach?
If you admit the link between chastity and integrity, the link is self-evident, I think. The way to chaste integrity passes through honest confrontation with the incoherences and passions we carry. This model, too, could be transferred to the body politic, where one tends to project these things onto others, shunning catharsis and — if you admit the term — conversion.
To live and love chastely is to reverence the other, refusing to see her or him as merely an instrument for the fulfilment of my purpose or desire. Here, too, we touch a key dimension of society.
At EncuentroMadrid, you openly asked: “Where is it written that today cannot be the day of my salvation?” Upon hearing you, I immediately thought of the deep eschatological tradition of monastic spirituality, of which you, as a Trappist monk, are a part. How do we connect this heritage — which leads from prayer to work, from grammar to eschatology — to today’s reader?
St Benedict enjoins that each day’s liturgy should start, in the darkness of the night, with the recitation of Psalm 95, which has the verse: ‘O that today you would listen to his voice! Harden not your hearts!’ We return to the theme of the transcendent Word present in time. The Word is never silent. Whether we are ready or able to hear it is another matter. Our task is to work on our hearts, refusing to let a carapace of cynicism form, resolving to stay vulnerable, receptive. Then to listen and heed. If we do this, we may find ourselves seeing with unexpected clarity that the kingdom of God is in our midst (cf. Luke 17.21).
A central concept in your work is the notion of longing, which you identify almost as an immortal whisper, inseparable from human consciousness. Yale writer Christian Wiman has written similar things referring to poetic desire. Where do you perceive the longing for God in our world?
At the risk of seeming banal: almost everywhere. ‘The heavens proclaim the glory of God’, says a Psalm (Psalm 19.1). In the natural world, this dimension is obvious. In men and women it is more mysterious and concealed.
But I do believe that to be a human being is to be possessed of longing, to live as an embodied echo of a Word I may have no conscious awareness of. This lack of awareness can have a tragic aspect. It may imprison me in frustration, even hopelessness: nothing in the world seems adequate to what I really want. But it can also enable instances of exultantly unexpected, ecstatic recognition.
Shortly before he died, the poet Seamus Heaney sent a text message to his wife with a brief message in Latin: “Noli timere” (Do not be afraid). These were his last words. Anchored in faith and hope, what does Monsignor Varden fear?
In the Gospels, those words are uttered by our Lord as he approaches, walking on the water, the disciples caught up in a terrible storm. They are followed by the affirmation: ‘It is I’.
The one thing worth fearing is separation from Him Who Is. The priest translates this fear into aspirational terms in a prayer he prays at each Mass before receiving communion: ‘Never permit me to be parted from you’.
As long as I do not draw back from that intention, I have nothing to fear, be there a raging tempest all about me.
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This is a very thought-provoking interview. Much here to be reread and taken to heart…
Yours truly offers only a fragment in response to the following: “The scandal of evil has troubled mankind in every age. The question ‘why?’ isn’t always answerable in the concrete, for evil is of its nature irrational, not susceptible of explanation.” Four thoughts:
FIRST, since we are created “in the image and likeness of God,” we have planted within ourselves the analogous and radical freedom by which God has created and sustains all things. Not by necessity or pagan emanation, but freely. Our own radical freedom, then, is the choice to be either with or alien to the God who is both above and within. The consequence of what is “irrational” (worse, a violating the LOGOS) is scattered and layered across all of history like the layers of a tear-inducing onion. Moral evil is malignant.
SECOND, at the risk of sounding monistic or pantheistic (and he does), the Basque novelist Miguel de Unamuno (“Tragic Sense of Life,” 1921/1954) loosens our thinking existentially, it seems to me, beyond settled schools of theology later than Augustine. For example:
“We have created God in order to save the Universe from nothingness, for all that is not consciousness and eternal consciousness, conscious of its eternity and eternally conscious, is nothing more than appearance. There is nothing truly real save that which feels, suffers, pities, loves, and desires, save consciousness; there is nothing substantial but consciousness […] Love is a contradiction if there is not God.” The Contradiction of the Cross.
THIRD, “[f]or to believe in God is, to a certain sense, to create him, although He first creates us [!]. It is he who is continually creating Himself.”
[Now back to free will] “Faith, therefore, if not a creative force, is the fruit of the will [!], and its function is to create. Faith, in [only] a certain sense, creates its object. And faith in God consists in creating God, and since it is God who gives us faith in Himself, it is God who is continually creating Himself in us [!].
Therefore St. Augustine said: ‘ I will seek Thee Lord, by calling upon Thee, and I will call upon Thee by believing in Thee. My faith calls upon Thee, Lord, the faith which Thou hast given me, with which Thou hast inspired me through the Humanity of Thy Son, through the ministry of Thy preacher’ (Confessions, book 1, chap. 1).”
FOURTH, we also read of our choice is to be either superficially happy or to suffer…that “it is only suffering that makes us persons [….] Suffering tells us that we exist; suffering tells us that those whom we love exist; suffering tells us that the world in which we live exists; and suffering tells us that God exists and suffers [that is, is changeless but freely chooses to take on our suffering].”
SUMMARY: What does it really mean about “evil” to say too glibly that this is a Fallen world? And, what is there about sin, our sin, that evokes a God (!) to freely enter inside of his own creation to willingly die for and within each one of us? About our freedom toward both good and evil—nothing less than the very “concrete” universal, Jesus Christ as the Incarnation…
The perceived evilness is God’s simple attempts to naturally (without affecting the original freedom, whereby each one is being lived up as gods and He made himself as if nonexisting, the original Sin), reveal the sinfulness of others to the affecte and help reflecting on His enforcement of justice using the same sinners so as to raise their concept of God into the fullness of Truth. Those who cannot be convinced about the Truth that He alone is the only existional reality and everything else are His live materialisation and this world cannot be made a utopian paradise so long as men and women prefer death over the Truth are sentenced to death as the time is up for giving them everlasting life. In other words, He gently inspiring without hurting the ego through each ones’ life to seek the way for living in paradise, the Kingdom of God, kept hidden amidst and beyond the reach of sinners and only discoverable by pristine/holy minds/souls, who demonstrated sufficient truthfulness in handling His talents as part of growing them up into full men and women from nothing, though the God initially let them belive as if they are borne from their parents.
Erik Varden, Pope Francis’ excellent choice for bishop of Trondheim. Varden refers to Benedict’s Each day’s liturgy should start in the darkness of the night. Why evil? Why guilt? Varden doesn’t pretend to answer Guardini’s questioning of God directly. He answers, Why it exists is unanswerable, that it exists is what matters. From this writer’s perspective it’s similar to asking, why does this person choose evil, and another good? That God who alone is good in whom there is no darkness should create the arena in which evil could exist. Aquinas’ best response is that evil is in the will. Of Man.
Trondheim is below the Arctic Circle with regular nights and days. Varden says St Benedict commends our prayer day start during the darkness of night. Night, historically associated with the darkness of evil, time when the drunkard drinks the fornicator and adulterer sins, the thief breaks into homes. Although it’s God that Daniel’s canticle praising God says created both light and darkness, themselves a good. Night becomes transformative, the moment of peace when the heart turns away from evil to God in expectation of the dawn.
Varden, clearly a philosopher, underscores the link between chastity and reverence of the other, the body politic, conversion rather than catharsis. Trondheim’s bishop delineates for the Christian a clear path to eternal life in a precarious world, “The priest translates this fear into aspirational terms in a prayer he prays at each Mass before receiving communion: ‘Never permit me to be parted from you’”.
Dear Bishop Varden, I agree with you that “there is only really one big crisis: the gradual eclipse of a true understanding of who Jesus Christ is.” I have tried to make the same point in my series, “The Once and Future Lord.” https://wherepeteris.com/category/feature/the-once-and-future-lord/
Congratulations to Bishop Erik Varden for this seriously heartening discourse on a Catholic Christianity that would be approved by Our LORD, His and our Most Blessed Mother Mary, The Apostles of Christ, and nearly 2,000 years of Saints & Martyrs in Glory. In other words, it would be authenticated & applauded by The Church sensu strictum.
Yet it must be a challenge to those many contemporary catholic clergy & lay (including not a few in Rome) who have resiled into a sort of hostility to the absolute authority of Jesus Christ in The Heavens and on The Earth. To them Jesus Christ is not LORD in an absolute & exclusive way.
In Romans 8:18-22, inspired by The Holy Spirit of God, Saint Paul makes it plain that the whole universe of space-time/energy-matter, together with whatever has life, with whatever is human, together has the sole purpose of birthing those who lovingly obey God (following on from The LORD Jesus’s many parables concerning separation of what is good & useful from what is bad & useless).
The miraculous separation power of God in saving what was lost amidst the universal rebellion finds echo in Romans 8:38-39 – “For I am certain of this: neither death, nor life, nor angel, nor prince, nothing that exists, nothing still to come, nor any power, or height or depth, nor any created thing, can ever come between us and the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus our LORD.”
There seems to be a hiatus (a gap with something missing), where heretical universalists might question: “How is it possible to be separated from God who is perfect self-giving love, the context, the source, the sustenance, the beginning & the end, the alpha & omega, the first & the last? How could any person be separated from God whose Kingdom is ‘close & even within’ e.g. Mark 1:15; Luke 17:21.”
Some baby-steps for bridging this hiatus have been presented in a Griffith University PhD thesis [Ethical Encounter Theology: An Inter-Disciplinary Consonance] and subsequent publications. I wouldn’t mention this except the work has surprised us by being downloaded over 600 times – seemingly found useful in helping contemporary thinkers address the puzzle of theodicy.
https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/handle/10072/367007
Ever seeking to hear & lovingly obey King Jesus Christ; blessings from marty
Beautiful Testimony to our Universal Call to Chastity, in our thoughts, in our words , and in our deeds.
This gradual eclipse is because so many have remained silent in the face of The Greatest Apostasy since the Arian apostasy, that denied The Divinity Of Christ.
We can know through both Faith and reason, that The Charitable Anathema was instituted by Christ Himself, “You cannot be My disciples if you do not abide in My Word.”
How exactly does one follow Jesus The Christ, if they cannot even recognize the invalid fraudulent election of a man who could not have possibly been canonically elected to The Papacy because by denying that sin done done in relationships he defines as being “private” , is still, in essence sin, he denies our Call to desire to be Temples of The Holy Ghost in public and in private.
We cannot transform Christ, Christ Transforms us, through our acceptance of Salvational Love, God’s Gift Of Grace And Mercy, available to all those who desire to repent and believe The Good News!
“He is Risen!”
Christ’s Church is being persecuted from within.
Jorge Bergoglio fell into heresy, prior to his election to The Papacy, thus the election of Jorge Bergoglio is not valid. Every cardinal who was aware of the heresy of Jorge Bergoglio but voted for him, Ipso facto defected from The Catholic Church.
“Canon 188 §4 states that among the actions which automatically (ipso facto) cause any cleric to lose his office, even without any declaration on the part of a superior, is that of “defect[ing] publicly from the Catholic faith” (” A fide catholica publice defecerit“).
May all Faithful Bishops and Cardinals call for a Council, so that that the anti Christ church attempting to subsist within The True Church Of Christ, will be visibly anathema, and may this Council be Called in The Name Of Our Blessed Mother Mary, who, by her Fiat, affirmed The Filioque.
“Behold your Mother.”- Christ On The Cross
Pray that a Council be Called to restore The Papacy, so that Our Blessed Mother’s Immaculate Heart will be Triumphant and Peace will be restored in Christ’s Church.
Dear Blessed Mother Mary, Mirror Of Justice And Destroyer Of All Heresy, Who Through Your Fiat, Affirmed The Filioque, and thus the fact that There Is Only One Son Of God, One Word Of God Made Flesh, One Lamb Of God Who Can Taketh Away The Sins Of The World, Our Only Savior, Jesus The Christ, thus there can only be, One Spirit Of Perfect Complementary Love Between The Father And The Son, Who Must Proceed From Both The Father And The Son, In The Ordered Communion Of Perfect Complementary Love, The Most Holy And Undivided Blessed Trinity (Filioque), hear our Prayer.
“Penance, Penance, Penance”
At the heart of Liberty Is Christ, “4For it is impossible for those who were once illuminated, have tasted also the heavenly gift and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, 5Have moreover tasted the good word of God and the powers of the world to come…”, to not believe that Christ’s Sacrifice On The Cross will lead us to Salvation, but we must desire forgiveness for our sins, and accept Salvational Love, God’s Gift Of Grace And Mercy; believe in The Power And The Glory Of Salvation Love, and rejoice in the fact that No Greater Love Is There Than This, To Desire Salvation For One’s Beloved. “Hail The Cross, Our Only Hope.”
“Blessed are they who are Called to The Marriage Supper Of The Lamb.”
“For where your treasure is there will your heart be also.”
2 Corinthians 13:5 – “Examine yourself to make sure you are living in The Faith. Test yourself. Do you not know that Jesus Christ is really in you? If not, then you have failed the test!”
Having a conscious union with The Living Christ in this world is what assures us of an eternity of joy with Him in The New Jerusalem. No Christ in us now = no Heaven.
Romans 8:9 – “Your interests, however, are not in the unspiritual, but in the spiritual, since The Holy Spirit of God has made His home in you. In fact, unless you possessed The Holy Spirit of Christ, you would not belong to Him.”
Pursuit of a life of loving obedience to Jesus’s commands attracts The Holy Spirit of God to dwell in us. We are no longer alone, battling the flesh, the world, & the devil. We have the whole power of God to help us overcome and so to bear good fruit, such as is required by Father God. “If you love Me, you will obey My commands!”
“Those who bear no good fruit are cut off and thrown in the fire . .!.”
Pursuit of a path of unloving disobedience to Jesus is the greatest foolishness. For: “If we gain the whole world but lose our soul, what a terrible loss is that!”
It’s super to read an Episcopal conversation encouraging us to do our utmost to stay united with Jesus Christ and so to enter into His work of salvaging all those who love God. As well as being the greatest wisdom, it’s the path of humor & great joy.
As Catholics we sometimes refer to certain theological realities as ‘mysteries’, yet the greatest mystery is surely that of those who will to separate their souls from God.
Why chase after wickedness when the eternal joys of pursuing holiness, helped by King Jesus and filled with the joy of His Holy Spirit are freely offered to us?
Why lie – Truth is so much sweeter. Why rob – Giving fills our hearts with God.
Why hate or wound or kill – Cherishing, healing and saving life unites us with the Resurrected & Reigning King of Calvary.
Why engage in immoral acts – Purity and chastity and faithfulness have godly pleasures beyond common imagination.
Why be a pope who fosters disobedience to Christ and His Apostles – Papal Apostolic authenticity alone is certain to please God.
Why be a slave of the devil, whose plan is to torture you throughout eternity – Friendship with God and the joys of Heaven are offered to all of the obedient by Jesus Christ.
Willing disobedient separation from King Jesus Christ is surely the most profound and inexplicable form of insanity & self-hatred.
This Lent let’s pray for the eyes of all ‘separationists’ to be opened to the ecstasies of Salvation that are so wondrously offered to all.
Let’s pray for an Easter that overflows with eager catechumens.