I have read all of the Gospels with the presupposition that he was insane; that he was a megalomaniac; that he was psychotic; that the idea of his own divinity was a schizophrenic obsession; that he was not The Way at all; that he was neither the Truth nor the Life. But I always found myself forced to ask, during times of trouble, how can an insane man have done all this? And on the other hand: how can it be justified that the New Testament, the book in which the wise men of the world descry the pinnacle of perfection, is all about a lunatic? In order to do this, all ideals built on sound reasoning would have to be turned inside out. In order to do this, new criteria would have to be formulated, and that deemed lowest which everyone believes to be highest, that most imperfect which everyone believes to be most perfect. Then the most perfect thing known to the soul of man could be considered madness and delusion, and the beast a paragon. Sound reasoning could never justify considering Jesus Christ a lunatic. Quite the contrary: sound reasoning can comprehend the perfection of Jesus Christ only when it realizes that he and the Father are one, can worship his teachings only when it sees the perfection of God in Christ himself. Human wisdom cannot separate God and Christ.
And yet if I persuade myself that all of the humility and equanimity that he displayed to his revilers and tormenters was a type of arrogant madness, I would certainly be forced to halt at this final question: how could any man be resurrected from death, even if he did have delusions of grandeur? Because no matter how I consider the New Testament, it is not at all possible for me to ignore that astonishing event, which turns all of the science of the world into vain prattle.
I have read all of the Gospels under the presumption that they are works of fiction; that Jesus Christ never existed. But then I always arrive at this question: who wrote this work of fiction? My God, will you lead me to the person who has made up this story about Jesus Christ? And if many others have helped in doing so, will you lead me to them? I am sufficiently experienced to know that it is impossible to fictionalize about anything except for oneself. It is impossible to make poetry more beautiful than a man is himself. It is impossible to describe a man better than oneself, or, in fact, a man worse than oneself. Only someone who was as great as Jesus Christ himself could have written the story of Jesus Christ. If you tell me that I may not believe in Jesus Christ, then I will believe in whomever wrote the story of Jesus Christ. The one who wrote the story of Jesus Christ has revealed to mankind your perfection. And I believe in your perfection. After I had rattled off to myself all the videtur ut non91 about the divinity of Jesus Christ and finally thought that I could celebrate my victory over this man from Galilee, I discovered that this song of praise echoed stronger in my soul than at any other time:
Unus Altissimus Jesus Christus.92
My skepticism could not defeat the man from Galilee.
My God, help me. He persecutes me. I cannot negotiate with this man from Galilee. I am like a cotton-grass wick in his hands.
X.
I believe in Jesus Christ. I cannot help but believe in Jesus Christ. Everything is worthless to me except for Jesus Christ. I will die if I am not allowed to believe in Jesus Christ.
And I think that I can hear you calling to me to believe in him. Stop me if I am on the wrong path! Are you not telling me that it was for Jesus Christ that your saints were blessed? Are you not telling me that in his name mankind is forgiven its sins? Are you not telling me that no one comes to you except through Jesus Christ? And are you not commanding me to lift my cross to my shoulders and follow him?
XI.
“Si quidem aliquid melius et utilius saluti hominum, quam pati, fuisset, Christus utique verbo et exemplo ostendisset,” says the Master.93 “If there were anything better or more useful for man than suffering, Christ would have taught it to us by his words and examples.”
Finally I have come before your eyes to ask you to open to me the way that leads to unity with you, the way that Christ has marked out, the way that all the saints and holy men have trodden since time immemorial, regia via sanctæ crucis.94 And I have come to ask you to place the cross on my shoulders. I pray to you and nothing but you and grant myself no refreshment except in you. You alone are my hope, my health, and my freedom. And the way to you is the way of the cross. I know that wherever I go and wherever I search I will find no road higher or more secure than the regia via sanctæ crucis. There is no other road to life, to life in you, than the king’s road of the holy cross. The cross – the scandal and the foolishness – it has now become my only hope, because without it I would never be able to shun myself, and now I ask you for the grace to be able to bear it.
I pray for the grace to be able to die to myself so that I might be allowed to begin to live in you. You have led me out into the darkness, and have filled my soul with forebodings of my perdition, to reveal to me that there is nothing within the limits of existence that could possibly comfort me while I have not yet denied myself. You have led my soul into great darkness in order to make me lose all faith in my own power and to find you. You have allowed my pride to sink into the waywardness of waywardness so that I might find the footprints of Jesus Christ, hanc regiam viam quæ est via crucis,95 the bloody trail of the cross on the hard frozen ground. And now I know that you will lead my soul into great light. A man finds no solution to the riddles of his soul before he has thrown himself down to the ground and fallen onto his face before the cross. In the cross is good fortune, says the Master; in the cross life, in the cross protection against enemies. In the cross is the infusion of heavenly blessings; in the cross the most sublime bliss; the cross is the condensing lens of all true virtue; our souls derive their strength from the cross; in the cross and nowhere else is perfection.96
O crux, ave, spes unica!
XII.
“Factus sum omnibus humillimus et infimus, ut tuam superbiam mea humilitate vinceris,” says the voice of the man from Galilee. He shouldered his cross for me and allowed himself to be crucified for me so that I might learn to shoulder my cross and die to myself upon the cross. If I die with him, I will live with him. And if I share in his suffering, I will also be granted a share of his glory.
Over the gate of the royal road stand the words that reveal the key to the forecourt:
Nothing to you is worthy of pursuit or admiration, and nothing to you of value but for God alone and that which belongs to God.
The comforts granted to the created are to you worthless chaff.
The soul that loves God despises all that is inferior to God.
God alone is eternal and unchangeable, fills all, is the comfort of the soul and the true joy of the heart.
66.
The flowers here in the monastery garden smell best on days after rain. There stands the rosebush with three hundred and fifty roses. Behold the beds with the huge multicolored blossoms! Those in the middle are called Georgias, because they come from Georgia, a land that lies on the other side of the Earth. Aren’t they delightful, the paths between the young trees? The leaves tickle your cheeks. At the western end stands the fountain in a glade, with beautifully green, mown grass all around. At the eastern end is a little grove. And in the grove stands the Virgin Mary, who nurtured the Lord for us. The Virgin Mary is blessed among women, as it says in the angel’s greeting: “Ad Christum per Mariam.” We love this image of Mary in the grove; it is well made; supple ivy covers the pedestal upon which it stands. Notice how the linen falls about her head and shoulders. The same comeliness shines also from the boy’s mantle: the swathes are almost transparent; behold the Lamb of God! There is something wondrously human in this image of the child; his face just like any other infant at the breast; you see here not a trace of the elated air of divinity which so many portrait artists have taken to putting on his face. The child of Mary is like every other child, and so is Jesus Christ in his mature years: we think of him as we do every other man. “Homo factus est,” says the profession of faith, short and sweet. He himself was so conscious of his humanity that when
he was called good he answered, “No one is good but God alone.” The merits of our Lord Jesus Christ are to us most richly comforting because he came to us as a man, lived as a man, died as a man. In his veins streamed blood, just as in your veins and mine. This is how God chose to teach mankind to overcome the world: he himself came to us as a man and overcame the world as a man. For the only way that we are able to shoulder our crosses bravely is because the man Jesus Christ carried his before us. Think not upon your sorrows, but entrust everything to the Lord, past and future; the Lord calms the wind and the sea. You have been led to a holy place, but the Lord directed the journey; allow his mercy to trickle over your soul. Remember that man is nothing without the mercy of God, and look around you: around you reigns Pax Benedictina, the Benedictine peace. Yesterday it was windy and rainy. Last night it cleared up, and this morning is full of promises. God’s world spreads itself out before your eyes beautifully, as in the first light of the sun. Imagine that you are a new man, that you were created last night and saw the sun for the first time when it appeared over the edge of the forest this morning. Greet this world in which we stand not as a child of Adam, but rather as a son of God, limbs on the body of Christ, the re-created man, who does not live according to nature, but rather is above nature. Reason no longer according to your own understanding, but rather be certain according to the revelations of God. Drink no longer from the salty well of philosophy, but rather strive for purity of heart. A pure heart sees through Heaven and Hell.
I told you last evening that God loves you. I tell you the same thing today. I will tell you the same thing tomorrow: God loves you. I will not stop saying this to you until you have come to the understanding that it is the most precious of all the things that have been said in the world, the kernel of all joyous tidings. God himself, the Almighty, the Creator: he loves you. He loves you so much that he cannot think of losing sight of you for a single moment. His eyes follow you wherever you go. His ears have heard the falling of every tear from your eyes. He has loved you ever since you were an infant. Yes, he loved you before you came into being, has loved you since the creation of the world, and created you to allow you to revel in his glory. And he has descended from his Heaven in order to make your path to his glory more passable, has become the lowest and smallest of all. He let himself be nailed to the cross for you, precisely as if no other person existed on Earth except for you, so that you would not have to suffer the consequences of your apathy toward his love and your revolts against his will. It is he who protected your steps while you roamed throughout the world, friendless, wayward, and disturbed, watched over you like a mother at the foot of her suffering child’s bed. And now he has led you here to us, his wretched, unworthy servants, so that we might serve you.
In your countenance one glimpses the understanding of a mature soul; I perceive clearly that you are a much wiser man than I. And I am humbled to walk here by your side, daring to speak to you, as if I were so conceited as to think to teach you. I myself am the least learned of the disciples. The only thing that I have the power to do is thank God that he has displayed to me, so unworthy, the grace to show a soul whom he loves the way to our house. All that I am able to do is to receive you, just as a poor servant is required to receive the nobleman whom the king summons to council.
Do not look up to me, dear sir; I beg you this as fluently as I can, because I am not in any way more worthy in the eyes of God because I wear a monk’s cowl, or because the holy office of priest has been placed upon my shoulders. Neither of these things does anything but increase my obligations. I am the weakest of men and the most frail, and I perpetually forget the presence of God; keep this in mind every time that you speak to me. No one has further to go than I. If you want to see a miserable wretch of God, then look at me. I have not fallen seven times like the righteous, but rather four hundred and ninety times, like those who are most pitiable. But every time I fall I stand up again with these words of Saint Augustine on my lips: “Potuerunt isti et illi, quare non ego!” – “These and those were able to, why not I?”; and then I fall once more. You are justified in finding me ridiculous.
It is the hallmark of a Christian man to know the key to true perfection. Never let God’s presence slip from your mind. The key to your perfection is to remember at every moment of your life that you stand before the face of God. Therefore let your life be an uninterrupted prayer, all of your work in the service of God, every movement of your mind ad majorem Dei gloriam – to the further glorification of God. In the same way that the love of God enwraps you, so are you obligated to direct your thoughts to him, forever and always. In the morning when you wake let the first movement of your consciousness be a song of praise to him. And when you close your eyes to sleep in the evening let this be your final thought: In manu tua sum.84 Every step that you take, every word that you speak, every glance: let all of your thoughts be directed toward this one thing. It is the hallmark of the saints that they forget themselves in the sight of God. Pray and busy yourself with nothing but prayer. Pray to God. Pray always to God. Pray everywhere to God. For everything.
67.
Several days later, at the close of supper, the investiture of two novices took place in the abbey’s chapter hall. Steinn Elliði was invited to attend, and the Guest Master showed him to a special seat. Two young men were being accepted as novitiates: they had during the preceding months learned the abbey’s traditions and participated in the life of the novices, in layman’s dress and with full freedom of action. One was from The Hague, the other from Paris. Steinn had noticed them immediately in the choir, two men of the world surrounded by eighty canons, looking perpetually confused by everything that was happening. The Dutchman looked as if he had been a bank clerk or an office worker for an important company: he had gold-rimmed eyeglasses and his hair was gleaming with hair cream, his clothing and shoes were styled according to last year’s fashion. His shirt and tie were handsome without awakening any special notice, just like those worn by employees of upright commercial institutions. He had a fountain pen and a pencil in the breast pocket of his jacket. The man from Paris was still quite young, obviously from a bourgeois or perhaps aristocratic family, admirably raised, with dark eyes and eyebrows, his skin bright and pink like a young girl’s. His mouth, like his hands, displayed sensitivity, and his clothing was as tasteful as it was unostentatious, the mark of a good upbringing. These two youths had said farewell to the world in order to be consecrated to the cross from this day on.
All of the windowpanes in the hall were stained and let in only meager light, but above the abbot’s seat burned a small candle that cast a dull gleam over the hall’s Baroque style and the facial portraits of abbots many hundreds of years old, maintaining watch along all the walls. Everything is silent. Finally a bell rings dimly from a distant tower somewhere; the hall doors are opened and the monks step in two by two. They are clad in black choir robes, with their hoods pulled forward over their faces; each walks to his own seat in the hall. Last to enter is the abbot, with a white miter on his head; he sits in the high seat. Finally everyone is seated; eighty black-clad beings stare straight ahead, their faces expressionless like stone statues; everything is as quiet as before a beheading.
68.
Father Alban, this fool of the Lord, “le fou de bon Dieu,” as he called himself, who emphatically denied that he was a man able to teach himself, much less others, became in fact the one whom Steinn looked upon as his master ever afterward. Father Alban had found the way that the son of waywardness had sought all of his life. Although Father Alban was extremely busy with his work, which consisted of attending five hours of divine offices every day like a regular monk, as well as serving the brotherhood as prior and Novice Master, two positions laden with responsibility, he still never seemed to lack the time to speak with the foreign guest. Steinn sat for long periods of time conversing with him in his room, as the sun shone in through the window and the summer breeze, blowing in from the garden, brought the pe
rfume of roses. Or they walked side by side through the young trees, where the crowns were low enough to brush a man’s cheeks, and the days passed by so quickly that the sun seemed to set before noon. And our Lady stands in the grove.
It did not take long before the monk knew all the details of Steinn’s life and spiritual journey, the hopes and disappointments of his youth, his dreams and reality, his plans and shipwrecks, his struggles, victories, and defeats. And he knew what was sick in Steinn’s soul and what healthy. Steinn studied Christian ascetic theory, either by listening to the monk’s living words, or by reading the books that he recommended. De Imitatione Jesu Christi became by and by his fondest reading, then Introduction à la vie dévote by Saint François de Sales, the Exercitia Spiritualia of Saint Ignatius, Master Eckehart, Pascal, and finally the Doctor Angelicus himself.
Little by little Steinn became part of the household of the abbey. Its astonishing aspect disappeared: he discovered that daily life here was just like anywhere else among mortals. He learned to find his way through the halls, got to know the monks. He attended services, dipped his finger in the holy water at the church door and signed himself, kneeled whenever he walked before the cross, received a Psalter and participated in the Gregorian chant, came to understand the Mass better and better, and would not be satisfied until he had come to understand the meaning of every last little detail of the liturgy.
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