The Great Weaver From Kashmir

by Halldor Laxness

  The monks were the most educated of all men, gentle in their conduct, cheerful, modest. When they were at Mass their faces reflected strong determination, and during the chanting, deep adoration that no outside influence could perturb. They would not have been vexed even if the house had collapsed. But in the refectory, where guests were invited to come, they were extraordinarily cheerful, and in the free time at the conclusion of meals they told antic stories from east and west, or wonderful tales about everything under the sun, and laughed in such a way that no one without a good conscience could possibly imitate. Over time Steinn came to know what each of them was named; behind each name was a man with distinct characteristics, although all of them seemed cast in the same mold at first sight. Father Alexandre had a huge nose; he was exceptionally learned and just as absentminded, knocked on everything that came into his hands as if he wanted to find out whether it might be hollow inside, peered into his glass as if gazing into a crystal ball, held his knife to his ear like a tuning fork while he was eating. He seemed to be the type of man who held many interesting discussions with himself, and who saw most things in a philosophical light. Father Benjamin looked like a portrait of a saint from the Beuron school, both solemn and personable. His eyes shone with a childish purity and deep understanding; out in the world others take it upon themselves to trample down such persons. Father Boots’ usual expression consisted of pursed lips, flared nostrils, and a furrowed brow, making one believe that he had recently committed some misdeed or other and was preparing to commit yet another. In conversation, however, he proved to be meek and harmless; he pressed his palms together as if begging for mercy and smiled out to his ears, causing one to forgive him of all his misdeeds at once. Father Benoit was handsome and dignified, portly like a medieval canon, around sixty, with an abrupt manner of speaking, gentle laughter, and frolic in his eyes. Dorval, the Guest Master, was lighthearted and animated, companionable and inquisitive; he thought it great entertainment to be told the news if there was any news to tell, told the news himself if no one else knew any, and read the newspapers. Word went around that he sometimes smoked a pipe out in the garden, but everyone adored him and found no fault with him for this. He was un homme du Midi and went to the Riviera for three-week stretches each winter to undergo treatment for asthma. “The climate in Belgium,” he said, “now that’s a miserable climate!” He had played as a child beneath palm trees. The Venerable Father, the abbot himself, was an aristocratic and honorable man, his smile and glance warm and paternal; they had all wept with joy when he returned to them after a half-year mission to the Congo last year. His bearing was determined and stately, his voice slightly cracked when he began the Benedicite at meals. He was sparing with words, but unsparing with his genial smile, and he would warm everything around him wherever he went. He was the incarnation of Benedictine dignity and gentility. And in the midst of these men went Father Alban, strong and gentle, kingly and meek, wise and childish, inspired and taciturn, smitten with the guilty conscience of a saint, because he was a holy man. Other men faded from Steinn’s mind when he thought about Father Alban. Voilà un homme! Such a countenance! Such hawk’s eyes! Such a bearing! His profile was pure of form, like a portrait on a Roman coin. Whenever Steinn thought of Benedict of Nursia, the nobleman who became the father of Christian monasticism, it proved impossible for him to call to mind any other image than the likeness of Father Alban.

  69.

  It was one of Father Alban’s particular characteristics that he never spoke about himself except during those few times when he could not refrain from saying what a contemptible and imperfect person he was, frail and helpless, unworthy in the eyes of God. He never made any mention of his former life. Had he put all of his memories to sleep or had he been born with a scapular on his shoulders? The information that Steinn received about the upbringing and former lifestyle of his master came from others, in particular the talkative Guest Master, Père Dorval.

  Father Alban’s story was in certain respects parallel to the life of Charles de Foucauld, his compatriot, an ascetic who lived in the Sahara desert and was killed by the natives there in 1916. Landry was an aristocrat like Foucauld, a member of an old and renowned family, born in Paris, brought up either there or at his family’s estates in the Pyrenees and on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Early on the astonishing artistic ability of the young aristocrat came to light: his violin playing earned him the admiration of virtuosos by the age of seven. His father, however, did not believe in prodigies, and thus the boy was made to follow the normal course of schooling. But along with his schooling the boy continued to practice the violin with extraordinary gusto; his energy for work seemed inexhaustible. And after he had fait son droit98 he entered a conservatory at the age of twenty, and it did not escape the notice of any musicians qualified to judge that here was a manifest gift of grace, and that he surely had a shining future as a virtuoso ahead of him. After studying for almost two years at the conservatory his teachers sent him away with the testimonial that he had surpassed them. In the winter of 1910 he held his first public concert in Paris, when he was twenty-five. His performance became legend. At that time Alban de Landry was worshipped in the concert halls of Paris, the stately man with a genius’ youth behind him and a prospective future as a superman. But he was cool and reticent; in his eyes dwelled the perception of another plane; the ways of men were not his ways. He did not let the adoration of women or the veneration of masters seduce him into a more comfortable way of life; instead he drove to his old estate in the Pyrenees and hid himself from the world for two years, following the example of Paganini. There he cultivated his art, playing the violin days and nights, roaming about in the countryside in between and hearkening to the echoes of the Aeolian harp. No other environment is better suited to raising a true troubadour than the land of the Gascons, and when he felt that the time was right he reappeared in the world of men and embarked on a concert tour throughout the various capital cities of the Northern Hemisphere, leaving a trail of fame from Stockholm to Rome, from Saint Petersburg to Madrid. In 1913 he was heard from in America; he continued his victorious journey from one great city of North America to another, and then on to Brazil and Argentina. It was there that snow started to cover his tracks, until finally it was no longer possible to follow his trail. Months pass and people cannot agree on what has happened to him. Some believe that he has returned to Europe to prepare new concerts. One newspaper claims that he is living on the island of Capri in the company of another virtuoso, a Spaniard, and that they spend their time together composing music. Another newspaper suggests that he has returned to his estate in the Pyrenees to refresh his health.

  But none of this turned out to be correct. At the end of 1914 his family hears the first true reports of his fate. He had certainly returned to Europe, but not to prepare new concerts or compose music; even less to refresh his health in the Pyrenees. He is no longer in the same class as Kreisler and Elman – he has shattered his violin, cut his bowstrings. He has become a novice at the Benedictine seminary of Saint Anselm’s in Rome.

  The attempts made by his family to remove him proved futile: even their last resort, a report from his family doctor claiming that he had always been mentally ill, failed. At the end of 1917 he earned a doctorate in philosophy. Two years later he was consecrated a priest and sent to the French Benedictine monastery of Solesmes. In 1921 he was sent to the abbey of Sept Fontaines, where he accepted the office of Novice Master and was later appointed prior.

  “There is no one else like him,” said one of the older monks to Steinn once, when the conversation turned to Father Alban: “He governs us with an iron fist wrapped in silk. We don’t know whether we love him more as a father or a brother. He is humble like the man Jesus Christ, stern like the judge Jesus Christ. He is the one man who never loses sight of what is deepest and highest in all ideals. Everything but the utmost is worthless to him. As a teacher he is an authority on every subject. He teaches canon law with the s
ame expertise as he expounds Greek and Hebrew texts. Biology, mathematics, history, literature, art, languages, he is well versed in all of them. Every day he spends five hours in choir for the mandatory divine offices; he conducts practices with us and the novices for three hours daily, attends to his duties as prior and receives visitors. On his shelves one can see ell-long rows of manuscripts: the history of the monastery, commentaries on the Psalms and other texts, philosophical and theological essays, and lectures on asceticism, all in Latin. When he has had time to write all these things, no one knows. It is no secret in the abbey that he prays long into the night, and yet is the first one to arrive at choir in the morning.”

  70.

  After the conviction that Jesus Christ was the incarnation of the highest power had become entrenched in Steinn’s mind, there were no other obstacles on his path; after this he considered himself a Christian. Man’s will was free to choose between the Creator and the created, the eternal and the perishable. There was no lingering doubt that the will of man inclined more toward those things that strengthened his perdition rather than his salvation, toward the visible and inconstant rather than the eternal truth behind creation, toward his yokes rather than his freedom, toward his vanity rather than God. This inclination led to what Christian moral philosophy designated with the name sin. To sin is to turn one’s desires from the Creator to the created. Jesus Christ is the way to the highest reality; no one comes to the Father except through him. As long as God exists, as long as his love has appeared to mankind in the person of Jesus Christ, then Christianity is nothing but the plain truth, the one certain healthy wisdom. Now finally Steinn appreciated the statement made by Robert Hugh Benson, which he had previously thought to be far too bold, that if God exists, then the doctrine of the Catholic Church is also one logical integrity all the way down to the font of holy water at the church door.

  If Jesus Christ established a Church, as was made clear in the apostles’ statements written in the New Testament, then no doubts crossed his mind as to what this Church was. It would never cross his mind to imagine that the churches of Luther, Calvin, the Methodists, Baptists, or any of the others among the six hundred Christian inventions of recent times could be the Church of Christ. It required neither contemplation nor cleverness to choose between churches on the day when he finally considered himself a Christian. Jesus Christ had vowed to support his Church all of its days until the end of the world, fifteen hundred years before the churches of Luther and Calvin were founded. And it was absolutely clear to Steinn that if Jesus Christ himself had founded a Church to lead mankind to the truth, it was a scandal and an outrage to imagine that that Church could teach a lie, and that other churches that were founded by men and were under the custodianship of men could teach the truth. Various offshoots of the Church did not exist: there is only one flock and one shepherd. Either all of men’s ideas concerning the Christian Church were blather and nonsense, or the Church of Christ is the unfailing envoy of the truth – ancilla veritatis.99 Other churches are rootless branches, Bedouin tents at the foot of a pyramid, raised for one night; when the tents are gone and the Bedouins are lost out in the desert somewhere the pyramid still stands. A church that hazards teaching one thing today and another tomorrow cannot be the Church of Christ, because God is unchangeable and his truth eternal. The divinity of Jesus Christ and the infallibility of the Church stand and fall together. No matter how improbable Christianity might appear, its full validity is guaranteed by the fact that the Church is founded on the magisterium granted by Christ to his apostles in these words: “Whoever hears you, hears me.” If God founded the Church, then its teachings are true. If men founded the Church, as they did, for instance, the Lutheran and Calvinist churches, then one has sufficient grounds for considering its teachings lies. They were false churches, the harlots of falsehood, which gathered together and held a conference in Stockholm during that jubilee year. They feasted for twelve days and debated bourgeois politics, but no one dared to mention Jesus Christ except in vague terms, because each delegate to the conference was firmly entrenched in his own lie about Jesus Christ. And if this flock of ravens had actually tried to discuss Jesus Christ, then their lies would have drowned each other out and the conference would have turned into a riot.

  And then there was the Church of Christ, the maidservant of the truth: the Catholic Church, the ancient Church, which gathered to Rome, its capital, its children from all the continents, all the lands of the east and west, all the corners of the world, in the same year, the jubilee year, 1925. The crowds entered through the colonnades of Saint Peter’s Square: men, women, and children, with the Apostles’ Creed in their hearts, the sign of the cross on their breasts, and their pilgrims’ scrips upon their backs, streaming into the chief cathedral of Christendom to sing the Te Deum. Here knelt poor and rich, high and low, learned and laymen, confederates united in their faith in the same Jesus, Lord and Redeemer, the true God, whom the apostles taught on the first Pentecost, born of the Virgin Mary, crucified, died, and buried, resurrected on the third day, ascended into Heaven. They prayed here. Here offerings were made. Here they wept and gave thanks. Here the living history of the living Church was being made. Around the representative of Peter, to whom Christ entrusted the keys of the Heavenly Kingdom, was unbreakable concord; certainty; undefeatable power, the power of the congregation, the power of Christ over the hearts of the people, the power of the Holy Spirit. And a poor old woman who did not have enough money to travel to Rome set off on foot from up north in Rhineland, over an entire kingdom, over mountains and wildernesses, through villages and towns, alone, hungry, and tired. She lay out under the sky at night, slept beneath the walls of churchyards. And by the time she reached Italy she had worn away her shoes and was walking barefoot. And onward continued this foreigner, in the roasting heat of summer, along the dusty highways of Italy week after week. She continued on, barefoot. She had with her one ten-aurar postcard from her parish church at home, the building that she had known to be the most glorious on Earth. And she had planned to show this postcard to the pope. The prayers of this woman beneath the eternal lamp of Saint Peter’s Basilica were more powerful and more holy and a thousand times more pleasing to God than the entire “church council” in Stockholm.

  Jesus Christ knew that written words were erasable. For this reason he never wrote any visible letters, except for once: these he wrote with his finger in the sand. He knew that palaces and temples crumble; thus he never built a house for himself, but took his lodging under the roofs of his friends or slept outside under his father’s sky. And the houses that his friends build for him, even the cathedrals themselves, are never so robust that they cannot be tumbled down in the next assault. The papal residence itself can tumble down when least expected. But he scratched his mark of ownership with invisible letters in the hearts of mankind and built a living temple in the hearts of men: “. . . and the gates of Hell will never overwhelm you,” he said. The Church that God has built for himself in the hearts of men will never fall while one man’s heart still beats. “Anima naturaliter christiana,” says the Church Father. The soul of man is Christian by nature.100 God’s Church will be slandered, disgraced, refuted, and attacked by the armies of its enemies until the last day, just as it has been until now. But it will stand. The Christian sects, which even out east in China wage war over Christ, chase after the latest fashions and teach one thing today and another tomorrow – they perish in the desert today, like the Bedouins who pitched their tents beneath the pyramids last night; they die out silently and soundlessly, the Lutherans and the Arians, Calvinists and Nestorians. And history chisels the words of Voltaire onto their bald-headed watchmen: “Rien n’est plus désagréable que d’être pendu obscurément.”101 The first Church shall be the last. The kingdom shall be overthrown; the king shall tumble from his throne, new forms of society established. Black savages shall conquer the Northern Hemisphere, build up a new civilization in those places where white savages evolved into
maturity a thousand years ago, but the words of the British master of history will be proven true: around the time that the natives of New Zealand dance on the ruins of London, yet another renaissance for the Catholic Church will be nigh.

  “Behold,” says the Lord, “I am with you through all days, even unto Doomsday.”

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  Of course Christ’s Church has for ages been subject to danger, as history tells us, but has never been defeated. Ecclesia militans, the shield-maiden of God, has been beset by swords and spears. Sometimes its worst enemies filled its highest offices; more often, however, its most bitter detractors were those who had fled from beneath its banner and wished its destruction because they knew that they lacked the strength to live according to its teachings. But at the conclusion of each trial it arose more powerful than before. It is always new, a different Church at the turn of each century, yet it is always the same. Christ not only keeps watch over it, but also in it, and that is what determines the outcome. Its core is the holiest sacrament of all, Christ’s body and blood, the supernatural nourishment of souls, found on every Christian altar.

  “I beg you, my God, to allow me to forget that my heart bears the scars of old wounds,” says Steinn Elliði. “Now I beg you to still the tongues that cry out malevolently about the wounds of your Church and deride it because it has been stabbed by swords and spears, for these are precisely the same tongues that mocked the scourged Christ. My enemies are sucklings of heresy, who hope to be vindicated at Doomsday by the fact that the treasures of the Catholic Church should have sometimes fallen into the hands of the unworthy. But they err grossly, for on Doomsday they will discover that they still have things left unswept before their own and their women’s doors.”