Bishop Erik Varden of Norway lives in the past. As a Trappist monk and former abbot, he follows an ancient rule and held a position of leadership in an order with roots stretching back a millennium. He studies dead languages and popularizes the third- and fourth-century teachings of the Desert Fathers. In his writing, he makes casual reference to obscure black and white films, old operas, poems, and fairy tales. And yet, at a recent speaking engagement, this Bishop of Trondheim, Norway – a medium-sized city six hours’ drive from Oslo – was introduced as “a man who knows what time it is.”
As the subtitle of his recently published essay collection, Towards Dawn, suggests, now is a time for hope, a stance not easily supported by the headlines. There are some hopeful signs in America, France, and the United Kingdom of a spiritual revival stirring, and in Varden’s native Norway, where belief in God is a minority position, the small Catholic population is increasing. But these glimpses of dawn come after decades of secularization, disaffiliation, and disestablishment in Norway and around the world. Twenty years have not passed since Charles Taylor published A Secular Age, and lawmakers daily challenge believers’ deepest convictions. But for Varden, terms such as “post-Christian” are incoherent, they make “no sense” theologically, for “[Christ] carries constitutionally the freshness of morning dew. Christianity is of the dawn.”
Towards Dawn is a short book, comprised of ten essays. The first is the most programmatic, including Varden’s model for engagement with culture. The most memorable is the third, which features Varden’s discussion of yoga. He relays the story of a Belgian monk and medievalist who took up, then popularized, what came to be known as “Christian yoga.” The monk recovered medieval debates over the relationship between the body and soul and put the Christian theological tradition into conversation with the rising tide of interest in Eastern religions. Varden jumps off from this moment to draw out lost physical manifestations of Christian practice: bodily ascesis, fasting, the regulation of appetites. From there comes the principle that “the state of one’s body is not indifferent to the state of one’s soul.”
Varden plays the English language like an instrument, and his essays are too individually rich to sort into a narrative or rhetorical arc. They are not sociological, although he is concerned with trends, especially among the young, nor are they strictly theological, although they are dense with theology. Varden’s essays feel more spiritual, concerning the spirit of Christian hope, defined unconventionally as the “confidence that everything, even suffering, disappointment, and injustice, can be purposeful.” Through hope, one moves toward Christ, light, truth, and dawn. His method is to take an unexpected subject – like a Holocaust memoir or DEI policies – and use it as a hermeneutic key to unlock his intended object. In one of his previous books, he used such “keys” as Wagner’s Triston and Isolde and the apocryphal The Book of the Cave of Treasures to get at the true meaning of chastity. Varden’s use of juxtaposition would wear thin were he not so earnest. One gets the sense that an essay stripped of poetry and allusion would be inauthentic to the man.