The Vision, Dante and Beatrice Ary Scheffer (1795–1858) Wolverhampton Art Gallery
Women may appear strange to those who do not know them. Just as with men, women like to socialise, some do this with a greater sense of urgency than others. For instance they like to take many photos of themselves and post them on social media. Others prefer solitude, they are quiet and reserved.
In much the same way, the Soul or Anima will be confusing or be unrelatable to those who are unfamiliar with stillness. In an article from a few years ago, Cologero highlights the aim of meditation which is to “bring the I consciousness into the lower parts of being … [where] one will find other beings, i.e., different “I’s” or different personalities, each claiming to be the true I.” Discovering more about oneself can be exciting, as can finding out more about women, it depends on what path you want to take.
Let us consider a suggestion and a warning from a holy man of God:
A most excellent means of keeping ourselves pure, is to lay open all our thoughts, as soon as possible, to our confessor with the greatest sincerity, and keep nothing hidden in ourselves.
When sensual thoughts come into the mind, we ought immediately to make use of our minds, and fix them instantaneously upon something or other, no matter what.
St. Philip Neri
Saint Philip is here talking about the passions and their unnerving ability to lead us down paths we do not wish to go down. Through meditation we can unify the Self with the Soul or Anima so that our passions do not control us. By revealing our thoughts, even if it is painful to do so, we can gain knowledge of the Self. This is essentially what C. J. Jung describes in his Two Essays on Analytical Psychology.*
The Diurnal and the Nocturnal
Because history—as, moreover, the life of the individual —is “worked” by day and by night. It has a diurnal aspect and a nocturnal aspect. The former is exoteric, whilst the latter is esoteric. The silence and obscurity of the night is always full of events in preparation — and all that which is unconscious or superconscious in the human being belongs to the domain of “night”. This is the magical side of history, the side of magical deeds and works acting behind the facade of history “by day”.
Valentin Tomberg, Letter V, The Pope
As history repeats itself so do our dreams. I have had some interesting dreams recently. I will detail them as events that actually happened. Meeting someone new is a unique opportunity to reflect on oneself, reflecting on dreams can also be fruitful. As Tomberg affirms, “The silence and obscurity of the night is always full of events in preparation.” I wrote about my dreams before; I found the process to be helpful, reflective and enjoyable.
In the first dream I distinctly remember a sensation of touch as if the woman before me, who was standing in the room, was touching my arm. She was naked, smiling, and somewhat familiar – perhaps it was a memory or a film I had watched – Ex Machina comes to mind.
Then, last night, I again met someone who I thought I had met before. It is probably just my subconscious using images from my day to day life. However the way in which I met them was curious. I was in a beautiful house with multiple rooms. Each room was lavishly fitted and appointed. I was left to my own devices to explore, though meeting “the parents” was somewhat awkward.
There was a definite sense that the mansion was mine for the taking, being linked as it were, to the woman in the dream. This then could represent the extent of my existence and the woman as a potential aspect of my soul. Compounding this was the inclusion of another woman who appeared later, different from the first, but similarly familiar. While intimate with the first the second was more intimate, not much later, I woke up.
So there are three women, each distinct, from the first to the last becoming progressively more intimate; from a touch, to kisses, to embracing. When considering my life so far it seems to me that the physically pales in comparison to the spiritual and emotional effects of union with a woman, as strange as that might seem to some readers.
Some questions arise:
How does one go from a path of courtly love, in which the Knight and his Lady remain apart, often not meeting again, to the Catholic position on marriage, of which the principle goal is to get one’s spouse to Heaven?
What is meant by the choice between Good and Evil in the Soul? Eve came from Adam, and through her obedience to the Serpent rather than God turned Adam from God to the Earth. How does one undo that wrong and return to God?
A good place to start – for meditative insight – would be with Dante’s Comedia, where the Blessed Virgin Mary is exalted as the new Eve, where we find Beatrice and Saint Lucy, and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux too. Furthermore, his initiation into the Fedeli d’Amore, and the fruits thereof cannot be left untouched. Fortuitously a Dante reading group has just started…
*The ultimate synthesis – speaking from the male point of view – is the integration of the Anima archetype, The archetypes are inborn in the psychic makeup, so the Anima is the image of the woman in the man. Prior to conscious awareness of the Anima, it is a dark force, erupting into awareness as unexplained moods and other ways.
Plato, “that great priest” as Meister Eckhart calls him[1], in Chapter Seven of his Republic writes:
“[T]hose whose hearts are fixed on the true being of each thing are to be called philosophers[.]”
How does one fix oneself on ‘true being’ rather than opinion? How does one become a philosopher?
Plato answers:
“[A] man must combine in his nature good memory, readiness to learn, breadth of vision and grace, and be a friend of truth, justice, courage, and self-control[.]”
To be a philosopher is to be a lover of wisdom. To rule the inner state, we need the above values just as much as we would if we were governing the exterior state. Julius Evola, in Revolt Against the Modern World, explains how during the Middle Ages knights would embody values of honour, truth, courage, and loyalty. He goes further comparing the cult of truth to which the knights’ oath was “In the name of God, who does not lie!” to the Aryan cult of truth.[2] Suffice to say this fact among others points to the Middle Ages as the last Traditional Aryan civilisation closest to us in time and space. Now there are different paths to enlightenment, that of the knight is different from that of the sage, but what we see here in both Plato and Evola is a unity of purpose. While both can be read as referring to what Evola says is ‘a superterritorial and supernational community’ beholden to the values previously mentioned and a ‘spiritual authority of a universal type’ or ‘the Empire’ for short, they are also speaking of an interior disposition. We see this quite clearly in the Arthurian epics of the age, in which men of worth proved themselves in daring quests which symbolise an ascension to God through stages.[3]
The Lady of the Lake
“[T]he earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while the spirit of God swept over the face of the waters.” ~ Genesis 1:2[4]
In the beginning there was nothing or rather nonbeing. This became being by a movement of the spirit of God. Meister Eckhart explains:
“God works beyond being, in breadth, where He can move, and He works in nonbeing: before there was being, God was working: He wrought being where no being was. Masters of little subtlety say God is pure being. He is as high above being as the highest angel is above a midge. I would be as wrong to call God a being as if I were to call the sun pale or black. God is neither this nor that. And one master says, ‘Whoever thinks he has known God, if he has known anything, it was not God he knew.’ But when I have said God is not a being and is above being, I have not thereby denied Him being: rather I have exalted it in Him. If I get copper in gold, it is there and it is there in a nobler mode than it is in itself. St. Augustine says, ‘God is wise without wisdom, good without goodness, powerful without power.’”[5]
And as Fra Girolamo Savonarola states:
“It is, likewise, evident that God is not a complex Being, but Pure Act and Simple Substance; for every complex being depends on others, and composite bodies depend on those that are simple. Since, therefore, God is the First Cause, independent of all others, and the one on whom all things depend, He cannot be a complex Being, but must be Simple Act. Again, were He a complex Substance, He could not be the First Supreme Being in the universe; for complex bodies do not precede their parts, but result from them; and the union of these parts could not take place, had not some first cause preceded them. We must conclude, therefore, that God is Simple Substance and Pure Act.”[6]
It is this pureness of action we wish to imitate. To be the copper elevated by the gold. To actualise the potential within ourselves. Returning to the analogy of water, it is in addition to the spirit a powerful indicator for our redemption. Previously I said that “the water is the action in which we are still and receptive to the Divine Will” as Valentin Tomberg likens the stillness to a mirror-like lake without ripple mirror. How can one not think here of the Lady of the Lake bringing forth the sword from the depths? It is when we are still and silent that we receive the spiritual weapons to defeat our foes. The Lady of the Lake doubles as Lady Wisdom or Philosophy who visits Saint Boethius in prison, who as Beatrice prepares Dante on his journey to Paradise, and became his guide to the highest realms of Heaven, who we venerate in the Blessed Virgin as man’s yearning for the feminine divine as C. G. Jung puts it in his Answer to Job.[7]
The Knight of the Swan
The story of the Knight of the Swan, or Swan Knight, is a medieval tale about a mysterious rescuer who comes in a swan-drawn boat to defend a damsel, his only condition being that he must never be asked his name. His name must not be known for that would be to know his essence and thus disarm him. The earliest versions (preserved in Dolopathos) do not provide specific identity to this knight, but the Old French Crusade cycle of chansons de geste adapted it to make the Swan Knight (Le Chevalier au Cigne, first version around 1192) the legendary ancestor of Godfrey of Bouillon.[8] Who, no doubt in his position as Protector of the Holy Sepulchre, Dante sees, together with Roland, in the Heaven of Mars with the other “warriors of the faith”.
Evola claims the Knight of the Swan to be a Hyperborean, one who like the Arthurian Knights committed to their quest for the Grail, is part of a ‘heavenly order of knights’.[9] Hyperborea in other words, while it might or might not have been an actual place is symbolic of the Primordial State.[10] So while we might not be able to – or wish to – return to the icy white vastness of the far northern part of the known world, we can say with Friedrich Nietzsche that:
“We are Hyperboreans; we know very well how far off we live. “Neither by land nor by sea will you find the way to the Hyperboreans” … Beyond the north, ice, and death — our life, our happiness. We have discovered happiness, we know the way, we have found the exit out of the labyrinth of thousands of years. Who else has found it? Modern man perhaps? “I have got lost; I am everything that has got lost,” sighs modern man.
This modernity was our sickness: lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous uncleanliness of the modern Yes and No. This tolerance and largeur of the heart, which “forgives” all because it “understands” all, is sirocco for us. Rather live in the ice than among modern virtues and other south winds!
We were intrepid enough, we spared neither ourselves nor others; but for a long time we did not know where to turn with our intrepidity. We became gloomy, we were called fatalists. Our fatum — the abundance, the tension, the damming of strength. We thirsted for lightning and deeds and were most remote from the happiness of the weakling, “resignation.” In our atmosphere was a thunderstorm; the nature we are became dark — for we saw no way. Formula for our happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.”[11]
To return to the Knight of the Swan, whose origins are quite interesting, we find the earliest mention included in Johannes de Alta Silva’s Dolopathos sive de Rege et Septem Sapientibus (ca. 1190), a Latin version of the Seven Sages of Rome. This latter is a cycle of stories of Sanskrit, Persian or Hebrew origins. What is certain is that it is of Eastern origin, possibly Indian, so it would be fitting if it was of Aryan generation. The story is as follows:
A nameless young lord becomes lost in the hunt for a white stag and wanders into an enchanted forest where he encounters a mysterious woman (clearly a swan maiden or fairy) in the act of bathing, while clutching a gold necklace. They fall instantly for each other and consummate their love. The young lord brings her to his castle, and the maiden (just as she has foretold) gives birth to a septuplet, six boys and a girl, with golden chains about their necks. But her evil mother-in-law swaps the newborn with seven puppies.
The servant with orders to kill the children in the forest just abandons them under a tree. The young lord is told by his wicked mother that his bride gave birth to a litter of pups, and he punishes her by burying her up to the neck for seven years. Sometime later, the young lord while hunting encounters the children in the forest, and the wicked mother’s lie starts to unravel. The servant is sent out to search them and find the boys bathing in the form of swans, with their sister guarding their gold chains. The servant steals the boys’ chains, preventing them from changing back to human form, and the chains are taken to a goldsmith to be melted down to make a goblet. The swan-boys land in the young lord’s pond, and their sister, who can still transform back and forth into human shape by the magic of her chain, goes to the castle to obtain bread to her brothers. Eventually the young lord asks her story, so the truth comes out. The goldsmith was actually unable to melt down the chains and had kept them for himself. These are now restored back to the six boys, and they regain their powers, except one, whose chain the smith had damaged in the attempt. So, he alone is stuck in swan form.
The work goes on to obliquely hint that this is the swan in the Swan Knight tale, more precisely, that this was the swan “quod cathena aurea militem in navicula trahat armatum (that tugged by a gold chain an armed knight in a boat).”[12] This last part about the boy who remains a swan brings to mind Saint Hugh of Lincoln and his loyal swan.
Saint Hugh of Lincoln
Hugh of Lincoln (c. 1135-1140 – 16 November 1200), also known as Hugh of Avalon, was a French noble, Benedictine and Carthusian monk, bishop of Lincoln in the Kingdom of England, and Catholic saint. At the time of the Reformation, he was the best-known English saint after Thomas Becket. His feast is observed by Catholics on 16 November. Avalon – coincidental in name with the mysterious realm where King Arthur’s sword Excalibur was forged and later where Arthur was taken to recover from being gravely wounded at the Battle of Camlann – is a small village in eastern France where Hugh was born. Like so many of the clergy at this time he was a nobleman. This is important when we consider saints like Bernard who embodied the ideals of the Knights of the Grail and the Templars. Hugh, as a Carthusian, can be placed among their ranks. The focus of Carthusian life is contemplation. To this end there is an emphasis on solitude and silence. Hence the similarity with the stillness and silence of the lake metaphor above.
Hugh was consecrated Bishop of Lincoln on 21 September 1186 at Westminster. Almost immediately he established his independence of the King, excommunicating a royal forester and refusing to seat one of Henry’s courtly nominees as a prebendary of Lincoln; he softened the king’s anger by his diplomatic address and tactful charm. After the excommunications, he came upon the king hunting and was greeted with dour silence. He waited several minutes and the king called for a needle to sew up a leather bandage on his finger. Eventually Hugh said, with gentle mockery, “How much you remind me of your cousins of Falaise” (where William I’s mother Herleva, a tanner’s daughter, had come from). At this Henry just burst out laughing and was reconciled. As a bishop, he was exemplary, constantly in residence or travelling within his diocese, generous with his charity, scrupulous in the appointments he made. He raised the quality of education at the cathedral school. Hugh was also prominent in trying to protect the Jews, great numbers of whom lived in Lincoln, in the persecution they suffered at the beginning of Richard I’s reign, and he put down popular violence against them—as later occurred following the death of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln—in several places.
Hugh’s primary emblem is a white swan, in reference to the story of the swan of Stow which had a deep and lasting friendship with the saint, even guarding him while he slept. While Hugh loved all the animals in the monastery[13] gardens, it was this wild swan that would eat from his hand and follow him about and would attack anyone else who came near Hugh. The swan followed him and was his constant companion while he was at Lincoln.
I give you Saint Hugh of Lincoln, a true Swan Knight, a man to whom you could entrust the state.
[8] 18 September 1060 – 18 July 1100) was a French nobleman and one of the pre-eminent leaders of the First Crusade. He was the first ruler of the Kingdom of Jerusalem from 1099 to 1100. He apparently avoided using the title of king, choosing instead that of princeps. Older scholarship is more fond of another title, that of “advocatus (defender, protector) of the Holy Sepulchre”.
On the Feast of Saint Joseph in the Year of St. Joseph it would be apt to discuss Consecration to the eponymous saint and to expand on what others have written.
The Consecrated Knight
Consecration to St. Joseph, as outlined by Fr. Donald H. Calloway, MIC involves reading his book of the same name and praying the Litany of St. Joseph after each reading. This takes place over thirty-three days to finish on a suitable feast day – the 19th March, the Feast of St. Joseph, being ideal. You might ask, “what is the point of this?” Well, getting to know St. Joseph is one way of understanding what it means to be a Just Man.[1] We read in Proverbs, “For a just man shall fall seven times and shall rise again: but the wicked shall fall down into evil.”[2] Did not St. Joseph fall seven times and rise again seven times?[3] For Fr. Calloway this means our goal should be to imitate St. Joseph in all his ways; spending thirty plus years in perpetual adoration of Christ and taking Mary into his home and heart.
Fr. Calloway does a good job of explaining the exoteric teaching on St. joseph as can be seen from his book, yet he leaves the esoteric teaching out. What does this mean? He rightly asserts, St. Joseph is a model of virtue and points out Church teaching through the Saints, Doctors and Fathers to this effect. For example, after the Resurrection of Christ when, on the first Easter Sunday, the Saints and the Just who Christ has freed from the Limbo of the Fathers enter Jerusalem – an allegory for the Heavenly City and the ascent of the I, St. Joseph was among them.[4] Exoterically this is a great honour to St. Joseph and only possible for one who was not denied any gift from God. Esoterically this means St. Joseph achieved the Primordial State, “In that state, there is no childhood, old age, disease, or infirmity. The body is incorruptible and is finer and lighter.” In other words, this is the restoration of our nature to its original state.
How did St. Joseph do this? Saint Jerome writes:
“Saint Joseph possessed all the virtues in a perfect degree.”
To possess all the virtues in this way, St. Joseph’s will must have been completely unified, and for the will to be unified it must be pure. A pure and thus unified will is a free will detached from external influences. The Church teaches, one must be detached from sin in order to gain a plenary indulgence otherwise it will only be partial. Another way of putting it is, demonic forces that are always around us are trying to drag us down to a lower level of being. Saint Gregory of Nyssa explains:
“The soulless or irrational beings are led by an external will. If a rational and thinking nature discards freedom [choosing freely the object desired], it also loses the right for thinking.”
It is interesting to note that one of St. Joseph’s titles is the Terror of Demons. Let us pray he protects us from the diabolic which is to say negative or disintegrating thoughts.
The Grail Quest
Likewise, Fr. Calloway misses the connection between St. Joseph and the Grail Quest. He contends that there was no need for the Knights of Arthur and those who emulated them to seek after the Grail, which he justly sees as the Chalice of Salvation, as it was available to that at Holy Mass. This is of course true in the sense that exoterically the chalice at Mass contains the Most Precious Blood of Our Lord. However, he misses the esoteric teaching contained within this allegorical legend: The Quest for the Grail is an Ascent to God as shown by the trials of the knights Lancelot, Percival, and most of all Galahad. The latter, like St. Joseph, died for the love of God and was assumed into Heaven. Similarly, like St. Joseph, Galahad was pure of heart, which means he had perfect knowledge of himself.[5] Moreover, like St. Joseph but unlike Lancelot, he was chaste – not consummating himself with a woman. So, in fact St. Joseph is very much akin to a Knight of the Grail, one who guarded the Bread from Heaven, the source of life, and was justly rewarded.[6]
Prayer to Saint Joseph
To thee, O Blessed Joseph, we have recourse in our tribulations, and while imploring the aid of thy most holy Spouse, we confidently invoke thy patronage also.
By that love which united thee to the Immaculate Virgin, Mother of God, and by the fatherly affection with which thou didst embrace the Infant Jesus, we humbly beseech thee graciously to regard the inheritance which Jesus Christ purchased with His Blood and to help us in our necessities, by thy powerful intercession.
Protect, O most provident Guardian of the Holy Family, the chosen children of Jesus Christ; ward off from us, O most loving Father, all taint of error and corruption; graciously assist us from Heaven, O most power protector, in our struggle with the powers of darkness; and as thou didst once rescue the Child Jesus from imminent peril to His life, so now defend the Holy Church of God from the snares of her enemies and from all adversity.
Shield each one of us with thy unceasing patronage that, imitating thy example and sported by thy aid, we may be enabled to live a good life, die a holy death, and secure everlasting happiness in Heaven.
[4] Among the Fathers of the Church it is held, no gift bestowed on any of the other saints, except of course Our Lady, was denied to St. Joseph. Ergo, Our Blessed Lord would not have forgotten to leave St. Joseph in Limbo, where he would have gone on his death, as we have seen, no gift bestowed on any of the other saints was denied him.
[5] As we have shown elsewhere this is eminently necessary.
[6] We could say he had ascended through the spheres to the Heavenly Fatherland and beheld the Beatific Vison as Dante did.
Whitsun has a muddled etymology. Some say it is to do with catechumens who came dressed in white garments, others attest to a disambiguation from the word ‘wit’ as in wisdom that the Holy Ghost does give to us on that day. Until the Conquest the day was known as Pentecoste[1], when white (hwitte) began to be confused with wit or understanding.[2] In fact in England the vestments were traditionally white not red at this great feast. Whitsuntide continues the joy of the coming of the Holy Spirit for another week (until 7th June this year). Unfortunately, many of our traditions are lost or obscured, including activities such as church processions sometimes known as ‘Whit-walks’, women and girls attending Whit-Sunday Mass in immaculate white garments, even Morris dancing. But enough of that … Whitsun is still regarded as the ‘Birth of the Church’ and the start of Summer – a turning towards the Sun as it bathes the green grassed fields in light of burnished gold.
The Holy Spirit is Wisdom and when He descends, He gives wisdom to those ready to receive it. Our Lord says to Nicodemus, “Spiritus ubi vult spirat, et vocem ejus audis, sed nescis unde veniat, aut quo vadat: sic est omnis qui natus est ex spiritu.” (“The Spirit breatheth where he will; and thou hearest his voice, but thou knowest not whence he cometh, and whither he goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.”)[3] We do not know from where the Spirit will come but we can learn to know. It is to the art of learning the art of learning we must turn. There are many different schools within the art of learning but a masterly school is the Major Arcana of the Tarot. A Christian Hermeticist might turn to that today as others have followed different paths in the past. A few examples should suffice though not exhaustive we could include, Dante, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bernard, the Templars, the Grail Legend, the Romance of the Rose (and other Medieval Romances).[4] In the last century, Valentin Tomberg and Hans Urs von Balthasar could be considered to be of this tradition. Likewise, when we are joined with two or three others there we find, in our midst, the Holy Spirit. It is the cultivation of ourselves with and within this tradition of learning and prayer that we make room for the Holy Spirit.
This is the Church of John. I sit here thinking of the frank question Our Lord put to St. Peter when he questioned his relationship with St. John; “What is it to you?” Surely, it is that which matters most.
The Church of St. Peter stands for the hierarchy of the Church – and the two are meant to be one in harmony with each other. For a while now it has not been clear if the exoteric church still stands as it did. It is certainly there. One can see the prelates and the buildings yet it is becoming increasing hard to distinguish them from the malaise around them, like shadows in the glomming. With the end of the visible symbol of the Papacy, as it slides into virtual oblivion competing against the unending proliferation of ‘information’, comes the hope that the beloved disciple who leaned on Our Lord’s breast – the Church of John – will succeed it. This was very much visible in around the middle of the last century and has only continued apace since then. It is interesting to contrast the freedom of the Spirit or rather the freedom granted by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost with the decline of one church and the rise of another in relation to the current situation which has accelerated the ‘digitisation’ of the Church. When we consider the notion of ‘two churches’ of hierarchy and mysticism in view of the former statement it points out an opportunity. If we ask ourselves, what is the mission of a disciple of Christ today? A wise man answers; to conserve the communal soul of religion, science and art.[5] Bearing this in mind, ought we not be joyous about what is before us? We are charged as it were with this freedom to store within ourselves a vital spark of life, a ray of sunshine, to share in the dark places of the world.
[1] From the Greek word ‘Pentekostos’, meaning ’50’, the feast being celebrated on the seventh Sunday after Easter, marking 50 days since the final Sabbath of Passover.
[2] Skeat, Walter William (1898) [1882]. An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (3rd ed.). Clarendon Press. p. 708. the Holy Ghost, whom thou didst send on Whit-sunday; O. Eng. Homilies, i. 209, 1. 16.
[4] It is interesting also to note the immediate intellectual link from St. John to Clement of Alexandria and then on to Maximos the Confessor; St John the Theologian ⇒ Irenaeus ⇒ Justin Martyr ⇒ Clement of Alexandria ⇒ Origen ⇒ Gregory of Nyssa ⇒ Maximos the Confessor.
I first encountered the Venerable Bede at school. From an early age I enjoyed wandering through the histories of bygone ages as if they were tales told to me by a wise old man content with his life and comfortable in his locality. Looking back, I think the Venerable Bede embodied this for me, teaching me as my grandad had done. It was through Bede’s The Ecclesiastical history of the English People that the world in which Bede lived became apparent. The static Bede, who never went more than thirty miles from his monastery in Jarrow in his entire life, chronicled the early years of Christianity in the British Isles. This stretched from the marginalisation of Christianity after the Romans had left, to the success of ‘Hibernian Christianity’; to the coming of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes; and to the return of ‘Roman Christianity’ through Pope St. Gregory the Great’s desire to see the Provinces of Britain reclaimed for the Empire. There is a tale told about Gregory concerning the Anglii (Angles) that is worth repeating here. While wandering through the markets of Rome he enquired after two young blond-haired blue-eyed children. When he learned that they were Anglii he replied with characteristic wit “Non Angli, sed angeli”, meaning “Not Angles, but angels”.[1]
Bede put me in touch with the tradition of the English that comes down to us from our ancestors to the present day. What a marvellous thought to behold! We see this in The 13th Warrior, a film about a Muslim scholar and the Kievan Rus (based on an historic account) when they say together:
“Lo there do I see my father; Lo there do I see my mother and my sisters and my brothers; Lo there do I see the line of my people, back to the beginning. Lo, they do call to me, they bid me take my place among them, in the halls of Valhalla, where the brave may live forever.”
And this is embodied for us Christians in the Apostolic Succession. To be not ashamed of who we are is to love our pagan past all the while steadfast in our affirmation the Christian truth. (Although I can appreciate that this must have been quite difficult for Bede and his contemporaries given the ever-present threat of heathen invasion!)
Bede is a Doctor of the Church and the patron saint of Historians. His influential writings and his tutelage of his pupil Archbishop Egbert of York had a profound effect at home and abroad. The aforementioned prelate founded a school at York and there in turn tutored Blessed Alcuin. Thus was the learning of Bede transmitted to the rest of Europe when Alcuin became master of Blessed Charlemagne’s palace school at Aachen.[2] As a historian looking at the past with renewed spiritual awareness it is delightful to see the sliver link of the Holy Spirit at work between these great men.
In Dante’s Divine Comedy, Bede is the only Englishman in Paradise. That should tell you something of what Italians think of the English! Joking aside, this choice shows how highly the author of the seminal text of the Middle Ages thought of Bede.
Prayer of St. Bede
Open our hearts, O Lord, and enlightened us by the grace of thy Holy Spirit, that we may seek what is well-pleasing to thy will; and so order our doings after thy commandments, that we may be found meet to enter into thine unending joys; through Jesus Christ Our Lord. Amen.
[1] Bede the Venerable, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People).
What Matters Most 