Preview: Sigrid Undset and Benson on "The Cross" on the Son Rise Morning Show

The third volume of Sigrid Undset's Nobel Prize Winning novel Kristen Lavransdatter is titled The Cross, so it makes sense that Matt Swaim or Anna Mitchell and I would look at what Undset appreciated in Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson's Christ in the Church. So during the October 5th edition of the Son Rise Morning Show, we'll discuss some important themes from Chapter 1 in Part IV "Failure and Triumph" in Benson's 1911 book.

In "The Theological Controversialist", chapter 8 of Sigrid Undset: Reader of Hearts, Father Nichols quotes some passages from Benson's chapter on the Cross in the above-mentioned work, which has "some palpable results for a theology of the Church, since throughout Benson's presentation of the life, death, and Resurrection of Christ he is always thinking ecclesiology . . ."

Benson discusses the Cross, and Our Lord's endurance of its agony, in response to a common argument against the authority and infallibility of the Catholic Church as the Church Christ founded and protects: her historical failures mixed with the stories of great saints; our corruption and weakness:

'Your principles are splendid,' they tell us; 'at least they sound splendid. But why are they not put into practice? The Sermon on the Mount is an exquisite ideal, but why do you not try to realise it? What is the matter with Christianity is that there are no Christians. You are always making good beginnings, but you never live up to them. You were magnificent under Nero and Diocletian; but so soon as you seemed really to have conquered the world, you allowed the world to conquer you. You saved others; yourselves you cannot save. You were unworldly so long as Nero burnt and tortured you, but you became as worldly as everyone else so soon as Constantine tolerated you. . . .' (p. 176)

Benson then comments that this mixture of success and failure matches the life of Christ told in the Gospels:

Now, this is precisely the story of the Gospels. Again and again there came moments when the success of Jesus Christ seemed almost assured. There were moments when the whole world went after Him who seemed so perfectly to meet its ideals; when the world itself would come and take Him by force and make Him a King; when the kingdoms of the world seemed laid at His feet  and yet, somehow or another, it all came to nothing. His whole life on earth was a kind of crescendo of popularity, up to the last moment; and then, in an instant, it all crumbled down again to nothing. Palm Sunday immediately preceded Good Friday. . . .

Now, all this is very largely true. We may regard the progress of Christ in the Gospels and in the Church as a triumph which fails, or as a failure which triumphs. (p. 177)

At the center of that triumphant failure/failed triumph is the suffering of the Cross. As Benson notes, many thinkers have tried to find a way out of this problem, "The Problem of Pain", but he suggests that "it is worth while to point out the solution that Jesus Christ offers. His solution of suffering is to suffer." (p. 179) He suffers out of love, Benson argues, and anyone who loves, suffers:

Real love seeks not to possess, but to be possessed ; not, so to speak, to devour the beloved, to satisfy self with the beloved, but the exact contrary — to be devoured and to satisfy. (That is why the Love of God, naturally greater than human love, insists upon the Sacrament of the altar.) Real love, then, is a continual emptying and slaying of self, a continual immolation of self on the altar of the beloved. This is simply a commonplace of human experience, described by every poet and artist since the world began. It is exactly this that distinguishes it from its caricature — its antichrist — from lust or liking. Lust and liking desire to acquire and to win; love to be acquired and to be won. (p. 184)

As Benson concludes, "Pain and failure must always be elements in the life of the Church."

For his part, in his study of Undset, Nichols comments that "the Cross and its images are prominent in her work. Brother Edvin tells Kristen, "I hold on to the Cross with all my strength--one must cling to it like a kitten hanging on to a plank when it falls into the sea." (p. 158)

Certainly the Cross is prominent in Undset's life too: a failed marriage, two disabled children in her care, her son Ander's death in 1940, exile from her homeland during World War II, the despoilation of her home, requisitioned by the Wehrmacht, illness, etc. Nichols concludes that the heart of her faith was the Cross: she "found in the Cross of Christ--seen as the glorious Cross, and thus with its inherent reference to the Resurrection--the answer to the questions of existence . . .",  (p. 177) so no wonder she read and translated Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson's Christ in the Church.