Sublime

key issue of suffering is loss of meaning.

Tarsicius van Bavel, in a lucid digest of Augustine’s teaching on this topic,54 cites Sermon 341 as a focal text: here Augustine says that ‘Christ’ has three meanings, referring to the eternal and pre-existent Word, to the incarnate figure of the redeemer and mediator, and to the ‘whole Christ’, head and body.

followed by a collection of medieval writings on memory by Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Hugh of St. Victor, and Peter of Ravenna.

Saint Benedict’s rule was designed with “a little strictness in order to amend faults and to safeguard love.” His rule is also famous for its gentleness and flexibility. He insisted that “in drawing up its regulations, we hope to set down nothing harsh, nothing burdensome.”7

Whether consoling their children when they awoke from nightmares, minding the thresholds at birth, illness, and death, or tending to the visionary states accompanying big life transitions, women have always been at the centre of magic-making.

Out of the chasm of hell—the middle space—we are pulled. We are pulled into the mystery of this miraculous rescue, whereby our new life will not be divorced from the death of godforsakenness. Instead, it will bear the marks of death. In Heart of the World, Balthasar describes this new life: “All of your past is like a dream which one can no longer

St Dunstan was a marvellous person and very much like you—mad about learning, terribly stiff and stern and scowly, and an absolute wizard at withstanding temptation. Do you know that the Devil once came to tempt him in the form of a fascinating woman, and he caught her nose in his goldsmith’s tongs and gave it a terrible twist?”

witchcraft, which included a wide range of activities such as midwifery, herbalism, divination, and the healing arts.

The exaltation of the condemned Jesus is presented by the disciples not as threat but as promise and hope.