Edna or the Song of Songs MYSTICAL THEOLOGY

Rabbi Akiba said: `Had the Torah not been given, the Song of Songs would have sufficed to guide the world.'

When I innocently and joyfully conveyed to Sister Edna that I was planning to write about her, the vehemence of her response took me utterly by surprise. She claimed that she would be ruined with her community, a closed community, which would feel that their trust in giving her permission to pursue her work on the Song of Songs had been betrayed. She wrote to me, `What we are all committed to is a life of prayer in hiddenness. Against that I count my work on the Song as nothing'. And since then my love of her and my sense of the truth have been in deep travail.

My more or less immediate response was to point out to Edna that she represents to me the St Bernard of my Paradiso. In Dante's Divine Comedy St Bernard is to be found at a higher terrace in Paradise than St Thomas Aquinas; for, to Dante, St Bernard expresses the love of God, while St Thomas expresses the knowledge of God. St Bernard also wrote a commentary on the Song of Songs in the form of eighty-six sermons. The symbolic analogy with Edna seems precise; while her whole life-story closely parallels and modernises the dilemmas and the goodness of St Augustine. It was the desire to communicate her radiant goodness that gave birth to this whole work in which I am engaged.

Edna replied to my reference to St Bernard with alacrity: `If I am your St Bernard that should make this easy. Bernard was really tough. Do you know the story of how, when he was preaching on one occasion, a blackbird flew into his face and, taking it by its wings, he tore it in two, commenting, "that is the last time you will fly in the face of God's word"?'

The violence of this threat to me opens up a surprisingly fruitful didactic.

In his De Laudibus Virginis Matris (On the Praise of the Virgin Mother, Migne Patrologia, vol. clxxxii, col. 56), St Bernard described the sacramental relation of the visible to the invisible world: `full of supernal mysteries, abounding each in its special sweetness, if the eye that beholds be attentive'. This applies to the mystery of the blackbird as well, to the mystery of Edna's hiddenness, and to the mystery of St Bernard.

St Bernard was the most adamant and powerful man: he began preaching the Second Crusade in the Cathedral at Vezelay on Palm Sunday 1146; he silenced Abelard's anticipation of the rediscovery of Aristotelian logic; he opposed (unsuccessfully) Suger's plans for the first Gothic Cathedral, at St Denis, north of Paris, when Suger, who had accompanied the King, Louis VII, to Vezelay to hear St Bernard preach the Crusade, returned inspired more by the potentialities of Vezelay's architectural form for an urban and regal setting than by the call for the Crusade.

Bernard's combination of political power and spiritual humbleness, his combination even of the pride of preaching and the solitary devastation of prayer, are not mutually reproducing dialectical contraries that, in a superficially wise way, might be referred to a soul out of touch with its different strata. Let us leave it for the moment as the mystery of Bernard's visibility and his hiddenness.

How could St Bernard, the Mellifluous Doctor, be sure though, how can we know, whether it is not the blackbird who, with special sweetness, sings the Word of God?

I first met Sister Edna when waiting outside the Oxford Playhouse for a coach arranged for Jonathan Webber's first Frank Green lecture on `The Future of Auschwitz', which was taking place late one afternoon in January 1992 at Yarnton Manor, the sixteenth-century manor house currently occupied by the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies. Edna cut a striking figure and presence. Acknowledged by many people as they arrived, she strode from person to person, lofty in height, wearing a habit that could have come straight out of a Counter-Reformation painting: thick woollen material in Vandyke brown, swirling to the ground, surmounted by a white coif covering the hair and ears, the bleached rope around the waist with the piece hanging towards the knees bearing the three widely spaced prominent knots symbolising the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.

I sat next to Edna on the bus and told her I had just published a book on Kierkegaard (The Broken Middle). She had read Kierkegaard's aesthetic and religious authorship. From the beginning I liked Edna's combination of keen intellectual presence and unfathomable piety: she relishes expressing unfashionable opinions as dogmatic truths, and, if challenged, will reason out her position without inhibition.

From the first we had Kierkegaard between us. Now, Love's Work is a profoundly Kierkegaardian work: it allows one to pass unnoticed. It deploys sensual, intellectual and literary eros, companions of pain, passion and plain curiosity, in order to pass beyond the preoccupation with endless loss to the silence of grace. Miss Marple is the code-name for this movement from loss to grace: Miss Marple is both exactly what she appears to be — a fiery, nosy, old lady — and something transcendent, someone who notices everything yet is not noticed herself. As a result she is not a `person' in the psychological sense: she has no individual pathos, no desire to win the affection of others in order to assuage her own difficulty. She represents Nemesis — justice. Transcendentally, she is a `person' in Polanyi's definition: `To be a person is to be in the image of another Truth and to receive it and grow into it.' This Truth is the unpredictable outcome of the passion and pain of the characters in each murder mystery.

Miss Marple is what Kierkegaard calls a knight of faith, as distinct from what we mostly are most of the time — knights of resignation. The knight of resignation is recognisable: she cherishes her misfortunes, remaining loyal and dedicated to the mists of memories. She clearly lives companioned by ghosts: family, friends, loves and lovers. The knight of faith, by contrast, moves behind this all-too-human stoicism: she lets her lost ones go, whether injured or injurious, and turns her attention to the astonishing nature of what is normally expected until she becomes both invisible, hidden, and quite ordinarily visible.

As the sublime in the pedestrian, the knight of faith simply appears as whatever she is: she returns to her vocation beyond the endless anxiety of the test of salvation.

On the bus Edna told me in turn about her work in Rabbinics: how she had spent two years studying Hebrew and Talmud at the Leo Baeck Reform Seminary in London. I understood then that Edna and I had something else profoundly in common: a refusal to adopt or affirm the opposition between law and love which has so marred the development of Christian theology. By characterising Judaism as the Pharisiacal religion of law and claiming a monopoly on the liturgical, pastoral and doctrinal notion of love, Christianity not only maligns Judaism but damages itself. For both...