2026/05/23 A Church in Norway
A happy Whitsun all. I believe this is my longest article to date.
A month and a bit ago, I went travelling in Norway. With a couple of good friends, we scaled some mountains - well, perhaps large hills, depends how pernickety you may be - in the cold and snow, and enjoyed the endless sherbet-dusted vistas. The snow was beautiful. Never had I been somewhere where all I could see was snow; in merry old England, the weather is not so bipolar so as to give feet upon feet of snow: such an extreme was novel. Hiking in the snow however was a challenge. We had snow shoes, but when the snow went all mushy around the trees, snow shoes didn’t help very much at all. There by the trees the snow was loose, and even with snow shoes you fell down into the snow knee deep at a minimum, sometimes contorting your ankle deep in the snow, the snow shoe then becoming a fetter to the snow’s depths. The hike was hard-going but delightful. A memory I will always hold dear. A memory I could only have had in Norway.
After several days of hiking, saunas, and bottles of Jonnie Walker, we returned from the Norwegian heartland down to Oslo, where my one friend lives. There we had a night out on the Friday visiting the many watering holes of the capital, trying out the Norwegian beer (though good, Norwegian beer doesn’t stand up to our English ale). We awoke the next morning with a whole Saturday ahead of us. Our flights were the next day, on the Sunday morning, and we considered where we should visit. And, after small deliberation, we settled on the Norsk Folkemuseum, or, in the English tongue, the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History.
The bulk of the museum was home to one of the largest collections of log cabins and stave architecture in the world. The site even boasts the oldest extent wooden house in the world, a structure which dates back roughly a thousand years. How so many aged log cabins were transported to this site, heavens knows; but to see so many there was rather overwhelming. I saw so many that I got a little bit of stave-fatigue towards the end, and began to forget that out there beyond this site houses were made of materials other than logs. Thankfully, though, before this fatigue hit, I got to see the crown jewel of the site: the stave church.
The stave church at the Norsk Folkemuseum is truly beautiful. Dating to around the thirteenth century from the town of Gol, the church escaped demolition from ‘renovators’ in the late nineteenth century, and was translocated to its current location of the museum in parts by sled. The move was paid for in full by King Oscar II. If you walk around the building you’d see these steep roofs with triangular faces, each tip of these triangular faces adorned with either a cross or some dragon-like objects. The architecture looked oddly foreign, reminiscent of a Japanese Buddhist temple should the crosses and dragon-like objects be replaced with shachihoko, those golden fish grotesques of the Japanese. But in seeing the dragons, my first thought was not of shachihoko, but of Viking vessels; those grotesques look like what I’d imagine a Viking invader, eyes set on Lindisfarne, would have had adorning the stem of his band’s warship.
The comparison isn’t idle, I feel. Chesterton writes beautifully in his essay The Architecture of Spears in his usual poesy about how Gothic Architecture is at war, like a moving stone fortress armed to the rafters with spires and Gothic florets which could skewer a man – truly the church militant. It is a soft and comfortable thing now, Gothic architecture and the church, since we’ve come to associate it with the comfy parochial middle England. But Chesterton in his essay manages to bring to life the feeling of the thing-in-itself, stripped of the layers of cottagecore clothing it has acquired, and re-enchant the intimidation and fear of the Gothic. Every one of the great Gothic cathedrals are covered in grotesques and gargoyles, Green Men and Sheela na gigs, all these strange symbols which are quite terrifying, and likely date to a far older age. If you stop and think about it for a second, a grotesque can very often be a tortured face: either this is some kind of apotropaic magic, wherein an evil thing is shown to ward away evil; or perhaps it’s to mimic a beheaded man, in the same way the heads of the treacherous were displayed in the public square to discourage treachery in the kingdom. Either way, there is something quite fascinating in Gothic architecture, something quite novel nodding to past ages, and something distinctly Western European. These motifs are in no way Christian, I would go so far as to contend: they are a kind of national expression. They are an expression of the culture, vision, and beliefs of Mediaeval Christians: what we could call a world-feeling. And in that same way, the scary dragon of the Viking vessel is a profound expression of the Viking world-feeling.
I don’t know how I’d feel if in the Congo the indigenous people in finding Christ decided to erect tall-spired Gothic churches. Nor if in Thailand they set to work building Classical domed churches – I think that would look a little odd also. Now, that isn’t out of any malice to deprive the Congolese and the Thai from the two most beautiful architectural traditions the world has ever seen; but rather because architecture belongs to a place and to a time. Classical architecture ought to be found in Rome, it ought to be found in Greece: but not Peru! Classical architecture, the rigid form, the circular domes, the perfect pillars, the fine-cut marble, all point to the Greco-Roman love of geometry and angles. Whereas if we look to Gothic architecture, we see no such exactitude. In Gothic architecture we see not a stationary Platonic solid, but something growing, something full of life. Gothic looks as if it’s alive, as if its shoots are striving for the heavens, striving to reach God. To the Classical mind, aiming to build the tallest structure one could would be nonsense; but the Gothic mind thought, “how tall can I make this building so as to scrape the sky,” the fruit of which being Lincoln cathedral whose spire once made her the tallest building in the world. What we see in the Classical and the Gothic are two very different temperaments, two very different ways of seeing and interacting with the world. Two architectural traditions expressing the world-feeling of their cultures. And yet two cultures - though partisans of the East and the West will argue - who have faithfully followed Christ. Though their religious expressions and theologies have been wildly different and have diverged from one another over the centuries, and though their whole mental cosmology may be different, at root they all faithfully worship the same God.
Thus far we’ve discussed architecture which is an expression of world-feeling, and next we will move on to theology. To talk of theology as mere national expression will no doubt to many be incendiary. Theologians are, in many denominations, talked of with prophet-like reverence: the Calvinist will defer to Calvin for interpretation; so too the Lutheran to Luther; the Catholic to St. Augustine or St. Thomas; and the Orthodox to St. John Chrysostom, St. Maximus the Confessor, or another of the church fathers. These figures are integral to their traditions of understanding Christ and worshipping Christ in a far clearer way than architecture. Whilst architecture is far more implicit and symbolic, theology makes reasonable and communicable the understanding of the Divine, in a level of specificity and detail impossible with a medium such as architecture. The difference can be thought of this way: architecture is a large and blurry understanding stood next to theology which is a more compact and focused understanding.
We see this clearly in the causes of the Reformation. What is commonly discussed as primarily an issue of corruption and theology, I believe was to a large extent an issue of national expression. The Germanic soul and the Roman soul simply couldn’t talk to one another. The veneration of statues in Luther’s day was undoubtedly part of Rome’s pagan past. These statues, carved in the Greek tradition, were originally used as idols, after all. However, for the Roman church these statues had been baptised into their tradition, and had been accepted, in spite of their past usage, as a loyal way to worship God. Owing to his German world-feeling, Luther didn’t see it that way, and saw venerating these once-idols as distractions from God.
This distinction in world-feelings is most clear when looking to history and geography. Just for a moment, look up a map of the Roman Empire at its height, and a map of the Christian cliques of Europe. What you’ll see is that the Reformation maps on near perfectly to the areas the Roman Empire never conquered. For instance, the Rhineland continues to be Catholic, but just North of the Rhine in say Amsterdam is (or rather was) a heartland of Calvinism. The same too can be said of anywhere in Germany, like the South of Germany versus the North of Germany; Romans conquered the South and not the North, and so the South remains Catholic (sort of) and the North remains Protestant. Vienna is (was1) a great defender of the Pope, and was also under Caesar’s banner, whereas Prague was only Catholic because Vienna made it, Prague having its own proto-Reformation under Jan Hus; Prague, of course, wasn’t Roman.
The English Isles are a little more complicated. England was Roman, but on the very fringe of the empire, and that can be seen in Anglicanism, having a Romish high-church and a Calvinist low-church. Scotland, a barbarous land the Romans decided it was better not to conquer, is as one would expect fiercely Calvinist with no Romish bent. But Ireland is a little different. Ireland was never Roman, and, though Catholic today, had their own distinctive form of Christianity. Much is lost of the traditions of St. Patrick, though through Roman sources we at least know they were unique in their liturgy, their dating of Easter, and they had a unique tonsure. There is a divide in Britain in Christian tradition since the Northern nations of the Heptarchy were Christianised by the Celts, and the Southern nations were Christianised by the Romans. The Celtic tradition is why so many of the Northern saints like St. Cuthbert have such an affection for animals, and why so many of them are hermits. Many believed that through secluding themselves from the world they could regain a prelapsarian nature, a belief which found its fruit in the most well-known early heretic the British Isles produced, Pelagius.
Through a figure like Pelagius, the Irish world-feeling came into conflict with the Roman one. The traditional Celtic worldview - as much as we have of it remaining - places a far lesser emphasis on fate, unlike the Roman worldview which was a progression from the Greek worldview of Fates (or Moirai) who wove the future. Please note, I understand the Roman worldview was more complicated, but we’re looking to the beginnings, the roots, from which the culture grew; and it’s worth noting these sympathies were found in Stoicism also. It is no surprise then that the Celtic world-feeling, as expressed in the English, gave rise to Pelagius (and much later in history the Arminian John Wesley and also political Liberalism) whilst the Roman world-feeling gave rise to the pre-destination of St. Augustine (and much later Machiavelli and Pareto). Then we can look to the Germans. Though much of the German pagan worldview is opaque, we can get a feel of what it may have looked like through its Norse cousin. Sharing a common root with the Greek worldview of Fates, the Norse had their Fates, the Norns. The Norns, however, were far more powerful than the Fates, for they were in some sense ontologically prior to the gods. All the gods of Norse mythology were subject to ‘wyrd’, the fate woven and inscribed on the tree of Yggdrasil by the Norns. The Norns also have a second role, in which they are constantly maintaining the health of the world; since the dragon Nidhogg is munching on the world-tree Yggdrasil injecting it with poison, the Norns must constantly heal Yggdrasil with white clay so that the poison doesn’t spread and destroy the world.
With this brief glance at Norse mythology, we can make a couple inferences about what aspects of Christianity the Norse and by extension the Germans would believe to be salient. First, that predestination is very important to the salvation of man, since their traditions have a high view of fate. And second, that original sin is very important to the understanding of man and the world, since their high view of fate, that which was once their ontologically primary force, is dedicated to keeping at bay evil. And the expression of these focuses on predestination and original sin can be nothing else but Calvinism.
Forgive me if this feels a bit like a ‘just so’ argument. I understand the analysis is blurry, wide-angled, and without focus. But to see a civilisation longitudinally requires looking from a very long distance away. It is to see a people as a continuum adapting across history, to see a culture, its natural progression, and the fruit borne by that branch of the genealogical tree. It is their unique expression, as expressed through theology just as it is expressed through architecture.
We can now return, with the background we’ve now discussed, to our quaint stave church in Norway. The feature you notice first are the steep roofs which have this downward feeling, as if there’s a heavy gravity pushing behind it; very different from the roofs of Gothic buildings which are often obfuscated by upward-pointing spires and flourishes to show as much striving for the infinite as can be managed. The heavy gravity of the stave church, I believe, reflects the aforementioned wyrd, the heavy pull of fate and predestination felt by the Norsemen. It isn’t all gravity, however. On each face, for each level, are these sharp isosceles faces, crowned either with a cross or one of the aforementioned dragons. I reckon these sharp triangles in the architecture represent a kind of upward motion striving against the downward gravity of the roofs; and the apicies of each countercurrent being adorned with a cross shows how Christ and Calvary represent a hope which draws man up against that fatalism.
Let’s now look inside the church. You couldn’t walk inside, you could only look in from the doorway. There were lights, but it was dark; and if the modern LED bulbs were replaced by candles, it would’ve been darker still. There was no natural light from windows: you wouldn’t want windows in the cold Scandinavian winter. Inside was an empty room, no pews for sitting. Empty save for the altar, a simple table draped with a cloth with a crucifix and candles placed on top. Around the altar in the sanctuary are murals painted onto the wood, no doubt restored since the thirteenth century. Most strikingly is an icon of the last supper painted behind the altar.
The walls there were drenched in worship and love for God, you can just feel it. It’s the same feeling as going into an old pub; the walls there are drenched in jollity from the innumerable happy times spent. I stood looking in for a little while in awe. It has been a little over a month since I visited, and still I think about this moment with awe. There was a kind of simplicity there, a sense of religious simplicity stripping out the non-essential. Not that I would want to strip out the non-essential, please understand; but to be able to understand the essence, you have to see the form laid bare stripped to its more fundamental parts. And that’s what I saw. The altar and an image behind it showing what the altar was for.
It is in ritual that man approaches God. Theology is the map, but what good is a student of maps if he never leaves the basement? The mountain is tall and there are many paths up, each mapped out by different traditions who’ve studied Scripture, been led by tradition, and have followed Christ’s direction. I will concede a tradition may be led astray. Some maps do not lead to the summit, but to nowhere, or worse still a sheer drop. There is required a boundary to what is and isn’t Christianity, a kind of fence if you will, and that boundary, though difficult to define, is best found in the Creed.2 Most traditions however are faithful to Christ, but seem strange and foreign to us since we don’t share their world-feeling. After all, each of the nations, according to their world-feeling, place salience upon specific aspects of Christ and of the Faith, aspects upon which their tradition focuses.
I would go so far as to argue that this tension of world-feelings is found in Scripture itself, seen at their extremes in the Gospels of St. Luke and St. John. St. Luke was a physician who travelled with St. Paul, and was a Greek. By virtue of his profession, he was an educated man, trained in the Greats, writers like Thucydides. Though I am of course no Koine Greek scholar, I have read others write that St. Luke both mimics the literary style of Thucydides and the conventions of the Greek historical tradition, stitching together primary sources (sources like St. Mark, no doubt) and forming an accurate narrative. This was the fruit of the Greek world-feeling. St. John, participating in the Jewish world-feeling, couldn’t have been more different. St. John writes not like a clear, flat window into the past, but like a cut diamond diffracting the meaning of Christ’s life into a thousand dazzling lights. In St. John is found layer upon layer of symbolism harking back to each and every book of Scripture, shining a rich image through which for us to understand Christ. This by no means makes St. John’s gospel historically untrue. Only that our truth-making tradition, which stems from the Hellenes, is one and the same with St. Luke’s and not with St. John’s. The Gospels through their variance affords both Jew and Greek to become one in Christ by accommodating their unique world-feelings.
This division in epistemologies and world-feelings mustn’t be a cause for national division, but rather an acceptance of national difference. Each of the nations, and by extension their cultures, was not to be replaced by Christianity, but rather baptised into Christianity. St. Paul did not want the gentile to be circumcised and follow the Jewish law: following Torah was for the Jew, not the Norseman. I don’t believe Christianity points towards one world soup of culture. Christ’s army is unified and fights under one banner; but armies have legions and battalions under which they fight. The Norsemen have their battalion; and the Norse have their family tree. They cannot overnight, or even over a thousand years, lop down the tree which has been growing since the beginning of their lineage and replace it with a new ‘Christian’ tree; they must instead graft the bough of his nation back onto the Tree of Life, so that it may once more be nourished by the Creator (Romans 11).
I left the stave church with a slight sorrow. A sorrow that stave churches were a thing of the past and no more. A sorrow that in the conquest of Norway by the Danish crown, so much of the Norse world-feeling was plastered over; and that lost in the stone, brick, and plaster of the Danes was in the logs something so unique and vital. Walking around the open-air museum, seeing these grand log buildings, I was reminded of an artist I’d seen some time ago called Vsevolod Ivanov. He is a Russian artist who paints fantastical landscapes of an imaginary lost Russian Hyperborean culture practising an Aryan Vedism, and in his works are displayed stave structures so large they are the size of Gothic Cathedrals. I wonder if, should the stave tradition have continued, such structures as seen in his paintings could be around today. A living, breathing tradition of stave churches and cathedrals expressing and reflecting the Norse world-feeling. But alas, that is not the future we live in, for this stave church, by the grace of King Oscar II, is consigned to the care-home of a museum.
1. The Habsburgs were instrumental in the creation of the EU, however.
2. I am aware the filioque makes appealing to the Creed for ecumenism a challenge. What makes one belief Christian and another not is too large a topic to cover.
The stave church at the Norsk Folkemuseum is truly beautiful. Dating to around the thirteenth century from the town of Gol, the church escaped demolition from ‘renovators’ in the late nineteenth century, and was translocated to its current location of the museum in parts by sled. The move was paid for in full by King Oscar II. If you walk around the building you’d see these steep roofs with triangular faces, each tip of these triangular faces adorned with either a cross or some dragon-like objects. The architecture looked oddly foreign, reminiscent of a Japanese Buddhist temple should the crosses and dragon-like objects be replaced with shachihoko, those golden fish grotesques of the Japanese. But in seeing the dragons, my first thought was not of shachihoko, but of Viking vessels; those grotesques look like what I’d imagine a Viking invader, eyes set on Lindisfarne, would have had adorning the stem of his band’s warship.
The comparison isn’t idle, I feel. Chesterton writes beautifully in his essay The Architecture of Spears in his usual poesy about how Gothic Architecture is at war, like a moving stone fortress armed to the rafters with spires and Gothic florets which could skewer a man – truly the church militant. It is a soft and comfortable thing now, Gothic architecture and the church, since we’ve come to associate it with the comfy parochial middle England. But Chesterton in his essay manages to bring to life the feeling of the thing-in-itself, stripped of the layers of cottagecore clothing it has acquired, and re-enchant the intimidation and fear of the Gothic. Every one of the great Gothic cathedrals are covered in grotesques and gargoyles, Green Men and Sheela na gigs, all these strange symbols which are quite terrifying, and likely date to a far older age. If you stop and think about it for a second, a grotesque can very often be a tortured face: either this is some kind of apotropaic magic, wherein an evil thing is shown to ward away evil; or perhaps it’s to mimic a beheaded man, in the same way the heads of the treacherous were displayed in the public square to discourage treachery in the kingdom. Either way, there is something quite fascinating in Gothic architecture, something quite novel nodding to past ages, and something distinctly Western European. These motifs are in no way Christian, I would go so far as to contend: they are a kind of national expression. They are an expression of the culture, vision, and beliefs of Mediaeval Christians: what we could call a world-feeling. And in that same way, the scary dragon of the Viking vessel is a profound expression of the Viking world-feeling.
I don’t know how I’d feel if in the Congo the indigenous people in finding Christ decided to erect tall-spired Gothic churches. Nor if in Thailand they set to work building Classical domed churches – I think that would look a little odd also. Now, that isn’t out of any malice to deprive the Congolese and the Thai from the two most beautiful architectural traditions the world has ever seen; but rather because architecture belongs to a place and to a time. Classical architecture ought to be found in Rome, it ought to be found in Greece: but not Peru! Classical architecture, the rigid form, the circular domes, the perfect pillars, the fine-cut marble, all point to the Greco-Roman love of geometry and angles. Whereas if we look to Gothic architecture, we see no such exactitude. In Gothic architecture we see not a stationary Platonic solid, but something growing, something full of life. Gothic looks as if it’s alive, as if its shoots are striving for the heavens, striving to reach God. To the Classical mind, aiming to build the tallest structure one could would be nonsense; but the Gothic mind thought, “how tall can I make this building so as to scrape the sky,” the fruit of which being Lincoln cathedral whose spire once made her the tallest building in the world. What we see in the Classical and the Gothic are two very different temperaments, two very different ways of seeing and interacting with the world. Two architectural traditions expressing the world-feeling of their cultures. And yet two cultures - though partisans of the East and the West will argue - who have faithfully followed Christ. Though their religious expressions and theologies have been wildly different and have diverged from one another over the centuries, and though their whole mental cosmology may be different, at root they all faithfully worship the same God.
Thus far we’ve discussed architecture which is an expression of world-feeling, and next we will move on to theology. To talk of theology as mere national expression will no doubt to many be incendiary. Theologians are, in many denominations, talked of with prophet-like reverence: the Calvinist will defer to Calvin for interpretation; so too the Lutheran to Luther; the Catholic to St. Augustine or St. Thomas; and the Orthodox to St. John Chrysostom, St. Maximus the Confessor, or another of the church fathers. These figures are integral to their traditions of understanding Christ and worshipping Christ in a far clearer way than architecture. Whilst architecture is far more implicit and symbolic, theology makes reasonable and communicable the understanding of the Divine, in a level of specificity and detail impossible with a medium such as architecture. The difference can be thought of this way: architecture is a large and blurry understanding stood next to theology which is a more compact and focused understanding.
We see this clearly in the causes of the Reformation. What is commonly discussed as primarily an issue of corruption and theology, I believe was to a large extent an issue of national expression. The Germanic soul and the Roman soul simply couldn’t talk to one another. The veneration of statues in Luther’s day was undoubtedly part of Rome’s pagan past. These statues, carved in the Greek tradition, were originally used as idols, after all. However, for the Roman church these statues had been baptised into their tradition, and had been accepted, in spite of their past usage, as a loyal way to worship God. Owing to his German world-feeling, Luther didn’t see it that way, and saw venerating these once-idols as distractions from God.
This distinction in world-feelings is most clear when looking to history and geography. Just for a moment, look up a map of the Roman Empire at its height, and a map of the Christian cliques of Europe. What you’ll see is that the Reformation maps on near perfectly to the areas the Roman Empire never conquered. For instance, the Rhineland continues to be Catholic, but just North of the Rhine in say Amsterdam is (or rather was) a heartland of Calvinism. The same too can be said of anywhere in Germany, like the South of Germany versus the North of Germany; Romans conquered the South and not the North, and so the South remains Catholic (sort of) and the North remains Protestant. Vienna is (was1) a great defender of the Pope, and was also under Caesar’s banner, whereas Prague was only Catholic because Vienna made it, Prague having its own proto-Reformation under Jan Hus; Prague, of course, wasn’t Roman.
The English Isles are a little more complicated. England was Roman, but on the very fringe of the empire, and that can be seen in Anglicanism, having a Romish high-church and a Calvinist low-church. Scotland, a barbarous land the Romans decided it was better not to conquer, is as one would expect fiercely Calvinist with no Romish bent. But Ireland is a little different. Ireland was never Roman, and, though Catholic today, had their own distinctive form of Christianity. Much is lost of the traditions of St. Patrick, though through Roman sources we at least know they were unique in their liturgy, their dating of Easter, and they had a unique tonsure. There is a divide in Britain in Christian tradition since the Northern nations of the Heptarchy were Christianised by the Celts, and the Southern nations were Christianised by the Romans. The Celtic tradition is why so many of the Northern saints like St. Cuthbert have such an affection for animals, and why so many of them are hermits. Many believed that through secluding themselves from the world they could regain a prelapsarian nature, a belief which found its fruit in the most well-known early heretic the British Isles produced, Pelagius.
Through a figure like Pelagius, the Irish world-feeling came into conflict with the Roman one. The traditional Celtic worldview - as much as we have of it remaining - places a far lesser emphasis on fate, unlike the Roman worldview which was a progression from the Greek worldview of Fates (or Moirai) who wove the future. Please note, I understand the Roman worldview was more complicated, but we’re looking to the beginnings, the roots, from which the culture grew; and it’s worth noting these sympathies were found in Stoicism also. It is no surprise then that the Celtic world-feeling, as expressed in the English, gave rise to Pelagius (and much later in history the Arminian John Wesley and also political Liberalism) whilst the Roman world-feeling gave rise to the pre-destination of St. Augustine (and much later Machiavelli and Pareto). Then we can look to the Germans. Though much of the German pagan worldview is opaque, we can get a feel of what it may have looked like through its Norse cousin. Sharing a common root with the Greek worldview of Fates, the Norse had their Fates, the Norns. The Norns, however, were far more powerful than the Fates, for they were in some sense ontologically prior to the gods. All the gods of Norse mythology were subject to ‘wyrd’, the fate woven and inscribed on the tree of Yggdrasil by the Norns. The Norns also have a second role, in which they are constantly maintaining the health of the world; since the dragon Nidhogg is munching on the world-tree Yggdrasil injecting it with poison, the Norns must constantly heal Yggdrasil with white clay so that the poison doesn’t spread and destroy the world.
With this brief glance at Norse mythology, we can make a couple inferences about what aspects of Christianity the Norse and by extension the Germans would believe to be salient. First, that predestination is very important to the salvation of man, since their traditions have a high view of fate. And second, that original sin is very important to the understanding of man and the world, since their high view of fate, that which was once their ontologically primary force, is dedicated to keeping at bay evil. And the expression of these focuses on predestination and original sin can be nothing else but Calvinism.
Forgive me if this feels a bit like a ‘just so’ argument. I understand the analysis is blurry, wide-angled, and without focus. But to see a civilisation longitudinally requires looking from a very long distance away. It is to see a people as a continuum adapting across history, to see a culture, its natural progression, and the fruit borne by that branch of the genealogical tree. It is their unique expression, as expressed through theology just as it is expressed through architecture.
We can now return, with the background we’ve now discussed, to our quaint stave church in Norway. The feature you notice first are the steep roofs which have this downward feeling, as if there’s a heavy gravity pushing behind it; very different from the roofs of Gothic buildings which are often obfuscated by upward-pointing spires and flourishes to show as much striving for the infinite as can be managed. The heavy gravity of the stave church, I believe, reflects the aforementioned wyrd, the heavy pull of fate and predestination felt by the Norsemen. It isn’t all gravity, however. On each face, for each level, are these sharp isosceles faces, crowned either with a cross or one of the aforementioned dragons. I reckon these sharp triangles in the architecture represent a kind of upward motion striving against the downward gravity of the roofs; and the apicies of each countercurrent being adorned with a cross shows how Christ and Calvary represent a hope which draws man up against that fatalism.
Let’s now look inside the church. You couldn’t walk inside, you could only look in from the doorway. There were lights, but it was dark; and if the modern LED bulbs were replaced by candles, it would’ve been darker still. There was no natural light from windows: you wouldn’t want windows in the cold Scandinavian winter. Inside was an empty room, no pews for sitting. Empty save for the altar, a simple table draped with a cloth with a crucifix and candles placed on top. Around the altar in the sanctuary are murals painted onto the wood, no doubt restored since the thirteenth century. Most strikingly is an icon of the last supper painted behind the altar.
The walls there were drenched in worship and love for God, you can just feel it. It’s the same feeling as going into an old pub; the walls there are drenched in jollity from the innumerable happy times spent. I stood looking in for a little while in awe. It has been a little over a month since I visited, and still I think about this moment with awe. There was a kind of simplicity there, a sense of religious simplicity stripping out the non-essential. Not that I would want to strip out the non-essential, please understand; but to be able to understand the essence, you have to see the form laid bare stripped to its more fundamental parts. And that’s what I saw. The altar and an image behind it showing what the altar was for.
It is in ritual that man approaches God. Theology is the map, but what good is a student of maps if he never leaves the basement? The mountain is tall and there are many paths up, each mapped out by different traditions who’ve studied Scripture, been led by tradition, and have followed Christ’s direction. I will concede a tradition may be led astray. Some maps do not lead to the summit, but to nowhere, or worse still a sheer drop. There is required a boundary to what is and isn’t Christianity, a kind of fence if you will, and that boundary, though difficult to define, is best found in the Creed.2 Most traditions however are faithful to Christ, but seem strange and foreign to us since we don’t share their world-feeling. After all, each of the nations, according to their world-feeling, place salience upon specific aspects of Christ and of the Faith, aspects upon which their tradition focuses.
I would go so far as to argue that this tension of world-feelings is found in Scripture itself, seen at their extremes in the Gospels of St. Luke and St. John. St. Luke was a physician who travelled with St. Paul, and was a Greek. By virtue of his profession, he was an educated man, trained in the Greats, writers like Thucydides. Though I am of course no Koine Greek scholar, I have read others write that St. Luke both mimics the literary style of Thucydides and the conventions of the Greek historical tradition, stitching together primary sources (sources like St. Mark, no doubt) and forming an accurate narrative. This was the fruit of the Greek world-feeling. St. John, participating in the Jewish world-feeling, couldn’t have been more different. St. John writes not like a clear, flat window into the past, but like a cut diamond diffracting the meaning of Christ’s life into a thousand dazzling lights. In St. John is found layer upon layer of symbolism harking back to each and every book of Scripture, shining a rich image through which for us to understand Christ. This by no means makes St. John’s gospel historically untrue. Only that our truth-making tradition, which stems from the Hellenes, is one and the same with St. Luke’s and not with St. John’s. The Gospels through their variance affords both Jew and Greek to become one in Christ by accommodating their unique world-feelings.
This division in epistemologies and world-feelings mustn’t be a cause for national division, but rather an acceptance of national difference. Each of the nations, and by extension their cultures, was not to be replaced by Christianity, but rather baptised into Christianity. St. Paul did not want the gentile to be circumcised and follow the Jewish law: following Torah was for the Jew, not the Norseman. I don’t believe Christianity points towards one world soup of culture. Christ’s army is unified and fights under one banner; but armies have legions and battalions under which they fight. The Norsemen have their battalion; and the Norse have their family tree. They cannot overnight, or even over a thousand years, lop down the tree which has been growing since the beginning of their lineage and replace it with a new ‘Christian’ tree; they must instead graft the bough of his nation back onto the Tree of Life, so that it may once more be nourished by the Creator (Romans 11).
I left the stave church with a slight sorrow. A sorrow that stave churches were a thing of the past and no more. A sorrow that in the conquest of Norway by the Danish crown, so much of the Norse world-feeling was plastered over; and that lost in the stone, brick, and plaster of the Danes was in the logs something so unique and vital. Walking around the open-air museum, seeing these grand log buildings, I was reminded of an artist I’d seen some time ago called Vsevolod Ivanov. He is a Russian artist who paints fantastical landscapes of an imaginary lost Russian Hyperborean culture practising an Aryan Vedism, and in his works are displayed stave structures so large they are the size of Gothic Cathedrals. I wonder if, should the stave tradition have continued, such structures as seen in his paintings could be around today. A living, breathing tradition of stave churches and cathedrals expressing and reflecting the Norse world-feeling. But alas, that is not the future we live in, for this stave church, by the grace of King Oscar II, is consigned to the care-home of a museum.
1. The Habsburgs were instrumental in the creation of the EU, however.
2. I am aware the filioque makes appealing to the Creed for ecumenism a challenge. What makes one belief Christian and another not is too large a topic to cover.