Prayer as mourning, mourning as prayer

Of the many, many charges Friedrich Nietzsche levels against Christianity in The Anti-Christ, one hits me harder than the others. He accuses Jesus’ followers, from the very first disciples, of being unwilling to sit with the pain and the grief of his death.

Nietzsche sees the whole of the Christian tradition as one great refusal to mourn this founding loss, one great flight from “the feeling of being shaken and disappointed to their depths” into reassuring stories promising that disappointment has been reversed and loss restored.

The point certainly lands against a wide swath of Christian theology, but the idea that Christian faith might look less like triumph and more like mourning is not as unthinkable as Nietzsche supposes. Jon Fosse’s novel Septology, written in Norwegian as a series and recently issued in a single English-language volume, shows how such a tragic vision of faith can shine with a luminous darkness.