What began as a summer read for pleasure turned out to be one of the most rewarding reading experiences of recent memory. Absorbing Jon Fosse’s Septology, the 2023 Nobel Prize winner for literature, has been an amazing and transformative experience. Though this novel is not for everyone, anyone interested in theology, mysticism, literature or the Catholic novel as a genre will find this book to be a rewarding reading that will not disappoint.
On one level, the book brought me back to a college English course, “Theology and Literature,” where we read works like Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. Added to that list in any reprise of such a course would unquestionably have to be Septology. In addition to being a literary masterpiece and rich source of theological reflection on the great mysteries of faith, this novel—which is spread out over three days in the narrator’s life—is an immersion in mystical theology, especially that of Meister Eckhart.
At one point in his narration, the main character, Asle, suggests that life itself is a prayer and that every life is a longing for God. Observations such as these are why reading this novel sometimes has the feel of being on retreat where the reader finds himself drawn into reflection and prayer.
In a New Yorker review of Septology, Merve Emre identified the bookas “the only novel I have read that has made me believe in the reality of the divine.” Writing in Book Forum, the same reviewer quite accurately pointed out that “to describe what Septology is to defile it. Perhaps it would be simpler to say that reading it is the closest I have come to feeling the presence of God.”
All of these descriptors rang true as I read this novel. It is a literary masterpiece imbued with mysticism and theological insight.
A literary masterpiece
The novel is one continuous sentence and contains no periods throughout its 667 pages. It is divided into three parts that recount seven days in the life of an aged painter, the aforenamed Asle, and his doppelganger, also named Asle. These seven days occur during the last week of Advent. Volume 1, titled The Other Name, gives us days one, two and three. Volume 2, I Is Another Name, is the narrator’s detailed account of his thoughts and activities on days four and five. The final volume, A New Name, takes the reader through days six and seven.
The stories of each day are uniquely framed. Each begins with Asle reflecting on his painting of St. Andrew’s Cross and each day ends with him praying. Sometimes it’s the “Salve Regina”; sometimes the “Pater Noster”; other times an “Ave Maria.” Day one, for example, ends with the author falling asleep mouthing the words, Sancta Maria Mater Dei ora pro nobis peccatoribus nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Days two and seven end with Asle breathing in and breathing out the words, “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me.”
Fosse uses a number of fascinating techniques, like creating a doppelganger for Asle who has the same name. All other names are also very similar. Asle is married to Ales until she dies, and Asle’s best friend is named Asleik.
Symbols weave their way throughout the seven books, none more central than the painting of St. Andrew’s Cross that Asle, who is a recovering alcoholic, ponders at the beginning of each day. The cross, which is a mere two intersecting lines, is very suggestive of the paradoxes that Asle regularly brings to the reader’s attention. Each day, through multiple flashbacks and stream-of-consciousness thoughts, Asle journeys into his past—reflecting on the death of his sister when they were children, the death of his grandmother and the death of his wife Ales.
Throughout his ponderings, the painting of St. Andrew’s Cross is a recurring symbol reenforcing the theme of the “coincidence of opposites,” which is another prominent theme developed in the novel.
A Catholic novel
Much has been written about the “Catholic novel,” and what makes a book constitutive of this genre. Though I am not certain that Fosse would embrace the designation for Septology, he clearly draws upon Catholic themes, particularly the theme of sacramentality. Throughout the novel’s multiple flashbacks, we discover that it was due to the influence of his wife Ales that Asle converted to Catholicism. There appears to be an element of autobiography here, as Fosse himself converted to Catholicism in 2015. What draws him to Catholicism appears to be the richness of its sacramental symbols.
One of the major symbols that runs throughout the novel is the rosary. Asle has an extensive collection of rosary beads given to him by his wife Ales when she was alive, but the one he prays regularly is the one he wears around his neck. It is in the context of praying the rosary that Asle offers a profoundly theological interpretation of the Apostles Creed. For example, in reflecting on the opening words of the Apostles Creed, Asle states:
I believe in God the Father almighty, I believe in it in a certain sense, and if God isn’t almighty, but is more likely powerless, still he’s there in everything that is and everything that happens, because that’s how it has to be if God put limits on himself by giving human beings free will, since God is love and love is inconceivable without free will
Asle also, due to Ales’ influence, has a deep appreciation of the Eucharist. “I think there is a strange power in the Eucharist, yes, every time the priest holds up the bread in the consecration as they call it, to change it into Christ’s body, a kind of light shines out from the host, yes, I see it,” he states, “light comes from the host, or from something like a halo around it… it’s not something you can understand but I know what I know.”
Reflections like these, which are scattered throughout the novel, show how deeply it is imbued with the Catholic principle of sacramentality.
Steeped in mysticism
One way of characterizing this novel that would not be inaccurate is to see it as one long reflection on the nature of God. This reflection is heavily steeped in the theology of Meister Eckhart, which is frequently drawn upon throughout the seven days that make up the novel. For Asle, his painting is a prayer and an expression of the human longing for God. He loves to paint in autumn and winter because they are the darkest time of the year, and following Eckhart he sees darkness as a powerful metaphor for God, but it is a darkness from which light shines. The phrase he likes to use is “shining darkness.” God is a shining darkness. Asle paints because he recognizes that words connect us with God but also separate us from him. In his reflections on God, we find words like these:
because in a certain sense God isn’t anything, he is a dark shining nothingness, a nothing, or not, and at the same time he is also in everything that is, he is being, a distance that is also closeness because God is both in and gone from the created world, which is outside the creator, outside of God,
Elsewhere, he opines:
and maybe God is closest of all to those who are poor in spirit, those who never think about God, yes, because they shall inherit the kingdom of God, as is written, I think, and it’s always these words, yes, that only have meaning when they contradict each other, and Meister Eckhart has thought of almost everything I think before I did, I think, but isn’t every human being a unity of opposites, yes, a paradox, they call it, coincidencia oppositorum, with a body and a soul, like how Christ was both human and God, yes, Jesus Christ is himself the paradox that contains the paradox that all people are, I think, so that the cross is the symbol of the paradox, I think, and I think that since faith is paradoxical, self-contradictory, they call it, it can never be understood with reason…
Elsewhere he states, “God is the great silence, and it’s in the silence that you can hear God.”
This book is a profound meditation on the nature of God as luminous darkness—as distant but ever near, and as the object of every human longing. It belongs on the reading list of any course on theology and literature, any list of Catholic novels, any course on theological aesthetics and any list of books that explore the mystery of God.
Septology is so much more than just a carefully crafted novel; it is also a reflection on the great mysteries of faith and the relationship between theology and art.
