A Catholic memory.
The old solemn high Mass in Latin. Black vestments, unbleached candles, the catafalque, the chant of Dies Irae. Visits to the cemetery.
On that day, too, when I was a kid, you could get three plenary indulgences for the Holy Souls in Purgatory, by visiting three churches on November 2nd and saying certain prayers. A plenary indulgence completely releases a soul from that post-mortem purifying state penultimate to heaven. (Details here). A big deal. But with the ingenuity that you find in large, old and non-bourgeois religious traditions, that requirement had been mitigated so that you could achieve the same goal of three plenaries by exiting and entering the same church three times. Easier for the living, more advantageous for the dead.
All day you could see people leave the church, stand on the steps and then go back in.
To a rationalist or a Protestant mind, this is kind of embarrassing. Mechanical and commercial. But to a naturally religious person, it is a mark of a connection and a care that lives beyond the separation of death.
While I'm at it,when I visited England I noticed that, as part of the Reformation "purification" of the churches from Romish corruption, they removed all the statues and altars of the saints. And replaced them over time with huge sepulchres of the upper classes, complete with life-size statues and plaques noting their virtues. Wow, that was an improvement.
1 comment:
1. I quibble with your implicit use of "bourgeois." Really the 'bourgeois' have been the great foundation of Christianity, including Catholic Christianity. Trent, the SJ, Spanish mysticism, and the various movements in early-modern RCC that I know zilch of. Pre-'bourgeois' Christianity hardly did more than give Christian lingo to pagan (etym peastant) earth religion or whatever, and knight-errantry (Grail quests etc) for the gentry. Upper-class Catholicism e.g. recusants were 'bourgeois' in their concerns: enthusiasm for pieties or rite and religious life, not for warfare and knight-errantry (Don Quixote spirituality was for book readers, not warriors à la Ghibellines [anti-clerical, and more or less atheist]).
2. The richness of imagery isn't in doubt, but you always leave unexplored the opposition to sacredotal images, which has an (apophatic?) glory. This derelection saddens Ikhnaton whenever he checks out "ex cathedra."
3. When the Reformation's Ikhnaton-ized sanctuaries were fill'd with the images and tombs of the plutocratic dead, this was indeed a decline in taste from the days when images and tombs of the saints fill'd those sanctuaries, but it was perhaps an advance in revelation or at least truthfulness à la "honesty." ... I guess Luther did intend to destroy Christianity (Gay Science 358), but only so as to open the Old Testament. Who could wish to undo his programme?
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