All in the Head
The great composer W.A. Mozart (who, I
must admit, has made more than one appearance on this blog) is reported to have
said that “Protestantism was all in the head”, and that “Protestants did not
know the meaning of the Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi [Lamb
of God who takes away the sins of the world]”. I would not put it so
harshly, but with all due respect to my friends among the separated brethren, there
is at least an element of truth to this observation. Protestantism
on the whole is very uncomfortable with the corporeality of more traditional
expressions of Christianity, starting with the Protestant rejection of the True Presence
of Christ in the Eucharist and the efficacy of sacraments in general, and
carrying that same mind-set through to a suspicion of any physical expression
of faith apart from the Scriptures themselves (and, in some congregations,
speaking in tongues). As a consequence, the Sign of the Cross,
genuflection, rosaries, icons and statues all seem foreign to them. It almost
appears that many of our Protestant friends, relying on Sola
Scriptura and focusing on just The Word, are trying to uncarnate
(so to speak) the Word made Flesh.
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| Sure, they may not look naked . . . |
Many of them, but by no means all: there have always been some members of the
reformation churches who understand and embrace the sacramental outlook that
has been preserved in the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. One such is the
17th century English religious poet George Herbert.
Herbert was an Anglican cleric in addition to being a poet, and so he devoted a
portion of his poetry to defending his church. Being an Anglican, he
directed some of his fire at the Catholic Church, as one would expect, mostly
criticism of the papacy and what he considered a certain superficiality
(needless to say, I don’t concur in these objections). He reserves his
harshest and most substantive criticism, however, for the protestant Puritans, whom
he accuses in his poem “The British Church” of being “undrest”.
Naked
Puritans?
Nakedness is not something most of us
associate with Puritanism; what is Herbert getting at? One needs to look at his
Latin poetry (which is, unfortunately, rarely read today) to get the full
context for this criticism. The Puritans, according to Herbert, miss the
importance and implications of the Incarnation. In his poem “In
Angelos” (“On the Angels”) he says:
The perfected mind of
Angels is not like ours at all,
Which must by nature look to our senses
For concrete images . . .
If it weren’t for
concrete things,
we ourselves could not by thinking find
what we are in ourselves.
Intellectus
adultus Angelorum
Haud nostro similis, cui necesse,
Ut dentur species, rogare sensum . . .
Si non per species, nequimus ipsi,
Quid ipsi sumus, assequi putando.
While Angels are pure
intellect, we mortals must rely on sense experiences to attain knowledge.
That, it follows, is one reason at least why God became Man, and why he
continues to speak to us through Sacraments, sacramentals, liturgies,
devotions, etc. The Puritans, however, have lost this vital
understanding. In “De Rituum Usu” (“On the Use of Rites”)
Herbert says:
And so the Puritans, while they are covetous of a
Lord’s bride bare of sacred rites, and while they wish
All things regressed to their fathers’ barbaric state,
Lay her, entirely ignorant of clothing, bare to conquest
By Satan and her enemies.
Non
alio Cathari modo
Dom sponsam Domini piis
Orbam ritibus expetunt,
Atque ad barbariem partum
Vellent Omnia regredi,
Illam tegminis insciam
Prorsus Daemoni et hostibus
Exponunt superabilem.
Herbert uses clothing to
represent liturgical rites, which are the concrete channels of God’s
grace. By doing away with such outward signs, the Puritans are aspiring
to an Angelic state of understanding and failing to take into account our human
limitations. In denying our physicality, the Puritans have actually eliminated
the means of achieving spiritual understanding.
The
clothes don’t make the man, but . . .
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| John the Baptist, dressed for Prophecy |
I don’t believe that Herbert’s choice of symbol was lightly made. He was
fully committed to a very catholic version of Anglicanism. The fact is that
clothing has important, often unconscious, symbolic meanings for people in
every time and place (consider all the various uniforms, traditional attires,
kinds of ritual or formal wear, etc. throughout the world), but especially for
Catholic Christians because of our sacramental view of the universe.
Think back also through scripture to how often clothing is mentioned
prominently: not just those first primitive garments worn by Adam and Eve that
were the outward sign of their fall from grace, but Joseph’s coat that became a
focus of his brothers’ jealousy, the special garments God commands the Aaronic
priests to wear (which King David puts on to dance in front of the Arc of the
Covenant), Jesus’ seamless garment for which his executioners cast dice, John
the Baptist’s clothing of camel’s hair and skins.
Speaking of John the Baptist, he is an interesting case. One reader of my recent
post on Mass attire [here] asserted that God must not care how we
dress, citing John the Baptist’s less-than-formal clothing in the desert as
proof. It may not seem so at first glance, but John the Baptist is in fact not
a refutation, but a very good illustration of the deep significance of dress.
He was very aware of his appearance. Like the Old Testament prophets, he
carefully chose his dress and actions in order to represent spiritual truths in
the physical realm (this is also at least part of the reason for the habits
worn by religious orders, which another commenter mentioned). By dressing
like the Prophet Elijah (see 2 Kings 1:8) John asserts his
prophetic authority, and the austerity of his apparel is a rebuke to the
extravagance of the Temple priests and the legalism of the Pharisees. If
only we were all as conscious of our dress as John the Baptist was of his!
You
mean it’s not all
about what I want?
For me, that earlier discussion of how we dress for Mass should be situated in
the larger context of the sacramental view of the universe. Catholics and
Orthodox Christians are particularly aware of the deeper meaning of clothing,
even when we resist it. Our tradition helps us to understand that how we dress
for Mass is not important for its own sake (except, as I point out in the
original post, in cases such as when one person’s provocative dress, for
instance, is a temptation to others to violate the sixth commandment in their
hearts) so much as for what it says about the importance we place on the
Sacrament, and an expression of our love for Jesus Christ. We used to
know a family in which the father drove a delivery truck for a living; he was
required to wear a company uniform on the job, and his work schedule was such
that he could not attend Mass with his family unless he came straight from the
job without changing, so he attended Sunday Mass in his worn blue
coveralls. I am sure that very few of us would find fault with his attire; in fact, we
would see his determination to be present as the spiritual head of his family
as an exemplary thing. It’s a very different matter when we show up for
Mass dressed for a barbeque or the beach simply because we didn’t bother to put
on something more formal (and perhaps a little less comfortable), which sends
the message that attending Mass is nothing special.
How does all of this fit together? I think we all have a tendency to get
stuck in our own heads, as Mozart accuses the Protestants of doing, and Herbert
likewise accuses the Puritans. We don’t open ourselves up to God’s Grace
as he wants to confer it, but try to put everything in neat categories of our
own devising. One purpose of many spiritual disciplines, including
fasting and other mortifications, and of liturgical prayer such as the Liturgy
of the Hours, has been to take our focus off our own will and desires,
and instead orient ourselves to God’s will (see Romans 12:2). If we find ourselves
saying “God will understand . . . “, well, of course, God understands
everything. The question is what, and how, do we understand?
(An earlier version of this post was published on June 16th, 2014)
(An earlier version of this post was published on June 16th, 2014)
