To rave in the nave or not to rave in the nave? The disturbances about what should or should not happen in a cathedral have divided Christian opinion in the UK.
This is perhaps partly because the differences between the Protestant and the Catholic minds run deep. It’s not driven only by differences in the content of belief but by diverging mind-sets: what one might call opposing landscapes of the mind.
Protestant Anglicanism was born in the culture of the Enlightenment. Hence perhaps it ought to be no surprise that the current Anglican custodians of medieval cathedrals in England see them primarily as large buildings that are of use to the mission of their church. Those cathedrals might coincidentally be beautiful, but purpose becomes their primary feature. They are quintessentially useful. Things are to be done to them and in them.
Anglicans are bemused that Catholics want to restrict ways in which they are used or have concerns about what takes place in them. With some impatience, they give examples of different events or meetings that have successfully taken place in cathedrals under their custodianship, as if to prove their capacity for versatility.
The underlying assumption is that God is served by anything that happens in a church. There is a fear that it might lose its purpose by being empty without activity.
In an interview with protestors against what was described by some as the “Rave in the Nave” in Canterbury Cathedral, holy site of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket, the Dean of Canterbury said that to his mind there was no aesthetic difference between performances of US rapper Eminem and Czech composer Dvořák.
When asked by the protesting Catholics, who had asked to meet him, if there was anything at all that he would prohibit taking place in the Cathedral, the only example he gave was that if someone turned up naked, he would object, because that would break the criminal law.
For the Protestant, usefulness is a cardinal virtue. And behind the love of usefulness lies a whole culture birthed by the Enlightenment. It led to the scientific revolution founded on the skill of examining and measuring things and discovering how they worked.
But the Catholic mind was formed around 1,500 years prior to the Enlightenment and while encompassing it is not constrained by it.
The Enlightenment is most comfortable with what is empirically verifiable. This, however, is impoverishing and unbalanced to a Catholic. It produces the philosophically monoglot. It reduces all reality to just one language – and a language that is uncomfortable and ill at ease with faith and mystery.
Perhaps it is no surprise that the Anglican mind does not easily take into account the sanctity of matter. There is a kind of gnostic bifurcation that separates spirit from matter, which is a consequence of the Enlightenment project. As one becomes more ambiguous about what spirit is, so the focus on the material – and how you measure and use it – grows more intense.
The Catholic mind, which believes in the reality of matter transformed by Spirit that it encounters in the Mass, sees reality differently. It starts theologically with the concept of God (spirit) taking flesh (matter), which then simply continues the trajectory of the principle of the Incarnation by the transformation of matter (bread) into spirit (Jesus).
Empiricism on its own is not sufficiently versatile to encompass any meaning that lies beyond the dimensions of the material.
Tom Holland, author of Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind about the influence of Christianity in and on the West, argues that one of the dangers of the Protestant reformation and its accompanying mindset was that it led to this exclusive reliance on the empirical, while becoming increasingly tone deaf to meaning: giving rise to the birth and growth of atheism.
If you don’t deal with the religious instinct correctly in the right context, you may find it being dealt with badly as it re-emerges in another form in another context.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan, which analyses how unpredictable events change and mould our world to degrees we usually fail to fathom, and who describes himself as an “epistemologist of randomness”, details how this re-emerging element happens in the world of economics and statistics.
He warns of the danger of losing touch with the sacred and an over reliance on a materialistic empiricism: “Modernists…refuse religion on rational grounds, but then fall for economic forecasters, stock market analysts and psychologists.”
He reminds us of the unpalatable truth that “we know that economic forecasts work no better than astrology”, and lays the blame at the foundation of Enlightenment culture: “once religion exits the sacred, it becomes subjected to epistemic beliefs.”
As a Greek Orthodox, Taleb warns the Catholic Church that it is not immune from the rationalising and materialism to which Protestantism has succumbed, if it adopts the same outlook. He suggests, perhaps a little too bluntly but nonetheless with some cause, that the Second Vatican Council began to take steps in that direction:
“Effectively, Catholicism lost its moral authority the minute it mixed epistemic and pisteic belief [related to the philosophy of knowledge] – breaking the link between holy and the profane”, which Nassim argues is what happened with “the aggiornamento of the Second Vatican Council, in the early 1960s” that was “meant to ‘update’ Catholicism”.
He adds: “But once religion exits the sacred, it becomes subjected to epistemic beliefs. Atheism is the child of Protestantism, and Vatican II turned out to be a second reformation.”
This may be a little clumsy and one sided, but he is right to sound the alarm about the trajectory that has been taken.
And yet, even if the culture of the Church begins to lose its bearings temporarily, mistaking geist for pneuma, the Holy Spirit does not abandon the Church.
The Catholic Church is shaped and defined by its relationship with the miraculous. It has been contoured by its encounter with these mysteries. And miracles are the experience of matter being reconfigured with compassion by the Holy Spirit.
Although often misunderstood and misevaluated by secular observers, the experience of the miraculous has a deep and consistent history in Catholic experience. Whether it be the liquification of blood at Lanciano, or weeping statues throughout the world, the material is porous to the presence of God and can be and sometimes is reconfigured for the purposes of the Gospel by the Holy Spirit.
Hoaxes abound and credulity is the flip side of careless faith, but there are moments nonetheless when the sacred breaks through. One event, in recent history, offering an insight into the enlivenment of matter (and authenticated by the Church), took place in Japan when a statue defied the laws of physics during the apparition of “Our Lady in Akita”.
The reportage of the event was compelling and moving. It took place in May 1974 in Akita, a city on the west coast of the country. As well as replicating a wound in the hand carried by Sister Agnes, the nun who received the apparition, the statue through which Mary spoke was subject to profound changes of colour. The face, hands and feet of the statue dramatically turned a dark red. It was observed by many to weep copiously.
As predicted in the apparitions, Sr. Agnes’ deafness was cured on 30 May 1982. But the heart of the event was not the transformation of the statue, but the messages calling the Church to a deeper prayer, penance and conversion. For those who take the infusion of matter and Spirit seriously, corroborative phenomena has been observed throughout the Orthodox world, with icons of our Lady in particular weeping and producing a substance with a scent like myrrh.
The Church is rightly sceptical of all such phenomena until an investigation has taken place. But given that numbers of such events have been authenticated – not least the eucharistic miracles since 1994 – the effect is to deepen the Catholic perception that matter is porous to spirit. More than that, under the custodianship of our prayers and penitence, matter is intended to resonate with the presence of God.
The Bible is full of poetic references to creation praising God as if it had an underlying inbuilt capacity to respond. But the Christological dimension of our faith takes us further. In Colossians 1.17, St Paul reminds us: “In Christ all things consist” or “hold together.”
Catholics repudiate the pagan pantheism, but modify it to a more profoundly personalised panentheism. Matter has its being only because it is infused by the presence of God, and has its character by the purpose by God.
Matter can never be devoid of theological significance. If matter is porous or potentially porous to the Holy Spirit, then matter which has been specifically and purposefully reconfigured to the service of God gains a deeper resonance, purpose and significance in the dynamics of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Protestants, however, tend to be revolted by relics. But relics for the Catholic mind and in Catholic experience are the fusion of matter irradiated by the compassionate purpose and healing presence of God.
Cathedrals and many churches are shaped in the form of Christ’s body on the cross. To enter through the stone portal is to take a journey deeper into the presence of Christ topographically as well as spiritually. It is to deliberately engage both the material of the building and the matter of one’s body in a parallel and conjoined exercise of the spirit and the soul.
Only a form of theological apartheid which empties stones and buildings of theological significance and pneumatic potentiality could view a cathedral in strictly utilitarian terms and be immune to the spiritual dissonance of using it for hedonism and secularised self-gratification.
Perhaps part of the dissonance created in Canterbury by the Dean’s entrepreneurial venture into the entertainment industry is about more than taste and cash. It’s also a consequence of the clash between the Catholic vision of the fusion of matter and spirit that gave the world the medieval cathedral – an expression of love, faith and purpose whose beauty takes the breath away – and a very different way of looking at the world. Perhaps even a different way of experiencing God.
Utility and purpose stripped of beauty and mystery have given us retail parks. We ought to be able to tell the difference.
Photo: The miracle of Lanciano. (Wikimedia Commons.)
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