It gave them a single powerful sacred focus. Now they are frequently separated, with the tabernacle on a side altar or separate chapel, a return to an older practice.
And I think that this has contributed to disorientation and splitting inside the building. And for an old Dominican, whose order had a particular issue about never turning your back to the tabernacle, it was, I remember, uncomfortable.
A really good solution is at the Trappist Holy Spirit Monastery in Georgia. The tabernacle is behind the altar, central but on the same axis, but within its own niche or shrine, so to speak, with curtains. During Mass, the curtains are closed so that the altar is the focus. For the rest of the time, both altar and tabernacle are connected.
Hey, this blog is about sex, politics AND religion.
PS What i like about this is the arrangment of items: altar, tabernacle in enclosable shrine (with curtains or even doors), not necessarily the very spare monastic aesthetics. In a parish especially, it would need more color and image and lines perhaps not so severe.
5 comments:
I've been following your blogging about altars and tabernacles. Sorry about the gutting of the older sacred loci of Pius 12's the Church, but as Nietzsche observes of a mysterious religious continuity, »If a temple is to be erected, *a temple must be destroy'd*: that is the law—let anyone who can show me a case in which it is not fulfil'd!«
Since Catholics were to be no longer Catholics but only "God's Pilgrim People" or "the assembly of the baptized" [I'd never heard of that phrase till your blog posting], the old things had to be ruin'd.
My own impression early on was that altars were turn'd around because of the appeal of Bonhoeffer's emphasis on God in our midst. In the new dispensation, for which Bonhoeffer has been so formative, the altar no longer protects RCs from the terrible living God: I guess the terrible living God is us, the 'assembly' (supposing that the location of God vis-a-vis the altar remains the same).
The older arrangement of the altar so that the assembly was behind the priest projected the terrible God -- the hoi polloi, theoi polloi -- out into the beyond. Which Feuerbach said we shouldn't do, eh?
jpm
The newer 'reparative' orientations that you (Jungian intuitive thinker) welcome seem cold and uninviting. You observe that today's American Catholics probably could probably not relate to the sacred in this interior architecture, but the American Catholics of Pius 12's the Church might have found them forbidding, mathematically ascetic, not sacred as they were habituated to sacredness.
Maybe it doesn't matter in any case. The pilgrimage of God's people has been completed: their sense of holiness has been "dissolved ... into the casual egotism and thoughtlessness of the everyday," as you say with a nod to your study of Heidegger.
Does institutional 'holiness' or the 'sacred' begin as a rebuke? Your descriptions of the change from Pius 12 to Vatican 2 implementation make me ask this. You may be right.
Obviously this is not so of the awe that one can experience as a child -- for sparkling sunshine on water, for a storm of lightning and thunder, for a new crescent moon in the early evening sky, or for a tremendous building that excites awe (even in secularist tourists). Aidos is an element of eros (only so are 'sadistic' kicks possible, alas).
But if a child senses the adults around him growing silent and respectful as they enter a "church" or a "sanctuary," then their psyches pick up on a duty that they must not be spontaneous: they must assume that their direct immediate psychical life is unholy, and that holiness requires a clampdown, egkrateia. This egkrateia can become attentiveness to hidden or subtle presences, but admittedly it can be used for institutional philistinism.
An example I frequently think of: during an anthem at a very mainline liberalish Anglican church, a little girl, maybe four years old, spontaneously moved out into the aisle and danced in some curious way to the music. Not done before. I mean, the little girl wasn't a show-off, performer, etc
The grandmother in whose care the child was attending church look'd to the cleric to see if she should interfere and stop the child's movements; sc was the dancing impious, disrespectful. The cleric understood the grandmother's concern, but he open'd his eyes wide and subtly shook his head No. Sc let girl's dancing continue. When the music ended, the child calmly return'd to the pew and sat down beside her grandmother.
A wonderful child's gesture, but also amusing to consider the projection of Old Man Grumpus into the beyond that occurs within the implications of the imposition of respectful behaviour vis-a-vis holy stuff. If there IS a God after all, does He mind that authorities imply that spontaneous behaviour tends to enrage Him?
There's also the consideration that the duty of circumspect awe before holy things does not mean that holy things are circumspect etc in return: what Hegel says of rationality in the world and in looking at the world may not obtain for holiness. Sc the relation isn't mutual. That is, respectful egkateia vis-a-vis the divine doesn't mean the divine is respectful in return. The Gods maybe "let it all hang out" or to use a recurrent phrase of yours the Gods are aidos-less "Unitarians in drag."
Perhaps the Church's experimentation actually succeeded. You observe that while sacredness was removed from church buildings and the objects of the altar and tabernacle, "the people in the pews were endlessly told that they were sacred." The result, you observe, was "all kinds of thoughtless, shockingly disrespectful and very unsacred behavior in church and during services."
This was "explained away" by the experimenters "as the casual freedom of the sons of God in their Father's house." But perhaps in this case an explaining away was not mistaken or misleading.
The rabble maybe don't understand; God is often said to be "unconscious." Accordingly, you may be correct too, that "Sacredness was not shared, it was diluted and largely lost."
jpm
Maybe the badness results from the beginning — not in the implication that aidos requires egkrateia, but in the implication that egkrateia and even aidos are a penalty, a misery or Elend imposed on slaves, and from which the blessed are free. The blessed, the Gods, go around letting it all hang out, feel no awe, do not see within awe, do not desire within awe. The constant message is that aidos is for chumps, a burden externally imposed on the finite. etc.
jpm
P.S. I don't mean to imply that aidos rightly induces approval or even laisser-faire. ... I remember c. 1996 being sick-awe-struck reading Randy Shilts' "And the Band Played On."
Post a Comment