My First Day in a Cathedral

Catholisism is a sort of Sunday morning poetry. It's beautiful and evocative, but I have no idea what's going on. The mass lasts a little over an hour, yet there are only ten minutes of sermon. The remainder is filled with song and ritual, organs and choirs and incense burning. We stand and bow our heads, we lift our hands at the elbow, we kneel, we turn to eachother and say 'Peace be with you,' we shuffle through an elaborate circle to eat the body of Christ and to drink his blood.

What does all this mean? I am not Catholic and I was not raised Catholic. Yet even to somebody who has no idea what's going on, the beauty of this ceremony can be overwhelming. The chime of the bells, the high notes hit by the choir, the incense smoke rising across a stained glass depiction of Mary in heaven. They evoke the divine, the celestial. In a Godless universe, what is this feeling?

Even if we dismiss religion as mumbo-jumbo (as many of us were raised to do), it's worth noting that hundreds of millions of people practice Catholicism today and find some sort of meaning in it. Amongst the congregation, I saw only a handful of people with blond hair. Almost everyone had dark features, if pale skin. Compare that to the Aryan features of a protestant church. Why the divide? Is this something passed on from parent to child? From generation to generation for hundreds of years?

And the relationship between the Catholics and the Jews. Reading from a book written in the late 1800s, Jews are depicted as outsiders, often seedy. Just a hundred years ago, could I have walked so easily into a Cathedral? With all its grandeur, its expensive materials and its overwhelming size, this was the creation of the populous, of the majority, of the masses. These were the people that sweat and toiled, that transformed an inhospitable wilderness into a place where people could thrive. This was the great bulk of humanity, their labor divided, organized and hierarchical. A handful directed the many and guided them to create these great monuments to civilization. Because the masses were aligned with the will of their rulers, they were welcome into these places. Jews, however, were on the outside. They had a separate, smaller society with its own, less rigid hierarchy. They did not acknowledge the superiority of the Genteel elites, and so were kept on the fringes. Later, as Western civilization transitioned to capitalism, this outlook gave them the boldness to become leaders within the economy, while Catholics were encouraged to continue submitting out of love for Christ, love for their neighbors, love for order and society.

Even to this day, the Catholic church holds sway over countless people. Even if eternal life is a myth, something essential is passed on from father to son, mother to daughter. Eternity is found in the unbroken chain of heredity. And to those good Catholics who practice the love of Christ, who work hard and accept the authority of society, they are promised advancement through the ranks of heaven. From generation to generation, they will rise through society as long as their spirit doesn't falter and they wander not down the darkened paths.

Demons, Angels, and the Human Psyche

As a culture, we take a unique pleasure in insulting the intelligence of our ancestors. Stories of blood-letting and witch-burning are woven into our conceptions of the past. When we say 'Dark Ages,' it's with an undertone that those centuries were truly brutal, degraded, and filled with the most vile forms of ignorance. Neighboring countries slaughtered each other, raped and pillaged. People accused one other of heresies and murdered criminals for the slightest infraction. It's easy to conjure the image of a man swaying from the gallows, or of a smoldering ruin that was once a thriving village. These images glow with a celluloid menace, and sitting in the movie theatres, it's easy to think, 'I'm glad it's not like that anymore.' How proud we are that we're better than the medieval peasantry, whose ignorance serves to highlight the sophistication of our own culture.

Yet rather than dismissing their belief as ignorant, what happens when we explore them seriously? Let's take, for instance, the phrase 'bless you,' which originates from the bygone belief that when a man is sneezing, he's expelling demons from his body. Taken at face value, many of us find this laughable. But at the same time, our ancestors were on to something. Like modern doctors, they noticed that when an individual started sneezing, his behavior likewise changed. He had greater trouble rising from bed, he was lethargic, he complained of aches. They blamed these symptoms on 'demons' and said that the man was trying to expel them when he sneezed. This explanation isn't that far from the truth. We simply replace the word 'demon' with that of 'virus,' and suddenly it fits seamlessly with modern medical science. Our ancestors understanding of sickness was more colorful than our own, but it was likewise based on observation and reasoning.

This gets even more interesting when we examine their beliefs on temptation. While modern psychology blurs the interplay of psychic forces to create a single 'self' or 'I', medieval psychology recognized the multitude of impulses and thought patterns that composed the individual. Some of these psychic qualities they classified as demons, asserting that many of our thoughts and impulses were just the whisperings of these infernal beasts. Others they ascribed to the Holy Ghost, who spoke on God's behalf within the individual's psyche. This same dichotomy would later be depicted in cartoons from the beginning of the 20th century, with a child protagonist conflicted between a selfish or pro-social choose, a demon standing on one shoulder and an angel on the other.

Because they differentiated between their thoughts in this manner, it's easy to conceive that even in their ignorance, many of our ancestors were more aware of themselves than we ourselves are. The modern layman simply doesn't have as many symbols to attach to his own mental processes. Meanwhile, within the cosmology of demons and angels, there is a great wealth of encoded psychological wisdom, and we are fools for so casually dismissing it.