Avoiding the Void
In my timeline on X (née Twitter), a post by Rod Dreher came up concerning a Roman Catholic cathedral, St. Hedwig’s. The newly remodeled church has a strikingly minimalist look.
Dreher was unimpressed:
He expands on this opinion in an article for The European Conservative.
The interior of the vast structure has been stripped utterly bare, its interior an all-white canvas of nothingness. It is so vacant of any sign of not only the Catholic faith, but of Christianity itself, that even a strict Calvinist would be left puzzled over which God is worshiped inside this whitewashed modernist sepulcher, this costly monument to the Void.
“The building is a visible sign for the dead German church,” pronounced the German-born U.S. Catholic theologian Ulrich Lehner. “It is a shell without any life inside. Nobody will pray here.”
Utterly, damnably true. …
There is scarcely anything visibly Christian about the space. Aesthetically and symbolically, it invites visitors to worship the sacred Nothing. It is a “clean, well-lighted place,” in the nihilistic sense of Ernest Hemingway’s 1933 short story of the same name. It is a hauntingly spare tale about an elderly, suicidal Spanish man who frequents a certain café, described in the story’s title, seeking refuge from nihilism.
Dreher quotes the mock prayer in Hemingway’s story:
It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name …
Dreher adds, “This is the perverse prayer one imagines visitors to the bleached-out St. Hedwig’s will pray, if they pray at all.”
Essentially he believes that St. Hedwig’s “sacralizes nihilism,” replacing the richness of traditional Christianity with a postmodern black hole. In his article, he tells of a time he and his young son attended services in Methodist church, and his son asked in alarm, “Dad, dad. Where are the icons?” Dreher’s whole article amounts to the same question.
Had Nietzsche heard the boy’s question, he might have said something about The Twilight of the Idols, which would lead inexorably, he thought, to a point Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche was no Christian – he wrote a whole book called Antichrist – and he liked to believe himself liberated from traditional religious beliefs, a harbinger of the Übermensch, the mythical Superman who was his true object of worship. But a deeper part of him may have demurred; in his later years, shut up in an asylum, he sometimes fantasized that he was Jesus Christ.
Dreher no doubt disagrees with Nietzsche on most things. But he would probably agree that the downfall of the icons, or idols, will lead to an amoral, post-human future.
My response to St. Hedwig’s is more positive. And I can say exactly why. The artist’s rendering bears a marked similarity to a imaginal space I often visit when I practice meditation. My version of this space has rows of carved stone benches, rather than freestanding chairs, and a wide column of light descending from a skylight to the midpoint of the circular floorpan, where the bowl or urn is situated in the illustration. Otherwise it looks much the same. I could imagine visiting St. Hedwig’s, though I’m not a churchgoer, and enjoying a worship service there. And contra Rod Dreher, I don’t believe I would be worshiping the Void.
People who object to an icon-free religion tend to be suspicious of anything that departs from the faith in which they were raised, or to which they converted in a burst of enthusiasm. In their view, it shows a certain effrontery to browse among a given religion’s various truth-claims, picking and choosing what to believe. Such browsers substitute their own fallible human judgment and egoistic preferences for the dictates of God.
The trouble with this objection is that the alternative, for many of us, is decidedly worse. The alternative is to accept a particular religious tradition lock, stock, and barrel, with no questions asked. Instead of relying on one’s admittedly imperfect judgment, the traditionalist suppresses his own judgment and believes what he’s told. If he finds a given religion too unpalatable, he may choose another, as Dreher apparently did (he alludes to his “spiritual journey that eventually took [him] to Catholicism, and after a later crisis, into Orthodoxy”), but he cannot adopt a “fast-food menu” approach, taking some insights from column A and some from column B. Whatever tradition he adopts must be adopted wholesale. It is the Word of God, after all.
But is it?
As I see it, all mature religious traditions are heavily overgrown with accretions having nothing to do with the primal revelations that inspired them. Over the centuries, any body of thought will acquire political, cultural, mythological, and iconographic baggage, which would seem not only alien but absurd to the religion’s founder. It is doubtful that Jesus of Nazareth, for instance, ever envisioned anything remotely like the carnival of Technicolor imagery in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.
As a corollary, I also think that serious religions (I exclude trolling efforts, like the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and ephemeral cults) are grounded in some legitimate spiritual experience and insight, and that immersion in such a religion can put the worshiper in touch with this insight and replicate this experience, at least to a degree.
If this is true, then the mass of theological argument and mythological narrative accrued by a religion, along with the visual representations of these ideas, is mostly irrelevant and arguably counterproductive.
Organized religion can serve many aims – fraternizing with friends, building a sense of community, doing good works. But so far as inward, spiritual exploration is concerned, the discovery (or rediscovery) of the founder’s original, untainted insight is religion’s real purpose. And in most cases, the dogmas and doctrines, the symbols and mantras, the sacred stories and well-loved icons only get in the way of this deeper and more elusive truth.
Nietzsche was at least partly wrong. The twilight of the idols does not necessarily lead to relativism, angst, and a renascence of the primitive. It may well be true, as Dostoevsky said, that “if God is dead, everything is permitted.” But God is more than idols. God is the still, small voice within us. And the still, small voice can be heard by those who listen for it, even in “a clean, well-lighted place.”
Or perhaps especially there.
Ooof.
A master class in profound simplicity.
I needed this.
Much thanks from the flotsam and jetsam of Japan.