Such are the jokes that Fate plays on us. I meant to keep (as much as is ever possible) my fandom observations apart from my personal ideological positions; that was the whole point of Orrery, from the beginning. But when one's religion becomes a mass fandom, involved in a partisan fight over a work of fanfic, the literary critic and ethical dialectician is forced to merge to two, volens nolens. So here goes: there's bound to be something to offend everybody here—

Disclaimer: I am not a licensed historian. I am not an ordained divine, nor a certified scholar of Scripture; I had a few undergraduate courses in Judeo-Christian history at a Catholic college, but otherwise my erudition (such as it is) is entirely amateur, borne of reading and spending time in museums, or talking informally to those who are qualified scholars. Unlike 99% of the people commenting on The Passion of the Christ, however, I do try to verify my sources — and not by looking for those which I know will agree with me in advance, as seems to be the rule rather than the welcome exception in Christian "Bible History" books and websites. Thus you will always find footnotes and references and indications where else the reader, dissenting or curious, can go to find verification or contradiction of what I say. (I won't do all your searches for you, though. But the notes open in a new window for convenience, since this is so long.)

[Note: there is a further problem with this essay, in that it's tacitly understood that anyone reading Orrery is going to know a little about my other writings and that's why you're reading this, because you're interested in what I'm going to have to say on some other subject than fanfiction. But it strikes me as possible that someone is going to link to this without any context, and so a lot of this is going to probably sound like gibberish to the reader showing up out of the blue. I don't know how to solve this, because it's already a mammoth project to try to provide enough obscure backdrop for the arguments I pose to make sense, without trying to explain the whole canon/fanon battles of fanfiction, and my own takes on the problem. This is probably the worst article you could pick of mine to start with, because it assumes some familiarity with on-line fandom in general, Middle-earth fanfiction in specific, and principles and approaches that I have taken in both my fiction and my nonfiction — and my idiosyncratic style ad humours.

It rambles because the problem is so complex and messy, and because I am so (ahem) passionate about the issues involved it isn't a neat academic work at all, but dashes from lit crit to history obsessions to political analysis of obscure small movements to fierce exhortation and denunciation. I guess the thing to do, if you are coming to this rant as a complete stranger, and don't have time to read the rest of my stuff to fill in the gaps, is to email me and just ask about apparent non-sequiturs & other weirdness.]

CAVEAT: Strong language, graphic imagery, caustic humour and spoilers for The Passion of the Christ. You Have Been Warned.
***

This is an examination of the film from a variety of perspectives, historical, artistic, theological, cultural, and an indictment of the culture which produced it, and the cultures which embrace it, from one who speaks not as a foreigner examining queer alien customs, but as a traveler from that land. The journey passes through many strange realms, many of them not at first glance sharing much (or anything) in common, and it ends up being full of detours and backtracks because of this. Because it's gotten so long, and so tangled (like anything organic) I've given up trying to sort it into neat sections, there's a lot of reduplication and some things may be out of order, because I don't write sequentially but laterally, and I've made the footnotes and sidebars to open in separate windows, to avoid scrolling or a too-small text screen.

The Passion of the Christ can only properly be understood if it is considered from the subcultural strata it comes from — and part of that background is one which is deeply rooted in hurt-comfort focused fanfiction, though I am certain that most of the film's supporters — the Passionistas, I call them — are quite unaware of the fanfic phenomenon, and would utterly reject my assertion if made aware of it. What after all does a work of devotional art have to do with a thoroughly secular pop-culture movement that is most notable (in extra-fandom media and the world at large so far as the world at large is aware of us) for "adult fiction" featuring romances between Captain Kirk and Spock the Vulcan? The suggestion is surely anathema.

But sed contra, as Aquinas would say, religious fanfiction has a long and venerable tradition. It is possible to argue that the very art of film has its roots in religious fanfiction, for what are the Greek Tragedies of Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, if not fanfic of the highest water, and what are the Festivals of Athens, except organized, socially-sanctioned fanfiction competitions? Well-known myths and familiar characters, reinterpreted in ways that challenge the accepted understanding of the stories, or which flesh out and give psychological motivations to the hieratic figures of goddesses and kings, spear-carriers and princesses, demi-gods and gods and the Fates themselves?

And other religions, to greater or lesser extent, have engaged in such fanfiction, not excluding the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Talmud even, with its furnishings of additional motivation and plot details not found in the Torah, borders on fanfic. Paradise Lost is fanfic on an epic scale. School Christmas Pageants are fanfic on a lesser scale. The suggestion is not unique to me, either; a Jewish humanities professor and Tolkien and Buffy fan has also noted the connection between Mel Gibson's film and the tradition of religious fanfic. But the species of Christian fanfiction is a much more complicated and rocky field than most people are equipped to traverse, I fear, because it require both a high level of familiarity with the subject matter, and the ability to look at it from a detached, outside perspective.

If I were to say, for example, that the Stations of the Cross were fanfiction, once past the blank stares, it would take a lot of work to explain why this is so, because most people I know would have a hard time dissociating them from their function, which is that of a devotional work. Even if I were able to get an admission that most of the Stations are not in the Gospel, and therefore invented by some later author (and not be met with the allegation that they must just be an independent tradition passed down from the time of the Apostles) — I am not sure that I could convince most Catholic hearers of my acquaintance that they might legitimately be considered as a cultural artifact, a strange combination of iconography and dramatic reenactment not unlike that of a float in the Rose Parade, I would be surprised if I did not meet with the same hostility reserved for those who compare such things to similar artifacts found in other world religions.

It is similar to the inability found in many Christians to appreciate artifacts which are produced by, and for, other religions, from antiquity to the present, only in reverse. A statue of Shiva may be a superb work of art made by a master sculptor, or a crude hodgepodge made by an untalented individual for home use. In either case, its function religiously is the same: to inspire and aid in meditation those who look upon it, and arguments can be made that it is irrelevant what it looks like so long as it does the job (just as a "Fire Exit" sign's job is not to be beautiful, but to be legible, and it fails no matter how beautiful it is if it is not the latter) or, on the contrary, that a hideous blob is a distraction to devotion; or, yet again, on the other hand, that the beauty of the statue is itself distracting from the primary purpose. And these are all legitimate topics for discussion, and they are two distinct arguments, the quality of the art and the question of what is good for meditation, and they are valid no less of a Hindu image than of a Christian one, as when Anselm of Canterbury complained¹ of the many bad paintings of Jesus he had seen. Even if you think (as I do not) that the "strange gods" of other religions are merely demons, or nonexistent.

But for many devout — or at least, devoted — Christians, it is impossible for them to separate the symbolic function of the artwork from its res, its "somethinghood" and agree that yes, it is beautiful as a work of art, even if one does not believe in what it symbolizes, or thinks it worse yet dangerous or evil; "pagan art" is all idolatry, idols are evil, idols of naked humanoids are pornographic, and there is nothing more to be said on the subject. Thus they rob themselves of the ability to understand not simply those (dangerous) Others out there, but also to understand better (perhaps) their own beliefs: to see, for instance, that there are ways in which the omnipotence of the Divine can be rendered visually, in the many arms of Indian iconography; or that the flash of insight that leaves a mundane preoccupied individual thunderstruck, and changes the entire course of that one's life thereafter, which we think of in terms of "Saul on the road to Damascus" has been visually represented by the symbol of a stylized thunderbolt in Thibetan Buddhism, and in three-dimensional form used as a ritual object no less meaningful than a palm branch or aspergillum; or find it interesting, to consider one's own hymnography and imagery and note that we, too, refer to the Deity in terms terpsichorean, and render the idea of evil impulses being trampled underfoot with visual literalism, though we don't happen to combine the two in our tradition.

—These are dangerous considerations, of course: such observations may lead one to start thinking ecumenical thoughts, and then before one knows it, Moral Relativism has taken hold and one has become hopelessly infected with Modernism and Humanism and Liberalism and needs to be (always lovingly, of course) anathematized for one's own good. [/irony] But not really. I've heard all this, in various forms, over the course of my life, along with more ecumenical and intelligent views, and I have often wondered how much of the pious horror of things "pagan" is genuine, how much of it a superstitious fear of ritual contamination by things forbidden and tabu, how much merely the yokel's provincial incomprehension and disdain for a foreign idiom,² — and how much a dread that, after all, one will be forced to admit that there is not such a great gulf between Them and Us in every regard, as is pleasant to pretend. I have discerned all of the above in varying degree, even in otherwise educated writers like Justin Martyr, who irrc makes the sad mistake of holding demons responsible for the existence of myths like Hercules, so that by pre-planting such stories of a god's son being raised up, the validity of Christianity would automatically be called into question.³ And indeed, this same argument I read, some 1800 years later, in almost the same words (though less eloquently) when the Disney cartoon came out, apparently come to independently by the furious author of the page "Counterfeit Savior"…

On the other hand, one must also point out that not every Early Christian was so moved: the painter who depicted Christ-as-Apollo driving the sun-chariot in a catacomb was not, and neither was St. Patrick, who reports in his memoirs how his subconscious invoked Helios as a symbolic name for Jesus in the midst of a terrible nightmare. So this inability to detach and be objective about such things is not incompatible with Christianity, it is merely sadly rare — and the more so among those who most avoid contamination by secular culture, present or past. So too we should not be surprised to find the same sort of fervency that was seen as I read some years ago in India, when angry villagers stormed down in mobs on the local stations that quit carrying the Ramayana, among Christian viewers who by their own admissions haven't been inside a movie theatre for twenty-five years and don't expect to enter another one in the next twenty-five. Of course they can't be objective about it, or consider it as art, or even objectively as a religious artifact among many religious artifacts, any more than the devout Hindu viewers could consider the depiction of their patron merely a TV show.

But it is more surprising, and worse, to find among the educated and semi-educated, those who brag of their knowledge of the Bible, or of the liberal arts, and ought to know better. (That is after all why I began my reluctant series of informal indictments of the film with the "trick question" of what language the New Testament was written in: even the worst faith-based "historical" websites usually manage to get that right, though there are some which persist in trying to prove that the Latin translation was in all ways superior to the originals.⁴

They report that the Gospels were written in Greek, and the best of them consider the problems of various rescensions honestly, and report on the cultural contexts and debates surrounding them. The problem is, in order to tell good from bad among them, you already have to know a lot about the subject matter. Kind of a circular trap, there, since most believers that I know are afraid of secular scholarship as The Enemy always trying to sabotage the True Faith.

Regular readers know that I am not afraid of offending anyone. It isn't for nothing that I chose as my "handle" a faux-Celtic form of the ancient Roman word (a genuine one, btw) that is the feminine form of bellator, meaning "warrior", with the connotations of one who fights alone, not as part of any unit. Why then would I have hesitated, as I did, before addressing the topic of Gibson's Passion on my message board, hoping that someone else would bring it up and ask my opinion, which I could then solemnly give, rather than plant my guerdon and take a stand, or ride up to the pavilion and slam my lance against the Red Knight's ominous shield, hanging upon the tree of corpses?

Because I pick my battles. Not on the grounds of winnability — as Yoda might say, "There is no win," no point at which someone in my profession can ever say it's settled; you just go on fighting the long defeat against the Demons of Stupidity (in one's self, no less) day after day until there isn't another. But on the basis of whether there is any point in arguing it publicly. Sometimes it is clear that the benefits of a given debate will not likely outweigh the likely problems occasioned by it, and sometimes it is clear that the people who would benefit aren't going to listen at all, and sometimes there simply aren't enough people who will understand the terms of the debate without stopping it for a lengthy course in defining them, and in all of these cases, or any, it's better to discuss such things privately, in person or in private mails, hotly perhaps, but not in a vast arena, just as there are some topics that there is no point in trying to address when dealing with a large freshman seminar: more constructive argument will take place over a coffee-shop table instead.

And it just seemed to me to be too big a topic, one for which I am incompletely qualified, and where there was a high likelihood of an audience divided utterly between those who already have thought of everything I might have to say (and thus I would be wasting their time) and those who would automatically be unwilling to listen to anything I should say on the subject, it being negative (and thus I would be wasting my time.)

Another reason, less creditable, is that of a personal cowardice: not of repercussions but because it means going into terrain I have no desire to revisit: some minefields are best left behind. Like the desire to keep fandom and "real life" separate, it has proven impossible to avoid this — honorably, at least. If I had seen anyone else doing what I am attempting to do, with competence, then I would most gladly have pointed readers that way and left this battle to better warriors. But alas, this cup was not to pass me by—

(I thought about trying to tone down the appalling puns, the outrageous ObRefs, and be more appropriately serious — and then I thought, Heck with that, it just isn't worth it. Making wide detours about the obvious cultural references and muzzling my deranged poetic muse to try to moderate the buffoonery in a gesture towards the sensibilities of possibly-sensitive possible readers would be but a fig-leaf on the rough beast of my writing, and as much use, given the whole gist and purpose of this rant, as trying to modestly disguise the sexuality of the Diana of Ephesus or the Bull of Heaven — and if you just read that statement as a declaration of neopaganism then you missed the point entirely. Actually, I belong to the Illuminati. (And no, I can't help it. I'm not even going to try to apologize, because before I get to the end of it something else even worse will come to mind, like the two or three that just did. Did you know that 2 Peter 2:22 is an ObRef to Proverbs 26:11?)

So who am I talking to and why? (Those who are just going Get on with it, start the movie! please bear with this introit: it is relevant, I promise, and if it doesn't seem to fit, just wait for the EE and it will all make sense, I assure you…)

Those Christians who might be ready/willing/able to understand the Laocoön group not simply as "fine art," safe and non-threatening because it is from a lost and defeated culture, nor contrarily as obscene and hideous because it contains nudes and depicts a scene from pagan mythology, but to examine and accept it for what it is, Iliad fanart — those are the only ones I expect to be able to reach (not necessarily convince, by any means) by my arguments. And those, I strongly suspect, would find it a large camel to swallow, to be asked to in turn regard Michelangelo's Pieta as Bible fanart. And those who already agree with what I say, of course, but perhaps haven't put it all together yet or haven't the inner access to the cultural substrata that this filmic fanfic is coming out of.

Those who do not consider themselves Christians (I personally make no attempt to sort out the ontological status of those who were baptized as infants but do not aver a creed presently, regardless of official Church doctrine) who — despite the best efforts of my coreligionists — still manage to nonetheless hold onto the principle and conviction that not all Christians are necessarily ignorant, bigoted, intellectually-lazy and above all else, fearful; who know that there is something terribly, terribly weird about the film and the fervor surrounding it, but don't know enough about Christianity to feel confident to argue the problems that they perceive but as in a glass darkly; or cannot make out the dynamics of the situation enough to make sense of it all, because there is no accepted paradigm as yet for "Intra-Fandom Flame Wars and List Wars" in the matter of religious artwork.

This last is particularly ironic, because the whole foundation of modern fanfiction comes from religion, and particularly from the Judeo-Christian realm, and in its historical development from Catholicism specifically. As I've mentioned here and there, now and then (going to and fro as I do) — the idea of canon, of retconning, and of nitpicking for fun and profit, not merely in flameage, comes from the same fandom that gave us fanfiction, profic, fanon and even slash, way before Gene Roddenberry was on the media scene — The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Yes, it was Holmes fans who first obsessed in such a way as to make more than the sporadic headline (things like moody teenage readers of The Sorrows of Young Werther dressing like their idol and even shooting themselves in imitation) back when they lined up to snag the Strand as soon as the next episode came out, and went into public mourning when the series was cancelled, and protested until the series' creator finally relented and brought back his hero. Or heroes, because after all what is Holmes without Watson, whose voice is our primary access to that secondary world? Just who is Dr. Watson, anyway, with all his contradictory characteristics?

That is what got the whole concept of canon, in fandom, going — the intersection of obsessed series fans, and serious theology students, in the person of Rev. Ronald Knox and some friends, who took their Scripture study training and applied it to the writings of A. Conan Doyle, combing the source texts for contradictions and proposing solutions, in the high-falutin' style of 19th century Biblical scholarship, looking for Q sources and interpolations, and establishing what was and was not part of "the canon," perfectly straight-faced and tongue-in-cheek at once, as if The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes were not fiction at all but a chronicle put forward as truth claims, to be investigated like any nonfiction history. It's a game that goes on to this day, but it has spread far beyond Baker Street, and I very much doubt that anyone else could have accomplished such a thing, besides educated ecumenical British clergy with a skewed sense of humour,⁵ a passion for genre fiction, and a total lack of stuffy defensiveness about either their hobby or their vocation.

The crew of mystery writers and mystery readers which included Fr. Knox and G. K. Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers were about as far from the target audience for Gibson's film as can be imagined. They weren't so terrified of popular culture and worldly evils that they remained utterly ignorant of them, like children hiding heads under blankets, and all those viewers of the film who brag that this is the first time they've gone to see a movie in dozens of years, and surely the last; who talk all day long about the sins of unbelievers while carefully ensuring that they're never contaminated by actually meeting any; who are so ignorant of history that they really do think that all the evils of society are new and the result of "modern times," somehow forgetting that there is nothing new under the sun; and manage to wink entirely at Christian hypocrisy and sin in their zeal for "evangelization," which as far as I can tell mostly involves self-righteous dictatorial outbreaks in a conscience-salving way of writing off threatening Others.

But it is a Christian's duty to evangelize! —Well, but there's a big difference between doing something, and making a meaningless gesture. Evangelism as it is usually meant, by those who claim to be doing it and those who object to it, is actually anything but — but this is a complicated dialectical problem, the problem of definitions and the abuse of words, which I doubt I can solve in a few paragraphs. I don't believe in evangelizing as it is typically defined, which I would consider "pseudo-evangelizing," engaging in a ritual action which has nothing to do with the real thing at all. My faith, which holds that if God exists, then the Eternal is surely competent to recognize those who struggle to serve the Light Side without my direction, does not allow me to try to bully strangers into belief so that they can legalistically qualify for salvation, else I dare not have anything to do with them, far less care about them—

Just as there is "negative theology," which attempts to amplify the understanding of the Divine by describing what God is not — so too there is what I have just coined as "negative evangelism" — which counter intuitively doesn't mean convincing people not to become Christians (that's regular evangelism), but not doing that; that is to say, since traditional evangelism tends to alienate people (even fellow Christians, making us want to go and sacrifice goats to Pan just out of oneryness) by being arrogant, dismissive, assertive and accidentally ironic by telling people what it is that they believe instead of what it is that they should be believing, the job of the negative evangelist is to be the opposite, to "make a space" around belief, and not to fill it with senseless chatter: to, by refraining from alienating and aggressive behaviour, to show people that it is, in fact, possible to be intelligent, civilized, curious, and respectful (except of people who chew peppermint and puff it in your face, of course) and to be a Christian, difficult though it may be to credit. That's the best, and the most, that anyone in this current climate of doctrinaire aggression can and ought to do.

—Personally, I think the business of evangelization proper ought to be confined to Christians at the present time, because that's who seem to be most severely in need of it. It isn't the person who isn't using a power tool who is in danger: it's the idiot who thinks he knows how to use a saber-saw and doesn't who is a menace to himself and others. (Of course, the thing to do first is to take the saw away from him, so the analogy (like all analogies) is flawed. Practically speaking, there isn't any way to get their Bibles away from them, but at least we might be able to make them open the books and start reading instead of using them to thump strangers over the heads with. Reading beyond highlighted proof-texts with approved interpretations, I mean; though I despair of that sometimes when I read, for instance, the site for Christian Women™ — I'm sure I fail on both counts by their standards — which had a mediation on the book of the prophet Amos which managed to entirely ignore the social justice theme and reinterpret "Woe to the complacent in Zion!" as a personal self-motivation text.

It was a staggering example of wishthink there, taking something which when I first read it, even as a very low-level member of the First World, made me assess my own status and community in a way that few other exhortations to charity ever manage, arousing not a low-level feeling of guilt and discomfort but a sense that living in a cultural acceptance of gross excess resting on a substrate of grinding poverty was an outrage to Heaven and an invitation to Apocalypse — and turning it into a meek, non-threatening reminder that we all need to keep our souls like our living rooms nice and tidy. I don't think I'm being unfair, either. I've noticed that prominent Christian women authors usually edit out the parts of the "Rubies" passage that deal with the Queen-Consort handling international trade and land deals and managing businesses…
***
 

The reason I didn't want to get involved, but would rather have passed by the whole bloody mess on the other side of the road, (and am I the only one to see the irony of the different sects of Christianity happily anathematizing each other for heresy while all reading smugly of the Good Samaritan in church?) is that it requires revisiting aspects of my past life that, well, I just didn't want to go there. Now, I try to keep autobiography to a minimum in public discourse, and only where relevant; this is unfortunately relevant.

I come from a background not the same as, but in closer proximity to, that of Mel Gibson than most people. Some declare themselves "recovering Catholics" — I say, rather, that I am a recovering American Neo-Traditionalist. This is a sub-set of Catholics which has its own fragmentation and sects, of which the Sedevacantists like Hutton Gibson are either the pure faithful core of the True Believers, or the tag-end of the ragged fringe, depending on whether one is inside or outside. Sedevacantists (lit. "the throne is empty") are so much more "Catholic than the Pope" that they don't believe there is a pope at all, because obviously no Church that changes the things that are most important to them personally could possibly be guided by the Holy Spirit, most notably the ceremonials of the liturgy from the old Latin Tridentine Rite to the Novus Ordo. In other words, they have made a small breakaway Protestant church founded on the devotion to the externals of the Roman Catholic tradition as manifested circa 1950 in the United States.

Yes, this is weird. And inconsistent. And it's particularly funny that the American Neo-Traditionalists call everyone else "cafeteria Catholics" who pick and choose what they want to believe. They are all part of a generic class of "Old Catholics," similar churches which broke off in past centuries because they objected to, say, the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception and Marian devotion back in 1854, or thought their ethnicity was slighted, like the Polish National Catholic Church, and they all ignore the Vatican (well, sort of) and consider themselves the only true Catholics, unlike the rest of us LiberalModernSecularHumanists who are all going to Hell.

The Sedevacantists are so far out of the mainstream even of "Traditionalism" that many Catholics don't even know they exist. I was rather surprised when I found out about them, in my teens. Slightly less marginal are the Tridentistes, who are equally devoted to the Latin Mass but don't say that there is an Antipope in Rome, just that the Vatican is misguided. The more infamous of these are the Lefebvrites (and don't worry if you haven't heard of them, hardly anybody outside the "Traditionalist" movement has) who follow the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre who decided to bring back the old format liturgy without permission from Rome, and got excommunicated for it. This makes them schismatic, according to Roman Catholicism, like the Russian and Greek Orthodox churches, but still part of the same mystical unity. (And yeah, Catholics who mock Protestantism for fragmenting and that such fragmentation is a necessary consequence of the Reformation's principles, haven't a leg to stand on, only most of us are ignorant of the fact.)

His followers are also known as SSPX, short for Society of St. Pius X, and I had heard years ago that Mel Gibson was part of that — though it turns out that it is more complicated than that (not surprisingly) — the Gibsons had attended a SSPX church to get the illegal Tridentine Mass, but weren't actually part of it, it seems, and went off to build their own chapel (which isn't permitted, btw, you can't just go and decide you're going to make a church without official permission and still consider yourself a Catholic in good standing) up in Malibu Springs. These subgroups split all the time: part of the Lefebvrites for instance reconciled with Rome and became the Society of St. Peter, licensed to perform and celebrate the old-style rites legally; while there are other groups which consider even SSPX to be too liberal and secular and therefore damned⁶ and which constantly feud, excommunicate each other and probably have maybe twenty or thirty members apiece.

I wasn't part of that, but I knew a lot of Tridentistes growing up. (We had more of a romantic attachment, like Jacobitism, for something lost that we had never experienced.) Now, I specifically call it "American Neo-Traditionalism" because I don't know, and frankly doubt, that it is anything like the situation in Europe. Is there much romanticized longing, like that of Russian romantics for the Tsars, for the days of the Tridentine Mass and the time when priests were revered and everyone did as they were told and no one ever questioned? (Was there ever such a time, anywhere, except in people's imagination?) But in the US, and I gather from the example of Archbishop Lefebvre, in Canada, the situation is one of a kind of general nostalgia for "Pre-Vatican II" combined with a nostalgia for Norman Rockwell's America, and may or may not contain any number of other fealties and ideologies, including Inquisition Denial, the Cult of St. General Franco, the Three Days of Darkness (a Catholic variant of Rapture), Fatima, Medugorgje, and/or other Marian Apparitions, relics, stigmatics, Indulgences, miracles, talismans of various classes, fasts and abstinence on Fridays — what they have in common with other Christian groups holding to similar positions often classed as "conservative" though that is a misleading term, is a universal sense that they are under attack, that the world is worse now than it ever was, and that the End Times are near, and that the downfall of Christianity and Civilization (which they identify uncritically) is to be found in things like women wearing trousers and the prefix Ms., and vegetarianism, and modern art.

I haven't yet figured out how all the subsets of "Traditionalism" overlap: part of the problem is that I am too close to it, so that things which seem mainstream to me, I discover are really outré to most Catholics, even now. And, as I research and listen, always were, even back in ye Goode Olde Days. And therein lies the rub. Most of the "Traditionalists" I know weren't part of the Catholic Church before Vatican II. An increasing number of us weren't even born then. So it's all a longing for a fantasy world, which bears no resemblance to the way things were in most parishes across the country for most parishioners — that world where everyone was educated and devout and knew all about their faith and believed deeply, until the combined forces of The Devil and Modernism conspired to suddenly destroy it all in one fell swoop in the 1960s. Even as a very young kid I used to wonder how things could be "so good" and then suddenly fall apart all out of nowhere. (I was always a philosopher.) The answer of course, being that they weren't and they didn't. But that is a subject for another book really.

However, this subgroup of isolationist Christians with a peculiarly narrow definition of Catholicism accepts the tropes almost unquestioningly, and doesn't by and large read anything outside the group except to pan it — and I am afraid from the reviews and articles I read by Neo-Traditionalist Catholics, that they don't actually even read the books they attack, and perhaps don't even bother to skim them all the time. I was once such a dogmatic and obnoxious Triumphalist —because the pessimistic and historically-illiterate conviction that these are the End Times and the worst the world has ever been go hand in hand with a conviction that somehow We the orthodox⁷ faithful are going to triumph and rescue Western Culture from the clutches of the Liberals. —This sounds weirdly like Nader, now that I think of it, replacing "orthodox" with Greens.) Such is the mindset of papers like The Wanderer and those who read little besides such publications, as I know too well.

There is a certain amount of identification with "political/fiscal conservativism" but it is not as great, based on my own experiences, as might be expected. Most of the Neo-Traditionalists are pretty well dropped-out of secular culture, going off and forming semi-communes (I knew virtually no non-Catholics at all until I was in my early teens), devoting all their "political" energy into doing things like praying the Rosary, assuming that they interact with the secular world on that high of a level; aside from hot-button family values issues, most of those I knew were largely oblivious to anything but the most slanted polemic views of a world run by LiberalModerns who are simultaneously apathetic and out to obliterate Christianity and Culture, who are also trying to annihilate humanity so that they can leave the world to "Nature," and who are running the world by various conspiracies and hegemonies that somehow manage to organize themselves and run smoothly when in my experience trying to get ten people on a parish CCD committee all pointing in the same direction is next to impossible…

Most "cradle Catholics" in places where the local ethnic culture is also Catholic don't even think about doctrine. Any more than most cradle Buddhists worry about it in Korea — though you do see a good bit more angsty introspective concern in culturally-riven Japan. The Latin Mass is the banner issue, but it isn't all of it. It is extremely relevant to the claims of authority of the Neo-Traditionalists, Sedevacantists or not, but it's in a way eyewash for the real problems. Frankly I think that it should have been made a non-issue from the start by allowing both Rites to coexist all along and not making it a casus belli, and let it wither away naturally as people gravitated to the rituals they could not simply understand, but actually even hear (my first and last experience of the Tridentine rite was a staggering disappointment — I typically heard more Latin at my local English language mass which often incorporates Gregorian chant — as it was all mumbled at the speed of a 45 played at 78 rps) but that is all blood under the bridge, as it were. And it is not irrelevant to the movie, either, and I will get to that in part II of this article.

But people forget in all the controversy that the rejection of Vatican II involves a lot more than the old liturgy, or even the official denunciation of the charge of Jewish deicide, but also a spirit of tolerance and respect towards others which was quite lacking in the Counter-Reformation Church that "Traditionalists" have set up as the One True Era to worship.

Just as Traditionalists as well as others forget (or never knew) that the second Vatican Council didn't come out of nowhere: that these humane, intellectual, ecumenical reforms had been part of the Catholic culture for a very long time. There is, I fear, a fearful desire to not think, to not admit that the world did change long before Vatican II, that the Church itself did as well, and so too doctrine and practice, and this is the cause of that longing for Ye Goode Olde Days of moral absolutism when everyone knew right from wrong and knew his (and especially her) place and everything was beautiful and noble and pigs ran around preroasted with forks in them—

Vatican II never mandated the worst of the abuses — clown masses, dancers in tights, all the hot-button stories (some of which I confess I now regard with a bit of skepticism) that came into the Catholic Church in America in the 1970s, though the "Folk Mass" and Vatican II were conflated by polemicists on both sides of the debate throughout. But it would be well for those "Traditionalists" who lament Vatican II, to ask themselves why "the masses" (sorry) didn't rise up in protest and defense of their beloved Tridentine Rite, why the people did in fact bring in and impose those innovations, dumb and irreverent and tacky — but then, it's hard to say that "tacky" was a consequence of either the 1960s or of the Second Vatican Counsel, when you know much about the history of American popular culture since colonial days — and have few, if any, regrets for Ye Goode Olde Days? (It would also be instructive to contrast the claims of martyred, persecuted powerlessness of the Church in America, with the revelations of just how much worldly, secular, financial power the Church in its oldest Archdioceses has wielded, both de facto and de jure, over the secular state. The immunity to the common laws, the reverence from the powers of government, that Boston and New York enjoyed to the ruin of all is undeniable, and makes the stance of being poor widdle helpless victims of the secular state a rather tough one to keep on maintaining.)

The thing about Neo-Traditionalism is that it is (as I will keep on saying) a very new tradition: it is less than 500 years old. It is essentially a stripped-down, repainted version of Counter-Reformation Catholicism, the reaction to the Protestant Reformation which was like all reactionary movements, immoderate and counter-productive. (I commit "Traditionalist" heresy by disavowing the Counter-Reformation, and its flagship venture, the Council of Trent.⁸ I don't care.) Those who talk about the "glorious immutable tradition" are not (afaik) saying that they want to reinstall castrati in the choirs of their churches, or make it a crime to have sex during Lent again, or be obliged to apply for clerical permission if they want to read Descartes or Victor Hugo. Those who declare that the Tridentine Mass is the only perfect version of the liturgy, and that no other forms are permissible because that was what was stated at Trent, are not only fetishizing a dead language, (and doing their best to divide the faithful from their faith, but more on that in part II), and that at no time in the past was the thought of it being something "for" the worshippers, something subjective and participatory, but always the God-directed Sacrifice to which congregation involvement was irrelevant so long as the forms were carried out properly — but also pig-ignorant of the history of the liturgy itself. (Or else lying like rugs.)

It isn't just things like the fact that as far back as the time of the Song of Roland, that horrible modern travesty of the Sign of Peace was in use — and worse yet, it was the Kiss of Peace! Not a euphemism, either: it was a real kiss on the cheek of the person next to you (though men and women were later segregated in the old churches, as in the synagogues, originally it was in the Early Church, "promiscuous" as the old Catholic Encylopedia says) which eventually for the more finicky was changed to a substitution of an object called a pax, a carved tablet with a Gospel scene, kissed and passed from person to person through the later middle ages. The customary Elevation of the Host — the moment both in the old Tridentine Rite and the Novus Ordo, the new mass, when the celebrant holds up the consecrated bread for everyone to see — that was a response to medieval laity pressure, did you know? There was a folk belief that the sight of the Eucharist would confer blessings and even healing, and people in the back of the new huge cathedrals couldn't see it through the priest's back, and started calling for it to be held up high enough for everyone to catch a glimpse. So much for a docile congregation and an unchangeable service!

Of course, medieval liturgies during the "Age of Faith" were raucous affairs, not solemn and reverent at all — when pastors complain about people bringing their hawks to church, as medieval sources attest you know that it was a bit different from nowdays. Trying to imagine a medieval mass, based on the complaints, is a bit mind-blowing — but the concept of liturgy-as-fashion-show/place to pick up lovers is indicated in fairy tales such as "Fair, Brown, and Trembling" — Philippe the Mouse would have been quite at home there.

But the real problem with the claims of historic tradition and the value of the dead language is the fact that Greek, the mainstream Greek that the Gospels were written in, the koine that was the English of the classical world centuries before Latin replaced it, was the original language of the Mass. It was only after several centuries of Christianity that the celebration of "agape" — another Greek word — was changed to Latin … so that ordinary people could understand and take part in it. This rather destroys the entire platform of the Latin Mass movement: if it was the right thing to do some seventeen hundred years ago, then why is it the wrong thing to do now, and why wasn't it done in between? Might, perhaps, the fracturing of Christianity in the West have been averted, if people had been allowed to have a more personal involvement, if comprehension of the liturgy and the bible had not been restricted to the clergy and the educated upper classes?

And this fact, that the Tridentine Mass resembles the celebration of the Eucharist in the time of the Apostles not at all, when it is forced upon Neo-Traditionalists, results sometimes in the bizarre Orwellian spectacle of a platform based on appeals to history now turning about to attack things ancient… Sic transit gloria mundi…

Do I hate Latin? Does it look like it? I can't help dropping into Latin, and my pocket Oxford Classical Latin dictionary is always an arm's reach from my desk. I think that it can be very helpful to attend a service in another language, both in terms of gaining familiarity with the unfamiliar language, and in seeing new things about the familiar service. But it is simply false to say that Latin is the language that God intended the Mass to be said in, as I have read Gibson declare. And it is folly to assert that a religion that was originally preached to the masses on their own level should necessarily and properly be restricted to only those willing and able — and the able is an enormous part of it — to learn another language. I think more people should enjoy Latin. It's a tremendously economical and elegant language, with great potential for wit and snarkage. I would like to be able to take a course in it sometime, myself.

But I have to work for a living, and I don't have the money to take any classes at all. Could the average American, even the traditionally most fervent Irish-American, Italian-American, Polish-American with a family and a job to take care of in the pews of 1950 understand the nuances of a liturgy whispered in a foreign language, and be moved to greater understanding of Scriptural paradigms by it? The spectacle of little old Franco-American ladies devoutly praying their rosaries all through the consecration of the mass, and the tales of devout Catholic academics like Belloc giving historical lectures to his fellow worshippers, indicates to me that there was not much there to feed the souls of most churchgoers, unless they brought it with them. There is more audible Latin nowdays in the liturgy than there was then. How G's P is meant to advance the ideology of the Tridentistes, and how it does so, I will examine in the latter part of this article.

I am old enough to remember when the "Traditionalist" Catholic publications like the National Catholic Register and the Wanderer exhorted us to go out and protest against blasphemous new films like the Life of Brian and Last Temptation of Christ — not merely to boycott them, but to try to have them banned, to dissuade the theatres for even showing them, as well as inspiring us to outrage by describing them in film while simultaneously urging us not to harm ourselves by seeing them.
 

Am I impressed by the haughty sneers that "Secularists" and "Jews" were objecting to the Gibson film before it was even released? What do you think? Particularly when those who were objecting were doing so because of Gibson's deliberate provocative hinting that it would be so anti-Semitic that "They" would be out to get him for it, but he couldn't be anything less than true to his faith (casting himself as the Suffering Servant yet again!) and a) conditional and b) based on those things which were definitely known of the film (and which turned out to be far worse than any of us who were concerned had guessed) — and that no one, not even the ADL, had throughout done anything like advocate having the film's distribution preemptively banned or theatres blocked by protests! (In fact, there were calls here not to boycott it but for more dialogue on the issues raised.)

SIDEBAR RESOURCES · How Gibson ignores the Gospels and Nostra Aetate Heroine, not Heretic: Paula Fredriksen, Ph.D  · I find her accounts more trustworthy than Gibsons' partisans' Theologians' (Dark) Humour

It is very easy for me to see the applicability of beams and eyes here, or to see the disastrous lack of credibility in publications which like the New Oxford Review are reduced to creating parodies with which to argue against, characters named things along the lines of "Lulu Liberal" and "Professor Poppycock" to be the straw men in their "debates" — for St. Peter's sake, people, have the decency to take on your adversaries word for word in their own words, don't flyte your own sock-puppets! —But this is tempered by the recollection of an absolutist little twit who used to go around telling classmates they were going to Hell for taking the Lord's name in vain, and was one of the naive parrots of the claptrap about Evil Liberals and Us Happy Few herself…

Granted, I haven't been one since I was ten-and-a-half, and it was always tempered with a wider perspective that made me a misfit even among fellow Neo-Traditionalists, due to my family's convert, not "cradle-Catholic" origins and academic alignment. But it is still embarrassing to me to remember being that doctrinaire and arrogant, and pride-which-is-no-small-part shame recoils at revisiting those days, and so I am both reluctant and angry at Gibson for obliging me to reenter the Cave, even if it is in an attempt to drag transfixed viewers out into daylight, knowing they will be furious and not at all thankful assuming that they don't dash back inside to watch the projected shadows on the screen…

The story of how I broke from Neo-Traditionalism is not any dramatic Road-To-Damascus story; if there was anything like that, it was the year of the Anita Hill hearings and Tailhook, when my eyes were opened to the fact that yes, we, in so far as there was a meaningful "we" here, really were as sexist as accused, and those of us who weren't were isolationists in denial; but though a great deal of my disillusionment can be traced to serious theology and philosophy classes, where we read first-hand source materials that contradicted many of the tropes of "Traditionalism," (see, education is dangerous to faith!) it was actually a long combination of personal life events, and intellectual discoveries, and the fact that I have never been good at living with cognitive dissonance: my sense of pitch is too acute to bear it long. And — I have recently come to realize — reading The Guns of August at age thirteen was no small part of the seismic shift; learning that WWI didn't actually come out of nowhere, and researching the firsthand source materials of the Gilded Age in obsession thereafter for years, completely destroyed the credibility of the Fatima message for me.

The world was no worse then than before or after; to declare that the Bloody Somme and the Eastern Front were a divine punishment for sin, like Jove's lightningbolts, both superficial when considered as part of a vast tectonic array of alliances, retaliations, and ambitions all documented leading up to the Great War — a war that was just waiting for an excuse to happen, as Tuchman most readably proved — and a hideous theodicy, describing a dysfunctional Deity, not worthy of belief, when considered against all the details of the First World War itself. Not to mention that the simplistic solution of merely praying the Rosary as a substitute for real action, a cure-all in a bottle for the world's ills, looks pretty feeble compared to the heroic work of people like Dr. Schweizer or Herbert Hoover saving the poor and displaced in very dangerous circumstances, not out of the ulterior motive of "saving souls" either. —Again, I thus prove that booklearning is dangerous for piety!

But that is as autobiographical as I shall get, in public.⁹ I merely point out that when those held up as intellectual authorities are caught out in untruths, it does not much matter if they are lying or merely mistaken; their credibility on other matters, as yet unstudied, is automatically called into question. But if it is demonstrated that they are not simply mistaken, but are given over to wishthink, then the extension of courtesy in regards to those unproven areas must be limited; and if it is certain that the untruth was knowing and deliberate — then credibility is lost entirely unless earned back.

But in the absence of such compelling negative truth, and coming from a tradition which is not merely anti-intellectual Neo-Traditionalism but also reaches into genuine Catholic intellectual tradition, which has always had room for more scientific attitudes towards the Scriptures and their interpretation, I prefer to reclaim the tradition from those who would abridge it to a band of narrow historical and local customs in their pursuit of worldly power. Uncertainty doesn't bother me (much) any more; the ecumenism of Vatican II is well in line with inclusive impulses that have always been part of my personality — and the tradition which made room in Heaven for the Virtuous Pagans as far back as the Middle Ages — and the fact that so much of what is not merely revelatory in the Judeo-Christian tradition is common to Wisdom writings all over the globe and all over history, encourages me in my determination to test everything, hold fast to that which is true — including the words of Paul himself. That other world religions teach the same thing isn't scary, as it is for those whose faith depends on being able to think themselves part of a unique elite, and the word "goddess" doesn't give me thrills of pious horror. "Cafeteria Catholic" —? Only if "Linguistic Necrophiliacs" will admit to being equally, if not more, piecemeal in their adoption of "tradition."

It was, when I was a kid — and still is, I see, looking at the public discourse on G's P — to declare that it was only anti-Christians who slandered Christians with the claims that we were stupid, unreasonable, bigoted, sexist, ignorant etc. And of course if the Christians you happen to know don't appear to be any (or at least not very much) of those things, and you never read anything but Christian media, it's easy to accept that trope. However, the longer experience and the broader one's encounters with fellow-Christians, the harder it becomes to maintain that belief. And the interment has dashed it entirely. Unless one truly believes that all the supposedly-Christian sites maintained by people who claim to be devout and trying to save souls, who can't spell and obviously don't read or talk to strangers, are actually elaborate trolls, all faked (as the persona "Christina" is/was) to discredit real Christians, by sophisticated pranksters who are mimicking the lingo so perfectly as to fool even real Christians — not only does that require a level of conspiracism that goes beyond any sane willingness to withhold even momentary disbelief, but it doesn't solve the problem. Like The Manchurian Candidate, even if that were so it wouldn't matter.

In that surrealist film, the awful McCarthyesque clown being put up for office is an unknowing pawn of the Communist conspirators, who want to put such a buffoon in charge of America because they know he will ruin it so badly that Communism will be able to come to the rescue. All very Cold War paranoia, satisfying to right-wing sentiments, no? Except the real joke is that this fellow is already being accepted by the populace as a Vice President, for his honest patriotism, and embraced by the voters. It doesn't take the Enemy Other outside to force our problems on ourselves. If these sites of bigotry, illogic, and ALL CAPS SHOUTING THAT EVERYONE WHO DOESN'T SAY THE ROSARY DAILY IS GOING TO HELL!!!! are not by real Christians, if the illiterate and arrogant posters on message boards dismissing everyone and everything to the outer darkness are all in fact trolls — then why are they not being denounced as such by those real Christians en masse?

When serious Christian sites argue that The Flintstones is more realistic than T. Rex and the Crater of Doom, we're in trouble. When almost everyone who defends the Passion movie against criticism does so with the dual claims that it's historically accurate and that anyone who criticizes does so because they are irreligious or the wrong religion or only want a mealy-mouth Christianity of niceness and are hypocrites for praising the violence in other films while condemning this one — and honestly can't even see the sophistry and idiocy of these statements — you don't even need to cite the example of the poster at Atlantic Magazine who, unless he is a prankster of immense subtlety to no obvious end, really doesn't understand why citing "historical evidence" from a site named RaptureMe isn't going to impress well-read skeptics, to show that Christians have a far bigger problem internally than any evil and unbelief "out there," in the world. It isn't The Devil who's making it hard for non-Christians (or Christians not as strict as other Christians wish them to be) to believe in Christianity. We do that just fine all by ourselves.

There is a point to this, and it is really an article about a movie, believe it or not. I'm not just getting maudlin-drunk confessional, though this all could be enough to drive one to drink. (Note, I do not say whether for the author or the audience; I leave that to individual conscience and discretio.)

***

The problem that is going on right now is that there is an inability to separate the subject matter from the artwork in the minds of its fans — and the operative word is fans, in the fandom sense, not the casual outside sense. This is a listwar writ large, make no mistake; there are accusations of genre bias, there are conflations of fanon with canon, there is hot debate over what constitutes canon and how much it can be accepted or dismissed, even by those who claim to be canon purists; there is flameage and attempts to shut down debate with accusations of partisanship galore. The only problem is that 99% at least of those involved have no idea that they are part of an interfandom fight, as the number of educated religious folks who are also genre fans and part of online fandom, though a lot larger than I ever thought, is fairly minute and doesn't overlap much from what I read, with people who think that fiction is of the Devil and that fantasy is thrice-damned, and that watching or reading about people doing immoral things is the second surest way of going to hell, after making stories about them. And those who do understand fandom's ways, and how they reflect but human nature, and are not caused by computers and cables any more than alehouse arguments are caused by tables and benches, are not for the most part familiar enough with the tropes of religious fanfic, or used to thinking of devotional artifacts as fanart, so far as I have read.

But Gibson's movie is merely a manifestation of the sub-sub-sub-genre of Scripture fandom which could be termed "Catholic Pietistic Hurt/Comfort and Character Torture Angstfic, with Self-Insertion Overtones." This describes not simply the film itself, but the main source for its fanon, which is most definitely not the Gospels. It is moderately well-known that Gibson drew on a book called The Dolorous Passion by one Anne Catherine Emmerich; there was a weird series of admissions, then a retraction, and then acknowledgment, and once the film came out, it was impossible to conceal the connection to anyone willing to do a teaspoon's worth of research. (I mean, come on — how hard is it to type "Dolorous Passion" into Google? Granted, actually reading the bloody thing is painfully hard going, but there's no excuse for people asking about if stuff really does come from Emmerich, or denying it, when both the Gospels (in many translations) and Dolorous Passion are freely available and searchable on-line. I have no respect for those who do not do their homework before pontificating.)

For all Gibson's claims that "the Holy Spirit" was the one making the movie, the screenplay was actually written by him and a guy named Benedict Fitzgerald, (who has done three TV-movie scripts, and also the script for a film of Wise Blood, a novel by Catholic proto-magical-realist author Flannery O'Connor, back in 1979, which I confess I didn't even know existed until researching this article, none of which I've seen so I don't have any idea how good a scriptwriter he is, because there's no way to tell from Passion) and demonstrably based on Emmerich's words in addition to, and in some places, instead of, the NT. (Also, reportedly, from visions of another nun, the Spanish sister Maria de Agreda, who lived in the 1600s wrote a book I have not read called The Mystical City of God, and thus cannot verify one way or the other.)

What is less well recognized, afaik, is that the book by Emmerich is in fact a peculiarly Catholic manifestation of abusefic, and I do mean peculiarly. Yes, it's perfectly legitimate imo for people to write meditations or make objects to aid them in the understanding and practice of their faith. But it is important to recognize that not all things which are "inspired by" faith are particularly religious in nature, nor free of the tropes of the culture from which the maker comes — the secular culture, or rather, the human culture, any more than of human nature. And some things just don't go away, for good or bad.

Mawkish emotionalism has afaik always been around and always will, though it fades and brightens, and some cultures seem to embrace it wholeheartedly one era, then reject it the next, and sometimes it's hard to recognize it in an alien idiom. Are there geometric forms in Scythian steppe or Pacific Oceanic religious art that were the source of bitter tensions, village Elders getting angry over this latest generation of Shamans tampering with or softening traditional iconography and thought? I have no way of knowing as an outsider; though with regard to Indo-European cultures and certain Asian cultures I am on much stronger ground, both because of the survival of some verbal cultural contexts and because the visual idioms are the source of those we use today. Not all of them match up or can be interpreted, but when we have myths, and popular reactions to myths both serious and farcical, verbal and visual, that gives us a lot more to work with.

This particular sub-genre has its roots as far as I can tell in classical fandom — stories like Ovid's Metamorphoses and the art that was made to depict such stories does tend to be rather focused on arousing emotions and combining sentimental pity with erotic identification and a piquant revulsion, not unlike modern horror movies, only with more class. Beautiful aristocratic people being abused, manipulated into victimhood, raped, maimed, transformed into animals, mostly female, mostly young, (but not always), with focus on mourning family or horrified bystanders, as well as the emotional distress of the helpless victims themselves — this is the kind of fanart that was made around the theme of the Sacrifice of Iphegenia, or the story of Philomene, or the semi-historical one of Lucretia, of Dido, of Phaedrus — there is a high and deliberate squick factor in the later artistic developments of the classical myths, and the source of their attractiveness in the Renaissance, with its images of the flaying of Marsyas, Daphne's escaping Apollo's rape attempt only by dehumanizing herself, the rape of Europa, Venus and Adonis, etc. etc.)

But what has Rome to do with Jerusalem? Surely all this pagan stuff has nothing to do with such starkly Christian themes as the Crucifixion, with a character so severely unerotic as the New Testament Jesus? If only it were that simple. The thing about people saying that any of this is "traditional" is that it's only a fairly recent tradition, in any aspect. The "Hurt" and "Angst" aspects started up full bore only in Western Europe, as far as I can determine, only with the coming of the Plague. As I've said, I'm not a trained historian, so there might have been earlier signs of the trend that would take hold, but it doesn't seem to have become mainstream until the prosperity and materialism and international culture of the late Middle Ages came to a crashing halt in the trauma of the Black Death and the social upheavals which followed it, including a civilization-wide soul-searching and reactions against earlier trends. I am not sure that it would be entirely wrong to say that Puritanism came eventually out of the Plagues; not after having read accounts of people claiming that neighbors were smitten because they had become so decadent as to use that newfangled invention, the fork, thinking themselves too good to touch God's gifts of food, and blaming the sins of society, with a heavy emphasis on the sexual and financial, for the "judgment" of the disease.

It is out of this cultural climate that flagellants and the Dance of Death, the Isenheim Altarpiece and Holbein's Dead Christ grew; those Westerners who are revulsed at and regard as a sign of massive cultural incompatibility the sight of Shiite pilgrims cutting and flogging themselves in symbolic enactment/empathy with a revered saint, or the flesh-impaling rites of Indonesia, should remember that not so very long ago, historically speaking, it was also a Catholic thing; and still is, in parts of the Spanish-American tradition, where I have read, "tiger warriors" take part in ritual combat traditions held over from the Aztecs, carried on in honor of Christ, where the ritual has not been worthily carried out until blood has been spilled and much pain endured, or as in this image of a Holy Week penitential ceremony from 2004, courtesy of the BBC.

But other forms of self-harming behaviour have been sanctioned — though always and with increasing wariness at official levels — by the Catholic Church, especially on a popular level. I remember well reading many admiring stories about saints like Rose of Lima, or venerated figures like the Seers of Fatima, in which self-harming behaviour is presented as signs of sanctity. Frankly, I'm baffled that more purportedly-intelligent Catholics do not recognize the stories of self-starvation, abrading with chains worn against the skin, or knotted cords, bruising with stones, and of course the self-flagellation as signs of psychological disturbance, and that they should laud it as something for children to admire. I would venture to say that the "modern" behaviours of "cutting" (which is a narrow and misleading term for a wide variety of self-harming physical activity which has several different psychological origins) is not modern at all: but in the past, it was safely hidden away behind cloister walls and defined as religious fervour. Rather like those who say things like "Primitive male-dominated societies have no neuroses" — something which shows up a lot in the pages of journals like NOR and other Neo-Trad mags, and is only true because they call them curses and possession, not because they're not afflicted by depression and anxiety, as conservative ideologues like to try to "prove" in order to show that we should drop psychology and let bearded manly men run everything — those who think these are new issues are simply not recognizing the same patterns elsewhere in another context.

This all comes together — the outward, open fixation on images of pain and gore which one begun, go on full blast through the Renaissance, being tempered a bit with shifting tastes and the trend of sanitizing of historical pictures and narrative that began in the 18th century, though it did not become dominant until the 19th in what we call Victorian taste (though it has reached its zenith, or nadir, with the creation of the Precious Moments King James Bible in the 20th) and the internal, emotionally-fixated "spirituality" of Pietism and the anti-intellectualism which post-Reformation Christianity (Catholic and Protestant alike) has tended to embrace — in the figure of Anne Catherine Emmerich and the stories she passed on.

Who is Emmerich and why do her words matter? She was an uneducated but pious seamstress living in Germany at the end of the 1700s and the beginning of the 1800s, when Europe was in the throes of the Age of Revolutions and the Napoleonic Wars, and fierce battles political and economical no less than doctrinal were going on between State and Church all over — and between rival denominations. She thus wrote — or spoke, rather, for she was illiterate and all her reports were transcribed by a friend, the devout Catholic poet Brentano — in a time of beleaguerment and persecution, the which would culminate in Bismarck's expulsion and suppression of all German Catholic clergy who did not submit to the authority of the secular government — something which was disastrous later on, as it resulted in a Catholic clergy tamed and nationalized to a greater extent than anywhere else, come the 1930s; and which expulsion occasioned Rev. Hopkins' lament "The Wreck of the Deutschland" on the destruction of a ship carrying some of those expelled religious.

She was also highly anti-Semitic, as her words demonstrate, and I do not see that it helps much to try to exonerate her by claiming that she was the product of her environment merely, and no more anti-Semitic than other religious of her day, as I have read: those who do so do not seem to realize how badly such a defense must reflect on the Roman Church wholesale.

None of that would matter much, however, if Emmerich had not also been a stigmatized ecstatic, a purported visionary whose body was afflicted with injuries supposed to be replicating the wounds of Jesus, accompanied by trancelike states in which she supposedly conversed with Jesus and other celestial beings, and received visions of "things past, or passing, or to come."

Let me explain, for non-Catholics and Catholics outside the "Traditionalist" domain, what is so enthralling and compelling, for Traditionalists, about Emmerich and her ilk. There always have been, in all religions, wonder workers of various levels of quality. Not all of the phonies are frauds, in the sense of being con artists out to fleece the crowd. Many believe, like the ascetic in Kate Elliott's novels, that they really are in communion with the Divine. But pious frauds are still frauds, and in any case are we not counseled against seeking after signs and wonders in the very scriptures? But the idea that weird, mysterious, scientifically-inexplicable and squicky things Reveal God's Presence in this modern world is a very strong one, and not just for Catholics either, as things like miraculous images all across America prove today. It is a kind of magical thinking, and the fact that it is about "religion" does not make it any less occult, though this would horrify those who have such a horror of "the occult" as well as of the sciences, no doubt.

Emmerich was a stigmatized ecstatic; that is, she reportedly had unhealing wounds which mimicked the position of the wounds suffered by Jesus during the crucifixion, and she had visions that were supposedly given to her by God. I make no judgment on whether or not such miracles actually happen; I don't consider them ontologically impossible, but I have come to consider practically every instance of them implausible, for various reasons. One of which is merely that they seem severely OOC for God, like the stories of St. Patrick cursing everything in sight — it doesn't fit with the patient and reluctant-to-blame individual we see wrestling with trying to excuse a friend's personal betrayal in his memoirs, or holding no grudges against his captors, or becoming almost inarticulate as he tries to express his outrage at a human-rights violation in the one surviving letter of his. It's like trying to make the Infancy Gospel of Thomas — a very early work of Christian fanfic — with its sentimental stories of Little Tyke Jesus bringing clay birds to life and offing annoying neighbor kids, then bringing them back to life, with any of the other Gospels, which all state in very unemotional prose mind you, that Jesus did not start a career of miracle-working until well into adulthood. (Then again, there is the story of the "golden emerods" as a cautionary counter: God smote the followers of Dagon with hemherroids, as the above quote from Samuel, in the Elizabethan spelling of the DR and KJV attests, and an overabundance of mice, and the curse of the hemherroids was not lifted until the Ark of the Covenant was returned together with golden propitiatory images of the afflictions, to wit, five "jewels of gold" in the shape of the malignancies and five golden mice. So perhaps such low humour is not OOC for the Deity after all.¹¹)

For non-Catholic readers, it should be noted that the Roman Church does not in fact accept all visions and visionaries uncritically, that no Catholic is required to accept any such "private revelation" at all, not even Fatima or Lourdes; and the best that Church officials will ever say of such an account derived from a personally claimed vision is that it can be helpful to personal devotion and is not obviously of the Dark Side. So there is no Vatican endorsement of Emmerich, nothing that obliges Catholics to consider her stories other than the imaginings of a devout, uneducated, highly-emotional and sensitive contemporary of Jane Austen and Mrs. Radcliffe, as edited, collated, and admittedly-added-to by one Clemens Brentano, who it seems by scholarly examination of his library, added such small historical and geographical factoids as could be supplied: remember that archeology, as a discipline, did not exist at this time; the tumult of the Napoleonic wars which would birth it by Bonaparte's conquest of Egypt still held the world in its throes, and Champollion had only been born, not yet vowed to become a language scholar so that he might someday uncover the secrets of the Rosetta Stone and similar artifacts which his soldier brother had revealed to him. Those clergymen who praised Emmerich's "visions" (frankly, I personally do not consider them in the least authentic, for many many reasons, stylistic as well as documentary) were simply praising a work of literature which told them what they already (thought they) knew.

The Early Christians — like the Jewish Scribes — knew that Scripture had to be read critically and carefully. And in different ways, depending. (You might be surprised at how recent the naive literalist reading tradition is). It's possible to believe that the Bible is a) divinely inspired; b) not historical or scientific narrative; c) nor dictated by God word for word through human Ouija boards, and d) needs to be read and thought about very carefully, without jumping to the most simple of possible conclusions. This is what the Talmud was all about — that is to say, Jesus, yes, Jesus, would have been coming from a tradition filled with critical thought and interpretation of the Scriptures, aware that they're full of symbolism and fable and perchance even some retconning, certainly not accepting them as baldly-literal statements easily comprehended. Of course, my Church helped shoot the exegesis business in the foot by a) banning the reading and publication of the Talmud in its areas of influence¹² and b) discrediting Catholic exegesis to a large extent by associated guilt which left the breakaway sects with nothing to work with but the isolated and late redactions of the Scripture texts themselves…

And there is an equally long-standing culture of caution and rationalism within Christianity, even in the Roman Church, despite popular impressions within and without Catholicism, which regards bleeding statues and mystic visions with skepticism, as both unnecessary and dangerous to true faith, counterproductive to the practice of a godly life, and a stumbling-block to believers and unbelievers alike. But in the popular imagination, saintly virgins with bleeding replicas of the crown-of-thorns talking to Jesus are right up there with miraculous pictures of Elvis and the face of Jesus appearing in ordinary objects and black helicopters and aliens from outer space and Nostradamus. No amount of logic is ever going to shake people's faith in this, and no amount of objective evidence. And this has increased as a kind of reactionary behaviour to popular rationalistic counter trends, such as the rather mis-named Age of Reason, better called the Age of Revolutions.

Just as, in antiquity, people like Xenophanes and Plato and Akhenaten all spoke out against the irrationality of religious pop culture in their days and were ignored, so too have the mirantists — those fixated on signs and wonders — always ignored the voices of reason, and engaged in legerdemain to "prove" that those who didn't buy into the pop-miracles (and why are pop miracles so often squicky? as squicky as the obsession with bizarre deaths and surreal crimes that is rampant among young secular women?) are wrong and immoral.

When you go back a thousand years, trying to find documentary evidence of doubtful things that would pass muster in a respectable journal, let alone a courtroom, is a challenge. (It is difficult enough investigating events in living memory.) So I'm not certain at all that the stories about stigmatics Francis of Assisi and Bernard of Clairvaux and Catherine of Sienna are not retroactively inserted as proof of holiness into their biographies. There is a long history of this sort of thing as well.

Personally I have grown increasingly skeptical of such "signs and wonders" which I was raised as a child to revere as well as believe in, not because they are unfashionable — because indeed they are, these days, just look at the tabloids or listen to people talking about miracles of deliverance in church social or supermarket — but because I have encountered personally and demonstrably a willingness to suspend disbelief and look for the mirantist¹³ explanation of anything, as in cases of "miraculous" golden rosaries which changed from "silver" to "gold" after a visit to Medugorje. This is a well-known phenomenon; (I myself own several such miraculous golden earrings and necklaces — in which cheap jewelry made of (goldish) brass has been tinned over, making it look silver, and eventually the brass underneath shows through. But the people I knew who believed in the miracles of their rosaries turning to gold were educated enough to have known better, and yet did not make any effort to find out even if the "gold" were now real gold, let alone if there were a legitimate natural explanation. And that is but one example of a lack of critical thinking due to wishthink , to the quest for external validation of religious belief — but without the rigour required to actually make such "proofs" credible. I also have seen the failure of an apparent faith-healing, and the medical explanation of why the apparent healing seemed to work, temporarily, myself.

So I am not particularly impressed by Emmerich's miraculous stigmata, nor any such "signs and wonders", particularly at such a far historical remove. It could be real. But I am not required to believe it.

But regardless, there is a pretty wide gulf between someone like Francis of Assisi, who was an upper-class kid with education and connections before he gave it all up when he got religion, to his bourgeois family's horror, and never stopped dashing around doing things, talking to people — including outsiders — as well as animals, and making things happen, not just nativity scenes or churches but POW releases, and the illiterate sheltered ex-seamstress who never got out of the convent and was bedridden with (afaik) undiagnosed mystery ailments for most of her life. Francis doesn't need miraculous injuries to prove something special about him; while if there were no miracles surrounding Emmerich, she would be merely a very sad case, someone who got a series of bad breaks from life, and coped by using her imagination, which unfortunately wasn't a very well-nourished one. Inexplicable mystical injuries both elevate her from this mundane station, and at the same time create a barrier of untouchable authority about her stories: it becomes an exercise in circular reasoning, in which her visions cannot be challenged because her stigmata "prove" the authenticity of divine interference.¹⁴

But read objectively, placed side by side with no automatic stamp of holiness attached to one more than the other, Anne Catherine Emmerich's visions have nothing to match say, Dame Julian of Norwich, another earlier mystic, with her holistic visions of a healed universe and the Trinity as Father, Mother, and Us — a woman who for all her voluntary choosing of a semi-hermit's life, had lived a full life (for that era) in the world before the near-death experience that started her on a second religious career, well-read and sophisticated in thought for all her traditional expressions of being no expert student, who openly admitted the problems of trying to figure out what was and wasn't a genuine revelation, looking outward at the nature of everything via the lens of Christ's suffering, rather than reducing the whole world to insignificance by inward focus on the physical and emotional aspects of the same.

Emmerich falls into a trend that grows throughout the early Modern era and is elevated to its height in the Victorian era — a cultural trope of idealized womanhood of a particular and untenable sort: holiness as a passive, "innocent" (meaning ignorant of the details of sex and of world events) and sheltered young woman, one who does not suffer from the flaws of immodesty of either body or mind, is not clever and ambitious or in any way masculine, but instead has the most exquisite and refined sensibilities, and is preferably sickly, perhaps even bedridden, who nevertheless remains ever sweet, ever gentle, ever sunny of disposition, and is an edifying example to the more worldly folks around her. St. Therese of Lisieux and the fictional character Pollyanna both fit into this class along with the almost certainly apocryphal St. Philomena so popular in the 19th century, and feed into the Maria Goretti mystique; a present-day example, a positive culmination of this cult of frail virgins, is to be found in the horrible case of "victim soul" Audrey Santo, taking place in my quarter of the country.

Better scholars than I could and probably have written on this as a social reaction to a perceived fragmentation of society, a backlash against the overt discussion of sexism and irresponsible capitalism and religion-as-status-quo that was going on all the time, but with increasing visibility as things like paper and printing presses became more accessible and government attempts to crack down on them increasingly futile. The retreat into Pietism and the rest makes sense when seen in the context of the world wars culminating at Waterloo and Mary Wollenstonecraft-Shelley and the creation of lending libraries, of newspapers and railroads, so that things done as long as people have lived in cities were now familiar to people who might not have heard of them otherwise. Increased media pressure creating the illusion of greater social ills and new ones throughout history would be an interesting dissertation topic. But the late 1700s and early 1800s were certainly a chaotic time for Europe, though frankly I think it's hard to say that they were any worse than the 1600s, and people did react to moral and intellectual challenges in a variety of way, as they have always done.

On an official level, from the 1500s onward, this had meant, in religion, a crackdown and an increasing effort to get political control and thereby ensure mental control. This was no less true of the Protestant churches than of the Church of Rome, but the latter had a bit of territorial and financial advantage the younger ones didn't. It backfired of course, in the "more you tighten your grasp, the more star systems will slip through your fingers way" — but the legacy of the Council of Trent was a lot of things not good, a catalogue of anathemetizations for things one mustn't think, the Index of Forbidden Books, the assertion that the Roman Rite of the mass was the only allowable one, now and forever amen, and the essential locking down of the kind of vigorous discussion of things like the biological issues behind bodily resurrection (what if, say, you were eaten by a cannibal? and then the cannibal had kids? and then those kids were eaten by a tiger, huh? who gets the matter that was your original body?) that went on in the Medieval world of Scholasticism. Instead, an emotionally-based piety was preferred and philosophy shunned: even the works of Descartes and Kant were banned without special permission from an accredited clergyman if you could demonstrate why it would be safe and necessary for you to study them, as if dissenting words were radioactive material that mustn't be allowed in the hands of the untrained, for their own safety and the common good.

So, in Emmerich's day, we have a sub-sub-culture in which education is feared as intrinsically secular, in which emotional indulgence is called "faith" and which is looking for evidence of the miraculous as proof positive of the faith against Freethinkers and the exaggerated, reactionary rationalism of the era, existing in a matrix of a wider culture of Romanticism, which also values intense emotionality and uninhibited indulgence therein, which combines a hokey eroticism with a coy prudery, and which really, really needs a good editor when it comes to its literary products. I have read the Castle of Udolpho and sundry other Gothic novels in order to understand what Austen was mocking in Northanger Abbey, and Emmerich's stuff is very much in line with them.

I say Emmerich, and I must keep saying Emmerich for the sake of intelligibility, but part of the problem is that at least as much of it is the work of one Mr. Clemens Brentano, a Catholic poet who was her co-author to a significant, but unknown, extent. I have read that the investigations into Emmerich's Cause for beatification have turned up the fact that Brentano owned contemporary books on the Holy Land and so the "miraculous" accuracy of those bits of her accounts that actually are somewhat accurate is not so miraculous after all. There's no way to tell at this late date what is Emmerich's voice, and what is Brentano's voice, because he admittedly polished up everything she dictated to him, some of which was very confused and rambling. This is interesting in that it makes the Dolorous Passion not exclusively a feminine work; but it is nevertheless solidly in a tradition of female-dominated fiction with a largely female target audience being produced in the Napoleonic era — though the historic aspects put it more in line with Ivanhoe and the Romantic adventure novels of Sir Walter Scott. It's a Catholic version of the novels which clergy thundered against their parishioners reading, only an approved subject, so it's quite all right you see.

But the titillation, the torture scenes, the sighs and authorly asides, the rambling and plotless nature, the constant digressions into minutae of physical detail regarding sets and costumes — all of these are classic Gothic novel traits. (And Mrs. Radcliffe is better than Emmerich, hands down, though Udolpho is not anywhere near as good as Ivanhoe.) I would never assert as some have that all religious feeling is the result of sublimated Eros — but in this case, the Eros isn't sublimated at all, it's right there on the surface.
 

The above discussion of the Savior's lack of chest hair, vis à vis his cousin's unsexy hairiness, juxtaposed with the gruesome visuals following, and combined with the self-insertion aspects of the entire genre, let alone this particular instance, of dream-vision narratives, totally exemplifies what I mean when I say that this is classic fanfic of the sort that is typically written by sexually-ignorant, psychologically immature young women without much breadth of understanding or knowledge of the world. What is the difference between Dolorous Passion, in which Emmerich luxuriates over the anguish suffered by her "Divine Spouse" and stories in which "Legolas" is beaten by "Thranduil" or sold as a slave to "Boromir," — and where there is often a hapless servant girl who shares in his sufferings and/or rescues him, an obvious authorial stand-in — written by people who call themselves Princess Greenleaf and read by rapturous weeping fans who simultaneously fulminate about how much they "hate" the tormentors of their passive hero, and how much they long for the authoress to continue the saga of pain?
 

What we're dealing with clearly is Christian Hurt-Comfort fanfic, full of Character Torture and Angst-wallowing, with no indication of plot or cultural context, and what few attempts at such that are made, are entirely wrong with what is already established by canon, and by consultation of the Primary World. Religious badfic doesn't get any free passes from me, either. The kinship between Mel Gibson and Library of Moria is much nearer than either would like to admit.

SIDEBAR: EMMERICH RESOURCES · a fan-written biography of Sr. Anne Catherine Emmerich · the complete text of Dolorous Passion