One of my favorite restaurants is Buca di Beppo. The whole thing between the food and the decor is just a rich, overwhelming sensory overload. The portions are huge. The smallest plates feed at least two people. And the decor is an excessive splash of vibrant color and kitsch. The images are a jumbled mix of saints and sinners: nuns playing soccer, busty women sporting cleavage, iconography of the saints, ostentatiously nude statuary, and a giant bust of His Holiness the Pope. The bathroom might be the highlight of the whole experience. I haven’t seen the women’s room but the men’s room is a burlesque artistic celebration of the most undignified bodily functions. Yet the whole thing is somehow just barely “family friendly”. An American with less of a balmy Mediterranean and more of a conservative Puritan cultural background leaves the place wondering, “What just happened?”
I thought of Buca di Beppo when I first read an article by Alessandra Bocchi titled Cultural Christianity, Italian Mentality. What is it about Italian Catholic culture that makes it possible for Christian piety to coexist such uninhibited sensory indulgence? One possible response is that some indulgences that we think of as peccadillos aren’t really in conflict with piety and righteousness anyway. Wine and dance are not in themselves sinful. But Bocchi brings up another point that I find interesting, which is a certain understanding of human sinfulness and the function of forgiveness. An American said to Bocchi, about Italians, “so you just live in sin, and repent.” Bocchi says to this: “I couldn’t think of a better description. Individual, moral failures don’t negate the need for a moral structure of repentance and renewal — on the contrary, the evidence of the sin is proof for the necessity of upholding the Christian culture.”
A collection of the sayings of the Desert Fathers shares the following story: “A hunter in the desert saw Abba Anthony enjoying himself with the brethren and he was shocked. Wanting to show him that it was necessary sometimes to meet the needs of the brethren, the old man said to him, ‘Put an arrow in your bow and shoot it.’ So he did. The old man then said, ‘Shoot another,’ and he did so. Then the old man said, ‘Shoot yet again,’ and the hunter replied ‘If I bend my bow so much I will break it.’ Then the old man said to him, ‘It is the same with the work of God. If we stretch the brethren beyond measure they will soon break. Sometimes it is necessary to come down to meet their needs.’ When he heard these words the hunter was pierced by compunction and, greatly edified by the old man, he went away. As for the brethren, they went home strengthened.”
I’m simultaneously inspired both by the Biblical call to perfection – “Be ye therefore perfect” (Matthew 5:48, KJV) – and with the Biblical recognition that human beings are not – “the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” (Matthew 26:41, KJV).
Not only that. We’re also supposed to enjoy and appreciate the world: Deuteronomy 8:7-10. JPS:
“For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with streams and springs and fountains issuing from plain and hill; a land of wheat and barley, of vines, figs, and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey; a land where you may eat food without stint, where you will lack nothing; a land whose rocks are iron and from whose hills you can mine copper. When you have eaten your fill, give thanks to the Lord your God for the good land which He has given you.”
Deuteronomy 12:7, JPS: “Together with your households, you shall feast there before the Lord your God, happy in all your undertakings in which the Lord your God has blessed you.”
In the Jerusalem Talmud Kiddushin 4:12 it says that “In the future, a person will have to give an accounting before heaven for every good thing his eyes saw, but of which he did not eat.” Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch made sure that he took a trip to Switzerland before he died and explained: “When I stand shortly before the Almighty, I will be held accountable to many questions… But what will I say when… and I’m sure to be asked, ‘Shimshon, did you see My Alps?”
“To every thing there is a season” (Ecclesiastes 3:1, KJV). We eat food, but we don’t eat all the time. Sometimes we eat a lot of food, but we shouldn’t eat a lot of food all the time. We can drink wine, but we shouldn’t drink wine all the time. We can indulge our sexual appetites, but we don’t do it all the time, nor should we indulge all of them. Anyway it’s really the cyclic, non-constant nature of these things that make them enjoyable. We abstain for long enough to build up our desires so that it will be all the more enjoyable when they are satisfied.
C.S. Lewis related this to our nature as beings who exist in time, experiencing reality successively. In The Screwtape Letters, speaking in the mouth of a demon he said: “The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, [God] (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual year; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.”
This is something I appreciate about Mardis Gras and Ash Wednesday. There is a time for Lenten asceticism. But there is also a time for feasting. I also think that there’s something to be said for both a minimalist aesthetic and for an aesthetic of sensory excess. There’s the great commandment to love the Lord your God with all your strength, בְכָל־מְאֹדֶֽךָ (be-kol meod-eka), with all of your “muchness” (Deuteronomy 6:5). Alessandra Bocchi’s writing about Italian culture reminds me of another Italian, Camille Paglia. Paglia has often spoken about her persisting appreciation of Italian Catholicism’s aesthetics of “florid pictorialism”, which she attributes to a certain retention of paganism. I don’t know about that, at least theologically, but aesthetically that might be right. She fondly recollects from her upbringing: “I loved the cult of saints, the bejeweled ceremonialism, the eerie litanies of Mary… My baptismal church, St. Anthony of Padua in Endicott, New York, was a dazzling yellow-brick, Italian-style building with gorgeous stained-glass windows and life-size polychrome statues, which were the first works of art I ever saw.”
Paglia explores her interpretation of Italian Catholicism in her book, Sexual Personae:
“Paganism is eye-intense. It is based on cultic exhibitionism, in which sex and sadomasochism are joined. The ancient chthonian mysteries have never disappeared from the Italian church. Waxed saints’ corpses under glass. Tattered armbones in gold reliquaries. Half-nude St. Sebastian pierced by arrows. St. Lucy holding her eyeballs out on a platter. Blood, torture, ecstasy, and tears. Its lurid sensationalism makes Italian Catholicism the emotionally most complete cosmology in religious history. Italy added pagan sex and violence to the ascetic Palestinian creed.”
You get a sense there of Paglia’s over-the-top, shock-value style, which I wouldn’t take fully at face value. And this might not be the aspect of Catholicism that Catholics would want to highlight. But, I think it’s an interesting compliment and can be taken as such. It reminds me again of a feast day at Bucca di Beppo.
Here’s another passage from Sexual Personae that includes some personal recollections:
“To this day, relatives in my mother’s village near Rome visit the cemetery every Sunday to lay flowers on the graves. It is a kind of picnic. I remember childhood feelings of chill and awe at the candle kept burning by my grandmother before a photograph of her dead daughter Lenora, the small, round yellow flame flickering in the darkened room. A sense of the mystic and uncanny has pervaded Italian culture for thousands of years, a pagan hieraticism flowering again in Catholicism, with its polychrome statues of martyred saints, its holy elbows and jawbones sealed in altar stones, and its mummified corpses on illuminated display. In a chapel in Naples, I recently counted 112 gold and glass caskets of musty saints’ bones stacked as a transparent wall from floor to ceiling. In another church, I found a painting of the public disembowelling of a patient saint, his intestines being methodically wound up on a large machine like a pasta roller. Nailed like schools of fish to church walls are hundreds of tiny silver ears, noses, hearts, breasts, legs, feet, and other body parts, votive offerings by parishioners seeking a cure. Old-style Italian Catholicism, now shunned by middle-class WASP-aspiring descendants of immigrants, was full of the chthonian poetry of paganism. The Italian imagination is darkly archaic. It hears the voices of the dead and identifies the passions and torments of the body with the slumbering spirits of mother earth.”
It all seems very earthy. Perhaps appropriate for beings who are made of earth. The historian Eamon Duffy talks about this material aspect of Christianity in his book Royal Books and Holy Bones: “Christianity is and has been, first and foremost, a materialistic religion. It is rooted in the belief that in the Incarnation the eternal Godhead took on human flesh… So any attempt to understand Christianity must engage with the multifarious temporal practices and artifacts by which it has expressed that central incarnational conviction… Christianity, for most of its history, has also been a religion in which the divine has been understood as immanent in and accessible through created matter: in the material elements of the sacraments (bread and wine, oil and water); in the painted or carved images of Christ and the saints; in the music and ceremonies of the liturgy; in the landscapes, routes and journeyings in which the shrines of the saints were located; and in the very flesh and bones of the holy dead themselves.” I think this is a good way to think about and understand the interest in holy relics, like those 112 gold and glass caskets of musty saints’ bones that Camille Paglia counted in a Naples chapel.
Paglia’s talk of “sex and sadomasochism” in Christianity sounds a lot like something out of the Marquis de Sade, who is another one of Paglia’s scholarly interests. But there’s an important difference and it’s a difference that makes all the difference. And that’s partially hinted at in her comment that Italian Catholicism is the “the emotionally most complete cosmology in religious history”. In Christianity the raw physicality and lurid sensationalism is not gratuitous, as it is in the Marquis de Sade. It’s wrapped up in an infinitely meaningful, cosmological and salvific story of enfleshed deity and deified flesh. It’s all part of a larger purpose.
I think we see this too in the seasonal extravagance of Mardis Gras. Whatever chaos is there serves a constructive purpose. The philosopher Charles Taylor has a fascinating discussion of this idea in his book A Secular Age, in a chapter where he talks about Carnival and such festivals of reversal generally. Think of the “Feast of Fools” in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He refers to what he calls “equilibrium in tension”:
“Another way in which this feature of equilibrium in tension emerges in this society became evident in Carnival and similar festivities, such as the feasts of misrule, or boy bishops, and the like. These were periods in which the ordinary order of things was inverted, or ‘the world was turned upside down’. For a while, there was a ludic interval, in which people played out a condition of reversal of the usual order. Boys wore the mitre, or fools were made kings for a day; what was ordinarily revered was mocked, people permitted themselves various forms of licence, not just sexually but also in close-to-violent acts, and the like.”
Taylor argues that all of this unleashed chaos serves a larger structured purpose and that the bacchanal is ultimately not serious. He quotes a French cleric saying: “We do these things in jest and not in earnest, as the ancient custom is, so that once a year the foolishness innate in us can come out and evaporate. Don’t wine skins and barrels burst open very often if the air-hole is not opened from time to time? We too are old barrels.”
Very similar to the story of Abba Anthony and the bow.
Taylor says: “The festivals were not putting forward an alternative to the established order, in anything like the sense we understand in modern politics, that is, presenting an antithetical order of things which might replace the prevailing dispensation.” That would be exactly what the Marquis de Sade was in fact calling for, for example, in his book Philosophy in the Bedroom. Throw off all restraints. Embrace chaos and nihilism completely. A complete anti-order as an alternative to the established order; a culture of anti-culture. But that’s not what’s happening in Carnival, says Taylor. “The mockery was enframed by an understanding that betters, superiors, virtue, ecclesial charisma, etc. ought to rule; the humour was in that sense not ultimately serious.”
Speaking more generally of similar festivals of reversal in many religions, like for example in the Roman Saturnalia, Taylor offers the following as one possible interpretation: “The intuition supposedly underlying these is that order binds a primitive chaos, which is both its enemy but also the source of all energy, including that of order. The binding has to capture that energy, and in the supreme moments of founding it does this. But the years of routine crush this force and drain it; so that order itself can only survive through periodic renewal, in which the forces of chaos are first unleashed anew, and then brought into a new founding of order. As though the effort to maintain order against chaos could not but in the end weaken, tire, unless this order were replunged into the primal energies of chaos to emerge with renewed strength. Or something like this; it’s hard to get it entirely clear.”
I get a kick out of that closing remark: “Or something like this; it’s hard to get it entirely clear.”
As of this writing and recording I’m in the height of the Halloween season. I love Halloween. I love its rowdy ridiculousness and excess. Maybe it’s my Mardis Gras, since I don’t actually do Mardis Gras. It’s just guts and gore and craziness. There’s something of reversal to it as well I think. Children can be whoever and whatever they want to be. They go up to strangers’ homes at night and threaten them with trickery and demand candy. And lest we forget, it’s all leading up to another Christian holiday: All Saints’ Day. There’s a lot going on with it. Children are confronted with death and decomposition in a way that’s contained, not traumatizing, and humorous. We get to open our minds obliquely to the possibility of an uncanny, otherworld of spirits and mysterious forces, but again, in a way that’s not too serious in a way that we can’t handle. We can’t face such notions head-on. And for a few weeks we’re loaded up and stocked with sugar, replunged into the primal energies of chaos to emerge with renewed strength.
This is not my usual form of piety. I actually find the asceticism of the Desert Fathers and medieval mystics quite inspiring. A kind of spiritual athleticism that I try to emulate at least partially. I appreciate moments of stillness and the opportunities they give for kenotic emptying and spiritual receptivity. But we live life, even and especially religious life, in time and through different seasons. Each season has its unique aspects. So even though it’s not my usual mode I also appreciate the exuberance and excess of the feasts and frivolity. It plays a part in an emotionally complete cosmology of spirit and flesh. And so, I think I’m actually due for another ridiculously oversized meal at Buca di Beppo this weekend.
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