Understanding the Times
“The idea of the holy”
Derek Thomas
In “Understanding the Times” we will think together critically, biblically and Christianly about important cultural and practical issues for today’s Christian. We will introduce you to some of the major issues in the church and world, in family and parenting, in the news and current events – and look at them from a distinctively Christian perspective. We hope this will help better equip you to engage our culture, and to think and live as a Christian.
It was last Tuesday morning that the thought occurred to me. I was standing in the Sistine Chapel in Rome gazing up at the frescos on the magnificent ceiling—depictions of the opening chapters of Genesis.
Commissioned in 1508 by Pope Guilio II, Michelangelo painted over 300 figures in 27 separate panels. It took him four years to complete. Together with the frescos on the four walls of the Sistine Chapel, painted a quarter of a century earlier by some of the leading painters of the fifteenth century Italian Renaissance, including, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio (Michelangelo’s Florentine teacher), Pierro di Cossimo, Cosimo Rosselli, Perugino and Pinturicchio, these fresco paintings are considered one of the artistic wonders of the world. Six years ago, following major cleaning and renovation work, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was re-opened to the public to reveal Michelangelo’s magnificent artwork.
Michelangelo di Lodo-vico Buon-arr-oti Simoni (born in 1475 in Florence and died in 1564 in Rome) was arguably a more accomplished sculptor than a painter—his David, Moses and Pietà are well known. Among his paintings The Last Judgment is particularly graphic portraying what today would be thought unimaginable realism about the nature of life after the death and the reality of both heaven and hell.
But, I digress. It was in the Sistine Chapel that the thought occurred to me. It had taken well over an hour to get inside the walls of Vatican City and another hour touring through corridors of museums. I had reached “information overload” and the sound of my well-informed guide was beginning to fade: a Botticelli on this wall, a Caravaggio on that wall, and an exquisite Raphael over there...
The Sistine Chapel drew near and everywhere signs insisting that “Silence” is to be observed in the Chapel. Then as we passed along a very narrow corridor and audible warnings were now given in several languages once again reminding us of the need for silence. Suddenly we were inside and it was like the “Closing Bell” time at Wall Street Stock Exchange. There must have been several hundred people in the Chapel being urged to move along and I estimated that 90% of them were talking, some loudly, and some (whose nationality I’ll protect) very loudly indeed! There was also one lady on a cell phone saying, “Darling, you’ll never guess where I am!”
And then it occurred to me. In our postmodern society, nothing is sacred anymore. People do not have a template by which to judge what is appropriate in a given setting. Attending a family funeral a few months ago in England it seemed futile to criticize what people were wearing—in most cases, clothes once thought inappropriate for a funeral. They simply had no point of reference. In the dumbing down of formality everything is reduced to the same level.
A century ago Rudolph Otto wrote The Idea of the Holy (1917, translated into English in 1923), a German work of liberal theology containing a nugget of truth. There is an experience of the transcendent, the numinous (to cite Immanuel Kant) that has a ghostly effect, the mysterium tremendum. He argued that experiences of the numinous were not ordinary experiences magnified, but wholly different experiences, sui generic. Otto was attacking the naturalism of Charles Darwin that understood the world in purely materialistic terms
C. S. Lewis, who had read this work of Otto’s in the late 1920s, helps us here, I think:
Suppose you were told that there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told "There is a ghost in the next room," and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is "uncanny" rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous. Now suppose that you were told simply "There is a mighty spirit in the room" and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking–described as awe, and the object which excites it is the Numinous. (The Problem of Pain [1940])
There is a code of behavior, a ritual of dress and speech and silence appropriate to certain occasions—meeting the President in the White House, a wedding, public worship on the Lord’s Day to cite a few examples. Increasingly, these are being whittled away.
So, I asked my guide about this lack of respect to what in this case was not a mighty spirit, but a 500 year-old piece of art through which, it may be argued, a sense of the numinous occurs: “I began to notice it a few years ago,” she said. “There was a time you could walk into the Chapel and you could hear a pin drop. Not any more! I’m thinking of retiring. It just isn’t special any more.”
When there are no absolutes by which to form judgments, there is only noise.