by W. E. Gutman
“what we call ‘libido’ was regarded as original sin by the Church and condemned. Today, what we regard as the expression and influence of the subconscious, the Church in the Middle Ages saw the intervention of God or the Devil. It is possible that modern psychology allows us better to understand the lingering magnetism Bosch’s work elicits but it cannot shed any light on their meaning and intent, neither those of the artist himself, nor what his contemporaries thought of it. It is doubtful that psychology can explain the spiritual energy that animated his baffling work.”
Then, surrendering to wishful thinking, the opinion piece argues that
“Bosch, it is certain, did not attempt to tamper with his audience’s subconscious. He sought instead to impart moral and spiritual verities. This is why his paintings have always had a very precise and deliberate meaning. It is for this reason that one must look for Bosch’s sources in religion, in the language and popular rituals of his time. His art reflects, no more, no less, the hopes and insecurities that gripped society at the twilight of the Middle Ages.”
Art, by definition, is a proclamation. Artists, by nature and conscious intent, “tamper with their audience’s subconscious.” They do not “imitate life” to satisfy some reflex for mimicry but to convey an idea, to impart a mood, to stir the senses. Turning litigious in its final stanzas, the editorial cautions against
“overly enthusiastic academics who skew the results of their investigations so they match their preconceived ideas.”
What a remarkable characterization of “revealed” religion.
The playful vigor of Colombian artist Fernando Botero’s corpulent characters makes Montvert smile. Their heftiness, deadpan expressions and seeming lack of self-consciousness dispel any tendency one might have to mock their mammoth proportions. The phone rings as Montvert admires his new acquisition, a signed lithograph of a foppishly attired dancing couple by the beloved painter.
“Yes?”
“Bishop Touvier.”
“What can I do for you?”
“Your obsession with that fifteenth-century dauber is causing needless confusion and unease among Catholics. Assuming the remote possibility that some of his work is caricature or catharsis, satire or criticism -- of what practical value can such disclosures be to modern society, five hundred years after the fact?”
“The pontiff and the village priest keep asking the same question when they are reminded of the cold indifference or cheerful acquiescence of the Church to the slaughter of Jews. Do not expect posterity to be lenient. It has a way of stirring the past.”
“You despise Christianity, don’t you?”
“Despise? No. But I have news for you. I’m not too fond of your competition either -- Judaism or Islam. I’m wary of any religion not confined to home and house of worship. I panic when it is foisted on society, when it intrudes on personal liberties.”
“You must stop maligning us. What harm have we done you? What dark compulsion drives you to slander an institution that obeys God’s commands, opens its arms to the perplexed and the poor and the distraught and the forgotten, and tries to spread love and instill hope where there is none?”
Montvert and Touvier have a long, animated conversation about religion. Montvert attempts to draw the bishop in a dialogue steeped in pure reasoning. Touvier clings to doctrine and the rote rehashing of a script that suffers no poetic license, even if the truth is sacrificed in the process. Montvert argues that the underpinnings of religion -- mysticism, the supernatural, blind faith in an invisible but all-knowing entity, the theatrical rituals, the taboos and strident proscriptions -- are all contrived to enslave man, not liberate him. Touvier demurs, arguing that man cannot survive without spiritual guidance and a belief in a higher power. Montvert counters that religion suffocates like a strait-jacket.
“Did you happen to watch Christiane Amanpour’s recent investigative report,” he asks.
Aired on CNN and rebroadcast several times, the three-part “God’s Warriors: The Clash Between Piety and Politics,” offers a caustic if sobering overview of the three major religions’ susceptibility to intolerance in the service of deity and of their relentless effort to sway or control national politics.
“Yes, I did,” Touvier replies without elaboration.
“Surely, you will agree that carried to extremes, religion is a dangerous aberration that renders men insane.”
“Isolated fits of violence by deranged individuals must not be allowed to sully the nobility of monotheism, to eclipse its good works.”
“Isolated? Nobility? Good works? What Amanpour’s cameras captured is the bare face of dogma running amok, Bishop Touvier. This is how organized religion, if allowed, transforms society into a citadel of intolerance, into an incubator for hatred and persecution. Your own history is dripping with examples of sectarian hatred, of pogroms against ‘heretics.’ It is the contradictory command to love one's enemies while regarding alien or divergent doctrines as subversive and hostile that fuels the conflict.”
Montvert, eager to unclog Touvier’s selective amnesia, reminds him that more than half a century after the end of the Second World War, revisionists, among them high-ranking members of the French Catholic clergy, stubbornly deny that the Church, whose age-old anti-Semitism harmonized with Germany’s objectives, cooperated with the enemy, sometimes even exceeding their demands. He also reminds him that the defeat of Germany, the Vatican had feared, would bring down the conservative systems that form the first line of defense against communism. On the other hand, the Vatican had concluded that a victory by the Allies would lead to France’s demise and the end of civilization. This was a nihilistic goal, the Church asserted, to which Jews were committed. This grotesque assessment was turned to profit not only by the unscrupulous, the defeatists and common traitors, such as Touvier’s great-uncle, but by rich entrepreneurs who, all else failing, had everything to gain from an alliance with Hitler and the Pope.
“N’est-ce pas, Bishop?”
Bishop Touvier is at a loss for words. There is little he can say to contradict Montvert without betraying his indelible prejudices or appearing to be the dismissive, unbending zealot he is. Adopting priestly hauteur, he cries out:
“I feel sorry for you, Montvert. You are causing us grievous harm. Perhaps God will forgive you, perhaps not. Remember: There’s no greater truth than God. Adieu.”
Montvert wonders whether the bishop is conceding defeat or telegraphing a veiled warning. Not one to dither, he snaps, “You’ve got it all wrong, Bishop. There’s no greater God than truth. Good day.”
Montvert is annoyed. There’s so much he could have said to Touvier to make his case, or at least to nettle him. But a tirade risked corrupting the truth, debasing valid arguments and cheapening the sorrow that overwhelms him when memories rush in. Anticipating an eventual war of words, he had pulled and set aside several documents from his files -- labeled “Weapons of Mass Vexation” -- but he never got a chance to use them.
One was a banner headline in the New York Post quoting the late John Cardinal O’Connor’s bombastic declaration that “God is a man” -- meaning a male, not a female. How this otherwise moderate prelate had reached this anatomical conclusion remains a mystery. Another was a copy of a letter by O’Connor’s spokesman, Father Whalen, to a friend, a journalist and fellow Freemason, which reads,
“His Eminence has asked me to inform you that he has no time to comment on the issues addressed in your article.”
The article, also submitted to the Rev. Billy Graham, and similarly snubbed, chronicled the assassination of streets children in Central America by agents of the state. Busy telling the poor to “go forth and multiply” and preaching against the use of condoms, the Church has yet to denounce this ongoing daily wave of social cleansing.
Another story, Montvert’s favorite, underscores the psychotic nature of religion. Datelined Rome, February 11, 2008, it reads:
“The 150th anniversary of the appartions in Lourdes of the V
irgin Mary was marked in Rome by a procession that culminated at St. Peter’s Basilica, Christianiaty’s most hallowed edifice, where a rib of Bernadette Soubirou, revered by the Church and blessed by the Pope as a saintly relic, was placed on display before an adoring crowd of worshippers.”
A rib! A macabre artifact idolized not in the remote Australian outback, the depths of darkest Africa, the jungles of Papua New Guinea or the Peruvian altiplano, but in a nation where the Rennaissance was born, where the wholesome breezes of Enlightenment helped air out the stench of ignorance and superstition.
“Ghoulish. Idolatrous buffooneery,” Montvert had grumbled.
Suspended midway between waning faith and reason, Manuel Albeniz had once wistfully suggested that “people seem to need religion. They think society would collapse without it.” Coming to his senses, Albeniz had quickly added, “Of course, the more hocus-pocus and histrionics religion delivers, the more plausible and persuasive its doctrines become.”
Montvert had agreed with his friend. The grand spectacle of religious rituals, the necromantic melodrama of the Mass, the boisterous exuberance of evangelical “revivals” all enthrall the faithful and they keep coming back for more. But he had rejected the notion that humans “need” religion or that some apocalyptic meltdown would ensue without it.
“Religion is a catechism in which are cast in stone proscriptions and commands, threats and penalties enforced with incantations and theatrics that the faithful are enjoined to regard as essential to their life and well being,” Montvert had added. “Faith is a potent narcotic but only those who have been ‘turned on’ (generally by force from infancy) succumb to its lethal ‘high.’ People are not born naturally predisposed to believe in fairy tales. Nor do they innately acquire an ‘addictive personality.’ One does not become a junkie until one has sampled and presumably become ‘hooked’ on the toxic merchandise. Religious belief is not the product of evolutionary instinct and very rarely a conscious choice. It is first infused in an unsullied psyche then reinforced through repetition and the discipline of fear.”
Nor would mankind wander in a spiritual desert without ‘divine’ guidance. Morality predates religion by millennia. Cultural anthropologists have shown that even the most “primitive” societies maintain codes of behavior that are not religious in origin, scope or intent. Conversely, history has demonstrated time and again that vast quantities of blood were shed in the name of “God” and that it continues to be spilled in modern sectarian conflicts. In contrast, no war was ever waged to advance the cause of atheism.
Montvert had been brought up in an ambiance utterly devoid of religious affectations. An absence of ceremonial spirituality at home did not create a void in his life and, as he tells anyone willing to listen, he found the notion of an omnipotent, ineffable, unknowable creator/judge/destroyer preposterous even as a child. (He had learned how to deny being a Jew in half a dozen languages during the German-occupation). Yes, he had gone through his “mystical period,” immersing himself in the study of Zen, the Tao, Tantric Buddhism, Hinduism, Shinto. Like his father before him, he had spent countless hours “meandering in stupefied fascination” through the Kabbalah’s cerebral minefields. At first, he had felt intellectually challenged but the leaps of comprehension, not to mention the leaps of faith the Kabbalah demands, had left him exhausted and confused. Ultimately, it was the Kabbalah’s hyper-deterministic character that had prompted his father to dismiss this, the most arcane of all Jewish philosophical systems as “a disquieting pastime for the idle, borderline monomaniacs or candidates for lunacy.” The Kabbalah, he would conclude, not only trivializes human hopes, knowledge, dreams and the legitimacy of voluntary action or inaction, it effectively discourages rational and deliberate action of any kind. Any system that pledges to temper human perplexities and lead to enlightenment through occultism, he held, delivers false hope and leads to disillusionment.
It was shortly after his father’s death, troubled by his stormy apostasy and anxious to jettison some of his own dismissive preconceptions that he ventured for the first time in the Kabbalah’s arcane realm. Enthralled and bewildered at first, often driven to mental exhaustion, he too eventually tired of its multilayered circularity, flagrant contradictions and maddening esotericism. He was not being ushered into some liberating “beyond.” Rather, he was being shoved and jostled and inveigled to probe the “nothingness” that dwells within. He found such mental pirouettes more taxing than he had imagined. Thought can travel no farther than its point of origin. The mind cannot fathom itself. Faced with the imponderable -- the very essence of Kabbalah -- he bowed out, humbled by the magnificence of paradox. His brief but intense foray into Kabbalah would not be in vain. Careful, measured readings yielded fresh insights on the depth of Jewish thought. He would later marvel at the magnitude of its influence on the works of Mirandola, Spinoza, Leibniz, Swedenborg, Kafka, Borges, Benjamin and Derrida. He would also discover that the root of Kabbalistic doctrine had been enunciated, much earlier and in considerably simpler language, in the Tao and Buddhist teachings. No matter the originality of a concept -- “There is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes, 1.9) -- he admitted that he too had been transformed, however imperceptibly, by the Kabbalah’s awesome, wrenching mental exactions. But Montvert’s excursions into mysticism were inspired by an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, not a need to take refuge in some ideological sanctuary.
“I think, therefore I doubt,” he had exclaimed at last when he awoke from a blinding sleep and shed the last vestiges of forbearance for senseless beliefs. Nine-tenths of his family had perished in Hitler’s gas chambers and the “inscrutability of God’s designs,” at best an offensive rationale, had since become loathsome.
He rebuffed the notion that man is born sullied by some “primal offense,” that pain ennobles the soul and that sentient beings need to be ruled by an arbitrary system of faith-based values and protocols.
In religion’s imaginary goodness, he discovered not a path to enlightenment but an instrument of deceit and emotional enslavement. The transformation from fence-straddler to mutineer was gradual, filled with misgivings. At first, he found religion’s mystique inscrutable. He had meandered through its occluded allegories and bizarre canons like an explorer in a strange, uncharted wasteland. He had glimpsed the very faint light that religion claims to shed but found only vast and gloomy shadows. It is in the shadows that his senses, now accustomed to the darkness, caught sight of a glow, a radiant luminosity that rinsed his pupils free of the gritty debris of credulity. He now understood that blind faith, not truth; prejudice and fear, not common sense, threaten humankind and consign it to bondage.
Like others before him, he had absent-mindedly tolerated sundry propositions and viewpoints along the way, some of which he even peddled, parrot-like, out of stupidity or intellectual sloth, not for the intrinsic virtues with which they were purportedly endowed.
Assembly-line rearing, fashionable in the days of his youth, had instilled a value system that seemed strange if not utterly without merit. He had been coached by otherwise doting parents to defer to authority with robot-like reverence: Applaud politely but do not innovate. Respect your elders. Venerate your teachers. Salute your superiors. Obey the boss. Comply with representatives of the public order. In short, he was to idolize or at least yield to all species of adults of dubious pedigree who had by now forgotten what it feels like to look at a very menacing world from three feet off the ground.
In school, he had been programmed by coldhearted masters to smile or fight back the tears, to subdue, sometimes to smother very raw feelings under the pretext that such perfunctory bearing is what society expects of a good little boy and later, of a mensch. Precocious and sly, he knew he was not and could never be a good little boy. Nor did he aspire to menschhood, a status not clearly defined or imagined at the time. But he understood that pretending to do what others anticipate -- feigning religion, simulating approval of orthodox concepts, conforming to time-honored
trends -- can bring on small rewards or, at the very least, shield one from censure, reprimand or retribution -- all of which he eventually incurred when he tired of pretending and transitioned at last from conciliation and irresolution to defiance.
Later, as his peripheral vision improved and his depth perception deepened, he began to ask questions, the very questions he now regretted not asking Bishop Touvier:
Why are we susceptible to pain and defenseless against the fury of disasters -- natural and manmade -- that, religion insists, are wrought against us “for mysterious reasons” by some capricious supernatural force?
Who is this “maker” who inflicts (or tolerates) atrocities for “the good that comes from them”? What cunning and irreducible absolute orchestrates without apparent aim -- or turns a blind eye to -- the paroxysms that convulse his realm?
What “intelligent designer” remains stone-silent while the sobs of his creation are never heard?
What “ineffable” entity is this, whose ear is inattentive and whose breast is unfaithful to the throngs who call on him and seek his succor?
What cruel despot decrees that his subjects will parrot words not their own, that they will blindly obey the injunctions of self-anointed envoys, tremble at their threats and admonitions, mouth off supplications and jeremiads and recite guilt-ridden prayers of indebtedness and veneration, all repeated ad nauseum, day after day, to a God who never shows his face, never bares his heart, never sheds a tear, never says he’s sorry, a God who grants life and, with it, the fear of death?
The questions, mulled over when he was still a child, were in fact declaratory statements conjugated in the interrogative. This he believed: Religion is divisive, repressive, irrational and detrimental to the pursuit of harmony among men. It belongs, if at all, in houses of worship or at home. It has no place in the bedroom, schools and government, much less in the crafting of a national psyche.