Losing (and regaining) our sense of the sacred in a “bourgeois” society

In 2016, Pope Francis gave an interview to Fr. Antonio Spadaro, editor-in-chief of Civiltà Cattolica, in which he wondered why it is that so many young people are interested in the traditional Roman liturgical rites, as they existed prior to Vatican II. “I always try to understand what’s behind the people who are too young to have lived the pre-conciliar liturgy but who want it.” A similar puzzlement about why anybody, let alone young people, is still attached to the traditional Roman rite seems to underlie the motu proprio Traditionis Custodes, the letter which accompanied it, and the recent clarification issued from the Congregation for Divine Worship.

Of course, Pope Francis himself has his own theories about what the causes of this attachment to the pre-conciliar rites may be. In the same interview, for example, he attributed it to a type of spiritual “rigidity” that arises not from love but from insecurity. To be sure, there may be enough truth to this diagnosis: traditionalists have suffered from a sense of insecurity, the fear of losing something that they cherish, the fear of being forever marginalized, for several decades now; and it would not be surprising if many of them have by now adopted this disposition as a more or less permanent feature of their spiritualities. This is unfortunate, and it is right to call them out of such a rut.

However, there is another, more penetrating diagnosis that is capable of explaining not just the traditionalist movement in the Catholic West, but the variety of religious seekers who are looking for alternatives to the major ways of religious practice that are on offer in the Western World. In a recent article, Bishop Robert Barron commented on the interesting phenomenon of young people leaving institutional religion en masse and seeking out other forms of religious and spiritual experience. Many are going to New Age spirituality, Wicca and other forms of witchcraft, or identifying as “spiritual but not religious.” One could add to this the plethora of young people seeking to practice meditation according to the various Oriental traditions of Zen Buddhism, Yoga, Taoism, and the like.

It might be profitable to understand Catholic traditionalism as yet another part of this larger phenomenon of people who are dissatisfied with the state of contemporary Western religion, particularly Christian religion, and looking elsewhere for a more enriching experience. The only thing separating traditionalist Catholic from the “nones” who seek other forms of religious or spiritual experience outside Christianity is, obviously, that the traditionalists have sought for such an experience within their own Catholic tradition. Although they are by no means abandoning institutional religion, they join the hosts of other spiritual seekers in seeking an alternative to the types of religious experience that are being offered by Western religions by and large.

In the foreword to his fascinating text, Christ the Eternal Tao, Hieromonk Damascene of the Serbian Orthodox Church commented on a sad phenomenon taking place in the contemporary West. Christians in the West are abandoning Christianity in droves and seeking alternative forms of religion and spirituality in the East, particularly in ancient China. Hieromonk Damascene speculates that this is because people in the West are finding that the Christianity being practiced there has been watered down, diluted from its original, ancient, mystical quality. He writes:

They see that the people in the churches are not changing and becoming better, but rather are comforting themselves and each other in their unregenerate state. They find that the spirit of the Western churches is, at its core, little different from that of the world around them. Having removed from Christianity the Cross of inward purification, these churches have replaced a direct, intuitive apprehension of Reality and a true experience of God with intellectualism on the one hand and emotionalism on the other.

In a certain way, what the Hieromonk is describing is the near total loss of a sense of the sacred in the West. In the abstract, the sacred denotes something out of the ordinary, something set apart for the purpose of mediating between God and Man in the context of worship. To encounter the sacred is to step, as it were, into another world, a word that transcends the experience of our daily lives, a world where all of our ordinary impulses and habits are silenced in the presence of a mystery that cannot be comprehended in human terms.

The intellectualism and sentimentalism of contemporary Western religions can be understood as a sort of “dumbing down” of the mysterious quality of the sacred. In Evangelical Protestant churches, for example, a heavily didactic intellectualism prevails, where the experience of going to church necessarily centers around the figure of the preacher. Going to church is very often like going to a lecture – with the added embellishment of singing a few songs of praise before and after the lecture.

In other churches, including Catholic churches, the liturgical service takes on the appearance of something like group therapy, and the style of music only reinforces the sense that the congregation is celebrating itself and attempting to cultivate “good feelings,” as though these were equivalent to religious devotion. The sermons and improvised prayers one hears from the altar add yet more to the sense that all we are doing is attempting to feel good about ourselves and each other. The act of worship is thus reduced to a form of collective self-care, in a capitulation to the narcissistic quality of a secular therapeutic culture at large. It is well and good to call this sort of activity “sacred,” but to do so is to render the word practically meaningless.

The didactic intellectualism and the therapeutic sentimentalism of contemporary religions extend beyond the boundaries of the liturgy as well, and into the complex plethora of devotions and spiritualities that religious people seek to cultivate in their lives. These spiritualities, as complex as they sometimes are, often do little more than to give an air of religious piety to a life otherwise indistinguishable from the prevailing social patterns of a fundamentally secular culture. Such forms of religious practice serve an ideological function in the way once identified by Karl Marx: they do not radically call into question the ways of life assumed to be normal by “bourgeois” society. Rather, they merely give it a veneer of religious legitimacy.

This is probably what Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had in mind on the several occasions he has labeled contemporary Western Christianity “bourgeois.” In The Yes of Jesus Christ, for example, he identifies “bourgeois Pelagianism” as a peculiar attitude among Christians, in which the Christian tells himself, self-confidently:

‘I do my duty, and the minor human weaknesses cannot really be as dangerous as all that.’ This attitude is a modern version of ‘acedia’ – a kind of anxious vertigo that overcomes people when they consider the heights to which their divine pedigree has called them. In Nietzschean terms it is the mentality of the herd, the attitude of someone who just cannot be bothered to be great. It is the bourgeois because it is calculating and pragmatic and comfortable with what is common and ordinary, rather than aristocratic and erotic…

Ratzinger goes on to attribute this to a culture of security, as a substitute for the full and open response of Christian hope. This sheds some light on what the “sacred” is, and why it is that contemporary “bourgeois” Christianity resists it. To encounter the sacred is to be shaken out of all one’s prior illusions of security, to fall entirely out of one’s comfort zones. The bourgeois Christian desires to be secure in what is common, ordinary, and familiar, rather than to be shocked into awareness of his radical calling.

The therapeutic culture of self-care, however disguised by the accoutrements of religious piety, is no more than this culture of security, at the expense of the theological hope which is necessary in the face of the fearsome unknown that is present in the sacred. In a similar way, the security and certainty of an overly rationalistic and moralistic approach to religion is but another illusion, a form of self-assurance that refuses to be faced with the call of faith to total transformation, and no substitute for the opening of the heart to the mystery of the sacred.

The German philosopher, Rudolf Otto, identified the element of tremor as an essential component of the experience of the holy, in his seminal work The Idea of the Holy. To encounter something holy is to be confronted with something entirely other, and therefore something unknown, mysterious, and tremendous in its mystery. The Latin phrase mysterium tremendum encapsulates this experience, connoting something of the “fear and trembling” that necessarily accompany the experience of sacred things. Otto rightly notes that this experience is at the root of all the ancient religions. It is not difficult to understand why this experience is all but avoided by the complacent people of the contemporary West. Trapped in the culture of security identified by Ratzinger, they are afraid to be struck into holy terror by the awful face of the sacred – they are afraid to fear the tremendous mystery of the divine. They would rather recede into the ordinary comforts of a bourgeois existence.

Others, dissatisfied with the culture of security and longing for a genuine encounter with the sacred, are going elsewhere to find it. Many are going to the East, perhaps to non-Christian Eastern religions and spiritual traditions like Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, or New Age spiritualities, with their austere traditions of meditation, contemplative silence, or other forms of experiencing the sacred. (Pope Francis himself has recognized this interesting phenomenon.) Or they are going to Orthodox Christianity, which possesses its own ancient traditions of prayer and elaborate ritual. Yet others are seeking the sacred in the more ancient traditions of Roman Catholicism itself, such as the ancient liturgy as it existed prior to Vatican II. Or they are seeking to restore the spirit of these traditions to the celebration of the reformed liturgy itself, in accordance with the very directives of Vatican II itself, when so often the celebration does not accord with that spirit. These are all part of one global movement of souls in search of the sacred – in search of an other-worldly encounter.

The Second Vatican Council, in Nostra Aetate, declared that the Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true in the great non-Christian religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism. The Council proclaimed:

[In] Hinduism, men contemplate the divine mystery and express it through an inexhaustible abundance of myths and through searching philosophical inquiry. They seek freedom from the anguish of our human condition either through ascetical practices or profound meditation or a flight to God with love and trust. Again, Buddhism, in its various forms, realizes the radical insufficiency of this changeable world; it teaches a way by which men, in a devout and confident spirit, may be able either to acquire the state of perfect liberation, or attain, by their own efforts or through higher help, supreme illumination. Likewise, other religions found everywhere try to counter the restlessness of the human heart, each in its own manner, by proposing “ways,” comprising teachings, rules of life, and sacred rites.

It is sadly ironic that, in an era when the Church is supposed to be exploring the ways in which these other religions have aided souls in the pursuit of the divine, some of Her leaders are simultaneously disregarding the traditions by which her own faithful have been aided in this same quest. If anything is to be learnt from the other ancient religions, it is that the flight to God cannot be accomplished by means of a compromise with the social fashions of the world, which are aptly labeled “bourgeois.” Rather, such a journey can only be mediated by the stark symbolism of the sacred, with all its air of mystery and other-worldly transcendence.

In this respect, the traditional rites of the Church share a close kinship with the non-Christian religious traditions in their authentic form. The ancient, slow chants of the Roman rite, the incense that rises like the cloud of unknowing, the sacred language that is spoken more like a spell or incantation than as conversational speech, the meditative silence and the emptiness that pervade the traditional liturgy – these are elements which the ancient Catholic rites share with many of the world’s great religions. The souls who seek out these rites do so to encounter something great, something nameless, a mystical presence that cannot be securely defined by words or comfortably domesticated by sentimental emotions. Like the multitudes who look to the Orient or to the New Age in order to find a path of spiritual awakening, many of the traditionalists who look to the ancient rites of the Roman Church seek nothing more nor less than to lose themselves in the transcendence of God.