Bernini: Erotic Religious Seduction
She swoons languidly upon a coral-like bed of dreams that floats above the altar of the Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome. Head tilted back invitingly, throat beginning to emerge from a ravishing swirl of polished drapery, Teresa seems about to fall into a perpetual unconsciousness while, poised above her, Cupid thrusts the golden arrow again and yet again deep into her heart.
An odd mixture of the erotic and the mystical, of pagan and Christian motif, Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa presents us with the archetypal religious image: the welcome collapse of ego boundaries for world-weary souls; the welcome return to the undifferentiated power and bliss that can only be found at the umbilicus of the world.
Golden rays pour downward from the interior of a cervical star and illuminate the repetitive thrust and withdrawal of the phallic arrow. Teresa appears to slip her moorings; and the rough hewn rock which is her couch–and which is our rasping world– is transformed before our eyes into a cloud.
Much like the caressing rays of the sun which so gently stroke the humanistic pharaoh Amenhotep IV some three thousand years earlier, this descending radiance inspires the visionary with a glimpse of the “is, was and ever shall be” of infancy and primal fantasy.
To surrender to its siren memory is to defy the world of matter, of time, of change:
I saw eternity the other night
Like a great Ring of pure and endless light
All calm, as it was bright,
And round beneath it, Time in hours,
Days, years Driv’n by the spheres,
Like a vast shadow mov’d,
In which the world and all her train
Were hurl’d. (Henry Vaughan)
But though religion invites humanity to turn its gaze heavenward, its most potent magic comes from the earth; from the creaturely need to escape death, as well as the daily petite mort of existential angst. Lest we forget: it is with mortal eyes that humans see, and mortal minds that humans conceive of the pure, the eternal, the infinite.
So it is that Ovid, like so many others, commits the error of taking manifest phenomena at face value when he declares:
“All other animals look downward; Man, Alone, erect, can raise his face toward Heaven.”
Humanity alone first created the gods, it is true. But these projected images are fashioned from childhood memories of the parental attachment figures of the earliest hearth and home.
“The propensity to magic cults and religions derives from the psychobiological neoteny of the human animal, since each individual has passed through a magical…and a religious stage of ego-differentiation to which, under stress, he may regress.” (La Barre, 1980)
These projections end by being hung in the empyrean–and they are so well fashioned that they seem to have always been there.
It is this curious admixture of the earthly and the ethereal, of the childish and the sublime, that makes religion one of the most paradoxical constructs of the human mind. For it is precisely at the moment that its doctrine slips its moorings and waxes celestial, or urges its worshipers onto the behavioral heights of ethical altruism, that it most clearly displays its thralldom to earthly concerns: the need for safety, security and order.
Truly, it is a compaction of mud and stars.
The fragile self desires nothing more than to continue to live; but it can achieve Life only by canalizing the life force itself. It can achieve Life only through delayed gratification, or through renunciation of that same bodily desire for more Life. The ambivalent bargain struck by Freud’s rebellious sons reaches up through the aeons to undergird the dogma preached in the modern cathedral: he who would gain his life must first lose it.
What could be more noble than the desire to live for an intellectual vision of purity, at once severing the connections between man and the beasts who exist, apparently, solely for the gratification of their appetites?
But this self-denial and ethereality are perhaps only sublimations of behaviors insisted upon by several of the laws of evolution. The child who delays the gratifications that might accompany maturity, is the child who also prolongs parental investment (Badcock, 1990). And the child who behaves altruistically toward his or her siblings is one whose behavior not only gratifies the parent, but who also contributes to an unconsciously advantageous kin-altruistic equation.
Such a child is a good child because he or she acts in harmony with the will of the Father: that is, in harmony with the phylogenetic calculus of inclusive fitness.
The parental investment score-sheet which demands greater sibling altruism than either party to the transaction might desire, looks this way when translated into text:
“Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns and yet your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? Therefore, do not be anxious, saying, What shall we eat? or what shall we wear? But first seek his kingdom and his righteousness and all these things shall be yours as well.”
Inspiring as the words of Totem-Son Jesus are, they nevertheless mask a power-seeking paradox: to forsake the world is to achieve the world ultimately. Even the Beatitudes promise the maximization of inclusive fitness in a cryptic way, reminding us that the meek shall inherit the world and that the last shall be first. The saved shall win, the damned shall lose.
“How shall I laugh, how shall I rejoice,” says Tertullian some two centuries after the grisly sacrifice of the crucifixion, “when I shall see the magistrates who persecuted God’s servants melting in fiercer flames than those wherewith they themselves raged against the Christians!”
When they express sentiments like these, the followers of the Prince of Peace lose their benignity, and the mask which is the meekness of the Lamb falls away:
“It is impossible,” says Riane Eisler in her valiant effort to unearth the mechanics of the triumph of dominator religion, “to even begin to describe a process that went on for millennia…the process whereby the human mind was, sometimes brutally and sometimes subtly, sometimes deliberately and sometimes unwittingly remolded…As we can still read in the Bible, the Hebrews, and later also the Christians and Muslims, razed temples, cut down sacred groves of trees, and smashed pagan idols. It also entailed massive spiritual destruction…not only through book burning, but through the burning and persecution of heretics, those who did not perceive reality in the prescribed way” (1988).
The human Id being what it is, I suppose it is impossible to wish for nothingness, and even to wish for annihilation (Thanatos) is to wish for something thought to be better. The Hindu fakir standing for hours balanced on one foot staring into the sun, the self-flagellants punishing the flesh as did Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter, the Egyptian stylitic monks hauling baskets of food up to their lonely, narrow aeries–all have a desire to be first in a way. Even Augustine, who could observe the collapse of Rome with equanimity, had a desire to be first, only his citizenship was in the City of God.
The implements of torture speak of this desire. Here, the iron maiden waits to embrace the heretic with its deadly, un-Cupidean arrows. For others it will be the fiery stake of the Spanish auto da fe, or the organized masses of inspired, murderous soldiers of the Albigensian crusades. It was not so long ago that any one of us could have met death for questioning the existence of the judeo-christian god, or the validity of certain fine points of church dogma.
Throughout its history religion has pursued a self-contradictory course, and mounted its assault upon the heavens with engines stolen from hell. At the same time–almost as a corollary–it has licensed its devotees to play a game of hide-and-seek, the reaction-formation rules of which are obscured from the participants themselves.
So it is that the faithful mask their own hubris by giving lip service to the virtue of humility, or mask their aggressiveness by protesting that they love others as much as they love themselves, or mask their intolerance by reiterating the value of its opposite, forgiveness; or mask their vanity and egotism by emphasizing their own–and humanity’s–unworthiness to be admitted into the presence of the holy.
For as it must–as all human inventions must–religion has remained faithful to its roots: the earth-bound, mortal imagination which is as much concerned with maximizing fitness–with being first–as it is with escaping the bonds of gravity.
It is this need to preserve order and security–and as a corollary, to banish existential fear and thereby legitimize the existence of the unworthy self– that explains why the crimes of religion have often exceeded those of the state. “Certainty” licenses guiltless savagery; and guilt lessness, if one can purchase it, is balm.”
The problem, of course, is that the god’s word is communicated to finite beings who, as often as not, are likely to misconstrue the message. Determined to have their god triumph in this world lest their immortality project collapse, many sects will punish others on their god’s behalf, only to awaken to subsequent regrets about the wisdom of purifying excess. As Shakespeare wryly observed:
“…Man, proud man, dressed in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what he’s most assured, his glassy essence, like an angry ape, plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens, would all themselves laugh mortal.”
Even the town of Salem voted restitution to its savaged victims.
To examine the roots of religious thinking is to confront the problem of evil in its starkest aspect. It is to confront the hunger of the bodily driven human imagination, the leap of faith, the credo quia absurdum est of Tertullian.
It is to learn that even in the darkened church one is unable to elude the ever earthward tug of the self– not only those fears that are borne of the anticipation of death, and not only the guilt and self-negation that engender so much hostility, but also those epigenetic rules that compel human religious behavior as well.
It is also to discover the truth of the paradox that Becker discovered decades ago:
The urge to overcome Evil
is Often its Father.
Or as Wotan had to learn: the desire to construct a fort to banish all fear only deepens the complexity and terror of one’s entrapment.
The horrific painter Bosch was right in a way: the demon that drags the damned back into the cosmic sphincter is the only angel who laughs.
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