On Mon, 24 Oct 2005 09:15:28 -0400 Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu>
writes:
> > Isn't that the truth. Spain and Italy almost made me long to be a
> practising Catholic again.
> > The cathedrals
> > and iconography really tug at you.
> >
> > John Thornton
>
>
> Yeah, those Catholics knew how to do religion right. They knew that
> religion is supposed to inspire awe, astonishment and the sense of
> something
> bigger than life in people and understood the role of theatrics to
> attain
> that goal. A very different animal from the feel-good-about-myself
> variety
> that developed on this side of the pond.
I suspect that might be due to the fact that the Catholic Church evolved under a feudal social order and has retained some of the communitarian values of that order, even while adapting to capitalism. Protestantism was born of the revolt against feudalism and the American variety has been, almost from the beginning, suffused with capitalist values and attitudes. feel-good varieties represent a form of religiosity that is adapted to the consumer society of late capitalism.
>
> PS. On a second thought, Catholic-style religiosity was not such a
> bad
> thing after all, its known shortcomings notwithstanding. People
> need awe,
> astonishment and a sense of not being the center of the world and
> there
> being something bigger than them - for otherwise they start behaving
> like
> pigs, mindlessly grubbing themselves with junk, shitting all around
> themselves, and responding only to a whip.
It is intereresting to note how many secular thinkers in Catholic countries, especially France, were concerned with developing some sort of a secular substitute for Catholicism that would be able to perform the same sorts of functions like the ones that Wojtek describes. Saint-Simon, Comte, and Durkheim were all obsessed with this enterprise. Even a Marxist like Althusser, who came from a devout Catholic family, shared in this obsession.
>
> Wojtek
>
>
>
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