The Itinerant Mendicant: The tenderness of faith

Many years ago, while wandering through the seemingly unending galleries of artworks at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, I came upon the works of Adolf vonMenzel. Particularly striking among his works, and yet not among the more celebrated, nor indeed among the larger canvasses he painted, was one titled Kircheninneres (Barocker Altar). As the title suggests, the image is of a Baroque altar, even though Menzel does not detail the altar, but only hints at its complex forms through dark brush strokes. The altar is illuminated only through tiny lights indicative of candles, while its bulk is illuminated from the day light that pours from a window behind the altar, and onto the worshippers who gather around the communion rail of the altar, like an orientalist’s imagination of pagans before their idols. Indeed, the figure of the Catholic priest at the altar is not very clear, and contributing to the possibly ‘pagan’ nature of this image are the clouds of incense that rise from the foot of the altar. The question I faced then, and which remains unresolved is, what exactly was Menzel attempting with this image? Was he mocking the Catholic faith? Or was he alluding to the profound devotion of the Catholics he encountered? 

This image of the Baroque altar is not the only image where Menzel captured the rituals of the Catholic Church. Located in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich is a canvas depicting the procession of the Blessed Sacrament celebrating the Feast of Corpus Christi in the Austrian village of Hofgastein. Once again, along with the images of persons devoutly engaged in the procession, Menzel has sneaked in images of dandies and other lofty folk who are clearly spectators, but don’t seem particularly interested in the scared ritual. Rather, they seem to mock the ritual as some engage in conversation with each other, others stand apart and stare at the procession, and one young man in particular, actually looks out of the canvas and straight at the viewer.

Regardless of Menzel’s intentions, what definitely comes across from both these canvasses is the devotion of the Catholics involved in the rituals being represented. In both canvasses one finds people completely lost in the ritual that they are participating. Indeed, it is perhaps for the fervour of the devotees around the Baroque altar represented in Kircheninneres that this particular image is one of my more favourite, returning to me over, and over again. One such occasion was on a recent visit to Vienna. 

Competing for attention with the displays of imperial power, were some of the Catholic temples in various parts of the city’s core.  One of these churches was Michaelerkirche or the Church of St. Michael the Archangel.  Now one does not expect to see tender displays of devotion in Europe anymore given the extent to which European society has become secularized, but this church of St. Michael, as indeed other churches within the historical core of Vienna, displayed a number of touching displays of devotion.  Thus for instance, on my visit to St. Michael's, I found a fresh little posy of flowers resting on the side altar in front of the icon of St. Jude, and the wall behind it crammed with plaques of stone thanking St. Jude for his intervention in the lives of these devout. This was not the distant relationship with Catholicism that one would have expected in this largely secular city, but something akin to the devotion of the women one finds kneeling in front of the Baroque altar that Menzel depicted. At the same time however, the altar to St. Jude was a simple altar located close to the more ancient part of the Church and quite unlike the fancy alabaster crafted high altar that would have probably formed the more obvious subject for Menzel’s work. There is a profound lesson located somewhere in this contradiction, but like the answer to the question about the artist’s intention, I am quite unable to find it.

(A version of this post was first published in The Goan, 24 Aug 2013)

Faith, Hindus, Christians and Cynics: A Letter to Sudin

Dear Sudin,

A couple of weeks ago, I read a letter to the editor in one of our local newspapers. Written by a Hindu gentleman who had visited a temple dedicated to Shantadurga, the letter does not indicate to us why he went there. One presumes however, that he was there to perform a ritual. While at the temple, he came across a farmer who was there to beg the intercession of the Goddess. He had suffered rodent damage to his crop, and was convinced, or so the narrator of this letter tells us, that sprinkling the teertha (holy water) in the fields would save him and his crop. This simple (and perhaps naïve) faith of the farmer proved too much for our gentleman narrator, and in his letter to the editor, exhorts that we must cease such practices of blind superstition and adopt scientific principles and rationality.

I have to confess on reading this letter I was most upset. While I might join the narrator in thinking the farmer’s practices naïve, surely they are just as naïve as the reasons that the narrator was in the temple in the first place? For what was our narrator doing in the temple? Was it not to honour a deity of graven stone?

You will realize that I am not rubbishing the practice of the worship of the Goddess. I am merely challenging the supercilious attitude of our narrator, asking him to indicate where blind superstitious faith ends, and rational belief begins! While the formulation above was clear to my mind, I nevertheless felt that I was missing something in my analysis of the issue.

A few days ago, in the course of a virtual chat, I was eager to impress you that I speak about the importance of faith in public life, not in religion. You retorted, indicating that perhaps this ‘faith’ was something you (Christians) have, whereas we (Hindus) don’t need it, it is enough that ‘we’ perform the ritual. No sooner had you made this suggestion, did I realize what was bothering me about this letter I have just elaborated on above. My response will deal with two issues; the first the whole idea that the Hindu/ Indian is alien to faith (this being a Christian/ Western innovation) and second the implications of this faithless religion.

In its attempt to dominate the world, colonialism set up certain binaries of virtues. Thus if the colonizer was material, the colonized was spiritual. If the colonizer intelligent, the colonized innocent. In these binaries, the colonized always landed up with the least flattering, as the colonizer was cast as the mature and pragmatic sibling in the relationship. These binaries were wildly popular during the halcyon days of nationalism. In the attempt to give the colonized a voice, rather than challenge these binaries, these binaries were valorized and made the basis of the colonized’s challenge. While we don’t engage in such childishly embarrassing binaries today, the tendency remains. There is an attempt at shallow sophistication. Thus colonialism is now tied to Christianity, and this faith-tradition is counterposed to the native traditions, and differences trotted out. Christianity has a text, Hinduism does not. Christianity has faith, Hinduism does not, and so forth. The idea is to cast colonialism as bringing modernity, and in face of the problems and violences of modernity, to suggest that the non, and pre-modern can provide a useful platform for a challenge to our modern mess. This is the intellectual origin of the suggestion that the Hindu has no need for faith.

Surely the encounter in the temple narrated above should convince you that the ‘pagan’ native is capable of and not innocent to faith. Empirically therefore, your argument should fall flat on its face. It is possible that you would choose to argue that this native has learned faith from the Christian. I trust you will not go down this embarrassing path and deny the bliss of faith to the native. Should you choose to do so however, what you are effectively doing is to suggest that Christianity is forever alien to native soil (a preposterous position for reasons beyond my being a South-Asian Christian). Secondly, you would be suggesting that the native faith traditions have somehow emerged fully formed, without any evolution, or that any evolution has been entirely indigenous.

In response to your argument however, I will not deny that there are Hindus who operate without faith. This is not however, exclusively a Hindu domain, since this dubious facility is shared by Christians, Muslims and Jews as well. These people fulfill their religious obligations, but do so recognizing that these are religious rituals that must be performed for the social sanction they obtain. Thus John Fernandes will take his children to mass, and introduce them to First Holy Communion, even though he thinks the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection to be ‘scientifically impossible’ and thus akin to our farmer’s use of teertha.

In these days of religious revivalism, fundamentalism et al, it is not the faithful that I fear. It is the religious. That is, those who operate in the field of religion without faith. It is true that the fields of faith and religion intersect so often that it is often difficult to distinguish one from the other. The faithful can be gullible, but it is the cynical, those who perform religious ritual, without a belief in its spiritual merit, that are perhaps more to be feared.

In the course of my itinerations round Goa, I have seen the cynics that populate the temples, obsessed more with using the Goddess as a tool to power, rather than falling prostrate at Her feet. The narrator of the letter, I would wager is one of them. The product of his cynicism, is that not only is there a failure to grow in the virtues of trust and mutual dependence that faith brings, but it brings also, as was so obvious from the letter to the editor, a certain disdain for those of the lower order. These ‘superstitious’ are seen as in- need-of-education, and at the end of the day, merely tools for us to reach the paradise that we have deemed fit for creation. Indeed, as the good Pope Benedict XVI repeats constantly, contemporary man, having displaced God, arrogates unto himself the power of God, but in the process renders fellow humans less than human. Setting out to create paradise, he invariably produces the hell of contemporary existence.

To these ramblings, I would welcome your comments.

(Sudin, is the pseudonym for a Goan (Hindu) currently engaged in a PhD in the UK. While Sudin is a pseudonym, all other references are entirely factual.)

(First published in the Gomantak Times, 13 Jan 2010)