Why I Am A (Medieval) Catholic

Manifesto(es)

Dear Friends,

I’m keeping to my (loose) schedule of having a political piece towards the beginning of the week, a cultural piece towards the middle, and something a bit haphazard on weekends. This is a continuation of a series I’ve started on world religions.

Best,

Sam

WHY I AM A (MEDIEVAL) CATHOLIC

I think my journey into Medieval Catholicism started with an article in Vanity Fair, in which William Friedkin, the director of The Exorcist, described the first exorcism he had seen — 40 years after the release of The Exorcist. Friedkin wrote:

Without warning Rosa began to thrash violently. The five male helpers had all they could do to hold her down. A foam formed at her lips….Then Father Amorth called out the satanic cults, the superstition, the black magic that had possessed her. She reacted, growling, and screamed “MAAAAAAIIIIII!!!” The scream filled the room.

Another voice from deep within her shouted in his face: “DON’T TOUCH HER! DON’T EVER TOUCH HER!!” Her eyes were still closed. Father Amorth yelled, “CEDE! CEDE!” (Surrender!)

She reacted violently: “IO SONO SATANA.” (I am Satan.)

Friedkin was clearly impressed and I was too. This wasn’t a trick. Whether or not there was an actual devil inhabiting the woman undergoing the exorcism didn’t matter. She clearly believed that there was, and she was so steeped in Catholic tradition that a priest performing an exorcism had a healing effect on her. A skeptical person would be able to dismiss what had happened as ‘placebo,’ but that was exactly the point. In our vaunted modern medicine, placebo does remarkably well in controlled trials against medical treatments. In a Catholic tradition — steeped in demons and healing rites — placebo could, at the very least, be regarded as having its own efficacy. The Catholic Church was evidently persuaded as well. The Vatican continues to train hundreds of priests in the techniques of exorcism — long past the time when it stopped being socially acceptable. The Vatican — and I’ve seen an exorcist speak on this — just clearly felt that it worked, sort of in the way that nobody can exactly explain why talk therapy seems to work.

Father Amorth thumbing his nose at the devil

Thinking about the world in this way made me view the Christian centuries very differently. It wasn’t exactly that everybody had collectively lost their minds when, towards the end of the Roman Empire, they suddenly started seeing demons and angels everywhere. It was more that a very potent language for psychological states had been discovered, which served to elucidate ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ways to be. In a modern ‘scientific’ context, we assign labels. Somebody or other has ‘bipolar disorder’ or ‘schizophrenia’ or ‘alcoholism’ or whatever it is. But, as all clinicians would acknowledge, these labels are more art than science, a way simply of imposing a linguistic structure on patterns within human behavior. Medieval Catholics seemed to do just as well using the language of demonology. If a person was ‘possessed,’ they had allowed themselves to pass into an unfortunate mental state, and the way out of it was, first, to properly identify it — to assign it to a ‘demon,’ which was, really, a way of differentiating it from the essence of the person themselves — and then to work on a path towards ‘healing,’ which might involve the absolution, or talk therapy, of the confessional or else a turn towards an edifying patron saint or in extreme cases an exorcism. When in the 5th century, St Augustine described pagan Rome as having been governed by demons and, in the sixth, Procopius wrote that his boss Justinian was in fact a demon, we can understand them to be engaging more in political science than in a flight of irrationality. Both Augustine and Procopius were highly sophisticated, logical people. At different points in their life they had been close to power, and what they were saying was in a way not so very different from what a modern critic of government might say — that the Roman or Byzantine Empires were largely based on dark energy, that there was a ‘devilry’ at work in political and military processes, and the language of demonology was most useful in assessing the brutal acts that Justinian, for instance, had carried out. (In the hyper-rational 20th century, commentators on the Nazi period found themselves similarly giving up on any materialist or political understandings of Hitler and describing him, as Emil Fackenheim did, as an intrusion of the ‘demonic’ into history.)

Justinian. A demon.

For the most part, we have lost the gift of allegorical language, the absence of which makes the Catholic centuries largely opaque to us. But it is a trenchant way of thinking and it is surprising how much it has persisted in our understanding of certain extreme states. I have been very moved always by the recovery community and the way that religious language is, in that context, widely understood to be the only really viable path towards healing. It may well be that our current model of treating alcoholism will soon be replaced by Ozempic and pharmaceutical substances, but it has also been the case that, for the last century, in our ostensibly secular era, our approach to alcoholism has had next to nothing to do with the mechanics of drinking and has started instead with submission to a higher power, with an acceptance of oneself as being irredeemably fallen. (Saying ‘I am an alcoholic’ and having that be one’s permanent condition is very close to saying that you are in a state of ‘original sin.’) Alcohol is understood to be a metaphor — the old-style preachers who claimed that the devil lived in booze were certainly onto something — and the process of making oneself over into a being that accepts their powerlessness, that walks ultimately in a state of hard-earned grace, is very much a way of getting into a dualist frame of mind, in which the temptations of the devil saturate the world but it is possible with strenuous effort to tend to the purity of one’s soul. It sounds convoluted, but, as generations of those in AA have attested, it works — and nothing else really does.

What my glimpses of AA, and of extreme states in general, have shown me is that there is an alternative, far-more intense way of looking at the world than is on offer from laissez-faire secular society and that speaks better to the real tempests within people’s souls. In the acme of medieval Catholicism, Dante put this very vividly. We all live constantly in hell is the point — the society that he finds in The Inferno is really not particularly different from his Florence, if the tortures are more immediate and apparent. To reverse Bryan Stevenson’s formulation, everyone is exactly the worst thing that they have ever done in their life and the fitting punishment for each wrong action is eternal pain. Just as an empirical matter, anyone who has found themselves dwelling on past actions, on past wrongs, knows how difficult, if not impossible, it can be to ‘just move on’ or ‘let go,’ that some more complicated psychodrama is required. And the Catholic allegories of salvation and redemption are above all about that — with, for instance, Dante the pilgrim wandering down to the very depths of hell, seeing the endlessness of suffering and despair, and then abruptly reversing course, changing directions, and beginning his ascent; and with a priest, at the end of a long litany of mortal sins, giving his casual recipe for atonement. Forgiveness, in the Catholic conception, occurs with an understanding of the depth and eternity of sin but is independent of it — forgiveness is understood to come from an entirely different domain. Without being too literal about it, it is enacting a very intelligent metaphor of healing from the apparently unendurable — creating the indelible, eternal picture of the wrong, the ‘sin,’ which is juxtaposed nonetheless with the far greater force of Christ’s mercy. And in that drama, which is occurring simultaneously on an internal and a cosmological scale, is the possibility of healing from anything.