It’s also provides an interesting perspective from which to view the insistence of some that the current Vatican administration’s mandates on the TLM must be immediately implemented to the letter or else…do you even communion with the Holy Father, bro?
Which is something I’ve been thinking about for a while now. Keating takes time to unpack all that bishops and educational institutions were, on paper, supposed to do in contrast to what they actually did.
Replacing “disposal” with the word for “order” (seiri), it became a service that tends respectfully to the “straightening up” (katazukeru) of belongings, emphasizing both the nature of the matter (that is “not treated as garbage”) and the attitude given it by the workers (who “tend to the feelings” of the bereaved and “show respect” to the deceased). For a service that still brokers the disposal of belongings, Keppers adds a labor of care that personalizes the work they do and the attitude they take toward the objects themselves. In this they are treating the matter they deal with as something other, and more, than the garbage that Wang calls the “corpse of a commodity:” objects that have lost their utility and value.
As revealed in the motto for the company—“we help in your move to heaven” (tengoku he no hikkoshi no tetsudai/天 国へのお引越しのお手伝い)—the attitude is of recognizing the person still lingering in the things being removed from a home: what Sasha Newell, in his 2014 article on hoarding, has called the “unfetish” of an object still animated by the memories, attachments, and energy of the life it once had for or with a human.
You might or might not know that my favorite part of studying history is: You know what you thought was true? Well, think again.
The author looks at the most common explanations: they were remnants of pagan thinking or they were put in place by irreverent or disgruntled craftsmen. He takes these theories apart – the second one, for example, by pointing out how every feature of a medieval church was subject to regulation, close review or both, by authorities. He concludes:
Although the story of the disgruntled stonemason, that carved rude sculptures to get one over on the church authorities, is extremely popular it is not based on verifiable evidence from the mediaeval world. The tale is perhaps predicated on three elements. Firstly, a lack of understanding at just how common sexual imagery was in the mediaeval church. Secondly, a lack of mediaeval theological and cultural context. Thirdly, assumptions of morality based on Victorian and modern concepts.
The fact that highly visible, carnal sculpture was so abundant in the mediaeval world can be coupled to a distinct lack of legal prosecutions brought against stonemasons and carpenters. This in itself acts as a significant piece of evidence that the imagery was sanctioned. Meanwhile, we have access to many actual edicts by the church which indicated that they monitored the content of artwork very closely indeed.
Instead, we must look to what functions such imagery played within the mediaeval church. Sexual motifs may have been related to negative mysticism and a sense of intangible spirituality – taking the viewer to a dark place to find the true light of Christianity. The sculptures could act as moral warnings – expressions of how not to behave. Equally, the use of satirical humour has always had a great strength in undermining behaviour: “Blimey! That carving of the naked man up there doesn’t half remind me of what happened after Old Baldrick drank all that strong ale! What a plonker!”
As ever, the mediaeval mind was extremely complex, and images could work on several levels at once. We must be careful not to bring modern morality to bear on mediaeval subject matter. As L. P. Hartley (The Go-Between, 1953) memorably stated: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
I highlight this, not necessarily because I believe that you are fascinated by the particular subject (Although I’ll bet you are…) but because it points to a larger truth, one that I return to in this space quite often – the tenuousness of our understanding, the stubborn mysteriousness of past and present, and the right each of us has to interrogate “given” truths and assumptions, to search for and consider evidence, and to question self-proclaimed authorities, in any field.
Charlotte was Both 