Religion
I spent a good many of my childhood mornings squirming in Protestant pews. My parents were WASPs, and church attendance was part of the WASPian routine.. Dad just went to church for weddings and funerals; he was a gambler, and believed only in Lady Luck, who sometimes even behaved like a lady for him. But Mum got religion from time to time (usually after she found out that Dad had been unfaithful to her again), and wherever we were living, she would seek out the nearest Episcopal Church and attend services. She didn’t buy into the Christian story completely: the Virgin birth, Jesus rising from the dead, the doctrine of bodily resurrection on Judgment Day, and Hell as a malodorous sub-basement ruled over by a sadistic pyromaniac, were all too much of a stretch for her. But she did like the notion of redemption. She felt imprisoned in her own life, weighed down by the responsibilities of marriage, children, overseeing frequent moves, managing a household, and keeping up appearances as a proper WASP wife while her husband was tomcatting around.
So at an early age I found myself sitting in church on Sundays dressed in a little blue jacket, short gray flannel pants, and red-and-white striped tie. During mother’s paroxysms of devotion, she always sought out the fanciest church in the area, the type called “Smoking Episcopal,” because the priest burned incense copiously and celebrated mass at the altar and did everything Roman Catholic priests did except accept the authority of the Pope, hear confessions, or perform exorcisms.
The Episcopal Church is America’s version of the Church of England, which was founded by Henry VIII, a man of large appetites and little patience. First he married Catherine of Aragon, who gave him a daughter, but no sons. When the Pope refused to annul his marriage to her, he pronounced himself head of the English (or Anglican) Church so that he could marry saucy Anne Boleyn and try again for an heir to the throne. Some sources say that Anne was already pregnant at the time of her marriage, and it has been noted that Bluff King Hal also kept Anne’s sister Mary as his mistress. Sir Thomas More, the king’s chancellor, and a devout Roman Catholic, refused to accept Henry as head of the English Church, and got his own head chopped off for his temerity. Anne Boleyn lost hers, too, executed on a charge trumped up by the scheming Thomas Cromwell, of adultery with court musician Mark Smeaton. This left Hal free to marry Jane Seymour, who finally gave him a son (the future Edward VI, the first openly Protestant king of England). Shortly after the boy was born, Jane died of uterine rupture. Edward succeeded to the throne as a child, and died of tuberculosis in his teens, but not before passing over his half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, and naming Lady Jane Grey as his successor. But the willful Mary, assisted by a faction of powerful magnates, deposed Queen Jane after only nine days. She was locked up in the Tower of London, and shortly thereafter, off went her head.
Mary promptly re-established Roman Catholicism as the state religion, and during her reign, thousands of Protestants were massacred, earning her the nickname Bloody Mary (the popular cocktail has nothing to do with her, but I’m sometimes reminded of her when I drink one, especially if the bartender adds too much Tabasco sauce). She was succeeded by Good Queen Bess – Elizabeth I – who restored her father’s Smoking Episcopal Church, and pissed off the Pope – Pius the Fifth – who excommunicated her, an act of futility like closing the barn door after the horse has decamped. Pius was followed by Gregory XIII, who in turn was succeeded by Sixtus V. That ferocious fellow persuaded King Philip II of Spain to invade England, but fortunately for those of us who speak English, the dim-witted Philip picked a general instead of an admiral – the Duke of Medina-Sidonia – to command his Armada, and the bold pirate Francis Drake sank most of his ships.
WASPs whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower or the Fortune prided themselves on their courageous Separatist forebears, but the grim Calvinism practiced by William Bradford’s Pilgrims, with its merciless doctrine of predestination and eternal damnation for all but a select few, was too soul-shriveling for later generations. Many wealthy WASPs backslid into a sort of country-club Episcopalianism, in which attending church on Sunday morning was something one did before the afternoon round of golf. Of course they were blissfully ignorant of the fact that by embracing even a lax form of Anglicanism, they were choosing the very church the Separatists had rebelled against. In this respect, they resembled those New York businessmen in the 1860s who, though ostentatiously proclaiming their loyalty to the Union, continued to buy Confederate cotton to sell to the British. WASPs who were politically liberal often opted for the Unitarian-Universalist Church, and when asked what they believed, replied, “What have you got?”
As for me, I stopped believing in God the same year I stopped believing in Santa Claus, for much the same reason: nobody’s all naughty or all nice. Eva Braun loved Hitler; Alfonso of Aragon loved Lucrezia Borgia; George Washington owned slaves; Martin Luther King, Jr. cheated seriatim on his wife.
But I attended Phillips Andover Academy, and unless you were Jewish, Sunday services at Cochrane Chapel were mandatory. They were nominally ecumenical, but the chaplain read liturgical passages from Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, and the hymns were all Anglican. So in effect, Episcopalism was the school religion. However, PA was the home of the Memorial Bell Tower, which housed a carillon that rang out Lutheran hymns like “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” right after services ended, and Martin Luther opposed Anglicanism, so religion at Andover was a tad contradictory. Also, the student who played the carillon, a gifted pianist named Gary Fuller, sometimes ended his liturgical concerts by playing bebop compositions written for the vibraphone, such as the Modern Jazz Quartet’s “Bags’ Groove” – a case of ecumenism with a vengeance. The school authorities were scandalized, but the students loved Gary’s cool rebellion, so unlike the heretics of Andover and Salem in 1693, he was not taken out and hanged.
I went to Yale, where church attendance was optional, so I didn’t set foot in a house of worship (except as a tourist visiting medieval cathedrals while on leave from my Army stint) until I met my first wife, Louise. She was an actress and a non-observant Roman Catholic, and she and I started out happily living in sin on New York’s Upper West Side. But to please her widowed Italian-American mother, I agreed to convert to Catholicism, and we attended a Pre-Cana Conference with a priest at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. I went first, and promised the priest that we would never use birth control devices or seek an abortion, and would raise our children according to the tenets of the Church. The priest was well pleased.
But then it was Louise’s turn in his office, and suddenly we found ourselves standing on the sidewalk, like Adam and Eve driven out of the Garden of Eden. I asked her what had happened, and she confessed that her childhood catechism classes kicked in, and she couldn’t lie to a priest. “I told him you lied,” she said.
We eventually got married in a civil ceremony, which disappointed Louise’s mother, but at least we were legal cohabitants. Almost immediately, we parted: Louise landed a running part on a soap opera in New York, and I was hired by a theater in Michigan to play leads in plays by Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Anton Chekhov. The following year, I was offered another season at the theater, and she wound up on a different soap, playing a woman with a split personality for more money a week than I made in six months. I got involved with another woman, she got involved with another man, and we agreed to part amicably. She flew down to Mexico, got a quickie divorce, and sent the papers to me for my signature. That was that: no alimony, no acrimony, no muss, no fuss. Nice lady, Louise.
Patsy and I got married in a Unitarian-Universalist church. The minister omitted the “obey” part of the wedding pledge, and the ceremony was basically about the bride and groom loving and respecting each other. The church had a single bell, and Patsy’s nephew Chris, who was about eight, and small for his age, got to ring it as the celebrants filed out. He was lighter than the bell-clapper, and the rope attached to it lifted him clean off his feet, to his delight.
But for every happy event religion has given rise to, there are dozens of atrocities. Six million Jews died in the Shoah. Stalin killed twenty million people (including numerous Jews) he thought were disloyal to the Soviet state credo, his own twisted form of communism. “Ethnic cleansing” in the name of religious orthodoxy began with the Roman persecution of the early Christians, and achieved its monstrous perfection with the Albigensian Crusade in the early 13th century CE, when Pope Innocent III promised the northern French under King Philip II and the mercenary commander Simon de Montfort centuries off their time in Purgatory if they wiped out the Cathar heretics, annihilated the cultured, sophisticated Occitan nobility, and took over their land. In 1209, when the army of Simon’s son Amaury de Montfort and the warlike Bishop Arnold of Citeaux breached the walls of Béziers, a commander asked Arnold how to tell the Cathars from the Catholics. “Kill them all,” said Arnold. “Let God sort them out.” Some ten thousand men, women, and children were cut down with swords and war-axes that hot day at Béziers, and a number of the killers died themselves, of heat exhaustion, from wielding their heavy weapons while wearing full armor. After the last band of Cathar knights were butchered at Montségur Castle in 1244, Occitania vanished as a political entity, and the Renaissance was put off for two hundred years.
The central paradox of religion is that although it has always called forth the ugliest aspects of human nature, it has also inspired the most beautiful works of art ever made. Johann Sebastian Bach was a virulent anti-Semite, but he wrote the B-Minor Mass. Michelangelo was a guilt-torn pederast (he consorted with catamites in the Baths of Diocletian, which he had restored), but he created the Sistine Chapel’s Last Judgment and the glorious statue of David. Shakespeare’s Shylock is a vicious Jewish stereotype, and his Coriolanus, a prideful aristocratic general with a vicious streak, despises the common people of Rome and lets many of them starve during a famine. The Bard of Avon’s female characters, with the exception of young innocents like Juliet, Desdemona, and Ophelia, are overbearing termagants; his misogyny might have stemmed from his stormy relationship with his wife Anne Hathaway, who was eight years his senior.
But he redefined English poetry with the sonnet sequence he dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, his patron, the “Fair Youth” of the first group of poems, and the “Dark Lady,” possibly Emilia Lanier of Queen Elizabeth’s court, whom he celebrated in the latter group. And of course he wrote the most delightful comedies, the most fascinating history dramas, the most heartrending tragedies, and the most bittersweet problem plays in the English language.
Shakespeare openly subscribed to the Anglican faith, because it was potentially fatal to defy it. But Clare Asquith, author of Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Politics of William Shakespeare, asserts that in private he held to the Catholicism of his youth. I haven’t yet read the book, but other Shakespearian scholars have pointed out that Hamlet’s quandary – informed by a ghost who may or may not be his father’s spirit that King Claudius is a murderous usurper, but unable to bring himself to take revenge until he has more substantial proof – was similar to Shakespeare’s own religious dilemma. And like Hamlet, his creator had to live a double life that must have almost driven him crazy. Fortunately for the playwright, he could project his agonized condition onto his fictional creation, and thereby retain his sanity.
He wasn’t the last author to write his way out of a mental breakdown. Toward the end of his career, William Butler Yeats had a hallucinatory experience which might have destroyed his mind, if he hadn’t turned it into a poetic unified field theory, complete with perns and gyres, which he called “A Vision.” The book is crazy, but not stupid, and he drew on its imagery for one of his greatest poems, “The Second Coming.”
Another Irishman, James Joyce, was a lapsed Catholic whose early books, written in a style of slightly elevated realism, gave way to bardic stream-of-consciousness. Joyce’s young alter-ego, Stephen Dedalus, has renounced the Catholic faith and refuses to pray at his mother’s funeral, but is haunted by guilt (“the agenbite of inwit,” as Joyce called it in his masterpiece “Ulysses”). The guilt proves that Stephen failed to completely sever his ties to the church, unlike his blasphemous frenemy Malachi “Buck” Mulligan, who is a figure for the false god Moloch, or Baal, a Canaanite deity whose rites included human sacrifice. In Ulysses, the theme of demonic ritual continues, with the figure of Hugh “Blazes” Boylan, a silver-tongued devil who manages Leopold Bloom’s wife Molly’s singing career, and also sleeps with her from time to time.
Shakespeare, Yeats, and Joyce, three god-haunted geniuses whose writing enriched, even ennobled, humankind, versus Pope Innocent III, Hitler, and Stalin. Do the virtues of the former outweigh the vices of the latter? Or is that a pointless question? Maybe not. I’ll end with a quotation from the diary of Anne Frank, who died at Bergen-Belsen because she was a Jew:
“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes based on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the suffering of millions, and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come out right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”