The Psychology of "Smells and Bells"
There is an appeal in simplicity, in sparseness, in the few beautiful things of a Japanese teahouse, the joyful tidiness of Marie Kondo; this is the “classical” beauty, of bare white marble, free of pigments. (A historically inaccurate view of those once-garishly-painted Roman statues, but an accurate account of how they live today.) Taken to its extreme, there are the starkly nude walls of a Calvinist church, of “thou shalt not make unto thee any grave image” distilled to its highest proof, of (paradoxically) angelism incarnate. Yet, like most things, when not taken to such an extreme, there is a truth in simplicity and sparseness.
This denuding, for instance, is a key to meditation, of any kind, from the clearing of the mind prior to lectio divina, to the imageless noetic prayer of the Greek Fathers, to—again, an extreme—the absolute mind-emptiness of Buddhist meditation. There are times when distractions must be cleared away, when a well-swept room is needed for focus. But bareness is not all the soul needs.
Sometimes one can direct one’s soul, through soul-force alone, to a chosen thought, to a chosen goal: a wrenching of soul-sight towards God. But often the soul needs enticement: sometimes spiritual sweetness, God’s ghostly baits; sometimes fleshy delights. (Enticement can be negative too: pains, spiritual or fleshy, can drive us towards the Soother of Pains, or the Remover of Pains.) These “fleshy delights,” though, are not delights for the sake of flesh, but delights that, through flesh, turn the soul to God. Instead of bareness, such delights require stimuli, require sensations.
One should not jerk straight over from stripped white walls to cacophonous ornamentation; as in most things, there is the Aristotelian happy mean.1 A gaggle of rambunctious children is a distraction from thought; an auditorium buzzing with individual conversations is chaos, unless one can hone in on a single conversation alone. There are some who can drown out such chaos and find the one thing needful therein; others cannot so unattend their minds from their surroundings. But here I am not talking about such a cacophony, such an unorganized, raucous polyphony of stimuli: there can be a focused swarm of sensations.
William James discusses, neurologically, such a “summation of stimuli.” In his Psychology: Briefer Course, he states that “a stimulus which would be inadequate by itself to excite a nerve-centre to effective discharge may, by acting with one or more other stimuli (equally ineffectual by themselves alone) bring the discharge about.” Anecdotally, he mentions a horse drawing a carriage who suddenly balks; a single sensation is not enough to regain his attention and composure: in the end, “the final way of starting him is by applying a number of customary incitements at once. If the driver uses reins and voice, if one bystander pulls at his head, another lashes his hind-quarters, the conductor rings the bell, and the dismounted passengers shove the car, all at the same moment, his obstinacy generally yields, and he goes on his way rejoicing.”2
There are some who can be enticed by a single stimuli, or by the “few beautiful things”; one imagines the poet raptured by a Grecian urn, or a student of Zen whacked into enlightenment by a single flower or clog to the head. But many—especially those mired in the mercantile muck and the whirlpool of the workaday world—need a harder jolt, a many-voiced call, in order to heed it. For them, a rite “shining with noble simplicity,” as Sacrosanctum Concilium calls for, may be ineffective; for such souls, perhaps no repetitions are “useless,” and brevity may not be very perspicuous.3
Such persons need all the stimuli of ritual, all the “smells and bells”: the incense, the chanting, the vestments, the icons. Through all of these means, their senses can be pushed from all sides towards God, towards devotion. For what makes such a crowd of stimuli harmonious instead of cacophonous, concordant rather than discordant, is the singular aim, the aim of devotion. The rambunctious herd of children is running about every which way, small groups playing together, other groups not, one boy trying to dictate the others’ play, one girl screaming to be left alone—this is a discord of varied aims. When used correctly, all those “smells and bells,” those things that, as Aquinas said, pertain to the solemnity of the sacrament rather than its necessity,4 are pointing together to the one goal.
This is not something limited to religion alone. I remember once reading a little article in a college magazine where the author talked about the focused clamor of a concert or a rave and compared it to a sensory-heavy liturgy or praise-and-worship gathering. A concert has booming speakers, a variety of loud instruments, mosh pits, light shows, maybe even pyrotechnics, but it is all focused together on an experience of the music. So, too, with “smells and bells.”
So, some persons require “noble simplicity,” some require concordant “smells and bells.” For others, though, there is a further style: a kind of “concordant discord.” Here, the general environment is focused, but individual elements can stand out, or individual groups of elements. Consider the old practice in cathedrals, where there might be a large Mass celebrated at the main altar, while smaller, individual Masses are being celebrated at the side altars; or, in a Byzantine church, during the Liturgy, you might have individuals lighting candles or praying at certain icons. Some Eastern churches seem designed for such use, with little icon alcoves throughout, or shrines jutting out of the wall. (I think, for example, of the octagonal shrine of St. Demetrios in Thessaloniki, stuffed in one of the side aisles, where one might pray while the main congregation is in the center aisle, focused on the Liturgy.) For persons like these, the general “vibe” of the Liturgy—or Vespers or Matins—provides a backdrop for their devotion, while their explicit focus is on a particular, separate element. One might consider a stereotypical cocktail party, where there is a live band whose music provides the general “vibe,” while each small group of conversants is its own focused element. Here, each element is on its own, fairly self-contained, thus, one would think, rendering the experience discordant; however, the overarching “vibe,” or the main event (such as the Liturgy in the church, or the dancefloor at a club), gives these disparate elements a concordance. For such an experience, the simple “smells and bells” accompanying the liturgical actions is not enough: it only provides the overarching concordance, not the focused “discordant” elements. For these, one needs candles or statutes or icons or shrines.
No two saints are the same; no two paths to holiness are identical. Each personality is sparked in a different way; St. John Henry Newman spoke of the illative sense,5 that uniqueness of each which inclines him to accept principles and evidence and conclusions based more on personality than rationality. If this personal uniqueness can even affect reasoning and assent, even more so can it affect responses to sensations and stimuli. This uniqueness lends an argument for liturgical diversity, not merely in the historical sense (the various traditions of the Byzantine Rite, the Chaldean Rite, the Roman Rite, the Ambrosian Rite), but even in practice of each rite. Some souls are drawn to God by a stark, simple Low Mass; others, by a richly ornamented High Mass; others still, by a harmonious polyphony of alcoves and icons amidst a Liturgy. As long as the goal—worship of and devotion to God—is kept in mind, the many varieties of liturgical stimuli are all legitimate, all effective, all saint-making.
Each personality needs its own push towards perfection.
1 See Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Book II.
2 William James, Psychology: Briefer Course, in Writings 1878-1899, ed. Gerald E. Meyers (New York: The Library of America, 1992), 131-132.
3 See Vatican II, Sacrosanctum Conilium §34.
4
See Aquinas, ST III, q. 64, a. 2, ad. 2, and q. 66, a. 10, corp.
The things pertaining to the “solemnity of the sacrament” are
aimed at inducing an effect (q. 64, a. 2, corp.); the ritual of
Baptism, for instance, has three effects: 1) ) “exciting the
devotion of the faithful, and reverence for the sacrament”, 2)
“the instruction of the faithful”, and 3) “so that, through
prayers and blessings and other things of the sort, the power of the
demon may be held back [cohibetur] from impeding the effect
of the sacrament” (q. 66, a. 10, corp.). Aquinas even goes so far
as to say that those things which pertain to the solemnity of the
sacrament, even if they are not of the necessity of the sacrament,
yet they are not superfluous, since they are for the well-being of
the sacrament [ad bene esse sacramenti]” (q. 66, a. 10, ad.
4). I was pointed to these passages by a document from the Office
for the Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff, “The Noble Simplicity of Liturgical Vestments” (11/17/2010).
Comments
Post a Comment