I was in France last week following in the footsteps of David Hume, first in La Flèche – where he wrote most of the Treatise in his youth – then in Paris, where he was fêted in later life. (It’s for a book for a Korean publisher – sorry English-language readers!)
En route we stopped off at somewhere very un-Humean: l’abbeye Saint-Pierre de Solesmes. This community of Benedictine monks is world-renowned for its Gregorian chants, as the racks of CDs in its gift shop testify. Six times a day the monks come into the church for their offices or hours – the regular prayers and chants. One of these, sext, coincided with our visit, so we sat in – or rather up and own, as there was a lot of that for such a short service.
I had no idea what was being said in those fifteen minutes but it got me thinking more about something that’s been getting me thinking a lot for some time. It’s what I talked about a few weeks ago at the Society for the Study of Theology annual conference: immanent religiosity.
Religion is typically thought to be primarily about transcendence, a tricky concept to pin down but essentially about that which is beyond the physical, temporal world. In a more secular world it’s sometimes more loosely understood as that which is over and above the individual in the here and now. That, I think, is too loose: footballs league and multinational corporations are transcendent on that definition.
The immanent, in contrast, is that which is wholly present in time in space: the mortal, the bodily. So it is interesting that in the abbey, it seemed to me that most of what was going on was very much about the immanent. The ways of the community of Saint-Pierre de Solesmes were sacralising – making sacred – the mortal world.
First and foremost, the abbey church was stone made animate by the combination of architecture and light. It was a sensuous space, with the strong scent of incense and the chanting of the monks capturing both nose and ears. This was not the sensuousness of desire and craving, but of being present, absorbed, alive.
The regularity and ritualisation of the life of the monks creates order in time, short and long term. Each day is a kind of fractal of the long tradition in which monks have done pretty much the same things for centuries. This is a spirituality of clocks and calendars, not of eternity or a realm beyond time.
Most striking to me was that the sparse decoration of the church was almost all focused on earthly suffering rather than heavenly salvation. The simple altar had only a crucified Christ. The statues I could see were of Mary with her dead son laid across her lap and another of her being comforted. These images invite us to contemplate solemnly the harshness of life and the inescapability of pain.
All this illustrates how religion is far from being only about the transcendent. As Emily Kempson pointed out at the SST conference, the Christian God is usually understood as being wholly transcendent and wholly immanent. That paradoxical nature is expressed most clearly in the person of Christ, both man and God, mortal and immortal.
I think it also shows how in practice, religion’s value can be as much or even more about how it orientates us towards the immanent than to the transcendent. Believers are not necessarily or entirely cheated when their life of devotion ends in the grave rather than in heaven. There are certain kinds of religious life that can enrich the temporal world by helping us to cultivate a more serious, deeper relationship to it.
I was reminded of a piece I wrote with my better half Antonia Macaro a few years ago about monastic life. We asked several monks and nuns whether they would remain in their communities if they lost their faith. A few said they would. I’m also reminded of Paweł Pawlikowski’s film Ida, about a young nun who leaves the convent when her estranged mother dies only to decide to return at the end. There is no theology in the film and Ida gives no explanation for what she does. She is simply left cold by the prospect of secular life and decides life in the cloisters is better. It’s not a choice I would make but sitting in the abbey I could see why religion could be embraced for what it offers us now, not in a fictional life to come.
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