Revealing Individual Character: Wanda and Cabiria React to Religious Spectacle

** This is going to be way longer than the typical blog post, and explains why it's showing up late. I got carried away on the idea of the individual response to religious experience and how that relates to society. My prime example is the reaction of Wanda and Cabiria to the ceremony of asking forgiveness from the Madonna. Stick with it, though, I think it should prompt some interesting discussion **

If we consider blasphemy as Plate did, a transgression of the profane - the every day, the commercial – into the realm of the sacred, then there must be no more blasphemous place on earth than Rome. I had the chance to go to Rome during high tourist season and it is truly a spectacle. Crowds pushing against each other, strange and ancient religious traditions, and ancient histories crowded in next to modernity all swirl together to make Rome a complete sensory overload.

I personally identified with Wanda and Cabiria as they joined the festive march of the Madonna. As a tiny example, if you go to visit the Vatican today, and you get the pleasure to visit the Sistene Chapel, where some of the holiest of ceremonies take place, you visit it with what seems like thousands of your closest friends. There are crowds of people, crying children, and security guards shoving away cameras trying to take a picture of the beautiful ceiling. The chapel was made to house the holiest ceremonies of the Church, such as the naming of a new pope, but certainly it is an entirely profane experience to be shoved through along with a crowd. But still, for people from all over the world, visiting the chapel is a transcendent experience.

I manage to sneak a picture in amidst the crowds in the Sistene Chapel

Even those not familiar with the particulars of Catholicism, like myself, are tremendously moved by the sight. But the fact that as a group, it is wholly profane and commercial, for the individual, you, me, Cabiria, or Wanda, the religious spectacle - however commercial and profane - can still be profoundly moving. We get caught up in it, we are viewed as a group, but the experience is different for each person.

We see that clearly in the reactions of Wanda and Cabiria to the religious service and the act of asking for mercy. Here, they see the religious procession and both react with their own personal histories. Cabiria reacts as the cynic who thinks everyone is as empty as she is and trying to cover it up. Wanda reacts to Cabiria’s cynicism by telling her to not make fun of them.

However, when they arrive to the church to ask for mercy from the Madonna, the roles are reversed. Cabiria is the one seeking forgiveness actively, while Wanda is doubtful and anxious. Perhaps there is also an aspect of not knowing the particulars of the service. We can see that when Wanda and Cabiria are asking each other what comes next in the service. They face it together as friends, staying close to each other and taking comfort in not being alone in this strange religious environment. That’s not entirely unfamiliar to anyone who has been in an unfamiliar religious service. I have the same sense of camaraderie, for example, with my younger sister when we go to Catholic mass with my grandmother.

Camaraderie of "outsiders" in a religious service

I think it is also important to remember that no matter how much of the service is comprised of spectacle - even outright manipulation - there are still individuals in the audience actively seeking truth. But still, others in the audience are taken aback by the spectacle and return to cynicism and dismiss the significance of the religious experience. We see that idea in the characters of Wanda and Cabiria after asking forgiveness of the Madonna. Wanda “sees through” the ceremony, and simply returns to her old life. Cabiria, regardless of the spectacle, finds something meaningful to her and is dismayed that nothing “miraculous” happened. She laments, “We haven’t changed! We’re all the same as before, just like the cripple!” She expected the change to be immediate and mercy to be tangible. She reacts with drunken anger at the nuns leaving the ceremony, “Did the Madonna give you mercy?” she shouts angrily, throwing a stone their direction - a powerfully symbolic, accusatory act.

Wanda and the group dismiss the ceremony and return to life as usual

 Cabiria laments the lack of immediate change

A "seeker" reacts angrily to those who claim to possess truth

In high school, I went to a Christian school and worked in the sound and video booth during the charismatic services. It was very different from the stoic, old school Christian worship services I grew up with, simple songs from a hymnal, accompanied by piano and a choir. I learned a lot being in a separate room, raised above the “spectacle” of the worship service. From my bird’s eye view, I observed people reacting much as Wanda and Cabiria did. You can see it in the body language of people in the audience and in the conversation following. Some seekers of truth who find their own nugget of wisdom in the experience, while others block out the whole experience for their own reasons, often the known hypocrisy of those conducting the service. However, in between those two groups, there are those, perhaps most, who simply dismiss the entire thing. Wanda belongs to the group of the unchanged, while Cabiria was deeply impacted by the religious experience.

Cabiria's genuine individual religious experience

I recall the story of the Christian theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed by the Nazi’s for his efforts in a plot to kill Hitler. I could not find his quote in its entirety, but it went something along the lines that he felt more kin to the atheist than the average churchman. That is, he felt camaraderie with the people who are changed by their encounter with religion, either positively or negatively, and was dismayed that people could simply dismiss it.  

Much like Joan in the Passion of Joan of Arc, Cabiria’s reaction to religious experience is profoundly individual, as it should be. As an aside, after reading about blasphemy, I came across a very interesting article by Ken White on the idea of orthodoxy. He makes the case that it is morally right to respect and defend the individual to respond to religion, or any set of ideas, be it moral, religious, or political, in their own way and that we ought not be “enforcing orthodoxy” as a society. This fits well with the idea of homo religiosus that we discussed before, the idea that we are religious beings and that anything can be viewed as religious, whether it is mythology, Christianity, Islam, nationalism, science, cinema, or commercial culture.

He makes his case using the example of religious refusals to recite the pledge of allegiance. The US Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Justice Frankfurter (who, in Plate’s example, points to the changing idea of blasphemy in defending the artist from the religious “morality police”) where he makes the case that Jehovah’s Witness children, who have the religious obligation to not pledge allegiance to anyone by God, can be forced by the state to swear allegiance to the flag. Ironically, his respect for religious plurality evidenced in the blasphemy case reveals a pernicious denial of the individual in the case of religious exemptions. Observe his dismissal of individual response to the ceremony of the pledge of allegiance, in its own sense a “religious” ceremony, here:

“But to affirm that the freedom to follow conscience has itself no limits in the life of a society would deny that very plurality of principles which, as a matter of history, underlies protection of religious toleration.”

In other words, to “tolerate” the individual refusal to recite the pledge is to subvert “protection of religious toleration” itself, a shocking experience in circular logic. In a sense, it is also the act of placing the “religion” of the state, nationalism, or political power, however you choose to frame it, as supreme, and to punish “blasphemers” by compelling them to proclaim allegiance to the state.

Thankfully, the court overturned this ruling and the rationalization of Frankfurter in a later decision. Justice Jackson, in a scathing rebuttal to Frankfurter’s way of thinking, summarizes the previous case as a dangerous return to the punishment of blasphemers, “Failure to conform is "insubordination," dealt with by expulsion. Readmission is denied by statute until compliance. Meanwhile, the expelled child is "unlawfully absent," and may be proceeded against as a delinquent.” Jackson makes the case that it is the duty of a just society to respect the individual right to conscience. In some of the most soaring and poetic language I have ever encountered in a Supreme Court opinion, invoking the constellation metaphor from Plate, Jackson writes,

“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.”

So, in conclusion to this way longer than normal blog post, the most compelling aspect of the characters of Cabiria and Wanda is their individual response to religious experience. Cabiria’s anger and cynicism show the profound effect the act of asking for forgiveness had on her, while Wanda’s dismissal of the experience indicates that she rejected the deeper meaning of the experience. The understanding of blasphemy discussed in Plate is the entire essence of Rome and the tourist aspect of religious ceremony as a whole. The powerful idea is that for the individual seeking truth amongst all the noise, sacred truth can break through the commercial spectacle. That is the idea behind Yo Momma’s Last Supper, The Holy Virgin Mary, and all the other “blasphemous” pieces of art, that we each have a personal relationship to religion and religious ideas. Plate mentions the idea of redrawing “oppressive lines” between the sacred and the profane, and I would like to conclude with a similar admonition. We ought to be exploring the lines between sacred and profane, “redrawing” them as they change each of us, with the broad goal of respecting the individual, the non-conformist, and not sacrificing the conscience of the artist, or anyone who “sees things differently”, to the shifting sands of what may be considered cultural or societal “blasphemy”, no matter how it may offend majority sentiments.    

** For anybody who has stuck around this long, you'd probably be interested in Ken White's full article. Check it out here: http://www.popehat.com/2013/10/03/the-persistent-appetite-for-orthodoxy/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Popehat+%28Popehat%29

- Corey Landry