Texts: Luke 1: 46-55; Matthew 11: 7-19; 1 Corinthians 1: 18-25
The Feast of Fools
Some months ago, I came across a theological treatise written in the early 20th century, an attempt to diagnose the ills then plaguing Europe in particular, along with a prescription for the remedy. I read it with great interest, for I sensed within it truths that people of faith and conscience need to reckon with at the moment. But in particular, I seized upon a statement found at the beginning of the treatise, a kind of credo or life statement. It’s that which I’d like to share with you this morning. Here’s what it says:
The positive conception of life is obviously an ethical one…No activity can be despoiled of the value which a moral purpose confers on all things. Therefore life, as conceived of by (our Movement), is serious, austere, and religious; all its manifestations are poised in a world sustained by moral forces and subject to spiritual responsibilities. (Our Movement) disdains an “easy” life.
In this conception of life, every action would be brought under a rigorous moral interrogation and scrutiny, examined to determine whether it fit the greater purpose and direction of one’s life. But the central thrust of the treatise, and indeed, of the entire life orientation that it commends, can be summed up in three words. It is, first of all, serious of purpose. It is, second, austere, shunning excess, frivolities, or luxury, in favor of a rigorous and principled simplicity. And it is, third, deeply religious in its orientation, dedicated to upholding theological truths and values that seemed to be in decline. It is the God of ascetics, saints, heroes, and ordinary people in their ordinary piety that the treatise is invested in. Above all, readers are urged to shun the easy life, and to choose the most difficult paths, those requiring struggle and shared sacrifice. That path, the difficult one, would be where meaning and higher purpose would be found. That path, the one of shared struggle, would be where life would achieve its maximum vitality.
But there’s more to this theology. Written in a moment of economic trouble and a decline in communal participation, the treatise lifts up the virtues and goodness of the family. It stresses the importance of communal belonging, within one’s personal orbit, but also within wider cultural terms and social terms. Above all, the treatise abhors the rise of individualism, noting that as human beings, our greatest strength comes from being organized into a greater whole. It leaves plenty of room for individuality, for the realization of one’s individual personhood, but, in the spiritual and moral vision put forth by this tract, the European crisis of the early to mid-twentieth century was such that common alignments, rooted in the family, rooted in one’s culture, rooted in religion, but above all, rooted in a common, unifying belief needed to be discovered and enhanced.
The time has come for all of us here in Old Lyme, and maybe beyond this setting, to grapple with this spiritual vision. The time has come for us all to consider this spirituality of seriousness, austerity, and religion. The time has come for all of us to pay attention to the underlying theology that makes this treatise, and its recommendations for human life feel coherent. But maybe not for the reasons you think. Everything I’ve described from this early 20th century theological treatise sounds persuasive, maybe even necessary, for those of us who take this thing called faith seriously. Everything about it indicates a vision of life that, on the face of it anyway, we might do well to emulate in uncertain times. Everything about it speaks to a perennial spiritual yearning that many people do experience, including, at times, us. It promises a kind of hope, whereby the use of our strength, and our shared bonds, might lead us to transcend moments of chaos, while binding us back together into a cohesive whole. Perhaps we need a vision such as that to guide us through our own vexatious moment.
No doubt you’ll be interested to know the author of this spiritual vision, the theologian who penned this document. Perhaps Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from his Nazi prison cell, or Karl Barth at the advent of the First World War. Perhaps Simone Weil, from the ruins of the Spanish Civil War, or maybe Paul Tillich, writing in exile after fleeing a Europe in ruins. It was none of those.
Now let me pull the rug out. The tract I’ve been quoting from was written in 1932, and it was indeed written in a moment of profound crisis. Its author was a European intellectual, well versed in the currents of philosophical, religious, and social history – a charismatic, cultured, and learned figure. Here comes the tug of the rug. The author is none other than Benito Mussolini. The name of his document is oft cited but rarely read: “The Doctrine of Fascism,” better known as “The Fascist Manifesto.”[1]
The Manifesto first came to my attention last spring, when a student in my class shared the quote that I offered just a little earlier. Like many people, I knew of its existence. And I had casually used the word, fascist, without ever reading the document from which it came. But after that presentation, I did.
Let’s pause long enough to state the obvious. The very word, fascist, is so overused that it’s teetering on the brink of nonsense. Usually, it’s used as an epithet against most anything that represents an authority or power to which one must submit. Sit in the DMV long enough, and someone will probably complain about how it’s an arbitrary and fascist system. Or maybe it’s the IRS, or Universal health care, or the Obama administration, or the Trump administration. Maybe it’s the Church, or cops issuing speeding tickets. Parents insisting children eat their vegetables are fascists, as are teachers, preachers, soldiers and bosses. The word has become so overused that it has come to signify little more than “that social cue that I wish I didn’t have to follow.” Or to reduce it still further, it has come to mean “that which I personally dislike.”
And yet. To read the document is to become unsettled. My first reaction upon reading it was probably akin to many of yours right now. I wished to identify any and all of the traits I might share with the Manifesto’s ideal human, and to drive them out. My thoughts went like this: if the Manifesto argues for seriousness of purpose, then perhaps frivolity is to be valued more highly. If it argues for simplicity, decadence must be the solution. If it argues for religion, then perhaps it makes sense to affirm the secular. If it argues for the predominance of the family, then alternative forms of relationship should be nurtured. If it argues for the communal, then perhaps individual expression should be elevated. In other words, in order to avoid any similarities with the ideal person posited by the Manifesto, take what it says and do and be the opposite. That might be a very legitimate response. I understand and feel a great deal of affinity with those who have made such choices. I get it. But let’s simply say that the Manifesto, with its vision of seriousness, austerity and religion, presents a narrowed and shrunken vision of human life. Would its opposite not then be equally shrunken, albeit in different ways? One side of that equation might be more attractive than the other, depending on your vantage, but they both wind up feeling reductive.
You can understand my worry, though. What happens when you read a document whose vision of life you abhor, and it turns out to contain certain affinities that you seem to hold in common? What happens when there are traits that you actually share? Say, for the sake of argument, that there are times when seriousness of purpose is called for, or required. Say that one admires the austere simplicity of Benedictine nuns, for example, even if one didn’t necessarily emulate that simplicity all the way down. Or say spirituality and religious expression – prayer, the study of sacred writings, the worship of someone or something larger than oneself, adherence to a long and complicated tradition – is something that defines and orients your life in the world. Say you have a family that you love, a community you care for, a country that, for all its flaws, seems worthy of some measure of pride. Say you possess all of those qualities to one degree or another – what then? Does that make you the ideal reader of Mussolini’s text? Does it mean that you’re wired in a way that makes you susceptible to the kind of political currents that Mussolini was then stirring? Does it mean you’re in danger of being swept up in whatever similar currents might be swirling around us at the moment?
Perhaps. It’s something I do worry about. Purported goods, like moral purpose and simplicity, like religion and community, are capable of being distorted, and used for harmful ends. The history of religion, I’m sorry to say, is strewn with such distortions. You don’t need me to name them all. Still, as often as not, it isn’t evil per se that keeps me awake at night, but rather the idolatry of smaller and limited “goods,” distorted by self interest or blind zeal. The Manifesto raises the possibility that our own devotion to particular visions of the good might be the most dangerous thing of all. It’s worth bearing in mind.
Beyond that, however, it’s worth noting something that’s conspicuously absent from the Manifesto, and then using that absence as a clue toward how we might put together a counter-theology, an alternative life system, rooted in a different understanding of human life. What’s absent from the Manifesto is this: it is utterly devoid of anything resembling laughter, humor, irony, joy, celebration, or festivity. The Manifesto is, as the quote I shared with you suggests, a sober document, without the hint of a smile, to say nothing of a puckish grin. There is nothing permitting a spirit of play or excess, improvisation or, for that matter, any emotional depth. For all of its claims to read the essence of the human soul, it’s a curiously dull, prosaic understanding of human life.
Were we to counter the grim and regimented view of life on offer in the Manifesto, we could do little better than to resurrect the spirit of festivity contained in the medieval “feast of fools,” which doubles as the title of my favorite of Harvey Cox’s works of theology and culture. Most of you will know how deeply I admire Harvey’s work, and I’m grateful that he’ll be joining us in Old Lyme two weeks from now to talk to our young people about his experiences in the Civil Rights Movement. But in The Feast of Fools, Harvey offers what I take to be an antidote to the drab and humorless theological world of the Manifesto’s prose.
The title comes from a medieval holiday called “the Feast of Fools,” one that took place throughout Europe. Participants would wear masks, often bawdy in nature. Sometimes it included impersonations of clergy, and at other times those same clergy members would dress in drag. There were comic blasphemies, parodies of the Mass, risqué humor, and depictions of historic battles in which the losers were no longer actually the losers. One scholar who studied those celebrations, which would later become institutionalized as Carnival, noted that they represented “the temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, and norms…It was the feast of becoming, change, and renewal.”[2]
That ritual practice, which will take place all across the world, but especially in the Southern hemisphere, has a long theological pedigree, rooted in the words and deeds of both Jesus and his mother Mary. The Manifesto and those it describes might wish to claim that pair for themselves, but in truth, Jesus and Mary are a far cry from the vision put forth in that humorless document. In fact, qualities like seriousness, austerity, and high minded religiosity sound far more like Jesus’s opponents, the Pharisees, than it sounds like Jesus himself. Did you hear how the Pharisees grumbled about him in our Gospel reading? Instead of fasting, instead of exhibiting the austere qualities the Pharisees thought proper, Jesus was eating and drinking, accused by some of gluttony. Instead of maintaining a rigid moral code, like his more religious critics, he finds companionship with hookers and thieves, who are drawn to the vision of healing and wholeness he exudes. He’s reluctant about notions of family or bloodline, saying that everyone who responds to the Word of God is his brother, mother, and sister. He doesn’t own property, doesn’t live in a house, and doesn’t hold down a permanent job. He doesn’t conform to any known versions of success. In fact, by most any measure, he dies as an abject failure. Is it any wonder that the Apostle Paul described Jesus and his Gospel as the foolishness of God?
At least Jesus came by it all honestly. It was his mother Mary who set the tone. Upon hearing that she was pregnant with the Son of God, she delivers her Magnificat, in which she utters these words about God: “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” It’s an announcement at the very beginning of Luke’s Gospel that the world we’re entering will be filled with strange reversals, a topsy turvy world of mistaken identities and upended social roles. Mary’s prayer was the reason that Christmas was treated as a season of carnival. The birth of the Son of God in a manger was a spectacular example of the world turned upside down.[3]
That event continues to serve as the theological underpinning for everything that occurs on the Tuesday before Lent in places like Haiti and Brazil, in New Orleans and Trinidad, in the Dominican and throughout Catholic Europe. That sort of festivity, where excess, celebration and role reversals are encouraged, reveal a component of the human spirit of which the Manifesto is thoroughly ignorant. Foolishness and laughter, play and celebration aren’t to be mistaken for empty frivolity. They’re an essential part of who we are as human beings, and they work to keep rules, orders, laws and orthodoxies flexible, malleable, and humane. On Harvey’s telling, we desperately need the flights of wild fancy contained in festival moments, or we shall be reduced to the serious, austere, and pious creatures that the Manifesto would have us be.[4] God save us from such piety.
What does that mean for your life, and for mine? Well, there’s this – you might raise a toast this coming Tuesday, or find some way to manifest a spirit of play on that day, and not only that day. To play is to resist the grim logic of the Manifesto, to keep alive your sense that the world is still open to improvisation and joy. And then this: The spirit of laughter contained in the Feast of Fools is useful for unmasking the empty pretensions of arbitrary authority and power. The best way to cast out the devil, Luther said, is with the spirit of laughter. I would have us incarnate such a spirit in this place – not of smirks or scorn, sarcasm or derision, but of genuine and freeing laughter. Perhaps we need our own Feast of Fools. But I would also hope that we would be hybrid creatures, capable of deep seriousness and elaborate play, of simplicity and extravagance, of devoted piety and a nonchalant irreverence. That’s the meaning of the week before us, when the excess of Carnival sits side by side with the reflectiveness of Ash Wednesday. In the first, we celebrate the gift of having bodies, and of being alive. In the second, we reckon with the knowledge that none of it is permanent. We need both of those in order to be truly alive.
But more than anything, I would have us be thankful that when the Pharisees arrive, as they always do, toting Manifestos and preaching the ways of seriousness, austerity and religion, Jesus comes to us as a clown, a jester, a joker, as God’s own fool. He’s having none of it. And thank God, neither must we.
[1] The Manifesto can be found online at: http://www.sjsu.edu/people/cynthia.rostankowski/courses/HUM2BS14/s0/The-Doctrine-of-Fascism.pdf
The quote at the beginning of the sermon is found on the first page of the Manifesto.
[2] Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pg. 10.
[3] Insights taken from Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell, (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), pg. 167.
[4] That vision of festivity can be found in much greater, and more eloquent detail, in The Feast of Fools, by Harvey Cox (New York: Harper and Row, 1970). See especially the Overture and Introduction.
