SALVATION FOR SALE: an overly limited account of consumerism in the history of Christianity.
What is this new pity of God and the pope, that for money they allow a man who is impious and their enemy to buy out of purgatory the pious soul of a friend of God, and do not rather, because of that pious and beloved soul’s need, free it for pure love’s sake?
- Dr. Martin Luther from Project Wittenburg
When Jesus of Nazareth arrived in Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, the synagogue there represented one of the major spiritual centres of the Jewish religion. As it was nearing Passover (or what Christians would come to call Easter), pilgrims from all around had already begun to congregate in unprecedented numbers. The temple priests, seeing that the sacrificial alters would otherwise be over-capacitated, had devised an ingenious strategy for limiting the numbers of devoted: monetary oblations could only be made in temple coinage. Entrepreneurial money-changers immediately set up their stalls outside of the synagogue to make a profit. It was as if the faithful had to buy tickets just to give them away (much in the same way Disney®Money works). The poor, including Jesus, were outraged. So it was that he went into the temple and famously overthrew the moneychangers’ tables, saying: “It is written, [God’s] house shall be called the house of prayer; but you have made it a den of thieves.”
Undoubtedly there would have been numerous other protests at the uncharitable instigation of the temple priests. However, it’s unlikely that any were simultaneously claiming to be the Messiah (not that it was an infrequent ground for crucifixion at the time), and even more unlikely that they would have a backing of twelve others, attesting to a recent resurrection of the dead (i.e. Lazarus). This, the temple priests could not abide. Jesus of Nazareth would be made an example of … though not as they had intended.
Jesus of Nazareth’s death struck a chord with many; here was a champion for the underdog – a situation that the majority of us will find ourselves in sometime during our lives, but, moreover, a situation that often finds one in need of spiritual support. This was certainly the case for the much persecuted early Christians of antiquity, as a great many were martyred for their beliefs. For those that remained, the all-too-real possibility that they could soon be facing similar circumstances worked to transform natural mourning into ‘super’natural veneration. In the case of martyrs, the longstanding tradition of annually commemorating the deceased now served a twofold purpose of fortifying one’s resolve to meet such an end with equal dignity. It is little wonder then, that Christianity’s first saints took the form of martyrs.
Recent contemporary Psychology and Parapsychology has much to say about the power of belief, the effects of mass hysteria, and the like. But it is not for here to delve into such matters, any further than to say that before long, the newly formed cults of saints had every remarkable occurrence (both good and bad) being attributed to the miraculous intercessory powers of the venerated dead.
Pilgrims, once again, travelled far and wide to visit the shrines of the saints. This ancient form of tourism, which is still much in vogue today, greatly bolstered the reputations and economies of what would have otherwise remained utterly obscure villages. People’s entrepreneurial sense again kicked in and, before you could say ‘boo!’ a thriving relic trade was established. The corpse of a saint represented the spiritual centre of a church or monastery; and if your community didn’t yet have its own patron, at least you could buy a foreign saint’s personal items, such as a bible, an item of clothing, or, if you were really lucky, a finger or another appendage.
Martin Luther grew up in such an atmosphere and, for a time, happily participated in it. Eventually, however, he came to be entirely cynical about the practise. As Richard Kieckhefer explains:
In 1520 [Martin Luther] wrote an anonymous pamphlet parodying a relic collection of archbishop of Mainz; he listed as items in this collection “a fine piece of the left horn of Moses, three flames from the bush of Moses on Mount Sinai, two feathers and an egg from the Holy Ghost, an entire corner of the banner with which Christ rose from Hell,” and so forth. The pamphlet reads like a heavy-handed parody until one turns to the archbishop’s own official catalogue and finds listed there such treasures as a clod of earth from the place where Christ gave the Lord’s Prayer, a small piece of a cloak that Mary made for Jesus (and which had the marvellous power to grow as he did), two vats from Cana, one of Judas’s silver pieces, and remains of manna from the desert.
But relic trading was the least of Luther’s criticisms. Catholic theology postulated that the saints had accumulated a store of divine merit by virtue of their supererogatory (i.e. beyond the call of duty) actions, the benefits of which could be purchased by monetary ‘donations’ made to the church. It was essentially salvation for sale. Nailed to the church door, Luther’s famous 95 Theses condemned this practise, arguing that the saints cannot intercede on behalf of individuals (especially not for cash money); salvation is fundamentally a matter of personal merit. As Luther’s 28th thesis puts it:
It is certain that when the penny jingles into the money-box, gain and avarice can be increased, but the result of the intercession of the Church [and its saints] is in the power of God alone.
In the sixties, the famous French existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre, claimed that “the phenomenon of saintliness appears chiefly in societies of consumers.” This is because the future of consumerism rests in the perpetuation of discontent (‘Come on, George. Tatts me outta here!’®), making the following appear possible:-
a Nay carried to the extreme is necessarily transformed into a Yea. Extreme poverty is wealth, refusal is acceptance, the absence of God is the dazzling manifestation of his presence, to live is to die, to die is to live, etc.
Consumers, although unable to break free of their ideological spell, nevertheless sense that lasting contentment is not part of the deal they’ve bought into. The saint, it seems, by renouncing worldly pleasures, is able to attain what we might imagine is absolute spiritual contentment. Yet, saintliness essentially relies on novelty value; if everyone were saintly, surely it would lose all meaning. For instance, the ascetic’s claims of self-denial would be ridiculous if everyone was already starving in poverty.
Yet I believe that people are no longer so easily ‘duped’ by this doublethink sentiment. Today’s consumer believes that the saint struggles to not have, just as much as he or she works to have … and in the end (assuming that we’re not buying in to the whole life-after-death judgement scenario), what’s the real difference: a posthumous shrine or an SUV you can show off to your friends? But as Susan Sontag said of Simone Weil:
Some lives are exemplary, others not; and of exemplary lives, there are those which invite us to imitate them, and those which we regard from a distance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence. It is roughly the difference between a hero and a saint… No one who loves life would wish to imitate [Weil’s] dedication to martyrdom, or would wish it for his children or for anyone else whom he loves. Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it, nourished by it.
With regard to religion, each individual’s soul is at stake. The faithful, by association, have a vested personal interest in the religion. As a great many works of literature have emphasised, religion allows the small-minded bigot to self-righteously identify themselves with the saints, without necessarily taking stock of their own lives. In this light, the saintly missionary to distant, unknown lands is praised, not so much for the benefits they may bring for the foreigners, but the greater glory of God.
In contrast, Capitalism’s promotion of personal discontent, at least according to the ads, can only be overcome by personal material purchases. We ourselves are not (actively) concerned with charitable action, except in principle, and even then only as a passing fancy. Our primary business is the promotion of the self. The causes or institutions that moral saints have self-sacrificed themselves for, provide us with little personal enjoyment. Instead, their supererogatory acts – unless they contribute to a particular institution of which we are actively a part of – may actually cause us displeasure and guilt for our neglect of a universal institution which each of us are inexorably a part of: Humanity. In this sense, condemnations of the moral saint might be seen as a psychological defence of a consumerist way of life, a conceptual shutting off from the (potentially) full burden of selfless charity.
As stands presently, the true moral saint has still yet to come into existence. Humankind is yet to reach the stage where empathy with all (human) life is central to our identity. All of the World Religions, in one way or another, have their saints. Humanity as a whole now, more than ever, needs theirs.
Ross Barham, 04.2005
