Astral Codex Ten

church

7 min read

church

Article

church is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 03, 2022 and November 17, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “a consecration to the church, which also mediated family relations”; “At some point it no longer needed the Church as a carrier vehicle”. It most often appears alongside Europe, God, Rome.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: June 03, 2022
  • Last seen: November 17, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: The Castrato
June 03, 2022 · Original source
“…I want to claim that the business of having a son castrated is not reducible to a quest for survival or improvement. Always mediating the phenomenon were Catholic religious ideas, often intermixed with rural folk beliefs as well as familial strategies for distributing wealth and functions within a system of primogeniture, none of the strands of which can be disentangled. As John Rosselli insisted, to offer one’s son for castration was to make an offering to God and thus a consecration to the church, which also mediated family relations. Legally the church condemned the practice as being against the order of nature and counter to the obligation to be fruitful and multiply. And yet proscriptions do not map onto the symbolic load castration bore. In some sense castration for singing, as a sacrificial offering to the church, was much like joining the priesthood. Accordingly it was freighted with beliefs and obligatory utterances—the two are hard to distinguish—about giving up procreation and sexuality in order to gain subsistence for one’s family or to improve oneself and one’s loved ones, to find salvation, a place in society, the good graces of the Lord, and the good graces of the Lord’s shepherds, meaning ecclesiastical authorities and royal patrons who ruled by divine right. Carried out in a kind of indirect symbolic imitation of Christ’s passion, such sacrifices were a more than viable alternative in a world where want and famine were rife and were mutilation, whether as physical therapy or punishment, or the harsh consequences of disease, physical labor, or other misfortunes, was commonplace. That virtually all castrati did sing primarily or (more often) exclusively for the church speaks to this issue of castration as sacrifice in the properly Catholic sense. [pg. 7]
Balatri’s self-mocking origin story illustrates an important aspect of the castrati phenomenon, one that constitutes a core theme of the book. Feldman argues that the castrati are best understood as liminal beings, so-called “creatures of the threshold”, somewhere between human and animal, man and woman, angel and monster, and myth and reality. This liminality manifested as a set of deeply contradictory attitudes in the culture of the day; "They were poised between adulation and fear, approval and censure, ridiculed as often as acclaimed, and not unrelatedly were sanctioned by the church, which was dependent on but embarrassed by them” (pg. 9). Roger Pickering typifies this ambivalence and the man-animal-divinity liminality of the castrato in a passage in Reflections upon theatrical expression in tragedy (1755) that discusses Farinelli (1705-1782), an operatic superstar who was widely regarded as the greatest of the castrati.
Inline links: liminal beings
Imagine you are the patriarch of an Italian peasant family. War, plague, and natural disaster have brought your family to the brink of starvation and forced you to flee from your rural home to the nearest city. Giuseppe [1], your youngest son (age 8), begins singing in the boy’s choir at the local conservatory, which also doubles as a charitable home run by the Catholic church (you are, of course, a deeply devout Catholic). One day, the head of the conservatory (a powerful and well-respected priest) comes to you with a proposal: allow your son, sweet little Giuseppe, to become castrated in order to preserve his angelic singing voice. Following the castration, he will live full time at the conservatory and undergo years of musical training in order to hone his talents. In return, you will receive a small sum of money and the hope that your son could become one of those famed castrati who sings in royal courts and opera houses all over Europe. Though part of you is repulsed at the very thought, you try to weigh the pros and cons of the proposal as objectively as you can. In truth, Giuseppe’s prospects are incredibly poor and his likelihood of bearing a legitimate son are virtually nil—if he even survives past childhood, he will either become a soldier (not exactly conducive to staying alive and fathering children in those days) or spend his life as an anonymous clergymen in some remote chapel. In the end, your reservations are outweighed by your desperation to improve the lot of your family and you agree to send Giuseppe away for castration.
Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
November 17, 2023 · Original source
At some point it no longer needed the Church as a carrier vehicle. Like Oedipus, it killed its parent. The Church, it might seem, is not maximally designed to help victims. It has all these extraneous pieces, like prayers and cathedrals and Popes. And isn’t prayer offensive when we should be engaging in direct revolutionary action to free the oppressed? Aren’t cathedrals are a gaudy celebration of wealth, when that money should be used to feed the poor. Doesn’t a celibate clergy create conditions rife for child sexual abuse? As the single divine Word grew louder and louder, Christianity started to seem morally indefensible, and began to wither away like the pagan faiths it supplanted.
So how does the Hebrew Bible escape this failure mode? Girard says divine intervention. God (here meaning literal God, exactly as the average churchgoer understands Him) tried to break the reign of Satan (here meaning metaphorical Satan, the single-victim process) over the Jewish people, by constantly providing them with examples of the single-victim process being bad and ensuring those examples were written up accurately. He got the Israelites to obsess over these examples and worship them as a holy text, trying to hammer the whole thing into their heads. Finally, He sent His only begotten Son as the perfect victim, who would undergo the process in its entirety and have it be written up with unprecedented attention to detail. This extra-compelling example finally penetrated the Israelites’ thick skulls. Although Peter and the other disciples sort of joined the mob in denying Jesus at the beginning, after the Resurrection they started thinking previously barely-thinkable thoughts, like “what if our mob was in the wrong?” and “what if mob violence is bad?”