Quid Es Veritas?

Is there anyone more postmodern than he who utterly rejects postmodernity?

Rejection is never negation; rejection is negation thwarted. Even the Amish, who reject modernity, cannot negate modernity, or its sequel, postmodernity. The cautionary day-glo triangles that adorn the Amish’s buggies betray an implicit awareness on their part that, for the rest of the world, it is no longer the nineteenth century. If anything, these orange triangles stand as emblems of the Amish’s defiance of the dialectical progression of history, as ensigns around which they arrange their insular society in order to keep at bay the encroachment of modernity. The Amish way of life is history brought to a halt by an act of sheer collective will. All time is one for the Amish, as it is for St. Augustine’s God. But are the Amish aware of the dialectical nature of their own identity? Isn’t Amish-ness only possible in a modern or postmodern age?

Two Sundays ago I had an encounter with Catholicism's own version of the Amish, namely, Catholics who continue to celebrate the Tridentine Mass despite the reforms of Vatican II. I have long been fascinated with the Tridentine Mass. For some time I had wondered about the enduring appeal of the pre-reform Mass. Thus I had been planning to attend one of these services, offered every Sunday at 5 PM at Holy Family Church here in Tucson, but, plagued by some vague apprehension, I continually quailed at the last moment.

Before I continue my narrative, I should perhaps better explain my interest in the Tridentine Mass. Generally, I celebrate my postmodernity and the theoretical discourse associated with it. I relish the latter’s explanatory power, and I feel fortunate to have been thrown into history at a moment when the complete demystification of the world, and humanity's relationship to it, at last seems possible. But, as I have grown older, and as I have crammed my head with ever more abstruse theory, I have discovered that my enlightenment exacts a price in the form of an ever-lurking nihilism that at times threatens to overwhelm me. According to the claims of many contemporary theorists, certainty is altogether impossible. Yet, despite this knowledge, I still find myself standing on the shifting sands of postmodernity looking ruefully upon the seemingly effortless religious conviction of such figures as John Henry Newman, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy (Catholics all), who not only managed to weather the epistemological gale of modernity, but who also managed to diagnose with a certain serene sprezzatura all of modernity’s various malaises. For these individuals, Catholicism remained something more than rank superstition. I suppose I am dissatisfied with what I take to be the cold comfort of modern secularism. Thus I contemplated exploring the Catholicism of my pre-Vatican II brethren, anticipating one of two possible outcomes: either I would rediscover the spiritual plenitude of the faith in which I had been raised--a plenitude that I had never before recognized, or I would at least derive some aesthetic pleasure for the solemn pageantry of the mass, that I would, like Philip Carey”s friend Hayward in W. Somerset Maugham’s *Of Human Bondage,* be able to luxuriate in the sartorial splendor of “the gold and silk that clothes the priests of Rome.”

Sadly, my experience attending the Tridentine Mass proved anything but consoling. It was, in a word, terrifying.

Though I had arrived ten minutes before the mass began, I entered the church while a recitation of the rosary (a pre-mass tradition of the former Catholic era) was still in progress. I quickly found a pew at the rear of the church, moving with the furtiveness of someone who perceives his entrance a disruption. Almost immediately, I felt like an intruder on my own faith.

As I surveyed the parishioners, many of whom knelt over the backs of the pews in front of them with rosaries wrapped firmly in piously folded hands, I fully expected my head to be one of the only ones not gray or white. I was, however, surprised to find many parishioners who appeared to be around my own age, some with as many as four children (O, thou fecund faithful!). As the service began, many of these parents harshly whispered their progeny’s eyes forward, or crisply swatted the fidgets from them. All of the trappings of the old faith were in full display: the women's doily-like head coverings, the spiritual shepherd with his back to the flock, muttering almost inaudible Latin prayers, the kisses planted on the foot of the life-sized crucified Christ. On the whole, the Tridentine Mass was alien enough for me not to know when to sit, stand or kneel, which, as any Catholic will tell you, is quite remarkable, because most of us have internalized this liturgical choreography so thoroughly that it has become second nature to us. (Return and lapsed Catholic to mass after a hiatus and she will fall in step with the others like she has never been away.) The celebrant’s homily was a soaring discourse on that perennial curriculum of perdition, namely, abortion, contraception, and homosexuality. His invective provoked in me fugitive, heretical thoughts. I resented his thesis, but I resented even more the dogmatic absolutes with which he adorned it.

There I was, a secularized apostate among the faithful remnant for whom 1962 never happened: among those who still move to the staid pulse and rhythm of the liturgical calendar: among conservative Catholics, who are in many respects indistinguishable from mega-church-going evangelical Christians. Like the evangelical, the conservative Catholic goes in for cheap political ostentation: American flags set in car windows, bumper stickers proclaiming the driver’s abhorrence of Roe v. Wade or uncritical support of the present administration, and so on. Thus I realized the reason why Mel Gibson’s *The Passion of the Christ,* which I understand is steeped in singularly Catholic theology, full of iconography and lore that the evangelicals’ forebears would have derided as “Papistickal claptrap”--could achieve such pan-Christian appeal. It was because the making of this film was more a political act than a devotional one. It gave both conservative Catholics and evangelicals an excuse to drop the cudgels of a centuries-old antagonism and rally around the pet project of a well-heeled schismatic madman. The film became an emblem of insularity and the absolute rejection of the liberalizing tendency of the last hundred years. The film is a fasces in the pure etymological sense—an axe carried before both the conservative Catholic and evangelical Christian with the purpose of smashing the coupling between them and the train of history. Amish, evangelicals, and conservative Catholics all live as if the twentieth century never happened.

It appears that I will have to revise my original assertion that rejection is thwarted negation, because rejection in postmodern age is, for all intents and purposes, equivalent to negation. Postmodernity’s peculiar brand of skepticism allows for the rejection of postmodernity itself. In other words, the consummate postmodern gesture is the rejection-negation of postmodernity by willfully comporting oneself to a reified and eternalized ideology. Thus, if someone were to ask, “Show me those individuals completely at home in postmodernity,” I would say to him, “Look at the Amish, look at the evangelical, look at the conservative Catholic, and there you will find those you seek.”