blackoxford's review
4.0
“Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief.”
The tragedy of the believer who loses his belief - especially a priest - is a lonely one. Only he cares. Other believers are appalled; and the rest of the world is amused by or indifferent to his suffering. Which makes the loss of faith an even deeper tragedy. There is no one from whom to solicit sympathy. Nowhere to find solace. Hypocrisy is compulsory in such a situation: “We preach one thing in public, but in the confessional it’s another story.”
So the lapsed of faith are likely to do some strange things in their isolated despair. They turn to others who have given up or been forced out of some previous life - like a tattooist who was formerly a corporate CPA, or UFO cultists who double as paedophilic-hunters - as an anchor in an unknown world. That such a move represents yet more faith in something equally unknown and equally implausible doesn’t really rise to the level of consciousness. Hence more tragedy can be expected.
Faith, as well as tattoos, have an unexpected effect. They soon “get to be in charge. They ride us.” They are not worn, but wear their bearer. When the spiritual marks of faith on the soul are opposed to the inked marks of the tattoo on the skin, the elements of a cosmic drama are in place to tear a person to pieces. This drama is particularly interesting when the one being ridden to death is a twin, whose DNA, therefore, is not strictly his own.
It could all be a Gnostic re-enactment of a flawed universe except that in The Priest evil is in the spirit and salvation is in the flesh. The Church, with its “gonzo theology,” officially represses and punishes, historically with the death penalty, human folly but unofficially engages in whatever perversion it can rationalise, that is, more or less everything done by its agents. The after-life is where things get straightened out. But that’s hardly a threat to believers whose primary belief is that they can cook the books at the last minute.
Quite a deal this: favours for faith (or faith in favours, which is functionally equivalent) one might say. In fact just this has been said since the beginning of Christianity. The idea rarely takes hold all at once. As they say, it’s a process: “... do what we say, and the belief will come. We will own you. Not all of you, all at once. But piece by piece, in increments.” Eventually faith will be seen as an irresistible bargain. Amor et quod vis fac, Love and do as you like. A mobster’s code, this business of spiritual forgiveness for material wrongs. It keeps the bosses and. made-men in business and the party rolls on. Anyone talks and they’re out.
Getting out alive is the problem. Faith comes with a pledge of omertà, meaning not just silence but self-reliance. Real men do their own dirty work. The bad news is that it’s not possible to buy one’s way out: “We don’t want your money, Father. We want your soul,” is the way the bad guys of the alternative faith put it. The fact that they believe in extra-terrestrials rather than incorporeal spirits is really not that big a shift in metaphysics. But it does lead from the ecclesial frying pan to the alien fire.
Even worse, it turns out that hell is right here in River City, in this “Chartres of suburbia, the Notre Dame of Middle America, the Mont-St-Michel of fifties Catholicism when the spirit of the nation and of the Church were at their most congruent.” More generally, hell exists wherever and whenever the Church has been successfully peddling its supernatural superiority over the merely material world. “Hell’s cruelest punishment is just to be ourselves.” Pretensions of transcendence constitute the reality of evil in a society that would be much better off without them. “Their world is their prison.” Fortunately, such spiritual arrogance, when left to itself, politically combusts from within through claustrophobia and sheer bitchiness.
Disch wrote The Priest in 1994, well before the truth of sexual abuse in the Church became widely known. Disch parodies himself as “... a fervent exCatholic of the sort that keeps tabs on every scandal concerning the Church and has to comment on all of them.” But I doubt that even he believed that paedophilia and institutional intransigence about it would be continuing and apparently incorrigible problems a quarter of a century later.
Or perhaps he did understand the depth of the problem when he has a senior cleric attest the standard doctrine of the Church: “It’s in the nature of the Church that it can’t change.” Thus the real tragedy of the believer and his institutions: Religious belief inhibits learning... anything, except about itself. Ad majorem gloriam dei.
The tragedy of the believer who loses his belief - especially a priest - is a lonely one. Only he cares. Other believers are appalled; and the rest of the world is amused by or indifferent to his suffering. Which makes the loss of faith an even deeper tragedy. There is no one from whom to solicit sympathy. Nowhere to find solace. Hypocrisy is compulsory in such a situation: “We preach one thing in public, but in the confessional it’s another story.”
So the lapsed of faith are likely to do some strange things in their isolated despair. They turn to others who have given up or been forced out of some previous life - like a tattooist who was formerly a corporate CPA, or UFO cultists who double as paedophilic-hunters - as an anchor in an unknown world. That such a move represents yet more faith in something equally unknown and equally implausible doesn’t really rise to the level of consciousness. Hence more tragedy can be expected.
Faith, as well as tattoos, have an unexpected effect. They soon “get to be in charge. They ride us.” They are not worn, but wear their bearer. When the spiritual marks of faith on the soul are opposed to the inked marks of the tattoo on the skin, the elements of a cosmic drama are in place to tear a person to pieces. This drama is particularly interesting when the one being ridden to death is a twin, whose DNA, therefore, is not strictly his own.
It could all be a Gnostic re-enactment of a flawed universe except that in The Priest evil is in the spirit and salvation is in the flesh. The Church, with its “gonzo theology,” officially represses and punishes, historically with the death penalty, human folly but unofficially engages in whatever perversion it can rationalise, that is, more or less everything done by its agents. The after-life is where things get straightened out. But that’s hardly a threat to believers whose primary belief is that they can cook the books at the last minute.
Quite a deal this: favours for faith (or faith in favours, which is functionally equivalent) one might say. In fact just this has been said since the beginning of Christianity. The idea rarely takes hold all at once. As they say, it’s a process: “... do what we say, and the belief will come. We will own you. Not all of you, all at once. But piece by piece, in increments.” Eventually faith will be seen as an irresistible bargain. Amor et quod vis fac, Love and do as you like. A mobster’s code, this business of spiritual forgiveness for material wrongs. It keeps the bosses and. made-men in business and the party rolls on. Anyone talks and they’re out.
Getting out alive is the problem. Faith comes with a pledge of omertà, meaning not just silence but self-reliance. Real men do their own dirty work. The bad news is that it’s not possible to buy one’s way out: “We don’t want your money, Father. We want your soul,” is the way the bad guys of the alternative faith put it. The fact that they believe in extra-terrestrials rather than incorporeal spirits is really not that big a shift in metaphysics. But it does lead from the ecclesial frying pan to the alien fire.
Even worse, it turns out that hell is right here in River City, in this “Chartres of suburbia, the Notre Dame of Middle America, the Mont-St-Michel of fifties Catholicism when the spirit of the nation and of the Church were at their most congruent.” More generally, hell exists wherever and whenever the Church has been successfully peddling its supernatural superiority over the merely material world. “Hell’s cruelest punishment is just to be ourselves.” Pretensions of transcendence constitute the reality of evil in a society that would be much better off without them. “Their world is their prison.” Fortunately, such spiritual arrogance, when left to itself, politically combusts from within through claustrophobia and sheer bitchiness.
Disch wrote The Priest in 1994, well before the truth of sexual abuse in the Church became widely known. Disch parodies himself as “... a fervent exCatholic of the sort that keeps tabs on every scandal concerning the Church and has to comment on all of them.” But I doubt that even he believed that paedophilia and institutional intransigence about it would be continuing and apparently incorrigible problems a quarter of a century later.
Or perhaps he did understand the depth of the problem when he has a senior cleric attest the standard doctrine of the Church: “It’s in the nature of the Church that it can’t change.” Thus the real tragedy of the believer and his institutions: Religious belief inhibits learning... anything, except about itself. Ad majorem gloriam dei.
nigellicus's review
5.0
The Supernatural Minnesota books are just so damned good. The MD will remain one of the greatest literary horror novels of all time, but the other three are in no way to be sneezed at.
The Priest seems like an appropriate read at the moment. When it came out the various scandals that were rocking the Catholic Church were pretty bad, but few could have imagined the deluge to come. Well, Disch did, in a kind of murderous, tragic, apocalyptic way. Now there's a new pope and the taint of scandal has been irrevocably ingrained into the substance of the Church, and Disch's gothic vision of conservative Catholic values run amok in the modern world is pretty much a spot-on piece of savagely satirical entertainment.
In The Priest, a paedophile priest - an ephebophile, really - is blackmailed into, amongst other things, getting an enormous tattoo of Satan on his torso. Passing out while under the needle, he wakes up in the time and body of a medieval bishop in the throes of the orgy of torture and slaughter that was the Albigensian Crusade. Worse still, the medieval bishop wakes up in the priest's time and body. Hi-jinks ensue.
Oh, what a tangled, nasty tale. Disch's trenchant anti-catholcism is in full flight. With anyone else that might have led to something rather unsatisfying, but Disch's focus on the documented evils, while taking a side-swipe at a thinly disguised cult founded by a science fiction writer that's half Hubbard, half Streiber, and his merciless dissection of human vanity, means that even with the supernatural body and time jumping elements, this is a meditation on all-too-human and all-too-banal acts of evil. It's also a gut-wrenching exercise in mounting suspense, and the moment when the bishop is loosed on the pregnant girls trapped in the cells under the cathedral is agonising.
In the ongoing series of where-was-I-when-I-first-read-this, I borrowed The Priest from Cork City Library and read it on breaks and during lunches while working in Dunnes Stores in Douglas sometime in the mid-nineties. Hell of a book.
The Priest seems like an appropriate read at the moment. When it came out the various scandals that were rocking the Catholic Church were pretty bad, but few could have imagined the deluge to come. Well, Disch did, in a kind of murderous, tragic, apocalyptic way. Now there's a new pope and the taint of scandal has been irrevocably ingrained into the substance of the Church, and Disch's gothic vision of conservative Catholic values run amok in the modern world is pretty much a spot-on piece of savagely satirical entertainment.
In The Priest, a paedophile priest - an ephebophile, really - is blackmailed into, amongst other things, getting an enormous tattoo of Satan on his torso. Passing out while under the needle, he wakes up in the time and body of a medieval bishop in the throes of the orgy of torture and slaughter that was the Albigensian Crusade. Worse still, the medieval bishop wakes up in the priest's time and body. Hi-jinks ensue.
Oh, what a tangled, nasty tale. Disch's trenchant anti-catholcism is in full flight. With anyone else that might have led to something rather unsatisfying, but Disch's focus on the documented evils, while taking a side-swipe at a thinly disguised cult founded by a science fiction writer that's half Hubbard, half Streiber, and his merciless dissection of human vanity, means that even with the supernatural body and time jumping elements, this is a meditation on all-too-human and all-too-banal acts of evil. It's also a gut-wrenching exercise in mounting suspense, and the moment when the bishop is loosed on the pregnant girls trapped in the cells under the cathedral is agonising.
In the ongoing series of where-was-I-when-I-first-read-this, I borrowed The Priest from Cork City Library and read it on breaks and during lunches while working in Dunnes Stores in Douglas sometime in the mid-nineties. Hell of a book.
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