Sacred Horror
I.
July 6, anno Domini 1415: the theologian and Church reformer Jan Hus is undressed and tied to a stake, hands behind his back, the neck bound with a chain. Wood and straw are piled up around him, covering his body to the chest. The fire is lit – but it refuses to fully blaze up. After some troublesome attempts to kindle the flames, an old woman makes toward the stake and throws a withered bundle of brushwood onto the pile. At the sight of her dutiful act, the martyr exclaims: “O Sancta Simplicitas!”
What he means – while the flames are already licking at his limbs – remains rather obscure. “Holy Simplicity” might be an address laden with bitter irony, mocking the zealousness and servility of a human being that has been kept in ignorance through religious indoctrination. Then again, “Holy Simplicity” could also, at the moment of approaching death, rise before the eyes of Jan Hus as the only true epitome of humble naivety, as a new saint in glorious rags and as the antithesis of the many learned Christian scholars (including Hus himself) who had been debating for several months at the Council of Constance.
What is beyond dispute, however: The bundle that the modest woman supplies to spark off the executioner’s fire is the same, down to the last twig, that the young Gelsomina carries strung across her shoulder when she appears, more than five centuries later, in the very first shot of Fellini’s La Strada – her back towards the camera, clad in a dark, monkish cape as the waves roll in on the windy, wintery beach near Fiumicino. The bundle serves as a relay – in all the word’s meanings – it changes hands, it is passed on as insignia of the terrible ambiguity of holy simplicity.
II.
Circa 1210: another execution – this time averted. The city of Viterbo is besieged by the merciless tyrant Nicolai (a fictional warlord from the anthology of legends The Little Flowers of Saint Francis who, in Roberto Rossllini’s cinematic retelling Francesco, giullare di Dio, appears more like a burlesque ogre than a military leader). Due to the false accusations of the devil, Nicolai takes the benevolent Franciscan brother Ginepro who wanders into his camp for an assassin and condemns him “to be tied to the tail of a horse and dragged along the ground to the gallows, and then to be hanged by the neck.” Only when a priest recognizes Ginepro as a companion of St. Francis, the tyrant studies his prisoner’s face more intently – its gracious gaze and silent smile and childlike candor – he rolls his eyes in stupefaction, puffs his cheeks, cannot make sense of this countenance that returns his inquisitive look with the deepest trust, until he finally crumbles in the face of this terrible simplicity.
What’s so atrocious about this face and this simplicity is their disturbing immutability – in brother Ginepro as well as in Masina, in the strongman’s assistant Gelsomina, in the streetwalker Cabiria, the carefree mother Giulietta (by name “Passerotto,” the little sparrow) in Europa ’51, the betrayed wife Giulietta (of the Spirits) ... This, however, does not mean that the face of simplicity is a mere mask of unchangeable, mild humility, a featureless surface without depth. If anything, this face is only depth, an inner substance that occupies the entire plane of expression. Its affects do not well up, as we like to think, from an underlying deeper stratum (the mind, the movements of the soul). Instead, they drift over the plane of expression like weather events. Meanwhile, the plane itself consists of a goodness that confronts us like a dense slab of stone; except for its meteorological variations, this face is essentially immobile because it does not know time or becoming. It is a quality: it is made from a nameless and obstinate white matter – precisely the opposite of a clown’s makeup – that consists of an inexorable modesty, ingenuousness and quiet meekness.
Fellini revels in this mineral expanse, in Masina’s “little round face which can express happiness or sadness with such poignant simplicity.” The film scholar John Stubbs calls this face a zone of defamiliarization, “to set the material off from the quotidian train of events” and see it as “something on the level of myth or fairy tale.”
III.
October 6, anno Domini 303 (or 287): a third execution – averted only fifteen centuries later, during its theatrical reenactment in 1965. A maiden named Faith, having consecrated her life to Christ, is summoned before the Roman procurator Datianus of Agen and ordered to sacrifice to his pagan gods. As she refuses, the legionaries tie her on a bronze grill and burn her to death on its red-hot lattice ... When the little Giulietta (of the Spirits) is chosen for the martyr’s role in a play at her convent school, her grandfather rushes onto the stage, cranks down the child on the fiery grid that, with a wooden capstan, has already been hoisted halfway to the gates of heaven, and saves her from the plastic-foil flames: “You like being roasted, stupid girl?”
The grandfather’s rescue and scolding – Ti piaceva farti abbrustolire, eh, Bella stupida? – mark a certain doctrinal split or discrimen: St. Fides of Agen belongs to the class of canonical saints whose immovable faith demands suffering. Apart from all types of hot metal objects and wild beasts that come into violent contact with their bodies, this suffering may also include periods of doubt and (self-)searching, painful epiphanies, wanderings through the desert, flagellations, stigmata. It presents itself as assignment, exercise, or work. From this, however, another model of sainthood branches off, somewhat less statutory and orthodox, manifested by saints who merge entirely into their own innocence. They seldom “work,” they rather breathe, incorporate, excrete their almost heretically natural faith – which is directed not so much at a venerable higher being as at the world of living things. This saintliness does not lack sincerity, but it knows little of severity ... Leaving behind the nuns’ burning vision of St. Faith as well as her own awed childhood self, Giulietta enters that very realm of holy simplicity. And all her kin, Gelsomina, Cabiria, Giulietta (the little sparrow), Masina, will inhabit the same sphere: even when abused and exploited, they will still show more “joy-thru-foolishness” than St. Francis himself, a “silly humility” that Rossellini’s giullare di Dio pictures as the merrier aspect of Franciscan life.
But at the edge, or perhaps in the heart of this humble, unwise, guileless mode of sainthood, its fiercest and most resistive property is born – an ultimate unsacrificeability. This unfitness (of the simple mind and the slightly droll body) to be sacrificed begins to push the figure of the saint out of every “Christian” system and community.
IV.
Saint visits saint: Lost in a bleak proletarian suburb, the bourgeoise Irène, in Europa ’51, experiences what Jacques Rancière calls her “conversion,” a shift of her perception and understanding “off to the side” (together with a brief aberrance of the image itself) to become aware, for the first time, of the workers’ life and human reality. Even before this event, Irène has displayed some incoherent traits of saintliness as her young son’s suicide initiated an inner quest and confused urge for welfare work. But now she will once and for all abandon her past, class consciousness, religious belief and sanity to transform into a figure of radical compassion, sheltering a young criminal, nursing a tubercular prostitute and finally enduring her very own psychiatric martyrdom.
“The genesis of sainthood is thus not any revelation in the smoke of incense between the church’s pillars, but the chance of the deviation that afterward leads little by little toward someone we must call our neighbor. Little by little, we have gone where we should not go, where we no longer know where we are. […] It is […] an act of trust that leads Irene out of the frame, displaces her.”
She picks up a handful of children and herds them home to a wood-and-tarboard shack where she is greeted by their mother, Giulietta, the little sparrow. And soon it becomes evident that Giulietta is a saint too – albeit of a different kind. While Irène (quite likely christened after the woman who tended the wounds of Saint Sebastian) is bound to her suffering, dedicated to her work of suffering, and must in the end suffer confinement for her scandalous beliefs – in short: while she sacrifices herself – any such act of self-abandonment remains foreign to her hostess Giulietta. No thorny passion, no numinous verity, just a well-rounded body to nurture her young ones; instead of the horrifying pleasures of despair, a lighthearted care- or even recklessness: For a romantic tryst, Giulietta makes her benefactor Irène take over her shift at the deafening, bone crushing paper factory. In like manner, brother Ginepro, the ruthlessly beatific companion of St. Francis, tackles the pig of an unsuspecting peasant and cuts off its foot to prepare a meal for a sick confrère. No scruples, no sacrificial inclinations, just a profound and innocent certitude of the sacred body’s immediate demands.
Avital Ronell (by now beyond atonement and untouchable herself) has one or two things to say about the relation between sacred idiocy and “sacrificeability:” The idiot Myshkin, she writes, possesses both saintly innocence and an ailing body – but his infirmity does not belong to the sphere of meaningless, blunt and, therefore, unsacrificeable physicality. Rather, he is capable of being sacrificed “to the extent that [his] illness still binds him to the sacred […]. The residue of sacrificeability is due in part to the fact that this body retains and persists in making sense.” In other words, we sacrifice what can serve as a symbol, what has significance or acts as a signifier, what produces meaning and is thus, in a certain way, attached to the divine – Rossellini’s Irène who, as a canonical saint, gains sense from her suffering.
Meanwhile, Giorgio Agamben tells us of another, almost antithetical figure in Roman law, physically unimpaired but devoid of all meaning: Homo sacer has been expelled from the region of the profanum and its rule of justice; his life can be taken by anyone without punishment – but he may not be sacrificed. This exponent of bare life resembles what Ronell would call a “stupid” body, the opposite of saintly Prince Myshkin, emptied of sense, depleted of purpose and no longer sacrificeable since it has been delivered to “the degradations of poverty, hunger, deportation, torture, deprivation, ugliness, horror.”
The body of Giulietta, however, and that of her kindred spirit Ginepro, is neither filled with holy passions or symbolic purport, nor is it emptied out, battered or degraded. Similarly, Giulietta and Ginepro have no place in the general scheme and exchanges of society, but neither for being touched by the divine, nor for being ostracized or outlawed by man ... Instead, they are unsacrificeable solely on account of their simplicitas, their obscene excess of innocence, their illegible vitality that removes them from the gravitas of spiritual devotion. This is, indeed, a very different, deeply unethical and highly joyous kind of sacredness and unsacrificeability – far from both Ronell’s saintly idiot and Agamben’s homo sacer.
V.
Other saint visits other saint: The fourth episode of Rossellini’s Francesco recounts how Santa Chiara – founder of the Order of Poor Clares – makes her way from San Damiano Monastery to visit the Franciscans at their small chapel, Santa Maria degli Angeli, and pray and eat with the brothers. While Irène’s visit in Giulietta’s shack creates a vertical figure (not a moral or class hierarchy, merely a line drawn from saintly πνεῦμα to sacred σῶμα), St. Clare’s visit at St. Francis’ oratory establishes a horizontal figure, a relation between two beings whose juxtaposition does not call for more words than a modest salutation and for other deeds than sitting side by side in contemplation, surrounded by their followers.
Both saints, Chiara and Francesco, reside on the same middle or intermediary level between lofty saintliness and lowly sacredness – not devoted to the renunciant work of meaningful suffering (although St. Francis will receive his stigmata), also not fully steeped in careless “stupidity” (St. Francis seems to have delegated that horrifying, childlike simplicity to his companions, first and foremost to brother Ginepro).
An intricate constellation of similarities and differences emerges: Santa Chiara resembles San Francesco, while she differs from the little sparrow Giulietta as well as from the martyr Irène; Irène, in turn, contrasts with Giulietta and stands close to San Francesco (not least since Rossellini sees her as the saint’s modern incarnation), but she is also removed from him by her pronounced agony; St. Francis seems related to the Giulietta, the Masina persona, “the secular equivalent of a Catholic saint”, who does not so much follow Christian doctrines as a universal humanism; and he separates himself from such worldliness as – according to Justin Ponder at Marian University, founded by the Sisters of St. Francis – his quintessential “humility” is, in fact, no compassion or modesty in the face of fellow humans but a relationship of awe, obedience, and worship to God.
VI.
A saint’s return visit: Yet another pattern forms through the various calls of saints at other saints’ domiciles, namely their differing spatial attachments. At first, the expatriate Irène has no home, wanders through streets, open landscapes, suburbs, until her saintly works and canonization as martyr immobilize her inside a bare asylum cell – and now it is Giulietta and her pack of children who must set out and visit Irène, locked in and looking out between the bars of her window. While becoming a saint implies spiritual displacement, it also seems to result in local fixation: Isn’t the resting place of bones and repository of relics the destination of pilgrimages? Aren’t saints regularly tacked to a place, Saint Irene of Rome, Saint Faith of Agen?
Although of Assisi, Rossellini’s Saint Francis appears less stationary: He and his brothers may build their own chapel, shed, dormitory – a humble monastic complex to shut the door against the devil. This installatio, however, is framed by images of elemental uprootedness. The prolog of The Flowers of Saint Francis plunges the saint and his followers, on their way from Rome back to Santa Maria degli Angeli, into a nondescript wilderness of rain, mud and earth, dissolves them in a windy grey, exiles them from their straw hut that has been occupied by a peasant and his donkey. And the epilog will see them leaving Assisi and scatter to the four winds to preach in Siena, Florence, Arezzo, Pisa, Spoleto, Foligno, and “where that chaffinch hops among the trees” (for “religions are about dwelling and crossing, about finding a place and moving across space” ).
Giulietta, finally, appears inseparable from her place, stove, table; her cabin imitates the stuffy comfort of a bourgeois home, the doilies, the (paper) tablecloth, the potted plant on the dresser, the wall hanging (made of placards and military tarpaulins). But at the same tie, this home is situated at the extreme edge of social space, beyond even the proletarian tenement blocks, and sunk into a pit so that its roof is at a level with the surrounding terrain ... This marginal position, however, is not a feature of the “sacred” in its original sense, of that which, according to Agamben (and William Robertson Smith and Wilhelm Wundt and Sigmund Freud and Ward Fowler and Emile Durkheim), sits undecidably between the pure and the shunned impure, between the inviolable holy and the excluded untouchable, “constituting that mixture of veneration and horror described by Wundt – with a formula that was to enjoy great success – as ‘sacred horror.’” Instead, Giulietta’s sacred horror, the specific horror of her sacredness springs from a fundamental placelessness (closely linked to her entirely non-Agambian unsacrificeability): rather than being expelled from the profane to its obscure outside, her existence is, from the very outset, without place, unlocated, nomadic, unbehaust. Unlike canonical saints and any Franciscan brother, the little sparrow Giulietta/Passerotto, the streetwalker Cabiria, the travelling player Gelsomina possess no cell, shell or sanctuary – even the housewife Giulietta “of the Spirits” will in the end leave her parlor and garden and roam among the pine trees into an open yonder. The neat bourgeois cabin is revealed as a sham; its interior has always been wallpapered with travel advertisements: TWA – Trans World Airlines
VII.
Coda on idiocy and the political: Can we in any way “profit” from that sacred figure, sancta simplicitas, the sparrow-saint; that is, can we consider Giulietta also as something else than an enigmatic block of innocence at the limits of both our patience and communal life? Can she ever play a part in or for that community (like the saint whose sacrifice “designates a body’s passage to a limit where it becomes the body of a community, the spirit of a communion of which it is […] the material symbol” )? In yet other words, can she ever have a “social” or “ethical” purpose beyond her private being, can she be not only an idiot, an ἰδιώτης, but also become political?
Doubt seems warranted: If that figure, the Masina persona, should incarnate a “hope,” this hope remains a simple presence devoid of any futurity, prospect or promise. If it advocates an “ideal,” this ideal cannot be realized by any other individual or collective. It is a condition, without becoming, a quality. All its traits testify to a difference or distance to the political and its semantics: The countenance, an impenetrable manifestation of humaneness, the pointless candor that opposes every circulation of meaning, every ritual, signification, common sense or sacrifice, the homelessness and profound unlocatability of the sacred resist every wider exchange or intercommunion. Our horror arises from the sacred as a capsule, a terrible monad that is not even touched by its own acts of charity or cruelty. No embedding in the reality of a public, people or populace (even if neorealism dreams of little else); no awareness of a communality. Idiocy.
And what about Giulietta’s antithesis, Irène? Could her canonical sainthood indeed be closer to a “people” or imply a “politics”? True, Irène embodies a Simone-Weil-like asceticism, harsh self-abandonment and suffering that sets her far apart from the sentimental piety of the crowd – for Rossellini, “renunciation of all things worldly is meant to be a struggle, a contention with shame and indignity. It loses its seriousness when it is equated too bluntly with the innate virtue of the poor and the meek.” Thus, the strictness and theatrical sacrifices of such a saint seem rather unpopular and hardly suited as political gestures: “Saintliness and politics are not a good match. Or so the conventional wisdom goes.”
Nonetheless, states Lisabeth During in unison with film theoretician André Bazin, it is precisely this distance to shared values and public interests which links the Rossellinian saint to a – peculiarly indiscriminate – mode of the political. In a sense, Irène does not inhabit the “Land of the People,” as Rancière has claimed, she does not attach herself to the worker or the poor or the insane, to an individual, cause or community. Instead, she lives in the uncharted no man’s land of a ridiculous “love that is (as Simone Weil puts it) ‘not a personal thing’:” disinterested, groundless, self-effacing, indifferent to reciprocity. Such an anti-sentimental love or caritas is, in fact, closer to impartial distance than to empathy (and the same holds true for Rossellini’s audience that may well feel for Giulietta, but never with St. Francis or Irène). Since it ignores the value of a common world and striving, the “politics” of saints is perhaps no politics at all – but, explains During, it can certainly “fit into an ‘impolitical’ politics, foreshadowing a community that is […] committed to a praxis of attentive, impersonal action, where ‘malignant sovereignty’ would have no place.”
What, then, is the root of Giulietta’s horror? Not the brutal openness of that “little round face,” not her reckless self-certitude, not the irritating absence of dolor or doubt, not her sacred inviolability or placelessness – but the element in every one of these traits that makes her fold back onto herself and divests her of all possible politics. The horror of St. Giulietta is this: that the world will be touched and then – simply – remain the same.