What struck me in childhood and what still clings to me today is the aesthetic decadence of Catholicism. I remember the royal purples, the blood reds, and the extravagant golds. The encompassing scent of incense and the wondrously detailed iconography. The beautiful music that induced a solemn but fervent religiosity. What we Catholics lacked in mirth we made up for with a deep sensuality, a remnant of our pagan, mystery cult origins. And of course how can I not mention the crucifixion of Jesus? Even as a child, I sensed the eroticism of the passion of Christ. We were compelled, especially during the Easter season, to partake in the jouissance of the passion of the cross. The whole edifice was a voluptuary celebration of this erotic, holy excess: Jesus had an excess of love for humanity which was expressed through the excesses of suffering. There’s something deeply transgressive about the whole thing – it transgresses the limit-experience of love and approaches its eschatological point. The erotism of the Catholic mass and worship never felt tawdry though. The whole aesthetic and sensory experience felt elevated and induced a zealous religiosity and devotion. It is through the sublime, the surpassing of the limit-experience of beauty, that we reach the Divine.

On the other hand we were encouraged (or more like forced) to confess our sins to a priest. In a private and enclosed confession booth. In exchange for engaging in the excesses of the Catholic Church, you must recount and do penance for your own personal excesses. Every violent, negative, sexual, and despicable action and thought must be sublimated through and into the Lord. But it’s not so much that these urges get repressed/overcome in order to reach transcendence but more placed under the disciplinary surveillance of the panopticon of the Kingdom of God (God’s judgment, priests, your neighbors, and society at large). The dichotomy between the full-bodied sensuality of the Church and the periodic calls for purification is interesting to me, and one can go into a full on Foucauldian analysis as to why this dichotomy exists but I’d rather not write a dissertation.