In the Book of Genesis, God makes garments of skin for Adam
and Eve and clothes them. Gianfranco Ravasi, a Roman Catholic Cardinal and de
facto cultural minister of the Vatican, reflected on the meaning of liturgical
vestments while he was in New York with prominent designers to preview the
upcoming exhibit, “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That fashion could point to the transcendent
would seem to go against the ostensibly fundamental dichotomy between the superficial and the
significant. The religious quest can be
understood in such terms as transcending the image to the underlying ineffable
mystery that must characterize the transcendent.
The items lent by the Vatican “feature exquisitely crafted
clothing and accessories, with intricate patchworks of gold and silver thread
embroidery, as well as bejeweled tiaras and miters.”[1]
On one level, silver and gold represent wealth, which until beginning with the
Commercial Revolution in Medieval times was assumed to be indicative of an
underlying motive—that of greed, the love of gain itself.[2]
The ornate vestments in this sense represent the crowning glory of the
pro-wealth paradigm as evinced by the
prosperity gospel.
On a deeper level, however, the liturgical vestment “represents
above all the transcendent dimension, the dimension of the religious mystery,
and that’s why it is ornate,” the Cardinal explains, “because that which is
divine is considered splendid, marvelous, sumptuous, grandiose.”[3]
These adjectives essentially point to the supremacy of value that is placed on
the divine; it’s value relegates even ethical goodness. Plato’s sublimated love
of eternal moral verities becomes for Augustine love (caritas) of God. To declare the value of the divine to be the
highest is, however, merely a starting point, beyond which transcendence beckons—the experience of the sacred that relegates
the ascetics of ornate beauty for unobtainable, ineffable mystery. The
temptation is to hold on to the pretty vestments rather than to transcend them.
The source (and value) of the divine lies beyond the limits of human cognition
and perception, so the vestments themselves should not be allowed to become the
point; their value is only relative. Optics draws the eyes in, but must
ultimately be let go for the yearning to be transcendent
in nature, and thus in line with the nature of divinity. It is a marvel of
human nature that ornate beauty can be appreciated at all, yet even more
astonishing that an instinctual urge is oriented to going beyond the limits of
our perception and cognition.[4]
Hence liturgical garb is to be grasped only as a starting point rather than a
focal point. The animus (mind,
spirit) is capable of transcending itself as well as its realm in yearning for
the invisible and unknowable transcendent called God.
[1]
Elisabetta Povvoledo, “Fashion
Meets the Vatican at a Met Costume Institute Preview,” The New York Times, February 26, 2018.
