Sister Wendy on love as an obedient art
All images and quotes are scans grabbed from Sister Wendy Beckett’s The Mystery of Love: Saints in Art through the Centuries.
Spoiler: It is no mystery at all. Doctrine removes all mystery from immanence once dogmas are selected for instruction to the obedient, if only as a fig leaf of love.
Sister Wendy was a Carmelite nun who gained famed as an interpreter of art, especially on free-to-air television in the 1990s, and whose passion for this vocation was irrepressible.
The Carmelites are a Catholic mendicant order.
In her introduction to The Mystery of Love: Saints in Art through the Centuries her focus is to outline the importance of obedience. The context for this, and the examples, are of the individual and the christ exemplar, before the mono-god. This is in keeping with Christianity’s origins as a devoteeist movement. So, the set-up here is “yeah but how do I know what pleases him [sic]?”
So don’t do that devotee-ist malarky anymore. Instead, your direct devotional relationship with… whoever, is now with who and how we say it is. If you are loyal then you will hold dear what we say you should hold dear, and your conscience, well, that’s just there to make you feel guilty for not obeying, you sinner you.
Instead?
Well, stopp thinking do as you are told so we do not doubt you loaulty andinvent theinquisition again. All this information is mediated via the authority and power of the church, we are the holy tradtion of reason in this regard. This means you should primarily obey the church as you would god.
But for some other reason, in more modern times this imperious attitude not said directly to the laity, those in holy orders are well aware of it, mind, but the requirement of obedience structures all truly Catholic (and Orthodox) thought and its co-evolution with changning mundane legal structures. In the modern age, this is thus the shame of the church, the call for obedience that dare not speak its name, its quest for naked power, its pudenda.
Sister Wendy does extremely well in covering it up again, after the wardrobe malfunction above of ‘the one sole virtue is obedience’.
The fig leaf here is love.
Given the title of the book The Mystery of Love one might think Sister Wendy would use that little thing called love as the wellspring, but the Carmelite nun does not do so. Love is frameworked within obedience through respect and honour. I.E. love is obedience, not any other sort of thing a young brainless flippetty-jibbet might want to indulge in.
It is no mystery at all.
This is a revision of a substack post from a year ago in 2023.
