Seeing is believing
'Remembering Peasants: a Personal History of a Vanished World' (Patrick Joyce, 2024)
Halfway through Remembering Peasants, Patrick Joyce presents us with a photo of his mother’s old Mass and prayer missal. Entitled The Treasury of the Sacred Heart, this small, tatty book appears unremarkable save for an embossed image of the flaming heart of Christ on the cover. The picture of the heart hints at what lies within: as Joyce comments, the missal is ‘full of images, some of which are in fact shaped as smaller objects within the greater one of the book’. He points in particular to a miniature metal heart that lay within a tiny shrine embedded in the front cover. Joyce suggests that it was these images and objects, packed in together, that gave the book its sacred power. His mother, a devout Catholic from rural Wexford, carried it around for her entire adult life.
Remembering Peasants is, as its subtitle suggests, a strikingly personal account of the ‘peasantry’ - the rural, pre-industrial and pre-capitalist peoples who made up the vast majority of the European population until the mid-twentieth century. Now aged seventy-eight, Joyce writes as the ‘son of peasants’, often referring back to his parents, who left their families and communities in rural Mayo and Wexford to settle in London. While Ireland naturally takes the lead in Joyce’s narrative, Remembering Peasants also flits between two other European peasant cultures - those of Italy and Poland - in an effort to give some idea of a pan-European peasant experience.
Catholicism is an underlying theme throughout the different peasant cultures examined by Joyce. Deeply embedded in peasant society, Catholic Christianity often sat alongside various non-Christian spiritual beliefs and what we might term a form of animism, linked to the outdoor world that was the peasant’s entire universe. However, in his declaration of Catholicism as the religion of (most) European peasants, Joyce also makes an interesting claim. Drawing on the example of his mother’s prayer missal, he argues that ‘Catholicism is a religion of the image rather than the word.’
Joyce’s point is that Catholicism has traditionally prioritised the dissemination of the faith via sacred pictures or objects, including icons, relics and sacred art and architecture. This grounding of faith in material items connects Catholicism to the peasantry, Joyce argues, because the peasants of Europe were people whose lives were built around material, rather than abstract, things: crops, animals, fields, earth, rain, sunlight. To Joyce, images ‘give … the promise of peace by means of their innate physicality, their immediate reality.’
Thus Catholicism differentiates itself from Protestantism, which Joyce describes as a religion of the ‘word’ on account of its emphasis on personal exegesis. Noting the widespread illiteracy of Europe’s peasantry until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he comments that:
‘Because over historical time the image and the object have been more real to peasants than words, the written word that is there is a way in which Catholicism has been more in tune with traditional peasant beliefs than Protestantism.’
To an illiterate person whose life is spent outside, hacking at the soil and tending to animals, the image-based religion of Catholicism holds more value than a faith built around Bible-reading and discussion. As a result, Protestantism naturally developed among more urbanised, mercantile-industrial peoples, hence its success in England, the Dutch Republic and Prussia. Even those occasional Protestant peasants who worked the land alongside Catholics (such as the Silesian Lutherans) still considered themselves different - and often implicitly superior - to their icon-worshipping neighbours.
There’s some merit to this argument. It’s a well-established historical view that Protestantism emerged with a historical turn towards urbanisation, mercantilism and eventually industrialisation. In this sense, Protestantism can be understood as a religion of people who had become distanced from the land, whose lives had become more abstract and, inevitably, word-based. At least, this was the case until the Catholic Church began to catch up with the process of industrialisation in the nineteenth century, producing new social teachings aimed at embedding the Church in the new industrial working classes.
Similarly, one can’t deny that Catholicism relies heavily on imagery. Last week, I had the discombobulating experience of spending Wednesday morning at a Pentecostal church hall in the South Wales Valleys (for work) and Thursday afternoon at the Iglesia de la Encarnación in Marbella’s old town (for leisure). The former felt like a small-scale early-2000s conference centre - magnolia walls, carpeted floor, a low stage and a total absence of religious imagery. The latter, by contrast, is shown in the photo below:
All the same, the starkness of the Catholic-image/Protestant-word divide proposed in Remembering Peasants remains unconvincing. Yes, the Catholic Church loves an icon, but it also loves pages and pages of theological discourse. Catholicism as a religion is built on vast amounts of writing, stretching from Augustine to Aquinas to the Neo-Thomists of the nineteenth century and the Liberation Theologians of the twentieth. Entire universities exist today to produce such writings - indeed, the western-style university system was itself set up in the Middle Ages in part to provide scholars with bases from which to develop Catholic theology to suit the problems of their time. The production of words isn’t limited to Catholic scholars, either. It’s an expectation that popes will produce several encyclicals during their papacy, written documents that hold immense power over the Church’s evolutionary process. Popes are, in effect, scholar-vicars of Christ.
Perhaps, then, it’s more accurate to say that Protestantism is a religion where the faithful are more personally connected to the word of God, via individual interpretation of the Bible. Catholicism is no less a religion of the word, but it maintains a far greater and more institutionalised process of interpretation. Armies of Catholic theologians have worked and continue to work to adapt the word to the issues of the present, rather than leaving it to flock. In some ways this makes the word less accessible (theological texts aren’t easy reads, though at least they’re no longer published solely in Latin…), but the presence of this interpreter caste also means that the word can (or at least should) be adapted with nuance and intellectual cohesion before being shared with the faithful.
Protestantism has a different relationship with the word. That’s not to say it doesn’t have its own interpreters - the Anglican Church, for example, maintains its own ranks of clerics and theologians, including those embedded in the British university system. Nonetheless, the fact remains that Protestant churches are by their nature more closely tied to the Bible itself than to reems of doctrine and liturgy produced by a theological machine, as in the case of Catholicism. (This closeness to the Bible as a document is perhaps one reason for why biblical literalism is so prevalent among modern Protestant churches.) Theirs is a religion of the word in a direct sense, in comparison to Catholicism’s more intellectualised, top-down approach.
What does all this say about images, then? Catholicism’s blend of high-level theological reasoning and high-glamour aesthetics works because, in effect, the images represent complex ideas. It’s not easy to transmit a 2,000-year-old idea that Jesus’s suffering on the cross was a willing sacrifice made for the benefit of the community of humans, and that we should emulate his example by making the moral decision to show love to others at every opportunity and thus lead humanity as one to God’s shining kingdom. Far simpler to stick up fourteen illustrations of Christ’s grisly last hours and use these to explain the concept of the Passion. Protestantism doesn’t do this (we’ll discount High Anglicanism for now), as the faith is built around personal reading and interpretation of scripture. Yet it still uses aesthetics: like a modern office building, Protestant churches, chapels, meeting houses and centres are deliberately plain, modest and unassuming. Their purpose reflects that of the office space, that is, the grey-and-white surroundings are designed to help the individual concentrate on their task at hand. Gold-plated statues of the weeping Virgin can be a terrible distraction when one is trying to slog one’s way through Deuteronomy.
Remembering Peasants is a highly readable and genuinely heartfelt account of a people who have all but vanished from the Western world. Joyce writes with compassion for the lost peasantry without falling into the twin traps of reactionary romanticisation and liberal progressivism. He is unequivocal in maintaining that peasant life was hard, often violently so (I wondered if he’d mention the Hautefaye incident of 1870 - I wasn’t disappointed), but at the same time he doesn’t pretend that our post-industrial, consumerist society is somehow superior to that of our rural ancestors. Peasants existed in a social system that is unlike ours by nearly every metric, and they got on with their lives within that system as best they could. They worked, they ate, they drank, they married, they danced, they fought, and, of course, they worshipped.
Catholicism plays a central role in Joyce’s history. However, his characterisation of Catholicism as a religion of the ‘image’, compared to Protestantism as a religion of the ‘word’, feels clunky. Things are rarely that simple. True, Catholicism plays heavily on aesthetics, but it is also a religion built on thousands of years of theological discourse and, therefore, on writing. Images in Catholicism serve as ciphers for such ideas, for such words - a method of transmission that remains as powerful among a largely literate congregation today as it did among a largely illiterate peasant congregation two hundred years ago. Meanwhile, Protestantism (as much as we can generalise) may emphasise the ‘literal word’ of the Bible, but it also uses aesthetics - those of plainness and purity - to concentrate its congregation on the word.
Religion represents a blending of the word and the image, with different faiths and denominations using these tools to different effects. Catholicism and Protestantism are both religions of the word, and both religions of the image. Both use the image to transmit the word, albeit via different pathways. The grey Pentecostal conference centre is more similar to the glinting Catholic basilica than one might initially think.