Divine Church of Jupiter

On Crowds  The notion of the "madness of the people", or the "madness of the crowds" is nothing new. In this post, we will explore how crowds, broadly conceived, can help and hinder us in our daily lives and what allegiance, if any, we owe to them. Much of our lives - national, social, local and personal - is structured as being part of some crowd or other. The Guardian, of all newspapers, regularly publishes articles that explicitly appeal to "tribes" such as the "runner tribe", or the "teacher tribe", where interests and identity are shared to a remarkable degree. It is hard, perhaps impossible, to conceive of a world in which such crowds would not play a large, if not necessarily critical or supreme role. The success of such crowds is, ideally, due to the value they produce in the lives of individuals and communities, but that does not seem to be always or even usually the case. Let us examine the often unexamined role such crowd...

Introibo ad altare Dei, ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meum.  From the Missale Romanum, " Prayers at the Foot of the Altar"   On Sacrifice Sacrifice appears to be a universal religious instinct and it is found in the "great world religions" generally. In Christianity, it is most closely identified with the sacrifice of Jesus for the sins of the world, renewed or re-presented in the Sacrifice of the Mass, in which, in a typically Baroque understanding, the sacrifice is understood to be to God by God (in the person of his minister, the priest). The ancient pagans, of course, ridiculed these rites as a form of cannibalism in their general disgust at the religion. Here, we will explore the sacrificial impulse in general and the pagan approach in particular. Sacrifice in General Why is the sacrificial impulse so general? The human condition, bounded with uncertainty, is such that, in earlier times, we sought primarily supernatural means to control natural ev...

On Sex    There are few things that religion like regulating more than sexual intercourse. Until as recently as 2003, traditional Christian beliefs framed the law on sex in England and Wales, forbidding such things as buggery (including between males and females) and orgies (at least for homosexual males). The intrusion of a deeply public religion into the sexual realm seems odd - what role does religion have, if any, in regulating this deeply private aspect of personal life? That is the question we must now consider. In the ancient world, such as in Greece, a man ( vir ) had the obligation to father and raise children with his wife. This did not prevent him, however, from contracting what were felt to be more pleasurable and no less honourable sexual relations with other males (usually young men and adolescents) and thus the private and public realms were dictinct and complementary. In Rome, on the other hand, the notion of domination/dominated prevented freemen from en...

On Discipline, or Self-Command "Discipline" has a two-fold sense; as a verb, it refers to the act of disciplining others, or of the application of order, rule and reason to oneself. The noun, "discipline", referring to a shared or collective rule, perhaps does best in uniting both senses, e.g. the discipline of the Rule of St. Benedict is gradually internalised. Its relevance to public life is best summarised by the dictum that no man can be a fit master of others, without being master of himself. In religion, discipline occupies a central place in both the ethical and cultic realms, thus the rite of Mass, for Catholics, is normally (and normatively) celebrated according to a certain rite ( e.g. Missa normativa ) and the Church's discipline constrains clerics and laymen to participate as a matter of the Divine Law, which to disobey deliberately is mortal sin. Christianity, in general, is conspicuous for the importance it gives to formal, public worship in ...

On Work  One of my French students, when I taught literature in France, remarks that the word for work ( travail ) derived from the Latin word for torture. This rather cheeky, if accurate remark conveys an alienation that many of us feel from the toil and burden of the day. Likewise, another young student, who wished to have a financially successful career, regretted the sad fact of the necessity of work. He wanted the money without the work; he wanted to be Blackadder's Comte de Frou-Frou, who wanted other people to work and to give him the money. In most lives, we cannot and we would probably not want to be work-free. We must, in the telling phrase, earn a living and keep a roof over our heads. Indeed, few people who are blessed with prosperous idleness really pursue lives of pure leisure; the time may be given to the gym, or to full-time "Youtubing", or even gaming (which is now a potential full-time job). Even the idlers must fill the hours of the day. Work, then...

On the Gods  On one reading, the gods, to the Divine Church of Jupiter, hardly matter. We do not believe that they literally exist, as most Christian Churches believe in the God of the Bible, or Muslims in Allah. The notion of faith, which is so intrinsic to our sense of religion, had no place in Romans' understanding of their relationships with the gods; for them, the gods were a given and their rites, vows and prayers assumed the form of contract rather than covenant, i.e. they would ask for something in particular and offer a prayer, vow or sacrifice to that end. It was all rather transactional; one did not love the gods anymore than one would love the shopkeeper, or the delivery boy. What value do the gods retain then? The pleasures of ceremony aside, the gods can be interpreted as types in human psychology and behaviour. Their rather strange behaviour, at times, sheds light on the perversity and oddity of man, helping us to arraign and control what are the common shortfal...

On Worship It may seem strange to be a priest to a god in whom one does not believe, but it is merely to acknowledge that worship is not ultimately about gods (whom would surely have no need of worship), but about men, for whom it is a felt necessity. History itself suggests that having an outlet for the psychological need for worship may be safer than simply suppressing it (the reader may feel some similarity with Freudian views about sex). The Sacred:  Imagining and Possibility What is the sacred? The sacred is an opening onto another world, in which we are invited to let the mind wonder and imagine. This is not merely a daydream, but it does not exclude it either. Roman generals and statesmen would consult the auspices before starting a battle against an enemy. Discounting the possibility of the gods answering via the entrails of some beast, it provided an opportunity for the mind to be concentrated and for a part of the decision to be externalised, according to the inter...

The Priesthood of Jupiter We have mentioned the Priests of Jupiter, who are those devoted to the pursuit of the good life as we have outlined, which has as its ideal the heights of knowledge. Let us now look at its nature and requirements. Who can be a Priest of Jupiter? Entry to the Priesthood of Jupiter is open to both sexes and without regard to "protected characteristics". More important are the love of study and learning, the enjoyment of conversation and the ability to pursue truth in company with others of good will. There are, of course, no dogmatic standards for the priesthood. Priests of Jupiter make an undertaking to pursue truth and to frame their lives according to knowledge and right reason. Are there other priesthoods? In paganism, there is no "one" priesthood, unlike in Christianity, where you are a priest or not. Priesthoods are normally dedicated to one deity, or to a sacred place, etc. When we confer the priesthood of Jupiter, we norma...

Aristotle, though a Greek, made many good points. Even medieval Christians such as Aquinas referred to him as The Philosopher in their writings. For Aristotle, his disciples and those who followed him, the chief question of philosophy was practical; how do I live? The right answer, it was felt, would yield the good life. To ancient common sense, man pales in comparison with the gods. He is mortal; he is limited in wealth and gifts; he grows old and ugly; he is liable to all manner of shortcomings (intellectual and ethical); he must labour and strive to know. The gods are subject to none of these things and, insofar as they are not human, they are happy. Despite human frailty, man does have some consolation in that his ability to know, although it requires toil, does ultimately yield, for the philosopher, an ability to comprehend things as do the gods. The highest form of life - of the quest for pleasure, the quest for success and the quest for knowledge - is the quest for knowledge, ...

First of all, we believe there are no gods, nor that the God of the Bible, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim, exists in anything other than a metaphorical or psychological sense. Religion, as the ancients knew, can still be an awful lot of fun - just ask Bacchus! If you like, we put the fun into fun damental (joke!)! The psychologist Carl Jung talks about how man is an essentially religious creature for whom the absence of its forms and insights is injurious. Many Catholics go to mass without much of "faith in Jesus" out of habit, familiarity and a vague sense that it is good for them. For more, have a read of Man in Search of a Soul, by Jung. The Romans gradually lost their belief in the ancient gods until they succumbed, at their lowest point, to belief in the angry Jewish tribe god, Yahweh. They swapped their Caesars and their Hercules for useless ascetic, illiterate saints, who spend their lives murmuring prayers to a vindictive psychopath dreamt up by a mixture of ...