Exploring the Dynamics of Religion in Post-COVID-19 World with Reference to Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron
Abstract:
Religious practices have undergone ruptures down the ages owing to several factors, pandemics being one of the most notable of those. The Asian flu, Antonine plague, and the Black Death among others, have been major game changers of history. These pandemics have subsequently affected our socio-cultural identities, of which, our religious customs and practices constitute a major part. COVID-19 is another addition to the list of pandemics which have altered the way we think and act. It has not only put a halt on our daily lives, but also massively altered our existence with the introduction of social distancing and self-quarantine. With technology taking over every aspect of our lives, religious practices have severely come under scrutiny regarding their necessity in the present circumstances. The inability of mass gatherings to take place has affected our age-old practices of bidding adieu to the deceased, which raises questions about the validity of such rituals in the first place. Literature has bore testimony to these questions previously as well, as seen in several accounts regarding the Black Death, where the practices of the Roman Catholic Church had been heavily questioned. Conceived after the plague in 1348, Giovanni Boccaccio’s seminal work The Decameron raises questions about the steadily declining Papal supremacy and the efficacy of its traditions during the Black Death.
Our study uses references from Boccaccio’s work and relates them to the present scenario all around the world, which has vehemently altered our practice of religious customs. This paper concerns the dynamics of the prevailing religious practices with reference to the position of the Roman Catholic Church during the Black Death. It contests the validity of the present religious customs without sacrificing the essence of any religion.
KEYWORDS: Religious practices, Post-COVID-19, pandemic, Black Death, Roman Catholic Church, Boccaccio, The Decameron
Introduction
Pandemics have prevailed since the beginning of human existence. Outbreaks such as the Antonine Plague (165 to 180 AD), the Black Death (1346-1353) the Asian Flu (1957-1958), and more recently the COVID-19 (2019 to present) have changed the course of history, affecting both the world economy and our socio-cultural identities, of which religious customs and practices constitute a major part. Amendments and alterations in traditional religious practices have always been a side effect of pandemics, as testified by history. An Ebola-like plague (249-262 CE) which devastated the Roman empire, weakened confidence in the traditional pagan gods as Christians used the plague to promote the idea that there was a life beyond death. Similarly, suspected to be either measles or smallpox, the Plague of Galen wiped out one third of the population of the Roman empire. Marcus Aurelius believed that it was the wrath of the pagan gods against Christians who refused to worship them, and thereby started exterminating them. Many of the Christians survived as they were willing to assist the sick and provide them with basic necessities. The survivors were comforted by the thought that their loved ones dying as Christians would receive salvation. The very promise of redemption in the Afterlife attracted additional followers and Christianity became the official religion of the empire.
More than a millennium later, the Plague hit Asia and Europe, killing a third of the world’s population. A scholar and a witness to the Plague, Ibn Khaldun wrote, “Civilisations both in the East and West were visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish… The entire inhabited world changed”. It is believed that the Plague took roots in the scorched lands of Central Asia. From there it reached Crimea in 1346 via the Silk Route. Eventually, it spread to the ones near the Black Sea and then to the rest of Europe as a consequence of frightened people trying to escape from the horrors of this pestilence. The term “quarantine” also originates from these dark days. A 30-day period of isolation or trentino was made mandatory for ships returning from plague afflicted areas in Ragusa (now Dubrovnik, Croatia). Over the period, other cities such as Pisa and Marseilles adopted similar measures. Eventually, the isolation period was extended from thirty to forty days, and the term shifted to quarantino. Europe was stripped off of its economic power and centralised monarchies started to arise. Religion provided shelter for most of the masses and others reacted with a pessimism that threw them into despair or self-indulgence, which were in turn reflected in the arts and literature. In 1665, the Bubonic Plague hit London. Around three hundred years after the Black Death, people still consulted astrologers and the Bible for cure. Daniel Defoe in A Journey of the Plague Year (1722), which he wrote with a complimentary advice manual Due Preparations for the Plague recounted that “there was hardly a Horse to be bought or hired in the whole City”. The city gates had been shut, confining everybody in. But buying supplies was unavoidable, “This Necessity of going out of our Houses to buy Provisions, was in a great Measure the Ruin of the whole City,” added Defoe.
The fear of infectious diseases has been fueled, since ancient times, by the belief that pandemics originate as a cause of offences against divinities. In the Bible, plague is regarded as the chastisement of humans against sins. It is cautionary to the Israelites to encourage moral behaviour. Later, pandemic literature started dealing with human behaviour and the unbiased contagions. Among such books are The Betrothed (1827) written by Italian novelist Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873), which deals with the plague that struck Milan in around 1630; Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi (1940), set in colonial India about the 1918-19 flu pandemic; and The Scarlet Plague (1920), a post-apocalyptic novel written by Jack London (1876-1920). The Scarlet Plague looked deeply into the scientific discoveries of Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) and Robert Koch (1843-1910), because by this time, pandemics were no longer considered a divine punishment.
But in earlier days when pandemic was justified as a divine retribution, people resorted to random acts of violence against those who were falsely accused to have caused the plague, especially minorities which included Jews, lepers, beggars and foreigners. A detailed narrative of the pestilence can be found in the illustrative composition of Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. Boccaccio’s seminal work not only tells the story of the plague, but also raises a dialogue about its effects on the religious beliefs of the people, which is relevant today in a world struck with the terror of COVID-19: a worldwide phenomenon which has similarly challenged and altered the religious practices of millions.
THE DECAMERON, BLACK DEATH, CATHOLICISM
Giovanni Boccaccio’s (16 June 1313 – 21 December 1375) The Decameron (1353), subtitled Prince Galehaut tells the story of seven women and three men, who entertain themselves with stories while being sheltered in a villa outside of the Plague afflicted Florence. Before introducing the characters, he describes how the plague struck the city of Florence in 1348 CE, people’s reaction to it, and the death toll in millions. The predicament of the sufferers have been depicted aptly in the following words of Boccaccio:
“How many valiant men, how many fair ladies, breakfast with their kinfolk and the same night supped with their ancestors in the next world! The condition of the people was pitiable to behold. They sickened by the thousands daily, and died unattended and without help. Many died in the open street, others dying in their houses, made it known by the stench of their rotting bodies. Consecrated churchyards did not suffice for the burial of the vast multitude of bodies, which were heaped by the hundreds in vast trenches, like goods in a ship's hold and covered with a little earth.”
People were not being able to understand its source or how it was spreading. “The mere touching of the clothes,” wrote Boccaccio, “appeared to itself to communicate the malady to the toucher.” The 14th century Europeans had little scientific understanding and many believed that the Black Death was a punishment for sins against God: “Either because of the influence of heavenly bodies or because of God’s just wrath as a punishment to mortals for our wicked deeds, the pestilence, originating some years earlier in the East, killed an infinite number of people as it spread relentlessly from one place to another until finally it had stretched its miserable length all over the West.” (The Decameron). Thus, for them the only way to survive was to win God’s forgiveness. This sudden revival of religious ardour resorted to fanaticism with a resolve to purge their communities of heretics. Anti-Semitism considerably aggravated and the Jews were charged with the accusation of poisoning public water supplies in an attempt to destroy the European civilisation. This allegation, merely caused by the lesser number of deaths on the part of Jews due to their hygienic practices, ensued the massacre of thousands of Jews in Europe from 1348 to 1351.
As claimed by Joseph P. Byrne in his book The Black Death (2004), Muslim women in Cairo also faced persecution during the Black Death. The religious lawyers of the Sultan of Cairo believed that the Plague was Allah’s punishment for the sin of fornication and promiscuity. The outcome of this theory was a law passed by the Sultan which prohibited women from coming out of their homes as they may entice men into debauchery. According to Byrne, a European historian and Associate Professor at Belmont University, this law was only lifted when “the wealthy complained that their female servants could not shop for food” (The Black Death). Among the less violent approaches, some engraved the symbol of cross with the words “Lord have mercy on us” on their front doors.
Many were overcome with the need to perform atonement and self punishment, a retribution for the sins committed against God. Flagellants were among such groups engaged in public displays of penance and punishment. The Flagellant Movement first emerged in the year of 1348, in Eastern Europe, around Hungary and Poland. Later its popularity extended to Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. They whipped themselves and one another with leather straps studded with sharp pieces of metal believing that this would grace humanity with God’s mercy. The flagellants repeated this three times a day for thirty-three and half days, and then they moved onto a different town. It was customary of them to fall to the ground in a crucified position, or holding three fingers in the air for perjurers, or lying face down for the adulterers. The ritual started with the Master of the Brethren thrashing them. When the whipping ceased, the Brethren would stand and begin lashing themselves.
The Flagellant Movement did become a ray of hope to people who felt defenceless and vulnerable in the face of the all-consuming Plague. But it soon became a concern to the Pope as this movement appeared to be capable of overthrowing the Papal supremacy. In October 1349, Pope Clement VI excommunicated many flagellants with the declaration that the Brethren disregarded and disrespected the rules of the Church. Consequently, the movement disappeared by the next year. Heinrich von Herford (1300-1370), a Dominican friar, chronicler, historian and theologian, wrote in Chronicon Henrici de Hervordia, “However the flagellants ignored and scorned the sentence of excommunication pronounced against them by bishops. They took no notice of the papal order against them – until princes, nobles and the more powerful citizens started to keep them at a distance […] they disappeared as suddenly as they had come, as apparitions or ghosts are routed by mockery.”
Similar to the present days, in their efforts to curb the contagion, the civil authorities had forbidden religious meetings and processions. When frightened people quarantined themselves in their homes, St. Charles ordered the erection of crosses in the main squares and street junctions so that the people could attend Masses and public rogations from their windows (analogous to the online church services provided these days). Indulgences or absolutions of sins were pronounced by religious figures for those who died without receiving last rites - which at times covered entire cities.
“The city was full of corpses…Moreover, the dead were honored with no tears or candles or funeral mourners; in fact, things had reached such a point that the people who died were cared for as we care for goats today…So many corpses would arrive in front of a church every day and at every hour that the amount of holy ground for burials was certainly insufficient for the ancient custom of giving each body its individual place; when all the graves were full, huge trenches were dug in all of the cemeteries of the churches and into them the new arrivals were dumped by the hundreds; and they were packed in there with dirt, one on top of another, like a ship’s cargo, until the trench was filled…” (The Decameron).
Before the plague, people lived their lives on the dictations of the Catholic Church. But, Priests and Bishops started to lose their credibility because they could not explain the plague or offer a cure. Clergymen couldn’t be present for confessions; more than half of the parish priests who gave the final sacraments to the dying, perished themselves, and the remaining ones were not willing to do the last rites. The comfort in religion started to diminish and as a result the people began to stray from the Church and question its teachings.
Priests and clergy had been reduced to human stature as they were dying just like ordinary beings. Some even refused to come into contact with the sick and abandoned their posts in fear. As a result, hastily trained and inexperienced priests started to get appointed and so, the Church’s teachings weakened, thereby putting the position of the Roman Catholic Church in serious question.
COVID-19: A HARBINGER OF CHANGE TO OUR RELIGIOUS PRACTICES
The 21st Century is no longer alien to the life-altering effects of plagues and pandemics. The Corona virus plummeted across the globe in 2020 and ransacked the global economy, socio-political hierarchies, and mankind at large. At an hour when words like ‘social distancing’ and ‘self quarantine’ punctuate every conversation, human lives have been greatly unsettled from their regular proceedings.
Religion and its myriad practices have not been spared from the clutches of change. Religious congregations have been one of the leading factors resulting in the spread of diseases, as seen during the Spanish Flu of 1918 as well. During the recent pandemic, several such events have taken place. A forbidden choir practice in Washington led to the spread of the Corona virus among its members, out of whom two have succumbed to it. A missionary movement of Islam called the Tableeghi Jamaat resulted in around 30% of the COVID-19 cases in India during April. Indifference to social distancing norms by officials of the Tirumala Tirupati Balaji temple of Andhra Pradesh resulted in over a hundred workers of the temple being affected with the Corona virus, including priests as well. Owing to such harrowing incidents of disease and demise, religious practices irrespective of faith, have been heavily cut down to avoid mass gatherings from taking place. Most religious institutions across the globe have shut their doors at the onset of the pandemic, thereby leading to an indefinite pause on one’s regular practices. Manifold alterations have occurred in the practice of every possible religion. Episcopal and Catholic dioceses around the world have ceased their Sunday masses and shifted to providing services over radio and internet, Anglican communities have banned in-person worship, drive-through confession systems have been extensively adopted, according to the Time magazine. St. Peter’s Square has been rid of pilgrims, the Mecca which is thronged by devotees every year during Eid has been shut down, Spain did not see its Semana Santa for the first time since 1933. Jerusalem’s Western Wall has debarred Jews from attending, while the al-Azhar at Egypt ordered a complete halt on sermons. Ram Navami celebrations have gone without a procession in several parts of India, Buddhism practitioners have been unable to celebrate their Higan holiday on strict orders of the Buddhist Churches of America. The dread of the pandemic can be verily seen in the replacement of Holy Water with sanitiser at the Maronite Church in Lebanon.
The curb on our engagement in religious and social practices at the outbreak of a virus, have unseeingly challenged our age-old traditions and customs, much akin to The Decameron’s account of how the Black Death had similarly questioned the position of the Roman Catholic Church. Owing to severe alterations in the services provided by the clergy, the masses were further prodded to question their religious beliefs and practices in return. The tradition of confessing before death had ceased during the Black Death, since the priests avoided visiting houses of the affected people, leading to further changes in customs involving disposal of the dead. Similar alterations have been found in recent times also, since social distancing has put a hold on rituals concerned with death. The pandemic has not only put a hold on our festivities and rituals, but also questioned the need for the same. The Varanasi ghats, which is a sacred spot for the Hindus to cremate their dead, has been going vacant for days. In normal times, this same spot is thronged by families of the deceased all year around, to satisfy their ideas of salvation. These situational changes have posed an important question on our culture: are our practices mostly social phenomena more than religious ones?
ADAPTATIONS OF RELIGIOSITY
The validity and necessity of religious customs have been a matter of debate during the ongoing pandemic. Bound by the chains of social distancing, the face of age old customs and traditions are presently undergoing noticeable changes. Religions, moulded by centuries of tradition, are quite reluctant to adapt to new forms of thinking about the world, especially when it concerns technology. Yet we have begun to see the proliferation of digital forms of worship, which may take the form of parishioners engaging via Zoom app. Religious figures seem to have started mending the gap between Faith and Science. With no hope of mass gatherings in the near future, most religious institutions have shifted to virtual methods. One of the many examples include the local priests in the USA, who conduct services accessible to all via Facebook and YouTube. Reportedly, even the Archbishop of Canterbury had resorted to a virtual Eucharist this year, thereby exemplifying the revolution of sorts, which religious practices have indeed undergone.
Apart from the recent pause on celebration of festivities, alterations have also been made on our rituals involving disposal of the deceased, and the mourning thereafter. The obsession with death has been prevalent in mankind since times immemorial. “Death” per se, has been a philosophical and spiritual subject, replete with theories of the Afterlife and the disintegration of the soul to other forms. Along with death, mourning in itself holds a lot of importance and religious value in every faith. Therefore, every religion has its own set of rules laid down for death and its subsequent mourning, all of which have been compromised in the wake of COVID-19. Similar instances occurred during the Black Death as well. With clergymen withering away at the face of the plague, the afflicted mass had to resort to laymen for securing their confessions before death. Not a single parish was available to bless the mourners, which made them question the position of the Roman Catholic Church, as well as the practice of their centuries old tradition, because it could not be feasibly carried out any longer. Sixty years after the horrendous Black Death, a Dominican friar came up with the Latin texts of Ars moriendi, or the “The Art of Dying”, which guided the common man to the pathway of a “good death”. Securing a peaceful death, religious mourning, and the passage to Afterlife have been important concepts across all religions - all of which have been contested by the ongoing pandemic.
At present, every religion across the world has had to compromise on bidding adieu to the deceased. With Sri Lanka doing away with burials, followers of Islam are also cremated along with Hindus. In certain parts of India, Hindus are being buried due to the absence of sufficient resources for a cremation. Stigma attached to the disease has made it difficult to safeguard the dignity of the deceased, as certain instances show how dead bodies have been secretly cremated at the dead of the night, away from prying eyes. In such a situation, customs and traditions have taken a backseat long ago. Customary mournings have been altered to keep in tandem with the norms of social distancing, which emotionally impacts the family of the deceased. Condolence meets, public gatherings to address the grief of one another, and even funeral processions have been banned at certain places. Supposed ideas of salvation and deliverance have gone for a toss at such hastily conducted funerals. In recent times, customs involving death and mourning only appear to be modes of psychological pacification for the bereaved loved ones of the deceased, as it does not fulfill any of its intended “purpose” otherwise. This raises the point that whether our rituals and customs are mostly social phenomena, than spiritual ones which really contribute to our well-being. Regular newspaper articles show instances of intermingling of customs, as every tradition has been adapted according to the rules of social distancing.
This brings forward the pertinent question: are these rituals necessary in the first place? With most religious institutions aiming towards technological discourses, the requirement of these traditions seem to falter. Death in itself has been altered, with no loved one to mourn for the deceased in most cases. Corona appears to trigger a deep sense of insecurity and a fear of an invisible intruder that gets inside the body and eventually destroys it, fuelling a need for collective rituals (from clapping hands for medical personnels to synchronized lighting of candles, and the like), but these fears have wholly remained unaddressed due to quarantine regulations. The most one has been able to perform is within the confines of their own homes. Binaries at every level have been dissolved; every deceased person receives the same send-off despite their race, caste, creed or colour, once again reinforcing the concept of La Danse Macabre, or “The Dance of Death” - a prominent allegory which emanated during the Black Death, suggesting that the inevitable “dance of death” engulfs all, irrespective of their social standing. With festivals getting restricted to the boundaries of our respective homes, the celebratory grandeur of the same have been questioned as well. It merely appears to be a social affair now, upon closer observation. The function of religious institutions have been modified to suit the need of the hour. Regular proceedings in Iranian mosques have been halted to provide space for setting up makeshift mask workshops. Archdioceses in certain countries have started relief work at their premises, putting religious sermons at the backseat. The Sikh community of Kolkata (West Bengal) have started relief work in their premises, where they provide food and shelter to people of all caste and creed. In such circumstances, the position of these religious institutions have been reduced to places of social interaction only. With people practicing religion from their homes, the premises of these institutions have been utilised better. Even huge amounts of money set aside for celebration of festivities have been used in charitable purposes by certain philanthropic groups. The Powai Bengali Welfare Association has used all the funds for Durga Puja celebration in providing emergency supplies for medical personnels and disaster management officials.
Be it Easter, Holi, or Eid, every festival has been celebrated with our families, at our very own homes. Keeping religion intact, religious practices have largely been questioned regarding their necessity of late, as apart from spreading connectedness, their ultimate need seems to falter. Therefore, to seek solace amidst the deadly pandemic, people have mostly resorted to virtual methods and spiritual means. An upsurge of spiritualism has been noted across all religions, since it is more convenient for one to pray and meditate at home for one’s well-being. But this trend has not been devoid of conflicts. As far as Christianity is concerned, while some have argued that the Church buildings do not hold any spiritual significance per se, others have debated that there can be no spiritual attachment without the physical altar of God. But amidst all such arguments, most religious practitioners have fruitfully chosen the spiritual way of worship.
CONCLUSION
COVID-19 has prominently marked a shift from religiosity to spirituality. With no celebration of festivals around the corner, and no rituals to secure a safe passage for the souls to the Afterlife, the validity and even necessity of traditional customs have been scrutinized. But that question does not extend to the existence of individual religions. Having nullified our obsession with staunch rules, the pandemic has set the ground for a steady debate for the possibility of religion to exist without its mandatory customs. Religion has shown the ability to stand in itself, independent of the practice of rituals, which were considered to be essential identity factors for each. The non-adherence to customs has been situational, but it also contributed to the bigger picture that drove home the truth, that religions can essentially thrive without redundant practices. Religious identities and orientations remain unblemished even if one does not abide by customs. Burial and cremation rituals have been juxtaposed between Hindus and Muslims. But that has not stepped in the way of a dying person’s lifelong identity and affiliation to a particular religion. If not anything, the pandemic has taught us that the funeral rites of a person cannot discern his religiosity. Rather a person’s faith consists of his sense of compassion, justice, and benevolence. Religion as a dividing factor has been undone at many levels, since most religious groups have come forward to partake in the battle against the pandemic, be that in the form of donating the funds set aside for festivities, or throwing open their premises for carrying out relief work.
The post-COVID-19 era can be expected to usher in a change of mankind’s religious sensibilities. Since it is an ongoing debacle, its outcomes on human life and the world civilization at large cannot be discerned for sure, but it does give the possibility to look forward to a humanity which considers religion more as a spiritual practice that purifies the body, mind, and soul, and not a rigid institution with hard and fast rules. At-home worship has been heralded as the new normal. Anglican priest Jonathan Warren Pagan encouraged people to resort to “Spiritual Communion” instead of gathering at churches during the pandemic. Pope Francis has also supported the mode of Spiritual Communion as a great way to uphold one’s spirits during the testing times. The regular calls for prayer from the mosques have also been tweaked in places like Kuwait, where instead of “hayya alas-salah” (come to prayer), the muezzin advises “as-salatu fi buyutikum” (pray in your homes).
The need for delving into oneself has been of utmost importance during a pandemic which has racked through all hierarchies of the world. Disrupted lifestyles and financial crises have greatly affected the mental health of the masses. The need for spirituality has been at a rise in order to alleviate the constant stress. People have started communicating more with themselves and shifted towards meditation and other modes of mental pacification. There are Apps such as Headspace, which promote meditation as a goal. These virtual platforms help in rediscovering solitude in the fight against anxiety and other mental health issues caused by the fatal virus.
There's likely to be a great multiplicity of forms of worship as well, as the ban on public worships and celebrations have sparked a conversation about the internal and external appearance of one’s faith; while religion is the external manifestation of mankind’s connection with the Divine, spirituality is the internal manifestation of that same connection. Praying and meditating in solitude can be considered as a great way of conserving one’s religiosity, instead of practicing a number of rituals. The current bar on attending religious services for an unknown period will have both short terms and long term consequences, even after the recommencement of what used to be a “normal life”, as it is a continuous process of learning to respond emotionally and psychologically to these disturbances to our routines. With social distancing becoming a norm and technology taking over the day, COVID-19 will indeed be a gamechanger of history as far as religion, spirituality, and traditions are concerned.
Works Cited:
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Mrittika Maitra and Amritaa Roy Chowdhury, Arya Mahila P. G. College, Varanasi. Mail: maitra.mrittika@gmail.com