If the gates of Hell should prevail against the Catholic Church, and should her mourners—condemned henceforth to practice the submissive rites of paganism—ask what epithet should be put on Her grave, I would like it to read, “she tried to put hats on everyone.”
For the Church really does have a mad passion for hatting, begun in her infancy, when Paul advised Christian women to cover their heads when they pray or prophesy. A stern custom, I suppose, but why it is the subject of fervent protest from modern people who never seem to pray, much less prophesy, I’ll never know. Now the custom has faded, but coverings remain. Women may go uncovered, but bishops are obliged to cover their august heads with hats that look like peanut halves.
I think it is a noble impulse. That a pope shall have a big hat, that a Cardinal shall have a small one, that a bishop shall have a pointy hat, and a priest a modest, black biretta to be removed during the words of the creed, et incarnatus est — it’s right and just.
For this is the first purpose of the hat, and indeed, of all regalia: not that it is something worth putting on, but that it gives one something to take off. It is difficult to honor others, difficult to swallow the various passions of envy and pride in order to acknowledge someone as someone better. A hat is a small mercy, both to oneself and others, in that it gives some definite, customary form to self-abasement, whether of a man to a passing woman or a monsignor to the passing mention of Jesus Christ. That we don’t wear hats now is fine, so far as fashion goes; but I wonder how much of our hatless fashion was fashioned by the fact that we don’t believe anyone deserves a tip of the hat.
The Church’s hats are called medieval, and they are. The spiritual power capped its cardinals and donned its deacons and the temporal power matched them with equal solemnity — not just the clerics but the lawyers, not just the presbyters but the pilgrims had their headdresses. There were hats for kings, mayors, judges, masters, alewives, almoners, stonemasons, and carpenters: a specification of the human top that moved from the top to bottom of the social hierarchy. I think the medievals thought it was fun. But historically speaking, the question is not why the Church still hangs on to the hat, but why the world has hung it up.
I think it is probably through cowardice. Being distinguished is not necessarily an act of pride or vanity, any more than being indistinct is a sign of humility. A man may be indistinct because he is lowly — or because he is a spy. St. Francis distinguished himself by his dress, but only a fool would call the beggars’ rags he wore a mark of distinction. Our politicians dress, with an actors’ care, to look exactly like the men to whom they politick, but only the naive would see this as a mark of their humility. To be distinguished is to be distinguished for others. Every monument erected at the top of a hill is also a target. And for a rich man to dress like a rich man shows him off, but also shows him to — to poor men who have a claim of justice on his wealth. For a priest to wear a collar distinguishes him from those who don’t, but it distinguishes in the way an outline distinguishes a figure, or a circle on a map points out a location — the priest stands revealed, in his dress, as the target of all spiritual need and weakness, which have a claim of justice on his prayers, preaching, and delivery of the sacraments.
There is nothing more predictable than those modern cultural productions that aim to reveal the hypocrisy and evil of Christendom’s supposedly just authorities: of lecherous popes, tyrannical kings, repressed nuns, impure knights, and on and on. But it has always seemed to me that the success of such shows rely entirely on a prior decision of Christendom to dress up and put a hat on power, precisely so that, whenever power is used for evil, the person is distinguished in doing so. We make movies about corrupt popes, to whom we consider ourselves morally superior, but the truth is that a corrupt millionaire or a corrupt bureaucrat is just as bad, often worse — but there’s no visual hypocrisy in his corruption. He has great power, and so a responsibility to use it well, but no tradition has marked his power with a hat, no custom has dressed his responsibility in a uniform, and no law has ladened whatever limited rule he enjoys with some necklace or ring, whose splendor he must ignore or misuse in his acts of corruption. In short, we can only scoff at the hypocrisy of the middle ages, or be titillated by the failings of Christendom, insofar as the middle ages already marked their people for such scoffing, organizing their appearance into such a state that, should they sin, their activity would be at odds with their dress, and moderns would get the chance to laugh. Cowardice presumes that men will fail, and so dresses them down. Courage presumes that men will succeed, and so dresses them up, raising the stakes of failure and the splendor of success.
Now, we do not respect a man who wears a jewel on his head to show the world he has power. But we do not blink to see a man wear a certain clothing brand to show that he is rich. It is not the clothes — which may well be nothing more than another iteration of a t-shirt and slacks — but the fact of buying them that distinguishes. And we do not admire the office that these clothes represent — for as far as I can tell, the capacity to afford Gucci does not come with a subsequent responsibility to give alms — as much as the access one has to this particular section of the market.
And this means that we are always given over to envy, rather than admiration, because dress never signifies a particular role, only a particular amount of money. And while we may be happy not to wear a miller’s cap or walk in a soldier’s shoes, having started on our own walk of life, we may always, at least potentially, get our hands on the money necessary to afford a rich man’s jeans.
The press recently bored us with reports that Mark Zuckerberg’s signature t-shirt, distinct in its lack of distinction, costs some $500 dollars. His t-shirt fits our world to a tee, even as it is too tight to fit the middle ages. The former world hides wealth. The latter reveals it. The former would argue that everyone is really the same, born with an equal opportunity to access a stratified order of goods. The latter would argue that everyone is different, that there is no equal opportunity in a diverse, unrepeatable Creation: and so differences of power should be highlighted, marked, and crowned for the sake of being obviously and easily ordered towards service—for the sake of showing off the evil and incongruity of failing to use power to serve those over whom it is wielded. With this much said, we might revisit Paul. For however temporary the custom of veiling women was, this much must be admitted, that it recognized a power-difference that comes, not from wealth, but from the hand of God — I mean the power of women over men. If veiling represses women, it still admits that they have a power worth repressing. We fancy that we have liberated women, and this may be true, but I imagine the contemporary repulsion towards the veil does not really arise from any sort of liberating decision as much as a confusion as to why anyone would make a fuss over something so indifferent as a woman’s hair.
Our world reduces all power difference to price difference, all authority to the authority that comes from a larger checking account. Our wealthy class is not distinguished by any particular hat. The wealthy are distinguished by having more expensive versions of the things that we all have — houses, cars, shoes, and the like. We imagine that it is democratic that billionaires wear jeans and eat cheeseburgers like the rest of us. The Church imagines, rather emphatically, that it is a sin. If the temporal were ordered to the spiritual, the Church would put a progressively larger hat on every man who culled a section of the world’s wealth beyond his immediate needs — flat caps for millionaires, stove-pipe hats for multi-millionaires, and large dunce hats for those who break a billion dollars, marking them out to beggars for miles around.
Still, it is necessary to warn lay Catholics not to be so foolish as to begin wearing hats because of all this. This is the prototypical error of the traditionalist, that they think they can have a “tradition” not as a custom embedded within a society, but as an individual act of rebellion against a decadent culture. Such self-assertions are as ill-fitting as the tweed jackets they sport. They make the traditionalist, with his defiant pipe, his beard grown out before its time, his (heaven help us) unnecessary cane, into the most modern of modernists, the young man wearing “tradition” like a brand of clothes. Rather, let us pray, improve ourselves, and await the day in which all power and authority will wear the mark of the Church once more.