Reformation Day and Deathworks

On Saturday we visited St Andrews Castle. It lays in ruins, with the occasional structure intact. A room in the tower gate where pedestrians would have entered still remains, as does the room housing the dungeon - a circular opening into which prisoners were lowered into a larger room underneath. Practically medieval. The ruins tell a story of the fall of the Roman Catholic church, the death of Cardinal Beaty (who fathered over 20 illegitimate children) at the hands of reformers, and the eventual capture of the castle by French Catholic reinforcements who captured and enslaved John Knox for two years before his eventual release.

But it is not all that is in ruins. Nor is it all that tells a story. Before exiting the gift shop where tickets are sold, one has the chance to walk through a brief series of displays telling illustrating the castle's story. Towards the end, a statue of John Knox, the famous Scottish Reformer, leans over the pulpit in the middle of an earnest sermon. The ruins and story are here. For Knox is covered in spiders and spiderwebs, 'decorations' for Halloween. Someone has, perhaps inadvertently, crafted a deathwork.

The late sociologist Phillip Rieff coined the term - a deathwork is an assault on objects of culture's admiration. Carl Trueman summarizes Rieff's deathworks saying,

"A deathwork... represents an attack on established cultural art forms in a manner designed to undo the deeper moral structure of society... Deathworks make the old values look ridiculous. They represent not so much arguments against the old order as subversions of it. They aim at changing the aesthetic tastes and sympathies of society so as to undermine the commands on which that society was based"

(Trueman, Rise and Triumph, 96-97).

Two days before reformation day, nothing tells the story of ruins of a culture like spiders and cobwebs hanging from the preaching figure of a prominent reformer. The arguments need not be articulated - a picture is worth a thousand words.