Jake and Catholicism

As we were reading The Sun Also Rises, multiple references to Jake’s relationship with the Catholicism came up, and I started wondering why he seemed so ambivalent about it. The Church very important to him, and is one of the ways Jake tries to find meaning in his life. As we discussed in class, Jake’s spirituality is increased in Spain - he actively went to church, not only in the instance where he narrated his prayers, but once again with Brett, and multiple other unspecified times - during the vacation in Spain, there were casual mentions of Jake ‘returning from mass’.

One moment I’d like to examine in particular is the instance where Jake, Brett and the gang try to enter the church during the festival of San Fermin. The text reads: “They were all standing outside the chapel where San Fermin and the dignitaries had passed in, leaving a guard of soldiers.... We started inside and there was a smell of incense and people filing back into the church, but Brett was stopped just inside the door because she had no hat, so we went out again.. “ To me, this illustrates how Brett has been and continues to hold Jake back. Jake is stuck on Brett, and this prevents him from moving forward in his life. Her presence and romantic affairs are a constant reminder of his failure and injury.

Yet despite Jake’s attendance at church, it seems that bullfights serve to give him the meaning and sense of purpose that organized religion aims for. Jake knows everything and everyone in a bullfight, and is even part of the ‘legit’ aficionado club, despite being an American. Jake may not know what he’s working for in life, but he knows the goal of a bull fight and how things ought to happen. His objective during the contest is to judge the bullfighter, the bull, and how well the ideal ritual is carried out.  

Corrida de Toros also lines up with the passage of Ecclesiastes included in the beginning of The Sun Also Rises.  It reads: "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever…” The ceremony of bullfighting is the same. A bull dies and is replaced, the torero dies and is replaced, even the audience changes, but the ritual remains. Taking part in this tradition allows Jake to be part of something far larger and far older than himself, a sentiment that religious services also produce.

The movement from Paris to Spain also resembles a religious pilgrimage. It happens at a set time, once every year, for a specific event - the festival of San Fermin, which is a religious event as well as an enormous party. However for Jake, the religious observance is not held in church, but in the streets where the bulls run, and the ring where they fight. The parallels with pilgrimage are also supported by the changes in Jake’s lifestyle; in Spain, everything has a heightened level of religious observance, and the style of his days are more in line with the idealized pastoral life. This is exemplified in Jake’s regular trips to church, and the fishing trip he takes with Bill, where the two of them can, for a moment, talk earnestly and without irony, where they only (ha!) bring two bottles of wine, and where Jake literally works in the soil to find the worms.

However, I find it odd that Jake has such a strong desire for religious experience and tie to the Catholic Church, and yet he doesn’t attend regularly except in Spain, and appears deeply ambivalent towards it. On the one hand, we have quotes about how Aloysius is “a good Catholic name,” and on the other hand there is the scene from the fishing trip, where Bill says: ”’Listen, Jake.... are you really a Catholic?’ ‘Technically.’ ‘What does that mean?’ ‘I don't know.’” As we have seen multiple times throughout the book, Jake does not have an issue with commitment - he has a steady job, reads the bullfighting paper every night and visits Spain every year, and is still caught up on Brett - if he goes to something on and off there’s probably something holding him back.

Near the beginning of the book, Jake is alone in his  bedroom pondering his wound. At one point he thinks:  “The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyway. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it.” Perhaps Jake blames the Church for not being able to help him when he needed it most, after the war when he was wounded and suffering. But I also think there’s a social component to Jake’s lapses of observance in Paris. In the modern, cynical, apathetic West Bank culture, it seems that religion is another old-world value that is ignored or slightly mocked. Take Cohn, for example, whose older principles set him apart from the others and earn their annoyance. Jake is already deeply insecure about his wound, and this manifests in his overcompensation in various ways to fit in with the group, nevertheless. Like all of us, Jake decides certain aspects of his identity to present and suppress, and among people in the West Bank he suppresses his religious identity to avoid mockery. Yet in Spain, people are more religious and different rules apply than in Paris, so Jake can freely go to church. There is also the simple physical problem of having to cut social obligations to attend church, which can alienate people.