Jiminy Cricket, Spiritual Guide

Our spirit guide through Vienna's Zentralfriedhof cemetery.

Wiener Zentralfriedhof is pretty new by the standards of European burial places. Established in 1863 to accommodate the future needs of Vienna's growing population, the cemetery immediately took flak from conservative religious quarters for interring Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, and Jews on the same grounds (in separate sections, of course). Because the new friedhof was planned with space to expand in mind, it was also located pretty far from town--about half an hour today by tram.

This was still a bit à province for fashionable, sophisticated Viennese to contemplate depositing their mortal remains. After all, unlike in the US, in Europe, you don't buy a burial plot. You rent it and hope that your family continues to pay for its care and upkeep in perpetuity. The last thing you want is some distant, as-yet-unborn cousin to slack off for the sake of inconvenience.

To sweeten the pot, friedhof planners made a couple of smart moves. First, the cemetery is laid out like a grand park, and is positioned as a great place to spot wildlife such as foxes and deer (and intrepid crickets, naturally).

Second, they packed up the mortal remains of several A-list German and Austrian composers and musicians and moved them right into the Zentralfriedhof, as a means of drawing reverent fans and assuring future customers that the grounds at least would always be well cared for. These transplants included Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Schoenberg, and a couple of Strausses.

Third, and dearest to me, they added the magnificent St. Charles Borromeo church at the cemetery's center. It's a beautiful, domed structure, designed in a grand mausoleum style by Max Hegele in 1908, and surrounded by a large plaza with circular flower beds. The interior is relatively spare, but decorated in a way that blends traditional Romanesque elements with contemporary German Jugendstil (i.e., Art Nouveau).

Jugendstil details inside the Friedhofskirche zum heiligen Karl Borromäus, Zentralfriedhof, Vienna.

I don't count myself among the faithful. For me, visiting places of worship is a way of reading a faith community's spiritual, political, and social history in the icons and architecture that express its collective vision of the divine. Is that a form of communion? Maybe. But if so, it's with a people's belief systems, rather than with a deity. 

And while sacred architecture expresses ideas that may have persisted for millennia, any specific church is of course of its time and place. St. Charles Borromeo is certainly an imposing structure from the outside, and which keeps many Catholic design traditions such as cavernous interior space and natural lighting served by huge paned glass windows. Yet is also lacks any of the baroque and gothic design elements that mark so many other western European churches. Not to put too fine a point on it: they've omitted the spooky stuff. It's light and colorful rather than shadowy, with delicate rather than ornate features. There's neither a leering skull nor skulking gargoyle to be found. The depiction of the Last Judgement above the altar includes the damned, but they are rendered with simple human despair rather than ripped to shreds by horrific demons who devour and shit them out to restart the entire process of inflicting suffering all over again, for eternity.

Not so much of this. Jan Van Eyck, detail from The Last Judgment (1436), public domain use from the The Met.

It's possible that this gradual drift towards more modern representations of the Gospels, and a de-emphasis of fantastical and supernatural elements of the church's teachings, was what German sociologist Max Weber had in mind in 1918 when he described a cultural process of "disenchantment" (Entzauberung); that Enlightenment principles, the scientific method, and technical advancements had diminished the relevance of superstition and the mystical and supernatural aspects of religion to people's everyday lives. He did not mean this as a full-throated endorsement of "progress;" Weber instead saw science and rationality as an inadequate substitute for the role of faith communities. Science can describe factually what the world is like without reference to gods or spirits. But it could never act as a moral code nor tell people how they were supposed to feel about a world made up of atoms rather than magic.

Let's give Herr Professor Weber the benefit of the doubt, and assume he meant that disenchantment was a process that happened unevenly and in a non-linear fashion; it might advance further and faster in some places than in others, and it may even recede from time to time, like waves withdrawing from the beach even though the tide is rising. In this way, disenchantment as a sociological term can accommodate the emergence of a church such as St. Charles Borromeo as an adaptation in style to a changing social context informed by scientific rationalism, but not an abandonment of core teachings in christian theology, such as charity, humility, and love for others. It's possible to lose the monsters and keep the saints.

To that point, the grounds of the Zentralfriedhof contain at least two internments that illustrate the complicated notions of morality and the state of enchantment with the world.

In one section, Anatomie Gedenkstätte, people who were moved by their conscience to donate their bodies to medical training and scientific research are honored with a memorial garden and sitting space designed to encourage silent contemplation of their gifts.

Elsewhere are buried the cremains of Guido von List (1848-1819), a self-proclaimed mystic (aren't they all?) who was a proponent of a pan-Germanic religious revival based on an imagined, glorious Aryan racial past. You may be indirectly familiar with his work.

Which of these better captures the essence of disenchantment with the world?