Sainthood and Race: Marked Flesh, Holy Flesh 0415740126, 9780415740128

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
Introduction
1 An African Saint in Medieval Europe: The Black Saint Maurice and the Enigma of Racial Sanctity
2 The Threefold Man: Lavater, Physiognomy, and the Rise of the Western Icon
3 The Recanonization of Saint Cyprian: A Deep History of Black Religion and Racialism
4 The Interspecies Logic of Race in Colonial Peru: San Martín de Porres’s Animal Brotherhood
5 Cuba’s Virgin of Charity: Sanctity, Caribbean Creolization, and the Color Continuum
6 Saffron Saint of the Most Spiritual Race: Sundar Singh and the Western Oriental Christ
7 Racialized Crossings: Coptic Orthodoxy and Global Christianities
8 The “Desolated Center”: Baby Suggs, Holy, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
9 The Post-Racial Saint? From Barack Obama to Paul of Tarsus
10 The Pre-Racial Saint? Ma(r)king Aztec God-Bodies
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Sainthood and Race

In the popular imagination, saints exhibit the best characteristics of humanity, universally recognizable but condensed and embodied in an individual. Recent scholarship has asked an array of questions concerning the historical and social contexts of sainthood and opened new approaches to its study. What happens when the category of sainthood is interrogated and inflected by the problematic category of race? Sainthood and Race: Marked Flesh, Holy Flesh explores this complicated relationship by examining two distinct characteristics of the saint’s body: the historicized, marked flesh and the universal, holy flesh. The essays in this volume comment on this tension between particularity and universality by combining both theoretical and ethnographic studies of saints and race across a wide range of subjects within the humanities. Additionally, the book’s group of emerging and established religion scholars enhances this discussion of sainthood and race by integrating topics such as gender, community, and colonialism across a variety of historical, geographical, and religious contexts. This volume raises provocative questions for scholars and students interested in the intersection of religion and race today. Molly H. Bassett is an assistant professor of religious studies at Georgia State University, United States Vincent W. Lloyd is an assistant professor of religion at Syracuse University, United States

Routledge Studies in Religion

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

7 Christianity, Tolerance and Pluralism A Theological Engagement with Isaiah Berlin’s Social Theory Michael Jinkins 8 Negative Theology and Modern French Philosophy Arthur Bradley 9 Law and Religion Edited by Peter Radan, Denise Meyerson and Rosalind F. Atherton

15 The Entangled God Divine Relationality and Quantum Physics Kirk Wegter-McNelly 16 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy A Critical Inquiry Paul J. DeHart 17 Animal Ethics and Theology The Lens of the Good Samaritan Daniel K. Miller

10 Religion, Language, and Power Edited by Nile Green and Mary Searle-Chatterjee

18 The Origin of Heresy A History of Discourse in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity Robert M. Royalty, Jr.

11 Shared Idioms, Sacred Symbols, and the Articulation of Identities in South Asia Edited by Kelly Pemberton and Michael Nijhawan

19 Buddhism and Violence Militarism and Buddhism in Modern Asia Edited by Vladimir Tikhonov and Torkel Brekke

12 Theology, Creation, and Environmental Ethics From Creatio Ex Nihilo to Terra Nullius Whitney Bauman

20 Popular Music in Evangelical Youth Culture Stella Sai-Chun Lau

13 Material Religion and Popular Culture E. Frances King 14 Adam Smith as Theologian Edited by Paul Oslington

21 Theology and the Science of Moral Action Virtue Ethics, Exemplarity, and Cognitive Neuroscience Edited by James A. Van Slyke, Gregory R. Peterson, Kevin S. Reimer, Michael L. Spezio and Warren S. Brown

22 Abrogation in the Qur’an and Islamic Law Louay Fatoohi 23 A New Science of Religion Edited by Gregory W. Dawes and James Maclaurin 24 Making Sense of the Secular Critical Perspectives from Europe to Asia Edited by Ranjan Ghosh 25 The Rise of Modern Jewish Politics Extraordinary Movement C. S. Monaco 26 Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality Ethnographic Approaches Anna Fedele and Kim E. Knibbe 27 Religions in Movement The Local and the Global in Contemporary Faith Traditions Robert W. Hefner, John Hutchinson, Sara Mels and Christiane Timmerman

31 An Introduction to Jacob Boehme Four Centuries of Thought and Reception Edited by Ariel Hessayon and Sarah Apetrei 32 Globalization and Orthodox Christianity The Transformations of a Religious Tradition Victor Roudometof 33 Contemporary Jewish Writing Austria after Waldheim Andrea Reiter 34 Religious Ethics and Migration Doing Justice to Undocumented Workers Ilsup Ahn 35 A Theology of Community Organizing Power to the People Chris Shannahan 36 God and Natural Order Physics, Philosophy, and Theology Shaun C. Henson

28 William James’s Hidden Religious Imagination A Universe of Relations Jeremy Carrette

37 Science and Religion One Planet, Many Possibilities Edited by Lucas F. Johnston and Whitney A. Bauman

29 Theology and the Arts Engaging Faith Ruth Illman and W. Alan Smith

38 Queering Religion, Religious Queers Edited by Yvette Taylor and Ria Snowdon

30 Religion, Gender, and the Public Sphere Edited by Niamh Reilly and Stacey Scriver

39 Sainthood and Race Marked Flesh, Holy Flesh Edited by Molly H. Bassett and Vincent W. Lloyd

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Sainthood and Race Marked Flesh, Holy Flesh Edited by Molly H. Bassett and Vincent W. Lloyd

First published 2015 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sainthood and race : marked flesh, holy flesh / edited by Molly H. Bassett and Vincent W. Lloyd. — 1 [edition]. pages cm. — (Routledge studies in religion ; 39) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Saints. 2. Christian saints. 3. Race. 4. Race—Religious aspects. I. Bassett, Molly H., 1980–, editor. BL480.S25 2014 206'.1—dc23 2014011038 ISBN: 978-0-415-74012-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-81582-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figures

ix

Introduction

1

MOLLY H. BASSETT AND VINCENT W. LLOYD

1

An African Saint in Medieval Europe: The Black Saint Maurice and the Enigma of Racial Sanctity

18

GERALDINE HENG

2

The Threefold Man: Lavater, Physiognomy, and the Rise of the Western Icon

45

BRIAN BANTUM

3

The Recanonization of Saint Cyprian: A Deep History of Black Religion and Racialism

66

JARED HICKMAN

4

The Interspecies Logic of Race in Colonial Peru: San Martín de Porres’s Animal Brotherhood

82

CHRIS GARCES

5

Cuba’s Virgin of Charity: Sanctity, Caribbean Creolization, and the Color Continuum

102

JALANE SCHMIDT

6

Saffron Saint of the Most Spiritual Race: Sundar Singh and the Western Oriental Christ TIMOTHY DOBE

124

viii

Contents

7 Racialized Crossings: Coptic Orthodoxy and Global Christianities

150

ANGIE HEO

8 The “Desolated Center”: Baby Suggs, Holy, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

164

PAMELA M. HALL

9 The Post-Racial Saint? From Barack Obama to Paul of Tarsus

182

VINCENT W. LLOYD

10 The Pre-Racial Saint? Ma(r)king Aztec God-Bodies

199

MOLLY H. BASSETT

Contributors Index

217 219

Figures

1.1

Statue of the black St. Maurice of Magdeburg. Magdeburg Cathedral, Germany, 1240–1250. Courtesy of Hickey & Robertson, Houston/The Menil Foundation. 1.2 Statue of the black St. Maurice of Magdeburg (detail). Magdeburg Cathedral, Germany, 1240–1250. Courtesy of Hickey & Robertson, Houston/The Menil Foundation. 2.1 Hans Holbein, “Christ Talking to Two Men,” Essays Vol. 1, 162. Image from Wellcome Library, London. Accessed August 15, 2013. 4.1 A Humble Statuette. Photograph by author. 4.2 The Classic Iconography of San Martín de Porres 5.1 A contemporary Cuban holy card depicts the Virgin of Charity hovering above the Three Juans, who are often regarded as representative Cubans. The Christ child has a lighter complexion than the Virgin, which suggests white paternity and which, according to Cuban racial hierarchies, marks the progeny as an adelantado, or an “advanced” offspring who is assigned a higher racial status than that of their parent of color. 6.1 The fakir on the bed of nails. From William Butler’s Land of the Veda (1864). 6.2 Sadhu Sundar Singh, Break room, Henderson Memorial Girls High School, Kharar, Punjab. Photograph by author. 6.3 Warner Sallman, Head of Christ, 1940. Courtesy of Warner Press. 7.1 A passing pilgrim taking blessings from icons of the Virgin and St. Moses the Black in the Bulaq district of Cairo, Egypt. Photograph by author. 10.1a (front) and 10.1b (back) Xipe Totec. Painted volcanic tuff, mid-fourteenth–mid-fifteenth century. © Museum der Kulturen. Basel, Switzerland. 10.2 Chicomexochitl (7 Flower) effigies, Veracruz, Mexico. Photograph by author.

19

20

54 83 93

104 128 130 131

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Introduction Molly H. Bassett and Vincent W. Lloyd

Some people think Zell Kravinsky is crazy. Other people think he is a saint. After a sputtering academic career that yielded him two PhD’s and no job, Kravinsky made a fortune in real estate. Then he gave it all away: he donated more than $40 million to charity. Later he voluntarily donated one of his kidneys to a stranger. He calculated that the one-in-four-thousand chance that he would die during the operation outweighed the nearly 100 percent chance that the recipient would die without the kidney. “I thought, at first, that people would understand . . . But they don’t understand math.” Then, he talked of giving more—perhaps the other kidney. Or even more: “My organs could save several people if I gave my whole body away.”1 Kravinsky followed in his life the same economic mind that brought him a fortune from real estate.2 He calculated values of buildings or people or organs, estimated risk factors, and circumvented the competition (he didn’t tell his wife or children about his kidney donation until after the operation). Like the classical saint—the medieval Christian saint—Kravinsky literally and broadly applied the privileged precepts of the age, now economic rationality rather than Christian theological teachings. No longer subject to the domain of the bishops of Rome or Wall Street, the saint lives as if the dominant but distanced discourse is actually true, a purity of commitment that prompts hoi polloi—steadfast in our healthy cynicism—to find a holy man or a psychotic. But Kravinsky doesn’t see his life as special. When a psychiatrist evaluating his fitness for organ donation said, “You’re doing something you don’t have to do,” Kravinsky responded, “I do have to do it. You’re missing the whole point. It’s as much a necessity as food, water, and air.” Like the classical saint, it is Kravinsky’s body that is marked and that marks his commitment.3 An article about Kravinsky in the New Yorker includes a photograph of him holding an x-ray displaying the absence of his donated kidney, the scientific proof needed for a modern saint. Like the classical saint, Kravinsky’s body begins unmarked, ordinary—which is to say, in modern America, white. If the saint’s body were already marked, how could we tell it was holy? Moreover, Kravinsky’s achievement depends on the marked flesh of others. The site of Kravinsky’s healing, where he achieves what he calls “ethical ecstasy,” is no longer a leper colony but “an

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Molly H. Bassett and Vincent W. Lloyd

inner-city hospital where he could be fairly confident that a donated kidney would go to a low-income African American patient.” Indeed, Kravinsky’s nondirected (though not particularly anonymous) donation did hit its mark, his kidney making its way into the abdomen of a twenty-nine-year-old single black woman. “I prayed. I left it in God’s hand,” said the woman, and God provided Zell Kravinsky. The words of Kravinsky’s single black woman (her name is never provided) grate against the story of a secularized saint. Racial difference tracks religious difference as the quaint folk belief of the single black woman celebrates her secular savior, whose whiteness and rationality go hand in hand. Furthermore, Kravinsky himself is the head of a healthy Jewish family, with a doctor-wife, Emily Finkelstein, and four children, and it is tempting to read his aspirations to ethical purity in an appropriately post-Protestant manner as also concealing the quasi-racial mark of his own Jewish origins. In other words, attention to racial difference complicates the meaning of saintliness. Of course, Kravinsky’s hyperrationality is only one model of the modern, secular saint. Might Oprah Winfrey be the Venus to his Mars, the hyperemotive correlate for a modernity set on compartmentalizing the rational and the affective and lauding both? And is it Oprah’s blackness, or her post-blackness, that makes it possible for her to play the part of the secular saint?4 In other words, attention to saintliness might complicate our understandings of race. These questions are foreclosed by the two approaches to studying saints that seem the most intuitive: the contextualist approach and the humanist approach. Most narrowly, the contextualist approach focuses on saints canonized by the Roman Catholic Church and investigates their lives and the worlds in which they lived. To do this, hagiography and artistic representations of the saint may be helpful, but only when read against the background of a commitment to historical veracity. In contrast, the humanist approach understands the existence of saintly individuals as part of the human condition. These special people are found in all times and all places with the same special qualities. To name those qualities is the task of the humanist scholar: perhaps they include charisma, or excess, or supererogation, or transgression, or something a bit queer. Yet the pesky will to truth animates both contextualist and humanist approaches, and their convergence is often seen in collections of essays on saints. With a chapter from here and there, then and now, such collections explicitly or implicitly illuminate the truths of the human condition by examining the specificities of saints or what might be translated, somehow, as saints. Of course, as scholars of race have reminded us, the human condition is the condition of white humans—or, rather, the fantasy of white humanity. A third approach, the critical approach, takes saints as symptoms.5 The complications of a saint herself and the contest around her saintliness point toward deeper tensions in a society that the figure of the saint attempts to soothe. Put another way, the purportedly perfect subjectivity of the saint

Introduction

3

offers a model to be emulated by the good subject. The saint is perfectly interpellated: her being perfectly embodies the ideology of the status quo. Indeed, Althusser’s seminal discussion of interpellation uses the address of God to (Saint?) Peter as a paradigmatic example of the way ideology forms a subject, along with Moses and Christ.6 The saint’s will conforms to the will of God, acting precisely as she ought to, without fail. Ideology succeeds by concealing the contradictions it entails, and the critical approach to saints reveals those contradictions in the paradigmatic figure of the saint so as to reveal them more broadly in society. For such a critical project, the saint is particularly useful because of the condensation of ideological meaning in her body and the simultaneous failure to embody what she is supposed to (unlike the Messiah, the saint is only purportedly perfect). What role might race have in the critical study of sainthood? The scholarly consensus has it that race, far from being natural or biological, is perpetuated by ideology (the Marxist scholar would add that race is instrumental in perpetuating capitalist ideology). Examining saints as embodiments of ideology could then expose the unnaturalness of race and the mechanisms by which race is made to seem natural. But race is often conceived as a peculiarly modern social formation, whereas sainthood is often conceived as peculiarly premodern. If that is the case, exploring the nexus of race and saints is unlikely to find critical traction. More worryingly, conceiving of the racial saint as ideology embodied overlooks the agency of the saint—and so takes away the agency of the racialized subject. Certainly that agency is complicated, for the saint must follow preexisting patterns to be recognized as saintly. Yet the saint must also have her own idiosyncrasies, must have her own unique story within the genre of hagiography. If she acts exactly as another saint acted, she does not qualify as a saint. This, of course, is one dimension of a broader worry about ideology and the way a scholarly focus on the overbearing power of ideology takes away the possibility of agency. Saints seem a particularly fruitful site to reimagine agency because of saints’ exemplary freedom and constraint. Saints follow norms excessively, but in doing so they do not become mindless bureaucrats. Rather, they exhibit impressive creativity and imagination. Recent scholarship has begun to conceive agency in similar ways: not as autonomous choice making or resistance to hegemonic ideology but as self-formation within a context of (often religious) constraint.7 The pious Muslim or evangelical Christian exercises her agency as she aspires to cultivate her virtue, to follow the path of God. All the more so, we submit, for the saint. The critical approach to sainthood, unlike the contextual and humanistic approaches, pays as much attention to representations of sainthood as it does to the reality of sainthood. Indeed, the distinction between representation and reality is often considered unhelpful on this approach. Hagiography, the visual arts, song, and oral traditions all are condensations of ideology in the same way that the saint’s body is; all are potentially fruitful

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sites of critical study. But if we want to be attentive to the agency of the saint or the possibilities of agency suggested by the saint, representations of a saint must be read neither as pure ideology nor as pointers to the truth of the saint but as records of self-formation—or, as some would put it, ethical praxis. The scholarly literature that moves in this direction, that seeks out agency as self-formation, has rarely entered conversations about race. Advocates of this direction, such as Saba Mahmood and Ruth Marshall, do see self-formation as political, albeit in an indirect sense. Because such practices are inscrutable both to secular liberalism, with its focus on individual autonomy, and to many Western radicals, with their focus on resistance, Mahmood and Marshall locate a subtle rejection of colonialism and its postcolonial remnants in practices of religious self-formation—and we will add, by extension, the practices of the saint. But colonialism is not the same thing as racism, no matter how often they are conflated. What would it man to think of inhabiting racial terrain, inhabiting the norms of race? What would it mean to think of virtue not only as proper religious practices but also as proper racial practice—given that racial and religious norms equally constitute the terrain in which the subject, or the saint, finds herself? And what would the possibilities of political mobilization look like that harness such practices, particularly given the complicated relationship of personal piety to liberation in the Arab Spring? In all of this, the category of the saint may seem to have been assumed, to have taken on an unjustified universal status when, in fact, sainthood has a very particular, very provincial history rooted in Roman Catholicism. By what right can the concept be extended to non-Western, non-Catholic contexts—say, to the context of Zell Kravinsky? Of course, the same questions can be asked for race, often taken to be a modern, Western social construction. Searching for such a right, one that would authorize our usage of the terms, in the facts of history or philology is misguided. Indeed, since Nietzsche, we have seen that the search itself for such a right is misguided. What matters, rather, are the effects of using such terms: what they allow us to see and what assumptions they bring with them. But those assumptions are worryingly Eurocentric and modern (race) or Christian (saints).8 The essays in this volume both complicate those assumptions and creatively extend the usage of these terms. They ask whether race really is a product of modernity or whether there might be much more continuity between the medieval and the modern than we assumed. They question whether saints might be produced at the boundaries between religious traditions, for example at points of intersection between Christianity and Hinduism. They probe ostensibly pre-racial (Aztecs) and post-racial (Obama) contexts to see what insights attention to race, when coupled with the concept of the saint, might produce. In short, the essays are mindful of the specific history of the concepts of race and saints, they further interrogate that history, but they also toy with that history, in some cases turning it inside out. Distinctions do

Introduction

5

matter, and the difference between the saint and the martyr, or the prophet, or the sheikh, are attended to in the essays that follow. But this attentiveness to difference does not stifle the possibilities unleashed by creatively but rigorously interrogating the category of the saint. Before summarizing the chapters that follow, we will limn some of the major themes found in the scholarship on saints. In doing so, we are particularly focused on classical—Christian, medieval—saints, but we are also opening questions about how the classical categories of sainthood might be inflected by discussions of race. It is with these classical categories and their racial inflections in mind that we will be able to extend analyses of the saint to less familiar and perhaps less comfortable contexts, such as that of Zell Kravinsky. MARKED The body of the saint is often considered to be, paradoxically, specifically marked and representing the universal. The saint has a specific appearance, community, gender, and story, but the saint is also perceived to provide a universal model for the good life (or the holy life). Perhaps most famously, St. Francis was marked with holes: his hands and feet received the stigmata, the wounds of Christ. So did Padre Pio, likely the most famous twentiethcentury Catholic saint, canonized in 2002. Some saints are accompanied by their characteristic instruments of marking (the martyred St. Catherine of Alexandria always has her torture wheel and sometimes the pincers that were used to remove her breasts), while others’ flesh was marked by less visible suffering and pains (St. Catherine of Siena could only eat communion bread). Indeed, miracle is a prerequisite for sainthood, and more often than not miracle involves the marking of flesh. In another sense, to become a saint entails losing one’s marking, losing one’s affiliation with particular places or communities. To be marked by holiness is to be marked by nothing else. Scholars have noted the role that anxiety around hybridity plays in defining religion and the religious self, particularly in Christianity and particularly during periods of contact with the unfamiliar (the Crusades, the colonial encounter, etc.).9 Achieving purity of faith and of a faithful body stanches that anxiety. To be a pure Christian, and so to be saintly, means being not-Jewish, not-pagan, not-Indian. And so, at other times this anxiety prompted by difference is dealt with through incorporation. In the colonial Americas, a select group of natives who had converted to Catholicism were venerated as saints. While some have taken this to mean that missionaries were more respectful of the humanity of those they were to convert than might otherwise be thought, with that humanity displayed through the details of native saints’ hagiographies, it seems an open question whether the tension between the saint as marked and unmarked produces that sort of genuine respect.10

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A closely related question, explored by Garces in his chapter, concerns the relation of saintly humanity to that of the nonhuman, particularly to animals. St. Francis famously has the ability to speak with animals; does this represent a broader affinity between saintly humanity and (likeable?) animals? Perhaps confirming the purity of Christianness, and Europeanness, was at some moments more relevant than the purity of humanness. Or perhaps, as Agamben and Derrida have suggested, there is a natural affinity between the holy man and the animal (and particularly the wolf, or werewolf): both are necessary to the community of ordinary men but are also excluded from that community, an operation at the core of sovereign power.11 In this way, the saint may be marked as animal, even if the saint’s bodily integrity remains. This approach to the marked and unmarked character of the saint suggests the provocative and oversimplified notion that unmarked existence is brought about through figures who are marked. The distinctions between Jew and Greek, man and woman, slave and free can be erased by the stigmatized figure of Christ. The staid church hierarchies of the high Middle Ages can be disrupted by the mendicant saints, most prominent among them Francis. Might it be the same case, in our secularized, modern world, for the racial saint? As Lloyd’s chapter ponders, might Barack Obama achieve (seemingly) a post-racial world because of the marking of his own flesh, just as the saint would? Indeed, such racial/post-racial figures are themselves the subject of much postsecular hagiography and other saintly apparatus. Yet this approach, it must be remembered, is indeed oversimplified and too easily lends itself to the critical approach to saintliness that would only see the saint as embodying the ideological contradictions of the society around her. A more interesting question is how the practices of self-formation in such figures are both constituted by and in tension with the racial and religious ideological waters in which they swim. The marking of the saint and the staging of the saint—that is, the performance of saintliness—as pure or animal or stigmatized are often hard to distinguish. The saint is marked in performance: St. Francis had a witness when he received the stigmata, and the saint’s miracles must be confirmed by witnesses. The marking of the saint is a public act, dependent on its publicity, just as the marking of racialization is dependent on a public or imagined public. In both cases, social scripts are reinforced by authorizing apparatus, but the marking of saintly performance would seem to be individual where the marking of race would seem to be performed collectively. But is race really sung as a chorus, or might it also be understood as individual marked performances—at least for those whose race is marked, as opposed to the unmarked existence of whiteness? If the body of the saint is purified of its contingent markings, it is given one new, necessary marking: its exemplarity. The saint is not just an exemplar; she is a moral exemplar. Those who aspire to act rightly are encouraged to model their behavior on that of saints. However, there is much ambiguity

Introduction

7

in the moral status of the saint. For example, does the saint simply fulfill her moral duty exceptionally well, or does she go above and beyond her duty (i.e., how is supererogation related to sainthood)? Or does the moral status of the saint suggest that alternative ethical idioms to that of duty are necessary, perhaps the idiom of virtue? In a widely discussed article, philosopher Susan Wolf provocatively argued that sainthood is, in fact, undesirable.12 Wolf understands a saint to be “a person whose every action is as morally good as possible.” If the moral goodness of actions is understood on either Kantian or utilitarian grounds, Wolf claims, sainthood “does not constitute a model of personal well-being toward which it would be particularly rational or good or desirable for a human being to strive.” In short, Wolf’s argument is that there are many nonmoral values—such as musical performance and humor—that are impossible to achieve for the saint. Saints are not pleasant people to be around, nor people we genuinely desire to be, Wolf claims. There have been many, varied responses to Wolf’s article, including notably an article by Robert Adams that argues that saints must be understood in their religious context.13 In such contexts, rich with narrative and tradition, it is clear that the saint does more than mechanically fulfill a certain conception of duty. Indeed, this approach to understanding saints within a religious community, as particularly virtuous members of such a community, has a long history. William James wrote of sainthood as “the collective name for the ripe fruits of religion in a character.”14 Scholars taking a comparative approach have suggested that a virtue model may be a useful way to understand the ethical significance of saints across religious contexts. Saints and Virtues, a collection of essays published in 1987, explores the ethical significance of saints in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and beyond at a variety of historical moments.15 The editor, John Stratton Hawley, summarizes the collection’s findings: “Within each religion a powerful body of tradition emphasizes not codes but stories, not precepts but personalities, not lectures but lives.” In other words, the study of saints complements the turn in ethics to virtue: it emphasizes narrative, tradition, and practice instead of rules, beliefs, and decisions. Such a move is helpful in understanding how a saint may be marked by exemplarity. It is not simply that a saint always makes the right choices but that a saint somehow embodies the values of a good life. But discussions of virtue ethics often presume that good life is defined by a community’s values— and so often presume relative homogeneity of a community. Focusing on race exposes the limitations and proposes revisions to the virtue-ethical approach to sainthood. Is normativity necessary for sainthood, or for the study of sainthood? In the scholarly literature, discussions of saintly ethics and comparative studies of sainthood sometimes speak past each other. For example, the mid-1980s saw the publication of both Hawley’s Saints and Virtues and Kieckhefer and Bond’s Sainthood: Its Manifestations in World Religions, a collection

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Molly H. Bassett and Vincent W. Lloyd

that brackets questions of normativity; yet there is strikingly little overlap between the two sets of studies. More generally, studies of saints that focus on art historical or hagiographical material often seem removed from questions of how one ought to live. The chapters that follow in this collection, in contrast, fold questions of representation and of ethics into each other, taking the two as inseparable. Where Hall’s chapter explores literary representations of saintliness, Hickman’s explores a museum representation, and Heo’s explores saintliness inflected through virtual media, Dobe’s and Bassett’s discern and reflect on the practices of saintly (in the rich, broad sense) individuals. Despite the varying contexts, the saints found in these chapters have in common some sense of exemplarity, and with exemplarity comes normativity: the attractive and repulsive force exerted by the saint with its origin in the sense that from the saint’s flesh radiates commands. HOLY In its strictest sense, sainthood requires the imprimatur of religious authority, specifically, the pope. However, the process is often complex: popular demands, local interests, and politics of all sorts influence who is canonized. Indeed, there is a sense in which sainthood—both the saint herself and the response of her devotees—is opposed to all authority. If the saint and her devotees believe that her sanction comes directly from God, the authority of religious institutions seems insignificant in comparison. The example of St. Francis of Assisi is a reminder that saints have famously challenged religious authorities—and that saints have also, less famously, been used by religious authorities. Scholars have attempted to cut through this complexity by offering criteria, independent of canonization and independent of any specific religious tradition, to discern the holiness of saints. Scholars of religion and society such as Max Weber and Joachim Wach created typologies of religious figures, including the saint, the reformer, the prophet, and the magician, distinguishing each based on whence and how they claim authority.16 Weber famously classes the saint as one who expresses religious virtuosity, typical in an elite subset of a religious community. The phenomenologist of religion Gerardus van der Leeuw classes the saint together with the king, medicine man, priest, and preacher as a “Sacred Man” who is himself a source of power rather than one who channels power.17 Others have pointed to the role of the saint as an exemplar as the source of holiness, as well as to the tensions inherent in this role of exemplar. On the one hand, the saint is to be imitated; on the other hand, the saint is venerated because of his or her distinctive status. The tension is clear: if a saint could be imitated she would not be distinctive; if a saint were distinctive she could not be imitated. Kieckhefer and Bond identify this central paradox of sainthood as the unifying feature of saints in every religious tradition: “If

Introduction

9

there are individuals in each tradition who come to be both imitated and venerated, these individuals may by definition be regarded as the saints of each tradition.”18 But the search for criteria of holiness has been much maligned by recent scholars of religion.19 Such a search commits the scholarly sin of essentializing, searching for one shared characteristic of many different things—and, more likely than not, misidentifying that characteristic and so skewing our perception of those many different things. More subtly, such a search commits the theological sin of Protestantism, privileging individual holiness over the always already embedded, mediated, and performed nature of religious practice. The scholar becomes crypto-theologian, making claims about the location of the holy, treated as mysterious and sui generis, and so ultimately the conduit to the transcendent, even if the secular scholar purports only to be describing what she finds in her data. Along with these scholarly and theological sins comes the racial sin that accompanies the perspective of whiteness, turning the array of cultural and racial difference present in world religions into various avatars of a familiar, unmarked, uncolored European-American model. “Freud murdered sainthood,” writes Aviad Kleinberg.20 Presumably Kleinberg means that sainthood has been reduced to psychological quirk, or psychosis. Instead of listening to God through the saint, we listen to the saint to diagnose her mental disorder. But Freud also symbolizes a broader reductionist mentality that offers nonreligious explanations for apparently religious phenomena. If not psychological, the explanation for religious beliefs and practices is economic or sociological or biological. However, resistance has grown to reductionism, and not just from those whose religious commitments are the target of reduction. Subtler stories are being told about the way that religious ideas persist, beneath the surface, in our ostensibly secular culture. The secularization thesis, claiming that religion would fade away in modernity, has given way to accounts of secularism, the exclusion of religious ideas from public discourse.21 Secularism excludes religion and so represses religion but does not destroy religion. We are collectively haunted by our repressed religious heritage as it manifests under new names and in new forms—as hope and love, as celebrity culture, or as deference to political authority. And so with sainthood: what was once explicit has become implicit, gone underground, taken a thousand masks (some of them black and brown). But such stories of decline are always hyperbolic, for it is pure fantasy to imagine that “before” the murder of the saint the holy would sit contently in its proper place, embodied here and here but not there. Similarly, the novelty of secularism is often exaggerated, as the territory of the religious, in whatever form, has always been contested, its boundaries marked by inclusion and exclusion of the complex terrain of differences that characterize lived experience. Still, the dynamics of secularism are important to account for in examining sainthood, and they inform many of the chapters that follow. When

10 Molly H. Bassett and Vincent W. Lloyd particular attention is paid to race, however, the obverse of secularism comes into view. As religious ideas and practices are being excluded from high culture, that is to say from upper-class white male culture, those who are marked by difference also become marked by hyperreligiosity. The female, the lower class, and particularly the black are coded as extremely religious—excessively religious—thus circularly justifying their exclusion from high culture.22 But this dynamic is nothing new. In his classic study of early Christian saints, Peter Brown suggests that saints are particularly fruitful sites of research because they provide access to popular religion, to religion at a distance from the ideology of the elite with its interest in controlling what does and does not count as properly Christian.23 In other words, the figure of the saint has always challenged what we now call secularism, and perhaps the figure of the saint can provide insight into the racism that may be deeply entwined with various avatars of secularism. The trajectory of sainthood within a European context—bracketing the question of the porous and contested borders of Europe—further demonstrates the varied inflections of the figure of the saint. Julia Reinhard Lupton opens her study of Renaissance political theology by stating, “The saint and the citizen would seem to face each other across an unbridgeable historical divide.”24 Yet she locates in the Renaissance a natural bridge over that divide. Where the earlier saint was primarily aligned with the City of God and the later citizen was primarily aligned with the City of Man, subject to his own authority as participant in democratic deliberation, there was a period when versions of the citizen-subject flourished. Not only are such figures found in Baroque drama (as famously described by Walter Benjamin) and Shakespeare, they are also important to the self-image of colonists in the Americas. John Winthrop’s band of religious adventurers coming to the New World, and their descendants making a revolution, have also been described as citizen saints.25 Yet in such accounts of sainthood, where saints and sovereignty are closely aligned, the figure of the saint becomes implicated in perpetuating racialized exclusions—with the fate of Native Americans and African Americans prime examples. This is precisely Giorgio Agamben’s point in his theory of the generalized form of the saint, the homo sacer.26 According to Agamben, this figure is necessary for sovereignty, but must be excluded from the sovereign’s domain. The homo sacer is ever present but invisible, authorizing rule but not subject to being ruled. As described earlier, the homo sacer is often an animal or a human-animal hybrid. Other times, the homo sacer is more traditionally racialized. Among his paradigmatic examples, Agamben points to Jews in Nazi Germany and the racialized Muslims held at Guantanamo by imperial America (why he overlooks African Americans, enslaved or disenfranchised or incarcerated, is an open question). Where St. Paul might be read as a marked figure inaugurating a world free of difference, Agamben’s racial saints are marked figures whose existence is necessary for perpetuating the existing racial hierarchy.

Introduction

11

A salvific, saintly, and very white figure, a figure who might surprisingly resonate with that of the homo sacer, has recently made an appearance in another realm. Peter Singer inaugurated an upshift in discussions of moral obligation in a secular context with his article, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.”27 The premise—which went so far beyond the Ivory Tower that it made a cameo appearance in Woody Allen’s Manhattan—was that “I” certainly would dirty my clothes to save a child drowning in a pond I walk past, and so I should certainly send a few dollars to help reduce global poverty. Singer’s article begins with urgency: “As I write this, in November 1971, people are dying in East Bengal from lack of food, shelter, and medical care.” In a sense, Singer, whose work was an inspiration to Zell Kravinsky and who invites Kravinsky to speak to his ethics courses, sets the terms for secular sainthood—though this is a term Singer would certainly reject, as the ethical commitments he describes are advertised for all, not the select few. Moreover, secular sainthood for Singer, like Kravinsky, is dependent on the suffering stranger—who is a different color. To become a secular saint, we must overcome race. Might such a mentality of the democratic citizen-saint who requires the brown or black sacred noncitizen precisely confirm the model of sovereignty Agamben diagnoses as so pervasive in the West? FLESH Likely martyred in Rome and later canonized, Paul writing to the church in Rome sounds more mortal than saint: “I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.”28 He describes a struggle familiar to many. We might even say that it is part and parcel of the human experience: wanting to act rightly, righteously, yet finding it difficult, if not impossible, to do so. Paul blames his lack of goodness on his body, the mass of matter that binds him to this earth and its creatures. Like other members of the animal kingdom, humans are fleshy beings. Muscles, fat, and skin protect our organs, facilitate our movement, give us shape, and enable our sensation and perception of our surroundings. Our flesh ties us to the earth and its elements. Compositionally, we are earthy organic creatures feeling our way through the world: touching, tasting, tapping, grasping, fingering, thumbing, kneading, rubbing, palpating, petting, and pressing (on). Quite paradoxically, the human body is the singular site of sainthood. Before saints become saints, they are humans: mortals in bodies like the rest of us. Like Paul was. Perhaps sainthood arises from the tensions drawn taut by enfleshment. By contrast to the vast majority of humanity, moral exemplars rise above the base urges of their bodies, their flesh. And it shows. It, their exemplary morality, shows in and on it, their flesh, especially in its afterlife. Death, as much as flesh, makes the saint. Indeed, death—more

12 Molly H. Bassett and Vincent W. Lloyd specifically the corpse’s ability to withstand decomposition—verifies saintliness. Indeed, cases for sainthood often began around the deathbed where associates of the not-yet-deceased discussed the future saint’s potential (as) relics. The Christian cults of saints grew out of the veneration of martyrs, a practice that increased in popularity and gained widespread sanction following the fourth-century imperial appropriation of Christianity. Saints, then, are just one type of religious exemplar. The authors in this volume define saint and delineate sanctity in various ways, and the “saints” they engage come from diverse religious contexts. A few of the “saints” are proper (Christian) saints, some emerge in religious contact zones, and others are exceptions to “saint.” In each case, however, the story of the saint begins with a living, breathing person, whether fictional or historical, who emerged from the masses as an exemplar, a paragon and paradigm. As for (Christian) saints’ exemplary status, it is worth invoking Aviad Kleinberg’s assertion that “conceptually, the idea of exceptionality precedes the notion of moral excellence that we now tend to associate with sanctity.”29 Saints stand out from the crowd. The way they are in the world causes the rest of us to pause and take note of something different, whether their physical markings, their morality, their compassion, or the grace of their comportment. The difference—that of which we take note—makes an impression that demands (even as it may defy) explanation and inscription. The story must be told and retold: “Excess cannot but provoke excessive response.”30 And so we find that the lives of saints begin with their stories as much as with their bodies. But for those who witnessed the miracles of saints’ living, dying, and deceased bodies and for the fortunate few who may yet hold a relic, we read hagiographic inscriptions of saints as their marked flesh that is their holy flesh. The biological body distributed as relics is reconstituted in the hagiographic corpus. Hagiographies breathe life into saints, who without their stories would simply and silently have returned to the dusty earth. Without a doubt, human flesh comprises the matrix of sainthood, and the making of saints (and of other similar religious exemplars outside Christian cultures) takes place in bodies and in words. Saints’ bodies were not subject to the natural laws that governed other mortals, and reasonably so: the corporeal test of sainthood centered on the ability of the candidate’s (living or dead) body to make miracles happen. (Saints’ miraculousness was a tricky matter, as demons and sorcerers could also perform magical miracles: “Miracles are a possible—but not a necessary—expression of sainthood.”31) The living bodies of some saints exhibited inscriptions of their miraculous difference. Saint Francis was the first to receive the stigmata, marks on his hands, feet, and side that corresponded to those Christ received during his crucifixion. In his study of the visual and textual representations of Francis’s stigmata, Arnold I. Davidson emphasizes the stigmata’s novelty: “Francis’s stigmatization was represented, both textually and iconographically, as a unique miracle, indeed a miracle greater than any other miracle. It marked,

Introduction

13

one could say, a new stage in the history of the miraculous.”32 From the first, descriptions of Francis’s stigmata appealed to their sui generis nature; uniquely miraculous, they had no precedent save that of Christ.33 As the story of Francis receiving the stigmata persisted, it acquired more miraculous attributes. For instance, Davidson cites Bonaventure’s attribution of the markings to the vision Francis received of a Seraph and a crucified man: “Bonaventure’s causal attribution has two components: the subjective state of Francis’s soul and the objective nature of the vision itself that, in some unspecified way, impresses the stigmata on Francis’s body.”34 Miracle compounds miracle as Francis’s vision produces his stigmata. The proliferation of saints’ abilities to produce miracles continued and sometimes intensified after their deaths. Indeed, saints may have been more valuable dead than alive, since in dying, they took on new life, often in multiple. As the cult of saints took on life in the fourth century, the nature of martyrdom changed so that “the ascetics changed the present to make it more like the past [and] the cult of saints, for its part, changed the past to perpetuate it in the present. . . . The saints were not dead.”35 Their vitality imbued their relics. Unconstrained by the taboos against disturbing graves observed by their Roman, Jewish, and Muslim neighbors, Christians opened the martyrs’ tombs and distributed their remains throughout the empire. Relics brought prestige to the communities that housed and venerated them, and communities began “remembering” saints whose remains had been “discovered.”36 Saints took on what Constance Classen calls a “tangible wonder” so that any part of their bodies, however small, and anything a saint had touched presented and represented the saint to his or her devotees.37 Nothing, Classen asserts, compared to the religious feeling produced through physical encounters with a saint or her relics. The Church went to great lengths to put parishioners in touch with the saints, and as relics became scarce, Church authorities invented ways of distributing saints’ potency in the absence of their bodily remains. They placed vials of oil, for example, in the saints’ tombs and distributed them as brandea, everyday objects whose proximity to holiness made them sacred. The distribution of saints’ relics both unified and diversified Christianity. Over time, saints replaced the images of pagan gods in temples throughout the Mediterranean, and they adopted some of the attributes of those deities, including associations with natural cycles. Theoretically, a saint was an ethical exemplar, but pragmatically, “once dead, [a saint] became a powerful lord who behaved like any other lord, capricious, megalomaniacal, and jealous. Saints maintained relationships with their admirers that often had little to do with morality. They were overly sensitive, demanding, tyrannical, greedy, eager for gifts—gold and silver—and envious of other saints.”38 The dispersion of saints’ relics further complicated their authenticity, especially in instances in which two churches claimed to host the same saint’s relics. What sometimes may be overlooked in the examination of political and social motivations for securing relics is the notion that the relics

14 Molly H. Bassett and Vincent W. Lloyd were the persisting presence of saints in their devotional communities. If, as Kleinberg argues, “charisma is a quality or an energy attributed to certain individuals by others” and “miracles occur when a community is seeking miracles,” then we might say that saints are similarly communally identified. Through formal or informal processes of canonization, saints enter into a specific and exalted social relationship with their devotees. The social relationship is possible, in part, because their relics retain some portion of their personae. As Classen observes, “The relics of saints were not simply thought of as vessels for a greater or lesser amount of sacrality. Rather they were understood to retain part of the saint’s personality, to be able to feel and respond to the treatment they received.”39 Through the distribution of their relics, saints “lived” in community. Really, they lived in more than one community. A single saint was/is simultaneously in many places at one time, and each of those places may claim, rightly or not, to have the authentic relics of Saint So-and-so. If saints live on in their stories and relics, the stories of their relics introduce an astounding pluralism into Christianity. Kleinberg explains that “the result of the radical fragmentation of saints’ bodies was a parallel fragmentation of their biographies.”40 Writing about the saints chased the circuitous circulation of their relics; language and the body never quite came together, but they mutually maintain the posthumous life of the saint. What happens when we focus on the flesh of the saint with an eye toward that other, ostensibly secular technology of the flesh: racialization? THE CHAPTERS THAT FOLLOW We do not offer a systematic survey of saints across time and culture. Nor do we offer a systematic survey of the features of sainthood. Rather, the chapters that follow argue by juxtaposition. The complexities of race and saints are explored in each, and these workings share a logic, as it were, but that logic, we hope, emerges immanently, perhaps by Gestalt, from the assortment of places and times our collaborators explore. Agamben, who employs such a method himself, describes it as analogous to the grammatical paradigm, exhibiting characteristic usage that enables imitation rather than aspiring to exhaustiveness—“neither inductive nor deductive but analogical,” moving “from singularity to singularity.” As Agamben further states, “The paradigmatic case becomes such by suspending and, at the same time, exposing its belonging to the group, so that it is never possible to separate its exemplarity from it singularity.”41 The chapters that follow engage with classical texts and probe new texts, they question existing boundaries of period and place, but they all consistently complicate race and saints. The book’s first chapters reexamine classical figures of sainthood, asking whether they must be understood differently when race is taken into account. In doing so, they question our assumptions about race. Through

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a close examination of German representations of a black saint, Geraldine Heng argues that race was very much a part of the world of the European high Middle Ages—centuries before many theories of race posit its invention. Brian Bantum approaches an early figure of the secularized saint: the idealized body expressed in physiognomic writings. Reading these writings against the background of theological reflections on saintly icons, Bantum sheds new light on the connections between whiteness and saintliness in the early modern period. Jared Hickman uses the recent history of black nationalist hagiography as a jumping-off point for reflections on the deeply entwined histories of racialized bodies, global encounters with difference, and religious representation. While race and colonialism are not to be conflated, in the colonial context the power of race is particularly acute, as is the power of saints. In a cluster of four chapters, these intersections are probed in case studies. Timothy Dobe details the sanctification of a man who stood between India and Europe, between Hinduism and Christianity. Chris Garces investigates a Peruvian canonization of a mulatto servant, paying particular attention to the role of animals in defining both sainthood and race. Angie Heo focuses on a white saint in a Muslim world, in Egypt, who contests the racial difference between Coptic Christians and their Muslim neighbors. Jalane Schmidt tracks, over a long historical expanse, the significance of Cubans’ varying perceptions of the race of their patron saint. The final cluster of three chapters builds on the earlier rereading of classical figures and probing of the colonial/racial nexus in order to try out the categories of race and sainthood in unexpected locations. Pamela Hall, an ethicist, turns to literature, asking whether the category of the racial saint could be useful in reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Vincent Lloyd suggests that the figure of the racial saint is still very relevant in an ostensibly postracial America by noting echoes of a much earlier, Pauline post-racial sentiment. Finally, Molly Bassett turns to a context supposedly lacking in both race and saints, Aztec Mesoamerica. Even in this context, Bassett shows how the vocabulary of the racial saint raises provocative questions that not only can illuminate her own field of study but also can speak to broader questions about religion and race today. NOTES 1. Ian Parker, “The Gift,” The New Yorker (August 2, 2004): 54–63, is the source of quotations; see also Jason Fagone, “What if Zell Kravinsky Isn’t Crazy?” Philadelphia (December 2003): www.phillymag.com/articles/what-if-zellkravinsky-isnt-crazy/ 2. In the same genre as Kravinsky we might read Paul Farmer and Jim Kim, whose seemingly selfless commitment to health care in Haiti, another racialized landscape, was also featured in a New Yorker article, and subsequent book, around the same time. Kim has subsequently been appointed president of the World Bank.

16 Molly H. Bassett and Vincent W. Lloyd 3. And marked with love: on Kravinsky’s view, “The scar would be sexy. If he weren’t married, in fact, and he had a kidney-donor lover, ‘I would kiss it so tenderly,’ he says. ‘The parts without scars would be less beautiful.’ ” Fagone, “What if Zell Kravinsky Isn’t Crazy?” 4. For a religious reading of Oprah Winfrey addressing some of these issues, see Kathryn Lofton, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011). 5. For example, Françoise Meltzer and Jaś Elsner (eds.), Saints: Faith Without Borders (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 6. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971): 127–186. 7. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Ruth Marshall, Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); this scholarship represents a shift from an interest in Foucault’s early and middle work to his later work. 8. For an analogous worry about “ritual,” see Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 9. Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Jonathan Boyarin, The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 10. Allan Greer, “Gender, Race, and Hagiography in New France,” The William and Mary Quarterly 57:2 (April 2000): 323–348; Allan Greer and Jodi Blinkoff (eds.), Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, 1500–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2003). 11. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 12. Susan Wolf, “Moral Saints,” The Journal of Philosophy 79:8 (August 1982): 419–439. 13. Robert Merrihew Adams, “Saints,” The Journal of Philosophy 81:7 (July 1984): 392–401; for a more recent response see Vanessa Carbonell, “What Moral Saints Look Like,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39:3 (September 2009): 371–398. 14. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Random House, 1929), 150. 15. John Stratton Hawley, ed., Saints and Virtues (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 16. Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963); Joachim Wach, Sociology of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944). 17. Gerardus van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation, trans. J. E. Turner (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). 18. Richard Kieckhefer and George D. Bond, eds., Sainthood: Its Manifestation in World Religions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), viii. 19. Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism

Introduction

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

17

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Aviad Kleinberg, “Apopthegmata” in Saints: Faith Without Borders, 396. This distinction is helpfully made by Jeffrey Stout in Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). On racial hyperreligiosity, see most recently Curtis J. Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 1. Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (New York: Athenaeum, 1968). Agamben, Homo Sacer; Idem, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1:1 (Spring 1972): 229–243. See also Peter K. Unger, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Romans 7:18. Aviad Kleinberg, Flesh Made Word: Saints’ Stories and the Western Imagination, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 2. Françoise Meltzer and Jaś; Elsner, “Introduction” in Saints: Faith Without Borders, xii. Kleinberg, Flesh Made Word, 49. Arnold Davidson, “Miracles of Bodily Transformation,” in Saints: Faith Without Borders, 456. Ibid., 458. Ibid., 467–8. Kleinberg, Flesh Made Word, 34. Ibid., 37–38. Constance Classen, The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 34. Kleinberg, Flesh Made Word, 49–50. Classen, The Deepest Sense, 40. Kleinberg, Flesh Made Word, 41. Giorgio Agamben, Signature of All Things: On Method, trans. Luca d’Isanto (New York: Zone Books, 2009), 31.

1

An African Saint in Medieval Europe The Black Saint Maurice and the Enigma of Racial Sanctity Geraldine Heng

In Europe, sometime between 1220 and 1250, amid a virulent, centuries-old discourse on blackness that was producing horrific images in visual art of vicious black African torturers of Christ, brutal African executioners of John the Baptist, and grotesque black African devils and demons, a saint who had been venerated for nearly a millennium in the Latin West was suddenly portrayed as a black African knight—imaged in an extraordinary, lifelike statue in Magdeburg Cathedral in eastern Germany, a cathedral where he was the patron saint.1 This manifestation of St. Maurice—a martyr who hailed from the third century CE—suddenly as a black African was followed, a century later, by more images of an African Maurice in visual art. Images thereafter proliferate and diversify in Europe until the seventeenth century, accruing all manner of iconographic features, in all manner of styles. Catalogued by Gude Suckale-Redlefsen, art objects depicting an African St. Maurice total nearly 300, spread over Germany, Scandinavia, the Czech Republic, Austria, Poland, and Italy, as the maps of their diffusion show.2 Each instance that a black St. Maurice appeared, of course, had its own matrix of enabling circumstances, but the conjuring up of a black African saint for the first time in Germany remains an astonishing phenomenon. This thirteenth-century black Maurice is a saint and a knight—the most esteemed exemplars of the human in Latin Christian Europe and the perfect marriage of Christian faith and warrior chivalry, seamlessly meshing secular and sacred prowess. Unlike the fictitious Prester John, another medieval icon who conjoined military and evangelical goals, Maurice was not an elusive fantasy hovering somewhere in the great beyond, always anticipated but never materializing, and whose Christianity would likely have been of a heretical kind, if John had existed.3 Nor was Maurice a black knight of the kind selectively depicted in European literary fantasy—like the black Moriaen, a Christian knight in a thirteenth-century Dutch romance, or like the piebald, part-black, part-white Feirefiz, a pagan knight in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s famed thirteenth-century German romance—African sojourners who are ejected from Europe at the end of their fictional narratives. When he is suddenly seen as a black African

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Figure 1.1 Statue of the black St. Maurice of Magdeburg. Magdeburg Cathedral, Germany, 1240–1250. Courtesy of Hickey & Robertson, Houston/The Menil Foundation.

knight and saint, Maurice’s hagiography is already a thousand years old, and his solid presence in the heart of medieval Europe is supported by the tangible evidence of his body and relics at Magdeburg Cathedral. Maurice’s hallowed martyrdom in the third century CE is chronicled first by Eucherius, bishop of Lyon, between 443 and 450 in his Passion of the Martyrs of Agaunum and recounted in a contemporary letter to Eucherius’s friend, bishop Salvius.4 But at the time of Eucherius’s chronicle, a pilgrimage to the graves of Maurice and his men was “already in full flourish.”5 The events of the martyrdom are roughly as follows: Maurice, leader of the Christian Theban legion of imperial Rome, and his legionaries were summoned from Thebes in Egypt to Gaul to assist the emperor Maximian in a revolt in the third century CE. Ordered to persecute Christians or to sacrifice to pagan gods, the Christian legionaries refused and were executed.6 Maurice’s fame spread from Agaunum to Tours to Auxerre and thence to the rest of Europe, where, over the centuries, he became the patron saint

20 Geraldine Heng

Figure 1.2 Statue of the black St. Maurice of Magdeburg (detail). Magdeburg Cathedral, Germany, 1240–1250. Courtesy of Hickey & Robertson, Houston/The Menil Foundation.

of various places, occupations, and kingdoms. His feast day in the Roman calendar is September 22. Unlike fantasy characters in literature, the historical existence of saints is commonly attested by the presence of physical bodies and relics. Maurice’s body was transported at Christmas in 960 CE from Saint-Maurice-d’Agaune (in Switzerland today), where his martyrdom is traditionally held to have taken place, to the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I at Regensburg and sent on to Magdeburg.7 Maurice’s skull, later found by crusaders in Constantinople and taken to Franconia, was subsequently purchased by Magdeburg in 1220.8 The tangibility of a saint’s presence, anchored by what is believed to be his actual body, thus places the power and impact of a saint in a different register from fictional characters in literature or art. The lifelike statue in Magdeburg suddenly presented this sainted martyr, along with his body, as a physiognomic black African. The shocking boldness

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of the Magdeburg invention—a break with tradition lacking precedent—is justly admired by art historians and historians alike. Unlike Nicholas of Verdun’s famed 1181 black Queen of Sheba enamel in an ambo at Klosterneuburg, the sandstone Black St. Maurice does not merely have the iconographic features of European physiognomy accompanied by black skin but is unmistakably African in his facial features. And unlike black Africans portrayed in medieval European art before his appearance, Maurice is no mere African servant or attendant in the retinue of distinguished pagans from the East like the Queen of Sheba or the Three Magi—Maurice is not just an exotic servitor to mark the exotic provenance of Biblically important heathens. To sum up the strangeness of this African saint: Maurice is not only black, he is African; he’s not a servant but an important personage of high status, a knight; in fact, he is leader of the Egyptian Theban legion of imperial Rome. He’s not a virtuous heathen, like the Black Magus who will appear later, after him, in fourteenth-century visual art: Maurice is a Christian martyr, movingly executed with his men for refusing the orders of Rome because of fidelity to Christ. Maurice’s uniqueness also stems from the timing of his appearance: a whole century before the Black Magus and a half century before St. Gregory the Moor, a black African martyr localized to Cologne, and possibly “modeled on the black Maurice though with a much lower profile.”9 Maurice also materializes considerably earlier than the Black Madonnas of Europe—fascinating images not “securely datable to the period before 1500” and that do not display “the characteristic hair, nose, or lips that have long been part of the European stereotype of black African appearance.”10 The Black St. Maurice of Magdeburg is so complex and multilayered a puzzle that it attracts continuing, vital scholarship attempting explanations. Who commissioned the statue and why, and was it that person or persons who decided on the saint’s portrayal as a black African? Who sculpted it, and did the sculptor make the decision of an African model? Who was the model? Were there Afro-Europeans (as Paul Kaplan calls them) in medieval Europe?11 Ladislas Bugner sums up the enigma succinctly: “A black saint for whites . . . What for?”12 Last of all, and impossible to answer, are the questions that are asked not top down but from the ground up. How might devotees feel, standing or kneeling before a black African saint in supplication and prayer, in the heart of the Latin West in the thirteenth century? Must we assume that a black Maurice would have been resisted by the faithful, or might a black African saint have unsuspected kinds of appeal? This chapter considers answers to the enigma of the Black St. Maurice and will at the very least attempt to engage speculatively with such questions as cannot ever be properly answered or confirmed but that we continue, of necessity and curiosity, to ask. To begin with, the statue itself: Suckale-Redlefsen helps us understand that Maurice’s lifelike naturalism is part of a new artistic fashion at the time,

22 Geraldine Heng with the leaders of this artistic movement residing in France (a country in which St. Maurice was not portrayed as a black African): In the thirteenth century, the French were pioneers in the study of nature and its translation into artistic forms, setting an example to Europe. German stonemasons went to serve their apprenticeship in France, or at least drew their inspiration from French models. Consequently, it is only natural that the first authentic figures of blacks are seen in the cathedral sculpture of France. . . . [However,] all the African figures hitherto found there represent persons of subordinate position. In thirteenth-century France the age-old conventions of previous centuries are continued: the hangman’s assistants in the Judgment of Solomon or the execution of John the Baptist are shown as Negroes. The cringing attitude of a figure with distinctly “Negroid” features below the white Queen of Sheba in the north transept portal of the cathedral of Chartres is symptomatic. . . . no portrayal of an African in a positive sense exists in France in the thirteenth century.13 Maurice is both lifelike and sculpted with sensitivity: he’s a finely rendered life-sized knight who is realistically dressed in the armorial style of the day, with a beautiful, expressive face. The knight’s bearing, dress, and posture, Suckale-Redlefsen reflects, suggest his calm poise and readiness for battle, while polychromy skillfully hints at the saint’s aura of sanctity by surrounding the knight’s face with a de facto golden halo created by his encircling coif and hauberk. The statue is approximately 150 centimeters, correspond[ing] roughly to the actual height of a thirteenth-century knight. The armor, firmly encasing the body, faithfully reproduces the fashion of the period: a cloth undertunic hanging down in deep folds, a mail hauberk, and a sturdy leather surcoat shaped like an apron at both front and back. We see the seams, rivet heads, reinforcement straps, and buckles for fastening the garment and belt at the back. . . . The African features are emphasized by the surviving remains of the old polychromy. The skin is colored bluish black, the lips are red, and the dark pupils stand out clearly against the white of the eyeballs. The golden chain mail of the coif serves, in turn, to form a sharp contrast with the dark face.14 A millennium after St. Maurice of Agaunum’s life and death, who suddenly decided the saint should be remembered as this vital, lively figure of a black African knight, “a sensational mutation in the field of iconography,” and why?15 To address these questions, I begin by first examining the evidence presented by art historians and historians who have studied the Black St. Maurice for decades. I then consider, step by step, the implications of a racial saint in the heartlands of medieval Europe, with each section that follows examining a different aspect of those implications.

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THE CASE FOR WHO AND WHY: SCHOLARSHIP ON THE GENESIS OF THE BLACK ST. MAURICE OF MAGDEBURG The phenomenon of the Black St. Maurice has attracted considerable interest, but scholarship has been shaped principally by three major voices, Jean Devisse, Gude Suckale-Redlefsen, and Paul Kaplan.16 Tracing the saintly cult of Maurice in Europe over the long centuries before Maurice turned into a black African, Devisse shows how from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, Maurice came to be seen increasingly as a knight, “one of the military saints to whom those close to the [Holy Roman Emperor] and those engaged in the profession of arms addressed their prayers”.17 A martyr who elected to be put to death as his form of resistance to imperial authority might seem to modern sensibilities an odd choice for an imperial military saint. But Devisse notes how Otto I (Otto the Great) founded a Benedictine Abbey at Magdeburg in 937 dedicated to Maurice and the Theban martyrs and, after Otto’s coronation as Holy Roman Emperor in 962, officially designated Maurice patron saint of Magdeburg and of the Holy Roman Empire.18 Otto began the construction of Magdeburg cathedral in 955 and later had the saint’s body translated there. Magdeburg was charged with evangelizing the Slavic lands, and in the eleventh century, under the Emperor Henry II, Maurice, the patron saint of the Empire, “became the symbol of the Germanic offensive against the Slavs.”19 From having been a martyr slaughtered for resisting a pagan empire because of his Christianity, Maurice thus became a military saint who blessed the slaughter of pagan Slavs resisting Christianity imposed by a Christian empire. Having established that Maurice was “not a people’s saint but a companion of those in power,” Devisse hazards that a later Holy Roman Emperor, the infamous Frederick II (r.1220–50), was likely the initiator of a black St. Maurice.20 In this, Maurice’s traditionally attested geographic provenance proves important, and Devisse astutely notices the pull exercised by Egypt and north Africa in the thirteenth century.21 Egypt was the original power base of Salah ad-Din Yusof ibn Ayyub—“Saladin” to the Latin West—who launched the countercrusade that eventually wrested Jerusalem back from Latin Christendom in 1187, after nearly a century of occupation by crusaders. Egypt, not Jerusalem, had been the target of the Fourth Crusade in 1204 before its armies were misdirected to Constantinople. Egypt was also the target of the failed Fifth Crusade of 1217; it was the destination of both St. Louis’s crusades in 1248 and 1268 and the 1268 crusade of Edward I of England when he was yet a prince. Significantly, Frederick II was keenly awaited by the armies of the Fifth Crusade at Damietta in Egypt, where he failed to make an appearance. The history of crusading in the thirteenth century thus bears out Devisse’s intuition that Egypt, from which Maurice issued, was on the minds of the military and imperial great in Europe. Given the abject failure of all the thirteenth-century crusades to Egypt and Frederick II’s lack of interest in

24 Geraldine Heng disrupting commercial and political relations with Egypt’s Ayyubid Sultan al-Kamil (Saladin’s nephew) and his successors by waging holy war, we can suspect that a saint from Egypt might usefully serve a compensatory, face-saving function in this time.22 Symbolism of this kind would say: while we cannot successfully capture and hold this Islamic land, we have proof, and an important visual reminder, that Christianity once triumphed here among its people. Maurice’s blackness and Africanness would thus symbolically function as a trophy of a compensatory, apotropaic kind, warding off specters of military failure and the interminable postponement of Christianity’s triumph. The function of a racial saint can thus be to fill a vacuum imposed by military failure: art coming to the rescue of history. Black Africans might reasonably be expected among the populations of Egypt in the thirteenth century. And, given that the statue of Maurice needed to appear with the standard accouterments of European knighthood, Maurice’s far-off provenance would have to be signaled in some other way than through his dress. Since he was a Christian, Maurice’s foreignness could not be displayed through the iconographic vocabulary deployed visually to signify heathen foreignness, such as curved swords, insignia on shields, headdress, and so on. One instantly striking way to announce Maurice’s geographic provenance would thus be to specify this provenance with racial markings in the form of color and physiognomy. Here, then, a visible race serves as shorthand for geography, securing location and place. Devisse and others emphasize Frederick II’s attachment (like that of his imperial predecessors) to the cult of St. Maurice. Before the saint’s transformation into an African, it was at Frederick’s behest that Maurice’s skull, a “costly relic” under the protection of the monastery of Langheim in Franconia, was sold in 1220 to Magdeburg. At Magdeburg, the relic was treated with great honor, set into a reliquary, and crowned with a crown belonging to Otto I: “On the anniversary of Otto’s death the crowned reliquary adorned the head-end of the dead emperor’s tomb.”23 Devisse’s hypothesis that Frederick was likely responsible for imagining the patron saint of the empire as a black African has been improved by a new thesis expounded by Paul Kaplan, who persuasively demonstrates why the Hohenstaufen dynasty of emperors that begins with Frederick II’s grandfather, Frederick Barbarossa (Frederick I, r.1155–90), should particularly concern itself with Africans. Kaplan follows the trail of black Africans depicted in German and Italian art in the Hohenstaufen period, noting that the portrayal of these African figures was not necessarily negative, nor were the figures necessarily only low-status servants. Sometimes they were images of an “egalitarian” kind.24 Kaplan’s decision to read visual art transregionally under the Hohenstaufen is a canny one: the 1186 marriage of Frederick II’s father, Henry VI

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(r.1191–7) to Constance, daughter of Roger II, the first Norman king of Sicily, and Henry VI’s military successes in Sicily meant that the boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire in the thirteenth century had expanded from Germany and its adjacent northern territories, plus northern Italy, to subsume southern Italy and Sicily. The Empire now embraced a Mediterranean zone with significant multiracial, multiconfessional populations knitted into relationship with more northerly imperial lands. Aggressive in his ambitions, Frederick II, Kaplan argues, adapted and secularized the Christian Pentecostal theme that all peoples of the earth are called to salvation—the early theological idea that “all races are equal before God, and . . . the Christian mission is universal.”25 In visual art, the theme of universal salvation through converting the nations of the earth to Christianity was sometimes articulated by depicting black Africans among the human populations of the saved. Suckale-Redlefsen notes that the one exception to her attestation that “no portrayal of an African in a positive sense exists in France in the thirteenth century” was “the idealized head of a black man in the throng of those risen from the dead in the Last Judgment tympanum in Paris.”26 Devisse and Kaplan offer other examples of such art. Under Frederick II, Kaplan argues, secular depictions of black Africans in Italian art and new roles for black Africans in sacred art in Germany and Italy arose to present a “more secular version of the evangelical universalism long promoted by both the Greek and the Roman Catholic Churches.”27 Just as Christianity’s dominion extended over all the earth, so too did (or should) the Holy Roman Empire, which had the right to encompass the entire world, whose farthest reaches are dramatically represented by black Africa. There, by tradition, lived the most remote of men. Visual art is then a means for articulating the Holy Roman Empire’s assertion of universal power and the Holy Roman Emperor’s right to rule the earth. These depictions of black Africans are ideological statements in a visual medium: art in the service of empire. Among visual art of this kind, the jewel in the crown is a fresco at the tower of the Church of San Zeno Maggiore in Verona from the second quarter of the thirteenth century, which cleaning and conservation rendered more readily legible in the 1990s. In this fresco, A seated figure with a crown accepts the homage of a line of twentynine men. . . . The most distinctive group [of these men], and the only one made up of four rather than three men, are the figures with nearly black skin near the front of the line. Besides their complexion, the men are similar in their tightly curled hair.28 The most widely shared view among art historians is that the enthroned figure receiving homage is likely Frederick II.29 Frederick lodged at San Zeno in 1236, 1237, 1238, and 1239; in 1237, his consort Isabella of England also lodged for some weeks at San Zeno;

26 Geraldine Heng and in 1238, Frederick’s natural daughter Selvaggia was wedded to his vassal Ezzelino da Romano before the doors of the San Zeno church on the feast of Pentecost—“that festival of universal evangelization often illustrated with black African figures in nearby Venice and farther east”—a wedding Frederick attended.30 If Frederick himself did not commission the fresco, Kaplan suggests that Ezzelino or even Selvaggia might have been the patron. Kaplan tells us that shortly after 1235, Nicholas of Bari addressed an elaborate encomium to Frederick II in which he flatteringly likened the emperor to Christ and the Magi, even quoting “a passage from Psalm 71 of the Latin Vulgate in which it is prophesied that ‘Ethiopians shall fall down’ before the Lord”—flattery, Kaplan wryly observes, that “must have fallen on fertile ground, since Frederick once referred to his birthplace at Jesi in the Italian marches as ‘our Bethlehem.’ ”31 The San Zeno fresco, depicting an enthroned Frederick—“the heraldic imperial eagle [even] appears in one corner of the room”—receiving the homage of far-flung subjects who represent the diverse nations and races of the earth, allows for an assertion of secular dominion that is thus also remarkably redolent of sacred mythography.32 The artist’s positioning of the four black Africans grouped together near the head of the line manifests popular knowledge of Frederick’s famed associations with black Africans. The son of Constance of Sicily and Henry VI, Frederick grew up in his mother’s Sicilian domains, where he “absorbed the cosmopolitan pan-Mediterranean culture of the island, which had previously been ruled by Byzantine emperors and (more recently) Muslim emirs.”33 Frederick’s well-known admiration for Islamic culture, science, mathematics, and philosophy, his impressive grasp of Arabic epistolary and literary form, and his knowledge of Arabic made him unique among Holy Roman Emperors.34 Indeed, the Sixth Crusade of 1228 to 1229—Frederick’s crusade, at last—was extraordinary, and something of an un-crusade. Arriving in Palestine under papal excommunication, having fought no Muslims or any holy war, Frederick was handed Jerusalem by the Ayyubid Sultan al-Kamil, with no blood shed. Sojourning in the holy city, where he put the crown of the Kingdom of Jerusalem on his own head before the altar in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Emperor lightly jested at the expense of Christians; chided his host, the Muslim qadi of Nablus, when that notable had the muezzin refrain from issuing the call to prayer out of respect for the Emperor’s presence; and distributed money to the custodians, muezzins, and pious men of the Haram, as Arab chronicles report.35 Resident in Jerusalem were some of the traditional representatives of Christian Sub-Saharan Africa: “among [Frederick’s] new subjects were black monks from the kingdom of Ethiopia.”36 In 1224, Frederick began the process of relocating Muslims in Sicily to a colony at Lucera in Apulia, which grew into a population of some 15,000 to 20,000 people:37

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Among these Sicilian Muslims, there were people of black African descent, whom Frederick apparently selected for particular purposes: several boys were trained in wind instruments, and one man, known as Johannes Maurus (d.1254), became Frederick’s chamberlain and the judge-administrator of Lucera. From his given name, it is possible that Johannes converted to Christianity. . . . By mid-century Johannes obtained considerable power in Lucera and the southern Italian kingdom in general, acting as chancellor after Frederick’s death.38 Frederick was fond of dramatic pageantry and processional spectacles, with exotic elements, as a mode of imperial display. The “conspicuous presence of black Africans in Frederick’s train as he traveled through his northern Italian and German lands in the 1230s” is much remarked on, and a 1235 chronicle showed how Frederick approached Wimpfen in Swabia, proceeding in great glory with numerous carriages laden with gold and silver, byssus and purple, gems and costly vessels, with camels, mules as well as dromedaries, with many Saracens, and with Ethiopians [that is, black Africans] having knowledge of rare skills accompanying apes and leopards and serving as guards bringing along money and treasure.39 The racial elements of Frederick’s imperial pomp—Africans with the knowledge and skill to care for fabulous animals like apes and leopards and Africans who safeguarded money and treasure—and his black African chamberlain and governor, Johannes Maurus, are singled out and attached to Frederick’s memory in the cultural record so that more than three decades after the emperor’s death, that memory of Africans is restaged in Europe, still attached to Frederick, when the “False Frederick” of 1283, an imposter who appeared near Cologne, paraded African retainers, including a black African chamberlain, as proof to clinch his authenticity.40 To the question: who had the boldness and the motive to declare St. Maurice of Agaunum a black African? Devisse and Kaplan thus furnish a logical answer: that most unique of Holy Roman Emperors, Frederick II. Devisse’s early working hypothesis that “a command from the emperor caused St. Maurice to be depicted as a black in Magdeburg, the city where his relics were enshrined” stemmed from Frederick’s “Mediterranean policy,” which required Frederick “to uphold the theory of his sovereign rights over the distant lands around the eastern Mediterranean.”41 That working hypothesis of the 1970s is transformed, in Paul Kaplan’s hands, into a thesis of how the Hohenstaufen used black Africans and black African visual images to articulate his imperial claims to universal, not just Mediterranean, sovereignty—adapting the example of Christendom’s Pentecostal mission to evangelize the earth and oversee all of humanity—and supporting those claims “with evidence that people from remote lands acknowledged Frederick as their lord.”42

28 Geraldine Heng ARCHBISHOP OVER EMPEROR: A SECOND TAKE ON WHO COMMISSIONED A BLACK SAINT The puzzle, however, of who had the black Maurice created and why is not unanimously considered settled. Suckale-Redlefsen, whose 1987 study, Mauritius: Der heilige Mohr, was not yet completed when Devisse’s L’Image du Noir appeared, disagrees with Kaplan’s and Devisse’s conclusions. Suckale-Redlefsen proposes an archbishop of Magdeburg instead, either Albert II of Käfernburg, archbishop from 1205 to 1232, or his stepbrother, Wilbrand, archbishop from 1235 to 1254, as the one responsible for the “startling iconographic innovation.”43 Devisse himself had raised this possibility and had focused on Wilbrand but ended up dismissing the idea because of what Devisse assumed would be negative psychological reactions on the part of the populace to the sudden arrival of a black African saint substituting for the old Maurice at an inopportune moment, and also because of the financial costs involved.44 Magdeburg cathedral in the thirteenth century presumably had other images of Maurice that did not represent him as an African, but with the exception of a statue from c. 1220, none has survived. Devisse’s point—that all the statues of Maurice in the cathedral prior to his racial transformation would have had to be altered for consistency, at some cost—is driven home when we consider that surviving 1220 statue, which was sculpted in a style utterly unlike the artistic naturalism that allowed for the making of a lifelike black Maurice: This figure with its lifeless rigidity has the appearance of a columnar jamb statue from the west portal of Chartres, remote from reality. The armor is so overladen with ponderous ornamental detail that its protective function is obliterated. . . . Unlike the statue of St. Maurice . . . this figure in the choir of the cathedral has neither “Negroid” facial features nor any other indication of the African origins of the Christian warrior.45 Suckale-Redlefsen favors Archbishop Albert II as the alternative to Frederick, which would date the commissioning of the black Maurice to before Albert’s death in 1232 and presumably after that 1220 statue of a stillEuropean St. Maurice. She finds the prospect raised for the first time that Maurice was a black African in chronicle literature of the third quarter of the twelfth century, noting that earlier chronicle references to Maurice, in Germany and elsewhere, had not raised his Africanness or blackness before. But the Kaiserchronik, “a widely read book compiled by a cleric in Regensburg about 1160,” explicitly describes Maurice “as ‘the leader of the [black] Moors’ (herzoge der swarzen Môren) and his legionaries as ‘black Moors.’ ”46 Albert II presumably took cognizance of this new idea of the saint as a black Moor and commissioned a black St. Maurice in the context of a new building program after a fire devastated the old cathedral in 1207.

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The 1220 statue of a pre-African Maurice was part of the sculptural program for the new cathedral, according to Suckale-Redlefsen; so also was the black St. Maurice, unlike as the two sculptures may be.47 In the end, Suckale-Redlefsen’s consciousness of archbishop Albert’s shifting loyalties in the volatile politics of the Holy Roman Empire, where powerful rivals (Otto IV, Frederick II) contended to be emperor, and her consciousness that papal Rome’s support of an imperial candidate was mutable, leads her to conclude that “Archbishop Albert was an independent territorial ruler. In matters of art he was not guided by the court of Frederick II, but by French models which reached Magdeburg by way of Bamberg.”48 By contrast, Kaplan follows Virginia Roehrig Kaufmann in emphasizing the ties of archbishop Albert to Frederick II. Kaufmann notes: During the last ten years of his life, [archbishop Albert] was constantly in Italy in Frederick’s service, a career that is first documented in 1221. In 1222 he was with the emperor in Naples and Capua, where he received the office of imperial legate for north Italy. . . . the emperor then bestowed on him the countship of Romagnola, which yielded considerable revenue that could be put toward the archbishop’s building projects in Magdeburg. . . . He was in Pavia in 1226 as witness to a settlement of strife between the emperor and the citizens, which he had probably helped to negotiate. . . . After Albrecht’s death in 1232, the building and decoration of Magdeburg cathedral proceeded only with great difficulty because of financial problems.49 Archbishop Albert, Devisse had stressed in the 1970s, was actively extending the cult of St. Maurice, and, having acquired the skull of the saint in 1220 for Magdeburg through the good graces of Frederick II, Maurice’s relics thereafter “were brought out once a year for public veneration.”50 Pilgrimage to Maurice was encouraged. To foster pilgrimage, when the Collegiate Church of St. Maurice at Halle was dedicated, Pope Honorius III offered pilgrims a thirty-day indulgence. Several dioceses incorporated Maurice in their devotions, and, at Albert’s death in 1232, Pope Gregory IX showered the deceased archbishop with high praise for making Magdeburg “one of the pillars of Christianity.”51 Albert’s successor, Archbishop Wilbrand, also fostered popular devotion to Maurice.52 Would such efforts have been hurt by the saint’s delivery as a black African? THE POWER OF A RACIAL SAINT: MOVING AFRICA TO EUROPE AND THE PAST TO THE PRESENT It is not difficult to see how an Africanized St. Maurice could serve an ambitious emperor using art to express his right to rule the earth and the ambitions of an archbishop promoting pilgrimage and cult, without having to select between them. Indeed, we may find it useful to shift the focus slightly,

30 Geraldine Heng from who originated an African Maurice to what the statue’s African-ness tells us by calling attention to itself. Iconography that remains stable and is replicated without change does not issue an invitation to consider its meaning anew. The racial transformation of a saint, however, from a white European to a black African, invites attention to how reconceptualization of an old template produces new functionalities and points to the functionalities themselves. Kaplan has shown us that for Frederick, an African St. Maurice is art in the service of empire, a synecdoche for empire. The importance of Egypt in the failed crusades of the earlier thirteenth century also suggests that Maurice’s racialization is an efficient means to mark his geographic provenance and to issue propitiatory symbolism in the face of crusading failure. The luminous early tale of the Theban legionaries’ heroic courage and selfless commitment to Christ, summoned through Maurice’s origins made visible, retrieves Christianity’s once and future presence in the heart of heathen lands—a recalling of the past and future promise that serves secular and church interests alike. A signifier for an important crusade destination as well as the far-flung world, the visual medium of Maurice’s racialized statue makes the saint’s geographic origin readable instantly and renders his body, relics, and cranium also readable as artifacts from Africa, lodged within Europe, where they are staged in a cathedral and displayed for all to see once a year. Africa in Europe: Race here, in the person of an African saint, is a way of bringing a continent to Germany, the homeland of the Christian empire. Maurice’s Africanized statue is an exemplary model of how race can be used to make a place mobile and transportable to the Latin West. The Africa the saintly Maurice issues is also the right Africa to have: not the medieval continent of sinful “Ethiopians” who are the torturers of Christ and the killers of the Baptist but the sanctified ground of early Christianity. Maurice’s Africanization thus infuses his physical body and relics in the cathedral with a new aura and new meaning. Now understood as sacred artifacts from African shores, the relics collapse time and space: a deep Christian past, in Africa, borne in these artifacts, is translocated into the European present, the immediate now, in the heartlands of Latin Christendom, where it is owned and displayed. Race mobilizes and recruits Africa for Europe—an Africa of church fathers, desert ascetics, and the sainted martyrs of Latin Christianity in its formative, triumphant phase, the poignant, early centuries of Christianity. This Africa, the matrix of Christianity, summons the faithful to prayer and pilgrimage through an African Maurice’s physical and visualized body. A pilgrimage to Maurice’s embodied remains in Germany is thus a journey through time and space: a way to travel to Christianity’s luminous past and to African soil, collapsing geographies and temporalities. In the Africanization of Maurice, we thus glimpse a summary of the changing meanings of Africa for Europe, a mode of recruitment and ownership, and a process of selection that decides what Africa will give the Latin West.

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But Maurice was more than just an early martyr. Crusade historiography also depicted Maurice more recently as a crusading saint. During the First Crusade, Maurice is among the heavenly hosts inspiring crusaders at Antioch in a critical moment when the ragged remnants of the Christian army had captured the city but not the citadel. The crusaders were still fighting inside Antioch when they had to face the combined hosts of the Islamic East led by Karbuqa, the atabeg of Mosul, outside the city walls. In the chronicle of Robert the Monk, Saints George, Maurice, Mercurius, and Demetrius materialize as the leaders of a heavenly army, lifting their standards, firing the spirits of the crusaders, and fighting alongside the Christians to dispel the might of the Saracen forces.53 Crusade chronicles exult in how heavenly hosts garbed in white, led by eastern saints, multiplied the ranks of the Christians, so that the crusaders seemed more numerous than they actually were. Is it any wonder that Karbuqa’s military alliances fell apart in the field, that his allies retreated and his forces were routed, or that he himself fled, only to be found and beheaded while fleeing? The First Crusade—that most militarily successful of the incursions into Syria, Palestine, and Egypt—triumphantly wrested territory from the Islamic East and established four crusader colonies: the Principality of Antioch, the County of Edessa, the County of Tripoli, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. At Antioch, during a debilitating siege of six and a half months, were found relics of Christ’s passion, including the Holy Lance, when crusader morale was at its lowest. Thanks to confusions of tradition, statuary of Maurice, patron saint of the Holy Roman Empire, had the saint bear insignia that included a lance that tended to be conflated with the Holy Lance itself, a specimen of which had been found at Antioch. Thus in his first life before his martyrdom, Maurice was from Africa; in his celestial afterlife, Maurice was an eastern crusader saint from the holy lands of the Littoral. An Africanized Maurice by no means limits what is communicated to a single message, moreover. Signaling Egypt, Africa, and the Near East, Maurice’s race is an aid to historical memory, but it can also be a powerful way to summon more personal meanings in immediate context. For an archbishop promoting devotion and pilgrimage to the saint, Africanizing Maurice furnishes the message that even the sinful Ethiopian, black from sin and evoking a country of black humans that corporately personified sinfulness, could be saved—indeed, could be a saint. To a Christian penitent undertaking pilgrimage to expiate sin, what more potent message could there be? Black, the color of sin, on a saint, elicits a powerful, tangible, sensory understanding of who can be saved.54 If Albert II and his successor churchmen were committed to promulgating pilgrimage to Maurice’s relics and extending devotion to Maurice’s cult, a message of universal salvation carried in the very skin of a newly racialized saint communicates hope in a powerful, tangible way to penitents and the faithful whose souls were most in need of intercession.

32 Geraldine Heng Indeed, the vision summoned with an African saint is no less Pentecostal, evangelical, or universal than a Last Judgment painting in which Africans, too, are shown among the nations of the saved. Blackness of skin and an African face can thus carry an emperor’s message of his right to universal sovereignty and an ecclesiastic’s message of Christianity’s sovereign promise of universal salvation. Secular and sacred functions dovetail neatly in the genius that produces Maurice as a black African: a racial saint is a gift to both Christian and secular empire. Change, away from the familiar, especially a radical change of this kind, when a saint is suddenly shown to be a black African, invites a new relationship with the visualized representation, activates a process of response. A black African St. Maurice evokes, recalls, summons, and connects. THE SCULPTOR, THE WORKSHOPS, STYLES, AND INFLUENCE: OR, POLITICS OF THE EPIDERMIS IN ART Whoever imagined Maurice as a black African, Suckale-Redlefsen and Kaplan are in agreement on the likely sculptor of the black St. Maurice. Both art historians finger him as the “Master of the Magdeburg Rider,” the sobriquet bestowed on the sculptor of one of two famous “equestrian statues” that may have commemorated an imperial entry into Bamberg and Magdeburg.55 For Suckale-Redlefsen, the mounted figure of the Magdeburg Rider, a statue that is the sculptor’s “masterpiece,” is Otto the Great; for Kaplan, the mounted figure may be either Otto or Frederick II. Virginia Roehrig Kaufmann reasons that Albert II had the Magdeburg Rider made and installed in a prominent, public space in the city of Magdeburg as an important reminder. The equestrian statue, which “depicts an imperial entry, an adventus regis, of a medieval emperor into Magdeburg,” is a strategic visual confirmation of the archbishop’s legal authority, issuing from the emperor, over the city populace, with whom the archbishop’s relations had become tense because the citizenry of Magdeburg “wanted a greater share in legal and political matters and seems to have grown restive in the first half of the thirteenth century.”56 The life-sized Magdeburg Rider, with a naturalistically carved face and wearing thirteenth-century clothing, has a “real-life appearance”; his “open mouth suggests, moreover, that he was in the process of speaking”: The archbishop would have had good reason to want to demonstrate his authority in the major public space of Magdeburg, the Old Market Square. The depiction of an imperial entry with the emperor uttering the grant of confirmation of privileges to the archbishop would have been a most effective way of demonstrating to Magdeburg’s citizens his ultimate authority over them, and the source of that power. Schwineköper has demonstrated convincingly that the Rider monument served this

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function in Magdeburg, where it was situated before the archiepiscopal court of justice. There the archbishop himself, or his representative, sat facing the gesturing and “speaking” equestrian emperor, seemingly in the process of granting or reconfirming the archbishop’s powers.57 The capacity of stone statuary for dynamic action is striking. The Magdeburg Rider brings the original grant of privileges and authority conferred by Otto I on Magdeburg’s archbishop out of the tenth century and into the thirteenth century, where it visually confirms Albert II as the recipient and bearer of those archiepiscopal rights. If the imperial Rider is Otto I, the monument collapses time, transporting the past to the present, and creates a temporal mobility in the way an African Maurice makes Africa mobile and transportable. If the Rider is Frederick II, Archbishop Albert’s canny use of the monument’s activity in the present context strikingly parallels Fredrick’s use of black African visual images to attest his authority and privileges. The extraordinary, lifelike naturalism of these stone figures—Maurice, the Magdeburg Rider—sustains, moreover, a “real-life appearance” that works to elicit human response. These lifelike faces and human forms beckon to audiences and issue a sense of immediacy, even intimacy. They “speak” to us through pathways more direct, perhaps, than narrative hagiography. For the enigma of Maurice, this may be one of the few clues supporting our quest to imagine how a supplicant or pilgrim might feel before the image of a black African saint in the heart of German Europe: stone statuary, it seems, in mimicking life and summoning the past or distant lands, has a dynamic ability to issue an invitation to transact with them and initiate a living dialogue with its viewer. These meticulous efforts of recovery tell us little, of course, about the sculptor himself. But Suckale-Redlefsen’s admirable account of the stonemason’s style tries to explain why French artists, the leaders in naturalistic portrayals, themselves did not portray Africans “in a positive sense,” whereas in Germany, and particularly in eastern Germany, art patrons who commissioned work and artists who executed their commissions were allowed a freedom to create unusual forms. [T]he comparatively consistent development and enormous density of sculptural productions in France . . . led to an early fixing of the iconography and within it of social and hierarchical graduation. The sculptors certainly possessed the skill to portray non-Europeans precisely, but the representation of saints as black persons would have constituted an unthinkable affront to established norms. In Germany . . . there were hardly any established traditions to which the sculptors could refer. The local art patrons who commissioned their works were also less conventional than elsewhere, and the specified tasks less strictly defined. This is doubtless the reason for the striking richness of invention.58

34 Geraldine Heng German stonemasons who were furnishing Magdeburg cathedral with new statuary in the first half of the thirteenth century were thus able to apply French innovations “with astonishing independence.” In Germany, then, we may suppose, “the representation of saints as black persons” would not “have constituted an unthinkable affront to established norms” either to the patrons commissioning the art, who were “less conventional” than patrons elsewhere, or to the masters executing their commissions, who had “astonishing independence.”59 A black St. Maurice was made whose creation fell within a window of opportunity—an interval of time in cultural creation—that was opened. That window of opportunity thereafter closed: “Soon after the middle of the century artists turned away from the realistic approach of their predecessors and created stylized ideals of beauty which had little in common with the actuality which had seemed so desirable only a short time before.”60 Paul Kaplan, citing Kaufmann, has an alternate view of the models influencing Magdeburg’s black Maurice and the Magdeburg Rider. In Kaplan’s perspective, southern Italy rather than France provided the examples and influence. From southern Italy came also “egalitarian” depictions of black Africans in visual art. The evidence of masonry thus leads Kaplan to trace artistic influences from within Frederick’s empire, rather than without, linking two geographic extremities of the empire into cultural relationship. Kaufmann acknowledges that sculpture at Reims cathedral in France “has generally been considered the source for the German sculpture at Bamberg and Magdeburg,” but she too suggests—referring not specifically to Maurice but to Magdeburg’s and Bamberg’s imperial monumental sculpture around the time of Maurice—that we consider “revising our idea of the direction of influence.”61 We might consider the possibility that Italy, as well as France, was a major source of influence on sculpture in Bamberg and Magdeburg. We have found evidence of the presence of a German artist associated with Bamberg and Magdeburg working in Apulia.62 Is it possible that sculptural forms in Magdeburg benefited richly from both France and Italy? Does artistic creation issue from singular sources of influence or multiple resources, and can the question of influence be decided on the basis of relative emphasis and degree? Whatever we conclude from the thoughtful arguments of art historians on the enigma of Maurice’s creation, Suckale-Redlefsen’s summary of the shift in European visual art after the mid-thirteenth century toward idealized forms and away from naturalism is important for those of us interested in questions of epidermal race. Suckale-Redlefsen’s midcentury shift is borne out by another striking development, also the result of a midcentury shift, which the art historian Madeline Caviness has detected in medieval visual art.63 Caviness argues that after the mid-thirteenth century, we find depictions in European visual

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art of European skin tones as white—white like the whites of the eye, like the whiteness of clothing—and no longer the naturalistic flesh tones of the preceding centuries. Like the shift in favor of physiognomic idealization, away from naturalism, stylizations of this kind, depicting European skin as white, also “had little in common” with “actuality.” Change in the depiction of European skin color, which Caviness localizes right to the middle of the thirteenth century, idealized a medley of human flesh tones in a variety of tints (pink, cream, ruddy, light brown, greyish, and E. M. Forster’s famous “pinko-grey”) as pure white. The stylizations and idealizations of the later thirteenth century that closed the window on naturalistic depiction thus not only renovated earlier ideas of beauty but also supported the emergence of whiteness as a stylized, idealized representation of western Europeans.64 After all, white is the color of beauty and sanctity in the thirteenth century—except, of course, for Maurice and the sainted black Africans who follow him in visual art. Maurice’s African naturalism and the stylized whiteness that followed thus seem to stand as two moments of epidermal depiction that virtually touch in the racialized art of thirteenth-century Europe. BLACK POWER: CONTEMPLATING DEVOTEES, PILGRIMS, AND THOSE WHO VENERATE A RACIAL SAINT I have suggested gains to be had from racialized art in the form of an African St. Maurice for those who wielded power—emperor, archbishop—by considering functionalities that are gained with this particular racial saint at this particular time. For the penitent, pilgrim, or devotee standing or kneeling before an Africanized Maurice, however, naturalizing explanations are less easily to be had. Ladislas Bugner states the case baldly: “How can one reconcile saintliness and blackness? Impossible. Maurice is white and handsome. Because a saint.”65 A black St. Maurice is a contradiction in the very meaning of sanctity, a paradox incarnate. Yet Bugner himself introduces a possibility that does not offend Christian thinking: Compared to more familiar figures, Maurice’s African features and black complexion express in a more blatant fashion the insignificance of a world of appearances and the preeminence of an ideal reality. . . . It was the genius of the Magdeburg sculptor to give material expression to this veritable spiritual about-face in which, through holiness, blackness is changed into light.66 Maurice is black but a saint: someone who visually embodies the early Latin Christian theme that blackness sometimes coexists with beauty as a direct contradiction—nigra sum sed formosa, says the bride in Canticles,

36 Geraldine Heng I am black but beautiful. In Christian terms, a paradoxical condition of this kind directs attention to “the insignificance of a world of appearances” and points to the importance of attending to “an ideal reality” beyond. Among sinful laity, I’ve suggested, penitents could see their own sin, hidden away within them, visually externalized in the skin of the saint and can thus understand God’s generosity to embrace them, ordinary sinners, since God’s generosity embraces even those who are the very color of sin itself. Maurice’s is thus an apotropaic blackness that positions a consoling paradox: representing sin and forgiveness, blackness on a saint wards off the prospect of infernal damnation. Intuition of this kind on the part of a penitent only requires a small leap of identificatory sympathy with Maurice, with little of a barrier to faith: it is amply helped by the fact that, as a martyr, Maurice’s sanctity is of the most hallowed and traditional kind, his martyrdom wholly orthodox and reassuringly familiar in its pedigree. Indeed, the absence of a racialized subjectivity attached to St. Maurice’s hagiography allowed a millennium of pious responses by devotees to be sedimented, on which the new iconography could draw. Maurice’s sanctity, attested by a thousand years of veneration, anchors and secures the invitation of identification. But a less naturalizing way to think of Maurice’s blackness is to treat the possibility that blackness itself holds a power to counter the dominant medieval discourse on its meaning. In this, popular devotion to the Black Madonnas of Europe—a later phenomenon than Maurice, to be sure, but an equally persistent phenomenon over la longue durée—may supply a guide of sorts. Explanations differ for the efflorescence of black images of the Virgin Mary at the close of the Middle Ages or in the Renaissance. Church explanations center on how candle smoke, accumulated over the centuries, inadvertently blackened the Virgin’s face, turning her images black in some instances (critics who resist this explanation point out that atmospheric blackening of this kind should be less selective in recoloring statues or parts of a statue only).67 Some scholars proffer a more anthropological perspective: that the images are in fact Christianized incarnations of ancient pagan goddesses like Isis or Ceres, goddesses especially of fertility and abundance, whose association with black soils and dark mysteries sometimes found expression in their being colored black. Whatever the explanation(s), scholars remark on the deep attachment of devotees to their black Madonnas—their devotion not just to the Virgin but to the Virgin as black. A color that embraces all other colors, black’s appeal on the Madonna may indeed testify to a memory of ancient power associated with it. Equally, we note that contradictions in how color is bound to meaning strongly appeal to the great minds of the church as exquisite ways to articulate subtleties of theology and afford erudite play. For instance: the importance of sin—whose color is black—in salvational theology often leads, in medieval

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modes of religious expression, to what David Wallace wittily calls “competitive abjection” between sinners self-proclaimed.68 Since the condition of being more sinful than thou and thus more abject than thou signals the potentiating likelihood of being more saved than thou and ascending to greater heights of ultimate grace—so much does God love the worst sinners, who are the most abject of all—possessing blackness, at least in theory and in imagination, is not always a bad thing. Thus it is possible for the great Bernard of Clairvaux, in his Sermon 25 on the Song of Songs, only half playfully to refer to Jesus, who among humans has the greatest access to the highest grace (his self-sacrifice being the ultimate abjection) as “obviously black,” and “black but beautiful.”69 Paradoxical play with color, among the erudite, suggests that the contemplation of color polarities afforded intellectual pleasures of wit and paradox for the great theological minds of the Middle Ages, such as the venerable St. Bernard. Yet common church teaching also thrived on contradiction and paradox: Mary, the mother of Jesus, is and must be a virgin, despite her conception of a child and her parturition. Original sin is borne by all humanity out of the disobedience of Adam and Eve, except for Mary, who, contradictorily, remains without original sin. Cannibalism is heinous and abhorrent, forbidden to all, except when the faithful consume the consecrated host that is the transubstantiated body of God, sacramentally eating God: then cannibalism is not only permissible but salvific. Acknowledging that contradiction and paradox are harnessed by the church and disseminated in church teaching does not, of course, clearly suggest how the faithful actually responded to incarnated paradoxes— except when popular heretical movements were seen specifically to reject the contradictions and paradoxes of church teaching, such as the eating of a transubstantiated host-that-was-God. But for a black St. Maurice, the recognition that blackness may have an ancient allure that is not negated in its entirety by a rationalizing theological discourse on the meaning of blackness has implicit appeal. This is because blackness on a saint or on the Virgin can be safely embraced, whereas in other contexts it is to be shunned, feared, and abhorred. Attraction and revulsion are affective responses that can exist as alternating—reversible—currents. Laid upon a holy figure, blackness is imbued with a capacity for protective homeopathy, and doses of sacred blackness, embraced in protected contexts of safety and reassurance, such as the privacy and inwardness of devotional moments, can help to defend against larger, more frightening contexts in which the otherness of blackness is called into play. To put it another way, as Ladislas Bugner has: “the representation of St. Maurice offers here a space where darkness, rather than threatening and swallowing up, is dissipated.”70 For color to work apotropaically in this way, blackness must be coupled with safety and reassurance—conditions that are realized in sacredness, in a black St. Maurice and in black Madonnas.

38 Geraldine Heng There is an uncanny aura, then, possessed by a racial saint that marks him off, say, from a blind saint, an animal-loving saint, or a saint who blesses the crops. Able intimately to mingle familiarity and alienness, the body of a racial saint offers up the power of a queer sanctity that can shock and shelter. The queerness of racialized sanctity thus lies in both the jolting unexpectedness and strangeness of its manifestations and the ability of racialized sanctity to comfort and reassure. In medieval courtly literature, an admixture of blackness, courtliness, and gendered virtue figured by the black queen Belakane in the thirteenth-century Middle High German romance Parzival allows the attraction of Belakane’s otherness to surface and to be enjoyed by the European Arthurian knight Gahmuret and by Parzival’s readers. Blackness that is coupled with chivalric prowess, as figured by the black knight Moriaen, in the thirteenth-century Dutch romance of the same name, similarly manifests otherness as familiar and welcome, affirming an international fraternity of knighthood, of courtly behavior, and of aristocratic kinship. Might not the epidermal blackness of a saint or a Madonna offer a similar degree of protective sheltering, in which the lure of otherness can be embraced and welcomed, while the fear of otherness is disengaged and dissolved, within a proffered context of safety and reassurance? Since it is impossible to recover with any clarity or sureness the affective devotional response of pilgrims and penitents to Maurice and equally impossible to prevent ourselves from wondering, with human curiosity and sympathy, what that response might be, the push to ask our questions and the effort to think about the unanswerable at least tenders some small measure of affective optimism in the readerly imaginary. THE AFTERLIVES OF MAURICE: A BLACK AFRICAN SAINT RAMIFIES IN THE WEST The closing of the window of opportunity in which a sympathetic African naturalism was able to take hold in visual art of the thirteenth century, it turns out, coincides with the end of the Hohenstaufen dynasty in 1268, with the death of Conradin, Frederick II’s grandson. Suckale-Redlefsen appropriately cautions that “We will never know whether the ideas for these programs were dictated entirely by the patrons who commissioned them, or whether perhaps the artists themselves had a greater share in their conception.”71 Nonetheless, Kaplan finds links for nearly all the Hohenstaufen family—Henry VI (Frederick II’s father), Manfred (Frederick II’s natural son), Conradin (Frederick’s grandson)—with black Africans and/or black African portrayals in visual art, and this coincidence helps to provide a double accounting for why so large an interval yawns between the first appearance of a black Maurice and the subsequent late-medieval reappearance of black Maurician images only in the fourteenth through sixteenth

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centuries.72 In the remainder of the thirteenth century, Suckale-Redlefsen remarks, “It may at first seem surprising that the conception of the black St. Maurice which had evolved in the stone sculpture of Magdeburg did not meet with general acceptance, and that in later works the allusions to the saint’s African origins remained at most extremely discrete [i.e. discreet], indeed almost veiled, if present at all.”73 If Maurice’s thirteenth-century transformation into a black African was at the behest of the emperor Frederick II, the archbishop Albert II, or Archbishop Wilbrand, there is little reason to suppose that the Black St. Maurice “did not meet with general acceptance” by the laity, whose devotional responses are unknown and unknowable, and greater reason to suspect that changes—of a political, theological, aesthetic, socioeconomic, or other kind—on the part of those commissioning statuary and those executing their commissions shifted the depiction of racialized sanctity. Suckale-Redlefsen points, after all, to the midcentury turn away from naturalism in visual art toward increasing idealization and “stylized ideals of beauty,” while Caviness points to a midcentury shift that portrayed the flesh hues of sainted figures and Europeans as pure, pristine, idealized white. Not surprisingly, then, in the second half of the thirteenth century, racial saints were ultra-whitened Europeans, and Maurice’s race is alluded to only discreetly in subsequent visual representations—“almost veiled, if present at all.” The stained-glass black Maurice ca. 1250 to 1260 in the west choir of Naumburg Cathedral is the only other surviving image of Maurice from around the period of Magdeburg’s black Maurice, and Naumburg is a suffragan diocese subordinated to Magdeburg. A black St. Maurice only reemerges a century later when another Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV of Bohemia, resurrects the iconography of the saint as a black African in a series of paintings between 1359 and 1365 in the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Karlstejn castle in Bohemia. This “deliberate reversion to the older Magdeburg iconography,” Suckale-Redlefsen suggests, issues from imperial ideology: The choice of saints reveals that careful attention was paid to representing all the nations of Europe and the various parts of the empire. Precedence is given to the saints of Bohemia and the German Empire. This program is not only religious, but also political, expressing very cogently the aspirations cherished by Charles IV. Although his claims had no basis in the actual balance of power, Charles IV regarded himself as a world sovereign whose domain encompassed East and West.74 Devisse emphasizes how the Luxembourg emperor follows in the footsteps of the Hohenstaufen Frederick: “Once again those in power drew attention to Maurice: thereafter he was black.”75 Devisse notes that Magdeburg “welcomed [back] the black saint in its episcopal sees, monasteries, and humble rural churches,” and follows the trail of an African Maurice in

40 Geraldine Heng Halle, Jüterbog, Stendal, Halberstadt, and across Germany and to the north and east.76 Kaplan, however, points to a salient difference in this second, late-medieval efflorescence of an African Maurice: [T]here is no evidence of the actual presence of people of black African descent at Charles IV’s court or in Bohemia. Instead, part of the appeal for Charles, and for Bohemian artists and audiences, may have rested on the notion that the Czechs, like the Ethiopians, were a group at the edge of the Christian world. The fair skin and golden hair of the Czechs, emphasized by Giovanni dei Marignolli, one of Charles’s court intellectuals, may have been seen as defining one extreme of human physical appearance, just as the black Ethiopians embodied the opposite extreme.77 Indeed, Kaplan’s intuition of the symbolic potential of cross-race identification continues the trace of an affective logic that makes identification with a black African Maurice possible by the lay faithful, by the sculptors themselves, and by those who commissioned an African Maurice with an eye to ideology. Instantiating Africa inside Bohemia of the fourteenth century, a black African Maurice allows all who feel themselves insecurely situated in some way—on the periphery, or set apart by their sin, by nature, or by geography—to identify with an extremity that so eloquently dramatizes how an insecure position can be thoroughly secured through sanctity, across the opposite ends of epidermal race. Thereafter, on the heels of Bohemia arrives a wondrous diversity of art objects depicting a black Maurice that accrues over the centuries and across regions and countries. The marvelous color and monochromatic plates in Devisse’s sumptuous volume show us a profusion of black Maurices, large and small, in two and three dimensions: displayed on a bishop’s miter, covered in dazzling plate armor, with loop earrings, crowned with jewels and sporting bejeweled collars, sprouting a goatee and mustache, even materializing as tiny statuettes atop a ciborium and a drinking horn. Kaplan contemplates Maurice’s legacy in the emergence of the Black Magus in the fourteenth century and beyond and scrutinizes the portrayal of “AfroEuropeans” all the way into Renaissance visual art, where vital, confident, male and female Africans beckon, “lively and alluring,” manifesting “a part of the past that reads as modern.”78 To Devisse, then, who first brought the attention of scholars to the extraordinary enigma of the Black St. Maurice of Magdeburg, belongs the final word: There remains the masterpiece in Magdeburg. . . . one would search in vain in medieval art and probably in Western art as a whole for a representation of the African as faithfully and powerfully rendered as this one. Beyond its realism and historicity this statue, in the plenitude of its expressiveness, embodies the ultimate vocation to offer a blackness through which the light of sanctity might shine.79

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NOTES 1. For a discussion of the medieval discourse on black Africans and a bibliography see Geraldine Heng, “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages 1: Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages,” Literature Compass 8:5 (2011): 315–32, and idem, “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages 2: Locations of Medieval Race,” Literature Compass 8:5 (2011): 332–50. The current chapter is a substantially reduced summary of a segment of a book chapter in the manuscript, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, where a full bibliographical apparatus can be found. Unfortunately, length restrictions in the present context do not permit extensive annotation in support of the evidence and arguments I develop here, for which I apologize. 2. Jean Devisse, The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the Early Christian Era to the “Age of Discovery,” trans. William G. Ryan, Vol. 2, Pt. 2 (New York: William Morrow, 1979), 270–1; Gude Suckale-Redlefsen, Mauritius: Der Heilige Mohr (Zurich: Verlag Schnell & Steiner, 1987), 16, 17, 158–285; Paul H. D. Kaplan, The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985), 75. 3. For the legend of Prester John, see Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia UP, 2003), chapter 5; Michael Uebel, “Imperial Fetishism: Prester John among the Natives,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 264–91; and Christopher Taylor, “Prester John, Christian Enclosure, and the Spatial Transmission of Islamic Alterity,” in Contextualizing the Muslim Other in Medieval Christian Discourse, ed. Jerold Frakes (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 39–64. 4. Devisse, The Image of the Black, 149; Suckale-Redlefsen, Mauritius, 28, 29. 5. Suckale-Redlefsen, Mauritius, 28, 29, and further: “On the basis of archeological findings the date of the first church dedicated to the Theban Legion could be fixed at approximately A.D. 380.” Between 470 and 500 CE, an anonymous author added a supplementary account of some length to the Passion (Suckale-Redlefsen, Mauritius, 28, 29; Devisse, The Image of the Black, 149). Marbod of Rennes wrote an eleventh-century verse account of the Passion; Sigebert of Gembloux wrote twelfth-century commentary; and anonymous authors at different times wrote poetry in honor of Maurice and his companions (Devisse, The Image of the Black, 149). Devisse (chapter 3) and Suckale-Redlefsen (chapter 1) have lengthy accounts of the transmission of Maurician hagiography and the spread of the legend. 6. See Suckale-Redlefsen, Mauritius, for one of the more detailed versions; she adds, “The authenticity of the martyrdom of the Theban Legion in this place is generally doubted today” (28, 29). Variant accounts exist of the events in the martyrdom. 7. Suckale-Redlefsen, Mauritius, 32, 33. 8. Suckale-Redlefsen, Mauritius, 40, 41. 9. Paul H. D. Kaplan, “Introduction” (22) to the reissued The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the Early Christian Era to the “Age of Discovery,” trans. William G. Ryan, preface by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Vol. 2, Pt. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; Houston: Menil Collection, 2010), 1–30. “Cologne now had a saint who appears to have been consistently depicted as a black from the fourteenth century on” (Suckale-Redlefsen, Mauritius, 124, 125), though Devisse notes that neither Gregory “nor the Holy Moors, whose leader he was, were prominent in the city’s devotions” (The Image of the Black, 176). Suckale-Redlefsen presents one version of Gregory’s legend (124–5).

42 Geraldine Heng 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

Kaplan, “Introduction,” 25. Ibid. Ladislas Bugner, “Forward” to Suckale-Redlefsen, Mauritius, 12, 13. Suckale-Redlefsen, Mauritius, 44, 47. Suckale-Redlefsen, Mauritius, 18, 19. Devisse, in The Image of the Black, citing a PhD dissertation at the University of Paris as his source, says that Maurice’s right hand once held a banner (166). Devisse, The Image of the Black, 158. Devisse’s chapter in L’Image du Noir appeared in 1979, Suckale-Redlefsen’s Mauritius: Der heilige Mohr was published in 1987, and Kaplan’s publications range from 1983 to 2010. Their work forms the context of critical summary and discussion and guides my thinking. Devisse, The Image of the Black, 153. Ibid. Ibid., 153–4. Ibid., 160. Ibid. Arab chronicles noted that the Hohenstaufen dynasty was prone to Islamophilia. See, e.g., Ibn Wasil’s comments in Francisco Gabrieli, ed. and trans., Arab Historians of the Crusades (London: Routledge, 1957), 276–8. Suckale-Redlefsen, Mauritius, 40, 41. Paul H. D. Kaplan, “Black Africans in Hohenstaufen Iconography,” Gesta 26 (1987): 29. Ibid. Suckale-Redlefsen, Mauritius, 44, 47. Kaplan, “Introduction,” 12. Ibid., 13. Ibid. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 14. See, e.g., Alex Metcalfe, The Muslims of Medieval Italy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 280. Frederick’s legend looms so large that, in a revisionary swing of the pendulum, after Ernest Kantorowicz’s 1927 laudatory account of Frederick’s uniqueness (Frederick the Second 1194–1250, trans. E. O. Lorimer [New York: Frederick Ungar, 1931]), historians are now more inclined to suggest Frederick’s similarities to than his differences from his counterparts. David Abulafia’s 1988 account of Frederick (Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988]) may be contrasted with Kantorwicz’s. A contemporary chronicler referred to Frederick as the wonder of the world (stupor mundi); Pope Gregory IX referred to Frederick as the Antichrist. Muslim chronicles spoke admiringly of him but wondered at his faith (see, e.g., Al-Jauzi’s remarks in Gabrieli, Arab Historians, 275). For Ibn Wasil’s and Al-Jauzi’s accounts of the treaty between the Sultan and the Emperor, and Frederick’s sojourn in Jerusalem, see Gabrieli, Arab Historians, 269–75. Kantorowicz and Abulafia offer considered discussions of the extraordinary relationship between Al-Kamil and Frederick. Kaplan, “Black Africans,” 33. Julie Anne Taylor, Muslims in Medieval Italy: The Colony at Lucera (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 89. Kaplan, “Introduction,” 14. Quoted by Kaplan, “Introduction,” 15. See also Suckale-Redlefsen 22, 23. Kaplan, “Black Africans,” 34.

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41. Devisse, The Image of the Black, 164, 160. The theory “that the whole circuit of the world was by right under the tutelage of the Roman Imperator” was also held by Frederick’s father and grandfather (Kantorowicz, Frederick the Second, 7). 42. Kaplan, “Black Africans,” 33. 43. Suckale-Redlefsen, Mauritius, 52, 53. 44. Devisse, Image of the Black, 159–60. 45. Suckale-Redlefsen, Mauritius, 42–4. 46. Ibid., 52, 53. 47. Ibid., 41–7. Devise, who dates the black Maurice to 1240–50, somewhat later than Suckale-Redlefsen’s dating (before 1232), does not intimate that both statues belong to a single sculptural program for the new cathedral. 48. Ibid., 54, 55. 49. Virginia Roehrig Kaufman, “The Magdeburg Rider: An Aspect of the Reception of Frederick II’s Roman Revival North of the Alps,” in Intellectual Life at the Court of Frederick II Hohenstaufen, ed. William Tronzo (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1994), 74. 50. Devisse, Image of the Black, 159. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. Carol Sweetenham, trans. Robert the Monk’s History of the First Crusade (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 171–2. 54. On the negative symbolism of Ethiopia and Ethiopians and blackness as the color of sin and the devil, see Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (London: Routledge, 2002); Devisse, Image of the Black, 59–61; Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 29–93; Dorothy Hoogland Verkerk, “Black Servant, Black Demon: Color Ideology in the Ashburnham Pentateuch,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001), 57–77. 55. Suckale-Redlefsen, Mauritius, 42, 43; Kaplan, “Introduction,” 15. 56. Kaufmann, “The Magdeburg Rider,” 66, 67. 57. Ibid., 67. 58. Suckale-Redlefsen, Mauritius, 44, 47. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., 50–1. 61. Kaufmann, “The Magdeburg Rider,” 81, 82. 62. Ibid., 82. 63. Madeline Caviness, “From the Self-Invention of the Whiteman in the Thirteenth Century to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,” Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art 1 (2008): www.differentvi sions.org. 64. I discuss this more fully in chapter 4 of Invention of Race. 65. Bugner, “Forward,” 10, 11. 66. Ibid. 67. For an introduction to the Black Madonna, see Monique Scheer, “From Majesty to Mystery: Change in the Meaning of Black Madonnas from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries,” The American Historical Review 107 (2002): 1412–40. 68. David Wallace, “Surinam: The Long History of Black and White,” public lecture delivered at the University of Texas, Austin, October 18, 2002. This paragraph draws on Heng, “The Invention of Race 2.” 69. Kilian Walsh, trans., The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux: On the Song of Songs II (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1976), 56. 70. Bugner, “Forward,” 10, 11.

44 Geraldine Heng 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

Suckale-Redlefsen, Mauritius, 46–7. Kaplan, “Introduction,” 13–14; “Black Africans,” 33. Suckale-Redlefsen, Mauritius, 50, 51. Ibid., 56, 57. Devisse, The Image of the Black, 169. Ibid., 174. Kaplan, “Introduction,” 19. Ibid., 30. Devisse, The Image of the Black, 205.

2

The Threefold Man Lavater, Physiognomy, and the Rise of the Western Icon Brian Bantum

“We are beholding a countenance, then whenever we have before us a face that has fully realized within itself its likeness to God: and we then rightly say, ‘Here is the image of God’, meaning, ‘Here is depicted the prototype of Him.’ ”1 —Pavel Florensky “The essence of the image is not visibility; it is its economy.”2 —Maria José-Mondzain “If there existed a creature who was the complement, the sensible bond of created Beings, the master-piece of creation—that creature would be a copy, a visible Representative of the Divinity, a subordinate Deity, God in his image!”3 —Johann Kasper Lavater

What does it mean to become “like Christ,” to be transformed into “his image?” This question has been a central aspect of Christian discipleship, as those who seek to follow Christ also seek to understand what it might mean for their own lives to embody and emulate the one whom they see as their perfection and their salvation. In these endeavors, the importance of examples, ideal embodiments, saints, has been central in helping believers to see an image of faithfulness. Relics of martyrs, hagiography, paintings, and icons have all served to image the embodiment of faithfulness, Christ-likeness. But which bodies reflect Christ? Practices of delineating beauty and ugliness are not new. Aristotle considered the correlation between a person’s physical attributes and their character. In societies looking at the world through the lens of Christian faith and belief that God became a man, the body could reflect a profound reality, how humanity was created in the image of God. But in societies in which Christian belief shaped one’s view of the world, faces were also interpreted as displaying unfaithfulness, a dissonance with the image of God. In Medieval and Renaissance societies, the faces of unfaithfulness were the faces of

46 Brian Bantum Jews especially. Often signified by a distinct nose, the Jewish body was a foreign, alien body. The Jewish face was the antithesis of Christian belonging and discipleship. But as the premodern slowly turned to the “modern,” a burgeoning idea of whiteness would emerge. Europe’s slow metamorphosis from Renaissance to Enlightenment was accompanied by a crystallization of a racial logic. Enlightenment practices of physiognomy interpreted Jewish and European bodies in relationship to numerous accounts from global encounters arriving with the exploits of colonization and the growing dependence upon scientific methods of interpretation. As such, the Enlightenment exhibited a shift in how faithful Christian life (and especially the body) was discerned and interpreted. What would Christ-likeness look like and how does one begin to see this likeness? Between the attempts to extricate Christianity from the seemingly primitive claims of religious dogma and “myth” and the desire to make sense of religious faith from within inherited beliefs of what Christian faith was (miracles, the divinity of Christ, the resurrection of the body, and so on), theologian and pastor Johann Kasper Lavater (1741–1801) expressed a Christian faith that was mystical but also articulated itself within the bounds of scientific inquiry and reason. Through his scrupulous process of analysis and classification, Lavater created a system of interpreting faces and bodies that did not simply lift up the example of a person’s life. Through the interpretation of a person’s bodily lines and features, Lavater codified particular bodies as signifying the divine. In doing so, he deconstructed the context of the saint’s lived life and reconceived a person’s features as indicative of their ideality, his saintliness as embodying the image of God. Lavater did not appeal to race or skin color as a category, but insofar as his writings exclusively had as their object the white, European, male body, Lavater effectively codified the racial saint. Published in 1772, Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy sought to interpret the visible features of the face in order to discern the invisible character of the person. Wildly popular, Lavater4 and his text were known throughout Europe and England.5 The text compiled, classified, and interpreted various artistic renderings of faces in order to understand and systematize the interpretation of bodies and, more fundamentally, one’s personhood. While physiognomy would eventually go out of fashion and today is seen as little more than a naive quasi-scientific mythology, its significance lay not only in the burgeoning Enlightenment fascination with scientific classification and rational explanations of the body.6 Examined in light of Lavater’s own vocation as a pastor, mystic, and scientist as well as in relationship to the Christian traditions of images and bodies, Lavater’s physiognomic writings and drawings can be interpreted as a form of icon writing. Within this economy of “Western icons,” the text is a means of transformation, drawing the reader into a fuller embodiment of what it means to be truly human (or implicitly inscribing the boundary that delineates what is not possible).

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The fullness of humanity in Lavater’s work is not only a white male body but a particular set of features and characteristics. In this regard, Lavater’s physiognomical writings exhibit the racial logic of seemingly “premodern” conceptions of medieval and Renaissance representations of bodily difference (especially in relationship to Jews and Africans.)7 And while the physiognomy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would scientifically classify the peoples of the world, Lavater’s work holds two important distinctions from subsequent physiognomical writings. First, his work was not an academic project but was accessible and widely read. Put differently, Lavater’s work became a part of public life. Second, Lavater’s position as a highly regarded theologian and pastor and the presence of Essays alongside Lavater’s many theological writings highlights Essays itself as a theological project.8 In all, Lavater’s work, while never explicitly invoking racial nomenclature, articulates a theological vision of an ideal Christian body, a saint, as a male white male body. In doing so, Lavater’s work displays how whiteness will function in the modern world, not simply through the academic claims of philosophers, scientists, and politicians but through the discipling, the formation of the layman’s gaze. Lavater’s physiognomic work drew the reader into a practice of “reading” others and reading themselves in relation to the image of Christ. Lavater’s physiognomic writings are themselves representative of a historical tradition of physiognomy that emphasized the spiritual significance of exterior characteristics. This spiritual emphasis was contrasted with physiognomic writings that centered on diagnostic and medicinal purposes, seeking to delineate ailments through the interpretation of physical features. Lavater’s physiognomic method, however, was an explicitly theological explication of bodies through scientific inquiry. What differentiates Lavater from previous physiognomists was the degree to which his observations of bodies served a broader theological and explicitly Christian system of thought and practice. This integration of “scientific” explanation/classification and Christian spirituality/piety served to popularize physiognomic thought throughout Europe in the late eighteenth century. But even more, Lavater’s system exhibits a reconception of the saints’ visual markers. Not miraculous piety or healing or vows of poverty, the contours of one’s face become inextricably connected to one’s ideal of faithfulness, and in so doing, the significance of the body and what its various features indicate become transformed through Lavater’s economy. The economy of thought for Lavater was deeply Christological. The height or archetype of such inquiry was Jesus, the Word made visible. Lavater’s Essays included commentary and interpretation on various artists’ images as well as interpretation of what those bodies indicated. In this way, we see a deepening of the interpretive gaze in which the images are interpreted in terms of the body’s inherent or natural qualities. In this respect, meaning is, through the interpretive gaze, laid upon bodies. But for Lavater, the height of the human form remained the Eternal Word in Jesus Christ. As

48 Brian Bantum Stafford highlights, for Lavater “Christ was the perfectly intelligible Word. The supreme incarnation of a transfigured and readable humanity.”9 This movement among the viewer, the viewed, and the archetype of Christ constitutes a theological economy wherein the viewer is encountered by a possibility of what he10 could be. The relationship between the gaze and the conformity of one’s life, of how one lives, constitutes an economy, a mode of being and ordering one’s life toward a particular end, in this case, the conformation of one’s life and soul to the perfection of Christ’s person. In Lavater’s physiognomic thought, the viewer is transformed into the image of Christ through the cultivation of a knowledge and sight that was engraved upon a face. In this way, Lavater’s physiognomy was a theological description of bodies and their possibilities that shifted the practice of icon writing away from the production of the visual icon itself and toward the right interpretation of bodies. This shift in the visual object reproduces iconicity in the human form and the capacity to see one’s own (and others’) body rightly. In this chapter I will examine Lavater’s Essays as a theological anthropology, outlining his theological matrix of viewer and viewed as a process that transforms some into saints while also theologically codifying the grotesque other. Highlighting the theological anthropology intrinsic to Lavater’s work, I will examine Lavater’s work in relationship to the Christian theological tradition of icon writing found in the Eastern Orthodox understanding of the icon and iconicity. In doing so, I suggest Lavater’s physiognomic writings can be understood to be a transposition of the icon, transferring the object of devotion and transformation away from the image (and its invisible antecedent) and onto the body, transforming the Western body into a walking icon to be viewed and interpreted and to codify others into a matrix of Christ-likeness or difference. ESSAYS ON PHYSIOGNOMY AS A THEOLOGICAL ECONOMY Born in Zurich in 1741, Johann Kaspar Lavater was a renowned pastor, theologian, and writer. Lavater was a man known for his theological writings and letters in addition to being credited for the popularization of physiognomic thought in the eighteenth century. Lavater’s writings mediated two seemingly discordant moments in Enlightenment Europe. On the one hand, the rise of rationalism and observable truths were pervasive and powerful convictions growing throughout Europe. Within these convictions were earnest attempts to articulate Christian faith in ways that were consonant with the rationality of observation. In doing so, claims concerning miracles, Jesus as the Son of God, the virgin birth, and resurrection were often deemphasized or attributed to naive, unsophisticated people. Instead, Christian life was centered upon moral character and choices, the capacity of a person to enact a moral life. But another aspect of Europe’s Christian ethos was “orthodox” responses to the Enlightenment reinterpretations of Christian

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doctrine coupled with pietistic spirituality emphasizing the centrality of Scripture and a life conformed to Christ. Lavater’s theological writings display a deeply spiritual character animated by belief in Christ’s divine personhood and the human soul’s capacity to conform to the image of Christ. But Lavater also believed that this conformity could be seen and discerned through the rational observation of faces, suggesting that the interior qualities of the soul can be seen through the characteristics of one’s face and one’s life. In this regard, Lavater occupies a curious space in Enlightenment Christianity, holding a deeply mystical view of the relationship among the soul, the body, and God while articulating these beliefs within the “rational” mode of scientific observation and classification. Often understood within the rationalism of the Enlightenment, physiognomy has been read as an extension of this system of scientific classification that marked so much of Enlightenment thought. And yet, Lavater’s Essays, while desiring to display the indelible mark of rationality, was also framed by the deeply theological themes of the imago dei or man as “image of God” and, further, this imago dei was understood most fully within a rigorously Christocentric point of view. This theological framing highlights how Lavater’s aims are not only classificatory but also explicitly transformational. In the process of seeing and understanding the various features of the face and their relationship to invisible realities of character, the viewer begins to conform to the image of God as one who can see, who understands. This seeing is an act of discipleship that arises from the imago dei, To know, to desire, to act—or rather, to observe and think, to feel and be attracted, to possess the power of motion and resistance: These render man a physical, moral, and intellectual Being . . . Man endowed with these faculties, with this threefold life, is to himself an object of contemplation; the object of all others most worthy of being observed, and which he alone is worthy to contemplate.11 As the highest expression of God’s good creation, humanity alone possesses the capacity to interpret and understand the intricacies of creation and in particular the human body and face. Through the face, the possibilities and character of God are revealed. But what is the process of discerning the meaning of these various characteristics? Here Lavater’s spirituality becomes interwoven with the practices of observation and classification. Before we can consider the theological economy that Lavater engenders, we must first consider the wider phenomenon of physiognomy during the late eighteenth century. The Enlightenment practice of physiognomy was an expression of a burgeoning scientific knowledge that grew as modernity continued the trajectory of Renaissance artistic discovery. The scientific inquiry of the Enlightenment draws upon the exacting work of Renaissance artists and their techniques of

50 Brian Bantum dissection and observation.12 In this convergence of science and the image, the relationship between knowledge and image would be inverted, with knowledge displayed through “collections” or encyclopedias providing the interpretive framework of the image and, more profoundly, bodies themselves. Art historian Barbara Maria Stafford points to an important relationship between the burgeoning scientific community of the Enlightenment and the visual arts that provides an important insight into the interrelationship between Enlightenment scientific practice and the images it produced. As science and medicine grew and expanded their reach, in many ways, science began to speak more authoritatively on what the world was and who human beings were in this world and, in so doing, sought to find the “connection between the visible surface and the invisible depth.”13 Through several “somatic metaphors,” Stafford describes the process by which Enlightenment thinkers and artists began to uncover “truth” and display a truer nature of humanity and the world. The themes of dissection, abstraction, conceiving, marking, magnifying, and sensing all work for Stafford to describe how the Enlightenment world sought to uncover the fundamental nature of things. In each of these, the main task becomes a certain separation and cataloging of anatomy so as to get to the deeper truth of a thing. This involved the process of dissecting bodies to uncover the interrelationship and underlying connections of interior and exterior characteristics. Ultimately, in each of these somatic moments, bodies are “metaphors of decoding, dividing, separating, analyzing, fathoming permeated ways of thinking about, and representing all branches of knowledge from religion to philosophy, antiquarianism to criticism, physiognomics to linguistics, archeology to surgery.” Stafford continues, “analogies of dissection, specifically, functioned on two interrelated levels. The literal, corporeal sense derived from the tactile cuts inflicted by actual instruments” wherein a person must utilize instruments and skill to dig and determine the difference between bone and flesh and his particular functions in the body.14 The discursive knowledge of the Renaissance image (and what was necessary in order to achieve it) became a mode of gazing. This gaze not only attempted to penetrate the depths of what a person was but began to utilize the body in order to map these inner realities.15 One example of a dissecting gaze in physiognomic thought is the creation and interpretation of silhouettes. The process of creating a silhouette in the eighteenth century according to Stafford was a type of dissection—a type of study—what Stafford calls a “graphology of character” whose virtue lay in “discovering ‘what does not immediately strike the senses,’ discerning in every external feature, attitude, and position of the human body what man internally really is.”16 Lavater is an important example of the various attempts to capture the silhouette and highlight slight and stark contrasts between various human beings. Yet what Stafford points to is the way in which these differences were not merely noted but were latent with meaning concerning the more fundamental nature of a person. As “graphologies of

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character,” they depicted a deeper sense of the who but sought to unearth the what of each person. Physiognomy as a study of the human form became a scientific “reading” of human forms seeking to “diagnose unseen spiritual qualities by scrutinizing visible traits.”17 The interrelationship between the internal and external that was bound to the various systems of physiognomic interpretation outlines the dynamic nature of images, bodies, and viewers. Historian and theorist Maria JoséMondzain suggests, “the essence of the image is not visibility; it is its economy.”18 Mondzain’s observation derives from an investigation of the intersection of the iconoclastic controversies of the Byzantine Empire in relationship to not only a Christological question but also the authority of the Emperor and specifically the emperor as an image of God’s authority. At stake in the iconoclastic controversies was not simply what was fitting to be imaged but who had power to name and to be named. Mondzain’s observation regarding how images are entangled in patterns of interpretation and meaning highlights the economy latent within physiognomic images. Central to this practice of physiognomy as dissection is an economy of sight and interpretation that suggests bodies are to be viewed while constructing the reader as viewer. At the fulcrum of this interchange in Lavater’s Essays is the image of Christ, at once impossible to capture perfectly but also serving as the archetype of humanity’s likeness to God and human possibility. In this triangulation of faces (the faces of the viewed, the viewer, and Christ) an economy of transformation begins to emerge. Lavater frames Essays within a reflection on the image of God. In Christ, the image of God is seen fully and, in Lavater’s view, the visibility of Christ [and his facial features] becomes the interpretative frame through which all faces (and thereby persons) are interpreted. In this way, Essays is not a primarily scientific account of human beings as subsequent physiognomic texts would be but is more precisely a compendium of approximations to and deformations from the image of Christ. The aim of the essays was to develop the capacity of the viewer to identify this proximity or difference. While Essays is a catalog of various faces and attributes, these faces are on display for the sake of the viewer, to develop and train a way of seeing, all of which are acts of Christian discipleship oriented toward love of neighbor. Oriented toward the cultivation of virtue and the soul, the physiognomic observations of Essays are anthropological applications of Lavater’s pastoral work and writings, repeatedly emphasizing how a person ought to reflect the life of Christ in her virtues and friendships. Lavater’s physiognomic explorations are classificatory and formational, relying upon a purportedly scientific process of observation to discern characteristics of a person’s soul. This capacity to see makes possible the love of one’s neighbor; according to Lavater, “An attentive study of Man teaches us not only what he is not, and what he cannot become; it likewise indicates the reason, and informs beside what he is, what it is possible for him to be.”19 The physiognomist can discern in people their greater capacities and

52 Brian Bantum the ways in which their lives are not conforming to the image their face corresponds to: As the Painter catches a thousand little shades, a thousand reflections of the light which less experienced eyes, to the Physiognomist can discover in Man, actual and possible perfections which are imperceptible to those who are disposed to undervalue and calumniate mankind, and remain frequently concealed even from the eyes of them who judge more indulgently of their fellow creatures.20 The physiognomist becomes a mediator, a means by which the misconstrual of one’s being can be identified and lifted to its true state, while those whose countenance is lesser may be shown mercy and slowly drawn into a space of repute through their relation with those whose insight and capacities are greater. At the heart of this process of classification is the presumption of the unique capacity to see in human beings in general but also, more specifically, a cultivation of physiognomic sight that resides in certain individuals uniquely according to their own physical attributes, for “without the advantage of a good figure, it is impossible to become an excellent Physiognomist.”21 Bound to the presumption of form is a constellation of additional attributes. Let us recapitulate the whole in a few words. The Physiognomist ought to unite to a person finely formed and perfectly organised, the talent of observation; a strong imagination, a lively and discerning spirit, extensive acquaintance with and superior skill in the Fine Arts: above all, he must possess a soul firm, yet gentle, innocent and calm; a heart exempted from the dominion of the ruder passions, and all whose various windings are well known to himself. No one can comprehend the expression of generosity, can distinguish the signs which announce great quality, unless he himself is generous, animated with noble sentiments, and capable of performing great actions.22 The physiognomist is one who uniquely sees and names, providing the viewed a proper understanding of themselves. In this regard, Lavater’s Essays is not only a compendium of faces and techniques of reading but a means of training and educating that expands the economy of viewed and viewer, drawing the reader of Essays into an economy of reading the world around them. Lavater’s aim in the distribution of the Essays was not only the establishment of the physiognomist as the authority but the development of physiognomic thought among those who read so that they might see themselves more faithfully. Through this corrected sight, they might also enact a more Christ-like way of inhabiting the world. Given the structure of Essays as a collection of comparisons grounded in relation to the image of

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Christ, Essays reshapes the significance of the viewer’s body and the bodies the viewer sees in her midst. In Lavater’s view, Christ’s portrait could never be captured perfectly, for it was the fullness of the human form. Evaluating several different silhouettes of Christ and their various inadequacies, he comments, “They all have an air of uneasiness and chagrin, an expression of indifference bordering on weakness . . . Every one of these silhouettes bears a certain impress of greatness; and yet there is not one of them that really deserves to be called great.”23 Yet a good approximation of Christ’s image works for the development of spiritual and moral character. Within Essays, Christ’s body is a certain type of body that gestures toward the encapsulation of divinity and humanity and thus outlines the fullest possibilities of humanity. Of course, Lavater’s understanding of the “true” image of Christ is determined as much by Greek notions of beauty distilled through Renaissance artists, but what is operative here is not the scientific accuracy of the image or Lavater’s flawed assumptions but, more critically, the economy of how these images are working and how the various referents operate in relationship to the reader. Here, it is not merely Christ’s body that becomes salvific, but more specifically a certain type of body. It was a body in which the facial proportions, slant of the nose, and symmetry of features reflected the true divine character of the eternal Son. And in gazing upon this image, the viewer might gain insight into the true form of beauty and wisdom and thereby become conformed into this image. He writes, Ah! If antiquity had transmitted to us an exact profile of the divine Jesus, how dear would that image be to my heart! I would sacrifice everything to get possession of it . . . Yes, I should discover in his celestial features the testimony of those truths which he left behind Him. I should trace in them the whole character of his Gospel; and this proof would speak more home to my mind than the most faithful version, nay more than the original manuscripts themselves.24 But without a “true” image of Christ, Lavater does employ several reproductions of Jesus’s likeness or silhouettes, evaluating the extent to which they capture the fullness of Christ, the divine Word. The fullness of Jesus’s identity is not encapsulated in these images (these are the only images for which this is the case), but these images do serve an important function within Lavater’s formative process. The images of Christ serve as a plumb line for comparison, placing the faces that precede and that follow into a broader classificatory matrix ranging from a Christ-like ideal to the grotesque and defamed. For instance, Essays Vol. 1., Fragment Fifteen concerns the “Harmony of Moral Beauty and Physical Beauty.” In this fragment, one image, “Christ after Holbein,” demonstrates a diminishment of virtue in three faces beginning with Christ. While Christ’s image is not sufficient to encapsulate perfection, it does serve

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Figure 2.1 Hans Holbein, “Christ Talking to Two Men,” Essays Vol. 1, 162. Image from Wellcome Library, London. Accessed August 15, 2013. http://wellcomeimages. org/indexplus/image/V0009091.html

as a referent to which various deformations of character are envisaged in either protruding jaws or gaunt eyes. But following this brief comparison, the fragment continues with examples of various philosophers, famous musicians, and celebrities, noting the outlines of moral character and visible beauty. This procession of beauty and moral character is followed with pages of images exemplifying the visual deformities of criminals, drunkards, and the grotesque. While the science of such a classificatory system is obviously dubious, the economy of this fragment’s structure in instructive. With an approximation of Christ as its interpreting frame of reference, a range of faces and bodies is presented to the viewer, drawing the viewer into a process of approximation for himself, his neighbors, friends, and strangers. Parlor activities that drew silhouettes of guests would further instill this practice of interpreting the community. Examples of silhouettes of prominent clerics or composers sought to make visible the contours of deep intellectual or moral character. Conversely, depictions of those who deviated; the insane, Jews, Africans, and others became not only means of describing those who have visibly fallen away from the ideal form of Jesus’s humanity but also served to further outline the normalcy (or approximate divinity) of an ideal form. The perfection of the Eternal Word becomes visible in the world through the

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approximation to an ideal Greek form but also through the cataloging of the “grotesque.” Stafford notes that in temporal portraiture, recording distorted marks of an unregenerated humanity, stood in caricatural opposition to the unique and beautiful Christological symbol. Its unfit and multitudinous subjects were only too much in evidence . . . Mutilated and deformed, these existential subjects became the physiognomist’s staple. [Lavater] wished to determine “their every passion, the seat of its residence, the source from which it flows, its root, the fund which supplies it.”25 Silhouetting and physiognomy interpreted the contours of human form to catalog and gaze upon in order to gain a deeper insight into the Creator and strive toward a greater approximation to the “Word made flesh.” The images utilized in this endeavor were drawn from significant works of art, scientific and common portraits, yet the discourse that accompanied them effectively transferred the power of the image from walls and frames to the contours of living bodies. In addition to the comparisons of bodies internal to the European, through the wider depictions of newly “discovered” peoples of the East and far West, the lines of manhood and womanhood were more deeply etched upon the bodies of Europeans. These lines were not without depth or power, for they represented a growing “dogma.” That is, certain bodies began to take on the form of accepted normalcy and, even more profoundly, a “true form of humanity.” This structure of the human body, for Lavater, was a thing to marvel at while being “only the cover of the soul, its veil and its organ.” He continues, “by how many languages, motions, and signs does this present though concealed divinity, reveal himself in the human face! Thence he is reflected as from a magical mirror.”26 This deeply racialized economy highlights how notions of normativity and deformation were exacerbated through the classification of non-European bodies.27 But in addition to these outward classifications, the theological economy of physiognomy worked within and upon the European body as well, inscribing upon it meaning, possibilities, and impossibilities. Theological meaning was written upon their bodies. In this development of a bodily rubric by which people become cataloged and inspected in order to ascertain their character and capacities lay the logic or economy of the icon. The perfection of Jesus’s sensibility and timidity is contrasted to insensibility and barbarity. The curvature of the nose in particular is the primary indicator of this deeper moral character. These detailed comparisons and cataloging of lips and noses and profiles etched the ideal upon the viewer. The progression of attributes becomes an overarching rubric of evaluation and discernment. In Essays, the viewer becomes “dissected” just as the image displays the dissection of the human body and its types into individual parts. Each line begins to display a deeper reality of knowledge or character and begins

56 Brian Bantum to reorient the viewer to a new way of envisioning himself and others in his world. His approximation to Christ is outlined through the idealized Greek form but also through the imaging of the deformed, the African, the handicapped, and others. In the examination of the “grotesque” dark body and the Jewish body, the difference among European (and eventually white) bodies slowly became minimized in relation to the “darker” difference beyond the European nations.28 While such processes of classification were felt most violently in dark bodies, Lavater’s Essays displays how this fragmentation was also working upon the European body, slowly, painstakingly delineating the curvature of perfection as a particular white face. Lavater’s Essays draws the viewer into a practice of discernment with Christ as an invisible but present outline of humanity’s possibilities. Through a process of training the gaze for similitude and dissimilitude, Lavater’s project aims to not only educate the reader but to transform him, drawing him further into the profundity of the invisible perfection made visible through the rational organization of beauty and ugliness. Through this process, the interior moral and spiritual reality are extended beyond the pages of the book and become displayed upon the very faces of the readers. In this way, Lavater’s text functions as a means to mediate and transform and thus can be understood as a form of icon. Theologian and philosopher Jean-Luc Marion (b. 1946) considers this economy less an economy of the icon than an economy of the idol in which “in the idol, the gaze of man is frozen in its mirror; in the icon the gaze of man is lost in the invisible gaze that visibly envisages him.”29 And yet, Lavater’s Essays exhibit a unique quality in comparison to the wider pattern of Enlightenment self-perception as holding powers of intellect and observation that penetrated the deep recesses of truth in our bodies. For Lavater, his images serve to unmask the deep contours of the viewer’s life not through the perfection of the image but through the recognition of the perfection of the invisible that is utterly distant from the image yet also present with it. In this regard, Essays articulates human possibility within itself but also external to itself. In this way, Lavater’s intent bears a curious resemblance to Marion’s summary of the icon in which opposed to the idol which delimited the low-water mark of our aim, the icon displaces the limits of our visibility to the measure of its own—its glory. It transforms us in its glory by allowing this glory to shine on our face as its mirror—but a mirror consumed by that very glory, transfigured with invisibility and, by dint of being saturated beyond itself from that glory becoming, strictly though imperfectly, the icon of it; visibility of the invisible as such.30 Lavater’s Essays draw the viewer into an economy of viewer, viewed, and the face of Christ with the aim of developing the capacity to see the invisible meaning of the visible aspects of the body. Given Lavater’s theological

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commitments, an understanding of this economy can be deepened by examining Lavater’s theological economy in relationship to the wider tradition of Christian images and in particular the Eastern Christian tradition of icon theology. In drawing this comparison, I am not suggesting that Lavater is invoking Eastern Orthodox icon theology. Instead, I am asking what facets or nuances emerge when we consider Lavater’s economy in relationship to explicitly theological accounts of the image and its relationship to personhood. ESSAYS ON PHYSIOGNOMY AS ICON WRITING The earliest Christian writing regarding images focused on the faithfulness of depicting Jesus’s face. In Jesus’s face was the paradox of what was visible and what was understood to be utterly invisible: the glory of God. In the midst of the numerous controversies regarding Jesus and the interrelationship of divinity and humanity that constituted his identity was a deep, underlying claim regarding the meaning of and possibilities of the body. To say that Jesus was the face of God was to claim the possibility of humanity’s likeness to God. These concerns over Jesus’s identity and the meaning of the body would continue to define further questions concerning Christian images. Could Jesus’s body be depicted? The iconoclastic controversies of the eighth to ninth centuries would draw upon Christological formulations to deny or affirm the possibility of imaging Jesus, the son of God. The economy of the gaze engendered in Lavater’s Essays points not only to a classificatory process but also to a process of seeing that transforms one’s self-understanding and thus how one inhabits the world. It is in this regard that I have begun to gesture toward physiognomy as a form of icon writing. But in order to explore these connections (and disconnections), we will briefly outline aspects of Eastern Orthodox theology of the icon and, in doing so, highlight physiognomy’s shared economy even in the midst of its differing emphases. In Eastern Orthodoxy, the icon is an image of Jesus or a saint intended to draw the viewer into the spiritual reality that is Christ’s incarnation. Through this process, the viewer becomes transformed or conformed into this image, thus becoming an icon of deified humanity. But in addition to a theology of image and the body, the icon is tied to the worship life of the church as a visual symbol of the spiritual reality that the church signifies. A particular church building and congregation is a symbol of a unified confession, the church universal and the reality of God’s presence and involvement in the world. In this regard, the theology of the icon is not simply about the meaning of an image but about the interrelationship among image, body, and a larger reality or idea. The icon is a symbol that is the visualization of presence and the significance of a space and a particular body. Orthodox theologian Leonid

58 Brian Bantum Ouspensky (1902–1987) notes, “the icon is both a means and a path to follow. It is itself a prayer. Visibly and directly, it reveals to us this freedom from passion about which the Fathers speak.”31 The icon is created to serve as a window, as a means to be drawn into an invisible, spiritual reality, and in that economy, the one who prays with the icon is transfigured into the image of Christ. This image is not an individual image but is one that is envisaged in the midst of the communal life of the church, the sacraments, and one’s bodily life. I will consider three particular aspects of icon theology as representative of the larger economy of the icon: the icon itself as a visual image or as art, the relationship between the icon and the viewer (and the viewer’s body), and the relationship between the transformed body and the world. In examining these various aspects of Eastern icon theology, I will point to the ways in which the theological economy of Lavater’s Essays shares in these economies. These interrelationships will point to the textuality of icons that are written and read so that they might become means of transforming the body of the viewer into an icon that can be “read” and seen in the world. As we have seen in our attention to the theological economy of images in Essays, Lavater’s aim is not merely the instruction but also the cultivation and conformation of moral likeness in the reader. Read in conjunction with this broader of framework of the icon, Lavater’s physiognomic essays can be interpreted as a broader theological economy, or the instantiation of a European icon theology. ICONS AS “ART” Eastern icons are not artistic expressions of individuality but deeply inscribed orthodoxies and claims that are intended to draw the viewer into a spiritual truth. Orthodox theologian Pavel Florensky (b. 1882) suggests that “An icon is a transfixing, an annunciation that proclaims in color the spiritual world; therefore, icon painting is the occupation of a person who sees that world as sacred.”32 Florensky’s conception of painting icons is tied to the inherent qualities of the icon’s materials as indicative of deeper spiritual realities. Florensky critiques Western art (and especially Protestant art) for its penchant for seeking to continually “create out of nothing.”33 The Orthodox icon is painted upon a board that is rigid and requires the painter to conform to its qualities, and something as innocuous as a canvas is, for Florensky, an example of the attempts of Western artists to manipulate and conform materials to their image rather than be conformed to the spiritual reality that lay beneath an image. The icon, with its material limitations and its limitation to the dogmas of form,34 is not a moment of self-expression but a window. Again, Florensky observes, “Thus a window is a window because a region of light opens out beyond it; hence, the window giving us this light is not itself ‘like’ the light, nor is it subjectively linked in our imagination with our ideas of light—but the window is that very light itself, in

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its ontological self-identity.”35 The understanding of the image’s ontological identity and its capacity to reveal the fundamental form is tied to the image’s function within a broader economy of transformation. The icon is part of a communal reality that is the church, that is the mystical body of Christ. Here Florensky’s observations regarding the nature of the icon and the ways in which the icon is and is not art are instructive in understanding the iconicity of Lavater’s Essays. For Florensky, an icon is art insofar as it is a representation of a body. The icon writer is creating a likeness. However, the icon also displays a deeper reality. The portrait artist displays what is typical, but the icon displays countenance, that which is relative to a person’s essence. But for Lavater, the typical features of a person’s face are analogous to Florensky’s sense of countenance. The curvature of the nose or the protrusion of the jaw is a window to a person’s essence. While Lavater utilizes etchings and drawings of well-known artists of Europe, Lavater’s analysis is not tied to the genius of the artist. The artist remains anonymous. Rather, the locus of the gaze focuses upon the function of the image itself and what the image has the capacity to do in relationship to the viewer. The image is not “art” in the sense of individual expression. In Essays, the images are a means of seeing the light and the dark of one’s own body and life, helping them to see how all bodies are windows to the soul. In the images, one can begin to see the ways in which his own body conforms or varies from a true invisible form that becomes visible through the contours of the body. Returning to the relationship between image and thought in Stafford’s work, individually the images that populated Lavater’s work display a capacity to know. But in Lavater’s theological economy, the images in Essays were icons insofar as the image of the icon existed not for its own sake but for the manifestation (or discernment) of truth. While the Eastern icon’s truthful image is understood through prayer and a distortion of the human form, the images of Essays move from the assumption of the artist’s capacity for realism in capturing the essence of a thing through skill and observation. As such, the image reveals the “natural” truth revealed in the contours of the image. If Christ is the true human being, the cumulative accuracy of the “scientific” images creates a visual barometer of what it means to be a true human being. As in Eastern iconology, the correspondence of one’s body and one’s soul is not merely the image alone but the way that the image or the contours of the face reflect a transcendent ideal. Corresponding to truth, the icons of Eastern Orthodoxy and Western physiognomy are revelatory, their production pointing to humanity’s capacity (or incapacity) for the virtuous life of friendship and moral life—or to be like Christ. ICON AND THE VIEWER If in Orthodox iconology the icon is not art but rather a window, its aims are not for the aesthetic pleasure of the viewer nor the self-expression or

60 Brian Bantum articulation of the artist. Rather, the identity of the icon is constituted by its relationship to the viewer within the context of the ecclesial community. And within this constellation of markers, the icon signifies and reveals the viewer as iconic. In viewing, praying with, and seeking the spiritual reality the icon reflects, the viewer is transfigured, transformed into the image Christ. The spiritual reality of this transformation becomes visible in his life within the community. As Leonid Ouspensky (1902–1987) observes, “Thus the aim of the icon is not to provoke or glorify in us a natural human feeling. It is not ‘moving,’ not sentimental. Its intention is to attune us to the transfiguration of all our feelings, our intelligence and all the other aspects of our nature, by stripping these of all exaltation which could be harmful or unhealthy.”36 In reflection and prayer with the icon, the viewer himself becomes an icon, displaying the spiritual reality that is Christ’s incarnation. This change is a transformation of “the spiritual constitution of one’s body from something conformed to the world to something transfigured.”37 Here the economy of the icon in its relationship to the viewer is an explicit relationship in which the viewer is not implicitly formed through repetitive imaging of bodies deemed beautiful or desirable. Rather, prayer and worship with the icon is an explicit practice of seeing an image of a body and, in this gaze, coming into an awareness of an invisible reality. This realization is not simply a rational conceptual understanding of what is good or not good but rather the process of seeing is a process of transformation central to one’s following Christ. This transformation’s high point is not in the ascent to certain beliefs. More fundamentally, the transformation the icon engenders is the transformation of the body of the viewer into an iconic reality, a visual display of an invisible spiritual truth concerning Christ’s work and presence in the world. The theology of the icon as described by Florensky highlights the transfiguration of the body where “We are beholding a countenance, then whenever we have before us a face that has fully realized within itself its likeness to God: and we then rightly say, Here is the image of God, meaning Here is depicted the prototype of Him.”38 The countenance of Lavater’s icons is bound to two related claims. First, the stability of the face as revelatory— the face indicates something stable and inherent—and second, the human being is the ideal interpreter of these faces. But this encounter does not suggest transformation. Rather, in the encounter there is a revelation of what is already present or what is not present. While the ideal is measured in the icon through the skill of the iconographer and the truth of the dogmas and orthodoxies of the church, the ideal indicated in the physiognomic drawings is an economy of interpretation. The body reveals the inner character of the individual that signifies its ontological similitude or dissimilitude to the image of Christ. More profoundly, the process of conformation and transformation derives from a mastery of the process of interpretation. And yet, as we have seen with the qualities

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of the physiognomist as one who sees things as they are, who sees himself truthfully, who has keen powers of observation and a noble character, such capacities are also bound to certain bodies while remaining absent from others. Consequently, those with the capacity to discern and with the responsibility to interpret the world around them become themselves icons, or more precisely icon writers as they inscribe meaning upon the contours of the bodies in their midst. This interrelationship among body, text, and image is important and can be related to the shift in Lavater’s conceptions of church and body. The interrelationship is now absent the church and distilled by and into the body. The body now bears the weight of symbolizing the wider reality of God’s presence in the world. But as well, this reality is condensed into the symbol of a particular body rather than the constellation of signifiers (citizenship, family, vocation, or religious belief, for example) that constitutes a person’s identity. God—church—image—body is now a linear progression leading from God to a singular body with other bodies now arranged in correspondence to a particular body, which results in a perpetual negation. The economy of the body and image are then articulated not within the confines of an ecclesial community but in the “natural” world as the ideal bodies become interpreters and the standard of interpretation, inscribing meaning upon the bodies of those they encounter in their daily lives. THE BODY AND THE WORLD In viewing and praying with the icon, the body is transfigured upon the typology of spiritual beauty.39 The bodily life of the faithful begins to declare the mysteries that lie beyond them such that “our face gains the precision of a spiritual structure quite different from our ordinary face . . . this difference is due to the material reality of our face conforming to the deepest tasks of its own essence.”40 But in addition to the transfiguration of the body, the Eastern icon is not a face in isolation. The saint is present in the midst of a created order. And yet this created order is reordered, itself made new in the presence of embodied spiritual truth in which “Everything that surrounds the saint bows with him to a rhythmic order. Everything reflects divine presence, is drawn—and also draws us—towards God.”41 While the icon exhibits an anthropology, a statement regarding the nature of humanity, it also points to a relationship between humanity and creation itself. The icon functions to image the human figure within a space that ultimately displays to who God is. Conversely but not unrelatedly, physiognomy is the isolation of the bodily form and in many cases its reduction to the face and even further to the silhouette. The consequence is a distilling of the world and meaning not only into an individual but, even more radically, into individualized aspects of one’s person. At points, this means one’s eyes or forehead correspond to a perfection of temperament or morality,

62 Brian Bantum while at other moments the improper protrusion of a jaw or eyes evidences a deep distortion of one’s moral center, and thus the person is left at odds against himself. But more broadly, these distortions of truth and beauty become refracted through individuals’ facial characteristics and individuals themselves as they walk through their everyday lives. The relationality this process creates is one of perpetual classification and bodies that exist for the purpose of being looked into and gazed upon. Thus the practice of physiognomy is a practice not only of seeing but of writing. This process of writing is not confined to the worship life of a particular church, but through the inscribing of meaning upon all bodies, the world becomes an ecclesial space and the act of interpretation becomes an act of worship. Physiognomy and iconography are attempts to articulate a visual language— to say who God is and what humanity is. And yet in these attempts, the aim draws upon slightly differing logics of the body and what knowledge is. Lavater begins with the assumption that the body is the fullest image of God in itself and that this image is also only suitably interpreted by humanity. In a circular movement, humanity becomes the highest object of interpretation but can only maintain this status through the differentiation of itself. CONCLUSION While Johann Kaspar Lavater did not have in mind the theology of the icon as he wrote his Essays on Physiognomy, his devotion to the art of “reading” bodies in relationship to his theological anthropology constitutes a theological economy or, more precisely, a theology of the icon. In reading his Essays as a theological economy and overlaying this economy upon the Eastern Orthodox theology of the icon, the political meaning of these images and their interpretive matrixes cannot be forgotten. As Mondzain reminds us, “visibility belongs to the definition of the icon and not the image. This is why the icon is nothing other than the economy of the image, and its task is to be faithful to the prototype of each and every economy.”42 Here the idolatry of the image that the iconoclasts so desperately feared begins to be seen. In physiognomic images, the gaze peers deeply into creation, supposing to see clearly enough, yet mistakes what can be seen and observed for the image of God within a particular European body. The archetype becomes imaged within a racialized reality that does not gather but asserts itself through a logic of opposition. It becomes an icon that establishes itself through the negation of all difference yet maintains those differences in order to constitute itself. Lavater’s physiognomy turns the economy of the icon and the Christological interpretation of images and bodies upon itself, dissecting the European body and reducing the person to its constitutive aspects. In turn, it inscribes meaning upon the bodies of those who are imaged and those who

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are viewing. Taken within the wider realities of colonization and the oppressive realities of the image of the ideal as a white male body in the Western world, the iconicity of the Western body can be seen as profound deformation of bodies as it circumscribed the image of Christ even while physiognomy seemed to echo Florensky’s Orthodox dictum: “Christians speak by their bodies.”43 Lavater’s Essays displays a confluence of the scientific and the theological that would continue to unfurl itself in the world for centuries to come. While Lavater certainly did not intend to articulate the superiority of the white male body, nor could it be said that the entirety of Europe’s idealization of particular white bodies has its root in Lavater’s Essays. But Lavater’s work signals the way the racial saint is formed through a persistent cascade of everyday interpretations and classifications. These practices were effective not only because of their supposed rational validity but because they were incorporated into the everyday spiritual lives of those who themselves sought to be saints. Lavater’s work served to condense sainthood into a biological form, transforming some viewers into saints, icons of Christ. This iconicity would serve to pervade European society and the world as its logic seeped more deeply into the daily lives of the Western world, writing all bodies into icons, the world into a veritable ecclesial space, and distilling worship into daily practices of interpretation.

NOTES 1. Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis, trans. Donald Sheehan and Olga Andrejev (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Press, 1996), 52. 2. Maria-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, trans. Rico Franses (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 82. 3. Johann Kasper Lavater, Essays On Physiognomy, Vol. 1 (London: Printed for John Murray, 1789), 3. Essays On Physiognomy will be referred to throughout the chapter as Essays. 4. For a fuller biography of Lavater and an account of his historical moment, see Graeme Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982) and Melissa Percival and Graeme Tytler eds., Physiognomy in Profile (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 15–24. 5. Physiognomy was not without its critics, who noted the dubious scientific basis for the conclusions being made and were deeply suspicious of the implications these conclusions had for people with physical deformities. But despite these criticisms, Lavater’s physiognomic and spiritual writings, such as Aphorisms on Man, remained common texts in the late eighteenth century. 6. For historical accounts of physiognomy in the ancient world, see Simon Swain and G. R. Boys-Stones, Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul: Polemon’s Physiognomy from Classical Antiquity to Medieval Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Elizabeth Cornelia Evans, Physiognomics in the Ancient World (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1969). For a broad historical survey of physiognomy in Europe, see Martin Porter, Windows of the Soul: Physiognomy in European Culture 1470–1780 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005).

64 Brian Bantum 7. See Geraldine Heng, “The Invention of Race in the Middle Ages I: Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages,” Literature Compass 8:5 (2011): 258–274. 8. Here it should be noted that many who criticized Lavater’s physiognomical writings did so not simply on the basis of their flawed scientific basis but more crucially on Lavater’s aim of seeing the soul. Rather than simply seeing character as a matter of moral choices, Lavater maintained a highly mystical view of the soul and body, an idea quite contrary to the growing belief in moral life as an exercise of rationality. 9. Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 92. 10. A note on gendered language: in making broader claims about viewers and readers, I have chosen the singular male pronoun. My intention here is to highlight the explicit presumption of Lavater and his contemporaries regarding male normativity and the male approximation to the image of God. 11. Lavater, Essays, Vol. 1, 14. 12. For accounts of the intellectual shift in the self-understanding of artists in relationship to art and knowledge during the Renaissance, see Robert Williams, Art, Theory, and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy: From Techne to Metatechne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Such shifts were also mirrored in Northern Europe; see Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2004). 13. Stafford, Body Criticism, 1. 14. Stafford, Body Criticism, 47. 15. It should be noted here that the aim of Stafford’s text is to show how Enlightenment thought, based largely on Neoplatonic paradigms, sought to render bodies and subsequently images as a lower form of knowledge. While I think her project has done this to a degree, I believe her work does far more to show the way in which bodies continued to remain visible but became interpreted through a new rubric that intentionally or unintentionally devalued certain bodies in order to idealize others. 16. Stafford, Body Criticism, 84. 17. Ibid. 18. Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, 82. 19. Essays, Vol. 2, Pt. 1, 47. 20. Ibid., 48. 21. Lavater, Essays, Vol. 1, 116. 22. Ibid., 126. 23. Lavater, Essays, Vol. 2. Pt. 1, 212. 24. Ibid., 212. 25. Stafford, Body Criticism, 93. 26. Lavater, Essays, Vol. 1 Pt. 1, 4. 27. See Stafford, 115. “As was true of anatomical treatises and drawing manuals in general, the illustrations were of greater importance than the text. They conveyed more, and different kinds of, information than the printed page. The engravings constituted an international, technical ‘imagistic’ universally comprehensible without translation. [Dutch Surgeon and anatomical illustrator Pierre] Camper’s optical theories for determining a ‘fine’ countenance in works of art could be interpreted from the plates as positing useful standards for human comparison. Further, they could be understood as constituting an infallible anthropological method for visibilizing psychic perfection and imperfection in different ethnic groups.” 28. For an examination of the relationship between Lavater’s physiognomic project and the rise of scientific racism, see Richard T. Gray, About Face:

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29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

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German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz (Detroit, WI: Wayne State University Press, 2004). Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being: Hors-texte (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 20. Ibid., 22. Leonid Ouspensky, The Theology of the Icon, Volume 1 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992), 181. Florensky, Iconostasis, 78. Ibid., 107. Icons conform to dogmas or predetermined configurations that the icon painter works within in order to faithfully express the spiritual reality of the moment. Florensky, Iconostasis, 65. Ouspensky, The Theology of the Icon, 181. Florensky, 58. Ibid., 52. Ouspensky notes that in creating the natural flesh tints of the figures in icons, the aim is not for physical beauty but for spiritual beauty. Ouspensky, The Theology of the Icon, 184. In Lavater’s Essays, physical beauty and moral or spiritual beauty become one. Florensky, Iconostasis, 52. Ouspensky, The Theology of the Icon, 189. Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, 82. Florensky, Iconostasis, 58.

3

The Recanonization of Saint Cyprian A Deep History of Black Religion and Racialism Jared Hickman

One of the rewards of living in Baltimore is the opportunity to frequent the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum, housed in a former firehouse along one of the most traversed and blighted thoroughfares of the city. This museum, as a few scholars have begun to recognize, offers a unique experience of the history of Africa and its diaspora, its uniqueness only heightened by the existence, two miles due south, of the elegant and expansive Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, one of the architectural and cultural gems of the city’s revitalized, touristoriented Inner Harbor.1 Marcus Wood’s keen recent “reading” of the Great Blacks in Wax Museum, because it proceeds primarily from the standpoint of museum studies, fails fully to grasp what I want to argue here by way of framing a larger inquiry into black religion and racialism: namely, that Baltimore’s Great Blacks in Wax Museum is not so much a museum as a shrine, a holy place of pilgrimage for the east-coast African Americans who, beginning around Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, come by the busload and make up 70 percent of the museum’s visitors, according to director Jon Wilson.2 The museum space and pedagogy are openly sacral and ritualistic. Prominently placed on a wall next to the ticket booth is an account of the museum’s establishment by Drs. Elmer and Joanne Martin (professors of social work and English at Baltimore’s two historically black universities, Morgan State and Coppin State, respectively) that not only references but invokes spiritual forces: The possibility that in 1988 [the Martins] would be celebrating the grand opening of a 10,000 square foot facility on North Avenue seemed almost unimaginable. But they always knew that a higher power than the two of them was guiding the effort. So they have always dared to dream, to believe that if they just “kept the faith,” things would work out. . . . We ask that you join all of us in saying “thank you” to that higher power that grants all dreamers the courage to dream. Once one steps through the doors of the museum proper—conspicuously made to feel ceremonial insofar as they are painted in vibrant black-nationalist

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colors and covered in resonant symbols like the Egyptian ankh and the West African mask—it becomes clear that the primary referent for this “higher power” is “the ancestors.” The museum’s organizing principle is contained in the text of Elmer’s “A Message from the Ancestors,” which is distributed to all visitors (a “sheet like no other museum guide in the world,” Wood comments) and reproduced in large print on the wall of one of the galleries.3 “Message” voices what Wood usefully denominates a set of “commandments from the dead to the living”: “We did not struggle to keep our minds from being shackled, only to have you turn away from learning and the wise ways of the elders . . . We did not die by the millions for you to kill each other by the thousands.”4 What “Message” prescribes for the visitor is the apprehension of the wax figures of “great blacks” from the past—from Akhenaton to anonymous survivors of slavery—not merely as quaint representations of historical figures but as sacramental icons of the ancestors. This point is underscored in the two most extraordinary and overpowering of the museum exhibits—a subterranean replica of the hold of a slave ship and, also in the basement, an absolutely brutal restaging of the lynching epidemic that is preceded—rightly—by a parental advisory.5 At the exit of the slaveship exhibit, which unflinchingly depicts rape, torture, and death, sits a jar of water, several small cups, and an invitation to pour a libation “in memory of a deceased relative, friend, hero, or anyone in the spirit world for whom one feels deep respect.” In a similar vein, the lynching gallery centers on “a memorial” to what are notably termed “the martyrs of lynching,” consisting of a wall-length, small-type list of the 5,000 black victims of lynching in the United States and—standing out against the general shabbiness—a granite slab that, again, dares to speak for the dead: “Think not of our suffering but of what we might have been if we had lived. Think what the world might have missed. We could have been liberators, builders, sages, or prophets, leading our people to the dawning of a new day. Most importantly, think of the unfinished work that you—the living—still must do.” These invitations to interactivity are far from the latest touchscreen technology; they are not slickly pedagogical but earnestly devotional. Following a vague but potent notion of “African tradition,” the Great Blacks in Wax Museum aspires to be a cultic space for honoring noteworthy ancestors. In effect, it divinizes historical persons of African descent for their descendants by celebrating their accomplishments and granting them spiritual claim upon the living. It is against the racial hagiography in which the Great Blacks in Wax Museum so candidly engages that black theology and religious studies in the academy have largely defined themselves. Writing in 1964 as an anxious witness to the history haltingly being made by Martin Luther King, Jr., Joseph R. Washington, Jr. proffered the provocative thesis that “the authentic black religion” forged in enslavement and diaspora was not a genuine subset of Christianity but rather a theopolitics of racial justice and equality that merely instrumentalized Christianity for its particular(ist) ends.6 Running through the myriad forms of black religion was an “ethnic

68 Jared Hickman ethic” that flouted both the ostensible universalism of Christianity and a properly “theological frame of reference.”7 In a word, black religion was as much racialism as religion, or, put another way, “black” was the dominant signifier in “black religion.” With integration so promisingly yet also vulnerably looming on the horizon, Washington attached a moral imperative to this historical judgment: “Negro qua Negro religion” was in a state of “unalterable disrepair” due to the particularism tragically forced upon it by the racism of the churches and the larger society; but tragedy could turn to comedy and particularism to universalism (read Christianity) if black religionists would “voluntarily giv[e] up their segregated worship life,” redirecting their protest energies toward gaining institutional admission to the Christian community (“the warp and woof of the Western world”) and immersing themselves in the Christian faith. By this means, “the American dream and the Christian community” might finally be achieved.8 Washington thus underscores the particularity of black religion as a historical formation with a special function to perform in the unfolding of American and Christian destiny, but he predicates the fulfillment of that function on the disavowal of black religion’s particularism. Although James Cone contested Washington’s characterization of black religion as “outside the main stream of Christian tradition,” one observes the same affirmation of particularity and negation of particularism in his work.9 Black theology as object and mode of inquiry becomes the privileged means to a genuine Christian universalism. But, in this formulation, the blackness of black theology must ultimately efface itself, as Cone would concede in later work: “While some black theologians may be content with the identification of Black Theology with current black politics, I maintain that the authenticity of black theological discourse is dependent upon its pointing to the divine One whose presence is not restricted to any historical manifestation.”10 For Washington, as for Cone, the success of black religion as a historical force and academic enterprise seems to hinge on the repudiation of the immitigable racialism of institutions like the Great Blacks in Wax Museum. The recognition of black religion in the academy was thus in part premised on a Feuerbachian trivialization of racial hagiography. One sees the lingering effects of this transaction in much recent scholarly work that takes racial hagiography—ostensibly with sympathy—as its subject.11 Wilson Jeremiah Moses, one of the foremost investigators of these traditions, ultimately determines that they are “usually harmless and inoffensive, if sometimes extravagant, folk traditions. They are whimsical, entertaining, and often charming fantasies.”12 Moses’s hard distinction between “popular” or “folk” and academic history of the sort he assiduously models and his over-the-top downplaying of the significance—intellectual, existential, and otherwise—of the discourses in question combine to put racial hagiography firmly in its place—on the margins of serious history and serious religion. Another sort of dismissal occurs in Colin Kidd’s recent history of race and scripture in the Atlantic world, The Forging of Races.

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After examining “forms of racialised religion” that propagate white supremacism, Kidd devotes a chapter to what he calls “black counter-theologies.” By having his discussion of black “racialised religion” follow a discussion of white “racialised religion” likely to incur the reader’s disapproval, Kidd manages to characterize black religious formations that feature racialism as both inescapably racist and merely reflective. In Kidd’s hands, black theology “replicate[s]” “many of the features” of “white theology” and “appropriate[s] some of the less attractive elements of nineteenth-century racialism”; in short, it is “a mirror image” of white theology.13 This imitative mirroring is somewhat sympathetically understood as occurring “in the (otherwise perfectly reasonable) defence of the black race against white slurs” (here is the essential reactionariness of Kidd’s “black counter-theologies”).14 But this reduction of black racial hagiography to the necessary evil of a sociopsychological coping mechanism in a society awash in antiblack racism fundamentally prevents us from taking it seriously as an intellectual and spiritual project. Black racial hagiography is pitiably bad religion, but bad religion nonetheless, happily destined to be outmoded by the eventual eradication of the racism that unfortunately provoked it. To some extent, this is Washington redux. This essay sketches a deep history of black racial hagiography in the hope of providing alternate terms for understanding and evaluating its imperatives and implications. The first part of the essay traces the conceptual and historical dialectic of euhemerization and divinization—of humanizing gods and divinizing humans—in order to show how what we might want to distinguish as racialism and religion are actually interfused in a particular way in Atlantic modernity. The second part of the essay briefly considers the figural transformations of the second-century Christian bishop of Carthage in North Africa, Saint Cyprian, as an exemplum of this dialectic. THE DIALECTIC OF EUHEMERIZATION AND DIVINIZATION Euhemerism has come to denote a classic philosophy of religion originally attributed to the fourth-century BCE philosopher Euhemerus, who wrote a utopian fiction titled Sacred Inscription that survives only in fragments and summaries in the work of subsequent admirers and critics. From what we can gather, Euhemerus’s Sacred Inscription described an imaginary island in the Indian Ocean called Panchaea that enjoyed the special favor of the gods. The island’s capital city, Panara, housed a temple not only dedicated to but by Zeus. According to a golden stele in the temple purportedly inscribed by Zeus himself, Zeus and his forebears—Cronus and Uranus—were human kings whose remarkable deeds had led to their elevation to the status of gods by their people. Euhemerus’s utopia becomes the site at which the true identity of the gods is revealed: they are nothing but deified culture heroes.15

70 Jared Hickman The work of euhemerization is thus the exposure of a historical process of divinization. Euhemerism has subsequently come to signify precisely the theory of theism as the burnished relic of an earlier aggrandizement of accomplished humans.16 A spate of recent classicist scholarship on Euhemerus has importantly complicated this picture and, by extension, any subsequent history of “secularization” that has invoked or evoked the theory of theism traveling under Euhemerus’s name.17 Most important for our purposes is the often overlooked dualism of Euhemerus’s account. As A. I. Baumgarten has convincingly shown, Euhemerus’s demystification of one class of gods—the terrestrial18 gods depicted in myth—was paired with the celebration of another class of gods—the eternal gods identified with “the forces of nature, such as the sun, moon, stars, and winds.”19 That is to say, Euhemerus—whatever his detractors and defenders, ancient and modern, may have said—likely was “neither an atheist nor an enemy of traditional values.” Rather, like the Stoics and other philosophers, he was a creative respondent to the longstanding dilemma posed by the ancient myths as recounted by Homer and Hesiod: “How was one to retain allegiance to these sources”—“the very foundation of their intellectual and cultural world”—“and yet avoid the discomfiture caused by many of the stories told, and the values they reflected?”20 By making the gods of myth divinized humans, Euhemerus made mythology’s dubious morals entirely explicable and instructionally valuable in new ways; and by positing the existence of another, unimpeachable order of the divine in the workings of the cosmos, he affirmed a viable, albeit impersonalist, theology. As other scholars have suggested, the thrust of Euhemerus’s work may well have been conservative and pietistic in some sense—to highlight the divinity of the “true” gods by way of deconstructing the ascribed divinity of human rulers in the age of Alexander, whose exploits earned him and his successors in retro-pharaonic Ptolemaic Egypt (where the Sacred Inscription was likely written) divine credentials.21 What I want to suggest is that subsequent deployments of Euhemerus’s method by early Christians, Enlightenment philosophes, and, eventually, nineteenth-century racialists successively “reoccupied” this built-in dualism, to use Hans Blumenberg’s term.22 Early Christians like Clement of Alexandria opportunistically seized Euhemerus’s work as an admission of the falsity of the “pagan” gods and as a means to distinguish the one and only holy Man-God, Jesus, from the multitudinous and libidinous men-gods of the Greeks and Romans.23 Put another way, early Church fathers winnowed the field of terrestrial gods to a single, exceptional example—the incarnate Christ—and, through the sleight of hand of trinitarianism, elevated this singular terrestrial god to the position of the eternal god. With the highest place of the eternal gods now occupied by The Divine Man, the place of the terrestrial gods—the gods of myth in Euhemerus’s scheme—was opened to a different class of divinized human beings—what would come to be

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called the saints.24 The Christian saints effectively displaced the terrestrial gods of Greco-Roman mythology to the lowest sphere—that of undivinized humans—which is to say the Greco-Roman gods were increasingly conceptualized as, at best, poetic fancies available for aesthetic enjoyment but not religious experience. The Christian saint thus came to occupy precisely the position around which ancient Greek popular religion had revolved and, consequently, upon which the euhemeristic method trained its sights—the troubling category of the divinized human, the terrestrial god. It is no coincidence that the Protestant reformers and Enlightenment philosophes who, per Charles Taylor’s account, brought the Christian Age to a close and ushered in a Secular Age, redeployed euhemerism first and foremost against the cult of the saints, seeing the misplaced devotion of idolatry in it.25 In a zero-sum game, Protestants and philosophes alike diminished the saints as mere human beings divinized by centuries of tradition in order to magnify what they took to be the eternal gods—the God of the Bible and the God of Nature, respectively. Such would be the seemingly neat tale of euhemerism within Latin Christendom, but, as I have argued elsewhere, that tale simply cannot be told without considering the quite literal cosmic rupture that occurred in 1492.26 How did the European Christian encounter with bracingly unfamiliar modern “pagans”—many of whom had their own theories and practices of divinization—rather than happily domesticated ancient ones affect the fortunes and forms of euhemerism? Specifically, how did the figure of the Christian saint as terrestrial god fare in this context? The sixteenth-century mestizo historian Diego Muñoz Camargo’s account of Cortes’s massacre of the people of Cholula is here illustrative: The Cholultecas had placed such confidence in their idol Quetzalcoatl that they believed no human power could defeat or harm them. . . . They believed that the enemy would surely be consumed by bolts of fire which would fall from heaven, and that great rivers of water would pour from the temples of their idols to drown both the Tlaxcaltecas [Cortes’s indigenous allies] and the Spanish soldiers. This caused the Tlaxcaltecas no little fear and concern, for they believed that all would happen as the Cholultecas predicted, and the priests of the temple of Quetzalcoatl proclaimed it at the top of their voices. But when the Tlaxcaltecas heard the Spaniards call out to St. James, and saw them burn the temples and hurl the idols to the ground, profaning them with great zeal and determination, and when they also saw that the idols were powerless, that no flames fell and no rivers poured out—then they understood the deception and knew it was all falsehoods and lies. . . . None of [the Cholultecas’] expectations was fulfilled, and they lost all hope. Of those who died in the battle of Cholula, the greater number hurled themselves from the temple pyramid in their despair and they also hurled the idol

72 Jared Hickman of Quetzalcoatl headfirst from the pyramid. . . . When the battle of Cholula was finished, the Cholultecas understood and believed that the God of the white men, who were His most powerful sons, was more potent than their own.27 What we have here is what might be called theo-geopolitics.28 Two terrestrial gods—Quetzalcoatl, a deified Toltec culture hero, and the ancient Christian apostle James, patron saint of Spain—duke it out on earth with territory at stake. A modern myth is created out of a shared metalanguage of cosmic war—both parties are depicted as willing to subject their terrestrial gods to winner-take-all tests of their earthly efficacy. But the most important point here is that these terrestrial gods are now identified with specific portions and peoples of the conceptually and physically emergent globe. It is the god of the Cholultecas against the god of the Spaniards, or “the white men,” with the locale of Cholula itself as the prize. That is to say, these terrestrial gods— gods understood to have emerged from and to be especially engaged with the immanent plane of the human—have undergone an additional terrestrialization that anchors them in ethnicized and incipiently racialized zones of what was becoming coherent as a planetary immanence. James’s status as patron saint of Spain here takes on a whole new meaning and weight. The terrestrial gods become mere avatars of their human bearers—in this case, the Christian saint becomes Spanish and white. The Christian saint—as a divinized human being of the Old World—proved a crucial cog in this additional process of terrestrialization. It is no coincidence that the various forms of syncretism that developed in the post–1492 Americas and other contact zones—whether Jesuit mythography or indigenous Catholicisms—often centered on grappling with the identities of the saints. For the catechizers, the question was which saints could be effectively correlated with which indigenous gods in order to facilitate interreligious understanding; for the catechumens, the question was which saints possessed marks or traits that seemed to render them available to non-European, nonwhite subjects.29 To summarize, one can follow a long creep of terrestrialization or immanentization. For the ancient Greek philosopher Euhemerus, there was a hard distinction between the eternal gods and the terrestrial gods—suprahuman forces of nature versus the divinized humans of myth. The early-Christian conceit of the Incarnation destabilized this distinction by nominating The Terrestrial God, Christ, for the status of eternal god. After 1492 (heuristically speaking, of course), this distinction begins to dissolve entirely. The only gods, it seems, are terrestrial ones. Every god becomes identifiable with particular peoples and places in the demystified mundus. In Euhemerus’s original scheme, such historicization of the divinity was aimed at downgrading the divinity, at least relative to the eternal gods: the point was that impersonal, nonanthropomorphic gods who clearly (indeed, literally) rose above the human sphere were more proper objects of reverence than anthropomorphic gods who in multiple senses bore the stamp of human origination.30 But when the position of the eternal god has been successively

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reoccupied by The Divine Man and then, perhaps, by the would-be divine men who purport to be the bearers of The Divine Man—that is, amid the waning of a theoretically plausible and robustly lived dualism of the eternal and the terrestrial—the historicization of divinity does not readily perform a critical function. If all the gods are terrestrial, divinized by/as particular human beings, then what becomes the basis for elevating one set of gods over another, and what are the ramifications of that judgment? The answer lies in the account of the massacre at Cholula: the gods of the historically “vanquished” are downgraded relative not to the eternal gods but to the terrestrial gods of the “victors,” who are so identified with their earthly devotees as to be indistinguishable from them. In the example at hand, not only is the victorious terrestrial god, Saint James, identified with Spain and whiteness, his on-the-ground victory redounds to the power of white, Spanish men in such a way as to make them seem more than common men— indeed, “white gods” themselves.31 Post–1492 global cultural encounter facilitated a universal euhemerization of all gods as divinized by/as particularized (read racialized) human beings, and this constitutes the ground zero not only of modern secularism but of religion as well. Modern religion is “always already” racialist, and modern racialism is legitimately cultic. THE EXAMPLE OF SAINT CYPRIAN I now turn to conclude a concrete example of the complex, centuries-long historical processes just rather schematically laid out—the story of what I will call the recanonization of Saint Cyprian. Cyprian was a third-century bishop of the early Christian Church, born and martyred in Carthage in present-day Tunisia in North Africa. His prominence as a writer and a pastor during the Decian persecutions, as a result of which he lost his life, seem to have made him an immediate object of reverence in the early Christian cult of the saints.32 So here we have a man from a particular place and time divinized by early Christians over and against the heroes Greco-Roman “pagans” granted apotheosis, which, for Euhemerus, included all of the recognized gods of myth. Over time, as happened with the gods of Greco-Roman myth, the historical particularity of the man Cyprian to some extent fell away before the force of his canonization: in popular practice at least, Cyprian’s identity would have come to consist primarily in the fact that he was one of the saints, a fixture of the liturgical cycle whose importance was that he had been authorized as usefully capable of intercession with God on behalf of humans. The Christian Age gave way to the Secular Age as philosophes like the Swiss theologian Jean Le Clerc turned euhemerism on Christianity as Christianity had turned it on Greco-Roman “paganism” tout court, eliding (or redrawing) Euhemerus’s original distinction between the eternal and terrestrial gods in the process.33 A representative of what Jonathan Israel calls the Moderate rather than Radical Enlightenment, Le Clerc, in his Lives of the

74 Jared Hickman Primitive Fathers, tends not toward the Spinozistic atheism that descended from Xenophanes’s radical monism but rather toward a rational, properly educated theism arguably consistent with Euhemerus’s dualism of eternal and terrestrial gods.34 Notably, Le Clerc makes Cyprian Exhibit A in his euhemeristic exposure of the historical process of divinization whereby men became terrestrial gods under Christianity: To draw People to their Churches, [Ecclesiasticks] began to vent Miracles and Legends, much more frequently than they had before; and to preach a blind Belief, instead of exhorting Christians to have a Faith enlightened and grounded upon good Reasons. One may find an Instance of what I say in the Eighteenth Oration of Gregory, which is in Praise of St. Cyprian: He says that the Bishop of Carthage had been a Magician, and would have seduced a Christian Virgin, called Justina, by the means of a Demon; who having not been able to effect it, went into the Body of Cyprian himself, and was turned out of it by that Magician [that is, pre-conversion Cyprian], by invocating the God of Justina. Those who have read St. Cyprian, know that the Bishop never had such Adventures . . . When Gregory says, after he had harangued that manner upon the Testimony of a Legend, that the Ashes of St. Cyprian had the Vertue of Driving away Devils, Curing Diseases, and Foretelling Things to come. One is as little disposed to believe those Miracles, as the remaining part of that Fable. There is also, at the end of that Oration, a Prayer to St. Cyprian, wherein Gregory begs his Help to govern his Flock well. That Prayer doth not look like a Rhetorical Figure: And there is another Passage in that Oration which may make one believe that the Invocation of Saints began to be practised about that time.35 The basic thrust of the Enlightenment ars critica of which Le Clerc was one of the first theorists and practitioners is to “separate truth from nonsense, fiction from fact, superstition from actual occurrence.”36 Le Clerc wants to cut through the “legend” of Saint Cyprian—the stuff (in Le Clerc’s account the primordial stuff) of canonization—to recover the historical Cyprian, the man who served—admirably but entirely humanly—as bishop of Carthage in the third century, all with a view to redirecting Christian piety toward more proper objects. What is crucial to recognize is that, under the conditions of global modernity I’ve described, Le Clerc’s euhemerization of Saint Cyprian as a historical human being divinized by a particular cult cannot be seen as automatically and/or exclusively secularizing in its effects. Yes, the revelation of Cyprian as a late-antique North African man made holy could for some believers disenchant Cyprian—and perhaps, by extension, all the saints, the Church, and possibly Christianity itself. But it could also enchant Cyprian for another constituency—African American Protestants. Insofar as euhemerization is to a real extent the very element in which modern religion lives—and, more

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than that, thrives—and insofar as any project of modern religion has built into it the project of a comparative theography of terrestrial gods identified with particular swaths of the Terra Nova of the globe, euhemerizations like Le Clerc’s may afford just as much opportunity to sacralize as to secularize. Under these conditions, the seeming demotion of Cyprian to a divinized human from North Africa could actually enable his promotion to the status of a saint for nineteenth-century African American racialists. Cyprian’s name routinely appears in vindicationist histories of the race, often with Augustine and Tertullian as a member of a trio of early Christian bishops of North Africa.37 Cyprian is worthy of special notice here because his obscurity relative to the other two makes his recovery and reverence under specifically racialist auspices unambiguous. To wit, Cyprian seems to have become important for African American Protestants in large part as a result of his link to Carthage, which, via Hannibal’s brave resistance of the slaveholding Roman imperium, had effectively been transformed into an extension of a glorious ancient, black Egypt.38 Between his relative obscurity and his link to Carthage, Cyprian could more readily be imagined as, in some sense, a black man. Cyprian appears at formative moments of the cult of black racialism. The first instance of Cyprian’s nomination as something like a racial saint that I’ve been able to find occurs, significantly, in John Marrant’s sermon to Prince Hall’s Masonic lodge in Boston in 1789.39 It makes sense that it was in the ritual, quasi-religious context of black freemasonry that Cyprian was first recanonized. That tradition is reflected in the name given to the first black Masonic lodge west of the Alleghenies, the St. Cyprian Lodge in Pittsburgh, one of whose early members was Martin Delany, who also named one of his sons Saint Cyprian. Delany’s 1853 address to the St. Cyprian lodge, The Origin and Objects of Ancient Freemasonry, proudly peddles an Afrocentric history and philosophy of religion wherein “Egyptians and Ethiopians were the first who came to the conclusion that was created in the similitude of God” and the first who exemplified that similitude through their monumental acts of creativity; for Delany, modern freemasonry is thus the descendant of this “high and pure,” prebiblical African “mythology.”40 It is this type of racialized religion that was variously associated with the name of Saint Cyprian. One encounters Cyprian again at another formative moment in black intellectual life—the founding of the first African American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal. A mere month after the paper’s first issue in March 1827, junior editor John Brown Russwurm concluded a three-part editorial on the vicissitudes of racial history by posing a rhetorical question (around an unattributed quotation of Edward Gibbon’s history of Rome) regarding the potentiality of the heirs of able Cyprian: “We are informed that the gospel was received in the burning sands of Africa with great eagerness. ‘African Christians soon formed one of the principal members of the primitive Church. During the course of the 3d century, they were animated by the zeal of Tertullian, directed by the abilities of Cyprian and Origen, and adorned by

76 Jared Hickman the eloquence of Lacta[n]tius.’ But where are their descendants to be found? Is it not time to enquire after the descendants of men who have hazarded their lives to preserve the faith of the Gospel pure and unadulterated?”41 Another of The Freedom’s Journal correspondents wrote under the pseudonym Cyprian.42 It is clear that Cyprian, by this early point, had already cemented his place in the cult of black racialism. Two 1837 articles in The Colored American extend this trope of Cyprian as an ennobling progenitor for modern Negroes, suggesting the possibility that the Presbyterian minister, Samuel Cornish—the common editorial thread between Freedom’s Journal in 1827 and The Colored American in 1837—was one major source of the recanonization of Cyprian. The first article draws attention to the hypocrisy of “learned” and yet ignorantly racist white Christians quoting “a Cyprian, a Cyril, or a St. Augustine” in the course of “polemic and theological strife” without recognizing that “they were negroes! Does this learned disciple expect to sit down with them in heaven? And will he continue to speak of their countrymen as being of a degraded caste?”43 The second explores the implications of Cyprian’s blackness for modern blacks rather than whites: Before our people can occupy the position, which the law of God, and the genius of the age bespeak for them, there are many things to be done, many purposes to be sought out, and accomplished. Should they commence the work industriously and skillfully, the promises of God, the leadings of His providence, and the signs of the times assure success. They have all the natural requisites to make them, in science and renown, what ancient Egypt once was. The pinnacle of earthly glory, with all its shining attractions is before them. What Cyprian, Augustine, Origen, Tertullian, and others, in the Church were, colored men may be again.44 Cyprian has become an African genius loci so powerful as to overcome the dislocations of space and time and inspire nineteenth-century African Americans to reconstitute the race’s ancient glory. That the name itself had become talismanic—given to Masonic lodges, literary personae, churches, and sons in whom one vested the hopes of the race—speaks to how this racialized religion came to be lived by thousands of nineteenth-century African Americans eager to reposition themselves in the theo-geopolitics of global modernity.45 There is real spiritual power in such invocations that should not be mocked or balked at, reminding one of the devotionalism of the Great Blacks in Wax Museum with which we began. Although Cyprian, unfortunately, does not have a sacramental presence in the repurposed firehouse on North Avenue (he does get a mention), he certainly could.46 The figure attests to a historical process of racialist divinization arising from rather than in spite of the euhemerizations of global cultural encounter that the museum instantiates as ongoing. Acknowledging the historicity of one’s divinities may be a condition of global modernity, but it is not necessarily

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a springboard to secularism; rather, it may become the impetus for openly divinizing the historical, for making do with divinized human beings, as many cultures through space and time have done. A god’s historicity need not be the grounds for that god’s abandonment or anathematization. That Africa is one place where such practices of divinization have predominated and persist is something the Great Blacks in Wax Museum—in a striking bit of self-reflexivity—folds into its cultic racialism. Above the entrance door to the museum, one reads: The Africans of ancient Kemet (Egypt) were the first to produce wax figures and also to cast bronze, gold, and copper statues from wax molds. These statues kept alive the memory of great kings and queens and other contributors to society. When Kemet fell and was nearly forgotten, the discovery of statues and the unearthing of such colossal monuments as the great sphinx revived an awareness of Kemet as the oldest and greatest civilization. Since literally hundreds of these statues had distinct African features, they served to expose as false the scheme of those claiming that the original people of Kemet was white. The Great Blacks in Wax Museum is proud to carry on a tradition started by our Kemet ancestors over five thousand years ago. The Museum is also proud to be guided by the concept of ‘Maat’, a Kemet philosophical principle translated as the “truth.” Our Kemet ancestors believed “know thyself”, for, as an old black spiritual teaches, “The truth shall set you free.” The museum makes divinization—through monumental representation—a primeval African legacy that it merely perpetuates in contemporary Baltimore. Embracing Africanness means embracing divinization as part of one’s cultural heritage and—because Homo sapiens originated in Africa—of the human heritage. After all, the museum suggests, the most ancient humans of whom we have ample record are divinized Africans—the Egyptian pharaohs and their courtiers, like Imhotep, according to the museum placard, an early third-millennium BCE architect under King Djoser who “designed the great Step Pyramid of Egypt” and, “because of his paramount mastery of medical skills,” came to be revered by “many Africans, Arabians, and Europeans . . . as the God of Medicine.” An alternative modern history and practice of divinization dwells here that should encourage us to rethink the categories of the secular and the religious from the standpoint of race. NOTES 1. See Faith Davis Ruffins, “A Community Revealed,” and Jeremy Kargon, “Architecture: The Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture,” Curator: The Museum Journal 49:1 (January 2006): 81–89, 90–94; but, above all, Marcus Wood’s discussion in Black Milk: Imagining Slavery in the Visual Cultures of Brazil and America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 357–90.

78 Jared Hickman 2. Interview with Jon Wilson, conducted January 23, 2014. 3. Wood, Black Milk, 365. My interview with Wilson corroborates this claim. When asked about the “spiritual” dimension of the museum’s work, he immediately referred to Dr. Elmer’s “message to the ancestors” and, after our interview, walked me down to the gallery in which the message appears in large print on the wall. 4. Wood, Black Milk, 365. 5. For descriptions and analyses of these exhibits, see Wood and, further, for the lynching exhibit in particular, which features an astonishingly grotesque depiction of the horrific lynching of Hayes and Mary Turner in Valdosta, Georgia, in May 1918, see Julie Buckner Armstrong, Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 153–185. 6. Joseph R. Washington, Jr., Black Religion: The Negro and Christianity in the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), especially 30–162. 7. Joseph R. Washington, Jr., Black Sects and Cults (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1973), xi; Washington, Black Religion, viii, my italics. 8. Washington, Black Religion, viii, 290–291. 9. James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (New York: Seabury Press, 1969), 103. 10. James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 84. 11. One exception might be John Ernest’s Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 12. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 17. 13. Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 247, 249, my italics. 14. Kidd, Forging of Race, 247. 15. The relevant source texts are books 5 and 6 of Diodorus Siculus’s Library of History, which quote and paraphrase bits of Euhemerus’s Sacred Inscription, and Ennius’s poem Euhemerus, one of the first Greek texts to be translated into Latin (often taken as a measure of its prominence), which survives only in quotation and paraphrase in book 3 of the early Christian writer Lactantius’s Divine Institutes. This summary of the sources and their content relies on Nickolas P. Roubekas’s “Post Mortem Makes a Difference: On a Redescription of Euhemerism and Its Place in the Study of Graeco-Roman Divine Kingship,” Journal of Religion and Theology 19 (2012): 319–339. 16. Although Monica Gale characterizes euhemerism as a species of “allegorism,” it seems important to distinguish Euhemerus’s historicist method for dealing with popular mythology from contemporaneous forms that are unambiguously allegoristic, for instance, the so-called physical allegorists who interpreted the myths as anthropomorphized, narrativized observations of natural phenomena. See Monica Gale, Myth and Poetry in Lucretius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 75–84. A. I. Baumgarten observes the mutual animosity of physical allegorists and euhemerists in antiquity, taking this as sign they were importantly different theories competing for the same intellectual space; see his “Euhemerus’ Eternal Gods: or, How Not To Be Embarrassed by Greek Mythology,” in Classical Studies in Honor of David Sohlberg, eds. Ranon Katzoff, Yaakov Petroff, and David Schaps (Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1996), 93–103. Kees W. Bolle sums up Euhemerus’s method “in two words: historization and humanization,” “In Defense of Euhemerus,” in Myth and Law Among the Indo-Europeans: Studies in Indo-European Comparative Mythology, ed. Jaan Puhvel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 20. In the

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17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

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Enlightenment, euhemerism and allegorism would “fuse;” see Frank Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 111. See Roubekas and also Franco De Angelis and Benjamin Garstad, “Euhemerus in Context,” Classical Antiquity 25:2 (October 2006): 211–242, which contextualizes Euhemerus as a fourth-century BCE Sicilian. I borrow Gale’s designation here (Myth and Poetry, 75); Baumgarten prefers the immortal (or eternal)/mortal binary. A. I. Baumgarten, “Euhemerus’ Eternal Gods: or, How Not To Be Embarrassed by Greek Mythology,” in Classical Studies in Honor of David Sohlberg, eds. Ranon Katzoff, Yaakov Petroff, and David Schaps (Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1996), 91. Gale also recognizes this dualism, albeit from a different angle (Myth and Poetry, 75 n. 278). Baumgarten, “Euhemerus’ Eternal Gods,” 102, 100. On Euhemerus’s Sacred Inscription as “a disguised satire on . . . the deification and cult worship of contemporary rulers,” see Niklas Holzberg, “Utopias and Fantastic Travel: Euhemerus, Iambulus,” in The Novel in the Ancient World, ed. Gareth Schmeling (New York: Brill, 1996), 625; cf. Gale, Myth and Poetry 76; De Angelis and Garstad emphasize the local Sicilian context of divinization as a driver of Euhemerus’s inquiry. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 63–75. Bolle notes that early Christians inverted euhemerism by discrediting the gods of Greco-Roman mythology as divinized on the basis of their monumental immorality rather than their civilizational contribution and by warding off—anxiously, it must be said—the very idea of divinization itself (“In Defense of Euhemerus,” 23–26). Hypostasized as God through the Nicene ingenuity, Jesus is eventually extricated from the problem of divinization (he is always already divine), and the saints’ divinization is justified in part by way of their self-evident moral superiority to the tyrannical rulers divinized by the “pagans.” On the similarities and differences between the Christian cult of the saints and the ancient Greco-Roman cult of the heroes, see Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 5–6. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). On the Protestant Reformers’ rejection of the cult of saints, a topic that evidently has received little scholarly attention (perhaps because of its seeming self-evidence), see Carol Piper Heming, Protestants and the Cult of Saints in German-Speaking Europe, 1517–1531 (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2003). On the early Enlightenment philosophes’ targeting of the cult of saints, see Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 429–430. Jared Hickman, “Globalization and the Gods or the Political Theology of ‘Race,’ ” Early American Literature 45:1 (March 2010): 145–182, and “Cosmic American Studies,” PMLA 128:4 (2013): 968–975. Miguel León-Portilla, The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico, expanded and updated ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 41–49. León-Portilla notes that Muñoz Camargo “married into the nobility of Tlaxcala” and that “the Tlaxcaltecas allied themselves with Cortes . . . and wrote from their point of view” but seems generally to trust the source on the basis of the fact that it is often corroborated by other sources (4). Questions of historical accuracy aside, the text bears witness to the early formation of a global theo-geopolitics.

80 Jared Hickman 28. My terminology here owes much to Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s discussion of “the geopolitics of evil” in Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). 29. For an account of “Jesuit syncretism,” see Octavio Paz, Sor Juana or, the Traps of Faith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 145– 179, 338–356; for a historiographical review and theoretical reflection on non-European-Christian incorporations of Christian saints into religious practice, built around the case study of Cuban santería, see Joseph M. Murphy, “Santa Barbara Africana: Beyond Syncretism in Cuba,” in Beyond Conversion and Syncretism: Indigenous Encounters with Missionary Christianity, 1800–2000, ed. David Lindenfeld and Miles Richardson (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 137–166. 30. Bolle emphasizes that “the historization and humanization [of gods], which, in our terms, involve the making up of stories, do not rob a god of his reality. In this respect euhemerism differs fundamentally from all nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular intellectualism that declares the gods and spirits nonexistent” (“In Defense of Euhemerus,” 26). That is to say, euhemerism was not necessarily tantamount to atheism for ancient Greeks and Romans or for modern polytheistic non-Europeans who “believed in” the divinization of their leaders—for the latter, see chapter 9 of Joyce Marcus, Mesoamerican Writing Systems: Propaganda, Myth, and History in Four Ancient Civilizations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), titled “Euhemerism and Royal Ancestors.” 31. León-Portilla, Broken Spears, 47. 32. For an accessible recent historical account of Cyprian’s episcopate, see J. Patout Burns, Jr., Cyprian the Bishop (New York: Routledge, 2002). 33. “If Euhemerism is broadened to include those who recognized in most pagan myths the elaboration of ancient political and other historic events of great moment, then the concept would encompass the majority of mythographers and chronologists who flourished in the first half of the eighteenth century— Baniet, Freret, Le Clerc, Foucher, Warburton, Fourmont, Pluche, Shuckford,” Manuel, The Eighteenth Century, 103–104. 34. Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 409–470. 35. Jean Le Clerc, Lives of the Primitive Fathers . . . (London: Printed for Thomas Ballard, 1701), 273–275. 36. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century, 105. 37. In addition to the many examples to be furnished below, I would here cite: Robert Benjamin Lewis, Light and Truth: Collected from the Bible and Ancient and Modern History, Containing the Universal History of the Colored and the Indian Race, from the Creation of the World to the Present Time (Boston: Benjamin F. Roberts, 1844), 311; Henry Highland Garnet, The Past and the Present Condition, and the Destiny of the Colored Race . . . [1848] (Miami: Mnemosyne Publishing Inc., 1969), 12. 38. Margaret Malamud, “Black Minerva: Antiquity in Antebellum African American History,” in African Athena: New Agendas, ed. Daniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, and Tessa Roynon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 82–85. For the notable demurrals of James W. C. Pennington and Alexander Crummell on the blackness of Carthage, see Moses, 59–60. 39. “Ancient history will produce some of the Africans who were truly good, wise, and learned men, and as eloquent as any other nation whatever . . . such as Tertullian, Cyprian, Origen, Augustine, Chrysostom, Gregory Nazianzen, Arnobius, and ma[n]y others;” see John Marrant, A Sermon Preached on the 24th Day of June 1789 . . ., in Black Atlantic Writers of the Eighteenth

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40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

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Century: Living the New Exodus in England and the Americas, ed. Adam Potkay and Sandra Burr (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 115, 121 n. 23. Martin R. Delany, “The Origin and Objects of Ancient Freemasonry . . .,” in Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader, ed. Robert S. Levine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 53. John Brown Russwurm, The Struggles of John Brown Russwurm: The Life and Writings of a Pan-Africanist Pioneer, 1799–1851, ed. Winston James (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 149–150. I’ve taken the liberty of correcting the original, reproduced in James’s collection, by shifting the quotation mark to the end of the end of the sentence that ends in “Lactantius,” which is where the unattributed Gibbons quotation actually ends. Cyprian, “De Witt Clinton,” Freedom’s Journal, April 4, 1828. “Prejudice Against Color in the Light of History,” The Colored American, March 18, 1837. “Facts for Colored Americans,” The Colored American, May 6, 1837. See also “The Colored Race,” The Colored American, July 7, 1838; “Prejudice Against Color,” The Colored American, September 5, 1840. This piety was sufficiently encompassing as to elicit the following critique of any magical thinking that might attend it: “The Augustines—the Cyprians— the Tertullians, and Hannibal, will never elevate us, though they did live in Africa; and however proud we may be to refer to them, the glowing lustre of their bright names is unfading; but the labor, the toil in the upward race of moral elevation, is ours to perform,” A. G. B., “Thoughts—No. XII,” The Colored American, July 3, 1841. In the exhibit on “The Black Church,” a placard titled “Christianity and Black America” reads: “Blacks have played a major role in the development of Christianity. Ancient African Theologians such as Saints Cyprian and Augustine vigorously defended Christianity in their writings while blacks such as St. Maurice chose to die rather than denounce the Christian faith.” There may be an implicit acknowledgment here that Cyprian and Augustine were likely not black (by contrast to Maurice).

4

The Interspecies Logic of Race in Colonial Peru San Martín de Porres’s Animal Brotherhood Chris Garces

As I write this article in the city of Guayaquil, where Martín de Porres (1579–1639)—a well-known saint throughout much of the Spanish-speaking world—spent the early part of his youth, I am accompanied by a credit card–size laminated image (estampa) and a tiny plastic statuette, both of which bear his likeness.1 The 75-cent estampa is one that I have glanced at so often walking the streets of Guayaquil, with its scores of Catholic churches and curbside stands full of mass-produced reliquaries, I am, like most city residents, fairly inured to its details. The devotional card shows a subject of African descent wearing the seventeenth-century Dominican habit, with a broom and a crucifix in his hands; “fray escoba”—the friar of the broom—is one of San Martín’s many monikers, as he was designated patron saint of custodians and menial labor in the wake of his Roman canonization in 1962. In the background, one clearly makes out two hospital beds by their spare simplicity and the presence of a crucifix atop each headboard. In the foreground, San Martín himself is curiously surrounded by animals: what appears to be a dove flies downward as three quadrupeds—a dog, a cat, and a mouse—together ring a half-eaten plate of food. The diminutive and unassuming statuette, by contrast, cost me only 25 cents and looks at first glance to be made of glow-in-the-dark material, sporting a simplistic human figure with faux gold “priestly” raiment, a head with indistinguishable features shaded in black, and a canary yellow– colored dog who waits aside a blurry, bowl-like object, with his head cocked upward, perhaps toward the saint’s outstretched hand. The statuette’s image is entirely slipshod and inconclusive. It doesn’t glow in the dark. But for those who purchase these Catholic devotional materials, the great comfort of possessing an estampa or humble plastic statue is the piece’s unquestionable invocation of a Spanish American narrative with a positive, salutary vision of race and animal complementarity at the very heart of Catholic colonialism. For generations upon generations of Latin Americans, an unbroken hagiographic discourse about the animal has surrounded the storytelling and material iconography of Martín de Porres’s life. The principal image

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Figure 4.1

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A Humble Statuette. Photograph by author.

of the cat, mouse, and dog dates at least in writing to 1663, when Bernardo Medina’s sacred biography—the first of many to be dedicated to the santo mulato—described how the Dominican servant had quickly become a monastic luminary within Lima’s El Rosario monastery, managing to succor animals ordinarily viewed as “mortal enemies” to share the same plate of food. Seeing a mouse emerge from a hole in the wall of the infirmary, Fray Martín encouraged the tiny creature to join the other animals, which the mouse eventually did, much to the amazement of Dominican witnesses. In the hands of religious and nonreligious commentators alike, this particular tale of Martín de Porres’s charity stands out as a countercolonial example of “creaturely love” or a Creole fantasy scenario of projected interethnic harmony bringing white, black, and brown together. Martín de Porres’s influence over “his” animals, however, could just as easily be evidenced in stories that are less well known, such as the tabby cat (black, white, and red) that purportedly woke up Fray Martín before Vespers each morning and accompanied him to ring El Rosario’s bells, a monastery duty the fraile donado carried out for his brotherhood most of his religious life.2 Martín de Porres’s “little stories,” a term coined by Alex García-Rivera, metaphorized the prospect of a love capable of transcending ethno-racial and human–animal differences. Whether or not Martín de Porres’s “life” as

84 Chris Garces such exemplified lasting rapprochement between divided subjects, I suggest, his animal encounters should be analyzed individually and understood as an ideological mode of co-constituting colonial hierarchies of being.3 Indeed, among the many miracles attributed to Martín de Porres, few are more striking yet misunderstood than those exemplifying his close identification with animals. Although locally celebrated for his monastic piety, charity, and obedience, Martín de Porres also embodied a considerably more ambiguous saintly attribute: the innate capacity to communicate with nonhuman creatures—whom he would often call his “brothers.” My chapter analyzes Martín de Porres’s rhetorical association of brotherhood with different animals in order to critique the interspecies dynamic animating his monastic popularity in early to mid-colonial Lima. Despite the Dominican servant’s affecting relationship with animals, I probe how an early to mid-colonial discourse of mulato self-recognition was cobbled together across Martín de Porres’s curious act of speech, for which, whenever he was praised for his monastic excellence, he humbly identified himself with animals or abandoned creatures in colonial hierarchies of being. Exploring the mid–seventeenth-century hagiographic figure cut by Martín de Porres places what might be called “interspecies racism” in stark relief: problematizing how Spanish Catholic brotherhood was imaginatively granted across color lines and species boundaries on the exclusive condition that such beings manage to give their assent and to and reperform their colonized status as beasts of burden or as subjects normally unworthy of civil recognition. RACING THE ANIMAL/ANIMALIZING RACE One evening the same year he would die in Lima, Peru, Martín de Porres made himself scarce in El Rosario after receiving his daily communion in order to communicate with God in perfect isolation. At nearly sixty years of age, Fray Martín’s reputation for monastic piety had grown so outsized that it extended well beyond the Dominican convent where he spent most of his adult life. Throughout the city, many Limeños believed him capable of miraculous healing, of treating the sick, battered, and dying of Lima and turning their bodies well again. Yet the unfailing obedience of the fraile donado, or “religious servant,” would be put through an uncommon religious ordeal on this particular night. According to witnesses, the newly appointed archbishop of Mexico, Feliciano de Vega, had fallen gravely ill while traveling through Lima and had taken a sickbed in El Rosario. His condition had worsened precipitously, with doctors exhausting their bloodletting procedures, when El Rosario’s prelate, Cipriano de Medina, ordered his Dominican brothers to bring Fray Martín to the archbishop’s side in the hope of pursuing a cure beyond medical knowledge. Cipriano de Medina’s order set in motion a frenzied, unsuccessful, convent-wide search to locate

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the fraile donado. When Medina advised Vega to call out the obedient friar’s name, however, Martín de Porres appeared at the threshold of the room and threw himself on the ground before the archbishop’s bed. More than twenty years later, Cipriano de Medina would describe his Dominican brother’s quasi-miraculous appearance in his argument before the Vatican to open a Proceso de Beatificación (or Catholic “saint-making trial”) for the religious servant. Testimonies drawn from his beatification trial, analyzed alongside Medina’s biography, offer a more holistic perspective on this event: the mortally ill archbishop, whom doctors had given up for dead, scolded the brother for failing to arrive with haste and instructed him to place his hand on the Archbishop’s side. According to Medina, Fray Martín was hesitant to play such a vainglorious healing role. “Why does a prince want the hand of a poor mulatto lay servant?” he is said to have asked.4 Responding to this pious reluctance, Vega explains, “Has not the Prelate [i.e., Cipriano de Medina] ordered you, brother friar Martín, that you [should] obey me as if I were him? Do you not understand how obedience is more pleasing to God than [a] voluntary sacrifice?” “That’s right, my Lord” (Asi es, señor), he responded.5 And without further ado, Martín de Porres placed his hand on the Archbishop’s side. The prelate is said to have felt immediate relief. One might think that observing Feliciano de Vega’s automatic improvement would have reassured the fraile donado, whose primary responsibility in El Rosario was to serve as the priory’s barber-surgeon (a kind of general yet unlicensed medical practitioner). But quite the opposite was in the making: “[r]ealizing his action, he became uncomfortable and his [i.e., Martín de Porres’s] face turned very red and he began to sweat profusely and he said[,] [‘]No, that is enough sir,[’] to which the archbishop responded[,] [‘]Leave it where I have put it[’].”6 Celia Cussen places Fray Martín’s encounter with Feliciano de Vega (one of Spain’s handpicked American emissaries of the Inquisition in Peru) in its proper religious-historical context. Dominican advocates for the fraile donado’s saintly promotion underscore the monastic importance of this event as evidence of his obedient, unblemished moral character. As a casta, “mixedrace” subject of African descent, known for his unusual Catholic piety and miracle working, Martín de Porres’s monastic gifts directly contrasted with seventeenth-century Spanish persecutions against idolatrous apostasy in a era of moral panic about diabolism and the unleashing of demonic indigenous forces. In Cussen’s reading, “[t]he account encapsulates those aspects of Fray Martín’s life and personality that would become part of his saintly biography: his unfailing obedience, his devotion to the Eucharist, and his profound humility[.]”7 Strangely, Feliciano de Vega’s command—the particular way in which he applied a monastic, idealized logic of unquestioning Catholic obedience to seize the very hand of the fraile donado—blurs any distinction between whether Martín de Porres was merely acting with humility or found himself manipulated by his very ideals into being the host of strange and self-alienating ritual.

86 Chris Garces Frank Graziano suggests that for Catholics who believe in a continuum between the living and the dead, the undead character of heroic acts of sacrifice often blurs any distinction between who is worthy of being prayed for and who is powerful enough to be prayed to.8 In Martín de Porres’s own case, his unflagging will to dedicate himself to the Dominican cause became almost indistinguishable from the interests of his Creole superiors. Given Vega’s brief lesson in Catholic obedience as an intrinsic good (moving beyond any means–ends calculation of the individual), the fraile donado felt compelled to follow the archbishop’s command despite his great reluctance. In Bernardo Medina’s account, the archbishop’s health improved so dramatically that he was shortly back on his feet and looking for ways to bring Fray Martín along with him to Mexico. Nevertheless, the archbishop would not survive his ocean voyage to the northern Spanish American viceroyalty and would never assume his new appointment. Martín de Porres would also die a few months later, surrounded by Dominican superiors mourning the loss of their beloved mulato religious servant. The telling of a story about Catholic sacrifice, in which the venerable subject disavows his personal worthiness to be sacrificed, is something of a commonplace for saintly candidates across nearly two millennia of Christological discourse. But disavowal of any personal sacrifice in the act of being ingeniously victimized takes on a special, almost characteristically defining importance for Spanish America’s subjects of mixed-race background. I would argue that Martín de Porres’s episode with Vega sheds light on a peculiar late medieval/early modern form of Catholic agency, or “licencia,” in which casta subjects gave all the appearance of obeying colonial authorities or complying with their ritual-symbolic orders while preserving, at the same time, a certain degree of latitude in transgressing colonial hierarchies by maneuvering Catholic moral codes to their advantage. Alongside the sick archbishop, Martín de Porres’s actions exemplify a paradigmatic moment of ethno-racial “collaboration” to further the ends of the colonial Church; yet undeniably, it also appears to be something of a religious trial, whereby the miracle-working subject of African descent was first put to the idolatry inspector’s informal test and then willed into a healing procedure that filled him with trepidation. The seventeenth-century saintly candidacy of the fraile donado had been verified not only by the metaphorical sacrifice of his self-interest but also, and more subtly, through his self-denigrating confessional statement before a room full of Spanish and Creole authorities, claiming that his ethno-racial colonial status rendered him unworthy of lofty religious or civil expectations. Obedience, confession, humility, and supernatural care: all of these defining monastic elements within the life of Martín de Porres are evinced from the healing of Feliciano de Vega. Yet what concerns me most about this strange, hagiographic encounter is the ease with which this seventeenth-century mulato subject accepted his role as a kind of scapegoat, the symbolic sacrifice of whose intentions was apparent to all yet disavowed as such—a broader symptom, I claim, of the simultaneous humanization and animalization of early colonial race relations.

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INTERSPECIES SANCTIFICATION In the midst of Lima’s 1660s citywide effort to gather testimony in support of Fray Martín’s beatification, Bernardo Medina would publish his sacred biography. In praise of what he considered the fraile donado’s peerless charity, Medina claimed that “if the law depends on the love of God and all neighbors—according to the Savior’s Gospels—then he who takes special care to love God, [and] who loves not only men but also irrationals, for God’s sake, complies only too well with the law, [which then] would be the [only] relevant [form] of perfection.”9 The deployment of a term such as “irrational” effortlessly indexes the animal order, but it also conveys a certain semantic ambiguity and indicates the ethno-racialized boundaries that distinguished between fully realized humans and a broader and more variegated array of nonhuman beings. Medina’s hagiographic critique of racialized anthropocentrism—stunningly novel, you might say, for its own era—not only served to highlight Martín de Porres’s willingness to dedicate his own life, at whatever personal cost, to further the means and ends of Catholic brotherhood. It also forwarded a biblically reasoned defense of the mulato friar’s Catholic hospitality, communication, and influence with animals. Half a century after the conquest of Peru, the discourse of Catholic brotherhood openly helped to mediate definitions of Afro-Peruvian casta identity. In their “colonial faith-based taxonomic moralities,” Europeans projected religious and ethno-racial hierarches as they unmoored themselves and settled anew in early to mid-colonial customs and practices.10 Like scores of other commentators, I have only grown more perplexed over time by the colonial figure of Martín de Porres—“the St. Francis of the Americas,” or “the Saint of the Broom”—owing to the curious power of self-inscribed racialization he employed in tandem with the animal. In particular, the close relationships he forged with different creatures, with whom he appears to have identified himself, has become a reminder of the possibility of leveling or at least suspending human–animal hierarchies. Some critics go so far as to consider Martín de Porres’s kindness toward animals an exceptional example of Christianity’s potential to sublate differences of racialor species-being through creative expressions of love, a practice capable of developing even within the depths of a major slave-trade city such as Lima, Peru.11 Indeed, almost 400 years’ worth of sacred commentary has lauded San Martín’s wondrous relationships with nonhuman beings. Yet there is clearly another story to tell about Fray Martín’s rhetoric of self-identification with the animal. While Christian arguments about “creaturely love” have been put forward by his most ardent defenders, my own interests in returning to Martín de Porres’s animal stories have more to do with Creole structures of fantasy and the interspecies logic that subtended mid-colonial Peru’s colonizing projects. The seventeenth-century Spanish American efforts to sanctify Martín de Porres’s life unmistakably point to a colonial Catholic and civic-moral discourse about animalization, as both

88 Chris Garces mixed-race subjects and beasts of burden became central to systems of labor extraction and spiritual economies of colonial value and exchange. There is a strong precedent for reading against the grain of colonial-era sacred biography and drawing attention to human–animal relations that conditioned the figure of the colonized saint. The exciting prospect of an interspecies analytics has recently been proposed to challenge the latent anthropocentrism of humanistic categories for scholarship, such as “language,” “consciousness,” “agency,” or even “social thought.”12 Concerned with relationships across species boundaries, the questions posed by interspecies researchers attempt to think beyond anthropocentric typologies or counter-Enlightenment intellectual programs that merely reconsider (yet again) the biases critics bring to their intellectual pursuits—even when coming to the defense of nonhuman animals. A good deal of this critical literature posits itself as a kind of break from the aporias of research that would presuppose the exceptional status of human beings. But I suspect that before “interspecies” projects can be more attentive to untold thresholds of nonhuman immanence, the critic would first benefit from working through the human–animal relationships that have structured colonial fantasy worlds and served imperial agendas for decades and centuries at a time. PROBLEMATIZING MARTÍN DE PORRES’S BIOGRAPHY In “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” Derrida has submitted one of the most comprehensive treatments that would throw the conditions of the human–animal divide into question.13 Martín de Porres’s stories of animal friendship, I suggest, can be challenged through a Derridian reading of his biographical materials. Describing his inexplicable sense of shame whenever he suddenly finds himself naked before the gaze of a cat, the philosopher delves headlong into a philological reconstruction of the variety of “nudities” offered up in accounts of humanity’s mytho-historical origins. The Abrahamic “Fall from Grace,” for example—wherein learning about the human condition is posited as the discovery of one’s nudity, or the very shame of being naked—is something that is absent within the order of animals and is thereby said to distinguish human from animal. For while Abrahamic man is ashamed of his sex and covers himself, the animal is always naked and does not feel ashamed. The anthropocentric logic of the human capacity to spin webs of meaning with/in difference, you might say, defines the human–animal divide within the Religions of the Book. Yet for Derrida, drawing attention to the structuring structures of human difference, as in Lewis Carroll’s novels, creates a caesura between human and animal worlds steadfastly kept separate, a rupture that for the philosopher happens to challenge the overdetermined singularity of “the animal” in the Genesis story. First, the book’s account of human ontology—made in the image of God yet reborn as imperfect after the Fall—posits that man takes

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possession of a remnant of God’s sovereignty; animals were created before humans, yet humans have been superpowerfully consigned to give animals their names. Second, the human being can only ever approach but never come face to face with the animal inside him or herself, precisely because human “language” has become a maddening pathos or inexhaustible fascination with one’s difference. The good reader will hopefully excuse this long digression into Derrida’s late work, because a sleight of hand in the essay should directly call the attention of Latin American race theorists. Throughout his essay, Derrida plays on the temporal ontology implicated by Genesis’s mythical foundations of the human capacity to give names to animals, and he openly questions the latent generational inequality by which some living beings come “before” and “after” others. The one with the power to name is also the one who happens to exercise dominion over the named, hence the self-alienating and sovereign loneliness of the naming subject. “For we,” he writes, “shall have to ask ourselves, inevitably, what happens to the fraternity of brothers when an animal enters the scene. Or, conversely, what happens to the animal when one brother comes after the other . . .”14 With this statement, Derrida identifies a subtle rift within the logic of an interspecies analytics. We know what the philosopher means when he claims that any definition of the animal is a problem mediated by fraternal relations and that “brotherhood” in practice happens to enforce inequality; the communion of subjects is always enforced by the hierarchies of “anthropo-logocentrism,” the very boundaries of the social—or the patriarchal basis of colonial domination. Whether or not Derrida considered the Catholic philology of “brotherhood,” the monastic ideals of fraternity in Christ were at once a founding principle of colonial adventures as well as the experimental grounds upon which notions of “race” were conflated with animal life across the originary efforts to settle the “New World.” In early to mid-colonial Lima, Martín de Porres gained a widespread charismatic and unexpected following precisely to the extent that his uncanny, exceptional relationship with animals played a key role in Creole Spanish monastic understandings of his mulato piety. The early colonial publics’ veneration and identification with Spanish American saints served a number of unconscious and mutually reinforcing functions: examples of colonial piety that Creoles thought worthy of emulation; examples of sacrifice to be publicly and privately commemorated; examples of heroic intercession on God’s behalf in moments of political, moral, or personal crisis; embodiments of Catholic scripture for the majority of Spanish American subjects who could neither read nor write; prompts to make donations to one’s parish or missionary cause; evidence of a continuum of Catholic species-being uninterrupted between heaven and earth; and unimpeachable reminders of colonial order wherein ethno-racial hierarchies could settle, become imbalanced, and settle again.15 The great paradox of mid-colonial Catholicism in Latin America, as explored in these works, was, of course, the extent to which the material iconography of saints, who led exceptional lives and

90 Chris Garces suffered unjust deaths, would become a civil and pedagogical necessity. The Council of Trent doubled down on Catholic material culture and ceremonialism as an antidote to Protestant “apostasy”—as well as a never-ending source of material unease as saintly images were thought to supplant indigenous idols and therefore always potentially invoking the Andean deities they were meant to replace. Colonial historians show how the dual projects of extirpating idolatry and cultivating Catholic devotions were integral aspects of the same field of colonial discourse historians, though Cussen in particular demonstrates how emerging connotations of black casta or “mixed-race” Afro-Peruvian identity were forged differently across the same colonial process.16 The earliest attempts to “settle” Latin America witnessed momentous legal arguments in the courts of Spain that debated the human status and very identity of non-European subjects.17 One of the most famous encounters took place in Valladolid, between Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de las Casas, when these jurists contested the origins and cognitive capacities of indigenous peoples. While the former considered Amerindian populations something like Aristotle’s “natural slaves” (and justified their enslavement), the latter believed them more akin to lost Christians—people capable of reason upon whom the Word could be welcomed. The subsequent, mid-colonial legal writings of Francisco de Vitoria would find a resolution to this juridical impasse by considering indigenous peoples “childlike,” innocent, and in need of protection—a way of resolving the superimposed problem of ethnological origins and identity while giving sanction to established colonial institutions, such as the encomienda system of “entrusting” indigenous communities to hacienda owners and the division of law between the República de Españoles and the República de los Indios, both of were purported to “care” for indigenous well-being. Despite such legal wrangling over the subjectivity of colonized indigenous communities, subjects marked by African descent, whether slave or freedmen, tended to fall outside the purview of such classificatory schemes—having already been relegated to being Fallen peoples who nevertheless embraced Christianity and were among the closest domestic confidants of Creole and Spanish subjects. By the early seventeenth century, the trans-Atlantic slave trade had turned Lima into a city with a black majority composed of domestic slaves, freed persons, and mulatos working in homes of anyone who could afford them. Mixed-race subjects in particular were crucial to filling the ranks of unwanted labor and artisanal apprenticeships. And black colonial subjects, free and slave alike, formed themselves into a myriad of cofradías, or religious brotherhoods, mediating ceremonial and microeconomic life in Lima’s urban black neighborhoods. Although Creole Spanish subjects looked to the countryside with a certain fear of what they perceived as potential Indian idolatry and ethno-racial uprisings, countless slaves and freedpersons, negros, mulatos, and other mixed-race individuals figured predominantly in domestic and working life. More often than not, individuals of

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African descent carried out the city’ s most tedious chores and managed the city’s beasts of burden, serving as mediating agents between those who gave orders and those who acted upon them.18 Dominick La Capra has written of the close relationships formed between animals and those who are most exploited in hierarchical communities— past and present. “Through a form of self-fulfilling performativity,” he writes, “the animal must be ‘brutalized’ to become the image of brutality that in actuality characterizes particularly vicious and humiliating human practices in the treatment of others, perhaps more than it characterizes other animals.”19 The logic of his statement about interspecies dynamics and their relationship to colonialism mirrors the often-noted claim of Frantz Fanon that the settler’s frustrating habit to liken the colonized to animals, incapable of governing their behavior, is a source of amusement to the colonized subject, who daily copes with these insults and revels in a revolutionary collective overturning of the projected human–animal order.20 Neel Ahuja likewise writes of the intimate relationship between race and animality in the discursive reproduction of colonial worlds, calling attention to the tense, life-and-death performance of adopting what he calls “the animal mask,” whereby the colonial system unwittingly develops conditions for the colonized’s donning of a masked animality as well as the surprising, oftentimes violent unmasking of deanimalization.21 The colonial logic of animalization was indeed rife across the Limeño testimonies culled in support of Martín de Porres’s beatification. To merely critique the interspecies logic of colonial hagiography or its adaptability to shifting ethno-racial orders, however, does not challenge how the latter turns the unmasking of animality into a necessary passage into “history” itself. Derrida’s critique of Christianity’s latent anthropocentrism does, on the other hand, make a critical pass across the tendentiousness of human–animal distinctions. Cary Wolfe has said of Derrida’s inquiry into animal studies that “[i]nstead of recognizing the moral standing of animals because of the agency or capabilities they share with us . . ., he fundamentally questions the structure of the ‘auto’ (as autonomy, as agency, as authority over one’s autobiography) of humanist subjectivity by riveting our attention on the embodied finitude that it has been the business of humanism largely to disavow.”22 I might similarly add that Catholic biographical projects to define the autonomy of the self at its open points of articulation with other beings were principally cultivated across collective monastic experiments, rendering certain colonized beings more sacred, or worthy of emulation, than others. COLONIAL SAINTS AND ANIMALS Michel Foucault, of course, has described “biopolitics” as the discourse of species-being, which, although it can be philologically retraced to the origins of humanist thought, principally arose in the flashpoint of imperial

92 Chris Garces flourishing and the beguiling encounter with native subjects (e.g., Pagden 1987); colonial “racism” as such involves a caesura within the concept of species-being, fixating on the disruptive existence of incommensurable forms of life.23 Interspecies theorists Julie Livingston and Jasbir Puar appreciate the prospect of biosocial critique insofar as it engages with new political, legal, and intellectual movements in animal studies. Yet both take umbrage with the classically Foucauldian biopolitical paradigm to the extent that it reinscribes counterhumanitarianism, critiquing of “the human” as a modality of normativization, as the very limit-figure or intellectual horizon of all possible knowledge. The promise of so-called posthumanist writing, in their view, depends largely on the way in which race and species have been conflated, along with attempts to challenge or circumvent the critic’s own colonial complicity with anthropocentric projects. Rather, Livingston and Puar foreground unfolding pluralities and uncertainties of relationships over the typologies invoked by the mere naming of a “species,” or the act of defining animal worlds exclusively in relation to human beings. Drawing attention to the problematic figure cut by Martín de Porres and his relationship with animals, in other words, might allow for a case study and critical assessment of the interspecies frame. The “interspecies” program seeks to be a “capacious analytic paradigm,” one that hopes “to upturn normative modes of thinking, of methods, of scholarly production, reflecting the excitement of this crucial intellectual and historical moment.”24 The unbridled excitement of such a “nonanthropocentric” approach to rethinking subjectivity is, of course, tempered at every turn by foregrounding human colonial histories of the nonhuman animal, or the way in which species hierarchies were mobilized as intrinsic to capitalist regimes of labor extraction and the “intransigent,” “irrational,” or even “pestiferous” nature of the colonized. In the opinion of these authors, interspecies research “complicates notions of nonhuman agency by destabilizing the centrality of language, consciousness, and cognition (attributes constituted as singularly human) in favor of ontological irreducibility.”25 What seems important to add, however, is that across different imperial projects, in periods of “unsettling crisis,” interspecies relationships have been reworked in ways that sediment colonial inequalities and authorize new forms of violence precisely by thinking against the species-centric grain of settled hierarchies of being. One such well-documented caesura in the (re)establishment of colonial order, indeed, took place during Martín de Porres’s lifetime, when white, fatherland-identifying children of the Spanish Peninsula began to settle in Lima, the central wealth-generating, slave-trading outpost of Christendom, and found themselves increasingly overlooked for key positions in Spanish American civil and religious bureaucracies, where the Spanish-born were systematically favored by the crown. As is well-known among Latin America’s colonial historians, Spanish Peru’s seventeenth century bore witness to a veritable paroxysm of Creole claims to

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saintly perfection as men and women led heroic Christian lives of asceticism beyond the pale of religious expectations. Among these saintly aspirants and their hagiographers, the surest path to sanctification was the death-drive of martyrdom, a religious trajectory neither predictable nor commonplace within a Spanish American context that, from the early seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, experienced few outbreaks of convulsive violence. In Spanish American monasteries, “flights of the spirit” (arrobamientos) quickly drew the attention of idolatry inspectors once the Inquisition had arrived on American soil, compelling those who had cultivated mystical or superhuman pious abilities to downplay their religious talents on pain of castigation, torture, or death. The surest path to seventeenth-century saintliness was therefore as ascetically grueling as it was instrumental. Becoming someone known for incomparable poverty, chastity, or obedience turned into the procedure by which most of the religious athletes of mid-colonial Peru had to exercise their creative, self-abnegating semblance of Christ’s passion. This Catholic “counter-countercolonialism” was the seventeenth-century Spanish American backdrop for Martín de Porres’s strange charitable relationship toward animals, which took on such a powerful material and symbolic charge for Creole casta subjects in Lima.

Figure 4.2

The Classic Iconography of San Martín de Porres

94 Chris Garces THE SAINTLY ANIMAL The figures of the saint and apostate are joined together in rhetoric, or “mobilized,” as it were, for the purpose of either supporting or critiquing regimes of violence. If, however, the saint and the religious criminal both lie beyond the pale of ordinary human intercourse, so too do animals. For Bernardo Medina, the Gospels offer ample evidence for considering animals capable of love and worthy of protection, albeit for the better care of human salvation; “Saint Thomas,” he would write, “indicated that the man of charity should love the brute as God would order it, as a creature of the Creator, being pleased with the propagation of animals for God’s honor and for the neighbor’s use.”26 These statements about the animal, which serve as a preface to Martín de Porres’s sacred biography, call attention to a new dispensation of Catholic colonial relationships. In a chapter dedicated to the fraile donado’s care for nonhumans, Medina presents a touching story. When the cadaver of a Limeño was brought to El Rosario for its funeral ceremony, the dead man’s dog never left his side even after he was buried next to the monastery. “This animal attended to his deceased master, howling and digging at the ground in a show of sentiment, that even brutish animals can share in ceremonial pain” (que hasta en brutos animals tiene el dolor ceremonias). The interspecies logic of these Catholic representations of a dog’s faithfulness and capacity for suffering will shadow Martín de Porres’s identification with this particular animal. Recognizing the canine was mourning the loss of his master—as the aggrieved cannot often manage to feed themselves—the fraile donado took care to bring a plate of food to the gravesite where the animal stood daily vigil and guarded his master. Both Medina’s biography and the testimonials gathered during Martín de Porres’s beatification reveal an array of such unexpected, tender, and generous encounters between the brother and Lima’s animals. In this section, I outline a number of these episodes, considering their immediate monastic and broader Spanish American contexts. In so doing, I seek to explore a paradox within the fraile donado’s hagiographic corpus. These animal stories may reveal the creaturely love by which species boundaries and colonial hierarchies of being were mediated and transcended. Yet time and again, the rationale for Martín de Porres’s empathy for nonhuman animals was justified as the perfection of monastic obedience—obedience that doubled as a model for emerging racialization of civil hierarchies. In other words, the fraile donado’s widely admired care for colonial animals reveals a split within the subjectivity of the mixed-race, Afro-Peruvian subject’s relationship to the animal order. Martín de Porres’s projected identification with dogs, cats, mice, and other creatures appears to be an unimpeachable example of a charity that knows no bounds. Inspired by “monastic perfection,” however, the particular license with which Martín de Porres cared for nonhuman animals also helped to install a new colonial order that extended Catholic brotherhood to so-called irrational castes, on

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the exclusive condition that all accept a God-given role as inferior subjects who should grow accustomed to a life of unrelenting toil. That Martín de Porres’s treatment of nonhuman animals was informed by his unbounded projection of monasticism is beyond doubt. But his complicated widening of the circle of moral consideration was particularly visible when- and wherever his “acts” were accompanied by his own words. Although most of these animal stories hinge around dogs and other domesticated creatures, his charity toward untamed subjects is a focal point of such narratives. The fraile donado, like a good many premodern saints, could pacify rampaging bulls, calming a footloose toro in Lima’s cemetery in one moment, while in another moment coaxing a bull out of his obstreperous behavior, and in yet another moment be playing with baby calves and calling it the “happiest day of my life.”27 Even the smallest of creatures received hospitality, advice, and care. When a patient in El Rosario’s infirmary discovered that mice had nibbled holes in his socks and then set baited traps around the room, the fraile donado responded: “it’s good indeed that you would take preventive measures; let’s [also] hope that a mouse won’t have to use his teeth. Out, out with these traps[!], so that no one has to die. It isn’t good to take away their industry, enticing them into this disastrous thing.”28 In another instance, Martín de Porres finds a mouse in the laundry room and warns the creature that invading human spaces in El Rosario would lead to conflicts with the friars, saying, “Go[,] brother, and tell and your compañeros not to be bothersome, my novices, [so] that you might all retire to the orchard, and I’ll bring you sustenance every day.”29 At least apocryphally, Martín’s religious brothers took notice and were amazed that mice were nowhere to be found the next day. In another moment, Martín de Porres is said to have encountered a buckshot vulture (gallinazo) and carried it back to El Rosario’s infirmary. As scavenging birds of this sort are viewed as particularly frightful, opportunistic predators who prey on the dead, Fray Martín’s gesture was nothing short of astonishing to his religious brothers. Like other creatures whom he cured, the vulture repaid the fraile donado with frequent visits. The lay brother’s well-known relationship with Lima’s mosquitos is strangely even more wonderful. After using the cilice and other disciplines to mortify his flesh, Martín de Porres was said to have frequently bloodied his whole backside. On one occasion visiting the Dominicans’ orchard, he and Juan Macías, a religious brother of indigenous extraction, spent the better part of a day disciplining themselves in this retreat from El Rosario. As they returned to Lima that night, Juan Macías remarked to the fraile donado (who was so weak he needed help to walk home) that their disciplinary rigors would not be so uncomfortable were it not for the mosquitoes that mercilessly swarmed and bit them. The fraile donado replied that even the mosquitoes needed sustenance and that he could not deny them their share. Even as Martín de Porres lay dying, he would object to being administered with salves and medicines confected with animal byproducts—telling the doctors

96 Chris Garces who attended to him, “Why would you take the life of these creatures of God, given how they [themselves] do not benefit from [the] medicines? Because it’s divine will that I will die.”30 Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek have each forwarded defenses of the Christian foundations of universalism, respectively, as either the first religion that required a deep-seated fidelity to overcoming differences or the perverse kernel of logic by which Christ’s claim to being forsaken on the cross (“Father, why have you forsaken me?”) implied that Christianity was a religious tradition in which even God doubts his authority.31 In each case, the identification of true Christian love demands either betraying or being betrayed by the object of one’s desire. I do not wish to dispute either philosopher’s treatment of love, or their handling of Christian truth-claims in the service of fraught immanence or political metamorphosis. Both arguments draw from what might be called the gray zones of Christian ontology. Yet neither thinker appears to offer analytic tools with which to better understand the colonial predicament of subjects marked by Christian legacies of ethno-racialized discrimination. In Medina’s account of Martín de Porres’s austerities, he writes that the mulato friar “treated his body like a rebel slave or mortal enemy”—an internalization of the mechanism that Badiou would sublate, and resolve, within the Christian absolute.32 Moreover, whenever his religious superiors in El Rosario drew attention to his remarkable piousness or miracles, Fray Martín appears to have automatically responded with a peculiar expression of his Catholic humility. Time and again, whenever he received monastic praise or a superior’s fraternal correction, Martín de Porres addresses himself as a “mulatto dog.”33 A Christian practice of selfinspection is at work in this routinized act of speech, identifying the mulato subject with canine nonhuman animals or creatures effectively “abandoned by God.” One way or another, we know that Fray Martín’s self-animalizing response to his superiors was a serial gesture, often reiterated, but precisely to what extent was it solicited? Is it possible to peer outside the hagiographic frame of these overdetermined moments of seventeenth-century mulato animalization? Conversely, might we understand Martín de Porres’s words as if they were intended to convey an emerging Creole truth-fantasy that he would mold and exemplify for his own temporary advantage. For much of his religious career as El Rosario’s barber-surgeon, Martín de Porres was the target of racialized epithets from patients delirious in their illnesses or merely externalizing their own unhappiness about their unwell condition. Notably, when he disciplined himself late into the night, Martín de Porres could be heard repeating the same injurious words hurled at him during his rounds in the infirmary. When the fraile donado himself fell ill, his monastic zeal for austerity kept him from accepting basic “human” comforts. In one episode, the Dominican’s provincial leader ordered a sick Martín de Porres to use bed sheets, to which he responded, “for a mulatto dog, [someone] who would [ordinarily have] neither have a thing to eat, nor a place to sleep, your illustrious

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Paternity orders him to lie down in sheets[?]; for the love of God don’t permit it.”34 In the end, the mulato friar will accept the superior’s order, yet sleep under the bedding wearing shoes and his rough-hewn Dominican habit. This self-denigrating humility should be properly understood as a deeply personal and inwardly focused ethno-racial self-discipline—widely admired by Creole Spanish brothers and superiors alike. In his free time, Martín de Porres purportedly taught his Christian faith to newly arrived African slaves (so-called bozales) and so-called wild Indian subjects, and here, too, his will to the perfect the racialization of monastic ideals was intended to influence others by his own example.35 When slaves working in the Dominican plantation at Limatambo complained about the lack of adequate food, the fraile donado would tell them that he, too, had not eaten because he did not yet deserve to eat—entirely overlooking the differences between his fast and the regime of toil and hunger to which his pupils were subject.36 In those few hagiographic contexts in which Fray Martín acted as a religious superior, he most often did so while interacting with canines. The particularly close relationship developed between the fraile donado and dogs can be attributed to historical associations with dogs as key animals within the Spanish conquest; the nickname for the Order of Preachers being “the dogs of the world;” or to the “political misplacement” of the mulato subject within seventeenth-century conceptual taxonomies of ethno-racial difference, just as mestizos were often called dogs.37 Indeed, the critic would be hard pressed to exhaust the potential meanings of Martín de Porres’s human–canine associations in testimony given toward his saintly beatification. These tales of contact between the fraile donado and Lima’s dogs serve as an allegory for mid-colonial mulato subjectivity and the normalized condition of unjust abandonment and exile at the very edge of colonial human community. The first of these tales concerns El Rosario’s cook. For nearly eighteen years, Medina claimed, this Dominican friar, whose job it was to procure and prepare food for his religious brothers, was faithfully accompanied by a smelly, incontinent dog. When the creature had grown old and sick, the cook gave an order to “blacks from the Community” to “kill him and drag him away from the Convent,” which they did. But before they could take the dog’s broken and dead body to Lima’s dumping grounds, they encountered Martín de Porres, who, when he was informed about the cook’s actions, reprehended them for their lack of charity and ordered them to take the body back to the laundry room, which also served as his monastic cell.38 When Martín de Porres subsequently approached the cook, he is said to have remarked, “Father, how could you have such little piety with that brute, after it served you so many years? Did you have the heart to order taking the life of someone who had accompanied you all these years? That’s the pay you gave for his service?”39 The next morning, all the convent’s brothers were informed about the event, and when they found the dog—broken and

98 Chris Garces lifeless one night before—not only alive and well, but without his characteristic odor, all were astonished. Again according to Medina, Fray Martín counseled the dog with the following words: “brother, don’t go to the food dispensary where your disgraceful master [is working]: you already know the corresponding payment.”40 And for many years to come, the cook’s abandoned dog would heed the advice of Martín de Porres and even flee from his old master, every now and then, when he was approached by him. Far from protecting Lima’s dogs, the second narrative finds Martín de Porres serving as an instrument of justice toward wayward animals. The witness account derives from Cipriano de Medina’s beatification testimony. The event in itself is worthy of full transcription, in spite of its colonial legalese: As the said brother fray Martín de Porres was in the infirmary caring for his sick brothers, a huge dog walked right up to him, his entrails dragging behind from his stomach, spilling great quantities of blood and yelping as he arrived before the said brother, looking for a cure, something those from all circumstances saw in him. And the said brother turned to the dog and exclaimed, “Who made brother dog so angry? That’s what you get for being angry” [Quien le mete hermano perro en ser bravo? Esto sacan los que son]. And caressing the dog, brother friar Martín took him by an ear to his cell, which he had in the infirmary, and admiring [the scene] from that wing this witness saw him bend down in all haste to look and understand what [condition] stood before him. And inside his cell he found a soft fur rug on which he [the dog] could lie down, and taking a bit of wine in his mouth, he [fray Martín] washed the wounds with great charity, and afterward with a thread and needle began to sow. As the dog began to grow more conscious of the pain he [fray Martín] was causing him, he began to growl and make fierce gestures, and the said hermano tenderly turned to him and said: “Learn to be tame and not angry, because those who don’t get stuck with it.” And finishing up with stitching wounds, he ordered him to stay on the fur rug and not to move, and, as if he were a person with reason, he obeyed him, and he [fray Martín] brought him things to eat, and with great diligence he grew well again. And the thankful animal did not want to leave his side, accompanied him wherever he went, without missing a thing, and it grew so extreme, that if he saw some person grab the said fray Martín, he would grow ferocious and bear his teeth. And one day in particular, a religious servant came to ask him I don’t know what, the dog grew ferocious and bit him [the religious servant], and turning to him [the dog], [fray Martín] said: “The brother [i.e., the dog] doesn’t want to get rid of his angriness, nor to learn his lesson about anger [escarmentar]? Well, in truth the next time you do it the religious of the house will need to give you the stick and kick you out.” As in fact that happened a few days later [. . .] after he wanted to grow fierce

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with [embestir] another religious, some of them got together in the said convent and they heartily beat him with sticks and, half-dazed, they threw him out of the said convent.41 THE INTERSPECIES LOGIC OF RACE In these passages, the fraile donado assumes a limited, contingent role as religious superior in the monastic setting of El Rosario, where his treatment of animals serves didactically as an imaginative contrast to the way Creole Spaniards managed their colonial subordinates. One sees how the logic of mid-colonial agency (or licencia) is interwoven throughout relations of patronage and dependency, idealized in a hierarchical process by which, if one obeys the ultimate will of the superior, the subordinate might expect a certain discretionary latitude for contingent thought and action—enough “independence,” one might say, to turn oneself from a casta subject into saintly candidate. That licencia could be forged or broken in monastic contexts, was one of the most captivating aspects of watching mid-colonial social relations unfold in the performative spotlight of the inwardly focused cloisters. The life of Martín de Porres happens to reveal, in the negative, some of the most fraught dilemmas of ethno-racialized subordination in seventeenth-century Peru. Exploring the hagiographic figure cut by Martín de Porres places what I call “interspecies racism” in stark relief. Indeed, Spanish Catholic brotherhood was granted to the colonized across color lines and species boundaries alike on the exclusive condition that mixedrace subjects, whom Creole structures of colonial fantasy imagined as servile beings, accepted their ethno-racial status as subjects of labor unworthy of civil recognition. Focusing on hagiographic efforts to sanctify Martín de Porres’s uncanny relationship with animals may complement interspecies critique, demonstrating how colonial efforts to modify racial orders—during the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century—posited conceptual identification with nonhuman actors as a field of Catholic humanitarian and charitable practices. How one reads hagiographic stories about Martín de Porres as a limit figure in seventeenth-century Peru’s ethno-racial imagination helps one to understand the earliest material-symbolic ruptures of colonial “race” within the trans-Atlantic legacies of African slavery. Dominick La Capra has argued that “[t]he major problem” lying at the heart of critical animal studies today, “is not so much the distinctions [set up between human and animal] . . . but the very desire to postulate them with their invidious functions and consequences, particularly in the attempt to reduce or eliminate the problematic or contestable dimensions of certain human practices.”42 What my reading of Martín de Porres’s animal stories has aimed to show is that a racialized colonial logic was only possible by positing novel human–animal distinctions, with all their overdetermined

100 Chris Garces social functions and unintended discriminatory consequences. Livingston and Puar have rightly claimed that “not all study of animality achieves a posthumanist politics, as some threads of animal studies unwittingly reinscribe the centrality of human subject formation and, thus, anthropomorphism.”43 Yet it would seem critically important to recognize how, within the long colonial histories of human and animal subject formation, interspecies dynamics were often recruited as the very topos by which imperial regimes enveloped colonial subjects within a logic of discriminatory “care.” NOTES 1. I would like to thank the Latin American Studies Programs at the University of Washington and at Cornell University for allowing me to present this material before challenging audiences and to gain feedback on earlier versions. Conversations with María Elena García have been a wonderful inspiration for this article. Ananda Cohen and Vincent Lloyd provided generous feedback on earlier drafts. Special thanks also go to Vincent Lloyd and Molly Bassett for asking me to participate in their fall 2011 conference on The Racial Saint at Syracuse University. 2. Alex García-Rivera, St. Martín de Porres: The ‘Little Stories’ and the Semiotics of Culture (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1995); Celia L. Cussen, Fray Martín de Porres and the Religious Imagination of Creole Lima (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1996). 3. Cf. Martha Few and Zeb Tortorici, eds., Centering Animals: Writing Animals into Latin American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). 4. Bernardo Medina, San Martín de Porres: Biografíâ del Siglo XVII (Mexico City, Mexico: Editorial Jus, 1964), 65. 5. Ibid. 6. Proceso de Beatificación de fray Martín de Porres (Palencia, Spain: Secretariado “Martín de Porres,” 1961), 14v, emphasis added. 7. Celia L. Cussen, “The Search for Idols and Saints in Colonial Peru: Linking Extirpation and Beatification,” Hispanic American Historical Review 85 (2005): 441. 8. Frank Graziano, Cultures of Devotion: Folk Saints of Spanish America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 9. 9. Medina, San Martín de Porres, 25. 10. Marisol de la Cadena, “Are Mestizos Hybrids? The Conceptual Politics of Andean Identities,” Journal of Latin American Studies 37 (2005): 259–284. 11. García-Rivera, St. Martín de Porres. 12. Julie Livingston and Jasbir K. Puar, “Interspecies,” Social Text 29 (2011): 3–14. 13. Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” Critical Inquiry 28 (2002): 369–418. 14. Ibid., 381. 15. Chris Garces, “Saints and Saintliness,” Iberia and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History (New York: ABC-Clio, 2005); Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff, eds., Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, 1500– 1800 (New York: Routledge, 2003); Ronald J. Morgan, Spanish American Saints and the Rhetoric of Identity, 1600–1810 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002).

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16. Kenneth Mills, “The Limits of Religious Coercion in Mid-Colonial Peru,” Past and Present 145 (1994): 84–121; Luis Millones, Una partecita del cielo: la vida de Santa Rosa de Lima narrada por don Gonzalo de la Maza a quien ella llamaba padre (Lima: Horizonte, 1993); Juan Carlos Estenssoro Fuchs, Del Paganismo a la Santidad: La Incorporación de los Indios del Perúal Catolicismo 1532–1750 (Lima: IFEA, 2003). 17. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 18. Cf. Carlos Aguirre, Breve historia de la esclavitud en el Perú: Una herida que no deja de sangrar (Lima: FECP, 2005). 19. Dominick LaCapra, History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 156. 20. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1963). 21. Neel Ahuja, “Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World,” PMLA 124 (2009): 556–563. 22. Cary Wolfe, “Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities,” PMLA 124 (2009), 570. 23. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–78, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Michael Senellart (New York: Picador, 2008). 24. Livingston and Puar, “Interspecies,” 12. 25. Ibid., 3. 26. Medina, San Martín de Porres, 94. 27. José Antonio Busto-Duthurburu, San Martín de Porras (Lima: Pontífica Universidad Católica del Perú, 2006), 294–295. 28. Medina, San Martín de Porres, 97. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 104–105. 31. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Boston: MIT Press, 2003). 32. Medina, San Martín de Porres, 51. 33. Proceso de Beatificación, 90–91, 116, 193, 204–206, 220, 266, 290. 34. Ibid., 59. 35. Ibid., 54. 36. Ibid., 56. 37. Cussen, Fray Martín de Porres, 149. Cf. de la Cadena, “Are Mestizos Hybrids?” 267. 38. Medina, San Martín de Porres, 106–107. 39. Ibid., 106. 40. Ibid., 107. 41. Proceso de Beatificación, 88–89. 42. LaCapra, History and Its Limits, 159. 43. Livingston and Puar, “Interspecies,” 5.

5

Cuba’s Virgin of Charity Sanctity, Caribbean Creolization, and the Color Continuum Jalane Schmidt

On April 1, 1687, Juan Moreno, an 85-year-old black creole slave (Negro esclauo natural desta dho Lugar), one of three original discoverers of the effigy of Cuba’s Virgin of Charity, gave a deposition to officials of the Catholic Church of Santiago de Cuba in which he “affirmed as a Christian” his account of the finding (hallazgo) of the Virgin’s image floating on ocean waters seventy-five years before. Lost for three centuries, Moreno’s notarized testimony was rediscovered in 1974 and reads This declarant said that when he was ten years old, he went, in the company of Rodrigo de Joyos and Juan de Joyos, two Indian brothers, to collect salt, having been in Key Franses in the middle of the Bay of Nipe for a long time en route to the Salt Mine. It was morning and the sea was calm when they left Key Franses before sunrise on board a canoe bound for the salt mine. In the distance beyond Key Franses they saw something white on the foam of the water but they could not distinguish what it was. As they approached, it appeared to be a bird, and as they got closer, the Indians said that it looked like a girl. Upon consideration, they recognized and saw the Image of Our Lady of the Most Holy Virgin with a Baby Jesus in her arms upon a small platform with large letters that Rodrigo de Hoyos read and which said “I am the Virgin of Charity.”1 The twentieth-century Cuban intellectual Jorge Mañach once asserted, “There is no nation without the Virgin of Charity.”2 But the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre (hereafter, “the Virgin”) was not always a national icon. Rather, Cubans’ ongoing reflections upon and debates about their preferred national characteristics—including racialization—have intertwined with religious devotion to produce a complex creolized (“mixed”) account of their nation (patria) and its patroness (patrona). Originally in the early seventeenth century, the Virgin of Charity was the object of a regional cult in Cuba’s perennially less developed eastern province, Oriente. Given the low social and racial status of her original devotees—indigenous Taínos, enslaved Angolans, and their black and

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mulato descendants—and the location of her shrine in a small remote copper-mining village, the Virgin of Charity would not seem a likely advocation to achieve island-wide prominence. But particularly as Cuba’s colonial epoch (1492–1898) and then the Republic of Cuba (1902–1958) gave way to the revolutionary era (1959–present), the general reconsideration of Cuba’s demographic composition and the perceived race of the Marian effigy herself would, over the centuries, lead many Cubans of various social strata and religious commitments to claim the saint as an appropriate symbol of cubanía (Cuban-ness). The hallazgo of the bobbing Marian image on ocean water became, like the color of the effigy itself, a floating signifier waiting to be wrested and brought aboard and interpreted by its seers. THE “THREE JUANS”: CREOLE CONSTITUENCY OF THE VIRGIN’S DEVOTEES The official version of the finding of Cuba’s Marian image is the 1687 notarized oral testimony—a portion of which appears earlier—of the youngest of the seers. The testimony of the by-then-elderly Juan Moreno preserves an account that combines “black” and “Catholic” leitmotifs— enslavement and a Marian apparition, respectively—into a creole Cuban narrative. In subsequent embellishments of the popular apparition story, the “surf” (espuma) upon which Moreno described the Virgin’s image to have been floating in the Bay of Nipe was rendered as a “storm,” until, by the late eighteenth century it had become a full-fledged “hurricane.”3 These meteorological enhancements of Moreno’s testimony of the hallazgo are reproduced in the images of holy cards that depict the Virgin of Charity and underscore the catechetical imperative that like the beleaguered boat’s desperate multiracial group of navigators—who Cubans dub the Three Juans— viewers of the printed image should look in hope to the brown Virgin, who alone can calm rough waters. One devotee, a Spiritist and Roman Catholic of Spanish and Chinese descent who, until his recent death, lived and worked in El Cobre, explained the Virgin’s nautical arrival to the island by saying that “she came by way of the ocean, just as we did.” Thus, Cubans forge an important parallel between the circumstances of the Virgin’s original hallazgo and the oft-stated truism regarding the overseas origin of each constituent racial group of Cuba’s population: whether the island’s original inhabitants, the indigenous Taínos (a seafaring branch of the South American Arawak), Spanish colonists, African slaves, or Chinese indentured laborers, “everyone came in boats.” The devotee continued his explanation of the Virgin’s widespread appeal by making a direct connection between

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Figure 5.1 A contemporary Cuban holy card depicts the Virgin of Charity hovering above the Three Juans, who are often regarded as representative Cubans. The Christ child has a lighter complexion than the Virgin, which suggests white paternity and which, according to Cuban racial hierarchies, marks the progeny as an adelantado, or an “advanced” offspring who is assigned a higher racial status than that of their parent of color.

Cuban demography, creole religious recombinations, and Cubans’ ascription of “race” to their patron: She is an authentic Cuban Virgin, Cubana por excelencia. The Virgin with her color is a mestiza Virgin who includes all of the races. She represents to us the mestizaje [quality of mixedness] of our race, and furthermore, of our culture. She is an expression of syncretism.4

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Cubans frequently reason that it is only fitting that the Virgin herself is most often represented as a morena (brown-skinned woman) or, in some circles, as a mulata (woman of African and European descent).5 Although Cuban nationalist ideology often celebrates racial “mixing,” in different periods of Cuban history, the Spanish and African poles of national culture have been privileged or downplayed by particular Cubans who wish to advance specific goals. The Virgin’s racial iconography is a contested marker that changes over time and space. The cult of the Virgin of Charity reportedly began when, for some time after her hallazgo in 1612, the Marian effigy stayed under the care of one of the “Three Juans,” the Indian Rodrigo de Hoyos. In the settlement of Hato de Barajagua on the coast of the Bay of Nipe, the Virgin resided in a bohio, a conical thatched-roof hut, a traditional indigenous dwelling in rural Cuba, where it is said she was venerated according to Taíno devotional practices.6 During her time in the tiny settlement of Barajagua, the Virgin’s image reportedly disappeared from Rodrigo de Hoyo’s care at night on two occasions and then reappeared the next morning, unharmed but with her vestments wet—in a seeming inversion of her original finding at sea, in which her vestments reportedly remained miraculously dry.7 Upon hearing this news of the Virgin’s nocturnal wanderings from her lamplit altar in Barajagua, the closest Spanish colonial official, the administrator of the copper mine in Santiago del Prado y Real de Minas del Cobre (hereafter, El Cobre), Francisco Sanchéz de Moya, feared that the Marian effigy might be permanently lost or damaged if it remained in the custody of the Indians. According to eighteenth-century El Cobre chaplain Julian Joseph Bravo’s version of this 1612 event, when Rodrigo de Hoyos’s brother Juan learned that Sanchéz de Moya wished to construct a quieter hermitage for the Virgin, Juan de Hoyos hid the Virgin’s effigy in order to prevent “the whites” from taking her away.8 The religions of both the Taínos and the Spaniards each featured divine figures in motion. Juan de Hoyos’s reported sequestering of the Virgin’s effigy may have been a continuation of traditional Taíno practices of commandeering zemis (deities) in order to curry their favor.9 As for Spanish Catholicism, peripatetic miraculous Virgins who subvert the normal social and physical orders are recurring features of many Marian stories, although the awareness of this would have been little consolation to Sanchéz de Moya at the time. The Spanish mining official sent a company of soldiers to commandeer the Virgin’s effigy, which was escorted in procession accompanied by music and dancing and Spanish signs of heraldry such as ringing bells and a volley of rifle salutes and transferred to the majority black and mixedrace copper-mining village of El Cobre, where she has resided ever since.10 So began Cubans’ centuries-long physical and metaphorical wrestling for possession of the Virgin’s image and attempts to normalize devotional practices. The purported rivalry between the Taíno Juan de Hoyos and the Spaniard Sanchéz de Moya for control over the Virgin’s effigy so soon after her initial 1612 finding in the Bay of Nipe illustrates an important argument about the social history of this Marian advocation: perceptions of race have

106 Jalane Schmidt been important since the inception of this Cuban cult, and there has never been a golden age of consensus when the Virgin of Charity’s affections were believed to rest equally upon everyone. Even as Sanchéz de Moya endeavored to save the Virgin of Charity from the Indians he considered unreliable, he unwittingly delivered the Virgin to those who were deemed, by persons of Sanchéz de Moya’s status, to be colonial Cuba’s ultimate outsiders: enslaved Africans. At the time of the Virgin’s reported arrival in El Cobre in about 1613, the village was populated by approximately 200 slaves, two thirds of whom were of African origin, the majority of these hailing from Angola and the Congo.11 The village of El Cobre, which sits 20 kilometers outside Santiago de Cuba on some lowelevation mountains, had been founded as a privately owned copper-mining venture soon after Spanish colonization of Cuba began in the early sixteenth century. Continuing his account, Juan Moreno said that shortly after her effigy arrived in El Cobre, the Virgin made known, by the miraculous illumination of three lights that shone from on high on three successive nights, where she preferred her shrine to be located: on Mine Hill (Zerro de la Mina) next to the residences of the village’s enslaved miners. As the historian María Elena Díaz and liberation theologian Miguel Díaz have offered, the finding of the Virgin of Charity’s effigy by low-status seers and her seeming preference for subalterns follows well-established patterns of Marian apparitions.12 Upon arriving in El Cobre, the Virgin of Charity promptly upended expectations: rather than align herself with the Spanish officials concerned to save and preserve her effigy, the Virgin reportedly opted for the company of the enslaved copper miners who worked under them. The initial relationship between enslaved devotees in eastern Cuba and their Virgin was formative to the early growth of the cult in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—a time during which Cobreros (residents of El Cobre) constructed shrines for the effigy of their celestial patroness, revolted on several occasions, fled to nearby mountains, appealed to colonial officials and the King of Spain, and credited the Virgin’s miraculous intercession for their eventual manumission in 1801, or almost ninety years prior to general abolition in Cuba.13 The perceived race of her effigy and the loyalties the Virgin might evince have been contentious topics for centuries. In general, the closer the informant’s geographic proximity to the Virgin’s shrine, or the closer the informant’s ethnic identity or ideological or pastoral sympathies lay to that of her original, predominantly black devotees, the darker were the reports of the Virgin’s complexion. Eighteenth-century chaplains at the Virgin’s shrine described her effigy as “brilliantly brown,” “somewhat brown and transparent,” and as “a Cuban Charity . . . of dark color, or blazened wheat that the sun has browned,”14 in a manner that linked brownness with Cubanness. But what El Cobre’s chaplains and local black and mulatto devotees considered a matter-of-fact observation of the visage of their patroness was not a matter of consensus.

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PATRIA Y PATRONA The cult of the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre began to achieve island-wide popularity as an important “creole” (criolla) symbol of Cuban nationalism during the nineteenth century, particularly when Cuban soldiers in the wars for independence (a disproportionately black and mixed-race force) and their concerned family members appealed to the virgen criolla as the patron of their military and political cause.15 As Cuba’s independence struggle intensified, Cubans increasingly denoted preferred national characteristics with the term “creole,” meaning someone or something that was a homegrown hybrid invention. So understood, creole is juxtaposed to a person or object that was peninsular, that is, Spanish, and to someone or something that was bozal, meaning African and not acculturated to the New World. After the abolition of slavery in 1886, Spanish defeat and retreat in 1898, and the founding of an independent Republic of Cuba in 1902, a selfconscious young nation began a careful examination of its symbols. In the early years of the Republic, on the western side of the island, most high-status Catholics did not count themselves as devotees of the Virgin of Charity. Indeed, in 1902 when Havana’s Iglesia del Espíritu Santo organized a cofradía (lay-led devotional organization) dedicated to the Virgin of Charity, only “pious Black women” aspired to join.16 In early republican-era Havana, devotion to the Virgin of Charity was indeed more popular among blacks. Irene Wright, a white North American historian of Cuba, noted in 1910 that the Virgin’s cult had spread to all parts of the island and that la Caridad was “the most popular Virgin, especially among the lower classes. Negroes adore her because one of the three to whom she came on Nipe Bay was a negro child.”17 Wright also noted, with marked displeasure, the prevalence of devotions of African provenance in the Virgin’s popular cult in western Cuba—emergent Afro-Cuban religious practices that later, more sympathetic Cuban ethnographers would call “Santería.”18 Notwithstanding the widespread popularity in Cuba of music, dance, and religions of African inspiration, republican-era white elites’ preferred definitions of “Cuban-ness” minimized or effaced their black compatriots’ cultural contributions and assigned to blacks a politically and economically marginal status.19 Some black civil rights advocates mobilized politically by their 1908 founding of the Partido Independiente de Color (PIC), an action that challenged the new nation’s conventional accepted narratives about Cuba’s putative racial egalitarianism. During the political tension that ensued, members of the PIC made a 1910 pilgrimage to El Cobre to appeal to the Virgin for the “triumph of justice.”20 Irene Wright recorded that PIC members had gathered before the Virgin’s altar in El Cobre and “sworn to the death” to defend “the noble race of color.”21 But other contemporaneous Cuban reports of this incident stoked racial tensions by mischaracterizing the PIC’s petitions in El Cobre as an appeal by these black Cubans for the Virgin to kill whites. The old fear that the one Cuban constituency might

108 Jalane Schmidt appeal to the Virgin at the expense of another would be revisited on many occasions during the twentieth century. The PIC was quashed in 1912 by the national government’s horrific massacre of 3,000 blacks.22 Given this politically tense backdrop, the question of the Virgin’s color, and any presumption stemming from this about the Virgin’s supposed loyalty to specific races of devotees, was a delicate question. Several years after the state’s brutal attack on its own black citizenry, a multiracial group of veterans of the 1898 independence army appealed to the Vatican to officially recognize the Virgin of Charity as Cuba’s patron saint, an effort that one contemporary resident Cuban historian has interpreted as a “means of smoothing inter-ethnic strife” in the wake of the 1912 massacre.23 The request was granted, and since 1916, the Virgin of Charity has been recognized as Cuba’s most prominent religious symbol. RACIAL “TYPES” IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY CUBA The interpretation of the Virgin’s physical appearance and Cubans’ ascription of race thereto does not exist separately from contemporaneous Cuban debates about racial representation—debates that were often couched in discussions about religion. As with many of their contemporaries throughout Latin America, Cubans deployed an elaborate classificatory schema for describing racial castas, as well as strategic polite silences with regard to race. Cubans’ nomenclature for racial phenotypes is affected by taxonomies that combine skin color, hair texture, and facial features as well as social class and concomitant notions of respectability. Cubans (then and now) tend to describe color in fine gradations from white, which is positively valued, to black, which is held in low esteem. Such hierarchical patterns of racial classification were (and are) pervasive. Terms that were used in Cuba in the early twentieth century included blanco (white) and gallego (Galician, from the Spanish region of Galicia), which were generic monikers for those with Spanish features, such as light-complexioned skin, straight hair, a nose with a slender bridge and nostrils, and thin lips.24 The meaning of “whiteness” was to some degree tied to social position. U.S. visitors also described the prevalence of racial attitudes in Republican Cuba that encouraged higher-status or lighter-complexioned persons of color to “pass for white,” a pattern that repeated itself across the Americas.25 For those Cubans of color, the oft-sought goal of “improving the race” through marriage to persons categorized as white and the bearing of adelantados (“advanced” lighter-complexioned offspring) valued a steady whitening (blanqueamiento) tendency.26 The popular iconography of the Virgin of Charity appears at times to unwittingly encode this racial taxonomy, as a brown-skinned Mary holds a white-skinned infant Jesús, the divine adelantado.

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Three descriptors that indicated a person with “dusky” skin without necessarily connoting African descent, listed from lightest to darkest, were trigueño (literally, “wheat-colored,” by which is meant tanned, olive-skinned, or tawny), índio (“Indian,” often a person of light-brown complexion who has dark, straight hair), and moreno (brown, often a brown-skinned person with dark hair). In the colonial epoch, moreno designated an enslaved black person, while pardo usually indicated a free black. By the twentieth century, increasing social belonging—as measured by the shedding of slave status—removed overt references to blackness, which are included in the terms negro and mulato, and replaced these terms with a supposedly more inclusive, racially ambiguous moreno. Other descriptors that mark a person as being of African descent, listed from “lightest” to “darkest,” are jabao (a mixed-race person of light complexion, sometimes with freckles and reddish hair, who may have “Negroid” features, such as full lips, a broad nose, and tightly curled hair),27 mulato (a person of European and African descent who has brown skin and lightly curled or wavy black hair), and negro or prieto (black, referring only to those who have dark, black skin and tightly curled hair. Any of these descriptors can be modified with the adjectives oscuro (dark) and clara (light) or bien (“good,” which can also serve as the adverbial modifier “very”), and fina or buena (“fine” or “good,” which can refer to the individual’s social respectability, honorableness, and therefore perceived approximation to whiteness, whether phenotypical or cultural). Thus, a trigueña bien clara would indicate a light, dusky-complexioned woman; a mulata fina could be a woman of African and European descent who perhaps had lightly curled hair, slender nose and lips, was legally married, or had a higher-status occupation, such as a teacher; and a negra bien prieta would refer to a dark-skinned black woman, perhaps with a lower-status occupation, such as a market vendor. Since marriage between individuals classified as white and black was not legally permitted during the epoch of slavery, a person of both Spanish and African descent was, by definition, considered “illegitimate.” Originally the progeny of illicit desire between black and white Cubans during the slave era, the mulata became a sign of eroticized relations of dominance and the fetishized object of a heterosexual Cuban male gaze seeking sexual conquest. White planters occasionally maintained a mulata mistress in a casa chica of a tangled urban zone far from their family’s presumably morally ordered plantation manor. In the late colonial era, Cuban literature such as Cirilo Villaverde’s romantic novel Cecilia Valdes featured a protagonist who is Cuba’s version of the tragic mulata, while the costumbrista paintings of visual artists such as Victor Patricio Landaluze made the figure of the mulata the focus for Cubans’ ruminations on the island’s racial and cultural recombinations into new creole models of the nation and established la mulata as Cuba’s standard of beauty.28 But physical beauty did not necessarily connote respectability: assigned a liminal space between races,

110 Jalane Schmidt the perceived “mixture” of mulatas often excluded them from bourgeois notions that prized whiteness and the presumption of moral purity and honor that accompanied this status. THE VIRGIN’S RACE: ¿MORENA O MULATA? At a time when the term morena still often referred to Cubans who were designated “of color” or “black,” it seems significant that a Cuban journalist writing in July 1907 for the Havana newspaper El Fígaro described the Virgin’s original seventeenth-century effigy as “more brown than tawny” (“morena más que trigueña”).29 The ascription of brownness to the Virgin could, depending upon the social circle, discredit or promote her worthiness for veneration. In the 1920s and 1940s, Cuban ethnographer Fernando Ortíz interpreted the beliefs of various Cuban constituencies about the “race” of the Virgin of Charity. Ortíz quoted a pastoral letter penned by Cuba’s Catholic bishops in 1917— one year after the Vatican’s official recognition of the Virgin of Charity as Cuba’s patron saint—in which the Church officials promoted the construction of a new sanctuary for the Virgin of Charity, who, the prelates explained, “if she is morena, this is because the sun has tanned her.” In attributing the Virgin’s brownness to her exposure to the warm Cuban sun, the bishops implied that her original color was of a lighter, possibly white complexion. Ortíz contextualized the bishops’ early-twentieth-century description of the Virgin’s color within their identities as white, predominantly Spanish foreigners: “For the [Catholic] bishops, who are all white and not all Cuban, the Virgin of Charity is of the white race. This is not to say . . . that she is white in color, but rather of the white race, although with a denigrated [sic] face.”30 Here Ortíz seems to use “the white race” as a cultural and social marker in which the ideological sympathies of the person or figure deemed “white”—notwithstanding their physical characteristics that might otherwise mark them for lower status—are presumed to reside safely on the side of the dominant white ethnic group. Ortíz further argued that Those who describe the Virgin as an “india” do so due to long-ago patriotic exaltations that deem it convenient to deform historical realities and to weave an illusory past for us due to a childish desire to present us as the descendants of Siboney and Taíno Indians, when we are not mixtures of their blood. Nothing justifies this indiophilic interpretation save a political rationalization.31 In the Cuban imaginary, Indians were not remembered as an aggressive threat to Spanish colonization efforts but rather pitied as the country’s “primitive” original inhabitants, most of whom died within a century of Spanish settlement.32 By the twentieth century, the term “Indian” was not

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used so much as an ethnonym for a person of indigenous descent, but rather designated an individual perceived to have phenotypical similarities with natives—that is, brown skin and straight dark hair. But if Indians were romantically regarded as the island’s lost precolonial innocence, this had come at the expense of those who suffered the contempt of being regarded as Cuba’s outsiders, namely enslaved blacks. Ortíz presented a third explanation of the Virgin’s color—that she is black—more sympathetically, noting that this invocation of “la negra” predominated in Oriente, even among white devotees. The final, most popular interpretation—the origins of which Ortíz attributed to Havana adepts of the “popular African religion of the Lucumís,” or Santería—characterized the Virgin of Charity as a “mulata . . . due to her African blood . . . This predominant belief has spread,” Ortíz explained, “due to the long-standing, persistent and intimate African crossings in the Cuban substratum. Without a doubt, this is an important factor in the vernacular Cubanization of the Virgin of Charity.”33 Other mid-twentieth-century Cuban artists and intellectuals agreed and were more apt to speak of “la Virgen mulata.” Jorge Mañach regarded Cuba’s “Virgin mulata” as evidence of Cuba’s easy racial “mixing” and relative lack of racism in comparison to the United States.34Elías Entralgo declared La Caridad a fitting symbol of Cubans, the “mulatto people that we are,” whose image advanced the nation toward what he regarded as its final goal: mulatez, his neologism for the best combination of Cuba’s imaginative capacities, embodied in its Spanish and African ethnic constituents.35 THE CONUNDRUM OF A MULATA VIRGIN Ortíz was one of the most prominent members of the afrocubanista movement of artists, writers, and folklorists of the 1920s and 1930s, which—much to the dismay of many of their elite white Cuban compatriots—celebrated formerly disparaged African elements as indispensable ingredients of Cuban popular culture. During the afrocubanista movement of the early twentieth century, mulatas, specifically their bodies, were the frequent subject of Cuban poetry, novels, songs, and aphorisms, and their images were featured in many paintings and cigar box lithographed marquillas as shorthand symbols of the nation itself. But even though the image of the mulata often functioned, for Cubans and foreigners alike, as Cuba’s sensual phenotypical ideal, mulatas were frequently depicted as a lascivious archetype, associated with moral deviance and vanity. Nicolás Guillén’s 1930 poem “Mulata” chides an unnamed mixed-race female lover for considering herself “so advanced,” or distant from blackness, while Ernesto Lecuona’s classic 1930 song “María la O” describes an “unhappy mulata” who is killed by her lover as revenge for her “betrayal.” One of the most famous works of twentieth-century Cuban visual art is Carlos Enríquez’s “The Rape of the Mulatas” (1938), an afrocubanista rendering of an icon of the Western art canon, the ancient Roman legend of the

112 Jalane Schmidt rape of the Sabine women. Enríquez’s painting depicts two mulatas being taken on horseback through the countryside by smirking, bandolier-sashed armed white men whose eyes are obscured by low-drawn sombreros.36 The mixed-race women are depicted as voluptuous semi-nudes, with comehither eyes and rapturous faces—the very portrait of sexual availability so often imputed to mulatas. Enríquez’s 1933 painting “La Virgen del Cobre” depicts a crowned dark-complexioned Virgin hovering over a stylized representation of the storm-tossed boat carrying the Three Juans, while in the foreground two black devotees dance together suggestively. The eponymous subject of Enríquez’s work is rendered with the darker skin, curly hair, and more recognizably African-descended features of a mulata. A flash of lightning in the background sky might also remind viewers versed in Santería mythology of Changó, the oricha (deity) of lightning, the divine royal consort of the Virgin’s syncretic Santería counterpart, Ochún—who is commonly imagined as a vain mulata and described by some of her devotees as the sacred whore of the Santería pantheon.37 In a sympathetic account published in the Diario de Cuba just days prior to the 1936 coronation of the Virgin’s image (to be discussed later), Cuban folklorist Rómulo Lachatañeré described to Santiago’s reading public the important mythical, symbolic, and ritual parallels that Cuban blacks, particularly those living in the island’s western region, had forged between the two divine figures of the Virgin of Charity and the Santería oricha Ochún.38 Santería mythology recorded in the 1930s portrayed a pantheon full of fluctuating relationships, as orishas alternately joined together to complete certain tasks or as their divine alliances were challenged by rivalry. Narratives about the Virgin of Charity and her Santería homologue Ochún share many parallels with the so-called Madonna-Whore complex that delineates women’s sexual behavior. For instance, Ochún was often described as a mulata, a beautiful and sensual dancer who seduced the blacksmith Ogún, a homely forest-dwelling loner. But Ochún—not unlike the reputation of her human mulata counterparts—was an unfaithful lover and next became the consort of Changó, a virile king.39 Preferring to maintain her profligate lifestyle rather than care for their resulting offspring, Ochún took her twin sons, the Ibeji, to Yemayá, her more maternally inclined sister and the oricha of the sea, who raised them. Thus the lore of Ochún’s selfregard accords with Cuban representations of mulatas and forms a foil to the more honorable ever-Virgin Mary’s selfless vigilance over her children. PRIVILEGING WHITE ORIGINS Lachatañeré’s reports of how adherents of an Afro-Cuban religion then commonly regarded as witchcraft expressed their own devotion to the patroness, added to the paradox of a virgin mulata, would have struck bourgeois

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Cubans of the 1930s as outré. The afrocubanismo movement did not meet with the approval of Cuba’s business, political, and ecclesial elites, who were almost uniformly white and Catholic. Not unlike the racially contested birth of blues and jazz in the United States, son and rumba were dismissed by Cuba’s white middle class as music and dance forms that were a “true disgrace,” “indecent,” “seldom mentioned in polite circles,” and deemed the province of a “writhing African dance jungle.”40 An aesthetic riposte to the afrocubanistas’ perceived storming of the racial barricades of the nation’s popular culture was offered beginning in the mid-1930s and continuing into the 1940s. The restoration of Spanish colonial architecture in Old Havana in 1935 inspired another group of Cuban intellectuals, the origenistas, so-called for their flagship journal, Orígenes, or “origins,” to privilege the Spanish sources of national identity.41 Arguing that “only the resilient Hispanic ethics could achieve unity,” José Lezama Lima, a representative of this new group, selected Spanish forms, urban settings, and the interior spaces of gracious colonial-era architecture for the origenistas’ white creole (blanco-criollo), upper-class Roman Catholic rendition of Cuban national culture.42 Thus Cuban “ ‘high’ culture increasingly distanced itself from Afro-Cuban expressions beginning in the late 1930s, [although] mainstream popular culture remained heavily influenced by it.”43 These highbrow efforts to underscore the blanco-criollo pole of Cuban identity, with its attendant privileging of Roman Catholicism, found expression in certain claims about the Virgin’s race. PASSING FOR WHITE: THE 1936 CORONATION OF THE VIRGIN Only two decades after being recognized as Cuba’s official patroness, the 1936 canonical coronation of the Virgin’s original effigy marked her reintroduction to her devotees, in a public space, in a manner that underscored her rising significance in the young republic’s panoply of national symbols. The coronation ceremony for the Virgin Mary was standardized liturgically by the Roman Catholic Church in the nineteenth century and was meant to add adornment to the religious image so honored.44 Cuba’s Roman Catholic bishops reiterated the orthodox Catholic theological doctrine that the Virgin Mary was Queen of Heaven and commented that Cubans already viewed their heavenly patron as possessing a crown. Thus they urged that the Virgin be feted as a queen and crowned liturgically—an act they viewed as necessary “for the better veneration of the faithful” and because “our dear patroness merits this distinction.”45 Accommodating the anticipated crowds for this 1936 coronation rite event required a larger venue than the Virgin’s newly constructed 1927 shrine in El Cobre could provide, necessitating that the Vatican-authorized High Mass be celebrated outside in a plaza of Oriente’s provincial capital of Santiago de Cuba. While still rooted “on the mountain of El Cobre,” this national objectification of Cuba’s patron saint apparently drove some

114 Jalane Schmidt lay leaders among the coronation planners to elide the terms of the Virgin of Charity’s perceived parochialness—for example, some Orientales’ claims about her blackness—in the interests of appealing to an expanding circle of potential devotees in a wider, and whiter, public. The historiography of the Virgin and her cult was also being altered to reflect the preferred racial, ethnic, and religious terms of Cuba’s dominant white Catholics, who planned the 1936 Coronation festival. Cuban Catholic writers of the era insisted that the Virgin’s effigy was constructed of antique wood—and was thus of reliably European stock—rather than of hardened corn paste, which would have suggested a New World and perhaps indigenous provenance.46 In the time around her 1936 coronation, Santiago’s lay Catholic elites deployed many “whitening” strategies with regard to the Virgin and her cult. Juan Martín Leiseca, the 1930s historian of Cuba’s Roman Catholic Church, referred to the Virgin’s complexion with polite and, in this epoch, racially ambiguous terms such as morena.47 But other high-status Catholic writers rendered ever-lighter descriptions of the Virgin’s complexion. Santiago’s leading daily newspaper, the Diario de Cuba, published an editorial on the evening of the 1936 coronation that described the Virgin as índia. Many of the pious poems published in the 1936 coronation’s commemorative album mention the Virgin’s “dusky” complexion while affirming that she was “the most beautiful” or the “ideal beauty.” Of course, those devotees who invoked a darker patron, such as the “santa prieta” of the poor Orientales (who in this epoch were disproportionally illiterate), and the virgen mulata of the afrocubanista intellectuals and Santería adepts, were not represented among the recorded poetry. The winning entry for the coronation poetry competition, written by a white woman from Santiago’s exclusive Vista Alegre neighborhood, described the “Virgen Mambisa” (the patron of Cuba’s independence wars) as having a wheat-colored or tawny face (rostro trigueño). With respect to the term trigueño in mid-twentieth-century Cuba, the Léxico Mayor de Cuba noted the tension that sometimes exists between the perceptions of color and social status accorded to an individual by explaining that “ironically, trigueño refers to the mulattoed (amulatado) color of certain people who have a socially white status.”48 After her coronation ceremony in Santiago, the lay Catholic authors of the 1936 coronation commemorative album dispensed with euphemism altogether and further lightened the Virgin’s complexion, perhaps in a manner they deemed commensurate to her high regal status. They described the Virgin as having “a round, white face” (rostro redondo, de color blanco), a characteristic they associated with honor: “Her every aspect inspires respect and veneration.”49 The Queen of Republican Cuba had commanded regal treatment, by Cuban popular and upper classes alike, as a paragon of Catholic piety and sexual purity, a respectable mother of legitimate children, she maintained her honor as she processed with an impressive entourage, bringing order

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to Santiago’s normally carnivalesque, profane streets, where she asserted her realm. The Virgin could be described as having successfully passed for white. CUBA’S DECAPITATION The Virgin’s 1936 coronation rite featured a formal procession of the original seventeenth-century effigy from the national sanctuary in El Cobre to Oriente’s provincial capital for a pontifical mass in Santiago, where the Virgin was fêted as a ruling monarch. On that occasion, Santiago’s peripheral spaces and their usual vernacular activities were tamed by the presence of the Virgin’s effigy and the “center” values of a coronation ritual. Fifteen years later, Catholic clerics who planned a fifteen-month nationwide tour of an image of the Virgin of Charity likened this trek to a military campaign, dubbing her effigy the “Virgin General.” Timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Republic, the Church hierarchy’s catechetical goal for the Virgin General’s march was that she would battle an entrenched regime of sin—“superstition,” Protestantism, and communism chief among the offenses—by commanding the loyalty of ever-expanding troops of devoteewarriors for the Church Militant. But during the Virgin General’s triumphal march toward the capitol, her campaign was altered by the military action of yet another mulatto general. General Fulgencio Batista was, much like the Virgin, a brownskinned guajiro of indeterminate race, held in variable regard by Cuba’s white elite, who also hailed from Cuba’s rural eastern region. Batista staged a golpe de estado (coup d’état) on March 10, 1952, which precipitated a civil war and many anguished appeals to a more maternally imagined Virgin. Order was quickly restored after Batista’s bloodless putsch, and the Virgin’s temporarily suspended national pilgrimage continued toward the capitol. For the culminating May 19, 1952, fiftieth-anniversary celebration, church leaders decided that it would be important to substitute for the days of this momentous occasion in the capital the Virgin’s original seventeenthcentury effigy from her shrine in El Cobre. So her original, seventeenth-century effigy was flown in from El Cobre. But during what should have been her triumphant procession at the conclusion of commemorative events in Havana, onlookers in the streets gasped and screamed in horror as low-slung electrical cables accidentally decapitated the revered effigy of the Virgin.50 That the original, centuries-old beloved icon of Cuba would be damaged by her nation’s shoddily installed modern infrastructure was bad enough. But as the Virgin’s beheading occurred at a popular street event timed to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Republic—now weakened by Batista’s recent overthrow of Cuba’s elected head of state—the decapitation also formed an anguishing metaphor for the nation’s immediate political crisis.

116 Jalane Schmidt Some Cubans interpreted “the disaster” as a signal of the Virgin’s sadness about the golpe de estado and that the Virgin was suffering with her nation. That night, the Virgin’s broken image was flown back to her shrine in El Cobre, where a nun conducted the delicate task of repairing the effigy. Some middle-aged Cobreros commented approvingly that, in their judgment, the religious sister took the opportunity presented by the need for repairs to the Virgin’s effigy to further darken her complexion, to a darker shade of morena. After the repairs, the Virgin’s original El Cobre image could hardly be described as trigueña, much less as white. LA CARIDAD’S CULT: A “BLACK THING”? But Cuba’s brown patron was still not universally adored in mid-twentiethcentury Cuba. Older Catholic informants from Havana have described the elite Catholic opinion in the capital toward popular devotion to Our Lady of Charity before the 1959 Revolution as one of patronizing dismissal: devotion to La Caridad was regarded as a “black thing” (cosa de negros) “marked by syncretism”—that is, popular among Santeros—and thus not considered a dignified advocation for proper white Catholics.51 Parochial schools, which were usually staffed by foreign clergy and nuns, did not often celebrate the Virgin’s September 8 feast day. Thomas Tweed’s field research among Cuban-American Catholic exiles in Miami also reported that before the revolution of 1959, there still was some truth to the caricature that the [Virgin’s] devout were disproportionately lower-class blacks living in the eastern provinces near the original shrine . . . An exiled [Cuban] priest who was trained in the Catholic schools of Havana recalls that he shared the common belief that devotion to Our Lady of Charity was “only for the lower classes of society.”52 Those Cuban church workers who served these lower classes of society confirmed this perception about the cult of Cuba’s patroness. An elderly exiled black Cuban nun of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, rubbing her forearm with her index and middle fingers in the Cuban gesture that indicates con características (someone “marked” as a person of African descent), insisted to me, her mixed-race interviewer, that “The most devoted were our people.”53 Elite white Cuban Catholics’ reluctance to embrace their nation’s patron saint was the cause of some privately voiced concern of Catholic clergy of the 1950s. A 1957 conference of Cuban seminarians and priests from various religious communities lamented amongst themselves that We are agreed that devotion to the Virgin of Charity is almost completely besieged by superstitions . . . Among our practicing Catholics,

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the devotion is scarce, not only because the devotion is devalued by superstition and bad taste, but also because the parochial schools and other centers of religious formation have forgotten to properly foment the devotion.54 The conference proposed numerous measures to counteract this state of affairs: to publicize the 1916 pontifical declaration of the Virgin of Charity as the patron of Cuba, to acquire “more dignified and modern” images of the Virgin of Charity (the writers did not specify what they perceived to be in “bad taste,” nor whether they were referring to the complexion of the Virgin’s visage), to write prayers and novenas that were “more liturgical,” and to “emphasize the historical aspect” of the relationship between the cult of the Virgin of Charity and significant figures of Cuban history. With the escalation of armed political strife in late 1950s Cuba and the eventual Victory of the Revolution on January 1, 1959, the image and cult of the Virgin of Charity were increasingly imbricated with discussions of national identity and race. REVOLUTION: RECONSIDERING RELIGION AND RACE Only three months after the rebels’ January 1, 1959, triumph, the genie of race was released from the bottle as rebel leader and future Cuban president Fidel Castro denounced racial discrimination as contrary to Revolutionary values. In contrast to the polite silence vis-à-vis racial matters that had been the expected practice in Cuba, Castro criticized job discrimination and the racially segregated social clubs that were so common in Cuba’s Republican era (1902–1958). Racism was now regarded as a flaw of a superseded “pseudo-republican” era, and members of some elite social circles scurried to keep abreast of the rapid ideological changes of post-revolutionary society. For instance, the racial restrictions that had formerly barred students of color from admission to elite white Catholic schools were, in some cases, hastily and quietly discarded.55 With the quick pace of policy changes and improvements in standards of living for so many Cubans under the provisional revolutionary government, there emerged a new pride in all things Cuban and a new desire to identify and celebrate cohesive expressions of “Cubanness.” It was in this new self-consciously nationalistic atmosphere that the National Catholic Congress would take place in Havana’s Civic Plaza on November 28 through 29, 1959. Congress planners juxtaposed “charity” with the “hate, envy and discord” of Cuba’s recent strife and implored the Virgin of Charity to bless the upcoming Congress and to heal the nation’s wounds.56 Twenty-three years before the Revolution, white lay Catholics who planned the Virgin’s 1936 coronation asserted that the Virgin had a “white

118 Jalane Schmidt face,” and the winning entry in the poetry contest described a Virgen trigueña (tawny or wheat-colored). In 1959, as Revolutionary policy was elevating national consciousness of the nation’s racial composition and challenging the unexamined racism of Cuban society, “Cubanness” invoked a resolutely brown patron. The Virgin’s color was consistently represented in a darker hue along the color continuum that more approximated a broader swath of the national population. The opening prayer for the 1959 Catholic Congress set the tone for subsequent appeals to the patroness. “Our Cubanness invokes you, Brown Virgin,” who was further described in the prayer as the navigator “over your creole boat”—in reference to the Tres Juanes, the legendary multiracial group who found the Virgin’s image in the seventeenth century. “She is not white, nor black, but softly brown” (suavemente morena), another speaker described the Virgin.57 It was not that such themes had never been articulated before. But the dense concentration on the issues of race, region, and nation in the prayer of invocation for the 1959 Congress pointed to a more deliberate, self-conscious effort on the part of the event’s upper-middle-class, white lay Catholic planners to link the Virgin to Revolutionary Cuba’s recently rearticulated sense of nationalism and racial inclusion. The cover illustration of the 1960 “notably augmented” ninth edition of the Piedad Instruida, the devotional book for students at the Colegio de Belén, the prestigious Jesuit high school in Havana that educated the children of Havana’s white, Catholic elite, depicts Catholic schoolgirls surrounding a plaster image of the Virgin of Charity and the Tres Juanes.58 Now that the symbol of the Virgin of Charity had garnered greater potency as a symbol of the nation, even white upper-class, previously aloof Havana Catholics were eager to join their poorer compatriots of color in associating themselves with this apt, ever-browner religious symbol of “Cubanness.” As was the case with Brazil’s own patroness, Our Lady of Aparecida, the increasing twentieth-century nationalization of Cuban devotion to the Virgin of Charity, and the cult’s extension into public spaces led to a steady browning in Cuban’s perception of her image.59 REVOLUTION, RELIGION, AND RACE As Cuba’s revolutionary officials turned ever leftward and tensions between the hierarchy of Cuba’s Catholic Church and Cuba’s Marxist government reached a breaking point in the 1960s, religious individuals were at times regarded as insufficient in their ideological alignment, at best, and counterrevolutionary, at worst. Religious processions in the streets, formerly a mainstay of the Virgin’s popular cult in particular and of Cuban popular culture more generally, were banned outright in 1961, a prohibition that lasted for four decades.

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In Marxist form, government cultural programs elevated the status of “los humildes” (the lowly ones) in its consideration of and public education about national culture. Since blacks were predominantly from the clases humildes (lower classes) with which the Revolutionary Marxist state sought to uplift and align itself, Revolutionary Cuba’s self-consciousness about valorizing popular culture often translates to a privileging of Afro-Cuban cultural forms. “Culture” is objectified in Revolutionary Cuba as a tool for challenging racism and bringing about better political and social integration. The head of state himself weighed in on this matter, when in a 1975 statement unprecedented by Cuba’s political leadership, Castro asserted that Cuba should be regarded, and regard itself, as an “Afro-Latin” nation.60 In the 1990s, Cuba’s nascent tourism industry sought to promote “Cuba” as a destination within a crowded Caribbean tourism market by exoticizing and monetizing the enduring impact of black Cubans’ considerable contribution to the island’s signature cultural expressions. To the consternation of lay and ordained leaders of Cuba’s Catholic Church, who decried what they regarded as the government’s “promotion” of “syncretism” as tantamount to a “national religion,” Afro-Cuban religions such as Santería were increasingly presented as “national folklore.” In tourist venues of the late 1990s, Afro-Cuban religious music and dance were more readily represented and made available for purchase—both as live performances and in recorded form—than were images of the patron saint or other Catholic figures. Thus officials of Cuba’s Catholic Church relished the opportunity presented by the long-awaited January 21–25, 1998, visit to Cuba of Pope John Paul II. During an outdoor mass in Santiago de Cuba that was televised live throughout the country, the Pontiff re-crowned the Virgin’s original effigy. Photos of this emblematic event adorn the covers of Church-published commemorative books, and many Cubans cited the coronation of the patroness as the most memorable moment of the Papal visit.61 Although calling attention to the enslaved status of some of the Virgin’s first devotees during the Santiago mass, the Pope did not mention the African origins of a significant proportion of Cuba’s population nor characterize the Virgin’s color. By contrast, in its description of the Virgin’s 1998 coronation ceremony in Santiago, the Cuban Revolutionary government’s commemorative album of the Pope’s 1998 visit described the Virgin as exhibiting “mulata features.”62 It was this adamantly mulata Virgin—as presented by Cuban tourism organizations and Ministry of Culture institutions as a symbol of cubanía—to whom I was introduced during my initial research visits to Revolutionary Cuba in the late 1990s. But in Cuba of the 1990s, to be deemed mulata was not an uncomplicated racial characterization, since the bodies of mulatas were, quite literally, being policed. My occasional experiences of being stopped on the street by police and required to show my identification, being refused entry to hotels (“¡Vete mulata!” was the emphatic dismissal), or, alternatively, of being accosted by male tourists who presumed that I was a prostitute

120 Jalane Schmidt (jinetera) were not unusual for better-dressed, mixed-race women of my age cohort. By contrast, due to the tourism industry’s racist insistence on what they called “good presentation” (buena presentación), white or lightcomplexioned Cubans were now enforcing these color-coded exclusions that harkened back to the Republican era. In Cuba’s emerging private-sector economy, darker-complexioned Cubans con características are often left out of the island’s rising middle class, who, like their Batista-era counterparts, are disproportionately white. In 2001, when I spoke with church officials and offhandedly characterized the Virgin as a mulata, they were quick to offer the terms morena and india, which they seemed to prefer. The old fault lines persist between, on the one hand, leftist intellectuals’ and avant garde artists’ assertion of an African-descended patrona of an Afro-Latin patria versus the Church’s polite silence with regard to race and preference for a seemingly more inclusive brown patroness. Old debates about the presence of racism in Cuba, or its supposed vanquishing in the Revolutionary era, are being painfully revisited. Cubans often describe the Virgin of Charity as a saint who “walks with” them and identifies with their struggles.63 Perhaps it is only appropriate, then, that the race of their patron would be the subject of continuing debate.

NOTES 1. “Declaración del Capitán Juan Moreno, Negro Natural Del Cobre de 85 Años,” Appendix 4, Olga Portuondo Zúñiga, La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre: Símbolo de Cubanía, (Santiago de Cuba: Editorial de Oriente 1995), 298–299. The testimony is reproduced on the website of the Diocese of Santiago de Cuba: www.virgendelacaridaddelcobre.org/index.php/historia/ documentos-historicos/47-juanmoreno. An excerpt of Moreno’s testimony is also found in María Elena Díaz, The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 341–342. 2. Jorge Mañach, “La barquilla de la Caridad del Cobre,” Bohemia 40 (1948): 24. 3. Portuondo Zúñiga, La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, 171. 4. Carlos “El Chino” Fong Novelles, personal communication, April 2001. 5. Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 26; Elías Entralgo, La Liberación Étnica Cubana (Havana: University of Havana Press, 1953), 215ff; Portuondo Zúñiga, La Virgen, 33; Mañach, “La barquilla.” 6. Portuondo Zúñiga, La Virgen, 93; José Juan Arrom, Certidumbre de America (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1980 [1959]): 206–207. 7. Díaz, The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves, 100. 8. Julian Joseph Bravo, “Aparicion prodigosa de la Ynclita Ymagen de la Caridad que se venera en Santiago del Prado y Real de las Minas de Cobre,” (Unpublished manuscript, 1766): S. V., #26. 9. Arrom, Certidumbre de America, 206–207. 10. Onofre de Fonseca’s 1703 account, as presented in Bernardino Ramírez’s 1782 manuscript, published by J. Antonio Veyrunes Dubois as Historia de

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11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

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la Milagrosa Aparición de Nuestra Señora de la Caridad Patrona de Cuba y de su Santuario en la Villa del Cobre (Santiago de Cuba: Escuela Tipográfica “Don Bosco,” 1935), 27. See Portuondo Zúñiga, La Virgen, 308. Díaz, The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves, 42–43. It is possible that some of these Cobreros from the regions of Angola and the Congo already may have been familiar with Christianity in their native Africa. John K. Thornton, “Religion and Cultural Life in the Kongo and Mbundu Areas, 1500–1800,” in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, edited by Linda Heywood, et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 17. Díaz, The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves, 120; Miguel H. Díaz, “Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres: We Walk-with Our Lady of Charity,” in Orland E. Espín and Miguel Díaz, eds., From the Heart of Our People: Latino/a Explorations in Catholic Systematic Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), 156. Portuondo Zúñiga, La Virgen; Díaz, The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves. For the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonial epoch under consideration here, we must dispense with the anachronistic notion that the Cobreros’s Marian devotion was, in whole or even in part, directed toward the Lucumí oricha Ochún (cf., Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island,15. Regla de Ocha developed in the western region of the island among Lucumí slaves some two centuries after the Virgin’s reported hallazgo in eastern Cuba in 1612 and the development of her cult among enslaved Angolans and Congolese and their creole descendants. Onofre de Fonseca, Bernardino Ramirez, and J. Antonio Veyrunes Dubois, Historia de La Virgen de La Caridad del Cobre por sus Capellanes (Santiago de Cuba: Escuelatipo gráfica “Don Bosco,” 1935), 37, 193; Bravo, “Aparicion prodigosa,” S. IV, 5. Arrom, Certidumbre de America; Levi Marrero, Los esclavos y la Virgen del Cobre: Dos Siglos de Luchapor la Libertad (Barcelona: Edición Universal, 1980); Portuondo Zúñiga, La Virgen; Villaverde 1994. See Stafford Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531–1797 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995) for the history of the spread of devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe during Mexico’s war for independence. Portuondo Zúñiga, La Virgen, 241. Irene Wright, Cuba (New York: Macmillan, 1910), 381–382. Ibid., 148, 150. Robin D. Moore, Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920–1940 (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 1997). Libro de Testimonios in the National Sanctuary of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre. “Triunfo de justícia” entries written April 6, 1910, by Julian V. Guerra, Colonel of Liberation Army and PIC member, and Gregorio Surín, national leader of PIC. Wright, Cuba, 382. Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). Portuondo Zúñiga, La Virgen, 25. Joseph L. Scarpaci, Roberto Segre, and Mario Coyula, Havana: Two Faces of the Antillean Metropolis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 46. Wright, Cuba, 83, 87–97. Langston Hughes, “Cuban Color Lines, 1930,” in John Jenkins, ed., Travelers’ Tales of Old Cuba (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2002), 129.

122 Jalane Schmidt 26. Verena Martínez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989). 27. Jabao is a Cuban phonemic elision of the Spanish adjective, jabado, which refers to a bird with mottled plumage. 28. Madeline Cámara Betancourt, “Between Myth and Stereotype: The Image of the Mulatta in Cuban Culture in the Nineteenth Century, a Truncated Symbol of Nationality,” in Cuba, the Elusive Nation, edited by Fernández, Damián et al. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 101; Cirilo Villaverde, Cecilia Valdes, or, El Angel Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). See Reynaldo González, Contradanzas y Latigazos (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1992) and Raimundo Lazo, Cecilia Valdés, Novela de Costumbres Cubanas: Estudio Critico, 3rd edition (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, S.A., 1986) for Cuban literary criticism of Villaverde’s representation of la mulata cubana. See also Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 29. Portuondo Zúñiga, La Virgen, 23. 30. Fernando Ortíz, La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre: Historia y etnografía (Havana: Fundación Fernando Ortíz, 2008), 12–13. 31. Ortíz, La Virgen, 12–13. 32. Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 139, 169, 158. 33. Ortíz, La Virgen, 154–155. 34. Mañach, “La barquilla,” 96, 24. 35. Entralgo, La Liberación Étnica Cubana, 197, 215–217, 185, n. 62. 36. Thus Enrique’s image evoked Cuba’s dreaded and capricious Rural Guard police, who did occasionally rape rural women. Ernesto Cardenal, In Cuba (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1974), 70. 37. Juan A. Martínez, Cuban Art and National Identity: The Vanguardia Painters, 1927–1950 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), 90; Lydia Cabrera, Yemayá y Ochún: Kariocha, Iyalorichas y Olorichas, 3rd edition (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1996). 38. Lachatañeré preferred the spellings “orisha” and “Oshún,” terming “Ochún” a “corruption of the primitive vocabulary.” (cf., Stephan Palmié, The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religions, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2013), xi–xii.) Lachatañaré referred to the Afro-Cuban ethnic group as Yoruba (not “Lucumí”) and to their religion as “Santería,” explaining that this was the preferred term among practitioners in the 1930s. Rómulo Lachatañeré, “La Religión Santera y el Milagro de la Caridad del Cobre.” Del Caribe (1993): 79, 81. 39. Lachatañeré, “La Religión Santera,” 80; Idem, El Sistema Religioso de los Afrocubanos (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2001 [1936]), 43–58. 40. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). 41. The origenistas also sought to “resist the encroaching of North American popular culture.” Juan A. Martínez, “Lo Blanco-Criollo as lo Cubano: The Symbolization of a Cuban National Identity in Modernist Painting of the 1940s,” in Damián Fernández and Madeline Cámara Betancourt, eds., Cuba, the Elusive Nation: Interpretations of National Identity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 289. 42. Martínez, “Lo Blanco-Criollo as lo Cubano,” 288. 43. Robin D. Moore, Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920–1940 (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 1997), 223.

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44. Adrian Fortescue, “Images,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7, edited by Charles Herbermann (New York: The Encyclopedia Press, Inc., 1913), 670. 45. David Chamah Fetué and Jose Diego Grullón, eds., Album Conmemorativo del Primer Congreso Eucharistico Diocesano y de la Coronacion Nacional de la Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre Patrona de la Republica, Celebrados en Stgo. de Cuba en 1936 (Havana: P. Fernández y Cía., S. en C., 1937), 59. 46. Chamah Fetué and Grullón, Album Conmemorativo, 21. 47. Juan Martín Leiseca, Apuntes para la historia eclesiástica de Cuba (Havana: Carasa y Cía, 1938), 51, 55, 280, 282. John Kirk notes a persistent avoidance on the part of Martín Leiseca to mention or depict blacks. Between God and the Party: Religion and Politics in Revolutionary Cuba (Tampa: University Press of South Florida, 1989), 42–43. 48. Esteban Rodríguez Herrera, “Moreno,” Léxico Mayor de Cuba, vol. II, G–Z (Havana: Editorial Lex, 1959), 283. 49. Chamah Fetué and Grullón, Album Conmemorativo, 132, 137–138, 133, 60. 50. Archbishop Pedro Meurice Estuí, personal communication, August 2005; Francisco Figeroa Marrero, personal communication, May 23, 2002; Monseñor Ramón Suárez Polcarí, personal communication, October 2001; Portuondo Zúñiga, La Virgen, 267. 51. Padre Elpidio, personal communication, October 2001. 52. Thomas Tweed, Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 65, 68. 53. Sister Angel, personal communication, June 3, 2006. 54. Boletín Oficial Eclesiástico de la Diocesis de La Habana 41 (1957): 404; Archivo Histórico de La Habana, Havana, Cuba. 55. Sister Angel, personal communication, June 3, 2006. 56. Bishop Evelio Díaz Cía, “Oracion a Nuestra Señora de la Caridad: Inpetrando su auxilio y proteccion para el Congreso Catolico de Noviembre de 1959,” Boletín Oficial Eclesiástico de la Diocesis de La Habana 42 (1959): 330; “Invitacion del Episcopado,” ibid., 356–357. 57. Diario de la Marina, December 1, 1959, section B, page 5. Smathers Latin American Library, University of Florida. 58. Bernardo Redondo, S. J. Piedad Instruida: Devocionario Completo Solido y Jugoso, 9th edition. (Havana: Colegio de Belén, 1960). 59. Cf. Paul Christopher Johnson, “Kicking, Stripping, and Re-Dressing a Saint in Black: Visions of Public Space in Brazil’s Recent Holy War,” History of Religions 37 (1997): 122–140. 60. Johnnetta B. Cole, “Race Toward Equality: The Impact of the Cuban Revolution on Racism,” The Black Scholar, 11 (1980): 15. 61. Conferencia de Obispos Catolicos de Cuba, La voz de la Iglesia en Cuba: 100 Documentales Episcopales (Mexico City: Obra Nacional de la Buena Prensa, A.C., 1995) 62. Instituto Cubano del Libro, ed., Juan Pablo II en Cuba (Havana and Milan: Baldini & Castoldi s.r.l., 1998), 87. 63. Díaz, “Dime con quién andas.”

6

Saffron Saint of the Most Spiritual Race Sundar Singh and the Western Oriental Christ Timothy Dobe As in few other races, the tendency towards metaphysical speculation is in the blood of India. —Friedrich Heiler Most [Europeans] have white skin and black hearts. —Sundar Singh

AN INDIAN CHRIST(IAN) ASCETIC, HINDU SAINTS, AND PROTESTANT ICONS That it was none other than Max Müller, the great textualist, who wrote the first ever English-language book on a contemporary Hindu holy man— and used the term “saint” throughout to describe him—is witness to the successful rise of the living, non-Christian holy man in India and in the metropole. To be a legitimate Indian saint was now, after centuries of Protestant critique and conflation of Hindu and Roman Catholic traditions, to represent an essential and newly present “metaphysical” nation. In this way, the Indian saint, having disassociated himself from suspect yogis and beaten out the Persian poets, became a metonym for, in Müller’s view, the spiritual preeminence of India in world history.1 As he put it, “From [Ramakrishna’s] sayings . . . we learn that . . . the real presence of the Divine in nature and in the human soul was nowhere felt so strongly as in India.”2 Along with many Orientalists and modern Hindus, Müller represented this spirituality as “Vedanta,” calling it “the oldest religion and philosophy of the world.”3 The saint becomes not only metonymic but also racialized: a “country permeated by such thoughts” must be seen as far superior to “ignorant idolaters to be converted. . . . [from the] races of Central Africa.”4 This chapter focuses on the Indian Christian convert and sadhu (ascetic holy man) Sundar Singh (1889–1929) as a figure who offers new perspectives on these wider historical shifts. I claim that central to what made such

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Western discourses powerful in the case of modern Indian monks, including Singh, was not so much the discourse itself but the creative enactment of embodied ascetic practice within globalizing, visual registers of race and religion. Thus, my goal here is to explore how Indian individuals used specific religious, here ascetic, aptitudes to engage that Western discourse in varied, subtle, and original ways. As a Punjabi figure grounded in vernacular religion, affected by Bengali religious nationalism and representative of India to the West, Sundar Singh’s life and identity as a saffron-robed sadhu is a complex confluence of traditional, refurbished, and ambivalent asceticism. Traditional because history remains at least partially accessible (to him and to us) despite imperial effects, refurbished because here asceticism moves from its premodern publics into a modern public sphere marked, among other things, by Orientalism, print culture, and nationalism, and ambivalent because asceticism in the modern, Protestant West, as elsewhere, was simultaneously disavowed and central. My specific proposal here is that sainthood and race can be explored through the particulars of the ascetic practice of dress, visual culture, and the innovations of upstart saints across both Indian and metropolitan contexts. Put differently, if the cassette tape is the medium par excellence of today’s Islamic revivals, the saint—his body, dress, and image—offered similar media for colonial Hindu and Indian identities more generally, though in more visual than aural modes.5 In the context of Western scholarship on race, this approach expands the range of material surfaces in play from skin to clothing. As Karmen MacKendrick reminds us, “draperies” are far from “freestanding” from the flesh and vice versa.6 Through new stagings of the rich South Asian ascetic repertoire, I argue, modern monks used dress to unhinge the modern Indian body from its colonization and to occupy alternative sites of authority and religious experience. In place of the dark body and caste-specific color codings of imperialism, Sundar Singh offered his audiences a saffron Christian body of his own ascetic making. Put simply, the monk’s robe became a second or “social” skin, an incandescent material layer of spirituality.7 While this was a new application of older ascetic, broadly Indian, and in many ways cross-cultural logics, it proved once again that “clothes might actually make the man.”8 For Sundar Singh, dress was, on the one hand, a means of evoking the subtexts of the spiritual of the superiority of the East, and thus, implicit comparisons to rival, non-Christian Indian holy men such as Swami Vivekananda. These dimensions, however, rarely surfaced publicly; in fact, while abroad, Sundar Singh noticeably downplayed the spectacularly “Indian” elements that had led to his fame, distanced himself from Hindu “asceticism” as such, and, in stark contrast to other touring Christian sadhus, refused to speak about Hinduism or Vedanta.9 Instead, combining his thoroughly biblical idiom with an unwavering Oriental style, Sundar Singh showed not only that he knew his Bible but also that he understood an audience shaped by the recent explosion in Protestant visual piety and Orientalist scholarship.

126 Timothy Dobe Thus, dress, on the other hand, also offered a powerful entry point into the twentieth-century Protestant West, infused as it was with the material and visual presence of the East and “iconic” constructions of Western identities and divinity.10 The world of Orientalism was biblically focused and image rich, where historical-critical biblical studies and popular material culture made it “more and more difficult to evade the fact that the English Bible was an ‘Oriental’ book.”11 In this context, Sundar Singh’s India and an “Oriental” asceticism were the (mostly) unspoken subtexts of his saintly success. In fact, for many in America and Europe, Sundar Singh’s robe and turban transformed him into a vision of the biblical Christ himself, a figure who, like the Bible that was his word, now also appeared evermore Oriental. Thus, while recent scholars of Christianity and race refer to America’s nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century “white Jesus” best typified by Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ, the often-noted similarity of Sundar Singh to Jesus on his Western tours helps us trace the more complicated “contours of whiteness.”12 Could one, could Christ, be both “white” and “Asian” or “Oriental,” for example? Entering Western worlds awash in such anxious questions and the objects—including books, images, and exhibits—that gave them their shape and color, Sundar Singh drew on his own ascetic capacities to become a modern icon. Sundar Singh’s Christ-like image, dress, and reception, however, also positioned him on the problematic margins of Western theologies of sainthood, indeed of dominant European notions of holiness itself. The generally Protestant context of those who hailed him on his tours make this tension particularly obvious: for several Protestant critics, Sundar Singh recalled nothing less than the medieval cult of saints. They echoed Luther and Calvin’s charge that such adulation detracted from the glory of Christ.13 What does it mean for a Christian to imitate Christ, to directly and indirectly compare himself with his Master? At what point does imitation become (self)-deification? More subtly, strains of Christian theology stressing the alterity and invisibility of God, including especially some Roman Catholic traditions, likewise understand the holiness of the saint to be essentially inaccessible. If, as JeanLuc Marion puts it, even “the holiness of the resurrected [Christ]—remains by definition invisible,” then the saint’s Christlikeness is necessarily hidden in the unnamability of sainteté.14 Such longstanding anxieties revealed themselves in the repeated need of admirers to stress that Sundar Singh was nothing more than a “humble servant” of Christ who claimed no special status for himself, despite the often superstitious adoration of the “masses.” While theologically substantive accounts, however, such views may obscure the ways that, through the layers and colors of Sundar Singh’s clothing and skin, a multiply sourced and assertive form of sainthood actually soaked its way into the West. While understanding this materiality requires that we attend to Indian ascetic practice and history, these contexts converge with the power of raced bodies, the prestige of Orientalist scholarship and

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Protestant visual culture, and, perhaps most importantly, species of Christianity less exclusively enamored with invisibility. Of course, Sundar Singh’s self-conscious linking of himself to Christ could be precisely an example of such an embodied Christianity. In my view, Sundar Singh’s comfort with and use of such comparisons were a result of his theological vision. For him, union with Christ meant not vague mystical or psychological states but physically taking on the features of Jesus. As he told B. H. Streeter, the saints he beheld in his visions bodily resembled Christ himself and radiated an ever-shifting array of colors.15 To become, rather than merely to believe in, the living Christ—indeed to resemble him down to facial features—was hardly unique to him but was the call of all people. THE PROBLEM OF WHAT TO WEAR AND THE COLONIAL BODY More than a modern identification with “Indian” culture over against things “Western” or European, the significance of Indian, and I would add ascetic, dress depends on longstanding views that connect self, the sacred, and ornament. As Tarlo puts it, there is a “distinctively pre-colonial Indian view of cloth ‘as a thing that can transmit spirit and substance’ (Bayly 1986: 286).”16 This material-moral approach to clothing made, for example, Gandhi’s dress powerful through the “transformative” qualities of cloth and makes sense of Sundar Singh’s choices to wear conspicuously Indian rather than non-Indian clothing. Unfortunately, Sundar Singh’s wearing of the saffron robe has typically been seen as a “prescribed” act, turning cloth into “mere labels which do little more than reveal identities,” rather than as a key part of dynamic self-construction.17 The adoption of the saffron robe by a Sikh Christian convert makes the active nature of sartorial acts especially clear, offering us a rich example one of the “often controversial moments when individuals and groups choose to change their clothes or combine one type of clothing with another.”18 We thus need to ask: “What do clothes mean to the people who wear them? Why do certain individuals and groups choose to dress in a particular way? What are the various constraints within which they formulate these choices?”19 Hindu nationalism lead to the visual saffronization of asceticism as Vedanta, belying the diversity of South Asia’s vernacular asceticism even as it drew on its power.20 Yet along with and in some ways because of this homogenizing trend, the meanings of sartorial choices required and still require extensive interpretation in both Indian and non-Indian contexts.21 In addition to attending to visual representations then, we need to examine what Sundar Singh said and denied about the meaning of his dress, a subject that was surprisingly more prominent than accounts of modern religion as “internal” would lead us to expect. As Crane puts it: “words [are] a functional part of . . . performances that should not be isolated from the material

128 Timothy Dobe register.”22 In this sense, saffron—as color, as material, as signifier, and as a part of behavior—can be seen in terms of “the problem of what to wear rather than the description of what is worn.”23 The fixing of Indian identities through dress, visual representation, and color was a major part of the imperial process that David Arnold calls “colonizing the body.”24 More broadly, the representation of Oriental bodies not only contrasted idealized Western ones but also de- or relegitimized indigenous religious specialists.25 In addition to the many verbal descriptions of Indian ascetics, visual portrayals included “saints” on beds of nails and the “hideous figure” and “most disgusting object” of a “Hindu fakir,” for Sunday School children, for example.26 At more official and textual levels, through the much-studied categorization of Indian identity, religion, and caste, imperial knowledge drew on the Dharmasha¯stra literature for its color codes—white priests, red warriors, yellow merchants, and dark-colored servants.27 The central role of the body in colonial, indigenous, and recent scholarly knowledge must make us aware of the ways in which colonialists “cho[se] the body of the ‘natives’ as the correct means of understanding ‘them,’ ” recognize that the body was at “the heart of the systems of [Indian] society, metaphor and of identity long before” Europe was on the scene, and understand the body as a “cross-cultural site of representation, control and resistance.”28 Taussig’s work on Western “chromophobia” likewise both explores the centrality of color and cloth to

Figure 6.1 (1864).

The fakir on the bed of nails. From William Butler’s Land of the Veda

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Euro-American selves and highlights the anxieties provoked by too much color, of brightness brought too close.29 In fact, we might argue that the Western need to fix and denigrate the body of the South Asian ascetic was directly proportional to the unsettling freedom of faqirs, sadhus, and sannyasis to recreate and reshape themselves. For, in ancient south Asian contexts, ascetic dress not only contradicted householder values but also did the very work of unhinging the ascetic body from the socialized body of householders, investing the figure of the ascetic with an authority that worked through spectacular and subtle registers of difference.30 Similarly, the narrative traditions of later bhakti and Sufi gurus, faqirs, and pirs provide countless stories in which dress also functions constructively, creatively adapted to challenge settled orthodoxies, embody power, gather followers, and reveal inner truths in and on the surfaces of the body.31 These dynamic and deconstructive dimensions of asceticism made faqirs difficult to account for except through negative categories such as superstitious “saint” worship or criminalization, and thus, necessary to track, control, and in not a few cases, fight in actual combat. As a part of the “problem of what to wear,” the body, clothing, and color thus unite British and Indian contexts as much as they have been used to secure their difference. As Tarlo points out, swadeshi sentiments about cloth connected not only with Indian traditions but also with the wider latenineteenth-century “aesthetic view of clothing,” which in England and India rejected industrial cloth in favor of “craft” as crucial to national and personal moral character. Niharikar Dinkar’s work on the ascetic body in colonial Indian art similarly connects anticolonial Indian nationalist aesthetics with pre-Raphaelite trends.32 Of course other, less rarified examples of the porousness of the self and its exteriors in metropole and periphery, whether of cloth or skin, include nineteenth-century views of race in terms of skin color and philology’s frequent equation of race with language. If, for example, the “Black Acts” of 1849 typified the growing “whiteness” of the English and the “blackness” of Indians, further hardening racism into heightened forms, color could also connect elite classes of “fair-skinned” Indians with their “white” Aryan cousins in contrast to the “dark[er]” peoples of India through the networks of language, color, and imagined selves.33 As Aryans, in fact, Indian swamis could and did claim whiteness in ways then impossible for an over(t)ly Semitic Christ, an ambiguity that the category of “Oriental” helped to negotiate, potentially bringing the historical Christ closer to whiteness.34 SUNDAR SINGH AND THE WESTERN ORIENTAL CHRIST Walking into the break room at Henderson Memorial Girls School in Kharar, Punjab, I was surprised to find the austerity of the space broken by a rather beautiful profile picture of Sundar Singh, complete with a paper lotus flower laid out in front of it.

130 Timothy Dobe

Figure 6.2 Sadhu Sundar Singh, Break room, Henderson Memorial Girls High School, Kharar, Punjab. Photograph by author.

In reflection, it now seems to me that at least part of the reason this image struck me as no other image of Sundar Singh had (and I had seen many) was the way it reminded me so strongly of the image of Jesus with which I was raised, Warner Sallman’s 1940 Head of Christ. What I did not realize at the time, however, was that the relationship between the two pictures was deeper than my personal reaction or a natural likeness between Sundar Singh and modern, Western images of Jesus. In fact, it is quite possible that Sallman himself, a recent graduate of Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute, was aware of Sundar Singh’s visit there in 1919 and that the Indian Christian holy man’s much-reproduced photographic image during this tour had some impact on Sallman’s 1924 original drawing for this painting. As we will see, the American press certainly made much of visual comparisons between Sundar Singh and contemporary paintings of Jesus at the time of his tour. Regardless of a specific historical link between these images, however, its very possibility is evidence of the wider context of encounter and imagination explored here. That is, the two images reveal the synergies between emerging Euro-American visual culture and biblical imagination, South Asian practices of sacred sight (darshan) and material blessing (barkat), and Sundar Singh’s own creative use of the charismatic possibilities of dress. Sundar Singh’s Westward trips followed those of several other South Asian swamis, all of whom entered an America already imagining the Orient.35 In this context, his popularity signaled Euro-American obsession

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Figure 6.3

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Warner Sallman, Head of Christ, 1940. Courtesy of Warner Press.

with things Oriental and, simultaneously, their rejection. That is, as an Indian convert to Christianity and self-styled missionary to Tibet, Sundar Singh reaffirmed key tenets of the Christian missionary project increasingly under the attack of globetrotting Indian sadhus and Christian self-doubt and debate: the need for and success of Christian missions; salvation in a unique Christ over against non-Christian religions, and the shortcomings of modernism in favor of a biblical world of the supernatural. After all, who better than an authentic Indian, invested with the authority of the saffron robe of the Indian saint, to reaffirm these? The thoroughly biblical idiom Sundar Singh embraced in his sermons, his testimony to the living Christ, and, perhaps most importantly, his notable silence about the very things his rival swamis talked so much about—spirituality, Vedanta, mysticism, renunciation, science—helped make him something of a Christian superstar. In this sense, it was by being an antiguru that he became a Christian one. Sundar Singh’s saffron self-presentation can thus be seen as a form of “iconomachy,” a displacing of rival images and the ideologies associated with them.36 Yet the saffron robe, and the ascetic Orient it evoked, remained a site of ambivalence. For undergirding the triumphalist missionary interest in Sundar Singh was another, more ambiguous reality: the very Bible at the

132 Timothy Dobe heart of the Protestant missionary project and that Sundar Singh affirmed so strongly was increasingly historicized as an Oriental book. Thus, the biblical Christ, that is the very Christ evangelicals were saved by, was an Oriental Christ. Indeed, the need to refute the Orientalized Christs of Indian swamis can be seen in direct relation to Indian encroachment not simply into Euro-America but into the Bible itself. How could the Bible serve, for example, as a intimate manual for American and British gender and family norms but at the same time be the product of languages, customs, peoples, and lands so foreign that the entire scholarly apparatus was needed to understand them?37 The tension in Western imaginations of Jesus’s simultaneous familiarity and foreignness were of course noted by non-Westerners trying to pass through immigration: Jesus himself would hardly be allowed to immigrate to these Christian countries!38 In scholarly contexts, the very questions Sundar Singh refused to broach in his public talks motivated European interest in him: Was he a mystic or an ascetic? If so, in what sense? What was his relation to the history of Christian mysticism and asceticism? To Roman Catholic and Protestant tensions? To the making of a fully Indian Christianity or the image of the Oriental Christ? Were his stories of the Maharishi of Kailash, the naked Christian seer hidden in a cave the Himalayas, a part of his Oriental tendency toward visions, or were they historical facts?39 With these wider contexts in view, we return to this chapter’s central question: How did Sundar Singh understand and set his ascetic practice and identity to work—a site of ambivalence as much as excitement—in his negotiation of Western worlds? The question is all the more difficult given what I term his “renunciation of renunciation” in the Euro-American context, namely his tendency to downplay rather than play up his Oriental background and identity. But we would be mistaken to take critical comments about some forms of asceticism to mean that ascetic practice itself had become irrelevant. Rather, if we approach asceticism as a practice in which dress is a crucial part of the transformation of self, a practice that simultaneously allows an individual critical distance from social norms, access to authority within a public, and a means of negotiating plural religious identities, new interpretive possibilities open up. We can start to see that Sundar Singh’s combination of biblical idiom, witness to the living Christ, and uncompromising Oriental style allowed him, quite selfconsciously it seems, to assimilate to himself something of the power of the very Oriental Christ that Eastern swamis had begun to claim and Western Christians had begun to imagine and yet remained anxious about meeting. And, as I show in what follows, while his popularity depended in many ways on his affirmation of Christianity’s vibrancy, the critical racial dimension of his ascetic Christ-like self-fashioning argued for here is supported by more subtle themes in his sermons and, especially, in his private exchanges that clearly challenge Western orders of religion, civilization, and color.

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VERY INTERESTING BUT NOT USEFUL: RENOUNCING RENUNCIATION When asked to speak about the occulted Christian sage in the Himalayas, the Maharishi of Kailash, by Euro-Americans, as he repeatedly was on his Western tours, Sundar Singh refused. “That is very interesting, but not useful,” he firmly told his Swiss secretary as she pressed him, having been refused once already, to at least tell some of these stories to an audience of waiting children.40 Similarly, asked about his spiritual visions, Sundar Singh’s “only remark was a long, indifferent ‘Yes.’ ”41 Such refusals and Sundar Singh’s related denials to indulge interest in things exotically Hindu, Indian, or mystical is especially interesting because such stories were a key part of his life and rise to fame in India. Indeed, stories of Indian Christian martyrs, an ancient, occulted Christian rishi, secret orders of Christian sannyasis, and eventually his own otherworldly travel, rather than strictly biblical preaching or indeed the figure of Christ himself, formed the bulk of his repertoire throughout the 1910s.42 In striking contrast, while on his Western tours, Singh spoke publically only on biblical texts and repeatedly emphasized the figure of the “living Christ” of his own personal experience. The one exception to Sundar Singh’s refusal to speak of his “mystical” experiences is precisely the one that proves the rule of this transformation. For that narrative, unlike his many other visionary and miracle tales, neatly fits a biblical precedent of conversion that also served as a common template for converts of global missions—that is, Paul’s vision of Christ on the road to Damascus.43 Sundar Singh first spoke of his conversion being the result of a vision of Christ to the London Missionary Society missionary, Rebecca Parker, in 1917, and repeated it often on his many tours afterward. Here is a version from his 1918 tour: In the room where I was praying I saw a great light. . . . Then as I prayed and looked into the light, I saw the form of the Lord Jesus Christ. It had such an appearance of glory and love. I heard a voice saying in Hindustani, “How long will you persecute me? I have come to save you; you were praying to know the right way. Why do you not take it?” The thought then came to me, “Jesus Christ is not dead but living and it must be He Himself.” So I fell at His feet and got this wonderful Peace which I could not get anywhere else. This is the joy I was wishing to get. This was heaven itself.44 The Pauline elements of this story are clear, in particular, a framing narrative of persecution of Christ, including Singh’s burning of the Bible just before his vision, Christ’s phrase, and the divine light. Of particular note here is not only the Pauline character of the story but also that this version of Sundar Singh’s conversion appears at this time for the very first time, some ten years after Sundar Singh’s life story had been appearing in print. To note

134 Timothy Dobe this earlier absence is not to claim that Sundar Singh had no such vision of Christ—for how could we access his spiritual experiences?—but to point out that the way the story of his conversion was told changed significantly.45 This suggests the shaping of a life story more clearly to fit a biblical model for new audiences while also retaining details, such as his threatened suicide, that continued to resonate with well-known stories of Hindu holy men from Namdev to Ramakrishna. The shift in narratives, the earlier tales replete with ascetic figures and the latter one sidelining them, also affects the interpretation of Sundar Singh’s decision to become a sadhu. If addressed at all, the Pauline version of Sundar Singh’s conversion subsumes his asceticism within a larger narrative of non-Christian opposition to Christian converts: on conversion, his father outcastes him. He is thus forced into homelessness, becoming a wandering holy man almost by default. If it is given independent attention, his decision to become a sadhu is attributed to his mother’s reverence for holy men and her desire that he become one. It is, of course, only a short step between a mother’s rearing and values to constructions of Indian “culture” that his ascetic robe would come to represent. Both Protestant missionaries and emerging Indian religious nationalists focused on the essential role of mothers in the preservation of a pure domestic space, a symbolic and sovereign domain of national culture, character, and tradition.46 These tellings are in stark contrast to Sundar Singh’s own account in his 1915 Urdu text. Here he states that, after his baptism, he purposefully took on the robe of faqir as the result of divine “guidance.”47 This framing of his conversion creates a much stronger claim for his ascetic practice. Here asceticism is not a necessity of a homeless happenstance, a filial response to his mother’s wishes, or a simple manifestation of Indian culture: it is the result of a divine command. The point is that as Sundar Singh shifted his narrative to biblical and missionary models, the divine command to take up an ascetic way of life generally fades into the background. Nor did Sundar Singh’s attempt to distance himself from overly ascetic images or narratives end here. As mentioned, his oft-told tales of esoteric Indian Christian holy men (sannyasis) stopped while in Europe and America. More importantly, when asked whether he was an “ascetic,” he took pains to say that he was not: Hindus renounced the world out of mistaken notions that the world was unreal, desire itself bad, or for “self-torture.” In contrast, he was only a sadhu as a method of service and preaching.48 Such pronouncements undoubtedly set largely Protestant audiences, uncomfortable with Christian monasticism, Indian renunciation, or comparative discussions of “mysticism,” at ease and helped him assimilate the image of heroic missionary. Indeed, for one American writer, Sundar Singh’s significance could be summed up as the revelation, however ironic, of “the hollowness of Eastern mysticism and asceticism.”49 Anti-ascetic assurances also gave Singh’s scholarly admirers what they needed to secure his essential difference from a variety of others: for the comparative religionist and Catholic convert to Lutheranism, Friedrich Heiler,

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Sundar Singh’s rejection of the Catholic monastic “counsel” of obedience, among other things, showed that his “whole temper is not characteristically Catholic, but Protestant.”50 On the Indian side, his robes had nothing to do with the “gloomy pessimism” and the spirit of “rigid asceticism” that is “nearly akin to it,” which, despite Buddha’s condemnation, remained ingrained in the “Indian temper.”51 For Streeter, Sundar Singh, though at times called “an ascetic,” was emphatically not, since he rejected the guru worship common to superstitious Indians.52 Like Max Müller’s reassurance to his readers that admiration for a “Hindu saint” such as the sannyasi Ramakrishna would not lead Europeans toward asceticism, Sundar Singh’s presence paradoxically reaffirmed a basic ascetic otherness in relation to modern Western and Protestant Christian identities.53 Assurances are necessary only in the face of anxieties: asceticism was already far too close to home and charged in nineteenth- and early-twentieth century British and American contexts. THE WESTERN DARSHAN OF THE ORIENTAL CHRIST Sundar Singh’s biblical and missionary idiom, his denials of many of the features of his story that marked him as “too” Indian, and his consistent disinterest in discussing the specifics of Hinduism make for a striking contrast with the tenacity with which he kept to his saffron robe, turban, and sandals during his Western tours. Why downplay Indianness in one’s speech but claim it so vehemently in one’s dress? In contrast, Rama Tirtha, Vivekananda, and others, though they certainly made much of their Oriental garb, also chose to dress in a variety of other costumes, that of the professor or the parson, for example.54 In fact, Sundar Singh objected to so much as wearing socks under his sandals, which he had donned on his usually bare feet as his only concession to Western norms. A British press report captures the sense of Oriental otherworldliness his dress created, using the gathered Anglican bishops to symbolize worldly self-awareness embodied in the details of dress: Slightly before the time announced there enters the strange figure of Sadhu Sundar Singh. He is as a man from another world . . . Nothing I can say here can convey the impression I could wish—that of a man apart, renouncing great possessions, exulting in the saving grace of his Master and speaking with the utmost simplicity. His complete freedom from any self-consciousness made even the Bishops’ gaiters seem a bit ridiculous.55 The visual production of Sundar Singh’s Indian presence through descriptions of the “strange figure” of a man from “another world” in such contexts is indicative of the widespread interest in the Orient. Rather than see this as a kind of media imposition on Sundar Singh, however, such passages

136 Timothy Dobe are more likely the outcome of his own comfort with, even promotion of, the distribution of his visual image. As personal letters show, Sundar Singh was often asked for and frequently sent images of himself to his many American, European, and Indian correspondents and admirers. The importance of images can also be seen on his preaching tours: “postcards of the Sadhu were for sale at the entrance, and everybody seemed to be buying one.”56 Thus, during his Euro-American tours and afterward, photographs, visual descriptions, and circulation networks played a major role in Western remembrance. A 1924 letter from a teacher at Westminster Missionary Sunday School to a retired colonial official, for example, asks him for permission to keep the photograph of Sundar Singh he had sent her, adding: “I am sure God will hear a great wave of prayer rise up to His Throne for this His son from more than one heart at Westminster. One of the boys, quite spontaneously, having looked at the photograph in quietness for a few moments, said quite suddenly to his teacher, ‘Isn’t it like the face of Christ.’ ”57 In this boy’s meditative gaze on the photo, we get a hint of something of the “fleshiness” of the sight that beheld Sundar Singh, that is, of the embodied, affective attitudes that focus a range of sensory practices.58 We might of course interpret Sundar Singh’s visual presence and power in terms of Indian models of darshan, the sacred gaze central to Hindu traditions of image worship and sadhu veneration and thus to sensibilities and capacities Sundar Singh had developed. We must also keep in mind, however, that the circle of adulation here is a Euro-American and, often, evangelical missionary. What we have then is something more like Western Christian darshan, a visual encounter that creates a sense of sacred presence, a form of “iconicity.”59 In fact, both the boy’s meditative gaze and his comparison of Sundar Singh to Christ repeat countless accounts in Euro-American sources. An American press report reads: This tall strong young man has come from India to tell the world of Christianity again. He has an entirely ageless look of both youth and age in one; joy, energy, wisdom. . . . He has a high glad way about him. He is said to look like the pictures of Christ, and he does; but there is a greater vitality and joy about him than is ever represented in the pictures of Christ. Perhaps the pictures are wrong.60 Thus, importantly, it is not that Sundar Singh seems similar to contemporary paintings of Jesus but that he outdoes them, giving direct access to the reality that art tries to represent. Again, the importance of Sundar Singh’s appearance, in the sense of dress but also more broadly in the sense of “total personality,” shapes the sacred through emergent Protestant popular visual culture. Streeter writes, “Sadhuji always wore the saffron robe and turban and even during travel to the West, he wore the same. Not only in his external appearance, but even the appearance of his total personality was such

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that it was said about him that his look is ‘as if he stepped straight out of the pages of the Bible.’ ”61 As the American press quotation makes clear, that link was made possible by the rise of Euro-American Oriental biblical art and the nineteenth-century Bibles that incorporated it. In the words of the shorthand secretary that accompanied Sundar Singh in Switzerland: “Many persons have made the same remark, [‘C’est le Christ!’] and I too have noticed the resemblance to pictures of Christ.”62 Less favorable observers put it somewhat differently, still intent on the importance of dress, however. Calling him the “the ascete, mystic and ecstatic of the age,” Sundar Singh’s Jesuit critic, Fr. Hosten, writes: Who is this man? The same who, dressing as a Sadhu in a yellow robe, calling himself a Christian, has been hailed by a certain section of Christians as the new Messiah. Women press round him to kiss the hem of his garments; children are brought for a blessing; at Tavanne, in Switzerland, in 1922, people climb on the trees to see and hear him . . . and someone in high position, it is said, tried to bring about an interview between the Pope and our new Dalai Lama. Such is the power of bluff.63 While Hosten’s near obsession to discredit Sundar Singh was, as Heiler pointed out, at least in part driven by a Catholic resistance to a Protestant craze for a Christian “saint” outside the Church, it is helpful here as evidence of the anxiety of idolatrous worship that infused Sundar Singh’s presence. The line between claiming Sundar Singh as an ascetic or mystic and a Messiah or Dalai Lama blurs; all are equally results of “bluff,” that is, an inflated self-presentation and its superstitious, Euro-American embrace. Such charges would have to be refuted by Sundar Singh’s Protestant defenders even as they were shared by others, including Protestant missionaries. Throughout the accounts of both critics and admirers, however, what comes through is the physicality of Sundar Singh and his image, his bringing of the power of the sacred to European and American Christians. His “Sadhu’s yellow robe” becomes, in Hosten’s use of the biblical phrase, the “hem of his garment.” And, indeed, it was not uncommon that “people touch[ed] his robe as he passed” on his way to the pulpit.64 The racial subtext of the controversy and its context, with its language of color, dress, and idolatry, emerged in varied ways. Heiler would write, against the charges of Hosten and others, that Sundar Singh’s continued humility throughout the admittedly sometimes superstitious adulation of the “crowds” proved his saintliness through nothing less than a racial miracle: “To receive such honour in one’s lifetime is dangerous for any Christian; it was doubly so for a convert, and still more for an Indian—one has only to remember how a Guru may be deified; how much more dangerous it was then for an Indian to receive such honours from Europeans!”65 Indeed. How did Europeans and Americans—most of them missionary-minded evangelicals— come so close to deifying a colonial subject?

138 Timothy Dobe First, the visual and physical importance of Sundar Singh’s race is apparent in press descriptions that do not make comparisons to the Bible or Christ. Here “race” is to be seen as more than skin color, but in the period’s wider sense of racialized “dress” or “appearance” or, even, in Streeter’s words, “total personality.” In an Iowa newspaper, for example, visual description is given as much attention as Sundar Singh’s life: “When he arrived in Des Moines on Tuesday he was wearing the turban of an Indian sadhu or holy man. He is of middle height and apparently full of vigor. His head, well-poised and intellectual, is still covered with raven-black hair. His eyes are dark, deep-seated and wistful, his complexion bronzed and his expression kindly and grave.”66 Second, these were precisely the kinds of details that had animated the imagination of Jesus in Europe and America, a combination of Orientalist biblical imagination, phrenology, and popular and fine art that helped standardize “exotic” racial markers of skin, face, body, and clothing. Regarding the latter, for example, Sundar Singh’s turban would have visually connected him with a long line of Orientalist biblical art, in which turbans, styled on Western perceptions of Ottoman Turks, are a key sign of the East.67 Such imaginings were bolstered by nineteenth-century scholarship on the historical Jesus; for example, Renan’s Life of Jesus drew on his travels in the Levant and on his belief that the Bedouin presented a living window onto ancient Semitic life. While Benjamin’s “art in the age of mechanical reproduction” predicted the waning of the artistic aura, the exuberant expansion of other auras multiplied through images of Christ. Catholic France had offered the world Gustav Doré’s Sainte Bible in 1865 replete with Bedouin-style illustrations and, closer to Sundar Singh’s own time, the massive, internationally traveling set of paintings of Christ’s life by Tissot. In England, the pre-Raphaelites drew on research into the historical world of Jesus to offer their new religious and artistic vision, even as the Oriental Bible brought the East into the English sitting room. In the United States, the nineteenth-century effeminate images of Jesus described by Stephen Prothero gave way to the life-affirming, manly and “virile” Christ of the early twentieth century, culminating in Sallman’s Head of Christ. Though it would later itself be perceived as too effeminate, Sallman’s image aimed to show an active Jesus approaching the cross “in triumph.” The Orientalist dimension remained strong; Sallman pursued the “new learning” of Orientalism by attending lectures on biblical archeology by the director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem.68 While, from the perspective of a post-1960s West, such images appear problematic for their “white” Jesus, we should not overlook the ways they simultaneously manifest nineteenth-century ambivalence over his evermore undeniably “Jewish” or “Oriental” character. The fact that pictures of Jesus had to negotiate being “not too dark-skinned, with not too curly hair and never with a ‘Semitic’ nose” suggests the inner tensions and contradictions of the category “white” itself.69 It was precisely these features—an Oriental

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biblical imaginary, the visual and verbal repertoire of race, and the Western anxiety to find an Oriental but not too Oriental Christ that made the elaborate veneration, the meditative gaze, the physical touch, and the grand rhetoric of the “St. Paul” and “Apostle” and yes, even Christ, of India possible in Sundar Singh’s case. The vitalistic rhetoric of the American press reports, in particular, reflects an increasingly this-worldly and masculinized image of Jesus that eschewed what was now seen as a far too otherworldly Christ feminized by Sunday School teachers and their surprising allies, “cloistered monks.”70 What then of Sundar Singh’s own role in all the adulation? First, as we have already seen, he adapted his message to a more clearly biblical idiom on his tours, suggesting his desire to link himself more closely to biblical precedents and, in particular, the model of St. Paul. Indeed, the link between his own experience and that of the Apostle Paul not only could be inferred from his oft-told, post-1918 conversion narrative, but, in more than one sermon, he meditated at length on the similarities between himself and the “Apostle to the Gentiles.”71 Second, Sundar Singh seemed more than comfortable with the visual circulation of images that undoubtedly encouraged the sense of iconicity of his person, often sending images of himself to friends and admirers. That he might have thought of his personal presence in terms of “contest of images” is suggested by his objection to speaking in a Catholic church: “There are so many pictures, there would be no room for me.”72 Protestants, with less sacred art in their churches but with a burgeoning visual biblical culture, seemed, after all, especially willing to allow Sundar Singh the central iconic stage. Third, though he was reticent to heal and baptize, Sundar Singh never refused his frequent role as blesser of children or the physical contact his admirers sought. Indeed, Sundar Singh was not averse to comparing himself to Christ, homologizing his experience on tour in the West with biblical images of Jesus and the crowds: as the crowd walked too closely and damaged his sandals, he remarked, “Christ had the same experience.”73 In the present context, of course, the fact that clothing serves as the site of comparison with Christ suggests in a very tangible way the process through which identification with Jesus was made real. As Sundar Singh’s body and the reverence it received stirred controversy on his Western tours, similar objections had already been voiced by missionaries in India, just as Sundar Singh emerged as more than an obscure, at most regional figure. It is ironic that, in the context of the European controversy, Heiler uses Sundar Singh’s saying about Christ’s donkey to justify his humility: as the donkey that Christ rode into Jerusalem also received the signs of honor given by the crowd, so Sundar Singh was no greater than this donkey.74 In contrast, having emerged out of similar Western missionary anxieties about idolatry in the Indian colonial context, the point of Sundar Singh’s comparison was not his own humility but justification for receiving physical adoration.

140 Timothy Dobe The women crowded round him, took hold of his scarf and put it on the heads of their children. They would also touch his garment reverently. A missionary in the station objected to these signs of veneration and took the Sadhuji to task: “Why do you allow people to pay you their respect in all these ways?. . . . This honour belongs to Christ, not to you.” Sundar Singh said: “Well, Sahib, I shall tell you why I get it and why I accept it. My beloved Jesus went to Jerusalem riding on an ass. The people took off their clothes and spread them on the road. It was the ass who walked on the clothes, not Jesus. The ass was honoured because he carried Jesus. I am like that ass. People honour me not for my sake but because I preach Christ75 (my emphasis). The sadhu’s acceptance of the bodily forms of respect given to Indian holy men here affirms his own humility and, simultaneously, his own nearness to Christ. In fact, it might be the servant, not Christ, who actually receives the honor: “It was the ass who walked on the clothes, not Jesus.” That interaction of course flowed both ways, as physical contact with a powerful sadhu was also a source of blessing (barkat), as indicated by the women’s placing of his scarf on the heads of their children. While touch played more of a role than one might expect in Euro-American contexts, the transfer of charisma through objects in these Indian contexts is especially pronounced, the role of blessing-infused scarves is in keeping especially with Sufi traditions, for example.76 Indeed, Sundar Singh was known to give his old turbans to friends and admirers; to Vincent David he gave a scarf—black and emblazoned with the words “He came to save sinners”—articles many carried on their bodies for years.77 In Japan, an entire crowd of Bengali workman “got on [their] knees and made a profound obeisance to him.”78 Stories that Singh’s shawl had been preserved and carried the physical power of healing would circulate within Indian Christian circles of remembrance.79 In the cited passage, the pointed use of the term “Sahib” while justifying the acceptance of “honour” underscores Sundar Singh’s defiance of white, missionary, colonial authority. Positioning himself within the biblical world, Sundar Singh links himself intimately to Christ while never directly claiming identity, much in the way he presented himself in Europe and America. While many Western and missionary authors displaced these forms of embodied reverence onto the superstitions of the Indian or even European “masses,” Sundar Singh’s comfort with them is striking. As suggested, however, this comfort in the role of guru or venerated holy man should not be simply attributed to static Indian “culture” or an ineluctable Hindu “syncretism” but had an explicitly Christian theological rationale for Singh.80 The bodily resemblance of the saints to Christ he had seen in his visions could be explained by no less an ancient Christian authority than St. Athanasius. Quoting him, Sundar Singh would write, “[God] became man that we might be made God.”81 God, he writes elsewhere, can

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only be satisfied by the love of his or her equals and so infuses his devotees as fire transforms coal to ash or as a sponge submerged is thoroughly soaked with water when in water.82 The writings of Sundar Singh’s close followers in India confirm the link between local forms of reverence for holy men and explicitly Christian understandings. One Indian writer, for example, critiques missionaries who complain that granting Sundar Singh the title swami and mahatma may deify him. First of all, the writer complains, the title “Lord” is given in England for secular reasons of wealth and worldly prestige; second, since Christ dwells so deeply in Sundar Singh, these titles of honor are more than justified. Another writer, commenting on familiar stories of miracles performed by Sundar Singh, turns not to affirming the supernatural power but to the theme of divine indwelling, relating it to medieval Christian theology: Christians greet him rapturously wherever he goes, and have voluntarily entitled him “Swami” and “Mahatma,” two terms of honour and respect which mean “a partaker in the divine nature”. . . . Some ignorant and ill-informed people have objected to these titles, but none else merits these titles better than Sundar does, for in Theologica Germanica we read “Some may ask ‘What is to be a partaker of the divine nature,’ ” or a godlike man? Answer “He who is imbued with and illuminated by the eternal or divine light, and inflamed or consumed with eternal or divine love, he is a godlike man, and a partaker of the divine nature . . . [with a] deep humility; and where this is not, the man hath not been made a partaker of the divine nature.” . . . Sundar Singh does not think himself at all wonderful.83 While these stories and arguments construct an exalted position for Sundar Singh, it would be a mistake to equate that construction with a simple bid for self-aggrandizement. Specifically, the line separating God from creation, while not entirely absent in South Asian traditions, was far more porous than in missionary Protestantism; the role of devotion to and even submission to human embodiments of that divine power in South Asian traditions had little parallel in the Christianity that informed colonial missions. Importantly, however, as citations of Orthodox and medieval Christian sources make clear, to make this contrast is not to make a contrast between the West and India as such but to point out the particularity and parochiality of missionary theology as rather narrow forms of Christianity itself. Just as these Christian theological imaginaries have room for the human embodiment of Christ himself in the here and now, so the imitation of Christ in early Christian contexts could result in the kind of “double vision” between the living saint and Christ, as Peter Brown and Georgia Frank have shown.84

142 Timothy Dobe WHAT THE ROBES HID: TRAINING CIVILIZED ANIMALS AND THE WEST AS JUDAS Like this theological view, certainly far from the mainstream Protestant theology of his sponsors, there was much about Sundar Singh’s identity that remained, as it were, largely cloaked in his sermons, the price perhaps of the ability to mediate the living Oriental Christ in Europe and America. If his renunciation of renunciation and biblical idiom helped keep the threat of the “Orient” at bay while quietly harnessing its allure, a closer reading of his private conversations and letters reveals a more complicated picture. He admitted that witnessing to the living Christ was only part of his motivation for going West: he came in order to evaluate the relative spirituality of the so-called Christian countries and was coming to rather unfavorable conclusions. One did not need to be in countries long to “smell” their spiritual state, he said.85 As he traveled with his Western hosts, small incidents, such as waiting at the train station, would call forth unflattering incidents of European racism in India, set against claims of a Christian Europe. Reminiscing about a mutual American friend in India could turn into a rebuttal of the idea that he was an “unpractical” Oriental.86 Gandhi and Tagore could not be blamed for resisting Christian conversion when the West had failed to show them the living Christ.87 He could invoke claims of Eastern spirituality through plays on the language of race and color to unsettle assumptions about European superiority: “I used to think that the inhabitants of Western lands. . . . were like angels. But when I traveled through these countries I saw my error. Most of them have white faces and black hearts.”88 In a private letter to a British friend about prominent church leaders in New York, Sundar Singh expresses the link between racism, color, Christ, and his own experience in the West especially clearly: “I don’t ask money or help from them, but I expected Christian fellowship which could have help [sic] in my spiritual life . . . They seem to me artificial spiritual leaders, if I am not mistaken if Christ would have come today here from Palestine these leaders would have rejected Him as a coloured man.”89 Interestingly, a parallel if more enigmatic private saying recorded by his Swiss secretary suggests that had Christ come to Europe as a “fakir” or sadhu, like Sundar Singh, he would have been viewed as “cracked.”90 In my view, this comment is suggestive of Sundar Singh’s sense of his European audience’s rather shallow sense of ascetic traditions in favor of a certain Orientalizing exoticism. To be sure, such commentary with its explicit racial resonances remained mostly private; Sundar Singh’s public addresses focused on biblical texts, missionary themes, and evangelical piety. It was especially these later two, however, that carried with them a subtext that shared much with broader invocations of the spiritual superiority of the East. First, by exemplifying biblical themes of evangelism with tales of Indian martyrs and of his own harrowing near-death experiences in Tibet, Sundar Singh presented an image of Indian converts that tended to take the high ground of heroism

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away from missionaries themselves.91 It was in Tibet, where he and other Indians went to preach, that the real New Testament drama of hardship, preaching, darkness, and light was playing out.92 Second, in stressing the vital difference between the “dogmas” of Christianity and Christianity itself—that is, knowing “about” Christ and “knowing Christ”—Sundar Singh made the same basic differentiation between genuine Christianity and “Churchianity” (his term) invoked by other swamis. In this way, Sundar Singh’s appeal to the living Christ resonated with Vedantin and evangelical appeals to experience as the “heart” of religion. As Prothero has argued, it was precisely this split, with deep roots in American history and European Pietism, that lead ultimately to the visual severing of Jesus not only from the Church but also from the Oriental biblical scenes that had characterized much of nineteenth-century religious art. Sallman’s Head of Christ, like Sundar Singh’s invocation of the living Christ of experience, left the detailed world of the Orient behind, inviting its audiences to a highly individualized sense of religious encounter.93 People were hardly to be blamed if Sundar Singh’s physical presence and image brought them at least one step closer to just such intimacy, as they simultaneously evoked and erased the Orient that had brought them so close. Finally, Sundar Singh’s appeal to the living Christ also carried a sharper edge that cut at the righteousness of the European self, exposing some of his more private motives for his tour to his audience. While attributing Western progress to Christ’s impact on Europe and America, he could likewise reduce Western “civilization” to animal training, insisting that the routinized, modern world missed the goal of a person’s spiritual development.94 Such critiques generally remained assertions of a vague Eastern spirituality. More to the point, however, Sundar Singh also invoked the providentialist narrative of the divine blessing of Europe: “Europe owes all the blessings of culture, freedom and education to Christianity.”95 This of course was the very narrative that had long been used by Europeans, and some Indians, to justify imperial rule. Using stark biblical imagery, however, Sundar Singh flipped the blessing very quickly to curse: “Europe is like Judas Iscariot who ate with Christ and then denied Him. But now Europe has also to fear the fate of Judas (it may hang itself on the tree of learning).”96 The providentialist narrative of European superiority and progress quickly became one of impending doom, often set against an eschatological horizon. Thus, while Sundar Singh’s message may have been an overtly religious call for repentance, the critical recasting of the common providentialist narrative of Europe’s blessing suggests something more than a mere repetition of well-worn missionary calls to re-Christianize Europe.97 In sharp judgments, Sundar Singh spoke of WWI as only a “little punishment” for the West’s “rejecting Christ.”98 Europe, it seems, would soon fall from its civilizational heights, and the English empire would soon follow. In fact, Sundar Singh shared political sympathies with Indian religious nationalists, in clear contradiction to the way in which he was represented

144 Timothy Dobe on his Western tours.99 According to Gandhi’s article in Young India, Singh’s visit to Gandhi’s ashram made clear he approved of “seditious” noncooperation in the political sphere, viewing it as something of a divine miracle.100 Similarly, Singh’s friendships with Indian Christians and non-Christians committed to nationalist noncooperation, such as K. T. Paul, Samuel Stokes, C. F. Andrews, and Gandhi, would seem hard to understand if he was a staunch supporter of British rule. In fact, writing in 1927, he calls svaraj (self-rule) “our birthright.”101 The priority Singh assigned to following Christ over a purely political agenda, often pointed out to depoliticize him, actually echoes Gandhi’s recommendation that political self-rule needed to be grounded in self-rule understood first as individual, spiritual discipline.102 Against this background, Sundar Singh’s comments contrasting Euro-American militarism and India’s spiritual atmosphere can be seen as indicative of a political strain in his attitudes. CONCLUSION I hope to have shown that new, racialized notions of India as a land of spirituality embodied in her living “saints” deeply shaped the context into which South Asian holy men on tour in Europe and America brought their message in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While this has been pointed out already in a number of contexts, the materiality and ambiguities of this moment of emergent geospirituality have largely been overlooked, not the least in their Christian dimensions. That is, the perception and performance of Eastern spirituality in the West depended on particular men who used their innovations on Indian ascetic and other sartorial repertoires to engage the visual culture and imagination that, in turn, shaped their reception. Sundar Singh’s life and message help illustrate these dynamics in action and also highlight another overlooked connection: the deep and mutual entanglement, we might even say intimacy, of Christianity and its so-called Oriental others. As widely acknowledged, Orientalism’s construction of the Orient was shaped not merely by Eurocentric but especially by deeply Protestant Christian presuppositions and biblical imaginaries. Less recognized, however, is the fact that perceptions of the Bible and Christ were themselves being reimagined and reworked through the imagining of Christ’s Oriental world. The diversity of terms that might characterize that world—Semitic, Jewish, Bedouin, Eastern, Oriental, and Asian—suggest the ambivalence and uncertainty about the racial, cultural, and religious identities that swirled around and, indeed, on and in the skin and clothes of the otherwise “white” Jesus in this period. In terms of the analysis of race and sainthood, Sundar Singh’s life pushes us to think in complex ways about the relationship of skin and other surfaces, such as clothing, and even more expansive yet still racialized concepts such as “total personality.” In fact, Sundar Singh ultimately went, as it were,

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under the surface of skin and dress to the “heart” of race. His image of white European skins and the black hearts they housed forces us to consider the way race not only extends outward from skin to envelop dress and appearance but also reaches inward. Race, in this sense, goes deep. It is not that underneath all the varied skin colors of the “races” we find the same kind of universal human heart or blood but that the many darks hearts of Europe have a kind of subtle materiality, are colored as much as skin itself. At times Sundar Singh would speak of this collective reality as an overall “smell” of a country or kind of spiritual cloudiness that blocks out the divine Sun/Son. In terms of sainthood, specifically Christian sainthood, Sundar Singh’s life and recognition as nothing short of the Oriental Christ of the West raise questions of just how “near to Christ . . . it is possible to be,” as one devotee put it. That this same person claimed that witnessing Sundar Singh in prayer in the chapel established this space as truly sacred, that “he has consecrated” the church as church, suggests that the visual, spatial, and material dimensions of the sacred so clearly expressed in South Asian holy man traditions converged in important ways with contemporary Protestant Euro-American religiosity.103 As I have argued, we can see this transformation as the deployment of an ascetic capacity of deconstructing the socialized (raced) body through a religiously remade one. We can also ground Sundar Singh’s own self-consciousness and self-presentation not as a mere imitator of Christ but as his living embodiment in forms of Christianity, Indian or otherwise, at home with the visibility of holiness. Ultimately, Sundar Singh’s transformation from a dark colonial subject to a “Christ-bearing,” saffron-robed holy man, a black that whites longed to touch as he passed, was—as Heiler suggested for rather different reasons—nothing short of a racial miracle. NOTES 1. On the absence, presence, and perceptions of the ascetic body in yoga discourse and practice, see Mark Singleton, Yoga Body (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), chs. 1–4. On the colonial construction of Indian religion, “mysticism,” and role of Vedanta, see Richard King, Orientalism and Religion (New York: Routledge, 1999). For holy men in early Bengali nationalism, see Indira Chowdhury-Sengupta, “Reconstructing Spiritual Heroism: The Evolution of the Swadeshi Sannyasi in Bengal,” in Myth and Mythmaking, Collected Papers on South Asia, ed. Julia Leslie (Surrey: Curzon, 1996): 124–142. On missionaries, modern religion, living saints, and sainthood, see Timothy Dobe, Hindu Christian Faqir: Modern Monks, Global Christianity and Indian Sainthood (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 2. Max Müller, Ramakrishna: His Life and Sayings (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1898), ix. 3. Ibid., 11. 4. Ibid., xii. 5. Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

146 Timothy Dobe 6. Karmen MacKendrick, Word Made Skin (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 73. 7. See Jane Schneider’s discussion of Terrence Turner’s (1980/1993) concept of cloth as “second skin” and Mauss’s sense of the “spirituality of clothing” in “Cloth and Clothing,” in Handbook of Material Culture, eds. Chris Tilley, Webb Kean, Susanne Küchler, Mike Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2006), 204. 8. Joanne Waghorne, The Raja’s Magic Clothes (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1994), 113. See also Bernard Cohn, “Cloth, Clothes and Colonialism: India in the Nineteenth Century,” in Cloth and Human Experience, eds. Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1989), 303–353. 9. Brahmabandhab Upadhyaya (1861–1907), for example, the Roman Catholic Bengali convert and self-proclaimed Hindu sannyasi, had lectured extensively on Vedanta during his visit to England. 10. David Morgan, The Sacred Gaze (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 11. Mary Wilson Carpenter, Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 45. 12. Edward Blum and Paul Harvey, The Color of Christ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 9–12. 13. John Calvin and Jacopo Sadoletto, A Reformation Debate, ed. John C. Olin (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2000). 14. Jean-Luc Marion, “Invisibility of the Saint,” in Saints: Faith without Borders, eds. François Meltzer and Jaś Elsner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 361. 15. B. H. Streeter and A. J. Appasamy, The Sadhu: A Study in Mysticism and Practical Religion (London: MacMillan, 1921), 118. 16. Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 13. 17. Ibid., 1–2 and 6. 18. Ibid., 1. 19. Ibid., 8–9. 20. Older images of Sai Baba of Sirdi, for example, show him dressed in white in the style of a faqir, that is, with kafni robe and headdress, but recent images show saffron. See Rachel Dwyer, Filming the Gods (New York: Routledge, 2006), 94. For the case of Ramakrishna, see Sumit Sarkar, “Kaliyuga, Chakri and Bhakti: Ramakrishna and His Times,” Economic and Political Weekly 29 (July 1992), 286. In identifying symbolically with the Dashana¯mi order through the specific color of their robes, Hindu modern monks not only laid claim to the Advaita philosophy of this monastic lineage’s founder, Shankara, but also contradicted the very “otherworldly” images Orientalism had created of it. The Dashana¯mis preserved aspects of vernacular asceticism much ridiculed by the British, such as warrior traditions and hagiographies of Shankara as a miracle-wielding, royal corpse-invading, yogic adept and “world conqueror.” 21. Tarlo, Clothing Matters, 64. 22. Susan Crane, The Performance of Self (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 1. 23. Tarlo, Clothing Matters, 8. 24. David Arnold, Colonizing the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 25. Singleton, Yoga Body, chs. 2 and 8. 26. Pramod Nayar, English Writing and India, 1600–1920 (New York: Routledge, 2008), ch. 2. For the Sunday School context, see “A Hindu Fakir,” The Church Missionary Quarterly Token no. 25 (1859): 4–5.

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27. Tarlo, Clothing Matters, 9. 28. James Wills and Satadru Sen, eds. Confronting the Body (London: Anthem Press, 2003), 4. 29. Michael Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 30. Patrick Olivelle, “Deconstruction of the Body in Indian Asceticism” in Asceticism, eds. Vincent Wimbush and Richard Valantasis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 188–210. 31. The Sikh janamsakhis, for example, record verbal descriptions and paintings of Guru Nanak’s appearance that illustrate hybrid forms of ascetic dress and the shifting sartorial displays that shaped his reception history. In the Bhaktamala, the dress of Vaishnava devotees is seen as so important that it can transform even an animal into a saint. North India Sufi hagiographies and narratives further multiply the spiritual functions of dress, including as means of ascetic discipline, charismatic object of lineage transfer, and revealer and concealer of “true” identities. 32. Niharika Dinkar, “Masculine Regeneration and the Attenuated Body in the Early Works of Nandalal Bose,” Oxford Art Journal 33:2 (2010): 167–188. 33. Julius Lipner, “Introduction,” in Bankimcandra Chatterji, Anandamath (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 6. 34. For an “Aryan” claim to whiteness by a saffron-robed Indian swami in just such a context, see Rama Tirtha’s 1903 American lecture, “The Civilized World’s Spiritual Debt to India,” in In the Woods of God-realization, vol. 1 (Lucknow: Swami Rama Tirtha Pratisthan, 2002). 35. Stephen Prothero, American Jesus (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003), ch. 6. 36. Morgan, The Sacred Gaze, 12. 37. Carpenter, Imperial Bibles, 47. 38. Moustafa Bayoumi, “East of the Sun (West of the Moon): Islam, the Ahmadis, and African America,” The Journal of Asian American Studies 4:3 (2001): 251–263. 39. The work of the comparative religion scholar Friedrich Heiler represents this strain of interest and adulation well. His 1927 book, The Gospel of Sadhu Sundar Singh, situates Sundar Singh amid an august range of Christian martyrs, saints, monks, and mystics and offers an Eastern Christian alternative to the near-contemporary Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. Friedrich Heiler, The Gospel of Sadhu Sundar Singh (New York: Oxford University Press, 1927). 40. Miss Alys Goodwin, Sadhu Sundar Singh in Switzerland, ed. A. F. Thyagaraju (Chennai: The Christian Literature Society, 1997), 27–28. 41. Ibid., 16. 42. Timothy Dobe, “Flaunting the Secret: Lineage Tales of Christian Sannyasis and Missionaries,” History of Religions 49:3 (February 2010): 254–299. 43. Peter van der Veer, Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity (New York: Routledge, 1996), 14. 44. Streeter and Appasamy, The Sadhu, 5–7. 45. I am indebted to Eric Sharpe’s The Riddle of Sundar Singh (New Delhi: Intercultural Publications, 2003) for noting the absence of this dramatic conversion story in earlier texts. 46. For the context of Protestant “zenana missions,” see Eliza Kent, Converting Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). On the role of domestic space, women’s “traditional” roles, and holy men in early Indian nationalism, see Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 47. Sundar Singh, Collection of Incidents (Saharanpur: Jaina Lal Machine Printing Press, 1915), 1.

148 Timothy Dobe 48. Streeter and Appasamy, The Sadhu, 19. 49. E. J. Pace, “The Testimony of Sundar Singh,” The Christian Workers Magazine 20 (1919): 965. 50. Heiler, Gospel of Sadhu Sundar Singh, 51–52. 51. Ibid., 52. 52. Streeter and Appasamy, The Sadhu, 13. 53. Müller, Ramakrishna, vi. 54. Gwilym Beckerlegge, “Sva¯mí Viveka¯nanda’s Iconic Presence and Conventions of Nineteenth-Century Portraiture,” International Journal of Hindu Studies, 12:1 (2008): 1–40. 55. The Church Times, March 12, 1918. 56. Goodwin, Sadhu Sundar Singh in Switzerland, 4. 57. Miss Kitty Carey to W. Coldstream, 24 Nov., 1924, United Theological College, Box I, folder I. 58. Hirschkind, Ethical Soundscapes, 25–31. 59. Morgan, The Sacred Gaze, 130. Morgan broadens the Orthodox sense of the “icon” to suggest the felt sacred presence in and through any (even “secular”) images’ “iconic” status: “seeing them means encountering their referents in a powerful way.” It is important to point out, however, that the reciprocal sense of darshan, in which the viewer both sees and is seen by the sacred persona in the image, sacred material form, or person is missing from the concept of iconicity, a difference derived from the Christian dominance of two-dimensional art from Orthodox icons to modern photography and press images. 60. New York Evening News qtd. https://sites.google.com/site/gloryofhiscross/ sadhuinamerica, accessed February 3, 2014. 61. Streeter and Appasamy, The Sadhu, 42. 62. Goodwin, Sadhu Sundar Singh in Switzerland, 5. For similar passages invoking an Oriental biblical imagination, see 8, 12. 63. Hosten, The Works of Fr. Hosten, vol. XXXIII, 49. 64. Goodwin, Sadhu Sundar Singh in Switzerland, 17. 65. Heiler, Gospel of Sa¯dhu Sundar Singh, 51–52. 66. “Indian Pastor Visits Des Moines,” The News, July 6, 1920. 67. Ivan Davidson Kalmar, “Jesus Did Not Wear a Turban: Orientalism, the Jews and Christian Art,” in Orientalism and the Jews, eds. Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2005), 10. 68. Jack R. Lundbom, Master Painter: Warner E. Sallman (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1999), 53. 69. Kalmar, “Jesus Did Not Wear a Turban,” 23. 70. Prothero, American Jesus, 102. On Victorian gendering, ascetic imagery, and self-representation, see James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 71. Sundar Singh, The Christian Witness of Sundar Singh, ed. T. Dayananda Francis (Madras: Christian Literature Society, 1989), 506–507. 72. Goodwin, Sadhu Sundar Singh in Switzerland, 26. 73. Ibid., 15. 74. Heiler, Gospel of Sa¯dhu Sundar Singh, 52–53. 75. Vincent David, quoted in A. J. Appasamy, Sundar Singh: A Biography (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 1958), 90. 76. In common practice in Sufi shrines (dargahs), scarves and cloths (cha¯dar) are especially emphasized as a material of sacred exchange and blessing. 77. Appasamy, Sundar Singh, 96. 78. Ibid., 107.

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79. Joshua Daniel, Another Daniel (Madras: The Layman’s Evangelical Fellowship, 1980), 27. 80. Jon Bialecki, Naomi Haynes, and Joel Robbins, “The Anthropology of Christianity,” Religion Compass 2:6 (2008): 1144. 81. Singh, Christian Witness of Sundar Singh, 203. 82. Ibid., 34. 83. Alfred Zahir, A Lover of the Cross (Allahabad: The North India Tract and Book Society, 1917), 4–5. 84. On the blurred line between “imitation” and “identification” in the Christian sainthood of the “Christ-bearing man,” see Peter Brown, “The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity” in Saints and Virtues, ed. John Stratton Hawley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 13. On Egyptian and Syrian desert holy men visually recreating a biblical world for pilgrimage to “living saints,” see Georgia Frank, The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 85. Goodwin, Sadhu Sundar Singh in Switzerland, 21. 86. Ibid., 13. 87. Ibid., 22, 29. 88. Quoted in Heiler, Gospel of Sadhu Sundar Singh, 53. Cf. Ibid., 31 and, for example, Swami Rama Tirtha’s saying: “Europeans and Americans exult to clothe their bright skin in dark or brownish clothes. The black apparel does not signify a dark body. So, the Hindus prefer dark skin to clothe a bright glorious Soul” (In the Woods of God-Realization 5:94). 89. Private letter qtd. in Keith Clements, Faith on the Frontier: A Life of J. H. Oldham (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, Ltd., 1999), 191–192. 90. Goodwin, Sadhu Sundar Singh in Switzerland, 30. 91. For a discussion of the general Western perception of Indian converts and their “mixed motives” as inferior to the purely “spiritual” motives of missionaries, see Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). 92. Sundar Singh, Christian Witness of Sundar Singh, 489. 93. Prothero, American Jesus, 119. 94. Sundar Singh, Christian Witness of Sundar Singh, 489. 95. Ibid., 500. 96. Appasamy, Sundar Singh, 173. 97. Jeffrey Cox is right to point out this continuity but fails to attend to the differentials of Sundar Singh’s “Eastern”/colonial identity and his particular historical moment. See his Imperial Fault Lines, 231. 98. Goodwin, Sadhu Sundar Singh in Switzerland, 56. 99. Streeter, for example, represents Sundar Singh as being totally uninterested in “Home Rule” because the sadhu is more interested in spiritual things, such as his true “Home” in heaven (The Message of Sadhu Sundar Singh, 78). 100. M. K. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. XXII (December 1921–March 1922) (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Trust, 1968), 364. 101. Sundar Singh, Christian Witness of Sundar Singh, 352. 102. M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. Anthony J. Parel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 103. Goodwin, Sadhu Sundar Singh in Switzerland, x.

7

Racialized Crossings Coptic Orthodoxy and Global Christianities Angie Heo

How is Christianity a global religion? Where does one go to specify its culturally diverse features? One avenue to explore, as this volume on “the racial saint” prompts us to do, is cults of divine sainthood. Popular patron saints—such as the Virgin Mary, St. Mark, and St. George—disseminate throughout denominational filiations and geographic regions via varied depictions and media. At times, comparisons in their representational styles can offer some helpful glimpses into the transregional crossings that lend them their current form. In the Brotherhood of St. Moses the Black, an African Orthodox North American organization founded in the 1990s, iconic portraits of its namesake submit a dark and adjudicating protagonist. Like the black Madonnas of late medieval Europe, which had arguably stirred memories of authentic origins in the Holy Land, these images represent the search for spiritual roots in an imagined originary Middle East—and more specifically, in a faroff Egypt. In the words of Father Moses Berry, the founder of the Brotherhood: “By founding the monastic tradition, [the people of Africa] preserved the otherworldliness of true Christianity.”1 In the black image of St. Moses the Black, the black-American diaspora locate their genealogical authority in an ancient Africa, within the North African monastic communities of the fourth and fifth centuries. Remarkably enough, today’s Coptic Orthodox Christians generally venerate the whitened faces of the saints. In contemporary Egypt, the Virgin (al-‘adhra¯’) is recognizable as the blue-eyed saint of ivory complexion. Entering the home of any given Coptic family, chances are that she will be spotted as a blanched caricature, crowned and with Christ child, alongside the equally pale faces of St. Menas the Martyr or St. Mercurius. One stark exception is St. Moses the Black (al-Amba¯ Mu¯ sa¯ al-Aswad), the fourthcentury monk and Ethiopian convert from a former life of murder, adultery, and thievery. Dressed in austere midnight-black robes, his shadowy, lean features are his characteristic marks for visual identification. However, in contrast to the case of the African-American St. Moses, whose blackness hearkens back to his ancient origins, this version of St. Moses the Black signifies a moral change of heart from black to white. Across a range of

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media, his pathbreaking conversion is also a spiritually cosmetic process of sorts. According to the holy texts of the Coptic Synaxarium, the Patriarch is remembered for saying, “Who brought this black one here? Cast him out,” only to pronounce after some time: “Moses, all of you now has become white.”2 In hagiographic film, St. Moses confesses his sins to an angel, and after this pivotal point, his face noticeably brightens for the remainder of the film.3 For as the late Pope Shenouda (d. 2012) pronounced, in his commentaries on the Song of Songs, all human beings are “black in the state of sin, but beautiful in the state of repentance.”4 On the face of it, the difference in “blackness” between Orthodox iconographies suggests a difference in its interpretive meaning: for the Brotherhood of St. Moses, an effort to recover the true Christianity, and for the Coptic Orthodox, a reminder of moral impurity and the continuous necessity to repent. Whether black or white, Marian imagery and its celebrated diversity around the world likewise confirms multicultural contexts for new genres of saintly reception. To these claims, I would add that these changing aesthetics of visual representation, across time and space, also presents an interesting puzzle of “race” and its role in the globalization of Orthodox Christianities. Considering religion as a site of racialization requires accounting for the ways in which religious disseminations intersect

Figure 7.1 A passing pilgrim taking blessings from icons of the Virgin and St. Moses the Black in the Bulaq district of Cairo, Egypt. Photograph by author.

152 Angie Heo with other domains of racial belonging and universalizing order—colonial, national, territorial, and ethnic. This is because the historical making of Christianity into a global religion is very much a byproduct of the social and political forces that encompass it. As I aim to show, the images of the saints Virgin Mary and Moses the Black offer one promising vehicle for analyzing the racializing relations between Coptic Orthodoxy in Egypt and pan-Orthodoxy in the Americas. This includes looking at transformations in longstanding dichotomies of racial identity and colonial difference as they reach new worlds of saintly legatees. It also includes unearthing how elemental conceptions of race are tied to lands of blessing and suffering, mapped in certain ways to nationstates and multiethnic arrangements. For establishing Egypt as a holy place of African origins turns upon imagined continuities and discontinuities in the racialization of Orthodox Christianities. RACE AND GLOBAL CHRISTIANITIES If we were to draw an ancestral tree of Coptic Orthodoxy and its conventionally understood relationship to world Christendom, it would begin at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 C.E. Very early on, the Copts are said to have broken away over Christological debates. Other key dates definitive of their location include 1054 C.E., which marks the Schism between the Byzantine East and the Latin West, and 1517 C.E. the inaugural date of Protestant Reformation in Germany. This is perhaps the most widely told version of Copts and their place in a privileged theological narrative of global Christianity. For Copts, as with other Oriental Christians, the historical points of reference when it comes to the knotty challenges of religious belonging are the Christian empires surrounding them. Following the onset of Islamic rule in the Middle East and North Africa, the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox Churches have made bids for protectorate power over Christian minorities such as the Copts in Egypt, Armenians in Turkey, Maronites and Greek Orthodox in Lebanon, Jacobites in Syria, and Assyrians in Iraq. It is this configuration of uneven religious status that continues to evoke the memory of different Christianities and Churches at political odds with each other. The Coptic Orthodox Church is regarded to be the national Church of Egypt. Of the 6 to 12 percent of Egypt’s population who are Coptic Christian, a small but relatively influential fraction is the outcome of two strands of missionization, the Coptic Catholics and Coptic Evangelicals.5 As the Egyptian variety of Orthodox Christianity, the Coptic Orthodox also represent a particular kind of “global Christianity” against other kinds. As Chris Hann and Hermann Goltz have astutely pointed out, “the Orthodox churches can stake a strong claim to be more global in the original Christian sense of church unity: they form a global structure of local churches, as

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distinct from the “globalization” of a local church, be it the West, Roman, the Wittenbergian, or the Genevan.”6 The idea here is that within Orthodox empires of unity and difference, the status of the local or national Church is central to its globalizing configuration. For this reason, the Coptic Orthodox Church’s self-designated status as the “national Church” is unrivaled by the Catholics and Evangelicals, for whom the other Churches radiating out of Rome and North America are more central. Part of this globalizing structure of Christian belonging also intersects with the racializing politics of the modern nation-state. Widely considered as the largest religious minority in the Arab Middle East, the Copts continue to grapple with their Coptic identity vis-à-vis the Arab identity of the Muslim national majority. What is the nature of the Coptic/Arab difference? As recent public discourse attests, the difference is not quite fully religious. In the words of Coptic demonstrators chanted in Maspero of 2011, it is the Coptic Christians who are “the True Egypt”; and in the equally inflammatory words of Church leader Bishop Bishoi, “Muslims are our guests.” Through their claims to a civilizational heritage that precedes Islam (it is also frequently emphasized that “Copt” means “Aigyptos” in Greek), many Copts currently distinguish themselves from the tenth-century entry of Arab rulers into Egypt. Indeed, Copts have referred to this process of Islamic Arabization as an invasion rather than the opening (fatah · al-Isla¯m) their Muslim conationals characterize with more celebration. This difference in reference echoes Hindus in India and Maronites in Lebanon, who go so far as to declare themselves of different racial stock than Arab Muslims, shoring up their legitimate status as the rightful ancestors of their respective nations. As other postcolonial nations similar to Egypt thus suggest, the racialization of religious differences is tied up with identitarian ideologies of national purity. Coptic retrievals of an Egyptian ancestry, to be prioritized over an Arab one, also resonate with the colonial archives of race science. It is important to recall that as late as 1956, Sudan (understood to be derived from Arabic, bila¯d al-su¯da¯n” “country of the blacks”) was governed as Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and ruled by an Egyptian appointee of the British Empire. And up until 1959, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church was part of the Coptic Orthodox Church, or the Patriarchate of Alexandria and of all Africa. My point in mentioning these national and religious linkages is simply that what we now know to be Egypt, territorially and ecclesiastically, is itself a relatively recent demarcation. Imperial mappings that linked Egypt to Africa also gave rise to new models of knowledge about the people of Africa. As historian Edith Sanders’s influential argument goes, the contents of the Hamitic Hypothesis of sixteenth-century British inception radically transformed as a result of the French expedition to Egypt in 1798.7 The now-infamous hypothesis proposed that “apart from relatively late Semitic influence . . . the civilizations of Africa are the civilizations of Hamites.”8 In its original formulation, the Hamite was the Negro-Hamite, following the Hebrew myth of the “curse of Ham as one of blackness. Upon Napoleonic discovery of

154 Angie Heo Pharaonic monuments, arts, and sciences, newly valued as ancient precursors to Enlightenment modernity, the hypothesis reversed. Rather than functioning as a link to the Negro black, the Hamite began to be understood as the Caucasoid-Hamite. How do these colonial categories of racial difference locate Copts on the map of geopolitical belonging? Much expectedly, the longstanding binary of Islam versus West does not bode well for a racialized parallel in Arab versus Coptic. Against sweeping presumptions that Copts are of a different race than Arabs (i.e., Hamites rather than Semites), or believe themselves to be so, I would strongly argue that the majority of Copts today identify themselves to be Arab Christians and invoke the slogan of “one blood” and “brother and sister” when emphasizing their national unity with Egypt’s Muslims. Indeed, a critical component of President Nasser’s anticolonial nationalist agenda, from the 1950s onward, was to institute his ideological vision of pan-Arab and pan-African belonging as well as political unity. Nasser’s commitment to pan-Arab nationalism was also what inspired the short-lived United Arab Republic (1958–1961), which brought together Egypt with Syria and Yemen. Unlike the Coptic Evangelical and Catholic Churches, the Coptic Orthodox Church—again, as the national Church— was the most vocal in its support of the Arab nations, most publicly during the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973 (discussed further in the section titled Global Marianism). Its religious and political identity as Arab is crucial to its institutional place in the nation. These days, in the contemporary moment of their alienation from a more “Islamist” nation, it is the nature of this Arabness that Copts are placing under increasing interrogation. Although the topic of race is never brought to the fore, what has become more pronounced is the political platform of an originary Coptic identity that had preceded cultural Arabization.9 In the aftermath of the Arab Spring of 2011, it is the idea of Copts as the West’s last link to their civilizational heritage that has revived this older notion of imperial self-identity in Africa. After the military coup in July of 2013, resulting in the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood from seats of power, burning churches and monasteries of ancient origin continues to appeal most powerfully to a transregional mode of Christian identification. If Copts are the legatees of the most authentic varieties of desert monasticism and pilgrimage ritual, then what kind of political obligations are made of globally Christian ties? Since the revolutionary downfall of Mubarak in February 2011, a significant exodus of Copts from Egypt has signaled their precarious status from within a transitioning nation. Diasporic exile, whether in the form of emigration or refuge, calls upon shifting transnational terms of their religious identity.10 In the next two sections, I examine various forms of globalization that shape the life of Coptic Orthodox Christianity in Egypt and abroad. By tracing representations of the Virgin Mary and St. Moses the Black, I look at racialized crossings between the national and Christian imaginaries in

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which Copts are embedded. The first section examines the intersection of global Marianism with Arab nationalism, specifically the reappearance of a white Virgin during the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli war. The second examines the relationship between ethnic America and the black-American growth of pan-Orthodox identification. GLOBAL MARIANISM Whether in the alcove of a homemade shrine or the dashboard of a taxi, visual images of the Virgin Mary abound in Egypt. Coptic spaces of devotion, however varied, present a relatively consistent repertoire of Marian iconography. One sample is the portrait of the Virgin with her hands outstretched and face tilted downward, what is known as al-manzar al-tagallı¯ (the transfigurational pose or the apparitional pose). Another captures her frontal profile with a cherubic Christ child embracing her neck. And less widespread yet popular still is the Madonna of the Streets who holds her sleeping infant on her shoulder while gazing upward. In most, she has a bright white complexion and is dressed in robes and covered in a veil. In April of 1968, the Virgin of Zeitoun joined the world history of modern Marian apparitions. As a collective apparition, the Zeitoun appearances of the Virgin drew thousands of Muslims and Christians to the suburban neighborhood of Cairo, where they witnessed the same figural bursts of light, at the same time and on top of a church, for a period of two to three years. From that moment onward, collective apparitions of the Virgin continued to take place as discrete events at particular sites: Edfu in 1982, Shobra in 1986, Assiut in 2001, al-Warraq in 2009, and more. Unlike the case of Marian apparitions in Catholic Europe, in which a privileged seer reports what he or she has privately seen and heard, these collective apparitions are availed to the mass public, their legitimacy even depending on numerous witnesses. The Virgin of Zeitoun occurred at the heights of Arab nationalism. About a year after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the apparition signaled a divine response to the pan-Arab humiliation of defeat and territorial dispossession. The 1967 war resulted in the Arab dispossession of lands from all sides (i.e., Golan, West Bank, East Jerusalem); for Egypt, the losses were the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula. According to one Lebanese newspaper, “the repetition of the Virgin’s appearance confirms that the miracle will continue until the return of Arab Jerusalem and its liberation from Zionist terrorism.”11 Witnesses of Zeitoun have also explained that “the Virgin visited because we could not visit her.”12 Militarized and transfigurative, the borderlines prohibited Arab pilgrimage to Holy Lands, which include the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. As the newly envisioned spatial route between Cairo and Jerusalem, the Virgin Mary offered traveling continuity between Israel and Egypt through an inaugural genre of divine visuality.

156 Angie Heo Joining the ranks of St. Mark and St. George, the Virgin Mary is a figural saint who journeys across the Mediterranean East and West. Unlike the others, however, the Virgin is one of the few who crosses between Christianity and Islam, venerated in both monotheistic traditions of intercession. When she appeared in Zeitoun, the Church’s confirmation relied on the reports of Muslim guarantors, or those Muslim witnesses who are regarded as disinterested observers by virtue of their religious identity.13 Briefly put, for the Virgin of Zeitoun to be a national blessing, it was essential that she be an identifiably Muslim-Christian one. For the Virgin to partake in this global economy of Christian return to the Arab nation, Muslims were going to have to participate in the collective nature of her public presence. Under Nasser, the consolidation of Arab identity and pan-Arab unity was a national priority. For Copts, the post-1967 result was the Arabization of the Marian phenomena—visually and territorially. Strangely enough, post-1968 Marian apparitions also present a political imaginary in which pan-Arab nationalism meets older Roman Catholic iconic representations. When witnesses reported the same image of the Virgin in Zeitoun, they also recovered an objectified image of the Miraculous Mary: the Roman Catholic icon of early-nineteenth-century origin. In one of St. Catherine Labouré’s visions of the Virgin in France, she was commanded to reproduce her vision in the form of the miraculous medallion. Depicted with bright white complexion, the Miraculous Mary portrait was closely associated with the new dogma of the Immaculate Conception and a color scheme dominated by white. Via the phenomenon of collective apparitions, St. Catherine Labouré’s vision was translated into Coptic terrain as an Egyptian national one. Al-manzar al-tagallı¯, or “the transfigurational pose,” is the Virgin in full frontal profile, bluish-white dress, with hands outstretched and head haloed. As one Coptic eyewitness explained of Marian apparitions in Egypt, “the Virgin appears in the language by which we recognize her.” How did this Catholic-originated Virgin become her recognizably iconic form in Egypt? To what extent does the Virgin of the 1967 war signify the apparitional remainder of racial difference within the Roman Catholic empire? If the Zeitoun image is understood to be an anticolonial nationalist one (against Israeli occupation), then what does its aesthetic derivation from an early-nineteenth-century French nun’s vision suggest? At this historical juncture in 1968, we can catch a glimpse of how panArab nationalism converges upon global Marianism in Egypt. By global Marianism, I mean to refer to the ways in which appearances of the Virgin circulate worldwide and then become recognizable as the same or similar phenomena. From the turn of the nineteenth century, the Roman Catholic world experienced Marian apparitions that spanned nations—in Lourdes, Fátima, Guadalupe, Medjugorje—and wrought forth anxieties about transecting orders of belonging. For example, in her work on Marian reappearances in Rome, anthropologist Valentina Napolitano examines the racial

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tensions among Latino American migrants in Italy that ritual celebrations of the Virgin of Guadalupe (or Virgen Morena, “Brown Virgin”) evoke.14 In the assimilation of Marian difference into globalizing Catholicism, racial distinctions are embodied and enacted between ultramontane Rome and Mexican indigeneity. Global Marianism, in other words, spawns an iconizing relation of sameness and difference across reproducible imaginings of the Virgin. Apparitions of the Virgin present a peculiar form of bodily mediation. Enabling the crossing of saintly presences in time and space, apparitions are technologies of visitation. As Peter Brown has inimitably detailed in his work on the Mediterranean economy of holy patrons, “the sense of living in a world with frequent interchange pushed to the fore the standardized images of universal figures—icons of Christ and the Virgin.”15 The Miraculous Mary is an example of such standardization, one that had originally spread through the currency of coins. As the iconic medium of Byzantium, coins of imperial portraiture draw forth the reterritorialization of lost lands. In post-1967 Egypt, the fleshly presence of the Virgin is reproduced through the mass mediation of photography, print iconography, videos, and mobile phones. Copts understand the collective apparitions, in Zeitoun and elsewhere, to be authored by the same Virgin of Catholic Europe. That is, the Coptic memory of a racialized Marian form—fair skinned and blue eyed—invokes a spiritual kinship between the pan-Arab Virgin and the Roman Virgin (in her representations all over the world). In the same instance of global Marian recognition, the Virgin’s eventful appearance in 1968 served as a message in a moment of crisis over lost Holy Land. To an eye accustomed to the Semitic-looking “Arab,” the white Virgin of transfiguration appears foreign. Yet it is the imagistic memory of imperial recovery in the Christian past that also translates globally into the Arabization of the Virgin, particularly at the heights of territorial loss. ETHNIC ORTHODOXY Envisioned as a holy land of divine origins, Egypt represents for many a collective tie to the ancient origins of Christianity. Of course, how this tie is imagined is different for the Coptic Orthodox who currently inhabit the land and Christian foreigner visitors to Egypt who see themselves also to be related somehow to it, as spiritual progeny of the tradition. In some historical cases, this gap in the representational memory of Egypt and other ancient lands is a racialized one. In her work on black Madonnas in early modern Europe, for example, historian and anthropologist Monique Scheer makes the argument that changing perceptions of dark saintly complexions did not always uphold race to be its core lens of aesthetic valuation. Rather, the blackness of Marian iconography connoted its age and Eastern

158 Angie Heo provenance—itself closely linked to miraculous power, not unlike the powers designated for the “true portrait” of St. Luke.16 As Scheer further notes, it was only as late as 1816 that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe unhappily surmises that the appearance of black Virgins is for “Egyptian or Abessenian reasons.”17 Saints of ostensibly African origin include Moses the Black or Ethiopian, Mary the Egyptian penitent of sexual excess, as well as Maurice the Nubian soldier known as the Theban. All of them are recognized by their fleshly blackness and identified by some geographic location that also suggests an ethnic genre of ancestry. Varying according to time and place, the aesthetics of authentic Christian origins is not a static sensibility, and Orthodox traditions are a testament to its living and shifting dynamic. This chapter opened with an emphatic difference in how two Orthodox groups today—Coptic Orthodox and African-American Orthodox—understand the blackness of St. Moses the Black. Whereas the former associates the black color of St. Moses with his original state of moral impurity, the latter forwards it as a vehicle of racial consciousness and self-identification. To grasp better the racializing effects of saintly imagination, we turn now to the ways in which an Orthodox image of African origins circulates globally, particularly to the United States. From the 1970s and 1980s, a growing number of Evangelical Protestants in North America have been converting to the Antiochene Orthodox and American Orthodox Churches. As opposed to the cradle Orthodox, who are reared in the church from birth, these nonethnic converts understand their entry into the church as “a return to something pure and sacred, something that had been lost.”18 Parallel to the globalizing Orthodox polity of local jurisdictions as national churches, Orthodox churches in North America are recognizably ethnic and tied with particular immigrant communities. For example, the Antiochene Orthodox stateside is understood to derive historically from the Greek Orthodox, and similarly so, the American Orthodox from the Russian Orthodox.19 According to American religious historian Phillip Lucas, conflicts between the cradle and nonethnic Orthodox frequently arise when aspirations for pan-Orthodox unities place pressure on the cultural and linguistic enclaves of ethnic Orthodoxies. He details one incident that occurred in the late 1990s: when a group of Caribbean immigrants wished to join an Antiochene Orthodox Church in Danbury, Connecticut, they faced strident racism from the local parishioners and eventually rejection.20 An older strand of conversions to the Orthodox denominations in the 1920s and 1930s reveals a slightly different American landscape of panOrthodox aspiration. Founded in 1921 by George A. McGuire (a native of Antigua), the African Orthodox Church was from its inception an institution of black consciousness, at its height reaching 30,000 members (currently in decline). In its initial stages of growth, it attracted mostly Anglican West Indies diaspora and established provinces in the U.S. and South Africa.

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Despite the modesty of its numbers, its fairly rapid development as an autonomous church demonstrated its historical convergence with emergent racial ideologies in the U.S. In one of his earlier sermons, McGuire pronounced his vision for a black-led ministry: “The promoting of both the spiritual and material welfare of our Race, and the fostering within them of the spirit of self-reliance and self-determination is peculiarly the duty of the hour for the Negro ministry . . . Only Negroes can be true shepherds and bishops of Negroes and that is what the African Orthodox Church is providing . . . we are just shepherds and sheep of one fold and one race.”21 Self-characterized as an institution of black autonomous reliance, the African Orthodox grew from within the entrenched battleground of American racism and racebased discrimination. Saintly patrons for black Americans thus functioned as racial referents for lost African origins. Officially a part of the African Orthodox Church, the Brotherhood of St. Moses the Black advances the mission of exploring the African roots of Orthodoxy. In this framework, the national and ethnic structure of Orthodox ties to Christianity’s ancient past serves to buttress racial ideologies of belonging. Figures of racially divine belonging, like St. Moses the Black and St. Mary the Egyptian, represent a deep ancestry of black spirituality. To establish its spiritually legitimate headship as truly independent, on the grounds of racial difference, the African nature of holy patrons was essential to uphold. Interestingly enough, as in the case of most African-Americans converts to Orthodoxy, the Brotherhood of St. Moses the Black belongs to mainline Eastern Orthodoxy rather than to Oriental Orthodoxy (i.e., Coptic or Ethiopian Orthodoxy).22 This suggestively shows how pan-Orthodox crossings of race and ethnicity create new differences in what the spiritual link to Egypt connotes: for black Americans, as the “African Egypt” on the one hand, and for Copts, as the blessed nation of Egypt on the other. Shifting racializations in African Orthodox sainthood occurred within broader historical transformations in global Christian imagination as it was shaped by African-American religion. Such transformations included a reiteration of the Hamitic Hypothesis; unlike the late modern European colonial version, which forwarded the Caucasoid-Hamite link, the contemporaneous American version equated Negro descendants with the biblical figure of Ham, forever cursed to worldly subordination. As historian of nineteenth-century American Christianity Sylvester Johnson argues, both white and black Americans were invested in the racial fact of the Hamitic identity of blacks: “Hamitic identity, as sensus communis, was primarily about originary concerns, not slavery apologia.”23 Against the predominant understanding of the Hamitic ideology as the white creed for proslavery politics, Johnson unpacks how blacks ascribe for themselves their dual identity as “Ham’s offspring” and “people of God.” It is out of America’s racial legacy that the relegated status of black skin as the “sign of Ham” intersects with the spiritual valuation of St. Moses the Black as a “black saint” for converts to African Orthodoxy from Protestantism.

160 Angie Heo Related to this shift in racial identification with the mythic origins of blackness is the racialization of the Egypt/Israel relation. Upheld as the patron saint of African origins, St. Moses the Black also represents the figural memory of his namesake, the Old Testament prophet Moses of Egypt. Against American Christian self-ascriptions as the “white Israel,” religious historian Albert Raboteau further points to an “old Egypt” in order to retrieve America’s spiritual-historical ties to the political present of racial oppression. Quoting his words, “to black Americans [America] was not a New Israel but the old Egypt, condemned to sure destruction unless she let God’s people go. The existence of slavery, segregation, discrimination, and racism contradicted the mythic identity of Americans as a “chosen people.”24 Raboteau, himself an African-American convert from Roman Catholicism to the Orthodox Church of America in the mid-2000s, advanced a black ideology of divine election for the chosen subjects of racism. Posited as the New Israel, the black inheritance of true salvation makes the memory of Egypt into the racialized site of exodus out of subjection. There is nothing intrinsically racial about black Madonnas or black saints like St. Moses the Black. Even up until today, Copts in Egypt remember St. Moses the Black not as an ethnic saint in his black appearance (as the Coptic Orthodox Church also remembers Ethiopia as part of its ecclesiastical self) but as one of the most dramatized converts to monasticism. Within North America, by contrast, the global unity of the Orthodox Church has translated into “ethnic” enclaves of Orthodox immigrants and pan-Orthodox strategies to transcend them. When structures of ethnic Orthodoxy converge upon widespread patterns of discrimination, the black-American spiritualization of slavery gives rise to newfound African Orthodox conversions toward lost “African origins.” Under these conditions, Orthodox Christianity, as the recovery of a “true past,” also offers an identitarian means of racial belonging. CONCLUSION Considering race and religion in multiple Orthodox Christian contexts presents a provocative thought experiment for engaging how varying representations of divine origins create distinct visual genres of saintly belonging. This chapter took off from Egypt, in particular, as it is both currently inhabited and imagined as an ancient birthplace of Christianity. In the contemporary moment, the historical interfaces of Christian belonging with colonial and national forces in Egypt opens Coptic Orthodoxy up to the globalizing influences of nation-states at war, such as the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973. As I have sought to detail, the rise of Arab nationalism rendered the “white” Marian image of Roman Catholic origin into a publicly central intercessor in the pan-Arab crisis. Not so much understood as a lost link to Western Europe, this Marian image was effectively Arabized into the prophetic sign of territorial reclamation. Elsewhere outside of Egypt, the African Orthodox of North America advanced Eastern Orthodoxy as

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a black religion against their experiences of racial discrimination and in broader concert with African-American ideologies of black identity and divine peoplehood. In this racializing milieu, an ancient Egypt of originary belonging and exodus functioned as the imagined site of salvific patronage. For this reason, the black image of St. Moses holds such different meanings for African Orthodox followers of St. Moses and their Coptic Orthodox counterparts in Egypt today. Racialized crossings between Coptic Orthodox and African Orthodox patrons thus reveal transformations in how saintly images travel across space and time. If shared saints serve as cultural components of global Christianity, it is important to watch how their disseminating forms intersect with domains of race, nationhood, and ethnic identity. To think through Orthodox Christianity as a particular scheme of Christian globalization, saints like the Virgin and St. Moses the Black offer deep histories toward examining how different Orthodox groups imagine their relation to one another. NOTES 1. Father Moses Berry, “Full Circle: A Final Word from the Brotherhood of St. Moses the Black,” in An Unbroken Circle: Linking Ancient African Christianity to the African-American Experience, eds. Fr. Paisius Altschul (St. Louis, MO: Brotherhood of St. Moses Press, 1997), p. 164. 2. Coptic Synaxarium, Paona 24. 3. al-Amba¯ Mu¯sa¯ al-Aswad (St. Moses the Black). VCD. Directed by Magued Tawfik. 4. H. H. Pope Shenouda III, Have You Seen the One I Love? (Boston: St. Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Church, 2004–2008), p. 189. 5. The Roman Catholic Church began sending missionaries to Egypt in the seventeenth century and the British and American Presbyterians later in the late nineteenth century. For an interesting history of Catholic bids for a joint formula of faith and a union with the Coptic Orthodox, see Magdi Guirguis and Pieternella van doorn Harder, The Emergence of the Modern Coptic Papacy (Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2011). For more on the impact of British colonial and American Evangelical missions, see Heather Sharkey, American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008) and Paul Sedra, From Mission to Modernity: Evangelicals, Reformers and Education in Nineteenth Century Egypt (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2011). 6. Chris Hann and Hermann Goltz, “Introduction: The Other Christianity?” in Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective, eds. Hann and Goltz (Berkeley: University of California Press), p. 3. In addition to this argument about the particular “global” structure of the Orthodox Churches, Hann and Goltz emphasize that “continuity” is a critical feature of Orthodox Christianity’s self-characterization. On both points, they distinguish anthropological approaches to Orthodox Christianity from those of Protestant and Catholic Christianities, which underscore their culturally “global” aspects and their ideologies of “radical discontinuity.” For comparison, see, for example, Fenella Cannell, “Introduction: The Anthropology of Christianity” in The Anthropology of Christianity, ed. Cannell (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 1–50, and Joel Robbins, “Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture: Belief, Time, and the Anthropology of Christianity,” Current Anthropology 48:1 (2007): 5–38.

162 Angie Heo 7. Edith R. Sanders, “The Hamitic Hypothesis; Its Origin and Functions in Time Perspective,” in The Journal of African History 10 (1969): 521–532. 8. Charles G. Seligman, Races of Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1930), p. 96. 9. Anthropologist Saba Mahmood discusses how this preservation of a cultural Coptic identity, against an Arab one, operates in the international realm of minority politics and their rights to religious freedom. For more, see Saba Mahmood, “Religious Freedom, the Minority Question, and Geopolitics in the Middle East,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54:2 (2012): 418–446. 10. As I write this (September 2013), I happen to be flying in an airplane from Frankfurt to Toronto, seated in the middle of 50 to 60 Iraqi refugees, all of whom are either Assyrian Orthodox or Chaldean Catholic. 11. al-Anwar, May 12, 1968. 12. The Virgin in Zeitoun: Official Report of Papal Commission in 1968. Led by Bishop Gregorious, Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate (Cairo, 1968). 13. Here, I borrow the coined phrase of other anthropologists who have worked on Marian apparitions in Egypt. See Sandrine Keriakos, “Apparitions of the Virgin in Egypt: Improving Relations between Copts and Muslims?” in Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean: Christians, Muslims, and Jews at Shrines and Sanctuaries, eds. Dionigi Albera and Maria Couroucli (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012) and Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, Pèlerinages d’Égypte: Histoire de la piété copte et musulmane XVe–XXe siècles (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2005). For more detailed analysis on how the objectivization of Marian apparitions contributed to a visual politics of Muslim–Christian difference, see my article “The Virgin Between Christianity and Islam: Sainthood, Media and Modernity in Egypt,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 81 (2013): 1117–1138. 14. Valentina Napolitano, “The Virgin of Guadalupe: A Nexus of Affect,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (2009): 96–112. 15. Peter Brown, “A Dark-Age Crisis: Aspects of the Iconoclastic Controversy,” The English Historical Review 88 (1973): 19. 16. Monique Scheer, “From Majesty to Mystery: Change in the Meanings of Black Madonnas from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries,” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 1435. Scheer’s art historical study is unique in that it takes seriously the psychological perceptual conditions of hagiographic depictions in text and icons. 17. Ibid., 1438. 18. Phillip Charles Lucas, “Enfants Terribles: The Challenge of Sectarian Converts to Ethnic Orthodox Churches in the United States,” Nova Religio 7 (2003): 6. 19. The first Eastern Orthodox presence in the Americas was established in the late 1700s to early 1800s by Russian missionaries in Alaska, then part of “Russian America.” Only after the U.S. purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867 did Russian Orthodoxy become increasingly associated with American immigrant communities; before this, Orthodox subjects were understood as converts to Russian Empire. For this fascinating history, see Ilya Vinkovetsky, Russian America: An Overseas Colony of a Continental Empire 1801–1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) and Sonja Luehrmann, Alutiq Villages Under Russian and U.S. Rule (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2008). 20. Lucas, “Enfants Terribles,” 17–18. 21. George A. McGuire, “The Bishop’s Sermon at the Ordination of Reverend F. A. Toote to the Priesthood,” The Negro Churchman 1 (1923): 4, quoted in Warren C. Platt, “The African Orthodox Church: An Analysis of its First Decade,” Church History 58 (1989): 482.

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22. Most African-American members converted to mainline Orthodoxy to “prioritize historical continuity and theology” with Western Christianity; Coptic Orthodoxy falls outside of this because they are considered “non-Chalcedonian.” For more detail, see Dellas Oliver Herbel, “The Relationship of the African Orthodox Church to the Orthodox Churches and Its Importance for Appreciating the Brotherhood of St. Moses the Black,” Black Theology: An International Journal 8 (2010): 27. 23. Sylvester Johnson, The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004): 5. 24. Albert J. Raboteau, “American Salvation: The Place of Christianity in Public Life” in Boston Review, 4 April 2005, http://bostonreview.net/american-sal vation-albert-raboteau-christianity-in-public-life (September 25, 2013).

8

The “Desolated Center” Baby Suggs, Holy, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved Pamela M. Hall

She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.1 Baby Suggs, holy, believed she had lied. (Beloved, 89).

Toni Morrison’s Beloved offers one of the most compelling—and vexed— representations of a saint in English-speaking fiction: the mysterious and magnetic “Baby Suggs, holy.” Morrison’s magisterial novel of American slavery and its effects is centrally concerned with the question of survival, personal and social: How can we name and understand the effects of such racial violence? What provides resources for those who have survived it? What does it even mean for people to survive in the wake of a past that is, along with their present, in Morrison’s words, “intolerable” (4)? It is Baby Suggs in the novel who offers in her work a response (if not an answer) to this challenge of survival, and it is Baby Suggs whose life—and death, and memory—form a kind of pedagogy for survival for others in the novel. I engage with this novel as one seeking to find the most satisfying language for understanding virtue and high goodness and as one who looks to literature, especially to the novel, as a crucial resource in this search for language. On one hand, so-called virtue ethics offers a rich vocabulary of moral personality, of response, of perception, of emotion—of virtue. Surely this should help in understanding saints. But too much virtue ethics takes the emergence of virtuous persons as the predictable outcome of communal processes of moral formation, from Aristotle on. I am leery of this assumption; communities injure and displace moral development as much as encourage it. Beyond this, individuals exceed the terms of their social imbeddedness. People of high goodness often emerge in ways that challenge or exceed a dominant community’s sense of value and norm (think of Saint Francis, Joan of Arc, Dorothy Day, or even Teresa of Avila). Those who most innovatively and richly express virtue are often not well explained by appeals to communal narratives about goodness.2 This is strange and compelling. I want also to think about what high goodness means in terms of interiority. Saints are so often identified by their extraordinary works, by acts of

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generosity, or courage, or sacrifice—understandably enough. But this leaves untouched the question of how their works are related to their inner lives. What might be learned if we consider goodness as bearing on the quality of the self? Goodness in its most exceptional expressions may not best be captured by an appeal to a stable self or unified character, which may, pace Aristotle, be an illusory goal at best. I take the self as the mystery at the core of the moral life, and I want to pursue a conception of the self as always ongoing, often obscure to us.3 How might we understand the virtues in relation to this self as an ongoing project, and how might we understand the work of high goodness, of saintliness, in relation to that self’s inner life? Even more: How might we understand the virtues as expressive of a self caught within or between communities rather than as products of communities’ formation?4 I turn to literature, especially to the genre of the novel, as an important form of ethical reflection for this work. Novels from their inception have taken on a special role in representing selves and their development within social worlds, showing how people navigate, defy, resist, collude, founder, or succeed, in those worlds. They offer resourceful and precise languages of interiority and individuality. Novels can provide a language for and visions of good people (but not just good ones) by showing us the particularity, even the peculiarity, of high goodness, its adaptations to or perplexities in material circumstance, and the shapes of such a commitment within the whole of a human life and in the history of a community. Finally, they can open us to worlds in which goodness is most needed—and most surprising. And thus we come to the world of Beloved. Recall the novel’s central action. Sethe, a former slave from the farm of Sweet Home in Kentucky, has fled in 1855 to the Ohio home of her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, who is called “holy” in the ministry she has taken up. (Baby Suggs has been ransomed from slavery by the only son, Halle, she has been “allowed” to see grow to adulthood.) Sethe arrives in Ohio with her newborn daughter, Denver, named for the poor runaway “whitegirl” (8) who has assisted Sethe in the birth. She joins there her mother- in-law, along with her two boys and the “crawling already?” (93) baby whom she has sent on ahead of her. Sethe flees grotesque abuse, the theft of her breast milk, and a subsequent flogging, at the hands of “schoolteacher,” the overseer of Sweet Home, and his two nephews. The sight of this abuse has driven mad her husband Halle. Sethe enjoys, with her mother-in-law, a single month of free life with a newfound community of former slaves in Cincinnati before schoolteacher and his nephew track her down. She responds to the attempt to recapture her by killing her “crawling already?” baby and seeking to kill her other children. The ghost of the dead baby haunts their house at 124 Bluestone Road in the aftermath; the community of former slaves recoils from Sethe’s defiance of remorse for her choice, and Baby Suggs takes to her bed in apparent despair, finally dying shortly before the end of the war. The novel’s present commences in 1873, with Sethe and Denver’s isolation called newly into question by the arrival of Paul D, a former slave from Sweet

166 Pamela M. Hall Home, on the scene, and with the apparent incarnation of the ghost into the form of a young woman who arrives to stay. Her appearance in human form compels a long forestalled reckoning—not only with the violence of the past, suffered or perpetrated, but with the community’s ostracism and Sethe’s defiance. To start: Beloved offers a historical world in which (white) communal structures destroy and maim, in which (black) men and women struggle to survive despite these structures rather than to flourish because of them. (Already we can see this is a world very different from the world of beneficent community envisioned by much virtue ethics.) The community of former slaves in Cincinnati must reckon with a past of almost unimaginable suffering and injury, a past Morrison means to help us to imagine. Human, they have been treated as not human. All have lived through the worst sort of racial violence, indeed were born into this violence: into chattel slavery, sexual degradation, social shame and isolation, the loss of kin and friend. Morrison’s novel builds a language to register the toll of this violence, both as a record of physical and material harm but, crucially, also as injury to the very inner lives of those black people of whom she writes.5 The abiding question of these survivors is how to live through what they have already lived through. The past and how to hold themselves in relation to it emerges, in Morrison’s telling, as the central life problem for all the survivor characters of the novel: for Sethe, Paul D, Stamp Paid, Ella, and Lady Jones, as well as for Baby Suggs. Morrison casts this as a problem with experiencing time in part, as a problem of living disposed toward possibility and change in the light of the past’s horrors. These survivors have developed strategies for managing their consciousness so that memory, grief, dread do not destroy outright. These strategies take different forms, on different levels. Sethe seeks to hope for as little as possible, to remain (frozen?) in the mundane present. Told by Paul D of the fate of her husband, Sethe thinks: No thank you. I don’t want to have to remember that. I have other things to do: worry, for example, about tomorrow, about Denver, about Beloved, about age and sickness not to speak of love . . . But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for the next day. (70) On another level, Sethe wants to remain in the past, obsessively and defiantly. (This would not require a reckoning with it or mourning for it.) She remarks early on in the novel to Denver, warning her about what might lie beyond 124, that “nothing ever dies” (36); she calls this lingering of past events into the present “rememory” (36). Sethe will retreat into a denial of time altogether, in seeking, whatever the cost, a “timeless present” (184) in 124 with her dead child come back again, Beloved. This denial will involve a rejection of love from Paul D and even a withdrawal from Denver, her living daughter.

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The experience of time and memory bears of course on love, and this is the other dimension of the past’s effects for the novel’s survivors, beyond even Sethe’s characteristically extreme responses: how it is possible to love— themselves and others—having already experienced what the loss of such love can cost? Paul D’s strategy is to save himself by “lov[ing] just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one” (45). He contrasts his approach with Sethe’s “too thick” maternal love, which refuses to compromise or even to accept limits despite the constraints of enslaved life (164). Paul D takes his strategy of emotional economy to indict his manhood, to make him more a slave than a man, and in this he compares himself unfavorably to Halle and Sixo (220)—who did not survive. Ella too, “practical” (256), sharp-tongued, “beaten every way but down,” (258) endures rather than loves (92): “Daily life took as much as she had” (256). Still others in the community have precisely gone “crazy,” lost the ability to function in confronting their world’s manifest craziness (97). It is Baby Suggs who is cast in the role of the ethical and emotional center of this community of former slaves, of survivors on-the-way, within Cincinnati— by inspiring, encouraging, and seeking to heal all those who have lived these “unlivable lives” (173): and it is in this work that Baby Suggs is called repeatedly “holy.”6 I do not believe this epithet is ever ironized or called into question by Morrison, but it is complicated by her within the action of the novel. For Baby Suggs’s response to Sethe’s infanticide is cynicism and despair, ending in her eventual death. This looks like the defeat or failure of a saint at least, but perhaps even this failure may serve the community she cares for (beyond perhaps her intentions), and perhaps even her despair may offer a model for a richer life, beyond the model of endurance. These are strange claims, I know, but they are important for considering what sort of exemplar or saint Baby Suggs is—and what kind is needed within the world of the novel. I want to consider then Baby Suggs’s life in its whole arc: her enslaved life, her life in freedom before “the Misery” (as Stamp Paid calls Sethe’s act of infanticide, 177), her life after the Misery, and her life, as it were, after her death. (This is after all a novel with no trouble acknowledging the power of the dead; is Sethe’s view of rememory ever really repudiated?) In fact, we are given access to Baby Suggs only in recollection in the novel’s present of 1873 to 1874; she has died, and, we are told, died unhappily, some eight years before. Morrison reveals this in the novel’s opening passage; she then immediately conjures for us Baby Suggs’s dying state of mind, who hears her grandsons Howard and Buglar leave with apparent apathy. Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn’t get interested in leaving life or living it, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. Her past had been like her present—intolerable— and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color. (3–4)

168 Pamela M. Hall In this beginning, the novel reminds us of the absence of the holy presence it offers in memory. Only retrospectively does it give us access to the power and mystery of Baby Suggs, through memories of her by others—memories of her extraordinary acts, but beyond this, of her extraordinary “heart” (this very heart which has apparently despaired). In this regard, her life, her presence remains real, active—and still under interpretation—by the community from which she emerges. I think this process of communal reinterpretation and engagement is key to Baby Suggs’s work of holiness. Morrison tells us that Baby’s slave life shared central features with other slaves’ lives in the novel, tolerating the “intolerable.” In this she is not exceptional—or, better, her endurance is no more exceptional than others’. Sethe recalls Baby Suggs after learning of Halle’s death: [I]n all of Baby’s life, as well as Sethe’s own, men and women were moved around like checkers. Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn’t run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized. So Baby’s eight children had six fathers. What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children. Halle she was able to keep the longest . . . “God take what He would,” she said. And He did, and He did, and He did and then gave her Halle who gave her freedom when it didn’t mean a thing. (23) There is a savage understatement in Baby Suggs’s naming of her affliction “the nastiness of life,” and a bleakness to her pronouncement that “God take what He would.” Both cover over part of the action of loss and suffering. It is the whites of the novel who have done the taking, perhaps God who has done the letting them take. Baby Suggs’s own strategy of survival at this point is endurance, and a withholding of committed love from her children (except perhaps for Halle?) as a response to “the nastiness of life.” (In this, she is distinct from Sethe in her attitude, and her choices more closely resemble those of other enslaved black women in the novel.) Baby Suggs’s life at Sweet Home, while a material improvement, does not mitigate the “nastiness of life.” It casts it in a new light. In an extraordinary passage immediately preceding the Misery, as Baby Suggs senses “a dark and coming thing” (138, 147), we are given direct access to the memory of Baby Suggs by the narrator. Baby recollects her life at Sweet Home, where whatever the work, at least “nobody knocked her down” (140). Sweet Home was a marked improvement. No question. And no matter, for the sadness was at her center, the desolated center where the self that was no self made its home. Sad as it was that she did not know where her children were buried or what they looked like if alive, fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like. (140)

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What enslaved life has denied her, and what she grieves, is the opportunity to build an ordinary life, an ordinary self, by dint of her own choices and relationships. She feels empty, “desolated.” Her life at Sweet Home is marked by hard work and little talk, “because what was there to say that the roots of her tongue could manage?” (141). Morrison presents her suffering as both physical harm (her hard labor, her crippled hip, her past of being, we can infer, “knocked down”) and as emotional harm (her grief for her lost children and, beyond them, for the empty or abandoned self that she has never had the chance to know). In both aspects of her suffering, Baby Suggs’s experience conveys what is characteristic of enslaved life: the denial of sustained social connections necessary for recognition by others and thus perhaps for self-understanding, the denial of liberties of choice and time, as well as the infliction of pain. It is essential to Morrison’s project in the novel that it illuminates the wounds to the self, the damages to the interiority of these survivors, as well as to their bodies. This insistence on Baby Suggs’s “desolated center” and her “little talk” in her enslaved life makes the character of her life in freedom all the more miraculous—and inexplicable. Entering into freedom, Baby Suggs does two things: she feels her heart beat and she reclaims her married name (141– 143). Called Jenny by Mr. Garner, she renames herself after the husband she has lost in slaved life.7 Morrison’s summoning of the sensation of Baby Suggs’s heart and her claiming of a family name signal the two forms of activity that will form the substance of her work in free life, until the Misery: her attempt to locate her family and care for them and her work as an “unchurched” preacher (87). It is her “great, big, old heart” (89) that forms the resource for her work in freedom and that can be considered most fundamentally a work of holiness. But her heart sustains (or requires?) many specific and practical expressions of work. Baby Suggs feeds and corrects; she leads. As Sethe recalls: 124 had been a cheerful, buzzing house where Baby Suggs, holy, loved, cautioned, fed, chastised, and soothed. Where not one but two pots simmered on the stove; where the lamp burned all night long. . . . Talk was low and to the point—for Baby Suggs, holy, didn’t approve of extra. “Everything depends on knowing how much,” she said, and “Good is knowing when to stop.” (86–87) This is Baby Suggs, holy, as teacher and comforter, perhaps also as lawgiver. (And in this work she shares leadership with Stamp Paid, as “mountain” to “his sky,” 170). She is strict, bountiful, tender, wise. Saintly. There is a dimension of the maternal in this work.8 Sethe’s recollection of Baby Suggs in this ministry is also part of a longing for her touch and her counsel to “ ‘Lay em down, Sethe. Sword and shield. Down. Down. . . . Don’t study war no more. Lay all that mess down’ ” (86). In this, she helps to create for Sethe a place (in her mind and in 124) that is not merely about resistance or horror or anger. It is a place beyond the experience of slavery. Indeed, Baby

170 Pamela M. Hall Suggs, with Stamp Paid, helps to create a community (of which 124 is one center) for all of Cincinnati’s former slaves, one that promotes a life beyond that of mere survival or endurance. Most crucial in this building of community, and reserved for her alone, is “the Call” Baby Suggs gives to her fellow survivors. She seems to find it, mysteriously, as part of finding her heartbeat when she enters into freedom; the greatness of this heart is revealed to us (and to her?) only in the Call. Morrison lets us hear the Call, this heart’s work, in exalted language merging pungent vernacular and formal beauty. When warm weather came, Baby Suggs, holy, followed by every black man, woman, and child who could make it through, took her great heart to the Clearing. . . . In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart. . . . She told them the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it. . . . “Here,” she said, “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs, flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it, love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. . . . You got to love it, you! . . . This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. . . . More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.” (87–89) The cadences of the Call are scriptural; this “preaching” is offered with the power of revelation. Baby Suggs’s Call to her fellow survivors is to live, to forge a “livable life” (198), not merely to survive. Her Call is also crucially performative: she creates, in priestly fashion, a space (“Here”) in which a “livable life” can be enacted—as a ritual of love, as participatory, as communal.9 It restores and repairs what needs restoration and reparation. She calls on these survivors of racial violence to love themselves and to love each other, in their bodies (which have been so reviled and so tormented by white people) and, in this act of loving, to heal their hearts, their very selves (“ ‘For this is the prize’ ”). She affirms bodily pleasure, joy, grief, and love. The Clearing forms a space for this work to be accomplished, giving it a (temporary) home. In this respect, I see the Clearing as the making of this new life immanent rather than as a call to transcendence.10 She brings her people home. There is no language about God at all. Her rhetoric sounds Christian but is not ultimately Christocentric; this is work they must do for themselves and for each other—with Baby Suggs’s help. “She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine” (88). Yet this space—in time, in the forest, in her heart perhaps—will only always be a partial healing, because there is still “yonder” to contend with, the space “out there” in which “whitepeople” still enslave, hunt, and kill “blackpeople.”11 It is also always partial because the Call is dependent on Baby Suggs

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to do the Calling and to enact the event. She makes the Clearing clear; she holds the war at bay so that they may study something else. What this costs her is not marked, at least not there. Consider Baby Suggs’s own relation to this work: “she let her great heart beat in their presence” (87). Morrison shows us Baby’s abject and unmediated gift of herself to her people. There is no question that this has a Christian resonance. There is power, beauty, and high consolation in the Call (and this section of the book has drawn considerable theological attention). But we cannot stop there—because the Call is situated as a moment, an ecstatic moment, in her life and in the life of a people. The action of the novel takes us beyond the Call. It compels us in narrative form to look beyond the Clearing to the rest of Baby’s life and to the life of the community she serves. Morrison does not attempt to resolve the mystery of Baby Suggs’s gift; we are not told how the “desolated center” comes to be capable of this work. We are not told of the cost to her of this work or whether she counts this cost herself. She does not speak of this in the Clearing—and she is not asked to. The Call in this sense is not fully dialogic in structure: she gives and others receive. She is not called to. Neither is the Call storytelling, where she might “put her story next” to another’s, as Paul D wishes to do with Sethe (273). In this way, the novel as an act of memory supersedes the Call. Baby Suggs, holy, remains mysterious, a life-giver whose life itself is still a question. Is her holy work liberatory for her—or is it perhaps another form of labor, this time chosen, and for “blackpeople” but still not for herself? She calls on her people to love each part of themselves that she has acknowledged in herself as “busted,” worn out (87). Morrison does not tell us, but she may raise the question by placing the Call within an account of Baby Suggs’s “unlivable,” “intolerable” life (5, 173). The effect of this seems tragic rather than a suggestion of easy Christian triumphalism: this is not, if we look at the whole of her life, a person simply ennobled through suffering or taught by pain to cast herself on the Lord. (She is here more like Moses leading to but never entering the Promised Land.) The injuries and privation that are the effects of slavery may remain with her even in her “redemptive” work. Even Morrison’s choice of language in describing Baby Suggs’s greatest gift—her “great, big, old heart” (89)—reminds us by its emphatic, colloquial simplicity that it is not really explaining this heart. Consider how the “Feast” and its aftermath alter the shape of Baby Suggs’s life and force a separation of Baby Suggs with the Call. Twenty-eight days after Sethe’s coming, Baby Suggs opens her home to her community in celebration for the arrival of Sethe and her children. Food is (miraculously?) multiplied so that there is plenty for all, and, when the revelry is over, the community responds with resentment at her bounty. 124, rocking with laughter, goodwill, and food for ninety, made them angry. Too much, they thought. Where does she get it all, Baby Suggs, holy? Why is she and hers always the center of things? How come she

172 Pamela M. Hall always knows exactly what to do and when? Giving advice; passing messages; healing the sick, hiding fugitives, loving, cooking, cooking, loving, preaching, singing, dancing and loving everybody like it was her job and hers alone. . . . Loaves and fishes were His powers—. . . . It made them furious. (137) There is a grievous and complex irony at work in this scene. Baby Suggs, holy, makes (for once) a personal claim and invites the community to rejoice with her in her family’s reconstitution, (for once) bringing together her private joys and her public work. Miracles are worked and there is food for all. The community responds—with resentment at her generosity, even at her apparent capacity for miracle. Having counted on her extraordinariness for her Call in the Clearing, they condemn her for extraordinariness here— because she has not suffered as much as they have, to their lights. Having enjoyed the benefits of her heroic work and heroic heart, they take her to task for her very capacity for this love and for her (very) human joy in her family, accusing her of pride (137). Baby Suggs, the next day, is aware of their anger and feels “a dark and coming thing” (138). She was accustomed to the knowledge that nobody prayed for her—but this free-floating repulsion was new . . . And then she knew. Her friends and neighbors were angry at her because she had overstepped, given too much, offended them by excess. (138) Baby Suggs’s loneliness in her work is never clearer. Her strength is so much counted on that no one prays for her. Now the gifts she has offered in joy provoke “envy.” The community’s resentment prompts their failure (Stamp Paid calls it “meanness,” 157) to send warning that day to Baby Suggs and Sethe when the schoolteacher and his minions appear in town. They appear in the yard of 124, and the Misery follows—one day after the Feast. Both events together form a kind of anti-Clearing, sowing contention and animosity between Sethe, Baby Suggs, and the community of survivors she has cared for, enacting division and judgment among these survivors. And Baby Suggs seems to accept her community’s accusation of excess and pride rather than to correct it; picking up her injured grandchildren, she mutters, “ ‘Beg your pardon, I beg your pardon” ’ (152). Are these words directed to her grandchildren? To the people she has offended? To God? Perhaps to all three. Baby Suggs seems to blame herself for what has happened, against any reasonable logic of cause. She abstains from criticizing either Sethe or the community that has failed her—perhaps rejecting an ethics that would parse the impossible choice of a life of slavery or a safety in death. (Sethe takes on this parsing with terrible decisiveness.) But—this is not the end of Baby Suggs’s life, nor perhaps of her work. Baby Suggs after the Misery withdraws from public life, withdraws, it might be said, from life itself; she “dismisse[s] her great heart” (89).12 This

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withdrawal is lengthy—ten years, lasting until her death—and is a cause for shame and consternation among the people to whom she brought healing. It is also extreme, almost an abstention from meaningful human interaction altogether.13 She fixes shoes (this menial work brings in money) and refuses to Call; she takes to her bed and considers color; when asked for an account of herself, she only pronounces that there is “no bad luck in the world but whitefolks” (104). Stamp Paid remembers an exchange with her early in this withdrawal, in what is the most detailed recollection in the novel of her words after the Misery; he notes the blankness and “indifference” (178) of her expression and manner, a dramatic shift from the engagement and practical tenderness that have characterized her earlier ministry: “Saturday coming. You going to Call or what?” “If I call them and they come, what on earth I’m going to say?” “Say the Word!” He checked his shout too late . . . “That’s one other thing took away from me,” she said . . . “Can’t nobody Call like you. You have to be there.” “What I have to do is get in my bed and lay down. I want to fix on something harmless in this world.” “What world you talking about? Ain’t nothing harmless down here.” “Yes it is. Blue. That don’t hurt nobody. Yellow neither.” “You getting in the bed to think about yellow?” “I likes yellow.” . . . “You blaming God,” he said. “That’s what you doing.” “No, Stamp. I ain’t.” “You saying the whitefolks won? That what you saying?” “I’m saying they came in my yard.” . . . “You saying God give up? Nothing left for us but pour out our own blood?” “I’m saying they came in my yard.” “You punishing Him, ain’t you.” “Not like He punish me.” “You can’t do that, Baby. It ain’t right.” “Was a time I knew what that was.” “You still know.” “What I know is what I see: a nigger woman hauling shoes.” (178–179) Baby Suggs resists every attempt by Stamp Paid to elicit from her any substantive account of her thoughts on the Misery or on anything else. She resists the making of meaning altogether: every attempt by Stamp to put words in her mouth, to encourage an account of herself (“You saying . . .?”) is turned aside, met with a nonresponsive reply (“I likes yellow.” . . . “ ‘I’m saying they came in my yard.”) Her focus on color seems deliberately dissociative to me, abstracted from human meaning and from human suffering, “harmless.” Even Stamp’s claim that she is punishing God goads her only

174 Pamela M. Hall into: “Not like He punish me.” How does she mean this? Literally? Is she rather speaking of the unseemliness of a world order that would “punish” a Baby Suggs? We can’t say. She concludes her exchange only by recharacterizing herself, away from Stamp’s importuning, in the demeaning terms of white racism: she calls herself “a nigger woman hauling shoes.” This ugly capitulation to how whitepeople might see her (in language that explicitly denies the reclaiming love of the Clearing and the community’s name for her as holy) signals her final turning away from self-explanation. It also signals her rejection of the Call: now she will speak to no one, about nothing important. There is anger surely in this response and despair—but not just at God. The community she conjured in the Clearing has failed her at 124; the daughter-in-law whose arrival she has celebrated has murdered her granddaughter and driven a wedge between her and the community of survivors. All of this occurs within the frame of a white society and law that will recognize no boundary or limit in its persecution of black people. Consider Baby Suggs’s recurrent maxim after the Misery, “ ‘There ain’t no bad luck in the world but whitefolks’ ” (89, 104). On one level, the truth of this pronouncement can hardly be denied in the context of the novel’s action; the Misery is only intelligible within the “logic” created by slavery and the coming of schoolteacher. But her maxim functions almost like a koan in her utterances; it is an explanation that does not explain. It is not supposed to. It refuses to engage or reflect. In this regard, it is a koan meant finally not to illuminate on a deeper level but perhaps to make all attempts to illuminate despair. (Compare this reflection on white racism to Stamp Paid’s deep and satisfying account of racism, of the “jungle” the whites themselves plant: “The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own” (198–199). Baby’s pronouncement is intended rather as an admission of defeat and helplessness over white hatred and violence. It covers over Sethe’s own choices. It totalizes what, in the Clearing, Baby Suggs had sought precisely to offset and counteract. It is also literally her deathbed testimony (104). She seems to let them have the last word. This is why she repeats, “ ‘They came in my yard,’ ” on my view—there is no space that will not be invaded and violated, she has learned. The body, the family, the Clearing, 124—all are subject to the apparently insatiable and inexorable hatred of whites for blacks.14 Behind even this claim is the failure of her own community to come to her aid on the day after the Feast, a failure about which she is silent. Baby’s own funeral, years later, will be marked by acrimony and disaffection between Sethe and the community of former slaves: “So Baby Suggs, holy, having devoted her freed life to harmony, was buried amid a regular dance of pride, fear, condemnation and spite” (171). If this were the end of the work of Baby Suggs, holy, this would be a dismal end indeed; it would be either a testament to the defeat of a saint or the rejection by the saint of her calling in the face of bitter loss. (Both meanings are entertained by those she leaves behind.) Such an end would be tragic and a testament to the ruin

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and desolation worked by the effects of slavery (and by Sethe’s reckless act in the face of it and by the failure of love in the community of survivors). But—the arc of the novel’s action after the death of Baby Suggs takes us beyond even this conclusion: the effect of her life as a whole works its own question within the lives of those she has left behind. Her negative work, her period of silence, feeds this question. Thus I see Baby’s Call and service, and her despair, withdrawal, and death, as serving an important moral function in the novel’s action—they create a moral uneasiness, an interpretive itch, in those she leaves behind. The survivors want to understand her. They feel they have wronged her. They feel remorse, shame, and a sense of unfinished business. These feelings help, with the coming of Beloved herself, to take them beyond the morass of resentment, blame, and guilt in which all have been suspended since the Misery. Beloved’s incarnation sets in motion the change and unfreezing of emotion that has been locked in place for years. It also sets in motion a revisitation of the meaning of Baby’s life—and opens the possibility of a reintervention by Baby Suggs herself.15 (Note that the novel suggests glancingly that Beloved may be sent by Baby Suggs herself, or that she is at least in communication with the ghost; Denver wonders this several times within the novel [4, 75].) Sethe returns to the Clearing in the novel’s present, with Denver and Beloved, and recalls the end of Baby Suggs’s life. The Clearing, once conjuring a renewed communal love, now conjures its loss—and a remorse that Sethe will not voice elsewhere. She recalls her mother-in-law with longing and guilt. Baby Suggs, holy, believed she had lied. There was no grace—imaginary or real—and no sunlit dance in a Clearing could change that. Her faith, her love, her imagination and her great big old heart began to collapse twenty-eight days after her daughter-in-law arrived. (89) Sethe holds herself responsible for this change in Baby’s life, and one attraction of the “timeless present” she creates with Beloved in 124 is that she will not have to feel this remorse any longer (183). Indeed, Beloved’s return seems only a completion of the haunting and a crystallization of Sethe’s own “rememory.” Sethe has never left the tool shed, and increasingly she works with Beloved for a restoration of what was lost there. She wants a “timeless present” in which the past is effaced and the future only a recursive practice. Again there is paradox—such a desire denies the very nature of time and her own history. (A timeless present is not a recovery of the past; neither is it recovery from the past.) 124 becomes a repetitive and, increasingly, deathly enactment of demand, grievance, and reconciliation. Nothing is ever resolved or accomplished—that would require change. We still are in the tool shed and we cannot leave. Just so, the community of survivors are themselves suspended in alienation from 124, aloof from Sethe and apparently more concerned with self-justification than with the wellbeing of Sethe and Denver.

176 Pamela M. Hall Stamp Paid seeks to intervene in this standoff; he enters the yard of 124 and knocks (against his usual practice of free access). He recollects his earlier fault-finding of Baby Suggs with shame, and he braves even the voices around 124 (the collective voices of all the unquiet dead) to make recompense to her, to her family. In this scene, he enters imaginatively into her despair in such a way as finally to understand the humanity of her despair, its gut intelligibility. Now, too late, he understood her. The heart that pumped out love, the mouth that spoke the Word, didn’t count. They came in her yard anyway and she could not approve or condemn Sethe’s rough choice. One or the other might have saved her, but beaten up by the claims of both, she went to bed. The whitefolks had tired her out at last . . . Mistaking her, upbraiding her, owing her, now he needed to let her know he knew, and to get right with her and her kin. (180–181) He grants to Baby Suggs in memory the human limits (limits to what can be “tolerated,” to what can be asked, given, taken) that the community (and its predicament) refused to her in life. Having received and enjoyed the gift of her very heart, Stamp Paid now understands that something is due to her as well. This movement of emotion and understanding is the catalyst for Stamp Paid’s attempts at intervention. The memory of Baby Suggs also influences the deliberations of Denver in the wake of Beloved’s return. It becomes increasingly clear to Denver inside 124 that the price of Beloved’s return is life. Denver must then leave to save herself—and her mother. Denver must step off the porch, leave the yard of 124, and seek help from the very community that has scorned her family for so long. Contemplating this action, she considers what could await her out there; she recalls Sethe’s talk of rememory and the despair of Baby Suggs, even Baby’s bitter condemnations of all whitepeople, with which even Sethe had argued. She freezes. Remembering those conversations and her grandmother’s last and final words, Denver stood on the porch in the sun and couldn’t leave it. Her throat itched; her heart kicked—and then Baby Suggs laughed, clear as anything. “You mean I never told you nothing about Carolina? About your daddy? You don’t remember nothing about how come I walk the way I do and about your mother’s feet, not to speak of her back? I never told you all that? Is that why you can’t walk down the steps? My Jesus my.” But you said there was no defense. “There ain’t.” Then what do I do? “Know it, and go on out the yard. Go on.” (244)

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In 124, where the past is alive and memory capable of incarnation, Baby Suggs herself reenters to persuade her granddaughter to overcome her own counsels of despair. This may certainly be a manifestation of her strength and her “great heart,” renewed.16 But it is also a different side of Baby Suggs from her great heart given for all, to all (86–87). It is a Baby who is able to speak, not the Word for others but of her own sufferings and of those of her family. It is a Baby who now requires from Denver strength of her own and a willingness to cope with a knowledge that has broken Baby Suggs herself.17 Her weakness is perfected in Denver’s strength. Her words work more as an invitation to Denver than as a commandment, and they help to create another opportunity for the community of survivors to intervene and rescue her family. The novel’s resolution is thus accomplished communally, with the thirty women, led by Ella, offering what was withheld years ago when the four horsemen came into Baby Suggs’s yard to make claims of their own. The women begin, in response to Denver’s request, by providing food to the family, in contrast to the event of the Feast (at which they were fed).18 They end by reconstituting the Clearing in seeking to “rescue” Sethe and her family from the power of the dead. Arriving at 124 to make this rescue, they see themselves once more at the Feast (in perhaps another affirmation of “rememory”). They give to themselves, and to Sethe, the music that, before, Baby Suggs had called out of them. They reestablish the communal connection their past envy and judgment had helped to break. For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat and simmering leaves, where the voices of women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words. Building voice upon voice until they found it . . . It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash. (261) The women intervene in the unnatural immersion in the past in which 124 is fixed, an immersion for which they bear some responsibility: now they “baptize” Sethe in their song. They now do what they can to make things right. This is more than a confrontation with rememory, more than even a restoration of past joy and community; it is a kind of reparation for their earlier failure to live the Clearing, beyond the Clearing. It is therefore a completion of the Clearing’s work (and a reparation of the divisions sowed by their grievances after the Feast). Crucially, this completion is not something Baby Suggs has had to do for them—this is something they do for her and her family. It is also something they do for themselves. Here then they go beyond the Word spoken by Baby Suggs; they move to a space of radical enactment of harmony in wordless music. Before, this was the song they gave back to Baby Suggs, following her Call in the Clearing (89). Now they call it out of themselves.19 Beloved is banished; Denver will be reincorporated into the community and accepted into adulthood; only Sethe’s fate

178 Pamela M. Hall is left a question, responding to Paul D’s claim that she is “ ‘her own best thing’ ” with “ ‘Me? Me?’ ” (273) Baby Suggs’s work is perfected in the community’s own work of recompense, restitution, and recovery. Her own life (not just her Call)—including her withdrawal and the memory of her after her death—have helped to make this work possible. Crucial to this work is also its temporal frame: such reparative work requires, the novel shows us, the material of time and the movement of lives through it. There can be no escape from this “narrative” work, this temporal work, of leaving the past behind, and of moving into the future, which does not cost life itself. It is this movement which, within the novel, most characterizes a “livable life” beyond survival. As Paul D says to Sethe in the novel’s close: “ ‘Sethe, me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow’ ” (273). All of the survivors of the novel reckon with memory as a form of menace, with the past as an enemy to life. Beloved shows us, in its own narrative work, how memory can also serve in this work of making tomorrow, of making a “livable life.” The memory of Baby Suggs, as much as her living action, functions as a moral resource for the community of survivors. Memory of her helps to recall the survivors to their best selves but also to remind them of their past failings. Even the memory of Baby’s despair compels them to fill the void of meaning and justice with which she has left them. In so doing, they may make a space (a moral space? a mystical space?) for the presence of Baby Suggs to emerge once again. This is the whole gift of Baby Suggs, holy, to her people: a gift that is only completed in the work of their own lives and a gift she could not, in her own lifetime, give to herself. What a “livable life” requires then according to Beloved is an acknowledgement that there is no safety secured by boundary but only an openness to change and to suffering, a willingness to undergo (as a kind of virtue needed for living). This acknowledgement and openness can only be borne together, especially for those individuals and communities marked out for special systemic violence, and it can only be built together; such is the work of love.20 In this communal act of a love that renews life, not even the death of a saint is an impediment: the goodness that is the work of Baby Suggs’s life is completed in the work of the community she sought to heal; the “failure” of Baby Suggs, who is indeed holy, is repaired by the family and friends who build a life together after her. Beloved may then afford us new ways to imagine a self of high goodness, even in the teeth of affliction and failure; it does not identify holiness with either wholeness or success. It shows us the ways in which high goodness can emerge precisely out of great violence and suffering, not as some triumph over them but almost as or by a coexisting with their effects: Baby Suggs, holy—the “desolated center” Calling. On another level, Morrison never really attempts to explain the miracle of Baby Suggs’s great heart, which comes to life only in freedom. Her interiority, beyond its desolation, is left obscure to us. But Morrison gives us a vision of this great heart working and grieving and even failing, a vision not reducible to an action or a mission or even a set of virtues but captured in the shape of her life as a (broken) whole. Beloved’s moral

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world suggests new ways to imagine the work of the virtues as the work of lives—and as created and made meaningful in a frame of radical communality, in which selves can fail and be borne up by others, and in which agency is not most richly understood in individual terms. Thus it helps us to reenvision a communal dimension to the life of the virtues. Community’s relationship to its members should not best be understood as authoritarian or homogenizing or reductive, but rather as pluralistic, radically historical, and as capable of giving injury to individuals, even tragic injury, as well as of restoration. The novel does not flinch in registering the ways in which communities can damage their members through the uses of power in law, acts and systems of violence, and abjection. It recognizes that distinct communities can exist in the same time and place and that they can interact and even interpenetrate through language and memory as well as through direct agency. Beloved may also give us new ways to appreciate the place of saints in the life of the virtues and in the lives of communities; saints can serve as exemplars not only in their success but even in their failure, teaching even by marking their defeats—and by provoking others to take up the cause. Broken by the implacable violence of “whitepeople” and by the pettiness of the “blackpeople” she has worked to save, Baby Suggs despairs. But the memory of her life and of her despair works on her fellow survivors as a goad, provoking them to take her place and to make their own Call, one which must be renewed and lived into the future. In this they continue her work and their own: they enact a life together. The moral pedagogy of this saint is complex, perhaps ironic, certainly tragic, but it is surely even more compelling for being so. NOTES 1. Quotation is from Beloved by Toni Morrison (New York: Plume/Penguin Books, 1988), 88. First published 1987 by Alfred A Knopf. All subsequent references to this novel will follow the pagination of the Plume/Penguin edition and will appear parenthetically within the text of my essay. The phrase quoted in my essay’s title can be found in Beloved, 140. 2. Alasdair MacIntyre’s communitarian virtue ethics certainly gives precedence to the role of community in building virtuous persons. But even he allows for ways in which individuals can exceed or test the community’s thinking: see After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 199. 3. In this regard, I cite Iris Murdoch as a support: she views the individual as primary for ethics and the self as ultimately mysterious and elusive. These are recurrent themes throughout her work, including the influential The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970). I find her view of the self’s opacity and even intractability compelling and evocative: how might we do ethics if that is the core reality with which we must engage? Argument might need to be superseded with description of experience and with rhetorical interventions, with ways to release and “transform” this messy, captive, and wayward self. This is virtue ethics of another kind than a conservative communitarianism, and it involves a conception of growth in goodness as a journey of the soul, a soul ultimately never fully tractable to political structures.

180 Pamela M. Hall 4. Thus my questions are connected to the ways in which Lisa Tessman pursues virtue-oriented ethics within her (wonderfully named) conception of “burdened virtues.” My approach will be distinct insofar as I place emphasis on the self, on the very personality that is the possessor of the virtues, rather than on an account of the definitions of the virtues that may be needful for survival or adaptation in difficult circumstances. See her significant book Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 5. I here adopt the simplest means of designating the racial groups represented in the text, but I will also defer to and use Morrison’s own colloquial expressions deployed throughout the novel: “whitepeople” and “blackpeople.” 6. In what follows, I am indebted to several critical discussions of Baby Suggs in Beloved. There is Trudier Harris’s remarkable discussion in chapter 4 of her Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Black Women in African American Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 57–78. Harris presents a detailed and nuanced reading of Baby Suggs as playing out in extreme form the “pathology of strength” (Harris’s phrase) that she argues is wrongly valorized as a virtue for black women. Her argument is most powerful. My own reading wants to show Morrison’s recognition of the costs of such (necessary) strength in the very rendering of the action of the novel. Another substantial discussion of Baby Suggs can be found in Emily Griesinger’s helpful article, “Why Baby Suggs, Holy, Quit Preaching the Word: Redemption and Holiness in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” Christianity and Literature 50 (2001): 689–702. One major difference I have with this subtle reading is as interpreting Baby Suggs’s work as clearly Christian. I think this is precisely, and delicately, withheld from the rendering of Baby Suggs’s mission by Morrison. Neither do I see the crux of the novel as the possibility of Sethe’s “redemption.” Rather, the focus is on this life for Morrison and for the possibility of forging a way to live in it. I wish to note that Griesinger also uses the language of Baby Suggs as a “moral center” of her community; see her “Why Baby Suggs Quit,” 698. 7. Trudier Harris, in Saints, Sinners, Saviors, 58–59, reads this renaming as also pathological—as it affirms a loss, an “absence,” as definitive of Baby Suggs and enforces a celibacy in her new life. I find this claim forced; rather, it seems to me that Baby Suggs is trying to reclaim features of her private life that have been denied her in slavery. 8. Harris also discusses this in Saints, Sinners, Saviors, 60–62. 9. See Harris’s discussion, Saints, Sinners, Saviors, 60–61, on the Call: “but [Baby Suggs] also creates godhead . . . she becomes mother/priest, a potential savior, to a generation of suffering and undirected newly freed black humanity.” 10. See Harris for a different view, Saints, Sinners, Saviors, 61–63. 11. Harris focuses on this alternation between psychic spaces as well, Saints, Sinners, Saviors, 62. She also reads Baby Suggs as essentially founding a new sort of religion (see her discussion, pp. 62–65). I see her work as more therapeutic and ethical in a robust sense in the Clearing and less ordered toward a foundational re-visioning of spiritual or religious truths. But my claims may not be incompatible with Harris’s reading. 12. Harris reads Baby Suggs as a kind of extended suicide, and there is warrant for this in the text. See Saints, Sinners, Saviors, 67. 13. It can be argued that all of the survivors of the novel face points of crisis, in which their “unlivable lives” (Morrison’s phrase, p. 173) give them one traumatic event too many to bear. Each responds according to their character in choosing how to respond and how to live after, or whether to live

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17. 18. 19.

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at all. Sethe provides the most crucial example of this, of course, in her act, which is the pivot point of the whole novel. Baby Suggs is another example. As a contrast, Stamp Paid changes his name in the wake of enduring the rape of his wife by his master’s son, confronting his desire to kill her when she returns; in this renaming he makes a radical break with his slave life and he “cancels” all debts owed: “With that gift, he decided that he didn’t owe anybody anything. Whatever his obligations were, that act paid them off” (Beloved, 185). My reading of this period of Baby Suggs’s life thus differs greatly from Judylyn Ryan’s account in her essay “Spirituality and/as Ideology in Black Women’s Literature: The Preaching of Maria W. Stewart and Baby Suggs, Holy,” in Women Preachers and Prophets though Two Millennia of Christianity, edited by Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 267–287. Ryan claims that this period for Baby Suggs is characterized by a “quest for a liberating theodicy” (“Spirituality and/as Ideology,” 281) in which she seeks to rethink how color (in racial terms) is value laden. I do not see this interpretation as borne out by the text. Harris rejects this possibility because of Beloved’s punitive agenda toward Sethe (See Saints, Sinners, Saviors, 66). I see Beloved as a catalyst of events that are eventually restorative and liberatory and thus as not incompatible with the workings of Baby Suggs. But this is speculative speculation indeed! Harris reads this resurrection of Baby’s voice as yet another manifestation of her “pathology of strength.” See Saints, Sinners, Saviors, 66–67. On the contrary, I see it as a shift away from this pathology and as a more personal and more intimate sharing of herself. It also creates the space (that is still not another Clearing?) in which the community can step in to heal rather than being yet another occasion for her to do the healing herself. Griesinger also notices this resurrected voice in her essay, “Why Baby Suggs Quit,” 696. My reading of this passage differs here from Harris’s. See Saints, Sinners, Saviors, 66–67. I am grateful for this excellent point to Griesinger, “Why Baby Suggs Quit,” 696. See Joanna Wolf’s essay on how music/song is featured in the novel: “‘Ten Minutes for Seven Letters’: Song as Key to Narrative Revision in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” Narrative 12 (2004): 263–280. See also Karla Holloway’s treatment of speech as an event in relation to the novel’s rhetorical choices in her “Beloved: A Spiritual,” reprinted in Beloved: A Casebook, edited by William L. Andrews and Nellie McKay (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 67–78. For a reading of Beloved that connects it to Greek tragedy and a reconception of freedom, see the marvelous discussion by Cynthia Willett, “Narratives of Hubris, Songs of Love: Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” in her book The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 203–225.

9

The Post-Racial Saint? From Barack Obama to Paul of Tarsus Vincent W. Lloyd

There is no such thing as a racial saint. There are only post-racial saints. Saints access the universal through the particular. Through a specific life, through a specific body, the saint participates in the transcendent, in the holy. Not just participates: makes accessible for the rest of us. This is precisely the meaning of the post-racial as it is used today in the contemporary United States. A racially marked life, body, is seen to participate in a world transcending race—and so to make that world accessible to all of us. While the post-racial seems to describe a state of affairs, a world in which race no longer matters, in fact it describes a specific narrative, often with a protagonist. This protagonist is never white. He or she is always racially marked. Furthermore, the plot of the post-racial narrative sanctifies its protagonist. The transcendence of racial divides is not merely a conceptual operation. Because of the richness of the world that race constructs—a world of bodies, myths, institutions, technologies, habits, and taboos—transcending race is a religious plot, and its protagonist is a religious figure. Its protagonist is the post-racial saint. Reading the post-racial as a narrative, the continuing pull of race is the post-racial’s prerequisite. The post-racial saint lives in a world chronically infected by race. Indeed, read as a religious narrative, a post-racial world is eschatological, impossible to access from within our world. The post-racial saint offers a glimpse of the eschaton. Devotion to the post-racial saint means commitment to that other, impossible world. Emulation of the post-racial saint means lifting up our world closer to the world of our deepest desires. It is not only narrative structure that elicits this religious reading. St. Paul functions as the paradigmatic post-racial saint, racially marked as a Jew but proclaiming an end to the distinction between Jew and Greek under the reign of Jesus Christ. The post-racial saint is no messiah (nor is she, I will argue, a prophet). In narratives of the post-racial, the protagonist is incapable of single-handedly transforming the world. The protagonist proclaims and embodies transcendence of racial difference. Such narratives are told by champions of the post-racial world (sometimes by post-racial protagonists themselves). They can be read as hagiographies, offering sacred stories that confirm belief in

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the possibility of racial transcendence to a wavering public. They introduce readers or listeners who have never encountered the post-racial before to its possibility. Contemporary secularism forces post-racial hagiographers to disclaim the theological dimension of their narratives. The attempt to disarticulate the religious and the racial results in idolatry; it results in transcendence, contra St. Paul, based on the false premise that the racial component of our worlds is an isolated problem with an isolated solution. Peddlers of the post-secular are selling late modern capitalism’s story of transcendence, rooted in a simulacrum of hagiography, in the false appearance of the universal and the particular conjoined. To reach this critical conclusion, this chapter starts by considering the figures of the racial prophet, the racial messiah, and the (post-)racial saint—the last being illusory. Then it examines the most famous post-racial narratives of our moment: those surrounding Barack Obama, including those he tells, those told about him, and those somewhere in between. With these narratives in mind, the chapter concludes by reading Obama with St. Paul, reflecting on the antinomies produced in the dialectics of secularization—and the ideological, or idolatrous, figures of sainthood that result. There is something religious about Barack Obama, but no one is sure quite what. Hortense Spillers refers to the “sacralization of the secular” found in images of the Obama inauguration: images of prayer, reverence, and thanksgiving.1 There was the rabid devotion of young people during his campaign, volunteering because of their faith in candidate Obama. There were the excited commentaries hailing the momentous transition from one epoch to another in American history. There was the Rolling Stone cover with Obama’s head against the background of the presidential seal, forming a halo.2 There was Obama’s invocation of the fullness of time, his refrain that “now is the time.” There was his start: the speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in which Obama’s invocations of faith and hope promised to break the right’s monopoly on religious language in politics. And of course there was the opposition: the demonization of Obama as Muslim or Communist or foreign born, all with a fanaticism that cannot but evoke the religious. The American presidency necessarily carries religious overtones. As metonyms for sovereignty, the growing scholarship on political theology reminds us that leaders of nations, both subject to law and creators of law, occupy a space in the social imagination that can be traced back to the sacred kingship of the middle ages, sovereign ruler aligned with sovereign God.3 American civil religion, too, sacralizes the presidency as it does the national spirit, with elections functioning as rituals of acclamation.4 Moreover, Max Weber’s characterization of the political change agent as necessarily charismatic, disrupting (before reinstating) bureaucratic rationality, and so necessarily tapping premodern, religious energies suggests that inhabiting at least a quasireligious space is necessary for electability in a political culture with an insatiable appetite for change.5

184 Vincent W. Lloyd In the case of Obama, these general religious overtones come together with the tropes of African American leadership. In the American cultural imaginary, the black leader, whether a preacher or politician, naturally blurs the sacred–secular divide. A charismatic speaker capable of mobilizing the masses but also morally flawed and potentially misleading, this figure of the black leader holds sway from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Jesse Jackson and Cornel West.6 This figure is the leader of a people, not of a nation. Because the people—the African American community—is outside the realm of bureaucratic rationality, not descriptively but ideologically, always coded as premodern, the transformative potential Weber attributes to charismatic leadership is often absent. From the inside, from the perspective of the black community, such leaders fit the Weberian category of the traditional authority, articulating and reaffirming a community’s values. From the outside, from the perspective of whites, such leaders appear charismatic, posing a challenge to modernity’s status quo—to the reign of white supremacy. But they only appear charismatic: the black leader serves as a symbol of the sovereign exception, representing the outside of the rule of law that makes the rule of law itself possible—the racial exclusion that is the foundation of American national sovereignty. As Giorgio Agamben has shown, the sovereign exception, who can be killed without the act being considered murder, is homo sacer, sacred man—the obverse of the sacrality of the sovereign.7 What seems to be disruptive charisma actually secures the status quo. Focusing on the sacaralization of Obama simply reinstates a postProtestant mystification of the sacred. The religious aura of Obama need not be reduced to a knot of the inexplicable or irrational, alluring and dangerous and hinting at the transcendent. Rather, it manifests concretely in norm-governed religious roles. Just as political and cultural leadership are specific roles in American culture, inhabited and inflected in different ways in different contexts, the Christian religious context of modern Europe and the U.S. offers a finite set of possible roles for religious figures to fit or resist. The sociological and phenomenological studies of these roles once brought with them universalizing ambitions that have now been discredited, but the roles that they limned remain pragmatically useful because of their traction in our present cultural landscape. Most relevant here, to help us understand Obama’s place in the American religious imaginary, are three such roles: the prophet, the messiah, and the saint. The scholarship and advocacy of Cornel West has popularized the association of prophecy with African American leadership.8 As he and others have explicated the office, prophecy involves appreciating tradition, discerning present social ills, underlining the seriousness of those ills, and pointing forward to a time when social harmony will be restored. In doing so, the prophet motivates others to do the concrete and burdensome labor of moving us from here to there, rectifying the social ills identified by the prophet. The prophet himself is merely a medium for a voice coming from the beyond,

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a god angered by the disobedience of his people but promising rewards for those who will change their ways. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, understood both white and black American social worlds, saw the injustice of segregation, used his rhetorical talents to underline this injustice, and pointed toward his dream of a day when his children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Indeed, the position of the race leader lends itself to the office of prophecy, for the very position entails a critique of social ills, particularly racism. Prophecy does not seem to be the right fit for the role Barack Obama occupies. The character and body of the prophet do not matter, just his message. In contrast, Obama’s story is an essential part of his sacralized representation: his African father and mother from Kansas, his community organizing background, his wife from Chicago’s South Side, his pictureperfect children, his thoughtfully written account of his journey of selfdiscovery. Where it is Martin Luther King’s children who, King hopes, will have the opportunity to transcend race prejudice, it is Obama himself who embodies the race-transcending world. While Obama on the campaign trail did use the word “hope” often, it was not part of a prophetic moral vision. Obama did not paint a picture of a world in which a certain grave ill, hitherto ignored, that threatened to destroy America would be repaired and in which the world would be made well. Most certainly Obama did not discern a particularly dangerous social ill concerning issues of race. He addressed issues of race as some among the many moral complexities of the contemporary American landscape, and he did not offer any novel approaches or vocabulary for discerning these issues. In one of his few public remarks on race, his much-vaunted speech on race after the Jeremiah Wright controversy, in March 2008, Obama proclaimed the message of his candidacy, “out of many, we are one,” and located racial animosity in an earlier generation, in his older black pastor and in his white grandmother. At most those problems of the past “haunt” the present. Another religious vocation that might seem relevant to an analysis of Obama is that of the messiah. Where the prophet points to a better world ahead, the messiah announces the better world himself. The messiah not only represents but embodies divinity. His whole body is filled with divinity: every word and act is divine. He has unlimited capacities—unlimited knowledge, unlimited power. And he brings redemption. Humans can only be made right if they give their allegiance to him, setting aside all other worldly obligations. A racial messiah would have a body marked by race but also, with the same body, transcend race. This is the account offered by Albert Cleage and James Cone of Jesus as black, accounts that utilize the racial messianic role.9 Wallace Fard, founder of the Nation of Islam and considered an embodiment of God, reversed the American racial hierarchy, associating white America with sinners and redeeming, by their race, black Americans. Perhaps Jim Jones offered a variation on this messianic role, pastoring a multiracial community and evincing commitment

186 Vincent W. Lloyd to racial transcendence though acknowledging the whiteness of his own redemptive body. Shortly after Obama’s election, Ta-Nehisi Coates worried in Time Magazine about those who think that Obama is “a God-child descending from the heavens to teacheth benighted African Americans.” He concludes, missing the real power of metaphor, “Barack Obama is a black President, not black Jesus.”10 Cultural theorists have also, loosely, found messianic overtones in Obama’s peculiar location at the supposed change of epochs, announcing the significance of the present moment, as a time outside of time, leading crowds in chants proclaiming their own ability to take advantage of that moment—“yes we can.”11 But the role of the messiah does not seem to fit Obama any better than that of the prophet. Obama himself is not seen as racially transformative. It is his election that signifies an epochal shift. Further, it is not the entire character and body of Obama that are infused with divinity, with omnipotence and omniscience. His life story is powerful, but not because it is the life story all should seek to reenact. Rather, his life story is powerful because of what it represents. Both the image of Obama “descending from the heavens to teacheth” and Obama conjuring the fullness of the present moment are suggestive of the prophet more than the messiah, as the former brings extraworldly insights to worldly problems and demands response. The messiah does not need to bring something or demand something because he embodies all that is needed, and he demands total allegiance. Obama merely demanded a vote, a donation, and perhaps some volunteer work. (Note how, after the election, there were not legions of devotees volunteering their lives for government service). In our contemporary world, saturated with media and capital, there is a new variation on the messiah and particularly on the racial messiah. This is a role that emerged before Obama and with which his media image often seems to resonate. The most admired black person in America, according to polls, is Oprah Winfrey. Her followers are devotees; she staged redemption on live television; her own black body, having suffered racial and sexual abuse, is the instrument of salvific hugs and tears. Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon reads Oprah as a signal confluence of religion and consumerism: “It is Oprah’s world. We’re just buying in it, buying into it, and believing it.”12 Oprah elicits devotion, in the form of purchases, through her corporate media empire. She at once rejects the category of religion and performs religious authority, drawing her audience toward her with centripetal spiritual force. “Oprah is an instant of overflowing cultural iconography, providing stuffing for every nook and cranny of your psychological gaps and material needs,” Lofton writes.13 In other words, Oprah organizes the array of contemporary culture in a spiritually comforting manner (this has always been the role of the messiah). Race is just one piece of culture to be comfortably arranged. The example of Oprah suggests that the role of the messiah today may look quite different than what we were expecting. Still embodied and still

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redemptive, the role of the messiah becomes that of transforming beliefs and desires that are now monetized. In a sense, this describes Obama well, as he sold himself to the market of voters. Like the modern, capitalist messiah, he is immanent, not orthogonal, to the plane of culture. His understanding of the policy issues of the day, his narration of his life, his self-presentation, and his conception of race all trade in contemporary cultural currency. None are particularly surprising. All would be publishable in the New York Times. The exception, Obama’s relationship with Jeremiah Wright, whose racial views were out of bounds, was quickly neutralized with a heavy dose of eloquently arranged conventional wisdom. This is precisely Obama’s modus operandi: reconfiguring the cultural landscape with magnetic performances so as to reorient the preferences of voters. But Obama lacks Oprah’s complete immersion in the plane of popular culture. Obama’s performances are more clearly performances. A remainder of inwardness remains, manifesting as what the commentariat has labeled his coldness. Obama’s body is an integral part of his sacral performance, but it is not one with his public. An Obama hug always seems awkward, the polar opposite of an Oprah hug. The body of a messiah is supersaturated with her religious role; there is no religious role beyond her overflowing person. The specificity of the saint’s body and story point to the universal, to the transcendent. They point rather than embody: the saint is still human, and like all humans the saint struggles with obstacles and battles vice, but unlike other humans the saint does an exemplary job of seeking the good, the true, and the beautiful. In this way the saint, in the Christian tradition, models her life on the life of Christ, the paragon of goodness, truth, and beauty, but does so in a manner specific to her place, time, and circumstances. The saint actively shapes her life, restraining some of her desires and cultivating others, in light of her overarching desire to participate in the transcendent.14 The transcendent shines through in the saint’s life, visible to those she encounters, manifested in the miracles she causes, and recorded in hagiographic literature as well as in iconic representations for a broader community and for future generations to venerate. All of these features remain with the role of the saint in the contemporary, post-Christian context. The saint’s piety, once directed at Christ, now turns to some other worthy cause or some amorphous set of ideals. Gandhi fits the role of saint because of his selfless devotion to a certain set of values paired with Indian self-rule. The physician Paul Farmer, founder of Partners in Health, works medical miracles in Haiti, lives ascetically to maximize his time in service to the poor, and was even the subject of a New York Times bestselling hagiography.15 Sometimes the word “saint” is used more loosely, to include venerated celebrities such as Elvis Presley or Princess Diana.16 But such figures do not fill the role of saint because they lack both the single-minded commitment and the rigorous self-fashioning entailed by that role. Single-minded commitment to worldly success does not a saint make (Steve Jobs was no saint).

188 Vincent W. Lloyd A racial saint could mean a saint who happens to be racially marked, or it could mean a saint committed to something race related. In the former case, race is merely one aspect among many of the saint’s particularity, the particularity that provides a bridge to the universal. In the latter case, that to which the saint is devoted must be a world transcending race because any other object of devotion (such as one’s own racial community) would suggest, like in the case of the celebrity, worldly rather than otherworldly commitment. In both cases, what seemed like a racial saint is actually a post-racial saint, for race is not determinative. This is perhaps why the prophet and the messiah are much more familiar characters in the African American cultural-religious landscape. It has only been recently that a discourse in the United States that includes race but in which race is not determinative has emerged. There is one African American saintly figure that does turn up repeatedly, particularly in films. Originally described by Anthony Appiah, who called it “the Saint” and took Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost as paradigmatic, Audrey Colombe added details to Appiah’s account, describing a moment of proliferation of the “magical Black man” in films such as The Legend of Bagger Vance and The Matrix.17 More recent scholarship has settled on the term “Magic Negro” for this figure and has constructed a longer genealogy, from the unequivocally moral and nonthreatening characters of Sidney Poitier through Six Degrees of Separation and up to Gus Van Sant’s Elephant.18 In each case, the black character is articulate, asexual, and self-sacrificing, with supernatural powers used to help a film’s white protagonist. Magic Negro characters have no history or future and no community, they have some threatening aspect, and they play merely instrumental roles in a film’s plot. In short, they seem to have overcome American racism by depicting likeable and helpful African Americans, but actually they perpetuate racism by relegating blacks to subordinate roles in a white world, concealing black community and history. The Magic Negro fulfills the first type of post-racial saint role and shows the limits of this role. As portrayed on film, it just happens to be that the Magic Negro is black; it is one of her characteristics, part of her particularity that provides a bridge to the transcendent (think Morpheus in The Matrix), but it does not seem essential to her sainthood. In fact, stepping back from the internal logic of the Magic Negro narrative to the way that it is deployed, race is essentially tied to sanctity, in a very old-fashioned way: the racial other is depicted as a repository of authentic religious wisdom and practice.19 Early in Obama’s first presidential campaign, David Ehrenstein argued in the Los Angeles Times, “Obama also is running for an equally important unelected office, in the province of the popular imagination—the ‘Magic Negro.’ ”20 According to Ehrenstein, Obama was seen, and perhaps aspired to be seen, as the essentially moral, unthreatening helpmate of the white man, complete with supernatural powers to overcome adversity and garner

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support. On this reading, Joseph Biden’s infelicitous description of Obama as “clean and articulate” was not problematic because it suggested most African Americans are dirty and inarticulate but because it casts Obama in the role of holy helper, as post-racial saint. Ehrenstein concludes that, cast in this role, “Obama is there to help, out of the sheer goodness of a heart we need not understand. For as with all Magic Negroes, the less real he seems, the more desirable he becomes. If he were real, white America couldn’t project all its fantasies of curative black benevolence on him.”21 But the Magic Negro version of the post-racial saint role does not quite fit Obama. He does have a history and a community, and they are essential to his sanctity. They are key aspects of his particularity that allow transcendence to shine through. Further, self-sacrifice and asceticism are not essential aspects of Obama’s image. Quite the opposite, his story is one of ambition fulfilled, the promise of America realized. Obama does not talk about long hours in the library studying or summer jobs in the factory. He describes a series of desires and opportunities. He does not talk about his own failings in moralistic terms. His encounters with drugs and lethargy are merely stages in his journey. If Obama exhibits self-discipline, often read equivocally as “coolness,” it is because it is part of his nature, not through effort. Moreover, the transcendence suggested by Obama is not a general holiness or otherworldliness but the specific transcendence of a racialized world. Obama’s ascendance allows the promise of an alternative, post-racial world to shine through to our world. In short, Obama seems to be the second type of post-racial saint, not the saint who happens to be raced but the saint committed to a post-racial world, with faith in that world. But as we will see, this narrative, just like the Magic Negro narrative, is not as redemptive as it seems. A saint is created neither by the holy actions of a person nor by representing a person as holy. Sainthood involves a complex interaction between saintly actions and representation (or, more precisely, between various gradations of mediation) against the background of the norms governing the role of saint in a culture. Furthermore, if that to which the saint is committed is the transcendence of the racialized world, the saint must be particularly astute at predicting the ways her story and body will always already be racialized, and she must offer a personal performance of sanctity that is not overdetermined by the racialization of the culture in which she lives. The post-racial saint will succeed only by living a life that allows the post-racial world to shine through, offering a stark contrast with the racialized world that surrounds her. And she will succeed only if that life is legible to the media-savvy public and so capable of soliciting veneration and imitation. Obama wrote a book, Dreams from My Father, before he was a political figure. But it is hard not to read this book as a post-racial autohagiography. Obama prefaces the book by telling readers that he had initially planned to write about public policy, but then he realized it was important to share his

190 Vincent W. Lloyd own personal story first. That story is one of a humble, pensive young man coming of age in a world in which race is determinative. The young man’s biracial body and multicultural soul do not fit the racialized world, and he remains an outsider, an observer, wherever he finds himself. Because of his nonracial identity, he is always in but not of the worlds he navigates: Muslim Indonesia, his white grandparents’ home in Hawaii, black nationalists in California, an Ivy League university in Harlem, the South Side of Chicago, and, finally, his father’s homeland, Kenya. In this coming-of-age journey, the most pages are devoted to Obama’s time in Chicago. He went to Chicago seeking redemption as an advocate for disempowered communities and seeking to find a racial community with which he could identify. Before he decided to go, he would lie in bed at night viewing, in his mind’s eye, images of the civil rights movement, from lunch counter sit-ins to voter registration drives to jails filled with the songs of protest. “Such images became a form of prayer for me,” he reflects (134).22 Yet the images remain distant. They took place before his lifetime, and he does not feel connected to the world of blacks. In his hyperreflective but also emotionally distant style, Obama recalls his thoughts at the time: “I saw the African-American community becoming more than just the place where you’d been born or the house where you’d been raised. Through organizing, through shared sacrifice, membership had been earned” (134–135). Obama moved to Chicago to become a community organizer: it held for him “the promise of redemption” (135). In Dreams from My Father, Obama expresses his own weakness and doubts, wondering whether the community-building work he is engaged in really is worthwhile. But in typical hagiographic style, humility and selfdoubt ultimately function to confirm holiness. Obama’s discerning eye points out the flaws of those around him, narratively positioning Obama himself as the only three-dimensional, self-aware, and so efficacious character. On the one hand, there are the male leaders of Chicago’s black community, each of whom is tragically flawed. Harold Washington managed to achieve political victory with his election as Chicago’s first black mayor, but his celebrity distorted his ability to help communities, and his death revealed that no lasting infrastructure was in place to permanently secure black political gains. Black male leaders in the neighborhoods coveted power, promoting their own interests to the detriment of those they supposedly represented. On the other hand, the ordinary women who were the leaders of the community organization with which Obama worked were versed in folk wisdom and exhibited virtue aplenty but needed an outsider’s direction and motivation to get anything done. Although it remains unsaid in the narrative, the figure who takes the best from these two types is Obama himself. He is capable of identifying with the ordinary women but also capable of navigating the world of politics. He is thoughtful and articulate (his prose and reported speech is unmarked; the reported speech of other blacks is often in dialect). While Obama realizes that politics are based on assertively and sometimes

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cunningly advancing one’s interests, Obama’s interests are entirely identified with those of the ordinary black resident of Chicago’s South Side. The promise of redemption that motivated his Chicago sojourn turned out to be false. At this point in the narrative, Obama has not yet realized his own identity as an apostle of the post-racial. He seeks a racial community, but he seeks to enter it as an outsider, as a paid worker helping the locals. Even if the community will embrace him, he does not fit comfortably into it. His identity is constantly being confused. One day he is thought to be Irish, the next day Muslim, the next day a black American. Unmoored, Obama reflects on what he was missing. He realizes that he had been brought to Chicago not just by a search for personal acceptance but by a “demanding impulse”—a religious impulse. What was needed to make the necessary “sacrifices,” what was needed “to be right with yourself, to do right by others, to lend meaning to a community’s suffering and take part in its healing,” was “faith” (278–279). Obama had skills and talent, but he lacked faith in anything larger than himself. So he went out to find faith and succeeded in Jeremiah Wright’s church. He went, and he listened, and he wept, and he left a convert. What he found was not the militant Afrocentrism that has more recently come to be associated with Wright and his congregation. Rather, what Obama found were stories of Ezekial and David and Moses, stories “of survival and freedom, and hope” that “became our story, my story” (294). This was not the honorary blackness of the South Side. It was something more, something more universal. “Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black . . . I also felt for the first time how that spirit carried within it, nascent, incomplete, the possibility of moving beyond our narrow dreams” (294). The spirit of the service, of Christian worship, could no longer be dismissed as merely provincial or as a symptom of false consciousness. Obama could now see how the religious spirit was aligned with the post-racial and how the particularities of racial identity all opened up to the post-racial horizon. He could now see how each step in his own personal journey was a step in a spiritual journey. Each racial affiliation he tried on, when understood rightly, offered a glimpse of that post-racial eschaton. Obama had finally found faith in something more than himself, and he had realized that his life and body were already oriented by that faith. Obama’s piety was not pure as yet. A man, a mortal, stood in the way: Jeremiah Wright. While Obama understood Wright’s church as offering a post-racial message, that did not stop Wright from preaching in racialized terms. When this came to the attention of the American public during the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama had to clarify to the world what his object of devotion really was. Obama explicated his object of faith in a much-heralded speech, “A More Perfect Union,” that quoted at length from his post-racial description of Wright’s church in Dreams from My Father. The speech’s name and its opening line’s citation of the Declaration of Independence name Obama’s theopolitical object of faith. His is a commitment,

192 Vincent W. Lloyd despite the evidence, to a world without division, most significantly without racial division. Obama locates himself in a tradition of devotees of this idea, although past devotees all have their imperfections. The Founders promised equal citizenship and freedom for all but left “the original sin of slavery” intact. Obama’s faith “comes from my own American story,” he tells his listeners, recounting his multiracial, multicultural heritage. His personal narrative “has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts—that out of many, we are truly one.” In other words, the saint’s faith and story are inextricably bound together. However, the fallen world is committed to seeing things in terms of black and white. Obama notes that he has been accused of being “too black” and of being “not black enough.” Discussion of Obama’s association with Wright had been “particularly divisive.” The contrast between division and unity is the key theme of the speech. Wright’s controversial statements “were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity.” Obama sets his own story and racially marked body as the site of unity, a site that can become one with America to overcome division. After discussing the racial hatred of both Wright and his own grandmother, Obama writes: “These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.” Obama is able to bring unity out of difference in his own life, incorporating and transcending the figure of Wright and the figure of his grandmother, foreshadowing a theological unity at the eschaton promised to America. Obama admits the impossibility of this promised world beyond race. He admits that the nation is mired in “a racial stalemate” that his candidacy will not solve. Yet there is work to do, for both blacks and whites, to achieve the post-racial—by imitating the work that Obama himself has done. Obama asserts that he has “a firm conviction—a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people—that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.” The faith Obama has is the faith of “all the world’s great religions” to treat others as we would have them treat us, which Obama evokes to mean an end to racial discrimination. Here again Obama’s religious and racial (and national) faith blend, and Obama himself models the piety he extols. “A More Perfect Union” proceeds to discuss the “division” around race fueled by the media, which Obama dismisses as a distraction. Instead, Obama proclaims, we should be talking about education, health care, the economy, and other pressing issues. We should begin to act in this world as if it were post-racial, as if the actual existing divisions no longer mattered—a practice Obama himself will model. The speech closes with the tale of one of Obama’s devotees, a young white woman, Ashley, who worked building support among blacks for the Obama campaign in a South Carolina town. Obama tells the story of Ashley telling her own story to a group of other volunteers. She speaks of her mother’s illness and her struggle

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with the broken health care system. Then an “elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time” was asked why he was an Obama volunteer. According to Obama, he responded, “I am here because of Ashley.” The presidential candidate concludes, “[T]hat single moment of recognition between the young white girl and the old black man” is the starting point in the quest for a more perfect union. The moment also represents proper devotion: the way to respond to the post-racial saint is to participate in the post-racial world: for a white woman to campaign for a black man in a black neighborhood, that is, to act as if the ills of racism are over, knowing that they are not. The media coverage of Obama’s speech focused on its post-racial promise. Janny Scott’s analysis for The New York Times states that Obama “confronted race head-on, then reached beyond it to talk sympathetically about the experiences of the white working class and the plight of workers stripped of jobs and pensions.”23 Commentators embraced Obama’s narrative structure, describing the speech as even-handed, offering an account of both sides of the problem of race in America—and so offering a way forward. Andrew Sullivan called the speech “searing, nuanced, gut-wrenching, loyal, and deeply, deeply Christian.” Jesse Jackson described the speech as “warm, filling, captive, reconciling, and comprehensive” and added that “it displayed real true grit.”24 These responses indicate that the speech served its theopolitical purpose, not only distracting media attention from questions about the extent of Obama’s association with Wright and not only offering a policy prescription for racial justice issues but filling the hearts of listeners with a new vision of a post-racial world, a vision in which all of the components of the old world remain, but with our affective investment rearranged, and so with the world entirely reconfigured. Alain Badiou’s account of St. Paul closely matches this account of Obama.25 For Badiou, St. Paul announces a transformation in the way things in the world fit together. St. Paul urges his audience to commit themselves to the new arrangement, even if what precisely it means remains obscure. On Badiou’s account, we become subjects by having faith—faith in an event, in a transformative moment. Not only do we become subjects, we become equal. The previous status we held was secured by the old regime, the old way of organizing things, before the transformative event. All of that is up in the air with the event: the only thing that can be said for certain about subjects who accept the authority of the new regime is that they have faith. Thus, Badiou reads Paul’s famous “Neither Jew nor Greek” imperative as a refusal of two, codependent discourses, Jewish and Greek, in favor of a third, novel discourse that is Christian. Instead of accepting humanity divided in two, with two separate structures of authority, Badiou is committed to universality, to a “universal logic of salvation [that] cannot be tied to any law.”26 While Badiou regrettably does not ponder Paul’s status as saint, focusing instead on his status as disciple, we can observe the logic of the post-racial

194 Vincent W. Lloyd in his account. Paul, as Jew, seeks to neither affirm nor reject his own Jewish affiliation. Rather, he seeks to render it obsolete through his own personal story (the road to Damascus) and bodily commitment to the new regime (his suffering and death). Obama, similarly, tells a story of two discourses, black and white rather than Jew and Greek, and seeks to overcome them with his own faith. Like Paul the Roman Jew, Obama the black American offers a path to the universal through his own particularity. Like Paul, Obama tells stories of followers rendered equal in their shared commitment to the project he announces: his presidential election campaign (Ashley and the unnamed old black volunteer, among others). But this way of representing Paul leans on a history of Christian supersessionism, of the Christian effort to denigrate Judaism. This is a point made by Daniel Boyarin, who urges readers to pay attention to Paul’s cultural context: “Pauline religion should be understood as a religio-cultural formation contiguous with other Hellenistic Judaisms.”27 Read in this context, Boyarin suggests that Paul is able to hold both literal and allegorical meanings together, in two registers. Ethnic and gender (“neither male nor female”) identities remain in the literal register, but in the allegorical register, which is primary, identities are united in Christ. “By entering into the body of Christ in the spirit, people become one with the seed to which the promise was made and thus themselves heirs of Abraham and children of God according to the promise.”28 In other words, Paul was not rejecting his own Judaism but was adding another dimension to it, opening the allegorical register. While differing with Paul philosophically and theologically, Boyarin finds that Paul raises certain important questions that Jews must address about ethnic particularity and nationalism, especially in light of the contemporary religious-national project of Israel. Instead of the choice between identity based on genealogy (the racial state) and identity based on claims of universality (the modern liberal state), Boyarin urges disaggregating “people, language, land, and culture” in a “diasporic” Jewish identity.29 If we are to jump again from the post-racial Paul to the post-racial Obama, and so from the supersession of Jewishness to the supersession of blackness, Boyarin’s concerns seem well founded. As many commentators have noted, the “post-racial” often is politically problematic, concealing the continuing force of American racism.30 Moreover, holding racialized identity together with but subordinate to post-racial identity, as Obama does seem to do, legitimates a liberal political discourse that relegates race to a matter of cultural difference and even personal taste, limiting the significance of race to little more than one among many identity boxes to check on forms. In light of Obama, it is unclear how the diasporic conception of identity that Boyarin proposes as an alternative to both Jewish and Greek conceptions (another supersession?) is less problematic. Obama would seem to be the paradigm of diasporic identity, with nation (his Indonesian and Hawaiian upbringing and Kenyan father) disaggregated from race (the blackness ascribed to him and the white institutions he navigates) disaggregated from culture (his Ivy

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League pedigree) disaggregated from language (his refusal, in Dreams from My Father, to write or represent his own speech in black dialect). Yet all of these features reinforce Obama’s racial supersession. Indeed, they all add to his post-racial sanctity. The more diverse the components of his identity, the more his own story and body allow the coming post-racial world to shine through. Yet, at the end of the day, Obama is still read as black, as a black man aspiring to the post-racial. Given the force of the American racial regime, no amount of identity disaggregation overrides racialization based on skin color. One wonders whether Boyarin’s optimism about the potential effects of disaggregation of Jewish identity is warranted, given the similarly intensive regimes of racialization that have been imposed on Jews. Obama himself has some thoughts on Jewish identity, linked with black identity–thoughts he shares in “A More Perfect Union.” Immediately after reminding listeners that he has condemned Wright’s controversial remarks, he describes just how troubling these remarks were: [T]he remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country—a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam. Though ostensibly linked because they are both responsive to Wright’s sermons (Wright’s comments on both whites and Palestinians caused controversy), Obama’s remarks reveal a close connection between the promise of the post-racial and the persistence of the racial state. The first wrongheaded, “divisive” view disclaimed here is a belief in the racism of most whites. While Obama labels slavery America’s “original sin” and describes continuing racial problems, he positions whites as predominantly willing to convert to the post-racial, if only they are given the opportunity. Such conversion does not take rejection of the old (racism), just openness to the new (the post-racial world illumined through Obama). Doing so will inevitably lead the old to wither away. In the same sentence, the opportunity for conversion is foreclosed for those opponents of Israel since their motivation is, indeed, irrational, effectively another form of racism: the hatred cultivated by “radical Islam.” Similarly, while Obama’s speech consistently questions the identification of America with the white race, he has no problem unequivocally affirming America’s alliance with a state unabashedly committed to a particular racial identity: Israel. This antinomy points both to the specifically Christian nature of the post-racial (excluding Islam) and to the way that not only domestic but also foreign racism are concealed through post-racial narratives. Put another way, while Obama’s role as post-racial saint is distinct

196 Vincent W. Lloyd from the role of the Magic Negro, both roles simultaneously appear to further an antiracist agenda while in fact subtly perpetuating racism. Is the post-racial saint, then, just as much of a conceptual impossibility as the racial saint? Does the post-racial saint function solely as a catalyst for interpellation, pacifying the grumbles of racialized subjects? Perhaps we made the jump from the first-century Mediterranean to the twenty-first-century United States too easily. Perhaps we have played too fast and loose with the theological category of the saint in our secular age. Approached from the opposite direction: St. Paul himself, in that famous third book of Galatians, can be read as offering a forceful critique of secularism. He condemns those who would “rely on the works of the law.” Those who do so are, St. Paul proclaims, “held in custody under law” and “under a curse,” a curse removed by Christ. Now, under the authority of Christ, it is faith that makes humans right before God. St. Paul’s opponents are committed secularists. They recognize only the authority of law, but law is simply the substitute for the authority of God. The role of the saint is to allow the authority of God to shine through, revealing secularism’s dogmatic commitment to our worldly prison, its dogmatic refusal to be open to a higher authority. St. Paul, then, trumpets his refusal of the plane of immanence, proclaiming a commitment to an authority orthogonal to the world. This is often lost when the concept of the saint is applied to secular contexts, to contexts in which the religious is relegated to one among many domains of human interest. That to which the saint is committed, that which shines through in the life of the saint, is conceived in worldly rather than otherworldly terms. Even a smidgen of worldly content contaminates the transcendent. Badiou suggests that this was the case with the Nazi commitment to a universal contaminated by racial thinking, by the categories of Aryan and Jew, and the same contamination seems evident in the case of Obama’s post-racial transcendent.31 The post-racial seems to describe another world, totally different from our own, yet it is only different in one respect, with respect to race, with respect to a specific difference of our specific world. The postracial saint, then, is not a saint but a celebrity. She advances her own fame under the guise of a universal that conceals its particularity rather than with a particularity that points to a universal. The post-racial saint is a narrative device, deployed to advance the interests of some—at the expense of others.

NOTES 1. Hortense Spillers, “Destiny’s Child,” Boundary 2 39 (2012). 5. 2. The August 20, 2009, cover was designed by Shepard Fairey. The words that ring the presidential seal in the image are “Bold Action or Compromise?” Time also featured an evocatively haloed Obama on the cover of its March 10, 2008, issue. Newsweek featured Obama with a rainbow-colored halo, captioned “The First Gay President,” May 21, 2012.

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3. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985); Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 4. Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96 (1967): 1–21; Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), chapter 7. 5. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 6. See Erica R. Edwards, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 7. Agamben, Homo Sacer; George Shulman, “Schmittean Sovereignty in Racial Drag,” unpublished manuscript. 8. Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982); Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). See also George Shulman, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and Christopher Z. Hobson, The Mount of Visions: African American Prophetic Tradition, 1800–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Compare Max Weber’s much more general account of the prophet as one who has a calling to proclaim religious teaching in The Sociology of Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963). 9. Albert B. Cleage, The Black Messiah (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968); James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (New York: Seabury Press, 1969). See also Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982). 10. Coates, “Obama and the Myth of the Black Messiah,” November 13, 2008. But see Corey Walker’s provocative suggestion that “Obama is the messiah without messianism”—for white Americans. Walker, “Barack Obama and the Crisis of the White Intellectual,” Counterpunch, January 12–14, 2008. 11. Spillers, “Destiny’s Child”; Donald Pease, “Black Orpheus: Barack Obama’s Governmentality,” Other Modernities (2011) http://riviste.unimi.it/index. php/AMonline/article/view/1290. 12. Kathryn Lofton, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 19. 13. Lofton, Oprah, 8. 14. Contra Susan Wolf, every choice the saint makes is not dictated by a normative program; rather, the desire for the transcendent shapes the saint’s life in broad strokes. Wolf, “Moral Saints,” Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982): 419–439. 15. Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains (New York: Random House, 2003). 16. See the scope of chapters included in François Meltzer and Jaś Elsner, eds., Saints: Faith Without Borders (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 17. K. Anthony Appiah, “ ‘No Bad Nigger’: Blacks as the Ethical Principles in the Movies,” in Media Spectacles, ed. M. Garber, J. Malock, and R. L. Walkowitz (New York: Routledge, 1993), 77–90; Audrey Colombe, “White Hollywood’s New Black Boogeyman,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 45 (2002), www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc45.2002/colombe/ index.html. 18. Forest Whitaker in Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog is a particularly rich and complex example, with the saintly black man as protagonist, explicitly committed to an otherworldly moral code.

198 Vincent W. Lloyd 19. See Curtis Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 20. David Ehrenstein, “Obama the ‘Magic Negro,’ ” Los Angeles Times, March 19, 2007, www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ehrenstein 19mar19,0,3391015.story. Ehrenstein’s comment resonated with conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, who discussed it on air and during the campaign season repeatedly aired a song called “Barack the Magic Negro” to the tune of “Puff the Magic Dragon.” A singer mimicking the voice of Rev. Al Sharpton complains about Obama’s appeal to white voters, attributed to his lack of racial authenticity. The song went largely unnoticed outside of the world of conservative talk radio until Chip Saltsman, a candidate for chairman of the Republican National Committee, distributed CDs containing the song. Competing candidates for the chairmanship criticized Saltsman, making the song a national issue. 21. Ehrenstein, “Obama the ‘Magic Negro.’ ” 22. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York: Times Books, 1995). 23. Janny Scott, “Obama Chooses Reconciliation Over Rancor,” The New York Times, March 19, 2008 24. www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/18/jesse-jackson-obama-just-_n_92109. html? 25. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 26. Ibid., 42. 27. Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 13. 28. Ibid, 24. 29. Ibid, 243. 30. Touré, “No Such Place as ‘Post-Racial’ America,” The New York Times, November 8, 2011, http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/ no-such-place-as-post-racial-america/; Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” The Atlantic, August 22, 2012, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ archive/2012/09/fear-of-a-black-president/309064/. 31. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London: Verso, 2001).

10 The Pre-Racial Saint? Ma(r)king Aztec God-Bodies Molly H. Bassett

The image or figure of this idol [Xipe Totec] was of stone, about as tall as a man. His mouth was open like a man speaking. He was dressed in the skin of a sacrificed man, and on his wrists hung the hands of the skin . . . He also wore an elaborate, splendid breech cloth, which seemed to be part of the human skin in which he was attired. This was the dress he always wore . . . Forty days before the feast [of Tlacaxipehualiztli] the people dressed a man as a representation of the idol with his same adornments, so that this live Indian slave should be an image of the idol. Once he had been purified, they honored and glorified him during the forty days, exhibiting him in public as if he had been the god himself . . . Each ward honored and revered this man who personified the deity, just as in the main temple . . . After the god impersonators had been sacrificed, all of them were skinned very rapidly in the way I have described. When the heart had been removed and offered to the east, the skinners (whose task it was) cast the dead body down and split it from the nape of the neck to the heel, skinning it as a lamb. The skin came off complete. After the skinning had taken place . . . other men donned the skins immediately and then took the names of the gods who had been impersonated. Over the skins they wore the garments and insignia of the same divinities, each man bearing the name of the god and considering himself divine.1

In this excerpt from his Book of the Gods and Rites, Diego Durán recounts one of the strangest and most gruesome ritual practices the Aztecs observed.2 In honor of Xipe Totec, whose name means Flayed or Flaying Lord, priests extracted a sacrificial victim’s heart, skinned the corpse, and then handed the skin to another ritual actor, who proceeded to wear it. In wearing the skin and Xipe Totec’s regalia, the participant took on the identity of the teotl (god). He became the god’s teixiptla (localized embodiment), a word whose roots mean “someone characterized by a flayed surface.”3 Through sacrifice, skinning, and skin wearing, a man became the god. According to this passage and others like it, material objects became gods, too. They took on animacy through a process of ritual manufacture akin to the “theological education”

200 Molly H. Bassett a human teixiptla received. Aztec ritual activity produced the living localized embodiments of deities in a grisly display of ceremony and power. Though not unique to Aztec religion, man-made god-bodies pose certain challenges to the standard categories in the study of religions. Was Xipe Totec a god? In a certain sense, yes. Was he God-like? Friars like Durán certainly did not think so. Was he an idol? It depends on whom we ask. To Durán and his brothers, yes, but to an Aztec and her descendants, no. (Although in his discussion of the slippery notion of the fetish, Michael Taussig reminds us that we should qualify that “no.” When the Portuguese asked people living along Africa’s west coast if their gods’ images were handmade, they answered “yes,” and then when they asked if the handmade images were “true divinities,” the Africans answered “yes”—an impossible contradiction to the questioners.4) And finally, was Xipe a saint? The Aztecs marked Xipe Totec’s skin—in fact, marked flesh is the god’s defining visual and onomastic quality—but was his marked flesh holy flesh? Was he in any way a “racial saint?” My examination of Aztec practices of divine embodiment contributes to this volume on saints and race not by providing a ludic testing ground for Western notions of sainthood, race, or religion but by both sharpening and broadening our ability to recognize and analyze diverse religiosities, along with their various manifestations of divinity and modes of marking holy flesh. Like other Mesoamericans, the Aztecs reproduced their cosmovision, their view of an integrated (super)natural world, in their built environment. The ruins of the monumental ceremonial structures that filled Tenochtitlan’s sacred precinct attest to the culture’s extraordinary investment in its mythohistory. For example, the Templo Mayor, the great dual temple in the heart of the Aztec capital, both replicated Coatepetl (Serpent Mountain), the place of their patron god’s birth, and provided a stage for that myth’s (re)presentation in state ceremonies. That the Aztecs rebuilt a primordial setting in their urban center and also brought to life the events that had gone on there—sometimes in front of an invited audience of subject polities— demonstrates the centrality of ceremonial time, place, and activity, three integral aspects of the Aztec cosmovision that coalesce in the human body. In the following, we will explore how Aztec rituals that marked the human body produced god-bodies, more properly the teixiptlahuan (localized embodiments) of teteo (deities). Human bodies and their blood, hearts, and skins permeated and perpetuated the Aztec cosmovision, the culture’s unique perspective on the integration of the this-worldly and the otherworldly. Aztec mythohistories and Nahuatl language underscore the human/god-body’s fundamental importance and its manufactured nature, while sixteenth-century accounts of the calendric festivals Tlacaxipehualiztli and Toxcatl describe how ritual activity affected apotheosis. In conclusion, we will examine how contemporary Amerindian concepts of animacy and ontology provide insight into how marked flesh became (and becomes) holy flesh.

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THE SKINNY ON SAINTS AND RACE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY Given the European origins of both “saints” and “race,” it may seem odd to consider the “racial saint” in Mesoamerican culture. However, Aztec religion—infamous for its manipulation of the human body in the service of state ceremony—proves to be a particularly fascinating context in which to explore the marking of flesh in relation to the making of holy bodies. Like other Amerindians, the Aztecs marked flesh on numerous occasions and for a variety of reasons.5 They did not, however, “mark flesh” in the same ways Europeans did. Indeed, until the early sixteenth century, Mesoamericans lived in isolation from the European societies that produced the concepts of “race” and “saint,” to which we should add “religion.” Like “saint,” both “religion” and “race” have conceptual roots in Western culture, specifically Classical and Medieval thought. Late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century writers writing from the New World occasionally use these terms (though without the precision we associate with them), but neither gained traction as analytical categories until the eighteenth century or later.6 Long before then, both Aztec and early Christian communities recognized that some members of society exemplified social values in ways others did not. By the third century, early Christians thought of saints as those who suffered persecution that led to martyrdom, but beginning in the fourth century, Christians began to think of ascetics as “sancti,” holy persons who led exceptionally virtuous lives of self-denial. By the seventh century, Catholic leaders began promoting the cult of (dead) saints, in part through hagiographies, while they minimized the importance of living saints in an effort to gain control of saints’ growing popularity and their veneration. From the third to the seventh centuries, the referent of “saint” in the Western Christian tradition shifted from the virtuous living to the righteous dead. By the Middle Ages, saintly mediation had become an integral facet of Christianity, and believers frequently petitioned saints as intermediaries. Saints’ roles in Christianity became a focal point in the sixteenth century as reformers reacted strongly and negatively to saints’ veneration. This led Catholics to address the differing roles of dulia and latria during the Council of Trent (1545–1563); however, reforms related to the veneration of saints and their icons reached the Americas long after they had taken hold in Europe.7 As a result, Christianity in New Spain remained predominantly pre-Tridentine. That is to say, the Christianity Europeans introduced in Mesoamerica was one in which the saints and their icons played significant roles. Colonial documents indicate that, like Christians, Aztecs esteemed people who were “saintly.” In his Vocabulario, lexicographer Alonso de Molina (c. 1513–1585) glosses yecnemilice as “hombre justo y de sancta vida” (a man of righteous and holy life).8 This term’s roots, yectli, “something good, pure, clean” and nemi, “to live,” suggest that the Aztecs thought of a “saintly” person as one who led a good, clean life.

202 Molly H. Bassett The Florentine Codex (1585) describes the cuallihuehue (good old man) as “famous, honored, an adviser, a reprehender, a castigator, a counselor, an indoctrinator. He tells, he relates ancient lore; he leads an exemplary life,” whereas the tlahuelilochuehue (malicious old man) was “a fabricator, a liar, a drunkard, a thief; decrepit, feeble; a gaudy old man, a luxurious old man, an old fool, a liar. He invents falsehoods.”9 By contrast to Christians, for whom “saint” came to designate an ecclesiastically approved individual, a “saintly” Aztec was simply someone—really anyone—who lived honorably and honestly. The Aztecs and their contemporaries differentiated among social groups, but not in racialized terms like those Westerners deployed. Aztecs distinguished themselves from one another based on gender, ethnic ties, language, social status, household association, occupation, and geographic location. In Nahuas after the Conquest, James Lockhart explains that “at the heart of the organization of the Nahua world, both before the Spaniards came and long after, lay the altepetl or ethnic state.”10 The word altepetl is a difrasismo formed from atl (water) and tepetl (mountain), which were (and among Nahuas still are) regarded as the most crucial (super)natural resources for communities’ sustenance.11 In addition to identifying with an altepetl, Aztecs differentiated among themselves based upon social status. The two largest social classifications were the pilli (nobles) and the macehualli (commoners), and within each of these categories existed further distinctions based upon proximity to and dependency on powerful people. In sum, they used terms of classification that described their relationships to language, location, land, and household rather than ones that distinguished groups based on race.12 The concepts of “saint” and “race” as we conceive of them and as sixteenth-century Europeans conceived of them were largely absent in Aztec culture.13 Like most of the world’s peoples, the Aztecs recognized the good, honorable, and honest among them, but these individuals were not saints in the ways that Christians conceived of saints. And like most of the world’s peoples, the Aztecs distinguished between us and them, but they did so based on factors that did not include physiognomy or skin color. In fact, Aztecs associated darkened skin with sacred activities; the codices depict priests who have blackened their skin with pitch and other unguents to affect a holy transformation.14 The blackening of priests’ skin was not the Aztecs’ most famous way of marking flesh. Indeed, we remember them more—though not kindly—because they marked bodies through sacrifice, a semantically significant activity.15 LINGUISTIC MARKS: THE LANGUAGE OF HOLY FLESH The Aztecs, like modern-day Nahuatl speakers, understood life and being as existing along a continuum that did not (and still does not) draw hard

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and fast distinctions between the (in)animate, the (super)natural, or the (super)human. Rather, like other Amerindians, they evaluated life, liveliness, and god-likeness according to a folk taxonomy organized around qualitative clusters.16 Yoltoc, “someone alive, among the living,” describes animate entities and has its root in the verb yoli, “to live; to come to life, to hatch.”17 These terms convey the process of becoming reflected in the ritual manufacture of Xipe Totec’s god-body; not just any man wearing any skin or any assortment of insignia could become Xipe Totec. Rather, each deity came into being through a process: a specific human or effigy adopted the appearance (and, as we shall see, in some cases the behavior) of a particular deity. In the Aztec context, a seemingly lifeless thing could take on life by adopting the appearance—the flesh—of a god. With regard to Aztec god-bodies, I argue here and elsewhere that processes of ritual marking, masking, and manufacture transform inanimate—or, in the case of human embodiments, less animate—materials into the highly animate bodies of teteo (gods).18 Teotl and teixiptla (localized embodiment) are complementary terms insofar as the moment in which an Aztec god assumed a bodily form; whether human or plastic, that bodily form became the teotl’s teixiptla. Mesoamericanists translate teotl as “god,” and according to my work with the Florentine Codex, that translation is accurate as long as it retains the following semantic associations: teteo were beings that had their own possessions and property; day-signs, privileges, and prerogatives; and exclusive occupations, businesses, or pursuits.19 The Aztecs referred to deity effigies—whether human or material—as teixiptlahuan. A deity’s teixiptla was his or her physical presentation in the material world, regardless of whether the deity took shape in a plastic effigy or a human body.20 Whereas teotl is a morpheme and can be defined only using contextual clues, teixiptla is a compound word. A tentative morphological parsing of teixiptla reveals that it is a compound of ixtli (eye; face; surface) and *xip (shaving, peeling, flaying). Put simply, the term teixiptla signifies “a surface-flayed thing.” Additionally, like Nahuatl names for body parts, teixiptla is inherently possessed, and inherently possessed nouns always take a possessive prefix. Nonaca (my ear) is always “my ear,” never just naca or “ear.” Similarly, a teixiptla (literally, “someone’s localized embodiment”) is never simply a “localized embodiment.” A teixiptla cannot exist independently from the entity it embodies. Traditionally, scholars have translated teixiptla as “impersonator,” “representative,” and “representation,” and indeed, the word occurs in a variety of contexts where it signifies “proxy,” as in the phrase “teixiptla, tepatillo,” which refers to a military delegate. However, the term’s condition of inherent possession and the fact of its (performative) embodiment direct us away from translations like “representation,” which connotes a mental image or symbolic stand-in. A teixiptla is the being whom s/he embodies; it is neither an impression nor a representation of that being.

204 Molly H. Bassett By translating teixiptla as “localized embodiment,” we avoid creating a representational distance between the teotl and teixiptla where it seems that none existed. In relation to teotl, teixiptla’s connotations of eye, face, and surface lead us into a sematic field related to appearance. It is through a ritual process that results in appearing like the god—physically and behaviorally—that a body embodies Toci, Tezcatlipoca, or Xipe Totec. In other words, when a ritual actor donned the flayed skin of a sacrificial victim and/or the attire of a teotl, that person underwent a major ontological transformation from human to deity embodiment. Wearing the skin and participating in attendant ritual activities brought about the god’s localized embodiment in a living god-body. Linguistically, materially, and mythohistorically, teixiptla literally tied flayed skins to god-bodies.

Figure 10.1a and 10.1b Xipe Totec. Painted volcanic tuff, mid-fourteenth– mid-fifteenth century. © Museum der Kulturen. Basel, Switzerland.

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(Countinued).

MYTHOHISTORICAL MARKS: A PARADIGM FOR MAKING GOD-BODIES The Nahuatl term teixiptla encapsulates the notion of deity manufacture and apotheosis that the following account narrates. This story establishes the mythohistorical paradigm for the ritual production of the teixiptlahuan, the localized embodiments of teteo (gods) in Aztec religion.21 Huitzilopochtli, the patron god of the Aztecs, led his people on a long peregrination from their mythic homeland in the north into the Central Valley of present-day Mexico, where they eventually founded Tenochtitlan. During the journey, Huitzilopochtli took various forms: he appeared to priests in visions, he communicated from within his tlaquimilolli (sacred bundle of relics), and he took form in an effigy. The following events took place near the end of their journey.22 Upon the Aztecs’ arrival in the Central Valley near the year 1299, polities already established there, including that of the Colhua, allowed the

206 Molly H. Bassett newcomers to settle in Tizaapan, an area believed to be uninhabitable because of an epic scorpion and snake infestation. Much to the chagrin of their neighbors, the Aztecs thrived in Tizaapan: “Lord, ruler,” an emissary reported to the Colhua ruler, “We went to visit them. They have exterminated the snakes; they have eaten them. There are no more snakes; they have been finished off.”23 The Aztecs’ hardiness and determination earned them a reputation as fierce and fearless. The people were prepared to settle permanently, but their leader Huitzilopochtli had other plans. He sent his priests to nearby Colhuacan to invite Achitometl, the local ruler, to marry his daughter to Huitzilopochtli. Huitzilopochtli explained to his priests that the princess would become Yaocihuatl (Enemy Woman), a figure whom the Aztecs would venerate as “Toci, Tonantzin” (Our Mother, Our Grandmother).24 The priests told Achitometl that his daughter would be their god’s bride and a goddess: “My nobleman, lord, ruler, we beg you . . . to concede, to give us your necklace, your precious quetzal feather, your daughter . . . She will be watched over there among the mountains in [Tizaapan].”25 Achitometl “loved the maiden greatly, but he was enthralled by the idea that she should reign and be a living goddess, so he surrendered her to the Aztecs.”26 When Achitometl’s daughter arrived in Tizaapan, the priests followed Huitzilopochtli’s instructions: “[They] took the young princess of Colhuacan, heiress to that kingdom, and killed her, sacrificing her to their god. They then flayed her and dressed one of the principal youths in her skin, as their deity had willed. Then they went to the sovereign of Colhuacan and invited him to come adore his own daughter and offer sacrifices to her as a goddess, since Huitzilopochtli had proclaimed her his bride and his mother.”27 Achitometl accepted the Aztecs’ invitation to attend his daughter’s wedding, and when he arrived with flowers, quail, and incense, Huitzilopochtli’s priests led him inside a dark temple. After sacrificing the quail, Achitometl lit his brazier of incense, and he was—quite understandably!—“exceedingly terrified” and “overcome with horror” upon seeing a priest dressed in his daughter’s skin.28 Achitometl declared war upon the Aztecs, saying, “They have killed my daughter, they have flayed her and dressed a youth in her skin and have made me worship him!”29 This gruesome sacrifice not only sowed discord between the Aztecs and the Colhua, but it also established (mythohistorically speaking) the ritual process through which the Aztecs manufactured localized embodiments of their gods. Each time a young priest wore the attire of Toci, Tonantzin, (s)he embodied the animate goddess and re-membered this mythohistorical event. This story interweaves myth and history around a ritual scenario familiar to all Aztecs: human sacrifice that resulted in divine apotheosis. Put differently, this account acted as a social, political, and ritual paradigm (or, perhaps better, justification) that reflected and reinforced practices in which Aztec nobles and priests regularly engaged, like creating alliances through royal marriage. “The first kings of Tenochtitlan, like some other royal families in

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the Valley of Mexico,” Susan Gillespie explains, “were legitimated via a kinship tie with the Colhuacan dynasty.”30 It is not surprising, then, that in this origin narrative, we find Huitzilopochtli inciting enmity by taking advantage of a social convention used to secure alliances. His marriage to Yaocihuatl certainly created an enemy of the Colhua. Of greater interest to us, though, is the way in which this account describes the ritual manufacture of an Aztec goddess. The story of the Colhua woman’s sacrifice, flaying, and apotheosis as Toci, Tonantzin brings life to the goddess’s teixiptla and to the term’s etymology. Unlike the descriptions of ritual sacrifices provided by Sahagún and Durán, which are peopled with nameless captives as the sacrificial victims, or an intellectual understanding of teixiptla’s etymology, which provides us with a faceless impression of the term’s origins, the emotive affect of this mythohistory animates the gruesome power of a deity’s localized embodiment. We meet the young woman and her father, whose enthusiastic interest in her potential marriage and deification prevents him from remembering the Aztecs’ reputation. And then we watch—with omniscience denied Achitometl—as her sacrifice brings about her reappearance as Toci, Tonantzin, a monstrous visage for her father. This mythohistory and the etymology of teixiptla indicate that the young woman’s flesh facilitated the priest’s embodiment of Toci, Tonantzin. Notably, neither Durán nor Chimalpahin refers to the Colhua woman as a goddess prior to her sacrifice. Following the woman’s sacrifice and flaying, Toci, Tonantzin appears before Achitometl with the face of his daughter but another person’s body. Her flesh, on which lingered the marks of her appearance, her death, and its removal from her corpse, retained the memory of her life and wrapped the living goddess around the priest’s body. This narrative enfleshes both the living teixiptla “Toci, Tonantzin” and the concept of teixiptla. CORPOREAL MARKS: THE MAKING OF TEZCATLIPOCA’S TEIXIPTLA DURING TOXCATL The Aztecs’ ritual calendar included several occasions on which human sacrifice resulted in divine apotheosis. Aztecs practiced autosacrifice, the bleeding of their own bodies, but most victims of human sacrifice were exogenous prisoners of war, the “slaves” or captives mentioned in the chroniclers’ accounts.31 During state ceremonies like Tlacaxipehualiztli and Toxcatl, deity embodiments achieved animacy through a process of ritual manufacture that located the god’s presence in and through the effigy. Flayed skin (and, by extension, insignia) served as the defining feature of a god-body, both materially and linguistically. During the month-long celebrations of Tlacaxipehualiztli and Toxcatl, feasts in honor of the gods Xipe Totec (Flaying Lord) and Tezcatlipoca (Mirror Smoking), sacrificial victims became the deities’ teixiptlahuan. These festivals illustrate two aspects of how marking

208 Molly H. Bassett flesh related to making Aztec god-bodies: first, though inspired by myth, the practices of human sacrifice, skin flaying/wearing, and deity apotheosis did not belong exclusively to the realm of myth; and second, becoming a deity’s teixiptla involved an elaborate process of ritual manufacture and education that resulted in the localized embodiment looking and being (like) the god. Apotheosis was not as simple as wearing a skin, a point made clear by reports of people who wore skins without undergoing deification.32 When a ritual actor who had been chosen to become a teixiptla donned the flayed skin of a sacrificial victim and/or the attire of a teotl, that person underwent a major ontological transformation from human to deity embodiment. By contrast to Tlacaxipehualiztli, no skins were worn during Toxcatl. Toxcatl draws our attention to the marking of flesh as the first step, but not the only one, in transforming a human body into a god-body. The prisoner of war selected to become Tezcatlipoca during Toxcatl was: without defects. He was like something smoothed, like a tomato, like a pebble, as if sculptured in wood; he was not curly-haired, curly-headed; his hair was indeed straight, his hair was long. He was not rough of forehead; he had no pimples on his forehead . . . he was not mute, he was not of injured eyes; he was not of injured cheeks; he was not bulging of eye . . . he was not buck-toothed, he was not large-toothed, he was not fang-toothed . . .)33 The description of how the person should look occupies an entire page, approximately one tenth of the text dedicated to this festival. In a rhythmically repetitive Nahuatl, it describes the appropriate appearance of more than a dozen physical features requisite for Tezcatlipoca’s teixiptla, including his face, forehead, hands, fingers, abdomen, and buttocks. The passage’s length and level of detail gives us a sense of how important the teixiptla candidate’s appearance was in his selection. It also helps us understand what it meant for the candidate to be “without defects.”34 Note, too, that these presentational attributes merely qualified an individual to become Tezcatlipoca’s teixiptla, a process that involved elaborate training and further transformation. The teixiptla spent a year receiving instruction concerning Tezcatlipoca’s manner of speech and musical abilities: For him who was thus, who had no flaw . . . there was taken the greatest care that he be taught to blow the flute, that he be able to play his whistle; and that at the same time he hold all his flowers and his smoking tube . . . [V]ery great care was taken that he should be very circumspect in his discourse, that he talk graciously, that he greet people agreeably on the road if he met anyone. For he was indeed much honored when he appeared, when already he was a teixiptla.35 Seeing these standards as qualitative expectations facilitates our understanding of how a particular teotl came to be (in) his or her teixiptla(huan).

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The description of the “perfect” candidate for Tezcatlipoca’s teixiptla draws our attention to the significance of the body’s physical form and representative ability (that the candidate not be mute, e.g.), while the description and depiction of the candidate’s training underscores the extent to which embodying the god involved more than physical appearance. The emphasis placed on the teixiptla’s appearance, both during his candidacy and throughout his training, reached its epitome when he met Moteuczoma. At a critical point in the ritual, priests cut the teixiptla’s hair, and he presented himself to Moteuczoma, who “repeatedly adorned him; he gave him gifts; he arrayed him; he arrayed him with great pomp. He had all costly things placed on him, for verily he took him to be itlazoteouh (his beloved god).”36 Moteuczoma’s responsibilities as tlahtoani (speaker, ruler) required that he dress the teixiptla with his own beloved possessions and exclusive belongings. Sahagún describes the teixiptla’s luxurious dress at length: he wore a flower crown, turquoise ear plugs, a shell necklace, a seashell breastplate, an exquisite breechclout and golden bell anklets.37 The embodiment of Tezcatlipoca culminated in the teixiptla’s sacrifice, and then the festival of Toxcatl continued with the selection of a new teixiptla.38 Toxcatl foregrounds the significance of the human body in the selection of a perfect candidate for transformation into a teotl’s teixiptla. As Davíd Carrasco observes of the festival, “The image of Tezcatlipoca was alive, not only in the sense that a human being was the public image, but also in the changes he underwent at different stages of the year-long ceremony. The ideal person who started the ceremony was changed into the cultural paragon of Aztec society.”39 The priests selected, trained, and dressed a perfect candidate for the express purpose of manufacturing a teixiptla of Tezcatlipoca. The people of Tenochtitlan expected Tezcatlipoca’s teixiptla to look and act like the one before him and the one before that, and so on. They reacted to his appearance with solemn displays of veneration: “There was the assigning of lordship; he was importuned; he was sighed for; there was bowing before him; the commoners performed the earth-eating ceremony before him.”40 The teixiptlahuan of Xipe Totec and Tezcatlipoca become the gods by undergoing a process of ritual manufacture, and while the process was not entirely passive—presumably the teixiptla cooperated in wearing deity attire, by ingesting ceremonial food and drink, and the like—apotheosis and embodiment took place within a sacred precinct and communal context. Teixiptlahuan were not self-fashioned products of devotion, moral action, or even flagellation. They were the handmade products of origin myths, regional conquests, theologies of embodiment, and ritual activity. HUMAN FLESH, HOLY FLESH: AN ONTOLOGICAL AND PERSPECTIVAL CHANGE Based on ethnohistoric evidence and ethnographic observations, my take is that a teixiptla came to be a teotl through a ritual process rather than in a

210 Molly H. Bassett moment of consecration or emanation. That is to say, it seems that embodiment occurred through becoming: the teixiptla came to resemble the god, act like the god, and eventually be the god. Each successive teixiptlahuan of a given teotl learned to look and act like the prototype over the course of a ritual process. This process marked the god as visibly present through the adoption of a particular and related set of skin, attire, insignia, behavior, and being. A similar process occurs in contemporary rituals like Chicomexochitl (7 Flower). During this annual celebration, modern Nahuatl speakers work with a ritual specialist to produce the “holy family,” who represent maize and whose general beneficence they propitiate throughout the year. In this ritual, several days of paper cutting, bundle making, censing, dancing, and feeding/eating culminate in the effigies being dressed and walked to the top of the community’s altepetl (sustenance mountain), where devotees communicate with the deities in a series of avian sacrifices, censing, and prayers before descending the mountain and placing the images on the family altar. Throughout the year, the family cares for the effigies as they would care for family members: they clothe the images, they feed them, they clean them, and they talk to them.

Figure 10.2 Chicomexochitl (7 Flower) effigies, Veracruz, Mexico. Photograph by author.

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In addition to this comparative ethnographic context, the ethnolinguistic research that colleagues and I have conducted in collaboration with modern Nahuatl speakers from the Huasteca of Veracruz indicates that they perceive the world and almost everything in it as animate. When asked to identify whether a noun/thing (e.g., a cat, a cloud, or the moon) is animate or inanimate, native speakers subjected the word and the thing to a series of questions, including whether it moves, whether it walks, and whether it breathes. (Keep in mind that what may “breathe” in modern Nahua cosmology, including caves, may not correlate with the Western worldview.) They also explored which “be” verb functions with the noun. Nahuatl speakers use multiple “be” verbs; for example, they use one (eltoc) with objects that are inanimate and another (itztoc) with entities that are animate. Once my colleagues determined the relative animacy of an object or entity, they then placed the person or thing along a spectrum. The spectrum ranges from the highly animate teteo (totiotzintzin in modern Nahuatl) at one end to celestial bodies (Dios, the sun, moon, and stars), features of the natural world (mountains, fire, wind, and water), humans, animals, plants, and finally rocks.41 During Chicomexochitl, the ritual specialist cuts relatively inanimate newsprint into the shapes of highly animate teteo, and the cutting and the rituals surrounding it, including censing, dancing, special music, and offerings of blood and food endow the effigies with life.42 My sense is that the transformation reflected linguistically—when an “eltoc” object becomes an “itztoc” entity—is (and likely was in precontact religion) analogous to the affective change experienced by a person who became a teotl’s teixiptla. An inanimate entity becomes animate through ritual education, a process of learning how to be differently, much in the same way a person learns to be a god (and not just look like or act like a god). These processes of becoming function along a spectrum or sliding scale of animacy rather than across a hard and fast ontological divide, such as natural/supernatural, human/superhuman, profane/sacred. The concept of the cosmos as animate pervades indigenous American cultures (as well as indigenous cultures elsewhere). Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s studies of Amazonian Amerindian cosmology describe another conception of animacy. His work points to the centrality of “perspectivism,” meaning “the ideas in Amazonian cosmologies concerning the way in which humans, animals and spirits see both themselves and one another.”43 The cosmologies Castro studies understand all beings as having different bodies that participate in the same soul, so that the viewer’s unique body (whether that of a human, a bee, or a lizard) affords him/her a unique perspective. The viewer’s perspective is at the heart of Castro’s theory of Amerindian being and knowing. He explains that a perspective is not a representation because representations are a property of the mind or spirit, whereas the point of view is located in the body. . . . the differences between viewpoint (and a viewpoint is nothing if not a difference) lies not in the soul. Since the soul is formally

212 Molly H. Bassett identical in all species, it can only perceive the same things everywhere. The difference is given in the specificity of bodies.44 By comparison, the localized embodiments of gods occupy specific perspectival locations in Aztec and modern Nahua religions, namely a highly animate subjectivity acquired through a ritual process of becoming that is initiated when one person gets inside another person’s skin. Physical appearance is key to both the before and after in these rituals: specific bodies wear specific skins and clothing in order to become specific deities. Once inside the skin (and/or attire), the teixiptla sees the world as Toci, Tonantzin, Xipe Totec, Tezcatlipoca, or a totiotzintzin. The perspective is not only divine, it is also deictic with respect to the set of qualities that characterizes the specific teotl. At a fundamental level, god-bodies in Aztec religion are bodies clothed in marked flesh. Neither transcendent nor immanent, their divinity derived from their materiality, their locality, and their perspective.45

NOTES 1. Diego Durán, Book of the Gods and Rites and the Ancient Calendar, trans. Fernando Horcasitas and Doris Heyden (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 175–176. 2. Thanks to Maria Ramos for her feedback on the chapter’s early drafts, and to Vincent Lloyd for his careful reading and helpful suggestions. Thanks, too, to my family—and in particular to Jennings’s grandparents, whose late-summer and early-fall visits gave me time to finish revising the chapter. 3. See Molly Bassett, The Fate of Earthly Things: Aztec Gods and God-Bodies (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015). 4. Michael Taussig, “On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods,” in On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 2–7. 5. Scholars hold different opinions regarding the use of the term “Aztec.” The people to whom “Aztec” refers did not think of or call themselves Aztecs, but it is a familiar term for an audience that may be unfamiliar with Mesoamerican cultures. Generally speaking, the people we think of as the Aztecs lived in and around Tenochtitlan, Tlacopan, and Texcoco, the three cities that in 1528 formed the Triple Alliance, the heart of the Aztec empire. In the following, I refer to Tenochtitlan as the capital of the Aztec empire, though in reality it was one half of a twin city-state that also included Tlatelolco. More specifically, the people living in the core of Tenochtitlan identified themselves as the Mexica. The lingua franca of the Triple Alliance was Nahuatl, and speakers of Nahuatl are commonly identified as Nahuas. Scholars refer to the Aztecs’ Nahuatl as “Older” Nahuatl, and approximately 2 million people, many of whom live in Veracruz and Puebla, speak a modern variant today. 6. On the circulation of the concepts of race and racism prior to the modern era, see Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler, eds., The Origins of Racism in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). On the emergence of religion as an analytical category, see Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

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7. In the sixteenth century, saints gained traction in New Spain as Nahuas and other indigenous groups incorporated their veneration into individual and corporate religious life. For a concise summary of the importance of saints in postcontact religion, see James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 235–251. 8. Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en Lengua Castellana y Mexicana y Mexicana y Castellana (1571) (Mexico City, México: Editorial Porrúa, 2004; reprint, 5th), 34v. Yecnemilice comes from the verb yecnemi, “to live well, honorably,” comprised of yectli, “something good, pure, clean,” and nemi, “to live.” Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 165, 336, and 38. Manuscripts from the colonial period attest to the use of similar terms, like yecnemiliztli (proper living). See Andrés Sáenz de la Peña’s Manual de los Santo Sacramentos, 1643, in Mark Z. Christensen, “Nahua and Maya Catholicisms: Ecclesiastical Texts and Local Religion in Colonial Central Mexico and Yucatan” (Pennsylvania State University, 2010), Appendix E, 16. 9. Bernardino de Sahagún, Book 10: The People, trans. Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson, 12 vols., General History of the Things of New Spain (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1961), 11. 10. Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest, 14. 11. Karttunen, Analytical Dictionary, 9. 12. Some readers may counter that the difference between Chichimecs and Toltecs demonstrates that the Aztecs thought of some ethnic groups as “barbaric” and others as “civilized.” Federico Navarrete Linares argues against this characterization—or, more precisely, that it is a characterization imposed upon indigenous ethnicities by Westerners: “This interpretation is not correct, because it comes from our conception of the existence of an irresolvable juxtaposition between barbarism and civilization and from the necessary superimposition of the first over the second, which prevents us from recognizing that the sources explicitly affirm that all of the altepetl in the Valley of Mexico combined Chichimec cultural elements and Toltec cultural elements to create a hybrid and complementary identity” (my translation). See Federico Navarrete Linares, Los Orígines de los Pueblos Indígenas del Valle de México (Mexico City, México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2011), 31. 13. Accounts of the Encounter describe the Aztecs noting physical differences between themselves and Europeans, but most of those stories come from or were redacted by Europeans. It seems certain that based on the characteristics Mesoamericans used to understand different peoples—place of origin, language, and occupation—the conquistadors and company, which included Africans, would have been a puzzling lot. Sahagún’s heavily edited Book 12: The Conquest tells one version of the story. See Bernardino de Sahagún, Book 12: The Conquest, trans. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, 12 vols., General History of the Things of New Spain (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1975). 14. See Molly Bassett and Jeanette Favrot Peterson, “Coloring the Sacred in the New World,” in The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400–1800, ed. Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 53–56, and Guilhem Olivier, Mockeries and Metamorphoses of an Aztec God: Tezcatlipoca, “Lord of the Smoking Mirror,” ed. Davíd Carrasco and Eduardo

214 Molly H. Bassett

15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Matos Moctezuma, trans. Michel Besson (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003), 188. The work of Georges Bataille and Rene Girard exemplifies Western interpretations of Aztec human sacrifice. See Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 45–61, and René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (London: Continuum, 2005), 1–40. See Carolyn Dean, A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 8–13 and 35–40; Stephen Houston, David Stuart, and Karl Taube, The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya, Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 72–76; Jennifer Hughes, “Mysterium Materiae: Vital Matter and the Object as Evidence in the Study of Religion,” Bulletin for the Study of Religion 41 (2012): 16–24, and Maria Neves Zedeño, “Bundled Worlds: The Roles and Interactions of Complex Objects from the North American Plains,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 15 (2008): 362–378. Karttunen, Analytical Dictionary, 340 and 43. Bassett, The Fate of Earthly Things. Ibid. During Panquetzaliztli, for example, priests fashioned the teixiptla of Huitzilopochtli from amaranth dough. See Durán, Gods and Rites, 457–458. Alfredo López Austin suggests this as well. See Alfredo López Austin, HombreDios: Religión política en el mundo Náhuatl, 2a ed., Serie de Cultura Náhuatl (Mexico City, México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1989), 151. I borrow “mythohistory” from Andeanist Gary Urton in Gary Urton, The History of a Myth (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 142 n. 4. I draw upon Chimalpahin’s Mexican History or Chronicle (1621) and Diego Durán’s History of the Indies of New Spain (c. 1581) in this retelling. See Arthur J. O. Anderson and Susan Schroeder, Codex Chimalpahin, ed. Wayne Ruwet and Susan Schroeder, 2 vols. (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 93–101, and Diego Durán, The History of the Indies of New Spain, trans. Doris Heyden (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 36–39. Anderson and Schroeder, Codex Chimalpahin: 93. Durán, History of the Indies, 36. Anderson and Schroeder, Codex Chimalpahin, 97. Durán, History of the Indies, 37. Ibid. Chimalpahin’s account states simply, “And then they killed and flayed the noblewoman. When they had flayed her, they then dressed a certain offering priest in her skin” (97). Anderson and Schroeder, Codex Chimalpahin, 97, and Durán, History of the Indies, 38. Durán, History of the Indies, 38. Susan D. Gillespie, The Aztec Kings: The Construction of Rulership in Mexica History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989), 21. See Inga Clendinnen, “The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society,” Past & Present, 107 (1985): 68–76. For instance, Bernardino de Sahagún reports that during Tlacaxipehualiztli, captors wore the skins of their captives and other ritual participants wore the skins as an act of penance; none of these skin wearers became teixiptlahuan. See Bernardino de Sahagún, Book 2: The Ceremonies, trans. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, 12 vols., General History of the Things of New Spain (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1981), 54 and 58.

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33. Ibid., 67. 34. Ibid., 66. 35. Ibid., 68. Other accounts describe the materials that Aztec priests used to construct teixiptlahuan made of dough that were submitted to similarly exacting standards. See Elizabeth Hill Boone, “Incarnations of the Aztec Supernatural: The Image of Huitzilopochtli in Mexico and Europe,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 79 (1989): 35–36, 40. 36. Sahagún, Book 2, 69. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 71. 39. Davíd Carrasco, City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 134. 40. “netecuyotilo, tlatlauhtilo, icaelcicihuoa, ixpannepechteco, ixpanontlalcua in macehualtzintli,” Sahagún, Book 2, 68. 41. For the most part, rocks are inanimate, but the rocks that comprise and rest on a community’s altepetl would be considered animate. 42. For more on the effigies cut during rituals like Chicomexochitl, see Arturo Gómez Martinez, Tlaneltokilli: La espiritualidad de los Nahuas chicontepecanos (Mexico City: Ediciones del Programa de Desarrollo Cultural de la Huasteca, 2002), and Alan R. Sandstrom, Corn is Our Blood: Culture and Ethnic Diversity in a Contemporary Aztec Indian Village (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). 43. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4 (1998): 469. He argues that unlike in the West, where we operate on the assumption that there is one way of Being with many ways of knowing, “Amerindian thought proposes the opposite: a representational or phenomenological unity that is purely pronominal or deictic, indifferently applied to a radically objective diversity. One culture, multiple natures—one epistemology, multiple ontologies.” In Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies,” Common Knowledge 10 (2004): 474. 44. Viveiros de Castro, “Exchanging Perspectives,” 474. Emphasis mine. 45. Notably, too, their divinity depends upon being seen and being recognizable. Compare the Hindu practice of darshan. See Diana Eck, Darshan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 3–6.

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Contributors

Brian Bantum is assistant professor of theology at Seattle Pacific University. He teaches and writes on the intersections of race, identity, and theology. His first book was Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity (Baylor, 2010). Molly H. Bassett is assistant professor of religious studies at Georgia State University. Her research and teaching focus on pre- and postcontact indigenous religions in the Americas, and her book, The Fate of Earthly Things (University of Texas Press, 2015). Timothy Dobe is associate professor of religious studies at Grinnell College. He is the author of Hindu Christian Faqir: Modern Monks, Global Christianity and Indian Sainthood (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). His next book project deals with the past and future contributions of South Asian studies to the broader field of religious studies. Chris Garces is assistant professor of anthropology at Cornell University. He is currently writing a book about religion and prisons in Ecuador. His writing has appeared in journals including Cultural Anthropology, Anthropological Quarterly, and Focaal: The Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. Pamela M. Hall is associate professor of religion at Emory University in Atlanta. She teaches and writes in the areas of virtue ethics, moral psychology, and theology and literature. Her book Narrative and the Natural Law: An Interpretation of Thomistic Ethics was published by the University of Notre Dame Press. Geraldine Heng is Perceval Fellow and associate professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the author of Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (Columbia, 2003). She is founder and codirector of the Global Middle Ages Project and other digital humanities projects.

218 Contributors Angie Heo is a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany. Currently, she is completing a book manuscript on holy images, bodily-technological mediation and Coptic Orthodox modernity in Egypt. She is also beginning a second project on Evangelical Protestantism and corporate capitalism in South Korea. Jared Hickman is assistant professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is coeditor of Abolitionist Places (Routledge, 2013), and he is currently completing a book manuscript exploring the relationship between racial difference, theological heresy, and political radicalism under the metaphysical regime of Atlantic slavery and racism. Vincent W. Lloyd is assistant professor of religion at Syracuse University. His books include The Problem with Grace: Reconfiguring Political Theology (Stanford, 2011), Black Natural Law: Beyond Secularism and Multiculturalism (Oxford, Forthcoming), and the edited volume Race and Political Theology (Stanford, 2012). Jalane Schmidt is assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia. She is an anthropologist of religion who researches and teaches about the religions of Latin America and the Caribbean. Her book, Cachita’s Streets: The Virgin of Charity, Religion, Race & Revolution in Cuba, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

Index

abnegating 93 Africa: black Africans 18, 20 – 2, 24 – 8, 31; church fathers, desert ascetics, martyrs 30; crusades 31; as matrix of Christianity 30 – 1 African-American Orthodox 158 African-American religion 159 African Orthodoxy 159 afrocubanismo 113 Ahuja, Neel 91 Albert II, archbishop of Magdeburg 28, 31 – 3, 39 animacy 199 – 200, 207, 211 animalization 86 – 7, 91, 96 apostasy 85, 90 Appiah, Anthony 188 Arab-Israeli War of 1967 154 – 5, 160 asceticism 93, 127, 129, 134, 146, 189; ascetic practice 125 – 6, 132; “Hindu” 125 “Oriental” 126; rigid 135 Badiou, Alain 96, 193 barkat 130, 140 Batista, Fulgencio 115 Baumgarten, A.I. 70, 78 beauty 35, 45, 53 – 4, 56, 62, 170 – 1, 187; ideals of 34, 39, 114; physical 53, 65, 109; spiritual 61, 65 Belakane 38 Bible 71, 125 – 6, 131 – 3, 137 – 8, 144 biblical studies 126 Biden, Joseph 189 Black Madonnas 21, 36 – 7, 150, 157, 160 blackness: as apotropaic 24, 36, 37; as sin 36 – 7, 40

black theology 67 – 9 blessing see barkat Blumenberg, Hans 70 Bolle, Kees W. 78 – 80 Boyarin, Daniel 194 brotherhood 82 – 4, 90; Catholic 87, 89, 94, 99; Muslim 154 Brotherhood of St. Moses the Black 150 – 51, 159, 161 Brown, Peter 10, 141, 157 Bugner, Ladislas 21, 35, 37 Burns, J. Patout, Jr. 80 Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge 80 Carrasco, David 209 Carthage 69, 73 – 5, 80 Casta identity 87 Castro, Fidel 117, 119 Caviness, Madeline 34 – 5 Changó 112 charity 1, 83 – 4, 87, 94 – 5, 97 – 8 Charles IV of Bohemia, Holy Roman Emperor 39 – 40 Cholula massacre 71 – 3 Christ, Jesus (image of) 48, 53, 56, 60; idealized body of 47, 51, 53 Churchianity 143 Cleage, Albert 185 Clendinnin, Inga 214 clothing 32, 35, 125 – 7, 129, 138 – 9, 144, 212 Coates, Ta-Nehisi 186 colonialism 4, 15, 82, 91 Cone, James 68, 185 conversion, 133 – 4, 139, 142, 151, 158, 160, 195 Coptic Orthodoxy 150, 152, 160, 163 Cornish, Samuel 76

220 Index Crusades: crusade chronicle of Robert the Monk 31; Edward I’s crusade 23; First Crusade 31; Fourth Crusade 23; Fifth Crusade 23; military failures of 24; Sixth Crusade 26; St. Louis’s crusade 23 Cussen, Celia 85, 90 Cyprian, Saint: in African American vindicationist histories 75 – 6; biography of 73; Enlightenment euhemerization of 73 – 4 darshan 130, 135 – 6, 148 De Angelis, Franco and Benjamin Garstad 79 deity, deities 45, 112, 199, 203 – 9; Aztec (teotl) 199, 203 – 4, 208 – 12; Tezcatlipoca 204, 207 – 9, 212; Xipe Totec 199 – 200, 203 – 4, 207, 209, 212 Delany, Martin Robison 75 Derrida, Jacques 6, 88 – 9, 91 Devisse, Jean 23 – 5, 27 – 9, 39 – 40 Díaz, María Elena 106 Díaz, Miguel 106 divinization 69 – 71, 74, 76 – 7, 79, 80 dogs 94 – 8; different meanings of 97 dress see clothing Egypt: black Africans 24; crusades to 30 – 1; and early Christianity 24; sultan of (Al-Kamil) 24, 26, 42 Ehrenstein, David 188, 198 El Rosario monastery 95 embodiment 3, 45 – 6, 89, 141, 145, 185; teixiptla 199 – 200, 203 – 5, 207 – 12 Enlightenment 46, 48 – 50, 56; Moderate versus Radical 73 – 4 Enríquez, Carlos 111 Entralgo, Elías 111 Ethiopians: as symbol of sin and sinfulness 30 – 1, 43 ethnic Orthodoxy 157, 160 Euhemerism, euhemerization: early Christian deployments of 70 – 1; Enlightenment deployments of 71, 73 – 4; and globalization 72 – 3; history and definition 69 – 70; Protestant deployments of 71; as sacralization rather than secularization 76 – 7; theological dualism of 70, 72 – 3

Euhemerus 69 – 70, 72 – 4, 78 Evangelicals see Protestant faith 5, 36, 66, 74, 76, 175, 183, 189 – 96; Christian 18, 45 – 6, 48, 68, 81, 97 Fanon, Frantz 91 faqir see sadhu Fard, Wallace 185 Farmer, Paul 187 Feirefiz 18 Florensky, Pavel 45, 58 – 60, 63 Foucault, Michel 16, 91 Fraile donado 83 – 7, 94 – 9 Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor 23 – 7, 29 – 30, 32 – 4, 38 – 9 Gale, Monica 78, 79 Gandhi, Mohandas 127, 142, 144, 187 García-Rivera, Alex 83 Garnet, Henry Highland 80 Gillespie, Susan 207 global Christianity 145, 152, 161, 217 global Marianism 154 – 7 Goldberg, Whoopi 188 Graziano, Frank 86 Gregory the Moor, St. 21 Guillén, Nicolás 111 guru see sadhu hagiography 2, 3, 33, 45, 187; colonial 91; Maurice’s 19, 36, 41; nationalist 15; post secular 6; racial 67 – 9 Hamite, Hamitic Hypothesis 153, 159 Heiler, Friedrich 134, 137, 139, 145, 147 Heming, Carol Piper 79 hierarchies of being 84, 92, 94 Hinduism 4, 15, 125, 135 Hohenstaufen dynasty: Conradin 38; Frederick I (Barbarossa) 24; Henry VI 24 – 6, 38; Frederick II (see Frederick II); Manfred 38 holy man/men 1, 6, 130, 134, 138, 140 – 1, 144; ascetic 124; Hindu 124, 134; Indian Christian 130, 134; non-Christian 124, 125 Holy Roman Empire 23, 25, 29, 31 Holzberg, Niklas 79 Hosten 137 human-animal relations 88 humility 85, 86, 97, 137, 139 – 41, 190; Catholic 96

Index icon, theology of 57 – 8 iconoclastic 51, 57 idolatry 62, 67, 90, 93, 137, 139, 183; extirpating 90 immanence 72, 88, 96, 196 Indians (Native Americans) 10, 102, 105 – 6, 110 – 11 interspecies: analytics 88, 89; biopolitics 92; racism 84, 99 – 100 Islam 7, 24, 153 – 4, 156, 195 Israel 160, 194 – 5 Israel, Jonathan I. 73 Jackson, Jesse 184, 193 James, patron saint of Spain 72 Jarmusch, Jim 197 Jerusalem 23, 26, 31, 138 – 40, 155 jewish body 46, 56 Jobs, Steve 187 Johannes Maurus (John the Moor) 27 Jones, Jim 185 José-Mondzain, Marie 45, 51 Kaiserchronik 28 Kaplan, Paul 21, 23 – 30, 32, 34, 38 Kaufmann, Virginia Roehrig 29, 32, 34 Kidd, Colin 68 – 9 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 66 – 7, 185 La Capra, Dominick 91, 99 Lachatañeré, Rómulo 112, 122 Landaluze, Victor Patricio 109 Las Casas, Bartolomé de 90 Le Clerc, Jean 73 – 5 Lecuona, Ernesto 111 Leiseca, Juan Martín 114 León-Portilla, Miguel 79 Lewis, Robert Benjamin 80 licencia 86, 99 Lima, José Lezama 113 Limbaugh, Rush 198 Livingston, Julie 92, 100 Lofton, Kathryn 186 love: Christian 95 – 6; creaturely 83, 87 Magdeburg 20 – 39 Magic Negro 188 – 9, 196, 198 Maharishi of Kailash 132 – 3 Malamud, Margaret 80 Mañach, Jorge 102, 111 Manuel, Frank 79 Marcus, Joyce 80 Marian apparitions 106, 155 – 6, 162

221

Marion, Jean-Luc 56, 126 Marrant, John 75 masking 91, 203 material culture 90, 126 Matrix, The 188 Maurice, Black Saint: crusading saint 31; imperial saint 23, 39; martyrdom and legend 19 – 20, 23, 31, 36; pilgrimage to 29 – 31; sandstone statue 21; skull (relic): 20, 24, 29 Medina, Bernardo 83, 86 – 7, 94 Medina, Cipriano de 84 – 5, 98 Messiah 3, 137, 182 – 8 mice 94 – 5 missionaries 5, 134, 137, 139, 141, 143 modern religion 73 – 5, 127 monasticism 95, 134, 154, 160 Moreno, Juan 102, 103, 106, 109 Moriaen 18, 38 Moses, Wilson Jeremiah 68 mosquitos 95 mulatto: identity 84; piety 89 Mulatto dog epithet 96 – 7 Müller, Max 124, 135 Muñoz Camargo, Diego 71, 79 Murphy, Joseph M. 80 Nahuatl 200, 203, 205, 208; modern speakers 202, 210 – 12 National Great Blacks in Wax Museum 66 – 8, 76 – 7 nationalism (or Indian/Hindu nationalism) 127 naturalism in medieval art 21, 28, 33 – 5, 38 – 9 noncooperation 144 Obama, Barack 6, 182 – 96 Ochún 112 Orientalism 125, 126, 138, 144 Origenistas 113 Ortíz, Fernando 110, 111 Otto I (the Great), Holy Roman Emperor 20, 23 – 4, 33 Our Lady of Aparecida 118 Ouspensky, Leonid 58, 60, 65 painting 30, 39, 45, 111, 122, 130, 138; contemporary 136; costumbrista 109; Enríquez 112; icon 58; Last Judgment 32 Pan-Orthodoxy 152 Parker, Rebecca 133

222 Index Partido Independiente de Color 107 Paz, Octavio 80 photography 148, 157 pictures see paintings Poitier, Sidney 188 Pope John Paul II 119 Porres, San Martín de 82 – 99 post-racial 4, 6, 15, 182 – 96 Prester John, legend of 18, 41 Prince Hall’s Masonic Lodge 75 Proceso de Beatificación 85 Prophet 5, 8, 67, 160, 182 – 8 Protestantism 9, 115, 141, 159, 218 Puar, Jasbir 92, 100 Queen of Sheba 21, 22 Quetzalcoatl 71 – 2 racial “mixing” 105, 111 Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture 66 Revolution, Cuban (1959) 116 – 20 Roman Catholicism 4, 113, 160 Romance, medieval 217 Roubekas, Nickolas P. 78 Russian Orthodoxy 162 Russwurm, John Brown 75, 81 sacrifice 19, 37, 53, 85, 165, 188, 202 sadhu 124 – 5, 129 – 31, 134 – 8, 140, 142 saffron 124 – 5, 127 – 8, 131, 135 – 6, 145 saintliness 2, 6, 12, 15, 46, 93; goodness 165; proved 137; reconcile 35; sensations of 8 St. Moses the Black 150 – 1, 154, 158 – 61, 163 saints: globalization 161 Saladin (Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub) 23 – 4 Sallman, Warner 126, 130 – 1, 138, 143 Saltsman, Chip 198 Sanchéz de Moya 105 – 6 sannyasi see sadhu Santería 107, 111 – 12, 114, 119 Scott, Janny 193 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de 90 Sicily 25 – 6; Lucera 26 – 7 “social” skin 125 Spillers, Hortense 183 spirituality 49, 124 – 5, 131; black 159, 181; Christian 47, 49, 142;

of cloth 146; India 144; superiority 125, 142 Stafford, Barbara Maria 48, 50, 55, 59 Streeter, B. H. 127, 135 – 6, 138 Sudan 153 Suckale-Redlefsen, Gude 18, 21 – 3, 25, 28 – 9, 32, 33, 34, 38 – 9 Sullivan, Andrew 193 swami see sadhu svaraj 144 Taylor, Charles 71 Taylor, Julie Anne 42 theological anthropology 48, 62 Three Magi 21 torturers 18, 30 turban 126, 135 – 6, 138, 140 Tweed, Thomas 116 universal salvation: Pentecostal theme of 25, 27, 31 – 2 Van Sant, Gus 188 Vedanta 124 – 5, 127, 131 Vega, Archbishop Feliciano de 84 – 6 Villaverde, Cirilo 109 Virgin of Charity of El Cobre 102, 107 Virgin Mary 36, 112, 113, 150, 152, 154 – 6 Virgin of Zeitoun 155 – 6 visual culture 125, 127, 130, 136, 144; representation 39, 127, 128, 151 Vivekananda 125, 135 vulture 95 Washington, Harold 190 Washington, Joseph R., Jr. 67 – 9 West, Cornel 63, 184 whiteness 2, 6, 9, 15, 35, 46 – 7, 73, 108 – 10, 126; whiteness, emergence of in the thirteenth century 35 white theology 69 Wilbrand, archbishop of Magdeburg 28, 29, 39 Winfrey, Oprah 2, 186 Wood, Marcus 66 – 7 Wright, Irene 107 Wright, Jeremiah 185, 187, 191 Žižek, Slavoj 96