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FROM THE EDITOR

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c h a p t e r s h o w c a s e

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compares the experiences of the original first-century Christian women addressed by the letter to

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4 - 24 Cody J. Sanders, “Troubled Stories, Best Hopes, Precarious Survival,” in Christianity, LGBTQ Suicide, and the Souls of Queer Folk

25 - 53 Muhammad Fraser-Rahim, “Africanizing Dixie: The Enslaved African Muslim Experience and the Black American Islamic Continuum,” in America’s Other Muslims: Imam W.D. Mohammed, Islamic Reform, and the Making of American Islam

54 - 70 Christophe D. Ringer, “The Eschatological Production of Mass Incarceration,” in Necropolitics: The Religious Crisis of Mass Incarceration in America

71 - 89 Janette H. Ok, “You Have Become Children of Sarah: Reading 1 Peter 3:1–6 through the Intersectionality of Asian Immigrant Wives, Patriarchy, and Honorary Whiteness,” in Minoritized Women Reading Race and Ethnicity: Intersectional Approaches to Constructed Identity in Early Christian Texts, edited by Mitzi J. Smith and Jin Young Choi

90 - 129 Yongho Francis Lee, “The Spiral Dialectics of Cataphasis and Apophasis in Bonaventure,” in Mysticism and Intellect in Medieval Christianity and Buddhism: Ascent and Awakening in Bonaventure and Chinul

contents

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The pagination of the original chapters has been preserved to enable accurate citations of these chapters.These chapters are provided for personal use only and may not be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

L e x i n g t o n B o o k s R e l i g i o n C h a p t e r S h o w c a s e4

29

TWOTroubled Stories, Best Hopes,

Precarious Survival

The research I present in the following chapters emerges from manyhours of recorded interviews I conducted with nine participants. Thesenine volunteered for the research out of their willingness to speak withme about the intersections of their sexual or gender identity, their relig-ious lives, and their suicide experience. Most of them did with the hopethat their stories would provide some aide to other LGBTQ people insimilar situations. And many also voiced a desire to help churches tobecome safer, more life-giving places for LGBTQ people as well.

In the chapters to come, I put these narratives into conversation withthe literature of philosophy, theology, psychology, and varied other dis-ciplines in order to identify themes that hold potential to shape practicesof care in relation to LGBTQ lives. But before I begin extracting pieces ofthese lengthy interviews for critical examination, I believe it is importantfor readers to get to know these nine participants in a fuller sense thaninterview excerpts can provide.

Ann Lowenhaupt Tsing says of stories, “we need to tell and tell untilall our stories of death and near-death and gratuitous life are standingwith us to face the challenges of the present. It is in listening to thatcacophony of troubled stories that we might encounter our best hopes forprecarious survival.”1 That is my hope in rendering these nine individu-als’ stories here. And that, too, was their hope when they first told theirstories to me.

Cody J. Sanders, “Troubled Stories, Best Hopes, Precarious Survival,” in Christianity, LGBTQ Suicide, and the Souls of Queer Folk (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), 29–49. Series: Emerging Perspectives in Pastoral Theology and Care. All Rights Reserved.

L e x i n g t o n B o o k s R e l i g i o n C h a p t e r S h o w c a s e 5

Chapter 230

THOMAS

Thomas, forty-eight-years-old when we spoke, “wrestled” all his life withbeing gay and Christian. His father was a lay Unitarian minister and hisuncles were also ministers. His paternal grandfather achieved only afourth-grade education, but read the Bible exhaustively. This familialbackground typifies Thomas’s experience of religion as a child. “I sang inchurch when I was three years old. I believed in Christ from like a smallboy and I wanted to be a minister since I was age six,” he explained.

Thomas spoke of his adolescence in this atmosphere, saying, “I wouldparticipate in youth groups as best I could and feel these attractions forthe other boys and know that one of the most powerful aspects of who Iwas was absolutely forbidden in any social circle in the community. So Istayed alone with it. I kept my faith in Christ. I always have.” He begandrinking at age fifteen and taking drugs in college partially to deal withthe sexual abuse he experienced as a ten-year-old at the hands of an olderboy, and partially to deal with the growing “distance” he sensed betweenhimself, the world, and the grace of God.

By the time he was in college, Thomas had “let the whole church thinggo” and attempted suicide first at age sixteen and several other timesafter that. He described, “going out into the car and closing the garagedoor and turning on the car and leaving it on. Just when I was going topass out I’d turn it off and open the door and think . . . I didn’t know whyI wanted to live but I didn’t know why I wanted to die.” Thomas alsoattempted overdosing on drugs on a couple of occasions. Once, aftertaking two hits of acid, Thomas recounts his most vivid attempt to endhis life, saying,

I became convinced on that day that the reality was that God was goingto take everybody up and this was going to be hell . . . because therewas something wrong with me. So I ran into this building and I ran upthe stairs and a friend ran after me. I got to the top of the stairwell and Iclimbed over the railing and he pulled me back. And I threw him to theground and wrestled him and I pinned him until he stopped strug-gling. He was okay, but he stopped struggling and let go of me. Then Iclimbed back over the stairwell. And I was praying the whole time, itwas only prayer, just over and over again: “God, save me.” And Ijumped off. And I inverted and I dropped about twenty feet, maybe alittle more, and I landed on my face on concrete steps. And I didn’tpass out. I didn’t break bones. My nose hurt a little bit. I have no ideawhy I survived that.

All throughout these attempts at suicide, even after having left regularchurch attendance behind, Thomas described showing up periodically atvarious services. Once, at a little church near the airport on the outside oftown, he responded to an altar call when he heard a voice inside himsaying, “Go up and pray.” At this church, he sensed that God didn’t want


Troubled Stories, Best Hopes, Precarious Survival 31

him to be gay or to drink or take drugs, so he stopped. He promptlybroke up with his first boyfriend he had ever had and joined a Christianministry on his college campus.

Thomas, who describes himself as “a marrying kind of guy,” begandating a woman he had known since high school. “So she knew I hadbeen gay and we both believed firmly—firmly—that if we had the rightkind of faith we could make me straight,” he explained. So they gotengaged. His mother took his wife-to-be aside and told her that Thomaswas gay. “He won’t be after he gets married,” his fiancée assured her. Sothey were married. Thomas got drunk at the reception so that he couldn’tdrive them to the honeymoon hotel and he continued drinking allthrough the honeymoon.

He was accepted into a PhD program in another city, but once hearrived in town to begin classes, he had the sense that something “hadbroken within [him] and it couldn’t be fixed.” Within two weeks of be-ginning doctoral courses, he couldn’t continue. His wife was upset. “Shestarted hitting me because I couldn’t be the man she wanted, I guess. Shewas angry with me and I didn’t understand. And I was committed, youknow, like when you get married, you get married.” So they began havingchildren. But when the abuse continued Thomas threatened to kill hiswife if she didn’t stop hitting him. So they ended their marriage and heleft.

After leaving his wife and children and the PhD program, Thomassought therapy and psychotropic medications. Nothing helped. But heentered Alcoholics Anonymous and became sober. “I started reading theBible exhaustively . . . I would read chapters of it and then I wouldmeditate and I would go for walks. I became like a monk,” Thomas says.“I withdrew from all my friends who partied and everything. And Ibecame somebody else and then I couldn’t find a way back . . . I couldn’tget over the feeling that there was something really really wrong with mebeing gay.”

“So, I basically stayed alone. I had my faith and that’s all I had.”

TANDIWAE

One of the strongest iterations of a sense of Christian vocation cominginto conflict with one’s sexual identity was voiced by Tandiwae, a forty-nine-year-old, White, cisgender woman who identifies as lesbian.

“I knew as a young kid that, you know, four years old I’m realizingthere’s something different about me,” Tandiwae says. And from as earlyas she can remember, she was regularly in church. Raised Southern Bap-tist in the “deep south,” it took Tandiwae a while to realize that her fatherwas a preacher because most people she knew, like her own family, wereheavily involved in church.


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At the same time that her family’s religious tradition was becoming soimportant to Tandiwae’s identity as a child, she also began sensing anemerging attraction to women.

“I realized at that time that I wanted to be close to women and notmen . . . And I thought, ‘Hmm, this is interesting, this is strange.’ So whenI look back, I realize that’s when I knew I was a lesbian without knowingthat. And so I stayed secluded as I grew up.” But it was in junior highschool that Tandiwae says, “life really changed for me and I realized,whoa, I am different.”

She soon started attending a youth group at another church in town.“That youth program [is where] I really realized that I really did likegirls. And I still didn’t know what the word was, but I’m being called‘fag’ and ‘weirdo’ and ‘creepy’ and all that stuff,” she explains. Bullyingand teasing was combined with messages she perceived as condemnato-ry toward same-sex attraction that she heard in sermons. She says, “Sit-ting there and listening to all the sermons all the way through highschool, sometimes they would just pointblank tell you that it was wrongto be something that you shouldn’t be.” But the messages were oftensubtle.

The preachers never said the word “gay” when I was growing up. Butit was like an underlying thing because I don’t remember ever havingthe gay issue such a strong thing as it is now. And maybe it’s becauseI’m listening now. But at that time, I didn’t understand it all and Icertainly wasn’t going to act on it. I certainly wasn’t going to show thatI was acting on it. Or at least try—try to hide it as best as I could.

So Tandiwae struggled with her emerging sense of sexuality in si-lence. “And I knew that I could not ever act upon my liking anotherwoman. It was just something that would have to stay hidden withinme,” Tandiwae explains. “But I also knew that my dad’s teaching andwhat we were learning in Sunday school was that we’re all God’s chil-dren, we’re all loved, but there is a certain distinction between men andwomen.” Yet, at the very same time, she vividly recalls the contrastingmessage preached from the pulpit, “you are going to die and go to hell ifyou do anything outside of the boundaries.” Though these messagesdidn’t come from her father’s pulpit. She explains,

I do not ever remember my father preaching those from the pulpit.And I asked him later on when he retired, I said, “Dad, how come younever preached upon these things?” And he said, “One, I didn’t under-stand it, so I can’t preach on something I don’t understand. And two, Ijust wanted to preach about the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” And that washis true aspect. He wanted to tell everybody that Jesus loves them. Andthat was his theology. But it was a very strong theology. And . . . as hegot older and I came out to him . . . he actually wrote a letter to theSouthern Baptist Convention, that they needed to change their theolo-



gy . . . and they needed to start preaching about the love of Jesus andaccepting all people and to stop condemning and they needed to edu-cate, not indoctrinate.

But coming out to her larger Christian community was not as positivefor Tandiwae. At one point, she worked at a Southern Baptist camp in ajob that she found greatly fulfilling. During the summer Tandiwae be-friended a woman in town known by the camp employees to be lesbian.While their friendship was strictly platonic, Tandiwae was told she hadto stop hanging around this lesbian woman if she wanted to keep her jobat the camp. This was the first episode she recalled of her faith commu-nity forbidding a fulfilling relationship with another person because ofsexual orientation and it sent a clear message to Tandiwae, who wasn’tyet open about her own sexuality.

She recalled the painful episode of later coming out to her communitythe year that she met her partner.

I came out to myself two years earlier than that, but still didn’t knowhow to come out. I was, “Ok, yes I am gay. Ok, yes I need help. Ok, yesI need to work through these issues.” And I was still involved in thechurch. And as soon as I came out openly, I was booted from everychurch I was involved in, which to me, was devastating. Because that’sall I knew, that’s all I thought I was worthy of because that’s how I hadbeen brought up.

Amid such theological messages of condemnation and communal actsof rejection, Tandiwae recalls her early suicidal ideations. Tandiwaetraced attempts to harm herself in various ways and her contemplation ofenacting suicide in a way that would cause the least pain possible to herfamily all the way back to age twelve. “We lived in an area where therewas nobody around,” she explains. “So I would throw myself up againsta tree. I would smack my hands in the lockers after school when no-body’s around. And I would sit there and pound my head and just wishthat I would just like cause an aneurism or something and I’d be done. OrI would break my neck and I’d be done. You know, it’d be freak acci-dent.”

As she got older, she says, “I remember driving down the road and I’dbe in some zone and I would have no idea where I just drove through.Because I was thinking about, ‘Man, if the next diesel comes by, I’m goingto just pull right in front of it and life [will] be done.’” She continues,

Or I would look at the embankment I knew was coming around thiscorner and what if I just keep flying and, you know, say that my pedalgot stuck, maybe they’ll just think my pedal got stuck or somethingand I’ll just fly off this ridge. Nobody will ever miss me. And then Iwould stop and think, what would that do to my mother? That wouldfreak my mother out and she’s already a basket case anyway. Whatwould that do to my father’s ministry . . . ? Everything kept bringing


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me back so I never followed through but I’d get really close to it. Imean, I would slam on the breaks and pull over and just weep. “Whatam I doing? Why can’t you deal with this?” So it became a “why can’t Ideal with it?” I brought it back to me. Because that’s what you’retaught. It’s your problem, your fault. Then I would sit and say, “God,why did you make me this way? God, why can’t I change? God, whycan’t you heal me? God, why can’t you fix me? Why am I this way?Can’t you change my thinking? You’re supposed to be able to do allthese things.” And then I would get frustrated.

She was pulled on one side by theological messages condemning hersexual self-understanding, and on another by a strong sense of call to-ward a vocation in ministry—each narrative pull emerging throughclosely related theological narratives. Tandiwae summed up her dilem-ma with these words:

I knew, as a gay woman—openly gay woman—that I would not be ableto do the music ministry that I wanted to do, that I would not be able towork in the churches and with people and with kids that I wanted todo because then I’d be considered a molester. I did know that wordand I did know that gay people couldn’t do any kind of church-affiliat-ed work, which was the only thing I really believed that I ever wassupposed to do or could do—work with ministry. That was it.

SILAS

Silas is a forty-eight-year-old Irish/Cherokee/Choctaw gender queer per-son who identifies as a lesbian. She grew up in a fundamentalist Baptistenvironment and attended a fundamentalist Christian university. This iswhere the majority of her storytelling centered. She says, “I liked being at[the University]. I liked the spiritual elements, I liked the people, I likedthe academics, the environment—everything was nice, I mean, it wasgood, you know.” Already aware of her same-sex attraction as a studentat the university, Silas had hoped that something would change for her orthat she would meet a mate, believing that the university would be “agood place to find somebody.” As hopeful as she was that somethingmight change for her in this new environment, she harbored a great dealof suspicion:

You know, thinking I would change but also knowing that I wouldn’t.You know, that being gay is as inherent as, you know, our skin, oureverything that we’re made of. Having those feelings, you could sup-press them. And I have over the years. But it doesn’t change, youknow, it’s still a part of who we are. It’s an inherent part of being aperson.

While she was home for the summer before her senior year of college,Silas had a romantic encounter with another woman. It was, in her



words, “a minor experience,” but one that she wrote about in her journal.When she went back to the university, her roommate read her journaland made copies of it and took the pages regarding her same-sex roman-tic experience to the school’s Dean of Women. She explains,

I had to go to the Dean of Women’s office and they asked me whether Iconsidered myself to be homosexual. I answered the question that,“Yes, while I had those feelings and they were a part of who I am, that Idid. But, while I was there and I wasn’t really doing anything about itwhile I was there, no.” So they sent me out of their office and theybrought me back in and they said, “We’re going to let you graduate butwe’re going to change you to a different room. We’re going to send allyour journals home to your mother.”

But the school also stripped her of her campus ministerial responsibilitiesas a chaplain and a prayer captain—roles that were meaningful to Silas asan emerging ministerial leader.

After that, folks would talk about her behind her back as she walkedacross campus. Then one day her dorm supervisor called her into heroffice and asked Silas, “Knowing what you know about yourself, do youthink you should stay here?” Silas thought about the question and an-swered honestly, “Knowing what I know about myself, no. I don’t think Ishould stay.” Because, as Silas admitted, “that was against their rules andI was coming to terms with [the fact that] it was a part of me and . . . I hadone close friend that we were practically in love with each other, exceptthat we couldn’t be.” So she left the university and moved back home towork part-time at a newspaper with a gay friend she knew from highschool.

Silas found community in gay bars near her home because it was oneof the few places she knew to meet other gay and lesbian people. “Wedidn’t have the Internet. We didn’t have any gay churches that I knewof.” But she also admits that it would have been difficult for her to go to a“gay church” because of her own religious perspectives. She explains,

So if there was like a Universalist church, a Unitarian church, when Iwould go there it just wouldn’t align with my philosophies. So I had ahard time. What I wanted, I guess, was my cake and eat it too. I wantedto be able to have the religion and beliefs and thoughts that we had,and I had, and I wanted to be able to marry the woman of my choice.

In fact, there was a woman at her university that she dreamed of marry-ing. That dream included both of them becoming missionaries in LatinAmerica because they both spoke Spanish and were deeply religiouslycommitted. “But,” Silas said with some pain, “that wasn’t going to hap-pen because her mom was praying for her to have a car and a husbandand she got both and that worked out fine.”


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Silas’s mother had difficulties with same-sex attraction. “She lovedmen and was attracted to men and she couldn’t understand people beinggay,” Silas said.

One day she was getting ready for work, and it must have been my dayoff. And we got into some kind of discussion and we were face-to-face Iremember in the hallway at her house. And somehow she asked me orI told her that I was gay, and when I did she didn’t like it and shepunched me in the face. My mom’s a tough woman.

When her mother went to work, Silas decided to kill herself. Shefound a bottle of lithium that her stepfather took for a mental illness. “Itook I don’t know how many—as many as I could,” she said. “And Iwent to lie down in my bed and I thought I would just die and thatwould be the end of it.”

But then she began having second thoughts. She remembered a familymember who had a medical condition that left her comatose and Silasbegan imagining herself in that situation. She had visions of being “aperson just lying in bed having to be taken care of because she died, shealmost died but not quite.” So she dialed 911 and was taken to the hospi-tal. Fortunately, the only damage was minor harm to her kidneys. Heraunt came to pick her up from the hospital to stay with her and later hermother came to the house and apologized. After that, much changed forher mother and she began going to gay bars with Silas and having funwith her friends.

Yet, for Silas, the hope of becoming straight still lingered. “I met a niceman and we started dating and then I got engaged and I was engaged fora couple of years. But then I thought, ‘Why am I playing this role? That’snot who I am.’” And she called off the engagement. She explained herdilemma, saying, “each time it’s like I kept trying to do one or the other. Itried to fit the expectations. And then I just tried to be myself. And it justwas that pendulum back and forth.” Explaining her grappling with thereligious narratives related to her sexuality, Silas said,

I’ve always felt and believed that God never leaves us and, you know,we have a lot of the truths God gives us regardless of how we aresometimes. You know, God still will be there, but you know, you alsohave verses like, “The way of the transgressor is hard,” or whatever. SoI thought, here I am, I’m just nothing but a transgressor, always goingto be seen that way, so I guess I’m just going to have a hard life and Ijust kind of went with it.

FLORENCE

Florence, a thirty-seven-year-old, White, cisgender woman who identifiesas lesbian, was brought up in a relatively conservative denomination inthe Reformed tradition. Family and religion were vital parts of her life



growing up. Her parents instilled in her from an early age that it wasimportant to ask questions about faith and religion and when she wentoff to college, she began exploring other churches within the wider Chris-tian tradition and continued to immerse herself in artistic engagement asshe had throughout her childhood.

When it came to homosexuality, Florence’s operative understandingfrom her growing up years was encapsulated in the phrase, “love thesinner, hate the sin.” The appropriate way to respond to gay and lesbianpeople as she understood it was “to love them as human beings, but todisparage what they do and who they are.”

I had talked to my guidance counselor at school and said that I washaving these feelings for my best friend who was a woman and he kindof said, “Well, you know, everybody sort of goes through these kind ofphases and it’s probably just something that you’re going through and itstotally natural. Just don’t act on it because that would be bad. But you’llget through it.”

At the time, this message felt liberating, allowing Florence to feel thefeelings she was experiencing believing that they would someday pass.She said,

I really sort of took to heart what my guidance counselors said andthought that this was maybe just something I was going through andthat I would grow out of it. And I had mostly had boyfriends in highschool and I really liked them. It wasn’t hard for me. There wasn’t aconflict there. It wasn’t like I was pretending. So I just kind of figuredthis is an anomaly and something that I’ll grow out of and it’ll be okayas long as long as I didn’t do anything. For me it was like, as long as Ididn’t act on it, I wasn’t complicit or I wasn’t doing anything wrong aslong as I wasn’t sort of actively engaged in anything.

She later talked with her pastor about her feelings of same-sex attrac-tion, receiving the message from him, “Unless you’re really sure, don’ttell anybody because it’ll just make your life really hard,” and recom-mend that she seek counseling, perhaps from an ex-gay ministry likeExodus International. She declined to do so.

But as Florence met more out gay and lesbian people in college, shebegan challenging the rhetoric she had been exposed to regarding homo-sexuality and began asking what she really wanted in her life. When sherealized that what she really wanted was a romantic relationship withanother woman, Florence experienced a crisis. Florence experienced heronly suicide attempt in college during a process of coming to an under-standing of herself as lesbian. This occurred “somewhere around cominginto knowing who I was and thinking about how I wanted to be in theworld and all of the conflict that kind of comes with that,” Florencestated. She describes this conflict, saying,


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So I was interested in thinking about what that would look like and Ihad absolutely no idea how to reconcile it with my faith. I reallythought I was going to become an atheist. And that almost terrified mealmost as much as being a lesbian—the sense that I would have to giveup Christianity.

LOUISE

Louise, a twenty-one-year-old, White, gender queer/pangender/fluid per-son of German/Irish heritage, identifies as pansexual. She grew up in aCatholic family—“religiously religious,” as she describes them. She dealtwith a number of stressful situations in her growing up years. She saysher family was “kind of falling apart,” she wasn’t doing well in school,she suffered from insomnia and would often be too tired to attend school,and she dealt with persistent bullying in school—“just the general bull-shit essentially,” as she names it.

Her family went to church every Sunday and Louise was baptized asa baby in the Catholic Church. “I definitely consider myself the blacksheep of that family,” she said, “because even as a child, I never really,like, I just didn’t feel welcome in the community.” Her family movedmany times during her growing up years and she was part of severalchurches.

She vividly recalls one priest she encountered in one congregationwho she describes as “pretty liberal and pretty progressive,” and he wasthe only person that she ever remembers talking about gender or sexual-ity in a positive way in church. Aside from that priest, everything else sheheard about sexuality—heterosexual sexuality or otherwise—was “over-whelmingly negative.” She describes the nature of religious discourse inher family, saying,

I mean the comments that come out of, like, my dad’s side of the fami-ly—out of their mouths—is just sometimes unbearable to hear becauseit’s so painfully negative. And even if it wasn’t affecting me as a childbefore I understood my sexuality and I really was struggling with it—like as a young, young child—even then I felt like, it just felt painful tome. It was hard to hear. And I can’t really—even to this day—can’treally articulate exactly what was going through my mind.

So Louise only stayed in church for a brief time and curtailed the opin-ions she wanted to express to her family. She explains, “It was just sostressful to be around that environment because I was constantly double-checking everything I say and do all the time.”

She was sexually active with her male peers at a young age. “I felt likeI was trying to like reinforce myself. Like, reinforce my sexuality andbeing feminine and like, you know, whatever—attractive to males andthings,” she explains. She also reported being sexually abused by a girl



seven years older when Louise was only six or seven years old. Shebelieves that was a major factor in her avoidance of dealing with herattraction to other women. “I’m just really nervous around women,” shesays, “and so that kind of hindered me exploring my sexuality.”

As she got more and more involved in sexual activity with men, shefelt that she was reinforcing a delusion of her sexuality and gender exist-ing in binary terms. “I just felt like I was trying to hard to be somethingthat I wasn’t, basically. Which was an over-feminine girl . . . And I wasn’thappy and I didn’t feel like myself.” She continued, “I was still in thatchaos phase and I was over sexualizing myself to make up for the guiltthat I felt for being so lost and confused.”

She had her first sexual experience with another woman at seventeenor eighteen and began at that point identifying as bisexual, before morerecently shifting toward “gender queer,” “pangender,” and “pansexual”as identifiers when she started to recognize that a person’s sex wasn’t acentral factor in her attraction to them, and that gender, more broadly, isa social construct.

Her attempts to understand her sexuality and to challenge the sexual-ity-shaming discourse that surrounded her in her church and her familygrowing up were not proving successful. She explains,

The fact that I, I don’t know it was, like, even though I knew that outloud I could say, “This isn’t dirty. This is just normal. This is biology,”whatever. Out loud, you know, I could rationalize it. But I was stilldealing with that, like, “This is wrong.” Even though it isn’t, like, it’swrong and it’s dirty and it’s something that you don’t talk about. Inever had the sex talk with my family. Like, they never had that talkwith me. And I felt guilty about being on birth control. You know, justevery little thing, every little aspect in my daily life was like, I feltguilty about.

She identifies her first suicide attempt as stemming from a place of angerand resentment—some of which related to her religious upbringing. Sheingested sleeping pills and attempted to drown herself in her bathtub,but felt guilty because she didn’t want her mother to have to find herdead and aborted the attempt.

Her second suicide attempt emerged more from a place of guilt.“Guilt upon guilt upon guilt,” she described it. Years of various influ-ences enforcing the sense of guilt led to feelings of guilt over her sadness,even guilt for wanting to die. And Louise couldn’t locate any supportiveperson to share these feeling with. She explained, “And so when I wasgoing through the hardest points in my life when I felt like I had nofriends or nobody I could rely on, I couldn’t even go to my family. Andthat was what was so hard. Like, you’re suppose to have one thing to fallback on and I didn’t have that one thing, it felt like.”


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JULIANA

Juliana is a forty-five-year-old, African American, cisgender woman whoidentifies as queer. Twelve years went into her suicide attempt, she says,speaking thirteen years on the other side of surviving the attempt to endher life. She continues,

I mean, I’ve tried to figure out was it twelve years that went into it orwas it my whole life that went into it? That’s why I answered that onequestion the way I did because you think you have a handle on it, youthink you have a narrative around it and then things happen and youhave to change that narrative.

Juliana grew up in a predominantly African American denomination andboth of her parents were pastors. She attended a religious college that shedescribes as a “cauldron” of “politically right wing, theologically conser-vative . . . center of evangelicalism.” She explains her impetus to attendthat school: “The idea was to go there and, because they believe in super-natural healing and whatever ails you believe and you will receive it,etcetera, etcetera. So, I knew what I was going for. I was going to behealed of my homosexuality.” She described the decision further, saying,“Every time I run, I run right into this. So I came to the one place where Ithought I could be just, you know, that’s it. I come here and I get myhealing and that’s it.”

She had been “conditioned” in her growing up years that there wassomething wrong with her that “needs to be excised.” Looking back onher college choice, she reflected, “Being in an environment . . . whereyou’re just inundated with that and it was on purpose—I did it on pur-pose.” But, she said as she laughed, “one of the things that I found thereis that I was not alone in going there for that reason.”

And yet, Juliana describes here experience with religion as a 60/40split—60 percent negative and 40 percent positive.

And so when you’re left with a big forty percent like that you have tosay, well, what part of it—you know, to have an integrated self—I cansay, ok well, these terrible things happened to me and I can blamereligion. Or I can say, all of these things happened in part because ofreligion and so what do I do now? So what do I do?

It was in college that Juliana first revealed her same-sex attraction, and bythe beginning of her third year in school, she fell for a female TA who“seduced” her. Juliana described her decision to enter a relationship withher, saying, “The more I run from this the more I run smack into it. So I’mgoing to do an experiment. I’m going to stop running. I’m going to,quote, ‘give in.’”



“But the deeper issue,” she explained, “was that I’m going to actuallyquestion what I’ve been told.” This was the issue that was of most con-cern to her parents. She described what she told them with these words:

I said, “You don’t control my thoughts. You don’t control my beliefs.You don’t control anything about me.” And that’s hard for a preacher’skid to do . . . Well when both of your parents are pastors and they havethe legitimacy that you do not, just as a young person and as a personwho is daring to question them. You really do feel like you’re out on alimb. It’s meant to be an isolating experience. It’s one of the things thatkeeps you in the fold. It’s the fear of being alone or being on your ownor can’t make it with out them. Then you start to realize, well I’mtwenty years old, what do you mean I can’t make it without them?

And the following summer, her parents kicked her out of the house overher sexuality, her questioning of her religious tradition and her parents’authority, “over all of it.” While she hadn’t yet disclosed her sexual at-traction to other women to her parents, they told her “God had told themthat I was on my way to being a practicing homosexual.” That, she says,began what she sees as the twelve-years that led up to her suicide at-tempt.

When they confronted her with their suspicion, Juliana confirmedwhat they suspected and admitted to being in a relationship with anotherwoman, which led to a “violent confrontation.” Her parents beat her upover the course of an entire weekend. They confiscated her journals andthreatened to expose the TA with whom she had been in a relationship.And at the end of the weekend, they made her leave the home. She spentseveral week sin a women’s shelter and then found a place of her own inanother city. She took a year off from college and devoted her efforts togetting back into school as an independent student, which she eventuallydid. “It just gets tiring. It gets tiring . . . I was just tired. I was really tired,”Juliana says

She had few people in her life who could understand the complexityof her experience—few people, she says, “who are willing to take thetime to hear what you’re saying, whatever it is that you’re saying.” Out ofthe complexities of her experience, in the aftermath of a love interest thathad gone “very badly” and a lot of alcohol consumption, she cut herwrists in order to bleed to death. She described the sense of “futility” thatled to that moment:

That futility that you—this is all, yes, this is all there is. This is it. This isall you get. And what you’ve gotten, Juliana, is a very mixed bag. Youhave gotten a mixed bag. So you can’t cover it up with books. You can’tcover it up with the pursuit of knowledge. You can’t cover it up. This isit. So that futility that I think had gone on, I mean, definitely since[college] days, thinking, yeah, the more I run, the more I’m going torun smack into it. That basically took over.


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But her attempt to end her life ended without her death. The very factthat she could not successfully carry out her own suicide was a turningpoint in her experience. She explained,

I just cut myself but I was at a point where I wasn’t even thinking clearenough that as soon as you cut yourself your body’s going to starthealing whether you want it to or not. So where you get this idea thatyou’re just going to bleed to death, I mean, I still don’t know where Igot that idea from. Total fantasy, just complete fantasy. But then yousee it happening. You see the blood coagulating and you’re like, I stillcan’t get out of here. Okay, so what am I going to do now? So beingconfronted with something as simple as that can be, I mean, it’s jarringbut it’s also it helps you realize what you think about yourself isn’tnecessarily true. It’s not necessarily so . . . You don’t have as muchcontrol as you think you might, not even over your own existence.

She concluded her reflections upon her suicide and her mother’s deathand the years she spent caring for her father in the midst of his declininghealth and eventual death, saying, “So the sense of, I guess, the sense ofself that comes from that is people can withstand a lot. I guess I’m one ofthem.”

MATTHEW

Matthew is a thirty-one-year-old, White, cisgender man who identifies asgay. He grew up Southern Baptist and at the time of the interview was inprocess to join the Episcopal Church. Matthew’s family went to a South-ern Baptist church for the first eight or nine years of his life but thenceased attending church altogether. Matthew, however, began attendingchurch with friends who went to one of the largest churches in his state—also a Southern Baptist congregation.

When Matthew was eighteen, he began to realize that he was gay andslowly stopped going to church. Yet he decided to attend a SouthernBaptist college for his freshman year. He soon recognized that his emerg-ing sense of sexuality could put him at odds with his college, resulting inexpulsion if the revelation of his sexuality came to light on campus. Hereported,

I know for a fact that there were other gay people at [the Baptist col-lege], but they were in the closet, you know. I’d hear reports of, youknow, if students at [the college] when to [the local gay bar] that theUniversity would send out spies to keep track of who they saw go inthere and would report it back to the administration and those studentswould either get very heavy sanctions or be completely expelled fromthe University.



Thus, Matthew made the decision after his first year of college to transferto a public university where this possibility would no longer be of con-cern.

Even at his new public university, Matthew attempted to retain hisreligious practices and communities through involvement in the BaptistStudent Union and Campus Crusade for Christ. Eventually, however,Matthew reports, “I got so frustrated with religion and how they treatedgay people that I dropped out.” At that point, the university’s gay stu-dent group was the only organization in which he retained involvement.

It was during college that Matthew made two attempts to end his life.His last attempt Matthew doesn’t connect to his sexual identity, but to hisdiagnosis of obsessive compulsive disorder and the difficulty he haddealing with that diagnosis at work and in his life more broadly. His firstsuicide attempt, however, Matthew describes as “directly religiously in-volved” with a number of other factors that also went into the decision.

Matthew was bullied at school for his weight, for not being masculineenough, for not being into sports, and the ways he was perceived to fallshort of a masculine ideal. He attempted to date a girl during this timeand once they broke up, Matthew felt guilty for dating her, knowing thathe was not attracted to women. He continued striving to live up to theexpectations of his church, saying, “I guess up until I was, like, eighteenand twenty I tried to be, you know, the perfect Christian or whatever.Didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t have premarital sex.” This becamemore and more difficult during college when Matthew’s same-sex attract-ing and Christian identification came into greater conflict.

A few of Matthew’s friends who knew of his emerging sense of same-sex attraction convinced him to go to an ex-gay ministry to rid himself ofhomosexuality. Attending this ministry, he reports, “kind of messed meup and just got me feeling bleak.” He believed that if he didn’t keepgoing to this ex-gay ministry that he would lose the friends who sent himthere. Matthew spent approximately three years attending two differentex-gay ministries—one in his home city and one near his university.

Matthew said, “I guess for like a couple of years during my early partof college I really struggled with, you know, knowing my attraction tomen, but wanting to be Christian at the same time and not feeling I couldbe both.” He continued,

It made me feel like I was a disappointment to my friends at churchand a disappointment to God. Like, that something was really, that Ifelt like I had a birth defect or something. That I wasn’t, that made mejust want to be normal like all the other people around me . . . I tried totalk to my youth minister at [my church] and, you know, he just en-couraged me to keep going to the ex-gay ministry and avoid peoplethat might cause me, lead me into temptation as far as, like, avoidingother gay people and stuff like that.


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He very soon realized, however, that his sexuality wasn’t going tochange.

Speaking about the teaching concerning homosexuality instilled inhim throughout his life before he had the tools to critically reflect onthose teachings, Matthew said, “I wasn’t able to think for myself. Andonce I was able to do that, I was able to start lifting some of the depres-sion and other feelings of guilt that I’ve dealt with.”

I came to realize that it wasn’t God that was causing my problems withChristianity, it was people that I was going to church with and, youknow, certain denominations’ practices. And it really took a whilearound here. Because it’s only been the last several years that more gayaffirming churches have started popping up in this area . . . And until Ifound our about some of the more open and affirming churches in thearea, I just, you know, I would read my Bible at home.

After college, Matthew’s longing for a religious community led him toUnitarian Universalism and then—desiring a more explicitly Christianchurch—Matthew began the process of joining the Episcopal Church.Near the end of his interview, Matthew reflected back on his story, say-ing, “I personally take the signs of me still being alive as a fact that Godwas looking out for me and didn’t want, you know, didn’t think it wasmy time to go yet.”

KATE

Kate is a twenty-three-year-old, White, cisgender woman who identifiesas a lesbian. While racially she identifies as White, she also identifiesculturally as a third culture “islander,” as she was raised outside of thecultural milieu of her parents heritage as the child of missionaries.

Growing up with conservative Christian missionary parents, same-sex attraction and sexuality were presented to Kate growing up as some-thing that was “always sin, wrong, and never really any room for ques-tion.” She had heard many stories and read statistics about people com-ing out to parents or confessing their “struggles” with same-sex attrac-tion that made her afraid of the results of talking to her own parentsabout her sexuality. It was, she said, as if homosexuality was the “sin-of-all-sins” as she understood it. She recounted one family story that in-stilled in her this notion when she overheard a conversation her grand-father was having with other family members:

My grandfather was talking about these two guys that he worked with,I guess they were in a relationship or something like that, and he wassaying that he would have gotten his shotgun out and taken care of it,and that kind of thing. So those kinds of things, it was like it wouldscare me and make me think, okay, well maybe that’s what Christian



people and, I don’t know, maybe that’s what my family—maybe all ofthem—think that way.

For these reasons, Kate kept her sexuality a secret from her family untilyears later.

She attended a fundamentalist Christian university and encounteredother situations that exacerbated her felt need for hiddenness. She says, “Ithink maybe if I hadn’t been [at the University] I probably would havemaybe been more open about my sexuality and tried to get help. But Ithink being there—I had friends that had been kicked out for being gay.”She opened up to a roommate a bit, but that, too, didn’t go well and itinstilled in Kate a sense of fear if her sexuality were revealed. She ex-plained, “Like I said, you have a few negative situations and so then youjust assume that’s the way everyone is going to respond—even the peo-ple that love you, your family.”

Kate’s suicide attempt occurred in her senior year at the university.She said, “[the University] isn’t the world, but at that point it was myworld—it was all I knew.” She explained her struggles to address thefraught intersection of her faith and sexuality during that period, saying,

It was very frustrating because it wasn’t going away and I was tryingto do what I thought, like, find accountability, read God’s word, pray—pray that God would take it away—and it wasn’t happening so it wasvery frustrating. So then I was like, well maybe God does hate me . . . itwasn’t really helping and so it almost kind of made it worse. Justbecause I started to hate that part of myself—I started to hate that andthen I started to hate God and then I started to hate people around me.And then I was kind of like, well, there’s really no point to live. And Iwas just like, if I die now, then I can just stop—because I came to apoint where I realized that it was never going to go away.

And while Kate was raised to believe that suicide was a “really bad sin”and example of selfishness, she reasoned, “If I die now, I can get to leaveand just be with God and I don’t have to worry about being—not neces-sarily even just struggling with the sin—but I was like, if I live here, I’mgoing to be continually tempted.”

Kate explained further the impact of the thinking behind her beliefthat God hated her, saying, “I felt like I was a disappointment to God.”She continued,

Even though I knew in my head, like, God doesn’t make mistakes andhe creates us in his image, I felt like he must have like, for me to havethe worst of all the worst sins, I felt like he must be really angry at meor not love me as much. And I felt like even though I was trying topursue him, I was trying to read God’s word and I was trying to do theright things—what I thought was right—I just felt like I couldn’t getinto his good graces.


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Her anger at God contributed to her sense of the unlivability of life due tothe devastation of losing a relationship with God that she considered tobe of central importance in her life. Kate said,

I got really angry at [God]. And that was another reason, too, I thinkthat I was suicidal. Because for most of my life I’ve known about God.I’ve been close to him since my teen years—that’s when I acceptedChrist. And when you have a bond with someone and all of the suddenit’s like, it’s different—it’s, like, broken. I don’t know, it’s like life’s notworth living, you know. Because you were in love with somebody andthat relationship was broken.

While this period of her life were devastating for Kate, reflecting backabout the period of her life leading up to her suicide attempt, Kate said,

I would say it was very dark, rock bottom, very depressing, but also atthe same time looking back now I feel like it was part of a necessaryprocess in trying to figure out where I stood—trying to understandGod. And it’s definitely given me a lot more of an open mind to peoplethat are struggling.

While she doesn’t identify suicidal thoughts as a “good thing,” she doessay, looking back on this period of her life, “I really had to wrestlethrough a lot of who I was and what truth is and what morals are and alot of the, I guess, deep questions of life that people try to figure out.”And that struggle with important questions of identity and religiousunderstanding she sees as helpful to her development as a person.

Her first positive experience sharing her sense of sexuality with an-other person occurred when she opened up to a friend over Skype. AfterKate told her of her same-sex attraction, her friend wrote Kate a longletter with the basic message, “you’re still the same person that I metthree years ago and I don’t look at you any differently and I love you.”After having that positive experience telling one of Kate’s closest friends,she felt better prepared to tell her parents and others.2

When Kate finally decided to talk with her family about her sexualityand struggles with suicidality, she was surprised by this openness to theconversation and the ensuing exploration of the intersection of Kate’ssexuality and the family’s faith tradition. She recounted,

During that time, being open with [my parents] and then seeing thatthey were okay with it and that they were supportive and they wantedto help me. I guess that was kind of like, it just helped me becausewhen you’re in a dark situation where you’re just like, you don’t seeany light and you’re assuming because there’s negativity from certainpeople . . . I guess like in that sea of negativity I saw, I guess I wasafraid of being open with certain people. And then when I was, like,they wanted to help me, they wanted to be there with me, they wantedto help me figure out what I believe and wanted to support me. So thatwas very freeing, very uplifting, very encouraging.



Kate’s mother responded in a way that was particularly heartening toKate as she continues her journey to reconcile her faith and sexuality. Sheexplained,

We were talking about it and she was like, “I want to be open to whatGod has to say.” And she basically said, “If being gay and being Chris-tian is not wrong, I want to be okay with accepting that if that’s whatGod’s Word says.” She’s like, “Because I haven’t researched it andthere’s things I haven’t researched and I’ve just accepted them blindlybecause I’ve been taught them.”

With Kate’s own openness to exploration reflected in the response of herown mother, Kate began letting others in on the journey with her. Afterleaving the university where she felt under constant judgment, Kate metothers who accepted her and the journey of exploration she was on. Shesummarizes the impact of these relationships, saying, “So I think meetingChristians that actually cared about me, that had a huge impact. Andthere weren’t a lot, but here were some.”

MIGUEL

Miguel is a thirty-year-old, Mexican/French, cisgender man who iden-tifies as a “sexual being” in a same-sex relationship. He grew up in anominally Catholic household and now identifies with “historical Chris-tianity.” His mother an father both came to the country undocumentedfrom Mexico and gained citizenship in the United States.

In the fifth or sixth grade, Miguel recalls his first encounter with theconcept of “religion,” which he always thought of as part of this ethnic-ity. Upon asking his mother what religion they belonged to, she ex-plained to Miguel that they were Catholic. His family attended churchmostly on Christmas and Easter and other special occasions and, uponinvestigating further, he discovered his mother also practiced Santeria.Miguel mostly understood their family’s sporadic church attendance asan opportunity to spend time with family and eat a big festive mealafterwards.

Reflecting back on his seven suicide attempts, Miguel says that sexual-ity played a part in them, but wasn’t the catalyst. He explained that he“didn’t have a pretty childhood.” His family experienced periodic home-lessness, living out of their car at one point, in a family homeless shelterat another, and several times in section eight apartments. He and hissiblings were bullied for being the poorest kids in school and, on top ofthis targeting because of his family’s economic status, he recalls thethought, “Oh, I’m different than everybody else in this sense: I’m notinterested at all in girls.” Adding one thing on top of the other, Miguelreflects back, “a little kid can only take so much.” He explains his reason-ing for the suicide attempts in hindsight,


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So that’s kind of how I had my self-reflection and why I think suicideseemed so logical, like, oh I’m in pain. Oh, I don’t think it’s ever goingto stop. Oh, that seems like the solution for it. If I die then I no longerhave any torment or pain. I don’t have to get bullied anymore. Andthen I’m just kind of out of the equation. Also, being poor, I alsothought . . . well then it’ll be one less person they have to feed or takecare of as well. So it was kind of all these things kind of combined.

Miguel’s suicide experience stemmed from the comingling of all of thesefactors. As he said, “It was just having despair, hopelessness, I was beingbullied at school, you know, not feeling understood or accepted.”

But after a final failed attempt, Miguel ceased trying to kill himself. Hesaid, “The fact that I attempted suicide seven times and that as you at-tempt suicide and you don’t complete the suicide several times that justmakes you more depressed because you can’t even do that right.” But healso reflected back on this decision to cease his suicide attempts with atheological reasoning as well:

I gave up on killing myself because I figured, obviously even if I wantto kill myself, apparently God does not want me dead. And apparentlyyour time is when your time is and apparently it’s not my time. Sothat’s kind of what kind of—I was at peace with, okay, I guess I shouldstop trying.

Miguel had a budding interest in religion when he was in his mid tolate teenage years and went on the above-mentioned quest to decideupon a religious tradition to practice between the ages of fourteen andsixteen. After systematic exploration of a number of world religions, Mi-guel recalls being taken to church by a friend’s family after spending thenight at their house on a Saturday evening. While Miguel was in theyouth room of the church with worship music planning, he recalls, “I hadthis tremendous, I had this emotion go over me and it was a sense oftremendous fear and tremendous warmth at the same time.” He contin-ues,

So then I thought, okay, I’ll take this as a sign that, like, God, you’rehere whether you’re here in the sense of presently here or here some-where in the sense of like this religious place or church or whatever.I’m just going to take that as a sign because I didn’t experience thatanywhere else in any of the places that I went to. So then I said, wellwhat better time to do the two-week thing and then, and my thoughtwas, I’ll do the two weeks and then this thing will be over and then I’llgo on to whatever the next religion I can find. So I start doing the wholetwo-week thing. I talk to the youth pastor, I talk to the senior pastor, Itell them what I’m doing, I tell them what I need to do to fulfill whatev-er this religion is.

But instead of lasting two weeks, his exploration of protestant Christian-ity lasted for two years. He continued studying the tradition but didn’t



accept this as his own personal faith tradition until he was eighteen yearsold.

At eighteen, Miguel now belonged to a protestant Christian traditionand embraced this faith as his own. It was at that time when he beganreading the verses in the biblical text about homosexuality. He says,“And then I had this idea, well if it’s wrong, then what can I do aboutthat? And so then I went to reparative therapy, or ex-gay ministry.” Hewas twenty-one or twenty-two years old at the point he entered the ex-gay ministry, driving two-hours each way to access the group for biweek-ly meetings. “I bought a couple of books, I went to a little support groupthing, journaled, did all that stuff,” he said. “And it wasn’t all bad. Ilearned things about, like, emotional dependency—which I realized I waslike a poster child for, so I was able to work through that.” But the groupand its mission began to seem incredulous to Miguel. He reports goingthrough a long period of seriously looking at the assumptions and teach-ings and methods of the group. He says, “I did that and then I realizedthat a lot of it was a bunch of crap.”

Today, Miguel has reconciled his faith and sexuality, but holds amuch more complex view of sexual identification than is often availablein popular discourse. He says, “I’m just a sexual human being like every-body else. Because I don’t really identify with gay, straight, or bi and Idon’t, I don’t give that part of my identity a lot of hold in my life or a lotof power in labeling.”

NOTES

1. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibilityof Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 34.

2. Kate made an observation about the experience of many Christians in needingto “come out twice” to friends and loved ones. She said, “I don’t know if this is typicalof being in Christian circles, being gay and being Christian—but it’s almost like youcome out twice, sort of. I sort of feel like that. Just because the first time you’re like,‘This is a sin, this is wrong, help me.’ And people are supportive and then whenyou’re like, ‘Wait, I don’t think this is unbiblical and this isn’t something I can reallychange.’ And then it’s like you kind of have to resay it again and then—and that canbe scary too, because you don’t know. Because a lot of times Christians will support ifyou say it’s a sin, but then if you’re like, ‘it isn’t,’ then it’s like, you don’t have thatsupport.”


39

Chapter Three

Africanizing DixieThe Enslaved African Muslim Experience and

the Black American Islamic Continuum

THE ENSLAVED AFRICAN EXPERIENCE

Between the early 1500s and 1866, more than 12.5 million Africans weretransported in bondage to the Americas, and, of those, around 10.7 millionsurvived the middle passage. The vast majority of those enslaved Africansarrived not in North America but in the Caribbean and South America, espe-cially Brazil. Regardless of the exact number of individuals forced into bond-age, the importation of African human merchandise to the Americas made asizable imprint on the economics of soon-to-be American society.1 Many ofthese colonies, some which eventually had direct shipment to the Southernshores of North America, impacted many lives and traditions. These coloniesnot only became profitable states for the Southern economy but also in-creased the size of the population in the American South.

The historical academic literature points to a consistent theme of South-ern planters seeking to separate men, women, and children along ethnic lines.They encouraged mixing the African population in order to discourage ahomogenous cluster of people, which could potentially create divisionsamong the enslaved African population. Families with the last names ofMende, Bantu, and Yoruba, to name a few, were all clustered together intoone monolithic flow, resulting in the creation of one identity. 2 In Brazil, theMale (“Muslim”) uprising in 1835 was a product of tribal and ethnic linesuniting and establishing a revolt against colonial Portuguese society.3 Me-chal Sobel notes in his work that it was “trader lore that slave populationsshould be mixed so that they might not have a lingua franca and would be

Muhammad Fraser-Rahim, “Africanizing Dixie: The Enslaved African Muslim Experience and the Black American Islamic Continuum,” in America’s Other Muslims: Imam W.D. Mohammed, Islamic Reform, and the Making of American Islam (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), 39–67. All Rights Reserved.


Chapter 340

forced to learn English more rapidly.”4 In many instances, enslaved Africanswere consistently being imported from specific regions in West Africa fortheir technical expertise. Enslaved Africans from the West African coastwere essential to plantation owners as they were familiar with the climateand vegetation of the southern American states. Men and women frompresent-day Senegal and Gambia were particularly useful because of theirskilled techniques in indigo and rice cultivation.5 Both of these crops grew inthe low country of South Carolina, and precise accuracy was required forgrowing them. Peter Wood, a noted historian of blacks in South Carolina,argues that, during the eighteenth century, roughly 40 percent of the Africanscoming into the thirteen colonies passed through Charleston.6 Equally impor-tant, this large percentage provided this coastal city with a continuous streamof cargo until 1808, when federal law prohibited the transportation of slavesthrough the Atlantic slave trade.7 The American South, particularly SouthCarolina, was perhaps the epicenter of activity for the importation ofAfrican-born slaves, and it later became the location where large concentra-tions of African Muslims’ public and written records have been found.

The shipment of African-born slaves peaked in the mid-to-late eighteenthcentury and again briefly at the start of the nineteenth century. Between 1761and 1775, nearly 57,000 enslaved Africans were imported to South Carolina,with the greatest number arriving in the five-year period between 1771 and1775 (19,215 total). According to slave shipping databases at Emory Univer-sity, vessels carrying the slaves embarked from various locations in WestAfrica, including Congo, Angola, Senegambia, Sierra Leone, and Ghana, toname a few.8

AFRICANIZING THE SOUTH

We describe a two-phase process for the evolution of the enslaved Africanpopulation’s struggle and their resistance against Southern plantation own-ers’ attempts at forced assimilation and conversion to Christianity. The firstphase was the rejection and attempted hidden conversion to Christianity viathe spiritual Islamic sciences taught in West Africa, and the second phasewas through the Gullah/Geechee tradition developed in the American Southas a form of resistance against white southern plantation owners. We will seein this chapter how this resistance was engaged directly via key personalitiesand the Gullah/Geechee communities of low-country South Carolina andGeorgia.

As in West Africa, the African religious beliefs and practices brought tothe Americas were varied and numerous. A significant portion of WestAfrican– and continental African–based populations were Muslim, and manyof the enslaved Africans who journeyed to the New World served as living


Africanizing Dixie 41

testimonies to these traditions. The earliest research of African Muslims inAmerica can be found in the sales records of European slave companies.Many ships carrying enslaved Africans came up and down the Eastern Sea-board of the United States with the highest concentration arriving in theAmerican South. Islam had established a stronghold in West Africa and wasnow seeking to plant a seed in the Americas. Various records from news-papers and census reports have indicated that men and women who were ofIslamic background were in clear sight and present in the American planta-tion system. Leo Weiner, who was a professor of ethno-linguistics at HarvardUniversity in the early twentieth century, asserts that there were interactionsbetween West Africans and indigenous Native Americans living in the Gulfof Mexico region.9 Even though he did not have much evidence other thansome words and personal testimonies of the indigenous population, his pointwould be given some validity less than a century later.

For enslaved communities in the American South, holding on to theirreligious identity in the colonial period was not easy. Plantation owners werecareful to introduce Christian religious instruction as a process of accultura-tion for enslaved Africans. Conversion to Christianity was perhaps the mostwidespread method by which African Muslims were quickly assimilated andforced to form new communal relations. Scholars have limited information topiece together concerning when the open practice of Islam ceased in theAmerican South, but it is clear that the American-born children of AfricanMuslims seem to have not widely practiced Islam, nor did they identify asMuslims.10 Furthermore, ideas of antiblackness and Arab superiority, evidentthroughout early global Islamic history and on the continent of Africa, werealso techniques applied in America. Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, in his book AHistory of Islam in America, argues how “de-negrofication” and “de-Islam-ization” were strategies employed in the New World so as to strip enslavedAfricans of their identity and to encourage self-hate techniques that allowedthem to distance themselves from their African features and attributes. Gha-neaBassiri uses the examples of historical African Muslim personalities inAmerica to drive home his point. The following are just a few examples:Thomas Bluett, the biographer of Job Ben Solomon, an enslaved AfricanMuslim, wrote of Job, “his Countenance was exceedingly pleasant, yet graveand composed; his hair was long, black and curled, being very different fromthat of the Negroes commonly brought from Africa.”11 Omar Ibn Said, whowill be explored later, is described as an “Arabian prince . . . a hereditaryprince of the Foulah tribe in Arabia.”12 In addition, the depiction of IbrahimaAbdul Rahman, a prince from West Africa, is recorded by Cyrus Griffin, theeditor of the Natchez Southern Galaxy in Mississippi:

That Prince [Abdul Rahman’s slave name] is a Moor, there can be but littledoubt. He is six feet in height; and though sixty-five years of age he has the


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vigor of the meridian of life. When he arrived in this country, his hair hung inflowing ringlets far below his shoulder. Much against his will, his mastercompelled him to submit to sheers, and this ornament which the Moor wouldpart with in his own country only with his life, since that time he has entirelyneglected. It has become coarse, and in some degree curly. His skin, also, bylong service in the sun, and the privations of bondage, has been materiallychanged; and his whole appearance indicates the Foolah rather than the Moor.But Prince states explicitly, and with an air of pride that not a drop of negroblood runs in his veins. He places the Negro in a scaled being infinitely belowthe Moor.13

I argue that the notions of Moor and Arab were, for the majority ofAmericans, based on popular literature of the time, including Shakespeare’sOthello. The depiction in Othello and much of American literature was basedon Europeans’ perspectives, and they oftentimes lacked careful nuancesbased on race and geographic location. As GhaneaBassiri highlights,“African Muslims were painfully aware of the oppressive linkage slaveryreinforced between one’s color and humanity.”14 These carefully constructeddehumanization tactics employed by white plantation owners and their proxystewards would serve as effective deterrent mechanisms to enslaved Africansand, later, would bolster the attempt to convert them to Christianity.

In his book Slave Religion, Albert Raboteau describes a concerted effortto establish plantation religious missions in the American South, both to savethe souls of slaves and their masters and to Christianize them. While it seemsclear that the practice of Islam died out among second-generation AfricanAmericans, the conversion of Muslims to Christianity had already begunwith the first generation of arrivals. Abdul Rahman and another enslavedAfrican by the name of Lamine Kaba responded to the American Coloniza-tion Society, a popular evangelical movement at the time that sought toestablish a Christian colony in Africa. They both were baptized, and theypromised to spread Christian values upon their return to their native home-land. Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, originally from Benin and enslaved inAmerica, was also reported to have converted to Christianity “to be enabledto return to his native land, to instruct his own people in the ways of theGospel of Christ.”15 The historical records of Muslims who traveled back toAfrica further corroborates the notion that they perhaps pretended to convertto Christianity in order to comply with the environment in which they foundthemselves and to return back home.16

Over time, African retentions combined with adaptations to Americanslavery led to the formation of uniquely African American cultures and iden-tities, including the Gullah Geechee tradition. During and after slavery, Gul-lah and Geechee individuals passed on cultural traditions from one genera-tion to the next through language, agriculture, and spirituality, including theearly influences of their African Muslim ancestors. Among the low country’s



Gullah and Geechee enslaved African populations, there was an incrediblydiverse religious community that included a fusion of traditional Africanreligious traditions and Islamic traditions. For these enslaved African popula-tions, retention of West African religious and cultural traditions was a keypart of their cultural tradition preserved since the mid-1700s. The commu-nities and individuals who reside today along the coast of the southeasternUnited States continue to share similar cultural and linguistic connections toWest Africa and are often referred to as Gullah/Geechee.

For those living in the low country of South Carolina and Georgia, “Gul-lah” often described the culture of the emergent African American commu-nity life, including food, customs, and traditions passed on from their ances-tors who made the middle passage journey to the Americas. The term“Geechee” captures the language spoken, a mix between a patois and PidginEnglish with an infusion of West African dialect and language primarilyfrom the Mano River countries of Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia. Manytraditions of the Gullah and Geechee culture were passed from one genera-tion to the next through language, agriculture, and spirituality.

Unfortunately, as of this writing, the vast majority of scholarly research inthe area of the intersection between enslaved Africans in America, the Gul-lah/Geechee tradition, and West African Islam has been scarce at best. InMargaret Washington’s Creel book, A Peculiar People: Slave Religion andCommunity Culture among the Gullah, the author makes little to no mentionof the connection between enslaved Africans in America and Islam in generalor the mystical experiences of West African Sufism in particular. Further-more, Ras Michael Brown’s African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Caroli-na Lowcountry makes no mention of Islam leaving West Africa or enteringthe larger Americas. This lack of details by scholars regarding an Islamicpresence within the Gullah/Geechee tradition in South Carolina and Georgiademonstrates a limited understanding of West African spirituality or theimpact of Islam on the continent of Africa. The examples provided herereflect varying degrees of local custom, oral traditions, and syncretic incor-poration of pre-Islamic religion and behaviors. This is of particular impor-tance as West African Sufism played an important role in the development ofIslamic communities on the continent of Africa.

The pre-Islamic African traditions oftentimes coexisted with Islam andprovided interwoven and sometimes fluid religious interpretation as demon-strated by the living and experiential form of Sufism, which historicallyfavored a heavy emphasis on esoteric readings of the Qur’an and Sunna. Byconsidering the impact of West African Muslims on the African continentand their New World descendants of the low country, I build on the researchof Dr. Jeffrey Halverson that highlights the relationship between GullahPraise Houses in the low country and West African Sufi circles, or zawiyaas,which would have initially existed alongside traditional houses of worship in


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America. Zawiyaas are locations designed for Muslims who seek to go intosincere and passionate overtime in their religious practices and engage inIslamic devotional chanting and, sometimes, Islamically sanctioned rhythmicmovement for the remembrance of Allah and the acquisition of experientialknowledge.17 In many Sufi orders, a state of divine presence is summoned,and the individual’s soul is believed to be absorbed into the essence of theoneness of Allah. The Qadiri tariqa, well-known in West Africa, utilizeschanting and distinctly circular gatherings engaged in rhythmic movements,including swaying, bowing, and clapping, in their rituals. In many instances,new initiates in the tariqa are given wirds, personal formulas akin to mantras,from their teacher or guide to use in their daily lives. In the cases of theenslaved African Muslims Yarrow Mamout, Omar Ibn Said, Ibrahima AbdurRahman, and Salih Bilali, the formal and informal Gullah Praise Housesutilized their personal wirds brought from West Africa to help them survivein the American South. These wirds also served as mnemonic devices thatthe adherent could use for the purpose of elaborative encoding, retrieval cues,and imagery that allowed the brain to have better retention of the informa-tion. These encoded meanings within the wird itself provide multiple mean-ings and knowledge for those versed in its power and access. While one levelof understanding might be widely shared inside and outside a community,additional layers of interpretation may be known only to a select group,therefore conveying a certain nuanced meaning.

Another potential link between the Gullah tradition and Sufism involvesthe commonly called Ring-Shout ritual that occurs in the Praise Houses.During this ritual, adherents sing aloud in an act of devotional praise, asmany Sufis do in their devotional practices. I would suggest, however, thatthese connections between these religious traditions go even deeper. Manyscholars, including Lorenzo Dow Turner, have concluded that the Englishword “shout” is derived from the Arabic saut, which means to “raise one’svoice.” Turner repeatedly argues that the definition of “saut” has its originsin the frequent movement of Muslim worshippers around the Kaaba in Mec-ca, Saudi Arabia. Although this exact definition may be debatable and hasbeen a source of further scholarly inquiry, Turner does move in the rightdirection on the word’s origins, as the circumambulation of the Kaaba iscalled the tawaf and does have an Islamic nexus.18 In recent decades, mod-ern-day scholars, including Sylvianne Diouf and Jeffrey Halverson, haveasserted that the Gullah adoption of saut is rooted in Sufi usage to connotesacred sound. Diouf argues that though Turner’s definition is rooted in someinaccuracy, there are similarities between West African Sufism and the syn-cretic shouters found among enslaved Africans in Trinidad and Tobago in theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Halverson highlights that the Sufi termshawq, as defined by the eleventh-century Sufi teacher Abdul Qasim al-Qushayri, refers to the passionate longing of the heart to meet God. Halver-



son highlights that these Sufi rituals were emotional and directed towardseeking out encounters with the divine, similar to those practiced at theGullah Praise Houses in South Carolina and Georgia.19

As presented earlier, we have an abundant amount of evidence demon-strating that there were enslaved African Muslims in the low country ofSouth Carolina and Georgia. Some of the best documented accounts by suchMuslims have been found in South Carolina, which was arguably the epicen-ter of enslaved African Muslim activity because of entry ports such asCharleston. South Carolina has also been the source of numerous articleswritten on Muslim runaway slaves, which have also been recorded in publicdocuments.20 The Columbian Herald, a newspaper from the late eighteenthcentury, included one such public notice. It read, “1790 (Thursday) the Suf-fering of Yamboo, and African in South Carolina.”21 Additionally, in theCharleston Times, November 17, 1803 (Thursday): “Five dollars Reward.Runaway, a Negro, about 30 years of age. He had on, when he went away, abrown frock coat. He has been accustomed to working as a Gardner at Vaux-hall. Whoever will deliver him at the Work House, shall receive the abovereward, and all expenses.”22

The Charleston Vauxhall, an entertainment venue frequented by social-ites, was run by a Frenchman named Alexander Placides from 1799 to 1812.The runaway slave, named Mahomet, may have belonged to Placides, or mayhave come with the property when Placides bought it in around 1798. Thisraises serious questions about the role of the slave, property ownership, andstatus.

A Christian enslaved African by the name of Charles Ball, the grandsonof an African-born slave in Maryland, recounted that he had met manyAfrican Muslims who had disembarked in Charleston. “I knew several[Africans],” he writes, “who must have been, from what I have since learned,Mohamedans; though at that time, I had never heard of the religion of Mo-hammed.”23 As Halverson argues, “the fact that Ball was unable to identifythese slaves as adherents of Islam until late in life is notable for scholarsinterested in slave narrative, missionary accounts and how observers per-ceived the religious practices of African slaves.”24 Ball also notes, “there wasone man on this plantation, who prayed five times every day, always turninghis face to the east, when in the performance of his devotion . . . we werejoined by the African born man who prayed five times a day; and at the goingdown of the sun he stopped and prayed aloud in our hearing, in a language Idid not understand.”25 Finally, Major David Anderson, an officer in theAmerican Revolution who owned a plantation along the Tiger River, hadenslaved Africans in his possession during the year 1768, one of whom was aliterate Muslim who wrote down five short chapters (surahs) of the Qur’an inArabic, including Surah al Fatihah, which is the primary Muslim prayer. 26


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Omar Ibn Said

Omar Ibn Said (1765–1864) was born in present-day Senegal, West Africa.According to his autobiography, Said was captured at the age of thirty-sevenand forced to travel to Charleston through the trans-Atlantic slave tradewhere he was sold into slavery in 1807.

In 1807, the same year he arrived, he escaped, but he was recapturedshortly thereafter and transported to Fayetteville, North Carolina, where hewas imprisoned after entering a Christian church to pray. Said received noto-riety for writing on the walls of his jail cell in Arabic, an act that challengedthe prevailing understanding that enslaved Africans were not able to read andwrite. Soon after his recapture he became the legal property of General JamesOwen from North Carolina, who served as the US congressman to the Fif-teenth Congress (1817–1819).

While enslaved in America, Said wrote more than a dozen manuscripts,including the only known autobiography written in Arabic by an enslavedAfrican in the United States.

Though never receiving his freedom, his influence was documentedthroughout academic and other circles of influence of the era. TheodoreDwight, the first secretary of the American Ethnological Society, an earlyanthropological scholarly institution, was aware of Said and other enslavedAfrican Muslims who were a part of early American society. In 1864, in themiddle of the civil war, Dwight noted, “It affords an idea of the degree ofeducation among the Moslem blacks, when we see a man like this able toread and write a language so different from his own native tongue. Where isthe youth, or even the adult, among the mass of our people who is able to dothe same in Latin or Greek.”27

Ayyuba Suleiman Diallo

Ayyuba Suleiman Diallo (1701–1773), also known as Job Ben Solomon, wasborn in Bundu, of present-day Senegal. Job was a Hafiz, which meant hememorized the entire Qur’an and came from a prominent Muslim familyknown for their religious scholarship and understanding of Islamic spiritualsciences.

Job was captured in his homeland in 1730 and brought to Annapolis,Maryland, another major North American port in the trans-Atlantic slavetrade, where he was sold into slavery.

Conversant in the Arabic language, Job wrote a letter that he hoped wouldmake its way back to his father via James Oglethorpe, a British aristocrat andfounder of the Georgia colony.



Oglethorpe helped purchase Job’s freedom and sent him to London,where he worked for the Royal African Company. In 1734, Thomas Bluett, aBritish lawyer, wrote a detailed account of Job’s life:

His Memory was extraordinary; for when he was fifteen Years old he couldsay the whole Alcoran [Qur’an] by heart, and while he was here in England hewrote three Copies of it without the Assistance of any other Copy, and withoutso much as looking to one of those three when he wrote the others. He wouldoften laugh at me when he heard me say I had forgot any Thing, and told mehe hardly ever forgot any Thing in his Life, and wondered that any other bodyshould. . . .

Upon our Talking and making Signs to him, he wrote a Line or two beforeus, and when he read it, pronounced the words Allah and Mahommed; bywhich, and his refusing a Glass of Wine we offered him, we perceived he wasa Mahometan, but could not imagine of what Country he was, or how he gotthither; for by his affable Carriage, and the easy Composure of his Counte-nance, we could perceive he was no common Slave.28

Ibrahima Abdur Rahman

Ibrahima Abdur Rahman (1762–1829) was born in present-day Guinea, WestAfrica. Ibrahima was a prince in his native homeland, and he was enslavedfor forty-two years in Natchez, Mississippi, until his freedom in 1828. Ibrahi-ma was educated in the Islamic intellectual center of Timbuktu and wasconversant in the Arabic language. Because of his abilities in Arabic andthrough a chance meeting with a former British captive, a letter was sent inArabic via diplomatic channels to the embassy of Morocco, which then sentthe communiqué to President John Quincy Adams, who helped facilitate hisfreedom. With the support of abolitionists and the African Colonization Soci-ety, he managed to make his way to Liberia but died before he could makehis way back to his homeland of Guinea. Much of the publicly availableinformation on Ibrahima comes from a pamphlet titled, “A Statement withRegards to the Moorish Prince, Abduhl Rahhaman,” written by Thomas H.Gallaudet, one of the cofounders of the American School for the Deaf. Ibra-hima is known affectionately as the “Prince amongst Slaves” due to his royalAfrican lineage and scholarly credentials.29

Yarrow Mamout

Yarrow Mamout (1701–1773) was an enslaved African Muslim, entrepren-eur, and property owner in the Georgetown area of Washington, DC. Mam-out was captured in his homeland in West Africa at the age of sixteen andarrived in Annapolis, Maryland, on the slave ship Elijah in 1752. In 1822 and1819, respectively, American painters James Simpson and Charles WilliamPeale painted portraits of Mamout, which became the earliest known por-


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traits of an American Muslim. Why Peale painted the picture of Yarrow isunknown, but some assumptions among historians include that Yarrow’speculiarity of being a practicing Muslim circulated through Washington, DC,and Eastern Seaboard elite circles. Peale is also known for his paintings ofGeorge Washington. “He professes to be a Mohometan (Muslim) and is oftenseen and heard in the streets singing praises to God and, conversing withhim, he said man is no good unless his religion comes from the heart.”30

Salih Bilali

Salih Bilali was an enslaved African Muslim from Mali who lived on SapeloIsland in Georgia. He was given the title of plantation manager among otherenslaved Africans and is documented as having observed Islamic ritualprayers and fasted during the month of Ramadan. In addition, Bilali was aninfluential leader who, along with other African Muslims, shaped whatwould become the Gullah/Geechee traditions on the sea islands of SouthCarolina and Georgia. Bilali was owned by James Hamilton Couper andlived on his plantation on St. Simons Island in Georgia. Couper allowed hisenslaved population to worship freely. As Couper noted about Bilali:

He possesses great veracity and honesty. He is a strict Mahometan; abstainsfrom spirituous liquors and keeps the various fasts, particularly that of theRhamadan [sic]. He is singularly exempt from all feeling of superstition; andholds in great contempt, the African beliefs in fetishes and evil spirits. Hereads Arabic, and has a Koran (which however, I have not seen) in that lan-guage, but does not write it.31

This letter provides insights into Couper’s views not only on Bilali butalso of African Muslims. It highlights his diet, dress, and private life andchallenges the notion that enslaved Africans were limited in their ability toread and write. According to Couper, “All children are taught to read andwrite Arabic by the priests they repeat the [verses] from the Koran, and writeon a board, which when filled, is washed off.”32

Bilali Mohammed was an enslaved Muslim who was owned by ThomasSpaulding, a friend of James Hamilton Couper who also had a plantation onSt. Simons Island. Both Couper and Spaulding were part of the southernplantation elite society that deeply influenced the politics, culture, and econo-my of Georgia and the American South. Mohammed himself recorded theevents of plantation life in Arabic, not his native tongue but a language helearned through Islamic schools in West Africa. Couper’s grandson re-counted in 1910 that Bilali “faced the East and called upon Allah” during hisprayers.33 Bilali also wrote a thirteen-page manuscript in Arabic that servedas an Islamic devotional manual on spirituality, worship, and jurisprudence



and were most likely extracts from the Risalah, one of the key texts usedunder the Maliki School of Islamic jurisprudence.

Bilali Mohammed’s daily life on Sea Island in Georgia represents a conti-nuity of traditions passed along from West Africa into the American South,traditions that also influenced the modern-day Gullah/Geechee and AfricanAmerican traditions. In 1829, Zephaniah Kingsley, a Southern plantationowner, wrote about Bilali Mohammed and Salih Bilali as having been in-fluential in protecting their owners’ interests during the War of 1812. Hedescribed them as “remarkable” and said that the two men were “influentialnegroes” and “professors of the Mahmodean religion.”34 Also, in 1939, theWorkers Project Administration, which was created under President FranklinRoosevelt’s Federal Writers Project, conducted interviews that included de-tailed accounts of Bilali’s wife and children, as well as their Gullah/Geecheelocal vernacular and Islamic religious practice.

These descriptive accounts into the rituals and traditions of Salih Bilaliand Bilali Mohammed provide a rich account of the literacy and religioustolerance of these two men, as well as their intricate social networks andreligious experiences. They also provide an example of white American aris-tocrats of the South documenting their personal and public communicationswith these men. According to Spaulding’s grandson, there were many en-slaved African Muslims in South Carolina and Georgia. He states, “Manyfresh from the darkest Africa, some of Moorish or Arabian descent, devoutMussulmans [Muslims], who prayed to Allah in the morning, noon and eve-ning; all loyal and devoted to their respective owners.”35

The final part of this chapter takes a look at the emergence of proto-Islamic movements in America and their relation to the experiences of Islamin West Africa and the New World. The story of Edward Wilmot Blydenexplains the synergy between the emergence of these two experiences ofIslam and the paradox that lies within them.36 Blyden was born in St. Thom-as in the Virgin Islands in 1832. He had a keen, intellectual mind, and he wasencouraged by a white minister to join the ministry. Through the advice ofthis minister, Blyden traveled to the United States in 1850 intending to enrollat Rutgers Theological College, but he was turned down by the college.37

Seven months later, Blyden departed from the United States to Monrovia,Liberia, at the invitation of the American Colonization Society (ACS). Bythe year 1858, Blyden had become a Presbyterian minister and was fulfillingthe mission and direction of the ACS. During his time in Liberia, he movedquickly through the ranks and earned the titles of president of Liberia Col-lege and secretary of state of Liberia. He traveled to both Syria and Egypt forArabic language cultivation. It is Blyden’s argument that underlines theAfrican / African in America Muslim slave perspective:


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The Mohammedan Negro is a much better Mohammedan than the ChristianNegro is a Christian, because the Muslim Negro, as a learner, is a disciple, notan imitator. A disciple, when freed from leading-strings, may become a pro-ducer; an imitator never rises above a mere copyist. With a disciple progress isfrom within; imitator grows by accretion from without. The learning acquiredby the disciple gives him capacity; that gained by an imitator terminates initself. The one becomes a capable man; the other is a mere socialist. Thisexplains the difference between the Mohammedan and the Christian Negro.38

I argue that Blyden was seeking to find a voice in understanding whatreligion and civilization had meant within the African context. He had madethe journey out of his homeland in the Caribbean and had faced the racialhatred of America, and therefore, he was not oblivious to the intricacies ofrace, religion, and dominance. Blyden and other black intellectuals of thenineteenth century were impacted greatly by the racial stratifications inwhich they lived, and despite their newfound religious zeal, they were deeplyreminded of the importance of their role in society and the subjugation theyfaced because of racial divisions. Blyden, himself, observed how Islam inter-sected with native African populations, stating that “Islamization in Africadidn’t mean Arabization. Mohammedan conquests mean subjugation to theKoran and not to Arab or Turk.”39 Furthermore, he writes:

Their local customs were not destroyed by the Arab influence introduced.They only assumed new forms, and adapted themselves to the new teachings.In all thriving communicates in West and Central Africa, it may be noticed thatthe Arab superstructure has been superimposed on a permanent indigenoussubstructure; so that what really took place when the Arab met the Negro in hisown home, was a healthy amalgamation, and not an absorption or an unduerepression.40

Many scholars have debated whether Blyden was a Muslim; some schol-ars, such as the Moroccan Muslim scholar Lotfi, argued in the affirmative,while others disagreed. In fact, Blyden may have been similar to enslavedAfrican Muslims who had been forced to show publicly that they were Chris-tians but were still privately Muslims. In other words, he might have beenpracticing Taqiyyah like the enslaved African Muslims in the United Stateswho were well versed in this tradition.41 Overall, Blyden clearly had a criti-cal but deep appreciation for Islam, and he was fascinated yet deeply per-plexed by the world, especially since he could not avoid his own Africanancestry or the role of religion in it as he traveled. This was most evident inhis efforts to fulfill his role as a Christian pastor and a spreader of Christian-ity. His earliest attitudes toward Islam, like those of many of his contempo-raries, were largely shaped by European Orientalism. In his book From WestAfrica to Palestine, it is evident that his stay in Lebanon in 1866 was almostentirely with Europeans and Americans, including Dr. Daniel Bliss, president



of the Syrian Protestant College.42 Furthermore, during his travels through-out the Middle East, he interacted predominantly with Western Orientalists,rather than native inhabitants, thus pointing to a very narrow and limitedinterpretation of Islam. Despite this fact, however, he had a relatively posi-tive view of African historical accomplishments. Quoting the words of thefamous Liberian poet Hillary Teage: while exploring the halls of the greatEgyptian pyramids of Cheops, Blyden said that he

[f]elt I had a peculiar “heritage in the Great Pyramid.” . . . The blood seemed toflow faster through my veins. I seemed to hear the echo of those illustriousAfricans . . . I felt lifted out of the commonplace grandeur of modern times;and, could my voice have reached every African in the world, I would haveearnestly addressed him in the language of Hilary Teage—Retake yourfame.43

The historian Edward Curtis IV argues that in order for Blyden to make thelinkages between his trip to Egypt and his own African nationalism, heengraved the word “Liberia” into the walls of the ancient tomb on July 11,1866. Perhaps it was his desire to slowly connect his work in West Africawith the larger purpose of finding balance in his appreciation of the societiesthat he was closely understanding as his own. For Blyden, learning Arabic,living in West Africa, and being a Christian missionary had to have involvedsomewhat of an internal struggle. He must have experienced some cultureshock as he came from the Caribbean and was confronted, via the visual andreligious aesthetic of Muslim daily life, with a new religious faith of whichhe had not previously been very aware. In the January 1871 edition of theMethodist Quarterly Review, Blyden argues that Islam came to West Africaby the pen, not the sword, and that it encouraged deep learning, intellectualacumen, and discipline among its adherents. He writes, “Mohammedanismcould easily be displaced by Christian influence, if Christian organizationswould enter with vigor into this field.”44 Through the example of Blyden andhis passion to connect Africa, Islam, and the New World, we also see theemergence of a nouveau Islamique developing in America. In his writingsand lectures, he introduces students of Islamic, African, and American histo-ry to the shift from the old-world Islam of the enslaved Africans intoAmerican Islam by using the tool of Pan-Africanism, which would come toserve as the ideological connection for Islam in the United States. 45

EMERGENCE OF EARLYAMERICAN ISLAMIC MOVEMENTS

As a result of the experience of the transatlantic slave trade and the institu-tion of slavery, there has been considerable debate among scholars concern-


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ing the linkages between the Islam of the enslaved African Muslim popula-tions and Black American Islam. For the purposes of this research, I focusand build upon the intellectual works of Dr. Sulayman Nyang, an esteemedprofessor of African studies at Howard University, who refers to “the sixty-year gap between African Muslim slaves and the African American Muslimsof this century.”46 Though there is a considerable body of scholarly researchabout the legacy of enslaved African Muslims as they journeyed to the NewWorld, this legacy was, in many ways, cut off from its original African-basedforms.

This separation between the two communities, one having been rooted onthe African continent with centuries of Islamic rituals and traditions and theother having emerged out of the Atlantic slave trade by initial appearance,seems openly very different. As a result of this unique geographical, cultural,and social separation, new adaptations were created in America. We arguethat without the experiences of American slavery, the reconstruction periodin the United States with its Jim Crow laws that contributed to the subjuga-tion of people of African descent, and, most important, the emergence ofproto-Islamic movements in America, the American Muslim community,which has been led largely by immigrant and white American Muslim lead-ership, would not be what it is today.

Blyden argues that through its intersection with African nationalism, Is-lam could serve a particular purpose. Blyden did not see Islam as claimingexceptionalism over the other Abrahamic faiths; in fact, he saw it as part of acontinuum of shared views with Judaism and Christianity. This compellingpoint uniquely addresses how early Black American converts to Islam wereable to harness their Islamic spiritual tradition via their personal BlackAmerican experience. It should be noted that this ability to utilize pre-Islamiccultural tradition and fuse it with one’s current condition is a common themethat is seen throughout early Islamic movements. In the academic communitytoday, there are serious concerns about how Black American Islam has beenaddressed. Notable scholars, including Yvonne Haddad, John Esposito, Ste-phen Barboza, Paul Barrrett, Aminah Beverly McCloud, and Kambiz Gha-neaBassiri, all who have been referenced earlier, have provided interestingand unique insights into the contributions of Muslims in America.

However, Black American Muslims, despite being considered one of theoldest American Muslim communities, have witnessed the marginalizationand possibly even the intentional erasure of their experiences and storiesfrom normative Islamic traditions. Despite the role of Black American Islam-ic communities as the inheritors of a triple heritage of African, Islamic, andWestern identity, scholars often miss the complexities of the Black Americanexperience with Islam, and as a result, we have seen inaccurate assertionsthat are not rooted in an evidence- or empirical-based approach to this schol-arship.47 GhaneaBassiri amplifies this point by arguing that American Mus-



lims have actively participated in American history and that black AmericanMuslims, in particular, have been a critical voice in response to the peculiarpolitical events and unique environment in the United States.48

Outside of the enslaved African Muslim experience, very few studies onthe Black American Islamic experience have existed in the academic com-munity prior to the late 1990s. Of all the cited studies on early Islamicmovements that emerged out of the Black American Islamic experience, C.Eric Lincoln’s Black Muslims in America stands out as the most authoritativeanalysis of the Nation of Islam. Alex Haley’s Malcolm X, which has beentranslated into numerous foreign languages throughout the Middle East, Afri-ca, Latin America, and Europe, provides deep insight into the conversionprocess of American Muslims.

In regards to the existence of Islam in modern-day America, religiousmovements like the Nation of Islam, as well as precursor organizations likethe Moorish Science Temple and the Ahmadiyya movement, served as thefoundation for its establishment. It is the argument of this work that withoutthese movements, which uniquely addressed the specific circumstances ofBlack Americans who were deeply affected by institutionalized racism inAmerica, the American Muslim community would not exist as it does today.All of today’s Muslim Americans have benefitted from the hard work ofBlack American syncretic and Islamic movements. These movements weredirect catalysts for the designers and organizers of large-scale AmericanMuslim organizations such as the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA),Zaytuna College (the first accredited Muslim liberal arts college in the Unit-ed States), and the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Despitewhat we characterize as selective decisions by these mainstream organiza-tions to pick and choose the good and bad of the American Muslim commu-nity as they see fit, organizations and movements like the Nation of Islamand Ahmadiyya were the direct founders of Islam in America. Without theseAmerican groups, we would not have the modern-day institutions that haveafforded immigrant Muslims the ability to freely express themselves in con-temporary America. There are actually several movements that played acritical role in the development of Islam in America. During the period ofAntebellum slavery and the subsequent generations up until the 1980s, theBlack American Muslim community was given the ability to define Islamunilaterally without foreign interference or opposition and to create the foun-dation of North American forms of Islam, namely through Ahmadiyya mis-sionaries, the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, and the commu-nity associated with the late Imam W.D. Mohammed. Through this indepen-dence and ability to creatively take on their role as heirs of American Islam,the men and women affiliated with these groups created a practical andsocially reforming movement that would leave lasting impressions on BlackAmerican and mainstream American culture. Only in the late 1970s and early


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1980s did we see a gradual shift toward foreign influence, involving predom-inantly Wahhabi literalist and puritanical interpretations, on the BlackAmerican Muslim and the greater Muslim American communities. This in-fluence has continued to have devastating consequences into the present day.The following sections discuss several of these early American Islamicmovements.

AHMADIYYA MOVEMENT

The Ahmadiyya movement in the United States was an Islamic missionarymovement that originated in Southeast Asia. Its ideological teachings weresimilar to those of mainstream Muslims as they were based on following theQur’an and the example of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. It departedfrom mainstream Islam, however, in the specific teachings of its founder,Hazrat Ghulam Ahmad, who, in 1888, declared himself the Mahdi, or prom-ised Messiah in Islam and Christianity, and also argued that he was theincarnation of the Hindu god Krishna.49 As we have seen in various Islamicrevivalist movements in West Africa, Ahmad believed that Islam’s beliefsand practices had been corrupted by Islamic scholars, and therefore, therewas a need for a revival of Islam through high ethical, moral, and nonviolentactions. This theme of Islamic revivalism has been prevalent throughoutIslamic history, and it was carried forward to America by Ahmadiyya mis-sionaries who tailored their Islamic reformation into the American context.Mufti Muhammad Sadiq was an Ahmadiyya religious operative who wassent to the United States to spread the teachings of Islam, in general, andAhmadiyya Islamic revivalism, specifically. According to numerous primaryrecords of the Ahmadiyya, Sadiq was sent initially on a mission to recruitwhite Americans to Islam, but he quickly realized the challenges of racialidentity in America after being detained at the airport upon entry for being aMuslim. Sadiq then adjusted his tactical approach to focus on BlackAmericans, who were subjected to clear and open racial abuse and who werelikely to be more open to a universal racial, spiritual, and religious messagethat included them. By the time of Sadiq’s arrival in the United States, manyBlack Americans had already become acquainted with Islam through thePan-African philosophy of Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Im-provement Association (UNIA).

Prior to the 1940s, Ahmadis originating from Southeast Asia were theprimary propagators of mainstream Islam to Black American Muslims, andtheir purposeful decision to build their mosques in urban locations made itpossible for many Black Americans to be exposed to normative Islamicteachings.50 The Ahmadiyya movement is perhaps the single most importantIslamic movement of the twentieth century for establishing Islam as an insti-



tution in America. Furthermore, Sylvia Chan-Malik at Rutgers Universityargues that, even within academic scholarship, there is prevalence to label theAhmadiyya and other early Islamic movements as being part of proto-Islamicexpression.51 Using this theme, however, many of these early Islamic move-ments have been relegated to being unauthentic and as a result, scholars ofIslamic and religious studies have generally dismissed their contributions toAmerican Islam. By recognizing the Ahmadiyya movement as having beencritical in the establishment of Islam in America, one is able to see howdiverse forms of Islam spread and adapted to new frontiers. The Ahmadiyyainfluence is evident in the abundance of jazz musicians who were directconverts to Ahmadiyya Islamic teachings, including Yusuf Lateef, AhmadJamal, Art Blakey, and McCoy Turner.52 As Fatima Fanusie argues in herwork on Fard Muhammad, the Ahmadiyya message had been uniquely pur-poseful and strategic in order to gain a footing in the United States. 53 TheAhmadiyya legacy will eternally be remembered for their establishment ofthe Moslem Sunrise, a quarterly newspaper that continues to be the earliestand longest running Islamic magazine in the United States.

Despite having one of the most important movements in the establish-ment of early Islamic identity in America, the Ahmadiyya influence began tosubside by the late 1920s and early 1930s. Most scholars argue that compet-ing ideological directions were likely the cause of this decline. The increas-ing influence of Black Americans as a whole, including their having becomemore aggressive in their demands for equal rights in work, pay, education,and housing and the growth of the black empowerment movement, alsoplayed a significant role in the Ahmadiyya influence. In addition, increasedtensions between Ahmadiyya missionaries in America and their Southasia-based religious leaders caused considerable tension, and as anxiety increased,Black Americans began to push against foreign influence and authority.These elements of and encounters with foreign versions of Islam, thoughhelpful in exposing Black Americans to Islamic orthodoxy in various forms,were, in fact, contributing factors toward the movement by Black AmericanMuslims to assert their own agency and identity as separate from non-American interpretations of Islamic thought. This is evident in the examplesof both the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam.54

EARLY ISLAMIC MOVEMENTS AND THE QUR’AN

To understand the growing influence of Islam among Black Americans, onemust first understand the migration of Black Americans to major cities alongthe East Coast and throughout the country in order to find employment andescape the Jim Crow laws of the American South. It was also during the1920s and 1930s that a new multireligious, spiritual, and eclectic zeal was


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sweeping over the United States. This zeal, having largely taken root in whiteAmerica, involved religious revivalist movements, such as the TheosophicalSociety, Christian Science, Mormonism, and Shakerism.55 These spiritualwars that were sweeping across America were not anything new. Even in the1800s, the word “spirituality,” defined as a quest to understand the purposeof life through nonorganized religious experience outside the normativeChristian experience, had developed a slow and steady group of admirers.Writers Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson were just two examples ofAmericans who largely categorized themselves as wayfarers seeking tounderstand the supernatural and metaphysical aspects of life with all of itscomplexities. In his 1871 work Democratic Vistas, Whitman wrote:

And is a result that no organization or church can ever achieve. . . . I shouldsay, indeed, that only in the perfect contamination and solitariness of individu-ality may the spirituality of religion come forth at all. Only here, and on suchterms, the mediation, the devout, ecstasy, the soaring flight. 56

Whitman was seeking to understand the growing shift of this centurytoward a personalized and individualized connection to the divine based onfinding a purpose beyond organized religion. Furthermore, Dr. Leigh E.Schmidt, a professor of religion at Princeton University, describes in hisbook Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality certain definingcharacteristics of American spirituality in the tradition of Emerson and Whit-man. He highlights the following characteristics: (1) a yearning for mysticalexperience or epiphany awareness; (2) valuing silence, solitude, and sus-tained meditation; (3) a belief in the immanence of the divine in nature andattunement to that presence; (4) a cosmopolitan appreciation of religiousvariety, along with the search for unity in diversity; (5) an ethical earnestnessin pursuit of justice-producing, progressive reforms; and (6) an emphasis onself-cultivation, artistic creativity, and adventuresome seeking.57 This searchfor meaning and self-critique among early American philosophers, thinkers,and dreamers was not based solely on transporting oneself to the supernaturalbut also on a work ethic of actual meaningful application. As a result, theBlack American encounter with new financial resources as well as the safetyand freedom to express themselves more openly should also be seen as partof a larger story that other Americans were confronting and addressing aswell. As such, Black American institutions were gradually able to articulatehow their personal spiritual and religious experiences were different from themainstream church experiences of the past. As mentioned earlier, BlackAmericans’ quest to learn more about themselves and find an identity wasmore evident in the cosmopolitan urban centers. Thus, the early Islamicmovements in America must be seen within the broader scope of descendantsof enslaved Africans yearning for and seeking practical, personal, and long-



er-term spiritual guidance that could provide them with meaning, purpose,and memory in their lives.

For the purposes of this book, the following organizations are arguablythe single most important organizations to establish Islam in America andtheir recruitment of Black Americans to Islam as articulated by their interpre-tation.

MOORISH SCIENCE TEMPLE

The Moorish Science Temple was established by Timothy Drew(1886–1929), a leading Pan-Africanist who became a key influencer of nu-merous Black American early Islamic movements in America. Drew tracedhis ideological roots to Marcus Garvey and would later adopt the nameNoble Drew Ali. He appropriated into his deeply esoteric organizationaldoctrine Islamic religious motifs; elements of freemasonry, theosophy, andPan-Africanism; and symbols from the modern Middle East. Drew also bor-rowed from a number of other ideas in an attempt to find an identity for hisgroup. At its peak, his movement included around thirty thousand members,quite an accomplishment for a newfound social, political, and religiousmovement in the context of the times and the extreme poverty and limitedpublic transportation of the communities it influenced. Drew established re-ligious centers in Detroit and Lansing, Michigan; Pittsburgh and Philadel-phia, Pennsylvania; Chicago, Illinois; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Cleveland andYoungstown, Ohio; Charleston, West Virginia; Richmond and Petersburg,Virginia; Pine Bluff, Arkansas; and Baltimore, Maryland.58 After years ofinternal rivalry, Drew established a permanent headquarters in Chicago in1923 and named his movement the Moorish Holy Temple of Science, laterchanging the name to the Moorish Science Temple of America. 59

The early Islamic movements in America had identity at the core of theirinfluence, and for Drew, the aim of the Moorish Temple was to impress uponits followers the importance of dignity, self-respect, and responsibility. Ac-cording to followers’ archival narratives, they were to be known as Asiatic orMoorish people from Morocco. This lore, which was created by Drew largelywithout the use of any documented records proving their ancestral links toMorocco, sought to bring some dignity to the Black American who wassubjected to discrimination, poverty, and unfair racial treatment.

By creating a myth as well as using some factual historical accounts,Drew sought to create a message that resonated with disaffected and down-trodden Black Americans who sought to reclaim their purpose and self-worth. In one of Drew’s teachings, he called himself “the prophet” whose jobwas to “lift the fallen Asiatic nation of North America by teaching its mem-bers their true religion (Islam), their true nationality (Moorish) and their true


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genealogy, which he taught could be traced directly to Jesus, who was adescendant of the ancient Canaanites, the Moabites and the inhabitants ofAfrica.”60 By giving Black Americans these self-empowerment themes,Drew facilitated a massive resurrection of those individuals who were gradu-ally finding techniques to address their condition in America. By donningfezzes, establishing lodges with Arab-Islamic names, and appropriating theIslamic crescent and star in the organizational cultural dress, Drew slowlyintroduced into urban culture what ultimately became a popular BlackAmerican Muslim tradition for generations to come. While it is evident thatDrew had no direct connections to the ritualistic religious traditions of Islamin West Africa, he nevertheless facilitated the development of a new way ofimagination for the Black American community by introducing them to vari-ous aspects of Islamic practices.

Finally, as I will continue to highlight with other early Islamic move-ments, the overlapping thread of these groups lies in their ability to point tothe Qur’an and normative Islamic teachings as a source of idealism, while atthe same time adapting certain aspects of traditional Islam to serve the pur-pose of supporting their fight against the plight of Black Americans. TheIslamic idealism of many early Black American Islamic movements is hardlycoincidental. Instead, it can be seen as relating back to US relations withMorocco, which is documented as having been the first country (debatedbetween France as well) to have recognized the United States as an indepen-dent nation. On June 23, 1786, Morocco signed a treaty of peace and friend-ship with the United States, thus beginning the process of an enduring, for-malized, and long-standing relationship between the two countries.61 In1790, the South Carolina House of Representatives passed the Moors SundryAct, which provided clarity on the status of free individuals for the sultan ofMorocco, Mohammed Ben Abdallah. The resolution stated that free citizensof Morocco were not subject to the same laws as American slaves and blacks.Because of this peace treaty, four individuals petitioned the South Carolinalegislature, claiming that they were free subjects of the Moroccan ruler andshould not be tried (as scheduled) under the Negro Act of 1740.62 This is butone example of Morocco’s influence on the Moorish Science Temple and itsdesire to connect with the larger Islamic world.

In 1927, Drew wrote his own version of the Qur’an, called the HolyKoran (also called the Circle Seven Koran). He prepared several iterations ofthis sixty-four-page book and primarily used four major texts as his refer-ence: the Qur’an, the Bible, The Aquarian Gospels of Jesus Christ (an occultversion of the New Testament), and Unto Thee I Grant (literature of theRosicrucian Brotherhood). According to Richard Brent Turner, Sufism likelyinfluenced Drew as well, particularly the teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan, anIndian mystic who preached a form of Sufism that taught universalism andthe common values of all religions. Drew’s philosophical teachings em-



braced similar ideas of love, truth, peace, and freedom and borrowed frommany religions and cultures, as did Khan’s.63 Drew, like the leaders of otherearly Islamic communities, sought to reform Black Americans’ conditionfrom marginalization by reconstructing their identity to one that was built onthe enslaved African Muslim legacy and a broader Pan-Islamic connection.Drew, like Elijah Muhammad, presented Christianity as an inferior religionthat oppressed Blacks and provided a meticulous theological plan to supporthis argument. Turner writes that Drew created new identities for his membersby saying the following:

When Noble Drew Ali said, “The Name means everything,” he was convincedthat he could change the political and economic fate of African Americans inthe Jim Crow era by ethnicizing the name of the race and by changing thenames of the followers, thereby erasing the stigma of slavery and distancingthem from ordinary Negroes who were not respected as Americans. The ulti-mate objective . . . was to erase the stigma of their minority group status inorder to be accepted as genuine Americans by the prevailing culture.64

Drew’s movement provided the building blocks for thousands of BlackAmericans’ introduction to Islam in the early twentieth century. The MoorishScience Temple was an essential component of the development of the Na-tion of Islam’s ascendency and the massive conversion of Black Americansto Islam. In the words of Lincoln, “It was not Islam, but it was a significantrecovery of the awareness of Islam.”65

MARCUS GARVEY AND THE UNIA

Outside of the Ahmadiyya movement, there was, perhaps, no other move-ment that brought together Islam and Pan-Africanism in America as much asthe Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). This organization,created by Marcus Garvey, had chapters in forty nations on several conti-nents and became the vanguard of black pride and self-independence.66 TheGarvey movement promoted a universal teaching for all people of Africandescent, regardless of faith, and was, thus, attractive to early Black AmericanIslamic movements. Both Noble Drew Ali, the founder of the Moorish Sci-ence Temple, and Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, weredirectly impacted by the teachings of Garvey and frequently referenced hiswork in their public speeches. Although Garvey and many members of theUNIA were Christian, the UNIA fully embraced religious differences. Gar-vey himself was a student of world religion and, therefore, very familiar withIslam. Garvey was introduced to Islam in 1912 by Duse Muhammad Ali, aSudanese Egyptian Pan-Africanist who later became minister of African Af-fairs for the UNIA. During his travels throughout the United States in 1925,


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Duse Ali gave a number of public and private speeches and was integral inencouraging a significant number of practicing Black American Muslims tojoin the UNIA.67

Movements like the UNIA provided the philosophical and practical expe-rience for Black Americans to instill in themselves a sense of pride anddignity. In a society where people of African descent were struggling withlimited economic opportunities and continued racial suppression, movementslike the UNIA aided communities and individuals alike in addressing theirconditions. Professor E.U. Essien-Udom, in his book Black Nationalism: TheSearch for an Identity, writes:

The tragedy of the Negro in America is that he has rejected his origins—theessentially human meaning implicit in the heritage of slavery, prolonged suf-fering and social rejection. By rejecting this unique group experience andfavoring assimilation and even biological amalgamation, he thus denies him-self the creative possibilities inherent in it and in his folk culture. This “dilem-ma” is fundamental; it severely limits his ability to evolve a new identity or ameaningful synthesis, capable of endowing his life with meaning and pur-pose.68

This illustration by Essien-Udom captures the plight of Black American lifeand is central to understanding the existence and, ultimately, the struggle toraise the consciousness of Black American men and women. It is largelythrough these early Black empowerment and Black American Islamic move-ments that Black Americans were able to directly address this struggle. Thispoint is driven home even further by W. E. B. Dubois in his book The Soulsof Black Folk, in which he eloquently captures the Black American experi-ence. He writes:

The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-con-sciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the outerworld. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of al-ways looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soulby the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

And further laments:

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing toattain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truerself. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He wouldnot Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world andAfrica. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood for white Americanism,for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishesto make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without



being cursed and spit upon by his fellows without having the doors of Oppor-tunity closed roughly in his face.69

From this experience captured by Dubois, one gains a further insight into thechallenge of Black American identity, consciousness, and self-awareness. Inmany ways, the UNIA, the Ahmadiyya movement, and the Nation of Islammovement became the building blocks to address Black identity in America.

NATION OF ISLAM

The Nation of Islam was an indigenous Black American movement estab-lished by Wali Fard Muhammad and implemented by Elijah Muhammad.This movement combined elements of freemasonry, spirituality, mythology,Black Nationalism, and made-up theology to address the conditions andcircumstances of life for Black Americans. It directly critiqued white Ameri-ca for its marginalizing racial injustices toward Black Americans. ElijahMuhammad, through careful instructions from Fard Muhammad, instituted astep-by-step program to radically reform the mental, physical, and economicstate of Black Americans. C. Eric Lincoln describes Elijah Muhammad’s taskas a rather Herculean effort to reform the condition of his people:

The complexity of Mr. Muhammad’s task was beyond imagination, for asMessenger of Allah he had committed himself to nothing less than the restora-tion of the most despised and brutalized segment of American Christianityback to a level of dignity and self-appreciation from which informed choicescould be made. . . . His initial “parish” was the slums of the Black ghettos ofthe industrial cities, and his potential converts were the slum created outcastsof a developing technocratic society. His people were those who were the mostbattered by racism and stifled by convention, and whose experience of thewhite man’s invincibility made the appearance of Black inferiority seem asreasonable as it was pervasive.70

As a whole, the Nation of Islam was a social reform movement focusedon the experience of Black American life. Its agenda included a moral andphysical code in which adherents were instructed to abide by strict measuresof discipline, including abstinence from alcohol, gambling, fornication, adul-tery, drugs, and dancing, as well as dietary restrictions, such as avoidance ofpork. These and other rules were carefully orchestrated so as to make clearthe divisions between members and nonmembers of the Nation of Islam.

Many Black Americans were sympathetic toward the Nation of Islam andsaw the techniques it employed as vital. It likely had millions of followers inits height. However, many Black Americans were hesitant to join this newmovement that articulated new language and messages and were often quitecritical of the white American establishment. Though this research doesn’t


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address the minutiae of doctrinal details on the Nation of Islam or other earlyIslamic movements, we do attempt to describe the Nation of Islam and othersuch movements as having offered elements of Islamic reform to address thephysical, emotional, and spiritual conditions of its followers. Furthermore, itargues that, since their inceptions, early Black American Islamic movementsdirectly utilized authoritative Islamic religious texts, including the Qur’an,while also employing strategic techniques such as mythmaking in an effort tochange the condition of men and women who were suffering from the legacyof centuries of physical and emotional abuse.

While many scholars of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies relegate theNation of Islam and other early Islamic movements to the status of “hetero-dox” or “proto-Islamic,” I choose not to use this language. Instead, I seek tobuild on the work of Dr. Ernest Allen, a University of Massachusetts profes-sor specializing in Black American Muslims who rejects the notion that theMoorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam should be placed in thesecategories. According to Allen, these categories are largely defined by schol-ars of Islam who are not familiar with the Black American Islamic experi-ence. Instead, he characterizes these groups as syncretic and describes themas being no different from other denominations of established religious com-munities that select and borrow the ideological perspectives and traditionsthat suit them best.71 As noted in previous chapters, this understanding fitswell with the explanation as to how Islam acculturated itself in West Africa.

This theme, discussed by Allen and other academics, helps explain whyBlack American Islam has often been viewed as subordinate to other Islamicperspectives by the largely immigrant-based American Muslim populationand overseas Muslims who have largely dominated the discourse. The Nationof Islam’s teachings, like those of its ideological predecessors, were againstthe views imposed on them by white Americans. By introducing new verbi-age into its lexicon, such as “Asiatic” and “Black is beautiful,” the Nation ofIslam was building on the ideological views of its predecessors, including theAhamadiyya movement, the UNIA, and the Moorish Science Temple. How-ever, the Nation of Islam went a step further, not only rejecting the whiteracist teachings about Black Americans and the idea of inferiority but alsoproviding an alternative master narrative for their followers. By using aninversion process highlighting that blacks were good, beautiful, and evengods, they directly critiqued mainstream white American society and thecurrent condition of inferiority in which Black Americans found themselves.Lincoln describes Elijah Muhammad’s effort to address this condition in thefollowing terms:

The complexity of Mr. Muhammad’s task was beyond imagination, for asMessenger of Allah he had committed himself to nothing less than the restora-tion of the most despised and brutalized segment of American Christianity



back to a level of dignity and self-appreciation from which informed choicescould be made. . . . His initial “parish” was the slums of the Black ghettos ofthe industrial cities, and his potential converts were the slum-created outcastsof a developing technocratic society. His people were those who were the mostbattered by racism and stifled by convention, and who’s [sic] experience of thewhite man’s invincibility made the acceptance of Black inferiority seem asreasonable as it was pervasive.72

Elijah Muhammad faced considerable pushback on his newfound teach-ings and was often confronted by hostile elements from within the govern-ment at local, state, and federal levels. Even within the black community,Black American intellectuals were highly critical of his movement and itsteachings and ridiculed it on a continuous basis. Like the doctrines of theother early Islamic movements, Elijah Muhammad’s fused mythology to-gether with theology from a number of primary sources. For the Nation ofIslam and the Moorish Science Temple, the connections between Africanheritage, spirituality, Black Nationalism, orthodox Islam, and, in some in-stances, a mythical understanding of Islam, allowed them to directly describetheir experiences on their own terms. As argued first by Joseph R. Washing-ton Jr. in his book Black Religion: The Negro and Christianity in the UnitedStates, “Independent Negro (Christian) congregations and institutions areineffective among Negros’s because they failed in faithfulness to Black relig-ion.”73 Reinhold Niebuhr also states, “Contending factions in a social strug-gle require morale and morale is created by the right dogmas, symbols andemotionally potent oversimplifications.”74 Sherman Jackson, at the Univer-sity of Southern California, argues that “black religion for its part has alwaysbeen rich in powerful oversimplifications and its rejectionist’s instinct hasalways served to insulate it from the anesthetizing forces of accommodation-alism, domestication, and intellectualism, all of which tend to mollify ratherthan address the demand for change.”75 The fact that the Nation of Islam, theMoorish Science Temple, and the UNIA would use their American religiousexperience and their syncretic version of Islam as a form of holy protest andcritique of the white establishment allowed them to directly engage the spaceof resistance against that establishment. Furthermore, by utilizing a versionof Islamic ideals, they created legitimacy for their argument using their ownterms and conditions.

Through their high visibility, strong family work ethic, strong emphaseson education and self-improvement, and nationwide network of religiouscenters and worship sites, the Nation of Islam introduced in mass scale whatit was to be a Muslim in America.76 Through their weekly newspaper, Mu-hammad Speaks; their rejection of pork and drugs; and their antiviolencecampaign, the Nation of Islam introduced a reform movement in Americathat hit at the core of economic, political, and social life in the BlackAmerican urban community. The Nation of Islam’s teachings, which pro-


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vided the backdrop for the popularization of Islam in mainstream Americanculture, also facilitated a broader Muslim internationalism.

One of the leading voices of the Nation of Islam was Malcolm X, alsoknown as El Hajj Malik Al Shabazz. His influence, I argue, facilitated astronger connection between the Nation of Islam and the broader Islamicworld, one that went beyond the imagined ideal or mythical interpretation asdemonstrated by the Moorish Science Temple and the early days of theNation of Islam.77 Malcolm saw the Black American struggle as part of abroader, global battle of Third World people against foreign domination,imperialism, and colonialism.78 The Nation of Islam finally acquired itslong-sought identity by connecting Malcolm with its larger struggle for free-dom for black Americans in America.

Many scholars have denied the Nation of Islam’s influence on Malcolm’slife and have instead given credit to his reawakening when he went on thepilgrimage to Mecca. Dr. Sohail Daultazai, in his book Black Star, CrescentMoon, argues that the Nation of Islam was the impetus for Malcolm’s ascen-dancy. Daulatzai further argues that Malcolm’s first trips to Africa and theArab world were in 1959 in which he was deeply affected by the assassina-tion of Patrice Lumumba, met with Fidel Castro in Harlem, vocally sup-ported the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, supported Nasser in Egypt, alliedwith the Vietnamese victory of Dien Bien Phu, and attended the BandungConference in 1955, all while he was a member of the Nation of Islam.79

This goes against the general belief that the Nation of Islam was not address-ing overseas issues. The inheritors of the early Islamic movements and theNation of Islam can learn from the truly cosmopolitan and internationalnature of these communities.80

As C. Eric Lincoln states,

Elijah Muhammad must be credited with the serious reintroduction of Islam tothe United States in modern times, giving it the peculiar mystique, the appeal,and the rest without which it could not have penetrated the bastion of Judea-Christian democracy. If now, as it appears the religion of Islam has a solidfoothold and an indeterminate future in North America, it is Elijah Muhammadalone to whom initial credit must be given.81

The Nation of Islam in general, and Elijah Muhammad in particular, offereda fusion of traditional Islam, mythology, and alternative theological narra-tives to address the social experience of black American life. As will befurther outlined in the next chapter, which focuses on the role, evolution, andcontribution of the late Imam W.D. Mohammed, W.D. Mohammed not onlycarried forward the initial groundwork of his father’s teachings but alsobrought about a radical transformation by instituting Islamic “Sunni” ortho-doxy and doing so on the terms of Black American Muslims.82 What we willsee from the efforts of W.D. Mohammed, which I argue were a continuum of



the good practices of social dignity and black consciousness encouraged byhis father but also a rejection of the divisive teachings of black supremacyand anti-Semitism, is an independent and direct critique on normative andtraditional Islamic institutions, which overemphasize blind ritualism. He of-fered a direct challenge to the immigrant wave of 1952 and 1965, arguingthat Black American Muslims could be both American and Muslim on theirown terms and without foreign interference that imposed a cultural and dog-matic rigidness that was imported from immigrant home countries.

NOTES

1. Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,1994).

2. Sherman Pyatt and John Meffert, Black America Series (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Pub-lishing, 2000).

3. Katia M. de Queiros Mattoso, To Be a Slave in Brazil, 1550–1888, trans. Arthur Gold-hammer (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1994 )

4. Mechal Sobel, Traeblin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Westport, CT:Greenwood Press, 1979).

5. Phillip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of WisconsinPress, 1969).

6. Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 throughthe Stono Rebellion (London: WW Norton, 1974).

7. Ibid.8. Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South

Carolina (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 1981), 116.9. Leo Weiner, Africa and the Discovery of America (Philadelphia: Innes and Sons, 1922).

10. Bilali Muhammad’s daughters, mentioned by Georgia Writers’ Project interviewees,were born in Africa and were transported to the United States by their parents.

11. Thomas Bluett, Some Memories of the Life of Job, the Son of Solomon, the High Priestof Bonda in Africa (London: Printed for Richard Ford, at the Angel in the Poultry, 1744).

12. Ibid.13. Cyrus Griffin, “The Unfortunate Moor,” Natchez Southern Galaxy, December 13, 1827.

Reprinted in African Muslims in Antebellum America: A Sourcebook, edited by Allan Austin(London: Garland, 1984), 135.

14. GhaneaBassiri, A History of Islam in America, 21.15. Raboteau, Slave Religion.16. Robin Law and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds., The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua:

His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America (Princeton, NJ: Markus WienerPublishers, 2003), 92.

17. Halverson, “West African Islam in Colonial and Antebellum South Carolina.”18. L. D. Turner, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (Columbia: University of South Caroli-

na Press, 2002).19. Abdul-Qasim al-Qushayri, Al-Qushayri’s Epistle on Sufism, trans. Alexander D. Knysh

(Reading: Garnet Publishing, 2007), 336.20. Allan D. Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: A Sourcebook (New York:

Garland, 1995).21. Columbian Herald, 1790, microfiche.22. Charleston Times, November 17, 1903, microfiche.23. Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of

Charles Ball (New York: John S. Taylor, 1837), 165.24. Halverson, “West African Islam in Colonial and Antebellum South Carolina.”


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25. Ibid., 167.26. John B. O. Landurum, History of Spartanburg County (Atlanta: Franklin Printing and

Publishing, 1900), 254.27. Theodore Dwight, “Condition and Character of Negroes in Africa,” Methodist Quarterly

Review 46 (January 1864), 89.28. Bluett, Some Memories of the Life of Job.29. Terry Alford, Prince among Slaves, 30th anniversary ed. (New York: Oxford University

Press, 2007); Allan D. Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Storiesand Spiritual Struggles (New York: Routledge, 1997).

30. Ibid., 15–57.31. Ibid., 35–8932. Ibid.33. Ibid.34. Ibid.35. Ibid.36. Edward E. Curtis IV, Islam in Black America: Identitiy, Liberation, and Difference in

African-American Islamic Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).37. Sherman Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking toward the Third Resurrection

(London: Oxford University Press, 2005).38. Edward W. Blyden, “The Call of Providence to the Descendants of Africa in America,”

in Negro Social and Political Thought, 1850–1920, ed. Howard Brotz (New York: BasicBooks, 1966).

39. Edward W. Blyden, Liberia’s Offering (New York: J. A. Gray, 1862).40. Ibid., 14.41. Samory Rashid, Black Muslims in the US (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).42. Edward W. Blyden, From West Africa to Palestine (Manchester: John Heywood, 1873),

37–42, 159–62, 180.43. Ibid., 104–5.44. Edward W. Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887; reprint, Edinburgh:

Edinburg University Press, 1967), 173–88.45. Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 2003), 45–59.46. Sulayman Nyang, Islam in the United States of America (Chicago: Kazi Publications,

1999).47. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and John L. Esposito, eds., Muslims on the Americanization

Path? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 10.48. Rashid, Black Muslims in the US.49. Adil Hussain Khan, From Sufism to Ahmadiyya: A Muslim Minority Movement in South

Asia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015).50. Fatima Fanusie, “Fard Muhammad,” PhD diss, Howard University, April 2008.51. Sylvia Chan-Malik, “Profile: Black American Women in the Ahmadiyya Movement of

Islam,” Sapelo Square, accessed February 29, 2016, https://sapelosquare.com/2016/02/24/profile-black-american-women-in-the-ahmadiyya-movement-of-islam/.

52. Hisham Aidi, Rebel Music: Race, Empire and the New Muslim Youth Culture (NewYork: Pantheon Books, 2014); Robert Dannin, Black Pilgrimage to Islam (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2002).

53. Fanusie, “Fard Muhammad.”54. Amaddou Shakur, ‘Islam in America: The Middle Period (1900–1950),” Islamic Hori-

zons Magazine, May/June 2016.55. Hans A. Baer, The Black Spiritual Movement: A Religious Response to Racism, 2nd ed.

(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001).56. Ibid.57. Leigh Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (Berkeley: Univer-

sity of California Press, 2005).58. Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience.59. Ibid.



60. Ibid.61. “Treaty with Morocco June 28 and July 15, 1786,” Avalon Project, accessed February

12, 2017, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/bar1786t.asp.62. Charleston City Gazette, January 28, 1790, and the Charleston State Gazette of South

Carolina, February 1 and 4, 1790, microfiche.63. Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience.64. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, “From Muslims in America to American Muslims,”

Journal of Islamic Law and Culture 10, no. 3 (2008): 254–80.65. C. Eric Lincoln, “The Muslim Mission,” African American Religious Studies: An Inter-

disciplinary Anthology, ed. Gayraud S. Wilmore (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989),345.

66. Ibid.67. Ibid.68. E. U. Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism: The Search for an Identity (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1995).69. W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin Books, 1989).70. Lincoln, Black Muslims in America.71. Ernest Allen Jr. “Identity and Destiny: The Formative Views of the Moorish Science

Temple and the Nation of Islam,” in Muslims on the Americanization Path? Edited by YvonneHaddad and John Esposito (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 243 n. 2.

72. Lincoln, Black Muslims in America, 346.73. Joseph R. Washington Jr., Black Religion: The Negro and Christianity in the United

States (Toronto: Reginald Saunders, 1964).74. Ibid.75. Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican.76. William H. Banks Jr., The Black Muslims: African American Achievers (Philadelphia:

Chelsea House, 1997).77. Magnus O. Bassey, Malcolm X and African American Self-Consciousness (Lewistown,

NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005); Robert E. Terrill, The Cambridge Companion to Malcolm X(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

78. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse(London: Zed Books, 1986).

79. Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and BlackFreedom Struggle beyond America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

80. James Jennings, ed., Blacks, Latinos and Asians in Urban America: Status and Pros-pects for Politics and Activism (London: Praeger, 1994); Yuri Kochiyama, The Impact ofMalcolm X on Asian-American Politics and Activism (London: Praeger, 1994).

81. Lincoln, Black Muslims in America, 345.82. I argue that W.D. Mohammed introduced normative Islam to his community, which can

be characterized as “Sunni” Islam. But as you will see later, W.D. Mohammed offered newlanguage and sought to depart from the labeling and staunch ritualism of the Muslim world,which, in his estimation, caused some of the problems of ethnic, racial, and intra-Muslimpolitics pervasive throughout the Islamic world.


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Chapter Five

The Eschatological Productionof Mass Incarceration

As, previously stated, within many Christian traditions Hell is the use ofplace and time as an instrument of punishment. From the standpoint of phen-omenological description, mass incarceration is, quite literally, Hell on earth.More importantly, I argue that necropolitics produces an eschatological hopeby sacrificing the flourishing of predominantly marginalized black and Lat-inx communities. I intend to evidence this claim by integrating theoreticalcurrents in spatial theory into my account of necropolitics.

Eschatology often indicates thinking about “last things” or “endings.”However, in Eschatology and Space: The Lost Dimension in Theology Pastand Present, Vitor Westhelle rightly argues that spatiality was initially verymuch part of eschatological thought denoting limits, borders, passages, andopenings.1 This is evidenced in the New Testament phrase “the ends of theearth” (Acts 1:8, 13:47) or “to the end of the world” (Rom. 10:18). Thesespatial aspects of eschatology began to erode with Augustine’s distinctionbetween the temporal earthly and eternal city and culminate in circumnavi-gating the globe by the Portuguese in 1524. The effect Westhelle argues isthat spatial or latitudinal concerns were displaced by a longitudinal focus ontime and history with sharp emphasis on a future telos.2 What I find compel-ling in Westhelle’s recovery of space as the “lost dimension” in eschatologyis its relationship to the historical occurrence of liberation theology and post-colonial discourses.

Westhelle honors that the diversity of thought often gets lumped underthe category of liberation theology while drawing attention to how the mar-gins of society question dominant modes of thinking. In particular, theychallenge teleological visions where the lives of all persons are moving pro-gressively forward and improving. He argues that liberation theologies and

Christophe D. Ringer, “The Eschatological Production of Mass Incarceration,” in Necropolitics: The Religious Crisis of Mass Incarceration in America (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), 115–131. Series: Religion and Race. All Rights Reserved.


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postcolonial perspectives draw our attention “not only the differences amongpeople and their discourses but also to the preponderant inequalities. And thisinequality runs deep into what the eschatological discourse is really about:life and death, beginnings and endings, even though life is a compromise thatwe settle between the two.”3 To move beyond the era of mass incarcerationrequires an unveiling of this eschatological hope that creates spaces of socialdeath and inaugurates a new era by resisting cultural stereotypes and politicaleconomies that create conditions of desperation. This requires understandingthe relationship of margin to center as it relates to the religious depth of theAmerican political community.

This theoretical account returns to where I began, with the arche ofAmerican Political Community that is touched in times of crisis. However,here I want to engage Charles Long’s Significations on the relationship of thearche to the spatial ordering of public life. Long acknowledges a key aspectof Mircea Eliade’s work that is often overlooked: the idea of the center. Thecenter is that which is religiously real, the site of revelation that organizes thevarious aspects of our common life through participation in the sacred. 4 Thecenter is the source of human value. What is important for my argument here,is that Long claims this is evidenced by empirical studies of the rise of citiedtraditions. In particular, he highlights the historical transformation of cere-monial centers into cities. While the former does not always become thelatter, ancient cities were nearly always first ceremonial cities. A centralfeature of citied traditions is that the ceremonial site becomes the centerthrough which power is both drawn and distributed. The city as center is co-present with the rise of the critique of myth by classical Western philosophyas well as the correlation between the ordering of space and epistemologythrough hierarchy.5 A key concern in Long’s argument is the hermeneuticalaspects of Western rationality and of “others” as data to be interpreted. Inparticular he argues that the problem of epistemology is one of distance andrelationships, time and space, center and periphery. As such I argue that massincarceration in the U.S. is the material and spatial ordering produced by apolitical community whose arche, its generative power in times of crisisincludes the animalization and criminalization of blacks. In effect, mass in-carceration renders visible the eschatological dimensions of necropolitics asa rationality of governance.6 Thus mass incarceration represents a perverseracialized eschatological hope by a necropolitics that mediates uneven devel-opment,7 spatial regulation and dispossession. This is a critical step in ac-counting for the actual material existence of jails, prisons and those whosuffer within them.


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INTERPRETING SPACE

A key insight of spatial theory is that space is not something that is neutral orthat simply contains culture. Rather, the production of space is itself a socialprocess inseparable from its meaning. Scholars working at the intersection ofblack studies and geography understand space as a means of investigating thereciprocal relationship of physical materiality, imaginative configurationsand black populations. Our focus thus far has emphasized the way that repre-sentations of social death constitute a rationality of governance. It is impor-tant to realize that such representations also constitute the meaning of jailsand prisons. However, black feminist geographer Katherine McKittrick inreferring to slave ships argues, “The physicality of the slave ship, then,contributes to the process of social concealment and dehumanization butimportantly, black subjectivity is not swallowed up by the ship itself.”8 Like-wise, in examining the lives of Stanley Tookie Williams and Mumia Abu-Jamal, I argue that jails and prison are sites of concealment and revelation,repression and resistance, punishment and redemption.9 More importantly,mass incarceration in America is also a product of the transformation of themaster-slave dialectic to the white citizen–black criminal dialectic. And thesimultaneity of this dialectic within our religious situation affirms the insightof Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space that space is the site of socialstruggle. As such, the eschatological dimension of necropolitics is also a siteof struggle. As such, spatial theory helps to articulate the reciprocal relation-ship between racialized spaces of incarceration and society10 mediated by thelogic of containment, regulation, surveillance and necropolitics.

The question of spatiality is important in another respect. I contend thatmass incarceration should be understood as a symptom of America’s unjustsocial arrangements, rather than an isolated social problem. As such, thereare three theoretical currents that warrant brief engagement in understandingU.S. mass incarceration. The first is the recent mainstream engagement withabolitionist discourses11 through a groundswell of social movements ad-dressing mass incarceration and police violence12 as well as the heinouspolicy of family separation by the Trump administration.13 It is critical thatas abolitionist framings flourish we do not lose the key insight that abolitionis not only concerned about what we should eliminate, but more importantlywhat we should build. I find the definition of Abolition from Critical Resis-tance as a “political vision that seeks to eliminate the need for prisons,policing and surveillance by creating sustainable alternatives to punishmentand imprisonment”14 to be deeply persuasive. This entails both challengingour society’s current consensus on our reliance on mass incarceration toaddress social problems as well practical actions that citizens can take towardtransforming society. Julia Sudbury outlines those actions as working towardmoratoriums, decarceration and abolition.15 Pursuing moratoriums seeks to


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reduce public support of prison expansion by raising awareness of costs aswell as policies that increase the prison population. Decarceration is thespecific targeting of a population such as survivors of domestic violence orthose charged with non-violent drug offenses. The third, abolition, is the taskof constructing a society where people have access to the material and socialgoods necessary to flourish in their communities. Such a vision also calls forcitizens to confront the patterns of spatial organization that perpetuate massincarceration.

The importance of an abolitionist perspective is that it challenges theeschatological aspects of governance that sustain mass incarceration. Thereare two issues worth considering. I am sympathetic to concerns raised byAmy Levad that the rhetoric of prison abolition may hamper building thewidest possible coalitions for dismantling mass incarceration.16 This is animportant point. There are those who want to eliminate all jails and prisonsunder any circumstance and those who want to eliminate most of them.17

Embedded in many accounts of prison abolition however is the idea of “non-reformist reforms” which are changes that actually decrease our relianceupon mass incarceration to address social problems produced by social injus-tice. This is a critical point can serve as a bridge across a broad range ofideological lines. Moreover, it provides a critical norm for strategies em-ployed by all persons, activists, organizers and coalitions attempting to endmass incarceration.18 Although space does not allow for an adequate treat-ment here, it is important to think about the relationship between the reasonswhy we want to end mass incarceration and the rhetorical frames that alterpublic perception and relationships of power.19 Together, nonreformist re-forms, moratoriums on prison expansion, decarceration and the restoring ofthe common good are key practices compatible with what I call eschatologi-cal practices that challenge the representational, ideological and materialinvestments in mass incarceration.

The second current is that of afro-pessimism. Although a diverse groupscholars are often gathered under this sign, for this particular point, FrankWilderson III serves as a good conversation partner. In Red, White andBlack: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms Wilderson articulates aparadigmatic analysis of the political ontology that occasions black sufferingthat is not reducible to Marxist accounts of the exploitation of labor power. Inan effort avoid the “downward spiral into sociology” that would lead tounsubstantiated claims of racial progress and turn our eyes away from thisontological question, he engages the work of Orlando Patterson.

In a passage worth quoting he states:

Orlando Patterson has already distilled this faulty ontological grammar inSlavery and Social Death, where he demonstrates how and why work, orforced labor, is not a constituent element of slavery. Once the “solid” plank of



“work” is removed from slavery, then the conceptually coherent notion of“claims against the state”—the proposition that the state and civil society areelastic enough to even contemplate the possibility of an emancipatory projectfor the Black position—disintegrates into thin air. The imaginary of the stateand civil society is parasitic on the Middle Passage. Put another way, No slave,no world. And, in addition, as Patterson argues not slave is in the world.20

Wilderson’s interpretation fails to address that Patterson is not denying factsor historical records. Specifically, he is profoundly dependent on them toinvestigate slavery as a social fact. In addition, Patterson’s engagement withMarx on this point is not to remove the “plank of work,” but to comparativelyidentify the relationship of domination that can be constituted through directand indirect forced labor. More importantly, it is precisely the slave’s statusin the social world that is at stake. Patterson’s key claim is that free men mustbe made into slaves through the repetition of the original form of violence.

It is precisely the lack of engagement with Patterson’s account of slaveryas an institutional and dialectical process that leads Wilderson equivocatesocial status with social ontology. This culminates in his curious challenge toanyone to find a “distinction between Slaveness and Blackness.”21 This chal-lenge and assertion is representative of the central problem with afro-pessi-mism as it relates to the religious situation of mass incarceration: in severingsocial death from an institutional and dialectical process we fail to distin-guish what mass incarceration resembles from what is. The contingent andperennial aspects of historical struggles and social formations are equivocat-ed and our historical understanding of mass incarceration distorted. Morespecifically, this distorts key aspects of spatial analysis such as the history ofspace,22 representations of space as lived and representations of space23 inrationalities of governance. This does not require an adoption of a narrativeof inevitable progress that denies the persistence of racism. Rather, it iscritical to have the best handle on the nature of this social formation of powerin order to engage forms of redress.24

The third theoretical trend this account is designed to avoid is the obscur-ing of social complexities through concepts such as “empire” and “globaliza-tion.” It is not that these terms have no value or are unimportant. I haveargued that U.S. mass incarceration is the product of an intersection of anti-black racism and global capitalism as our religious situation, the arche ofAmerican Political Economy. Some accounts of empire appear to render thecomplexities of deeply sedimented cultural meanings as well as the structuresof governance that secure markets to be epiphenomenal. 25 To reiterate, as areligious symbol, “American Political Economy” represents the dynamics ofglobal capitalism we can intuit within the society in which we live. Thequestion of scale, however, acknowledges the complexities of these dynam-ics at different levels of social processes. As geographer David Harvey states,


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“Human beings have typically produced a nested hierarchy of spatial scaleswithin which to organize their activities and understand their world. House-holds, communities, and nations are obvious examples of contemporary or-ganizational forms that exist at different scales.”26 The question of scales iscritical for addressing the particular conundrum in thinking about mass incar-ceration: the ability for various cities with different political cultures to havesimilar outcomes for black and brown people while crime is traditionallyunderstood as a local issue. Thus, representations of social death as a ration-ality of governance interacts with uneven geographical development to dis-possess blacks from our common social world creating Hell on earth.

RACE, SPACE AND ESCHATOLOGY

In The Racial Contract Charles W. Mills argues forcefully that the racialcontract, which has been the actual social contract throughout Americanhistory, is dependent on the racialization of space. Moreover, the racializa-tion of space has as its correlate the state of nature and civilization. Thus, forspaces that are understood as white, the state of nature is a metaphoricalspace that the civilized might fall into. However, for spaces understood asnon-white, those spaces are understood to actually be the state of nature,inhabited by those whose very nature are understood to be unable to partici-pate in the political community. More importantly, Mills argues that thisracial contract produces a normative judgment through a vicious circularity:people considered “subpersons” are such because of the space they originatefrom and such spaces are that way because of who inhabits them.27 This isconsistent with our previous engagement with David Wilson’s InventingBlack-on-Black Violence where representations of social death provided ex-planations for the decline of American cities in capital accumulation andmoral values. These representations simultaneously inform how people ima-gine other geographic spaces and the people who inhabit them, without actu-al interaction. Such representations are then able to justify disinvestmentfrom communities as undeserving while investing in punitive policies thatprotect them from such elements.28 Eschatology is a way of framing how thehuman flourishing of certain geographies and populations are sacrificed toprotect the “City on the Hill.” This task implicitly calls for an account of therelationship between space, eschatology and justice.

In Seeking Spatial Justice, Edward Soja develops a spatial theory of jus-tice. Key aspects of this account are the intertwined claims that we are spatialas well as social beings from birth embedded in geographies. This serves as acorrective to social ontologies that only focus on the social/societal and tem-poral/historical as determinants of human existence. I want to emphasize twokey claims by Soja to examine the formation of space in religious depth of



the necropolitics of mass incarceration. The first is that social forces such asa racialized political economy actually shape geographical landscapes andthe built environment. In turn, the products of these processes also shape theforces of capital. The second point is that this process produces unevendevelopment that occasion inequalities. And while existence itself producesinequalities, Sojo is concerned about consequential inequalities that “havedeeply oppressive and exploitative effects, especially when maintained overlong time periods and rooted in persistent divisions in society such as thosebased on race, class, and gender.”29 Soja refers to spatial injustice as aproduct of social relations, as a socio-spatial temporal dialectic. Previously, Ihave argued that in America, the master-slave dialectic was transformed intoa white citizen–black criminal dialectic. When spatial analysis is integratedinto necropolitics, the material appearance of jails and prisons is a not a“social problem,” rather it is a product of our social arrangements. Thisleaves the task of evidencing this relationship within an invisible ontology,30

the representations of social death and the forces of political economy is thissocio-spatial production of mass incarceration.

There are three important and related claims for our account of the persis-tence of mass incarceration as the spatial production of the white citi-zen–black criminal dialectic. The first is David Harvey’s revisiting of theMarxist analysis that the internal contradictions31 of capitalism create socialunrest at home eventually leading to colonial and imperial ambitions abroad.These actions abroad help to ease social tensions domestically, while simul-taneously avoiding any rigorous programs for redistribution of wealth. Thesecond is that this movement abroad is related to what Harvey calls the“spatial fix.”32 The spatial fix recognizes that the built environment does notsimply immediately adapt to changes in society. As such, the “creative de-struction”33 of capitalism is played out in the built environment itself. Thespatial fix is the use of geographic expansion and spatial reorganization toaddress the internal contradictions of capitalism as evidenced by the accumu-lation of capital within a particular geographic area. Such surplus capital canbe invested in long-term capital projects, social expenditures, as well as theopening up of new markets elsewhere. A key aspect of this analysis is themediating role of financial and state institutions to generate credit that allowsinvestments to flow in the built environment. Third, he notes that oftenMarx’s account of primitive or original capital accumulation34 is rendered ahistorical fact and the ongoing aspects of violent and coercive means ofcapital accumulation is often left out of contemporary accounts of politicaleconomy.

Harvey calls the contemporary iteration of this accumulation by dispos-session.35 Accumulation by dispossession addresses the problem of surpluscapital that lies idle with no form of investment. Dispossession releases a setof assets, including labor power, at low or zero cost, available for capital


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investment to turn a profit. Harvey includes familiar examples of privatiza-tion of formerly public goods, the commoditizing of land from forceful ex-pulsion of populations and more recent trends in the pirating of geneticmaterial for pharmaceutical companies. Curiously absent from this list as anexample is our current practice of mass incarceration.

In Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in GlobalizingCalifornia Ruth Wilson Gilmore augments this analysis with the idea of the“prison fix.” Gilmore’s work investigates the reason for the growth of theprison population by nearly 500 percent between 1982 and 2000 despite thecrime rate peaking in 1980.36 This includes construction of 23 new prisons ata cost of $280 to $350 million dollars apiece.37 Previously the state had builtonly 12 prisons between 1852 and 1964.38 Central to this development wasthe simultaneity of two forms of surplus. The first is what Gilmore calls theend of the golden era of U.S. capitalism. This is includes profits that allowedfor a massive military buildup for World War II as well as the transformationof the Pentagon from the organizational structures implemented by the NewDeal. In addition, the increase in military spending occasioned a lot of eco-nomic development in the southwest and Gilmore even dubs this a form of“military Keynesianism.” However as Gilmore rightly notes, economic in-equality is a political problem and “African Americans who had migratedfrom the South and East to fight their way into wartime industries and theirCalifornia-born children were poorer in real terms in 1969 than they hadbeen in 1945, because after the hot war was over, most were pushed out ofwar material jobs whose pay levels could not be duplicated in other sec-tors.”39 The result is that extreme poverty was concentrated in AlamedaCounty, Los Angeles and other regions where black people had settled.

These profound changes in California’s political economy produced newcapital movement creating a surplus of finance capital, land, labor and statecapacity. These surpluses were not all absorbed politically, economically,socially, or regionally. Wilson argues that the use of prisons was a deliberatepolitical choice to absorb these surpluses. State resources and capacities areput in motion, making use of idle land and public debt resulting in theremoval of 160,000 low-wage workers off of the street.40 This surplus popu-lation created, experiencing a doubling in poverty and racial confrontations,found themselves outside of restructured labor markets and literally strandedin urban and rural communities. In bringing Harvey and Gilmore’s analysisinto this account, I want to argue that necropolitics results in accumulationthrough dispossession of the common good and membership in the politicalcommunity.

Harvey’s analysis of the internal contradictions of capitalism within soci-ety does not take into account the potential creation of an “internal colony.”41

In the case of California the contradictions of capitalism created a surpluspopulation, what criminologist Steve Spitzer refers to as “social junk.” In the



“prison fix,” prisons serve two roles simultaneously, to regulate and containthis population through punishment creating a “prison industrial complex”that absorbs capital investment. Through necropolitics this surplus popula-tion is simultaneously dispossessed of the representation necessary for politi-cal participation as well as the common goods necessary for human flourish-ing. This is also evidenced by an important distinction between mass incar-ceration and slavery. During slavery the slave was the object of capital in-vestment, whereas under the regime of mass incarceration, jails and prisonsrather than inmates are the object of capital investment (a point I will returnto later in this chapter).42 The necropolitics in the religious depth of the“American Political Economy” creates a social ontology that realizes itself inthe visible social and spatial formations known as mass incarceration inAmerica.

As previously mentioned, I want to move beyond a smooth historicalnarrative of peculiar institutions, as persuasive as Loïc Wacquant’s accountis. Wacquant has argued for a series of institutions of social control movingfrom slavery, to Jim Crow, to the urban ghetto and now mass incarceration.43

The last two are deeply intertwined as he argues that mass incarcerationdisproportionately targets the black poor. As such, prisons are used primarilyto target those blacks that are dispossessed and dishonored. In addition, heargues that each historical instantiation of institutional social control is ac-companied by its own stereotypes and images of dishonor. Although, I agreewith Wacquant’s descriptive claims, it still does not account for the salienceof these images nor the cultural logic of their permutation. Wacquant’s anal-ysis has the virtue of bringing together a wealth of empirical research withinan analytical frame that explicitly bridges the material and symbolic aspectsof mass incarceration. At this point, I want to articulate more specifically therelationship between dispossession and social death.

Talk of the common good or the commons in particular is a challenge foranyone, least of all for religious scholars. Gone are any univocal understand-ings and agreements of a “good” that constitutes a common aim of all diversecultures. Critical theorist Nancy Fraser cautions that speech about the com-mon good can serve as a dangerous form of mystification concealing rela-tionships of exploitation and domination.44 A number of scholars have notedthe pressures from social movements to disrupt the erasure of differenceunder the well-meaning banners of “community,” “universality” and“unity.”45 Simultaneously they have noted the neoliberal assault to render thecommon corporate while difference has become commoditized as a homoge-neous individualism.46 In addition, many have theorized political engage-ment through religious ways of being that emphasizing the multiplicity andmultivocality of the commons that is planetary in scope.47 As I have argued,the radical rise in the use of incarceration to manage populations is a globalphenomenon. However the particular histories of various political commu-


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nities profoundly influence which populations fall into its clutches. Thus,understanding and resisting mass incarceration in the U.S. requires an inves-tigation of the co-presence of the global and national political community.However, our analysis of the necropolitics as the arche of American PoliticalEconomy evidences two important points. The first is that the arche and itsinvisible ontology can be seen as operating across “scales of justice” fromthe federal to the state and local forms of governance. Likewise, I findaspects of David Hollenbach’s account of the common good to be persuasivein providing a normative criteria to address mass incarceration as symptomof our socio-spatial production that reveals an eschatological hope sustainedby necropolitics.

The Common Good and Christian Ethics by David Hollenbach is a sus-tained effort to renew the idea of the common good as part of a publicphilosophy. Hollenbach presses the point that the social problems facingAmerican public life such as economic deprivation, unemployment, home-lessness, drug violence, and I would add mass incarceration, cannot be ad-dressed by concepts such as tolerance.48 Moreover, his account acknowl-edges that urban poverty arises from sustained disinvestment and that “peri-odic irruptions of civil unrest remind citizens of how much remains to bedone if they are to address the continuing plight of the urban poor. But short-lived attention to urban problems stimulated by this unrest suggests that thenation is unprepared to make efforts to address these problems that are com-mensurate with their seriousness.”49 At the heart of Hollenbach’s vision isthe recognition of democracy as a social good that we must pursue togetherwhile embracing the fact of genuine pluralism. There are four key pointsworth articulating. The first is that social reality is embodied in social rela-tionships constituted by mutual respect. Thus, a common good is a good thatmembers both create and benefit from together. The second is that any ac-count of freedom and self-determination cannot be predicated on understand-ing ourselves through an isolated self-sufficiency. Rather, self-determinationpresupposes social institutions and practices of democracy that give one anexperience of being a moral agent in society.50 The good of autonomy andthe good of society are interdependent. Third, social relationships are goodwithin themselves with public life serving as the realization of this intrinsicaspect of who we are. Finally, society is related through forms of mutualinterdependence. As such, he rightly argues that urban and suburban commu-nities are not independent variables, but are in a relationship marked byunequal interdependence based in non-reciprocity and inequality that affectsboth geographic regions.

Hollenbach is careful to note that this relationship is not immediate asbetween two persons, one being a thief and the other a victim. Rather therelationship is mediated through political, economic and cultural institutionsthat affect issues such as “land use, zoning, housing and the funding of



education opportunities.”51 In addition, he acknowledges that these decisionsaffect the movement of capital and thus jobs erecting a “high wall separatinginner cities from middle class suburbs.”52 Hollenbach’s retrieval of the relig-ious and philosophical legacy of the common good and its application toquestions of social ills contains an important spatial dimension. More specifi-cally, it avoids the perennial problem of seeing the “urban question” asisolated from larger forms of spatial and social organization. More impor-tantly, his account is compatible with the insight of geographer Neil Smithwho challenged the conventional wisdom that gentrification was driven by“consumer sovereignty.” Rather, Smith demonstrates that gentrification islargely a product of unhampered land and housing markets.53 Moreover, thisretrieval of the common good leads to a normative account of solidarityrooted in two related aspects of justice, contributive and distributive. Thecommon good of adequate housing, accessible jobs, quality education, childcare and health care goods that citizens require to live in dignity. Contribu-tive justice calls on all citizens to build up these aspects of social life appro-priate to their capacity while distributive justice concerns the allocations ofgoods for the well-being of its members.54 When citizens fail in their contri-bution is a failure of solidarity as institutional arrangements that preventsome people from sharing in social goods is a failure of distributive justice.This rendering of the common good challenges American beliefs about theright to live in communities of similar households and excluding those whodiminish their quality of life (terms used in broken windows theory) arecomplicit in sanctioning racial discrimination. While this account of the com-mon good excels at challenging widespread beliefs that maintain unequalinterdependence, accounting for the rise of mass incarceration and possibil-ities of resistance and restoration requires integrating an analysis of necropol-itics and its generative power in times of crisis.55

The unequal interdependence of inner-cities and suburban cities that Hol-lenbach describes is a product of the social–spatial dialectic that producesuneven development—and the predictable social miseries that accompanyit—is a white citizen–black criminal dialectic legitimating containment, reg-ulation and over-punishment. Up to this point I have argued that such imagesof social death are used to represent persons and populations that provide arationality of governance. This also includes representations of geographicspace, how we imagine people we do not interact with on a regular basis iscritical. As I have evidenced previously, representations of blacks in generaland black youth in particular, as animals and criminals served as explana-tions for the decline of the city and legitimated investment in the suburbswith assumptions of moral worthiness. However, a key aspect of necropoli-tics is the importance of how representations of neighborhoods as such areoften portrayed.


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In Police Power and the Production of Racial Boundaries Ana Munizdocuments the process by which the neighborhood of “Cadillac-Corning”became “LaCienega Heights.” More than just a name change, the shift interminology indicates a long struggle and process by which a neighborhoodbecame predominantly African American and Latino surrounded by affluentwhites and Jewish residents.56 Muniz’s research documents the relationshipbetween zoning, housing development and school segregation to gang in-junctions, broken windows and community policing. More specifically, shenotes that repressive policing policies require a target area understood as“exceptional and threatening” in order to be justified.57 More importantly,the area targeted by police was according to their own data “one of the safestplaces in LA during and before the time of the gang injunction.”58 Ganginjunctions have deep resonances with broken windows policing analyzed inthe previous chapter and effectively operate as another plank in the logic ofnecropolitics.

As many other scholars, organizers and activists have stated, Muniz is notarguing that social problems within communities are not real. Rather ourresponse to social problems exacerbates them considerably. Gang injunctionsare civil lawsuits against neighborhoods based on the distinction betweengang and nongang residents. Police have the discretion to determine who islabeled as a gang member and which otherwise legal behaviors they areprohibited from engaging in such as congregating in groups of two or moreor standing in public for more than five minutes. Engagement in any of thesebehaviors could result in arrest.59 Three effects of gang injunctions are im-portant for the argument presented here. The first is that gang injunctionsexpanded to prohibit a wide range of noncriminal acts giving police broaddiscretion to detain and arrest people based on appearance and assumptionsabout acts they might commit rather than acts they have committed. 60 Inaddition, gang injunctions effectively created a dual criminal justice systemin which marginalized urban communities of color are criminalized or notdue to neighborhoods that are stigmatized. Moreover, gang injunctionsevolved not only to keep people indoors but also to displace them fromneighborhoods. Gang injunctions complemented the process of gentrifica-tion. A police officer in Los Angeles County remarked that a gang injunctionwas successful since “We’ve got Bed, Bath and Beyond now! We’ve gotStarbucks now! We’ve got In-N-Out Burger . . . here!”61 These commentsreveals the aim of gang injunctions as a tactic of governance is merely publicsafety for current residents who suffer from social miseries rooted in inequal-ities. In addition, gang injunctions are simultaneously rationalized by thecriminalization of blacks and Latinos that justifies the targeting of a geo-graphic space in order to facilitate capital investment.

The importance of Muniz’s research and the comments of the policeofficer is that they reveal the dialectical relationship of racialized spaces of



incarceration and gentrification. Gang injunctions are tools used to simulta-neously frame geographic spaces as threats to the well-being and boundariespredominantly of white middle-class residents while simultaneously facilitat-ing the investment of capital to renew the built environment through the“development of entertainment centers, business districts and gentrifiedhousing.”62 As such, the very social problems often created by politicaleconomy are not addressed. Rather, they are pushed to another geographiclocation, often jails or prisons. This is social-spatial dialectic within necro-politics that occasions jails and prisons that both disappears surplus labor and“problem populations” but also sacrifices the well-being of a large segmentof the political community for another. The “prison fix” renders populationsboth disposable and indispensable. Thus, returning to Hollenbach, I want toargue that in the U.S. necropolitics mediates between the spaces of jails andprisons and urban and suburban spaces dispossessing people of the commongood.63 The eschatological significance of this cannot be underestimated asnecropolitics creates spaces with different life outcomes, expectancies andhopes. Another important example of the role of the prison in mediating thissocial spatial dialectic can be witnessed in the State of Illinois.

In The War on Neighborhoods: Policing, Prison and Punishment in aDivided City Lugalia-Hollon and Daniel Cooper draw the portrait of thethreads between our cultural perceptions of the neighborhoods, politicaleconomy and punishment. In a poignant example, Bethel New Life Commu-nity Development Corporation (CDC) engaged in a range of activities suchas affordable housing and job training for those formerly incarcerated. Manyof their services were funded by grants from state government. During theeconomic recession of 2008 the finances of the state were also in dire straitsfalling behind on $9 billion worth of bills. The lack of revenue from the stateforced nonprofits to consider closing their doors. Bethel New Life howeverdecided to organize. Traveling to the capital in Springfield, residents of theWest Side neighborhood sent a clear message, “Pay your bills! You owe theWest Side of Chicago! Pay your bills!”64 On the very same day, however,there was another much larger protest happening.

The governor of Illinois planned to close Pontiac Correctional Center as acost-cutting measure. Despite the falling crime and incarceration rates, theremoval of residents from Austin through incarceration was an economicengine for corrections-related jobs in Pontiac. The protest to save the correc-tional facility carried the day. The correctional center is still open whileBethel New Life was forced to severely curtail their services toward families,those returning from prison and affordable housing. Austin as a high incar-ceration neighborhood is effectively “locked in a zero-sum competition withprison towns for scarce and ever-decreasing levels of state investment.”65 Inaddition, a critical point within their broader account concerns the emergenceof “million dollar blocks” where over $1 million in state money is spent in a


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residential block to incarcerate residents. This is a direct result of prisonsbeing the fasted growing of all public investments in Illinois since the1970s.66 On average the state invested $100 million into Austin for incarcer-ation and $6 million from the Illinois Department of Human Services. 67

Moreover, from 2005 to 2009 $1 million was invested in 851 census blockswith 121 of those blocks exceeding a million dollars from non-violent of-fenses alone.68

Returning to Hollenbach’s account, it is not only that poverty and socialmiseries along geographic lines born of unequal interdependence occasionsthe incarceration of black and brown citizens, but that rural communities inparticular are dependent on the prison economy itself to secure its future.69

Necropolitics mediates an eschatological contradiction in American PoliticalEconomy as most socially and economically marginalized communities arejudged as “surplus” and “disposable” to clear the way for new investmentwhile simultaneously being judged as indispensable as their incarcerationprovides economic development for rural areas. Ironically, the evidence isthin that these left behind rural areas are better off having entered into thispolitics of death.

NOTES

1. Vitor Westhelle, Eschatology and Space: The Lost Dimension in Theology Past andPresent (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 56.

2. Ibid.3. Ibid., 76.4. Charles H. Long, Significations (Davies Group, 1999), 79.5. Ibid., 80.6. Mitchell Dean in Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: SAGE

Publications Ltd., 2009) argues that what makes governance an art rather than only the exerciseof authority rendering the activity “irreducible utopian.“ In addition, he argues that isolatingthis utopian aspect or telos is critical in making regimes of government intelligible. I am ingeneral agreement with Mitchell although here I invoke eschatology to render the spatial andhermeneutical aspects of telos of necropolitics visible.

7. The term “uneven development” has a long genealogy in urban studies and studies ofpolitical economy. Here, I use the term to refer to inequalities across geographic spaces andscales produced by our political economy. For representative theories of uneven developmentsee Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Athens:University of Georgia Press, 2008); David Harvey, Space of Global Capitalism: Toward aTheory of Uneven Geographical Development (New York: Verso, 2006).

8. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies ofStruggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xii. Also see, Rashad Shabazz,Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity (Champaign: Uni-versity of Illinois Press 2015), Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Adrian Woods, Black Geogra-phies and the Politics of Place (Lutsen: Between the Lines, 2007).

9. I am not implying that incarceration is redeeming, rather I am stating that an individualexperience of redemption can sometimes be discerned within such spaces.

10. See Dominique Moran, Carceral Geography: Spaces and Practices of Incarceration(Routledge, 2016) and Jennifer Turner, The Prison Boundary: Between Society and CarceralSpace (Springer, 2016).



11. Here I am referencing the engagement with the abolition democracy of W. E. B. DuBoisby George Lipsitz, Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba and Critical Resistance.

12. See “What Abolitionists Do,” by Dan Berger, Mariame Kaba, and David Stein in http://jacobinmag.com/2017/08/prison-abolition-reform-mass-incarceration and “Mariame Kaba IsOur Very Own Modern Day Abolitionist,” by Mekeisha Hadden Toby Essence, https://www.essence.com/holidays/black-history-month/mariame-kaba-warrior-wednesday/.

13. Ruairí Arrieta-Kenna, “‘Abolish Prisons’ Is the New ‘Abolish ICE,’” POLITICO Maga-zine, accessed September 26, 2018.

14. “Unpacking the Crisis: Women of Color, Globalization, and the Prison Industrial Com-plex” by Julia Sudbury in Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the UnitedStates (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), Rickie Solinger et al., 21.

15. Ibid., 21–22.16. “Redeeming a Prison Society,” Syndicate (blog), https://syndicate.network/symposia/

theology/redeeming-a-prison-society/.17. In her response to Brandy Daniels, Levad reiterates the point made by Aristotle and

Aquinas that there are those who “rape, abuse, and murder others for the sake of raping,abusing, and murdering” or such acts as such always satisfy a good. I’m in agreement withLevad that not every act committed by a person is reducible to adverse social conditions.However, it is still the case that the social conditions profoundly exacerbate such issues. Iwould argue for the increased use of restorative justice where appropriate (e.g., the potential forpsychological manipulation in some domestic violence cases pose particular challenges), I wantto focus my argument here on key aspects of what occasions our use of jails and prisons tosolve social problems.

18. In Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice and the Abolition of Prisons (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2020), Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd argue persuasively those wanting toend mass incarceration and other systemic forms of violence are already in alignment withabolitionist struggles, 58.

19. This point is explored in depth in Deva R. Woodly's, The Politics of Common Sense:How Social Movements Use Public Discourse to Change Politics and Win Acceptance (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2015).

20. Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antag-onisms, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 11.

21. Ibid.22. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, 1st edition

(Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992), 46.23. Ibid., 38–39.24. Wilderson invokes Loic Wacquant’s work to argue that a carceral continuum is a con-

stant condition of black life regardless of the historical formations such as the “slave ship,Middle Passage, Slave estate, Jim Crow, the ghetto and prison-industrial complex.” The prob-lem with this interpretation is that it acknowledges Wacquant’s account of a genealogy ofAmerica’s “peculiar institutions,” but is simultaneously highly critical of those who describemass incarceration as slavery.

25. Here I resonate with similar critiques by Seyla Benhabib et al., Another Cosmopolitan-ism (New York: Oxford University Press US, 2006), 16–17 and Alexander J. Motyl, “IsEverything Empire? Is Empire Everything?,” ed. Niall Ferguson, Michael Hardt, and AntonioNegri, Comparative Politics 38, no. 2 (2006): 229–249.

26. David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 74.27. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 41–42.28. For an additional account of the role of racialization, space and its role in the production

of racial exclusion and public policy see George Lipsitz, “The Racialization of Space and theSpatialiation of Race: Theorizign the Hidden Architecture of Landscape,” Landscape Journal.Also, see George Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,2011).

29. Edward W. Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,2010), 73. Also see Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space inCritical Social Theory (Verso Books, 2010), 76–93.


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30. Karen E. Fields and Barbara Jeanne Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality inAmerican Life, 2012. Here I have invoked the term “invisible ontology” to signal the structureof beliefs that constitute rationality that sustains the social practices of racism.

31. For the clearest account of Harvey’s meaning of the term “internal contradiction” see“Introduction: On Contradiction” in Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Myusage here draws on Harvey’s understanding of contradiction as the presence of opposingforces in a particular situation, process or event. For Harvey opposing forces within capitalismsuch as use value and exchange value are the perennial generators of social crisis. My accountdiffers from Harvey in one important respect. Harvey sees racism, sexism and other socialantagonisms as interacting with and affected by capital accumulation but ultimately transcendsthem. Thus, I interpret Harvey as theorizing a revised economic determinism where culturaldynamics are not a mere superstructure or epiphenomenal but their presence is still dependentupon the workings of capital. As previously argued, my account here attempts more of asynthetic analysis of the co-presence of neoliberalism and anti-black racism in the U.S. Foranother account of the simultaneity of anti-blackness, neoliberalism and social crisis as itrelates to criminal justice see Michael Dawson, “Hidden in Plain Sight: A Note on LegitimationCrises and the Racial Order.”

32. David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2005), 87. Also see David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography, 1stedition (New York: Routledge, 2001), 284–311. Harvey, Spaces of Hope, (Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press, 2000), 24–31.

33. The term “creative destruction” owes its popularity to Austrian economist JosephSchumpeter’s interpretation and critique of Karl Marx. Schumpeter argued that internal logic ofglobal capitalism is an ongoing process of creative destruction. Schumpeter’s theory broke withthe economic orthodoxy that focused on perfect competition within the market, and argued thatrelentless competition for markets through innovations revolutionizes from within, simultane-ously creating and destroying economic structures. See Capitalism, Socialism and Democracyby Joseph Schumpeter.

34. This refers to what might be called the “classical” account of how capitalist socialrelations emerge into those who own the means of production and those who must sell theirlabor to survive. For a good summary of the various concepts associate with “primitive accu-mulation” and “accumulation by dispossession” see Derek Hall’s “Primitive Accumulation,Accumulation by Dispossession and the Global Land Grab.”

35. Harvey, The New Imperialism, 145–183.36. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Glo-

balizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 7.37. Ibid.38. Ibid.39. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Glo-

balizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 274.40. Ibid., 88.41. Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (New York:

Penguin, 2009), 270. In his memoir Newton argues that the state refers to the facility where hewas housed as a “Men’s Colony.” However Newton uses the term California Penal Colony todescribe a “penal institution and a colonized situation.” Newton’s description is prescient andprefigures the theoretical engagement given here. Moreover, the literature on AfricanAmericans as an internal colony is quite rich and vast. In light of the emergence of settlercolonial theory there has been a revival of this scholarly debate. For two recent takes seeCharles Pinderhughes, “Toward a New Theory of Internal Colonialism,” Socialism and De-mocracy 25, no. 1 (March 1, 2011): 235–256 and Cedric Jonson, “The Panthers Can’t Save UsNow,” accessed October 18, 2018, https://catalyst-journal.com/vol1/no1/panthers-cant-save-us-cedric-johnson. For a good overview of the debate from the 1950s to the early 1990s, seeRamon A. Gutierrez, “Internal Colonialism: An American Theory of Race,” Du Bois Review:Social Science Research on Race 1, no. 2 (September 2004): 281–295.

42. I appreciate Michael R. Fischer for pushing me to considering this point further as heargues that the plantation is a more appropriate comparison to the prison. However, “prison fix”



calls attention to a different relationship of a slave to a plantation and an inmate to a jail orprison that are often equated. There is a substantial debate regarding slavery and its relationshipto our understanding of the history of capitalism in general and Marxist theory in particular.See this forum “To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism and Justice,” at BostonReview. Here, I want to emphasize not only that slaves were property but also their role in themeans of production and the distinction between slave and free labor.

43. Loïc Wacquant, “New Left Review,” From Slavery to Mass Incarceration 13 (January/February) and Loïc Waquant, “The ‘New’ Peculiar Institution: On the Prison as SurrogateGhetto,” Theoretical Criminology 4, no. 3 (2000): 377–389.

44. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of ActuallyExisting Democracy,” Social Text, nos. 25/26 (1990): 72–73.

45. See the introduction in Catherine Keller and Elias Ortega-Aponte, Common Goods:Economy, Ecology, and Political Theology, ed. Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre, 1st edition (NewYork: Fordham University Press, 2015).

46. Ibid.47. Ibid.48. David Hollenbach, Common Good and Christian Ethics (New York: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 2002), 32.49. Ibid., 34.50. Ibid., 72.51. Ibid., 174–175.52. Ibid.53. “Toward a Theory of Gentrification A Back to the City Movement by Capital, Not

People: Journal of the American Planning Association: Vol. 45, No. 4.”54. Ibid., 196.55. Mark Lewis Taylor has forcefully argued for thinking about the U.S. public as a necro-

politics constituted by an assemblage of racialized regimes of social control including massincarceration, migration regime, land confiscation regime and imperial regime. I am in deepagreement with Taylor, however here I am attempting to integrate a spatial analysis whilesimultaneously providing a normative criteria that communities and citizens might use as amean of recognition and action in responding to mass incarceration in the U.S. context. SeeTaylor’s “Beyond Only Difference: Necropolitics, Racialized Regimes, and U.S. Public Theol-ogy,” in Harold J. Recinos, Wading through Many Voices toward a Theology of Public Conver-sation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 235–250.

56. Ana Muñiz, Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries (New Brunswick:Rutgers University Press, 2015), 15.

57. Ibid., 31.58. Ibid., 40.59. Ibid., 7.60. Ibid., 54.61. Ibid., 80.62. Ibid., 82.63. Here I have not addressed the complexities of the black middle class, which is an

important factor. See my “Tangle of Perils: the Eschatological Dilemma of Black Families inAmerica,” Concilium: International Journal of Theology, 2 (2016).

64. Ryan Lugalia-Hollon and Daniel Cooper, The War on Neighborhoods: Policing, Prison,and Punishment in a Divided City (Beacon Press, 2018), 128.

65. Ibid., 129.66. Ibid., 35.67. Ibid.68. Ibid., 36.69. For recent research on mass incarceration and rural economies see John M. Eason, Big

House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation, 1st edition (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2017).


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Chapter Six

You Have Become Children of SarahReading 1 Peter 3:1–6 through the Intersectionality ofAsian Immigrant Wives, Patriarchy, and Honorary

Whiteness

Janette H. Ok

Among the documents collected in the New Testament, 1 Peter is the mostrevealing about the process of identity formation. This chapter reexaminesthe exhortation to Christian wives in 1 Peter 3:1–6 through two lenses: theexperiences of first-century Christian women addressed in 1 Peter who aremarried to non-Christian men and that of Asian immigrant women in interra-cial marriages. The author of 1 Peter offers his women readers a strategy ofminimizing unnecessary suspicion and criticism from their husbands anddisrupting stereotypes associated with Christians in general and Christianwomen in particular. While 1 Peter’s address to wives in mixed marriagesserves both an apologetic and missionary function in response to outsidecriticism, it also serves an identity-forming function as the author seeks tostrengthen ingroup cohesion among his readers and their capacity to copewith prejudice, conflict, and hostility within the domestic sphere.

By characterizing gentile Christian wives as “children of Sarah” (3:6), 1Peter offers wives a means to elevate their status as children of Sarah irre-spective of their husbands’ opinion of them or conversion to their religion.1

The author inscribes them into the great Jewish matriarch’s genealogy toremind them of their elect status as God’s chosen, royal, holy people(2:9–10) that is not based on shared bloodlines but on shared belief andbehavior.

The uniquely intersectional experiences of Asian American women whoare married to white American men offers insights into the ways the author

Janette H. Ok, “You Have Become Children of Sarah: Reading 1 Peter 3:1–6 through the Intersectionality of Asian Immigrant Wives, Patriarchy, and Honorary Whiteness,” in Minoritized Women Reading Race and Ethnicity: Intersectional Approaches to Constructed Identity in Early Christian Texts, edited by Mitzi J. Smith and Jin Young Choi (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), 111–129. Series: Feminist Studies and Sacred Texts. All Rights Reserved.


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of 1 Peter seeks to help his female, married addressees cautiously negotiatetheir multiple and potentially conflicting commitments to members of theirdomestic household, specifically their husbands, and members of the “house-hold of God.”

Asian American women often experience the cultural homogenization oftheir identities, despite having immigrated to the U.S. from distinct cultures,and the exoticization of their identities, despite being ethnicized as honorarywhites.2 In a study of racialized sexism and sexualized racism for AsianAmerican women, participants reported intersectional experiences of dis-crimination that set them apart from Asian American men and other womenof color, including white women.3 The homogenization or reduction of eth-nic and gendered diversity among Asian American women has led some toconstruct their own idealized identities as a way to set themselves apart fromwhite American women and the cultural stereotypes the dominant culture hasof them.4 Their new idealized identities, however, have the potential to beessentialized by others, suggesting both the effectiveness of such a strategyand its liabilities.

First Peter 3:1–6 confronts the essentializing of negative and unwantedstereotypes of Christian women through the idealizing and ethnicizing ofcertain behaviors. Although the author does not seek to idealize the hierarchi-cal and patriarchal ordering of husband and wife, his advice to wives hasbeen interpreted as an essential and enduring posture and practice of submis-sion that Christian wives are to have across time and cultures. However, asthe experiences of some Asian immigrant women suggest, idealizing andethnicizing certain behaviors as a way to disrupt stereotypes and give a senseof greater personal agency may ironically lead to the further essentializing ofracial-ethnic and gender stereotypes and idealization of whiteness and patri-archy. The contemporary experiences of Asian immigrant women subse-quently interrogate a universally prescriptive reading of the 1 Peter textthrough the particular intersectional challenges they face in their marriagesand family relationships.

THE EXPERIENCES OF FIRST-CENTURY WOMENADDRESSED IN 1 PETER 3:1–6

In the letter’s section known as the Haustafel or household code (2:18–3:7),the author of 1 Peter addresses appropriate relationships between slaves andmasters, wives and husbands, and husbands and wives. After exhorting ad-dressees to “be subordinate you all to every human creature (pasē anthrōpinēktisei) because of the Lord” (2:13), the author narrows his focus on Christianslaves (2:18–25) and wives (3:1–6) before saying a brief word to believinghusbands (3:7).5 The author shows particular concern for slaves and wives


You Have Become Children of Sarah 113

living in unbelieving households because their subordinate status leaves themin a precarious, vulnerable, and potentially hazardous position. His advice towives reflects a strategy that both complies with and challenges dominantGreco-Roman cultural expectations and values for women, opening the doorfor evangelistic possibilities, while also helping to forge a stronger sense oftheir identity as children of Sarah.

The Petrine author offers believing wives the following advice: “Likewiseyou wives, be subordinate to your husbands so that even if some are disobe-dient to word, they may be won over without a word by the behavior of theirwives when they observe your reverent and chaste behavior” (vv. 1–2).6 Thephrase “even if some” (kai ei tines) has led some commentators to concludethat mixed marriages were the exception, not the rule: 1 Peter’s injunctionapplies to all women in all marriages, whether Christian or non-Christian. 7

However, elsewhere in the letter, those who “disobey the word” (2:8) and“the gospel of God” (4:17) starkly contrast those who “believe” (2:7), are the“people of God” (2:10), and belong to the “household of God” (4:17). Fur-thermore, the restrained missional hope conveyed in 3:1 by the Greek wordkerdēthēsontai (“may be won over”) suggests the possibility for the conver-sion of “some” husbands.8 The author’s singular address to believing hus-bands in 3:7 strongly suggests that marriages between believers are the ex-ception, not the rule. The brevity of 1 Peter’s exhortation to husbands alsoreflects that the author’s concern in 3:1–6 is not with wifely submission butwith helping wives prudently navigate and strategically survive potentiallyconflictual relationships with their unbelieving husbands as a result of theirobedience to Christ. The rest of 1 Peter’s household code assumes that thosein social and domestic positions of authority over Christians are unbelievers(2:13–3:6). Furthermore, the parallel NT household codes address both hus-bands and wives as though they are in Christian marriages (Col. 3:18–19;Eph. 5:21–33; cf. Titus 2:3–5) and make no mention of husbands disobeyingthe word or evoking fear in their wives.

Christian wives were not in a position to win over their husbands bymeans of coercion. Instead, they had to take a more “winsome” approach byattracting them by their distinctly Christian but attractive way of life (cf.2:12).9 The implication in 3:6 that wives have something to be terrified aboutreflects the author’s concern for women in religiously mixed marriages be-cause they are particularly vulnerable to the intimidation of their nonbeliev-ing husbands.10 While suffering is not explicitly mentioned in 3:1–6, 1 Pe-ter’s exhortation that wives be “free from all fear” (3:6) implies the threat ofviolence.11 Unbelieving husbands would have likely become antagonistictoward their wives because of their Christian beliefs and activities, as sup-ported by the identification of the letter’s recipients in 2:11 as paroikous kaiparepidēmous (“resident aliens and foreigners”) and the multiple references


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to the negative attitudes toward Christians harbored by non-Christians (e.g.,2:12; 3:13–14, 16; 4:4, 14–16).

First Peter’s plea that women subordinate themselves to their unbelievinghusbands corresponds to the prevailing norms, expectations, and values con-cerning the roles and interactions of husbands and wives in the Greco-Romandomestic context. According to Roman writers, the ideal household served asa microcosm of the intensely hierarchical structure of society in which theemperor reigned supreme, while all others held lower status positions largelydetermined by their birth and gender. The Roman household thus was tofunction “like an empire writ small: the head of the household, usually a freemale, ruled over the other household members subordinate to him.”12 It alsoserved as the site of religious activity where members of the household,which might extend to family members, slaves, employees, and other depen-dents, worshiped the gods of paterfamilias (father of the family).13 Althoughmasters or husbands usually presided over the domestic cult, slaves andwives often had the role of preparing and carrying out cultic rituals in thehousehold.14

The mere suggestion in 1 Peter 3:1 that husbands might adopt the religionof their wives is itself remarkable in light of Greco-Roman societal expecta-tion that a submissive and deferential woman wholeheartedly accept thereligion of her husband.15 So Plutarch warns, “A married woman shouldtherefore worship and recognize the gods whom her husband holds dear, andthese alone. The door must be closed to strange cults and foreign supersti-tions. No god takes pleasure in cult performed furtively by a woman.”16 In3:1–6, 1 Peter addresses the very women Plutarch has in mind, since from theperspective of their nonbelieving husbands, these wives worshipped and rec-ognized a “foreign” deity of a strange, new cult known as “the Christians.”17

Whether these Christian women also participated in the worship of theirhusband’s gods is uncertain. Warren Carter argues that 1 Peter does notdiscourage Christians from participating in Rome’s imperial cult nor wivesand slaves from participating in the domestic cult because it was their non-participation in such socially and religiously sanctioned activities that causedhostility between Christians and non-Christians.18 He interprets 1 Peter’sexhortation to wives as a “strategy of urging civic and domestic submission,including cultic participation, while maintaining inner loyalty to Christ.”19

Because 1 Peter has a “culturally assimilationist agenda,” the letter encour-ages Christians in general and slaves and wives in particular to be publiclycompliant, while remaining inwardly resistant.20 Carter turns to the work ofJames C. Scott to help illuminate the agency 1 Peter offers slaves and wom-en. Scott argues in Weapons of the Weak that calculated measures of publicconformity can help cover the tracks of more hidden forms of resistance andnoncompliance.21 Those without the power to overtly resist authority mayshow public deference as a way to mask their resistance. First Peter’s admo-



nition that wives conduct and adorn themselves in a manner that demon-strates their modesty, reverence, and gentle and tranquil spirit enables themto demonstrate outward compliance with socially sanctioned practices, suchas cultic participation, while inwardly resisting the authority of their hus-bands because “their hearts are now given to Christ (3:15).”22

Caroline Johnson Hodge similarly argues that 1 Peter urges compliance totraditional social hierarchies as a means to “ease the tensions” between slavesand wives and their unbelieving masters and husbands and also possibly toprevent further persecution and slander against the Christian community.23

She sees in 1 Peter’s advice to women a form of agency “precisely in hersubservience.”24 Despite being in a subordinate position, a Christian wife hasthe potential to wield some influence over her husband’s religious allegiance.The very fact that these wives are worshipping a “foreign” deity is itself anact of resistance to their husbands’ power, since even religious practice thatis “constrained by patriarchal values” still has the capacity to “empowerdisempowered participants.”25 While the warning against excessive acces-sorizing and expensive clothing and the encouraging of modesty and otherinner virtues in 3:3–4 is not uniquely Christian, the author of 1 Peter offers anexplicitly theological rationale for a woman’s modesty and inner beauty.26

In 1 Peter 3:3–4, the author does not wish to condemn wives for theircertain sartorial choices but to safeguard them against being perceived bytheir husbands or by society at large in ways that could be misconstrued assexually provocative precisely because they were taking the liberty to comein and out of the home to gather with the “household of God” (4:17). Theindependent conversions of these women would lead them to attend Christianmeetings, neglect their traditional cultic duties, and “negotiate between twocommunities in conflict.”27 First Peter thus encourages wives to adorn them-selves with inner qualities of a “gentle and tranquil spirit” in order to mini-mize the suspicions and conflict that may ensue from their worshipping a“foreign” deity outside of the home (3:4).28 By leaving the home unadorned,she would make it clear to her husband that she is leaving to worship her Godof the new cult now known as “the Christians” and not leaving for a tryst orto engage in sexual promiscuity (4:16).29

David Balch, in arguing for the apologetic function of the household codein 1 Peter, explains that the primary reason the author prescribes his readersto follow conventional Greco-Roman household behavior was “to reducesocial-political tension between society and the churches.”30 The letter firstaddresses slaves and wives because they faced the most intense social tensionbetween the church and Roman society, since Romans believed wives andslaves to be particularly susceptible to the seduction of foreign cults. 31 Cla-rice Martin likewise asserts that “patriarchally appropriate behavior was en-joined to persuade authorities that Christian communities were not a threat tothe state (1 Pet. 2:11–3:12).”32 Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza agrees with


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Balch’s hypothesis that assimilation to doing what is good in the sight of thelarger Greco-Roman community was the main purpose of the Petrine house-hold code, although she questions the actual effectiveness of the strategyhypothesized by Balch to reduce the tension between the Christian commu-nity and the patriarchal pagan household.33

Betsy Bauman-Martin argues that Balch’s highly influential reading ofthe Haustafel in 1 Peter has been too simplistically taken up by feministinterpreters to argue that Christian slaves and women are encouraged tobehave in ways that would appease their masters and husbands in order toprevent unnecessary domestic conflict and subsequent persecution.34 Instead,she interprets 1 Peter’s injunctions to wives as addressing the rupture alreadytaking place between masters and slaves and Christian husbands and theirwives because of their Christian beliefs and “antipatriarchal activity.”35 WithJohn Elliott, she argues that the purpose of 1 Peter’s injunction to wives isnot to defend them against accusations that they pose a danger to society andthe family but to encourage Christian distinctiveness and particularity fromthe values of the dominant culture in order to promote greater ingroup cohe-sion.36

The household code in 1 Peter attends to both outgroup and ingroupperceptions and concerns. As Shively Smith explains, the letter’s writer has a“double vision” in which Christians remain subject to the social contractsdemanded of subordinates in the Greco-Roman social system while beingsubject to an “alternative social system with its own communal standards.”37

Through the household ethic, 1 Peter attempts to preserve the bonds of inti-macy of the household to keep societal peace and also to prevent Christiansfrom reinforcing false and negative stereotypes that Christians are family andsociety haters. The emphasis the letters places on being a “spiritual house-hold” (oikos pneumatikos) and an “house of God” (oikos tou theou) providesan alternative family and household in addition to their unbelieving familiesand households. Christians must manage multiple and intersecting commit-ments (e.g., to their masters, husbands, wives, neighbors, associates, andChrist group) and must navigate multiple ideologies and pressures (e.g., howto honor the emperor without worshipping him, how to live as free peoplewithin the laws of Rome, and how to worship God while living under theroof of a master or husband who worships other gods). Their primary andultimate commitment, however, is to Christ their Lord. The reverence (enphobō) expected of a wife is not for her husband but for God (cf. 1:17; 2:17;2:18, 20). The author does not exhort wives to hold their husband in highregard. Rather, he encourages them to hold themselves in high regard notbecause of their status as wives but because of their identity as children ofSarah.

The letter’s author is not simply concerned with the visibility of a certainway of behaving in the eyes of nonbelievers. When Christians engage “hon-



orable conduct” (tēn anastrophēn . . . kalēn), Gentiles may still condemnthem as “evildoers” (kakopoioi) because of their refusal to participate in thebehaviors and values that Gentiles consider appropriate (3:16–17; 4:4; 14,16, 19) and practice of that which Gentiles consider shameful, such as behav-ing in a lowly manner patterned after Christ (2:21–23; cf. 3:9). Although theauthor does not portray unbelievers in a positive light, he does suggest thatGentiles who slander Christians as “evildoers” might nevertheless observetheir good deeds and share some common ground with Christians in judgingwhat is “good” (2:14; 3:2), even as the author characterizes the desires andbehavior of Gentiles in a negative light elsewhere in the letter (e.g., 4:2–4).

First Peter’s admonishment to wives reveals the “boundary-crossing” ac-tivities that Christian wives had to maneuver and how they had to treadcautiously, deftly, and strategically between the public and private spheres. 38

Although these women are to accept the authority of their husbands, suchauthority does not render them completely passive nor prohibit them fromtaking risks for “doing what is right” (2:12; 3:6; 3:14). Their reverent andchaste behavior may please and even convert their husbands, but it may alsoput them in continued or escalating conflict with them. Thus 1 Peter attemptsto give them a further motivation for their good conduct that does not dependon their husbands’ positive or negative evaluation of them. That is, while heseeks to offer wives a strategy to challenge and disrupt negative perceptionsthat their husbands may have of them as a result of their new way of life andalso convert their husbands to this way of life, the author of 1 Peter seeks tochange the way wives perceive themselves by offering them the honorarystatus as Sarah’s children.

YOU HAVE BECOME SARAH’S CHILDREN

The apologetic and missionary impulse in 1 Peter 1:1–5 shifts focus when theauthor appeals to “holy wives” in 3:5–6: “For this is the way the holy wivesin former times—wives who put their trust in God—used to adorn them-selves by being subordinate to their husbands, like Sarah obeyed Abraham,calling him lord. You have become her children when you do what is rightand do not fear any kind of intimidation.”39 The background of 3:6 is notori-ously difficult to ascertain as the image of Sarah found in 1 Peter does notharmonize well with her depiction in Genesis and in Midrash of Genesis. Themajority of commentators attribute Genesis 18:12 as the OT passage 1 Peteralludes to in 3:6. Mark Kiley shares the majority view that 1 Peter hasGenesis 18:12 in mind, but he explains that Sarah’s obedience as conveyed inGenesis 12 and 20 enables the Petrine author to “typify what he sees as thecommendable attitude of a wife.”40 Sarah and her perilous situation as thewife of Abraham in a foreign land serves as a model to the Gentile Christian


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women married to nonbelievers in a hostile environment.41 For Troy Martin,either 1 Peter misinterprets the Genesis tradition regarding Sarah or makesuse of noncanonical legend. Martin makes a case for the latter, arguing thatthe Testament of Abraham best illuminates the probable background of 1Peter 3:6 because it contains specific instances when Sarah obeys Abrahamand calls him “lord,” presents Sarah as the mother of the elect, and connectsgood deeds with fearlessness.42

Magda Misset-Van de Weg offers another possibility that does not dis-count that the author of 1 Peter has the “Abraham-Sarah cycle” of Genesis inmind; she sees the role of Sarah in 1 Peter 3:6 as symbolic. Sarah is the“apogee, the more precise marker, or the sign” that along with the holywoman of the past serves to “situate women’s submissiveness within theframework of the sacred tradition.”43 The Petrine author places his female,married addressees on the continuum of ancient Jewish wives, who alsosubmitted themselves to their husbands as a way to inscribe them into thenarrative of the Jewish people.44 When the author of 1 Peter singles outSarah as the great matriarch of the Jewish people, he brings them into thenarrative of the people of God, specifically by means of bequeathing them aspiritual ancestry. The author is reminding his addressees of their status asGod’s elect children when he says they have become Sarah’s children (tek-na).

The fact that 1 Peter refers to readers in 3:6 as tekna (children), notthygateres (daughters), is significant.45 Earlier in 1:14, the author describeshis readers as “children of obedience” (tekna hypakoēs). The phrase teknahypakoēs describes obedience as a fundamental aspect of his addressees’identity as God’s children and thus as a central cultural value as God’speople. To be children of God is to be obedient to God. God is holy, and soGod’s children must also be holy (1:15–16). By identifying wives in 3:6 asSarah’s children, 1 Peter’s author reiterates the idea that they are God’schildren. By recalling the holy character of wives in the past and associatingtheir holiness with their hopefulness in God (3:5), he reiterates the idea thatholiness, which characterizes God’s children, is possible even in the face ofresistance, conflict, and persecution because believers have a “living” and“eschatological hope” (1:3, 13).

In 1 Peter, the idea of shared descent arises as the author establishes hisaddressees’ elect status.46 In the letter’s prescript, he begins to delineate aspiritual genealogy for his predominantly Gentile audience based on the factthat Christians are “chosen (eklektos) . . . according to the foreknowledge ofGod the Father” (1:1–2) and “born anew to a living hope through the resur-rection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1:3b). Such descriptors serve as basesfor their identity as “people of God” (2:10). Rather than use the language andlogic of adoption (hiothesia) by the Spirit to explain how Gentiles are alsosons and heirs of God as Paul does, the author links the idea of election to



that of spiritual regeneration (anagennaō) to explain how his addressees caninvoke God as Father and understand themselves as God’s children (1:3, 14,17, 23; cf. Rom. 8:14–17; Gal. 4:6–7).47

In 1 Peter 3:6, the author makes a strong connection between his address-ees’ obedience and their status as God’s children but uses a more explicitlyethnic line of reasoning.48 Their distinctive “way of life” or “behavior”(anastrophē) connects them more specifically to the ancestry of Sarah.49 Bybecoming children of Sarah, Christian wives in effect become honorary Jews.Jewishness serves as a means of engendering solidarity for the letter’s belea-guered addressees, particularly woman in mixed marriages, who might other-wise feel extremely isolated and alienated in their domestic sphere and alonein their marital suffering.

Why use Sarah imagery here rather than children of God imagery usedelsewhere? Through Sarah, the author is able to intersect the various strate-gies for coping with and minimizing, in so far as it is possible, the conflict,risk, and suffering that Christian wives experienced as subordinate membersof unbelieving households. Christian wives, despite their precarious positionsin the households of their paterfamilias, have an honored status as children ofobedience, which is another way of saying they are children of Sarah. Byethnicizing his addressees’ religious identity, the author is able to essentializethe behaviors associated with Sarah as an indelible part of their identity. Byappealing to them as Sarah’s children, Christian wives can live in a mannerthat might appease their husbands and possibly convert them. But moreover,they can live faithful lives that please God regardless of whether husbandsare appeased or won over and even in the face of tensions or hostility.

FIRST PETER AND ASIAN IMMIGRANT WIVES

Western feminist, womanist, liberationist, and postcolonial scholarship hasgiven much attention to resistance and agency among the oppressed. Thisshift from seeing the oppressed as passive victims to active and strategicresistors has served as a much-needed corrective to the prevailing notion inWestern scholarship that views the disenfranchised or disempowered as pas-sive victims or completely powerless. It has also helped open the door to themanifold ways and degrees in which the subjugated have resisted their op-pressors. However, there are some downsides to focusing too much attentionon resistance as a totalizing strategy or way of being.

For Asian Americans, the impact of the model minority stereotype on theAsian American psyche and experience has been explored by many.50 Whilecritique of this narrative is vital, Karen Pyke speaks of what she calls the“model resistor stereotype,” which treats the oppressed as almost superhu-man in their reliance and resourcefulness so as to deny the harsh realities of


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their challenges, depression, and oppression.51 Pyke’s point is that an inter-sectional approach that considers gender in model minority critique helpsavoid relying on an either/or approach to interpreting individual action asbeing resistance or complicity. Intersectionality helps nuance simplistic bi-naries and helps us consider, for example, not only how women respond tooppression but also what people do to women, not only the measures womentake to increase their agency but also how by resisting one form of domina-tion they can inadvertently reproduce other forms of it.52

In her book Where Is Your Body? legal scholar Mari Matsuda articulates avery helpful method for understanding intersectionality:

When I see something that looks racist, I ask, “Where is the patriarchy inthis?” When I see something that looks sexist, I ask, “Where is the heterosex-ism in this?” When I see something that looks homophobic, I ask, “Where arethe class interests in this?” Working in coalition forces us to look at both theobvious and the nonobvious relationships of domination, and, as we have donethis, we have come to see that no form of subordination ever stands alone.53

Pyke, adapting Matsuda’s model to her cross-racial study, asks, “Where isthe complicity with racial oppression in this resistance to gender oppression?Where is the resistance or challenge to gender inequality in this complicitywith racial domination?”54 Intersectionality opens our eyes to see the over-lapping, interdependent, and sometimes contradictory relationships betweendomination and subordination. It also helps us consider how strategies toovercome one thing may rely on structural forms of that very thing one istrying to overcome.

Experiences of Recent Asian Immigrant Women inInterracial Marriages

In the opening act of Puccini’s famous opera, Madam Butterfly, U.S. Navylieutenant Benjamin Pinkerton describes his soon-to-be Japanese bride, Cio-Cio San in the following way: “She . . . like a butterfly, hovers and settles,with so much charm and such seductive graces, that to pursue her a wild wishseized me—though in the quest her frail wings should be broken.”55 Theopera follows the story of Pinkerton who marries Cio-Cio San, or “Butter-fly,” with the intention of moving back to U.S. later to marry a “realAmerican bride,” unbeknownst to his ecstatic and naive young wife. Deter-mined to please her husband, Cio-Cio San renounces her family’s Buddhistreligion to adopt Christianity. Thus her entire family renounces her. Cio-CioSan considers this enormous loss of her family and religion as a necessarysacrifice to follow her true love. Pinkerton, however, goes back to Americaand leaves her with the promise that he will return to Japan for both her andtheir son. He never does. As a further act of cowardice, exploitation, and



abandonment, he sends his American wife to collect the boy. After realizingthat she has relinquished everything only to be left with nothing, she bows toan image of the Buddha one last time before stabbing herself with a knifebearing the inscription, “To die with honour / When one can no longer livewith honour.”

It is difficult to understand why a play such as Madam Butterfly remainsso popular despite the orientalism, sexism, and colonial-era stereotypes itemploys in order to portray the innocent, beautiful, and sacrificial Asianwoman. Psychologist Natalie Porter explains in her study of contemporaryrelationships between white American husbands and their Asian immigrantwives how historical and social constructions of whiteness continue to createinequality in heterosexual relationships.56 Porter’s case studies shed light onthe intersectionality of gender, social class, culture, immigration, and white-ness in shaping the dominant white culture’s perceptions of these Asianwomen and how Asian women constructed their identities in opposition to“the Butterfly myth.”57 They did this, she argues, in order to increase theirpsychological well-being while simultaneously internalizing the idea thatwhite American culture is superior to their own.

In studies of white men who select mail-order brides, the men often sawthemselves as more socially conservative and traditional than other Americanmen and sought less “pushy” and “domineering” American women.58 Theytended to essentialize Asian women as being more submissive, modest(though highly sexual), and family oriented, and Asian wives in turn seemedto have internalized these qualities and essentialized white American womenas being more aggressive, less family centered, less attractive, and less self-sacrificing.59 As a way to set themselves apart from white American wives,Asian immigrant wives dedicated themselves to meeting their husband’s ex-pectations of them. This is not only because they internalized these “Butter-fly stereotypes”60 but also because they often lacked family and social sup-port in the U.S. They thus saw themselves as more reliant on their spouses,even as their spouses depended heavily on them for their domestic and finan-cial contributions. When white cultural practices and values serve as univer-sal norms of appropriateness, internalized racism is difficult to overcome.61

Asian immigrant wives who mimic racialized gender stereotypes in the largersociety tend to evaluate whiteness as both normative and superior to theirown ethnic values and practices. However, when they seek to resist suchstereotypes by attempting to act differently from their own stereotypes ofwhite American wives, they end up relinquishing some of their agency toadvocate for themselves.62

In one of Porter’s case studies, a woman named Daya gave up her suc-cessful career as a dentist in India to marry her white American husband.63

Because she would need to repeat her education in order to practice dentistryin the States, she decided to give up her profession because her husband


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thought it was too costly and took her attention away from the family. Shealso chose to do so as a strategy that set her apart from American wives,whom she perceived as less committed to their families and marriages. It wasa way for her to interrogate and push back against Western norms of individ-uality and self-fulfillment. Yet, simultaneously, it caused a dilemma of con-structing an identity different from those who viewed her as less Americanand hence reinforced that stereotype while allowing that form of resistance toprevent her from advocating more for her own interests. In other words,Daya attempted to set herself apart from white American wives by beingmore domestic than she would have been in India, while resisting the statusof honorary white. The fact that her husband expressed displeasure at social-izing in the Indian community because it made him feel like an outsider,coupled with his frequent business trips that made it difficult for her to meetwith her Indian friends, only increased her sense of isolation and depression.Furthermore, her husband equated American life as a superior life to herexperiences in India. This made it difficult for him to consider the alienationand otherness she felt by being an immigrant in an interracial marriage in alocation where she had no family support to help with child care, contrary toher experience in India. The way in which Daya and other Indian womenexperienced a greater sense of well-being was by “maintaining stronger tieswith and a sense of superiority about their home cultures” and by entertain-ing the possibility of returning to their former homes in India to give theirchildren a better quality of life.64

When Teresa came to the U.S. from a rural agricultural region of thePhilippines, she experienced economic gain and social status relative towomen in her home country, unlike Daya, who experienced a loss in eco-nomic and social status upon immigrating.65 Teresa had a successful careeras a nurse. Her husband Ned, however, had been unemployed for the pasttwo years. Although they sought therapy for their son, James, what therapyrevealed was Teresa’s marginalization in the home. Both Ned and Jamesshowed little respect for Teresa’s culture. James referred to his mother’s foodas disgusting and painted an image of Filipino society as dangerous, outdat-ed, and lawless but American society as safe, modern, and orderly. He por-trayed his father as the breadwinner of the family, when in reality his motherworked to support the family financially. In general, Teresa herself spokelittle of her language and culture to her family. In therapy, she remainedsilent, deferring the therapist’s questions to her husband, even when theywere directed toward her. As assessed by his therapist, James’s overidentifi-cation with his father and dismissal of his mother, whom he actually resem-bled more in attributes and appearance, manifested an “internalized ra-cism.”66 This internalized racism reveals itself in the way he viewed hismother as a second-class, un-assimilated citizen (despite having dual degrees



and a respected, well-paying career that supported the family) and referred tosimilarly biracial and bicultural students as “others” and “Asian-looking.”67

Whereas Daya gave up her successful career and higher social and eco-nomic status in India to marry her white American husband and raise herfamily in the U.S., Teresa gained a successful career in the U.S. and attaineda higher social and economic status by marrying her white American hus-band. Both women accepted the normativity of the white American for theirhusbands and children. They did not, however, accept all of American life forthemselves. In fact, they rejected the values and customs they perceived asbelonging to white American women, such as being more career oriented andself-serving.68 While these women did not see themselves as white nor ex-press the desire to be white, they did like Cio-Cio San aim to please theirhusbands and give primacy to their American heritage over their own. Thebiracial and bicultural children of these Asian women fully identified withwhite culture.69 Both Daya and Teresa essentialized themselves as morefamily oriented and self-sacrificing than their white American counterparts,even though Daya grew up in India with much more independence and socialand familial support than in the States and Teresa worked as the primarywage earner while her husband stayed home. Their adherence to “traditionalgender roles” led to their invisibility in the family and to a lack of awarenessfrom their spouses of how much these women had to assimilate in order toraise white children rather than biracial and bicultural children.

CONCLUSION

Teresa’s case study suggests that assimilating at the expense of honoringone’s own ethnic and cultural heritage in order to please her husband has anegative impact not only on her well-being and sense of self-worth but on theway her spouse and son perceive her. Earning the respect of her husband andson and elevating their appreciation of her culture proved difficult when sheherself was reluctant to share her language or culture. In other words, win-ning them over without a word led to her marginalization and invisibility inher household. Daya’s case study suggests the benefits of maintaining notonly strong ties with one’s interracial family but also with the larger commu-nity of one’s home culture. The alienation felt by Asian immigrant wives andtheir need to affirm their ethnic identity and community resonate with thesituation of Christian wives in 1 Peter, who are vulnerable to feelings ofhopelessness amid hostile and precarious domestic circumstances and whosesense of Christian identity needs strengthening.

In view of the self-loathing felt by ethnic women who accept the hege-monic normativity of the values of the dominant culture, I suggest that weconsider seeing the Petrine author’s appeal to Sarah as an attempt to elevate


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the status of the wives suffering from a low sense of self in domestic contextswhere their values and identity as Christ followers are marginalized anddenigrated. By recalling the holy women of the past and establishing theiridentity as children of Sarah, the author places wives within the genealogy ofthe chosen, holy, royal people of God as a way to elevate their sense of self-respect and give them a stronger sense of ingroup identity as God’s children.These wives had little choice but to subordinate themselves to their hus-bands, but they could actively entrust themselves to their faithful creator anddo what is right, even if it inevitably results in their suffering (4:19). Theauthor of 1 Peter offers a less potentially devastating and more realisticapproach to navigating marriage in non-Christian households by not equatingfaithfulness to God with wholesale submission to their unbelieving husbandsnor with outright resistance to their authority.70 Rather, he seeks to engenderin Christian wives a resilient sense of their chosen status not as wives ormothers but as children endowed with a spiritual heritage that cannot betaken away from them.

By examining how race/ethnicity, gender, religion, and culture intersectin the experiences of women in both ancient Greco-Roman and contempo-rary U.S. contexts, I seek to further nuance the way the injunctions to wivesin 1 Peter 3:1–6 have been understood as way to alleviate unnecessary andpotentially violent conflict between Christian wives and their pagan hus-bands and offer a form of agency. Gentile Christian women faced stereotypesof being family haters. Furthermore, Christian wives managed multiple com-mitments and had to navigate multiple ideologies and pressures. The authorof 1 Peter seeks to disrupt and resist the essentializing of Christian women asthreats to family cohesion by exhorting them to be more chaste, virtuous, andfamily oriented than their Greco-Roman counterparts and behave as childrenof Sarah. In doing so, he offers them a way to identify with an entirelyseparate system of honor that comes not from being the wife or mother butby being children who are inscribed into the narrative of Israel through thegreat matriarch and given a new ethno-religious identity. First Peter does notcharacterize or idealize a woman’s subordination to her husband as a God-ordained principle. Rather, he presents the Christian wife’s willingness toaccept and submit to the authority of her husband—though not at all costs—as a necessary strategy for survival and avoiding unnecessary conflict. Whilethe author expresses the hope that the behavior of believing wives mayeventually lead to the conversion of their husbands, his primary concern isthat wives possess the kind of quiet aplomb and fearlessness that is preciousbefore God and befits their new status as Sarah’s children.



NOTES

1. While it is impossible to know the precise ethnic-religious makeup of 1 Peter’s actualaudience, the letter gives us clues to his imagined audience and writes to them as if they areGentiles (1:14; 1:18; 2:10; 4:3–4).

2. Natalie Porter, “The Butterfly Dilemma: Asian Women, Whiteness, and HeterosexualRelationships,” Women & Therapy 38, no. 3–4 (2015): 211.

3. Themes of discrimination directed at Asian American women included assumptions thatthey are “exoticized and fetishized (e.g., comments like, ‘You look like a China Doll’ or ‘I havea thing for Asian women’), not a leader, submissive and passive, cute and small, invisible andsilent, and service providers” (Shruti Mukkamala and Karen L. Suyemoto, “Racialized Sexism/Sexualized Racism: A Multimethod Study of Intersectional Experiences of Discrimination forAsian American Women,” Asian American Journal of Psychology 9, no. 1 [2018]: 42).

4. Porter, “Butterfly Dilemma,” 211.5. Both John Elliott and Paul Achtemeier translate anthrōpinē ktisei “every human crea-

ture.” Unlike “every human institution” (used by the NRSV and ESV), the translation “everyhuman creature” more clearly conveys the common humanity emphasized by the imperativeshypotagēte, in verse 13 and timēsate in verse 17 that form an inclusio. The translation “everyhuman creature” also limits the authority and power even of the emperor, who in the Romansocial order was superordinate to all. Furthermore, the phrase anthrōpinē ktisei prepares readersfor the list of other social superordinates to whom the author instructs Christian slaves andwives to subordinate themselves (2:18–3:6). See John H. Elliott, 1 Peter, AB 37B (New York:Anchor Bible, 2001), 484, 486; Paul J. Achtemeier, 1 Peter, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Augs-burg Fortress, 1996), 179–80.

6. Translations mine unless otherwise noted. The verb hypotagēte, a compound of thepreposition hypo- (“under”) and the verb tassō (“order, place, station”), occurs six times in 1Peter (2:13, 18; 3:1, 5, 22; 5:5). “Subordinate,” rather than “submit” or “obey,” helps conveythe positional sense advocated by 1 Peter. Rather than demand unconditional obedience to civilauthority, masters, and husbands, the author advocates for a more nuanced approach in whichone must find his/her proper place in the social order and household and act accordingly(Achtemeier, 1 Peter, 182).

7. E.g., Wayne A. Grudem, 1 Peter, TNTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 137.8. Cf. 1 Pet. 2:12. Kerdainō appears in Matthew 18:15 in reference to “convincing” a

brother who has sinned against a person of his wrongdoing and in 1 Corinthians 9:19–22 inreference to Paul’s “convincing” or “winning over” others for the cause of the gospel. SeeDavid Daube, “Κερδαίνω as a Missionary Term,” HTR 40 (1947): 109–20; Greg W. Forbes, 1Peter (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2014), 99.

9. Elliott, 1 Peter, 558.10. Elliott, 1 Peter, 574.11. Caroline E. Johnson Hodge, “‘Holy Wives’ in Roman Households: 1 Peter 3:1–6,”

Women and Spirituality 4, no. 1 (2010): 10.12. Johnson Hodge, “Holy Wives,” 4–5.13. Johnson Hodge, “Holy Wives,” 5–7.14. Johnson Hodge, “Holy Wives,” 7–8, who cites Plautus’s plays Trinummus and Rudens

and Cato’s de Agricultura.15. J. Ramsey Michaels, 1 Peter, WBC (Waco, TX: Word, 1988), 171.16. Plutarch, Advice to the Bride and Groom 19, trans. from Sarah B. Pomeroy, ed., Plu-

tarch’s Advice to the Bride and Groom and A Consolation to His Wife: English Translations,Commentary, Interpretive Essays and Bibliography (New York: Oxford, 1991), 7.

17. Johnson Hodge, “Holy Wives,” 9.18. Warren Carter, “Going All the Way? Honoring the Emperor and Sacrificing Wives and

Slaves in 1 Peter 2:13–3:6,” A Feminist Companion to the Catholic Epistles and Hebrews, ed.Amy-Jill Levine with Maria Mayo Robbins (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 14–33.

19. Carter, “Going All the Way,” 31.20. Carter, “Going All the Way,” 33.


Janette H. Ok126

21. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 284, cited in Carter, “Going All the Way,” 32.

22. Carter, “Going All the Way,” 28, 32.23. Johnson Hodge, “Holy Wives,” 11.24. Johnson Hodge, “Holy Wives,” 3.25. Johnson Hodge, “Holy Wives,” 20.26. The views against excessive outward attention to beauty espoused in 1 Peter 3:3–4 agree

with the values of the OT (e.g., 1 Sam. 16:7; Prov. 31:30; Isa. 3:18–24) and of Greek andJewish moralists (e.g., Dio Chrysostom, Or. 7.117; Juvenal, Satire 3.180–81; Plutarch, Mor.,Con. pr. 141E; Philo, Virt. 7.39; 39–40).

27. Betsy Bauman-Martin, “Women on the Edge: New Perspectives on Women in thePetrine Haustafel,” JBL 123, no. 2 (2004): 273.

28. Johnson Hodge, “Holy Wives,” 9, 11.29. Karen H. Jobes, 1 Peter, BECNT (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005), 205.30. David L. Balch, Let Wives Be Submissive: The Domestic Code in 1 Peter, SBLMS 26

(Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981), 81.31. Balch, Let Wives Be Submissive, 96–97.32. Clarice J. Martin, “The Haustafeln (Household Codes) in African American Biblical

Interpretation: ‘Free Slaves’ and ‘Subordinate Women,’” in Stony the Road We Trod: AfricanAmerican Biblical Interpretation, 206–23 (Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 1991), 213.

33. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruc-tion of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroads, 1983), 253–62, cited in Betsy Bauman-Martin, “Women on the Edge,” 257.

34. Bauman-Martin, “Women on the Edge,” 256–57.35. Bauman-Martin, “Women on the Edge,” 258, 264.36. Bauman-Martin, “Women on the Edge,” 264 n. 39.37. Shively T. J. Smith, Strangers to Family: Diaspora and 1 Peter’s Invention of God’s

Household (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 77–78.38. Bauman-Martin, “Women on the Edge,” 268, 273, and Margaret Y. MacDonald, Early

Christian Women and Pagan Opinion: The Power of the Hysterical Woman (Cambridge, UK:Cambridge University Press, 1996), 203.

39. Translation adapted from Magda Misset-Van de Weg, “Sarah Imagery in 1 Peter,” in AFeminist Companion to the Catholic Epistles and Hebrews, ed. Amy-Jill Levine with MariaMayo Robbins, 50–62 (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 50.

40. Mark Kiley, “Like Sara: The Tale of Terror behind 1 Peter 3:6,” JBL 106, no. 4 (1987),691.

41. Kiley, “Like Sara,” 692. See also Michal Beth Dinkler, who sees Sarah’s situation inGenesis 12 and 20 as parallel to that of the women addressed in 1 Peter (“Sarah’s Submission:Peter’s Analogy in 1 Peter 3:5–6,” Priscilla Papers 21, no. 3 [2007], 10) and Aida BesanconSpencer, who also concludes that Genesis 12 and 20 is most apropos to 1 Peter’s context(“Peter’s Pedagogical Method in 1 Peter 3:6,” Bulletin for Biblical Research 10, no. 1 [2000],106).

42. Troy W. Martin, “The TestAbr and the Background of 1 Pet 3:6,” ZNW 90 (1999):139–46. Spencer also argues, as does Martin, that Genesis 18:12 does not fit 1 Peter’s descrip-tion of Sarah (“Peter’s Pedagogical Method,” 106).

43. Misset-Van de Weg, “Sarah Imagery in 1 Peter,” 62.44. Work from the field of narrative psychology offers some insight. Julie Beck explains

that, “the way a person integrates those facts and events internally” is how one makes meaning,and “this narrative becomes a form or identity, in which the things someone chooses to includein the story, and the way she tells it, can both reflect and shape who she is” (“The Story of MyLife: How Narrative Creates Personality,” The Atlantic, August 10, 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/08/life-stories-narrative-psychology-redemption-mental-health/400796/).

45. For others who translate tekna in 3:6 as “children” not “daughters,” see, e.g., Michaels, 1Peter, 166, and David G. Horrell, “Ethnicisation, Marriage and Early Christian Identity: Criti-



cal Reflections on 1 Corinthians 7, 1 Peter 3 and Modern New Testament Scholarship,” NTS 62(2016): 455.

46. I have argued in my dissertation, the author of 1 Peter characterizes Christian identity asa kind of ethnic identity because doing so has the potential to engender a powerful sense ofsolidarity for his largely Gentile addressees who experienced social alienation, estrangement,and hostility from the wider society as a result of their conversion. Janette H. Ok, “Who YouAre No Longer: Constructing Ethnic Identity in 1 Peter,” PhD diss., Princeton TheologicalSeminary, 2018.

47. Rom. 8:15–17; 23; Gal. 4:1–7; cf. Eph. 1:3–6. Caroline Johnson Hodge addresses howPaul uses the metaphor of adoption by the Spirit to reconstruct the origins of Gentiles in If Sons,Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2007), 67–77. The meaning of anagennaō conveyed in 1 Peter 1:3 appears byimplication in John 3:3–8 when Jesus tells Nicodemus that “no one can see the kingdom of Godwithout being born from above” (ean mē tis gennēthē anōthen, ou dynatai idein tēn basileiantou theou).

48. Denise Kimber Buell intentionally deploys the terms “race” and “ethnicity” interchange-ably in her examination of Christian strategies of self-definition, as represented in her use of thephrase “ethnoracial.” Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York:Columbia University Press, 2005).

49. Horrell, “Ethnicisation,” 453. The aorist verb egenēthete denotes the event of conversionor “new birth” (1:3, 23) The participle phrase agathopoiousai kai mē phoboumenai mēdemianptoesin conveys both a sense of exhortation and conditionality (455), not in the sense that theyare saved by works but that wives demonstrate their identity as children of Sarah by doing whatis good even in the face of intimidation or terror (cf. 1:6–7).

50. E.g., Nicholas Daniel Hartlep, The Model Minority Stereotype: Demystifying AsianAmerican Success (Charlotte, NC: Information Age, 2013); Victor Bascara, Model-MinorityImperialism (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2006); Claire Jean Kim, “TheRacial Triangulation of Asian Americans,” Politics & Society 27, no. 1 (1999): 105–38; PeterTurnley, “The Effects of Seeing Asian-Americans as a ‘Model Minority,’” New York Times,October 16, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/10/16/the-effects-of-seeing-asian-americans-as-a-model-minority; Janette H. Ok, “Myth of Model Minority,” IntersectingRealities: Race, Identity, and Culture in the Spiritual-Moral Life of Young Asian Americans,ed. Hak Joon Lee, 121–33 (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2018).

51. Karen Pyke, “An Intersectional Approach to Resistance and Complicity: The Case ofRacialised Desire among Asian American Women,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 31, no. 1(2010): 83. The trope of the impervious “strong black woman” serves as an example of how the“model resistor stereotype” downplays and/or dismisses the multiple discriminations of gender,race, and class that many black women suffer. Another problem with the “model resistorstereotype” is that overidealizing resistance tends to normalize domination (83). See also KarenPyke, “Defying the Taboo on the Study of Internalized Racism,” Global Migration, CulturalTransformation, and Social Change, eds. Emory Elliott, Jasmine Payne, and Patricia Pluesch,101–20. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

52. Pyke, “An Intersectional Approach,” 81, 83.53. Mari J. Matsuda, Where Is Your Body? And Other Essays on Race, Gender and the Law

(Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 64–65.54. Pyke, “An Intersectional Approach,” 83.55. L. Illica and G. Giacosa, Madam Butterfly: A Japanese Tragedy, trans. R. H. Elkin (New

York: G. Ricordi & Company, 1906), 11. Illica and Giacosa’s libretto serves as the script forGiacomo Puccini’s musical composition.

56. Porter, “Butterfly Dilemma,” 207–8.57. Porter, “Butterfly Dilemma,” 211.58. Porter, “Butterfly Dilemma,” 216.59. Porter, “Butterfly Dilemma,” 216–17.60. Porter, “Butterfly Dilemma,” 211.61. Joe L. Kincheloe, “The Struggle to Define and Reinvent Whiteness: A Pedagogical

Analysis,” College Literature 26 (Fall): 162–97.


Janette H. Ok128

62. Gayatri Spivak’s concept of “strategic essentialism” may be helpful to consider howimmigrant wives might express agency in such a way that “essentializes” them in order to setthemselves from the predominant narrative of femininity. Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean,eds., The Spivak Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 214.

63. Porter, “Butterfly Dilemma,” 213–14.64. Porter, “Butterfly Dilemma,” 214.65. Porter, “Butterfly Dilemma,” 212.66. Porter, “Butterfly Dilemma.” 212.67. Porter, “Butterfly Dilemma,” 212.68. Porter, “Butterfly Dilemma,” 216.69. Porter, “Butterfly Dilemma,” 216.70. James W. Aaegeson, “1 Peter 2.11–3.7: Slaves, Wives and the Complexities of Interpre-

tation,” A Feminist Companion to the Catholic Epistles and Hebrews, ed. Amy-Jill Levine withMaria Mayo Robbins, 34–49 (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 44.

WORKS CITED

Aaegeson, James W. “1 Peter 2.11–3.7: Slaves, Wives and the Complexities of Interpretation.”In A Feminist Companion to the Catholic Epistles and Hebrews, edited by Amy-Jill Levinewith Maria Mayo Robbins, 34–49. London: T&T Clark, 2004.

Achtemeier, Paul J. 1 Peter. Hermeneia. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1996.Balch, David L. Let Wives Be Submissive: The Domestic Code in 1 Peter. SBLMS 26. Chico,

CA: Scholars, 1981.Bascara, Victor. Model-Minority Imperialism. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press,

2006.Bauman-Martin, Betsy. “Women on the Edge: New Perspectives on Women in the Petrine

Haustafel.” JBL 123, no. 2 (2004): 253–79.Beck, Julie. “The Story of My Life: How Narrative Creates Personality.” The Atlantic, August

10, 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/08/life-stories-narrative-psychology-redemption-mental-health/400796/.

Carter, Warren. “Going All the Way? Honoring the Emperor and Sacrificing Wives and Slavesin 1 Peter 2:13–3:6.” In A Feminist Companion to the Catholic Epistles and Hebrews, editedby Amy-Jill Levine with Maria Mayo Robbins, 14–33. London: T&T Clark, 2004.

Daube, David. “Κερδαίνω as a Missionary Term.” HTR 40 (1947): 109–20.Dinkler, Michal Beth. “Sarah’s Submission: Peter’s Analogy in 1 Peter 3:5–6.” Priscilla

Papers 21, no. 3 (2007): 9–15.Elliott, John H. 1 Peter. AB 37B. New York: Anchor Bible, 2001.Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of

Christian Origins. New York: Crossroads, 1983.Forbes, Greg W. 1 Peter. Nashville, TN: B & H, 2014.Grudem, Wayne A. 1 Peter. TNTC. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998.Horrell, David G. “Ethnicisation, Marriage and Early Christian Identity: Critical Reflections on

1 Corinthians 7, 1 Peter 3 and Modern New Testament Scholarship.” NTS 62 (2016):439–60.

Illica, Luigi, and Giuseppe Giacosa. Madam Butterfly: A Japanese Tragedy, translated by R. H.Elkin. New York: G. Ricordi & Company, 1906.

Jobes, Karen H. 1 Peter. BECNT. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2005.Johnson Hodge, Caroline E. “‘Holy Wives’ in Roman Households: 1 Peter 3:1–6.” Women and

Spirituality 4, no. 1 (2010): 1–24.———. If Sons, Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul. Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2007.Kiley, Mark. “Like Sara: The Tale of Terror behind 1 Peter 3:6.” JBL 106, no. 4 (1987):

689–92.Kim, Jean Claire. “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans.” Politics & Society 27, no. 1

(1999): 105–38.



Kimber Buell, Denise. Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity. NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2005.

Kincheloe, Joe L. “The Struggle to Define and Reinvent Whiteness: A Pedagogical Analysis.”College Literature 26 (1999): 162–97.

MacDonald, Margaret Y. Early Christian Women and Pagan Opinion: The Power of theHysterical Woman. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Martin, Clarice J. “The Haustafeln (Household Codes) in African American Biblical Interpreta-tion: ‘Free Slaves’ and ‘Subordinate Women.’” In Stony the Road We Trod: AfricanAmerican Biblical Interpretation, edited by Cain Hope Felder, 206–23. Minneapolis: Augs-burg, 1991.

Martin, Troy W. “The TestAbr and the Background of 1 Pet 3:6.” ZNW 90 (1999): 139–46.Matsuda, Mari J. Where Is Your Body? And Other Essays on Race, Gender and the Law.

Boston: Beacon, 1996.Michaels, J. Ramsey. 1 Peter. WBC. Waco, TX: Word, 1988.Misset-Van de Weg, Magda. “Sarah Imagery in 1 Peter.” In A Feminist Companion to the

Catholic Epistles and Hebrews, edited by Amy-Jill Levine with Maria Mayo Robbins,50–62. London: T&T Clark, 2004.

Mukkamala, Shruti, and Karen L. Suyemoto. “Racialized Sexism/Sexualized Racism: A Multi-method Study of Intersectional Experiences of Discrimination for Asian American Wom-en.” Asian American Journal of Psychology 9, no. 1 (2018): 32–46.

Ok, Janette H. “Myth of Model Minority.” In Intersecting Realities: Race, Identity, and Culturein the Spiritual-Moral Life of Young Asian Americans, edited by Hak Joon Lee, 50–62.Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2018.

———. “Who You Are No Longer: Constructing Ethnic Identity in 1 Peter.” PhD diss.,Princeton Theological Seminary, 2018.

Pomeroy, Sarah B., ed. Plutarch’s Advice to the Bride and Groom and A Consolation to HisWife: English Translations, Commentary, Interpretive Essays and Bibliography. New York:Oxford, 1991.

Porter, Natalie. “The Butterfly Dilemma: Asian Women, Whiteness, and Heterosexual Rela-tionships.” Women & Therapy 38, no. 3–4 (2015): 207–19.

Pyke, Karen. “Defying the Taboo on the Study of Internalized Racism.” In Global Migration,Cultural Transformation, and Social Change, edited by Emory Elliott, Jasmine Payne, andPatricia Ploesch, 101–20. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

———. “An Intersectional Approach to Resistance and Complicity: The Case of RacialisedDesire among Asian American Women.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 31, no. 1 (2010):81–94.

Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven,CT: Yale University Press, 2008.

Smith, Shively T. J. Strangers to Family: Diaspora and 1 Peter’s Invention of God’s House-hold. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016.

Spencer, Aida Besancon. “Peter’s Pedagogical Method in 1 Peter 3:6.” Bulletin for BiblicalResearch 10, no. 1 (2000): 107–19.

Spivak, Gayatri. The Spivak Reader, edited by Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean. New Yorkand London: Routledge, 1996.

Tuan, Mia. “Honorary White.” Encyclopedia of Diversity in Education, edited by James A.Banks. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452218533.n349.

Turnley Peter. “The Effects of Seeing Asian-Americans as a ‘Model Minority.’” New YorkTimes, October 16, 2015. http:// https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/10/16/the-effects-of-seeing-asian-americans-as-a-model-minority


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Chapter Three

The Spiral Dialectics of Cataphasis and Apophasis in Bonaventure

The final section of chapter 1 investigated the Itinerarium and addressed Bo-naventure’s integration of Franciscan spirituality and the powers of the intellect. The section examined Bonaventure’s six steps of contemplation, which begins with meditation on the material world, proceeds to an exploration of the soul, and finally comes to contemplate God in His Being and Goodness. This specula-tion moves from the things of the external world, through the mental activities of the soul, to the conceptual summit of the divine attributes. As Bonaventure describes it, the pilgrim encounters Jesus Christ at the end of this intellectual and spiritual pilgrimage. At this stage, the mind of the pilgrim reaches the perfec-tion of intellectual illumination that has been inspired by the divine light. While Jesus Christ is the pinnacle of the intellectual pilgrimage, he is at the same time “the way and the door”1 enabling the soul to pass over to the divine from the perceptible and conceptual world. Chapter 7 of the Itinerarium, the focus of this chapter, articulates this final stage and its apophatic, mystical nature.

Bonaventure insists that at the mystical and secret passage that comes at the final stage, the soul should abandon all intellectual activities, and instead should direct all devotions and affections toward God.2 This articulation of the mystical stage of the journey, in particular the total renunciation of intellect, clearly reflects the apophatic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a Syrian writer of the late fifth and early sixth centuries, known pseudonymously as Dionysius the Areopagite after the Athenian who was converted to Christianity by Paul as described in Acts 17:34.3 The Dionysian corpus,4 which merged Neoplatonism and Christian theology in a distinctive way, had a great influence on medieval theology and spirituality—its sig-nificant contribution to the development of Christian mysticism both in the speculative and spiritual realms is undeniable.

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Yongho Francis Lee, “The Spiral Dialectics of Cataphasis and Apophasis in Bonaventure,” in Mysticism and Intellect in Medieval Christianity and Buddhism: Ascent and Awakening in Bonaventure and Chinul (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), 153–192. All Rights Reserved.


154 Chapter Three

Therefore, prior to exploring the final stage of the Itinerarium, it is neces-sary to survey the thought of Dionysius, including his apophatic and cata-phatic theology as well as his understanding of the mystical journey. This will enable the reader to see clearly the influence of Dionysius on medieval intellectuals and Bonaventure’s distinctive adaptation of Dionysian Neopla-tonism. These preliminary matters will be followed by a close investigation of chapter 7 of the Itinerarium, focusing on Bonaventure’s adaptation of Dio-nysian apophaticism and unique understanding of the divine union. Among other things, this investigation will provide insight into the confusion many readers of the Itinerarium experience when encountering the seventh chap-ter’s drastic transition to an apophatic and affective discourse, abandoning all the previous steps.

DIONYSIAN DIALECTICS OF CATAPHATICISM AND APOPHATICISM

Mystical theology in the West—including that of Bonaventure—cannot be understood without taking into consideration the thoughts and writings of Dionysius. The Dionysian distinction between cataphatic and apophatic theological discourse has played an especially significant role in the develop-ment of this mystical theology.5 The cataphatic theology engages primarily in affirmative discourse employing conceptual names or perceptual images of God and draws on the divine manifestation in creation, biblical revelation, and the sacraments. On the other hand, apophatic theology employs negative discourse that rejects affirmative words or concepts about God. This latter discourse is closely related to the transcendence or ineffability of God and emphasizes the limitations of language and concepts in understanding and speaking about God. Apophatic theology holds that no words can describe God properly and no intellectual activity is adequate to understand God; therefore, cataphatic theology involving concepts and analogies is “defec-tive,” as viewed from the divine perspective.6

The Purpose of Cataphatic Theology

The inadequacy of an intellectual and linguistic approach to knowing and speaking about God begs an inevitable question: If the human mind cannot ever reach a full understanding of God, what is the purpose of cataphatic discourse? Dionysius’s Divine Names may provide an answer to this ques-tion. In this text, Dionysius enumerates various names of the divine based on the perceptible and conceptual. However, even in this apparently affirmative

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The Spiral Dialectics of Cataphasis and Apophasis in Bonaventure 155

discourse of the divine names, he reminds the reader of the inexpressibility of the divine: “Indeed the inscrutable One is out of the reach of every rational process. Nor can any words come up to the inexpressible Good, this One, this Source of all unity, this supra-existent Being. Mind beyond mind and word beyond speech are gathered up by no discourse, by no intuition, by no name.”7 Nevertheless, Dionysius leaves room for an intellectual pursuit of union with God, denying absolute incommunicability: “By itself it [the Good] generously reveals a firm, transcendent beam, granting enlightenments pro-portionate to each being, and thereby draws sacred minds upward to its per-mitted contemplation, to participation and to the state of becoming like it.”8

Dionysius draws on the scriptures for the intelligible names of the divin-ity; we can rely only on the Holy Spirit who truly comprehends the divine and has the power to grant glimpses of it through the scriptural writers.9 For Dionysius, the scriptures communicate “the immeasurable and infinite in limited measures,” and are the only means of such communication propor-tionate to our human capacities.10 Yet it remains obvious to Dionysius that, however hard one strives, it is impossible to reach the transcendent one, who is “unsearchable and inscrutable.”11 The treatise on divine names does not aim at comprehending God or aspire to an unimpeded encounter with Him. Its purpose is rather to direct one’s mind upward to God. Dionysius writes of those who make intellectual efforts to trace back to the Divine Truth through contemplating the divine names:

They do not venture toward an impossibly daring sight of God, one beyond what is duly granted them. Nor do they go tumbling downward where their own natural inclinations would take them. No. Instead they are raised firmly and un-swervingly upward in the direction of the ray which enlightens them, they take flight, reverently, wisely, in all holiness.12

Through the contemplation of the divine in its names, one’s mind is made “prudent and holy,” able to offer proper worship to the One who is beyond thoughts and words.13 Even denial, the reverse of affirmation, is a way to “praise the Transcendent One in a transcending way.”14 In the Mystical Theol-ogy, Dionysius employs the analogy of a sculptor who reveals hidden beauty by “clearing aside” every inessential part of the original rock.15 Therefore, although the ultimate form of praise would be made after the total cessation of all intellectual activities and at the moment of union with the divine, until then, the contemplative should use symbols and concepts related to God, while at the same time striving to distinguish these symbols and concepts from God by use of negations. This will allow an appreciation of the beauty of God in the most direct way possible.16

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Praising God both affirmatively and negatively—though it seems para-doxical—is based on another of Dionysius’s paradoxical claims regarding the doctrine of God: God is manifested in creation and is at the same time the divine transcendence above creation. On the one hand, the premise that God created all beings in the universe enables the positing of affirmative descrip-tions of the Cause of these beings that manifests itself in the created world. On the other hand, the transcendence of the Cause necessitates negation of all affirmations due to the inadequacy of human language and intelligence.17

While the doctrine of creation allows affirmations and the doctrine of transcendence demands negations, Dionysian apophaticism goes beyond both affirmation and negation. The ultimate goal of apophaticism is reached in un-derstanding the inadequacy of both affirmation and negation,18 and the final stage of Dionysian apophaticism is to enter into silence through the negation of all conceptual and perceptible things. Although the affirmative approach may not directly lead the contemplative to a transcendant union with God, it is nevertheless “a necessary, even penultimate stage” in the ascent toward God.19 Thus, the contemplative praises God in his affirmative discourse about God, who reveals Himself in created beings, and at the same time he walks “the path to a deeper knowledge of God,” who will reveal Himself in His hiddenness at the end of the road.20

The Nature of Mystical Union with the Divine

In the Mystical Theology, Dionysius presents Moses’s ascent to Mount Sinai as an allegory of the journey to God, which involves moral preparation and the use of affirmative and negative discourses about God until there comes a point where total silence is demanded.21

It is not for nothing that the blessed Moses is commanded to submit first to puri-fication and then to depart from those who have not undergone this. When every purification is complete, he hears the many-voiced trumpets. He sees the many lights, pure and streaming abundantly. Then, standing apart from the crowds and accompanied by chosen priests, he pushes ahead to the summit of the divine ascents. And yet he does not meet God himself, but contemplates, not him who is invisible, but rather where he dwells.22

Becoming holy through purification, Moses sets out to journey to the source of light, and the higher he climbs, the purer and brighter is the light he sees. However, even at the summit of the mountain he does not see God, but only encounters His dwelling place, surrounded by the cloud of unknowing. At this point, Moses plunges into this unknown darkness and leaves the sum-

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mit. The contemplative must abandon all his knowledge about God that he has acquired through sensible and intelligible activities: “Here, renouncing all that the mind may conceive, wrapped entirely in the intangible and the invis-ible, he belongs completely to him who is beyond everything.”23 Dionysius further articulates the final state that will be reached by plunging into the darkness: “Here, being neither oneself nor someone else, one is supremely united to the completely unknown by an inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing.”24

The final stage of this ultimate destination of mysterious union with the divine can be conceived of as either intellectual in an extraordinary way, for God is beyond any knowledge, or experiential and affective, character-ized by an indescribable affection (or love) for this personal union.25 Denys Turner supports the former,26 refuting the tendency of some to understand the mysterious encounter in darkness as “a certain kind of experience—of ‘inwardness,’ ‘ascent,’ and ‘union,’” which, he argues, is derived from a modern misunderstanding of medieval Christian Neoplatonism.27 Although Dionysius’s articulations of ascent are full of “traditional metaphors of af-fectivity, touch, taste and smell,” Turner insists that the governing principle of the process is intellectual.28

In fact, however, Turner does not entirely deny the significant role of the affective element. Rather, he emphasizes the role of “eros” in the Dionysian concept of creation. The divine Cause of the universe outpours itself from the Divine Goodness, Divine Love, and Divine Yearning into creatures, and continues to do so.29 For Dionysius, this love and yearning must be mutual, for it is these that motivate and facilitate the creature’s return to its Cause.30 Turner writes:

One of the most powerful effects of Platonic allegory on the mysticism of Denys is to be found in its resolute “intellectualism.” Even were more emphasis to have been given than I have allowed for the presence in Denys’ theology of a richly erotic imagery . . . the conclusion would be the same: it is the ascent of the mind up the scale of negations which draws it into the cloud of unknowing, where, led by its own eros of knowing, it passes through to the darkness of union with the light. It is therefore the eros of knowing, the passion and yearning for the vision of the One, which projects the mind up the scale.31

For Turner, eros implies an affective motivation to aspire to “know,” and the final status of the divine union is definitely intellectual, which is to know “beyond the mind by knowing nothing.”32

In his explication of eros in the Divine Names,33 Dionysius writes: “What is signified [by eros] is a capacity to effect a unity, an alliance, and a particular

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commingling in the Beautiful and the Good.”34 Thus, eros makes both the soul and God yearn for each other and enables the soul to be united with God.35 In this regard, Andrew Louth views eros as “ecstatic,” which means “taken wholly outside oneself.”36

While Louth understands ekstasis in the Mystical Theology as the ecstasy of love despite the absence of any explicit mention of either eros or agape in the text,37 Paul Rorem, consistent with Turner’s understanding of the nature of divine union, does not relate ekstasis with affectivity. He interprets the pro-cess of negation or abandonment, in which one leaves behind all perceptible and conceptual knowledge and finally even leaves oneself, as ecstasy itself.38 Rorem insists that Dionysius did not understand the term ekstasis to be “a private, emotional, and supra-rational experience,”39 and he sees Louth’s understanding of ecstasy in the Mystical Theology as a misinterpretation fostered by his reliance on later medieval mysticism, not on Dionysius’s own understanding.40

Turner agrees with Rorem’s analysis that medieval mystics tended to mis-interpret Dionysius in anti-intellectual and antimystical41 ways. He argues that the later medieval Dionysians like Thomas Gallus (d. 1246) and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing (written in the late fourteenth century) were biased toward affectivity and thus replaced intellectual enlightenment with ecstatic union of the soul with God.42 They applied this view, accord-ing to Turner, if not to the whole process of ascent, at least to the ultimate stage. However, it seems incorrect to imply that every medieval intellectual and mystic shared this view of Dionysius’s works. Rorem suggests that there have been two distinct narratives of the ascent to the divine union—affective and intellectual. He names representative theologians and mystics who have advocated these respective approaches throughout history. With respect to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Rorem describes Albert the Great and Meister Eckhart as heirs of the intellectual interpretation and Bonaventure and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing as advocates of the affective interpretation.43 Whether Bonaventure had mistaken Dionysius’s original intention or not, there is no doubt that Dionysian apophaticism had a great influence on Bonaventure, as can be seen especially in the seventh chapter of the Itinerarium, which will be investigated below. Before looking into the Itinerarium in light of Dionysian apophaticism, there will first be a discus-sion of Dionysius’s influence on the development of medieval spirituality and theology. Special attention will be given to Bonaventure and his unique adaptation of Dionysius within the broader context of the medieval appropria-tions of Dionysius.

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THE DIONYSIAN INFLUENCE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

The Medieval Adaptations of Dionysianism

The sixth-century articulation of mystical theology by Dionysius laid the foundation for the unfolding of the speculative discourses and spiritual prac-tices of Christian mysticism, both in the East and in the West. The Dionysian corpus appealed to many medieval Christian thinkers and mystics for its spiri-tual and theological profundity, combined with the fact that the pseudonym of Dionysius endowed it with apostolic authority.

Despite some evidence that Christians—such as St. Gregory the Great (d. 604)—read and referred to the Dionysian corpus as early as the late sixth century, it was only in the ninth century that the West began to give close attention to Dionysius with the production of Latin translations of his corpus. First, Hilduin, abbot of the monastery of Saint-Denis near Paris, undertook the task of translating Dionysius’s Corpus Areopagiticum from Greek into Latin between 835 and 840.44 However, because of the unsatisfactory nature of this translation, a new translation was in demand, which John Scotus Eri-ugena (ca. 810–ca. 877) produced in 862. This was revised by Anastasius, a papal librarian, in 875. Other attempts at translating the Dionysian corpus were undertaken in the twelfth century by John the Saracen (Sarracenus) and Robert Grosseteste (ca. 1175–1253). With his corpus made accessible through these Latin translations, the influence of Dionysius was enhanced, a process given further impetus by the production of commentaries by influen-tial theologians, including Eriugena, Hugh of Saint Victor (d. 1142), Thomas Gallus, Albert the Great (ca. 1200–1280), and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), to mention but a few.45

Because of linguistic obstacles, most Western theologians in the Middle Ages relied on the Latin translations, paraphrases, and commentaries that together constituted “the Latin Dionysian corpus.”46 This Latin corpus was a multilayered product that had evolved over time, which, according to some scholars, was “bent” from original or “pure” Dionysianism.47 In his investigation of the medieval understanding of Dionysianism, Paul Rorem summarizes six distinct “bends” from original Dionysianism.48 Neverthe-less, as Rorem emphasizes, there is no doubt that the influence of Dionysius was “long, broad, and occasionally deep”49 among medieval thinkers, and that Dionysianism, despite the criticism that it has been misunderstood and deformed, has contributed to the development of various aspects of Christian life, including the speculative, spiritual, liturgical, ecclesiastical, and aestheti-cal. The Dionysian corpus inspired and provided medieval theologians with apostolic authority for their adaptation of the idea of hierarchies of angels

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and ecclesiastical structure, the discourses on the divine names, the triple ways of purification, illumination, and perfection, and the significance of light as a divine symbol.50 However, the most significant contribution of the Dionysian corpus, which also closely pertains to the topic of this chapter, mystical theology, is that it provided the keystone for the medieval develop-ment of anagogical (literally translated, “uplifting”) theology, spirituality, and aesthetics,51 drawing on the Neoplatonist and Christianized concept of procession and return.52

While scholars agree on the details of the medieval development of Dio-nysianism, they differ in their approach to it. Some are rather critical and others are more appreciative of this development. For example, Paul Rorem tends to emphasize that medieval appropriations skewed Dionysianism, whereas Bernard McGinn argues that this was unavoidable. “From the start his [Dionysius’s] writings were treated much like the Bible itself as a divine message filled with inner life and mysterious meaning which could never be exhausted, but which needed to be reread in each generation and reinterpreted in the light of new issues.”53 McGinn also stresses the positive contribution of Dionysian mystical theology to the development of Christian mysticism in the medieval period. “He [Dionysius] created the categories (including ‘mystical theology’ itself) that enabled later Christian mystics to relate their consciousness of God’s presence and the mystery of his absence to the tradi-tion of the apostolic teaching represented by ‘Dionysius.’”54 The Dionysian corpus has never remained static like some ancient manuscript preserved in a glass box in a museum. Rather, it is a living set of texts, the meaning of which has been adjusted for different theological and ecclesiastical contexts from generation to generation.

Bonaventure’s adaptation of Dionysian mysticism is no exception in this regard. While the apophatic description of the final stage of the spiritual as-cent in the Itinerarium is indisputably Dionysian, his emphasis on the role of affectivity and on Jesus Christ is definitely something of a departure from the prevalent intellectualism and Neoplatonism of early Dionysianism.55

Pseudo-Dionysius and the Victorines

Dionysian mysticism, with its distinctive dialectic of knowing and unknow-ing, was transmitted first through early Eastern Christians, including John Scythopolis (d. ca. 548), Maximus the Confessor (ca. 580–662), and John of Damascus (ca. 675–ca. 749). It then made its way to John Scotus Eriugena (ca. 810–ca. 877) who introduced it into the intellectual and spiritual thought and practice of the medieval West. Paul Rorem argues that in the twelfth cen-tury, intellectual Dionysian mysticism began to merge with Western monastic

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spirituality, which was marked by an emphasis on emotion and the central role of Christ. This affective and Christocentric tradition was developed in the West by great Christians like Augustine (354–430), Gregory the Great (pope, r. 590–604), and Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153).

The canons of the Abbey of St. Victor in Paris played a pivotal role in combining Dionysianism with Western monastic traditions. Two regular canons of the abbey—Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1141) and Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173)—were eminent leaders who contributed greatly to the develop-ment of Christian spirituality during the innovative era of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, an era that was affected by significant social, ecclesias-tical, cultural, intellectual, and spiritual changes.56 Another important Victo-rine canon was Thomas Gallus (d. 1246), who was educated at the Abbey of St. Victor and later became abbot at the Victorine abbey in Vercelli, Italy. These notable Victorines enriched medieval theology and spirituality and bridged two different intellectual strands within the monastic tradition—one that focused more on the spiritual development of monks, and another that stressed the Scholastic tradition with its strong emphasis on speculative and theoretical discourses.

Bonaventure was one of many medieval theologians and mystics who embraced both of these strands. In doing so, he was greatly influenced by the Victorine canons. He was particularly influenced by Hugh of St. Victor and Thomas Gallus with regard to his affective apophaticism, which emerges in the last chapter of the Itinerarium. The following two sections will explore the development of affective Dionysianism focusing on the two Victorine masters—Hugh and Gallus. This will help locate Bonaventure’s mysticism and apophaticism within a wider context and facilitate a better understanding of the Itinerarium.

Hugh of St. Victor

The Abbey of St. Victor was founded by William of Champeaux (ca. 1070–1121) in Paris. William originally intended to retire from his ecclesiastical and educational position in 1108. However, he was persuaded to continue teaching in the new compound of the abbey, and eventually established the School of St. Victor. It was not long after the foundation of the school that the Victorines gained a great scholarly reputation, fueled by the intellectual prowess and leadership of Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1142). Hugh was a master of great erudition and a prolific writer who greatly contributed to medieval developments in theology, philosophy, biblical exegesis, and spiritual con-templation, leaving indelible imprints on medieval Dionysianism. Hugh of St. Victor embraced certain Dionysian themes and was keenly interested in his Celestial Hierarchy and its themes of knowledge and negation.

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However, the Hugonian adaptation of Dionysianism was not without its own peculiar emphasis. According to Dionysian mystical theology, during the final stage of the anagogical journey to God, the contemplative must renounce all knowing so as to plunge into the darkness of unknowing. While Dionysius only suggests the abandonment of intellectual activities at this threshold of unknowing, Hugh insists that in place of intellect the contempla-tive needs love in order to be united with God.57 Hugh draws this conclusion from Dionysius’s etymological interpretation of the angelic hierarchy. In the Celestial Hierarchy, Dionysius explicates the meanings of the Hebrew words for “seraphim” and “cherubim”: “Those with a knowledge of Hebrew are aware of the fact that the holy name ‘seraphim’ means ‘fire-makers,’ that is to say, ‘carriers of warmth.’ The name ‘cherubim’ means ‘fullness of knowl-edge’ or ‘outpouring of wisdom.’”58 Here, Dionysius relates “seraphim” to fire; however, he never describes the seraphic fire as the fire of love—that connection was made by the translator Eriugena. Although Eriugena did not explicitly associate fire with charity or love in his translation of the seventh chapter of the Celestial Hierarchy, in his commentary on the same text, he metaphorically connected the attributes of fire with those of love.59

Hugh of St. Victor adopted this identification of the seraphic fire with the fire of love, but added an additional innovation. Eriugena, who linked the seraphim to love, never explicitly ranked seraphim/love and cherubim/knowledge. It was Hugh that insisted on the superiority of love over knowl-edge, drawing on the hierarchy of angels, wherein the seraphim is the highest rank. Hugh concludes: “Love [dilectio] surpasses knowledge, and is greater than intelligence. He [the beloved of the Song60] is loved more than under-stood, and love enters and approaches where knowledge stays outside.”61 Hugh’s take on love involves not only the Dionysian angelic hierarchy, but also the metaphor of the affectionate union of lovers in the bridal chamber as described in the Song of Songs: a lover leaves his knowledge outside when he enters the bridal chamber. Although Hugh himself rarely showed inter-est in Dionysian apophaticism, the Hugonian union is apophatic in that the “bridal chamber” is a realm beyond knowing. In Hugh’s apophaticism, the bridal chamber of love replaces the unknown darkness of Mount Sinai. This is important in that union with the unknown God through love is the govern-ing principle of Bonaventure’s mysticism. Indeed, Rorem stresses that Hugh “opened the way for this influential turn of the Dionysian apophatic toward the Franciscan affective.”62

Thomas Gallus

Hugh’s appropriation of Dionysian apophaticism was inherited and advanced by his successor Richard of St. Victor, and passed on to abbot Thomas Gallus

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(d. 1246), who in his turn developed the final form of the Victorine mysti-cism, making it available to the Franciscans.63 Gallus (i.e., “the Frenchman”) was born in France in the late twelfth century and joined the Abbey of St. Victor as a canon. At the Abbey, he was immersed in the tradition of the Victorines that flourished under Hugh and Richard. In addition, the canon was also well trained in the Scholastic tradition that was rapidly developing in Paris. In 1219, he moved to the Abbey of St. Andrew in Vercelli, Italy, and in 1226 became abbot there.64 His educational background prepared him well for his role in systematizing Victorine Dionysianism.

Bernard McGinn divides the medieval adaptation of Dionysianism into two periods, roughly before and after the thirteenth century. Thinkers of the old Dionysianism (before 1200) such as John Scotus Eriugena and Hugh and Richard of St. Victor drew on the Dionysian corpus selectively for their own purposes, motivated primarily by the apostolic authority of Dionysius. Think-ers of the new Dionysianism, in contrast, approached the Dionysian corpus in a systematic and comprehensive way. This new Dionysianism would unfold in two broad streams. One would be distinguished by its emphasis on knowl-edge and another by its emphasis on love in the spiritual ascent to God. The emphasis on knowledge lies at the center of the speculative or intellectual Dionysianism advocated by Albert the Great (ca. 1200–1280) and continued by Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260–1327). In contrast, affective Dionysianism, pre-sented systematically by Thomas Gallus and adapted by the Franciscans—in particular Bonaventure, as well as by the author of The Cloud of Unknow-ing—emphasizes the superiority of love over knowledge.65

The discussion above presented Hugh of St. Victor’s attempt to combine the mystical interpretation of the Song of Songs with his adaptation of Dionysian mysticism and briefly explored the roles of and relationship be-tween knowledge and love within the anagogical journey. Gallus was more systematic and detailed in this synthesizing attempt. Well-versed in both the Dionysian corpus and the Song of Songs, Gallus created “an extended dialogue” between the two texts. He saw that both texts deal with different aspects of the knowledge of God: Dionysius’s Mystical Theology treats the theoretical, whereas the Song of Songs unfolds the practical aspect of mysti-cal theology.66

This dialogue between the Dionysian corpus and the Song of Songs resulted in Gallus’s reinterpretation of the Dionysian apophatic ascent. In the Mystical Theology, Dionysius writes, “Here, being neither oneself nor someone else, one is supremely united to the completely unknown by an inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing noth-ing.”67 This intellectualized apophatic statement was “paraphrased” by Gal-lus as follows:

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Separated from all things and from oneself, as it were, one is united to the intellectually unknown God through a uniting of love which effects true knowl-edge by means of a knowledge much better than intellectual knowledge, and, because intellectual knowledge is left behind, one knows God above intellect and mind.68

The phrase in italics clearly manifests Gallus’s “interpolation”69 of the af-fective reading of the Song of Songs into his reinterpretation of Dionysius’s mystical theology.70

Though Gallus’s thought is in line with his predecessors’ emphasis on af-fectus, he is distinctive in his systematic formulation of medieval Dionysian-ism and in his effort to bring the Song of Songs into dialogue with Dionysian writings. In addition, McGinn argues, Gallus went further in his understand-ing of the superiority of love over knowledge. Hugh and Richard understood that love subsumes knowledge, but this idea still acknowledges the role of knowledge in the unitive ascent to God. However, Gallus broke the link be-tween love and knowledge at the final step in the divine union, understanding that union in solely affective terms. McGinn writes:

Gallus’s understanding of the relation of knowledge to the higher uniting of love differs from this71 by emphasizing a separation, or cutting off, of all knowing before the flight into the amorous unitio deificans. In other words, love no lon-ger subsumes preparatory forms of knowing, however necessary, but discards or rejects them.72

While agreeing with McGinn on Gallus’s role in the development of af-fective Dionysianism, Rorem suggests that the Carthusian Hugh of Balma (d. 1304) played a more significant role in drawing a sharp line between knowledge and love:

Whereas for Gallus and his predecessors, love was the true, higher form of knowledge, for Hugh of Balma there was little or no continuity at all between the lower, intellectual process and the higher union of love. Although Hugh’s work is not well known today, it was the source of the “anti-intellectualism” often noted in The Cloud of Unknowing.73

Whether Gallus argued for the need for a total break between love and knowledge or whether he left room for some relationship between them, there is no doubt that he saw love as predominant over knowledge, emphasizing its role in the apophatic flight to union with God. As will be seen, this would greatly influence Bonaventure’s mystical theology.

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THE BONAVENTURIAN DIALECTIC OF CATAPHASIS AND APOPHASIS

Bonaventure and Dionysius

For Bonaventure, all religious practices—whether intellectual study, prayer, or the practice of virtue—ultimately aim at union with God. In his explana-tion of the threefold spiritual reading of the scriptures in On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology, Bonaventure asserts that the allegorical reading of scriptures teaches the doctrines of divinity and humanity that arise from faith; the moral reading teaches one how to live morally, and the anagogical read-ing teaches the mystical union of the soul with God.74 He identifies union with God as “the ultimate goal” of all three readings, which he learned from distinguished teachers: “The first is taught chiefly by Augustine; the second, by Gregory; the third, by Dionysius.”75 Although Augustine’s and Gregory’s contributions should not be underestimated, Bonaventure was greatly in-debted to Dionysius for his mystical theology. Further, he reveals that he learned a great deal about Dionysius from the Victorines—Hugh and Richard of St. Victor—in his brief genealogy of the three ancient masters: “Anselm follows Augustine; Bernard follows Gregory; Richard follows Dionysius. For Anselm excels in reasoning; Bernard, in preaching; Richard, in contempla-tion. But Hugh excels in all three.”76 Rorem summarizes the Victorine influ-ence on Bonaventure: “[Bonaventure’s] creative work is the culmination of the Victorines’ integration of Dionysian darkness into the Western legacy of love for Christ crucified.”77

Rorem presents the threefold influence of Dionysian anagogia (ascent spirituality) in the West: the Neoplatonic framework of procession and re-turn,78 the elevation of contemplation from perceptible to conceptual things, and the renunciation of intellectual activity and knowledge at the entrance to the darkness of silence.79 All of these Dionysian elements prevail in the Bonaventurian ascent to God, particularly in the Itinerarium.

Among the multifaceted Dionysian influences on the Bonaventurian ana-gogia, the remainder of this chapter will focus on the apophatic union with God that prevails at the last stage of the ascent. Bonaventure’s exploration of the anagogical movement in the Itinerarium will provide some insights into the Bonaventurian adaptation of the mystical theology of Dionysius. The focused study of mystical union with God will also help address the dynamic relationship between cataphasis and apophasis and provide some keys for understanding the tension between them, and also the tension between the intellectual and spiritual life. Both of these tensions will be discussed later in the chapter.

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Bonaventurian Apophaticism

In the final chapter of the Itinerarium, Bonaventure repeats Dionysius’s prayer invoking the triune God to guide the soul to the mystical knowledge of the divine. In addition, he quotes Dionysius’s advice to his friend Timothy to leave behind everything—perceptible and conceptual things, and even one-self—so that the soul will be lifted up to the divine darkness.80 Bonaventure’s description of the end of the anagogical journey to God, which follows his six steps of cataphatic contemplation, is similar to what Dionysius describes in the Mystical Theology.

In the Itinerarium, Bonaventure contemplates God by reading the Book of Creation, in which the creator manifests Himself in His shadows, vestiges, images, and similitudes. Each of these created things is analogically related as verbum divinum to its creator, the Verbum Dei. Any verbum divinum created by God can be part of a cataphatic discourse because it bears some similarity to its creator. At the same time, it should be noted that all verba divina are in-herently dissimilar to the Verbum Dei because of God’s transcendent nature.81 This inherent dissimilarity is what leads eventually to apophatic silence. In other words, the analogical discourse of verbum divinum is ultimately defi-cient for conveying the truth of Verbum Dei. As Timothy Johnson writes, “The Journey of the Soul into God discloses in this interplay between the kataphatic and apophatic, the inability of the Book of Creation to impart more than a captivating glimpse of the Author.”82 Bonaventure never explicitly explained the dialectic of dissimilarity in the Itinerarium; however, Johnson argues that this apophatic strand is woven into the texture of the cataphatic discourse of the six-step ascent to God.83

This dynamic between similar and dissimilar that leads theological dis-courses from the cataphatic to apophatic prevails in the Dionysian corpus.84 Denys Turner explains the Dionysian dialectic of dissimilarity on two levels. First, it would be a paradox to say that a thing can be similar and dissimilar at one and the same time. Second, the discourse of similarity and dissimilarity presupposes a common ground for a comparison between different things, but there is an unbridgeable abyss between the creature and the creator. Therefore the comparative notion of dissimilarity itself fails, which entails the failure of any theological discourse on which it is grounded.

The dialectic of dissimilarity can also be understood as the dialectic of af-firmation and negation, which eventually leads to the apophatic renunciation of both modes of speaking of God. First, there is the similarity of a created thing to its creator, which allows affirmative discourse. Then, there is the negation of this discourse due to the inherent dissimilarity of the thing and its creator. Finally, there is the failure of the very notion of dissimilarity or difference, which entails the negation of both affirmation and negation.

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This dialectic of affirmation and negation is the principle that dominates the metaphysical contemplations of chapters 5 and 6 of the Itinerarium. While the contemplations of God in the first four chapters are mediated by metaphors, vestiges, images, and the restored similitude, in chapters 5 and 6 the dialectic of dissimilarity dominates. These chapters contemplate God in a direct and abstract way, speculating on the two highest attributes of God, Being and Goodness.

First, contemplating God in His Being, Bonaventure enlists the essential attributes of divine Being: that God is “the first, the eternal, the most simple, the most actual, the most perfect, and the supremely one being.”85 While each of these attributes implies the others,86 it also simultaneously connotes its opposite: “Being itself is both first and last, eternal and most present, most simple and greatest, most actual and unchangeable, most perfect and im-mense, supremely one and all-embracing.”87 The two divine attributes of each pair are seemingly contradictory yet simultaneously implicative of the other, which arouses admiration in the mind of the contemplative, who remains at a loss for how to express this mystical paradox.88 Thus, the paradoxical pairs of divine attributes usher the contemplative into apophatic silence through the threefold process of affirmation, negation, and negation of both affirmation and negation.89

The same apophatic dialectic is at work as an underlying principle in chap-ter 6 in which Bonaventure is concerned with the properties of the trinitarian Persons in contemplating the Divine Goodness. Reflecting God as supreme goodness leads the contemplative to the realization of the six characteristics of the interrelationship between the Three Persons of the Trinity: supreme com-municability, supreme consubstantiality, supreme conformability, supreme coequality, supreme coeternity, and supreme mutual intimacy.90 A further contemplation of these six characteristics results in recognizing another set of contradictory but at the same time mutually embracing pairs: “The highest communicability together with the property of the persons, highest consub-stantiality together with the plurality of hypostases, highest conformability together with discrete personality, highest co-equality together with order, highest co-eternity together with emanation, the highest intimacy together with mission.”91 The contemplation of these incomprehensible pairs leads to the same apophatic wonder shown above in the analysis of chapter 5.92

Bonaventure next turns to Jesus Christ, in whom divinity and humanity are united in a most profound way, with all the infinite, divine attributes joined to the finite, human attributes.93 The human soul will be enabled to consider the invisible divine attributes by beholding Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the perfect image of God. Meditating on Jesus Christ, the soul tran-scends all visible and knowable things to reach the invisible and unknowable

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God. Denys Turner explains that while the soul finds all the affirmations of God in Christ, it is also led to the Father, who is hidden.94 That is to say, Christ is the ladder through which one climbs from the cataphatic to the apophatic contemplation of God. In this consideration of the union of divin-ity and humanity in Christ, the soul perfects its intellectual contemplation, and there is nothing left for the human mind except to rest “in the dazzling darkness of a silence.”95 The last chapter of the Itinerarium focuses on the soul’s ecstatic rise to this apophatic silence.

Thus, the Dionysian dialectics of similarity and dissimilarity, cataphasis and apophasis, and affirmation and negation are the dynamic principles of the anagogical movement that dominate the Itinerarium—but not without a Bo-naventurian transformation. There are three distinctive elements in Bonaven-ture’s adaptation of Dionysianism or Dionysian mysticism that he inherited from his medieval predecessors: the prevalence of affectivity, the essential place of Christ, and the significant role of Francis as a concrete model of the spiritual journey to union with God. The following three sections will con-sider these distinctive themes of the Itinerarium.

Affectivity: Union with God in Love

The Prevalence of Affection in Bonaventurian Dionysianism

As shown in the brief survey of the medieval development of Dionysianism above, the most noticeable shifts were the emphasis of love over knowledge and the change in the nature of love (or eros) from cosmic, cognitive eros to a more affective intersubjective eros. These shifts in understanding the na-ture and supremacy of love are reflected in Bonaventure’s description of the soul’s final flight to mystical union with God. In the Itinerarium, however, the role of affectivity is not confined to the final stage of union with God; rather, it prevails throughout the anagogical journey.96

In the prologue of the Itinerarium, Bonaventure rejects the idea that the spiritual journey is solely intellectual and affirms the necessity of affectivity. Bonaventure insists that those who set out on the six-step journey are, in the first place, to be disposed to affectivity. He dedicates his treatise not just to anyone but

to those who are already disposed by divine grace—to the humble and pious; to those who are devout and sorrowful for their sins; to those anointed with the oil of gladness; to those who are lovers of divine wisdom and are inflamed with desire for it; and to those who wish to give themselves to glorifying, admiring, and even savoring God.97

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Here, while the preparatory requirements of humility, devotion, repentance, and gladness all confirm the necessity of affectivity in the soul’s journey, there is a further requirement that demands closer attention: the desire for the Divine Wisdom. The desire for wisdom is ambivalent in the context of the present dis-cussion because it bears on both affective desire and intellectual knowledge. A close study of the desire for wisdom will facilitate an understanding of Bo-naventure’s integrative accommodation of affectivity and intellect, which can be distinguished from Dionysius’s more intellectual theology.

First of all, according to Dionysius, the desire for wisdom can be under-stood as an intellectual aspiration to know. Denys Turner interprets eros in the Dionysian corpus as the yearning for knowledge in an intellectual sense.

The ascent of the mind . . . is therefore the eros of knowing, the passion and yearning for the vision of the One, which projects the mind up the scale; it is the dialectics of knowing and unknowing which govern that progress, and it is not in the traditional metaphors of affectivity, touch, taste and smell, but in the visual metaphors of light and dark, seeing and unseeing, that that progress is described.98

As Turner insists, whereas the ultimate object one desires to achieve in Dionysian mystical theology can be considered to be purely intellectual in nature, the object desired in Bonaventure’s spiritual ascent is not exclusively intellectual, but rather includes both affectivity and intellectuality; Bonaven-ture understands that wisdom embraces both knowledge and affection. This Bonaventurian understanding of wisdom also reveals the Franciscan master’s concern that those engaged in theoretical and speculative activities maintain a balance between the intellectual and spiritual life.

The reflections Bonaventure presents in the Itinerarium illumine the divine truths or transcendental attributes of God so that his readers will glorify, admire, and savor God, who ought to be glorified, admired, and savored.99 Among these three activities, admiration is noteworthy for its central role in the spiritual journey. Philotheus Boehner explains that, in Bonaventure’s thought, these three activities are distinct from one another: “The first step of the Itinerarium leads only to praise or glorify God (cf. 1.15). To admire God is more; it is the step that leads to mystical peace. To savor God means to actually experience the deep joy of the mystical union. This, of course, is the ultimate goal of the Itinerarium, described in Chapter VII.”100 As Boehner points out, while the early stages of reflection would lead the contemplative to praising or glorifying God, in the later stages of reflection (discussed in chapters 3–6) he will be lifted up in admiration, recognizing God’s unfathom-able splendor and encountering Him in His incomprehensible divine reality.101

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This admiration results from Bonaventure’s six-step reflection on the universe, the human mind, and the divine attributes. In his description of these speculative stages of the Itinerarium, Bonaventure employs the metaphor of light: “The soul becomes like the dawn, the moon, and the sun corresponding to the steps of illumination that lift up the soul in wonder at the Bridegroom.”102 The higher one climbs the ladder to God, the more brightly his soul will be illumined, and the deep contemplation guided by the suggested steps will most assuredly lead the contemplative to wonder. Then, in great amazement the soul will rise up to the union with the Bride-groom wherein it experiences or “savors” God in the ecstatic union of love. As such, admiration is a natural consequence of intellectual contemplation as well as a transformative activity leading to a more affective and experi-ential state of union; and the soul shows the involvement of both intellect and affectivity in Bonaventure’s description of the spiritual journey toward union with God.103

Bonaventure’s concern for the integration of intellect and affectivity is clearly stated in the prologue of the Itinerarium, quoted in chapter 1 but worth repeating here, in a discussion of Bonaventure’s integration of intellect and spirituality, where he admonishes the reader:

Do not think that reading is sufficient without unction, speculation without devotion, investigation without admiration, circumspection without exulta-tion, industry without piety, knowledge without charity, intelligence without humility, study without divine grace, the mirror without the inspiration of divine wisdom.104

As Ewert Cousins rightly puts it, in the Itinerarium, “philosophical specu-lation is joined with mystical affectivity.”105

While both intellect and affectivity are central components in the spiritual journey as described by Bonaventure, they are clearly ranked according to importance. In the Itinerarium, a highly intellectual treatise, affectivity takes supremacy over intellect, a disposition Bonaventure inherited from the Victorines. Just before he sets out to unfold his speculative reflections, Bonaventure instructs the reader to give more attention “to the stimulation of affect than to the instruction of the intellect.”106 When the soul is prepared to enter the chamber of the Bridegroom, the encounter with the beloved con-sists more in “the experience of affections than in rational considerations.”107 Again, in chapter 7, Bonaventure stresses the supremacy of affectivity as he asserts that the soul’s passing over108 to God through the crucified Christ is possible when all intellectual activities are renounced and one’s total affec-tion is directed to God.109

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The Dominance of Affectivity at the Final Stage of the Journey

To better understand the dominant role of affectivity in Bonaventure’s final stage, as distinguished from the preeminence of the intellect at most of the stages of the Itinerarium, attention must be paid to Bonaventure’s under-standing of the various powers of the soul. In chapter 1, Bonaventure pres-ents six levels of the powers of the soul by which one can ascend to union with God.110 The six powers of the soul, corresponding to the six steps of the ascent, are “sense, imagination, reason, understanding, intelligence, and the highest point of the mind or the spark of conscience [sensus, imaginatio, ratio, intellectus, intelligentia et apex mentis seu synderesis scintilla].”111 Etienne Gilson stresses that these six powers do not represent six separate faculties of the soul, but “six different aspects of the same faculty . . . con-sidered as it turns successively to different objects.”112 That is to say, the six powers of the soul are all different aspects of the same intellect.113 However, distinguished from the other five aspects, which are primarily functions of the intellect, the highest or the apex mentis is not associated with the intellect only but also the will. Bonaventure equates apex mentis with synderesis scin-tilla, or the spark of conscience.114 According to Bonaventure, synderesis is that which “stimulates one toward the good.”115 He sees this natural tendency toward or desire for goodness as an affective power, distinguishing it from conscientia, or conscience, which is an intellectual disposition of the soul.116

Scholarly schemes that associate the six powers of the soul with the six stages of the Itinerarium bring about a mismatch between the affective sixth power and the intellectual contemplation of the sixth chapter. McGinn pro-vides a solution. In an original diagram, he shows the seven chapters of the Itinerarium and the six powers of the soul side by side. Rather than relating each of the six steps of the mystical ascent to each of the six powers of the soul one by one, McGinn rearranges the relationship between the two cat-egories by associating chapters 5 and 6 taken together with intelligentia and chapter 7 with apex mentis.117 In doing so, he embraces two arguments: one, that as the highest activity of the soul, the apex mentis must be associated with the final stage of the soul’s ascent to God; and two, that the affectivity of the apex mentis accords with the affective ecstasy involved in the final union of the soul with God.

Ecstasis and Excessus unto God

In the Itinerarium, Bonaventure uses the Greek word ecstasis and the Latin word excessus without distinction.118 The etymological meaning of the Greek ecstasis is “standing outside the self” and the Latin excessus means “departure

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or death”; the definitions of both imply the idea of breaking out from a pre-vious state. He employs these terms twenty-three times altogether—ecstasis three times, excessus twenty times—to describe the dynamic status of the soul primarily at the final stage of the mystical ascent. Boehner uses mentalis excessus as simply “another term for the mystical union.”119 However, these terms are not only used to describe the ultimate state of the mystical union itself. Excessus also implies means, path, transition, or uplifting to reach a higher level.120 Therefore, in the Itinerarium the dynamic terms ecstasis and excessus indicate either the transitional stage in one’s spiritual progress or the final state of the same process.

Though there can be different understandings regarding whether the terms ecstasis and excessus imply the final state of union or the process leading to it, there is no doubt that the terms are affective in nature. Not only are ec-stasis and excessus themselves affective in nature, but they also imply other affective activities. According to Bonaventure, the soul becomes disposed to ecstasis through devotion, admiration, and exultation, all of which involve affection.121 While affection plays a crucial role, ecstasis also has other results at the transitional moment of one’s spiritual leap to God: “When [with] love the soul embraces the incarnate Word, receiving delight from him and passing over to him [through] ecstatic love, it receives its sense of taste and touch.”122 This ecstatic love enables the soul to stand outside itself and transition to union with God. In the transition to and experience of union, the soul should abandon the activities of intellect, and only affection should be at work.123

The Relationship between the Ecstatic Love and Intellectual Activity

There is no doubt that the Bonaventurian ascent involves both affectivity and intellect, unlike Dionysius’s predominantly intellectual ascent. In addition, the supremacy of love over knowledge is apparent at the final stage of the Itinerarium. Bonaventure is clear in his opinion that in the soul’s passing over to union with God, all intellectual activities and knowledge should be aban-doned in favor of the utmost in affection.124 This renunciation of intellect at the final stage of ecstatic union, however, does not depreciate the significant role of intellect in the rest of the anagogical journey. Whereas the ecstasis or excessus mentis is predominantly affective, the path that leads to the stage of ecstasis is both intellectual and affective. In the beginning of the Itinerarium, as noted earlier, Bonaventure instructs his readers to balance intellectual ac-tivities with affective virtues and devotional practices.

To better understand how intellectual contemplation leads to the rise of the affections, there is a need to return to chapters 5 and 6, in which, at the height of the speculative contemplation of the divine attributes, the soul comes to a place of admiration in its encounter with incomprehensible divine realities.125

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Furthermore, it is amazed as it contemplates Jesus Christ, which leads even-tually to excessus mentis or excessus contemplationis.126 All the illuminative stages of the Itinerarium are directed toward this encounter with Jesus Christ, the contemplation of whom silences all intellectual activities, and at the same time, ironically, perfects the intellectual journey. Bonaventure writes, “Here, with God the mind reaches the perfection of its illumination on the sixth step, as on the sixth day. Nothing further remains but the day of rest when in an ecstatic insight the discerning power of the human mind rests from all the work that it has done.”127 At the summit of all its intellectual contemplations, the soul comes face to face with mysteries beyond its intellectual capacity, which entails renunciation of the intellect and requires the highest form of af-fection. Thus, the realization of unknowing which leads the soul into ecstasy and darkness is ignorantia docta or “learned ignorance.”128 Bernard McGinn rightly states the relationship of knowledge to ecstatic love: although the apex affectus is not an intellectual power, it

still bears some kind of relation to knowledge and to what can be expressed in language, both because it draws up into itself all the preparatory cognitive op-erations that are part of the journey into God just at the moment it leaps beyond them, and also because although what is received is incommunicable, the person who receives it is transformed by this contact in a way that enables him or her to be a better channel of divine illumination.129

While he weighs in on the apophatic and affective experience of union with God, Bonaventure acknowledges the effect and necessity of intellec-tual efforts to reach the final goal of union in love and in the silencing of all knowledge. In On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology, Bonaventure concludes with a summary of the relationship between knowledge, theology, and charity.

And so it is evident how the manifold wisdom of God, which is clearly revealed in sacred Scripture, lies hidden in all knowledge and in all nature. It is clear also how all divisions of knowledge are servants of theology, and it is for this reason that theology makes use of illustrations and terms pertaining to every branch of knowledge. It is likewise clear how wide the illuminative way may be, and how the divine reality itself lies hidden within everything which is perceived or known. And this is the fruit of all sciences, that in all, faith may be strengthened, God may be honored, character may be formed, and consolation may be derived from union of the Spouse with the beloved, a union which takes place through charity: a charity in which the whole purpose of sacred Scripture, and thus of illumination descending from above, comes to rest—a charity without which all knowledge is vain because no one comes to the Son except through the Holy Spirit who teaches us all the truth, who is blessed forever. Amen.130

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For Bonaventure, all sorts of knowledge serve theology so that one can be illuminated to the essential teaching of the whole of scriptures, which is char-ity. Scientific knowledge helps the human mind see the manifestation of the divine in all things created by God. Nevertheless, what leads to union with God in the end is charity. As charity is “the fruit of all sciences,” Bonaven-ture maintains that all intellectual activities and knowledge aim at charity or ecstasis,131 and he acknowledges the contribution of intellectual activity to this ultimate end.

Christ, the Way, and the Door to the Apophatic Union with God

Along with Bonaventure’s strong pairing of affection with intellect in the soul’s return to God, Denys Turner notes another way in which Bonaventure radically transforms Dionysian apophaticism: his Christocentrism.132 Bo-naventure’s theology and spirituality always put Christ at the center. The Son of God is for him the central Person of the Trinity, as he is the total expression of the Father’s boundless love, a love that is associated with the divine nature of fruitfulness and self-communicative goodness. The Son also participates with the Father in the procession of the Third Person, the Holy Spirit. This procession is the result of the loving bond between the Father and the Son. The centrality of the Second Person is manifested beyond the triune relation-ship in his active involvement in creation as the exemplar, and in his decisive participation in salvation history through his Incarnation and Passion, all of which reveal God’s love to the universe.133 Bonaventurian Christocentism is closely associated with divine love within and outside the Trinity. The Franciscan master’s metaphysical Christocentricism and his affective mysti-cal theology are also grounded in the mystical spirituality of Francis, who experienced God as good and loving through the crucified Christ.

Christ the Center in the Itinerarium

Christocentrism is a central principle in Bonaventure’s work, particularly in the later part of chapter 6 of the Itinerarium. As seen above, the soul’s specu-lative contemplation of God culminates in the person of Christ, in whom God and humanity, and also seemingly opposed divine characteristics, are joined. For Bonaventure, the soul’s contemplations of God’s Being and Goodness result in wonder, a wonder arising from its consideration of the unity in the opposites of God’s transcendental attributes. The contemplation of Jesus Christ astonishes even more as the soul considers the unity of the opposites of finite and infinite, immanence and transcendence, in the person of Christ.134

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The contemplation of this mystical union of God and humanity surpasses the human intellect.135

For Bonaventure, the unity of the finite and the infinite in Christ can be compared to the meeting of the cataphatic and the apophatic in Christ. The two ways of knowing God meet in “the Way” (Jn 14:6). As the Word of God, Christ is the invisible Book of Creation or Principle of Creation through which the universe was made, and it is only in Christ, with his spiritual senses restored, that the contemplative can properly read the Book of Creation.136 Most cataphatic discourses are associated in one way or another with this Book of Creation—they speak of God through the vestige, image, and simili-tude of God in created things, as shown in the writings of Dionysius and in Bonaventure’s Itinerarium. In this regard, as Turner rightly puts it, Christ is “the résumé of the cataphatic,” and all the affirmative contemplations of God in the creature lead to Christ who is the true image of God.137 In Christ, the contemplative reads not only the Book without, but also the Book within; that is to say, both the creature and the creator,138 for in Christ the creature and the creator are united. Furthermore, in Christ the contemplative transcends the creature and the cataphatic to reach the creator and the apophatic, for Christ who is the Son leads us to his Father, the invisible God. In this transition from the contemplation of the immanent God in which cataphatic theology domi-nates, to contemplation of the transcendent God in which apophatic theology dominates, the contemplative is required to silence his words and his intellect. Thus, in the Christology of Bonaventure, Christ is the key that unlocks the dialectic of cataphasis and apophasis.

Closely related to this, the crucified Christ holds a significant place in Bonaventure’s Christology. While metaphysical Christocentrism primarily involves intellect and speculative discourse, the crucified Christ, who was central in Francis’s spirituality and mystical experience, is closely associ-ated with affective contemplation and plays a decisive role in the movement towards an apophatic union with God.

The Crucified Christ in the Itinerarium

For Bonaventure, Christ is “the way and the door” through which the con-templative transcends all perceptible and conceptual things and passes over to union with God. At the end of the six-step intellectual journey, the soul reaches the most profound mysteries, which defy intellectual comprehension and therefore demand the renunciation of the intellect.139 The soul’s journey of ascent to God does not end there, however. Anyone who contemplates the Mercy Seat or the union of God and humanity in the person of Christ “with faith, hope, and love, devotion, admiration, joy, appreciation, praise,

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and rejoicing” now beholds Christ on the cross.140 While intellectual con-templation of the person of Christ led the contemplative to incomprehensible mysteries, now “the most burning love of the Crucified”141 lifts up his eyes and soul so that the soul may be united with Christ on the cross. Here, there is a paradox—the mystical journey is at one and the same time ascending and descending: the anagogical movement toward union is bound downward for the tomb where the soul rests with Christ.

This passing over to death is possible only through one’s inflamed desire to transform himself into his lover, even unto death on the cross. Bonaven-ture insists that only this love of the Crucified can lead one to God in ecstatic love.142 Although affection for the Crucified is essential for union with God, Bonaventure does not discount the preparatory stage of purification involv-ing prayers and the six stages of illuminative contemplation; rather, he sees these as means of enhancing a burning love of the crucified Christ: “Desires can be inflamed in us in two ways, namely through the cry of prayer which makes us cry aloud with groaning of the heart, and through the brightness of contemplation by which the mind turns most directly and intently to the rays of light.”143 Aided by these measures, the contemplation of the crucified Christ is still the only way to ecstatic union with God.

While both chapters 6 and 7 contemplate Christ, there is a notable dif-ference between them. Chapter 6 contemplates the person of Christ, who is the union of God and humanity, whereas chapter 7 focuses on the crucified Christ and his Passion. Contemplation of the Incarnate Word is primarily intellectual in nature, whereas contemplation of the crucified Christ is pri-marily a matter of affection and burning love. This fervent affection toward the crucified Christ carries the contemplative out of himself and moves him into God.144 Finally, the spiritual journey in the pursuit of peace through the illumination of the soul145 ends with one’s entrance with Christ into darkness through death, which is impossible except through total renunciation.

Only one who loves this death can see God, for it is absolutely true that no one can see me and live. Let us die, then, and enter into this darkness. Let us silence all our cares, desires, and imaginations. Let us pass over with the crucified Christ from this world to the Father, so that when the Father has been shown to us, we may say with Philip: It is enough for us.146

Thus, Christ is not only “the point of juncture of the cataphatic and the apophatic,”147 but He is also the meeting point of the two different gazes—the intellectual and the affective. Christ is the way leading the soul through the six-step intellectual journey, the door through which the soul can breach the impassable wall separating the creator and the creature in the self-denying

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love of the crucified Christ, and the destination of the spiritual journey, at the end of which the soul is finally united with God and rests in peace.

Francis, the Guide for the Spiritual Journey to God

Francis and the Crucified Christ

Bonaventure acknowledges at the outset of the Itinerarium that the centrality of the crucified Christ in the treatise was inspired by St. Francis of Assisi, especially Francis’s vision of the crucified seraph.

Bonaventure writes that love of the crucified Christ “so absorbed” the spirit of Francis that it left the physical marks of the Passion on the body of the saint.148 In the prologue, Bonaventure begins his description of the multistep spiritual journey to God by referring to Francis as an inspirational model, and in chapter 7 he ends by presenting the saint as a witness who completed the mystical journey.

All this was shown also to blessed Francis when, in a rapture of contemplation on the top of the mountain where I reflected on the things I have written here, a six-winged Seraph fastened to a cross appeared to him. . . . Here he was carried out of himself in contemplation and passed over into God. And he has been set forth as the example of perfect contemplation just as he had earlier been known as the example of action, like another Jacob transformed into Israel. So it is that God invites all truly spiritual persons through Francis to this sort of passing over, more by example than by words.149

Although Bonaventure begins and ends his treatise of spiritual ascent with Francis and his mystical experience at Mount Alverna, in between he rarely mentions the saint. However, Bernard McGinn argues that despite no explicit reference to him in the middle chapters of the Itinerarium, Francis is still serving as Bonaventure’s model: “Bonaventure’s treatment of the stages of contemplative ascent . . . is nothing more than a laying out of what had taken place in the soul of Francis as a model for all ecstatics.”150 McGinn asserts that Francis, “as the ideal expression of the crucified Jesus, is the exemplar of our journey, or reduction, back into God.”151

Bonaventure’s understanding of Francis as “the exemplar of the crucified Christ”152 is fully unfolded in his biography of the saint, the Major Legend of St. Francis. Bonaventure is amazed that Francis’s desire for the crucified Christ was acknowledged by God granting him seven visions of the cross of Christ, from the first vision in which he saw a palace full of military weapons with the insignia of Christ’s cross to the vision of the seraph in the form of the crucified Christ at Mount Alverna.153 After enumerating the

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seven visions, Bonaventure explicates their meaning in a conversation with Francis, as it were.

Behold, you have arrived with seven apparitions of the cross of Christ won-drously apparent and visible in you or about you following an order of time, like six steps leading to the seventh where you finally found rest. For the cross of Christ, both offered to and taken on by you at the beginning of your conversion and carried continuously from that moment throughout the course of your most proven life and giving example to others, shows with such clar-ity of certitude that you have finally reached the summit of Gospel perfection that no truly devout person can reject this proof of Christian wisdom ploughed into the dust of your flesh. No truly believing person can attack it, no truly humble person can belittle it, since it is truly divinely expressed and worthy of complete acceptance.154

The essential role of the crucified Christ in the Itinerarium is most certainly a product of Bonaventure’s profound reflection on the life of the founder of his order, in particular the saint’s mystical experience at Alverna. Bonaven-ture’s recurring references to the vision of the cross indicates his view of how much Francis’s life and spirituality revolved around Christ. McGinn argues that the seven visions of the cross “mark the stages in an itinerary of deepen-ing understanding of the meaning of the cross,” the perfection of which was manifested in the reception of the stigmata on the saint’s body.155

Furthermore, as McGinn points out, Bonaventure links the seven visions of the cross in the Major Legend with the seven stages of the Itinerarium,156 drawing on his own words in the Major Legend: “Behold, you have arrived with seven apparitions of the cross of Christ wondrously apparent and vis-ible in you or about you following an order of time, like six steps leading to the seventh where you finally found rest.”157 This parallel confirms again Bonaventure’s understanding that Francis’s life and spirituality are centered on the crucified Christ.

Francis, the Model for the Bonaventurian Dialectic of Cataphasis and Apophasis

Of course, Bonaventure had admired Francis long before composing the Itinerarium and his hagiography, and McGinn asserts that Francis provided Bonaventure with constant inspiration that enabled him not just to summarize and synthesize the Christian tradition, but to transform them.158 Nevertheless, it seems clear that Bonaventure came to contemplate the life of the saint more deeply after his election as minister general of the Franciscan Order, a position that required him to appeal to the broader audience of his Franciscan brothers and sisters, as well as the ordinary faithful. Joshua Benson suggests

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that the marked prevalence of the mystery of the crucified Christ in the later writings, including the Itinerarium, the Major Legend, and the Collations on the Gifts of the Holy Spirit is a manifestation of Bonaventure’s deeper understanding of Francis’s spirituality, centered on Christ and His Passion.159

The influence of Francis on Bonaventure’s adaptation of Dionysianism is not limited to the saint’s love of the crucified Christ. Just as Christ is the mediator between transcendence and immanence, Francis also played a sig-nificant role in bridging the gap between the mystical realm of the divine and the concrete life of humanity. Timothy Johnson argues that for Bonaventure the mystical pilgrimage to transcendence requires a particular place where the divine can reveal itself, and the life of Francis was such a place. That is to say, Francis was a “locus theologicus,”160 not only for Bonaventure, but also for all spiritual persons desiring to pass over to God in conformity with the crucified Christ.161

For Johnson, the presence of Francis in Bonaventure’s mystical treatise represents a notable shift in the historical development of Christian mysti-cism. Distinguished from previous mystical writings which drew mostly on biblical figures like Moses, Benjamin, or Rachel, Johnson insists that Bo-naventure was inspired to present Francis to the reader as “a tangible touch-stone of transcendence,”162 the concrete model of a spiritual seeker. Walking with him, the seeker can move from the splendor of the creation to its creator, from intellect to affectivity, from speculation to spiritual experience, and from cataphatic discourse to apophatic peace.

In chapter 11 of the Major Legend, after briefly praising the depth of Fran-cis’s understanding of the scriptures, Bonaventure expresses his admiration for the saint’s penetrating insight into the divine mysteries, in which intellect gives way to affection:163 “For his genius, pure and unstained, penetrated hid-den mysteries, and where the knowledge of teachers stands outside, the pas-sion of the lover entered.”164 Thus described by Bonaventure, Francis appears as the embodiment of a long mystical tradition that began with Dionysius, whose works were transformed by affective monasticism.

It is easy to recognize that Bonaventure’s understanding of the saint’s life and experiences represents a uniquely medieval appropriation of Dionysian mysticism. As this chapter has argued, this can be seen in the dominance of affectivity and the centrality of Christ, prevalent themes in Bonaventure’s mysticism as manifested in the Itinerarium. On the one hand, Christ who is the manifestation of the mystery of God the Father, and Francis of Assisi whose mystical experience was highly visual, concrete, and affirmative, sup-port cataphasis. However, on the other, these two figures play decisive roles in the apophatic ascent to God as they are the mediators between cataphasis and apophasis. The love manifested in the Crucifixion and Francis’s love for

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the crucified Christ are essential in the spiritual ascent to the union with God, which is an apophatic experience.

SUMMARY

Chapter 3 explored the development of Christian mysticism, in particular focusing on the development of Dionysianism in the medieval West and the crucial influence of medieval Dionysianism on Bonaventure’s mysticism, which is a central feature of the latter part of the Itinerarium.

Early Dionysianism was explored in regard to the Dionysian categories of theology, the relationship between those categories—in particular between cataphatic and apophatic theologies—and the nature of the apophatic union with God. In his sophisticated description of the spiritual ascent to God, Dionysius tries to reconcile the contrasting doctrines of the divine: the divine manifestation of God in creation and the transcendence of God. While Diony-sius stresses the unknowability of the transcendent One, he does not repudi-ate the affirmative elements of Christianity—moral purification, sacraments, and the scriptures—to which the cataphatic theological discourses have their primary recourse. He acknowledges that the creature’s existential purpose is to praise and glorify God through affirmation, as well as the necessity of affirmation along the path of becoming enlightened as to the transcendence of God.

When it comes to the nature of the ultimate goal of Dionysian ascent, scholars like Turner and Rorem argue that it is primarily intellectual because the union with the divine ends in apophatic knowing. However, there still seems to be room for other interpretations, such as the affective and experi-ential interpretation of Louth, not to mention the development of these themes in the Middle Ages.

The mystical theology of Dionysius appealed to the minds and hearts of medieval Christians, providing them with valuable resources for elaborate articulations of the intellectual and spiritual life of Christians. However, Christian intellectuals and mystics did not simply adopt early Dionysianism, but instead developed it so that affectivity assumed a crucial place in the anagogical journey to God.

Bonaventure inherited Dionysianism as adapted by earlier medieval think-ers. This is manifest in the Itinerarium, his spiritual treatise of a mystical journey to God. The seemingly contradictory yet at the same time comple-mentary relationship between Dionysian cataphasis and apophasis can be seen throughout the Itinerarium. The six-step contemplation of God through His vestiges, images, similitudes, and attributes certainly involves affirmative

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speculation, but Bonaventure is well aware of the ineffability of God, and the Dionysian dialectic of affirmation and negation and the related principle of dissimilarity play a crucial role as the journey moves upward to the unknow-able God. Finally, Dionysius’s apophatic theology dominates and love for the crucified Christ decisively raises the soul to union with God in silence. The emphasis on love and the significant role of Christ, in particular in the form of the Crucified, were obviously drawn from the affective adaptation or the medieval bent of Dionysianism, which holds that the love for the Crucified enables one to leave oneself so as to be united with God and rest in unitive love. This affective medieval adaptation is distinguished from the early Dio-nysianism, in which the union with God is considered to be apophatic know-ing. This Bonaventurian adaptation of Dionysian mysticism was also, as Bo-naventure himself witnesses, inspired by the mystical experience of Francis.

Bonaventure’s description of a spiritual journey to a mystical union with God employs the dialectic of affirmation (cataphatic theology) and negation (apophatic theology). Though at the final unitive stage, all intellectual activity should be abandoned in recognition of the ineffability of the mystical state, this does not imply the futility of cataphatic discourse and intellectual con-templation. For Bonaventure, all forms of speculative contemplation on the creature, the soul, and the divine attributes comprise a spiritual staircase that leads a Christian soul to union with God in silence.

NOTES

1. Itinerarium mentis in Deum (hereafter cited as Itin.) 7.1, in Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, trans. Zachary Hayes, introduction and “Notes & Commentary” by Phi-lotheus Boehner, vol. 2 of WSB, rev. ed. (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 2002), 133 (hereafter cited as WSB).

2. Itin. 7.3–4, in WSB, 2:135–37.3. He is also referred to as simply “Dionysius,” or as “Pseudo-Denys.”4. The surviving Dionysian corpus includes four treatises and ten letters: The Di-

vine Names (hereafter cited as DN); The Mystical Theology (hereafter cited as MT); The Celestial Hierarchy (hereafter cited as CH); The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy; and Letters I–X. Quotations from the Dionysian texts are taken from the English transla-tion by Colm Luibheid, in collaboration with Paul Rorem. See Pseudo-Dionysius, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid, with introductions by Jaroslav Pelikan, Jean Leclercq, and Karlfried Froehlich (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987). Luibheid’s translation is based on the Greek text of the Migne edition. Jacques Paul Migne, ed., Patrologia Cursus Completus, Series Graeca, vol. 3 (Paris, 1857).

5. Besides cataphatic and apophatic theologies, Dionysius also mentions symbolic theology and mystical theology. However, he never provides definitive meanings of these terms, and this has given rise to various categorizations of Dionysian theologies

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by modern scholars. Nevertheless, all four theologies can be merged into the cat-egories of cataphatic and apophatic. Symbolic theology, which primarily concerns analogies of God, involves an affirmative discourse, and can therefore be categorized as cataphasis. Mystical theology focuses on the union with God in silence with all affirmative discourses and thoughts about God relinquished. It primarily employs negative discourse, and it can therefore be categorized as apophasis. Deirdre Carabine views these four theologies not as separate, but rather interwoven in a continuous movement leading to the transcendent God.

Kataphatic theology, which can be said to culminate in symbolic theology, is concerned with the manifestation of God and how he can be named through his effects. Apophatic theology, which uses affirmations as a springboard from which to proceed to negation, culminates in mystical theology and is concerned with the nature of God as he is in him-self, apart from his effects. (Deirdre Carabine, The Unknown God: Negative Theology in the Platonic Tradition: Plato to Eriugena [Louvain: Peeters Press, 1995], 287)

6. CH 2.3, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 149. 7. DN 1.1, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 49–50. 8. DN 1.2, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 50 (bracketed insertion

mine). Here, the Good refers to God who is the Good. 9. DN 1.1, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 49.10. DN 1.1, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 49.11. DN 1.2 (Rom 11:33), in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 50.12. DN 1.2, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 50.13. DN 1.3, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 50–51.14. MT 2, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 138; see also DN 1.5, in

Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 54. For a discussion of praising God in the Dionysian theology, see Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys, second ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 160–61; Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Intro-duction to Their Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 193.

15. MT 2, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 138.16. DN 1.4–7, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 51–56.17. MT 1.2, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 136.18. Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 45.19. Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary, 166: See also Janet Williams, “The

Apophatic Theology of Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite-I,” Downside Review 117, no. 408 (1999): 158.

20. Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, 163.21. Denys Turner argues that the Western Christian employment of the metaphors

of light and darkness, ascent and descent, resulted from a Christian merger of the Greek and Hebraic intellectual and religious cultures, represented, respectively, by the “Allegory of the Cave” in Book 7 of Plato’s Republic and the story in Exodus of Moses’s encounter with Yahweh on Mount Sinai. See Turner, The Darkness of God, 11–18.

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22. MT 1.3 (Ex 19), in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 136–37.23. MT 1.3, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 137.24. MT 1.3, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 137.25. Kevin Corrigan and L. Michael Harrington, “Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite,”

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/pseudo-dionysius-areopagite/ (ac-cessed March 9, 2019). In addition to these two interpretations of the final stage of divine union, Louis Bouyer suggests a third, that it is “ontological,” arguing that union with God ends in the contemplative’s divinization, the fruit of an ontological trans-formation. See Louis Bouyer, The Spirituality of the New Testament and the Fathers (London: Burns & Oates, 1960), 416–20.

26. Turner, The Darkness of God, 47.27. Turner, The Darkness of God, 4.28. Turner, The Darkness of God, 47.29. See Turner, The Darkness of God, 29, and Dionysius’s articulation of love and

yearning in DN 4.10–16, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 78–83.30. DN 4.10, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 79–80.31. Turner, The Darkness of God, 47.32. MT 1.3, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 137. See also CH 2.4, in

Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 151:

Now when we apply dissimilar similarities to intelligent beings, we say of them that they experience desire, but this has to be interpreted as a divine yearning for that immaterial reality which is beyond all reason and all intelligence. It is a strong and sure desire for the clear and impassible contemplation of the transcendent. It is a hunger for an unend-ing, conceptual, and true communion with the spotless and sublime light, of clear and splendid beauty.

33. DN 4.12–13, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 81–83.34. DN 4.12, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 81 (bracketed insertion

mine).35. DN 4.12–13, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 81–83.36. Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, 175. See also DN 4.13,

in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 82. In the Dionysian corpus, the Greek term ekstasis means to “be taken wholly out of oneself.” For the meaning of “ecstasy” in Dionysius, see Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary, 147, 165, and Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 130n266.

37. Jan Vanneste points out the total absence of both the terms “eros” and “agape” in the Mystical Theology. See Jan Vanneste, “Is the Mysticism of Pseudo-Dionysius Genuine?” International Philosophical Quarterly 3, no. 2 (1963): 286–306.

38. Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary, 165.39. Paul Rorem, Biblical and Liturgical Symbols within the Pseudo-Dionysian

Synthesis (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984), 137. This discus-sion of the nature of ecstasy is closely related to the discussion of the definition of mysticism. While modern readers tend to associate mysticism with mystical rapture entailed by an affective experience of God, an understanding that has developed

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since the medieval period, the ancient Greek definition and the early Christian under-standing of mysticism was not emotional and experiential. Jan Vanneste has studied Dionysian mystical theology from the perspective of the medieval and modern under-standing of mysticism, and naturally concludes that “there is no authentic supernatu-ral mysticism expressed in the text of Pseudo-Dionysius if we interpret it in a strictly objective way.” Vanneste, “Is the Mysticism of Pseudo-Dionysius Genuine?” 305. Rorem warns that readers and scholars of the Dionysian corpus should be cautious not to read it through a “medieval, affective overlay.” Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary, 230n28.

40. Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary, 230n28; also 184. Colm Luibheid translates a sentence that includes the word ekstasis in MT 1.1 as follows: “By an undivided and absolute abandonment of yourself and everything, shedding all and freed from all, you will be uplifted to the ray of the divine shadow which is above everything that is.” See Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 135. Unlike Louth’s translation, the term “ecstasy” has been omitted. It is possible that Luibheid inten-tionally omitted the term so that there would be no allusion to the emotional and ex-periential implications of “ecstasy” and “mysticism” with which modern readers are familiar. It is noteworthy that Paul Rorem collaborated with Luibheid on the English translation appearing in the The Complete Works.

41. Turner criticizes the affective interpretation of the medieval mystics as an “anti-mysticism” because it runs contrary to the Dionysian understanding of mysti-cism focused on intellectual hiddenness. Turner, The Darkness of God, 4.

42. Turner, The Darkness of God, 47.43. Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary, 238.44. Hilduin also wrote a hagiographical account of the life of Saint Denis, in which

Pseudo-Dionysius was identified with the apostolic Dionysius the Areopagite referred to in the book of Acts and with the first bishop of Paris and martyr, Saint Denis. See Jaroslav Pelikan, introduction to Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 22, and Jean Leclercq, introduction to Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 26; Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary, 15–16.

45. Jean Leclercq, introduction to Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 26–27; Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary, 16.

46. Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary, 237. In his survey of medieval influences on each Dionysian work, Paul Rorem repeatedly draws attention to the tendency of medieval writers to interpret Dionysius’s words or ideas in accordance with their own theology or arguments.

47. Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 182.

48. The six “bends,” or changes in emphasis, presented by Rorem are as follows:

First, the Areopagite’s original local hierarchy of clergy and laity was stretched into a uni-versal pyramid of ultimate authority. Second, the author’s vague comment about scriptural symbols was bent into a hoary warrant for excluding biblical allegory from theological argumentation. Third, the format of a liturgical commentary was stretched and bent so as to multiply allegories and typologies. Fourth, Neoplatonism’s timeless procession and re-turn was given a chronological and eschatological bent and transformed into Christianity’s

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salvation history of creation, incarnation, and final salvation. Fifth, the ascent to unknow-ing was considered as preparatory to a final union of love as medieval Dionysians added Christ and love to The Mystical Theology. Furthermore, even though the three ways were originally all phases or levels of thought in Dionysius, they were later shaped into moral purification, intellectual illumination, and a unitive perfection through love, although this material was not among the subjects chosen for direct presentation in this commentary. (Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary, 238–39)

49. Paul Rorem, “The Uplifting Spirituality of Pseudo-Dionysius,” in Christian Spirituality: Origins to the Twelfth Century, ed. Bernard McGinn, John Meyendorff, and Jean Leclercq (New York: Crossroad, 1985), 144.

50. Rorem, “The Uplifting Spirituality,” 144.51. For the Dionysian influence on medieval aesthetics, in particular regarding

Abbot Suger’s (1081–1151) appropriation of The Celestial Hierarchy to provide a theoretical articulation of Gothic architecture, see Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Com-mentary, 78–83.

52. Rorem summarizes the whole Dionysian corpus as a series of theological descriptions of “the epistemological uplifting”—first transiting from perceptible symbols to the conceptual realms through negating dissimilar images then proceeding to the ineffable transcendence of the divine through the negation of all symbols and concepts. Rorem, “The Uplifting Spirituality,” 142, 132–51.

53. McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, 182.54. McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, 182.55. Paul Rorem’s historical survey of the misrepresentation and reinterpretation of

the Dionysian dialectic of knowing and unknowing provides the reader of the Itiner-arium general knowledge of the medieval adjustments to Dionysian mysticism. See Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary, 214–25.

56. The Victorines were regular canons who were clerics living in a religious com-munity following the Augustinian Rule. For a brief introduction to the Victorines, see Grover A. Zinn, “The Regular Canons,” in Christian Spirituality, 218–28; Bernard McGinn, “The Victorine Ordering of Mysticism,” in The Growth of Mysticism: Greg-ory the Great Through the 12th Century (New York: Herder and Herder Book, 1994), 363–418. For a brief study primarily concerning the relationship between Dionysian-ism and the Victorines, see Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary, 216–19.

57. Rorem briefly explains how the Victorines, under the significant influence of Eriugena, came to place love above knowledge. Paul Rorem, Hugh of Saint Victor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 172–76; see also Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary, 216–19.

58. CH 7.1, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 161.59. See John Scotus Eriugena, chap. 7, lines 139–43 of Expositiones in Ierarchiam

Coelestem, ed. Jeanne Barbet, vol. 31 of Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediae-valis (Turnholt: Brepols, 1975), 95. The reference to Eriugena’s commentary on this text is indebted to Rorem, Hugh of Saint Victor, 173.

60. Refers to the Song of Songs in the Old Testament.61. Jacques Paul Migne, ed., Patrologia Cursus Completus, Series Latina, vol. 175

(Paris, 1854), 1038D, quoted in Rorem, Hugh of Saint Victor, 175.

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186 Chapter Three

62. Rorem, Hugh of Saint Victor, 175.63. Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary, 217–18.64. For a brief introduction to the life of Thomas Gallus, see Bernard McGinn,

The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200–1350), vol. 3 of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1998), 78–79.

65. Bernard McGinn, “Thomas Gallus and Dionysian Mysticism,” Studies in Spirituality 8 (1998): 83–84; McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 78–79. For a historical survey of the development of the two streams of medieval Dionysianism, see Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary, 214–25.

66. McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 80.67. MT 1.3, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 137.68. Thomas Gallus, Extractio, in MT 1, in Philippe Chevalier, ed., Dionysiaca, vol.

1 (Paris: Desclée, 1937), 710n578, quoted in McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 81. Gallus’s Extractio both translated and paraphrased the Dionysian treatises for ordinary readers. See McGinn, “Thomas Gallus and Dionysian Mysticism,” 84n11.

69. Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary, 219.70. Gallus’s synthesizing attempt was not limited to his interpretation of Diony-

sian texts. Gallus brought the account of eros/agape in the fourth chapter of the Divine Names into his commentary on the Song of Songs “in order to justify his inserting the affective erotic language of the Song into the vision of cosmic eros described by Dionysius.” McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 81; see also 360n49.

71. That is, love subsuming knowledge.72. McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 82.73. Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary, 221. In order to support his ar-

gument about the separation between knowledge and love originating with Gallus, McGinn quotes some phrases from Gallus’s corpus to the effect that the supraintel-lectual journey to a union with God or to the divine light requires leaving behind all intellectual effort. This is obviously Gallus’s interpretation of Dionysius’s Mystical Theology, but McGinn’s argument that Gallus was the first thinker to assert the need for a complete abandonment of knowledge is not persuasive. For example, Hugh of St. Victor’s well-known phrase—“love enters and approaches where knowledge stays outside” (Patrologia Latina 175:1038D)—may have anticipated Gallus’s position. It is also worth noting that Gallus’s paraphrase of the text of Mystical Theology implies to a certain extent the idea of “love subsuming knowl-edge,” rather than the total cessation of intellectual processes. McGinn’s argument would benefit from a clearer explanation of the difference between Hugh’s and Gallus’s positions with respect to the relationship between knowledge and love on the journey of ascent.

74. Bonaventure, On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology, trans., with intro-duction, Zachary Hayes, vol. 1 of WSB (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1996), in WSB, 1:43–45.

75. On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology, in WSB, 1:45.76. On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology, in WSB, 1:45.77. Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary, 220.

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78. The dialectic of procession and return is dominant in the Itinerarium. For ex-ample, Itin. prol. 1, in WSB, 2:35: “In the beginning I call upon that First Beginning from whom all illumination flows as from the God of lights, and from whom comes every good and perfect gift,” and prol. 2, in WSB, 2:37: “I was there reflecting on certain ways in which the mind might ascend to God.” Ewert Cousins compares the metaphorical movements of procession and return—downward and upward—in the Itinerarium to the architectural structure of the Gothic cathedral: “The movement of the stone as it reaches up toward heaven reflects the ascent through creation which Bonaventure describes in The Soul’s Journey, and the light streaming through the stained glass windows reflects the downward movement of God expressing himself in the variety of creatures and in his gifts of grace.” Ewert H. Cousins, introduction to Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey into God·The Tree of Life·The Life of St. Fran-cis, trans. and ed., with introduction and annotations, Ewert H. Cousins (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 16–17.

79. Rorem, “The Uplifting Spirituality of Pseudo-Dionysius,” 147.80. MT 1.1, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 135; Itin. 7.5, in WSB,

2:137–39.81. For the dialectic of similarity and dissimilarity between the creature and the

creator in Bonaventure, see Timothy Johnson, “Reading Between Lines: Apophatic Knowledge and Naming the Divine in Bonaventure’s Book of Creation,” Franciscan Studies 60 (2002): 139–58.

82. Johnson, “Reading Between Lines,” 149.83. Johnson, “Reading Between Lines,” 158.84. See Turner, The Darkness of God, 19–46, esp. 40–46.85. Itin. 5.5, in WSB, 2:117.86. Itin. 5.6, in WSB, 2:117.87. Itin. 5.7, in WSB, 2:119.88. Turner, The Darkness of God, 128.89. Turner, The Darkness of God, 129.90. Itin. 6.2, in WSB, 2:125.91. Itin. 6.3, in WSB, 2:127.92. Turner, The Darkness of God, 129.93. Itin. 6.4–6, in WSB, 2:129–31.94. Turner, The Darkness of God, 131.95. Itin. 6.7, in WSB, 2:131; see also Itin. 7.5, in WSB, 2:139.96. For a detailed study of the role of affectivity in the Itinerarium, see Elizabeth

Dreyer, “Affectus in St. Bonaventure’s Description of the Journey of the Soul to God” (PhD diss., Marquette University, 1982). See also Elizabeth Dreyer, “Bonaventure the Franciscan: An Affective Spirituality,” in Spiritualities of the Heart: Approaches to Personal Wholeness in Christian Tradition, ed. Annice Callahan (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), 33–44; Elizabeth Dreyer, “Affectus in St. Bonaventure’s Theology,” Franciscan Studies 42 (1982): 5–20.

97. Itin. prol. 4, in WSB, 2:39–41.98. Turner, The Darkness of God, 47. In the Itinerarium, “the traditional meta-

phors of affectivity, touch, taste and smell” are prevalent.

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188 Chapter Three

99. See Itin. prol. 4, in WSB, 2:38–40.100. Philotheus Boehner, “Notes & Commentary” on Itinerarium, WSB, 2:151.

For “admiration” in the Itinerarium, see also Dreyer, “Affectus in St. Bonaventure’s Description of the Journey,” 127, 135.

101. See Itin. 3.7, in WSB, 2:93; 4.3 (99–101); 5.7 (119); 6.3 (125–29). For ex-ample, Itin. 6.3 (125–27):

But as you contemplate these matters, beware that you do not think that you have come to comprehend the incomprehensible. For you still have something to consider in these six characteristics that will lead the eye of our mind with great strength to a stupor of admiration. For here we find the highest communicability together with the property of the persons. . . . Who would not be rapt in wonder at the thought of such marvels [Quis ad tantorum mirabilium aspectum non consurgat in admirationem]?

102. Itin. 4.3, in WSB, 2:101.103. Admiration is also associated with the emotion of fear that arises at the soul’s

overwhelming realization of the unknowability of God. See Boehner, “Notes & Com-mentary” on Itinerarium, in WSB, 2:151–52. McGinn points out that in chapters 5 and 6 it is not Bonaventure’s intent to demonstrate something regarding the divine attri-butes, but rather to arouse admiration. See McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 108.

104. Itin. prol. 4, in WSB, 2:39.105. Cousins, introduction to Bonaventure, 22.106. Itin. prol. 5, in WSB, 2:41.107. Itin. 4.3, in WSB, 2:101.108. “Transitus” in Latin.109. Itin. 7.4, in WSB, 2:137.110. Itin. 1.6, in WSB, 2:49–51.111. Itin. 1.6, in WSB, 2:50–51. McGinn surveys the historical development of the

scheme of the multiple powers of the soul that was later adapted by Bonaventure. He shows that the Bonaventurian sixfold scheme is an extension of a fourfold and later a fivefold scheme, to the latter of which Bonaventure added the apex mentis. See Bernard McGinn, “Ascension and Introversion in the Itinerarium Mentis in Deum,” in S. Bonaventura 1274–1974, ed. Jacques-Guy Bougerol and Etienne Gilson (Rome: Collegio S. Bonaventura, 1974), 3:547–48. However, elsewhere, McGinn shows that prior to Bonaventure, Thomas Gallus had added the “high point of the power of at-traction” or the “spark of the synderesis” (apex affectionsis/scintilla synderesis) to the upper level of the various powers of the soul in an attempt to merge the affective eros of the Song of Songs and the cosmic eros of the Divine Names. This is further confirmation of Gallus’s influence on Bonaventure. See McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 81–82, 106.

112. Etienne Gilson, The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, trans. Dom Illtyd Tre-howan and Frank J. Sheed (Paterson, NJ: St. Anthony Guild, 1965), 483n31; see also 329. This reference comes from McGinn, “Ascension and Introversion,” 538. Bonaventure distinguishes four faculties of the soul: the vegetative, the sensitive, the intellect, and the will in the rational soul. See Gilson, The Philosophy of St. Bonaven-ture, 343.

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113. See Gilson, The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, 343.114. For a detailed note about apex mentis or synderesis, see Boehner, “Notes &

Commentary” on Itinerarium, 163n11.115. II Commentarius in quatuor libros Sententiarum Petri Lombardi, d. 39, a. 2,

q. 1, in Doctoris seraphici S. Bonaventurae Opera omnia, 2:910, quoted in Boehner, “Notes & Commentary” on Itinerarium, in WSB, 2:163n11.

116. “For conscience dictates and synderesis either desires or flees from. . . . And so in order that we may speak properly, synderesis names the affective power in as far as it is naturally fit for the good and tends toward the good; conscience, on the other hand, names the disposition of the practical intellect.” II Commentarius in quatuor libros Sententiarum Petri Lombardi, d. 39, a. 2, q. 1, in Opera omnia, 2:914, 917 quoted in Boehner, “Notes & Commentary” on Itinerarium, in WSB, 2:163n11. Both Boehner and Cousins translate synderesis as conscience, which results in some confu-sion in light of the fact that Bonaventure distinguishes synderesis and conscientia. See Cousins, introduction to Bonaventure, 62.

117. See McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 107.118. Bonaventure also uses other terms to describe the final stages of the unitive

ascent, such as unitio amoris and sapientia vera. See George H. Tavard, Transiency and Permanence: The Nature of Theology According to St. Bonaventure (St. Bo-naventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1954), 241. For a detailed discussion of the Bonaventurian ecstasy or excess (excessus), see Tavard, Transiency and Permanence, 240–47; McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 106–12; Karl Rahner, “The Doctrine of the Spiritual Senses in the Middle Ages,” in Theological Investigations (New York: Crossroad, 1979), 16:117–28.

119. Boehner, “Notes & Commentary” on Itinerarium, in WSB, 2:147. In his own translation of the Itinerarium, Boehner frequently employs “transport” for excessus. See Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, vol. 2 of The Works of Saint Bonaven-ture, trans. Philotheus Boehner and F. Laughlin (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan In-stitute, 1956). See also Dreyer, “Affectus in St. Bonaventure’s Description,” 121–22.

120. For example: “Ut transeat ad pacem per ecstaticos excessus sapientiae chris-tianae” (Itin. prol. 3, in WSB, 2:36); “Ut transiens in illud per ecstaticum amorem” (Itin. 4.3, in WSB, 2:100); “Per . . . suspensiones excessuum” (Itin. 4.4, in WSB, 2:100–102); “De excessu mentali et mystico, in quo requies datur intellectui, affectu totaliter in deum per excessum transeunte” (Itin. 7.1, in WSB, 2:132); “Ubi in Deum transiit per contemplationis excessum” (Itin. 7.3, in WSB, 2:134); “Etenim te ipso et omnibus immensurabili et absoluto purae mentis excessu, ad superessentialem divina-rum tenebrarum radium omnia deserens et ab omnibus absolutus ascendes” (Itin. 7.5, in WSB, 2:138). While excessus mostly implies a transitional stage, there are cases in which ecstasis/excessus is associated with the state of the ultimate goal; for example, “ad ecstaticam pacem,” Itin. prol. 1, in WSB, 2:34, in which ecstasis is descriptive of the final goal of peace.

121. Itin. 4.3, in WSB, 2:101. The exultation that one experiences at the point of union with God is obviously an affective feeling; admiration involves the will (an affective aspect of the soul) and devotion is “an affective feeling toward God and Christ.” For a detailed explanation, see Dreyer, “An Affective Spirituality,” 41.

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122. Itin. 4.3, in WSB, 2:98–101: “Dum caritate complectitur Verbum incarnatum, ut suscipiens ab ipso delectationem et ut transiens in illud per ecstaticum amorem recuperat gustum et tactum.” The English version is quoted from Zachary Hayes’s translation except the two words in brackets. I employed different prepositions than those in Hayes to stress the implication of transition and means.

123. See, Itin. 7.4, 7.6, in WSB, 2:137, 139.124. Itin. 7.4, in WSB, 2:137.125. Itin. 5.7, 6.3, in WSB, 2:119, 125–29.126. Itin. 6.4, 6.6–7, 7.2, in WSB, 2:129, 131, 135. Ewert Cousins argues that

the coincidence of opposites is prevalent in Bonaventure’s writings. Particularly the last three chapters of the Itinerarium show how reflecting on the coincidence of op-posites in the divine attributes of God, in the personal attributes of the Trinity, and in the person of Christ leads the soul to ecstatic union with God. See Ewert Cousins, “The Coincidence of Opposites in the Christology of Saint Bonaventure,” Franciscan Studies 28 (1968): 27–45; Ewert Cousins, “Itinerarium Mentis in Deum,” chap. 3 in Bonaventure and the Coincidence of Opposites (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1978), 69–96.

127. Itin. 6.7, in WSB, 2:131.128. Bonaventure, Breviloquium 5.6.8, in Breviloquium, trans., with introduction

and notes, Dominic V. Monti, vol. 9 of WSB (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan In-stitute, 2005), 196.

129. McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 111.130. On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology, in WSB, 1:61. See also On the

Reduction of the Arts to Theology, in WSB, 1:45.131. McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 376n216. On Bonaventure’s emphasis

on the affective power of love in the soul’s rising up to God in his other writings, see Timothy Johnson, The Soul in Ascent: Bonaventure on Poverty, Prayer, and Union with God, rev. ed. (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 2012), 179–84. Fol-lowing Bonaventure’s threefold way to the ecstatic peace of contemplation proposed in his Commentary on the Gospel of Luke, Timothy Johnson articulates the anagogical journey of the soul, drawing on Bonaventure’s various texts. The threefold way con-sists of the way of James, the way of Peter, and the way of John, which, respectively, correspond to the ways of purification, illumination, and union. These two threefold categories again are reflected in the structure of the Itinerarium, in which, although not explicitly confirmed by Johnson, each way corresponds to first the prologue, then chapters 1 through 6, and finally chapter 7. Johnson’s articulation of the triple way leading to ecstatic peace helps locate the dense text of the Itinerarium, heavily laden with philosophical, theological, spiritual, and historical implications, within the development of Bonaventure’s theology and spirituality. See Johnson, The Soul in Ascent, 149–93.

132. Turner, The Darkness of God, 131–32. There are different opinions concern-ing the role of Christ in Dionysian mysticism. Without doubt, Dionysius brings Christ into his writings, but Bernard McGinn notes that “the Areopagite’s remarks on Christ are scattered and to some extent unassimilated into his more systematic works.” Mc-Ginn, The Foundations of Mysticism, 180.

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133. On Bonaventurian Christocentrism, see Zachary Hayes, The Hidden Cen-ter: Spirituality and Speculative Christology in St. Bonaventure (1981; repr., St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 2000); Zachary Hayes, “Christ the Center,” in Bonaventure: Mystical Writings (New York: Crossroad, 1999), 114–27; Zachary Hayes, “Christology and Metaphysics in the Thought of Bonaventure,” in “Celebrat-ing the Medieval Heritage: A Colloquy on the Thought of Aquinas and Bonaventure,” Supplement, The Journal of Religion 58 (1978): S82–S96; Ilia Delio, “Theology, Metaphysics, and the Centrality of Christ,” Theological Studies 68 (2007): 254–73.

134. Itin. 6.4–7, in WSB, 2:129–31.135. Itin. 7.1, in WSB, 2:133.136. Itin. 4.2, 4.3, in WSB, 2:97–99, 99–101. In the description of the soul’s trans-

formation, Bonaventure explains how in contemplating three aspects of Christ (the uncreated Word, the inspired Word, and the Incarnate Word), the three theological virtues—faith, hope, and charity—purify, illuminate, and perfect the soul. He as-serts that the soul embraces the Incarnate Word in love and passes over to Christ in ecstatic love.

137. Turner, The Darkness of God, 130–31.138. Itin. 6.7, in WSB, 2:131.139. Itin. 7.1, in WSB, 2:133.140. Itin. 7.2, in WSB, 2:135.141. Itin. prol. 3, in WSB, 2:37.142. Itin. prol. 3, in WSB, 2:37–39.143. Itin. prol. 3, in WSB, 2:39.144. Itin. 7.4, 7.6, in WSB, 2:137, 139. Bonaventure uses the allegories of light

and fire to represent the intellectual and affective aspects of the spiritual journey, respectively.

145. Itin. prol. 1, 3, in WSB, 2:35, 37.146. Itin. 7.6, in WSB, 2:139. Biblical references to the italicized phrases come

from, in order, Ex 33:20, Jn 13:1, and Jn 14:8.147. Turner, The Darkness of God, 132.148. Itin. prol. 3, in WSB, 2:37.149. Itin. 7.3, in WSB, 2:135.150. McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 94.151. McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 93.152. McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 93.153. The seven visions of the cross, revealed either to Francis himself or to others,

are recorded by Bonaventure in Major Legend 1.3, 1.5, 2.1, 3.5, 4.9, 4.10, and chap-ter 13, in FA:ED, 2:532–33, 534, 536, 544–45, 556, 557, and 630–39. McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 96; Ewert Cousins, “The Image of St. Francis in Bonaven-ture’s Legenda Major,” in Bonaventuriana: Miscellanea in Onore di Jacques Guy Bougerol OFM, ed. Francisco de Asís Chavero Blanco (Rome: Edizioni Antonianum, 1988), 317, 320.

154. Major Legend, 13.10, in FA:ED, 2:638–39.155. McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 96.156. McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 96

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192 Chapter Three

157. Major Legend, 13.10, in FA:ED, 2:638–39. See also Itin. prol. 3, 1.1–7, 7.1, in WSB, 2:37–39, 45–51, 133–35. The reference in the Itinerarium to the quotation from the Major Legend comes from Cousins, annotation to The Life of St. Francis, in Bonaventure, 314n45.

158. McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, 93.159. Joshua Benson, “The Christology of the Breviloquium,” in A Companion to

Bonaventure, ed. Jay M. Hammond, J. A. Wayne Hellmann, and Jared Goff (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 284–87.

160. Timothy Johnson, “Place, Analogy, and Transcendence: Bonaventure and Bacon on the Franciscan Relationship to the World,” in Innovationen durch Deuten und Gestalten: Klöster im Mittelalter zwischen Jenseits und Welt, ed. Gert Melville, Bernd Schneidmüller, and Stefan Weinfurter (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2014), 86. On Francis as the embodiment of a narrative or map of the spiritual pilgrimage to the divine and facilitator of a participative reading of the Itinerarium, see Timothy Johnson, “Dream Bodies and Peripatetic Prayer: Reading Bonaventure’s Itinerarium with Certeau,” Modern Theology 21, no. 3 (July 2005): 413–27; Timothy Johnson, “Prologue as Pilgrimage: Bonaventure as Spiritual Cartographer,” Miscellanea Fran-cescana 106–107 (2006–2007): 445–64.

161. See Itin. 7.3, in WSB, 2:135.162. Johnson, “Place, Analogy, and Transcendence,” 87. See also Johnson,

“Dream Bodies and Peripatetic Prayer,” 418–19.163. See Dreyer, “An Affective Spirituality,” 40–41.164. Major Legend 11.1, in FA:ED, 2:612. See also Itin. 7.4, 7.6, in WSB, 2:137,

139.

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