In other cultures of early modernity, however, the strained ties holding together the “great chain of being” (a vision that integrated divine transcendence and immanence, spirit and flesh, reason and emotions, theory and practice, asceticism and pageantry) increasingly showed signs of rusting and breaking. Under the reforming passion of Protestant Christianity beginning in the sixteenth century, cultures of festivity were gradually replaced by cultures of discipline, leading to forms of Christianity that were more suspicious of ritual, aesthetics, and festivals than the prevailing vision of the Middle Ages.48 As early as the Reformation, if not earlier, there was a shift in Christianity from corporeal and ritualized practices toward a disembodied and disenchanted form of Christianity, with heavy emphasis on doctrinal propositions, catechisms, and mental states. Though this trend is also evident in the concerns and mandates of the Counter-Reformation, the Puritan variety of these reforms developed a particular concern with discipline and punishment, as it sought to repress the festive, ecstatic, Dionysian expressions of Christianity with a work ethic of self-regulation, restraint, and order. Modern capitalism, as Max Weber famously argued, would be built of such things.
The forms of culture, religion, and custom that did not conform to the new ideals of self-control and restraint became tantamount to indolence, moral torpor, economic debility, and religious barbarism; in North America, Catholic, American Indian, and African behavior and forms of worship were considered cases in point, specifically prone to idolatry, futility, and dereliction of duty.49 To forge a more perfect union of disciplined, rational, and professional modes of life, cultural and religious traits that did not match Calvinist and neo-Stoic values were to be repressed and colonized into submission; they didn’t have a future in a well-ordered society. In the case of Catholics, almost everything they did smacked of unproductive and primitive values: sacramental rites and popular festivals, feasting at cemeteries, dancing around the maypole, the veneration of saints and angels, shrines associated with paganism and the natural world, the aesthetic extravagance of carnival, baroque architecture, and so forth.
Excess and ostentation would fall on hard times in the modern world, leading to a more incorporeal conception of the soul. In someone like René Descartes, this seems clear: his embrace of neo-Stoicism led him to redefine the meaning of “soul,” making it resemble the soul of the philosophers more than the soul of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to paraphrase Blaise Pascal. In my reading, this led to a damming of the torrential tributaries of the soul, to a more sedate and staid view. Here is how Descartes described a “great soul”: “The greatest souls . . . are those whose reasoning powers are so strong and powerful, that although they also have passions, nonetheless their reason remains sovereign.”50 What would have he said about the holy madness, flaming eroticism, and emotional rapture of Teresa of Ávila or of the black church that W. E. B. Du Bois later described? “A sort of suppressed terror hung in the air and seemed to seize us—a Pythian madness, a demoniac possession, that lent terrible reality to song and word. The people moaned and fluttered, and then the gaunt-checked brown woman beside me suddenly leaped straight into the air and shrieked like a lost soul, while round about came wail and groan and outcry, and scene of human passion such as I had never conceived before.”51 The congregation’s sensual, aesthetical drama, described here—the guttural murmurs and shouts, the rushing to and fro, waving and clapping of hands, pounding of feet, weeping and laughing, all the eroticism—surely would have been far too profligate and passionate to suit Descartes’s standards. This behavior would have represented the drowning of reason in a deluge of emotion, the rush of blood to the heart that in effect deprives the brain of oxygen. The acquisition of soul demands sobriety, moderation, and reason. For Descartes, black religion, and for that matter the Catholic baroque, would have been quintessential examples of the fall of reason into the undisciplined body of excess and intemperance; they would have been seen as the sudden invasion of a Pythian madness into the sane company of philosophers, or the revenge of Dionysus on the Enlightenment of Descartes’s day.
As I consider throughout this study, there is a shared indulgence in the beauty and sensual delights of the human experience in African American Christianity and a Latin baroque Christianity. Though the former tended to be far more auditory (a stress on the spoken Word), while the latter was more visual (a stress on the Logos in visual and ceremonial forms), they converged on a deeply felt incarnational theology, one that electrified the body and aroused the festive, mystical energies of religion. In these instances, the representation of soul was deeply aesthetical and ran afoul of modern attempts to rationalize, bureaucratize, and sanitize the human soul, whether in philosophy, civil society, or the new world order of capitalism.
The Ethical Contours of Soul: What Does It Profit a Man . . .
In the new bourgeois marketplace of the early modern period (especially in Protestant countries from the eighteenth century forward), the integrity of the soul was increasingly endangered. The idea of the soul would have to fight for its livelihood in the face of forces that depreciate its value, that barter and exploit it for its economic worth. Like a parable out of the “prosperity gospel” in North America (the conviction that God rewards enterprising behavior with financial blessings), the new capitalist version of the soul likened the Christian message to the values of free enterprise and effectively consecrated the pursuit of wealth. In severing itself from many of the moral fetters of old—the troublesome injunctions to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, and visit the prisoner—the modern self was given free rein to pursue material progress without restriction, to pursue self-gratification with impunity.52 Classic vices like acquisitive self-interest and greed were magically transformed into benign self-regard, a fundamental right of a modern human person and a guiding principle of the public realm of economics and politics. As Brad Gregory argues, the capitalist society required this new construction of avarice, an ideological about-face that upended the Gospels’ negative view of greed and sought to prove Jesus wrong: you can, after all, serve God and money.53
Of course the classic Christian position on ethics disavows these principles, this entire alchemical business that would commodify and transform the values of the soul into products of gold. We cannot speak of the soul and not address the exorbitant cost of gaining the whole world: namely, the loss of one’s soul (a comment found in all three synoptic Gospels). In assessing this famous adage by Jesus in modern times, it is difficult not to be struck by its relevance and prescience. In contrast to versions of Christianity that hallow the capitalist economy of desire (for fashion, consumer products, fetishes, wealth, etc.), the cultivation of the soul implied in the biblical tradition requires a prophetical, oppositional stand to the sinful drive to possess and dominate the world. It requires a drastic conversion from self-regard to other-regard, a love that is infinite in scope and more lavish and ostentatious than its competitor’s values of limitless consumption.54
Those who adhered to this classic reading of the concept of the soul and resisted the temptations of the new continued to shepherd many of the grievances brought against the most vulgar and defiling aspects of capitalism. Already at the dawning of modernity, in the early eighteenth century, a figure like Soren Kierkegaard expressed his befuddled dismay at the seeming ease with which Christianity embraced the new bourgeois world. He called this new order “Christendom,” a term that signified the betrayal of Christianity and victory for the gods of profit and shameless self-interest (there are no Christians in Christendom, Kierkegaard famously remarked). Christendom represented for him an unmistakable calamity, the parade of glory and power instead of abasement and abnegation, the promotion of sentimentality and mawkishness in lieu of the message of the cross, philanthropy instead of true agape.55 In these betrayals and others, Christendom was for Kierkegaard a