race, religion, and the contradictions of identity

Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

RACE, RELIGION, AND THECONTRADICTIONS OF IDENTITY: A THEOLOGICAL ENGAGEMENTWITH DOUGLASSS 1845 NARRATIVE

J. KAMERON CARTER

Identity is what is at stake . . .Stuart Hall1

I

This essay is about identitywho we take ourselves to be and how we orientourselves to others. More specifically, it is about how identity is performedand thought about; the contradictions, conflicts and even failures attendinghow it is performed and thought about; and finally, but most crucially, it isabout the central place of religion and, indeed, of theology in all of this. Itake up these concerns through a consideration of how they play out in animportant text of both American and African American letters, the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.2

Douglasss central, explicit aim in the Narrative is to tell the story of hislife as a movement from bondage to freedom, from property to prophet, fromchattel to abolitionist spokesman and public intellectual. In short, he wantsto give a confession, in the tradition of St. Augustine, of how he re-madehimself beyond the constricting confines of the ways that race had come todefine his existence in America. A counter-narrative of identity, a saga toldfrom the underside of modernity, one meant to give a different account ofwho he took himself to be and of his relationship to others: such is the story

Modern Theology 21:1 January 2005ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)

J. Kameron Carter,Duke Divinity School, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA

this celebrated text of American literature tells. Douglass engages in autobi-ographical jeremiad by taking up a kind of racialized writing, to useWilson Jeremiah Mosess expression,3 that had as its chief goal throwinglight on the American slave system (p. 102). Doing this required that he notonly re-present himself in a different light, one that positioned him as,from the first, fully human. It also required that he re-present himself as onewho had his humanity, indeed, his true identity, stolen and then sold intoAmericas political economy of slavery.4 The result was that he and thoselike him were rendered inarticulate on slave plantations before slavemasters. The 1845 Narrative is a literary work that resists the ethics of thisinarticulacy. In eleven suspenseful chapters, Douglass engages in a dramaticstruggle of religious fortitude and imagination; he wages a veritable war ofwords, meant, on the one hand, to put forward a rhetorically compellingaccount of his humanity and, on the other, to make a case for his freedom inthe context of the oppressive inhumanity of Americas slavery system.

A central feature of Douglasss literary battle over the symbolic construc-tion of racial and national identity is the critique, ensconced within the Nar-rative, of American religion. This critique and the contest over the symbolicconstruction of identity that it signifies is not operative simply at the levelof the eleven chapters that make up the body of the text properly speaking.It is also at work in the literary battle being waged between the Narrativespreface and the concluding appendix. The famed northern abolitionist,William Lloyd Garrison, wrote the preface, which was meant, as John Sekorahas remarked, to authenticate the Narrative by sealing Douglasss blackvoice and black message inside of a white envelope.5 In the appendix,however, Douglass speaks in his own voice, offering a moving soliloquy, apoetic ode against the slaveholding religion of this land (p. 97) or what heotherwise calls the Christianity of America (p. 99), and for the impartialChristianity of Christ (p. 97). It is this religious critique of the ways thatAmerica defined his identity, along with how he enlists theology into his cri-tique, that I wish to foreground in this essay. I do so for two reasons.

First, doing so will assist me in determining why an emancipatory poli-tics of identity often embroils us in contradictions and why, insofar as thisis the case, such a politics fails us. My reading of the Narrative will show howan identity politics often repeats a form of the self that needs overcoming.Second, carefully examining how identity works in Douglasss Narrative andthe contradictions within which it ensnares himin his case, contradictionscentering on gender or, more specifically, on the black femininewill putme in a position to show how his approach to theology in relationship towhat he takes religion to be actually aids and abets the problem instead ofproviding a liberating alternative to the debilitating form of self-identity itseeks to overcome. I want to consider why this is so, and in a final pro-grammatic gesture sketch a more theologically rigorous approach to howidentity might be re-thought and differently performed.

38 J. Kameron Carter

Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005

To make my case I pay particular attention to two scenes in the Narrative:Douglasss recounting of the beating of Aunt Hester (called Esther in hissubsequent autobiographies and in the remainder of this article) and thefamed altercation in chapter ten with the slave-breaker Edward Covey. Dou-glasss literary re-presentation of these events shows how the religiousnature of racial and national identity construction are linked in his under-standing, but also why certain contradictions and failings necessarily attendthose construals. For Douglass, remedying those failings requires a differentvision of the ends of religion and a different deployment of theological dis-course. Thus, the reading of the Narrative put forward here will show howthis work, in literarily rescuing the dignity of black life and in offering a dif-ferent vision of black identity, sought to reorient the American sacred mythosand its vision of American peoplehood.6 Crucial to the Narratives strategywas, first, a critical interpretation or unmasking of the ways Christs passionwas characteristically used to ground the political economy of slavery, andsecond, a redeployment or reinterpretation of that story in ways that wouldmake it comport to Douglasss flourishing as a black manthat is, as a blackmalein America. Hence, within the literary economy of the Narrative anumber of things are struggling to emerge. Chief among them is a differentway of understanding black identity. The overarching assumption of theNarrative is that a new understanding of black identity is possible onlyinsofar as a different vision of national identity, of the meaning of humanexistence in America, is also put forward. For this double re-imagining towork, it was necessary that Douglass re-conceive the aims and ends ofAmerican religion itself; that is, it was necessary that he reimagine howreligion is to function in the public sphere of politics, and how race ought tofunction in the American sacred mythos and in determining American peo-plehood. Black religion becomes the ground of this new vision of racial andnational identity. But what is black religionto say nothing of religionas such?7 Setting aside for now my deep suspicion about how the categoryof religion works in modern religious thought,8 it nevertheless is fair tosay that in the 1845 Narrative black religion ultimately (but not uncompli-catedly) means the unique ways in which black folks have appropriated thereligion of their masters; namely, Christianity.9 Aside from challenging theinner structure of American religion, the 1845 Narrative also subtlety engageswith the ways Christianity has been appropriated by black folks. It chal-lenges the widely-held view that black folks adopted a religious posture thatencouragedin fact even if not intentionallyacquiescence in their veryoppression. If Douglass is out to contest and re-direct the religio-symbolicconstruction of American national identity and the place of race within it, heis just as interested in contesting and redirecting the religio-symbolic con-struction of black identity and, crucially, how it is performed.

My aim is to recount Douglasss complex and subtle endeavor of re-charting the territory of racial and national identity, which he carried out by


Race, Religion, and the Contradictions of Identity 39

autobiographically probing the intersection of the meaning of religion ingeneral and of black religion in particular as they bear on the question ofracial and national identity. My objective is to lay bear the constructivepotential of what Douglass sought to accomplish by re-charting the terrainof black identity through a cultural reading of the cross of Christ and itsatoning effects. But besides this, I also question just how successful this sup-posedly new cartography of racial and national self-understanding is bypointing out the limits of Douglasss approach to theology qua cultural criti-cism. I will show why in the end his effort to re-map black identity andagency tragically fails. It fails, I contend, because it repeats the very form ofthe self from which it seeks liberation. To be sure, these two momentsofconstructive potential and of ultimate and contradictory failurethat aretightly interwoven in Douglasss narrative portrayal of himself are alsotightly intertwined in my own engagement with them. However, to avoidor at least minimize potential confusion, it is important to keep thesemoments logically distinct; for on the one hand, there is Douglasss move toread the dignity and the meaning of black life against the backdrop ofChrists passiona move fraught with unrealized spiritual, intellectual, andsocio-political potential which could provide a different way of engaging ina theology of culture. And yet there is the question, on the other hand, ofwhy this potential goes unrealized. Why this potential is left largely unful-filled, I argue, has everything to do with how Douglass conceives religionand how Christian faith and the theological enterprise are framed within thatunderstanding of religion. Douglasss construal of religion as but a culturalartifact and reflex, and theology as simply the discursive voice of that arti-factual reflex, unwittingly circumscribes Douglasss understanding of blackidentity within the very form of the self he so determinedly seeks to over-come. Starkly put, Douglasss endeavor shows how it is possible for one touse theological language in a way that is not actually theological. I want toconsider the tragic consequences of this possibility as it bears upon ourcurrent situation.

Having given the bulk of the essay over to laying out this problem, I con-clude by pursuing in schematic outline what theological reflection on iden-titycultural and nationalmust entail for Christian thought. Here I movebeyond Douglassand indeed much of the black intellectual tradition,including much of contemporary black theology, both of which inherit fromDouglass a certain way of thinking about religion and identity. I do so inorder to pursue an alternate path of rethinking the meaning of human exis-tence and identity in light of Christs passion, a path that Douglass indicatesbut never really enters upon. One might say that I want to read Douglasstheologically against himself. Central to my proposal will be an effort todraw modern theology back into the pentecostal nature of Christs passion.Doing so will allow me to re-conceive identity under a different rubric, thatof inter-humanity, a heading which exhibits the gift-structure of creaturely



existence. It will also become apparent that crucial to the pneumatologicalre-working of identity that I propose is a theology of creation rooted in aChristian doctrine of Israel and, through Israels election, a Christian doc-trine of the nations.10

II

Let me begin by turning to the subtly complex scene of the beating of AuntEsther in the Narrative. I want to tease out some of the ways in which thescene begins to unmask the ways identity is conceived and performed.11 Thescene is important because it brings together in one literary location the inter-twined moments of constructive potential and of ultimate failure mentionedabove. The scene takes place in the opening chapter of the Narrative. Mr.Plummer, the overseer who worked for Douglasss childhood master, AaronAnthony, is the protagonist who drives the scenes action. Yet as the quota-tion below reveals, the real object of concern in the scene is not so much Mr.Plummer as it is Aunt Esther. It is through Douglasss representation of Estherthat he is able to cast the scene as one of indignity and as a metaphorical rep-resentation of the structure of black selflessness in slaveholding America.Therefore, is it Esthera metonym of black indignity in the Narratives rep-resentation of thingswho is in truth the scenes primary subject. About Mr.Plummer, (who functions primarily as a literary prop that sets up what is tofollow, though he certainly is more than this), Douglass has this to say:

[he] was a miserable drunkard, a profane swearer, and a savage monster.He always went armed with a cowskin and a heavy cudgel. I haveknown him to cut and slash the womens heads so horribly. . . . He wasa cruel man, hardened by a long life of slaveholding. He would at timesseem to take great pleasure in whipping a slave.

The scenes center of gravity then decidedly shifts to Aunt Esther. I haveoften been awakened at the dawn of day, Douglass says,

by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own [sic] aunt of mine, whomhe used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back til she wasliterally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from hisgory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose. Thelouder she screamed the harder he whipped; and where the blood ranfastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make herscream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome byfatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin. (p. 18)

From this quotationand from the scenes subsequent unfoldingDouglassshows how violence mediates both white and black identity alike. Both, thatis, are brokered through Plummers cowskin and a heavy cudgel andsealed in fast-flowing blood. The result of Plummers bloody purpose



is to render white life articulate. Yet the articulacy of white existence is pos-sible only by either subjecting black life to a violent hush or by distortingits speech into that of a harsh scream. I will have more to say about thenature of the violence portrayed in this scene. For now, however, it is enoughto note an important implication of this episode regarding how identity isoften performed and imagined. The implication is that violence is the deepstructure, one might say, of the logic and practice of identity in America.

In this scene, however, Douglass is not content simply to register the factthat violence mediates (in-)dignity. Rather, the scene displays how the vio-lence in view is of a specifically religious and sacred nature, one that groundsthe mythos of American exceptionalism and peoplehood and the vision,enmeshed within that mythos, of the aims and ends of humanity. In otherwords, the scene brings violence and the sacred into close proximity.12

Brokering that nearness, moreover, is scriptural exegesis. That is, for Douglass the Old and New Testament scriptures afford the reader with thecontested ground of identity, a framework within which to fashion self-understanding and orient ourselves in the world. The scene, therefore, offersinsight into Douglasss broader strategy in the Narrative; namely, to conceiveof autobiography as exegesisindeed, as a counter-exegesis of the selfandexegesis as autobiography. Douglass deploys this literary form with a viewto challenging a prevailing outlook but also to struggling towards a differ-ent hermeneutical and theological basis on which to reconceive Americasself-understanding and its vision of the human.

Consider how the scene plays on Old Testament imagery. In speaking of Plummers bloody purpose, Douglass seems to align the overseer,Plummer, with the biblical figure of Cain. His suggestion is that as Cain wasbent on drawing his brothers blood (cf. Gen. 4), so white brutality, in theperson of Plummer, remained determined in its bloody purpose. Thatpurpose was not just physically to incarcerate the black body in pain,13 butalso to render it mute and utterly inarticulate. In this way the white manPlummer/Anthony, rather than blacks (in the person of Douglass), is shownto be the savage, indeed, a savage monster. This is the case because of thespeechlessness, inarticulacy, and illiteracy Plummer foists upon Aunt Esther,and even Douglass himself, who says that he had to labor through his owninarticulacy, as it were, to commit to paper the feelings with which [he]beheld [the ghastly scene] (p. 18). Thus, the narrative reveals that speech-lessness, inarticulacy, and illiteracy are the unique markers, the signs, of theloss of self. By contrast, speech, articulacy, and literacy are indicators of thedignity, freedom, and autonomous agency which Douglass, as self-mademan and abolitionist intellectual, has acquired and now embodies throughhis autobiographical account.

The Old Testament dimensions of the scene receive further amplificationwhen they are read against his aunt Esther, who aligns rather strikingly withthe scriptural figure of Abel. The crucial link between Esther and Abel is their



inarticulacy and indignity, which are accentuated all the more in view of thearticulacy and dignity of their antagonists. Both are articulate only in a non-conventional way: Abel, through his blood crying out from the ground; andEsther, through her heart-rending shrieks, screams, and the hushallintermingled, so to speak, with fast-flowing blood. Furthermore, in bothstories a third dramatis persona is active, God. In the fratricidal scripture story,God is the one to whom Abels blood cries out, demanding that God justifyhimself by vindicating the slaughtered victim. The scene of the whipping ofEsther likewise takes place before Gods all-seeing eyes, the One who isostensibly underwriting the social arrangement of white dignity over blackindignity in America, the One before whom prayerful tears are shed, andinto whose ears reaches Esthers cries for vindication. By setting Esthersbeating against the backdrop of story of Abel and Cain, Douglass advancesthe claim that the genesis of black indignity (co-originary with the loss ofblack agency) lay in the moral and ethical failures of slaveholding Chris-tianity. But even more radically, Douglass implies that the genesis of blackindignity lay perhaps as well in Gods failure to respond to the situation.God might be seen as culpable precisely because Esthers screams, whichplead for a rectifying response, go unanswered. The situation thus appearsanalogous to that of Abels cry to Goda cry, mind you, that is articulatednot by Abel himself, who lacks agency, but by the Mosaic authorand thecircumstances surrounding his cry (cf. Gen. 4:10).

This reading is deepened and enriched when one takes into account howthe dramatic persons in the scene of Esthers whipping are further figuredthrough New Testament allusions. Here Douglass, as is the case in much ofthe Christian traditions reading of the Abel figure, subtly aligns Esther, whois herself a type of Abel, with Christ. In reading Esther christologically, Douglasss subtle attack on American religions complicity in quelling blackselfhood gathers force. Troped through Christs Easter dereliction, Douglasssaunt, he says, could utter no words, no tears, no prayers capable of reach-ing a God who might have effectively intervened in her plight. Thus, througha deft typological reading Douglass dramatizes how the black body becomesconfigured as a sort of parchment onto which religious letters are violentlyscarred and emblazoned. But the blackened, bloodied body is a text of a par-ticular sort: namely, a palimpsest, a parchment over-written by a bolder, dom-inant text of American peoplehood, underneath which are visible the faint,partially erased but nonetheless distinct lines of a slave economy. By inter-weaving the Old and the New Testament figures into the narrative of blackoppression, Douglass subtly unmasks the perverted ways in which the Christian Easter story functions in the American sacred mythos. Indeed, hisreligious critique of the national imaginary cuts deepest as he discloses howthe story of the Pasch socio-politically grounds the American order of thingsand its attendant meaning of human lifefor both blacks and whites. This isrepresented in the way that Douglass frames the episode of the whipping of



Esther in paschal terms, with Esther as a figure of the crucified Christ. Byoffering a christological reading of Esthers humiliation, he takes his scrip-tural criticism and (counter-)exegesis to its most trenchant level, the level oftheology itselfthe theology of Christs passion and of suffering. But it isexactly at the point where the promise of Douglasss strategy appears mostfruitful and promisingi.e., uncovering the way the Easter story has beenused to ground American national identity by upholding white identity atthe expense of black identitythat it is also most fraught with problems. Themost acute difficulty with Douglasss strategy arises with regard to howgender functions in his own redeployment of the Easter story with a view toproviding a liberating account of black racial identity.

Consider more closely how Douglass frames the beating of his aunt Estherthrough the Easter story. Subsequent to recounting the facts surroundingEsthers beatingevents framed through allusions to Old and New Testa-ment scriptureDouglass immediately registers the psychic effects that thatbeating had on him as a child.

I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I wasquite a child, but I well remember it. I never shall forget it whilst Iremember any thing. It was the first of a long series of such outrages, ofwhich I was doomed to be a witness and a participant. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I wasabout to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit topaper the feelings with which I beheld it (p. 18; italics mine).

Jenny Franchot contends that [Douglasss] acquisition of manhood and,hence, of autonomy is achieved through this scene of Esthers suffering. Shefurther observes, commenting on this scene as Douglass later modified it inMy Bondage and My Freedom (his second autobiography), that the whippingprovokes [Douglasss] eventual emancipatory inquiry into the nature andhistory of slavery. The scene, in other words, allows Douglass to dramatizean ontology of slavery replete with an ethical structure of white articulacyand black inarticulacy. That ontology is one in which black identity has as itsprecondition a rupturing of the placid state of childhood innocence. The com-plementary aspect of this rupture is a recognition of ones state of inarticu-lacy and a concomitant desire to change that condition, that is, to bring speechout of silence. Such is the struggle for liberation. In the concrete terms of thisscene, the young Douglass, by virtue of being a witness and a participantto the whipping of Esther, is ontologized into the cavernous and dark innerrecesses of the indignity of slavery. He is brought into the logos or inner (ir-)rationality of modern racial self-understanding, and into the struggle forfreedom, for a different mode of consciousness that comes with having beenso awakened. In Douglasss case, it is the black intellectual qua abolitionistorator and representative man who uniquely realizes this different, liber-ated mode of consciousness. What is distinctive about this new mode of con-



sciousness/agency is its insight into the uses and meanings of religion forovercoming the indignity of inarticulacy and the loss of selfhood.

Douglasss advances in this new mode of consciousness notwithstanding,what is disconcerting about his account are the gender conventions at play.For Douglass indignityi.e., silenced agency, which amounts to no agencyat alland the feminine, particularly the black feminine, are made virtuallyequivalent. What this implies is that manhood is the place of redemptionand hence the locus of genuine identity and true agency. How these genderprotocols work is clearly evident in the way Douglass represents the Easterstory. As Jenny Franchot helpfully notes, Douglass acquired his virileautonomy somewhat at [Esthers] expense.

Receiving some thirty or forty stripes and suffering repeated whip-pings thereafter, Esther plays the sacrifice to his redemption. . . . Indeed,his success as abolitionist orator depends uneasily upon his recurrentinvocation of the whipped woman. . . . [In short, Esthers] suffering provides him with his credentials as victimcritical to his self-authentication as fugitive slave-orator; her femininity enables him totranscend that very identificationa transcendence critical to his successas the Representative Colored Man of the United States.14

Franchots reading is insightful, especially her observation that the event had the force of revelation for the child Douglass, that is, through itsdiabolic imitation of Christs manifestation of the concealed divinity, theevent disclosed for him the hitherto disguised interior of slavery.15 Thatconcealed interior is framed metaphorically and christologically, but also atthe same time somatically as feminine. The religious problem, for Douglass,thus provesalbeit unwittinglyto be the problem of the black feminine.Moreover, by reflecting upon the meaning of his aunts beating and the psy-chological effect it had on him, Douglass brings into close proximity theproblematic of religion, race, and gender. This confluence of images, ideasand experiences may well explain why the awful force of slavery struckhim so forcefully at that precise moment. Having been a voyeur of sorts tothe beatingwhich is staged as a kind of rape in which he was made, as hesays, to participatethe child Douglass can no longer see the world as pureand virginal. Again, the epochal status of the beating reveals itself; it willbecome the first of many beatings to which he will be privy. He realizes thatthe modern construction of race, which rationalizes black inhumanity, is aviolent affair. But, as his language suggests, Douglasss world is now alsocomplexly gendered in its violent configurationwhich is at the same timea disfigurementof race and peoplehood. The beating initiates him into agendered and en-gendering reality. The phallic imagery he uses to portraythe beating confirms as much: Douglass re-presents himself as about to passthrough the hymenal veil, as it were, and so enter into the blood-stainedgate. The theological language by which Douglass deepens his imagistic



use of the New Testament constitutes the framework which allows him toidentify what is really going on behind the religious discourse that isAmerica. Indeed, the blood-stained gate through which [he] was aboutto pass from innocence into (self-) consciousness is in fact his entrance tothe hell of slavery.

But what is this bloodstained gate which leads to a descent into theunholy Saturday of slavery, the veritable sojourn through Hades, if not thebrutal beating of Esther? Indeed, the beating of Esther is something to whichDouglass bears witness, but also something in which he participates, albeitvicariously. He participates by virtue of his identification with her, as he toois a slave. Her abuse is vicariously his abuse; her inarticulacy is vicariouslyhis inarticulacy, an inarticulacy that he wish[ed] [he] could commit topaper; and the indignity of her femininity, which shows itself on her bruisedbody, is in fact his acquiescing femininity in the face of the dignified mas-culinity, freedom, and articulacy of the brutal father-figure Plummer/Anthony. The crucial point in all of this is that the black female body madefigural in his aunts physical body becomes the summum in nuce of the indig-nity of chattel existence; woman or the feminine as acquiescent passivityeffectively comes to re-present what it means to be a slave, the rich symbol-ism of the Easter Pasch further facilitating that re-presentation. Not surpris-ingly, Douglasss struggle for freedom, which entails the struggle for releasefrom the condition of racial indignity, becomes at the same time a struggleagainst the loss of masculinity. Hence, freedom as the movement towardsliberated selfhood is re-presented as resistance to the femininethat is tosay, enslaved unconsciousness. Resisting the feminine, then, is part andparcel of Douglasss quest to seize the consciousness of manhood andthereby a consciousness of self-reliance, virile articulacy, and liberated iden-tity. Douglasss aim, therefore, having entered into what Wilson JeremiahMoses has called the constraints of racialized writing,16 is to occupy theposition of being master of himself; that is, he seeks to occupy the posi-tion of self-reliant sovereignty as the mode of true agency and emancipatedidentity. Herein lies freedomthe freedom of manhood.

III

Douglass recounting of Esthers beating, replete with its rich symbolism ofthe Easter Pasch, shows how he construes the meaning of slavery and whatthe implications of the latter are for acquiring a liberated self. Folded intoDouglasss account of the beating is the Easter story, which together with thenarrated events forms a dramatic portrayal of slaverys ontology by meansof an alignment of Esther with the figure of Christ in his passion. In this narrative emplotment, it is important to see that Christ too is somaticallyfeminized. By the time one gets to Douglasss account of his adolescent altercation with Covey in chapter ten of the Narrative, however, there is a



shift in the way that the image of Christs passion is recounted. In this latterepisode, Christ is masculinized; he becomes an emblem of dignifiedmanhood that overcomes the feminine. The Easter story, in other words, isre-told as a gnostic saga of the masculine self. Indeed, it becomes agnosis of the black, liberated self. I want to consider how the Narrative,having earlier interpreted the Easter story as one of feminine weakness,now through this latter scene redeploys the passion narrative as a ventureinto self-made manhood. It is worth stating again that my central concern isto show how religion functions in this re-framing and why theology toooften abets rather than mitigates the problems latent within it.

Chapter ten of the Narrative unfolds as a series of smaller altercations thatDouglass had with slave owners. He notes that these altercations had as theirgoal beating him into submission and breaking his will for freedom. Even-tually buckling under the weight of the brutalityfor [during] the first sixmonths, of that year, he says, scarce a week passed without his whippingme. I was seldom free from a sore back. (p. 56)Douglass records how hispassion for freedom was eroding. Fairly quickly Douglass is reduced to con-fessing that a few months of this discipline tamed me even though I wassomewhat unmanageable when I first went there. Indeed, Mr. Covey suc-ceeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My naturalelasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to readdeparted, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark nightof slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!(p. 58). In this poignant episode in chapter ten, but also in the Narrative as a whole, Douglass reaches his nadir. The account builds to a crucial con-frontation, the point where Douglass reverses his [transformation] into abrute, undoing how a man became a slave (italics mine). Manhood thusbecomes . . . the crucial spiritual commodity that one must maintain in theface of oppression.17 How does Douglass represent this spiritual com-modity? Furthermore, how does he maintain [it] in the face of oppres-sion? On both scores Douglass once again draws upon the Easter story,deploying it as the master-narrative which frames his dramatic fight withCovey and hence his resistance to oppression.

According to the Narrative, Douglass one day fell ill with extreme dizzi-ness to the point that [he] trembled in every limb. At about three oclockof that day [he] broke down; [his] strength failed [him] . . . [he] could standno longer, [he] fell . . .. (p. 60). Covey immediately demanded that Douglassreturn to work. Exceedingly feeble, he does not comply. For this failure torespond, Covey rewarded Douglass with a number of swift kicks and, finally,a heavy blow upon the head, making a large woundlike the wound pro-duced by the crown of thorns forced upon Christs brow. From this wound,. . . the blood ran freely (p. 61). Douglass remained on the ground bleed-ing profusely, probably only semi-conscious, and Covey, seeing him in thisquasi-dead state, left [him] to [his] fate.



Douglass then decided to flee Coveys plantation and return to the townof St. Michaels to throw himself at the mercy of Mr. Thomas, the master whosent him away to Covey, the nigger-breaker, in the first place. While enroute, Douglass once more loses consciousness from his loss of blood: I felldown, and lay for a considerable time. . . . For a time I thought I should bleedto death. (p. 61). After a while he regains his strength, gets up and journeyson to arrive that night at the home of Master Thomas. Thomas refuses toassist him in his escape and insists that Douglass return to Coveys planta-tion in the morning. Just as Douglass noted the exact hour of his beating theprevious day (three oclock), so now too he makes a point of mentioning thetime: I remained all night and, according to [Master Thomass] orders, Istarted off to Coveys in the morning, (Saturday morning,) wearied in bodyand broken in spirit. (p. 62; parenthesis original). The time reference willprove most important symbolically in Douglasss account of how heacquired his dignity. Seeing Covey coming towards him at about nineoclock Saturday morning with his cowskin to give me another whipping(p. 62), Douglass flees, fearing for his life, into a nearby field. These eventsoccurred on Saturday. Recall that on the previous afternoon (Friday), Douglass was left for dead, metaphorically crucified, at the three oclockhour (cf. Luke 23:44).

Douglass thus continues to wage a subtly antagonistic war against scrip-tural enslavement that begins already in chapter one of the Narrative. Thisscene in chapter ten continues his counter-exegesis of scripture and of theself by claiming Jesus three oclock hour of dereliction as his own. Douglassthereby seeks to alter the very structure of Christian consciousness and slave-holding religion by insinuating within the very core narrative of Christianfaith itself a space for the dignity of black life and selfhood. Stated differ-ently, in bringing attention to the time of his own quasi-death, Douglassunites his death with the death of Jesus on Good Friday. Literarily the sug-gestion is that God manifests Godself in black suffering and in the blackstruggle for dignity and selfhood.

By invoking but also by extending in his autobiographical account thesymbolism of the Passion, Douglass effectively complicates it. An instanceof this can be seen in the way he portrays his dealing with an old advisor,a slave acquaintance, Sandy Jenkins, from whom he seeks advice as to whatcourse it was best for [him] to pursue. Sandys counsel was for Douglassto

go back to Covey; but that before I went, I must go with him into anotherpart of the woods, where there was a certain root, which, if I would takesome of it with me, carrying it always on my right side, would render itimpossible for Mr. Covey, or any other white man, to whip me. . . . I atfirst rejected the idea, that the simple carrying of a root in my pocketwould have any such effect as he had said, and was not disposed to take



it; but Sandy impressed the necessity with much earnestness. . . . Toplease him, I at length took the root, and, according to his direction,carried it upon my right side. This was Sunday morning. (p. 63; empha-sis original)

This episode introduces a certain ambiguity into Douglasss Easter portrayalof events, in particular a vagueness regarding the nature of his liberated anddignified self. The scene effectively questions whether it is Christianityeven if a distinctively black Christianityor the root, which is emblem-atic of black folk ways and customs, that mediates his deliverance fromCovey. Douglass is dissatisfied with both options, as is evident by the wayhe literarily re-presents Sundays and Mondays eventsfor Douglasssdealings with Sandy occur on Saturday. The events of Sunday would groundhis dignity as a black man on the black feminine (and her supposedly acqui-escent religiosity). However, Mondays events seem to ground this newlyacquired dignity in black folk life and folkways. In the Narratives represen-tation of things these two ways of conceiving and rescuing black selfhoodare proximate, even if they are both inadequate in themselves. Indeed, itwould appear that the Narratives judgment against the black feminineentails as well a judgment against black folk life. Hence, both must be sub-lated into his consciousness as abolitionist intellectual. This is demonstratedin the subsequent unfolding of the story.

Before turning to this subsequent unfolding to see how this double judg-ment against the black feminine and black folk life is worked out, I want toconsider briefly an episode from chapter two of the Narrative, since it offersan important clue as to how Douglass understood the folk.18 The scene isalso important because it is one of the first interpretations of the sorrowsongs or the Negro spirituals, as they are often called.19 Crucial for myargument is the fact that Douglass frames his interpretation of the slavesongs in language similar to what he used in describing the epochal statusof the punishment of Esther only one chapter earlier. Coming to terms withthe singing of the slave songs gave him [his] first glimmering conceptionof the dehumanizing character of slavery. Those songs, he says, had theeffect of impress[ing] some minds with the horrible character of slavery,[more] than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject coulddo (p. 24). Indeed, reminiscent of the sentiment expressed in EsthersbeatingI remember the first time I witnessed this horrible exhibition. . . .I shall never forget it whilst I remember any thing. . . . It was a terrible spec-tacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it (p.18)Douglass here relates similar feelings: The mere recurrence to thosesongs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expres-sion of feeling has already found its way down my cheek p. 24). What wesee in this similarity of feelings is that, for Douglass, the black feminine andblack folk life occupied two nodes on a continuum through which he sought



to renegotiate the terms of black existence, in particular the terms of his ownexistence as a black man. The more prominent of the two nodes, I want toargue, was that of the black feminine. That clear emphasis notwithstanding,the significance of the second node should not be underestimated.

Douglass observed that the slaves would, out of reverence, inject into thesesongs with great exuberance something about the Great House Farm (p. 23;italics original)an affectionate reference to the village-like plantation onwhich he lived as a child (p. 22). At the time he really did not . . . under-stand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs,along with their references to the Great House Farm. The means to thisappreciation was lost on him while he was a slave and existed within thecircle of slavery. While trapped within slaverys circle, he neither saw norheard as those without might see and hear (italics mine). But having nowstepped outside the circle, Douglass is able, paradoxically, to claim access tothe inner meaning and pathos of the songs. What it means for him to be anintellectual, one who has plumbed the depths of the slave songs and theinner caverns of common folk life, is defined precisely in this way: to be ableto lift the veil of consciousness and to plumb the depths of the truemeaning of religion and identity. This is now possible precisely to the extentthat he himself has access to and is living out of a different mode of con-sciousness. In just this way religious inquiry and theological analysis becomecultural criticismand nothing more. Something akin to this, along with animportant gendered dimension, is evident in the moving episode justrecounted.

Douglasss analysis of slave singing is a veritable lifting of the veil, agesture that prefigures W.E.B. Du Boiss peering into the souls of black folks.Upon raising the veil, what does he see? He sees how the slaves anguishof deprivation and their rapturous hopes for deliverance joined in theirvision of the Great House Farm, the symbol of oppression, glory, . . . [and]repose.20 He discerns, in short, the cultural significance of the Great HouseFarm and its role in the trek towards liberated selfhood. In the slave dirges,the Great House Farm symbolizes the barrier to the realization of blackdignity and selfhood, the bog where black folks have gotten stuck in theirtrek towards freedom. The songs capture something of this incompletion ofconsciousnessa state of not-yet-self-consciousnesssuspended betweenrapturous hope and anguishing sorrow. At the upper limits of this unhappyconsciousness sits the Great House Farm, the horizon of transcendence. Dou-glass notes how one song in particular captures this dialectical sentiment:

I am going away to the Great House Farm!O, yea! O, yea! O! (p. 23)

Note how the last line of the stanza oscillates between, on the one hand, ananguishing and suspenseful O and, on the other, an exclamatory yea.Significantly, it is the lamenting O rather than the affirmable yea that



both opens and closes the line. Hence, Douglass concludes, at root songssuch as this one represent the sorrows of [the slaves] heart; and [the slave]is relieved by them only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears (p. 24).Douglass grasps this because he neither saw nor heard as those withoutmight see and hear. What he sees rather is the primacy of culture for decod-ing who we take ourselves to be. In short, Douglass interprets the meaningof race, religion, and nation within cultures ultimacy.

Incorporating references to the the Great Farm House into slave songscan only lyrically intone the symbolic barrier to the realization of black self-hood; it cannot as such overcome that barrier. The songs at best signify anincomplete revolution in black consciousness; at worst, they signify no rev-olution at all. Hence if black selfhood is ever to be attained, so the momen-tum of the Narrative suggests, black folk life must rise above this limitation.The final part of the Douglass-Covey altercation episode does just this. Inlaying siege to the Christian Easter story, Douglass triumphs over Covey;but at the same time he does so by overcoming Sandys root and the blackfeminine.

We are now in a position to return to the fight scene of chapter ten. Withthe root at his side, Douglass returns to Coveys plantation. Importantly, hishomecoming is made against the backdrop of the symbolism of the threeholy days of Easter. Because he is not fully persuaded of the power of theroot, Douglass actually anticipates a physical confrontation with Covey.However, no fight ensues. Rather, on Easter Sunday morning out cameMr. Covey on his way to [church] meeting. Douglass observes: [Covey]spoke to me very kindly, bade me drive the pigs from a lot near by, andpassed on towards the church. Now, this singular conduct of Mr. Coveyreally made me to begin to think that there was something in the root whichSandy had given me. Douglass becomes half inclined to think the root tobe something more than I at first had taken it to be (p. 63). Perhaps thereactually is something potent and efficacious about black folk culture!

Douglass, however, is quickly and rudely awakened from his slumbers:All went well till Monday morning. On this morning, the virtue of the rootwas fully tested (pp. 6364). The roots power consisted apparently only indelaying the inevitable, for on Monday morning Covey commenced whip-ping Douglass for the weekends indiscretions. Douglass fully resists him,meeting violence with violence and, in the end, relies neither on black folkreligion nor on American Christianity, but rather on himself to bring abouthis own resurrection. Identity begins and ends with the sovereign self.With these actions of resistance and self-assertion, Douglass seizes hismanhood, thereby overcoming the black feminine (even as he overcomesSandy and the limitations of black folk culture) on his way to acquiring hisdignity.

In order to see more clearly how Douglasss victory over Covey consti-tutes a masculine triumph of self-reliance and to conclude this part of the



essay, it is worth recounting a few more important details in the aforemen-tioned altercation. Long before daylight, Douglass relates,

I was called to go and rub, curry, and feed, the horses. I obeyed, and wasglad to obey. But whilst thus engaged, whilst in the act of throwing downsome blades from the loft, Mr. Covey entered the stable with a long rope;and just as I was half out of the loft, he caught hold of my legs, and wasabout tying me. As soon as I found what he was up to, I gave a suddenspring, and as I did so, he holding to my legs, I was brought sprawlingon the stable floor (p. 64).

Coveys attempt to tie Douglass with a long rope from a joist in the stableconjures up the earlier episode of the beating of Esther. Recall how Mr.Plummer, the cruel overseer, used to tie [Esther] up to a joist, and whipupon her naked back (p. 18). By alluding to this earlier traumatic scene,Douglass implies that his own resistance to Covey constitutes a refusal to befemininized through beating. Douglass instead refuses to submit, therebyseizing his masculine dignity but also his freedom: Mr. Covey seemed nowto think he had me, and could do what he pleased; but at this momentfrom whence came the spirit I dont knowI resolved to fight; and suitingmy action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I didso, I rose (p. 64).

Interestingly, Douglasss resolve to fight Covey, and so deny white maledominance, is a complicated Christian moment, refracted as it is through the Easter mystery and its language of resurrection: I rose. Douglass hereclaims New Testament authority to challenge scriptural enslavement. Butwhat is also apparent is Douglasss reversal of his earlier negative portrayalof Christianitys Easter story as endorsing feminine docility and submis-siveness. In laying claim to the Pasch for himself, Douglasss own newly-gained freedom and dignity assume a distinctively christoform or paschalshape. The Easter story is now recast not as the story of femininity but as astory of the recuperation of masculinity. Such is his recoveryas he put it in the Narratives important appendixof the impartial Christianity ofChrist, a retrieval that has embedded within it a problematic, masculinegendering of Christianity and of Christ. By repeating the oppositional logicat work in the discourse of race within the American myth of national iden-tity, Douglas mires himself even deeper in the very structures from whichhe most vehemently struggles to extricate himself. The difference now,however, is that the problematic repetition of this logic brings to light thevexed relationship between race and gender (and indirectly, even class).

The gendered aspects of his fight with Covey are made strikingly appar-ent by Douglasss subsequent comments. Surprised at Douglasss resistance,Covey is described as being taken all aback and as trembl[ing] like a leaf.At this Douglass was buoyed, [holding] him uneasy, causing the blood torun where I touched him with the ends of my fingers (p. 64). The blood



image once again becomes centralbut with a difference. For now it isCovey, not Douglass, who is bleeding, and it is Douglass, not Covey, whobrandishes in his bare hands the lash. Indeed, Douglasss fingers havebecome instruments of the very violence he once received and reviled.Having inverted the structures of power and authority, Douglass seeshimself as a Christ figure who battles Covey for some two hours before thelatter concedes defeat, that is, until Covey is feminized, made to acqui-esce. For, [the] truth [was] he had not whipped me at all (p. 65), since atno point had [Covey] drawn . . . blood from me, but I had from him.Throughout the 1845 Narrative, blood is not only a symbol of the femininebut a portent to the fight, which initiates the flow of blood. To be sure, thisstruggle is not just a racial fight, but a gendered one as well. Of the alterca-tion with Covey, Douglass himself admits that it revived within me a senseof my own manhood (p. 65).

What are we to make of Douglasss newly acquired, virile dignity? WhatI have been laboring to show in this essay is that the dignity Douglass seizescomes at the expense of the indignity of the black feminine and of the reli-giosity of black folk life. In other words, Douglass enacts a vision of the selfthat tragically repeats the vision of the human under which he was held asa slavebut with an important difference. Douglass is now the masculinemaster of his fate and of himself by his overthrow, on the one hand, of theblack feminine and black folk life and, on the other, of Coveys position ofwhite authority. He is now the self-made religious and cultural critic qua abo-litionist intellectual. He has become, in short, a cultural theologian of theemancipated self.

IV

The above engagement with Douglasss Narrative cries out for constructiveresponse. To be sure, such a response could follow a number of possible tra-jectories. For example, it could be pursued in the direction of a theology ofgender (perhaps along the order of womanist and feminist theology21); or in the direction of a political philosophy that reconfigures the relationshipbetween religious thought and political theory (perhaps on the order ofJeffrey Stouts recent and important statement on democratic pragmatism22);or in the direction of a democratic philosophy of race (perhaps on the orderof Cornel Wests work on a pragmatic philosophy of religion and a tragi-comic conception of race or on the order of Eddie J. Glaude, Jr.s recentattempts to develop an approach to black identity grounded in pragmatichistoricism, in particular the philosophy of John Dewey23). My intention isnot to pursue any of these concernsat least, not directly. Rather, I wish tolay the groundwork for how a vision of identity might be developed beyondthe intractable entanglements outlined above so as to provide a rigorous theological basis from which these lines of inquiry might be advanced. By



establishing a rigorous theological basis I mean, to use the language ofJeffrey Stout, an attempt to construct an understanding of identity on thebasis of Christianitys full-fledged truth-claims24specifically those theological claims regarding the meaning of Easter as classically expressed,for example, in patristic and high medieval Christian thought.25

From within the literary economy of the 1845 Narrative, Douglass helps usappreciate the ways in which the contradictions and discontents of moder-nitythe question of identity specificallyare to a large extent symptomaticof the failures of modern theology itself. That is, he helps us see how themodern theological imagination proves surreptitiously complicit in the fash-ioning of a distinctively modern self, forged as it is in the kiln of sacrificial,sacred, and therefore sanctifying, violence. As Michel Foucault so bril-liantly saw in the 1970s in his lectures at the College d France, war struc-tures modern societies, and integral to the tactics of that warfare are thebio-politics of racial identity.26 Douglass has already, in many ways, madeFoucaults point. But he says more. Submerged in his narrative is the claimthat theology as a discourse has functioned to support this warfare of the selfand thus the hypocritical Christianity of this land (p. 97). Douglass hasautobiographically shown, perhaps more clearly than Foucault, how theo-logical language buttresses rather than challenges the political economy andits social order.27 Even if he insufficiently extricates himself from or finallyfails to provide an alternative to the form of political life he criticizes, Douglasss religious indictment of the political economy of slavery is telling.He contends that behind the political economy of American slavery lay atroublesome social performance of the Easter story. Although Douglass iscorrect in his diagnosis, he fails in his execution. For on his autobiographicalreading of things, the Pasch proves not to be an alternative politic and socialarrangement. It becomes instead transformed into the cultural allegory, thesacred myth, of the American political order.28 As represented within the Narratives textual horizon, the American political economy is exposed as aneconomy of sacrifice, for it requires sacrifice to maintain its totality; withoutblood there is no preservation of the social order.29 The reading of the Narrative offered here shows that, within the terms of Douglasss cultural cri-tique, the Easter story (laced as it is with modernitys logic of race) nonethe-less continues to structure the American sacred mythos. The terms andmeaning of identity have not changed. But my reading of the 1845 Narrativegoes further: first, it foregrounds the work that the Easter mythos actuallydoes within the American political imaginary and, second, it exposes howtheology has often functioned to support rather than subvert that imaginary.

As regards the social functioning of theological discourse, Douglasssindictment might be formulated as follows: scripture and its theological sig-nifications have in actuality been made to function as the immaterial or spir-itual superstructure that sanctions the material structures of power in theAmerican social order and its political economy of slavery. Easterto con-



tinue his indictmentdoes not represent an alternative mode of being in theworld, for what the story at least in its cultural performance simultaneouslyconceals and enacts is the truth of raw power and its supposed ultimacy.There cannot be, so the story goes, a genuine recuperation of black selfhoodapart from a prior narrative of self-sufficient power. For power is the truthof things; it is the story of being as such. It is this last move of seeing poweras the meta-narrative of existence and of interpreting Christianity as a reflex,a cultural expression, of power that leads Douglass to remain mired in thisdebilitating mode of self-construction, but now at the level of gender. Nevertheless, in exposing how a certain construal of power stands behindmodern forms of identity and self-understanding, and how this narrative ofpower is at root religious and theological, Douglass does us a great intellec-tual service. Not only does he unmask, albeit partially, the ideological ruseat the heart of American racial and national identity, he also shows how theseconstructions are aided and abetted by Christianity and Christian theology.

What, then, is to be made of the contradiction at the heart of Douglassswork? I want to suggest two ways of accounting for this contradiction beforeoffering my own constructive proposal about how to move beyond Dou-glass. One way of accounting for the internal contradictions of Douglassscritique is in terms of dogmatic theology. Dogmatically, Douglass reads thespiritual story of Easter as a narrative of raw power, of white power onthe basis of which he then seeks to seize for himself the material power ofmanly dignity. Such an interpretation not only entraps him within the verystructures of violence from which he seeks escape, but it forecloses the truthof the story of the Cross which, while accessible through its cultural perfor-mance, nonetheless exceeds and transforms that performance. Because Dou-glass misses the excessive dimension in the power of the Cross, he fails toappreciate how the story of the Cross recounts an altogether different visionof material power. In short, the inner logic of the theology of Christspassiona story of power as self-dispossession and disempowerment, ofascetic and aesthetic renunciationseems lost on Douglass. Consequently,he fails to appreciate sufficiently how the revelation of power in the cross ofChrist is an exchange of love wherein poverty and wealth, possession anddispossession are not opposed to one another, but are rather mutually inher-ent and so are mutually constitutive.30 Douglass is, moreover, unable to seethat this story of Gods loving dispossession in Christ through the Spirit is a trinitarian story of the repetitiona true repetitionof creation(Kierkegaard), the recapitulation (Paul; Irenaeus) of the many words of cre-ation in the one, eternal Word of God (Maximus the Confessor). This truth-ful and thus positive repetition occurs in the Holy Spirit, that is, in the Giftin whom all gifts, including the gifts of dignity, identity, and freedom(Gregory of Nyssa), are given. The Spirit of God enacts Israels hope for acoming Kingdom throughout her long history with hopeful signs arrival. Butthe Spirit of God is also Supreme Gift, sacramentally and liturgically received



in the church, in order that all life might be released not merely into beingor existence, but into a full and flourishing existence (what Maximus calledwell-being), indeed an ecstatic, super-well-being through deification. Inthe dramatic movement from being to well-being to super-well-being, iden-tity is preeminently conferred as gift. Regrettably, by foreclosing a more clas-sically dogmatic approach to the theology of the Passion, Douglass relapsesinto a well-worn but false telling of the Easter story as a narrative of cultur-ally illicit power.

This brings me to the second way one might account for the contradic-tions in Douglasss unmasking of the problem of black identity in America.Douglasss primary fault is that he attacks a style of religious thought withweapons derived from the very theologically co-opted outlook that he istrying to overturn. Without question, he is rather adept at showing whathappens when theological discourse functions as nothing more than a sym-bolic or religious superstructure that legitimates the present material order,the so-called real order of things. When he is reflecting back to moderntheology its own deficiencies, Douglass is clearly at his best. Bearingprophetic witness and exposing the falsity of a purely human religiousknowledge that is gnostically accessed through some cultural calculus ordiscursive technique of power is clearly his forte. Without question, Dou-glass has in a profound way tapped into a black religious gnosis through hiscultural re-reading of the passion of Christ. But even in exposing the whitereligious gnosis31 upon which modern theology characteristically tends toground the political economy, he succeeds only in part.

Christian thought more often than not tends to ventriloquize the Ameri-can social order rather than bear witness to an alternative form of socio-political existence. In this Douglass is exactly right. But what is not oftenappreciated is the way in which modern theologys failure in this regard leftDouglass (and many other black intellectuals besides him) with no live alter-native. For what remained was recourse only to a tragic inhabitation of thevery vision of the self in need of overcoming. Thus, he, like many black intel-lectuals after him, could not help but be committed to a radically democra-tic vision of the self with its grand religious visionor eternal logic, asW.E.B. Du Bois once saidof emancipation.32 Douglass fails to come to termswith the theological depths of the paschal mystery and so, unwittingly, endsup miming some of the most pernicious aspects of modern religious thought,one of the most central of which is dissembling on how Christs passion sets peoplehood within a qualitatively different moral and socio-politicalhorizon. What Douglass partially glimpses but fails fully to articulate, then,is the central importance of how Christ re-locates the world within Godslife through his obedient love in the Spirit. Such is the new ground of iden-tity for Christianseven and especially black Christians.

What is instructive about Douglasss failure, then, is this: his appeal tomodern theology to reflect differently not only on the meaning of the



humanand thus on the selfbut also his appeal to theology to refashionits self-understanding and its connection to life. Douglass petitions theolo-gians to reflect on what it means for theology to be a discourse; that is, amode of thought and a set of practices of the self. On this point, PierreHadots work on ancient philosophys self-understanding could prove quiteuseful. Hadot argues that prior to seeing itself as a specialized form of discourse, philosophy was a way of life, a form of non-Christian asceticspirituality.33 What might it mean for modern theology to restore such a distinction? And what would it mean to affirm that Christian theological dis-course is faithful only to the extent that it witnesses to the form of life, thestyle of being, that is an aesthetics and ascetics of Gods triune love? It wasout of such an understanding that much of early Christianity maintainedthat it was a philosophy, the true discourse of life and practice of thePassion.34 Christian theologys distinctive contribution to human identityand to how the self might be conceived and practiced would be to under-stand the self as neither a static possession nor as aimlessly adrift in theworld. Rather, it would be to conceive of the self in christological terms, thatis, in terms of how identity becomes forged anew in the Easter Pasch. Buthere Easter is to be understood as a drama of dispossession rather than as adrama of raw powerthe latter of which is something that Douglass, fol-lowing the terms of the American religious mythos, assumed rather thanchallenged.35 But what does it mean to have an Easter identity, to exist dispossessively and not powerfully, if not to become pentecostal,pneumatic, or spiritual?

A brief consideration of Acts 2, which demonstrates this pneumatic wayof existence, can help clarify what I mean here and so conclude the essay. Acrucial sign of the coming of the Spirit, and therefore of human conformityto the Cross, is the ability both to hear and to speak languages that are notones own. This sign indicates the reversal of the judgment that descends onhumankind in Genesis 11 whereby God allows various peoples of the worldto remain trapped within their various self-enclosed political and culturalboundaries. Such was the divine judgment against such ways of being in theworld. Pentecost signals Gods reversal of this judgment. Yet the reversalcomes about only by way of God being faithful to Gods promise to Israel,the seed of Abraham. The promise was that Israel would be pivotal in theprocess by which nations and the peoples of the world would be deliveredfrom the enclaves of their various national and cultural identities. The Chris-tian claim is that Israels pivotal position in the reversal of the judgment ofGenesis 11, which is never superseded, reaches its crescendo in Jesus ofNazareth.

How so? Christs life, which culminates in the hour of his passion, is the pneumatological foil to Genesis 11, the foil that reverses creations self-enclosure, first and ultimately, over against God and, second, but no lessimportantly, over against itself. Israel is crucial in effecting this reversal, for



she is elected by God to mediate creations re-creation. Through Christ, theseed of Abraham, the world in its entirety becomes conscripted into Israelsdestiny in and for the world. Israels destiny is not, nor has it ever been,closed in upon itself; it is not solipsistic. Rather, her election is to be herselfprecisely by being more than herself, which is to say, by being for the world.Israel is called and chosen to be a non-nationalistic nation, a different kindof peoplethe people of God. This non-solipsistic destiny is brought tofruition in Christ, who is at once child of Israel and Son of God/Son of man.He is most truly the former as he is most fully the latter, inaugurating a NewCovenant economy to the extent that he disrupts the logic of cultural andpolitical nationalisms and identities. Having disrupted this faulty perfor-mance of language and therefore of identity, Christ re-performs it and,through the momentum of his life, draws creation into the grandiloquenceof his re-performance. Such is the pentecostalization of the world. To bedrawn into Christs incarnate, passion-ate way of existence is to beschooled in a new mode of speech and identity.

Christs cry of dereliction on the Cross anticipates the full pentecostal-ization of the world; indeed, it prefigures certain aspects of the miracle oflanguages in Acts 2. Note that the poverty or powerlessness of language sig-nified in the cry is the very means by which Christ seizes anew the wealthof language and so re-articulates and redeems the meaning of identity,dignity and peoplehood. His life of linguistic dispossession, impoverish-ment, and powerlessness draws creation into the kenosis of the Logos. In thisway he grants to creation a new, inflamed, Pentecostal tongue. Creation isnow given spiritual ears to hear in Christ the language of Gods triunelove. The surprising feature of this hearing, however, is that it is discernedprecisely in and as the various languages (logoi) of creation itself. Creationhears the divine language by being swept into the embracing overabundanceof Gods Logos, which at once creates the world and passion-ately releasesitself into the world so that God might accompany creatures in their journeyback to God and hence toward self-realization. The story of Gods journeywith Gods creatures occurs, then, in historythe history and flesh of Israel,which culminates in Jesus of Nazareth. For in Jesus God has brought Israelshistory to an irrepeatably unique pitch, whereby Christ becomes translatedinto the languages of all nations. In brief, what emerges within this neweconomy of divine love is a self that is known in, through, and as anothera transformation which entails a re-imagining of identity on both personaland cultural levels. All of this means that the destiny of a given nation, itssense of peoplehood, is bound inextricably in Christ to the destinies of othernations and their sense of peoplehood. Indeed, this sense of co-people-hood or inter-nationalism is theologically rooted in the unfolding ofChrists existence in history as an eschatological movement towards theKingdom of God, an unfolding in which the church haltingly and imper-fectly, but for all that no less truly, participates. To restate the point: what I



am gesturing towards here is a Christian theology of Israel and of the nationsthat un-asks and then re-asks the question of identity by situating thatquestion within the ultimate horizon of creations destiny; namely itsdivinization in Christ through Gods Spirit.

Such an understanding of identitywhich has profound ethical, socialand political consequencesleads to an understanding of nationhood andpeoplehood that refuses any final grounding in a politics of political and cul-tural nationalism. Geo-political, ethnic, racial or cultural demarcations proveimpotent in generating authentic human identity. Only an identity that real-izes itself by being ecstatically caught up into the divine language as sungin the revelation of God in Christ will finally suffice. Being thus enraptured,the prospect of restoring a proper theological identity to creation is genuinelymade possible. Indeed, one small sign of this nascent, re-created identityoccurs whenever people begin, by the grace of Gods Spirit, to speak as theirown a foreign or adopted language, the language of divine sonship. In sodoing, nationalism (i.e., identity construed in binary terms and therefore asself-enclosure) is broken.

Acts 2 gestures toward this through its double miracle of speech and audi-tion, on the one hand, and, on the other, the miracle of repetition (whichdeepens and extends the first miracle, as witnessed throughout the remain-der of Acts). The miracle of speech is most evident in the way that certainJerusalem Jews (cf. Acts 1) were granted the ability by the Spirit to speak inlanguages not their own (Acts 2:14) the promises that the God of Israelsecured in the life of Christ. The miracle of audition then follows. Devoutdiaspora Jews were able to hear and comprehend Gods promises translated,without diminution, into the dialects of the nations (Acts 2:56). The rest ofthe book of Acts charts how this grand miracle of repetition, the wondrousinterplay of Spirit-inspired speech and divinely-guided audition, reverber-ates throughout the entire amphitheatre of history. Indeed, such repetition(re-) creates history as an extension of Christs Easter, as his passion-ate,pneumatological body. This new history and body politic inaugurated byChrist thus proceeds by way of the early Jewsor more accurately, earlyJewish-Christiansreturning to the nations from which they came and con-tinuing to speak the truth of the God of Israel in the languages of their non-Jewish host nations. In the course of this new unfolding of historythehistory of Christs post-Easter body now made available to the worlda ver-itable revolution of language, and so of culture and identity, is effected. Forall languagesnow having the Word which is Jesus as their ultimatedestinyare enabled to be released from their self-enclosures, made open toother languages by the creaturely words sung in the Word of God. Identitiesthereby become multi-layered, polyphonous and marked by heteroglos-sia, as Mikhail Bakhtin might say.36 Such is the inter-humanity of thepeoples of the world.37 The openness that marks Israel in its destiny to befor the world, an openness that restores the openness of the nations, is part



and parcel of the openness of creation to God as revealed in Christ. Themeaning of the human, then, can only be firmly understood within the theological openness and vulnerability of Gods creation as revealed andconsummated in the person of Gods Son.38

Many contemporary approaches to the self and to the question of identityoften fail precisely because modern theology has in crucial ways failed. It hasfailed principally because it has too often been nothing more than a culturaldiscourse, the discourse of white nationalism that has intercepted and prematurely inhibited the realization of a genuine theological identity. In this respect, it has been a white theology. And what makes such a theology white is precisely its anti-Jewishness. It is white exactly becauseit is insufficiently paschal, charismatic, pentecostal, and spiritual. I do notmean by this that all white theology has actively and intentionally adopteda posture antagonistic towards Jews, though this has been true for far toomuch of it.39 What I mean is that what makes this theology white is that itdoes not do its work pentecostally; that is, it does not proceed from within thedistinctively Jewish-Christian horizon of the miracle of speech, the overturn-ing of nationalism, and the theological re-founding of human identity via theperson of Jesus of Nazareth. As such, it is unable to speak the truth of the Godof Israel in a tongueand therefore in a cultural and political orientationnot its own. It is unable to fathom how another reality sacramentally and icon-ically might bear the presence of God. This inabilitywhat I should like tocall the stammering of whitenessinfects its overall vision of the humanperson and leads to a repression of black identity. Douglass at some basic levelhad an inkling that the problem lay in this direction. He grasped that thisinability bespeaks modern theologys failure to utter anything but the lan-guage and cultural ethos of whiteness, where what is white is perceived asdignified because it is conceived in broadly Kantian terms as an end-in-itself. Douglass sensed that the Cross in some way profoundly disrupts thisnationalism and its deeply problematic vision of the self. Yet, to the extent thathe barricaded himself within the citadel of the self-made, Emersonian-Franklinian man, he alas remained captured by the aura of a self-enclosedwhiteness.40 Because Douglass could not break the spell, he repeatedevenif unwittinglythe debilitating contradictions of modern identity.

NOTES

1 Stuart G. Hall, Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities in The House That RaceBuilt: Black Americans, U. S. Terrain, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Pantheon, 1997),p. 291.

2 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave inAutobiographies: Frederick Douglass, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Library ofAmerica, Penguin, 1994). Subsequently referred to internally by parenthetical reference tothe page number. It should be noted that Douglass wrote two subsequent autobiographiesover the course of his life: My Bondage and My Freedom and The Life and Times of Frederick



Douglass. For critical inquiry into the interrelationships between these autobiographies andhis lifetime endeavor to write and re-write himself, see Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake theNations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress, Belknap Press, 1993). I do not engage the autobiographies subsequent to the 1845Narrative here as my aim is not to do a literary history centered on Douglass and his autobiographical writings. Rather, my objective is to foreground the religious and deeplytheological character of Douglasss approach to identity in the Narrative for its contempo-rary significance.

3 For more on this see Wilson J. Moses, Writing Freely? Frederick Douglass and the Con-straints of Racialized Writing in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed.Eric J. Sundquist, Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1990). This article builds on Mosess observations to showthat the constraints of racialized writing within which Douglass found himself had to dowith his efforts to navigate the straits of race in America. But it had just as much to withhis efforts to re-define how race functioned in the determination of national and religiousidentity.

4 My use of the term political economy is informed by Jeffrey Sklanskys account of its usein late eighteenth-century America and into the nineteenth-century. Those uses were significantly shaped by Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations (1776). Sklansky says, The namecommonly given that synthetic science by Smith and his contemporaries was politicaleconomy, by which they meant the study not solely of the production and distribution ofwealth, the main focus of Smiths masterpiece. Political economy concerned as well thebasis of social order, broadly conceived to comprise psychology and ethics, law and poli-tics . . . In this inclusive sense as the science of human nature and society, political economyprovided the foundation for late eighteenth-century political thought. Jeffrey Sklansky,The Souls Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 18201920 (Chapel Hill,NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), p. 14. In speaking of the political economyof slavery, then, I mean to indicate the way in which slavery regulated the socio-politicalorder.

5 See John Sekora, Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority inthe Antebellum Slave Narrative, Callaloo, No. 32 (Summer 1987), pp. 482512.

6 Craig R. Prentiss provides a useful working definition of myth for my purposes. A mythis a narrative that not only claims truth for itself but is also seen by a community as cred-ible and authoritative. To hold that a narrative is credible means to understand it as beingtrue, either literally, as is often the case, or in some sense, metaphorically. When the com-munity sees a story as authoritative, the story is understood as setting a paradigm forhuman behavior. In other words, human beings point to the story to authorize (give author-ity to) their preferences, to justify or re-create their social patterns, or to guide their deci-sion making. So . . . stories achieve the status of myth among a given people by the waythey are used. See the introduction to Craig R. Prentiss, ed., Religion and the Creation of Raceand Ethnicity: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2003), p. 5 (italicsoriginal). My understanding is also informed by Eddie J. Glaude, Jr.s discussion of the ide-ological dimensions of myth in the same volume. See Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Myth andAfrican American Self-Identity in Religion and the Creation of Race and Ethnicity: An Intro-duction, ed. Craig R. Prentiss (New York: New York University Press, 2003), pp. 2931 andn. 7 on p. 40. For a consideration of the philosophical and theological positivity of mythsee Ferdinand Ulrich, MythosLogosSeinserfahrung in Logo-Tokos: Der Mensch Und DasWort (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 2003).

7 This question has been given renewed energy through the work of a number of scholarswho have returned to the work of Charles H. Long. See, for example, James W. Perkinson,Reversing the Gaze: Constructing European Race Discourse as Modern Witchcraft Prac-tice, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 72, no. 3 (2004); Anthony B. Pinn, Why,Lord?: Suffering and Evil in Black Theology (New York: Continuum, 1995); Anthony B. Pinn,Varieties of African American Religious Experience (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1998);Anthony B. Pinn, Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion (Minneapolis, MN: FortressPress, 2003). Longs work has also been influential on the work of religious ethicist VictorAnderson. According to Long, religion is the phenomenon that makes particular reli-gious and theological discourses possible. See Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs,



Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion, ed. David Carrasco, et al., rev. ed., Seriesin Philosophical and Cultural Studies in Religion (Aurora, CO: The Davies Group Pub-lishers, 1995).

8 Suspicion about how the category of religion functions in modern thought is raised inTalal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam(Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Richard King, Orientalism andReligion: Postcolonial Theory, India and the Mystic East (London: Routledge, 1999). Throughan engagement with Longs work, but also its recent re-appropriations, I take up this ques-tion in earnest in chapter 3 (Opaque Faith: Charles H. Long and the Significations of BlackReligion) of my forthcoming Race: A Theological Account (Oxford University Press).

9 See Sharon Lynn Carson, Ambiguous Tradition: Religious Language and Problems of Cultural Authority in Selected 19th-Century American Literature (Ph.D. diss., Universityof Washington, 1990); Sharon Lynn Carson, Shaking the Foundation: Liberation Theologyin Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Religion and Literature Vol. 24 (1992), pp. 1934.

10 Behind this is an important theological assumption that I cannot fully develop here; namely,the presupposition that Christs life, including his Easter mode of existence, is ongoing andcontemporaneous with each epoch and historical moment. It is this contemporaneity thatprovides the basis for a theology of history and of culture(s), a theology in which each his-torical moment and cultural and political expression analogically participates in the divineeconomy of the Trinity as disclosed and historically embodied in Jesus of Nazareth. Theanalogical participation of history in Gods triune life must not be understood as placidand untrammeled. Rather, the way each epoch exists in Christ is riddled with tensions.This is because existence in Christs economy is always an uneasy combination of sinfulresistance to and embrace of the will of God that ethically expresses itself in how persons,groups, and nations relate to one another. I draw here on several sources. Among pre-modern and early modern theologians, I am indebted to Irenaeus of Lyonss Adversus Haere-sus, the Christology of Maximus the Confessor, especially as articulated in Ambigua 7 and41, and particularly the theology of the seventeenth-century French theologian PierreBrulle. Among contemporary thinkers I draw, particularly, on the religious undercurrentin the work of W.E.B. Du Bois; the thought African American religious historian Albert J.Raboteau; the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar as expressed in his theological trilogy onaesthetics, drama, and logic; Erich Przywaras doctrine of analogy; and the thought ofphilosopher Ferdinand Ulrich on language, myth, and cultural folklore. Note the follow-ing references: Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, 7 vols.(San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 19821989); Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, 5 vols. (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 19881998); Hans Ursvon Balthasar, Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory, vol. 1 (San Francisco, CA: IgnatiusPress, 2000); W.E.B. Du Bois, Writings: The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, the Soulsof Black Folks, Dusk of Dawn, Essays and Articles (New York: The Library of America, 1986);P. Erich Przywara, S.J., Polarity: A German Catholics Interpretation of Religion, trans. A. C.Bouquet (London: Oxford University Press, 1935); Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: TheInvisible Institution in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978);Albert J. Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995); Albert J. Raboteau, The Legacy of a Suffering Church:The Holiness of American Slaves in An Unbroken Circle: Linking Ancient African Christianityto the African-American Experience, ed. Fr. Paisius Altschul (St. Louis, MO: Brotherhood ofSt. Moses the Black, 1997); Ferdinand Ulrich, Homo Abyssus: Das Wagnis Der Seinsfrage(Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1998); Ferdinand Ulrich, Logo-Tokos: Der Mensch Und Das Wort(Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 2003).

11 For a masterful engagement with this episode, to which I am indebted, see Jenny Franchot,The Punishment of Esther: Frederick Douglass and the Construction of the Feminine inFrederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist, CambridgeStudies in American Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1990).

12 For a literary and philosophical engagement with this issue see Ren Girard, Violence andthe Sacred (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). This is a recurrent themein his oeuvre.



13 See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1985).

14 Franchot, pp. 143144.15 Ibid., p. 141.16 Wilson J. Moses, Writing Freely? Frederick Douglass and the Constraints of Racialized

Writing.17 Richard Yarborough, Race, Violence, and Manhood: The Masculine Ideal in Frederick

Douglasss the Heroic Slave in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed.Eric J. Sundquist, Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 167.

18 The interpretation which follows has been significantly influenced by David Leverenz,Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).

19 W. E. B. Du Boiss interpretation of the slave songs in The Souls of Black Folks (1903) takesits lead in many ways from Douglasss reflections on the songs. To my knowledge, however,a critical appraisal of the connections between their interpretations, and their significancefor the formation of the black intellectual imagination, has not been done. As for Du Boissinterpretation of the songs and its significance for his thought and beyond, see Paul AllenAnderson, Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought (Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 2001); Ronald Radano, Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago,IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Shamoon Zamir, Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois andAmerican Thought, 18881903 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

20 Leverenz, Manhood, p. 125.21 For a classical expression of womanist theology, see Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilder-

ness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993). I would alsopoint the reader to the essays collected in Part V, Black Theology and Black Women inJames H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore, eds., Black Theology: A Documentary History, Vol.1: 19661979, second revised ed., (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993). See also the essayscollected in Part IV, Womanist Theology in James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore, eds.,Black Theology: A Documentary History, vol. 2: 19801992 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993).

22 Jeffrey Stout, Democracy & Tradition: Religion, Ethics, and Public Philosophy (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 2004).

23 Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Pragmatic Historicism and the Problem of History in Black Theol-ogy, American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, Vol. 19 no. 2 (May 1998), pp. 173190;Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century BlackAmerica (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Pragmatismand Black Identity: An Alternative Approach, Nepantla: Views from South Vol. 2, no. 2 (2001);Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Myth and African American Self-Identity.; Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.,Tragedy and Moral Experience: John Dewey and Toni Morrisons Beloved in Pragmatismand the Problem of Race, ed. Bill E. Lawson and Donald F. Koch (Bloomington, IN: IndianaUniversity Press, 2004); Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Prag-matism, ed. Frank Lentricchia, The Wisconsin Project on American Writers (Madison, WI:University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).

24 Stout, p. 14.25 A good summation of the patristic traditions on these matters can be found in Aloys

Grillmeier, S.J., Christ in Christian Tradition: From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (451), trans-lated by John Bowden. Vol. 1, second revised ed. (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1975). Onmedieval thought and the theology of Easter and the atonement, see Jaroslav Pelikans finework, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 3, The Growth ofMedieval Theology (6001300) (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 19711990).

26 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College De France, 19751976,trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003).

27 As regards this point about Fo

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