It is interesting that slaves had religion at all. In Aristotle’s Politics, he says that religion requires a certain amount of luxury and ease to believe that ‘the good’ can be sought and maintained. It is hard to see why this is necessary, until modern philosophy developed the idea of nihilism; Nothingness as the only truth. Belief in Nothing comes from a tragic experience of life, and one can see why this could happen: imagine sharing love with your mother, who is suddenly whipped, has a bloodhound let loose on her and then is sold to another place far away. It is not difficult to imagine anybody living like this laughing outright at the concept of a caring God. In this world, love leads inevitably to suffering; the only way anybody does escape suffering is by chance (cf. Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil).
Religion has a hard time adequately addressing the idea of ‘chance,’ which is why the Calvinist’s predestination is difficult for modern people of more affluence (thus having less need to address chance) to understand. However, whatever myth somebody believes, it is more acceptable when one is on chance’s good side: through the early years of her life, Jacobs “was so fondly shielded that [she] never dreamed [she] was a piece of merchandise, trusted to [her owners] for safekeeping, and liable to be demanded of them at any moment” (281). Because Jacobs had a relatively good life in her youth, her grandmother was able to imbue a sense of morality and faith into her. It seems to be a general rule that most of the younger slaves in Jacobs’ narrative believed without apology in a just God: Jacobs relates the story of a mother beside her daughter (she was dying in labor with a child) told by her mistress, “Heaven! There is no such place for the like of [your daughter] and her bastard.” The girl replied, “Don’t grieve so, mother; God knows all about it; and HE will have mercy upon me” (287).
Although this girl of fifteen years believed God would save her, it seems terribly morbid she felt that salvation came only by death. On the plantation, most thought the justice of God only appeared in afterlife; it was hard to see Providence (“Who knows the ways of God?” says Jacobs’ grandmother [284]), and thus an otherworldly sanction became the only tether to faith. Piety and morality were capable of only the most devout since God’s work was literally nowhere to be seen.
This was true for mainly one reason. Religion was crafted by the ruling class to fully exclude blacks, and in fact to make blacks enemies with it. When her child was to be baptized, Jacobs says, “My grandmother belonged to the church; and she was very desirous of having the children christened. I knew Dr. Flint would forbid it, and I did not venture to attempt it” (295). Jacobs did end up baptizing the child after Dr. Flint went away for his medical practice, but this episode clearly shows how religion was discouraged among slaves; whites opposed black participation in religion on the ground that they were not good enough ‘things,’ let alone people.
Why this is important can be explained: in Plato’s Republic, Socrates discusses with Glaucon and Adeimantus the idea that the most moral person is the one who has the reputation in the polis as the most immoral, yet still seeks ‘the good;’ in the Christian story, Jesus was not exactly a rockstar everywhere he went – a lot of people hated him. Because it requires a tremendous beatitude to continue this sort of life, many abandon the castigating path of piety for lower standards. Conversely, says Plato, the most immoral are those who create a façade of morality while truly being wicked. In his Duke of Marlborough, Churchill writes of one such person, Louis XIV:
“No worse enemy of human freedom has ever appeared in the trappings of polite civilization. Insatiable appetite, cold, calculating ruthlessness, monumental conceit, presented themselves armed with fire and sword. The veneer of culture and good manners, of brilliant ceremonies and elaborate etiquette, only adds a heightening effect to the villainy of his life's story.”
For Churchill, the villainy is that ‘the bad’ was presented as ‘good.’ It helps to recall how appealing the snake appeared in Eden; his artificial ‘goodness’ was something Eve could not resist, and considering his true motives, this made the snake purely Satanic.
In Jacobs’ narrative, most people fall somewhere in between these two poles, except for Dr. Flint. He tried to sell Jacobs’ grandmother in private, saying it was out of respect for her, when it was truly to escape his own humiliation (285). In another case, Dr. Flint caped his dubious motives for trying to send Jacobs to an isolated living space as “trying to make a lady of [her]” (288). Since people like Dr. Flint were presented as moral beings to the community, a real problem arose for the religiosity of slaves, because (especially for those who could read Scripture like Jacobs) it contradicted the idea of God and justice: “…the condition of the slave confuses all principles of morality, and, in fact, renders the practice of them impossible” (291).
The simple fact of the matter is that civil life, where one could base what one saw on rationality, was far different than slave life, where passions drove decisions. Literally nothing that happened on the plantation made sense on any level: clouded rationality was itself what prevented whites from seeing blacks as political equals (cf. Peter C. Myers’ Our Only Star and Compass). Yet eventually, Jacobs became free and religion was restored to its righteous place in her life, as she concludes, “It does not require man’s praise to obtain rest in God’s kingdom” (315). But to come near that reality would be, recalling The Lord of the Rings, the same as believing the coarse, jarring bellow of Gandalf portending the ills of the Eye while Saruman sweetly expounds his affliction with a mellifluous tongue.
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