to elevate the mind beyond the bedlam of noises in the world to the perfect consonance of the stars and the beauty beyond them. (Augustine’s tract De musica is an example of this and culminates in the sixth book with a meditation on the mystical number patterns in music.)41
Since music is revelatory of the pattern of the universe, not to mention the divine pattern within the human person, sin might be seen as a note of cacophony and discord that suddenly disturbs the soul’s rhythm, pace, and sense of time. Thrown off balance and dazed by sin, the soul is now a dancer without grace, knocked awry and tangled up. As the Lord of the dance, however, Christ enters the world to reform, inform, and transform the soul. Christ recovers the soul’s dexterity and converts it from the graceless condition of a will that is curved in upon itself to a condition of charity and self-abandon, lost in the arms of the other—the ecstasy of Teresa of Ávila is nothing else.42
While Teresa’s ecstasy may be a particularly intense and special case of mysticism and seemingly remote from the experiences of modern man and woman, music has a way of making us all into mystics of sorts, of spreading to us the peace, joy, and knowledge that surpasses all the art and argument of the earth.43 No wonder that Nietzsche considered the intoxicating appeal of Dionysus to be indistinguishable from music.44 His own experience of modern music confirmed what the ancient Greeks had understood: that music could seize and shake one’s soul in moments of pleasure, and that it is incomparable in its revelatory possibilities. “Compared with music,” he wrote, “all communication by words is shameless.”45 Just as Aquinas considered everything he wrote to be like straw compared to what God had revealed to him, Nietzsche considered music in a similar mystical sense, as a spiritual phenomenon with a unique ability to penetrate the secrets of life.46 Western civilization is filled with testimonies of music’s mesmerizing and transporting power, its ability to raise the temperature of the soul to feverish highs. Music can hypnotize, as Biggie says, or it can cause us to lose ourselves in it, as Eminem and T. S. Eliot say, or it can simply make us say “uhhhh,” to summon Master P.47
In following this stirring signature inherent in music, I want to insist that these kinds of spiritual raptures were not just encased in marble and confined to theological circles during the Middle Ages. One would have witnessed a feast of beauty in myriad rituals, carnivals, festivities, and theatrical performances. Unlike the disembodied forms of Christianity that emerged with the modern world like a late-born heresy, Gnostic in inspiration, premodern Christianity was deeply corporeal. One might say that it had some of the same features as Cervantes’s characters in Don Quixote: the bodily and sensual sensibilities of Sancho Panza and the magic, marvel, and mysticism of Don Quixote. This Christianity knew the longings of transcendence; the urges of the flesh and panza; and the delights of drama, rite, and farce. A rich and round figure, the Catholic baroque soul would increasingly show signs of fragmenting and coming apart, but Cervantes kept it together the way he kept together the bosom friends of his novel: the dreamer and pragmatist, the idealist and realist, the transcendentalist and sensualist.
In other cultures of early modernity, however, the strained ties holding together the “great chain of being” (a vision that integrated divine transcendence and immanence, spirit and flesh, reason and emotions, theory and practice, asceticism and pageantry) increasingly showed signs of rusting and breaking. Under the reforming passion of Protestant Christianity beginning in the sixteenth century, cultures of festivity were gradually replaced by cultures of discipline, leading to forms of Christianity that were more suspicious of ritual, aesthetics, and festivals than the prevailing vision of the Middle Ages.48 As early as the Reformation, if not earlier, there was a shift in Christianity from corporeal and ritualized practices toward a disembodied and disenchanted form of Christianity, with heavy emphasis on doctrinal propositions, catechisms, and mental states. Though this trend is also evident in the concerns and mandates of the Counter-Reformation, the Puritan variety of these reforms developed a particular concern with discipline and punishment, as it sought to repress the festive, ecstatic, Dionysian expressions of Christianity with a work ethic of self-regulation, restraint, and order. Modern capitalism, as Max Weber famously argued, would be built of such things.
The forms of culture, religion, and custom that did not conform to the new ideals of self-control and restraint became tantamount to indolence, moral torpor, economic debility, and religious barbarism; in North America, Catholic, American Indian, and African behavior and forms of worship were considered cases in point, specifically prone to idolatry, futility, and dereliction of duty.49 To forge a more perfect union of disciplined, rational, and professional modes of life, cultural and religious traits that did not match Calvinist and neo-Stoic values were to be repressed and colonized into submission; they didn’t have a future in a well-ordered society. In the case of Catholics, almost everything they did smacked of unproductive and primitive values: sacramental rites and popular festivals, feasting at cemeteries, dancing around the maypole, the veneration of saints and angels, shrines associated with paganism and the natural world, the aesthetic extravagance of carnival, baroque architecture, and so forth.
Excess and ostentation would fall on hard times in the modern world, leading to a more incorporeal conception of the soul. In someone like René Descartes, this seems clear: his embrace of neo-Stoicism led him to redefine the meaning of “soul,” making it resemble the soul of the philosophers more than the soul of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to paraphrase Blaise Pascal. In my reading, this led to a damming of the torrential tributaries of the soul, to a more sedate and staid view. Here is how Descartes described a “great soul”: “The greatest souls . . . are those whose reasoning powers are so strong and powerful, that although they also have passions, nonetheless their reason remains sovereign.”50 What would have he said about the holy madness, flaming eroticism, and emotional rapture of Teresa of Ávila or of the black church that W. E. B. Du Bois later described? “A sort of suppressed terror hung in the air and seemed to seize us—a Pythian madness, a demoniac possession, that lent terrible reality to song and word. The people moaned and fluttered, and then the gaunt-checked brown woman beside me suddenly leaped straight into the air and shrieked like a lost soul, while round about came wail and groan and outcry, and scene of human passion such as I had never conceived before.”51 The congregation’s sensual, aesthetical drama, described here—the guttural murmurs and shouts, the rushing to and fro, waving and clapping of hands, pounding of feet, weeping and laughing, all the eroticism—surely would have been far too profligate and passionate to suit Descartes’s standards. This behavior would have represented the drowning of reason in a deluge of emotion, the rush of blood to the heart that in effect deprives the brain of oxygen. The acquisition of soul demands sobriety, moderation, and reason. For Descartes, black religion, and for that matter the Catholic baroque, would have been quintessential examples of the fall of reason into the undisciplined body of excess and intemperance; they would have been seen as the sudden invasion of a Pythian madness into the sane company of philosophers, or the revenge of Dionysus on the Enlightenment of Descartes’s day.
As I consider throughout this study, there is a shared indulgence in the beauty and sensual delights of the human experience in African American Christianity and a Latin baroque Christianity. Though the former tended to be far more auditory (a stress on the spoken Word), while the latter was more visual (a stress on the Logos in visual and ceremonial forms), they converged on a deeply felt incarnational theology, one that electrified the body and aroused the festive, mystical energies of religion. In these instances, the representation of soul was deeply aesthetical and ran afoul of modern attempts to rationalize, bureaucratize, and sanitize the human soul, whether in philosophy, civil society, or the new world order of capitalism.
The Ethical Contours of Soul: What Does It Profit a Man . . .
In the new bourgeois marketplace of the early modern period (especially in Protestant countries from the eighteenth century forward), the integrity of the soul was increasingly endangered. The idea of the soul would have to fight for its livelihood in the face of forces that depreciate its value, that barter and exploit it for its economic worth. Like a parable out of the “prosperity gospel”
