has assumed its throne in the life of Columbus, and it is in his honor, not for God, nor for the natives of the New World, that he would devote himself. In this desire for a tangible, material deity, entirely present and determinate, Columbus would seemingly take no notice of a fundamental dimension of mystical thought, namely, divine absence and, thereby, the need for dispossession and emptiness in the life of one seeking to mirror this divine emptiness. Columbus couldn’t appreciate the meaning of divine emptiness or nothingness among Pseudo-Dionysius, John the Scot Eriugena, or Eckhart because he was so eager for fullness, for what would fill the emptiness of his heart and pockets.
If we are to attribute any mystical or Adamic qualities to Columbus, therefore, we know that these also include the great catastrophic sin of Adam as well. Columbus brought original sin from the Old World like a plague that would infect everything and everyone. True to his biblical ancestor, Columbus’s descendants would suffer long and hard for his inability to resist taking and eating the fruits of paradise, fruits that included human bodies alongside apples and such. The heritage of this serpentine American patriarch will always include this original and decisive sin that stained the American soul and cast a pall over this beautiful, troubled continent. In Billie Holiday’s haunting rendition of “strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees,” I recognize the history of Columbus’s effect, the history of exile and slavery he left in his wake:
Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.14
Billie Holiday sounds out an elegy on behalf of all the strange fruit of the Americas that has been violently plucked from its branches, never allowed to ripen. These American trees stained with blood share the malediction and curse brought on by Adam’s primal deed and that of Columbus. The result has been a long history of people hanging from trees, crucified peoples.
Long before Billie Holiday’s lament for crucified peoples, however, other American voices cried out in favor of the dispossessed.15 The second route of wonder that I want to map in this chapter shows us how wonder can be a force that explodes ethnocentric, European assumptions of superiority and that can reveal to us a glimpse not only of diversity and pluralism, but of infinity, the iconic face of the other. I am suggesting that an articulation of the wondrous and marvelous, as readily as they can become assimilated and exoticized by the colonial enterprise, can also be thought of as fragments of infinity, as metaphors of the unknown and unknowable, as gestures of silence that leave us stunned, uncertain, tolerant. In the figures we will now be analyzing, wonder is chastened by a sense of exile. These remarkable figures recognize the marvelous and alien nature of native cultures as also residing deep within the depths of their own soul. As Stephen Greenblatt wrote, “The movement is from radical alterity—you have nothing in common with the other—to a self-recognition that is also a mode of self-estrangement: you are the other and the other is you.”16 We are the aliens and exiles.
Voices of the Dispossessed: Cabeza de Vaca and Bartolomé de Las Casas
In Marvelous Possessions, Sir John Mandeville appears as Stephen Greenblatt’s great hero, a “knight of dispossession” he calls him. Although I want to focus on figures of the New World, beginning with Mandeville and Greenblatt’s approach on “wonder” will help us better understand the contributions of Cabeza de Vaca and Las Casas.
Up to this point in my study, I have been suggesting that the evocation of wonder in the Middle Ages and Renaissance was a common strategy by which something new and unfamiliar, alien and foreign, or even terrible and hateful was assessed. We have already explored the way that wonder can operate in the service of possession and colonialism, but too little has been said thus far about the liberating impulse of wonder. The enriching possibility of wonder lies, for Greenblatt, in its indeterminacy. It is a metaphor of the absence rather than fullness of knowledge, the partiality and deficiency of human reason more than its wholeness.
It is not enough to call to mind the intellectual indeterminacy of wonder, however. There is also something sensual about wonder, something that strikes at the core of the human person, that thumps the chest and attacks the heart. No wonder, then, that Aquinas’s famous teacher Albert the Great described wonder with affective metaphors. It is “a constriction and suspension of the heart caused by amazement at the sensible appearance of something so portentous, great, and unusual that the heart suffers a systole.”17 The systole here is the affective response to something that appears incomprehensible to the mind. Wonder is the body and soul’s gasp at the unexpected and surprising, the extraordinary and strange. It is an electric current and feeling that suffuses the body with an untamed mixture of curiosity, desire, and fear. For Greenblatt, then, wonder incites human desire as much as it reminds us of human ignorance.18
While different approaches to wonder are evident throughout the Middle Ages—from philosophy’s search to remove ignorance to the enhancement or intensification of wonder in art or mysticism—wonder is especially abundant in travel narratives, and Mandeville’s text, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, is a great example of wide-eyed wonder. Around every corner of his journey he encounters people, places, and things startlingly new and different, and he never ceases to be amazed by it all. In entering foreign territory, wonder comes as naturally to him as fear comes to a child suddenly lost and alone. While there are manifestations of this primal fear in Mandeville’s travels, the stronger impulse is actually courage—there is a lot of nerve and audacity in Mandeville’s willingness to take leave of his home and wander through unknown lands. And he is clearly changed as a result: Mandeville’s journey from the West to the Holy Land and then into regions further east resulted in this remarkable knight’s suspension of all he had known prior to the journey and, subsequently, in a new vision—more catholic, more liberal, magnanimous. Mandeville is a border crosser, an illegal alien, trespassing across walled cities and across the boundaries of European preconceptions and prejudices, and it took heavy doses of courage for him to scale walls of this sort.
Mandeville’s experiences in the East (Turkey, India, China), for instance, instill in him a remarkable sympathy and appreciation for human diversity (I leave aside the question of whether Mandeville ever actually traveled to these regions in person or whether they are the journeys of a remarkably imaginative reader). Not only does he withhold condemnation and judgment of different cultures and religions, he speaks admiringly of Orthodox Christians, Muslims, and Hindu Brahmins. In a memorable passage about Brahmins—who “always go about naked”—Mandeville writes:
Even if they are not Christians, nevertheless by natural instinct or law they live a commendable life, are folk of great virtue. . . . And even if these people do not have the articles of our faith, nevertheless, I believe that because of their good faith that they have by nature, and their good intent, God loves them well and is well pleased by their manner of life, as He was with Job, who was a pagan, yet nevertheless his deeds were as acceptable to God as those of His loyal servants. And even if there are many different religions and different beliefs in the world, still I believe God will always love those who love Him in truth and serve Him meekly and truly. . . . For we know not whom God loves nor whom He hates. (SJM, 178–80)
We learn a lot about Mandeville from this passage. He reveals to us a man who is charitable and benevolent toward all of God’s creatures and who contends on their behalf, speaking of their goodness and natural faith, their ability to love God however different and idiosyncratic their religions may appear to the Christian mind. But he also tells us about his theology, how little we know the mind of God, how little we can presume about anything about God’s ways. Although there are many precedents for this Christian approval of pagan traditions—medieval theology’s practice of baptizing the Greek philosophers—Mandeville is a path breaker both for his emphasis on travel and for his almost anthropological interest in non-Christian religions.
