contingency of Jesus.”81 By reminding theology of the historical nature of salvation’s narrative, history as such does the important theological work of preserving the notions of the particular and the unique. As signposts of the Incarnation, the particular and the unique are iconographic in nature. It is through the various particularities of being itself that divine being is seen; being is therefore ekstasis. Carter finds hope in the realization that, for Raboteau, history is not simply a causal sequence of seemingly random events but is itself a window into the life of the Triune God. In this sense, Raboteau’s theology of history may more appropriately be termed an “iconography of history.”82 It is this iconographic view of the historical salvation narrative, and the plot structure that it bequeaths to all history, that Carter finds best represented in the work of Maximus the Confessor and best intuited in the work of Jarena Lee.
For Carter, Raboteau’s “signal contribution” may also be identified in his insistence on the importance of the narrative scope of history, specifically his recognition of the theological significance of the story of Israel for understanding African American religious experience. It is the significance of plot that allows Carter to maintain that “whiteness is the ‘political unconscious’ of false emplotment.”83 Because it is A Fire in the Bones that prompts this important observation and because Carter finds it the most promising of Raboteau’s major works, I take it as the key text in analyzing Carter’s methodological relationship to Raboteau.
Raboteau was raised an American Catholic, but has since converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. I take this journey to be archetypical of what I will read as Carter’s progression from the Anglo-Catholic retrieval narrative of Radical Orthodoxy into an aesthetic sensibility akin to Eastern iconography. Carter’s use of Eastern patristic theologians (e.g. the Cappadocians, Maximus) is implicitly subversive of the tendency of traditions of virtue to utilize classically Western theologians (e.g. Augustine, Aquinas). Carter finds Eastern theological anthropology to suggest a more dynamic conception of being than that of the Latin West. Carter proposes to “inhabit” the “aesthetic theory of iconic beauty” which Raboteau offers.84 While he will offer black flesh as an icon of the divine, Carter will not be content with static identity but will construct an ecstatic aesthetic akin to that of Raboteau, who ends A Fire in the Bones by positing the “hidden wholeness” of the shared contemplative action of Thomas Merton and Martin Luther King Jr.85
Raboteau’s Historiographic Method
Raboteau opens his text by relating a story of his childhood travels to Europe as part of a parish boys’ choir. While his presence as a black chorister elicited all sorts of responses, including that of curiosity, the episode that most poignantly remains in his memory is that of being asked by a French monsignor to sing for them a “Negro spiritual” which, it was claimed, “we love.”86 This moment encapsulates for Raboteau the bewildering mix of thoughts and feelings he has experienced over the ensuing years surrounding the “complex relationship of race, religion, and national identity.” He recognizes the somewhat paradoxical nature of his task as he offers his text as a “response to that French priest’s invitation to sing ‘one of your people’s spirituals’.”87 Raboteau implies a similarity between offering a scholarly work on race and singing for a European church leader. As he relates, “I also felt a vague unease about exhibiting something of my people for the enjoyment of white folks.”88 While the implication is that his work may be received in this fashion, Raboteau finds the experience of aesthetic mutuality worth the risk of misrepresentation. This position of vulnerability and its overture toward human connection moves beyond mere prosopopoeia and is methodologically akin to Carter’s thesis. While Carter’s posture is a bit more guarded, he nonetheless makes clear this dimension of his work by envisioning a scandalous miscegenation between peoples in which each learns the tongue of another and receives her own being back from another in a process of mutual renaming.
Like Raboteau, Carter recognizes what he terms the “veritable conundrum of the black intellectual in modernity.”89 The postures of both Carter and Raboteau suggest that scholars of all people groups should experience humble awe at the complexity of the task of reflecting upon identity. This complexity is that which whiteness has attempted to iron out through colonial reorderings and the modern descriptive method. While religious studies has posited a relativist objectivity, Raboteau’s posture demonstrates the possibility of an inter-human mutuality. While Carter is cautious as to the deployment of said mutuality given what he identifies as the racial legacy of coloniality-modernity, he nonetheless shares the same hope. We will see that this possibility is available only to lesser degrees in the works of Cone and Long.
The first two essays in A Fire in the Bones render apparent the ways in which Raboteau’s iconography of history will be important for Carter. Raboteau overtly offers more than a simple historiographic enumeration of causal relationships.
History, simply put, consists in telling stories about the ways that people lived in the past. Historians, as distinct from chroniclers, construct narratives that try to reveal the meaning of past events. Narration is of course already an act of interpretation. Events do not speak for themselves. In this very fundamental sense, history is based upon an act of faith, the faith that events are susceptible of meanings that can be described in narration.90
By recognizing that “Christian faith also asserts that the events of human experience have meaning, a coherent pattern, a telos,” and by finding “the source of that meaning . . . in the will and providence of God,” Raboteau holds in tension what he identifies as “the dialectical relationship” between “faith and the academic life.”91 Carter suggests the Incarnation as the cohesive structure in which Raboteau’s dialectic could find synthesis. Raboteau maintains that “[t]he historian as historian” must remain “agnostic about such claims [of narrative meanings in history],” while as a “believer” he “cannot but hope that our history is touched by the providence of God.”92 The quest for “objectivity” in the historiographic enterprise discourages Raboteau from more fully developing his iconographic theology of history.
Yet it is clear that Raboteau is moving in the latter direction. He utilizes a picture of former slave children “praying their ABCs” at a funeral as an “emblem” of the religious struggle for freedom through education.93 It is Raboteau’s use of “emblem” that Carter takes to be a vision of a material world imbued with iconographic Christian meaning. Because Carter finds the dialecticism of Raboteau’s discipline to limit the analytical power of his history, Carter extends Raboteau’s analysis into his own theology of race. Carter maintains that Raboteau is heading toward “an incarnational understanding of faith and history” while still “continu[uing] to hold onto” a “dialecticism of faith and history.”94 Carter eschews dialectical tension through a Maximian account of the Incarnation, in which the world is inhabited as an “ensouled” reality by means of the hypostasis of “Jesus in his Jewish humanity.”95 As Carter explains,
when Maximus says that “through the mutual exchange of what is related . . . the names and properties of those that have been united through love [are fitted] to each other,” he is indicating that the same gesture of incarnation that fits divinity to humanity and humanity to divinity so that they can take on each other’s names, also refits human beings to one another so that they, too, can be named from one another. The latter intrarenaming of the human (and the history it opens) occurs inside of the interrenaming of the human that has taken place in Christ and that Maximus speaks about with recourse to the communicatio idiomatum of Chalcedon.96
For Carter, the theology of history that is opened in the Incarnation signals the death of dialectic. This is important for Carter because he contends that race functions precisely within the sort of Hegelian dialectic that is the posture of the modern academy. If thesis and antithesis must be had for synthesis to be achieved, then both whiteness and blackness as such are necessary for mutuality to occur. However, if, as Carter describes, being itself is not static but is translucent in an iconographic sense, then racial essentialization is not a necessary component of a proper relationality. Whiteness can no longer unilaterally name the other but must receive
