Tried something new in "Theorizing Religion" today. We're starting a 4-session tour through some classic texts in the study of religion, but since the class meets weekly for 3 hours there's time to pair each one with something contemporary. For Hume's Natural History of Religion I decided it might be interesting to read some work by Sylvia Winter, and chose the essay "The Pope must have been drink the King of Castile a madman: Culture as actuality, and the Caribbean rethinking modernity," in part because it's among her most accessible.On its own this essay (from 1995) would already be a valuable corrective to the contemporary US-focused religious studies reflex to blame everything on "Protestant" conceptions of religion. Caribbean-oriented Wynter argues that our problems go deep into medieval Catholic understandings of the "non-homogeneity" of the supernaturally saved celibate church and the sinful secular world, a "non-homogenity" reproduced first in Renaissance humanism's celebration of European Man in contrast to the brown and black "humans" colonized and enslaved in the age of empire, and then into 19th century "race science" and the invention of whiteness. As a frame and foil for Hume it worked brilliantly, too! Hume comes a few centuries after the Renaissance but, especially in NHR, writes like a humanist, apparently bypassing Christianity to root his arguments in the wisdom of Greco-Roman antiquity. And, while it's hidden by the all-purpose misanthropy of NHR, Hume in other works is just on the cusp of the invention of race.
Wynter's title refers to the response of Cenú Indians to the papal bull "granting" the "new world" to the King of Spain, given definitive form in the 1513 "Requerimiento." Their land wasn't the pope's to give, or the king's to accept! But, as Wynter stressed, the purpose of the Requerimiento wasn't really to persuade. If the inhabitants of these territories claimed by the King of Castile, by divine right vouchsafed by the Pope, didn't accept the new state of affairs, they announced themselves to be inimicos Christi, whom the Spanish crown was entitled to dispose of as they saw fit, killing or enslaving them.
It's madness but it kills, and the descendants of the vilified and enslaved continue to bear the scars of the raving presumption of "non-homogeneous" superiority of Catholic Church, modern state, Man of reason, human sciences, progress over all others. Descendants of all these remain blinded by an inability to understand ours as just one of many cultures - as in our need for religion (as we understand it) to be part of human nature and for all religions to be incipiently "world religions." But while NHR is the founding document of the social-scientific study of religion, the fall guy in today's discussion turned out to be discipline associated today with Hume, "philosophy," his alternative Hume (though in more humble ways than most) to the mess of human ignorance, superstition and intolerance. Why are "philosophy" and "ancient philosophy" and "modern philosophy" in our curricula never marked as western? Jewish or Indian or African philosophy are hyphenated terms, but the project of philosophy "itself" is, in Wynter's sense, a dream of "aculturality." Drunk or mad?
And for those who don't get it or don't accept it (I'm thinking of my colleague R's talk in "After Religion" last week), isn't a text like Natural History of Religion a kind of Requerimiento?