History and Presence by Robert A. Orsi (review)

This book seeks an alternative to the modern quest to articulate history in a purely secular way, detached from the agency of divine or spiritual presences. Listening to and reading narratives of Roman Catholics over the last six decades, exploring Marian apparitions, the cult of the saints, relations with the dead, Catholic comic books, relics, prayer cards, and other “icons,” Orsi argues that excluding the divine from spiritual biographies produces a thin, reductionist approach both to autobiography and spirituality. Orsi runs headlong into matters that for many would be deemed superstitious. Not only that, but he directly engages the impact of priestly pedophilia on survivors’ spirituality. In a word, his point is that modernity’s attempt to expunge “superstition” from “religion” has failed to make religious studies more “rational” or “intelligible,” but instead has made it more superficial (27).

Shadowing the study throughout is the Zwinglian denial of Christ’s real presence in the host. For many Protestants, and the modern world in general, the host has become “repellant, strange, dangerous, and horrific” (31). Indeed, the symbolic interpretation of an absent Christ in the Lord’s Supper is a characteristic of the modern mindset, making Roman Catholic views of God to be “grossly material.” What Orsi likes about the Catholic perspective is that in manifold ways, particularly in icons of all sorts, it affirms that the “transcendent” has “broke into time” (51); time cannot be fully understood or appreciated apart from that interruption.

Naturally, Orsi is aware of the Lutheran confession of the real presence, but he does not deal with it straightforwardly. The Zwinglian approach was to have a greater impact on modern sensibilities. That modern perspective evaluates religions as “social constructions” which underwrite “the hierarchies of power,” reinforce “group solidarity,” and more rarely, “functions as a medium of rebellion and resistance” (58). Appealing to philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Orsi challenges this view of spirituality which is codified in James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. All Frazer accomplishes is “to make [religious phenomena and practices] plausible to people who think as he [Frazer] does” (63). “The everyday life of the theorist and historian becomes the ground for judging the experience of others” (63).

While secular critics tout religion as a means to help people cope with negative experiences, Orsi in contrast maintains that theodicies, defenses of God, are seldom persuasive. Indeed, “other domains of culture such as law, consumerism, politics, and education offer a more definite and attainable meaning and purpose that religion not only fails to provide, but actually troubles” (106). Orsi notes that in light of the recent priest scandals the “holy” has been exposed as a hiding place for evil. Why survivors of priestly sexual abuse would continue to attend mass in spite of the pain that it evokes for them is explained by the mystical, even supernatural draw that the real presence in the Eucharist still holds. In conclusion, Orsi, akin to a polytheist, writes “Once the gods return and once their presence is acknowledged, functionalism yields to a messier, less predictable, and perhaps less recognizable past, one that is not bound to a single account of human life or to a single, short period of time or to a single ontology” (251).

Orsi’s is a powerful alternative to the secular approach to Religious Studies. Eschewing any exclusivity, it operates with a kind of polytheism: many different gods or spirits should be acknowledged. Would the book even be more challenging to the establishment if it were fearlessly to privilege distinctively Christian truth claims? That perhaps would hearken a “fundamentalism” that Orsi would eschew. But, after all, has not Orsi shown that secularism, in its own way, becomes a fundamentalism, a privileged stance invulnerable to critique, acting as gatekeeper for legitimate discourse in the academy? Surely in a democratic, public forum, even an academic need not disown his or her own faith stance if that faith stance sincerely listens to other voices and ultimately is committed to truth, wherever truth may take him or her.