History and Presence by Robert A. Orsi (review)

I read History and Presence on a train ride through southern France, after two weeks of almost overwhelming evidence there of the marked divide between secularity (laicité) and living faiths that assume the existence of God, or what Orsi calls the divide between “absence” and “presence.” While in the United States it is usually Protestants who represent “absence,” in formerly Catholic France, French nationalism is its vehicle. The superiority of secularism/absence is currently being deployed there against Muslim immigrants, as seen in the frequent and militant singing of La Marseillaise and in graffiti sporting the Revolutionary motto of “liberté, egalité, fraternité”; and also against Catholics, evidenced by the decrepit conditions of many French cathedrals, as at Toulouse. Nevertheless, while few French citizens would rush to embrace religion, and while Mass attendance is at an all-time low, the historical record of Catholic France constitutes its own unshakeable presence: abbeys, chapels, churches, convents, pilgrimage routes, roadside crosses, saints’ statues, and religious schools still blanket the country.

In the United States, the border between an enchanted world and a disenchanted one has been filtered by the long shadow of the Protestant Reformation’s “Eucharistic debates and confessional wars” (31). Orsi’s concerns in his seven chapters and epilogue are twofold: to explore via ethnography and history the “complex politics of presence within Catholicism itself from early modernity to the present” (28), and via metahistory to posit Roman Catholic history as a challenge to the Protestant domination of the field of “history of religion,” in which Catholics have functioned as the pre-modern other and the defenders of presence (37). “The power of the Church,” explains Orsi, “depends on offering access to supernatural presence while at the same time controlling who gets such access and when” (29–30).

The contents of the chapters will be familiar to those who have been reading the author’s work over the past 15 years. There are discussions of “abundant history,” the role of suffering, Catholic print propaganda for children, the rituals and meanings of death and the afterlife, and a concluding discussion of the toxic “abundant evil” signaled by the recent clergy sexual abuse scandals which used the holy as “a hiding place for evil” (219). The book persistently interrogates how “practices of presence became—and to a great extent they remain—the province of people of color, women, the poor and marginalized, children and childish or childlike adults, the eccentric, the romantic, the insane, and those unhinged by life experiences that overwhelm their reason” (41– 42). Orsi’s conviction that the gods matter, and that their presence cannot be rejected as merely figurative, consigned to “the museum case, the costume cabinet, or the lovely ruin,” (44) suffuses the book.

Many “fissures” between presence and absence in the modern era stem from the theological debates emerging from the Reformation about the body of Christ. Catholics maintain that the consecrated Host contains the Real Presence, whereas most Protestants affirm only its symbolic meaning (45). The resulting six centuries of hostility between these two Christian traditions has had profound effects on world history, wherever Christians travelled and settled. “Presence/absence,” Orsi declares, “is the pivot around which other differences, accusations, lies, and hatreds have spun” (30).

This point is illustrated profusely through examples of the power of presence derived from ethnographic and historical studies conducted over the past three decades. To choose just one that is perhaps less familiar to readers: Orsi considers Catholic comic books intended for children that detailed the grisly martyrdoms of saints. Such publications serve him in questioning the role of print culture, usually associated with Protestantism, in conveying a pedagogy of supernatural presence, as well as unearthing the double bind that such methods generated. In deploying graphic and horrific examples of suffering, how could Catholics prevent children from seeking their own early painful deaths in imitation of the saints, and yet also preserve their desire to emulate them? One allied episode that emerges is the spectacle of secular comic...