History and Presence by Robert A. Orsi (review)

In History and Presence, Robert Orsi uses a well-known anecdote about the novelist Flannery O'Connor as both introduction and paradigm. Informed by Mary McCarthy, who had been raised Catholic, that she had come to view the Eucharist as a symbol, O'Connor replied: "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it." For Orsi, who, like O'Connor, explores and illuminates the holy in stories—some of them wrenching stories of violence and abuse—the fissure between symbol and presence becomes, methodologically and substantively, the heart of the study of religion.

If one knows the variety of ways in which presence pervaded and manifested itself in the bodily and the material in fifteenth-century Europe, Orsi's effort to make the Eucharistic controversies of the sixteenth century the key to later sensibilities seems limited. Moreover, the contrast he draws between, on the one hand, religion as he studies it here and, on the other hand, social science approaches (to which his own impressive earlier book The Madonna of 115th Street [1985] belonged) leaves too much out. Surely the past century saw efforts to grapple with holy presence through the phenomenology of religion, and, however unsatisfactory many of them are, the recent efforts of art historians, especially Byzantinists and scholars studying relics, to give agency to the material are part of this same struggle to speak nonreductively of presence.

Nonetheless, Orsi's evoking of the full reality of the holy in the world is extremely moving, shot through with wonder and horror. Speaking of the sanctuary at Chimayo—which the present reviewer has also visited—Orsi rejects trauma theory. The well of earth is not a "metaphor for suffering," a "hole in the mind" where suffering spills out; instead, "the seeming emptiness is in fact full"; the hole is paradoxical; Christ is present in the dirt. Moreover, Orsi describes the special horror experienced by girls and boys abused by priests as stemming from the priest's ability not only to touch but also to "make" God in his hands. Hence the abused woman called Monica, whom Orsi interviews, sees herself as a skeleton, like the flayed saints in holy pictures, her sin (for she saw it as her sin) visible like their bones. One waits in vain, however, for any attention to the maleness of crucial Christian presences (the father God, the bleeding male body on the cross and in the Eucharist) and the related consideration that so many Catholic abusers are priests, by definition male, or (as in the tragic story he tells of a certain Natalie, abused by her stepfather) are protected by priests.

There is much that is specifically Catholic about the horrors and glories that Orsi sets out in such carefully researched detail. His argument in a short epilogue that we should see all religious history through a matrix of presence is, nonetheless, convincing. But it remains incompletely thought out, especially in light of his earlier discussion of Protestantism, which sees Protestant theology and practice as above all a rejection of an earlier Christian understanding of presence. Yet an application to Protestantism, especially to current American evangelicalism, of the very methodology he suggests in the epilogue would reveal a formidable sense of encounter with presence in many forms.