Black Lives Matter: A Spiritual Response

A soul of a child that is born and is unchristianed, because of original sin has no likeness of God; he is nought but an image of the fiend and a brand of hell. But as soon as it is christened, it is reformed to the image of God, and through virtue of faith of Holy Kirk suddenly is turned from the likeness of the fiend and made like an angel of heaven.

Walter Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, II.6.¹

The Black Lives Movement (BLM) paradoxically sheds "light" on negative racial construction in Christian spirituality. Blackness sheds light. This is indeed a paradox and yet throughout Christian spirituality even the benign element of the via negativa could not prevent the onslaught of racism that infected Western Christian spirituality. This onslaught is important to be conscious of since the association of light and whiteness came to be synonymous with white people. Even in my own Anglican tradition, this is so in both the confusion of evangelizing the British Isles (already containing Christian faith) in the 6^th century and mistaking Angles for angels (Non Angli, sed Angeli), a play on words attributed to Pope Gregory I for his affinity for fair-haired Anglian, slave children being auctioned in the Roman marketplace. For Pope Gregory, those children may have been born "unchristian," but they seemed innately closer to the kingdom of heaven because they resembled angels in their whiteness.

In case the reader may have missed an important fact in my paragraph above, I need to reiterate it here. Anglian children were being sold as slaves in the Roman marketplace. For the 21^st century reader this may come as some surprise but in the 6^th century world this was commonplace in Greco-Roman occupational rule. What is most surprising, however, is that there was no legal justification to enslave these children on the basis of physiognomical difference as became the case in subsequent centuries to justify the North Atlantic slave trade. It took the epiphany of a pope in power to recognize the contradiction in this phenomenon of an Anglian slave that looked like an angel. I dare say it took a much longer time in the North Atlantic slave trade for a pope to see the contradiction of an African slave. My intention here is not simply to blame individuals of the past for being racists, but to explore the confusing world-view of Christians in power when it came to the blindness of recognizing the likeness of God in black bodies.

In particular in this essay, I look at how the BLM sheds light on how Western Christian spirituality can learn from the particular focus of how indeed black lives matter to God's likeness. I do this by looking at two well-known saints in Christian spirituality, St. Antony of Egypt and Hildegard of Bingen. Both of these saints are instructive in how they point to complex themes of light and darkness in Christian spirituality without being seduced into the evil associations of black people somehow being the image of the fiend and the brand of hell. I write this not because this allusion back to Walter Hilton makes him somehow a racist but to expose the confusing worldview in much of Western Christian spirituality that the Holy Kirk (Church) has often lacked virtue in seeing the likeness of God in black people and have instead structured such likeness primarily for those of European descent.

ST. ANTONY OF EGYPT (251–356)

In the past I engaged such contradictions between God's likeness and black bodies through the paradox of St. Antony's contest against the devil in the guise of a black boy.² In holy passion, Antony boldly rebukes the devil's form of a black boy. When hearing this rebuke, the devil immediately flees, cowering at the words of Antony. Thus, from the very beginning of this seminal piece of hagiographical literature, Athanasius depicts Antony with a character so powerful that even demons fear to confront him. It is anachronistic however, to conclude that Antony was a racist because as I...