The Disappearing Christ

Secularism in the Silent Era

Phil Maciak

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• ISBN:
  9780231547000
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

At the turn of the twentieth century, American popular culture was booming with opportunities to see Jesus Christ. From the modernized eyewitness gospel of Ben-Hur to the widely circulated passion play films of Edison, Lumière, and Pathé; from D. W. Griffith's conjuration of a spectral white savior in Birth of a Nation to W. E. B. Du Bois's "Black Christ" story cycle, Jesus was constantly and inventively visualized across media, and especially in the new medium of film. Why, in an era traditionally defined by the triumph of secular ideologies and institutions, were so many artists rushing to film Christ's miracles and use his story and image to contextualize their experiences of modernity?

In The Disappearing Christ, Phillip Maciak examines filmic depictions of Jesus to argue that cinema developed as a model technology of secularism, training viewers for belief in a secular age. Negotiating between the magic trick and the documentary image, the conflicting impulses of faith and skepticism, the emerging aesthetic of film in this period visualized the fraught process of secularization. Cinematic depictions of an appearing and disappearing Christ became a powerful vehicle for Americans to navigate a rapidly modernizing society. Studying these films alongside a multimedia, interdisciplinary archive of novels, photographs, illustrations, and works of theology, travel writing, and historiography, The Disappearing Christ offers a new narrative of American cultural history at the intersection of cinema studies and religious studies.

1

A Rare and Wonderful Sight

Ben-Hur’s Historicism

An admixture of historical romance and Sunday School fable, Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, was praised upon release for its meticulously accurate portrayal of the Palestinian landscape, its thrilling action sequences, and its reverent depiction of scenes from the New Testament. Wallace, however, wrote Ben-Hur without ever having set foot in Palestine. To correct this deficiency and write a fictionalized eyewitness account of the life of Christ without boarding a steamship across the Atlantic, Wallace turned to Holy Land travel narratives and works of sacred geography that extensively described important locations from the Bible, as well as German-made maps and archaeological documents that he had shipped from Europe at great expense. “In making [Palestine] the location of my story,” he wrote, “it was needful not merely to be familiar with its history and geography. I must be able to paint it, water, land, and sky, in actual colors … I had to be so painstaking!”¹ For a fictional work, Wallace perceived that he might be held to a standard that transcended mere accuracy—the impossible production of “actual colors,” not just mimetic representations. Thus, the story of the writing of Ben-Hur is not just a story of creative scholarship but of the notion that painstaking and faithful scholarship might yield something otherwise inaccessible to the reader.

Research, for Lew Wallace, was a transcendent act. Toward the climax of Ben-Hur, the narrator directly addresses his reader with a moment of apology for the dense narrative that came before. The narrator says that the long passages of historical and geographical detail that characterize the novel—from minutely described landscapes to elaborate discussions of Jewish custom—were all written “in anticipation of this hour and this scene; so that he who has read them with attention can now see all Ben-Hur saw of going to the crucifixion—a rare and wonderful sight.”² This passage articulates a direct link between the descriptive historiography Wallace routinely employs and a quasi-religious vision. It is also Ben-Hur’s narrative theory: a hybrid of historical, theological, and literary perspectives on narrative authority. The effective novelist, like the persuasive evangelist and the rigorous historian, enables readers to miraculously see the past.

Ben-Hur is a novel about the impossible possibility of becoming an eyewitness to history. In the nineteenth century, spurred in part by the claims of evidential theology—which prioritized the gospels as eyewitness accounts—and a broader cultural emphasis on the scientific and spiritual capacities of vision, thousands of American Christians sought to replicate this point of view. To see, as Wallace intended his reader to do, is an imaginative act theorized in resonant ways by the historian William H. Prescott and put into practice by thousands of nineteenth-century tourists in the Holy Land. For Wallace, to achieve faith in Christian revelation—manifest in the truths of the gospels, both material and ethereal—the reader must first attain knowledge of the history, geography, political context, and cultural dynamics of the period of early Christianity. In other words, true faith must be compatible with good history and vice versa. For the theologians of evidentialism, writing in reaction to European higher critics whose source criticism unsettled the authority of the evangelists, true faith was to be found in establishing the stability and credibility of those eyewitnesses. For Prescott, good history inhered in the ability to create a virtual experience of the past for the reader: in effect, to put readers in the position of the eyewitnesses themselves. While evidentialist Christians sought to reinforce Christian belief and Prescott wrote to excavate the histories of Spanish colonialism, their methodologies and priorities echoed each other. In this historical-theological discourse, then, the past was positioned as an object to be seen, and Wallace’s highly descriptive narrative emerges from the fraught space of this discourse.³

Lew Wallace’s eyewitness—a point of view leveraged between the reader in the present, the reader transported to the past by Wallace’s narrative gaze, and Ben-Hur himself—is the impossible model of the secular subject. Although Ben-Hur the novel is animated by Ben-Hur the character’s authoritative witness of these scriptural and nonscriptural events, it is also full of gaps, moments when the reader is asked to collaboratively imagine the experience of being near to Jesus in his time. Gregory Jackson has called this interactivity the “substitutionary mode of readerly incorporation.” For a Christian to read Ben-Hur was to engage with a text that functioned more like a board game than a traditional novel. The character Ben-Hur, in this reading, “stands in as a token readers occupy to fill in the missing interval with details from their lives, from, that is, Christ’s story as they live it. They occupy Ben-Hur to occupy Christ, to occupy themselves as Christ.”⁴ This interactivity—the feeling of personalization, incorporation, and intimacy it might produce—was, of course, scripted. It was scripted by the synoptic gospel narrative, but, moreover, it was scripted within a set of methodologies that very pointedly depicted the contours of modern faith. Awash in a sea of descriptive ethnographic detail, metahistoriographical flourishes, and a suggestive slippages between accuracy and faithfulness, Ben-Hur asks readers to occupy a secular negotiation of the norms of rationalism and belief as much as they occupy a compelling renarration of Christ’s life. Readers, aware of this constantly visible apparatus of interactivity, choose the way they supply details of their lives and prejudices and even opinions. This enshrinement of choice as a liberal ideal echoes Taylor’s “nova effect” narrative of nineteenth-century secularism. But, within Ben-Hur’s literary economy—buttressed by evidentialism, romantic historiography, and the recreational skepticism of the Holy Land travelogue—every choice reaffirms Wallace’s carefully constructed framework of how reason and faith, histories scientific and sacred, ought to support and mutually authenticate each other. To read Ben-Hur, then, no matter what one’s theological perspective, was to practice at being secular.

Ben-Hur is not a visual text; it is, however, practically obsessed with visualization. It is exemplary (perhaps excessively so) of Elaine Scarry’s characterization of literary prose as “instructions” for seeing. The profusion of descriptions of various kinds in Ben-Hur does not make it any more or less successful than any other nineteenth-century realist novel at generating a mental picture for readers. However, the novel’s own self-conscious, metanarrative insistence on its status as a set of instructions or preparations or “necessary” descriptive detours is evidence of Wallace’s impulse to teach, to tell, readers how to see. In this way, Ben-Hur exists squarely in the tradition of literary portraiture that was popular—especially, as Jefferson Gatrall points out, in the genre of the Jesus novel—at the time. Without claiming any actual transcendence of the words on the page, it’s worth foregrounding the facts that Wallace’s novel was composed with the popular idea that it would produce something analogous to a portrait of Christ, and that its ambitions were very explicitly framed—through this set of genre conventions, as well as Wallace’s appropriations of both Prescott and Holy Land travelogue writing—as ambitions toward visibility. Ben-Hur would, of course, be an important source text for films at three different crucial moments in the history of Hollywood cinema, but its impact would not be limited to the longevity of its story. Wallace’s Ben-Hur is a set of practical instructions for a particular style of secular spectacle. In describing the “shrewd” crowds witnessing—and believing in—Christ’s miracles and providing the testimony of Ben-Hur as eyewitness, Wallace theorized a model of spectatorship and belief that would become central to the era of early cinema.

This chapter tracks the way that a variety of sacred and secular discourses about the visual converge in Lew Wallace’s historiography, ultimately producing a novel that could serve as a training manual for belief in a secular age. In the first section, I focus on the genealogy of Ben-Hur’s interest in the eyewitness narrative. Specifically, I suggest that Wallace’s hybrid historical vision is indebted to two popular, though seemingly unrelated, discourses: the romantic historiography of William H. Prescott and the travel narratives of nineteenth-century pilgrims in the Holy Land. Wallace took from Prescott the idea that good historical writing ought to produce, for the reader, a visual experience of the past. His were secular works of scholarship, but they required a kind of imaginative faith from the reader, and Wallace saw the potential of this style for his tale of Jesus. At the same time, Ben-Hur was influenced by popular narratives of Holy Land travel. Although many travelers returned from pilgrimage to produce documents testifying to life-changing visual encounters with the locales of scripture, a few produced works of what I call “Holy Land disappointment,” recounting an inability to bolster their faith through sight of the holy landscape. Ben-Hur seeks to mobilize Prescott’s methodology alongside the Holy Land pilgrim’s desire to see and believe in order to produce a synthetic, time-traveling narrative of Christ’s life that will not disappoint modern, skeptical readers. This convergence, in other words, produces a model for how religious believers might adapt to the normative secular values of rationalism, pluralism, and individualism without practicing their beliefs in ways deemed overly superstitious or credulous. In the second section of this chapter, I finally turn to Ben-Hur in context of the popular genre of the life of Jesus. In its excessive detail and its metahistoriographical asides, Ben-Hur mirrors texts like Ernest Renan’s 1860 Life of Jesus, which famously refers to the contemporary Palestinian landscape as “the fifth gospel,” and which set a popular standard for the way a story about Jesus could mobilize both historical method and imaginative interactivity. Ben-Hur used the formal example of Renan and others to materialize Ben-Hur, Jesus, and the fifth gospel itself, crafting a new eyewitness narrative with all the apparent rigor of modern historiography.

HOLY LAND DISAPPOINTMENT: PRESCOTT, STEPHENS, MELVILLE

In an 1893 essay entitled, “How I Came to Write Ben-Hur,” Wallace describes a writing process that is equal parts scholarly research and divine inspiration. After discussing the method by which he conducted research in Biblical geography for the book, Wallace presents a curious scene of writing from his home in Santa Fe:

My custom when night came was to lock the doors and bolt the windows of the office proper, and with a student’s-lamp, bury myself in the four soundless walls of the forbidding annex…. In the hush of that gloomy harborage I beheld the Crucifixion, and strove to write what I beheld.⁵

In this account, Wallace presents himself as both empiricist and visionary, faithful recorder of observable reality and beneficiary of special revelation. He is insistent on showing his work in terms of his elaborate research process, but he is also committed to a picture of artistic creation that is based in a special relationship to the divine. “I strove to write what I beheld,” reads as an almost Howellsian profession of realist aesthetics, but what Wallace beheld was by no means a traditional object of realist study.⁶ Here Wallace narrates the transcription of a vision as if it were a work of reportage. More than that, though, he positions the research process—which is not trumped or elided by his beholding of the crucifixion but transfigured by it—as the precondition of this experience.

This theory of the practically supernatural possibilities of research is reflected in the work of nineteenth-century historian William Hickling Prescott, a pioneer in the field of Latin American history and a primary influence on Wallace. In an oft-quoted letter written while he was composing his epic three-volume The History of the Conquest of Mexico, Prescott told a friend, “I am in the capital of Montezuma, staring out at the strange Aztec figures and semi-civilization.”⁷ Setting aside the unsettling racial overtones of this sentence—explored elsewhere by Eric Wertheimer—there are two remarkable elements of Prescott’s letter that put it in dialogue with Wallace’s vision of the crucifixion.⁸ First, Prescott was not anywhere near South America when he wrote the letter. In fact, despite laying the foundation for nearly a century of work on Latin American and South American history, Prescott never traveled south of the border. Further, even if he had been standing at the vantage point he outlines, Prescott would not necessarily have had a clear view of what lay before him. As a result of an apparently high-stakes collegiate food fight at Harvard, William Prescott, like Homer and Milton before him, suffered from extreme eye pain and was nearly blind for most of his adult life.⁹ Thus, we must understand that Prescott is not actually beholding the ruins of Montezuma’s capital; rather, he is describing the experience of writing and research. Indeed, he follows the comment just quoted by explaining, “I received last month a rich collection of original documents from a learned Spaniard in London…. It is interesting enough to hold in one’s hand the very letter written three hundred and twenty years since, by the celebrated emperor.”¹⁰ Prescott is thus equating nearness to archival material with a visual experience of the past. Like Wallace, to fully understand the complexity of history is to attain a kind of new visual faculty.

Often grouped with George Bancroft and Francis Parkman as a U.S. “romantic historian,” William Prescott—who would not necessarily have approved of that appellation—made his name as the author of massive, multivolume histories of Spain and colonial Central and South America. Though Prescott was by no means a pioneer or figurehead in any of the numerous innovations in historiography for which the nineteenth century is rightly famous, he was one of the most well-read of a generation of American scholars occupying an interstitial space between the amateur historians of the revolutionary period and the scientific historians who led the professionalizing charge into academia in the latter half of the century. Peter Novick, in his magisterial history of “objectivity” in U.S. historical writing, classes Prescott as a “gentleman amateur” who, despite his masterful work with original sources, was eventually rejected by younger historians for his distinctly “literary” style and clear moral prerogative.¹¹ Likewise, Eileen Ka-May Cheng suggests that although Prescott practiced a highly successful version of historiography that “brought together a belief in a truth that was independent of the historian’s interpretation with a recogni...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction // The Disappearing Christ and Other Stories
• 1. A Rare and Wonderful Sight: Ben-Hur’s Historicism
• 2. Looking Sideways: Media Theories of Jesus Christ
• 3. Tricks and Actualities: The Passion Play Film and the Cinema of Attractions
• 4. The Double Life of Superimposition: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Christ Cycle
• Coda // Resurrectionists: Toward a Post-Cinematic Postsecular
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index