Abstract
In an attempt to articulate what I consider to be the salient features of African American Christian consciousness I will make extensive use of The Souls of Black Folk and “The Religion of the American Negro,” both authored by Du Bois, and will also draw upon Friedrich Nietzsche’s vision of the tragic, first articulated in his classic study The Birth of Tragedy, then further developed and fleshed out during the course of his lifetime.1 It is my opinion that Du Bois’s Souls is to date the classic work on identifying the distinctive elements and spirit of the African American religious (Christian) experience. Unlike many of his successors, Du Bois did not conflate the normative task of the theologian and the descriptive moment of analysis. He had no theological ax to grind and no latent or manifest theological agenda, just a profound appreciation of the depth and power of the experience itself.
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Notes
Rose Pfeffer, Nietzsche: Disciple of Dionysus (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1972). I am in complete agreement with Rose Pfeffer when she writes, “Nietzsche’s philosophy is based on the conviction that the greatness of man and the development of culture can be realized only within a spirit that he calls tragic. I contend that it is the central aim and purpose of his philosophical writings to clarify the meaning of the “tragic disposition” and to help initiate t he coming of a tragic age , which he sees as t he only hope for the future of mankind.” (29)
Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 39.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: NAL Penguin, 1982), 212.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Random House, 1967), 60.
See, for instance, Edgar S. Brightman in A Philosophy of Religion (New York: Prentice Hall, 1940), 246.
Edith Hamilton, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (Boston, MA: New American Library, 1942), 104.
M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Ronald Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life (England: Penguin Books, 1982), 1–2.
See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).
Ian Barbour, Myths, Models and Paradigms (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whitenessand the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).
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© 2010 Matthew V. Johnson
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Johnson, M.V. (2010). Deep Calls unto Deep: African American Christian Consciousness Pt. 1. In: The Tragic Vision of African American Religion. Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109117_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109117_5
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