Thomas Santa Maria is a Yang Visting Scholar in World Christianity at Harvard Divinity School for the 2023-24 academic year. He has published in journals including the Catholic Historical Review, and the Journal of Early Modern Christianity. He comes to HDS from Yale University, where he was the Residential College Dean of Silliman College, and before that, a graduate student in renaissance studies and history. His work focuses primarily on the relationship between the body, emotions, and religion in the Early Modern period.
From Boston to Rome
I grew up around here in the Boston area. I went to the College of the Holy Cross, and one of my advisors was a Jesuit priest and professor in the history department. He was an Early Modern European historian. I said, “Maybe I can do that, too!” I was kind of like Saint Ignatius (of Loyola) who said, “I want to do what Saint Francis did or what Saint Dominic did.” And I have been able to do a lot of my research in Rome over the years.
The Catholic Reformation
The particular period I study is known as “the Catholic Reformation” or “the Counter-Reformation.” One can also simply call this period “early modern Catholicism” (1450-1773), as John O'Malley (a great Jesuit historian) did. Some major figures during this time are Teresa of Avila, Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, Francis de Sales, and others.
The idea here is that Catholics in the inner circle in Rome—in the Curia—Catholics on the ground, priests, and laypeople were already thinking about ways to live more spiritual lives before Martin Luther ever posted the 95 Theses.
Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457) is an interesting example, because many people look at him and think, “He was an anti-church guy!” This is due to the “Donation of Constantine” controversy, which is a text that Lorenzo Valla proved a forgery. It was a document that the popes used in order to say, “See, Emperor Constantine let Pope Sylvester have the Papal States, the authority to wear purple, the colors of kings, etc.”
Valla, taking insights from the Renaissance and especially Renaissance philology, was able to look at the Latin and say, “This was not written in the fourth century.” It was written in the ninth century, and he proved it was a fraud. Of course, the interesting thing is you might think Valla was excommunicated or burned as a heretic. No. He actually ended up being the papal secretary!
The Catholic Reformation was born out of the Renaissance, and one of the key ideas of the Renaissance is the dignity of man. A lot of people believe that once you have this great dignity of man and there's this new emphasis on how great the body is and how good creation is, that all these medieval things went away. But actually, they took off, and they are given new life, and I think one of the reasons this happened is because it took off around the world and within other cultures.
For example, take martyrdom in Japan. Many early Japanese converts to Christianity, as well as missionaries, were martyred there for refusal to reject tenets of the Catholic faith, or to stomp on crosses or other religious images. These martyrdom accounts electrified European audiences. Hearing about martyrs encouraged men to join religious orders and request to be sent on missions.
At the same time, there was another type of martyrdom at play, known as white martyrdom, or practicing intense self-mortification. Some converts to Christianity, Kateri Tekakwitha notable among them, were very zealous in their self-mortification. Hearing about converts like her may very well have spurred European Catholics to adopt these practices themselves with renewed vigor. In some says, it may have been competitive, but for sure it was a new age of asceticism.
Yang Scholars Program
What brought me to Harvard Divinity School was probably a little bit of a naivete, which is to say I think I didn’t fully understand what World Christianity is. World Christianity is a field that has a lot to do with the present and even the future as my brilliant colleague and fellow Yang Scholar Dr. Gina Zurlo would have it. This is to say that it's a major corrective to longstanding historiographic trends that present Christianity as a religion of the West when, in fact, increasingly today, Christianity is a religion of the Global South.
In fact, in a short time, China will be one of the countries with the highest population of Christians on Earth, even more so than Brazil, if Pew Research polls are correct. Of course, my research is different. I am looking at Christianity many centuries before—earlier than what most people looking at World Christianity study.
I think my initial naivete maybe has some insight, which is to say that there could be no World Christianity before there was an age of global missions. And that World Christianity—while it is future oriented—may also do well to look back to try and better understand the origins of not just how in the colonialist period Christianity changed many places, but how world trade changed Christianity, too.
During my time here, I've been fortunate in nearing completion of my first book. I’ve also been working on an article about bilocating nuns. While bilocation, meaning the ability to be in two places at once, had long been a supernatural grace that hagiographers recorded or saints experienced, there is no doubt that it flourished in early modernity, especially in Spain. Perhaps the most famous case is of Maria de Agreda, who bilocated nearly 500 times. That is, though her body never left her convent, she also travelled to the modern-day American southwest, where she claims to have evangelized the Jumano people. Interestingly, cases of bilocators also exploded in the new world. We have nuns who claimed that they were bilocating battling pirates in the Caribbean and even battles in the lowlands, in mainland Europe, as well as taking on missionary and catechetical activities in Asia for example.
Mysticism and Madness
I’ve had the opportunity this semester to teach my class, “Mysticism and Madness in the Early Modern World.” We're looking at what a lot of these mystics were saying and trying to understand what was so animating in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. We’re asking, “What does it mean to be a mystic?”
Although we think of “saints” and “mystics” as synonymous, in those times mysticism was read more under a hermeneutic of suspicion. So, if you're talking about a mystic, in all likelihood, you were talking about a heretic.
I think the students are enjoying it, and I'm certainly getting a lot out of it. I have students from a variety of different faiths and many of them are curious about issues of gender in all of this. So many of these great mystics were women.
There's a synod right now in the Catholic Church—the Synod on Synodality meeting—which is raising a lot of questions about the role of women in the church. Many of my Catholic students have gone into this class seeking insights from these mystics about a way to proceed with women in the church.
Advice for Yang Applicants
I say, “Apply!” There is an embarrassment of riches here in terms of resources—not just at the Divinity School but at the rest of Harvard University—and what HDS and Harvard are able to offer a person studying Christianity is immense. But it’s not just the available resources, another great benefit is in the students, faculty, and people that you can collaborate with.
There are so many people here interested in these questions, and they're not all at the Divinity School. So, I would encourage openness to conversation with colleagues here and elsewhere and in other departments, and to get involved in so many things at the University. It’s very fruitful.
—Interview conducted and edited by Suan Sonna, HDS news correspondent
Editor’s note: This is final interview in our special series spotlighting the 2023-24 Yang Visiting Scholars in World Christianity at Harvard Divinity School. You can read more about Yang Scholars Gina Zurlo and Nathanael Homewood on the HDS website.