Chapter 7

Tui Atua’s splendid paper “Whispers and Vanities” pleads eloquently for a liberation of pre-Christian Samoan culture into open, unashamed discourse and debate. His instinct is surely sound, for does not Samoan indigenous culture have a richness and depth that prima facie western missionary Christianity lacks? To associate God with the latter at the expense of the former is therefore plainly absurd. Centre-stage is a Samoan interpretation of creation that celebrates the kinship of all life as opposed to a top-down picture that discriminates negatively between the upper and lower levels of ‘the great chain of being’. The one generates a natural sense of the sacred and mutual respect between all forms of life; the other, hierarchies that license exploitation and, in the worst case, demonisation. The prime example cited in the paper is the human body and, more precisely, male and female sexuality. In a top-down model, predictably, the head is valued at the expense of the genitals, the male at the expense of the female, children getting no mention at all!

The question underlying the paper is: how can we arrive at a conception of the wholeness of the human person that frees us to love authentically, one that is as inclusive of the body as of the heart, mind and soul? While the paper does not come up with an answer, it goes some way (in my view) towards posing the question in a way that forces us to be truly inclusive of all dimensions of who we are. But instead of continuing with these sorts of generalities, I want to comment on certain statements in the paper that to me warrant further discussion. Hence the title of my chapter, “Notes and Questions in the Margin”.

Tui Atua speaks of ‘Augustinian guilt’ as inherently repressive and juxtaposes that with a Samoan view that sees, “the origin of all knowledges, all power and status, of all that is successful and good [as] God-derived and God-oriented”. The danger with this, it seems to me, is that it doesn’t put us in touch with the real Augustine. Further, it may set up false antitheses, and could lead to an exclusive use of Tui Atua’s Samoan indigenous reference.

Let me explain. Take the famous passage that sums up much of what Augustine says in his Confessions:

Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within me and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called out and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.77

Henry Chadwick, the translator of this passage, comments: “Augustine’s Latin [here] is a work of art, with rhymes and poetic rhythms not reproducible in translation. He is fusing imagery from the Song of Solomon with Neoplatonic reflection on Plato’s Phaedrus and Symposium, and simultaneously summarising the central themes of the Confessions”.78 In other words, we tread warily in interpreting a passage such as this. We are, however, on safe ground if we see Augustine’s central point as being that God, with a beauty beyond any conceivable earthly beauty, calls us from the depths of our heart. This for Augustine was the perspective in which any earthly beauty, be it of body, mind or spirit, is truly seen and appreciated.

To make this clearer, Augustine warns against disdaining this kind of contemplative wisdom in favour of an impatient and self-absorbed desire to find gratification in what is nearest at hand. He writes:

What happens is that the soul, loving its own power, slides away from the whole which is common to all into the part which is its own private property. By following God’s directions and being perfectly governed by his laws it could enjoy the whole universe of creation; but by the apostasy of pride which is called the beginning of sin it strives to grab something [limited that it values] more than the whole and to govern it by its own laws; and because there is nothing more than the whole it is thrust back into anxiety over a part, and so by being greedy for more it gets less.79

Without going into detail, I would plead that this densely thought-out reflection on the dangers of getting hung up on a part – perhaps a body part – at the expense of a vision of the wholeness of life in God raises the question of the perspective in which the contemporary revival of the Samoan indigenous reference (exemplified by this and other papers by Tui Atua)80 is to be seen. What, in other words, is the worldview capable of delivering for a heart-centred and body-inclusive wholeness in the human person; in his or her relationships; in community in its total setting; in material creation?

The crying need for a perspective that delivers an acceptable account of the sacred (and with it wholeness) resonates with the statement in Tui Atua’s address, “The tenth heaven, where God Tagaloa resided, was beyond the ninth heaven, beyond the earthly mountain, into the cosmos and the realm of the unknowable. In life and death, the tenth heaven was considered beyond man’s reach”. The key word here is ‘beyond’ (or we could say, ‘more than’) and it challenges us to think of transcendence; mystery; the sacred; what finally sets things free to be themselves, in terms which don’t depend on up-down spatial hierarchies. My question here is about how this ‘beyondness’ (or transcendence) is understood. Is it in some way spatial – ‘high’ like a mountain? Or is it basically spiritual, located, that is, in the depths of the heart (as in Augustine)? Once again we are faced with the question of what allows us to see the true beauty of people and things as they truly are in God.

My contention is that Augustine’s advocacy of a heart-centred sense of ‘beauty’ as the key way for interpreting the ‘beyondness’ of God, could be a key point of dialogue for an understanding of faith that begins to do justice both to Samoan culture and the authentic Augustine. For surely none of us want to fall into the trap of idolising the human body, particularly the female body, divorced from any context of the sacred (however understood), as has happened extensively in degenerate forms of western culture. Earthly beauties, to be truly free, truly creative, need in some way to be nourished by, in touch with, and touched by a divine beauty, inclusive of – but not reducible to – what we can see or touch or hear physically.

In relation to the further statement that “all that is successful and good is God-derived and God-oriented”, I would make the following observation. Like Samoan theologians in pre-Christian times, Augustine meditated on and explored the mystery of God–Tagaloa. The result was his great book on the Trinity, which few will have read, let alone understood. I have already quoted from it. One idea that runs through it is of patterns in the creation which, by analogy, correspond to relations – or shall we say ‘kinships’? – in the being of God itself. This is grounded in the fact that God in God-self is constituted by a set of kinship relations – Father, Son, Spirit – which, besides evoking the mystery of God, also structure (or enable in-depth understanding of) the visible creation itself. There is, in other words, a mutually illuminating analogy between God and creation. In that way we could say that the statement “all that is successful and good is God-derived and God-oriented” is a very Augustinian affirmation. It could also pose a question for the Samoan indigenous reference: is Tagaloa a monad with no kinship relations in the tenth heaven where Tagaloa dwells – alone? In other words, are kinship relations in the creation truly grounded in the being of God, as in Augustine? Or do they have some less radical explanation?

Once again, we are back with the question of the perspective we pre-suppose in retrieving an ancient yet living culture. Let me put it in the form of a question. How far does any modern conception of the sacred – if we have one – correspond (or measure up) to the sense of the sacred present in the Samoan indigenous reference? Or, are we in fact moderns with little or no sense of the sacred, hungry – perhaps uncritically hungry – for something that will satisfy us?

But to return to Augustine: there are certain things we should also bear in mind. When in 19th century missionary theology there is talk of ‘Augustine’, we should remember that it is a bastardised version of the real thing. In other words, we should always go behind the popular understandings of Augustine – filtered through a puritan ethic and an oversimplified evangelical missionary (and colonial) theology – to the writings of Augustine himself. In the real Augustine, we might find – to our delight – a real dialogue partner, not a whipping boy. Second, in relation to Augustine and sexuality, we should understand that in modern terms, Augustine was a sex addict. Freeing himself from that – by divine grace! – he freed himself for an extraordinarily loving and extensive pastoral ministry as bishop and theologian. It’s not – as has been widely misunderstood – that he thought of sex as inherently evil, but that he had found in God that which gave his whole life meaning and freed him to love a great many people in a non-sexual way. An addict’s enthralment to the erotic could never have achieved this. That is what he was trying to convey in the passage from the Confessions quoted above.

As soon as one sees Augustine’s life in this way, one can see how he could be misunderstood as setting up an antithesis or incompatibility between God and sex. And there are, it has to be conceded, passages in Augustine that might suggest this. For example, Augustine, who saw God as a free, choosing agent, believed that where there was loss of control in the human agent or person – in a horror of human situations like guilt, sex or death – these were at odds with the freedom of God (as he understood it). In that way, there is much in the spontaneity, joie de vivre and brio of Samoan culture and life that he could have learned from. For is not ritualised spontaneity in matters sexual (as in Tui Atua’s Samoan indigenous reference) a whole world away from the unrestrained Bacchanalia or Dionysian revels now re-surfacing in the wilder forms of contemporary popular music and drug culture? This is one of the questions I sense behind Tui Atua’s paper. Are we stumbling our way to an understanding of human sexuality as grounded in mutuality, in the spontaneous and joyful abandonment or self-giving of the one to the other in which ‘heart speaks to heart’? This goes far beyond anything Augustine ever articulated.

Next I’d like to comment on the beguiling section, ‘Welcoming the naiufi’. There are two very positive ideas behind this. First, because humankind – here fully inclusive of women – shares a common descent with the rest of creation, they share a kinship that is written into the order of the cosmos itself. This embraces sharks and humans, the oceans, the land, the sky – everything. The fact of kinship, then, positively translates into a strategy for the survival of all. For in a kinship situation, all have equal right to survival (and to flourish), a situation in which all ideas of domination or hierarchy are foreign.

My worries about this are twofold. First, for all the exquisite courtesy to the shark shown by the hunter–fisherman, it is the shark that is caught, killed and eaten, not the fisherman. Or, is the practical message that the survival of humankind depends on a limited killing of sharks, not the kind of exploitative, commercially driven factory fishing that recklessly destroys the fish stocks of the ocean without regard to the future? Isn’t there nevertheless a hidden idea of hierarchy and domination in the assumption that sharks are a food-source for humankind, not the other way round? Similarly there is surely a question to be asked about ‘Treating laoa’. While appreciating the indigenous worldview that gave rise to the healing practices described, are these what we would actually resort to today if we had a fishbone stuck in our throat? Wouldn’t we hurry along to doctor with his speculum, tweezers and local anaesthetic? This may sound trivial, but it serves to pose a question, the resolution of which may be vital to Tui Atua’s enterprise of recovering authentic Samoan culture. How do we achieve this recovery without play-acting, without archaising or being romantic, in such a way that we don’t just ditch what we value in modernity? In talking about the Samoan indigenous reference, aren’t we in fact talking about a ‘contemporary Samoan indigenous reference’?

My second concern is related. How does the traditional Samoan metaphysic of common descent and kinship cope with the horror of a tsunami? What kind of brother or sister is it that destroys with the indiscriminating fury of a tsunami? We’d like to think of nature as benign, as the mother and nurturer of life. But what happens when she turns on her offspring and devours them? This is a big subject, one that I can’t enter into in detail here. I have sketched the outline of an answer in a brief paper entitled, “Earthquakes, Tsunamis & God”, published in Anglican Taonga.81 Here I simply want to protest against the easy writing off of the Genesis account of creation in favour of Samoan indigenous mythology.

In his earlier paper, “Religion, Law and the Samoan Indigenous Reference”,82 Tui Atua interprets the Judaeo-Christian account of creation as merely narrating the origin of undesirable hierarchies and the emergence of a pathological idea of shame around the human body.83 This overlooks several things: that according to the early chapters of Genesis (1–11), the original creation was a primordial harmony inclusive of God, humankind, the biosphere, the lithosphere, etc.; and that this original, primordial harmony was declared by God to be good, ‘very good’ (Genesis 1:10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31). However, as the narrative continues, this original harmony manifestly broke down – witness difficulties in the relations of man and woman; not to speak of murder and violence (Cain and Abel); or even the difficulties of communication (Babel). True knowledge – that is, the knowledge of God – will always be beyond humankind (the Tree of Knowledge), but the hubris of humans will be forever to try to transgress that limitation. Without elaborating further, my point is that in Genesis we have a story that is not just the story of Creation, but also of Creation and the Fall. There are thus in the Genesis account at least openings for an account as to how things can go wrong and how they have in fact gone wrong. Can the same be said of the Samoan indigenous reference? Or is this still imprisoned within a rather benign notion of the sacred that doesn’t allow us to grapple realistically with horror? What I’m saying is that to authenticate any form of discourse – in this case the Samoan indigenous reference – we have also to consider things that might count against it or which show up the gaps and limitations in its present form.

My third and last comment relates to the final and most passionately felt section of the address, ‘The sexual and reproductive body’. Here, with great courage and not without attacks of (Augustinian?) self-doubt, Tui Atua enacts the passage from tala taumusumusu to tala tu’umumusu by giving a literal translation of one of the chants from the ‘auala va’a ritual. In an early version of the address, it included the word ‘cunt’ to refer to the female cavity. Here we see the cultural clash at the heart of the paper in its starkest and most painful form. In the Samoan indigenous reference, human reproductive organs, the female genitalia and their male counterparts, are celebrated in all their beauty and in rituals that mimic their interaction. In this performance of the paradox of a sacred irreverence, the release of energy and joy is palpable. By contrast, we have a westernised, Christianised culture in which one of the unwritten rules is, never mention the female pudenda in public and certainly not with taboo vulgarisms such as cunt. To do so is inevitably to cause offence and invite misunderstandings. We too have our culture of tala taumusumusu, one that is based on shame and repression. Perhaps this comes out most clearly in the German word die Schamgegend, literally ‘the shame area’, to refer to the human genitalia. Could it be of significance that Germany was the original European colonial power in Samoa? Do we touch here a mindset that obscured the genuinely erotic and, to go one step further, attempted to ban it as merely pornographic?

While it is true that the liberation of words like ‘cunt’ into Anglo Saxon public discourse has been bravely attempted in well-known works such as The Vagina Monologues (or, earlier, in the words of DH Lawrence), it is not without difficulties or dangers. The genuinely erotic easily degenerates into the crude; and in what feminists have described as ‘rape culture’, exposure can invite not celebration so much as violence. As I wrote the original version of this paper, a well-known rapist was on the run in Wellington. The terror this unleashed in women, especially those who had already been raped, was real and profoundly shaking. So once again there is a question. Can we talk or practise sex in a way that respects the freedom of the other? More bluntly, how in contemporary essays in the recovery of the true sacredness of our sexuality can we break free from historic oppressions of women? The merit of the word ‘cunt’ is perhaps to be the bell-weather (or litmus test) of what is at issue. Does it signify something earthy, human, beautiful and full of life? Or is it a code word for a patriarchy prone to fantasy that can be intrusive or violent?

This poses the further question of why the celebration of human sexuality works so well in a Samoan traditional ritual context and not elsewhere. The answer, I believe, lies in the whole cultural and religious context (or armature) in which the given ritual is set. In my marginalia to Tui Atua’s text, I jotted down some of the following (as a way of trying to grasp the context):

I could go on. But this already serves to the pose the question of whether the celebratory and open attitudes to sexuality at home in traditional, pre-Christian culture can survive with the passing of that culture. Are we talking about a nostalgic revival of something that, like the gods of ancient Greece, has long passed into antiquity? Or, alternatively, is a vibrant, surviving Samoan culture obscured by a thin veneer of missionary Christianity?

Whatever the answer to these questions, we would all, I’m sure, acknowledge that there is something fundamentally good in what Tui Atua relates. Few voices would be raised against a project that seeks to achieve a true resurrection of the body and the recovery of a more open, celebratory and frankly pleasurable attitude to sex, whether this be in religion or culture. Yet can we achieve this without self-consciousness or artificial play-acting? That it seems to me is part of the dilemma.

The deep underlying spirituality of Tui Atua’s paper comes out when he sketches the biblical concept of ‘vanity’ as a possible criterion for resolving that dilemma. Is our talk and practice of sex something that opens us to God or something that, conversely, obscures God from us? In our western culture, sex-talk is often seen as open rebellion against God, a God who is perceived as anti-sex. But this (as we know) can so easily degenerate into promiscuity and self-indulgence. It is here, I believe, that the Samoan indigenous reference can come to our aid: not only by keeping sex and sexuality on the agenda, but to do so in such a way that we do justice to our heart-centred, mind-body-spirit wholeness, as people who aspire to be as open to each other as we long to be fully open to the loving wisdom of our God. Would not this be the true wisdom of the fully mature human lover? Does this put us on the track of an authentically modern notion of the sacred?

In this quest, a few good questions will do well to keep us honest. Here are some that derive ultimately from an authentic Christian experience of salvation. Does it feel right to all involved? Is there at the heart of the joy and spontaneity of a fresh experience of sexuality the kind of mutual respect and giving of the whole person that make relationships sustainable over time? From what kind of slaveries or oppressions are we being released or liberated? How, in what is proposed, is the historic alienation between women and men addressed and overcome? Where do children figure in the equation? As we revel in being human (with all that implies), how do we remain open to the liberating energies of God that clean up our act, give it meaning, depth and a sense of direction and purpose? For, if anything is certain about the modern world, it is the fact that it is always on the move, in a process of rapid social change. Samoa is no exception. For this we need a moral and spiritual compass that is reliable and equal to the task.

77 Saint Augustine. (1992). Confessions (H. Chadwick, Trans.). New York, U.S.A.: Oxford University Press. Book 10, Para 38.

79 Saint Augustine. (1991). The Trinity: The works of Saint Augustine. (E. Hill, Trans.). New York, U.S.A.: New City Press, Book 12, Chapter 3, Para 14. p.330.

80 Suaalii-Sauni, T., Tuagalu, I., Kirifi-Alai, N., & Fuamatu, N. (Eds.). (2009). Su’esu’e Manogi: In search of fragrance: Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta’isi and the Samoan indigenous reference. Le Papaigalagala, Samoa: The Centre for Samoan Studies, National University of Samoa.

81 Pelly, R. Earthquakes, Tsunamis & God. (2010, Winter). Anglican Taonga, 33, 39.

82 Tui Atua, T.T.T.E. (2008, 3 December). Religion, law and the Samoan indigenous reference. Keynote address presented at the Pacific Futures, Law and Religion Symposium, National University of Samoa, Lepapaigalagala, Samoa. Retrieved from http://www.head-of-state-samoa.ws/speeches_pdf/Tui%20Atua%20Religion%20and%20Law_3%20December%202008.pdf.