Providence and Progress: Louis Sabunji’s “Historico-Pictorial Genesis & Symbols of the Various Religions”

New York City, 1872. A traveller on a tour of the world conceives an idea for a painting depicting the history of all major religions. For the next thirty-six years, in between various posts in Europe and the Middle East, he gathers information about these faiths. He collects foundational texts and records ancient and modern symbols. These ephemera, he increasingly believes, are not particular or idiosyncratic, nor is there strictly a correct theology superior to all others. Instead, these expressions of faith hint at an underlying unity – a unity that is as fundamental to understanding the present as it is to the past.

The second half of the nineteenth century saw many attempts to ascertain the order behind the multiplicity of global cultures and religions. These accounts often rationalized Euro-American hegemony, situating “Western civilization” at the forefront of human progress. The travelling protagonist of this story, however, was a self-identified Easterner – Syriac Catholic priest, journalist, and imperial agent of many allegiances Louis Sabunji (1838-1931).

Figure 1. The Thirteen Columns of the "Historico-Pictorial Genesis"

The only remaining image of Sabunji’s “Historico-Pictorial Genesis & Symbols of the Various Religions,” completed in 1908, is a press photograph from a 1921 exhibition in Washington, D.C.[1] Although Sabunji reportedly distributed hundreds of copies, the last mention of any physical version known to this author is a 1968 article that cites two copies held in Michigan and California.[2] The “Historico-Pictorial Genesis” attempted to convey a universal history of religion. It organized hundreds of miniature scenes depicting deities, clerics, and rituals into thirteen columns, each representing a major ancient or modern religious tradition. The painting reflected Sabunji’s singular perspective on the relationship between religion and civilization in a world dominated by Western imperialism. It has, nonetheless, only received cursory scholarly attention, with Sabunji’s most thorough biographer, Rogier Visser, focused primarily on the priest’s journalistic writing.[3]

Born in a village near Mardin in today’s Turkey, Louis Sabunji was educated to be a Syriac Catholic priest in a monastery in Mt. Lebanon and the Collegio Urbano in Rome. He eventually settled in Beirut as a parish priest, where he began a decades-long career in publishing. Sabunji took avidly to print journalism; twice he was forced from the city by local authorities because of polemics against his peers. His second expulsion eventually landed him in England, where he published a bilingual al-Nahla, taught Arabic, and fell in with British supporters of Egyptian nationalism. In 1891, Sabunji was hired as a secretary to the Ottoman sultan Abd al-Hamid II. Following his patron’s deposition and the First World War, Sabunji relocated to the United States, where he continued to publish until his death in 1931 in Los Angeles. A polyglot who also dabbled in photography, invention, and business in between these various intrigues, Sabunji’s life did not lack for adventure.[4]

How did the painting fit into this eclectic picture? What does it say about Sabunji’s understanding of religion and its role in the world? Through the painting, Sabunji articulated a notion of universal or “Natural” religion; formal doctrines, he argued, were derived from this quintessential divinity, but did not necessarily embody it in practice. This generic religion allowed Sabunji to develop his own gauge of civilizational progress, but in religious rather than secular terms.

Sabunji first formulated the idea of the painting in the midst of debates about the place of religion in contemporary Ottoman Syria. In the first of his two exiles from Beirut, and the one that eventually launched his trip to New York, Sabunji’s magazine al-Nahla (“The Bee”) had been banned in 1870 by local Ottoman authorities after a series of polemic articles were exchanged between Sabunji, the journalist and scholar Butrus al-Bustani, and the latter’s son Salim al-Bustani. As Visser has detailed, Sabunji perceived the corrupting secular influence of “the unbeliever Voltaire” in an article in Salim al-Bustani’s al-Jinan. Sabunji accused the elder Bustani of “spread[ing] the teachings of unbelief under the pretext of civilization and love of the fatherland,” attacking Bustani’s trademark non-sectarian patriotism.[5] All three parties were participants in a burgeoning print culture in Beirut which was eagerly debating the impact of new ideas about patriotism, education, and reform. In contrast to the Bustanis, Sabunji insisted that religion should remain the ultimate reference point for society.

Figure 2. Title Page of Sabunji's 1872 Lecture Pamphlet

Leaving Beirut in 1871 as a critic of secular Ottoman-Syrian identity, the first leg of Sabunji’s travels found him relying on Catholic networks for support. In the United States in 1872, he lived as a visiting Eastern Catholic priest, attending local Catholic events and giving lectures about the Syriac Catholic rite, the oppression of Syrian Christians, and the Holy Land to raise funds for the construction of a church back home.[6] A lecture tour, facilitated by local Catholic clergymen, would eventually take him to Chicago, Davenport, Omaha, Stockton, and San Francisco, where he boarded a ship for East Asia in 1873.[7]

Despite his Catholic priesthood and confrontation with the Bustanis, Sabunji was no doctrinaire reactionary. In fact, his fund-raising campaign was at least in part intended to appeal specifically to a progressive current of American Catholicism. His 1872 lecture Old Mother Phoenicia and her Young Daughter America was printed as a pamphlet and sold at St. Stephen’s Church in Manhattan, where Sabunji also deposited funds raised from his lectures. St. Stephen’s pastor, Edward McGlynn, was a fellow alumnus of the Collegio Urbano in Rome affiliated with the “Accademia,” an informal group of clerics and Catholic converts who favoured a Catholicism aligned with American progress and democracy.[8]

Sabunji’s declaration in Old Mother Phoenicia that “Providence has destined America to this new glory, the New World to help the Old” seems to have been directed at this audience. So too does his discussion of Syria’s Phoenician past, which lingers on shared penchants for self-government (the Phoenicians were “governed, as far as we can learn, as ‘constitutionally’ as possible”) and technological-commercial genius (a “golden age” of “Phoenician commerce, manufactures, and progress”).[9] While the text’s historical narrative notably skips the Christian era, a contemporary description of another of his lectures on “the checkered history of the Syrians, the race from which Christ himself sprang” suggests its unstated links to the Christian faith. Old Mother Phoenicia thus captures Sabunji creatively linking religion to modern civilization, and vice versa, alongside his American Catholic audiences.

It was in New York in 1872, and in the midst of this ongoing exploration of the intersections of religion and modern civilization, that Sabunji “conceived the idea of designing an oil-painting illustrating the origins and evolutions of the principal religions of the world.”[10] Eager, perhaps, to emphasize the place of religion in the trajectories of both Syrian and American progress, Sabunji’s emphasis on both “origins” and “evolutions” speaks to his interest in both religion’s foundational  essence and its capacity to undergo change. It is no wonder, then, that Sabunji claimed to have “first [gone] to Utah and conferred personally with Brigham Young on Mormonism.”[11] In addition to being a curiosity, the Mormons offered Sabunji a novel religious cosmology that explicitly incorporated notions of the providential destiny of the United States: a new configuration, in other words, of faith and modernity that Sabunji could incorporate into the painting’s wider tableau.

Figure 3. The "pure natural Religion"

Despite being occupied in various capacities in the coming decades, Sabunji continued to “collect the authentic and reliable documents for this gigantic work.”[12] The painting was completed in a time of stability, when he was employed as tutor to an Ottoman prince. After the Young Turk constitutional revolution in 1908 and the First World War, however, Sabunji landed in New York in need of a new livelihood. His “Historico-Pictorial Genesis,” now in English and accompanied by a 1919 book called the Key for the Historico-Religious Chart, Symbolic Mother of All the Revealed Religions, was both a promotional tool and a source of income for the peripatetic priest.

The Key laid out a pedagogical rationale for the painting before offering in-depth explanations of the various scenes and symbols it depicted. Sabunji specified that the text and painting were “not… sectarian [so as not] to be excluded from the public schools.”[13] Sabunji had written several textbooks and taught throughout his life. He also claimed to have served on the Ottoman “High Council of the Board of Public Instruction.” The painting in this way reflected Sabunji’s effort to incorporate non-denominational religion in state education. Here, Sabunji once more envisioned a place for religion in a domain of modernization.

In order to qualify for public schools, the religion that Sabunji described in the Key and depicted in the painting had to be generic or, more precisely, universal – an unchanging aspect of human knowledge, morality, and society. Thus, the Key begins from the premise that religion is a divinely-inspired innate quality in humanity that conveys the unity of God and the Golden Rule.[14] The central column of the painting is devoted to this “pure Natural religion;” the haloed, light-skinned woman at the top of this column is the focal point of the entire painting, from whom emanate lines of light that extend across its entire surface. Beneath her, scenes of Adam and Eve, the flood, and Abraham’s sacrifice confirm that Sabunji’s universalism was unavoidably Abrahamic. Still, the naked symbol of “Natural religion,” which “was infused in the heart of man by his creator,” is clearly meant to convey a purity that transcends religious divisions.

Each of the subsequent columns to the left and right of “Natural religion” are topped with a symbolic female figure, underneath which are depictions of events, figures, and ritual scenes in chronological order. Framed as an accessible way to teach the history of religions, the painting and Key also offered, in typical turn-of-the-century fashion, a means of understanding the animating principle behind different civilizational types. As Sabunji wrote matter-of-factly in the Key, “the religion of all nations typifies their peculiar characters, the degree of their intelligence and the quality of their social morality.”[15] Visual displays of individual human marked as one or another ‘type’ was a widespread contemporary form of depicting national, racial, cultural, and other forms of difference that appeared in everything from ethnographic studies to postcard photographs. Here, Sabunji offered his own array of ‘types’ with religion as the primary measure of collective character.

While the Key often cites European and American authorities on religion, philology, and archaeology, the painting hints at Sabunji’s own perspective on Eastern contributions to the global pantheon of religion. For example, what might be called Eastern religions – “Egyptian,” “Mosaic,” “Assyrian,” and “Mithraic” – flank “Natural religion” on both sides, bridging the temporal gap between creation and contemporary faiths like Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism and thus earning a certain pride of place. The East, in other words, was the home of religion, a spiritual cradle of civilization. Further, and despite the Key’s notes about the unity of God, the painting itself makes no distinction between monotheistic and polytheistic religions, a divide that was often conflated with the civilized-savage binary by Sabunji’s contemporaries.

More parochially, the painting also includes two columns on the far left and right which depict the “Greek” and “Syrian Catholic” churches, each topped by a male priest rather than the symbolic female figure of the other faiths. These columns gave Sabunji a chance to place his own Syriac Catholic church on an equal grounding with the much larger Greek Orthodox. Sabunji thus introduced these two Eastern churches to Ottoman and American audiences as peers. This equivalence speaks to a practice of narrating his own place in the long arc of religion that Sabunji had been practicing since his lectures on the Syriac Catholic rite in the eighteen seventies.

Figure 4. The "Assyro-Phoenician" and "Mithraic" trinities

Finally, the painting foregrounds horizontal parallels across the columns through repeated use of certain terms or visual structures. The existence of shared fundamental rituals or beliefs substantiated, for Sabunji, the underlying unity of faith as an inheritance of “Natural religion.” Shared tropes included “sacrifice” and “baptism,” for example. Sabunji was most insistent, including in a lengthy passage in the Key, on the ubiquity of the trinity; the painting features “Assyro-Phoenician,” “Mithraic,” “Hindoo,” “Greco-Roman,” and “Egyptian” trinities, in addition to the Christian one. Here was another case in which Christian doctrine became a template through which Sabunji read different faiths, glossing over theological disputes minor and major.

Yet this was precisely his purpose – to gesture towards an approach to the study of religion in which “truth[,] being in substance one, had to be taught by every founder of religion, under different forms and names.”[16] While this validated religious pluralism, the painting’s comparative method also suggested the existence of an ultimate metric by which any given religious belief or practice could be categorized. The notion of “Natural religion” isolated “that innate feeling which forcibly induces all human races to worship some Supernatural and Omnipotent Divinity” from existing “dogmas, mysteries, rites, and ecclesiastical hierarchies.”[17] If “the religion of all nations typifies their peculiar characters,” the painting was not only a taxonomy, but also hierarchy of religion, and thus a sword that religious modernizers like Sabunji could wield against secular modernity and religious particularism alike.

The notion of a fundamental religious truth reflected Sabunji’s long-held interest in envisioning a universal religion that would speak to a historical moment in which secular progress seemed to reign supreme. From his encounters with secular Syrian patriotism and American providence to the eventual realization of his idea, Sabunji sought to link religion and progress. The painting allowed Sabunji to draw lines of influence from East to West while positioning himself as an arbiter of the respective merit of the world’s societies on religious terms. In this regard, Sabunji’s project bore a resemblance to, even as it rejected, competing secular understandings of diversity in an imperial age.