Saint Monica was black. Not white.

[Guest]

Saint Monica was black. Yet if you search for her in Catholic Media almost every picture she's white. Why is that? I don't believe it's some innocent mistake. It seems much deeper than that. The same with Saint Augustine. Why would their be an effort to show him as white to everyone? I just learned he was black.

 

Edited November 4, 2019 by Guest

[Guest]

18 minutes ago, Josh said:

Why would their

 

 

*there

[Luigi]

"Because of her name and place of birth, Monica is assumed to have been born in Thagaste (present-day Souk Ahras, Algeria).[3] She is believed to have been a Berber on the basis of her name.[4]" - Wikipedia.

1. Algerian people are Arabic. Berbers are Arabic.

2. People who hear the word "Africa" and immediately think "that means Black" don't know geography. North Africans - Egyptians, Tunisians, Libyans, Moroccans, and Algerians among others are Africans who are not Black.

3. You can't believe what you see in art. Those are artistic depictions, created by creative people, not photographic portraits or even attempts to be. For instance, there is no Biblical mention of angels having wings, yet almost all depictions of angels depict them with wings. That's because artists made assumptions about how angels traveled back and forth from heaven to earth. And people have complained for years that Jesus and Mary are depicted as blonde-haired, blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked Europeans when in fact they were probably black-haired, dark-eyed, olive-skinned Sephardic Jews.

 

 

[Lilllabettt]

So this can be tricky.  There's ethnicity and race. An issue with "white" is that its definition is contested. There was a time when Italians, Greeks, and the Irish were not counted as "white." Nowadays they are. There are white Hispanics and black Hispanics. Most Hispanics are racially white, and outside the US most do not think of themselves as "people of color".  In like, Argentina, they will laugh at you if you called them poc.  Same with arabs and persians. These ethnicities are considered white ethnicities by world governments and most arabs/persians think of themselves that way. So. St Monica wasn't some Scandinavian princess but by most standards she would fall into the "white" bucket. Which, once again, is a description devoid of real meaning. 

[Peace]

2 hours ago, Luigi said:

"Because of her name and place of birth, Monica is assumed to have been born in Thagaste (present-day Souk Ahras, Algeria).[3] She is believed to have been a Berber on the basis of her name.[4]" - Wikipedia.

1. Algerian people are Arabic. Berbers are Arabic.

2. People who hear the word "Africa" and immediately think "that means Black" don't know geography. North Africans - Egyptians, Tunisians, Libyans, Moroccans, and Algerians among others are Africans who are not Black.

3. You can't believe what you see in art. Those are artistic depictions, created by creative people, not photographic portraits or even attempts to be. For instance, there is no Biblical mention of angels having wings, yet almost all depictions of angels depict them with wings. That's because artists made assumptions about how angels traveled back and forth from heaven to earth. And people have complained for years that Jesus and Mary are depicted as blonde-haired, blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked Europeans when in fact they were probably black-haired, dark-eyed, olive-skinned Sephardic Jews.

Well it all depends on how you define “Black” I think. If we are talking pitch black, devoid of all color then only folks from Sudan etc are Black. If we apply the one drop rule common in the US for most of our history they are all Black.

Most ancient Egyptians and many other N. Africans would probably be considered black by US standards I think. Basically a multiracial society with heavy influence from Sudan. You can go to the British museum and look at all of the stolen statutes, half of them look like my uncle Jerome.

The thing is, if they need to be pitch black to be considered “Black” then they certainly cannot be considered White either, because their skin color certainly isn’t snow white. So I think if people have license to paint them white, they should also have license to paint them black. I choose black statutes in my crib because hey, root for the home team if you gotta choose.

As with everything a nice shade of light brown such as myself would be ideal.

[Maximilianus]

 

[dominicansoul]

I'm pretty sure Adam and Eve were black... which means we are all black...

[Seven77]

 I agree that St. Monica was a Berber, which means she wasn't white but she wasn't black, according to our standards. But hey, I was not around back then so what do I know for sure about the way she looked? Many in the Early Church were straight up brown for sure. There are black Saints in the Coptic Church. St. Nicholas, St. Athanasius, were not white. Art should represent truth as much as possible, totally on board with that.

[Peace]

On 11/5/2019 at 5:11 PM, dominicansoul said:

I'm pretty sure Adam and Eve were black... which means we are all black...

Oh great, we only get the two people who screwed it up for all of us!

[Luigi]

5 hours ago, Seven77 said:

 Art should represent truth as much as possible, totally on board with that.

Aye, there's the rub. Art has never represented "truth as much as possible" - at least not 'truth' in the Western, rationalistic, scientific, documentary sense.

Art is an imaginative way of knowing. Art always exaggerates some features and reduces or eliminates other features of what it depicts. It does tell "A" truth, but it's a truth that appeals to the emotions, not the mind. 

The Jesus of the Pieta is too big for the Mary of the Pieta to actually hold - she would've dropped him. But it expresses the truth of the tragedy that Mary must've experienced. St. Dominic was never at the foot of the cross the way Fra Angelico portrayed him, but those paintings express the truth of St. Dominic's reverence for the Passion. Depictions of the Trinity usually include an old-but-still-mighty God the Father (even though theology tells us that God the Father has no body), a Jesus (for which the artist almost always uses models from the contemporary culture), and a glowing dove (specified in the gospels but depicted as the artist imagines it, not based on photographic evidence). 

Asking art to be always representational, and always accurately representational, is asking it to do and be something that it was never intended to do or be. It's like asking algebra to be compassionate - that's not what algebra does. 

[penitent60]

Jesus has been depicted Caucasian but would have been extremely Jewish in appearance. I worship Jesus as God not for his ethnicity. In Asia Jesus is depicted with Asian features in places. I guess it was to help people identify more with the man.

 

 

[Peace]

2 hours ago, penitent60 said:

Jesus has been depicted Caucasian but would have been extremely Jewish in appearance. I worship Jesus as God not for his ethnicity.

Hmm. This raises an interesting question. Are our Lord's human features worthy of worship? I think the answer should be yes. Jesus is God and Jesus is man. I don't think you can really separate them out and say "I worship Jesus as God but I don't worship Jesus as human."

I could be wrong.

[penitent60]

1 minute ago, Peace said:

Hmm. This raises an interesting question. Are our Lord's human features worthy of worship? I think the answer should be yes. Jesus is God and Jesus is man. I don't think you can really separate them out and say "I worship Jesus as God but I don't worship Jesus as human."

I could be wrong.

Hmmm....okay I worship Jesus because He is God my Saviour. I don't think I want to start  worshiping  of say Jesus's beard etc., although we have devotions to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I know what I mean even if my explanation is weak and unclear.

[Guest]

On 11/7/2019 at 3:21 PM, Luigi said:

Aye, there's the rub. Art has never represented "truth as much as possible" - at least not 'truth' in the Western, rationalistic, scientific, documentary sense.

Art is an imaginative way of knowing. Art always exaggerates some features and reduces or eliminates other features of what it depicts. It does tell "A" truth, but it's a truth that appeals to the emotions, not the mind. 

The Jesus of the Pieta is too big for the Mary of the Pieta to actually hold - she would've dropped him. But it expresses the truth of the tragedy that Mary must've experienced. St. Dominic was never at the foot of the cross the way Fra Angelico portrayed him, but those paintings express the truth of St. Dominic's reverence for the Passion. Depictions of the Trinity usually include an old-but-still-mighty God the Father (even though theology tells us that God the Father has no body), a Jesus (for which the artist almost always uses models from the contemporary culture), and a glowing dove (specified in the gospels but depicted as the artist imagines it, not based on photographic evidence). 

Asking art to be always representational, and always accurately representational, is asking it to do and be something that it was never intended to do or be. It's like asking algebra to be compassionate - that's not what algebra does. 

[Peace]

8 hours ago, penitent60 said:

Hmmm....okay I worship Jesus because He is God my Saviour. I don't think I want to start  worshiping  of say Jesus's beard etc., although we have devotions to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I know what I mean even if my explanation is weak and unclear.

I understood the main gist of what you wanted to say. But it does raise an interesting question (although off-topic). Is our Lord's beard worthy of worship? I think so. Are his feet worthy of worship? I think so. How could they not be?