Sovereignty and Secularism: Thinking with Silver Altarware

When the Jesuits were expelled from the Americas in 1767, the Spanish Crown undertook the massive project of disposing of their property. As the Crown inventoried Jesuit silver altarware, notaries were instructed to differentiate the profitable from the salvific. Silver items were classified according to “degrees” of proximity to the body of Christ, the first one addressing “items that make immediate contact with the divine cult,” such as chalice, monstrance, and reliquaries holding saints’ bones. The second degree includes silver items without physical contact with the divine cult, but which “daily serve the Sacrament,” such as vinegar jars, lamps, and silver that “touches” saints’ images: crowns, diadems “and other similar items that in a certain mode surround the Sacred.” In the third degree are items with “no physical contact with the sacred” that augment “its magnificence and greater pomp, such as vases and bouquets. The Crown will allow itself the silver of the third degree.”

This paper explores how power in colonial Mexico followed “sacramental logics” in which the body of Christ enables and disrupts flows of power because the table at which everyone is seated is Christ’s own altar. After two centuries of feasting at said table, the Jesuits were summarily dismissed from their role as meditators of divinity. But even if the Crown enacted this stunning take-down of the Society of Jesus, its power, too, was subject to sacramental logics. If the Crown is stopped by the god-man present in the Eucharist, how are we to understand the nature of colonial “sovereignty”? This paper argues that these details about god-touched silver help scholars trace the way in which sacramental logics underwrote the field of power relations in colonial Mexico, but also point toward ways of thinking about secularism as a fragmentation and scattering of sacramental power.