The Enlightenment & Awakening Era · 1704-1706 · Kongo
The Antonian Movement in Kongo
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About This Movement
By 1700 the Kingdom of Kongo had been Christian for two centuries — its kings baptized, its capital São Salvador full of churches, its catechism printed in Kikongo. And it was also in ruins, broken by civil war and the slave trade, its capital abandoned. In 1704 a young noblewoman named Kimpa Vita, baptized Beatriz, announced that she had died and been possessed by Saint Anthony of Padua, and that he now spoke through her. The kingdom must be reunited, the capital reoccupied, and Christ and the saints understood as Kongolese rather than European. Thousands followed her back into São Salvador. Two Capuchin missionaries persuaded the restored king to arrest her, and in July 1706 she was burned as a heretic.
Sources
- Bernardo da Gallo's and Lorenzo da Lucca's Capuchin relations - the only contemporary documentation of Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita's movement, incl. her interrogation, trial, and burning (1706) (primary) — Her voice survives only through the pen of the men who condemned her. Italian originals; available in English chiefly through Thornton's translations.
- The Salve Antoniana - the movement's own reworked prayer, recoverable through da Gallo's transcription/summary (primary) — An inside text that survives only through hostile transmission, reconstructed by Thornton.
- The Kongo-Christian documentary matrix: the court's correspondence (Pedro IV's era), the Kikongo catechism tradition (1624 Doutrina), Sao Salvador church records (primary) — Documents the two-century-old African Christianity without which this movement can't be understood. Editions include Brasio's Monumenta Missionaria Africana.
- John Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684-1706 (CUP, 1998), with Cecile Fromont, The Art of Conversion (UNC, 2014) (secondary) — Thornton is the standard work, built on the Capuchin records read critically, against their hostile grain.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 7, 'Christianity in Africa' (Sanneh) (reference)