About that medieval christo Jesuit missionary from Italy, Nobili, who used inculturation and pretended he was a Hindu to trick people into converting. In post 78 of the christo subversion thread has a bit of Joseph McCabe's writing on how the means of proselytisation which Nobili used were considered heresy, and how an archbishop therefore recalled him to Rome to appear before the Inquisition.
Well, it appears that Nobili and his methods weren't greatly favoured by at least one of his own order: another Jesuit missionary who'd also worked in India. In fact, the two wrote to charge each other with demonism.
The other missionary happens to be the one who converted the Parava community in the 16th century.
As usual, christians bickered: even Jesuit missionaries trying to harvest the same souls for their cannibalistic gawd. But, for a change, these two didn't do away with each other.
Following is the intro from
<b>Aristocratic Analogies and Demotic Descriptions in the Seventeenth-Century Madurai Mission</b>, Ines G. Županov, <i>Representations</i>, No. 41. (Winter, 1993), pp. 123-148.
Most of the article looked a bore to me, written as it is from a European POV which is interested in these characters and the way Jesuits disputed about theological matters. But a few bits are of some interest to Hindus and other inconvertibles:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Two Jesuit missionaries confronted each other in 1610 through letters and treatises, following what appeared to have been an intense, though brief, cohabitation in a distant mission at the heart of Tamil country. Roberto Nobili, a Roman aristocrat, schooled in the Collegio romano and a relative of the Cardinal Bellarmino, in his early thirties with about five years of experience in the "Indian" apostolic field, came under fire from an older colleague. His adversary was Goncalo Fernandes, a semi-literate Portuguese ex-soldier who for fifteen years had cultivated his Madurai Mission of Paravas, a low caste of fishermen converted by St. Francis Xavier.
The controversy started over the correct method of conversion, but it issued in two distinct proto-ethnographic accounts. The differences at stake can be understood at various levels: personal animosity, age difference, apostolic experience, status in an institutional hierarchy, national feeling, and social class. In the heat of the argument the two Jesuits came to perceive each other as "other." <b>In European seventeenth-century terminology, they suspected each other of falling victim to demonic influences. The translation of the smallest personal, political, or theological conflict into daemonomachia was a standard Jesuit (and not only Jesuit) strategy of both containment and annihilation.</b> And it was precisely the discovery of this otherness within the European colonial, or in this case proselytizing, enterprise that fueled their opposing cultural descriptions of Tamil alterity.
The gravity of demonic charges and counter-charges, although relatively subtle and prudent in the case of the controversy between Nobili and Fernandes, produced, to the historian's delight, a plethora of written documents bearing witness to the intellectual labor that brought them into being as well as their contingent, improvisational, and contesting origins. Nobili and Fernandes forced each other to assume in detail, as if on a distant horizon, the divisions and epistemological rifts that tore the European social and cultural fabric from within. While Nobili drew upon an aristocratic and humanist theological universalism as a catalyst for cultural incorporation, Fernandes's demotic impulses stood with a different technique based on the belief that radical others could and should be approached by direct sensory perception. He rejected Nobili's moves endlessly to supplement a familiar context, the product of scholarly sophistication, for inscription and description of Tamil customs and religious behavior and desperately defended his experiential authority over the singular, though not unique, "pagan" field of the Madurai Mission. For Fernandes the only measure of the truth and authenticity of external things and events was the self-presence of the "here and now." No memory, no trace of absent experience, no learned analogy could replace the moment of the eye/I contact. At issue, I would argue, was the crystallization in Fernandes's and Nobili's accounts of what would become in contemporary anthropological jargon, proto-emic and protoetic cultural approaches.
<b>Roberto Nobili</b>, born in 1577 in Rome, was the eldest son of an aristocratic family from Montepulciano. His decision to join the Society of Jesus, and later the Indian Mission, did not meet with easy approval. The resistance of his kinsmen led him to some dramatic escapes and mysterious disappearances in the fashion of a would-be saint or a martyr, until his family bowed to his wishes. After his novitiate in the Jesuit college of Naples and then theological studies in Rome, Nobili left Europe for good aboard the Sao Jacinto bound from Lisbon for Goa on 28 April 1604. When he died in 1656 in the Portuguese city of Mylapore, today one of the urban areas of Madras in the state of Tamil Nadu, he was a well-known missionary, considered a founder of the Madurai Mission. However, he <b>never achieved the sainthood that he so eagerly desired and felt predestined for because his fame or, according to his adversaries, his notoriety remained forever overshadowed by the controversy over the adaptationist method of conversion.</b> <b>As a partisan of the accommodatio to certain customs and rites of the "pagans," first developed by Alessandro Valignano for the Japanese and Chinese missions and then put more firmly into practice by Matteo Ricci, Nobili founded "his" Madurai Mission on the same apostolic methods designed for those missionary fields that still remained beyond Portuguese or Spanish military and administrative control. Although Jesuits resorted to accommodation whenever and wherever it seemed the only or the most efficient instrument, it was developed as a theory and practice, mostly by Italian missionaries, in and for the Asian missions.</b> <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Since the other Jesuit missionary was not recalled to be sent to the Inquisition, it would be fair to take his opinion: Nobili's conversion methods (<i>inculturation</i>, appears to be 'accomodatio') prove his was infested by 'demons'. (Never mind I don't believe in 'em. Them christos do.) Hence, his strategy is 'Evil'. Q.E.D. And that's exactly what the Protestants have been yelling about inculturation since Day One; and the catholic hierarchy in Nobili's time too, as mentioned by McCabe. If it worked it might have been something. But 'twas a leaden ship. You'd think they'd have learnt from it by now...
Second para of the excerpt above: "daemonomachia" <!--emo&:roll--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/ROTFL.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='ROTFL.gif' /><!--endemo--> You learn a new word every day. Now, if only I could find some use for it in my daily speech <!--emo&
--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Well, it appears that Nobili and his methods weren't greatly favoured by at least one of his own order: another Jesuit missionary who'd also worked in India. In fact, the two wrote to charge each other with demonism.
The other missionary happens to be the one who converted the Parava community in the 16th century.
As usual, christians bickered: even Jesuit missionaries trying to harvest the same souls for their cannibalistic gawd. But, for a change, these two didn't do away with each other.
Following is the intro from
<b>Aristocratic Analogies and Demotic Descriptions in the Seventeenth-Century Madurai Mission</b>, Ines G. Županov, <i>Representations</i>, No. 41. (Winter, 1993), pp. 123-148.
Most of the article looked a bore to me, written as it is from a European POV which is interested in these characters and the way Jesuits disputed about theological matters. But a few bits are of some interest to Hindus and other inconvertibles:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Two Jesuit missionaries confronted each other in 1610 through letters and treatises, following what appeared to have been an intense, though brief, cohabitation in a distant mission at the heart of Tamil country. Roberto Nobili, a Roman aristocrat, schooled in the Collegio romano and a relative of the Cardinal Bellarmino, in his early thirties with about five years of experience in the "Indian" apostolic field, came under fire from an older colleague. His adversary was Goncalo Fernandes, a semi-literate Portuguese ex-soldier who for fifteen years had cultivated his Madurai Mission of Paravas, a low caste of fishermen converted by St. Francis Xavier.
The controversy started over the correct method of conversion, but it issued in two distinct proto-ethnographic accounts. The differences at stake can be understood at various levels: personal animosity, age difference, apostolic experience, status in an institutional hierarchy, national feeling, and social class. In the heat of the argument the two Jesuits came to perceive each other as "other." <b>In European seventeenth-century terminology, they suspected each other of falling victim to demonic influences. The translation of the smallest personal, political, or theological conflict into daemonomachia was a standard Jesuit (and not only Jesuit) strategy of both containment and annihilation.</b> And it was precisely the discovery of this otherness within the European colonial, or in this case proselytizing, enterprise that fueled their opposing cultural descriptions of Tamil alterity.
The gravity of demonic charges and counter-charges, although relatively subtle and prudent in the case of the controversy between Nobili and Fernandes, produced, to the historian's delight, a plethora of written documents bearing witness to the intellectual labor that brought them into being as well as their contingent, improvisational, and contesting origins. Nobili and Fernandes forced each other to assume in detail, as if on a distant horizon, the divisions and epistemological rifts that tore the European social and cultural fabric from within. While Nobili drew upon an aristocratic and humanist theological universalism as a catalyst for cultural incorporation, Fernandes's demotic impulses stood with a different technique based on the belief that radical others could and should be approached by direct sensory perception. He rejected Nobili's moves endlessly to supplement a familiar context, the product of scholarly sophistication, for inscription and description of Tamil customs and religious behavior and desperately defended his experiential authority over the singular, though not unique, "pagan" field of the Madurai Mission. For Fernandes the only measure of the truth and authenticity of external things and events was the self-presence of the "here and now." No memory, no trace of absent experience, no learned analogy could replace the moment of the eye/I contact. At issue, I would argue, was the crystallization in Fernandes's and Nobili's accounts of what would become in contemporary anthropological jargon, proto-emic and protoetic cultural approaches.
<b>Roberto Nobili</b>, born in 1577 in Rome, was the eldest son of an aristocratic family from Montepulciano. His decision to join the Society of Jesus, and later the Indian Mission, did not meet with easy approval. The resistance of his kinsmen led him to some dramatic escapes and mysterious disappearances in the fashion of a would-be saint or a martyr, until his family bowed to his wishes. After his novitiate in the Jesuit college of Naples and then theological studies in Rome, Nobili left Europe for good aboard the Sao Jacinto bound from Lisbon for Goa on 28 April 1604. When he died in 1656 in the Portuguese city of Mylapore, today one of the urban areas of Madras in the state of Tamil Nadu, he was a well-known missionary, considered a founder of the Madurai Mission. However, he <b>never achieved the sainthood that he so eagerly desired and felt predestined for because his fame or, according to his adversaries, his notoriety remained forever overshadowed by the controversy over the adaptationist method of conversion.</b> <b>As a partisan of the accommodatio to certain customs and rites of the "pagans," first developed by Alessandro Valignano for the Japanese and Chinese missions and then put more firmly into practice by Matteo Ricci, Nobili founded "his" Madurai Mission on the same apostolic methods designed for those missionary fields that still remained beyond Portuguese or Spanish military and administrative control. Although Jesuits resorted to accommodation whenever and wherever it seemed the only or the most efficient instrument, it was developed as a theory and practice, mostly by Italian missionaries, in and for the Asian missions.</b> <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Since the other Jesuit missionary was not recalled to be sent to the Inquisition, it would be fair to take his opinion: Nobili's conversion methods (<i>inculturation</i>, appears to be 'accomodatio') prove his was infested by 'demons'. (Never mind I don't believe in 'em. Them christos do.) Hence, his strategy is 'Evil'. Q.E.D. And that's exactly what the Protestants have been yelling about inculturation since Day One; and the catholic hierarchy in Nobili's time too, as mentioned by McCabe. If it worked it might have been something. But 'twas a leaden ship. You'd think they'd have learnt from it by now...
Second para of the excerpt above: "daemonomachia" <!--emo&:roll--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/ROTFL.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='ROTFL.gif' /><!--endemo--> You learn a new word every day. Now, if only I could find some use for it in my daily speech <!--emo&
--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif' /><!--endemo-->