Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (118 page)

While the Jesuits rapidly began following up their initial advantage in Portuguese territories in Africa, Asia and Brazil, they were comparatively late into the Spanish Empire, since the Spanish Inquisition for a couple of decades after the Society's foundation remained suspicious of an organization whose leader had twice briefly spent time in their prison cells. The Society only began arriving in the 1560s and 1570s, after more than half a century in which Franciscan and Dominican missions had been forced to think out a new theology of mission. Western Catholicism had limited experience to draw on; the last great ventures had been by the friars in Central Asia during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries (see pp. 272-5). Apart from that not very fruitful precedent and small beginnings in the Canaries, only the officially sponsored changes of religion in medieval Lithuania and Spain provided any reference point.

America presented a complex weave of powers and hierarchies which the missionaries needed to navigate with care. The Spaniards were very ready to distinguish between tribal societies and the sophistication of city-based cultures with recognizable aristocracies like their own. In such urban settings, they might very willingly strike marriage alliances with members of the local elites, in a notable contrast with the attitudes of Protestant English colonists in North America. Maybe Spaniards were simply more secure in their own culture than Tudor and Stuart Englishmen, who were products of one of Europe's more marginal and second-rank monarchies, and conscious that they had failed badly in their effort at cultural assimilation in their neighbouring island of Ireland.
⁹
The nephew of Ignatius Loyola, Martin Garcia de Loyola, symbolizes the complexity in Spanish America. He led the expedition which in 1572 seized the last independent Inka ruler in Peru, Tupac Amaru, and executed him in the Inka capital, Cuzco, but Loyola also eventually married Beatriz, Tupac's great-niece. Their politically motivated nuptials were proudly commemorated (and idealized away from a murky reality) in a portrait which is still one of the most remarkable features of the Jesuit Church in Cuzco (see Plate 59). In it there stand beside the Spanish newcomers the Inka grandees in their traditional finery, but also duly equipped with the blazons of European heraldry.
¹⁰

As Christianity took shape in the new setting, it was hardly surprising that even those most concerned to protect the native 'Indio' populations brought with them the exclusive attitudes of their Christian monopoly culture when dealing with the religions that they found. Sometimes one encounters echoes of Spain's non-Christian past, some presumably the result of craftsmen bringing their own style from Europe: for instance, the intricate Moorish abstract designs decorating the ceilings of the Franciscan church at Tlaxcala in New Spain (modern-day Mexico), which was built in the 1530s for a people who had done well out of a military alliance with the Spaniards against the Aztecs. More common was a conscious appropriation of important pre-Christian sacred sites, neutralizing or converting them by building major churches. The model was actually the missionary practice of Augustine of Canterbury's mission to the Anglo-Saxons back around 600 CE, with Pope Gregory's famous advice to Augustine's team of clergy to do precisely this - there were plenty of good libraries in Spanish America's rapidly developed network of colleges and universities where Bede's
Ecclesiastical History
might be consulted.
¹¹
Not far from Tlaxcala in the highlands of New Spain is the sacred city of Cholula, whose princes made a treaty with the Spaniards after fierce resistance. It boasts amid its pre-Conquest pyramids a formidable array of churches, and the former chief temple, the largest man-made pyramid in the world, is now crowned by the Church of Our Lady of Succour: one place of sacrifice transformed into another. One Dominican, Diego Duran, even envisaged turning the great stone basin supposedly previously used for human sacrifice in Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) into a font: 'I think it good that . . . what used to be a container of human blood, sacrificed to the devil, may now be the container of the Holy Spirit. There the souls of Christians will be cleansed, and there they will receive the waters of baptism.'
¹²

The most remarkable church in Cholula is the
Capilla Real
, built in the 1540s for the far-off Emperor Charles V as his symbolic Chapel Royal, but also as a gift to the defeated nobility of the region. This presents a complicated message about past and present. It is unlike any Christian church building in Europe, for inside and out it is a deliberate replica of the Grand Mosque of Cordoba, without obvious orientation or liturgical focus, and with the same forest of arches inside and vast courtyard outside. Back home, Spanish Catholics had crushed Islam and turned mosques into churches. Now in New Spain they had crushed other false gods and conquered the native princes. So, here in Cholula, they celebrated a new victory in the same way by building the princes a church which looked like a mosque. Significantly, Cortes in his forays through the region habitually referred to the native temples he encountered as 'mosques'.
¹³
While this building of the
capilla
at Cholula had a few companions in New Spain, there were many more parallels for its great square courtyard, with open corner chapels for devotional stations in processions (
capillas posas
), partly because of the courtyard's utility for an open-air worship which presented Latin liturgy in a setting where many in the crowd might not have been baptized. Such courtyards have no exact precedent in Christian Spain, but they recall another Islamic building known to Spanish pilgrims, the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. At the time that structure was widely considered to be the Palace of Solomon, and so a second message of the
Capilla Real
and its courtyard may be that a New Jerusalem could be found in Cholula for a new Christian people - just at the moment in the 1540s when so many souls were being lost to Protestantism in Europe.
¹⁴

The Spanish mission in America soon became not so much crusade as apocalypse. Franciscans coming from Iberia were particularly prone to the millenarian enthusiasm which gripped southern Europe around 1500, and which the Franciscan Order had so long fostered. They believed that they were living in the End Times and so their task of bringing good news to new peoples was desperately urgent (Chancellor Gattinara was not the only cleric to identify Charles V with the Emperor of the Last Days). In much of New Spain, an entirely new pattern of settlements of villages and towns was laid out on a grid plan - again, the ideal plan of a perfect Jerusalem - each centring on a church. This redrew the map of Central America, in a fashion which had no precedent in the architecture of old Europe and which, in its social engineering, made it impossible to separate out religious from secular concerns.
¹⁵
Nothing could be further from the clergy's minds than any need for Christianity to develop a long-term strategy of coexistence with other world faiths; there was no more room for rival religions in the 'New World' than back in Spain. When clergy noticed curious analogies in Aztec religion with Christian practice - an apparent sign of the cross, or belief in the virgin birth of a God - such similarities did not inspire them to inter-faith dialogue. These devices mocked and deceived God's Church in Satan's struggle against God's imminent Second Coming.
¹⁶
Apocalyptic fervour merged with Dominican concerns for legalities. Since Dominicans like Vitoria denied that the pope had the right to grant temporal rights of conquest in the New World in 1493, they were driven to stress the rationale of what he had done in terms of bringing the good news of Christianity and banishing Satan. Yet sometimes their very anxiety to destroy the demonic quality of the religion they found affected their message: anxious to banish the worship of the sun, priests appropriated sun imagery to the Christian Eucharist. One result seems to have been a notable stylistic innovation affecting the entire Tridentine Catholic world: eucharistic monstrances (vessels for displaying the consecrated wafer) which place their Host-container at the centre of a golden sunburst. Some of the earliest surviving examples were manufactured in the Spanish New World and imported back to Europe, and they were common in the Americas before they were in the Old World. They remain one of the most recognizable symbols of Tridentine Catholicism.
¹⁷

Clerical attitudes to indigenous cults hardened from the 1530s. In 1541 and 1546, major uprisings among the Maya of Yucatan were directed against all things Spanish, including Catholicism; they involved savage revenge attacks on the Spanish settler population and were naturally suppressed with equal cruelty. In 1562, Franciscan missionaries in Yucatan discovered that some of their converts were continuing secretly to practise pre-Conquest religious rites. It was bad enough to find that people had been burying figures of the old gods next to crosses so that they could go on publicly worshipping them undetected, but those questioned reported cases of human sacrifice, some including crucifixions, staged with satirical blasphemy during the Christian solemnities of Holy Week. The Franciscan provincial Diego de Landa set up a local Inquisition which unleashed a campaign of interrogation and torture on the Indio population. A newly appointed bishop, horrified at zeal gone wild, abruptly stripped de Landa of his authority, and put a stop to the atrocities, but the Maya had already paid a terrible price.
¹⁸

The effect of such disappointments was that Spanish clergy radically limited their trust in the natives. Indigenous people might become assistants in the liturgy, but never principals - catechists, sacristans, cantors and instrumentalists, not priests. At first, native men were not even allowed to enter religious orders. A problem arose which has remained constant for the Catholic Church entering new cultures (see p. 884): compulsory celibacy for the priesthood, restated with renewed vigour in the Counter-Reformation, was an alien idea in most cultures. Only in the eighteenth century did significant numbers of indigenous men become priests, at a time when consciously non-Christian religious practice in peoples under Spanish control had long ceased.
¹⁹
There were even serious debates throughout the sixteenth century as to whether natives should be banned from receiving the eucharistic Host when they came to Mass - after all, European laity only did so once a year, while these people were barely fit to be considered full Christians.
²⁰
In South America, first under Portuguese rule in Brazil and then in the south-eastern Spanish territories, Jesuits treated their hunter-gatherer converts almost as children, organizing them into large settlements to protect them against the greed and exploitation of the other colonists, but always in a benevolent European-led dictatorship of estates, the 'Reductions'. When the Jesuits were forcibly expelled from the Americas in 1767, they left their natives without any experience of leadership, and the carefully structured communities in the Reductions quickly collapsed. Only in Bolivia did priests of supposedly pure Spanish blood (Creoles) manage to carry on similar work after the Jesuits had left.
²¹

Within this framework, the Church did achieve a remarkable degree of synthesis between Christianity and what it allowed to survive from native culture. Naturally friars and Jesuits worked with the languages which they found, particularly since they were reluctant to open natives up to unhealthy influences from colonists by teaching them Spanish. They had utterly different priorities from the Protestant Reformation's insistence on the vernacular. Protestants would demand vernacular Bibles, but for Tridentine Catholics, not even vernacular preaching mattered as much as safeguarding the confidentiality of sacramental confession: if a priest heard a penitent's confession through an interpreter, many felt that it made a mockery of the sacrament. As missionaries developed their vernacular work, they tended to privilege certain languages in order to simplify their task, choosing for instance in New Spain the former official lingua franca of Nahuatl. Sometimes they imported into these languages some Latin theological terms, such as the Latin
anima
for soul, to avoid further conscious or unconscious local syncretism with pre-Christian concepts - there were just too many possible conceptions of 'soul' in Nahuatl to risk using any native words. Nevertheless, priests recognized that too much borrowing like this might cause pastoral problems, so one early-seventeenth-century guide for priest-confessors suggested that they talk to their penitents about Hell using a choice of Nahuatl words:
Mictlan
(Place of the Dead), or more picturesquely
Atlecalocan
(Place without a Chimney) or
Apochquiahuayocan
(Place without a Smoke Vent).
²²

Above all, missionaries realized that after the traumas of the conquest and epidemics, they must show that there was joy and celebration in the new religion. Frequently they turned their catechisms into song, just as the Jesuit Francis Xavier in India turned the creed into poetry for recital, and out of these initiatives sprang a vibrant indigenous tradition of music in church; many clergy also encouraged the Indios to dance, even inside the church buildings.
²³
In the multitude of new churches, the extrovert art and architecture of the developed Counter-Reformation gleefully fused with native artistic traditions to create some of the most sumptuous monuments of the Catholic world (see Plate 60). Catholic festival days were soon assimilated as community celebrations. In Peru, where the pre-Conquest aristocracy survived, Inka nobles might send their daughters to convent school to receive a good Spanish education from Creole nuns, but then on Corpus Christi day or the like, the nobles joined the eucharistic procession proudly wearing Andean costume and insignia, to emphasize their continuing privileged position within indigenous society.
²⁴
The long-term success of Spanish evangelism in the Americas was to make the Catholic Church both essential in native culture and a tie binding the indigenous peoples to the cultures of southern Europe. Beyond the sacramental life of the Church, a great deal of this activity was sustained by catechists, native or mixed-race laymen without any right to preside over sacraments, but devoted to repeating in their own communities what they had learned of the faith from clergy, interpreting, visiting, leading prayer. This was something new: there was little known precedent for the importance of catechists in the medieval European Church, even in its early medieval missions.