Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (119 page)

In Mexico, the resulting vernacular culture is symbolized by the centrality to national identity of the Virgin of Guadalupe. This apparition of Our Lady is supposed to have been experienced by an Aztec lay convert with the Spanish name Juan Diego. As Diego was affirming his experience to his bishop, her image became miraculously apparent in the cloak he was wearing; the cloak and its painted image remain an object of veneration at the shrine of Guadalupe Hidalgo, now engulfed by the vast sprawl of Mexico City, but a quiet hillside in the country when these events are said to have taken place in 1531. The Guadalupe tradition in written form cannot be traced earlier than the work of Fr Miguel Sanchez in 1648; that hardly matters to the impact of Our Lady's appearance. It perfectly united old and new Latin American cultures in affirmation of divine motherhood - the very place name Guadalupe comes from Arabic Spain and a Marian shrine there, yet it was to a native that the sign of divine favour had been given, and the name sounds conveniently like the Nahuatl attribute of a goddess,
Cuatlaxopeuh
- she who trod the serpent underfoot. A recent study of the 'miracle' highlights the narrative achievement of the Creole priest Sanchez, who drew on both Augustine of Hippo and John of Damascus in meditating on the Guadalupe miracle. It is an extraordinary tribute to Augustine, the source of Luther's and Calvin's Reformations, that he should also fire the imagination of this Mexican priest.
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COUNTER-REFORMATION IN ASIA: EMPIRES UNCONQUERED

Whereas in Iberian America, Christianity could rely on official backing from colonial governments (subject to the myriad other concerns of colonial administrators), this was not so in Asia or Africa; nor did Europeans have disease on their side to weaken the great Asian empires they encountered, thanks to the centuries of continuous contact between Asia and Europe. Here the Portuguese were the main European Catholic power, and even after Philip II of Spain gained the Portuguese throne in 1580, Portuguese weakness meant that there was little or no military backing for Christianity, particularly against far stronger native empires in India and China. Only in the small enclaves where the Portuguese authorities were able to exercise real control, such as their Indian fortress headquarters at Goa, could they emulate the Spaniards' creation of a monochrome Christian culture - if monochrome is the right word for the heady Counter-Reformation Baroque of the colonial churches of Goa, which include the largest Catholic cathedral so far built in Asia. Portuguese religious rhetoric tended to ignore political realities, and Portuguese Church authorities often made things more difficult for non-Portuguese European missionaries by insisting on the paramountcy of their own culture and ecclesiastical jurisdiction as granted in the
Padroado
: the Archbishop of Goa became primate of all Catholic churches around the Pacific Ocean.

So once outside these uncomfortable pockets of European rule, Catholicism in Asia had to make its way on its merits, often where earlier Eastern Christian missions had already known success followed by gradual decline and contraction (see Chapter 8). Only in the Philippine Islands, a Spanish colony named after King Philip II, did Christianity eventually secure a substantial foothold among a large population in Asia - but the reason for this exception proved the rule. There, as in America, the Augustinian friars leading the Church's mission could rely on backing from colonial authorities with substantial military force. In fact, in a link-up at first sight bizarre, but highlighting the Philippine analogy with Spanish American experience, the bishopric of Manila in the Philippines was first ranked as part of the archdiocese in New Spain, thousands of miles across the Pacific, since most links with the home government in Madrid were via America.

Presenting the Christian message without military backing posed considerable problems for a missionary priest. Nearly always a Jesuit or a friar, he faced Asian peoples with age-old and subtle cultures, full of self-confidence and likely to be profoundly sceptical that Westerners could teach them anything of value. Muslim rulers and Hindu elites in India could contemplate with sarcastic interest the normally dire relations between the Christian newcomers and the ancient Dyophysite 'Mar Thoma' Church in India which derived from Syria. The Portuguese contempt for Christians they regarded as schismatics or heretics, and the schisms and disputes which Portuguese interference provoked in these Churches, were not impressive demonstrations of Christian brotherly love, as Catholic Christians burned venerable Christian libraries and occasionally people too for Dyophysite heresy. Catholic clergy did not at first appreciate a perennial obstacle in India: Hindu converts to Christianity automatically lost caste. It was not surprising that the missionaries' main success was with peoples lowest in the caste system (though it must also be said that the Mar Thoma Christians, who had over the centuries established themselves with higher-caste status, showed no signs of ever having reached out to such people).

One story of Christian success should be better known, because it is particularly significant for the future success of Christian mission in Asia and Africa. Joao de Cruz was a Hindu merchant who converted to Christianity and acquired his new Portuguese name in Lisbon in 1513. His efforts to restore his shaky finances led him to trade on the Fisher Coast of south India, where he was touched by the misfortunes of the pearl fishers (Paravas or Bharathas), once a privileged caste but now poverty-stricken and facing extermination by local rulers and their Arab merchant allies after they had rebelled. He advised the Paravas that their one hope of deliverance was to seek Portuguese protection - that would necessarily mean adopting Christianity. Twenty thousand Paravas are said to have been baptized as a result.
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Because the Paravas customarily moved over wide areas with the changing seasons, they spread their enthusiasm for their new faith across the Gulf of Mannar to Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Even when the Protestant Dutch captured Ceylon in 1658 and, with their own religious prejudices from Reformation Europe, systematically repressed Catholic practice where they exercised power, the local Catholicism persisted in secret. By the mid-eighteenth century the Dutch were baffled and furious to find that there were more Catholics than members of the Dutch Reformed Church in Ceylon, despite all its official favour, and when Dutch rule ended, the Reformed Church there collapsed, unlike Catholicism.
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The initiative by an insider to the subcontinent showed how an indigenous foundation might survive when Christian missions begun and run by Europeans might rise and fall in step with the ability of Europeans to sustain them.

The Jesuits began building up their strength after Ignatius Loyola's early companion in the Society Francis Xavier embarked on a prodigious decade of Asian mission in 1542. Now a new attitude emerged among the Jesuits, very different from Iberian missions in the Americas: other world faiths might have something of value and reflect God's purpose, and it was worth making an effort to understand Indian culture, language and literature. This was a far cry from Jesuit attitudes to Protestantism back in Europe: heresy was a greater danger than other faiths. This proposition was also attested by the fact that that same Francis Xavier was also responsible for recommending the introduction of the Portuguese royal Inquisition to Goa, with an eye on Mar Thoma Christians, though one of its first victims, in classic Iberian fashion, was a Jewish 'New Christian' from Portugal.
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The boldest experiment in India was made by an Italian Jesuit, Robert de Nobili (1577-1656). He took the unprecedented step of living in southern India as if he were a high-caste Indian, adopting dress appropriate to an Indian holy man. Becoming fluent in the appropriate languages, he also took particular care to point out to those to whom he preached that he was not a
Parangi
(a Portuguese). Higher-caste Hindus still tended to ignore him, but his strategy did produce results in establishing his guru status among lower-caste people. The Portuguese authorities fiercely opposed de Nobili, but finally lost their case against him in Rome in 1623; his reports back to Europe in the course of these disputes are among the earliest careful western European accounts of Hinduism and Buddhism. Whatever success the Church had in the Tamil country of south India was entirely thanks to Nobili and his Italian successors, but their work suffered during the eighteenth century both from severe Muslim persecution and, as in South America, from the general suppression of the Society of Jesus.
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Nobili was actually adopting a precedent of his Society from another vast mission field, China. Here, in the face of one of the world's most powerful empires, Portugal had even less influence than in India.
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The Chinese were not especially interested in large-scale contacts with foreign countries, not even for trade, and with their military might they were certainly not prepared to let the Portuguese in their small trading enclave at Macau adopt the ruthless proselytizing methods of Goa. The Jesuits quickly decided that missionaries must adapt themselves to Chinese customs. This involved much rapid self-education. Their first great missionary, the Italian Matteo Ricci, on his arrival in 1582, adopted the dress of a Buddhist monk (
bonze
), without realizing that
bonzes
were despised by the people who mattered.
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When his mistake was pointed out, he and his fellow Jesuits began dressing as Confucian scholars, complete with long beards (see Plate 46); they were determined to show that their learning was worthy of respect in a culture with a deep reverence for scholarship (an ethos of which naturally they greatly approved). In this they had the advantage of the network of colleges and educational experience built up back in Europe in the previous decades. One Portuguese member of the Society in 1647 used a metaphor for a Jesuit college drawn from a more militant mission field: it was 'a Trojan horse filled with soldiers from heaven, which every year produces
conquistadors
of souls'. He also commented whimsically that the Jesuits' long training was reminiscent of the naturalist Pliny's assertion that baby elephants were carried in their mother's womb for two years. The purpose of such long gestation both for elephants and for Jesuits was that they would be prepared for battle and strike fear into other creatures.
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The Chinese upper class was indeed impressed by the Jesuits' knowledge of mathematics, astronomy and geography, and the Society gained an honoured place at the emperor's court through its specialist use of these skills, even taking charge of reforming the imperial calendar - but not gaining many converts.

The Jesuit emphasis on their honoured place at Court was always something of a diversion from the real reasons for the growth of adherents, who were very different in their social profile from the exalted figures around the emperor. At the peak of the Chinese mission's success at the end of the seventeenth century, it was serving perhaps around a quarter of a million people - an extraordinary achievement, even though still, as in India, a tiny proportion of the whole population.
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Yet at that time there were only seventy-five priests to serve this number, labouring under enormous difficulties with language: how, for instance, to solve that problem already encountered in America, to hear confessions in such circumstances? What the Jesuits did very effectively in this situation was to inspire a local leadership which was not clerical, both catechists in the classic American mould and a particular Chinese phenomenon (perhaps inspired by the Ursulines), 'Chinese virgins': laywomen consecrated to singleness but still living with their families, teaching women and children. This preserved the mission into the nineteenth century despite worsening clerical shortages, which became acute when the emperor expelled foreign clergy in 1724. If the trend in Counter-Reformation Europe was for the clergy to take more control of the lives of the laity, circumstances in China consistently promoted lay activism - and the same was to prove true of Chinese Catholicism's daughter-mission to Korea in the eighteenth century (see pp. 899-902).
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As elsewhere in Asia and Africa, Portuguese suspicion of non-Portuguese clergy complicated the spread of Catholicism in China, and more serious problems emerged. When Dominicans and Franciscans arrived in China from the Philippines in the 1630s, they launched bitter attacks on their Jesuit rivals, and raised major matters of missionary policy. The friars, with a background in America assuming total confrontation with previous religions, violently disagreed with the Jesuits in their attitude to the Chinese way of life, particularly traditional rites in honour of Confucius and the family; they even publicly asserted that deceased emperors were burning in Hell. The French, including many French Jesuits of 'Jansenist' sympathies (see pp. 797-9), weighed in against the policy of flexibility when they became a significant presence in the 1690s. Complaints about the 'Chinese rites' were taken as far as Rome itself, and after a long struggle successive popes condemned the rites in 1704 and 1715. This was a deeply significant setback for Western Christianity's first major effort to understand and accommodate itself to another culture, and it was not surprising that the Yongzheng Emperor reacted so angrily in 1724.
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Christian work in Japan was the most extreme story, as the most spectacular success of any mission launched from Portuguese bases in Asia or Africa ended in almost total destruction.
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Francis Xavier and his fellow Jesuits arrived as early as 1549, only seven years after the first Portuguese visit to Japan, and Jesuits continued to dominate the Japanese mission. They quickly achieved results: by the end of the century there were perhaps as many as 300,000 Christian converts in Japan, aided by a determined and imaginative effort to meet Japan on its own terms. From the beginning, the Jesuits took Japanese culture seriously: 'these Japanese are more ready to be implanted with our holy faith than all the nations of the world,' Xavier affirmed, and he recommended bringing members of the Society from the Low Countries and Germany since they were used to a cold climate and would work more efficiently in it.
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The Italian Jesuit Alessandro Valignano envisaged the formation of a native clergy, and a Portuguese, Gaspar Coelho, was active in recruiting some seventy novices by 1590, concentrating especially on the sons of noblemen and samurai who would command respect in Japanese society (his colleagues felt more cautious and restrained his initiative).
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