The Early Modern Jesuit Attitude Towards Hindu and Ethiopian Strains of Asceticism (Jesuit Studies, 41) 9004538550, 9789004538559

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The Early Modern Jesuit Attitude towards Hindu and Ethiopian Strains of Asceticism

Jesuit Studies MODERNITY THROUGH THE PRISM OF JESUIT HISTORY

Editor Robert A. Maryks (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań) Editorial Board James Bernauer, S.J. (Boston College, emeritus) Louis Caruana, S.J. (Pontificia Università Gregoriana, Rome) Emanuele Colombo (DePaul University) Paul Grendler (University of Toronto, emeritus) Yasmin Haskell (University of Western Australia) Ronnie Po-chia Hsia (Pennsylvania State University) Thomas M. McCoog, S.J. (Loyola University Maryland) Mia Mochizuki (Independent Scholar) Sabina Pavone (Università degli Studi di Macerata) Moshe Sluhovsky (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Jeffrey Chipps Smith (The University of Texas at Austin)

Volume 41

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/js

The Early Modern Jesuit Attitude towards Hindu and Ethiopian Strains of Asceticism By

Leonardo Cohen

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: untitled painting by Eduardo Cohen, the author’s father. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at https://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023042468

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2214-3289 isbn 978-90-04-53855-9 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-53856-6 (e-book) DOI 10.1163/9789004538566 Copyright 2024 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Brill Wageningen Academic, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

The writing of this book took place between Jerusalem and Rome and between Rome and Jerusalem (2010–2023). It is dedicated to those who were with me in this round trip and are still with me to this day: Amitai and Esty

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Contents Acknowledgements ix Introduction: The Early Modern Jesuit Attitude toward Hindu and Ethiopian Strains of Asceticism 1 1 A Comparative View of Jesuits and Ascetics 1 1 Historical Background to the Jesuit–Eastern Ascetic Encounter 17 1 The Missions and the Portuguese Padroado of the East 17 2 The Jesuit Experience in India and Ethiopia 22 3 The Jesuit Approach to Asceticism: in Search of Symmetry 37 4 Hindu Ascetism 53 2 Understanding Ethiopian Asceticism 61 1 Interest in the Origins of Ethiopian Asceticism 62 2 Description and Assessment of the Ethiopian Ascetic 72 3 The Danger of Relaxing Ascetic Norms 78 4 The Virtues of the Virgin and the Question of Who Is a Good Christian 87 5 Conclusion 95 3 Jesuits and Yogis: Description and Ambivalence 97 1 The Visual Impact of Yogis 97 2 Yogi as Role Model (Imitatio yogii) 100 3 The Excesses of the Renunciants 106 4 Conclusion 112 4 Confronting Yogis and Ethiopian Monks 115 1 Doctrinal Errors and “Inadequate” Biblical Exegesis of Ethiopian Monks 123 2 Degenerate Christianity 139 3 Conclusion 148 5 Another Polemical Front: Faith, Healing, and Medicine 150 1 Exorcisms and Healing 155 2 Salvation through Images, Relics, Crosses, and Amulets 163 3 Volatility, Social Tensions, and Natural Disasters 167 4 The Allure of Shrines 172 5 Conclusion 177

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6 Jesuit Ambitions to Convert Ascetics 179 The Motivations of Converts and the Genuine Conversion 1 Dilemma 184 2 “Conversion of the Heart”: the Jesuit Approach to the Evangelization of the Yogis 186 3 The Conversion of Ethiopian Monks 195 4 Coercion, Intimidation, and Punishment 204 5 Fake Catholics 209 6 Conclusion 212 Conclusion 215 Bibliography 221 Index 248

Acknowledgments During the writing of this book, several colleagues from Mexico and Israel helped me translating the terms and accurately editing all of its chapters. In this regard, I would like to like to thank especially Avi Aronsky, Marianela Santoveña Rodríguez, Francisco Palafox and Pascal Roy.

Introduction: The Early Modern Jesuit Attitude toward Hindu and Ethiopian Strains of Asceticism 1

A Comparative View of Jesuits and Ascetics

In September 1977, a Jesuit by the name of Swami Sevenand (dates unknown) published an article titled “Christian Sannyasa” in Indian Theological Studies. Originally written for a conference of Indian members of the Society of Jesus, the author urges his colleagues to embrace the deep-seated local practice of approximating the divine, particularly the methods of Hindu sannyasi (renouncers). The Second Vatican Council (1962–65), Sevenand explains, called upon Catholic proselytizers to integrate religious values with the cultural heritage of each country. For instance, they should assimilate the contemplative and ascetic traditions that God has implanted in ancient cultures. Moreover, he urges his readers to keep abreast of new forms of religious experience. With this in mind, Sevenand argues that it is incumbent upon the church in India to adopt the sannyasa idea of incarnation.1 To succeed in India, he adds, Catholic missionaries must see to it that locals do not perceive Christians as a group that vies with others, a foreign cult, and a theology or doctrine meant to be studied. Lastly, the Christian faith must be contemplative and spiritually oriented.2 The age-old semblance between the Christian man religious and the Indian ascetic derives from the meditative nature of both religions. Owing to the Society of Jesus’s ambivalence—a composite of rejection and attraction— toward the Eastern anchorites, scholars are hard-pressed to accurately describe the first encounters between the Society’s missionaries and Hindu renunciants during the early modern period. Likewise, the Jesuits had mixed feelings about Ethiopian monks and ascetics. While deeming Ethiopian Christianity a schismatic offshoot, the missionaries respected its ecclesiastics’ austerity and abstinence. The Society of Jesus was certainly not the first Catholic order to venture eastward. That said, the sources ensconced in the Jesuit archives as well as published editions of the books and letters by the organization’s representatives documenting its missions undoubtedly surpass those of the other proselytizing orders. In the first half of the sixteenth century, quite a few Catholic 1 Swami Sevenand, “Christian Sannyasa,” Indian Theological Studies 14, no. 3 (September 1977): 264–88, here 275–76. 2 Sevenand, “Christian Sannyasa,” 278.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004538566_002

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agents working overseas sent back informative letters and sundry reports to Europe.3 However, the Jesuits were the first to develop an extensive postal system and a comprehensive plan for disseminating the content of their missives. For these reasons, the Society’s literature is both vast and meticulously organized.4 In fact, the order’s system of correspondence was better run than that of most states during these years. From the order’s very advent, its members, like their European allies, felt compelled to apprise their readers not only of outreach activities overseas but topics like climate, geography, the customs of the targeted populations, and competition between different local religious bodies. The epistles from Asia and Africa thus stood out from their European analogs, offering interesting historical-cum-ethnographical details and reports on the achievements, tribulations, and vicissitudes of the missions in these distant regions.5 By the time the first groups of Jesuit proselytizers arrived in Ethiopia, the Society’s efforts to advance the faith in India were already underway. The missionaries on the Horn of Africa encountered a deep-rooted Christianity. Nevertheless, they formally condemned the local version as aberrant to the teachings of the Holy See.6 While excoriating the Ethiopian Church and Coptic Patriarchate, on which the former leaned, the missionaries displayed a certain ambivalence toward the spirituality of Ethiopian monks. Of all the Catholic orders, only the Jesuits managed to secure a toehold in this African monarchy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The order’s model of piousness differed appreciably from its Catholic counterparts as well. Codified in 1558, the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus speak to these disparities.7 To begin with, the Jesuits lacked convents, priors, and 3 António da Silva Rego (1905–86) assembled the order’s letters; see Donald F. Lach, India in the Eyes of Europe: The Sixteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 314. 4 As early as 1547, Ignatius of Loyola furnished the order’s proselytizers in India with “a detailed list of everything worth knowing; for example, the climate, food, customs, and temperament of the indigenous peoples, as well as everything that might be necessary for the worship of God and aid of the souls.” Jesús María Granero, La acción misionera y los métodos misionales de San Ignacio de Loyola (Burgos: Bibliotheca Hispana Missionum, 1931), 87–88. For a disquisition on the historical value of the Jesuit missives from Asia, see Lach, India in the Eyes of Europe, 314–31. 5 See Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond 1540–1750 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Markus Friedrich, “Circulating and Compiling the Litterae annuae: Towards a History of the Jesuit System of Communication,” Archivum historicum Societatis Iesu 77 (2008): 3–39. 6 On the controversies over biblical interpretation and Christology between Catholics and Orthodox Ethiopians, see Leonardo Cohen, The Missionary Strategies of the Jesuits in Ethiopia (1555–1632) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2009), 113–40. 7 Santiago Arzubialde, Jesús Corella, and Juan Manuel García-Lomas, eds., Constituciones de la Compañía de Jesús: Introducción y notas para su lectura (Bilbao: Mensajero, 1993), 62, 110.

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general chapters. However, members put a premium on their individual houses. In addition, the Society’s superior general and other leaders enjoyed immense privileges. The Jesuits also refrained from dedicating themselves entirely to a single task, like preaching or charity. Instead, they saw themselves as a highly exclusive group that was constantly at the beck and call of the pope.8 Regardless of duration, content, and location, they accepted whatever assignment was issued by the pontificate at the drop of a hat, no questions asked. According to John W. O’Malley (1927–2022), this pledge stands in contrast to the ecumenical monastic vow of stability. In sum, Ignatius of Loyola (c.1491–1556) clearly had no intention of establishing a monastic order with permanent residences and tasks. The Society’s fourth vow epitomizes this ideal—“distribution of the members in the Vineyard of the Lord,”9 namely throughout the world. As Jerónimo Nadal (1507–80), a companion of the founder, put it in the Alcalá exhortations: There are houses for the professed, where the ministries of the Society for the help of the souls are exercised. Is there more? Yes, the best: the “missions” on which the pope or superior sends us, so that for the Society the whole world will become its house; and thus it will be with the divine grace.10 Plainly put, early modern Jesuits had no permanent residence. They vowed to go anywhere on the face of the earth that they could exert the most influence. For this same reason, they became educators, missionaries, diplomats, confessors of royalty, and the like.11 In this context, the newly founded Society’s attitude toward the widespread ascetic practices of the other orders also warrants our attention. The Jesuits did not arise in a religious void. As part of the spirituality movement triggered by the Catholic Reformation, hermitry, mortification, humiliation, and askesis 8 As per the Society’s fourth vow, every Jesuit is duty-bound to serve God by loyally complying with the pope’s wishes. The wording leaves precious little room for interpretation, as this oath is to be honored “without subterfuge or excuse, immediately, all that which His Holiness commands us to do regarding the benefit of souls and the propagation of the faith.” See Ignacio Iglesias, “Cuarto voto,” in Diccionario de espiritualidad ignaciana, ed. Grupo de Espiritualidad Ignaciana (GEI) (Bilbao: Mensajero, 2007), 1:515–20, here 517. 9 John O’Malley, “To Travel to Any Part of the World: Jerónimo Nadal and the Jesuit Vocation,” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 16, no. 2 (1984): 1–20, here 9. 10 Cited in O’Malley, “To Travel to Any Part of the World,” 7. 11 Guenter Lewy, “The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Early Years of the Society of Jesus,” Church History 29 (1960): 141–60; Ignasi Salvat, Servir en misión universal (Bilbao: Mensajero, 2002), 180. Also see Javier Osuna, Amigos en el Señor: Unidos para la dispersión (Bilbao: Mensajero, 1998), 244–47, 403–54.

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were revitalized in the sixteenth century, not least among a handful of the mendicant orders. At the time, the writings of the desert fathers and other texts extolling the hermit ideal were quite popular.12 From the outset of the Catholic Reformation, orders like the Discalced Carmelites,13 a handful of Franciscans, and the Benedictines from Montserrat (a group that was open to secular hermitages),14 among others, embraced asceticism, particularly mortification and seclusion. The first Jesuits were also exposed to this mystical-cum-spiritual literature, including the life of the saints and De imitatione Christi (The imitation of Christ) by Thomas à Kempis (1380–1471).15 In certain provinces, the Society’s novices would read the life of Saint Anthony, albeit with certain omissions, or The Letters of Saint Catherine of Siena.16 However, both the founding general and his successors tried to moderate the influence of this literature by paring back its repertory to a number of select texts and adapting them to the postulants’ specific needs. At Ignatius’s behest, a “director” supervised the “curriculum” of each exercitant. Moreover, the founder insisted on restricting the time for prayer and ascetic practices, lest they interfere with the daily running of the ministry.17 As Pedro de Leturia (1891–1955) writes, “the general plan of exercises” was tailored to the particular exercitant.18 In other words, the oral exposition of the mentors increasingly replaced the traditional reading of spiritually inclined books during this formative period, with the objective of acclimating the novices to methodical prayer. Though at odds with the 12 Apart from works by the desert fathers, this literature consisted of texts like Jacopo de Voragine’s (1228/30–98) La legenda dourada (The golden legend)—a hagiography of the anchorites—and the different editions of the Flos sanctorum (The lives of saints). Another major Catholic figure during these years was Pedro de Alcántara (1499–1562)—a Franciscan father. Alcántara’s contemporary, Teresa of Ávila (1515–82), considered him an exemplar of sanctity. See Célia Maia Borges, “Os eremitas e o ideal de santidade no imaginário português: O Deserto dos Carmelitas Descalços no séc. XVII,” Lusitania sacra 23 (2011): 189–203, here 193–94. 13 Maia Borges, “Eremitas”; John Patrick Donnelly, “The New Religious Orders, 1517–1648,” in Handbook of European History, 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, ed. Thomas A. Brady Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 2:296–98. 14 See José Adriano da Freitas Carvalho, “Eremitismo em Portugal na época moderna: Homens e imagens,” Via spiritus 9 (2002): 83–145, esp. 86, 98–99, 103. 15 Pedro de Leturia, Estudios ignacianos, II. Estudios espirituales (Rome: Institutum Historicum S.I., 1957), 273–82. 16 Leturia, Estudios ignacianos, 283. Among the Jesuits, Nadal was a leading advocate of balanced asceticism. While lamenting the excesses of the Alumbrados, he rejected what he considered to be dangerous, cold intellectualism. See John O’Malley, “Early Jesuit Spirituality: Spain and Italy,” in Religious Culture in the Sixteenth Century: Preaching, Rhetoric, Spirituality, and Reform (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993), ix, 3–27, here 18. 17 O’Malley, “Early Jesuit Spirituality,” 7. 18 Leturia, Estudios ignacianos, 272.

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apostolic values of the “Church Militant,” which above all demanded institutional obedience, Jesuits continued to engage in spiritual readings. Father Luis Gonçalves da Câmara’s (c.1519–75) reminiscences of the founding general superior illustrate how Jesuit abstinence and bodily mortification were gradually ratcheted down: “Talking to me […] about the exercises of the abbot [i.e., Jerónimo Martinengo (dates unknown)],” Ignatius told Gonçalves da Câmara that “the rigor of the exercises in the beginning […] was now worthless; that at the time, no one did them without having fasted a few days, though no one convinced them to do so; and that now he would not dare to consent to a strong individual doing this more than one day [a week], though he had no misgivings about what was [done in the] past.”19 Furthermore, he explains the restrictions that Ignatius placed on fasting: “The father leaned always toward compassion and said it was good; even so, for specific reasons, he seemed to allow some others to fast throughout Lent; children he allowed one day per week; those who were nineteen or twenty years old, three; those who worked, such as masons,” were entirely forbidden from such abstinence. Thereafter, Ignatius “sent a letter of admonishment to Sicily, for they had permitted the children to fast during Lent; he regularly condemned with great vigor allowing novices to fast.”20 Pedro Laín Entralgo (1908–2001), the renowned essayist and medical anthropologist, notes that the Ignatian attitude toward health and sickness is “modernly Christian” in all that concerns the excesses of medieval ascetics: Let the rules concerning the food of the exercitants and, above all, the advice warning against the abusive value placed on the spiritual merit that a patiently borne illness be read from this point of view. “With a healthy body you shall be able to do much; with a sick one, I know not what you would do,” he [i.e., Ignatius] says to Sister Teresa Rajadell in one of his letters. Saint Ignatius does not so much value what a sick body may be worth in terms of merit compared to what a healthy body can do for [achieving] perfection in life.21

19 Benigno Hernández Montes, ed., Recuerdos ignacianos: Memorial de Luis Gonçalves da Câmara (Bilbao: Mensajero, 1992), 209–10. 20 Hernández Montes, Recuerdos ignacianos, 156. 21 Pedro Laín Entralgo, “La personalidad de Ignacio de Loyola,” in Ignacio de Loyola en la gran crisis del siglo XVI: Congreso Internacional de Historia, Madrid, 19–21 noviembre de 1991, ed. Quintin Aldea (Madrid: Universidad Complutense, 1993), 191–200, here 197–98. Also see Michael Barnes, “The Body in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola,” Religion 19 (1989): 263–73.

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This position also surfaces in a letter that the founder addressed to Urbano Fernandes (dates unknown), the rector of Lisbon. Ignatius ordered the ailing Jesuit, who was en route from Portugal to the Indies, to return if the physicians deemed it necessary.22 As opposed to the mendicant orders, then, the Society of Jesus was less ardent concerning bodily mortification. Though outwardly more rational and moderate, even the Jesuits struggled to reconcile themselves with currents in mystical thought. As O’Malley has suggested, self-imposed austerity aimed at overcoming personal clutter was not in vogue. Instead, the new asceticism centered on the rigors and hardship of uncompromising dedication to the ideal of ministry in a world dominated by the needs of the capricious masses.23 In his famous Coimbra talks, Nadal declared that “our perfection goes in circles: it is being flawless in prayer and spiritual exercises and helping your neighbor, and then acquiring more perfection from prayer to further help your neighbor.”24 Be that as it may, at around the turn of the sixteenth century, a strong contemplative predisposition took hold of the Society, especially on the Iberian Peninsula.25 More specifically, certain Jesuits searched for answers in seclusion and through practices that were associated with the much-maligned Alumbrados (“illuminated” or “enlightened”). Established in the 1400s, this movement was perceived as harmful by ecclesiastical authorities due to the “excessive” importance it placed on visions, revelations, and other ecstatic experiences.26 While passing through Navarrete, Alcalá, and Valladolid, Ignatius perhaps met and had dealings with a few Alumbrados.27 22 Granero, Acción misionera, 131. 23 O’Malley, “Early Jesuit Spirituality,” 8. 24 Cited in Anton Witwer, “Contemplativo en la acción,” in GEI, Diccionario de espiritualidad ignaciana, 1:457–65, here 463. 25 An exemplar of this Zeitgeist was the Jesuit writer Alonso Rodríguez’s (1538–1616) widely read Ejercicio de perfección y virtudes cristianas (Exercise of perfection and Christian virtues), which was indeed translated into many languages. Published in 1609, this book presents the Christian virtues along with a set of practical recommendations for prayer, mortification, and silence. Rodríguez illustrated his precepts with anecdotes from the lives of saints, De vitae patrum and Juan Casiano (360–435). See O’Malley, “Early Jesuit Spirituality,” 14. 26 For more on this movement, see Bernardino Llorca, La inquisición española y los alumbrados (1509–1667), Bibliotheca Salamanticensis, Estudios 32 (Salamanca: Universidad Pontificia Salamanca, 1980); Álvaro Huerga, Historia de los alumbrados, 5 vols. (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1978) and Predicadores, alumbrados e inquisición en el siglo XVI (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1973); Alastair Hamilton, Heresy and Mysticism in Sixteenth-Century Spain: The Alumbrados (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). 27 Luis Fernández, “Íñigo de Loyola y los alumbrados,” Hispania sacra 35 (1983): 585–680. Rogelio García Mateo shows how the Flos sanctorum, like the Carthusian Vita Christi

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Some Jesuits indeed embraced aspects of this movement’s heterodox worldview. In response, Everard Mercurian (1514–80), the Society’s fourth superior general (in office 1573–80), endeavored to root out this influence. He even went so far as to discountenance the general use of an ascetic prayer style championed by Baltasar Álvarez (1560–1630)—a prominent Jesuit who was the spiritual director of Saint Teresa (1515–82).28 Accentuating practical elements of the order’s spirituality, Mercurian also banned the reading of medieval mystics like Johannes Tauler (c.1300–1361), Jan van Ruysbroeck (1293/94–1381), and Heinrich Seuse (Henry Suso [1295–1366]).29 In so doing, the general solemnly believed that he was following in Ignatius’s footsteps. Mercurian asserted that prayer was not, in and of itself, a Jesuit end but merely an instrument for attaining virtue. Therefore, he decided to lead the way against non-discursive contemplation at some point in the 1570s.30 This same issue was taken up by Mercurian’s successor—Claudio Acquaviva (1543–1615, in office 1581–1615). In his famed message of May 8, 1590 on prayer and penance, the fifth superior general warned against spiritual, mystical, and ascetic activities that ran counter to the Jesuit spirit. According to Leszek Kołakowski (1927–2009), Acquaviva “demanded that contemplation be treated as a means and not as an independent value; what was most important was that the order’s apostolic tasks leave no room for independent,” open-ended “contemplation” of “all religious practices.” For the sake of “efficiency,” then, exalted prayer was “to be permanently accompanied by apostolic work” (Life of Christ), provided Ignatius with tangible conversion archetypes: “Penance in particular, the rigors and even the excesses of mortification in Manresa are better understood from the passages of the Carthusian.” García Mateo, Ignacio de Loyola: Su espiritualidad y su mundo cultural (Bilbao: Mensajero, 2000), 64. Santiago Madrigal observes that several aspects of the Ignatian Exercises are redolent of the Alumbrados’ approach, such as the focus on the experiential (“feeling”), discerning spirits, and making “gut decisions.” Staunch enemies of the Jesuits, including Melchor Cano (c.1509–60), cast doubt as to whether under the guidance of the spirit the Exercises induce contemplation and feeling. Cano even raised the possibility that these tools could imperil devotees should they fall into the hands of Satan. See Santiago Madrigal, Eclesialidad, reforma y misión: El legado teológico de Ignacio de Loyola, Pedro Fabro y Francisco Javier (Madrid: San Pablo, 2008), 43–44; Terence O’Reilly, “Melchior Cano and the Spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola,” in Ignacio de Loyola y su tiempo: Congreso internacional de historia (9–13 Septiembre 1991), ed. Juan Plazaola (Bilbao: Mensajero, 1992), 369–80. 28 For an in-depth look at the influence of Baltazar Álvarez and Jesuit spirituality on Teresa of Ávila, see Jodi Bilinkoff, The Avila of Saint Teresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth Century City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 87–95. Luis de la Puente (1554–1624) discusses Mercurian’s handling of this strain of ascetic prayer in his Vida del Padre Baltasar Álvarez (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1958). 29 O’Malley, “Early Jesuit Spirituality,” 15. 30 Leszek Kołakowski, Cristianos sin iglesia: La conciencia religiosa y el vínculo confesional en el siglo XVII, trans. Francisco Pérez Gutiérrez (Madrid: Taurus, 1982), 300.

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and firmly integrated with “other tasks in the life of the Jesuits.”31 Moreover, Acquaviva urged Jesuits to subordinate contemplation to the exigencies of action. In the event of a conflict between the demands of obedience to the Constitutions and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the former would always prevail.32 From a positive standpoint, the virtues of an inner life are only vital to the character of the individual Jesuit insomuch as he renders services to God within the Society’s framework. Acquaviva’s prescription had not completely quelled the tension between efficacious apostolates and the spirit that had inspired them in the first place. By the end of Acquaviva’s generalate in 1615, the ranks of the Society of Jesus had mushroomed to over thirteen thousand members, foundings had multiplied, the occupations of its members had diversified, the order’s influence had expanded, and its assets had increased. As is often the case, quantitative growth engendered qualitative change. Under Acquaviva’s generalate, the Jesuits tried to articulate the very nature of their calling. One major issue that members broached was that certain ministries were becoming specialized to the point of no longer reflecting the Ignatian way. A case in point was a group of young Jesuits in Aquitaine (a region in southwest France) whose naysayers dubbed “the little prophets” and the “little saints.” These members of the Society of Jesus launched a movement that calls to mind Saint John of the Cross’s (1542–91) old Carmelite order (from which the Discalced Carmelites had sprung forth). According to these malcontents, the order had lost the spiritual “purity” and rich inner life that was its trademark in the days of Ignatius. Moreover, they bemoaned the fact that “the work law surpasses the law for contemplation.”33 O’Malley astutely sums up the state of affairs within the Society in the early 1600s as a confrontation between two antithetical currents of “spirituality.” On one side of the “barricades” were the proponents of a cautious and soberly ascetic outlook. Espousing a rigorously methodical 31 Kołakowski, Cristianos sin iglesia. 32 Acquaviva’s recommendations are of a piece with Ignatius’s celebrated 1531 letter on obedience to Jesuits in Portugal: “Though in all virtues and graces I wish thee perfection, it is true […] that God wishes that I signal this infinitely more in obedience than in any other [area]. […] We may suffer other religions to outdo us in fasting, abstinence, and other hardships, which according to their Institution, they sacredly observe; however, in purity and perfection of obedience […], it is my utmost desire, dear Brethren, to call attention to those in this Society that serve the Lord our God, and in this may its true children be known [Epp. IV, 669].” Cited in Herbert Alphonso, “Obediencia,” in Diccionario de espiritualidad ignaciana, ed. Grupo de Espiritualidad Ignaciana (GEI) (Bilbao: Mensajero, 2007), 2:1325. 33 For a close look at the Discalced Carmelites, see Michel de Certeau, La fábula mística, siglos XVI–XVII, trans. Jorge López Moctezuma (México: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1994), 285–320; Kołakowski, Cristianos sin iglesia, 302–33.

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prayer style, they argued that the contemplative variety was a detriment to the judicious exercise of the ministries. Their opponents advocated a much more expansive, syncretistic view in which the emphasis was on more affective and mystic themes in the founder’s life story.34 According to the consensual Jesuit worldview, unity with God is what enables Christ to continue his work through the body of the order.35 In this respect, the missionary is no less than an instrument of God. As per the Constitutions, individual members should allow themselves to be moved and directed under divine providence by their superiors just as if they were a corpse, which allows itself to be moved and handled in any way, or as the staff of an old man, which serves him wherever and however he who holds it in his hand pleases to use it.36 This form of asceticism is evidently undergirded by the theology of the Catholic Reformation. If everything is God’s handiwork, nothing can be done without man, who is a cog in the divine machine. Hence, the Jesuit’s calling is to place himself at the disposal of God’s plan. The idea of an apostolic energy stemming from the conversion work of Ignatius’s Exercises revolves around this belief.37 In this context, it bears noting the ascetic value that was attributed to missionary work in the Indies since the earliest days of the Society. Not only would this outreach save the souls of the infidels; it would also bring the individual Jesuit closer to the spiritual path of Christ. As Ignatius himself put it, all of the order’s members should strive for the “holy poverty”—the unpleasantness and lack of ephemera—that Jesus endured: And truly, I know not of a place in the Society where one does not feel the message of this grace, even if it is greater in some places than others. However, if we compare this with our brethren in India, who are contending with immense bodily and spiritual fatigue, an extremely short 34 O’Malley, “Early Jesuit Spirituality,” 17. De Certeau expounds on the prevailing outlook among French Jesuits in Fábula mística, 285–320. 35 Ignasi Salvat notes that the poor means of communication notwithstanding, the Society maintained its unity during Ignatius’s tenure. The regular correspondences that he mandated in order to keep both the provinces and leadership informed were quite useful to the missions. During the order’s nascent stages, its unity of criteria, style, and “course of action” was remarkable. “The presence of a brother in any part of the world was experienced as the presence of the Society itself.” Salvat, Servir en misión, 221. 36 Arzubialde, Corella, and García-Lomas, Constituciones, 234–35. 37 Paul Legarve, “Instrumento,” in GEI, Diccionario de espiritualidad ignaciana, 2:1040–42, here 1042; Arzubialde, Corella, and García-Lomas, Constituciones, 345–46.

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supply of food—no bread is to be had in many places, much less wine, making do with a bit of rice and water or similarly meager food—are scantily clothed and, lastly, much inconvenienced, it does not seem to me that our inconvenience is much. We may also imagine ourselves to be in our own Indies, which are everywhere.38 To Ignatius, then, the Indies experience embodied the ascetic life. As such, he extolled the austerity and discipline of the missionaries laboring in the East. This outlook also had practical consequences. Unlike their counterparts stationed elsewhere, the superior general had no objection to Jesuits in India or Ethiopia accepting ecclesiastical dignities on account of the harrowing conditions they faced. Under such circumstances, he claimed, the ambition and greed that is liable to whet a Jesuit’s appetite for such honorifics was completely neutralized: “The counterbalances they will have from work and burdens even without the spirit and charity (to be the main remedy) will suffice to exclude such temptation.”39 This same argument was made by Cardinal Francisco de Mendoza (1508–66) in 1553: Expecting such great and universal good as the conversion of those nations to the unity and purity of the Christian faith and religion, we have been unable to renounce episcopal dignity; if in these parts [i.e., the Occident], however, there were so much work as awaits the patriarch [of Ethiopia] and his companions there, they [i.e., plumb posts in the Horn of Africa] would not be so desired by many.40 João Nunes Barreto (c.1510–62), Belchior Carneiro (1516–83), and Andrés de Oviedo (1518–77) had all refused the episcopal nominations that were attached to senior church positions in Ethiopia on the premise that such “fringe benefits” were not becoming of a Jesuit. In a letter dated February 17, 1555, Ignatius reminded Nunes Barreto that owing to the travails that inform the Ethiopian episcopate, the nomination to this post could not in any way be compared to those in Europe, which stoke the envy of many a priest.41 Overseas missions naturally left their mark on the Society’s ascetics. The Jesuits viewed many forms of anchoritism with suspicion. In stark contrast 38 39 40 41

Granero, Acción misionera, 92–93. Granero, Acción misionera, 158–59. Granero, Acción misionera, 158. Nuno da Silva Gonçalves, “Inacio de Loiola, D. João III e a missão da Etiópia,” Brotéria 134 (1992): 497–510, here 502.

Introduction

11

to these reclusive practices, the order’s representatives were called upon to exhibit religious discipline when interacting with the masses. In any event, assignments in faraway lands subjected the proselytizer to solitude and isolation, which were heightened by poor communications. As a result, they were unable to fully adhere to the organization’s religious ideal or observe the practices they had grown accustomed to back in Europe. In many parts of India and Ethiopia, these privations were exacerbated by the arrantly understaffed missions charged with the conversion of vast territories. To contend with these problems, Ignatius determined that there should always be at least two Jesuits on any assignment.42 Francis Xavier (1506–52), a companion of the founder, wrote to Nicolò Lancillotto (1515–58), a fellow Jesuit, about the difficulties this injunction presented to the men in the field: There is so much need for doctrine in these and many other [areas of the world], so that that each one of us would like, if possible, to be divided into many parts to be able to contend with so much misery […]. The best way to remedy this and escape the inconveniences that could arise from going alone is to send only […] men of great experience and prudence so well-versed in the life of mortification that they will be able to swim without aids.43 Decades later, Gaspar Páez (1593–1635) recounted the great lengths to which he and his fellow Jesuits in the Ethiopian province of Tǝgray went to reunite with their colleagues for Christmas at the Society’s residence in Gorgora. Upon their arrival, they performed spiritual exercises, renewed vows, and discussed the strides taken by the Jesuit missions in every province of the African kingdom.44 Against this backdrop, the present book delves into a number of related topics. To begin with, we will take stock of the Jesuit outlook on non-Catholic strains of asceticism by plumbing the rich trove of ethnographical accounts that the Society’s missionaries compiled. These representatives indeed expounded on their encounters with and impressions of yogis, monks, and other spiritual figures in Ethiopia and India. With respect to their own observance, those Jesuits roughly practiced what Max Weber (1864–1920) defined as “world-oriented asceticism.”45 Put differently, they were willing to re-evaluate 42 Granero, Acción misionera, 152. 43 Granero, Acción misionera, 152. 44 Gaspar Páez, “Carta anua de Ethiopia a do mes de Julho de 1625 athe o de 1626 do estado secular do imperio da Ethiopia,” in Arquivo Distrital de Braga, file 779, fols. 29, 332v. 45 Max Weber coined the term “intramundane asceticism” as part of his comparison between Catholic monasticism and Puritan activism. In either case, religious faith inspired a way

12

Introduction

traditional standards and rationally analyze the specific conditions of every mission in the hopes of developing an optimal work plan.46 While underscoring the specific motives of his order, the Jesuit scholar Gustav Gundlach (1892–1963) admitted that “its idea of work comes close to that of Capitalism” in the Weberian sense of the word.47 The Jesuits under review examined a wide array of foreign religious practices. As discussed below, they found some of the phenomena to be familiar, whereas others were quite exotic. Much has been written about the relationship between the Society of Jesus and heads of state.48 In places like Ethiopia, there is a scholarly consensus that the order’s missionaries set up shop in close proximity to the centers of power on the assumption that winning over the elite would pave the way to of life; and their exponents channel the self-discipline of both paradigms toward the supreme goal of eternal salvation. However, each group goes about this in a different way. Whereas the monk avers that his lofty cause demands the renunciation of sex and family life, property, class relations, and participation in politics, the Calvinist believes that, if properly managed, all these activities could help fulfill the divine will. The monastic life constitutes a model of perfection for those few willing to pursue this route. Conversely, the Puritan views rigorous discipline to be a universal obligation. In this same context, Weber differentiated between the asceticism of Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, on the one hand, and the Protestant intramundane strain, on the other. As an order forged on the flames of the Catholic Reformation, the Society of Jesus inherently bears the tension between these two schools. Betty R. Scharf, El estudio sociológico de la religión, trans. Rosa Vilaró (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1974), 214. 46 Emerich K. Francis, “Toward a Typology of Religious Orders,” American Journal of Sociology 55, no. 5 (1950): 437–49, here 447. 47 Gustav Gundlach, Zur Soziologie der katholischen Ideenwelt und des Jesuitenordens (Freiburg: Herder, 1927), 100–101. According to Weber, “the person who lives as a worldly ascetic is a rationalist, not only in the sense that he rationally systematizes his own conduct, but also in his rejection of everything that is ethically irrational, esthetic, or dependent upon his own emotional reactions to the world and its institutions. The distinctive goal always remains the alert, methodical control of one’s own pattern of life and behavior.” Protestant asceticism, Weber posited, is the culmination of this rational mindset; see his Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1:544. For a penetrating analysis of the question of nationalism and religion in Weberian thought, see Malcolm B. Hamilton, The Sociology of Religion: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2001), 137–46. 48 See Jean Lacouture, Os jesuítas: 1. A Conquista, trans. Maria Fernanda Gonçalvez de Azevedo (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1993), 401–38. The aspiration to collaborate with monarchs is discussed in a number of studies on the first one hundred years of the Jesuits’ international mission: Jacques Gernet, Primeras reacciones chinas al cristianismo, trans. Carlota Vallée Lazo (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989), 156–73; Merid Wolde Aregay, “Japanese and Ethiopian Reactions to Jesuit Missionary Activities in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Ethiopia in Broader Perspective: Papers of the XIIIth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, Kyoto, 12–17 December 1997, ed. Katsuyoshi Fukui, Eisei Kurimoto, and Masayoshi Shigeta (Kyoto: Shokado, 1997), 1:676–98.

Introduction

13

the masses.49 At any rate, less attention has been paid to the Jesuits’ ties with anchorites, cenobitic monks, and other ascetics. In filling this lacuna, we will raise the following questions: What was the attitude of these missionaries toward the spiritual practices of the “holy men” in the targeted societies? Did the methods of these rival clergy have any influence on the Catholic proselytizers’ own search for truth? Was their ambiguous outlook on other forms of asceticism a reflection of the inner tensions within the Society? Did the methods the Jesuits encountered remind them of the “excesses” of Catholic mendicant orders? Though these Ethiopians and Indians practiced a strange cult and ostensibly worshiped a false god, did the Jesuits find merit in their spiritual approaches? As we shall see, these questions defy a straightforward answer. The argument can be made that these missionaries’ writings contain the first buds of an outlook whereby a comparative perspective on different ways to renounce the world of the flesh constitutes a means for approaching the divine. Put differently, they perceived similarities between the elements, behavioral traits, and religious views of yogis, anchorites, and other Indian or Ethiopian spiritual figures, on the one hand, and Jesuit asceticism, on the other.50 49 Merid Wolde Aregay and Girma Beshah, The Question of the Union of the Churches in Luso-Ethiopian Relations (Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1964); Sevir Chernetsov, “The Role of Catholicism in the History of Ethiopia of the First Half of the Seventeenth Century,” in Études éthiopiennes: Actes de la Xe conference international des études éthiopiennes; Paris 24–28 août 1988, ed. Claude Lepage (Paris: Publication de la Société française pour les études éthiopiennes, 1994), 1:205–12; Manuel João Ramos, “Machiavellian Empowerment and Disempowerment: The Violent Political Changes in Early Seventeenth-Century Ethiopia,” in Anthropology of Power: Empowerment and Disempowerment in Changing Structures, ed. Angela Cheater (London: Routledge, 1999), 191–205; Andrzej Bartnicki and Joanna Mantel-Niečko, “The Role and Significance of the Religious Conflicts and People’s Movements in the Political Life of Ethiopia in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Rassegna di studi etiopici 24 (1969–70): 5–39; Cohen, Missionary Strategies, 27–75; Hervé Pennec, Des jésuites au royaume du Prêtre Jean (Paris: Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian, 2003), 185–240. 50 In the Christian tradition, askesis fills a prominent role in the quest to comprehend and tap into sanctity. While the church was not the first to enlist asceticism for spiritual purposes, its systematization of ascetic theory and practice is unparalleled. See Rosemary Rader, “Asceticism,” in The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, ed. Gordon S. Wakefield (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983), 24–28. A number of scholars have defined Christian askesis as a personal, free, conscious, loving, and voluntary commitment to a life of spiritual perfection, which is achieved via exertion, mortification, penance, prayer, work, renunciation, and sacrifice. Ermano Ancilli, “Ascesis,” in Diccionario de espiritualidad (Barcelona: Herder, 1983), 171–86, here 172. From a psychological viewpoint, askesis is a transcultural phenomenon comprising the following core elements: fasting, sexual abstinence, poverty (begging for and subsisting on alms included), seclusion or isolation, and both physical and mental mortification. Walter O. Kaelber, “Asceticism,” in

14

Introduction

Most of the Society’s representatives did not encounter ascetic practices, for such techniques were all but absent from pre-Hispanic culture in the Americas. Over the chapters to come, we will assay the Jesuits’ outlook on asceticism through the prism of its emissaries’ interactions with Ethiopian monks, cenobites, and anchorites as well as yogis on the sub-continent. With respect to the first group, the Jesuits categorically rejected Ethiopian Christianity. Despite the shared symbols of the Trinity and the cross, the missionaries accused the Ethiopians of heretically altering the true Gospel. In India, the Jesuits found the religion and culture to be abstruse. The Iberian Peninsula had long hosted devotees of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Anyone outside of these Abrahamic cultures, however, did not fall under the Society’s exacting definitions of religion and was thus considered a barbarian or pagan. Following Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan Library, 1987), 1:441–45, here 442. The sociologist Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968) defines asceticism as a trans-cultural mindset that revolves around four primary ideas: (1) since the ascetic ideational mentality strives toward the ultimate, supersensory reality, lasting, eternal, unchangeable, and not toward the everchanging and ephemeral sensate reality, it associates itself either with indifference to, and a detachment from, the physical environment (“What is the use of trying to adapt oneself to that which is merely illusory!”), or a reluctance to change it (“Only fools try to write on waves”), or with a contempt of it; (2) the above attitude leads logically either to a repression of bodily needs, or to a detached indifference to them as the nonexistent; (3) the attention is turned to the principle of Being, views reality as everlasting and unchangeable Being (Sein), in contradistinction to ever-changing Becoming (Werden); the ultimate reality remains eternally the same, unchangeable even in its manifold modifications; (4) the ascetic ideational mentality leads to man’s control of himself, especially on his bodily senses of his emotions, feelings, wishes, lusts; (5) the ascetic ideational mentality is mainly of an “introvert” nature (directed upon self and its analysis and modifications); (6) the ascetic ideational mentality, on the one hand, opens wide the mental eyes and ears to grasp, register, and understand the essence of soul, mind, ultimate reality, God, the devil, good, evil, salvation, eternal value, consciousness, conscience, justice, and so on. See Pitirim Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics: A Study of Change in Major Systems of Art, Truth, Ethics, Law, and Social Relationships (Boston, MA: Extending Horizon Books, 1957), 30–32. A phenomenological approximation may be found in the work of Oscar Hardman (1880–1964): “[Asceticism] has stood persistently for moral and religious self-discipline innocent of any dualistic foundation as well as for the purgation of the spirit from the material and therefore, as some believe, evil environment, and the former use cannot be arbitrarily ruled out. The term implies a moral and religious foundation for the practices which it denotes, but it leaves the precise nature of the foundation altogether undefined. The moral ascetic need hold no views whatever about the spirit. The only belief that is essential to the creed of the religious ascetic is belief in the existence of the transcendent supernatural order to which he is himself related: but he is pledged to no particular theory of the relation between spirit and matter.” Hardman, The Ideals of Asceticism: An Essay in the Comparative Study of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 5.

Introduction

15

in the footsteps of the historian Luis Filipe Barreto, I argue that the Jesuits considered the Hindu population a blank slate on which to project, albeit with difficulties, the essence of the Portuguese civilizational message. In contrast, the Ethiopians were deemed to share an affinity with the Portuguese. As a result, the Jesuits viewed them more favorably than the populace on the sub-continent.51 While devoid of formal monasticism, Hinduism possessed strains of “worldrejecting asceticism.”52 The Hindu masters believed that the universe is an illusory phenomenon. Using different methods of prayer, meditation, and physical abnegation, an individual can transcend the ephemerality of material objects and social relations; by eschewing social interactions, the yogi can detach himself from and completely transcend the sensorial realm.53 Although the Society’s missions to Ethiopia and India were coeval, researchers have yet to compare them. In the early 1500s, Goa was a port of call for Jesuits looking to spread their faith in distant lands. To what extent did these missionaries arrive in their targeted societies with a preconceived view of Eastern ascetic traditions? Did the actual experience change their attitudes? How influential was a Jesuit’s particular schooling to his individual approach to Ethiopian or Hindu asceticism? Over the past few decades, the literature on the Jesuit missions to India and Ethiopia has made appreciable strides. After many long years of approaching the Society’s outreach from a positivist or a simple chronological vantage point, scholars have begun to explore uncharted waters: cultural exchange,54 51 52

53 54

Luis Filipe Barreto, Os descobrimentos e a ordem do saber (Lisbon: Gradiva, 1989), 37. As per the proponents of world-rejecting asceticism, Weber claimed that “concentration upon the actual pursuit of salvation may entail a formal withdrawal from the ‘world’: from social and psychological ties with the family, from the possession of worldly goods, and from political, economic, artistic, and erotic activities—in short, from all creaturely interests.” Weber, Economy and Society, 542. Gavin Flood, El hinduismo, trans. Miguel José Hagerty (Madrid: Akal, 2008), 104. For a relatively new bibliography of the Jesuit mission in Ethiopia, see Leonardo Cohen and Andreu Martínez d’Alòs Moner, “The Jesuit Mission in Ethiopia (16th and 17th Centuries): An Analytical Bibliography,” Aethiopica: International Journal of Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies 9 (2006): 190–212. Among the most recent works on this subject are Andreu Martínez d’Alòs Moner, Envoys of a Human God: The Jesuit Mission to Christian Ethiopia, 1557–1632 (Leiden: Brill, 2015); Cohen, Missionary Strategies; Pennec, Jésuites. The Jesuit mission in India is discussed at length by, among others, Ines G. Županov, Missionary Tropics: The Catholic Frontier in India (16th–17th Centuries) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005); Alexander Henn, Hindu–Catholic Encounters in Goa: Religion, Colonialism, and Modernity (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2014); Paul Axelrod and Michelle A. Fuerch, “Flight of the Deities: Hindu Resistance in Portuguese Goa,” Modern Asian Studies 30, no. 2 (1996): 387–421.

16

Introduction

religious transformations, and the enculturation of the missionaries. That said, precious few comparative studies have been conducted to date. One exception to this rule is Merid Wolde Aregay’s (1934/35–2008) thought-provoking article contrasting the Ethiopian response to the Jesuit presence with that of the Japanese to Catholic missionaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He argues that the two countries reacted differently, in large part owing to their disparate political institutions and social traditions.55 In the pages to come, I hope to demonstrate that asceticism was one of the more intense, variegated, and influential manifestations of religiosity and devotion on both the Horn of Africa and the sub-continent. Alert to such phenomena, missionaries left behind a cornucopia of written testimony concerning the routines of the monks, anchorites, and yogis they crossed paths with in these two regions. These descriptions also bear witness to the evolution of Jesuit thought amid the order’s nascency. Regardless of whether these accounts were systematic or makeshift and anecdotal, all of them are informed by nuances that betray a lack of concurrence within the order. Put differently, every early modern Jesuit source that refers to this subject matter in Ethiopia and India is highly ambivalent. One can certainly discern a more “official” line that refutes the world-renunciating asceticism of the targeted societies. Below the surface, though, the reports contain a modicum of empathy for and even identification with the Eastern ascetics, as both the Jesuits and their Ethiopian-cum-Indian rivals espoused a life of abstinence and austerity. 55

Merid Wolde Aregay, “Japanese and Ethiopian.”

Chapter 1

Historical Background to the Jesuit–Eastern Ascetic Encounter 1

The Missions and the Portuguese Padroado of the East

The Renaissance-era discoveries severely upended conventions of living and knowledge. According to Barreto, the Portuguese expeditions constituted no less than a sweeping socio-cultural revolution that mobilized the established centers and networks of power into transforming the way the planet is viewed.1 Consequently, these discoveries triggered major political, economic, religious, and scientific processes across the globe. Succinctly put, the Portuguese and Spanish breakthroughs during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries established new socio-cultural frontiers.2 Against this backdrop, this book presents the different visions, empathies, and contradictions that Jesuit missionaries revealed in their encounter with ascetic traditions that were hitherto alien to Catholic civilization. Without the cooperation of monarchs, their advisors, and the colonial apparatus, the missions would have failed to secure a beachhead overseas. Pursuant to the Holy See’s concessions to the Portuguese throne, religious elements—missionary or otherwise—could only venture to the Indies by way of Lisbon under the aegis of royal patrons. Bowing to this arrangement, Ignatius worked out the details of the Society of Jesus’s first mission with King João III of Portugal (1502–57, r.1521–57). While it appeared that both the superior general and Xavier would remain in Europe, the latter ultimately made the trip to India. The mission to Ethiopia was also broached in the discussions with João III, who was reluctant to appoint a Frenchman like Paschase Broët (1500–1562) as the patriarch of the African kingdom. As per the above-mentioned concessions, the Jesuits only set out for the Horn of Africa once the said monarch decided to back this initiative.3 Put differently, 1 Barreto, Descobrimentos e a ordem do saber, 14. 2 Barreto, Descobrimentos e a ordem do saber, 15. 3 Nuno da Silva Gonçalves, “Inacio de Loiola, D. João III e a missão da Etiópia,” Brotéria 134 (1992): 499–504; Jesús María Granero, San Ignacio de Loyola: Panoramas de su vida (Madrid: Editorial Razón y Fe, 1967), 389–96; Ricardo García-Villoslada, San Ignacio de Loyola: Nueva biografía (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1986), 997–99.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004538566_003

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the Jesuits did not act alone. They were part of a complex project that was fueled to a large degree by Portugal’s maritime economic, political, and military ambitions. Though it is customary to speak of the “Portuguese Empire of India,” the Iberian kingdom never actually built such an entity. Portugal certainly possessed a few coastal cities in India, but at most the throne’s ambit only extended a few miles beyond its naval bases. Given the sheer size of the continent, the throne would have been hard-pressed to construct a full-fledged empire over the objections of myriad hostile Asians.4 Portugal’s sole expansive territorial possession was Goa—a coastal enclave that was fairly easy to defend. In light of the above, proselytizers were compelled to operate between scores of far-flung Portuguese islands and other littoral strongholds. Hence, the missions on the subcontinent and the Horn of Africa developed in a less welcoming environment than their Latin American counterparts in, say, Salvador Bahia, Lima, and Mérida. The threadbare European presence throughout Asia suggests that the prospects for Westernization were less promising in this corner of the world. Portuguese ships first landed on the coast of India in 1498. The impetus behind this maritime enterprise was diverse: scientific curiosity, crusading zeal, the desire for Guinean gold, the rich spice trade in the Indies, the search for the legendary kingdom of Prester John,5 and the objective of breaking the Muslims’ commercial monopoly.6 The powerful religious dimension swiftly manifest itself in robust Christianization efforts. After discovering the maritime route to India, Portugal became the first Western state to forge direct and enduring ties with large swathes of the Asian littoral. From the west coast of Hindustan, where the throne constructed its first permanent bases, the Portuguese wasted little time engaging the area’s main trading centers and accumulating a wide range of geographical and

4 Felix Alfredo Plattner, Jesuitas en el mar: El camino al Asia (Buenos Aires: Editorial Poblet, 1952), 21. See also Francisco Bethencourt, “O Estado da Índia,” in História da expansão portuguesa, ed. Francisco Bethencourt and Kirti Chaudruhi (Navarra: Temas e Debates, 1998), 2:284–314. 5 Manuel João Ramos, “O destino etíope do Preste João: A Etiópia nas representações cosmográficas europeias,” in Condicionantes culturais da literatura de viagens: Estudos e bibliografias, ed. Fernando Cristovão (Lisbon: Edições Cosmos e Centro de Literaturas de Expresão Portuguesa da Universidade de Lisboa, 1999), 235–59. Starting in 1160, the catalyst behind Europe’s interest in Asia was the prospect that somewhere in this vast, uncharted continent lay a mighty Christian sovereign with the resources and willingness to help the Occident prevail over Islam. See J. R. S. [John Roland Seymour] Philips, La expansión medieval de Europa, trans. Rafael Lassaletta (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994), 82–84. 6 José Manuel Garcia, Breve história dos descobrimentos e expansão de Portugal (Lisbon: Editorial Presença, 1999), 138–39.

Historical Background

19

ethnographic information.7 As a member of Vasco da Gama’s (c.1469–1524) crew put it upon disembarking in Calcutta, the navy was on the lookout for “Christians and spices.”8 The geographical exploration of Asia’s extensive coastline advanced at a rapid pace. In 1503, Portuguese ships approached the entrance to the Red Sea; some three years later, they reached the island of Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka).9 By 1509, the fleet landed in Malacca (along the shore of what is today Malaysia), conquering the city within a span of two years. From 1512 onward, expeditions were organized to the Maluku Islands (Indonesia) and Siau. A year later, the first Portuguese made landfall in southern China and perhaps Timor. In 1516, the outskirts of the Bay of Bengal were explored for the first time. Over the first two decades of this century, then, Portugal solidified its presence in the East especially during Afonso de Albuquerque’s (1453–1515) stint as governor of Portuguese India from 1509 to 1515. During these years, Albuquerque formed an alliance with Hormuz—a move that culminated with a protectorate in 1515. Moreover, Portugal conquered Goa—where the empire set up its administrative headquarters—in 1510 and Malacca the following year.10 Displaying an interest in Ethiopia, the governor endeavored to break Islam’s hegemony over the Red Sea by striking an accord with the besieged Christian monarchy. To strengthen the potential ally, Albuquerque offered to help divert the Nile’s course. In November 1512, he received Mateus the Armenian (d.1520)—an envoy of Empress Ǝleni of Ethiopia (1431–1522). Thereafter, Albuquerque dispatched his interlocutor to Lisbon for an audience with King Manuel I (1469–1521, r.1495–1521). The latter subsequently named Duarte Galvão (1435/40–1517) ambassador to Ethiopia with a mandate to negotiate the terms of an alliance. Albuquerque was succeeded as governor by Lopo Soares de Albergaria (1460–1520). In 1520, the

7

António Alberto Banha de Andrade, Mundo Novos do Mundo: Panorama da difusão, pela Europa, de notícias dos descobrimentos geográficos portugueses, 2 vols. (Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1972); Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 1, The Century of Discovery (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1965). 8 Rui Manuel Loureiro “Visões da Ásia (séculos XVI e XII),” in Cristovão, Condicionantes culturais da literatura de viagens, 339–53, here 340. For more on the geographical progress of Vasco da Gama and the contacts that the explorer and his crew established with different local societies, see Garcia, Breve história, 57–66. 9 P. E. [Paulus Edward] Pieris (1900–1976) and M. A. H. [Mathilde Auguste Hedwig] Fitzler (1896–1993) delve into the Portuguese presence on this island; see their Ceylon and Portugal, part 1, Kings and Christians, 1539–1552 (Leipzig: Verlag der Asia Major, 1927). 10 On Portuguese expansion during King Manuel I’s reign (r.1495–1521), see João Paulo Oliveira e Costa with José Damião Rodrigues and Pedro Aires Oliveira, eds., História da expansão do império português (Lisbon: Esfera dos Livros, 2014), 105–28.

20

Chapter 1

first Portuguese embassy, under the ambassadorship of Dom Rodrigo de Lima (dates unknown), opened its doors in the African kingdom.11 Beginning with Albuquerque’s governorship, strategic bases were constructed in Goa, Hormuz, and Malacca along with a network of fortresses along the Asian shore. Despite this “minimum territoriality” approach, the Portuguese managed to embed themselves into the continent’s major trade routes by dint of a formidable navy. Starting with the operations center in Goa, small Lusitanian centers, linked in part to the crown, slowly emerged from the gateway of the Persian Gulf to the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, legions of Portuguese men rambled through this expanse. Whereas some were driven by mercantile, navigational, and colonial aims, others endeavored to spread the faith of Rome. All of these elements traveled from Portugal to India along either the sea route via the Cape of Good Hope or the ancient roads connecting the East Mediterranean world to various regions of Asia.12 Such adventures to uncharted territories inspired a broad array of writing. For instance, Jesuit correspondence accompanied the launching and development of the Society’s missions in the East from as far back as 1542. At the behest of their superiors, the order’s representatives expatiated on their activities, achievements, and travails on far-flung vessels and lands. These letters open an illuminating window into the Portuguese encounter with newfound societies from the unique perspective of the evangelical quest.

11 Leonardo Cohen, “Albuquerque, Afonso de,” in Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, ed. Siegbert Uhlig (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2005), 2:193–94. 12 Dom João II (1455–95, r.1481–95) commissioned Bartolomeu Dias to travel east, under the direction of Pêro de Covilhã (1460–1526) and Afonso de Paiva (1443–90), for the purpose of garnering information about Prester John of the Indies and the region’s spice trade. Furthermore, Dias was expressly mandated to reach Ethiopia with the objective of building amicable ties and, if possible, an alliance with its king against the Muslims. Within the framework of a separate mission, Covilhã and Paiva were instructed to find out as much as possible about trade, attendant routes, and the geopolitical status quo in the Indian Ocean. The two fluent Arabic speakers initially went to Egypt via Barcelona, Naples, and Rhodes while posing as merchants. Upon reaching Aden, the explorers parted ways: Paiva continued on to Ethiopia, whereas Covilhã boarded a ship for the south Indian city of Cannanore (Kannur). In the process, Covilhã became the first Portuguese to step foot on the sub-continent (1488). From Cannanore, he proceeded to Goa and then Hormuz. The knowledge amassed on this journey was indispensable to future East-bound missions. Luís Filipe Barreto, ed., Por mar e terra: Viagens de Bartolomeu Dias e Pero da Covilhã (Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional, 1988); Garcia, Breve história, 53–54. Michel Mollat, Los exploradores del siglo XII al XVI: Primeras miradas sobre nuevos mundos, trans. Lijia Arjona Mijangos (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1990), 38.

Historical Background

21

As alluded to earlier, Albuquerque wrested Goa away from Sultan Adil Sah of Bijapur (1450–1510) in 1510. The territory’s city of Margao soon became the capital of Portugal’s eastern colonies. In some cases, the governors of Goa received the honorary title of viceroy.13 Extending from Hormuz to Malacca, what came to be known as the Estado da Índia encompassed a plethora of ethnic groups.14 Margao soon became a meeting point between the Hindu–Muslim and Iberian civilizations, thereby giving rise to a Luso-Indian society. During the 1500s, the city became a significant political, economic, cultural, social, and religious center. The initial Portuguese effort to convert the Goans had limited success.15 Farther south lived the Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala, whose population appears to have been in the vicinity of one hundred thousand.16 In 1498, the year of Vasco da Gama’s arrival, every last mile of “South India proper” was ruled by Hindu kings.17 The Vijayanagara emperor ruled over the area’s entire south from his capital in the Bellary district.18 Among his subordinates were representatives of the old Pāṇḍya and Chōḷa dynasties in the cities of Madura and Tanjore, respectively. On the western littoral, the Zamorin ruled parts of Calicut; the rajas of Cochin and Travancore, along with a farrago of petty chiefs, held sway over South Malabar. All of these rulers were Hindu. The last Muslim ruler in South India before Gama’s expedition was Sultan Alla ud-din

13

The first governor of the Estado da India, Francisco de Almeida (1450–1510, in office 1505–9), took office during the reign of King Manuel. He was succeeded by Afonso de Albuquerque (in office 1509–15), Lopo Soares de Albergaria (in office 1515–18), Diogo Lopes Sequeira (in office 1518–22), and Duarte de Meneses (in office 1522–24). For a list of all the viceroys of Goa from 1505 to the end of Philip III/IV’s (1605–65, r.1621–40/65) in 1640, see Garcia, Breve história, 140–43. 14 From their strategic locations in Goa, Malacca, and Hormuz, the Portuguese managed to keep an eye on and, as far as possible, control some of the key trade routes in the East. See Garcia, Breve história, 145–46. 15 Teutónio R. de Souza, Goa medieval: A cidade e o interior no século XVII (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1993), 88. 16 John Correia-Afonso, The Jesuits in India, 1542–1773 (Bombay: Heras Institute of Indian History and Culture, 1997), 8. 17 The Muslim Brahmani king reigned over the Deccan Plateau’s Kŗishņa River basin; however, the modern nomenclature does not include this area in South India. 18 Following its establishment in 1336, the Vijayanagara (City of Victory) empire rapidly expanded to Madurai down south and Goa to the west, intermittently controlling the eastern shoreline. Within the framework of their political rivalry, the Brahmins and the Vijayanagara kings waged war over the Krishna-Tunghabadhra riverbed, which changed hands several times. The Arabs and the Portuguese vied for influence and control over the western ports. See Enrique Gallud Jardiel, Historia breve de la India (Madrid: Sílex, 2005), 95.

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Sikandar Shah of Madura (d.1394), whose coins date to no later than 1377.19 Upon assuming office, Albuquerque encouraged his soldiers to marry Goan women. This intermingling begat a community of racially mixed people who were connected to Portugal through blood, language, and religion. Across the sea, on the Horn of Africa, stood a Christian polity with which the Portuguese were destined to form ties—Ethiopia. During the early 1500s, Ethiopia was also commonly referred to as the Kingdom of Prester John of the Indies. As Manuel João Ramos points out, the consensus surrounding the geographical ambiguity of this land, its inhabitants’ ostensibly “heretical” Christian faith, and the nature of the mysterious kingdom’s leader was revised time and again in line with the headway made by European explorers.20 The vagueness of what is meant by “India,” or rather the scope of this toponym vis-à-vis other lands bordering the Indian Ocean, throughout the fifteenth century still prevailed in a letter dated February 20, 1504, the contents of which were vouched for by no less than Gama himself. This epistle makes reference to “the king of Quíloa [modern-day Tanzania], a Moorish king, the first to enter India.” As we can see, the Portuguese still equated the East African coast with India. During the sixteenth century, the Estado da Índia was thought to extend to Sofala (a province of contemporary Mozambique) or even the Cape of Good Hope.21 2

The Jesuit Experience in India and Ethiopia

The expansion of the Occident’s geographical reach and its attendant encounters with legions of heretofore unknown groups spawned a new religio-cultural problem from the standpoint of the Catholic faithful: many of the recently discovered people had no knowledge of the Old or New Testament. Insofar as the Portuguese missionaries were concerned, the long-dormant “duty of the apostolate” was once again relevant. Henceforth, their proselytization efforts were galvanized by the knowledge that the Gospel had yet to be proclaimed before all men. In other words, a fair share of the earth’s population had been denied so much as a chance to be saved through baptism.22 19 Henry Heras, The Conversion Policy of the Jesuits in India (Bombay: Indian Historical Research Institute, 1933), 4–5. 20 Ramos, “Destino etíope,” 241. 21 Garcia, Breve história, 39–40. 22 José Sebastião da Silva Dias, Os descobrimentos e a problemática cultural do século XVI (Lisbon: Editorial Presença, 1988), 48. On June 12, 1514, Pope Leo X (1475–1521, r.1513–21) issued a bull titled Pro excellenti praeeminentia according to which the authority over the ecclesiastical administration and the appointment of clergy and dignitaries in India

Historical Background

23

The Society of Jesus wasted little time setting up shop in Goa. Adhering to the church’s official position, the Jesuits’ conversion policy was undoubtedly similar to that of other Catholic orders in Goa.23 By the early sixteenth century, there was already a Christian population of thirty thousand or so along the Malabar coast. Faithful to the Syro-Chaldean tradition, this community was administered to by the Armenian patriarchate.24 Upon their arrival, though, the Society’s emissaries insisted that the Portuguese authorities apply the principle of cuius regio, illius religio (whose region, their religion) to the crown’s overseas possessions. The Reformation can be said to have penetrated Goa under the impulse of the Jesuits.25 In racing to India, many of the missionaries at hand gave every indication that they were there for the long haul. Owing to the perilous and protracted sea voyage, the distant lands of the mission were indeed viewed from the outset as an adopted, life-long home. Stationed in an expansive territory far removed from the superior general, the proselytizer came to the East with broad and vague objectives. These conditions put the Jesuit idea of fidelity to the mission to the test. While stopping off at various destinations throughout his bailiwick, the emissary availed himself of prayer and the means provided him by the order but was also expected to lean heavily on personal discretion. If there was a neighboring superior, the Jesuit was obliged to consult with him.26 In selecting candidates for the missions to the East, Ignatius was looking for complementary qualities that would serve a common goal. For the Ethiopian mission, say, he sent the Portuguese monarch a list of candidates from which to choose a patriarch and coadjutors. In addition, the Society’s founder detailed the integrative skills that each man could bring to the table. Likewise, he informed the provincial of Portugal, Diego Mirón (d.1590), that a group of five men with the following qualities were about to set sail for the Horn of Africa: Oviedo, a Castilian with a solid background in administration; Carneiro, an erudite and good-natured Portuguese who was also fit to lead; Master Juan of Flanders (dates unknown), whose sturdy physique could handle any duty or obstacle thrust his way; Master Miguel (dates unknown), a Catalan with experience teaching the church’s doctrine to youth; and Juan Thomas (dates were transferred from the church to the Portuguese throne. Maria de Deus Beites Manso, “Contexto histórico-cultural das missões na India: Sec. XVI–XVII,” História Unisinos 15, no. 3 (2011): 406–16, here 410. 23 Conversions to the Latin rite on the sub-continent predate Xavier’s arrival in Goa, as the order’s representatives merely continued the work begun by the Franciscans, Dominicans, and secular clergy. Heras, Conversion Policy, 15. 24 Alden, Making of an Enterprise, 42–43. 25 Souza, Goa medieval, 88. 26 Osuna, Amigos en el Señor, 224–25.

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unknown), an Italian who had exhibited the requisite grace for the pulpit and hearing confession while ministering to orphans.27 The mix of nationalities and dispositions within small proselytizing teams was designed with optimal cooperation in mind and to ensure alternative ways of looking at the new world that the Jesuits would face. Ignatius instilled his men with the confidence to independently make decisions according to their “mature judgment and spiritual discernment.” For instance, he wrote thus to Barreto, the designated first patriarch of Ethiopia: All that is proposed shall serve as a warning; but the patriarch should not consider himself bound to act in this fashion, but according to discreet charity, which takes into account the disposition of present things, and to the anointing of the Holy Spirit, which is principally to direct him in all things. [These factors] shall dictate [the proper course] to him.28 In sum, Jesuits were granted significant leeway in handling the vagaries of interaction with disparate cultures. It was Xavier who laid the foundations for the Society’s operations in the East.29 More specifically, the mission in India was to adhere to certain guidelines for Muslim and Jews, whose practices the emissaries were well versed in, on the one hand, and a “land of the gentiles,” on the other. The latter referred to societies whose characteristics the Jesuits had yet to reveal. In Goa, the Society maintained four residences: the College of Saint Paul,30 the professed house of Bom Jesus, the College of Saint Roch, and the novitiate,

27 28 29

Cited in Osuna, Amigos en el Señor, 221–22. Cited in Osuna, Amigos en el Señor, 225. See Félix Zubillaga, ed., Cartas y escritos de San Francisco Javier (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1979), 3–45; Madrigal, Eclesialidad, reforma y misión, 209–98; Alden, Making of an Enterprise, 43–51; Lino de Assumpção, História geral dos jesuitas (Lisbon: Moraes Editores, 1982), 61–76. 30 The Jesuit College of São Paulo developed into the Ignatian order’s centerpiece in this particular province. The college was founded in 1541, and the first contingent of missionaries destined for Ethiopia, including the patriarch-elect João Nunes Barreto, resided there. During the seventeenth century, many of the distinguished Jesuits who served on the Horn of Africa resided beforehand in Goa, not least Pedro Páez, Manuel de Almeida, and Afonso Mendes. This college became a regional center that provided education, including a full-scale university program, to a large multi-ethnic community. In 1567, the first printing press arrived in Goa from Portugal. See Teotónio R. de Souza, “Goa,” in Uhlig, Encyclopaedia aethiopica, 2:815–16. According to François Pyrard de Laval (1578–1621), the French navigator who chronicled his adventures in the Maldives Islands from 1602 to 1607, all the classes at the Saint Paul College were “well distinguished and ordered.” Heras, Conversion Policy, 29.

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which was subsequently transferred to Chorão.31 To the north, the order ran a series of colleges, houses, and associated missions, such as Bassein, Thane, Damão (Daman), Chaul, and Diu as well as the interior listening post at the Mughal capital—Agra or Delhi. In the west, the emporium of Hormuz became a temporary Jesuit outpost. The same can be said for Ethiopia between 1555 and 1632. Chronic struggles notwithstanding, the mission in Mozambique endured for a much longer period.32 To the south was the huge province of Malabar. Administered by Cochin College, the area’s proselytizing enterprise lasted until 1662. From Cochin, a network of Jesuit colleges and missions extended southward to Cape Comorin and eastward to the ancient spiritual center of Madura, the vast Pearl Fishery Coast, Sãó Tomé de Meliapor (in present-day Madras), and the northeastern outpost at Hugli, from which Calcutta would arise. The provincial of Malabar was also responsible for Jesuit undertakings on the island of Manar (Mannar), Ceylon, and the Moluccas along with the college at the trade hub of Malacca.33 In a letter to the king, Xavier outlined the mission’s needs in distant Asia: There are many who live [according to] the Mosaic law and the [customs of the] Moorish sect, without any fear or shame of the world. And because these [transgressors] are many and scattered between all the [Portuguese] fortresses, the holy Inquisition and many preachers are needed. May Your Highness provide your loyal and faithful vassals in India with such necessary things.34 Once the Jesuits had settled in, the Goans realized that for the first time since the Portuguese assumed control, the state and the church were working in unison to impose the norms of Roman Catholicism on the local population. As Teotónio R. de Souza (1947–2019) has argued, the order’s methods for propagating the faith shattered the traditional social bonds that had held rural communities together: “Among other measures adopted, Hindu temples disappeared, and public social and religious celebrations were outlawed.”35 31 Heras, Conversion Policy, 15. 32 For an in-depth look at the Jesuit missions in Mozambique, see António da Silva, Mentalidade missiológica dos Jesuítas em Moçambique antes de 1759, 2 vols. (Lisbon: Junta de Invstigações do Ultramar, 1967). 33 See Dauril Alden, “Some Considerations concerning Jesuit Enterprises in Asia,” in A Companhia de Jesus e a missionação no Oriente (Lisbon: Brotéria, 2000), 53–62, here 53–54; Oliveira e Costa, Damião Rodrigues, and Aires Oliveira, História da expansão, 168–86. 34 Cited in Madrigal, Eclesialidad, reforma y misión, 270–71. 35 Souza, Goa medieval, 88.

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Until 1542, the proselytization efforts in India sputtered along. The primary task of the clergy that arrived was to cater to the spiritual needs of the Portuguese in the cities and fortresses. A few indeed toiled to advance Catholicism among the “gentile” population, but they achieved only modest success.36 This venture, though, ultimately bore fruit. In May 1542, four months after his arrival, Xavier described Goa as an “entirely Christian city.”37 From that point forward, missionary expeditions set out to the East on a yearly basis under the terms of the Regio Padroado (the Vatican’s agreements with Portugal). The size of the groups depended on the particular circumstances. Though the international mix also varied, the Portuguese were the dominant nationality, as the treks were to their own state’s colonies; in addition, the evangelical spirit pervaded both the Ignatian order and the entire country. Portugal extended its reach to hitherto unknown sea routes and lands with the objective of disseminating its culture, European civilization, and the faith of Jesus.38 The relations between the India-based Catholic authorities and the Jesuit emissaries proved to be cordial. Remarkably enough, Xavier managed to imbue the former with the zeal of the Society’s founder. Upon reaching Goa, Xavier prostrated himself at the feet of the local bishop, John of Albuquerque (d.1553), before requesting his approval to launch the mission. As Jesús María Granero astutely observes, neither Xavier, who was an apostolic nuncio, nor the other missionaries, by virtue of their own pontifical privileges, were outranked by the ordinary ecclesiastics. However, “for greater edification and to avoid dissension,” Granero notes, “St. Ignatius recommended and even imposed prudent

36 Among the era’s most distinguished missionaries was the Dominican Rodrigo de Sousa (1540–97), to whom Afonso de Albuquerque entrusted the church at Coulào. Vicente de Lagos (d.1552), a Franciscan, established a seminary in Cranganore (Kodungallur) for eighty students, which produced more than its share of priests. Lastly, Diogo de Borba (d.1547) was best known for the seminary he founded in Santa Fé in Goa. See Fortunato de Almeida, História da igreja em Portugal, ed. Damião Peres (Porto: Portucalense editora, Livraria Civilização, 1968), 2:297. 37 Francis made this observation in a letter to his associates back in Rome; Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, 247. 38 J. S. [José Sebastião] da Silva Dias comments that the “geographical aggrandizement of the world” in the 1500s and the realization of a void in the apostolate did not foment theological doubts or objections to the Portuguese ethos. Instead, this awareness led Portuguese society to the conclusion that the pagans must be exposed to the Gospel. As a result, the impetus to expand the empire and propagate the faith was not an outgrowth of a conventional political attitude but derived from a spiritual vision. Silva Dias, Descobrimentos e a problemática cultural, 48–49.

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27

circumspection and caution in dealing with the ecclesiastical authorities […] in the far-off Indies as well.”39 The proselytization enterprise in India was left in the hands of the Jesuits who arrived in Goa three years after Xavier. At the outset, there were fourteen missionaries under his helm, most notably Antonio Criminali (1520–49), Lancillotto, Henrique Henriques (1520–1600), Afonso Cipriano (1483–1559), Francisco Henriques (dates unknown), Adão Francisco (d.1549), Manuel de Morais (1511–53), Baltasar Nunes (1523–69), and Gaspar Barzeo (Jasper Bersel [1515–53]). Each of these men was sent to a different locale. For example, Afonso de Castro (d.1558) was stationed in Maluco, Cipriano went to São Tomé de Meliapore, Lancillotto to Coulão (Kollam), and Barzeo ended up in Hormuz.40 All the Far East-bound Jesuits departed from Portugal and stopped off at Goa. From there, they would continue on to Agra and Delhi for an audience with the great Mughal; Ethiopia in the hopes of reaching the legendary domain of Prester John; the distant spice center in the Moluccas; or above all to China and Japan. The first Christian converts were from the groups closest to the Portuguese: fishermen, merchants, and naires (warriors in the service of Europeans). In 1557, the Society of Jesus inaugurated the practice of general baptisms—a ritual that would assume far-reaching social significance. According to Father Luís Fróis’s (1532–97) tally, the Jesuits baptized 12,742 Goans in November 1560. Within a three-year span, Margao as well as the nearby islands of Divar and Chorão were deemed to be thoroughly Christian, as seventy thousand of their inhabitants had entered the fold.41 The neophytes would participate in long processions through the streets of Goa, to the accompaniment of horns and drums.42 In most cases, they were forced to adopt Portuguese norms. Wearing 39 Granero, La acción misionera, 115. Upon assigning Barzeo to Hormuz, Francis gave him the following instructions: “When you arrive, you will kiss his [i.e., the vicar’s] hand on your knees and with his permission you will preach, confess, teach, and engage in other spiritual works, and you will not break with him for any reason.” Zubillaga, Cartas y escritos, 307. 40 Almeida, História da igreja, 2:299. At the time of Xavier’s passing in December 1552, there were already sixty-four Jesuits under his helm on the sub-continent, half of whom resided in Goa. See Correia-Afonso, Jesuits in India, 15. 41 Correia-Afonso, Jesuits in India, 33. 42 From the very outset of the Society’s mission in India, its representatives integrated music into services on a wider and more elaborate scale than their brethren in the Occident. See John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 160–61. Citing foreign travelers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Heras argues that, for the most part, the Jesuits relied on processions, festivals,

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attire that differed from “unrepentant” Hindus, they were allowed to work in the territory’s public administration.43 The destruction of Hindu temples predated the Society of Jesus’s arrival.44 From 1542 onward, the anti-Hindu campaigns that began with the razing of prayer houses triggered the most violent reactions. At any rate, this policy would become all the more systematic in the following decade.45 Correspondingly, a series of new edicts banned the public practice of Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic rituals in Portuguese-controlled areas.46 This oppressive measure appears to have reached its climax in 1567 with the destruction of around 280 Hindu temples, countless domestic shrines, and a few small mosques in Salcete (southern Goa). According to John Correia-Afonso (1924–2005), these events were followed on the one hand by more active missionary work, both religious and social, and on the other by determined resistance on the part of the Hindus, who more than once joined the Bijapur armies against the Portuguese. In 1578, Bijapur invaded Salcete yet again, wreaking havoc on the Christian villages and churches, and persecuting the converts, who remained faithful [to the Latin rite]. Peace was signed in 1579, but things did not return entirely to normal in South Goa.47 As we have seen, Xavier grasped the wide array of religions and customs that were practiced on the sub-continent. In his opinion, there was but one root cause behind this diversification: ignorance of Christianity and its ecumenical message.48 Over the next few decades, the rules governing outreach in India were set by a succession of five ecclesiastical councils that were held

43 44 45 46 47 48

and dramatizations to sway potential converts. Heras, Conversion Policy, 29–38. These events were also intended to affirm doctrinal truths, catechize, and evoke models of sanctity or asceticism. However, the missionaries took pains to distinguish between these experiences from what they considered to be superstitions. See Beites Manso, “Contexto histórico-cultural,” 412–13. Fernanda Durão Ferreira, O papel da Igreja Católica na Índia (1498–1640) (Lisbon: Hugin, 2000), 108. Durão Ferreira, Papel da Igreja Católica, 113. “Carta geral ao Padre Pero de Almeida: Goa, 26 de Decembro de 1558,” in Documentação para a historia das missões do Padroado Português do Oriente, ed. António da Silva Rêgo (Lisbon: Divisão de Publicações e Biblioteca, 1993), 6:470–74. “When the Gentiles saw that their customs were prohibited […] they made every effort to observe them in secret and as late at night as possible.” “Carta geral ao Padre Pero de Almeida: Goa, 26 de Decembro de 1558,” 6:469. Correia-Afonso, Jesuits in India, 82. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, 248.

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29

in Goa between 1567 and 1606. Imbued with the Tridentine spirit,49 the decisions of the pivotal opening conclave were reaffirmed—albeit with slight modifications—by the ensuing councils. The underlying purpose behind these guidelines was to impose Christian discipline throughout Portugal’s Asian colonies, especially Goa.50 As Souza demonstrates, it was the Society of Jesus that infected Goa with the zeal of the Counter-Reformation.51 For the first time under Portuguese rule, the territory’s inhabitants understood that both the church and the throne were quite serious about forcing Roman Catholicism on the entire populace. The Jesuit methods had severe ramifications for Goa’s rural communities. For instance, non-Christian houses of worship were destroyed, and Hindus were forced to wear identifying attire.52 The fact that converts had to take the Council of Trent’s (1545–63) Professio fide (Profession of faith) was indicative of the church’s aspirations to instill a uniform doctrinal-cum-liturgical vision into the areas under Portugal’s direct rule, such as Goa, Baçaim, Damão, and Diu as well as regions outside its control, including the coast of Pesqueira, Travancore, and Ceylon. Both in India and Ethiopia, the Society adopted a mix of explanatory persuasion and force. With respect to the sub-continent, many of the inhabitants living near the Portuguese fortresses were converted to Christianity, above all in regions along the west coast and the plains of Ceylon. Nevertheless, Henry Heras (1888–1955) contends that the Jesuits had merely picked up where their predecessors in India had left off.53 Xavier’s immediate successors focused on the peaceful evangelization of India’s pagans, rather than mass conversions under duress. Most of their missionary activities were conducted on the streets. For example, the Jesuits preached, held disputations with Brahmins or mullahs, and sang catechisms to popular tunes out in the town square. They also encouraged Muslims and pagans to attend Mass. What is more, pupils enrolled at Jesuit schools introduced the faith of Rome to kith and kin. 49 Adriano Prosperi, El Concilio de Trento: Una introducción histórica (Valladolid: Junta Castilla-León, 2008); Hubert Jedin, El Concilio de Trento en su última etapa: Crisis y conclusión (Barcelona: Editorial Herder, 1965). 50 Almeida, História da Igreja Católica, 2:513–15; Patricia Souza de Faria, “Os concílios provinciais de Goa: Reflexões sobre o impacto da ‘Reforma Tridentina’ no centro do imperio asiático portugués (1567–1606),” Topoi: Revista de história 14, no. 27 (2013): 218–38. 51 Souza, Goa medieval, 88. In general, the decrees of the Goa councils applied to the region between Diu and Cape Comorin (the archbishopric of Goa). However, some resolutions dealt specifically with Hormuz, Malacca, the northern provinces, or the so-called “cities of Christian populations.” Souza de Faria, “Concílios provinciais,” 219. 52 Souza, Goa medieval, 88. 53 Heras, Conversion Policy, 29–38.

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In 1567, Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606) reached the sub-continent. The twenty-eight-year-old Italian Jesuit breathed new life into and streamlined the missions throughout the region. In the spring of 1574, Valignano was appointed visitor to the province of India. The next year, he toured the area’s first congregation, which was located on Chorão.54 As visitor, the priest was charged with examining and, whenever necessary, reorganizing the Society’s structures and methods across India, China, and Japan. Answerable only to the superior general in Rome, Valignano was granted substantial latitude, especially for someone so young. Exceedingly tall, his commanding presence would “turn heads in Europe and draw crowds in Japan.” Valignano devised a basic strategy for Catholic outreach that is widely referred to as “adaptationism.” Under this approach, traditional Christian comportment takes a back seat to advancing the Society’s goals. To avoid cultural friction, he adapted Latin precepts to local customs. Quite a few missionaries believed that he went too far in compromising the values of their faith. Moreover, this approach stood in contradistinction to those of the mendicant orders including the Franciscans and Dominicans, whom Valignano labored to keep out of Japan.55 The missions to India at the turn of the seventeenth century were relatively successful. By 1606, there were about thirty thousand Christians in Goa. Pesqueira and Paravas also saw their Christian population swell. During these years, other maritime powers, such as Holland, Denmark, and the United Kingdom, began to establish a presence on the sub-continent. All of these states would leave their imprint on this region. In 1605, Roberto de Nobili (1577–1656) made landfall in Goa. As part of his novel approach to indigenous cultures,56 the renowned Jesuit devised a method for adapting to India’s customs. With the approval of Bishop Francisco Ros (1559–1624), among others, de Nobili secluded himself from other Europeans and immersed himself in the local customs and languages, especially Sanskrit. Moreover, he began to lead a very austere life punctuated by mortifications. Among other tactics, de Nobili endeavored to convert the Brahmins of Madura by assimilating their customs and behavior, insofar as Christianity allowed. While netting a few supporters, most of his Portuguese confrères viewed these means with suspicion. For example, the bishop of Cochin unequivocally disapproved. Additionally, a host of de Nobili’s fellow Jesuits, such as Gonçalo 54 Županov, Missionary Tropics, 218. 55 M. Antoni J. Üçerler, “Alessandro Valignano: Man, Missionary, and Writer,” Renaissance Studies 17, no. 3 (2003): 337–66. 56 Roberto de Nobili, Preaching Wisdom to the Wise, trans. and intro. Anand Amaladass and Francis X. Clooney (St. Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2000); Vincent Cronin, A Pearl to India: The Life of Roberto de Nobili (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1959); Correia-Afonso, Jesuits in India, 133–59.

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Fernandes (1541–1619/21), eventually repudiated his approach as “scandalous,” “illicit,” and a rejection of true Catholicism. This position also garnered support in Rome, leading Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino (1542–1621) to write a letter to the innovative proselytizer that he “could never read without shedding tears.”57 In Ethiopia, the Jesuits enjoyed a spiritual monopoly that they did not have anywhere else along the shores of the Indian Ocean. This advantage rendered the Society the lone Catholic actor to develop a mission on the Horn of Africa throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As noted, the Jesuits in India had merely picked up where the Franciscans, Dominicans, and the secular clergy had left off. In Ceylon, the order’s representatives were even perceived as opportunists by the Franciscans, who had preceded them on the island by nearly five decades.58 With respect to Goa, though, the argument can be made that the more venerable orders had achieved little prior to Xavier’s arrival in 1542. Building a new methodology, the Jesuits initiated the learning of native tongues. As Charles Ralph Boxer (1904–2000) points out, the Ignatian order—in its capacity as the vanguard of the church militant—ramped up the struggle for souls to a level on par with the fierce competition over the lucrative spice trade.59 Consequently, the Jesuits deserve the lion’s share of the credit for the remarkable development of the Portuguese missions between 1550 and 1750, particularly in India and Christian Ethiopia. At first, the Society’s accomplishments on the Horn of Africa were quite meager. Encouraged by Ignatius himself, for whom launching the mission to Ethiopia was among his most cherished goals,60 the first Jesuits reached the country in 1557 and soon received an audience with Emperor Gälawdewos (1521–59, r.1540–59). The latter diplomatically rejected the solicitations of Oviedo, the Catholic patriarch. In a text that has come to be known as the Confessio fide of King Claudius (i.e., Gälawdewos), he outlined the Ethiopian Church’s theological positions in the face of the Latin challenge.61 From the very beginning, the missionaries set their sights on the imperial court, where they managed to hold debates against proponents of Ethiopian monasticism. Despite conspicuously refusing to submit to the authority of the Holy See, 57 Correia-Afonso, Jesuits in India, 139–41. 58 Alden, Making of an Enterprise, 153. 59 Charles R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825 (London: Pelican Books, 1973), 66. 60 Santiago Madrigal, “La carta al negus de Etiopía,” Miscelánea Comillas 53 (1995): 341–79. 61 Edward Ullendorff, “The Confessio fidei of King Claudius of Ethiopia,” Journal of Semitic Studies 32, no. 1 (1987): 159–76; Leonardo Cohen, “The Portuguese Context of the Confessio fidei of King Claudius,” in Ethiopian Studies at the End of the Second Millennium: Proceedings of the XIVth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, 6–11 November 2000, Addis Ababa, ed. Baye Yimam et al. (Addis Ababa: Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University, 2002), 1:152–68.

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Gälawdewos tolerated the missionaries’ presence in his realm and allowed them to settle in Tǝgray in the north, where they had the backing of the Ethio-Portuguese community. The latter had taken root in the monarchy following Portugal’s military intervention of 1541—a campaign intended to liberate Christian Ethiopia from the Muslim yoke. Under the protection of the local governor, the Jesuits took up residence on the plateau of ʿAdwa (Fǝremona), where they befriended monastic leaders, foremost among them the mahamêr62 of the monastery of Ǝnda Abba Gärima.63 According to Constantino Bayle (1882–1953), the Spanish Jesuit historian, Christianity managed to firmly embed itself wherever the apostolate was backed by military forces, as opposed to locales in which the missionaries worked alone and were unarmed.64 Adopting a similar outlook, Alonso de Ovalle (1601–51), a seventeenth-century Jesuit, compared his order’s missions in the East to those in the Americas: In the East, far from the sea coast, the hinterland is not under the possession of Catholic kings, but other kings, princes, and very powerful Gentile lords, who are thus more difficult to persuade to embrace the faith and law of God, for whom that of the flesh is so repugnant and contradictory, and all the more so those that are accustomed to greater liberty and relaxing customs, [a description] that tends to characterize those who primarily live on their own and are more independent. […] Since the example set by princes has such a strong impact on their own [subjects], when they see them [i.e., the princes] shun the law of God that is preached to them, oppress the preachers, or at least ignore them and place their vices and Gentile customs above their doctrine, it is hard to find any vassal who does not follow in their path. This is the reason behind the opposition to the Gospel found in those parts.65

62 Wolf Leslau (1906–2006) defines mamhǝr as “teacher, instructor, superior, abbot, prior of a monastery”; see Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez (Classical Ethiopic) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006), 334. 63 “P. Aloisius de Azevedo ad provincialem Goanum (I). Fremonae, 22 iul. 1607,” in Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales inediti a saeculo XVI ad XIX, ed. Camillo Beccari, S.J. (Rome: Excudebat C. de Luigi, 1903–17), 11:109. 64 Constantino Bayle, El protector de los indios (Seville: Escuela de Estudios HispanoAmericanos de la Universidad de Sevilla, 1945), 3–7. 65 Alonso de Ovalle, Histórica relación del Reyno de Chile y de las misiones y ministerios que ejercita en él la Compañía de Jesús, ed. J. T. [José Toribio] Medina (Rome: Francisco Cauallo, 1646), 2:205–6.

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The missionaries operating in the vicinity of Goa indeed benefited from the support of Portuguese institutions. Sebastián Fernandes (1563–1622) reported a total of 3,200 Goan conversions in 1569 alone. On Salcete, one percent of the island’s two hundred thousand residents embraced Christianity the next year.66 The situation was quite different for proselytizers in remote areas like Hormuz, which were far beyond the throne’s sphere of influence. Without access to coercive means in, say, Malabar, the Jesuits had to adjust their strategy.67 In 1579, the Great Mughal Akbar (1542–1605, r.1556–1605) had requested the presence of Christian ecclesiastics at his court in Fatehpur Sikri. Under the assumption that the emperor wished to embrace Catholicism, the Society’s leaders in Goa dispatched Rodolfo Acquaviva (1550–83), Francisco Henriques (dates unknown), and Antonio de Montserrat (1536–1600) to the Mughal capital. However, the sovereign was merely seeking to acquaint himself with all the religions of the world. The three Jesuits partook in the court’s theological discussions, including debates on whether the Quran or the New Testament was the final truth, for an entire year, but made little headway for their cause.68 From their very first years on the Asian continent, the Portuguese were apprehensive about the Muslim populace. At the initiative of Vasco da Gama, Muslim-owned lands in Goa were confiscated and transferred to Portuguese and natives who actively collaborated with the new regime from 1510 onward.69 Between the end of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the Ignatian missionaries at the Great Mughal’s court had to grapple with the contempt shown for their faith. Similarly, the locals regarded Christians-cum-Europeans sojourning through Islamic lands as inferior. What is more, the Jesuits were baffled by the peculiarities of Muslim apologetics.70 On the Horn of Africa, where the evangelical manpower was sparse and conditions precarious, the Ignatian order could point to major achievements, fleeting as they would be. The aforementioned Portuguese military intervention, which helped reinstate Christian sovereignty over Ethiopia, constituted 66 Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, 8. 67 Maria de Deus Beites Manso, “A Sociedade Indiana e as estratégias missionárias: 1542–1622,” Portuguese Studies Review 9, nos. 1–2 (2001): 321–33. 68 Antonio de Montserrat and Josep Lluís Alay, Embajador en la corte del Gran Mogol: Viajes de un jesuita catalán del siglo XVI por la India, Paquistán, Afganistán y el Himalaya, trans. Ramón Salá (Lleida: Editorial Milenio, 2008). For an extensive bibliography on the Jesuit presence at the Mughal court, see Alden, Making of an Enterprise, 51–52. 69 Angela Barreto Xavier and Ines G. Županov, Catholic Orientalism: Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015), 68. 70 Hugues Didier, Os portugueses no Tibete: Os primeiros relatos dos jesuítas (1624–1635), trans. Lourdes Júdice (Lisbon: Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 2000), 51.

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the only time the local mission would receive the support of armed troops. Under Oviedo’s watch, the Society’s representatives were persecuted and internally exiled. More specifically, Emperors Minas (d.1563, r.1559–63) and Śärṣä Dǝngǝl (1550–97, r.1563–97) banned Catholic worship and relegated the small number of missionaries and their diminutive Ethiopian Portuguese community to peripheral areas up north. In 1577, Patriarch Oviedo died alone in abject poverty. Within eleven years, only two Jesuits would remain throughout the entire kingdom.71 Toward the end of the sixteenth century, the Ottomans kept impeding Goa’s lines of communication with the Horn of Africa. Nevertheless, Melchior da Sylva (d.1615) managed to slip into Ethiopia. According to the Brahmin’s testimony, the local Catholic community was in dire straits. As a result, the group’s members had begun to adopt the language and customs of the Orthodox Church.72 That said, the arrival of a new Jesuit leader, Pedro Páez (1564–1622), to the kingdom in 1603 rekindled the missionary project. By targeting the political elite, the mission substantially improved its performance. While displaying caution, Páez worked closely with Emperor Zä Dǝngǝl (d.1604, r.1603–4) and his successor Susǝnyos (c.1571–1632, r.1607–32). Páez’s encouraging reports induced fellow Jesuits to set out on the long journey for the Horn of Africa. To begin with, two priests stationed in Diu, a town on India’s northwest coast, joined the mission. In conjunction with Luis de Azevedo (1573–1634), Lorenzo Romano (1569–1621), António Fernandes (1567–1642), and Francisco Antonio de Angelis (1566–1622), Páez made appreciable inroads, winning the support of broad sectors of the Ethiopian nobility.73 Páez’s indefatigable efforts to win over Susǝnyos delivered results in 1622. For several years, the king had displayed an inclination toward the faith of Rome. In fact, his brother Sǝʿǝlä Krǝstos (1570–1636) not only embraced the Latin rite in 1613 but established a mission in the province of Goğğam. Despite the scorn of the abunä (Orthodox bishops), who excommunicated Susǝnyos from the Orthodox Church, the emperor received communion from Páez a few months before the prelate’s demise.

71

Santos Hernández, Jesuitas y obispados, los jesuitas obispos misioneros y los obispos jesuitas de la extinción (Madrid: Universidad Pontificia Comillas, 2000), 38–46; Cohen, Missionary Strategies, 20–22. 72 “Father Belchior da Silva reports that Catholics are at risk in Ethiopia,” in Cartas de Etiópia, ed. Aurélio de Oliveira (Braga: Livraria A.I., 1999), 151–66. 73 Hervé Pennec, “La missión jésuite en Éthiopie au temps de Pedro Paez (1583–1622) et ses raports avec le pouvoir éthiopien,” Rassegna di studi etiopici 36–38 (1992–94): 77–115, 135–65, 139–81.

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In 1625, a new Catholic patriarch, Afonso Mendes (1579–1659), arrived at the imperial court. During his tenure, there was a sharp uptick in the number of missionaries proselytizing along the Horn of Africa. Before this turn of events, the Jesuits had several residences across the kingdom: Fǝremona/May Qaḥqǝḥä (est. 1566) in Tǝgray; Maraba (1605), Gorgora (1606), and Gännätä Iyäsus (1623–24) in Dämbǝya; Qʷälläla (1612) in Goğğam; Tanqha (1624–25) in Agääw Mǝdǝr; Gäbärma (1624–25) in Damot; and Atkäna in Bägemdǝr (1624–25). With the fresh influx of emissaries, a bevy of new residences was opened: Ḥädaša (1625–26), Sarka (1625–26), and Ǝnäbäse (1626) in Goğğam; a new domicile in Gorgora (1626); Dǝbarwa (1625–26) and Adegada (1626–27) in Tǝgray; Liqä Nǝguś (1626) in Damot; Dänqäz (1626–27) and Däbsan/ Ǝmfraz (1626–27) in Dämbǝya; and Depeçan (1628–29) and Näfaša (1630–31) in Agäw Mǝder.74 Emperor Susǝnyos ultimately broke ranks with the local church, the patriarchate of Alexandria, and the abunä. Despite unflagging opposition from monks and certain sectors of the aristocracy, the Latin rite seemed firmly entrenched throughout the realm, as the enemies of Catholicism were increasingly identified as enemies of the state. In 1622, Pope Gregory XV (1554–1623, r.1621–23)75 established the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide with the objective of transforming the missions from a colonial phenomenon into an ecclesiastical movement that was shielded from political interference.76 The pontiff believed that a new, well-run organization was needed in order to facilitate evangelical work and curtail the power of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies.77 Through correspondence and apostolic nuncios, the new body requested detailed information, 74 Cohen, Missionary Strategies, 23–24. 75 Josef Metzler, “Foundation of the Congregation ‘de Propaganda Fide’ by Gregory XV,” in Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide Memoria Rerum I/1 (Freiburg: Herder, 1971), 79–111. 76 Josef Metzler, Compendio di storia della Sacra Congregazione per l’Evangelizzazione dei Popoli o “de Propaganda Fide” 1622–1972 (Rome: Pontificia Universitas Urbaniana, 1973), 7. 77 With the emergence of the congregation, the Portuguese monopoly over proselytization was gradually broken. Portugal no longer held full responsibility and control over the eastern spread of Christianity. For instance, the Vatican assumed the right to operate in territories where the ecclesiastic hierarchy was vague. In fact, Rome began circumventing the monopoly in 1608, when missionaries affiliated with the mendicant orders set out for the East from Lisbon and other ports. This privilege was extended to the rest of the orders in 1633 and, at long last, to any clergymen four decades later. As a result, the Portuguese government and church were hard-pressed to control who traveled to India. See Ignacio Ting Pon Lee, “The Attitude of the Holy Congregation against the Strong Patronage,” in Metzler, Compendio di storia, 353–38.

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to include an annual report, from the heads of each order concerning their missions’ progress, resources, and methods.78 In addition, Gregory was interested in centralizing the apostolate and unifying its methodology. The Propaganda Fide’s establishment coincided with the latter stages of the Jesuit mission on the Horn of Africa. Mendes began his tenure just as the new rules issued by the Congregation in Rome took effect. In the end, the patriarch would have to grapple with copious demands and intervention from Rome. During Mendes’s patriarchy, significant religious and cultural reforms were implemented in Ethiopia. For instance, Catholic priests were ordained, Latin Masses were translated, and Orthodox Christians were re-baptized. These measures and Susǝnyos’s administrative policies aroused the opposition of monks, other ecclesiastics, the population at large, and even some members of the royal family. Triggered by religious and political issues, uprisings against the centralized authority proliferated during these years. By 1630, the emperor was compelled to rescind many of the pro-Catholic injunctions and grant religious freedom to his subjects. Two years later, Susǝnyos abdicated the throne, passing the helm to his son Fasilädäs (d.1667, r.1632–67). Hostile to the Catholic project, the new sovereign abrogated the mission’s privileges. Starting in 1633, most of the Jesuits moved to the coastal area and then left for Goa. Only a few missionaries stayed in the kingdom, for the sake of tending to the remaining flock.79 The secession of the Portuguese–Spanish union in 1640 also had major repercussions on the Jesuits in India.80 The accession of King João IV (1604–56, r.1640–56) in Portugal roiled the conflict of interests between the two Iberian powers in the East. Throughout most of this period, the chair of St. Peter was occupied by Urban VIII (1568–1644, r.1623–44), whose main apparatus for coordinating the missions was indeed the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide. In 1639, as the Jesuit presence on the sub-continent was nearing its centennial anniversary, the English made landfall in Madras—the future Asian headquarters of the East Indian Company. The Luso-Dutch struggle, which began with the raid of Príncipe and São Tomé in 1598–99, ended over six decades later with Holland’s capture of the Portuguese settlements on the Malabar Coast. It would take roughly seventy years to finalize the terms of the peace agreement between the two monarchies. Founded in 1602, the Dutch East India Company wrested control of the mace, cloves, and nutmeg in the Moluccas, 78

The first report was issued by the superior general of the Society of Jesus. See Metzler, “Foundation of the Congregation ‘de Propaganda Fide,’” 107. 79 Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, Envoys of a Human God, 311–37. 80 For more on the crisis and reconfiguration of the Portuguese empire between 1580 and 1640, see Oliveira e Costa, Damião Rodrigues, and Aires Oliveira, História da expansão, 168–86.

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the cinnamon on littoral Ceylon, and the pepper of Malabar. By 1663, the Netherlands had also supplanted Portugal as the leading maritime carrier of goods between Japan and Arabia.81 In sum, the Society of Jesus first laid its foundations on the Asian continent in India and subsequently expanded to territories, including the Moluccas, Japan, China, and Ethiopia, on which Europeans had rarely, if ever, stepped foot. Be that as it may, the Jesuits and Portugal suffered daunting reversals of fortune during the 1600s, above all the throne’s loss of wide swathes of Malabar82 as well as the mission’s banishment from Ethiopia,83 Japan,84 Malacca,85 and Ceylon.86 3

The Jesuit Approach to Asceticism: in Search of Symmetry

The Jesuit presence in India transformed the European approach to religious diversity. During the first half of the sixteenth century, Boxer argues, Portuguese missionaries on the sub-continent were barely interested in learning the culture and beliefs of the people they aspired to convert. The Franciscans in Goa never became the counterpart of the “twelve apostles” who, under the command of Fray Martín de Valencia (1474–1534), would lead the spiritual conquest of Mexico from 1524 onward. Until the arrival of the Society of Jesus in 1542, the performance of the missionaries on the sub-continent basically continued to 81 Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 111–13. 82 Alden, “Some Considerations,” 61–62. 83 For more on the Society’s banishment from Ethiopia, see Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, Envoys of a Human God, 277–37; Albert Kammerer, “L’éphémère triomphe du catholicisme en Abyssinie (1622–1632),” Revue d’histoire diplomatique 60 (1946): 260–93; Merid Wolde Aregay and Girma Beshah, Question of the Union of the Churches, 89–110; Philip Caraman, The Lost Empire (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 133–53; Jean Baptiste Coulbeaux, Histoire politique et religieuse de l’Abyssinie (Paris: Geuthner, 1929), 2:209–24; Leonardo Cohen, “A Postmortem of the Jesuits’ Banishment from Ethiopia,” in The Council of Trent: Reform and Controversy in Europe and Beyond (1545–1700); Between Artists and Adventurers, ed. Wim François and Violet Soen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018), 3:257–76. 84 For a comparison between the Society’s missions in Japan and Ethiopia, see Merid Wolde Aregay, “Japanese and Ethiopian Reactions to Jesuit Missionary Activities in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Katsuyoshi Fukui, Eisei Kurimoto, and Masayoshi Shigeta, Ethiopia in Broader Perspective, 676–98. 85 Sarnia Hayes Hoyt, Old Malacca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 30–56; Manuel Pintado, A Stroll through Ancient Malacca (Macau: Instituto Cultural de Macau, 1990), 9–24. 86 See R. G. [Richard Gerald] Anthonisz, The Dutch in Ceylon: An Account of Their Early Visits to the Island, Their Conquest, and Their Rule over the Maritime Region during a Century and a Half (Colombo: C.A.C. Press, 1929).

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sputter along. At this juncture, we can discern a clear shift. The order’s representatives brought new outreach methods and perspectives. First and foremost, the Jesuits endeavored to grasp the beliefs of their targeted populations by translating their sacred texts.87 The Portuguese missionaries started delving into the culture of the regions they were stationed in long after their Spanish counterparts in Peru and New Spain. Before the Jesuits reached Goa, there were relatively few Portuguese proselytizers in India, and they had little to show for their efforts. For a long time, neither the proselytizers nor the secular clergy in Asia bothered to acquaint themselves with the scriptures and fundamental religious beliefs of their potential converts, be they Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist. Instead, they broadly rejected the indigenous faiths as the work of the devil. There are two different ways of comprehending foreign traditions: study languages and texts with the objective of understanding a society’s myths and beliefs,88 or observe customs, rituals, and ways of life—to include 87 Charles R. Boxer, The Church Militant and the Iberian Expansion, 1440–1770 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 49–50; Luís de Albuquerque, ed., Notícias de missionação e martírio na Índia e Insulíndia (Lisbon: Alfa, 1989), 13. See also the cases of Roberto de Nobili (1577–1656), Sebastão Gonçalves (1561–1640), Gonçalo Fernandes Trancoso (1521–1621), Henrique Henriques (1520–1600), and Francisco García (158?–1659). 88 The founder of two hospitals in Punicale (Punnaikayal), Henrique Henriques’s most distinguished achievement was his books on Tamil grammar, not least a dictionary. For more on this figure, see Alonso de Andrade and Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, Varones ilustres de la Compañía de Jesús, vol. 2, Misiones de la China, Goa, Etiopía, Malabar (Bilbao: Administración del Mensajero del Corazón de Jesús, 1889), 652–64; Josef Wicki, “Father Henrique Henriques, S.J. (1520–1600): An Exemplary Missionary of India,” Indian Ecclesiastical Studies 4, no. 2 (1965): 142–50; Wicki, “Father Henrique Henriques, S.J. (1520–1600): The Superior of the Missions,” Indian Ecclesiastical Studies 5, nos. 1–2 (1966): 36–72; Wicki, “Fr. Henrique Henriques, S.J. III. The Last Years of His Life (1576–1600); Local Superior, Consultor, Infirmities,” Indian Ecclesiastical Studies 5 (1966): 175–89; Correia-Afonso, Jesuits in India, 17; Županov, Missionary Tropics, 232–58; Anand Amaladass, “The Writing Catechism and Translation Strategies of Three Jesuits in South India: Henrique Henriques, Roberto de Nobili, and Joseph Beschi,” in Translating Catechisms, Translating Cultures, ed. Antje Flüchter and Rouven Wirbser (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 170–94. Thomas Stephens (1549–1619), an English Jesuit who spent forty years in Portuguese India (1579–1619), became fluent in Marathi. By dint of this skill, he composed Krista Purana (Christian Purana)—also titled Discourse of the Coming of Our Savior Jesus Christ to the World. This epic poem on the life of Christ was published in Rachol in 1616. Written in the style of the Hindu Puranas, but printed in Romanized Marathi, Krista Purana became a classic of vernacular literature and extremely popular among local Christians. Following in Stephens’s footsteps, the Jesuit Estevan de la Cruz (dates unknown), wrote a Purana in Marathi–Konkani on the life of St. Peter, which was published in Goa in 1634. See Mariano Saldanha, “História de gramática concani,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 8, nos. 2–3 (1936): 715–35; Correia-Afonso, Jesuits in India, 148–51. In 1616, Fernandes Trancoso composed an important treatise on Hinduism: Tratado do P. Gonçalo Fernandes Trancoso

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asceticism (the main topic of this book)—from an ethnographic perspective. The first generation of Jesuit missionaries on the Horn of Africa had few opportunities to explore the local Christian faith. Their initial encounters with Ethiopian Christianity were debates and other forms of polemical confrontation. Thereafter, the Society’s emissaries were relegated to areas from which outreach was more difficult. Only after the arrival of Páez89 in 1603 did the study of the local tradition—its origins, annals, ethnography, literature, and theology—begin to flourish. Four years later, Páez embarked on his Portuguese-language treatise The History of Ethiopia, which constitutes the first geographical, ethnographic, political, and religious disquisition of the ancient Christian kingdom.90 Besides informing readers of the land, Páez’s thick tome sobre o hinduismo (Treaty by Fr. Gonçalo Fernandes on Hinduism). The second part of this exhaustive study on Brahmanic practices was devoted to a long compilation of quotations from Sanskrit texts. Although Fernandes himself did not know Sanskrit and depended on local translators, he was cognizant of the missionary advantages of using local primary sources. See Josef Wicki, Tratado do Padre Gonçalo Fernandes Trancoso sobre o Hinduismo (Madure: 1916) (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1973). For an in-depth look at these proselytizers’ study and rendering of Ethiopian texts, see Leonardo Cohen, “The Jesuit Missionary as a Translator (1603–1632),” in Ethiopia and the Missions: Historical and Anthropological Insights, ed. Verena Böll et al. (Hamburg: LIT Verlag Münster, 2005), 11–30. 89 Pedro Páez Xaramillo (1564–1622) was born to a noble Castilian family in Olmedo, Spain. After joining the Society at the age of eighteen, he went on to become one of its more prominent members. As a Jesuit he possessed a cosmopolitan erudition by virtue of, among other things, a prodigious talent for languages. As he traveled across the East, Páez picked up languages like others gather impressions. “Now I am busy learning Persian,” the Jesuit wrote from Baçaim. While being held captive along the Red Sea, he took a stab at reading and writing Arabic. In all likelihood, a couple of Jewish prisoners taught the missionary some Hebrew. Upon reaching the Horn of Africa, he seems to have effortlessly acquired Amharic and Gǝʿǝz. Not only did these languages enable him to translate Ethiopian religious works into Portuguese but they also improved his homiletic prowess. Curiosity of other societies and missionary zeal also converge in the figure of Páez. Upon reaching Ethiopia in May 1603, he began to develop a profound knowledge of the land, its customs, and tongues. For more on this figure, see Elaine Sanceau’s (1896–1978) prologue to Páez’s [Péro Pais] História da Etiópia, 3 vols., intro. Elaine Sanceau, annotations Alberto Feio, paleography Lopes Teixeira (Porto: Livraria Civilizaçao, 1945–46), 1:ix–xxiii; Sylvia Pankhurst, Ethiopia: A Cultural History (Essex: Lalibela House, 1959), 339–58; Hervé Pennec, “Missión jésuite”; Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, “Páez, Pedro,” in Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, ed. Siegbert Uhlig (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010), 4:89–90. 90 Over the last one hundred years, several editions of Paez’s work have been brought to press, including translations into English and Spanish. Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, vols. 2–3; Pais, História da Etiópia; Pedro Páez, História da Etiópia, ed. Isabel Boavida, Hervé Pennec, and Manuel João Ramos (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2008); Páez, History of Ethiopia, 2 vols., ed. Isabel Boavida, Hervé Pennec, and Manuel João Ramos, trans. Christopher J. Tribe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011); Páez, Historia de Etiopía, trans. Juana Inarejos Ortíz (La Coruña: Ediciones del Viento S.L., 2014).

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was meant to refute the claims of the Dominican theologian Luis de Urreta (1570–1636). Soon after this work was completed in the 1620s, Manuel de Almeida (1580–1646)91 started writing his own History of Ethiopia in Gorgora. However, the Jesuit would only finish the book between 1642 and 1645, following his return to Goa. Both authors drew on a wide array of Ethiopian sources, most notably royal chronicles, theological texts, and hagiographies along with first-hand accounts and oral communications. The tracts of other Jesuits, such as Patriarch Mendes,92 Manuel Barradas (1572–1646),93 and Jerónimo Lobo (1595–1678),94 also contain valuable historical and ethnographic information about the Horn of Africa. The same can be said for the Society of Jesus’s rich epistolary material that has been compiled by Camillo Beccari (1849–1928)95 and Aurélio de Oliveira,96 along with letters that have yet to be edited.97 Like the Indian documents, these texts shed light on the Ethiopians’ beliefs and religious life, to include some peculiar observations of ascetic phenomena. A few of the era’s Portuguese travelers and Catholic missionaries suggested that many local cultures possessed traces of an ancient Christian culture that had fallen into oblivion over the ages. Upon making landfall in Calicut, Vasco da Gama was unable to distinguish between churches and Hindu temples. Boxer posits that the myth of a lost or abandoned Eastern Christianity stemmed from the Portuguese throne’s messianic ardor.98 In Michael Pearson’s view, Gama’s impressions betray a “tolerant attitude” toward the sub-continent on the part of the initial wave of European explorers. The Portuguese, he avers, developed a curious “desire to find familiar things in India.”99 91 Manuel de Almeida, “Historia Aethiopiae,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, vols. 5–7. 92 Afonso Mendes, “Expeditionis aethiopicae,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, vols. 8–9. 93 Manoel Barradas, “Tractatus tres historico-geographici,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, vol. 4; Barradas, Tractatus tres historico-geographici (1634): A Seventeenth-Century Historical and Geographical Account of Tigray, Ethiopia, ed. Richard Pankhurst, trans. Elizabeth Filleul (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1996). 94 Jerónimo Lobo, Itinerário e outros escritos inéditos, ed. Manuel Gonçalves da Costa (Porto: Livraria Civilização, 1971); and The Itinerário of Jerónimo Lobo, trans. Donald M. Lockhart (London: Hakluyt Society, 1984). 95 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, vols. 10–14. 96 Aurélio de Oliveira, ed., Cartas de Etiópia (Braga: Livraria A.I., 1999). 97 Arquivo Distrital de Braga, MS 779, Cartas annais das missões da Etiopia. 98 Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 34. 99 Michael Pearson, The New Cambridge History of India, vol. 1, The Portuguese in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 116.

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Commonly referring to its people as gentiles, the first Portuguese to arrive on the sub-continent lacked a clear understanding of the area’s faith-based identities. As a result, these pioneers, as well as the Jesuits who followed in their wake, were struck by the ostensible “similarities” between local religious phenomena and Christian culture.100 The parallels they found between the Ethiopians and the St. Thomas community were even more salient. Notwithstanding the strong resemblance between the Christian elements-cum-symbols of the proselytizers and the proselytized, the Jesuits deemed these faiths to be corrupted or schismatic forms of Catholicism.101 Guy Stroumsa contends that the Society’s emissaries soon realized they would have to accommodate the mores of their targeted populaces. In order to justify this step, he writes, the missionaries “needed to discover the equivalences between religions and cultures. A series of similarities allowed them to overcome the radical otherness of the newly discovered religions and to understand them within the intellectual framework of their own culture.”102 The prelates attending the first provincial council in Goa undertook to restore India’s archaic Christianity, which was the fruit of St. Thomas the Apostle’s outreach in the first century CE. However, they also viewed this stream as a faith that was distorted, which was caused by the propagation of the Nestorian heresy and various other Asian fallacies.103 In light of the above, the council promulgated a reform designed to staunch the degeneration of Indian Christianity and extirpate the attendant superstitions. All this was transpiring as Portugal was expanding its conquests in the East.104 Numbering around 150,000 souls, the St. Thomas Christians were scattered along the coast as far as Mylapore. The European Catholics thought that they were heretics owing to their affiliation with the Nestorian patriarch of Baghdad. By 1577, the leader of the St. Thomas community, Archbishop Abraham of Cochin (d.1597), had fallen out of favor with the Holy See. There 100 In Alexander Henn’s view, “the curious search for the similar in the religion and the culture of the foreign land long continued among the early-modern Europeans who traveled to India or wrote about it.” Henn, Hindu–Catholic Encounters in Goa, 6. 101 Leonardo Cohen, “Ethiopian Christianity as Heresy: The Development of the Concept in the Portuguese and Jesuit Sources,” in Proceedings of the XVth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, Hamburg, 2003, ed. Siegbert Uhlig (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006), 649–55. 102 Guy Stroumsa, A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 21. 103 According to sundry Catholic accounts, the churches of the St. Thomas community were viewed as pagodes (pagan temples). See Beites Manso, “Sociedade Indiana,” 322. 104 Souza de Faria, “Os concílios provinciais,” 232.

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is reason to believe that he initiated this falling out for his own political interests, that is, to merit the backing of the Portuguese crown. At this critical juncture, Visitor Valignano stepped into the void, leaving no stone unturned in an effort to effect a reconciliation between the St. Thomas Christians and Rome. To this end, the missionary treated the local community’s members as proper Christians. Following the death of Archbishop Abraham, this attitude toward the Indian stream was once again called into question. In 1590, Archbishop Aleixo de Meneses (1559–1617) of Goa launched a campaign to convert them and patiently toiled to bring this goal to fruition. At the Synod of Diamper of 1599, the St. Thomas Christians were finally brought into the Latin fold.105 Two years later, the Jesuit Francisco Ros (1559–1624) was consecrated bishop of the see of Angamaly, but the church soon transferred him to Cranganore.106 After the conclave, the Syrian Church in India was reformed as per the Roman model, save for language.107 Ethiopian Orthodoxy was also seen as a form of Christianity that had deteriorated owing to geographical isolation and neglect. Hence, this denomination was also in need of reform. As far as is known, Francisco Álvares (c.1465–1542), the chaplain of the first Portuguese embassy to Ethiopia, did not believe that the local population was heretical.108 He expounded on the kingdom’s culture and social life. From his descriptions of rituals and customs, the secular 105 In the synod’s proceedings, there is a long list of customs from all fields of life that were slated for proscription or remediation. Alexander Cherukarakunnel posits that the reformers were by and large ignorant or badly informed of the cultural aspects of these practices and caste rules. Many of the St. Thomas Christians’ and upper-caste Hindu customs were quite similar. Cherukarakunnel, “The Hindu Christians of India,” in The Malabar Church, ed. Jacob Veallian (Rome: Orientalia Christiana Analecta, 1970), 203–8, here 203–4. Also see Joaquim O. Bragança, “O Sínodo de Diamper,” Didascalia 14 (1984): 247–61; Beites Manso, “Sociedade Indiana”; Beites Manso, “Combate contra a heresia: O Sínodo de Diamper,” in D’Aquém, d’Além e d’Ultramar: Homenagem a António Dias Farinha, ed. Francisco Contente Domingues et al. (Lisbon: Centro de História da Universidade de Lisboa, 2015), 2:1447–58. 106 For more on the Society’s relations with this group, see Josef Wicki, “How the Jesuits Began to Work among the Christians of St. Thomas (1575–1577),” in The Malabar Church, ed. Jacob Veallian (Rome: Orientalia Christiana Analecta, 1970), 193–202; Mathew Vattakuzhy, “The Three Rites in Malabar,” in Veallian, Malabar Church, 165–85; Cherukarakunnel, “Hindu Christians,” 203–8; Luís Filipe Thomaz, “A lenda de S.Tomé Apóstolo e a expansão portuguesa,” Lusitania sacra 3 (1991): 349–418; Durão Ferreira, Papel da Igreja Católica, 122–25, 201–2; João Teles e Cunha, “Confluence and Divergence: The Thomas Christians and the Padroado, c.1500–1607,” Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 63, nos. 1–2 (2011): 47–71; George Mark Moraes, A History of Christianity in India (Bombay: Manaktalas, 1964), 175–245. 107 Beites Manso, “Sociedade Indiana.” 108 Charles F. Beckingham, “The Achievements of Prester John,” in Between Islam and Christendom (London: Variorum Reprints, 1983), 3–24.

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minister evidently perceived them as odd. He emphasized how local rites, including holy week services, marriages, and burials, differed from their Iberian analogs. In particular, he wondered about a few of Ethiopian Orthodoxy’s signature traits, not least Sabbath observance, circumcision, and a number of dietary restrictions. Notwithstanding these disparities, the general impression that one gets from Álvares’s work is that, in his estimation, the local faith still fell under the heading of Christianity. After all, he opined, the locals are “good Christians.” Moreover, there is no reason to object to any of their customs, for they do not essentially alter the devotees’ religious affiliation.109 It also bears mentioning that Álvares did not even touch on Ethiopian Orthodoxy’s theological, dogmatic, or Christological differences with the Latin rite. In fact, he was evidently unaware of such disparities.110 What was the basis for Álvares’s sympathetic attitude toward Ethiopian Orthodoxy? As a secular Presbyterian minister, we can surmise that his theological knowledge paled in comparison to that of the Jesuits, who would make landfall in the kingdom thirty-seven years later. Furthermore, the chaplain’s embassy was animated by the profound hope, which had been pulsating in the European Christian consciousness for hundreds of years, to finally discover the realm of “Prester John” and enlist the king in the struggle against the “infidels.” Miguel de Castanhoso (d.1565?) possessed nearly the same mindset as Álvares. Together with four hundred other men, he served in D. Cristóvão da Gama’s (1516–42) campaign to free Ethiopia from the Muslim yoke of the neighboring lands (1528–41). Castanhoso’s historical treatise offered an account

109 Before the Protestant Reformation and the Council of Trent, popular faith in Portugal also contained quite a few elements that were far from “purely Christian.” In fact, many of them could have scandalized any Portuguese missionary doing outreach among gentiles. “Although hidden,” António Henrique R. de Oliveira Marques (1933–2007) observes, “behind the façade of Christianity, which lent names of saints and Catholic feasts to the forces of nature and pagan devotions, worship of nature was quite actively preserved throughout the Middle Ages, drawing denunciations and threats from the Church and from the more enlightened laymen. To this cult were connected all kinds of superstitions, which are carried on in part even today. Thus there arose, especially outside of the cities, a complex fusion of beliefs and practices, in theory baptized with Christianity but in practice quite remote from it. The Penitential of Martim Perez establishes a long list of superstitions that must be considered sinful by the confessors and consequently punished.” See António Henrique R. de Oliveira Marques, Daily Life in Portugal in the Late Middle Ages, trans. S. S. Wyatt (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 226. 110 Francisco Álvares, The Prester John of the Indies, ed. Charles F. Beckingham and G. W. B. [George Wynn Brereton] Huntingford, trans. Lord Stanley of Alderley (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1961), 293. For the original Portuguese version of this book, see Álvares, Verdadeira informação das terras do Preste João das Indias, intro. and annotations Neves Águas (Sintra: Publicações Europa-América, 1989).

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of these battles as well as Ethiopian culture.111 Though a Catholic knight, his book is devoid of theological material. Instead, Castanhoso provides genuinely empathetic descriptions of the local rituals he witnessed. He related how the Ethiopians observed holy week, confessed, and participated in the Eucharist.112 He did not even object to the kingdom’s myriad fasts, which he deemed to be part of the “old law.” Moreover, Castanhoso pointed out commonalities, like the holding of Sunday and festival services at noon.113 In his estimation, the customs spoke to the particularity of a nation that was determined to follow the rite of its ancestors. Differences aside, he felt that the Ethiopians were part and parcel of Christendom and that their way of life did not run counter in the least to the faith of Rome.114 Castanhoso made no attempt whatsoever at orthopraxis, much less orthodoxy. In other words, he refrained from labeling customs as either legitimate or beyond the pale. From 1557 to 1632, and even before the monarchy embraced Catholicism in 1622, the Jesuit writers lauded the average Ethiopian’s religious proclivities, dedication to their faith, and strong affinity for Christian symbols. “They are wonderfully predisposed toward the divine,” Gaspar Páez opined, “and they had always kept alive that little spark of faith.”115 According to Lobo, the monarchy’s inhabitants “received [the law of the grace] with such sincerity that all those kingdoms then subject to the Abyssinian ruler rendered obedience and made themselves subject to the law of the Gospel.” He also extolled Ethiopian monasticism and praised the country’s rulers for endowing land to the monasteries. Thereafter, Lobo observed that the people are inclined […] to charity, fasting, doing penances, frequenting the churches, the sacraments of Confession and Communion, Mass and sermons. 111 Miguel de Castanhoso, Historia das cousas que o mui esforçado Capitão Dom Cristovão da Gama fez nos reinos do Preste João com quatrocentos Portugueses que Consigo Levou, intro., notes, and ed. Neves Águas (Sintra: Publicações Europa-América, 1988). For the English version, see Richard Stephen Witheway, ed. and trans., The Portuguese Expedition to Abyssinia in 1541–1543 as Narrated by Castanhoso: With Some Contemporary Letters, the Short Account of Bermudez, and Certain Extracts from Corrêa (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1967), 3–104. 112 See Witheway, Portuguese Expedition, 87–91. 113 Witheway, Portuguese Expedition, 87–91. 114 A similar idea turns up in a letter from 1551: “They confess and believe in the Holy Trinity, our Lady, and all the rest [of the principles] that the Church of Rome has and believes in.” See “Relatio de statu politico et religioso Aethiopiae a patre Gaspare Barzaeo per testes oculatos accepta et in Europam missa. Góa, anno 1551,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 10:24. 115 Gasparo Páez, Lettere annue di Ethiopia del 1624, 1625 e 1626 (Rome: Per l’Herede di Bartolomeo Zannetti, 1628), 163.

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And although that Church is presently ruined to the extent we saw in its spiritual edifice, it still preserves so much of all of these good customs and works that, as far as this part is concerned, it does not have to envy any other kingdom where purity of faith is of greater perfection and excellence. Commendations aside, Lobo then pointed out a glaring failure: It is very true that, because it is lacking the principle of grace and true union with its Head, Christ Jesus, since they are separated from His vicar, the Roman Pope, by an ancient and obstinate schism as well as the infinite number of heresies to which they cling, these good works that I have reported do not have the value they deserve nor the perfection and grace which would be given to them by the pure Catholic faith, by the true religion.116 The common denominator between all these accounts is that Ethiopian Orthodoxy is a naive, ignorant, and undisciplined institution that has been led astray by the Jews and Alexandrian patriarchs. Each and every one of the Society’s authors under review dedicated at least one part of their treatise to the “errors” that beset this stream. In the estimation of the Portuguese, these mistakes fell under one of two categories: false conceptions of dogma, religious truths, and the sacraments; or the improper execution of certain rituals. With respect to false conceptions, the Jesuits brooked no compromise. Every author zealously defended their own theological truths regarding the corporality of God, the nature of Christ, the rational souls, purgatory, and the Holy Ghost. In parallel, they negated the Ethiopian Church’s analogous views as heretical. The Society’s attitude was more ambiguous with respect to the practice of rituals, as its emissaries had reservations concerning the demarcation between truth and error. Likewise, they equivocated over what falls under the heading of custom and what is a fundamental component of the religion itself. Above all, the Jesuits designated customs an error in sacramental contexts that pertain to theological issues. Moreover, the order displayed little patience when a ritual possessed a strong “Jewish” flavor. For example, Ethiopian dietary restrictions, Sabbath observance, and circumcision were deemed antithetical to the Jesuit–Portuguese view of Christianity.117

116 Lobo, Itinerário of Jerónimo Lobo, 157–58. 117 See Leonardo Cohen Shabot, “Los portugueses en Etiopía y la problemática de los ritos ‘judaicos,’” Historia y grafía 17 (2001): 209–40.

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On the sub-continent and the Horn of Africa, Europeans were on the lookout for “the similar,” especially in local Christian groups. As per the Tridentine view, non-Latin churches should be rectified with the objective of maintaining discipline, promoting “good” customs, and inculcating the Catholic creed. This search for the familiar also included other faiths. Historically speaking, the Western definition of religiosity is linked to a set of Christian-oriented social phenomena. Religion and Christianity are logically tied to each other from the standpoint of genus and species, respectively. However, as Alfredo Fierro observes, Christianity has been a privileged species, functioning as the primary model for comparison. There have long been question marks in the European discourse as to whether all the leading Asian spiritual frameworks—Confucianism, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Shintoism—are religions in the strict sense of the word, or merely ethical philosophies on life brimming with symbols.118 For instance, according to Heinrich von Stietencron’s (1933–2018) hypothesis, the multifarious behaviors, thoughts, and devotional faiths that Hinduism encompasses significantly diverge from the concept of religion that is unique to Christianity. Owing to Hinduism’s internal contradictions and heterogeneity, Western encounters with attendant phenomena during the sixteenth century gave rise to a hazy and far-removed mosaic of the faith. “Even within Hinduism,” von Stietencron writes, “the sacred scripture of one is not that of the other. A god whom one worships with the deepest devotion as the supreme divinity and lord of the world may be of secondary importance to another.”119 It was during the period in question that European missionaries and traders noticed that the Hindu designation applied to most non-Muslims inhabiting the sub-continent. For the first time, then, the Occident drew a distinction between the profane term “Indian” and the religious “Hindu.”120 118 Alfredo Fierro, Sobre la religión: Descripción y teoría (Madrid: Taurus Ediciones, 1979), 220–22. 119 Heinrich von Stietencron, “¿Qué es el hinduismo? Historia de una tradición religiosa,” in El cristianismo y las grandes religiones, ed. Hans Küng et al., trans. Jose María Bravo Navalpotro and Roberto Gody (Madrid: Libros Europa, 1987), 177–201, here 177–78. 120 The word “Hinduism” was not coined by its devotees. Instead, the term was the handiwork of Europeans seeking to designate the Hindus’ faith. Unfortunately, the word was introduced before its creators sufficiently understood this phenomenon. For example, the minters were unaware of the fact that Hindus practiced a variety of different religions. From that time forth, Hinduism has been portrayed as “one of the great faiths of the world.” Some of the concept’s users even believed that this religion actually existed. Von Stietencron, “¿Qué es el hinduismo?,” 181, 179.

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As illustrated throughout this study, asceticism exemplified devotion and religiosity on both the Horn of Africa and the sub-continent. Though hardly the lone manifestation, ascetic practices are undoubtedly one of the more intense, expressive, and colorful. Sensitive to this sort of phenomena, the order’s representatives left written accounts of them. They searched for equivalences or parallels between the ascetic facets of Ethiopian and Indian culture and those of Counter-Reformation Catholicism. Regardless of whether the descriptions and treatment of local phenomena were systematic, improvisational, or anecdotal, the defining elements of these testimonies are their complexity and ambivalence. For this reason, scholars would be hard-pressed to pigeonhole the Jesuit impressions of such practices under a single category. The more “official” Catholic discourse impugns the “excessive” forms of worldly renunciation practiced by the church’s antagonists. Beneath the surface, though, the reader of these texts can perceive a high degree of empathy for and even identification with the Eastern proponents of self-restraint and austerity. Pedro de Ribadeneyra’s (1527–1611) outlook on two of the most prominent Jesuit superior generals—Ignatius of Loyola and Francisco de Borja (1510–72, in office 1565–72)—bears witness to the value that the order placed on austerity and mortification. In his history of the Counter-Reformation, Ribadeneyra expounds on the different qualities of the Society’s leaders, a few of whom were champions of asceticism. For instance, Ignatius embraced “the virtue of holy humility as the mother and bedrock of all virtues; walking injured and half-naked, wandering in hospitals like the poorest of the poor, despised and dejected, and hoping not to be recognized or regarded by anyone, and filled with joy when affronted and persecuted for the love of Jesus Christ our Redeemer […]. Always strive,” the Society’s founder instructed his disciples, “to follow the path of humility and self-contempt” while tending to the Lord’s vineyards.121 Ribadeneyra also provides an anecdote about Borja: When a person was praised as holy and perfect, he [i.e., the superior general] would say: “It would be so if the person is mortified.” He regarded his body as an arch enemy and never sought to give it peace or [reach] a truce, constantly seeking and finding ways to mistreat it, and engaged in whatever actions that would help afflict it. If the sun made him weary walking in the summer, he would say, “Oh how well our friend helps us!” 121 Pedro de Ribadeneyra, Historias de la Contrarreforma (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 2009), 336–37.

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And he would say the same of the ice, […] air, and […] rain in the harsh of winter; and the pain of gout and of the heart, and of those who would oppress and murmur [aspersions].122 Borja dreaded the possibility, the chronicler added, of passing away on a day in which he did not get around to mortifying his senses or at least doing some penance. For this reason, he walked around in a perpetual vigil, waging war against his flesh. […] At times, he put sand and grit in his shoes, so that his feet would hurt while walking; and when he was unable to take his [implements for] penance on the road, he had certain devices to painfully draw his blood and gave himself rounds of pinches.123 The Ignatian order indeed placed a premium on asceticism and mortification. However, it was also incumbent upon its emissaries to practice these virtues with moderation, avoid excesses, and perform them under the supervision of the order’s top brass. Not surprisingly, the Jesuits were rather curious about religious and cultural phenomena in India and Ethiopia. This stemmed from a desire to understand ceremonies and narratives, albeit from the hegemonic perspective of the church’s official ecclesiastical history. In consequence, the Society generated troves of ethnographic information. As was the case regarding other devotional topics, the Jesuits endeavored to find parallels and symmetries with the ascetic practices of local cultures. There are different takes on Vasco da Gama’s attitude toward the devotional phenomenon he encountered in Calicut. As alluded to earlier, the explorer thought that a Hindu temple, apparently one dedicated to Vishnu, was a church. Boxer ascribes this mistake to Europe’s preoccupation with finding Prester John.124 Likewise, Sanjay Subrahmanyam avers that at the time, the Portuguese were convinced that they would find powerful Christian kingdoms in Asia eager to join the Occident in its struggle against the Mamluks and other Muslim rivals in the Near East.125 Alternatively, Pearson interprets the Calicut episode as “a desire to find familiar things in Asia.”126 The Portuguese were fascinated by what they grasped as “similarities” between certain gentile devotional concepts and rituals and those of their own. For instance, Gama’s 122 Ribadeneyra, Historias de la Contrarreforma, 831. 123 Ribadeneyra, Historias de la Contrarreforma, 833. 124 Boxer, Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 37. 125 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Penumbral Visions: Making Politics in Early Modern South India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 26. 126 Pearson, New Cambridge History, 116.

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error suggests that the Jesuits were looking for the roots of Catholic asceticism in Indian and Ethiopian cultures. We can perhaps infer from Ribadeneyra’s above-cited examples that the Society’s representatives were also interested in like-minded attitudes toward mortification. At any rate, the Jesuits both criticized and praised the intense mortifications they encountered on the sub-continent and the Horn of Africa. This quest for the familiar generated esteem and sympathy for the local proponents of asceticism as well as a fair share of acculturation. However, it also spawned contempt. On occasion, the Society’s emissaries even viewed the ascetics they came across as magicians in the service of heresy or idolatry. The Jesuits on the Horn of Africa readily identified several ancestors of Ethiopian monasticism. Besides their pan-Christian influence, St. Pachomius (d.348)-inspired cenobitism and Anthonian solitary anchoritism127 are cornerstones of the kingdom’s monastic tradition. According to Ethiopian lore, monasticism was imported from the Mediterranean region at the turn of the sixth century by “the nine saints.” Upon reaching the Horn of Africa, these figures were welcomed by Emperor Ǝllä ʿAmida ( fl. fifth–sixth centuries) and the inhabitants of the Tegrayian city of Aksum, where they are believed to have established the kingdom’s first monastery.128 The most prominent among the “nine” were Zämika‌ʾel Arägawi, Pänṭälewon, Afṣe, and Gärima (or Yǝsḥaq) ( fl. late fifth century/early sixth century). As their names reveal, the saints were from different parts of the Eastern Roman Empire and adhered to the same religious doctrine. It seems that they left their homelands due to the era’s faith-based conflicts. Owing to their anti-Chalcedonian views, the saints were persecuted by the Roman emperor, who backed the dyophysite cause. At first, they escaped to Egypt, where they spent a number of years in a monastery founded by Pachomius.129 The different forms of Ethiopian asceticism are well documented in the kingdom’s literature from the medieval and early modern periods, especially hagiographies. Known as gädlat (singular: gädl),130 these “saints’ lives” are invaluable to historians reconstructing the social life on the Horn of Africa during these years in Ethiopia. The hagiographies feature saints who belonged to 127 Cenobitism and anchoritism are the two main monastic lifestyles; both appeared in the fourth century. 128 Getatchew Haile, “Ethiopian Monasticism,” in The Coptic Encyclopedia, ed. Aziz S. Atiya (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 2:990–95, here 991. 129 From a historical standpoint, a community that leads an ascetic way of life was deemed to inhabit a monastery. Stuart Munro-Hay, “Saintly Shadows,” in Languages and Cultures of Eastern Christianity: Ethiopian, ed. Alessandro Bausi (Farnham: Ashgate Variorum, 2011), 221–52; Antonella Brita, “Nine Saints,” in Uhlig, Encyclopaedia aethiopica, 3:1188–91. 130 Literally “contending with spiritual adversity,” gädl is the biography of a holy person.

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a particular monastic community. In other words, these texts were a way for the subject’s peers and disciples to underscore and honor his contribution to the monastery. Against this backdrop, it stands to reason that we have less information about anchorites, even though this phenomenon, as discussed below, was far from marginal. Besides the local gädlat, the biographies of martyrs and saints from other Eastern churches were translated into Gǝʿǝz, including those of distinguished Egyptian anchorites. These works had a marked impact on how Ethiopians perceived the ascetic life and the Christian ideal. Over the ages, renderings of sundry Eastern Christian works flowed into the kingdom. A case in point is a chronicle of Egypt’s monastic fathers. Attributed to Philoxenus of Mabbug (d.523),131 the hagiography was translated from Arabic in the mid-1300s. Isaac of Nineveh’s (c.613–c.700) treatise on ascetic spirituality132 was rendered into Gǝʿǝz before the sixteenth century. Likewise, a monk named ʿƎnbaqom (1470–1560) translated the ascetic writings of John Saba (690–780) from Arabic during the reign of Emperor Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl (1496–1540, r.1508–40). In Alessandro Bausi’s view, the scores of existing gädl manuscripts attest to their instrumental role in the development of the ascetic consciousness on the Horn of Africa.133 Steven Kaplan’s The Monastic Holy Man and the Christianization of Early Solomonic Ethiopia (1984) assays different facets of Ethiopian monasticism. The book demonstrates that the role of monastery superior bore a close 131 Philoxenus (440–523) was one of the leading Syriac Monophysite authors of the fifth century. Hailing from the Persian province of Beth Garmai, he became bishop of Hierapolis in 485. This figure copied a number of exegetical, doctrinal, and ascetical treatises. See Linda Knezevich, “Philoxenus of Mabbug,” in Atiya, Coptic Encyclopedia, 6:1961–62. 132 Isaac was consecrated bishop of Nineveh by Catholicos George I (658–80). Owing to his contemplative temperament, Isaac ultimately retired to the Persian wilderness of Susiana. His mystical deliberations focused on the relationship of an individual soul with the divine. See Peter Bochum Bruns, “Isaac of Nineveh,” in Dictionary of Early Christian Literature, ed. Sigmar Döpp and Wilhelm Geerlings, trans. Matthew O’Connell (New York: Crossroad Publication, 2000), 306. 133 The output of this troika was assembled into a canon titled Mäṣḥǝftä mänäkosat (Books of the monks). As Alessandro Bausi points out, the canonization process was rather slow. Most of the manuscripts are limited to two of the three authors’ works, and only four contain all three. Bausi, “Monastic Literature,” in Uhlig, Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, 3:993–99, here 997–98. Also see Enrico Cerulli, Storia della letteratura etiopica (Milan: Nuova Accademia Editrice, 1956), 190; Victor Arras, ed., Asceticon, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, 458–59, Sae 77–78 (Louvain: E. Peeters, 1984). Mäṣḥǝftä mänäkosat includes edifying phrases of the desert fathers as well as homilies and ascetic treatises by Chrysostom (347–407), Ephrem (306–373), and Isaac of Nineveh (613–700), inter alios. Victor Arras, Geronticon, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, 476–77, Sae, 79–80 (Louvain: E. Peeters, 1986). See also Vitold Witakowski, “Filkəsyos,” in Uhlig, Encyclopaedia aethiopica, 2:541–42.

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resemblance to that of a governor. Both presided over a certain community, owned land, and were involved in court politics. Moreover, the two position holders had to grapple with the kings’ efforts to centralize church and state.134 Unlike the governor, the monk’s prestige was an outgrowth of his ascetic comportment—a principal topic of the current study. Many Ethiopian hagiographies describe a contemplative ascetic primarily concerned with his own salvation. In contrast, other gädlat accentuate the saint’s energetic and combative nature, particularly when evangelizing among pagans. One of the founders of Ethiopian monasticism in its present form was Abba Yoḥanni ( fl. thirteenth century). As per the hagiographic tradition, this figure gave up the comforts of the Zagʷe dynasty’s court for an ascetic life at Däbrä Damo. Once he had entered the hermitage, Yoḥanni never left its premises. Moreover, he was the spiritual mentor of two key figures in the annals of Egyptian monasticism: Iyäsus Moʾa (1214–93) and Abba Täklä Haymanot (d.1313). The argument can be made that the ascetic practices of Ethiopian holy men were the same as those widely attributed to Christian eremites in other parts of the globe.135 In all likelihood, celibacy was the most important virtue for these monks. The vast majority of them deliberately chose this route to either forsake conjugal ties for a celestial marriage or to abandon nuptials with the objective of joining a monastery. On occasion, the level of restraint barred so much as making eye contact with a woman.136 Fasting and other types of dietary abstinence also played a key role in the monastic experience. In fact, the stress that Ethiopian Christianity placed on fasting was unparalleled in other denominations. According to Fǝtḥa nägäšt (The law of the kings), a Coptic law code that was translated into Gǝʿǝz: “The number of fast days in the year totals 250, of which 180 are obligatory and the rest exclusively for priests, monks,

134 Steven Kaplan, The Monastic Holy Man and the Christianization of Early Solomonic Ethiopia (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1984), 45–69. 135 Arthur Vööbus, A History of Asceticism in the Syrian Orient (Louvain: Secrétariat du Corpus SCO, 1960), 2:251–56. 136 During the early years of Däbrä ʿAsbo, monks and nuns lived and slept in the same quarters while refraining from intercourse. Objecting to such cohabitation, Abba Anorewos ( fl. fourteenth century) drove away the sisters from the monastery during his tenure as mäggabi (a senior official in the Ethiopian Church). Furthermore, Bäṣälotä Mika‌ʾel, one of the religious and moral reformers of the fourteenth century, demanded that women be forbidden from stepping foot on the island of Ḥayq—home of the ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon and Iyäsus Moʾa monasteries. See Steven Kaplan, “The Ethiopian Holy Man as Outsider and Angel,” Religion 15 (1985): 235–49, here 242.

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and nuns.”137 Therefore, we can assume that quite a few monks observed this practice even before discovering their vocation. Asceticism often manifested itself through the observance of dietary restrictions that underscored the anchorite’s detachment from the rest of society. Many of them subsisted on wild herbs, fruit, and water. At times, these diets were accompanied by deprivations like protracted standing (e.g., throughout a prayer service), continuous bowing, or forgoing a night’s sleep.138 The hagiographies indicate that somatic mortification is a pillar of Ethiopian monasticism. According to this tradition, the body is but a transient vessel and thus considered a foe of the eternal soul. Lest the body triumph over the soul, monks undergo rigorous fasting, prostrations, and other corporeal hardships. If two ascetics disagree on the number of days to fast, the rule is that the longer interval always prevails. Notwithstanding the Ethiopian saints’ overindulgence in these privations, the Christian faithful deemed them to be paragons of an exemplary way of life. Before the founding of the local Jesuit mission, European visitors to the Horn of Africa, such as Álvares, testified to the spartan lifestyle of the monks in all that concerns food and clothing. The chaplain noted that legions of monks refrained from consuming bread, subsisting entirely on herbs and lentils. Some of these ascetics resided in diminutive tabernacles and eschewed sitting throughout the days of Lent. A few would only leave their domiciles for the Mass of Resurrection. On Lent Wednesdays and Fridays, they slept submerged in water up to their necks, despite the cold weather. There were monks, Álvares concluded, who dwelled in the forests or atop mountains with the objective of avoiding contact with other human beings.139 One idea that emerged in cenobitical society was that ardent corporeal mortification begets angel-like wings, which symbolize perfection. For instance, several manuscripts of a hagiography describe Abunä Täklä Haymanot graced

137 As stated in the Fǝtḥa nägäšt, “fasting is abstinence from food, and is observed by man at certain times as determined by law, to attain forgiveness for sins and much reward. In so doing, he obeys the One who established the law. Fasting [also] serves to weaken the power of concupiscence, so that [the person] may obey the rational soul.” Such abstinence is “the tribute of the body, [just] as giving alms is the tribute of wealth.” Ignazio Guidi, ed. and trans., Il Fetha Nagast o Legislazione dei re, codigo ecclesiastico e civile di Abissinia (Rome: Casa Editrice Italiana, 1899), 160. Ephraim Isaac distinguishes between ritual fasts, which are meritorious, disciplinary, or penitential acts, and fasts that have a clear ascetic purpose, like those observed by the Ethiopian anchorites. Isaac, “The Significance of Food in Hebraic-African Thought and the Role of Fasting in the Ethiopian Church,” in Asceticism, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush and Richard Valantasis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 329–42, here 337. 138 Kaplan, “Ethiopian Holy Man,” 245. 139 Álvares, Prester John, 394–97.

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by three wings on either side.140 Lastly, Ethiopian monks believed that a consummate ascetic has no need for food or beverage. 4

Hindu Ascetism

Asceticism is one of the important contributions of ancient Indian culture.141 The practices of Hindu renunciants have much in common with Christian forms of asceticism. Whereas most Jesuits found Christian roots in Ethiopia, the same cannot be said for India.142 Nonetheless, there has long been an important tradition on the sub-continent of renouncing the world. Within this framework, idleness is considered a means for attaining spiritual liberation. Among Indian mendicants known as sādhu,143 saṃnyāsī,144 and yoguīs,145 140 Kaplan, “Ethiopian Holy Man,” 245. 141 From the cultural vestiges of the Indus Valley, a few scholars have inferred the existence of asceticism and Yogic practices, along with the cult of Śiva qua Paśupati and Yogin, even among the area’s non-Indo-Aryans. See Haripada Chakraboti, Asceticism in Ancient India in Brahmanical, Buddhist, Jaina, and Alivika Societies (Calcutta: Punthi Pustak, 1973), 3. 142 In some cases, early modern Portuguese chroniclers found traces of a “deteriorated Christianity” in India. Henn cites from the writing of Tomé Pires (1465?–1524/40)—an apothecary who reached numerous ports of call in Southeast Asia and China during the early 1500s: “The whole of Malabar believes, as we do, in the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, three in one, the only true God. From Cambay to Bengal all the people hold this [to be true].” Regarding the people of Gujarat, Pires was convinced that the similarities were remnants of a Christian heritage that had fallen into decay: “The heathen of Cambay are great idolaters and soft, weak people. Some of them are men who in their religion lead good lives, they are chaste, true men, and very abstemious. They believe in Our Lady and in the Trinity, and there is no doubt that they were once Christians and that they gradually lost the faith because of the Mohammedans.” Henn, Hindu–Catholic Encounters in Goa, 30. 143 The term Sādhu derives from the Sanskrit root sādh: “to go straight,” “to reach one’s goal,” “to succeed,” and the like. By the time of the Mahābārata (A large text describing ancient India), the word’s adjectival meaning was “virtuous,” “honorable,” or “righteous,” while as a noun it could signify “a good or virtuous or honest man” as well as “a holy man, saint, or sage.” During this period, the concept of ascetic renunciation was not necessarily linked with this term. However, the Jain and Hindu traditions eventually used it almost exclusively to denote those who have chosen this way of life. See Ramdas Lamb, “Sādhus, Saṃnyāsīs, and Yogīs,” in Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism, ed. Knut A. Jacobsen (Leiden: Brill, 2009–15), 3:262–78, here 262. 144 Early Sanskrit law books classify saṃnyāsi as those who “resign from the world,” discarding “all worldly ties and attachments.” This term is among the earliest honorifics for ascetics who closely adhere to the Brahmanical path. Lamb, “Sādhus, Saṃnyāsīs, and Yogīs,” 262. 145 Yogī is one seeking the yoga. Though less commonplace in the local parlance, it was the Jesuits’ term of choice for Indian ascetics. Yoga is arguably one of the most misunderstood Hindu concepts in the West. Contemporary Westerners tend to associate yoga with

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inter alia, total detachment from the world is achieved through asceticism and other established means for directing one’s consciousness. Though less commonly used by the denizens of the sub-continent, the prevalent term for local ascetics in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Jesuit literature is yogi. Many Europeans also availed themselves of the umbrella term fakir, even though it specifically denotes the Islamic mendicant.146 At the foundation of Indian ascetic behavior lies the desire to extricate oneself from samsara. An interminable cycle of successive reincarnations involving every last creature on the planet, samsara entails unavoidable suffering and misery for one and all. Asceticism ostensibly provides the means for putting an end to this grim loop. In the Christian tradition, such practices have long been a form of repentance for iniquity, and hardship is a prerequisite for cleansing oneself of past sins. That said, Hinduism does not believe in congenital impurity or eternal damnation. According to Ramdas Lamb, the religion holds that all beings have an inherently pure and divine essence, or spirit, and all will eventually reach union with the divine, in one manner or another. Although humans have this purity, we begin the long cycle of birth–death–rebirth with a total lack of understanding of our true nature. After a long series of incarnations in various life forms, we eventually take on a human body, at which point we can consciously begin the process of realizing our true essence. We mostly work to avoid doing actions that are ignorance and ego-based, for these perpetuate the illusion that we are our bodies, our minds, and our emotions. They also cause us to hurt others, which leads to both suffering and further bondage to the material world. In order to stop these actions and counteract the negative karma accrued, we have to break the attachments to the passing and temporary aspects of reality, and asceticism is one of the best methods.147

exercises and body postures but ignore or are oblivious to most of its traditional forms and functions. The term derives from the verb youj—“to join” or “harness.” Lamb, “Sādhus, Saṃnyāsīs, and Yogīs,” 263. 146 Lewis Sydney Steward O’Malley, Popular Hinduism: The Religion of the Masses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), 204. Also see A. [Alfred] S. Geden, “Asceticism (Hindu),” in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings (Edinburgh: Clark, 1909), 2:87–96, here 90. As we shall see, Jesuits and other Portuguese authors were inclined to use the term “yogi” in reference to ascetics. 147 Lamb, “Sādhus, Saṃnyāsīs, and Yogīs,” 264.

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As such, privations like fasting, celibacy, speech moratoriums, exposing oneself to extreme weather, or dressing inadequately help the practitioner disregard their own suffering and avoid sexual addictions. Having abandoned the world, the renunciant can liberate himself from samsara by wielding creative force to train the will to develop a tapas (inner heat)—one of the more venerable approaches to self-improvement.148 At times, this form of asceticism involves penances as severe as foreswearing recumbence for years and keeping one’s arm up until its muscles atrophy. “Through physical deprivation and spiritual stress,” von Stietencron explains, “the will is hardened to the point where the ascetic may be able to overcome the normal limitations of bodily existence and develop superhuman powers of perception and action.”149 The Sadhus, or renunciants, draw from a wide array of social groups, each of which adheres to a mélange of philosophical doctrines and observes their own mix of ritual and spiritual practices.150 However, all members of this group follow the same tradition of asceticism and renunciation—a way of life that distinguishes them from India’s non-ascetic population. More specifically, these renunciants forgo marriage, remain celibate, break off all ties with kin and caste, frown upon possessions, and eschew any form of manual, agricultural, manufacturing, or commercial work. In other words, the Sadhus predominantly live off alms and donations from paterfamiliases. Succinctly put, they leave the caste system and form a group that is symbolically and structurally distinct from the rest of the Hindu fold.

148 Tapas and tapsaya both denote privations ideally undertaken for spiritual gain. At the outset, tapas was a general word for “heat.” Over time, it came to specifically mean the heat from ritual fires kindled by priests. The term was eventually used to denote religious austerity and various forms of bodily mortification. As it now stands, tapas is generally associated with any religious vow or practice that restricts one’s sensorial input, not least fasting or silence. Hindu scriptures enumerate a long row of tapas. Besides food and recumbent sleep moratoria, the texts recommend, among other things, standing in water up to the neck, holding an arm up high, and looking into the sun. See Lamb, “Sādhus, Saṃnyāsīs, and Yogīs,” 263; Geden, “Asceticism (Hindu),” 87; Klaus K. Klostermaier, A Concise Encyclopedia of Hinduism (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1998), 182; Chakraboti, Asceticism in Ancient India, 3–5. 149 Heinrich von Stietencron, “El hombre y la liberación en las religiones hindúes: Perspectivas hindúes,” in El Cristianismo y las grandes religiones: Hacia el diálogo con el Islam, el Hinduismo y el Budismo, ed. Hans Künk et al., trans. José María Bravo Navalpotro and Roberto Godoy (Madrid: Libros Europa, 1987), 261–92, here 268. 150 On the plethora of ascetic lifestyles across the sub-continent, see the ethnographic work of Robert Lewis Gross, The Sadhus of India: A Study of Hindu Asceticism (Jaipur, New Delhi: Rawat, 1992), esp. 112–18. Also see Lamb, “Sādhus, Saṃnyāsīs, and Yogīs,” 267–71.

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There are essentially two views on the origins of sub-continental renunciation.151 Spearheaded by Jan C. Heesterman (1925–2014) and Madeleine Biardeau (1922–2010), the orthogenic theory emphasizes the continuities between the renunciants and the following: the Vedic traditions, different forms of ritualistic individualism, and a number of purifying practices. For Hindus, the Brahmin is indeed the standard against which all things are measured: this class represents unadulterated purity and holds a monopoly over Vedic ritual. Conversely, the renunciant has excluded himself from “the camp,” to the point of severing all worldly relationships. Be that as it may, the orthogenic thesis posits that the disparity between the ideals of the Brahmin householder and the renunciant is a matter of degree more than type. It is incumbent upon both of them to master their senses, be honest, shun all violence, as well as maintain objectivity and equanimity. The main difference between the two lies in the fact that the Brahmin is fulfilling his duties as a householder, whereas the renunciant is at the final stage of life (āśrama)152 and thus exempt from ceremonial obligations. While the latter has turned his back on society, the Brahmin only does so during Śrauta rituals, whereupon he rejoins the community.153 Louis Dumont (1911–98) and Patrick Olivelle aver that the traditions of the Brahmin ritualist and the renunciant are in perpetual conflict. If so, it stands to reason that the conventions of the latter developed outside of Vedic circles, before gradually being assimilated therein. Consequently, Dumont views Hinduism in terms of a dialogue between the “renunciant of the world” and “man in the world.”154 In this sense, the ideology of asceticism and renunciation evidently marks a departure from the Brahmanic affirmation of social duties and commitment to observe public and domestic rituals. That is to say, the renunciant is engaged in a protest or insurrection against the tyranny of the caste system. In contrast, Dumont and other authors emphasize that within the sub-continental tradition, the renunciant is ultimately responsible for faith-based innovations.155 151 Indian asceticism might very well have two origins, Vedic and non-Vedic. Johannes Bronkhorst demonstrates the connections between them; Johannes Bronkhorst, The Two Sources of Indian Asceticism (Bern: Peter Lang, 1993). 152 According to the Varṇāśrama Dharma, there are four stages in life: Brahmcarya (early youth), Gṛhastya (life of the householder), Vānapastya (life in the forest), and Samnyāsa (life of renunciation, homelessness). Klostermaier, Concise Encyclopedia of Hinduism, 28. 153 Jan C. Heesterman, The Inner Conflict of Tradition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985), 40. 154 Gavin Flood, An Introduction to Hinduism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 88–90. 155 Louis Dumont, “A Modified View of Our Origins: The Christian Beginnings of Modern Individualism,” Religion 12 (1982): 1–27, here 2.

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Owing to caste restrictions, a member does not operate as an individual but exists solely within the framework of social relations. Conversely, the renunciant has transcended this system, forging an individuality for himself. These ascetic practices, though, have also left their mark on the Brahmanic tradition of the householder.156 As Gavin Flood puts it, “renouncers have provided an important sense of coherence within Hinduism as they wander around the villages teaching and conveying religious ideas to ordinary people.”157 The Laws of Manu158 offer the clearest guidelines on the Hindu ascetic life, which were subsequently exalted and amplified by the Dharmasutras texts.159 It is beyond our capacity to determine the extent to which these rules were subject to a literal reading and rigorously observed over the ages. However, A. S. [Alfred Shenington] Geden (1857–1936) posits that the evidence of Indian ascetics subjecting themselves to extreme levels of bodily affliction implies that these rules may have indeed been meticulously followed: He should heat himself with the five fires in summer, live under the open sky in the monsoon, and wear wet clothes in winter, gradually increasing in inner heat. When he washes at the time of the three Soma pressing he should offer libations of water to the ancestors and to the gods, and he should dry his own body by generating more and more intensive heat. When he has transferred his three sacrificial fires within himself in accordance with the rules, he should become a hermit with no fire and no home, eating only roots and fruits, making no effort to get the things that give happiness, chaste, sleeping on the bare ground, owning no shelter, taking the roots of trees for his home.160 When he has departed from his house, taking with him the instruments of purification, he should wander as an ascetic hermit, indifferent to the desirable pleasures that may come his way. He should always go all alone, with no companion, to achieve success; realizing that success is 156 Louis Dumont, Homo hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 272. 157 Flood, Introduction to Hinduism, 93. 158 This work consists of 2,685 verses on sundry topics that pertain to Hindu thought, including the different phases of life and the social obligations of various castes. Most likely a product of the early Christian era, The Laws of Manu reacts to earlier traditions. In light of the above, the book is an authoritative source on the dominant forms of Hinduism. Wendy Doniger and Brian K. Smith, eds. and trans., The Laws of Manu (London: Penguin Books, 1991), xv–lxxviii. 159 The Laws of Manu is a paragon of the Dharma-śāstra genre, whose texts are attributed to ancient sages (ṛṣi). 160 Laws of Manu, 119 (VI, 23–26).

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for the man who is alone, he neither deserts nor is deserted. The hermit should [light] no fire and [possess] no home, but should go to a village to get food, silent, indifferent, unwavering and deep in concentration. A skull-bowl, the roots of trees, poor clothing, no companionship, and equanimity to everything—this is the distinguishing mark of one who is freed.161 In sum, The Laws of Manu warn the ascetic of the need to be humble, avoid holding any other being in contempt,162 and refrain from working miracles and divinations as a quid pro quo for alms.163 That said, various Hindu texts describe men that have acquired extraordinary powers via strenuous tapas. Using different postures to control the body strengthens resilience to heat or cold. Heightened sensorial alacrity, buoyed by deep concentration (saṁyama), can substantially improve hearing. Such focus can allow one to subliminally comprehend past lives and the inner workings of other minds. In addition, the yogi is capable of turning invisible.164 Having forsaken the world, the renunciant can practice asceticism and develop tapas for the sake of liberating himself. This may take the form of a harsh penance (e.g., a vow not to leave one’s feet for twelve years, during which leaning on a prop is the sole form of rest). First and foremost, ascetics are encouraged to practice yoga in order to reach a state of dormancy that calms their body, their breathing, and at long last the mind.165 In an effort to draw a general distinction between ascetics and non-ascetics in South Asian religious traditions, Richard Burghart contends that the former see themselves as treading along an exclusive path that releases them from the transient world (as opposed to society).166 Symmetries were found across the proselytization divide. To the Brahmins and other members of the higher castes, it was the austere life of the Jesuit de 161 Laws of Manu, 121 (VI, 41–44). 162 Laws of Manu, 121 (VI, 47). Certain passages therein declare asceticism to be the loftiest stage of life (Manu 6.96). Conversely, other sections deem the householder to be superior to the pupil, hermit, and ascetic, for he supports all three of these phases (Manu 6.89). In addition, a householder that performs the ritual duties of his life-phase is said to eventually be united with Brahma (Manu 6.93). In sum, both Brahman householders and ascetics reach the highest level. That said, whereas the former get to this phase during their lifetime, householders do so at the end of their present or future life. See Richard Burghart, “Renunciation in the Religious Traditions of South Asia,” Man 18, no. 4 (1983): 635–53, here 638. 163 Laws of Manu, 122 (VI, 50). 164 Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1931), 2:366–67. 165 See Flood, Introduction to Hinduism, 93. 166 Burghart, “Renunciation in the Religious Traditions,” 643.

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Nobili that made him seem like one of their own renunciants or leaders—a Christian saṃnyāsī who observed local customs. Similar to Indian anchorites, the missionary indeed limited his diet to boiled rice, fruit, and vegetables while dressing in saffron-colored raiment. Moreover, he lived in a mud house quite a distance from the Society’s base of operations. This daily mortification ingratiated de Nobili with the upper classes that he aspired to convert.167 Be that as it may, the bishop of Cochin and even several of the Jesuit’s confrères—above all, Gonçalo Fernandes—disapproved of his approach.168 This introductory chapter has outlined the historical background of the encounter between Jesuits and ascetics. What is more, I have painted the different modes of asceticism that European missionaries came across in broad brushstrokes. The contrast between the regimen promoted by the Ignatian order, which was fraught with internal tensions, and that of Hinduism and Ethiopian Orthodoxy, warrants a closer look. Both the non-Catholic varieties lean on a potpourri of sources and traditions. Regardless of the nuances that inform each school, Ethiopian and Hindu ascetics can be said to have rejected the best of what society had to offer them. By refusing to marry and eat like others, the holy men set themselves apart from nearly all of their compatriots. The argument can also be made that once the ascetic cuts his prior social bonds, he not only exists outside of the community but detaches himself from mankind. As a result, he is well placed to mediate between different sectors of society as well as between God and his flock. A century has elapsed since Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) duly observed that “great ascetics” have historically served as role models that inspire effort from others: When their deeds and acts are analyzed in detail, one asks himself what useful end they can have. He is struck by the fact that there is something excessive in the disdain they profess for all that ordinarily impassions men. But these exaggerations are necessary to sustain among the believers a sufficient disgust for an easy life and common pleasures. It is necessary that an elite put the end too high if the crowd is not to put it too low. It is necessary that some exaggerate if the average is to remain at the fitting level.169

167 Beites Manso, “Contexto histórico-cultural,” 415. 168 Correia-Afonso, Jesuits in India, 139. 169 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957), 316.

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Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), a Protestant theologian, noted that asceticism has sometimes the primarily mystical sense of an extinguishing of all that is finite and sensuous in the eternal and supersensuous; sometimes primarily the disciplinary sense of a methodical adaptation and direction of all action towards the ends of the other life. In the former sense it tends to Quietism; in the latter to methodical action. Catholicism practiced both: in pattern form among the clergy and the religious orders; and among the laity with due regard to the conditions of the practical life.170 In both India and Ethiopia, there was a dynamic interaction between ascetics and laypeople.171 It is only natural, then, that the Society of Jesus deemed the local ascetics as fierce rivals but also potential allies in disseminating the Catholic faith. Over the next few chapters, we will delve into the order’s historical perspective on and ethnographic description of asceticism on both the sub-continent and the Horn of Africa. Thereafter, the book explicates the confrontations between the Jesuits and the yogis-cum-monks over who possessed the “genuine faith.” Finally, we will outline the Society’s efforts to convert these ascetics and recruit the most saintly and talented among them to help spread the Latin rite. 170 Ernst Troeltsch, Protestantism and Progress, trans. W. [William] Montgomery (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1958), 14. 171 According to Burghart, the South Asian “renouncer quits his place in society, becomes symbolically dead to the social world, and adopts a role which is universal and personal vis-à-vis the social world.” Burghart, “Renunciation in the Religious Traditions,” 635.

Chapter 2

Understanding Ethiopian Asceticism For some sixteenth-century Jesuit missionaries, Indian and Ethiopian ascetics were the heirs of ancient and respected traditions. Consequently, it was difficult for these same proselytizers to de-legitimize them. In India and Europe: An Essay on Understanding (1988), Wilhelm Halbfass (1940–2000) notes that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the scholarship on Hindu philosophy and religion worked along the same lines as those established by Western classicists for their own field: “Even such pioneers of modern Indian studies such as W. Jones, Anquetil Duperron and Chr. Lassen still combined a retrospective study of Greek and Roman materials with the direct, future-oriented exploration of Indian sources.”1 Likewise, the Society of Jesus’s representatives assumed that yogis had inherited several notions of the Trinity from the ancient philosophers,2 which also came to expression in their way of life.3 At one and the same time, the missionaries did not appear to make a serious effort to unravel the origins and historical development of Indian asceticism. Instead, the Jesuit sources merely rehashed a “genesis story” that had been put forward by classical thinkers. For example, the Italian traveler Pietro della Valle (1586–1652), who visited India in the early 1600s, referred to yogis as those “world-renowned gymnosophists” who saunter about in the nude and patiently endure suffering. By virtue of their discipline, none other than Alexander the Great (356–322 BCE) and Onesicritus (c.360–c.290 BCE) sought these ascetics’ counsel.4 Moreover, Giovanni Pietro Maffei (1533–1603), a chronicler of the Jesuit mission in India, mentioned that “those Brahmans 1 Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988), 22–23. 2 Gaspar Barzeo (1515–53), the sixteenth-century Jesuit, perhaps alluded to the forms of mystic religious asceticism that were adopted by Greek philosophers, who had a significant influence on early Christian thought. See Wilhelm Capelle, “Asceticism, Greek,” in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1909), 2:80–87. 3 “P. Gaspar Barzeus S.I. P. Ignatio de Loyola, Romam. Goa 16 Decembris 1551,” in Documenta Indica, ed. Joseph Wicki and John Gomes (Rome: Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, 1950), 2:253–54. 4 Pietro della Valle, The Pilgrim: The Travels of Pietro della Valle, trans., abbreviated, and intro. George Bull (London: Hutchinson, 1989), 235–36. The itinerant Italian cited from Strabo’s Geography: “Onesicritus says that he himself was sent to converse with these sophists; for Alexander had heard that the people always went naked and devoted themselves to endurance.” See Strabo, The Geography of Strabo 15, 1, 60–65, esp. 63, trans. Horace Leonard Jones (London: William Heinemann, 1966), 7:109. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004538566_004

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who profess celibacy” were dubbed gymnosophists by the ancient Greeks.5 Among the proselytizers under review, de Nobili stood out for theoretically assaying Hinduism, but even he refrained from examining Indian asceticism. Be that as it may, the Jesuits’ overall approach in India sharply diverged from that of their counterparts along the Horn of Africa. 1

Interest in the Origins of Ethiopian Asceticism

In the early 1600s, the Society’s missionaries gained access to essential Ethiopian books on local monasticism. Upon explicating these sources, the Jesuits concluded that Ethiopian monasticism was an outgrowth of the ancient Christian version. Páez, Almeida, Mendes, and other representatives of the order penned works on the origins of religious life in the African kingdom. On occasion, the authors integrated this knowledge with relevant information that they found in Greek or Latin patristic-cum-ecclesiastical sources and works by contemporaneous historians of the Catholic Church.6 For instance, the literary tradition that Mendes exemplified follows in the footsteps of the Greco-Latin canon, drawing on a bevy of classical sources and elaborating on ancient cultural topics. Likewise, this genre leans on the church fathers and ancient Greco-Latin historians. At one and the same time, these works on Ethiopian religious history are a synthesis between post-Tridentine concepts, Jesuit education, and the rigors of ecclesiastic hierarchy. Against this backdrop, Mendes and his followers endeavored to reconcile the classical sources with the information provided by local Ethiopian texts on monastic life throughout the kingdom by way of creative improvisation: “I read the Ethiopian books very carefully, collating them with ours and finding out the time, the years, in which each of these things happened, as will be seen in the course of this account.”7 5 Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, 1:449. 6 Afonso Mendes compared the insights that he gleaned from Ethiopian books and the writing of his Jesuit predecessors to the information offered by the Italian church historian Cardinal Cesare Baronio (1538–1607). A few decades prior, Baronio had completed a monumental history dedicated to substantiating the primacy of the Roman rite and demonstrating that the Catholic Church is the sole dispensary of orthodox faith. For a disquisition on Baronio’s treatise, see Enrico Norelli, “The Authority Attributed to the Early Church in the Centuries of Magdeburg and the Ecclesiastical Annals of Caesar Baronius,” in The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists, ed. Irena Backus (Leiden: Brill, 1997). 2:745–74. 7 Afonso Mendes, “Informação em que se mostra, em que tempo se pregou o Evangelho em Ethiopia, é começou a vida monastica, e ques foram seus instituidores e pregadores,” in Arquivo Distrital de Braga, MS 779, Cartas annais das missões da Etiopia, fols. 559–69, here fol. 559r.

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To the Jesuits, then, the definitive historical truth concerning the provenance of Ethiopian monasticism lay in the study of local traditions and the revision of its texts. Páez was the first to debunk theories circulating in Europe whereby this asceticism derived from the Augustinian and Dominican missions to the region centuries earlier.8 In Historia de Etiopía (History of Ethiopia), he refuted this claim by leaning on original Ethiopian texts. Father Manuel da Veiga (1566–1647), the provincial of the Society of Jesus in Goa, expanded on this outlook in his account of Páez: “Highly knowledgeable and learned in the annals of Ethiopia and knowing first-hand the essentials of the empire, he carried out extraordinary actions on matters pertaining to these friars. If there was any record or trace of such monasteries, he found they never had Augustinian and, all the more so, Dominican friars.”9 The Society’s interest in this topic certainly burnished the reputation of the long-deceased forerunners of Ethiopian monasticism. In the writings of Páez, Almeida, and Mendes, the nine saints and the Ṣadǝqan (The Righteous), inter alios, are depicted as missionaries that spread the true doctrine many years before Ethiopia got caught up in schism and heresy. Citing directly from the Ethiopian imperial catalogs, Páez writes that the nine saints came to the monarchy during the reign of Emperor Amiamid (d.493, r. c.486–93), who,10 according to the country’s hagiographical tradition, preceded Kings Tazena and Kaleb.11 Drawing heavily on Annales Auxumitani (Chronicle of Aksum),12 8

Among the exponents of this theory was Luis de Urreta; see his Historia eclesiástica, política natural y moral de los grandes y remotos reynos de Etiopía, monarchía del emperador llamado Preste Juan de las Indias (Valencia: Casa de Pedro Patricio Mey, 1610), 214–18; and Historia de la sagrada orden de los predicadores en los remotos reynos de la Etiopia (Valencia: Casa de Juan Chrysostomo Garriz, 1611), 1–21. 9 Manuel da Veiga, Relacam geral do estado da Christiandade de Ethiopia; Reduçam dos scifmaticos, entrada, & recebimento do Patriarcha Affonso Mendes, obediencia dada polo Emperador Seltan Segued com toda sua corte à Igreja Romana; & do que de novo socedeo no descobrimento do Thybet, a que chamam, gram Catayo (Lisbon: Por Mattheus Pinheiro, 1628), 3. 10 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:108. 11 Amiamid is also known as Ǝllä ʿAmida (God of the columns). In all likelihood, there were two emperors with this appellation. One was the father of ʿEzana (b.325?, r.330–65/70?)—the first Ethiopian ruler to embrace Christianity. According to the hagiography of the nine saints and the Şadqan, the other Ǝllä ʿAmida ruled at around the turn of the fifth century. Given the confusion surrounding these traditions, major events of the sixth century, like Kaleb’s military victories in southern Arabia, could have been mistaken with those that anteceded ʿEzana’s conversion in the fifth. See Gianfranco Ficcadori, “Ǝllä ʿAmida,” in Uhlig, Encyclopaedia aethiopica, 2:259–61. 12 Carlo Conti Rossini, Documenta ad illustrandam historiam: 1. Liber Axumae, 2 vols., Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 54, 58; Scriptores Aetiopici 24, 27 (Louvain: Imprimerie Orientaliste L. Durbecq, 1954).

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Mendes reports that quite a few monks came from “Rum,” nine of whom settled and established monasteries in the kingdom of Tǝgray.13 In general, the Jesuits’ chronology of this turn of events is consonant with that of modern-day historians. Some of the latter suggest that the first wave of monks to the ancient kingdom of Axum was triggered by the repudiation of monophysitism at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and the ensuing persecutions of the stream’s adherents. It also stands to reason that they arrived within the context of the monophysites’ reaction to the edict of unity, Henotikon, which Emperor Zeno (425–91, r.474–75, 476–91) promulgated about three decades later in the hopes of averting a schism.14 That said, the early seventeenth-century Jesuits did not mention any possible “heterodox” doctrines among the founders of Ethiopian monasticism. As per Mendes, monks had been present in the empire since the fourth century. In addition, he claimed that the nine saints reached the country between 470 and 480 and subsequently founded the monasteries at Tǝgray. With the exception of Abba Pänṭälewon, they all adopted Ethiopian names: “Abba Arogavi,15 id est senex, qui eos aetate et dignitate anteiret [that is, an old man who preceded them in age and dignity], Abba Guarima,16 Abba Alefi,17 Abba Sahami,18 Abba Afe,19 Abba Licanos,20 Abba Adimata,21 Abba Oz,22 quem etiam Gubȃ, hoc est tumidum dicebant [which they also called synod, that is, swollen].”23 These same figures introduced Christianity to wide swaths of Ethiopia and performed great wonders, foremost among them killing a serpent that had been devouring men and sheep near Aksum, by means of prayers. Mendes’s dating is based on the history of King Kaleb.24 According to this work, Emperor Justinian (482–565, r.527–65) led a military campaign in 522 against Hunan,25 the Jewish king of the Ḥimyarite dynasty (r. first quarter of 13 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 8:70–72. Also in Arquivo Distrital de Braga, MS 779, Cartas annais das missões da Etiopia. 14 Gianfranco Ficcadori, “Gregentios in the Land of Homerites,” in Life and Works of Saint Gregentios, Archbishop of Taphar, ed. Albrecht Berger, Millennium Studies 7 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006), 48–82, here 65. 15 Abba Zämikael Arägawi. 16 Abba Gärima. 17 Abba Alef. 18 Abba Ṣǝḥma. 19 Abba Afṣe. 20 Abba Liqanos. 21 Abba Yǝmʾata. 22 Abba Oṣ. 23 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 8:70. 24 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 8:70. 25 Corruption of Ḏū Nuwās.

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the sixth century), in response to an appeal from the patriarch of Alexandria.26 The Ethiopian sources maintain that spiritual backing for Justinian’s campaign was provided by the aforementioned Pänṭälewon. From this point of departure, Mendes undertook to reconstruct the chronology of subsequent events. That same year, he asserted, Kaleb set out for battle, while Pänṭälewon cloistered himself in a tower. Roughly forty-five years later, he left the compound and arrived in Ethiopia with the other eight saints. At this juncture, the Catholic patriarch arbitrarily determined that it took Pänṭälewon seven years to familiarize himself with the country and language.27 Despite the temporal proximity of their relocation to the Council of Chalcedon, Mendes did not refer to any heretical doctrines among the saints. Present-day historians lack the wherewithal to confirm the objectives or identity of these nine figures. Only a few post-fourteenth-century hagiographies, which were penned upwards of nine hundred years after the events under review, contend with these questions.28 By dint of several linguistic clues, a few twentieth-century researchers hypothesized that the monks were of Syrian descent; however, this theory has since been refuted.29 Hewing closer to the hagiographies of these saints, the Jesuits argued that all of the saints hailed from provinces of the Byzantine Empire. Whereas Mendes posited that they were natives of Rum (i.e., Thrace, Graia, and Constantinople), his Western rivals, such as Urreta, opined that they were of Latin descent.30 Páez, Mendes, and Barradas ascertained that the two principal monastic orders in Ethiopia were those that had been founded by Abba Täklä Haymanot and Abba Ewosṭatewos (1273–1352), respectively.31 In the missionaries’ estimation, Abba Arägawi, one of the nine saints, laid the groundwork for both institutions. These writers also occupied themselves with the history of Täklä 26 Yūsuf Asʾar Yaṯʾar (Ḏū Nuwās), a South Arabian ruler of the first quarter of the sixth century. He was the king of the Ḥimyarite dynasty in Yemen, embraced the Jewish faith around the year 517. Between the years 518 and 523, he launched a military campaign in the Arabian Peninsula against the Ethiopians and their allies, the local Christians. Upon capturing the city of Nağrān, Yūsuf massacred thousands of Christians for refusing to renounce their faith. Soon after, though, the Aksumite army intervened and notched a momentous victory on behalf of Eastern Christianity. See Walter W. Müller, “Ḥimyar,” in Uhlig, Encyclopaedia aethiopica, 3:32–34. 27 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 8:70–71. Also see Antonella Brita, I racconti tradizionali sulla “seconda cristianizzazione” dell’Etiopia: Il ciclo agiografico dei Noe Santi, Studi Africanistici—Serie Etiopica 7 (Napoli: Università degli studi di Napoli “l’orientale,” 2010), 51–52. 28 Stuart Munro-Hay, “Saintly Shadows,” in Bausi, Languages and Cultures of Eastern Christianity, 221–52. 29 Munro-Hay, “Saintly Shadows,” 240–46. 30 Mendes, “Informação em que se mostra,” fol. 567v. 31 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:431–32; Veiga, Relacam geral, 4.

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Haymanot and Ewosṭatewos. Páez managed to obtain important information on the life of Täklä Haymanot—the most celebrated saint in the annals of Ethiopian monasticism. After omitting elements of Täklä Haymanot’s life story that he deemed apocryphal, the missionary rendered the first translation of that hagiography into a European tongue.32 From the outset of its mission in Ethiopia, the Society undertook to hereticize local Christianity. Given their diminutive numbers and fragile social resources, though, the Jesuits were forced to temper their criticism. To this end, they dusted off certain historical figures of Ethiopian Christianity, above all monastic leaders, depicting them as paragons of virtue with impeccable doctrinal credentials.33 At the top of this pantheon stood the founder of the Šäwa monastery—Abba Täklä Haymanot. The glorification of prominent historical figures from a tradition the Jesuits deemed to be schismatic generated constant tension. In any event, missionaries referred to Täklä Haymanot with a reverence befitting a saint: It is said of him that his penance is notorious, great favors have been bestowed onto him by God, many apparitions and miracles. […] [He is an] illustrator of his religion, which often flourished with literary and historical virtues in countless religious towns of Ethiopia. What more can be expected of a people who have not had teachers to impart the true doctrine and ecclesiastical theology.34 The Jesuits were particularly impressed by the stories of Täklä Haymanot opposing the worship of trees, serpents, and stones. Excising what they saw as apocryphal addenda from the Ethiopian texts, the missionaries cleared this figure of any responsibility for heresy and other improprieties that had been “erroneously” attributed to him. More specifically, they omitted cases in which Täklä Haymanot performed rituals and miracles dealing with the so-called aberrant practice of circumcision.35

32 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:469–70. See Leonardo Cohen, “The Jesuit Missionary as Translator (1603–1632),” in Böll et al., Ethiopia and the Missions, 11–30. 33 Hervé Pennec, “Le récit hagiographique de Täklä Haymanot au service des jésuites d’Ethiopie (XVIIe siécle),” in Saints, Biographies and History in Africa, ed. Bertrand Hirsch and Manfred Kropp, Nordostafrikanisch/Westasiatische Studien 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003), 249–60. 34 Balthazar Tellez, História geral de Etiópia a Alta (Coimbra: Na Officina de Manoel Dias Impressor da Universidade, 1660), 84. 35 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:469–70.

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On the basis of certain historical conjectures, Mendes dated Täklä Haymanot’s birth to around 615. This estimate diverges sharply from that of modern researchers who place the saint in the early fourteenth century. Mendes conferred historical veracity on texts from Täklä Haymanot’s hagiography that associate the hermit with Däbrä Damo—a monastery in the Aksum region. This institution, which was ostensibly founded by Abba Arägawi, had a reputation as a fine ecclesiastical school. It is evident that these accounts are a byproduct of the rivalry between Däbrä Damo and a number of other monasteries, especially to its south. For instance, Emperor Gäbrä Mäsqäl (d.548, r.534–48), Kaleb’s successor, asserted that Däbrä Damo was founded by the royal family back in the Aksumite era. In Stuart Munro Hay’s (1947–2004) estimation, the heads of the monastic communities that developed south of Aksum at the height of the Solomonic dynasty—figures like Täklä Haymanot and Iyäsus Moʾa—laid claim to a historical connection to this holy site with the objective of bolstering their credentials: It seems to have been accepted eagerly enough by their hagiographers, since by this means southern monastic leaders like Iyasus Moˋa and Täklä Haymanot could be viewed as successors to a monastic line stretching back to the glorious days of King Gäbrä Mäsqäl of Ethiopia, and then to Pachomius in Egypt. Without the intervention of the Tǝgray monastery of putative Aksumite origins, the Amhara hagiographers could not make this vital connection for their heroes.36 For similar reasons, Mendes dated Täklä Haymanot much farther back than other sixteenth-century Jesuits: The angel Saint Michael passed his monastic habit down to Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony [bequeathed it] to Saint Macarius, he in turn to Saint Pachomius, [and] he to Abba Aregauy, who was one of the nine to enter Ethiopia. The latter gave his habit to Abba Christos Bezana, he to Abba Mascal Moa, he to Abba Joannî, he to Abba Iesus, [and] he to Abba Takla Haymanot, to whom Abba Joannî also gave his cap and asquemâ,37 [which] resembles a scapular. It seems that those early monks, who were

36 Munro-Hay, “Saintly Shadows,” 230. See also Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia 1270–1527 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 165–67. 37 Askema: garb, monastic dress. See Wolf Leslau, Concise Dictionary of Geʿez (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1989), 138.

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Greek, called it a schema, for haber tanquam schema Monachismi […].38 It is evident from this tree that between Abba Aregauiy, who entered [the monarchy] with Abba Pantalewon and Abba Tekla Haymanot, there are no more than three lives, those of Christos bezanâ, Mascal moâ, and Joannî. For even when he also speaks of Abbâ Iesus, Tecla Haymanot received the cappello and azquema from the hands of Abbâ Joannî. Therefore, Abbâ Arogauîy must have arrived in Ethiopia when he was quite old, around the year 470; we will say that he lived until the year 500. And giving 120 years to the other three, it is thus probable that Tecla Haymanot was born around the year 615 or 620.39 To further strengthen this hypothesis, Mendes leans on an “indisputable” argument: as per Täklä Haymanot’s hagiography, the saint’s parents took him to Abunä Qerǝllos ( fl. thirteenth to fourteenth century) when he was fifteen. Therefore, Mendes argues, he must have been born around 615, for Qerǝllos was a contemporary of Benjamin ( fl. 622–61), the Alexandrine patriarch, and Saint Sophronius (560–638), the patriarch of Jerusalem (in office 634–38).40 This hypothesis notwithstanding, it is known that Abunä Qerǝllos lived during the early phases of the Solomonic dynasty’s restoration, namely in the 1270s. Moreover, present-day historians have shown that Täklä Haymanot filled an outsized role in this process. On the other hand, there is no doubt that Benjamin I—the thirty-eighth patriarch of the Saint Mark Church and a notable figure in the annals of the Copts—was active in the seventh century. Therefore, Mendes probably confused this figure with the eighty-second patriarch, Benjamin II (d.1339, in office 1327–39), who lived during the Solomonic dynasty.41 In his Historia da Etiópia a alta (History of Ethiopia at the highland), Manuel de Almeida (1580–1646) further bolstered this case. At the time, Urreta asserted that Täklä Haymanot had been a contemporary of Yǝkunno Amlak 38

The word askema comes from the Greek skema: figure, shape. “And like this is the figure of the monks.” About the term askema in Ethiopia, see Steven Kaplan, “Askema,” in Uhlig, Encyclopaedia aethiopica, 1:373. 39 Mendes, “Informação em que se mostra,” fol. 566r. Father Manuel de Almeida also championed this thesis. “Between him [Täklä Haymanot] and Abba Arägawi, there were no more than three monks; in consequence, Täklä Haymanot could not have flourished before the years 700–800.” Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 5:191. 40 Also see Tellez, História geral, 83–84. 41 See Aziz S. Atiya, ed., The Coptic Encyclopedia (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 375–78. For an in-depth look at Täklä Haymanot’s hagiography, see Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State, 160–74; Steven Kaplan, “Iyäsus Mo’a and Täklä Haymanot: A Note on a Hagiographic Controversy,” Journal of Semitic Studies 31, no. 1 (1986): 47–56.

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(d.1285, r.1270–85)—the leader credited with restoring the Solomonic dynasty (1270).42 Almeida sought to debunk this theory in several ways. To begin with, he noted that Täklä Haymanot’s hagiography credits the saint with converting King Matolomê43 ( fl. thirteenth to fourteenth centuries) of the Damot44 to the Christian faith. If indeed so, it would be far-fetched to believe that the Damot were still heathens in the run up to the fourteenth century. Second, Almeida contended that the hagiography is silent with respect to Islam, even though the Christian empire was already surrounded by Muslims. The Life of Täklä Haymanot also recounts the saint’s visit to Jerusalem and portrays the monks in the Egyptian desert. By this juncture, though, there were no monks left in the area due to the Muslim conquests. Lastly, there is no mention of the rock-hewn churches of Lalibäla in the hagiography. These four arguments, then, support the following elements of Almeida’s thesis: heresy took hold of Ethiopia only at a later period; Kaleb was a saintly emperor who was faithful to the Catholic patriarch of Egypt; and as per Mendes’s suggestion, Täklä Haymanot lived in the seventh century.45 Almeida evidently overlooked certain relevant facts. To begin with, various literary texts of the early Solomonic period highlight the pagan character of the Damot. In addition to The Life of Täklä Haymanot, ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon’s (d.1334, r.1312–34) chronicle reminds us that the Ethiopian ruler conquered the lands of King Motälämi.46 A century later, Zarʾä Yaʿǝqob’s (1399–1468, r.1434–68) chronicle bears witness to the Christian emperor’s remonstrations against the upswing in pagan practices throughout the region.47 This indicates that Christianity had yet to consolidate its hold over Damot by the early fifteenth century. With respect to the lack of references to Islam, it can be argued that Ethiopian hagiographies downplayed the saints’ encounters with 42 43

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45 46 47

Urreta constructed this argument based on information he received in Valencia from João Baltazar; see Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 5:191. Alternative spellings include Motälämi, Motälami, Motälome, and Motä Lomi. The first part of the name (motä) probably derives from the south Ethiopian title mooti, to which the king’s personal name was attached. See Denis Nosnitsin, “Motälämi,” in Uhlig, Encyclopaedia aethiopica, 3:1035–37. Damot is located west of Šäwa. During the early fourteenth century, ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon began to subjugate the province. Henceforth, the Amhara culture and Christianity were slowly diffused among its populace. By the 1500s, Damot had become an integral part of the Ethiopian empire; LaVerle B. Berry, “Damot,” in Uhlig, Encyclopaedia aethiopica, 2:78–79. Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 5:191–92. G. W. B. Huntingford, ed. and trans., The Glorious Victories of Amda Seyon, King of Ethiopia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 129. Tsehai Berhane Selassie, “The Question of Damot and Wälamo,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 13, no. 1 (1975): 37–45, here 38–39.

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Muslims. What is more, Almeida probably underestimated the staying power of Egyptian monasticism after the Islamization of the Nile delta. In the thirteenth century, the desert monk was still emblematic of the Coptic faith and identity. Accordingly, convents were the loci of intellectual activity throughout the Middle Ages. For example, Coptic literature was mainly preserved in these institutions, and Arabo-Coptic writing flourished therein.48 While on the topic, it bears noting that the sixteenth-century Jesuits exonerated Täklä Haymanot of any responsibility for the “monophysitic heresy.” Instead, Mendes and Almeida laid the blame on the Coptic Church. The Jesuit historian Balthazar Tellez (1596–1675), who authored Historia de Etiópia a alta decades later, agreed with Almeida. “In those early times, up until the seventh and eighth centuries,” Tellez concluded, “heresy had not yet reached Ethiopia.”49 This major historical revision allowed the Society’s emissaries to appropriate the dominant figures of the Ethiopian monastic-cum-ascetic tradition, with the objective of competing against the successors of these revered saints. From the Jesuits’ standpoint, there was no trace of heretical beliefs in Ethiopia from the time of the nine saints until Täklä Haymanot. This view undergirds Páez’s ruminations on the origins of the pioneering monks: Many holy religious men [the nine saints included] entered Ethiopia coming from Rum. Some people understand this word “Rum” to mean Rome; others have determined that it does not mean Rome, but [another] land called Rum under the rule of the Turk; this is why the Turks are called Rum. While I was captive among them, they made it known to me that the name Rum is not given to those who are Turks by nationality, but rather to those who are by caste Christians. But even if those religious men were from that land, they would certainly have obeyed the Roman church and taught its doctrine, since they were saints, and they could not have been saints otherwise; and that is enough for us, even if they did not come from Rome.50 The Jesuits’ religious agenda was coupled with a genuine interest in the fundamental texts of Ethiopian monastic life. Besides the remarkable case of 48 Kurt J. Werthmuller, Coptic Identity and Ayyubid Politics in Egypt, 1218–1250 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2010), 104. 49 Tellez, História geral, 84. For what appears to be the same reason, Jerónimo Lobo concluded that “for eight hundred years they [the Ethiopians] had lived in union with the Catholic, Apostolic, Roman faith.” See his Itinerário of Jerónimo Lobo, 158. 50 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:311. My italics.

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Abba Täklä Haymanot,51 the hagiographies of other prominent saints, or at least portions thereof, were rendered into Portuguese. Almeida also produced an abbreviated version of The Life of Täklä Haymanot, which he culled from a manuscript held by the Däbrä Libanos monastery.52 Similarly, Páez translated fragments of The Life of Abba Samuʾel.53 The Jesuit also wrote about Abba Ewosṭatewos, despite never laying eyes on the original version of the saint’s hagiography.54 During his stay in the province of Ǝndärta, Barradas was granted access to The Life of Gäbrä Mänfäs Qǝddus—an Egyptian-born saint.55 He then proceeded to render its sections on Abba Gärima56 and Saint Alexius ( fl. fourth to fifth centuries) into Portuguese.57 The interest that these proselytizers exhibited in this material calls to mind the outlook of several of their 51 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:438–70. 52 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 5:171–87. 53 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:474–75. Abunä Samuʾel of Däbrä Halleluya (d.1375) was a holy monk from Tǝgray who lived in Märäta and Torat during the reigns of Kings ʿAmdä Ṣǝyon (d.1344, r.1314–44) and Säyfä Arʾad (d.1371. r.1344–71). His name and his activities are traditionally linked with the foundation of the monastery of Däbrä Halleluya. The main source for Abunä Samuʾel’s life is his hagiography. See Gérard Colin, trans. and ed., Vie de Samu’el de Dabra Halleluya, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 519, 520; Scriptores Aethiopici 93, 94 (Louvain: E. Peeters, 1990). 54 “I could not,” Páez admitted, “get hold of the history of Abba Stateûs [i.e., Ewosṭatewos’s] because, not only are there few books of it, but they [the Ethiopian monks] will not lend them, for they think that we want to see if we can find something to criticize or refute their errors, for they have seen that we refute them with other books of theirs.” Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:431. 55 Gäbrä Mänfäs Qǝddus’s hagiography appears in Ethiopic synaxarium—a book on the Ethiopian Church’s saints. E. A. [Ernest Alfred] Wallis Budge (1857–1934) translated an English version directly from the Ethiopic; see his The Book of the Saints of the Ethiopian Church: A Translation of the Ethiopic synaxarium […] Made from the Manuscripts Oriental 660 and 661 in the British Museum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), 2:755–72. For a complete bibliography on the life and miracles of Gäbrä Mänfäs Qǝddus, see Paolo Marrassini, “Gäbrä Mänfäs Qǝddus,” in Uhlig, Encyclopaedia aethiopica, 2:619–22. 56 According to Manuel Barradas, The Life of Abba Gärima was sent to India for publication; Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 4:238; Manuel Barradas, “Notícia sobre o Reino de Tigré,” in Oliveira, Cartas de Etiópia, 11–70, here 68–69. A translation from Gǝʿǝz to English can be found in Budge, Book of the Saints, 4:1009–10. 57 The story of St. Alexis, which first appears in the Historia Lausiaca, was eventually rendered into Ethiopic. There are currently several different versions of this work, all of which were edited and translated into French by Enrico Cerulli, ed. and trans., Les vies éthiopiennes de Saint Alexis, l’homme de Dieu, 2 vols., Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 298, 299; Scriptores Aethiopici tomus 59, 60 (Louvain: Secrétariat du Corpus SCO, 1969). Also see Barradas, “Notícia sobre o Reino de Tigré,” 68–69.

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colleagues toward Catholic hagiography. While Páez and his successors were translating these works in Ethiopia, Jesuit scholars in Europe began to develop a critical historical perspective on hagiographic literature that would come to be known as Bollandism.58 By delving into the sources of Ethiopian religious life and occasionally alluding to the behavior of Indian yogis, the Society’s representatives sought to comprehend the origins of asceticism on the Horn of Africa and the sub-continent. In any event, they were ambivalent toward these spiritual figures and their practices. For instance, Jesuits accentuated the tension between original purity and lack of true devotion. Moreover, they believed that the Ethiopians and Indians were decadent. With this in mind, the missionaries aspired to root out their subjects’ infidelities, idolatry, and heresies. The accounts of the missions on the Horn of Africa and the sub-continent indicate that this dissonance was never entirely resolved. 2

Description and Assessment of the Ethiopian Ascetic

Besides delving into the origins of religious institutions, the Jesuits in Ethiopia occasionally formulated detailed accounts of the beliefs, appearances, deportment, and customs (e.g., ordainment rites) of the local monks they encountered. More generally, the emissaries described the religious life that they witnessed. Like their colleagues who were portraying Indian yogis, the Society’s representatives on the Horn of Africa endeavored to depict the physical characteristics of the ascetics. A case in point is this discerning ethnographical report by Barradas: The ordinary habits [i.e., raiment] of these monks are the same: underneath a long white or striped shirt [that extends] down to the ankle, sometimes lower, [one can find] a belt or something of this sort [which is] black in front. A hood of the same color [is] joined at the top, without a pointed top; it is never taken off, even for the king or while saying Mass before the holy sacrament. […] The cloak that they use to cover themselves depends on what they want or can afford; some of them wear fotetes,59 others wear silk clothes if available, or a more common type, sometimes of coarse local cloth; some have the wool dyed dark, others, 58 Cohen, “Jesuit Missionary,” 18–19. 59 Fota is a thin turban. See Francisco Júlio Caldas Aulete, Diccionário contemporáneo da lingua portuguesa (Rio de Janeiro: Editôra Delta, 1964), 3:1829.

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more austere, wear a Dabâs cape, which is [made of] tanned cow hide soft as cloth. The color of this cloth tends to be yellow or cloth of the same color the yogis wear in India.60 It is worth noting that very few other accounts compare the ascetics of Ethiopia and India, particularly with respect to attire. Apart from the habit and hood, the Ethiopian monks wore an askema.61 Páez observed that this garment was “a kind of scapular made of two parts, one part rests on the breast and the other on the back, and each end with a large leather cross, along with ten other crosses, for a grand total of twelve crosses. […] It is worn by monks who have completed the third profession.” The askema featured a very narrow braid composed of three strips of parchment; worn around the neck, the ends of each strip hung over the front and were bound together by a small copper ring at the belt. Some of the clergy attached diminutive wooden crosses to this accessory. Only monks over thirty years old could don an askema. To earn this honor, they had to serve fellow monks for a year, catering to their every request. The askema was awarded at a ceremony that included a few prayers.62 Mendes noted that this garment underscored their break from the uniform attire of Macarius (300–391) and Pachomius (292–348), as each ascetic dressed as he saw fit.63 Barradas referred to a wide array of larger silver, iron, copper, or black wooden crosses that were toted by superiors. Some of these items consisted of many intertwined crosses that together formed a larger one. What is more, it was common for monks and other clerics, as well as a few distinguished laymen, to carry all sorts of smaller crosses.64 The presence of crosses on the raiment of Ethiopian monks confirmed their link to the missionaries, as both groups held this religious symbol in common. To reiterate, the lineaments of Ethiopian Christianity were not as alien to the Jesuits as those of Hinduism. As a result, the missionaries were able to conceptualize the former as a schismatic version of their own faith. Nevertheless, 60 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 4:256–57. 61 See Ignazio Guidi, Vocabolario amarico-italiano (Rome: Instituto per l’Oriente, 1953), cols. 445–46. This rendering is predicated on that of Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State, 164. 62 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:437. All told, the habit of the medieval Ethiopian monk was composed of five parts. The first was a long cotton or leather cloak. Though usually white, some monasteries preferred yellow mantles (qämis [shirt]). The other components were a leather belt tied around the cloak; a consecrated cord (qinat [belt]) that monks wore on their neck; the head-piece (qob [skull cap]); and the askema. Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State, 164. 63 Mendes, “Informação em que se mostra,” fol. 566a. 64 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 4:257.

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the specter of oblivion also hung over the Ethiopian Church. According to the Jesuits, the Ethiopians practiced a strain of Christianity with the purest of origins, but for various reasons their church had fallen into decay. To begin with, geographical isolation had forced the local Orthodoxy to lean on Alexandrine Coptic Christianity. In the eyes of the Jesuits, the latter had been tainted by centuries of schismatic patriarchs who rejected the Council of Chalcedon’s decisions. Moreover, Ethiopian society was plagued by a dearth of teaching and discipline. From the missionaries’ standpoint, the importance of Old Testament traditions to the Ethiopian Church bore witness to a direct, and in their view perversive, Jewish influence over its rituals and beliefs. In light of the above, the order’s representatives concluded that the native faithful had inevitably been led astray by a deviant form of Christianity.65 To the Jesuits, the local monks and ascetics were primarily responsible for these “errors” and “heresies,” owing to their skewed interpretations of the scriptures and misguided theological and Christological reflections. A number of researchers have explored this criticism of the Ethiopian Church’s beliefs and rite. Fervently adhering to the principle of Christ’s dual nature following the incarnation (dyophysitism), the missionaries accused Ethiopians of postulating a monophysitic Christology that fused and confused the two natures of Christ: human and divine.66 Furthermore, they claimed that the local monks misunderstood the creation of rational souls and purgatory. The Jesuits also imputed the Ethiopians with the belief that the Holy Spirit derives solely from the Father and not the Son.67 Lastly, they looked askance at the populace’s sanctification of the Sabbath as well as the observance of circumcision and certain dietary restrictions, all of which they perceived as traces of Judaism.68 A fair share of the Ethiopian monastic literature that was produced toward the end of the sixteenth century and opening decades of the seventeenth century was devoted to fending off the Jesuits’ assertions and buttressing

65 Cohen, “Ethiopian Christianity as Heresy,” 649–55, here 652. 66 Ignazio Guidi, “La Chiesa Abissina,” Oriente moderno 2 (1922–23): 123–28, 186–90, 252–56; Sevir Chernetsov, “Ethiopian Theological Response to European Missionary Proselytizing Activities in the 17th–19th Centuries,” in Böll et al., Ethiopia and the Missions, 59–67; Tewelde Beiene, “La politica cattolica di Seltan Sägäd I (1607–1632) e la missione della Compagnia di Gesù in Etiopia” (PhD diss., Pontifical Gregorian University, 1983); Cohen, Missionary Strategies of the Jesuits, 116–29. 67 Cohen, Missionary Strategies of the Jesuits, 133–36. 68 Cohen, “Los portugueses en Etiopía,” 209–40; Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, “Paul and the Other: The Portuguese Debate on the Circumcision of the Ethiopians,” in Böll et al., Ethiopia and the Missions, 37–57.

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the traditional position of the Ethiopian Church.69 The polemic also engendered a plethora of Christological tendencies among the local devotees. Over the next few centuries, these ideas competed against each other in the local religious marketplace, even after the missionaries had long been banished from the kingdom.70 That said, the Jesuit–Ethiopian polemic was not solely over Christological issues. As discussed in the next chapter, local monks were accused of misinterpreting the sacred texts, including the Old Testament. Poor exegetical skills, the Jesuits contended, led to absurdly literal readings of the scriptures that were devoid of uplifting content. Despite acknowledging many of their virtues, the Jesuits perceived the monks as bearers of Ethiopian Christianity’s heretical traditions, perversions, and decay. In addition, quite a few of these local clerics were deemed to be ignoramuses. This benightedness, according to the order’s emissaries, stemmed from misguided beliefs, an inadequate conception of God and Christ, and mythological interpretations of the Bible. As a result, the missionaries viewed the staunchest defenders of the Ethiopian Christian tradition as hopeless schismatics. For instance, the Jesuits thought that the penances of the baḥtawis (anchorites dwelling in the Ethiopian desert) have no influence on high. Páez ultimately concluded that their ascetic ways were futile. Nevertheless, he believed that all these hermits were disciples of Abba Ewosṭatewos and Abba Täklä Haymanot: All those who live in the desert are monks of the religions that we have talking about, of Abba Stateûs and Taquela Haimanôt, and these wear habits as he describes, some made of yellow cotton cloth, others of skin like the chamois of Spain, but coarser, and others of black or white cotton cloth. In this there is nothing in particular that distinguishes between those of the desert and those of the towns: each one wears a habit of the colour and cloth that he wants or can afford, and so some wear very expensive silk cloths over their habit. However, those monks of the desert [who want to appear more penitent always wear yellow skins, like thick chamois]. They have their monasteries there; and in order to free 69 Enrico Cerulli, ed. and trans., Scritti teologici etiopici dei secoli XVI–XVII, 2 vols. (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1958–60). 70 See Getatchew Haile, ed. and trans., The Faith of the Unctionists in the Ethiopian Church (Haymanot Mäsiḥawit), Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 517, 518; Scriptores Aetiopici 91, 92 (Louvain: E. Peeters, 1990); see also his “Materials on the Theology of Qǝbʿat or Unction,” in Ethiopian Studies: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, Tel Aviv, 14–17 April 1980, ed. Gideon Goldenberg (Rotterdam: Balkema, 1986), 205–33.

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themselves of communication and dealings with other people, they have obtained decrees from the emperors that nobody may farm or settle within certain limits of a long distance of their monasteries. Ordinarily they perform great penance in those monasteries and increase them particularly on Lent, because then they go out in pairs or larger groups to fast under trees or in caves, and they eat nothing but a few herbs or vegetables at night and drink water, and some go two days or longer without eating or drinking. They wear iron cilices and do other very extraordinary things, but what can all this profit them, since they are schismatics and heretics, and without faith it is impossible to please God? As Saint Paul says, “Sine fide autem impossibile est placere Deo [But without faith it is impossible to please God].” Hebrews 11.71 In sum, the baḥtawis were not idolaters. To the contrary, their religious practices were grounded on the same beliefs as the Catholic rite.72 However, their fasting and abstinence was in vain, for they were schismatics. Like his contemporary de Nobili, Páez considered their ascetic practices to be religio-devotional.73 Moreover, he stressed that these deeds neither addressed nor contributed to the worship of false deities. Be that as it may, the hermits’ asceticism was ineffectual; for while the baḥtawis worshiped the true God, they grasped him in a false and inadequate matter. Similarly, Lobo averred that the ruinous state of their ecclesiastical institutions notwithstanding, the Ethiopians’ fasts, charity, prayer, and penance were good deeds that merited preservation. However, it is impossible for these practices to confer the grace of “the true union” so long as they are not associated with the Catholic religion and its ecclesiastical authority.74 Against this backdrop, let us scrutinize Almeida’s remarks on the “common practice” of keeping silent on the Sabbath among the Damot region’s monks, who, among other things, also refrained from traveling and removing weeds on this day of the week.75 The proselytizer argued that this silence was not 71 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:434. 72 Páez wished to emphasize the vast differences between the Christians and gentiles that he came across in Ethiopia. To this end, he noted “many diabolical kinds of idolatry,” not least sorcerers practicing all kinds of “devilish arts” and worshiping cobras and other animals. This “infernal heresy,” he wrote, has always burned in Ethiopia, as its rulers have never managed to extinguish these flames. Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:123–24. In this context, “heresy” connotes a strain of idolatry, rather than a wayward branch of Christianity. 73 See Cronin, Pearl to India, 59–71. 74 Lobo, Itinerário of Jerónimo Lobo, 158. 75 Mäşḩafä bǝrhan (Book of light), a voluminous fifteenth-century work by Emperor Zarʾä Yaʿǝqob, was devoted to reforming the ties between church and state in Ethiopia. It unwaveringly deems the Sabbath to be a holy day. Among the rules and provisions that

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maintained for spiritual reasons or in order to commune with God but for the sake of meticulously observing the Sabbath.76 In previous studies, I have discussed the Jesuits’ reservations about the central role of the seventh day in Ethiopian Christianity.77 While the Jesuits revere silence, along with, say, discretion and prudence, its practice within the framework of the “Judaic” Sabbath observance was anathema to Almeida. Although there is testimony that missionaries adopted the physical trappings and practices of yogis for the sake of spiritual elevation, there is no evidence of such emulation on the Horn of Africa. We may assume that there was a permanent divide separating the Jesuits from the Ethiopian monks. As Christians, the Society’s representatives may have equated them, to some extent, with Western mendicants. Some of these Jesuits, though, displayed a healthy respect for the Ethiopian monastic tradition and the way it stimulated learning: Ethiopia, still so uncultured, did not completely lose the relics of those good principles of yore, which were learned from the holy apostles. Even today, it is customary for parents to send their sons to study at monasteries. Mainly the lords, who are not content with only their sons learning from the holy books […], have their daughters learn from them as well. For this reason, every lady knows the text of the holy words by heart and the epistles of Saint Paul and the Psalms of David are inscribed to their memory.78 Their contempt for Ethiopian monks aside, the Jesuits never described the local Christians as wizards or magicians—markers of sophistication. Interestingly enough, the yogis were given these titles now and again. To the missionaries, then, the Ethiopian ascetics were merely arrogant ignoramuses and quacks. The primary reasons for these shortcomings, the Jesuits believed, were feeble ecclesiastical education, attendant doctrinal errors, and heretical rites and beliefs. In any event, the Society of Jesus was not overly concerned with the local clergy’s proclivity for magic.79

Zarʾä Yaʿǝqob set forth for the day of rest were injunctions against travel and agricultural work. Ephraim Isaac, A New Text-Critical Introduction to Mäşḩafä bǝrhan (Leiden: Brill, 1973), 90. 76 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 6:134–35. 77 Cohen, “Portugueses en Etiopía,” and Missionary Strategies, 180–86. 78 Luis de Azevedo, “P. Aloisius de Azevedo ad provincialem Goanum (I): Fremonae, 22 iul. 1607,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 11:82–138, here 85. 79 Barradas, “Notícia sobre o Reino de Tigré,” 21, 59.

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Monks filled a pivotal role in Ethiopian society, not least their service as Christian oracles. Many of them, Páez reported, claimed to have experienced great revelations from “Our Lord” of future events.80 In this capacity, the ascetics rivaled the Society’s emissaries, as each side offered a unique model of religious leadership. It should also be recalled that the Jesuits sought to align themselves with the emperor. Already in the early 1500s, Azevedo warned that the monks in Ethiopia frequently sparked uprisings. “Not long ago,” he remarked, “a superior of a monastery rose up against a king.”81 At times, these efforts distanced the missionaries from the country’s religious elite. In availing himself of terms like “Our Lord,” though, Páez was implying that the Ethiopians and Jesuits shared a common bond. 3

The Danger of Relaxing Ascetic Norms

The Jesuits warned against the excesses of the Eastern ascetics’ bodily practices, not least those in Ethiopia and India. Alternatively, they criticized instances in which the discipline and norms of ascetic life were ostensibly relaxed by these same elements. The Society’s missionaries were looking for the “right mix” of ascetic practices among their targeted populations. From the order’s very inception, Ignatius remarked that Ethiopian religious life was tainted by intolerable abuses. Moreover, he felt that the bodily penance and austerity of the kingdom’s monks had gotten out of hand. These disproportionate exercises in penance, the superior general proclaimed, should be replaced with works of charity and mercy, like healing the sick. In Ignatius’s estimation, these sorts of proactive deeds were far more effective than fasting. Accordingly, Páez and Almeida enumerated the precise degree of mortification, discipline, and sacrifice that was exhibited by Oviedo, who preceded them as patriarch of Ethiopia. Almeida homed in on this figure’s early schooling at Coimbra and his collegiate studies in Gandia. During this period, Oviedo exemplified “mortification and […] the observance of our rules.” For example, he “fasted almost all year round, eating nothing but bread moistened in salt and a drop of oil.” Moreover, he spent three hours a day meditating, which he combined with three very harsh disciplines. He was wont to enter dark woods and places where he found pondering under the sky so joyous that he wanted to dedicate his life to contemplation. For this 80 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:434. 81 Luis de Azevedo, “P. Aloisius de Azevedo ad P. provincialem Indiarum(I): 30 iul. 1608,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 11:142–71, here 166.

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[activity], he found a good companion in Francisco Ynofre, who at the time flourished in letters and virtues at the college, as he was the top and busiest scholar […]. Rising at midnight, he gave the first seven full hours to God and meditation, before even so much as a moment to books. Being of one mind, they [Oviedo and Ynofre] wrote a letter to our holy father Ignatius asking for permission to refrain from any contact with their neighbors, to take up the anchorite way of life, and give themselves up to contemplation.82 This way of life certainly runs counter to that of the early seventeenth-century proselytizers who sought to advance the mission by formulating a worldly ascetic discipline. As Weber put it, the ascetic “denial of the world” stands in contradistinction to the contemplative mystic who seeks “repose” in the divine and nothing else. From the ascetic’s point of view, the mystic’s ponderings are “indolent, religiously sterile, and ascetically reprehensible self-indulgence— a wallowing in self-created emotions prompted by the deification of the creaturely.”83 As per Almeida’s testimony, Ignatius “moderated his fervor, answering that this was not his calling and God had not brought him into the Society to benefit himself, but to facilitate the Lord’s good works and save myriad souls.”84 To his Jesuit successors in Ethiopia, Oviedo’s devotion and ardor was an example to all those Jesuit novices that struggled to complete the first week of spiritual exercises. However, the moderation that Ignatius demanded of Oviedo was no less crucial. Almeida stated that the first Catholic patriarch of Ethiopia personified the ideals and virtues of a “founding father of the mission.” In reconstructing Oviedo’s tenure, he separated the wheat from the chaff. The latter concluded that his forerunner had transcended a contemplative initiation period to become an active, down-to-earth missionary focused on converting the kingdom of Ethiopia. Put differently, Oviedo, along with Ynofre, underwent a major transition: “Since the beneficent fathers in their desire for a life of solitude earned the anchorite crown, and with their work and resignation, they earned the prize and glory of perfect obeisance at the first sign of the superior’s will.”85

82 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 5:447. 83 Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Clauss Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1:546. 84 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 5:447. 85 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 5:448.

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In his own portrait of Oviedo, Páez elaborated on how the father’s ascetic qualities came to expression during his tenure as patriarch of Catholic Ethiopia and indeed set the tone for this position: Even though his food was so insubstantial, he fasted almost all the time, and he exercised himself singularly in this virtue and in that of prayer, for he knew how important they are and how the saints [increasingly] made use of them to receive divine enlightenment because as fasting mortifies the flesh it calms the passions, for if the passions are disturbed one can barely discern what God impresses on the soul, like the images of things in troubled, dark water.86 Oviedo’s moderate, orderly asceticism was directed at intramundane transformations. In the Jesuits’ view, this paradigm runs counter to the jumbled Ethiopian monastic asceticism. The African church’s lack of ecclesiastical discipline, according to Barradas, was one of the principal reasons for its surfeit of errors.87 Many of the Society’s proselytizers also felt that the Ethiopian monks had inordinately relaxed their Christian ascetic practices over the years.88 Azevedo had a somewhat different take on the evolution of monasticism on the Horn of Africa. The Jesuit described its asceticism as primitive. To wit, it was part of a devotional world that Europe had moved on from centuries earlier. In his romantic view, pre-Tridentine Portugal, especially its idea of abnegation, had been the epitome of Catholic faith. He then contrasted this ideal with a broad range of moral and disciplinary abuses throughout the Christian world.89 Ethiopian society, he claimed, was still unreformed, as such vices co-existed with the greatest Christian virtues. However, all this beneficence was conducted in a somewhat harsh spirit of voluntary sacrifice.90 Despite these flaws, Ethiopia preserved an innocence that had characterized “our Little Portugal.” For instance, the kingdom possesses “virginal, vidual, and conjugal” chastity. “Married continence is kept during Lent; there is much love 86 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 2:66. 87 “Errors among Ethiopians are too numerous to be counted […]. It seems to me that there is no error in [the history of] the Catholic Church that cannot be found [in the Ethiopian Church] nowadays. […] This is because there is no one here to punish such errors. […] All of them say and preach what they want. […] Neither the secular nor the ecclesiastical authority punishes the [monks for their] errors regarding the faith, nor do they make any effort to understand them.” Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 4:287. 88 Veiga, Relacam geral, 3. 89 Miguel de Oliveira, História eclesiástica de Portugal (Mem Martins: Publicações EuropaAmerica, D.L., 1994), 122. 90 Almeida, História da igreja em Portugal, 1:477.

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for fasting.”91 On the other hand, the stern Ethiopian Church did not exempt the infirm from such displays of abstinence. Consequently, believers ended up dying of thirst on the road.92 In Azevedo’s estimation, the asceticism practiced on the Horn of Africa merited both sympathy and criticism. Unlike the Jesuits, he added, the Ethiopian anchorites had yet to be exposed to the Ignatian remedies. Lobo’s assessment of Ethiopia’s religious life was no less equivocal. Over the centuries, he observed, the kingdom’s rulers had meritoriously bestowed land to monasteries. Furthermore, he was impressed by the piety of the masses: The piety of the people, both natural and Christian, in all works of virtue, is very great, inclined as they are to charity, fasting, doing penances, frequenting the churches, the sacraments of Confession and Communion, Mass, and sermons. And although that Church is presently ruined to the extent we saw in its spiritual edifice, it still preserves so much of all these good customs and works that, as far as that part is concerned, it does not have to envy any other kingdom where purity of faith is of greater perfection and excellence. It is very true that, because it is lacking the principle of grace and true union with its Head, Christ Jesus, since they are separated from His Vicar, the Roman Pope, by an ancient and an obstinate schism, in addition to the infinite number of heresies to which they cling, these good works I have reported do not have the value they deserve nor the perfection and grace which is given them by pure, Catholic faith, by the true religion.93 Notwithstanding this praise for Ethiopians, Lobo felt that certain good deeds, such as charity and fasting, were performed more out of a “natural” than “religious” impulse—terms that appear to be mutually exclusive in the Jesuit’s disquisition.94 91 92 93 94

Azevedo, “P. Aloisius de Azevedo ad provincialem goanum (I),” 82–138, here 111. Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 11:111. Lobo, Itinerário of Jerónimo Lobo, 157–58. As far back as the sixteenth century, Jean Bodin (1530–96) put forth a contrasting view: there is no difference between God and nature as sources of true religion. Instead, a distinction must be made “between that universal source and revelation in the sense of a specific, historical moment of divine intervention for purposes of instruction.” For Bodin, both natural and revelatory religions can lead to salvation. See J. Samuel Preus, Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 12–13. Toward the latter half of the seventeenth century, the idea of a “natural religion” common to all humanity and consonant with reason started to gain credence; see

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Quite a few traditions recognize charity and fasting to be two essential manifestations of devotion.95 Generosity and voluntary destitution have been major themes throughout the annals of Ethiopian Christianity.96 ʿAsärtu täsǝʾǝlotat (Ten questions)—an Ethiopian responsa that was composed shortly before the Jesuits were expelled from the kingdom—decreed that “this virtue of alms is greater than any other virtue.”97 In the Fǝtḥa nägäšt,98 the question of charity is discussed at length: To give alms is one of the acts of mercy. It is an act of man’s piety [carried out] with his own property for those in need, without any desire to be repaid by them. Instead, devotees engage in this behavior to fulfil the commandment of Our Lord, who said: “Sell what you possess and give alms to the poor.” (Luke 12:33).99 There are around 250 fast days on the Ethiopian calendar, some of which are only mandatory for clerics. The observance of these days entails abstinence from food or drink until noon, at the earliest.100 As per Fǝtḥa nägäšt, these days fall out on “certain times determined by law.” They are kept in order “to attain forgiveness for sins and much reward; in so doing, [the faithful] obey he who established the law. Fasting [also] serves to weaken the power of concupiscence so that [the body] may obey the rational soul. […] Just as giving alms is the tribute of wealth,” so too fasting is “the tribute of the body.”101 As noted earlier, Lobo posited that charity in Ethiopia was bestowed more out of inclination than devotion102 and that fasting is more natural than ecclesiastical. “They abstain even from water; and in Lent they say Mass late in the afternoon because they think they are breaking their fast with the sacramental elements of the bread and wine they consecrate.” Specific observances and Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion: A New Approach to the Religious Traditions of Mankind (New York: New American Library, 1964), 40–41. 95 David Kinsley, “Devotion,” in Eliade, Encyclopedia of Religion, 4:321–26, here 325. 96 Steven Kaplan, “Alms,” in Uhlig, Encyclopaedia aethiopica, 1:209–10. 97 Cerulli, Scritti teologici, 1:203–4 [Gǝʿǝz] and 228 [Italian]. 98 “The Law of the Kings.” A book of law that has been in use in Christian Ethiopia since at least the sixteenth century. See Ignazio Guidi, ed. and trans., Il Fetḥa Nagast o Legislazione dei Re, codice ecclesiastico e civiledi Abissinia (Napoli: Tipografia della Casa editrice italiana, 1897 [text] 1899 [trans.]). 99 Guidi, Il Fetḥa Nagast, 166 [Italian]. 100 Sergew Hable Sellassie and Belaynesh Mikael, “Worship in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church,” in The Church of Ethiopia: A Panorama of History and Spiritual Life, ed. Sergew Hable Selassie (Addis Ababa: Ethiopian Orthodox Church, 1997), 63–71, here 70. 101 Guidi, Il Fetḥa Nagast, 160. 102 Lobo, Itinerário of Jerónimo Lobo, 178.

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precepts might seem religious, but the participants’ “true” motivations reveal that they are not “authentic” religious deeds. In other words, the Jesuit drew a clear distinction between Christian devotion and mere ritual gestures.103 By citing the scriptural basis for fasting, the ʿAsärtu täsǝʾǝlotat (Ten demands)104 argued that it is indeed an expression of religious devotion, an act of communion with the apostles who lamented the death of Christ, even if the devotees are unable to fathom the meaning of the crucifixion. “He who eats this day,” the ʿAsärtu täsǝʾǝlotat warned, “has separated his soul from the company of the apostles.”105 Unlike the Ethiopians who emphasized the religious and devotional value of these acts, Lobo and the rest of the Jesuits sought to exclude fasting and charity from the religious debate. As such, the debates between missionaries and Ethiopians were not exclusively over the observance or prohibition of certain rites but whether they should be interpreted as religious duties or local customs. Both Páez and Barradas highlighted the fact that many Ethiopian monks would leave their villages and monasteries for extended retreats in the wilderness.106 “Each resides,” the latter observed, “where he pleases and comes and goes without leave from the superior, their monastery land being taken from him only for long absences, at risk, however, of the matter ending up in litigation before secular law.”107 Barradas thus concluded that monks do not take vows of obedience, chastity, or destitution. Despite contrasting evidence from the hagiographical literature, Barradas maintained that the local clergymen spurned the ideal of poverty. While ancient monastic communities were economically self-sufficient, medieval institutions were the beneficiaries of imperial largess, receiving land and other gifts from the royal family. However, the economic fragility of these communities during the period under review forced monks to take up different earthly trades. Assuming a censorious tone, Barradas remarked that each monk strove to earn as much as he could. To this end, they tried to acquire xumetes (Ethiopian governorships)108 and master profitable “lowly” trades like winemaking.109 103 Lobo, Itinerário of Jerónimo Lobo, 178–80. 104 ʿAsärtu täsǝʾǝlotat is an Ethiopian text dated to around the 1620s in which a disciple presents ten questions on ecclesiastical subjects to his mentor, each of which is followed by the answers of the latter. See Cerulli, Scritti teologici, 2:187–211 [Gǝʿǝz] and 213–36 [Italian]. 105 Cerulli, Scritti teologici, 2:202 [Gǝʿǝz] and 226–27 [Italian]. 106 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:434. 107 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 4:255–56. 108 From śǝyyum: official, governor, prefect. See Leslau, Concise Dictionary, 54. 109 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 4:256.

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The Jesuits recognized the Ethiopians’ high regard for chastity, but some of them maintained that the locals pursued this ascetic goal in an undisciplined manner. As per the Society of Jesus’s Constitutions, obedience and chastity are tightly linked to purity of body and mind.110 Barradas indeed acknowledged the Ethiopian monks’ respect for chastity but claimed that few of them lived up to this ideal. He tied this laxity to the Ethiopian Church’s systemic degeneration. “Monks observed chastity,” he wrote, “until they became corrupted with the women of the nobility,” when the latter “went off to war.”111 Some of the monks, Barradas added, even live with women or are married. The missionary attributed this state of affairs to the inability of the Ethiopian Church’s highest officials, the abunä, to crack down on wayward behavior. In a similar vein, Mendes condemned the local clerics for relaxing the rules. To enter the monastic ranks, postulates must declare that “they wish to leave the [temporal] world,” but admittance requires no other vows. “Whenever they wish,” monks can pack up and leave, “exchanging the religious life for any other that contents them” without incurring any “punishment.”112 Páez told of an anchorite who had resided in the desert for six years. During this period, the hermit only wore skins and did extensive penance, spending hours of the day in prayer while simultaneously doing a headstand. Out of the blue, though, he renounced the ascetic life with the intention of starting a family. According to Páez, many others recanted their vows on the grounds that they had been forced to take them under duress and were incapable of remaining continent.113 As an aside, this story demonstrates that the Jesuit viewed chastity to be a worthy religious undertaking even when practiced by schismatic Christians. It bears noting that much of this criticism of Ethiopian practice was directed at monks who showed little enthusiasm for Catholicism once it became the empire’s official religion: “Besides being wanting in the observance of the statutes,” Mendes claimed, these clergy “also lacked obedience to the Roman church; it is in this light that the relationship must be viewed, and those who consider it must also be warned of the errors of the monks in Ethiopia and be persuaded and certain that among them there are none of our European monks.”114 In sum, a lack of discipline was associated with heresy.

110 Arzubialde, Corella, and García-Lomas, Constituciones, 234–35 [547]. 111 Arzubialde, Corella, and García-Lomas, Constituciones, 234–35 [547]. 112 Veiga, Relacam geral, 4. 113 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:434–35. 114 Veiga, Relacam geral, 3.

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There is substantial evidence in the Ethiopian literature that local saints held the ideal of chastity in the highest regard.115 Why, then, would the Jesuits raise such accusations in the face of such evidence? Part of the answer certainly lies in the fact that the local monks carried out their ascetic regimen beyond the purview of any Catholic institution. Perhaps the missionaries’ charges stem from their above-mentioned association between chastity and obedience, especially in all that concerns hierarchy. As per the Constitutions, “the vow of chastity does not admit diverse interpretations, confirming how perfectly it must be observed in the attempt to imitate angelic purity and cleanliness of body and mind.”116 Thomas Hollweck (1942–2011) accentuates the premium the Jesuits placed on emulating the purity of angels. This notion derives from fifth-century neo-Platonic theology, not least the work of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite ( fl. late fifth to early sixth century). Sustained by medieval theology, this idea was very much alive during the Society’s formative years. Though primarily servants of God, Ignatius posited, angels are constantly dispatched to help mortals establish and bolster their communion with God. From the standpoint of the order’s aspirations, this angelic standard implies a purity of mind and body as well as a commitment to poverty. As per the Ignatian formula of contemplativus in actione (contemplatives in action), there was a synchronous propensity toward both God and men.117 In light of the above, Jesuit chastity is essentially apostolic, imitates the celestial hierarchy, which draws its inspiration from angelic purity, and is consubstantial with discipline and the mission.118 The Society’s reproof of Ethiopian monasticism must be understood in this vein. More specifically, the Jesuits felt that the monks’ chastity was whimsical and lacking in backbone due to their opposition to Catholic power and the church’s structure, not least the authority of the pope. This criticism reflects the military spirit of unconditional obedience that informed the Society of Jesus. As Ignatius himself put it in his famous “Epistle on Obedience” of 1553: “Other religions may surpass the Society in fasting and other austerities which according to their institute they piously practice; but in true and perfect obedience and abnegation of will and judgment I greatly desire that those who serve 115 Kaplan, Monastic Holy Man, 77–79. 116 Arzubialde, Corella, and García-Lomas, Constituciones, 234 [547]. 117 Thomas Hollweck, “Castidad,” in GEI, Diccionario de espiritualidad ignaciana, 1:314–19, here 316. 118 This idea also surfaces in Páez’s description of the five Jesuits who accompanied Patriarch Oviedo to Ethiopia: “The life that these blessed fathers led in Ethiopia was more angelic than human, for the great purity with which they always lived deserves that name.” Páez, History of Ethiopia, 2:80.

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God in the Society should be conspicuous.”119 Following in the superior general’s footsteps, Almeida contrasted the “disorderly life” of local monasticism with the Jesuit ideal of discipline. Zäśǝllase (d.1608), an Ethiopian monk who embraced the Catholic faith and was subsequently martyred for his beliefs, underscored two virtues of the Roman rite: eagerness for knowledge, which he attained by, say, translating books; and living “a righteous life” steeped in chastity.120 In Almeida’s estimation, the convert’s martyrdom was all the more impressive given the scarcity of angelic virtue on the Horn of Africa. Zäśǝllase was such a “zealous defender of our faith,” the missionary gushed, that “upon seeing the disorder of its [i.e., Ethiopia’s] monks, he said that he would not set out on the road unless a father of our Society was in every monastery to govern them.”121 Similarly, Mendes felt that this figure exemplified the words of Saint Jerome (c.342/47–420): Ama scientiam Scripturarum et carnis vitia non amabis (Love the knowledge of the scriptures, and you will not love the vices of the flesh).122 These words appear to echo the underlying Jesuit principle whereby “perfection” cannot be achieved outside of a Catholic framework. To the Jesuit missionaries, this perfection should evince, above all, the greatness of apostolic vocation: “Even among angels no nobler exercises can be found than those glorifying their Creator and bringing his creatures to him, to the best of their abilities.”123 Besides tending to the salvation and perfection of one’s own soul, the friars are urged to “intensely strive to aid in the salvation and perfection of the soul of others.”124 This outlook on asceticism and the mission can be traced back to Nadal, who was among the first to link the word “apostle” with “the one sent on a mission.”125 In sum, the asceticism championed by the Jesuits includes a precise definition of the term “apostolic,” which diverges sharply from the Franciscans’ absolute poverty and from radical Catholic or Orthodox hermitry. 119 Cited in Guenter Lewy, “The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Early Years of the Society of Jesus,” Church History 29, no. 2 (1960): 141–60, here 143. 120 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 7:113. 121 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 7:113. 122 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12: 493. 123 Ignatius of Loyola, Epistolae et instructiones (Madrid: Typis Gabrielis Lopez del Horno, 1903), 1:498. 124 Arzubialde, Corella, and García-Lomas, Constituciones, 57 [3]. Also see Manuel Ruiz Jurado, “Perfección,” in GEI, Diccionario de espiritualidad ignaciana, 2:1145–49, here 1147. 125 According to John O’Malley (1927–2022), the discovery of the New World, the Turkish threat, and the confrontation with Protestants drove the need for a new Catholic evangelization. These developments affected how Jesuits like Nadal used the term “apostolic.” O’Malley, “To Travel to Any Part of the World,” 12.

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The Virtues of the Virgin and the Question of Who Is a Good Christian

Penned amid Catholicism’s darkest days in Ethiopia since the arrival of Patriarch Mendes in 1625, Antonio Fernandes’s (1567–1642) compelling The Life of the Virgin Mary enhances our understanding of the Jesuits’ attitude toward ascetic practices in the kingdom.126 As this hagiography demonstrates, the “Holy Mother” played a key role in distancing Ignatius from his past, above all his carnal urges.127 Apart from spreading devotion to the saint, Fernandes aspired to forge an exemplary Marian model of ascetic conduct. Hence, the Life of the Virgin Mary was primarily a didactic work intended to regulate ascetic behavior and marital relationships in Ethiopian society. As a Mariological treatise, Fernandes’s work naturally presents the Catholic Church as an institution that faithfully patterns itself after and details the saint’s virtues—“preservation of virginal purity, chastity, prayer, penance, fasting, cilices, discipline. […], and deeds of mercy.” Among the good works that Mary is known for, Fernandes reminded his readers, are visiting and tending to the sick and prisoners. “From these and many other such things in this little book [i.e., The Life of the Virgin Mary],” he wrote, “it can well be seen that the children of the Roman church love, worship, serve, and emulate this Lady more than those in any other nation.”128 The Jesuit author felt compelled to emphasize his denomination’s affinity for these virtues because, unlike its struggle with the Protestants, the Society’s representatives in Ethiopia faced a strain of Christianity that stood out for its devotion to Mary129 and monasticism. 126 This Portuguese-language text was published in Goa. Divided into forty-two chapters, The Life of the Virgin Mary is composed of 183 folios. It includes a preface by Afonso Mendes, the Catholic patriarch of Ethiopia. Two general aspects of this hagiography merit our attention. To begin with, Fernandes sought to debunk what he considered to be “errors” and “heresies” typical of the Ethiopian Church by means of inspiring histories and theological principles. Moreover, his work was designed to burnish the standing of Catholicism vis-à-vis the local church by demonstrating that Catholics are ardent followers of the Holy Mother. António Fernandes, Vida da Sanctissima Virgem Maria May de Deos, & Senhora Nossa (Goa: Collegio de S. Paulo, 1652). 127 Ignatius of Loyola, Autobiografía y Diario espiritual (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1992), 63–64 [chapter 1, 10]; Maria Clara Lucchetti Bingemer, “María,” in GEI, Diccionario de espiritualidad ignaciana, 2:1195–201, here 1196. 128 Fernandes, Vida da Sanctissima Virgem, 36. 129 In fact, the mission’s defenders wrote of the great lengths the order went to spread the cult of Mary. While the Jesuits also pursued this objective in various other locales, there was an apologetic air to the efforts on the Horn of Africa. Almeida remarked that the local monks “planted in people’s heads the idea that we [i.e., the Jesuits] are enemies of the Virgin.” See Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 7:98, 129. In previous centuries,

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As discussed earlier, the Jesuits condemned what they saw as the Ethiopian monks’ lax attitude toward chastity and obedience. Some of the missionaries asserted that compared to Ethiopian Orthodox doctrine, Catholicism was a superior fillip of chaste behavior. Father Diogo de Mattos (1586–1642) related the story of an Ethiopian captain who asked to take communion on the grounds that it was presently impossible for him to live in chastity. After receiving communion from the church’s fathers, he managed to fully adopt a celibate lifestyle.130 When Catholicism became the official religion of the empire, Jesuits lambasted the Ethiopian monks for displaying little enthusiasm for the Roman faith. Likewise, the order’s emissaries associated indiscipline with heresy: “Besides being remiss in the observance of statutes,” the Ethiopian monks “were also lacking in obedience to the Roman church.”131 In this context, Fernandes’s exegesis on the wedding at Cana (John 2:1–11) is instructive. To the Jesuit, the transformation of water into wine is not only the first wonder that Jesus performed together with Mary but constitutes a metaphor for turning around a life gone astray: “Just as cold and tasteless water was turned into wine of a soft and luscious taste, those for whom she intercedes are changed and transformed.”132 Fernandes’s interpretation leans on a handful of cases brought forth by patristic sources dating as far back as John Chrysostom (c.347–407).133 One example that he cites is Saint Andrea (Andrew) Corsini (1302–73/74). Despite growing up in an illustrious family, young Andrea fell in with bad company. Sometime later, the prodigal son had a dream of his mother. “Before you were born,” she tells him, “I dreamt that you were a fierce wolf leaders of the Ethiopian Church had dubbed heretics “enemies of the Virgin.” Cuthbert Guminger, “María en las Liturgias Orientales,” in Mariología, ed. Junípero B. Carol, trans. María G. Ángeles Careaga (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1964), 182–233, here 214. The fifteenth-century Stephanites called for the abolishment of prostration before the cross and icons of the Holy Mother. Steven Kaplan, “Stephanites,” in Uhlig, Encyclopaedia aethiopica, 4:746–49. Odd as it may be, the missionaries under review were forced to demonstrate their unfaltering devotion to the Holy Mother. 130 Diogo de Mattos, “P. Didacus de Mattos (I) ad praepositum generalern S.I. Fremonae, 2 mn. 1621 (2),” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 11:468–501, here 491. 131 Veiga, Relacam geral, 3. 132 Fernandes, Vida da Sanctissima Virgem, 139. 133 “There are men who in nothing differ from water, so cold, and weak, and unsettled [are they]. But let us bring those of such disposition to the Lord, that He may change their will to the quality of wine, so that they be no longer washy, but have body and be the cause of gladness in themselves and others.” John Chrysostom, “Homilies on the Gospel of St. John and the Epistle to the Hebrews,” in A Select Library of the Nicene and PostNicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1983), 14:1–334, homily 22, here 78.

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entering a temple; once inside, you turned into a lamb before a representation of the Holy Virgin. O how I have prayed to God and the Virgin that the second part of this dream shall come true.” Filled with shame and remorse, Andrea went to the church of the Carmelites. Taking to his knees before an image of the Virgin of Carmen, the young man promised to get back on the right path. Fernandes also alluded to the fourth-century saint Mary of Egypt (c.344–c.421). After years of selling her body, she too withdrew into a life of asceticism. The Jesuit’s last case is that of Bento de Góis (1562–1607)—the first European to cross from India into China via Afghanistan. As a soldier in the Portuguese army, Bento got hooked on gambling and other military vices. Looking to turn a new leaf, he joined the Society of Jesus.134 While in the Indian kingdom of Travancore, the explorer prayed before an image of the Virgin, who then duly intervened on his behalf.135 Following these examples, The Life of the Virgin pivots to a contrasting episode on the Horn of Africa. “Let us take notice,” Fernandes wrote, “of the abominable transformation of wine into water that transpired in this kingdom in 1632.”136 This incident, along with the local church’s granting of communion under the two species,137 strengthened the Jesuit claims that Ethiopian society had lost its moral compass and its clergy’s Eucharist was invalid.138 Further echoes of this controversy turn up in Ethiopian texts from this period. For instance, ʿAsärtu täsǝʾǝlotat devotes a section to refuting these charges and justifying the Ethiopian Church’s practice from a theological standpoint. At any rate, Fernandes expounded on the Jesuit position in this debate: Human blood and flesh descend from bread and water. Then, when Mary carried our Lord Jesus Christ in her womb, by the hand of the Holy Ghost, immaculate, Jesus took a tiny piece from the very bread that Mary had day after day, out of which he made his flesh, and from the water that she drank mixed with wine, took a little to make his blood. This is why Our Lady and all the people from this country drink water mixed with wine.139 134 Fernandes, Vida da Sanctissima Virgem, 140–42. 135 For an in-depth look at Bento de Goes, see Cornelius Wessels, ed., Early Jesuit Travelers in Central Asia (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1924), 1–41; Vincent Cronin, The Wise Man of the West (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1955), 236–56. 136 Fernandes, Vida da Sanctissima Virgem, 142. 137 Leonardo Cohen, “The Jesuits in Ethiopia and the Polemics over the Sacrament of the Eucharist,” in The Two Christian Reforms: Propagation and Diffusion, ed. Myriam Yardeni and Ilana Zinguer (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 138–50. 138 Cohen, “Jesuits in Ethiopia.” 139 Cerulli, Scritti teologici, 2:201 [Gǝʿǝz] and 225–26 [Italian]. My italics.

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The Jesuit mission deemed the Ethiopian concoction of water and prunes to be “a most grievous sin,” for it deceives the people by “giving them water for the blood of the Lord himself.”140 In so doing, Fernandes based his argument around a row of suggestive dyads: wine–water, Catholicism–Ethiopian Orthodoxy, and asceticism–iniquity. Chrysostom wrote about the transformation of water into wine opposing gluttony and repletion to moderate diet and abstinence.141 To Fernandes, the rebellion against Catholicism in Ethiopia was being waged in the name of vice against virtue—a process by which, among other things, wine was being turned into water. The Life of the Virgin deals with the impediment of premature marriages to religious vocation. In an effort to set clear and logical borders between the two, the Jesuits endeavored to regulate and temper both the ascetic and married life. To this end, Fernandes expressed the concern that many Ethiopians are forced into nuptials without an opportunity to freely weigh a life of chastity. Building on the thoughts of Jesuit philosopher and theologian Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), he asserted that the Holy Mother has long raised the banner of virginity. As per the Jesuit author’s reading of 1 Corinthians 7:38, God prefers the celibate lifestyle: “So then, he that giveth his own virgin daughter in marriage doeth well; but he that giveth her not in marriage doeth better.”142 This determination, though, led him to the following question: When is a person mature enough to make a conscious decision? In line with the patristic model, which accentuates the parallels between Eve and Mary,143 Fernandes undertook to share his insights on moderation, obedience, and modesty with the Ethiopian populace. Echoing the teachings of Saint Irenaeus (c.130–c.202), he pointed out that whatever Eve bound by incredulity, Mary unlocked through faith.144 The pillars behind virginity are obedience and life. Fernandes indeed emphasized two specific virtues of the Holy Mother: virginity and humility.145 Mary is the lamb of all virgins, the first virgin.146 While slaves to carnality hock off the precious jewel of virginity for a pittance, “the Holy Virgin, in offering to be the mother of God, [asked] how 140 141 142 143

Fernandes, Vida da Sanctissima Virgem, 142. John Chrysostom, “Homilies,” homily 22, 78–79. Fernandes, Vida da Sanctissima Virgem, 38–39. Walter J. Burghardt, “María en la patrística occidental,” in Carol, Mariología, 111–55, here 112–19; Burghardt, “María en el pensamiento de los padres orientales,” in Mariología, 488–547, here 488–99. 144 St. Irenaeus of Lyon, Against the Heresies, ed. and trans. Dominic J. Unger and Irenaeus M. C. Steenberg, Ancient Christian Writers 63 (New York: Newman Press, 2012), 3:104–5. 145 Fernandes, Vida da Sanctissima Virgem, 54. 146 Fernandes, Vida da Sanctissima Virgem, 38.

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this was to be done without impairing her virginity, thus teaching us to keep and preserve chastity and her vow.”147 Put differently, Fernandes contrasted wise virgins148 with the “foolish and insane of both sexes that easily succumb” to temptation: Hence, the prerequisites for resisting the cravings of the flesh are fortitude and temperance, foremost in wine (redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Eph. 5:16), in ornament, in friendships, in talk, and in visits. What is more, those striving to remain chaste ought to discard looking glasses, placing the mirror of the most pure virgin in front of their eyes [while] mending their actions and ways.149 For Fernandes, one need only follow the exhortations of Saint Ambrose (c.339–c.397) in book 2 of Virginibus ad Marcellinam sororem (To the virgins of Marcellina’s sister), where the bishop of Milan argues, by way of insightful examples, that the character and lifestyle of virgins are preferable to the dictates of the law.150 Drawing on sources from Lorenzo Surio (1523–78) and Flos sanctorum (The lives of saints), Fernandes similarly paid tribute to paragons of celibacy.151 A fine example is an incident that occurred in the midst of the First Italian War (1494–95). As Charles VIII of France’s (1470–98, r.1483–98) army was sweeping through Italy, the king forced himself on a beautiful young maid that caught his fancy. In the moment, the distraught women happened to glimpse a painting of Mary and Jesus on the wall, whereupon she begged the Virgin for forgiveness. Moved by the woman’s tearful plea, Charles set her free unmolested, along with her imprisoned parents. In addition, he gave the maiden five hundred cruzados for a dowry. “Such examples,” Fernandes advised, “are to be followed by women, who should not allow themselves to be 147 148 149 150

Fernandes, Vida da Sanctissima Virgem, 38. Matthew 25:1–12. Fernandes, Vida da Sanctissima Virgem, 54. “I thought it better to instruct by examples than by precepts,” Saint Ambrose wrote, “for more progress may be made by means of an example, inasmuch as that which has been already done is considered to be not difficult, and that which has been tried to be expedient, and that which has been transmitted in succession to us by a kind of hereditary practice of ancestral virtue to be binding in religion.” Ambrose, bishop of Milan, “Three Books concerning Virgins,” in Schaff and Wace, Select Library, 10:361–87, here 374. 151 Azevedo believed that “there are” also “married couples” in Ethiopia “who live in chastity of common accord, as brother and sister, virgins and widows who preserve it [i.e., their celibacy] in good marriages.” For the most part, these words refer to Portuguese and long-standing Ethiopian Catholics. Luis de Azevedo, “P. Aloysius de Azevedo ad praepositum provinciae goanae (I),” 434.

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tainted even by kings and lords, like this maid who did not give in to a king so rich and powerful that he could have made her a rich and noble lady.”152 Over the past decade, researchers have examined the struggle of Ethiopian noble women against the missionary advances of Catholic proselytizers.153 This topic pertains to Fernandes’s above-mentioned opinion that women are not ripe for marriage until they are capable of seriously weighing a life of chastity. The medieval Ethiopian literature is rather vague on these sorts of premature marriages. For instance, the hagiography of Wälättä Peṭros (1594–1644)—an anti-Catholic Ethiopian saint and a contemporary of Fernandes—relates that she was schooled in the teachings of the Orthodox Church until reaching the customary age for marriage.154 Abba Zä-Yoḥannǝs ( fl. fourteenth century), a renowned medieval ascetic, was offered a wife at the relatively advanced age of twenty-five.155 However, other sources imply that the age of matrimony could even have been less than twelve. For instance, Saint Bäṣälotä Mikha‌ʾel ( fl. fourteenth century) reputedly fled to a monastery because his father was eager to marry him off. In any case, the abbot turned the boy down on the grounds that he was a ḥǝṣan (minor).156 Ethiopian women had even less latitude. In 152 Fernandes, Vida da Sanctissima Virgem, 39. 153 Maria Rosaria Papi, “Una Santa Abissina Anticattolica: Walatta-Pēṭros,” Rassegna di studi Etiopici 1 (1943): 87–93; Verena Böll, “Holy Women in Ethiopia,” in Saints, Biographies and History in Africa, ed. Bertrand Hirsch and Manfred Kropp, Nordostafrikanisch/ Westasiastiche Studien 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003); 31–45; Sevir Chernetsov, “A Transgressor of the Norms of Female Behaviour in the Seventeenth-Century Ethiopia: The Heroine of the ‘Life of Our Mother Walatta Petros,’” Khristianskij Vostok 4, no. 10 (2006): 56–72; Gerard Geist, L’influence portugaise sur la femme éthiopienne aux XVIème et XVIIème siècles (Coimbra: Coimbra Editora Limitada, 1986); Cohen, Missionary Strategies, 170–78; Wendy Laura Belcher, “Sisters Debating the Jesuits: The Role of African Women in Defeating Portuguese Proto-colonialism in Seventeenth-Century Abyssinia,” Northeast African Studies 13, no. 1 (2013): 121–66. 154 Carlo Conti Rossini and C. [Charles] Jaeger, eds., Vita sanctorum indigenarum I Acta S. Walatta Petros, II, Miracula S. Zara-Buruk, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 68; Scriptores Aethiopici 30 (Louvain: Imprimerie Orientaliste, 1954), 9 [Gǝʿǝz]; Lafranco Ricci, Vita di Walatta Pietros, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 316; Scriptores Aethiopici 61 (Louvain: Imprimerie Orientaliste, 1970), 9 [Italian]. Wendy Laura Belcher and Michael Kleiner, eds. and trans., The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 93. 155 Madleine Schneider, Actes de Za-Yohannes de Kebran, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 332, 333; Scriptores Aethiopici 64, 65 (Louvain: Imprimerie Orientaliste, 1972), 8 [Gǝʿǝz and French]. 156 Carlo Conti Rossini, Vitae sanctorum indigenarum I. Acta S. Basalota Mikāý°ēl et. S. Anorēwos, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 28, 29; Scriptores Aethiopici 11, 12 (Louvain: Imprimerie Orientaliste, 1955), 8–9 [Gǝʿǝz] and 8 [Latin]. Several hagiographic texts used the term hasan (lit. infant young, child, or page) to refer to a newborn. Moreover, the term was extended to persons lacking judgment and a sense of responsibility. In this sense, ḥǝṣan is legally synonymous with “minor” (underage).

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a patriarchal society where girls were betrothed at a tender age, a woman could only pursue a vocation later in life. Therefore, it was quite common for middle-aged women to embrace asceticism. A case in point is Krǝstos Śämra ( fl. fourteenth to fifteenth centuries)—one of the few female saints of Ethiopia.157 Drawing on patristic sources, Fernandes buttressed the tradition whereby the Virgin and Joseph married when she was fourteen158 and the husband appreciably older. Consistent with the authoritative opinions of Jerome, Augustine, and Thomas, the Portuguese missionary averred that Joseph was also a virgin. This topic was particularly resonant in light of Fernandes’s condemnation of “premature” nuptials and his spirited opposition to all matrimonial “abuses.” To Fernandes’s way of thinking, young men and women had to wield good judgment upon deciding whether to forfeit their innocence. How can fledglings seriously consider an ecclesiastical or monastic vocation, he rhetorically asked, if they are offered marriage before possessing ample discernment? Fernandes also implied that the Society of Jesus undertakes to precisely define the borders between clerical-cum-ascetic and lay-cum-family life. According to canon law, he explained, the “right age” for nuptials is twelve for women and fourteen for men. Moreover, “doctors of the church say that marrying early without just cause and authorization from a prelate is a mortal sin.”159 To support this argument, Fernandes cited edifying literature and other works by distinguished authors. Foremost among them was Luigi Lippomano (1496–1559), the Italian bishop who played a major role in the Council of Trent.160 In his crowning achievement, Sanctorum priscorum patrum vitae (The lives of the ancient saints),161 Lippomano presided over a large-scale amassment of hagiographical information from a wide array of repositories. Fernandes combed this work for evidence that married life should be regulated

157 158

159 160 161

Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez, 226. Also see Steven Kaplan, “Seen But Not Heard: Children and Childhood in Medieval Ethiopian Hagiographies,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 30, no. 3 (1997): 545–48. Marina Fluche and Joachim Persoon, “Nunneries,” in Uhlig, Encyclopaedia aethiopica, 3:1206–209, here 1207. Based on coeval Jewish sources and customs, several researchers have corroborated this hypothesis. See Paul Gaetcher, “The Chronology of Mary’s Betrothal to the Birth of Christ,” Theological Studies 2, no. 2 (1941): 156–58; Michael J. Gruenthaner, “María en el Nuevo Testamento,” in Carol, Mariología, 82–110, here 85. Fernandes, Vida da Sanctissima Virgem, 47. One of the first nuncios to assume a more pastoral than political disposition, Lippomano was also a precursor of scientific hagiography. This field was subsequently developed by Jean Bolland (1596–1665) and Heribert Rosweyde (1569–1629), among others. Luigi Lippomano, Sanctorum priscorum patrum vitae, vols. 1–10 (Rome: Apud Antonio Bladum Impressorem Cam, 1551–64).

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just like the ascetic one. For example, he extracted the martyrdom of Giuliano and Basilissa (d.304) during the reign of Emperor Diocletian (242/45–311/12, r.284–305). This young man and woman were forced into an arranged marriage but agreed to remain celibate.162 Another example Fernandes mentions is that of a young woman, Cecilia of Rome, who was betrothed to a noble young pagan by the name of Valerian. Having ascended to their nuptial chamber after the wedding, Cecilia warns Valerian that she has consecrated herself to God and that an angel is zealously guarding her virginity. The young groom then asks to see the angel, whereupon she explains that only baptized Christians could see such divine creatures. After undergoing the ablution, Valerian finds his wife praying with an incandescent angel at her side. In any event, the couple are ultimately martyred for their faith.163 While on the topic, it bears noting that Jesuits admonished noble Ethiopian women for eschewing a Catholic baptism, including those that had already embraced the kingdom’s new faith. The missionaries also perceived these women as archetypes of Ethiopian licentiousness and one of the main obstacles standing in the way of the Roman doctrine’s advancement in the region. Conversely, Patriarch Mendes testified that the local “women and maidens” who accompanied the Jesuits into exile were “so virtuous, pious, and chaste that they are no different from those born in Lisbon.”164 That said, the missionaries were conspicuously silent on the widespread phenomenon of Ethiopian women adopting monastic lifestyles. Fernandes assailed the custom of marriage among the secular clergy, which is quite prevalent in the Ethiopian Church and other Eastern denominations to this day. His criticism speaks to the Jesuits’ tendency to delimit the boundaries between matrimonial life and chastity. In his book, Magseph assetat (Against the libels), Fernandes questioned the legitimacy of such nuptials. Married clergymen, he averred, cannot help but neglect the needs of their parishioners. The shared scriptural tradition of Ethiopians and Catholics enabled the Portuguese missionary to ground his case against marriage on the Gospels as well as the canons of church fathers and ecumenical councils.165 Preventing clerical matrimony was indeed essential to the regulation of monastic life and asceticism. Every last school of Christian thought revolves around a universal 162 Lippomano, Sanctorum priscorum patrum vitae, 7:203–6. Fernandes, Vida da Sanctissima Virgem, 46–47. 163 Fernandes, Vida da Sanctissima Virgem, 46. 164 Afonso Mendes, “Do 1632, scripta a S. Mag.e pello Patriarcha Dom Affonço Mendes,” in Arquivo Distrital de Braga, MS 779, Cartas annais das missões da Etiopia, fol. 500. 165 António Fernandes, Magseph Assettat, contra libellum aethiopicum (Goa: Collegio D. Pauli, Societatis Iesu, 1642), chapter 60, fols. 209–10.

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church and ethics—to wit, conventions of faith, charity, and love that are maintained by all sacramental officiants—rather than small or isolated ascetic communities. The explicit support of legitimate and binding marriage sets clear limits on the isolated mortification of celibate communities. As we have seen, laws and other issues that pertain to chastity, virginity, and nuptials headlined controversies over perfection in both streams. Against this backdrop, the argument can be made that the Life of the Virgin was designed to turn up the social control and discipline over ascetic and matrimonial life. At any rate, this topic certainly warrants greater scrutiny. Besides promoting the cult of Mary, Fernandes’s hagiography was dedicated to bolstering the Roman faith, to the detriment of its Alexandrine counterpart, and presenting Catholicism as a paragon of Marian virtues, as opposed to the iniquities and turpitude of Ethiopian Christianity. As such, the Jesuit made every effort to delineate the boundaries between the ecclesiastical and lay realms as well as those between ascetic conduct and licentiousness. His treatise illumines the events surrounding the Society’s banishment from Ethiopia in 1632 through the prism of a firsthand witness. Fernandes continued to believe that the mission, to which he devoted many long years, would be restored. However, the Jesuit laid much of the responsibility for this defeat on the temperament and inclinations of his Ethiopian rivals, for whom, he claimed, hatred of Catholics far outweighed their desire to venerate the Holy Mother. 5

Conclusion

Not unlike their accounts of the yogis, the Jesuit missionaries’ descriptions of Ethiopian ascetics are fundamentally evaluative. That said, the ethnocentric mirror effect partially obstructed their view. “The other” is always at fault; and rather than help the Jesuits appreciate how they really differed from their targeted audiences, the missionaries came away with an inverted view of themselves. Nevertheless, the Society of Jesus’s perception of the Ethiopian ascetic was multifaceted. Missionaries like Páez, Almeida, and Mendes analyzed the historical development of the kingdom’s monastic-cum-ascetic traditions using both classical and Ethiopian sources. This formula led them to the conclusion that the pivotal figures in the African empire’s Christian saga, foremost among them the nine saints and Abba Täklä Haymanot, were completely innocent of heresy. Whereas the accuracy of this reading is checkered, it enabled the mission to appropriate these same protagonists and depict them as faithful to the Catholic way.

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The attempts by the Society’s emissaries on the Horn of Africa to describe the region’s ascetics turned out to be more complicated than their historical analysis. In all likelihood, the most empathic Jesuit account was put forth by Azevedo, who equated the local asceticism with that of medieval Portugal. To the rest of the authors, the glory days of Ethiopian monasticism were not only long gone but the attendant practices were also in a state of advanced decline. What is more, the main purveyors of this ideology—the kingdom’s monks—lacked discipline and apostolic rigor. The Jesuits’ outlook clearly derives from their understanding of asceticism and its implications for mission, ministry, and obedience to the pope. In the absence of a real faith, the order’s representatives posited, the Ethiopian varieties of asceticism were vague and/or futile. Since the local monks were ostensibly uncommitted to religious life, their beliefs were deemed to be problematic. Fernandes’s hagiography of the Virgin Mary exemplifies how the Jesuits perceived their confrontation on the Horn of Africa. Not only did Catholicism preach the true doctrine but its virtues emanated from the chastity and other impeccable virtues of the Holy Mother. Interestingly enough, Fernandes chose to underscore the Marian elements of his faith in the only country where the Jesuits were ever accused of being “enemies of the Virgin.”

Chapter 3

Jesuits and Yogis: Description and Ambivalence In a thought-provoking article published in 1974, Thomas V. Cohen reflected on the motives that prompted different men of all ages to join the Society of Jesus during the sixteenth century. On the Iberian Peninsula, novitiates were motivated by a desire to escape the uncertainty and imperfections of the world; to engage in mortification; and serve the Lord. The first class of Jesuits, Cohen argued, was more interested in finding haven from a chaotic reality than joining an overseas mission. Likewise, over half of the recruits were more concerned with their own salvation than redeeming others.1 Be that as it may, quite a few of these pioneers ended up in far-off lands. As exponents of the Counter-Reformation, they eyed the ascetic behavior of the “others” they strove to convert in the hopes of attaining their own salvation. 1

The Visual Impact of Yogis

The Society of Jesus encountered a venerable ascetic tradition in India. As we have seen, there are a plethora of Hindu terms for the sundry practitioners of worldly renunciation.2 The first Jesuits generally referred to the itinerant penitents and tatterdemalion mendicants on the sub-continent as jogues.3 Along with some of their contemporaries and successors, the missionaries expanded the purview of this term to include ascetics that were unaffiliated with religious institutions.4 1 Thomas V. Cohen, “Why the Jesuits Joined, 1540–1600,” Historical Papers/Communications historiques 9, no. 1 (1974): 237–58. 2 Mariasusai Dhavamony, Classical Hinduism (Rome: Universitá Gregoriana Editrice, 1982), 369–75. 3 The term jogue was occasionally applied to Muslim mendicant clerics properly known as fakirs. It derives from the neo-Aric jogī or zogī and the Sanskrit yogī (a man who practices yoga—a daily regimen for uniting with God through contemplation and austerity). Sebastião Rodolfo Dalgado, Glossário luso-asiático (Coimbra: Academia Real das Ciências de Lisboa, Imprensa da Universidade, 1919), 1:491. 4 Several researchers have occupied themselves with the yogis ( jogues or iogues) in India before the Jesuits’ arrival. See, e.g., Gaspar Correia, Lendas da India (Lisbon: Academia Real das Ciências de Lisboa, 1860), 2:871–72; Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, História do descobrimento & conquista da India pelos portugueses (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade, 1924), book 1, 89. There are various words for these mendicant ascetics: sādhus, sanyāsis, bairagis,

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Jesuit texts describe the physical appearance of these yogis and related how the ascetics wore rags or sufficed with a piece of cloth over their private parts.5 We also find echoes of rumors concerning the length of the yogis’ hair and beards.6 One of the first reports from this period—a detailed portrait by Sebastián Fernandes—tells of a Hindu renouncer being hauled off to prison donning cheap and tattered habiliments, a cloak whose collar had a strap in which he kept the stones he used as relics for his pilgrimage; he carried a copper bowl that he used for eating and a jug from which he drank; he wore metal mail on [his] arms and legs and rings of the same metal on [his] fingers and toes; like a hunter, he wore a whistle around his neck and carried a horn in his hand, which he blew to announce his arrival as he entered places. He carried a certain dead bird in a small box [that] he apparently used to contemplate death. His head and beard were shaven, leaving a spot on top of his head that resembled a large coin [tostón] along with a mane of long braided hair. He also had [his] ears pierced in four or five places, through which he inserted earrings that marked his profession.7 Manuel Teixeira (1536–90), a Jesuit and biographer of Francis Xavier,8 wrote about these renunciants while studying theology and philosophy in Goa. For instance, Teixeira reported that they seldom go to town. Moreover, the ascetics live in tree huts to protect themselves from wild beasts and heighten their

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gosains, and yogīs, among others. Some of these terms allude to these figures’ way of life. For example, sādhu means holy man. Sanyāsi is one that has renounced the world and become a Śaiva, that is, a person following in the footsteps of the god Śiva—a consummate ascetic who went off to the Himalayas in order to forgo all worldly pleasures. Detaching from society, bairagis are primarily members of the Hindu denomination of Vaiṣṇavism. Lastly, gossain refers to one who has mastered his passions. Although fakir specifically refers to a Muslim mendicant cleric, numerous sixteenth-century Europeans used this term to describe Hindus as well. See O’Malley, Popular Hinduism, 204. The term yogi was mainly used by Jesuits and other Portuguese authors to refer to this same phenomenon. “Fr. Balthasar Nunes S.I. Sociis (Conimbricensibus), E Travancore, 18 Novembris 1548,” in Documenta Indica, ed. Josef Wicki and John Gomes (Rome: Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, 1948–88), 1:321. “P. Marcos Nunes S.I. Padre Antonio de Quadros S.I., provinciali Indiae, Punicale, 24 Octobris, 1559,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 4:268. “Fr. Sebastianus Fernandes S.I. Ex. Comm. P. Francisco Borgiae, praep. gen. S.I. Goa, Novembri Exeunte 1569,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 8:77. Georg Schurhammer, Francisco Javier su vida y su tiempo, India 1547–1549, trans. Félix de Areito (Navarra: Gobierno de Navarra, 1992), 3:594–97.

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seclusion.9 Missionaries and other contemporaneous observers deemed Indian ascetism a multi-faceted vocation.10 Fróis11 distinguished between two types of yogis: “Some are merely indigents who subsist on begging and telling a few stories and lies about their code; others are anchorites living abstinently inside caves shunning conversation with people.”12 This portrait is a recurring theme in the Jesuit literature. Some works mention itinerants covered in ashes, which a number of cultures considered a symbol of power and sanctity. The Italian traveler della Valle, among others, suggested that ashes play a key role in the ascetic experience of certain yogis. According to Baltasar Gago (1518–83), some of them even consume ashes on the grounds that humans are made of dust.13 A number of Jesuits elaborated on this practice, albeit without providing an explanation of its origins.14 In sum, the presence of these ascetics in India clearly did not escape the notice of the Society’s representatives.

9 “Fr. Emmanuel Teixeira S.I. Ex. Comm. Sociis Lusitanis, Goa, 25 Decembris 1558,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 4:170. 10 The Italian traveler Pietro della Valle, who visited Goa in the 1620s, described ascetic phenomena in India, especially among yogi groups. Della Valle, Pilgrim, 236–39. 11 Shortly after becoming a Jesuit, Luís Fróis (Lisbon, 1532—Nagasaki, 1597) joined Barzeo’s expedition to India, where he met Francis Xavier. Following a multi-year stint in Goa, he went off to Japan. For an in-depth look at Fróis, see J. Ruiz de Medina, “Fróis, Luis,” in Diccionario histórico de la Compañía de Jesús, ed. Charles E. O’Neil and Joaquín María Domínguez (Rome: Institutum Historicum S.I., 2001), 2:1535–36. 12 “Carta geral do Irmão Luis Frois aos religiosos da Companhia em Portugal, Goa 8 de Dezembro de 1560,” in Documentação para a história das missões do Padroado português do Oriente, ed. António da Silva Rêgo (Lisbon: Fundação Oriente, 1952), 8:220. 13 “P. Balthasaris Gago S.I. excerpta e litteris P. Gasparis Barzaei Sociis Goanis, Armuzia, [Mense Septembri 1549] missis,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:504. According to Della Valle, the ashes were a memento mori, a sign of mourning, or an act of penance. Della Valle, Pilgrim, 236. 14 “In Hindu mythology the god Śiva, the divine paradigm of yogis, burns up all the other gods with a glance from his third eye, which possesses the vision that penetrates the essential nullity of all forms. Śiva then rubs the gods’ ashes on his body. The yogis rub the ashes of the sacred fire on their bodies as a symbol of having sublimated the fiery power of procreation or lust (kāma). The whiteness of ashes is referred to as the glow of the ashes of the yogis’ semen.” Richard Thorn, “Ashes,” in Eliade, Encyclopedia of Religion, 2:456–57. According to William Crooke, yogis believe that ashes protect their body from impurity and are a potent scarer of demons. Crooke, The Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1968), 1:29–30.

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Yogi as Role Model (Imitatio yogii)

Several key Jesuits in India, beginning with Xavier and a small handful of his disciples, thought that the missionary’s personal virtues carry much more weight on the targeted audiences than the “Word” or even theology itself. As Xavier put it: The Indians of this land, Moor or Gentile, all that I have thus far seen, are rather ignorant; so those [Jesuits] who still walk among the infidels tending to their conversion will not need much learning, but many virtues: obedience, humility, perseverance, patience, love of neighbor, and great chastity, on account of the many occasions to sin, [as well as] good judgment, and a body fit for labor.15 Echoing these sentiments, Barzeo, a student of Xavier, asserted that a missionary does not need a silver tongue to evangelize in India. Closely resembling the yogi model, the Jesuits perceived virtue and humility as the principal traits needed to promote Christianity on the sub-continent. Barzeo indeed provided one of the earliest Jesuit testimonies about yogi life. While residing in Hormuz, a city on the isle of Jerūn, he compiled some notes about the characteristics and practices of Hindu renunciants. Situated in the Persian Gulf, this rocky and arid island was a vast emporium for, among other goods, silver, cotton, horses, carpets, silk, and illicit arms. In parallel, it served as an assembly point for pilgrims traveling to Mecca. At the time, Hormuz’s population was estimated at over fifty thousand, including Hindus from Sind and Cambay, Persians, Jews, and several hundred Portuguese.16 To the early Jesuits, this prosperous city was famous for its “immoral” customs.17 This turpitude, the ecclesiastics felt, derived mainly from the lack of physical separation between the different faith-based communities. In light of the above, Xavier

15 “Al Padre Ignacio de Loyola, Roma, Cochín, 14 de enero 1549,” in Zubillaga, Cartas y escritos, 275. 16 Mohammad Bagher Vosoughi, “The Kings of Hormuz: From the Beginning till the Arrival of the Portuguese,” in The Persian Gulf in History, ed. Lawrence G. Potter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Walter J. Fischel, “New Sources for the History of the Jewish Diaspora in Asia in the Sixteenth Century,” Jewish Quarterly Review 40, no. 4 (1950): 379–99. 17 Alden, Making of an Enterprise, 52–53.

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thought that Jerūn was in dire need of spiritual assistance.18 Dedicated to this cause, he turned down an opportunity to preach in Japan, dispatching Barzeo in his stead.19 A native of northern Flanders, Barzeo set sail for India in 1548. After a season in Goa, he proceeded to Hormuz in June of 1549. The gifted preacher quickly earned the trust of civilians and soldiers, a couple of whom refused to go off to battle without him.20 To Barzeo, Jerūn was akin to a second Sodom21—“the most degenerate land in the world, a place of bestiality and lust where customs have largely been forsaken, Christians commit sins of ignorance, cavort with Moors, Jews, and Gentiles, and […] their children have by and large become Moors.”22 In both his own letters and those of other missionaries, Barzeo comes across as the Society’s most accomplished emissary in Hormuz and a humble man who practiced what he preached in a sea of deviance.23 Upon his arrival on the island, the Flemish Jesuit felt that the local inhabitants were shocked and offended by his destitution and tattered garb.24 Within a matter of weeks, though,

18 “Many are the needs of the people of our Society in this land, mainly in Hormuz and in Dio, more so than in Goa, for many of them walk outside our holy faith for lack of someone to preach to them.” “To Father Simón Rodrigues, Portugal, Cochín, January 20, 1549,” in Zubillaga, Cartas y escritos, 286. 19 “Francis Xavier [Instruction to Father Barzeo before his transfer to Ormuz in early April 1549],” in Zubillaga, Cartas y escritos, 303–14. 20 Eduardo Javier Alonso Romo (1969–2014) has produced a comprehensive biography of the Dutch Jesuit: Alonso Romo, “Gaspar Barzeo: The Man and His Writings,” Archivum historicum Societatis Iesu 77 (2008): 63–92. Also see Schurhammer, Francisco Javier, 3:367–75, and 4:484–519; Andrade and Nieremberg, Varones ilustres de la Compañía de Jesús, 2:136–86. 21 “P. Gaspar Barzaeus S.I. P. Ignatio de Loyola, Romam, Goa, 16 Decembris 1551,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 2:249. 22 “P. Gaspar Barzaeus S.I. Sociis S.I. In India et Europa Degentibus, Armuzia, 1 Decembris 1549,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:606; “Armuzia, 10 Decembris 1549,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:657. 23 Andrade and Nieremberg, Varones ilustres de la Compañía de Jesús, 144. The travel ban that Xavier issued against Barzeo speaks to the character traits of the latter. Xavier feared that the missionary’s apostolic zeal and martyrdom wish would lead him to Persia or Turkey. Fearing for Barzeo’s life, he ordered the emissary to remain in Hormuz. See Alonso Romo, “Gaspar Barzeo,” 76; “Instructio pro Barzaeo, Armuziam profecturo: Goae ineunte Aprili 1549,” in Epistolae S. Francisci Xaverii aliaque eius scripta, ed. Georg Schurhammer and Joseph Wicki (Rome: Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, 1945), 2:98. 24 “P. Gaspar Barzaeus S.I. sociis S.I. in India et Europa Degentibus, Armuzia, 1 Decembris 1549,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:637.

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it seemed to all that I was a saint in whom salvation was to be found. If I came to a house, all [the occupants], women or otherwise, would kneel to kiss my garment. […] Marveling at my poverty, the wives of the Portuguese would run for the doctrine [catechism] when they saw me walking with a bell. I went around in rags, as the poverty of the Society of Jesus became much lauded throughout this land.25 Displaying animosity toward the city’s Jews and Muslims, it stands to reason that Barzeo exaggerated their vices.26 In any case, the above-cited words open an aperture onto how the Jesuit perceived himself within Hormuz society. Moreover, this excerpt attests to the value he placed on the fundamental principle of Ignatian spirituality of evincing humility via poverty and simple raiment. In a letter sent from Jerūn in 1549, he extolled the virtues of humility, poverty, chastity, and obedience, asserting that they comprise the path to knowing God and unsurpassable freedom.27 It is against this backdrop that Barzeo “sized up” the local clergy and spiritual figures in Jerūn. On a personal level, he highly respected the island’s rabbis and imams. While calling into question their theological principles, the Dutch ecclesiastic admired their religiosity and devotion.28 With respect to the yogis, Barzeo praised the “very dark caves” where they live a life of “abstinence”; the ascetics cherish “poverty and chastity, without which they say God cannot be seen.”29 Though wary of their myriad superstitions,30 he looked favorably upon their humility, chastity, and destitution. Like their Christian counterparts, these renunciants sought unity with God and practiced self-contempt. Against this backdrop, Barzeo can be viewed as a transitional figure that bridged the gap between a life of intellect and virtuous action. Besides his empathy for the Hindu ascetic tradition, the Jesuit claimed that the yogis 25 Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:612. Also see “10 Decembris 1549,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:664. 26 “1 Decembris 1549,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:625–28. Also see “P. Gaspar Barzaeus S.I. sociis S.I. in India et Europa Degentibus, Armuzia, 10 Decembris 1549,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:675–78. 27 “10 Decembris 1549,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:653. Emphasizing the virtue of humility, Barzeo signed his letters “Unworthy servant of all.” According to Alonso Romo: “He referred to himself as a slave of the Society, a maggot of a vile and loathsome manner, foul sinner, and devil. He attributed all his works to the Society, considering himself worthless.” Alonso Romo, “Gaspar Barzeo,” 90. 28 “P. Gaspar Barzeus S.I. sociis S.I. in India et Europa Degentibus, Armuzia, 1 Decembris, 1549,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:627–28, here 630; “10 Decembris 1549,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:678, 683. 29 “10 Decembris 1549,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:676. 30 “10 Decembris 1549,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:676.

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wish to be with me at all times. They have great love and reverence for me and believe that I am living the life of a yogi. They ring out the Hail Marys at night with a bell. So gentle following their conversion, these are the people I wish to walk alongside of.31 What is more, Barzeo claimed that the optimal way to evangelize in India is to follow in the yogi’s path by ambulating in the nude while covered in ashes.32 According to Pearson, Barzeo was curious about the similarities between his world and the phenomena he encountered in Asia.33 In the father’s estimation, shows of devotion were more telling than any attempt to define precepts of faith. With respect to outward appearances, he viewed the poverty and chastity of the ash-covered yogis to be a meritorious way of life that even resembled that of Jesus Christ. Barzeo himself appears to have personified the age’s new spirituality. An outgrowth of the great Castilian orders’ reformation, this way of life had a major impact on Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises.34 For instance, the Society’s founder deemed seclusion to be a prerequisite for inner renewal, and he put an emphasis on life experience, spiritual joys, and affect. Similar to his predecessor Barzeo, Lancillotto pointed out in a letter to Ignatius that many of the renunciants he had come across in Southern India were leading outwardly modest lives to the point where the Egyptian Eremites might have been envious of their ascetic feats.35 On the basis of a conversation with a yogi, Fróis declared “that these ascetics deem chastity to be the principal virtue of them all […], calling it the queen of virtues, and whoever possesses it 31 “1 Decembris, 1549,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:629; also see “10 Decembris 1549,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:676. 32 “10 Decembris 1549,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:676. 33 See Pearson, Portuguese in India, 116. Also see Henn, Hindu–Catholic Encounters in Goa, 20. 34 Mark Rotsaert, “L’originalité des Exercices spirituels d’Ignace de Loyola sur l’arrière-fond des renouveaux spirituels en Castille au début du seizième siècle,” in Plazaola, Ignacio de Loyola y su tiempo, 329–41. 35 Lancillotto was evidently referring to the fathers of the desert—the pioneers of Christian monasticism. “P. Nicolaus Lancillottus S.I. [P. Ignatio de Loyola, Romam], Coulano, 5 Decembris 1550,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 2:128. The French physician, philosopher, and traveler François Bernier (1620–68) studied Indian philosophy and religion as well as the history of the Mughal empire. His self-documented journey to this region brought him lasting fame. In one of the chapters of his book, Bernier dwelled on the phenomenon of Indian renunciants: “As to the extreme poverty, the fasting, the austerity, there is some truth to it. And in all likelihood, none of our European clerics or hermits can surpass these people or, for that matter, all Asian clerics in this [asceticism], as proven by the life and fasting of Armenians, Copts, Greeks, Nestorians, Jacobites, and Maronites.” François Bernier, Viaje al Gran Mogol, Indostán y Cachemira, trans. Justo Fornovi (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1921), 2:84.

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shall possess the others as well.”36 All of these Jesuits underscored the external similarities between the yogi lifestyle and the mortification and self-restraint of the Christian ascetic. Be that as it may, they felt that the Hindu renunciants did not sufficiently believe in this way.37 At this phase of the encounter, the Society’s representatives dealt exclusively with the yogis’ comportment, as they struggled to get to the bottom of their interlocutors’ belief system. In any case, the output of Barzeo, Lancillotto, and people like them presage a criticism whereby the yogis possessed remnants of superstition38 and displayed an arrogance that is typical of those who, “in poverty,” as Ignatius observed, “seek riches (as many do in religion).”39 We shall return to this subject in the chapters to come. In all likelihood, the yogis and Jesuits conducted a significant exchange on how to abstain from worldly temptations. Evidence of this can be found in the correspondence between Henriques (a missionary and scholar of the Tamil)40 and the future generals of the order Diego Laínez (1512–65, in office 1558–65) and Borja. In a letter from 1561, Henriques wrote that I must confess to Your Eminence that the climate of this island of Ceylon inclines toward ill, and we thus feel more tempted by sensuality in these parts than […] on the coast. In India, there are jogues who take remedies that mortify the flesh, thereby negating their appetite for the sensual. Since we all desire to take them, I seek the permission of the provincial. Having license to take these medicines will do us good and thus please God. The jogues are well disposed, and no ill befalls the body from this medicine. Among the people [of Ceylon], jogues are a sort of religious person.41 36 “Carta geral do Irmão Luis Frois aos religiosos da Companhia em Portugal, Goa, 8 de Dezembro de 1560,” in Silva Rêgo, Documentação para a história das missões, 8:224. 37 Remarkably enough, Della Valle adopted Ignatian vocabulary in his account of yogi contemplation, meditation, and efforts to unlock the soul: “They have their own way of spiritual exercises.” Furthermore, the Italian globetrotter noted that these methods consist of “the art of fortune-telling, the secrets of herbs, and other things of this nature, [as well as] magic and spells.” Della Valle, Pilgrim, 239. 38 “P. Nicolaus Lancillottus S.I. [P. Ignatio de Loyola, Romam], Coulano, 5 Decembris 1550,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 2:128. 39 “P. Gaspar Barzeus S.I. P. Ignatio de Loyola, Romam, Goa, 16 Decembris 1551,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 2:253–54. 40 For more on Henrique Henriques, see Andrade and Nieremberg, Varones ilustres de la Compañía de Jesús, 652–64; Wicki, “Father Henrique Henriques, S.J.,” 142–50; Wicki, “Father Henrique Henriques, S.J. (1520–1600): II. The Superior of the Missions,” Indian Ecclesiastical Studies 5 (1966): 36–72; Wicki, “Fr. Henrique Henriques. S.J.: III,” 175–89. 41 “P. H. Henriques S.I., P. Iacobo Lainez. Praep. Gen. S.I. Resp. Sociis Conimbricensibus, Manâr, 19 Decembris 1561,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 5:382.

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Responding to this appeal, Laínez, who was considered a gentle soul by his successor Borja,42 exhibited a flexible and permissive attitude toward the use of local anaphrodisiacs: Concerning the medicine used by the jogues that you wish to avail yourself of, those residing on the isle should write to the provincial to consult the physicians. And if it is not found to be deleterious to the health, to contain a trace of superstition, or to run the risk of [creating a] scandal with neighbors, I have no objection to your benefiting from it.43 In a subsequent epistle, Laínez expanded on this topic: Father Anrique Anriquez writes from Manar that he and others there wish to avail themselves of certain medicines used by the jogues in those places to neutralize the concupiscence of the flesh, as they find that the environment on those isles strongly predisposes [them] to it. It is best advised to look into this, for if no superstitions are involved, the remedies are natural, no harm befalls the body, and there is no fear of [triggering a] scandal among neighbors. […], we here have no objection to strengthening the chastity of our people […] against the many dangers and irritants that crop up there.44 Borja was less amenable to such inhibitors than Laínez. Drawing on the Spiritual Exercises, the former was confident that reason illuminated by faith invariably leads to good habits, order, and temperance.45 Therefore, the anaphrodisiacs should be “left for the bonjes.46 Let us make do with the standard prescriptions for the servants of God and his church,” like prayer and confinement.47

42 43 44 45 46

47

Francisco de Borja, Tratados espirituales, ed. Cándido Dalmases (Barcelona: Juan Flors Editor, 1964), 20. “P. I. Lainez Praep. Gen. S.I., P. Henrico Henriques S.I., Mannar, Tridento, 11 Decembris 1562,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 5:661. “P. I. Lainez, Praep. Gen. S.I., P. Antonio de Quadros S.I., provinciali Indiae, Tridentino 1–2 Ianuarii 1563,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 5:698–99. Francisco de Borja, San Francisco de Borja: Diario espiritual (1564–1570), ed. Manuel Ruiz Jurado (Bilbao: Ediciones Mensajero, 2005), 61–62. Bonjes derives from the Japanese bózu, which corresponds to the Chinese fan-seng (religious person). In using this term, the missionaries were referring to Buddhist clerics from Japan and China. Thereafter, bonjes was extended to include Shinto priests, though the proper term is canuxis. See Dalgado, Glossário luso-asiático, 138–39. “P. Franciscus Borgia, praep. gen. S.I., P. Antonio de Quadros S.I. provinciali Indiae, Roma 29 Novembris 1565,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 6:526.

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In sum, Laínez’s and Borja’s responses to Henriques’s petition differed. However, follow-up to the correspondence, which was initiated by the latter, demonstrates that some emissaries were quite interested in the yogis’ methods for preserving their chastity. These letters also bear witness to the deference to leadership within the Society of Jesus. Barzeo’s testimony and Henriques’s exchange with the superior generals are indicative of the early Jesuits’ affinity for the renunciants, which eventually translated into mutual affection and the sharing of information. From the missionaries’ standpoint, this exchange served to bolster the observance of their cherished vows of poverty and chastity. 3

The Excesses of the Renunciants

At the heart of the Jesuits’ criticism stood the unremitting tension within the order between mystical and contemplative values, on the one hand, and the church militant’s apostolic principles on the other. From a theoretical standpoint, Kołakowski notes, these values are easy to reconcile qua elements that complement the Christian idea of perfection. In everyday Catholic life, though, they are strictly at cross purposes.48 For instance, owing to its Counter-Reformational mysticism, the Society’s top brass kept a watchful eye on such phenomena, lest any member breach institutional discipline on the grounds of having received personal inspiration from the Holy Spirit. From this perspective, the excesses of ascetic life could be viewed as the first stirrings of a mutiny against the Christian establishment. The presumed overkill of the yogis, some of which was hardly the sole preserve of Hindu asceticism, provoked the astonishment and rebuke of Jesuits. Yogi fasting and abstinence, in conjunction with vigils and meditation, spawned hallucinations and ecstasy49—a phenomenon that indeed also surfaces in the 48 49

Leszek Kołakowski, Cristianos sin iglesia: La conciencia religiosa y el vínculo confesional en el siglo XVII, trans. Francisco Pérez Gutiérrez (Madrid: Taurus, 1982), 297. Bernier observed that some yogis “spend hours on end in ecstasy, their external senses not functioning, and what would be admirable if true, seeing God himself as an exceedingly white light, very bright and inexplicable, with joy and satisfaction no less inexplicable, followed by total detachment and contempt for the world; if what one of them told me were true, that he intended to be able to achieve such ecstasy and had done it several times, and if what those around him say was true, for they declare it in a way that conveys unflinching belief. Only God knows what that is. And if in that seclusion and in the midst of fasting, the imagination weakened, they would not abandon themselves to such illusions, or were not [experiencing] that kind of natural ecstasy which Cardán says he reached when he wanted. Furthermore, he observed chicanery in what they do, for they ascribe their rules to atrophy or damage their senses little by little. They say, for example,

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Christian hagiography as well.50 Many of the Hindu renunciants also practiced self-mutilation or self-flagellation. Insofar as the order’s emissaries were concerned, these practices were symptomatic of arrogance, greed, and a craving for honor. For example, Amador Correia (dates unknown)51 argued that the yogis hold others in extreme contempt. This character flaw, he added, was the work of the devil, who had exploited the renunciants’ years of abstemious solitude in the wilderness.52 Among the chief organizers of the Jesuit missions in East Asia,53 Valignano was horrified by the severity of the yogis’ penance upon relieving Henriques of the superiorship on the Pesqueira coast: It is no less terrible to see the cruel penance that many [yogis] practice of their own free volition, which may well give us cause for much confusion and shame as many of them expire due to the unrivalled abstinences we mentioned earlier and from the rigor that informs many of their activities; and during the feast days that many partake of, they suspend themselves up high using […] iron hooks that they pierce into their back; and while suspended (just watching them is a torment) they display so little feeling; they spin, chant, and say a great deal in praise of their idols as if they were in no pain. Furthermore, others that hang themselves in this fashion cut off parts of their bodies with their own hands and skewer them on arrow heads […] [They then] shoot [the pieces] way up into the air; and those [onlookers] that manage to catch a piece of that flesh prize and venerate it as [though it were] some great relic. […]

that after having subsisted for a few days on bread and water, one should remain exclusively in a secluded place, eyes fixed up high for some time, without moving them at all, and then directing them steeply downward and fixing them in such a way that they both look at the tip of the nose, both sides at once (which is very difficult), continuing to stare at the tip of the nose until that light arrives. In any event, I know that rapture and the means to achieve it are a great mystery in the kabbalah of the jauguis and […] the sufys.” Bernier, Viaje al Gran Mogol, 83–84. 50 A case in point is the excesses and mortifications practiced by Syrian monks or the ecstatic mysticism of Gregory of Nyssa (c.335–c.395). See García María Colombás, El monacato primitivo (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 2004), 139–49, 745–49. 51 As a young man, Correia resigned from the Portuguese army in order to join the Society of Jesus. Schurhammer, Francisco Javier, 4:639. 52 “Fr. Amator Correia S.I. Cuidam Fratri S.I. In Lusitaniam, Cocino, 15 Ianuari 1565,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 6:430. 53 Hubert Cieslik and Josef Wicki, “Valignano, Alessandro,” in O’Neil and Domínguez, Diccionario histórico, 4:3877–79.

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On certain feasts, some transport their idols to very high castles on [wagons containing] four or six extremely large wheels, running through the streets with great speed. To obtain forgiveness for their sins, they throw themselves under the carts [and] […] are crushed and torn to pieces. From these and similar penances, it can be seen how deeply ingrained the desire for honor and covetousness is in these people.54 Gonçalo Fernandes Trancoso (1520–96) also excoriated Hindu ascetics and renunciants. Born in around 1541, the Lisbon native participated in Constantino de Bragança’s (1528–75) naval assault on Jaffnapatao55 (a fortified port town on the shore of Ceylon) in 1560.56 Amid his first encounter with Jesuit missionaries, on the island of Manâr, he volunteered to help them whenever possible. In 1561, the solider entered the order as a novice. Fernandes Trancoso considered the yogis to be a great company of servants that the devil holds in these parts of India. […] They do so much in his [i.e., the devil’s] service, for he has blinded so many of them [to the point where] they go around entirely in the nude; owing to their miniscule diets, they hold their belly tight with a leather strap the length of a hand. […] They go around covered entirely in ashes and are so pompous that they hold all other nations and Moors in contempt; and some are so austere that they claim to eat only once a day. Others reach such extremes that they kill themselves by going under carts pulled with ropes by two thousand men, where they are crushed into pieces and their flesh is taken as a great relic. These and many other things, which would take hours to tell, these wretches do to please the devil, for whom they do so much work that is remunerated with no less than hell. How fervently, Carissimo, did we have to labor to please God and ignore the travails of the world, the devil, and the flesh, for the Lord we serve is so exemplary that just as he leaves no sin unpunished, he will not allow beneficence to go unrewarded. In consequence, these people are willing to work so hard on behalf of those that perceive them to be saints. This is one of the reasons why they go to 54 Alessandro Valignano, Historia del principio y progreso de la Compañía de Jesús en las Indias Orientales (1542–64), ed. Josef Wicki (Rome: Biblioteca Instituti Historici, 1944), 2:36–37. 55 Alternative spellings of this port are Jaffnapattan and Jaffnapattam. 56 Josef Wicki, “Gonçalo Fernandes (Trancoso),” in O’Neil and Domínguez, Diccionario histórico, 2:1397.

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such extremes, as they wish to be viewed as something that they are not. Many of us have indeed taken note of their arrogance.57 These harsh judgments against the yogis epitomize the Society’s objections to submitting the body to extremes. No less than Ignatius of Loyola, as well as a few contemporaneous Spanish mystics, among them Fray Luis de Granada (1504–88), felt that devotees in pursuit of rigorous perfection should be more cautious with their bodies.58 On this matter, the founder diverged from the church’s other spiritualists and medieval ascetics.59 Whereas inflicting pain on one’s own flesh60 constitutes a legitimate form of penance according to the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius suggested that this be done in moderation. For the sake of averting illness, he recommended that the pain must only be exacted on the flesh; it is not to penetrate the bones. Hence, flagellation should be practiced with “thin ropes.”61 In this sense, the Spiritual Exercises and Ignatian piousness diverged from medieval ascetism. At the same time, the founder rejected Erasmus’s (1466–1536) view that optimum spirituality is meditative and directed inward.62 Put differently, works of an outward nature and acts of penance are still an essential part of Christian religiousness. This, then, helps explain why Barzeo, Henriques, and other Jesuit missionaries lauded certain Hindu ascetic virtues while simultaneously rebuking the “cruel penitence” that jeopardized the practitioners’ health.63 57 “Fr. Gundisalvus Fernandes Trancoso S.I. Fr. Andreae Gomes S.I. Ulyssiponem, Cocino, 10 Ianuarii 1565,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 6:417–18. 58 Pedro Laín Entralgo, La empresa de ser hombre (Madrid: Taurus, 1958), 83. 59 Diego García Guillén, “Ejercicios corporales y ejercicios espirituales,” in Aldea, Ignacio de Loyola en la gran crisis del siglo XVI, 227–38, here 228. 60 As per the definition in the Exercises, this punishment entails “giving sensory pain, achieved by taking spiked belts or ropes or iron bars to the flesh, flagellating or wounding, [or] any other type of roughness,” Ignatius of Loyola, Ejercicios espirituales de San Ignacio de Loyola (Madrid: Editorial Sal Terrae, 2001), 15 [85]. 61 Loyola, Ejercicios espirituales, 16 [86]. After departing from Loyola, Ignatius penitentially flagellated himself once per day. In Manresa, he subsisted on a bread-and-water diet for several months. According to Laínez, Ignatius thought man could achieve sanctity before God by means of austerity and harsh penance. In the Spiritual Exercises, elements of this early belief are transformed into internal sorrow and accompanied by a call for moderation. See Terence O’Reilly, “The Spiritual Exercises and the Crisis of Medieval Piety,” The Way Supplement 70 (1991): 101–13, here 105, 109. 62 O’Reilly, “Spiritual Exercises,” 102. 63 “Regarding eating, sleeping and other things necessary or convenient for life, though it will be commonplace and no different than what the physician of the land where he lives [has prescribed], it seems that what each one takes away shall be for devotion and not obligation.” Arzubialde, Corella, and García-Lomas, Constituciones, 240–41 [580]. Also see García Guillén, “Ejercicios corporales,” 230.

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Jesuits also obliged substantial penance from those guilty of pride—the opposite of humility. In fact, the Society had been preoccupied with these two concepts since its inception.64 Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises list three vices—riches, honor, and pride—that open the way to the other iniquities. Conversely, poverty, disgrace, and humble contempt for worldly honor beget other virtues.65 With this in mind, the order’s Constitutions offer precise guidelines for how to maintain one’s composure and behave with humility on a daily basis. For the sake of maintaining peace and true humility, the Jesuit is also advised to stay clear of pandemonium. He must consider when the time is ripe for conversation. Lastly, it behooves the Jesuit to project modesty and circumspection while refraining from displays of impatience or pride.66 In order to reach the pinnacle of the spiritual life, the Society called for greater abnegation and “continuous mortification in all things possible.”67 However, as per the Constitutions, mortification was subordinate to apostolic and missionary tasks. In addition, this ascetic practice was not considered a moral imperative. More specifically, a Jesuit could cleanse his sins and justify himself before God without engaging in mortification. As an aside, yogi asceticism is a means for purifying the body.68 When reason is impaired, though, the superior general is prevented from effectively leading the movement. Therefore, the Society reformed such excesses. To avoid imprudent decisions, novices had to consult with their superiors before adopting a mortification regimen.69 According to Sebastián Fernandes, there was a list of mortifications sanctioned by the local superior displayed in the Jesuits’ Goa residence, out of which each member could choose a single item.70 Obedience, diligence, and not wasting time were to be encouraged.71 The average Jesuit was deemed incapable of acting sagaciously on his own. To avoid the pitfalls of pride, members were supposed to humbly defer to their superiors’ judgment. The order equated this submission with religious humility. As inferred from the Ignatian ideal, mystic communications are not an end in themselves; they are merely components of an all-encompassing code that enables the Jesuit to devote his life to a single cause: serving God by serving 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

Loyola, Ejercicios espirituales, 23–24 [146]. Loyola, Ejercicios espirituales, 142–46. Arzubialde, Corella, and García-Lomas, Constituciones, 143 [250, 1–3]. Arzubialde Corella, and García-Lomas, Constituciones, 103. O’Malley, Popular Hinduism, 205. Arzubialde, Corella, and García-Lomas, Constituciones, 146 [263]. “Fr. Sebastianus Fernandes S.I. Ex. Comm. P. Francisco Borgiae, praep. gen. S.I., Goa, Novembri Exeunte, 1569,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 8:41. Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 8:42.

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the movement and the church.72 Accordingly, the Society’s brand of asceticism was well regulated. In contrast, the yogi analog was voluntary, autonomous, unbridled, and individualized. These excesses, many of the missionaries thought, spawned pride and arrogance among the renunciants. Needless to say, these differences between the Catholic and Hindu ascetics were a source of conflict in India, other parts of Asia, and Africa. De Nobili was another Jesuit that adopted the Hindu ascetic way of life to facilitate his outreach. By virtue of his prodigious talent for languages and for nimbly adjusting to circumstances, de Nobili is one of the most outstanding, as well as controversial, figures in the annals of the Jesuit missions. Upon arriving in Madurai in 1610, he delved into the local Hindu tradition with the objective of formulating an outreach plan.73 Over the next few years, the Italian-born polyglot endeavored to ascertain which of the local customs could be tolerated from a Catholic standpoint and which were an outgrowth of irredeemable superstitions. De Nobili understood that in order to convert the natives, he had to bolster his reputation among the targeted audience by embracing local rules of conduct. To this end, he engaged in some basic trial and error: the missionary grew a beard and then shaved it off, discarded his leather shoes, and vacillated between the red silk habiliments of the powerful gurus and the ochre raiment of the Sanyāsi.74 In the end, the Jesuit embraced the norms of the latter group. For example, he jettisoned the symbols of caste for the sake of expressing his renunciation of worldly honors.75 To some degree, de Nobili was following in the footsteps of Matteo Ricci (1552–1610). A couple of years earlier, the China-based Ricci received his superiors’ permission to become a full-fledged Buddhist bonzo. However, he failed to make significant inroads among the local populace due to the contempt in which he was held by the mandarins—the most educated men in China—who also happened to be his prime missionary target. After eleven fallow years, Ricci decided to adopt the code and exquisite garb of the mandarin. Soon after, he began to earn the respect of the local elite. Alternatively, de Nobili realized that to gain the Indians’ respect, he had to ratchet up his austerity level. To this end, he began eating only once a day, regularly fasted, observed penance in accordance with local rules, and intensified his reclusiveness.76 This transformation is evident in de Nobili’s epistle to Cardinal Bellarmine: 72 Kołakowski, Cristianos sin iglesia, 298. 73 See Willem Caland, “Roberto de’ Nobili and the Sanskrit Language and Literature,” Acta Orientalia 3 (1924): 38–51. 74 Caland, “Roberto de’ Nobili,” 49. 75 Cronin, Pearl to India, 118. 76 Cronin, Pearl to India, 69–70.

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My food consists of a little rice—abundant in this country—with some herbs and fruit; neither meat nor eggs ever cross my threshold. It is necessary to observe all this because if the people did not see me doing such penance, they would not accept me as one who can teach them [i.e., yogis] the way to heaven, for this is the way of life that their own teachers maintain. Some of them lead a more austere life, even abstaining from rice, which is saying quite a lot, for Your Eminence must know that here we partake in neither bread nor wine, except at the Holy Sacrifice, so that if we do away with rice you might imagine what remains.77 Henriques’s correspondence with the two superior generals alongside Barzeo’s testimony attests to the similarities between the early Jesuits and yogis. The missionaries’ attraction to the Hindu renunciants eventually developed into mutual affection and an exchange of information. From the Jesuits’ standpoint, this dialogue strengthened their observance of the order’s fundamental vows of poverty and chastity, even under adverse conditions. Whereas Barzeo’s decision to embrace local custom was guided by intuition, de Nobili reached this conclusion by dint of systemic analysis. 4

Conclusion

The encounter between the first wave of Jesuit missionaries and Hindu renunciants in India bears witness to the inner tension within the Society of Jesus between mystic-cum-contemplative ideals and the apostolic principles of the church militant. For the most part, this attraction/aversion that the order’s emissaries felt toward local ascetics was evaluative. At any rate, the Europeans could not fully overcome their ethnocentric biases. While forming opinions about the yogis, the Jesuits were also looking at the mirror in a way that, above all, rendered “the other” a distorted reflection of themselves. This chapter has identified points of convergence and information exchanges between the Jesuits stationed in India and the local yogis. In the process, we have discerned the main Catholic apprehensions regarding foreign strains of ascetism. Some of the missionaries admired their interlocutors’ level of poverty, chastity, and abstinence. The Jesuits also realized that these same virtues were means through which they might attain their order’s goals. Notwithstanding this praise, the missionaries believed that the Hindu ascetics 77 Cronin, Pearl to India, 74.

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had grown arrogant because of these qualities, which were placed at the service of the “devil.” Submission to authority was a trait that Jesuits associated with religioninspired humility, whereas the excessive self-confidence they pinned to the yogis was a source of pride and arrogance. These general findings aside, the source material indicates that each missionary drew his own, unique conclusions on the basis of personal character and background. The next chapter focuses on texts by, inter alios, Barzeo and Henriques, both of whom gave voice to the belief that the Jesuits were pursuing an original religious calling. These works are also tinged with ambivalence toward the yogis. While the Catholic emissaries deemed their Hindu counterparts “superstitious” or “idolatrous” natives, they were willing to approach and even seek counsel from these ascetics. In fact, some of the Jesuits viewed the yogis’ way of life as a model that could help them advance the order’s goals even beyond the sub-continent. On the other hand, the ex-soldiers Amador Correia and Fernandes Trancoso—both soldiers who had turned to religion, among other missionaries—exhibited more critical and belligerent attitudes toward these renunciants. The 1560s transformed the Jesuits’ theological and political outlook on indigenous Asian religions. From this point forward, the Society of Jesus was less tolerant of “the perversity of idolatry” and of infidels in territories under Portuguese control. This approach is evident from the resolutions that were concomitantly passed by successive Diocesan councils of Goa.78 At any rate, the missionaries struggled to accurately categorize the yogi religious tradition. For example, they alternatively labeled the renunciants superstitious sorcerers, idolaters, and adherents of a strange religion that nevertheless possesses a kernel of truth. Upon comprehending the rudiments of the yogi belief system, some of these missionaries were convinced that they had unmasked its adherents as falsifiers of the divine cult and thus servants of the devil—the ultimate impersonator of God. That said, several of the order’s emissaries in India felt that it was imperative to recruit missionaries with similar attributes to the yogis. For instance, Melchior Nunes Barreto (1520–71),79 vice-provincial of India, wrote to his superiors in Portugal requesting new men “who are nothing more than workers driven exclusively by the love of God and who are chaste, patient, long-suffering and virtuous,” for Brahmans, yogis, “and other such servants of 78 António da Silva Rêgo, A liberdade religiosa e o i concílio provincial de Goa (1567) (Lisbon: Academia Real das Ciências de Lisboa, 1967). 79 Melchior Nunes Barreto was the brother of João Nunes Barreto, the first appointed Catholic patriarch of Ethiopia.

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Satan […] are saintly in appearance.” In Nunes Barreto’s estimation, these qualities are essential to combating the “hypocrisy” of the Hindu renunciants.80 Following the initial encounter between yogis and the Society of Jesus’s representatives, ensuing conversations sparked a genuine discussion regarding the origins of their respective ascetic practices in a mutual effort to overcome the ambiguity and establish a correlation between practice and belief. In parallel, Jesuits embarked on a similar process in Ethiopia. The focus in the Horn of Africa was on understanding the local strain of ascetism as an outgrowth of Christianity’s historical development in the region. 80 “P. Melchior Nunes Barreto S.I., viceprovincialis, Patri Dr. Iacobo Miron S.I., provinciali Lusitaniae, Cocino, 20 Ianuarii 1566,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 6:681.

Chapter 4

Confronting Yogis and Ethiopian Monks In previous chapters, we explored Jesuit attitudes toward different strains of non-Catholic asceticism. These outlooks were ambivalent as well as varied, ranging from admiration to contempt and outright repudiation. Nonetheless, all of the cited examples clearly show that missionaries approached local ascetics with the objective of learning from, debating, and ultimately converting them. In parallel, the Jesuits sought to place what they deemed to be their rivals’ virtues, if any, at the disposal of the Catholic Church. The Society’s emissaries were aware that the Hindu and Ethiopian traditions viewed ascetics as bearers of the sole religious truth. Therefore, the Jesuits looked for ways to compete with these figures in areas where the former had the upper hand, with the objective of affirming the veracity of the Latin faith. Among the bailiwicks where the missionaries felt that they had an advantage was religio-theological disputation and miracle works. In the Jesuits’ estimation, was it enough for them to “prove” that their Hindu and Ethiopian Orthodox disputants were charlatans, or was it also necessary to bring them into the Catholic fold? Put differently, it was incumbent upon the order’s emissaries to formulate a strategy for confronting the most distinguished representatives of local asceticism and its manifold expressions. If the plan entailed converting these adversaries, then the missionaries would have to laud their admirable practices while rooting out—or at least curbing—behavior that the Society had explicitly reproached. Given their own hierarchical perspective on religious life, Jesuits endeavored to comprehend the ascetics’ own pecking order and reel them into the Catholic Church on the premise that converting the head of the pyramid would bear fruit among the lower strata.1 In the Society’s experience, disputation was an optimal means for interacting with local ascetics. Consequently, its missionaries initiated or at least willingly participated in disputations where they stood a good chance of demonstrating the superiority of their faith. At the 1 One of the Jesuits’ principal strategies for advancing their missionary goals was to forge alliances with princes in an effort to tap into the legitimacy of the “Caesar” and render unto God what is his. The power that Ignatius of Loyola reckoned to share with the bishop of Rome had not prevented him from joining forces with the Bourbons or Habsburgs, always in a spirit of reciprocity and freedom. At least in principle, it was possible for him to collaborate with any particular monarch without losing his independence. Jean Lacouture, Os jesuítas, trans. Maria Fernando Gonçalves de Azevedo (Lisbon: Editorial Estampa, 1993), 1:154.

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same time, the emissaries were cognizant of the persuasive limitations of such exchanges, namely that they did not suffice to bring about the desired results on their own. In the end, the Jesuits concluded that displays of erudition at these exchanges burnished the church’s reputation. With respect to Ethiopia, the Society’s emissaries partook in disputations throughout their one-year stint in the kingdom in 1557. Jesuit sources point to the occasional spontaneous debate with Ethiopian monks out in the field.2 That said, most of the chronicled exchanges were apparently held at the royal court or other official venues with the emperor’s consent and backing. As recently shown, Ethiopian Orthodoxy’s defenders were compelled to operate under duress. Leaning on their rhetorical skills, the Jesuits ridiculed their adversaries and called their doctrine into question.3 For first-generation Jesuits, learning was a pathway to authentic-cumintimate devotion. In accordance with their humanist convictions, scientia et mores (knowledge and ethos) and virtus et litterae (virtue and letters) were closely related.4 The former deepened the faith of individuals in Christ, augmented their morality, and drew them closer to a state of perfection. On the other hand, virtue and letters were considered prerequisites for missionary success. However, the emphasis on one of these principles over the next depended on how the local mission viewed the people or settlement it was targeting. Throughout Europe, the Society’s emissaries had already mastered the art of public oration, earning quite a reputation for the quality of their sermons.5 In general, the Jesuits were well suited for oral confrontations. Be that as it may, rhetorical skills were not always essential to the task at hand. “There is no need,” Xavier wrote, “for much knowledge in converting the Gentiles [of India], as the people of these parts are barbarous and ignorant, so that with a poor education along with great virtue and effort they [i.e., missionaries] may provide splendid service to the Lord our God.”6 Therefore, it was not considered that erudition was an indispensable requirement for such missionary enterprises. Likewise, Xavier pointed out that “missionaries with little talent for preaching and confession may render good service to the church in India so long as they are willing in spirit and physically fit.”7 Writing in 1549, Simão 2 “P. Emmanuel Fernandez ad praepositum generalem S.I. (I). Ex Aethiopia die 13 iunii 1567,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 10:209–15, here 210. 3 Cohen, Missionary Strategies, 87–96. 4 Dennis Edmond Pate, “Jerónimo Nadal and the Early Development of the Society of Jesus, 1545–1573” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1980), 26–52. 5 Bilinkoff, Avila of Saint Teresa, 90. 6 Zubillaga, Cartas y escritos, 294. 7 Zubillaga, Cartas y escritos, 162; Granero, Acción misionera, 128.

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Rodrigues (1510–79), among the Society’s founders, observed that the mission did not necessarily need “lettered” men. Instead, fervent ascetics with “many years of experience in the conversion of the heathen would do much good, as the infidels in these parts are barbarous and ignorant people.”8 These recommendations aside, Jesuits in India did engage their rivals in disputation and other forms of spoken argument. The Society viewed its Ethiopian enterprise in quite a different light. From as far back as the early 1540s, Ignatius posited that missionaries on the Horn of Africa should possess three qualities: kindness, knowledge, and physical strength.9 The debates in Ethiopia significantly differed from those on the subcontinent. One of the distinctions stemmed from the Ethiopian Church’s monastic tradition, which imbibed from the same sacred texts as Catholicism. For this reason, the order’s superiors believed that a high level of erudition was needed to convert the heads of Ethiopian Orthodoxy. In 1556, Nunes Barreto, the church’s patriarch-elect for the African monarchy, recommended to King João III of Portugal that Bishop Oviedo be dispatched to Ethiopia on the following grounds: his “letters suffice to confuse and defeat all the learned men in Ethiopia.”10 As soon as the missionaries reached the kingdom, they indeed plunged themselves into doctrinal polemics with rival religious. To this end, the Jesuits did not hesitate to avail themselves of their finely honed rhetorical skills.11 The order’s representatives surmised that level-headed theological argumentation could win over the hearts of “schismatic” monks.12 According to this outlook, embracing Catholicism is a logical outgrowth of sound judgment 8 Zubillaga, Cartas y escritos, 281. 9 Granero, Acción misionera, 138–39. 10 “Patriarcha Nunez ad Joannem III. Goa, 1 dec. 1556,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 10:74. 11 Despite their prowess for theological debate, the Jesuits had some reservations about its effectiveness. As O’Malley notes: “Their epistemology led them to believe that once the heart had been changed, the veil of blindness would fall from the eyes of the mind and truth would be embraced. They surely did not want for that reason to be without credible answers to questions that may be raised, but they generally did not believe that argumentation and reasoning would in themselves accomplish their desired end.” O’Malley, First Jesuits, 70–71. 12 “I have tried to dissuade them” of their error, Páez wrote, “by clearly showing them the truth through the holy scriptures, the holy councils, the authorities of the saints and reasoning.” Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:313. Páez believed that to a large extent, he could convince targeted audiences via the power of persuasion; see Hervé Pennec, “La mission jésuite en Éthiopie au temps de Pedro Paez (1583–1622) et ses rapports avec le pouvoir éthiopien: Deuxème partie, Le temps de la séduction (1603–1612),” Rassegna di studi etiopici 37 (1993): 135–65, here 144.

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predicated on an “adequate” interpretation of the canon. Therefore, the Jesuits treated these debates with the utmost seriousness. Leaning on their sharp oratory, the missionaries challenged Ethiopian Orthodoxy’s age-old Christological positions while vehemently defending the Catholic principle of dyophysitism—the two natures of Christ after his incarnation. Another factor behind the adoption of this strategy was the rulers’ interest in disputation. In the early seventeenth century, a number of the kingdom’s monarchs had an affinity for religious discourse, even if not all of them possessed the knowledge to fully understand such proceedings.13 These exchanges with monks and other scholars were a golden opportunity for the Jesuits to find favor in the eyes of the sovereign and other local dignitaries.14 What is more, these spectacles dramatized the rivalry between the missionaries and the Ethiopian clergy. In light of the above, the argument can be made that these disputations laid the groundwork for the order’s ultimate, if fleeting, domination of the country’s religious life. Upon arriving in the Horn of Africa in 1555, the Jesuits put down in writing and endeavored to debunk what they considered to be Ethiopian Christianity’s doctrinal errors. It is evident that these texts were intended for Emperor Gälawdewos, whom the missionaries were nudging to honor the promise of his predecessor Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl to adopt Catholicism. The order’s representatives initially engaged court scholars and leading monks, who clarified to them the local church’s position.15 The clergy were rather wary of interacting with the Jesuits, as the latter sought to undermine their authority before the emperor. The missionaries would not only attempt to save their interlocuters’ souls but used this forum to pull his own heart toward the Latin faith.16 13

Merid Wolde Aregay, “Society and Technology in Ethiopia 1500–1800,” Journal of Ethiopian Studies 17 (1984): 127–47, here 144. Hagar Salamon devotes a chapter of her book to Jewish–Christian polemics in Ethiopia. “Everybody loves to argue,” she writes, “that the inhabitants regard disputation as a form of entertainment.” Salamon, The Hyena People: Ethiopian Jews in Christian Ethiopia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 83–95. 14 Religious disputations were a “field of struggle for power.” Coined by Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), this notion encompasses “areas of production, circulation, and appropriation of goods, services, knowledge, or status, and the competitive positions held by actors in their struggle to accumulate and monopolize these different kinds of capital.” David Swartz, Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 117. 15 “P. Emmanuel Fernandez ad praepositum generalem S.I. (I). Ex Aethiopia die 13 iunii 1567,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 10:209–15, here 211. 16 “Owing to their [i.e., the Farangis] faith, there were many controversies. And they debated and argued with the sages, the disciples of Abba Žäkäre, and the monks.” Jules Perruchon, “Notes pour l’histoire d’Éthiopie: Le règne de Gâlawdêwos (Claudius) ou Asnȃf-Sagad,” Revue sémitique 5 (1894): 155–66, 263–70, here 162 [Gǝʿǝz] and 266–67 [French].

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The oral communication between the Society’s emissaries and the Ethiopians was far from seamless. Unable to effectively communicate in the native tongue, the first wave of Jesuits enlisted interpreters to convey their positions on the local church’s doctrine.17 Moreover, the language barrier prevented the Jesuits from divining Gälawdewos’s true intentions.18 That said, it eventually dawned on them that regardless of his sympathy toward Catholicism, the monarch was unwilling to yield to the throne of St. Peter.19 When Páez reached Ethiopia, theological disputations once again became the principal means for winning over local monks. At the invitation of Emperor Zä Dǝngǝl in 1604, the Spaniard held theological disputations with ecclesiastical and lay leaders.20 The ruler himself asked Páez to speak on controversial topics. By this juncture, Zä Dǝngǝl had already displayed his sympathies for Catholicism.21 Impressed by how the father had handled his opponents over twenty-six days of debate, the emperor requested that he conduct a religious service before the royal court.22 Christological-cum-theological debates were also popular during Susǝnyos’s reign, both before and after he decreed that Catholicism was the official religion of the land.23 These exchanges became a Jesuit vehicle for forging a ritually homogeneous and doctrinal Christianity that the Society hoped would be recognized by every last monk and priest throughout the Horn of Africa. Held on a less regular basis, the debates in India were spontaneous affairs. More specifically, Jesuits preached in public squares where they locked horns with mullahs (Islamic leaders); they also held disputations with various representatives of Hinduism, such as Brahmins and yogis. Unlike the Ethiopian case, there was no structured format or venue for these exchanges. The Society’s emissaries most likely viewed these forums as a means for promoting 17 “P. Emmanuel Fernandez ad praepositum generalem S.I. (I). Ex Aethiopia die 13 iunii 1567,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 10:209–15, here 211. 18 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 2:20. 19 “PP. Emmanuel Fernandez, Gonzalus Cardoso et Franciscus Lopez ad praepositum generalem S.I. Ex Aethiopia, 29 iulii 1562,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 10:150; “P. Emmanuel Fernandez ad praepositum generalem S.I. (I). Ex Aethiopia die 13 iunii 1567,” in Beccari and Almeida, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 10:209–15, here 212. Also see Páez, History of Ethiopia, 2:34. 20 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:322; “P. Petrus Paez ad P. Thomam Iturén. Dambiâ, 14 sept. 1612,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 11:224–30. 21 “In the last days of debate,” Páez recapped, the emperor “was moved by our words.” See “P. Petrus Paez ad P. Thomam Iturén. Dambiâ, 14 sept. 1612,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 11:231. 22 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 11:230. 23 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 7:6.

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Christianity among Indian holy men. However, this strategy does not appear to have lived up to their expectations. Rather than winning the hearts of locals, the missionaries felt that the primary benefit of such debates was to strengthen the identity of Catholic onlookers. As Andrés Fernandes (dates unknown) put it: Talks are ofttimes given to Moors, Gentiles, yogis, and Brahmins, though only a few profit from them because of their folly and blindness, which they love more than light, and [due to] their tainted appetite, as bread or rather rocks from Satan’s table taste better to them than from God’s, yet Christians see them in confusion answering not for their sects; but confessing the Christian law to be true, they are confirmed.24 Henriques wrote that not long ago a grizzled yogi arrived to these shores; many followed him. And I spoke to him in Ponicale before many Christians and Gentiles. He was dumbstruck; and it became known among the Gentiles that he was solely interested in money, which I brought up later; and Christians were glad that this happened to us.25 Likewise, these encounters served to exalt Christian doctrine in the eyes of the Christian attendees.26 According to Juan de Mesquita (dates unknown), “I had some disputations with Gentile yogis before Christians: they were amazed by their falsities, and the Christians were full of joy knowing how they [i.e., the Hindus] all lived in error. I will not record the disputations, for they are too extensive.”27 Several of the debates in Goa were held at Saint Paul’s—a Jesuit-run college. As per some of the accounts, the Portuguese viceroy requested or pressured a number of yogis to leave their retreats and participate in these forums with the missionaries, who were ultimately seeking to convert them.28 Fróis explained 24 “P. Andreas Fernandes S.I. Sociis Lusitanis. Coulano 15 Ianuarii 1565,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 6:436. 25 “P. H. Henriques S.I. P. Antonio de Quadros A.I., Goam. Punicale 3 Ianuarii 1560,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 4:496. 26 “P. H. Henriques S.I. P. Iacobo Lainez, praep. gen. S.I. [Ex Insula Mannâr] 8 Ianuarii 1561,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 5:18. 27 “P. Ioannes de Mesquita S.I. Sociis Lusitanis. Punicale 1 Decembris 1558,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 4:125. 28 “Carta geral do Irmão Luis Frois aos religiosos da Companhia em Portugal: Goa 8 de Dezembro de 1560,” in Silva Rêgo, Documentação para a história das missões, 8:220–28.

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how Francisco Ros, a missionary well versed in the Hindu literature, cited ideas from this same corpus aimed at revealing inherent contradictions and luring yogis to Catholicism. The content of the exchanges on the subcontinent also differed from those on the Horn of Africa. As noted, the Jesuits and Orthodox monks shared the same canon. Once missionaries in Ethiopia acquired the local tongue, they gained the upper hand in these debates by virtue of their proficient use of a common scriptural lexicon. Consequently, the disputants were at loggerheads over how to interpret texts that both deemed to have been revealed by God or composed by jointly revered saints.29 The Jesuits considered the statements of their Ethiopian rivals at these debates to be heretical. Moreover, they felt that the monks’ exegesis was akin to fables or mythological representations.30 The basic premise behind the exchange with yogis diverged from the standpoint of both parties. For quite some time, the Society was in the dark about the religious sources behind the beliefs of yogism. Upon discovering their roots, the missionaries dismissed them as falsehoods or legends. What is more, they only broached these sources for the purpose of refuting them. Due to these cultural gaps, the Hindu conceptual world was substantially more alien to the Occidentals than that of the Ethiopian monk. Whereas the yogi was an idolater, the latter was a schismatic. These differences notwithstanding, both cases involved monastic and ascetic traditions of varying rhetorical sophistication that the Society’s emissaries viewed as unsanctioned writing. The Jesuits had inherited their rhetorical toolset from the sophisticated analytical model of medieval universities and late European Scholasticism. As such, the missionaries’ analysis was based on written texts, even though the debates were oral. This approach is exemplified by a confrontation at 29 Haymanotä Abäw (The faith of the fathers) is the Gǝʿǝz version of a sizable Arabic compilation of writings by early church fathers and later patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch. One section is devoted to excoriating any deviation from their Christian path. Above all, Haymanotä Abäw focuses on the doctrines of the Trinity and incarnation, with the primary objective of defining the non-Chalcedonian view. Amid the written and oral polemics with senior Ethiopian clergy, the Jesuits took this collection with utmost seriousness. From the missionaries’ standpoint, this work mixed “venerated” patristic texts with “heretical” Alexandrine sources. Consequently, the order’s representatives deemed Haymanotä Abäw to be both a source of authority and an object of suspicion. See Cohen, Missionary Strategies, 122–25. 30 Leonardo Cohen, “Who are the ‘Sons of God?’ A Jesuit–Ethiopian Controversy on Genesis 6:2,” in Varia aethiopica: In Memoriam Sevir Chernetsov (1943–2005), ed. Denis Nosnitsin et al. (St. Petersburg: Gorgias Press, 2005), 35–42; Cohen, “An Ethiopian Interpretation of the Story of the Leviathan and Its Connection to Rabbinic Exegesis,” Pe’amim 120 (2009): 93–116 [Hebrew]; Cohen, “El padre Pedro Páez S.J. frente a la interpretación bíblica etíope: La controversia sobre ‘cómo llenar una brecha mítica,’” Archivum historicum Societatis Iesu 164 (2013): 397–419.

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which a yogi was unable to answer specific questions about his own doctrine. According to Fróis, these points should have been well within the opponent’s. In his defense, the yogi argued that “it had been so many years that he had been on that island and had forsaken books.” Upon secluding himself on that isle, the disputant’s sole “desire” had been to avoid iniquity and please God. The last thing on his mind was to delve into a new “science.”31 Misunderstandings also reared up in the Ethiopian polemic. These debates were the outgrowth of a struggle between a religious culture—Ethiopian Orthodoxy—that was by and large the product of an oral tradition and its adversary, Catholicism, which was forged in the furnace of textual and rhetorical analysis. This is not to suggest that the monks were illiterate, but Ethiopian culture was dominated by the spoken word in both religious and secular affairs.32 Above all, the Orthodox monks were ritual experts and the supreme guardians of the Ethiopian historical tradition. For the most part, though, their acquaintance with the Christological complexities broached by the missionaries was rudimentary.33 Under the circumstances, the Jesuits managed to improve their position while undermining the reputation-cum-authority of their Indian and Ethiopian rivals. There were also major differences between our two case studies with respect to the ground rules for debate. Jesuits on the Horn of Africa were generally well received by the Ethiopian elite, so that they could freely present their doctrine and polemicize before the monarch. At times, they were even favored over the local monks. Susǝnyos himself, who ultimately embraced the Latin faith, paved the way for the mission to advance the principles of Catholicism and divulge the “errors” of the Orthodox Church with little restraint. Sitting in judgment over the disputations, the emperor made no pretense of partiality.34 31 “Carta geral do Irmão Luis Frois,” in Silva Rêgo, Documentação para a história das missões, 204–28, 225–26. 32 According to Francisco Álvares, Ethiopians “are not accustomed to write to one another, neither do the officers of justice write anything. All the justice that is done, and what is ordered, is by messengers and speech.” Álvares, Prester John of the Indies, 2:514–15. What is more, Lobo bemoaned a “barbarous custom” of the Ethiopians: “In their lawsuits, they use legal procedures, but it is all done verbally, the judge being anyone the plaintiff and accused wish to select of whom the lord of the land [then] appoints.” Lobo, Itinerário of Jerónimo Lobo, 174. On the function of literacy in traditional societies, see Jack Goody, ed., The Interface between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Goody, Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). 33 Manuel Barradas wrote that the Ethiopians recite their Masses by heart, without a single book on the altar. “In so doing, they expose themselves to many errors,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 4:265. 34 Merid Wolde Aregay, “The Legacy of Jesuit Missionary Activities in Ethiopia from 1555 to 1632,” in The Missionary Factor in Ethiopia, ed. Getachew Haile, Aasulv Lande, and Samuel Rubenson (Hamburg: Peter Lang, 1998), 31–56, here 47.

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In both Ethiopia and India, the order’s strategy went beyond merely demonstrating the truth of its way. The game plan also involved engaging in a type of confrontation that enabled its missionaries to take advantage of one of their most developed skills—rhetoric. Within these polemical frameworks, the Jesuits cast doubt on the rite and doctrine of their rival ascetics. In Ethiopia, once Catholicism had become the official religion of the land, the missionaries had free rein to persuade, chastise, and even intimidate “subversive” monks, for the political standing of the former outclassed those of their adversaries. As we shall see, Jesuits occasionally had monks arrested and forced Catholicism on them with the full backing of the emperor. 1

Doctrinal Errors and “Inadequate” Biblical Exegesis of Ethiopian Monks

The disputations with Ethiopian monks centered on theological principles that roiled the Council of Chalcedon and other doctrinal questions. In the Jesuits’ estimation, their disputants’ views on these matters were tied to heretical outlooks. From the very outset, the polemic apparently revolved around the “monophysite question” and the authority of the said conclave. Both Ethiopian and Jesuit texts pertaining to these debates cite and interpret the same canonical verses. Moreover, each party set their theological and exegetical skills to formulating a new apologetica in the hopes of substantiating their “unique” truth. The Society’s emissaries averred that Christ assumed two natures following the incarnation. Known as the dyophysite doctrine, this idea was rendered as aḥadu akal wäkǝlʾetu täbay (one person, two natures) in Gǝʿǝz.35 Back in the fifth century, the Ethiopic term hǝllawe was used to refer to hypostasis, essence, nature, or physis.36 With the subsequent ascendance of Egyptian-Arabic Christianity, physis began to be translated as baḥrǝy.37 Amid the disputations with the Jesuits, the Ethiopian Church’s most prevalent words for hypostasis,

35 See, for example, Cerulli, Scritti teologici, 2:11; António Fernandes, Magseph Assetat, contra libellum aethiopicum (Goa: Collegio D. Pauli, Societatis Iesu, 1642), chapter 31, fol. 103. 36 In all likelihood, Cyril of Alexandria’s usage of physis was originally translated into Gǝʿǝz as hǝllawe; Enrico Cerulli, “La littérature éthiopienne dans l’histoire de la culture médiévale,” Annuaire de l’Institute de philologie et d’histoire orientales et slaves 14 (1954–57): 17–35, here 20. Also see José Bandrés and Ugo Zanetti, “Christology,” in Uhlig, Encyclopaedia aethiopica, 1:730; Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez, 218. 37 Among the sundry definitions of bahrǝy are pearl, precious stone, essence, element, nature, substance, quality, and hypostasis; see Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez, 91. Cerulli discusses the origin of this term in “Littérature éthiopienne,” 20–21.

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essence, and nature were baḥrǝy and täbay.38 However, various authors used these terms to convey different meanings. In any event, hulätt akal (two persons), and hulätt baḥrǝy or hulätt täbay (two natures), were deemed to be heretical concepts by Ethiopian Orthodox when used in reference to Christ.39 The monks indeed undertook to refute the dyophysitic position. To this end, they penned a handful of texts including Mäzgäbä haymanot (Storehouse of the faith),40 Säwänä näfs (Preservation of the soul),41 Mäshetä lǝbbuna (Mirror of understanding),42 ʿAsärtu täsǝʾǝlotat (The ten questions),43 Fǝkare mäläkot (The interpretation of the Lordship), Hamärä näfs (The church of the soul),

38 Täbay can be defined as natural disposition, nature, elements, and essence; see Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez, 587. Täbayk, rather than physis, is the Gǝʿǝz term for the Greek ouisia. While both of these terms denote “substance” and “essence,” ouisia is the only one that expresses “stable being, immutable reality.” See Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 2:1274. 39 Cerulli, Scritti teologici, 2:11 [Gǝʿǝz] and 77 [Italian]. 40 Well acquainted with Mäzgäbä haymanot, the Jesuits went to great lengths to refute its content. This treatise came out no later than 1559—the year of Gälawdewos’s demise. Hundreds of years would pass before Cerulli christened the work with the said title; Cerulli, Scritti teologici. The first part of Mäzgäbä haymanot surveys the church’s first four councils, not least the gathering at Chalcedon. In all likelihood, this section was rendered from the Arabic. Divided into five brief chapters, the second part summarizes the Chalcedonian doctrine and assaults the Catholic Church. Mäzgäbä haymanot constitutes the first Ethiopian counterattack against the newly arrived Jesuits’ fusillade against monophysitism; Cerulli, Scritti teologici, 2:1–65 [Gǝʿǝz] and 67–101 [Italian]. 41 Cerulli, Scritti teologici, 2:103–17 [Gǝʿǝz] and 119–35 [Italian]. A critical edition of this same manuscript was translated and published by Wolf Leslau, “A Monophysite Epistle: ‘The Consolation of the Soul,’” Orientalia christiana periodica 30, no. 2 (1964): 447–84. In Cerulli’s estimation, this text is an open letter that was sent by the prelate Nǝwayä Mäsqäl (dates unknown), who lived in Egypt, to the Ethiopian monarch between September 1603 and October 1604. The missive entreats the sovereign to continue upholding monophysitism. Furthermore, Nǝwayä Mäsqäl raises pertinent objections to the Society’s doctrine. See Cerulli, Scritti teologici, 2:iv, viii–xii. Comparing this letter to the Jesuit sources, Tewelde Beiene hypothesizes that it was penned in 1620. See Tewelde Beiene, “La politica cattolica di Seltan Sägäd I (1607–1632) e la missione della Compagnia di Gesù in Etiopia” (PhD diss., Pontificia Universitas Gregoriana, 1983), 124–29. 42 Cerulli, Scritti teologici, 2:137–60 [Gǝʿǝz] and 161–86 [Italian]. The scholar titles this work, which was penned in the Ethiopian year 1614 (1621–22), “Spechio dell’inteligenza” (Reflection of intelligence). Also see Tewelde Beiene, “Politica cattolica,” 129–35. 43 Cerulli, Scritti teologici, 2:187–211 [Gǝʿǝz] and 213–36 [Italian]. Eschewing a precise date, Cerulli notes that the treatise must have come out at around the same time as Mäshetä lǝbbuna. In any event, ʿAsärtu täsǝʾǝlotat falls under the heading of a popular catechesis. Assuming a responsa format, the work was intended to furnish Ethiopians with tools for parrying the Jesuits’ barbs; see Cerulli, Scritti teologici, 2:iv, xvi–xix.

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and Märs amin (The safe port).44 Though all fervently anti-Chalcedonian and anti-dyophysite, these works are far from homogeneous, as each one was suited for a different period-cum-audience. The Society’s arguments were put forth in a bevy of Latin, Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish treatises. Furthermore, the overlooked Magseph Assetat was penned in Gǝʿǝz by António Fernandes. On more than one occasion, the Jesuits pointed to the inconsistencies in Ethiopian theology and ritual observance. From the missionaries’ standpoint, theological argumentation was an effective tool for converting the learned “schismatics” of the emperor’s court,45 not least the däbtäročč.46 Respected in monarchical circles, the däbtäročč were popularly believed to be the scion of families who had returned with Mǝnilǝk (fl. tenth century BCE) from King Solomon’s palace in Jerusalem.47 Almeida referred to them as the court’s sagacious, married men and felt that they “knew more about” the scripture than other courtiers:

44 Cerulli, Scritti teologici, vol. 1. In 1632, one Ṣägga Krǝstos (d.1696), a famed royal exile, took manuscripts of Fǝkare mäläkot, Hamärä näfs, and Märs amin to Italy, where they were subsequently deposited in the Colbert Library. At some point, the works were transferred to La Bibliothèque nationale de France and all but forgotten, until Enrico Cerulli (1898–1988) brought them to print in 1960. Dating these three treatises to the 1590s, the Italian scholar links them to the fifteenth-century Mika‌ʾelite “heresy” over the question of God’s image. Cerulli, Scritti teologici, vol. 1. Whereas the latter offers a Gnostic interpretation, Abba Agostino Tedla (1921–89) suggests that the troika refutes the Catholic position by arguing that the human mind lacks the wherewithal to fathom the essence of God and the Trinitarian mystery, not least the incarnation. Agostino Tedla de Hēbo is inclined to date these texts to 1633; see Agostino Tedla de Hēbo, “A proposito di alcuni passi oscurinelle scritti teologici etiopici dei secoli XVI–XVII publicati da E Cerulli,” in Proceedings of the Third International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa, 3–7 April 1966, ed. Richard Pankhurst and Stanislaw Chojnacki (Addis Ababa: Haile Sealassie I University/Institute of Ethiopian Studies, 1969), 2:217–42. Similarly, Tewelde Beiene posits that they were composed after 1628, following the revolts of Täklä Giyorgis and Šärṣä Krǝstos—an opportune time for polemical literary enterprise; Tewelde Beiene, “Politica cattolica,” 368. In any event, researchers agree over the anti-Catholic hue of these texts. 45 “I have tried,” Páez asserted, “to dissuade them of it by clearly showing them the truth through the holy scriptures, the holy councils, the authorities of saints, and reasoning.” Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:313. The Spaniard believed that reasoned persuasion could bring the Ethiopian clergy around; see Pennec, Des jésuites au royaume du Prêtre Jean, 144. 46 The däbtäročč were lay clerics well versed in the ways of the traditional Ethiopian Church and its literature. In their capacity as cantors and choristers, they performed hymns and sacred dances during Mass. See Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez, 122; Steven Kaplan, “Däbtära,” in Uhlig, Encyclopaedia aethiopica, 2:53–54. 47 Richard Pankhurst, A Social History of Ethiopia (Addis Ababa: University of Addis Ababa, 1990), 29.

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In many places in these [Jesuit polemical] books, their [i.e., the däbtäročč’s] errors were shown and refuted, and they were convinced. They lived in the emperor’s court or under the protection of some lords and ladies, who are still at court, where sermons and disputes were constantly held and the truth of the holy faith [i.e., Catholicism] was always victorious before the lies of their errors and heresies.48 The Jesuits viewed the Ethiopian Church as a degenerate strain of Christianity. While its roots are Orthodox, the missionaries believed that the institution had gradually deteriorated into heresy.49 As a result, it was incumbent upon the Society’s emissaries to shepherd this flock, which had lost its theological bearings, back to the “true path.” Disputes were thus an apposite means for reacquainting their interlocuters with the theological truths that were still latent in Ethiopian Christianity. According to one of the mission’s annual letters, which was sent to Goa in 1609, “Abyssinian monks often spend time at our residence, and we strive to return [our guests] to the bosom of the Catholic Church by holding discussions with them on faith.”50 As discussed in chapter 6, the Jesuits saw the local clergy as middlemen in their efforts to convert the population. Moreover, the report offered the following evidence that the proselytization campaign was bearing fruit: A certain monk tried to persuade a lady that in no way were two natures to be found in the Lord Christ. She ordered the monk to be gone his wicked deeds, declaring that the proposition in question had been sufficiently proved by the arguments of the [Latin] sages and confirmed by the emperor’s authority.51 The theological debates with the royal court placed several obstacles before the Society’s first representatives in Ethiopia. To begin with, there was the problem of language. In May or June of 1555, Gonzalo Rodrigues (1523–64) declared that he had finished what was probably the first treatise on the local Orthodox Church’s errors and that he hoped to present this work—either orally or in writing—to the emperor. According to Páez, Oviedo also completed such a text and delivered it to the monarch.52 These efforts aside, the language barrier left 48 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 6:177. 49 See Cohen, “Ethiopian Christianity as Heresy,” 649–55. 50 Wendy Belcher, ed., The Jesuits in Ethiopia (1609–1641): Latin Letters in Translation, trans. Jessica Wright and Leon Grek (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2017), 42. 51 Belcher, Jesuits in Ethiopia, 84. 52 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:355. Father Fernão Guerreiro (1550–1617) also confirmed that “Andrés de Oviedo wrote some treatises on the errors of the Abyssinian people.” However,

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the missionaries with serious doubts about the ruler’s intentions.53 Moreover, they were hard-pressed to explain theological ideas that were articulated in Portuguese to their disputants in the local tongue. These hardships notwithstanding, the oral debates got underway in 1557. Five years later, Manuel Fernandez (1516–85), Gonzalo Cardoso (?–1574), and Francisco López (1529–68) dispatched a letter to Superior General Laínez with an account of the inaugural disputations between Bishop Oviedo and Emperor Gälawdewos: The controversies circa fidem [about faith] started between him [i.e., Gälawdewos] and the bishop. He [the emperor] arrogantly told him that he wanted to attend [the debates] with his men of letters. Lectures were often held in his presence, and all his sages looked like idiots before him. Many times, he personally took the initiative and vehemently defended his mad ramblings, so that we were forced to work hard. And even when the bishop, by divine grace, always had the last word, they [the courtiers] continued ridiculing him, claiming victory, so that [it] was all for naught. Realizing how little was achieved, the senior bishop took the main subjects and [key] points of their [i.e., the courtiers’] errors, wrote them up, and presented them to the emperor; writing over the father’s longhand, he [Gälawdewos] declared that he would not obey Rome.54 A coeval, Ethiopian text provides similar, if less detailed, information on this exchange: “Because of their own faith [that of the farangis (i.e., foreigners)], there were many great controversies. And they debated and discussed with the elders, with Abba Žäkäre’s followers, and with all the monks.”55 In sum, the emperor was not convinced by the missionaries’ arguments and ultimately decided to shun the Catholic Church. Theological disputations continued to be held at the monarchial encampment in the early seventeenth century. During the winter months, one of the Jesuits gave a daily Bible lesson to däbtäročč and scores of monks in Dänqäz. the original texts have not survived. Guerreiro, Relação annual das coisas que fizeram os padres da Companhia de Jesus nas suas missões (1600–1603) (Lisbon: Iorge Rodrigues, Impresor de Livros, 1605), 1:356. 53 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 2:20–21. 54 “PP. Emmanuel Fernandez, Gonzalus Cardoso et Franciscus Lopez ad praepositum generalem S.I. Ex Aethiopia, 29 iulii 1562,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 10:150. Also see Páez, History of Ethiopia, 2:34. It stands to reason that this encounter inspired the Ethiopian clerics to write Mäzgäbä haymanot. In Cerulli’s estimation, this treatise was penned between 1555 and 1559. The text itself can be found in Cerulli, Scritti, teologici, 2:1–65 [Gǝʿǝz] and 67–101 [Italian]. 55 Perruchon, “Notes pour l’histoire d’Éthiopie,” 162 [Gǝʿǝz] and 266–67 [French].

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On occasion, the emperor also took part. Within this framework, debates were held, and the preacher spoke about ethics. Following the lessons, attendees would update the despot or his senior advisors on the highlights and controversial statements that were uttered by the farangi.56 According to Almeida, these events sparked “a great deal of fervor in the reduction enterprise [i.e., conversion], as there were many who zealously convinced those who had not received or had looked down upon our faith.”57 The Filioque was another bone of contention between the Society and the Ethiopian monks. Latin for “and from the son,” the Filioque was added to the Niceno-Constantinopolitan creed by the Catholics after the words “The Holy Ghost […] that comes from the Father and the Son.” This addendum caused friction between the Eastern and Western Churches. In fact, it was among the reasons for the Schism of 1054 between the Orthodox and Catholics. While the latter maintain that the Holy Ghost derives from both the Father and the Son, the Orthodox posit that only the Father begat the spirit.58 There is no evidence to suggest that the Filioque was a source of controversy within the Ethiopian Church, or that the institution was forced to take a side in this dispute before the Jesuits reached the Horn of Africa. According to a number of historians, it was the Spanish church that inserted the Filioque into the creed during the Council of Toledo (589).59 If so, it seems only natural that the Ethiopians would have continued reciting the Niceno-Constantinopolitan version of the creed. At any rate, the Jesuit attacks forced them to muster the following defense for what had hitherto been a “non-issue.” To begin with, Gälawdewos’s declaration of faith reads thus: “And we believe in the Holy Ghost, giver of life, who comes from the Father.”60 Mäzgäbä haymanot focuses on this question from an apologetic vantage point, grounding its case on ecclesiastical authority and scripture. For instance, the work cites “Bishop Cyriacus” of Bahnasah:61 “Let us not mix so it is not 56 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 7:6. 57 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 7:6. 58 Timothy Ware (1934–2022) delves into this controversy and its ramifications on the Schism of 1054; Ware, The Orthodox Church (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), 51–81. 59 Gonzalo Martínez Diez and Félix Rodríguez, eds., La colección canónica Hispánica (Madrid: C.S.I.C., 1984), 4:340; Ignacio Escribano Alberca, “Toledo, Councils of,” in New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 14:189–91; Luis A. García Moreno, Historia de España visigoda (Madrid: Cátedra, 1989), 132–38. 60 Ullendorff, “Confessio fidei of King Claudius,” 159–76, here 166. 61 A few scholars aver that Cyriacus, the bishop of al-Bahnasā, composed the eight homilies. That said, opinions differ not only as to the period in which this figure was active but whether he actually existed. René-Georges Coquin, “Cyriacus,” in Atiya, Coptic Encyclopedia, 3:669–71.

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confusing; let us not divide it so it is not divided and differentiated.”62 Resting on the Gospel according to John, Mäzgäbä haymanot reaffirms the theological position that the Holy Ghost derives exclusively from the Father: “And from me [i.e., the Father] he shall take.63 In truth, the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father, was taken by the Son, and spoke through the prophets and the apostles.”64 During the 1600s, this question headlined the Jesuit–Ethiopian Christological debate. Varying interpretations of the pertinent sources triggered disagreements over the church fathers’ authority to interpolate and alter the creed. To recite the Filioque became tantamount to recognizing the Catholic faith, whereas its omission was akin to a “pledge” of allegiance to the Ethiopian– Alexandrine tradition. Needless to say, Ethiopian Christology rejected the Filioque in no uncertain terms. The origin of individual souls was another sore point between Jesuits and Ethiopian monks. Both Páez and Almeida devoted an entire chapter of their works to “the errors of the Ethiopians concerning the rational souls.”65 In addition, Fernandes’s Magseph Assetat includes several chapters on this question.66 As early as the mid-1500s, the Ethiopians responded to the Society’s arguments on this issue. More specifically, the fifth chapter of Mäzgäbä haymanot unfurls the Orthodox view on the Catholic position: According to what is said [by the Latins], it is not true that the human being takes the soul of her mother and her father; instead, on the fourth day of her birth, God sends her another soul that is not Adam’s. Its nature is unique. Only when the newborn’s formation is complete does the Lord 62 This alludes to a passage from the Anaphora of Mary, which is attributed to Cyriacus of al-Bahnasā. See Cerulli, Scritti teologici, 2:71; Sebastian Euringer, “Die Ȁthiopische Anaphora Unserer Herrin Maria,” Oriens Christianus 34 (1927): 63–102, 84–85. In contrast, Getatchew Haile posits that this work was penned by Samuʾel, the abba of the Wali monastery during the reign of Emperor Dawit I (d.1413, r.1382–1413). To strengthen this case, Getatchew Haile notes that medieval Ethiopian authors were wont to attribute the fruit of their own labor to saints of the indigenous church; see his “On the Identity of Silondis and the Composition of the Anaphora of Mary Ascribed to Hereyaqos of Behensa,” Orientalia christiana periodica 49 (1983): 366–89. 63 John 16:14. 64 Cerulli, Scritti teologici, 2:5 [Gǝʿǝz] and 71 [Italian]. 65 Patriarch Mendes and António Fernandes also broached this subject, albeit in less detail; see Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 8:62; “Excerptum epistolae p. Antonii Fernandez ad visitatorem Indiarum. 3 iun. 1610,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 11:202. 66 Fernandes, Magseph Assetat, chapters 48–57, fols. 174–202.

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send him another soul, which does not come from [the] blood [of the mother] or [the father’s] semen. This is what they say and teach.67 Following this summary of the Catholic view, the author immediately turned to the Orthodox position whereby all souls derive from Adam’s and are transmitted from parent to child. Composed of the four basic elements,68 the first human being received his soul after God breathed life into him. With body and soul intact, man had come to fruition. Thereafter, Mäzgäbä haymanot presents the Orthodox belief that there is but one soul:69 Is it not true […] that when God finished his creation there came Saturday and rest? Could he have rested had he not yet created the souls of Abel, Cain, and Seth? However, the souls of those fathers were rendered out of Adam’s soul, and so were their bodies. And now God rests. And had the souls of Abel and Cain not been created out of the substance [baḥrǝyawi] of Adam’s soul, but […] out of another substance, the Lord would not have finished his work and could not have rested on Saturday, for he would have had to create the souls, the heavens, and the angels. And to prove my point, Moses says: “And on the seventh day God finished the 67 Cerulli, Scritti teologici, 2:25 [Gǝʿǝz] and 92 [Italian]. Also see “Märs amin,” in Cerulli, Scritti teologici, 1:251 [Gǝʿǝz] and 292–93 [Italian]. This topic came up earlier in the annals of the church. According to the doctrine of traducianism, the human soul is passed onto children by their parents. See Frank Leslie Cross and Elizabeth A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1636. The patristic literature on this topic is difficult to fathom, and there is a multiplicity of views. Traducianism was advocated by some of the fathers, especially Tertullian in his De anima (chapters 23–41); Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., The Anti-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325 (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1956–62), 3:213–20, 25–26. Though Augustine grappled with this question several times in his works, he did not reach a definitive conclusion. As a result, many Latin fathers wavered on this issue. That said, most lean toward creationism and repudiate traducianism. In the Ethiopian Church, traducianism is considered a fundamental precept. A case in point is The Mystery of the Trinity—an Ethiopian manual of theology composed by Abunä Matewos (1846–1926) in 1911. For an annotated Italian translation, see Enrico Cerulli, “Il mistero della Trinità: Manuale di teologia della Chiesa Etiopica monofisita tradotto dall’amarico,” Orientalia christiana periodica 12 (1946): 47–129, esp. 50–51 and 102–10. 68 Some Syrian church fathers, among them Išʿodad of Merv (d.850) and Theodore of Mopsuestia (350–428), maintained that the visible world was created out of the four elements (water, air, earth, and fire); see Taeke Jansma, “Investigations into the Early Syrian Fathers on Genesis,” Oudtestamentische Studiën 12 (1958): 69–181, here 135. 69 Cerulli, Scritti teologici, 2:25–26 [Gǝʿǝz] and 92–93 [Italian].

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work that he had been doing; and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done.” (Gen. 2:2).70 Given the Christological and theological ramifications of this biblical passage, there is a strong likelihood that the Jesuits and Ethiopian monks waged formidable debates over its meaning. Fernandes indeed devotes an entire chapter of his Magseph Assetat to interpreting Genesis 2:2. Building on the exegesis of church fathers like Basil (329–79), Ambrose (339–97), and Justin (100–165), the Portuguese missionary formulated his own: He blessed the seventh day and consecrated it because on this day he rested from all his creation. For this reason, the scripture states: God rested on the seventh day to render it holy. It does not say that he stopped creating ad infinitum. God created what is evident and visible. This refutes the argument of those who erroneously believe that God rested from his creation and did not create anything else. And this suffices to convince those who erroneously say that God does not create the rational souls of men, for Genesis states “and God rested from the creation of his works.” This attests to the fact that God creates the souls of men ex nihilo.71 Páez also commented on this verse in one of his Portuguese-language works: I responded that the divine scripture there meant nothing more than that on the seventh day Our Lord God stopped creating anymore new things or in a new way that he had created the others, but he still governs and multiplies the works that he made in those first days. Thus Christ Our Lord says in Saint John, chapter 5, that his Father and he work until now.72 Therefore it is not inconvenient that he now creates souls, because they are not new things, nor does he create them in a new way than that 70 Cerulli, Scritti teologici, 26 [Gǝʿǝz] and 93 [Italian]. Also see “Märs amin,” in Cerulli, Scritti teologici, 1:251–52 [Gǝʿǝz] and 293 [Italian]. 71 Cerulli, Scritti teologici, 175. My italics. 72 Augustine writes in his Epistle 166 addressed to Jerome: “To avoid prolixity, therefore, let me refer to the opinion which you, I believe, entertain, viz. That God even now makes each soul for each individual at the time of birth. To meet the objection to this view, which might be taken from the fact that God finished the whole work of creation on the sixth day and rested on the seventh day, you quote the testimony of the words in the Gospel, ‘My father worked hitherto, and I work’ [John 5:17] […] Behold, I am willing that the opinion you hold should be also mine; but I assured you that as yet I have not embraced it.” See Augustine, “A Treatise on the Origin of the Human Soul, Addressed to Jerome,” in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church,

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in which he created the first soul, and God is not kept busy in creating so many every day because, as David says in Psalm 148, he only spoke, and they were made: he commanded, and they were created. In this way, he could create a thousand other worlds if he wished.73 In this excerpt, Fernandes coined the idea that God created Adam and Eve’s soul from naught. Leaning on the Old and New Testaments, as well as the church fathers, he posited that “the soul of man is immortal and incorruptible.” This notion would become so deeply embedded in Catholic thought that Christological interpretations were derived thereof. Páez offered a rather succinct description of his adversaries’ stance: The Ethiopian church opines that our Lord God does not create rational souls, but they come from the parents. What is more, even Christ our Lord’s soul was taken from the Holy Spirit, from the most holy soul of the Virgin our Lady, for God only created Adam’s soul; and others say that he made it out of the four elements.74 In earlier chapters of his treatise, Páez cited directly from the Mäzgäbä haymanot. As can be expected, his critique of the Ethiopian view refers to the section of this Orthodox work on the origin of Christ’s soul and its relation to that of Adam. The following is Mäzgäbä haymanot’s stance on this topic: But there is a greater argument than the ones we have presented: if man did not take his soul from his father and mother, Christ would not have taken his soul from Our Lady Mary, but the empty body and the soul would have come down from the heavens. Does not this statement contain a heresy? If this is the case, the soul of Christ would not be Adam’s—the one that came down to siʾol [Sheol] where the souls are chained. Why would another soul have to free Adam’s soul from siʾol, if it is alien to his own? This [alas] is not the case: Christ received his full body and soul from the Virgin Our Lady Mary, and she is Adam’s daughter.75

ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, trans. J. G. Cunningham, 1st series (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1988), 1:523–32. 73 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:348. 74 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 347. The motif of the four basic elements also turns up in ʿAsärtu täsǝʾǝlotat; Cerulli, Scritti teologici, 2:200 [Gǝʿǝz] and 225 [Italian]. 75 Cerulli, Scritti teologici, 2:29 [Gǝʿǝz] and 96 [Italian].

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The Ethiopian view indeed falls under the heading of traducianism. It was with this in mind that Páez formulated this counterattack. An entire chapter of Fernandes’s Magseph Assetat is devoted to the Ethiopian view76 whereby Jesus’s soul did not come from the Virgin but was created by God. The Jesuit begins by quoting the so-called contradiction between verses stating that God was born of the Virgin, of the lineage of David,77 and John’s passage stating that “the Word was made flesh.” To reconcile these passages, Fernandes inferred that the human nature of Christ was the product of both body and soul. More specifically, the Holy Ghost fashioned the body inside the Virgin’s womb, where Jesus’s soul was rendered.78 In other texts and disputations, both Catholics and Orthodox dwelled on the subject of whether the creation lasted beyond the sixth day. As per the Ethiopian andǝmta79 commentary on Genesis 2:2, “after the six days of creation” nothing else would be brought into the world ex nihilo. Instead, the existing species would procreate on their own.80 This rendering prompted the Catholics to asseverate that the genesis picked up again after the Sabbath. This question evolved into a matter of Christological significance for both the Latins and the Orthodox Ethiopians. What is more, the opposing views became identity markers that distinguished one camp from the next. Apart from the Christological disputations, monks were accused of hatching “mythological” interpretations of sacred texts. Jesuits were indeed highly suspicious of such mythical readings.81 A case in point is the commentary on biblical verses that pertain to the leviathan and tannin (commonly translated as sea monsters). Likewise, Genesis 6:1–2 tells of the Nephilim, or sons of God, who descended to earth and “took wives from among” the daughters of man. These mythical vestiges in the Bible tempted exegetes into complementing the narrative with legends of preternatural occurrences. 76 Cerulli, Scritti teologici, 2:29 [Gǝʿǝz] and 96 [Italian]. 77 Fernandes, Magseph Assetat, chapter 51, fols. 179–82. 78 To bolster his argument, Fernandes cited from Matthew 1:18: “Before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost”; Fernandes, Magseph Assetat, chapter 52, fol. 182. 79 The term andǝmta designates a vast corpus which contains traditional interpretations of religious texts. 80 Roger W. Cowley, Ethiopian Biblical Interpretation: A Study in Exegetical Tradition and Hermeneutics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 262. Similar remarks were made by the Syrian fathers; see Jansma, “Investigations into the Early Syrian Fathers,” 135. 81 “If a breach,” Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit observe, “is any point of a tale which incites an interpreter to fill it with detail, then a mythical breach is one which, by introducing creatures or mythical events, needs to be completed with a mythical tale” (my italics). As we have seen, the Bible is “susceptible” to such breaches. Halbertal and Margalit, Idolatry, trans. Naomi Goldblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 76.

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Páez recounted interpretations concerning the sea monsters and Nephilim that he had heard from Ethiopian monks. To the Jesuit, such commentaries were nothing but fables and yarn, lies rooted in ignorance or incomprehension. These tales, he asserted, were swayed by deleterious external factors that had permeated the kingdom’s religious consciousness, such as Jewish tradition and biases. In his history of Ethiopia, Páez mentioned a commentary on Genesis 6 that was authored by a respected local authority on the scriptures who was also a confidant of Susǝnyos: I was talking to the emperor about certain things of the scripture, he told me that when that monk who taught him came to explain that part of Genesis 6 that says: “Videntes filii Dei filias hominum quod essent pulchrae” etc. he had told him that those that the scripture here call sons of God were angels, and that when they saw that the women were fair, they joined with them and they gave birth to a giant son of such a great and extraordinary stature that they would plunge their arms right down to the bottom of the ocean sea and, standing up, they would roast the fish that they had taken from there in the region of fire. And when they destroyed all the fish that were in the sea, they started on the animals. When these were finished, they started to eat the men who were not of their race. And when God saw such shamelessness, he sent the waters of the deluge [with] which [he] punished them.82 As part of his mission, Páez felt obliged to debunk fantastical stories and demythologize religious history. These objectives were of a piece with the dictum that Bernard Fontenelle (1657–1757) coined a hundred years later: “Men see marvels in proportion to their ignorance and lack of experience.”83 Like other Jesuits, Páez often labeled Ethiopian monks ignoramuses and claimed that they were overly credulous. Espousing Augustine’s view that Nephilim were merely the descendants of Seth, he undertook to demythologize interpretations

82 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:224–25. Jewish sages first identified the Nephilim with angels upon encountering the Persian religious literature in the aftermath of the exile. Geo Widengren, “Iran and Israel in Parthian Times with Special Regard to the Ethiopic Book of Enoch,” Temenos 2 (1966): 139–77; W. B. [Walter Bruno] Henning, “The Book of Giants,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 11 (1943): 52–74; J. T. [Józef Tadeusz] Milik, “Turfan et Qumran: Livre des Géants juif et manicheén,” in Tradition und Glaube: Das frühe Christentum in seiner Unwel, ed. Gert Jeremias, Heinz-Wolfgang Khun, and Hartmut Stegemann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971), 117–27. 83 Preus, Explaining Religion, 42.

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whereby these “men of renown” (Genesis 6:4) were portrayed as remarkable or heavenly beings who, as in pagan myths, challenged God’s will. This same spirit animates Páez’s critique of an Ethiopian commentary on Psalm 104:26,84 which underpins a monastic funerary custom. In his History of Ethiopia, the missionary quoted the Latin rendering of this verse (Draco iste, quem formasti ad illudendum ei)85 before unfurling his adversaries’ interpretation: They say that at the beginning of the world Our Lord God created two fishes of immense size, male and a female, but he saw that, if by generation they multiplied, they would hinder navigation, so he killed the female and stored it so that with it he could invite the just to a splendid feast after the resurrection; meanwhile he plays with the male for three hours every day. And they say that this is what those words from the Psalm mean.86 Since Páez dutifully cited written sources, it stands to reason that this commentary reached his desk from an oral source. Moreover, the Jesuit described a baḥtawi custom in which members are laid to rest with a knife tied to their waist for the purpose of being able to carve the leviathan at the great banquet on resurrection day.87 At this point, he explained that Jews have brainwashed Ethiopians with these sorts of “rabbinic fables.”88 To Páez, this exegesis presents the transcendent God in an opportunistic and disrespectful manner. In the monks’ literal reading of Psalm 104:26, he contends, the Lord interacts with his own creation in a daft manner. Furthermore, the missionary brought up the colorful funerary ritual in order to demonstrate that the monks truly believe in this literal interpretation. In light of the above, the argument can be made that this commentary is a “living myth.” As Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit put it in a more general context, these sorts of readings and customs involve “an understanding of the seriousness of the

84 This verse can be rendered thus: “There go the ships, and the leviathan you formed to sport with.” 85 As per the Septuagint, Páez places this verse in chapter 103. Páez’s quotation corresponds to Psalm 104:24–26: “Earth is completely full of things you have made: among them vast expanse of ocean, teeming with countless creatures, creatures large and small, with the ships going to and fro, and leviathan whom you made to amuse you.” 86 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:416. 87 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:416. 88 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:416.

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wording.”89 The sacrament under review imparts the tale with a mythical or sacred character that, much to Páez’s chagrin, is liable to be interpreted in the literal sense of the word. Another conspicuous element of the Spaniard’s invective is his emphasis on the connection between this exegesis and what he calls “rabbinic fables.” In the process, Páez questions the legitimacy of the Rabbinic Midrash’s prevalent reading of the verse. This sort of interpretation had been a target of the church’s attacks on Judaism since antiquity, through the Middle Ages, and up to the early modern period. More specifically, these kinds of legends, which the church deemed “imprudent” accounts of the biblical God, were often condemned with greater severity than other widespread sub-genres.90 Páez also mentioned another commentary that he had heard from Susǝnyos’s advisor. In the missionary’s telling, the emperor had asked the monk how the Israelites multiplied so prolifically in Egypt. The ecclesiastic replied that the first time the Israelite women gave birth they had twins, whereupon the output doubles every subsequent delivery.91 This explanation alludes to Exodus 1:7: “But the Israelites were fertile and prolific; they multiplied and increased abundantly, so the land was filled with them.” As in the previous case, there is a striking resemblance between this exegesis and a Rabbinic interpretation according to which the women miraculously conceived of as many as twelve children from a single womb (a few sages even go as high as seventy). A fine example is Midrash Exodus Rabbah 1:8:

89 Halbertal and Margalit, Idolatry, 80–81. As defined by Mircea Eliade (1907–86), a myth is “‘living,’ in the sense that it supplies models for human behavior and, by that very fact, gives meaning and value to life.” Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968), 2. 90 As antagonism toward Judaism intensified among the medieval church militant, the group’s representatives tendentiously mined the Midrash for interpretations to bolster Christian attacks on the Mosaic faith, especially its contemporaneous outlooks. Chen-Melech Merchavia, The Church versus Talmudic and Midrashic Literature (500–1248) (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1970), 5–6 [Hebrew]. Peter the Venerable (1092–1156) stipulated that pagan fables mocking the upright, in which, say, animals spoke, men turned into gods, and women became stars, could be tolerated, whereas brazen Jewish legends are off limits under any circumstances. The latter, he claimed, are differentiated from the myths of other nations by their complete lack of moral or practical benefit. To the contrary, they are utterly foolish, heretical, and devoid of form and content. In issuing this injunction, Peter affirmed earlier church positions demanding allegorical interpretations of the Bible, rather than the literal counterparts favored by the Jewish exegetes. Merchavia, Church versus Talmudic and Midrashic Literature, 133–35. 91 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:225.

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Each woman bore six at one birth, for it is said: and the children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly. Others say: twelve, because the word paru implies two, wa-yishreẓu another two, wa-yirbu another two, wa-yeʿaẓmu, another two, bi-meʾod meʾod another two, and the land was filled with them, another two—this making twelve in all. And they increased abundantly [wa-yishreẓu]—some say, giving birth to six at once. Do not be surprised, for the scorpion, which is one of the reptiles [sheraẓim], gives birth to seventy at once.92 This sort of commentary revolves around a play on words—an undertaking for which the Hebrew language is most amenable. For instance, the Midrashic collection Pesikta de-Rav Kahana (Sections of Rav Kahana) tells of a conversation between two amora’im (Jewish sages from roughly 200 to 500 CE) on the meaning of the word vayyišrěṣu (increased abundantly), which is a derivative of šereṣ (small animal): “The Israelites, being as fertile as small animals, multiplied and increased very greatly,” and then commented: the verse gives us an idea of just how fertile the Israelites were, for if by “small animal” is meant the largest of small animals, the mouse, it bears six young at the time; if the smallest of small animals, the scorpion, is meant, it bears sixty at the time.93 The interpretation that Páez brought up evidently derives from the Midrashic tradition. Though Gǝʿǝz is a Semitic language, it does not allow for the dual meaning expressed by the Hebrew original shereẓ.94 In any event, scholars are hard-pressed to determine the moment and means by which quite a few of these sorts of translations reached the Horn of Africa. It also bears noting that Christian interpretations of this verse are more typological.95 92

This rendering draws heavily on H. [Harry] Freedman and Maurice Simon, eds., Midrash Rabbah, trans. S. M. Lehrman (London: Soncino Press, 1951), 3:8–9. 93 Pĕsiḳta dĕ-Raḇ Kahăna, trans. William G. [Gershon Zev] Braude and Israel J. Kapstein (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1975), 211. 94 The verbal form ṡaraṣa can be translated as germinate, sprout, proceed from, grow, and flourish. Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez, 535. In contrast, Ethiopian renderings use the term ḥaqäfä (enormous), precluding typical Rabbinic wordplay. See Oscar Boyd, ed., The Octateuch in Ethiopic: According to the Text of the Paris Codex, with the Variants of Five Other Manuscripts; Part II, Exodus and Leviticus (Leiden: Brill, 1911), 2:1; Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez, 239. 95 On the other hand, a typological interpretation, such as the one provided by Saint Caesarius of Arles, offers an unequivocally Christian reading of the verse in question. In sermon 94, the bishop explained that Joseph had prefigured Christ in that he too attracted

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Addressing the monk’s exegesis, Páez quipped that “the poor things [i.e., the Israelite women] were certainly forced to bear a very large burden for several months. And anyway, after they gave birth, how much milk and how many breasts would they need to nurse such a great multitude of children […]?” On hearing this remark, the Jesuit recalled, Susǝnyos laughed for several long moments before remarking: “Your Reverence will see from that what our teachers are like, and this one was even one of the most renowned that we have.”96 This account bears witness to Páez’s disdain for commentaries with fantastical-cum-miraculous elements that are difficult for a rational reader to accept at face value. As opposed to miracles in the New Testament, this narrative lacks a clear divine hand, or even a mediator between God and man. While believing in supernatural events, the father assumed that they can only take place via divine intervention. Unlike the leviathan commentary, the father did not identify a Rabbinic influence over this reading, even though the circumstances were ripe for such an attribution. Nevertheless, his criticism might be the outgrowth of a patristic attitude toward traditional Jewish exegesis. Put differently, the church objected to literal interpretations bereft of Christian and spiritual content. It is worth recalling that Cyril and Jerome, inter alios, deemed the Midrash narrative a historical source of information on certain biblical passages. However, the church fathers had a classical grammar-oriented perspective that was not shared by Jewish exegetes.97 Likewise, Páez’s sardonic view detaches the reading from its original context, which is less historiographical than the Catholic approach. In addition, he evaluates the commentary using criteria that are alien to this narrational genre. In sum, Páez reproved an Ethiopian exegesis that most likely reached him by word of mouth. As a missionary aspiring to convert the African kingdom to Catholicism, it was incumbent upon him to demonstrate the “fallacy” of the rival ecclesiastics. At any rate, this particular tradition does not turn up in any other existing source. Páez made a value judgment on this interpretation, harping on a putative misunderstanding ostensibly caused by a spiritually deficient message. The Jesuit’s narrative underscores the faint and crude mythological vestiges in the Bible. Confronting what he deemed to be absurd literal interpretations, Páez put forth an alternative exegetical method. As a church representative, he asserted that “mythical breaches” of sacred text engender few believers over his lifetime. After the passing of both saints, though, the ranks of the Israelites and Christians swelled. Caesarius of Arles, Sermons, trans. Mary Magdeleine Mueller (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1981), 2:61. 96 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:225. 97 Adam Kamesar, “The Evaluation of the Narrative Aggada in Greek and Latin Patristic Literature,” Journal of Theological Studies 45, no. 1 (1994): 39–42.

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thorny contradictions. From a strictly monotheistic standpoint, the divinity would not have brought the genesis into fruition, only to then leave his creatures to their own devices. To the contrary, God periodically intervenes, revealing his will via historic events. If so, and as we have seen, “mythical breaches” in the scriptural text are fertile ground for heated encounters between members of competing exegetical schools. Páez’s criticism of literal commentators also targets popular religion. As a self-styled post-Tridentine evangelical purist, the theologian felt obliged to take swift action against these sorts of manifestations. In a similar vein, he described the Ethiopian Church as wielding excessive interpretational autonomy, which begat popular tales and myths that diverge from the official Catholic narrative. Jesuits occasionally blamed these Ethiopian “legends and lies” on a “rabbinic connection” that spread misguided Jewish readings. Likewise, the missionaries excoriated many Old Testament rituals that local Christians practiced. Denouncing these sacraments as “pure Judaism,” the order’s emissaries urged the populace to abandon them. Regardless of whether there was actually a direct link between the Orthodox and Rabbinic traditions, Páez undoubtedly aspired to discredit the local church’s exegesis. Similar to his outlook on the Jewish commentaries, he viewed the Ethiopian analogs as excessively literal and absurd, especially in all that concerned depictions of God. This type of stricture was intended to undermine the authority and intellectual sway of the kingdom’s leading monks over the local elite. 2

Degenerate Christianity

Consistent with the ideas of their Portuguese forbearers, a couple of the earliest Jesuits discerned a religion or faith-based sect in yogism.98 As noted earlier, the missionaries classified the religious world that they had come across since Xavier’s landfall in Goa under the general heading of gentilic faith. During his tenure in Cochin, Amador Correia (dates unknown) reported that India is home to five religious communities: Christians, gentiles, Moors, Jews, and

98

The Portuguese chronicler Fernão Lopes de Castanheda described yogis as “men of a certain religion among gentiles who roam the world making feasts and pagodes and houses of worship for their sects.” Lopes de Castanheda, História do descobrimento & conquista da Ïndia pelos Portugueses, books 1 and 2, ed. Pedro de Azevedo (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade, 1924), 89.

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yogis.99 Likewise, Sebastián Fernandes divided the populace into idolaters, Moors, Jews, and Jogues, “who are like preaching priests.”100 In any event, all the missionaries on the sub-continent grappled with the following questions: What do the yogis believe in? Are they practitioners of some degenerate form of Christianity, or a completely different faith? And are they idolaters or superstitious theists? An interesting approach to the ascetics’ worldview turns up in the writing of Henriques, who thought that yogism was a debased form of Christianity. As illustrated in the opening chapter, since Vasco da Gama’s visit to the Calicut “Church,” the Portuguese harbored hopes of finding the mythical Christianity of the East and recruiting their long-lost co-religionists for the struggle against the Muslims.101 We have already discussed how the Society of Jesus perceived the Ethiopian Church as a degenerate form of Christianity. While rooted in Orthodoxy, it had slowly succumbed to heresy. The Jesuit outlook on yogism ran along similar lines. The search for remnants of Christianity in Hinduism was not the sole preserve of the Iberian missionaries or, for that matter, Occidental clergy. In his exposition on this period, Donald F. Lach (1917–2000) demonstrates that this was a pan-European phenomenon: “The Europeans also persist in believing that the Hindus adhere to some early forms of Christianity, which they were forced to give up or modify under pressure from the Muslims. Consequently, they seek to associate Hindu practices with Christian beliefs rather than trying to understand Hinduism for itself.”102 Henriques was among the first Jesuits to establish a warm relationship with a yogi. Within this framework, he made every effort to decipher his acquaintance’s beliefs. Henriques deepened these ties by virtue of his swift acquisition of Tamil—the local tongue. As a result, he did not have to rely on interpreters and translators that were struggling to adequately explain Christian doctrine

99 “Fr. Amator Correia S.I. Cuidam Fratri S.I. In Lusitaniam. Cocino 15 Ianuarii 1565,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 6:430. 100 “Fr. Sebastianus Fernandes S.I. Ex. Comm. P. Francisco Borgiae, praep. gen. S.I. Goa [Novembri Exeunte] 1569,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 8:45. 101 Henn, Hindu–Catholic Encounters in Goa, 22. 102 Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, 1:426. According to Michael N. Pearson, Malabar’s non-Muslim inhabitants appeared to be some sort of Christians. Tomé Pires, an apothecary and passionate student of Malay-Indonesian society, thought that Hindus had once practiced Christianity but lost their faith amid the rise of Islam. For Duarte Barbosa, a military officer from Portuguese India, the teachings of the Gujarati Brahmins were highly redolent of the Trinity. Pearson, Portuguese in India, 116; Henn, Hindu–Catholic Encounters in Goa, 30–31.

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to Indian audiences.103 In building these bonds, the scholar was following Xavier’s advice to conduct a detailed study of foreign ascetics’ life for the purpose of reaping the spiritual benefit.104 By virtue of these steps, Henriques managed to penetrate the beliefs of some yogis. In November 1549, the missionary wrote about the friendship he had struck up with a “wise and virtuous ascetic.” Besides these qualities, Henriques posited that his interlocutor held a monotheistic worldview and was perpetually contemplating God. The Jesuit also claimed that the yogi loathed pagodes,105 even before adopting the Christian faith. During one of their conversations, Henriques posed a question that was apparently of relevance to his own Christian outlook: “Among gentiles there are men who seem to lead a virtuous life; if they died, would they go to hell or paradise?” As per an established Catholic historical outlook, idolatry is symptomatic of moral perversion.106 If so, a possible corollary to this stance is that a pious life is indicative of adherence to the one true doctrine. The yogi 103 “P. Henricus Henriques S.I. Pp. Ignatio de Loyola, Simoni Rodrigues Ceterisque Patribus in Europa Degentibus. E Vembar 31 Octobris 1548,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:286. 104 Francis Xavier, “Instructio pro P. Barzaeo, Armuziam profecturio. Goae Ineunte Aprili 1549,” in Monumenta Xaveriana (Madrid: Typis Gabrielis Lopez del Horno, 1912), 2:97–98. 105 Sebastião Rodolfo Dalgado (1855–1922) points out four meanings that the Portuguese in India attached to pagodes: idols (i.e., representations of Asian gods or saints); Hindu temples or, by extension, the mosques of Moors and Buddhist houses of worship; a gold coin in circulation throughout southern India; and a raucous or licentious feast. As in earlier cases, Henriques was most likely using pagode in the first two senses of the word. See Sebastião Rodolfo Dalgado, Glossário luso-asiático (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade, 1921), 2:129–37. 106 In the annals of monotheism, idolatry has the broader sense of worshipping false gods. This is a major theme of the biblical prophets who harped on the emptiness of false deities, asserting that they are nothing more than pieces of wood or stone—a position that the church fully adopted. “As for your images,” Tertullian wrote, “I shall only observe that they are material, and often of the same matter of your common utensils.” Tertullian, The Apology of Tertullian, trans. W. [William] M. Reeve (London: Griffith Farran & Co., 1890), chapter 12, 41. Likewise, Clement of Alexandria opined that “I bring the statues themselves and place them by your side for inspection; you will find on going through them that custom is truly nonsense, when it leads you to adore senseless things, ‘the works of men’s hands.’” The philosopher then drew a strong correlation as well as distinction between error and moral corruption. In his estimation, pagan gods are demons, shadows, and notoriously unclean spirits. Beyond the inherent folly of idol worship, there is a Christian outlook that perceives moral perversion as an outgrowth of error. As tools of Satan, idols arouse sensuality and desire. On the other hand, the monotheistic cult of the true God, Clement averred, confers dignity onto the believer and nourishes a life of fulfillment. Clement of Alexandria, The Exhortation to the Greeks: The Rich Man’s Salvation and the Fragment of an Address Entitled “To the Newly Baptized”, trans. G. W. [George William] Butterworth (London: William Heinemann, 1919), 101–43.

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replied that worshipping pagodes and comparable iniquities negated a spot in heaven,107 for it is irreconcilable with the monotheistic tradition. Thanks to these bonds, Henriques was able to examine yogi customs and gauge whether these were manifestations of a “true” faith. These inroads notwithstanding, the first Jesuits in India were hard-pressed to absorb the rudiments of yogism. To reiterate, a few of the missionaries labeled its practitioners superstitious magi, whereas others considered them victims of oblivion. Throughout the world, the Society’s emissaries interpreted the local foundation myths and other legends as distortions of the biblical narrative. For example, Jesuits attributed Catholic elements to Indian versions of the creation and deluge stories.108 However, the narrative was obfuscated by a cloud of forgetfulness that had settled over the original “facts.” As such, Henriques asserted that yogism still bore a “kernel of truth” from the Bible. While Jesuits considered the worship of the Lord a historical and personal endeavor, the cult of other gods lacks a historical impetus. In a similar vein, monotheistic speakers have long associated idolatry with forgetfulness. Conversely, they posit that God continuously demands remembrance.109 This perspective undergirded Henriques’s commendation of his yogi interlocutor for not only leading “a righteous life” but believing in “one true God” and loathing “all pagodes.”110 This is one of the first references in the Society’s correspondence to a righteous yogi adhering to a monotheistic faith. What is more, Henriques acquainted his friend with key parts of the Genesis narrative, such

107 “P. Henricus Henriques S.I. Pp. Ignatio de Loyola, Simoni Rodrigues ceterisque patribus in Europa degentibus. E Vembar 31 Octobris 1548,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:292–94. 108 Throughout the 1500s and 1600s, sundry observers discerned traces of the flood narrative in all corners of the earth. Guy G. Stroumsa cites various examples of such vestiges, ranging from Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua to the Orient and China; Stroumsa, New Science, 79. In his treatise on Chile’s indigenous people, Diego de Rosales, the seventeenth-century Jesuit, wrote that they “have no knowledge of writing, sacred or profane, or memory of the creation or the beginning of the world or men; only some inkling of the Deluge from a number of signs given to them by the Lord, through which they would know him.” However, the devil confuses them, according to Rosales, with a litany of lies and deceptive practices, so that they are blind to the original cause of the flood, namely the sins of mankind. Rosales, Historia general de el Reino de Chile, Flandes Indiano, selection, prologue, and notes by Alfonso Calderón (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1969), 17–18. 109 Halbertal and Margalit, Idolatry, 31. 110 “P. Henricus Henriques S.I. Pp Ignatio de Loyola, Simoni Rodrigues ceterisque patribus in Europa digentibus. E Vembar 31 Octobris 1548,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:291.

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as the fall of Adam and the deception of Eve. On the other hand, he claimed that the yogi interpolated falsehoods into the creation story.111 Josef Wicki (1904–93) suggests that Henriques was familiar with the tale of Rāmā. As the incarnation of Vishnu, the deity descended to earth as a human warrior to kill the demon king Rāvaṇa, who had taken his wife, the goddess Sītā, hostage.112 Though we are not privy to the exact version of the story that had come to the Jesuit’s attention, he may very well have transformed its content into a quaint fable of how Satan deceived Eve. Missionaries indeed believed that a major factor behind the oblivion of Christianity on the sub-continent was the gradual distortion of various biblical narratives. Though the Lord’s message, according to the Society’s representatives, had somehow been transmitted to the groups they encountered, a number of the stories had been markedly obfuscated. The same can also be said for the Trinity. In Barzeo’s estimation, yogis had inherited some vague knowledge of this concept113—power with the Father, wisdom with the Son, and grace with the Holy Ghost114—from the philosophers.

111 Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:291–92. 112 Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:292. Also see Robert P. Goldman, ed. and trans., The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1:9; Velcheru Narayana Rao, “Rāmāyaṇa,” in Eliade, Encyclopedia of Religion, 12:213–15. 113 “P. Gaspar Barzaeus S.I. Sociis S.I. in India et Europa degentibus. Armuzia 1 Decembris 1549,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:629. As per Francisco de Borja’s mystical interpretation, the Trinity matches up “three powers of the soul […] so that they become a true domicile and mansion of the three Divine Persons.” Each of these powers is bestowed to one of the divinities: memory to the Father, wisdom to the Son, and will to the Holy Ghost. Francisco de Borja, Tratados espirituales, ed. Juan Flors (Barcelona: Centro de Estudios de Espiritualidad, 1964), 9. 114 As Barzeo put it: “They worship a ternary God.” “P. Gaspar Barzeus S.I. P. Ignatio de Loyola, Romam. Goa 16 Decembris 1551,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 2:253. These ideas were planted by early sixteenth-century Portuguese writers. For example, the historian Fernão Lopes de Castanheda argued that the Brahmans believe in a “single god,” numerous devils, who must be propitiated, the transmigration of souls, and in paradise and hell. Furthermore, he averred that “they have hints of the birth of our Lord and his sufferings, venerate the picture of Our Lady, and on festive occasions wash themselves as a kind of baptismal rite.” See Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, 1:387. Between 1513 and 1515, Duarte Barbosa delved into Brahmanism. The Portuguese officer came to the conclusion that Brahmins worship their “idols” with elaborate ceremonies, processions, and regular offerings. On the other hand, “they also ‘honor the Trinity,’ to which they refer as ‘Berma [Brahma], Besma [Vishnu] and Maceru [Maheshvara] who are three persons and only one God, whom they confess to have [existed] since the beginning of the world.” Henn, Hindu–Catholic Encounters in Goa, 30–31.

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Gago, who had arrived on the sub-continent together with Barzeo,115 commented that yogis “have the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost;116 all of these are approved and await for a savior; they say that come what may, all will become Christians.”117 Similarly, Fróis intuited from a conversation with an ascetic that yogism upholds a single god consisting of three people. This idea, he averred, was passed on by Christians “who had come to these parts.”118 Alternatively, Henriques was told by a yogi that God has ten sons, rather than one.119 In all likelihood, this alludes to Viṣṇu’s avatars: a central motif in Hindu mythology according to which a single god comes down to earth and assumes a variety of forms.120 Jesuits also claimed that the yogis believe in false prophets that spread idolatry. This charge stems from Fróis’s account of a disputation that was held at Saint Paul’s College in Goa between Roiz and a yogi from the Ceylonian kingdom of Jaffna. The debate centered on the Bhagavadgītā Giītā,121 a canonical 115 For biographical details on Balthazar Gago, see Georg Schurhammer, Francisco Javier: Su vida y su tiempo India 1547–1549 (Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra, 1992), 3:375–76. 116 It stands to reason that both Gago and Barzeo equated the Hindu triad of Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu—representatives of the creative, destructive, and preservative principles, respectively—with the Christian Trinity. 117 “P. Balthasaris Gago S.I. excerpta e litteris P. Gasparis Barzaei sociis Goanis. Armuzia [Mense Septembri 1549] Missis,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:505. 118 According to Fróis, the yogis compared their divinity to the sandalwood (a small, evergreen tree): “In it are to be found color, shade, and scent, and each one is different from the other, and yet they are all still a sandalwood tree and their own Trinity; while constituting only one entity, they are three different things.” See “Carta geral do Irmão Luis,” in Silva Rêgo, Documentação para a história das missões, 222. 119 “P. Henricus Henriques S.I. Pp. Ignatio de Loyola, Simoni Rodrigues ceterisque patribus in Europa degentibus. E Vembar 31 Octobris 1548,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:289. 120 Despite the varying number of Viṣṇu Avatārs over different periods and across manifold Hindu traditions, most of the schools agree that there were ten: Matsya (the fish), Kūrma (the tortoise), Varāha (the boar), Narasiṃha (the man-lion), Vāmana (the dwarf), Paraśurāma (Rāmā wielding an ax), Rāmā of the Rāmāyaṇa, Kṛṣṇa, the Buddha, and Kalki. Each Avatar is destined to fulfill some task in the restoration of the cosmic order. Upon attaining its objective, the archetype disappears or returns to Viṣṇu. See David Kinsley, “Avatāra,” in Eliade, Encyclopedia of Religion, 2:14–15. 121 The Bhagavadgītā Giītā (Song of the Blessed Lord) is one of the most popular texts in the Indian religious corpus. Over the two thousand years of its existence, the work has continued to inspire and console readers. Even disillusioned Hindus are able to recite, or at least paraphrase, some of its verses. Passages from the Bhagavadgītā are chanted during renouncer initiation ceremonies. The myriad commentaries that the work has attracted, included those by Vedāntic philosophers and theologians, attest to its historic importance. See Eliot Deutsch and Lee Siegel, “Bhagavadgita,” in Eliade, Encyclopedia of Religion, 2:124–28, 124; Catherine A. Robinson, “Bhagavadgītā,” in Encyclopedia of Hinduism, ed.

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Hindu text that Roiz ascribed to “the prophet” Giītā.122 Possessing a version of this work, he cited passages therein with the objective of demonstrating that its prophecies are false. The Jesuit explained that the Bhagavadgītā’s first twelve volumes are dedicated to idolatry, as it promotes the worship of pagodes and the observance of gentile ceremonies. In the thirteenth volume, though, readers are abruptly beseeched to avoid such cults. Against this backdrop, Roiz asked his disputant whether Giītā had been an evil or ignorant man at the time he espoused these idolatrous practices.123 The yogi promptly responded that this volte-face only seems like a contradiction, for the book’s primary audience is the masses, who are guided by external senses. To lasso these readers in, the Bhagavadgītā initially enjoins them to continue adhering to their beloved idols. Once the book has won them over with external signs, it transitions to internal matters while demonstrating how little the former benefits them. These recommendations indeed surface in volume 13, which is designated for “spiritual” men.124 It turns out that Roiz’s arguments were based on a spate of misunderstandings that derived from poor, Christian-oriented translations of local religious concepts. To begin with, the Giītā is not a prophet. In fact, the idea of a prophet of God “sent” to preach his message to mankind is only prevalent in Western and Near Eastern societies.125 The Jesuit’s point of departure, then, is a patently Christian outlook: a world devoid of mythological forces that, as in the Old Testament, constitutes a theater of action for God and exceptional men.126 It is against this backdrop, then, that Roiz individualized the Giītā and imputed him with contradictory teachings. However, the Bhagavadgītā is not a prophet;127 Denise Cush, Catherine Robinson, and Michael York (London: Routledge, 2010), 83–86. There are many editions and translations of this canonical work, the most outstanding of which merit the attention of Deutsch and Siegel, “Bhagavadgita,” 128. Also see Angelika Malinar, “Bhagavadgītā,” in Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism, ed. Kurt A. Jacobsen (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 2:95–110. 122 At the original Gittaa. 123 “Carta geral do Irmão Luis Frois,” in Silva Rêgo, Documentação para a história das missões, 222. 124 “Carta geral do Irmão Luis Frois,” in Silva Rêgo, Documentação para a história das missões, 223. 125 The Greek word prophētēs left its mark on European languages, primarily due to the early Jewish and Christian writers who enlisted this term to describe protagonists of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. See Gerald T. Sheppard and William E. Herbrechtsmeier, “Prophecy,” in Eliade, Encyclopedia of Religion, 12:8–14. 126 Peter L. Berger, The Social Reality of Religion (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), 117–18. Also see “Carta geral do Irmão Luis Frois,” in Silva Rêgo, Documentação para a história das missões, 227. 127 Klostermaier, Concise Encyclopedia of Hinduism, 74.

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it is a religio-philosophical text in the guise of an epic poem. A synthesis of past and present ideals-cum-rules, the treatise harmonizes Brahminic values with a warrior code, reconciling traditional pantheism with what seems to be a new theistic approach to religiosity. In other words, the Bhagavadgītā fuses a number of potentially divergent philosophical currents. This, then, explains why the yogi responded to Roiz’s charges by interpreting the “objections of his law” in a spiritual manner.128 In light of the above, a case can be made that Roiz took the liberty of representing textual contradictions of another religion in a manner that he would never have applied to the ambiguities of his own scriptures. According to Halbertal and Margalit, even-keeled analysis of any community’s sacred writings demands ample charity and goodwill.129 In contrast, Roiz evidently went about this task in a mean-spirited fashion. As the two scholars put it in a more general context: “My stories are allegorical, but yours are literal; my stories are deep spiritual truths dressed up as simple tales that anyone can understand, but your stories are old wives’ tales and a bunch of superstitions.”130 The Ignatian order indeed faced serious obstacles ascertaining the precepts of yogism, for this belief system widely differed from any phenomenon that its missionaries had thus far encountered. To a large extent, the same can be said for Hinduism. Lancillotto was one of the first Jesuits to realize the diversity of beliefs and religious life on the sub-continent: Some hold that there is no God, others hold that there are many gods, still others say that there are some good gods and other evil ones; the latter worship the good gods to obtain blessings from them and worship the evil ones to keep from being harmed by them. Others say that the souls of

128 “Carta geral do Irmão Luis Frois,” in Silva Rêgo, Documentação para a história das missões, 223. 129 According to Willard Van Orman Quine’s (1908–2000) principle of charity, “one should not make one’s fellow human being seem more irrational than necessary. That is, one should not attribute a literal meaning to an interlocutor’s expressions if it will make him seem crazy or stupid, when it is more plausible to assume that he is neither of these and that a deviation from the literal interpretation will clarify his meaning.” Halbertal and Margalit, Idolatry, 88. 130 Halbertal and Margalit, Idolatry, 89. The contemporary Indian Jesuit Varghese Malpan posits that the Giītā and Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises “can meet in the only true God who is the sole author of every religious experience.” Malpan, A Comparative Study of the Bhagavad-Gītā and the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola on the Process of Spiritual Liberation, Documenta Missionalia 22 (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Universita Gregoriana, 1992), 404.

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men, beasts, and plants are all the same and that when a man dies, God reincarnates him according to his worthiness or unworthiness.131 To this day, scholars are hard-pressed to clearly define Hinduism owing to the broad range of traditions and meanings that fall under this category.132 Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916–2000) asserts that from an ideological and sociological perspective, “religious system” is an Occidental (and Muslim) construct that Westerners have errantly tried to impose on the sub-continent.133 Lancillotto’s astute observation notwithstanding, many sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Jesuits were only capable of fathoming modes of Hinduism through a Christian lens. De Nobili was one of the few Society’s emissaries to confer a religious value to ascetic practices, so long as they were “untainted” by idolatrous beliefs.134 As we have seen, Jesuits stationed in many different parts of the world sought to find parallels between the Catholic salvation rituals and the foreign ceremonial practices they came across. For example, the missionaries were inclined to cast idolatry as a falsified imitation of the “true” rite. In the Jesuits’ estimation, spurious cults worship vacuous objects or real, nefarious forces, like the devil. Hence, they averred that “Christian” rituals must only be performed for God, certainly not idols.135 De Nobili was the first Jesuit to plumb the depths of Hinduism. While claiming that the renunciants were a threat, he maintained that those in India (“the Samnyasis”) lead a chaste life, regardless of their affiliation. Many of these ascetics, de Nobili opined, fall under the heading of idolaters and venerate the same false gods as their co-religionists. That said, he added that quite a few are wisemen that completely shun these pagan customs. This distinction was rather progressive in the early 1600s.136 Furthermore, the Italian Jesuit credited these “good” ascetics with secular wisdom and natural knowledge: 131 “P. Nicolaus Lancillotus S.I. [P. Ignatio de Loyola, Romam] Coulano 5 Decembris 1550,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 2:123–31, here 127–28. 132 Flood, Introduction to Hinduism, 8–10. Brian K. Smith defined Hinduism as “the religion of those human beings who create, perpetuate and transform traditions whose legitimizing reference is the authority of the Veda.” Smith, “Exorcising the Transcendent: Strategies for Redefining Hinduism and Religion,” History of Religions 27 (1987): 32–55, here 40. 133 Smith, Meaning and End of Religion, 58–59. 134 For more on this figure and his campaign against sub-continental idolatry, see Francis X. Clooney, “Roberto de Nobili’s Dialogue on Eternal Life and an Early Jesuit Evaluation of Religion in South India,” in The Jesuits. Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 402–17. 135 Halbertal and Margalit, Idolatry, 208–9. 136 De Nobili, Preaching Wisdom to the Wise, 158–59.

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We know for certain that no less a man than St. Gregory of Nazianzen admitted, in his controversy with Julian [the Apostate],137 that after he had mastered the divine doctrine he acquainted himself also with the wisdom of the Gentiles. We find the same in similar words in the writings of St. Ambrose, On the Faith 3;138 in St. Jerome, Commentary on Galatians 3;139 in St. Augustine, Christian Doctrine 2.140 Moreover, the same St. Gregory in his funeral oration in honor to St. Basil makes a point which agrees with the common feelings of humanity when he says that among man’s best gifts learning stands first. By this he means not just Christian learning, but also such learning as is found outside the folds (this is, among Gentiles), and he regrets that many Christians are misled into rejecting it on the erroneous plea that it is deceitful and pernicious and bound to estrange people from the true God.141 For our purposes, the most relevant item in this passage is that de Nobili deemed sexual abstinence to be an experience—a form of religiosity and devotion; and whoever practiced continence on behalf of false gods essentially worships them. In a similar vein, the Italian missionary emphasized that “religions cannot be compared to many rivers flowing into a single ocean, or many roads leading to a single town. Variations in the details of one’s journey are of course possible, but if a town is to the north, everyone must head in that direction.”142 3

Conclusion

Perceiving Ethiopian and Hindu ascetics as rivals, the Jesuits engaged them in debate with the objective of demonstrating through reason and argumentation the “truth” of the Catholic faith. The polemical format in each region differed. In the case of Ethiopia, theological and Christological disputation 137 C. W. [Charles William] King, ed. and trans., Julian the Emperor: Containing Gregory Nazianzen’s Two Invectives and Libanius’ Monody (London: George Bell and Sons, 1888), 1–121. 138 St. Ambrose, Select Works and Letters, in Schaff and Wace, Select Library, 3:242–62. 139 St. Jerome, Commentary on the Galatians, trans. Andrew Cain (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 203–68. 140 Saint Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. [Durante Waite] Robertson Jr. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1958), 34–78. 141 De Nobili, Preaching Wisdom to the Wise, 77–78. 142 See Clooney, “Roberto de Nobili’s Dialogue,” 406.

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was governed by ancient protocols. Moreover, the exchanges revolved around interpretations of commonly held scriptures. Among their chief aims was to expose the purported inconsistencies and subpar exegesis of the local tradition. On many occasions, the Jesuits locked horns with the Ethiopian monks in the presence of the ruler. From the missionaries’ standpoint, the Orthodox Church’s failure to bridge over the mythical gaps in the Bible was responsible for its doctrinal errors and heresies. The debates on the sub-continent were more sporadic and less coherent. In their exchanges with Hindu ascetics, Catholic disputants sought out equivalences between local praxis and Christianity. As discussed in chapter 6, the missionaries believed that segments of the populace revered the yogis as virtuous and holy figures. Hence, they assumed that the conversion of these ascetics would bolster the mission in places like Ceylon, Hormuz, and Goa. These debates reveal how the Jesuits misperceived their adversaries’ views as principles of faith. In the Society’s estimation, these beliefs contained authentic elements that derived from Christianity. However, these components had been distorted and had fallen into oblivion over the ages. To a certain degree, this impression is redolent of the Jesuit contention that the monks in Ethiopia had slowly allowed genuine Christian principles to erode.

Chapter 5

Another Polemical Front: Faith, Healing, and Medicine Among the Jesuits’ main strategies for whittling away at their adversaries’ religious prestige was to force them into competing in the obscure realm of magic, superstition, and other beliefs-cum-practices that were forbidden under the “true” Catholic doctrine. Most people are naturally hesitant about admitting to superstitions but have no compunctions about labeling other people’s views as superstitions. Since the outset of their confrontation with Protestants in Europe, the Society of Jesus accentuated the relationship between the natural and supernatural worlds. According to early modern Protestant teachings, Gary Waite notes, “God communicated primarily through the written scriptures, although they admitted that natural events were effects of providence.” Furthermore, the Protestants felt that the age of direct miracles (e.g., signs from above, monstrous births, and natural disasters) had expired. From this perspective, then, the Latin church’s attribution of preternatural workings to saints, sacraments, and the sacramental was a vestige of the pagan worldview. Pushing back against such criticism, the Jesuits showcased Catholic miracles. The order’s “public exorcisms of demoniacs,” Waite contends, “became the most famous expression of this battle between biblicist religion stripped of most day-to-day supernaturalism and one that provided believers with tangible proof of the divine in their daily lives.”1 Within this framework, Juan Maldonado (1533–83), a Jesuit Spanish theologian, lashed out against Protestantism. His sermons exhorted Catholics to stand firm against heresy. Moreover, the fiery priest drew an analogy between Protestantism and evil spirits, comparing the rival denomination’s members to the heretics in “Bohemia and Germany, [where] the Hussite heresy was accompanied by such a storm of demons that witches were busier than heretics.”2 Maldonado’s polemical commentaries on the Gospels were translated into Gǝʿǝz by the order’s representatives in Ethiopia.3

1 Gary K. Waite, Heresy, Magic, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 79. 2 Waite, Heresy, Magic, and Witchcraft, 106. 3 Cohen, “Jesuit Missionary as Translator,” 11–30.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004538566_007

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Jesuits imputed certain beliefs, habits, and practices to their rivals on both the Horn of Africa and the Asian sub-continent. However, there was a fundamental difference between the Society’s attitude toward the Hindu yogis, on the one hand, and the Ethiopian monks, on the other. While there was no shortage of animus between Jesuits and Ethiopian clergy, the latter was rarely pegged as sorcerers or magicians in the Catholic emissaries’ writing. Instead, the monks were viewed as ignorant quacks or stubborn-cum-arrogant heretics. From the order’s standpoint, the underlying problem with the local ecclesiastics was their subpar ministerial training. Likewise, the Jesuits attributed the putative doctrinal errors of Ethiopian Orthodoxy to its clergy’s ineptitude and smugness as well as the obstinacy with which they adhere to heterodox practices and beliefs.4 Due to these shortcomings, the Society’s representatives concluded, the Ethiopian monks would be hard-pressed to demonstrate the temporal aptitude of their faith in exorcism contests. As opposed to this image of misguided Christians, several Jesuit writers presented the yogis as sorcerers. This outlook is akin to how the order’s emissaries in other parts of the world viewed the proponents of shamanism.5 More specifically, idolatry was perceived as an attempt to impose a different world order through sundry tactics and means, revolutionary or otherwise.6 If sorcery was akin to idol worship, the figure of the sorcerer—in all its various manifestations—was the main culprit behind this false way. Following this line of thought, the Chilean Jesuit Alonso de Ovalle (1603–51) underscored the political sway of these “idol priests” on Eastern societies, from the masses to the elite. For this reason, he felt that evangelization was more challenging on the sub-continent than in the Americas. Not only did the Western Hemisphere, 4 “Notícia sobre o reino de Tigré (1626),” in Oliveira, Cartas de Etiópia, 11–70, here 21, 59. 5 The word shaman derives from the Russian Tunguz šaman. In Siberia and parts of Inner Asia, the shamans “are preeminently the antidemonic champions; they combat not only demons and disease, but also the ‘black’ magicians. In a general way, it can be said that shamanism defends life, health, fertility, and the world of ‘light’ against death, disease, sterility, disasters, and the world of ‘darkness.’” Mircea Eliade, “Shamanism,” in Eliade, Encyclopedia of Religion, 13:201–8, here 206–7. For more on the relation between faith and shamanism, particularly in South America, see Alfred Métraux, “Religion and Shamanism,” in Handbook of South American Indians, ed. Julian Steward (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1949), 5:559–99. 6 Jerome averred that idols are not gods, as they can do neither good nor bad. “This is not to say,” he elucidated, “that the idols or the demons inhabiting idols do not do evil frequently, but that unless God permits them to have power they cannot do so.” Cited from the church father’s commentary on Isaiah 12:6. I draw heavily on the translation of Mark W. Elliot and Thomas C. Oden, eds., Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007), 30.

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in Ovalle’s estimation, have far fewer “phony priests” but the missionary had diminished their authority.7 At any rate, he equated these elements with Far Eastern bonzes.8 Like the Society’s view on the yogis (see chapter 4), Ovalle posited that the Indians of Chile have a “knowledge about God, but this was imperfect and confused.”9 Upon reaching the sub-continent, the Jesuits wrote off the yogis as superstitious enchanters and sorcerers. The term “superstition” has long been used by religious groups seeking to distinguish their “legitimate” beliefs from those of their rivals. India, Lancillotto observed, “abounds with charmers and sorcerers who are greatly revered.”10 Moreover, the Jesuit Salvador Cortés (dates unknown) posited that yogis “are the sorcerers of the gentiles.”11 In sum, a few of the order’s representatives accused these Indians, who pursued a contemplative life, of dedicating themselves to sorcery and devil-worship. For instance, Fróis described a shamanic rite for communicating with ancestors in Malacca as a “type of idolatry.”12 To this day, scholars document yogi exorcisms, faith healing, and remedies. In the seventeenth century, the French physician, traveler, and philosopher François Bernier (1620–88) wrote about the power and science of jaugism. Observing two rival yogis locked in thaumaturgical competition, he remarked that “I do not know if Simon the Magician could have done better, as they read 7

Alonso de Ovalle, Histórica relación del Reyno de Chile y de las misiones y ministerios que ejercita en él la Compañía de Jesús, ed. José Toribio Medina (Santiago: Imprenta Ercilla, 1642), 2:206. 8 “Among the baptisms performed,” Ovalle wrote, “those of the three ‘machis’ [traditional Mapuche healers]” were unique. His celebratory tone not only speaks to the machis’ central role in Araucan society but indicates that the Jesuits viewed these healers to be serious competitors who must be defeated. In the Chilean father’s estimation, they performed extraordinary feats by manipulating the power of the devil. One of the machis “could tell just by looking” at people the maladies they were suffering from. She infiltrated “their bodies with her eyes like dowsers do to penetrate the earth with theirs. Upon receiving the baptismal water, the woman abrogated the pact with Satan and renewed it with Jesus Christ, thereby purging herself of all appearances and fictions that the common enemy put in her eyes. From hereon in, the machi ‘no longer penetrated man or woman with her eyesight, she abandoned her evil office, and the devil was foiled.’” Ovalle, Histórica relación, 2:295. 9 Ovalle, Histórica relación, 2:196. 10 “P. Nicolaus Lancillotus S.I. [P. Ignatio de Loyola, Romam] Coulano 5 Decembris 1550,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 2:128. 11 “Fr. Salvator Cortés S.I. Ex Comm. P. generali et patribus Europaeis S.I. Cocino Ianuarii 1573,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 8:650. 12 “Scholastic Luís Fróis, S.J., by Order of Fr. Baltasar Dias, to the Jesuits in Portugal: Malacca, November 18, 1556,” in Documenta Malucensia, ed. Hubert Jacobs (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1974), 1:1542–57: 197.

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the mind, make a tree branch blossom, and bear fruit in less than an hour.”13 Ethnographic research in the 1900s confirmed these sorts of practices. By submitting themselves to rigorous penance, J. N. [John Nicol] Farquhar (1861–1929) maintained, Indian ascetics sought to obtain supernatural powers, like flight or invisibility, and to impose their will on the gods.14 Correspondingly, John Campbell Oman (1841–1911) pointed out that the sādhus (Indian mendicants) were thought to possess remarkable healing powers. Unwilling to share their methods with others, the ascetics closely guarded these secrets.15 According to George Briggs (1874–1966), yogis used peacock fans to perform exorcisms and treat children that were impaired by the evil eye.16 Many of these ascetics claimed that the succor they bought to cripples and other ailing people was a testament to their own sanctity.17 Legions of rural and urban dwellers indeed believed that yogis possess supernatural powers that could be used for both good and evil.18 Teixeira wrote about the practices of some “contemplative hermits,” whom he intentionally refrained from calling yogis. For instance, the philosopher told of an alchemist-cum-sorcerer from Cambay who summoned the devil. In turn, the latter pretended to appear before him just as he had before Ignatius in Manresa. This story also involves the Ignatian paradigm of the mystical experience. Rather than confessing, as the Society’s founder did in the aftermath of his encounter, the sorcerer cleansed himself of all external filth and, by dint of certain brews, purified himself of internal corruption. Thereafter, the magician retired to a house bereft of light and constructed a tent from rags in which to further seclude himself. Clutching beads, he recited a few short prayers and invocations. Though not a true believer in Teixeira’s estimation, he offered burnt sacrifices consisting of sugar, lard, and silk shreds, optimizing 13 Bernier, Viaje al gran Mogol, 2:85. 14 John Nicol Farquhar, The Crown of Hinduism (London: Oxford University Press, 1915), 249–50. A well-known hymn in Ṛg Veda Saṃhitā describes long-haired (keśin) or silent (muni) ascetics who strongly resembled their latter-day Hindu cohorts. The text describes these miracle workers as either clothed in red tatters or “swathed in wind” (i.e., naked). “Possessed by the gods,” these ascetics lost themselves in ecstasy. Redolent of what has come to be known as an “out-of-the-body experience,” they “fly out of the body.” Moreover, these ascetics are capable of reading minds—a power that was subsequently identified with accomplished yogis. Cited from Flood, Introduction to Hinduism, 77. 15 John Campbell Oman, The Mystics, Ascetics, and Saints of India (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903), 66. 16 George Weston Briggs, Gorakhnāth and the Kānphata Yogīs (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 23, 127. 17 Briggs, Gorakhnāth and the Kānphata Yogīs, 127. 18 Oman, Mystics, Ascetics, and Saints of India, 6.

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the oblation with as much of these components as possible.19 Lastly, the father claimed that these eremites were better acquainted with demons than the church fathers were with angels.20 According to the Italian traveler della Valle, the yogis had their own “spiritual” and “learning” exercises. “Most of” these techniques whether spiritual or erudite, consist simply of the art of divination, the secret of herbs and other things of nature, and magic and incantations, to which they are much addicted and with which they boast of achieving great wonders. […] By way of such exercises, such as prayers, fasting, and such similar superstitions, they arrive at revelations, it seems to them, which in reality are nothing than commerce with the devil.21 Della Valle’s use of the term “superstition” was indeed more pejorative than descriptive. As in many other cases, not least the Counter-Reformation, this was meant to label a culture or religious tradition as misguided. The question of what constitutes superstition loomed large at the Council of Trent (1545–63). However, it would take the Catholic reformers nearly five decades to hammer out a clear definition, which was unveiled at the Council of Malines (1607): “It is superstitious to expect an effect from something when that effect cannot be produced by natural causes, by a divine institution, or by mandate or approval from the Church.”22 In establishing this definition, Catholicism asserted an institutional monopoly over the supernatural. As such, della Valle considered the yogis’ spiritual exercises, such as prayer and fasting, mere superstitions, for they led to the practice of magic and ostensibly divine revelations. These pursuits, the globetrotter maintained, were no less than commerce with the devil, who appeared before and deceived the ascetics. In many of these encounters, Satan purported to be able to predict the future. Less often, he seduced the yogis by assuming the form of a spiritual-cum-invisible woman, whom they revered in many ways.23 In line with the ideas of the Catholic Reformation, missionaries condemned the yogis’ independent efforts to access the supernatural. Post-Tridentine European orthodoxy sought to channel all exchanges with transcendental forces, be they nefarious or benign, through the monopoly of the Catholic 19 “Fr. Emmanuel Teixeira S.I. Ex. Comm. Sociis Lusitanis. Goa 25 Decembris 1558,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 4:169–70. 20 “Fr. Emmanuel Teixeira,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 4:170. 21 Della Valle, Pilgrim, 239. 22 Mary R. O’Neil, “Superstition,” in Eliade, Encyclopedia of Religion, 14:163–66, here 165. 23 Della Valle, Pilgrim, 239.

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Church and its institutions.24 Distinguished Jesuit priests, like Martín Anton del Río (1551–1608) and Maldonado, believed that the Protestant Reformation had triggered an invasion of demonic spirits. On the premise that error could no longer imitate truth, Del Río claimed that all heresy must “either degenerate into magical arts or into a final extremity of atheism as heretics enter upon a close companionship with evil spirits and learn the diabolical arts.”25 The Society endeavored to delegitimize the yogi as a mediator between man and natural forces. In this sense, the emissaries treated Indian ascetics and faith healers on the American continent in the same way,26 equating all of them with sorcerers and thus idolaters. From the Jesuit perspective, idolatry was a veritable insurrection—an attempt to impose a new world order through the exploitation of sundry powers. 1

Exorcisms and Healing

To counter these perceived threats, Jesuit missionaries across the globe sought to demonstrate by means of worldly toil that Catholicism was the lone true faith. The order’s representatives in India and Ethiopia were not interested in merely vanquishing their adversaries—the local ascetics—through intellectual debate or mind games. A significant portion of their “playbook” called for enlightening and evangelizing these same opponents by controlling and predicting the forces of nature through healing and exorcisms. To sixteenthand seventeenth-century Jesuits, the temporal effectiveness of Catholicism, namely their own wherewithal to treat emotive disorders and physical maladies, attested to the faith’s veracity.27 As Lobo (1595—lucidly put it, Ethiopia’s common folk 24 Mary R. O’Neil, “Sacerdote ovvero strione: Ecclesiastical and Superstitious Remedies in 16th-Century Italy,” in Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, ed. Steven L. Kaplan (Berlin: Mouton, 1984), 53–83. 25 Quoted in Waite, Heresy, Magic, and Witchcraft, 152. 26 In Canada, say, the Jesuit missionaries were both fascinated and alarmed by the shamanic culture that they encountered. According to P. G. [Peter George] Maxwell-Stuart, “Father Paul Le Jeune,” the superior of the Canadian mission in 1632, “used military terminology in his reports, describing the territory round the St. Lawrence as ‘Satan’s empire,’ and his principal aim as being that of destroying the huge numbers of Indian superstitions which he viewed as potential enemy spoils he would eventually dedicate to Christ. The native shamans were therefore chief among the Jesuit targets. But curiously enough, the Indians reciprocated by regarding the missionaries themselves as shamans.” Maxwell-Stuart, Witchcraft in Europe and the New World, 1400–1800 (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 96. 27 Nicolas Standaert describes the rituals and exorcisms that the Society’s representatives performed in China. Moreover, he explains how they incorporated an element of fear

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came to hold me in high repute as a doctor, thinking that that was my profession, and coming to ask me for remedies, which I distributed liberally and authoritatively according to the instructions of a book I have; and I did not disdain the art of gaining some profit from it if those who sought my advice were returned to health because of it.28 The Jesuits accused the yogis in India of “serving the devil”29 and practicing sorcery. At the same time, the missionaries were well aware of the goodwill and prestige that their rivals had accrued in local society.30 Henriques told of a confrontation between a yogi and a Christian in which the latter had challenged the ascetic to cast out a demon from any possessed individual that they happened upon. The said Christian was confident that his adversary would fail and that he would manage to banish the spirit by reciting a few holy words. For his part, the yogi was not overly eager to partake in this contest. Owing to his ascetic way of life, the rival claimed, he was simply “looking for something to eat” and had little desire to engage in polemics. According to Henriques, though, this contention was a ruse to avoid near-certain defeat.31 Āyurveda (life knowledge)32 is a system of indigenous medicine practiced on the sub-continent. According to William Sax, it is difficult to separate religious

28 29 30 31 32

(the paramount Catholic notion of heaven and hell) into their polemic repertoire. In his estimation, the Jesuits also spread tales of numinous phenomena that echoed the Taoist and Buddhist popular tradition. “Chinese primary sources show,” Standaert writes, “that at a lower level, in small communities of Chinese converts in remote provinces, where Christian missionaries had to compete not with learned Buddhist monks or anti-Christian scholars but rather with Taoist masters, sorcerers, and faith healers, things quite different from intellectual discussions were taking place. At that level the Jesuits themselves engaged in practices that, at least in the eyes of the Chinese authorities, fully belonged to the realm of popular magic, sorcery, and potentially subversive cults.” Nicolas Standaert, “Jesuit Corporate Culture as Shaped by the Chinese,” in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 352–63, here 359. This translation draws heavily on Jerónimo Lobo, Itinerário of Jerónimo Lobo, 262. “Fr. Gundislavus Fernandes Trancoso S.I. Fr. Andreae Gomes S.I. Ulyssiponem: Cocino 10 Ianuarii 1565,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 5:417. “Fr. Balthasar Nunes S.I. socisis Lusitaniae, Goa 1552,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 2:571. “P. Henricus Henriques S.I. Pp. Ignatio de Loyola, Simoni Rodrigues ceterisque patribus in Europa degentibus. E Vembar 31 Octobris 1548,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:289–90. The fundamental āyurveda texts, Suśruta Saṁhitā and Caraka Saṁhitā, methodically explain how to diagnose and treat a wide range of ailments; Klostermaier, Concise Encyclopedia of Hinduism, 33. For cultural and theoretical perspectives on the āyurveda, see Sadhir Kakar, Shamans, Mystics, and Doctors: A Psychological Inquiry into India and Its Healing Traditions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982), 219–51.

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from non-religious āyurveda treatments or Hindu from non-Hindu practitioners. Quite a few of the latter, Muslim or otherwise, avail themselves of Hindu symbols, treatments, and medicaments, such as vibhuti (sacred healing ash),33 which demand extraordinary skills. Conversely, Hindu healers make extensive use of Muslim analogs, like the tabiz (healing amulet).34 Furthermore, there are countless folk methods for exorcism. In South Asia, as well as many other parts of the world, a clear distinction is made between positive and negative possession. As Sax puts it: Negative possession by spirits, ghosts, and malevolent deities is unwanted and unsought, often occurring unexpectedly, for example after the victim has experienced a sudden fright that renders him or her vulnerable to possession by a malevolent being. It is also believed to sometimes be induced by the evil machinations of enemies, working together with sorcerers. But there are also many forms of positive possession where mediums are possessed by local gods and spirits and, in a state of trance, diagnose the causes of suffering, bless the victims or give them spiritually empowered substances meant to help relieve their affliction, and “prescribe” methods for curing the affliction, usually performing ritual.35 Against this backdrop, the Jesuits considered a successful exorcism overwhelming “proof” that truth was on their side. Henriques advised Christians that when encountering someone malignantly possessed, they should find as many Brahmins, yogis, and gentile clergy as possible and exorcise the spirit 33 Literally “miraculous powers,” vibhuti also refers to “the ash-like substance forming on pictures of Sathya Sāī Bābā, which is said to have miraculous properties.” Klostermaier, Concise Encyclopedia of Hinduism, 202. 34 Alternative spellings include ta’wiz, taʿwīd, and tawiz. A tabiz is a locket generally associated with Islam. More often than not, this pendant contains verses from the Quran. In addition, Islamic prayers and symbols are etched onto its metal exterior. The metal or black cloth locket is usually stitched to a chain via a thick black string. While most users wear the tabiz around the neck, some tie it around the arm. This popular item found its way into Hindu society. As a rule, Hindu taweez are inscribed with the holy Om or Aum symbol. For a disquisition on thaumaturgy and healing in Muslim societies, see Michael W. Dols, “The Theory of Magic in Healing,” in Magic and Divination in Early Islam, ed. Emilie Savage-Smith (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 2004), 87–101. Arthur Norman Moberly expounds on the link between the Hindu tradition and the very concept of tabiz in Amulets as Agents in the Prevention of Disease in Bengal, Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal Series, vol. 1, 1905–7 (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1907), 223–48. 35 William Sax, “Healers,” in Encyclopedia of Hinduism, ed. Knut A. Jacobsen (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 3:235–39, here 237–38. For an in-depth look at possession in Hindu lore, see Kathleen M. Erndl, Victory of the Mother: The Hindu Goddess of Northwest India in Myth, Ritual, and Symbol (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 105–34.

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through the “holy words” of Catholicism, thereby underscoring the rivals’ inability to provide succor.36 The Jesuits themselves indeed competed against the yogis in the fields of healing and exorcism. A Society member, Barzeo reported, was importuned to treat a woman regularly afflicted by epileptic spasms, which compromised her faith and elicited visions. Owing to his myriad duties, the father was unable to personally tend to the matter. However, he wrote down a handful of solemn words from the Gospel of John on a piece of paper and instructed the suppliant to apply the sheet to the neck of the possessed. As soon as the remedy was administered, the woman was permanently cured of her ailments.37 From its very inception, the Society of Jesus approached healing as a legitimate means for spreading the faith. The founder’s secretary, Juan Alfonso de Polanco (1517–76), recalled an incident involving a “possessed and half dead” wife.38 Such cases attest to the fine line separating preternatural healing from superstition. Charles B. Schmitt (1933–86), a Bavarian Jesuit who held a professorship in theology and philosophy, remarked that through common magic, “we apply true and natural causes to the production of rare and strange effects.” Should these methods fail or result in unintended consequences, he warned, they could engender superstitious beliefs and thus demonic intervention. Nevertheless, the scholar did not believe that these dangers warranted the abandonment of natural thaumaturgy.39 As part of their struggle with Ethiopian monks, Jesuits were also ambivalent about healing’s “strange effects.” In any event, they incessantly linked tribulations to the devil’s work, in the face of skeptics who claimed that suffering was either a part of the natural order or the handiwork of occult powers. For instance, Almeida lamented the fact that the kingdom’s elders and other “prudent” factors thought it was impossible to make a pact with the devil40 allowing 36 “P. Henricus Henriques S.I. Pp. Ignatio de Loyola, Simoni Rodrigues ceterisque patribus in Europa degentibus: E Vembar 31 Octobris 1548,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:290. 37 “P. Gaspar Barzaeus S.I. sociis S.I. In India et Europa degentibus: Armuzia 1 Decembris 1549,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:637. 38 Cited in O’Malley, First Jesuits, 268. 39 Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 226. 40 Notwithstanding the Portuguese Inquisition’s relative laxity toward witchcraft, there is sufficient information on the demonological policy of the religio-magisterial institution’s assorted medieval enforcers. For instance, the guiding principle behind their disposition was a “pact with the devil.” See Francisco Bethencourt, O imaginário da magia: Feiticeiras, saludadores e nigromantes no séc. XVI (Lisbon: Projecto Universidade Aberta, 1987), 157–65; Bethencourt, “Portugal: A Scrupulous Inquisition,” in Early Modern European Witchcraft, ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Heninngsen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 403–22; Clark, Thinking with Demons, 460.

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an individual to harm another from afar. “Even though they acknowledge that there are sorcerers and sorceresses,” the Portuguese missionary claimed, “they say that these [elements] can cause pain and similar ills only by administering poison.” In Almeida’s estimation, these attitudes stemmed from ignorance. At an earlier stage in their history, he added, the Ethiopians indeed believed in such arrangements with the devil: To avoid these ills, they agreed that no one would say there was a buda (so they called the sorcerer and the witch).41 They also decided it was foolish to believe that they could exist, for this would mean having two gods. In consequence, they were told that nothing is done without God’s permission and that to conceive of sorcerers and witches is to conceive of two gods. They understood the scriptures that deal with these maledictions as referring to those who abuse poison; sorcerers assuming the form of wolves and other animals is something they do not understand, as they imagine that we literally mean a person transforming into a wolf when we, say, refer to Pharaoh’s magicians, Simon the Magician, and other passages in the Bible; they shy away from all of this. At most, the emperor conceded that these magicians had existed in the old days, but in other parts of the world, not Ethiopia. After listening to many arguments on this [topic], one of their more learned scholars told a friend of ours: “I am surprised, and I pity these fathers [i.e., Jesuits] who, despite being such fine and educated men, have committed the enormous mistake of stating that there are witches in the world.” Their ignorance severely impedes the progress of our faith.42 Be that as it may, buda is not synonymous with the demonic. Whereas buda specifically refers to a person who injures another by means of the evil eye,43 the demonic activity under review is an entirely different kettle of fish. Apart from Satan (diyablos and säytan), there are many different kinds of demons in

41

The concept of buda pertains to the evil eye. In Ethiopia, this belief involves the existence of a mythical hyena—a supernatural creature that is a protagonist in the local popular cosmology. By extension, buda also refers to those under its thrall. For more on this topic, see Hagar Salamon, “Buda,” in Uhlig, Encyclopaedia aethiopica, 1:633–35; Salamon, The Hyena People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 35–41; Richard Pankhurst, A Social History of Ethiopia (Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University, 1990), 263–64. 42 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 7:60–61. 43 Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Gǝʿǝz, 86.

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Ethiopian lore: ganēn,44 lēgēwon,45 mäqzay,46 mäsä’eb,47 sädänat,48 serämo,49 tēgēri or tēgri,50 and täfänt.51 The question of the evil eye notwithstanding, a variety of malicious spirits filled key roles in the Ethiopian imagery. As we shall see, the Ignatian missionaries often competed with local holy men over the exorcism of spirits. The Jesuit sources are tightlipped in all that concerns the activities of witches or magicians throughout the kingdom. During the final stages of Mendes’s patriarchy, Almeida recalled, a woman was found guilty of witchcraft. Mendes sentenced her to a few lashes—a “punishment much inferior to the one her guilt warranted.” However, this ruling provoked an outburst of mutinies that “can hardly be expressed with words […]. From that point onward, they [i.e., the Ethiopians] listened to neither our doctrine nor preaching.”52 That said, with the exception of this case, there are no reports of serious witch hunts directed at the local population. This state of affairs was analogous to the one in Portugal, where the repression of Jewish customs among new Christians was higher up on the inquisitorial agenda.53 In any event, the Society’s actions resembled that of the Ethiopian clergy. With regard to coping with demons and the “possessed,” they all assumed responsibility for healing the physically or mentally ill through prayer and exorcism. Local hagiographies expound on the monks’ therapeutic undertakings, which were intended to demonstrate the Orthodox Church’s superiority over the different strains of paganism along the Horn of Africa. What 44 “Demon, ghost, evil spirit, devil, specter,” Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez, 198. 45 Deriving from the Greek legeōn and Latin legio, lēgēwon is the “name of a demon, body of demons” or “body of Soldiers,” Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez, 308. 46 “Demon, name of demon,” Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez, 356. Also see Stefan Strelcyn, Prières magiques éthiopiennes pour délier les charmes (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1955), 329. 47 A “kind of demon,” Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez, 362. 48 “Demon of the field and forest, monster, satyr, siren, angel of death,” Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez, 547. Also see Marcel Cohen, “Quelques voyages de mots,” Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 29 (1929): 132–37, here 134–35. 49 “A sleep demon,” Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez, 564. 50 “Malicious spirit.” The closely related tegrid means “epilepsy or someone possessed by a spirit.” Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez, 572. 51 “Demon, evil spirit,” Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez, 588. 52 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 7:60. 53 See Bethencourt, “Portugal”; Bethencourt, La Inquisición en la época moderna, trans. Federico Palomo (Madrid: Akal, 1997), 373; Charles Amiel, “Los ritos judaicos en los edictos de fe ibéricos,” in Xudeus e conversos na história, ed. Carlos Barros (Santiago de Compostela: Deputacio Ourense—La Editorial de la Historia, 1994), 1:205–24; Maria José Pimenta Ferro Tavares, Judaismo e Inquisição (Lisbon: Editorial Presença, 1987), 194–99.

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is more, these sources attest to the divinely inspired miracles performed by local saints. For instance, Abba Anorēwos (fl. late thirteenth century or early fourteenth century)54 cured an epileptic with the following words: “O my Lord Jesus Christ, cure this invalid by your mighty hand, so that you may receive his soul and have mercy on him, for you are merciful.”55 Gädlä Täklä Haymanot (The life of Täklä Haymanot) tells of demons that were vanquished by saints while screaming: “What do you want of us? Why do you persecute us? Is it not enough that we have left you the land of Calâlgy and Catatâ? Where are we to flee from you? Leave us alone now; do not give us trouble and we shall leave of our own will.”56 On another occasion, Abbot Mika‌ʾel (fl. late thirteenth and early fourteenth century) beseeched Täklä Haymanot to save a possessed man. “How can I, a sinner,” the latter replied, “heal him? May God, whom you serve, heal him through your prayer.” As these words left the saint’s mouth, the devil burst out of the victim and protested thus: “Is it not enough that I have left you the land of Ceoâ, that you come to Amharâ to persecute me? Where am I to flee […]? I cannot find rest anywhere?” At this point, the spirit assumed the form of a monkey and vanished like smoke into the thin air and would never trouble that man again. In return for his services, Abbot Mika‌ʾel asked the beneficiary to put everything aside and join his brothers in the church.57 Interestingly, many of these same themes resurface in the Jesuit literature. The order’s emissaries indeed availed themselves of similar tools to the monks—the cross, prayer, images, and reliquaries—in their own capacity as exorcists and healers. In the Christian tradition, epilepsy was considered a form of possession. More specifically, the “victim” was in thrall to a phantasmagorical or divine being. The manifestations of this condition ranged from heavy trembling that prompted a loss of consciousness to an elevated state of inspiration in which a divine message was received.58 From as early as the 54 This priest is occasionally dubbed “the Elder” to distinguish him from Anorewos the Younger (fl. mid-fourteenth century). According to his hagiography (Gädlä Anorewos), the saint was born to a noble family in Mugär. Early on, he decided to become a monk and joined Däbrä ʿAsbo—the monastic community run by Täklä Haymanot. See Samuel Wolde Yohannes Red, “Anorewos ‘The Elder,” in Uhlig, Encyclopaedia aethiopica, 1:277–78. 55 Carlo Conti Rossini, Acta S. Baṣalota Mikāʾēl et S. Anorēwos, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 28–29, Scriptores Aethiopici 11–12 (Louvain: Impremerie Orientaliste, 1955), 98–99 [Gǝʿǝz] and 87 [Latin]. Also see Kaplan, Monastic Holy Man, 84. 56 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:456–57. 57 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 2:461; Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge, ed. and trans., The Life and Miracles of Tâklâ Hâymânôt in the Version of Dabra Lîbânôs and the Book of the Richest of Kings (London: Lady Meux, 1906), 2:65–66. 58 Simón Brailowsky, Epilepsia: Enfermedad sagrada del cerebro (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999), 22.

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church fathers, these diagnoses were supported by New Testament passages of Jesus casting out an evil spirit from a child.59 Throughout the Middle Ages and early modern age, the Catholic leadership deemed epileptic symptoms to be diabolic stigmata.60 Against this backdrop, the strong resemblance between the therapeutic activities of the Jesuits and the Ethiopian monks comes as no surprise. The essential Imitatio Christi motif informs both parties’ exorcism model, and Satan was responsible for physical and mental ailments in each culture. Thus, in light of the above, a missionary could bolster the reputation of his faith by vanquishing an evil spirit.61 A few days after reaching Fǝremona, Páez was approached by a noble man who shared his plight with the father: “For a spell,” the Jesuit recalled, “the demon would take him” to a remote land “and leave him naked on the road or at times in some village, predicaments that brought immense hardship and shame upon him; the man solicited Our great Lord’s assistance; and in return for his deliverance, [he] promised to make confession and adhere to the Roman church.” In a gesture of good will, Páez agreed to pray to God on his behalf. Moreover, the priest told the suppliant that he was certain that the Almighty would extricate him if his vow came from the heart. Shortly after, the Lord permanently expelled the demon.62 Upon hearing of this feat, another Ethiopian solicited Páez to help his sixteen-year-old son who was occasionally tormented by a demon. If the priest successfully intervened, he would consecrate the boy to the Latin church. Páez indeed managed to banish the spirit. Not only did the child regularly pray from thereon in at the missionary’s house of worship but his parents and two brothers also embraced the Catholic rite.63 In the hopes of demonstrating that his church was in the ascendancy, an Ethiopian monk, Almeida wrote, challenged a young Catholic seminarian in 59 Mark 9:14–29; Matthew 17:14–20; and Luke 9:37–43. 60 For more on the different perceptions of epilepsy between the Middle Ages and the early modern era, see Esteban García-Albea Ristol, Historia de la epilepsia (Barcelona: Masson, 1999), 22–45. 61 Jonathan Barry explains that for instance, “Exorcism (and hence witchcraft) was also important to the Catholic Church in other countries, such as France, where they faced strong Protestant competition, and lacked the same credibility in the more secure Catholic churches of Spain and Italy.” Jonathan Barry “Introduction: Keith Thomas and the Problem of Witchcraft” in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1–46, here 20. 62 “P. Petrus Paez ad p. Thomam Ituren. Dambia, 14 sept. 1612,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 11:219–20. 63 “P. Petrus Paez,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 11:220.

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Gorgora to an exorcism contest involving a possessed woman. Along with several of his companions, the ecclesiastic tried myriad prayers, but the demon would not budge. At this juncture, the seminarian held his reliquary over the victim’s neck. Forthwith, she climbed to her feet and cried out: “It is gone, it is gone.” As a result, the monk switched his allegiance to the See of Rome.64 While the Jesuits certainly shared these tales for their audience’s edification, they took their curative duties with utmost seriousness, on the premise that healing was an efficacious means for showcasing the verity and power of the Catholic faith. 2

Salvation through Images, Relics, Crosses, and Amulets

In Ethiopia, amulets, charms, and protective symbols were regularly used to contend with evil spirits and ailments. The most commonplace of all talismans was the cross. Christians availed themselves of this symbol to protect their homes against nefarious elements. Moreover, the cross was often placed on the body of the sick to vanquish the malady.65 As demonstrated by surviving talismanic parchments from the early modern period, spells were inscribed on legends for the purpose of warding off the evil eye.66 For their part, the Jesuits stationed on the Horn of Africa handed out crosses and golden veils of Veronica as protection against Satan.67 The missionaries often attempted to heal and assuage the pain of locals by means of relics, saint images,68 or 64 “P. Emmanuel de Almeida ad praepositum generalern Soc. Iesu. Gorgorra, 16 iun. 1628,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12:276. 65 E. A. [Ernest Alfred] Wallis Budge, Amulets and Talismans (New York: University Books, 1961), 178. 66 Budge, Amulets and Talismans, 185. Also see Déborah Lifchitz, Textes ethiopiens magicoreligieux (Paris: Institute d’Ethnologie, Université de Paris, 1940); Jacques Mercier, Art That Heals: The Image as Medicine in Ethiopia (New York: Prestel, 1997). 67 Barradas, “Notícia sobre o reino de Tigré (1626),” 11–70, here 26–27. In his instructions to missionaries, Ignatius of Loyola raised the possibility of fostering devotion on the Horn of Africa with the help of relics imported from Europe; Monumenta Ignatiana, Sancti Ignatii de Loyola Societatis Jesu fundatoris epistolae et instructiones (Madrid: Typis Gabrielis López del Horno, 1909), 8:688. 68 Throughout the early modern period, saints in various parts of Europe used to heal the afflicted either through personal intercession or by having disciples wield their relics. For instance, a saint’s object was bathed in water or oil and then used as a treatment. See David Gentilcore, “The Church, the Devil, and the Healing Activities of Living Saints in the Kingdom of Naples after the Council of Trent,” in Medicine and the Reformation, ed. Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (London: Routledge, 1993), 134–55; Stephen Sharot, A Comparative Sociology of World Religions (New York: New York University Press,

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holy water.69 According to Almeida, the Society’s representatives cured many inhabitants of Ḥädaša by having them drink water that was touched by a cross made out of special bread, which they stored in St. Francis Xavier’s box.70 This procedure of rinsing a cross in water and then using the latter as a cure occasionally surfaces in the Ethiopian hagiographies.71 The Jesuits also availed themselves of saint images, relics, and amulets to ease the burden of women in labor. For example, Almeida was asked to take the final confession of a woman in Fǝremona who was on the brink of succumbing to the pangs of a premature labor. Upon arriving at the scene, the missionary found the woman unconscious and proceeded to lay an image of Xavier over her body. At that very moment, she delivered a dark infant with a broken leg. The child soon improved, and his skin tone lightened. However, the baby suddenly died when the father baptized him. For the purpose of securing the infant’s place in “the garden of heaven,” Almeida then washed its soul in lamb’s blood.72 Barradas chronicled a similar case of two women who survived difficult childbirths by virtue of an image of Saint Ignatius that was affixed to their necks.73 Likewise, Thomas Barneto (1580–1640) was asked to intercede when the daughter of the behernägaš74 entered an agonizing labor. While admitting that he possessed no treatment, the missionary sent an image of Ignatius and instructed the ruler to faithfully apply it to his pregnant daughter. As soon as the relic arrived, the woman gave birth to a child whom she named after the Society’s founder. What is more, the entire family became devotees of the saint.75

69 70 71 72 73 74 75

2001), 225–26; Fernando Cervantes, “El demonismo en la espiritualidad barroca novohispana,” in Manifestaciones religiosas en el mundo colonial americano, ed. Clara García Ayluardo and Manuel Ramos Medina (México: UIA, 1997), 129–46, here 225–26. In many cultures, Mircea Eliade has observed, water is “the supreme magic and medical substance; it heals, it restores youth, it ensures eternal life.” Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (Cleveland: Sheed & Ward, 1963), 193–94. “P. Emmanuel de Almeida ad praepositum generalern Soc. Iesu. Gorgorra, 16 iun. 1628,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12:279. Stanislas Kur, Actes de Marḥa Krestos, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Otientalium 330 [Gǝʿǝz] and 331 [French], Scriptores Aethiopici 62, 63 (Louvain: Secrétariat du Corpus SCO, 1972), 77–79 [Gǝʿǝz] and 70–72 [French]. Also see Kaplan, Monastic Holy Man, 85. Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 7:102. “P. Emmanuel Barradas ad praepositum generalem S.I. ex Aethiopia, 20 maii 1631,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12:437. Behernägaš, or king of the sea, was the title bestowed upon the ruler of the northern province bordering the Red Sea. For more on this post, see the discussion in chapter 6. “P. Thomas Barneto (I) ad p. Stephanum da Cruz (2): Maigogâ, 12 martii 1627,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12:201. Relics of Francis Xavier were also used to facilitate parturition. See “P. Emmanuel Barradas ad praepositum generalern

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Various other maladies were treated with relics, crosses, and a host of other religious articles. According to Barradas, a certain nobleman was suffering from a disease that left him bleeding uncontrollably from the mouth. Unreceptive to any cure, the dignitary appeared to be on his last legs. Barradas rushed over an image-cum-relic of Xavier. After soaking the object in water, the nobleman drank from the concoction for several days and proceeded to recover.76 Luís Cardeira (d.1640) reported from the mission in Goğğam of a woman who fell to the ground and began trembling all over “as though it were the devil’s doing.” Time and again, he ordered the patient to utter the name of Jesus, but she was unable to enunciate the word. Finally, the priest applied the image of St. Ignatius to her throat, whereupon she managed to blurt out “Jesus, Mary” a few times. Soon after, the convalescent overcame the affliction.77 By making the signum crucis (the sign of the cross), Cardeira restored the hearing of an elderly woman as well as a person’s ability to speak and eat.78 The interaction between healer and patient revolved around shared meanings and acknowledging the position of the former. Such relations were commonplace along the Horn of Africa well before the Jesuits’ arrival. For example, there are many accounts of local holy men healing cripples79 by means of religious symbols. A case in point is Märha Krǝstos (1408–97) crossing himself in order to exorcise a demon from a man.80 Moreover, he treated a woman plagued by snakes with water that was used to soak a cross.81 In Ethiopia, there were a number of avenues to holiness other than the sacraments. Consequently, holy men, relics, tombs, icons, and crosses continued to play an important

76 77 78 79

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S.I. ex Aethiopia, 20 maii 1631,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12:463. Moreover, the Jesuits in Cape Verde availed themselves of crosses and images of St. Ignatius when presiding over thorny deliveries and treating a wide range of maladies. See Nuno da Silva Gonçalves, Os jesuítas e a missão de Cabo Verde (1604–1646) (Lisbon: Brotéria, 1996), 163–64. “P. Emmanuel Barradas ad praepositum generalern S.I. ex Aethiopia, 20 maii 1631,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12:455–56. Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12:457–58. Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12:458. In this context, it is worth revisiting the case of Abba Täklä Haymanot. See Budge, Life and Miracles, 2:335. The same can be said for Abba Filmona; see Maurice Allotte de la Fuÿe, ed. and trans, Actes de Filmona, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 181–82, Scriptores Aethiopici 35–36 (Louvain: Secrétariat do Corpus SCO, 1958), 58–59 [Gǝʿǝz] and 55 [French]. Kur, Actes, 37 [Gǝʿǝz] and 35 [French]. Also see Steven Kaplan, “Seeing Is Believing: The Power of Visual Experience in the Religious World of Aṣe Zerʾa Ya‌ʾeqob of Ethiopia (1434–1468),” Journal of Religion in Africa 32, no. 4 (2002): 403–21. Kur, Actes, 77–78 [Gǝʿǝz] and 70–71 [French].

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role in daily life.82 Against this backdrop, the populace expected religious figures—be they local or foreigners—to practice healing and exorcism. Unlike the Ethiopian healers, the Society of Jesus did not attribute its emissaries’ curative power to sanctitude but to their role as agents of the “true faith” who had “proven” tools at their disposal: the sacramental rites of the Catholic Church. The Jesuits worked miracles and cured individuals in the hopes of persuading them to receive the sacraments. For their part, the locals viewed the treatments administered by holy men as an established method for tapping into the numinous. Fróis reported from Goa on the healing power of sacred rites. The priest underscored the case of a woman whose vision was impaired by a malady. In the hopes of restoring her sight, family members recommended that she undergo a baptism and embrace Christianity. Fróis classified this case as an acceptance of “medicine with healing properties […]. With the help of Our Lord, she received not only the new baptismal grace but also the clarity of the soul and the recovery of her health.” Following the woman’s convalescence, she even urged many of her relatives to convert to Catholicism.83 In addition, the priest discussed a mother whose children were infected by a disease, from which all but one perished. After being baptized, the lone survivor recuperated. As a result, the woman overcame all her debilitating fears.84 Besides elucidating the therapeutic dimension of relics, the Jesuit correspondence indicates how these artifacts burnished the missionaries’ prestige among new Christians. In Goa, Catholic relics, along with dances, theater productions, and various aesthetic innovations, ratcheted up the population’s devotion.85 As Bruce Kapferer has demonstrated, aesthetics has a substantial impact on the efficacy of myriad rituals.86 The Jesuits believed that impressive 82 See Steven Kaplan, “The Social and Religious Functions of the Eucharist in Medieval Ethiopia,” Annales d’Éthiopie 19 (2003): 7–18. 83 “P. Ludvicus Frois S.I. ex comm. sociis Lusitaniae et Europae. Goa 1 Decembris 1561,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 5:277–78. 84 Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 5:278. 85 “Fr. Eduardus Leitão S.I. ex comm. P. [Francisci Borgiae, praep. gen. S.I.] Goa 5  Novembris 1572,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 8:585–86; “Fr. Oliverius Toscanello S.I. P. Everardo Mercuriano praep. gen. S.I. Goa, Decembris 1575,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 10:222–23; “P. A. Valignanus S.I. visitator. P. [Everardo Mercuriano, praep. gen. S.I.] Goa 16 Septembris 1577,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 10:878. 86 Bruce Kapferer stresses that what can be broadly described as the dynamic logic behind aesthetic processes are symbolically constitutive rather than expressive. That said, he notes the strong connection between these facets. Kapferer, “Sorcery and the Beautiful: A Discourse on the Aesthetics of Ritual,” in Aesthetics in Performance: Formation of Symbolic Construction and Experience, ed. Angela Hobart and Bruce Kapferer (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 129–60, here 129.

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performances would goad locals into switching their affiliation to the Catholic Church. For example, João de Salanova (dates unknown) described a “party” that attracted a large audience to a shrine where they, among other things, worshipped “the holy relic of the Holy Cross, which our father was generous enough to send us.” The “attendance” at the party, he added, “was much greater” than the previous year, “to the point where many Christians said that with more festivals like this, in no time the Gentiles will […] abandon their pagodes.”87 Many Jesuits understood the potential of therapy to advance the Catholic mission, as the overcoming of a serious ailment is often a trigger for conversion.88 By assuming curative duties, the Society’s representatives not only competed with local Ethiopian monks for the hearts of the populace but showcased the effectiveness of the Latin rite. The missionaries assumed that their penchant for exorcism and healing stemmed from a belief in the “true faith” and their role as mediators between God and the infirm. Quite often, the vehicle for conducting a miracle was a relic, consecrated oil, dust from a holy place, or water that had been used for liturgical-cum-devotional purposes. Alternatively, missionaries liberated the possessed by wielding the sign of the cross or excoriating the invasive demon. As Nunes Barreto wrote to the superior general in 1568, the missionaries’ therapeutic capacities gave the church a foothold in different parts of the world. For instance: “If the Lord our God bestowed some of us with the power to heal the sick, the gift of prophecy, or the ability to work any other kind of miracle, the Chinese would readily welcome us, for they are […] very curious […] about new things.”89 3

Volatility, Social Tensions, and Natural Disasters

As noted earlier, the Jesuits had an ambivalent outlook toward miracle-working. Páez, among others, rejected appeals to conduct miracles on the grounds that he did not believe “in sorcery.” On the other hand, he willingly performed exorcisms whenever called upon for the sake of demonstrating the truth of Catholicism. For example, a man from the countryside requested his assistance against a Moor who had threatened to unleash a plague of locusts on the town’s harvest should he fail to provide adequate compensation. When 87 “Fr. João de Salanova S.J. to Fr. Cl. Acquaviva S.J., General: Marchekati, Fishery Coast, January 9, 1586, Second Way,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 14:282. 88 Lewis R. Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 49–50. 89 “P. M. Nunes Barreto S.I. P. Francisco Borgiae, praep. gen. S.I. Cocino 27 Ianuarii 1568,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 7:492.

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the locusts arrived, the suppliant claimed, the Moor picked one up and, as he walked, the locusts flew away, but when he stopped, they swooped back down and wreaked havoc on the field, sparing not a single green leaf. In response to this entreaty, Páez stated that the Portuguese did not believe in witchcraft and would not give anything because, even if that Moor came and sat there with his locust, I was not afraid of any harm coming to us, unless God wanted to punish us and then we would take it in penance for our sins. So he went away saying that afterward we would see, and that left some people rather afraid, even some of our Catholics. A few days later, the village people came weeping and told me that they were doomed and I should give them some remedy, because there were so many locusts near their crops that they covered the fields and were destroying everything. When I saw how afflicted they were, I felt sorry for them and said, “the remedy is to pray to Our Lord to deliver us for such a great plague.” I went with them to the church and we recited the litanies, and then I performed exorcisms in the directions where the locusts were and blessed some water for them to sprinkle on their crops, which they did with great trust in Our Lord. And in his infinite mercy he saw fit that, when the locusts reached the edge of our land and were destroying all the crops around, they did no harm at all to our village’s crops nor outside and had sprinkled holy water. One Portuguese had a cultivated field outside and had sprinkled holy water on it, and when the locust came eating up to the edge of his field, they flew over it to the other side to eat the local people’s crops without touching his, as he told me, since he had seen it with his own eyes.90 Another, non-Catholic villager, Páez reported, asked a member of the Portuguese community for a few drops of the water. A neighbor tried to persuade him against using the father’s repellent. However, the villager replied that he deeply trusted the Catholics and spilled the water on his parcel. When the locusts arrived, they skipped over his fields while decimating that of the naysayer.91

90 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 2:163. For more on religious vows and ecclesiastical responses to natural disasters, like epidemics and locust plagues, in sixteenth-century Spain, see William A. Christian Jr., Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 23–69. 91 Christian, Local Religion, 23–69.

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Locust attacks on different provinces of Ethiopia were a relatively common occurrence during the period under review.92 In 1627, Barneto reported, a swarm zeroed in on the crops of wealthy northerners and noblemen who had rebelled against the emperor. As in previous cases, the “sorcerers” were called upon to divert the insects to Portuguese-cultivated fields. Although spells were cast, the Catholic properties in May Gʷaggʷa (a village adjacent to Fǝremona) were spared.93 Instead, the swarm devoured the grains planted by members of “the schismatic church” in waves. “As a result, the schismatic followers were befuddled, whereas the new Catholics were reassured of their faith.”94 Likewise, Barradas claimed to have driven away a swarm from a kätäma (royal military camp), though he expressed a bit more skepticism than Barneto: “Even if they [i.e., the locusts] departed in a natural way, all of them [the Ethiopians] believed that it was because of the holy water.”95 There appears to be a connection between these natural disasters and socio-religious friction. More specifically, the Orthodox population viewed these “acts of God” through the lens of the constant threats they endured from adversarial Muslim and Catholic groups. In describing the Moor who could purportedly steer the locusts, Páez alluded to this ongoing inter-faith antagonism. According to Lobo, Orthodox clergy told their flock that wherever the Jesuits go, a cloud of locust follows. Put differently, God has cursed the Latins.96 Within the Ethiopian conceptual world, then, accounts of locust swarms open a window onto the deep tensions provoked by socio-religious conflicts.97 92 93 94 95 96 97

Richard Pankhurst cites a variety of external sources describing locust attacks in Ethiopia; Pankhurst, Social History of Ethiopia, 10. A city in Tǝgray province, Fǝremona was one of the Jesuit mission’s principal centers of activity in Ethiopia and a stronghold of the local Portuguese community. “P. Thomas Barneto (I) ad p. Stephanum da Cruz (2). Maigoga, 12 martii 1627,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12:210. “Notícia sobre o reino,” in Oliveira, Cartas de Etiópia, 31. Lobo, Itinerário of Jerónimo Lobo, 191. Also see Caraman, Lost Empire, 145. A number of anthropologists and sociologists have emphasized the strong relation between travails and witchcraft in certain cultures, such as the Azande of North Central Africa. See Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), 100; and Jean Cazeneuve, Sociología del Rito, trans. José Castelló (Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 1971), 141–42. Conversely, magic is wielded to fend off bad luck caused by witchcraft. Mary Douglas (1921–2007) expounds on the danger and power of socially marginalized actors in Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2002), 91–116. According to Freudians, thaumaturgical ceremonies on their own are enough to satisfy both the magician and patient, as the final result is only of secondary importance. René Laforgue, “Le pensée magique dans la religion,” Revue francaise de psychoanalyse 7, no. 1 (1934): 19–31.

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By taking over the functions of, say, combating evil, reciting litanies, offering blessings, administering holy water, and performing exorcisms,98 which were traditionally filled by holy men, the Jesuits asserted the church’s power over Ethiopian society. This turn of events is analogous to one that transpired on the Iberian Peninsula a few decades earlier. After prohibiting “enchanters,” “fortunetellers,” “bewitchers,” and “magicians” from conducting prayers and exorcisms, the 1566 Synodal Constitutions of Toledo exhorted “all the clergy of this archdiocese who are responsible for souls” to scrupulously perform “the exorcisms approved by the church.”99 In any case, Páez refrained from invalidating the religious worldview of his potential converts. With the objective of demonstrating Catholicism’s superiority over the local faith, he gradually enculturated and adapted the church’s outlooks to the traditional Ethiopian outlook whereby holy men are charged with explaining, predicting, and controlling temporal events. With respect to India, missionaries and European travelers described yogis as charlatan magicians who profess to work miracles. As noted, Bernier wrote about two yogis who competed against each other in this field. The Western explorer quipped that it is uncertain if Simon the Magician could have bested these ascetics, for “they guess the thoughts of others; they make the branch of a tree bloom and produce fruit in less than an hour; they place an egg that they are given to hatch in their bosom and, in less than a quarter of an hour,” a bird is flying “around the room; and I don’t know how many other marvels.” That said, Bernier made sure to inform his readers that he had merely heard of these wondrous feats but never personally witnessed them.100 The lively debate over the nexus between magic and religion persists to this day. A handful of scholars posit that a theoretical distinction must be drawn between them, either as polar opposites or two sides of the same continuum.101 According to Kaplan, though, the difference between magic and religion 98 In Pietro Scarduelli’s estimation, conflicts demand a ritual process that enables individual-cum-subjective emotions to be understood as or converted into symbolic objects. For example, tensions induced by social discord are cognitively transformed into acts imbued with meaning. In the process, the feelings are incorporated into pre-existing cultural models. Scarduelli, Dioses, espíritus, ancestros, trans. Stella Mastrangelo (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988), 87–88. 99 Cited in Christian, Local Religion, 30. 100 Bernier, Viaje al Gran Mogol, 2:85–86. 101 James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (New York: Limited Editions Club, 1970); Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (London: Allen & Unwin, 1957); Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science, and Religion and Other Essays (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1954); William J. Goode, “Magic and Religion: A Continuum,” Ethnos 14 (1949): 172–82.

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is culturally defined. As such, he argues that thaumaturgy is merely “a term used for other people’s rituals.”102 The Jesuits indeed condemned Ethiopian and Hindu “magical” practices while classifying their own magic as “religious.” These labels were socially motivated rather than the fruit of a comparative effort to produce a universal definition of magic. In other words, the Jesuits used the term “sorcery” for practices they deemed to be reprehensible. While Páez insisted that “the Portuguese did not believe in witchcraft,” there were accusations of this practice—many of them false—in the Iberian kingdom. A number of early modern Catholic authors opined that the divine mirrors the diabolical. Moreover, they assumed that the demonological has no language of its own. In other words, evil is merely the antithesis of the divine.103 These views aside, Páez not only conducted a quasi-sorcerous exorcism to prevent locust attacks but discussed it in a Portuguese-language book that was aimed at European readers. The similitude between religious conceptions of Jesuits and local ascetics on magic, exorcism, and miracles facilitated the interaction between the missionaries and the general public. Put differently, the order’s emissaries could readily execute the thaumaturgic duties that were filled as a matter of course by the local holy men. As illustrated earlier, both Hindu ascetics and Ethiopian Orthodox monks were prominent members of their respective societies owing to their perceived holiness. Lobo recalled how an Ethiopian landowner entrusted a venerated saint, by virtue of his mystical knowledge, to locate an old hidden treasure. The Jesuit bristled at the “absurd and superstitious beliefs” of this ascetic and his accompanying monks. For example, they informed the nobleman that the time was ripe for his heretical monks told him that now was the time to find it [the treasure] because the demon who had prevented the early searchers from discovering it was far away from there, had lost his leg, was blind in both eyes, was mourning the death of a son, had a daughter who was one-eyed and ailing, and thus was unable to come to prevent any work he might undertake to discover the treasure.104

102 See Steven Kaplan, “Magic and Religion in Christian Ethiopia: Some Preliminary Remarks,” in Studia aethiopica: In Honour of Sigbert Uhlig on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday, ed. Verena Böll et al. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2004), 413–22. 103 Gentilcore, “Church, the Devil, and the Healing Activities of Living Saints”; Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 265. 104 Lobo, Itinerário of Jerónimo Lobo, 264.

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Lobo then described how a famous, reclusive saint over a hundred years old, totally blind and crippled, officiated over a ceremony aimed at ensuring that the trove was unearthed. “To such a state had this poor man, the landholder, been reduced by his barbarous greed, ignorance, and stupid blindness”105 that he was convinced a ceremony performed by heretical monks would guarantee success. The mystic “had only his voice with which to deceive, and arrogance and self-conceit to so high a degree that he supposed that he alone, with his prayers, was sufficient to obtain the hidden treasure from God.”106 In addition, the father portrayed the local attendees as “blind superstitious people” who place their trust in “diabolic sorcery, idolatry, [and] abominable sacrifice” and revere the devil. Correspondingly, the “monks and blind schismatics found nothing in this work to prick their consciousness but rather approved and authorized” this spectacle “with their presence and music.”107 This entire performance, Lobo wrote, was enabled by qualities that Catholics must diligently avoid: greed, hubris, stupidity, and magic. The Jesuit reminded the owner that if the treasure was not found, “the deceitful old monk deserved at least thirty lashes from a strong hand, for his age and physical condition would not allow more,” as punishment for disgracing himself with such sacrilegious fictions and offering a “sacrifice to the devil.”108 Although the expedition ultimately failed, the aging Ethiopian monk blamed this on the lagging faith of the attendees, who unceremoniously filed out and returned to their homes.109 4

The Allure of Shrines

In parts of Ethiopia and the sub-continent, shrines became centers of healing. Quite a few of these venues derived their curative power from the mystical presence of a holy figure. To this day, Indian Hindus and Muslims conduct therapeutic ceremonies and exorcisms at or near the burial places of saints. Fixed times on the shrine’s ritual calendar as well as odd random moments are deemed to be propitious for healing.110 Medieval and modern pilgrimage on the sub-continent was an outgrowth of the Brahmin revival. To some extent, these devotional journeys spread to the countryside and other cults. 105 Lobo, Itinerário of Jerónimo Lobo, 264. 106 Lobo, Itinerário of Jerónimo Lobo, 264. 107 Lobo, Itinerário of Jerónimo Lobo, 264. 108 Lobo, Itinerário of Jerónimo Lobo, 265. 109 Lobo, Itinerário of Jerónimo Lobo, 266. 110 Paul B. Courtright, “Shrines,” in Eliade, Encyclopedia of Religion, 13:299–302.

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Devotees believe that many of the pilgrimage centers endow visitors with prosperity, health, and salvation.111 The Mahābārata, an ancient Sanskrit epic poem, lists a variety of reasons why certain locations are sacred: “Just as certain limbs of the body are purer than others, so are certain places on earth more sacred; some on account of their situation, others because of their sparkling waters, and others because the association or habitation of saintly people.”112 At the turn of the nineteenth century, William Crooke (1848–1923), a British orientalist, researched the miracle-working tombs in northern India. By dint of sheer piety and uncompromising austerity, he concluded, the local saints had wrested a modicum of power from their reluctant god. Following the death of these figures, this power is thought to exude from their grave. Hindu saints, in Crooke’s estimation, are so directly imbued with the divine afflatus that they need not the purifying influence of fire, and are buried, not cremated. Their Samâdhi113 or final resting-place is usually represented by a pile of earth, or a tomb or tumulus of a conical or circular form. Others, again, like some of the Gusâînis, are after death enclosed in a box of stone and consigned to the waters of the Ganges. These shrines are generally occupied by a disciple or actual descendant of the saint, and their vows and prayers are made and offerings presented.114 Surveying the iconoclastic nature of the Portuguese expansion into Goa amid the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Alexander Henn highlights the fact that the area’s shrines became accessible to multiple religious denominations.115 In every Hindu village, local gods were replaced by a Catholic patron saint. 111 Swami Agehananda Bharati, “Pilgrimage in the Indian Tradition,” History of Religions 3, no. 1 (1963): 135–67, here 152. In the Hindu tradition, David Dean Shulman observes, rudimentary motifs for a deity’s localization derived from prevalent types. “Most basic of them all is the identification of the sacred site with a center or navel of the universe, the spot through which passes the axis mundi connecting heaven and earth and the subterranean world of Pātāla.” Shulman, Tamil Temple Myths (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 40. Also see Surinder Mohan Bhardwaj, Hindu Places of Pilgrimage in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). 112 Cited in Bhardwaj, Hindu Places of Pilgrimage, 84. Bhardwaj surveys the Hindu pilgrimage sites as per the Mahābārata on pages 29–42 therein. 113 A samâdhi is a memorial chapel erected over a saint’s tomb. See Klostermaier, Concise Encyclopedia of Hinduism, 161. 114 William Crooke, The Popular Religion and Folk-Lore of Northern India (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1968), 1:185. 115 Henn, Hindu–Catholic Encounters in Goa, 160.

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“The ubiquitous distribution of Catholic crosses, saints’ images, and shrines,” according to Henn, “also indicates that the replacement affected each and every minor deity and tutelary being.”116 Comparing David Shulman’s idea of “localization” in Hindu mythology and practice to the “localistic religiosity” that informed early modern Catholicism on the Iberian Peninsula, Henn observes that both developments engendered a sphere of direct contact between communities and their saints.117 The practice of marking the Christian occidental landscape with religious sites and monuments can be traced back to late antiquity. More specifically, aristocratic families began to patronize saint tombs, which evolved into popular pilgrim centers.118 This “Christianization of the landscape” intensified in thirteenth-century Iberia with the upsurge in devotional images. According to Henn, the “systematic marking” of Goa “with Catholic images and monuments may not only have been the effect of iconoclastic replacement of Hindu images and monuments but also the result of a genuine similarity of Hindu and Catholic concepts and practices regarding the manifestation and distribution of the divine and holy in space.”119 Ethiopian monasticism also venerated the tombs of “the holy men” who founded the different monasteries, to the point where these sites were considered a gateway to salvation. For instance, the Däbrä Libanos monastery imposed its authority on neighboring cloisters in Šäwa by transmigrating the bones of Abba Täklä Haymanot—among Ethiopia’s most celebrated monastic leaders. In the early 1400s, the remains of Täklä Haymanot and the community’s abbots were transferred to a new church that Emperor Tewodros I (d.1414, r.1413–14) had expressly built for this purpose.120 Likewise, Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob (d.1468, r.1434–68) reinterred Abbot Philip’s (1274–1348) bones in Däbrä Libanos.121 Adhering to medieval Catholic traditions, early seventeenth-century Jesuits were particularly fond of relics, to which they attributed miraculous healing

116 Henn, Hindu–Catholic Encounters in Goa, 59. 117 Christian, Local Religion, 20. 118 Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 1–22. 119 Henn, Hindu–Catholic Encounters in Goa, 60. 120 Marie-Laure Derat, “Däbrä Libanos,” in Uhlig, Encyclopaedia aethiopica, 2:25–28. Also see Enrico Cerulli, “Gli abbati di Dabra Libānos, capi del monachismo etiopico secondo la ‘lista rimata’ (sec. XVI–XVIII),” Orientalia 12 (1943): 226–53; 13 (1944): 137–82; 14 (1945): 143–71; Christine Chaillot, The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church Tradition: A Brief Introduction to Its Life and Spirituality (Paris: Inter-Orthodox Dialog, 2002), 142–48. 121 Cerulli, “Abbati,” 250–53. Also see Getatchew Haile, “The Translation of the Relics of Abunä Filǝppos of Däbrä Libanos of Shoa,” Rassegna di studi etiopici 34 (1990): 75–113.

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powers.122 For example, missionaries along the Horn of Africa endeavored to locate items of significance to the local Catholic tradition. Upon their discovery, the relics were housed in protected venues that attracted religious worship and pilgrimage. A case in point are the sepulchers of the Jesuits, which became a major component of the Ethio-Latin rite. What is more, the Society’s representatives preserved the bones and gave them a proper burial on the premise that, to some degree, they retain the life and anima of the deceased. The body of Oviedo, the second Catholic patriarch of Ethiopia, was laid to rest in a small church in Fǝremona. Roughly a quarter-century after his demise, Páez lionized his predecessor. He described Oviedo’s burial and the reverence with which the patriarch was held by both Catholics and Orthodox Ethiopians alike, including the father superior of the Abba Gärima monastery.123 Furthermore, Almeida dedicated several pages of his history of Ethiopia to lauding Oviedo’s religious enterprise.124 The church in which Oviedo was interred was gradually expanded. His remains were transferred to a burial mound on higher ground and subsequently to a new limestone church on the same property.125 From as early as 1607, there are accounts of sick and needy pilgrims flocking to the site.126 Páez also bears witness to the fact that this sepulcher had become a pilgrimage site. According to the Jesuit, the schismatics also have such great devotion for the father that they are constantly taking earth from his grave with which to [treat] afflictions, and so no matter how much we cover it up [i.e., the grave], they always make another very deep hole in it, and they usually bring him offerings of wheat and other items.127 122 Leonardo Cohen, “Jesuit Missionaries in Ethiopia: Their Role as Exorcists, Healers, and Miracle-Makers (1603–1632),” in Wälättä Yohanna: Ethiopian Studies in Honour of Joanna Mantel-Niečko on the Occasion of the 50th Year of Her Work at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Warsaw University, ed. Witold Witakowsky and Laura Łykowska, (Warsaw: Elipsa, 2006), 79–91. 123 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 2:77. 124 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 5:445–51. 125 Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, “Fǝremona,” in Uhlig, Encyclopaedia aethiopica, 2:528. 126 “P. Aloisius de Azevedo ad provincialem Goanum (I). Fremonae, 22 iul. 1607,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 11:120. According to William A. Christian Jr., coeval Spanish shrines revolved around miracles. “Without such evidence a shrine could not attract the votive devotion necessary for its maintenance, and it would revert to a simple chapel, without keeper or chaplain. Without miracles, monasteries that maintained shrines would lose considerable income.” Christian, Local Religion, 102. 127 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 2:78.

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Upon reaching the kingdom, Mendes visited the church. “The first time a person enters it,” the patriarch wrote, “he must bring an ample supply of tears, for hidden in this poor hut […] is a great heavenly treasure.”128 During his tenure, steps were taken to glorify Oviedo’s legacy. Above all, the Jesuits sought to enlarge the burial site and render it a formidable pilgrimage center. Apparently drawing on Páez’s reports, Almeida chronicled the miracles that Oviedo had performed over his lifetime. Moreover, he claimed that they continued to occur postmortem.129 Among the bevy of tales were several depicting how the father’s prayers had safeguarded the Catholic community from a plague of locusts.130 Both Jesuits also referred to miracles involving Oviedo’s tomb, such as the healing of pilgrims’ sores with earth from his grave.131 What is more, the site was left unscathed by an Oromo raid on Fǝremona in 1616: Four Oromo [warriors] came to the town of the church where the saint is interred, and one of the bolder ones tried to set it on fire. This was a simple task, for it [i.e., the church] was very low and made of straw. He lit it [the fire], but it went out even though the straw was dry. We saw as he futilely tried a second […] and third time. […] Undeterred, he tried to light another fire, but […] stumbled, fell, and broke a leg. Upon seeing this, our people profusely thanked the Lord, who indeed helped our cause for the glory of his saint. The Oromo eventually went away, leaving Fǝremona intact.132 Barneto elaborated on the materials used to construct the prayer house, such as an altar composed of stone and mottled with red paint. In addition, he described his visit to the shrine: I then opened the cave inside the old church where the ancient fathers had deposited the relics of the holy patriarch, in the presence of the Portuguese, women, and important Abyssinians, many of whom had known and served the holy man as children. And the moment the holy receptacle came into sight, there was a welter of tears, sobs, and cries as though it was their own father and mother who was buried; such is the esteem with which they hold the holy man, whose memory vigorously 128 Tellez, Historia geral de Ethiopia, 408. 129 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 2:77–78. 130 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 5:460. 131 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 5:460. 132 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 5:459.

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endures in these people as though he were alive. For this reason, they come, and will always come, to ask for healing and succor, in the trust that, like many before them, even schismatics, they will not leave empty-handed.133 At Oviedo’s new tomb, the Society dispensed offerings to the throngs of indigent locals who came to supplicate for “healing and succor.”134 A number of Jesuits testified that Ethiopian dignitaries who had embraced Catholicism, such as Kabä Krǝstos (dates unknown), made the pilgrimage as well. In fact, the aforementioned governor of Tǝgray swore before an image of the Virgin Mary that if he defeated the Oromo on the battleground, he would build a church over the grave site.135 Conversely, another pilgrim who made a false oath at the tomb was struck by lightning.136 In sum, the remains of venerated figures, even those from the not-so-distant past, were believed to miraculously safeguard pilgrims from evil, cure ailments, usher in prosperity, guarantee military victory, and burnish the legitimacy of visiting leaders. Ceremonies and venues that pertain to such relics were designed to lay down Catholic roots on the Horn of Africa and foster an attendant identity. In a similar vein, Mendes availed himself of Oviedo’s legacy to bolster his own authority. The Jesuits would indeed erect a variety of Catholic shrines and other places of worship throughout the 1620s. 5

Conclusion

By virtue of their influence as oracles or representatives of a prophetic Christianity, the local ascetic figures constituted rivals of the Jesuits, as both sides espoused competing models of devotional leadership. In both Ethiopia and India, the Society’s emissaries were trying to implement an ecclesiastical order whereby God has ultimate providence over the universe and heresy is symptomatic of the devil’s machinations to thwart this disposition. Time and again, the missionaries voiced their concern that the “heresy” of the Ethiopians or the yogis’ “deteriorated Christianity” had spawned “unauthorized,” rather

133 “P. Thomas Barneto (I) ad p. Stephanum da Cruz (2): Maigoga, 12 martii 1627,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12:209. 134 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12:209. 135 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12:343. 136 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 7:69.

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than “undeserving,” clergymen.137 For the Jesuit order, it was imperative that those who conducted exorcisms and healing rituals were sanctioned by the Holy See. So long as these activities were properly executed under the supervision of a “legitimate” ecclesiastic, they would surely bring about the desired result. As a corollary, the efforts of yogis and “heretic monks” were bound to fail given their lack of requisite training.138 In Dominique Deslandres’s estimation, most missionaries shared the conviction that there were very few genuine enemies. From the vantage point of the French Jesuits, she argues, only the “leaders”—the bad priests in Catholic areas, the ministers of “la Prétendue Religion Réformée,” the sorcerers in the lands of the “Savages”—mislead the “Other.” The “Other” was alternatively drawn between truth and error. They were the “field” of the mission as well as the stake of the combat.139 In comparing the Jesuits’ attitudes to the practices of Hindu ascetics and Ethiopian monks, Deslandres’s insights merit our attention. The Jesuits strove to follow in the apostles’ footsteps. In consequence, miracles were considered within the realm of the possible. This outlook indeed animated all the different cases that were examined in this chapter: battles against Satan, evangelization campaigns, and attempts to demonstrate the earthly success of the “true faith.” If nothing else, the bookish Jesuits were more than capable of holding their own in theological disputations with Ethiopian monks or ascetic Hindus. As noted in chapter 4, the missionaries authored books on a wide range of doctrinal issues. On the other hand, they also built working relations with ordinary folk who were highly receptive to tales of miracles, to exorcisms, and copious descriptions of heaven and hell. This, then, served as the backdrop for the thaumaturgical contests between Jesuits and local ascetics that were waged to determine whose magic was more potent. 137 For a discussion on order and the boundaries of Orthodox Christianity, see G. [Gillian] R. Evans, A Brief History of Heresy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 51–64. 138 Brian P. Levack explores different meanings of witchcraft in Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (London: Longman, 1987), 1–24. 139 Dominique Deslandres, “Exemplo aeque ut verbo: The French Jesuits’ Missionary World,” in O’Malley et al., Jesuits, 258–73, here 267.

Chapter 6

Jesuit Ambitions to Convert Ascetics From the standpoint of many evangelists, the missionary conscience is tied to a loophole in the Christian apostolate. In the 1500s, there was a growing consensus within the church that the Gospel had not been revealed to all men. Given the era’s prevailing theological conceptions, J. S. [José Sebastião] da Silva Dias (1916–94) suggests, this idea was no less than astounding.1 Nevertheless, the Jesuits toiled to advance their faith among Indian “gentiles” and Ethiopian “schismatics,” including the ascetics among them. Besides saving these anchorites’ souls, the order’s underlying motives were twofold. Deeming the ascetics to be virtuous and devout men, the missionaries ultimately wished to enlist them in the service of the church. Second, the Jesuits well understood that these men were influential figures in their own communities. As a result, the Society viewed their conversion to be a major ingredient in its campaign to disseminate the Latin rite across the globe. Soon after making landfall on the Asian sub-continent, the Jesuits observed that yogis were feared and venerated by the local populace. According to Gago, a missionary who served in the Far East in the 1500s, some of these renunciants are considered saints and thus revered by the average Indian.2 Likewise, his colleague Sebastián Fernandes described these anchorites as “holy religious penitents.”3 A handful of late sixteenth-century European travelers reached nearly identical conclusions. In 1593, Jan Huygen van Linschoten (1563–1611), a Dutch merchant, wrote that the yogis in Goa “are like hermits and are esteemed as holy men by all. They live a strict life of great abstinence and cause ordinary people to believe all types of strange things.”4 The French traveler Bernier, who traversed the Mughal Empire, ascribed incredible religious power to these ascetics: I have observed them shamelessly walking, stark naked, through a large town, men, women, and girls staring at them with considerably more 1 Silva Dias, Os descobrimentos e la problemática cultural, 48. 2 “P. Balthasaris Gago S.I. excerpta e litteris P. Gasparis Barzaei sociis Goanis: Armuzia [Mense Septembri 1549] Missis,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:505. 3 “Fr. Sebastianus Fernandes S.I. ex comm. P. Francisco Borgiae, praep. gen. S.I. Goa [Novembri exeunte] 1569,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 8:76. 4 Heras, Conversion Policy of the Jesuits, 19.

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emotion than […] when a hermit passes through our own streets. Females would often dotingly bring them alms, surely believing that they were holy personages, more chaste and discreet than other men.5 As we have seen, yogis also maintained peculiar habits. By refusing to marry and by keeping strange diets, these eremites placed themselves above society. In consequence, they had merited a certain status that allowed them to function as mediators between rival groups or between man and God.6 Renouncing the temporal realm, yogis shed the bonds and duties of family and caste. Hence, they were free to eat and drink whatever they pleased. In some respects, anchorites were considered among the deceased. Upon joining the yogi rank, the renunciants’ kin were welcome to their earthly possessions.7 This liminality, otherness, and profound impact on others is what caught the Jesuits’ attention. For this reason, when a prominent anchorite embraced the Catholic faith, the Ignatian order deemed it a significant achievement worthy of celebration. As per the testimony of Barzeo, the proselytization of a distinguished yogi “set off quite a commotion, for he had great authority in the land of the Moors; water was imbibed from the relics in which we cleansed his feet.”8 Henriques shared the following anecdote about a yogi companion: “When I ask him if something is a sin or not, he always prudently responds that it seems Christian.”9 According to Fróis, these ascetics possess “a certain natural fire, as they have a propensity for contemplation.”10 If yogis are “holy religious penitents,” Sebastián Fernandes opined, it is preferable that they serve God rather than demons.11 After converting such an eremite, Nunes Barreto extolled his virtues: “I was greatly fascinated by the wonderful fire that the Lord bestowed upon this person who had hitherto been a yogi and master of idolatry. For this, he has much credit among the people who are glad to hear his preaching, and some have been converted through him.”12 5 6 7 8

Bernier, Viaje al Gran Mogol, 2:81. Kaplan, Monastic Holy Man, 77. O’Malley, Popular Hinduism, 208. “P. Gaspar Barzeus S.I. P. Ignatio de Loyola, Romam. Goa 16 Decembris 1551,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 2:254. 9 “P. Henricus Henriques S.I. P. Ignatio de Loyola, Simoni Rodrigues ceterisque patribus in Europa degentibus. E Vembar 31 Octobris 1548,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:294. 10 “Carta geral do Irmão Luis Frois aos religiosos da Companhia em Portugal: Goa 8 de Dezembro de 1560,” in Silva Rêgo, Documentação para a história das missões, 220. 11 “Fr. Sebastianus Fernandes S.I. ex comm. P. Francisco Borgiae, praep. gen. S.I. Goa [Novembri exeunte] 1569,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 8:76. 12 “P. Melchior Nunes Barreto S.I. sociis Europaeis: Cocino 31 Decembris 1561,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 5:415.

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While the Jesuits admired the yogis’ devotion to their god(s), the former also sought to proselytize them for strategic reasons. The Society took pains to identify and transform popular holy sites into Catholic centers.13 If so, the missionaries reasoned, why not convert the local saints as well? In Hormuz, Antonio de Heredia (1513–62) reported, the Society has neither school nor residence, only a hermitage. Not far from the city, at a location high above, to [the light of] three chalices, Master Gaspar contemplated a famous yogi who in that [same] place (where he had a cave and hovel) had converted to [Christianity]. So it came to pass that in that spot where the devil had long been worshipped, God, the creator of the universe, was now revered.14 In Granero’s estimation, the Society’s proselytizers would capitalize on “anything” they could “in the towns of the mission,” not least “the multitude of inclinations, tendencies, knowledge, orientations, and other factors that are furnished by the generous hand of God,” so long as these elements “have not been irrevocably tainted by the sins of men.”15 The Jesuits discovered that the yogis were honest and venerated by the local populace. Hence, the order believed that if these ascetics could be “shown the light,” they would immeasurably enhance the local proselytization efforts. For instance, Henriques lodged the following report about a renouncer he had met: When the gentiles see a man of such great judgment, who among them [such a virtue] is so rare, a man so poor and contemptuous of the world, whose public deeds are good and admonitions so holy, convert to our faith, God willing some shall [also] convert and many will feel the meaning of our faith; those already Christian shall rejoice with great vigor; I trust in God that their conversion will reap a bounty of fruit.16

13 Alexander Henn shows that Hindu temples, images, and altars were systematically destroyed and replaced by Christian equivalents; see Hindu–Catholic Encounters in Goa, 40–64. 14 “P. Antonius de Heredia S.I. P. Ignatio de Loyola, Romam: Armuzia 20 Octobris 1554,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 3:102. Also see “P. Antonius de Heredia S.I. Cuidam Patri Gravi S.I. [Ulyssipone Autumno 1561],” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 5:195–96. 15 Granero, Acción misionera, 188. 16 “P. H. Henriques, superior Pescariae, P. Ignatio de Loyola et Sociis: Punicale 21 Novembris 1549,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:584–86.

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At the time, the father wrote that the Jesuits should “pray that God converts many men like the yogi I wrote to you about last year, for” this will produce “great glory for the Lord and the conversion of many infidels.”17 During these years, many European reformers were clamoring for the elimination or drastic reduction of popular acts of piety on the grounds that they obscured the true essence of Christianity. That said, the Jesuits were cognizant of the power vested in external manifestations of devotion, such as fasting, long prayers, and the use of sacred objects.18 Conspicuous expressions of asceticism, they reasoned, could be of immense service to God if duly moderated and tailored to the Latin rite.19 On the Horn of Africa, the Jesuits felt that the proselytization of exemplary charismatic figures would be a solid foundation upon which to build a local Catholic edifice. Páez described a monk in Amhara that the mission had baptized “as a man of solitude who leads a good life; he possesses great authority in his land.”20 Furthermore, the proselytizer referred to another convert, Aliba Dangil (Ḥalib Dǝngǝl [dates unknown]),21 as “an esteemed hermit, known for his great penance and for being a ‘clean monk,’ a term they use to mean he had no female friend or disciple, which is the same.”22 With respect to the baḥtawis, Almeida posited that their sanctity was “feigned” but could not deny that they were saints in the eyes of the local populace.23 Azevedo, a scholarly Portuguese missionary, recalled the glory that the evangelization of a “much renowned” and influential monk brought to the church: “By dint of his conversion, he showed many the way, thereby discrediting the doctrine of Ethiopia and furnishing a persuasive argument against it.”24 Henriques pursued a similar course in India, for which he earned high praise from Lancillotto in a missive to Ignatius: “He has and continues his tireless endeavors to find men, both married and single, who are well-suited and predisposed to instructing [others] on matters of religion. Once they are assumed

17 “P. Henricus Henriques S.I. P. Ignatio de Loyola. Romam. resp. sociis Conimbricensibus: Cocino 27 Ianuarii 1552,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 2:307. 18 O’Malley, First Jesuits, 266. 19 “P. Gaspar Barzeus S.I. P. Ignatio de Loyola, Romam. Goa 16 Decembris 1551,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 2:254. 20 Gaspar Páez, Lettere annue di Ethiopia del 1624, 1625 e 1626 (Rome: Per l’Herede di Bartolomeo Zannetti, 1628), 187. 21 Ḥalib Dǝngǝl. 22 Gaspar Páez, “Carta anua de Ethiopia a do mes de Julho de 1625 athe o de 1626 do estado secular do imperio da Ethiopia,” in Arquivo Distrital de Braga, MS 779, Cartas annais das missões da Etiopia, fol. 339v. 23 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 6:176. 24 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 11:89.

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to be faithful, he stations them in many places and charges them with teaching the Christian doctrine.”25 Above all, the Jesuits set out to directly influence the top brass in Ethiopian monasteries, on the premise that conquering the ecclesiastical summit would hasten the spread of Catholicism. In his original instructions to the Society’s emissaries, the founder urged them to convert personages whom the local populace deemed to be “saintly.” Once they have embraced the Latin rite, he added, the missionaries should gently prod them into abjuring harsh corporal penance “for a more divine service.”26 As part of this search for “influencers,” the missionaries were preoccupied with discerning the ecclesiastic hierarchy among the renunciants and monks in both India and Ethiopia. This task was far more complicated on the sub-continent, where yogism utterly lacked such a pecking order. The starting premise behind this enterprise was that, as is the case with statesmen, the cooperation of the religious elite could pay dividends. The missionaries tirelessly searched for parallels between monastic Catholic orders and yogism. From the perspective of Pietro Maffei, an Italian Jesuit, the Hindu renunciants’ “spiritual exercises, monastic hierarchy and evangelizing organization and spirit resemble the regular orders of the Catholic Church.”27 A number of the Society’s documents from that period even refer to the head of the anchorite community as “king of the yogi.”28 According to some missionaries, this title was bestowed upon this figure by the Ethiopian monarch himself. Similarly, Georgius de Castro (1494–1574) averred that the renunciants possessed a hierarchical structure on par with the Latin church. In fact, he claimed that “on a mountain close to Mangalore resides the yogi king—supreme Brahman—with his advisors and false cardinals, and nearly five hundred eremites and penitents who dwell in caves living in solitude.”29 The Jesuits also went to great lengths to understand the bonds tying the different monastic communities along the Horn of Africa. Here too, they found certain similarities with the Society of Jesus. What is more, the Society was interested in the relations between Ethiopia’s sovereigns and the monastic 25 26 27 28

Granero, Acción misionera, 166. Granero, Acción misionera, 191. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, 1:449. “Fr. Balthasar Nunes S.I. Sociis (Conimbricensibus): E Travancore 18 Novembris, 1548,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:321; “P. Marcos Nunes S.I. Padre Antonio de Quadros S.I., provinciali Indiae: Punicale 24 Octobris, 1559,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 4:268; “P. Georgius de Castro S.I. P. [Antonio de Possevino, secretario generali S.I.] Romae [autumno 1574],” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 8:746. 29 “P. Georgius de Castro S.I. P. [Antonio de Possevino, secretario generali S.I.] Romae [autumno 1574],” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 8:746.

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establishment. In practice, the head of a convent was known as a mêmeher (master).30 While this title was awarded for life, its holder could be forced to step down. At any rate, Páez dubbed the echegue,31 the abbot of the Däbrä Libanos monastery in Šäwa, as “the general of the order.” To reiterate, the Jesuits assumed that the conversion of senior political and ecclesiastical factors would advance their efforts.32 However, the missionaries’ impression that Ethiopia had a centralized ecclesiastic system obfuscated their view of the region’s monastic-cum-ascetic life. The appreciable role played by secluded monks on the local religious scene should have perhaps raised alarm bells as to the validity of this hypothesis. In the hopes of comprehending the organization behind the ascetic groups they encountered, the Jesuits in India and Ethiopia undertook to translate the hierarchical structures they ostensibly found into their own Ignatian terminology. Moreover, they kept their eyes peeled for individuals who were not necessarily part of the institutionalized elite but exercised authority by virtue of their charisma and standing among the broader public. As we have seen, the Society’s emissaries admired many of the traits these ascetics reputedly possessed and thus believed they could help the church make substantial inroads throughout these lands. In his annual report from Ethiopia for 1626, Páez discussed a rebellious monk who defied both the emperor and the local Catholic establishment. Following his incarceration, the ascetic was pardoned thanks to the intercession of Mendes, the Latin patriarch of Ethiopia. “It is expected,” Páez added, “that being now ordained by the patriarch father,” the freed monk will put his fine reputation as a saintly figure at the disposal of the mission.33 1

The Motivations of Converts and the Genuine Conversion Dilemma

As discussed above, the conversion of ascetics was indeed a top priority for the Jesuits. Over the next few pages, we will grapple with the following related questions: What type of transformation was the Society of Jesus aiming for? What methods did its emissaries adopt for the purpose of winning over the anchorites? Did a “formal” or coerced conversion suffice, or was the objective a gradual, heartfelt change? 30

Wolf Leslau defines mamhǝr as “teacher, instructor, superior, abbot, prior of a monastery;” Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez, 334. See Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:432. 31 Ǝḉḉäge was an honorific bestowed by the monarch upon the native Ethiopian he appointed to oversee the kingdom’s church. See Getachew Haile, “Ǝḉḉäge,” in Uhlig, Encyclopaedia aethiopica, 2:212–13. 32 Cohen, Missionary Strategies of the Jesuits, 62. 33 Páez, Lettere annue di Ethiopia, 103–4.

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A recurring theme throughout the history of missionary outreach is the issue of who constitutes the arbiter of genuine conversions. More often than not, it would appear that the neophyte regards his transformation as sincere, whereas the proselytizer harbors doubts. Lancillotto dwelled on this problem at the outset of the Society’s mission in India: Those who become Christians merely do so out of a passing interest, and many of them with bad intentions. In these lands, many deceive their fellow man; those who are slaves of Moors and Gentiles become Christians for the sake of attaining their freedom; others become Christians so that they will be protected against tyrants; yet others become Christians in return for a bonnet, a shirt, or any small trinket; others become Christians to avoid the noose; others for the sake of conversing with Christian women; so blessed is he that becomes a Christian by virtue alone.34 Lach has suggested that with the exception of a few yogis and Brahmans who professed to acknowledge the superiority of Christian teachings, most of the early converts accepted conversion out of either political or diverse individual interests: slaves wanted freedom, parents wanted greater security and better training for their children, and others wanted the new European clothes which went to every convert.35 This topic becomes all the more complex when the historian’s judgment of “authenticity” comes into play. Kaplan alerts us to the intrusion of the researcher’s own values when judging between a “genuine” conversion and one driven by intra-mundane motives: Although it is something of a truism: people convert in order to improve their lives. The crucial question is, therefore, how they understand that deceptively simple concept of “improving their lives.” In any event, it must be clear that to view certain motives as valid and legitimate, and others as lacking in those characteristics, tells us more about the researchers’ values than about the converts.36

34 Granero, Acción misionera, 162. 35 Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, 250. 36 Steven Kaplan, “Themes and Methods in the Study of Conversion in Ethiopia: A Review Essay,” Journal of Religion in Africa 34, no. 3 (2004): 373–92, here 380–81.

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In my estimation, there is scant difference in the motives underpinning the “true” conversion of religious figures and common people. Even a hermit, say, can be driven by material concerns, such as access to Portuguese culture or technology. In Ethiopia, Almeida enumerated three types of reactions on the part of clergy to the pressure Emperor Susǝnyos placed on them to embrace the Latin rite: “The emperor summoned many monks who were in hiding. Upon hearing our proposal, many whole-heartedly received our sacred faith; others made false profession; and some were obstinate and bore their punishment.”37 2

“Conversion of the Heart”: the Jesuit Approach to the Evangelization of the Yogis

Rather than focusing entirely on the catechumens, Lewis Rambo and Thomas O. Beidelman have emphasized the need to study the origins, perceptions, objectives, and strategies of the missionaries in order to better understand the conversion process.38 This vantage point is crucial with respect to the Society’s early modern missions in Ethiopia and the sub-continent, for the principal sources on these enterprises are Jesuit-authored documents. In fact, there is scant testimony from the converts themselves. This poses methodological difficulties, for the vast majority of the accounts are structured by the order’s internal discourse. The term “conversion” (a derivative of the Latin conversio) corresponds with a pair of Greek words: epistrophé and metanoia. In the Christian context,39 Paul the Apostle used epistrophé to describe pagans abandoning idolatry for the sake of worshipping the “one true” God.40 Alternatively, metanoia expressed the interlocking notions of repentance, rebirth, and conversion as the fruit of

37 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 7:6. 38 Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion, 66–75; Thomas O. Beidelman, “Contradictions between the Sacred and Secular Life: The Church Missionary Society in Ukaguru, Tanzania, East Africa, 1876–1914,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (1981): 73–95. 39 In Christian lore, the idea of conversion has roots in biblical and classical notions of spiritual transformation. See Anya Mali, “The Dynamics of Conversion: The Mystical and Missionary Experience of Marie de L’Incarnation (1599–1672)” (PhD diss., Hebrew University, 1990), 15–30. 40 Galatians 4:9. See Ronald E. Witherup, Conversion in the New Testament (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1994), 88–99.

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divine providence.41 In other words, conversion can express the jettisoning of infidelity, paganism, or any transgression for genuine faith and a life abounding with grace. As such, the Christian term combines repentance and a turn to God. The first Jesuit missionaries indeed used “conversion” to express both of these acts. It also bears noting that Ignatius’s curriculum vitae exemplifies this sort of transition. Not surprisingly, elements of the founder’s narrative underpin the Jesuit approach to evangelizing sinners.42 In his so-called autobiography,43 Ignatius describes how God led him down the path of conversion, reshaping his soul along the way. Moreover, the book expounds on the maturation process through which the Society’s founder joined the ranks of the devoted and found his true calling. Before this volte-face, Ignatius was admittedly a sensual man “given to the vanities of the world.” He delighted in the exercise of arms and suffered from a “great […] desire to obtain honor.”44 Triggered by a vision of Mary and baby Jesus, the superior general’s initial conversion “left him disgusted with his entire past life, especially [concerning] matters of the flesh.” These apparitions liberated Ignatius from the temptation of carnal sin and increasingly motivated him to devote his life to God.45 Accordingly, the founder trained his own disciples along these same lines. To this end, he laid down guidelines for conversion in both the Spiritual Exercises46 and the order’s Constitutions.47 At any rate, Ignatius’s transformation was neither instantaneous nor complete.48 Even after his rebirth, the founder experienced mood shifts and was buffeted by temptation and dilemma. The superior general also struggled 41 Mathew 3:2, 8, 11; 4:17; Mark 1:4, 15; Luke 5:32; 13, 3–5; Acts 2:38; see Witherup, Conversion in the New Testament, 22–73. Jacob W. Heikkinen expounds on the difference between these two terms in “Notes on ‘Epistrepho’ and ‘Metanoeo,’” Ecumenical Review 19 (1967): 313–16. 42 “By the seventeenth century,” Anya Mali contends, “the theory, practice and experience of conversion took on new dimensions and the idea of religious change in its various guises infiltrated the public imagination and was captured in a rapidly expanding body of Christian literature. […] Conversion as the crux of personal salvation, as a powerful literary motif or as a missionary activity, were part of the mental baggage which Church leaders and ordinary Catholics carried into this new age.” Mali, “Dynamics of Conversion,” 29. 43 Loyola, Autobiografía y Diario espiritual. 44 Loyola, Autobiografía y Diario espiritual, 58 [1:1]. 45 Loyola, Autobiografía y Diario espiritual, 63–64 [1:10–11]. Donald L. Gelpi, “Conversión,” in GEI, Diccionario de Espiritualidad Ignaciana, 1:481–84, here 481. 46 Loyola, Ejercicios espirituales. 47 Arzubialde, Corella, and García-Lomas, Constituciones. 48 Unlike Paul the Apostle, Ignatius’s conversion was neither sudden nor tumultuous. While the superior general emphasized that he was “illuminated by God,” the divine fire did not visibly descend from heaven. See Loyola, Autobiografía y Diario espiritual, 63 [1:9]. Instead, the flame penetrated “sweetly, subtly, and softly like a drop of water through a

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long and hard over whether to continue along his iniquitous path or follow in the footsteps of Saints Francis of Assisi (c.1181–1226) and Dominic (1170–1221): “At times, his soul […] did not find pleasure in preaching or Mass […], while on other occasions, he was overcome by the opposite of this.” When worshipping the Lord, “the sadness and despair appeared” to have evaporated in one fell swoop.49 Moreover, Ignatius discovered that reverting to a life of sin elicited a feeling of spiritual emptiness and agitation. On the other hand, the Christian way endowed him with serenity and contentment. Reflecting on his previous experiences, the former military man eventually arrived at the conclusion that God was speaking to him and decided to open a new leaf. It bears emphasis that throughout this process, the superior general exhibited his trademark self-control, which he would subsequently pass on to others. Against this backdrop, it is only natural that Jesuit missionaries were wont to introduce the faith in a gradual yet unwavering manner. Another text by Ignatius that divulges his outlook on conversion is Las reglas para discernir espíritus (Rules for the discernment of spirits). In this work, the superior general reflected on his own route to God and pastoral experiences. A major facet of the Spiritual Exercises is the idea that God and the devil are at work in every process.50 Therefore, Ignatius posited that emotions like sadness, confusion, happiness, and serenity must be taken with utmost seriousness. At the core of Las reglas stands the basic assumption that a battle for every potential convert’s soul is being waged between the forces of good and evil, between God and the devil—the “enemy of human nature.”51 The heart registers the swings in this confrontation as feelings of solace and desolation. Consequently, it is incumbent upon every person to distinguish between and figure out where these emotions are leading them. The objective behind the Exercises is to help the believer identify “the good spirit” and the Lord’s plans for them at each step along the way. As we shall see, these concepts turn sponge.” Loyola, Ejercicios espirituales, 57 [335]. While convalescing from a leg injury, the Society’s founder read edifying books. Loyola, Autobiografía y Diario espiritual, 62 [1:7]. 49 Loyola, Autobiografía y Diario espiritual, 75 [3:20]. 50 See O’Malley, First Jesuits, 41. In Ethiopia, there were numerous cases of Jesuits blaming botched conversions on demons. The emissaries truly believed that they were locked in mortal combat with a preternatural force. 51 Loyola, Ejercicios espirituales, 57 [334]. The Gǝʿǝz term for the “life of a saint” is gädl. The word derives from the root gädälä, which means “to strive, wrestle, struggle, fight, battle, combat.” Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez, 182. Accordingly, the stress of Ethiopian hagiography is not on the biographical aspects but rather the protagonist’s spiritual struggle. Much like Ignatius, the ascetic monk is implicitly compared to a “fighter and combatant.” Steven Kaplan, “The Glorious Violence of Amdä Seyon of Ethiopia,” in Violence and Non-violence in Africa, ed. Paul Ahluwalia, Louise Betlehem, and Ruth Ginio (London: Routledge, 2007), 12–26, here 18.

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up in the Jesuit reports on the conversion of ascetics, not least their evaluations of the novices’ sincerity and the quality of these undertakings. To reiterate, the first Jesuits drew a correlation between a “return” to Catholicism and a conversion of the heart. That is to say, the former was an inexorable result of the latter. Accordingly, the Society’s members believed that once the heart has been transformed, the veil that blinds the neophyte shall be lifted. For this reason, the Jesuits, though hardly lacking in persuasive arguments, did not generally consider disputation and reasoning to be sufficient in and of themselves for winning over souls.52 It was not enough for the Society’s emissaries to go through the ritualistic motions, particularly in instances where they were seeking conversions. Aiming for “genuine” transformations, the Jesuits were in no rush to perform baptism. What is more, the flurry of new denominations that the Reformation had wrought in Europe increased the demand—among both Catholics and Protestants alike—for veritable confessions.53 When referring to the evangelization of gentiles, the Society’s members by and large preferred the verb “reduce” (reducir; reducción; redução). In these contexts, “reduce” is “to persuade with reason and arguments on behalf of some cause,” not least the embrace of “the true faith or […] repentance.”54 Another meaning of “reduce” is “to subject, tame, subdue, and subjugate, or restore control over and the obedience of those who have strayed.”55 This, then, implies a process that goes beyond a mere religious transformation. For Catholics, “reduction” connotes surrender and submission to an idea or institution. One of the Jesuit mission’s central goals was attaining obedience. As per the Society’s outlook, it is imperative for a neophyte who genuinely wishes to obey those “in command” to desire and feel the same thing as the superiors as well as to “happily” submit to their authority.56 However, repentance and obedience were not the sole objectives of the Ignatian movement. From the missionary’s standpoint, lassoing in an ascetic that obediently and diligently adheres to the new faith could vastly improve his evangelical prospects. 52 See O’Malley, First Jesuits, 70–71. 53 Following the Protestant Reformation, Catholicism was no longer associated with a specific culture. Until then, every aspect of life was tethered to religion. However, it was more precise to speak in terms of a religious culture than faith. See John Sommerville, “Debate: Religious Faith, Doubt, and Atheism,” Past and Present 128 (1990): 152–55. 54 Diccionario de autoridades de la Real Academia Española (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1963), 5:1737. 55 Francisco Júlio Caldas Aulete, Dicionário contemporáneo da língua portuguêsa, 2ª edição brasileira por Hamílcar de Garcia (Rio de Janeiro: Editôra Delta, 1964), 4:3446; Diccionario de autoridades, 5:1737. 56 Herbert Alphonso, “Obediencia,” in GEI, Diccionario de espiritualidad ignaciana, 2:1325– 37, here 1333. Also see Arzubialde, Corella, and García-Lomas, Constituciones, 235 [550].

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As noted earlier, the Jesuits regarded the conversion of ascetics to be a “selling point” or “promotional tool” vis-à-vis the targeted population, all the more so when the embrace of Catholicism fomented strong emotions and profound gestures of devotion. In a letter to the superior general from 1549, Henriques opined that when the Gentiles saw a man of immense knowledge—one of the few of this sort among them—and such a poor and humble man […] whose public deeds are good, [and] his advice of utmost holiness, convert to our faith, I have hope in God that some others will [also] convert, and many [Catholics] will feel better about our faith than they have.57 Two years later, he wrote to Ignatius that “I prayed to God that many men would be converted, such as the yogi about whom I wrote last year, for the conversion of such men will be a great honor for the Lord and will help convert many infidels.”58 In essence, the Society regarded the conversion of ascetics to be qualitatively superior to any other target, save for political figures. Besides edifying the anchorites themselves, these successes inspired practicing Christians and stood to the detriment of the infidel. For this reason, Jesuits left detailed accounts of gradual conversion processes involving extensive doctrinal instruction preceding the baptism. On the other hand, there is also evidence of some rushed, apparently lax conversions that left a bad taste in the proselytizer’s mouth. Political circumstances also figured into the equation. Ascetics were occasionally converted under duress. Such coercion was possible when the mission had the backing of the local authorities. Among the most remarkable cases of protracted yogi conversions to the Latin rite involve ascetics whom the Jesuits hitherto regarded as wise and righteous men.59 Since the vast majority of the extant testimonies were penned by the Society’s representatives, these accounts have a common format, style, and limitations. One of the archetypal conversions involved a renouncer from the isle of Hormuz. Introduced to the faith by Barzeo, the yogi was christened Paulo de Santa Fe (1511–50). Owing to his distinguished standing, Paulo was among the Ignatian order’s most frequently cited examples of a Hindu 57 “P. H. Henriques, superior Pescariae, P. Ignatio de Loyola et sociis: Punicale 21 Novembris 1549,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:585. 58 “P. Henricus Henriques S.I. P. Ignatio de Loyola, Romam, resp. sociis Conimbricensibus: Cocino 27 Ianuarii 1552; Prima via,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 2:307. 59 “P. H. Henriques, superior Pescariae, P. Ignatio de Loyola et sociis: Punicale 21 Novembris 1549,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:584.

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convert.60 In the Jesuits’ estimation, he was an intelligent, chaste ascetic who had meticulously adhered to his vow of poverty. There are also reports that he was wont to preach about death.61 The emissaries were certain that as in the aftermath of a monarch’s conversion, other Indians would follow in Paulo’s wake.62 Unlike the other conversions under review, there are a couple of extant letters by this particular ascetic. In 1558, Paulo spent time in Coimbra, Portugal. During this trip, he sent a letter to none other than Ignatius of Loyola. Confessing to the addressee that one of the main reasons he embraced Catholicism was the desire to visit Rome, the novice presented himself as one of the figures most revered by the gentiles in Hormuz. Moreover, he requested an audience with the superior general. After many years of falling victim to “big lies,” Paulo added, he had been attracted, thanks to Father Barzeo, “to the fire of the most holy Catholic faith.”63 The Ignatian lingo clearly surfaces in Paulo’s account of his own conversion. To begin with, he adopts the founder’s spiritual outlook whereby the transformation entails renouncing one’s past sins and following the model of Jesus Christ. All the more so, the fire metaphor has deep roots in Ignatius’s Spiritual Diary, according to which devotion and warmth are integral parts of a “unity of experience.” Similarly, the phrase “warm devotion” (devoción calorosa) recurs time and again in the said Diary.64 “Warm devotion” is an inner feeling of heat and light that emanates from a divine sensation triggered by a reference to God. In turn, the warmth elicits a “symphony” of mystical-corporal stirrings.65 The letter also recounts how Paulo gave up the pagode where he had dwelled so that the Jesuit order could build a college in its stead. According to 60 “P. Gaspar Barzaeus S.I. sociis S.I. in India et Europa degentibus: Armuzia 10 Decembris 1549,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:676. Paul was the “name of choice” for renowned early converts in Asia. A case in point is the celebrated Japanese samurai Anjirȏ (1511–50). Baptized on May 20, 1548, he too was re-christened Paulo de Santa Fe. D’Alòs-Moner, Envoys of a Human God, 136. 61 Eduardo Javier Alonso Romo, “Gaspar Barzeo: El hombre y sus escritos,” Archivum historicum Societatis Iesu 77, no. 153 (2008): 63–92, here 77. 62 “P. Gaspar Barzaeus S.I. sociis S.I. in India et Europa degentibus: Armuzia 10 Decembris 1549,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:685. 63 “Paulus a Sancta Fide Patri Ignatio de Loyola: Conimbrica 13 Februarii 1553,” in Ignatius of Loyola, Monumenta ignatiana Sancti Ignatii de Loyola Societatis Jesu fundatoris epistolae et instructiones (Madrid: Typis Gabrielis Lopez del Horno, 1909), 5:32. 64 Loyola, Autobiografía y Diario espiritual, 228, 232, 237, 253, 261–65 [49, 56, 71, 114, 133, 134, 143, 144]. 65 José García de Castro, “Calor,” GEI, Diccionario de espiritualidad ignaciana, 1:255–60, here 256–57.

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the neophyte, he could not pursue the priesthood because he lacked the necessary restraint and thus wished to get married. Nevertheless, he was willing to serve the Lord anywhere the Society had a presence.66 In another missive from December 20, 1558, Paulo described the final stages of his conversion process upon returning to Hormuz. By that juncture, the yogi had gained a new perspective on his life. He felt sympathy and, to some extent, disdain for his fellow islanders who continued to adhere to their old ways. Apart from internally consummating his new bonds, Paulo also underwent an external change: The people of Hormuz greatly honored me and rejoiced at seeing me [again] […]. Moreover, the people of the land were astounded by my habiliments, which were so different than what they had previously seen me [wear] […]. I must confess to Your Reverence that on many occasions, I look with compassion and heartache upon these people who are so far from our Truth and heavily imprisoned by their sins and errors. May our Lord grant them light and wisdom so that they may overcome their ignorance and blindness. Amen.67 Paulo’s testimony involves a biographical reconstruction that is galvanized by the evangelization process. The sociologists James Beckford (1942–2022) and Brian Taylor illustrate how various faith-based collectives demand that novices adapt their conversion story to the group’s narrative. The beginners learn what is expected of them by listening to other accounts. Thereafter, the novices comprehend their life through this shared perspective, by which they become a new person.68 These letters constitute the only existing testimony of a converted ascetic. Let us now turn the spotlight back onto the mission’s vantage point by raising a number of questions: In the Jesuits’ view, what is the ideal evangelization process for an ascetic Hindu? More specifically, how many weeks of instruction must an anchorite undergo prior to being baptized? And what religio-cultural

66 “Paulus a Sancta Fide Patri Ignatio de Loyola: Conimbrica 13 Februarii 1553,” 5:32–33. 67 “Paulus de Sancta Fide, Armuzianus, provinciali S.I., in Lusitaniam: Goa 20 Decembris 1558,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 4:164. 68 James A. Beckford, “Accounting for Conversion,” British Journal of Sociology 29, no. 2 (1978): 249–62; Brian Taylor, “Recollection and Membership: Convert’s Talk and the Ratiocination of Commonality,” Sociology 12 (1978): 316–24; Taylor, “Conversion and Cognition: An Area for Empirical Study in the Microsociology of Religious Knowledge,” Social Compass 23 (1976): 5–22.

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practices should the neophyte observe before and once he is accepted into the Catholic fold? Baltasar Dias (dates unknown) wrote about two yogis, including Paulo de Santa Fe, who were converted by Barzeo. In Dias’s estimation, these renunciants were analogous to St. Paul before his vision. He also reported that the ascetics speak about eighteen different languages. Nevertheless, they were primed on the basics of the Latin faith, including the catechisms, together with several children. All told, it took the yogis about three months or so to become full-fledged Christians.69 In 1595, Valignano, a key figure in the Society’s Far East operations, laid down unique guidelines for converting yogis: Every day, there should be two talks with the catechumens on the matters of our holy faith and about the falsehoods of its sects and idolatries, as per the needs of each one, especially the Moors, Jews, and yogis, along with other priests or ministers of idolatry or infidelity. Let it be warned that the Moors, foreign Jews, and yogis are not to be baptized until having gone through three months of catechism, as the Goa council ordered, for our experience shows that these people occasionally recant.70 Valignano harbors suspicions regarding the Jews, Muslims, and yogi, for such novices cannot be regarded as tabula rasa. To the contrary, they had latterly displayed variant religious inclinations, which must be patiently eradicated.71 Accordingly, Barzeo lambasted Manuel de Lima, captain of Hormuz (in office 1547–50), for taking Paulo de Santa Fe to Portugal before the neophyte had completed his indoctrination: These [renunciants] worship a ternary God, through which they worship all creatures. They have a school outside the city, where they retire 69 “P. Balthasar Dias S.I., V. prov. Indiae, P. Iacobo Mirón S.I. prov. Lus. Goa 4 Ianuarii 1555,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 3:210–11. 70 “The Instruction of Fr. A. Valignano S.J., Visitor, for the ‘Pai dos Cristãos’: Goa, sometime before September 24 1595,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 17:86. 71 In 1536, the Portuguese Inquisition began repressing converts. Four years later, the autoda-fé was inaugurated in Lisbon; and the courts of Évora, Coimbra, Oporto, Lamego, and Tomar soon got behind this enterprise as well. During this period, most Spaniards and Portuguese believed that Iberian Jews had left their faith under duress. It also bears noting that those of the Mosaic persuasion who vacillated or resisted conversion amid the first three decades of the Spanish Inquisition faced long and harsh punishments. See Juan Ignacio Pulido Serrano, Los conversos en España y Portugal (Madrid: Arco Libros, 2003), 47, 55.

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at night. They abide by rules of comportment. Their way of life seems like that of philosophers; they preach in the streets to the gentiles. Known as joges, a significant portion of them have converted to the faith of Christ, not least the most important one of them all, whom Don Manuel de Lima took [to Portugal], basically against my will, as he was not instructed in the faith; and his name is now Paulo. For God’s sake, I intervened lest it [i.e., his conversion] come to naught.72 Other Jesuits also informed their superiors of the piecemeal conversion of distinguished yogis. Henriques followed this game plan with a renouncer whom he deemed to be knowledgeable and leading a good life: I nimbly befriended and converted this man. Little by little, I disclosed the precepts of our faith to him; and today he declared […] his will to become a Christian, for the tenets of our faith seem very sacred to him and consistent with good reason. He has wished to become a Christian for quite some time. Upon finishing up a matter, he said that he would get baptized.73 Reporting from Malacca, Francisco Perez (1530–95) had formed a similar impression of an old yogi. This “priest of the idols” approached him about embracing the Latin rite. According to Perez, the renouncer became a faithful Christian, husband, and father. To mark his conversion, Dom Pedro da Sylva (c.1554–78?), the vicar and captain of the Portuguese colony,74 threw “a great celebration.” Six months later, the neophyte died a believer “of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Be that as it may, the proselytization was no easy feat. “For an entire year, I walked around with him immersed in conversation.”75 The statements of both missionaries suggest that they had favorable views about the yogi path and wisdom. For this reason, the lengthy indoctrination process should be understood as a framework for inspiring the novices to embrace the Latin rite. From the Jesuits’ perspective, the ascetics only gained entry into the Catholic fold upon adopting the Roman creed and submitting to the church’s authority. Building on this outlook, Perez contended that baptism “remits all sin, original and actual. In addition, it bestows sanctifying grace, and 72 “P. Gaspar Barzeus S.I. P. Ignatio de Loyola, Romam: Goa 16 Decembris 1551,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 2:253–54. 73 “P. H. Henriques, superior Pescariae, P. Ignatio de Loyola et sociis: Punicale 21 Novembris 1549,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 1:584. 74 Dom Pedro da Silva da Gama served as the captain of Malacca from 1548 to 1552. 75 “P. Franciscus Perez S.I. sociis in Lusitaniam: Malaca 24 Novembris 1550,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 2:106.

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endues the soul with the heavenly virtues of faith, hope, and charity.” Finally, “it makes the recipient a member of Christ, the child of God and inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.”76 That said, the Ignatian movement clearly viewed the “authentic conversion” as an ongoing process. Especially regarding the evangelization of distinguished sages and ascetics, it was important for the Society’s representatives to prompt moral, intellectual, and emotive changes before the baptism. To varying degrees, the ascetics under review had ties with the local Portuguese community or the Western culture that it represented. At the end of the conversion process, the Indian renunciants were given a Portuguese name. A case in point is Paulo de Santa Fe. Even before the Jesuits’ arrival on the sub-continent, Lopes de Castanheda (1500–1559) reported of a yogi known as Miguel, or by the moniker Jogue, who embraced the Christian faith. Following long conversations with Henriques, he adopted the name Manuel Coutinho (dates unknown).77 However, scholars are hard-pressed to ascertain his motives due to the lack of self-testimony. At any rate, the Jesuits often required extensive preparations before administering the holy sacraments to nobles and senior ecclesiastics for the sake of ensuring a true “conversion of heart.” Put differently, the Society’s emissaries made the most strenuous demands on high-profile novitiates. 3

The Conversion of Ethiopian Monks

Baptism was indeed the essential rite of passage for prospective Catholics. Even before the Portuguese and Jesuits reached Ethiopia, this was the way non-Christians converted to Ethiopian Orthodoxy. It is only natural, especially in modern times, for Christian novices to delve into the essential beliefs and rituals of the prospective denomination before they are allowed to undergo the ceremonial immersion.78 The Jesuits had an ideal, if somewhat rigorous, conversion process that was passed down by the Society’s founder—Ignatius of Loyola. In contrast, the path to Orthodoxy in medieval Ethiopia was relatively 76 Vernon Staley, The Catholic Religion: A Manual of Instruction (London: A. R. Mowbray, 1904), 262. 77 “P. Henricus Henriques S.I. P. Simoni Rodrigues et sociis Lusitanis: Cocino 12 Ianuarii 1552,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 2:160. 78 Debates on this subject are examined by Gustav Arén, Evangelical Pioneers in Ethiopia: Origins of the Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus, Studia Missionalia Upsaliensa 32 (Stockholm: EFS Forlaget, 1978), 165. According to Kaplan, the length of this waiting period and the material that was taught were usually linked to the particular group’s theological understanding of conversion; Kaplan, “Themes and Methods,” 379–80.

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facile. The process often consisted of a short, informal ceremony that included a profession of faith, baptism, and the adoption of a new name. Rarely did the proselytes undergo substantial training, either before or after their conversion.79 It is in this context that the Jesuits’ decision to offer thorough Ignatian “schooling” to neophytes—with the objective of ensuring quality, rather than a multitude of conversions—should be understood. The results of this enterprise were far from uniform. The missionaries tallied every soul that was baptized and composed reports of their “harvest” for the Society’s leadership. As we shall see, though, many different factors were at work in the proselytization enterprise, and varying degrees of commitment stood behind the numbers. From the second half of the 1500s onward, several Ethiopian monks apparently conditioned their embrace of the Latin rite on the arrival of Portuguese troops.80 This may have stemmed from the fact that Portugal’s indispensable help in liberating Christian Ethiopia from the yoke of Islam was still fresh in the local memory. According to the Jesuit António Fernandes, a local monk told him that when “the Portuguese come, and if it is true that they will come, I will take on [the Roman] faith.” In response, the father asked him what he would do if he perished “before” the fleet arrives. Fernandes’s interlocutor replied that “I will go to hell.”81 It is evident that the Society’s emissaries were in the habit of providing assistance to specific monks who agreed to switch over to the Latin rite. In the case of Ethiopia, there is no extant document or testimony of a native Catholic. Jesuit texts from the latter half of the sixteenth century allude to a few monks who, at their own initiative, joined the local Catholic community of around one thousand souls.82 This group endured highly precarious conditions, especially under the regimes of Emperors Minas and Śärṣä Dǝngǝl. Missionaries briefly recounted the devotion and joy with which a “pure-hearted” monk by the name of Marcos took his communion and confessed before a Jesuit priest.83 While the sources are tongue-tied with respect to the motivations behind the conversion of, say, a pair of young monks, Thadeos and Pedro (dates unknown), it is known that they stayed at the Jesuit residence despite the protests lodged by many of their brethren.84 79 Kaplan, Monastic Holy Man, 132. 80 “P. Emmanuel Fernandez ad praepositum generalem S.I. (I). Ex Aethiopia die 13 iunii 1567,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 10:213. 81 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 10:214. 82 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 10:210. 83 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 10:210. 84 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 10:212.

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Various sources indicate that most Ethiopian monks were rather hostile toward Catholicism. Almeida considered the local monks “the strongest enemies of the Catholic faith,”85 dubbing them “the Pharisees of Ethiopia” who dare to uphold the Sabbath.86 Within these monastic circles, conversion was not an easy step. Several Jesuit narratives describe individual monks or learned Ethiopians who went to great lengths to conceal their growing affinity for the faith of Rome.87 On quite a few occasions, the monks who decided to embrace Catholicism claimed to have had dreams in which authority figures, like an angel, a venerable old man, or the emperor himself, urged them to seek confession.88 In the earliest known testimony of the Jesuits’ role as dream interpreters, Páez offered a detailed account of his encounter with a monk in Fǝremona.89 The latter asked to have a word in private with the father. When the two were alone, the monk fell to his knees and begged Páez to hear his confession. The Jesuit inquired as to the Ethiopian’s reasons, for in their previous meetings the monk had displayed little enthusiasm for the Latin rite. As his eyes welled with tears, he replied that a venerable man with a cheerful face had delivered the following message in a dream: “If you want to be saved, confess with this father who has recently arrived.”90 Upon awaking, the monk played down the experience; however, the same figure reappeared twice more, asking why he had not done as bidden. After the third occurrence of this dream, the discombobulated clergyman was unable to fall back asleep. Consequently, he went to see Páez that very morning. The missionary told his visitor that as an act of goodwill, he would hear his confession, but only if the monk vowed to obey the church’s doctrine. As one of the veterans of a huge monastery, the Ethiopian replied, he 85 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 6:176. 86 For a survey of the violent confrontation over Sabbath observance between Susənyos’s followers and the monks of Damot, see Francisco María Esteves Pereira, ed. and trans., Chronica de Susenyos, Rei de Etiopia, 2 vols. (Lisbon: Sociedade de Geographia de Lisboa, 1892 and 1900), 1:253–58 [Gǝʿǝz]; 2:195–98 [Portuguese]. 87 After the debates at Zä Dəngəl’s court in June 1604, one of the clergymen told Páez that he believed that the truth was indeed on the Catholics’ side. Nevertheless, the monk admitted that he had vociferously countered the father’s arguments owing to peer pressure. If Páez succeeded in opening the king’s eyes, the monk eventually promised, he would offer the Jesuits his unmitigated support. “P. Petrus Paez ad p. Thomam Iturén: Dambiâ, 14 sept. 1612,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 11:229. 88 On the role of dreams and visions in this context, see Leonardo Cohen, “Visions and Dreams: An Avenue for Ethiopians’ Conversion to Catholicism at the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of Religion in Africa 39 (2009): 4–29. 89 At the time, a community of Ethio-Portuguese lived in Fǝremona—one of the Jesuit mission’s principal centers of operation in Tǝgray. 90 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 2:161.

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was obliged to conduct himself like the rest of his brethren (e.g., observe the Sabbath91 and perform baptism once a year),92 lest he face severe repercussions. For this reason, the monk proposed confessing sub rosa whenever Páez wished. The latter, though, refused these terms, and the Ethiopian left without converting. Following a long hiatus, the two met again. The Jesuit explained to him all the issues over which Catholics and Orthodox Ethiopians diverge. Thereafter, the monk promised to comply with Páez’s every last wish. At this juncture, Páez provided the neophyte general instructions for the ritual. Three days later, the monk “confessed with great devotion.”93 These sorts of prescriptive dreams also shed light on the hardships that new Ethiopian Catholics faced. Like other Jesuits, Páez wrote about the dilemma facing a local monk who sympathized with Catholicism but was concerned about the backlash at embracing the Latin rite from within his own community. What is more, these accounts expose political deterrents and fears concerning the demands that the mission would make once the novices had formally joined the church. For instance, monks sedulously asked about the mysteries of the new faith and were far from satisfied with the explanations they received. “The Portuguese,” one Ethiopian claimed, “did not say everything

91

The fact that Ethiopian Christianity upheld a number of ritual practices that the Society believed to be of “Jewish” origin provoked enormous disputes between Catholics and the monarchy’s Orthodox (Tawahədo) Christians. Among the most troublesome rituals from the mission’s standpoint were circumcision, the observance of Sabbath on the seventh day, and certain dietary restrictions. See Ullendorff, “Confessio fidei of King Claudius,” 159–76; Ernst Hammerschmidt, Stellung und Bedeutung des Sabbats, in Athiopien (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1963), 48–61; Leonardo Cohen, “Los portugueses en Etiopia y la problemática de los ritos ‘judáicos,’” Historia y grafía 17 (2001): 209–40; Cohen, “The Portuguese Context of the Confessio fidei of King Claudius,” in Ethiopian Studies at the End of the Second Millennium: Proceedings of the XIV International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, 6–11 November 2000, ed. Baye Yimam et al. (Addis Ababa: Institute of Ethiopian Studies, 2002), 1:152–68; Andreu Martinez d’Alos-Moner, “Paul and the Other: The Portuguese Debate on the Circumcision of the Ethiopians,” in Ethiopia and the Mission: Historical and Anthropological Insights, ed. Verena Boll et al. (Munster: Lit Verlag, 2005), 37–57. 92 The missionaries abhorred the Ethiopian ṭəmqat (epiphany)—a ceremony in which the laity and priests assembled along a river or spring for a mass baptism commemorating that of Christ. The Jesuits considered this sort of practice to be sacramental. In their view, baptism was a once-in-a-lifetime event. 93 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 162.

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and afterward they came up with something new.”94 In turn, the Society’s emissaries had doubts concerning the proselytes’ intentions.95 When Emperor Susǝnyos began to display an interest in Catholicism at the beginning of the seventeenth century, power relations and internal politics could determine whether a monk voluntarily leaned toward the faith of Rome. After Susǝnyos’s conversion in 1622, these factors would become even more potent. In his annual letter of 1626, Gaspar Páez reported that a monk had embraced the Roman faith in the Bägemdǝr region and subsequently urged others to follow in his path. To this end, the convert asked Jacinto Francisco (dates unknown), the superior of the local Jesuit residence, to put him in charge of his fellow neophytes. It is not entirely clear whether the monk was indeed delegated authority over his counterparts from the outset or was merely seeking to leverage his position to this end.96 Owing to his lofty standing within the local church, the efforts to proselytize Zäträ Wängel ( fl. end of the sixteenth century), the ǝččäge (imperial counsel) at the Däbrä Libanos monastery,97 were of utmost importance to the Society. With the exception of the abunä, the ǝččäge was deemed the senior most official in the Ethiopian clergy. Throughout this period, the relationship between

94 “Patriarcha Mendez ad praepositum generalern S.I. ex Aethiopia, 8 iul. 1629,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12:382. According to Donald Levine, the Amhara were constantly on the lookout for hidden motifs in the Catholic “sales pitch.” Levine, Wax and Gold: Tradition and Innovation in Ethiopian Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 251. 95 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 7:6. The order’s suspicions were aroused within the context of the polemics, for the Ethiopian monks initially confronted their Jesuit rivals with great vigor, only to throw in the towel with little warning. See the description of Barradas’s visit to a monastery later on in this chapter. 96 “Carta anua de Ethiopia a do mes de Julho de 1625 athe o de 1626 do estado secular do imperio da Ethiopia,” in Arquivo Distrital de Braga, MS 779, Cartas annais das missões da Etiopia, fol. 341v. 97 The Däbrä Libanos monastery had dominated the central and southern regions of Ethiopia from as early as the latter half of the 1400s. Holding the special title of ǝččäge, the abbot of this institution outranked all his peers throughout the entire kingdom. According to Almeida, one of the privileges of Däbrä Libanos was that the ǝččäge could only be chosen from among its members. Unless flaws were found that warranted the bishop’s replacement, the position was a lifetime appointment; Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 5:204. Sources from the previous centuries affirm this hypothesis. During Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob’s reign, the monks of Däbrä Libanos were allowed to nominate four candidates for monastery superior, though the king apparently had the last word. See Kaplan, Monastic Holy Man, 53.

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these two figures was fraught with adversarial complications.98 Like his predecessors Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl and Gälawdewos, Susǝnyos was quite devoted to Däbrä Libanos and often went on pilgrimage to this venue.99 In fact, the portrait of its founder, Abba Täklä Haymanot, was featured on the king’s standards. At the outset of his rule, Susǝnyos appealed to Abba Abraham (d.1612), the ǝččäge of Däbrä Libanos, and the institution’s other leaders for their recognition and support. In addition, the emperor’s chronicle depicts the said bishop in a positive light: The following day, Friday, on the celebration of Christ our Lord and Savior’s crucifixion, Abba Abraham, abbot of the monastery, archpriest, and abbot of the monks, came into the church and called the priests. Wise in the holy scripture, he opened his mouth in front of the tabot [replica of the tablets] of our Lord Jesus Christ’s law and confessed all the sins he had committed since he was young and was given the rule of penitence, which is forced upon the penitents, as the Holy Ghost taught and inspired them; and he received it with humility and submission.100 Over the coming years, the top ranks at Däbrä Libanos indeed remained loyal to the new regime, thereby securing the monastic community’s economic well-being. Abba Abraham passed on in the sixth year (1612) of Susǝnyos’s reign.101 Around five years later, a new ǝččäge, Zäträ Wängel (dates unknown), openly backed the emperor’s Christological position. Under the influence of Pedro Páez and the rest of the Jesuit mission, the monarch averred that the Holy Ghost also derives from the Son, not just the Father.102 It appears that Zärträ Wängel had his own motives for adopting this position. In 1615, Páez reported, the superior appealed to Susǝnyos for the authority to ordain deacons and priests, which had hitherto been the sole prerogative of the abunä. The latter, Sǝmʿon (d.1617), objected on the grounds that this measure would instigate a breach with the Alexandrine church. Heeding the abunä’s advice, the king turned Zäträ Wängel down. Following Sǝmʿon’s demise in May 1617, 98

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Däbrä Libanos’s ǝččäge was considered superior to the abunä. When the Ethiopian branch ceded from the Egyptian Coptic Church in 1951, the abbot of Däbrä Libanos, Gäbrä Giyorgis (1883–1970) was named the first metropolitan, keeping the title of ǝččäge. See Ayele Teklahaymanot, “The Monastery of Däbrä Libanos: Its Founder and the Abbots,” in Miscelanea aethiopica (Addis Ababa: Capuchin Franciscan Institute of Philosophy and Theology, 2000), 307–19, here 309. 99 Ayele Teklahaymanot, “Monastery of Däbrä Libanos,” 311. 100 Esteves Pereira, Chronica de Susenyos, 1:97–98 [Gǝʿǝz]; 2:76–77 [Portuguese]. 101 Denis Nosnitsin, “Abraham,” in Uhlig, Encyclopaedia aethiopica, 1:47. 102 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:315.

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the ǝččäge took up the vanguard of the Orthodox Church’s opposition to the Jesuits. Notwithstanding his previous Christological opinions, which were in line with those of Páez and Susǝnyos, the abba relentlessly pushed back against the Catholics. Even the emperor failed to persuade Zäträ Wängel to moderate his views. In 1620, he led a contingent of monks to the imperial encampment during a celebration of Susǝnyos’s recent victory against the Oromo. The delegation complained that most of Goğğam’s residents had jettisoned the Alexandrine faith, emptying the region’s churches. With this in mind, they petitioned the monarch to forbid the Latins from teaching and giving communion. Moreover, they asked Susǝnyos to force the converts to return to their original faith. This demonstration initiated an open conflict between the emperor and Zäträ Wängel. As per Almeida, Susǝnyos was interested in reaching a compromise with the ǝččäge. The king dispatched envoys with gifts for Zäträ Wängel, but the latter refused to budge. In consequence, the sovereign confiscated many of the ǝččäge’s lands and dismissed him from his post on the grounds that the bishop was too old to carry out his duties.103 Thereafter, Susǝnyos demanded that the monks of Däbrä Libanos appoint a more pliant figure to the role.104 Refusing to convert, Zärträ Wängel gradually became a staunch rival of the Catholics. Be that as it may, as early as 1617, he warmed up to Rome’s Christological positions, calculating that this step would enable him to depose of the abunä and seize the helm of the Ethiopian Church.105 The Jesuits indeed struggled to pacify the monks. As discussed earlier, the mission was well aware of the central role these ascetics filled in Ethiopian society. In order to consolidate their own power base and neutralize one of the most anti-Catholic sectors along the Horn of Africa, the Society’s emissaries undertook to reform monastic life and appoint Catholic figures to head the key monasteries. As such, the hegemonic struggle was also manifest in the relations between the Jesuit hierarchy and the Ethiopian monastic leadership. In this sense, the conversion of key monastic leaders was politically prudent. Barneto, for example, wrote that he had baptized the superior of the Däbrä Bizän monastery along with a few other monks and roughly a hundred servants. “I subsequently trained them in the faith,” he wrote. “After performing acts of faith and taking every necessary measure, I baptized them on a shield, which one of the monks went to fill with holy water.”106

103 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 6:394. 104 Merid Wolde Aregay and Girma Beshah, Question of the Union of the Churches, 91. 105 Cohen, Missionary Strategies, 63. 106 “P. Thomas Barneto (I) ad p. Stephanum da Cruz (2). Maigoga, 12 martii 1627,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12:184.

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Perched on a towering mountain, Däbrä Bizän is located in the Eritrean province of Ḥamasen, along the main road to Massawa. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a handful of foreign sources depicted the institution’s monks as the highest ecclesiastical authorities in the region. According to these same observers, the clergy also served as political ambassadors of the baḥǝr nägaš (ruler of the sea)—the governor of the coastal provinces. Residing in Dǝbarwa,107 this administrator controlled access to the Red Sea. Over the centuries, the baḥǝr nägaš’s loyalty to the emperor wavered precipitously.108 Against this backdrop, another objective behind the conversion of these monastic leaders was to varnish the order’s prestige and improve its ties with the regional authorities. Gaspar Páez wrote about a famous monk who had utterly secluded himself for five years. When Susǝnyos declared Catholicism the religion of the land, he went into hiding rather than accept the Latin rite. However, the monk was tracked down and brought before the king, who then placed him in the Jesuit’s custody. At first, the repatriated clergyman held fast to his Orthodox beliefs “as fierce as a lion” but gradually softened his stance. Páez invited him to a meal, over the course of which a theological dispute was held. The ascetic peppered his host with questions and patiently listened to the answers. Amid a welter of tears and immense pain, the monk ultimately succumbed to the Jesuit’s exhortations to adopt the Roman faith. These emotions, the missionary claimed, attest to the great force with which the divine grace had penetrated the novice. Upon embracing Catholicism, he availed himself of that same zeal to bring many others into the fold.109 Political motives aside, it is evident from these narratives that the Society’s representatives kept their eyes peeled for the same feelings that Ignatius had experienced during his own conversion with the objective of determining how “genuine” the neophytes were. Adhering to their founder’s model, the Jesuits deemed tears and pain to be a sign of repentance and emotional investment in the conversion process. While overseeing his disciples’ spiritual exercises, Ignatius had urged them to aspire to “full-fledged and intense pain and

107 See Gianfrancesco Lusini, “Däbrä Bizän,” in Uhlig, Encyclopaedia aethiopica, 2:15–17. 108 As Franz Amadeus Dombrowski has observed, the policy of entrusting the coastal region to one man, the baḥǝr nägaš, only benefited the throne when the position’s holder was loyal to the king; Dombrowski, Ethiopia’s Access to the Sea (Leiden: Brill, 1985), 24. 109 “Carta anua de Ethiopia a do mes de Julho de 1625 athe o de 1626 do estado secular do imperio da Ethiopia,” in Arquivo Distrital de Braga, MS 779, Cartas annais das missões da Etiopia, fol. 341v.

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tears,”110 in solidarity with the tribulations of Christ.111 This theme recurs in other cases where the missionaries describe sincere and honest conversions. A case in point is Barneto’s encounter with a very old monk at the gates of the Mäy Gʷaggʷa fortress, near the River Täkkäze. Having heard about the Latin creed, the Jesuit testified, the ascetic walked for eight days over vast stretches to be baptized and confess his sins before passing on: After the good old man performed many acts of contrition and hope, raising his teary eyes to heaven with great devotion, I baptized him and heard his confession, even though it was very late at night […]. The following day, he participated in Mass and took communion with great fervor and, upon parting ways along the road […] to […] [the] desert, he left me very comforted and encouraged.112 Another Ignatian concept that pertains to genuine conversion is “the health of the body and the soul.”113 In Gaspar Páez’s view, religious transformation improved the health of the soul and body “every time he [i.e., a proselyte] received this bread of life.”114 These words reflect the Society’s general approach to the body and health. Almeida recalled how Páez, who believed that body and soul are deeply intertwined, would administer the confession to the sick.115 None other than the Society’s founder spoke of external and internal diseases. Out of concern for the physical well-being of his flock, Ignatius did not prescribe general penances. Instead, the superior general recommended that each confessant tailor his expiatory deeds to his specific physical condition.116 As suggested in the book’s introduction, it behooves a Jesuit to avoid any extreme behavior that is liable to compromise his health. For instance, a member of the 110 Loyola, Ejercicios espirituales, 12 [55]. 111 Loyola, Ejercicios espirituales, 32 [203]. 112 “P. Thomas Barneto (I) ad p. Stephanum da Cruz (2). Maigoga, 12 martii 1627,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12:183. 113 After a series of exaggerated corporal penances, such as food deprivation, Ignatius begun to feel a loss of vigor and had bouts with pain and disease. He soon came to the realization that abusing the body stood in contradistinction to the Christian way. Loyola, Autobiografía y Diario espiritual, 74, 79 [19, 26]. Also see Rogelio García Mateo, “Lo corporal en la espiritualidad de Ignacio de Loyola,” Ignaziana: Rivista di ricerca teologica 16 (2013): 146–54. 114 “Carta anua de Ethiopia a do mes de Julho de 1625 athe o de 1626 do estado secular do imperio da Ethiopia,” in Arquivo Distrital de Braga, MS 779, fol. 338r. 115 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 6:89. 116 Santiago G. Arzubialde, “Enfermedad,” in GEI, Diccionario de espiritualidad ignaciana, 1:750–59, here 756.

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order should moderate his penitential discipline and ascetic norms while getting adequate rest and maintaining a salutary diet. In sum, a Christian must be guided by proper devotion, rather than compulsion. On certain occasions, the Society attributed miracles to honest conversions. Almeida wrote of a paralyzed hermit “full of Luciferian pride” who sequestered himself in a hut near the St. John’s Church in the Amhara region. Following a dispute with Father João de Souza (dates unknown) about the interpretation of Ethiopian books, the monk continued to hold true to his Orthodox faith. Only after listening to a bevy of sermons and encomium for the Virgin, the Jesuit wrote, did the recluse change his mind and formally embrace the Latin rite. Owing to his sincere repentance, not the powers of the missionary, the devil stopped appearing before the neophyte. What is more, “he started walking on his own feet, despite being incapacitated to the point where he was unable to move from the bed on which he rested.”117 In sum, the Jesuit narrative prioritizes cases where monks embraced Catholicism over those who refused to “see the light.” Furthermore, the stress is on emotions and other signs that betray a genuine “conversion of the heart” as per the Ignatian-Catholic model—a cultural heritage the Jesuits adhered to in their different missions across the globe. 4

Coercion, Intimidation, and Punishment

The models for converting the Ethiopian and Indian ascetics were predicated, to a large extent, on the capacity of the religious authorities and their secular allies to impose the necessary terms and conditions. Put differently, the political power that the mission wielded in every region was a key barometer of its success. Needless to say, not all these elements converted under duress. There were numerous instances in which the transformation was set in motion by personal encounters with the Society’s representatives, many of which were casual-cum-serendipitous roadside exchanges. According to the Jesuit sources, quite a few of these cases involved Ethiopians who had already decided to embrace the Latin rite and were waiting for an opportunity to be baptized. Be that as it may, violence was hardly absent from doctrinal debates along the Horn of Africa. The emperor had the prerogative to serve as the final arbiter of these disputations and occasionally intimidated Ethiopian Christianity’s speakers. In one instance, around fifty older monks were forcibly taken to the camp of Emperor Susǝnyos’s brother Sǝʿǝlä Krǝstos, who made the clergy listen 117 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 7:95.

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to the mission’s “sales pitch” and curbed their movement until they accepted the faith of Rome. Within a few days, all the monks succumbed to the pressure and converted.118 After Susǝnyos entered the church’s fold, theological disputes were increasingly tilted against the proponents of Ethiopian Orthodoxy. Several monks were detained, brought before the king, and arrested on charges of inciting the local population against the emperor’s authority and the faith of the land. Under the guise of a theological debate, Catholics also questioned and threatened recalcitrant monks, who were prevented from answering or defending their Gospel. Many were forced to recognize the principles of Latin Christology. Upon lambasting the Ethiopian creed, Susǝnyos instituted capital punishment for avowing the union of the two natures. Violence was employed against individuals and monastic groups within the framework of disputations and even personal conversations.119 Following the debates held between Orthodox ecclesiastics and the tandem of Pedro Páez and Azevedo, one of the monks returned to Susǝnyos’s camp. In the presence of the king and Abba Märkä (dates unknown), he emphatically denied the two natures of Christ. As a result, he was condemned to flagellation—a punitive measure that the kingdom subsequently adopted for this “transgression.”120 On occasion, monks were physically intimidated and disciplined until they entered the Catholic fold121 or publicly thrashed for adamantly opposing the throne’s repression of Orthodox Christianity.122 A variety of scare tactics were used against the representatives of the Ethiopian Church. There are numerous accounts of monks being detained and threatened until they accepted the Latin rite. Together with doctrinal exchanges, heavy-handed persuasion, threats, and corporeal punishment were indeed the primary means of Jesuit evangelization along the Horn of Africa. In a letter describing the case of Abba Atquo (dates unknown), Almeida expounded on how around fifty of the monk’s colleagues were arrested and 118 “P. Thomas Barneto ad p. Stephanum da Cruz. Maigogâ, 12 martii 1627,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12:194. 119 “Notícia sobre o reino de Tigre (1626),” in Oliveira, Cartas de Etiópia, 21–22. 120 According to Páez, the monk was disciplined for the “contempt that he had uttered and his insolence before the emperor.” However, “most people thought that it was because he had affirmed that there was only one nature in Christ.” Páez, History of Ethiopia, 1:329–30. Also see Balthazar Tellez, Historia geral de Ethiopia a Alta (Coimbra: Na Officina de Manoel Dias Impressor da Universidade, 1660), 330–31. 121 Merid Wolde Aregay, “Legacy of Jesuit Missionary Activities in Ethiopia,” 31–56, here 47. 122 Merid Wolde Aregay and Girma Beshah, Question of the Union of the Churches, 82. Also see “P. Emmanuel Barradas ad praepositum generalem S.I. ex Aethiopia, 20 maii 1631,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12:465–66.

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brought to trial on the charge of “feigning Catholicism.” After reprimanding the ecclesiastics, the judges sentenced them to death. However, the royal court saw fit to stay their execution. Instead, a disputation was held with the objective of educating and making the “prodigal” clergy see the light. According to Almeida, the monks were handed over to “jealous and powerful” elements who sought to convince them via sermons and debates. At long last, the defendants “abhorred their past mistakes and whole-heartedly embraced the Roman creed.”123 The case of Abba Atquo, whom Almeida considered to be one of the Latin rite’s most arduous opponents, stands out from the other narratives under review. He was tracked down and imprisoned by the Catholic monk Abba Atnatewos (dates unknown). Though sentenced to death on several occasions, Atquo was pardoned each time. By dint of preaching and argumentation, he was gradually convinced of his errors. Nevertheless, he refused to accept the faith on the grounds that the apostles had never forced anyone to convert or detained them for refusing to do so. In Almeida’s estimation, the bishop swiftly grasped the difference between people who had entered the flock of Christ and the “confines” of the holy church via baptism and those who were not branded with “the iron of our Lord Christ.” The main disparity was that only members of the community could be force-fed.124 Almeida’s testimony implies that the native Christianity of the Ethiopian monks was more dangerous to its believers than religious practices associated with “alien” or “distant” faiths. From the Society’s perspective, the former was a deviant or eroded form of Christianity. In light of the above, the Ignatian order sought to exercise full control over defining the religious truths that governed life in Ethiopia. The proximity between the Catholic and Orthodox streams markedly heightened their confrontations. So long as the “aberration” of the Other is kept out and deemed beyond the pale, the segregation of minority groups is a viable solution for upholding a monopoly over spiritual-cum-ritualistic truth within a community. When these borders break down, Peter Berger (1929–2017) and Thomas Luckmann (1927–2016) duly observe, “the traditional experts are likely to call for the fire and the sword—or, alternatively, particularly if fire and sword turn out to be unavailable, to enter into ecumenical negotiations with the competitors.”125 123 “P. Emmanuel de Almeida ad praepositum generalern Soc. Iesu. Gorgorra, 16 iun. 1628,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12:261. 124 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12:262. 125 Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 122.

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The Abba Atquo narrative portrays the dilemmas and bewilderment faced by monks who were harassed for resisting conversion. While Atquo understood “the force of reason,” Almeida posited, he did not wish to surrender to it. The monk even went so far as to tell acquaintances that the doctrine the Jesuits were teaching is pure and holy. If they wish to save their souls, he added, they must embrace the Latin rite. On several occasions, Atquo was even on the verge of crossing denominational lines. However, some of his former pupils “exhorted him” to remain in the Orthodox camp. By turning his back on Ethiopian Christians and becoming “a disciple of foreigners,” he would “discredit himself before his public.”126 Susǝnyos contemplated meting out a graver punishment to the clergyman but ultimately settled on a routine exile. More specifically, the monk was banished to “deep valleys between towering mountains, where the sun” was excruciating. Escorted by well-disciplined guards, Atquo offered no resistance once the journey commenced, as the prisoner believed that his allies would soon intervene. Upon realizing that help was not forthcoming, the monk tried to stall by feigning illness. However, the guards were not fooled and searched for a cot and a few men to lug their charge the rest of the way. At this juncture, Almeida claimed, he was “possessed by the devil.” Seething at the failure of his ruse, Atquo got off his stretcher and asked to be killed. Incensed, the soldiers hit the prisoner on the head with their sticks, knocking him out on the side of the road. In the missionary’s opinion, this was a fair punishment for such “brazen arrogance.”127 From this account, we can infer that the Jesuits were not satisfied with forced conversions. As such, they considered punishment a means for softening the adversary’s resistance to dialogue, arguments, and other forms of verbal persuasion. In the cases under review, the missionaries aspired to a conversion of the heart, rather than one attained under duress. During Mendes’s stint as patriarch of Ethiopia, the Jesuit mission rolled out harsh new tools for exposing and stigmatizing heretics. After Täklä Giyorgis ( fl. 1605–29), Gorgora province’s rebellious governor, was executed in 1629, his supporters were forced to walk past his gallows at a church while holding candles. After their guilty verdict was publicly decreed, the governor’s accomplices were excommunicated.128

126 “P. Emmanuel de Almeida ad praepositum generalern Soc. Iesu. Gorgorra, 16 iun. 1628,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12:262. 127 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12:263. 128 “Patriarcha Mendez ad praepositum generalern S.I. Ex Aethiopia, 8 iul. 1629,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12:390.

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There are many other evangelization narratives that revolve around the harassment of prominent clergymen. For the sake of attaining Catholic hegemony, the Jesuits endeavored to win over venerated ascetic figures that exerted influence over local society. In one of his missives, Gaspar Páez discussed the conversion of an illustrious monk. For quite some time, this figure resisted the attempts to bring him into the Latin fold. Consequently, he was relieved of his duties as the superior of over twenty churches and thrown into jail. The monk’s protracted obduracy goaded Ras Śǝʿǝlä Krǝstos (dates unknown), a distinguished Catholic nobleman, into unsheathing his sword and threatening to decapitate the former unless he abandoned the Orthodox path. In turn, the monk knelt down and lowered his head, resigning himself to fate. Śǝʿǝlä Krǝstos spared his life, and the priest ultimately embraced Roman Catholicism. In fact, the proselyte went on to become “an apostle of Ethiopia.” Apart from confessing before a priest and receiving communion on a daily basis, he managed to convert scores of his fellow Ethiopians. When Patriarch Mendes arrived in Dämbǝya, a district on the northern shore of Lake Ṭana, the monk was the first local to ask the prelate to lead them in Mass. Since the neophyte had not been ordained by the abunä, he asked Mendes to re-consecrate him as a priest. On King’s Day, the monk took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience at the church of Gorgora. According to the Jesuit, this occasion was among the Ethiopian mission’s high points during these years.129 Gaspar Páez described how monks, not least superiors, from distinguished monasteries were badgered into converting by civil authorities. As per the father’s reports, it was typical for these clergy to be threatened with capital punishment. Despite this coercion, he averred, they went on to become formidable promoters of the Latin rite.130 Of course, the violence was not always physical. Verbal threats often sufficed to intimidate the monks into undergoing baptism and communion or, at the very least, renouncing their previous convictions. The Orthodox representatives who debated the Jesuits at the royal encampment were the target of similar pressure campaigns.131 One tactic that was directed at hermits was to evict them from their caves.132 Some of these recluses avoided conversion by 129 “Carta anua de Ethiopia a do mes de Julho de 1625 athe o de 1626 do estado secular do imperio da Ethiopia,” in Arquivo Distrital de Braga, MS 779, Cartas annais das missões da Etiopia, fol. 338r. 130 Arquivo Distrital de Braga, MS 779, Cartas annais das missões da Etiopia, fols. 338r–338v. 131 “P. Thomas Barneto (I) ad p. Stephanum da Cruz (2). Maigoga, 12 martii 1627,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12:194. 132 “Informa o Padre Geral da Companhia, sobre a vitória da Igreja Católica no reino de Abexins. Notícia sobre o império dos abexins e o estado eclesiástico da Residência de

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taking flight. In outlying regions, the mission had a weaker social base and thus limited influence. Consequently, even the baptisms that the order managed to perform yielded significantly less commitment on the part of the new recruits. Most of these measures—be they violence or “mere” threats—were aimed at the monastic clergy. Owing to their education and mastery of the sacred texts, these priests were considered the most dangerous heretics. 5

Fake Catholics

In 1567, the provincial council of Goa ruled that Moors, Jews, foreigners, and yogis could only be baptized after undergoing three months of catechism. Building on past experiences, this directive sought to contend with the ostensible tendency of proselytes from these backgrounds to regress.133 Like many of the period’s other missionaries, the Jesuits were concerned about the sincerity of the conversion process and the possibility that some novices would have second thoughts. For instance, Almeida reported of Ethiopian monks who went into hiding for the sake of preserving their Orthodox faith. At a Catholic “orientation” that the emperor summoned them to, “many [of these clergymen] received our holy faith sincerely, others falsely practiced it, and others stubbornly endured their punishment” for shunning the Latin rite.134 The missionaries’ suspicions were aroused when the monks initially confronted them with sharp arguments and tireless resolve, only to give in at the drop of a hat. Barradas described a visit to a monastery in Tǝgray occupied by two clergymen: a master and his disciple. The latter engaged the Jesuit in a heated dispute. All of a sudden, though, he ceded the argument, took his confession, and received communion. “If he did so sincerely,” Barradas wondered, “only God knows.”135 The Jesuit correspondence reveals that the missionaries along the Horn of Africa were indeed concerned with the sincerity and “authenticity” of the proselytes even when the order was able to force the Latin rite on its targets with the help of the state. In many instances, conversions were executed post haste. However, this did not prevent questions from being asked about the legitimacy Dancas, Ganeta Jesus, Colela, Adaxã, Enebessee, Lige Negus, na terra dos Damotes, Atqhana, no reino de Begamedes, Fremona, no reino do Tigré e a residência de Adegada (Almeida),” in Arquivo Distrital de Braga, MS 779, Cartas annais das missões da Etiopia, fols. 359v–360. 133 “The Instruction of Fr. A. Valignano S.J., Visitor, for the ‘Pai dos Cristãos,’ Goa, sometime before September 24, 1595,” in Wicki and Gomes, Documenta Indica, 17:86. 134 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 7:6. 135 “Notícia sobre o reino de Tigré (1626),” in Oliveira, Cartas de Etiópia, 23.

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of the process and the need to indoctrinate, refine, and perfect the virtues of the ascetic before consummating the proselytization in the baptismal waters. The Society’s emissaries pointed to flaws in the system. As Almeida put it, “some [of the novices] are Catholics in name only.”136 When an ascetic neophyte was caught reverting to his previous faith or undermined the authority of his Latin superiors, he was designated a “fake Catholic,” namely one who did not undergo a real change of heart. “Fake Catholics” is indeed a recurring theme in the Jesuit literature on the Ethiopian mission. Time and again, this concept is applied to monks who disengaged from the Latin rite as soon as the opportunity presented itself. In all likelihood, there were a fair share of local clergy who were pressured into converting but resisted an unqualified and irrevocable commitment to the new faith. Both Mendes and Almeida referred to Täklä Haymanot—a monk who had grown up among the Jesuits and was under the employ of the Latin patriarch—as an erudite man with vast knowledge of Ethiopian letters.137 However, this figure was a “crypto-Orthodox.” To hide his true loyalties, the monk “occasionally said that he wanted to go to Rome.”138 Täklä Haymanot was so convincing that both the emperor and Ras Sǝʿǝlä Krǝstos urged him to become the superior of a monastery on Meṣraha Island. In the end, the fake Catholic was exposed when the authorities discovered that he was involved in Mälkǝʾa Krǝstos’s (d.1633) Alexandrian insurrection. Following Täklä Haymanot’s execution, a book that he had written was released. According to Almeida, the work identifies past Ethiopian figures— religious or otherwise—as paragons and indeed martyrs of the said rebellion, even Abunä Sǝmʿon.139 As a metropolitan of the local church, Sǝmʿon participated in disputations between Catholics and Orthodox at the imperial court. He became a staunch advocate of the official Orthodox dogma concerning the unique nature of Christ. What is more, the bishop forbade Ethiopians from adopting the Catholic faith and so much as stepping foot in Jesuit churches. In May 1617, Abunä Sǝmʿon was executed in Dämbǝya, along with the king’s rebellious son-in-law. As per the Jesuit sources, Täklä Haymanot lauded such efforts on the part of the church’s archrivals. Besides constituting a thorn in the mission’s side, this imposter was accused of leading a “scandalous life.” Above all, Almeida contended, the monk had “seven women,” two of which he wrested 136 “A nosso muito Reverendo Padre Geral Mutio Vitteleschi: Annua de Ethiopia desde Junho de 1626 ate o cabo de Março de 1627,” in Arquivo Distrital de Braga, MS 779, Cartas annais das missões da Etiopia, fol. 361r. 137 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 7:156; 8:354. 138 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 7:156. 139 Andreu Martínez d’Alòs-Moner, “Sǝmʿon,” in Uhlig, Encyclopaedia aethiopica, 4:618.

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away from their husbands.140 In Mendes’s and Almeida’s opinion, then, Täklä Haymanot’s feigned Catholicism was evident from his blatant disregard for the monastic ideal.141 The term “fake Catholics” signified a broad category of monks who blurred the lines between one religious tradition and the other, not only in terms of dogma but from a cultural standpoint as well. In 1628, when Catholic inroads on the Horn of Africa had reached their peak, Almeida wrote about monks who donned the trappings of Latin clergy while “reinforcing some [Ethiopians] and perverting others in their old mistakes.”142 On several occasions, the Jesuits apparently failed to grasp the root cause behind this oscillation between one stream and the other. They attributed these swings to the “inconsistent nature” of the Ethiopian monks. The Ignatian order adopted a similar outlook toward the Muslims along the Horn of Africa. In many Jesuit accounts, a comparison is drawn between Ethiopian Christianity and Islam in which the two are deemed sister religions and enemies of Catholicism. A bond was formed between these groups by virtue of their “similar temperaments.” More specifically, the devotees of both faiths were characterized by a certain “versatility” and “pliability” that was at loggerheads with “the discipline and courage” of the Portuguese Catholics. Furthermore, both traditions were accused of excessive rigor in all that concerns ascetic practices like fasting. This claim of a temperamental affinity undergirding Fasilädäs’s political alliance with the surrounding Muslim kingdoms becomes all the more salient after the mission was banished from Ethiopia.143 Barradas interpreted the decisions of Nadel (dates unknown), an ambitious Catholic monk, in a similar fashion. According to the Jesuit, Nadel requested that Patriarch Mendes ordain him to the priesthood with the objective of becoming the superior of Däbrä Bizän. The patriarch responded in the affirmative, and the ordination was ratified by the emperor. In return, the monk promised to advance the Catholic faith. However, the outcome of this arrangement puzzled Barradas: Upon receiving this honor, he [i.e., Nadel] did not wish to come to it [his convent] or to say the first Mass. On the way [back to the monastery], he went to a wasteland to do penance for the great sin he had committed in accepting the Roman faith and the orders of the patriarch. Furthermore, 140 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 7:157. Also see 8:355. 141 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 2:246–47. 142 “P. Emmanuel de Almeida ad praepositum generalern Soc. Iesu. Gorgorra, 16 iun. 1628,” in Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12:261. 143 Leonardo Cohen, “‘Versatilidad e inconstancia’: La animadversión de los jesuitas hacia el cristianismo etíope y el islam a partir de 1633,” Lusitania Sacra, forthcoming.

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he resigned from the priory, reverting to his old standing. And the worst thing was that upon completing his penance, he came to talk to me with so little shame as though such a thing had not occurred, offering no reason or explanation [for his actions].144 Doubts and suspicions repeatedly inform the Jesuit accounts of conversions. In quite a few of these cases, the novitiates voiced concern over the social, political, and ritual implications of this step. Moreover, they were wary of the demands that the mission would make once they had entered the Latin fold. Time and again, prospective Catholics asked the Society’s representatives to disclose the mysteries of the new faith. The Jesuits tried to put these doubts to rest, but the monks continued to suspect that “the Portuguese did not declare everything and then they revealed some more information.”145 Sǝʿǝlä Krǝstos ultimately became among the more devoted Ethiopian Catholics. Prior to his baptism, though, he too feared that a “poison of heresies” was concealed behind the Jesuit doctrine.146 Historically, religion has been the most widespread and effective instrument of legitimation.147 Owing to their status as local religious stalwarts, the consistency and fidelity of the monks’ conversion was vital to justifying the basic truths and theology that the Society was endeavoring to instill in Ethiopia. The oscillation of the proselytes between the Catholic and Orthodox traditions cast serious doubt on the Jesuit narrative. As a result, “fake Catholics” posed a grave threat to the Society’s efforts to Catholicize the Horn of Africa. 6

Conclusion

There may very well have been intellectual motives, as well as a certain religious disposition, behind the yogis’ and Ethiopian monks’ decision to embrace the Latin rite. From the way in which many of these ascetics approached Catholicism, we can perhaps detect an allure to the cognitive scheme that such a transformation represented. As Rambo puts it, “it is rare for someone to be converted to an option that embraces an intellectual framework radically different from the person’s previous orientation.”148 Furthermore, the beliefs, practices, and lifestyles of these neophytes might have been somewhat 144 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 4:268. 145 Beccari, Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales, 12:382. 146 Páez, History of Ethiopia, 2:300. 147 Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy. Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 32. 148 Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion, 61.

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compatible with the Roman faith.149 Needless to say, the Ethiopian monks shared the church’s textual tradition, including a substantial portion of the patristic lore. As discussed in chapter 4, the exchanges between Jesuits and yogis indicate that some of the yogis found a modicum of continuity between their own worldview and the Catholic tradition. Moreover, they exhibited a school child’s willingness to learn the new doctrine.150 Fróis extolled the chastity, humility, and rhetorical skills of a yogi who was drawn to the Latin rite.151 Against this backdrop, it is evident that the factors drawing these ascetics to the church ran the gamut from intellectual propensity, on through political interests and a desire for security, to the aspiration for social mobility. The confrontation between the adherents of the Ethiopian Orthodox and Catholic creeds undoubtedly entailed a struggle for power. Notwithstanding the polished rhetorical skills of the Jesuits, all of whom were graduates of European universities, it seems that to some extent the question of which stream would triumph rested more on sway than the disputants’ acumen. As Berger and Luckmann contend: The success of particular conceptual machineries is related to the power possessed by those who operate them. The confrontation of alternative symbolic universes implies a problem of power—which of the conflicting definitions of reality will be “made to stick” in society. Two societies confronting each other with conflicting universes will both develop conceptual machineries designed to maintain their respective universes. From the point of view of intrinsic plausibility, the two forms of conceptualization may seem to the outside observer to offer little choice. Which of the two will win, however, will depend more on the power than on the theoretical ingenuity of the respective legitimators. […] The historical outcome of each clash of gods was determined by those who wielded the better weapons rather than those who had the better arguments. The same, of course, may be said of intrasocietal conflicts of this kind. He who has the bigger stick has the better chance of imposing his definitions of reality. This is a safe assumption to make with regard to any larger collectivity, although there is always the possibility of politically disinterested theoreticians convincing each other without recourse to the cruder means of persuasion.152 149 Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion, 69–73. 150 “Carta geral do Irmão Luis Frois,” in Silva Rêgo, Documentação para a história das missões, 225. 151 “Carta geral do Irmão Luis Frois,” 221–24. 152 Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction of Reality, 108–9.

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In Berger’s estimation, raw power is not the only decisive factor: the sharper such resistance, and the sharper the means employed to overcome it, the more important will it be to have additional legitimations. Such legitimations serve also to explain why the resistance cannot be tolerated and to justify the means by which it is to be quelled. One may say, then, that the facticity of the social world or of any part of it suffices for self-legitimation as long as there is no challenge. When a challenge appears, in whatever form, the facticity can no longer be taken for granted.153 Many of the Ignatian order’s efforts to convert ascetics on the sub-continent and the Horn of Africa indeed fall somewhere between these two poles. Widely recognizing the sway that the ascetics exerted on the local collective conscience, the Jesuits strove to match their religious influence with force, intimidating, punishing, and constraining these elements. In regions where the Portuguese exercised full military and political authority, such as Goa, it was naturally easier to resort to punitive measures aimed at compelling these figures, along with other sectors of the population, to “see the light.” On the other hand, in remote areas far from the influence of the Portuguese maritime empire, the Society’s emissaries had no choice but to renounce any and all forms of violence. The case of Ethiopia falls somewhere in the middle. At the early stages of the mission, the Jesuits lacked the backing of the emperor, who not only stood atop the kingdom’s political hierarchy but was the de facto head of the local Orthodox Church. Only when Ethiopia’s sovereigns began to display a clear inclination toward Catholicism at the turn of the seventeenth century did the missionaries acquire greater leeway to threaten and prod. On occasion, the Society’s representatives could even count on the emperor, governors, and other local authorities to do their “dirty work” for them. 153 Berger, Sacred Canopy, 31.

Conclusion The Jesuits’ descriptions of both the yogis and the Ethiopian renunciants were marked by ambivalence. While critical of these ascetics, the missionaries also pointed out admirable facets of their comportment. In both the Society of Jesus’s positive and negative impressions, there are also glaring ethnocentric views that shift the spotlight onto the other’s flaws. Like many historical cases, these perceptions evolved into a sort of inverted mirror image of the self that revealed differences between the European Catholic and the native renunciant. There are a number of variants to the Jesuit outlook regarding Ethiopian asceticism. Drawing on classical Ethiopian sources, Ignatian emissaries like Pedro Páez, Almeida, and Mendes conducted historical analyses of monasticism’s development and forms of local asceticism along the Horn of Africa. It is evident that they refrained from imputing major Ethiopian ascetic figures with heresy and buttressed these conclusions with evidence from the aforementioned texts. While the accuracy of their historical understanding fluctuated, the Jesuits managed to appropriate Ethiopian notables such as the nine saints and Abba Täklä Haymanot, portraying them as ascetics who practiced a true faith. The Society’s perspective becomes somewhat more complicated upon describing the attributes and lifestyles of their contemporaneous renunciants. Perhaps it was Azevedo who displayed the most empathy toward local asceticism, comparing the Ethiopian version to that of medieval Portugal. Other Jesuits grasped the African kingdom’s ancient monasticism as an institution possessing a glorious past that was now in the throes of decadence. Likewise, Ethiopian monks were seen as undisciplined, bereft of apostolic rigor. This outlook was commensurate with the order’s understanding of asceticism and the implications thereof on mission, apostolate, and—most importantly—obedience to the pope. Given the native monasticism’s ostensible religious fallacy, the order’s representatives spurned its “brand” of asceticism. In sum, the Jesuits deemed the Ethiopian belief system to be problematic and its monks dissolute. Father Antonio Fernandes’s hagiography of the Virgin Mother exemplifies how the Society grasped its confrontation with Ethiopian Orthodoxy. Catholicism was not only the “right” doctrine but the proud bearer of all the virtues emanating from the saint’s chastity and impeccable behavior. Most interestingly, Fernandes stressed these claims even though Ethiopia was

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highly devoted to the Marian cult and was the only land to accuse the Jesuits of being “enemies of the Virgin.” The encounter between the first wave of Jesuit missionaries to India and the yogis also bears witness to tensions within the Society between mystical and contemplative ideals and the apostolic principles of the church militant. In shaping their views toward the sub-continent’s renunciants, the Ignatian emissaries, above all else, transformed the “other” into a distorted reflection of themselves. This monograph has explicated nodes and exchanges of information between the Jesuits stationed in India and the local ascetics. Some of the missionaries admired their life of indigence, chastity, and abstinence. Correspondingly, they realized that these same virtues could serve as a means for approaching other cultures and fulfilling the order’s goals. Notwithstanding this praise, several missionaries claimed that the yogis had grown arrogant due to these very qualities and placed them at the service of the “devil.” Submission to authority was a trait the Society of Jesus associated with religiously inspired humility. In contrast, the yogis’ excessive self-confidence was deemed to stem from pride and hubris. These general findings aside, the source material indicates that each of the missionaries had reached their own conclusions on the basis of their individual character and background. Fathers Barzeo and Henriques, inter alios, clearly embodied the belief that Jesuits aspired toward a unique and authentic religious vocation. Moreover, their writing is tinged with a certain ambivalence toward the Hindu renunciants. While regarding the latter as “superstitious” or “idolatrous,” the missionaries were willing to interact with them. In fact, they even sought the yogis’ advice and tried to learn from their austere way of life. Some of the Jesuits viewed this lifestyle as a model that could help them advance the Society’s goals, even beyond the sub-continent. On the other hand, those with military experience, not least Amador Correia and Gonçalo Fernandes Trancoso, displayed more critical and baleful attitudes toward these renunciants. During the 1560s, the order’s politico-cum-theological perspective on Asia’s indigenous religions underwent a far-reaching change. The mission became less tolerant toward infidels and “the perversity of idolatry” in territories under Portuguese control. A case in point are the resolutions that were passed by the successive diocesan councils in Goa from 1567 to 1606. In any event, the missionaries made an effort to accurately classify yogi religious traditions. For example, they alternately labeled renunciants as superstitious sorcerers, idolaters, and devotees of a strange faith that nevertheless harbored a modicum of truth. Delving into the yogi belief system, a few of the Jesuits on the sub-continent were convinced that they had unmasked their rivals as counterfeiters of divine worship and thus in league with the devil—the quintessential imitator of the Lord. That said, a couple of the Catholic emissaries felt that it

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was imperative to recruit missionaries with yogi-like attributes. For instance, Nunes Barreto, vice-provincial of India, urged his superiors in Portugal to send new men “who are nothing but workers driven exclusively by the love of God and who are chaste, patient, long-suffering and virtuous.” In the father’s opinion, these qualities were essential to combating the “hypocrisy” of the Hindu renunciants. After the initial yogi–Jesuit encounter, the subsequent conversations between the two sides broached the origins of their respective ascetic practices in a mutual effort to overcome ambiguities and establish a correlation between deed and belief. Correspondingly, the Ignatian order embarked on a similar process in Ethiopia aimed at understanding the local variety of asceticism as an outgrowth of Christianity’s historical development in the region. These dialogues were also triggered by other motives. Since the missionaries perceived the Ethiopian and Hindu renunciants as adversaries, they lured them into debates with the objective of substantiating, through reason and argumentation, the “truth” of the Latin rite. The polemical format was different in each area. On the Horn of Africa, the theological-cum-Christological dispute adhered to local norms and traditions. Moreover, the exchanges revolved around scriptural interpretations held in common by the two Christian denominations. Among the Jesuits’ priorities was to expose the alleged inconsistencies and mediocre exegesis of the local church. Time and again, the Society’s representatives confronted their disputants in the emperor’s presence. From the Jesuits’ viewpoint, it was Ethiopian Orthodoxy’s stress on the Bible’s mythical sources that was responsible for its alleged doctrinal errors and heresies. Debate on the Asian subcontinent was more sporadic and less coherent. At these exchanges, the order’s emissaries strove to draw equivalencies between Christianity and local praxis. As documented in chapter 6, the missionaries believed that the inhabitants of, say, Ceylon, Hormuz, and Goa revered yogis as virtuous and sacred figures. Hence, they assumed that the conversion of these renunciants would bolster the mission. These disputations betray how the Jesuits misinterpreted their rivals’ beliefs as principles of faith that harbor authentic elements deriving from Christianity but had been distorted over the centuries. To some extent, this impression is analogous to the Society’s claim that the monks in Ethiopia had allowed true Christian principles to slowly erode. By virtue of their influence as oracles or representatives of a prophetic Christianity, the local ascetic figures indeed became the Jesuits’ foes, as both sides espoused competing models of devotional leadership. In both Ethiopia and the sub-continent, the missionaries aspired to install an ecclesiastical order whereby God held ultimate providence over the universe and heresy was a symptom of the devil’s machinations to disrupt this plan. The Catholic

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emissaries repeatedly voiced concern that the African stream’s “heresy” or the “deteriorating Christianity” of the yogis had begot a faith-shorn or unworthy monkhood. From the Ignatian order’s standpoint, then, it was vital for those who perform exorcisms and healing rituals outside the Catholic framework to be sanctioned by the Holy See. As long as these activities were properly executed under the supervision of a “legitimate” ecclesiastic, they would achieve the desired result. In other words, the efforts of yogis and “heretic monks” were doomed for failure owing to their lack of adequate clerical training. The erudite Jesuits possessed the wherewithal to defend their positions and confute their rivals in theological disputations. As noted in chapter 4, the missionaries authored books on a wide range of doctrinal topics. Furthermore, they habitually engaged with segments of the population that were receptive to exorcisms, miraculous tales, and familiar depictions of heaven and hell. This grassroots experience came in handy during the emissaries’ thaumaturgical competitions against local renunciants—jostles that were essentially over which party represented the “authentic” faith. It is quite possible that intellectual motives as well as a certain religious bent stood behind yogis and Ethiopian monks’ decision to accept the faith of Rome. In the proselytes’ approach to Catholicism, we can perhaps discern the cognitive appeal of such a covenantal transformation. Additionally, their existing lifestyles, practices, and beliefs may have also been compatible with the Latin rite. To a large extent, Ethiopian monks and their Jesuit interlocutors held a common set of scriptures, including much of the patristic tradition. There was also a certain affinity between the yogi and the Catholic worldview (see the discussion in chapter 4). Fróis praised the chastity, humility, and rhetorical skills of a potential yogi convert. In sum, neophytes evidently gravitated toward the church on account of their intellectual propensities, a desire for security and social mobility, political reasons, and emotional needs. The confrontation between representatives of Ethiopian Orthodoxy and Catholicism undoubtedly entailed a power struggle. Despite the eloquence of the Jesuits, all of whom studied at European universities, the question of which stream would triumph occasionally depended more on raw clout than on personal acumen or faculties. Recognizing the sway the ascetics exerted on the local collective consciousness, Jesuits tried to complement their religious argumentation with the use of force, intimidating and chastising potential recruits. In areas where Portugal exercised full politico-military authority, such as Goa, it was naturally easier to resort to duress. With regard to places well outside the Portuguese empire’s sphere of influence, though, the Society’s emissaries had no choice but to

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renounce violence. The case of Ethiopia falls somewhere in between. At the early stages of this mission, the Jesuits lacked the backing of the emperor, who was also the titular head of the local Orthodox Church. Only in the early seventeenth century, when Ethiopian rulers began to display a clear inclination toward the Latin rite, did the proselytizers acquire greater license to threaten and upbraid their opponents. At times, the Society of Jesus even implored the monarch, governors, and other local authorities for their unconditional support.

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Index Abba Gärima, monastery 175 abnegation 15, 80, 85, 110 Abraham, Abba 200 Abraham of Cochin 42 abstinence 1, 5, 8, 13, 16, 51–52, 76, 81–82, 90, 102, 104, 106–7, 112, 148, 179, 216 in Ethiopian Orthodox in 1, 16 Ignatius de Loyola on 5, 78 Jesuits on 1, 5, 8, 13, 16, 81–82, 90, 104, 106, 112, 148, 179, 216 Roberto de Nobili on 148 in sexual intercourse 51n136 abunä (bishop) 34–35, 84, 199–201, 208 Abyssinia. See Ethiopia Abyssinian monks 126 people 126n52, 176 ruler 44 Acción misionera y los métodos misionales (Granero) 2n4, 6n22, 10n38–n40, 11n42–  n43, 116n7, 117n9, 181n15, 183n25–n26, 185n34 acculturation 49 Acquaviva, Claudio 7–8, 167n87 Acquaviva, Rodolfo 33 adaptationism 4, 30, 60, 170. See also Quietism Adegada, Ethiopia 35, 209 Aden 20n12 Adimata, Abba 64 ʿAdwa 32 Afe, Abba 49, 64. See also Afṣe Afghanistan 89 19–22, 26, 38 Africa, continent 2, 10, 16–18, 22–23, 111, 169n97. See also Horn of Africa Afṣe, Abba 49, 64n19 Agäw Mǝder 35 Agehananda Bharati, Swami 173n111 Agostino Tedla de Hēbo 125 Agra, India 25, 27 Águas, Neves 43n110, 44n111 ailments 156n32, 158, 162–63, 177 Akbar (emperor) 33 Aksum, Ethiopia 49, 63–64, 67 Aksumite army 65n26 Aksumite era 67

Al-Bahnasā, bishopric 128–29, 19, 21 Albuquerque, Afonso de 19, 20n11, 21n13, 22, 26n36 Alcalá, Spain 3, 6 alcuni 125 Alcántara, Pedro de 4n12 Alden, Dauril “Some Considerations concerning Jesuit Enterprises in Asia” 25n33, 37n82 The Making of an Enterprise 2n5, 23n24, 24n29, 31n58, 33n68, 100n17 Alef/Alefi, Abba 64n17. See also nine saints Alexander the Great 61, 130, 173, 181 Alexandria, Clement of 123, 141n106 Alexandria, Patriarch of 35, 45, 65, 68, 121n29 Alexandrian insurrection 210 Alexandrine Coptic Church 74, 95, 121n29, 129, 200–201 Alexius, Saint 71 Aliba Dangil (Ḥalib Dǝngǝl) 182 Alla ud-din, Sikandar (sultan) 21 Almeida, Francisco de 21n13 Almeida, Manuel de Coptic Church for 70 cult of Mary 87n129 Däbrä Libanos, privileges for 199n97 däbtäročč for 125 Ethiopian monasticism for 62–63, 86, 95, 206, 209–10, 216 healing for 158, 160, 164, 203–4 Historia da Etiópia a alta 68 História da Igreja Católica 29n50, 80n90 History of Ethiopia 40 Judaic Sabbath for 77 local monks for 186, 197, 206, 209, 211 on Oviedo 78–79, 175–76 on Täklä Haymanot 68–71, 95, 210 Susǝnyos and 186, 201, 207 The Life of Täklä Haymanot 69, 71 theological debates and 128–29, 206 transfer to Africa from Goa 24n30 witchcraft and exorcisms 160, 162–63, 204 alms 13, 52, 55, 58, 82, 180 alumbrados 4, 6–7

Index Álvares, Francisco 42–43 Prester John of the Indies 43n110, 52n139, 122n32 Álvarez, Baltasar 7 Ambrose, Saint 91, 131, 148 Virginibus ad Marcellinam sororem 91 Amdä Ṣǝyon (king) 71n53 Amdä Ṣǝyon, monastery 51n136, 69 Americas, continent 14, 32, 151, 155 Amhara 69, 182, 199, 204 people 67, 199n94 region 69n44, 161, 182, 204 Amiamid (emperor) 63 amora’im 137 amulets 157, 163–64 Anaphora of Mary 129n62 anaphrodisiacs 105 ancestors, rite of 44, 57, 152 anchorites 1, 4n12, 13–14, 16, 50, 52, 59, 75, 81, 99, 179–80, 184, 190, 193 anchoritism 10, 49. See also asceticism Andrade, Alonso de Varones ilustres de la Compañía de Jesús 38n88, 101n20, 101n23, 104n40 Andrea, Saint (Andrew) 88–8 andǝmta 133 Angamaly, bishopric 42 angels 52, 67, 85–86, 94, 130, 134, 154, 160, 197 Angelis, Antonio de 34 animals 76, 134, 136–37, 159 Annales Auxumitani 63 annual letters 36, 126–27, 184, 199 Anorēwos, Abba 51n136, 92 Anorewos the Younger 161n54 Anquetil 61 Anriquez, Anrique 105 Anthony, Saint 4, 67 anti-Catholic 92, 125n44, 201 anti -Chalcedonian 49, 125 anti-Christian 156 anti-dyophysite anti-Hindu 28 anti-demonic 151n5. See also Shamans and exorcism Antioch, patriarch of 121n29 Apology (Tertullian) 141n106 apostles 37, 77, 83, 129, 178, 206

249 Aquitaine, France 8 Arabia 37, 63, 65 Arabic language and writings 20, 39n89, 50, 121n29, 123, 124n40 Arabs 21 Araucan 152n8 Archivum historicum Societatis Iesu 2n5, 101n20, 121n30, 191n61 Arägawi, Abba 49, 64–65, 67–68 aristocracy, Ethiopian 35, 174 Armenians 19, 23, 103 Arquivo Distrital de Braga 11n44, 40n97, 62n7, 64n13, 94n164, 182n22, 199n96, 202n109, 203n114, 208n129–n130, 209n132, 210n136 art magical arts 76 diabolical arts 155 Aryans 53 Asärtu täsǝʾǝlotat 82–83, 89, 124, 132n74 asceticism. See also yogi celibacy and 51, 55, 62, 91 detachment in 14n50, 52, 54, 106n49 dietary restrictions 43, 45, 52, 74, 198n91 Ethiopian asceticism 49, 51, 61–95, 215 fasting and 5, 8, 13, 44, 51, 52n137, 55, 76, 78, 80–83, 85, 87, 103, 106, 154, 182, 211 guidelines of Hindu ascetic life 57 hair in 98, 153n14 Hindu asceticism 15, 55, 106, 110 Jesuit asceticism 13 lifestyles in 49n127, 52, 55n150, 88, 90–91, 94, 104, 212, 215–18 Marian model in 87, 95 ascetics as oracles in 78, 177, 217 sexual abstinence in 13n50, 148 sexual addictions and 55 silence in 6n25, 55n148, 76–77 sleep in 52, 55n148 ,57, 109n63 Asia 2, 18–20, 25–26, 28, 33, 38, 48, 53, 58, 62, 89, 100, 103, 107, 111, 140, 143, 151, 157, 183, 185, 191, 216 Asia in the Making of Europe (Lach) 2n4, 26n37, 28n48, 33n66, 62n5, 140n102, 143n114, 183n27, 185n35 askema 67–68, 73 askesis 3, 13n50 āśrama 56

250 Asʾar Yaṯʾar, Yūsuf 65n26 atheism 155 Atkäna, Ethiopia 35 Atnatewos, Abba 206 Atquo, Abba 205–7 Augustine, Saint 93, 130n67,131n72, 134, 148 Augustinian order 63 Aum (Om) 157 austerity 1, 6, 10, 16, 47, 55, 78, 97, 103n35, 109n61, 111, 173 Autobiografía y Diario espiritual (Loyola) 187n127, 187n43–n45, 187n48, 188n48, 188n49, 191, 203n113 avatar 144 Ávila, Teresa of 4n12, 7n28, 116n5 Axum, kingdom 64 Ayele Teklahaymanot 200n98–n99 Āyurveda 156–57 Azande culture 169 Azevedo, Luis de 34, 77n78, 78, 80–81, 91n151, 96, 115, 139, 175, 182, 205, 215 Bägemdǝr, region 35, 199 Baghdad, Iraq 41 baḥrǝy 123–24. See also täbay baḥrǝyawi 130 baḥtawi 135 baḥtawis 75–76, 182 baḥǝr nägaš 164n74, 202 bairagis 97n4–98n4 Bandrés 123 baptism, Catholic 22, 27, 94, 152, 166, 189–90, 195–96, 198, 206, 208–09, 212 barbarians 14, 116–17, 122n32, 172 Barneto, Thomas 169, 176, 201 Baronio, Cesare (cardinal) 62n6 Barradas, Manuel on chastity of Ethiopian ascetics 84 on conversion of ascetics 209, 211–12 description of Ethiopian ascetic by 72– 73, 80, 83–84 Ethiopian Church for 80, 122n33 The Life of Abba Gärima 71n56 Notícia sobre o Reino de Tigré 71n56–n57, 77n79, 163n67 Religious images and mirales in missions and 164–65, 169 Tractatus tres historico … 40n93

Index Barzeo, Gaspar Francis Xavier and 100–1 healing and exorcism 158 mission to India 100–03 proselytization in Hormuz 27, 101–02 on renunciants 190–91, 193, 216 on yogis 61n2, 99–100, 103–4, 109, 113, 120–22, 143–44, 158, 180, 190–91, 193, 216 Bäṣälotä Mikhaél, Saint 51n136, 92 Basil, Saint 131, 148 Basilissa, martyr 94 Bassein, mission 25 Baçaim, India 29, 39 Beccari, Camillo Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales 32n63, 39n90, 40n91–93, 40n95, 44n114, 64n13, 64n23–n24, 65n27, 68n39, 69n42, 69n45, 71n52, 71n56, 73n60, 73n64, 77n76, 77n79, 78n81, 79n82, 79n84–85, 80n87, 81n92, 83n107, 83n109, 86n120–n122, 87n129, 88n130, 116n2, 117n10, 118n15, 119n17, 119n20–n23, 122n33, 126n48, 127n54, 128n56–n57, 129n65, 159n42, 160n52, 162n62–n63, 163n64, 164n70, 164n72– n75, 165n75–n78, 169n94, 175n124, 175n126, 176n130–n132, 177n133–n136, 182n23–n24, 186n37, 196n80–n83, 197n84–n85, 197n87, 199n94–n95, 199n97, 201n103, 201n106, 203n112, 203n115, 204n117, 206n118, 206n122– n124, 207n126–n128, 209n133–n134, 210n137–n138, 211n140, 211n142, 212n144–n145 Beckford, James 192 Beidelman Thomas 186 Bellarmine, Robert (cardinal) 31, 111 Bellary, India 21 Benedictines 4 Bengal 19, 53, 157n34 Benjamin, patriarch 68 Berger, Peter 206, 213 Sacred Canopy 212n147, 214n153 Social Construction of Reality 206n125, 213n152 Social Reality of Religion 145n126 Berma (Brahma) 143 Bernier, François 152

251

Index Viaje al Gran Mogol, Indostán y Cachemira 103n35, 107n49, 153n13, 170n100, 180n5 Bersel, Jasper. See Barzeo, Gaspar Besma (Vishnu) 143 bestiality 101 beverage 53 Bhagavadgita Giītā 144–46 Bible 75, 127, 133, 136, 138, 142, 145, 149, 159, 217 Bijapur, India 21, 28 bi-meʾod meʾod 137 bishop 26, 30, 42, 50, 59, 91, 93, 115, 127–28, 137, 199–201, 206, 210. See also abunä bodies, human 54, 99n14, 107, 109, 130, 152n8 Bodin, Jean 81n94 Bohemia 150 Bolland, Jean 93 Bollandism 72 Bom Jesus, the College of Saint Roch 24 bones 174–75. See also relics Bonjes 105n46 bonzes 105n46, 152 bonzo 111 Borba, Diogo de 26 Borja, Francisco 47–48, 104–6 Diario espiritual 105n45 Tratados espirituales 105n42, 143n113 Bourbons 115 Boxer, Charles Ralph 31, 37, 40, 48 Church Militant … 38n87 Portuguese Seaborne Empire 31n59, 37n81, 40n98, 48n124 bózu 105n46. See also bonjes Brahma 58n162, 143n114, 144n116 Brahmanism 143n114 Brahmcarya 56n152 Brahmins 21n17–n18, 29–30, 56, 58n162, 59, 61, 113, 119–20, 140n102, 143n114, 157, 183, 185 Brotéria 10n41, 17n3, 25n33, 165n77 Broët, Paschase 17 buda 159. See also witchcraft Buddha 144n120 Buddhism 12n45, 46 Buddhist 28, 38, 105n46, 111, 141n105, 156n27

burials 43, 172, 173–76 Byzantine empire 65 Caesarius of Arles, Saint 137n95, 138n95 Cain 130 Calcutta, India 19, 25 calendar, Ethiopian 82, 172 Calicut, India 21, 40, 48, 140 Calvinist 12n45 Calâlgy, Ethiopia 161 Cambay, India 53n142, 100, 153 Cana, wedding at 88 Canada 155n26 candles 207 Cannanore, India 20n12 Cano, Melchor 7n27 canon law 93 canonical 123, 144–4 cantors 125n46 canuxis 105n46. See also bonjes Cape Comorin 25, 29n51 Cape of Good Hope 20, 22 Cape Verde 165n75 capital punishment 205, 208 Capitalism 12 Caraka Saṁhitā 156n32 Cardeira, Luís 165 Cardoso, Gonzalo 119, 127 Carmelites 4, 8, 89 Carmen, Virgin of 89 Carneiro, Belchior 10, 34 carpets 100 Carta anua de Ethiopia (Páez) 11n44, 182n22, 199n96, 202n109, 203n114, 208m129 Cartas annais das missões da Etiopia 40n97, 62n7, 64n13, 94n164, 182n22, 199n96, 202n109, 208n129–n130, 210n136 Cartas de Etiópia (Oliveira) 34n72, 40n96, 71n56, 151n4, 169n95, 205n119, 209n135 Carthusian 6n27, 7n27 Castanhoso, Miguel de 43–44 caste system 42n105, 55–57, 59, 70, 111, 180 castles 108 Castro, Afonso de 27 Catatâ, Ethiopia 161 catechism 29, 102, 193, 209

252 Catholicism asceticism in 12n45 church militant and 31, 106, 112, 136n90, 216 confrontation with Ethiopian Creed 213 cooperation with Portuguese state in Goa 25–26, 29 Counter-Reformation 47 De Nobili, Roberto and 31 devotion to Mary in 87–88, 95–96 Emperor Akbar and 33 Ethiopian monarchy and 35, 44, 118–19, 122, 177, 199, 202, 214 Ethiopian Christianity vs 41, 90, 117, 122–23, 126, 138, 183, 204, 215 Ethiopian monks and 84, 197–99, 206, 208, 211–12, 218 exorcism and 162n61, 167 health and sickness in 155, 158, 166 Hindu concepts and 174 Nestorian Christianity and 40 Quietism and 60 Spiritual Exercises and 189 supernatural and 140 yogis and 121, 190–91 Catholic Reformation 3–4, 9, 12n45, 154 caves 76, 99, 102, 176, 181, 183, 208 Cecilia, Saint 94 celibacy 51, 55, 62, 91 cenobitism 13–14, 49, 52. See also anchoritism Ceoâ, Ethiopia 161 ceremonies 48, 143n114, 144n121, 145, 169n97, 172, 177, 196, 198n92 Cerulli, Enrico Gli Abbati di Dabra Libānos 174n120 “La littérature éthiopienne …” 123n36–n37 Les vies éthiopiennes de Saint Alexis 71n57 Scritti teologici etiopici dei secoli XVI– XVII 75n69, 82n97, 83n104, 83n105, 89n139, 123n33, 124n38, 124n40–n43, 125n44, 127n54, 129n62, 129n64, 130n67, 130n69–31n70, 132n75–33n76, 174n120–n121 Storia della letteratura etiopica 50n133 Ceylon 19n9, 25, 29, 31, 37, 104, 108, 144, 149, 217

Index Chalcedon, Council of 49, 64–65, 74, 121n29, 123, 124n40, 125 charity 3, 10, 24, 44, 76, 78, 81–83, 95, 146, 195 charms 163. See also icons and witchcraft chastity 80, 83–88, 90–92, 94–96, 100, 102–3, 105–6, 112, 208, 213, 215–16, 218 Chaul, Ethiopia 25 children 5, 8n32, 87, 101, 130n67, 136–38, 153, 166, 176, 185, 193 China 19, 27, 30, 37, 53n142, 89, 105, 111, 142n108, 155n27 Chorão, Ethiopia 25, 27, 30 Christ 4, 7n27, 9, 38n88, 45, 47, 74–75, 81, 83, 89, 93n158, 103, 116, 118, 123–24, 126, 131–33, 137n95, 152n8, 155n26, 161, 191, 194–95, 198n92, 200, 203, 205–6, 210 Christianization 18, 50–51, 174 Christmas 11 Christology 2n6, 74, 123n36, 129, 205 Christos Bezana, Abba 67–68 Chronica de Susenyos (Esteves Pereira) 197n86, 200n100 Chronicle of Axum 63 Chrysostom, John 50n133, 88, 90 Church Militant … (Boxer) 38n87 Chōḷa dynasty 21 cilices 76, 87. See also mortifications cinnamon 37 Cipriano, Afonso 27 circumcision 43, 45, 66, 74, 198 cleanliness 85 Clement of Alexandria 141n106 climate 2, 104 cloak 72, 73n62, 98 cloisters 174. See also monasteries clothes/clothing 52, 57–58, 72, 75, 185 cilices 76 cloak 72, 73n62, 98 Dabâs cape 73 Fota 72 fotetes 72 of Ethiopian monks 52, 58, 72, 73–74 garb 67n37, 101, 111 habits, monastic 67, 72–73, 75, 105 mantles 73n62 ochre raiment 111 qinat 73n62

Index clothes/clothing (cont.) qob 73n62 rags as 98, 102, 153 raiment 59, 72–73, 102, 111 silk 72, 75, 100, 111, 153 skins 75, 84 tabiz 157n34 yellow skin/cotton 75 wool 72 coadjutors 23 cobras, worship of 76n72. See also idolatry Cochin Amador Correa in 139 bishop of 30, 41–42, 59 College of 25 rajah of 21 cohabitation 51n136 Coimbra, Portugal 6, 66n34, 78, 92n153, 97n3–n4, 139n98, 141n105, 191, 193n71, 205n120 coins 22, 98, 141n105. See also tostón Colleges Cochin, India 25 Saint Paul’s, Goa 24, 120, 144 Saint Roch, Lisbon 24 São Paulo, Brazil 24n30 colonialism 92n153 colonies 21, 26, 29, 194. See also Padroado Commentary on the Galatians (Jerome) 148n139 commerce 154 Communion, sacrament of 34, 44, 81, 88–89, 196, 201, 203, 208–9 competitions 2, 31, 152, 162, 218 conclave 29, 42, 123. See also Chalcedon, Synod of Diamper and, Trent Confessio fide of King Claudius 31, 128n60, 198n91. See also Gälawdewos Confession, sacrament of 24, 44, 81, 116, 162, 164, 189, 197–98, 203, 209 Confucianism 46 Congregation de Propaganda Fide 35–36 Constantinople 65 Constitutions, Jesuit 2, 8–9, 84–85, 110, 187 Constitutions of Toledo 170 contemplation 7–8, 78–79, 97, 104, 180 Claudio Acquaviva on 7–8 contemplative ascetics 50–51, 152

253 contemplative hermits 153 contemplative Jesuits 1, 6, 9, 79, 85, 106, 216 contemplative mystics 79 contemplativus in actione 85 contests 151, 156, 163, 178 controversies, on faith and creed 2n6, 89, 95, 118n16, 127–28, 148. See also fallacies convents 2, 70. See also specific monasteries conversio 186 conversion Ethiopian monks 117, 128, 167, 184, 196–97, 201–02, 207–08 Ezana’s 63n11 in Jesuit context 7n27, 9–11, 23, 186–91, 195–96, 203–04, 217 of Paulo de Santa Fe 190–94 sincerity in 207–12 Susǝnyos 199 of yogis 100, 103, 149, 167, 179, 181–82, 185, 194–95, 199, 201–04 copper 73, 98 Copts/Coptics 68, 103n35 Christianity 70, 74, 200n98 Faith, literature and identity 70 law 51 Patriarchate 2 Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum …  50n133, 63n12, 71n53, 71n57, 75n70, 82n154–n156, 161n55, 164n71, 165n79 Correia-Afonso, John The Jesuits in India 21n16, 27n40–n41, 28, 30n56, 31n57, 38n88, 40n92, 59n168 Correia, Amador 107, 113, 139, 216 Corsini, Andrea, Saint 88 Cortés, Salvador 152 cosmology 159n41 cotton 73, 75, 100 Coulào, India 26n36, 27 Councils Chalcedon 49, 64–65, 74, 121n29, 123, 124n40, 125 Goa 29n51, 41, 113, 193, 209, 216 Malines 154 Second Vatican Council 1 Toledo 128, 170 Trent 29, 37n83, 43n109, 93, 154, 163n68

254 Counter-Reformation 29, 47, 97, 106, 154 Coutinho, Manuel 195. See also Jogue Covilhã, Pero de 20n12 Cranganore, India 26n36, 42 creationism 130n67 creed 14, 46, 128–29, 194, 203, 205–6, 213 cremation 173 Criminali, Antonio 27 Cronin, Vincent Pearl to India, A 30n56, 76n73, 111n75–n76, 112n77 crucifixion 83, 200 Cuba 142n108 cults 1, 13, 43, 53, 87, 95, 113, 141–42,145, 147, 156, 172, 216 customs 2, 25, 28, 30, 32, 34, 38–39, 42–46, 59, 72, 81, 83, 93–94, 100–01, 111–12, 122, 135, 141–42, 147, 160 Cyriacus of Bahnasah, bishop 128–29n62 Cyril of Alexandria, Saint 123, 138 Däbrä ʿAsbo 51n136, 161n54 Däbrä Bizän 201–2, 211 Däbrä Halleluya 71n53 Däbrä Libanos, monastery 71, 174, 184, 199, 200–01 Däbrä Damo 51, 67 Dabâs 73 Däbsan, Ethiopia 35 Däbtära, Ethiopia 125n46 däbtäročč 125–27 Da Gama, Vasco 19, 21–22, 33, 40 Daman, India 25 Dämbǝya, Ethiopia 35, 208, 210 damnation 54 Damot 35, 69, 76, 197 Damão, Ethiopia 25, 29 dances 125, 166 Dänqäz, Ethiopia 35, 127 Da Silva Dias, J. S. [José Sebastião] Os descobrimentos e la 22n22, 26n38, 179n1 Da Silva Rêgo, Antonio 2n3 Documentação para a história 28n45, 99n12, 104n36, 113n78, 120n28, 122n31, 144n118, 145n123–n124, 145n126, 146n128, 180n10, 213n150 Da Sylva, Melchior 34, 194

Index daughters 77, 133 Da Veiga, Manuel Relacam geral … 63n9, 65n31, 80n88, 84n112–84n113, 88n131 Dawit I (emperor) 129n62 deacons 200 De Albergaria, Lopo Soares 19, 21n13 De Alcántara, Pedro 4n12 De Angelis, António 34 De anima (Tertullian) 130n67 De Almeida, Fortunato História da igreja em Portugal 26n36, 27n40, 80n90, 29n50 death 42, 54, 83, 98, 151, 160, 171, 173, 191, 206 De Azevedo, Luis 34, 77n78, 78n81, 91n151 Dǝbarwa, Ethiopia 35, 202 debates, theological and religious 31, 33, 39, 83, 89, 116,117n11, 118–23, 126–29, 144, 148–49, 155, 170, 197n87, 204–06, 217 De Castro, Georgius 183 Deccan Plateau 21n17 De Granada, Luis 109 De Heredia, Antonio 181 deities, Hindu 76, 141n106, 143, 157, 173–74 De la Cruz, Estevan 38n88 De Lagos, Vicente 26n36 De la Puente, Luis 7n28 De Laval François Pyrard 24n30 De Leturia, Pedro 4 De Lima, Rodrigo 20 De Lima, Manuel 193–94 Delhi, India 25, 27, 33, 55, 99, 173 Della Valle, Pietro 61, 99, 104, 154 The Pilgrim 99n10, 99n13, 104n37, 154n21, 154n23 Del Rio, Martín Anton 155 deluge 142n108 De Mesquita, Juan 120 demons 99n14, 141, 143, 150–51, 154, 156, 159–63, 165, 167, 171, 180, 188n50 demoniacs 150 demonic spirits 155, 158–59 demonological policy 158, 171 See also exorcism De Morais, Manuel 27 Denmark 30 De Nobili, Roberto ascetic practices 111–12, 147

Index De Nobili, Roberto (cont.) adaptationism and adoptism by 30, 59, 111–12 arrival in Goa 30 baḥtawis ascetic practices for 76 on Hinduism 62, 111 mortifications and 30, 59 Preaching Wisdom to the Wise 30n36, 147n136, 1148n141 on sexual abstinence 148 translations of sacred texts 38n80 De Ovalle, Alonso 32, 151–52 Histórica relación del Reyno de Chile … 32n65, 152n7–152n9 Depeçan, Ethiopia 35 De Rosales, Diego 142n108 De Salanova, João 167 De Santa Fe, Paulo 17, 190, 191n60, 193, 195 despot 128 De Sousa, Rodrigo 26n36 De Souza, João 204 De Souza, Teotónio 24n30, 25 detachment 14n50, 52, 54, 106n49 De Urreta, Luis 40, 63n8, 65, 68, 69n42 De Valencia, Martin 37 devil 14n50, 38, 102n27, 107–8, 113, 142, 143n114, 147, 152–54, 156, 158n40, 159, 160n44, 161, 172, 181, 188, 204, 207, 216 devoción calorosa 191 devotees 7, 14, 43, 46, 75, 82–83, 109, 164, 211, 216 devotion 16, 43, 46–47, 72, 79, 82–83, 87–88, 102–3, 109, 116, 148, 163, 166, 175, 181–82, 190–91, 196, 198, 203–4 devotional images 174 Dharma 56–57 Dharmasutras 57 Dhavamony 97 dialogue 56, 112, 207, 217. See also debate Diario espiritual (Borja) 105n45 Dias, Baltasar 20, 152n12, 193 Dias, Bartolomeu 20n12 diet 52, 59, 90, 108–09, 180, 204 dignitaries 22n22, 118, 177 Diocletian (emperor) 94 diplomats 3. See also dignitaries disasters, natural 150, 151n5, 167, 168n90, 169 Discalced Carmelites 4, 8

255 discernir 188 discernment 24, 93, 188 discipline 10–12, 14, 29, 46, 61, 74, 78–80, 84–87, 95–96, 106, 204, 211 disease 151, 165–66, 203 disputant 122, 145 disputation 29, 115–20, 122–23, 127, 133, 144, 148, 178, 189, 204–06, 210, 217–18. See also debates Diu, India 25, 29, 34 Divar, islands 27 divinations 58, 154. See also witchcraft diyablos 159. See also demons doctors 93, 156. See also medicine Documentação para a história (Da Silva) 28n45, 99n12, 104n36, 113n78, 120n28, 122n31, 144n118, 145n123–n124, 145n126, 146n128, 180n10, 213n150 Documenta Indica (Wicki and Gomes)  61n3, 98n5–n7, 99n9, 99n13, 101n21– n22, 101n24, 102n25–n30, 103n31–n32, 103n35, 104n38, 104n40, 105n43–n44, 105n47, 107n52, 109n57, 110n70, 114n80, 120n240–n27, 140n99–n100, 141n103, 142n107, 142n110, 143n111– n114, 144n119, 147n131, 152n10–n11, 154n19–n20, 156n29–n31, 158n36–n37, 166n83–n85, 167n87–n89, 179n2–n3, 180n8–n9, 180n11–n12, 181n14, 181n16, 182n17, 182n19, 183n28–n29, 190n57– n59, 191n60, 192n67, 193n69, 193n70, 194n72–n73, 194n75, 195n77, 209n133 Dominic, Saint 188 Dominicans, order 23, 26, 30–31, 40, 63 dramatizations 28n42 dreams 88–89, 197–98. See also visions dressing 55, 59, 67n37. See also clothing Ḏū Nuwās 64n25, 65n26 Duarte, Barbosa 140n102, 143n114 Dumont, Louis 56–57 Duperron, Anquetil 61 Durkheim, Émile 59, 170n101 Dutch East India Company 36 dyophysitism 49, 74, 118, 123–25 Eastern Christianity/Churches 40, 50, 65n26. See also Ethiopian Orthodoxy Eastern Roman Empire 49

256 ǝččäge 184, 199–201 education 24, 62, 77, 116, 209 Egypt 20, 49–50, 67, 69–70, 89, 124, 136 Egyptian anchorites 50 Egyptian-Arabic Christianity 123 Egyptian Coptic Church 2, 51, 68, 70, 74,103n35, 200n98 Egyptian Eremites 103 Egyptian monasticism 51, 70 Ejercicios espirituales (Loyola) 109n60–n61, 110n64–n65, 187n46, 188n48, 188n51, 203n110–11 Ǝllä ʿAmida (emperor) 49, 63 Ǝleni, empress 19 Embassy, Portuguese 20, 42–43 Ǝmfraz 35 Ǝnäbäse 35 Ǝnbaqom 50 Encyclopaedia aethiopica (Uhlig) 24n30, 49n129, 50n133, 63n11, 65n26, 68n38, 69n43, 69n44, 71n55, 82n96, 88n129, 93n157,123n36, 125n46, 159n41, 161n54, 174n120, 175n125, 184n31, 200n101, 202n107, 210n139 Ǝnda 32 Ǝndärta 71 enforcers 158 English 36, 38n88, 39n90, 44n111, 71n55–n56 Enoch, Book of 134n82 entertainment 118n13 Ephrem 50n133 epidemics 168n90 epilepsy 160n50, 161, 162n60. See also exorcisms epiphany 198n92 “Epistle on Obedience” (Ignatius) 85 Epistolae et instructiones (Ignatius) 86n123 Erasmus 109 eremites 51, 154, 180, 183. See also Asceticism erotic 15n52 errors, doctrinal 45, 71n54, 74, 77, 80, 84, 87n126, 118, 122–23, 126–27, 129, 149, 151, 192, 206, 217. See also heresy Estado da Índia 21–22. See also Padroado Esteban 162 Esteves Pereira, Francisco Maria Chronica de Susenyos 197n86, 200n100

Index Ethics 14, 54, 61 Ethiopia 2, 10–13, 15–17, 19–20, 22, 24–25, 27, 29, 31–34, 36–37, 39–40, 42–44, 48–51, 53, 60, 62–74, 76–87, 89–93, 95, 113–14, 116–19, 121–23, 125–27, 132, 134–36, 138, 148–50, 155, 159, 161, 163, 165–66, 168–69, 171–72, 174–77, 182–86, 188, 195–200, 202–3, 205–8, 210–12, 214–15, 217, 219 Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity abstinence in 1, 16 admittance for monks in 84 asceticism in 49, 51, 61–95, 215 bodily mortifications in circumcision in 43, 45, 66, 74, 198 doctrinal errors of 45, 71n54, 74, 77, 80, 84, 87n126, 118, 122–23, 126–27, 129, 149, 151, 192, 206, 217 fallacies 41, 138, 215 leviathan story in 133, 135, 138 magic in 77, 104n37, 150, 154, 156, 158, 164n69, 169n97, 170–72, 178 Orthodoxy 42–43, 45, 59, 74, 90, 116–18, 122, 140, 151, 195–96, 205, 215, 217–18 as the Other 178, 206 premature nuptials in 90, 92–93 Ethiopic synaxarium 71n55 Eucharist, sacrament of 44, 89n137, 166n82 Europe 2, 10–11, 17–19, 26, 28, 30, 33, 37, 48, 61, 63, 72, 80, 116, 163n67–n68, 189 evangelists 179 Evangelization 186 Eve 90, 132, 143 Évora, Portugal 193n71 Ewosṭatewos, Abba 65–66, 71, 75 exegesis 88, 121, 123, 131, 135–36, 138–39, 149, 217 exegetes 133, 136, 138 exercitant 4, 5 Exodus Rabbah 136 exorcisms 150–53, 155, 157–58, 160–63, 166–68, 170–2, 175, 178, 218. See also witchcraft ʿEzana 63n11 fables 121, 134–36, 143 Fábula mística 9n34 fakir 54, 97–98

Index fallacies 41, 138, 215 fan-seng 105n46 farangis 118n16, 127–28 Farquhar, John Nicol 153 Fasilädäs (emperor) 36, 211 fasting 5, 8, 13, 44, 51, 52n137, 55, 76, 78, 80–83, 85, 87, 103, 106, 154, 182, 211 Fatehpur Sikri, India 33 fear 25, 105, 155n27 feasts 43, 107–8, 135, 139, 141 Fǝkare mäläkot 124, 125n44 Fǝremona, Ethiopia 32, 35, 162, 164, 169, 175–76, 197, 209n132 Fernandes, Andrés 120 Fernandes, António blood and flesh of Christ 89–90, 130 creation story 133 conversion of monks 196 human soul 129, 131–32 life of the Virgin Mary 87–96, 215 Magseph Assetat, contra libellum aethiopicum 94n165, 123n35, 125, 129, 131, 133n77–n78 on moderation, obedience and modesty 90–91 on nuptials and marriage 90, 93–95 Vida da Sanctissima Virgem 87, 88n132, 89n134, 89n136, 90n140, 90n142, 90n145–n146, 91n147, 91n149, 92n152, 93n159, 94n162–n163, 94n165 on women 91–94 Fernandes Trancoso, Gonçalo 31, 38n87, 39n88, 59, 108, 113, 216 Fernandes, Sebastián 33, 98, 110, 179–80, 196 Fernandes, Urbano 6 Fernandez, Manuel 127 festivals 27n42, 44, 167 Fǝtḥa nägäšt 51, 52n137, 82 Filioque 128–29. See also fallacies Filkəsyos 50n133 Filmona 165n79 Filǝppos, Abunä 174n121 First Italian War 91 flagellation 107, 109, 205 Flanders 23, 101 Flos sanctorum 4n12, 6n27, 91 Fontenelle, Bernard 134 food 2, 5, 10, 52–53, 55, 58, 80, 82, 112, 203

257 fortresses 20, 26, 29, 203 fortune-telling 104n37, 170 Fota 72 fotetes 72 Foundation 35–36 France 8, 91, 125n44, 162n61 Francis of Assisi, Saint 188 Franciscans 4, 23, 26, 30–31, 37, 86, 200 Francisco, Adão 27 Francisco, Jacinto 199 freedom 36, 102, 115, 185 friars 63, 86 Fróis, Luís on chastity 104n36 Francisco Roiz and 121, 145n123, 145n126, 146n128 Gaspar Barzeo’s expedition and 99n11 on healing through sacred rites 166 on idolatry in Malacca 152 on yogis and yogism 99, 103, 120, 180, 213, 218 funeral 135, 148 Gäbärma, Ethiopia 35 Gäbrä Mäsqäl (emperor) 67, 71, 200n98 gädälä 188n51 gädl 49–50, 188n51 gädlat 49–51 Gädlä Täklä Haymanot 161 Gʷaggʷa, Ethiopia 169, 203 Gago, Baltasar 99, 144, 179 Gälawdewos (emperor) 31–32, 118–19, 124, 127–28, 200 Galatians 148, 186n40 Galvão, Duarte 19 Gama, Cristovão 43, 44n111 gambling 89 Gandia, Spain 78 ganēn 160 Ganeta, Ethiopia 209 Ganges, river 173 Gännätä, Ethiopia 35 garb 67n37, 101, 111. See also clothing Gärima, Abba 32, 49, 64, 71 garment 73, 102. See also clothing Geden, Alfred Shenington 54–55, 57 Gǝʿǝz 39n89, 50–51, 71n56, 83n104, 121n29, 123, 124n38, 188, 197, 200

258 Gentiles 26, 28, 32, 48, 100–1, 116, 120, 145, 148, 157, 167, 179, 181, 185, 189–91, 194 Geography of Strabo (Strabo) 61 Germany 150 ghosts 157. See also exorcisms giant 134 girls 93, 179 Giītā, prophet 144–45, 146n30 Gli Abbati di Dabra Libānos (Cerulli) 174n120 gluttony 90 Gnostic 125n44 Goa, India 15, 18–22, 24, 26–31, 33–34, 36–38, 40–42, 63, 87n126, 98, 113, 120, 126, 139–40, 144, 149, 154, 166, 173–74, 179, 193, 209, 214, 216–18 councils in 29n51, 41, 113, 193, 209, 216 renovations by Jesuits in 166 gods 57, 99n14, 136, 141–42, 146–48, 151, 153, 157, 159, 173, 213 Goğğam, Ethiopia 34–35, 165, 201 Góis, Bento de 89 gold 18, 141n105 Gomes, John Documenta Indica 61n3, 98n5–n7, 99n9, 99n13, 101n21–n22, 101n24, 102n25–n30, 103n31–n32, 103n35, 104n38, 104n40, 105n43–n44, 105n47, 107n52, 109n57, 110n70, 114n80, 120n240–n27, 140n99– n100, 141n103, 142n107, 142n110, 143n111– n114, 144n119, 147n131, 152n10–n11, 154n19–n20, 156n29–n31, 158n36–n37, 166n83–n85, 167n87–n89, 179n2–n3, 180n8–n9, 180n11–n12, 181n14, 181n16, 182n17, 182n19, 183n28–n29, 190n57– n59, 191n60, 192n67, 193n69, 193n70, 194n72–n73, 194n75, 195n77, 209n133 Gorgora, Ethiopia 11, 35, 40, 163, 207–8 Gospel of John 88, 129, 131, 158 Gospel of Luke 82, 162n59, 187n41 Gospel of Mark 162n59, 187n41 Gospel of Mathew 187n41 187n41 Gospels 14, 22, 26n38, 32, 44, 88n133, 94, 129, 131n72, 150, 158, 179, 205 gossain 98 Graia 65 grains 169 Granero, Jesús María

Index La acción misionera y los métodos misionales de San Ignacio de Loyola 2n4, 6n22, 10n38–n40, 11n42–n43, 116n7, 117n9, 181n15, 183n25–n26, 185n34 grave 173, 175–77. See also relics greed 10, 107, 172 Greek 61–62, 68, 145n125, 160n45, 186 Gregory XV, pope 35–36 Gregory of Nazianzen, Saint 148 Gregory of Nyssa 107n50 Gṛhastya 56 Guarima, Abba 64 Guerreiro, Fernão 126n52 Relação annual das coisas que fizeram 127n52 Gujarat, India 53n142, 140 gurus 111 Gusâînis 173 gymnosophists 61–62 habiliments 98, 111, 192. See also clothing habits, monastic 67, 72–73, 75, 105 Habsburgs 115n1 Ḥädaša 35, 164 hagiographies 4n12, 40, 49–52, 63n11, 65–69, 71–72, 87, 92, 93n160, 95–96, 107, 160, 161n54, 164, 188n51, 215 Ethiopic synaxarium 71n55 Flos sanctorum 4n12, 6n27, 91 Life of Abba Gärima 71n56 Life of Abba Samuʾel 71 Life of Christ 7n27 Life of Gäbrä Mänfäs Qǝddus 71 Life of Täklä Haymanot 69, 71 Life of the Virgin Mary (Fernandes)  87, 88n132, 89, 89n134, 89n136, 90, 90n140, 90n142, 90n145–n146, 91n147, 91n149, 92n152, 93n159, 94n162–n163, 94n165, 95 by Wälättä Petros 92 Halbertal, Moshe 133n81, 135, 136n89, 142n109, 146, 147n135 Halbfass, Wilhelm 61 Ḥalib Dǝngǝl 182 Hamärä näfs 124–25 Ḥamasen, Eritrea 202 ḥaqäfä 137n94

Index hasan 92n156 Haymanotä Abäw 121n29 Ḥayq, island 51 health 5, 77, 105, 109, 151, 156, 166, 173, 203 diseases 151, 165–66, 203 healers 152, 155–57, 161, 165–66, 175 healing 158, 160–64, 167, 203–04 medicine 104–5, 156, 166 pain 48, 107, 109, 159, 163, 202–3 religious images and 89, 125, 151, 161, 163–64, 165n75 sickness 5, 78, 87, 163, 167, 175, 203 treatments 47, 157, 163n68, 164, 166 Hebrew 39n89, 137, 145n125 hǝllawe 123 Henotikon 64 Henriques, Francisco 27, 33 Henriques, Henrique Alessandro Valignano and 107 conversion of ascetics 190, 194–95 Diego Laínez and 104, 104n40 departure to Goa 27 on exorcisms 157 Gaspar Barzeo and 113, 143, 216 hospitals founded and book on Tamil grammar 38n87–38n88 Hindu asceticism and 109 on yogis 120, 140–42 143–44, 156–58, 180–82 heresies 45, 72, 74, 81, 87, 126, 149, 212, 217 asceticism, magic, and 49, 74, 155, 177, 217 devil and 177, 217 doctrinal errors as 45, 71n54, 74, 77, 80, 84, 87n126, 118, 122–23, 126–27, 129, 149, 151, 192, 206, 217 Ethiopian Christianity as 45, 81, 87n126, 126, 140, 149, 177, 218 indiscipline and 88 Jesuit doctrine as 212 Jesuit missions against 72 of Mäzgäbä haymanot 132 Mikaʾelite form of 125n44 Nestorian and Asian 41 nine saints of Ethiopia and 63, 95 Pedro Páez on Ethiopia’s many 76 Protestantism as 150 Täklä Haymanot and 66, 69–70, 95, 215 Hereyaqos of Behensa 129

259 hermits 4, 57–58, 67, 75–76, 84, 103, 153, 179–80, 182, 186, 204, 208 hermitages 4, 51, 181 hermitry 3, 86 ḥǝṣan 92 Hierapolis 50n131 Himalayas 98n4 Ḥimyarite dynasty 64, 65n26 Hindu 1, 15, 21, 25, 28, 38, 40–42, 46, 48, 53–55, 57–59, 61, 97–100, 102–4, 106–9, 111–15, 121, 140–41, 143–45, 148–49, 151, 153, 157, 171, 173–74, 178, 181, 183, 190, 192, 216–17. See also yogis Hinduism 12, 15, 38–39, 46, 53–59, 62, 73, 97–98, 110, 119, 140, 144–47, 153, 156–57, 173, 180. See also yogis asceticism in 15, 55, 106, 110 Āyurveda and healing in 156 bodily mortifications in ascetics of 5–6, 9, 14, 55, 57, 78 Brahma in 58n162, 143n114, 144n116 caste system 42n105, 55–57, 59, 70, 111, 180 Catholicism and concepts in 174 deities 76, 141n106, 143, 157, 173–74 guidelines of ascetic life in 57 Henrique Henriques on 109, 120, 140–42 143–44, 156–58, 180–82 Mahābārata 53n143, 173 mythology in 99n14, 144, 174 pagodes or temples of 41n103, 139n98, 141n105, 142,145, 167, 192 Rāmā in 143, 144n120 Rāmāyaṇa in 144n120 reincarnations in 54 Roberto De Nobili on 62, 111 Shiva in 144 Veda in 147n132 Vedāntic philosophers 144n121 Vedic traditions of 56 Vishnu in 48, 143, 144n16 Hindustan 18 Historia da Etiópia a alta (Almeida) 40, 68 Historia de Etiópia a alta (Tellez) 66n34, 68n40, 70n49, 176n128, 205n120 Historias de la Contrarreforma (Ribadeneyra) 47n121, 48n122–48n123

260 Histórica relación del Reyno de Chile (Ovalle) 32n65, 152n7–152n9 History of Ethiopia in the Highlands (Almeida) 40, 68 History of Ethiopia (Paez) 39, 63, 65n31, 66n32, 66n35, 70n50, 71n51, 71n53– n54, 73n62, 76n71–n72, 78n80, 80n86, 83n106, 84n113, 85n118, 117n12, 119n18– n20, 125n45, 126n52, 127n53–n54, 132n73–n74, 134n82, 135, 136n91, 138n96, 159n41, 161n56, 161n57, 168n90, 169n92, 175n123, 175n127, 176n129, 184n30, 197n90, 198n93, 200n102, 205n120, 211n141, 212n146 Holland 30 Holy Spirit 8, 24, 45, 53, 74, 89, 106, 128–29, 132–33, 143–44, 200 Holy See 2, 41, 178, 218 homelessness 56n152 “Homilies” (John Chrysostom) 88n133, 90n41 homilies 50, 88, 90, 128 honor 50, 73, 107–8, 110–11, 118, 143, 148, 187, 190, 211 honorifics 10, 53, 184 Hormuz 19–21, 25, 27, 29, 33, 100–102, 149, 181, 190–93, 217 Horn of Africa 2, 10, 16–18, 22, 23, 24n30, 31, 33–36, 39–40, 46–47, 49–50, 52, 60, 62, 72, 77, 80–81, 86–87, 89, 96, 114, 117–19, 121–22, 128, 137, 151, 160, 163, 165, 175, 177, 182–83, 201, 204–5, 209, 211–12, 214–15, 217 horses 100 hospitals 38n88, 47 hulätt akal 124 hulätt baḥrǝy 124 hulätt täbay 124 Hunan (Ḏū Nuwās) 64 husbands 93, 194, 211 Hussite heresy 150 hyena 159n41 hymns 125, 153 hypostasis 123 Iberia 174 icons 88n129, 165. See also relics and crosses idolatry 49, 72, 76, 113, 141–42, 144–45, 147, 151–52, 155, 172, 180, 186, 193, 216

Index cobras, worship of 76n72 idols 107–8, 141, 143, 145, 147, 151, 194 pagodes 41, 139, 141–42, 145, 167 Iesus, Abba 67–68 images, religious 89, 125, 151, 161, 163–64, 165n75, 174, 177, 181 imams 102 Imitatio Christi (Kempis) 4, 162 incantations 154. See also magic incarnation Sannyasa as 1, 54 dyophysitism 74, 118, 121, 123, 125 of Vishnu 143 India 1–2, 9–11, 14–31, 33–38, 40–42, 48, 53, 55, 59–62, 71, 73, 76, 78, 89, 97–104, 108, 111–13, 116–17, 119, 123, 139–44, 147, 152–53, 155–58, 170, 173, 177, 182–85, 191, 216–1 Indies 6, 9–10, 17–18, 20n12, 22, 27 indoctrination 193–94. See also de Santa Fe, Paulo Indonesia 19 Indus, valley 53n141 Inquisition 25, 193n71 Instructio 101, 141 “Instruction to Father Barzeo …” (Xavier) 27n39, 101n19 intellectualism 4n16 intercession, of saints 163n68 intercourse, sexual 51n136. See also abstinence iogues 97n4. See also yogis Irenaeus of Lyon, Saint 90n144 Isaiah, prophet 151n6 Išʿodad of Merv 130n68 Islam 14, 18–19, 69, 140n102, 157n34, 196, 211 Israel 137 Italy 91, 125n44 Itinerário of Jerónimo Lobo (Lobo) 40n94, 45n116, 70n49, 76n74, 81n93, 82n102, 83n103, 122n32, 156n28, 169n96, 171n104, 172n105–n109 Iyäsus Moʾa 51, 67. See also Täklä Haymanot Jacobites 103n35 Jaffna, kingdom of 144 Jaffnapatao, port 108 Jain 53n143

Index Jainism 46 Japan 27, 30, 37n84, 99n11, 101, 105n46 Jardiel 21 jaugism 152 Jerome, Saint 86, 93, 131n72, 138, 148, 151n6 Commentary on the Galatians 148n139 Jerusalem 68–69, 125 Jerūn, isle of 100–102. See also Hormuz Jesuits abnegation and 15, 80, 85, 110 abstinence and 1, 5, 8, 13, 16, 81–82, 90, 104, 106, 112, 148, 179, 216 Adam, argument about soul of 129–30, 132, 143 adaptationism 4, 30, 60, 170 adoption methods of 1, 23, 25, 27, 29, 32, 34, 77, 104n37, 110–11, 118, 184, 211 alumbrados and 4, 6–7 ambivalence to Ethiopian Christianity 1–2, 16, 47, 72, 115 ambivalence to Indian asceticism 16, 72, 113, 115, 158, 167, 215–16 anchoritism for 10, 49 annual letters 36, 126–27, 184, 199 apostolic term for 5, 7, 9, 26, 35, 85–86, 96, 101, 106, 110, 112, 215–16 Atquo, Abba and 207 banishment from Ethiopia 37, 95 blood and flesh of Christ for 89–90, 130 on bodies 54, 99n14, 107, 109, 130, 152n8 church militant for 31, 106, 112, 136n90, 216 confrontation with Ethiopian orthodoxy 39, 96, 197, 213, 215, 218 Constitutions 2, 8–9, 84–85, 110, 187 contemplation and Jesuits 1, 6, 9, 79, 85, 106, 216 contemplativus in actione 85 controversies, on faith and creed 2n6, 89, 95, 118n16, 127–28, 148 conversion and 7n27, 9–11, 23, 186–91, 195–96, 203–04, 217 curriculum of 4, 187 debates, theological and religious 31, 33, 39, 43, 74–75, 83, 89, 116,117n11, 118–23, 126–29, 131–33, 144, 148–49, 155, 170, 197n87, 200–01, 204–06, 217 detachment for 14n50, 52, 54, 106n49

261 discernment and 24, 188 disputation and 29, 115–20, 122–23, 127, 133, 144, 148, 178, 189, 204–06, 210, 217–18 dramatizations and 28n42 dyophysite doctrine and 49, 123, 125 ethnocentric biases of 112, 134 errors and, doctrinal 45, 71n54, 74, 77, 80, 84, 87n126, 118, 122–23, 126–27, 129, 149, 151, 192, 206, 217 exorcisms and 150–53, 155, 157–58, 160–63, 166–68, 170–2, 175, 178, 218. See also ghosts and witchcraft on fake Catholics 209–12 guidelines for converting yogis 193 guidelines in Jesuit Constitution 110, 187 guidelines for Muslims and Jews 24 guidelines of Tridentine council 29 healing for 158, 160, 164, 203–04 Marian devotion and 87, 95–96, 216 Mäzgäbä haymanot and 124n40, 132 missions 1–3, 9–11, 15, 17–18, 20, 23, 25, 30–32, 35–37n84, 63, 72, 107, 111, 186, 204 on moderation 48, 79, 90, 109n61 Protestants and 150 reduction, in evangelization 128, 189 Susǝnyos (Negus) and 34–36, 119, 122, 134, 136, 138, 186, 199–202, 204–5, 207 repression of Orthodoxy and 202, 205, 207 residences 3, 11, 24, 32, 35, 110, 126, 181, 197, 199 theological debates and 128–29, 206 vow of chastity for 85 on witchcraft and exorcisms 160, 162–63, 204 yogis and 61n2, 98–100, 103–4, 109, 113, 120–23, 143–44, 156, 158, 180, 190–91, 193, 216 Jesuits in India (Correia-Afonso) 21n16, 27n40–n41, 28, 30n56, 31n57, 38n88, 40n92, 59n168 Jews 24, 45, 100–102, 135, 139–40, 193n71, 209 Joannî, Abba 68 João III (king) 17, 20n12, 117 João IV (king) 36

262 Joges. See jogues jogues 97, 104–5, 140, 194–95. See also yogis jogī. See jogues John of Albuquerque 26 John Chrysostom 88 “Homilies” 88n133, 90n41 John of the Cross, Saint 8 Joseph, Saint 93, 137n95 Judaism 14, 74, 136, 139 Julian the Apostate 148 justice 14, 122 Justinian (emperor) 64–65 kabbalah 107n49 Kabä Krǝstos 177 Kaleb (king) 63–65, 67, 69. See also Täklä Haymanot Kalki 144n120 kāma 99n14 Kannur, India 20n12 Kapferer, Bruce 166 Kaplan, Steven 51n136, 68n38, 68n41, 82n96, 8888n129, 93n156, 125n46, 155n24, 165n80, 166n82, 171n102, 185n36, 188n51 The Monastic Holy Man 50, 51n134 karma 54 kätäma 169 Kempis, Thomas Imitatio Christi 4, 162 Kerala, india 21 keśin 153n14. See also yogis Kodungallur, India 26n36 Kollam, India 27 Koran. See Quran Krista Purana (Stephens) 38n88 Krǝstos Śämra, Saint 93 Kṛṣṇa 144n120 Kūrma 144n120 Lach, Donald 140, 185 Asia in the Making of Europe 2n4, 26n37, 28n48, 33n66, 62n5, 140n102, 143n114, 183n27, 185n35 India in the Eyes of Europe 19n7 Laínez, Diego 104–6, 109n61, 120, 127 laity 60, 198n92 Lalibäla 69 Lamego, Portugal 193

Index Lancillotto, Nicolò 11, 27, 103–4, 146–47, 152, 182, 185 Latin America 18 Latin rite 23n23, 28, 34–36, 43, 60, 167, 175, 179, 182–83, 186, 190, 194, 196–98, 202, 204–10, 212–13, 217–19 Law of the Kings. See Fǝtḥa nägäšt Laws of Manu 57n158–n160, 58 laymen 43, 60, 73 Le Jeune, Paul 155n26 learning 31, 37, 39, 77, 100, 115–16, 148, 154. See also education leather 73, 108, 111 Lǝbnä Dǝngǝl (emperor) 50, 118, 200 Legenda dourada, La (Voragine) 4n12 legends 121, 133, 136, 139, 142, 163 legeōn 160n45 lēgēwon 160n45 legio 160n45 Le Jeune, Paul 155n26 Lent 5, 52, 76, 80, 82 Leo X, pope 22n22 Lettere annue di Ethiopia (Páez) 44n115, 182n20, 184n33 Letters of Saint Catherine of Siena, The 4 leviathan, story of 133, 135, 138 libations 57 Licanos, Abba 64 Life of Abba Gärima (Barradas) 71n56 Life of Abba Samuʾel 71 Life of Christ 7n27 Life of Gäbrä Mänfäs Qǝddus 71 Life of Täklä Haymanot (Almeida) 69, 71 Life of the Virgin Mary (Fernandes) 87, 88n132, 89, 89n134, 89n136, 90, 90n140, 90n142, 90n145–n146, 91n147, 91n149, 92n152, 93n159, 94n162–n163, 94n165, 95 Lima, Peru 18 Lippomano, Luigi 93–94 Sanctorum priscorum patrum vitae 93, 94n162 Liqanos, Abba 64n20 Liqä Nǝguś, Ethiopia 35 Lisbon, Portugal 6, 17, 19, 35n77, 94, 108, 193n71 litanies, prayer 168, 170 literacy 122n32

Index literature Coptic 70 edifying 93 Ethiopian 49, 74, 85, 92, 125n46 hagiographic 72, 83, 85 Hindu 121 Jesuit 2, 54, 99, 161, 210 on Jesuit missions 15 local traditional 39 mystical/spiritual 4 patristic 130n67 Persian religious 134n82 vernacular Indian 38n88 “Littérature éthiopienne …” (Cerulli) 123n36–n37 Lobo, Jerónimo 40, 44–45, 70, 76, 81–83, 122, 155, 156n28, 169, 171–72 Itinerário of Jerónimo Lobo 40n94, 45n116, 70n49, 76n74, 81n93, 82n102, 83n103, 122n32, 156n28, 169n96, 171n104, 172n105–n109 locusts 167–69, 171, 176 Lopes de Castanheda, Fernão 139n98, 143n114, 195 História do descobrimento … 97n4, 139n98 Lopes Sequeira, Diogo 21n13 López, Francisco 127 lore 49, 157n35, 160, 186n39, 213 love 47, 80, 86–87, 95, 100, 103, 113, 120, 217 Loyola, Ignatius de, Saint 2–11 17–24, 26, 31, 47, 61, 78–79, 85–87, 100–101, 103–4, 109–10, 115, 117, 141–44, 146–47, 152–53, 156, 158, 163–65, 180–82, 187–88, 190–92, 194, 196, 202–3 abnegation and 85, 110 abstinence and mortification for 5–6, 47, 78, 109 on angels 85 Autobiografía y Diario espiritual 87n127, 187n43–n45, 187n48, 188n48, 188n49, 191, 203n113 conversion process passed down by 187, 196 on dealing with ecclesiastics 26 Epistolae et instructiones 86n123 “Epistle on Obedience” 85 evangelization of sinners 187

263 Jesuit missionary asceticism of 9–10 Joao III and 13 in Manresa, Spain 7n27, 109n61, 153 Monumenta Ignatiana 163n67, 191n63 Rules for the discernment of spirits 188 on selection of candidates for Missions 23 on spiritual discernment 24 Spiritual Exercises 103, 105, 109–10, 146n130, 187n46, 188, 203n110–11 transformation and struggles 187–88 Virgin Mary’s role in conversion of 87 lust 14n50, 99n14, 101 Macarius, Saint 67, 73 Maceru 143n114 machis 152n8 Madras, India 25, 36 Madura, India 21–22, 25, 30 Madurai 21n18, 111 Maffei, Giovanni Pietro Maffeii 61, 183 mäggabi 51n136 magi 142 magic 77, 104n37, 150, 154, 156, 158, 164n69, 169n97, 170–72, 178. See also spells and sorcery incantations 154 magicians 49, 77, 151, 153, 159–60, 169n97, 170 spells 104n37, 162–63, 169 Magseph Assetat, contra libellum aethiopicum (Fernandes) 94n165, 123n35, 125, 129, 131, 133n77–n78 mahamêr 32 Maheshvara 143n114 Mahābārata 53n143, 173 Making of an Enterprise, The (Alden) 2n5, 23n24, 24n29, 31n58, 33n68, 100n17 Malabar 21, 23, 25, 33, 36–37, 53n142, 140n102 Malacca 19–21, 25, 29n51, 37, 152, 194 Malay 140 Malaysia 19 Maldives, islands 24n30 Maldonado, Juan 150, 155 Malines, council of 154 Mälkǝʾa Krǝstos 210 Malpan, Varghese 146n130

264 Maluco. See Maluku Maluku, islands 19, 27 mamhǝr 32n62, 184n30 Mamluks 48 mandarin 111 Mangalore, India 183 Mannar, island 25 Manresa, Spain 7n27, 109n61, 153 mantles 73n62. See also clothing manufacturing 55 manuscripts 50, 52, 71, 124–25 Mapuche, healers 152n8 mäqzay 160 Maraba, Ethiopia 35 Märäta, Ethiopia 71n53 Marathi 38n88 Marcos, monk 196 Margao, India 21, 27 Märha Krǝstos 165 Märkä, Abba 205 marketplace 75 Maronites 103n35 marriages 43, 51, 55, 90–95 António Fernandes on 90, 93, 95 Canon law on 93 celestial 51 Life of the Virgin on 90–95 Magseph assetat on 94 premature 90, 92–93 of secular clergy 51, 94–95 Martinengo, Jerónimo, abbot 5 Märs amin 125, 130–31 martyrdom 86, 94, 101n23 martyrs 50, 210 Mary, Blessed Virgin António Fernandes on 87–96, 215 as asceticism’s model 87, 95 belief in Ethiopia 44n114, 87, 95–96, 132, 177 belief in India 53n142, 103, 143n114 devotion in Catholicism 87–88, 95–96 cult of 87n129 Ignatius’ conversion and 87, 187 Jesuits and 87–90, 95–96, 133, 165 177, 204, 215–16 Life of the Virgin Mary (Fernandes) 87, 88n132, 89, 89n134, 89n136, 90, 90n140, 90n142, 90n145–n146, 91n147, 91n149, 92n152, 93n159, 94n162–n163, 94n165, 95

Index Marḥa Krǝstos 164 mäsä’eb 160 Mascal Moâ, Abba 67–68 Mäşḩafä bǝrhan 76n75, 77n75 Mäṣḥǝftä mänäkosat 50n133 Mäshetä lǝbbuna 124 Massawa, Eritrea 202 Masses 36, 122n33 Mateus the Armenian 19 Matewos, Abunä The Mystery of the Trinity 130n67 Matolomê (king) 69 Matsya 144n120 Mattos Diogo de 88 Mäzgäbä haymanot 124, 127n54, 128–30, 132 meat 112 Mecca 100 medicine 150–77. See also healing Āyurveda 156 doctors 93, 156 Hindu 156–57 Muslim 157 sacred rites as 166 treatments 47, 157, 163n68, 164, 166 Jogues 104–5 meditation 15, 79, 104, 106 Mediterranean 20, 49 mêmeher 184 Mendes, Afonso as Catholic Patriarch 35–36, 40, 87, 94 conversion of monks 208 Ethiopian asceticism for 62–64, 73, 84, 86, 95, 184, 211, 215 on Filioque argument 129n65 Jesuit College, Goa 24n30 on King Kaleb 64–65 on Oviedo’s legacy 176–77 on Täklä Haymanot 65, 67–68, 70, 210 on witchcraft 160 women of Ethiopia 94 mendicants 4, 6, 13, 30, 35, 53–54, 97–98, 153 Mendoza, Francisco de (cardinal) 10 Mǝnilǝk (king) 125 Meneses, Aleixo de 42 Meneses, Duarte de 21n13 merchants 20n12, 27 Mercurian, Everard 7 Mérida, Mexico 18 Meṣraha, island 210

Index metanoia 186 México 8, 12, 18, 20, 37, 142, 161, 164, 170 Middle Ages 4, 43n109, 70, 136, 162 Midrash 136–38 Minas (emperor) 34, 196 miracles 58, 66, 71, 115, 138, 150, 153n14, 161, 166–67, 170–71, 173, 175n126, 176, 178, 204. See also magic Miron, Diego 114 Mirror of understanding 124 missionaries. See Jesuits missions 1–3, 9–11, 15, 17–18, 20, 23, 25, 30–32, 35–37n84, 63, 72, 107, 111, 186, 204 Mohammedans 53. See also Muslims Moluccas 25, 27, 36–37 monasteries 32, 44, 49–51, 63–64, 66–67, 71, 73n62, 75–78, 81, 83, 86, 92, 129, 174–75, 183–84, 198–201, 208–11 Monastic Holy Man … (Kaplan) 50, 51n134 monasticism 11, 15, 31, 44, 49–52, 62–64, 66, 70, 80, 85–87, 96, 103, 174, 215 abstinence and 1, 5, 8, 13, 16, 51–52, 76, 81–82, 90, 102, 104, 106–7, 112, 148, 179, 216 cenobitic 13–14 Egyptian 51, 70 eremitic 51, 154, 180, 183 Ethiopian 31, 44, 49–52, 62–64, 66, 85, 96, 174 fasting 5, 8, 13, 44, 51, 52n137, 55, 76, 78, 80–83, 85, 87, 103, 106, 154, 182, 211 mortifications 30, 49, 107n50, 110 prostrations 52 monks, Ethiopian 1–2, 11, 13–14, 16, 35–36, 50–53, 60, 64–65, 67–78, 80, 83–88, 96, 107, 116–19, 121–24, 126–29, 131, 133–35, 139, 149, 151, 156, 158, 160–62, 167, 171–72, 178, 183–84, 186, 196–202, 204–13, 215, 217–18 admittance of 84 Almeida, Manuel de on 186, 197, 206, 209, 211 Catholicism and 84, 197–99, 206, 208, 211–12, 218 clothing 52, 58, 72, 73–74 cohabitation with nuns 51n136 conversion of 186–96 clerical Matrimony and mortification among 95

265 dietary restrictions 43, 45, 52, 74, 198n91 habits worn by 67, 72–73, 75, 105 mortification and 52 monophysites 64, 123 monophysitism 64, 124n40 monotheism 141n106 monsoon 57 monsters, sea 133–34. See also Nephilim Montserrat, Antonio de 4, 33 Monumenta Ignatiana (Loyola) 163n67, 191n63 Monumenta Xavieriana (Xavier) 141n104 monuments 174 Moors 100–1, 108, 120, 139–40, 141n105, 167–69, 180, 185, 193, 209 mooti 69n43 morality 116 mortification Andrés de Oviedo and 78 Askesis and 13n50 Catholic Reformation and 3–4, 97 clerical Matrimony in Ethiopia and 95 Ethiopian monasticism and 52 Everard Mercurian on 7n27 Francis Xavier on Missions and 11 Hindu forms of 55n148 Ignatius of Loyola on 5–6 Jesuit Constitutions on 110 Jesuit reaction to Ethiopian and Indian form of 49 Jesuits on moderate form of 48–49 Pedro de Ribadeneyra on 47, 49 Roberto de Nobili and 30, 59 Sebastián Fernandes on 110 Syrian monks and Christian 107n50 Yogis and 104 Moses 130 mosques 28, 141n105 Motä Lomi. See Matolomê motä 69n43 Motälami. See Matolomê Motälome. See Matolomê Motälämi. See Matolomê mourning 99n13, 171 Mozambique 22, 25 Mughal 25, 27, 33n68, 103n35, 179 Mugär, Ethiopia 161 mullahs 29, 119 muni 153n14. See also yogis music 27n42, 172

266 Muslims 18, 20n12, 21, 24, 29, 32–33, 38, 43, 48, 69–70, 97n3, 98n4, 102, 140, 147, 157, 169, 172, 193, 211 Mylapore, India 41 Mystery of the Trinity (Matewos) 130n67 mystics 7, 109 myth 40, 135, 136n89–n90, 139, 142 Nadal, Jerónimo 3, 4n16, 6, 86, 116 Nadel, monk 211 Näfaša, Ethiopia 35 Nagasaki, Japan 20, 99n11 naires 27 Naples, Italy 20, 163n68 Narasiṃha 144n120 Navarrete, Spain 6 navel of universe 173n11 navy 19–20 Nağrān, Arabia 65 Nephilim 133–34 Nestorian heresy 41 Nestorians 103n35 New Testament 132, 138, 145n125, 162 Nǝwayä Mäsqäl 124n41 Nicaragua 142n108 Niceno-Constantinopolitan creed 128 Nieremberg, Juan Eusebio Varones ilustres de la Compañía de Jesús 38n88, 101n20, 101n23, 104n40 Nile 19, 70 nine saints 49, 63–65, 67, 70, 95, 215 Adimata 64 Afe (Afṣe) 64 Alefi 64 Arägawi, Zämika ʾel 49, 64–65, 67–68 Guarima 64 Licanos 64 Oz 64 Pänṭälewon 49, 64–65, 68 Sahami 64 Nineveh 50n132 nobility 34, 84 nobles 195 novices 4–5, 79, 108, 110, 189, 191–95, 198, 202, 209–10 novitiates 24, 97, 195, 212 Nunes, Baltasar 27

Index Nunes Barreto, João 10, 24, 113n79, 117, 167 Nunes Barreto, Melchior 113, 180, 217 nuns 51n136, 52 nuptials. See marriages nutmeg 36 obedience 5, 8, 44, 83–85, 88, 90, 96, 100, 102, 110, 189, 208, 215 occult 158. See also magic and witchcraft ochre 111 oil 78, 163, 167 Old Testament 22, 74–75, 132, 139, 145 Oliveira, Aurélio Cartas de Etiópia 34n72, 40n96, 71n56, 151n4, 169n95, 205n119, 209n135 Olmedo, Spain 39n89 Om 157n34 Onesicritus 61 Oporto, Portugal 193n71 oracles 78, 177, 217 Ormuz. See Hormuz Oromo 176–77, 201 orphans 24 Orthodoxy 42–43, 45, 59, 74, 90, 116–18, 122, 140, 151, 195–96, 205, 215, 217–18 Ottomans 34 ouisia 124n38 Oviedo, Andrés de appointment to Ethiopia 10, 23, 117 Confessio fide... and 31 death of 34 on doctrinal errors of Ethiopians 126 Gälawdewos and 31, 127 Ignatius Loyola on 78–79 Páez and Almeida on 78–80 Jesuit chastity and 85n118 veneration after death 175–77 Oz, Abba 64 Oṣ, Abba 64n22 Pachomius, Saint 49, 67, 73 Padroado/ Regio Padroado 17, 26, 42n106 Páez, Gaspar Carta anua de Ethiopia 11n44, 182n22, 199n96, 202n109, 203n114, 208m129 Lettere annue di Ethiopia 44n115, 182n20, 184n33 on witchcraft 171

Index Páez, Pedro biography of 39n89 story of leviathan for 133, 138 The History of Ethiopia 39, 63, 65n31, 66n32, 66n35, 70n50, 71n51, 71n53– n54, 73n62, 76n71–n72, 78n80, 80n86, 83n106, 84n113, 85n118, 117n12, 119n18– n20, 125n45, 126n52, 127n53–n54, 132n73–n74, 134n82, 135, 136n91, 138n96, 159n41, 161n56, 161n57, 168n90, 169n92, 175n123, 175n127, 176n129, 184n30, 197n90, 198n93, 200n102, 205n120, 211n141, 212n146 works of 39n90 paganism 160, 187. See also Hinduism Catholic church and 150 Cecilia of Rome and 94 customs of 147 Damot’s pagan character 69 devotions and nature worship 43 non-Abrahamic religions and 14 pagan myths 135, 136n90 pagan gods as demons in 141n106 pagans 26, 29, 51, 186 pagodes 41n103, 139n98, 141n105, 142,145, 167, 192 pagodes. See under paganism painting, religious 91 Paiva, Afonso de 20n12 palace 125 Pänṭälewon, Abba 49, 64–65, 68 pantheism 146 pantheon 66 paradise 141, 143n114 Paravas 30 Paraśurāma 144n120 paru 137 paterfamiliases 55 patriarch. See specific patriarch Paul the Apostle, Saint 76–77, 186, 187n48, 193 peacock 153 Pearl Fishery Coast 25 Pearl to India, A (Cronin) 30n56, 76n73, 111n75–n76, 112n77 pearl 123n37 Pedro, young monk 196

267 penance 7, 13n50, 48, 58, 66, 76, 78, 84, 87, 99n13, 107, 109n61, 110–12, 153, 168, 182–83, 211–12 pepper 37 Perez, Francisco 194–95 persecutions 64 Persia 101n23 Persian Gulf 20, 100 Peru 38 Pesikta de-Rav Kahana 137 Pesqueira 29–30, 107 Peter, Saint 36, 38n88, 119 Peter the Venerable 136n90 Petrus, Saint 119, 162, 197 Pharaoh 159 Pharisees 197 Philip III/IV 21n13 philosophy 61, 98, 103, 158 Philoxenus of Mabbug 50 Physician 6, 103n35, 105, 109n63, 152 physis 123, 124n28 pictures, religious 143, 157 piety 81–82, 173, 182 Pilgrim, The (Della Valle) 99n10, 99n13, 104n37, 154n21, 154n23 pilgrimage 98, 172, 173n12, 175–77, 200 pilgrims 100, 175–77 pioneers 41, 61, 97, 103 piousness 2, 109 Pires, Tomé 53, 140n102 plague 167–68, 176 plants 147 Platonic theology 85 pleasures 57, 59, 98, 188 poem 38n88, 146, 173 poison 159 Polanco, Juan Alfonso de 158 policy anti-Hindu 26 conversion policy 23 demonological 158 baḥǝr nägaš in 202 politics 12n45, 51, 199 Ponicale, India 120 pope 3, 22, 35, 45, 81, 85, 96, 215. See also specific popes portrait, religious 80, 98–99, 200

268 Portugal 2, 4, 6, 8, 17–24, 26–27, 29, 32, 35n77, 36–37, 41, 43n109, 80, 96, 113, 117, 152n12, 160, 191, 194, 196, 215, 217–18 Portuguese Seaborne Empire (Boxer) 31n59, 37n81, 40n98, 48n124 possession, spiritual 157, 161. See also exorcisms poverty 9, 13n50, 34, 83, 85–86, 102, 103n35, 104, 106, 110, 112, 191, 208 prayer 4, 6–8, 13n50, 15, 23, 28, 52–54, 64, 73, 76, 80, 84, 87, 105, 154, 157n34, 160–61, 163, 170, 172–73, 176, 182 preachers 25, 32, 101, 128 Preaching Wisdom to the Wise (De Nobili) 30n36, 147n136, 1148n141 Prester John Francisco Álvares on 43n110, 52n139, 122n32 Dom João II on 20 Jesuits quest to find 27 Kingdom of 18, 22 Vasco da Gama’s error on 48 Prester John of the Indies (Álvares) 43n110, 52n139, 122n32 pride 110–11, 113, 204, 216 printing press 24n30 prison 98 prisoners 39n89, 87, 207 processions 27, 143n114 professed 3, 24, 185 Propaganda Fide 35–36 prostrations 26, 52, 88 Protestantism 60, 150 asceticism in 12n47 Catholic evangelization and 86n125 devotion to Mary in 87 pagan view of Catholicism in 150 Protestant Reformation 43n109, 155, 189n53 Protestant Reformation 43n109, 155, 189n53 Provincial, Jesuit 23, 25, 41, 63, 104–5, 113, 209, 217 Príncipe, São Tomé and Príncipe 36 Psalms, Book of 77, 132, 135 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite 85 pulpit 24 Punicale, India 38n88 punishments 84, 109n60, 160, 172, 186, 193, 205, 207–9

Index Puranas, Hindu 38n88 Puritan concepts 11n45, 12n45 pyramid 115 Pérez, Francisco 194–95 Qaḥqǝḥä, Ethiopia 35 Qʷälläla, Ethiopia 35 qämis 73 Qerǝllos, Abunä 68 Qǝbʿat 75n70 qinat 73n62 qob 73n62 Quietism 60. See also adaptationism Quran 33, 157n34 Quíloa 22 rabbis 102 Rachol, India 38 Rajadell, Teresa 5 rajas 21 Rāmā 143, 144n120 Rāmāyaṇa 144n120 rapture 107n49 Ras 208, 210. See also Sǝʿǝlä Krǝstos Rāvaṇa 143 recluse 204, 208. See also yogis recruits 97, 209, 218 Red Sea 19, 39n89, 164n74, 202 reducción 189 reducir 189 reduction 128, 189 redução 189 Reformation Catholic 3–4, 9, 12n45, 154 Protestant 43n109, 155, 189n53 Regio Padroado 26 reincarnations 54 Relacam geral do estado da Christiandade de Ethiopia (Da Veiga) 63n9, 65n31, 80n88, 84n112–84n113, 88n131 Relação annual … (Guerreiro) 127n52 relics 77, 98, 163–66, 174–77, 180 reliquaries 161, 163 religiosity 16, 46–47, 102, 146, 148, 174 religious orders 1–4, 6, 13, 23, 30–31, 35n77, 60, 65, 103, 183, 211 Renaissance 17 renunciants 1, 53, 55–56, 59, 98, 100, 102, 103n35, 104, 106–8, 111–14, 147, 179–80, 183, 193–95, 215–18

Index renunciation 12n45, 13n50, 47, 53n143, 55–56, 97, 111 Rerum Aethiopicarum scriptores occidentales (Beccari) 32n63, 39n90, 40n91–93,  40n95, 44n114, 64n13, 64n23–n24, 65n27, 68n39, 69n42, 69n45, 71n52, 71n56, 73n60, 73n64, , 77n76, 77n79, 78n81, 79n82, 79n84–85, 80n87, 81n92, 83n107, 83n109, 86n120–n122, 87n129, 88n130, 116n2, 117n10, 118n15, 119n17, 119n20–n23, 122n33, 126n48, 127n54, 128n56–n57, 129n65, 159n42, 160n52, 162n62–n63, 163n64, 164n70, 164n72– n75, 165n75–n78, 169n94, 175n124, 175n126, 176n130–n132, 177n133–n136, 182n23–n24, 186n37, 196n80–n83, 197n84–n85, 197n87, 199n94–n95, 199n97, 201n103, 201n106, 203n112, 203n115, 204n117, 206n118, 206n122– n124, 207n126–n128, 209n133–n134, 210n137–n138, 211n140, 211n142, 212n144–n145 residences Jesuit 3, 11, 24, 32, 35, 110, 126, 181, 197, 199 resurrection 52, 135 revelations 6, 78, 154 revolution 17, 125n44 Ṛg Veda Saṃhitā 153n14 Rhodes 20n12 Ribadeneyra, Pedro de 47, 49 Historias de la Contrarreforma 47n121, 48n122–48n123 Ricci, Matteo 111 rice 10, 59, 112 rites of ancestors 44 baptism 143n114, 195 Ethiopian church 74, 123 Ethio-Latin 175 of idolatry 147 Latin rite 23n23, 28, 34–36, 43, 60, 62n6, 76, 86, 162, 167, 175, 179, 182–83, 186, 190, 194, 196–98, 202, 204–10, 212–13, 217–19 shamanic 152 rituals 28, 38, 42, 44–45, 48, 56, 66, 74, 139, 147, 155n27, 166, 171, 178, 195, 198n91, 218 Rodrigues, Gonzalo 126 Rodrigues, Simão 116–17 Roiz, Francisco 121, 144–46. See also Bhagavadgītā

269 Rome 20, 26n37, 29–31, 34, 35n77, 36, 42, 44, 70, 94, 115n1, 127, 163, 191, 197, 199, 201, 205, 210, 218 Ros, Francisco 30, 42 Rosweyde, Heribert 93n160 Rules for the discernment of spirits (Loyola) 188 Rum 64–65, 70 Saba, John 50 Sabbath 43, 45, 74, 76n75, 77, 133, 197, 198n91 sacraments 44–45, 72, 81, 136, 139, 150, 165–66, 195 Sacred Canopy (Berger) 212n147, 214n153 Social Construction of Reality (Berger) 206n125, 213n152 Social Reality of Religion (Berger) 145n126 Ṣadǝqan 63 sādh 53n143 sädänat 160 Sādhu 53n143, 55, 97n4, 98n4, 153. See also yogis Şadqan 63n11 saffron 59 Saint Thomas Christians 21, 41–42 sages 53n143, 57n159, 118n16, 126–27, 134n82, 136–37, 195 Ṣägga Krǝstos 125n44 Sah, Adil (sultan of Bijapur) 21 Sahami, Abba 64 Saint Mark Church 68 Śaiva 98n4 Salá, Ramón 33n68 Salcete, India 28, 33 salt 78 Salvador Bahia, Brazil 18 Samâdhi 173 šaman 151n5 saṁyama 58 Samnyāsa 56n152 Saṃnyāsīs 59, 147 samsara 54–55 samurai 191n60 Samuʾel, Abba 129 Samuʾel, Abunä 71 Sanctorum priscorum patrum vitae (Lippomano) 93, 94n162 sandalwood 144n118 sannyasa 1 sannyasi 1

270 Sanskrit 30, 39n88, 53n143–n144, 97n3, 173 Sanyāsi 98n4, 111 sanyāsis 97n4 Sãó Tomé de Meliapore 25, 27 ṡaraṣa 137n94 Sarka, India 35 Śärṣä Dǝngǝl (emperor) 34, 196 Šärṣä Krǝstos 125n44 Satan 7n27, 114, 120, 141n106, 143, 152n8, 154, 155n26, 159, 162–63, 178. See also devil Sathya Sāī Bābā 157n33 Šäwa, Ethiopia 66, 69, 174, 184 Säwänä näfs 124 Savages 178 Sax, William 156–57 Säyfä Arʾad 71n53 säytan 159 schema 68 Schism of 1054 128 Schmitt, Charles 158 Scholasticism 121 schools 12, 29, 59, 67, 94, 139, 144n120, 181, 194, 213 science 122, 152 scorpion 137 scriptures 38, 46, 55n148, 74–75, 86, 117n12, 125, 128, 131, 134, 146, 149–50, 159, 200, 218 Scritti teologici etiopici dei secoli XVI–XVII (Cerulli) 75n69, 82n97, 83n104, 83n105, 89n139, 123n33, 124n38, 124n40–n43, 125n44, 127n54, 129n62, 129n64, 130n67, 130n69–31n70, 132n75–33n76, 174n120–n121 sects 120, 139n98, 193 Sǝʿǝlä Krǝstos 34, 204, 208, 210, 212 Ṣǝḥma, Abba 64n18 Sein 14n50 seminarian 162–63 seminary 26n36 Semitic 137 Sǝmʿon, Abunä 200, 210 senses 14, 48, 56, 106, 141, 145 sensuality 104, 141n106 Septuagint 135n85 sepulcher 175 Sequeira, Lopes 21n13 serämo 160

Index šereṣ 137 sermons 44, 81, 116, 126, 150, 204, 206 servant 102 Seth 130, 134 Seuse Heinrich 7 sex 12n45 sexes 91 śǝyyum 83n108 Shah 22 Shamanism 151 shaman 151n5, 155n26 shamanic culture 155 shamanic rite 152 Sheol 132 sheraẓim 137 shereẓ 137 Shinto 105n46 Shintoism 46 Shiva 144 Shoa 174 shoes 48, 111 shrines 28, 167, 172–74, 175n26, 176–77 Siau island 19 Siberia 151n5 Sicily 5 silence 6n25, 55n148, 76–77 silk 72, 75, 100, 111, 153 Silondis 129 silver 73 Simon the Magician 152, 159, 170 Sind 100 sins 52n137, 54, 82, 90, 93, 100–1, 108, 110, 142n108, 168, 180–81, 187–88, 191–92, 195, 200, 203, 211 sisters 51n136 Sītā 143 Śiva 53n141, 98n4, 99n14 siʾol 132 skema 68n38 slaves 90, 185 sleep 52, 55n148, 57, 109n63 Smith, William Cantwell 147 snakes 165 Society of Jesus. See Jesuits Sodom 101 Sofala, Mozambique 22 soldiers 22, 89, 101, 113, 207 Solomon (king) 125

Index Solomonic dynasty 50–51, 67–69 Soma 57 “Some Considerations …” (Alden) 25n33, 37n82 sophists 61n4 Sophronius, Saint 68 sorcery 151–52, 156n27, 167, 171–72. See also magic sorcerers 76n72, 113, 151–53, 155, 156n27, 157, 159, 169, 178, 216 Sorokin, Pitirim 14n50 soul 14n50, 50n132, 52, 80, 82–83, 86, 104n37, 105, 124, 129, 130, 131n72, 132–33, 143n113, 161, 164, 166, 187–88, 195–96, 203 Spain 38, 39n89, 75, 162n61, 168n90 spells 104n37, 162–63, 169. See also magic spice trade 18, 20n12, 27, 31 cinnamon 37 cloves 36 mace 36 nutmeg 36 pepper 37 spices 19 spirits, evil 7, 141n106, 150, 155, 157, 160, 163 Spiritual Exercises (Loyola) 103,105, 109–10,146n130, 187n46, 188, 203n110–11 Śrauta rituals 56 Sri Lanka 19 Stateûs, Abba 71n54, 75 statues 141n106 Stephanites 88n129 Stephens, Thomas Krista Purana 38n88 stigmata 162 Storia della letteratura etiopica (Cerulli) 50n133 stories 66, 99, 134, 142–43, 146 Strabo Geography of Strabo 61 subcontinent. See India suffering 54–55, 61, 113, 152, 157–58, 165, 217 sufys 107n49 sultan 21 supernatural 14, 138, 150, 153–54, 159n41 superstitions 28, 41, 43, 102, 104–05, 111, 146, 150, 152, 154, 155n26, 158 Susiana, Persia 50

271 Suso, Henry 7 Susǝnyos (Negus) 34–36, 119, 122, 134, 136, 138, 186, 199–202, 204–5, 207 abdication 36 Abraham, Abba and 200 abunä and 34–35 Catholicism as state religion 202 Christological debates and 119, 122, 205 conversion 199 Däbrä Libanos, devotion to 200–1 Gaspar Páez and 202 Pedro Páez and 34, 134, 136, 138, 200–1 Manuel de Almeida and 186, 207 repression of Orthodoxy 202, 205, 207 Sǝʿǝlä Krǝstos and 34, 204 Zärʾa Wängel and 200–1 Suárez, Francisco 90 Suśruta Saṁhitā 156n32 symbols 14, 41, 44, 46, 73, 99n14, 111, 157, 163, 165. See also rituals Synod of Diamper 42 taʿwīd 157 tawiz 157 Täbay 124n38 täbay 124 Täbayk 124n38 tabernacles 52 tabiz 157 täfänt 160 Täkkäze, river 203 Täklä Giyorgis 125n55, 207 Täklä Haymanot, Abunä 51–52, 65–71, 75, 95, 125, 161, 165n79, 174, 200, 207, 210–11, 215 tales 134, 139, 146, 156n27, 163, 176, 178, 218 talismans 163 Tamil 38n88, 104, 140 Ṭana, lake 208 Tanjore, India 21 Tanqha 35 Taoism 12n45, 156n27 Tapas 55n148, 58 tapsaya 55n148 Taquela Haimanôt. See Täklä Haymanot tatterdemalion 97 Tauler, Johannes 7 Tawahədo 198n91

272 taweez 157n34 Tazena (king) 63 taʿwīd 157n34 teachers 32n62, 66, 112, 138, 184n30 technology 186 Tedla, Agostino, Abba 125 tēgēri/tēgri 160 Tǝgray 11, 35, 64, 67, 71, 169n93, 177, 197n89, 209 tegrid 160n50 Teixeira, Manuel 98, 153 Tekla Haymanot. See Täklä Haymanot Tellez, Balthazar 70 História geral de Etiópia a Alta 66n34, 68n40, 70n49, 176n128, 205n120 temples 25, 28, 40, 41n103, 48, 89, 141n105, 181n13. See also pagodes temptations 10, 91, 104, 187 Teresa of Ávila, Saint 4n12, 7 Tertullian Apology 141n106 De anima 130n67 Tewelde Beiene 74n66, 124n41–n42, 125n44 Tewodros I (emperor) 174 Thadeos, monk 196 Thane, India 25 Theodore of Mopsuestia 130n68 theology 1, 9, 39, 66, 85, 98, 100, 125, 130, 158, 212 Thomas, Juan 23 Thomas, Saint 21, 41, 42n106, 93 Saint Thomas Christians 21, 41–42 Thrace, Greece 65 Tigray. See Tǝgray Timor, island 19 Toledo, Council of 128, 170 tombs 165, 173–74, 176–77 Torat, Ethiopia 71n53 tostón 98 Tractatus tres historico … (Barradas) 40n93 trade 18, 20–21, 25, 31, 83 traducianism 130n67, 133 transmigration of souls 143n114 Tratados espirituales (Borja) 105n42, 143n113 Travancore, India 21, 29, 89, 98n5, 183n28 treatments 47, 157, 163n68, 164, 166

Index Trent, Council of 29, 37n83, 43n109, 93, 154, 163n68 Trinity 14, 44, 53n142, 61, 121n29, 130, 140n102, 143n113, 144 Tunguz 151n5 turban 72n59 Turk 70 Turkey 101n23 tyranny 56 tyrants 185 Uhlig, Siegbert Encyclopaedia aethiopica 24n30, 49n129, 50n133, 63n11, 65n26, 68n38, 69n43, 69n44, 71n55, 82n96, 88n129, 93n157,123n36, 125n46, 159n41, 161n54, 174n120, 175n125, 184n31, 200n101, 202n107, 210n139 United Kingdom 30 universe 15, 173n111, 177, 181, 213, 217 university 24n30 Urban VIII, pope 36 Vaiṣṇavism 98n4 Valencia, Spain 69n42 Valerian, noble pagan 94 Valignano, Alessandro 30, 42, 107, 193, 209n133. See also adaptationism Historia del principio y progreso de la Compañía de Jesús en las Indias Orientale 108n54 Valladolid, Spain 6 Van Linschoten, Jan Huygen 179 Van Ruysbroeck, Jan 7 Varones ilustres de la Compañía de Jesús (Andrade and Nieremberg) 38n88, 101n20, 101n23, 104n40 Varāha 144n120 Varṇāśrama Dharma 56n152 Vasco de Gama. See De Gama, Vasco Vatican II 1 vayyišrěṣu 137 Veda 147n132 vernacular literature 38n88 Veronica, Saint 163 Viaje al Gran Mogol, Indostán y Cachemira (Bernier) 103n35, 107n49, 153n13, 170n100, 180n5

Index Vies éthiopiennes de Saint Alexis, Les (Cerulli) 71n57 vibhuti 157 Vida da Sanctissima Virgem (Fernandes) 87, 88n132, 89n134, 89n136, 90n140, 90n142, 90n145–n146, 91n147, 91n149, 92n152, 93n159, 94n162–n163, 94n165 Vijayanagara 21 violence 205 Virgin Mary. See Mary Virginibus ad Marcellinam sororem (Saint Ambrose) 91 virginity 90–91, 94–95 virgins 90–91 virtues 87 virtus et litterae 116 Vishnu 48, 143, 144n16 visions 6, 17, 158, 197n88. See also dreams Visitor, Jesuit position 30, 42. See also Valignano, Alessandro Vita Christi 6n27 Viṣṇu Avatārs 144n120 Voragine, Jacopo de La Legenda dourada 4n12 vows, religious of Hindu Saints 173 of chastity 83, 85, 106, 112, 208 fourth /of obedience 3n8, 83 of Ethiopian monks 84 of poverty 83, 106, 112, 191, 208 recantation by Ethiopians 84 in Spain 168n90 of stability 3 tapas as 55n148 Vāmana 144n120 Vānapastya 56 Wälättä Petros 92 Wali monastery 129n62 wa-yeʿaẓmu 137 wa-yishreẓu 137 wa-yirbu 137 weapons 213 Weber, Max 11, 12n45, 12n47, 15n52, 79 wedding 88, 94. See also marriage Werden 14n50 Westernization 18 wheat 79, 175

273 Wicki, Joseph Documenta Indica 61n3, 98n5–n7, 99n9, 99n13, 101n21–n22, 101n24, 102n25–n30, 103n31–n32, 103n35, 104n38, 104n40, 105n43–n44, 105n47, 107n52, 109n57, 110n70, 114n80, 120n240–n27, 140n99– n100, 141n103, 142n107, 142n110, 143n111– n114, 144n119, 147n131, 152n10–n11, 154n19–n20, 156n29–n31, 158n36–n37, 166n83–n85, 167n87–n89, 179n2–n3, 180n8–n9, 180n11–n12, 181n14, 181n16, 182n17, 182n19, 183n28–n29, 190n57– n59, 191n60, 192n67, 193n69, 193n70, 194n72–n73, 194n75, 195n77, 209n133 wine 10, 82, 88n133, 89–91, 112 winemaking 83 wisdom 143, 147–48, 192, 194 witchcraft 158n40, 160, 162n61, 168, 169n97, 171, 178n138 witches 150, 159–60 wives 92, 94, 102, 133, 143, 146, 158 wizards 77 womb 89, 133, 136 women 22, 51, 84, 91–94, 102, 134, 136n90, 137–38,152n8, 154, 158, 160, 163–66, 176, 179, 185, 210 Word (Christ) 100, 133 Xaramillo, Pedro Páez 39n89 Xavier, Francis arrival and description of Goa 23n23, 26, 139 death of 27n40 diversity of beliefs in India and 28 ecclesiastics in India and 26–27 Gaspar Barzeo and 100–1 guidelines for Muslims and Jews in the east 24 Henrique Henriques on 141 immediate successors in Ìndia 29 Jesuit missionaries in India under 27 letter to the king 25 Luís Fróis and 99n11 Manuel Texeira on 98 Monumenta Xavieriana 141n104 relics of 164–65 other religious orders in India and 31 trip to India 17 on virtues of men needed for the missions 11, 100, 116

274 Yemen 65n26 Ynofre 79 yoga 53, 58, 97 yogi 15, 53n145, 54, 58, 98–100, 103–4, 106, 110–11, 113, 120–22, 140–46, 152, 155–56, 180–83, 190, 192–95, 213, 216–18 Barzeo, Gaspar on 61n2, 99–100, 103–4, 109, 113, 120–22, 143–44, 158, 180, 190–91, 193, 216 Catholicism and 121, 190–91 conversion of 100, 103, 149, 167, 179, 181–82, 185, 194–95, 199, 201–04 cremation 173 Fróis, Luís on 99, 103, 120, 122, 144, 180, 213, 218 Jesuit description of 98 Jesuits confrontation with 121, 123, 156 king of 183 mortification among 104 Reincarnations for 54 sandalwood for 144n118

Index yogism 121, 139–40, 142, 144, 146, 183 Yoḥanni, Abba 51 Yūsuf Asʾar Yaṯʾar 65n26 Yǝkunno Amlak 68 Yǝmʾata, Abba 64n21 Yǝsḥaq, Abba 49 Zä Dǝngǝl (emperor) 34, 92, 119, 197 Zagʷe dynasty 51 Žäkäre, Abba 118n16, 127 Zämika’el, Abba 49, 64n15 Zamorin 21 Zärʾa Wängel 199–201 Zärʾa Yaʿǝqob, emperor 69, 76n75, 77n75, 174 Zäśǝllase, monk 86 Zä Yoḥannǝs, Abba 92 Zeitgeist 6 Zeno (emperor) 64 zogī 97n3. See also yogis