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- Convenor:
-
David Lorenzen
(El Colegio de Mexico)
- Location:
- Antifeatro 1, Piso 0
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 17 July, -, Thursday 18 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
The panel will examine the strategies used by European authors, many of them missionaries, to conceptualize Asian religions and present them to European and Asian readers.
Long Abstract:
The primary focus of this panel is on texts written by Christian missionaries and their priest correspondents in Europe about the religions that had been encountered in Asia, chiefly India, but also China, in the period from 1600-1800. The discussions in the Christian texts, often accompanied by illustrations, were influenced by three, not always compatible, strategies that their authors used to conceptualize the Asian religions and present them to European and Asian readerships. One strategy was to demonstrate the absolutely inferior and even demonic character of the Asian religions. A second was to analyze these Asian religions more objectively, partly in order to be able to debate with the Asians who followed them and partly in order to satisfy the Christian authors' own intellectual curiosity. A third strategy was to see how far the social and cultural practices of Asians could be accommodated within the life-style of Christian converts without falling outside the bounds of proper Christian behavior. In the end the missionaries' efforts at converting Asians to Christianity had only limited success, in part because of the resilience and sophistication of the cultures they worked in, in part because of practical limits to the power of the early European colonial administrations, and in part because of the rigid doctrinal and ritual norms imposed by the post-Tridentine Catholic Church and by early-Reformation Protestantism. Nonetheless, the missionaries and their European correspondents initiated the long process of the European study of these cultures and influenced the eventual creation of an Asian modernity.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 17 July, 2013, -David Lorenzen (El Colegio de Mexico)
Paper short abstract:
A study of the attempt to refute Hindu religion in the "Christian-Hindu Dialogue" of the Capuchin padre, Giuseppe Maria da Gargnano, written in Hindustani in 1751 with the purpose of aiding the conversion of Hindus to Christianity
Paper long abstract:
Giuseppe Maria da Gargnano (born as Bernardino Bernini, 1709-1761) was a Capuchin padre who joined the Tibet Mission sponsored by Propaganda Fide. He arrived in Bengal in 1739 and died at Bettiah in northern Bihar, India, in 1761. He was in Lhasa from 1742 to 1745 and spent most of following years in Bettiah where he established a small community of Christian converts, one that still exists. In 1751 he wrote--with the help of his fellow Capuchin and biographer, Cassiano da Macerata--a fictional dialogue between a Christian and a Hindu in the Hindustani language, a text intended to aid in the conversion of Hindus to Christianity. The dialogue shows that Giuseppe Maria did make a serious effort to understand Hindu religion. The Hindu conceptions and ideas he attacks in the dialogue include the transmigration of souls, the large Hindu pantheon of Hindu gods organized as a celestial government, the idea that God writes out a person's destiny at birth, the implausibility of the descriptions of gods and demons in Hindu scriptures, and the Hindu idea that all religions are given by God and that everyone can be saved by following his own religion. The paper will discuss these arguments and the possible influence in their formulation of the writings of early Christian thinkers against Roman and Greek religions and of the disputes in eighteenth-century Europe between Protestants and Catholics.
Sergio Mantecón Sardiñas
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses in the missionary as intercultural mediator and the cultural translation strategies used by the Jesuit missionaries. I analyze the Mezzabarba report to give a general approach on the cultural translation methods during the first half of the 18th century.
Paper long abstract:
The Chinese Rites controversy is currently a hot topic in many different fields related with the History of Religions, Translation or Intercultural Mediation. I am currently translating and analysing pieces of the diary and report titled Istoria delle cose operate nella Cina by the Vatican commissioner in China Carlo Ambrogio Mezzabarba and have focused my work not only in the controversy itself, but also, firstly, on the figure of the missionary as an intercultural mediator; secondly, on the cultural translation strategies used by the Jesuits and, finally, in the concept they had of the Confucianism, seen by the Jesuits as a philosophical behaviour guide more than as another religion, having then a different point of view than the Vatican. Terminological problems such as the adaptation of the concept of "God" or "Soul" and how they were solved by the missionaries leaded to subsequent problems caused by cultural and conceptual misunderstandings between both cultures and the understanding of christianity by the Chinese. The arguments of the great debate on this topic in the Vatican against the Jesuits produced the extinction of this religious missionary company in 1773. This paper goes deeply in the ethnographical approaches included in Mezzabarba report and his own considerations on this debate according to this own experiences in China to give a general approach on the cultural translation languages in the first half of the 18th century.
Thomás Haddad (University of São Paulo)
Paper short abstract:
It is common to optimistically point out the high place accorded to mathematics and "science" in early-modern Jesuit missionary strategies in the East. Here we present a case where such kind of knowledge (astronomy) is deployed by a Jesuit in order to discredit South Indian brahmins in the early 17th century.
Paper long abstract:
The long process of inventing "Hinduism" to early-modern European audiences (which was to be completed only in the eighteenth-century British Orientalist movement) was informed, from the start, by travel narratives, historical chronicles of the exploits of Westerners in several parts of India, and, evidently, by missionary literature in various genres (letters, relations, grammars, treatises, maps etc.). Seventeenth-century sources of these kinds abound in expositions of customs, rituals, "mythologies" and denunciations of idolatry (especially when it comes to missionaries' writings), and they even give some useful information on local natural-historical knowledge, but they are scant in representing local cosmological traditions. In this regard, the Jesuit Jacobo Fenicio's treatise "Livro da Seita dos Indios Orientais", written aroud 1610 (but only published, partly, in the 1930s, although having circulated in manuscript quite widely until the eighteenth century), is a notable exception. The book already starts with the presentation of cosmological conceptions of Malabari brahmins (whom the author calls "natural philosophers and theologians"), and proceeds to their refutation on the basis of contemporary European astronomy, which is taken as self-evidently correct. Natural knowledge is thus clearly identified as a key cultural trait and, concomitantly, as a cultural weapon to be deployed in the representation of the other. Here we examine the details of Fenicio's exposition and the place he accords to European and Indian cosmologies in wider Jesuit policies and ways of proceeding, reflecting also on the uses of science to reinforce cultural and religious identities and divides in early-modern contact zones.