William Wallace's from Evangelical to Catholic by Way of the East

Chapter 12 Alienation, Xenophilia, and Coming Home: William Wallace’s From Evangelical to Catholic by Way of the East

Despite the long history of Western Jesuits in India, beginning in 1542 with the arrival of Francis Xavier (1506–52) in Goa—and despite the pioneering and impressive work done by many a Jesuit scholar in Indic studies during the centuries before the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773—it is not easy to discern how much those Jesuits actually liked being in India or enjoyed, if not the religions, then the cultures they encountered.1,2 While I have by no means exhaustively studied this theme in the Jesuit sources, I have over the decades studied select writings of a range of the early Western Jesuits in India: Fran- cis Xavier, Henrique Henriques (1520–1600), Roberto de Nobili (1577–1656), Costanzo Gioseffo Beschi (1680–1747), Jean Venance Bouchet (1655–1732), and Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux (1691–1779)—and in this impressive array I have not found evidence for xenophilia. Defense of the dignity of native peoples; respect for the great cultures and literatures of the East; a plea to import a bet- ter Western Christianity to Asia—yes. But actual love of an Asian religion was unlikely to be expressed directly or, perhaps, even to be experienced. Perhaps there was no genre, in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries of Ro- man Catholicism, in which missionaries could speak personally and positively of the experience of being in India. In keeping with venerable missionary mo- tifs, they were rather more likely to stress the sufferings they endured due to opposition, and even in ordinary life. All the more surely, there was no accept- able way for them to speak positively of learning from what today we call Hin- duism, which in their time would more likely have been called superstition and idolatry. It is true that de Nobili is famed for his differentiation of Indian religion and “Indian customs,” a distinction drawn in part so he could praise the customs as noble and worthy, like those of ancient Rome and Greece. He, Bouchet, and others showed by their great learning an esteem for India, but we cannot equate that kind of regard with xenophilia, a positive engagement with a religious other that in their day had to be vilified rather than admired. Even the defenders of Indian traditions and practices that could be thought of as

1 This chapter has been reprinted with permission. See bibliography for full information. 2 The relationship of Indian Jesuits to Hinduism is a distinct story, for treatment in another essay.

218 Chapter 12 non-religious were obliged to detect in them something wrong that could be improved by encountering Christian culture.3 But we can make an exception for Fr. Beschi, composer of Tēmpāvaṇi (The unfading garland), a magnificent epic telling of the story of St. Joseph, written in a poetic form that has been praised by scholars of Tamil over the generations. To write so beautifully and so beyond the typical expectations of missionary work, Beschi must have loved south Indian literature deeply and recognized the power and beauty of the Tamil language. To find clarity and candor in a missionary’s writings about his affection for Indian religions, we must turn to the end of the nineteenth century and the life of William Wallace (1863–1922).4 He came to India as an evangelical Anglican missionary, worked in the Calcutta (Kolkata) region from 1889 to 1896, and quickly became disillusioned about the missionary approach and the fruits of missionary activity. After his initial stay of seven years in India, he returned to England, then moved back to Ireland where he had been born, and, after much discernment, converted to Roman Catholicism and became a Jesuit. He returned to India as a Jesuit missionary in 1901.5 In his remarkable though ne- glected autobiography, From Evangelical to Catholic by Way of the East (1923),6 he recounts his journey to Catholicism, showing how it was driven by an ever deeper appreciation for Hinduism. There is, I propose, a complicated xenophilia at work here: Wallace loves the religion of the other (Hinduism) in pro- portion to his disillusionment with his own religion (Anglicanism), leading not to a (for him impossible) conversion to Hinduism, but rather to a different form of Christianity (Roman Catholicism).7

3 On the reservation and hesitation inherent in the Jesuit engagement with Asia, see Indian and Cross-Cultural Studies, ed. Karin Preisendanz, 51–61. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sci- ences Press, 2007. Included in this volume. 4 See Francis X. Clooney, S.J., The Future of Hindu–Christian Studies: A Theological Inquiry (Lon- don: Routledge, 2017), 34–39. 5 Wallace was not the only Anglican of his era with an unusual attitude toward India. Bishop Brooke Foss Westcott (1825–1901), who had been an Oxford don and was one of the founders of the Anglican mission in Delhi (and also of St. Stephen’s College, still one of the best col- leges in India), was of the view that the mission would generate a new and vital form of Christian culture that would then come to the United Kingdom and revivify the Church of England. See Clooney, The Future of Hindu–Christian Studies, 2–3. 6 William Wallace, From Evangelical to Catholic by Way of the East (Kolkata: Catholic Orphan Press, 1923). 7 Wallace’s relevant writings include, in addition to his autobiography, “Introduction to Hin- doo Clairvoyance” (Kurseong, 1920), unpublished TS, archived in the Goethals Library, St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata; “A Bengali Commentary on the Yoga Philosophy” (1923), unpublished, polycopied MS, archived in the Goethals Library; “The Everlasting Religion of the Hindoo Sages in Relation to the Catholic Religion of the Christian Fathers,” unpublished TS, archived in the Goethals Library.