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Paris Managing Sacred Relics in Jesuit Asia (Sixteenth And 1 Ines G. Županov, CEIAS (CNRS-EHESS), Paris Managing Sacred Relics in Jesuit Asia (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries) When Francis Xavier started on a journey from Rome to Goa in 1540 he had only one shirt, as Ignatius of Loyola discovered, quickly ordering some more clothes to be packed for this very first Jesuit missionary sent on a long tortuous journey without return.1 Just a few years later, in 1544, Loyola himself faced a difficult decision concerning the role of poverty in the new religious order he was setting up and for which he was writing the Constitutions.2 Should the Jesuits accept donations and endowments, or should they keep the virtue of poverty as a “strong wall of religion (murus religionis firmus)”? This question kept Ignatius in prayer night after night in front of a small portrait of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.3 The problem with money and possession is a core predicament at the heart of all religious institutions.4 As Peter Brown recently argued, the Christian Church invented a successful formula by siphoning off the ‘secular’ wealth into its coffers through the invention of a heavenly spiritual treasury for which the monetary down-payment started during one's earthly existence. That sin was a debt was an idea present from the beginning, in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, and the monetary option became the only solution. On the wings of the burgeoning affective spirituality of the Catholic Reformation, Francis Xavier, just like Ignatius, despaired over money, which he perceived as dangerously enmeshed in 1 Schurhammer G., S.J., Francis Xavier, His Life, His Times, India (1506–45), trans J. Costelloe, S.J, vol. 1 (Rome: 1973) 555-556. 2 Mostaccio S., Early Modern Jesuits between Obedience and Conscience during the Generalate of Claudio Acquaviva (1581-1615) (Farnham: 2014) 70, 78. See also Pierre Antoine Fabre’s introduction in Loyola Ignace de, Journal des motions intérieures, ed. P.A. Fabre (Paris: 2007) 11. 3 Mostaccio, Early Modern Jesuits 70. 4 Bowersock G. W., “Money and Your Soul” (review of Peter Brown’s The Ransom of the Soul; Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity, Harvard University Press, 2015), The New York Review of Books LXII, 9 (2015) 928-30. 2 social obligations. “The one who takes [money], will be taken by the other.”5 The mission on which he ideally embarked was to give and provide for the universal salvation of each and every person, and to make individuals enrich the universal Catholic Church – all this ideally without touching (temporal) money himself. The story of how Xavier and his coreligionists - who succeeded in building a ‘spiritual’ empire that comprised not just the souls saved, but also colleges, churches, hospitals, libraries and all kinds of valuables - might just as well be told from its ending, when the Society of Jesus had been dismantled by the Catholic monarchies and the Pope, and their possessions in Portugal and the Portuguese empire were auctioned off on the orders of the Marques de Pombal.6 A casual glance at a rather dull list of objects enumerated in the inventory of the Basilica Bom Jesus and the Casa Professa in Goa in 1935, only a fraction of the riches it contained in the middle of the 18th century, reveals the vestiges of the former splendor of the gold and silver reliquaries, candleholders, ciboriums and similar objects studded with precious stones.7 In fact, already in 1589, a concerned Jesuit named Lopo de Abreu warned the General of the Order in Rome, Claudio Acquaviva, that the Professed House of Goa was excessively decorated.8 In his response in 1595, the General recommended moderation, and in 1597, while the cornerstone of the Jesuit basilica Bom Jesus was laid, Nicolau Pimenta, the Visitor, gave a written order that the church should not be decorated with figures and gold.9 The opulence of Jesuit churches such as the Bom Jesus, which became a pilgrimage site after it began to house the body of Francis Xavier within its walls, is obviously due to the centripetal pull of gifts and endowments by the faithful, from the poorest of the poor to the richest of the rich. It was through gifts of various objects --reliquaries, portraits, sculptures, 5 Xavier wrote to Gaspar Barzaeus before sending him to Hurmuz to proselytize among Muslims. Xavier, F., Epistolae S. Francisci Xaverii aliaque eius scripta (1535–52), Schurhammer G. - Wicki J. (eds.) vol. 2 (Rome: 1944. Reprint, 1996) [hereafter EX] 99. 6 Borges C. J., The Economics of the Goa Jesuits 1542-1759; An Explanation of their Rise and Fall (New Delhi: 1994) 125-138. 7 Teles R. M., "Inventário da Casa Professa de Bom Jesus", Buletim do Instituto Vasco da Gama 53 (Bastorá: 1942) 130-146. 8 Wicki J., S.J. - Gomes J., S.J. (eds.), Documenta Indica, vol.15 (Rome:1981) (henceforth DI) 373. See also Osswald C., Written in Stone; Jesuit buildings in Goa and their artistic and architectural features (Goa: 2013). 9 DI 18, 809. 3 altars, tombs-- immobilized in the interior of the churches, that the fervent Christians established the relationship with their chosen saints and patrons. As the endowments poured in, these objects became bigger, grander, more ornamented, and were encased in precious metals. [Fig. 1] Every gift also brought a web of relationships, based on patron and client arrangements, with which the Jesuits surely acquired more public visibility and importance, but were also bound by them, as Xavier lucidly remarked early on. Jesuits, and other missionary orders scattered throughout the world under the patronage of the Iberian monarchies and later under the Roman Propaganda Fide and the French king, were caught between the need to preserve at least a façade of poverty, on the one hand, and on the other the need to expand their financial portfolios and possessions. Different, context-sensitive methods --sometimes called 'cultural accommodation'-- were devised when confronted with the Protestants in Europe or against Buddhists in Japan, Confucian scholars in China or Mughal court in India, or settler colonies in Brazil, and they proved to be very expensive, risky ventures, which added further difficulty in resolving the poverty/opulence dilemma. One of the solutions --already attested in the history of religious expansion-- was to employ a wide range of material objects that combined, in varying degrees, both an aesthetic form and a sacred substance, in addition to the crude but quantifiable materiality of wood, stone, silver, cloth, as well as human bones, flesh, blood, tears and similar. What is important about these objects is that they can be endowed with an exorbitant value at one point and none or very little at another. Except for the casings in which they were kept, the sacred relics contained in them come close to the definition of ‘money’. While having no intrinsic value (without faith or trust), they become both means and unit of exchange and the way to store riches. In building a ‘spiritual empire’ these objects are the only tangible and quantifiable currency available. Although they are destined to circulate, they are also subject to ‘capture’ and immobilization. A certain degree of inertia inherent in these objects is also attested in Patrick Geary’s study of relics, all of which are in search of a shrine or church, and move only when their value is not ‘recognized’ properly. Poor management of ‘sacred objects’ could result in their loss. What needed constant care was the ensemble of affects employed to tie the object and the community together. The steady or even growing value of a relic or a saint depended on emotions the community invested in the relationship and showcased through rituals, apologetic 4 literature and production of images and ‘secondary’ sacred objects such as postcards, figurines, amulets, pendants and similar devotional items. Now in effigy, a relic may therefore continue its nomadic existence and engage in new conquests. In this chapter I look into a few selected episodes of Jesuit ‘relics management’.10 My question is how the ebb and flow of these ‘sacred objects’ constituted or added ‘value’ --spiritual and economic-- both to particular locations and to the Catholic spiritual network.11 And yet this value could just as easily disintegrate when the magical and enchanted circle linked by its umbilical cord to the Catholic Church and to universal Christianitas, with Rome at its center, had been broken.12 By looking into only a sample of documents from the Jesuit archives and from the first missionary century, my aim is to follow these objects as they pass through texts witnessing the construction of various, sometimes temporary, sometimes long-lasting, communities of affects and faith in Portuguese Asia.13 My argument is that between the early sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century, the Jesuits not only quickened the flow of these objects, they also 10 Various other sacred objects need to be studied simultaneously, since they often complement and supplement devotion to a particular relic. These include various hand-made objects for public and private devotion, from crosses, rosaries, agni Dei, pictures, to postcards and the like. These were all ‘sacred’ in different ways, or rather they were used as ‘sacred’ for different audiences, and they were part of a missionary empire in Asia, which was an empire within and beyond the Portuguese Estado da Índia. 11 These objects were based on need, not on desire, in the way that one covets luxury products. However, they also contributed to the creation of sociability and commercial networks. On luxury debates see the introduction to Berg M. and Eger E. (eds.), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Basingstoke: 2003).
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