From The River:Jesuit Missions and Exemplarity in Spanish Colonial Philippines 1581-1768

Abstract

This dissertation is about Jesuit missionaries and discrete moments of translation, accommodation and exemplarity from the time of their arrival in the Philippines to their expulsion in 1768. Using an interdisciplinary approach to textual interpretation and drawing from the fields of theology, history, literature, cultural studies, and anthropology, this dissertation explores the idea that Jesuit missionaries in the Philippines performed acts of imitatio Christi that were every bit as complex and creative as those demanded of the new Christian converts to whom they ministered. While it does not engage in an uncritical defense of missionaries, it does attempt to restore some of the complexity of the missionaries' own negotiations with the ideals of Roman Catholic conversion exemplarity and imitation. References to patristic authors, Roman historians and emulation of their rhetorical style and method could be seen as evidence of imitation at work, but did not mean its transparent application; Rather they indicated theological reflection and critique in light of particular circumstances. Ideas about martyrdom, miracle-working, the extirpation of idolatry, and the Church's relationship to empire itself were challenged by religious tensions in Europe and the New World, as well as locally. Indeed it is as a result of these circumstances that the liminality of Roman Catholic missionaries stands out because it reveals the complexity of their own imitative relation--their own `colonized' situation, as it were, with regard to Christian tradition. Away from home and far from the centers of European and colonial power, acts of imitation by individual missionaries in colonial Philippines alternately consolidated or ruptured these connections.