On April 7 1506, almost five hundred years ago, Francis Xavier was born in a castle of Navarre, northern Spain. His father was president of the royal Council of Navarre and his mother was the daughter of a royal chamberlain. On December 3 1552, the same Francis died on the island of Sancian, a Portuguese trading station off the Chinese coast of Canton. In the meanwhile, he had incessantly traveled to Goa, Malacca, the Moluccas Islands, Japan and other places throughout Asia, the first of many Jesuit missionaries who would foster the encounter between Western Christianity and Asian cultures and religions.
Recalling the labors and travels of Francis Xavier is a way to assess a cultural legacy that, till today, shapes the cultural relationship of Asia with the West. More importantly, it helps one to ponder over the new challenges that define cultural and religious encounters in today’s Asia, as all countries, faiths and cultures struggle to assert their specific contribution to a world that experience at the same time accrued conflicts and increased globalization. Five hundred years might be a time interval long enough for taking some distance from the unceasing flux of news and spelling out what makes civilization encounters fruitful or potentially devastating…
Francis Xavier’s life and deeds
In 1525, Francis left his home in order to pursue his studies at the University of Paris. Then he enrolled in the College of Sainte-Barbe where he met two other students who were to have a profound influence upon him, Pierre Favre in 1526 and Ignatius of Loyola in 1529. In the course of their studies, both Xavier and Favre became friends with Ignatius of Loyola, and they were associated with him in the founding of a new religious order, the Society of Jesus. After initial caution and resistance, the influence of Ignatius on Xavier was strong enough to induce Francis to make so radical a choice of life.
In November 1536, the followers of Ignatius walked to Venice and, later on, Rome. In 1537, the Pope gave them permission to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and to be ordained to the priesthood. Xavier was indeed ordained a priest in June 1537, but the companions were prevented from undertaking their pilgrimage due to the war between Venice and the Turks. They came back to Rome and offered their services to the Pope Paul III. The outline of what would become the constitutions of the Society of Jesus were approved by the Pope in September 1539. In the spring of 1540, two of the companions, Rodrigues and Bobadilla, were destined for India. Shortly before the scheduled departure for India by way of Lisbon, Bobadilla fell ill. Xavier was then instructed by Ignatius to depart for Lisbon the following day. On April 7, 1541, Xavier began his voyage to India. As he took leave of King John III of Portugal, he was given four papal briefs appointing him papal nuncio of the Indies and recommending him to the king of Ethiopia and other princes.
Rounding Africa, their ship put in at Mozambique. Towards the end of February 1542, leaving his two companions, Francis sailed for Goa, where he arrived on May 6. Four months later he sailed for Cape Comorin (the Fishery Coast), where there awaited around twenty thousand new Christians who had practically received no instruction. One year later, he returned to Goa, learned of the formal approval of the Society of Jesus by the Pope and of the election of Ignatius as its first General; he could then be appointed as Jesuit Superior of the East Indies. He returned to the Fishery Coast, intervened in various conflicts and baptized large number of natives. Already disillusioned with the Portuguese merchants and authorities, Xavier sailed from Malacca to the Moluccas and the islands of Moro in 1546. Later on, he progressively came back to Cochin, where he met with three Japanese who soon after would be baptized. He then resumed his travels, supervising the growing number of Jesuits who were coming from Europe to work on a territory that was already extending from Ormuz to Indonesia. In April 1549, Francis was able to realize a dream he had formed, sailing with one of the young converted Japanese, Anjirô, and other companions to the newly discovered Japanese islands. Xavier arrived at Kagoshima on August 15, the Feast of the Assumption. During the more than two years that Xavier remained in Japan, he founded churches in Kagoshima, Hirado and Yamaguchi. Though he undertook an epic journey to Kyôto walking in the snow, he did not meet with the emperor but was favorably received by the Daimyô of Kungo.
He came back to Malacca from Singapore at the end of the year 1551 and found there a letter from Ignatius appointing him Superior of the new province of India. His jurisdiction was to extend over all territories east of the Cape of Good Hope with the exception of Ethiopia. In the letters that Xavier sent to his companions in Europe around this time he not only gives an account of his travels in Japan but also of what he learned there about China and of his hopes of going to that country. On April 1552, Xavier left Goa again, accompanied by four Jesuits, his Japanese friend Anjirô and an overseas Chinese convert, Antonio. After arriving in Malacca, he sent most of these companions to Japan. Xavier was hoping to enter China in an official capacity with a Portuguese embassy. After the controversial cancellation of this embassy, Xavier left for China anyway. Towards the end of August, his ship reached the island of Sancian. Since the entrance of China was forbidden to foreigners, Xavier found a Chinese merchant who promised to help him to enter by night. Around the middle of November, his two Jesuit companions left him with letters he was sending to various destinations. The Chinese merchant never fulfilled his promise and, on November 21, Xavier fell ill. During the night of December 2 and 3, Antonio, his last remaining companion, witnessed the death of Xavier.
Xavier was canonized on March 12, 1622, together with Ignatius of Loyola and Teresa of Avila. In 1748, he was declared Patron of the Orient; in 1904, Patron of the Work of the Propagation of the Faith; and in 1927, together with Thérèse of Lisieux, Patron of All Missions. This afterlife glory testifies to the way his life and story had touched Catholic imaginations.
Assessing the legacy of Francis Xavier
In the year 1546, approaching the Moro islands on the Indonesian archipelago, Francis Xavier wrote to his Jesuit companions in Europe: “The people of these islands are very barbarous and full of treachery. … Each of these islands has a language of its own, and there is an island where almost every village on it has a different tongue.” Three years later, debarking in Japan, the same Francis Xavier noted with a kind of relief that “in all this land, there is only one language, and it is not very difficult to understand.” The discovery of the linguistic world of South-East Asia by Christian missionaries from the sixteenth century on was indeed for them a source of bewilderment. This Babelian variety was seen as an obstacle to evangelization and somehow associated with the “savage state” of the natives. In contrast, the (relative) linguistic unity of China and Japan was a proof of their degree of civilization, more proper to the reception of the Christian faith.
This same linguistic and cultural diversity (around 600 different languages and dialects in Indonesia, 135 in Malaysia) would nowadays be asserted by South-East Asian thinkers as their specific contribution to the world. South-East Asian believers offer to their respective religions the riches of the languages, rituals and worldviews originating from their nations. From Francis Xavier till today, a radical shift has taken place: the descriptions sent by Xavier could be quite spectacular, nurturing distinctive visions of nations and countries, but all giving way to an exoticism in which it is not difficult to see a starting point for “orientalist” imageries. In contrast, our post-modern world is certainly one in which the relativity of viewpoints and standards is the starting-point of any debate on cultures and values.
Xavier himself had to make the painful and exhilarating experience of cultural relativity. Sending to Rome a sample of Japanese writing, he observes: “Their writing is much different from ours, since they begin from the top and go to bottom. When I asked Anjirô {a Japanese convert} why they did not write as we do, he replied by asking me why we do not write as they do. He also gave me the following reason: for just as man’s head is at the top, and his feet at the bottom, so also when a man writes he should write from top to bottom.”
This episode can be read as the modest beginning of a cultural journey that is continuing today. Xavier was not a man for articulating theological shifts in an intellectual, systematic fashion, but rather for living these same shifts in the due course of meeting with people and for expressing the inner changes that he underwent in the way he was narrating an ever evolving story. The journey of Xavier had a resounding historical significance: it was taking place at a time when the West was starting to discover the depth and extent of the differences constitutive of humankind while it was dreaming of unifying the world under one and the same religious, scientific and cultural system. The astonishing haste and stamina of Xavier made him accomplish an inner travel that extends up to the present debate on globalization: Xavier was dreaming to unify the universe under Christ but was led to discover that differences were the space in which God was revealing Himself. Xavier was experiencing at first hand the variety of humankind, of its languages, faiths, cultures and living conditions, as no one maybe had experienced it before him. He first saw this maddening variety as an hindrance, as an obstacle to his missionary enterprise, this before sensing progressively that this insanely varied and complicated world was the one in which God was indeed living and working. Difference was the cross on which Xavier lived and died, and this cross was even more painful to bear as it was indissolubly linked to a vision of the Oneness of humankind: Towards the end of his life, Xavier relates that he has heard that a road links Beijing to Jerusalem (the first geographical objective of the Jesuit companions) and plans to travel this road by himself for reporting on it to Rome… In some way, Xavier, taken between the revelation of the Difference and the compulsive dream of Oneness, is a Patron Saint for the globalization era…
Living cultural encounters in today’s Asia
What do Xavier’s travels have to teach us today? Xavier was looking for “meaning’ in the course of his encounter, and the quest for meanings is a continuous one, even though it takes countless new expressions. To speak of a “meaningful” encounter among people from different cultural backgrounds is to spontaneously refer to an array of feelings and perceptions: first, there is some kind of a taste developing throughout the exchange, the pleasure that arises from conversation, mixing of languages, exoticism, discovery, friendship perhaps; second, there is the mutual acknowledgment that reciprocal displacements are taking place in the process - broadening of views, change in opinions and prejudices, and, to a certain extent, sharing of emotions and memories, be they collective or personal. A ”meaningful” relationship transforms, creates, carries forward meanings, seen as bits of perception, evaluation and interpretation of facts, people, places, texts or events. Eventually, a “meaningful” relationship develops from or evolves into shared projects and practical cooperation in order to fulfill common objectives, whatever the size of these objectives.
The first glimpse of “meaning’ that appears in a trans-cultural exchange has to do with the discovery of some commonality. However, ordinarily such commonality is not of a positive nature but rather of a negative one: it is about the sharing of crises and challenges. This might be true of a metaphysical or religious exchange (the sharing of the fact that we are all mortal beings…), but this is also true of cultural and social dialogue as framed and nurtured by the logic proper to the globalization era. Globalization is first and foremost the globalization of crises and challenges. This might mean to discover, not only through words but through shared experience, that deforestation, waste of natural resources, spread of AIDS and drugs, sustainability are indeed challenges for all, not only for one region of the world. This might be the realization that the growing gap between the (rational) language of social/cultural elites and the (symbolic, emotive) language of the marginalized sectors of society is a global phenomenon that makes most of our assumption about communication irrelevant. The feeling of commonality might also arise from a sharing about the collapse of traditional ways to understand one’s world, identity and culture. This might also have to do with the practical and moral challenges arising from the technologies of life. Or it might come from a reflection upon the spreading of a culture of violence at school or in society at large, a reflection upon the difficulty to implement mechanisms of harmony and reconciliation. What we share first is a feeling of urgency and disarray.
The second stage of the process is to realize anew the variety of the cultural resources we mobilize or could mobilize for answering such challenges. If we do confront common problems and crises, it is true also that there remain tremendous differences among world-views rooted into Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity or among the core values found in Confucian or European societies. On life itself, on authority structures, on relationships with Nature or with the Other, on processes of discussion and evaluation, our ground intuitions, logical approaches, canonical texts and ingrained norms of behavior are as varied, divergent or contradictory as one can possibly imagine. Furthermore, our cultural traditions are embedded into historical memories that conflagrate one with another. Discovering the wide array of our differences might be, at the same time, exhilarating and extremely puzzling.
This is where a strategic choice is to be made. “Meaning” continues to flow and to circulate when we decide to make this tremendous variety of cultural resources the tool box that enables us to interpret anew our own tradition and culture. Our cultures, world-views and creeds are being reformulated through the interpretative resources offered by the other cultures, world-views and creeds – and this operation happens simultaneously for all participants in the exchange. Such interpretative process can become a sophisticated intellectual endeavor when, for instance, it aims at re-interpreting Christian theological categories through the concepts and vocabulary of Mahayana Buddhism. However, the intuition that justifies the attempt to re-interpret one’s tradition through the resources offered by another cultural corpus can be pretty straight-forward. I remember a Chinese friend, expert in Daoist scriptures and history, to whom I was asking what his projects were now that he had at last completed some major publication. He answered me that, for some time, his contacts with Christianity had convinced him that the success met by this particular religious form throughout the world had to do with its capacity to confront the challenges of modernity and to make its thought and vocabulary evolve and develop with the modernization process. He wanted, he told me, explore the ways through which Daoism could similarly become a truly “contemporary” religious form. Similar reflections and intellectual endeavors have taken and are taking shape in innumerable minds and circles. Each time, the evolving relationship with the Other makes this very relationship the referent, the set of interpretative resources, through which I assess and reformulate my own cultural identity (the ”I” being collective or personal.) This reformulation can be spontaneous or highly intellectualized, and it challenges to varying extents the very core of my identity, but, in all situations, the dynamics that shapes this ever-evolving identity is the cultural interchange itself that nurtures the web of resources that I have at my disposal.
In this perspective, all cultures, creeds and world-views are perpetually reshaped, and what defines them is never taken for granted but rather is being discovered and challenged throughout the process of exchange and interpretation. Thus, the core of our identity is never “behind” us, it is always “beyond”, it cannot be “essentialized”, it is rather related to the other whose identity is similarly challenged and reshaped. At the same time, this ever-evolving reshaping of one’s culture, creeds and world-views does not lead to confusion, it does define and sometimes sharpen one’s sense of belonging and core values. Though identities are mobile and changeable, they are still discrete entities, and the solutions to our common challenges will remain localized and different in substance.
Let me then summarize the four stages of this programmatic model for cultural interaction:
- discovering and pondering a community of challenges, a commonality of crises and problems that the globalization era has made even more stringent;
- acknowledging the tremendous variety of cultural responses and resources that can be mobilized for answering these challenges, and the discrepancies among these resources;
- re-evaluating one’s cultural responses and core identity throughout the interpretative resources mobilized by the exchange process;
- recognizing the fact that these reciprocal re-interpretations and re-assessments do not amount to devising globalized answers to our common challenges; rather, they nurture an ever-evolving sharpening of one’s choices and decisions still rooted into a sense of belonging and identity.
A global ethics is a language ethics
Cultural interactions happen through languages that are necessarily subject to a process of translation – the very process that Francis Xavier at first found to be so painful. First and foremost, the standpoints that define people’s and cultures’ sense of crisis and identity happen in the variety of their languages. Second, within a given society, “translation’ is also needed between the various sets of symbolic and rational languages that coexist within the social and political field. Third, a double-bind translation process is needed each time the gaps between “natural” languages and “cultural” languages combine together; this is the case when, for instance, marginal classes from marginal countries are confronted with a discourse originating from power centers, such discourse being exemplified by the structure and vocabulary of globalized, technocratic English.
In this view, intercultural exchange is always about allowing a group of people to express itself in its mother tongue while understanding other participants’ mother tongues and being understood by them. This is at the same time a highly sophisticated process and something that cannot happen just because sophisticated procedures are being set up. This can take place first and foremost because there is a shared conviction that such is indeed the communication process that will allow everyone to go to the heart of the matter at stake.
In the same vein, local solutions to global problem are to be understood as solutions anchored into a shared language. They are essentially ”language solutions”, which does not mean that the differences that they articulate vis-à-vis other ways of solving challenges are only formal, void of content, but that the language in which they are expressed grounds the logic they develop. In this sense, the “global ethics” that the world community is insistently looking for is inseparable from the translation process itself. In many ways, this is the fact of sticking to the interpretative process that constitutes the global ethics. A global ethics is a language ethics. Interpretation is also invention. This is only by interpreting anew our particular ethics that we are able to draw the lines of a shared ethical standpoint.
Differences as common ground
We seem to have driven far away from Francis Xavier discovering the immensity and diversity of the Asian continent. However, the questions that he had to ask himself in the course of his travels are not so different form the ones we are confronting now: what are the core values and beliefs that are shared by all humankind, and how great and divisive are the differences that we meet when trying to communicate? Can differences themselves be the common ground on which we can build up solutions to be shared and experience? How do we go from confrontation to cooperation without relinquishing our convictions and ideals? How to be universalistic and relativistic at the same time?
Asia had to meet with the faith, knowledge and techniques brought by Francis and his successors, while offering them in exchange much food for thought. Asia was subverting in a manifold ways the logic and standpoints of the Western missionaries, explorers and merchants. Nowadays, the challenge is to confront common challenges while respecting the variety of our experiences, cultures and languages. Cultural encounters will always be risky endeavors. More than ever, though, they are necessary ones. The experience of our forbearers still can teach us how to communicate, translate and create anew when confronting the ever evolving challenges that constitute our common lot.
Benoit Vermander, s.j.
Academic director of Taipei Ricci Institute
Editor of “Renlai’, a Chinese-language monthly of cultural, spiritual and social concerns