[CHAPTER VIII]
THE ASIATIC CONTINENT
The Great Mogul — Rudolph Aquaviva — Jerome Xavier — de Nobili — de Britto — Beschi — The Pariahs — Entering Thibet — From Peking to Europe — Mingrelia, Paphlagonia and Chaldea — The Maronites — Alexander de Rhodes — Ricci enters China — From Agra to Peking — Adam Schall — Arrival of the Tatars — Persecutions — Schall condemned to Death — Verbiest — de Tournon's Visit — The French Royal Mathematicians — Avril's Journey.
At the very time that Queen Elizabeth was putting Jesuits to death in England, there was a remarkable pagan monarch reigning in what is now part of English India, who was inviting Jesuits to his court and making them his friends. His name was Akbar, and he is known in history as the Great Mogul. He was born in 1542, and ruled four years longer than the forceful Eliza. She was queen from 1558 to 1603; he was king from 1556 to 1605. Akbar appears first as the ruler of the Punjab and the country around Delhi and Agra; but in 1572 he drove the Afghans out of Bengal, and reunited the lower valley of the Ganges to Hindostan. Later, he annexed Cabul, Kashmir, Sind and Kandahar. He was a mighty warrior, but remarkable likewise as a civil ruler, the proof in this case being that he levied more money in taxes than England extracts at the present day from the same territory. He was very much interested in religious matters, and Christianity appealed to him, because one of his numerous wives had been a Christian; but he fancied that it was part of a general system which could be incorporated in a new cult which he had devised to conciliate the conflicting creeds of his realm. His own personal devotion was sun-worship, and he appeared every morning in public, devoutly offering up his orisons to the god of day. He fancied it was the world-soul that animates all things, a concrete form of one of the illusions of the present time.
At the invitation of Akbar, Rudolph Aquaviva, accompanied by Anthony Montserrat and Francisco Henriques, left Goa in 1579, to present himself at his court for the purpose of explaining to him the doctrines of the Christian Faith. He listened with pleasure and intelligence, but his interest was purely academic. As with other Oriental despots, nothing practical could be hoped for, on account of the harem. Seeing that it was lost time to remain there, Aquaviva returned to Goa, and was then sent down to the peninsula of Salsette, as superior of the mission established at that place. His stay there was not a long one, for on July 15, 1583, he and Alfonso Pacheco were attacked by the natives and cut to pieces. Fathers Pietro Berno, Antonio Francisco and Francisco Aranha, a lay-brother, together with twenty of their neophytes were included in the massacre.
Hearing of the tragedy, the Great Mogul despatched an embassy to the viceroy and to the superior of the Jesuits to express his sympathy, and also to urge that other missionaries might be sent to instruct his people. In compliance with the request, Jerónimo Xavier, a nephew of St. Francis Xavier, was sent there in 1595 and succeeded in winning the favor of Akbar. The "Encyclopedia Britannica" informs us that Jerónimo, at the suggestion of the monarch, translated the four Gospels into Persian. Ranke adds in his "History of the Popes" that "while the Jesuit was there the insurrections of the Mahometans contributed to dispose the emperor towards the Christians, for in the year 1599 Christmas was celebrated at Lahore with the utmost solemnity. The manger and the leading facts of the Nativity were represented for twenty days consecutively, and numerous catechumens proceeded to the Church with palms in their hands to receive baptism. The emperor read, with great pleasure, a 'Life of Christ' composed in Persian, and a picture of the Virgin, copied from the Madonna del Popolo in Rome, was by his orders taken to the palace that he might show it to the women of his household. It is true that the Christians drew more favourable conclusions from these things than the facts justified; still, great progress was really made. Indeed, after the death of Akbar, three princes of the blood royal were solemnly baptized. They rode to the church on white elephants, and were received with the sound of trumpets, kettle-drums and martial music. This took place in 1610, so that Christianity seemed gradually to acquire a position of a fixed character, although suffering from certain vicissitudes and the prevalence of fickleness in the matter of religious opinion. Political considerations, also, largely affected the public mind. In 1621 a college was founded in Agra, and a station established at Patna. In 1624 hopes were entertained that the Emperor Jehanguire would himself become a Christian."
Shortly after Jerónimo Xavier had settled down in the court of the Great Mogul, Father Robert de Nobili, a nephew of Cardinal Bellarmine, broke through the caste barrier in India in a way that, for a time, gave considerable scandal. He had gone to the mission of Madura, a territory somewhat in the interior towards the northeast of the Fisheries, and found there that Father Fernandes, a very pious and energetic missioner who had been living for fourteen years among his pagans, had never made a convert, as he could not get in touch with the influential people of the country. Two difficulties stood in the way: first, he was a Portuguese or a Prangui, and the Prangui were held in abhorrence, because they ate meat and drank wine; secondly, he mingled with the most degraded castes of India.
De Nobili determined to get rid of these obstacles. First, he insisted, that he was not a Prangui but a Roman nobleman in name and in fact; secondly, with regard to wine and meat, he would abstain from them and live on rice; thirdly, he would become a Brahmin, as far as their manner of life and dress was concerned, and, moreover, he would outdo them in the knowledge of their own language, literature and religion. Indeed, within a year, he was master of Tamil, Telugu and Sanskrit. He was now equipped for his work, and in 1606 he bade good-bye to Fernandes, and shut himself up in a hut which, for a long time, no one was allowed to enter. He wanted the news to spread among the natives that a great European Brahmin had made his appearance. Curiosity, he said, would do the rest, for his rigid seclusion would make them all the more intent on seeing him. The scheme succeeded, and when, at last, visitors were admitted to speak to him, they found him to be even holier in appearance than they had imagined him to be, and were amazed to hear him converse in Tamil, and show a perfect acquaintance with the literature of the language. He made it a point, also, to recite and even to sing the songs of their poets, for he was an able musician and had a good voice.
When his reputation was established he began to discuss some of the truths of fundamental theology, not as coming from himself, but which, as he showed them, were actually set down in their own Vedas. His knowledge of Sanskrit — perhaps he was the first European to venture into that field — had given him a more thorough knowledge of the sacred books than was possessed by any of the Brahmins themselves, and hence it happened that, before a year had passed, he had baptized several persons who were conspicuous both for their nobility and learning. He permitted his converts to continue to besmear their foreheads with sandal-wood paste, to cultivate the tuft of hair on the top of their heads, and to wear a string on the left shoulder. He did this after he had thoroughly convinced himself that there was no superstition in such practices. Meantime he was living on milk, rice, herbs and water, which were handed to him once a day by the servant of a Brahmin. It was a precaution to forestall any suspicion that other food was supplied surreptitiously.
In the second year, his flock was so numerous that the hut he lived in was insufficient to contain them all, and he had to build a church. That, of course, caused some alarm among the Brahmins, but it was nothing in comparison to the storm that de Nobili's life excited in Europe. Cardinal Bellarmine, his uncle, thought he had apostatized, and wrote him an indignant letter, and the General of the Society added to it a very severe reprehension. His brother Jesuit, Fernandes, had denounced him as a traitor, because of his rejection of the name "Prangui," or Portuguese, and also of his connivance at idolatry in allowing his neophytes to retain their heathenish customs. This was the origin of the famous question of the "Malabar Rites" which created such a stir in the Church, one hundred years later. These charges gave de Nobili a great deal of trouble for some time, but at last everything was satisfactorily explained, and the cardinal, the General and the Pope told the innovating missionary to continue as he had begun. Hence in order to obviate the apparent neglect and even contempt of the lower castes, other priests were assigned to that work, and de Nobili restricted himself to his peculiar vocation for forty-two years. He then lost his sight and was sent to Jafanapatam in Ceylon, and afterwards to Mylapore, where he died on January 16, 1656.
The mission had prospered. About the time de Nobili ended his labours, it had an average of 5000 converts a year, and it never dropped below 3000, even in the times of persecution. At the end of the seventeenth century its territory had extended beyond Madura to Mysore, Marava, Tanjore and Gingi, and the Christians of the entire Madura Mission, as it was called, amounted to 150,000 souls. Besides being a field for apostolic zeal, the mission also produced eminent scholars in Tamil and Sanskrit, like Beschi, Cœurdoux, and others. In 1700 it reached into the Carnatic and probably took in what Christians had been left there by the missionaries among the Moguls. This mission glories in its great martyr, John de Britto, who arrived there twelve years after the death of de Nobili. He, too, adopted the manners of a Saniassi, and labored as such for twenty-one years. It was a life of continual and horrible martyrdom. He was finally put to death as a magician, because of the multitudes of people attracted to the Faith by his holiness and teaching. Like his predecessor de Nobili, he did not worry his converts about their tufts of hair or the cotton cords on their shoulders, and it is noteworthy that long after his death, and just while the process of his beatification was going on, the theologians were hotly discussing the liceity of the Malabar Rites. If they were condemned, how would the decision affect de Britto's canonization? Pope Benedict XIV decided that it would not stand in the way, and so de Britto was placed among the Blessed.