Olivinho Gomes on Pre-Portuguese Christianity in Goa

From 26 August 2012, Goa:

Olivinho Gomes. Konkani Literature in Roman Script: A History. Panaji: Dalgado Konknni Akademi, 2010.

“The arrival of the Portuguese in Goa in 1510 and the activities of evangelization / proselytization of their missionaries that came in its wake, in which language played naturally a major part, marks a watershed of great importance in the creation of a distinctively Christian literature of excellence in it. But theirs was not the first introduction of Christianity into Goa, as had been believed for long. For a tradition did exist here that St. Bartholomew, one of the twelve Apostles of Jesus Christ, had brought and spread the Gospel in the Konkan region including God, in western India, as another of the Apostles, St. Thomas, had done in Kerala and Tamilnadu in the southern part of it.
“However, while the latter’s apostolate not only survived but thrived in southern India and established itself on a sound footing, the former’s did not succeed in striking roots strong enough to survive the onslaught inflicted on it later by other interests, religious and political. The result was that its existence and influence had waned considerably to the extent of its deterioration and merger with local Hindu cults to its ultimate conversion of Berthalameu in the Portuguese of the time [[but is this relevant, when we are talking about pre-Portuguese Christianity?]] to Betal, the homophonous Hindu god of fertility, and its virtual disappearance at the time of the Portuguese advent.
“However, their conqueror, Afonso de Albuquerque, mentions in his letters to the then reigning King Manuel I of Portugal, that he found in the excavations carried out in the fort of Banastarim that encircled and fortified the city of God, which he was repairing after his conquest of it, several crosses and an altarpiece with an engraved image of Lord Jesus Christ. This find was corroborated and reinforced by him by more blue and black crosses he stumbled upon on the Anjediva island off Karwar. [[This is new, but the references?]]
The residue of Christianity that survived in patches, however, brought about a very strong strain of devotion to the Cross and the Virgin Mary, the latter syncretically blended with the Mother Goddess of the local autochtonous [sic] culture. This in course of time seeped into the folk beliefs of the rural population of the area, giving a vigorous fillip to the composition of devotional poetry and music at the lowest rungs of the society. These compositions are thoroughly indigenous and do not display any Portuguese influence in the matter of their lexis, but have more of a Biblical flavor reminiscent of the early Christians of the first century, [[which would these compositions be?]] when Bartholomew preached in the Konkan, as attested in the hagiographic Passio Bartholomei and whose suffering and martyrdom is reflected in its raw and harrowing depiction in Vonvallyanco Mollo (1658-59), the massive five-tomed Konkani magnum opus of the Portuguese Jesuit Miguel de Almeida.” [Gomes 9-10]
Jesse-chi Talli, tum ge
Zolmoli aiz,
Tum Jezu-chi mata Mori,
Ankvar niz.
Davidachi gofinn tum ge,
Hatiar Golia-chem,
Sins kaplem tuvem
Holofernichem.
Moizeci betkantti tum ge.
Boli Kristanvancem.
Tem xar ibaddleim tuvem
Faravya rayacem.
Voikunttachem zhadd tum ge,
Foll am’rutachem;
Jivit rakhleim tuvem
Mon’xeakullacem. [Gomes 11-12.]
Santa Khursa,
Mornnachya tum polonga,
Ami somest loku,
Nomoskar kortanv tuka. [Gomes 12.]

“But they do not seem to have any religious sanction behind them and are not normally sung within the precincts of a church or a chapel.” [Gomes 13.]

Some other points gathered from Olivinho Gomes:

The earliest script in which Konkani is written is Kandvi – akin to but different from the Kannada of its onetime rulers. [Gomes xv.]

First European traveler to Goa, after its conquest by the Portuguese, is Tome Pires, himself Portuguese. Pires made notes of his travels in the East (1512-15). He indicates Konkani as quite distinct from Deccani or Marathi north of the Kharepattan river, and Kannada on the east and south. [Gomes 1-2.]

The King of Portugal present a printing press to Matheus, envoy of Ethiopia, “to be delivered to its famous Prester John, the / legendary Christian king in the East, with whom the Portuguese wished to establish contact as an ally in their political and religious designs in the region”. [2-3.] This press landed in Goa, as was the custom for all things destined for other areas, and from there was dispatched to the king through the Red Sea route. [[remember that there was no Suez Canal!]] The ship was caught in a storm and had to return to Goa. It was then thought that this was God’s will, and was installed in Goa, in September 1556. In the College of St Paul, just taken over by the Jesuits and named from the Seminary of the Holy Faith started by the Francicans Miguel Vaz and Diogo de Borba. Its first printer, a Spaniard called Juan Bustamente. Started operations in the Roamn script for which he had the fonts and types ready. [Gomes 2-3.]

First books: Francisco Cabral, Conclusoes de Logica, 1556. Manuel Teixeira, Conclusoes de Filosofia, 1556. [Gomes 3.]

Third: Andre Vaz [probably], Doutrina Christam [in Konkani, Roman script]. Vaz was a senior Goan seminarian, a Ksatriya / Chaddhi / Chardo ‘gaunkar’ from Kormbolli (Carambolim), later the first Goan Catholic priest, ordained in 1558. Based on the popular catechism of Marcos Jorge, then popular in Europe and known to the clergy in Goa. Adapted to the needs of his Goan parishioners. [3-4.] This is the first printed book in any language in India, and that in Konkani. [4.] So popular that it was reprinted in 1560, “as reported in the chronicles of the period.” Unfortunately no copy has survived “the fierce onslaught on these religious Orders that was decreed by several Portuguese governments, notably in 1758 on the Jesuits and later on all other religious Orders in J.A. Aguiar’s infamous mata-frades (priests’-killer) decree of 1834, and the sheer neglect and indifference that it was subjected to by later generations of the missionaries and apathy from its own people oppressed by a self-depression.” [Gomes 4.]

Andre Vaz was also credited with the first draft grammar of Konkani, on the basis of which he taught the foreign priests. [Gomes 4.]

Pre-Portuguese Christianity in Goa

25 August 2012, Goa. The visit to Fr Almir at Grace Church, Chorao, near the Madel Ferry to Ribandar, was extremely interesting. Julian had been mentioning the existence of a Seminary in Chorao, but I had never ever heard of such a thing, so I discounted it straightaway. What a surprise to find a drawing of a magnificent seminary precisely at Chorao, hanging in the little sitting room of Grace Church Rectory. Fr Almiro said that the ruins were still visible, but that the property, which belonged to a Christian bhatcar now, was filled with Hindu tenants who were naturally unwilling to leave. The bhatcar seems to have some intention of returning the property to the Jesuits, to whom it had originally belonged. Probably because of the plague, the seminary was eventually shifted to St Paul’s in Old Goa. Eventually that seminary or college also fell into ruin.

Another interesting piece of conversation with Fr Almir was about pre-Portuguese Christianity in Goa. There is a huge church of St Bartholomew in Chorao, overlooking one of the inlets of the Mandovi, and facing the Pomburpa church. The Chorao Seminary was also facing the river, as is evident from the drawing. Fr Almiro was very enlightening on this point: he said the main mode of transportation in those days was water, and so naturally the biggest and richest houses faced the river, as also the churches and seminaries. Chorao was the abode of the fidalgos, until the plague, and of rich Christian bhatcars. There were almost no Hindus at the time, according to him, and no Muslims at all. (He did not seem to have heard of the old temple near the Divar ferry in Chorao, however.)

So back to Bartholomew and pre-Portuguese Christianity in Goa: Fr Almiro said he believed this was true. When the Portuguese came, they found local Christians dating from Bartholomew and Thomas. They accepted them but destroyed all traces of their pre-Portugese Christianity. Unfortunately, Bartholomew had degenerated into Betal. The Portuguese heaped ridicule on Betal, which is why the familiar ditty:

Nagdo Betaro, xetan bhounvtalo
Xetcarachem mut pieun ghara ietalo.

I remembered this ditty from childhood days, but I had always heard it as “nagdo petaro”. It would seem the right thing is Betaro, or Betal or Vetal.

Despite this, there is indeed a church to St Bartholomew on the island, and it must count as one of the oldest churches in Goa, seeing that the Portuguese first settled on the islands, Ilhas. There is of course another one in Betal-batim in South Goa, or at least a famous altar to St Bartholomew, which, according to a recent editorial in the Herald, the locals still refer to as Betal or Sao Betal. And then the Aldona Church is dedicated to St Thomas.

The interesting thing is that Fr Almiro knew H.O. Mascarenhas, and had even met him in Madras in the old days, and it was from Mascarenhas that he learnt all these things.

He did not seem to know that St Francis Xavier, a few months after landing in Goa, wrote to Ignatius or to Rome speaking about the great devotion of the Goans to St Thomas, and asking for the possibility of celebrating the feast on 3 July…. Cosme Costa concludes that this devotion must antedate the Portuguese presence.

In addition, there is the fact of the surname Nazareth in Vaddem and around. Nazareth is not a Portuguese form, but an Anglicised form – of what? Probably Nozru – I remember Longinus Nazareth telling me that the old ladies of Vaddem would call him Nozrucho put, or Nordrucho put. Nozru – very close to Nasrani, which is the way Christians are still referred to in the Arabic speaking world.

And then the discovery of the St Thomas cross by Cosme Costa near Agacaim.

Person and relation

9 August 2012, Nashik: Joaquim D'Souza said something about my question, Is relation part of the definition of person and why not. He gave me a book: Edoard-Henri Weber, Le Christ selon Saint Thomas d’Aquin. Sounds suspiciously like Pickstock and Blanchette who I criticized in my Arthos review. So perhaps Thomas is more complex than I imagine, and I need to be careful not to absolutize Lonergan’s interpretation. Lonergan may be right; but there may be more. 

Milbank's rejection of unilateral gift

So: Milbank rejects ethics as unilateral gift and sacrifice, in favour of ethics as gift-exchange and openness to divine grace. He will make more explicit the grounds for this rejection by dealing with each of the four notions:

1. Unilateral gift. Such an idea, by making absolute one's inalienable self-possession of a will to sacrifice, preserves the Hellenic notion of the ethical as the overcoming of moral luck. This is true even if, or especially if, as for Derrida, this belonging or identity is secured only when one is dead. [Milbank also takes issue here with Marion, but I cannot make sense of what he says.] The point is that there is no true respect for the other here. The gesture which allows the other to persist outside of his communication with you is seen as more defnitive of the good than living communication. [This also is not clear, unless it takes off from the remark about Marion.] It is not surprising, says Milbank, that Levinas sees the other as only genuinely present in 'trace,' not in present image [why image?]. (122)

Milbank instead insists that if we truly value the other, we must value meeting him in his specificity, [and therefore in living interaction]. He admits / that such encounter might require, in certain circumstances, the sacrifice of oneself, even to death. We can even say that in a fallen world the path to the recovery of mutual giving will always pass through an element of apparently unredeemed sacrifice and apparently unilateral gift. [This is - good!] But the point is that this gesture is not in itself the good. It is not good at all outside the hope for a redemptive return of the self [= resurrection] - even though this is an eschatological hope "which never permits us to expect a return at any particular place or specific moment of time, or to elicit any specific mode of return." [Again, perfect.] (122-3)

To speak of such a return is not to fall from gift to contract: actual life is not a mode of self-possession that we then surrender in the sacrifice unto death. [The argument about the fall from gift to contract presupposes the understanding of life as self-possession. M rejects that presupposition] Rather, when we give, sometimes with sacrificial pain, we receive ourselves back as true abundant life. The resurrection preserves this logic at its limit: it is not an extrinsic super-added reward for the giving up of an (illusory) self-possessed life. It is the final surrender of an isolated life which issues in a better more abundant life. (123)

What distinguishes gift from contract is not the absolute freedom and non-binding character of the gift, but the surprisingness and unpredictability of gift and counter-gift, their character as asymmetrical reciprocity, and as non-identical repetition. Gift as absolute freedom and as non-binding is the Western counterpart to the reduction of exchange to contract. Mauss seems to have criticized this; according to Milbank, Derrida and Marion have not assimilated this critique. [More probably in Milbank's ... See n22 here.] Derrida of course regards the free unilateral gift as an impossibility: short of death, one always cancel's one's giving in receiving something back, be it only the consciousness that one is a giver. Thus only the dead person [who has sacrificed himself] can be a true giver. So also the only disinterested gift is to an absolutely anonymous other - the enemy, at the limit, as Marion says. And such a gift cannot possess any content beyond the gesture of giving, because, on this construal, there is nothing in an object that makes it in itself a gift. [It is the intention or else the gesture of giving that makes it gift.] Milbank instead argues that it is the content alone that determines whether a gift is appropriate, and therefore gift at all. (123)

So for Derrida, the gift is only ever a promise of a gift, perpetual postponement. And Marion's attempt will not work. A reduced gift which is no identifiable object, derives from no known source, and passes to no known / recipient can only be recognized in a way that makes no difference to actual ethical life. Such recognition involves only the idol of an abstract God. and where there is no intimation whatsoever of the source, gift is simply an impersonal intrusion. Its lack of content makes it arbitrary on our part to interpret it as gift. And where there is no knowledge of a recipient, and one assumes even that he is hostile, there cannot be a gift. A true gift must be appropriate to a donee; one must have already entered into an exchange with her. Gift-giving is a mode of social being. Ignoring this, both Derrida and Marion remain trapped in Cartesian subjectivity. At least Derrida, against Marion, deconstructs his Cartesian starting point when he insists that such a pure unilateral gift can never occur. "If there is a gift that can truly be, then this mut be the event of reciprocal, but asymmetrical and non-identically repeated exchange." (123-4)

2. Death as the necessary condition of the ethical. This celebrates something negative as the precondition of something positive in a way that is self-contradictory. [he says he has already shown how this is so.] A self-surrender without hope of self-return gives up on hope for ecstatic communication, for feasting and marriage, which is the only viable paradigm of the good. [again, already shown].

This paradigm is fully articulated only by Christianity, but is anticipated by Plato in the Phaedo. Socrates rejects the idea of warriors dying out of fear for loss of honour: this virtue as coinage, an exchange which is exemplified in the market economy, which is a sacrificial economy. The philosopher, instead, begins with absolute confidence, with the vision of the Forms, with positivity, without fear. The philosopher is good as first merely knowing, as receiving the vision of the Forms, not as acting or sacrificing in the sense of giving up something. Only in a secondary moment, out of plenitude of vision, if there is need, does he offer himself entirely, as it happened to Socrates. Nothing is lost here; instead, there is passage from lesser to greater, from weak participations to the fuller reality. / The Christian martyrs similarly begin from plenitude of paradisal vision in their acceptance of suffering. (124-5)

3. The reduction of God, lest his reward damage the purity of the gift

4. The gift as unilateral can only be realized in a secular sphere. This notion tries to occlude from our view the role of the city or state intervening to maintain civic order. This role can be seen in the way 'sacrifice' transmuted from practice to metaphor. Two moments in this shift:

4.1 Greek sacrifice involved a 'giving up,' offering, or sacrifice of material passion in favour of its sublimation. This is seen in the way the same scents and spices were involved in both erotic play and in religious sacrifice. After Pythagoras, e.g. among the Neoplatonists, we have not so much the offering of passion as the transmutation of passion into a higher passion. Sacrifice here is initiatory passage rather than gift or offering. It is only perhaps with Paul that we get the language of 'sacrifice of passions' in the sense of internalization of sacrifice. Here there is no vertical deviation of horizontal scents and spices. Rather, Paul is talking about an offering of self to a personal God, implicitly trusting in the return of self in a more abundant way. (125)

4.2 The death of the hero for the city was considered by Greeks and Romans as equivalent to sacrifice. (125)

In both these instances, there is the subsumption of something real into a greater whole, be it the city or the cosmos. There is loss without return, though there is the possibility of posthumous glory [see Achilles]. (125)

Modern / secularity gets rid even of such shadowy intimations of after-life, and so perfects pagan logic. Nineteenth century positivism spoke of altruism or self-surrender for the future, for science, for the state. 'Postmodern' or else Levinasian thinkers speak of the good, the moral act, or self-giving sacrifice as perpetual postponement. (See this notion as involved in the death of the hero, or in dying for the city, or for future generations: since every generation is subject to the same imperative, the consummation is perpetually postponed. [But: isn't there some betterment that we all experience, precisely because someone was brave enough to sacrifice himself?]) (126)

Milbank finds a surprising counterpoint to the above in John Buchan's novel Midwinter, where the hero puts the salvation of a young girl whom he loves before his political cause. He sacrifices (an idolatrous and finally merely nominal) all to the singular, "and so affirmed the resurrection hope for the return of each and every one, beyond the aporia of sacrificial options." [Hence the title of Milbank's essay: "The Midwinter Sacrifice". Not Shakespearean, as I assumed, despite the fact that M does make use of Shakespeare.] (126)

Milbank's claim: "the idea of self-sacrifice unto death without return for the sake of 'the whole,' even if that be the rule of moral duty to an unspecified other, is not at all the true moral kernel of the Jewish and Christian legacy." (126) He acknowledges a tension even in the NT. Derrida, he says, chooses to favour tedts like not inviting to feasts those who can invite you back (Lk 6:32-5) as the Christian essence. But Milbank stresses John's gospel, where there is no mention of loving enemies, where love circulates among friends, where there are erotic gestures, where the disciples are described as the Father's gift to the Son, just as the Son is his gift to the disciples. [The stress on mutuality, exchange, even if asymmetrical.] (127)

Someone might argue that Christianity has combined both perspectives on giving [non-reciprocal, and exchangist]. Milbank says it might have, but the higher perspective is that of reciprocity, "even though the eschatological character of this goal requires a 'quasi-unilaterial' moment for the gift in our fallen present time." The gift from the divine is to be returned from below, as the return of humanity to the Father. The gift of the Holy Spirit results from and manifests the mutuality of Father and Son. The Son offers himself not for the earthly city, not as giving up something for a greater something else, but 'for his friends.' Even this giving / dying is not so that they might live their self-possessed lives while he has lost his - as if he were saving them from drowning. It is rather in defence of the truth he has taught, the absolute creative power of the Father, maintained and fully taught in his resurrected return. (127)

This return is commemorated in the eucharist: we offer bread and wine, and immediately receive them back as God's flesh and blood. In the eucharist we enter in advance into the eschatological banquet and nuptials, "into the realm where once again we can entirely trust our every act as good precisely because we know that it will not merely follow our intention but be transformed and given back to us in a different and surprising mode." (127)

In the eucharist we see the only possible paradigm for gift and therefore for ethics, "not as one-way sacrifice but as total surrender for rereception." (128) Within this paradigm we can realize that, to the degree we are involved in some sense at some time in feast and marriage, we already participate in the resurrection. Here we give up everything, not for the earthly city, not even primarily for others, but 'absurdly' to God, in order to confess our inherent nothingness and to receive life as created anew. "Here we hold on to nothing, here we possess nothing securely, in contrast with exclusively ethical models which are also sacrificial. here instead we render ourselves entirely prey to the mere good fortune that it might turn out that we have been ethical. But the name of this fortune is secretly grace, the gift or the Good...." (128)

***

Unilateral gift as unethical

The unredeemed, unilateral gift, according to Milbank, is not in itself the good, and, indeed, not good at all outside the hope for resurrection, for a redemptive return of the self. (123) Why, I need to ask. Because perhaps "there is no true respect for the other involved here" (122). Because in the end it makes absolute "one's inalienable self-possession of a will to sacrifice and so preserves the Hellenic notion of the ethical as the overcoming of moral luck." (122)

Dis-ease

Reading Milbank on gift, the ethical, and so on, I feel quite excited, but also choked: there is so much to get into here, such complexity, so many things I have never quite entered into, not mastered at all. The ethical and what it might truly be. The ethical and the religious. The ethical and the Christian. And then so much to master also in Lonergan. The ethical certainly; but also the realm of cognitive interiority, especially the early notions of operation, perhaps in Gratia Operans. The whole area of the Latin theology. the Trinity. Essential and notional love. Causality. Meaning. 

This is one of the roots of my dis-ease with Milbank: that he has chosen to take issue with Lonergan in his book on Aquinas. So either he has misunderstood Lonergan, or he is right. Either way, the dis-ease. Or perhaps, the dis-ease is because of not having got to the bottom of this question. 

Milbank excites me like the complex of ideas brewing in the Gregorian and in Rome in the early 1990s did. A complex that excited my imagination, but which I never did get to the bottom of. A complex involving somehow Henrici, and perhaps von Balthasar, and certainly Blondel; and John Paul II; and somehow suspecting Lonergan as cognate. Action - being - the primacy of the existential - love - Trinity - unity - marriage - eschatology - feast - resurrection. There was a book there, and there is a book here. And what if all this is set into motion against the background of Sankara, for example. 

What excited me about Plascencia was the way he was able to turn upside down received notions, one of them being that of disinterested love: God's love is a love that looks for and longs for return. Don Bosco intuited that. And so our model cannot be disinterested love. Even if love does not stop being love for lack of (immediate) response. Milbank intuits these complexities well on his p. 123. 

The ethical, grace and resurrection

Milbank's own summary of his argument:

1. The ethical "is only genuinely imaginable as a mutual and unending gift-exchange, construed as an absolute surrender to moral luck or absolute faith in the arrival of the divine gift, which is grace."
2. The sustaining of such an exchange "requires a notion of resurrection and faith in the reality of participation in resurrection." (121)

The complex of ideas: the ethical as gift-exchange, feast, marriage, resurrection. The first element, gift-exchange is figured by the feast or by marriage. It is appropriately combined with the second, resurrection, in terms of the heavenly banquet or the eschatological marriage of God and humanity. [And here, all the echoes of John Paul II's Theology of the Body.]

[I suspect that Milbank is doing a phenomenology of the notion of the ethical, and he finds that this notion collapses without 'total exposure' to grace and the notion resurrection and participation in resurrection. If this be true, I would think that morality would still be possible for atheists and in general for people who do not have proper and consistent notions of the ethical and who do not believe in grace and resurrection. Simply because, whatever the explicit pole of the horizon, what matters ultimately is the reality of grace given.]

Milbank is seeking to deliberately oppose a recent consensus "which would try to understand the ethical as primarily self-sacrifice for the other, without any necessary 'return' issuing from the other back to oneself." [Note the idea of return or response: Benedict XVI surprisingly stressed response as a constitutive element in love, in Deus Caritas Est and then in his Message for Lent 2007, noting that, in the bible, even God ardently desires our response, 'like a bridegroom that of his bride.' Jose' Luis Plascencia had picked up and highlighted this idea in his retreat talks to the 26th General Chapter of the Salesians of Don Bosco in 2008.] [Note also that Milbank does not discount self-sacrifice completely. What he is setting aside is the idea of the ethical as primarily or purely self-sacrifice.]

[The way Milbank is proceeding reminds me of I.M. Crombie's response to Flew, the way he invoked central ideas in Christianity, including resurrection, if I recall right. - The point is that I am trying to sort out the methodological question. Perhaps: what is philosophy and what theology? Milbank is certainly blowing up received ideas of the distinction. In a manner analogous to that of Lonergan? Or radically different?]

This consensus itself involves a complex of ideas:

1. That only an entirely self-sacrificial giving without expectation of a counter-gift distinguishes the gift from a form of self-interested contract. [I.e., gift does not involve response; such a response, or expectation of response, would destroy it as gift and turn it into a contract or exchange.] [Milbank is blowing up the idea of gift as completely disinterested, and, probably, of love and of the ethical as completely disinterested.]

2. That death, "far from being complicit with evil, is the necessary condition for the event of the ethical as such." The reasons for this are two:

2.1 Only our vulnerability, the possibility that we might die, allows us to make an appeal as needy people to our neighbour. Our vulnerability is therefore the condition for the ethical demand.

2.2 Only the capacity of the ethical subject "to respond to the needy person if necessary with his own death, guarantees his deed as truly ethical, as truly disinterested gift." (122)

3. 'God' must be reduced to "a shadowy hypostatized other," because any God who interfered to reward the disinterested giver would be damaging the purity of this disinterest and of the ethical.

4. The true nobility and purity of religious self-sacrifice [and of the ethical] is only realized in a secular realm.

This consensus involves Patocka, Derrida, and probably Levinas. The first point [pure disinterested gift] is espoused by Marion though he does not see that it leads logically to the other three. [Ciglia described Marion yesterday as a Catholic 'a modo suo.']