Saints and Signs

4. Francis Xavier as a sign: conversion between sameness and otherness (p. 321-322)


This chapter will inquire about the way in which early modern Catholic sanctity was represented in relation to the new contexts explored by the religious expansion of Europe toward other continents starting from the sixteenth century. As in the previous chapter, comparisons between the Catholic culture of sanctity in internal and external missions will be systematically carried on. However, in this chapter the barycenter of such a comparison will be moved toward the cultural ‘elsewhere’ of Asia.

Missionary contexts are extremely relevant for both a historical and a semiotic study of sanctity as a spiritual medium of early modern Catholicism. Firstly, most representations of religious transformation produced and diffused after the Council of Trent circulated in these contexts; secondly, as a consequence of the linguistic difficulties that often characterized the evangelization of non-European natives, such contexts, even more strikingly than the European ones, allow one to realize the importance of images and other non-verbal artifacts in both eliciting and re-presenting religious conversions through the evocation of sanctity; third, from a broader, semiotic point of view, the study of early modern Catholic ‘external’ missions is particularly suitable in order to shed new light on the way in which the European religious culture of this period would describe cultural ‘otherness’ and, even more important, the way in which the elimination of this difference (i.e., from the Catholic perspective, evangelization) was sought.

Needless to say, such a study is full of obstacles. In most cases, representations of sanctity as a medium of spiritual change in missionary contexts, be such representations verbal or non-verbal, of conversion or for conversion, tend to be the result of a projection of the religious imaginaire of Catholic Europe over the ‘infidels of the Indies’. Therefore, it is important not to forget that analyzing these texts one learns more about the religious imaginaire of the missionaries (and about the way in which they conceived the ‘infidels’ and the mutation of their hearts) than about the imaginaire of the ‘missioned’ ones (that is, those who were the target of the activity of evangelization).
The semiotic analysis of images and other artifacts, meant to represent sanctity as a medium of religious transformation, will reveal many significant features about the ‘audience’ of these texts. Yet, the historical sources that would be the most enlightening in this regard, i.e., the documents that the missioned ones themselves produced in order to describe their own religious conversion or that of their companions, are scarce or difficult to interpret (mainly because of the language in which they are written, in most cases unknown to the author of the present book). Despite these difficulties, historical research in this field has considerably progressed in recent years. Moreover, it is exactly in relation to this kind of contexts that the semiotics of religious discourse can turn out to be an extremely useful methodology, enabling one to deduce certain features of the religious imaginaire of the ‘infidels’ from the efforts that European missionaries made in order to effectively bring about their spiritual change.