Compel People to Come In

Violence and Catholic Conversions in the non-European World

Autori Vari

• Publisher: Viella Libreria Editrice
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9788833134277
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

"Compelle intrare": since the time of St Augustine, St Luke's words in the parable of the Banquet have served as a justification for forced conversion to Christianity. Challenging this tradition, in 1686 Pierre Bayle denounced how a literal interpretation of the parable had led to a long line of crimes, and argued that "nothing is more abominable than obtaining conversion by coercion".In recent decades, scholarly research on conversion in the Early Modern Age has increasingly focused on intriguing aspects such as the fluidity of converts' identity and their crossing of borders – both geographical and confessional. This book takes a different perspective and brings the focus back to the dark side of conversion, to the varying degrees of violence that accompanied Catholic missionary activities in the non-European World in the 16th and 17th centuries. The essays collected here examine three areas where, sometimes visibly, sometimes much more subtly, the violent aspects of conversion took shape: doctrine, missionary practice, and the conversion narratives. Investigating the connection between violence and conversion is a way to reflect not only on the early modern world, but also on that of the present day, when conversion – including by coercion – has yet again become a significant issue.

Chiara Petrolini

A Sweet Conversion: Tommaso Campanella’s Quod Reminiscentur

For the success of the 1599 anti-Spanish conspiracy in Calabria and the subsequent foundation of a republic and a religion founded on freedom,476 Tommaso Campanella and the other conspirators knew that they would need to rely on external forces. They sought, and found, this help with the Turks: through the corsair Amurat Raìs, they managed to gain the support of Scipione Cicala (Cigala-Zade Yusuf Sinan), a renowned renegade who had made an extraordinary rise through the social ranks of the Ottoman Empire.477 Member of an illustrious family of Genoese origin that had settled in Messina, during the ‘pirate wars’ Scipione Cicala, along with his father, had been captured by a Turkish ship off the island of Marettimo, Sicily. Taken in chains to Istanbul and into the presence of the Sultan, after abjuring Catholicism he entered the Janissary corps, where he quickly became the favourite of Selim II, son of Süleyman the Magnificent. In 1591 he was appointed Grand Admiral of the Ottoman fleet. Now, that same Cicala had undertaken to come to the conspirators’ aid from the sea, with 60 boats and 100 pieces of artillery. The Turkish boats were indeed sighted off the coast of Calabria, but they never received the agreed signal to disembark, because the revolt was snuffed out at the very start and repressed with the utmost violence. Hundreds were arrested and some conspirators were hanged and their corpses displayed in public. Others were dismembered. Dionigio Ponzio, a Dominican and a good friend of Campanella’s, and the first, with him, to conceive of the insurrection, was tortured twice and left disfigured and unable even to grasp his pen (he had to hold it in his mouth) to sign the trial statement. He was sentenced to abjure de vehementi but then, in 1602, he managed to escape. Disguising himself as a Turk, he boarded a Maltese galley and took refuge in Istanbul, in the palace of the powerful Cicala. In just a few weeks the man who had been accused by the Holy Office of having claimed «that there was no God but nature»478 converted to Islam and began to preach to the renegades, inciting them to fight against the Christians. He said – according to the Venetian bailo – that Campanella (who kept a portrait of the sultan in his cell)479 would also soon escape and that he too would move to Istanbul, from where he would cause «very great harm to the Christian religion».480 But things turned out very differently: Ponzio died shortly after, stabbed in a fight. As for Campanella, he feigned madness to avoid execution and spent the next 27 years in prison.

This tale of reversals of fortune, of promised and failed conversions, of brutal violence dealt and suffered, acts as a prelude to and helps clarify the subsequent development of the idea of peaceful and global conversion proposed by Campanella.

1. Beyond the friend/foe dichotomy?

Chained in the dark in the fossa, the humid, underground cell in Castel Sant’Elmo in Naples, and in total isolation, Campanella attained the utmost mental concentration. In abjection he experienced what he himself insisted on calling ‘conversion’ (which, however, had nothing in common with the great paradigms of Paul and Augustine).481 In other words, the transition from a natural and sceptical philosophy of a Telesian stamp to militant Catholicism. And he dedicated to his own conversion and that of the peoples of the world one of the books most dear to him because he wrote it – as he said – almost «forced by God». That book was Quod Reminiscentur, which he began in 1606 and completed in 1618,482 four years before the establishment of Propaganda Fide, of which it was, as Luigi Firpo wrote, «a singular and brilliant foretaste».483

In a series of studies devoted to idolatry, Jan Assmann suggests applying to monotheistic religions Carl Schmitt’s view that the essence of politics lies in the distinction between friend and foe. According to Assmann, it is indeed monotheistic religions that «divide the world». This polarising power is the origin of the violence that springs from religion: it is rooted in the distinction between true and false and the obsession with idolatry. Hence the drive for proselytism and «the semantics of breaking away, of exclusion, of conversion».484 Assmann’s assertion, rooted in the Enlightenment, may be questionable,485 but it is borne out by most 17th-century conversion treatises, narratives and practices. This is not the case, however, with Tommaso Campanella’s Quod Reminiscentur, a grand project of global conversion. In this quadripartite treatise – especially in the second book, devoted to Gentiles – the friend/foe dichotomy is firmly rejected in favour of a radically alternative vision of the relationship between Christianity and non-European idolatrous cults. It lays out a plan for the universal conversion of the peoples that combines neo-Platonism, concepts such as the consensus gentium, prophecy, and hermeticism. Along with this, there is a deeply moving element of autobiography and introspection,486 a premonition of an imminent catastrophe, a consciousness of the way geographical discoveries have radically changed perceptions of space, and a creative use of the narratives of missionaries and travellers. The result is a work of amazing originality and interest which combines a meditation on an individual conversion, experienced first-hand by Campanella, with the need for the conversion of all as the solution to the crisis the century was undergoing, to heal a world dominated by violence and irrationality.487 I have decided to concentrate on Campanella because a viewpoint that is apparently off-centre, and genuinely philosophical, may offer a useful perspective on the missionary literature of the period. Campanella was an avid consumer of reports by missionaries and travellers, both printed and manuscript, like those of the Dominican Domenico Bisanti,488 and sometimes even of oral accounts.489 Observing how material of this nature is re-assembled and reconfigured within the architecture of the renewal of knowledge and of ways of living elaborated by the philosopher confirms their adaptability, their capacity to generate results far removed from the intentions with which they were written. Quod Reminiscentur is built entirely from the information surrounding the many and most varied faiths discovered through these types of report: only by climbing the Tower of Babel of these infinite beliefs is it possible to see more clearly the profound and substantial order and unity of the world and its peoples. A Utopia of universal fraternity, Quod Reminiscentur was created in response to a violence that was systematically observed (in Calabria), suffered (in prison) and perceived as a distinguishing feature of a world in turmoil and intent on ruin. Campanella was certainly not the only person in those years to be thinking of global conversion. In 1613, in Antwerp, the prior of the Discalced Carmelites monastery in Brussels, Tomás de Jesus (Díaz Sánchez Dávila), published De procuranda salute omnium gentium, a hugely successful manual which shares with Campanella’s writing many elements of the missionary method.490 However, Quod Reminiscentur ‘stands alone’ because it is based on an unbreakable link between autobiography and philosophy, between personal experience and theology. Reading it, one cannot fail to think of the core of utterly private torment, both physical and moral, from which it sprang. In addition to being the fruit of a rigorous theological and philosophical rationale and a formulation of what Jean-Louis Fournel called «geosophy», that is, «a sort of wisdom of the territory which does not claim to describe it but includes it in a holistic and strongly centripetal system»,491 the books of Quod Reminiscentur are also books of, literally, ‘escape’: they open up an escape route from the brutalisation of a convicted man who, in his solitary cell, reproduces the world in all its multi-coloured variety and summarises it in four books. It is as though, from the annihilation perpetrated from the outside world by others, from a violence experienced systematically and perceived universally, Campanella had caused a sort of phantasmagoria to be unleashed.

However, it is important to immediately make one point clear: Campanella was not engaged in an abstract intellectual experiment, and certainly did not see himself as eccentric. He did not want just to imagine histor...

Table of contents

• Summary page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Introduction
• I. Thinking Conversion and Violence
• ‘Ad militandum’: Sacrifice and the Jesuit Mode of Proceeding
• Different Perceptions on the Topic of Forced Conversion, after the South Atlantic Experience
• Violence and Adaptability of the Word: Jesuits and Natives in Portuguese America (16th-17th Centuries)
• II. Conversions and Missions: Practicing Violence?
• From Dreams of Alliance and Mass Conversions to the Ambivalences of Court Life: Catholic Missionaries in Safavid Persia
• Violence, Identity and Conscience in the Context of the Japanese Catholic Missions (16th Century)
• Practices of Conversion in South India in the 16th and 17th Centuries: Strategies and Narratives
• Who Were the δοῦλος (Luke 14:23) in the Jesuit China Mission?
• Telling Conversion Stories: Loreto as a World Sacred Space (16th-17th Centuries)
• A Sweet Conversion: Tommaso Campanella’s Quod Reminiscentur
• Abstracts
• Notes on Contributors