The Mission as “Beyond” and Beyond the Mission

Abstract

The global enterprise of Christian mission in the early modern period involved diverse and even contrasting perspectives of the "Beyond". In the view of the missionaries the Beyond had a very clear spatial and temporal sense. It was a geographical place located beyond Christian culture itself, outside Europe, the missionaries imagined in different ways based on the stories already known or on the utopian conceptions. Asia, particularly China, was at the core of missionaries ambitions; also the Americas, as a radical confine of Christendom, the gentile space par excellence. The Beyond was for the missionaries the place of Otherness, whose diversity could be captured in ad hoc taxonomies: the chronicles of the Spiritual Conquest in the four parts of the world and the indipetae letters of the Jesuits, are proof of this awareness. Missions were conceived of as a place of radical confrontation that may cause a perfect death as a martyr. Once the mission was established, the Beyond was redefined in front of the local reality, from distinctions that marked the separation between Christian life and faithless life, the city and the territory of the devil. From a temporal point of view, the mission expressed a desire, a preparation for the afterlife, a passage from the life in the world, the temporal life strictu sensu, to the eternal life of salvation, beyond death. This conception of good death was exalted and embellished in the visual mapping of the missions through paintings of saints and martyrs of evangelization. Dualism imposed in this process intended to make a radical difference between the temporal and the eternal, between heaven and hell, insistently inculcated the Indians. But the Indians were not passive. The mission was in fact the result of an interaction, a negotiation, a contrast between missionary visions and natives visions. What were natives ideas about the Beyond Indians of South American jungles represented it as the domain away from the domestic space, the house, towards the rainforest and the world of the colonizer, inhabited by visible and invisible entities that could or could not have a human soul. Natives incorporated the missionaries in their own cosmological frameworks as sui generis beings, sometimes represented as non-human, "ghosts". In contrast to the vision of the missionaries, who establish a discrete distinction between the inside and the outside of the missions (a present Christian time and an infidel past life), converted Indians would construct a continuous relationship with the Beyond, breaking the established distinctions. Standing inside the mission, the converted Indians would redefine the rainforest as a place-time with which it is possible to establish a fluid connection. In any case, going Beyond required preparations (spiritual exercises, liturgy, shamanic session) that made a passage possible. We need to explore the internal logic of these contrasting views, finding the common grounds that ultimately made possible life in missions.