Trent Pomplun: Divine Grace and the Play of Opposites

Loyola College in Maryland

 

In Prisoners of Shangri-la: Tibetan Buddhism and the West, Donald Lopez treats his readers to a provocative but entertaining history of Western fantasies about Tibet. Lopez discovers at the root of these fantasies a "play of opposites" between "the pristine and the polluted, the authentic and the derivative, the holy and the demonic, the good and the bad."¹ Not surprisingly, Catholic missionaries to Tibet play an important role in Lopez's history, and he depicts them as prisoners to the play of opposites par excellence. Truth be told, it is difficult to deny his charges; in a passage quoted by Lopez, the seventeenth-century Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher describes Tibetans' veneration of the Dalai Lama in these words:

Strangers at their approach fall prostrate with their heads to the ground, and kiss him with incredible Veneration, which is no other than that which is performed upon the Pope of Rome; so that hence the fraud and deceit of the Devil may easily and plainly appear, who by his innate malignity and hatred, in way of abuse hath transferred, as he hath done all the other Mysteries of the Christian Religion, the Veneration which is due unto the Pope of Rome, the only Vicar of Christ on Earth, unto the superstitious Worship of barbarous people.

Whence as the Christians call the Roman High-Priest Father of Fathers, so these Barbarians term their false Deity the Great Lama, that is, the Great High-Priest, the Lama of Lamas, that is, the High-Priest of High-Priests, because that from him, as from a certain Fountain, floweth the whole form and mode of their religion, or rather mad and brain-sick idolatry, whence also they call him the Eternal Father.²

Lopez explains this passage in light of what he calls the "doctrine" of demonic plagiarism, a relatively common belief among Christian theologians that resemblances between Christianity and other religions could be explained as parodies of the true faith authored by the Devil. Athanasius Kircher undoubtedly believed in such parodies; in point of fact, he had much stronger views about them than many of his contemporaries. But Lopez continues,

Why must this appearance be demonic? The answer derives in part from the Christian Church's claim to historical and ontological particularity. It is the [End Page 159] task of the missionary to transmit the word of particularity to those realms where it has not spread, to diffuse it from its unique point of origin. To carry its accoutrements from Rome in a time and to a place they could not possibly have been taken before, and to find them already there, suggests the workings of a power beyond history, which could only be seen as demonic.³

I would like to take issue with this unfortunately misleading presentation of Christian theology. No orthodox Catholic theologian believed that such appearances were necessarily demonic, nor did any think that demonic influences ruled out other, more positive, ones. A cursory reading of the writings of Ippolito Desideri, the Jesuit adventurer and missionary who lived in Tibet from 1716 to 1721, should demonstrate that Roman Catholic theologians developed several complex theories about the resemblances between Christians and non-Christians in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. If we situate the Jesuit missionary squarely in the theological currents of the seventeenth century, especially in debates about the salvation of non-Christians, I think we can come to see that the views of Roman Catholic missionaries about Tibetans, and non-Christians in general, were considerably more complex than Lopez imagines.

Ippolito Desideri on the Salvation of Tibetan Buddhists

Ippolito Desideri arrived in Lhasa on March 18, 1716. As a result of his acquaintance with Khang chen nas and Don grub tshe ring, Desideri quickly gained access to the court of the Qōśot Mongol chieftain Lha bzang Khan.⁴ Much to the missionary's delight, the Khan granted his request to preach the Gospel in Tibet with great enthusiasm and—if we are to believe Desideri's account—no small amount of paternal sentimentality. In order to facilitate his preaching, Desideri composed a small book explaining the errors of Tibetan religion and presented it to the chieftain in a solemn audience on January 6, 1717.⁵ The Khan took the book in his hands and untied its flowered silk wrapping himself. He then directed the missionary to sit next to his throne as he read the first few pages himself, occasionally objecting to Christians' belief in a single supreme being and their denial of reincarnation. A hearty debate followed and continued to midday. After considering Desideri's arguments, Lha bzang Khan decided the moment inopportune to make a decision about the future religion of Tibet; rather, he suggested that the Jesuit missionary hold a public disputation after he had become familiar with Buddhist philosophy. The missionary lost no time obeying the Khan's commands, which "agreed so perfectly" with his own.⁶

Desideri was a quick study. The book he presented to Lha bzang Khan freely used the religious terminology of the Padmasambhava and Avalokiteśvara cults that dominated early modern Tibetan religious culture, especially the language of the Padma thang yig and the Ma ni bka' 'bum.⁷ Although the missionary's later Italian account glossed over this initial exuberance, Desideri's small book implies that Tibetans worshiped God unwittingly as the infinitely compassionate Avalokiteśvara much as the [End Page 160] Areopagites had worshiped an "unknown god" (Acts 17:23). The missionary even presented the Gospel as a gter ma and himself as a gter ston, whose own treasure would teach Tibetans the nature of true compassion. Still, certain events in the life of Padmasambhava puzzled him; many bore an uncanny resemblance to events in Christ's own or to stories from Scripture and the lives of the saints.

One might well doubt whether Christianity was founded in these regions or whether some apostle came here long ago. Such suspicion may be reasonably grounded by a great many things in the Tibetan sect and religion that bear a great resemblance to the mysteries of our holy faith; to our ceremonies, institutions, and ecclesiastical hierarchy; to the maxims and moral principles of our holy law; and to the rules and teachings of Christian perfection.⁸

There is no indication that Desideri had resolved this doubt when he presented his first book to Lha bzang Khan. As he learned more, particularly about Avalokiteśvara and the bodhisattva's role in the birth of the Tibetan race, Desideri decided that there was "no credible indication" that Tibetans had once been Christian.⁹ Certain Buddhist phenomena, such as the three jewels, bore a resemblance to the Holy Trinity nonetheless:

The three complex objects of adoration, namely their primary and supreme saints, the books or laws they have given to the world, and the most faithful and perfect observers of those laws, I declare are totally separate from and opposed to the three persons of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but if you consider the principle attributes of the Most Holy Trinity on the one hand with the quality of these three complex objects of adoration on the other, one might wonder whether this complex trinity may be an obscure symbol or blind fable of the true and most august divine Trinity.¹⁰

The extent to which Desideri considered this question during the remainder of his stay in Tibet is open to debate. In any event, he did not seriously entertain it in his later Tibetan writings. I will reserve an explanation for this curious absence in the second part of this essay; for our present purposes, it is enough to note that the tone of Desideri's dialogue with Tibetan Buddhists changed when he moved in August 1717 to the great university attached to Se ra monastery. Although the lively philosophical disputations at Se ra quite impressed the young Jesuit, Desideri's study of Madhyamaka established, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that Tibetans denied the existence of God and providence.

Desideri would not have time to convince the monks of Se ra of their errors. When the Jungars, an Oirat Mongol tribe from the plains northwest of Tibet, invaded Tibet on November 30, 1717, Desideri fled to Dwags po and took up residence with the Capuchins. In Dwags po, Desideri wrote three works in Tibetan, largely in isolation from the vibrant philosophical community he enjoyed earlier at Se ra.¹¹ In these works, Desideri used Madhyamaka reasoning to demonstrate to Tibetans that emptiness and reincarnation, the two Buddhist teachings that stood [End Page 161] diametrically opposed to the existence of God and providence, were philosophically incoherent. Here, too, Desideri's labors were interrupted. The Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith awarded the Tibetan mission to his Capuchin rivals in 1719, forcing the Jesuit to leave Lhasa on April 28, 1721. When he left, the missionary's magnum opus, the I po li do'i zhu ba, lay unfinished, halted abruptly on its four hundred and sixty-fourth page. Desideri took it, his other Tibetan writings, and his working notes when he descended the Tibetan plateau, thereby denying Tibetan philosophers the opportunity to respond to his arguments. Desideri returned to Rome to appeal the ruling and died in 1733, shortly after his appeal was rejected.

Desideri's questions were not idle speculation. Theologians had long puzzled about the fate of those who, through no fault of their own, had never heard the Gospel. Holy Scripture allowed little, if any, room to maneuver. Faith, it proclaimed, comes from hearing (Rm 10:17), but it is impossible to please God without faith (Heb 11:6). Christ himself proclaimed, "He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned" (Mk 16:16). Faith was thus absolutely indispensable for salvation: no person, from Adam to the most recently deceased, who had not been united to God through an act of faith, could be found among the blessed in heaven. Theologians of the Middle Ages required those who lived after Christ to confess the mysteries of Christian faith such as the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation explicitly in order to meet this requirement.¹² Those who lived before Christ had to confess God's existence and providence explicitly but distinctive Christian mysteries implicitly. Alongside this rather austere teaching, Christian theologians held the admittedly more comforting doctrine that God sincerely desired the salvation of all men and women. Paul's First Letter to Timothy urged his disciple "that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all men, for kings and all who are in high positions," a practice that was "acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Tim 2:1–4). Since it was impossible to please God without faith, and yet God desired the salvation of all men and women, Roman Catholic theologians concluded that God necessarily gives all men and women grace sufficient to make an act of saving faith. The theologians of the Middle Ages had not given much thought to how God gave men and women this opportunity. Following Augustine, they assumed that, except for a small group of "exceedingly depraved people," the whole of humankind believed in God's existence and providence. A medieval theologian such as Thomas Aquinas could safely assume that the number of honest unbelievers who had not heard of the Gospel was exceedingly small. The exceptional person, Aquinas reasoned, might receive a revelation of the truths necessary for her salvation from an angel.¹³

Upon the discovery of vast numbers of people who had not had an opportunity to hear the Gospel, Roman Catholic theologians became less satisfied with recourse to such private revelations. While admitting their truth in limited circumstances—they had Scriptural warrant after all—theologians felt that newer theories might better account for the possible salvation of non-Christians. Generally, they relaxed the necessary conditions for faith among newly discovered people, allowing them [End Page 162] the possibility of an implicit faith in the Trinity and the Incarnation, while upholding the necessity of an explicit faith in God and His providence—the same requirements that Thomas Aquinas allowed for those who lived before the Incarnation. Theologians soon applied a great thicket of scholastic distinctions to determine the necessary and sufficient conditions for these two requirements—the belief in God's existence and providence—that might help the missionary discern the implicit faith of those who did not outwardly accept the Gospel. The Jesuits were particularly ingenious at formulating such theories. Juan Martínez de Ripalda (1594–1648), for example, argued that a broad faith in God's existence and providence was possible based upon metaphysical knowledge of created things. In such a case, God himself would elevate the unbeliever's natural knowledge of His existence and confer upon it the status of a supernatural act of faith.¹⁴ Juan de Lugo (1583–1660) felt that wherever even the faintest idea of a just God survived, there remained a vestige of the revelation God gave to Adam and Eve that would suffice for the salvation of those who sincerely wished to do God's will. Lugo even felt that God would, in exceptional circumstances, confer miracles upon non-Christians in order to preserve what remained of this primitive revelation.¹⁵

A missionary's search for resemblances between Christianity and another religion was thus primarily a search to determine whether its adherents might have implicit faith. While it is difficult to determine with any certainty Desideri's early feelings about Tibetans in this regard, his language seems to indicate that he believed that Tibetans did retain a vestige of the primitive revelation that was the common religious heritage of mankind. Pace Lopez, the genealogical criticism generally practiced by missionaries did not fault Asians or Americans for having fallen away from Christianity, but for having fallen away from the religious truths expressed, albeit symbolically or allegorically, in their own most ancient religious texts. Such genealogical analysis was de rigueur for missionaries during the seventeenth century, so it is not surprising that Desideri presented the Gospel as a gter ma or himself as a gter ston. Nor is it surprising that he used terms reminiscent of Avalokiteśvara, such as thugs rje chen po, to describe God. The Jesuit Roberto de Nobili similarly claimed that the Sanskrit term brahman was not the proper name of an idol but a general name for God even as he identified himself as a "guru of the lost law," who preached a "lost Veda" to the Indians.¹⁶ Matteo Ricci likewise exhorted the Chinese to return to the true teachings contained in the Confucian classics.¹⁷ Far from dismissing other religious traditions, such genealogical analysis often presupposed the religious authority of their ancient texts. In other words, it did not presuppose that a given religion was demonic, but rather that demons had obscured its true nature. Ricci, for example, believed that the ancient Chinese rightly worshiped God but rejected Neo-Confucianism as a distortion of the most ancient Chinese texts. The Jesuit missionaries Jean Bouvet, Jean-François Foucquet, and Joseph Henri-Marie Prémare even went so far as to claim that the ancient Chinese classics revealed supernatural mysteries of the faith such as the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation.¹⁸

In this, Jesuit missionaries were largely heirs to a Renaissance culture that valorized the gods and goddesses of the ancient world. The men most likely to condemn the [End Page 163] "mad and brain-sick idolatry" found in other cultures were also those with the keenest appreciation of its antiquities and—it must be said—the deepest desire to learn from them. Missionaries did not wish their interlocutors to throw off their gods, but the Devil. They wished to compel the ancient gods into the service of the Church much as Padmasambhava had compelled the indigenous spirits of Tibet into the service of Buddhism. Desideri falls clearly within this Renaissance tradition when he explains the three jewels as "obscure symbols" or "blind fables" of the Holy Trinity. First, he implies that Tibetan religion, like the religion of the ancient world in general, was idolatrous. It offered worship to improper things, be those things angels, men, or natural objects. When the missionary refers to Avalokiteśvara as a "fabulous idol," his terminology suggests that he identified Tibetan religion as a form of mythical theology, that is, the mistaken worship of long-dead heroes as gods. Here he alludes to Diodorus Siculus's well-known classification of religious worship, which he would have found in Thomas Aquinas or in Jesuit missionaries such as José de Acosta.¹⁹ Despite its status as idolatry, the "obscure symbols" of Tibetan worship still served, like the other religions of antiquity, as praeparationesevangelica. They enabled Tibetans to have the implicit faith in the Trinity and Incarnation necessary for salvation, at least insofar as Tibetans also confessed God's existence and providence. This is why Desideri attacked Madhyamaka philosophy so fiercely; by denying the two minimum requirements necessary for faith, the monks of Sera stripped the symbols of Tibetan worship of their very capacity to lead Tibetans to salvation. Desideri is absolutely clear on this:

Tibetans acknowledge no supreme judge who distributes rewards to the good and punishments to the wicked.²⁰

The primary error of the Tibetans' sect and the wellspring of all the false dogmas they believe, is to deny positively, directly, and expressly the existence of a being in itself, uncreated and independent, and the first and universal cause of all things.²¹

If one insisted upon the necessity of faith and yet Tibetan philosophers denied its two minimum requisites, hell must have grown ever more crowded with every step he took across the Tibetan plateau—a chilling thought for the Jesuit missionary! Still, he had learned in his own philosophical training that one could never attain rational certitude about a false proposition, much less one contrary to God's revelation. A paradox thus lay at the heart of Buddhist atheism. The Buddhist denial of God did not—and could not—rest on such firm footing as the Tibetans thought. Desideri concluded that Tibetans denied God's existence theoretically even as they affirmed it practically: "If by atheist you mean a person or people who neither signally or reflexively (to follow the manner of speaking in the schools) nor implicitly and confusedly, indeed neither theoretically nor practically, recognize any true or false deity in any way, I say that Tibetans, in my judgment, do not merit the hateful title of atheists."²² Here, despite the missionary's frequent recourse to the doctrine of [End Page 164] demonic plagiarism, we see a view considerably more progressive than that found in other theologians of his day. By recognizing that Tibetans might have an implicit faith in God's existence and providence—even as they explicitly denied both —Desideri granted Tibetans a share of God's grace that many previous theologians would have denied.

The Theology of Grace in the Society of Jesus

To this point, one might very well conclude that Jesuit missionaries were indeed imprisoned by the play of opposites. Were the missionaries not genealogists, as Lopez contends? Did they not assume a dialectic between the pristine and the polluted, the authentic and the derivative, the holy and the demonic, the good and the bad? Indeed they did. Consider the following passage, however, in which Desideri describes the excitement that surrounded his first Tibetan work:

Already touched and penetrated by the power of divine grace—far more than by what I myself said—their ears sought God's voice in their own hearts, and they asked me continually whether there was any great difference between our holy law and their sect. In response, I explained to them many times that one discovers two things in any law: first, some principles, maxims, or dogmas to be believed and, second, precepts and directions about what to do or not to do. With regard to the first, our laws were totally opposed, and a total change in their beliefs was absolutely necessary. With regard to the second, our laws largely agreed on teaching what to do, and we could not find much difference. This explanation gave them much consolation and encouragement, and they outwardly displayed the impulse and operation of divine grace that secretly animated and incited them.²³

When the Jesuit missionary wrote of divine grace animating Lha bzang Khan and his court, he wrote as an heir to one of the most fiercely controverted debates in the history of Roman Catholic theology. The grace controversies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—often thought some of the lowest points of scholastic aridity—come alive when placed within the larger question of the salvation of non-Christians. The particular emphasis that theologians of the Society of Jesus placed upon the compatibility of God's grace and human freedom provided a set of regulative principles that seriously compromised any simple play of opposites that identified the missionary with God and his interlocutors with the Devil. Indeed, the interplay between God's grace and human freedom followed a peculiar Christian pattern of reversal that placed the most significant responsibilities not upon the evangelized, but upon the missionary himself.

It may sound shocking today, but Ippolito Desideri's most controversial assertion may have been that there was little discernible difference between Tibetan and Roman Catholic morality. Shortly after Desideri had left for India, Pope Clement XI condemned the Jansenist Pasquier Quesnel's assertion that "All natural knowledge [End Page 165] of God, even that found in pagan philosophers, can come from nowhere but God, and without grace produces nothing but presumption, vanity, and opposition to God Himself, instead of adoration, gratitude, and charity."²⁴ Asserting that no one could perform morally good actions except in a state of perfect infused charity, Jansenist theologians such as Quesnel accepted the consequence that all acts of non-Christians were in fact sins. In fact, one of Michel Baius's condemned propositions read, "All of unbelievers' actions are sins and all of philosophers' virtues are vices."²⁵ The Jansenist Antoine Arnauld even claimed that "Pagans, Jews, heretics and others of the same kind receive no influx from Christ at all, and it is rightly inferred that in them there is but a naked and helpless will, without any sufficient grace."²⁶ As a result, he also argued that unbelievers necessarily sin in all of their actions, a position likewise condemned by Pope Alexander VIII.²⁷ It is perfectly orthodox to maintain an irreconcilable opposition between a state of mortal sin and a state of grace—no one can serve two masters—but does this entail that a Tibetan necessarily sins in all that he does?

Jesuit theologians resisted this conclusion with evident ferocity, for it departed from the Catholic tradition already established by Thomas Aquinas.²⁸ Some actions of unbelievers are in fact good, Aquinas reasoned, as the story of Cornelius in the tenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles indicates, because human nature retains its integrity after the Fall. This last point is of special importance. Roman Catholic theologians commonly taught that God did not deny grace to men or women who did what they could to follow the natural law.²⁹ Indeed, Jesuit theologians stressed this point to such a degree that some, such as Ripalda and Gabriel Vásquez (1549– 1604), argued that prevenient grace always accompanied natural virtues in the present economy of salvation.³⁰ Here, too, Desideri's vocabulary provides a clue to his deeper consideration of these issues. By distinguishing between prevenient (gratia preveniens sive operans) and subsequent graces (gratia subsequents sive cooperans), Desideri carefully avoided granting salvation to Lha bzang Khan—such a grace not being his to give—because only cooperating grace is salutary, strictly speaking. At the same time, the missionary recognized the possibility of the Khan's natural virtue and, if he followed the general theological trends of the society, would almost certainly have felt that prevenient grace oriented such natural virtues to the performance of those that are supernatural and salutary. While the missionary would have had no way of knowing whether Lha bzang Khan had received such grace—the effects of grace, like karma, are very hidden—the theology of his order would have given him reason to hope. In the Jesuit's heart, Epiphany Day 1717 might have been the day that Lha bzang Khan had been baptized with the implicit faith of desire.

Ippolito Desideri thus had every reason to encourage the Khan and his court in the practice of virtue; preserving and respecting the natural integrity of those evangelized allowed the missionary to assist them to predispose themselves negatively for the reception of grace—insofar as it was possible—or cooperate with prevenient grace should God grant it. If there is a play of opposites in Roman Catholic theology, it is between the absolute gratuity of grace and its paradoxical universality. Indeed this play mirrors the play between the strict necessity of faith and God's [End Page 166] desire that all men and women be saved. Roman Catholic theologians of Desideri's day believed that grace, the supernatural assistance based upon the merits of Jesus Christ that rendered men and women pleasing in God's sight, was absolutely necessary for salvation. Neither demanded by the strict requirements of justice, nor bestowed on account of any corresponding merit on the part of men and women, grace was, by its very nature, entirely gratuitous. While men and women were capable of attaining a knowledge of God, albeit negative, from a consideration of the universe, such knowledge was merely a preamble to the supernatural faith in which one was infused with a knowledge of those mysteries, such as the Incarnation or the Holy Trinity, that lay beyond the capacities of natural reason alone.³¹ Catholic theologians, however, also acknowledged that God gave grace to all men and women sufficient for their salvation. God lovingly called men and women to repentance, enlightened them, inspired them, and strengthened them with pious affections. He infused their souls with his own power, elevated their souls to the supernatural order, and made souls supernatural faculties, capable of making supernatural acts of faith, hope, and love.

The distinctive Jesuit contributions to the theology of grace are found in the Concordia Liberi Arbitrii cum Gratiae Donis of Luis de Molina (1535–1600) and thevarious works that that followed in its wake.³² In keeping with the common Thomistic tradition, Molina argued that prevenient grace elevated the will to the supernatural order and endowed it with the moral and physical power necessary to perform a salutary act in actu primo, but that the performance of the salutary act, the actus secundus, resulted only from one's free cooperation with divine grace. Also in keeping with the earlier Thomist tradition, Molina noted that the human will in no way added to the power of grace when it consented, since grace itself prepared and aided the will in making the act of faith. Molina, however, argued that the sufficient grace that God gives to all men and women is made efficacious by the free consent of the will, sufficient grace thus remaining inefficacious or merely sufficient if the will did not freely consent to God's salvation. Consequently, one and the same grace might be efficacious in one case and inefficacious in another—theoretically speaking.³³ Still, Christian theologians defined efficacious grace as intrinsically infallible, and Molina apparently asserted that the efficacy of grace depended upon quite fallible men and women.

Molina recognized this problem and affirmed the infallibility of efficacious grace, not because God predetermines how men and women will respond in his absolute decree of predestination, but because he knew how they will respond from all eternity through a scientia media, a "middle knowledge" that is neither his own knowledge of his eternal decrees nor a direct knowledge of the believer's free response, but rather an omniscient knowledge of how a free man or woman will respond when placed in certain situations. God, knowing both hypothetically free acts and absolutely free acts, infallibly and eternally knows how every man, every woman, and every child will respond in every possible situation and creates the world in order to secure, as it were, the free response of each. When God bestows grace in light of his eternal decrees, Molina argued, his grace proves efficacious or inefficacious according [End Page 167] to his foreknowledge of how the person might possibly respond rather than how he actually responds. Efficacious grace is infallible because God creates, conserves, and providentially governs the entirety of human history. Those who freely respond to his call and persevere are elected and predestined because the omniscient scope of God's scientia media embraces all possible worlds. Men and women who then respond—or fail to respond—truly exercise their free will, insofar as God has not physically predetermined their responses. From the point of human reason, God makes us an offer that we can in fact refuse. Seen sub specie aeternitatis, God makes us an offer than we can refuse only if he so wills.

It was left to Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) to clarify many of the problems in Molina's account of grace and free will.³⁴ Grace, he argued, must include both the state of affairs providentially ordered by God as well as the interior excitation and movement of the will. If the same grace is hypothetically offered to two men, and one accepts while the other rejects that grace—or properly speaking, one believes and is moved to charity and the other does not—this is not because the man who believed does so without grace but because he received the impulse of grace in the manner, place, and time that God saw to be congruous with his own intent to save humanity. The efficacy of grace cannot be attributed solely to the free determination of the will but to the fact that it was bestowed in states of affairs that were favorable to its operation. Grace is conferred, then, with the wise regard only an omniscient creator can have. Opponents of congruism objected that God did not adapt himself slavishly to states of affairs in order to enact his eternal decrees. Grace worked in men and women, they claimed, with little or no regard to the congruity of such states of affairs. Its Jesuit defenders retorted that such congruity, which was truly known by God alone, would remain hidden for those without eyes to see. Mysteries such as the Incarnation and Crucifixion could hardly be thought congruous without the illuminating grace of faith. Indeed, the mystery of God's providence, the Jesuits argued, was made manifest precisely when apparently weaker impulses of grace were conferred in favorable circumstances. Likewise, apparently stronger impulses might very well be thwarted by unfavorable affairs. Deo volente, a single stone might accomplish more than legions—or faith might move mountains.

Jesuit theologians gave this insight its greatest possible extension. God knew, before all time, how Lha bzang Khan would freely respond to Ippolito Desideri's questions, having created both men along with the court in which they debated. God, too, has seen in his eternity just what the young Jesuit must say to convert the Khan, if indeed he has decreed it so. The smallest acts—such as choosing to unwrap a gift with one's own hands—might very well be the state of affairs that God has deemed congruous for the salvation of a soul, even the soul of a Mongol warlord. Such an act might be the first of many prevenient graces that would lead, under the proper circumstances, to an act of faith. Timing is of essence here, for both the missionary and the people whom he evangelized, for the remotest possibility of faith must be seized upon and nurtured if the grace is to culminate in a salutary act. Far from being a base casuistry, congruism placed the theology of grace in the larger narrative [End Page 168] of God's providence. Implicated in that narrative, the missionary was required to discern not only the best methods for guiding a soul to attain his or her salvation through God's grace, but also to discern and root out any obstacle that his own sins might place in God's way. He was required to wage spiritual warfare, not merely against the demons that deceived Tibetans, but against the demons within his own heart.

This emphasis on the missionary's own responsibility to heed God's call gives congruism its true existential power. A Jesuit who believed that God had providentially ordered history in order to secure the free response of men and women could thus see himself as part of that providential history. Since the free response of an unbeliever could happen at any time—even those that appeared incongruous—the missionary had to attune himself to the grace that made him an actor in the drama already ordained by God. He must, in other words, commit himself to the practice of Christian faith, hope, and love, cooperating with God's grace in the discernment not only of the spiritual state of his charges, but also of the graces necessary for the successful completion of the drama. If God lovingly created the world to overcome any possible refusal—as congruism implies—then the Jesuit who failed to become a perfect instrument of God's grace would be responsible for any soul lost on account of his failure. A missionary who failed to nurture the possibilities of faith could find himself, not at Christ's right hand, but at his left. He could hear Christ speaking, not from the works he carried from Europe, but through those very people he evangelized: "Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the Devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me" (Mt 25:41–43). Far from ensuring the missionary a privileged role in the play of opposites, the theology of the Society of Jesus cast him in the role of servant. According to the theology of his order, Ippolito Desideri would work out his own salvation on the roof of the world.

Notes

1. Donald S. Lopez Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 4.

2. Lopez uses the translation found in the appendix to Johannes Nieuhof, An Embassy from the East India Company of the United Provinces to the Grand Tartar Cham Emperor of China (1669; reprint, Menston, UK: Scholar Press, 1972), pp. 42–43. The original Latin reads, "Ad quem advenae capitibus humi prostrates advoluti, non secus ac Summo Pontifici pedes incredibili, veneratione osculantur; ut vel indè Daemonis fraudulentia luculenter appareat, qua venerationem soli Vicario Christi in terries Romano Ponctifici debitam, ad superstitionum barbararum gentium cultum, uti omnia caetera Christianae Religionis mysteria, insitä sibi malignitate, in abusum transtulit; Unde uti Patrum patrem Pontificem Romanum Christiani, ita Barbari hunc Deastrum Magnum Lamam, id est, Sacerdotum Magnum, & Lamam Lamarum, id est, Sacerdotem Sacerdotum appellant, eò quo dab eo, ceu à fonte quodam tota religionis, seu potìus eidolomanias ratio profluat, unde & eundem Patrem quoque Aeternum vocant." [End Page 169]

3. Lopez, pp. 27–28.

4. Desideri's account can be found in the final three volumes of Luciano Petech, I Missionari italiani nel Tibet e nel Nepal, 7 volumes (Rome: Libreria dello Stato, 1954–1956) [=MITN]. In the notes to follow, I will use the abbreviations established by Petech to refer to Desideri's account of his travels in Tibet [=DR] and letters [=DL] in this edition.

5. DR 1.13 (MITN 5, p. 194).

6. DR 1.13 (MITN 5, p. 196).

7. The book that Desideri presented to the Khan was The Dawn, an Allegory of the Sunrise that Dispels Darkness (Tho rangs mun sel nyi ma shar ba'i brda). Cf. Giuseppe Toscano, Opera Tibetane Di Ippolito Desideri, vol. 1: Il "T'o ran.s"(L'Aurora) (Rome: Istituto Italiano per Il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1981).

8. DR 3.21 (MITN 6, p. 295): "Il secondo e forse più ben fondata dubbio può essere il ricercar se in quelle parti vi sia alcuna volta stata anticamente fondata la cristianità, o vi sia colà giunto alcun Apostolo. Tal dubbio molto ragionevolmente si fonda in moltissime cose, che nella setta e religione thibetana sembrano aver grandissima somiglianza o co' misterj della nostra S. Fede, o con le cerimonie, instituzioni e gerarchie ecclesiastiche, o con le massime e principj della morale della nostra S. Legge, o con le regole e direzioni dell'intessa perfezion cristiana." Such a question should not seem overly quaint; Tibetologists such as Paul Pelliot, Giuseppe Tucci, and Per Kvaerne have also raised questions about possible Christian influences in Tibet. Matthew Kapstein treats his readers to a particularly enlightening variation on this theme with a "detour into the no-man's land between historical scholarship and historical fiction" in a recent work. Cf. Matthew Kapstein, The Tibetan Assimilation of Buddhism: Conversion, Contestation, and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 30–32.

9. DR 3.21 (MITN 6, p. 297): "Concludo infine che quantunque non vi sia alcun indizio di creder che abbiano i Thibetani in alcun tempo avuto notizia della cristianità e della nostra S. Fede, è molto credibile l'abbian avuta gli antichi gentili dell'Hendustan, da' quali riconosce il Thibet la sua religione e la sua falsa credenza."

10. DR 3.21 (MITN 6, p. 295n): "Così per esempio, ancorchè que' tre complessi d'oggetti d'adorazione, cioè i loro Santi primarij e supremi, i libbri o leggi da' medesimi dati al mondo, e de' fedeli più perfetti osservatori di tali leggi, ancorchè, dico, siano totalmente e separate e opposte alle tre Persone della SS. Trinità: Padre, Figlio e Spirito Santo; con tutto ciò, se ben si considerino da una parte gli attributi principali della tre Divine Persone della Santissima Trinità e dall'altra parte le qualità che ne' detti tre complessi d'oggetti d'adorazione; parmi potersi dubitare se la trinità di quei complessi sia un oscuro simbolo e cieco favoleggiamento della vera augustissima e Divina Trinità."

11. These works are On the Origin of Sentient Beings and Various Other Phenomena (Sems can dang chos la sogs pa rnams kyi 'byung khungs), Essence of Christian Doctrine (ke ri se sti än. gyi chos lugs kyi snying po), and Questions Concerning Reincarnation and the View of Emptiness Offered to the Scholars of Tibet by the Christian Lama Ippolito (mgo skar gyi bla ma i po li do zhes bya yis phul ba'i bod kyi mkhas pa rnams la skye ba snga ma dang stong pa nyid kyi lta ba'i sgo nas zhu ba). For the first two works, see Giuseppe Toscano, SX, Opera Tibetane Di Ippolito Desideri, vol. III: Il "'Byun. K'un.s" (L'Origine degli Esseri Viventi e di Tutte le Cose) (Rome: ISMEO, 1984) and Giuseppe Toscano, Opera Tibetane Di Ippolito Desideri, vol. II: Lo "sÑyin.-po" (Essenza della Dottrina Cristiana) (Rome: ISMEO, 1982). This work may have been composed as Desideri stayed at Gnya' lam dzong before leaving Tibet for Nepal. Desideri remarks only that he added a few chapters to his refutation of Buddhism, although this could mean either that he composed the Chos lugs there or that he wrote a few more pages of the I po li do'i zhu ba. This final work, Desideri's magnum opus, has never been published. It can be found in the Roman Archives of the Society of Jesus [ARSI], cod. Goa, fol. 75.

12. Summa theologiae IIa, IIae, q. 2, aa. 7–8.

13. De Veritate, q. 14, a. 11.

14. Ripalda, De Ente Supernaturali, disp. 20, sect. 23. [End Page 170]

15. De Lugo, De Fide, disp. 12, n. 51.

16. On De Nobili, see Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 38–43.

17. On Ricci, see Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York: Penguin Books 1984).

18. On Bouvet, see David Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1989). On Prémare, see David Mungello, "The Reconciliation of Confucianism with Christianity in the Writings of Joseph de Prémare, S.J.," Philosophy East and West 26 (1976), pp. 389–410. For Foucquet, see John Witek, SJ, Controversial Ideas in China and Europe: A Biography of Jean-François Foucquet, S.J. (1665–1741) (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Jesu, 1982).

19. Summa theologiae IIa, IIae, q. 94, a. 1.

20. DR 3.9 (MITN 6, p. 184): "Non ammettono i Thibettani alcun giudice supremo che distribuisca il premio ai buoni e condanni i malvagi."

21. DR 3.10 (MITN 6, p. 194): "L'errore primario della setta de' Thibettani e la scaturigine di tutti gli altri falsi dogmi che credono è il negare positivamente, direttamente e expressamente l'existenza d'alcun ente a sè, increato, indipendente, e d'alcuna causa primaria e universale di tutte le cose."

22. DR 3.11 (MITN 6, p. 207): "Rispondo . . . che se per ateo voglia intendersi persona o gente che nè signate et riflexe (per sequitar a parlar con la scuola) nè implicite et confuse, e di più nè teoricamente nè practicamente in modo veruno riconoscano una qualque o vera o falsa divinità; in tal caso dico non meritarsi, a mio giudizio, i Thibetani l'opprobrioso titolo di atei."

23. DR 1.13 (MITN 5, pp. 193–194): "Toccati di già e penetrati dalla forza della grazia divina, che assai più di quel che io parlassi a' loro orecchi faceva sentir la sua voce a loro cuori, continuamente mi dimandavano se vi fosse gran differenza fra la nostra santa legge e la loro setta. In riposta spiegai loro più volte che in qualsivoglia legge due cose si ritrovano, cioè, primo alcuni principj, massime o dogmi da credersi; e secondo varj precetti e direzioni circa quello che deve o farsi o tralasciarsi. Quant'alla prima parte, la nostra e la loro legge esser totalmente opposte ed esser assolutamente necessaria una total mutazione di credenza. In ordine poi alla seconda parte, non esservi tra loro e noi tanta differenza che non potessimo, quando avesser voluto, accordarci. Da tale spiegazione si mostravano grandamente consolati e incoraggiati, dando sempre a divedere nel lor esterno l'impulso e l'operarzione della grazia divina che segretamente gli animava e gli incitava."

24. Clement XI, Constitutio "Unigenitus Dei Filius" (September 8, 1713), prop. 41: "Omnis cognitio Dei etiam naturalis, etiam in philosophis ethnicis, non potest venire nisi a Deo; et sine gratia non producit nisi praesumptionem, vanitatem et oppositionem ad ipsum Deum loco affectuum adorationis, gratitudinis et amoris." Denzinger-Schōnmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum Definitionum et Declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, 36th ed., (Rome : Herder, 1965) [=DS], n. 2441.

25. Pius V, Bulla "Ex Omnibus afflictionibus" (October 1, 1567), prop. 25: "Omnia opera infidelium sunt peccata et philosophorum virtutes sunt vitia" (DS 1925).

26. Alexander VIII, Decretum (December 7, 1690), prop. 5: "Pagani, Iudaei, haeretici aliique huius generis nullum omnino accipiunt a Iesu Christo influxum, adeoque hinc recte infers, in illis esse voluntatem nudam et inermem sine omni gratia sufficienti" (DS 2305).

27. Ibid., prop. 8: "Necesse est infidelem in omni opere peccare" (DS 2308).

28. Summa theologiae IIa, IIae, q. 10, a. 4.

29. Even Molina, who is sometimes accused of arguing that men and women could dispose themselves positively for the reception of grace, rightly noted that that any such positive disposition would have to be dependent upon God's universal salvific will. Aquinas is sometimes said to favor such a position in his earlier works. Cf. In Sent. II, d. 28, q. 1, a. 4, and De Veritate q. 1. Gabriel Vásquez went to the other extreme, denying that men and women [End Page 171] could prepare themselves negatively. Vásquez, Comment. In Summam Theol. 1a, d. 91, c. 10–11. Cf. Ripalda, De Ente Supernaturali, d. 17, sect. 1.

30. Vásquez felt that such acts were accompanied by supernatural assistance in the form of a "congruous thought" (cogitatio congrua) that was itself entitatively natural, but directed to God as its end by a secondary, supernatural impulse. Cf. Comment. In Summam Theol. S. Thomae 1a, 2ae, disp. 189. Vásquez might be accused of pseudo-Baianism, in which naturally good acts are impossible in the present order, but he avoids Baianism by accepting the Scotist dictum that morally indifferent acts of the will are possible, but in such a way that it is impossible to conceive them apart from the cogitatio congrua that orients them to God. In this regard, Vásquez may be seen as an important precursor to Karl Rahner's claim that nature is a "remainder concept." Juan Martínez de Ripalda felt that naturally good actions were invariably accompanied by prevenient grace in the present economy of salvation. For Ripalda, God provided all naturally good actions with "intrinsically supernatural graces" of illumination and confirmation precisely as a merciful dispensation of grace to those who had not had a chance to hear the Gospel. Cf. Ripalda, De Ente Supernaturali, disp. 20.

31. Thus Thomas Aquinas noted in a justly famous passage, "The existence of and other similar things are not articles of faith but the preambles to those articles, for faith presupposes natural knowledge just as grace presupposes nature, and perfection presupposes something that can be perfected." Summa theologiae Ia, q. 2, a. 2: "Deum esse et alia huiusmodi . . . non sunt articuli fidei, sed praeambula ad articulos; sic enim fides praesupponit cognitionem naturalem, sicut gratia naturam et perfectio perfectibile."

32. A partial translation exists: Luis de Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge (Part IV of the Concordia), trans. Alfred Freddoso (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).

33. Concordia Liberi Arbitrii cum Gratiae Donis, qu. 14, art. 13, disp. 38: "Asserimus auxilia praevenientis atque adiuvantis gratiae . . . pendere a libero consensu et cooperatione liberi arbitrii nostri cum illis atque adeo in libera potestate nostra esse, vel illa efficacia reddere consentiendo et cooperando cum illis ad actus, quibus ad iustificationem disponimur, vel inefficacia illa reddere continendo consensum et cooperationem nostram aut etiam eliciendo contrarium consensum." Cf. disp. 12: "Quare fieri potest, ut duorum qui aequali auxilio interirus a Deo vocantur, unus pro libertate sui arbitrii convertatur et alter infidelitate permaneat."

34. Bellarmine, De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio, I.12: "Prima opinio eorum est, qui gratiam efficacem constituunt in assensu et cooperatione humana, ita ut ab eventu dicatur gratia efficax, quia videlicet sortitur effectum et ideo sortitur effectum, quia voluntas humana cooperatur. Itaque existimant hi autores, in potestate hominis esse ut gratiam faciat esse efficacem, quae alioquin ex se non esset nisi sufficiens." He then opposes to this opinion the words of Augustine and scripture: "Haec opinio aliena est omnino a sententia b. Augustini et, quantam ego existimo, a sententia etiam Scripturarum divinarum."