A safer Ontario means more police and prosecutors making sure my car doesn't get stolen. It means building new jails to keep criminals behind bars. And it means there's no need to wear me when I play at the park. We're making every corner of Ontario safer to make all of Ontario safer.
That's how we protect Ontario. For all of us. Learn how at ontario.ca. Pay for by the Government of Ontario.
It's springtime, which means that Princeton University Press is having its annual 50% off spring sale. From May 4th through June 9th, you can get 50% off nearly every single print, ebook and audio book from Princeton University Press. Just go to press.prinston.edu to get 50% off incredible books like Disneyland and the Rise of Automation. And beyond belief, how evidence shows what really works.
There's so many fantastic books you can get an incredible deal on. Go to press.prinston.edu and use the code spring50. That's spryng50 at press.prinston.edu. This sale only lasts for a month, so go and get some books.
Welcome to the new books network. Hello and welcome back to the New Books in your religions podcast, a podcast channel here on New Books Network. I'm your host, Dr. Rush Walker.
More importantly, today I have the pleasure in honour of speaking with Dr. Francis Clooney, who is the Parkman Professor at Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, where he's taught since 2005, seasoned scholar in the field. We'll hear about some exciting research momentarily. Frank, welcome back to the podcast.
Thank you, Raj. Good to be with you again and to be part of your wonderful series. I'm grateful for the opportunity. The pleasure is ours.
So you've written a recent book, 2022, just recently out called St. Joseph in South India. Tell us a bit about how you came to this project. What's the next story you've had it?
So for a number of, so for many years now, I've been interested in Hindu traditions in India and in the Sanskrit and Tamil traditions, and some of my previous research has been related to that work. But I've also had kind of as a sub-discipline and side interest of Christian, Western Catholic missionaries in India. The interface over the past five centuries or so between Christians and Hindus, the encounters in the missionary, colonial era and so on like that. And since I am a Jesuit member of the Society of Jesus, I've also had particular interests in the Jesuits.
And so over the years, I had done a number of essays and translations and so on of the well-known Jesuit pioneering missionary, Robert Denoboli, who was one of the first to live in Tamilnad 1605. He got there writing books in Tamil and so on like that. And I explored his heritage and some of his writings from various angles over the years as a pioneering figure, not without his problems and not without controversy in terms of his missionary intentions and so on. But then less learning language, writing in the Tamil language, trying to find the vocabulary for the Christian faith and so on in Tamil.
And he was a major looming, you know, looming large figure for the 17th century, and kind of set the pattern for many Jesuit missionaries and other Catholic missionaries after him in terms of striving at least to fit into the culture, become part of Tamil society in order to be able to talk intelligently about issues of faith and the like. So after having done this and worked on him and a few other figures on and off of the years, I became interested about, I guess it must be six or seven years ago now, in Constantine Beshi or in the original Italian customs, or Diosa Fobeshi, Constantine Joseph Beshi, who was an early 18th century missionary in South India also, and is generally recognized as the most brilliant of the Jesuit Tamil scholars, creative in his writing, crafting dictionaries and grammars, and pushing the very idea of enculturation and kind of linguistic encounter with the people of India to a whole new level. And I had not done any work on him previously and so about seven years ago began to become interested in, and Beshi and it all started from there in 2019, and believe I had opportunity to give a lecture at the University of Vienna, honoring Professor Gerhard Oberhaemer, who was a great scholar of India in the West, and in that occasion I spoke about Beshi for the first time publicly, and that led one thing to another and eventually turned into this little book, St Joseph in South India Poetry, Mission and Theology and Costanza and Giosef Wobeshi's Tim Balbini. And I can tell you more about Tim Balbini also if you're ready for that.
Yeah, absolutely. I'll ask maybe about that in a moment. Just a bit about this, with remarkable culture, perhaps Jesuit culture, of a culture of learning the local language, of writing about the life and times of Jesus and the local language. You know, does he take this whole new level?
Is this typical? You could say a bit about that process, if you don't mind. Yes, I think both sides of that are true. He does take it to a whole new level, but this is a tradition that does precede him.
He's not the pioneer of this tradition. So the site of Jesus founded 1540. In 1542, one of the first Jesuits of all, Francis Xavier went to Goa, and then after some years in India went off to the Malacca's, some of the islands now where Indonesia is, and then to Japan, and was intending to go into China in 1552, but died on the way he never got into China. And he, although he's not remarkable linguistically, and not a great pioneering figure of adaptation, began to realize that to be present in a new culture, and for these Western Europeans, all of this was entirely new, this going around the world, had to require learning languages, learning the stories of the people, learning their customs, and the like.
And then the generation or two after Francis Xavier, Jesuits in China, in Japan, in India, and in both North America and South America, Latin America, began to experiment with finding ways to fit the culture, to learn the languages, to become part of where they are, to adapt art and music to the local culture, and the like. And it's a fascinating study in itself, that one of the first kind of great globalizing institutions in modernity was the Jesuit order, which was founded, not with this intention, but somehow spread east and west, again often on colonialist ships, but nonetheless, were finding their way in the Americas, in Asia, in Africa, also at the same time. And so, I bet she was a refined figure in that tradition, and kind of an excellent example who did it, you might say, but it's simply better than most in terms of visibility to understand the culture, and to produce literature in the cultural frame in which she found himself in South India. So, this work he creates, the tympalvany that you've produced also, translation, about 1300, 300 verses there, tell us a bit more about this work.
So, tympalvany, the name itself, means loosely in the time of the unfading garland, so that garland that does not fade or die. And in several points in the epic, this is explained in terms of the technicality of the term, the St. Joseph in the iconography of Catholic tradition, always is holding a staff, where they're literally growing from the top, which had identified him at the contents to become the husband of the Virgin Mary, holding the staff and his bloomed. And that was a sign from God that he would be the one.
This is a very old story, much older than the contact with India. And so, Joseph is connected with the unfading garland, or this flower that does not fade, and it became the name of the work itself, the unfading garland, which refers to Joseph to his staff and to the poetry itself. And what basically tympalvany is, in its 1300 plus verses, in its 36 chapters, is an effort to create for the Christian community in South India, an epic, in elegant, high tunnel, that they could be proud of and refer to as their great work of Tamil literature, just as you have for the James, the Jevic and Chantamani, you have the Kumben Remina, Tamil Remina for Vaishnapas, the Peripirana for Shaibas. He realized that for a culture, for a religious community to flourish in a new culture, you need some way of telling the great story.
And so, he decided to compose this great epic work called Timbabany. And he does it, and this is the odd part, our striking part. He does it by crafting the whole thing around the story of Joseph, the husband of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and decides to tell pretty much the entire Bible, except for the public ministry, the three years of Jesus' work before death and resurrection, through the story of Joseph, which is unexpected because Joseph has a very minor part in the New Testament and never speaks a word. But I think what Beshid was looking for was a figure recognizable to anyone who was becoming Christian with whom he could have maximal use of the imagination to weave stories from particularly the Hebrew Bible Old Testament and then some of the early parts of the New Testament and the Timothy story and so on, in order to be able to, through the life of the hero, that the hero's journey, the pilgrim's journey, tell everything about Christianity, everything about the Bible that needed to be known in an attractive poetic style.
And so, by telling the story of Joseph in Timbabany, he attempts to create this epic and to give kind of a vivid imaginative presence to the gospel in India. He might be contrasted, I'll stop with this the moment, with Robert Denobly, who with a brilliant linguist also, and as I said earlier, but more of a prose writer and an argumentative type. And I think Denobly, like some of the other missionaries, was prosaic, arguing, thinking, making the case, proving different points, whereas Beshid said, we have to appeal to a level, people in the imaginative, the emotional level. And so, a different kind of story that he's been told.
And that's how Timbabany came to be. Yeah, he certainly, even in my very limited exposure to your work, seems like quite a remarkable figure on a number of fronts. His understanding of the power of narrative, like his instinctive understanding of its power, his ability to sort of just drink in the culture, I'm not sure if much is known about his process whereby he arrived at the insight to need to put such a work, but his ability to just internalize the function of narrative in this elation context. And really, what comes to mind, and perhaps I could relate on some level, but in different ways, is that he clearly is, I think, or his brain works, he's a scholar, but he's a creative, he's an artist, he has extraordinary creativity, and he's leveraging that creativity through his connection to narrative and fascinating figure.
Do we know much about his process, so where about before he produced this work? Well, we do know that, first of all, there was a, unlike Robert Denobly, in the early 17th century, nearly 18th century, they were established Catholic communities in Tomeron, in Pondicherry and other areas in the South. And so, there were already churches, mission statements, stations in the lake, and basically came into that context, and was, again, apparently a brilliant parish priest in terms of building up the mission, writing hymns that some of which are still used in parish life, in Tamil that can be sung, and also realizing that many other missionaries were not as gifted linguistically as he was. And so, he was a pioneering figure in doing grammars of ordinary spoken Tamil and high literary Tamil.
And in those grammars, he refers and quotes from works of Tamil literature. I mentioned Jifik and Chantamani, the Jnepik and Kumben, and other poetry and so on. So, he's reading as much as could be available to a foreigner in the early 18th century. He's reading widely in the literature, as much as he can get his hands on, and having very precise understandings of Kavya, the poetic forms of epic, and then nuanced sense of vocabulary that went into his dictionary.
So, the sense is that while he was a, you know, what we might today call a busy parish priest, he was also reading as much as he could, and brilliantly soaking it up, and that became part of his kind of his way of being. Interestingly, he writes a little book for catechists, those who were delegated by the Jesuits to help, you know, maintain communities once there were communities of converts and like. And he writes a book for the for the converts, basically talking about what kind of person can communicate the faith properly, and there are things you would expect about knowing the faith, about being humble, about being open-minded, and about listening to the people whom you serve, and therefore being on the ground, being among the people, and being in conversation with them, if you hope to communicate anything to them. So, I think he himself and then he communicated to those working with him, an attitude of not simply being an imperialist or coming in and laying down the law, but of kind of living and spending your life in a certain place, learning the both idioms of culture, the idioms of language, and then finding ways to communicate in that context.
So, he seemed to read a lot. Again, I'm not the historian to know the process of how he got text and how he read them, but he certainly did, and he found what he could. There's a famous Tamil ethical text called Tirukudal, and the Tirukudal is a set of aphorisms, defining, setting forth the moral path, the path of Kingly duties, the motif of love in Tamil culture. It's a very popular text, even today, if you travel in Taunan, you can see verses from the Tirukudal on buses and bus stations and so on like that.
So, he read this work and translated the first two parts of it on righteousness and the duties of kings and ministers and so on into Latin, and 150 years and so before any other European was apparently, as far as we know, engaging this famous ethical text. He was already translating it and explaining it in the Latin language, and that shows, again, his figure that he wanted to find an ethical basis for cultural religious exchange, and therefore turn to this epic. And then by the time he got to writing his great epics and bubbony, which I think I said, it was 1300, I think it's maybe 3000 verses, it's a much longer epic, he hadn't in hand with great skill, the ability to compose Tamil poetry. Historians say that he certainly had help.
He wasn't simply working on his own, and it may have been native scholars sympathetic or at least willing to work with him, who helped him with some of his versification and the like. But I think the consensus is that he was able to compose this because of his learning and because of his musical ear, his ability to understand poetic forms and just did remarkable compositions in the Tamil language. Difficult, beautiful. Well, it's a band, at least to my mind, it's clear to me that he's a genius of sorts on multiple levels and able to integrate in a similar information.
And one wonders if such a one especially was not innately interested in people's and cultures above and beyond the utility of that interest for his mission. There's some sort of predilection or inclination or enjoyment of soaking up different ways of perceiving the world. Which can I just add to that please, and control that as an important point. So on one side, and I haven't stressed it very much, he's a missionary who believes that people should become followers of Christ.
And so he does have as his predecessors, a critical attitude toward Hindu mythology, Hindu practice, and I think a lack in the kind of sympathy that we would demand today. And so for his century, typical in a certain way, but I think he was, as you as you simply pointed out, maybe like some of the early Jesuits in China, just fascinated by the culture, by the language, by the new civilization that he had run into. And all the kind of sparks in his brain and his lights going on and off that as Rome and Greece were brilliant civilizations, even before there was any hint of the gospel present in them, he was in love with South Indian culture. And I think that's not to be underestimated, that he didn't come in with a kind of grim demeanor saying, all of this is in darkness and I will bring you light.
But rather, all of this is beautiful and I will make it more beautiful for you. Well, which is, I mean, that's, I mean, I don't know, but it seems evident to me based on just this conjecture based on knowledge of people that one does not give oneself to a language in this way or choose to construct in an idiom in high poetry, without some level of appreciation of the existing cultural processes and values and clearly, there's much to be protected about missionizing in South Asia or even in South Asia or in South Asia and clearly the ancient world across culture, as far as we can glean was laden with all kinds of prejudices and etc, etc. Obviously, we don't have a time machine and it's sort of, yes, we can point out the perils of the past and strive towards a better future. But nevertheless, seeing what is remarkably ahead of its times and a valuable and what this figure was capable of, it's sort of, he doesn't give one doesn't get the sense that he's entirely a product of his times.
He just has an eight view that surely, yes, clearly he sees himself on some level probably is saving these people spiritually, religiously. But nevertheless, his enterprise evidences a view, a space for a dignity of a people or a culture where he's striving to understand and learn and subjugate himself some way as a student of ancient into traditions. Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, I think there's so much in what he is doing.
It's an extravagant work, Tim Bubby, it's a long work, it's lavish in its portrayals of Tamil geography, culture, flora and fauna, all far beyond what would be required for a kind of a basic nuts and bolts presentation of the Christian message. There were even later missionaries, many of the Protestant missionaries were also very interesting in their own right, who basically said, well, Tim Bubby is a brilliant work. We ourselves could never compose anything like that. But what uses it?
What good is it to compose this epic and Tamil literature, particularly in the high form of Tamil literature that many people, and I would add, native Tamil speakers both then and now cannot easily read. And it seemed to be partly what you're saying is that he just plunged in love the culture, love the language, love the literature. As again, we see, you know, the Jesuits are a product of the late Renaissance period, you might say when the order was founded, Ignatius Leola, the founder and Francis Avern others were students at University of Paris. They were not anti-intellectuals, and I think soaking up Greek and Latin culture was in some way indicative of now we will go to the east again, China and India, and soak up the culture into light and producing works of art and music and the like.
I know that I should add that Beshi did early on that I still can be seen if you go to the village in South India where the church was. He had a hand custom made in the Philippines, a image of the Virgin Mary in a sorry, standing on the lotus, very much a Mary as an Indian woman and a glorious beautiful dignified Indian woman. And I think you just want to say that if we keep the faith foreign, if all our figures look like Europeans and there are, you know, Jesus's who look like they're, you know, blonde-haired white-skinned Europeans will always be foreign. And so both Jesus and Mary and then Joseph above all in this epic need to be shown as figures who could imaginatively at least be of the culture of South India.
Is it my imagination or does that not strike you as extraordinary nearly ahead of his times given particularly the very kinds of diversity we're struggling to display and imagine even in our own times? I mean, but strikes me as quite ahead of his times actually to have that view of shifting the cultural idiom for this virtual symbol. I mean, I imagine there would be other colleagues of his who may even see that as just in some sense or problematic. Well, I think there were many as I just said who thought it was superfluous like why bother with all of this is again why bother studying the classics in any tradition when we have immediate needs of care for people, medical care, food care, churches and so like that.
So in some ways it was lavish in terms of the affirmation of what we might call the humanities, you know, the art, the music, the poetry and the like, all of that I think comes to the fore very clearly in his work. But also I think to be fair, again, he's not the first Jesuit in South India, but that people like denobly were quite imaginative in terms of crossing over trying to become part of the culture, but they didn't have the same flair for literature and for poetry that that best you did. So in a sense, people like Robert denobly kind of set the path as Matteo Ricci had done in China and so on. It's just that that Beshi was able to fill this out beyond the imagination of his predecessors in terms of it.
And I think it would be true to say that there was no far in Jesuit in India after Beshi who died around 1740. There was no Jesuit after him who rivaled him in terms of the grasp of the language, the creativity in any of the Indian languages. I don't want to exaggerate too much, but I think he was with a Tamil context without parallel. There are several other Jesuits who's works you might think of over in the Marathi context and go up, you know, Maharashtra, Thomas Stevens wrote an epic, Chris Purana, a telling of the life of Christ in that language tradition.
So there are some other examples, but I think people say, Beshi did it better than anyone. He just had the brilliance. And as you say ahead of his time, I think probably one of the questions that, again, some of the Protestant missionaries may have been concerned about was if you totally engage and delight in the culture, do you eventually lose the reason for converting these people? If their culture is beautiful, their literature is beautiful, their art is beautiful, their music is beautiful, let us celebrate the gifts of God as he would say.
What exactly are you bringing that they don't have already? And the tension between being so positive towards the culture and the land that you no longer feel you have to save them from something. And sometimes it does tap into modern sensitivities about who needs to be saved from what should be a question anyone doing evangelical work of any tradition asks. Maybe they're okay already.
And he doesn't ever say that per se, but he does believe through this epic and I mentioned translating parts of Supercoral that there is this wisdom here and this beauty here that we can affirm and we do not want to take away from. And that kind of effort and to abobinate to show that through the life of Joseph and the virtues of Joseph and so on. I think it becomes very evident that there's some massive affirmation going on that he wants to, you know, in called Kate as the primary thing. Yeah, it's fascinating.
It seems to me an implied space between his missionizing and perhaps even thinking of it as saving souls and presumably might have considered it something along those lines versus the need to save them as people, that they have that they are that they're not in a lesser land circumstance in terms of a culture of civilization. They're just an alternate universe to our culture civilization. And the saving them from a missionizing point of view may just be on the spiritual level or another way that it occurs to me is that, you know, I'm a firm believer in, you know, let's just say I'm a firm believer, it's my job to spread the word of this tradition. I'm spreading it more as a vitamin rather than a painkiller, right?
You've got a great life, you've got a great culture, you've got lots going on, but here's something that's going to enrich you even deeper perhaps, which is very different from listen, there's not having a view of there can't be a whole lot going on with you or your language or culture civilization because, and there are a lot of pejorative words we could introspers here because you're an ex. And so, right? So it's in that there's this he strikes me as having this incredible nuance in his ability to process the different layers of the human experience. What would you, what was your selection process like in terms of what you chose to translate, what portion of the work for this?
So this was a hard job. And I would, you know, I did work endlessly, blood sweat and tears as they say on my translations, but I would welcome anyone reading the book who could improve on the translations. I give the tunnel in the back so people can check it and I don't claim to be a native speaker or the most brilliant tunnel scholar. But only when I was finishing the book did a translation of it come out by an Indian gentleman who put them out of the English.
So when I was doing my book, there was no English translation. There was only a small pamphlet or two summarizing the story. And therefore I had to kind of read the read those summaries and then look around saying, well, how without getting into the vast task of translating the whole thing, which would be, I'd still be working on it, I would be done at this point, how to kind of taste it and how to characterize it by picking passages. So, you know, certain parts stand out.
So passages, the beginning parts of the preface is opening verses where he explains what he's trying to do. There's a brilliant, and I can read some of this if you'd like, but the fourth chapter of the youth of Joseph and his struggle between being an ascetic living in the cave and the mountains and returning to the city. That's fascinating in terms of, you might say, karma yoga, because he ultimately affirms being in the city. And then all the well-known gospel stories of meeting Mary, the nativity, the birth of Jesus, King Herod trying to kill the baby and all that.
He enjoys telling these stories lavishly. And that I wanted to know. But one thing I noticed that was fascinating to me was that if there are 36 chapters in the epic, and perhaps one third or 40% of the epic is the journey to Egypt being in Egypt and coming back from Egypt. And so, you know, very briefly, in the gospel of Matthew, Herod wants to kill the child.
And so the angel tells Joseph, take the child and his mother and go to Egypt. And that's all it says. And then after Herod is dead, the angel comes and says, Herod is dead, come back. And he, I think, deliberately taps into the motifs that you can see elsewhere in the temple culture of the journey, and not just in the temple culture, but the journey and adventures on the road.
And then also what happened in Egypt? What did they do? I think he sees it as four or five or six years in Egypt. What did they do there?
And part of that was fascinating to me because I found that in some ways Egypt is a stand-in for Tamilnad before the arrival of the gospel, that this is a culture without the gospel. It's not a Christian culture. And so what was it like? What were the people like?
What were the challenges they were facing? And what happens when Mary, Jesus, and Joseph show up? So I wanted to sample that. And I spent a good bit of time on three of the chapters where there are conversion stories that I can tell you about.
And then briefly, how does it the death of Joseph, Jesus, when he went into heaven after dying on the cross, takes Joseph with him into heaven. So he's kind of glorified in heaven. So kind of getting the frame of the story and then looking at the scenes that seemed to be particularly beautiful, but to tell you the truth, in part, groping in the dark because I was reading parts of it, all anything I was reading was reading for the first time, and then trying to translate this extraordinarily difficult Tamil, using the three of four modern prose Tamil renderings of the text as a guide, and then occasionally checking with a native speaker, Catholic temple expert in Tamilnad to check on certain things. But wanting to not simply translate chapter one or chapter two, but give an overview of the whole thing and then speculate on what he was trying to do as he rubbed this work.
Fascinating. One can't help one wonders if this isn't even a nod in some way, shape or form to the story that takes up the most ace in Genesis, which is of a fellow named Joseph who ends up in Egypt in some sense, or if it's on a motif on some level. For him, Egypt is this unknown land of fertility and fertility rituals in many days and it sits sort of. Yeah, and he's a licensed of stories.
I mean, he'll tell the story of Joseph, he'll tell the story of Moses, and he'll when he introduces the epic like any proper Tamil epic, he talks about the land in the city in the first chapters, and when he gets to talking the second chapter about Jerusalem, he said, well, by the way, let me tell you the story of King David, and he talks about David and Goliath, an entertaining story about David and his exploits. Likewise, Joseph and the other Joseph, the Genesis, Joseph in Egypt, and I think he delights in the stories and delights in the, you know, the place of Egypt in the imagination of Jewish and Christian people. Why not bring them to life for people in India as well? And he'll tell Adam and Eve story, he'll talk about the Ten Commandments.
He'll talk about your battles with this or that enemy of the people of Israel and so on like that. He's always looking for ways to tell the story and to entertain immoral principles based on the Bible. So he doesn't say, I am now going to, you know, recite for you, you know, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, you know, go through the books of the Bible, ploddingly. But it's always like, it's almost like Chaucer's, you know, Ken Verteles or something on the road.
Well, by the way, that reminds me of this. Let me tell you this story and that story. And he's just, he's trying to be entertaining. This is why the stories are such powerful teaching tools because they teach you when you least expect it.
We teach you when they're busy, you know, inspiring you and entertaining you in some ways. And also clearly, he's, whether he just has the steppermment or he's really gropped the sort of texture of a piranha compositions or there's a backstone, you know, there's what Ken is, is a name will be mentioned. And then okay, well, let's tell you a story of that person and then a story within a story that you come back to that mean narrative and yeah, so why don't we take a little closer dive into some of the passages you translated. Yeah, so let me look in here for a moment.
I was thinking maybe I could read to you just a little bit of the very beginning of it. Yeah, when he opens it up in the first chapter, and then beginning, the beginning seems to be an excellent place to start. This would be on page 38 of the book and 39. And then maybe I could do one of the more familiar scenes, one of the very interesting scenes where he struggles with his conversion, like is he going to be in a cedic in the forest and is he going to go back into the city?
I can give you a bit of that sounds fantastic. So it starts this way. And this is my translation again, anyone listening in who is a Thomas Galler, I welcome corrections and the like, the God who is able to create, preserve, destroy all three excellent worlds to whom none is equal is superior, who transcends all and is pure. I praise his lotus feet that destroyed deeds.
And now again, I praise him by telling the story of Ellen, which is a name for Joseph the bountiful one. So as to shed light on Dharma and life's other goals, the heavenly world reveres Joseph who was joined with Mary, that sweet honey delegate behind in whom the Lord gives refuge to all three worlds that stand and flow his order, entered this world and came to abide here that all might live. I will tell the glory that the whole world praises and just one more by graces that made him flourish, he flourished without limit, possessing rare knowledge, rare glory within himself, known as Joseph by those learning it in the northern books that speak of him in detail by the Tamil word indicating prosperity, he is known as Vellan. So I guess it's double name Joseph and Vellan, which means the prosperous of the flourishing one.
But in those in those verses, there's so much going on with resonating, I think with the Hindu literary awareness, the God who's life, grace preserves, destroys the one who's transcendent and pure, praising his lotus feet, the teaching of the Dharma, all of this I think is echoed in these verses, the auspicious beginning to the epic. No one can cross the pure ocean of the grace is received by Joseph, but even so I, namely, Beshi, approached that roaring ocean, flooding ambrosia, and reverently I tasted it, purified and hearted my desire grew, and like one who had been mute, now I can begin to tell this precious story. And he begins to unfold the story from there. Later, a couple of pages of number of verses later, I don't have it right here, he begs forgiveness of his readers, saying, I'm like the parrot, I'm like the parrot who mimics the glorious story, forgive me for my pure, imperfect, tumble, but listen to the story.
And I'm telling, and you can see this in other epics where the poet is always a bit self-deferating. Self-effacing, yeah. And the story is much greater than my linguistic abilities. And he buys into that as well.
Let me read a little bit of the fascinating. When he is a young man in chapter four, this would be on page 43, 44, 45, he's portrayed as this innocent youth, this pure virtuous young man who decides that the world is not for him. And there's no mention of his family really, or, you know, the social context, but he's going to leave the city and go off and live in the forest in a cave for the rest of his life, because that is the thing to do. And he says this at this verse of 19 and 20 on page 44, he excelled in the wisdom that blossoms in the face of the just man, women whose faces blossomed in bouquets of fresh flowers, closed their slender eyes before the treasure of his face, like lotuses before the face of the morn.
He cultivated the finest sentences of the forest ascetics reference. When those with slender eyes slender as fish, when even the stars reference, smoke words of sweet that honey would defer to them, he cried out, all of this is by the sphere piercing my flesh, he would not listen. So he shrinks back from the world, and he's looking for something else. And he goes out and he goes determining to live in the forest rest of his life, but he providentially needs an old man on the road, on the way up into the mountains.
And this is part of their encounter. The old man explains to him, you don't have to do you have to choose, is it live in the forest or be a man of the world? Why can't you do both? And so Joseph says, as for practicing the two darmas, I've heard that the best arm is to renounce all things, or can there be some Dharma greater than renunciation?
If there is, please tell me about it. I will live by that Dharma alone. Must spoke the youth heir to the heavenly world. And the old man replies to him, if you look at the two darmas separately, then the Dharma of renunciation you've mentioned is best.
But if you hold them together within yourself as a single undivided Dharma, that Dharma ranks still higher in strength and fruit. Thus spoke the old man learned it on many themes. And this is, you might say, in a simple and pure Bhagavad Gita, you know, why renounce and refuse to fight, but better to be detached and in the world. Well, he's able to taste like he's able to certainly I'm far from the first person to observe this, but to my mind post epic epics onwards, Hinduism or Hindu narrative literature is one of the core themes is this bringing together property, liberty in various ways, ascetics in kings, Anishkhan Khan Mahogas, stages of life, it's reconciling these two venerable parents of Hindu world, the Vedic and sort of the Upanishadic.
And so he tastes that clearly. He's imbibed this essence of the religious ideology of what he's reading. And it's utterly fascinating that he would choose a Christian message, or messages through their thoroughly ensconced in Hindu messages and themes, or what we think of this into currently. I mean, I understand why some of his contemporaries and successors might have thought, Hey, well, you know, this is sort of way overboard with the use of this.
But clearly he's, you know, one wonders what beyond the missionizing, what his enterprise was, was he was aiming to entertain, was he aiming to rival some of the literature that did to prove to himself that he could produce it? I mean, clearly his motivations to my mind are far more than the mission I said. Yeah, and I think two things there. I mean, one point you just made, I mean, part of it was, I think his belief again, an Italian of some cultures and education in the late Renaissance period, I mean, the by 17th century, so after the Renaissance certainly.
But again, you know, what counts as Christian is the beautiful music, the art, I mean, the glories of Renaissance Rome, the magnificence of box music and so on like all of these things are the flourishing and Michelangelo and Da Vinci and so on like that. This is the way you know that the culture is fully integral and together is by his beauty, but the way of beauty, not the way simply of, you know, hammering truths or beating people over the head for the morality, which are important truths and morality importance, but nonetheless looking for this other path. And he does this in such a slow, careful way, because this chapter, which is about 60, 70 verses on Joseph's, you know, life decision about to go back to the city where eventually he'll meet Mary and Mary and Mary and so on, is that there is no Jewish or Christian reference in this chapter. Joseph is simply a good person who is seeking Dharma and struggling between the Jewish and Perfriti and Nivriti Dharma.
And I think the part of the point is that listeners hearing this chapter would be able to recognize it without feeling that they're being asked to embrace a foreign philosophy or a foreign religion, that Joseph is a man of the culture struggling to be detached in the city, detached in life and Gita, the Buddha and other figures would immediately come to Google's mind before anything is mentioned about the Son of God coming into the world and like fascinating. As you're talking about, comes to mind is something along the lines of speaking of the Renaissance. Raphael, Raphael's School of Athens, brilliant, brilliant on so many levels. And it's a brilliant work that depicts classical Greco-Roman, for lack of a better word, you know, pagan thought, but depicts it where people, palace, I believe it's on the probably the East Wall, or the East Wall, right across from the dispensation of the Holy Spirit.
Right? And so you have this, you have this by the same token, Greco-Roman culture is glorified in the trajectory of Western thought, in some sense, and at least in more modern times, that's not, that has not been the case of Indic thought through colonial encounters and scholarship, but it's, but either in his time or through his personage, there seems to be an analog between the height of refinement and culture in the Greco-Roman world versus the Indic world versus wherever. And so you can have the School of Athens, babe, into the papalas. Yeah.
Yeah. And again, this is the early 18th century. And so before the British were a dominant force, before English education was mandatory and the like, and so there's argument, a continuity of culture there. And what he saw as in his interest, and Robert Denobly knew this notionally, but was less successful in being able to communicate it, is that their vision of the humanistic vision of the gospel was in continuity with the culture that was there, and not in disruption of it.
The culture was still continuous, there was still great works being produced in the 18th century. And therefore, you know, being Christian in that culture was to try as much as a foreigner could to become part of it, to speak the language, sing in the language, be, you know, do beautiful things in the language. And that affirmation, I think, is so key. I mean, we do see the other side of it, you know, when we, when they're in Egypt, there are three extraordinary chapters where basically Mary and Jesus received into the background, and by an instruction of the baby Jesus to Joseph, Joseph teach the people.
And for three chapters, he has three kind of dramatic scenes of conversion. And there are long chapters and all the more remarkable, because as I said much earlier, in the New Testament, Joseph doesn't say a word. He doesn't speak one word in the Testament. Here he goes on and on as this kind of educated, articulate speaker, and telling stories, you know, moral stories from the Hebrew Bible in particular, Proverbs, the story of Tobit, the generous man who's blinded, and then the adventures of him and his son Tobias and so on, all these stories, Adam and Eve story and all that.
But in the three chapters, the the the the priests of the pagans with the strikingly Indian names Shiva, Shivan, and then the warrior of Amun, who is interested in what Joseph is saying, it's a whole chapter, but morally compromised. He cannot give up on the world on desire for wealth, desire for sexual pleasure and the like. And then the third chapter is more of a drama, there is an elderly woman who unfortunately comes across as the most negative figure being in a woman who wants to have Joseph kill, realizing that there's nothing to be done except get rid of him because he no one can compete with him, send another warrior, Novakan, to confront Joseph, and there is kind of spiritual conversion takes place. And so you have an intellectual conversion of the priest, and then the moral conversion of the warrior, and then spiritual conversion of the final warrior.
And in each case, they're they're woven in the intellectual issues about thinking about the world properly being moral in the world, you know, fairly straight-laced, you know, Christian Jesuit celibate morality in terms of monogamy and the like. But basically, I'm saying that all of this can be told in a way that appeals to what's best in the culture. This is not contrary. And again, this is all set before the public ministry of Jesus.
So he's not quoting from the gospels, he's not quoting Saint Paul, he's not talking about the death and resurrection, but he's talking about basic virtues and basic ways of being human, correct ways of thinking about divine realities that if you follow this, you'll realize you need to change your life. And so the priest finally changes his life and throws off his priestly garab and says, I'll now be a new person of the warrior, Vaman promises to tread the spiritual path as a moral person. And the third one, Novakan, the other warrior, eventually embraces Joseph's in tears, saying, you know, forgive me for my hostility to you. And none of them become Christian.
That's also because this is in Egypt. There were no Christians at that point in the even in the gospel story, but people who reform their lives in our better people, because of hearing not from the mouth of Jesus, who's not talking at this point, he's a baby, but rather Joseph, who is kind of radiating the presence of Jesus and Mary in a way that is our money is with the culture and brings out the best in the culture. But three conversions that are not Christian conversions, but human conversions to being better people. Well, it's so it's so meta in that he's he's he is crafting a narrative that's parallel to what he's endeavoring to do himself.
So the text in the world, we had a text or so clearly, and cleverly mirrored in this context. And I think that's what he's you know, he doesn't say this directly, but if his audience actually listens carefully to these chapters, so to Intumelnad. You know, Tumelnad is not a Christian culture. Tumelnad, there are many things going on and some of it, he thinks it's dark and dangerous.
But we're talking about people who can see the light, who can flourish, who can become fruitful in morality and love and charity. That can happen in India, even before there is any sense of a Christian ruler or a Christian country. Just by being more human, like Egypt, South India can become a more prosperous, humane culture. And that's really what he wants is the salvation of the culture, even before there's any kind of baptism going on in the lake.
Yeah, it's really a striking he grocs something crucial about the human spirit and the universal sense, irrespective of his relationship or endorsement of the Holy Spirit in a theological sense. Fascinating. I suppose we were pretty sick time for today, but was there anything else about the book that you hope to touch on for today? Well, I think again, thank you for having this opportunity to talk about the book and it's a wonderful opportunity.
I suppose in terms of our legitimate sensitivities about colonialism, hegemony, the domination of the West in South Asia, and so on and so on, that Beshi liked an obelie before him, I think, problematizes any caricature about what a missionary is like. And there are surely missionaries who fall into the worst tropes of being hostile and arrogant and marching through the town with the soldiers behind them and all. So that kind of thing happened. But the sophistication of somebody like Beshi advances, I think, in a way that I think you were mentioning earlier, sensitive and sophisticated respect for culture and necessity of understanding the people, their languages, their ways of being, rather than imposing something from the outside.
And while we might 300 years later do things differently and say things differently and think about the encounter of religions with one another differently, I don't think, on many levels that were that far ahead of somebody like Beshi who has this sophisticated sense of the beautiful, and that the good news is to be communicated through the beautiful, and the way to be a Christian in a culture is to communicate beautifully in a way that attracts people and help them affirm and say yes to be a human. And to be aware of that, that somebody like Beshi 300 years ago is countering images of missionaries in the West and India that perhaps are not nuanced enough because people like this are not taken into account. So looking at Tim Babani, looking at my books, and Joseph and South India, I think opens away, just beginning to rethink one of these trans-emissionaries, the Catholic missionaries, the Jesuit missionaries, and then you can look at the Lutheran missionaries, Z there are certain people, anybody who's interacted with small children know that we arrive with temperaments and there are certain people who they are, they're able to see beyond the ways in which they were conditioned to see. And he had the power to see people as people.
He had the power to see culture as valuable. He had the power to see beauty and spirit wherever, and because of that consciousness, that seeing power, then his mental apparatus wasn't as susceptible to dogma or prejudice. And in that sense, I do believe he was well ahead of his time. So as I was saying, I mean, when I was commenting on earlier was the idea of having a Virgin Mary and Indic Garbon Indic Forum as an Indian woman, I'm sure that would be blasphemous to many people in this day and age, and when we're struggling, so to embrace diversity on various levels.
And so without question, it's not, it's, we are looking at a luminary figure. He may well have been representative of one strand of the missionizing tradition. He may be a glaring exception, but irrespective, clearly, he's literally remarkable, which is why we're taking the time to remark on his works and why you bought him quite a bit. And what's optimistic about it too, also is that he's not been forgotten.
So I mentioned earlier, there's now an English translation, which can be improved on, but there is an English translation of the work for the first time ever. But then secondly, and more importantly, maybe three editions, I think in the past 20 years of kimabani in Tamil with Tamil prose summaries of the verses, and therefore a concerted effort, I think largely in the Christian community, the Catholic community, to make sure that this epic is not forgotten. And so not for foreigners, not for people like me, but rather for native Tamil speakers to be able to read the prose summary and then go back and read the verses to make it come to life in the culture. 300 years later, the people are still honoring and remembering this epic as well as the Statue of the Virgin Mary and the village setting shows that this kind of testimony to beauty and wisdom has life that continues when the colonial age is gone, when India has changed, but it's still there.
It's still working because it affirms the human at a basic level. Beautiful, beautiful idea upon which to conclude. Thank you very much for appearing on the podcast today. You're welcome, Racham.
Again delighted to be with you. Are those listening? Of course, I've been speaking with Father Francis Clooney, who is a professor of Harvard University on his brand new book that sheds light on a fascinating figure. The book, of course, is called St Joseph in South India.
The link to the book is in the podcast notes. Until next time, keep listening, keep reading, and keep contemplating these fascinating figures which seem to defy even their own conditioning and times. Take care.