4 - Miracles and Monsters in the Consolidation of Mission-Towns

Summary

El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (Reason's sleep / dream produces monsters)

— Francisco Goya

Abstract: Representations of the “efficacy of divine grace” informed the projects of conversion and concentrated settlement, while also serving as a cipher for recording the native experience of deracination and state of social anomie. The prose of spiritual conquest allowed the friars and Jesuits to promote the practical usefulness of apparitions and miracles. But for the presumably conquered peoples under Spanish rule, the reception of miracles and apparitions suggests a collective ambivalence and uncertainty regarding the prospect of abjuring native understandings of the spirit world for the faithless promises of concentrated settlement. The theo-politics of undeception masked an underlying conflict around the autonomy of native Indians to assign values (social, economic, and otherworldly) to their environment and community / communities.

Keywords: [divine] efficacy, use-value, deculturation, Agnus Dei medallions, monsters, cult(s) of the Holy Cross.

The staging of spiritual conquest in missionary literature represented the Christianization of the Philippines, much in the same way later historians would characterize Hispanization as a sociological process: a progressive, cumulative, even “evolutionary” accomplishment. This is certainly the way religious chroniclers have insisted on remembering it; a two-step forward, one-step backward affair. As we have seen in previous chapters, this willful narrative comes at a great cost: to the point of reinventing war as a form of peace, masking the rule of expediency as the rule of divine justice, and portraying the persistence of an unconquered frontier as the impetus towards an ever-unfinished conquest. The propagandistic value of this literature served as a constant reminder that for the religious Orders, the promotion of the Christian faith and the recounting of the historical deeds of the conquistadors meant the same thing.

The act of desengaño and spiritual emancipation as strategies of deculturation (see last chapter) exposes the instrumentality of Christianity as a colonial ideology. At the same time, it omits the issue of its efficacy or inefficacy among native populations. It is one thing to explain how friars and Jesuits explained the task of evangelization to each other and colonial officialdom. But how did they explain Christianity to the conquered peoples? What combination of coercion and persuasion led colonial subjects to profess the Christian faith and settle in and around the mission towns?