3 - Stagings of Spiritual Conquest

Summary

The creation of colonial reality that occurred in the New World will remain a subject of immense curiosity and study … Whatever conclusions we draw about how that hegemony was so speedily effected, we would be unwise to overlook the role of terror … the space of death where the Indian, African, and white gave birth to a New World.

— Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man 5.

Abstract: This chapter juxtaposes the project of spiritual conquest as the dual project of religious conversion and resettlement, against the haphazard spread of Christianity as the ideology and propaganda of the Spanish conquest. Both themes appear regularly throughout the missionary chronicles, which documented the progress of each monastic Order (including the Jesuits) in establishing doctrina, a word that came to refer at once to a Christianized population, a mission-town, and the inculcation of the basic tenets of Catholic orthodoxy – in Spain's overseas possessions. The juxtaposed themes of missionary progress and social disintegration appear in a language and imaginary that represent the native experience of deracination as episodes of spiritual “battle”: shot through with magic, demonic possession, monsters, miracles, and divine apparitions.

Keywords: theo-politics, undeception [desengaño], shaman [catalonan / babaylan], anito [ancestral spirit], Devil / demonology, idolatry.

The recasting of the conquest as pacification; and with it, the recasting of the religious effort to congregate and convert native populations to Christianity as the work of “spiritual conquest,” set the stage for the pastoral power of the religious Orders to assume its decisive political character in the conquest and colonization of the Philippines. While early missionaries like Augustinian priests Frs. Diego de Herrera and Martín de Rada saw themselves as the intellectual and spiritual heirs to Dominican priest and advocate of the American natives Fr. Bartolomé de las Casas, their Jesuit counterparts Frs. Alonso Sánchez and Pedro Chirino saw their Christian presence in the Philippines and Asia as inextricably linked to the universal monarchy under the Spanish Crown and its royal patronage of the Church. In many ways, the story of the spiritual conquest of the Philippines boils down to the degree to which these two divergent positions regarding the relationship of the religious to Crown authority could be reconciled – even as members of both religious Orders themselves shifted positions over time.