6 - Reflecting on ‘an other’ experience

Summary

My point in introducing the ‘micro-discourse’ of Roberto de Nobili negotiating the complex socially and historically conditioned ‘middle’ of inter-religious relations was to retrieve a very specific pre-modern context for Christian mission, a context governed by a Catholic humanist spirit of contemplation. This chapter continues the story. Here, however, the emphasis shifts from the contemplative to the more ethical dimension of Christian personhood.

The question raised by the dialogue between Levinas and Ricoeur asks how a certain passivity can be reconciled with the Christian commitment to prophetic speech before the other. So far, my reflections have remained very much at the level of the lone individual ‘taking time’ within the space controlled by the other to respond to the interior movement of the Spirit. De Certeau himself joined the Society of Jesus intending to be a missionary. There can be little doubt that the spirituality of Ignatius, with its guiding image of the apostolic ‘contemplative in action’, formed de Certeau's vision of the Christian life as a constant departure. Like Roberto de Nobili in the seventeenth century, he embarked on a lonely Levinasian ‘Abrahamic journey’ into the unknown. I finished the last chapter by extending the Christian's ‘horizons of contemplation’ to include the wider social reality, thus raising more intractable ethical questions about power, visibility and resistance. The subject of our next ‘micro-discourse’ is the wider ethical and political ‘context of otherness’ within which the Church must find its own place.