For centuries, the Passion of Christ has been the subject of representations in art, a recurrent motive in sacred oratory, and the theme of public performances throughout the Catholic world. It is better known as a commemoration of the steps leading from the trial to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, often involving group participation. Through meditation, worship, and prayer, the pious can embrace those events as an intimate, individual experience. John F. Schwaller sets out to explain how the remembrance of this core story of Christianity was introduced in Mexico in the form of a devotion. The focus of Schwaller's study is the translation into Nahuatl of a devotional book, Via crucis en mexicano, by Augustín de Vetancurt, a creole Franciscan friar and leading historian and chronicler who lived in seventeenth-century New Spain.
The original Spanish version of Via crucis en mexicano that Vetancurt translated into Nahuatl was written by a Spanish Franciscan friar resident in Cádiz in the seventeenth century. The Nahuatl manuscript that Schwaller studies in this book was copied in the eighteenth century by an indigenous scribe, Mateo de San Juan Chicahuastla. The transcribed manuscript belongs today to the Academy of American Franciscan History, and no printed copies of the Nahuatl version are known to exist.
Schwaller offers a detailed and profusely documented study of the history of the manuscript and the significance of its translation into a major indigenous language. This study is set within a historical account of the devotion from a perspective that embraces Western Europe and the Americas. Although one might mistakenly assume that the devotion of the Stations of the Cross had its roots in the Middle East, closer to the geographic and chronological roots of Christianity, Schwaller demonstrates that its beginnings were in early modern Europe. Even though the Franciscans had implanted the devotion in Mexico and labored to make it thrive among New Spain's Spanish and indigenous populations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the devotion would receive papal sanction and become widespread in Europe only in the eighteenth century. With the goal of helping the devote to visualize themselves accompanying Jesus as he walked to his final sacrifice, the Stations of the Cross involve prayer, meditation, pilgrimage, embodiment, and movement to bring about a holistic and deeply emotional religious experience.
Through carefully crafted chapters, Schwaller guides the reader through the history of the devotion, with descriptions of its steps and their significance, Vetancurt's biography and place within New Spain's intellectual world, and the built and artistic environments that surrounded the performance of the Stations of the Cross. Those most familiar with the history of early modern Catholicism may think that some passages do not bring new material to light, but the author has chosen to thoroughly contextualize the varied components of the devotion and explain their links to other religious practices and ideas that were being consolidated at that time. Readers are thus given the means to better understand the magnitude of the religious experience encompassing the Stations of the Cross and thus appreciate the enormous challenge involved in translating the Via crucis into Nahuatl.
Schwaller suggests that long-established Mexica religious and civic practices facilitated the adaptation of rituals such as the Stations of the Cross. The skeptic may think that the book has not demonstrated the spiritual and intimate aspects that the devotion was meant to elicit. However, Schwaller's descriptions of performances and his fine observations about the choices that Vetancurt made as he translated the text, in addition to the illustrations by the indigenous scribe Mateo de San Juan, allow us to sense how the Mexica received, taught, and enacted this powerful devotion.
