Saying Goodbye to the Savant of Our Times

It has been over a month since his funeral, and even longer since his demise from this world, but the heart still feels the void of Pope Benedict XVI's passing.

I did not start out as a fan of Pope Benedict XVI, on the contrary, at his election, influenced by the reportage in the international media, I was aghast that the “Panzer Cardinal” and “God’s Rottweiler” had been elected Pope. Surely this was a disaster I thought to myself.

At some point, however, I chided myself; surely as a scholar I had an obligation to first engage with his written works and then form an opinion about the man? And so began my felicitous encounter with his opus. I read one, and then another, and then many more of his works (I am still far from reading all his works) and was smitten.

There were several reasons for my conversion, and I will commence with the secular reason, for this was how I first approached him. My intellectual formation, since my time in the National Law School of India (between 1995 and 2000) was in what could be called the critique of modernity. Remember that this was the time when India had what I called its “Woodstock moment”. Many young people from the middle-class were in support of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, critiquing the mega developmental projects which were displacing communities and bringing impoverishment to them. I did not travel to the Narmada Valley like so many of my peers but restricted my support and engagement with the issue through scholarly engagement: reading, writing papers, and trying to understand the issue from a philosophical perspective. Modernity, I was convinced, as I still am, was a poisoned apple.

The result of this conviction, both personally and among my peers, was an embrace of the non-western (since the West was identified with modernity). As my scholarly career developed, I encountered Latin American and Southern European scholars who were also opposed to western modernity and proposed alternate models for our world. They offer concepts like ubuntu, and the Andean Pachamama in contrast to the certainties of the Western model. I soon realised, however, that these alternative models could not afford us a new way forward.

The critique of modernity often naively suggests that the non-western models displaced by western modernity are capable of offering peace to a divided world. However, there is much in these models which is offensive to the liberal values that we hold on to, even as we critique western modernity.

For example, these models are rooted in violence. How could I forget that the pre-Columbian Andean cultures routinely offered human sacrifice? Sacrifices prohibited after the coming of the Spaniards and the Portuguese to that continent? Just as they prohibited the burning of widows, and the killing of lower-caste slaves for occult reasons, in this subcontinent? The apparently pacific contemporary cult of Pachamama, and other such cults, therefore, owes more to the Catholic Iberians than its proponents would like to admit. The critique of modernity, therefore, was not providing any solution to the civilisational crisis that we were in.

It was at this point that I began reading the works of Pope Benedict XVI. In particular his encyclicals, Deus Caritas Est, Spe Salvi and Caritas In Veritate, which I now recommend to all – not just Catholic – discerning readers, and especially to you, dear reader. Reading these texts, I realised that I was in the presence of the savant of our times. Someone who had something to offer our world which seems to be increasingly spinning out of control. Benedict XVI was also critiquing modernity, he was, however, doing it from the location of Christianity, and suggesting – a suggestion I now wholly endorse – that Christianity can offer not just a critique of modernity, but a path out of the problems it has caused.

More interestingly, Benedict XVI was not simply proposing membership in the Catholic Church, or certain non-negotiable rules. Rather, I realised as I read the first volume of his biography of Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, he was offering a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. It is this encounter and engagement with Christ, he suggests, which is capable of, to borrow a Christian metaphor, turning our water into wine.

What perhaps convinced me instinctually then, which I am now able to reason out, is that the Christian faith, through the imitation of Christ whom the adherent knows personally, is able to deal with the question of violence. Violence is the central issue that plagues every civilisational model. Christ’s response to violence, was – through his death on the cross – to embrace it, an option adopted by Christians through the centuries. Where they have done so, their action has been exemplary.

And so, it turned out that my engagement with Benedict XVI's secular arguments led to a profound spiritual conversion. This was, I believe, because he managed the delicate balance between rigorous scholarship and affective tenderness, the latter born from his own love of a Christ who was personally known and experienced.

Benedict XVI was also able to critically intervene in another intellectual question that I had been wrestling with. He has drawn much flack for the role Europe plays within his philosophy, accused of being Euro-centric. But rooted in his appreciation of Catholicism, Benedict saw Europe as not simply existing eternally, but rather born from Christianity, or rather, a contemplation of Christ. Thus, when he engaged with Europe, or proposed Europe as a model, he was offering the Europe born from Christianity, not the Enlightenment project of bourgeois Europe that is itself in such a mess these days.

Through this nuance that Benedict brings, I was able to graduate my own critique of modernity. The position was no longer simply anti-west, rather it was critical of the bourgeois Europe that was divorced from Christ. For westernised Christians like myself, this nuance is useful in intra-Catholic debates, especially those among Catholics in India. Too many Catholics effectively wind-up embracing nationalism as their religion, when they de-westernise their faith practices. What we need to do instead, is to disengage from the modernity that has insinuated itself into Christianity and Catholicism. This is a delicate, intellectually demanding project, and we could have well done with Benedict XVI’s continued guidance through such a project.

However, perhaps Benedict XVI has done enough. He has left us a wealth of reflections, and more importantly an affective path through which to deal with this project. To once again paraphrase scripture, he has finished the race, he kept the faith. Now there is in store for him the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award him.

Adeus Papa Bento, rogai por nós. 

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo dated 8 Feb 2023)

The Virtuous Reader

Some weeks ago I found myself in a Christmas celebration in Aldona and in conversation with a young man from the village. “So,” I asked him, “how you do spend your time?” “I read” he responded. I was delighted! Here was evidence that while the reading habit among the young may be dying, it is not, in fact, dead. There was another reason for my delight at this young man’s response and this has to do the argument for the cultivation of the virtues which I extended last month.

As I indicated in my earlier argument, the cultivation of virtue and the cultivation of the intellect go hand in hand. One cannot determine what is prudent or not, if one is unable to develop a wider (and deeper) appreciation of the world within which one is living. This appreciation of the world can be obtained through experience, but reading, as we well know, offers one an insight into the experiences of others, persons who are distributed over time and space, and thus one develops a knowledge of the world.

But there is something else about reading that makes for a good base for the virtuous person and this pertains to what we call the reading habit. Those who have this habit will know that reading is not something that we simply do for the pleasure it affords us; indeed ,at times the pleasure of reading is not immediately apparent. On the contrary, when we first begin it takes some amount of effort to stick with the text that is being read. One develops that habit of reading through persistence in the act of reading. One reads, especially in one’s earlier years, despite other distractions that come up. This is precisely the understanding of habit that the classical philosophers had when they discussed the virtues. To their mind, habit was associated with habituation, which is the repetition of the act so many times, in spite of inconveniences and distractions, such that the act eventually becomes second nature to us.

Too often in contemporary society we assume that knowledge is everything. One has only to provide people with information, or the facts, of good or virtuous behaviour and they will then act on them. This belief clearly represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how the human being operates. Knowledge itself is not sufficient, one has to act on this knowledge, and then act on it again, and again, and again such that it becomes so part of our nature that we can go ahead and act virtuously even though there are plenty of opportunities for us to act to the contrary.

What the development of a habit does is not only does it make a certain practice second nature to us, but also that it develops our will to stick with an activity, resist temptation to do otherwise. In other words we develop the virtue of perseverance. When we reflect on this, we realise that perhaps this is the reason why the studious excel. Not because they are smarter than others, but because they persevere long enough until they succeed.

It was for these reasons that when I heard this young man share that he had the reading habit that I was overjoyed, for it was clear in the way he spoke that this was a young man who knew what perseverance was.

My joy was somewhat diluted though when I asked him what exactly it was that he read. “Non-fiction” he responded confidently, and I soon realised that he was referring to that genre I have some misgivings about; self-improvement.

One of the reasons I dislike the genre is the way it embodies the utilitarianism of our times. It is interested in the human being primarily as an economic unit, of bringing in the most, or maximizing the utility, or efficiency of the individual. The human person, as the Catholic Church teaches, is worth more than the amount of value s/he brings to society. They have an inherent dignity and must be respected and valued even if they do not bring in an economic value. Reading self-improvement literature, I believe, seeks to prepare us for the market, as a high-functioning unit, focussing on the contemplation, not externally, on the world around us, but on solely on ourselves.

The (dis)connection between efficiency and beauty, or the Christian way, became obvious to me one evening in the course of a conversation with Fr António Martins, the current chaplain of the historic Capela do Rato in Lisbon. “Beauty is offering something more than is absolutely necessary. The moment you do something a little more than is absolutely necessary,” he said, “you enter the realm of beauty.” Having said this, I realised what he was also driving at, that the beautiful and caritas, or charitable love, are intimately related. Put less poetically than he did, efficiency, or doing only what is necessary is opposed to the pursuit of beauty, and eventually is contrary to the virtue of caritas, or love. Efficiency is concerned with the necessary, the beautiful and caritas are concerned with the giving of more than is necessary, an overflowing, born from love.

This overflowing is also captured in the famous saying attributed to St. Iranaeus, one of the Fathers of the Church: “The glory of God is a human being fully alive”. Looked at from a purely material perspective, this business of being fully alive involves a developing and reaching out to more than is absolutely necessary. In the case of my young friend from Aldona, and indeed young persons everywhere with the reading habit, a true development of the self, the business of being fully alive, would go beyond self-help books that look to developing elements of the personality that would make the more desirable to the market. It would embrace the habit of reading for the sake of satiating our curiosity about the world, for no obvious purpose. Reading things which have no obvious economic value. In this way the habit of reading would also embrace the virtue of charity, eventually transforming the reader, into the virtuous reader.

 (A version of this text was first published in the O Heraldo dated 11 Jan 2023.)

Plotting for a Catholic Politics in Goa

Some months ago, I became aware of a curious trend on local social media. It appeared that there was a systematic pattern where local news agencies would release little phrases, or headlines, often quoting the chief minister of the state. Take, for example, the references to the dubious policy of the present government to reconstruct temples allegedly demolished by the Portuguese. Interestingly, none of these phrases could be used as the basis to prosecute the speakers. They could very easily be explained away, as indeed this temple policy has been cleverly explained away in the face of public outrage.

In fact, it appears that these phrases were cleverly designed to vitiate the public discourse in the state, one small, innocuous, drop at a time, till we wake up one fine morning to realise that the entire well has been poisoned. Impossible to address them individually, it will be even more difficult if not impossible, to address the damage once these little provocations have done their work, which is to provoke the communal passions of those in the state, and principally the passions of those groups who have been constructed as the “majority community”. We know, of course, that there is no such thing as a majority or minority community. Rather some communities are, often consciously and deliberately, designed as majority, while others are pushed into minority positions. These news bytes I refer to seemed similarly designed to not just further deepen the minoritisation that has been systematically taking place of the Catholics in the state, but also to create an emotionally volatile situation in the state, such that violence seems to be the only possible response.

Marveling at the wickedness of this stratagem, I realised that it was only a matter of time before we started behaving as Catholics, Muslims, and Hindus, rather than as members of a common political community. Indeed, this time is already here, and to some extent has been here since the integration of Goa into the Indian Union in 1961. It is just that things are going to soon reach a whole new level of crazy in the coming years.

If it is to be the case that we are going to have to start operating as Catholics first, what is to be the nature of this Catholic politics in Goa? I am personally convinced that these politics should most certainly not be identitarian in nature. Rather they should be ethical. To an extent we do not really have a choice, since even the Catholics in the state have taken up ethical positions, the opposition to the routing of the Konkan railway, for example, or tourism in the state, it has often been represented as communal in nature.

The Latin inscription reads:

 "We shall attain the excellence of virtue with the grace of God and the effort of our will."

https://flic.kr/p/3JmbGh

Nevertheless, there is something we can do, which to my mind has not yet been attempted in the state. It is my proposal that we shift to cultivating among Goans a politics of the classical and Christian virtues, and thus have a long-term project in mind, rather than focus solely on short-term issues, where the agenda is set not by us, but by others. Sun Tzu, the Taoist author of the treatise The Art of War would no doubt agree with me that one should always choose the terrain of battle, rather than fight on a terrain chosen by the opponent.

The appeal of cultivating the virtues among Catholics is immediately obvious. In an age where cynicism and the naked pursuit of either power or pleasure, or worse, both, is the norm in Goan politics, whether social or electoral, speaking of the virtues will offer an ethical framework where we can pause and evaluate our actions and those of others. Additionally, given its classical origins, these virtues are in fact shared across religious groups. Thus, while our effort will be directed primarily to Catholics, this discourse can just as easily be shared across religious boundaries.

Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude; these are the cardinal, or moral, virtues, handed down to us via the Hellenistic (the Graeco-Roman) world and further elaborated on within the Catholic intellectual tradition. To these four cardinal virtues, these Christian intellectuals, added the theological virtues, of hope, faith, and charity. In a time when social politics seems to have largely forgotten that this world is not restricted to the material, but has a spiritual or transcendental element, these latter virtues would offer us a way to move beyond the superficiality of the cynical politics of our age.

Another reason why I believe that the cultivation of the virtues is a good idea is because it also involves an intellectual element. One has to grow in the three intellectual virtues: knowledge, understanding and eventually wisdom. The reduction of our horizon to just the material world, and our activities essentially to (frenzied) consumption, has resulted in a situation where all we are interested in is accumulation of knowledge, or information. There is largely no movement toward relating that information to obtain understanding, and then moving on to the contemplation of these understandings that leads to wisdom.

There is no development of the virtuous life if it is not accompanied by a life of the mind. Classically there was an understanding of the crucial role that the intellect played in strengthening the will and tempering our desires. It must be acknowledged that despite our best efforts we in Goa have been lacking on this front. The reason for this lack is not, as I have suggested above, for lack of trying, but because our intellectual efforts have been largely restricted to the secular frame of liberal modernity. Left almost entirely untouched is the deep river of the Catholic intellectual tradition, which boasts persons like St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, and by adoption the classical philosophers like Aristotle. How many Catholics in Goa are aware, in any depth, of this intellectual tradition?


An engagement with this tradition will allow us to move beyond the rousing of the faithful for short-term political movements. Rather it will develop within them the ability to think deeply, and independently, and more importantly act instinctively to prefer virtuous living. All too often, despite our protestations, too many of us are invested in the deeply unvirtuous public life that marks contemporary Goa. If you can’t beat them, join them, seems to be our attitude.

A politics that rests on the practice of the virtues seems to me the best way forward into the mess that will mark twenty-first century Goa. It is a politics that is categorically not identitarian, and that with time will offer a solid mass of virtuous actors who will block the further descent of Goa into the darkness that threatens. 

 (A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo dated 14 Dec 2022).

In Hoc Signo...

image via https://planetgoaonline.com/the-cross-the-tulsi/

Late last month the leader of the RSS Mohan Bhagwat affirmed that all persons living in India are Hindus. Given that this assertion is a core part of the RSS imagination, he has not been the only person to say so, with one of our former Chief Ministers having also stated that Catholics in Goa are culturally Hindu. At the time a number of Goan scholars jointly offered a nuanced response to this latter assertion, indicating that, in fact, Goans were culturally Catholic. It would be fair to say, however, that while many Goans were culturally Catholic, nowadays, with the rise of Hindu nationalism, this cultural constitution is changing, and with scary consequences.

We need to take a rather large detour to appreciate this suggestion.

It is commonplace, both popularly and in scholarly discourse, to declare that the crosses that one finds by the wayside, and other locations, especially in the Velhas Conquistas, were placed there by European missionaries to displace the deities and spirits that the local population, now converted to Catholicism, used to worship earlier. This assertion always carries with it the suggestion that this missionary act was one of violence, or an attempt to trick people, over generations, to worship a foreign God.

What no one seems to consider, however, is that the locals who had converted to Christianity may have been the ones to erect the cross or request the erection of a cross in those locations. The ignoring of this possibility is not surprising, since as Aditi Shirodkar, scholar from Chicago University, demonstrates in her doctoral thesis, there is never any attribution of agency, or self-determination, to the locals. There is just an assumption that the locals followed the missionaries as if they were Mary’s little lambs.

But the fact that the erection of crosses was not a single act, but a continuous one, carried on over time, and following an ancient logic, but within a Christian meaning system, or world view, became obvious to me a few weeks ago. Travelling from Britona to Salvador do Mundo I came across a cross on the khazans that I have seen multiple times, but this time something clicked. The cross was erected to the memory of a young man who reportedly met with an accident and died there, at what was once a very lonely spot. The logic for erecting this cross can possibly be traced to an ancient pre-Christian logic, which says that persons who die violent deaths become restless bloodthirsty spirits. As I have discussed elsewhere, this belief is also the origin of the Zambaulim Damodar temple, which was originally built to satiate the spirit of a brahmin groom Damodar, killed on the edge of the village as his wedding party returned to his home. According to this belief, the restless spirit could be appeased by a blood sacrifice – whether animal or human – once a year.

It is at this point that Christianity offers what was possibly a welcome relief to those who had earlier followed these pre-Christian beliefs. For the logic of the cross is that Christ has offered the one and single sacrifice through his death on the cross. There is no more need for any bloody sacrifices. I have no doubt that this was a welcome news to the neo-Christian communities in Goa, especially those from the working castes who were the ones most in contact with the spirits that ruled pre-Christian Goa, and from whom sacrificial victims would most likely be chosen. These blood-thirsty and violent spirits lived on the borders of, and outside, the safe environs of the village and were known to cause harm to innocents straying into their territory. For these working persons, it made sense to erect a cross, sign of the great sacrifice that abolished all others. All one now needed to do was pray to Christ, vanquisher of the greatest of evil spirits and death itself. For those who died violent deaths, bloody sacrifice could now be replaced by prayers for the soul of these persons. The Roman Emperor Constantine reportedly saw a vision of a cross surrounded by the words “In Hoc Signo Vinces” (Under this sign you will conquer) prior to the battle which won him the title of Caesar. Our convert ancestors too would have realised that they would conquer a malign spiritual world under the sign of the cross. As is repeated so often in Konkani before every rosary, “Povitr Khursache  kurven Amcheam dusmanantlim Nivaramkam, amchea Deva”. If, therefore, we today encounter crosses at various places, like at the sluice gates of the various manos, or in fields, or hillsides, it is because the cross was possibly erected there by the native peoples who embraced Catholicism, since it liberated them from the blood thirstiness of the ancien regime.

The capriciousness of this ancient regime was substantially visible more recently when the switch from one party to another was justified by reference to the time-honoured practice of kaul prasad – divination by consulting a deity. The MLA who so justified his switching of electoral parties has been mocked substantially, but it is important to believe him, and take his action at face value, in the process respecting not just him but also the divination practice that he used to arrive at a decision. Indeed, if one looks at the way in which his actions were received in the media, one can discern that he was being judged – both by Christians and Hindus – according to Christian standards, suggesting he had spoken to the one God, rather than any one of the multiple deities that are peculiar to the non-Christian world the MLA belongs to.

If we mock his decision it is because, contrary to the assertions of a number of contemporary ideologues, we have all – regardless of the religions we profess – internalised Christian values which demand a certain ethical rigour. To such a mind, the fickleness of a yes today, and a no tomorrow, even from a deity is not well regarded. But this erratic behaviour was the nature of the pre-Christian ethical world, which was marked by a range of belief systems, many of them being substantially capricious and beholden to unpredictable deities.

The flip in the decision of this elected representative was not the last example of the dark possibilities contained within a non-Christian worldview. Some days after the departure to the ruling party, two individuals visited the temple of Bogdeshwar in Mapuça and offered the deity nine bananas,  betel leaves and areca nuts with a prayer that the deity teach the eight defecting MLAs ‘a lesson’. This request for ‘a lesson’ sounds suspiciously like a curse, and is unknown to the Christian ethic – which commands that we love and pray for those who do us evil and persecute us.

With the rise of Hindu nationalism, ably assisted by the scholarly project of postcolonialism and all manner of woke politics, the Christian worldview that was dominant not just in Goa, but to some extent in (British)India as well, has gradually started being eclipsed, such that we are able to see pre-Christian worldviews re-emerge. These worldviews are not necessarily benign, which, interestingly, shows us why our first-Catholic ancestors would have gladly taken to Catholicism, and actively embraced the worldview taught to them by the European missionaries.

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo on 12 Oct 2022).