Justified True Belief

(●) The Basque nobleman who carried the gospel from Lisbon to Japan in eleven years, and died within sight of China. + In the spring of 1541 a Spanish priest of thirty-five boarded a ship at Lisbon with a breviary, the book of daily prayers a priest carries with him everywhere, a change of clothes, and letters naming him the pope’s representative to everything east of the Cape of Good Hope. He had never been to sea. He would spend most of the eleven years left to him on it, and he would not come back. Francis Xavier is the reason the word "missionary" carries the picture it does. Friars were already at work in Spanish Mexico and Peru when he sailed, but nobody before him had worked a whole ocean, and nobody had written the work down so that other men could copy it. After him the sending of preachers was an enterprise with a method, a literature, and a supply of volunteers. He worked the pearl-fishing villages of south India, the clove islands of the Moluccas, the ports of Malaya, and finally Japan, a civilization no European ruler controlled, which answered him argument for argument. For Christian readers that last stretch is the one that repays the most attention: in Yamaguchi in 1551 he stood in a borrowed monastery taking questions from Buddhist monks for hours a day, and when he found that his answers were not landing he changed his whole method. He wrote no books. Everything that survives from his own hand is correspondence: roughly 140 letters and instructions, scribbled in ports and on decks between sailings. One of them was printed at Paris in 1545, the first letter from the East ever published in Europe. Read in the courts of Spain and Portugal, and at the Council of Trent, the long assembly then sitting to settle Rome’s answer to the Reformation, those letters did more recruiting than the man himself ever could.

(●) 1506 AD: He was born in a castle in Navarre, in a kingdom that did not outlive his childhood. + He was born on 7 April 1506 at the castle of Xavier, a few hours’ ride from Pamplona, the youngest child of Juan de Jasso and Maria de Azpilcueta. The date comes from an old family register; the earliest biographers had guessed 1497, and the register corrected them. His father was a lawyer and a privy councillor to the king of Navarre, and his mother was the heiress of two houses, which is why the children divided the family names between them: some were called Azpilcueta and some Xavier. Navarre was a small independent kingdom wedged between France and Spain, and it was swallowed while Francis was a boy. Castile annexed it in 1512. His father died in 1515 with the family on the losing side, and in 1516, after the elder sons had joined a failed rising, Cardinal Cisneros, then governing Castile, ordered the walls and towers of the Xavier castle pulled down. In 1521 his elder brothers Miguel and Juan rode with the French and Navarrese force that tried to take Pamplona back, and inside the citadel they were shelling stood a Castilian officer named Inigo Lopez de Loyola, who took a cannonball in the legs there and spent his convalescence reading the lives of the saints. The youngest brother at home and the wounded officer would not meet for another eight years. So the boy grew up in a half-demolished house belonging to a family with a ruined political career, which is worth holding on to. Everything he later did without possessions he had first learned to do without an inheritance.

(●) 1525 AD: He went to Paris for a career in the church, and shared a room with Ignatius of Loyola, who took it from him. + At nineteen he arrived at the College of Sainte-Barbe in the University of Paris, the largest school in Europe, and settled into the ordinary ambition of a clever younger son: a master’s degree, a lectureship, and in time a comfortable church appointment with an income attached. He took the degree in 1530 and began lecturing on Aristotle at the College of Beauvais. He was good at it, and he was proud of it. His roommate was a shy, devout Savoyard farmer’s son named Pierre Favre. Into that room in 1529 came a third student, a limping Basque of thirty-eight who had been begging his way through the classes with boys half his age. Inigo of Loyola, by then writing his name Ignatius, had come to Paris to get the education he needed for the work he intended. He found Xavier pupils, and lent him money when his allowance from home failed, and then used the access those favours bought him. His earliest biographers report that the sentence he kept putting to the young lecturer was the Lord’s own: "For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?" (Matthew 16:26) Xavier held out for years. Favre gave way first, and made the thirty-day retreat Ignatius had written out as the Spiritual Exercises, a month of ordered prayer and self-examination taken a set of meditations at a time. What finally moved Xavier we are not told. He never described his own conversion, which is itself characteristic of him, and we simply do not know whether it came all at once or wore him down by degrees. What we do know is that by 1533 the ambitious lecturer was gone, and that in the autumn of 1534, a few weeks after the vows he and his friends swore on Montmartre, he made the Exercises himself; the early biographers say he fasted so hard over those thirty days that his friends were frightened for him.

(●) 1534 AD: On the hill of Montmartre he and six friends took vows, and the Society of Jesus began. + On 15 August 1534, in a chapel on the slope of Montmartre outside the walls of Paris, seven men made three promises: poverty, chastity, and a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to work for the conversion of the Muslims, with a clause attached that has outlived the rest. If within a year of reaching Venice they could not get to Jerusalem, they would go to Rome and put themselves at the pope’s disposal, to be sent anywhere he chose. Favre was the only one of them yet a priest, so he said the Mass. The others were Ignatius, Xavier, Diego Lainez, Alfonso Salmeron, Nicolas Bobadilla and Simao Rodrigues. The Jerusalem plan died of a war. They gathered at Venice, Xavier nursing patients in a hospital for incurables while they waited, and were ordained priests there on 24 June 1537; the fighting between Venice and the Turks closed the sea, and no pilgrim ship sailed that year. So the clause took effect. In 1538 they walked to Rome, and on 27 September 1540 Pope Paul III approved them as a religious order, the Society of Jesus, whose members are the Jesuits. It carried a fourth vow, and that fourth vow decided everything that came after: its members hold themselves ready to go wherever they are sent, without argument and without asking what it costs. Through all of it Xavier served as the secretary of the group, and he had no thought of the Indies at all. The man chosen for India was Bobadilla.

(●) 1541 AD: He sailed for India on his thirty-fifth birthday, and found baptized villages that had never been taught. + King John III of Portugal had asked Rome for men to send to his new possessions in the East. Bobadilla fell ill on the eve of departure, and Ignatius turned to the secretary at his elbow. The exchange is reported by the early biographers in words worth the doubt they carry: Ignatius explained the situation, and Xavier answered, "Well then, here I am." He left Rome within a day or two, mending his own cassock on the road. He never saw Ignatius again. He waited ten months in Lisbon, then sailed on 7 April 1541, his thirty-fifth birthday, carrying briefs from Rome that made him papal nuncio in the East. A brief is a short letter issued under the pope’s own seal, and a nuncio is the pope’s personal representative, empowered to act in his name. The voyage took thirteen months: scurvy on board, six months wintering at Mozambique by his own count, and a nuncio who spent them emptying basins for sick sailors. He landed at Goa on 6 May 1542. In October he went south to the Fishery Coast, the pearl-diving villages of the Paravas at the tip of India. Thousands of them had been baptized a few years earlier in exchange for Portuguese protection against raiders, and then left. He found a Christian people who could not tell him a single thing Christians believe, because nobody had ever told them in a language they spoke. So he did the plain thing. He gathered the most intelligent of them and men who knew both tongues, and over several days they turned the creed, the commandments and the prayers into Tamil. He learned the result by heart. Then he walked from village to village ringing a handbell to call the children and the adults together twice a day until they had it by heart too, and he left a written copy in each place, appointed local catechists, villagers set apart to go on teaching the doctrine after he had moved on, and got the governor to pay them a salary. Two years of this, and then a stretch in Travancore, wore out his voice, and on the heaviest days it wore out his hands as well.

(●) 1545 AD: Malacca and the spice islands cost him the best part of three years, and gave him a Japanese fugitive named Anjiro. + In September 1545 he reached Malacca, the Portuguese fortress commanding the strait between the Indian Ocean and the China seas, and from there he pushed east into the Moluccas, the only islands in the world where the clove then grew. Amboina, Ternate, and the group he calls the isles of the Moor took him from the opening of 1546 to the middle of 1547: villages reached by open boat, a volcano that shook one island continually, and a people among whom, he was warned, a visiting priest might simply be killed. He went anyway, and wrote home that the danger was the best part. He was back in Malacca by July 1547, and in December of that year he met the man who changed the rest of his life. Anjiro was a Japanese from Kagoshima, a fugitive from a homicide charge at home, who had been put in the way of a Portuguese captain and told that in Malacca there was a priest worth talking to. He wanted to know whether what he had done could be forgiven. Xavier wanted to know about Japan, and Anjiro, who was learning Portuguese fast, could tell him: a literate country, governed by its own laws, with universities and a religion argued about by professionals. Anjiro went to Goa, was taught and baptized at the College of St Paul as Paulo de Santa Fe, and became the first Japanese Christian on record. Nothing in the East had interested Xavier like this. A country no European had preached in, whose people would weigh what they were told rather than take it from their overlords, was worth a year of sailing, and he began arranging one.

(●) 1549 AD: He landed in Japan, where his hearers argued back with a learning to match his own. + On 15 August 1549 he came ashore at Kagoshima with two other Jesuits, Cosme de Torres and Juan Fernandez, and three Japanese companions. The first year went on the language and on translating the main articles of the faith into it. Then the local lord turned against them and they moved on: to Hirado, then to Yamaguchi, a city of ten thousand households. The first attempt at Yamaguchi is the one that taught him everything. He preached in the streets twice a day, in poor clothes, reading aloud from his translated book, and the boys of the town followed him about jeering: there go the men who say we cannot be saved except by the Maker of all things, there go the men who say a man may have only one wife. Almost nobody was converted. And a disaster was working inside his own preaching all the while, without his knowing it was there. Anjiro, translating as best he could, had rendered the word God as Dainichi, the name of a Buddha revered by the Shingon school of Japanese Buddhism, and the monks of that school had been welcoming him warmly as a man teaching a foreign version of their own doctrine. He was being applauded for the wrong thing entirely. Then he went to Miyako, the imperial capital, two months on the road through a country at war, and found it half burnt and the emperor without the power to grant anything. So he came back to Yamaguchi and tried the opposite of his first approach. He put on good clothes, presented the letters and the presents sent for him by the governor of India and the bishop of Goa, and asked the daimyo Ouchi Yoshitaka, the lord who held that city and its province with his own soldiers, for one thing only in return: permission to preach. He got it, in public notices posted round the city, and an empty monastery to live in. The house filled every day with monks and nobles asking hard questions, and the first converts were the men who had argued hardest. It was in those exchanges, in 1551, that he finally understood what Dainichi meant. He put questions to the Shingon monks about the Trinity and the incarnation of the Son, watched their pleasure at his teaching come apart, and dropped the word entirely, teaching the Latin Deus in Japanese syllables instead. The principle he took away from it is one any translator would recognize: a name the hearers already own will fill itself with what they already believe. He left about a thousand Christians behind him in Japan when he sailed in November 1551, and the mission he founded lasted long enough to produce, two generations later, its own martyrs.

(●) 1552 AD: He died in a hut on an island off Canton, waiting for a boat to the mainland. + Japan had convinced him that the road ran through China. The Japanese scholars he argued with kept asking why, if this teaching was true, the Chinese had never heard of it, since everything the Japanese most respected in learning and law had come to them from China. He thought the question a fair one, and the last plans of his life were built on it. China was closed. Foreigners were forbidden to enter on pain of prison, and the Portuguese traded from islands offshore. He left Goa in April 1552 with a plan to enter Canton as part of an official embassy; the captain of Malacca, Alvaro de Ataide, wrecked it out of spite, holding the ship and stripping the party of its standing. Xavier went on anyway to Shangchuan, called San Chan by the Portuguese, a bare island used as a smuggling anchorage. A Chinese merchant took his money and promised to land him secretly on the mainland at night, and then did not come back. The trading ships sailed. A fever took him in the last week of November, and he died in a hut on the shore, attended by Antonio, a Chinese youth from the College of St Paul, with his eyes on a crucifix. The earliest account gives Friday 2 December 1552, about two in the afternoon; the church keeps his feast on the third. He was forty-six. They buried him packed in quicklime, the burnt lime his companions counted on to eat the flesh away within a few months, meaning to carry the bones back to India later. When the grave was opened in February the body had not decayed, and that fact did the rest: it went to Malacca, and in March 1554 to Goa, where it lies in the Basilica of Bom Jesus and is still shown. He had been eleven years out of Europe and had reached, by his own reckoning, more places than he could keep staffed.

What He Taught

(T1) Whole nations are ready to hear the gospel, and what is missing is people willing to go to them. + Imagine a village of two thousand people with a doctor living six streets away who has never once walked over, not because he refuses but because it has not occurred to him that the street has an end. That is roughly how Xavier came to see the Christian scholarship of Europe. He had been one of those scholars. He had lectured on Aristotle in the best university in the world and wanted a benefice, one of those comfortable church appointments with an income attached, and he wrote about that ambition afterwards with the particular sharpness of a man describing a room he used to live in. His claim is not that Europe was short of learning. It is that learning without charity is a ledger a man will have to answer for, and that the answer is owed now, while the people are alive. Paul had put the same thing as a chain of questions: how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard, and how are they to hear without someone preaching, and how are they to preach unless they are sent (Romans 10:14-15). Xavier read those verses as a description of a gap in the staffing of the world. It is worth noticing what he does not argue. He never suggests that the people he is describing are too hardened, or that the work needs a better century or a friendlier ruler. He says the harvest is standing in the field and there is nobody in it (Matthew 9:37-38), which is why his letters read less like reports than like recruiting posters, and why, read aloud in Europe, they worked as recruiting posters.

(Q) "There is now in these parts a very large number of persons who have only one reason for not becoming Christian, and that is that there is no one to make them Christians. It often comes into my mind to go round all the Universities of Europe, and especially that of Paris, crying out everywhere like a madman, and saying to all the learned men there whose learning is so much greater than their charity, ‘Ah! what a multitude of souls is through your fault shut out of heaven and falling into hell!’" + Source: Letter to the Society at Rome, from Cochin, 31 December 1543 (Coleridge translation; modern editions date the letter 15 January 1544). The most quoted sentence he ever wrote, and the one that emptied European lecture rooms into ships. The Latin of the cry is preserved in the original alongside the Spanish, and he goes straight on to say what he hopes those men would then pray: Lord, here am I, send me wherever it pleases you, even to India.

(T2) A baptized person who cannot say what he believes has not yet been taught. + When he reached the Fishery Coast he asked the Christians there what they knew about Jesus Christ, and they told him they were Christians, and that since they did not speak Portuguese they knew nothing else. It is one of the bleakest sentences in his correspondence, and his whole practical method grows out of it. What he built in answer was deliberately unglamorous, and it always ran in the same order. First came a text in the local language, made by committee because he could not make it alone. Then memorization: his own first, then the children’s, then everyone’s, with the creed repeated more often than the other prayers because the creed is the part that says what a Christian is. Then Sunday assemblies, where he recited each article and asked the whole congregation, article by article, whether they believed it. And then, when he moved on, a written copy left behind, salaried local catechists to go on using it, and the children commissioned to teach their own parents in the houses and the crossways. He reckoned that at twenty words a day an unlettered convert could carry a full course of instruction inside a year, which is the arithmetic of a man who had counted. Christians of every tradition have argued since over what he did next, which was to baptize in numbers before that instruction had run. The principle underneath the practice, though, is one no tradition disputes: making disciples and teaching them to observe what Christ commanded is a single instruction, not two (Matthew 28:19-20), and a mission that stops at the font has done half a job.

(Q) "This I learnt by heart, and then I began to go through all the villages of the coast, calling around me by the sound of a bell as many as I could, children and men. I assembled them twice a day and taught them the Christian doctrine: and thus, in the space of a month, the children had it well by heart." + Source: Letter to the Society at Rome, from Cochin, 31 December 1543 (Coleridge translation). The "this" is the catechism he and his interpreters had just translated into Tamil. The same letter records what the work cost him physically: he was often hardly able to use his hands from the fatigue of baptizing, and had sometimes lost his voice altogether from repeating the creed.

(T3) An argument the hearer cannot follow is not an argument. + In a temple on the Fishery Coast a crowd of Brahmins, the priestly caste of Hindu India and the learned men of any village they lived in, asked him whether a human soul perishes with the body the way an animal’s does. He had spent eleven years in Paris being trained to answer exactly that question, and the training was no use to him: the scholastic arguments, the careful technical distinctions of the medieval schools, assumed a shared vocabulary his hearers had never met. So he made arguments out of what they did have, and reported afterwards, with some surprise at himself, that these had worked. This is not a lowering of the content. It is the recognition that a proof is a thing that happens in somebody’s mind, and a proof nobody can follow has not happened at all. Peter tells Christians to be ready with a reason for the hope that is in them, and to give it with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:15); Xavier’s gloss is that the reason has to be in a form the asker can carry home. He applied the same rule to himself in Japan, where his hearers were as trained as he was and the problem ran the other way. There the mistake was not that his arguments were too subtle but that his vocabulary had been borrowed from a religion he was contradicting, and the fix was equally practical: stop using the borrowed word.

(Q) "I find, by the way, that the arguments which are to convince these ignorant people must by no means be subtle, such as those which are found in the books of learned schoolmen, but must be such as their minds can understand." + Source: Letter to the Society at Rome, from Cochin, 31 December 1543 (Coleridge translation). "These ignorant people" is his phrase for villagers with no formal schooling, and the same letter shows how little he took it to mean stupid: the questions he is answering here are whether the soul dies with the body and how it leaves it, which are not simple questions. He is describing a failure of his own equipment, not of theirs.

(T4) What is best in a people is a door into them, not an obstacle. + Xavier arrived in Japan with the reflexes of a man who had spent seven years among people the Portuguese ruled, and Japan did not work that way. Nobody there needed his protection, his king meant nothing, and the local scholars were better read than he was. What he did about it took two tries. The first try was the one his instincts gave him: preach in the street in poor clothes and let the gospel be its own recommendation. It produced jeering boys and almost no converts, and he was honest enough in his letters to say so. The second try used what he had learned about the country: honour is the thing Japan prizes above everything, so he arrived at the daimyo’s court dressed as an ambassador, handed over the letters and presents from the governor of India, refused the gold he was offered in return, and asked instead for permission to preach. That got him a public edict, a building, and a hearing. Two things have to be held apart. He never softened the content, and his letters are frank to the point of rudeness about what he thought of the Buddhist sects. What he changed was the door: he stopped expecting a proud and literate people to receive the gospel in a form that insulted them. A generation later that instinct became a Jesuit policy, and it is the seed of everything the missions of Valignano, Ricci and de Nobili would later be praised and prosecuted for.

(Q) "In the first place, the nation with which we have had to do here surpasses in goodness any of the nations lately discovered. I really think that among barbarous nations there can be none that has more natural goodness than the Japanese." + Source: Letter from Kagoshima, 5 November 1549, to the Society at Goa (Coleridge translation). Written within three months of landing. He goes on to describe a country where a nobleman’s poverty costs him no honour, and remarks that he hardly knows whether the same could be said anywhere in Christendom. It is an odd sentence to find in a sixteenth-century European letter, and it is the reason the Japan mission was run differently from every other mission he founded.

(T5) Hardship taken up for Christ arrives as joy rather than as loss. + The islands he wrote home about in January 1548 were the worst posting of his life. Friends at Ternate had begged him not to go north to the Moro group at all, on the grounds that he would be killed there; the food was strange, the water bad, one island shook with earthquakes and threw up ash, and the nearest help of any kind was weeks away by open boat. His account of it is not stoicism, which grits its teeth and calls the pain nothing. He says the danger and the discomfort themselves turned into consolation, and he is careful to name the condition that made the difference: borne for the love of our Lord Jesus Christ. Take that clause out and the sentence is nonsense; leave it in and it describes something Christians have reported since the apostles left a council rejoicing that they had been counted worthy to suffer dishonour for the name (Acts 5:41). This is also why the letters recruited so well. A man writing home about heroic sacrifice inspires admiration and no volunteers. A man writing home that he has never been happier, from the most dangerous place in the archipelago, is a different kind of advertisement, and Europe read him correctly.

(Q) "All these dangers and discomforts, when borne for the love of our Lord Jesus Christ, are treasuries filled full with heavenly consolations, so much so that one might think these islands were just the places where in a few years one might lose one’s eyesight from weeping so abundantly the sweetest tears of joy." + Source: Letter to the Society at Rome, from Cochin, 21 January 1548, looking back on the Moluccas (Coleridge translation; modern editions date the letter 20 January 1548). He closes the passage with a piece of wordplay: these should be called the Islands of Divine Hope rather than the isles of the Moor. Coleridge notes that he had gone to them over the objections of everyone who knew the region.

(Q) "As soon as the Japanese learn that the Chinese have embraced the faith of Jesus Christ, there is reason to hope that the obstinacy with which they are attached to their own false sects will be lessened." + Source: Letter to Ignatius of Loyola, from Cochin, 29 January 1552 (Coleridge translation). The last strategic judgment of his life, and the one that killed him: China first, because Japan would not move until China had. He was ten months from dying on its doorstep. Thirty-one years after his death a Jesuit named Matteo Ricci would get through the door he could not open, carrying the method he had worked out in Yamaguchi.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) His letters recruited the men his own hands could not, and the church made him the patron of every mission after him. + He complained constantly that he was one man. The remedy turned out to be the complaint itself, written down. A letter of his was printed at Paris in 1545, the first letter from the East to be published in Europe, and after that they were copied, translated into Latin, German and French, and read aloud: in the courts of Spain and Portugal, in Jesuit houses at table, and at Trent while the council sat. Ignatius sent men east on the strength of them, and by 1548 Xavier had enough hands to post them to the main centres of India and to take charge of the seminary at Goa founded seven years earlier by Miguel Vaz and Diogo de Borba, which became the College of St Paul and turned out local clergy and catechists. The effect outlived the century. The Society that had seven members on Montmartre numbered about a thousand by the time Ignatius died in 1556, four years after Xavier, and its overseas missions became the largest sustained preaching enterprise the church had attempted since the conversion of northern Europe. When Rome came to recognize him formally it recognized that. He was beatified in 1619, which is the step before sainthood, and canonized on 12 March 1622 alongside Ignatius, Teresa of Avila and Philip Neri; he was named patron of the East in 1748 and, in 1927, patron of all foreign missions. The second name attached to him in that 1927 decree makes the point better than any argument could. It is Therese of Lisieux, a French Carmelite who died at twenty-four and never left her convent. The church that had watched Xavier cross half the world set beside him a woman who went nowhere, and said the two of them were doing the same work.

(†) The Jesuits who came after him turned his second attempt at Yamaguchi into a policy. + Alessandro Valignano was appointed Visitor in 1573, twenty-one years after Xavier’s death, an office that set him over every Jesuit mission in the East. He spent his career arguing that a missionary in Japan must live, eat, bathe and bow as the Japanese do, learn the language properly before preaching in it, and train Japanese priests rather than import European ones. He wrote the rules down in a handbook of Japanese manners for his own men. Every part of that programme is Xavier’s Yamaguchi turn, made systematic. Valignano sent Matteo Ricci into China in 1583. Ricci entered dressed as a Buddhist monk, worked out that the men who mattered were the Confucian scholars, changed into the silk gown and beard of a literatus, as one of those scholars was called, and spent the rest of his life in Chinese as a mathematician and moral philosopher who happened to be a priest. Roberto de Nobili did the parallel thing at Madurai in south India from 1606, living as a sannyasi, a renouncer, learning Sanskrit and Tamil. Both of them, defending their work to Rome, stood on the principle Xavier had reached by trial and error: the gospel is not a European possession, and the clothes it arrives in are not part of it. That principle was contested then and is contested now, and the disputes it produced ran for more than a century after Ricci died. What is not in dispute is where it started. The chain of influence runs from a jeered street preacher in Yamaguchi in 1550 to a Jesuit in scholar’s silk at the Ming court, and the church has been arguing about how far to take it ever since.

(†) Protestants who wanted nothing else from Rome still counted his years as evidence that it could be done. + In 1792 an English Baptist cobbler named William Carey published a pamphlet arguing that the Great Commission, Christ’s parting command to make disciples of all nations (T2), still bound Christians, against respectable opinion in his own denomination that the command to go into all the world had been discharged by the apostles. To make the case he wrote a short history of missions since Pentecost, and in it, among the Jesuits and the Capuchins, appears this: "Xavier, whom they call the apostle of the Indians, laboured in the East-Indies and Japan, from 1541 to 1552." The sentence is grudging. Carey is not recommending Xavier’s theology, and a few lines later he delivers a blunt verdict on the whole period, that blind zeal, gross superstition and infamous cruelties marked the appearances of religion so much that the professors of Christianity needed conversion as much as the heathen did. But the name is in the list, with the dates right, in the founding document of the modern Protestant missionary movement. What Carey needed from that list was proof that the thing was possible and that somebody had recently done it, and Xavier supplied the proof. Since then his name has been common property. Protestant mission societies published his life; Catholic orders kept his feast; and the argument between them about what he taught has never stopped being an argument between people who both want what he wanted.

(†) Where his own record parts company with the gospel he preached: contempt, broken idols, and a request for the Inquisition. + Honesty requires the other column of the ledger, and in his case it is written in his own hand. - Contempt for the Brahmins. In the same famous letter that contains the cry about the universities, he describes the Brahmin priests of the Fishery Coast as "as perverse and wicked a set as can anywhere be found" and "liars and cheats to the very backbone." He had grounds for anger at particular men, and he says that in all his time in the country he had converted exactly one Brahmin, a young man who went on to teach the children their catechism, which is worth reading as a verdict on his own approach as much as on theirs. He also recorded, in the same letter, a long and courteous temple conversation in which two hundred of them embraced him. The contempt was not forced on him by the evidence; he chose it. - Breaking the idols. His own sympathetic Victorian biographer records without embarrassment that one of the first things he did after baptizing a village was to destroy the idols and their temples. A convert may pull down what he has personally worshipped; a foreign priest with a Portuguese garrison behind him pulling it down for a whole village is a different act, and the people whose shrines they were had not agreed to it. - The Inquisition. Writing to King John III of Portugal from Amboina in the Moluccas on 16 May 1546, he asked the king to send the Holy Inquisition to India, the church court that tried baptized people suspected of keeping another faith in secret, on the ground that many living under Portuguese rule were secretly keeping the law of Moses or the religion of Muhammad. Historians read the letter differently, some taking it as a request for the tribunal and others for a special minister of religion, and the Goa Inquisition itself was not established until 1560, eight years after his death and by other hands. But the sentence is his, and it asks for the machinery. Set beside his own work these are a contradiction, not a footnote. The man who ground a catechism into Tamil so that a pearl-diver could say what he believed knew perfectly well that faith arrives by understanding. Paul had already ruled on the alternative: "by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God" (2 Corinthians 4:2), which is a renunciation of every shortcut, and the shortcuts Xavier reached for belonged to his century rather than to his gospel. Both things are true of him at once, and a reader who keeps only one of them has not met him.