Menu
Close
In several documents of Vatican II, dialogus is used for formal engagements, usually between theological experts. But ‘Nostra aetate’ does not use dialogus; it uses a different Latin word, namely colloquia. Christians are urged to engage with others per colloquia et collaborationem—‘through conversations and collaboration’ (n.2). Colloquia has connotations of open-ended encounter or hospitality, in which people share their interests and thoughts in an atmosphere that often lacks any sort of structure. Sometimes I speak and lead; and sometimes I listen and wait. Sometimes I act like the gracious host who is ‘in charge’ and has the responsibility of receiving guests; sometimes I am myself the guest, the one who enters the other’s space, and I find myself taken into the confidence of the host.
Now this is not to say the authors of ‘Nostra aetate’ were thinking of interpersonal relations as a model for interreligious relations; the dominant discourse of the document is that of the history of religions, with the different religions described as sets of beliefs rather than the practices of communities of persons of faith. Nevertheless, the implication is there in the three imperatives that follow the generous acknowledgement that the Church rejects nothing that is ‘true and holy’ in other religions. Christians are exhorted to ‘recognize, preserve and promote the good things, spiritual and moral, as well as the socio-cultural values found among’ their followers (n.2).
The rest of the document includes some fairly bland words of approval of how the various religions address some fundamental human questions. Nothing is said about what these spiritual and moral good things might be; no judgment is made on any belief or practice. Whether we think in terms of formal meetings with an agenda and resolutions, or a more spiritual conversation which moves from chat about mutually engaging concerns to a disclosure of the inner person, that is the task of ‘conversations and collaboration’.
The distinction is important and enlightening. To model interreligious relations in terms of interpersonal conversation is not to ignore the legacy of trauma preserved in the memories of so many religious communities. A history of conflict and violence is not overcome by well-meaning pleas for respect and understanding. Nor does calling conversation informal make it any less serious; indeed, the kindness of hospitality to strangers—the migrant or refugee—is arguably the most immediate moral claim on all communities in our crisis-ridden world. It is not, however, naïve to argue that, if religion can be a problem, it can also be the solution. Not only do religions offer rich resources for reconciliation and peace-making, they are also practised in that openness to the Divine Other which is itself the fruit of a grace-filled welcome. As all good Ignatians will know, each of Ignatius’ exercises ends with a colloquy, a conversation which gathers together both the cognitive and the affective, and offers the inner movements in prayer before God.
In this sense conversation is an experience that brings out what is most human in all of us—but it is also intrinsically theological. In what follows, I begin with this Ignatian experience, before turning to a couple of examples of more structured conversations from the Christian tradition, and then returning to some further reflections on Ignatian practice. The principle I am arguing, that the interreligious needs to be understood through the lens of the interpersonal, may be stated roughly as follows. Whatever may be the content of the conversation, and however the particular responsibilities implicit in any interpersonal relationship are to be defined, both partners are responsible for maintaining the form, the atmosphere of respectful trust without which reconciliation, peacemaking—and most importantly learning—are impossible.
This is not, perhaps, the primary principle one associates with the missionary strategy of the early Society of Jesus. The first Jesuits’ practice seems, at times, more like a tactical opportunism in which willingness to learn takes second place to the conviction that gives rise to an assured teaching. In the context of a Rome rapidly being energized by the growing confidence of the counter-Reformation, that is hardly surprising. But appearances can be misleading.
In his book The First Jesuits, John O’Malley draws attention to the various ‘ministries of the word of God’ exercised by the early Society, particularly what Jerónimo Nadal refers to as ‘devout conversation’, a certain practical skill which Ignatius expected Jesuits to acquire—an ability to raise ordinary interpersonal encounters to an intellectually more serious and edifying level. (2) According to O’Malley, Peter Canisius eulogized Pierre Favre as a model of this practice, while Juan de Polanco recorded ‘thousands of examples’ of what was clearly regarded as a normal and significant aspect of Jesuit ministry. For Nadal the practice was rooted deep in the spirit which founded the Society, a spirit reflected in Ignatius’ gathering of the companions in Paris and his guiding them through the Exercises in a manner sympathetic and responsive to the needs of each individual. In this regard, O’Malley tells us that Ignatius was Nadal’s ‘model and mentor’; Ignatius ‘required that one approach individuals with love and a desire for their well-being, while carefully observing each person’s temperament and character’. (3)
This type of accommodation was more pastoral tactic than the art of conversation, embodying the cardinal rule of all Jesuit ministry, that the needs of the individual are paramount. But there was another type of conversation that caught the imagination, one with a more evangelical than pastoral purpose. The evocative image was to ‘go fishing’. According to O’Malley, the aim was to seek out likely individuals, engage in conversation, gradually insinuate a more serious topic, and draw them back to the church—where more demanding catechesis awaited. This, says O’Malley, was ‘devout conversation, commando style’. Despite reports of great success in terms of the number of reprobates, gamblers and pimps drawn back to the confessional, others were not easily taken in. According to some reports, says O’Malley, they ‘simply fled every time they saw the scholastics heading down the street’. (4) Sheer zeal was not enough. As described by O’Malley, those early decades were not about the working out of a settled blueprint but the story of a learnt wisdom that grew from discerned experience. The practice of devout conversation made its mark on the early Jesuits themselves. The principle that underpinned it—that the virtues manifested in a well-lived Christian life are themselves the best witness to the gospel—became central to the development of what, within a very few decades, became the missionary strategy for which the Society is so well known.
It is, of course, important not to be anachronistic here. Today’s secularised, multifaith culture cannot be characterized by some sort of latent or residual Christianity which simply has to be prompted back into life. On the other hand, the not-so-hidden assumption—that all Christian mission and ministry is based not on a few well-tried methods of persuasion but on a constant effort to discern and learn from the Holy Spirit as it moves in the hearts of other human beings—does provide an important basis on which the complex world of religious pluralism is to be understood theologically. For the first Jesuits, devout conversation was one more way of persuading their partners in conversation to see things in their way. Today’s conversations are set a stage further back, as it were—rooted in an act of faith in people’s God-given capacity to persuade themselves.
Let me continue that thought with a brief reference to two interreligious ‘conversations’ from the Christian tradition. The first is ‘The Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men’, written by the thirteenth-century Franciscan tertiary and Catalan mystic Ramon Llull. (5) It tells the story of a conversation between ‘the Gentile’, someone whom we would probably call these days a spiritual searcher, and representatives of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This is not apologetics—not even intra-Abrahamic apologetics. At the end the Gentile is left to go and make his own decision about which way to follow. When the three wise men eventually depart, they ask forgiveness of each other for any disrespectful word they may have uttered. After agreeing to continue their discussions later, they too go on their way, giving praise to God.
The second conversation, Nicholas of Cusa’s ‘On the Peace of Faith’, was written in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Constantinople to Muslim invaders in 1453. Given the circumstances behind its composition, this text is remarkable for its optimistic vision of a lasting peace between warring religions. If Llull’s text has about it a touch of the medieval romance, Cusa’s, with its question and answer method, is more of a catechism. The author imagines a heavenly dialogue between the Logos and seventeen major regions or peoples which centres around the topic of ‘religion’, what people believe and practise to express that belief.
There is a nice moment towards the end when ‘Anglicus’ raises a question about ‘fastings, ecclesiastical duties, abstinences from food and drink’. Quite why the ‘Englishman’ should be regarded as obsessed with ascetical practices I know not. The response he gets is that different people do things differently and there is always a legitimate pluralism of religious practice which has to be respected. For Cusa, faith is not an unswerving sense of certainty, but a life of constant response to the Word of God which allows for degrees of understanding and different forms of expression. Cusa finishes with the command of God that ‘the wise men return and lead the nations to the unity of true worship … that with the full power of all they come together in Jerusalem as to a common centre and accept one faith in the name of all’. (6)
We could argue endlessly about the theology in operation here. Neither has any doubt about the superiority of Christianity. And they share another, not so hidden, philosophical assumption that, when reasonable people engage in reasoned discussion, the ‘innate’ truth will emerge through a process of question and answer.. The conversations are very measured; there is no doubt about who is in control and where eventually they will lead. In so many ways they are very much artificially contrived texts which flout the usual conventions; indeed, it is something of a stretch to fit them within the category of interpersonal encounter. That, however, is to miss the point. In colloquia it is always the form that is of primary importance, not the content. I introduce these two texts not as forerunners of Ignatian ‘devout conversation’, let alone a template for all interreligious conversation, but because they remind us of a very familiar human experience.
Llull drew on the wisdom of the Andalusian world of religious learning in which Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars worked together in respectful harmony. Cusa, a notable ecumenist who strove to bring peace between Catholic and Orthodox, was addressing a dangerous political crisis which demanded intellectual and spiritual courage. They came from very different backgrounds, certainly, but their shared form of writing witnesses to a certain unspoken conviction, something held in common with our contested, pluralist, postmodern world. The respectful to and fro of different voices shifts attention from places or structures of power that are to be defended to the time it takes to establish lasting relations that are proof against violence of all kinds. In other words, at stake here is a profoundly important question about how interpersonal relations are established and maintained, or—to put it in rather more abstract terms—about the human need to bring harmony into our awareness of the abundance of things while ensuring that it does not screen us from their sheer otherness.
This raises the two questions which I have long pondered. What is to be learned for faith from the experience of finding oneself ‘interfaith’? How do I learn to listen attentively for resonances of the known in the unknown? The first raises the paradox of all interreligious study and conversation, that the more one learns about the religious world of the other the more one learns about the depths of one’s own faith. The second is itself an act of faith—trust in the power of conversation to sound certain echoes and resonances.
We might say that what people say of themselves has a certain sacred quality—or, to put it in Christian terms, the Spirit of God works directly in the well-disposed individual. Truth is communicated through the interhuman relationship, in the way people speak and respond to each other. Resonances begin to make themselves felt by cultivating attention to what is seen and heard, indeed touched and tasted, as one moves—sometimes literally—into another world.
When I lived and worked in Southall in West London, right in the middle of ‘little Punjab’, I would take my students into places of worship and start with a rule of thumb to help them work their way through the disarming experience of crossing a threshold into another world. I would teach them to recognise three stages or levels of understanding— nothing very profound, but important in the tricky business of discerning where the Spirit may be moving. First, I would tell them, notice how you will find yourselves taken by points of familiarity and continuity. Second, once you have become a little familiar with the space and what is happening there, you will begin to notice what is different and strange. And, at some point, there follows a third stage, when echoes of the known continue to resonate in the unknown. This is the point when things become more interesting—and a little disorientating. (7)
This takes me to a wonderfully evocative image from the French Jesuit historian and cultural critic Michel de Certeau. The ‘other’ is never repressed but always continues in some way to ‘haunt’ the space which we seek to fill with our theoretical constructs. (8) However imaginative and generous my account of the person whom I encounter, there is always something elusive or indefinable which resists comprehension. Just when I think I have understood the account that the other gives, something else, something more, emerges—a further interpretation, perhaps, or an unexpected objection—which simply does not fit. And I have to start again.
The other is always there, revealed in traces which we seek to comprehend, but equally the other is never there—and lies always beyond our imaginative grasp. That fairly common experience brings us up against something that we can all recognise. Conversation grows from encounter, a chance meeting or something more formally conceived, and opens up a while web of possible connections both within and beyond our ‘familiar world’. My conversation partner is another person like me—but not just this individual who demands a response. Rather the other, like me, points to a whole history of interaction which is, in a very real sense, still part of the present reality.
Let me turn now to the inner conversation that follows from the exterior encounter. To say that the other always returns, ‘haunting’ the present and expecting further engagement, means that the Christian host needs to foster a basic attitude of receptivity and willingness to learn. This attitude is ethical—demanded by the relationship with other human beings—but it is also theological, because it forces us to shift our own boundaries, to discomfort ourselves. And to trust the other, to act hospitably towards him or her, is to enter into the realms of a holy mystery which speaks of God.
At first that sounds counter-intuitive, even doubtfully orthodox. Christian witness to the God of Jesus Christ is rooted in the events which have formed the community—ultimately the Christian story that is celebrated in the paschal mystery. But this is not the story of the replacement of one community by another, Jews by Christians. It begins with a much more profound encounter and conversation, the ‘metastory’ of the Triune God: the Father’s sending of Word and Spirit for the creation and redemption of the world, in which, through the power of the Spirit of Christ, the whole of humankind participates.
This Word that God speaks, and the response uttered in the death and resurrection of Christ, can only be accounted thoroughly paradoxical. And that is the point: God questions the very tendency to seek comprehensive answers and resolutions. The paschal mystery reminds us that the only true self is the one that has been dragged painfully through the otherness of incomprehension and near despair. For a Christian, therefore, ‘action’ is inseparable from a certain ‘passion’; our witness to what we know goes hand in hand with a disarming wonder at what we do not—and perhaps cannot—know. To gain a proper sense of Christian faith and practice in a pluralist world demands a theology which allows for a certain passivity, the experience of limitation imposed by otherness of all kinds, to speak of the Other—of God.
There can be no doubt that to practise such a hospitable conversation with the other is immensely challenging, both practically and theologically. How benign the other was for the early Jesuit missionaries it is difficult to say. No doubt their confidence in the superiority of the Christian creed provided a welcome security against all questions. But it did not need a September 11 to remind their twenty-first-century successors that there is more to conversation with the other than gentle exchanges about spiritual verities. Even before those terrible events it had become clear that we were entering a new phase.
The early enthusiasm to engage with other religious worlds had long since given way to a more sober appreciation of the dark side of human religiosity, which at times demands a robust response. We live now in a more frightening world, where the power of unfettered religious rhetoric to inspire horrific acts of terrorism has become a part of everyone’s daily reality. In such circumstances, how are we to make sure that passivity does not descend into paralysis nor, in compensating for the missiology of conquest, vulnerability become a mere glorying in victimhood?
If there is to be an answer to that question it is to be found in a spirituality which seeks to be as faithful to the Christian vocation of prophetic resistance as it is sensitive to the traces of a divine otherness which continue to touch us in all our human relationships. Only in a practised attention to the Word of God, as it is spoken in the disarming interface between same and other, between what is known and what remains always strangely beyond our comprehension, do we learn to imitate the ‘active passivity’ of the self-emptying Christ.
This spirituality of ‘active waiting’ returns us to the generous response to God’s loving self-revelation which is at the heart of the Spiritual Exercises. What the Exercises formed in men as diverse in culture and temperament as Matteo Ricci, Thomas Stephens, Roberto de Nobili and Ippolito Desideri (the great early eighteenth-century apostle of Tibet) was a generous openness to the signs of God’s reconciling love, from which grew a discerned and decisive attitude of waiting upon God’s creative Word. The question—not one which can be addressed adequately here—is what brings those two key elements together into a single spirituality. But as a shorthand, I commend that paradox of ‘active passivity’: after the manner of Christ a putting off or relinquishment of self which opens a path to fullness. The more one allows oneself to be ‘taken’ by God, the more the living and loving grace of God becomes incarnate in our midst.
It is, of course, arguable whether those early Jesuit missionaries had a more difficult task than their successors in today’s postmodern world. But what gave them all the patience and the energy to persevere in seeking to understand lies not so much in existing strategies of persuasion as in the spirit of wonder developed by the Spiritual Exercises—a vision of the Spirit of God permeating the whole of reality. Catholic Christianity—and Ignatian spirituality is nothing more than a method for developing the best of that Catholic instinct—holds not just that every aspect of human life can be reached by the grace of God but that, properly understood, all human experience can witness to that grace, can become sources of a transformation which God is already accomplishing.
Today we live with the peculiar ambiguities of a globalised yet increasingly fragmented world. I am not arguing that cross-cultural communication is impossible; on the contrary, my point is that it is laborious and time-consuming. But it needs to be accompanied by the work of discerning the multiple ways in which what is strange and other pervades our world, and indeed our innermost selves—in both benign and dark forms. The more we learn about those extraordinary Jesuit stories which go on ‘haunting’ our age with memories of men surprised and challenged by the other, the more we become sensitised to the richness and diversity of God’s guiding Spirit. The Exercises commend not just a method for the discernment of spirits but a mysticism of love which desires only to respond generously to God’s will. Their spirit, so to speak, lies not with the maintenance of certain convictions in the face of hostility but in a generous openness to the other which is born of the experience of the freedom of God’s grace made alive in suffering human beings.
In summary, what I am arguing is that the Exercises form particular virtues and skills which have a rich potential for engaging with persons of good will. How are they to be appropriated in a way which addresses a society in which ‘faith’ and ‘culture’ seem at times to exist in very different compartments?
Maybe ‘spiritual conversation’ needs to be seen less as a tactical adjustment of the more explicit forms of proclamation and more as a value in its own right. To know how to get a conversation going, and to leave the resolution with God, rather than demand a particular outcome, is not just an appropriate way of understanding the very human experience of conversation, it also represents an authentic development of the properly Ignatian spirit. Where, in O’Malley’s account, the first Jesuits were quite prepared to ‘shake the dust off their feet’ when they encountered opposition, contemporary Ignatians are called to exercise a greater patience—with ourselves as much as with the other—if only because the mending of the various fractures of our postmodern world is an infinitely more complex business than Ignatius could ever have imagined.
Nevertheless, what we do share is a skill in initiating conversation, if not in bringing it to a completely satisfactory conclusion. The famous ‘presupposition’—‘that every good Christian ought to be more eager to put a good interpretation on a neighbor’s statement than to condemn it’ (Exx 22)—is itself based on an implicit ‘theology of conversation’: that God works directly in the well-disposed individual, and that therefore truth is communicated through what is actually articulated in the relationship established between director and exercitant. Somehow that implicit theology has to be converted into everyday conversations. Certainly, it needs to be made more explicit—a more conscious recognition, perhaps, that the Spirit of Christ is at work in all interpersonal relations where serious discernment takes place.
What is most necessary is an act of faith in the power of conversation itself. Is that not another ‘presupposition’—a variant, perhaps, on Ignatius’ great principle—what stands behind Llull’s story of the right-thinking Gentile—and even Cusa’s theatrical array of religious types and cultures? Hospitality and trust in the other are virtues that can be learnt with experience and practice. That does not absolve Christians from the need to be clear about who we are and what we stand for, but it does mean learning how to be more relaxed with, and hospitable to, those familiar yet awkwardly intractable resonances which are often confronted when conversation touches on more serious issues of the practice of faith. De Certeau’s point is that the other cannot be repressed but only returns in an-other form. If that is correct, then persons of faith become ‘persons of interfaith’ not when they seek to retreat to a safe place where the other has been domesticated to an empty (and dangerous) shadow, but when that risky mingling with others in the everyday is grasped with courage and generosity. Faithfulness and openness exist always in tension—as do the fundamental practices of all good conversation, speaking well and listening well.
Philip Endean SJ was Editor of The Way and Tutor in Theology at Campion Hall, Oxford. Until 2001, he taught at Heythrop College, University of London.
Séverine Deneulin is director of international development at the Laudato Si’ Research Institute, Campion Hall, University of Oxford, and associate fellow in international development at the Oxford Department of International Development. Her research is in the area of ethics and public policy. She is also visiting associate professor at the University of Bath in the professional doctoral programme in policy research and practice.
