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Jesuit on the Roof of the World is the first full-length study in any language of Ippolito Desideri (1684-1733), a Jesuit explorer and missionary who traveled in Tibet from 1715 to 1721.
Based on close readings of a wide range of primary sources in Tibetan, Italian, and Latin, Jesuit on the Roof of the World follows Desideri's journey across the great Western deserts of Tibet, his entry into the court of the Mongol chieftain Lhazang Khan, and his flight across Eastern Tibet during the wars that shook Tibet during the early-eighteenth century. While telling of these harrowing events, Desideri relates the dramatic encounter between his Jesuit philosophy and the scholasticism of the Geluk monks; the personal conflict between his own Roman Catholic beliefs and his appreciation of Tibet religion and culture; and the travails of a variety of colorful characters whose political intrigues led to the invasion of Zünghar Mongols of 1717 and the establishment of the Chinese protectorate in 1720.
As the Tibetans fought among themselves, the missionary waged his own war against demons, sorcerers, and rival scholastic philosophers. Towering over all in the mind of the missionary was the "fabulous idol" Avalokitesvara and its embodiment in the Sixth Dalai Lama Tsangyang Gyatso. In describing his spiritual warfare against the Tibetan "pope," the missionary offers a unique glimpse into theological problem of the salvation of non-Christians in early modern theology; the curious-and highly controversial-appeal of Hermetic philosophy in the Asian missions; the political underbelly of the Chinese Rites Controversy; and the persistent European fascination with the land of snows.
- Sales Rank: #974953 in Books
- Published on: 2009-11-11
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.10" h x 1.10" w x 9.30" l, 1.25 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 320 pages
Review
"A great feat of historiography, this at-once sympathetic and unblinking account of Desideri's missionary career and the collective fantasies behind it makes for terrific reading. Treated to a feast of intimate details drawn from letters, journals, and theological tracts alike, the reader comes to understand from the inside the ambitions and the disappointments of this seminal moment in the history of what we now call interreligious dialogue. Desideri's fascinating story helps us appreciate his complex combination of admiration, accommodation, and refutation of Tibetan Buddhist thought, all set against the turbulent period in Lhasa during the life of the Sixth Dalai Lama, not to mention virulent competition between Christian missionary sects at the time."
-- Janet Gyatso, author of Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary
"This is a very important book. It is the first in English seriously to treat the life and work of Ippolito Desideri, an eighteenth-century Italian Jesuit who was the first Christian intellectual seriously to engage Tibetan Buddhism in its own terms, to the point of writing extensive treatises in scholastic Tibetan. Pomplun is a first-rate Tibetanist as well as a good theologian, and he writes beautifully. The result is a book of considerable intellectual weight that is a delight to read."
--Paul J. Griffiths, author of Lying: An Augustinian Theology of
Duplicity, and Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Gramma
"The Jesuit missionary Ippolito Desideri, who lived in Lhasa during the turbulent years of the early 1700s, has been perceived as a uniquely fascinating and sympathetic figure by Western observers of Tibet ever since the rediscovery of his writings over a century ago. Previous scholarship, however, has not clearly situated Desideri in the context of his times and of his spiritual and intellectual formation. In Jesuit on the Roof of the World, Trent Pomplun vividly portrays Desideri's world in its remarkable contours, at once at the intersections of Asia and Europe, and medieval and modern. The book is a pleasure to read, and one, at last, that I can recommend to readers in both European and Asian studies."
-- Matthew T. Kapstein, Director of Tibetan Studies, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris
"It would be hard to imagine a scholar more ideally suited to understand Desideri's story in all its aspects, from every important perspective, and to appreciate its wonder, irony, and ultimately futility." --First Things
"This is a brilliant book, a fascinating account that is part review of the intensity of Jesuit formation, part biographical and historical narrative, and part philosophical and theological review of missiology and soteriology in the post-Tridentine era. Pomplun's work has that none-too-common quality for nonfiction books: being a page-turner. . . The book is a delight to read, shedding light on a little known area of Jesuit and Tibetan studies, one whose historical context has a particularly vivid contemporary significance--namely, the philosophical, social, and theological meanings and values layered in 'interreligious dialogue.' This is a great book."
--CHOICE
"Pomplun's study is well researched and elegantly written, a sophisticated sympathetic, even exciting account of Ippolito Desideri's (1684-1733) five-year mission to Tibet. . . generous, thought provoking, and exceptionally well-researched. I recommend it highly for both its treatment of initial Christian contact with Tibet and for its historiographical methodology."--Theological Studies
"An insightful book. . . This volume is highly recommended for both the serious student of Jesuit history, and Tibetan culture."--CatholicBooksReview.org
"Pomplun makes a significant contribution to Tibetan studies and the history of the Jesuit missions through his meticulously researched and perceptive reconstruction of the life and times of Ippolito Desideri, the notorious eighteenth-century Jesuit missionary to Tibet. Despite being written for partisan purposes...Pomplun rewards ecclesiastically minded readers with judicious treatment of relatively unkown debates concerning free will, the terms under which non-Christian religious beliefs and practices were evaluated as positive or negative for salvation, the influence of movements such as Hermeticism and Pythagoreanism in forming a late baroque Catholic imaginaire receptive to pagan wisdom as an expression of perennial religious truth, and the salvation of individual non-Christian believers."--Religious Studies Review
About the Author
Trent Pomplun is Associate Professor of Theology at Loyola University Maryland. His research interests include late medieval and early modern Catholicism, missions history, and Indo-Tibetan religion and culture. Jesuit on the Roof of the World is his first book.
Most helpful customer reviews
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
When Will We Learn the Details of The Dramatic Encounter?
By James S. Taylor
The strength of this book is in the immense detail that goes into situating Desideri in his cultural, historical and theological context. It also gives a critical reading of his reports against other documents from the time, showing that the way he presents things is not always exact. All of this was very helpful and added greatly to my understanding of the Jesuit missionary.
However, having been interested in Desideri for nearly three decades, I already know the story. The odd thing about him is that while everyone goes on about how engaging was his dialogue with Tibetan Buddhism, no one gives you details to decide for yourself. This book, for example, while the reviews and description bring his story up as a "seminal moment in...interreligious dialogue" with "the first Christian intellectual to engage Tibetan Buddhism on its own terms" showing a "dramatic encounter between [Desideri's] Jesuit philosophy and the scholasticism of the Geluk monks" leaves us nearly completely in the dark about the details, yet again. I find this typical of discussions about Desideri; even English translations of his own writings leave out these sections.
What this book does cover, instead, are Christian theological issues and the details are about doctrinal and procedural debates between different Christian groups, predominantly the Jesuits and the Capuchins. We are repeatedly brought to the door of Desideri's opinions about why he disagreed with Buddhism, but are not really let inside. More than once we are drawn into the fact that he greatly disagreed with the idea of rebirth, enough so that he wrote a large document on the subject, but we are not told any details of why he disagreed with it or what arguments he put forward against it. The only hint, in another context, is that he felt the Dalai Lamas used it as a social control mechanism. Surely there has to be more to it than that. Again, more than once we are drawn in to Desideri's study with Buddhists in monastic settings, where it is clearly shown that he was reading the right books and had a special interest in Madhyamaka, even though he disagreed with aspects of it. Other than that part of the disagreement centered on the denial of a Creator God by Madhyamika authors, we are given no idea of the details of this incredibly interesting worldview encounter. Pomplun knows the details enough to mention, more than once, that Desideri had some strange ideas about Madhyamaka, but, again, no details. And all this in a book with a chapter titled "Tibetan Religion in Theological Perspective," which is one of the main reasons I bought it.
Readers can be excused for starting to wonder if the emperor has no clothes. At one point, Pomplun notes that, despite Desideri's claim that many Tibetan intellectuals came to read his refutation of Buddhist doctrines, there is no reference to this in any contemporary Tibetan accounts. Is it because they didn't find anything of real substance? ;) Someone needs to write a book on what Desideri actually wrote on the subject and the arguments he used. Perhaps Michael Sweet's upcoming book or the one Pomplun says he wants to write next on Desideri's Tibetan documents, will finally fill the gap for those of us who neither read Tibetan or Italian nor have easy access to the journals where some of this work is starting to appear.
Either way, if none of that is your concern, than this book will not disappoint your quest to understand Desideri in a more thorough manner. It reveals the man at his best and worst, as well as disbanding a number of romantic myths about both him and Tibetan culture. If you have any interest in Desideri, it is rich in historical detail and well worth your time. Each of the six chapters is a self-contained unit focusing on a major issue in his life, picked up in chronological order. We are given a detailed examination of his Jesuit background, the literary context of his writing style, a general overview of how he situated Tibetan Buddhism in relationship to Catholicism, his understanding of the Tibetan politics during his visit, his theological disputes with other Christian groups, and how all of this fits into the European cultural context of his time. By the time you are done the introduction, you will clearly see that Pomplun is not going to get into the issues that interested me. Too bad the Amazon preview cuts off before then.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent Study
By Jonathan Homrighausen
I first heard about Desideri in my summer Buddhist Studies course in Nepal. In the early eighteenth century, he entered Nepal, and was the first missionary to take up extended residence there. (Others had tried, but even killed by disease or the hardship of trekking the Himalayas.) Sadly, much Desideri scholarship and sources are not available in English. Michael J. Sweet and Leonard Zwilling only came out with their mammoth translation of his journals* in 2010, the year this historian's biography was released. Pomplun's website reveals that he is currently working on a book-length study of Desideri's theology and translating his Tibetan works into English (which has never been done). Judging from this book, I have good reason to be excited about these works.
The chapter on Desideri's young life was perhaps the least interesting. Born in Italy, he entered the Jesuits at a young age. At this time, the missions to Asia and the Americas were the peak aspiration of young Jesuits across Europe. Many applied to their superiors for the privilege of this life; few were chosen. Accounts of violent deaths at the hands of natives (particular in Japan and the Americas) only increased this furor, as novices projected the martyrdom fantasies of early Christianity - a fast track into heaven - onto the exotic faraway lands of the New World and the Orient.
In 1712, Desideri was granted permission to go to Tibet. His trek from Italy to India and up to Tibet took three years. Settling in Lhasa, he found a patron in Tibet's ruler, Lhazang Khan, and rapidly applied himself to learning the Tibetan language. In no time at all he was composing Tibetan catechisms and refutations of erroneous Tibetan doctrines, such as reincarnation and the lack of God. Yet this bright period was short-lived. Within a few years Khan was deposed by invading forces, and Desideri was forced to go into hiding. Simultaneously he was vying with the Caputchin friars, who after arriving a year after him told him that the Pope had given Tibet to their order and not the Jesuits. (This kind of competition between religious orders, with the competing theologies of missions each brought to the foreign land, also happened in Japan and China.) These Capuchins eventually got him expelled from Tibet. Forced to go home in 1721, Desideri was forever embittered, feeling that his talents and calling were being wasted by a relentless bureaucracy.
Yet Desideri was not idle back in Europe. There he published his accounts of Tibet. At this time, missionary accounts were bestsellers in Europe, and the line between sensational storytelling and historical facticity was often blurred. Historians unable to corroborate events he details or locate people he mentions suspect that he may have invented details to bolster the popularity and funding of the missions, and comparisons with his private letters show he omitted some of the hardships and political machineries he faced in order to make the Tibet mission more appealing for young priests.
Most fascinating to me is the final chapter on these published accounts. Connecting to my other recent readings, Pomplun details how theologians confronted with massive numbers of people who had never heard of Christ had to reformulate the question of salvation outside Christendom. Yet this modern sensibility was part and parcel with Desideri's blatantly confrontational views of the Tibetan religion. He saw the Dalai Lama as a Satanic Anti-Pope, described Tibet in ways evocative of a circle of Dante's hell, and interpreted Tibetan texts as pointing toward fulfillment in Christ:
"Called to Tibet for the greater glory of God, the Jesuit missionary met a magnanimous king, wicked minsters, and all manners of black magic. In doing so, he found his position not merely confirmed in the teachings of the Catholic Church but prophecied in the Tibetan tales themselves. I like to imagine that as he followed an ancient sorcerer's footsteps across Tibet, Ippolito Desideri came to think of himself as a second Padmasambava, locked in battle with demons for the land of snows, and intending to repeat his rival's great feats for the Roman Catholic Church." (196)
Not only did Desideri contribute to the Orientalist vogue in Europe, the simultaneous demonization and idealization (but always exotification) of Asia, but also laid the grounds for much modern scholarship. His account of Tibet is heralded by Tibetologists as the beginning of their field. Pomplun has written the best kind of academic book: a concise, well-written study both edifying for the historian and accessible for the public. I look forward to his future work on this Jesuit and his mystique.
* Mission to Tibet: The Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Account of Father Ippolito Desideri, S.J.. The whole thing is 795 pages, including a 62-page introduction and 80 pages of footnotes and bibliography.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Fills a gap alongside "Mission in Tibet"
By John L Murphy
"The gravity-defying domes and impossible skies of Jesuit architecture evoked, with precise deliberations, the interior extravagance of generous abandon." (42)
Jesuit visual aids and verbal rhetoric, employed in the prolix account Ippolito Desideri sent back and re-wrote five times, aimed at inspiring novices in the Society of Jesus with the same fervor which fueled this young scholastic to ask to be sent to convert Tibet in 1712, even though he may have known nothing substantial of this most remote of outposts in the Society's Indies province. Furthermore (although there remains possibly some ambiguity in historical record as to what the young Jesuit knew and when), the Capuchin Franciscans had already been granted papal permission to establish themselves in Tibet. All the same, Desideri, not yet ordained when he left Italy for the East, arrived in 1715 and reached Lhasa the following year.
There, he quickly learned Tibetan; the preceding efforts of the Capuchins assisted him, but he certainly made astonishingly rapid progress, beginning his first book in the language the same year. The invasion by the Zunghar from Mongolia in 1717 impelled the Jesuit missionary to flee to Dakpo. He continued his writing of his Notizie istoriche, intended to justify his mission against both the claims of the Capuchins and, more crucially, the assertions of the Buddhists.
Their Madhayamaka philosophy earned the brunt of Desideri's assault. He sought to undermine the Buddhist denial of a supreme God as absurd, and this "evident falsehood" combined with the need for salvation, in Catholic theology, to rest on "certainties of reason in addition to certainties of faith." (94) In his new study of Desideri, Trent Pomplum discusses this in a dense chapter which analyzes Desideri's methods via post-Tridentine theology, and scholastic applications. The Tuscan Jesuit's sought to deny his Tibetan hosts and interlocutors the ability to assert their claims to what Desideri might define as prevenient grace, the assistance given by God to those seeking Him without their direct knowledge, but who gained by their unwitting good will to seek the ultimate truth the benefits of natural virtues.
This theme creates intricate terrain to explore in a compressed chapter, and those without added theological surety may find themselves challenged here. Still, Pomplum sums up the contrast between "natural virtues" which an unbeliever might possess and "supernatural fulfillment" which directed these virtues towards a Christian salvation and he shows why Desideri sought to refute Buddhist doctrines. Desideri, as any missionary of his time and formation, admired Tibet even as he tried to undermine its religious and cultural formations, in an attempt to win it over for Christ. Therefore, he had to unrelentingly refute the claims of dharma.
This book progresses through Desideri's training as a Jesuit as Pomplum introduces us to the baroque mindset within Italian Catholicism. Professor Pomplum sets out in a couple of hundred pages a narrative that conveys the gist of Desideri's aim to confront and convert a land that he came to nearly ignorant of. As the first Jesuit to establish a mission in "the third Tibet" of the innermost heartland, Desideri mastered the arguments of his opponents, who were also his instructors. He translated works and he commented upon them, seeking to correct what he regarded as mistaken notions of some Christians who had conflated Asian resemblances to Trinitarianism via the Three Jewels, for example, or those who had speculated that Nestorian traces of a vanished Christianity had remained in China.
The narrative devotes additional treatment to Jesuit missionary efforts in Asia and India, as it concentrates upon two of this scholar's areas of overlapping (for Desideri) expertise, Indo-Tibetan religion and culture, and Jesuit missions history. For a reader in Buddhist areas, Pomplum presumes familiarity with these theological and philosophical essentials. He delves into the finer points of Catholic-Buddhist contention as taken up by Desideri deeply and quickly.
However, a hundred pages of notes and a bibliography add to the usefulness of this compact work on an admittedly intriguing figure. Despite what may be for more casual readers an onslaught of information about the Zunghar invasion, there is merit in analyzing the complications reported, if with a bias, by Desideri. For scholars of this period, this summation in the fourth chapter will prove useful. The book tends to cover a wider area than its subtitle, and from it, readers will learn more about the influences which created and sustained zealous figures such as Desideri to do so much in so little time. Given but his half a decade in Tibet, while not as much about Desideri as a crafty and flawed figure may emerge as one might wish given the aims of Desideri's confident and clever report as "true history" to the Society, Pomplum energetically examines the nuances of the Jesuit's self-presentation and self-justification with all the scholarly acumen he and his academic colleagues have acquired in the centuries since this mission.
The twists and turns of Desideri's mission to the Indies, before and after his stint in Tibet between 1715 and 1721, are only part of the story. He was forced to leave when his sometime colleagues and sometime rivals the Capuchins reasserted and were reassured of their missionary status in the region, even as the Zunghar and then Manchu invasions created havoc in the Himalayan kingdom. He later served in Delhi and other outposts in India, before returning to Rome to vainly convince the Vatican to rule in favor of the Society and against the Capuchins for control of the Tibetan mission to which he must have longed to return.
Pomplum carefully corrects the excesses of Catholic hagiographers and then post-colonial critics who distort the truth about Desideri's missionary attainments, and those also of the Capuchins--who have often been denigrated while the accomplishments of their confreres the Jesuits have been elevated or caricatured. Jesuit ambitions are placed in context of the time, and Pomplum surveys the legacy of Desideri in the wider Chinese Rites controversy in which Matteo Ricci would be involved, and the question of Jesuit "accommodation" of native rituals and practices which would characterize the Malabar Rites fracas which in India would again pit Capuchin against Jesuit, and which would involve papal intervention. Pomplum defines what linked the friars to the Society of Jesus as to shared aims at how far to adjust Catholicism to Asian traditions, as well as what distinguished Jesuit missionaries among the Hindu such as Roberto de Nobili from their Franciscan, Dominican, and Vatican critics.
Pomplum concludes by reminding readers that if Desideri's mission had been as successful as many Buddhist Studies scholars appear to have wished it, there might not be any Buddhism left to study, four centuries later. "Viewed as a work of history, Desideri's narratio is a curious mélange of hard-nosed reporting, breezy innuendo, and simple mistakes." (172) The professor suggests it is better understood as we would an account today "based on a true story." Despite its flaws as history, the Notizie istoriche stands as a testament to how much one diligent missionary could amass about his adopted land to carry out his determined apostolate.
Its new edition, which was consulted by Pomplum as in turn his study informed this edition, appeared around the same year of 2010. Translated by Michael Sweet and edited by Leonard Zwilling, this massive compendium collects what is necessary to comprehend Desideri within his own writings, and those of his early confrere Manoel Freyre. (I reviewed "Mission to Tibet" in June 2012.)
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