The Missionary Strategies of the Jesuits in Ethiopia (1555–1632) (review)

Leonardo Cohen’s erudite study of an ostensibly failed Western missionary effort argues that, far from having no lasting impact, the encounter transformed both Ethiopian Christianity and the Jesuit mission for centuries to come. Despite nearly a decade in which Catholicism was triumphant in Ethiopia, those Jesuit methods that sought to create a unified Catholic position in Ethiopia were, Cohen argues, the primary obstacle to their mission and the root of its ultimate failure, resulting from their “attempt to homogenize Christianity and centralize a Church that was dominated by significant centrifugal forces” (191).

The English-language publication of Cohen’s research, based on extensive primary sources available chiefly in Portuguese, Amharic, and Gə̜əz (Classical Ethiopic), as well as myriad secondary sources, not only makes accessible valuable materials that are of interest to students of Horn of Africa historical studies but also opens these materials up to those in missiological studies. The publication further contributes to the wider discourse on alterity, since it brings together both Jesuit and Ethiopian sources and sheds light on the degree to which both Jesuits and Ethiopians “questioned to what extent the other was a brother or a stranger” (4). Cohen notes that the sixteenth- to seventeenth-century “Jesuit mission in Ethiopia represents a unique case in world Jesuit history since it concerns a mission addressed at Christians” (xviii), and, by being able to include both sides of the encounter, in my view, he also offers one of the earliest well-documented accounts of re-evangelization, which it has become fashionable to study in cultural anthropology in twentieth- and twenty-first-century contexts.

Although the Ethiopian Täwaḥədo Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church share much in terms of scriptural and patristic texts, sacramental practice, and discursive methods embracing these and other elements, Cohen’s close reading of the texts illumines not only the particular differences between them but also, and more importantly, how both the Ethiopians and the Jesuits sought to frame the encounter so as to include or exclude various practices or cultural productions within or without the sphere of religion that was being contested. Similar to the distinction between superstition and religion that the Jesuits made in the better-known missionary fields of China and India, both the Jesuits and the Ethiopians mutually constituted for one another what were malleable cultural practices and what were central religious concerns intrinsic to the mission. They thus engaged with one another in “the construction, acquisition, and transmission of knowledge,” which included not only the theological but also “building, healing, painting, and music-making.” Cohen’s study therefore aims to look beyond the political and the theological—without in any way dismissing these—in order to “understand the reasons behind the portrayal of events” in the primary sources. In so doing, he shows how the encounter between the Ethiopians and the Jesuits mutually constituted one another’s “conceptual world and the intellectual, political, social, and religious reactions of the Ethiopians vis à vis the Jesuit mission” (14).

Cohen points out how the Counter-Reformation milieu of the Jesuits set the stage for their “attempt to create a religious system which would be homogenous in terms of creed and theology as well as in terms of rituals” (xviii). Both the Protestant Reformation in Europe and the reconquista in Iberia had inculcated a suspicion of difference such that any diverse practice came to be labeled as deviant and was anathema. In Ethiopia at the time of the encounter, however, more than a century of “migration, inter-religious war, population movement and permanent political crisis” had resulted in widespread diversity in both religious and other practices.

As in other locations to which they were sent, the members of the Society of Jesus undertook their mission by seeking to convert to Roman Catholicism those in authority—political, religious, and intellectual—as a means of evangelizing from top to bottom. This led to the successful conversion...