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The Search for Idols and Saints in Colonial Peru: Linking Extirpation and Beatification

2005; Duke University Press; Volume: 85; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-85-3-417

1527-1900

Celia Cussen,

Historical Studies in Latin America

Recent interest in the cultural history of the middle colonial period in Peru has centered on two distinct clerical efforts to guide Christian behavior: the systematic inspection tours aimed at uprooting idolatry among the Indians of the Archdiocese of Lima (frequently called the "Extirpation") and the initiatives to promote the beatification of saintly Limeños.1 Both campaigns were linked to the aims of the clerics assembled at the Council of Trent (1545–63), who—in light of the Protestant threat—sought to improve doctrinal conformity and to reaffirm the saints as intercessors and models of Christian virtue. These two activities also expressed the baroque notion that the material world was a battle-ground where God's allies were pitted against agents of the devil. For clerics in this period, Indian idolatry was manifestly the work of Satan, while urban saints, on the other hand, were evidence of the successful rooting of Hispanic Catholicism in the viceroyalty of Peru.Scholars have commonly treated the Extirpation and the campaign for local saints as unrelated processes, without considering that they may be closely linked.2 In part, this conceptual distinction reflects the thinking of colonial authorities, who attempted to maintain a Republic of Indians jurisdictionally separate and geographically removed from the Republic of Spaniards. The church, through the councils and synods of the archdiocese of Lima, likewise often issued particular decrees for the religious instruction and sacramental obligations of Indians in the rural parishes (the doctrinas), while other edicts addressed the behavior expected of the city dwellers—peninsular Spaniards, their locally born (creole) offspring, free and enslaved blacks, and the growing numbers of castas, persons of mixed race. Yet the physical frontiers between the Andean and the Spanish (or Hispanicized) populations were diffuse; Spaniards, blacks, and castas moved and settled among the Indians in the sierra, and significant numbers of Indians resided temporarily and even permanently in Lima.As people from different social groups traveled between city and countryside, their approaches toward the supernatural likewise crossed the cultural frontiers originally dividing Andeans and Spaniards to create hybrid beliefs and superstitions.3 News of the religious errors of the Indians in the sierra and devotions of urban Christians flowed through formal channels as well. Creole priests made Indian idolatry a public issue in Lima and even pursued suspected idolaters—not all of them Andean—in the capital city. And, over time, rural parish priests introduced devotions originating in Lima, including the incipient cults of local saints. Thus, it is somewhat misleading to study rural Andean and urban Limeño religious practices in strict isolation from one another. Indeed, to fully appreciate the breadth and elasticity of the creole religious imagination in the middle years of the Spanish colonial project, as well as the pressures wrought on it by its contact with the Andean world, I believe it is essential to examine the links between the eradication of idols and the promotion of saints in colonial Peru.In the Spanish colonies, saints enjoyed—as they did in Catholic Europe—a privileged position at the center of devotional life. The Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven, was without a doubt the most beloved saint that Spaniards carried to the colonies during the conquest period, and only that of Christ surpassed the cult she enjoyed. Each new Spanish and Indian town was named for a saint, and likenesses of martyrs, apostles, and founders of religious orders were placed alongside images of Christ and the Virgin in the altar decorations of urban temples and the murals adorning rural churches. Friars and secular priests who endeavored to convert the indigenous population used saints as one of their principal tools of evangelization, and these special friends of God and man were rooted quickly into many aspects of Andean life—although not always in ways clergymen expected or desired. From the time of baptism, every Andean bore the name of a Christian saint, and, in the Andes as elsewhere in Spanish America, the annual celebration of the town's patron was a signal event of public ritual life. Individual saints were remembered on a daily basis, as well. The Andean chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma incorporated the feasts of the saints in his monthly calendar of colonial Andean ceremonial life, in an attempt to show the importance that Christian sacred time had taken on in the Andes.4In Lima, friars and priests began to identify and stimulate a devotion to home-grown saints-in-the-making almost as soon as the Peruvian church was given its enduring institutional shape by the Tridentine prelate, Toribio Alfonso de Mogrovejo (1581–1606), himself one of the first candidates for beatification. During the early decades of the seventeenth century, the city's bishops opened official investigations to determine the saintly qualities of a set of local heroes, their causes dispatched to the Vatican's Congregation of the Saints for consideration. Success was achieved surprisingly soon; in 1671, Pope Clement X canonized Rosa de Santa María, better known as Saint Rose of Lima (1586–1617), making her the continent's first officially recognized saint.5In what follows, I will examine how certain priests involved in the Extirpation—most of them creole members of the secular clergy—wrote about the saints as patrons, intercessors, and models. In order to explore the ways clergymen portrayed the saints to Indians, I will first analyze two sermon collections (sermonarios) written for the native Andean congregations by idolatry inspectors. These works supplemented the Tercero catecismo y exposición de la doctrina christiana por sermones, a sermon set published by the Third Provincial Council of Lima (1582–83) for the use of priests ministering in rural Indian parishes.6 This earlier sermonario merely glosses the meaning of saints and their function in Christian tradition, but the two later collections treat the saints in more detailed ways. One pays particular attention to the Christian tradition of miracles, and the other explicitly encourages the Indians to replace their traditional reliance on ancestor mummies (mallquis), sacred places and objects (huacas), and ritual specialists with appeals to the saints.I will then draw on a very different kind of edifying literature, one meant for Lima's urban audience. In it, two of the extirpators—or visitadores de idolatría, as they were officially called—wrote in great detail about the meaning of a saintly life in ways that foreshadowed some of the saint-making trends of the second half of the seventeenth century. Finally, I will look at the contributions made by three participants in the Extirpation to the development of the cult of a presumptive saint whose life was initially meant to be a model for urban Catholics: Martín de Porres. These documents—formulated to demonstrate the virtues of Fray Martín to Vatican authorities, as well as to stimulate devotion to the humble black man among all members of the universal church—show in great detail how these clergymen perceived saintliness and how they personally engaged the pious figure. Their accounts center on the virtuous and miraculous qualities of Fray Martín's life and his presumed ability to procure supernatural assistance to the benefit of the faithful. Finally, I will demonstrate how, despite the acknowledged fears of priests of the Extirpation that pre-Christian habits of mind often misshaped Indian interaction with the saints, colonial authorities of various types increasingly believed that Peru's saints were effective antidotes to idolatry.The extirpation campaigns began in the Archdiocese of Lima in the early seventeenth century as a dramatic and systematic response to the perception, by a number of clerical authorities, that the church—despite years of practices and policies designed to improve the efficacy of evangelization—had not succeeded in making true Christians of the Indians. Provincial church councils (most recently the Third Provincial Council of 1582–83) had addressed the persistence of Indian idolatry and issued decrees for improving the quality of religious instruction to the Indians. In the decrees of the Third Provincial Council, church authorities expanded Indian access to the sacraments, insisted that the priests ministering in the Indian parishes (doctrineros) be competent in the native language, and standardized the methods of conversion. The council also produced a catechism, a confessional, and a set of sermons in Spanish, Aymara, and Quechua for use by doctrineros.7The sermon set of the Third Provincial Council was probably composed under the guidance of the Spanish chronicler of the Indies, the Jesuit José de Acosta (1540–1600). Written in strong language, it contains simple arguments for the religious neophytes of "short and weak understanding," who wavered between the old and the new religious customs. After admonishing doctrineros to confine their lessons to the Indians to the essentials of the faith expressed in plain language, the cycle of 31 sermons begins with a rudimentary but vivid discussion of the afterlife of the soul, a concept well understood, it is asserted, by the Indians' ancestors. Immediately after establishing this common ground, the preacher introduces his main argument, one that he repeats frequently in the subsequent sermons: those who live well and please God in this world will have goods and rest ("bienes y descanso") forever in the next life, but the wicked and those who anger God with their sins will endure, for all time, the pain and torments of hell. Heaven can only be attained through faith, repentance for one's sins, participation in the sacraments, and obedience to the Lord's commandments. After developing each of these prescriptions in the remaining sermons, the cycle concludes with a presentation of purgatory and a final reminder of divine justice, to be meted out on judgment day.8The sermons steer clear of intricate points of theology, although they do treat the important mysteries of the Trinity, Mary's virginity, and the transubstantiation in the Mass. Above all, the author seeks to establish the centrality of God the Father as a patriarch, judge, and omnipotent creator of all that the earth contains, including the inanimate objects worshiped by the Indians. The life of that "remedy of man from sin," Jesus Christ, is presented in the third sermon, and the miracles he worked during his lifetime are introduced as proof of his divinity. The preacher addresses miracles again in the next sermon, this time as events that demonstrate the power of the faith of the saints who produced them. These are virtually the same set of miraculous abilities attributed to Christ in his lifetime: "giving sight to the blind, healing the sick, and reviving the dead, and controlling the sea, and the sun, and all creatures, because they are all subject to the word of God." It is notable that this initial reference to saints does not occur in the opening sermon that describes heaven and those who dwelled there with God and the angels. Instead, the saints make their first appearance in the fourth sermon, as preternaturally powerful individuals closely identified with Christ but with little identity of their own: men and women whose ultimate destiny in the afterlife is not yet made explicit.9Although the power of the saints is established in the fourth sermon, they are not yet portrayed as intercessors. The Indians are exhorted not to turn for aid, in times of difficulty, to the ritual specialists, "ministers of the devil," who mediate between man and the huacas—those "fools" who deceive people in order to get food "and who take you to hell." Instead, the Indians must take their needs and infirmities to Jesus Christ, their father and God, and have faith in his mercy and power. The intercessory power of the saints is finally addressed in sermon 8. Here, as part of the history of the church, the author describes a group of people whom he categorizes as martyrs, anchorites, founders of orders, teachers of the faith, and virgin martyrs. They, along with innumerable other saints, are in heaven, enjoying the sight of God, where they pray for us and act as our advocates. The role of the saints as intercessors is established here, although the Andeans listening to these sermons may not have understood precisely when they were to be called on; the preacher has elsewhere insisted that the petitioners must seek Christ's help with the needs and difficulties they formerly presented to their local "sorcerers" (hechiceros).10The sermons of the Third Provincial Council do little more than introduce the cult of saints, despite the fact that José de Acosta commented later in his De Procuranda Indorum Salute (1588) on the usefulness of holy water, images, rosaries, and candles to the ongoing evangelization of the Indians, adding that the doctrineros "in their sermons before the people should praise highly these practices, so that the people absorb the new symbols in place of the ancient superstition."11 Presumably, preachers in sermons of their own devising were teaching the Indians about the more simple gestures of devotion directed to Christ, Mary, and (to a lesser extent) the saints. The doctrineros would have complemented lessons on the saints using the images often painted on the walls of Andean churches of the period. However, the correct understanding and use of these iconographic representations—a central concern of the early modern church—is addressed in the disquisition on the fourth commandment in sermon 19.12 After condemning Indian idolatry, the preacher presents the rhetorical challenge made by an Indian, who points out that Catholics worship images. Here the priest attempts to clarify the distinction between sign and referent, an abstract argument that perhaps approximates the "very subtle reasoning" that the preface to the work cautions must be avoided. Clearly, however, the issue is as important as it is unavoidable, and the dialogue suggests that the Indians were keenly aware of clerical and lay devotion to religious images. The Indian points out that Christians adore painted and wooden images, kneel before them, kiss them, and even speak to them. "Does this not make them huacas?" asks the Indian. The preacher responds that the Christians are doing something quite different from what Indians commonly do; if they revere images by kissing them and beating their breasts before them, it is not for what those images are, but rather for what they represent.13This text was an adapted version of the decree published recently by the Council of Trent regarding the superstitious use of relics and images of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints. The council ordered that all Catholic churches contain the images of saints, and it instructed the clergy to use the "healthy example" of saints' lives to teach proper Christian behavior to the faithful. At the same time, it put clergymen on alert for all superstitious invocations of the saints or idolatrous use of their images.14 In the Andes, there was particular concern that the intercessory role of the saints be advanced without inducing the Indians to mask their reverence for the old idols with Christian signs, rituals, and devotional behavior. Clerical concern for the idolatrous use of saintly devotion—the veneration of saints' images and their use in community rituals—took on further significance by the second decade of the seventeenth century, when certain clerics questioned the success of earlier methods of evangelization and interpreted emerging Andean forms of Christianity—especially those involving the ritual use of saints' images—as idolatrous mockeries of Christianity. Yet, despite these worries, the sermons for Indians composed later by two creole priests (both with direct experience in the extirpation campaigns) enlist the cult of saints to provide the Indians with powerful intercessors and models of stalwart Christian faith.The Extirpation's infamous starting point was the dramatic auto-da-fé held in Lima's main square on December 20, 1609. The ceremony took place on an improvised stage before a crowd of the city's residents and Indians assembled from the surrounding area. It featured a sermon against idolatry preached in Quechua, the immolation of a pile of idols confiscated from the Indian parishes in the province of Huarochirí, and the administration of two hundred lashes to Hernando Páucar, an accused hechicero from the same district—a man reputed to maintain ongoing communication with the devil.15 Soon after, the recently installed prelate, Bartolomé Lobo Guerrero (1609–22), became convinced of the threat of Indian apostasy and commissioned several teams of priests to examine systematically the Indian parishes of the archdiocese. Among the appointed visitadores was creole priest Fernando de Avendaño (1580?–1655), who for more than seven years toured the doctrinas of the archdiocese and, according to his own account, heard the confession of 11,000 Indian apostates.16 In 1649, after a long lull, Archbishop Pedro de Villagómez (1641–71) revitalized the Extirpation and commissioned Avendaño to compile a set of sermons to be used during the inspections. The bilingual Spanish-Quechua work, Sermones de los misterios de nuestra Santa Fe Católica, en lengua castellana, y la general del Inca, was published the same year.17 It consists of 32 sermons organized in two parts—the last 22 of which are merely reprints from the sermon book of the Third Provincial Council, still the standard reference work for doctrineros.18The language of Avendaño's sermons demonstrates a deepening apprehension for Indian apostasy in the period since the earlier publication of the Third Provincial Council's sermonario. Avendaño emphasizes the errors of idolatry and attempts to provide more concrete, and even local, reasons for faith in the Spaniards' God—arguments, presumably, that Archbishop Villagómez considered to be more effective than those in the earlier work.19 The greatest innovation occurs in the description and juxtaposition of Andean idolatrous practice and Christian belief. The Indians are chastised for venerating large and small objects and then exhorted to adhere to the new set of Christian doctrines. Repeatedly, Avendaño condemns the material and local forms of Andean religious expression. He urges the new Christians to center most of their religious practices on the church and emphasizes the importance of prayer, the sacraments, and the mediation of the parish priest. In addition, his discussion of miracles introduces the possibility that a Christian—even in Peru—might access sacred power through saintly channels and experience a miraculous healing.Avendaño's primary contention is that God is a single and omnipotent deity, in contrast to the innumerable, inert idols of the Andean cosmos. He argues that God imparted to Adam and Eve the intrinsic knowledge of himself, and they transmitted this faith to subsequent generations, including the ancient Indians. However, these populations succumbed to the devil's trickery, and thus the true belief in God was lost to all Andeans. Faith in God must be restored, for it is essential for salvation; but how, Avendaño asks, does one believe in something one cannot see? Not only do we take on trust the existence of many things that are not visible (the soul, the king of Spain, the Inca Huayna Capac, or demons), but God has indeed given us visible proof of his existence, his divinity, and his power through a series of miracles, "true witnesses, that he shows to us and that demonstrate his divinity and omnipotence." Avendaño uses two kinds of miracles to illustrate how God has traditionally intervened in the material world: those that brought about the defeat of the infidels and their conversion to Christianity, and those that healed the sick and revived the dead. God's omnipotence is contrasted against the inability of Andean huacas to prevent the spread of Christianity, and healing miracles are juxtaposed with ineffective actions of Andean curanderos.20Miracles of conversion, writes Avendaño, have taken place among the native populations of China, Japan, and Mexico, and earlier generations of Andeans witnessed them as well. For example, the Holy Cross of Carabuco could not be destroyed by the devil, no matter how much he tried. Another cross, erected by a fugitive Spaniard, broke the drought of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. And the Virgin gave her miraculous protection to the Spaniards in Cuzco by putting out the fires lit by besieging Indians. Finally, reports Avendaño, it is a great miracle that idolatry has been destroyed and the devil cast out of the Andes.21Interspersed with the discussion of miracles of spiritual conquest are references to the small-scale miracles worked by Christ, the Virgin Mary, and various European saints for the benefit of the sick and the dead. Avendaño contrasts these marvels with the ineffectiveness of the Andean sacred: what huaca or hechicero has given sight to an Indian or revived a dead man? Indigenous ritual specialists only fool one into thinking that they can heal one's wife with some "rotten bones," he argues. The souls of the Indians' mallquis are paying for their sins in the hands of the demons in hell and cannot possibly heal anyone.22Just as in the sermons from the Third Provincial Council, the saints figure here primarily as thaumaturgists of the European church. Nevertheless, Avendaño begins to embed the Christian tradition of miracles into the local land-scape: in Peru, God has wrought miracles of conversion, and the Virgin Mary has actively interceded to the benefit of sick and lame Indians at Copacabana, proof from "your own land, that give[s] testimony of this Faith."23 Notably, Avendaño confines his discussion of local miracles to incidents involving the Virgin or the Holy Cross. The miraculous images of European saints hanging in Lima's churches and the wonders worked through the intercession of Peru's local candidates for beatification do not figure in his account of miraculous events, despite the fact that published accounts of their miraculous works were already circulating in Lima.24 Some of these putative saints, especially the Franciscan friar Francisco Solano and Lima's former archbishop Toribio Alfonso de Mogrovejo, were famous for converting the Indians and for performing posthumous miracles in the highlands. The sermons, however, omit these chronicles of saintly intercession, raising the possibility that they were not considered suitable for an Indian audience. Although Avendaño presents the confrontation between tangible forms of demonic and divine power in much starker terms than do the sermons of the Third Provincial Council, he continues to depict saints as barely differentiated larger-than-life heroes of early Christianity. Perhaps, after one hundred years of evangelization, Avendaño needed only name these figures to evoke in the Indians the beloved images in the churches and the dramatic narratives of their lives learned from the doctrineros. However, we have no evidence that Andeans were well schooled in sacred biography, and it is likely that, as elsewhere in Spanish America, the "rich lore" of Christian hagiography was lost in the transfer of the cult of saints to the Indian parishes.25Francisco de Avila (1573?–1647) appears constantly in the religious and ethnographic history of seventeenth-century Peru, most notably for instigating the first wave of systematic idolatry inspection tours in the rural areas of the archdiocese of Lima and for his hand in compiling Indian sacred beliefs and practices in the document known as the Huarochirí manuscript.26 Avila was a native of Cuzco whose probable mestizo origins thwarted his hopes to become a Jesuit, although his clerical achievements allowed him to end his career as a canon of Lima's cathedral. With his prodigious instinct for intuiting which direction the winds of cultural change might be blowing (or be made to blow), Francisco de Avila contributed to the cult of local saints in Lima—especially, I believe, in its innovative turn toward the creation of urban nonwhite saints. In the bilingual set of sermons he produced, Avila described the power of saints, their role as intercessors, and their exemplary behavior in ways that show him torn between an awarenesss that the cult of saints converged usefully with Andean attitudes toward propitiation of their tutelary gods and an intense worry that Andeans revered these idols in the guise of Christian saints.Unlike the sermons discussed thus far, Avila's Tratado de los evangelios (1648) is organized around the festival calendar.27 The first volume provides bilingual texts from the first Sunday of Advent through the Saturday before the Feast of the Trinity. Although the second volume was planned to span the rest of the year and end with the sermon on the Feast of All Souls, the work was incomplete when Avila died in 1647.The format of the Tratado is very different from that of the two earlier sermonarios discussed previously. Designed to treat the themes and gospels of the liturgical year, it does not build progressively upon a central line of argument. The sermons are a complex set of texts that treat many aspects of faith, although—true to Avila's declaration in the preface to the work—he misses no opportunity to refute the practice of Indian idolatry.28 Another recurring theme is the omnipotence of the Christian God and his active intervention in the material world. On one occasion, for example, Avila refers to the healing miracles of Christ as the proof of his divinity, and in a later sermon, he comments on Matthew's gospel account of how Christ healed a leper. He admits the story is meant to be an allegory for Christ's ability to "heal" sin, but it also provides an excellent opportunity to talk about proper and improper sources and uses of supernatural healing power.29Avila condemns the traditional and, he insists, enduring Andean custom of consulting the "old folk" for physical illnesses, infirmities that these men and women contend are the punishment of an angry deity and that can be cured by ritual offerings to idols.30 Avila states resolutely that one must adore only God and appeal to his aid in such circumstances, for he is "the source of all health and well-being." As an alternative, one might turn to the saints, "brave captains of God," to intercede on one's behalf. Sidestepping the customary Catholic practice of invoking the saints by praying and lighting candles before their images on home altars or in the presence of their relics in the church, Avila instructs the Indians to approach the saints in other, very specific ways. They might request a priest to celebrate a mass on their behalf, he suggests, or pray the rosary, or make an offering to the church.31 Yet, in a later sermon, Avila acknowledges that Andeans and non-Indian Christians rely on similar household and private techniques to seek supernatural help in the face of physical illnesses, and he uses the occasion to explain and underscore the intercessory role of saints. An Indian points out to the priest that Christians routinely ask for help from the saints and asks why, then, the Andeans might not do the same "with our progenitors"?32 The reply is categorical: Christians do indeed ask for health from the saints, but it is not a saint's healing power they seek, because saints do not, of themselves, have the capacity to heal. We venerate the saints, says the preacher, because we want them to obtain a favor for us from God, who is the only one who can grant it. The Andean, in contrast, believes his grandfather or father has given him the illness, and therefore he adores him and petitions him for good health. This is a grave error, the preacher maintains, not only because these individuals are in hell, but also because they have no power to grant health. The saints, on the other hand, dwell with God in heaven and might obtain our favor from him who is capable of everything.33Avila avoids discussing the iconographic problem addressed in the sermons of the Third Provincial Council and repeated by Avendaño—a notable omission given that in the preface to this work he reports on his own discovery of the idolatrous use of Christian images among the Andeans.34 Nonetheless, Avila may have been subtly fostering another symbolic confusion: saints as Christian "sacred ancestors." He concedes that devotion to the saints, and reliance on their intercession, may closely resemble Andean relationships with sacred places and objects associated with kin group origins, but he never directly disabuses the Indians of the idea that saints, like Andean deities, are some kind of fore-bears of all Christians. In this way, one might conclude that he subtly encouraged Indians to think of the saints as a new set of sacred ancestors, with greater power to produce healings than the idols he and his fellow idolatry inspectors ridiculed and ostentatiously destroyed. Moreover, when he suggests that a family or an individual replace the old ritual of propitiation to an ancestor with an appeal to a saint, Avila is quietly leading the cult of saints into the domestic sphere of the indigenous kin group. This was terrain that the extirpators sensed was a last stronghold of idolatry but one that they felt particularly ill equipped to control.35 Yet Avila, concerned no doubt about fomenting syncretism, only hints at the domestic uses of these new Christian intercessors and carefully avoids describing the ways images, grave dirt, and relics of official and putative saints circulated among Limeño households—practices common among European Catholics as wel