The title could be reworded as “substance beneath form”, or in many other ways. It is all about form and substance as central to logic and philosophical ideas in any culture. It may sound a play of abstract terms, but it affects real life of individuals and societies, and has been responsible for peace as well as social turmoils and bloody wars in history.
Much of the religious fundamentalism that has plagued history is a playground for the way these basic concepts have been understood and misunderstood. The early Christianity was caught between the Roman and Greek cultures, causing differences of understanding in the formulation of its doctrine or the justification of its rituals.
Transubstantiation as a change from the visible form of bread to the invisible substance of the body of Christ is central to the Catholic ritual of Mass, commemorating and re-enacting the Last Supper of Jesus. The visual form seeks to convey the ideas of food and unity of those eating together, but its linkage with the last supper of Jesus and his last advice before facing death gives a very special meaning and substance to the ritual of Mass across times. The so-called “heresies” that disturbed the unity that Christianity sought to preach, were consequences of culture conflicts, as the Christendom extended beyond the Greco-Roman cultures. The crusades against Islam and the nefarious activities of the Christian Inquisition were the western ways of handling the conflicts behind form and substance in the later centuries till very recent times. The thought habits acquired have changed little in substance, even after the so-called “secularization” or “laicization” of western culture.
Cultures differ by their specific forms of expressing the substance (also meaning nature or essence) which stands for the core of the reality. Wars have been fought to uphold one’s perception of form and substance. While upholding the “incarnation” of Jesus as a central mystery of Christian faith, the western missionary church forgot all about it when it accompanied the European colonial expansion.
A few exceptional cases of “cultural adaptation”, associated with the initiatives of the Jesuits like De Nobili in India and Matteo Ricci in China, were no more than strategies to penetrate the developed cultures of the East. It was only after Europe was forced to “decolonize” that the Rome-led Christianity woke up to the need of “inculturation” through a new strategy worked out during the Ecumenical Council of Vatican II, as a way of saving its gains in the colonial world, and minimizing its image as collaborator of the colonial powers. The colonial concept of western missions gave way to “local churches”, as more in tune with the foundational churches of the Apostle St Paul.
What made me rethink about substance and form to write this column? It was provoked by the recent death of my brother, Calisto. Our forms of living were very different and determined, as it always happens, by the life-circumstances that guided our professional paths in life. However, we shared many feelings and thoughts as siblings who spent formative years together, and updated during regular meetings and correspondence during the course of our lives.
When my personal and academic friends published “Metahistory: History questioning History” (Lisboa, 2007), a volume meant to mark 60 years of my life, Calisto contributed an essay “Brothers beyond borders” (pp. 52-55) wherein he summed up very well our shared core of interests, despite the borders of physical distances and professional differences.
His essay which can be read online at http://bit.ly/29wmkxp reflects my “Substance beyond form” in this column, which I wish to dedicate to him, in addition to a farewell poem in Konkani – “Geloi bhava, voch” – on my Facebook page, which drew response from family and friends worldwide with messages of support.
As I discovered only recently, my feelings outflow into Konkani verses in moments charged with emotions. No great efforts nor much time are required. I understood late in my life what a poetic inspiration means. It would mean some more time and more effort to write a poem in Portuguese or in English, the languages I have mastered sufficiently well for academic performance, but it is my native tongue Konknni that flows from the inner depths and helps to satisfy the emotional need of the moment.
My farewell poem drew different responses, and they merit analysis. Some responded to contents on the basis of the free English translation that accompanied the poem, one interested in the linguistic form pointed to some orthographic errors, and all those who could follow closely the cultural signifiers, including the local variants of the words and constructions used, resonated with my feelings, seeking a catharsis. Leaving aside the poetic license, the orthographic precision is never my priority. Besides, standardization of Konknni is still a long way off.
It is sad and distressing that many of my close family, now for long in diaspora, were not the majority among those who responded: “the poem brought tears to my eyes”. I am inclined to conclude that most of the diasporic Goans are fast losing, if they have not lost already their Goan souls, but I am not so sure how much they have assimilated the foreign culture. I see the net result, leaving aside some rare swallows that do not make a summer, is a tragic reality of soul-less Goans, a cultural flotsam and jetsam on foreign shores.
(Teotonio R. de Souza is the founder-director, Xavier Centre of Historical Research, Goa (1979-1994).
