Robert de Nobili

Roberto de Nobili (1577 – 16 January 1656) was an Italian Jesuit missionary to Southern India. He used a novel method of adaptation (accommodatio) to preach Christianity, adopting many local customs of India which were, in his view, not contrary to Christianity.

Quotes

• …With the permission of Father General I left Rome in 1603 and after two years spent travelling I arrived in Goa. Soon after I came to Cochin, and thence to Madura. There I remarked that all the efforts made to bring the heathens to Christ had all been in vain. I left no stone unturned to find a way to bring them from their superstition and the worship of idols to the faith of Christ. But my efforts were fruitless, because with a sort of barbarous stolidity they turned away from the manners and customs of the Portuguese and refused to put aside the badges of their ancient nobility.
  When I noticed that certain Brahmins were highly praised because they led lives of great hardship and austerity and were looked upon as if they had dropped from the sky, I thought that, if to win popularity among the pagans, and raise themselves in their esteem, they contrived to keep perpetual chastity and weaken their bodies by watching, fasting and meditation, I could, to win them to Christ, conform myself to their mode of life in all such things which were not repugnant to the holiness of the Christian doctrine, for it seemed to me that with divine help I could do for God’s sake, what they did with wicked cunning to win vain applause and worldly honours.
  Therefore I professed to be an Italian Brahmin who had renounced the world, had studied wisdom at Rome (for a Brahmin means a wise man) and rejected all the pleasures and comforts of the world. I had already learned Tamil and Sanskrit, which among them holds the same place as the Latin among us…
  • Robert De Nobili, a Jesuit missionary at Madurai, on his attempts to adapt to the lifestyle of caste Hindus in a letter to Pope Paul V in 1619 . Kuriakose, M.K., History of Christianity In India, Source Materials, Published for The Senate of Serampore College, The Christian Literature Society, 1982. 50ff quoted from Jain, M. (editor) (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts. New Delhi: Ocean Books. Volume III Chapter 14

• This manuscript undoubtedly belongs to the time when the ancient religion of the gymnosophists had begun to be corrupted; except for our own sacred books, it is the most respectable monument of belief in a single God. It is called Ezour Veidam: as if one were to say the true Veidam, the Veidam explained, the pure Veidam.
  • Voltaire, about the allegation and story that Roberto de Nobili was the author of a forged document (fifth Veda). Quoted from Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (Princeton, N.J.). (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines

• One ought to guard oneself against including among the canonical books of the Indians the Ezour Vedam , of which there is a socalled translation in the Royal Library, and which has been published in 1778. It is definitely not one of four Vedams, not withstanding its name. It is a book of controversy, written by a missionary at Masulipatam. It contains a refutation of a number of Pouranons devoted to Vichenou, which are several centuries later than the Vedams. One sees that the author tries to reduce everything to the Christian religion; he did introduce a few errors, though, so that one would not be able to recognize the missionary under the disguise of the Brahmin. Anyhow, Mr Voltaire and a few others were wrong when they gave this book an importance which it does not deserve, and when they regard it as canonical. 62
  • Pierre Sonnerat, , about the allegation and story that Roberto de Nobili was the author of a forged document (fifth Veda). Quoted from Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (Princeton, N.J.). (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines

• The very idea that he came, as he said, to preach a new or a fifth Veda, which had been lost, shows how well he knew the strong and weak points of the theological system he came to conquer.
  • Max Müller, about the allegation and story that Roberto de Nobili was the author of a forged document (fifth Veda). Quoted from Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (Princeton, N.J.). (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines