The humanity civilization experienced a long way of self-development with the flow of history. The oldest known civilizations are Egyptian, Greek and Rome, which were substituted by the various European civilizations of the later periods. In the tenth – eighteenth centuries Europe was a world center of the human civilization, which comprised the highest level of development in science, economics, technique and culture. Thus, this epoch is also characterized be the European conquer and colonization of America or New World.
The book by Marry Doria Russel The Sparrow manifests the problem of religious colonization of the neighboring planets in the close future. This paper is dedicated to the study of the role of religion in real-world colonialism and in the novel through manifestation of the connections between the history of Spanish colonization of Americas and the colonization of Rakhat planet in the novel, the analyses of the character of the priest Sandoz as an ancestor of the Spanish conquistadors and the role of the religion in the flop of missioners on the foreign planet.
The colonialism is a phenomenon that took its start after the epoch of the great geographical discoveries. The most common definition if this notion depicts colonialism as: “the establishment, maintenance, acquisition and expansion of colonies in one territory by people from another territory. Colonialism is a set of unequal relationships: between the metropole and the colony; between the colonists and the indigenous population” (Fanon, 95).
One of the most active metropole countries was Spain. The Spanish colonization is characterized be the conquest of the American indigenous tribes, who lived on the territory of modern Latin America. The conquest was accompanied by the attempts to assimilate local culture with European by means of Christianization and other ways of cultural assimilation. For this purpose the Spanish government organized special missionary expeditions to support the colonization of indigenous tribes.
The Spanish efforts were questionably successful, as the indigenous people added Catholicism into their longstanding traditional ceremonies and beliefs. Many native expressions, forms, practices, and items of art were destroyed by Spanish missionaries, military, and civilians. This included religious items, sculptures, and jewelry made of gold or silver, which were melted down before shipment to Spain. (Fanon, 267)
Taking into account these facts it is possible to say that the real colonization of America was successful and religion performed a very important part in the establishment of Spanish rule in America and the formation of the Latin America national culture.
Mary Doria Russell’s novel, dedicated to the story about Emilio Sandoz, who is a priest in Puerto Rico. It also deals with his relations with his circle of friends. It is the novel that can be classified as science fiction. The Latin American origin of the priest points out the idea of that Sandoz is one of the ancestors of the conquistadors and missioners, who colonized Puerto Rico a few centuries ago. The novel starts in 2059, when Emilio Sandoz is coming back from the planet Rakhat, where he had to fulfill a Jesuit mission.
The novel also depicts the details of the mission took by Sandoz. The novel is based on examination of the personal faith of the priest, its purity and strength. This idea takes its manifestation through the realization of the crew which travelled to the other planets: the athiests, and a non-Jesuit Catholic. During the star trip many characters begin to argue or share their religion beliefs. This episode stresses the difference between the real religion colonization and that one presented in the novel. The missioners are not unified in their faith in comparison to the Spanish colonizers, who only professed Catholicism and were solemn and steady in their faith.
In contrast to his predecessors, Sandoz is constantly searching for prove of purity and insanity of his religion and the power of his faith. In the progress of the mission, Sandoz is committing a visible sign by cosign physical injuries to himself due to “crumbling belief in a caring deity”. (Russell, 56) One of his friends is trying to convince him in the expediency of his deed:
For a moment, Giuliani wondered if he had misjudged.
But he saw shame, he was certain, and despair.
“Did you think you were the only one? Is it possible that you are so arrogant?” he asked, in tones of wonderment.
Sandoz was blinking rapidly now.
“Did you think you were the only one ever to wonder if what we do is worth the price we pay?
Did you honestly believe that you alone, of all those who have gone, were the single man to lose God?
Do you think we would have a name for the sin of despair, if only you had experienced it? (Russell, 79)
The episode shows the spiritual weakness of Sandoz in comparison with other missioners, his uncertainty and spiritual immaturity. Finally, all this demerits led to the rebellion on Rakhat and killing of the missioners except the protagonist, who became a servant of the local artist. The author stresses out the idea that the uncertainty in his mission by just one person leads to the disaster of whole expedition.
Russell also puts parallels between the spiritual power of the society of the middle of the XXI century and that one inherent for the epoch of real colonization on Earth. But still there is one point which unites the history of colonization both on Earth and Rakhat – the colonized nations managed to get rid of their metropolies but, that one on Earth did it much later, having almost assimilated with the propagated foreign culture.
The Sparrow is a novel which discovers a great variety of ideas and characters; staring from the problem of self-cognition and finishing with the possibility to reassume the concepts on the world history. These are not the sort of genial ideas which fully grasp the reader in the process of reading, but the ideas of the book still pursue the reader long after he finished with the book. The action in the novel occasionally gets slower in order to present more of philosophical and religious speculations and didactic debates.
Sometimes it sophisticates the process of reading and comprehension but it still makes The Sparrow a stronger novel in the philosophical sense and from the point of view of the author’s message. The novel depicts the role of religion in the forming of the personality, social relations and intercultural communication. In contrast to the successful Spanish colonization and missionary expeditions in the remote past, the same methods embodied in the far future leads to the disaster. Thus, the didactic point of the poem is the impossibility of returning to the tried methods for reaching the same purposes.
Works Cited
Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, London: Penguin Book, 2001.
Russell, Mary Doria, The Sparrow, New York: Random House, 1996.