Sermon on Saint Thomas, the Beloved Apostle: A Syriac Catholic Panegyric from Seventeenth Century Malabar (54)

This book examines an untitled panegyric sermon in praise of Saint Thomas the Apostle, composed by a Catholic missionary sometime after 1601. It belongs to the new missionary culture written in Syriac from Malabar, in the age surrounding the synod of Diamper (1599) . The text is an expression of the Catholic missionary strategy of accommodatio. It reflects the ways in which the Catholic missionaries approached Syriac theological writing in the aftermath of the aforementioned synod, while involving themselves in disputes with their Eastern Syriac or Chaldean contenders. The sermon is the result of a complex blending of scriptural, Patristic and literary sources, both in Latin and Syriac, which are gathered together according to the classical canons of the encomiastic discourse. The author of the text brings into focus the exceptionality of Saint Thomas, invested with a quasi-messianic status (he is called "the Saviour of the Indians") , by putting together a rich exegetical and rhetorical apparatus, giving birth to a beautiful speculative and non-scholastic theological thinking.