BCCCAP00000000000000000001719

264 BENEDICT VADAKKEKARA different language and culture. His Spanish Renaissance humanism made true the saying that no human reality is alien" (9). Thomas S. Bremer's study on the significance of Sahagun's Coloquios y doc– trina cristiana for inter-religious dialogue does indeed make insightful reading. The religious formation that Sahagun had received in his Order could have cer– tainly disposed him to remain ever open to others in a give-and-take spirit; "in fact, dialogues were a crucial part of Fray Bernardino's lifelong work" (12). The example of Francis of Assisi could have served him as role model in encounter– ing others, however diverse they might have been. The essayist warns of the danger of not seeing the wood for the trees, when he says: "Scholars commonly praise Sahagun as an insightful historian, and he has often been called 'the fa– ther of modern anthropology'. But when we consider the historical, cultural, social, and economic contexts in which he lived and worked, we find that Sa– hagun was not primarily an historian or anthropologist as we understand those disciplines today; he was, simply put, a sixteenth-century Franciscan missionary concerned above all with a lasting evangelization among the indigenous peoples of New Spain" (12£). However, this does not in any way cast a shadow on the inestimable value of the fruits of his research. The conversational origins of the Coloquios y doctrina cristiana notwithstanding, the fact of the matter is that its au– thor had crossed the ocean in order to impose "the monological word of the Christian faith. The consequent violences may have been regrettable, but in his view they remained necessary" (29). The theological framework within which the doctrinal contents of Sa– hagun's Coloquios y doctrina cristiana appear is painstakingly constructed by Fran– cisco Morales. While Sahagun was able to fall back on the conversations be– tween the first missionary friars and the native community leaders, he had to be inventive in coining categories in order to convey the Christian doctrines. The first Nahuatl catechisms and primers that the friars introduced into Mexico were clearly modelled after their counterparts in Spain. Though the language first used by the missionaries and later revised by the Coloquios proved to be in– adequate to fully signify the theological content of the catechisms, it raises the principal issues that "help us understand some of the aspects relating to the origin of this text and with the complex process of Christianization of the In– dian peoples" (57). Without a doubt Fr Bernardino too fits fairly and squarely into the current of theological thought that emerged in the wake of th encoun– ter of new peoples on the part of the Christian West. David A. Boruchoff makes a realistic reading of Sahagun's frame of mind in the evening of his life: "Obliged to concede that God's word alone did not disperse the 'great shadows