The new zeitgeist was undeniably more present in the Society of Jesus than is often claimed. There was even a group of Jesuit scholars at the Collegio Romano in the early eighteenth century who were open to the new ideas of the day. One of them was the gifted professor of physics and philosophy Giulio Gori ( 1686-1764). In his view, the received theological and philosophical positions were soon to be shipwrecked:
The sails of the old philosophy are already torn in more than one place, and the ship, although not yet broken up, is still yawning somewhat at the bows and is no longer capable of sailing unknown waters to discover new lands. It is forced to survive on what it already has . . .The hatred that the old-timers have for the new teachings they loath and their unwillingness to change their position are not, as some think, obstinacy of spirit . . .but rather the impotence of a mind that can no longer learn anything new.
In light of such diagnosis, many Jesuit philosophers resolved to seize on and repurpose transferable aspects of the new philosophy for a Catholic Enlightenment. What was ‘new’ did not necessarily have to be contrasted with the transmitted ‘old’ as praiseworthy ‘Innovation’- instead, it was simply adapted so that the Jesuits became de facto participants in the philosophes’ debate without proclaiming their rejection of the old traditions. In this way, many French Jesuits came into contact with at least sections of the philosophy of John Locke. In similarly selective fashion, Bertold Hauser in Dollingen cited the Lutheran natural law thinker and German philosophe Christian Wolff positively and without reservations around 1750.* His confrere Benedict Stattler utilized Enlightenment philosophy to develop a new form of Catholic theology that was intended to be acceptable to Protestants. Sisismund von Storchenau, who continued working as a philosophical author and teacher even after the banning of the Order in 1773, was also a friend and influential propagator of Wolff’s philosophy. Storchenau tried to adapt arguments of the more radical Enlightenment that potentially undermined religion and integrate them into a traditional ecclesiastical model.
The Jesuits, moreover, were very much alive to the fact that the ‘Enlightenment’ was more than a body of ideas and convictions. To be ‘enlightened’ also meant reading journals, discussing in salons, being ‘gallant’ and cultured, and being able to talk about major subjects in a pleasantly entertaining fashion. The European Enlightenment was a culture, a milieu, a self-conception, a habitus, a style, away of life. The absolute supremacy of antiquity as a model, which had held firm in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, began to crumble – the ‘modern’ style, as it was called, increasingly prevailed over ‘the ancients’ in ethics, culture, and language. The cultural openness of many Jesuits ensured that they easily came to terms with the new social ideas of the Enlightenment.
Personal relations between men of the Society and important thinkers of the new movement were accordingly common. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, for example, has good contacts with members of the order. Yves-Marie Andre (1675-1764) was a friend and companion of Malebranche. Guillaume-Francois Berthier cultivated Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a contact; although by no means uncritical of Rousseau, Berthier showed genuine affections and appreciation. In Spain in 1744, the Jesuit Andres Marcos Burriel became one of the most important correspondents and personal friends of Gregorio Mayans, the leading proponent of the Spanish Enlightenment. Even Voltaire, who had attended the Jesuit college of La Fleche, confided as a young man in his ‘paternal’ teacher Rene-Joseph Tournemine ( 1661-1739) in difficult situations after his schooldays. He turned to the Jesuit for advice and support in late 1713, for example, when he was desperately in love with Catherine Olympe du Noyer and had been disinherited by his father for that very reason. The tone of the Jesuits’ reception of Voltaire remained friendly and laudatory until the 1740s, when the Society clashed with its former pupil on account of his theological radicalization. Roughly contemporaneously, Charles Secondat de Montesquieu also maintained friendship with Jesuits, with Louis-Bertrand Castel among his closest confidants. Montesquieu discussed writings and ideas with the Jesuit, although they also had differences of opinion and sometimes biting ridicule for one another. Still, Montesquieu valued Castel so highly that he – together with another Jesuit- were present at the philosopher’s deathbed as his confessor.
Montesquieu esteemed and like individual Jesuits, but he took a skeptical view of the Society as a whole. He had rather harsh words for other members of the order. His condemnation of Tournemine is a famous example. Montesquieu came away from a meeting with him only with an impression of ‘despotism and chicanery’ and other sources also report that Tournemine had a forceful personality and deliberately flouted the conventions of gallant society.
Montesquieu and Tournemine had clashed at an event typical of the Enlightenment: a meeting for learned and philosophical conversation, namely, the societe litteraire of Abbe Oliva, the librarian of the Duke of Rohan at the Hotel de Soubise. Such private discussion groups, which met informally, yet by invitation only, to discuss current intellectual topics, were a mainstay of Enlightenment sociability. Women frequently hosted such salons. Jesuits were regularly present, too . . .
Members of the Society of Jesus were not present only at these ‘little academies’: the real, often state-sponsored or at least state-sanctioned ‘major’ academies for the arts and sciences also gladly admitted Jesuits. The famous Royal Society in London, for example, counted the Jesuits Roger Boscovich and the aforementioned Castel; among its members and often published Jesuit scientific findings in its journal. Provincial academies in Rouen and Bordeaux admitted Jesuits. Even as late as 1758, a Jesuit, Joseph-Antoine Cerutti (1738-923) – who later joined the Revolution and served as Mirabeau’s secretary – won the Academie francaise’s prize for eloquence. Numerous Jesuits were viewed quite naturally as part of the intellectual community of the Enlightenment.
The Jesuits of the Age of Enlightenment also experimented with one of the new media formats of the day, the periodical press. From 1702 to 1776, the Lettres edificantes et curieuses published thirty-four volumes of letters and reports from Jesuit missionaries overseas. The Memoires de Trevoux, also based in Paris, appeared far more regularly, once a month. The Memoires consisted of reviews of contemporary works, literary notices, and book excerpts with commentary.. The Memoires de Travoux was by far the most successful scholarly journal of any Catholic religious order. There were highs and lows, of course, and internal conflicts among the collaborators, but the journal survived and gave voice to the Society’s views.
The Lettres edificantes inspired a long-lived parallel project in Germany titled Der Neue Welt-Bott- which likewise made mission reports available to a broad readership in edited form and in translations. In Poland in the mid-1730s, the Jesuits took over the weekly Kuryer Polski, the most important newspaper in the country. In a print run of a thousand copies, this paper shaped the market for news and information in the kingdom for the following decades. The Jesuits were also involved in the publication of the Monitor, a journal that followed the model of the English Spectator and adapted the format of Enlightenment weeklies. If one were attempt to summarize the Jesuits intellectual engagement with the ideas of the Enlightenment in the middle of the eighteenth century, a statement by Guillaume-Francois Berthier from 1747 could serve as a bellwether:
The new philosophers have earned just praise for relieving philosophy of certain scholastic entities, formalities, and other terms signifying nothing, with which, when one knows them and cites them in school in an authoritative tone, one persuades oneself of one’s own erudition. The new philosophers have often successfully destroyed, but they have not always built with the same success. Their new edifices – that is, these new systems vaunted so highly- lack the solidity of the ancient buildings of Roman Catholic architecture.
The Jesuits could, at least to some extent, understand the philosophes’ need for a new intellectual beginning; they even could adapt some of their new ideas. But they also wanted ‘a mixture of the old and new,’ as Tommaso Ceva stated in 1722. The Jesuits therefore never made the Enlightenment completely their own. Hence, the Enlightenment also never became a part of the general self-conception and collective identity of the Society, as had been the case with the synthesis of late humanism and late scholasticism. The fundamental texts of the order – the Ratio studiorum, the Constitutions – we never adapted to the new culture. The official line still ranged from reserved to dismissive. Individual Jesuits nonetheless engaged in highly creative and productive ways with innovations of the Enlightenment and adapted significant parts of the new ideas in a moderate, theological, Catholic Enlightenment of their own.
This precious truce gradually gave way to open hostility after the mid-eighteenth century. The Jesuits lost their confident place in the Enlightenment, as the philosophes advertised the radical implications of the new culture ever more openly. The Jesuits and the Enlightenment thinkers increasingly stood opposed as hostile blocs. This was nowhere more evident than in the Society’s public battle with Denis Diderot and his Encyclopedie in 1751/2. Diderot’s great lexicon, which today is regarded as the epitome of the Enlightenment, attracted ample suspicion. It was considered a vehicle for atheist and heretical thought. Even leading proponents of the Enlightenment like Voltaire and Montesquieu were initially skeptical. The editor of the Memoires de Travoux at the time, Berthier, shared this critical attitude. In 1751 and 17523, he gave predominantly negative reviews of Diderot’s ‘Prospectus, ‘Discours preliminaire,’ and the first volume of the Encyclopedie. Berthier and other conservative authors criticized the fact that Diderot’s texts frequently contained radical ideas hidden in seemingly neutral and objective articles. Overall, this criticism was right on the mark. But the Jesuits around Berthier never lost sight of the fact that the new lexicon had powerful political supporters; they therefore steered an middle course that combined broad rejection with recognition of particular points.
These controversies escalated into a symbolic struggle between old and new forces for cultural and intellectual dominance. Opponents and supporters of the Enlightenment coalesced around the two parties. The criticism that the Jesuits and other members of the church leveled at the Encyclopedie forged the philosophes together in an alliance despite their respective differences and simultaneously radicalized them. As leaders of this ecclesiastical-religious countercurrent, the Jesuits became implicated in these highly prominent and polarizing public conflicts as the enemies of the Enlightenment.
The Jesuits could not shake this position in public life for the final decades of their existence prior to 1773. By midcentury at the latest, they were firmly in ther parti antiphilosophique –allowing for sporadic, individual exceptions mentioned previously – both in their own estimation and in that of most contemporaries. The Enlightenment, meanwhile, evolved into a broad, culturally dominant movement – and its proponents knew how to market themselves shrewdly to the public at large. Conflicts over forms of devotion, such as the veneration of the Sacred Heart, and over school reform catalyzed the process of the Jesuits cultural marginalization. Growing enmity and even more negative stereotypes about the Jesuits split the intellectual elite of Europe. Supporters and opponents of the Enlightenment squared off as ideological adversaries in increasingly implacable opposition.
II. The Debate Over Jesuit ‘Accommodation’
The expulsion of the Jesuits from China in 1724 was a consequence of constant disputes over the methods used by the Jesuit missions. Across the world and almost from the start, the Jesuits were criticized for their Christianizing methods. In Brazil, just three years after the arrival of Manuel da Nobrega, a bitter feud broke out between the Jesuits and the first bishop of Bahia, Dom Pedro Fernandes Sardinha. The bishop was displeased with how accommodating the Jesuits were towards the natives. They permitted the natives to sing their ‘heathen’ songs and keep their ‘heathen’ hairstyles, and they relied on mestizos as translators. The Jesuits were not at all sufficiently strict and consistent in his view. ‘I did not come here to make gentiles out of Christians, but to train gentiles to be Christians,’ the bishop stated. The Jesuits would hear these accusations again and again in countless iterations over the next two centuries.
Many Jesuits believed, on the contrary, that the success of their mission depended on their willingness to accommodate local preference. They vocally defended this approach. Da Nobrega thought it was permissible ‘to adopt some indigenous customs that are not contrary to our Catholic faith and are not rites dedicated to idols.’ The first Jesuit missionary to Vietnam, Francesco Buzomi, likewise thought in 1628 that one should propagate the faith first and worry about publicizing prohibitions later. A clear, practical insight lay behind this approach: it was impossible to change everything all at once, and some things perhaps need not be changed at all: ‘Our indulgence and goodwill towards such customs enable us to suppress other, much worse customs.’ In everyday practice, the mission involved a constant cost-benefit analysis, even though that often tangled up in intellectual quandaries. The nudity of many South American indigenous peoples, for example, was a difficult case. Da Nobrega himself was initially inclined to tolerate it, despite that he considered it a violation of natural law: ‘Because they come naked, should one deny them baptism and access to the church to hear mass and teaching, if they are otherwise prepared for it?’ In contrast to the stricter bishop, da Nobrega leaned towards compromise for pragmatic reasons.
Fifty years later, colleagues in India like the missionary Roberto de Nobili agreed. In de Nobili’s young community tt was not nudity but rather a certain clothing practice that was the problem. The Brahmin in Maurai wore threads across their bodies to indicate their social status and caste. Some of the Portuguese wanted to suppress the custom, suspecting that it was bases on ‘superstition.’ De Nobili retorted,
It is undeniable that these men find themselves in a painful dilemma. If they refuse to believe, they risk falling into the greatest of spiritual evils, the loss of their soul, if they embrace the faith and do not wear the threads, they incur the greatest temporal evils, the loss of personal dignity, and the forfeiture of their family goods and property. What sort of philosophy is this? Is it thinkable that for the sake of a trivial and false opinion put forward by a few men, it would be necessary to ordain that these converts of ours should subject themselves inevitably to either of these evils?
De Nobili not only let his Brahmin converts keep their threads but also attempted to raise his chances of successful converting the Indian population by presenting himself as a Brahmin. One contemporary reported, ‘He wore velvet slippers which people would kiss, he bathed twice a day before meals as Brahmins do, but without reciting prayers . . this he did not do out of love of cleanliness, but to show himself as a Brahmin, and when he went out, he used to go in a palanquim.’ Analogously, Matteo Ricci in China was soon also being carried in a litter like a distinguished Confucian scholar. And likewise viewed this accommodation to local customs as the most promising way to raise the level of acceptance shown the missionaries. By changing their appearance and way of life, the Jesuits fit more comfortably in the world view of their hosts and improved their chances of being heard.
The debate over strictness versus leniency in engaging with non- Christian cultures had a long tradition in Christianity. Essentially, these two opposing attitudes existed since the days of the apostles. ‘Accommodation’, adapting to local conditions, was also not a unique feature of the Society of Jesus in the early modern period. Many missionaries from other religious orders later saw things similarly. And even contemporaries acknowledged that, in addition to Manuel da Nobrega, it was the triumvirate of Jesuit missionaries in Asia – Alessandro Valignano, Matteo Ricci, and Robero de Nobili – who had pioneered this approach in an especially prominent and precedent-setting way. The question thus remains as to why the missionaries from the Society of Jesus in particular were so willing to adapt to strange new environments and able to integrate into new social conditions. The widest variety of reasons have been offered as answers, the Jesuits have been mistaken for the early advocates of religious inculturation or even of ‘interreligious dialogue.’
Such exaggerated interpretations do not bring us forward. In most cases, there is far less theory and far more pragmatism behind the Jesuit missionaries’ method. Concepts of cultural –let alone religious- relativity were as alien to few Nobili as they were to Ricci or da Nobrega. The early modern Jesuits were and remained firmly convinced that Christianity was the exclusive truth that led to salvation. In the Jesuits’ view, the practices that they accommodatingly tolerated were precisely not the religion of the Indians, Chinese or Tupi. Their approach was calculated much more, rather, to lead people of different faiths to Christianity. There was no place in their views for ideas of necessarily adapting essential Christian truths to cultural contexts. . .
The Jesuits pastoral ministry, with its therapeutic orientation and broad focus on edification, consolation, and positive guidance, and the Jesuits’ relatively positive theological view of mankind may have bolstered their inclination to look for ways to cooperate with non-Christian cultures.
We may also point to the fact that de Nobili, and Valignano, among others, came from the nobility. The aristocratic courtly culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries attached the utmost importance to courteous behavior. For nobles like them, it was second nature to play a variety of social roles without losing oneself. This skill was mandatory for life at court and also helped the missionaries adapt their appearance. The effortlessness with which de Nobili grasped the strict social differentiation between cases according to outward symbols may also have been connected to his roots as a nobleman in the European society of estates. At bottom, arrangements in India may not have looked so different from the social reality of Europe, where distinctions of social status could clearly be seen at many religious events.
The Jesuits’ outstanding education in ancient rhetoric may have encouraged and reinforced such views. It had long been a basic principle of humanistic rhetoric that one should key one’s speeches to the circumstances and audience.. From there, it was only a short step to viewing a missionary’s appearance, his actio, as something that also needed to be calibrated. Another legacy of late humanist scholarly practice was the Jesuits’ adroitness at reconciling non-Christian texts with Christianity – theoretically, what they did every day with Aristotle and Cicero could also work with Confucius and Hindu treatises.
Jesuits therefore felt their overall approach was justified because they judged foreign cultures and their ways of life only on the basis of the most diligent scholarly assessment; ‘It is risky to pronounce on the customs of people here, unless a person has first diligently gone through their books and familiarized himself with these same customs and usages, guided by knowledge of their origin and source’. In this case, spiritual reflections about missionary strategies productively collided with Jesuits’ enthusiasm for scientific observation. Their superior knowledge of indigenous cultures was one of the Jesuits most important weapons because they used all their expertise to differentiate the many customs known to them into those that were merely ‘secular’; and those that were truly ‘religious’ or ‘heathen’ or ‘superstitious. “Secular’ or social conventions could be tolerated, whereas the Jesuits banned genuinely ‘heathen’ practices as a matter of course. The Jesuits willingness to draw this distinction between religious and social, spiritual and cultural spheres, and to divide indigenous customs into those that were prohibited and the many others that were allowed, were among the key intellectual foundations of their way of proceeding worldwide. Whoever questioned this distinction, from the Jesuits perspective, merely proved that he had not yet familiarized himself sufficiently with local culture. ‘As soon as they see the Christians depart a little bit from the customs of Spain, they think it is all heathenism and idolatry. They don’t know how to distinguish between a pagoda and a heathen cult from the custom of a country or province.’ Whoever failed to accept this distinction, failed to temper ‘zeal’ with ‘knowledge.’ The scientific analysis of indigenous cultures facilitated and legitimated cultural adaptation, while Christian rigorism appeared to be symptomatic of ignorance.
The Jesuits’ adversaries obviously rejected this position. They were more intransigent and rigorous, and they considered it indispensable for religious reasons to implement as a complete version of European Christianity as possible among the ‘heathen.’ It all depended on whether one made the distinction that Jesuits drew between religious and civil, spiritual and social conventions. And it was precisely this question in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that ignited a bitter international debate that far surpassed in duration, impact, and importance earlier conflicts of a similar nature.
The missions in Madurai/Malabar and China stood in the eye of the storm . . .
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Wolff_(philosopher)
