This chapter analyzes the role that accommodation, dissimulation, equivocation, and mental reservation played in Jesuit spirituality, theology, and culture. These doctrines came to represent a fundamental component of the religious, theological, and intellectual identity of the Society of Jesus. Indeed, Ignatius Loyola himself made discreción one of the principles differentiating the Society from all other Catholic religious orders. The chapter demonstrates the centrality that these forms of accommodation and dissimulation acquired in the political, religious, and intellectual history of the early modern world, becoming useful tools to articulate one’s political and religious allegiance and thus becoming an integral part of post-Reformation culture. As post-Reformation Catholicism assumed an increasingly global dimension, these doctrines became politically, spiritually, theologically, and hermeneutically necessary for the Catholic missionaries to approach, come to terms with, and adapt to geographically and culturally different contexts, places, and people.
Origins of State and Legal Ideas of Russian Freemasons in the Late 18th – First Half of the 19th Century