French and Canadian Jesuit History Writing

This chapter investigates the links between the “old” and the “new” Society, as forged through the writing of history. More specifically, it focuses on the historiographical methods that were theorized and put into practice by French and Canadian Jesuit historians, active between the 1830s and the 1920s, in studying the history of their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century predecessors, with special attention to the writing of the history of the Canadian missions. The bibliographical and historiographical laboratory from which inventories (and categories) of sources, as well as general or specialized studies, were produced emerges by looking at both the correspondence of Jesuit historians and missionaries and their published works. Thus are revealed the constraints weighing on historical projects, the overlap between different objects and scales of analysis (the general history of the Order; histories of assistancies, missions, residences, etc.; the relationship with national history and history of empires), the blurred boundaries between hagiography and history (especially within the genre of life writing), and the necessary adjustments to different readerships.

Jesuit Interior Indias

This chapter examines the way in which Early Modern Jesuits understood the practice of confession. As leading actors in the apostolic field, they often promoted a vision of the sacrament of penance, which, in stark contrast to its connotations as a means of punishment, turned it into an effective tool oriented toward inner reform of the individual. Based on analysis of the Iberian interior missions, a range of practices is considered—including examination of conscience, general confession, and spiritual direction—that imbued the act of confession with a strong introspective dimension in the Society’s missionary contexts. Thus, this chapter highlights the role of such instruments in the development of forms of subjectivity, which contributed to individuals “entering into themselves,” exploring inner spaces of their soul. The particular geography of this space had to be known to conquer it and to thus lead the penitent toward a devoted life and Christian perfection.

The “First Fathers” of the Society of Jesus

This chapter argues on the basis of textual evidence and hagiographical literature that the foundation of the Society of Jesus was a complex interweaving of narratives, and of both individual and group actions. A blurred “family portrait” of the founding fathers, an open question of spiritual (and institutional) inheritance, and the genius of Ignatius of Loyola’s refusal to sign his own auto/biography are some of the innovations built into the Society of Jesus in its forming moments, compared to medieval monastic orders. The chapter argues that a certain interior institutional instability, continuously remedied by spiritual writing and by the production of the self-defining texts (from Constitutions to global network of correspondence), and the decision to espouse geographical dispersion and linguistic diversity, accounts for the global success of the Society of Jesus in the early modern period.

Jesuit Anthropology

This chapter analyzes the Jesuit missionary tradition of studying local customs and languages, which is known as “Jesuit anthropology.” By looking into some of the foundational Jesuit texts, the goal is to show how knowledge of non-Christian peoples had been constructed around the metaphor of “living books”: a “stranger” was a book, which the missionaries needed to decipher. From the information, observation, and expertise developed informally in all missionary fields, some Jesuits produced texts—some published but mostly remaining in manuscript—that were and still are considered important pieces in the European library of knowledge. The need and desire to know others was, of course, linked to religious goals: translating Christian message, administering sacraments, fulfilling divine will. From Francis Xavier to Michel de Certeau, the chapter addresses a set of Jesuit perspectives on alterity. They document the richness of interactions between the Jesuits and the local actors, but they always have to be read in light of the Jesuit project of religious conversion.

The Jesuits and the Enlightenment

How we think of the relationship between the Jesuits and the Enlightenment largely depends on how we conceptualize the latter. This chapter addresses it as a series of debates conducted in the context of a cosmopolitan Republic of Letters, and a number of specific cultural practices that made that very Republic possible. The Jesuits were, therefore, participants in, rather than enemies of, the Enlightenment. Because they combined theological conservatism with cultural modernity, the Jesuits were feared and resented with particular vehemence. Placed between two different modernities, one characterized by global structures of communication and learning, as well as by the practices of cultural accommodation, the other by the attack on superstition and religious authority, the Jesuits helped create the conditions for the Enlightenment, making important but paradoxical contributions to some of its central debates. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the impact of missionary ethnographies concerning the “Gentile” pagan peoples of the world.

Jesuit Missions’ Past and the Idea of Return

This chapter explores narratives about the past of the Jesuit missions in the context of the restoration of the Society of Jesus in the Iberian world in the nineteenth century. The first narrative is that of the Jesuits themselves, who try to connect their missionary past and present, by building a continuity based on the texts of the Ignatian spirituality (Constitutions, Spiritual Exercises, letters, hagiographies, etc.). The second narrative is that of the independent states that emerged from the collapse of the Iberian monarchies. Independent states expected from the restored Jesuit order to contribute to the construction of the new nations and the foundation of a new secular regime based on education. The third narrative is that of the local Christian communities, which had continued with devotional practices learned in the earlier Jesuit period. Religious practices of these communities would gradually become an object of condemnation by the returned Jesuits and ecclesiastical authorities for their autonomy and heterodoxy.

Jesuits and Islam in Early Modern Europe

This chapter discusses Jesuit narratives of Islam and the Jesuits’ approaches to Muslims in early modern Europe. It argues that the Jesuits’ interaction with Islam was a key component of the Society’s identity, despite the fact that the order was not celebrated for the success of this interaction. It explores the desire of Ignatius of Loyola and the first Jesuits to convert Muslims; the history of Muslims who converted to Catholicism and joined the Society of Jesus; the Jesuits’ tension between a polemical attitude and a missionary approach to Muslims; and, finally, the Jesuits’ willingness to engage Islam and their attempts to study Arabic during this period. The chapter sheds new light on the presence of Islam in early modern Europe and helps our understanding of views that also influenced early modern Jesuit missionaries overseas, most of whom undertook their formation in Europe.

Music in Global Jesuit Missions, 1540–1773

The Society of Jesus has long been recognized for its global contribution to the study, practice, and dissemination of European music in the early modern period, and especially for its interactions with non-European music cultures. In Europe, Jesuit colleges played a seminal role in music education and the development of music in drama, major sacred works were composed by or for Jesuits, and treatises on music were written by Jesuit theorists. In the Americas and on islands in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, music served as a device for evangelization and conversion of indigenous peoples; in some of the missions, European music was cultivated to a level reported as comparable with standards of cities in Europe. Meanwhile, elite Jesuit scholars who gained access to high courts in Asia engaged in dialogue with local scholars, impressing powerful potentates and distinguishing themselves through their talent in music and their skills in astronomy, mathematics, cartography, languages, and diplomacy. This chapter surveys and critiques the diverse role of music within the global missions of the early modern Society of Jesus, with case studies drawn from Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

Jesuits, Conversos, and Alumbrados in the Iberian World

This chapter focuses on the first Spanish Jesuits and in particular on the ambiguous relationship between orthodoxy and heresy that characterized the first phase of their long story in the Iberian world. Special attention is given to the Jesuits’ attitude toward heretical and ethnical minorities such as alumbrados, Erasmians, Protestants, conversos, and moriscos. Most of the first Spanish Jesuits had strong connections to those minorities. When the Society of Jesus developed into the champion of the Counter Reformation, these links became problematic. The chapter highlights the points of contiguity between the Jesuits and those minorities, as well as how the latter’s cultural and religious heritage influenced the Jesuit spirituality. Conversely, it also focuses on how the Jesuits distanced themselves from them, trying to convert them through missions, confessions, and rhetoric and, in some cases, with the help of the Spanish Inquisition. The controversial theory of the limpieza de sangre is of course a seminal issue of this chapter.

Jesuit Missions between the Papacy and the Iberian Crowns

This chapter reconstructs the political constraints on the Jesuits who were circulating across Africa, America, and Asia from the mid-sixteenth through the twentieth century. The first missionaries acted under the royal patronages that the papacy had granted the crowns of Portugal and Spain over their oceanic empires. This legal and institutional framework, which had a deep influence on the Jesuit missions, was increasingly challenged by the papal claim to take back full control of the overseas church. The creation of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in 1622 led to an open competition with the Iberian royal patronages, bringing about serious conflict between the Jesuits and the newly appointed apostolic vicars. The chapter analyzes the backgrounds and effects of these global tensions, including their slow epilogue in the aftermath of the reconstitution of the Society of Jesus in 1814.