The Jesuits (8 page)

In India the Italian nobleman Roberto De Nobili (1577–1656) reached the city of Madurai in South India in 1606, and for most of the next forty years worked as a missionary there. Dismayed at the policy of forcing Portuguese names and customs upon converts, he decided to adopt the dress, customs, diet, and manner of life of the Hindu holy man. He was one of the first Europeans to learn Tamil and perhaps the first to write a theological treatise in that or any Indian language. His life was dedicated to the proposition that to become a Christian one did not have to become a European. He and his Jesuit successors, especially the Portuguese nobleman João de Brito (1647–1693), had limited success, due in part to their small numbers, but they were the pioneers that later generations emulated.

The Catholic mission in the East that had the most lasting success by far was the mission to the Philippines, which resulted in the only country in that part of the world with a population overwhelmingly Catholic. In 1581 Antonio Sedeño, who nine years earlier had founded the mission to Mexico, arrived in Manila with three other Jesuits. Within a decade some hundred Jesuits were working in several of the islands, cooperating with and competing with other orders that had arrived earlier. Through the
seventeenth century, the number of men in the province hovered between about 100 and 130. Although the Jesuits made important contributions to the Philippine mission, they share the success with the other orders.

France was late in trying to establish an overseas empire, but in 1608 Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec City and thus New France. A small group of Jesuits led by Paul Le Jeune arrived in 1632 and within three years had founded in Quebec City the College of Our Lady of the Angels. The harshness of the climate, the indifference or hostility of the native peoples, and the primitive character of life even in the French settlements made this an especially difficult mission, and the Jesuits suffered terribly.

R
eassured by the celebrations of their first century, the Jesuits moved with confidence into their second. Although the Japanese mission, a venture of which they had been particularly proud, ended in tragedy, that failure was an exception. In virtually every other place where they had established themselves, they seemed to move ever more deeply into the religious and cultural fabric and to give it characteristics distinctive of themselves. They consolidated and further developed enterprises earlier undertaken.

Perhaps no more graphic illustration of this phenomenon can be found than in the elaborate network of reciprocally supportive institutions that the Jesuits constructed in Spanish America. The network integrated their urban and rural enterprises into a system in which, though each enterprise stood on its own, it also provided benefits to the others. In the cities the Jesuits opened schools and constructed impressive churches. But their urban holdings extended much further and included hospitals, pharmacies, and
retreat houses. In major cities such as Cusco or La Paz, they ran
tambos,
which were guesthouses or modest hotels where travelers might stay.

The larger schools, moreover, contained printing presses and housed extensive libraries with books published locally but also books imported from Europe on almost every imaginable subject. Some also operated astronomical observatories. The most celebrated school, San Ildefonso in Mexico City, whose construction was completed in the middle of the eighteenth century, was favorably compared with the schools of Spain, Italy, and France, but other schools in Spanish America equaled or almost equaled that standard of excellence. As in Europe, the schools became the major agent in mounting on a sometimes grandiose scale religious and civic celebrations, in which every stratum of society played a role. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Jesuits in the northern region of Spanish America—Mexico, Guatemala, and Cuba—were stationed in 40 colleges and residences and in 114 missions. Staffing these establishments were about 680 Jesuits.

Ongoing financing of the schools was a problem here as elsewhere. The rents and products from the Jesuits' holdings in the countryside were enlisted and organized to offset school costs. The Jesuits operated ranches, plantations, and fulling mills in which agricultural activity and the raising of livestock were often combined with an industry, such as sugar production and cloth making. For such institutions to function, waterworks were required to provide for drinking, washing, and manufacturing as well as for the movement of goods, which meant the construction of canals, dikes, dams, and mills. Some missions operated by the Jesuits contained potteries and silversmitheries, and others produced high-quality religious images and musical instruments, including organs.

The reductions, self-sufficient and self-governing communities of Amerindians, are of course the best known of the Jesuit enterprises in Latin America. Although the two or three Jesuits residing in them had the final word, the immediate authority for governance belonged to a council of the natives that possessed legislative, executive, and judicial power over perhaps as many as ten thousand inhabitants of a given reduction. These were not small settlements!

Each reduction contained flour mills, bakeries, slaughterhouses, and similar institutions, with an ample water supply and a sophisticated sewer system. The church, the most impressive building in a reduction, was the site of elaborate liturgies. At their peak, toward the middle of the eighteenth century, the urban development of the reductions equaled or surpassed that of neighboring cities, with the exception of Buenos Aires and Córdoba. The heaviest penalty for anyone convicted of criminal activity was ten years' imprisonment. The death penalty did not exist, which was unique for the era.

In China the Jesuits attained the height of their success during the reign of Emperor Kangxi (reign 1661–1722), the longest rule in Chinese history. Highly intelligent and inquisitive, Kangxi was attracted to his Jesuit courtiers for their knowledge and personal gifts. In his youth the Jesuits acted as his tutors and later served him in several important instances, which included helping him quell a major rebellion and facilitating for him his relationship with western powers. In gratitude for these and other services, Kangxi issued in 1692 an edict of toleration of Christians, which inaugurated the most promising dozen or so years in the entire history of the mission. The edict and the excellent relations between the emperor and the Jesuits led Louis Le Comte (1655–1728), a
French Jesuit returned to France from China, to publish a eulogistic biography of Kangxi as an extraordinarily wise and prudent ruler, a philosopher-king.

The French Jesuit missionaries convinced the emperor of the usefulness of a full-scale map of his domains. Kangxi undertook the project and, with the Jesuit cartographers and a large entourage, traveled to different parts of his empire to oversee it. The project turned out to be the largest cartographic endeavor based on exact measurements ever undertaken anywhere in the world. Similar projects in France and Russia, for instance, were not completed until decades later. In the project's final stages, the French Jesuit Pierre Jartoux (1669–1720) led efforts to combine regional maps to produce a large overview that enabled the emperor to take in his vast empire in a single glance.

In Europe the Jesuits continued to draw large congregations to their churches, continued in many places to send their teams of missionaries to villages in the hinterlands, and continued as chaplains in prisons and hospitals. Their Marian congregations flourished, and especially in Naples, probably the most musically alive city in Europe at the time, they sponsored well-attended concerts of sacred music in the great Jesuit church, the Gesù Nuovo. In 1722 the Marian congregation attached to the Jesuit church of San Fedele in Milan sponsored there the premiere of Vivaldi's last oratorio,
The Adoration of the Magi.

The colleges, despite significant challenges from a changing culture, sometimes a crushing debt, and, now, competition from the schools of other religious orders, continued to enjoy great prestige and play an important cultural role in the cities and towns where they were located. They were civic institutions of the first order, founded for the good of the city and often in some form
funded by the city. In this age before public libraries, the library in the Jesuit school was generally the largest and most important in the city, and the entertainment offered by the plays the school produced was sometimes the best available, especially in smaller towns. As late as 1741, for instance, the city of Milan called upon the Jesuits to orchestrate the elaborate program of public mourning for the death of Emperor Charles VI.

The College of Nobles founded in Milan in 1682 soon had an outstanding reputation. The curriculum was up to date and taught by celebrated teachers, including the famous scientist Roger Boscovich. Besides Latin, the three hundred or so students learned French and German, and they studied astronomy, mathematics, physics, history, geography, and hydrography. The repertoire of the college theater included a few comedies inspired by Molière and a tragedy derived from Corneille. Racine's
Athalie
served as a model for tragedies about biblical figures written by the Jesuits and performed by the students. But Milan was not unique. In Paris the Collège Louis-le-Grand had an outstanding faculty of Jesuit teachers and writers that drew a correspondingly brilliant body of students—including Voltaire!

As baroque culture developed, the Society became ever more identified with some of its leading artists. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, a friend of the superior general, Gian Paolo Oliva, designed for the Jesuits the new church in Rome of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale, completed in 1671, one of the gems of baroque architecture. Oliva at the urging of Bernini meanwhile engaged Giovani Battista Gaulli (known as “Baciccio”) to decorate the interior of the Jesuits' mother church, the Gesù, and give it the form it retains to this day.

Oliva brought to Rome Brother Andrea Pozzo, who among his many other works decorated the interior of the church of San Ignazio, the church attached to the Roman College and built to commemorate the canonization of Ignatius. Pozzo later went on to a brilliant career. In 1693–1698 he published in two volumes in Latin and Italian one of the era's most important works on perspective, soon translated into every major European language as well as into Chinese. Sir Christopher Wren wrote a preface for the English translation in 1707. After working extensively in Rome and elsewhere in Italy, Pozzo died in 1709 in Vienna, where he had been summoned in 1702 by Emperor Leopold I.

Other Jesuit artists produced works of high quality. Much earlier in Cusco and elsewhere in Spanish America, Brother Bernado Bitti's slender mannerist figures were highly prized. From Chile in the early eighteenth century, the accomplished sculptor Johann Bitterich asked his Jesuit superiors in Europe to send him artists and craftsmen. In 1724 fifteen architects, woodcarvers, pewterers, smelters, silversmiths, and weavers arrived, all Jesuits. In 1747 another twenty-three came, bringing with them 386 crates of materials and tools, and seven years later came a dozen more.

In the eighteenth century under the Qing dynasty, the most important period of Jesuit artistic activity in China took place, at the center of which was Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766), known as Shining Lang. Besides an extraordinary number of paintings, designs for engravings, architectural plans, and the translation into Chinese of Pozzo's treatise on perspective, he planned the palace pavilions at the emperor's summer residence near Beijing. Castiglione served his imperial masters for an astounding fifty-one years and taught Chinese artists techniques of European oil painting.

During this century, therefore, there is considerable evidence of vibrancy and of effective engagement with cultural and religious issues. But it was a long century. As it moved along, more and more problems emerged for the Society, and as hindsight makes clear, they began to coalesce so as to threaten the Jesuits' very survival. Some were internal to the Society. Among them, for instance, was how to sustain an austere personal life in institutions of ever greater sophistication. By and large it seems the Jesuits handled this problem reasonably well, despite the image of wealth some of their institutions projected.

Although membership in the Society continued to grow, it was at a slower pace, and in given areas the pattern fluctuated considerably. In some provinces, for instance, it moved from steady increase, to alarming slump, followed sometimes by at least partial recuperation. The slump sometimes occurred simply because the province did not have enough money to support the novices. The situation became so severe that in 1645 the Eighth General Congregation instructed the new superior general, Vincenzo Carafa, to limit the number of novices provinces might accept depending on their ability to support them, and even, if necessary, to prohibit provinces from accepting any at all.

War, plague, and rapidly shifting political regimes also took their toll. But the picture is mixed. By 1710 the numbers in the Gallo-Belgian province had dropped some 40 percent from what they were a century earlier. At roughly the same time, however, the German provinces continued to grow, and by 1773 the Austrian province had expanded to include some 1,800 members, one of the largest memberships in the entire history of the Society.

In fact, by 1750 membership in the Society worldwide reached a peak for the pre-suppression era, in contrast with the
Dominicans, whose membership had begun to decline. Jesuits numbered about 22,500, just slightly fewer than the Dominicans. The membership in these two orders combined did not, however, come close to equaling the number of men following the Rule of Saint Francis in the three branches of that order. In 1750 their number exceeded a hundred and forty thousand.

Although the schools seemed to be flourishing, they had to deal with two new challenges to the very foundations of their program. The first was the attack on the assumption that the classics of Greece and Rome were “the best” literature and alone to be taught in the schools. This “quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns” had long been simmering, but it became serious in the last decades of the seventeenth century. By then the brilliance of the “moderns” had become ever more evident in authors such as Tasso, Cervantes, Montaigne, Molière, and Shakespeare, to say nothing of older authors such as Dante and Boccaccio.