The Jesuits

by S. W. J. O'Malley

  But as late as 1730 the Sixteenth General Congregation and then again in 1751 the next Congregation decreed that the Society’s teachers adhere to Aristotle not only in metaphysics and logic but in physics as well. Although in any vibrant organization there is always a certain discrepancy between practice and normative documents, in the Society the discrepancy had in this instance become distressingly acute. It was in this context, nonetheless, that the Jesuits produced Boscovich (1711–1787), who, among his other accomplishments, successfully labored for the abolition in 1757 of the Congregation of the Index’s decree against the Copernican system.

  As Aristotle lost credibility, other philosophers emerged and reconfigured the discipline. Descartes, the Jesuits’ former pupil, was the first. The philosophical establishment rejected him to the point that the Paris Parlement threatened to ban his works. In 1663 his writings were placed on the papal Index “until corrected.” They were nonetheless extremely influential and enjoyed great favor in learned circles well into the eighteenth century and beyond. Descartes failed, however, to win the support he hoped for from the Jesuits. The same was true for Spinoza, Leibniz, and others who succeeded him, even though individual Jesuits had cordial and reciprocally profitable relations with some of them.

  The Age of the Enlightenment had dawned. By the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, France had emerged as the unquestioned cultural capital of Europe. Although the Enlightenment had important proponents in Scotland, Germany, and elsewhere, even in North America, its epicenter was France. And it was in France that the positions normally associated with the Enlightenment, such as deism, freedom of religion, and the supreme authority of Reason, took forms that were viciously anti-Catholic. Voltaire’s wish for the church was shared by many of his peers, Ecrasons l’infâme!

  A clash between the Jesuits and the philosophes, as the spokesmen for Enlightenment ideals were known, was inevitable, especially since the latter recognized in the former their most able opponents. But the inevitability was not immediately evident. Beginning in 1701, the Jesuits published the Journal de Trévoux, a monthly that commented on the intellectual and cultural currents of the day. When the first volume of the Encyclopédie appeared in 1751, the Journal of course reviewed this first child of the publication considered the single most influential articulation of the ideals of the French Enlightenment.

  The Journal gave the volume a positive review and greeted it as the beginning of a noble and mighty enterprise. As subsequent volumes appeared and their anti-Christian bias became more evident and pervasive, the Journal became of course ever more critical. Within a short while, therefore, the possibility of harmony between the Jesuits and the philosophes, whose influence by mid-century dominated intellectual culture in France, evanesced.

  CONTROVERSY

  During their second century, the Jesuits became the focal point of three major controversies of international scope, in each of which their opponents eventually triumphed. The first was the controversy over the degree of accommodation to Chinese culture that the Jesuits employed in their mission in Beijing, the famous “Chinese Rites” controversy. Even some Jesuits objected to the radical adaptation Ricci pioneered. But it was the Franciscans and Dominicans who first brought the issue into the international arena. They focused specifically on the Jesuits’ willingness to allow converts to continue to practice traditional Chinese ceremonies honoring Confucius and their ancestors.

  The controversy originated in the early 1640s when the first Spanish Dominicans and Franciscans entered China and were perplexed to witness Chinese converts to Christianity engaging in such rites. They questioned the Jesuit interpretation of the rites as civic, not religious. The friars then undertook their own investigation and came to conclusions at odds with the Jesuits’.

  This divergence in interpretation assumed public and ominous importance in 1643. That year Juan Morales, a Dominican who opposed the Jesuit practice, submitted “Seventeen Questions” to the papacy. He described the rites in a way that could only evoke condemnation, which the Holy See in fact issued in 1645. In response to the condemnation, the Jesuits in China sent their own representative to Rome, Martino Martini, and in 1656, Pope Alexander VII through the Holy Office decided that the ceremonies as described by Martini were “a purely civil and political cult” and therefore admissible. But this second decree meant each side now had a papal document supporting its position, which left the situation ambiguous.

  Twenty years later, in 1676, the controversy revived and entered an even more public phase when another Dominican, Domingo Fernández Navarrete, who had known the Jesuits in China, published in Madrid his Tratados … de la monarchia de China, which was severely critical of the Jesuits’ approach. The book, soon translated into several languages, became a major resource not only for those who had misgivings about the Jesuits’ approach in China but for everybody with a grievance of any sort against the Society.

  In the meantime the arrival in China of French clerics who were not Jesuits further tipped the balance against them. When in 1684 Charles Maigrot, Doctor of the Sorbonne and Vican Apostolic of Fujian, appeared on the scene, he immediately took a stand against the Jesuits. He provoked enormous ill will and resistance from the Chinese converts and of course from the Jesuits. The controversy moved into its final phase in 1697 when the Holy See agreed to consider the objections Maigrot raised against the Jesuits. The inquiry went on for seven years. The Jesuits reinforced their position by transmitting to Rome a declaration of Emperor Kangxi that the ceremonies were civic, not religious. They believed, wrongly, that the declaration was irrefutable proof of the correctness of their interpretation.

  On November 20, 1704, Pope Clement XI issued a decree forbidding Catholics to participate in the rites. The decree did not directly repudiate the Jesuits’ position that the rites were essentially civic, but it affirmed that in practice superstitions had become so entwined in them that they could not be allowed. Eleven years later the same pope issued a more resounding condemnation of the Jesuit position, which was in 1742 further confirmed by Pope Benedict XIV. No further appeal was possible.

  The decree of 1704, promulgated in China by the papal legate there, Charles-Thomas Maillard de Tournon, was quite specific and forbade a long list of practices by then habitual in the Chinese church, such as the use of certain terms found in ancient Chinese classics to denote God, the use of the characters jing tian (respect heaven) bestowed by Kangxi to decorate churches, and of course, under pain of excommunication, participation in the “sacrificial” rites honoring Confucius and ancestors.

  When Kangxi heard of the decision, he was furious, and in a reversal of his previously tolerant stance, he banned Christians from preaching in China. He continued, however, his cordial relations with the Jesuits, as shown by his engaging them for the great cartographical project. The Jesuits continued to hope against hope for a reversal of the decision, or a reversal of Kangxi’s ban, but they did so in vain.

  Despite Kangxi’s continued friendship with the Jesuits, his ban was the great turning point. It marked the beginning of the end not only for the Jesuits in China but for all missionaries. It was the beginning of the end of Christianity there. Only in 1746, however, were anti-Christian laws carried out rigorously and the first missionaries executed, beginning with five Spanish Dominicans in 1747 and two Jesuits the next year. The Jesuits in Beijing managed to survive in ever diminishing numbers and less friendly circumstances. The last one did not die until 1805.

  The paradox of the Rites Controversy is that it took place just as Sinophilia and its attendant Chinoiserie reached a peak in Europe. The phenomenon was due in large part to the letters from China the Jesuits wrote that were edited and published by their confreres in Europe and avidly read by a wide public. But papal condemnation of the rites gave the Jesuits’ enemies the heavensent occasion they had been waiting for. They unleashed an avalanche of vilification of the Jesuits as betrayers of the Christian faith and teachers of the gospel of Confucius rat
her than the Gospel of Christ, who in China amassed for themselves large fortunes. The Jansenists and the Paris Foreign Mission Society led the campaign. Michel Villermaules, an ardent Jansenist, published between 1733 and 1742 a seven-volume work that was nothing more than a collection of libels against the Jesuits, but his work was only one of many dozens of similar publications. The conclusion was inevitable: the only way to rid the church of the Jesuit scourge was to suppress the order altogether.

  The damage done to the Society by the “Chinese Rites” controversy was compounded by the “Malabar Rites” controversy that occurred at roughly the same time in South India. De Tour-non had spent eight months in Pondicherry (Puducherry) on his way to China. Just before he left he issued a decree forbidding certain accommodations the Jesuits made, especially in administering baptism and visiting sick pariahs in the homes. The Jesuits pleaded their cause with him and with the Holy See in a case that dragged on until 1744 when Pope Benedict XIV allowed some of the Jesuit practices and forbade others. By this time, however, the Jesuits’ enemies in Europe had seized the Malabar Rites as another instance of Jesuit disobedience and selling out to paganism.

  The second major controversy was the direct confrontation of the Jesuits with the Jansenists. Its point of origin was Louvain, where in 1640 Cornelis Jansen’s Augustinus was published posthumously. Jansen, who hoped to save the Catholic Church from the moral laxity of the Jesuits and make it into a model of probity that would lead to the conversion of Dutch Calvinists, turned to Saint Augustine, whose entire corpus he purportedly read ten times in preparation for the book. He had come to believe from the earlier De auxiliis controversy in Spain that the Jesuits by their emphasis on free will denied the efficacy of grace in the struggle against sin and that they subscribed to the Pelagianism that Augustine had so strenuously opposed and early councils of the church so clearly condemned.

  The Belgian Jesuits tried to halt the publication of the Augustinus and, when that failed, to have it condemned in Rome. They found its doctrine scarcely distinguishable from Calvinism, and, in fact, the Jansenists began to embody a religious culture and moral rigor that resembled Puritanism. The friends and partisans of Jansen, especially those in France, led by Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694), reacted to the Jesuits with the ferocity to be expected under the circumstances and set in motion the idea that the Jesuits were responsible for every setback the Jansenists received from either secular or religious authorities.

  The atmosphere turned acrid as anti-Jansenist and anti-Jesuit factions rapidly formed and as the controversy grew in France to engage the Paris Parlement and even the crown. Although the epicenter for the controversy had fast become Paris, for well over a hundred years Jansenism took deep hold in aristocratic lay and clerical circles throughout Europe, including members of the papal court itself.

  The Jansenists soon came to define themselves almost in opposition to the Jesuits. Their grievances against them fell under six main headings. The first was the Jesuits’ more optimistic assessment of human nature and free will, in contrast to the Jansenists’ doctrine of the utter corruption of human nature by Original Sin and the resulting powerlessness of the will to do good. The second, closely related, was the Jesuits’ advocacy of frequent reception of the Eucharist, which according to the Jansenists was incompatible with human unworthiness.

  The third was the Jesuits’ reconciliation with almost every aspect of classical culture, a symptom of the Jesuits’ worldliness that was most blatantly manifest in their promotion in their schools of theater and dance. It was also manifest in the Jesuits’ employment of “pagan magnificence” in their various enterprises and especially in what for the Jansenists was the overwrought character of the Jesuits’ baroque churches.

  The reconciliation with the pagan cultures of ancient Greece and Rome was related to the analogous reconciliation the Jesuits attempted with the cultures of Japan and China, an abuse passionately and unremittingly denounced by the Jansenists even long after the promulgation of the papal decrees against the rites. This was the fourth grievance. The fifth was the Jesuits’ pride and arrogance so evident in everything they did, beginning with the audacity of the very name of the Society.

  The final grievance was the Jesuits’ adoption of probabilism as their preferred form of moral reasoning. Jesuits (and others) who subscribed to probabilism taught that, in a conflict of opinion among respected theologians over the morality or immorality of a given act, the confessor was obliged to give the penitent the benefit of the less rigorous opinion, even if that opinion was regarded as less probable. The Jansenists saw the Jesuits’ advocacy of probabilism as proof positive of their moral laxity. Probabilism was an abomination that condoned sin and destroyed public morality. It was a devious device that enabled the Jesuits to win favor, especially with the mighty, by finding ways to let penitents wiggle out of responsibility for wrongdoing.

  In 1643, just three years after the publication of the Augustinus, Arnauld, brilliant member of a well-known and distinguished French family, published two anti-Jesuit works, Théologie morale des jésuites and De la fréquente communion. These were just the beginning of the anti-Jesuit works inspired by the Jansenists that henceforth poured from the presses especially in France and that became ever more vitriolic. Not vitriol, however, but understated wit and elegant style made Pascal’s Lettres Provinciales all the more effective in their parody of the Jesuits. The Lettres, published between 1656 and 1657, remains one of the most accomplished satires in the history of literature.

  For Pascal, as for other Jansenists, the Jesuits were compromisers who betrayed the purity of the Gospel message and preached an easy road to salvation. The most obvious manifestation of the Jesuits’ moral laxity was their advocacy of probabilism. Jesuit theologians published a large number of books in which they argued about the possible moral assessments of particular cases in which there seemed to be a conflict of moral principles. These theologians, not all of whom argued their positions well, were Pascal’s specific target.

  In the fictitious Lettres, their supposed author, curious about the Jesuits, consults one of them, who turns out to be well-meaning and eager to answer questions but hopelessly naive. The Jesuit reassures his questioner that the members of his order are flexible enough to be severe with penitents who like that sort of thing but able to give wide latitude to others. As the author probes, it becomes clear that the Jesuit does not see the implications of the positions he has been schooled to defend or realize how at odds they are with the true standards of the Gospel championed by the Jansenists.

  The Lettres along with the Monita Secreta turned out to be in the long run the most successful of all anti-Jesuit writings. The light and witty style of the Lettres, besides embodying and promoting a shift in what constituted “good taste,” was destined to win for the Jansenists a following in readers who were otherwise repelled by their severe and rigid moral standards.

  Pascal was far from being the only Jansenist to use satire against the Jesuits. Isaac-Louis Lemaistre de Sacy (1619–1684), best known for his French translation of the Bible, was a nephew of Arnauld and a close friend of Pascal’s. In 1654 he published anonymously Les enluminures du fameus almanach des PP. Iesuistes [sic]. In it he in verse makes devastating fun, for instance, of the Jesuits’ spiritual teaching as sweet and civilized. The style of piety the Jesuits promote is gallant, pretty, polite, and nicely coiffured. It makes people devout à la mode:

  Elle est douce & civilisée

  Et mesle aux bonnes actions

  Les belles conversations,

  Elle est galante, elle est jolie,

  Elle est frizée, elle est polie

  Elle marche avec cet agrément

  Plus à l’aise & plus seurement

  Elle rend devot à la mode.

  But the battle went beyond words. In the wake of the furor in France over Unigenitus, the last major papal bull condemning Jansenism, a Jesuit preached an anti-Jansenist sermon. In retaliation Louis-Antoine de Noailles,
archbishop of Paris and the leading figure in France trying to circumvent the bull, published in 1716 an edict prohibiting the Jesuits in Paris from preaching, hearing confessions, and practicing any other ministry. This extraordinarily severe edict remained in force for thirteen years, until Noailles’s death in 1729.

  Jansenism, though condemned by the Holy See, never lost its appeal in certain quarters and remained a small but extraordinarily powerful force in continental Catholicism until just after the French Revolution. For the Jansenists the destruction of the Jesuits grew to an obsession. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, they were able to enter into informal alliances with the Jesuits’ other enemies to accomplish their goal.

  The third great controversy concerned the reductions in Paraguay. By 1767 there were thirty of them with a population of some 110,000 natives, especially the Guaraní, in the territory of present-day Paraguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Brazil. They were, as mentioned, overseen by a small handful of Jesuits. This “Republic,” as they came to be known, aroused great curiosity in Europe, where it was much admired and sometimes idealized even by philosophes.

  Protection of the natives from the raids upon them by Spanish and Portuguese slave traders was a primary motivation for the establishment of the reductions. But these unarmed settlements could not resist the armed attacks of the marauders, who prowled the jungles looking for natives to enslave. In 1628 the kidnappers devastated the area of Guayrá, left intact only two of the eleven reductions, and reduced the original population from one hundred thousand to twelve thousand.