The Jesuits (7 page)

Xavier remained in Goa only four months, then worked for two years among the poor pearl fishers on the eastern side of Cape Comorin (Kanyakumari), the southern extremity of India. After that he traveled to the outmost bounds of Portuguese influence in the Far East, present-day Indonesia, four thousand miles beyond India. He returned to Goa to organize the mission. At that time there were about thirty Jesuits in India, but within five years another twenty-five had arrived. The Jesuits divided their labors between working for the conversion of the native population and ministering to the relatively large Portuguese population in those parts. The Jesuits blamed the greed and bad example of the Portuguese for their failure to make many converts.

The Jesuits' most exotic venture in India was the mission to the court of the Great Mughal, the emperors Akbar (1556–1605) and Jahangir (1605–1627). Northern India was at the time enjoying a climate of remarkable creativity and cultural openness. Its worldly rulers invited scholars, priests, and other holy men from around the world to their courts, where they engaged them in weekly interfaith debates into the small hours of the morning. The emperors and their guests expounded on the texts and traditions of faiths as varied as Islam, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism.

Akbar, a man of insatiable intellectual curiosity and, though professedly a Muslim, an eclectic in religion, in 1578 requested “two learned priests” to come from Goa to Fatehpur to serve as representatives there of Catholicism. In 1580 three Jesuits arrived
led by Rodolfo Aquaviva, whose uncle Claudio would be elected superior general the next year. At the insistence of Akbar, they plunged immediately into the debates over which he presided. They soon came to realize that, though the Great Mughal treated them with respect and kindness, they were for him more a source to satisfy his curiosity than serious contenders for his religious allegiance.

Nonetheless, the Jesuits founded a permanent mission there in 1598 and remained, with a few interruptions, until the suppression of 1773. They served the emperors well, bringing with them to northern India engravings, printed books, and oil paintings. Akbar himself was fascinated by Christian altarpieces and by the way the Jesuits used taffeta curtains, incense, and candles to enhance the spiritual power of their images. The urbanity of the Mughal court contrasted with the hostility the Jesuits faced elsewhere, due in large part to their being identified in the popular mind with the hated Portuguese.

In 1570 the mission to Brazil suffered a tragic loss of life. In that year, forty Jesuits set out for Brazil under the leadership of Ignacio de Azevedo. They were intercepted on the high seas by the Huguenot corsair Jacques Sourie. When Sourie discovered who the Jesuits were, he ordered them executed and their bodies cast into the sea. Back in Catholic Europe, they were immediately celebrated as saints, and they were in fact beatified in 1854.

Despite this loss of reinforcements, the mission to Brazil continued to prosper as it had from the beginning. Its prosperity was due to a number of factors but not least to the marvelous leadership provided early on by Nóbrega and Anchieta. The broad scope of Jesuit action in Brazil was twofold: the seacoast towns and the deep forests. In the towns the colleges, directed to the Portuguese
and Creole population, were here as elsewhere the center of Jesuit operations. They soon became mature institutions. When in 1566 the Portuguese wrested Rio de Janeiro from the French, Nóbrega transferred Jesuit headquarters there, where he soon opened a novitiate and a house of studies for the training of Jesuit scholastics. At Bahia in 1572, the college introduced philosophy into its curriculum and a few years later conferred its first master's degrees. Firm foundations for the future were thus laid.

Among the Indians, the Jesuit objective was to settle them in fixed communities, known as
aldeias,
where they could be weaned from superstition, drunkenness, and cannibalism and be instructed in the Christian faith. When Anchieta was involved in the process, it went reasonably well through his amazing output of lively and attractive songs, hymns, and religious plays. Even as Anchieta was molding the spiritual temper of early Brazil, he was laying the foundations for a national culture.

Although such efforts smack of paternalism and were inspired by a sense of cultural superiority, they were not engaged in by the Jesuits without some feeling of mutuality, and they contrast favorably with the attitudes and practices of many other Europeans who had settled there. In Brazil Jesuits took courageous stands against the enslavement of the natives and evoked great wonderment as word sped through the jungles that among the Portuguese there were some who defended them.

Although the Jesuits arrived in Brazil in 1549, they did not enter the Spanish domains of the western hemisphere until nineteen years later, 1568. The delay was due to the wary attitude toward the Society of Philip II. Unlike in Brazil, where the Jesuits were the first missionaries to arrive, the Dominicans, Franciscans, and other orders had arrived in Spanish territories some seventy-five years before they did and were well established. This situation
brought the Jesuits the advantage of being able to learn from the experience of the others but the disadvantage of being drawn into the sometimes unseemly, even vicious, competition among religious orders.

Once arrived the Jesuits soon entered three major areas claimed by the Spanish crown—Florida, Mexico, and Peru. In the first they suffered incredible hardships, made no headway with the Indians, and met death at their hands. The survivors retreated either to Havana, where they and their confreres soon opened a college, or to Mexico City to begin another successful chapter in the Society's history. In Mexico by 1574 the Jesuits had, with their church and school for six hundred boys in Mexico City and their schools at Oaxaca and Patzcuaro, entered as an important force into the cultural and religious life of the colony.

Among the first to arrive in the Viceroy of Peru was Alonso Barzana, who penetrated into the wilds of upper Peru and then into the eastern valleys of the Andes. These experiences allowed him to produce a dictionary and a prayer book in five Indian dialects. He was not alone among the Jesuits in his mastery of such languages and dialects. But the most enduring of the Jesuit undertakings in these early years was the founding of the college of San Pablo in Lima almost as soon as they arrived in the Viceroy. The oldest Jesuit school in Spanish America, San Pablo developed into a nerve center in the New World for the entry of European intellectual currents, and for two centuries it sparked the cultural life of Peru.

With the native populations in the forests of this vast territory, the Jesuits for the most part met hostility, identified as they perforce were with the Spanish aggressors. However, the mission among the more peaceful Guaraní was an exception, and it was among them that the Jesuits developed the famous reductions,
permanent settlements that were meant to protect the Indians from slave traders, teach them skills so that they might support themselves and pay the onerous taxes imposed by the government, and, finally, provide an atmosphere conducive to the practice of Catholicism.

Although Madrid set down the firm policy that none but Spaniards emigrate to “the Spanish Indies,” the Jesuits somehow circumvented it. Their work there almost from the beginning had a remarkably international character, reflective of the international character of the Society of Jesus itself. Of those sent to Mexico, for example, between about 1575 and 1625, thirty-seven of the Jesuits came from Italy, seventeen from Portugal, seven from France, five from the Low Countries, and others from other places, including Denmark and Ireland. In the latter part of the seventeenth century, the influx of German Jesuits especially in the Viceroy of Peru was considerable.

Regarding international staffing, the Portuguese were more tolerant than the Spaniards. The crown had no problem, for instance, that Xavier, a Spaniard, was the first priest to open the mission to Japan, where he arrived on August 15, 1549, accompanied by Father Cosmé de Torres, Brother Juan Fernández, and a Japanese recently converted to Catholicism named Paul of the Holy Faith. After several ill-advised ventures in trying to reach persons of authority who might help him, Xavier approached Ouchi Yoshitaka, daimyo of Yamagochi, a prince of real power, who, Xavier immediately realized, would be impressed only with a display of grandeur.

Xavier abandoned the simple clerical attire he had worn elsewhere and appeared in court finely robed. He presented his credentials as an ambassador of Portugal and gave Yoshitaka an
elaborate assortment of gifts, including a clock, eyeglasses, a music box, wine, and more still. The daimyo, fascinated and delighted with the gifts, gave Xavier permission to preach and also put an unused Buddhist temple at his disposal.

With that incident the Japanese mission got under way and did so with considerable success almost from that moment. Official approval of these visitors from a strange land made the difference. Xavier was deeply and favorably impressed with the Japanese. He wrote back to Goa that the Japanese “are the finest yet discovered. … They are good and not malicious, with a marvelous sense of honor and esteem for it.”
¹
Xavier's assessment was shared by others and made the Japanese mission attractive to members of the Society. Within thirty years, some sixty Jesuits were active there, an unmistakable sign of a successful venture. An even more unmistakable sign was the thousands of converts the Jesuits won.

In 1579 the young, talented, and decisive Italian Jesuit Alessandro Valignano arrived, armed by the superior general with the official title of Visitor, which gave him almost plenipotentiary powers. As he assessed the situation in Japan, he too was struck by the high level of Japanese culture and the need for a policy that took it into account. He determined that the missionaries abandon European dress, diet, and customs so as to conform themselves as far as possible with the culture of Japan. He opened a novitiate for the training of Japanese recruits to the Society, for he saw that the future of Christianity in Japan rested with a native clergy. In 1602 two Japanese Jesuits were ordained priests. More followed.

The most visible and physical evidence of the degree to which the Jesuits tried to adapt to their new land was the way they built their churches, which were utterly different from any style prevailing in Europe. They adopted many features of Buddhist temples
and built in the Japanese style of post-and-lintel wooden architecture, with hipped-gable roofs. Rather than a single freestanding building, the church proper formed part of a complex that might contain ablution fountains, fishponds, and gardens.

At the instigation of Valignano, the Italian Jesuit Giovanni Niccolò in 1583 founded an art school and studio that had an extraordinary impact on Japanese art outside the mission community. The school grew over the course of the years, and by the end of the century may have employed as many as forty artists. Students painted in oil on copper and wood and occasionally on canvas. They also executed paintings in Japanese watercolors. The school had a foundry, where small statues were cast. The school also made bells, clocks, and musical instruments.

The mission thrived. By the early seventeenth century, there were some three hundred thousand Catholic Christians in Japan. Under the surface, however, serious problems smoldered, including an ever shifting political situation that was closely related to Japanese reactions to Portuguese traders and trade policies. Fear grew that the missionaries might be acting as a fifth column to prepare for a Spanish invasion of Japan launched from the Philippines.

The first blow fell on February 5, 1597, when twenty-six Christians, including three Japanese Jesuits, were crucified at Nagasaki. The fatal blow fell on January 27, 1614, when all missionaries were expelled from Japan and all Japanese Christians ordered to return to the practice of Buddhism. The decree ended the mission, where by that time 116 Jesuits labored, who with their lay catechists and other helpers made up a staff of more than 500 persons. Christianity would not return to Japan until the middle of the nineteenth century.

Ever since Xavier, Jesuits dreamed of entering China. It was Valignano, convinced the Jesuits had to dissociate themselves from the image of the westerner as marauder, who finally made the venture possible by the same program of enculturation he developed for Japan. He assigned two brilliant young Italians—Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci—to the task of learning Chinese. Ready by 1583, the two gained entrance into the kingdom and eventually made their way to the capital, Beijing.

Ricci, by virtue of his marvelous gifts of mind and heart, his scientific skills, and his command of the language and the classics of Chinese literature, was able by 1594 to win the emperor's favor and enter the elite social class of the mandarins, whose style of dress he adopted. He sought ways to show the compatibility of Confucianism with Christianity, much the way Aquinas and others earlier tried to show Aristotle's compatibility. Unlike the Greeks with Aristotle, however, the Chinese honored Confucius in ritual ways. Ricci maintained that these rites were devoid of religious significance. But that was a position difficult to prove, and it became the center point of a controversy that ultimately proved disastrous.

Nonetheless, in these early years the mission in Beijing gave great promise. When Ricci died in 1610, there were some four hundred Catholics in the capital and many thousands in other parts of the country where Jesuits labored using more traditional approaches. Disappointing to Ricci and his successors was the minuscule number of conversions among the learned, who were ready to learn what the “western barbarians” had to teach them but felt no inclination to embrace their religion.

In succeeding decades political upheavals made the Jesuits' position difficult, and for five years they had to go into hiding.
The Jesuits persevered, however, and in 1618 twenty-two new missionaries set sail from Lisbon with China as their destination. Among them was the brilliant German astronomer Johann Adam Schall von Bell and the Swiss astronomer Johann Terrenz Schreck, who brought with him a science library of about seven thousand volumes. Although the Jesuits' position was often precarious, the learning of men like Schall and Schreck won respect and helped stave off the more drastic measures that might have been taken against them.