The Jesuits (9 page)

Moreover, French had replaced Latin as the international language of diplomacy and of intellectual and literary communication. The ability to speak and write in Latin lost practical appeal except for clerics. Although the Jesuit schools had consistently cultivated vernacular eloquence as well as Latin, the
Ratio
had set the classical curriculum in stone and made it difficult for the Jesuits to respond in a systemic way to this cultural shift. Other orders now engaged in formal schooling for boys were able to be more flexible.

The second challenge resulted from the impact of Galileo and especially the publication in 1687 of Newton's
Principia Mathematica,
which along with other works of the era discredited the Aristotelian basis of science. As mentioned, the Jesuits strove to keep abreast and were recognized as doing so. In 1685, for instance, six French Jesuits set sail from Brest for Siam. They traveled as
Mathématiciens du Roi
(Louis XIV) and carried with them telescopes, quadrants, seconds-pendulum, and other instruments to measure longitude by observing the satellites of Jupiter during an eclipse. Their project was sponsored not by the Society of Jesus but by the Paris Académie Royale des Sciences, an unmistakable sign of the esteem in which the Jesuits were held in the secular world.

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.

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 rather 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.