In this essay I would like to present the World Maps of Matteo Ricci and Ferdinand Verbiest as paradigmatic illustrations of Jesuit contributions to global connectivity and global consciousness in the early modern era.1 In fact, both maps do not stand alone, but are rather part and parcel of the many other relevant contributions by numerous Jesuit astronomers and cartographers, botanists and naturalists, linguists and ethnographers who travelled all over the globe and pioneered some of the most significant cultural exchanges between the cultures and peoples of the world during the so-called “First Globalization.”2 One should not forget, however, that those Jesuit scientists were first and foremost Christian missionaries. Without taking this basic fact into account one cannot understand how they could have become pioneer globalizers in “the Age of Discoveries.”
A few decades after their official foundation in 1540, the Society of Jesus had “missions” literally all over the globe, not only in the lands of Christian (Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox) Europe, but in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Following Roland Robertson’s broad definition of globalization as the increased awareness of the unity of the world as a whole, taking the globe as a focus for human activities, one could argue that the Jesuits have been the first organized group in history to think and to act globally. Moreover, they did this before there were institutionalized global structures that could sustain such global practices. In a sense, the Jesuits’ global consciousness transcended existing patterns of global connectivity, but their own global practices constructed novel forms of global connectivity that contributed, at times directly but mostly indirectly, to the formation of global structures. In the early modern phase of globalization, up through the mid-1700s, no other group contributed so much to global connectivity and, through their correspondence and cultural and political influence, to a global consciousness linking the four quadrants of the world. The Society of Jesus, one could argue, was the first global NGO avant la lettre.
I first examine the opportunity structures, external and internal to the Society of Jesus, that help us to understand better the socio-cultural context of Jesuit practices that made possible Ricci’s and Verbiest’s world maps. Secondly, I focus briefly on some of the cultural aspects of the production of those maps in order to understand what could be called the characteristic Jesuit global “way of proceeding.”
1 External Opportunity Structures
The Iberian colonial expansion offered the most basic opportunity structure for the Jesuit global mission. It made possible the connection of the Old World and the “discovered” New World, linking the East and West “Indies,” thus forming for the first time one truly global world in novel transatlantic and transpacific exchanges. In May 1582 Alonso Sánchez, a Spanish Jesuit arriving from the Philippines met in Canton with Francesco Pasio, who had just arrived in Goa with his fellow Italian Jesuit, Michele Ruggieri, to begin the China mission. According to a typical Jesuit account of that meeting, “they embraced each other with great joy and gladness, giving thanks to the Lord that one of them having come by the eastern route and the other by the western, they had in that embrace encompassed the globe, like true sons of Ignatius, in fulfilment of their Institute.”3
The eastern route referred to the Portuguese maritime route to the “Indies,” circumnavigating Africa to reach Goa and radiating from there onto East and Southeast Asia. The western route was the one used by the Spaniards to reach the West Indies, then crossing the land of Mexico or New Spain, and continuing from Acapulco sailing the Pacific to the Philippines, joining the East and Southeast Asian routes. The Portuguese Padroado régio and the Spanish Patronato real constituted indeed the dual foundation for the Jesuit global mission. But the very nature of the Ricci and Verbiest world maps, produced in China for the Chinese, not for any Western power or Western public, shows that the Jesuit global mission was not simply an instrument of Western imperial projects. The mission had a dynamic and rationale of its own that eventually clashed with the Portuguese and Spanish royal patronage, leading to the expulsion of the Jesuits in the second half of the 18th century from the Portuguese and Spanish empires.
The global Jesuit mission can also not be understood simply as a function of the expansion of trade and commerce. It is true that Jesuit missionaries sailed around the world in the same ships as conquistadores, traders, migrants, and colonial administrators. The great Jesuit missionary of Brazil, Antônio Vieira, put the matter most succinctly in his Historia do Futuro: “If there were not merchants who go to seek for earthly treasures in the East and West Indies, who would transport thither the preachers who take heavenly treasures? The preachers take the Gospel and the merchants take the preachers.”4 Portuguese traders and colonial administrators could land in Nagasaki, but the Jesuits continued onto Kyoto without them. Portuguese had a foothold in Macao, but further to the Chinese mainland and to Beijing the Jesuits travelled on their own, without colonial support.
In fact, the Jesuits were neither the only nor the first global missionaries. They followed literally in the steps of other older Catholic orders, Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, etc., who had preceded them in colonial Spanish America as well as in Portuguese India. In this respect, the Jesuit global mission was part and parcel of the Golden Age of global Catholic missions that flourished throughout the 16th–17th centuries, as part of the broad Catholic renewal that emerged in Italy and the Iberian Peninsula before the Protestant Reformation.
This Catholic renewal, much broader than the so-called “Counter Reformation,” forms another important opportunity structure for the emergence of the Jesuits as global missionaries. As pointed out by the historian R. Po-Chia Hsia “the centuries of Catholic renewal formed the first period of global history,” in that the Early Modern era was shaped by “the encounter between Catholic Europe and the non-Christian world.”5 This was the age when Catholicism became a world religion.
But global mission became the specific foundational mission or ministry of the Jesuits from its very inception in a way in which it had not been the case of the mendicant or other Catholic orders. As expressed explicitly in the Formula of the Institute, the 1539 foundational charter of the order, Jesuits took an oath, to travel to any part of the world where there was hope of God’s greater service and the good of souls in order to minister to “the Turks or any other infidels, even those who live in the regions called the Indies, or … any heretics whatever, or schismatics, or any of the faithful.”6
Global mobility was culturally encoded, as it were, into the make-up of the Jesuit order from its inception. Indeed, no other group took the entire globe as eagerly as the focus of their activities. Jerónimo Nadal, one of Ignatius’s closest collaborators and the man who, in the words of John O’Malley, “more than any individual … instilled in the first two generations their esprit de corps and taught them what it meant to be a Jesuit,” coined the famous phrase, “the world is our home.”7
The primary mission and ultimate end of the Jesuit global enterprise was the universal salvation of “souls” ad majorem Dei gloriam. According to O’Malley, no other expression “occurs more frequently in Jesuit documentation—on practically every page—than ‘to help souls’.”8 To reduce the Jesuit mission to something else is not only to miss what clearly motivated Ignatius and the Society he founded, but also to misunderstand the very source of the globalizing dynamic of the Jesuit enterprise.
But how does one explain the fact that Jesuit missionaries, whose primary mission was “to help souls,” spent so much time in what we would call today secular activities from cartography to military fortifications, from astronomy to botany, from building clocks to building cannons, from theater production to opera and ballet? Without ever losing sight of their primary salvational mission, Jesuit ministries encompassed all kinds of activities and spheres that today may be considered “secular” but that they regarded as an intrinsic part of their religious mission.9 The Jesuits were not only the first professional missionary order. They became also the first Catholic teaching order, in fact the first transnational professional organization of schoolmasters.
Teaching had not been envisioned originally as a particular Jesuit ministry. But the establishment of the first Jesuit school in Messina, Sicily, in 1548, was to have immense repercussions on the character and development of the Society. O’Malley does not hesitate to call it “a crucial event in the history of schooling within the Catholic Church and in Western civilization.”10 The Collegio Romano established by Ignatius in 1551, became the first Jesuit university, the training ground for some of the most important Jesuit missionary scientists, including Ricci and Verbiest, and the model of every subsequent Jesuit university. It was at the Collegio Romano that Ricci learned from the great Jesuit scientist Christopher Clavius the foundations of mathematics, geometry, astronomy, and geography, while also applying himself to the use of the astrolabe, clockmaking, quadrants, planetary tables and calendar computations.
O’Malley’s analysis shows how the Jesuits played a crucial role in developing a model of humanist liberal arts education, institutionalized in the 1599 Ratio studiorum, that was to become globalized through their extensive network of colleges throughout the world.11 The Jesuit college, particularly in its higher form offering tertiary education, was a combination of two competing systems of education, the university system with its scholastic and professional training paradigmatically represented by the University of Paris and the humanistic college that had emerged in 15th century Renaissance Italy. The first Jesuits were themselves products of both institutions. But as they appropriated them, they imbued them with distinctive characteristics, adding a solid training in mathematics and early modern science. Most significantly, what distinguished the Jesuit college was a unique global orientation shaped by what the historian of science Steven Harris has called “the Jesuit geography of knowledge.”12 In fact, it was the virtuous feedback between the global network of Jesuit colleges and the global network of Jesuit missions that made the Jesuits into pioneer globalizers.
If the charisma of Ignatius and his early companions may explain the rapid initial growth of the Society, the even more extraordinary growth of Jesuit colleges accounts for the steady stream of recruits thereafter. At the death of Ignatius in 1556, the order that was made up of ten companions in 1540 had grown to over 1,000 members and administered already 46 colleges. In 1579 the Society had 5,164 members and 144 colleges. By 1626 the respective numbers were 15,544 members and 444 colleges plus 56 seminaries. In 1749, ten years before the expulsion from Portugal and its empire, the order had over 22,000 members and over 800 colleges spread throughout Europe, Latin America and Asia.13
The Jesuit “college” was developed at a time when there was an obviously rising demand for education from the nobility and the emerging middle classes well before the state took over the control of schooling. There was a particular historical window of opportunity which the Jesuits exploited: they were the pioneer constructors of a model of educational institution, which they themselves reproduced isomorphically around the world. As pioneer cultural brokers and translators between North and South and East and West, the Jesuits were important actors in the construction of the early phases of some aspects of an emerging world society.
Their most important contribution may have been the advancement of what Roland Robertson has defined as two of the four reference points of the global field, namely, a) individuals or selves, which in Jesuit-Christian parlance were called souls; and b) humankind or global humanity.14 As is in so many other things, the Jesuits were not so much the originators but the effective carriers of a wider culture of universal Christian humanism that emerged from the confluence of Aristotelian-Thomist scholastic philosophy and Renaissance humanism, and crystallized in the “Schools of Salamanca and Coimbra.” In their encounters with the non-Christian “other” Jesuit global missions and colleges became the effective global disseminators of this culture of universal Christian humanism.15 This was to have unforeseen consequences in the Jesuits’ sustained professional dedication not only to the humanities, but to science, technology, and the arts. Following the Ignatian instruction, Jesuits were to find God “in all things.”
Besides being pioneer global missionaries and pioneer global educators, the Jesuits became global practitioners of what the first Jesuit Pope Francis has called “the culture of the encounter” with peoples and cultures of the world.
Those three interrelated processes—the Iberian colonial expansion, the early modern Catholic revival, and the culture of Renaissance Christian Humanism—formed the external opportunity structures for the development of the Society of Jesus as a global enterprise. All three had been operative for well over half a century by the time the society was established in 1540. All three helped to shape the institutional development and the global expansion of the new society in the following decades, and in turn the Jesuits became primary global carriers of the three processes in the early modern phase of globalization.
2 Internal Institutional Structures
Equally important in shaping the Jesuit global mission, however, were some internal institutional and structural characteristics of the society which gave them certain advantages over religious as well as secular competitors. Three in particular are worth mentioning. There is, in the first place, the characteristic Ignatian spirituality and ethic of critical self-examination and discernment, personal self-abnegation and control, dedication to the service of others and the common good, and openness to the world so that one may find God “in all things.” This was an ethic grounded in the “Spiritual Exercises,” a peculiar spiritual manual and technique of the self, first tested by Ignatius on himself and then applied to every individual who joined the society.16 It contributed to a peculiar organization of self-directed and relatively autonomous individuals who could be sent to any remote place in the world where they would tend to reproduce the peculiar Jesuit “way of proceeding.”
Both Ricci and Verbiest were in a sense extraordinary, yet typical members of the Society. Both joined the order at a young age, underwent a lengthy spiritual and academic formation and training within various institutional settings of the Society, but were then able to reproduce and further this Jesuit ethos of contemplative disciplined activism in the world in the most remote settings among foreign peoples and cultures for the rest of their lives.
Equally significant was the peculiar centralized hierarchic structure of the Society, written down in detail in the lengthy Constitutions. It was a structure that allowed both the extraordinary global mobility and the pattern of long-distance obedience and internalized self-control that distinguished the Jesuits from other Catholic religious orders. Any Jesuit anywhere in the world had to be ready to be sent ad missiones anywhere in the world. Members of the Society who came from “nations” that did not have colonial empires could be sent overseas by the Father General. This explains the large number of Italian, German, Austrian, Bohemian, Polish and Belgian Jesuits on overseas missions. It also gave those missions their distinctive “international” character. The Jesuit China mission in particular, although under the jurisdiction of the Portuguese Padroado, had a pronounced international character. Approximately a third of all Jesuit missionaries in China were Portuguese. Among them, there were prominent figures such as the linguist João Rodrigues, Gabriel de Magalhães, founder of the Dongtang or Eastern Church in Beijing, and Tomás Pereira, musician and close advisor of the Kangxi emperor. But along with them, one can point to the many prominent non-Portuguese Jesuits such as: the Italians Michele Ruggieri, Matteo Ricci, Giulio Aleni, Sabatino de Ursis, Ludovico Buglio, Martino Martini, and Claudio Grimaldi; the Germans Adam Schall von Bell, Johann Schreck and Ignaz Koegler; the Spaniard Diego de Pantoja; the Poles Jan Mikolaj Smogulecki and Michal Boym; the Flemish Nicholas Trigault and Ferdinand Verbiest; and the French Joachim Bouvet, Louis Le Comte and Jean-François Gerbillon. All of them played important roles in the inter-civilizational encounter between the sciences, arts and cultures of the Middle Kingdom and Europe in the early modern era.
The Society of Jesus’s character as a highly centralized and hierarchic transnational organization with a highly flexible and mobile structure, was made possible by a well-developed system of communication within the entire global Jesuit network based on regular and periodic letter writing and reporting to the superiors, to the provincials, and to the Roman curia. Carefully edited, much of this information was later redistributed as edifying letters to the more horizontal networks of global Jesuit missions and colleges and to the wider world through Jesuit publications.17 Their autonomous structure as a universal papal order, bound by the forth vow to the universal Bishop of Rome, with ambiguous and overlapping loyalties to various religious and secular authorities and jurisdictions, well-fitted to accommodate the most diverse local contexts, also gave the Jesuits certain global structural advantages in the early modern phase of globalization which elicited much envy, dread, and competition from friend and foe alike. This ambiguous transnational autonomy was at the base of the anti-Jesuit “black legend” and ultimately it led to their expulsion from every Catholic kingdom and to the final suppression of the Society of Jesus by Pope Clement XIV in 1773.18
In sum, the Jesuits contributed to the development of global connectivity and global consciousness not only through their ubiquitous missions but through their prodigious production and global circulation of annual letters and edifying mission reports, scientific and ethnographic descriptions, mapping and cartographic exercises, through the construction of numerous scripts, lexicons and grammars of non-Western languages, through the translation of classical Greek and Latin texts into non-Western languages and the translation of non-Western classical texts into Latin, through the production of Catechisms in every possible vernacular, and through the global circulation of all kind of objects, from scientific instruments to printing presses and type scripts, from medicinal plants (Jesuit bark or quinine) to all kinds of sacred objects, icons, and paintings, church architectural styles, music, drama, and ballet.19 Even the 1689 Sino-Russian Treaty of Nerchinsk, the first official diplomatic encounter setting the territorial borders between the expanding Qing and Russian empires, was written in Latin and mediated by the Jesuits Tomás Pereira and Jean-François Gerbillon. The treaty had been prepared by the role of Ferdinand Verbiest in the formation of Sino-Russian diplomatic relations.20
In the remainder of this chapter, I would like to reflect briefly upon the production of Ricci’s and Verbiest world maps as a paradigmatic illustration of the kind of collaborative cultural exchange that exemplifies the Jesuit method of accommodation, the practice of inculturation and, most importantly, what could be termed in the words of the Jesuit Pope Francis, “the culture of the encounter.” This dialogic culture of the encounter became a habitual part of Jesuit corporate culture in all their global enterprises. But, as indicated by Nicolas Standaert, each encounter was shaped as much by the particular context and by the power dynamics present in each encounter with the other, as it was by Jesuit corporate culture.21
As is well known, the Ricci map was the product of genuine non-hierarchic collaboration between European and Chinese cartography. It reflects a phase of globalization before Western hegemony, when less unequal exchanges between East and West were still possible, when the West did not function yet as a global center and the East as a global periphery. What is symbolically interesting about the Ricci world map is that neither the Middle Kingdom, nor Europe are at the center of the global map. In fact, both are decentered together within the “Western” hemisphere, which is filled by Afroeurasia, while “the new world” of the Americas and the Pacific fills the “Eastern” hemisphere, thus inverting East and West.
Most importantly, Ricci’s and Verbiest’s world maps stand within a continuum of geographical works authored and published by Jesuits in Chinese, from Ricci’s 1584 Shanhai yudi quantu [A Complete Map of Mountains and Seas in the World] to Verbiest’s 1674 Kunyu quantu [Complete Map of the Earth], which are symbolically paradigmatic of Jesuit missionary practices in China. As Chen Minsun has pointed out, after Ricci’s maps, Diego de Pantoja wrote some Notes, which were revised and enlarged by Giulio Aleni to produce his 1623 book on world geography, Zhifang waiji [Records of Regions beyond the Jurisdiction of the Imperial Geographer].22 Fourteen years later, in 1637, Aleni published his Xifang dawen [Answers to Questions concerning the West], which offers a vivid account of Europe. In 1669, after the consolidation of the Qing dynasty, Ludovico Buglio and Gabriel de Magalhães prepared the Xifang yao yi [A Concise Account of the West], which Verbiest presented to the Chinese emperor. Three years later, in 1672, Verbiest published his Kunyu tushuo [Illustrated Explanations of the Earth], a global geographical work which, as he pointed out in the preface, built upon the works of his learned colleagues, Ricci, Aleni, Alfonso Vagnoni, and Sabatino de Ursis. Two years later, Verbiest published the Kunyu quantu to complement the Kunyu tushuo. Thus, as pointed out by Chen, “from 1584 to 1674, a total of at least seven geographical works in Chinese were produced by the Jesuit missionaries.”23
In his analysis, Chen points out four common characteristics of the Jesuit geographical works: 1) “They were all produced or written in response to requests or demands” from Chinese scholar-officials or from the emperor; 2) In all of them the Jesuits express “a high esteem and praise towards China, its rulers and scholar-officials”; 3) “each Jesuit writer presented his work, not as the writing of a single author, but as the collective work of himself and his fellow Jesuits”; 4) “all Jesuit writers and editors were aware that they represented not only the Society of Jesus as missionaries in an alien country, but were also representatives of the European community, which had a different and highly developed civilization.”24 In other words, the Ricci and Verbiest maps were part of the collective corporate enterprise of the Jesuit China mission, but this mission itself was also embedded within a larger non-hierarchical civilizational encounter between Europe and China, when both could view each other as equal, before the onset of Western hegemony towards the 1800’s.25
The Jesuit “catholic” missionary impulse had naturally, as a matter of course, the hegemonic purpose of universal conversion to the true Catholic faith. But what makes Jesuit global missionary practices particularly relevant is the fact that, under certain “circumstances,” particularly when their mission was not embedded in structures of Western colonial power, their controversial method of “accommodation” took a form which we would call today “nativist inculturation.” One should avoid, of course, anachronistic interpretations of early modern Jesuit practices from our contemporary global perspective of cultural and religious pluralism. Nevertheless, Valignano’s method of accommodation, points to a formula of globalization which rejects unidirectional Westernization and opens itself to multicultural encounters and reciprocal learning processes.26
Significantly, Fr. M. Antoni J. Ucerler’s analysis stresses that “cultural accommodation” was not simply a method invented by European Jesuits in order to become effective “missionaries,” but was rather an initiative pressed upon them by their Japanese and Chinese interlocutors, particularly by Christian converts who often demanded that the Jesuit “fathers” engaged the local culture on its own terms. Notwithstanding their many limitations, Ucerler’s conclusion is that “the rich cultural legacies of the early Jesuits in East Asia are worthy of renewed scrutiny in our own time … as an original paradigm of inter-cultural engagement.”27
Even in Spanish colonial America, where conquest, colonization, reduction of the indigenous peoples, and conversion to Christianity were so inextricably intertwined, José de Acosta already insisted that “hispanización” was not necessary to “preach the Gospel” to the Indians nor to “procure their salvation.”28 This was the rationale behind the simultaneous publication (i.e., translation from Latin) of the trilingual Lima Catechism (1583) in Spanish, Quechua and Aymara. Not Spanish, but Guaraní was the language spoken in the large Jesuit Paraguay mission and became the official language of independent Paraguay. The practice of nativist inculturation, made explicit in the Jesuit method of accommodation, amounts to a formula of globalization of Christianity through the particularization of the universal, by going “local” or “native” through a process of reflexive inculturation and acculturation, which theologically amounts to a formula of ever renewed Christian “incarnation.”
This is the famous and controversial formula of Jesuit cultural accommodation which led to the adoption of the Confucian “habitus” in China by Matteo Ricci, the Brahmin “habitus” in India by Roberto de Nobili, the Guarani “habitus” in the “Reducción de Paraguay,” but also the, for us today, less commendable accommodating “habitus” of slave-owners in the Jesuit plantations in Brazil or Maryland. It was the differentiation of true universal religion and particular culture, as well as that between civilization and idolatry, first introduced by the Jesuits that allowed the various accommodating syntheses of supposedly Christian universalism and cultural particularism.29 The fact that the method was so vehemently attacked by the other missionary orders and even by other Jesuits in India and China, before it exploded into the Chinese and Malabar Rites controversies in Rome and Paris indicates the extent to which it challenged Eurocentric notions of a uniform Roman Catholic globalization.30
What becomes clear is that, at least in some cases, what begins as a one-way mission of Christian evangelization that assumes the exclusivity of Christianity as “the true religion” and the superiority of Christian European culture turns into a mutual intercultural and inter-religious encounter that “under certain circumstances” transforms the missionary as much as the native. There are of course fundamental differences between the Jesuit missions in Goa or Macao which remained embedded within the Portuguese colonial establishments and Nobili’s mission to Madurai or Ricci’s mission to Beijing. It seems indeed that the more the Jesuit missionaries were on their own and in the peripheries, without the support and protection of the Iberian colonial powers, the more favorable became the circumstances for an open-ended non-hierarchic interaction and a genuine dialogue.
In Ibero-America, by contrast, the colonial circumstance and the assumed superiority not just of Christianity but of European civilization and culture practically precluded such a non-hierarchic interaction and open dialogue with indigenous religions and cultures.31 Yet, even in Ibero-America there were fundamental differences between the Jesuit missions at the center of the Viceroyalties of Peru or New Spain and their missions to the indigenous frontiers. Maldavsky’s analysis, moreover, reiterates one of the central points of Ucerler’s analysis, namely, that the “method of accommodation” was not an invention of European Jesuits applied to different non-European contexts, but rather it emerged from pragmatic interactions.32
What is striking is not the fact that Jesuit missionaries in most respects behaved no differently from other Catholic missionaries, but the fact that “under certain circumstances” the Jesuit “way of proceeding” became peculiarly different, attracting in the process much controversial attention from all quarters, friends and enemies. Particularly in the encounter with the multifaceted religions of Asia the old catch-all category of “pagan,” “heathen” or “infidel” began to collapse and a new plural system of what later would be called “world religions” began to emerge.33
Without in any way attempting to settle the contested debate concerning the role of the colonial encounters and the later emergence of academic Orientalism in the European universities, it is undeniable that the Jesuits served as pioneer interlocutors in the religious, cultural, scientific and artistic encounter between East and West and between Old and New World. Particularly, pioneer Jesuits in Japan, China, Tibet, Vietnam, and India played an important role in transmitting and mediating the first knowledge about the foundational texts, religions, cultures and civilizations of the “Orient,” which would later develop into full-fledged academic “orientalism.”34
It is instructive to look at the parallel tracts as well as the reciprocal influences shaping the Jesuit intercultural encounters in the West and East Indies. This communication across oceans indicates the extent to which Jesuits in Europe, the Americas, and Asia were involved in a complex global conversation. José de Acosta’s developmental theory of Amerindian religions, as well as his comparative reflections on Amerindian cultures and the religions and cultures of Asia, presented in De Procuranda Indorum Salute (1588) and in Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias (1590), offers one of the best illustrations. Acosta’s work, which went through numerous editions and translations in various European languages, marks the point of departure of modern comparative ethnology and anticipates many of the later Euro-centric stadial theories of human development, both being forms of imagining global humanity.35
In fact, despite their Christo-centric assumptions and their frequent recourse to divine and satanic devices as explanatory keys to all forms of cultural and religious diversity, the Jesuit early modern imaginary of global humanity and their dia-praxis of cultural “accommodation” and local inculturation appears less Euro-centric, less racist, and less unilinear than later imaginaries associated with the cosmopolitan Enlightenment or with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ mission civilisatrice and imperial “White Man’s Burden.”
In their complex history, in their global consciousness as well as in their global practices, the Jesuits seem to reflect best cultural theories of globalization that emphasize simultaneous and seemingly contradictory dynamics of homogenization and heterogenization, the dialectics of the universal and the particular, the interweaving of the global and the local, as well as disjuncture and difference in a global cultural economy formed by overlapping ecumenes.36
The practical experiment in Christian inculturation that Jesuits, following Valignano’s instructions, were willing to probe in Japan, in China, and in the Madurai mission ultimately failed for a combination of geo-political, civilizational, and ecclesiastical reasons. But if one takes seriously the argument that processes of globalization are contingent historical processes, not functionally necessary processes or consequences of modernity, then the most important lesson from the Jesuit global story is that different historical processes, that is, different outcomes in the Jesuit Christian encounter in Japan, China, or India could have led to a different age of globalization.37
As we are entering a new decentered global age after Western hegemony the Jesuit global story of dialogic inculturation and deep inter-civilizational encounters still contains valuable lessons for us. Most of the issues they grappled with and their attempts to find viable resolutions to the tensions between universality and particularity, and between the global and the local are still with us.
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Giard, Luce, ed. Les Jésuites à la Renaissance: Système éducatif et production du savoir. Paris: PUF, 1995.
Gunn, Geoffrey C. First Globalization: The Eurasian Exchange, 1550–1800. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
Harris, Steven. “Mapping Jesuit Science: The Role of Travel in the Geography of Knowledge.” In The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts, 1540–1773, edited by John W. O’Malley, Gauvin A. Bailey, Steven J. Harris and T. Frank Kennedy, 212–240. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.
Hsia, R. Po-chia. The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Hyland, Sabine. The Jesuit and the Incas. The Extraordinary Life of Padre Blas Valera, S.J. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.
King, Richard. Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and ‘The Mystic East’. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Maldavsky, Aliocha. “Jesuits in Ibero-America: Missions in Colonial Societies,” edited by Thomas Banchoff and José Casanova, 92–110. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2016.
Masuzawa, Tomoko. The Invention of World Religions: Or How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Molina, Michelle. To Overcome Oneself: The Jesuit Ethic and the Spirit of Global Expansion, 1520–1767. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
Monreal, Susana, Sabina Pavone, and Guillermo Zermeno, eds. Antijesuitismo y Filojesuitismo. Dos identidades ante la restauración. Mexico, CF: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2014.
Mungello, David E. Curious Land. Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1985.
Mungello, David E. The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013.
Oh, Bonnie B.C. and Charles E. Ronan. East Meets West: The Jesuits in China 1582–1773. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1988.
O’Malley, John W. The First Jesuits. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
O’Malley, John W., Gauvin A. Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy, eds. The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts, 1540–1773. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.
O’Malley, John W., Gauvin A. Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy, eds. The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts, 1540–1773. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2006.
O’Malley, John W. “To Travel to Any Part of the World: Jerónimo Nadal and the Jesuit Vocation.” In Saints or Devils Incarnate?: Studies in Jesuit History, 147–164. Leiden: Brill, 2013.
Padgen, Anthony. The Fall of Natural Man. The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Pavone, Sabina. “The History of Anti-Jesuitism: National and Global Dimensions.” In The Jesuits and Globalization: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Challenges, edited by Thomas Banchoff and José Casanova, 111–130. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2016.
Pino Díaz, Fermín del. “Humanismo renacentista y orígenes de la etnología: a propósito del P. Acosta, paradigma del humanismo antropológico jesuita.” In Humanismo y visión del otro en la España moderna: cuatro estudios, edited by Berta Ares Queija. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1992.
Robertson, Roland. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage, 1992.
Rubiés, Joan Pau. “The Concept of Cultural Dialogue and the Jesuit Method of Accommodation: Between Idolatry and Civilization.” Archivum Historicum Societati Iesu LXXIV fasc. 147 (2005): 237–280.
Schütte, S.J., Josef Franz. Valignano’s Mission Principles for Japan, 2 vols. St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1980.
Sebes, Joseph. The Jesuits and the Sino-Russian Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689): The Diary of Thomas Pereira. Rome: IHSI, 1962.
Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. The Meaning and End of Religion; A New Approach to the Religious Traditions of Mankind. New York: Macmillan, 1963.
Stamatov, Peter. The Origins of Global Humanitarianism. Religion, Empires and Advocacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Standaert, Nicolas. L’“autre” dans la mission. Leçons à partir de la Chine. Bruxelles: Lexius, 2003.
Standaert, S.J., Nicolas. “Jesuit Corporate Culture as Shaped by the Chinese.” In The Jesuits, edited by John W. O’Malley, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy, 352–363. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.
Standaert, S.J., Nicolas. Methodology in View of Contact between Cultures: The China Case in the 17th Century. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002.
Tamburello, Adolfo, M. Antoni J. Ucerler, S.J., and Marisa Di Russo. Alessandro Valignano S.I.: Uomo del Rinasciment: Ponte tra Oriente e Occidente. Rome: IHSI, 2008.
Ucerler, S.J., M. Antoni J. Christianity and Cultures. Japan & China in Comparison, 1543–1644. Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2009.
Ucerler, S.J., M. Antoni J. “The Jesuits in East Asia in the Early Modern Age: A New ‘Aeropagus’ and the ‘Re-invention’ of Christianity.” In The Jesuits and Globalization: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Challenges, edited by Thomas Banchoff and José Casanova, 27–48. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2016.
Van der Veer, Peter. The Modern Spirit of Asia. The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.
Wardega, S.J., Artur K., and António Vasconcelos de Saldanha. In the Light and Shadow of an Emperor: Tomás Pereira SJ (1645–1708), the Kangxi Emperor and the Jesuit Mission in China. Newcastle upon Tyne: Scholars Publishing, 2012.
Wilde, Guillermo, ed. Saberes de la Conversión. Jesuítas, Indígenas e Imperios Coloniales en las Fronteras de la Cristiandad. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sb, 2011.
Witek, S.J., John W., ed. Ferdinand Verbiest, S.J. (1623–1688). Jesuit Missionary, Scientist, Engineer and Diplomat. Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1994, 273–325.
Županov, Ines G. Disputed Mission. Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-century India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.
This essay draws upon two of my publications: José Casanova, “Jesuits, Connectivity, and the Uneven Development of Global Consciousness Since the Sixteenth Century,” in Roland Robertson and Didem Buhari-Gulmez, eds., Global Culture: Consciousness and Connectivity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), 109–126; and “The Jesuits Through the Prism of Globalization, Globalization Through a Jesuit Prism,” in Thomas Banchoff and José Casanova, eds., The Jesuits and Globalization. Historical Legacies and Contemporary Challenges (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2016), 261–285.
Geoffrey C. Gunn, First Globalization: The Eurasian Exchange, 1550–1800 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
Quoted in H. de la Costa, S.J., The Jesuits in the Philippines, 1581–1768 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 42.
Quoted in C.R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800 (London, Hutchison, 1965), 65; and Luke Clossey, “Merchants, Migrants, Missionaries, and Globalization in the Early-Modern Pacific,” Journal of Global History 1 (2006): 41–58.
R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 7.
George E. Ganss, trans., The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, by Ignatius of Loyola (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1970), 68. The Constitutions may also be accessed at: http://jesuits-eum.org/readings/formula-of-the-institute-1550.
John W. O’Malley, S.J., “To Travel to Any Part of the World: Jerónimo Nadal and the Jesuit Vocation,” in Saints or Devils Incarnate?: Studies in Jesuit History (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 147–164; and The First Jesuits (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 12.
O’Malley, First Jesuits, 18.
Simon Ditchfield, “What did natural history have to do with salvation? Jose de Acosta SJ (1540–1600) in the Americas,” in God’s Bounty?: The Churches and the Natural World, ed. Peter D. Clarke and Tony Claydon (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2010), 144–168.
John O’Malley, “How the First Jesuits Became Involved in Education,” in Saints or Devils, 199.
Vincent J. Duminuco, ed., The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum: 400th Anniversary Perspectives (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000); and Luce Giard, ed., Les Jésuites à la Renaissance: Système éducatif et production du savoir (Paris: PUF, 1995).
Steven Harris, “Mapping Jesuit Science: The Role of Travel in the Geography of Knowledge,” in John W. O’Malley, Gauvin A. Bailey, Steven J. Harris and T. Frank Kennedy, eds., The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts, 1540–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 212–240; and Mordeccai Feingold, ed., Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
See Table I.I, “Growth of the Society of Jesus, 1556–1749,” in Alden, Making of an Enterprise, 17.
Roland Robertson, Globalization. Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992), 25 and passim.
Cf. Anthony Padgen, The Fall of Natural Man. The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Peter Stamatov, The Origins of Global Humanitarianism. Religion, Empires and Advocacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Guillermo Wilde, ed., Saberes de la Conversión. Jesuítas, Indígenas e Imperios Coloniales en las Fronteras de la Cristiandad (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sb, 2011).
Michelle Molina, To Overcome Oneself: The Jesuit Ethic and the Spirit of Global Expansion, 1520–1767 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).
On the Jesuit global system of organization, information management and communication see, Markus Friedrich, “Circulating and Compiling the Litterae Annuae. Toward a History of the Jesuit System of Communication,” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 77 (2008): 3–39; “Government and Information Management in Early Modern Europe: The Case of the Society of Jesus (1540–1773),” Journal of Early Modern History 12 (2009): 1–25; and “Jesuit Organization and Legislation: Development and Implementation of a Normative Framework,” in Ines G. Županov, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
Sabina Pavone, “The History of Anti-Jesuitism: National and Global Dimensions,” in Banchoff and Casanova, eds., Jesuits and Globalization, 111–130; Pierre-Antoine Fabre et Catherine Maire, ed., Les Antijésuites: Discours, figures et lieux de l’antijésuitisme à l’époque modern (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010); Peter Burke, “The Black Legend of the Jesuits: An Essay in the History of Social Stereotypes,” in Simon Ditchfield, ed., Christianity and Community in the West: Essays for John Bossy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); Susana Monreal, Sabina Pavone, and Guillermo Zermeno, eds., Antijesuitismo y Filojesuitismo: Dos identidades ante la restauración (Mexico, CF: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2014).
Cf. John O’Malley et al., The Jesuits; John W. O’Malley, Gauvin A. Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy, eds., The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts, 1540–1773 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2006); Gauvin A. Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1999); Charlotte de Castelnau, Marie L. Copete, Aliocha Maldavsky, and Ines Županov, eds., Missions d’évangelisation et circulation des saviors. XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Madrid-Paris: Casa de Velasquez-EHESS, 2011); Joseph A. Gagliano and Charles E. Ronan, eds., Jesuit Encounters in the New World: Jesuit Chroniclers, Geographers, Educators, and Missionaries in the Americas, 1549–1767 (Rome: IHSI, 1997); and Wilde, ed., Saberes de la Conversión.
Cf. Joseph Sebes, The Jesuits and the Sino-Russian Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689): The Diary of Thomas Pereira (Rome: IHSI, 1962); Artur K. Wardega, S.J. and António Vasconcelos de Saldanha, eds., In the Light and Shadow of an Emperor: Tomás Pereira, SJ (1645–1708), the Kangxi Emperor and the Jesuit Mission in China (Newcastle upon Tyne: Scholars Publishing, 2012); and John W. Witek, S.J., ed., Ferdinand Verbiest, S.J. (1623–1688). Jesuit Missionary, Scientist, Engineer and Diplomat (Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1994), 273–325.
Nicolas Standaert, S.J., “Jesuit Corporate Culture as Shaped by the Chinese,” in O’Malley et al. eds., The Jesuits, 352–363; and Methodology in View of Contact between Cultures: The China Case in the 17th Century (Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002).
Chen Minsun, “Ferdinand Verbiest and the Geographical works by Jesuits in Chinese 1584–1674,” in John W. Witek, S.J., ed., Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–1688): Jesuit Missionary, Scientist, Engineer and Diplomat (Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1994), 123–133.
Ibid., 127.
Ibid., 127–128.
David E. Mungello, Curious Land. Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985); and The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).
The literature on Valignano and the Jesuit method of accommodation is immense. Cf., Josef Franz Schütte, S.J., Valignano’s Mission Principles for Japan 2 vols (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1980); Adolfo Tamburello, M. Antoni J. Ucerler, S.J. and Marisa Di Russo, ed., Alessandro Valignano S.I.: Uomo del Rinascimento: Ponte tra Oriente e Occidente (Rome: IHSI, 2008); M. Antoni J. Ucerler, S.J., Christianity and Cultures: Japan & China in Comparison, 1543–1644 (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2009); Bonnie B.C. Oh and Charles E. Ronan, ed., East Meets West: The Jesuits in China 1582–1773 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1988); Jacques Gernet, China and the Christian Impact, A Conflict of Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Nicolas Standaert, L’“autre” dans la mission: Leçons à partir de la Chine (Bruxelles: Lexius, 2003).
M. Antoni J. Ucerler, S.J., “The Jesuits in East Asia in the Early Modern Age: A New ‘Aeropagus’ and the ‘Re-invention’ of Christianity,” in Banchoff and Casanova, eds., Jesuits and Globalization, 27–48.
José de Acosta, De Procuranda Indorum Salute o Predicación del Evangelio en las Indias (1588) (Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 1999).
Joan Pau Rubiés, “The Concept of Cultural Dialogue and the Jesuit Method of Accommodation: Between Idolatry and Civilization,” Archivum Historicum Societati Iesu LXXIV fasc. 147 (2005): 237–280.
On the internal Jesuit disputes concerning missionary methods in India see Ines G. Županov, Disputed Mission. Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-century India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999).
For a fascinating account of an incipient yet repressed possibility of such interreligious dialogue with Inca religion, see Sabine Hyland, The Jesuit and the Incas: The Extraordinary Life of Padre Blas Valera, S.J. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).
Aliocha Maldavsky, “Jesuits in Ibero-America: Missions in Colonial Societies,” in Banchoff and Casanova, Jesuits and Globalization, 92–110.
Cf. Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and ‘The Mystic East’ (New York: Routledge, 1991); Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion: A New Approach to the Religious Traditions of Mankind (New York: Macmillan, 1963); Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005); Peter Beyer, Religions in Global Society (New York: Routledge, 2006); Peter van der Veer, The Modern Spirit of Asia. The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); and José Casanova, Global Religious and Secular Dynamics: The Modern System of Classification (Leiden: Brill, 2019).
The majority of the names, over two thirds, in the list of early modern European Orientalists provided by Urs App are Jesuits. See Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 481.
José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies. Edited by Jane Mangan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Claudio M. Burgaleta, S.J., José de Acosta, S.J. (1540–1600) (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1999); and Fermín del Pino Díaz, “Humanismo renacentista y orígenes de la etnología: a propósito del P. Acosta, paradigma del humanismo antropológico jesuita,” in Humanismo y visión del otro en la España moderna: cuatro estudios, B. Ares, ed. (Madrid: CSIC, 1992).
Robertson, Globalization, and Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
José Casanova, “Locating Religion and Secularity in East Asia through Global Processes: Early Modern Jesuit Religious Encounters,” Religions 9.11 (2018): 1–12.