Brill Research Perspective in Jesuit Studies, 1, no. 3. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Pp. 104. Pb, $84.00. Also available in Open Access at https://brill.edhh.ma/view/journals/rpjs/1/3/rpjs.1.issue-3.xml.

This short paperback is an abridged, corrected, and updated reorganization of the second half of Udías’s Jesuit Contribution to Science: A History (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), which provided an overview of the Society of Jesus’s scientific contribution from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. The present book, as its title indicates, is narrower in scope: its focus is on the post-restoration efforts of Jesuit astronomers, meteorologists, geophysicists, mathematicians, and biologists to reconnect with the long-standing (albeit briefly interrupted) tradition of Jesuit natural philosophy. It also surveys the ways through which the Society of Jesus, as an institution, has been responding to the shifting educational and scientific landscapes of the modern era. This response, Udías shows, took the form of a global network of astronomical, meteorological, and geophysical observatories, as well as a renewed involvement in public education, through the founding of high schools, universities, and other institutions of learning.

The main question that animates Udías (himself a Jesuit geophysicist) is what accounts for the large number of Jesuits—that is, large relative to other religious orders—who devoted, and to a lesser extent, continue to devote, their lives to the natural sciences. Others before him have attempted to answer this question. Stephen J. Harris, for instance, proposed that the Jesuit ideology of “apostolic spirituality” (“Transposing Merton’s Thesis: Apostolic Spirituality and the Establishment of the Jesuit Scientific Tradition,” Science in Context 3, no. 1 [Spring, 1989]: 29–65), characterized by an emphasis on Christian service and active engagement in the world, is congruent with the values and practices of the empirical sciences, as is the commitment to education as a means of fulfilling the church’s apostolic mission. Building upon Harris’s “Transposing Merton’s Thesis,” Udías suggests that a specific examination of “Ignatian spirituality” is necessary to account for the Jesuit inclination toward the natural sciences (92–93). Four aspects of Ignatian spirituality stand out above all: a commitment to work for the greater glory of God; a conviction that one can find God in all things, including the natural world; a union of prayer and action; and a readiness to do work on the geographical and intellectual frontier (93–96). These, Udías argues, is what allows the disciples of Loyola to regard their scientific endeavor as a vital expression of their religious vocation. No doubt that these insights come not only from the author’s extensive historical research, but also from his lived experience.

Udías also identifies historical factors explaining the Society of Jesus’s appreciation for the natural sciences, starting with the timing of the Society’s restoration (which coincided with the maturation of modern scientific disciplines as well as the nationalization of education in many European countries) and its twofold desire to reconnect with its past and reestablish its reputation. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the need for the Catholic Church to develop an apologetic response to, and a practical refutation of, accusations of Catholic obscurantism likewise motivated the formation of Jesuit scientists. Another important factor was the strategic utility of observatories in missionary contexts, where Jesuits often made up for the absence of state-sponsored meteorological stations and earned the respect of local governments by mitigating, through data collection and forecasts, the damage caused by tropical hurricanes or earthquakes.

This complex thesis is articulated in the work’s introductory and concluding sections, yet not explicitly substantiated by its body of evidence. Like the longer work it reprises, Jesuits and the Natural Sciences summarizes more than it analyzes its sources. Udías alludes to the historical factors listed above amidst his descriptions of Jesuit accomplishments, while his valuable insights concerning Ignatian spirituality are to be inferred from his brief biographical sketches of Angelo Secchi (1818–78), Stephen J. Perry (1833–89), or James B. Macelwane (1883–1956), among others. Udías maintains that upon its restoration, the Society of Jesus sought to reconnect with its past, but generally leaves unanswered what these nineteenth-century Jesuit scientists had in common with their early modern predecessors. Diachronic comparisons of the content and form of Jesuit writings, as well as additional case studies of individual figures and institutions, are needed to substantiate Udías’s search for continuities and discontinuities in the Jesuit tradition, and to confirm his intuitions. Indeed, pointing to Christoph Scheiner’s, Athanasius Kircher’s, and Ruđer Bošković’s respective discoveries about sunspots, earthquakes, and atomic theory does little to establish the existence of an intellectual legacy, nor does it tell us how this legacy survived and transformed over time. The best passages of the book are actually those that venture to explain the nineteenth-century evolution of the Jesuit philosophy curriculum, and the gradual compartmentalization of neo-Thomistic cosmology and science training (5–11). The reader is left desiring more.

Though insufficient on its own, Jesuits and the Natural Sciences in Modern Times is nonetheless necessary. By establishing the who’s who and what’s what of modern Jesuit science, Udías is effectively clearing the ground for other scholars, much in the spirit of the series in which it appeared. Udías is right to point out the scarcity of secondary sources on post-restoration Jesuit sciences relative to the rich literature that has developed on the Old Society. For the work he has done—here and elsewhere—in preparation of deeper, interpretive accounts, he deserves our gratitude. The very shortcomings of his descriptive history are as many opportunities for professional historians to seize. One area in particular that deserves further attention is the period between the suppression and the restoration. Udías maintains that upon its restoration, the Society had to face the fact that the intellectual climate and the educational systems of European countries had changed, and that the Ratio studiorum, which had long provided curricular guidelines for Jesuit training, was now outdated. What this set-up misses, besides the fact that the ratio had long proved adaptable in practice, is that the men who took on the task of rebuilding the Society in the early 1800s were not catching up with a new reality, but produced by and actively shaping that reality. Exactly how this encounter between institutional memories and youthful energy played out in the scientific sphere has yet to be written.

Readers familiar with Udías’s previous work most likely will not need to purchase this paperback; they will, however, be able to consult it for reference in Brill Research Perspectives on Jesuit Studies. For those who are venturing for the first time on the territory of modern Jesuit science, I recommend this work as a mine of research topics.

doi:10.1163/22141332-00704008-14