The Jesuits and the Enlightenment

The Jesuits and the Enlightenment Oxford Handbooks Online The Jesuits and the Enlightenment Joan-Pau Rubiés The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits Edited by Ines G. Županov Subject: Religion, Roman Catholic Christianity Online Publication Date: Oct 2018 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190639631.013.30 Abstract and Keywords How we think of the relationship between the Jesuits and the Enlightenment largely depends on how we conceptualize the latter. This chapter addresses it as a series of debates conducted in the context of a cosmopolitan Republic of Letters and a number of specific cultural practices that made that very Republic possible. The Jesuits were, therefore, participants in, rather than enemies of, the Enlightenment. Because they combined theological conservatism with cultural modernity, the Jesuits were feared and resented with particular vehemence. Placed between two different modernities, one characterized by global structures of communication and learning, as well as by the practices of cultural accommodation, the other by the attack on superstition and religious authority, the Jesuits helped create the conditions for the Enlightenment, making important but paradoxical contributions to some of its central debates. Nowhere was it more obvious than in the impact of missionary ethnographies concerning the “Gentile” pagan peoples of the world. Keywords: Jesuits, Enlightenment, encyclopedia, Journal de Trévoux, Montesquieu, Castel, Du Halde, China Considering religion and letters as two different things, I can see that a philosopher might have been abandoned by God according to the desires of his heart and, nonetheless, be of subtle mind and fine judgment, thinking fairly and truthfully about literary matters.1 —Juan Andrés, S.J. One thing that I cannot harmonize with this age of Enlightenment is the authority of the Jesuits.2 —Montesquieu Page 1 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment Enemies of the Enlightenment? In February of 1755, as the baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755) lay with a fever in Paris, he asked for his old friend the Jesuit father Louis Bertrand Castel (1688–1757), the priest he most trusted at his side in his final hours. After Montesquieu had duly made his confession to Castel’s companion, declared his Catholic faith, and taken communion, the father was ecstatic: as Madame Dupré de Saint Maur caustically observed in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Suard (1732–1817), “he believed he had accomplished more than Francis Xavier, who claimed to have converted more than 12,000 people in a desert island.”3 Indeed, Montesquieu’s enormous prestige within the Republic of Letters and his reputation as a free thinker made the news significant, but, for Castel, the issue was also personal. After many years of ambiguous friendship, the relationship between the two men had become strained upon the appearance in 1748 of Montesquieu’s magnum opus, De l’esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws), possibly the most influential work of political thought of the culture of the Enlightenment. While Castel’s fellow Jesuit and rival, Guillaume-François Berthier (1704–1782), who was then the chief editor of the Jornal de Trévoux, attacked Montesquieu for subjecting religion to politics (albeit not with the same extreme aggressiveness as the Jansenist Nouvelles ecclésiastiques), Castel had complained in private to Montesquieu that he had not been sent the manuscript in advance of publication (Montesquieu speciously arguing that it was a work on politics, and hence outside the remit of a man best known for his interests in science and morality).4 What Castel had in mind was that a few years earlier, in 1734, he had offered advice (removing potentially offensive passages) and reviewed positively Montesquieu’s Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline), facilitating its reception in France.5 Despite his disappointment at being marginalized from the publication of De l’esprit des lois, the Jesuit was nonetheless eager to limit the damage, and when he eventually received a copy he was keen to suggest how the work could have been improved, rather than altogether dismiss it. In his mind it would be best if the great treatise of comparative politics, which eventually in 1751 entered the Roman index of forbidden books (although this had little to do with the Jesuits), could be made compatible with true religion. From his perspective, Berthier’s more aggressive stance did not represent the true spirit of the Society.6 Castel’s eagerness to engage constructively with the thought of one of the leading philosophes in France, and the difficulties this approach elicited, illustrates the fundamental tension underlying the relationship between the Jesuits and the Enlightenment. On the one hand, the Jesuits were a religious order distinguished by its commitment to learning, which entailed participation in the Republic of Letters and its institutions, notably journals, books, and literary, scientific, and antiquarian academies; on the other hand, many of the philosophes shared a critical stance toward established religion, and especially its potential for superstition, fanaticism, and authoritarianism, all of which were often associated (albeit not exclusively) with the Catholic Church. Between Page 2 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment these two poles there were of course various possible positions, some more open to new ideas and scientific practices, others more guarded against the dangers of irreligion and free thinking; however, the underlying tension between lumières as learning and lumières as free thought was structural, and always recognizable. It would of course be simplistic to accept the definition of the Enlightenment that those philosophers who were most vehemently opposed to established religion—such as the editors of the Encyclopédie—gave themselves, because the Republic of Letters was ideologically plural and also admitted of substantial national variations, even within the Catholic world. Indeed, how we think of the relationship between the Jesuits and the Enlightenment largely depends on how we conceptualize the latter. The pursuit of ideas obviously mattered a great deal, and in this sense it is not sufficient to simply talk about new forms of literary and scientific sociability, or the spread of print culture. However, those ideas must be properly contextualized, and in this respect it is equally important to avoid the potential anachronism of retrospectively identifying the Enlightenment with the values of liberal modernity, or its reduction to its more radical wing, those free-thinking critics of religious oppression, popular superstition, divine providence, and political despotism who were willing to embrace a materialist philosophy of Epicurean or Spinozist inspiration.7 Hence, it seems essential to analyze the pursuit of lumières as a plural and sometimes contradictory phenomenon, rather than an ideological program. The approach proposed here is to look into a series of specific debates conducted in the context of a cosmopolitan Republic of Letters, and through a number of specific cultural practices that made that very Republic possible—a definition that also invites a flexible periodization beginning in the last decades of the seventeenth century. From this perspective, the Jesuits were participants in, rather than enemies of, the Enlightenment. Obviously some of the crucial debates of the period concerned religion, often in connection to other branches of learning, and in this respect the Jesuits could not fail to take a predetermined stance that clashed with the claims of free thought. In fact, even when not directly engaged in Christian apologetics, the Jesuits could only accept ideological pluralism up to a point. Their peculiar position was that of constrained involvement, rather than complete opposition or ultimate irrelevance. It may be worth noting that their very efforts to engage in some of the central debates of the Republic of Letters did not help the Jesuits succeed in their institutional aims. The Society had always been heavily involved in the education of the laity, and many of their colleges were prestigious institutions from which they often laid the groundwork for ideological battles against, for example, Jansenism, Cartesianism, or deism.8 Jesuits had also often (especially in the seventeenth century) acted as royal confessors in Catholic countries like Spain and France, with powerful figures such as Johann Eberhard Nithard (1607–1681) and Michel Le Tellier (1603–1685), and thus were perceived as politically highly influential, when not masters of intrigue. Precisely because they combined religious conservatism and the defense of royal power with a measure of cultural modernity, they were resented and even hated with particular vehemence—and not only by anticlerical Protestants or by heterodox free thinkers. In fact, as we shall see, antiPage 3 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment Jesuitism had its roots in the Catholic Church, often originating from antimodernist (mendicant or Jansenist) rather than liberal tendencies, and the members of the Society can only with qualification be described as the champions of orthodoxy. Famously, they were often targeted for their practice of cultural accommodation in areas that might be considered not essential to the faith. Nor could they honestly be accused of being unpatriotic, or of failing to support the Catholic monarchies. In this respect, the identification of the Jesuits with papal authority and the threat of ultramontanism—part of the black legend to which their opponents subjected them—tends to underestimate their accommodation to Gallicanism, for example, and might be less significant than their very efforts to cultivate cosmopolitan lumières in a manner that was contrary to libertine tendencies. How they did this, however, at different times and in different places, was quite varied, and it would be quite wrong to assume a great uniformity of thought among the members of the order. If we want to consider the Jesuit relationship with the Enlightenment beyond a simplistic opposition between religion and philosophical reason, the first step is taking seriously their conviction that the “profession de jésuite” was compatible with “celle d’homme de lettres, de bel esprit, et de curieux,”9 and to assess the nature of the Jesuit involvement in the Republic of Letters and its cosmopolitan ideals. The Jesuits and the Republic of Letters Much of what we define as the Enlightenment—the advancement of learning, a celebration of the progress of modern technology and science by opposition to the more limited achievements of the ancients, the discussion of new ideas under the guise of a philosophical spirit willing to adopt a skeptical outlook toward tradition—had its roots in the transnational Republic of Letters of humanists and savants that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, what distinguished the long eighteenth century (1680s–1790s) as the self-conscious age of “Enlightenment” was not simply the cultivation of learning or a philosophical spirit by an elite, but its transformative impact on society by reaching toward wider groups, such as women or the bourgeois middle classes, by contrast with the more exclusive cultural environment of the seventeenthcentury polymaths and aristocratic academies. Learned journals and encyclopedias can be considered as some of the key institutions that facilitated this wider social appeal, and, from this perspective, the Journal de Trévoux, together with the various editions of the Dictionnaire de Trévoux (1704–1771), may be considered as fundamental to the Jesuit contribution to the Enlightenment.10 Rather than generate new ideas, what these journals and works that synthesized and popularized knowledge did, alongside the coffee houses, salons, and academies, was to create a huge resonance for more specialized books and essays covering a wide range of scientific, literary, and historical subjects.11 Page 4 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment The Journal de Trévoux—technically Mémoires pour l’histoire des sciences et des beaux arts—was inaugurated in 1701 under the patronage of Louis Auguste, Duke de Maine (1670–1736), natural son of Louis XIV. It was edited by the Jesuits at the Parisian College of Louis-le-Grand, an elite institution that taught not a few future philosophes and may be considered the flagship of their educational enterprise. Indeed, the Journal de Trévoux sought occasional contributions from lay philosophers thought to be intellectually congenial, such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and the young Voltaire (1694– 1778), who, for many years, cultivated a relationship to the Journal de Trévoux’s first director, René-Joseph de Tournemine (1661–1739). Indeed, it aspired to being compared to the already well-established and prestigious Journal des sçavans. A number of intellectual personalities within the order dominated the Journal de Trévoux in its various phases, notably Tournemine during the first couple of decades, Castel in the 1720s and 1730s, and Berthier from the mid-1740s until 1762. What distinguished the Journal de Trévoux throughout was its dual commitment to the advancement of learning, with judicious summaries of a wide range of works that aspired to a tone of impartiality, and the critique of deism and other forms of irreligion. It was this latter mission that of course eventually defined it in the eyes of the public, especially after 1750, as the party of the philosophers became bolder and more distant. In essence, the editorial project could not in the end escape the contradiction of actively embracing new information and the circulation of ideas, or promoting theater and poetry as privileged means for moral education, while denouncing libertinism and seeking to protect the late scholastic theological edifice of the Counter Reformation, with its peculiar synthesis between natural reason and faith. The Jesuits in the end sought intellectual prestige and ideological control rather than experimentation. Perhaps, one might argue, and contrary to what he himself thought, Castel the maverick Jesuit scientist and friend of Montesquieu represented less the spirit of the Society than Berthier, the cautious guardian of orthodoxy? Castel was indeed well known for his scientific and academic interests.12 He was a teacher of mathematics at the prestigious college Louis-le-Grand in Paris, as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society in England, and for over two decades after 1721 a chief contributor of the Jesuit Journal de Trévoux, where he reviewed books on a wide range of scientific, historical, and philosophical topics. In 1746, however, he clashed with the new chief editor, Berthier, who was looking for a more disciplined approach, and became marginalized. Until that point he had promoted (controversially) a less academic and more accessible and “natural” method of teaching mathematics, and had engaged in the polemics concerning Newton’s system of physics and optics—for example, by questioning his theory of light and colors. Instead, he offered an alternative antimaterialistic system, one that embraced Newton’s theory of gravity (in this respect preferable to the Cartesian alternative), but also ensured that Divine Providence and human freedom were not left out of the picture.13 Castel also became famous for designing and attempting to build an “ocular harpsichord”—an instrument that would connect musical performance to colors; obviously the idea did not quite work out, but for a while it elicited a great deal of positive curiosity.14 The artist Charles-Germain de Saint Aubin (1721–1786) clearly participated in Page 5 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment common anti-Jesuit feeling when he drew a caricature of Castel playing his ‘ocular harpsichord’ with a caption ‘if only all had employed their time with the same machine’ (Figure 1). Castel’s scientific pursuits might have been harmless, but the same could not be said of the activities of other Jesuits. Besides Montesquieu, Castel cultivated various relationships with Jesuiteducated lay philosophers such as Voltaire, occasionally appealed to female audiences as judges of taste and pedagogical effectiveness, and was even seen in some of the Parisian salons, such as the one led by Madame Tencin (1682–1749)— although he also complained that other Jesuits who were even Figure 1. A satirical drawing of Father Louismore gregarious, such as Bertrand Castel (1688–1757) playing his “ocular harpsichord.” Below, it adds “Father Castel the translator of classical relationship between sounds and colours.” drama Pierre Brumoy From Livre de caricatures tant bonnes que (1688–1742), spent too mauvaises by Charles-Germain de Saint-Aubin, Waddesdon (National Trust). Bequest of James de much time outside the Rothschild, 1957; acc. no. 675.302. Photo: Imaging college. Castel did Services Bodleian Library © National Trust, nonetheless draw firm Waddesdon Manor. lines in the sand when religion was attacked, and considered that “the proscription of deism is the proper business of the Jesuits.”15 Hence, for example, in 1756 he published an extensive reply to Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality amongst Men, with the significant title L’homme moral opposé à l’homme physique de Monsieur R***, lettres philosophiques où l’on réfute le déisme du jour, on the grounds that it ignored the “historical” facts of the Bible when discussing the origins of civilization, thus offering a deeply flawed anthropology that reduced men to their animal instincts. While Montesquieu (failing to take Castel’s advice) had omitted to discuss the “government of savages” described by missionaries in Canada as a foundational kind of society living according to natural law alone, previous to any republic, monarchy, or despotism, Rousseau perversely misrepresented those men as beasts, denying their morality and sociability.16 The intervention is doubly significant because Castel had been one of the various people who had sponsored and recommended Rousseau (1712–1778) when in Page 6 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment 1742 the young Genevan first arrived in Paris without any connections, but full of artistic and intellectual promise. Castel did not hide in his reply that he had been disappointed. Berthier, on the other hand, just as Castel was passing away, became famous for his direct clash with the editors of the Encyclopédie, Diderot (1713–1784) and d’Alembert (1717–1783). This became apparent from the publication of the work’s prospectus, which was critically reviewed by Berthier: as the Jesuit observed, Diderot’s classification of the sciences added little to Francis Bacon’s. However, the clash had little to do with scholarly issues, and also went beyond the competition between rival projects (given that the Jesuits had produced their own Dictionnaire de Trévoux): in many ways, it signaled the collapse in the 1750s of the idea that the Jesuits, who had educated the likes of Voltaire and were coparticipants in the passion for modern learning, could somehow bring back the philosophes to the cause of religion. The tension, one that writers like Diderot understood as a battle between progressive philosophy and conservative erudition, would only reach its pinnacle in the 1760s, when the order was suppressed in France—an unexpected event that elicited fascinating reflections both in private and in public by the chief editors of the Encyclopédie. However, the terms of the confrontation had already been set by the candid and slightly insulting open letter addressed by Diderot to Berthier in 1751, where he refused to be guided by the Jesuits toward religion, suggested that only the least original writers were praised in the Journal de Trévoux, and threatened to use the articles of the Encyclopédie to portray the gradual decline of Jesuit scholarship.17 The dismissal was cruel, given that the Journal de Trévoux was the centerpiece of the attempt by the French Jesuits to maintain a prestigious position in the Republic of Letters. In this context it is important to emphasize that Berthier was in fact a moderate, keen to avoid instigating unnecessary controversies; not unlike Castel, he would have appeared as a man relatively open to secular learning (provided it was properly guided).18 Although the Jesuits felt obliged to be more explicit in their defense of religion than lay academics, many of their misgivings concerning the works of Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), Voltaire, the English deists, La Mettrie (1709–1751), Diderot, and, to a lesser extent, Montesquieu and Buffon (1707–1788) were shared by the lay editors of the Journal des sçavans, for example.19 It is also symptomatic that the Jansenists considered that the “laxism” of the Jesuits had prepared the intellectual and moral grounds for deism. The relative moderation of the Journal de Trévoux becomes clear when we consider the position of the majority of Jesuits outside France, notably in ideologically constrained countries where the Inquisition was still a force to be reckoned with, such as Spain and Portugal.20 Despite their hold on education, the Jesuits in France did not have the same institutional and ideological control that they could enjoy in countries like Spain, nor was their work as humanists and scientists so mediocre and anachronistic. With a few notable exceptions, such as their contribution to the history of the New World, the Spanish Jesuits essentially derived their modern intellectual strategies from the French. Hence, it was not the ideological conservatism of the Jesuits in France, which to a large extent was inevitable, that broke the balance between “curiosity” and “edification,” to echo the Jesuits’ own terminology, as expressed in the title of the famous series of published letters devoted to their overseas missions.21 The break, instead, was largely provoked by the Page 7 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment growing confidence of the philosophes, who could afford to adopt an ironic tone toward the Jesuits even if, at the very same time, their own radical publications were under threat from the Jansenists and the royal censor. The decisive factor that, beyond their own internal decline, eroded the Jesuit efforts to combine the progress of learning with religious piety was the triumph of anti-Jesuitism, both in the Parlement of Paris and at the court. While Journal de Trévoux, with its prestige and longevity, was a very important journal in France, its overall significance must be relativized when considering the Republic of Letters as a whole. Some other journals, such as the already mentioned Journal des sçavans, which was closely connected to the two French royal academies (Académie des sciences and Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres), were no less prominent, although they did not suffer from the detrimental association with religious partisanship (something similar could be said about the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in Great Britain). Many others profited from the relative lack of censorship in Protestant countries, for example, the Huguenot journals in the Netherlands produced by Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736) (Bibliothèque universelle et historique/Bibliothèque choisie/ Bibliothèque ancienne et moderne) and Jean-Frédéric Bernard (1680–1744) (Bibliothèque française, originally under editorship of Denis-François Camusat [169732], a Jansenist), or the Swiss Journal helvétique, which was able to stay in business for a long time. Beyond the obvious but increasingly marginal clash with Protestantism, what the Journal de Trévoux really helps us understand is the way the Jesuits sought to balance their active religious vocation with a regular intervention in the Republic of Letters, which offered a largely neutral ground for literary, scientific, and historical discussion. Its editorial policies and interpretative biases thus can be compared to other journals in France: those that were largely neutral on controversial religious and philosophical matters, such as the long-lived Journal des sçavans, decisively organized under an editorial board by the highly influential royal librarian Jean-Paul Bignon (1662–1743); those that became increasingly radicalized, like the popular and versatile Mercure galant/ Mercure de France, especially after it was acquired by Charles Panckoucke (1736–1798); those with a strongly cosmopolitan, free-thinking vocation, such as the Correspondace littéraire edited by Abbé Raynal (1713–1796) and Friedrich Melchior Grimm (1723–1807), or the Journal étranger/Gazette littéraire de l’Europe edited by Abbé Prévost (1697– 1763), François Arnaud (1721–1784), and Jean-Baptiste Suard; and those committed to making explicit an alternative religious ideology, notably the Jansenist Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, for many years edited by the vociferous Jacques Fontaine de la Roche (1688–1761). Each journal, not only Trévoux, sought to navigate a path between instructive curiosity and explicit engagement in religious controversies. For the Jesuits, alas, finding the right balance proved elusive. Page 8 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment Jesuits, Philosophers, and Savants While the Jesuits sought to participate in the Republic of Letters from a Christian standpoint that was often (and necessarily) apologetic, the philosophes tended to seek distance from any dogmatic approach that encouraged uncritical credulity, although their personal religious beliefs varied greatly, and they could be sympathetic to the Society rather than hostile. The great German polymath Leibniz—nominally a Lutheran—offers a remarkable example of a positive synergy. In 1697, he edited a number of Jesuit texts about China under the title Novissima sinica with a remarkable preface where he praised the Chinese for their moral and political science, suggesting that the Europeans had to learn ethics from the Chinese, no less than the Chinese could learn from Europeans their religion, mathematics, and natural philosophy. As a result of that publication, Leibniz soon entered into a correspondence with the French missionary Joachim Bouvet (1656– 1730), one of a party of Jesuit scientists sent by Louis XIV to the court of the Kangxi emperor in 1685, but who had briefly returned to France in 1697–1698. Together they discovered a remarkable parallel between the hexagrams of the ancient “Book of changes” (I Ching), which combined two principles (male and female) in a sequence that generated sixty-four combinations used for divination, and his own system of universal formal language (characteristica universalis), based on combining zero (0) and one (1). This binary arithmetic was meant to be the foundation for a logical calculus with farreaching scientific potential—and the Chinese parallel suggested that its claims to universality could also be supported cross-culturally. Interestingly, though, Bouvet did not represent the dominant tendency within the Jesuit mission in China, which, inspired by Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), had sought throughout the seventeenth century a compromise between Christianity and Confucianism, interpreted by the Jesuits as a natural and civil moral philosophy compatible with natural monotheism. Instead, Bouvet and a few others cultivated a different kind of apologetic strategy, one that, rather than relying on natural reason as a common ground that made it possible to accommodate Gentile cultural traditions and history, sought to interpret the ancient Chinese books, notably the I Ching, as remnants of a primitive revelation containing, in symbolic form, the Christian mysteries. Leibniz was consistently sympathetic to the official Jesuit position in the rites controversy, by which authentic Confucianism was not perceived as a system of idolatry, but simply a rational teaching of “practical morality” compatible with monotheism and Christianity. Nonetheless, he was also keen on symbolic universalism: zero and one also represented creation ex nihilo. The discovery of arithmetic was in fact the rediscovery of the ancient theology of the legendary emperor Fu Xi—a cultural hero who also happened to be, as far as Leibniz’s main informer Bouvet was concerned, a figure from the times of the biblical patriarchs, possibly Enoch (who was of course pre-Noachian), also identified with Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegistus.22 Most crucially, and leaving aside any disputes about the interpretation of the ancient religion of China, Leibniz accepted that the Jesuit mission was a positive project, even though it sought to implant in China the Catholic version of Christianity. He was of course Page 9 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment himself a religious man with a cosmopolitan and ecumenical spirit. It was indeed the global expansion of his ecumenical vision that inspired his support for the Jesuit mission, since it created the grounds for an intellectual exchange—a “commerce of light”— between the two greatest civilizations of the world, providentially placed at the two extremes of the Eurasian continent. Hence, in addition to sharing the arts and sciences, European Christians would teach revealed religion to the Chinese, and would learn “the practice of natural theology” (ethics) from them.23 The very vocabulary of lumières was of course implicit in this idea of commerce of light, in an intellectual world where reason and faith were compatible, and the advancement of learning was not necessarily identified with the free thinking of the libertines.24 If we consider the deeper aims of Leibniz’s wide-ranging efforts to create a comprehensive philosophical system that was, at some fundamental level, reactionary, his intellectual sympathy for the Jesuits, however selective, is not surprising: as far as he was concerned, they were allies in the defense of natural religion and ethical universalism against the kind of skepticism represented by Pierre Bayle.25 As an example of a more cautious attitude toward the Jesuits, let us consider the relationship from the perspective of Montesquieu, that friend of Castel. In his The Spirit of the Laws he had praised the order’s reducciones in Paraguay as an example of a society with a system of laws successfully geared toward promoting virtue in citizens, and in that respect comparable to ancient Sparta or Pennsylvania. Not only did he excuse the involvement of the Jesuits in civil government, on the grounds that they had been able to improve the happiness of the American Indians, but he also saw this initiative as compensation for the abuses that the Spanish colonists had perpetrated against them —“one of the greatest wounds that humanity has yet received.”26 Montesquieu’s position was not unique among enlightened thinkers, and he seemed to echo the essay published by the Italian historian and social reformer Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750) in 1743, with the title Il Cristianesimo felice nelle missioni dei padri della Compagnia di Gesù nel Paraguay, which praised the Jesuit missions in Paraguay as an example of the simplicity of the primitive church. What is interesting here is the interpretative coincidence: there is no evidence of Montesquieu having read Muratori’s essay before publishing The Spirit of the Laws. In fact, it was only translated into French by a Jesuit in 1754, with substantial alterations so as not to offend the Spanish government.27 By contrast, Montesquieu disagreed with the official Jesuit interpretation of the Chinese political system presented by the Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Du Halde (1674–1743) in his influential Description géographique, historique, chronologique politique et physique de l’empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise (Paris, 1735). As far as Montesquieu was concerned, it was important to prove that the government of China was not a just and benevolent monarchy, but rather a peculiar example of despotism, given that, however paternalistic and geared toward public tranquillity, there was no proper institutional separation of powers, and the underlying principle was fear, rather than honor or virtue. He thus mobilized all possible sources, including some letters recently written by the Jesuit Dominique Parennin (1665–1741) in which, for example, he described the humiliating punishment coldly inflicted upon some Manchu converts, to correct the more Page 10 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment positive picture of Chinese justice and legal order presented by Du Halde.28 As far as China was concerned, it was primarily a matter of reading skeptically the rich sources that the Jesuits had themselves produced until “the aura of the marvellous vanishes,” since there was very little one could use otherwise.29 The extent to which Montesquieu was struggling to derive his abstract principles from primary sources is revealed by his surviving geographical notebooks, an extensive collection of extracts and observations from Du Halde’s Description, the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, and other travel accounts, where he displayed a systematic skepticism toward the good faith of the Jesuits.30 The issue was also highlighted by some of the critics of The Spirit of the Laws in the debate about oriental despotism, François Quesnay (1694–1774) and Voltaire, who could argue that Montesquieu was making Du Halde say the opposite of what he had intended.31 On the whole, in public Montesquieu maintained a polite but critical engagement with the Society, a moderately ironic attitude when compared with more radical figures of the philosophical Enlightenment. However, in private he seems to have entertained the same fears as later expressed by the editors of the Encyclopédie, Diderot and d’Alembert. Hence, in his Pensées he often expressed a sense of paranoia about the practices of an international body that seemed too good at influencing the powerful, too disciplined, and too well organized: “If the Jesuits had come before Luther and Calvin, they would have become the masters of the world,” or “The Jesuits are like a body that surrounds me and finds me everywhere.”32 This suspicion extended to their writings, such as the letters about their distant missions: “These letters are full of the most curious facts; they must be telling the truth whenever they have no interest in hiding it, so that they will be believed whenever they want to lie.”33 The fact that Montesquieu was married to a Protestant may have also encouraged this fear of a body as pervasive and efficient as the Inquisition. It was not only an abstract feeling, as he singled out some powerful Jesuits with intellectual pretensions, such as Tournemine, with particular enmity. How genuine, we can ask ourselves, was his friendship with Castel? Despite their differences, taken together, the cases of Leibniz and Montesquieu point toward an underlying pattern, by which the Jesuits were purveyors of eagerly sought information about the language, customs, history, and religion of distant peoples, independently from whether their recipients—antiquarian scholars and philosophers in Europe—fully embraced their efforts at Christian apologetics. Thus, in France Jean Paul Bignon bought manuscripts about the ancient religion of the Brahmans for the royal library, the Orientalist Étienne Fourmont (1683–1745) exploited the information provided by Joseph Henri Marie de Prémare (1666–1736) to develop his own linguistic research about the Chinese system of writing, and Nicolas Fréret (1688–1749)—the free-thinking secretary of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres—developed his theories about ancient chronology in correspondence with Antoine Gaubil (1689–1759), a talented Jesuit astronomer in Beijing (although, to be fair to Fréret, he also tried to encourage the Jesuit to publish his own research). Occasionally the missionaries facilitated the transfer of hard-to-find materials in order to obtain funds to copy manuscripts for their own use—a motive apparent in the cases of Jean François Pons (1688–1752) and Etienne Le Gac Page 11 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment (1671–1738) when in the 1720s and 1730s they agreed to acquire, catalog, and send a large number of Sanskrit texts (and also quite a few in other Indian vernaculars) to Bignon and Fourmont in Paris, thus creating the foundations for an impressive royal collection.34 In many other cases, the missionaries were eager to publish their work to secure an audience, especially after they realized that some of their writings were being suppressed or manipulated by their superiors in Europe. The fact that they were divided about the ancient chronology and religion of the Chinese, for example, often made some of these missionaries more eager to publish. Nobody could deny the Jesuits their ability to mobilize empirical information to fight extreme forms of religious fideism and philosophical skepticism. In this respect, few productions were as characteristic of the Jesuit participation in the Republic of Letters as their long annual series of Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, which, in thirty-four volumes that appeared between 1702 and 1776, summarized the progress of overseas missions in various parts of the world, from China and India to Canada and Paraguay. Its very title exemplifies the Jesuit balance of aims between historical and ethnographic information, on the one hand, and religious edification and propaganda, on the other. The series is also testimony to the worldwide system of correspondence that characterized the centralized system of communication of the Society and its missions. However, the letters were far from an accurate record of missionary activities: rather, they were edited carefully in Paris by skilful writers—men like Charles le Gobien (1653–1708) and Du Halde—to achieve a tone of naive simplicity and accessibility that would help improve the image of the Society among the laity, avoiding both an excess of detailed historical erudition and direct engagement in the controversies that plagued some of the missions. It was a successful strategy to judge by the popularity of the series and its various reprints. In fact, it was primarily as purveyors of detailed information about India, China, New France, and other various parts of the world that the Jesuits maintained their prestige and standing among European scholars, who—whatever they may have thought about the religious order—often lacked any other potential local agents in place. The same is true of their great works of synthesis, such as Du Halde’s four-volume Description de l’empire de la Chine, an up-to-date and systematic book about China, with expertly drawn maps and illustrations, which brought together the work of many authors (primarily as already published in the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses). Unsurprisingly, it immediately became indispensable, and was read and quoted by many of the very philosophers who, like Voltaire and (as we have seen) Montesquieu, were otherwise in disagreement with Jesuit views of religion and politics. Voltaire, writing in 1756, was very explicit: “even though he never left Paris, and did not know Chinese, Du Halde has given us, on the basis of the reports of his confrères, the fullest and best description of the empire of China that there is in the world.”35 The case of China is especially significant given the extent to which the Jesuits had, from the time of Louis XIV, associated their missionary activities to the scientific research and Orientalism of the French royal academies, in some cases acting as official correspondents. Not only had the French Jesuits at first traveled to the Qing empire as “royal mathematicians” (a mechanism to circumvent the Portuguese claims to exclusive Page 12 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment patronage over the Eastern missions), but they also brought with them detailed questionnaires prepared by the savants of the Académie des sciences (and another by Leibniz) on a wide range of topics.36 Their efforts found a favorable reception in the cosmopolitan curiosity of the Kangxi emperor, who tended to favor the Jesuits, and their learning, over their rivals from the Missions étrangères de Paris.37 The missionaries of the Society were of course fully aware that their privileged position as purveyors of information about China could be exploited to further their cause in Europe, especially since they had been for many years under attack for their method of accommodation of Gentile customs. The best years of the French mission in China coincided with a dramatic escalation of the debate in Europe, with Dominicans, Capuchins, and the fathers of the Missions étrangères leading the charge. By the time Du Halde’s Description de l’empire de la Chine was published in 1735, the papacy had already moved decisively against the Jesuit accommodation of the traditional Chinese rites (the crucial decrees by Pope Clement XI had been issued in 1704, 1710, and 1715), and tolerance for Christianity in China, which was dependant on the acceptance of the Riccian interpretation of Confucianism, had inevitably collapsed, quickly leading to overt prohibition in 1724.38 Nonetheless, some Jesuits were allowed to stay at the court in Beijing, albeit as scientists rather than missionaries; others were exiled to Macao. They remained the privileged means of accessing new information about China, including translations and summaries of Chinese scientific or historical books. Crucially, the Parisian Jesuits sought to control this flow of information. Thus, men like Tournemine, Étienne Souciet (1671–1744), and Du Halde successfully acted as filters between what the missionaries were writing and what became available to readers, or even to the scientific and antiquarian academies in France. For Du Halde, writing “scientifically” about China was a form of indirect apologetics about a topic—the rites controversy—on which it was no longer possible to express an explicit view. He adopted, therefore, a moderately conservative attitude toward controversial issues surrounding Chinese religion and ancient chronology, and suppressed both the views of the “figurists” (as Fréret called them) such as Bouvet, Prémare, and Jean-François Foucquet (1665–1741), who with their interpretations of the I Ching as a kind of Christian prophecy undermined the project of accommodating both Confucianism and Chinese historical records,39 and (on the opposite side of the debate) those of Father Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla (1669–1748), whose remarkably detailed history of China overtly challenged the chronology of the Vulgate and would only be published in 1777, after the suppression of the Society.40 By contrast, Gaubil’s reconstruction of a deep Chinese antiquity with the support of astronomy (notably recorded eclipses), going back to 2347 BC, was accepted with some caution, even though it also required replacing, for the patriarchal age, the shorter chronology of the Vulgate with that of the Septuagint—in this he was supported by Tournemine.41 In any case, the control exercised by Tournemine and Du Halde was imperfect, because many of the missionaries in China—not least the controversial figurists—were able to reach European scholars directly: Bouvet, as we noted, following a trip to France in 1697 began to correspond with Leibniz. Foucquet, more scandalously, left the Society in 1722 and settled in Rome under the protection of the Propaganda Fide, receiving many visitors Page 13 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment (including Montesquieu) and publishing about chronology in the Transactions of the Royal Society of London. In the following decades Prémare informed Fourmont, who was in charge of the royal collection of Chinese books, about the Mandarin language and system of writing (his translations of Chinese classics, albeit flawed, were crucial, since Fourmont could not read Chinese). On the Riccian side, Dominque Parrenin (1665–1741) wrote to both Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757) and Jean-Jacques Dortous de Mairan (1678–1771), successive secretaries of the Académie des sciences, about the Chinese knowledge of plants and medicine, while Gaubil, as we have seen, maintained his own correspondence with Fréret, author of a number of remarkable dissertations about Chinese chronology published in the Mémoires de l’Académie des inscriptions et belleslettres (1736 and 1743); these were largely dependent on Gaubil’s work and went beyond the cautious compromise with the Vulgate version of the Bible favored by Souciet and Du Halde.42 A few missionaries even wrote to these savants urging secrecy: as Prémare wrote to Fourmont in 1724 when he sent one of his translations, “please do not say anything to the Jesuits in Paris…. They do not have all the freedom that a curious and savant academic may exercise.”43 Nonetheless, the Jesuits had on the whole a strong sense of discipline, and when it came to publications in Europe, those missionaries whose views on China departed from the orthodox line were, on the whole, successfully contained. As far as the Republic of Letters was concerned, for many decades Du Halde reigned supreme. The Jesuits thus embraced a universal spirit of curious learning even at the very moment when they engaged in intricate polemics. Louis Le Comte (1655–1728), author of the Nouveaux mémoires sur l’état présent de la Chine (1696)—a skillful series of letters describing China, carefully constructed to support the thesis that ancient Confucianism was theistic and not idolatrous, but soon condemned by the theologians at La Sorbonne on the grounds that it made Christianity redundant—expressed this cosmopolitan ambition with eloquence: “he who undertakes to depict the customs of peoples, and to represent the arts, sciences and religions of the New World, will be unable to successfully touch on all these different matters without a wide range of learning and some sort of universal spirit.”44 And yet, given the ideological constraints, this commitment to erudition was not sufficient, and some of the relationships between Jesuits and antiquarian savants inevitably ended in personal disappointment. The case of the polymath Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721) offers an early example. He was best known for his own effort at antiquarian apologetics, the Demonstratio Evangelica, an ambitious work comparable to the efforts by Athanasius Kircher to connect all the religions of the world, although in Huet’s case, rather than an Adamic or Noachian prisca theologia, he sought to demonstrate that the Mosaic revelation had left traces in all Gentile religions.45 In 1710, the Jesuit missionary in South India Jean Venant Bouchet (1655–1732) began to send him letters explaining that he had found support for his theories in his own analysis of the Hindu tradition, which—he argued—contained traces of the Hebrew and Christian revelation.46 It was a strategy parallel to that pursued by the figurists in China, like Bouvet and Prémare.47 Huet at that point, seeking to free himself from his pastoral obligations as bishop of Avranches in order to pursue his studies, was in fact living in the Page 14 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment Jesuit professed house in Paris (he had joined them in 1699 and donated his considerable library to the Society). After he died in 1721, however, his hosts were in for a surprise. Huet had shared with the Jesuits a belief in historical erudition and the criticism of both Jansenism and Cartesianism, but his willingness to rely on philosophical skepticism to do the latter had taken an unorthodox turn. When in 1723 his friend Abbé Pierre-Joseph Thoulier d’Olivet (1682–1768)—himself a former Jesuit—posthumously published his Traité philosophique de la foiblesse de l’ésprit humain, Huet’s personal friends at the professed house were disconcerted, and others (like Castel in a furious refutation in Trévoux) simply refused to believe that the elderly savant had developed a Pyrrhonian streak to defend the faith—this must have been someone else’s work that Huet had simply copied.48 In fact, Huet was not crypto-libertine like Bayle, but rather, and despite some genuine philological skills, a supremely inept apologist for Christianity; he was capable of overextending the geometrical method with absurd historical claims one day (he would in time earn the scorn of d’Alembert as an example of useless erudition) and of undermining the claims of philosophical reason the next. Most fatal, he had admitted that Christian miracles and mysteries were no less unbelievable than the strange beliefs of ancient pagans—an open door to the corrosive skepticism of Pierre Bayle. Perhaps one of the most revealing symptoms of the gradual erosion of the place of the Society of Jesus within the Republic of Letters, especially in France, is to consider some of the cases of members who left it. Some of these former Jesuits made a living as popular writers, such as Abbé Prévost, and entered a world of sexual and intellectual libertinage that stood in contrast with the austerity of their earlier religious vocation.49 The conspicuous ecclesiastical figure of the abbé often made it possible to combine a more relaxed style of life with the possibility of an ecclesiastical benefit that was not, in fact, tied to the life of a religious community. Some outstanding scholars, such as Abbé d’Olivet and Nicolas Gédoyn (1677–1744), simply sought a way of pursuing their literary ambitions within the Republic of Letters without the limitations of the order’s social discipline. Gédoyn, for example, in his essay on the education of children, was critical of Jesuit education as unnaturally repressive, and opted instead for the idea of a universal natural morality compatible with a degree of religious tolerance—a line that was, of course, rather congenial to what philosophers like Voltaire advocated.50 The bulk of those who left the Order therefore did so to embrace a more liberal ideology, usually in the naturalist and deistic direction already implicit in the rationalist and semi-Pelagian positions—notably the Molinist defense of free will—that had characterized Jesuit theologians and moral thinkers in their confrontation against the Jansenists.51 A few were explicit in their support of the moderate religious policies of Philippe d’Orléans (regent 1715–1723), for example, Yves de la Motte (1680–1738), who after leaving the Society to pursue a sexual relationship with a married woman became a notable historian of the period under the pen name of Monsieur de La Hode. Some, like the poet Jean-Baptiste Gresset (1709–1777), who was eventually expelled for his satirical verses, were rather explicit that what had made being Jesuit valuable in the first place was the opportunity to pursue a literary vocation—and it was increasingly obvious that the same could be done more effectively and freely outside the order. The posthumous mémoires of the historian Page 15 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment Abbé Millot (1726–1785), expelled from the order for praising Montesquieu at the Academy of Dijon, are particularly insightful in this respect: the combined pursuit of learning and piety was ultimately contradictory, he observed, as in reality a few learned men found themselves surrounded by a host of superstitious and fanatical monks.52 Many of those who left were not overly hostile, however, and in particular they often appreciated the classical education that they had received as Jesuits. Others were tempted to offer a more critical diagnosis. The case of the hack writer Claude Lambert (1705–1765) is particularly interesting, as he wrote a semiautobiographical novel, Anecdotes jésuitiques (1740), where he revealed in great detail the incompatibility of a religious vocation with the sexual needs of young men. He made a career by popularizing the contents of the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, while embracing a life of practical libertinage.53 Of course it had always been the case that the Christian religion imposed a huge burden of sexual repression. What characterized the Enlightenment was the increasing difficulty of making such repression palatable when the context of social interactions offered so much more room for mundanity and frivolity. Eventually, in the wake of Louis de Bougainville’s Pacific voyage in 1767–1768, philosophers such as Diderot would come to theorize that the supposed savages of Tahiti had a healthier sexual attitude than the civilized but denaturalized nations of Europe.54 The kind of questioning of European sexual morality, complementing Rousseau’s deep critique of the civilizing process, constituted one of the main aspects of the Enlightenment’s radical transformation of the positive valuation of the law of nature that the Jesuits had often espoused. The focus we have adopted on the Journal de Trévoux, figures like Castel and Du Halde, and the clash between Berthier and the editors of the Encyclopédie obviously privileges France, a country central to the very possibility of a Catholic Enlightenment—both for its positive interventions to modern science, and in its capacity to combat materialism, deism, and constitutional republicanism. However, it should be emphasized that when considering the underlying tensions, similar patterns can be observed elsewhere. In Spain, for example, the Jesuits had control of much of the education, but their attachment to the intellectual legacy of the Counter Reformation, with its defense of reason and nature on the basis of late scholasticism and expurgated humanism, meant that they were largely hostile to modern science and philosophy. Unwilling to reform the Ratio Studiorum, the majority avoided a constructive dialogue with the European Republic of Letters, and even the most engaged derived many of their anti-Cartesian and antideistic intellectual strategies from the French Jesuits working at the Journal de Trévoux. The Spanish Jesuits suffered from the rivalry and hostility of the manteístas, men trained in law who had been excluded from colleges and university posts but who were increasingly influential at the royal court, often as reforming ministers committed to assertive regalism.55 The most innovative may have been the Jesuits in the former Crown of Aragon, notably during the second half of the eighteenth century, but it is symptomatic that the majority only flourished after their exile to Italy.56 Juan Andrés (1740–1817), for example, from Valencia, had been very highly valued by Gregorio Mayans (1699–1781), one of the more outstanding critical scholars in Spain, and a fierce critic of the repressive Page 16 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment spirit of the Society. Andrés’s comparative history of world literature, originally published in Italian in seven volumes as Dell’origine, progressi e stato attuale d’ogni letteratura (Parma, 1782–1799), would become influential across Europe. Although he understood that religious piety and the cultivation of letters were meant to be complementary, he also recognized that in men like Voltaire, Rousseau, or Fréret, the latter could flourish without the former.57 Page 17 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment Christian Apologetics and the Encounter with the New World At this point, it may be possible to conclude that while the relationship between the Society and the philosophical Enlightenment was fraught with contradictions, the contribution of the Jesuits to its cultural preconditions had one area of obvious strength: detailed and systematic knowledge of the history of non-European societies, including their religions, ethnography, and natural history. We might further assert that the driving force behind this Jesuit contribution to the Enlightenment went beyond the mere desire to participate in the advancement of learning, and was crucially determined by Christian apologetics. These, however, worked in two different directions, not always compatible: on the one hand, Jesuit missionaries were eager to find a working compromise between non-European cultures and Christianity, so as to successfully establish a number of churches that did not require thorough acculturation; on the other hand, they were eager to defend their methods in Europe, and to show that historical learning focused on Gentile traditions was compatible with orthodox religion, and indeed could help defend it against the growing threat of overt deism and atheism. It is, however, important to define carefully the nature of this missionary knowledge. It was a kind of scientific knowledge, in the sense that it was grounded on unparalleled philological research and methodical observation; in this respect, ethnography and “moral history” were conducted in the same spirit as natural history, astronomy, and other scientific endeavors. In other words, Jesuit science was primarily geared toward empirical activities—such as the collection of data—and often avoided an open-minded theoretical speculation that might lead to heresy.58 Some great examples relating to the Jesuit historiography of the New World in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, José de Acosta (1640–1600) and Bernabé Cobo (1582–1657), testify to the confidence that close attention to observations and the pursuit of causal arguments through logical reasoning would necessarily support the faith, whether one was concerned with human affairs or with the order of nature. It would be, of course, incorrect to treat these authors as representing the Enlightenment avant la lettre. Nonetheless, they exemplify the possible connection between the scientific humanism of the Counter Reformation and eighteenth-century science—Acosta’s Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590), in particular, continued to exert a massive amount of influence. This offers an interesting contrast with the rapid collapse of the Baroque antiquarianism represented by Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), whose philological skills were not up to the challenge of his Hermetic ambitions, which demanded that he find analogies between all systems of Gentile theology, ancient and modern. Indeed, the development of antiquarian comparatism, as exemplified by Kircher and (with a different emphasis) Huet, offers an excellent example of the way in which ideological agendas drove speculation in dubious directions, provoking a clash with the methodological skepticism of the Enlightenment. The case of the great ethnologist of the Page 18 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment Americas Joseph-François Lafitau (1681–1746), so often misunderstood as a precursor or modern anthropology, is particularly illuminating.59 After spending five years as a missionary in Saint-Louis-du-Salt (Kahnawake), across from the island of Montreal, in 1718 he published his Mémoire […] concernant la precieuse plante du ginseng, where he displayed the workings of the Jesuit Republic of Letters at its best. As he explained, he had deduced from the similarities of climate and latitude that the medicinal plant carefully described in a letter by the missionary in Tartary (and cartographer at the service of the Kangxi emperor) Pierre Jartoux (1669–1720), published in the latest volume of the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, which Lafitau had read in Quebec, must also be found in Canada. He thus was able to locate ginseng in the New World, enlisting the help of a native woman to identify it and learn about its notable medical properties. This remarkable success of the comparative method, applied to natural historical phenomena and made possible by the combination of cosmopolitan publications and the kind of local knowledge only missionaries with specialized linguistic skills could acquire, was inspired by the Baconian ideal of public utility. And yet Lafitau’s next and more ambitious work, the one that made him famous, fully displayed the manner in which his commitment to religious apologetics was the real key to his use of comparative methods. In Moeurs des sauvages amériquains comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps (Paris, 1724), the focus was apparently ethnographic, but the aim was overtly theological, namely, to refute the idea proposed by libertines like Pierre Bayle that it was possible to find peoples who had no religion. Instead, what the systematic comparison of languages and customs showed was the existence of a religious past shared by all of mankind, uncovered by interpreting symbolically many apparently peculiar cultural traits—an exercise that owed to antiquarian erudition no less than to ethnographic observation. Striking cultural similarities could ultimately only be explained by reference to common Adamic origins, rather than—as the libertins would have suggested—a common anthropology of religious self-deceit. The science of comparison was thus little more than a means for reconstructing ancient history—and especially the ancient history of religion—according to the truth of the Bible, in a manner reminiscent of the antiquarian practices of Athanasius Kircher and Pierre-Daniel Huet. In fact, Moeurs only made more explicit the “scientific” principles that were already operative in Lafitau’s previous work on ginseng. There, the connection between Canada and Tartary went beyond the realm of botany, and was also part of the traditional Christian argument about the original unity of mankind, which required that some sort of connection be established between the peoples of the Old World and the New. The striking linguistic similarities that Lafitau claimed to have uncovered between Chinese (as reported by Athanasius Kircher) and Iroquois words for that wonderful plant thus helped prove José de Acosta’s famous hypothesis that some sort of land bridge must have existed between East Asia (“Tartary”) and North America.60 By contrast with the sober hypothetical-deductive arguments of Acosta, however, Lafitau did not simply rely on the assumption of human anthropological unity to integrate the history of the New World with that of the Old: he also felt the need to meet the challenge of skeptics by reconstructing, through an extensive use of analogies, a cultural legacy common to the whole of mankind. Page 19 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment His most daring hypothesis, regarding the similarities of the Iroquois with the ancient Lycians described by Herodotus on the basis of peculiar customs such as the couvade, met with derision by the likes of Voltaire.61 In fact, the reception of his work reveals the extent to which Lafitau cannot represent any kind of “scientific” Enlightenment. Father Castel wrote an enthusiastic review in Trévoux and sent a copy to Montesquieu, but others, such as the Protestant editor Jean-Frédéric Bernard, expressed skepticism, and while Catholic historians often plagiarized Lafitau’s ethnographic materials, notably the fellow Jesuit François-Xavier de Charlevoix (1682–1761) and the euhemerist Abbé Antoine Banier (1673–1741), even within the order his approach met with serious doubts, a least in private.62 As it turns out, Lafitau’s closest allies within the Society were those “figurists” (as Fréret called them) who sought to reconstruct the ancient religion revealed by God directly to mankind by finding traces of the Bible in the ancient books of China. His next work on the ancient religion of mankind was thus suppressed by the Parisian Jesuits, probably Tournemine, who had his own scheme to promote. In the end, aspiring to a prestigious position in the Republic of Letters required great caution, so as to attract the broadest acceptance. It was one thing to refute Pierre Bayle about the existence of virtuous atheists in China, or of men without religion, however savage; it was quite another to risk subjecting Christian apologetics to public ridicule. While their motivations when undertaking ethnological research were often religious and apologetic, their scientific enthusiasm and rhetorical strategies allowed the Jesuits to make decisive contributions to Enlightenment history and anthropology. This was true in relation to both ignorant “savages,” like Lafitau’s American Indians, and “civilized Gentiles,” such as the magnificent empire of China described by Fathers Le Comte and Du Halde. We must nonetheless distinguish the writings produced by the Jesuits and their impact in specific antiquarian and philosophical debates. In relation to the least civilized peoples of the world, the Jesuits were not, of course, the only missionary order engaged in detailed ethnography. Franciscans, Dominicans, Capuchins, Carmelites, and various others wrote and published abundantly about Africans, Caribs, and many other native peoples in America and the Pacific. An example of an influential non-Jesuit text is Jean Baptiste Du Tertre’s Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François (1667), whose natural historical sections were one of the “empirical” sources for Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality amongst Men and revealed an idealizing tendency, imbued with Christian Stoic themes, concerning the simple and contented life of the naked Caribs—savages only in name.63 Nonetheless, the contribution by Jesuit ethnographers of uncivilized peoples to the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment was distinctive on various grounds: first, the long-term legacy of Acosta as an early theorist of ancient migrations and the distinction between different degrees of barbarism, a theory that in turn connected to the important debate about the peopling of the Americas; second, Lafitau’s notable attempt to define a universal anthropology of primitive religion that went beyond the mere denunciation of idolatry and was constructed as a direct reply to Pierre Bayle’s suggestion that men could live in full ignorance of God; third, the philosophical impact of the Jesuit missions in Paraguay, which were both praised and criticized, often within the context of the controversy about the ills of colonialism and the Page 20 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment Spanish conquest of the Americas; fourth, a contribution to the rhetorical construction of the theme of the noble savage—that is, of the simple natural virtues and moral understanding of men not corrupted by civilization. In relation to this last theme the Jesuits were of course far from unique—the impact of the already mentioned Dominican Du Tertre (1610–1687) is important, and by the eighteenth century philosophers could also inherit the libertine theme of the critique of civilization of lay writers such as Montaigne or, even more controversially, the Baron de Lahontan (1666–1716), who became one of the targets for Lafitau. Jesuits ethnographers and historians of the New World, moreover, emphasized the value of the progress of civilization (following, in this respect, Acosta’s lead). There were nonetheless some remarkable examples of the rhetorical elaboration of the opposite theme, its possible corruption. Charles Le Gobien’s Histoire des Isles Marianes (1700), which was read by antiquarians like Charles de Brosses (1709–1777) and philosophers such as Diderot, offers a case in point: in it the native leader of a Chamorro rebellion of 1678, Hurao, offered a powerful speech denouncing the ills of European colonization: “we do not need their help to live happily”; indeed, the artificial needs and the promised afterlife offered by Spanish civilization were inferior to their natural, simple life.64 It was, however, not the case that Le Gobien sought to endorse the rebel’s critique of civilization: rather, in the manner of a classical historian such as Tacitus, by deploring by means of fictional speeches the loss of barbarian liberty the Jesuit offered a tragic, dialogical counterpoint to the process by which Christianity and civilization were brought to the most distant and ignorant peoples of the world.65 Even more decisive than the Jesuit discourse about “savages” was the Order’s contribution to knowledge of the Gentile civilizations and religions of the East—notably India, Japan, and especially China. Although this contribution (whose materials often went back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) was not exclusive, it was often uniquely detailed, and affected some of the crucial debates in the Enlightenment. In the case of China, for example, where the preponderance of Jesuit sources was overwhelming, it is almost impossible to imagine that a number of important themes would have been so central to the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment without Jesuit materials. These included the rites controversy, which affected the distinction between idolatry and civil customs, and the possibility of natural religion and ethics; as a side product from that debate, the scandalous connection (mainly thanks to Pierre Bayle) between atheism, rationality, and civilization; the emergence of plausible ancient chronologies of Gentile peoples beyond the familiar world of the Mediterranean, closely connected to the crisis of biblical authority; the image of monarchical despotism, whether negative or benevolent, with contrary interpretations from Montesquieu and the Physiocrats; and finally, and more generally, the comparison of different kinds of civilization and political economy, with a discourse on European exceptionalism and the progress of civilization. Here again, what is symptomatic is that savants and philosophers Page 21 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. 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It must also be emphasized that the reception of China took place over many decades and affected all phases of the “long Enlightenment.” To begin with, Jesuit accounts clearly influenced the “libertine” origins of the Enlightenment in the late seventeenth century, mainly due to the impact of Martino Martini’s history of China (Sinicæ historiæ decas prima, 1658), which challenged biblical chronologies, and the Confucius sinarum philosophus (1687), a key Jesuit text in the rites controversy that sought to offer a full presentation of Confucius as an impressive non-Christian moral philosopher.66 Besides Pierre Bayle and Leibniz, these potentially radical themes were echoed by Isaac Vossius (1618–1689), Anthony Collins (1676–1729), François Bernier (1625–1688), and Christian Wolff (1679–1754). However, the impact continued well after the rites controversies had been resolved at the turn of the eighteenth century. This is clear both in the writings of Montesquieu, who (as we have seen) took a more skeptical attitude toward the achievements of China to define his theory of despotism, and of Voltaire, who instead reinstated the traditional Jesuit enthusiasm—but only to emphasize the antiquity of China and the challenge it presented to any Judeo-Christian history of civilization. Both Montesquieu and Voltaire cultivated personal relationships with some Jesuits. By contrast, the generation that flourished in the second half of the eighteenth century, led by the editors of the encyclopedia Diderot and d’Alembert, exemplifies the growing distance of the philosophical party from the weakened Jesuits, their missionary aims, and their discourse on China. Although the case of China seems paradigmatic, it should also be noted that, albeit without the same intensity, similar themes appeared in the context of Jesuit accounts of other parts of the world. India, for example, where the Jesuit presence was long-lived but always less exclusive, also offered a potential target for philosophical polemics. The Jesuit discourse on Hinduism was far from indispensable—even in South India, a traditional area of the Portuguese padroado. The Dutch pastor Abraham Rogerius (1609–1649) offered the most authoritative account published in the seventeenth century. Both Bayle and Montesquieu could rely on François Bernier for their accounts of Gentile (Hindu) superstition and of Mughal despotism. Although Voltaire, by contrast, substantially relied on Jesuit materials, he did so to construct the image of a natural deism that was strictly monotheistic but not revealed, and older than Judaism.67 It is one of the great paradoxes of the Enlightenment that Voltaire was inspired by a work of Jesuit apologetics, the Ezour Vedam, which he mistook as an authentic Veda translated from Sanskrit, to buttress his deistic beliefs.68 The Jesuits continued to provide important historiographical materials about Europe’s various new worlds even after their missions had been suppressed, and the order dissolved.69 On India, for example, some of the research on Hinduism by Father GastonLaurent Coeurdoux (1691–1779), written in dialogue with members of the Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres Abbé Barthélemy (1716–1795) and AbrahamHyacinthe Anquetil Duperron (1731–1805), but also conceived as a reply to Voltaire’s Page 22 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment anti-Christian Indology, was circulated in France with the title Moeurs et coutumes des Indiens (1777) by Nicolas-Jacques Desvaulx (1745–1817), an artillery officer at Pondicherry, probably with the Jesuit’s complicity. Among other things, Coeurdoux argued that Sanskrit shared many words with Greek and Latin, suggesting ethnic and linguistic interactions “of the descendants of Japhet” in the distant past. The treatise was also subsequently appropriated by the missionary Abbé Dubois (1765–1848), who opportunistically sold it to the English East India Company in 1808, leading to the publication of the highly influential Description of the Character, Manners and Customs of the People of India, and of Their Institutions Religious and Civil (London, 1817).70 This was in fact only one example of the British selective appropriation of Catholic Orientalist learning, as they set out to create their own imperial archive.71 Perhaps the more important case, for its intellectual impact, concerns America. The painful exile of many Jesuits from the Spanish colonies put an end to many missionary projects, from the plains of the Chaco in Río de la Plata (modern Argentina) to the frontiers of New Spain in California.72 And yet, these Jesuits, once in Italy, soon found themselves adopting a new role as historians of the New World, often sponsored by the ministers of the same Bourbon monarch, Charles III, who had expelled them from his territories, but who now expected them to defend patriotically the Spanish civilizing record against criticisms from the writers of the European Enlightenment.73 The economic penury of the exiles facilitated this new arrangement. Some of these Jesuit patriots reacted against philosophers and natural historians, such as Buffon in France or Cornelius de Pauw (1739–1799) in Prussia, who had described (with different emphases) American nature and its native peoples as weak or degenerate when compared to the Old World; others focused on those philosophical historians who were simply skeptical about the degree of civilization achieved by the ancient Mexicans and Incas, such as the Scottish William Robertson (1721–1793) in his influential History of America (1777), or, alternatively, who were harshly critical of the Spanish colonial record, notably Abbé Raynal (1713–1796) in the various editions of the Histoire philosophique des deux Indes (the third of which, published in 1780, was written with the collaboration of Diderot). In these various interventions the Jesuits did not speak with a single voice. Broadly speaking, we can distinguish those who, like Juan Nuix (1740–1783) in his Riflessioni imparziali sopra l’umanità degli Spagnoli nell’Indie contro i pretesi filosofi e politici, per servire di lume alle storie dei signori Raynal e Robertson (Venice, 1780), primarily wrote from a Spanish metropolitan perspective, defending the historical record of the conquest as a largely successful mission to bring Christianity and civilization to the New World, from those others who, having lived long or even been born in the colonies, identified with its particular landscapes and traditions, thus developing a Creole narrative. The former usually recycled traditional arguments—such as that any cruelties perpetrated by the conquerors were individual excesses—with a long pedigree in the historiography of the Spanish Empire, thus following apologetic strategies largely defined in the sixteenth century, although they were also occasionally willing to echo the theme of New World inferiority developed by Cornelius de Pauw in his Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains (2 vols., Berlin, 1768–1769).74 The Creole patriots, by contrast, incensed by de Page 23 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment Pauw’s dismissive rhetoric, were often more original and innovative, as they sought to mobilize the nativist historiography of Franciscan missionaries like Juan de Torquemada (1562–1624), the Dominican Las Casas (1484–1566), or the mestizo historians Inca Garcilaso (1539–1616) and Fernando Alva Ixtlilxochitl (1568–1648), together with the Creole constructions of Baroque antiquarianism, in order to reject the philosophical generalizations of distant writers who lacked any direct experience of America. They claimed, instead, the superior insights of a local perspective that was ultimately manifested by its capacity to interpret the particularities of the natural environment and its native traditions. Books of this nature, usually following José de Acosta’s dual model of a natural and civil (or moral) history, were produced by Juan Ignacio Molina in relation to Chile (Saggio sulla storia naturale de Chili [Bologna, 1782] and Saggio sulla storia civile del Chili [Bologna, 1787]; there was also a Spanish edition); by the Catalan Jesuit José Jolis (1728–1790), in relation to the Chaco (Saggio sulla storia naturale della provincia del Gran Chaco [Faenza, 1789], of which unfortunately the ethnographic parts have been lost); and by Juan de Velasco (1727–1792), himself from Quito, for the northern Andes (Historia del reino de Quito, a work completed by 1789 but whose publication was delayed due to lack of enthusiasm in Madrid). However, the most original and influential example of Jesuit Creole historiography, and indeed its canonical model, was no doubt Francisco Javier Clavigero’s (1731–1787) four-volume Storia antica del Messico (Casena, 1780–1781), which was translated into various languages. Paradoxically, while the book was available in English from as early as 1787, no Spanish version could be published in Madrid—the book was too positive toward the natives, and too critical of the conquerors. Hence, both conservative Jesuits, such as the fellow Jesuit exile Ramon Diosdado (1740– 1829), and documentary positivists like the royal cosmographer of the Indies Juan Bautista Muñoz (1745–1799) combined forces to cast doubt on its methodology and prevent its publication.75 In fact, William Robertson’s “foreign” and philosophical account stayed closer to the Spanish imperial tradition of celebrating European civilization, represented by the classic works of Antonio de Herrera (1549–1625) and José de Acosta, than to Clavigero’s Storia.76 The Jesuits and Their Enemies Given that throughout the eighteenth century many Jesuits saw their participation in the Republic of Letters as a means of combating atheism and irreligion, it would be tempting to interpret their eventual downfall as a victory for the philosophical party. This would be misleading, although there is no denying that many Enlightened thinkers, notably the editors of the Encyclopédie Diderot and d’Alembert, openly celebrated the Society’s suppression in France in 1764.77 This is not surprising in their particular case, as the Jesuits had actively criticized this great publishing enterprise, one that was in effect a direct rival to their own orthodox Dictionnaire universel françois et latin (also known as Dictionnaire de Trévoux).78 This no doubt contributed to the atmosphere of censorship, threats of suppression, and substantial interruptions that affected the progress of the Page 24 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment Encyclopédie over the years after its publication had in fact been forbidden in 1759 by the Parlement of Paris, following attacks by Abraham Chaumeix (1730–1790) and other Jansenists, who had connected the dictionary to the openly materialist philosophical treatise by Helvétius, De l’esprit.79 Particularly symptomatic was Diderot’s response to the news of the suppression, given that the thoughts he expressed privately in letters to his correspondent and lover Sophie Volland (1716–1784) closely corresponded to what he eventually published in the article “Jésuites,” on the pages of the great work to which he had devoted the best years of his life. As he wrote with obvious relief to Sophie, immediately upon hearing of the news of the arrêt issued by the Parlement of Paris in August 1762 to dissolve the Order, he had been freed from many powerful enemies, but he went on to analyze why the Jesuits, who meddled in everything, were not simply a threat to him, but in fact to everybody: They blurred Church and State. Subjected to extreme despotism within their houses, they were also its most abject advocates in society. They preached to the people blind obedience to kings; to the kings, papal infallibility, so that, masters of one, they could become masters of all; they recognised no other authority than that of their General, who was for them like the Old Man in the Mountain.80 The article “Jésuites,” which appeared in 1765 in volume eight of the Encyclopédie upon the resumption of its publication after many years of partial prohibition, elaborated on this picture, which privileged the political over the strictly religious themes. In effect it echoed the kinds of fears that Montesquieu had often expressed in private decades earlier. Other religious groups—notably the Jansenists—might have been even more fanatical, and less learned, than the Jesuits, but politically, with their hierarchical and despotic structure of governance (since the superior general knew everything and could decide anything), their commitment to acting in all places in the name of the papacy, and their tendency to meddle in all kinds of affairs, the followers of Ignatius had no equal: in effect, they posed a unique danger because they ambitioned universal dominion.81 Of course, the Jansenists were also delighted with the downfall of their bitterest enemies, not realizing—Diderot went on to note—that their own position had also been fatally weakened: the Christian Church in France was like a house supported by two pillars engaged in petty rivalries, and with one of them now fallen, the other would too. What Diderot’s analysis reveals is that he understood that, in reality, the Jesuits had not been brought down by philosophers devoted to the progress of learning (an attitude they might have shared with the Jesuits at their best), but rather by their enemies in the State and the Church. He of course blamed the Jesuits themselves, and their many failings, for this sudden reversal (in this respect fully participating in the dominant public opinion in Paris), with a simplicity of perspective that modern historians have often questioned. Nonetheless, the incontestable fact is that the Jesuits had been destroyed by their enemies within the very political and religious establishment they sought to represent. The same is true if we adopt a broader European perspective.82 The expulsion of the Jesuits from the major Catholic states of Portugal in 1759, France in 1762–1764, and Spain and its empire in 1767 (quickly followed by Naples and Parma, also under Bourbon Page 25 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment rule), culminating in the eventual suppression of the order in 1773, took place in a remarkably short period of time, and took the Society and most of Europe by surprise.83 It was not the result of a coordinated plan of action, but rather of an escalation in which each crisis created an important precedent for the following one. The political momentum eventually carried the papacy, so that Clement XIV (pope 1769–1774) only took the decision reluctantly and under a considerable amount of pressure from the Bourbon monarchies, led by Spain, and with the ambivalent indifference of Maria Theresa of Austria. Each major crisis was also triggered by a series of separate events that were often unrelated to the order’s principal activities—such as a violent riot in Madrid in March 1766, provoked by an unpopular finance minister’s decision to forbid wearing traditional cloaks and hats; nonetheless, these incidents provided the enemies of the Jesuits, sometimes acting with extreme cynicism, with the opportunity to take decisive action against an organization that had attracted enormous levels of resentment. In Portugal the chief instigator of the persecution was the all-powerful minister Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, future marquis of Pombal (in office 1750–1777), who had been offended by the resistance of Guaraní Indians living in Jesuit missions to accept change of imperial boundaries and orchestrated a wide-ranging propaganda campaign against the Order, culminating in the accusation of being behind an assassination attempt on the king (the real cause of which was José I’s affair with a noblewoman). In France the attack was led by the Parlement of Paris, who objected to the Jesuit constitution and legal status in France, with Jansenists of course leading the charge, and determined support from the king’s mistress and confidante Madame de Pompadour (1721–1764), who, in turn, could always count on support from the first minister Duc de Choiseul (in office 1758–1770). Finally, in Spain the key protagonist was reforming minister Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes (1723–1802), who, acting as public prosecutor, did not hesitate, in a famous dictamen of 1766, to fabricate a fictional coup d’état and attribute it to the Society. What these instigators had in common was their position of power and influence at the heart of the monarchical state. Some might have been sympathetic to the radical philosophers of the Encyclopédie, but others clearly were not. We must therefore seek the causes of this drastic act of self-mutilation by the Catholic Church in ideological preconditions, followed by a change of political circumstances. The former were decisive. The negative image of the Order had distant and manyfold origins throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it had become increasingly coherent and widespread in the eighteenth, as the role of public opinion became more important in the political life of the states of Europe. It had in effect generated a selfreproducing black legend of anti-Jesuitism, with some national variations. In France the role of Pascal’s powerful rhetoric in his Provincial Letters and the resentment of the Jansenists were crucial, for example, to which we can add the long-term Gallican suspicion of any organization supporting papal authority. Elsewhere one may also point toward rival Catholic orders, such as Dominicans and Capuchins, important, for example, during the rites controversy, and of course toward a wide spectrum of Protestant and libertine opinion, for whom the Jesuits represented the cutting age of the Catholic menace. In Huguenot circles, for example, and following the edict of Nantes, the threat of Page 26 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. 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In fact, their very indispensability to the political and social elites—notably as educators—and their proximity to the royal conscience only deepened their unpopularity in the long term. Hence, when, driven by Gallican and equivalent “regalist” (or Erastian) tendencies, political attitudes changed in Portugal, Spain, and France—that is, within the three Catholic monarchies that had relied most heavily on the Jesuits in the past—the tragedy unfolded with extreme rapidity. It may be symptomatic that the first to shift was Portugal: this was also the first monarchy that had embraced the new order with enthusiasm, in the middle of the sixteenth century, and sponsored its most sensational overseas missions. Page 27 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. 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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment Toward a Conclusion: The Conditions of Possibility of Enlightenment Debates It has been plausibly argued that the Jesuit contribution to the Catholic Enlightenment not only was doctrinally distinctive (by comparison with the Gallican and AugustinianJansenist contributions), but also, through the Society’s solid position in the educational system and the Republic of Letters, offered some the most sophisticated and sociopolitically resonant discourses in defense of religion of French intellectual culture before 1750—what might be characterized as a pro-unigenitus, Molinist synthesis that was largely positive toward human nature, and was compatible with the rational pursuit of scientific and political progress.86 In particular, by selectively adapting ideas from Descartes (1596–1650), Locke (1632–1704), and Newton (1643–1727) to modernize the fundamental theological legacy of Thomas Aquinas, the Jesuits developed distinctive and often widely influential intellectual strategies against the more radical and (it was understood) dangerous positions of Bayle and Spinoza (1632–1677). But this kind of analysis invites a careful reconsideration of how “enlightened” and “modern” this Catholic Enlightenment was. In this respect, it is important to avoid anachronistic interpretations of their theological flexibility and appreciation of natural reason. The Jesuits were substantially modern if we understand modernity in its early modern sense, one that was clearly visible circa 1600, rather than assuming an undifferentiated liberal perspective on modernity most usually associated to the global expansion of Western capitalism and its institutions after 1800. They were modern in the sense that they actively contributed to the education of the laity through a curriculum that included the humanistic disciplines and mathematics; modern in the sense that they embraced the power of natural reason to understand the world through empirical research and explored its potential for cultural accommodation on the basis of the idea of natural law; modern in the sense that they adopted a centralized and global system of communication; modern, finally, in their active participation in the Republic of Letters, with its global geographical perspective, and its celebration of the achievements of European commercial civilization. But the Jesuits were not radically modern, rather the opposite, reactionary, if we identify modernity with skepticism toward miracles and other religious mysteries (such as the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary); the erosion of Divine Providence through systematic emphasis on secondary causes in nature; materialist and neo-Epicurean philosophies, including utilitarian and hedonistic ethics; the defense of religious toleration; the critique of biblical authority, together with the historical plausibility of the book of Genesis, the power of the Church, and the supranational authority of the papacy; or more democratic forms of constitutional republicanism. In all these cases, the Jesuits were often at the forefront of the battle of ideas, but on the side of tradition and authority. Page 28 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment Placed between these two modernities, the Jesuits actively contributed to creating the conditions for the Enlightenment, often making important but paradoxical contributions to some of its central debates. In no area was this more obvious than in the impact of missionary ethnographies concerning the “Gentile,” pagan peoples of the world, whether savages or civilized, especially in the case of China. Here the Jesuits, driven by a religious agenda, often struggled to impose their often controversial interpretations, but nevertheless, as purveyors of information and even some intellectual strategies, they remained indispensable to the philosophes. In this respect, we could say that they often succeeded better in encouraging human curiosity than in providing pious edification. As the European networks of commerce, empire, and literacy gradually extended over the various parts of the world, and the lay genres of travel writing and natural history consolidated an authoritative position in the Republic of Letters, the role of missionaries as pioneer ethnographers often became less exclusive. Nonetheless, it is symptomatic of their proficiency that, even after their expulsion and suppression, and from their painful Italian exile, they were able to continue making important contributions to the historiography of the New World and to the history of literature, offering further specks of light to what was already becoming an age of revolutions. Bibliography Primary Sources Alembert [Jean le Rond d’Alembert]. Sur la destruction des Jésuites en France. “Edinburgh,” 1765. Andrés, Giovanni. Dell’origine, progressi e stato attuale d’ogni letteratura. 7 vols. Parma: Stamperia Reale, 1782–1799. Banier, Abbé Antoine. La Mythologie et les fables expliquées par l’histoire. 3rd ed., 3 vols. Paris: Briasson, 1738–1740. Castel, Louis-Bertrand. Traité de physique sur la pesanteur universelle du corps. Paris: André Cailleau, 1724. [Castel, Louis-Bertrtand]. L’Homme morale opposé a l´homme Physique de Monsieur R***. Lettres Philosophiques où l’on réfute le Déisme du jour. Toulouse, 1756. Charlevoix, François-Xavier de. Histoire et description generale de la Nouvelle France, avec le journal historique d’un voyage fait par ordre du Roi dans l’Amérique Septentrionnale. 3 vols. Paris: Rolin, 1744. Chaumeix, Abraham-Joseph de. Préjuges légitimes contre l’Encyclopédie, et essai de réfutation de ce dictionnaire. 8 vols. Brussels and Paris: Herissant, 1758–1759. Page 29 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment Dictionnaire des Journalistes, 1600–1789. http://dictionnairejournalistes.gazettes18e.fr/. Dictionnaire des Journaux, 1600–1789: http://dictionnaire-journaux.gazettes18e.fr/. Dictionnaire universel françois et latin [Dictionnaire de Trévoux]. Various editions, 1704– 1771. Diderot. Correspondance, edited by Laurent Versini. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1997. Diderot. “Supplément au voyage de Bouganville.” In Oeuvres Philosophiques, edited by P. Vernièr. Paris: Garnier, 1998. Du Halde, Jean-Baptiste. Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique et physique de l’empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise. 4 vols. Paris: P. G. Le Mercier, 1735. Du Tertre, Jean-Baptiste. Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François. 2 vols. Paris: Tomas Joly, 1667. Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. 17 vols. + 11 vols. of plates. Paris: Briasson et alii, 1751–1772. ARTFL online resource: http:// encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/. Gaubil, Antoine. Correspondance de Pékin: 1722–1759, edited by Renée Simon. Genève: Droz, 1970. Gédoyn, Nicolas. Oeuvres diverses. Paris: de Bure, 1745. La politique des Jésuites. “London,” 1688. Lafitau, Joseph-François. Mémoire […] concernant la precieuse plante du ginseng. Paris: Joseph Monge, 1718. Lafitau, Joseph-François. Moeurs des sauvages amériquains comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps. 2 vols. Paris: Saugrain l’ainé & Charles Estienne Hocherau, 1724. Lambert, Claude. Anecdotes jésuitiques, ou le Philotanus moderne. “The Hague,” 1740. Le Comte, Louis. Nouveaux Mémoires sur l’état présent de la Chine. 2 vols. Paris: Anisson, 1696. Le Gobien, Charles. Histoire des Isles Marianes, nouvellement converties à la religion Chrestienne. Paris: Nicolas Pepie, 1700. Leibniz, G. W. Writings on China, edited by Daniel J. Cook and Henry Rosemont. Chicago: Open Court, 1994. Page 30 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Discours sur la théologie naturelle des Chinois, edited by Wenchao Li and Hans Poser. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002. Lettres édifiantes et curieuses écrites des missions étrangères par quelques missionnaires de la Compagnie de Jésus. 34 vols. Paris: Nicolas Le Clerc, 1702–1776. Mémoires pour l’Historie des Sciences et des Beaux Arts [Journal de Trévoux]. 1701– 1767. Meynard, Thierry, S.J., ed. Confucius Sinarum Philosophus. Rome: Institutum Historicum Societates Iesu, 2011. Meynard, Thierry, S.J., ed. The Jesuit Reading of Confucius. The First Complete Translation of the Lunyu (1687) Published in the West. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Montesquieu. Ouvres Complètes, edited by Roger Callois. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1958. Montesquieu. Oeuvres Complètes de Montesquieu. Tome 16: Extraits et Notes de lecture I, Geographica, edited by Catherine Volpilhac-Auger. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2007. Muratori, Ludovico Antonio. Relation des missions du Paraguay, edited by Girolamo Imbruglia. Paris: La Découverte, 1983. Rousseau, Jean Jacques. Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes. Amsterdam: Marc Michel Rey, 1755. Voltaire. Ouvres Historiques, edited by René Pomeau. Paris: Gallimard, 1957. Secondary Sources Alleaume, M. “Notice biographique et littéraire sur les deux Porée.” In Mémoires de l’Académie impériale de sciences, arts et belles-lettres de Caen, 87–174. Caen: chez A. Hardel, 1855. Antognazza, Maria Rosa. Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Batllori, Miquel. La cultura hispano-italiana de los jesuitas expulsos. Madrid: Gredos, 1966. Brading, David. The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State 1492–1867. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Brockey, Liam Matthew. Journey to the East. The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Page 31 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment Burson, Jeffrey. “The Catholic Enlightenment in France from the fin de siècle Crisis of Consciousness to the Revolution, 1650–1789.” In Brill Companion to Catholic Enlightenment, edited by Ulrich Lehner and Michael Printy, 63–126. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Caruana, Louis, S.J. “The Jesuits and the Quiet Side of the Scientific Revolution.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, edited by Thomas Worcester, 243–260. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Dictionnaire des Journalistes, 1600–1789. http://dictionnairejournalistes.gazettes18e.fr/. Dictionnaire des Journaux, 1600–1789: http://dictionnaire-journaux.gazettes18e.fr/. Dodds, Muriel. Les récits de voyage, sources de “l’Esprit des Lois” de Montesquieu. Paris: Champion, 1929. Edelstein, Dan. The Enlightenment: A Genealogy. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010. Egido, Teófanes. “La expulsión de los Jesuitas de España.” In Historia de la Iglesia en España, edited by R. García Villoslada, vol. 4, 746–792. Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1979. Ehrard, Jean. L’Esprit des mots. Montesquieu en lui-même et parmi les siens. Geneva: Droz, 1998. Étiemble, René. L’Europe chinoise. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1988. Flamarion, Edith. “Jesuits.” In Montesquieu Dictionary (online resource): http:// dictionnaire-montesquieu.ens-lyon.fr/en/article/1377616473/en/. Franssen, Maarten. “The Ocular Harpsichord of Louis-Bertrand Castel: The Science and Aesthetics of an Eighteenth-Century Cause Célèbre.” Tractrix 3 (1991): 15–77. Gerbi, Antonello. The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic 1750–1900. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973. Giménez López, Enrique. “Los jesuitas y la Ilustración.” Debats 105 (2009): 131–140. Ginzburg, Carlo. “Alien Voices. The Dialogic Element in Early Modern Jesuit Historiograpohy.” In History, Rhetoric and Proof, 71–79. Hanover/London: University Press of New England, 1999. Page 32 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment Guasti, Niccolò. L’exilio Italiano dei Gesuiti Spagnoli 1767–1798. Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2006. Hawley, Daniel S. “L’Inde de Voltaire.” In Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 120, 139–178. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1974. Israel, Jonathan. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Landry-Deron, Isabelle. La preuve par la Chine. La “Description” de J.-B. Du Halde. Jésuite, 1735. Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2002. Larrère, Catherine. “Fréret et la Chine: de philosophique des langues à l’histoire de la chronologie.” In Nicolas Fréret, légende et vérité, edited by Chantal Grell and Catherine Volpilhac-Auger, 109–129. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1994. Mungello, David. Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985. Murr, Sylvia. L’Indologie du Père Coeurdoux: Stratégies, Apologétique et Scientificité. Paris: École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 1987. Northeast, Catherine. The Parisian Jesuits and the Enlightenment 1700–1762. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1991. O’Keefe, Cyril B., S.J. Contemporary Reactions to the Enlightenment (1728–1768). A Study of Three Critical Journals: The Jesuit Journal de Trévoux, the Jansenist Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques, and the seculaa Journal des Savants. Geneva: Slatkine, 1974. Pagden, Anthony. The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters. Oxford: Random House, 2013. Pappas, John N. Berthier’s Journal de Trévoux and the Philosophes. Geneva: Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 1957. 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. Peralta Ruiz, Victor. “The Spanish Monarchy and Uses of Jesuit Historiography in the Dispute of the New World.” In Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750–1830, edited by Gabriel Paquette, 83–97. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. Pereira, Jacques. Montesquieu et la Chine. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008. Perkins, Franklin. Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Page 33 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment Pinot, Virgile. La Chine et la formation de l’esprit philosophique en France, 1640–1740. Paris: Geuthner, 1932. Proust, Jacques. Diderot et l’Encyclopédie. 3rd ed. Paris: Albin Michel, 1995. Robertson, John. The Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Rocher, Ludo. Ezourvedam. A French Veda of the Eighteenth Century. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1984. Rubiés, Joan-Pau. “Oriental Despotism and European Orientalism: Botero to Montesquieu.” Journal of Early Modern History: Contacts, Comparisons, Contrasts 9, 1–2 (2005): 109–180. Rubiés, Joan-Pau. “From Antiquarianism to Philosophical History: India, China and the World History of Religion in European Thought (1600–1770).” In Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500–1800, edited by Peter N. Miller and François Louis, 313–367. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. Rubiés, Joan-Pau. “Reassessing ‘the Discovery of Hinduism’: Jesuit Discourse on Gentile Idolatry and the European Republic of Letters.” In Intercultural Encounter and the Jesuit Mission in South Asia (16th–18th Centuries), edited by Anand Amaladass and Ines Županov, 113–155. Bangalore: Asian Trade Corporation, 2014. Rubiés, Joan-Pau. “Apologetics and Ethnography in the History of the Mariana Islands by Luis de Morales/Charles Le Gobien.” Prologue to Luis de Morales S.J. & Charles Le Gobien S.J. History of the Mariana Islands, edited by Alexandre Coello de la Rosa, 1–12. Guam: University of Guam Press, 2016; 2nd rev. ed. 2017. Rubiés, Joan-Pau. “Histoire sacrée et ethnographie comparative chez Lafitau.” La plume et le calumet. Joseph-François Lafitau et les sauvages ameriquains, eds. Sara Petrella and Melanie Lozat (forthcoming, Grands Voyages, éd. Garnier, 2018). Schier, Donald. Louis-Bertrand Castel, Anti-Newtonian Scientist. Cedar Rapids, IA: Torch Press, 1941. Shackleton, Robert. Montesquieu: A Critical Biography. London: Oxford University Press, 1961. Shelford, April. Transforming the Republic of Letters: Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650–1720. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007. Standaert, Nicolas. “Jesuit Accounts of Chinese History and Chronology and Their Chinese Sources.” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 35 (2012): 11–87. Starobinski, Jean. Montesquieu par lui meme. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1953. Page 34 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment Van Kley, Dale. The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France 1756–1765. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975. Volpilhac-Auger, Catherine. “On the Proper Use of the Stick: The Spirit of the Laws and the Chinese Empire.” In Montesquieu and His Legacy, edited by Rebecca Kingston, 81– 96. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009. Wright, Jonathan. The Jesuits: Missions, Myths and Histories. London: Harper Perennial, 2004. Xavier, Angela Barreto, and Ines G. Županov. Catholic Orientalism. Portuguese Empire, Indian Knowledge 16th–18th Centuries. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015. Notes: (1) “Ma considerando come due cose affatto diverse la religione e le lettere, vedo bene que può un filosofo essere abandonato da Dio secondo i desideri del suo cuore, ed avere nondimento sottile ingegno e fino discernimento, e pensare con giustezza e con verità nelle materie letterarie.” Giovanni Andrés, Dell’origine, progressi e stato attuale d’ogni letteratura, 7 vols. (Parma, 1782–1799), 1:453–454. (2) “Une chose que je ne saurais concilier avec les lumières de ce siècle, c’est l’autorité des jésuites.” Montesquieu, Pensées, no. 715, in Édition critique des Pensées de Montesquieu, ed. Carole Dornier (Presses universitaires de Caen, @Fontes et paginae— Sources modernes, 2013), https://www.unicaen.fr/services/puc/sources/Montesquieu/ (accessed May 20, 2018). (3) The quotation is from Jean Starobinski, Montesquieu par lui meme (Paris: Seuil, 1953), 183. (4) Catherine Northeast, The Parisian Jesuits and the Enlightenment 1700–1762 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1991), 48–49. Berthier’s attack on the Spirit of the Laws targeted his subjection of religion to politics—including the defense of religious toleration and apparent cultural relativism. Trévoux published a moderately negative review, but it was the fiercer attack in the Jansenist Nouevelles ecclésiastiques in the fall of 1749 that prompted Montesquieu to publish a Défense de l’espirt des lois, assuring his readers that he was neither Spinozist nor a deist (and also noting that the two accusations were incompatible). Montesquieu’s defense from the accusation of Spinozism rang true (one could say that the exaggerations of the Jansenist critic had given the philosopher an easy line of defense), and in 1750 Castel sought to circulate this Défense in the Jesuit colleges. (5) Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 154–156. Page 35 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment (6) Castel thus excluded Berthier from “la plus saine partie des Jésuites” (Castel to Montesquieu, quoted in Northeast, Parisian Jesuits, 149). On Castel and Montesquieu see also Jean Ehrard, “Une “amitié de trente ans”: Castel et Montesquieu,” in L’Esprit des mots. Montesquieu en lui-même et parmi les siens, ed. J. Ehrard (Geneva: Droz, 1998), 69–81. (7) This potential for reductionism is one of the main issues surrounding the reception of Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), and of subsequent volumes of his massive tetralogy. For more recent and succinct discussions of the Enlightenment see Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010); Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters (Oxford: Random House, 2013); and John Robertson, The Enlightenment: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). (8) On Jesuit education see the chapter in this volume by Cristiano Casalini. (9) As noted by a critic with reference to Father Charles Porée (1675–1741), a professor of rhetoric at Louis-le-Grand, and Voltaire’s teacher. See M. Alleaume, “Notice biographique et littéraire sur les deux Porée,” in Mémoires de l’Académie impériale de sciences, arts et belles-lettres de Caen, 87–174 (Caen: chez A. Hardel, 1855), 127. (10) For a comparative assessment see Cyril B. O’Keefe, S.J., Contemporary Reactions to the Enlightenment (1728–1768). A Study of Three Critical Journals: The Jesuit Journal de Trévoux, the Jansenist Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques, and the seculaa Journal des Savants (Geneva: Droz, 1974). (11) On Jesuit scientific projects see chapters in this volume by Romano Gatto (on mathematics), Luís Miguel Carolino (astronomy), and Miguel de Asúa (natural sciences). (12) Donald Schier, Louis-Bertrand Castel, Anti-Newtonian Scientist (Cedar Rapids, IA: Torch Press, 1941). (13) Castel’s key work in this respect was Traité de physique sur la pesanteur universelle du corps (1724). For all his sympathy for some modern scientists, Castel’s intellectual inspiration was ultimately Platonic, as revealed by his admiration for Athanasius Kircher. (14) On Castel’s glorious failure—despite Diderot’s sympathy—see Maarten Franssen, “The Ocular Harpsichord of Louis-Bertrand Castel: The Science and Aesthetics of an Eighteenth-Century Cause Célèbre,” Tractrix 3 (1991): 15–77. (15) Northeast, The Parisian Jesuits, 50, quoting a manuscript of c. 1750 where Castel justified his philosophical endeavors as a defense of religion. (16) [Castel], L’Homme morale opposé a l´homme Physique de Monsieur R***. Lettres Philosophiques où l’on réfute le Déisme du jour (Toulouse, 1756), 106–112. Page 36 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment (17) Diderot, Correspondance, ed. Laurent Versini (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1997), 22–24 (all translations by Joan-Pau Rubiés). (18) For an assessment of Berthier see John N. Pappas, Berthier’s Journal de Trévoux and the Philosophes (Geneva: Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 1957). (19) O’Keefe, Contemporary Reactions, 29–43. An interesting example of the difficulty encountered by the Jesuits when defining the boundaries of irreligion is their erratic reaction to the French translation of Alexander Pope’s Essay of Man by Étienne de Silhouette (1736). (20) A more complex case is represented by the Jesuits in Austria and the Habsburg Empire. They produced, for example, their own series of global reports for the edification of the public, the Neue-Welt-Bott (The New World Messanger), originally edited by Joseph Stöcklein. See Renate Dürr, “Der ‘Neue Welt-Bott’ als Markt der Informationen? Wissenstransfer als Moment jesuitischer Identitätsbildung, in Zeitschirft für Historiche Forschung 34 (2007): 441-466. For another important central European case study, see Per Pippin Aspaas and László Kontler, Maximilian Hell (1720-1792) and the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe, forthcoming (Brill Jesuit Studies). (21) Lettres édifiantes et curieuses écrites des missions étrangères par quelques missionnaires de la Compagnie de Jésus, 34 vols. (Paris: Nicolas Le Clerc, 1702–1776). (22) Leibniz continued to express his defense of the Jesuit method of accommodation of original Confucianism—as distinct from the atheism of many modern Chinese literati— very late in his life, notably in his letter to the French Platonist Nicholas Rémond, “Discours sur la théologie naturelle des Chinois” (1716), which was published posthumously by Kortholt in the 1730s. For a modern edition see G. W. Leibniz, Discours sur la theologie naturelle des Chinois, ed. Wenchao Li and Hans Poser (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002). In English, Leibniz, Writings on China, ed. Daniel J Cook and Henry Rosemont (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), 75–138. The actual dates for the mythical first ruler “Fo Xi” (or Fo Hi) varied, from the extreme 2952 BC of Martino Martini to a few centuries later. Leibniz, more cautiously than Bouvet, did not echo the identification with Enoch—which placed Fo Xi before the Universal Flood—and simply reported the possibility of a connection to the early biblical patriarchs, observing that the Chinese religious tradition was “3000 years old.” (23) Novissima Sinica, in Leibniz, Writings on China, 51. (24) The expression “commerce of light” appeared in a letter from Leibniz to Father Antoine Verjus, procurator for the missions to China and India, in 1697—see Franklin Perkins, Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 42. There was a precedent in Francis Bacon’s scientific utopia New Atlantis, where the travelling scientists were “merchants of light.” Page 37 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment (25) For example, Leibniz argued that religious mysteries may be unprovable, but were nonetheless credible. For a thorough consideration of his life work see Maria Rosa Antognazza, Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). For his sinology see also Perkins, Leibniz and China. (26) Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, part I, chap. 6 (p. 37). These comments of course echoed the black legend, and preceded the crisis and dismantlement of the Jesuit missions in Paraguay a few years later, following the Treaty of Madrid, by which many of the mission areas came under Portuguese jurisdiction, prompting a native rebellion. (27) Muratori published a second expanded edition in 1749, where he engaged in a debate with his critics. For a modern edition of the French version see L. A. Muratori, Relation des missions du Paraguay, ed. Girolamo Imbruglia (Paris: La Découverte, 1983). (28) Esprit des lois part 1, book VIII, chap. 21. See Montesquieu, Ouvres Complètes, ed. Roger Callois, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), 2:366. Montesquieu added that the Jesuits may have confused rule by “the continuous exercise of the authority of a single will” with a semblance of order because they themselves were governed thus. (29) Montesquieu did nonetheless use the reports of the privateering voyage of English Admiral Lord Anson, which included a visit to the port city of Canton, to insist on the hollowness of Chinese virtue. (30) The topic of Montesquieu’s use of Jesuit writings and other travel accounts as fundamental sources has been extensively researched. The classic study remains Muriel Dodds, Les récits de voyage, sources de l’Esprit des Lois (Paris: Champion, 1929). The extant evidence about his reading practices, collected in Geographica, has recently benefited from a critical edition: Oeuvres Complètes de Montesquieu, vol. 16: Extraits et Notes de lecture I, Geographica, ed. Catherine Volpilhac-Auger (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2007). (31) For the logic underlying Montesquieu’s analysis of despotism see J. P. Rubiés, “Oriental Despotism and European Orientalism: Botero to Montesquieu,” Journal of Early Modern History: Contacts, Comparisons, Contrasts 9, no. 1–2 (2005): 109–180. For the debate about Montesquieu’s interpretation of China see also René Étiemble, L’Europe chinoise (Paris: Gallimard, 1988); Jacques Pereira, Montesquieu et la Chine (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008); Catherine Volpilhac-Auger, “On the Proper Use of the Stick: The Spirit of the Laws and the Chinese Empire,” in Montesquieu and His Legacy, ed. Rebecca Kingston (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009), 81–96. (32) “Si les jésuites étaient venus avant Luther et Calvin, ils auraient été les maîtres du monde” (Pensées, no. 11: https://www.unicaen.fr/services/puc/sources/Montesquieu/ index.php?texte=11, last accessed May 20, 2018); “Les jésuites, c’est un corps qui m’enveloppe et qui me trouve partout” (Pensées, no. 482). Page 38 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment (33) “Ces lettres sont pleines de faits très curieux; il faut qu’ils disent la vérité lorsqu’ils n’ont pas d’intérêt de la cacher, pour être crus lorsqu’ils veulent mentir.” Montesquieu, Geographica, 369. For a fuller analysis of these unpublished thoughts see the article “Jesuits” by Edith Flamarion in the Montesquieu Dictionary (online resource): http:// dictionnaire-montesquieu.ens-lyon.fr/en/article/1377616473/en/ (last accessed May 20, 2018). (34) See Ângela Barreto Xavier and Ines G. Županov, Catholic Orientalism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015), 301–311. (35) Voltaire, Le siècle de Louis XIV, in Œuvres Historiques, ed. René Pomeau (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 1160. (36) Isabelle Landry-Deron, La preuve par la Chine. La “Description” de J.-B. Du Halde. Jésuite, 1735 (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2002), 150–163, discusses the impact of these questionnaires of 1684 and 1689 on the sinological production of the following decades. For the circumstances of the French mission to China as a direct challenge to the vice province that had prospered under Portuguese patronage—to the point of overt disobedience—see Liam Matthew Brockey, Journey to the East. The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 151–163. When assessing the decline of the Jesuit position in Europe, it is important to emphasize the sharpness of this division according to national allegiances. (37) Their success with the Kangxi emperor, however, also meant that the papacy leaned toward the apostolic vicars of the Missions étrangères, who represented his authority. In this respect, the reactionary interventions by Charles de Maigrot in 1693 and by Cardinal Maillard de Tournon in 1707 on the question of rites were crucial in precipitating the collapse of the Jesuit mission, as it fatally undermined its legitimacy from a Chinese perspective. (38) In 1704, Clement XI (pope 1700–1721) condemned the Chinese rites with the decree Cum Deus Optimus. In 1710, he confirmed the decisions of 1707 of his legate to China, Cardinal Tournon, restricting those Jesuit practices that were understood to imply accommodation of idolatry, and in 1715 his bull Ex illa die confirmed the condemnation of the Confucian rites. In 1724, the Yongzheng emperor banned Christianity—“the sect of the Lord of Heaven”—altogether. On the Malabar and Chinese rites controversies see the chapter by Claudia von Collani in this volume. (39) The most radical figurists (such as Foucquet) were attached to the text of the Vulgate and, since in any case they interpreted ancient Chinese texts symbolically, they rejected the efforts to accommodate historical records concerning the second and third millennia. (40) For an intercultural assessment of the Jesuit historiography of China, culminating with the works of Mailla and Gaubil, see Nicolas Standaert, “Jesuit Accounts of Chinese Page 39 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment History and Chronology and their Chinese Sources,” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 35 (2012): 11–87. (41) The key difference between Gaubil and Mailla was the latter’s lack of caution—it was possible to entertain a long chronology, but at least in public it had to be done hypothetically. Hence, the Parisian Jesuit Étienne Souciet, while reluctant to go along with Mailla’s unambiguous rejection of the Vulgate, in 1732 published Gaubil’s chronological research in the third volume of his Observations mathematiques, astronomiques, geographiques, chronologiques et physiques, tirés des anciens livres chinois. In his classic study Virgile Pinot, La Chine et la formation de l’esprit philosophique en France, 1640–1740 (Paris: Geuthner, 1932), 189–279, exaggerated the extent to which the leading Parisian Jesuit intellectuals Tournemine, Souciet, and Du Halde retreated from the ancient chronology of China adopted in the seventeenth century by Martini and by Couplet (in the Confucius sinarum philosophus), and still maintained in the eighteenth century by both Gaubil and Fréret. Their prudence was clearly tactical. For a correction see Northeast, The Parisian Jesuits, 119–123. The real opposition to the antiquity of China came from biblical fundamentalists such as Bossuet or Abbé Renaudot, enemies of the Jesuits on theological grounds too. (42) Catherine Larrère, “Fréret et la Chine: de philosophique des langues à l’histoire de la chronologie,” in Nicolas Fréret, légende et vérité, ed. Chantal Grell and Catherine Volpilhac-Auger (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1994), 109–129. (43) Letter from Prémare to Fourmont, as quoted by Landry-Deron, La preuve, 114. (44) Louis Le Comte, Nouveaux mémoires, 2 vols. (Paris: Anisson, 1696), 7v: “celuy qui entreprend de peindre les moeurs des peuples, & de réprésenter les arts, les sciences, les religions du Nouveau Monde, ne peut toucher avec succés tant de differentes matières sans une grande étendue de connoissance, & sans avoir en quelque sorte un esprit universel.” The condemnation of this work in 1700 represented the high point of the major offensive against the Jesuit accommodation of Confucianism. (45) On Huet see April Shelford, Transforming the Republic of Letters: Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650–1720 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007). (46) Lettres édifiantes et curieuses écrites des missions étrangères par quelques missionnaires de la Compagnie de Jésus, vol. 9 (Paris, 1711; 2nd ed. 1730), 1–60. (47) For the significance of this letter in the context of the European construction of Hinduism see J. P. Rubiés, “Reassessing ‘the Discovery of Hinduism’: Jesuit Discourse on Gentile Idolatry and the European Republic of Letters,” in Intercultural Encounter and the Jesuit mission in South Asia (16th–18th centuries), ed. Anand Amaladass and Ines G. Županov (Bangalore: ATC, 2014), 113–155. Page 40 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment (48) Huet deployed skeptical arguments primarily to question Cartesian metaphysics, but Pyrrhonism—radical philosophical doubt—was a double-edged weapon for the orthodox. (49) The case of Prévost is interesting, as he also experienced a long phase as a Benedictine monk. (50) Nicolas Gédoyn, Oeuvres diverses (Paris: de Bure, 1745), 48. (51) Molinism, named after the Spanish Jesuit Luis de Molina (1535–1600), opposed an excessive emphasis on divine predestination at the expense of human free will by seeking to argue that divine foreknowledge was flexible (it included counterfactuals, i.e., what people would do in hypothetical circumstances), and hence God’s grace did not limit people’s moral choices. The position also helped dissolve the potential contradiction between faith and moral effort in human salvation by making it possible for people to choose to accept grace or not without curtailing divine omniscience. However, it was still criticized by Dominicans and Jansenists for being too close to the Pelagian heresy, which placed human free will ahead of divine grace. (52) For this and similar cases see the discussion in Northeast, The Parisian Jesuits, 204– 215. (53) As a compiler Lambert had a poor reputation. His authorship of the Anecdotes is not certain: http://dictionnaire-journalistes.gazettes18e.fr/journaliste/445a-claude-francoislambert. (54) Diderot, “Supplément au voyage de Bougainville,” in Oeuvres Philosophiques, ed. P. Vernière (Paris: Garnier, 1998), 445–516. (55) Enrique Giménez López, “Los jesuitas y la Ilustración,” Debats 105 (2009): 131–140. (56) Miquel Batllori, La cultura hispano-italiana de los jesuitas expulsos (Madrid: Gredos, 1966). (57) See n. 1. (58) Although this was true of antiquarian research, the same could be said about natural science. See Louis Caruana, S.J., “The Jesuits and the Quiet Side of the Scientific Revolution,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, ed. Thomas Worcester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 243–260. This cautious positivism also reinforced probabilism and the attempt to make ancient authorities like Aristotle speak to modern observations, so that, for example, Newtonianism could be avoided by reference to a reconstructed Aristotelianism. (59) For my analysis of Lafitau I summarize Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Histoire sacrée et ethnographie comparative chez Lafitau,” forthcoming in La plume et le calumet. Joseph- Page 41 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment François Lafitau et les sauvages ameriquains, eds. Sara Petrella and Melanie Lozat (forthcoming, Grands Voyages, éd. Garnier, 2018). (60) Lafitau, Mémoire, 16–18. On Jesuit missionary philology see the chapter in this volume by Stuart M. McManus. (61) The couvade was the custom by which fathers ritually simulated aspects of pregnancy and childbirth, taking to bed for a period of time and following certain prohibitions (while the mother went back to work). (62) Euhemerists interpreted ancient myths as stories ultimately derived from actual historical events, rather than as the moral or symbolic allegories preferred by NeoPlatonists and figurists. As far as the ancient religion of China was concerned, skepticism about Lafitau’s figurist interpretations was expressed by Antoine Gaubil in his letters to the astronomer Joseph-Nicholas Delisle and to Father Berthier in 1752: Antoine Gaubil, Correspondance de Pékin: 1722–1759, ed. Renée Simon (Genève: Droz, 1970), 669–672 and 704–705. The case of Charlevoix is no less symptomatic: when in 1743 he published his Journal d’un voyage fait par ordre de Roi dans l’Amerique Septentrionale—as the third part of a Histoire et description de la Nouvelle France—he heavily relied on the ethnographic passages of the Moeurs to supplement his text, but without any acknowledgment. At the same time, he omitted Lafitau’s ethnological speculations, and occasionally directly questioned his comparative analysis. Banier also extracted much material from Lafitau for the third edition of his La Mythologie et les fables expliquées par l’histoire (1738), but not his allegorical analysis. (63) Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François, 2 vols. (Paris: Tomas Joly, 1667), 2:356–357. (64) Charles Le Gobien, Histoire des Isles Marianes, nouvellement converties à la religion Chrestienne (Paris: Nicolas Pepie, 1700), 139–146. (65) See my discussion in Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Apologetics and Ethnography in the History of the Mariana Islands by Luis de Morales/Charles Le Gobien,” published as a prologue to Luis de Morales, S.J., and Charles Le Gobien, S.J., History of the Mariana Islands, ed. Alexandre Coello de la Rosa (Guam: University of Guam Press, 2016; 2nd rev. ed., 2017), 1–12. Also Carlo Ginzburg, “Alien Voices. The Dialogic Element in Early Modern Jesuit Historiography,” in History, Rhetoric and Proof (Hanover/London: University Press of New England, 1999), 71–91. (66) On the Confucius and its impact see Pinot, La Chine; David Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), 247–291, and, more recently, the English translations by Thierry Meynard, S.J., Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (Rome: IHSI, 2011) and The Jesuit Reading of Confucius. The First Complete Translation of the Lunyu (1687) Published in the West (Leiden: Brill, 2015). Page 42 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment (67) Daniel S. Hawley, “L’Inde de Voltaire,” in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 120 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1974), 139–178. Also Joan-Pau Rubiés, “From Antiquarianism to Philosophical History: India, China and the World History of Religion in European Thought (1600–1770),” in Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500–1800, ed. Peter N. Miller and François Louis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 313–367. (68) Voltaire received the text in 1761 from chevalier Maudave, commander of a French fortress in Coromandel. Modern research suggests that the work was originally written in French, possibly by Father Antoine Mosac (or perhaps Jean Calmette), and was meant to be translated into South Indian vernaculars. See Ludo Rocher, Ezourvedam. A French Veda of the Eighteenth Century (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1984). (69) On Jesuit historiography see the chapter in this volume by Paul Shore. (70) Sylvia Murr, L’Indologie du Père Coeurdoux: Stratégies, Apologétique et Scientificité (Paris: École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 1987). Jean-Antoine Dubois was a member of the Missions étrangères, who had inherited many materials from their rivals the Jesuits upon the order’s dissolution. This circumstance makes the subsequent plagiarism doubly cruel. (71) Xavier and Županov, Catholic Orientalism, 311–329. (72) On American missions, see the chapter in this volume by Rafael Gaune Corradi. (73) Niccolò Guasti, L’exilio Italiano dei Gesuiti Spagnoli 1767–1798 (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2006). (74) On this multifaceted dispute see the classic work of Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic 1750–1900 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973) and, more recently, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). See also the chapter by Niccolò Guasti in this volume. (75) It is clear that by the 1780s Spanish patriotism had developed ideological faces. However, some have argued that the metropolitan rejection of the Jesuit efforts was driven by the professional jealousy of those academics in Spain in charge of the counterattack against the philosophical historians—notably Juan Bautista Muñoz—rather than by unsurmountable ideological differences: see Victor Peralta Ruiz, “The Spanish Monarchy and Uses of Jesuit Historiography in the Dispute of the New World,” in Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and Its Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750–1830, ed. Gabriel Paquette (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 83–97. (76) As noted by David Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State 1492–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 439–441. Page 43 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment (77) Especially revealing was d’Alembert’s Sur la destruction des Jésuites en France (1765), which at first appeared anonymously, in the form of an “impartial” chronicle of the order’s downfall. In effect, it was an unforgiving analysis full of familiar accusations that led to the denunciation of a systematic intention to “rule the universe, not by force, but by means of religion” (p. 22). (78) There were various editions between and 1704 and 1771. (79) Abraham Chaumeix, Préjuges légitmes contre l’Encyclopédie et essai de refutation de ce dictionnaire, 8 vols. (Brussels, 1758–1759). As Jacques Proust argued, the royal censor Malesherbes in fact saved the encyclopedia from the Parlement’s Jansenist control in 1759, by revoking the privilege of publication altogether, but then allowing the work to continue quietly so as to prevent its publication abroad (which would entail a serious economic loss). See J. Proust, Diderot et l’Encyclopédie, 3rd ed. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), 70–79. (80) Letter to Sophie Voland, August 12, 1762, in Diderot, Correspondance, 407–408. (81) On anti-Jesuitism see also the chapter by Sabina Pavone in this volume. (82) For a summary account in English see Jonathan Wright, The Jesuits: Missions, Myths and Histories (London: Harper Perennial, 2004), 201–207. The role of the Jansenists in France is emphasized by Dale van Kley, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France 1756–1765 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975). The Spanish case was studied by Teófanes Egido, “La expulsión de los Jesuitas de España,” in Historia de la Iglesia en España, ed. R. García Villoslada, vol. 4 (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1979), 746–792. (83) On the suppression and restoration of the Society of Jesus see the chapter in this volume by Niccolò Guasti. (84) This anti-Jesuit tract was actually published in Amsterdam, albeit with London in the title page, and has been variously attributed to Pierre Jurieu and Louis de Montparsan. (85) Sabina Pavone has observed the various currents of anti-Jesuitism (their meddling in politics, their casuistry and laxitude, their excessive temporal commitments) can be traced back to the founding of the order, notably the focus on the political elites, which could be constructed as a form of Machiavellian calculation, and the particular obedience to the pope, which generated a cosmopolitan vocation but also, inevitably, further suspicion. Sabina Pavone, “The History of Anti-Jesuitism. National and Global Dimensions,” in The Jesuits and Globalization: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Challenges, ed. Thomas Banchoff and José Casanova (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2016), 111–130. Page 44 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018 The Jesuits and the Enlightenment (86) Jeffrey Burson, “The Catholic Enlightenment in France from the fin de siècle Crisis of Consciousness to the Revolution, 1650–1789,” in Brill Companion to Catholic Enlightenment, ed. Ulrich Lehner and Michael Printy (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 63–126. Joan-Pau Rubiés Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) and Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Page 45 of 45 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 15 December 2018