Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (review)

This impressive and important book opens with a discourse on method about writing "world histories of Christianity" that lays out the limitations of the ways that task is usually undertaken and then explains and justifies the author's approach, which is "to take the early-modern Catholic mission seriously as a macrohistorical phenomenon, that is, as a single world-spanning enterprise" (p. 3). The missionary enterprise, that is to say, can be understood only as a vibrant network of communications of different kinds that operated among the various missions and that at the same time entailed Europe itself in a variety of roles.

Luke Clossey, assistant professor of history at Simon Fraser University, is to be congratulated on the sophistication with which he explains his method and works it out in the body of the text. He expertly marshals his evidence. He commands a remarkable range of literature, primary and secondary, in an impressive range of languages, including Chinese. In the first chapter he provides, among other things a valuable literature review. The book deservedly takes its place among the best of the recent publications on the Society of Jesus written by a younger generation of scholars in Europe and North America.

Clossey focuses on fifty-three missionaries related to missions in Germany, Mexico, and China, each of whom were active in at least two of those areas during the seventeenth century. His point is that Germany was both mission territory and patron of missions abroad, which shows the interconnectedness and global character of Catholicism and of the missionary enterprise. The eleven relatively short chapters cover a wide spectrum of issues, including finances and the visual expressions of global mission in maps and images. Other chapters describe other ways the missions networked with the center and with one another. Chapter 6, a particularly crucial chapter in the author's viewpoint, deals with the missionaries' motivation.

A few cautions are in order. In the second chapter, where Clossey analyzes the organization of the Jesuits, he is sometimes inexact, sometimes incorrect. His most serious mistake is in asserting that the General Congregations (general chapters) of the order were subordinate to the superior general, whereas the precise opposite is the case (p. 23). His section on Jesuit "disobedience" is heavy-handed and unaware of the labyrinthian moral reasoning that all Catholic clerics of the day learned in their study of theology and canon law (pp. 50–58). More generally, sometimes the data he provides are so abundant and presented in such compact fashion that even specialists can lose their way.

In the concluding chapter Clossey addresses the large and contentious issue of what to call the Catholic phenomenon in this period. He is in favor of early-modern Catholicism but on condition it be understood in a global dimension. He seems to imply that the global dimension was not one of the great advantages of the term I indicated when I first proposed it (pp. 245, 249).

In that chapter he returns to the subject of chapter 6 to propound the thesis that the motivation of the missionary enterprise and the force that gave it unity and energy was the quest for salvation—the missionaries' quest for their own as well as for the peoples whom they evangelized. It is surprising that he makes so much of this point, which seems obvious to me, and, I should hope, to those who work in the period. But if it needs to be stressed, then he has done well to do so.