Escrituras de la modernidad. Los jesuitas entre cultura retórica y cultura científica (review)

Marshall McLuhan’s dictum,“The medium is the message,”would seem to apply especially to sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Jesuits, who did not hesitate to use all the media of their time, and even to create some new ones, to convey their message. As such, they stood out as forerunners of modern communication. The two editors, historians Perla Chinchilla (Iberoamericana University) and Antonella Romano (European University, Institute of Florence), and eleven other specialists analyze the different genre that presuppression Jesuits used to communicate: chronicles, catechisms, written sermons, biographies, scholarly manuals, legal briefs, and visual images.

Norma Durán and Alfonso Mendiola study the chronicles of José de Acosta, which on the surface appear to be simple descriptions of the New World Indians and the evangelization process. But, as both authors argue, these are not mere value-free chronicles. Rather, Acosta subtly establishes new norms for determining what is true religion. By so doing, he implies that the real evangelization of America began with the Jesuits who, unlike the noncritical mendicant orders who went before, understood the essential nature of the struggle between Christianity and the New World pagan religions. In another essay, Antonio Rubial compares the hagiographies of several holy women in New Spain, all written by Jesuits. The biographies fit the mold of that particular literary genre but, like Acosta’s chronicles, there is a message underlying all these pious stories: These women were holy because they were obedient (and in particular, obedient to their Jesuit confessors).

In another context, the Jesuits in China wrote many catechisms. But, as Gianni Criveller points out, Ricci and his successors did not merely reproduce the Roman catechism: They wrote introductions to Christianity intentionally adapted to the mentality of their Chinese readers. In this sense, they were really not “catechisms,” but sophisticated theologies of inculturation, written long before that concept was formally thought up in the twentieth century. Back in Europe the Jesuits were known as great preachers. But, as Fernando Bouza points out, they also used the printing press to preserve and disseminate their message in numerous summaries of sermons and in what might be called guidebooks for preachers. In the same line, Bernadette Majorana studies the sermons and instructions by Jesuits for writing sermons for rural missions. She notes that emphasis was placed on adapting the sermon to the rudes ac pueri—that is, the rural folk in Italy. But these were not watereddown sermons for the ignorant. Rather, the instructions call for greater creativity to communicate in a more difficult milieu. Perla Chinchilla takes on the topic of preaching in post-Tridentine Europe: how to effectively communicate divine truths without offending the new orthodoxy. Jesuit preachers built upon St. Ignatius’s “composition of place” in the Spiritual Exercises to “amplify” details, thus turning sermons into masterpieces of Baroque imagery. But if overdone, as Chinchilla observes, sacred oratory could degenerate into empty rhetoric.

Antonella Romano looks at another literary genre: the textbooks and manuals that the Jesuits wrote to accompany their classes in their schools and universities. Through these classroom aids classical culture was widely disseminated throughout New Spain. But were the Jesuits always “modern?” Carlos Alberto Moura Ribeiro Zeron and Rafael Ruiz González analyze the curious case of an anonymous Jesuit who used all the arms of the Scholastic method to argue in favor of lifting the excommunication that weighed over the slave raiders in seventeenth-century São Paulo.

But the Jesuits were not just masters of the written word; they also understood the importance of images, so much so that one of the authors, Ralph Dekoninck, argues that they cultivated a “science of the image” and even developed a “rhetoric of the image,” inspired very much by St. Ignatius himself who sought to “spiritualize all things.” In China, as Elisabetta Corsi points out, the Jesuits made...