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221 epilogue The Jesuit and the Armchair Philosopher i n 1767, King Charles III, following the precedent set by the Crown of Portugal and by France, signed a royal edict banishing the Jesuits from his dominions . Almost overnight, Jesuit priests and lay brothers were forced to abandon their residences, leaving behind the majority of their possessions, except for their most indispensable personal belongings.All the lands and buildings owned by the order, as well as the contents of their houses and colleges—including their scientific instruments and the books housed in the Jesuit libraries— were expropriated by the Crown. The Jesuits were sent in exile to the papal states in Italy. The expulsion of the Jesuits from Catholic kingdoms is a complex issue that has received broad attention from historians. Different explanations have been advanced as to why the Bourbon rulers of Portugal, France, and Spain decided to banish the Jesuit order from their dominions. A mixture of populism on the part of civil administrators, who (at least in Portugal and Spain) sought to turn the Jesuits into scapegoats to divert public attention from internal problems, along with a deep-seated suspicion of Jesuit activities fueled by a strong anti-Jesuit propaganda originating in the 1614 libelous Monita secreta (written by Jerome Zahorowski , a dismissed Jesuit), seems to have played a part in the decision to expel them. European propaganda against the activities of the South American Jesuits, in particular, reached a peak during the first half of the eighteenth century, when Spanish and Portuguese works variously accused the Jesuits in Paraguay of hiding fabulous riches from the Crown and of usurping the king’s authority in the missions. In 1758, the Jesuit José Cardiel took up the pen and wrote a rebuttal of these accusations. In his Declaración de la verdad, Cardiel wanted to refute the accusations leveled by an anonymous Portuguese writer who had claimed that the Jesuits had become so powerful and entrenched in the Paraguayan missions that the only way the new treaty of limits between Portugal and Spain signed in 1750 could be enforced was by waging war against the priests.1 Accusations such as these dated back to the seventeenth century, lamented Cardiel, and the Jesuits 222 Missionary Scientists had had to constantly rebuff claims that they had “taken for themselves the rule and power in these doctrines in the rivers Paraná and Uruguay, usually known as the Paraguayan missions, [and that] they extracted many treasures from gold and silver mines that they worked clandestinely for their own profit.”2 Despite defenses such as this, the Jesuits could not escape the tide against them, and by June 1767, copies of the banishment edict reached Buenos Aires. Before long, 2,267 Jesuits, many of them Creoles, were sent to exile in Europe, forced to leave family and friends behind and forbidden to maintain even epistolary contact with the colonies.3 The same year that the expatriated American Jesuits arrived in Italy, Cornelius de Paw’s Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains came off the presses in Berlin.Adopting certain ideas advanced by the French philosopher and naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788), de Paw articulated a view of America and its peoples as thoroughly inferior to the Old World. Based on what he claimed was reliable information about the nature of the New World, de Paw concluded that its many volcanoes, propensity for earthquakes, climate, and even (as Buffon claimed) its paucity of quadrupeds and their comparative smaller size to the Old World varieties, demonstrated that America had suffered a cataclysmic event. This event—probably a flood, as Buffon had hypothesized—had turned what once was a continent inhabited by ancient civilizations and large animals, as evidenced by the fossil record, into an unhealthy miasma populated by puny mammals and emasculated peoples. Drawing on geological, medical, and biological discourses, de Paw argued that the excessive humidity America still experienced had produced animals and humans whose arrested development was evident in their small sizes and inferior intellectual and moral qualities. America was a damp, wet continent dominated by noxious vapors and an unhealthy climate that produced degenerated living creatures.4 The reaction of the American Jesuits to what they considered nothing but calumny and slander disguised as science was swift and forceful. A flurry of publications, aimed at refuting and exposing de Paw and his followers, came from the pens of the exiled Creoles. If the thesis of these European writers had...

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