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I Narratives of Adversity
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I Narratives of Adversity It is fair to say that the Jesuit contribution to the cultural history of East-Central and indeed to that of Eastern Europe was much more important that to that of the West.1 The Society of Jesus has inspired more debate, scholarship, and speculation than any other Catholic order, and has probably been the subject of more books and articles than any other religious organization in history. The reasons for this are not hard to find. The Jesuits exploded onto the world stage in the mid-sixteenth century, and quickly became the most visible worldwide exponent both of Reformed Catholicism and of an expansionist European mindset that was not limited to Catholics .2 A century later the Jesuits were operating 800 schools on all of the known continents and had become the objects of heated debates about their beliefs, motives, and actions.3 As time passed the controversies about the motivations and methods of the Jesuits as well as their results gained intensity, and in recent years have coalesced around contemporary questions of globalization, inculturation, and the transactional nature of religious conversion that have gained prominence in academic discourse.4 The Society has been labeled “the first multinational corporation” and Jesuits dubbed, with some exaggeration, 1 Burke, Jesuits and the Art of Translation, 31. 2 O’Malley, The First Jesuits. 3 Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 33. 4 E.g. Ginzburg, History, Rhetoric, and Proof, 78; Louthan, Converting Bohemia , 175. 18 Narratives of Adversity “planetary men, the first in whom the world network became, to some degree, a world system.”5 On occasion during the past century eminent historians have weighed in with interpretations of the motives of the early Jesuits that sometimes seem based more on wishful thinking and anachronistic attribution of motives than on evidence.6 Meanwhile the field of Jesuit studies, once the home of confessional polemics, has burgeoned in recent years, and the wealth of still unexamined materials left behind by the Jesuits seems to guarantee that scholarly investigations , both by those focusing directly on Jesuits and by others dealing with broader cultural themes, will prove fruitful for many years to come. The question therefore is not—Why another book on Jesuits? But rather—What kind of book on Jesuits? While the remarkable successes of the Society, advertised with consummate skill by the Jesuits themselves,7 grab our attention, other events that were less than successes also deserve close examination. Some of the setbacks experienced by the Society in the first decades of its existence were spectacular, to the point that the retelling and visual representation of these seeming disasters themselves became an important part of the culture and lore of the Jesuits and shaped the Society’s selfperception .8 Yet as Jennifer D. Selwyn notes, there is legitimate danger in becoming too preoccupied with Jesuit “success” and “failure,” especially when anachronistic standards of our own individualistic, competitive modern society are applied.9 Certainly the early Jesuits who were martyred, banished, or faced imprisonment did not necessarily see themselves as failures, but instead understood adversity as useful to the 5 Headley, The Europeanization of the World, 97, quoting Samuel Adrian Miles Adshead, China in World History, 247. 6 Arnold Toynbee, for example, wrote that the Jesuits of China “were acting with uncommon insight and courage in trying to discriminate the essence of Christianity from its Western antecedents.” Toynbee, An Historian’s Approach to Religion, 267. 7 Imago primi saecvli Societatis Iesv. The Jesuit concern for self-representation as expressed in the Imago was relatively unusual in the seventeenth century. Burke, “The Jesuits and the Art of Translation,” 30. 8 The best known of these disasters was the destruction of the Japanese mission . The 26 Jesuits martyred in Nagasaki in 1597 soon became part of the triumphant narrative of the Society, retold many times in school dramas produced by the Jesuits. Yuki, Martyrs’ Hill: Nagasaki. 9 Selwyn, A Paradise Inhabited by Devils, 11–12. [3.142.135.86] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 21:19 GMT) 19 Narratives of Adversity just and necessary for sinners.10 Yet Jesuit enterprises did experience disasters , defeats and frustrations: practical goals were not achieved, conversions proved impermanent, anticipated support from the powerful dried up, and natural calamities destroyed the physical creations of the Society. Jesuits sometimes tasted bitter, even self-destructive disappointment and depression.11 Recent scholarship, including that undertaken by Jesuits, has begun to look at these failures in a new light, something that has...