journal of jesuit studies 1 (2014) 347-372
brill.com/jjs
Accommodation as a Rhetorical Principle
Twenty Years after John O’Malley’s The First Jesuits (1993)
Stephen Schloesser
Loyola University, Chicago
[email protected]
Abstract
Twenty years after its publication, John O’Malley’s The First Jesuits (1993) can be located
within a broader “postmodern” intellectual context that followed in the wake of 1989
and the consequent end of the Cold War. This context included both Stephen Toulmin’s
Cosmopolis (1990), a revisionist account of the origins of “modernity,” and Homi K.
Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994), a foundational work in post-colonial theorization of cultural hybridity. O’Malley’s thesis that early Jesuit ministries shared a
common fundamental “rhetorical” dimension exemplifies Toulmin’s account of a sixteenth-century rhetorical preference for the particular, local, and timely. This rhetorical accommodation to the individual also informed the missionary strategies
developed by Valignano and Ricci in the Far East. Ricci’s True Meaning of the Lord of
Heaven (1603) can be read as a hybridizing cultural accommodation, a strategy with
both promise and peril for self-identity. However, as the tumultuous (and eventually
tragic) history of the Chinese Rites demonstrates, a Renaissance preference for the
particular would encounter serious opposition during the seventeenth-century’s
“quest for certainty” and corollary embrace of universals. Toulmin would argue, however, that this “Counter-Renaissance” repudiation of accommodation did not make
the sixteenth-century project any less “modern.” Rather, he would see O’Malley’s
first Jesuits as exemplars of modernity’s original form—a preference for the particular
and openness to hybridity which Toulmin imagined being recovered in late-twentiethcentury “postmodernity.”
Keywords
accommodation – casuistry – Chinese Rites – cultural hybridity – rhetoric – Spiritual
Exercises – Matteo Ricci – Alessandro Valignano – Stephen Toulmin
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/22141332-00103001
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Schloesser
It has been twenty years since the appearance of John W. O’Malley’s The First
Jesuits (1993).1 Among other aims, the work countered longstanding readings
of the Society of Jesus as a “Counter-Reformation” and “Tridentine” institution
whose identity markers emerged from the seventeenth-century Baroque.2
By pushing the intellectual and cultural origins of the first Jesuits back to the
Renaissance, O’Malley was able to reveal a very different identity and set of
aspirations. He argued that every aspect of the first Jesuits’ ministries was
shaped by the rhetorical principle of accommodation to one’s particular audience, a principle derived from Renaissance Humanism. Opposing itself to
essentialist and universalist values prized by certain strands of medieval scholasticism descended from Aristotle, Renaissance rhetoric privileged the thoroughly contingent here-and-now (the existential hic et nunc) in this singular
time and place.
Had O’Malley’s work appeared at an earlier time, it might have experienced
a less enthusiastic reception. The bias for abstract, universal, and timeless
values, truths transcending all particular contingencies, has had a long run
in “modernity”: from the “Scientific Revolution” and various “Enlightenments”
through nineteenth-century positivism and into the post-1945 era of universal
rights. Had The First Jesuits arrived in, say, 1970, the rhetorical principle
of accommodation might have been seen as an interesting but marginal
“pre-modern” curiosity.
However, O’Malley’s work appeared within a context nicely illustrated by
two other contemporaneous publications: Stephen Toulmin’s Cosmopolis: The
Hidden Agenda of Modernity (1990); and Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of
Culture (1994).3 Toulmin’s privileging of “rhetoric” and Bhabha’s theorization
of “hybridity” both shared in the “postmodern” turn away from universalism
and toward particularity.4 In distinct but related ways, O’Malley, Toulmin, and
1 John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
2 Similarly, John O’Malley’s recent work shows how little “Trent” was “Tridentine.” See O’Malley,
Trent: What Happened at the Council (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2013).
3 Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1990); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
4 For “hybridity,” see Stephen Schloesser, “Jesuit Hybrids, Catholic Modernities, Future Pasts,”
in University of San Francisco, Joan and Ralph Lane Center for Catholic Studies and Social
Thought, For the City and the World: Conversations in Catholic Studies and Social Thought
(San Francisco: University of San Francisco, Association of Jesuit University Presses, 2010),
114–141, at 133n15. The paradigm shift implicit in historicizing universal rights may be seen in
recent studies: Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2010); Brooke A. Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference
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Accommodation As A Rhetorical Principle
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Bhabha exhibit family traits of what Jean-François Lyotard had reported (in
1979; 1984 English translation) as the condition of knowledge in postmodernity: “an incredulity towards meta-narratives.”5 Lyotard’s estimation preceded
the fall of the Berlin Wall—and Toulmin’s Cosmopolis—by exactly ten years.
In the following, I first sketch out notes toward an “O’Malley-Toulmin
Paradigm.” I then offer a synopsis—a review for some readers and an introduction for others—of O’Malley’s survey of the “rhetorical principle” in light
of Toulmin’s thesis. Finally, I consider the early Jesuit missionary strategy of
“accommodation” in China as an example of “hybridity.” The eventual fate of
the Chinese Rites provides a vivid example of perceived conflicts between
“particularity” and “objectivity.”6
Toward an O’Malley-Toulmin Paradigm7
Both O’Malley and Toulmin employ “rhetoric” as a central organizing concept.
Toulmin unabashedly acknowledges his present-day interests in revising the
historical narrative. Attempting to locate our own “postmodern” culture
within the trajectory of the “modern period,” Toulmin argues for a periodization of modernity divided into three eras: (1) a post-medieval Renaissance
era prior to 1650 that took rhetoric as its epistemological paradigm; (2) a counterRenaissance period after 1650 (i.e., after the 1618–1648 Thirty Years’ War) that
took logic as its paradigm; and (3) a “postmodern” present day (beginning
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A
History (New York: Norton, 2007).
5 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey
Bennington and Bernard Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv;
orig. Lyotard, La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Minuit, 1979). For 1979
as a watershed moment, see Christian Caryl, Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st
Century (New York: Basic Books, 2013). For the dissipation of the American “New Left”
around 1975 and the entry of “postmodern” theory, see Van Gosse, The Movements of the New
Left, 1950–1975: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005);
François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the
Intellectual Life of the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). For
the turn to micro-history, see Carlo Ginzburg, “Microhistory, Two or Three Things That I
Know about It,” in Threads and Traces: True, False, Fictive, trans. Anne C. Tedeschi and John
Tedeschi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 193–214 (chapter 14).
6 Compare Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American
Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), esp. 415–521.
7 I use this paradigm in my “Recent Works in Jesuit Philosophy: Vicissitudes of Rhetorical
Accommodation,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 1, no. 1 (2014): 105–126.
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during the decade after 1965) which has retrieved rhetoric’s attention to the
particular.8 Investigating a distinct yet related field, O’Malley also organizes his
account of sixteenth-century Renaissance Jesuits around the concept of rhetoric. O’Malley argues that this rhetorical principle extended far beyond the
obvious reach of methods employed in preaching, teaching, and other oratorical crafts. Rather, it functioned as a principle of accommodation and shaped
almost every aspect of Jesuit thought, action, and self-identity.
O’Malley and Toulmin mutually enhance one another. O’Malley strengthens
Toulmin: not only do individuals like Erasmus, Montaigne, and Shakespeare
appear as distinctively “modern” in their attention to the particular; but institutions as a whole (like the Society of Jesus) also adopt and propagate a “modern” religious vision rooted in personal and cultural accommodation.9 Likewise,
Toulmin’s thesis strengthens O’Malley’s. He argues that Renaissance Humanism
ought to be seen as a distinct but not inferior form of—and not merely the
antechamber to—a more genuine seventeenth-century rationalist modernity.
By re-reading the seventeenth-century Baroque not so much as a triumphant but as a somewhat reactionary and traumatized “quest for certainty”
(citing John Dewey), Toulmin’s work also suggests a new reading for the end of
the Jesuit experiment in the various expulsions and suppressions between 1759
and 1773. By arguing that a rigoristic (and perhaps neurotic) universalism
displaced an earlier rhetorical flexibility, Toulmin’s reading endows post-1650
hostility towards Jesuit preference for the particular with an air of inexorability. Far from being simply surface epiphenomena of political and economic
battles, Jesuit conflicts over probabilism, casuistry, and the Chinese Rites may
be reimagined as somewhat inevitable expressions of a paradigmatic or epistemic shift.
An O’Malley-Toulmin paradigm re-frames the story: an early accommodation of the particular, local, and timely conflicted with a post-1650 paradigm of
“objectivity” forged in response to the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War—an
epistemic shift to the universal, general, and timeless. If this narrative is true,
then the images we have of Jesuits being forcibly evicted from houses, schools,
kingdoms, and empires represent a deeper yet invisible cultural conflict: the
8 Toulmin’s work has had sharp critics. For an easily accessible example online see Quentin
Skinner, “The Past in the Present,” New York Review of Books (April 12, 1990): 36–37.
9 John O’Malley served as an editor of volumes in the Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press). For a perceptive study of how Jesuit missionary encounters led
to the formation of the modern “self” and to “religion” as individual practice, see J. Michelle
Molina, To Overcome Oneself: The Jesuit Ethic and Spirit of Global Expansion, 1520–1767
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).
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Accommodation As A Rhetorical Principle
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repression of an earlier Renaissance version of modernity by a later counterRenaissance. For Toulmin (in 1990), we are now in the “postmodern” process of
recovering many traits of modernity’s first version, a present-day project that
adds interest to early-modern tales.
Toulmin begins by observing that the standard account of modernity posits
the early seventeenth century as the transition period from medieval to modern times.10 In this view, a secular culture emerged from the clerical and, as lay
scholars began to read, they turned away from medieval scholasticism and
developed empiricism, that is, “new ideas based on their first-hand experience.” Born in a prosperous time, this modern age characterized itself by two
developments: the scientific revolution in astronomy and physics and the birth
of rationalistic philosophy. This “quest for certainty” posed problems and
sought solutions stated in “timeless” and “universal” terms.
In contrast to this received narrative, Toulmin proposes another one:
whereas the “modern” period was born in the Renaissance humanism of the
sixteenth century, the following seventeenth-century turn to science and
mathematics was actually a “counter-Renaissance.”11 The years 1605–1650, far
from being a period of general prosperity, were among the worst Europe has
suffered throughout history. Rationalism and scientism, then, must be situated
within this catastrophic context. Toulmin interprets the rigidities of Pascal,
Racine, and Donne in the seventeenth century as a traumatic reaction against
the earlier flexibilities of Erasmus, Shakespeare, and Montaigne—overly
porous boundaries now interpreted as having contributed to a thirty-year
bloodbath.
Renaissance Humanists valued modesty and limits in their epistemological
claims. They saw philosophical questions without practical implications as
hubristic, “reaching beyond the scope of experience in an indefensible way.” In
response to abstract, universal, and timeless scholastic theories, skepticism
found no warrant in experience for either their affirmation or denial. Toulmin
reads here “a new way of understanding human life and motives”: the
Humanists “taught readers to recognize how philosophical theories overreach
the limits of human rationality.”12
Having set out the historical context, Toulmin conceptually outlines the
seventeenth-century “retreat from the Renaissance” using four opposed dyads.13
10
11
12
13
Toulmin, 11–15. For the problem of periodization, see Schloesser “Recent Works in Jesuit
Philosophy.”
Ibid., 16ff.
Ibid., 29.
Ibid., 30ff.
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(1) Rhetoric yielded to logic (or oral argument to written). The rhetorical
question asks, “Who addressed this argument to whom, in what forum, and
using what examples?” As the art of persuasion, rhetoric’s first and final
concern must always be the particular place, circumstance, and time of the
audience being addressed. Soaked in the bloodshed of the Thirty Years’ War,
however, particulars became the problem, not the solution. Rationalists solved
it by constructing universal truths capable of affirmation by persons regardless
of nationality, creed, and culture. Analytic chains of written statements
replaced “the circumstantial merits and defects of persuasive utterances.”
Persuasion yielded to analysis, and this shift in turn entailed the next three.
(2) The particular yielded to the universal. As an example, Toulmin cites
casuistry, a topic on which he had published two years earlier.14 A method of
moral reasoning long associated with Jesuits, casuistry concerned itself with
concrete “cases of conscience,” holding that the moral worth of an action cannot be determined definitively without an account of the moral agent’s circumstances, motives, knowledge, and freedom. “Modern” moral philosophy,
however, has concerned itself not with particulars but with universals—“with
comprehensive general principles of ethical theory.” The most extreme example of this was Kant’s categorical imperative, an abstraction from every particular circumstance and (in some readings) even human desire. Moral reasoning
in this sense appealed to what all “rational beings” (including, theoretically,
non-temporal ones) are capable of willing for all eternity, not here and now.
(3) The local yielded to the general. The sixteenth century, born simultaneously with the explorations to the “New World,” was fascinated with accounts
of the “local”—with ethnography, geography, and history. Writers such as
Montaigne read accounts of travel like Jean de Léry’s Voyage to Brazil (1578) and
reveled in the seeming inconsistencies, idiosyncrasies, and irrationalities of
remote cultures and ages. These revelations nurtured a resurgent skepticism.
Fifty years later, however, Descartes could write in his Discourse on Method
(1637): “History is like foreign travel. It broadens the mind, but it does not
deepen it.” Descartes’s spatial metaphor is instructive: it implies that true
“depth” of mind discovers “underlying” ideas and principles by which “surface”
epiphenomena can be connected together. If anything, surface movements
only obscure our grasp of unchanging depths.
(4) The timely yielded to the timeless and the changing to the unchanging.
In law, medicine, and cases of conscience, Renaissance studies examined concrete issues of practice. The problems under examination referred to specific
14
Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral
Reasoning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
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moments in time—hic et nunc. But rationalism sought transhistorical truths
and turned away from concrete issues toward “permanent structures underlying all the phenomena of Nature.”
Toulmin summarizes his fourfold outline by saying that “modernity” had
two distinct starting points reflected in our present-day distinction between
the “humanities” and the “sciences.” The humanistic emerged from the sixteenth-century rebirth of classical literature while the scientific emerged from
seventeenth-century natural philosophy.15 The received account has taken the
latter to represent the paradigm of authentic rationality; the universal has
been seen as more “objective” than the particular. But this estimation of “objectivity” differs with respect to subject matter: “In practical disciplines, questions
of rational adequacy are timely not timeless, concrete not abstract, local not
general, particular not universal. They are the concern of people whose work is
centered in practical and pastoral activities.”16
In some matters—notably, the practical and the pastoral—the “objective” is
the human being as constituted by all of his or her particularities.17 In some
matters, “objectivity” is best attained in the concrete, not the abstract. This is a
version of the “modern” Toulmin sees being recovered in the “postmodern.”
O’Malley’s Rhetorical Principle of Accommodation: Synopsis
In O’Malley’s The First Jesuits, the “rhetorical” dimension most vividly marks
the Jesuits as men of the sixteenth century. The “rhetorical” dimension of the
Jesuits’ ministries—“to adapt what they said and did to times, circumstances,
and persons”—transcended the rhetorical needs of preaching, lecturing, and
even casuistry.18 O’Malley identifies the dimension rather as “a basic principle
in all their ministries, even if they did not explicitly identify it as rhetorical.”
The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, the order’s foundational document,
identifies the principle as a hallmark of “our way of proceeding”:
In general, they ought to be instructed in the way of proceeding proper to
a member of the Society, who has to associate with so great a diversity of
persons throughout such varied regions. Hence they should foresee the
15
16
17
18
Toulmin, 34.
Ibid. Emphasis mine.
See Josef Fuchs, S.J., Personal Responsibility and Christian Morality, trans. William Cleves,
et al. (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1983), 214.
O’Malley, 255.
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inconveniences that may arise and the opportunities that can be grasped
for the greater service of God by using some means at one time and others at another.19
This adaptation to diversity and contingency marked the “rhetorical dimension” of the Jesuit pastoral style.
Although this vision pervaded every aspect of Jesuit life, five areas can be
singled out as examples of that vision: Spiritual Exercises; experiencias in Jesuit
training; Jesuit self-representation; Jesuit preaching; and Jesuit education.
(1) The Spiritual Exercises. At the heart of the Jesuit world-view lay the
Spiritual Exercises, a pre-“Tridentine” composition largely completed by 1540
and published with papal approval in 1548. Two features stand out for their
“rhetorical” character. First, the Exercises primarily concern the individual subject as the arena of God’s labor in the world. Ignatius shares the early-modernist subjective turn of his religious contemporaries: the key for Luther is an
individual’s faith; for Calvin it is an individual’s predestination; for Loyola, it is
an individual’s discernment.20
Second, as a corollary and again like Calvin, Ignatius imagined the individual’s “vocation” in the world as a fundamental religious category. He arranged
the Exercises in order to facilitate an “election” or an individual choice about
one’s “vocation” in life. Ignatius shared with the other reformers of his time this
radically “modern” turn away from the collectivity and toward the individual
subject.
This rhetorical strategy finds expression in several of the “annotations” or
guidelines for the one who gives the Exercises to another. For example, Ignatius
insists that the Exercises “must be adapted to the condition of the one who is
to engage in them, that is, to his age, education, and talent. Exercises that an
exercitant could not easily bear, or from which one would derive no profit,
19
20
256. See St. Ignatius Loyola, The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, trans. and comm.
George E. Ganss (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1970), #414. All excerpts following refer to this edition.
When Ignatius’s secretary, Juan Alfonso de Polanco, commented upon the three ways of
making a decision set forth in the Exercises, he observed that the way of following one’s
feelings and desires was superior to a rational weighing of pros and cons. In following
one’s feelings, Polanco wrote, the person is guided “by a better light than human reason”
(O’Malley, 42). Polanco expresses the sixteenth-century mistrust of reason found in
figures as diverse as Luther, Montaigne, and Shakespeare; and the desire to locate a stable
foundation for convictions and decision-making within the individual subject. For context, see Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment
in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
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should not be given to one with little natural ability or of little physical
strength.”21 For those who are illiterate, Ignatius offers methods of meditation
that require no reading. For those who are educated but “engaged in public
affairs or necessary business,” Ignatius offers a shortened version of his meditations to be made within the normal routine of a politician’s or merchant’s daily
life. For those who have the leisure afforded by financial resources, he offers a
more radical version entailing complete withdrawal “from all friends and
acquaintances, and from all worldly cares.” Even when the exercitant wants to
make so noble a gesture as pronouncing vows of some sort, Ignatius warns that
“it is necessary to consider with great care the condition and endowments
of each individual. […] The more unstable in character [the director] knows
him to be, the more [the director] should forewarn and admonish him” against
taking hasty actions.22 Accommodation to the individual marks the “rhetorical” character of the Exercises.
The theological warrant for this character—and perhaps the most controversial claim of the Exercises—lies in the conviction that the person making
the retreat is to be “taught by God.”23 In the fifteenth annotation, Ignatius
warns the director not to influence the outcome of the exercitant’s “election.”
During the exercises, says Ignatius, “it is more suitable and much better that
the Creator and Lord himself communicate himself to the devout soul, embracing it with love, inciting it to praise of himself, and disposing it for the way that
will most enable the soul to serve him in the future.” He should “allow the
Creator to deal immediately with the creature, and the creature with its Creator
and Lord.”24 This extraordinary claim that God communicates “directly with
the creature” elicited charges that the Exercises were “scandalous and heretical” and associated with the alumbrados (or illuminati, i.e. enlightened ones).25
21
St. Ignatius Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, trans. Louis I. Puhl (Chicago:
Loyola University Press, 1951), Annotation 18. All excerpts following refer to this edition.
22 Spiritual Exercises, Annotations 18, 19, 20, and 14. The Exercises and its meditative format
had a wide-ranging influence throughout Europe, facilitating in many ways the continuing modern turn to the subject. For example, see Louis L. Martz, The Meditative Poem: An
Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse (New York: New York University Press, 1963); and
Gary Hatfield, “The Senses and the Fleshless Eye: The Meditations as Cognitive Exercises,”
in Essays on Descartes’ Meditations, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Los Angeles and
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 45–79.
23 O’Malley, 43.
24 Spiritual Exercises, Annotation 15, translation by O’Malley, 43.
25The alumbrados (or “enlightened ones” [illuminati]) sought spiritual perfection through
internal illumination and were pursued by authorities as pseudo-mystics. In the 1520s,
Ignatius and his early companions were suspected of being members of this movement,
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As early as 1546–1547 at Trent, just prior to the publication of the Exercises
(1548), Cardinal Marcello Cervini, a papal legate to the council, interviewed
Jesuit delegates about this claim of communication without mediation.26
The belief that God labors directly in the individual and that the individual
must then be accommodated was the fundamental premise of the Exercises.
Here the Exercises manifests itself as a quintessentially sixteenth-century document, a devotional expression of subjective individualism that shares insights
of the age’s religious reformers and humanist rhetoricians: Luther, Calvin,
Erasmus.
(2) Experiencias in Jesuit Training. Jesuits have been known for the lengthy
course of academic studies (about ten years) required prior to ordination.
Perhaps less known is the experiential structure of the first two years of Jesuit
life known as the novitiate. Here, too, the rhetorical character of the early
Jesuits’ world-view shaped the program of experiencias. Before a Jesuit formally entered the order by pronouncing first vows, he was asked in the novitiate to undergo “six principal testing experiencias” (following George Ganss,
“experimental experiences”) providing empirical data upon which a decision
for entrance could be made.27 In older religious orders, the novitiate had
been an apprenticeship in living within an enclosed cloister. But since the
Jesuits were intended to live dispersed in many different situations and among
different peoples, Ignatius devised this set of experiencias which would provide both superiors and applicants with empirical data for reflection and
decision.28
The turn to a posteriori subjective individual experience as the basis for
decision-making and certitude marks the method as strikingly “rhetorical.”
Here too, Ignatius directed that the individual be accommodated: “these
brought before the Inquisition in Alcalá, and spent forty-two days in prison awaiting the
verdict. Although they were found innocent, they were admonished to dress like the other
students and not to speak in public on religious matters until they had completed four
more years of study. O’Malley, 27. For context, see Alastair Hamilton, Heresy and Mysticism
in Sixteenth Century Spain: Alumbrados (Cambridge: J. Clarke, 1992); and Sluhovsky,
Believe Not Every Spirit.
26 O’Malley, 43.
27 Ganss observes: “The Spanish experiencia has three important meanings: (1) a testing, (2)
experience, the knowledge gained through doing or testing rather than instruction, and
(3) an experiment through which such knowledge is gained, often by trial and error […].
In Ignatius’s usage of experiencia, the emphasis shifts according to context from one of
these three meanings to another; but in whichever meaning the stress is found, the other
two are usually implied or connoted and color the first.” Ganss, Constitutions, 82n23.
28Ganss, Constitutions, 96n7.
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experiencias may be advanced, postponed, adapted, and in some case where
the superior approves, replaced by others, according to the persons, times,
places, and their contingencies.”29
The six experiencias consisted in the following: (1) making the Spiritual
Exercises for about a month in total seclusion; (2) serving another month in a
hospital, “helping and serving all, the sick and the well”; (3) making a monthlong pilgrimage without money and even in begging from door to door “to
grow accustomed to discomfort in food and lodging”; (4) employing oneself “in
various low and humble offices” within the Jesuit house; (5) explaining
Christian doctrine in public “to boys and other simple persons”; (6) preaching
or hearing confessions (if already ordained) or both.30
Each of these instructions was modified in some way so as to accommodate
the individual: “according to the capacity of the persons, according to what will
be taught to him in our Lord, and so forth”; “according to what seems better to
the candidate’s superior”; “what the occasion offers and what seems in our
Lord more profitable and suitable to the persons”; “in accordance with the
times, places, and capacity of all.”31
Finally, Ignatius specified the sorts of “testimonials” or “evidence” that each
of these “probationary experiencias” should yield: “testimony […] about the
good reputation he established” while in the hospital; “testimony […] that he
arrived there [on pilgrimage] without a complaint from anyone”; “his testimony will be the edification which he gave to all those in that house”; “he
should bring testimony from those places where he stayed for a noteworthy
time” while preaching and hearing confessions. In addition, other testimonials
were to be gathered that could help the decision-making process. Finally, when
such testimonials about the experiencias were not forthcoming, the reasons for
the lack were “to be investigated with great diligence, through efforts to learn
the truth about the entire matter.”32
All three aspects of the experiencias—the grounding in the “experience”
of the individual, the accommodation of particulars to the individual, and
the a posteriori “experimental” quality of gathering data for the drawing of a
conclusion—demonstrate “rhetorical” and “empirical” dimensions of the early
Jesuit vision. Focus on long years of intellectual preparation too easily overlook
this radically experiential aspect of Jesuit formation at one of its most crucial
junctures: the initial judgment about whether or not to enter the order.
29
30
31
32
Constitutions, [64].
Constitutions, [65–70].
Constitutions, [65–70].
Constitutions, [73–79].
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(3) Self-Representation. The Jesuit order has often been depicted as a tool of
the “Counter-Reformation,” the right arm of a centralizing papacy, and a quasimilitary inculcator of post-Tridentine order and discipline. Early Jesuit selfrepresentations, however, are strikingly lacking in such universalistic concerns.
Above all, the early Jesuits were ministers, committed to the “consolation of
souls” and the accommodation required in that pastoral task. Three examples
of such self-representation stand out: their own list of “desirable qualities” for
themselves; their attitude with respect to clothing; and the reasons they themselves gave for entering the order.
The early Jesuits employed a binary when criticizing others and exhorting
themselves: flexibility/rigidity.33 Prudence and good judgment—particularist
virtues of practical reason—demanded that Jesuits should be “flexible” and “not
rigid.” When Francis Xavier wrote from India, he asked for Jesuits “who knew
how to deal with others in tender fashion [amabilem] and [who were not] rigid,
wanting to control others by instilling a servile fear.” Juan Alfonso de Polanco,
Ignatius’s secretary, contrasted Jesuits with the contemporaneous Theatines
(founded 1524), recognizable “by the fear they aroused” and thus clashing with
the Jesuits’ “friendlier and more approachable style—familiariter.” Polanco later
assembled a list of sixteen qualities desirable in men seeking to enter the Society.
The third was “flexibility” (flexibilidad) in speculative and practical judgment.
“Hard heads” (duros de cabeça), he said, were not suited to Jesuit life.34
This same rhetorical quality of flexibility according to circumstances
revealed itself materially in the Jesuits’ clothing. Unlike older religious orders,
the Jesuits did not adopt a religious “habit,” that is, a distinctive type of dress
marking them out as members of a certain congregation. Polanco wrote rather
that Jesuits should be distinguished not by their “external habits but by the
example of their lives.” Jerónimo Nadal (another of Ignatius’s assistants), taking note of the fact that many people to whom Jesuits ministered found a religious habit “repugnant,” explained that Jesuits had “freedom of dress” so that
their work might be more “fruitful.”35 In external appearance as well as internal
dispositions, the overarching rule for the Jesuits was the rhetorical principle:
“To whom is this (self-) presentation addressed?”
Finally, Jesuits were attracted to the order by the very qualities that Polanco
represented as desirable. In 1561–1562, Nadal constructed and administered
33
34
35
O’Malley, 81–82.
See A. Lynn Martin, The Jesuit Mind: The Mentality of an Elite in Early Modern France
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 130.
O’Malley, 341.
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Accommodation As A Rhetorical Principle
359
“a remarkable thirty-point questionnaire” to Jesuits in Spain and Portugal asking, among other questions, “Why did you enter?” In the 1250 replies still extant,
men rarely cited universalist goals such as “converting the heathen or heretic.”
Rather, their replies were remarkably particularist:
Jesuits mentioned being attracted specifically to the Society over other
orders by the Jesuits’ cheerfulness, refinement, and graciousness—hilaritas, elegantia morum, suavitas. They sometimes also mentioned being
impressed by the purposefulness of the Jesuit community and by the
affection the Jesuits seemed to feel for one another.36
In these areas of self-representation—self-definition, external appearance,
and personal motivation—the early Jesuits exalted accommodation, adaptation, flexibility, generosity, and graciousness in particular dealings with individual men and women.
(4) Jesuit Preaching. Jesuits saw themselves primarily as ministers of the
word. Discourse was central to them in confessional practice, spiritual conversation, catechism, teaching, and so on. Perhaps no activity so defined the
earliest Jesuits for their contemporaries, however, as much as preaching.37
The amount of preaching and the variety of circumstances in which they
preached—“in the streets, in public squares and markets, in hospitals, in prisons, aboard ships in dock, in fortresses, on playing fields, in hospices or hostels,
in confraternities”—astonishes the contemporary reader, accustomed to
preaching being reserved for (or relegated to) Sunday services.38
Of the three traditional aims of preaching—to teach, to move, to please—
the early Jesuits saw the second as most important: to move.39 Drawing on
sixteenth-century Humanistic presuppositions, the Jesuits took for granted a
relationship between literary texts and the inculcation of virtue.40 The reading
of “good literature” was presumed to lead to the formation of a virtuous character, and a “good style” in rhetoric was one that persuaded (or moved) the
audience to choose some positive action.41 The Renaissance Humanist critique
of medieval scholastic rhetoric and education was “its failure to relate learning
36
37
38
39
40
41
Ibid., 55.
Ibid., 91ff.
Ibid., 93.
Ibid., 96.
Ibid., 208.
Ibid., 253.
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Schloesser
to a life of virtue and public service.”42 In its divorce of theory from practical
questions, Scholasticism had been stigmatized by Erasmus of Rotterdam
as “frigid.”43 For the Jesuits, then, preaching was above all rhetorical, “an act of
persuasion that entailed engagement of the imagination and emotions as
much as the intellect.” Jesuit preachers welcomed “an occasional swoon” and
found confirmation of their success in “sighs, moans, and especially tears,
whether of sadness or joy.”44
Jesuits assessed their own preaching by the change in conduct that it effected
in the audience, and they assumed that “a sermon that did not somehow touch
the feelings was no sermon at all.”45 In this they turned away from the “thematic” style of the medievals (the Scholastic Artes praedicandi) and toward
new theories (of Erasmus, for example) recovering the patristic employment
of classical rhetoric.”46 Nadal’s complaint that the Scholastic style of preaching
was “speculative and dry” echoed Ignatius’s own subtle sentiments in the
Constitutions: “[Jesuits] will exercise themselves in preaching and in delivering
sacred lectures in a manner suitable for the edification of the people, which is
different from the scholastic manner.”47 The only line in the entire Constitutions
devoted to preaching was an implicitly negative directive—Do not preach like
Scholastics!
The Jesuit ideal of preaching distinguished itself from “arid” Scholasticism
by its fundamental assumption: the purpose of rhetoric is not so much to
impart conceptual information as to persuade the audience to choose some
positive action. Just as in the Exercises, preaching required accommodation to
the individual so that deep feelings might be elicited and point toward a choice.
42
43
44
45
46
47
Ibid., 208.
Ibid., 253.
Ibid., 97.
Ibid., 96–97.
Ibid., 99. O’Malley’s immersion in the study of rhetorical forms extends back to his doctoral dissertation and comes into the present. See his Giles of Viterbo on Church and
Reform. A Study in Renaissance Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1968); Praise and Blame in
Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Orators of the Papal Court, ca.
1450–1521 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1979); “Luther the Preacher” and “Content and
Rhetorical Forms in Sixteenth-Century Treatises on Preaching,” in Renaissance Eloquence:
Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. James J. Murphy (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983), 238–252; “Erasmus and the History of Sacred Rhetoric:
The Ecclesiastes of 1535,” Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 5 (1985): 1–29; Four
Cultures of the West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); What Happened at
Vatican II (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).
Constitutions, [402]. Emphasis mine.
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Accommodation As A Rhetorical Principle
361
These feelings were presumed to be the hermeneutical key in interpreting the
will of God “by a better light than human reason” (Polanco).48
(5) Jesuit Education. Finally, this rhetorical assumption of the Humanists
undergird the enterprise for which the Jesuits have become most famous,
namely, as “schoolmasters of Europe.” In 1556, Pedro de Ribadeneyra wrote
a letter explaining to Philip II of Spain why Jesuits were expending so much
energy on founding schools. He exclaimed: “All the well-being of Christianity
and of the whole world depends on the proper education of youth.”49
Undergirding this enthusiastic outburst lay fundamental Renaissance presuppositions: “good literature” leads to virtue, learning must be related to a life of
public service, and Humanistic studies form upright character—pietas.50
In 1599, after years of experimentation and evaluation, the Ratio studiorum
was finally published, a prescriptive systematizing of every aspect and level
of Jesuit education.51 The lower-level Jesuit schools required three years of
“grammar,” one year of “humanities” (poetry, history), and one year of “rhetoric” (classic oratory).52 Excerpts from the Ratio indicate the degree to which
48O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 42. The early Jesuits await their “history of emotions.” For this
historiographical development, see Jan Plamper, “The History of Emotions: An Interview
with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns,” History and Theory 49, no. 2
(May 2010): 237–265; Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle
Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Representing Emotions. New Connections in
the Histories of Art, Music and Medicine, eds. Penelope Gouke and Helen Hills (Burlington:
Ashgate, 2005); Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” American Historical
Review 107, no. 3 (June 2002), 821–845; and William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A
Framework for the History of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See
also Jerome Neu, A Tear is an Intellectual Thing: The Meanings of Emotion (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000). See also the “History of Emotions Blog” http://emotionsblog
.history.qmul.ac.uk/ hosted by the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions
at the University of London (http://www.qmul.ac.uk/emotions); and the Australian
Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions website (http://www
.historyofemotions.org.au/about-the-centre.aspx), which includes a project on Jesuit
emotions directed by Yasmin Haskell (http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/our-research
/research-programs/meanings/meanings-project-list/y-haskell-research-projects.aspx).
49O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 209.
50 Ibid., 208–210.
51 For comparisons between the 1586 draft and the 1599 final texts, see Marco Forlivesi,
“Francisco Suárez and the rationes studiorum of the Society of Jesus,” in Francisco Suárez
and His Legacy: The Impact of Suárezian Metaphysics and Epistemology on Modern
Philosophy, ed. Marco Sgarbi (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2010), 77–90; reviewed in Schloesser,
“Recent Works in Jesuit Philosophy.”
52O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 215.
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Schloesser
the Jesuits incorporated the Renaissance Humanistic project. See, for example,
the “Rules for Professors of Rhetoric”:
The grade of this class […] aims at an education in perfect eloquence,
which includes two most important subjects, oratory and poetics (out of
these two, however, the leading emphasis should always be given to oratory) and it does not only serve what is useful but also indulges in what is
ornamental. Still, by and large, it can be said to consist in three things
especially: rules for speaking, for style, and for scholarly learning.53
Prescribing authors, the Ratio notes that “Style should be taken almost exclusively from Cicero (although the most approved historians and poets are sampled also).” As for Greek: “The Greek lesson, whether on orators or on historians
or on poets, should only be on the ancient classical authors: Demosthenes,
Plato, Thucydides, Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and others like this (provided they
are expurgated).” However, an exception is to be made for Church Fathers:
“Saints Gregory Nazianzen, Basil, and Chrysostom should rightly be included
with them.”54 The Church Fathers had “every right” to be studied in addition to
pagan authors by reason of their eloquence.
Signaling the young male audience to whom these studies were directed,
the “Rules for the Professor of Humanities” mandated the study of “Cicero
alone of the orators,” Caesar, Sallust, Livy, and Curtius from the historians; and
from the poets, especially Virgil, “setting aside the Eclogues and the fourth
book of the Aeneid.”55 Virgil’s chapter narrating Dido’s passion for Aeneas
apparently would have conflicted with the final goal of Jesuit education
expressed in the “Rules Common to All the Professors of the Lower Classes”:
“The teacher should train the youths who are entrusted to the Society’s education in such a way that, along with letters, they also and above all interiorize the
moral behavior worthy of a Christian.”56 The equation is Humanistic: proper
letters form proper character.
53
54
55
56
The Ratio Studiorum: The Official Plan for Jesuit Education, trans. and ann. Claude Nicholas
Pavur, S.J. (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2005), 115 [#375]. On “style,” compare John
O’Malley: “Style in this sense is not an ornament, not a superficial affectation, but expression of deepest personality. It is the ultimate expression of meaning. Le style, c’est l’homme
même. My style—how I behave—expresses what I am in my truest and deepest self.”
O’Malley, “Vatican II: Did Anything Happen?,” Theological Studies 67 (2006): 3–33, at
30–31; reprinted in Vatican II: Did Anything Happen?, ed. David G. Schultenover (New
York: Continuum, 2007), 52–91, at 82.
Ratio, 163 [387].
Ratio, 166 [395].
Ratio, 137 [325]. Emphasis mine.
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Accommodation As A Rhetorical Principle
363
In the higher levels (e. g., at the Roman College) were taught logic, metaphysics, ethics, mathematics, Aristotelian physics, and theology. Two subjects
in theology are of special interest with respect to the Jesuit rhetorical tradition.
The first (as noted above) is casuistry. The Jesuits introduced “cases of conscience” into their formal university curriculum and became casuistry’s strong­
est proponents.57 By examining individual “cases of conscience,” casuistry
brought moral absolutes from abstractions down to “the more lowly human
reality of ‘times, places, and circumstances.’”58 Toulmin remarks elsewhere:
“Rhetoric and casuistry were mutual allies. It is not surprising to find the
Jesuits, who were dedicated to teaching classical rhetoric in their colleges,
become the leading exponents of casuistry.”59
Casuistry eventually fell victim to the assaults of seventeenth-century rigorists like Pascal as well as to its own scholastic origins, namely, the tendency
“to tie up every loose end and resolve every possible doubt.” However, at the
center of casuistry was the rhetorical principle of accommodation, and the
desire to connect abstract moral reasoning with genuine practical problems:
problems of “time, place, persons, and circumstance.”60
A second theological subject of special interest is the privileged study of
Thomas Aquinas in the university. Given apparent Jesuit disdain for “scholastic” preaching and education, Thomas’s place in the curriculum comes as a
surprise.61 However, O’Malley argues that Aquinas’s “theology of reconciliation” between the Bible and Aristotle—that is, the assumed compatibility
between “nature and grace” and “reason and revelation”—provided metaphysical grounding for the Jesuits’ humanistic practices.62 Since grace, far from
opposing nature, “built upon” nature, Jesuits felt justified in using all the
available “human means” for their purposes.63 Moreover, since God was to be
“found in all things,” Jesuits considered themselves authorized to employ
57O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 238.
58 Ibid., 144.
59 Jensen and Toulmin, Abuse of Casuistry, 88; quoted in O’Malley, 145. For casuistry bibliography, see Schloesser, “Recent Works in Jesuit Philosophy,” note 9.
60O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 144–145.
61 On the question of Aquinas and Jesuits’ seemingly contradictory interest in nominalism
(especially in Francisco Suárez), see Schloesser “Recent Works in Jesuit Philosophy.”
62O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 249.
63See Constitutions, [147–162]. For the classic typology set out regarding possible relationships between Christ and culture (or “grace and nature”), see H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ
and Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1951); compare Schloesser, “The Unbearable
Lightness of Being: Re-sourcing Catholic Intellectual Traditions,” Cross Currents 58, no. 1
(Spring 2008): 65–94.
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Schloesser
means that scandalized their contemporaries.64 When Pope Paul IV instituted
the Index of Prohibited Books in 1559 and placed Erasmus’s works on it, the rector at Perugia “epitomized the quandary of many Jesuit schools” when he
exclaimed: “‘We have no books [for certain classes] except those of Erasmus!’”65
Finally, the radically innovative character of the Jesuits’ self-education
may be seen by contrast with the Dominicans’. In their thirteenth-century
Constitutions, the student-members of the Dominican order were neither to
read books by “pagans” (that is, writers of the classical world) nor to learn any
other “secular sciences” except by dispensation: “let these student-members
and all others read only books of theology.”66 However, Jesuits moved in precisely the opposite direction. In addition to grammar, rhetoric, and humanities, they taught and wrote about mathematics, astronomy, physics, and other
sciences; they ran observatories and laboratories; and they mastered theater,
dance, music, fencing, horsemanship, and architecture as well. Although the
Jesuits may not have anticipated it, their engagement with secular culture
became a hallmark of the order. As a result of the schools, the Jesuits began to
see themselves, without conflict, as having a cultural mission as well as a religious one. As O’Malley would write a decade after The First Jesuits, the classroom was “the center of the school, and there the pagans reigned. […] [Jesuits]
knew their Cicero better than they knew their Bible.”67
From the Spiritual Exercises through the Constitutions to the Ratio studiorum, the rhetorical principle marked Jesuits’ ministries and visions: in methods of meditation, experiencias in training, self-representations in thought and
externals, confessional practice and counseling, preaching and teaching. At
least in principle and at their best, early Jesuits aspired to accommodate the
individual person with respect to “time, place, and circumstance.” They did so
as Renaissance Humanists, firmly convinced of the fundamental reconciliation between grace and nature, revelation and reason, sacred and pagan.
Accommodation Abroad: Matteo Ricci and the Chinese Rites
Examples abound of early Jesuit missionary accommodation abroad in the
so-called Age of Discovery.68 A brief look at the mission of Matteo Ricci and
64 Constitutions, [288]; Spiritual Exercises, [230]-[237].
65O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 314.
66 Ibid., 241.
67 John O’Malley, “Jesuit History: A New Hot Topic,” America (9 May 2005).
68 Schloesser, “Jesuit Hybrids,” 117–120.
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Accommodation As A Rhetorical Principle
365
the eventual fate of the Chinese Rites provides a thick description of the
rhetorical character of Jesuit ministry as it was practiced in one place toward
the end of the sixteenth century.69 Scholars have noted the cultural importance of the early missionaries’ historical location. Already in 1967, George L.
Harris proposed that the impasse of the wars of religion (1562–1598) had led to
a hope that “if force could not prevail, persuasion might.”70 In 1988, just prior
to the O’Malley-Toulmin publications, Bonnie Oh proposed that Jesuit missionaries, originating in the “unsettled and yet creatively diverse atmosphere”
of the 1500s, “were more receptive and more willing to accommodate to different ideas and cultures.”71 The synergy produced by Renaissance rhetorical
ideals converging with historical realities produced extraordinary Jesuit crosscultural experiments. Moreover, as Wolfgang Reinhard incisively observed,
these experiments (and their eventual suppression) had profoundly moral
concrete results. Jesuit accommodation was “one of the few serious alternatives to the otherwise brutal ethno-centrism of the European expansion over
the earth.”72
69
70
71
72
The bibliography is large and expanding. For works published prior to 1991, see
Bibliography of the Jesuit Mission in China: ca. 1580-ca. 1680, eds. Erik Zürcher, Nicolas
Standaert, and Adrianus Dudink (Leiden: Leiden University, 1991). A sampling of recent
publications includes: Mary Laven, Mission to China: Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit Encounter
with the East (London: Faber and Faber, 2011); Michela Fontana, Matteo Ricci: A Jesuit in
the Ming Court, trans. Paul Metcalfe (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011); R.
Po-chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci, 1552–1610 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010); Florence C. Hsia, Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits and their
Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009);
Trent Pomplun, Jesuit on the Roof of the World: Ippolito Desideri’s Mission to Tibet (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Liam Matthew Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit
Mission to China, 1579–1724 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Sangkeun Kim,
Strange Names of God: The Missionary Translation of the Divine Name and the Chinese
Responses to Matteo Ricci’s “Shangti” in Late Ming China, 1583–1644 (New York: Peter Lang,
2004); Lionel M. Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal
Civilization (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
George L. Harris, “The Mission of Matteo Ricci, S.J.: A Case Study of an Effort at Guided
Culture Change in China in the Sixteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., Catholic University of
America, 1967), 231. Emphasis mine.
Bonnie B.C. Oh, “Introduction,” East Meets West: The Jesuits in China. 1582–1773, eds. Oh
and Charles E. Ronan (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1988), xix.
Wolfgang Reinhard, “Gegenreformation als Modernisierung? Prologomena zu einer
Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitaltes,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 68 (1977): 227–
252, at 241; quoted in Oh, “Introduction,” xvii.
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Schloesser
Ricci was born in Macerata, Italy in 1552 and entered the Society of Jesus
in 1571.73 He studied Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, as well as mathematics with
Clavius in Florence and Rome. After studies, Ricci was sent to Goa, India in
1578, left for Macao in 1582, and made his way northward over the next eighteen years, living in Zhaoqing, Shaozhou, Nanchang, Nanjing, and finally
Beijing. Meanwhile, in 1577, Alessandro Valignano, Ricci’s former superior in
the novitiate, became the head of the Eastern mission. Valignano came to
Macao, and instituted a new policy of evangelization—“cultural accommodation.”74 Ricci found in Valignano not only a former mentor but also a willing
superior and enthusiastic colleague.
Jonathan Spence describes Ricci’s eighteen years (1583–1601) in China before
settling in Beijing as “a type of ascent in sensitivity in which he learned to take
Chinese values ever more seriously.”75 Ricci’s initial success was his 1584 map
of the world—the mappamondo. Ricci brought his map from Europe, translated the terms and place names into Chinese, and “positioned China toward
the center of the map, thus giving the Chinese their traditional pride of place
as the ‘middle Kingdom’ (Chung Kuo).”76 Ricci interpreted Europeans and the
world by accommodating the Chinese standpoint.77
73
74
75
76
77
For a brief yet substantial overview, see Nicolas Standaert’s online essay written for the
400th anniversary of Ricci’s death: “Matteo Ricci, Shaped by the Chinese” (21 May 2010):
<http://www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/20100521_1.htm>
For Valignano references, see Standaert, “Shaped by the Chinese”; and Schloesser, “Jesuit
Hybrids,” 134n28. See also Standaert and M. Antoni J. Üçerler’s essays (on China and
Japan) in The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, ed. Thomas Worcester (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Jonathan D. Spence, “Matteo Ricci and the Ascent to Peking,” in Oh and Ronan, eds., East
Meets West, 13. See also Spence’s classic The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York:
Viking Penguin, 1984), now thirty years old.
Theodore N. Foss, “A Western Interpretation of China: Jesuit Cartography,” in Oh and
Ronan, eds., East Meets West, 209–251, at 211. Compare Foss, “La cartografia di Matteo
Ricci,” in Atti del convegno internazionale di Studi Ricciani, Macerata-Roma, 22–25 ottobre
1982, ed. Maria Cigliano (Macerata: Centro Studi Ricciani, 1984), 177–195; Boleslaw
Szcześniak, “Matteo Ricci’s Maps of China,” Imago Mundi 11 (1954): 127–136, at 129; and
Pasquale M. D’Elia, S.J., Il Mappamondo Cinese del P. Matteo Ricci, S.J. (Terza Edizione,
Pechino, 1602) Conservato presso la Biblioteca Vaticana (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica
Vaticana, 1938); cited in Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism, 312n12; Nicolas Standaert,
“Matteo Ricci en het probleem van de inculturatie,” Streven (Antwerp) 51 (July 1984):
915–927.
For the ideological function of Renaissance cartography, see David Harvey, The Condition
of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Basic Blackwell, 1989), 246 ff.
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Accommodation As A Rhetorical Principle
367
During this first period, Ricci studied Confucianism along with language in
order to debate and counter opposing claims of Buddhists. In 1591, Ricci translated the Four Books of the Confucian canon into Latin for the benefit of his
fellow Jesuits’ studies. Spence shows how Ricci’s attitude toward his translation drew on the classical and Humanistic learning of his European studies.
For example, he spoke of the role of rhetoric in the Four Books as being “in the
moral vein of Seneca” or the pattern of argument as being “comparable to
Cicero’s Family Epistles.” In his 1595 Treatise on Friendship, Ricci deliberately
used Roman and Latin models to convey ideas because “he felt such models
would have a greater initial impact than images drawn from the Old or New
Testament.” Cicero, Seneca, Ovid, Plutarch and Quintilian “bear far more of the
burden” in the Treatise than Augustine, Ambrose, or Chrysostom.78 In both
form and content, Ricci hybridized Renaissance Humanist rhetorical culture
with found Confucian elements.
In 1592, after the Jesuit mission in Shaozhou was attacked by local residents,
Ricci and Valignano met to discuss the mission’s problem “based upon experience of nearly a decade”—a concrete example of experiencia as both “experience” and “experiment.”79 One intriguing outcome of that meeting was the
decision to adopt a different habit of dress. (As noted above, Nadal had argued
for Jesuit “freedom of dress” on the basis of accommodating those who found
a religious habit “repugnant.”80) Until that time, Ricci and his companions had
modeled their dress and behavior on that of Buddhist monks. However, the
experience of the attack alerted Ricci and Valignano to unseen attitudes: many
viewed the Buddhist monks as “lax and corrupt.”
In 1594, after searching for another cultural analogue, Ricci and his companions adopted the yellow silk robes of Confucian scholars and began their work
among the literati. This change in audience and attire brought the Jesuits success, and they never went back to former ways.81 This episode supports Harris’s
thesis that the
hallmark of Ricci’s cultural approach was its empiricism. This was manifested in continuous and systematic study of the human environment in
which he was working, willingness to discard assumptions which did not
78
79
80
81
Spence, “Matteo Ricci,” 15 ff.
Harris, 21. Emphasis mine. For a parallel in the physical sciences see my review of Marcus
Hellyer, Catholic Physics: Jesuit Natural Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2005); in Schloesser, “Recent Works in Jesuit Philosophy.”
O’Malley, 341.
See Oh, “Introduction,” xx; Harris, 18–21.
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Schloesser
stand the test of observation or practice, readiness to learn from native
friends and enemies alike, and practical skill in avoiding unassailable
barriers and in focusing his efforts on openings in the society.82
About a decade later, Ricci published his masterpiece, True Meaning of the
Lord of Heaven (1603). By adapting the Confucian terms t’ien (heaven) and
Shang-ti (Lord on High), Ricci invented the term T’ien-chu to refer to God:
“Lord of Heaven.” Set in a Platonic dialogue form reminiscent of Erasmus’s
The Godly Feast (Convivium religiosum, 1522), Ricci’s True Meaning is a detailed
Christian catechism accommodating Confucian ideas and values. In the first
part, Ricci sets out proofs for the existence of God, using Confucian categories
to criticize the Taoist concept of “non-being” and the Buddhist concept of
“voidness.”83 Turning to the question of souls, Ricci then provides a demonstration for the soul’s existence by referring to Confucian classics, differentiating
human souls from plant and animal souls, and concluding that a monadal view
of corporeal existence is impossible.
The second part of the treatise focuses on the Renaissance Humanist’s rhetorical aim—namely, human virtue—by demonstrating the existence of both
thought and intention and concluding that good and evil actions are the products of intention. He then deploys Chinese classical texts to argue that heaven
and hell are the destinations of the good and evil after death. Finally, Ricci
treats divine worship and the imperative of self-cultivation, clarifying celibacy
by drawing parallels with the virtue of filial piety.
Bernard Hung-Kay Luk summarizes:
[Ricci and his companions] took the position that there was nothing
incongruous between Catholic doctrines and what they held to be the
“pristine” Confucianism of the classical texts. Anything in contemporaneous Confucianism that conflicted with their teaching, the missionaries
attributed to a corrupted transmission of the doctrines of the Chinese
sage. They equated the heaven of the Classics with the Christian God,
and rejected Taoism, Buddhism, and the Neo-Confucian metaphysics
that grew out of the Sung synthesis of these schools with older forms
of Confucianism. Confucius thus became, so to speak, a Chinese John
the Baptist, preparing the way for the coming of the Lord. The Jesuits
82
83
Harris, 232.
For the summary that follows, see “Introduction,” The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven
(T’ien-chu Shih-i), trans. Douglas Lancashire and Peter Hu Kuo-chen (St. Louis: The
Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1985), 23ff. This edition is a bi-lingual edition of the work.
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Accommodation As A Rhetorical Principle
369
contended that they were attempting to restore the original Confucianism
and to bring it to its fruition.84
Although well-intentioned, these Age of Discovery experiences were naive.
Hybridization carries both peril and promise in terms of maintaining selfidentity while accommodating the Other. What are the boundaries delineating
a culture’s non-negotiable identity markers? When has the self not merely
shared in the Other’s identity but actually become that Other?85
Both the genius and danger of accommodating hybridization are exemplified in Ricci’s account of Jesus of Nazareth. Out of the entire True Meaning,
Ricci devotes only one paragraph to the life of Christ:
[The Lord of Heaven] thereupon acted with great compassion, descended
into this world Himself to save it, and experienced everything [experienced by man]. One thousand six hundred and three years ago, in the
year Kengshen, in the second year after Emperor Ai of the Han dynasty
adopted the reign title Yuan-shou, on the third day following the winter
solstice, He selected a chaste woman who had never experienced sexual
intercourse to be His mother, became incarnate within her and was born.
His name was Jesus, the meaning of which is “the one who saves the
world.” He established His own teachings and taught for thirty-three
years in the West. He then reascended to Heaven. These were concrete
actions of the Lord of Heaven.86
The passage startles the Western reader: Ricci never mentions Christ’s crucifixion. (Had Luther still been alive, he would surely have named this the folly of
the “theologian of glory” versus the “theologian of the cross.”) Even given the
plurality of theologies of redemption throughout the history of Christianity—
some of which de-emphasize the crucifixion in favor of the incarnation—this
seeming suppression of the primitive kerygma is remarkable.87
84
Bernard Hung-Kay Luk, “A Serious Matter of Life and Death: Learned Conversations at
Foochow in 1627,” in Oh and Ronan, eds., East Meets West, 173–206, at 174.
85 My thought about anxieties over perceived threats of contamination and identity loss
have been especially marked by three works: Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and
Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001); Sander L. Gilman, Disease and Representation:
Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Susan
Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Vintage Books, 1979 [1978]). For my review of
Bynum see Theological Studies 64, no. 2 (June 2003): 411–413.
86Ricci, True Meaning, [580].
87 The translators for the Jesuit Institute attempt to explain away this astonishing omission.
However, the long amount of time Ricci spent perfecting this book, and the fact that the
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Schloesser
In effect, Ricci composed a radically “rhetorical” piece in both form and content: in form, because he adapted to his audience in a shrewdly accommodating way; in content, because the center of gravity is Humanism’s focus on the
citizen’s life of virtue. Ricci’s work is at once both Confucian and Renaissance.
The ultimate aim of literature and religion in the True Meaning is the production of virtue, the formation of character, and the obligations of the individual
in society. As such, it is also Aristotelian and Thomistic in its delineation of
“virtue ethics.” But anxieties over contamination of the self and loss of identity
to the Other remain: Is it necessarily “Christian”?
This gnawing question underlay the controversy and eventually tragic outcome of the Chinese Rites.88 Dominicans attacked Jesuits, accusing them of
laxity in matters of the cult of ancestors and reverence for Confucius. In a long
line of decisions, a number of popes repudiated the pronouncements of their
predecessors (some having been made “in perpetuity”) as the controversy
dragged on.89 The episode closed with the papal condemnations by Clement
XI (Ex illa die, 1715) and Benedict XIV (Ex qua singulari, 1742). Jesuit “laxity” in
China was seen as a symptom of a much broader decadence found also in
moral theology. Beginning in the 1650s—the date correlating exactly with
Toulmin’s thesis—Dominicans attacked Jesuit probabilists of “immorality,”
substituting instead their own rigorist probabiliorism. They were aided by
papal condemnations of “laxism” in 1665–1666. Contemporaneously, Jansenists
also (with Pascal as their most eloquent spokesman) assaulted Jesuit casuistry
as immoral. Note the beginning and ending dates of Pascal’s Provincial Letters:
January 1656 - March 1657.90
88
89
90
only book he published later was Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, suggests otherwise. In his
preface to the American edition, Shusako Endo writes that Buddhist mentality “has
little tolerance for any kind of transcendent being who judges humans harshly, then
punishes them.” Endo, A Life of Jesus, trans. Richard A. Schuchert, S.J. (New York: Paulist
Press, 1978), 1.
See, for example, David E. Mungello, The Chinese Rites Controversy: Its History and Mean­
ing (Nettetal: Steyler, 1994); J. S. Cummins, A Question of Rites: Friar Domingo Navarrete
and the Jesuits in China (Brookfield, Vt: Ashgate, 1993); George Minamiki, The Chinese Rites
Controversy from Its Beginning to Modern Times (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1985).
See also the classic by Malcolm V. Hay, Failure in the Far East: Why and How the Breach
Between the Western World and China First Began (Philadelphia: Dufour Editions, 1957).
For a chronological survey see Schloesser, “Jesuit Hybrids,” 121–122.
The plot becomes even more twisted under the Jesuit General Tirso González. See JeanPascal Gay, Jesuit Civil Wars: Theology, Politics, and Government under Tirso González
(1687–1705) (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012); reviewed in Schloesser, “Recent Works in Jesuit
Philosophy.”
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In Toulmin’s terms, rigorism can be seen as the application of seventeenthcentury “Scientific Revolution” mathematical ideals—notably, deductive certainty (both Pascal and Descartes being mathematicians)—to moral matters.
This quest for certainty ignored the ancient distinction drawn in Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics:
For it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class
of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits: it is evidently
equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and
to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.91
Dominicans, Chinese Rites, and Jansenists were just three of many factors
leading to the expulsion of the Jesuits from Portugal in 1759, France in 1764,
Spain in 1767, and the eventual papal suppression of the Society in 1773.
Conclusion
The Chinese Rites controversy and the suppression of the Jesuits have tended
to be explained—or have resisted attempts at explanation—in political and
economic terms, including expansionist colonialist policies of Portugal and
Spain and domestic political contests in France.92 However, using an O’MalleyToulmin paradigm as a useful lens for analysis can help one outline a thoughtprovoking sketch of the intellectual landscape as well.
If Toulmin is correct, the years following 1648 saw the reaction of a “counterRenaissance.” Humanism’s preference for the particular—its attention to the
limits of rationality, to epistemological modesty, and to the accommodation of
plurality—took on negative evaluations in a Europe devastated by ideological
wars. Thinkers of the 1650s looked elsewhere for more rigorous paradigms of
91
92
Aristotle; quoted in Lorraine Daston, “Probability and Evidence,” in The Cambridge
History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, vol. 2, eds. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1108–1144, at 1108. Compare Henry G. Van
Leeuwen, The Problem of Certainty in English Thought 1630–1690 (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1963).
Jonathan Wright cautions: “Crucially, we must abandon the notion of a simple, over-arching explanation of the Suppression.” Wright, “The Suppression and Restoration,” in The
Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, 263–277, at 263. For the classic account in English,
see Sydney F. Smith, The Suppression of the Society of Jesus, ed. Joseph A. Munitiz
(Leominster: Gracewing, 2004); originally published as a series of nineteen instalments in
The Month (February 1902-August 1903).
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Schloesser
thought, to universal principles, timeless formulae, and moral modes of reasoning abstracted from every particular context. Most specifically, they aspired
to the certainty promised by mathematics, astronomy, and the new physics.
Jansenism’s rise in France demonstrated a parallel kind of “rigorism,” a vision of
human nature no longer content with “probability,” a preference for Parmenides
over Heraclitus. Fiery papal condemnations, stoked by rigorist Dominicans
and others, demonstrated an emerging anxiety over Jesuits not merely accommodating Confucian culture but having actually become that Other. Perhaps
they were now merely passing for Christian. Closing Jesuit missions in Paraguay,
China, and elsewhere would have catastrophic consequences.
An O’Malley-Toulmin paradigm suggests that the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit controversies were more than political and economic.
They mark, in effect, the turning of a tide: from rhetoric to logic, particular to
universal, local to general, timely to timeless. The paradigm locates the first
Jesuits squarely among the ranks of the very first “moderns,” Renaissance
Humanists who set limits to medieval Scholasticism by advocating epistemological modesty and moderation. The paradigm also suggests further consideration of the vicissitudes of the Jesuit preference for the particular as a singular
marker of identity. Finally, it illustrates the tragic cost in human terms of the
new version of “modernity” that arose in the seventeenth century: a version
challenged during the post-Cold War 1990s and beyond, a postmodern age of
hybridizing accommodation.
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