Accommodation As a Rhetorical Principle Twenty Years After John O’Malley’S the First Jesuits (1993)

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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-twentieth- century “postmodernity.”

Keywords accommodation – casuistry – Chinese Rites – cultural hybridity – rhetoric – Spiritual Exercises – Matteo Ricci – Alessandro Valignano – Stephen Toulmin

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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 thor- oughly 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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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 counter- Renaissance 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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350 Schloesser 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 oratori- cal 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 insti- tutions 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 trium- phant 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 inexorabil- ity. 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 351 repression of an earlier Renaissance version of modernity by a later counter- Renaissance. 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 Toulmin, 11–15. For the problem of periodization, see Schloesser “Recent Works in Jesuit Philosophy.” 11 Ibid., 16ff. 12 Ibid., 29. 13 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 can- not 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 simultane- ously 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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Accommodation As A Rhetorical Principle 353 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 Toulmin, 34. 16 Ibid. Emphasis mine. 17 See Josef Fuchs, S.J., Personal Responsibility and Christian Morality, trans. William Cleves, et al. (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1983), 214. 18 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-modern- ist 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,

19 256. 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. 20 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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Accommodation As A Rhetorical Principle 355 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 contro- versial 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, embrac- ing 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 hereti- cal” 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 continu- ing 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. 25 The 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 for- mally 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 pro- vide 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. 28 Ganss, Constitutions, 96n7.

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Accommodation As A Rhetorical Principle 357 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 month- long 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 Constitutions, [64]. 30 Constitutions, [65–70]. 31 Constitutions, [65–70]. 32 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 quasi- military inculcator of post-Tridentine order and discipline. Early Jesuit self- representations, 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 O’Malley, 81–82. 34 See A. Lynn Martin, The Jesuit Mind: The Mentality of an Elite in Early Modern France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 130. 35 O’Malley, 341.

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“a remarkable thirty-point questionnaire” to Jesuits in Spain and Portugal ask- ing, 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—hilar- itas, 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 conver- sation, 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 pris- ons, 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 Ibid., 55. 37 Ibid., 91ff. 38 Ibid., 93. 39 Ibid., 96. 40 Ibid., 208. 41 Ibid., 253.

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360 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 “the- matic” 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 Ibid., 208. 43 Ibid., 253. 44 Ibid., 97. 45 Ibid., 96–97. 46 Ibid., 99. O’Malley’s immersion in the study of rhetorical forms extends back to his doc- toral 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). 47 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

48 O’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). 49 O’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.” 52 O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 215.

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362 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 exclu- sively from Cicero (although the most approved historians and poets are sam- pled 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 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. 54 Ratio, 163 [387]. 55 Ratio, 166 [395]. 56 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 rig- orists 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 reconcilia- tion” between the Bible and Aristotle—that is, the assumed compatibility between “nature and grace” and “reason and revelation”—provided metaphys- ical 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

57 O’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. 60 O’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.” 62 O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 249. 63 See Constitutions, [147–162]. For the classic typology set out regarding possible relation- ships 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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364 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 rec- tor 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 pre- cisely 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 class- room 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 reconcilia- tion 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]. 65 O’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 impor- tance 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 cross- cultural 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 alterna- tives to the otherwise brutal ethno-centrism of the European expansion over the earth.”72

69 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). 70 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. 71 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. 72 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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366 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, trans- lated 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 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): 74 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). 75 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. 76 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. 77 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 trans- lated 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 mani- fested in continuous and systematic study of the human environment in which he was working, willingness to discard assumptions which did not

78 Spence, “Matteo Ricci,” 15 ff. 79 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.” 80 O’Malley, 341. 81 See Oh, “Introduction,” xx; Harris, 18–21.

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368 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 demonstra- tion 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 prod- ucts 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 Harris, 232. 83 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 self- identity 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 exempli- fied 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. 86 Ricci, 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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370 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 produc- tion 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

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. 88 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). 89 For a chronological survey see Schloesser, “Jesuit Hybrids,” 121–122. 90 The plot becomes even more twisted under the Jesuit General Tirso González. See Jean- Pascal 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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Accommodation As A Rhetorical Principle 371

In Toulmin’s terms, rigorism can be seen as the application of seventeenth- century “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’Malley- Toulmin paradigm as a useful lens for analysis can help one outline a thought- provoking sketch of the intellectual landscape as well. If Toulmin is correct, the years following 1648 saw the reaction of a “counter- Renaissance.” 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 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). 92 Jonathan Wright cautions: “Crucially, we must abandon the notion of a simple, over-arch- ing 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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372 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 eigh- teenth-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 consider- ation 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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