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The Passion(S) of Jesuit Latin — Brill

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The Passion(S) of Jesuit Latin — Brill Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World The Passion(s) of Jesuit Latin (10,799 words) ¶ Was there ever such a thing as Jesuit Latin, and if so, how and why did it die? By the mid-eighteenth century, Article Table of Contents philosophes such as Jean le Rond d’Alembert seem to have associated belletristic Latin primarily with the Society of Hearts on Fire: The Engine of ‘aemulatio’ Jesus, and with a perniciously reactionary world view. Knowledge of Latin was necessary for reading the works Other Minds, Other Hearts of Horace or Tacitus, the Port Royal alumnus conceded, Further Reading but original literary composition in Latin was absurd. In the preface to the Encyclopédie, d’Alembert endorsed Latin’s continued use as an international language of science and philosophy, of erudition—to which he was not in principle opposed1—, but his (disingenuous?) resignation to the fact that the old language was, for all that, on its way out, no doubt hastened its march to an early French grave. Jesuit-educated Dutch physician, Gerard Nicolaas Heerkens (1726–1801), in his youth an acolyte of Voltaire and a frequenter of the philosophes, would scoff in the footnotes to an ornithological work: ‘That d’Alembert, a man of such great judgment, licensed only the explicators of scientific matters to write in Latin [sc. in the Preface to the Encyclopédie], but to write it in any old way—lest, that is, anyone who was going to write plainly should waste their time. But that writer will waste his time who is scarcely understood, and who is understood with such difficulty that he is therefore rejected’.2 But it is in the third volume of the Encyclopédie, under the rubric, ‘Collège’, that the sometime translator of Tacitus reveals the true extent of his animus against the Latin culture of the Society of Jesus. D’Alembert writes scathingly of the back-to-front education of the ( Jesuit) college system, bemoaning the fact that young boys were compelled to devote the best years of their lives to the mastery of Latin verse and rhetorical composition.3 They wasted their time on frivolous and pedantic tragedies and comedies, in effect learning how to talk about nothing (language) before acquiring, almost as an afterthought, a mere smattering of something (science).4 The Jesuits’ Latin was by implication a Latin designed to control and distract, puerile and decadent. Of course, the Jesuits of the eighteenth century (and of the seventeenth, for that matter) were no scientific slouches.5 When he was on vacation from his professorial duties in logic and mathematics at the Roman College, Orazio Borgondio (1675–1741) composed Arcadian Latin poems on mechanical motion, and claimed that, from his earliest years, mathematics, not frivolous pagan myth, had been his Castalian spring. Borgondio’s student and successor, Roger Boscovich (1711–1787), distinguished himself on an international stage in natural philosophy and, if not to the same degree, in Latin scientific verse, as composer of a poem on eclipses in five books (De solis et lunae defectibus, London, 1760).6 Boscovich, moreover, supplied exhaustive scientific annotations to the meteorological poems of another Jesuit professor of natural philosophy, Carlo Noceti (1694–1741), De iride et aurora boreali carmina (Rome, 1747), and to the veritably Lucretian Leviathan on Newtonian physics by his compatriot, Benedict Stay (1714–1801), Philosophiae recentioris libri x (Rome, 1755, 1760, 1795). Stay, who had begun to impersonate Lucretius already as a Jesuit high-school graduate from Ragusa, in a poem on the physics of Descartes (Philosophiae versibus traditae libri vi, Venice 1747; Rome, 1748), was much imitated by the Latin scientific poets of the Collegio Romano. Jesuit literary historian, Juan Andrés, paid him the dubious compliment of having ‘subjected poetry to all the exactness and precision of mathematical demonstrations’.7 But the mathematician, d’Alembert, regarded such feats of difficulté vaincue as misplaced, if not pathological.8 Stay himself described a sort of inertia of the mind, corresponding to the inertia of bodies, which compelled him to keep writing verses and rendered his literary labours almost perversely pleasurable: ‘Hence we do not enjoy leisure so much when devoid of activity, and respite from our labours is not always sweet; but [it is sweet] to conserve our present state, and only to do that very thing which we are doing, and to cling to the well-known, and to engage in those activities and pursuits which detain us, rather than those which, in other circumstances, we would approve’ (Philosophiae recentioris vol. 1, 1755, pp. 103–104).9 This charming confession of a compulsive versifier contains a wink, of course, at Lucretius’ famous late-night poetic labours (perferre laborem suadet et inducit noctes vigilare serenas, 1.140–2), but it also reveals a psychological truth of more general application, one that goes to the heart of the Latin culture of the early modern Society of Jesus, if not to the formation of an early modern Jesuit ‘mind’. In speaking, cautiously, of a Jesuit ‘mind’, I do not wish to raise the spectre of the regicidal, Machiavellian Jesuit of the Encyclopédie,10 nor to imply that the Society’s official mind was always perfectly aligned with those of its members, nor that a Jesuit mind was defined by a prescriptive table of contents, and still less that it could never be changed. But we might justifiably wonder, with d’Alembert, how a literary education as structured and intensive as that provided in Jesuit schools could not have produced long-term effects on adult minds and culture. For a representative sample of those minds and that culture we may turn to the proceedings of the 1996 Boston conference, ‘Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and Arts’, from which a consensus appears to have emerged that the pre-Suppression Jesuits evinced an approach to contemporary European society, science, and culture, and to other cultures, that was, on the whole, creative, flexible, and dialogic.11 To my knowledge, a connection between these qualities and tendencies and the Society’s Latin humanist education has never been proposed, but it is a hypothesis worth entertaining, I suggest, especially in the light of the recent ‘cognitive turn’ in literary and cultural studies.12 This premium placed on creative expression in the language of a radically foreign culture was not just central to the development and expression of the early modern Jesuit ‘mind’ in literature and the arts, I suspect, but also in moral and political philosophy and the sciences.13 Thus the character, diversity, and wide intellectual horizons of early modern Jesuit culture might be put in the context of mounting modern evidence of the benefits of early foreign language acquisition for attention and memory, for building metalinguistic comprehension (the capacity to reflect on language rules, a precondition of literacy), cross-cultural competency,14 creativity, and the capacity for scientific innovation.15 The poeto-rhetorical Latin education of the Jesuits was designed to equip students with the tools for Catholic eloquence, to be sure, but it also equipped them, by default, with tools for thought—for ‘invention’ in all senses of the word. Of course if Jesuit Latinity had a head, it also had a heart, one that was strong enough to sustain, for over two centuries, a vigorous corpus of longer and shorter poems, ingenious emblems, dialogues, plays, and orations. The vastness and yet integrity of this literary organism was felt in all its parts, and triumphantly proclaimed, for example, in the preface to the Parnassus Societatis Iesu (Frankfurt, 1654): Just one Society of Jesus has substituted . many poets for any one that learned antiquity revered and believed divine. One Society has given to the world so many Ovids, Horaces, Senecas, and Martials, that it would be difficult to choose one from among so many to wear the crown, since all deserve it—when it was once very easy to award first place in their genre to one Virgil or Flaccus, who had no runner-up . I, one person, wanted to fulfil the wishes of many; and to offer here, for sampling by individuals, whatever was sought after by many throughout the vast regions of the globe. There will be some—for I doubt there will be no-one —who will find something suspicious here: namely that in one SOCIETY such an abundance of that science [of poetry] may be found which was once rare throughout the entire world, and was therefore considered worthy of honour by so many Maecenases. .16 It is notable, moreover, that not only did this ‘one society’ of Jesus conspicuously distinguish itself for services to early modern Christian Latin poetry, but that several of its most celebrated writers, especially in the seventeenth century, were active across so many fields of verse and literary prose. Virgil cleaved to the hexameter, but one of his Jesuit emulators, Laurent Lebrun, was happy to append an Ovidius Christianus to his Virgilius Christianus (augmented edition, Paris, 1661).17 And the Alsatian Horace, Jacob Balde, S.J., arguably had more in common with Ovid, the restless experimenter, turning out lyric, but also satirical, elegiac, and dramatic verse. Jesuits were invariably adaptable and prolific practitioners of the literary skills drilled into them in the classroom, not least because they, in turn, were obliged to drill these very skills into others, via the ‘labour of the schools’. All Jesuit poetry is ultimately ‘ludic’ in the twin Latin senses of ‘playful’ and ‘scholastic’. Excitingly,
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