Early Modern Jesuits between Obedience and Conscience during the Generalate of Claudio Acquaviva (1581-1615)

Silvia Mostaccio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409457060
• eBook ISBN: 9781317146889
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Early Modern History

The Society of Jesus was founded by Ignatius Loyola on a principal of strict obedience to papal and superiors' authorities, yet the nature of the Jesuits's work and the turbulent political circumstances in which they operated, inevitably brought them into conflict with the Catholic hierarchy. In order to better understand and contextualise the debates concerning obedience, this book examines the Jesuits of south-western Europe during the generalate of Claudio Acquaviva. Acquaviva's thirty year generalate (1581-1615) marked a challenging time for the Jesuits, during which their very system of government was called into doubt. The need for obedience and the limits of that obedience posed a question of fundamental importance both to debates taking place within the Society, and to the definition of a collective Jesuit identity. At the same time, struggles for jurisdiction between political states and the papacy, as well as the difficulties raised by the Protestant Reformation, all called for matters to be rethought. Divided into four chapters, the book begins with an analysis of the texts and contexts in which Jesuits reflected on obedience at the turn of the seventeenth century. The three following chapters then explore the various Ignatian sources that discussed obedience, placing them within their specific contexts. In so doing the book provides fascinating insights into how the Jesuits under Acquaviva approached the concept of obedience from theological and practical standpoints.

CHAPTER 1
Jesuit Political Thought and Pastoral Care between Power and Obedience: Texts and Contexts

The Exercise of Power and the Practice of Obedience in the Society of Jesus: Two Realities in Search of Legitimisation

In 1581, the fourth General Congregation of the Society of Jesus met in Rome to elect a successor to Everard Mercurian. It chose Claudio Acquaviva, who had just turned thirty-seven and had until then been responsible for the Roman province. He was the first Italian general and he went on to enjoy a long reign which lasted until his death in 1615. It was a reign that witnessed a profound redefinition of the Ignatian institute. Acquaviva’s preoccupation with governance was translated into a series of initiatives: from the Ratio Studiorum to the new Directorium for the Spiritual Exercises, as well as successive editions of the Constitutions and reflections on the Society’s missionary activity. By wisely switching between centralisation and decentralisation, Acquaviva was able to guarantee the survival and expansion of Ignatius’s Society, steering it to the threshold of the seventeenth century.¹ At the same time, these decades straddling the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were characterised by lengthy struggles concerning the practices of government both within the Society and between the Jesuits, the pope and European states. We will return to these in some of the chapters that follow.²

Instead, I would like at this point to begin with obedience as it was discussed by some Jesuits active during the generalate of Acquaviva, who reflected upon issues of politics and power. I will start with the life of the general written just a few years after his death by Francesco Sacchini (1570–1625), one of the official historians of the Society and an important custodian of the Society’s collective memory. Sacchini succeeded Niccolò Orlandini (1554–1606) as editor of the Historiae Societatis Jesu for the sections on Generals Lainez, Borgia and Mercurian and from 1619 he was appointed secretary of the Society. Although Sacchini’s section on Acquaviva for the Historiae remained unfinished, he did decide to compose his biography. As a biography, this text recounted his interior life as much as the ‘spiritual outlook’ with which he had viewed the institutional and political affairs he had been involved with, and which were analysed in the Historiae. This biography remained unpublished until just a few years ago. In it, Sacchini demonstrates a studied balance in both what was said and what was left unsaid, leaving us an important source for the study of a complex generalate. Both the words and the silences of this text, if compared with other sources, serve as important clues for a more complete historical reconstruction.³

In June 1581, a few months after his election, Acquaviva sent a letter to the superiors of the Society. The letter was dedicated to the Society’s Felice progresso (‘happy progress’).⁴ In it, the general reminded the superiors of the importance of their role as mediators between the priorities of the Roman authorities and the manifest needs of their local situations. As a whole, the letter insisted on the double attitude that each superior needed to cultivate. Demanding a blind and indifferent obedience from their subjects was indispensible to the construction of the Society (fabrica Societatis as it was called in the Latin edition of the letter published in Antwerp in 1635).⁵ Just as indispensible, however, was knowing how to win over the wills of one’s subjects in order to push them towards a common project:

The most effective means for guiding them must be to win over the will, hence it must not satisfy a superior of the Society that a subject obeys him and goes on doing this or that in any old manner, but he must have an eye to him doing it with perfection, whereby this is greatly helped when subjects truly know that they are loved by their superiors.⁶

The Society, which was undergoing a whirlwind expansion, needed to develop a capacity to manage dissent and to manufacture consent. Significantly, Sacchini reproduces part of the letter in his biography of Acquaviva. The section he includes is the part stressing that such consensus would have to be constructed around a definite ‘evangelical’ project whose essential points were focused on refuting both worldly and ecclesiastical recognition; the ‘renunciation of honour and one’s own judgement’; and the increase of virtue for the sanctification of oneself and others. If they were attentive to these dispositions, superiors would be following one of two possible forms of government: namely, the evangelical form. If, however, they had felt led ‘by certain principles of human prudence and the light of reason to judge their subjects with some discretion’ so as not to sustain those who feel discontented, they would be governing according to the ‘political manner’. In this case, however, the Society would quickly be reduced ‘to being a large number of people of good learning and prudence and great ability and proficiency for doing anything, but useless to our purpose’.⁷

In his presentation of this letter – Acquaviva’s first official letter to the superiors of the order – Sacchini insists above all on the ‘otherness’ of the Society with respect to the world and its laws. According to Sacchini, Acquaviva is the person in charge of a foreign body that is able to operate with its own rules in the world, refuting ‘politics’ and its rules. Reading on, we should appreciate that for Sacchini ‘politics’ is synonymous with particular interests, divisions and tensions – to which we shall return in Chapter 4, and the long conflicts between the Jesuits in Italy and Spain. In all, Sacchini contrasts Acquaviva and his evangelical and universal vision. Without a doubt, one justification for the centralising initiatives that the general put into action to achieve uniformity within the Fabrica Societatis Iesu.

Yet in his letter, the new general had also reminded those in positions of authority within the order of the importance of ‘winning over the wills’ (guadagnar le volontà) of their own subjects. In the years that followed, he would set various initiatives in motion to conquer souls and wills. All of this took place within a complex system of managing consent and dissent. One of the most effective instruments of this system was a long inquiry, Ad detrimenta, which began in 1585 and ran until the sixth General Congregation held in 1608.⁸ Its aim was to collect the thoughts of the various Jesuit provinces and (at times) those of individual fathers concerning everything that had been damaging the Society with a view to remedying it. Acquaviva’s collaborators, assisted in various ways, pushed on with the work of the inquiry which allowed the general to be able to demonstrate his own interest in the life of those under him. Acquaviva’s interest was demonstrated in, amongst other things, a dense letter which he addressed to the Society on the most appropriate means for its conservation.⁹ When one rereads the intelligent accounts that were presented to this inquiry by the assistants of Italy and the ultramontane provinces, one glimpses the importance that the Society’s leaders accorded to the project of internal reform. They were concerned about questions of both theory and the institution, and worried about the need to appear united; most important of all was the issue of hierarchy of power within the Society.¹⁰ Without the argument ever having been shelved, during the fifth general congregation ten years later, twelve commissions were instituted and entrusted with the task of examining the various pressing questions of reform. This group was extended to include a group of five Jesuit fathers assigned by the general himself.¹¹ The theme of power and the exercise of power remained central. For example, a stylised synthesis produced in the course of the congregation’s discussions noted:

The first great harm seems to be the bad reputation that the Society suffers in our time among a lot of people, particulary on the point that its mode of governance is said to be despotic and tyrannical, and that the government is based on confessions, by virtue of our rule requiring us to account for our conscience.¹²

There is a certain importance in the joint reference to tyranny and to a form of government that would have recourse to the means of ‘spiritual governance’ – referred to earlier in the same letter – a governance which, it is warned, is improper (‘despotic and tyrannous’). Even in a religious order that had made blind obedience a central element in the construction of its identity, the forms of government were often the object of discussion and debate, and the renunciation of the will by the individual could not happen unless it operated under certain, controlled conditions. This early Roman source demonstrates the emergence of one of the most fundamental questions under discussion in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and the focus of this chapter: the responses of the Society of Jesus concerning the conditions under which legitimate power was exercised. Indeed, this question was not just of interest to the Jesuits in this period, neither was it exclusively an issue for religious authorities; rather, it was at the centre of reflections and struggles that occupied the whole age. It is impossible to speak of obedience without speaking of power and, in effect, the whole debate that accompanied the creation of the modern nation state. That debate spanned reflection on the nature, dialectics and hierarchies of power, as well as upon the nature, dialectics and limits of obedience. The Jesuits participated in this collective reflection on power and obedience and contributed in many different ways. As confessors to princes, mothers and soldiers; as missionaries to the Indie di quaggiù (‘the other Indies’); as promoters of Marian congregations; as theologians, polemicists, jurists, and historians: the Jesuits interpolated ideas of power and obedience both as members of the Society of Jesus and as men of their own day.

Towards a Political View of Obedience between the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Given the variety of pastoral responsibilities taken on by Jesuits during the generalate of Acquaviva, we need to look at the relations between authority and obedience from a variety of angles. The ‘Way of Jesuit obedience’ continues to provide the theoretical object of our analysis. Travelling along this path as though travelling along the ‘Rue Traversière’ implies that we will eventually find ourselves at a busy crossroads – the crossroads of political reflections that characterised the decades straddling the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To pass over this junction would be to suggest (erroneously) that there was just one type of Jesuit writing regarding the relationship between power and obedience. To reflect on the situation in this way would be grossly inappropriate for an order that, by its very nature, found itself involved in many fields of contemporary life. It would also, however, be completely inadequate with respect to the multitude of approaches and reflections on the topic that arose amongst contemporaries. Instead, placing the many Jesuit contributions in context will allow us to add some new pages to the travel journal (carnet de voyage) to which so many hands have made scholarly contributions over the years.

The methodology formulated by Quentin Skinner in the 1970s provides the prompt that lies behind the work that follows. Skinner was interested in the construction and evolution of political thought in the early modern period and, in particular, on the birth of the state and its self-governing reality with respect to the men charged with its administration.¹³ His view was that, in order to be able to give an account of these processes, the texts reflecting on the arguments involved needed to be placed within the various contexts in which they were produced.¹⁴ Thus the intentions, priorities, strategies, and the relations between the authors all became subjects of study and research in their own right. More than a history of ideas, this approach moved towards a history of ideologies – or rather, the history ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface (Flavio Rurale)
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Jesuit Obedience as the Theoretical Object of Cultural Narration under General Claudio Acquaviva (1581–1615)
• 1 Jesuit Political Thought and Pastoral Care between Power and Obedience: Texts and Contexts
• 2 ‘Perinde ac si cadaver essent.’ The Jesuits from a Comparative Perspective: The Tension between Obedience and Representar in the Legal Documents of Religious Orders
• 3 Hierarchies of Obedience in the Society of Jesus during the Pontificate of Sixtus V (1585–90)
• 4 A Gendered Obedience? The Spiritual Exercises by Jesuits and by Women: Two Case Studies and their Context
• Conclusion: Contexts and Challenges for Jesuit Obedience Both within and Outside the Society
• Bibliography
• Index