The Jesuits and Globalization

Historical Legacies and Contemporary Challenges

Thomas Banchoff, José Casanova, Thomas Banchoff, José Casanova

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781626162884
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Institutions & Organizations

The Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits, is the most successful and enduring global missionary enterprise in history. Founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1540, the Jesuit order has preached the Gospel, managed a vast educational network, and shaped the Catholic Church, society, and politics in all corners of the earth. Rather than offering a global history of the Jesuits or a linear narrative of globalization, Thomas Banchoff and José Casanova have assembled a multidisciplinary group of leading experts to explore what we can learn from the historical and contemporary experience of the Society of Jesus—what do the Jesuits tell us about globalization and what can globalization tell us about the Jesuits? Contributors include comparative theologian Francis X. Clooney, SJ, historian John W. O'Malley, SJ, Brazilian theologian Maria Clara Lucchetti Bingemer, and ethicist David Hollenbach, SJ. They focus on three critical themes—global mission, education, and justice—to examine the historical legacies and contemporary challenges. Their insights contribute to a more critical and reflexive understanding of both the Jesuits' history and of our contemporary human global condition.

Part I

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Historical Perspectives

1
The Jesuits in East Asia in the Early Modern Age

A New “Areopagus” and the “Re-invention” of Christianity

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M. ANTONI J. UCERLER, SJ

When we speak of the Christian faith in a global context, whether it be five hundred years ago or in the present day, we are faced with a seemingly irresolvable and ever-fluid tension between the universality of Christianity’s claims and the myriad cultural realities that define it locally over time and that provide the context for its historical development. This was the crux of the problem the Jesuits faced as they accompanied the Portuguese and Spanish merchants and colonial administrators on their voyages into the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. The age of maritime exploration—or “Age of Discovery,” as the Iberian empires referred to their own exploits—was, for better or for worse, the first age of globalization and the first sustained encounter with the Other, and its consequences would last for centuries thereafter.

Jesuit Pioneers in East Asia

What role(s) did the Jesuits play in these encounters, and what does their correspondence reveal about their mind-set? What did those first Jesuits who set out for East Asia, including Francis Xavier (1506–52) and his successors, Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606) and Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), hope to accomplish as they left Europe thousands of miles behind them, never to return to their native shores? To understand their way of proceeding (modo de proceder) across cultures, we must explore the nature of the Jesuit missionary enterprise (empresa)—a word with both religious and secular connotations—and the means they employed to introduce Christianity to ancient civilizations that had never heard of the Christian faith.

Was there a master plan or strategy? Were all the missionaries in agreement as to the best way to proceed, or were there differences of opinion among them? If there were disagreements, were they minor, or did they reveal fundamentally divergent or even incompatible ideas as to how Christianity was to be transmitted to a non-Christian people? Were the beginnings of Christianity in Japan and China both as a faith, with its specific doctrines, and as an organized religion, with its particular institutions and external forms of expression and religious practice, simply the imposition of an alien religious and cultural phenomenon by uninvited Western intruders upon unsuspecting East Asian peoples? Or did Christianity, in the process, take root and become a Christianity—at least in part—“Made in Japan” and “Made in China” rather than just being imported or transplanted into those countries?

What soon emerges from an examination of the Jesuits’ correspondence, and from other historical records, is that from the outset there was no clear agreement among the Jesuits regarding the best way to preach the Gospel. In fact, it took them at least several decades to formulate and refine their vision, and in the interim, they engaged in a great deal of experimentation as well as trial and error. One only need recall the misunderstanding that resulted in Japan when Francis Xavier initially adopted Dainichi Nyorai (Mahāvairocana), an Esoteric Buddhist term, in the belief that it could adequately express the concept of the Christian God. As he had arrived from India, the Japanese initially believed that Xavier belonged to an unfamiliar Buddhist sect and was bringing them a new teaching from within that tradition.¹

In the second generation after Xavier, in 1573 Jesuit superior general Everard Mercurian (1514–80) appointed Alessandro Valignano to act as his visitor, or delegate, for all the missions of the East Indies, which stretched from the eastern coast of Africa all the way to Japan. Valignano’s impact would be most strongly felt in India, Japan, and China. To begin a new mission in the Middle Kingdom, he sent two fellow Italians, Michele Ruggieri (1543–1607) and Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), to Macau to study the language.

The approach he encouraged Ruggieri and Ricci to adopt in the Middle Kingdom was what we today refer to as “cultural accommodation” or “inculturation”—a method that, in great part thanks to him and to his successors, we now take for granted. At the time, however, it was far from being the obvious or even “safe” (i.e., orthodox) choice. A common misconception about cultural accommodation is that it was purely the invention of European missionaries, whereby those who were receptive to the Christian message remained passive subjects. But in both Japan and China, the initiative for cultural accommodation often came from members of the local cultural elites who helped the Jesuits understand the cultural, social, political, linguistic, and religious contexts in which they were operating. It was frequently these Japanese and Chinese interlocutors who impressed upon the Jesuits the urgent need to engage the local culture on its own terms if they wished to make any significant progress.²

Cultural Accommodation and the “Jerusalem Compromise”

Valignano’s letter from Goa to Claudio Acquaviva (1543–1615), who succeeded Everard Mercurian as Jesuit superior general in 1581, is worth quoting in extenso as it clarifies this point. Writing in 1595, with more than twenty years of experience in Asia behind him, Valignano recounts how Ōtomo Sōrin (1530–87), the lord of Bungo in Kyushu who was known as Don Francisco after his baptism, and a number of other Japanese Christian lords had insisted that the Jesuits respect Japanese customs. Valignano makes no effort to hide the irritation these Japanese warlords expressed to him about his fellow missionaries’ demeanor:

They said that the way of proceeding in our houses was so different and contrary to what was appropriate in Japan that they never came to our residences without leaving very upset, and that this unease was shared by all the [samurai] lords and [Japanese] Christians. . . . And he also told me that if we wanted to attempt to convert Japan, we would have to master the language and live according to [Japanese] norms of civility (policía). Moreover, [he noted that] it could only be taken as a sign of diminished intelligence to imagine that a handful of foreigners could possibly induce the samurai and their lords to abandon their own time-honored customs and civilized forms of courtesy in order to accommodate themselves to our foreign ways . . . which appeared to the Japanese to be most barbaric and lacking in civility.³

But the problem that Valignano and his fellow Jesuits faced did not simply involve making superficial changes to their outward behavior. From a theological perspective, the key question was, what form should or could Christianity take outside of Europe? And to use Aristotelian categories familiar to them, they had to consider what was essential and what was accidental to their preaching. In theological terms, it meant interpreting anew the problem of preaching a God who Christians claimed had entered human history at a particular time and place. But what exactly did that mean in sixteenth-century East Asia?

The Jesuits in Japan and China became acutely aware of the difficulty of explaining the Incarnation and the Cross of Christ, “a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23). Why should a samurai or a Ming dynasty mandarin believe that a Jewish carpenter had risen from the dead? And what good could come from a faith that took as its symbol the dead body of an executed prisoner from some far-off land? As far as the Chinese were concerned, the very existence of a place named “Israel” was dubious at best and, in any case, quite irrelevant to their worldview.

The Jesuits knew that their faith was to make no distinction between “Jew or Greek” (Galatians 3:28), but that was easier said than done. The early Church had had to face a serious dilemma. How could the Jesuits translate the apostles’ faith in Jesus’s identity as the Messiah and hence the fulfillment of the promises of the Hebrew Scriptures into terms that were comprehensible to the pagan cultures of Greece and Rome? Simply put, the heart of the matter was in determining what was essential to the kerygma and what was not. The crucial turning point for the early Church came at the Council of Jerusalem, where Peter acknowledged Paul’s arguments and agreed that strict adherence to Jewish customs and rituals could no...