Page - 19 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

19Introduction the relationship between the Enlightenment and the Jesuits have not been ex- plicitly linked with the overall, massive, and consequential re-evaluation, seen in the past generation, of the character and contributions of the Society of Je- sus during the early modern period. It is nevertheless instructive to sketch such longer-term lineages, in whose light the affinities between even Jesuitism and the Enlightenment seem less of an anomaly. The revisionist literature has emphasized the extent to which the Jesuit or- der was “distinctive” within Catholicism,48 so that internal suspicion and re- sentment toward it was quite widespread from the very beginning: the theo- logical faculty of the Sorbonne condemned it in 1554 as “a danger to the Faith, a disturber of the peace of the Church, destructive of monastic life, and des- tined to cause havoc rather than edification.”49 Jesuit distinctiveness consisted partly in the Society’s manner of governance, not by provincial and general chapters but by a superior general with expansive authority. This was a combi- nation that led to an uncommon degree of international outlook and mobility, especially important when it came to the staffing of overseas missions: it en- abled Italian, German, Bohemian, or other Jesuits from Europe’s landlocked regions to obtain first-hand experience of Spanish and Portuguese colonial possessions in a measure way beyond the means of their fellows from other orders, and thanks to the peculiar network for reporting and the mechanism for storing information at the Society’s headquarters, these experiences were molded into a stock of global knowledge controlled by the Jesuits.50 Next, it must be stressed that the three Jesuit ministries of preaching, confession, and teaching envisaged by the order’s founders were to be performed “in the world,” a trait accentuated by the Jesuits’ refusal to wear a distinctive habit, and retain- ing their family names. The explicit commitment of the famous Formula vi- vendi (1539)—a thoroughly reasoned plan, true to the character of the found- ers of the order as university-educated men—to serve, besides the glory of Rationality, ed. Antony M. Matytsin and Dan Edelstein (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer- sity Press, 2018), 227–46, esp. 229–32. 48 John W. O’Malley, “The Distinctiveness of the Society of Jesus,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 3, no. 1 (2016): 1–16. 49 John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 289. 50 Steven J. Harris, “Confession-Building, Long-Distance Networks, and the Organization of Jesuit Science,” Early Science and Medicine: A Journal for the Study of Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Pre-modern Period, special issue, “Jesuits and the Knowledge of Nature,” 1, no. 3 (1996): 287–318. On the “cultural effort” behind the rise of Jesuit bureau- cratic governance based on the production, recording, and exchange of information, see Markus Friedrich, Der lange Arm Roms. Globale Verwaltung und Kommunikation im Jesui- tenorden 1540–1773 (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2011).