Introduction

This paper has two related components, a historical analysis that contextualizes the Jesuits’ vision of education, and an online digital narrative structured around an interactive map that visualizes the globality of their educational enterprise (https://theirgroup.org/Jesuits/map/).

In the longue durée interpretative historical synthesis, we examine the transformative Jesuit vision of education and pedagogies grounded in humanism, and the intersection of these with confessionalization. We place the Jesuits’ educational vision and ministry in an interplay with various contexts: at the micro level, we include the hierarchical Catholic Church and papal decisions, the papal patronages granted to the kings of Spain and Portugal, the impact of the reformations, and the religious disputes inside the Church. At the macro level, we insert the Jesuits and their schools in the societal, political, and intellectual changes in Europe, including the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, and within new configurations of modern ideas, particularly those of the seventeenth century that would be fully developed in the eighteenth century. With reference to the latter ideas, we examine current historiography and how the Jesuits’ ways of approaching knowledge relate to the ecologies of knowledge that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and to the limits of their articulation with those knowledges. The overall geopolitical framing context is that of coloniality, in which the Jesuits participated and often served as a cultural broker. Notably, locality would nuance their ministry, a point we underscore in the narrative that accompanies our interactive map.

The historical analysis of the texts draws from Quentin Skinner’s 1968 theories,¹ particularly those related to education, to explore the ministry’s intentionality and the Society’s vision of education and its articulation within the emerging ecology of knowledge. The analysis also draws on Reinhart Koselleck’s multiple temporalities and temporal structures,² and uses concepts such as confessionalization, configurations (spaces taken up by constellations of ideas and historical phenomena that allow us to understand connections and contradictions), globalism, and coloniality (the colonial organization of society, a side of modernity) as heuristic tools.³

The journey of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) and its educational ministry took full shape in the seventeenth century and was suppressed by the pope in 1773. Founded by Ignatius de Loyola in the sixteenth century, the Society was approved by Pope Paul III in 1540. It was a time conceptualized as global early - and we would add multi-directional - modernity, marked by the emergence of pedagogies in Western Europe and of different kinds of schools. The setting was one of commercial expansion, colonization, hybridity, forms of domination over the human and non-human world, and the emergence of individuality. Renaissance humanism was reaching universities and schools as an intellectual force. The Spanish and Portuguese kingdoms had created a colonial order grounded in a racial hierarchy that would be a widely accepted political ideology and structuring principle of world order for centuries to come.⁴ In this discussion on the global expansion of the Jesuit education ministry, we are placing emphasis on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries because this was the high period for Catholics, as well as for Southern European monarchies vis-à-vis Dutch, French, and English imperial ambitions.

As Paul Grendler wrote, “the Jesuits created the first free public education system that Europe or the rest of the world had seen. It was an international system and program with the same curriculum, texts, and pedagogy, whether the school was located in Portugal or Poland, Rome or Goa.”⁵ During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this network of schools, also known as colleges (contemporary secondary schools for boys and young men), extended throughout Europe,⁶ the Americas, Asia, and Africa and embodied a form of globalism with precursory transnational characteristics. By 1749, there were a total of 669 Jesuit colegios (contemporary intermediate and secondary schools).⁷ The interactive map and related narrative visualize the globality of the enterprise and the ambitious goal to prepare a Catholic (male) leadership for the new order of things.

Contextualized Analysis of the Jesuits’ Vision and Ministry

As O’Malley wrote in his study of the Council of Trent (1545-63), when the Council met, it was widely believed that “‘all the well-being of Christianity and of the whole world depends on the proper education of youth,’ that is, education in the Humanistic mode.”⁸ By the time the Council closed, the Society had a network of humanistic schools throughout Europe, and they had gone to India and what is now Mexico. In fact, already in 1541 (the order was approved in 1540) Francis Xavier, one of the first seven members, motivated by King John III of Portugal, had travelled to India, arriving thirteen months later.⁹ However, when the ten initial members worked out in 1539 the Formula vivendi (“Plan of Life”), to be submitted to the Holy See for approval, they conceived the order as a missionary one. It would be an itinerant order that would go overseas, in line with the tradition of the Dominicans and Franciscans and other orders founded in the thirteenth century.¹⁰ Within a decade of its foundation, the Society of Jesus had embraced education in its interaction with the modern world after the Reformations; education was its ministry, which made the Society distinctive.¹¹

This shift in intentionality can be explained by the interpretation that Ignatius and his collaborators made of Catholic needs at this particular historical time after the Reformations, the Council of Trent, and the reading of and response to the political and intellectual context. In a 1551 letter to Ferdinand of Austria (Habsburg domain), with reference to the creation of a college in Vienna, Ignatius wrote that the integrity of Catholic teaching would work toward the helping and improvement of others as a remedy to the disease sweeping Germany (meaning the Reformation); Catholic teaching, he elaborated, was a necessary idea inspired by God.¹² In religious language, we would say that the Jesuit shift was in response to the founder’s spiritual inspiration. As Jesuit historian O’Malley wrote, “Ignatius’ decision inaugurated a new era in Roman Catholicism for formal education.”¹³ In 1547, the Senate of Messina, with the endorsement of the Spanish viceroy - as Spain ruled Sicily - asked Ignatius to establish a school in Messina to teach lay boys.¹⁴ Ignatius authorized Jerónimo Nadal to represent him in the negotiations that led to the creation of the first Jesuit school in Messina in 1548.¹⁵ The school would become a model for other Jesuit schools. That same year, the Jesuits took full control of the school in Goa, originally run by the Franciscans to prepare East Indian boys for the priesthood.¹⁶ Here we would call attention to the Jesuits’ early global movement, which followed the colonization process under the patronage of Portugal and Spain, as visualized in our interactive map (https://theirgroup.org/Jesuits/map/). It was in 1560 that Ignatius’ successor, Superior General Diego Laínez, “announced [through Juan Alfonso de Polanco] that education was the most important ministry of the Society, equal to all the other ministries combined.”¹⁷

What was their vision of education? At the time, humanism as a philosophical view grounded in classical antiquity had become preeminent, leaving behind the “Lectio Divina” (Divine Reading), both the text and its exegesis, as well as analysis and synthesis. What Watson calls a “certain form of individuality,” a basic psychological change in sensibility within a changing social setting, emerged in Europe between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.¹⁸ This signified the opening of an epochal change, a transtemporal recreation.

The Jesuits brought a humanism open to transcendence, one that contained the Catholic temporality reflected in medieval scholasticism and the idea of eternity.¹⁹ O’Malley argues that the Jesuits found a bridge between humanism and the Christian outlook of Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536).²⁰ Erasmus, a Dutch philosopher within the Renaissance humanism tradition, stressed philological precision, grammatical correctness, and rhetorical elegance, but said that the virtues of bonae literarae cultivated by studying Latin and Greek authors had to be linked to Christian spirituality.²¹ In spite of his moderation, Erasmus was condemned by the Council of Trent, but he did inspire the Jesuits to go in a new direction. The main achievement of humanism, as Watson put it, was within education, since the language and literature of pagan antiquity became integrated into the curriculum.²² The humanistic curriculum adopted in Italian universities spread to Paris, Heidelberg, Oxford, and Cambridge.²³ However, it did not seem to have an early impact on the conception of the apostolate.²⁴ It seems clear that the initial group of Jesuits did not intend to be devoted to education or a pedagogy based on the humanities.²⁵

A major psychological change came with the rise of individuality, as mentioned before, and the Jesuits were aware of this. Watson cites Peter Burke’s three aspects of this change: a rise in self-consciousness, a growth in competitiveness, and an increased interest in the uniqueness of people.²⁶ These aspects are actually reflected in the Jesuit pedagogical practices, or methods of instruction, which were student centered as expounded in the Ratio Studiorum (1599), the official plan of studies that regulated Jesuit education.²⁷ These methods included the prelection: for example, to enable pupils to master rhetoric, the teacher would read a passage, normally from Cicero, upon which he (the teacher was always a man) would base the lesson of the day; then the teacher would go through a detailed explanation of its meaning, and the class would cooperate. There was also the concertation (consultation), where a general class discussion and questioning of each other occurred, and the disputation, a practice inherited from scholasticism. There was a daily public disputation with all students present, as well as declamations, repetition, reviews, examinations, and rewards for success.

Three major writings framed the educational work of the Jesuits. First, The Spiritual Exercises, developed by Ignatius and published in 1548, which were not to be prayed but lived, has educational principles such as self-activity, adaptation to the individual, as well as mastery of what one learns²⁸. The second was Chapter IV of the Constitutions, written by Ignatius and approved in 1558 after Ignatius’ death in 1556, which adopted the theology of Thomas Aquinas while retaining the philosophy of Aristotle, the latter of which some European universities had started to abandon, along with good morals and the greater service of God²⁹; this was framed by the principle of the greater common good as the Jesuits understood it, in other words, for the glory of God. The third major document was the Ratio Studiorum (1599)³⁰. We will not examine the Ratio and the program here. For our purposes, it will suffice to say that the Ratio contains rules for four principal areas that we identify today as administration, curriculum, method of instruction (pedagogy), and discipline. The Ratio gathered together practices such as the simultaneous method of teaching, or the “schola” (class), that was already widespread in France³¹.

On the goals of the Jesuits, the Ratio states: “it is the principal ministry of the Society of Jesus to educate youth in every branch of knowledge that is in keeping with the Institute. The aim of our educational program is to lead men [sic] to the knowledge and love of our Creator and Redeemer. The provincial should therefore make every effort to ensure that the various curricula in our schools produce the results which our vocation demands of us.”³² Bugnard notes that the order of the time in France - clergy, nobility, officers, and the third state (all the others of society) - was reflected in the program, but that it extended privilege (meaning a disinterested knowledge of the classical humanities and of eloquence and erudition, going beyond scholasticism) to the third state.³³ Bugnard argues that this was part of the Catholic reform that tried to combat the Calvinist heresy by educating young men, and that these colleges allowed for “a relative social evasion.”³⁴ In colonized places like Latin America, the Jesuits worked with the creole (born in Latin America but of European extraction) and the mestizo, the new leading classes.³⁵

O’Malley articulated the vision as follows: “It [the Jesuits’ philosophy] promised to produce men [the schools were for boys] of integrity, dedicated to the common good of church and society, and skilled in persuading others to [a] similar dedication.”³⁶ Following Grendler’s research, the goal of the lower schools (the majority of attendees were lay boys) was to make the students “able, eloquent, and virtuous leaders of civil society who would act for the common good.”³⁷ The notion of common good was defined by the Jesuits with a rather social conservative stance. Grendler understands the Jesuit approach as civic humanism, thus extending Hans Baron’s concept beyond the link between republicanism and humanism to any form of state. He uses Jesuit letters and documentation related to the Roman College, referring to the Christian republic and the contribution of a humanistic curriculum, to make his point³⁸.

However, the Jesuits’ education in the humanities - the ancient classics - put together with religion had a twist, because the texts were “purified” of “errors” and paganism, introducing only parts of texts rather than the use of suspension points; in this way, it could follow that the ancient wisdom could announce Christ.³⁹ In addition, the Catholic context of the sixteenth century had the inquisition and the indexing of prohibited books, which set up a challenge for the Jesuits and framed their contradictory political moves, in particular when approaching the issue of heresy.⁴⁰

Ignatius saw their universities as an extension of their ministry in the schools/colleges. Thus, over time, the Jesuits founded new universities and became teachers in existing universities.⁴¹ This happened in Europe and in various parts of the world. The Collegio Romano (1551), which depended upon the support of the Roman elites, became the Gregorian University in 1584 (after Pope Gregory XIII), and exemplified the international character of the Society and the multi-national community and faculty.⁴²

Their educational vision was central to the Jesuits’ global transformational confessional approach, which intersected with epochal changes, religious conflicts in Europe, and colonization. The Jesuits were highly pragmatic, being known as having a model of discerned accommodation, as we will discuss below.⁴³

The Protestant Reformation - a key element in the ideological and political configuration of modernity - broke Christendom, and confessionalization of the population was central to the intentionality behind educational efforts within one religious framework or another. Confessionalization refers here to particular religious agendas to secure faith by reaching out to all spheres of life, sometimes in alliance with the state in Europe and in European settlements in the new world.⁴⁴ Wolfgang Reinhard`and Heinz Schilling⁴⁵ developed a confessionalization paradigm to analyze the relations among state, religion, and education in the Early Modern times between the Colloquy of Worms in 1540, when Christendom was broken, to 1648, with the Peace of Westphalia, when religious division was accepted. In that period, Reinhard and Schilling argue, Calvinism, Catholicism, and Lutheranism served in similar ways as instruments for state building in Western Europe. States fostered confessionalization for their population by increasing religion in schools, banning other faiths, and subsidizing missions.⁴⁶ One example is France in the seventeenth century, when the monarch encouraged the Jesuits and the Oratorians to run a network of municipal colleges as part of the offensive against Protestantism.⁴⁷

However, the Jesuits provide early examples from the sixteenth century of a model of schooling that worked in partnership with rulers, rich supporters, and financial support from local civil governments.⁴⁸ It was an extensive Jesuit practice in Europe for schools to, apart from an initial endowment, depend on annual financial support from local civil governments, turning them into semi-public schools.⁴⁹ The schools were free and did not accept any payment from students, and the Jesuit teachers could not accept salaries and had vows of poverty; there were also noble-boarding schools.⁵⁰ Grendler, with particular reference to Europe, conceptualizes these schools as semi-public schools.⁵¹

Within the context of colonialism, particularly at the beginning of the expansions of Portugal and Spain supported by the pope’s patronage, along with the mercantile exploitation of resources that created a new Euro-Atlantic space, the Jesuits took their schools all over Europe (including Eastern Europe) and to the far east, the Americas, and Africa, as the reader can follow in the interactive map. Locality and practices in the missionary settings made questionable practices to finance schools (colegios) and the Jesuit complex settings acceptable. In Spanish and Portuguese America, and in more limited amounts in Asia, the Jesuits participated in money-making enterprises to fund their churches and schools (colegios) and thus became actors in early global capitalism. In Japan, for example, the Jesuits took part in the silk trade between Macao (China) and Nagasaki (Japan), with the terms of their participation established by the Portuguese king by means of a permit in 1584, through which he ratified the agreement reached by Jesuit Alessandro Valignani with Macao’s tradesmen. (Eventually, Pope Urban VIII prohibited this commerce.)

More often, however, the Jesuits were involved in enterprises such as sugar plantations and mining (silver mining) that made use of enslaved Africans, and in labor settings that included Hispanics, Indigenous people, and creoles. For example, the Colegio Máximo San Pedro y San Pablo in Mexico City, where the Jesuits arrived in 1568, received strong donations, but was also sustained by a complex of states named St Lucia, which had enslaved workers; later, the Jesuits bought the Xochimancas sugar state in the Cuernavaca basin, along with 240 enslaved people.⁵² Sugar plantations with bound Africans were a means to sustain the colleges for rich Portuguese Brazilians;⁵³ the Colegio Maximo de Santa Fé in Bogotá, Colombia, was sustained by the Hacienda de la Chamisera;⁵⁴ and the Colegio of San Pablo, founded in 1568 in Lima, Peru, was a large slave holder.⁵⁵ The Colegio Máximo in Cordoba, Argentina, which would become the University of Córdoba, and related operations in Córdoba were partly supported by the fees charged in primary and secondary schools, but also by several estancias - agro complexes - with enslaved workers.⁵⁶

A different situation emerged in the Jesuit Province of Paraguay (Paraquaria), which was under the jurisdiction of the viceroyalty of Peru until the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata was created in 1776. The provincial father resided in Córdoba, now Argentina. The order created the Jesuit “state” of the Guaranies (Indigenous people who had previously lived freely, without a political structure) by the basins of the High Paraná and Uruguay rivers. It consisted of reducciones, thirty villages with their schools and productive farms, with between 80,000 and 150,000 inhabitants by the early 1700s.⁵⁷ The Jesuits protected the Indigenous people living under their jurisdiction from raids by Spanish and Portuguese traders of enslaved people. A similar situation occurred in the Visayan Islands within the Vice-Province of the Philippines, which had become a Jesuit province independent from Mexico in 1665. There, the big issue was the expeditions of Muslim Malays from the southern Philippines to kidnap inhabitants with the intention of enslaving them; the Malays were strategically placed between the markets of enslaved people in Indonesia and the peaceful people of the Visayan Islands.

By the seventeenth century, France had reached a position of cultural and political dominance, and we cannot neglect to mention the connection between the French Bourbon state and the French Jesuits - as well as with other congregations - that was quite explicit in New France (Quebec, Canada). The Jesuits arrived in Quebec City in 1625.⁵⁸ They contacted Cardinal Richelieu to found a company in 1628, the Compagnie des Cent Associés, comprised of wealthy Catholic courtiers, merchants, and officers of state whose donations and commercial interests would support the colony.⁵⁹ Their apostolic missionary work, which included the assumption that Indigenous Peoples needed to be civilized, was paired with their educational ministry and with the secular dimension of their intellectual work, interpreted as being an integral part of a projected transatlantic French American political community.⁶⁰

The little school in Quebec City, “Notre Dame des Anges,” would become the first Jesuit college in North America in 1635. The school followed the Ratio like any other college, and also taught Indigenous languages.⁶¹ The financing of the mission intersected with transnational and local politics and with their apostolate, and eventually with the French-Canadian issue.

The expansive character of their missions over the globe, creating trans-regional entities that crossed cultures, polities, and even empires, along with the necessary political alliances, nourished profound contradictions in the Society’s apostolate and consequently in their educational practice. We wondered, what was encapsulated in their notion of common good and vision of a universal Christian (Catholic), given their pragmatic approach to means to achieve their objectives?

O’Malley points out that the Jesuit schools were large complex institutions that included classrooms, astronomical observatories, courtyards, and theatres, and as per Ignatius, they were “for everybody poor or rich.”⁶² It is not surprising, then, that the Jesuits carved a place for themselves as cultural brokers in the building of “multiple modernities,”⁶³ as creators of knowledge within their epistemological parameters, as interlocutors with local cultures, and as mobilizers of eastern culture to Europe and vice versa. As Marshall Hodgson put it, modernity was from the outset a global process of change, and it is important to think of the educational work of the Jesuits in this context.⁶⁴ Hodgson refers to the circulation of inventions and ideas that characterized the Afro-Eurasian oikoumene, the advances in mathematics and architecture reflected in language and the architecture left behind by the presence of Islam (expelled from Spain in 1493), and Europe’s assimilation of those creations. The process continued within an ever-enlarging context of colonization, commercial trade, and missionary work, as the Jesuits moved across notions of culture, art, architectural design, and mathematics.⁶⁵

The early Jesuits were aware of other major civilizations. Thus, for example, they started to connect with the Chinese intelligentsia. Matteo Ricci, who tried to work out the compatibility of Confucianism with Christianity, was granted the title of mandarin and Head of the Tribunal of Mathematicians, being on good terms with the emperor, to whom Ricci and another Jesuit offered precious European art.⁶⁶ But the Jesuits not only transmitted European knowledge to China and other places, they also brought knowledge to Europe. China is a case in point since they wrote books in Chinese, but also in European languages, covering aspects of the Chinese culture; the description and the debates in the French context influenced the Enlightenment thinkers, the Philosophes. Standaert has argued that this contributed to several breaks in the notion of “religion” in Europe - between a true Christian religion and a religion that was true but not Christian; between religion and morality; and between religion and history - the latter of which, in the end, led to a split between religious and non-religious spheres.⁶⁷

St. Paul’s College in Macao (also known as College of Madre de Deus), founded in 1594, followed the Ratio and Coimbra University regulations adapted to Chinese needs. The college offered theology, philosophy, mathematics, geography, astronomy, Latin, Portuguese, and Chinese, and it had a music and arts school. The college was not fully ecclesiastical nor civil, and it trained - like the college in Goa - Jesuit missionaries for other parts of Asia and even for Africa. An interesting example of their cultural role is provided by the mission to the Court of the Great Mughal and the emperors Akbar (1556-1605) and Jahangir (1605-27), the Mughal Sultanate in contemporary northern India, where the language was Persian. The Jesuits had been invited to go from Goa to the Arkar palace in Fatehpur to serve as Catholic debaters in interfaith debates and to provide works of European Renaissance art for the court.⁶⁸ Notably, there were no converts.

Meanwhile, the missionaries were also active in dismantling ways of life, often along with the colonizers or settlers, albeit not always on their terms and sometimes while encountering resistance and failure. A case in point is the Madurai mission in Tamil Nadu province in southern India, where leading Jesuit Roberto de Nobili (1577-1656) began the mission in 1606. After realizing that the Hindus had the power to resist westernization, Nobili then rejected the policy of forcing Portuguese names and customs upon converts and adopted the dress, customs, diet, and way of life of the Hindu Holy man.⁶⁹

In some places, the Jesuits were able to penetrate subjectivities with religion, which, like in Latin America, resulted in a complex process of transculturation that became part of matrixes of colonial power that aimed at imposing new structures of power that included a lifestyle, a morality, an economy, and the “colonization of existing knowledges.”⁷⁰ The concept of “coloniality of being” is useful here, since it considers the effect of coloniality on lived experience and not only on the mind, although we need to contend with its multidirectional complexity, reflected in the actual interiorization of Christianity.⁷¹

Placing the Jesuits in the Configurations of Western Ideas

The Society extended all over the world, even in Protestant spaces, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Initially, it was a time, particularly in sixteenth-century Europe, when, as Charles Taylor said, it was “virtually impossible” not to believe in God⁷² - but that would change. The Jesuits’ ministry was itself integrative of humanism and medieval scholastics, and the Jesuits used the vernacular in their catechetical apostolate and translations of works, and not only from Western authors. The colegios taught Latin. But it was also a century in which critical thought clearly emerged in Catholic settings where the Society had strongholds, albeit the quest for new ways of thinking and relating to the world took place in the intellectual milieu and cultural context of the time. Thus, French essayist and philosopher Michel Montaigne (1533-92), a Catholic (at the time, to doubt God was close to impossible) and author of Essais (Essays), often cited today in relation to cosmopolitanism, did not mix God with human matters; he put an emphasis on virtue in line with Plato, rejected scholastics and embraced free judgment, and questioned the assumed superiority of European civilization (the latter was in line with his notion that human conduct is not attached to universal rules, but to a diversity of rules).⁷³ It was a time of transitional change. How did the Jesuits navigate these changes toward modernity, new notions of liberty, property, and state, and scientific revolution?

A historiographical current in the last few decades has been reassessing Jesuit science and education and the influence these had on Catholic men of science. Historian Edward Grant differentiates between new modern positions like the motions of the earth (the Copernican theory was condemned by the Church) and those modern positions that were free from these constraints.⁷⁴ In the latter case, for example, Grant refers to the hardness or fluidity of the heavens, about which Jesuits had different opinions. In his view, the Jesuits sometimes went beyond adjustments with regard to their Aristotelian cosmological views, and they expounded new cosmological ideas such as the existence of an infinite three-dimensional space, linking it to God’s infinite immensity.⁷⁵ In spite of the censorship dominating the Church and the order, they contributed to optics, magnetism, and cartography.⁷⁶ Furthermore, the mobility of the members of the Society who worked in different parts of the world, a feature of the order, generated a movement of knowledge among themselves and around the world.

William Wallace explores the influence of Jesuit ideas on Galileo (1564-1642), examining the Jesuit teachers at the Collegio Romano and their connections with Galileo around 1588-91, in particular between Galileo and Christopher Clavius (head of the mathematicians at the Collegio).⁷⁷ The Church’s hostility toward Galileo’s discoveries increased from 1616, and in 1633, he was ordered to appear in Rome to be examined by the Congregation of the Holy Office (the Inquisition).⁷⁸ Nonetheless, Wallace argues that the Jesuits influenced Galileo’s science, and he makes the case for a “substantial element of continuity between the ideal of science (especially the ideal of a mathematical physics) that was taught at the Collegio Romano around 1590 and the ideal of science that was to emerge in Galileo’s later writings.”⁷⁹ The emphasis here is in the method of teaching and learning. In other words, the rules governing the order - the subordination of knowledge to an allegiance to the Church and Roman Faith - interfered with free expression and the discussion of emerging ideas; in this respect, historians can find good supporting sources in the records of disciplining members, testimonies of students, and injunctions against the teaching of new philosophies.

In a new configuration of modern ideas, René Descartes’ (1596-1680) systematic appraisal of knowledge, with the method of doubt as a heuristic, defied the Jesuits’ intellectual work, and by and large, the Jesuits strongly opposed it. In fact, the Jesuits condemned Cartesianism. Descartes had studied at the Jesuit College of La Flèche, where he stayed until 1615, having attended the College for eight of his formative years.⁸⁰ Ariew has argued that although Descartes did not oppose the doctrines sustained by the Jesuits, the latter could not accept doubt or suspicion, among other reasons, on pragmatic grounds, since their pedagogy was grounded on unity of thought to ensure that the curriculum was followed around the globe.⁸¹ Thus, Jesuit Claudio Acquaviva, fifth superior general of the Society, worked toward the organization and centralization of the Society and pedagogy around the Ratio.⁸² In 1613, he sent to all provincial superiors the Decree on the Solidity and Uniformity of Doctrine, in which article 1 contained the following: “we finally settled on this one thing: all problems would be more than adequately foreseen, as far as circumstances allowed, if we carefully keep to our Ratio studiorium.”⁸³ The intellectual missionary work was, of necessity, intermingled with intercultural communication and even controversial interpretations by the Jesuits themselves, and networks of exchange among themselves and the exterior world developed. The Ratio created tension, which is not surprising given the variety of situations they encountered across the world and the epochal changes.

O’Malley also refers to the impact of Galileo and of Isaac Newton’s (1642-1727) Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, which discredited the Aristotelian basis of science.⁸⁴ The author makes the point that the reputation of the Jesuits was excellent and gives as examples the fact that they travelled to Siam as mathematicians of the king (Louis XIV) and were sponsored by the Paris Académie Royale des Sciences to observe the satellites of Jupiter and determine the longitude of the Cape of Good Hope. The Jesuits met with the commissioner general of the Dutch East India Company, the Dutch governor general of Batavia, and the king of Siam, who had observed a lunar eclipse, at an event organized by the Jesuits, while at his palace in Louvo.⁸⁵ However, the Jesuits did not move with the times. Although Aristotle had lost credibility, as late as 1730 and again in 1751 at the meetings of the General Congregation, it was decided that the “Society’s teachers [would] adher[e] to Aristotle not only in metaphysic and logic but in physics as well.”⁸⁶

Nonetheless, some Jesuits were also part of the new configuration of ideas. The Spanish Salamanca School, in particular, the Spanish Jesuit Luis de Molina, published Concordance of Free Will with the Gifts of Grace in 1588, which generated a controversy with the Dominicans, who thought that Molina’s emphasis on free will was heresy. The point here is that the Jesuits retained a bias toward free agency; they would continue to hold on to this view even into the nineteenth century, in spite of a shift toward strong conservative positions.⁸⁷ Fumaroli argues that the Molinist view of the nature of humans as tainted by sin - not obscured by it - provided a foundation for the Enlightenment’s notion of the natural human or innocent savage.⁸⁸

In the seventeenth century, there was a renewed debate surrounding the encounter between religion and politics. Jesuit Francisco Suárez, also from the Salamanca School, wrote Tractatus de legibus ac deo legislatore (1619), in which he argued that all power comes from the community, making the community an authority in itself based on common consent; he also redefined the papal position as one of a sovereign on par with other sovereigns, but not over them.⁸⁹ Overall, at the time, after the breakdown of Christendom, there was an intellectual movement that emphasized the secular side of politics and ideas of individual liberty.⁹⁰

These intellectual changes that emerged in the process of Western modernity would generate a shift in the relationship between the state and religion, which of course would eventually affect the Jesuits’ ministry. We need to highlight some of those changes that set the stage for this eventual shift. Let’s go through some of them. In France, in the midst of the Huguenot war (Reform Calvinists), Jean Bodin (1529-90) is said to have set the basis for the theory of the modern sovereign state by arguing for an unassailable, centralized power, in which religious issues would be excluded to keep order.⁹¹

In England, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1678), who moved the scientific revolution to politics, published Leviathan in 1651, immediately after the third English Civil War (1650-51), in which he placed ecclesiastical power under secular power.⁹² In Hobbes’ Leviathan, there are four parts that include, in part one, “Of Man,” chapters on human knowledge and psychology, which examine the laws of nature and the origins of the social contract; the chapters contained in part two, entitled “Of Common-wealth,” discuss the rights of sovereigns and subjects, which are central to the book. In part three, “Of a Christian Common,” he expresses his religious views, and in the last part, “Of the Kingdom of Darkness,” he closes with an attack on the Roman Catholic Church. His understanding of humanhood, in which he denies the Aristotelian belief that humans are social animals and that therefore there cannot be a society without a “covenant of submission,”⁹³ is summarized in the phrase “Life is solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”⁹⁴

John Locke (1632-1704), “the prophet of the English business commonwealth,” who personified a generation “ready to benefit,”⁹⁵ authored “Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises of Government,” among other works. In his view, church and state were separate entities and the pope could not have authority on secular matters, and so he developed the notion of tabula rasa and verification of knowledge by experience. He argued that “God sends us the world without innate ideas of any of the other physical ‘conveniences of life.’”⁹⁶ Locke thought that the principles of Christianity demanded toleration and that the church had to be an entirely voluntary association.⁹⁷ In spite of Locke’s anti-Catholic stance, Rossiter, in a revisionist turn, makes the case that Locke’s thinking was within the lineage of the tradition of natural law influenced by the Jesuits’ neo-Scholastics.⁹⁸ He wrote that Locke echoed positions such as moderate voluntarism, the law of nature and the value of limited government, and some views of the social contract expounded by Molina, Suárez, and others.⁹⁹

Baruch de Spinoza (1634-77) is described by Jonathan Israel as “the chief challenger of the fundamentals of revealed religion, received ideas, tradition, morality, and what was everywhere regarded, in absolutist and non-absolutist states alike, as divinely constituted political authority.”¹⁰⁰ In Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, he attempted to promote freedom and applied science to religion. Israel argues that Spinoza’s work encompassed areas such as Bible criticism, scientific theories, theology, and political thought, and that he thought freedom could only be understood philosophically.¹⁰¹ Spinoza’s relevance resides, following Israel, in his approach to replace theology with philosophy to understand ourselves and our politics, that knowledge is democratic (with no special interest groups), and that humans are a natural creature with a rational place in the animal kingdom.¹⁰²

Modern ideas in literature such as those represented in Don Quijote by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), and in William Shakespeare (1504-1616) and Molière’s (1622-73) work, among others, started to provide a new framework, while the vernacular would have an increasing presence. The intellectual turmoil created a new context for the political alliances of the Jesuits, and by the early eighteenth century there was a crisis of confessionality.

The Thirty Years’ War that had ravaged central Europe ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, albeit some fights continued well beyond 1648.¹⁰³ There was a sense of being tired of religious wars. Meanwhile, there was a seventeenth-century movement in the Church to open up to the social needs of the world, the Church having France’s leading voices, such as Nicholas Barré, Jean Eudes, Vincent de Paul, Jean-Jacques Olier, Pierre de Bérulle, and Jean-Baptiste de La Salle. Women religious were needed. Then, the century brought a new educational configuration within the Church, a renewed response to the Reformations through schooling of the poor, representing an approach different to the one articulated by the Jesuits.

Educationalization and even pedagogization of the faith was taking place; many congregations started to develop methods to evangelize and instruct in the 3Rs through schooling, and women were integrated into apostolic work despite papal restrictions.¹⁰⁴ This process was evident, for example, in France in the work of Minim Friar Nicholas Barré, who in 1666 founded the Institute of Charitable Teachers - the future Sisters of the Infant Jesus - without vows and enclosure, and under the direction of a superior. The mission was the education of poor girls (with Christian instruction, reading, writing in the vernacular, and workshops for women).¹⁰⁵ Notably, Barré was able to circumvent the Church’s exclusion of women from the active apostolate. Barré, who was the spiritual advisor to Jean-Baptiste de La Salle (1651-1719), also had founded, in 1681, a Charitable School for boys that failed to flourish, after which de La Salle received them in his house. In 1684, de La Salle founded L’Institut des Fréres des Écoles Chrétiennes (The Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools), a lay religious teaching order (they were not priests), to provide free elementary and religious instruction in the vernacular to poor boys. The order quickly expanded throughout France and would spread all over the world. In fact, the de LaSalle Brothers put into operation principles of modern education, including Comenius’s ideas that were in use in a few places.¹⁰⁶ They were not the only ones concerned with educating the poor; for example, in Italy there were the Pious schools for the poor, founded by the Spanish Joseph Calazanz. We can conclude that by the beginning of the seventeenth century, scholasticism was on its way out, but it did provide the background against which new approaches were developed.

On the Protestant side, John Amos Comenius (1592-1670), bishop of Moravia, left a large body of theoretical and practical educational scholarship, the best known being The Great Didactic, written around 1628 and published in Latin in 1657.¹⁰⁷ A neo-platonist influenced by the scientific thought of the time, as Spinka argues, Comenius linked his own proposals to Francis Bacon’s principles.¹⁰⁸ He was critical of schools for not teaching real knowledge, thus reacting to the humanistic focus and the emphasis on memorizing Latin grammar while neglecting the vernacular. Thus, in The Great Didactic, Comenius put emphasis on a pedagogized school discipline (chapter XXVI), contact with nature, and teaching both sexes. Chapter XXV seems to refer to humanistic teaching in its subject matter: “If we wish to reform schools in accordance with the laws of true Christianity, we must remove from them books written by pagans, or, at any rate, must use them with more caution than hitherto.”¹⁰⁹ The seeds of learning, piety, and virtue, he thought, are inherent elements of our humanhood, and we have senses and the reason to learn.¹¹⁰ His theory brings to the fore the modern idea of progress and contains elements of the Eurocentric theory of recapitulation, which envisioned a pedagogy recreating the stages of humanhood to “civilization” that would appear at the end of the nineteenth century and embody a racialized view of human development.

It was a time of theological disputes that extended well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that would affect the Jesuits, in particular their confrontation with the Jansenists (named after Cornelius Jansen, theologian at the University of Leuven) around human freedom and divine grace.¹¹¹ The Jansenists, who had their center in France, questioned, among other issues, the Jesuits’ emphasis on free will, probabilism, and reconciliation with pagan cultures, expounded a moral rigorism, and championed the role of local bishops. One of the main opponents of the Jesuits was Jansenist Blais Pascal, a philosopher.¹¹² Furthermore, the re-emergence of Gallicanism, with its call for limitations to the power of the pope, would complicate the Jesuits’ standing in France, due to the relations they had with the French monarchy while being militant missionaries with vows of obedience to the pope. In 1705, Pope Clement XI condemned the “Chinese Rites,” the inculturation practice of Jesuit missionaries. The convergence of all these historical and theological developments affected the Jesuits’ standing and set the stage for their suppression.

The situational context was compounded by the colonial crisis generated when Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Madrid in 1750 for an exchange of territory through which natives in seven reductions in Portuguese territory had to move to now Spanish territory; this ended with Indigenous resistance and the War of the Seven Reductions (1756). In 1759, the Jesuits were expelled from Portugal and Portuguese dominions. This was not only a blow to their educational ministry in Spanish and Portuguese America but a major conjunctural component defining the future of the order.

Intellectually, the clash with the philosophers of the Enlightenment became inevitable by the mid-1750s, although we can talk of a Catholic Enlightenment nourished by the colonized elite. Note that Voltaire (1694-1778) had received his initial formation at the Jesuit Collège-Louis-LeGrand in Paris and was familiar with the Journal de Trévoux, the international Jesuit journal that engaged in fierce philosophical and theological quarrels.¹¹³ In 1764, King Louis XV suppressed the Jesuits in France by Royal Decree. Finally, in 1773, Clement XIV issued the papal brief Dominus ac Redemptor, supressing the order at the global level.

The eighteenth century saw a scientific and philosophical movement, which we will not fully enter into here. Thus, Immanuel Kant (1714-1804) stressed subjectivity in the process of knowing and a moral concept of progress while opposing the supernatural elements of Christianity. The philosophers of the Enlightenment advocated the idea of knowledge as a virtue as well as its emancipatory character, ideas that were further pushed by the educational optimism of Romanticism, starting with Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78). There was a change of attitude toward human awareness and an interest in human consciousness. Voltaire, in The Century of Louis XIV (1751), and David Hume, in The History of England (1778), questioned dogmatic Christianity as the central theme of historical change.¹¹⁴ Meanwhile, the establishment of political economy by the end of the eighteenth century, with Adam Smith (1776), signaled the profound economic changes taking place. The discussion of education and the creation of state-directed school were intelligible within an evolving new order of things. Regulations on compulsory schooling began in this century, pioneered by absolutist monarchs like Frederick V in Denmark, Maria Theresa in Austria, and Frederick the Great in Prussia.¹¹⁵ Thus, under Frederick II, the Prussian school codes of 1763 and 1765 ordered compulsory schooling for all children between the ages of five and thirteen or fourteen; these decrees also regulated school hours, vacations, curriculum, and textbooks. The introduction of nationwide systems of education was linked to the notion of the nation-state that emerged from the French revolution within Europe from the Congress of Vienna (1814-15), and this would take its own shape in the Americas.¹¹⁶ Pedagogically, the ideas of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852), and Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841) circulated in Europe, the Americas, and even the Middle East. Education was reconceptualized and the Jesuit vision was not in line with modern trends of thought, although the order contributed to its development through the global movement of ideas and forms of knowledge and even the creation of knowledge. In any case, we will close with the statement from Paul Grendler quoted at the beginning of the paper: “The Jesuits created the first free public education system that Europe or the rest of the world had seen.”

The Restored Society of Jesus, in 1814, would encounter a new scenario in which the Catholic Church, in many cases, would carve an educational space in a variety of settings.

Conclusion

The educational vision of the Jesuits aimed at the formation of men (sic) to be leaders with civic virtues, educated in a humanism open to transcendence while also grounded in scholasticism. Their emphasis was on the creation of colleges (secondary schools). Two temporalities converged in this approach, medieval scholasticism and Renaissance humanism. The Ratio Studiorum would become the plan of studies and the source of tensions, along with the scholastic parameters set by the order that persisted with Aristotelianism and Thomism. This became a barrier in their interaction with the new configuration of ideas that would nourish conceptions of education. The Jesuits ended up being inserted in a conflictive configuration in the Church, within the interplay between the secular and religious worlds. Their pragmatism, conveyed in political and economic accommodations to contextual circumstances, generated profound contradictions in their implementation of a universal (Catholic) Christianity that would order the world. We have illustrated this with the example of their use of enslaved people to sustain their operations.

Their globalism of their educational ministry, visualized in the online component of this work, followed the lines of colonization and trade, and the schools generated powerful networks. It was indeed a connected Jesuit apostolic enterprise involving the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe. However, recent historiography, as discussed in this paper, has problematized the idea of a Jesuit collective hierarchized identity and put emphasis on their agency in relation to the characteristics of location, the historicity of experience, and their own search for knowledge. Of particular interest is the argument around the role Jesuits and their educational work played in the formation of notable thinkers of modernity, such as Descartes or even Galileo - who the Church strongly opposed - or their own Jesuit theologians like Molina and Suarez and their vision of the secular. The Jesuits further mobilized ideas and cultures, and their linguistic abilities and their effect on the philosophers of the Enlightenment would be grounds to decenter the analysis of the order.

The seventeenth century marked not only the crisis with Jansenism and the decline of scholasticism and Aristotelianism, but also a spiritual renewal that opened the Church to the needs of the people, resulting in basic education for poor children as a response to the Reformation. Within the patriarchal setting of the Church, there was a realization that women were needed outside the cloister in the educational enterprise. The eighteenth-century scenario was not easy for the Jesuits, who could not articulate their thinking within new emerging configurations of political and intellectual ideas as they had done in the sixteenth century.