This is a difficult book to describe: translation, abridgement, paraphrase, and digest of a digest. The underlying foundational document is the memoir (Memorias) of the Spanish Jesuit Luis Martín García (1846–1906), superior general of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) from 1892 until his death. Beginning just short of age fifty, Martín wrote the approximately 5,500 manuscript pages in six languages during the final ten years of his life (1895–1905). Confided to friends as death approached, the highly personal document evaded ecclesiastical censorship (and likely destruction) as well as plunder during the Spanish Civil War. Nine decades later, permission was given for its translation into a single language—Castilian. The resulting two-volume, 2,195-page critical edition was published in 1988 by the Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu (Rome). Although David Schultenover's English volume preserves Martín's chronological structure, it is both an abridgement and a paraphrase setting Martín's original account within a historical narrative. Concluding the volume is Schultenover's sixty-five-page “Epilogue,” a digest of the preceding abridgement that guides the reader through Martín's dense forest. By any measure, this work—like its foundational document—is monumental.
Schultenover's subtitle—“Showing Up”—gestures to his thesis about why Martín engaged in such a mammoth undertaking, especially given his responsibilities for a religious order scattered across the globe in an age of empire. Martín wrote his Memorias as a general examination of his whole life (as prescribed by Ignatius Loyola)—or, more colloquially, as a way of “coming clean.” In particular, Martín was obsessively and morbidly preoccupied by what he called his “miseries” and what Schultenover terms Martín's “secret sexual compulsions.” These compulsions, Schultenover argues, were the “dominant surd” in Martín's life, and the composition of his Memorias was an attempt to make sense of this surd by giving it “narrative integrity” (869). Martín traced his “miseries” back to a two-year period in minor seminary during which he lodged with the family of a business associate of his father and had to share a bed with an older servant boy. Schultenover interprets this experience in contemporary terms: “It was here that he experienced what today we would call sexual abuse” (866).
From this pivotal traumatic episode flowed a life marked by Martín's compulsion to look at persons and things he judged inappropriate. Surveying his life's trajectory in his fifties, Martín judged “the curiosity of my eyes” as his principal fault, and Schultenover excavates the many visual and ocular metaphors throughout the memoir (339). The wide array of items attracting Martín's attention included “reading lewd sections of the classics” (199); classical sculptures, paintings, photographs, and engravings during the times he lived in Florence and Rome; “looking at the women going into the church opposite or living in the houses facing the window of my bedroom”; and especially viewing “the swimmers I often met along the Riviera de Genova” (339). Most significantly for Martín, however, was his attraction to fellow younger Jesuits, which he judged to be a “natural affection” in one case and “passionate love” in another (131, 234).
Martín's emotional and psychological burden was augmented by his situating sexuality within the contexts of sickness and death stalking him throughout his life. As his siblings’ childhood deaths left him as the lone survivor of seven children, Martín's parents became hyperanxious in their care and left him with an apprehension toward life (866). Martín recounts the impacts of numerous young Jesuit associates’ deaths throughout his twenties. Although untimely deaths were hardly uncommon in the late nineteenth century, Martín interpreted them religiously within the context of divine punishment for his “miseries”: sudden deaths caused him “to reflect on the brevity of life and to live always prepared for an accounting” at the final judgment (197). In 1905, the tenth year of composing his Memorias, Martín underwent surgery (voluntarily foregoing anesthetic) to remove a tumor in his right arm. Two months later, that arm (with his writing hand) needed to be amputated.
During the remaining months of his life, Martín forced himself to finish his Memorias—including his account of his final illness—with his left hand. His lifelong association of illness with divine punishment lasted to the very end as he “saw his death from cancer—as something deserved for his sins.” Having its “etiology in childhood influences and ‘original’ sins,” Schultenover concludes, Martín “saw all such influences as dragging him down” (869).
These personal details are embedded within Martín's sprawling eyewitness account of a half-century's geopolitical upheavals. Among the most striking aspects are poignant details giving flesh and blood to the sheer brutality of Jesuit expulsions in Spain, France, and elsewhere. Martín's ground-level account reminds readers of what it was like to have been on the losing side of liberal nationalism's inexorable push throughout the century: a life of endless chaos, multiple exiles, and relocations. Given present-day scholarship of the psychology of migrants in general and, more particularly, of refugees and exiles, Martín's accounts invite further study. Other topics include the peculiarly Spanish context requiring Martín's astute navigation between loyalist Carlists, extreme integralists, and liberal nationalists (383). Martín's visceral, bitter reaction to the end of Spain's empire following the Spanish-American War might usefully be read alongside John McGreevy's final chapter (“Manila, Philippines: Empire”) in American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).
Beyond Spain, at exactly the same moment (1899–1901), Martín had to address France's political earthquake following the Dreyfus Affair. Judging that Jesuits’ “efforts to protest our innocence” against “the cruelest and vilest libels” had failed (723), Martín needed to guide French Jesuits through their exile abroad (once again) and the confiscation of their properties (once again). Finally, Martín spent the last weeks of his life navigating Pope Pius X and the Roman Catholic Modernist Crisis. One of his final acts was the expulsion of George Tyrrell from the Jesuit order.
It is understandable that, although Martín seems to have wanted his “showing up” eventually to be published, in the near term he entrusted its safety not to the official archives in Rome (as would be expected for a superior general's writings), but to archives in his home province. Its survival of censorship and civil war is remarkable, and Schultenover's modified format in English translation significantly expands its accessibility for scholars across the globe. It is an invaluable resource for historians of nineteenth-century Spain, modernization and laicism, church-state conflict, religion and religious life, mentalities and emotions.
