In this new comparative work, Dale Van Kley draws upon his deep engagement with the history of eighteenth-century French religious reform and takes his findings for a spin around the Spanish and Italian worlds. He aims to address how a centuries’ old and very finely honed (and specifically French) anti-Jesuitism found new life in Iberian and Italian terrain and how this culminated in the arrest, expulsion, and extinction of the Society of Jesus in both Europe and the New World.
Van Kley sets up Gallicanism and Jansenism as the twin pillars of eighteenth-century Reform Catholicism that supported the converging components of anti-Jesuitism. France plays a privileged role in the historical narrative developed here, not only because this is Van Kley's area of expertise but also because he is keen to trace how Jansenism and Gallicanism, both “homegrown” in France, converged in what became a transnational anti-Jesuit movement. Briefly, Gallicanism had been grounded in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century church-state politics which resulted in an episcopacy that had greater control over decision-making in France, a status that French bishops were keen to preserve. Jansenism was a seventeenth-century spiritual movement that was grounded in a “rigorist” theology that considered postlapsarian humans as radically fallen. Critiqued by the Jesuits as “reboiled Calvinism” and squelched by both papacy and Crown in the seventeenth century, Jansenism nonetheless experienced a grassroots resurgence in France in the eighteenth century, popular in Parisian parishes and covered carefully in the press.
The Society of Jesus was an international order of religious men with a hierarchical structure based upon obedience to the Jesuit general in Rome and whose members, in making final vows, declared obedience to the pope. It is therefore not surprising that they often ran headlong against the keen Gallican desire to keep Rome at a distance. As to the Jansenists, Jesuit spirituality was distasteful to them. Ignatian spirituality was grounded in a relatively optimistic view that humans had free will that was inherently guided by what the Jesuit theologian Luís Molina conceived of as “sufficient grace.” Such concepts were abhorred by rigorist Jansenist theologians who deplored Jesuit penitential practices as exercises in moral laxity, made all the more appalling by the Jansenist view that shoddy Jesuit confessions had deluded fallen sinners into thinking they were worthy to take the Eucharist more frequently. As eighteenth-century anti-Jesuitism gained ground, the Gallican critique of Jesuit despotism and their blind obedience to Rome found common ground with Jansenist critiques of moral laxity. Eighteenth-century critics began to reexamine the writings of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theologians, not only Molina, but also Mariana and Bellarmine, whose probabilist theological speculations included the possibility that it could be moral to overthrow a king.
Van Kley uses terms like “crucible” to describe the conditions in which heretofore unrelated critiques of the Jesuits were mobilized to launch a movement against the order. My favorite description is afforded by a musical metaphor—the fugue. This term captures how long-standing singular phrases of anti-Jesuitism were “rather like themes seemingly left dangling in a Bach fugue only to be recalled and combined in a final crescendo.” Van Kley explains: “Every theme ever sounded against Jesuits seemed to resonate and resound anew in the acoustics of contemporary events with the help of a little editorial orchestration and direction” (103).
But how did such music play outside of France, in the Italian states and on the Iberian Peninsula? I focus here on the Spanish case: Unlike the slow-brewing French anti-Jesuitism, its appearance on the Iberian Peninsula represented a radical shift from prior attitudes toward the Society of Jesus. In Spain, this new movement against the order was largely top-down and orchestrated by Crown advisors (as opposed to the parish-based movement in France that found a voice in the popular press). The Gallican arguments were most appealing to the Spanish as a means of wresting control over religious institutions from Rome. Yet these theological musings of “roguish” Jesuits so contentious in France had, until this moment, been easily published in the Iberian Peninsula. Even by the mid-eighteenth century, Jansenism was never rooted deeply enough among the populace to be a causal factor for the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spanish holdings. Rather, the modernizing Bourbon state was keen to sideline the regular orders, and while the mendicants were lumped together as “backward,” the Jesuits distinguished themselves as “dangerous.” The discourse about despotism and regicide played well on the Iberian Peninsula because the American Jesuits had been critiqued as operating as an independent state in the Paraguay missions, and they had also successfully maneuvered against episcopal power in the battle against Juan de Palafox in Mexico. When an assassination attempt was made on Portugal's King José I, Jesuit's “regicidal theology” appeared to be a palpable and disturbing possibility. Finally, when a popular revolt took over the streets of Spain, the Crown swiftly blamed the Jesuits for supporting, even organizing, the uprising.
Thus, if the “fugue” is a French export, then to describe its impact on the Iberian Peninsula Van Kley relies upon the language of tectonics. Accordingly, the adoption of Gallicanism, the sharpened critiques of probabilism, and a developing taste for Jansenist spirituality represented a seismic shift on the Iberian Peninsula. Even so, Van Kley points out, Jansenism took root as an international movement largely as the result of the deployment of its tenets by state agents eager to expel the Jesuits. It was, he might have said, an aftershock, and one that continued to be felt in the maneuvering of the combined efforts of diplomats from the French, Spanish, and some Italian states to compel the papacy to dismantle the Society of Jesus altogether, which it did in 1773.
It is important to clarify the relationship that Van Kley presents between anti-Jesuitism and Reform Catholicism. Anti-Jesuitism is not the root of Reform Catholicism. Rather, critique of the Society of Jesus is a common denominator of several different reformist threads. That these threads would converge was not foretold. Rather, individual critiques of the society—ranging from the reformist notions that favored local governance in church-state relations to rigorist ideas of salvation—converged around a shared dislike of it, with the resulting emergence of a powerful international movement to extinguish the Society of Jesus.
This is a transregional and comparative story, meticulously told, about how varying threads of a reforming Catholicism forged common cause in the very act of circling the wagons around the Jesuits. His foray into the Spanish and Italian historiography brings to an English-language audience the more recent findings of Spanish and Italian authors. Scholars of early modern Spain will find nothing surprising in the story of the Bourbon Crown's battle against the Jesuits, the importance of Esquilache, the critiques of the American Jesuits as “despotic,” and the symbolic and spiritual importance of the beatification of the American bishop Palafox. Yet the comparative framing is illuminating, and specialists who have looked at the issue from only a singular national framing will find this an extremely useful book for teaching and research. The transatlantic component could be developed further, as scholars of Latin America have highlighted what was unique to the colonial world (see, for example, Eva María St. Clair Segurado, “Difusíon en América de la polémica europea en torno de la Compañía de Jesús,” Dimensión antropológica 10, no. 27 [2003]: 7–45).
The most important aspect of the book, in my view, is Van Kley's keen eye for the ways in which theological debates, spiritual sensibilities, and devotional practices influenced international politics in the age of the Enlightenment. His study of Reform Catholicism offers a theopolitical analysis of how state power draws upon—is in fact immersed in—“religion.” Thus, early modern political power depended upon and deployed religion in ways that cannot merely be written off as “instrumentalist.” In demonstrating so clearly how theological debates were key to shaping eighteenth-century world views, Van Kley explains in detail how this international theopolitical movement against the Jesuits gained traction and why it was so incredibly successful.
