Jesuit Enlightenment Interventions in Christianity and Intellectualism

5
Jesuit Enlightenment: Interventions in Christianity

and Intellectualism
Ivonne del Valle
An assessment of the Jesuits’ contributions to the enlightened culture of New

Spain must refer back to Ignacio de Loyola and his Ejercicios espirituales
(1541), the ur-figure and the ur-text of the society, because they both
exemplify, in all of its contradictions, the order’s greatest potential, as well
as its limitations. On the one hand, Loyola’s unwavering determination and
originality – which initially caused him problems with the Inquisition – and
the radical, transformative power of his Ejercicios represent a threshold in the
religious and political life of sixteenth-century Spain and Europe: the
opening of an opportunity for a reformed, modernized Catholicism to
remake the world one person and one place at a time. The society’s relatively
late creation occurred at a moment of profound crisis and social changes –
the Counterreformation, the conquest of the New World – which allowed it
to engage such situations with a fresh outlook, without the encumbrances of
the by then perhaps stale traditions of other religious orders. On the other
hand, the Jesuits’ flexibility and openness to tackling mundane affairs that
would allow them to influence what was happening in the world had a limit
in the image of the king who leads his armies against the infidels. Loyola
conjures up this idea in the Ejercicios to cast away any doubts as to what one
should do in order to serve God – the Jesuit leader’s stated goal (Loyola,
1944: 54–55). Nevertheless, for some time the Jesuits were able to maneuver
the space between Loyola’s autonomy and his own invocation of power
without exacerbating the rift between the friars’ service to God and their
commitment to serving him in the world. The following pages will address
the Jesuits’ strong contribution to the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century
New Spain, in the context of the transformation of this order that had been
torn between independence and acquiescence since its inception.
The Jesuits’ unparalleled vitality allowed them to expand rapidly
throughout the globe and to create one of the most impressive net-
works of communication and knowledge exchange in the early modern
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period, along with what continues to be the most expansive educa-
tional system the world has ever known. The order (in the Americas)
has often been referred to as “a state within a state,” and, indeed, by
the eighteenth century, the balance between the order’s economic
activities and its other missions (e.g., educational, religious) made the
Jesuits a highly autonomous body. The Jesuits were seen as a threat –
and/or later on as superfluous when the Bourbons formalized their
dominion of their overseas territories – by states working toward what
the Jesuits had already accomplished: a thorough and efficient institu-
tionalization. If at one point the Jesuits represented the promise of
change, of transformation into a Catholicism more committed to the
real needs of the people – a possibility suggested by one of their initial
mottos, “the world is our home” (O’Malley, 1993: 44, 68–69) – their
institutionalization ended up stifling them by converting them into the
conservative forces they initially set out to challenge. Acting in the
world, and attending to the needs of the people, could not have been
achieved without the consent of other powers, and the Jesuits’ assent-
ing to these powers took a toll on their ability to respond to the very
needs they wanted to serve.
Along with their sanctioning of economic and political powers,
the “yielding” of their will in the blind obedience required by their
statutes – according to Loyola, the feature that distinguished them
from other religious orders (Loyola, 1742: “Cartas” 78 and 100) – may
have ended up exhausting the Jesuits’ original vitality. Two eighteenth-
century events rekindled their energy: their expulsion in 1767 from
Iberian and French domains, and what Antonello Gerbi called “the
dispute of the New World” – the historiographical and philosophical
debates of what the Americas were and what their place in the geopo-
litical order of the world ought to be given their geographic and
natural characteristics. But by then the Jesuits were being expelled
from the territories in which they wanted to act. In addition, their
order would soon be suppressed, in 1773. As Pilar Gonzalbo has
brilliantly remarked in her evaluation of the Jesuits’ influence in New
Spain, in the wake of their expulsion:
dejaban un grupo privilegiado, incapaz de asumir su responsabilidad rectora
porque vacilaba entre ser español o americano, opresor u oprimido, mod-
erno o tradicionalista. . .. Cuando los jesuitas desterrados comprendieron la
grandeza de la misión que habían tenido encomendada era demasiado tarde
para rectificar errores . . . (1989: 226)
Jesuit Enlightenment: Interventions in Christianity & Intellectualism 83
Whereas at one point Loyola had to prove his orthodoxy before the
Inquisition, by the time the Jesuits were forced to leave their posts, the
order could be considered upholders of the status quo.1
First Stage: The Jesuits Arrive in New Spain

Cecilia Frost remarks that if the impact of the Jesuits in Europe was
pervasive, it was necessarily much more so in sixteenth-century New
Spain, where a new, Hispanic world had to be created from the destruction
and transformation of what remained of pre-Hispanic America (2000: 9).
Literary scholars such as Ángel Rama and Antony Higgins have deter-
mined that 1572, the year of the Jesuits’ arrival in New Spain, and 1767, the
year of their expulsion, define the political and cultural history of the
colony. Their influence is so widespread even in present-day Mexico that
it is difficult to fully characterize it (Gonzalbo, 1989: 229).2
In New Spain, the Jesuits embodied what Michel Foucault has referred
to as “pastoral technology”: a form of power that, in its capacity to
assemble its subjects under one banner, can be considered reason of state,
while also resembling, in its simultaneous ability to call each one of these
subjects an individual, a fatherly or priestly control figure. As the omnes et
singulatim (the all and the singular) in the title of Foucault’s text indicates,
this political form, closely associated with religious authority, assumes that
of a caring shepherd who wields power over his flock as a whole but who
also addresses them individually (Foucault, 1979: 237–238). According to
Foucault, the origins of our current forms of political power can be found
in this model (1979: 226–227). For several reasons (economic, urban,
cultural), and contrary to what could be expected given the Middle Ages’
religious character, a “triumphant pastorate” was not possible in medieval
times (1979: 240). But this model was feasible later, in Spain’s dominions,
especially in the case of the Jesuits.
Francisco de Florencia’s Historia de la provincia de la Compañía de Jesús
en la Nueva España (1694) narrates the arrival of the first fifteen Jesuits to
New Spain in 1572 and the rapidness with which they spread over the
territory. As if writing a play in contrasts, Florencia recounts the almost
stealthy arrival of the Jesuits – sick, devoid of possessions, in the middle of
the night, unseen by anyone – with a prose in which energy and certitude
convey the idea that the order had arrived to fill every interstice of power
available. Indeed, by 1576 the Jesuits had established three colleges in
Mexico City alone; by 1601 the Real y Pontificia Universidad of Mexico
City had to close its grammar classes because its students were attending
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Jesuit schools. At the helm of the education of the Creole elite, a project
they engaged while simultaneously spreading themselves to the remotest
areas of the Mexican viceroyalty, the Jesuits were establishing a far-reaching
and powerful command over the territory. By 1578 and 1610, years in which
the Jesuits led massive week-long celebrations commemorating the sending
of relics by Gregory XIII and the canonization of Loyola, respectively, they
had established a strong basis for what would become a new mestizo
culture. The inextricable combination of Christian and indigenous patrio-
tic and religious symbols promoted by the Jesuits in their processions,
theatrical representations, and popular festivities all contributed strongly
to the core of later Mexican culture (Alberro, 1999).
On the peripheries of New Spain, Jesuit missions proliferated, along with
the order’s cattle ranches, sugar cane haciendas, and many other commercial
enterprises. Even when some of these missions could be considered failures
with regard to their evangelizing objectives, they were still important in
connecting different economic and knowledge-producing regions extending
over far-flung territories.
In contrast to the Franciscans, who dominated the first period of evange-
lization in New Spain (1521–1572), the Jesuits’ approach to conversion
appears modern and open – untroubled, for example, by the superimposi-
tion of Christian and indigenous symbols that the Franciscans tried so hard
to prevent.3 In fact, the Jesuits’ conscious and pragmatic appropriation of
indigenous religious and political symbols for purposes of instruction and
control is considered paradigmatic of later Creole self-fashioning through
indigenous materials.
Their particular ethos notwithstanding, the order would have accom-
plished far less had the circumstances of the New World not given the
Jesuits such ample means and room to operate. The legal and material
conditions of sixteenth-century New Spain permitted many people,
including the Jesuits, liberal access to valuable resources such as land,
labor, and silver, which in turn reinforced the Order’s institutionalization.
The wealth produced by slave labor in the mines of Zacatecas owned by
Alonso de Villaseca (the Jesuits’ famous benefactor), as well as the labor of
the native peoples from Tacuba contributed by their cacique Don Antonio
de Cortés, was used to erect, in a very short time frame, the first Jesuit
college in Mexico City – the Colegio de San Pedro y San Pablo (Florencia,
1955: 129, 132; Santos, 1992: 24). The availability of these important
resources to Villaseca, the Jesuits, and the caciques made possible the
conditions that enabled the strong influence exerted by the Jesuits in the
American colonies. That is why, lest we overestimate the Jesuits’
remarkable success, we need to pair it with the exceptional conditions of the
colonies that allowed for what was impossible to realize elsewhere or
before.
Two important texts that document the Jesuits’ feverish activities within
their first hundred years in New Spain indirectly give us a glimpse of these
conditions: Andrés Pérez de Ribas’s Triunfos de nuestra santa fe entre gentes
las más bárbaras y fieras del nuevo orbe (1645) and Florencia’s previously
mentioned Historia. In both, but perhaps especially in Florencia, the by
then uncertain character of a colonial world still in the making is evident,
and the Jesuits had to move carefully to avoid stepping on anyone’s terrain,
be it that of the university, the Franciscans, or the Dominicans (Florencia,
1955: 124–131, 195). Florencia emphasizes that the Jesuits were not only
wanted, but desperately needed by New Spanish vecinos interested in
providing a good education for their children (1955: 67–70). As Florencia
presents it, outside of the cities, warring Indians populated the vast expanse
of the borderlands, and mixed peoples constituted the core congregations
in mining towns. All of these groups needed to be brought into the fold of
Christianity. In this respect, Florencia’s history (like Pérez de Ribas’s) is
clearly inscribed within a providential framework. For both authors, the
presence of God and Satan was undeniable and ubiquitous (Florencia,
1995: 91; Pérez de Ribas, 1944, I: 175). According to Florencia, the founding
of the Jesuit Order and their arrival in foreign lands had been announced
centuries before: whereas the creation of the Dominican and the
Franciscan orders had been prophesized by Joachim de Fiore, Santo
Tomás himself had spoken about the Jesuit missions (1955: 1). This reli-
gious character is absent in later accounts, a fact that speaks of the changes
in the order over time.
Pérez de Ribas’s Triunfos provides a full account of Jesuit missionary
work through 1645, at a time when the Jesuits were contemplating extend-
ing their network to California, a little-known land that promised “otro
Nuevo Mundo o otra Nueva España” (Pérez de Ribas, 1944, II: 244).
Written at a key moment in their northward expansion, it proposed
important adjustments to the ways in which this growth should take
place. According to Pérez de Ribas, in light of the recent Tepehuan
uprisings (1616–1620 in what is now Durango), which had resulted in
several Jesuit martyrs, presidios had to be the central apparatus from
which religious and economic activities would be deployed in the border-
lands (1944, I: chapters 13–15). As stated by Jesuit José de Acosta, who in De
procuranda indorum salute (1588) provided the theoretical and pragmatic
framework for Jesuit missionaries everywhere, God intended Christianity
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for everyone, regardless of their “stage of civilization” (their policía in the
political vocabulary of the seventeenth century). And according to Pérez de
Ribas’s title and the leitmotif running through his text, the northern tribes
were the “most savage” in the world. Therein lay the Jesuit’s triumph: in
their spreading of “civilization” (understood as the correct policía – that is,
the European way of life) and their success in gradually pushing the
dreaded barbarian frontier farther north (1944, I: 97–113). Whether they
were busy carving out a place in Mexico City and other urban areas or
erasing barbarity from the map, a militant religious vigor permeates the
actions and writings of these late seventeenth-century Jesuits.
Second Stage: Beyond Providential Frameworks, Secularization,

and the Enlightenment
Between this seventeenth-century written production and that of the
eighteenth century, there appears to be a hiatus; even if the Jesuits did
not stop writing, their better-known works appeared toward the final
decades of the latter time period.4 As I have suggested, it was the
combination of the expulsion and the Americas debates – their reading
of texts by Cornelius de Pauw and Georges Buffon, among others – that
gave a strong impulse and a new direction to Jesuit writing, which became
more focused on natural history and ethnography than on the history of
evangelization as such.
Being forced to abruptly leave what for many was their native country
had, no doubt, a traumatic effect on the Creole Jesuits – especially because,
with very few exceptions, they were never able to go back. To further
complicate things, the travel conditions endured in order to reach their
destinations were far from ideal, as the Jesuit Francisco Javier Alegre and
several others took pains to describe (Frost, 2000). Many were old men by
the time they had to leave everything behind. Of the 678 Jesuits expelled
from New Spain, 110 died before arriving at their destinations in Europe
(Santos, 1992: 63). Once there, many Jesuits coming from the Americas
stayed together – the contingent from New Spain took up residence in
Bologna, for example – where they shared not only their poverty, but also
conversations that helped concretize their newfound priority of defending
their patria from what they perceived as uninformed attacks by foreign
authors, such as de Pauw and Buffon.
Antonello Gerbi, who led the way for other historians who have studied
the eighteenth-century historiographical debates between European and
American writers, indicates that in spite of its many pitfalls, this polemic
“contributed to the advancement of the science of nature” (Gerbi, 1955: xvi).
To this we should add, on the side of the Jesuit Creoles’ “patriotic
epistemology” (as Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has referred to it), the delinea-
tion of a future patria. In the later books penned by Jesuits, something had
dramatically changed since the histories Pérez de Ribas and Florencia
wrote. These newer texts no longer centered on advancing Christianity
and its accompanying civilization, but rather on creating a space for New
Spain in the international world of letters and knowledge – a New Spain
that was not necessarily connected to old Spain. In this, their work was
remarkable. To give one example, Anthony Higgins has asserted that in
Rusticatio Mexicana (1781), Rafael Landívar imagined a new utopian order
“decoupled from the authority of both the Jesuits and the Spanish state”
(Higgins, 2000: 20). That Landívar proposed a prosperous New Spain
without the Jesuits is a gesture that speaks to the higher stakes Landívar
pretended to serve: those in which the particular interests of his order no
longer obtained, or mattered, in the name of the economic and social
advancement of a region that could and should go on without the Jesuits.
As significant as this secular shift was, it did not happen abruptly. If in
one sense it represents the Jesuits’ response to their changing circum-
stances, it is also the realization of possibilities present in the Jesuits since
the time of Loyola and the Ejercicios. In fact, the tendency toward secular-
ization might very well be the mark of the Jesuits: the feature, in contrast to
what Loyola had said about their defining characteristic (obedience), that
set them apart from other religious orders and made them powerful and
influential – but redundant later on. It is not only that Loyola, in a gesture
of remarkable independence, had declared that even if the Scriptures used
for teaching the truths of the faith had not existed, he would have been
equally willing to die for those truths in the name of what he had seen with
his soul (Dickens, 1968: 75), but also the fact that the church appears only
very late and as an afterthought in the Ejercicios. That is, ever since Loyola
and the Ejercicios, the centrality of the church is set aside by Loyola’s own
autonomy; he felt he didn’t need the church’s truths in order to believe
what he believed, or in order to do what he considered necessary.
Michel de Certeau has superbly analyzed this important feature of the
Jesuits, the order’s commitment to “leave God for God” – to, in God’s
name, leave the cloister and the traditional proximity to Him, which is
characteristic of this type of religious life, in order to submerge themselves
in the mundane activities of the world and to transform their mourning for
their distance from God into the multiple activities (those of their institu-
tion) that would mitigate or mask His absence (1993).
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In the eighteenth century, this secularization (which, although related,
should not be equated with a true departure from religion) is evident in two
interconnected areas: the Jesuit formation of citizens in Mexico and the
writing of patriotic or regional histories, or scientific works decoupled from
religious pursuits.5 Since the Jesuits held an unquestioned monopoly over the
education of Creoles and mestizos in Mexico (Santos, 1992: 293)6 and were
fundamental in instilling a Westernized way of life among many indigenous
groups, their influence throughout the colony was immense. As in European
centers of education, students at Jesuit colleges learned “politeness,
composure, ‘bearing,’ and even more, hygiene . . . productivity . . . competi-
tion, ‘civility,’ and so forth” (de Certeau, 1988: 159). With this, the Jesuits
contributed to a Catholic enlightenment that in many ways went beyond its
religious foundation.
In terms of the creation of a “civic consciousness,” the Jesuits have long
been recognized as important promoters of what has been referred to as
“singularidad novohispana,” or the creation and extolling through litera-
ture of a consciousness of the region’s natural riches (Vargas Alquicira,
1989). Although the Jesuits helped create, through their writings and
influential positions as educators, an idea of New Spain as a separate
cultural entity – and through this they were able to congregate those
Creoles who saw themselves as the (only) rightful members of the new
political unit – this was not, of course, the only possible form of belonging
available in the colonial period. Eric Van Young has demonstrated how, by
the nineteenth-century wars of Latin American independence, there was at
least one other important subaltern group comprised of Indians, mestizos,
and Creoles that saw itself in very different terms from those dictated by
Jesuit or Creole patriotism. Nevertheless, the Jesuits instilled a nationalistic
pride in the inhabitants of the territories in which they lived and in the
history of those places – though they were aware of the fact that this
history, which was largely pre-Hispanic, separated Creoles from the land
they considered theirs.7 The Jesuits’ writings might be understood as an
effort to bridge this gap between a history that was not their own, since it
belonged to the Indians, and their aspirations to assume a leadership role in
the production of knowledge about the places in which they lived and
worked.
The move toward secularization can also be seen in the indirect results of
Christianizing and civilizing the “barbarous” Indians of the northern
borderlands. Often, Christianization was not exactly what was taking
place, as the Jesuits’ complaints about their lack of success in this area
made clear. Such are the cases of Juan Jacobo Baegert and Philip Segesser in
Baja California Sur and Sonora, respectively. Nonetheless, the Indians
were gradually leaving behind their previous way of life, albeit incomple-
tely. Whether this constituted “civilization” or not is open to debate; what
is undeniable is the fact that from the Jesuits’ troubled history in the
missions, there emerged a formidable collection of books on natural history
and ethnography that are considered primary regional histories. Examples
include texts on Baja California written by Baegert, Miguel del Barco, and
Miguel Venegas, among others. This participation in more-secular endea-
vors was generalized in the eighteenth century at each and every mission
where the Jesuits were stationed. Their contributions – their work as
cartographers, geographers, linguists, botanists, and authors of ethno-
graphic writings – form the foundation of what we know about these
areas. Juan de Esteyneffer’s Florilogio medicinal (1711), for example, was
indispensable in every mission, and it remains a source of valuable infor-
mation on the botany and the medicinal practices (the saving of bodies and
not of souls) of its time. The inventories of the libraries in the missions of
Baja California at the moment of Jesuit expulsion led Michael Mathes to
refer to them as “cultural oases” in an otherwise culturally bleak panorama,
since many of these missions were located in isolated areas with very few
comforts, much less the luxury of a library.
If the Jesuits’ participation in the advancement of historical and scien-
tific knowledge was generalized,8 there were important differences among
missionaries in their appreciation of the territories in which they lived. The
scathing diatribes of some missionaries against the places where they were
posted, or against the Indians with whom they worked, would have offered
plenty of interesting data to fuel the imagination of the European writers
who provided dismal descriptions of the Americas (de Pauw, Buffon) –
authors against whom other Jesuits were writing. Though some of the most
acerbic criticisms were penned by Jesuits from northern Europe who were
sent to Mexico, such as Baegert and Ignaz Pfefferkorn, nationality does not
tidily differentiate among them. In a letter written in 1750, José de Abarca,
a Creole in the region of El Nayar, bitterly complained about the wretch-
edness of his mission in Guaynamota – a place that, according to him, was
good only for “bestias e indios brutos a ellas semejantes” (de Abarca, 1989:
111–113). One of the most riveting accounts of mission life comes from
Baegert, a German, who makes it clear in his Noticias de la península
americana de California that he doesn’t think much of California9 –
about which he says, “Todo lo concerniente a California es tan poca
cosa, que no vale la pena alzar la pluma para escribir algo sobre ella”
(Baegert, 1942: 3). He nevertheless proceeded to write and publish a couple
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of hundred pages on the topic. If nature in Baja California Sur, where
Baegert was stationed, was wondrous for its uninviting and inhospitable
character, what man – including the Jesuits – had achieved there was
inconsequential. As Baegert states, Nuestra Señora de Loreto Conchó,
located in southern Baja California, which was supposed to be the jewel
among the missions in California, was nothing more than a humble
“lechería suiza” (1942: 158). Letters and books such as those by Abarca
and Baegert did little to advance national pride and, as I have already
stated, would have contributed to the prejudices of writers such as Buffon
and de Pauw.
By contrast, Francisco Javier Clavijero’s Historia antigua de México
(1780–1781) and Andrés Cavo’s Historia de México (1797) are complemen-
tary volumes that foregrounded the value of Aztec society and the history of
Mexico, respectively. Cavo begins his history with an indictment of the
conquest. He critiques the incredibly large number of people killed,
the immense greed of Cortés and the rest of the Spaniards, the tyranny
of the repartimiento, and the astonishing fact that Indians were still being
made slaves as late as 1639. All of these conditions taint Cavo’s Mexico
(Cavo, 1949: 49–52, 313). And yet his pages, like those of all his fellow
Jesuits, contain no clear and direct criticisms of Spain, the king, or the
viceroys. Perhaps they are present in veiled form, as in Cavo’s recounting of
how Charles III, heeding the Marquis de Croix’s desire not to receive any
gifts from anyone, had raised the viceroy’s salary by 50 percent (1949: 461).
In spite of Cavo’s somehow conformist view, the reader is left with a
strange aftertaste from this history that, at least where the Indians were
concerned, was unambiguous: for example, according to Cavo, even after
more than two centuries, they refused to participate in the yearly celebra-
tions marking the fall of Tenochtitlan (1949: 48), as if the conquest were
still painfully fresh in their collective memory. Moreover, Cavo notes,
because the Spaniards had created not a single nation, but rather one
that was bitterly divided, they had failed to obtain the Indians’ consent
and their willing participation in the new society. Had they proceeded
differently, “los Españoles no serían malquistos de los naturales, cosa aun
en nuestros días la más lamentable y que tiene consecuencias funestísimas”
(1949: 59).
For his part, Clavijero wrote a history of the Aztecs and the conquest, as
well as a series of “Disertaciones” – the most original and interesting part of
his work – defending the indigenous people against the criticisms of
European writers, particularly de Pauw. It is perhaps lucky for us that
Clavijero did not have a better sense of humor. Had he taken lightly what,
in opposition to his “patriotic epistemology,” as Cañizares-Esguerra has
called it, we could call the “eccentric epistemology” of many eighteenth-
century Europeans, his work would lack its spark. But eccentric indeed it
was, as an irritated Clavijero demonstrates when addressing some of the
European authors’ more outlandish claims. Equal measures of appreciation
for his Mexican motherland and for the native peoples (painfully
misrepresented by Europeans and some Creoles alike [Clavijero, 1958,
IV: 209–210]), as well as of (partially amused) fury, set the tone of his
prose. To respond to de Pauw’s portrayal of the overall feebleness of the
Americas, and of the Indians in particular (supposedly beardless, weak, and
lacking in sexual drive), he says: “ellos [the Indians] son los que llevan todo
el peso de los trabajos públicos. . .. Esto hacen los débiles, poltrones e
inútiles americanos, mientras que el vigoroso Paw y otros infatigables
europeos se ocupan de escribir invectivas contra ellos” (1958, IV: 206).
To respond to de Pauw’s claim that all American languages lacked abstract,
general notions, Clavijero states:
Cualquiera que lea estas decisiones magistrales de Paw, se persuadirá sin
duda que decide así después de haber viajado por toda la América, de haber
tratado con todas esas naciones y haber examinado todas sus lenguas, pero
no es así, Paw sin salir de su gabinete de Berlín, sabe las cosas de América
mejor que los mismos americanos, y en el conocimiento de aquellas lenguas,
excede a los que las hablan. (1958, IV: 323–324)
His irony is raw and direct, and could words have been weapons, de Pauw
and many others would have undoubtedly been silenced by Clavijero’s
pointed attack.
The same spirit permeates José Antonio de Alzate’s articles in the Gazeta
de literatura (1788–1795), with one striking difference: he writes not to
demonstrate the value of the Aztecs’ past or of Mexico’s history, but rather
to serve the public good. Since this secular priest felt compelled to inves-
tigate and take charge of so many pressing problems, his texts give the
impression that the colonial government did not actually exist. His deter-
mination to separate secular concerns from religious matters is remark-
able,10 especially coming from someone who, though not a Jesuit, was still
a priest, and a former student of Clavijero. Alzate’s commitment to a civic,
scientific, and cultural order beyond the church is refreshing in its signaling
of a possible new social pact – one not grounded in God or religion, but in
the promotion of overall social good. To the historical debates of people
like Clavijero, he adds his notes on scientific experiments and his observa-
tions on the fauna and flora of the region (and on their medicinal uses and
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beauty). He also gives advice on how to improve the distribution of water
in Mexico City, as well as how to respond to epidemics, hunger, and floods.
In his recipes for nourishing and inexpensive dishes to alleviate the hunger
of the poor, the word charity, for example, is tellingly absent (Alzate, 2012).
Writing as though to feed those who needed it, as a civic duty and not an
opportunity to exercise Christian virtue, Alzate’s text proceeds without the
sentimentalism or the religiously moralistic tone that characterized many
of his contemporaries.
The work of Alzate and several other eighteenth-century writers (former
Jesuit student Juan José Eguiara y Eguren and Antonio de León y Gama,
for example) indicates that by the time they were expelled, the Jesuits were
perhaps no longer necessary. Alzate, Eguiara y Eguren, and León y Gama,
among others, were already intervening in the spaces the Jesuits had
occupied and fulfilling the functions the Jesuits had performed – in some
cases, as in Alzate’s, pushing secularization and the commitment to civic
duty for all members of society, Indians included, even further than the
Jesuits themselves had done. In addition to the work of people such as
Alzate, who by performing multiple tasks (such as checking Mexico City’s
water supply, writing about ways to alleviate hunger, describing the whole
area in which Mexico City was located, etc.) took the work of several
institutions upon himself, the Bourbon state was now ready to take the
reins of the colonies in a way the Habsburgs had not done before.
Without presenting it as such, John O’Malley points to one of the
paradoxes of the Jesuits: that they “sought to be mediators of an immediate
experience of God” (1993: 19). The main challenge for a group that conceived
of its tasks in terms of mediation was to remain necessary even when its
mediation was no longer needed. Many critics read Mexican Independence as
the logical continuation of the work of these eighteenth-century Jesuits, who
fought hard in their writings to create a strong and independent Mexican
cultural entity. However, since cultural difference is not equivalent to political
independence, others think of independence more as a rupture with the status
quo the Jesuits represented, in spite of their expulsion (Chinchilla, 2010: 13;
Gonzalbo, 1989: 228; Ortega, 2010: 92). Without denying the formidable
contributions of the order that I have emphasized here, I find the conciliatory
and mediating character of the Jesuits hardly adequate for moments, such as
the independence movement, in which more radical measures were necessary
and indeed the only possible solution. Nevertheless, as has been recognized
even by the Jesuits’ critics, by the time of their expulsion, their contributions
to history and culture were already woven through the fabric of everyday life
in what was to become Mexico.
Notes
1. According to Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, the Jesuits’ expulsion accelerated
Spain’s loss of its colonies, which were safer under what for this critic was the
Jesuits’ conservative influence (quoted in Ortega, 2010: 69–70, and
O’Gorman, 1947: 97).
2. For example, Kuri Camacho disparages my sympathetic yet critical analysis of
the Jesuits by stating that it seeks to “poner en jaque el piso de nuestro
pensamiento” (2010: 240), as if a critique of the Jesuits were a critique of
Mexico.
3. For more on the Franciscan ethos, see Burkhart and Phelan.
4. See Stolley for a literary history of the eighteenth century beyond the Jesuits’
written production.
5. For more on the formation of citizens by the Jesuits in their colleges, see
Chinchilla, especially Borja Gómez’s article distinguishing the creation of a
social body in imitation of the religious order’s mystical body from projects
that understood the need for differentiation between the two.
6. In New Spain they had twenty-two colleges, seven elementary schools, twenty
schools of humanities, twelve art colleges, and ten centers dedicated to
theology (Morales Orozco, 2010: 9).
7. See Pagden for a discussion of the emergence of nationalism in New Spain in
writers and thinkers beyond the Jesuits.
8. In addition to the works of the Jesuits mentioned above (del Barco, Baegert,
etc.), see, for example, Francisco Javier Clavijero’s Historia de la Antigua o
Baja California and Historia antigua de México; Juan Nentuig’s El rudo ensayo.
Descripción geográfica, natural y curiosa de la provincia de Sonora; Joseph Och’s
Missionary in Sonora. The Travel Reports of Joseph Och, S. J. 1755–1767; José
Ortega’s Maravillosa reducción y conquista de la provincia de San Joseph del
Gran Nayar; and Ignaz Pfefferkorn’s Sonora: A Description of the Province.
9. What today’s Baja California Norte and Baja California Sur were then called
(Baegert’s mission, San Luis Gonzaga, was located in the latter).
10. See, for example, Terán Elizondo on Alzate’s participation in literary debates.
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Jesuit Enlightenment Interventions in Christianity and Intellectualism

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Jesuit Enlightenment: Interventions in Christianity

An assessment of the Jesuits’ contributions to the enlightened culture of New

First Stage: The Jesuits Arrive in New Spain

Second Stage: Beyond Providential Frameworks, Secularization,

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