Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters
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loginOf the many backhanded compliments the Society of Jesus garnered afterits dissolution in 1773, Macaulay’s outshines most in wit, if not in malice.The Jesuits, Macaulay observed, “appear to have discovered the precisepoint to which intellectual culture can be carried without risk of intellectualemancipation.” And with good reason! While they lacked “no talent oraccomplishment into which men can be drilled by elaborate discipline,”Macaulay asserted, “such discipline, though it may bring out the powers ofordinary minds, has a tendency to suffocate, rather than to develop, origi-nal genius.” (History of England to the Death of William III, London,1967, volume I, pp. 564, 568) Macaulay’s overall perception of the Orderand the cultural production of its members was perpetuated by generationsof historians, whose interpretative framework has tended to swing betweenthe polemical and the apologetic. Only recently have scholars begun seri-ously to transcend centuries of preconceived belief by granting the Jesuitexperience rigorous and disinterested scrutiny.
