This collection of eleven essays (including Ulrich Lehner’s introduction) aims at demonstrating that early modern Catholicism between the years 1550 and 1700 was a flourishing locus of innovation and creativity. For readers of the Journal of Jesuit Studies, well acquainted with the vibrant innovations of early modern Jesuits, this thesis will hardly seem novel or surprising. However, Lehner’s stimulating exposition of editorial aims invites further reflection.
Several factors have combined over the centuries to make early modern Catholicism seem static and stultifying rather than vital and innovative. First, previous mainstream historiography has overemphasized the undeniable persecution and oppression by Catholic institutions in this period. Second, early modern Catholicism embraced one-sided rhetoric of its own, overemphasizing tradition and constancy—and a correlative negative valuation of innovation—as a strategy for maintaining its identity in contradistinction to reformers. An instructive example is the sixteenth-century conflict between Dominicans and Jesuits who mutually charged one other with heresy. For the medieval friars, “the inner workings of the Society of Jesus were seen as so innovative that the old orders felt threatened in their very right to exist and serve the church.” Lehner lauds “the genius” of Francisco Suárez for convincing the other orders “that the Jesuits were only innovative insofar as they tried to perfect what was already established in old traditions” (4, emphasis added).
A third issue would emerge later: a late-modern understanding (from the eighteenth century onward) of tradition and constancy as the binary opposite of endless change and evolutionary “progress.” By definition, the avant-garde moves forward precisely by replacing the past. These rhetorical stances on the part of both Catholicism and its opponents have led to “constructing a distorted view of the past.” Lehner’s collection, then, is both an argument for and demonstration of “a recalibration of historiography.” At its heart is “a particular Catholic approach to philosophical, theological, or cultural challenges [that] one could call innovation through tradition—that is, a creative rereading of the past” (1, emphasis original). Implicitly echoing Thomas Kuhn’s classic account of “normal science” and paradigm shifts, Lehner notes that innovation “seems to occur only as a response to a problem,” i.e., “when a person is confronted with evidence contrary to an established narrative.” Despite well-worn caricatures, Scholastics—for whom ignorance was seen as an evil—were driven toward inquiry in search of possible solutions to “colliding narratives” (3). In his chapter “Rhetoric of innovation and constancy,” Lehner uses historical examples to develop further his thesis of this paradoxical “rhetoric of traditional innovation.” An especially provocative example is the Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Gravina’s attempt “to demonstrate possible ways of salvation for Muslims, Jews, and followers of other religions by suggesting a development of doctrine, whose foundation he had found in Seneca’s principle of a gradual increase in natural knowledge” (12). Gravina’s reasoning in 1763 manifests the persistence of Renaissance humanistic rhetoric in Jesuit culture all the way through the era of suppressions (Portugal 1759; France 1764; Spain 1767; papal global 1773). Gravina asked rhetorically: “Why can nothing new in theology be invented? Why do we not say what Seneca uttered about nature?” (12). His question calls to mind the late John W. O’Malley’s observation: “If Erasmus could invoke ‘St. Socrates,’ I think some Jesuits were ready to invoke ‘St. Cicero.’” (O’Malley, “Five Missions of the Jesuit Charism: Content and Method,” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 38, no. 4 [Winter 2006]: 25).
Five chapters in this volume will be of particular interest to scholars of Jesuit history: Sylvio Hermann De Franceschi’s “Catholic Theology and Doctrinal Novelty in the Quarrel Over Grace: Theological Schools, Innovations, and Pluralism during the Molinism Controversy”; Victor M. Salas, “The Innovative Character of the Suárezian Project in Its Proper Historical Context”; Emanuele Colombo, “The Invention of Probabilism”; Elisabeth Rain Kincaid, “Natural Law and Cultural Difference: Innovations in Spanish Scholasticism”; and perhaps most surprisingly, Trent Pomplun, “Duns Scotus and the Making of Modern Catholic Theology.” Scotism “made great inroads in the Society of Jesus as the [sixteenth] century progressed,” and by the eighteenth century, “Scotism had largely conquered” the religious order (168). Pomplun’s chapter echoes a recent growing awareness of nominalist impulses in Jesuit culture— surprising because of the Society’s official adherence to St. Thomas Aquinas, but nevertheless consonant with Renaissance humanism’s turn toward existing particulars and away from a-temporal abstractions (see my review of Suárez’s Metaphysics in Its Historical and Systematic Context, ed. Lukáš Novák, in jjs 3, no. 1 [2016]: 85–93, at https://doi.org/10.1163/22141332-00301005).
Especially notable throughout this volume is Suárez’s ubiquitous presence: his argument that “the doctrine of middle knowledge was not contrary to the teaching of the ancient scholastics” (35; compare his ardent defense of St. Thomas, 31–32); the innovative character of his overall project (68–86); his razor-sharp distinctions between “those guilty of heresy or schism and those who have only inherited the label” (116); his defense of “the possibility of non-believers belonging to the Church provided certain, additional conditions” (123n49); his position “that baptism by heretics can possess the proper intention, form, and matter” (123n52); his accommodationist assertion that “how the common good should be instantiated will vary to some extent based on ‘the time and place involved, and with respect to the people and community in question’” (156); and his “conscious development of the tradition” that provided “a way to read the natural law and law of nations together to uphold justice and the common good in many different cultural contexts and situations, rather than presenting either natural law or the ius gentium as simply a pretext to justify European practices and customs” (160). Suárez appears not only as the consummate traditional innovator, but as the archetypal thinker for our present global age of migrations, mixtures, and mutations.
The final consideration in Pomplun’s chapter (which concludes the volume) might serve as a fitting summary of this collection’s aspirations. Pomplun reflects on the implicit (albeit not referenced) influence of early modern Scotists’ arguments “in one of the most important works of the [twentieth- century] nouvelle théologie,” the Jesuit Henri de Lubac’s Le mystère du surnaturel (Paris: Aubier, 1965). If de Lubac knew the early modern Scotist texts, why did he not credit their authors? And if he did not know these texts, how and why have such important arguments been so thoroughly erased? In either case, Pomplun concludes: “One must lament the degree to which the innovations of early modern theology have gone unrecognized—and wonder what other riches remain to be discovered” (172). This multi-faceted volume’s numerous case studies provide a compelling and fascinating effort at rediscovering these early modern hybrids—traditional innovations.
