Abstract
This article examines the records of the last generation of German Jesuit missionaries in California (present-day Baja California). Removed from the colonial Spanish territory in 1768 by edict of the Spanish king, the missionaries formed a narrative of their efforts in California that they then brought back to Europe. In California, the missionaries attributed great spiritual significance to the dry climate of the region. The arid physical environment thwarted the missionaries’ efforts to build the landscape that they believed was vital to the spiritual development of the indigenous Californians. The Jesuits maintained the necessity of their desired landscape even as they came to accept the impossibility of physically creating it in California. Ultimately, the environment occupied a prominent place in the missionaries’ accounts which simultaneously justified their work in California and explained its shortcomings.
* The California mentioned here and throughout this article is the area known today as the Baja California Peninsula in northwest Mexico, not to be confused with the present-day state of California in the usa. Albrecht Classen offers a helpful definition of “Germany” in the eighteenth century: “The term ‘Germany’ here means the wider framework including the Holy Roman Empire, Switzerland, Silesia, Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, Moravia, Bohemia, Alsace, and northern Germany.” Albrecht Classen, Early History of the Southwest through the Eyes of German-Speaking Jesuit Missionaries. A Transcultural Experience in the Eighteenth Century (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013), 86.
Now then! Those who have ears, listen! What is California? Nothing but innumerable stones and these you find in all four directions. It is a pile of stones full of thorns—because this is the whole of California, that means that besides stones and thorn-bushes you find nothing else in California; or to quote the Scripture, a pathless, waterless thornful rock, sticking up between two oceans.1
In one word, “nothing” sums up what comprised California for Jacob Baegert, the author of this description, and for his fellow German Jesuits.2 The missionaries maintained a preoccupation with the dry climate of California throughout their time there. The nothingness of California was understood to have a detrimental impact on the indigenous inhabitants of California and, subsequently, on the missionaries’ efforts to teach them the doctrines of Christianity. The Jesuits believed in a relationship between the physical and the spiritual.3 In Baegert’s mind, an environment comprised of nothing hindered Californians’ capacity for spiritual knowledge.4 He lamented, “As they know nothing, they will learn nothing.”5 Baegert and his Jesuit colleagues tried, therefore, to build something from nothing in California and create a landscape more conducive to the Christian religion.
This article supplements recent studies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary enterprises.6 These studies have shown the global reach of early modern Catholicism and greatly illuminated how religion impacted the modern world.7 This article focuses on two specific areas that remain open for further investigation. First, it examines the last generation of Jesuit missionaries before the global suppression of the order in 1773. Many studies focus on the early formation of Jesuit strategies in the sixteenth century and their implementation around the world into the seventeenth century.8 Less attention, however, is paid to Jesuits in the eighteenth century.9Second, the article explores the relationship between the natural environment and salvation in Jesuit missionary outlook and practice. This subject has received relatively little scholarly attention given the amount of Jesuit writing dedicated to the topic.10 The reports, letters, expedition accounts, and memoirs of the last German Jesuits in California reveal that these missionaries saw the natural environment as central to their work in California and central to their representations of that work in an eighteenth-century context.
From Germany to California
Spanish officials had long been interested in establishing a settlement in California, but it was Jesuit missionaries who eventually accomplished the task on Spain’s behalf. Hernán Cortés claimed California for Spain in the early sixteenth century.11 Despite its scant natural resources, by 1565 California became a strategic location because of its position along the route of the Manila galleon from the Philippines to Acapulco, Mexico.12 Early efforts at settlement failed, however, and the idea sat idle until the late-seventeenth century when pioneering German Jesuit missionary Eusebio Kino identified a need for evangelization in the region.13 The Jesuits proposed to fund the establishment of missions in California themselves under the protection of Spanish troops. With the support of the Spanish crown, the Jesuits founded thirteen widely spaced missions along the California peninsula throughout the eighteenth century. In 1768, seventy years of the Jesuits’ work in California came to an unexpected end when King Charles III of Spain (r. 1559–1588) had all members of the Society of Jesus forcibly removed from Spanish territories around the world.14
Germans comprised half of the sixteen Jesuits spread among the thirteen missions at the time of their banishment.15 Such a high ratio of Germans was not uncommon for the day. Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia explains that the eighteenth century was “the era of the German missionary.”16 German Jesuits were eager to travel overseas as missionaries in earlier centuries but were not permitted to do so.17 They finally had their opportunity to go in the eighteen century due to their sheer numbers compared to the limited amount of missionaries from other parts of Europe, most notably Spain in this case.18
The last generation of German Jesuits in California had a unique position during the era of the Jesuit order’s global suppression. The German Jesuits provide a distilled look at the Spanish missions in California and the missionaries’ goals there. In some ways, the Germans were distinct from their Spanish and Mexican peers. Indeed, they often harbored a “general dislike of the Spaniards.”19 The Germans brought biases and tastes with them from Europe that left them ill-disposed towards Spaniards and Spanish culture.20 Nevertheless, the German missionaries were not distinct from the Spanish Jesuits in terms of developing and executing a program for converting the Californians.21 Concern for saving souls was the genuine motivation of the missionaries, and that aim transcended national rivalries among the Jesuits.22
Emptiness
The Jesuits came to California with the twin goals of securing their own salvation and aiding in the salvation of the Californians.23 The missionaries viewed the barren physical terrain of California in relation to these goals and identified detailed ways in which the land impacted their spiritual aims. Specifically, the natural environment could not be separated from three features of the Californians that were especially noteworthy to the missionaries: their languages, their government, and their religion.24 In all three areas, the missionaries viewed the Californians as they viewed their land—empty.
The missionaries were diligent students of the Californians’ languages, but they found the Californians to be severely lacking in breadth of vocabulary.25 Baegert caustically wrote, “If foxes were able to speak, they would have a variety of necessary words of which the Californians would not know a thing.”26 This statement was informed by the conviction that if people thought about a concept, they would develop a word for it; the lack of a word in a language was an indication that its speakers had no conception of the idea it conveyed either.27 It illustrates how the missionaries saw the local languages as evidence that Californians were “a people which occupies itself with nothing, speaks of nothing, thinks and meditates about nothing, cares for nothing but food and other things which they have in common with animals.”28 Additionally, the statement was a condemnation of the Californians’ hunter-gatherer lifestyle and their way of interacting with the land, which was seen as on par with how animals live in the wild. The missionaries maintained that the Californians participated in their environment in a way that completely lacked sophistication.
The missionaries also held that government and religion were completely absent among the Californians.29 Indeed, these two features were seen as linked, as revealed by Baegert’s assertion that, “Before they were Christianized, they had no religion at all because they had no law and order.”30 Lambert Hostell maintained that in the absence of government and religion, the Californians simply lived by the inclinations of their corrupt nature.31 The missionaries were not surprised to meet “barbarous” people who lacked order and society, since indigenous people in such a state were thought to inhabit much of the New World.32
The German missionaries successfully employed a method of rendering the foreign familiar. Christine R. Johnson notes that this technique had already been used in Germany for hundreds of years.33 She calls attention to the dedicated work of Renaissance Germans who made sense of the New World for pragmatic reasons: “Molded and then explained by German cultural arbiters, the East and West Indies became familiar and comprehensible places, susceptible to the extension of European control.”34 The Jesuit missionaries had transformed the Californians into “just another” group of familiar barbarians in need of the order and religion that they brought from Europe.35 Establishing such order in California, however, posed unique challenges.
Converting the Landscape
From their perspective, the German missionaries had identified that the natural environment was spiritually detrimental to the Californians. These familiar conditions steered the missionaries to pursue a known solution to the challenges they faced; namely, they decided to build missions surrounded by stable, ordered, and static indigenous communities.36 Creating the specific landscape needed to physically support such communities became a central aspect of the Jesuit enterprise in California. The Jesuits aimed to create European-styled communities in which they could begin to remedy the perceived insufficiencies of the Californians.37
Cynthia Radding usefully defines “landscapes” as “lived spaces created by human labor.”38 Radding emphasizes the reciprocal relationship between human societies and nature. She argues for the importance of recognizing how small-scale societies altered their environments.39 She points out that Spanish missions were sites for building landscapes. The case of the Jesuits in California, however, raises another possibility that should not go unnoticed: when people try but fail to alter their environment in desired ways.
The missionaries saw the creation of new landscapes in California as essential for the salvation of Californians. From their point of view, converting a Californian in the wild was problematic. Although there is a stereotype that Catholic missionaries baptized indiscriminately and counted people as saved without concern for teaching dogma, that was not the case among this group of Jesuits.40 They were very determined that the Californians not only receive baptism, but that they also learn proper doctrine and the correct practice of Christianity. Baegert explicitly made this distinction when he confessed, “There are not so many good Christians as there are baptized natives.”41 Wenceslaus Linck recorded multiple encounters with Californians during his exploratory expeditions in which he wrestled over the decision of whether or not to baptize someone and grasped for proof of genuine faith on the part of the convert.42 Lambert Hostell noted an instance in which he refused to baptize a pregnant woman “because more time was required for her instruction,” at the risk of her child being born and dying in infancy without christening.43 For his part, Baegert was glad that all of the adults under the care of his mission were already baptized before he received the post, “For I would not know what to do and how to judge the capability and disposition which are necessary for the baptism of an adult person.”44 He managed to avoid facing that quandary by chance of assignment. Each of these instances highlights that the missionaries had more comprehensive goals than to just baptize the Californians. They wanted to make them good Christians, and they believed that the right setting was necessary for success.
The missionaries made some impressive modifications to the California desert in an effort to create that setting. Well outfitted Baroque-style churches built at the missions marked the Jesuits’ greatest achievement in transforming the physical space. Baegert reported, “The churches were well and as beautifully constructed as possible.”45 In his memoir of California he included many details about the churches. Heavy building materials were brought from miles away across the sparse land. The churches had three to nine bells each and two even had organs. The interiors of the churches were furnished with exquisite ornaments created in Mexico City which was a five- or six-hundred-hour journey from California. These included, among other things, gold and silver chalices, silver monstrances, silver crucifixes, large silver candlesticks, silk clerical vestments, carpets, laced and embroidered choir robes, and gold-threaded altar covers. Unlike anything else in California, Baegert asserted that the churches “would do credit to any European city.”46
The imposing churches depicted the spiritual presence of God at the missions.47 Baegert explained the justification for such lavish displays on the impoverished peninsula in terms of their spiritual function: “The fervent aim was to induce reverence and respect for the house of God in the newly converted Indians, and also to create among them prestige for the Catholic religious services.”48 Furthermore, the desert churches stood as testaments to the missionaries’ enduring commitment to a traditional spatial paradigm of practicing Christianity.49 The missionaries taught the Californians a Christianity that was centered on the sacred church building and the ceremonies performed within it.
Muriel Clair describes a counterexample in which Jesuit missionaries were willing to move away from a spatial paradigm of Christianity. Clair’s account of seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries in Canada is illuminating in juxtaposition with the California case.50 In the Canadian instance, French Jesuit missionaries permitted their indigenous converts to leave the missions for long stretches of time in order to hunt and provide furs for European traders. The indigenous converts came to practice a style of Christianity that was less linked to specific locations than to modified liturgical calendars.51 Clair writes, “It appears that, in their mode of Christian practice as the Jesuits cultivated and permitted it to flourish, a spatial paradigm came to be outweighed by a more inclusive, temporal paradigm.”52 The Jesuits in California never accepted a temporal alternative, or any other alternative, to the traditional spatial paradigm. Jacob Baegert, an avid reader of French books, had some knowledge of seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries in Canada.53 He was aware that in that region “those Indians move far away from their missions for several months in order to hunt.”54 Rather than considering the possible merits of abandoning a spatial paradigm, however, Baegert viewed the Christian natives in North America as “remarkable” because “it is difficult and unusual to find many good Christians in a country which offers no opportunities for work or community life.”55 In other words, he did not expect to find Christians in a place which lacked the type of landscape he and the other missionaries in California sought to create.
The churches in California were meant to be the centerpieces of fixed spiritual communities at the missions. These communities were never established, however, due to physical constraints in California. The communities would have been sites for a disciplined life in which the Californians could work on the land or as farmers and participate in the local activity of the Catholic Church. As a means of physically supporting the communities, the Jesuits tried to develop farming and animal husbandry, but persistent dryness and occasional flash floods largely ruined their efforts. Benno Ducrue cited Jacob Baegert as a model for the Jesuits’ success in cultivating the land.56 He attempted to grow wheat, corn, chick-peas, melons, and grapes, and he also tried to raise cattle, sheep, goats, horses, and mules. Nevertheless, Baegert never even produced enough food to sustain the Spanish soldiers at his mission, much less a permanent community of native Californians. The California missions relied on outside shipments of essential staples for the soldiers. The indigenous Californians were necessarily allowed to maintain their nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle.57
And if one finds here—as one thinks in Europe—as much rain and as many rivers as there, one could with so much space have more cows and consequently more cheese and butter than in the entire canton of Bern. One also could sow and harvest in abundance. And one imagines if one comes to a mission, one would meet there well-dressed people living together in huts, living on agriculture the way people do in Europe. And so you can say Mass in a nice way, can hear a lot of confessions on Sundays and holidays and give communion, can sing vespers and the Salve and could have a lot of enjoyment with them, and so on. Or if one would receive an order to found a new mission, after some years, one would be able to establish in this way a little market town.59
This quotation illuminates with striking lucidity how the missionaries imagined the landscape that they could not build. Nevertheless, rather than abandon their conviction about the necessity of creating an ordered landscape, the missionaries viewed their earthly failure as having grave spiritual consequences.
No Church in the Wild
So the most pitiable people never live together, neither in their own place nor at the mission, and that causes all misery. Consequently, besides their unspeakable carelessness, laziness, and inflexibility, one cannot educate them as much as one would like to because they urgently need it. Most of them, even if they have heard it hundreds and hundreds of times, are not able to answer the necessary questions at all or by memory, never sufficient for salvation.61
Baegert felt that his work among the Californians was overshadowed by the impact of disordered life in the wilderness.62
In Baegert’s view, life in the wilderness not only provided an education devoid of religion, but even worse, actually contradicted Christianity. Baegert wrote, “Nothing causes the California Indians less trouble and worry than the education of their children. All schooling is restricted merely to feeding them while they are incapable of searching for their own nourishment, that is, digging out roots, catching mice, and killing snakes.”63 Baegert was especially critical of the lack of discipline that he perceived among the Californians. His own attempts at disciplining Californian youths were met with strong protest by their mothers. He continued, “As a consequence, the children do everything they wish. They learn to imitate very early all evils committed by others of equal age or by their elders.”64 He concluded that, “In view of such conditions, which a missionary cannot remedy, it is not hard to imagine that there is little use in instructing, advising, or punishing such youngsters.”65 This description underscores Baegert’s belief in the connection between ordered society and one’s spiritual development. Baegert lamented but accepted the limitations he experienced as a result of his inability to control the physical and cultural environment of his own mission.
For the missionaries, the physical conditions of California became the reason that its native inhabitants were not good Christians. They could be good Christians if given the right opportunities. Baegert wrote of the Californians, “They are endowed with reason and understanding like other people, and I think that, if in their early childhood they were sent to Europe, the boys to seminaries and colleges, and the girls to convents, they would go as far as any European in mores, virtues, in all arts and sciences.”66 In California, however, they fell victim to the temptations inherent in the dry environment. Baegert believed that the education Californians received in the desert only took them further away from Christianity with time. While baptized infants who died in childhood were already in heaven, the longer Californians lived in their natural environment, the less likely they were to reach to paradise. Baegert’s experiences among the Californians reminded him of an idea he credited to the legendary Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier (1506–1552), “Only a few Indians who live longer than fourteen years go to Heaven.”67 In the missionaries’ imaginings, the people of California were trapped in an environment which was inherently inhospitable to Christianity. In a poem about California, Baegert juxtaposed the dry terrain of California and the spiritual condition of the Californians:
This poem conveyed a simple concept: California was only capable of producing thorns and the people nourished by it were only capable of producing vice.
Even Hell Needs Missionaries
Amidst the unique challenges posed by California, the German Jesuits maintained in their own minds the importance and necessity of their work there. The miserableness of California made it an ideal location for securing one’s own salvation. In comparing his new home to his old one, Baegert wrote, “California is not a land, but in comparison to Alsace, a veritable purgatory if not even a hell.”69 Franz Inama took the similarities between California and purgatory even further when he endorsed the view that life in California could substitute for time in purgatory. He provided this brief account of another, elderly Jesuit missionary: “A beautiful child informed him about the time when he would die, and that he would enter heaven without passing through purgatory.”70 Inama explained further that “God was accepting his suffering here in lieu of that in the next world,” and he expressed his desire to die similarly one day.71 The missionaries were able to spiritualize the dry climate in California and bring it into their religious cosmology, even as the physical features of California were seen as uncommonly horrible by the Germans. Life in the barren desert of California led them to evoke the psalmist in the wilderness of Judea. Lambert Hostell observed, “For lack of precipitation, this land, so desertlike, so pathless and waterless—to characterize it in the words of David—produces more thorns than anything edible.”72 With a focus on their own salvation, the difficulties of California proved to be a comforting validation of spiritual acceptance by God.
Prior to their expulsion, the missionaries also defended the legitimacy of their efforts to save Californians. Occasionally, they celebrated current achievements as Hostell did when he reported, “About the only thing worthwhile and consoling that I can write about California is the abundant harvest of souls which the zealous but few workers bring in every year from this not unproductive vineyard of the Lord.”73 More characteristically, the missionaries remained very forward looking.74 They adamantly wanted to reach more people with Christianity.75 Inama longed to contact more Californians for the first time, “When the heavenly Father sends us additional workers to help us, I shall gladly hand over my well-cultivated apostolic field and penetrate deeper into the interior of the country in order to till the land still covered with thistles and thus render it fit to receive the seed of the gospel.”76 Inama associated the physical condition of the land with the spiritual poverty of its people.77 He maintained, however, that the work of the missionaries brought the people closer to a place where they would be ready to receive Christianity.
But nobody should be frightened away from asking to serve in American missions across the ocean, for (1) even if there are only a small number of Indians, they should not be left without help; (2) the more depraved the people are, the more they live in a depraved country, the more pitiful they are. They should not be allowed to fall from rain into the creek [bad to worse] or fall from the little temporary hell into the big eternal Hell.78
Echoing Jesus’s teaching that the last shall be first, Baegert attributed a special significance to the spiritual value of the souls of the Californians. Baegert suggested that of all people, it would be most tragic for them to be denied paradise given their lamentable lot in this life.
Ironically, the impossibility of establishing ordered communities in California itself became a way of validating the importance of the missionaries. This narrative had utility before and after the expulsion in 1767. Before the expulsion it was a way of expressing the necessity of one’s own presence in California. In a letter from the year 1754 Baegert wrote, “I am firmly convinced that if the thirteen missionaries, spread out in the twelve missions in California, would leave the country, from that hour Christianity would vanish and not one child would be baptized in the future. Such is my abysmal judgment.”79 This was both a disappointing assessment and a strong declaration of self-importance. Baegert saw himself and his cohort as the only link between California and heaven.
From California to Germany
My dear friend: Enclosed you will find my Supplement to the numerous accounts of California that have been appearing. Surely, there has never been a land so frequently dealt with in all languages as this wretched peninsula. The reason for this can be none other than to calumniate the Jesuits, inasmuch as they are pictured in this forsaken corner of the world as abounding in wealth, gold, silver, and pearls; none of which is to be found in that region.83
The Jesuit missionaries faced a diverse audience at home, and while the attacks of secularists against Jesuits during the Age of Enlightenment have garnered much attention, this was only one part of the equation.84 Recent recognition among scholars that the Enlightenment was neither monolithic nor entirely secular has revealed that Jesuits in Germany faced challenges from other Catholics as well as Protestants and secularists.85
When writing for public German audiences, the banished missionaries stood by their established narrative of the work in California, and that narrative was actually well suited to refute common slanders they faced.86 Baegert cited the “demands of good friends and other respected persons,” the “craving curiosity of the public,” and a desire to combat venomous smears as influential in his decision to write a German-language memoir of his years in California.87 He explicitly wrote against the charge that the Germans subverted Spanish authority in California in order to rule as kings there.88 From the perspective of the missionaries, the accusation had little grounding. The Jesuits did not believe it was even possible to rule as kings since they maintained that the Californians had no government or law and order at all.89 Furthermore, the Jesuits had no reason to be disloyal to the Spanish king who provided the means for establishing a European-style society among barbarians, even though it failed in this case.90
Most importantly in the missionaries’ view, the Californians were the ones who suffered the worst because the Jesuits were expelled. Benno Ducrue appealed for sympathy in a published account of his final farewell to the Californians, “Who would not weep over the natives, still victims of their abysmal ignorance but pleading for baptism, as they returned to the wilderness from which they had emerged?”91 This rhetorical question portrayed the natural environment as a dangerous place for the souls of the Californians. Ducrue continued, “And would to heaven that they will not take with them many others which the preaching of the gospel won to the fold of Christ. Surely anyone acquainted with the fickle nature of the Indians cannot hope for their perseverance under such circumstances.”92 Ducrue lamented that even formerly converted Californians would be overcome by the natural environment without the missionaries there to sustain them in the faith.93
Conclusion
For German Jesuit missionaries, California was foreign in several ways. The people looked different and the physical features of the land looked different. The missionaries were not, however, mere observers of California. They viewed California with a distinct vision for what they wanted it to become. They foresaw a native population wearing European-style clothes, working with livestock or crops, and practicing Christian norms. They foresaw a landscape that produced the means of subsistence for a stationary community. In reality, none of these visions were realized at the end of seventy years of Jesuit missions in California. This article has shown how despite the wide gulf between their present reality and their visions of the future, the Jesuits were able to keep track of their position on the road from beginning to end. They had a program for getting the Californians from their present state to one akin to that of Europeans. It involved creating missions that could serve as outposts in the wilderness, where Californians could live and practice the mores of civilized life and Christianity. The program stalled on account of the physical conditions of the land. The missionaries were content to halt the civilizing project and to stand in the gap in the meantime. They never abandoned, however, their framework for conceptualizing what they were doing in California and the end goals they hoped to achieve.
The chronology of the Jesuit order has been divided by some historians into the formative period (1540–1615), the period of stability (1615–1704), and the period of stress (1704–1773).94 On the remote peninsula of California, this group of Jesuit missionaries kept a very stable outlook on their work during the climactic years of the “period of stress.” A close examination of these missionaries’ views concerning nature and salvation has revealed how they were able to maintain their resolve despite failing to gain control of the physical environment. If, as Christine R. Johnson has suggested, rendering a place familiar and comprehensible makes it susceptible to control, the unique physical setting of California can be seen as an example in which alterity left a place uncontrollable.95 The Jesuit missionaries grudgingly acknowledged it as such and then rhetorically utilized the physical conditions of California as an explanation for their shortcomings in meeting spiritual goals. In the final twist, the missions’ very shortcomings became the reason that they were so necessary.
I wish to express my gratitude to Ulrike Strasser and Patrick Hyder Patterson at the University of California, San Diego for their guidance. I am also grateful to Emanuele Colombo and the anonymous reviewer from the Journal of Jesuit Studies for excellent editorial suggestions. I thank The Group for the Study of Early Cultures at the University of California, Irvine for feedback on my early research at their annual conference. Finally, I thank Virginia Johnston and Teresa Walch for closely reading subsequent drafts of this paper.
1 Jacob Baegert, The Letters of Jacob Baegert, 1749–1761. Jesuit Missionary in Baja California, trans. Elsbeth Schulz-Bischof (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1982), 128.
2 Baegert was born in Schlettstadt, Alsace in 1717, entered the Society of Jesus in Mainz, Germany, lived in California from 1751 to 1768, and died in Neustadt, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany in 1772. Ernest J. Burrus, “Introduction,” in Ducrue’s Account of the Expulsion of the Jesuits from Lower California (1767–1769), trans. and ed. Ernest J. Burrus (St. Louis: Jesuit Historical Institute, 1967), 13–14; Bernd Hausberger, Jesuiten aus Mitteleuropa im kolonialen Mexiko: eine Bio-Bibliographie (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1995), 103–4.
3 Simon Ditchfield, “What Did Natural History Have to do with Salvation? José de Acosta sj (1540–1600) in the Americas,” in God’s Bounty? The Churches and the Natural World, ed. Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2010), 168.
4 The indigenous inhabitants of California are broadly referred to as “Californians” since this article analyzes common features of the missionaries’ interactions with people from various linguistic groups in California. For a map of the geography of the Californian languages showing the Cochimí, Guaycura, and Pericú regions, see Harry W. Crosby, Antigua California. Mission and Colony on the Peninsular Frontier, 1697–1768 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), 92. “Californians” is also used distinctly from the term “Californios” which refers to racially mixed Mexicans in a nineteenth-century context: Josue David Cisneros, The Border Crossed Us. Rhetorics of Borders, Citizenship, and Latina/o Identity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013), 25.
6 John W. O’Malley, “The Historiography of the Society of Jesus: Where Does It Stand Today?,” in John W. O’Malley Saints or Devils Incarnate ? Studies in Jesuit History (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 1–35. Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, “Jesuit Foreign Missions: A Historiographical Essay,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 1, no. 1 (2014): 65, doi: 10.1163/22141332-00101004.
7 Bronwen Catherine McShea, “Introduction: Jesuit Missionary Perspectives and Strategies Across the Early Modern Globe,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 1, no. 2 (2014): 171–76, here 171–72, doi: 10.1163/22141332-00102001.
8 See for instance J. Michelle Molina, To Overcome Oneself. The Jesuit Ethic and Spirit of Global Expansion, 1520–1767 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Harro Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought: The Society of Jesus and the State, c. 1540–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff, eds., Colonial Saints. Discovering the Holy in the Americas, 1500–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2003); Mordechai Feingold, ed., The New Science and Jesuit Science. Seventeenth Century Perspectives (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003); and Journal of Jesuit Studies 1, no. 2 (2014).
9 Notable exceptions include Marcus Hellyer, Catholic Physics. Jesuit Natural Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005); Galaxis Borja González, Die jesuitische Berichterstattung über die Neue Welt: zur Veröffentlichungs-, Verbreitungs- und Rezeptionsgeschichte jesuitischer Americana auf dem deutschen Buchmarkt in Zeitalter der Aufklärung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011); Bernd Hausberger, Für Gott und König: die Mission der Jesuiten im kolonialen Mexiko (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2000); Hausberger, Jesuiten aus Mitteleuropa; Johannes Meier et al., Jesuiten aus Zentraleuropa in Portugiesisch und Spanisch-Amerika. Ein bio-bibliographisches Handbuch, vols. 1–5 (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2005–2013). Older works remain standard texts on the subject: Bernhard Duhr, Geschichte der Jesuiten in den Ländern deutscher Zunge, vols. 5–6 (München-Regensburg: Verlagsanstalt vorm. G. J. Manz, 1928); Anton Huonder, Deutsche Jesuitenmissionäre des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. Ein Beitrag zur Missionsgeschichte und zur deutschen Biographie (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1899).
10 For studies that do engage with Jesuit missionaries and the environment, see Simon Ditchfield, “Natural History,” 160–61; Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples. Colonialism, Ethnic Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Cynthia Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity. Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Robert H. Jackson, Missions and the Frontiers of Spanish America. A Comparative Study of the Impact of Environmental, Economic, Political, and Socio-Cultural Variations on the Missions in the Río de la Plata Region and on the Northern Frontier of New Spain (Scottsdale: Pentacle Press, 2005); Classen, History of the Southwest; Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature. The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).
11 For a treatment of the Spanish procedure for claiming land in the New World, see Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 69–99.
13 Eusebio Kino was born in 1645 in Segno, Trent, joined the Society of Jesus in Germany, and studied in Ingolstadt before embarking to America. He died in 1711 in Sonora, Mexico. Hausberger, Jesuiten aus Mitteleuropa, 204.
14 The decree was issued in 1767 and carried out in California within a year: see William V. Bangert, A History of the Society of Jesus (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1972), 386.
15 Of the remaining eight missionaries, six were born in Spain and two were born in Mexico City, Mexico. Burrus, “Introduction,” 9–27.
17 This was both because of the Reformation in Germany and because of Spanish distrust of foreigners.
19 Classen, History of the Southwest, 200. Clossey states that although “German Jesuits generally had a positive reputation […] several Germans betrayed a strong condescension toward other nations.” Salvation and Globalization, 58, 61.
20 The Germans were not always negative: Franz Inama shared a recipe for making tortillas in a letter to his sister so her convent in Cologne could enjoy them. “Letter of Reverend Father Franz Inama, S.J., Missionary in California, from the Austrian Province to his Reverend Sister, a Carmelite in Cologne on the Rhine, written from Mission San José, on October 14, 1755,” in Ducrue’s Account, 152. Inama was born in Vienna, Austria in 1719, entered the Society of Jesus in Vienna or Leoben, lived in California from 1751 to 1768, and died in Austria in 1782. Burrus, “Introduction,” 17.
21 Compare Spanish Jesuit missionary Miguel del Barco (1706–1790; in California 1737–1768) in Miguel del Barco, Ethnology and Linguistics of Baja California, trans. Froylán Tiscareño (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1981) and Miguel del Barco, The Natural History of Baja California, trans. Froylán Tiscareño (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1980).
23 These goals were enshrined in the order’s Constitutions: “The end of this Society is to devote itself with God’s grace to the salvation and perfection of the members’ own souls, but also with that same grace to labor strenuously in giving aid toward the salvation and perfection of the souls of their fellowmen.” Ignatius of Loyola, Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, trans. George E. Ganss (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1970), 77–78.
24 Interest in these features of indigenous populations had a long tradition within Jesuit thought going at least as far back as Acosta, Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 191.
25 Missionary accounts often included samples of the Californians’ languages put to writing as well as grammatical charts; see Baegert, Observations, 103–4; Barco, Ethnology and Linguistics, 107.
27 Baegert, Observations, 95; Lambert Hostell, “Hostell’s 1750 Report from Nuestra Señora de los Dolores,” in Jesuit Relations, Baja California 1716–1762, trans. and ed. Ernest J. Burrus (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1984), 246–47; Pagden, Natural Man, 185.
31 Hostell, “First Letter,” 166. Hostell was born in Münster-Eifel in the Lower Rhineland in 1706, entered Society of Jesus into the Lower Rhine Province, lived in California from 1737 to 1768, and died in Münster in 1779. Burrus, “Introduction,” 9–12; Hausberger, Jesuiten aus Mitteleuropa, 178–79.
32 David A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 187.
33 Christine R. Johnson, The German Discovery of the World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 3.
34 Johnson, German Discovery, 3. It is unclear whether the German Jesuits in California were influenced by a distinctly German tradition of being cultural arbiters or merely used similar approaches. See also Carina L. Johnson, Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Alix Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
36 José de Acosta had advocated this approach for dealing with barbarians when he wrote, “We shall have to constrain them by controlled and proper means of force, obliging them to leave the jungle and reside in urban centers, and even carry it out, up to a certain point, against their wills in order to constrain (Luke 14:23) them to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” De procuranda Indorum salute, trans. G. Stewart MacIntosh (Scotland: Mac Research, 1994), 6.
40 Even the following nuanced explanation in an article on seventeenth-century missions turns out to not be the case among the Jesuits in California, “When Catholics baptized someone, they conferred saving grace to a convert to keep him or her from eternal damnation. Consequently, Christianizing the behaviour and belief systems of indigenes remained a separate issue from saving their souls.” Charles H. Parker, “Converting Souls across Cultural Borders: Dutch Calvinism and Early Modern Missionary Enterprises,” Journal of Global History 8 no. 1 (2013): 50–71, here 65–66.
42 Wenceslaus Linck, Wenceslaus Linck’s Diary of His 1766 Expedition to Northern Baja California, trans. Ernest J. Burrus (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1966), 59, 68. Linck was born in Neudek, Bohemia in 1736, entered the Society of Jesus in Brünn, lived in California from 1762 to 1768, and died in Olomouc, Moravia in 1797. Burrus, “Introduction,” 21–22; Hausberger, Jesuiten aus Mitteleuropa, 230–31.
43 It just so happened that Hostell offered a mass to the Virgin Mary and the pregnant woman went into labor that night, creating an opportunity for the baby’s christening the next day: Hostell, “Report,” 248.
49 I am utilizing Muriel Clair’s conception of this spatial paradigm as “the principle value assigned to ‘place’ in Catholicism,” “‘Seeing These Good Souls Adore God in the Midst of the Woods’: The Christianization of Algonquian Nomads in the Jesuit Relations of the 1640s,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 1 no. 2 (2014): 281–300, here 298, doi: 10.1163/22141332-00102008.
50 The differences in colonial approaches of France and Spain may be one factor which influenced the Jesuit missionaries in each context. Patricia Seed writes, “Unlike French practices of seeking an alliance and watching the faces and gestures of indigenous peoples for signs of assent, Spaniards created their rights to the New World through conquest not consent,” Ceremonies of Possession, 70.
53 In 1752, Baegert wrote that his library featured seventy-eight books, forty-six of which were French spiritual books that he read in his spare time, Letters, 160.
56 Ducrue’s Account, 54. Ducrue was born in Munich, Bavaria in 1721, entered the Society of Jesus into the Upper Rhine Province, lived in California from 1553 to 1568, and died in Munich in 1779. Burrus, “Introduction,” 7–8; Hausberger, Jesuiten aus Mitteleuropa, 136–39.
58 Wenceslaus Linck, Wenceslaus Linck’s Reports and Letters, 1762–1778, trans. Ernest J. Burrus (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1967), 64.
60 The title of this section, also the title of a recent popular song, aptly expresses the outlook of the German missionaries.
62 Karl Neumayer (b. 1707 Wrocław [Breslau], Silesia – d. 1764 California) presented a case in which a group of Californians moved from the mountains towards the mission resulting in a positive spiritual outcome: “They also abandoned in great part their ancient customs [...] they give clear evidence of the interior desire they foster of sharing in that eternal life which God has prepared for those who love and serve Him in this life.” “Neumayer’s 1762 Report on Nuestra Señora del Pilar,” in Jesuit Relations, Baja California, 256–57.
72 Hostell, “Report,” 249; compare “In terra deserta et invia et inaquosa sic in sancto apparui tibi ut viderem virtutem tuam et gloriam tuam,” Psalm 62:3 (Latin Vulgate).
74 The missionaries could draw from the legendary figures of Acosta and Kino who both emphasized that the Spanish were also barbarians at one point, Acosta, De procuranda, 27; Eusebio Francisco Kino, Kino’s Historical Memoir of Pimeriá Alta: A Contemporary Account of the Beginnings of California, Sonora, and Arizona, trans. Herbert Eugene Bolton (New York: ams Press, 1976), 122.
75 Linck, Diary, 62; Baegert, Letters, 165; Karl Neumayer, “Report,” 257; Lambert Hostell, “Hostell’s 1748 Report on Mission San Luis Gonzaga,” in Jesuit Relations, Baja California, 244.
77 Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra who has studied the use of garden metaphors by Spanish and British colonizers in the Atlantic draws attention to the metaphor of the flower and use of the biblical book, The Song of Songs. As exemplified in the two quotations immediately above, the German Jesuits typically depicted their spiritual work in California in terms of a field rather than a garden, drawing from imagery found in the parables of Jesus rather than the Song of Songs. Cañizares-Esguerra does mention that some American Puritans did the same. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 206–7.
80 Upon their return the Jesuits assumed the role of what Eve M. Duffy and Alida C. Metcalf have called “go-betweens.” Eve M. Duffy and Alida C. Metcalf, The Return of Hans Staden. A Go-between in the Atlantic World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).
82 Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies. Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 35–36.
84 The negative depiction of a Jesuit in Voltaire’s Candide is often cited. See for example Dot Tuer, “Old Bones and Beautiful Words: The Spiritual Contestation between Shaman and Jesuit in the Guaraní Missions,” in Colonial Saints, 81–83; T. Frank Kennedy, “Candide and a Boat,” in The Jesuits. Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 317–32.
85 See Michael Printy, Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 125–43; Hellyer, Catholic Physics, 202–16; David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment. Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 217–28; and Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 233–34.
86 For a study comparing the influence of Spanish and German audiences, see J. Michelle Molina and Ulrike Strasser, “Missionary Men and the Global Currency of Female Sanctity,” in Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800), ed. Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009); on the French case, see Clair “‘Seeing These Good Souls,’” 292–95; for a broader perspective on why colonialists primarily sought to be legitimized by their own countrymen, see Seed, Ceremonies, 11.
90 Hausberger notes that military subjugation of the indigenous populations was viewed by the missionaries as preparation for a conversion of faith, Für Gott und König, 76.
93 Administrative control of the missions quickly passed from the Jesuits, to the Franciscans, to the Dominicans, Kent G. Lightfoot, Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants. The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 52–53.
- 7
Bronwen Catherine McShea, “Introduction: Jesuit Missionary Perspectives and Strategies Across the Early Modern Globe,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 1, no. 2 (2014): 171–76, here 171–72, doi: 10.1163/22141332-00102001.
- 19
Classen, History of the Southwest, 200. Clossey states that although “German Jesuits generally had a positive reputation […] several Germans betrayed a strong condescension toward other nations.” Salvation and Globalization, 58, 61.
- 22
See Molina, To Overcome Oneself, 4; Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 6.
- 27
Baegert, Observations, 95; Lambert Hostell, “Hostell’s 1750 Report from Nuestra Señora de los Dolores,” in Jesuit Relations, Baja California 1716–1762, trans. and ed. Ernest J. Burrus (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1984), 246–47; Pagden, Natural Man, 185.
- 29
Baegert, Letters, 123; Lambert Hostell, “Hostell’s First Letter,” in Ducrue’s Account, 165–66.
- 31
Hostell, “First Letter,” 166. Hostell was born in Münster-Eifel in the Lower Rhineland in 1706, entered Society of Jesus into the Lower Rhine Province, lived in California from 1737 to 1768, and died in Münster in 1779. Burrus, “Introduction,” 9–12; Hausberger, Jesuiten aus Mitteleuropa, 178–79.
- 32
David A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 187.
- 33
Christine R. Johnson, The German Discovery of the World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 3.
- 34
Johnson, German Discovery, 3. It is unclear whether the German Jesuits in California were influenced by a distinctly German tradition of being cultural arbiters or merely used similar approaches. See also Carina L. Johnson, Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Alix Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
- 53
In 1752, Baegert wrote that his library featured seventy-eight books, forty-six of which were French spiritual books that he read in his spare time, Letters, 160.
- 72
Hostell, “Report,” 249; compare “In terra deserta et invia et inaquosa sic in sancto apparui tibi ut viderem virtutem tuam et gloriam tuam,” Psalm 62:3 (Latin Vulgate).
- 73
Lambert Hostell, “Hostell’s Fourth Letter,” in Ducrue’s Account, 176.
- 75
Linck, Diary, 62; Baegert, Letters, 165; Karl Neumayer, “Report,” 257; Lambert Hostell, “Hostell’s 1748 Report on Mission San Luis Gonzaga,” in Jesuit Relations, Baja California, 244.
- 82
Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies. Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 35–36.
- 85
See Michael Printy, Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 125–43; Hellyer, Catholic Physics, 202–16; David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment. Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 217–28; and Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 233–34.
- 94
Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 18; Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise. The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540–1750 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 230.
