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Stefania Tutino, Early Modern Jesuits between Obedience and Conscience during the Generalate of Claudio Acquaviva (1581–1615), by Silvia Mostaccio, The English Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 547, December 2015, Pages 1547–1549, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cev292
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Extract
Silvia Mostaccio’s book analyses some aspects of the Jesuit elaborations on obedience. It contributes to an already lively historiographical debate seeking to explore the spiritual, theological and cultural complexity of the Society of Jesus, and to highlight its importance in the wider political and religious history of early modern Europe. The book focuses on the Generalate of Claudio Acquaviva, a crucial moment in the history of the Society. During Acquaviva’s long tenure as General, the Society enjoyed a tremendous expansion, both in terms of numbers and in terms of influence in the centre as well as at the peripheries of the Catholic world. Acquaviva believed that the expansion of the Society required the consolidation of its governing system: during his tenure, the Society produced fundamental documents which firmed up its intellectual, spiritual and institutional structure, including the Ratio Studiorum, the Directorium, and the new editions of the Constitutions. In those years of expansion and consolidation, the Society of Jesus found itself pulled by different and often diverging forces. While the central role the Jesuits assigned to the notion of discreción , or discernment, equipped them with the necessary tools to adapt themselves to different geopolitical, cultural and religious contexts, their equally central notion of obedience and their relatively rigid institutional structure provided the leaders of the Society, and especially the General, with unprecedented institutional authority. This book shows that the concept of obedience reflected the complex and, at times, contradictory efforts of the Society of Jesus to negotiate between these centrifugal and centripetal forces, and that the debate over obedience was a manifestation of the contrast between the need for the superior to control, discipline, and shape the conscience of the religious subject, and the need for the religious subject to recognise and respect the orders of their own conscience. Far from being an essentialised and ‘quintessentially’ Jesuit concept, and far from being the expression of a rigid and monolithic attitude toward control and discipline, this book demonstrates that obedience was both an important and controversial aspect of the political and religious history of Europe, and a contested, complicated, accommodated, ambiguous and multifaceted concept in Jesuit theology, spirituality and political theory.
