Volume 41, Number 5 · March 3, 1994
The Soul's Entrepreneurs
By Anthony Grafton
The First Jesuits
by John O'Malley
Harvard University Press, 457 pp., $35.00
Ignatius of Loyola: The Psychology of a Saint
by W.W. Meissner S.J., M.D.
Yale University Press, 480 pp., $35.00
Jésuites: Une Multibiographie, Vol. 1: Les conquérants, Vol. 2: Les revenants from Pantheon/Bessie Books, winter 1995)
by Jean Lacouture
Le Seuil, Vol. 2, 569 pp., each volume 149 FF (forthcoming in a revised one-volume translation
Deep in Peru, late in the sixteenth century, a Jesuit missionary wrote of his experiences during an expedition to the Chunchos. As he surveyed the jungles of the Amazon from a mountain-top, he felt that he could see as far as the Caribbean. His greatest desire was to visit the unknown peoples between, supported only by the hand of God and a companion, and bring them to Christianity. Clearly, he thought that a faithful Jesuit could penetrate any society, however strange. At the same time, at another border of the Christian world, another Jesuit was in fact moving steadily toward the heart of the greatest of all gentile kingdoms. Dressed in Chinese silks and reading the Chinese classics, Matteo Ricci would soon be the first Christian mandarin. His legendary mastery of Western cartography and written and spoken Chinese would win him imperial favor, enabling him to spend his last years in Peking itself. There he explored the rich and virtuous classics of Chinese philosophy and tried with occasional success to convince literati that the Christianity he taught represented not a rejection but the completion of their grand tradition.[1]
Review, 6187 words
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