To Overcome Oneself: The Jesuit Ethic and Spirit of Global Expansion, 1520–1767

By J. Michelle Molina

To Overcome Oneself offers a novel retelling of the emergence of the Western concept of "modern self," demonstrating how the struggle to forge a self was enmeshed in early modern Catholic missionary expansion. Examining the practices of Catholics in Europe and New Spain from the 1520s through the 1760s, the book treats Jesuit techniques of self-formation, namely spiritual exercises and confessional practices, and the relationships between spiritual directors and their subjects. Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic were folded into a dynamic that shaped new concepts of self and, in the process, fueled the global Catholic missionary movement. Molina historicizes Jesuit meditation and narrative self-reflection as modes of self-formation that would ultimately contribute to a new understanding of religion as something private and personal, thereby overturning long-held concepts of personhood, time, space, and social reality. To Overcome Oneself demonstrates that it was through embodied processes that humans have come to experience themselves as split into mind and body. Notwithstanding the self-congratulatory role assigned to "consciousness" in the Western intellectual tradition, early moderns did not think themselves into thinking selves. Rather, "the self" was forged from embodied efforts to transcend self. Yet despite a discourse that situates self as interior, the actual fuel for continued self-transformation required an object-cum-subject—someone else to transform. Two constant questions throughout the book are: Why does the effort to know and transcend self require so many others? And what can we learn about the inherent intersubjectivity of missionary colonialism?

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780520955042

J. Michelle Molina

J. Michelle Molina is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Northwestern University.

Book preview

To Overcome Oneself

Horoscopium Catholicum from Athanasius Kircher’s Ars magna lucis et umbrae. Rome, 1646.

To Overcome Oneself

The Jesuit Ethic and Spirit of

Global Expansion, 1520–1767

---

J. Michelle Molina

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BerkeleyLos AngelesLondon

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2013 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Molina, J. Michelle.

To overcome oneself: the Jesuit ethic and spirit of global expansion, 1520–1767 / J. Michelle Molina.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-27565-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

eISBN 9780520275652

1. Ignatius, of Loyola, Saint, 1491–1556. Exercitia spiritualia. 2. Spiritual exercises. 3. Jesuits—Spiritual life. 4. Self-Religious aspects—Christianity. 5. Self (Philosophy) I. Title.

BX2179.L8M59 2013

271’.53—dc23

2012050209

Manufactured in the United States of America

22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14  13

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.

Cover illustration. Athanasius Kircher, Ars magna lucis et umbrae, in X. libros digesta [etc.]. Editio altera priori multò auctior. Amstelodami, Apud Joannem Janssonium à Waesberge, & Haeredes Elizaei Weyerstraet [1671]. By courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

To Samuel and Theo: Thank you for being my in-house artists, inventors, lizard hunters, animal trainers, trenchant observers of humanity, hilarious YouTube finders, and so much more.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: To Overcome Oneself

Grassroots Monasticism, or, The Modern Self as Medieval to the Max

Embodiment as a Paradigm for Historians

The Trajectory of the Project, or, How Merleau-Ponty Answered a Foucauldian Question

The Shape of the Book

1.The Jesuit Spiritual Exercises: Conquest of the Self, Conquest of the World

From Cell to World

To Awaken in Them a Desire to Be Themselves Helped

To Overcome Oneself, and to Order One’s Life

Imagination, Redemption, and Global Expansion

2.Women’s Devotional Labor

Spiritual Daughters, Spiritual Mothers

Pious Frenzy

The Gender of Obedience?

3.Consolation Philosophy: Or, How Prayer Moved People in an Age of Global Expansion

Passions, Virtue, Action

Experiments in Consolation Philosophy

Spinozist Interlude

The Fourth Week

Consolation in/as Action in the Indies, East and West

4.Evangelization and Consolation: Or, Philosophy in the Mission Field

Father Juan Bautista Zappa, SJ

Rituals of Reform

Talk as Touch

5.Facts: Houses, Books, and Other Remains

Houses

Books

Remains

6.Colonial Indifference? Another Approach to the Colonial Other

Indians: The Devil Is in the Details

Missionary Fantasies: A Desire for Difference

Compañeros

Spiritual Difference: A Devotional Eye, a Sacramental Map

7.A Heart-Shaped World

María Josepha, Your Unworthy Daughter: Self-Negation and Self-Formation

Desire for Presence, or, Love in a Mexican Convent: Petra de San Gabriel

The Shape of the Heart

Heart in the World

Conclusion: Re-membering the Past

Re-membering the Mexican Baroque

Re-membering Spiritual Exercises

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

1.Horoscopium Catholicum frontispiece

2.Contemplation to Attain Love from Exercitia spiritualia S.P. Ignatij Loyolae

3.Illustrated mnemonic for examining the conscience prior to making a general confession from Exercitia spiritualia S.P. Ignatij Loyolae

4.The Adoration of the Sacred Heart with Saints Ignatius Loyola and Aloysius Gonzaga (La Adoración del Sagrado Corazón con Ignacio de Loyola y Luís Gonzaga)

5.The Cult of Devotion That Every Christian Ought to Give to the Sacred Heart of Christ as Man and God

6.El Alma Victoriosa

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is probably not obvious in these pages how much I owe to an African economic historian, Ralph Austen, for putting me on this path. The questions about the history of New Spain in a global frame began to percolate in his graduate course on European expansion and the postcolonial world. Friends, colleagues, and teachers from those Chicago days, now scattered across the United States, who made it such an incredible place to think about colonialism and whose influence continues to shape my thought include Andrew Apter, Dipesh Chakrabarty, John and Jean Comaroff, Robin Derby, Rachel Fulton, Jan Goldstein, Tamar Herzog, Joshua Kaplan, Daniel Klingensmith, John MacAloon, Maria Elena Martínez, Erica Peters, Paul Ross, David Scott, Alex Stern, and Shields Sundberg. I am forever indebted to the Chicago workshop system, those lovely thought laboratories dedicated to intellectual experimentation, fermentation, occasional explosion.

I owe much to institutions that, to my great delight, are committed to taking such great care of the records with which historians think and, yes, play. Thank you to the archivists and staff at the Archivo General de la Nación de México, Archivo Romanum Societatus Iesu, the Bancroft Library, the Biblioteca Nacional de España, Biblioteca Nacional de México, the Bibliothèque St. Sèvres, Paris, and the Burns Collection at Boston College. Special thanks to Robin Rider at Special Collections at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and to Leticia Ruíz Ramírez at the Biblioteca Eusebio F. Kino de la Provincia Mexicana.

My former colleagues and graduate students in the Department of History at University of California, Irvine, contributed much to this book. I thank Marc Baer, Nicole LaBouff, Kurt MacMillan, Laura Mitchell, and especially Ulrike Strasser, who continues to be a fabulous interlocutor. Thanks to Roxanne Varzi, friend and colleague whose gorgeous prose inspires; and finally, a shout-out to my hilarious colleagues and laid-back Irvine neighbors, Amy dePaul and Rodrigo Lazo.

The Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School provided a magical year in which to write, not to mention a regular format for sharing work in progress with such smart women who, importantly, became very good friends. Thanks to Joan Branham, Anne Braude, Ronit Irshak, Mónica Maher, Miryam Segal, and Elizabeth Sutton for making the Carriage House a wonderfully productive place to think and write, not only about women, gender, and religion but, even more often, about life in general.

I brought this book to a close in the Department of Religious Studies at Northwestern University with the support of insightful colleagues and graduate students. Mira Balberg, Sarah Jacoby, and Barry Wimpfheimer comprised a team of incredibly supportive and inspiring junior faculty friends. It has been a privilege to poke my head out of my office door to find a cohort of impressive senior Catholic Studies scholars in Richard Kieckhefer, Robert Orsi, and Cristie Traina. Cristie and Richard have read numerous drafts and offered extended and quite brilliant feedback, for which I am of course very grateful. Perhaps like the late medieval and early modern Catholics whom I study, I wonder if I, mere mortal, can ever attain the sanctity of these exemplary figures. I have learned so much from a dazzlingly unique philosopher, Brook Ziporyn, a larger-than-life figure who is a bit hard to wrap one’s head around, but therein lies the pleasure. I have loved teaching the graduate students at Northwestern and appreciated thinking, sparring, and laughing at the conference room table. Special thanks to a very sharp and dedicated graduate student, Kristi Bain, for her conversation and thoughtful readings of so many drafts of my work. I have drawn upon the brain power of scholars in the wider Northwestern community, notably Ken Alder, Yarí Pérez Marín, and Claudia Swan. With great pleasure I acknowledge Mary Weismantel and Lars Tønder, who have shared in the immense fun of reading through the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology Workshop sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. AKIH has supported two other ventures of mine: a symposium, Vibrant Materiality: Religion, Embodiment and the Life of Things (2012), and what has become a biannual tradition of convening Jesuit studies scholars for a day-long roundtable (2009, 2011). Thanks to the scholars who have sat around the table to discuss the Society of Jesus: Steve Andes, Luke Clossey, Emanuele Colombo, Stephen Harris, Florence Hsia, Kristin Huffine, Karen Melvin, Kenneth Mills, Robert Orsi, Ulrike Strasser, Karin Vélez, and Thomas Worcester.

This book has been improved immensely by the feedback and conversations I have had with scholars at a variety of institutions. I presented preliminary parts of this book at a number of institutions, including Boston College, Harvard University, Holy Cross College, the University of Chicago, the University of Toronto, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The latter to be noted for its scintillating workshop on Lived Inquiry. Formal and informal conversations with Antonella Romano have been incredibly stimulating. Thank you to Alan Cole, for insightful hilarity and the wry editorial eye that he ran over the introduction. I am grateful to Florence Hsia for reading through an early draft of the manuscript, for being an excellent dinner companion, and for her infectious laughter. Ken Mills’s intellectual generosity is enjoyed by all of us in the field of colonial Latin American history and, over these many years, I have not only benefited from his informal mentorship, but also treasured his friendship. That the anonymous readers of the manuscript made this a better book is an understatement. Thanks to Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matthew O’Hara, and Valentina Napolitano for their generous and insightful feedback.

Three cheers for Reed Malcolm, senior acquisitions editor at University of California Press, who has been a rock-solid source of support for this project. Thank you, Reed.

How’s the book?

I can’t talk about it.

Thanks to my parents for putting up with years of that tireless nonconversation, and love to my sisters, Jennifer, Johanna, and Erica, for their steady support and shared laughter about things large and small, happy and tragic. I nod toward the long history I have shared with Gary Wong, who has done much to make my academic life very possible.

Two sisters, two kids, and three dogs? Special thanks to Jennifer for engaging in these periodic experiments in domestic living wherein we have agreed with Woody Allen that we do not belong to that very special group called the horrible, rather, we prefer to be lumped in with the merely miserable. The ensuing laughter has done much to release the pressure valve on single parenting. Thanks to friends and family who wander in and out the front door, making domestic life a little more like living in a village. Love to a brave band of women who crossed oceans to put an interesting accent on the venture of raising kids: thank you to Camille George, Naïma Bouaziz, and Mirka Lassakova. I am eternally grateful to Pamela Lui and George Bucciero, whose love, support, frequent dinners, and memorable nights at local music venues have been essential to surviving these past few years; love and thanks to my adopted extended family, Simon Aronoff and Mary Weismantel; to Barb Ciesemier, who navigates this post-divorce world with me; to Barry Wimpfheimer, my friend and academic comrade in arms; to Brook Ziporyn, with whom I negotiated a tequila-for-music exchange; to my wry yogi, Lane Fenrich; to Andrew Jankowski, my interpreter of dreams; to Jackie Winter, who shares her fabulous colonial art books with me; to Liz Fitzgerald and Lisa Lipkind for being such wonderful and much-anticipated extended guests; to Nils Halverson, for his enduring friendship; to Ana Maria Apodaca, my touchstone since sixth grade; and to the baristas and regulars at Peet’s who make scholarly life anything but scholarly.

I dedicate this book to my boys, the absolute best sources of love, challenge, and enjoyment in my life.

Introduction

To Overcome Oneself

SPIRITUAL EXERCISES

To Overcome Oneself,

And to Order One’s Life,

Without Reaching a Decision

Through Some Disordered Affection¹

— SPIRITUAL EXERCISES OF ST. IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA

Alone. Ignatius of Loyola was alone in Manresa, Spain, in 1522.² From this solitary period of meditative introspection, the sixteenth-century Spaniard wrote the Spiritual Exercises to share with others a method of self-evaluation that could lead to personal and spiritual transformation. But what was it about interior movement of the soul that set in motion prayers and persons around the expanse of the globe? Why didn’t Ignatius join a monastery, become a hermit, and inspire others to a life of prayerful contemplation? Instead, by the time of Ignatius’s death in 1556, there were thirty-five Jesuit colleges in Europe alone and, by the close of the sixteenth century Jesuits had established mission stations in the Americas, China, Japan, and India. How did a focus on the self become a will to transform others?

Ignatius of Loyola wrote and revised the Spiritual Exercises over a period of approximately twenty years, dating from his second conversion at Manresa in 1522. Circulating in manuscript from 1541 and published in 1548, the Exercises were written in a very functional manner, as a series of instructions, details, and suggestions for the Jesuit director who assisted another person through the course.³ Commenting upon the mélange of literary genres comprising the Spiritual Exercises, John O’Malley has observed: [Containing] directives, meditations, prayers, declarations, procedures, sage observations and rules . . . the very diversity of genres at first glance suggests a scissors-and-paste composition.⁴ Offering a condensed, simplified, and adaptable format, the Exercises offered neither a philosophical exposition on spiritual life nor a series of prayers.⁵ Rather, the book is best described as a teacher’s manual.⁶ Ignatius presented the Spiritual Exercises as a program to be carried out over four weeks (First Week, Second Week, etc.) with each week comprising a series of reiterative meditative exercises that would be built upon and expanded in the ensuing weeks. The week format was loosely interpreted: one might take longer or shorter than seven days to complete the various exercises. The entire program was a retreat that took approximately thirty days to complete, although a shortened version was swiftly made available to laity.

In the opening pages of the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius of Loyola stated that the purpose of this program was to overcome oneself. I take my title from this phrase because this book is a meditation on the meaning and practice of self-overcoming in early modern Catholic contexts. The irony is that a self must be forged before it could be overcome. In his Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius put together a series of techniques that required the continuous (re) construction of a self that one also aimed to (but could never quite) transcend. At stake was not only an increased intensity in one’s relationship with the divine; Jesuit devotional practices also involved a reordering of one’s social reality through a rigorous ordering of time. A practitioner of the Exercises constructed narratives about the particular sins that had plagued his life, producing an ordered understanding of his individual history. Here the exercitant paid attention to place and context, marking the hours, days, and years of his life, providing the practitioner a method for making decisions in a rational manner. This practice was intended to combine past, present, and future in a deepened relationship with one’s Maker. The Spiritual Exercises encouraged autobiographical accounts shaped around what had been undisclosed or hidden, ultimately contributing to a conception of religion as a private, personal practice, representative of one’s individual relationship with God.

This sounds like the makings of a story about Jesuits and Catholic interiority and, in part, it is. Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) wrote the Spiritual Exercises—a meditative program geared toward spiritual renewal—in the early sixteenth century. The band of men who formed around Ignatius and his Exercises conceived of their collective lives as dedicated to walking with Christ; thus they named themselves the Society of Jesus. Their oft-stated mission was the help or consolation of souls, and Loyola’s Exercises functioned as the active core of all Jesuit ministries, as well as a key component of Jesuit self-understanding, both individual and corporate. To Overcome Oneself treats early modern Jesuit techniques of self-formation, namely, spiritual exercises, confessional practices, and the relationships between spiritual directors and their subjects from the 1550s through the 1760s. My study of Jesuit spirituality historicizes a particular mode of self-objectification practiced by early modern Catholics in Europe and in New Spain in an effort to understand the epistemological shifts that produced a version of self, to study at close range a moment in the formation of a concept, and, ultimately, to produce a more complex history of the Cartesian moment that expands our understanding of early modern subjectivity beyond the realm of European philosophers. The terrain that produced the individual knowing subject was rich and the sources of the modern self more varied and dispersed than scholarship has thus far allowed.

But I offer what is perhaps a paradoxical view of self because in the course of this book, I will insist upon saying and praying as embodied practices. My aim has been to write an intellectual history that is grounded in the study of person-to-person interactions, to answer (from the vantage point of the ground) the very big question: How did the so-called Western self become a disembodied self? The short answer: it was through embodied processes that humans have come to experience themselves as split into mind and body. Despite the self-congratulatory role assigned to consciousness in the Western intellectual tradition, early moderns did not think themselves into thinking selves. Rather, the self was forged from embodied efforts to transcend self. To complicate matters, this was not a solo enterprise: Catholic spiritual healing practices in the early modern era relied upon the intersubjective relationships fashioned between the spiritual director and his subject. Furthermore, despite a discourse that situates self as interior, the actual fuel for continued self-transformation required an object-cum-subject: someone else to transform. A constant question throughout the book: Why does the effort to know and transcend self require so many others, and what can we learn about the inherent intersubjectivity of self-making in the process?

The Spiritual Exercises offer a good case study of a Catholic technique of the self that was available, accessible, and very popular among early modern Catholic laity. Despite being forged in retreat, this self would not remain behind the walls of a Jesuit college or retreat house. The various exercises were designed to become part of an exercitant’s everyday life. The exercitant could be renewed and improved through worldly action geared toward the help of souls. Intimate rituals of self-formation linked to a global vision of a triumphant worldly Christianity underpin my argument that care of the self propelled the Christian into the world. This is how the Jesuits understood themselves. The early Jesuit Jerome Nadal (1507–80) described the desire to be mobile in the following terms: [The Jesuits] consider that they are in their most peaceful and pleasant house when they are constantly on the move, when they travel throughout the earth, when they have no place to call their own.⁷ The Jesuits thought of themselves as contemplatives in action. Throughout the book, I hone in on the meaning of contemplation in action in order to write a history of bodies in motion. I continually refer to active bodies, first, because this has seemed to be the best way to understand and describe how this Jesuit-styled subjectivity was brought into being. Second, I have not wished to privilege the reflective or conscious aspects of personhood as the sole means of shaping what has been understood to be modern about subjectivity. I will say more on this later in this introduction.

For the moment, it is important to know that Ignatian spirituality was driven by an understanding of individual salvation to be achieved by mobility in a world that had only recently become a globe to be traversed. This was the age of exploration, and Jesuits were key players in molding the conceptual contours of both self and world. The transregionalism of the Society’s missionary efforts has attracted scholarly attention in the past two decades.⁸ Studies on the Jesuits have also emphasized the contributions that the Society of Jesus made to science—a much-studied topic in recent years.⁹ As Luce Giard commented upon the publication of a weighty collection of essays titled The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts, 1540–1773, the tome is remarkable for the number of specialists who are not Jesuits themselves who have stumbled upon the archives of the Society of Jesus to write an increasingly interdisciplinary study of religion, the history of science, and intellectual history.¹⁰ She has dubbed this the "désenclavement of the study of Jesuit history, in other words, a sign that the study of Jesuits no longer belongs solely to a semi-hagiographical historiography written by the Society itself. However, she also remarked that the edited collection contained practically nothing on Jesuit spirituality or, in her words, that the essays missed the problem of their motives, their inspirational drive, and the problem of the successive versions of their specific identity. . . . Historians who are attracted to the Jesuits because of their mobility and because of the eventful history of the order have to address the ‘hard core’ of Jesuit identity, that is, Ignatian spirituality."¹¹

I have written this book to kill multiple birds with a single stone. We can pay attention to spirituality, motivation, mobility, evangelism, and science by honing in on what might appropriately be labeled a Jesuit science of the self. There have been relatively few studies on Jesuit contributions to early modern forms of subjectivity.¹² As will soon become evident, the Exercises in particular (and Jesuit spiritual direction more generally) provided a methodology aimed at gaining reliable knowledge about one’s own sinning self. This Jesuit scientia aimed to name and identify a self that was subsequently to be overcome through discerning action.

Clearly, the Spiritual Exercises were the hard core of Jesuit spirituality, but the techniques therein can hardly be said to belong to the Society of Jesus alone. Rather, interwoven in these spiritual practices were long-standing Western philosophical deliberations (and practices) about the nature of reason in relation to the passions. With roots in ancient philosophy, these debates were revitalized in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, as early modern philosophers sought to answer questions about the ability of reason to control the passions, and the mechanisms by which it might do so, and, broadly construed, how both hereditary and external conditions (from climate to motion of the planets) could affect the passions.¹³ In a similar vein, Jesuits advocated experimental spiritual techniques to separate a knowing subject from a knowable object. The target in this case—the object to be controlled by rational method, more precisely—was the sinning self.

Yet this history of the formation of Western subjectivities cannot be bound to European terrain. If we can speak of an early modern self, this book compels its reader to take note that it emerged in Europe and Latin America simultaneously. The arc of my inquiry about spirituality and subjectivity includes the experiences of Catholics in Europe and New Spain in an effort to highlight shared aspects of a transatlantic Catholic cosmopolitan culture. Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic were folded into a dynamic that not only forged new concepts of self but, in so doing, fueled the global Catholic missionary movement. This inclusion of Latin America in the history of what was early about globalization remains woefully underexplored.¹⁴ Catholic techniques of the self took shape on the European continent and in the kingdom of New Spain simultaneously because Western consciousness declared itself vis-à-vis others who were both local and distant, regardless of geographic location. In other words, New Spaniards also imagined distant others in need of salvation. Attention to distant souls from the vantage point of New Spain is evident in the example of those who donated New World silver wealth toward the ransom of Spanish captives in North Africa.¹⁵ Another example is the seventeenth-century group of laity in Mexico City who formed a congregation with the specific aim of praying for martyred Christian laity in Japan. In this powerful instance of imagined Catholic community, it is important to emphasize that the object of their prayerful imaginative attention was not the much-lauded martyred Jesuit missionaries, but the Japanese Christian converts who had attempted to continue some form of Christianity after all missionaries had been expelled from Japan.¹⁶ To Overcome Oneself pays attention to the way the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises encouraged this kind of worldview. The globe—newly configured, still emergent—shaped the religious imaginary of Catholics in both European and extra-European locales.

As we shall see, formation of Christian selves moved missionaries and their followers to take steps that were small as well as large, to cross cities and towns and seas as they claimed the territory of individual souls. A focus on the mobility of Catholic subjectivities provides a rich opportunity to provincialize Europe by shedding strange light on the history of one of the Western intellectual tradition’s most prized possessions: the self. Grafting together the disparate area studies branches of Latin America and Europe produces a history of a self that emerged in relation to a globalizing Catholic missionary impulse. In the process, we collapse an exaggerated sense of cultural distance between Europe and New Spain. Instead, New Spain is situated, in Claudio Lomnitz’s terms, as Europe’s westernmost extremity.¹⁷ Moreover, we dismantle a reified notion of Europe itself because the Indies were everywhere. How else are we to understand the proliferation of Indies in Jesuit discourse? There were Jesuit missions in India, Jesuit missions for Indians in the Americas. Not only the rural regions of southern Italy and southern Spain but also urban prisons were given the moniker our Indies.¹⁸ The Indies were in the heart of Europe because, in fact, they could be found in the depths of one’s own heart. Jesuit spirituality needs to be understood in a transregional context because the Jesuits themselves envisioned their spiritual practices as key to shaping and expanding the early modern Christian world, one soul at a time.

Taking cues from colonial and postcolonial studies, this work situates metro-pole and colony within a single frame.¹⁹ Nationalist historiographies and area studies foci have divided the globe with boundary markers that were unnatural to the early modern world, and even bridging the Spain/New Spain divide is insufficient for understanding the nature of Jesuit influence across protonational and ocean boundaries.²⁰ Some have embraced Atlantic history as a means of moving beyond nationalistic histories, yet as Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra reminds scholars, early modern empires were driven by global concerns.²¹ The history of the Society of Jesus refuses the easy reach for the nation-state as an analytical lens, and I have clawed at the straitjacket that is area studies. Consider a very particular case to demonstrate my point: A young man began his formation as a Jesuit in Genoa (Italy) and then Nice (France), expressed his innermost wish to be a missionary in China, but then traversed the Atlantic and finished his formation at the Jesuit novitiate and colleges in Mexico City. At what longitude and latitude did his historiographical situation alter? Why in Europe is he dubbed an early modern subject, but in New Spain transformed into a colonial subject? Why is Latin America’s history colonial while Europe’s is early modern? I understand the value of the term colonial in that it signals a period of time when the viceroyalty of New Spain was subject to the Spanish crown. Yet colonial as a historiographical term makes a normative claim that Mexico’s history was one of delayed integration into a temporality (modern). To Overcome Oneself shifts our attention from arguments that implicitly or explicitly reify nationalistic historiographies. Rather, by attending to Jesuit spirituality, this study brings into view practices of ethical self-formation that produced a global imaginary that, in turn, propelled Catholics into the early modern world.

Readers unfamiliar with Latin American history may need to check certain expectations at the door: When we cross the Atlantic at the end of Chapter 3, the New Spain encountered is not the site of the exotic in this story. The grueling sixteenth-century story of contact and conquest was, by and large, over by the time the Jesuits arrived in the central valley of Mexico in the 1570s. Although I write about colonial difference (see Chapter 6), alterity plays second fiddle to the shared Catholic practices that forged transatlantic connections. Mine is an intellectual history of Western subjectivity that focuses on individual Christian efforts to forge and overcome selves on both sides of the Atlantic.

As Cañizares-Esguerra has lamented, scholarship in North America continues to represent Latin Americans as non-Western Others. "An intellectual history of the West that includes Latin America seems ludicrous at this stage."²² But what if we provincialize Europe by tossing ludicrousness squarely into the lap of European history? For, if we pause to notice, there is something inherently preposterous about the just-so histories of Western modes of subjectivity that have taken Rene Descartes’s I think therefore I am as paradigmatic: In contrast, I contend that whether in Europe or in New Spain, the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century inhabitants of these Western worlds did not always think their way into modern selves. This emergence was an embodied person-to-person process: talking, mimicking, crying, praying, self-flagellating selves into existence. If we pay attention to these details about the birth of the so-called modern self, these very details about the active religious body that have been strenuously disavowed are revealed to be absolutely and, yes, ludicrously central. The Western disembodied self appears as the end product of an embodied process; in fact, if we take embodied perception seriously, the rational self emerges as something of a punch line in a riddle we can never escape.²³ Accordingly, my study admittedly contributes an odd strand to the genealogy of Western subjectivity, but one that can be productively woven in with other histories of subjectivity to see how the shape, color, and weight of this thread alternatively jars, complements, and shimmers in a fabric composed of countless studies that explicitly or implicitly take Weber’s notion of a Protestant ethic as the paradigmatic link between religion and what has tirelessly been called modernity.

GRASSROOTS MONASTICISM, OR, THE MODERN SELF AS MEDIEVAL TO THE MAX

In European historiography, the early modern era represents the historical moment when religion came to be perceived as a matter of individual choice. Yet this was not only because there was something new called Protestantism to consider. Rather, centuries of spiritual practices conditioned Christians to think of themselves in a new light. In a rough gloss, one could say that monastic devotions had been performed on behalf of Christian populations but, by the late Middle Ages, not only did Christian theologians begin to place greater emphasis on the spiritual labors of each individual,²⁴ many individuals also sought multiple ways to deepen their own spirituality.²⁵ The Jesuit Spiritual Exercises popularized monastic techniques, leading to an intensification of personal piety. Monastics were skilled at making thoughts about God, a technique that relied on honing memory, not as a holding place, but as a tool or a machine.²⁶ Because the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises made these same techniques of memory, imagination, and composition of place easy and accessible, Jesuit ministries in Europe and Latin America can be characterized as a means of monasticizing the laity—a process of bringing monastic devotional practices to laypersons. Techniques of meditation—what Mary Carruthers has referred to as an architecture for thinking—were brought outside the highly structured and embodied routines that governed life within monastery walls. In fact, Jesuits adapted monastic practices to a life in motion, for both themselves and their followers. Here we can locate the Jesuits and their particular spiritual methods as crucial components in the historical transformations by which religion made its appearance as a matter of private devotion to be taken up by all Christian laity, no longer just the exclusive practice of monks (or elites) devoted to the secluded contemplative life. The import of the Society of Jesus was not in inventing new techniques, but rather, in universalizing long-standing elite monastic practices that themselves had roots in Hellenistic philosophy, and then mobilizing them across distances previously unimagined.

Indeed, the persistence of these long-standing techniques of self-formation is just as intriguing as the new shape taken in the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. Continuity and transformation converge in the presence of the strand that weaves its way from Hellenistic philosophy through monastic Christian practices, finally, to this Jesuit technique of an active and globally oriented self. Monastic practices sparked the Jesuit global imaginary. The techniques codified as Ignatian provided a do-it-yourself guide that situated embodied perception as central to constructing an architecture for thinking about God, self, and world. This meditative blueprint traveled on Jesuit missionary networks as both a text and a series of practices. This study of an action-oriented spirituality forms part of the history of what we now call globalization because the Exercises asked the practitioner to meditate on the globe and to imagine himself as active in the world, walking at Christ’s side.

The techniques in this small handbook encouraged exercitants to develop a narrative sense of self. When anthropologist Arjun Appadurai published a book on the culture of globalization in the mid-1980s, he took note of the multiple means of imagining oneself as contributing to a modernity that was now at large. I mention in particular his notion of mediascapes because his concept provides a useful frame for understanding how global missionary forces put monasticism at large:

Mediascapes . . . tend to be image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality, and what they offer to those who experience and transform them is a series of elements (such as characters, plots, and textual forms) out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives, their own as well as those of others living in other places.²⁷

The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises unleashed a particular brand of image-centered and narrative-based strips of reality that animated the body. Deployable narratives—not only of martyrs and saints, but also of struggling sinners reformed by the Spiritual Exercises—moved people. Allowing for the very important caveat that all early modern communication traveled on a vastly slower scale,²⁸ it is nonetheless critical to take note that, in globalization’s earliest moments, a great number of Catholics engaged in this brand of literary invention; they not only imagined themselves, but also composed themselves, according to the contours of spiritual scripts that followed particular plotlines, one of which entailed the reform of self, the other the salvation of pagan souls. We know much about the trade and commerce that moved on Catholic imperial networks, but in this book I point to self as both a concept and practice that traversed the same imperial networks. Jesuit missionaries inculcated a way of thinking about the ideal universal human as a Christian engaged in ethical self-formation. From its slow-moving beginnings, globalization has been relational, a human encounter between selves and others, but also between a person and his own self.

EMBODIMENT AS A PARADIGM FOR HISTORIANS

The Society of Jesus was a corporate body whose identity was forged through spiritual practices that centered on the individual bodies of its members and its followers. The practices outlined in the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises aimed to channel fleshly experiences into narratives of sinning selves who, via Jesuit spiritual therapeutics, would be capable of overcoming the passions and could emerge as contemplatives in action. Reading these historical documents, one is immediately struck by the physicality of Jesuit spiritual discernment because the various devotional practices in the Exercises were designed to console souls by putting bodies in motion. But for early moderns, what kind of body was this? And what kind of therapy was on offer? As we shall see, in Jesuit spiritual direction, diagnosis was grounded in the relationship between the spiritual physician and his patient, and therapeutics was based upon a principle of opposition to restore balance. In this early modern era when confidence ranged widely in the ability of postlapsarian humans to call upon reason to control the passions, the Jesuits clearly offered an optimistic reading of relatively flexible or fluid bodies that could be fine-tuned to resonate with God’s will.²⁹ But that leaves us with a crucial methodological question: how might we approach this language that situates persons as embodied beings?

Theories about affect, embodiment, and techniques of self-formation have provided very useful tools for thinking about how making the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises was an embodied experience whose popularity can, in part, be explained in terms of the transmission of affect. The book demonstrates these features of self-making—the active, mobile, perceiving body—as pertains to the Society of Jesus, but the problem of how religious subjectivities emerge from embodied perception can be extended to problematize mobile religious bodies in other evangelical moments in global history. What follows in the next two sections are thoughts on the challenges of incorporating phenomenology and affect theory into historical writing. For some readers, these very words evoke a sinking feeling, as if a lover turned over to say, Honey, there is something important we have to discuss. Escape hatch: if you are a reader who prefers theory or methodological discussions in the footnotes (if at all), feel free to skip ahead to the chapter descriptions under The Shape of the Book. I am a historian who takes pleasure in critical theory and philosophy, but, more to the point, I am committed to the view that facts are born of theoretical adventures and also that theories are only as convincing as the facts with which they explicitly engage. These are two sides of the same coin; the two share space on the same page, whether stated explicitly in the paragraph, decorously in the footnote, or unconsciously in language that was once considered theoretical but is now accepted as a kind of fact. An example: scholars no longer feel compelled to elaborate on theories of gender construction when they describe something as gendered. It is no longer necessary. In a relatively short space of time, what once came with much necessary saying now goes largely without saying at all. The difference between language that is considered theoretical and what slides by unnoted is, indeed, historically and contextually contingent. Not all of our presuppositions ought to be made explicit, but I do contend that, at this moment, there are some provocative avenues of thought that provide particular challenges to those wedded to historical method; in other words, I believe some saying is required. Accordingly, I devote some pages to phenomenology and affect theory as productive avenues for thinking, as a historian, about the emergence of mobile religious selves in any time period.

How can historians write about embodiment? To begin, the task is greater than acknowledging the simple and indisputable reminder that historical actors had bodies. Rather, theories of embodiment complicate the very notion of an actor having a body in the first place. The sentence I have a body positions me as conscious subject reflecting on body as object. I call this entity mine. This is not necessarily misguided, but it is an