Steven Harris

ABSTRACT Within the context of national traditions in colonial science, the scientific activities of Jesuit missionaries present us with a unique combination of challenges. The multinational membership of the Society of Jesus gave its missionaries access to virtually every Portuguese, Spanish, and French colony. The Society was thus compelled to engage an astonishingly diverse array of cultural and natural environments, and that diversity of contexts is reflected in the range and the complexity of Jesuit scientific practices. Underlying that complexity, however, was what I see as a unique combination of institutional structures; namely, European colleges, overseas mission stations, and the regular circulation of personnel and information. With this institutional framework as a backdrop, I briefly trace what I see as the most salient themes emerging from recent studies of Jesuit overseas science: 1) the Societys ability to use scientific expertise to its advantage amid the complex web of dependencies upon which it missionary activities rested; 2) the ability of its missionaries to become intimate with a wide range of cultures and to appropriate natural knowledge held by indigenous peoples, especially in the fields of material medica and geography; and 3) the different ways Jesuits used published accounts of “remote nature” (i.e., natural histories of overseas colonies) to advance their corporate and religious causes.

The condemnation of Galileo in 1633 did much to give the Roman Catholic Church the modern reputation of opposing scientific research that challenged theological dogma. In fact, the church had long encouraged freedom of speculation in natural philosophy, which in the case of heliocentrism was contradicted mainly owing to a complex variety of factors that reflected the papal reaction to the Protestant Reformation and the clash of powerful personalities. It was only 360 years after the fact that the controversy was finally resolved. But this more passive attitude of responding to scientific challenges in the interpretation of the Bible—of which the Galileo affair is a fine example—was not a predominant attitude of the church in its encounter with modern science. The church continued to patronize scientific endeavors, which led to the reestablishment in the mid-nineteenth century of the Vatican Observatory and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. The tradition of clerical science carried over into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with such notable researchers as Gregor Mendel, whose work provided the foundation to modern genetics; Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who worked as a paleontologist and developed popular, yet controversial, speculations on human evolution; and Georges Lemaître, who formulated the big bang cosmology. They all contributed to the theory of evolution that remains today the subject of much debate at the interface of theology and science.

ABSTRACT Within the context of national traditions in colonial science, the scientific activities of Jesuit missionaries present us with a unique combination of challenges. The multinational membership of the Society of Jesus gave its missionaries access to virtually every Portuguese, Spanish, and French colony. The Society was thus compelled to engage an astonishingly diverse array of cultural and natural environments, and that diversity of contexts is reflected in the range and the complexity of Jesuit scientific practices. Underlying that complexity, however, was what I see as a unique combination of institutional structures; namely, European colleges, overseas mission stations, and the regular circulation of personnel and information. With this institutional framework as a backdrop, I briefly trace what I see as the most salient themes emerging from recent studies of Jesuit overseas science: 1) the Societys ability to use scientific expertise to its advantage amid the complex web of dependencies upon which it missionary activities rested; 2) the ability of its missionaries to become intimate with a wide range of cultures and to appropriate natural knowledge held by indigenous peoples, especially in the fields of material medica and geography; and 3) the different ways Jesuits used published accounts of “remote nature” (i.e., natural histories of overseas colonies) to advance their corporate and religious causes.