The three phases of empire

In the following, I want to move away from a concept of imperial power structures, of empire, that focuses mainly on territoriality and regards other aspects merely as implications of territoriality. I further propose to conceive of “empire” as the consequence of practices that are meant to create and sustain the idea of “empire.”Footnote ² I see “empire” as a complex equilibrium of processes to be held in balance by their successful manipulation.Footnote ³ This is hardly a new approach, as Hannah Arendt already argued for it in the 1950s.Footnote ⁴ David Ludden recently supposed that “empire is best conceived not as a kind of structure with prime exemplars at all, but rather as a process of adaptive transformation in which people create, assemble, configure, reassemble, renovate and remodel imperial forms of power and authority under diverse, changing circumstances,” so that “[i]mperial forms of power and authority thus entail systematic patterns of inequality; exhibit a wide range of variation, in many settings, including kingdoms, families, firms, nations and globalisation; and appear in all domains of analysis, including culture, psychology, economics and politics.”Footnote ⁵ In the end, the coalescence of processes of domination into stable structures for the repetition of such processes shapes imperial structures in a distinct way, as observed by Egon Flaig: Empires are constituted of a metropolis that dominates and a periphery that is dominated, the whole composed of parts of unequal rights. Provinces have lesser rights towards the metropolis than the metropolis has towards its provinces, and it is impossible for the province to gain access to full metropolitan rights.Footnote ⁶ Timothy H. Parsons has provided a very clear-cut set of definitions for “empire” along the same lines:

Analogous views are shared by Abernethy,Footnote ⁸ Bang and Bayly,Footnote ⁹ Fisch,Footnote ¹⁰ Ludden,Footnote ¹¹ and Mattingly,Footnote ¹² in dealing with different empires across a timescale reaching from ancient Rome to twentieth-century Britain. I side with this definition yet want to emphasize two points: first, the key feature is to establish control;Footnote ¹³ second, control may come not only in political form, as held by Abernethy and Parsons.Footnote ¹⁴

Thus, imperial-ness is the quest for dominion of a large sphere of action, populated by subjects, by a clearly defined group of persons (citizens) coming from a small core of this sphere, which renders itself and its techniques of control inaccessible to anyone from the dominated body of persons within the periphery of it.Footnote ¹⁵ This in turn necessitates a constant othering of subjects by citizens to be able to uphold the differentiation between both groups.Footnote ¹⁶

If the focus shifts along this line, away from territory (and the political/military force needed to control it) to other spheres that then constitute fields of imperial activities,Footnote ¹⁷ three such spheres may easily be identified: territory, the economy, and the spiritual. Abernethy identifies them as the “Public,” “Private Profit,” and “Religious”Footnote ¹⁸ sectors, the problem being that in this formulation, as the special field of the political government the public sector functions both as the all-encompassing whole of the imperial enterprise and as one of its parts. I propose instead to view each sphere as a field of human action regulated by its peculiar needs, rules, and goals, with successful action establishing what I would like to call a distinct phase of empire (by analogy to three-phase electric power). This implies that in each sphere, the power that is necessary to establish control will likely be different in kind. To restrict “power” to what force of arms provides means, according to Norbert Elias, to use the word wrongly anyway, as if it denoted something substantial; “we say that a person possesses great power, as if power were a thing he carried about in his pocket.”Footnote ¹⁹ Power that is accompanied by other than physical force is power nevertheless, and so the power needed to control the territorial sphere can be different from the one needed to control economic or spiritual spheres. Even the power exerted by force of arms can in the end be seen as something of a mental phenomenon.Footnote ²⁰ What happens when the psychologically constructed acceptance of the ruler–ruled dichotomy fails to hold is commonly known as rebellion or revolution, and if its acceptance cannot be reinstalled by the force or forces the ruler(s) can command, the power structure thus questioned is history.

It is important to note that the three spheres and their resulting phases are of course connected, interwoven, and interdependent, yet not congruent. The achievement of dominion, the building of empire in one of them, facilitates similar efforts in the others, but does neither prescribe them nor guarantee their success. Spillovers are likely, but not inevitable. An entity constituting a full-blown empire will expand in each of these spheres, yet one sphere will likely constitute the main focus of its activities. Empires that coexist in the same space-time area by concentrating on differing spheres may thus be seen as phase-delayed, and therefore non-conflictingly possible. Possible because as power is not the same for each phase of empire, the dominion created by the exercise of power is also not the same for each phase. An economic empire strives to dominate markets and cash flows; a territorial empire aims at territorial and political control; and a spiritual empire is built on the control of believes and societal norms. If we concur—as I do—with Parsons that “[e]mpires are, by definition, a form of permanent authoritarian rule that consigns a defeated community to perpetual subjecthood, most often for the purposes of exploitation and extraction,”Footnote ²¹ this translates into different gains from exploitation and extraction for each phase of empire. Financial power is not the same as political might, which in turn is not the same as spiritual authority.

Although I presuppose that this model will be helpful for analysing imperial structures of all periods, as a historian of early modernity I am very relieved that it helps to disentangle some specific early modern problems frequently encountered in dealing with empire and colonialism. First of all, it does not give priority to politics, and thus allows for semistate, nongovernmental, and maybe even private actors to be taken into account as autonomous agents of empire, and not merely as subcontractors of the political ruler. Second, it allows for a satisfying interpretation of the early modern dispute about the nature of papal power. The question of whether the supreme spiritual power with which the papacy claimed to be invested also provided it with political power was still hotly debated in the sixteenth century,Footnote ²² and this called into question the very legitimacy of any European overseas conquest. The influential School of Salamanca tried to resolve this by ascribing to the pope power within the spiritual sphere as distinct, but not completely separate from, the political.Footnote ²³ Interpretations that focus on political-military power alone, while relegating this spiritual power to the background and deeming it to be only symbolic or metaphorical, cannot do justice to the circumstances of the time. It is important to keep in mind that my approach presupposes to “deploy the terms empire, imperial and imperialism as analytical terms denoting a kind of power dynamic operating in ranks of systematically patterned inequality, rather than as terms to represent regime ideology or official order.”Footnote ²⁴

The Three Phase Model and the Jesuits

I will now try to substantiate the possibilities of such an approach by viewing more closely the Asian missions of the Society of Jesus, especially in its expansion outside Europe during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The old Societas Jesu may be viewed as analogous to the colonial and commercial empires of early modernity, yet firmly situated within the spiritual phase. It was organisationally divided in provinces and vice-provinces found all around the globe, the whole structure—in theory—firmly centred on Rome, residence of the order’s general: an empire en miniature, comparable to those of the contemporary territorial states, and subject to the same problems.

Early modern empires came with ideologies.Footnote ²⁵ This is true also for the Jesuit Empire; Put simply, it exported God rather than goods. The economic activities of the East India Company (EIC) and the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) and the territorial holdings in the Indo-Pacific area they acquired in the same period may be seen as economically-oriented empires phase-delayed to primarily territorial colonial empires such as the Spanish viceroyalties in the Americas.Footnote ²⁶ The Estado da Índia, the colonial territories of the Portuguese crown east of the Cape of Good Hope, constituted something in between these extremes.Footnote ²⁷ The spiritual activities of the Society of Jesus, their territorial holdings such as the city of Nagasaki,Footnote ²⁸ and the concurrently evolving economic patterns centred on these constitute such a phase-delayed empire, too.Footnote ²⁹ “For. . . one reason European merchants, manufacturers, and religious leaders enjoyed substantial autonomy from their governments was that the territorial unit with which their activities were identified was not coextensive with the state but rather smaller or larger than it,”Footnote ³⁰ so that spatial coexistence of imperial structures of different phases theoretically presents no more problems than their chronological coexistence. This does not mean that such coexistence did not give rise to practical problems, some of which will show up in the later sections.

Contemporary colonial as well as indigenous institutions on the spot indeed sometimes saw the Jesuit order as an independent, discrete colonial agent,Footnote ³¹ and some of its actions seemed to contradict its spiritual character. The acquisition of Nagasaki in 1569–70 made the order responsible for administering not only the city as such but also criminal law and penal justice within its boundaries, for which—because ecclesia abhorret a sanguine (the Church abhors bloodshed)—a papal dispensation would have been necessary, though one was never formally given.Footnote ³² Pope Paul IV (1476–1559, Pont. 1554–59) conceived the Society as Spain’s fifth column,Footnote ³³ while Philip II (1527–98) suspected it of being an agent of the papacy.Footnote ³⁴ These conflicting impressions indicate that the order had managed to build up a position of its own which could be constrained neither to work exclusively for the political governments with which it interacted, nor to only serving papal ambitions.Footnote ³⁵ The Spanish diplomat and counsellor of Philip IV (1605–65), Diego de Saavedra Fajardo (1584–1648), indeed set them aside as a model for monarchs of organizational control and power through knowledge.Footnote ³⁶

Outside Europe this was acknowledged, too. One of the main reasons that the Japanese shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–1598) prohibited Christianity in 1587 was because he feared the Pope and the Portuguese Crown would wield too much influence over the Jesuit’s Japanese converts.Footnote ³⁷ The same problem surfaced in the China mission: the Society’s self-proclaimed obedience to the Pope, whom they dubbed the “Emperor of the Lore” (jiaohuang), was not very conducive to the missionaries’ favour in the eyes of the Chinese emperor, who could have felt his prerogatives challenged.Footnote ³⁸ Such clashes with the political authorities of extra-European territories were peculiar neither to the order’s Eastern missions nor to the sixteenth century. In 1760, the Society was expelled from the then-French colony of Saint-Domingue, present-day Haiti, having been accused of encouraging slaves to hold their own mass, thus making the planters fear a secret influence over their workforce.Footnote ³⁹

This is shifting terrain: it would be all too easy to fall for anti-Jesuit stereotypes that enhanced the dissolution of the old Jesuit order in 1774; in 1762 the Parlement de Paris “had declared the Society of Jesus to be “inadmissible by its nature in every organized state . . . as contrary to natural right, damaging to . . . all spiritual and temporal authority, and tending to introduce into the Church and into States, under the specious veil of a religious institute . . . a political body, whose essence consists in a continuous activity aiming by all sorts of routes, direct or indirect, concealed or public, first at an absolute independence, and successively at the usurpation of all authority.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The fallacies of this approach are twofold: it supposes that the order was primarily an instrument of domination and that its beliefs were (at least partly) hypocritical. Moreover, it suggests that the Society was a monolithic block that could be administered as centrally and as smoothly as it liked to present itself. Both suppositions are untenable. The orders’ provinces more often than not did not simply obey the superior general in Rome,Footnote ⁴¹ not just because of the difficulties of long-distance communication.Footnote ⁴² But this only serves to underline the similarities with other early modern empires for which the same structural phenomena are well known and never used as arguments to deny their imperial nature.

For the Society of Jesus this holds as well. Thus, we need to focus on its individual actors. To take Jesuit missionaries seriously we must begin by ascribing to them genuine faith, including a belief in their vocation and its efficacy to achieve its goals (the conquest of the entire world for Christ to the benefit and salvation of its people).Footnote ⁴³ Furthermore, we need to acknowledge individual agency in evading or opposing orders. Jonathan Wright has captured this very well: “The cause, of course, was conversion, but it did not take long for missionaries to realize that first and foremost, soutanes and Bibles notwithstanding, they were early-modern Europeans in unusual places, where it was far from clear whether the beliefs, assumptions, and accomplishments of early-modern Europe would be derided, admired, misconstrued, or simply ignored.”Footnote ⁴⁴

This does not mean, however, that their individual beliefs and actions may not be classified structurally to analytically derive certain prominent features of the different missionary enterprises of the old Jesuit order. With a primarily praxeological approach, my analysis focuses on the forms and effects of their actions rather than on their intentions—bearing in mind that their beliefs are known to us only in the results of actions taken because of them. This also allows us to compare the perspectives of individual actors in the different phases of empire to see if they really are compatible. Such an approach prompts a number of questions related to the broader question of spiritual empire. Were the actions taken by Jesuits consciously embedded in a vision of colonial spiritual conquest? Did they view the people they encountered as potential subjects rather than as soon-to-be brothers in Christ? And even if both questions can be answered in the affirmative, could that be translated into changes in the societies in which the missionaries operated, and into which changes? To make matters worse, all these questions simultaneously apply of course not only to the Jesuits as proponents of mission but also to the converts and the bystanders alike, as they all formed the social field in which mission as a distinct historical process happened. Critics of concepts such as “cultural imperialism” have rightly pointed out that these questions are not only notoriously difficult to answer; in many cases they are unanswerable.Footnote ⁴⁵ For the old Jesuit order this presents us with further difficulties as we have large amounts of documents but still know very little about most of the individual actors—they are “known only through a few published letters,”Footnote ⁴⁶ and even less is known about their individual converts.Footnote ⁴⁷ If we do have documents, they are almost exclusively of European origin.Footnote ⁴⁸ For a start, therefore, I am going to examine more closely one question crucial in this context: Was the miles Christi really in a phase-delayed analogous position as the conquistador?

As both were challenged with expanding or maintaining the structure they were serving, it may be asked if they both ran similar risks. Both faced the danger of death. As both had to travel by sea to reach their destinations, both were liable to illness, malnutrition, and shipwreck in much the same way, quite literally on board of the same ships. This shared experience may well have provided points of contact both could use in cooperation at a later date.Footnote ⁴⁹ Soldiers were in danger of getting wounded or killed in combat, missionaries of being killed or executed by alien communities or politicians. Soldiers took these risks for the honour and glory of their ruler (and their pay, of course), missionaries ad maiorem gloriam dei (and for the salvation of their own souls, of course). This analogy fits in well with the self-image of at least some Jesuits. In 1552, Henrique Henriquez, S.J. (1520–1602) wrote from the Malabar Coast of India to the general of the order, Loyola, that “as the capitãos search for better fighters for the wars we do now search for better Christians (as I wrote to you last year already) for this war and combat we carry in our hands”Footnote ⁵⁰ when he spoke about organizing indigenous converts to relieve the shortcomings in missionary personnel; Melchior Gonçalvez, S.J. (n.d.) spoke thus of Francisco de Javier, S.J. (St. Francis Javier, 1506–1552) in an often quoted passage: “Truly you may call him a soldier of Christ, and what I tell is nothing really.”Footnote ⁵¹ To dismiss this wholesale as just martial rhetoric, and nothing more, I think misses the point: though this is surely an important aspect, the frequency and context of such statements makes it clear that the analogy was taken as a real one. Just as Portuguese military commanders recruited soldiers, missionaries recruited converts, for different phases of the same enterprise: war against the infidels. Moreover, in many cases the analogy was a real one, as many of those who joined the order, especially those who joined outside Europe, had formerly been soldiers or officers.Footnote ⁵²

Martyrdom might not be structurally equivalent to dying for king and country, but constitute a special category. Dying for the faith showed true devotion and could be turned into spiritual capital; falling in combat could not be turned into political capital in the same way. But the Society of Jesus was not especially keen on martyrdom, valuable though it could be when communicated. Missionaries (like soldiers) transported to non-European parts of the world were, apart from anything else,very costly and scarce resources, not to be squandered. When Antonio Criminali, S.J. (*1520) died on a beach in South India in 1549, the first full member of the order to be killed in the Asian missions, the verdict of Juan de Polanco, S.J. (1516–77) in his guidelines for the missions was clear: “censendum sit de modo illo quo pater Criminalis se morti exposuit”—the way in which Criminali exposed himself to death was not be repeated.Footnote ⁵³ As Jacques d’Amiens, S.J. (1599–1659) recounted in his history of the order’s first century, a mere eighteen people died outside Europe in missionary action, and their deaths were commemorated not overly enthusiastically.Footnote ⁵⁴ None were specially credited with the martyr’s crown, and only six—three in the Americas, three in Asia—were accounted for as beati (blessed).Footnote ⁵⁵ It also has to be noted that many of these, as for example the three crucified in the famous Nagasaki massacre of 1596, when 26 Christians were executed, were lay brothers of the order, not full members.Footnote ⁵⁶ In addition to that, Cohen’s 1974 study has already demonstrated that desire for martyrdom was not among the prime motivations among Jesuit novices for joining the order in the 1560s, when the Society itself carried out an extensive survey of its members.Footnote ⁵⁷ A safe haven from the turmoil of the world, both materially and spiritually, was much more what they wanted. This related favourably with the intention of the order’s administration, which had clear-cut ideas about what its missionaries were to do outside Europe. They were to do productive work in the vineyard of the Lord, not just die in His name. Thus, even if martyrdom constitutes a category peculiar to the spiritual phase, it was not a phenomenon structurally called for but a rare occurrence on the fringes of everyday actions. In this it might relate to the valiant but strategically useless battle deaths of colonial military leaders, which could also be put to good use in internal and external communications but which were, if possible, to be avoided as unnecessarily costly.

The Jesuit Mission(s) as Spiritual Empire

Whatever contemporaries thought the Jesuit’s power structure to be, it was markedly different to the colonial and imperial ventures of political or economic agents in that its focus was not on territorial expansion. If the Societas Jesu sought dominion, it was not over land or goods but over people. Its primary aim was not to physically conquer a territory, but to psychically conquer its inhabitants in what was aptly termed a conquista espiritual—“a la fe por la razon”Footnote ⁵⁸ —[conquer] by reason for the faith—and thus to install itself as the norm-defining authority on any practices marked as morally-spiritually relevant.Footnote ⁵⁹ In short, to install itself as the spiritual ruler on behalf of the new numen, the Christian God, and to be duly obeyed by their new subjects. Such an approach to dominion can be described as hegemonic rather than territorial in recourse to a distinction made by Ross Hassig in his work on the Aztec empire.

The key point is that this control, the acceptance of the new order by the conquered or converted, rests on “power” rather than (brute) force, on the “perception of the [power] possessor’s ability to achieve its ends,” rendering on-going direct control of the conquests unnecessary once hostilities are over.Footnote ⁶¹ In such a structure, the new subjects police themselves because they fear the consequences of other behaviour, and only when this fear no longer outweighs the presumed gains of oppositional actions do such structures turn unstable.Footnote ⁶² These mechanisms allow to compensate a lack of manpower that prohibits direct control of the subjects:

Consciously or—more likely—unconsciously, the Jesuit practice of itinerant missionary work contributed, where successful, in its effects to the build-up of a hegemonic empire within the spiritual phase, most of all in areas outside the direct control of other colonial powers. The concept of itinerant mission work had originated in the initial wish to abandon all potentially corrupting material belongings, including permanent residences, which drove the order’s founder Iñigo de Loyola (St. Ignatius, 1491–1556). It specified that members of the order should not attach themselves to whichever place they were in, as they could—in theory—be ordered at any time to any other place their superiors deemed fit.Footnote ⁶⁴ Practically, this meant that individual Jesuits often did quite a lot of traveling, being relocated every couple of years to other towns, provinces, lands, or even continents. In South and East Asia especially, that meant covering a lot of ground and being thrown into entirely new social, political, and religious environments each time. That most of them hardly ever learned the indigenous languages, beyond being able to conduct the most basic of conversations,Footnote ⁶⁵ comes as no surprise. And as already said, European missionaries overseas were a costly good in short supply. The situation in most areas of Jesuit missionary work was similar to that in Thána on the north-western coast of India in 1568, where one member of the order was responsible for the pastoral care of 2,500 new Christians, as Pero Vaz, S.J. (†1539/40) reported. This figure almost exactly matches the ratio reported for the seventeenth century Guaraní mission in the Jesuit reductions of Paraguay.Footnote ⁶⁶ And tellingly, Vaz had to note clearly that the task was facilitated as the brother in question was indeed capable of expressing himself in the native language.Footnote ⁶⁷ In some areas, like the Moluccas and Japan, the ratio was even worse. So, as the concrete geospatial frame in which individual Jesuits operated was also a territorial one—an ambiguity already inherent in the term “mission,” which meant both the process of evangelization and the territory it was to take place inFootnote ⁶⁸ —they first had to cooperate with the local territorial authorities, both European and indigenous.Footnote ⁶⁹ And, if they wanted to achieve a position of control within the spiritual phase, they had to clear their operational area of spiritual competitors, which included not only non-Christian religious authorities but other Christian orders as well. In the Portuguese-controlled territories of the Estado da Índia, this was carried out in cooperation with the colonial authorities, which had assigned each order within their territory a special zone of authority;Footnote ⁷⁰ an analogous process took place in regions controlled by the Spanish crown.Footnote ⁷¹

On a larger scale and for regions outside European rule, the missionary orders sought to obtain these demarcations by papal intervention. Japan provides a good example. Situated in the Portuguese hemisphere as demarcated by the treaties of Tordesillas and Zaragoza, the Portuguese crown claimed that it fell under the Portuguese padroado, so that after 1549 it effectively became Jesuit-only mission territory. With the Spanish seizure of the Philippines, a new route to Japan opened up, and the Franciscans operating in the Philippines lobbied the papacy to grant their order the right to found missions in India and China in 1576.Footnote ⁷² Yet the Japanese case highlights the complicated relations between the Society of Jesus and political empires because Japan was, by virtue of its being within the padroado, organizationally bound to Portuguese ships sailing the carreira da Índia, and therefore to the order’s Portuguese province. In 1586 the Jesuit general Claudio Aquaviva (1543–1615, Gen. 1580–1615) officially forbade the Jesuits of the Mexican Province to sail via the Philippines to reach Japan, China, or even Macao,Footnote ⁷³ so as not to infringe on the Portuguese privileges to control entry into the padroado missions. Gregory XIII (1502–85, Pont. 1572–85) granted the Jesuits a new general missionary privilege for Japan in 1585,Footnote ⁷⁴ until the Franciscans forced their way back again in after Clement VIII (1538–1605, Pont. 1592–1605) declared missionary work in Japan free for any order, provided the missionaries travelled via Portuguese India.Footnote ⁷⁵ As military chaplains to Portuguese forces in the 1580s, the Jesuits in turn had made their way into Sri Lanka, for which the Franciscans held the exclusive papal general missionary privilege.Footnote ⁷⁶ Analogous demarcations were made for other regions in the same way. In California, in the seventeenth century, the Dominicans were in charge of Alta California, the Jesuits of Baja California.Footnote ⁷⁷ When in 1580 the Jesuits abandoned their mission to Hormuz in the Persian Gulf as unfruitful, they passed their station on to the Augustinians.Footnote ⁷⁸ In the same year, Alessandro Valignano, S.J. (1539–1606), successfully opposed sending a secular bishop to Japan as the nature of the country and the political circumstances would not allow for that.Footnote ⁷⁹ As a result, the first Catholic bishop sent to Japan was Luís de Cerqueira, S.J. (1552–1614), in 1598. This helped to further strengthen the Jesuit spiritual monopoly over the Japanese Christians in a strategic way, as those who had the power to draw such demarcations commanded a powerful tool of control, as in seventeenth century Paraguay, where the bishop of Asunción could threaten the Society of Jesus with expulsion from his diocese and the distribution of their territories among other clerics in 1641.Footnote ⁸⁰

Jesuits and Converts: Spiritual Subjection?

That the Societas Jesu was able to demarcate fields of spiritual activity for itself in cooperation with local or colonial political powers alone did not in itself make it an empire. It provided merely the necessary foundation to achieve it. To do so, they would first have to conquer the local non-Christians spiritually by converting them. Then they would have to establish an exclusive form of spiritual dominion, relegating the converts to a subaltern status through permanent control. Crucial to this process was the equation of Christianity with Latin European Catholic Christendom. In order to believe like European Christians, the converts had to behave like European Christians and to comply with the norms and regulations the missionaries viewed as truly Christian.Footnote ⁸¹ This also produced more compliant subjects in the political sphere.Footnote ⁸² Where conversions could be or were already made, the converts therefore were made to internalise certain practices in the spiritual-moral sphere of action—smashing their idols, abandoning polygamy, wearing European-style Christian names and clothing, crossing themselves, and, surprisingly important, castigating themselves.Footnote ⁸³ By following these practices, they accepted the normative authority of the Society and the disciplinary powers of its members. In most cases there were no attempts to change anything else in the local social structures or practices—given the low numbers of Jesuits actually there, they could not have forced such changes anyway. Crucial to such a strategy was to identify precisely which customs were of an arbitrary social nature that did not conflict with a Christian way of life, and which were not.Footnote ⁸⁴ As long as converts accepted Jesus Christ as their saviour and the Society of Jesus as acting in His name and solely responsible for interpreting His commands (and thus entitled to the same reverence), no other changes were necessary. Where the Societas Jesu relied on the political power structures of the colonial states to build and uphold their own structures, they returned the favour by simultaneously educating their neophytes to be both good Christians and loyal subjects of the king. This was true for the Estado da Índia as well as, for instance, the northern frontier regions of Mexico.Footnote ⁸⁵ In seventeenth-century Paraguay and northwestern Mexico such a spiritual conquest helped pave the way for military conquest. People missioned and baptized by the Society yet not colonialized by a territorial empire where brought under Spanish and Portuguese control afterwardsFootnote ⁸⁶ —though the order rejected that as an infringement on its sphere of action. In the Huron Missions of North America, French Jesuits employed the same approach from 1625 onwards, though with less success.Footnote ⁸⁷

The main problem of this approach was that it necessarily curbed the ambitions of the order’s indigenous affiliates as it denied them equality. Individuals not content with the limited possibilities the order offered them could take advantage of the Jesuit cooperation strategies with colonial authorities by turning the argument against them:

The question posed in 1620 as a complaint by the renegade Japanese Jesuit Fabian Fucan (1565–1621) is a complex matter. To what degree did the Jesuits regard their converted Non-European neophytes as spiritual brethren and equal before the Lord? To conceive of mission as spiritual conquest does not necessarily imply that the vanquished are in any way less than the victors. The theoretical framework proposed by the Three Phase Model does not necessarily comply with norm-defining spiritual authority. The acceptance of European practices where deemed religiously necessary should have been sufficient to allow for full access to the order’s spiritual domain. To make a long story short, generally speaking this was not what the Jesuits of the old order seem to have thought. They opted to deny their indigenous converts access to full and equal membership in the order, and thus, at least in areas where the Jesuits held a mission monopoly, permanently rendered them Christians of lesser status. In doing so, they reproduced a common pattern of European political expansionFootnote ⁸⁹ within the spiritual phase, in keeping with the contemporary scholastic theology of at least a part of the School of Salamanca.Footnote ⁹⁰ The inhabitants of the metropole—the Jesuits of European descent—commanded within the community of believers and the order a position to which the inhabitants of the periphery, the indigenous converts of Asia, the Americas and Africa, could not ascend. This may be taken as the prime indicator that in the spiritual phase the Jesuit enterprise can be characterized as an imperial project in which spiritual conquest is followed by spiritual colonization. The Societas Jesu not only tried to install itself as the normative spiritual authority among its converts, it also tried—successfully—to deny them full participation in the wielding of this authority.

One reason for this, and I think the most basic one, was the relationship established in Jesuit philosophical and theological thinking between reason and faith, and the implications inherent in this. In his Summa Theologiae Aquinas had established an analogy between knowledge gained by rational operation about the physical world and belief gained by rational operation about the spiritual realm.Footnote ⁹¹ This rationalisation of belief-gaining made “reason,” understood as a distinct faculty, an enormously important part of the human soul, as could be justified in recourse to Aquinas and Aristotle alike. A good example is the work of Benito Pereira, S.J. (Benedictus Pererius, 1535–1610), who wrote in 1568 that

In Thomist philosophical terms, this meant that the intellectual soul, anima intellectiva, the seat of the faculty of reason, was what made a human being an individual man or woman, as it interacted with the shapeless matter to form the concrete being in question. Now this could also be taken the other way round: Differences in bodily appearance could be seen as indicators of a different intellectual soul that expressed itself through this peculiar shape; and these differences in appearance could be related to the question of whether such individuals could get to know God and gain the faith necessary for salvation. As Henrique Henriquez, S.J. (1536–1608),Footnote ⁹³ put it, this was the reason why Pygmies were not human though they looked like humans, for “if they had the use of reason, they would surely have the image of God imprinted therein.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Concerns about such a theological reading of perceived ethnicity had in 1537 already prompted Paul III (1468–1549, Pont. 1534–49) to state in Sublimis Deus that the indigenous people of the Americas where indeed capable of understanding the Christian message.Footnote ⁹⁵ However, it did not explicitly state whether that ability was on a par with that of European Christians.

This theology facilitated a de facto colour bar in the non-European provinces of the Society, East and West alike, from the earliest period onward. In Brazil, the first provincial council of 1568 excluded mestizos and Indios from membership in the order,Footnote ⁹⁶ as they were in the Peruvian province;Footnote ⁹⁷ earlier experiments with the admission of members of indigenous or mixed descent were regarded as failures because of deviations from spiritual control.Footnote ⁹⁸ In India, only one native Indian was admitted to priesthood in the Society of Jesus during the sixteenth century, the South Indian baptized as Pedro Luís, S.J. (1532/3–1596), and that was possible only because of a direct order by the general in Rome, whom he had petitioned.Footnote ⁹⁹ Although Valignano had singled out Japan in 1577 in that its natives were, prospectively, to be admitted into the Society,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ in 1595 Francesco Pasio, S.J. (1551/4–1612), still opted for a strictly segregated Asian clergy, with the European members of the order forming an elite leadership and the indigenous ones doing the daily chores of the spiritual work.Footnote ¹⁰¹ His argumentation was simple: if indigenous members would be admitted to upper-level positions, who would be left to do the down-to-earth fieldwork? Even in contexts such as seventeenth and eighteenth century Paraguay, where at least members of mixed European-American descent were admitted into the order on a more regular basis, still European priests were preferred and sought dearly after, relegating the creole Jesuits to second-rank members only.Footnote ¹⁰² Those attitudes lingered on longer in some parts of the scholarly work on the topic than we should be comfortable with, like old habits that die hard. In 1988 John Sebes, S.J. could still write on the first years of Javier in India, 1542–8: “Relying, even temporarily, on a native clergy (in South India, Malacca, and the Moluccas) did not augur well for the future. Everywhere one encountered that soft, dreamy and non-enterprising spirit which would never do.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Nonetheless, I want to stress that—although the twisted relationships of colonialism, empire and race are well-knownFootnote ¹⁰⁴ —the sixteenth and seventeenth century Jesuit position sketched here cannot properly be called “racist” as it did not embody any clear concept of human races, only of human differences, the supposed reasons for such differences not being clearly delineated.

The Jesuits were of course not the only spiritual organization to build up dominions in such ways. The informal condominium between the Dominican order and the Portuguese Estado da Índia in late sixteenth-century Indonesia display similar patterns.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The missionary activities of the Franciscans in postconquest South and Central America follow a similar pattern with regard to the mechanisms of spiritual inclusion, exclusion, and control.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ And these structures were not—this is a point to be duly emphasized—a special Christian phenomenon. In the first half of the sixteenth century, for instance, the jodo shinshū school of Japanese Buddhism established a firm hold over many parts of central Honshū in a way “in that the type of power that the Honganji [the school’s main temple and spiritual center] wielded was not primarily over the land itself but over the inhabitants of the land.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The concurring jishū school of Buddhism did the same.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In both cases, the priests of the respective organisations wielded considerable spiritual power over their followers by using their normative authority to rule on everyday practices with the threat of exclusion from the community of believers and thus (in their reading) enlightenment and salvation. Chinese chan (Japanese zen, or Vietnamese thien) Buddhists organized a far-flung network between Japan, Vietnam, and southern China in the seventeenth century in close cooperation with Fujienese merchants that established a similar system.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The Problem of Controlling the Keys to Salvation

The promise of conversion was simple: salvation. The basic imperative behind the missionary endeavour was always given as the quest to save as many souls as possible from eternal damnation. Spiritual authority works through the implied answer to the lesser known second part of the above-cited verse of the gospel: obedience. To gain access to the salvation promised by the missionaries, people not only had to convert, but to live up to what this conversion entailed, the norms set by the new spiritual authorities for an orthodox life, as delineated above. Punishment for trespassing or deviation would have to be meted out in the form of spiritual sanction, penance, and ultimately the threat of excommunication and eternal damnation. Matthew 16:19 also contains—within the well-known verses used to legitimate the papal claim for spiritual supremacy—the blueprint for this: “And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”

Complications were bound to arise if it no longer seemed plausible to the neophytes that the new spiritual authority—the Society of Jesus—could defend these claims, especially after long phases of missionary absence, which could in their case amount to decades. The Christian community in the castle-town of Ichiku in central Japan, for example, saw seven visits of Jesuit missionaries, of a few days each, over a period of almost seventy years from the initial one in 1550 to the last in 1618, the longest span of absence being twenty-seven years (1578–1605).Footnote ¹¹¹ As the old spiritual authorities generally had many more representatives in proximity to the converts, reversion to the old faith(s) was not only possible but could be tempting. And room was made for such reversion, for example in late sixteenth-century India, where Brahmins devised ways for stray believers to re-enter the Hindu dharma though by their own religious law and tradition that should not have been possible.Footnote ¹¹² In more open and syncretic religious environments like Japan and China, reversion was much easier and happened far more often and in greater numbers. However, this may have been due to the superficial way of transmitting elementary Christian tenets that made the converts religiously illiterate, so to say.

In 1657, the papal secretary of the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, accused all missionary orders including the Jesuits of elevating Christian doctrine to a secret lore, claiming exclusive domains of action, and banning the ordination of indigenous priests in an effort to keep the populace spiritually dependent on the orders.Footnote ¹¹³ The spiritual illiteracy of the new believers, their ignorance of even central tenets of Christian dogma, was caused in part by a shortage of missionaries and the simultaneous desire to harvest as many souls as possible. Yet this did have the effect of elevating Christian lore to a secret knowledge only ever fully mastered by the European Jesuits, so that the key to salvation remained firmly in their hands. The aforementioned Henrique Henriquez wrote to Loyola about his work among the Indian Paravas in 1552, saying that “[l]ately I have taken the step of making these Christians understand the mystery of the Holiest Trinity, of the incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and the reason why we adore the cross.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ As the Paravas had embraced Christianity in 1530 and had been tutored by Jesuit missionaries since 1542, no need seems to have been felt to hurry the catechetical instruction of the new believers. The catechisms of Roberto de Nobili, S.J. (1577–1656), for the Madurai Mission in southern India followed the same pattern,Footnote ¹¹⁵ as did those drawn by Alexandre de Rhodes, S.J. (1593–1660), for the Jesuit missions in Vietnam.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In the Huron missions of North America’s New France it was very easy in most cases for indigenous converts to get baptised, too. A thorough catechesis was not necessary, only if it was to be used as an instrument of exclusion, as a disciplinary measure to bar selected people from baptism.Footnote ¹¹⁷ When the missionaries on the spot were not convinced that they could enforce a Christian way of living after baptism, the rite was simply postponed until a time when the position of the Society’s missionaries would allow for it, as in early eighteenth-century Baja California.Footnote ¹¹⁸

The Jesuits proved more heavy-handed when it came to salvation, which of course could only be attained by strict adherence to their way of Christian life. As the converts hardly knew how to avoid what was, according to the missionaries, a sin, and how to repent properly once sinned, they were thrown back on the Jesuit interpretation of the Gospel as their only road to paradise. In consequence, the social structures among the new Christians recentred themselves spiritually on the members of the order, who in turn delegated their power to chosen indigenous or mestizo lay brothers, catechumens, and others who were ranked according to how much they partook in the knowledge of the Christian message.Footnote ¹¹⁹ According to letters disseminated by the Societas Jesu itself, this began as early as the 1540s with Francis Xavier’s decision to recruit baptized Indian youths to police the villages and quite literally smash all attempts at heathen worship and unchristian behaviour while the missionaries were absent, if we are to believe his letters as the Societas Jesu itself chose to disseminate them in print.Footnote ¹²⁰

Relying on a broad substructure of native and mestizo affiliates of the Society was a practical way to counter the lack of European missionaries in the extra-European mission fields and it was thus widely employed. Though they were not to be admitted into the order, in any case not as full members,Footnote ¹²¹ these convert circles were firmly institutionalized, with regulations and vows of their own, and swore obedience to the Jesuits. Members fulfilled the spiritual duties of pastoral care in the absence of the missionaries, and complemented their efforts when the missionaries were present. But the legitimacy of their acts depended on (in most cases after the fact) missionary sanction and approval. In India they were called kanakappilei,Footnote ¹²² in Japan dōjuku, and with the mass of reports dealing with the Japanese mission dōjuku became widely established as a technical term for these institutions, as far as New France.Footnote ¹²³ Even where the name was avoided deliberately, the corresponding local institutions’ structural principles were the same, as in Vietnam.Footnote ¹²⁴ While these men carried the burden of most of the day-to-day spiritual duties of their local believers’ communities, they depended on the order for authorization as they themselves lacked full access to the Christian message. In turn, the missionaries depended on them for their intercultural and linguistic skills and, of course, their working power, for spreading their message and upholding confidence in it among the new believers. What made it possible for the Jesuits to stay in control of their indigenous subalterns, if they did, was precisely the quid pro quo outlined above: obedience for salvation.

The Society really did wield the keys to heaven in this situation. The spiritual dependency thus installed facilitated the arrangement of imperial structures, and, as a drawback, the rollback of missionary effort when those structures failed. This was most pronounced in areas where the Jesuits had truly achieved the dominion they had striven for, so that no other Christian spiritual agents could fill the gap, as in Japan. The problem inherent in this was already sensed by some of the Jesuits working in Japan themselves.Footnote ¹²⁵ The domain of Arima in western Japan constituted an extreme example of the potential dangers. Here, the local daimyo had officially invited and supported the Jesuits to missionize the populace in 1576, which reportedly resulted in 15,000 baptisms in one year performed by only two Jesuit priests. When the daimyo died in 1577, his successor reversed the conversion policy, banished the Society, and by 1578 almost all converts had abandoned their new faith.Footnote ¹²⁶ In other areas, for instance in Vietnam, the survival of Christian communities was facilitated by the persistence of the converts’ networks centred on the former subalterns of the Society,Footnote ¹²⁷ though communities were very small in comparison with what the Society of Jesus had hoped to achieve when starting their missions. Around the globe, the Jesuit mission finally failed in all areas where the order had succeeded in the quest for spiritual dominion that, as it had been built on the standard early modern European model of expansion, was both cause and product of its extra-European growth.Footnote ¹²⁸ That the missionaries, were acting in and constructing an imperial and colonial framework within the spiritual phase, however convinced of their actions and beliefs they may have been, might well have been one reason for that.