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What Did Natural History have to do with Salvation? José de Acosta Sj (1540–1600) in the Americas*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
At the southern foot of the Palatine Hill in Rome, a little more than one hundred metres due west of the triumphal arch erected by the emperor who is associated more than any other with the Christian conversion of the Old World — Constantine the Great – there stands another arch. Relocated from its original position at the eastern foot of the Palatine, more or less directly across from the biggest remaining ruin in the forum — that of the Basilica of Maxentius — it formed the monumental entrance to one of the most important botanic gardens in sixteenth-century Europe — the Orti farnesiani, which were given their definitive shape between 1565 and 1590. I propose that this second arch has reason to be considered as occupying a similar symbolic significance for the conversion of the New World.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Studies in Church History , Volume 46: God’s Bounty? The Churches and the Natural World , 2010 , pp. 144 - 168
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2010
Footnotes
*
This article was researched and written while I was holder of a British Academy Research Leave fellowship (2006–08). I am very pleased to acknowledge the financial generosity of the Academy.
References
1 For the Orti farnesiani in this period see, in particular, the articles by Fagiolo, Marcello, Viscogliosi, Alessandro, and Nocchi, Paolo and Pellegrini, Ezio, in Giuseppe Morganti, ed., Gli Orti farnesiani sul Palatino, Atti del convegno internazionale (Roma 28–30 novembre 1985) (Rome, 1990); cf. idem, Gli Orti farnesiani sul Palatino (Milan, 1999).Google Scholar
2 In fact, the earth dug for the foundations of the Gesù was used in the restructuring of the terrain against which the eastern perimeter wall of the Orti was built: Viscogliosi, ‘Gli Orti farnesiani – cento anni di trasformazioni (1537—1635)’ in Morgana, ed., Gli Orti farnesiani sul Palatino, 299–339, at 310–11.
3 In 1625 the exotic planting there was catalogued in Aldino [Pietro Castelli], T., Exactíssima descriptio rariorum quarundam plantarnm quae continentur Romae in Horto Farnesiano (Rome, 1625). New World highlights included acacia (Acacia Farnesiana), yucca (Yucca flaccida) and passion flower (Passiflora edulis).Google Scholar
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8 According to Harris, in just under two hundred years ‘the Society produced a corpus of some 5,000 published titles touching on virtually every branch of the natural and mathematical sciences’, let alone the mountain oí unpublished related correspondence by such figures as Athanasius Kircher (1602–80), for whom we have at least two thousand surviving letters: Harris, Stephen J., ‘Confession-Building, Long-Distance Networks, and the Organisation of Jesuit Science’,Early Science and Medicine 1 (1996), 287–318, at 288.Google Scholar
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10 Burgaleta, Claudio M., José de Acosta SJ: His Life and Thought (Chicago, IL, 1999), 63—64 Google Scholar. Writings by Acosta relating to his Rome visit may be found in Obras del José Acosta, P., ed. Franciscos Mateos (Madrid, 1954), 353–86.Google Scholar
11 See, for example, the contemporary account of Gregory Martin, Roma sancta (1581), ed. George Bruner Parks (Rome, 1969); Spear, Richard E., ‘Scrambling for Scudi: Notes on Painters’ Earnings in Early Baroque Rome’, Art Bulletin 85 (2003), 310–20; Michael Bury, The Print in Italy 1550–1620 (London, 2001), 121—69;Google Scholar Tessa Storey, Carnal Commerce in Counter-Reformation Rome (Cambridge, 2008). For a comprehensive account of the material conditions of the city during this period, see Delumeau, Jean, Vie économique et sociale de Rome dans la seconde moitié du XVI siècle, 2 vols (Rome, 1957-59).Google Scholar
12 Montaigne’s Travel Journal, trans, and intro. Frame, Donald (San Francisco, CA, 1983)Google Scholar, 97 (‘car de sa nature c’est une ville rapiecée d’estrangiers’: Journal de Voyage de Michel de Montaigne, ed. Rigolot, François (Paris, 1992), 127).Google Scholar
13 Delumeau, Vie économique, I: 37.
14 Friedrich, M., ‘Communication and Bureaucracy in the Early Modern Society of Jesus’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 101 (2007), 49–75 (quotation at 51). My thanks to Benjamin Ziemann for drawing my attention to this important article and for sending me a copy.Google Scholar
15 This letter, dated Cochin, 15 January 1544, may be most conveniently consulted in English as document 20 in The Letters and Instructions of Francis Xavier, ed. and trans. Costelloe, M. Joseph (St Louis, MO, 1992), 63–74.Google Scholar
16 Harris, ‘Confession-Building’, 304; cf. Lach, Donald F., Asia in the Making of Europe, 1: The Century of Discovery, Book 1 (Chicago, IL, 1965), 318–21.Google Scholar
17 Italics mine; in the original, italicized portions read: ‘que se scriviese algo de la cosmographia de las regions donde andan los nuestros…. si otras cosas ay que parescan estraordinarias, se dé aviso … Y esta salsa, para el gusto de alguna curiosidad que suel haver en los hombres, no mala’: Ignatius to Gaspar Berze, 24 February 1554, letter 4193 in Monumenta Ignatiana: Epistolae et Instructiones, 12 vols (Madrid, 1903–11), 6: 358.
18 Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, ed. Ganss, George E. (St Louis, MO, 1970), 292–93 Google Scholar (quotation at 292, paragraphs 673–76); cf. O’Malley, John W., The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 62–63.Google Scholar
19 Cited in Friedrich,‘Communication and Bureaucracy’, 50 n. 2.
20 Ibid. 56.
21 Correia-Afonso, John,Jesuit Letters and Indian History (Bombay, 1955), 38. After a long gap, the second series, published in the 1650s, covered the years 1650-54.Google Scholar
22 Harris, Steven J., ‘Networks of Travel, Correspondence and Exchange’, in Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, eds, The Cambridge History of Science, 3: Early Modern Science (Cambridge, 2006), 341–62, at 351–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
23 Besides the biography by Burgaleta cited above (n. 10), the most up-to-date account of his career with a list of his published works and a bibliography down to 1999 may be found in Charles O’Neill, E. and Domínquez, Joaquín M., eds, Diccionario histórico de la Compañía de Jesús: biográfico-temático, 4 vols (Rome, 2001)Google Scholar, I: 10—12. An excellent brief summary of Acosta’s biography and significance may be found in Mills, Kenneth, Taylor, William B. and Graham, Sandra Lauderdale, Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History (Wilmington, DE, 2002), 134–37. This is followed by a brief extract from De Procurando (ibid. 138–43) translated from De Procurando Indorum Salute, ed. Luciano Pereña, 2 vols (Madrid, 1984, 1987), by Professor Mills.Google Scholar
24 For this and what follows I have drawn directly on Burgaleta, José de Acosta, 26.
25 What follows is based on the transcription of the letter in José de Acosta, De Procuranda Indorum Salute, ed. and trans. Stewart McIntosh, G., 2 vols (Tayport, 1996), I: v-vi [hereafter cited as ‘De Procuranda, ed. McIntosh’ to avoid confusion with the Madrid edition which gives the Latin text with parallel text in Spanish, which will be referred to as ‘De Procuranda, ed. Pereña’].Google Scholar
26 De Procurando, ed. McIntosh, I: vi (in the original, the italicized portion reads: ‘Y si a es otras Indias me enviase la obediencia, en quedarme en Goa o por allí, hallo alguna repugnancia por parecerme que debe de ser poco más aquello lo de acá’: Obras del P. José de Acosta ed. Mateos, 251–52, at 252).
27 Burgaleta,José de Acosta, 40. The degree to which this was very much a burning issue can be seen in the extent to which Book III of De Procuranda was given over to addressing the practicalities facing the Jesuits in running parishes, in particular relating to the acceptance of tribute (a form of tithe paid to parish priests, more often than not in kind) from their Indian parishioners. As things turned out, however, the Jesuits only took permanent charge of two doctrinas: Juli in Lake Titicaca and Santiago del Cercardo on the outskirts of Lima: cf. Sabine MacCormack, ‘Grammar and Virtue: The Formulation of a Cultural and Missionary Programme by the Jesuits in Early Colonial Peru’, in O’Malley, John W. et al., eds, The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts 1540–1773 (Toronto, ON, 2006), 576–601, at 581.Google Scholar
28 Burgaleta,José de Acosta, 43; cf. De Procurando, ed. McIntosh, 2: 16–17, 24–26.
29 Burgaleta,José de Acosta, 45; cf. Aliocha Maldavsky’s observation that indigenous language-learning was regarded as a mere skill, not genuine scholarly knowledge, and: ‘If indigenous language-learning had an application in a geographical place (i.e. in the doctrinas), it did not necessarily play a consistent role in a Jesuit’s education or career over time.’ See her important article: ‘The Problematic Acquisition of Indigenous Languages: Practices and Contentions in Missionary Specialisation in the Jesuit Province of Peru (1568–1640)’, in O’Malley et al., eds, Jesuits II, 603–15 (quotation at 611).
30 In his annual letter to Rome of 1578, Acosta mentioned that there were eleven Jesuit priests at Juli plus three ‘brothers’ (temporal coadjutors, i.e. lay, unprofessed brothers). ‘Los padres todos saben la lengua de los Indios, si no es uno que la va aprendiendo agora, y algunos dellos saben las dos lenguas, quichua y almará y algunos tambien la puquina, que es otra lengua dificultosa y muy usada en quellas provincias’: Obras del P. José de Acosta, ed. Mateos, 294–97 (quotation at 294). Interestingly, Juli was located in an Aymara-speaking area, so there must have been a permanent staff of Quechua (and Puquina) speakers: see Alan Durston, Pastoral Quechua: The History of Christian Translation in Colonial Peru, 1550–1650 (Notre Dame, IN, 2007), 340 n. 32.
31 Burgaleta, José de Acosta, 47–50. Acosta himself referred on the same page of the annual letter cited above (n. 30) to just three parishes, with eight fathers supervising the largest, St Thomas, and two each (both with two brothers as assistants) attached to the parishes of St John the Baptist and the Assumption.
32 Ugarte, Rubén Vargas, Concilios Limenses 1331–1772, 3 vols (Lima, 1951-54)Google Scholar, 1: 261–375; Bartra, Enrique T., ed., Tercer Concilio Límense 1582–1583 (Lima, 1982). Cf. Toríbio de Mogrovejo: misionero, santo y pastor, actas del congreso académico internacional. Realizado en Lima del 24 al 28 de abril de 2006 (Lima, 2006).Google Scholar
33 For the table of contents of the Doctrina Christiana (which contained all three) in English, see Burgaleta.josé de Acosta, 146–49 (Appendix 4).
34 Two documents written by Acosta on this topic in 1587 are reprinted in Obras del P. José de Acosta, ed. Mateos, 331–45.
35 ‘servirà la salsa para algunos gustos’: cited in Obras del P. José de Acosta, ed. Mateos, xxxvii. Cf. the intelligent commentary on the issues raised by the Historia in Shepherd, Gregory L., An Exposition of José deAcosta’s ‘Historia natural y moral de las Indias’, 1590: The Emergence of an Anthropological Vision of Colonial Latin America (Lewiston, NY, 2002).Google Scholar
36 De Procurando, ed. McIntosh, I: 1 (‘Frustra vero gentes innumerabiles ad Evangelium vocari divinitus, frustra turn alios Dei servos turn nostras ad hoc opus mitti, ut mihi persuaderem adduci nunquam potui … quod fatendum est, peculiarem quandam iampridem conceptam de harum gentium salute fiduciam, omnibus dimcultatibus superiorem, in me semper adverterem’: José de Acosta, De Procurando, ed. Pereña, I: 48).
37 Ibid. 1: 3 (‘quod barbarorum gentes innumerabiles sint, ut caelo, locis, habitu, ita ingenio, moribus, institutis latissime dissidentes’: De Procurando, ed. Pereña, 54).
38 Ibid, 1 : 4, italics mine (‘quod omnium caput est, litterarum Celebris usus’: De Procuranda, ed. Pereña, 1: 60, 62).
39 Ibid. 1: 4—5, slightly modified (‘habent tamen magistratus suos certos, habent rempublicam, habent frequentes et certas sedes, ubi politiam suam servant, habent militae et duces et ordinem et religionis suae celebritatem quandam’: De Procuranda, ed. Pereña, 1: 62).
40 Ibid, 1: 5 (‘sine lege sine rege, sine certo magistratu et republica, sedes identidem commutantes aut ita fixas habentes, ut magis ferarum specus aut pecorum caulas imitentur’: De Procurando, ed. Pereña, 1: 66).
41 Ibid, 1: 6 (‘Neque enim de omnibus indorum gentibus eodem modo pronuntiare oportet, nisi graviter errare malimus’: De Procurando, ed. Pereña, 1: 68).
42 Acosta, José de, Naturai and Moral History of the Indies, ed. Mangan, Jane E. (Durham NC, 2002), 51 (‘Por tanto devemos colegir, que a los antiguos les quedò gran parte por conocer, y que a nostras oy dia nos esta encubierta no pequeña parte del mundo’: José de Acosta, Historia natural de las Indias en que se tartan las cosas notables del cielo, y elementos, metales, plantas, y animals, … y los ritos, y ceremonias, leyes, y govierno y guerras de los Indios (Seville, 1590), bk 1, ch. 15).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
43 Acosta, Historia natural de las Indias, bk 1, ch. 16 (Natural and Moral History, ed. Mangan, 53).
44 Ibid., bk 1, ch. 23 (Natural and Moral History, ed. Mangan, 69).
45 Acosta, Natural and Moral History, ed. Mangan, 72 (Acosta, Historia natural de las Indias, bk 1, ch. 24).
46 Ibid. 72 (‘pue es notorio, que aun en España y en Italia se hallan mandas de hombres, que si no es el gesto y figura, no tienen otra cosa de hombres’: Acosta, Historia natural de las Indias, bk 1, ch. 24).
47 Acosta, Historia natural de las Indias, bk 2, ch. 4 (Natural and Moral History, ed. Mangan, 79).
48 De Procurando, ed. McIntosh, 1: 7 (‘Quod non sit desperanda salus indorum’: De Procuranda, ed. Pereña, 1: 74).
49 Ibid. (‘Neque enim genus aliquod hominum exclusum est in Evangelii fideique communicatione’: De Procuranda, ed. Pereña, 1: 74).
50 ‘for even in the regions that I have gone through I think that there are more than thirty of them’: De Procuranda, ed. McIntosh, 2: 22 (‘cum idiomatum tam multiplex sylva sit, ut in his locis, quae ipse emersus sum, existimem plusquam triginta linguas numerari’: De Procuranda, ed. Pereña, 2: 64).
51 Ibid, 1: 54 (‘Da mihi certe apud indos apostólicos viras reddam ipse vicissim ex indis apostolicos fructus’: De Procuranda, ed. Pereña, 1: 236).
52 Ibid. 1: 51 (De Procuranda, ed. Pereña, 1: 224).
53 Ibid. (‘Hoc statu, his moribus nemo, opinor, causae indicae tam iniquus sit, qui non feliciorem vel potius minus infelicem provinciam istam nostram agnoscat’: De Procuranda, ed. Pereña, 1: 224).
54 Ibid. 2: 14 (‘Legat qui volet antiquos anglorum mores, duriores nostris indis inveniet’: De Procuranda, ed. Pereña, 2: 40).
55 Emphasis mine; ibid. 1: 77 (‘ad fidem efficacissimum ac pene singulare miraculum necessarium est, mores cum fidem congruentes’: De Procuranda, ed. Pereña, 1: 320).
56 ‘et nostra aetate in his praesertim locis adeo rarum ut vere miraculum haberi possit vita praedicationi non impar’: De Procuranda, ed. McIntosh, 1: 77 n. 5.
57 In the original manuscript this bad example was specified in the following terms: ‘avarice, violence, tyranny, for although confessing that they know Christ, nevertheless they radically deny Him through their acts (avaricia, violentia, tyrannis, cuoniam etsi Christum se nosse confitentur, factis tamen maxime negant)’: ibid. 1: 94 n. 1.
58 Ibid. 1 : xiv. On the same page McIntosh listed the chapters whose text received the most significant censure.
59 e.g. De Procuranda, ed. McIntosh, 1: 122, 131 (‘tyrones teneraque stirpes’,‘novis Evangelii cultoribus’: De Procuranda, ed. Pereña, 1: 460, 492).
60 De Procuratala, ed. McIntosh, 1: 157 (‘attamen si qua in re illorum mores a religione et iustitia non discrepant, non existimo facile immutandos’: De Procurando, ed. Pereña, 1: 596).
61 The Letters of Gregory the Great, ed. Martyn, John R. C., 3 vols (Toronto, ON, 2004), 3: 802–03 (quotation at 803); letter 11.56, 18 July 601 (‘quia is qui locum summum ascendere nititur necesse est ut gradibus vel passibus non autem saltibus elevetur’: bk 11, ep. 76, PL 77: 1215–17).Google Scholar
62 ‘vita integra, doctrina idonea, copia sermonis’: De Procumnda, ed. Pereña, 2: 46 (De Procurando, ed. McIntosh, 2: 16).
63 De Procurando, ed. McIntosh, 2: 156.
64 On the Chinese Rites controversy, see Paul Rule, ‘The Chinese Rites Controversy: Confucian and Christian Views on the Afterlife’, in Clarke, Peter and Claydon, Tony, eds, The Church, the Afterlife and the Fate of the Soul, SCH 45 (Woodbridge, 2009), 280–300.Google Scholar
65 Rome. Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Fondo gesuitico 732—759, containing 14,067 letters from 5,167 Jesuits covering the period 1583–1770. One of the earliest uses of otras Indias can be found in a letter from the Jesuit missionary Silvestro Landini, writing from Corsica on 7 February 1553: ‘Non ho mai provato terra, che sia più bisognosa delle cose dil Signor di questa … Questa isola sarà la mia India, meritoria quanto quella dil preste Giovanni [Prester John]’: Adriano Prosperi, ‘“Otras Indias”: missionari della controriforma tra contadini e selvaggi’, in idem, America e Apocalisse e altri saggi (Pisa, 1999), 65–87 (quotation at 67).
66 See, e.g.,Trevor Johnson’s discussion of the Jesuit missions in the Upper Rhine Palatinate at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in which the missionaries made use of such sacramentais as Xavierwasser, water that had been in contact with relics of the saint: ‘Blood, Tears and Xavier-Water: Jesuit Missionaries and Popular Religion in the Eighteenth-Century Upper Palatinate’, in Scribner, Bob and Johnson, Trevor, eds, Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe, 1400–1800 (Basingstoke, 1996), 183–202, 272–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
67 For a stimulating discussion of how the voyages of discovery stimulated the search for the ‘indigenous’ in the field of natural history in the Old World, see Cooper, Alix, Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2007), esp. 156—66, ‘The Indies in Switzerland’.Google Scholar
68 Pagden, Anthony, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, revised edn (Cambridge, 1986), 197. In a similar vein, the Dominican Gregorio García included an account of a group of Visigoths who almost a millennium before had fled into the mountains near Almuñeca from the invading Arabs and had only preserved ‘a bell and a few other symbols’ from their old religion: Historia ecclesiàstica y seglar de la Yndia oriental y occidental predicación del sancto Evangelio en ella por los Apóstoles (Baeza, 1626), fols 19v-20v.Google Scholar
69 I am very grateful to Rowe, Erin for identifying the precise play which was inspired by this incident. There exists a modern edition of the play in question: Las Batuecas del duque de Alba (Charleston, NC, 2007).Google Scholar
70 ‘[T]he De Bry collection above all vied to be recognisable, conforming itself to widespread expectations of the overseas world as uncivilised and un-Christian. Commercial considerations strictly curtailed the De Brys’ representational and ideological latitude’: Groesen, Michiel van, The Representations of the Overseas World in the De Bry Collection of Voyages (1590–1634) (Leiden, 2008), 388.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
71 Endean, Philip. ‘The Spiritual Exercises’, in Worcester, Thomas, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits (Cambridge, 2008), 52–67 (quotation at 52).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
72 Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, ed. Ganss, 204 (paragraph 414); cf. O’Malley, First Jesuits, 255–56 and index entries under ‘accommodation’.
73 Lucena, João de, Historia da vida do Padre Francisco Xavier (Lisbon, 1600; Italian trans., Rome, 1613; Spanish trans., Seville, 1619).Google Scholar
74 The volume on Asia and Japan was the first to be published, followed by those on Japan (1660); China (1663); Europe, including England (1667); and Italy (1673). That on America is conspicuous by its absence; cf. Leopardi, Zibaldone, 2396.
75 This appears to be the premise of Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin, TX, 2006).
76 e.g. Hellyer, Marcus, Catholic Physics: Jesuit Natural Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Notre Dame, IN, 2005).Google Scholar
77 The classic work in this tradition was Juan Eusebio Nieremberg’s Historia naturae, maxime peregrinae libris XVI distincta: In quitus rarissima natura; arcana, etiam astronomica, & ignota Indiarum animalia, quadrupedes, aves, pisces, reptilia, insecta, zoophyta, plantee, metalla, lapides, & alia mineralia, fluviorumque & elementorum conditiones, etiam cum proprietatibus medicinalibus, describuntur (Antwerp, 1635).
78 Nieremberg, Historiae naturae, 12, as cited in Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic 1550–1700, (Stanford, CA, 2006), 271 n. 91.Google Scholar
79 Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors, 147–48.
80 Acosta, Natural and Moral History, ed. Mangan, 219 (Acosta, Historia natural de las Indias, bk 4, ch. 27).
81 ‘Prologue to the Reader’, Natural and Moral History, ed. Mangan, 12.