Roman College Research Articles

Paul Macpherson, saviour of the Scots College Rome

The Pontifical Scots College in Rome was founded in 1600 by Pope Clement VIII and still continues its work of training priests for the Catholic Church in Scotland. Paul Macpherson served as the Agent in Rome of the Scottish bishops from 1792 to 1798 and then again from 1800 to 1827. He was also the first Scottish secular priest to be College Rector. Macpherson returned in 1800 with the mission to recover and preserve the College for the work it eventually resumed in 1820. The episode has been treated in previous histories of the Scottish Mission and its Roman College; this article, based largely on draft (‘scroll’) letters of Macpherson in the Scots College archives (SCAR 28/1), gives a close account, from his own point of view, of the extreme difficulties and disappointments he had to face in his struggle to keep his beloved college in existence.

Jesuit Attitudes Toward Printers and Printing in Early Modern Italy

Abstract The Society of Jesus engaged with the medium of print almost from its inception and, as in other fields, according to its own way of proceeding. This article studies two aspects of Jesuit engagement with print, using its Italian assistancy as a case study. In the first part, Jesuit attitudes towards printing technology—its dangers and opportunities—are examined, focusing especially on the relationship between Robert Bellarmine and some of his printers. What emerges is an overriding concern for accuracy: the need to disseminate texts without typographical errors in order to avoid misinterpretations and possible accusations of heresy. The second part of the article analyzes one possible solution to this difficulty: Jesuit attempts, at the Roman College and elsewhere, at managing their own printing presses. As these efforts regularly ended in economic failure, they bring into question the traditional view of Jesuits as skilled administrators.

Jesuits and Astrology: Print versus Manuscript

Abstract Astrology played an important part in early modern European culture, as a fundamental part of both mathematical and astronomical traditions. During the same period, the Society of Jesus built their global educational enterprise, which included a proven expertise in mathematical and astronomical study. Although insufficiently acknowledged in Jesuit historiography, astrology formed an important part of this scientific project. Several Jesuit authors engaged in the study, teaching, and practice of astrology. From the mathematics curriculum of the Roman College to the Jesuit astrology classes in Portugal and Spain, the present article discusses astrology’s presence in early modern Jesuit publications. It examines the discussion of astrology in the Society’s scientific works, highlights the sharp contrast between the printed word and the manuscript tradition, and demonstrates how the latter provides a better guide to the role of astrology as part of Jesuit science.

A Tale of Three Domes: The Un-Realized cupola of St Ignatius of Loyola in Roma

The church of St Ignatius of Loyola in Rome, together with the Church of the Gesù, represents the most significant artistic contribution of the Jesuits in the Eternal City. Incorporated in the broader context of the Roman College, and built between 1626 and 1650 following a project by Padre (Father) Orazio Grassi S.J., it is the only one of the great Roman churches without a dome. The projects for the helioscopic dome by Orazio Grassi, the Cortonesque dome by Armando Brasini and the perspective dome by Andrea Pozzo represent the difficult attempt to create a perfectly rational layout for Rome, an ideal scientific and theological city. These projects tell the story of three different ways of conceiving architectural space affecting the city: political manifesto, imaginative introspection and colossal scenography. This paper describes the history of an “impossible” dome, analysing the historical evolution of the project and its three potential authors, three magnificent and idealist designers.

The Great Aurora of 4 February 1872 observed by Angelo Secchi in Rome

Observation of auroras at low latitudes is an extremely rare event typically associated with major magnetic storms due to intense Earth-directed Coronal Mass Ejections. Since these energetic events represent one of the most important components of space weather, their study is of paramount importance to understand the Sun-Earth connection. Due to the rarity of these events, being able to access all available information for the few cases studied is equally important. Especially if we refer to historical periods in which current accurate observations from ground-based instruments or space were not available. Certainly, among these events, we must include the great aurora of February 4, 1872. An event whose effects have been observed in different regions of the Earth. What we could consider today a global event, especially for its effects on the communication systems of the time, such as the transatlantic cable that allowed a connection between the United States and Europe since 1866. In this paper, we describe the main results of the observations and studies carried out by Angelo Secchi at the Observatory of the Roman College and described in hisMemoria sull’Aurora Elettrica del 4 Febbraio 1872for the Notes of the Pontifical Academy of new Lincei. This note is extremely modern both in its multi-instrumental approach to the study of these phenomena and in its association between solar-terrestrial connection and technological infrastructures on the Earth. The Secchi’s note definitely represents the first example of analysis and study of an event on a global scale, such as the Atlantic cable, affecting the Earth. What we nowadays call an extreme space weather event.

Physics, neo-thomism and mosaic cosmogony at the roman college: the case of the jesuit Giambattista Pianciani

Preliminary the figure of Abbot Feliciano Scarpellini and the scientific environment in Rome in the first half of the XIX century are introduced. It is then analysed the life and work of the physicist and philosopher Giambattista Pianciani (1784-1862) of the Society of Jesus. Pianciani was in Rome among the most peculiar representatives of that cultural program aimed at countering the theses of Enlightenment materialism through a process of conciliation and justification of scientific discoveries with Catholic doctrine. This apologetic and concordist program started under Pius VII, also continued during the pontificate of Leo XVI. In the wake of this peculiar apologetic program, the controversy that, around the mid-nineteenth century, arose in the Roman College between neotomists and some scientists of the order, for example, Angelo Secchi, is also discussed. Finally, the specific concordist program developed by Pianciani is discussed. This program aimed to reconcile the biblical account of the world’s creation with the scientific results that came from the studies of natural cosmogony.

«Piccola, ma sufficiente per li miei studi»: the library of Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino. First investigations and census of annotated books

The article presents the first results of a research about the library of the Jesuit Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino (1542-1621). The starting point are some unpublished works dedicated to this topic compiled by two Jesuit scholars in the first half of ‘ 900: Francois Xavier Le Bachelet and Sebastian Tromp. In particular, Tromp’s work had concerned the identification of the editions cited in the library inventory, without however proceeding with the identification of the items actually belonging to the cardinal, today mainly preserved at the National Central Library of Rome and the Historical Archive of the Pontifical Gregorian University. In addition to providing a first analysis of the composition of the Bellarminian collection, the article examines the events related toits conservation at the Roman College, to which Bellarmino donated it after his death and where on several occasions it was subject to spoliations – even if today it is difficult to evaluate their extent. These episodes testify to the problematic intellectual legacy left by Bellarmino and how it influenced not onlyhis long process of canonization (which lasted three centuries) but also the conservation of his books. In the appendix, the inventory of the library is published for the first time, as well as a catalog of 122 books with the provenance note of the Bellarmine’s private collection and, in several cases, containing his autograph annotations.

Scholars and Literati at the Gregorian University in Rome (1551–1773)

This note is a summary description of the set of scholars and literati who taught at the Jesuit University in Rome (Roman College - Gregorian University) from its inception in 1551 to the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773.

La formazione spirituale ignaziana al sacerdozio. Dal Collegio Romano all’Istituto di Spiritualità della Pontificia Università Gregoriana di Roma

"The Ignatian Spiritual Formation in The Priesthood. From the Roman College to the Institute of Spirituality of The Pontifical Gregorian University of Rome. The present study aims to analyze the importance of the spiritual formation of Seminarians and Priests in the present times. Assuming that the most delicate part of the formation concerns the work of the divine grace, the exhortations of the Pontiffs, from Leo XIII to Francis insist that the good dispositions of the Seminarians help them to find in their Formators the spirit, better understanding and all the help to reach the state of perfection, called priestly holiness. As one of the forms of the celebrations of the 60° anniversary of the Institute of Spirituality of the Pontifical Gregorian University, this paper also has the purpose of some genuine expressions of gratitude for the contributions of Fathers Herbert Alphonso and Maurizio Costa, two Jesuits who have been called to the Father’s House. Together with Father Franco Imoda, they were sensible toward the needs of the Church with great courage. As an answer to these expectations and on the explicit request from Congregation for the Catholic Education of the Holy See, Father Joseph Pittau S.I., the then Magnificent Rector of Pontifical Gregorian University, founded, the Interdisciplinary Center for the Formation of the Formators in Seminaries (CIFS = Centro Interdisciplinare per la Formazione dei Formatori nei Seminari) in May 1996. Our conclusions synthesize the results of the research, and place in prominence the mission of the Institute of Spirituality as an expression of its fidelity to the inheritance of the Roman College. Keywords: priestly spirituality, priestly and spiritual formation, formation of the formators, Ignatian pedagogy, prayer, theology, Roman College, the Ignatian vision of man, pastoral charity."

St Thomas at the English College in Rome

Thomas of Canterbury has very particular significance for the Venerable English College in Rome, the Roman Catholic Seminary originally founded in the 16th century in the properties of the medieval pilgrim hospice. The archbishop came to have physical, spiritual and political associations with the institution as a result of his exile from England and royally sanctioned murder, so much so that the English and Welsh national church in the papal city is now dedicated to him. In the context of the Protestant Reformation and the Dissolution of the Monasteries in Britain, students and exiled priests studying at the Roman college looked to Thomas’s example of resistance to secular interference, reinforced by means of relics and depictions of Thomas in a highly charged pictorial scheme in the college church.

Newman and the Roman College: A Formative Exchange

Newman and the Roman College: A Formative Exchange

Los “fondos jesuitas” en las bibliotecas y archivos de Roma. Una aportación para su conocimiento

In Papal Rome, the centers of the Society of Jesus were accumulating since its foundation (1540) an enormous bibliographic and documentary wealth. The complex history lived by the Jesuits for more than three centuries was reflected in their librarian collections, until the annexation of the Papal States, in 1876, to the new unified Italy when they were mostly incorporated into the newly created National Library of Rome, as one of its main founding collections. In this work it is collected the history and operation of the libraries that were formed in the main centers of Rome, Roman College, Professed House, Novitiate and Germanic- Hungarian College, divided into three periods: the first, growth phase, since the inauguration from the Roman College until the dissolution of the Society of Jesus in 1773, the second phase of disintegration and regroupment, from 1773 until the restoration of the Society of Jesus, 1815, and the third, from 1815 until the inauguration of the National Library of Rome in 1876. Throughout the work, in addition, we refer to authors, collections and Spanish libraries.

Theologians of the Roman College in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Some Aspects of the Theology of the Mystical Body of Christ in the Ecclesiology of Giovanni Perrone, Carlo Passaglia, and Clemens Schrader

Theologians of the Roman College in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Some Aspects of the Theology of the Mystical Body of Christ in the Ecclesiology of Giovanni Perrone, Carlo Passaglia, and Clemens Schrader

Matteo Ricci’s Occidental Method of Memory (Xiguo Jifa) (1596): Untranslatable Images of a Classical Art of Memory in Ming China

Abstract One of the attributes of the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) was his prodigious memory. The humanistic education received at the Roman College enabled him to master the classical art of memory. In China, Ricci discovered that memorization was essential to the learning process required for the civil service examinations to hold posts within the empire, and so he composed the Xiguo Jifa (1596) (Occidental Method of Memory), based on one of the commonest mnemonic systems—the architectural type—to help candidates memorize contents for these examinations. Ricci chose Chinese characters as mnemonic images to be placed in mental structures. This article aims to show how Ricci’s choice of Chinese characters as mnemonic images in China deviated from one of the main functions of an art of memory: to mediate between words and images, creating bridges and modes of translation from one another, thus rendering those images “untranslatable.”

Ippolito Desideri: An Experience of Theological and Psychological Transformation

During his years in Tibet (1717–1722), the Jesuit missionary Ippolito Desideri succeeded in extracting a very precise definition of the metaphysical absolute from the texts of the "Middle Way" Buddhist philosophers that he was able to study in the Gelugpa academies thanks to his rapid mastery of the Tibetan language. Nevertheless, it is just this kind of absolute that the "central philosophy of Tibet" (Mādhyamika-Prāsangika) firmly negates with its assertion of the absence of inherent metaphysical substrate (nihsvabhava) in both the relative (samvrttisatya) and absolute (paramārthasatya) dimensions of reality. Employing an original strategy based on his own intellectual and intuitive orientation, Desideri sought out a Tibetan linguistic structure that might be analogous to the Thomist-Suaresian-Aristotelian notion of God-as-Absolute in which he had been trained at the Roman College. In order to do this, he delved into an interpretation of śūnyatā (the Buddhist term for the metaphysical voidness of phenomena) aimed at asserting its convergence with the notion of the contingency and dependence of the created order recognized in Baroque Scholasticism. In so doing, Desideri began to articulate views already known to the Tibetan Gelugpa scholars in their long struggle against the ideas of Dolpopa Shes rab rGyal mtshan (1292–1361), founder of the Jonang school, which asserted the necessarily permanent existence of voidness as an absolute. This voidness-absolute, devoid of all that is contingent, is the metaphysical basis in the Jonang system for the attainment of enlightenment. Developing his own responses to the doctrine of voidness as articulated in the Tibetan translations of the works of Nāgārjuna, Desideri underwent a transformation with both theological and psychological features, not without manifesting elements of human frailty.

Book Review: The Celebrated Museum of the Roman College of the Society of Jesus: A facsimile of the 1678 Amsterdam edition of Giorgio de Sepi’s description of Athanasius Kircher’s Museum. Edited with an afterword by Peter Davidson

Book Review: The Celebrated Museum of the Roman College of the Society of Jesus: A facsimile of the 1678 Amsterdam edition of Giorgio de Sepi’s description of Athanasius Kircher’s Museum. Edited with an afterword by Peter Davidson

Jesuit Pedagogy, 1540–1616: A Reader ed. by Cristiano Casalini and Claude Pavur

Reviewed by: Jesuit Pedagogy, 1540–1616: A Reader ed. by Cristiano Casalini and Claude Pavur John Patrick Donnelly S.J. Jesuit Pedagogy, 1540–1616: A Reader. Edited by Cristiano Casalini and Claude Pavur, S.J.[Sources for the History of Jesuit Pedagogy, Volume 1.] (Boston: Institute of Jesuit Sources. 2016. Pp. xxii, 346. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-997282-30-6.) The editors of this volume hope it is the first in a series of volumes based on the Monumenta paedagogica, seven volumes in the Monumenta historica Societatis Iesu. This book begins with a table of contents, a timetable of early Jesuit education up to 1613, a list of nine pictures, and ends with an excellent index. The volume includes an excellent Introduction (pp. 1–33) and thirty documents, each a separate chapter. Each chapter has an introduction almost a page long, which provides readers with information about the topic and its author. The first seven chapters were written in Spanish, all by St. Ignatius of Loyola or his close associates from 1547 until his death in 1556. Thereafter twelve chapters were written in Latin and eleven in Italian. Three of the thirty chapters were written by Germans, one by a Frenchman, all the rest by Italians or Spaniards. Interestingly, after Loyola's death only one of these documents was written by the Jesuit Superior General, that by Claudio Acquaviva in 1613, twenty years later than any other of the thirty documents here published. Acquaviva insisted that Jesuits teaching philosophy should follow Aristotle and those teaching theology should follow Thomas Aquinas. That directive affected Jesuit schools well into the twentieth century. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 is Inspirations: its seven chapters deal with the first Jesuit colleges, 1541–1556. Two chapters are by Loyola, three by his secretary Juan Polanco. Part 2 is about Administration. It has nine chapters dealing with the early colleges in Italy. The first important college was at Messina in Sicily, where the Jesuits taught local students from ages roughly fourteen to twenty. The town government and benefactors paid for most of the expenses. Three chapters deal with the prestigious Roman College. Rome was also the home of the German College, which had many Germans and Hungarians, but the majority were sons of wealthy Italians. Most students there were boarders and had to pay for their upkeep, unlike most Jesuit schools, which had free tuition. Here the Jesuits had to deal with often unruly students twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Chapter 14 looks at similar problems at the Roman College. Imposing discipline was not easy. Chapter 15 examines the plan and order of study at the Roman College, which in many respects was the model for Jesuit colleges through much of Europe. Part 2 closes with a chapter on the Roman Seminary, where the students resisted or ignored the rules of conduct; the Jesuit author of the chapter suggested that the Jesuits should simply leave the school or impose drastic measures on the students. Part 3, Formation, is the shortest part and covers chapters 17 to 22. Chapters 17, 19, and 20 deal with humanistic studies and values. Chapter 18 deals with spiritual and academic progress. Chapters 21 and 22 deal with doctrinal content and uniformity of doctrine. [End Page 346] Part 4, Teaching Practice, is likely the most interesting for today's readers. Loyola himself wrote chapter 23, on teaching composition. Chapter 24 explains "How to teach children Latin and Greek." Then come chapters of literary studies, mathematics, Hebrew, teaching philosophy, and teaching theology. I found this book interesting: there was good scholarship and immersion in topics and primary texts I had not thought about. The book was well organized. The main weakness was too much focus on Spain and Italy, too little on Germany and France. John Patrick Donnelly S.J. Marquette University (Emeritus) Copyright © 2017 The Catholic University of America Press

The Celebrated Museum of the Roman College of the Society of Jesus. Athanasius Kircher. Ed. Peter Davidson. Trans. Anastasi Callinicos and Daniel Höhr. With Jane Stevenson. Early Modern Catholicism and the Visual Arts Series 13. Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2015. 172 pp. $120.

The Celebrated Museum of the Roman College of the Society of Jesus. Athanasius Kircher. Ed. Peter Davidson. Trans. Anastasi Callinicos and Daniel Höhr. With Jane Stevenson. Early Modern Catholicism and the Visual Arts Series 13. Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2015. 172 pp. $120. - Volume 70 Issue 1

Jesuit Science and the End of Nature’s Secrets by Mark A. Waddell

Jesuit Science and the End of Nature's Secrets. By Mark A. Waddell. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2015. Pp. x, 214. $119.95. ISBN 978-1-4724-4972-6.)When the French Catholic philosopher and priest Pierre Gassendi declared in 1629 that all natural philosophy was either magnet or a remora (p. 53), he defined the intellectual terrain that preoccupied an emerging generation of Jesuit natural philosophers. Both were wondrous preternatural phenomena whose puzzling properties made them intensely fascinating yet difficult to know. The lodestone became a subject of a considerable corpus of Jesuit natural philosophy, embodied especially by the work of Niccolo Cabeo and Athanasius Kircher. Instead, by 1662 Kircher's disciple and collaborator, Kaspar Schott, dismissed the remora, a legendary small fish believed to be capable of stopping ships by attaching itself to the hull, as a fabulous product of the human imagination. Its occult qualities were not spiritually dangerous, unlike the weapon-salve, a magnetic unguent allegedly able to heal wounds at a distance. After fiercely debating its existence for a few decades, the Society of Jesus prohibited any teaching on this subject in 1651.These singular episodes frame the subject of Mark Waddell's study of Jesuit science and the demise of occult qualities in the seventeenth century. Focusing especially on the works of Cabeo, Kircher, and Schott, he encourages us to take Jesuit natural philosophy seriously in order to come to a better understanding of the nature of their probabilism. What issues occupied Jesuits who saw themselves as the pre-eminent Catholic interpreters of nature? How did they approach their subject and to what degree did they gradually alter the Aristotelian worldview that lay at the heart of the Thomist synthesis, and became the core of Jesuit pedagogy?The magnet proved to be an essential secret of nature. In 1600 the English physician William Gilbert made it a cosmological principle that one could know and test experientially, and ultimately a proof of heliocentrism. Instead, Jesuit nat- ural philosophers believed that the magnet creatively reconfigured Aristotelian arguments about the relationship between the visible and the invisible in their own explanations. Cabeo's Philosophia magnetica (1629) responded to Gilbert by restoring this subject to the realm of traditional natural philosophy. A little over a decade later, Kircher made the study of magnetism a demonstrative science, producing pages of lavishly illustrated descriptions of machines he would ultimately display in the Roman College museum but already showed visitors in his quarters in Rome. …

Shadows of Doubt: Language and Truth in Post-Reformation Catholic Culture by Stefania Tutino (review)

Reviewed by: Shadows of Doubt: Language and Truth in Post-Reformation Catholic Culture by Stefania Tutino Frederick J. McGinness Shadows of Doubt: Language and Truth in Post-Reformation Catholic Culture. By Stefania Tutino. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2014. Pp. xiv, 278. $74.00. ISBN 978-0-19-932498-9.) Stefania Tutino’s probe of the post-Tridentine Catholic intellectual world offers case studies of how some thinkers grappled with the function and limitations of language in moral theology, casuistry, rhetoric, dialectic, philosophy, history, ecclesiastical history, and poetry. Leaving aside scholarship focused on dogmatic Catholic truth on the one hand and skepticism on the other, she considers writers [End Page 935] rarely read—Agostino Mascardi, Pedro Juan Perpiñán, Famiano Strada, Francisco Suárez, Leonardus Lessius, Domingo de Soto, Paolo Beni, and Martín de Azpilcueta (Navarrus)—in whom she discerns hermeneutical and epistemological doubts that would have profound repercussions today on our efforts to understand the unstable, fragile relationship between human language and objective reality. In this “demimonde” she sees “a world of fractures and fractured truths that we, equipped with a heightened sensitivity to discrepancies and discontinuities, are now well suited to understand” (p. 4). Her approach is guided largely by philosophers of language and epistemology (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Giorgio Agamben, and others) and draws upon late- and postmodern critical theory to articulate the unstable yet crucial role of human language in post-Reformation Europe. Tutino’s five chapters delve into “the radical hermeneutical and epistemological implications of the doctrines of equivocation and mental reservation” (p. 149); “the hermeneutical question of the communication of meaning between a speaker and a hearer” (p. 19); language and truth; narrative and fact; “the truth-value of history, and the tension between documents, explanation, and interpretation” (p. 7). They consider further “the advantages and limitations of using historical documents to uncover the Truth of the Catholic Church” (p. 7), what it meant for a historian then to represent the past in narrative truly and truthfully, doubts about writing a human history of the Church (a divine institution), and the Roman College where “Jesuit intellectuals tried to grapple with the epistemological function of rhetoric as a means to attain knowledge in the unstable and uncertain world of men” (p. 113). The work ends by analyzing ideas of Paolo Prodi and Giorgio Agamben, who argue that the early-modern era marked “the erosion of the oath as a sacrament of language and the development of the oath as the sacrament of power” (p. 190). Each chapter makes much the same point: that “the fragility of the relationship between truth and language that characterizes our current intellectual and cultural horizon originated in the early modern world” (p. 190). Tutino explores interesting topics but leaves much to question, qualify, and (sometimes) doubt. She makes strong claims for these agents’ intellectual impact, but one would hope for more placement of their thinking in fuller historical context and in wider reference to past and contemporary thinkers. (Moral reservation, equivocation, and dissimulation had deep roots.) Perpiñán’s desultory thoughts on the relationship of rhetoric and dialectic make one wonder if his notes were not responses to Peter Ramus’s teaching on rhetoric and dialectic. The author suggests this (p. 132) but makes little of it. Why is there no mention of the teaching of Aristotle’s philosophy at the Roman College, especially books of the Organon like De sophisticis elenchis? Comments on Famiano Strada’s understanding of “the process of producing metaphor as … the human cognitive and heuristic activity par excellence” (p. 143) are tantalizing, but why not illustrate these claims with texts, perhaps with illustrations from Strada’s De bello Belgico (Rome, 1632)? Tutino’s study also begs for some understanding of this post-Tridentine “anxiety” within wider Western intellectual traditions, which would suggest that such uncertainties and [End Page 936] doubts go back further in time (see, for example, Sabina Flanagan, Doubt in an Age of Faith: Uncertainty in the Long Twelfth Century [Turnhout, 2008]) than one is left to imagine here. This work is thought-provoking but still in progress. Frederick J. McGinness Mount Holyoke College Copyright © 2015 The...