Jesuits

The Catholic Church’s intellectual special forces — part missionary order, part spy network, part university system.

The order

The Society of Jesus was founded in 1540 by Ignatius of Loyola, a Basque soldier who found God while recovering from a cannonball wound. From the start, the Jesuits were different from other religious orders. They didn’t hide in monasteries. They went out into the world: teaching, preaching, advising, and — their critics said — scheming.

Within a generation they ran the best schools in Europe, served as confessors to kings, and had missionaries in China, Japan, India, and the Americas. Their educational system was standardized and rigorous. Many of the leading scientists and mathematicians of the 17th century were Jesuit-trained, even when they weren’t Jesuits themselves.

Protestant nightmares

To Protestants, the Jesuits were the Pope’s secret army. They were accused (sometimes accurately) of plotting to assassinate Protestant monarchs, fomenting rebellion, and conducting espionage. England expelled them repeatedly; getting caught in England as a Jesuit priest could mean execution. The paranoia wasn’t entirely baseless — Jesuits did operate covert networks in Protestant countries — but it was wildly disproportionate to their actual numbers.

Science in China

Jesuit missionaries in China did serious intellectual work. They translated Chinese classics into Latin and European science into Chinese. They corrected the Chinese calendar, mapped the empire, and conducted astronomical observations. Leibniz corresponded eagerly with Jesuit missionaries, fascinated by Chinese mathematics, philosophy, and the binary structure of the I Ching (which he connected to his own binary number system).

In the novel

The Jesuits represent the Catholic intellectual world that runs parallel to — and competes with — the Protestant Royal Society. Where Daniel Waterhouse and his colleagues are building a new philosophy in London, the Jesuits are doing comparable work across a global network, connected to Leibniz rather than Newton. Same questions, different institutional frame, different politics.