The Jesuit Memoirists: How the Company of Jesus contributed to Anti-Jesuitism

In modern times, everything and its opposite has been said about the Society of Jesus. It seemed to include good and evil, to be on the side of kings and emperors and simultaneously the Pope’s army, the champion of the Counter-Reformation and the Antichrist, a community of apostles and a den of heretics. To mention but a single image of the Society of Jesus crafted in the workshop of the Enlightenment, d'Alembert emphasized in the Encyclopédie that “in the same body” lived “reason next to fanaticism, virtue next to vice, religion next to sacrilege, rigor next to laxity, science next to ignorance, all the contrasts bound together”.It is difficult to find out how the image took shape and consolidated; it recurs from the foundation of the Society until its suppression, influenced by many historical, political, social and even geographical facts and contexts. The order had a global presence, spearheading the Catholic evangelization from Asia to the Americas, its roots firmly in Europe, in the religious dissent of the 16th century, and its offshoots in globe-spanning work of education and predication.