"Contemplative Likewise in Action": Jesuit identity and the Church (Sixteenth-Seventeenth Centuries)

In 1657 the Jesuit Alberto Alberti (1593-1676) was summoned back to Rome by General Nickel to account directly to Pope Alexander VII for his involvement with the so-called Pelagini, a religious movement that originated around the oratory of Saint Pelagia in Milan in the 1640s and targeted by several inquisitorial investigations and ultimate condemnation. The case of father Alberti, who was then prosecuted by the Inquisition in Rome, provides interesting elements to reflect on Jesuit identity while considering a wider context of devotions and religious fervors aspiring to spiritual growth and perfection, i.e. what Adriano Prosperi called “charismatic religion.” The contribution takes Alberti’s instance as the terminus ad quem, while it aim is to retrace fundamental features of the Jesuit charismatic dimension that reached back to the spiritual experience of Ignatius and authors like Nadal, Ribadeneyra, Simon Rodrigues. The study considers the period of Acquaviva’s generalate (1581-1615) as crucial in setting a reconfiguration of the mystical-contemplative component in the Society’s self-consciousness and assuring it within the precincts of the Roman Church through strategies of mediation and legitimization of the Jesuit method. As the example of Alberti shows, such elaboration was not without contrasts. In the XVII century, when contemplative and spiritual ferments sharpened internal dissensions inside Counter-Reformation Catholicism, ecclesiastical institutions and inquisitorial apparatus responded by tightening their grip. Accordingly, the case of father Alberti is taken into account along with the Society’s religious ideology to shed some light on the Jesuits’ role in the diffusion of forms of “charismatic religion” that the Roman Catholic hierarchies strove to oppose during the XVII century and beyond.