It is easy enough to make the observation that Jesuits in the United States do not currently have a coherent self-understanding of who we are as Jesuits and intellectuals. But it is also true that this simple observation about the lack of an intellectual life is inaccessible to many Jesuits -- academics or not -- who see it as a vague charge, or a sign of other discontents, or simply not important.
Signs for concern
Yet the signals are clear. Allow me to suggest ten of them -- in the following incomplete, suggestive and somewhat contentious fashion:
1. As Jesuits, and particularly since the 31st and 32nd General Congregations, we are proud of our roots in the genius of Ignatius Loyola and the charism of the first Jesuits. We are proud of the Exercises and the Constitutions, and we cherish Ignatian spirituality as our particular genius. We dwell lovingly on our early tradition, wearing it as our distinctive mark and holding up as our reason for existing today. At the same time, though, we seem to think that we are living in the very best age of the Society since that beginning period; the achievements of the 1960s and 1970s become reasons to exclude further reconsiderations and new ideas which would push us beyond both our beginnings and our contemporary situation.Against the background of these provocatively stated claims, I would like to suggest that we can do much better.2. As American Jesuits, we keep trying to form solid religious communities, but in imagining ourselves and our lives together we lack the forceful combination of critical reflection, intellectual honesty and hope that we often urge upon others. We speak in many voices and in a piecemeal fashion that is often at odds with other things we say or have said about ourselves, and without reference to the hard realities of the situations in which we live. We tell one story about our founding vision, but do many things -- some unwise, most commendable -- which do not really fit what we are saying.
3. We have articulated and reaffirmed time and again a commitment to faith and justice and even to a preferential option for the poor. But most of us seem to have well-established good reasons for not changing what we do. We and our superiors notice this "staying put," but have little to say about its significance.
4. Jesuits who engage in reflection on the nature of the intellectual work of Jesuits are most likely well-placed on comfortable university campuses. But when it comes to explaining the apostolic value of this enormous corporate presence on such campuses, we lack a coherent rationale beyond what might just as well be offered by the institutions themselves. We are capable of offering incisive critiques of the modern university and we worry about the inevitable decline of religion at universities; yet we cannot effectively distance ourselves from the institutions which house us.
5. Like many American intellectuals, indeed, we are deeply divided persons. We are American and yet nestle uncomfortably between a yearning for the old European securities which affirm our settled values, and a concern about the new global context in which it is not clear that our values will be or should be respected. We appeal to diverse values at different times and in different contexts, without worrying about whether our claims would be coherent were they to be examined altogether.
6. We are late 20th century Americans with highly psychologized and privatized understandings of our selves, but the self-images we live with are not easily coordinated with the traditional claims we make about Ignatius and his vision of the Society. We are Christians, celibate males, and most of us are white, yet we live in an America which is increasingly diverse, where many key intellectual inquiries explore the boundaries of race, gender, sexuality and power and spiritual identities -- and where we may appear as nice, bemused, mildly interested spectators. For the most part, this marginal status does not seem to disturb us.
7. We praise the intellectual life and think of ourselves as the intellectuals of the Church; but we do not share much of an intellectual life together. We live as if the intellectual life is a luxury, an option in which we might engage, along with TV sports, the weather, campus gossip, etc. Some of us teach and research and write all day long, yet for the most part we fall silent or rely only on vague generalities when we have the opportunity to discuss and share what concerns us as Jesuit intellectuals. We lack the discipline to speak coherently with one another.
8. We adhere faithfully to our role as a clerical, priestly religious order within the Roman Catholic Church, but seem to prefer a low-key approach of individual ministries. We are public spokesmen neither for Vatican positions nor for bold alternatives. We may hold definite and even strong views, but do not speak in a voice that is public, audible, influential.
9. We are religious and priests, members of a religious order with a long intellectual tradition; yet we are not familiar with nor articulate about religion in the wide variety in which it is flourishes in America today.
10. However we speak of shared apostolic work and community, in practice and day by day we function with highly professionalized self-identities. Our professions give us an extraordinary range of friends and working contacts around the world, but they also divide us from one another as individual Jesuits. As intellectuals, we almost never work together.
Retrieving the Jesuit Self
We must clear the field, uncover and strip away the myths by which we superimpose a simple, smooth surface on our identities as Jesuits. We must dig much deeper, take things apart, and then begin to articulate a coherent -- integral, though complex -- discourse about what it means to be an American Jesuit at the beginning of the 21st century. We must learn to think about our Jesuit identities, to uncover the intellectual strengths and weaknesses, points of coherence and points of confusion in our identities as Jesuits in the United States today.
The stimulation for this proposed conversation can be traced back to a series of Jesuit conversations at Boston College which began in the late 1980s when the Jesuit community at BC undertook a series of symbolic steps to provide itself with an institutionalized, permanent role at the university, particularly through financial donations to the university aimed at the establishment of centers for research and spirituality. Many issues have been raised in the past ten years about Jesuit identity on university campuses, but none of them has been thoroughly explored, much less resolved. Some of us, at least, wanted more, and have been looking for ways to participate in a more intelligent conversation on the underlying issues.
But now it is clear that further discussion will be most fruitful if it is a common effort that extends far beyond the boundaries of one university campus; across the range of our experiences and ways of thinking, we need to work together to uncover the Jesuit self as this can be observed in Jesuit writings, reflection, behavior.
The cumulative impact of this inquiry will be a better way of describing our Jesuit selves in their current complexities, along with new ways of speaking about who and how Jesuits are today. Ideally, it will be a real conversation among real intellectuals -- especially scholars, though there is no need for it to be exclusively among "professional academics." It will work best if we think and write from our specific intellectual stances, disciplinary approaches, and cultivated, habitual ways of thinking, while yet sharing a strong conviction about the value of a new, common conversation.
Sources of the Self
The conversation proposed here is entitled "Sources of the Jesuit Self." This title obviously and deliberately echoes Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, though we should not (and could not) attempt merely to apply his most admirable research to ourselves. But linking our conversation to Taylor's work commits us to move toward a comprehensive analysis of our identities that is rooted in detail, rich in a sense of our traditions and yet also the truly new possibilities coming to life in and around us. This must be an inquiry that, like The Sources of the Self is alert and honest, rooted in our own view of things and yet recognizable in a wider intellectual community. It would be ideal if all participants in this conversation were to read Taylor's book.
The connections go deeper, for we too are among the modern people of whom Taylor speaks; we too are affected by three key aspects of modern identity:
"First, modern inwardness, the sense of ourselves as beings with inner depths, and the connected notions that we are 'selves;'Extending Taylor's work"second, the affirmation of ordinary life which develops from the early modern period;
"third, the expressivist notion of nature as an inner moral source." (Sources of the Self, page x)
A new Jesuit intellectual conversation must trace particular strands of identity which can, in various ways, be factored together with Taylor's three points. Here are three such strands:
we are Roman Catholic, most of us products of the post-Vatican II Church; we need to examine the specific nature of our Catholic identities and the effects they have on our ways of thinking;If we address Taylor's theses and take into account also the various additional factors -- those mentioned, and others too -- which distinguish us as Catholic and Jesuit intellectuals, this proposed conversation will have achieved its purpose. While we need to take pains to sort out and examine what Taylor (and other intellectuals) have to tell us, in the end we must be able to characterize our own Jesuit intellectual identity today, as it is and as it can possibly become.we are Jesuits whose contemporary ways of living and thinking were formed in the 1960s and 1970s; it is now time to assess how that interesting period is and is not in continuity with earlier versions of Jesuit intellectual identity, and to ask where we need to go from here;
we are academics; at least for now this incipient conversation is likely to occur among Jesuits who work in the setting of modern Catholic and Jesuit higher education; this environment gives us opportunities to enhance our intellectual identities, but its safe and secure boundaries can also marginalize and even banalize the powers and passions of the intellectual life.
It's not about them, it's about us
We Jesuits -- and our friends who share this conversation -- are quite different among ourselves, but are (or should be) joined together by a common concern that the Jesuit intellectual tradition is in danger because the Society has not kept deepening and renewing its intellectual life in a changing America. For the most part, we have denied that there is even an identity crisis to be faced; or we have shifted to discussions of moral action and religious commitments -- discussions which are valuable but do little to resolve the issue of whether and how we think as Jesuits. Although we cannot relish facing the contradictions and lacunae in our current identities, at the beginning of this conversation we need to be confident that it is better to acknowledge these elements openly rather than to pass over them in silence.
We need to be forthright and critical in this conversation, without attempting to exempt ourselves from evaluation. It is imperative to understand that the conversation I am urging upon us is about us, not about "other Jesuits" whom we observe critically; we are discussing ourselves
Raising these questions and making these pointed comments is not intended to close doors or signal firm conclusions, an end to discussion. Rather, all of this is simply an invitation to those who care to think about such things. This is a conversation at its beginning, and we must see where it leads us.
So what do you think?
Francis X. Clooney, S.J.
October 1, 1997
For more documents along these lines, visit the Home Page for Jesuit Scholarship in a Post-Modern Age -- http://fmwww.bc.edu/JSPMA/
Write/send your thoughts to: Ronald Anderson, S.J., or Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Jesuit Community, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467-3802, or by E-mail: ronald.anderson@bc.edu or: clooney@bc.edu
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