Ecology ante litteram in the sources of the Roman Archives of the Society of Jesus

By Robert Danieluk, SJ | ARSI (Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu) – General Curia
[From “Jesuits 2024 - The Society of Jesus in the world”]

A singular look at the research work of Jesuit missionaries who studied nature in the places to which they were sent.

It is safe to assume that the word “ecology” is not found in the letters of St. Ignatius nor in the writings of Jesuits of past centuries. Nevertheless, documents are preserved in the Roman Archives of the Society of Jesus that testify to the interest of several Jesuits in this issue, and thus justify the title of the present article, the purpose of which is a brief presentation of some of these writings.

As the first companions began to travel more and more to fulfil the missions entrusted to them by the Church, among the Founder’s major concerns was that of maintaining unity among these friends in the Lord. It was soon joined by the need to ensure the effective administration of the religious Order, whose membership was growing in an impressive way.

One concrete measure that Ignatius recommended from the very beginning was to maintain systematic written communication, regulated by the prescriptions that in 1580 became the Formula scribendi, which was nothing more than a brief but sufficiently detailed instruction on how to handle official Jesuit correspondence.

There is no shortage of examples in historiography of how these instructions were put into practice. Among the documents preserved in the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu are some that testify to their authors’ interest in sciences such as botany and zoology. Here are just two examples.

The Polish Jesuit Michał Piotr Boym (1612-1659) entered the Society in 1631. Traveling to China in 1643, he found himself staying for a long time in various places on the east coast of Africa: a frequent experience for travellers who, sailing from Lisbon to Goa, had to wait between the outlet of the Zambezi River and the territories of present-day Mozambique before continuing eastward. Finding himself on the Dark Continent unexpectedly, the curious Jesuit saw another world, quite different from his country of origin and from Europe as a whole. Much of his surprise was at the flora and fauna of the regions where he stopped, and this was strong enough to prompt him to describe what he saw there. So, in a report sent to Rome, Boym not only gave a written account of it, but added drawings, which have happily survived to the present day. In a series of five watercolours, he painted some plants that intrigued him, such as the cashew and pineapple. He also did two beautiful drawings of the hippopotamus.

Father Boym did not stay long in Africa. Soon enough he resumed his journey arriving, via India, in China, where he paid no less attention to what he encountered around him. Many of his observations later became the work known to scholars under the title Flora Sinensis that made its author famous. Another reason for his fame was the diplomatic mission to Europe on which he was sent by the Ming court. He brought to Rome letters from the Chinese empress, written on silk – one to the Pope and one to the General of the Jesuits which are preserved among the most precious treasures in the Vatican Apostolic Archives and the Roman Archives of the Society of Jesus.

Returning to our theme, Boym was certainly not the only author of such reports. In the next century, the Spaniard José Sánchez Labrador (1717-1798), a Jesuit since 1732 and a missionary to South America in the years 1734-1767, wrote his great work on Paraguay (only part of which was published) during his exile in Italy. Among his manuscripts preserved in Rome are many drawings of the plants and animals he had seen during his time in the missions. Next to the generally known tobacco or cacao, we see many other species of birds, fish, reptiles or insects. While some such as the gull are common and easy to encounter even in our day (at least in Europe), others would be a curiosity to many.

Boym and Sánchez Labrador are just two among many members of the Society of Jesus who described and charted the flora and fauna of their mission territories. The fame that the works of these Jesuits enjoyed on the Old Continent can be explained by their scientific importance, including for medicine, where the spread of knowledge about certain plants such as quinine, mate or curare, had lasting effects.

But one might ask, “Why the presence of such documents in the Jesuit archives?” The missionaries of centuries past certainly had enough to do, so much so that one must immediately discard the hypothesis of idleness as the genesis of such writings. In fact, the reason must be found in the instructions of St. Ignatius mentioned at the beginning of this article: several times he, as well as his collaborators and successors, asked Jesuits who had left for places located outside Europe to send information about the regions where they were, and this was done in order to make them known to the brethren as well as to other curious readers. All this also served as good publicity for the missions and an effective tool for vocation promotion.