A Juridicized Language for the Salvation of Souls: Jesuit Ethics
A Juridicized Language for the Salvation of Souls: Jesuit Ethics
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拯救灵魂的司法语言:耶稣会伦理
DOI:
10.1163/9789004394414_010
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发表时间:
2019
期刊:
影响因子:
--
通讯作者:
Christoph Haar
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Christoph Haar
The addition of an educational vocation to the Society of Jesus’s founding purposes exercised an enormous impact on the status of the Jesuits’ ethical thought, as it supplemented and in many ways quickly overshadowed their pastoral and missionary aims. Jesuit ethics developed in close connection to their pastoral and academic thought. 1 This chapter aims to offer a sense of what motivated some of the major Jesuit luminaries to write about this topic in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As the foundational Constitutiones Societatis Iesu mentioned countless times, the Jesuits’ thought and action should be performed ad maiorem Dei gloriam (for the greater glory of God). 2 An account of Jesuit ethics on the eve of modernity must accordingly illustrate how the growing sub-divisions in theological disciplines revolved around this overarching agenda, expressed in their juridicized language and emphasis on the aim of salvation.In this chapter, attention will first be drawn to the roles of Scholastic theology and cases of conscience in the Jesuit order of studies, the Ratio studiorum, finalized in 1599. Following the decisions of the Council of Trent (1545–63), the Jesuits made a series of improvements to their system of theological education and pastoral care. The Jesuit Ratioreflected the drive to educate and bring forth good confessors. This in turn represented a major thrust behind the expansion of Jesuit ethical thought, which will be traced by narrating the fluid relationship between Scholastic and moral theology. As will become clear, arriving at a precise definition of the content of Jesuit ethics remains an elusive task. This discussion is followed by an analysis of the moral manual composed by one of the theologians who was instrumental in drafting the Ratio, Juan Azor (1535–1603). Azor’s Institutiones morales, which was designed to expose the good and bad conscience revealed in human actions, served as an influential