Abstract
I start with a confession: Jack O’Malley was my undergraduate mentor, who inspired me to pursue a scholarly career in history, in my case the history of religious ideas and not, as in his, the history of the European Renaissance and Reformation. But I am in no way unique among Jesuits in my age cohort in confessing this, as Jack inspired several generations of younger Jesuits to choose the academy as their profession (and, in “Jesuitspeak,” as their apostolic work). The Education of a Historian is O.’s backward glance both on what most members of his order would freely confess as being the most distinguished academic career of any living Jesuit, as well as on the individuals who shaped his intellectual journey.
His autobiography evinces the same virtues that O. himself possesses: an ability to analyze the past with an unblinking eye, unafraid to tell the whole truth (blemishes included) as he sees it. He thus narrates his entrance into the Jesuit order, as well as his decision to attend Harvard for his doctorate, not as preordained paths whose conclusions were never in doubt, but rather as somewhat messy (and humorous) processes of trial and error: he thus found himself (somewhat surprisingly) in the Milford novitiate, and in Harvard Yard, no one more surprised by his surroundings than he.
O. is characteristically generous in offering praise for the scholars who trained and influenced him along the way, a list that comprises something of a “who’s who” of stars in the field of early modern Europe: Myron Gilmore, Heiko Oberman, and Paul Oskar Kristeller (among others). O.’s morphology of this “passing on of history” from an older to a younger generation of scholars is both intellectually exciting and revelatory of the interpersonal factor in historiography: as O. narrates it, the practice of history is at least as much about older scholars inspiring and shaping younger colleagues as it is about solitary scholars pouring over manuscripts in archives.
One of the more interesting of the book’s chapters is O.’s recounting of how (and why) he undertook the project that became one of his most famous and respected monographs: The First Jesuits. It is difficult to overstate the influence of that work in shaping how Jesuits conceive of their order, and how the thousands of lay faculty and students in Jesuit institutions are introduced to concepts like “Jesuit education” and cura personalis. O. himself concedes that the founding of “the schools” was not part of Ignatius Loyola’s original conception of the order, although the network of hundreds of high schools, colleges, and universities (the largest Catholic educational network in the world) came to define the sense of who the Jesuits were, and what their mission in world Christianity actually was. And O. is at his best in unapologetically narrating how the Jesuits “backed into” what became their trademark apostolic work: education. He makes the (startling, but true) observation that the logic of establishing such institutions (which needed long-term care, oversight, and most importantly stability) was diametrically opposed to Ignatius of Loyola’s core ideal of a Society as a group of well-trained but flexible clerics free from institutional entanglements and fund-raising obligations to move on at a moment’s notice to undertake missions where there was the greatest need. But anyone familiar with O.’s scholarship already knows his masterful use of the “logic of unintended consequences” in narrating the serendipitous nature of the past.
Arguably the major shortcoming in the autobiography is O.’s (all too brief) narrative of researching and writing a succession of magisterial books (Trent and All That, What Happened at Vatican II, The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, and Jesuits and the Arts) which opened new ways of conceiving and contextualizing two extremely important ecumenical councils, and the relation of Jesuit institutions to European-wide architectural and artistic movements like the Baroque and Rococo. In typical O. fashion, he took topics about which we already knew something (the relation of the Jesuits to the Baroque, for instance) and supplied the narrative that had been lacking to re-conceptualize the entire movement.
This book is a great read, not least because the author’s voice comes through loud and clear. Go out and buy it.