Latin Scientific Poetry under the Shadow of the Jesuit Suppression

my lam-entation bursts it by force. But why should I utter mournful steep of Pindus call suppliantly upon the leader of the Muses, for the heart looks for comfort from . that play on the ivory lyre the sacred Muses to sing in measure, be propitious to me as I sing of strange, and grant me I invoke

on liturgical projects and edit the writings of the Lambertini pope, Benedict XIV. Azevedo's fortunes turned in the years leading up to the Suppression and he was exiled to the Veneto in 1754. In the following decades he published inter alia a twelve-book descriptive poem on the city of Venice (1780), a verse life of the St Antony of Padua (Venice, 1786), a book of Latin translations from Italian, Spanish and Portuguese poetry and revisited and expanded a collection of his own poetry from the early part of his career. The abovementioned epic on the return of the expelled American Jesuits to Europe appeared in a volume that also contains a series of verse epistles to Azevedo's Jesuit brothers in exile, dedicated to Catherine the Great's favourite, General Potemkin. 5 It is in this collection taken as a whole, alternating and combining elegiac and heroic modes, that Azevedo most fully indulges his feelings about the Suppression and the sad fate of his Iberian and American compatriots. (In fact, in a preliminary note, he informally dubs the collection his Tristia.) While the volume does not contain any didactic verse per se, in the eighteenth epistle, dated 1772, Azevedo extols the consolations of learningespecially scientific learningin these difficult times. He is writing to a friend who is concerned because their Jesuit brothers are deserting the Society: Dulcis amice doles: justa est tibi causa doloris, Quem pietas animi, quem movet intus amore. Nempe doles socios eadem vexilla gerentes Saepius indecori terga dedisse fuga. Nec satis est magnos dudum superasse labores, Nec satis est primis praevaluisse malis Clara triumphali cinxerunt tempora lauro, Victrici numerant parta trophaea manu. Vidimus heu! Pulchras sensim marcescere frondes, Et periit clypeis, qui fuit ante, color. Carmina collectos laudarunt nostra triumphos, Tristia nunc miseri signa doloris habent.
You grieve, dear friend, and the reason for your suffering is just, moved as it is by a pious spirit and an inward love, for you grieve that your companions under the same standard so often turn their backs in shameful flight. It is not enough to have overcome great trials in the past, nor to have prevailed over the first evils. They have wreathed their brilliant temples in triumphant laurels and notch up trophies won by conquering hand. We have seen, alas, the beautiful leaves gradually decay and the lustre on their shields has faded! Our songs have commemorated our collective triumphs; now they bear the sad signs of wretched grief. (p. 210-11) Azevedo acknowledges the challenges of the suppressed Jesuit life, the dangers of women and worldliness, and advises his friend on how to recognise the telltale signs of a brother falling away. Why are we so lazy, he asks, when it comes to fighting for the prize of heaven, when we are willing to undergo any labours for the smallest profit? Azevedo confesses that he has personally found comfort in returning to his long-neglected Muses 6that is, to poetic composition and translationactivities in which he had already shown promise as a young professor of Rhetoric at Evora. But others' talents fit them for different pursuits, including rhetoric, history, law and theology. For the remainder of the poem, Azevedo runs through the various branches of knowledge, but the greater part is given over to scientific pursuits, starting with mathematics: If you desire to know the numbers, measures and weights of things, and the arts which learned mathematics loves, the first discoveries of your diligent labour will be a line and a point, triangles of various shapes, and you will learn to divide the indivisible point into parts and to write about imperceptible things with signs that are understood. At length the great earth will obey, subdued by your numbers on a flimsy piece of paper, and you will tread the liquid ocean and the wide heavens and know many things, things that the mob would scarcely believe. And the many things you know will be true because of certain laws, nor will there be room for error in your words. (p. 215) He proceeds to list topics in natural philosophy and natural history: the origin of the winds, of lightning, earthquakes and volcanoes; why rain comes and why snowflakes assume various shapes; how rivers get their water from the sea and lose their salt; whether the earth draws up pure water in springs or only receives that gift from the rain; whether it comes from mists rising from the internal heat of the earth and falling as droplets; the cause of the tides; what the sea nourishes in its fertile lap; the nature of light; what lies beneath the earth, the metals: Et juvat aethereos perpendere cominus orbes, An prodesse homini, sive nocere queant. Ut nostris sint visa oculis, quae sidera cernis, Volve animo quot sint saecula lapsa prius It is even pleasing to think about the heavenly bodies and whether they are profitable or harmful for human life. Count in your mind how many centuries have elapsed before the stars are seen by our eyes! (p. 215) We may consider the motion of the planets, sun and moon, "why the gloomy comet returns with a long tail" (Cur tristis longo crine cometa redit), the laws of attraction and motion. 7 As for botany, "not only the tall tree but the useless grass will provide useful food for your assiduous mind" (Nec procera arbor tantum, sed inutilis herba, / Utilia assiduae pabula mentis erit, p. 216), 8 how it grows, its structure, the varieties of flower and foliage. The human mind ranges over ridges and through valleys in search of every kind of wild beast, but it can equally be occupied by the "most subtle crowd of insects, the fly hiding in the oak and the bee, maker of honey" (tenuissima turba volantum, / Musca latens quercu, mellis & auctor apis). We can investigate birdsong and animal behaviour. And finally, "if you are unable to know, at least it will be a pleasure to investigate the things which the Creator of things has shown to us" (Noscere si nequeas, saltem indagare voluptas / Quae rerum nobis conditor exhibuit, p. 216). Azevedo concludes: Crede mihi; doctis superest incumbere libris: Hoc tantum miseris tempora dura sinunt. Hoc precor, admoneas, sic otia tollere quaeras, Utilis admonitu sic potes esse tuo. Forte aliquis rapidas passus jam corde procellas, Te duce tranquillos exiget inde dies. Otia si tollas, socios lucraberis omnes, Et quisque in medio turbine salvus erit.
Believe me, poring over learned books: this alone is conceded to us by these wretched times! I pray you, caution [your brothers], seek to dispel idleness in this way; you can be useful with your admonishments! Perhaps, with your guidance, someone who has already suffered these violent storms of the heart will, henceforth, live tranquil days. If you take away idleness you will bring great profit to all your companions and each will be saved from the midst of the storm. (p. 217) This long passage is tantalising because, from one angle, Azevedo might be adumbrating a program not just for Jesuit scientists and scholars but also for Jesuit scientific poetseffectively demonstrating how such materials might be rendered poetic in what is, in essence, a georgic praeteritio. 9 Indeed, many of the topics listed had already been treated by Jesuit scientific poets (botany, astronomy, comets, winds, springs, the nature of light, earthquakes). It is true that Azevedo does not explicitly exhort his companions to write didactic poems, 10 and when he refers in his notes to celebrity Jesuit physicist, Roger Boscovich, he does not, curiously, mention Boscovich's Latin poem, dedicated to the Royal Society of London, on the eclipses of the sun and moon. Nor, in his brief note on botanica, does he mention the Botanicorum libri iv (1712) by Neapolitan Jesuit Francesco Eulalio Savastano, which the Theatine Giampietro Bergantini had translated into Italian and published in 1749 as the first in a projected series of Jesuit poems about the arts and sciences.
In other verse epistles, Azevedo sings the praises and describes the nature of the New World, identifying a particular nostalgia afflicting his American comrades-in-exile. In this connection we might mention a handful of didactic poems on American themes published by ex-Jesuits in Italy: José Rodrigues de Melo's four books De rusticis rebus Brasiliensibus (Rome, 1781), incorporating the previously published poem on sugar, De sacchari opificio (Pesaro, 1780; reprinted Lisbon, 1798) by the Brazilian Prudençio do Amaral (d. 1751); and the MS "Aurifodinae Brasilienses", on gold-mining in Minas Gerais, attributed to former (and later anti-)Jesuit José Basílio da Gama. 11 But the greatest American didactic poem of the Suppression period was, undoubtedly, Rafael Landívar's fifteen-book blockbuster, Rusticatio Mexicana (Modena, 1781; expanded edition, Bologna, 1782). 12 Near the beginning of the first book, on the lakes of Mexico, Landívar, now living in exile in the Papal States, programmatically sublimates his homesickness for his native Guatemala into a truth-telling poetry about the wonders of New Spain: Returning to Azevedo's letter on the consolations of learning we find that the eighteenth-century poet conforms to time-honoured Jesuit procedure when advising his correspondent to ascertain the individual ingenia of his (faltering) flock. 18 The passions for learning in this letter are, moreover, harnessed for a well-defined spiritual endto keep the crumbling Jesuit community togetherand not for their own sake. 19 Moreover, Azevedo's list of physica is, on closer inspection, hardly the most up-to-date from the perspective of contemporary, nor even contemporary Jesuit, science. It may also be relevant that he imagines these disciplines being pursued in the abstractfrom books and by the individual mind, without reference to the laboratories, instruments, collections, expeditions, correspondence and collaboration that underpinned scientific enquiry in the period. It is instructive to compare a passage from Azevedo's Suppression epic, a summary of the career of Vincenzo à Castro, the young man whose Jesuit training and intellectual gifts fitted him to lead his American brothers in exile: […] quid enim studio incubuisse severo Profuit, atque novem sudare audaciter annos? Nam tribus occultas naturae inquirere leges, Astrorum placuit motus Lunaeque labores, Et varios rerum effectus causasque latentes. Inde annos totidem per Numen amabile, & altum Arcanum Triadis Superumque oracula versas, Et Romana sibi totidem sacra jura reservant. Haec satis instructum vivacis acumine mentis Testantur Juvenem; claro se jactat alumno Sancta Fides; supra humanam nunc exigit Artem Per brevia & syrtes fragilem deducere navem.
[…] for what use was it to have applied yourself to such difficult studies and to have sweated boldly for nine years? For you resolved to devote three years to inquiry into the secret laws of Nature, the movements of the stars and the labours of the Moon, and the various properties of things and their hidden causes; then you devoted another three to the beloved Godhead and the supreme mystery of the Trinity and Holy Scripture, and as many again to sacred canon law. These things are sufficient testament to your education and the power of your sharp mind. Santa Fé glories in its brilliant pupil. Now it has need of an Art which is beyond the human to steer the fragile ship through sandbanks and shoals.
(1. 495-506; pp. 22-3) The study of the natural world, then, has value more as a heroic ascesis than for the advancement of science, and is in any case topped by the Jesuit's studies in theology, Scripture and canon law. The difficult knowledge of astronomy serves Castro here not for literal but spiritual navigation. It is a guarantee of his strength of character and mental acuity, and it is above all prudence that he will need to guide the fragile ship of his suppressed comrades to the shores of Italy. Apart from Boscovich, Azevedo does not name any Jesuit scientists in his verse letter on the consolations of science, nor highlight the order's contributions to the fields of electricity, astronomy or aeronautics. 20 It is a moot point whether he was fully aware of the contemporary Latin scientific poetry being produced by his Italian (and Croatian) brothers in Rome. Be that as it may, they were certainly aware of him. Giuseppe Maria Mazzolari (1712-1786), professor of Rhetoric at the Roman College, paid tribute to Azevedo's as yet unpublished Venetae urbis descriptio in the finale to his "Six books on Electricity", Electricorum libri vi (Rome: 1767, 232). In a footnote ad loc., Girolamo Lagomarsini, who oversaw the publication of Mazzolari's Electrica, 21 explained that Azevedo had employed the conceit of a tour by gondola to present the wonders of Venice to his readers. 22 Lagomarsini's note confirms that at least one manuscript copy of Azevedo's poemwhich, it will be recalled, was not published until 1780was circulating between Rome and the Veneto in this period. 23 Further questions arise that are beyond the scope of this paper: how connected were the (poetic) communities of the exiled Jesuits? To what extent did they fracture into national groups under the pressure of the Suppression, and what role did Latinity play in binding the Society together at this difficult time? 24 The potential of didactic poetry as a vehicle for celebrating intellectual forebears and friends is established already in the classical models of Lucretius (who pays tribute to Epicurus, Ennius and Empedocles) and Virgil (who pays tribute to Hesiod and Lucretius). Poets of the Roman Jesuit "school" in the 1760s regularly acknowledged or imitated one another in their verse, as well as the Jesuit-educated Croatian priest, Benedict Stay, who was first to beat a poetic path into the forbidding terrain of Newtonian physics and mathematics with his Philosophiae recentioris libri x (Rome, 1755-1792). These writers preached and practised a poetics of difficulty and did not wear the learned labour of versifying science lightly. 25 It is therefore somewhat paradoxical to read from Roger Boscovich, from Boscovich's physics teacher and poet of the Northern Lights and Rainbow, Carlo Noceti, 26 and from electricity poet, Giovanni Maria 25 Contrast the Jesuit Giambattista Roberti, himself the composer of Italian didactic poems, who in his urbane Lettera sopra l'uso della fisica nella poesia (1765) surveyed various suitable and unsuitable topics (spiders!) and advocated a lighter style. 26 Noceti, for example, "complains about his 'long exile from Mount Pindus', during which time he was detained by 'the many tedious duties of a severe Minerva' (post longum a vertice Pindi / Exilium, et tetricae multa Minervae), i. e. teaching (Aristotelian) philosophy. He prays that the Muses will take him back now and purify him, his 'limbs filthy from engagement in Mazzolari, that the writing of such verse was cultivated by them as a respite from the burden of teaching. 27 Exchanging verse, even on such formidably technical subjects, served both as a recreational activity and as a cementer of friendships. We get a sense of the collaborative literary activity that went into such productions, and also of that distinctively Jesuit intertwining of science, erudition and Latin philology, in Lagomarsini's footnotes to Mazzolari's poemnotes which provide not only explanations and supplements to aid comprehension of its more abstruse subject matter, but also descend to the finer points of Latin grammar and style. 28 Mazzolari devotes the final forty pages of the sixth and final book of his poem on electricity to a digression on his vacations at the Roman college's villa Tusculana at Frascati, describing the ancient history and natural beauty of the place, and the joy he experiences from the freedom to write and read in peace in that locus amoenus. The greater portion of his coda, however, is devoted to documenting the writings of his Jesuit colleagues in (what we would now call) the raucous debates of the dusty classroom, and [his mouth] spouting barbarous words' (pulverei rauca inter bella Lycei / Sordentemque artus, et barbara verba sonantem)" (Haskell [Loyola's Bees], 206). 27 Of his vacations in the Alban hills, Mazzolari writes: "Here there is nothing to distract me, nothing to corrupt the health-giving sky or to disturb my tranquil ease. No bell is heard clanging harshly from the tower, summoning to their wonted tasks both Pallas's youth and their teacher, the wretch who has spent his whole life in this toilsome service" (Hic nihil est, animum quod carpat, quodque salubre / Inficiat caelum, tranquilla vel otia turbet. / Non aeris sonus ingrate de turre vocantis / Palladiam auditur consueta ad pensa juventam, / Doctoremque una, qui duro in munere totam / Contrivit miser aetatem, p. 221). Lagomarsini confirms in a note ad loc. that the author has devoted the better part of his life to the "most laborious and troublesome service of teaching" (laboriosissimo atque aerumnosissimo docendi munere). In his Hypothesis Copernicana (1777), Camillo Garulli revisits the Jesuit commonplace in a digression on his villula: "leaving the intractable youth and city far behind, my little country house calls me after the unrelenting stress of the obnoxious school, tearing out the bristling swarms of cares that have long been pinching my breast" (indocile pube & procul urbe relicta / Me vocat ingrati post taedia longa lycei / Villula discerpens acri quae pectora dudum / Horrida curarum pervellunt agmina morsu, p. 24). The site is said to command a clear view out to the Adriatic, suggesting that Garulli indeed composed this poem after the Suppression, when he was named Professor of Eloquence by the Senate of Fermo (his hometown). 28 In the finale to the second book, for example, Lagomarsini records his uneasiness about a line in which Mazzolari has reversed the natural order of events. Mazzolari has rejected his advice, citing ancient authorities and defending a certain quality of spontaneity in poetry without which it fails to "live". In effect, Lagomarsini is practising peer review in real time! the humanities, almost all men of his personal acquaintance. 29 He names contemporary Jesuit producers of poetry, prose, scholarly editions and translations, and a handful of theologians. While there is no direct reference to the recent travails of the Society in Portugal, France, Spain and Ibero-America, it seems likely that Mazzolari could read the writing on the wall and felt an anxious urge to conduct a virtual census of his brothers' learned achievements.
Ten years later, in 1777that is, four years after the papal brief of Suppressiona former Roman Jesuit, Camillo Garulli, published his astronomical poems Hypothesis Copernicana and Cometae, together with two long elegies on modern science. The Lucretian rhetoric of resistance to superstition is strong, for example, in the following passage from his Comets, refuting the belief that they portend disaster: Principio auricomos cernens ardere Cometas Mens hominum quondam variabilis inscia caeli, Irati laesam metuebat Numinis iram, Praeliaque horribilemque lucem supremaque Regum Funera & excidium populis instare canebat.
In the beginning, when it saw golden-tailed comets blazing, the mind of man used to fear that it had offended the majesty of God, ignorant as it was in former times of the movements of heaven; and it would foretell battles, the end of days, the deaths of the last kings and the destruction of peoples. But let no author persuade you of this, even though his fame has spread through all the lands and elevated him to the heavens, and venerable antiquity commends him to a remembering age for discovering the causes of things. For why do you not also, by the same reasoning, impute to that unusual blaze all the happy events that occur everywheresince at no time and in no part of the world are good things not mixed in with evilevents that immediately follow the sight of the bodies of the terrible comet in the heavens? (p. 35) 29 In his introductory note to this section, Lagomarsini cites "external" as well as in-house Jesuit examples for Mazzolari's poetic tribute, beginning with Ariosto and the fourth book of (Renaissance poet) Pier Angèli da Barga's Cynegetica (p. 221).
These verses introduce a catalogue of Lucretian-style rationalisations: why is it that we are visited by so many evils, wars, plagues and natural disasters even when there are no comets in sight? The passage climaxes in a tour de force description of the earthquake that destroyed Lisbon in 1755. Now the Lisbon earthquake, as is well known, was a "meteorological" event that notoriously marked the beginning of the end for the Old Society of Jesus. The Jesuit Gabriel Malagrida's characterisation of the disaster as divine punishment for the city's sinfulness was the catalyst for a tsunami of Jesuit persecutions and expulsions beginning with those of Sebastião 30 Later in the poem he refutes the opinion of those who attribute the biblical flood to a comet: "Hence the wise man reveres God, for the avenging anger of the offended deity is able to inflict upon the deserving earth, with justice, whatever we deem to be an evil, in any quarter" (Hinc sapiens venerare Deum; nam quidquid ubique / Novimus esse mali, jure Ultrix numinis ira / Offensi valuit meritis immittere terris, p. 81). It is worth noting, too, that in the very period that Garulli was publishing his "rationalising" Lucretian poems, a feverish spate of prophecies was circulating among the suppressed Jesuit communities in Italy, forecasting the imminent rebirth of the Society. 31 My emphasis. Cf. "tempore quamquam illo tellus quoque et aequora ponti, / obscenaeque canes importunaeque volucres / signa dabant. quotiens Cyclopum effervere in agros / vidimus undantem ruptis fornacibus Aetnam, / flammarumque globos liquefactaque volvere saxa" (Georg. 1. 469-73).
Nay, indeed, the fire which settled on the rooftops cut off every escape as it rolled great balls of flame and melted stones through all the lofty halls, and through the homes, their structure undermined, it ripped up obstacles of walls and tossed aside columns, the sturdy supports guarding the proud porches. Do you see, here theatres are burned down, there the splendour of churches and the trappings of nobility, the golden robes of state, the memorials of the ancestors? (p. 38) Interestingly, in an unpublished addendum to the second book of his poem on electricity, Mazzolari had also digressed on the Lisbon earthquake, immediately before turning to the troubles then besetting the Society of Jesus: "But why should I here, giving way to gloomy grief, complain of others' losses, I who am forced to weep for domestic [i. e. Jesuit] ones" (Sed quid ego hic luctu, tristi indulgensque dolori / Damna externa querar, qui flere domestica cogor). 32 It would certainly be an oversimplification to suggest that the writing of Latin scientific poetry by Jesuits in the later eighteenth century was motivated solely or even subliminally by a need for consolation of self and each other. Nevertheless, we have seen that the didactic genre lent itself to the construction of intellectual, poetic and, by extension, emotional communities. Already at the beginning of the Cometae, Garulli hints at members of a remnant community of Jesuit Latin poets when he hails the Arcadian Raymund Cunich. 33 Later, after a Lucretian flourish on the difficulty of versifying technical subjects, he praises the "Virgilian" Electrica of Mazzolari 34 and the Echo and Navis aëria of Zamagna before wandering off topic in a wistful reverie on his friendship with another Jesuit scientific poet, Gregorio Landi Vittori: Haec olim fuerunt: nunc ah! procul urbe relicta Eheu disjunctus tanto abstractusque sodali Moerentis cogor deducere tempora vitae! Attamen anxifera solvunt se pectora cura, Adliciuntque tuae quum me rapiuntque Camoenae.
And you also spur me to song, Vittori, to whose side I cleaved, an inseparable companion, admiring your profound eloquence and hanging on your every wordthen, to be sure, when after the raucous battles of the cacophonous classroom, we loved to run around the streets and piazzas of Rome, or catch the light breeze on the banks of the Tiber, or wander widely through the woods, those happy Tempes, the happy shade of the villas. This is how it used to be. Now, alas, having left the city far behind, I am forced to live out the remainder of my sad daysseparated from, wrenched away from such a companion. And yet my anxious heart loosens itself from care when I am enticed and inspired by your Muses.
(p. 43) 35 While Vittori had aspired to be Virgilian in the preface to his Institutiones Philosophicae, Garulli has added a Lucretian twist with semina materiae, as well as in the following references to the scientific Pierians and the daring ascent of the human mind (cf. Epicurus): But what can they not enclose within Pierian song? They [sing of] the various movements, laws, attractions and repulsions, bodies fighting one another with opposing force; of rain, and icy snows, and showers of hail, lightning and thunder, and the wonders produced by the machine that takes its name from Electrum. Nor do they cease to reveal and teach the myriad reflections and refractions of rays, interweaving the multicoloured threads of light. Nay, they have even dared to assay the inner sanctuaries of the human mind, and to be carried aloft on soaring wing above the ether, whence they teach the praises of men and the beautiful heights of the sublime Thunderer to resound everywhere through earthly woods! (p. 44) For Garulli, then, as for Azevedo, the Latin Muses do provide some consolation for the grief of the Suppressionand in Garulli's case, at least, these are the "enlightened" Latin Muses of Lucretian scientific didactic poetry. Just over a decade after the unleashing of the papal brief "Dominus ac Redemptor", a Hungarian ex-Jesuit, Michael Paintner, published a new edition of Zamagna's Navis aëria (Vienna, 1784), to which he appended a long list of modern didactic poems, mostly by (ex-)Jesuits. A silent homage to his suppressed brethren? Or the tacit expression of a hope that the Societyif not the Jesuit genre of scientific didactic poetrywould fly again?