Of the many backhanded compliments the Society of Jesus garnered after
its dissolution in 1773, Macaulay’s outshines most in wit, if not in malice.
The Jesuits, Macaulay observed, “appear to have discovered the precise
point to which intellectual culture can be carried without risk of intellectual
emancipation.” And with good reason! While they lacked “no talent or
accomplishment into which men can be drilled by elaborate discipline,”
Macaulay asserted, “such discipline, though it may bring out the powers of
ordinary minds, has a tendency to suffocate, rather than to develop, original
genius.” (History of England to the Death of William III, London,
1967, volume I, pp. 564, 568) Macaulay’s overall perception of the Order
and the cultural production of its members was perpetuated by generations
of historians, whose interpretative framework has tended to swing between
the polemical and the apologetic. Only recently have scholars begun seriously
to transcend centuries of preconceived belief by granting the Jesuit
experience rigorous and disinterested scrutiny