Accommodation as a Rhetorical Principle

Twenty years after its publication, John O’Malley’s The First Jesuits (1993) can be located within a broader “postmodern” intellectual context that followed in the wake of 1989 and the consequent end of the Cold War. This context included both Stephen Toulmin’s Cosmopolis (1990), a revisionist account of the origins of “modernity,” and Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994), a foundational work in post-colonial theorization of cultural hybridity. O’Malley’s thesis that early Jesuit ministries shared a common fundamental “rhetorical” dimension exemplifies Toulmin’s account of a sixteenth-century rhetorical preference for the particular, local, and timely. This rhetorical accommodation to the individual also informed the missionary strategies developed by Valignano and Ricci in the Far East. Ricci’s True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (1603) can be read as a hybridizing cultural accommodation, a strategy with both promise and peril for self-identity. However, as the tumultuous (and eventually tragic) history of the Chinese Rites demonstrates, a Renaissance preference for the particular would encounter serious opposition during the seventeenth-century’s “quest for certainty” and corollary embrace of universals. Toulmin would argue, however, that this “Counter-Renaissance” repudiation of accommodation did not make the sixteenth-century project any less “modern.” Rather, he would see O’Malley’s first Jesuits as exemplars of modernity’s original form—a preference for the particular and openness to hybridity which Toulmin imagined being recovered in late-twentieth-century “postmodernity.”