Nicole Reinhardt

Hernando de Mendoça (1562–1617), General Acquaviva and the controversy over confession, counsel, and obedience.

This article examines the clash between Superior General Claudio Acquaviva and the Spanish Jesuit Hernando de Mendoca, briefly confessor to the viceroy of Naples count of Lemos (1599–1601). It argues that Mendoca’s activities in Naples and the scandal that followed were an important influence on Acquaviva’s determination to formalize and push forward the regulations for princely confessors in 1602. It situates the confrontation within the context of the discontent amongst Spanish Jesuits, and their criticism of Acquaviva’s generalate. While Jesuit historiography has generally considered Mendoca’s case as an example of individual folly and disobedience, the essay elucidates the significance of his agency by taking into account his overlooked writings, which offer new insights into the controversy over the role of confession for just government within and without the Society of Jesus.

How individual was conscience in the early-modern period? Observations on the development of Catholic moral theology

This article investigates how the notion of individual conscience has to be understood within the early-modern development of Catholic moral theology. It highlights that 16th-century Catholic theologians continued to understand conscience mainly in Thomist terms as a rational judgment. Yet they also came to investigate more deeply questions of intention and individual circumstances that might interfere with the perfect execution of moral reasoning. Particular emphasis is given to the question of probabilism and whether this new method of analyzing moral agency provided a stepping stone towards a more individualized conception of conscience, as some intellectual historians have contended. The article argues that whilst probabilism sharpened the awareness for problems of conscience, this development cannot be disconnected from the culture of counsel of conscience, inscribed into the fundamentally Thomist definition of it.

Just War, Royal Conscience and the Crisis of Theological Counsel in the Early Seventeenth Century

This article explores how scholastic just war theories and concepts of theological counsel became increasingly problematic in the run-up to the Thirty Years War. It identifies increasing conceptual difficulties due to probabilism, religiously inspired contemporary warfare, and skeptical readings of the Old Testament. Such theoretical problems were exacerbated in the context of the struggle for European hegemony with French pamphleteers starting to ridicule theological discourse in order to denounce Spanish dominance, in particular during the Valtelline crisis. Scholastic just war traditions were so fundamentally discredited that the former royal confessor Caussin was eventually forced to abandon them. Instead he tried to recover theological authority and to safeguard the essence of scholastic just war teachings through a pacified reading of the Old Testament. Though ultimately unsuccessful, his adaptations bear witness to profound changes in the appreciation of the scholastic heritage as well as in the decline of moral theology for political decision-making.

Introduction: War, Conscience, and Counsel in Early Modern Catholic Europe

The introduction identifies the framework of Catholic moral theology, which informs the specific approach of the authors in this special issue, as an important context to deepen the understanding of early modern just war discussions. Some of the most productive contributors to the debate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were indeed Catholic moral theologians, who engaged with the question, driven by pastoral concerns over the conscience of subjects and rulers. The delegation of moral questions to theologians was an essential part of post-Tridentine Catholic culture which, however, eroded progressively in the seventeenth century as the tenets of moral theology as well as the external institutions of moral counsel attracted wide criticism.