The global mission in the music of Jesuit drama

The Jesuit school drama is rightly considered to be a vehicle of the ethical formation and civic education. Both these aspects were linked together in an inseparable whole thanks to the integral conception of man – which stands at the foundation of the education led by the Society of Jesus. According to the idea presented in the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, in which all values should be subordinated to the life goal, to its achievement serves also ethical formation and civic education, both based on the proper moulding of the intellect. According to Antonio Possevino, this cultura ingeniorum takes place especially in schools, colleges, seminaries and universities. The formation of man according to the virtues of political and religious life is regarded as a mission of these educational institutions, as well to the Europe like to the India, for which the Old World has became a New East, not only from the point of view of politics, but also of faith. For the successful implementation of both those domains of human’s activity very useful was the specific sense of cultural accommodation, which obliged the missionaries to adjust their activities to the local patterns of culture. Possevino refers here to the idea of José de Acosta, who specifies three different strategies of political and missionary actions, appropriate to three levels of the indigenous cultures development. The criteria of its evaluation – organised system of the public administration, codified legal system and written literary tradition – are to be found not in India Occidentales (both Americas), but only in India Orientales (China, Japan), which becomes also the favourite sceneries in the Jesuit dramas of missionary themes. Their topic was usually politic and religious virtues, but in the special conditions of cultural confrontation they were not always consonant and often led to conflict. How also all these values were presented and ordered to each other in the Jesuit drama of the missionary themes? How did it relate to the didactic, panegyrical, formative aims of the genre and the politic sense of its recipients? Were these spectacles accommodated to the world of their imaginations or rather to the ethical, moral and didactic priorities, which should had led them to the achieving its life goal indicated gently by their teachers and confessors? Having in mind that so many parts of Europe was regarded then as vera India, what kind of the missionary strategies are to be observed in the plots of the spectacles staged in these areas? And: to what extent the discovery of the New World changed the paradigm of thinking about values and the eurocentric historical imagination?