Jezuitu ordenis un renesanses laikmeta idejas un to ienakšana baltija

One is confronted in the historiography of Latvia and Estonia with extremely negative interpretations of the historical role of the Order of Jesuits. Such interpretations abound in the Lutheran orthodoxy (the sermons of Hermann Samson), the works of the Russian Orthodox authors, who speak of the spies of the Pope, etc. The meaning of the term 'Jesuit' has often acquired negative connotations in the Russian and Latvian languages, describing such qualities as swindling, deceiving, performing clandestine political manoeuvres. During the twentieth and thirtieth of the 20th century public discussions were taking place encompassing the standpoint of the Lutheran orthodoxy and the 19th century hysterical Russificationism.The historiography of the Soviet period added a measure of ideologized anti-Catholic propaganda. All these interpretations are nowadys sometimes to be met with in a single self-contradictory and yet mutually interdependent hotchpotch. As a kind of exception to this general trend one notices the works of the researchers of Latgale cultural heritage (M. Boiko, S. Kalvane, P. Zeile, etc/) and art historians (K. Ogle and others). These scholars are accentuating the profound contribution of the Order of Jesuits to the formation of the cultural processes in Latvia and the whole Baltic region. It is a comparatively new trendency within the hisotoriography and the intellectual life in general. The well-known Church historian John Meily has written that the history of the Jesuits originated at the intersection of the MiddleAges and the Modern times. The Jesuits are compressed between two epochs - the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. They have acquired some of the features of the Scholastic thought and have taken from the Renaissance the methods of humanism and the vision of the world, thus creating their own specific method ane their world-view. The Jesuits are not confined within the walls of a monastery, as it was characteristic of the monasticisn of the Middle Ages. They live among the people and share the concerns of their spiritual and material needs. If in the Middle Ages the monks were leaving the world, and the people to meet with God, the Jesuits stepped out into the world to meet the people and God there. The Jesuits became the first religious order of the Catholic Church that fully understood the importance of education and sciences, and they accepted these activities as their main means of serving God.The world had not witnessed before such a wide-spread network of schools and other educational establishments as a internationlly extended system. These schools became the centres of culture and sciences; they staged theatrical and ballet performances, established astronomical observatories. They involved the students in lay service, fostered their spiritual growth, helped them to acquire modes of Spiritual Exerises, so as to realize their faith in serving everywhere: in prisons, on the streets, in orphanages and old people's homes. Jesuits entered the God-forsaken and the people-forsaken peripheral locations, yet they did not dwell therein. Going into such peripheral, marginal places appeared as a stumbling block, originating in the Renaissance thought about the requirement to disseminate new ideas from the Centre, and somtimes - just the opposite - from one periferal location to the other, thus exchanging of experiences and human resources. The Jesuits were to be met everywhere, where new ideas were generated, experiments performed; they were generators themselve - the ones that disseminated the results of the new ideas and experiments in the perifery. This was the case concerning the Baltic (former Livonia), which had become during the Reformation a kind of periferal region - many Renaissance ideas arrived here from the Western and Southern parts of Europe, due to the religious education and cultural activities of the Order of Jesuits.