The Age of the Reformation

by Preserved Smith

SECTION 4. THE COMPANY OF JESUS

If the Counter-reformation was in part a pure reaction to medievalism it was in part also a religious revival. If this was stimulated by the Protestant {397} example, it was also the outcome of the rising tide of Catholic pietism in the fifteenth century. Still more was it the answer to a demand on the part of the church for an instrument with which to combat the dangers of heresy and to conquer spiritually the new worlds of heathenism.

Great crises in the church have frequently produced new revivals of monasticism. From Benedict to Bernard, from Bernard to Francis and Dominic, from the friars to the Jesuits, there is an evolution in the adaptation of the monastic life to the needs of Latin Christianity. Several new orders, [Sidenote: New monastic orders] all with more or less in common, started in the first half of the sixteenth century. Under Leo X there assembled at Rome a number of men united by the wish to renew their spiritual lives by religious exercises. From this Oratory of Divine Love, as it was called, under the inspiration of Gaetano di Tiene and John Peter Caraffa, arose the order of Theatines, [Sidenote: 1524] a body of devoted priests, dressing not in a special garb but in ordinary priest's robes, who soon attained a prominent position in the Catholic reformation. Their especial task was to educate the clergy.

The order of the Capuchins [Sidenote: c. 1526] was an offshoot of the Franciscans. It restored the relaxed discipline of the early friars and its members went about teaching the poor. Notwithstanding the blow to it when its third vicar Bernardino Ochino became a Calvinist, it flourished and turned its energies especially against the heretics.

Of the other orders founded at this time, the Barnabites (1530), the Somascians (1532), the Brothers of Mercy (1540), the Ursulines (1537), only the common characteristics can be pointed out. It is notable that they were all animated by a social ideal; not only the salvation of the individual soul but also the {398} amelioration of humanity was now their purpose. Some of the orders devoted themselves to the education of children, some to home missions or foreign missions, some to nursing the sick, some to the rescue of fallen women. The evolution of monasticism had already pointed the way to these tasks; its apogee was reached with the organization of the Company of Jesus.

[Sidenote: Typical Jesuit]

The Jesuit has become one of those typical figures, like the Puritan and the buccaneer. Though less exploited in fiction than he was in the days of Dumas, Eugene Sue and Zola, the mention of his name calls to the imagination the picture of a tall, spare man, handsome, courteous, obliging, but subtle, deceitful, dangerous, capable of nursing the blackest thoughts and of sanctioning the worst actions for the advancement of his cause. The Lettres Provinciales of Pascal first stamped on public opinion the idea that the Jesuit was necessarily immoral and venomous; the implacable hatred of Michelet and Symonds has brought them as criminals before the bar of history. On the other hand they have had their apologists and friends even outside their own order. Let us neither praise nor blame, but seek to understand them.

[Sidenote: Loyola, c. 1493-1556]

In that memorable hour when Luther said his ever-lasting nay at Worms one of his auditors was—or might have been for she was undoubtedly present in the city—Germaine de Foix, the wife of the Margrave John of Brandenburg. The beautiful and frivolous young woman had been by a former marriage the second wife of Ferdinand the Catholic and at his court she had been known and worshipped by a young page of good family, Iñigo de Loyola. Like the romantic Spaniard that he was he had taken, as he told later, for his lady "no duchess nor countess but one far higher" and to her he paid court in the genuine spirit of old chivalry. Not that this prevented him from addressing {399} less disinterested attentions to other ladies, for, if something of a Don Quixote he was also something of a Don Juan. Indeed, at the carnival of 1515, his "enormous misdemeanors" had caused him to be tried before a court of justice and little did his plea of benefit of clergy avail him, for the judge failed to find a tonsure on his head "even as large as a seal on a papal bull," and he was probably punished severely.

Loyola was a Basque, and a soldier to his fingertips. When the French army invaded Spain he was given command of the fortress of Pampeluna. Defending it bravely against desperate odds he was wounded [Sidenote: May 23, 1521] in the leg with a cannon ball and forced to yield. The leg was badly set and the bone knit crooked. With indomitable courage he had it broken and reset, stretched on racks and the protruding bone sawed off, but all the torture, in the age before anaesthetics, was in vain. The young man of about twenty-eight—the exact year of his birth is unknown—found himself a cripple for life.

To while away the long hours of convalescence he asked for the romances of chivalry but was unable to get them and read in their place legends of the saints and a life of Christ by Ludolph of Saxony. His imagination took fire at the new possibilities of heroism and of fame. "What if you should be a saint like Dominic or Francis?" he asked himself, "ay, what if you should even surpass them in sanctity?" His choice was fixed. He took Madonna for his lady and determined to become a soldier of Christ.

As soon as he was able to move he made a pilgrimage to Seville and Manresa and there dedicated his arms in a church in imitation of the knights he had read about in Amadis of Gaul. Then, with a general confession and much fasting and mortification of the flesh, began a period of doubt and spiritual anguish {400} that has sometimes been compared with that of Luther. Both were men of strong will and intellect, both suffered from the sense of sin. But Luther's development was somewhat quieter and more normal—if, indeed, in the psychology of conversion so carefully studied by James, the quieter is the more normal. At any rate where Luther had one vision on an exceptional occasion, Loyola had hundreds and had them daily. Ignatius saw the Trinity as a clavichord with three strings, the miracle of transubstantiation as light in bread, Satan as a glistening serpent covered with bright, mysterious eyes, Jesus as "a big round form shining as gold," and the Trinity again as "a ball of fire."

But with all the visions he kept his will fixed on his purpose. [Sidenote: 1523] At first this took the form of a vow to preach to the infidels and he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, only to be turned back by the highest Christian authority in that region, the politically-minded Franciscan vicar.

[Sidenote: 1524]

On returning to Spain he went to Barcelona and started to learn Latin with boys, for his education as a gentleman had included nothing but reading and writing his own tongue. Thence he went to the university of Alcalá where he won disciples but was imprisoned for six weeks by the Inquisition and forbidden to hold meetings with them. Practically the same experience was repeated at Salamanca where he was detained by the Holy Office for twenty-two days and again prohibited from holding religious meetings. Thus he was chased out of Spain by the church he sought to serve. Turning his steps to Paris he entered the College of Montaigu, and, if he here was free from the Inquisition he was publicly whipped by the college authorities as a dangerous fanatic. Nevertheless, here he gathered his first permanent disciples, Peter Le Fèvre of Savoy, Francis Xavier of Pampeluna and two Castilians, {401} James Laynez and Alfonso Salmeron. The little man, hardly over five feet two inches high, deformed and scarred, at the age of thirty-five, won men to him by his smile, as of a conqueror in pain, by his enthusiasm, his mission and his book.

[Sidenote: The Spiritual Exercises]

If one reckons the greatness of a piece of literature not by the beauty of the style or the profundity of the thought but by the influence it has exercised over men, the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius will rank high. Its chief sources were the meditation and observation of its author. If he took some things from Garcia de Cisneros, some from The Imitation of Christ, some from the rules of Montaigu, where he studied, far more he took from the course of discipline to which he had subjected himself at Manresa. The psychological soundness of Loyola's method is found in his discovery that the best way to win a man to an ideal is to kindle his imagination. His own thought was imaginative to the verge of abnormality and the means which he took to awaken and artificially to stimulate this faculty in his followers were drastic in the extreme.

The purpose of the Exercises is stated in the axiom that "Man was created to praise, reverence and serve God our Lord and thereby to save his soul." To fit a man for this work the spiritual exercises were divided into four periods called weeks, though each period might be shortened or lengthened at the discretion of the director. The first week was devoted to the consideration of sin; the second to that of Christ's life as far as Palm Sunday; the third to his passion; and the fourth to his resurrection and ascension. Knowing the tremendous power of the stimulant to be administered Ignatius inserted wise counsels of moderation in the application of it. But, subject only to the condition that the novice was not to be plied beyond what he could bear, he was directed in the first week of {402} solitary meditation to try to see the length, breadth and depth of hell, to hear the lamentations and blasphemies of the damned, to smell the smoke and brimstone, to taste the bitterness of tears and of the worm of conscience and to feel the burnings of the unquenchable fire. In like manner in the other weeks he was to try to picture to himself in as vivid a manner as possible all the events brought before his mind, whether terrible or glorious. The end of all this discipline was to be the complete subjection of the man to the church. The Jesuit was directed ever "to praise all the precepts of the church, holding the mind ready to find reasons for her defence and nowise in her offence." There must be an unconditional surrender to her not only of the will but of the intelligence. "To make sure of being right in all things," says Loyola, "we ought always to hold by the principle that the white I see I should believe to be black if the hierarchical church were so to rule it."

Inspired by this ideal the small body of students, agreeing to be called henceforth the Company of Jesus—a military term, the socii being the companions or followers of a chief in arms—took vows to live in poverty and chastity [Sidenote: August 15, 1540] and to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. With this object they set out to Venice and then turned towards Rome for papal approbation of their enterprise. Their first reception was chilling, but they gradually won a few new recruits and Ignatius drafted the constitution [Sidenote: September 27, 1540] for a new order which was handed to the pope by Contarini and approved in the bull Regimini militantis ecclesiae, which quotes from the formula of the Jesuits:

Whoever wishes to fight for God under the standard
of the cross and to serve the Lord alone and his vicar on
earth the Roman pontiff shall, after a solemn vow of
perpetual chastity, consider that he is part of a society
instituted chiefly for these ends, for the profit of souls in
{403}
life and Christian doctrine, for the propagation of the
faith through public preaching, the ministry of God's
word, spiritual exercises and works of charity, and
especially for the education of children and ignorant persons
in Christianity, for the hearing of confession and for the
giving of spiritual consolation.

Moreover it is stated that the members of the new order should be bound by a vow of special obedience to the pope and should hold themselves ready at his behest to propagate the faith among Turks, infidels, heretics or schismatics, or to minister to believers.

[Sidenote: April 1547]

Ignatius was chosen first general of the order. The pope then cancelled the previous limitation of the number of Jesuits to 60 [Sidenote: 1544] and later issued a large charter of privileges for them. [Sidenote: 1549] They were exempted from taxes and episcopal jurisdiction; no member was to be allowed to accept any dignity without the general's consent, nor could any member be assigned to the spiritual direction of women. Among many other grants was one to the effect that the faithful might confess to them and receive communion without permission of their parish priests. A confirmation of all privileges and a grant of others was made in a bull of July 21, 1550.

[Sidenote: Organization of the Society of Jesus, 1550]

The express end of the order being the world-domination of the church, its constitution provided a marvellously apt organization for this purpose. Everything was to be subordinate to efficiency. Detachment from the world went only so far as necessary for the completer conquest of the world. Asceticism, fasting, self-discipline were to be moderate so as not to interfere with health. No special dress was prescribed, for it might be a hindrance rather than a help. The purpose being to win over the classes rather than the masses, the Jesuits were particular to select as members only robust men of agreeable appearance, calm minds and {404} eloquence. That an aspirant to the order should also be rich and of good family was not requisite but was considered desirable. Men of bad reputation, intractible, choleric, or men who had ever been tainted with heresy, were excluded. No women were recruited.

After selection, the neophyte was put on a probation of two years. He was then assigned to the class of scholars for further discipline. He was later placed either as a temporal coadjutor, a sort of lay brother charged with inferior duties, or as a spiritual coadjutor, who took the three irrevocable vows. Finally, there was a class, to which admission was gained after long experience, the Professed of Four Vows, the fourth being one of special obedience to the pope. A small number of secret Jesuits who might be considered as another class, were charged with dangerous missions and with spying.

[Sidenote: General]

Over the order was placed a General who was practically, though not theoretically, absolute. On paper he was limited by the possibility of being deposed and by the election, independently of his influence, of an "admonitor" and some assistants. In practice the only limitations of his power were the physical ones inherent in the difficulties of administering provinces thousands of miles away. From every province, however, he received confidential reports from a multitude of spies.

The spirit of the order was that of absolute, unquestioning, blind obedience. The member must obey his superior "like a corpse which can be turned this way or that, or a rod that follows every impulse, or a ball of wax that might be moulded in any form." The ideal was an old one; the famous perinde ac cadaver itself dates back to Francis of Assisi, but nowhere had the ideal been so completely realized as by the companions of Ignatius. In fact, in this as in other respects, the {405} Jesuits were but a natural culmination of the evolution of monasticism. More and more had the orders tended to become highly disciplined, unified bodies, apt to be used for the service of the church and of the pope.

[Sidenote: Growth]

The growth of the society was extraordinarily rapid. By 1544 they had nine establishments, two each in Italy, Spain and Portugal and one each in France, Germany and the Netherlands. When Loyola [Sidenote: July 31, 1556] died Jesuits could be found in Japan and Brazil, in Abyssinia and on the Congo; in Europe they were in almost every country and included doctors at the largest universities and papal nuncios to Poland and Ireland. There were in all twelve provinces, about 65 residences and 1500 members.

Their work was as broad as their field, but it was dedicated especially to three several tasks: education, war against the heretic, and foreign missions. Neither of the first two was particularly contemplated by the founders of the order in their earliest period. At that time they were rather like the friars, popular preachers, catechists, confessors and charitable workers. But the exigencies of the time called them to supply other needs. The education of the young was the natural result of their desire to dominate the intellectual class. Their seminaries, at first adapted only to their own uses, soon became famous.

[Sidenote: Combating heresy]

In the task of combating heresy they were also the most successful of the papal cohorts. Though not the primary purpose of the order, it soon came to be regarded as their special field. The bull canonizing Loyola [Sidenote: 1623] speaks of him as an instrument raised up by divine providence especially to combat that "foulest of monsters" Martin Luther. Beginning in Italy the Jesuits revived the nearly extinct popular piety. Going among the poor as missionaries they found many who knew no prayers, many who had not confessed for {406} thirty or forty years, and a host of priests as blind as their flocks.

In most other Catholic countries they had to fight for the right to exist. In France the Parlement of Paris was against them, and even after the king had granted them permission to settle in the country in 1553, the Parlement accused them of jeoparding the faith, destroying the peace of the church, supplanting the old orders and tearing down more than they built up. Nevertheless they won their way to a place of great power, until, sitting at the counsels of the monarch, they were able to crush their Catholic opponents, the Jansenists, as completely as their Protestant enemies were crushed by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

In the Netherlands the Jesuits were welcomed as allies of the Spanish power. The people were impressed by their zeal, piety, and disinterestedness, and in the Southern provinces they were able to bear away a victory after a fierce fight with Calvinism.

In England, where they showed the most devotion, they met with the least success. The blood of their martyrs did not sow the ground with Catholic seed, and they were expelled by statute under Elizabeth.

[Sidenote: Jesuit victories]

The most striking victories of the Jesuits were won in Central Europe. When the first of their company, Peter Faber, entered Germany in 1540, he found nearly the whole country Lutheran. The Wittelsbachs of Bavaria were almost the only reigning family that never compromised with the Reformers and in them the Jesuits found their starting point and their most constant ally. Called to the universities of Ingolstadt and Vienna their success was great and from these foci they radiated in all directions, to Poland, to Hungary, to the Rhine. One of their most eminent missionaries was Peter Canisius, whose catechism, published in 1555 in three forms, short, long and middle, and in two {407} languages, German and Latin, became the chief spiritual text-book of the Catholics. The idea and selection of material was borrowed from Luther and he was imitated also in the omission of all overt polemic material. This last feature was, of course, one of the strongest.

[Sidenote: Missions to heathens]

But the conquests of the Company of Jesus were as notable in lands beyond Europe as they were in the heart of civilization. They were not, indeed, pioneers in the field of foreign missions. The Catholic church showed itself from an early period solicitous for the salvation of the natives of America and of the Far East. The bull of Alexander VI stated that his motive in dividing the newly discovered lands between Spain and Portugal was chiefly to assist in the propagation of the faith. That the Protestants at first developed no activity in the conversion of the heathen was partly because their energies were fully employed in securing their own position, and still more, perhaps, because, in the sixteenth century, Spain and Portugal had a practical monopoly of the transoceanic trade and thus the only opportunities of coming into contact with the natives.

Very early Dominican and Franciscan friars went to America. Though some of them exemplified Christian virtues that might well have impressed the natives, the greater number relied on the puissant support of the Toledo sword. Though the natives, as heathen born in invincible ignorance, were exempt from the jurisdiction of the inquisitor, they were driven by terror if not by fire, into embracing the religion of their conquerors. If some steadfast chiefs told the missionaries that they would rather go to hell after death than live for ever with the cruel Christians, the tribes as a whole, seeing their dreaded idols overthrown and their temples uprooted, embraced the religion of the stronger God, as they quailed before his {408} votaries. Little could they understand of the mysteries of the faith, and in some places long continued to worship Christ and Mary with the ritual and attributes of older deities. But nominally a million of them were converted by 1532, and when the Jesuits arrived a still more successful effort was made to win over the red man. The important mission in Brazil, served by brave and devoted brothers of Ignatius, achieved remarkable results, whereas in Paraguay the Jesuits founded a state completely under their own tutelage.

In the Far East the path of the missionary was broken by the trader. At Goa the first ambassadors of Christ were friars, and here they erected a cathedral, a convent, and schools for training native priests. But the greatest of the missionaries to this region was Francis Xavier, [Sidenote: Xavier, 1506-52] the companion of Loyola. Not forgetting the vow which he, together with all the first members of the society, had taken, [Sidenote: April 1541] he sailed from Lisbon, clothed with extraordinary powers. The pope made him his vicar for all the lands bathed by the Indian Ocean, [Sidenote: May, 1542] and the king of Portugal gave him official sanction and support. Arriving at Goa he put himself in touch with the earlier missionaries and began an earnest fight against the immorality of the port, both Christian and native. His motto "Amplius" led him soon to virgin fields, among the natives of the coast and of Ceylon. In 1545 he went to Cochin-China, thence to the Moluccas and to Japan, preaching in every place and baptizing by the thousand and ten thousand.

Though Xavier was a man of brilliant endowments and though he was passionately devoted to the cause, to neither of his good qualities did he owe the successes, whether solid or specious, with which he has been credited. In the first place, judged by the standards of modern missions, the superficiality of his work was {409} almost inconceivable. He never mastered one of the languages of the countries which he visited. He learned by rote a few sentences, generally the creed and some phrases on the horrors of hell, and repeated them to the crowds attracted to him by the sound of a bell. He addressed himself to masses rather than to individuals and he regarded the culmination of his work as being merely the administration of baptism and not the conversion of heart or understanding. Thus, he spent hours in baptizing, with all possible speed, sick and dying children, believing that he was thus rescuing their souls from limbo. Probably many of his adult converts never understood the meaning of the application of water and oil, salt and spittle, that make up the ritual of Catholic baptism.

[Sidenote: Use of force]

In the second place, what permanent success he achieved was due largely to the invocation of the aid of the civil power. One of the most illuminating of Xavier's letters is that written to King John of Portugal on January 20, 1548, in which he not only makes the reasonable request that native Christians be protected from persecution by their countrymen, but adds that every governor should take such measures to convert them as would insure success to his preaching, for without such support, he says, the cause of the gospel in the Indies would be desperate, few would come to baptism and those who did come would not profit much in religion. Therefore he urges that every governor, under whose rule many natives were not converted, should be mulcted of all his goods and imprisoned on his return to Portugal. What the measures applied by the Portugese officers must have been, under such pressure, can easily be inferred from a slight knowledge of their savage rule.

It has been said that every organism carries in {410} itself the seeds of its own decay. The premature corruption [Sidenote: Decay of Jesuits] of the order was noticed by its more earnest members quite early in its career. The future general Francis Borgia wrote: [Sidenote: 1560] "The time will come when the Company will be completely absorbed in human sciences without any application to virtue; ambition, pride and arrogance will rule." The General Aquaviva said explicitly, [Sidenote: 1587] "Love of the things of this world and the spirit of the courtier are dangerous diseases in our Company. Almost in spite of us the evil creeps in little by little under the fair pretext of gaining princes, prelates, and the great ones of the world."

A principal cause of the ultimate odium in which the Jesuits were held as well as of their temporary successes, was their desire for speedy results. [Sidenote: Efficiency] Every one has noticed the immense versatility of the Jesuits and their superficiality. They produced excellent scholars of a certain rank, men who could decipher Latin inscriptions, observe the planets, publish libraries of historical sources, of casuistry and apologetic, or write catechisms or epigrams. They turned with equal facility to preaching to naked savages and to the production of art for the most cultivated peoples in the world. And yet they have rarely, if ever, produced a great scholar, a great scientist, a great thinker, or even a great ascetic. They were not founded for such purposes; they were founded to fight for the church and they did that with extraordinary success.

[Sidenote: Failure]

But their very efficiency became, as pursued for its own sake it must always become, soulless. In terms suggested by the Great War, the Jesuits were the incarnation of religious militarism. To set up an ideal of aggrandizement, to fill a body of men with a fanatical enthusiasm for that ideal and then to provide an organization and discipline marvellously adapted to conquest, that is what the Prussian schoolmaster who {411} proverbially won Sadowa, and the Jesuits who beat back the Reformation, have known how to do better than anyone else. Their methods took account of everything except the conscience of mankind.

Moreover, there can be no doubt that in their eager pursuit of tangible results they lowered the ethical standards of the church. Wishing to open her doors as widely as possible to all men, and finding that they could not make all men saints, they brought down the requirements for admission to the average human level. One cannot take the denunciations of Jesuitical "casuistry" and "probabilism" at their face value, but one can find in Jesuit works on ethics, and in some of their early works, very dangerous compromises with the world. [Sidenote: Jesuitical compromises] One reads in their books how the bankrupt, without sinning mortally, may defraud his creditors of his mortaged goods; how the servant may be excused for pilfering from his master; how a rich man may pardonably deceive the tax-collector; how the adulteress may rightfully deny her sin to her husband, even on oath.[1] Doubtless these are extreme instances, but that they should have been possible at all is a melancholy warning to all who would, even for pious ends, substitute inferior imitations for genuine morality.

[1] Substantiation of these statements in excerpts from Jesuit works of moral theology, printed in C. Mirbt: Quellen zur Geschichte des Papst-tums[3], 1911, pp. 447 ff.