LOYOLA.
The family-name of the founder of the Order of Jesuits, commonly called Ignatius Loyola, is stated by Ranke, Romischen Papste, vol. 1, on the authority of judicial records, to have been Don Inigo Lopez de Recalde. He was born in 1491, at the Castle of Loyola, in the province of Guipuscoa, in Spanish Biscay; and being destined to the profession of arms, was sent, at an early age, to learn the rudiments of war and gallantry, at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella. He made great proficiency in both. Endowed with a lively imagination, and an ardent temperament, he became distinguished in arms, and first applied his talents, which were destined to such different purposes, to the composition of poetry. Thus he spent his youth; and he had already reached his thirtieth year, when he was called to the defence of Pampluna against the attack of the French. On this occasion he displayed his wonted valour, and while standing in the breach of the castle, he was struck by a cannon shot which fractured his leg. A tedious confinement followed; in part occasioned, as some assert, by his great anxiety to preserve the symmetry of the limb, which led him to undergo a second operation, to remove a deformity which had been occasioned by an ill-set bone. To relieve his weariness he called for some books of chivalry, but in their place he was supplied with the Lives of Saints, and other devotional works. He read them with extraordinary eagerness. He admired the zeal of those holy men; he sympathized in their sufferings; he envied their glory; and he aspired at their eternal recompense. His thoughts and wishes were thus turned into a new channel, and he entered on the path of spiritual warfare, with his natural ardour stimulated and inflamed by religious devotion.
Accordingly, he rose from his bed of sickness, resolved to renounce the pursuits and pleasures of this world, and to dedicate himself to the service of God. Still it was not without a desperate struggle that he could accomplish this resolution. He had a passion for military fame; he had a mistress whom it was necessary to abandon; and his earthly ties were as strong, as his temperament was violent. But the new sprung influence of religion overcame all obstacles. March 24, 1522, he passed the night in prayer and fasting in the church of the Holy Virgin at Montserrat; and having hung up his arms on the altar, he consecrated himself, according to all the forms of chivalry, to her service. At the same time he made a vow to perform a pilgrimage barefoot to Jerusalem; and he carried his immediate penance to such extremes of austerity, as to enervate his frame, and to endanger his life.
As the histories which had most deeply affected his imagination were those of St. Francis and St. Dominic, so the service which he vowed to the Virgin was one of privation and errantry. Accordingly he set out privately on his pilgrimage; and after tarrying some little time at Rome, to obtain the benediction of the Pope, he proceeded to Venice, and from Venice to Cyprus and the Holy Land. He reached Jerusalem, September 4, 1523, in the guise of the poorest pilgrim; and after indulging his piety in frequent visits to all the spots which religion and tradition have consecrated, he offered his services to the ecclesiastical officers resident there, for the conversion of the Infidels, or any other holy purpose. These however were refused, and he was dismissed, somewhat peremptorily, and commanded to return to Europe.
It is curious, in reviewing the lives of some of those eminent men, who have left lasting traces of their exertions, to observe how their own inclinations, had Providence allowed them their course, would sometimes have led them away from the work which they were commissioned to accomplish. Had Wesley proved a successful missionary, which was his earliest enterprise, the society which bears his name might never have existed. Had Loyola been permitted to spend his energies in attempts at converting the Jews or Turks, his life might have been of short duration, and his name might never have been heard beyond the limits of Palestine.
When his pilgrimage was completed, and he was restored to his native country, his passion for religious enterprise and distinction did not in any degree abate; but he soon discovered that his literary acquirements were wholly insufficient for his purpose. He began therefore, at the age of thirty-three, to apply himself to the rudiments of grammar; and endeavoured to regain lost time by his zeal and industry. He commenced his labours at Barcelona, and remained there till his pious attempts to reform a convent of abandoned nuns brought down upon him the vengeance of their lovers. Thence he retired to Alcala, where an university had lately been founded by Cardinal Ximenes. Here he pursued his studies with great ardour till the year 1527: he attempted at the same time the three sciences of logic, physic, and theology, and was bent on accomplishing by a single effort what results to other men from the patient employment of much time and labour. But it was too late in life. His mind had been already formed to more active pursuits, and he could not bend it to the acquisition of learning. A confused mass of knowledge, directed by no reflection, and founded on no principles, could neither be applied nor retained; and his endeavour to grasp so much, at so great a disadvantage, ended, where it was sure to end, in entire ignorance. He discovered his failure; and thenceforward directed his energies to a more attainable end: and, though he desisted not entirely from his tardy struggles after learning, he seems rather to have looked for success from the influence which personal intercourse generally enabled him to acquire over those about him. Some lectures, however, which he delivered at Alcala, gave offence to the authorities of that university; and after an imprisonment of forty-two days, he was prohibited from public preaching, until he should have completed a course of four years in theology. It seems too, that, together with two or three companions, he had assumed a peculiar dress, which they were ordered to lay aside.
From Alcala he removed to Salamanca; but there too he had no sooner resumed his preaching than the Inquisitors laid hands on him; and after a second confinement, with severer treatment, he and his companions were again dismissed, under a sentence not widely differing from the preceding. On these occasions it was not so much the character of his sermons which gave the offence, as the circumstance that they were delivered by a layman.
Thus discouraged in his native country, he hoped to find a wider, or at least a safer, field for his exertions in France. Accordingly he departed for Paris, and arrived there in the beginning of February, 1528. His means were extremely small, and even these had been provided by the generosity of his friends. He was deprived of all that remained to him, soon after his arrival, by the treachery of a fellow-student, and had no other method of subsistence than mendicity. Thus he lived, returning, as we are informed, with his first ardour to the rudiments of literature, and striving by his instructions and example to extend the narrow limits of his influence. Even thus however he was not beneath the notice of the Inquisitor, a special emissary of Clement VII., then resident at Paris; but on this occasion he cleared himself from any charge or suspicion of heresy, and was absolved without any particular injunction or reproach. But his poverty still compelled him to employ his vacations in begging, through various countries, the means which were to maintain him during his studies; and in one of these mendicant excursions, he visited certain Spanish merchants resident in London. Doubtless his powers of observation were profitably exercised during these wanderings, and his perpetual intercourse, even in the character of a religious beggar, with all classes of all nations, could not fail to improve a penetrating intellect in the art of dealing with mankind.
By this uncommon perseverance he was enabled to finish his course of study of three years, and was admitted to the degree of Master of Arts. Then again he betook himself more especially to theology; and it was at this time (1534) that he formed the first serious design of establishing a new Order. Such a project, in the hands of so very humble a person as Loyola then was, might have seemed wild and hopeless; and the prospect of its success was not improved by the number or quality of his associates. Seven individuals, of no distinguished rank or eminence, personal or ecclesiastical, some of whom were very young and others very poor, met together in the church of Montmartre, August 15, 1534, and devoted themselves to the service of Christ. They were prepared for this solemnity by prayer and fasting. One of them, Le Fevre, who had lately been ordained, administered the sacrament to his brethren in a subterraneous chapel; and all then bound themselves, by a solemn vow, to undertake a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the conversion of the infidels of the East, and to renounce all their possessions, except such as should be necessary for that pilgrimage: or else, in case they should be unable to accomplish that design, to throw themselves at the feet of the Pope, and offer their services as his faithful and gratuitous instruments and missionaries, for the performance of any ministry that he might think proper to impose on them. Another of these devotees was Francis Xavier, a Spaniard, fifteen years younger than Loyola; who, being from the very beginning one of his most zealous disciples, was numbered in later life among the most distinguished ornaments of the society.