Having thus far treated the organization of the Jesuits as implicit in Loyola's own conception and administration, I ought to add that it received definite form from his successor, Lainez. The founder pronounced the Constitutions in 1553. But they were thoroughly revised after his death in 1558, at which date they first issued from the press. Lainez, again, supplemented these laws with a perpetual commentary, which is styled the Declarations. These contain the bulk of those easements and indulgent interpretations, whereby the strictness of the original rules was explained away, and an almost unbounded elasticity was communicated to the system.
It would be rash to pronounce a decided opinion upon the much disputed question, whether, in addition to their Constitutions and Declarations, the Jesuits were provided with an esoteric code of rules known as Monita Secreta.[169] The existence of such a manual, which was supposed to contain the very pith of Jesuitical policy, has been confidently asserted and no less confidently denied. In the absence of direct evidence, it may be worth quoting two passages from Sarpi's Letters, which prove that this keen-sighted observer believed the Society to be governed in its practice by statutes inaccessible to all but its most trusted members. 'I have always admired the policy of the Jesuits,' he writes in 1608, 'and their method of maintaining secrecy. Their Constitutions are in print, and yet one cannot set eyes upon a copy. I do not mean their Rules, which are published at Lyons, for those are mere puerilities; but the digest of laws which guide their conduct of the order, and which they keep concealed. Every day many members leave, or are expelled from the Company; and yet their artifices are not exposed to view.'[170] In another letter, of the date 1610, Sarpi returns to the same point. 'The Jesuits before this Aquaviva was elected General were saints in comparison with what they afterwards became. Formerly they had not mixed in affairs of state or thought of governing cities. Since then, they have indulged a hope of controlling the whole world.
And I am sure that the least part of their Cabala is in the Ordinances and Constitutions of 1570. All the same, I am very glad to possess even these. Their true Cabala they never communicate to any but men who have been well tested, and proved by every species of trial; nor is it possible for those who have been initiated into it, to think of retiring from the order, since the congregation, through their excellent management of its machinery, know how to procure the immediate death of any such initiated member who may wish to leave their ranks.'[171] Probably the mistake which Sarpi and the world made, was in supposing that the Jesuits needed a written code for their most vital action. Being a potent and life-penetrated organism, the secret of their policy was not such as could be reduced to rule. It was not such as, if reduced to rule, could have been plastic in the affairs of public importance which the Company sought to control. Better than rule or statute, it was biological function. The supreme deliberative bodies of the order created, transmitted, and continuously modified its tradition of policy. This tradition some member, partially initiated into their counsels, may have reduced to precepts in the published Monita Secreta of 1612. But the quintessential flame which breathed a breath of life into the fabric of the Jesuits through two centuries of organic activity, was far too vivid and too spiritual to be condensed in any charter. A friar and a jurist, like Sarpi, expected to discover some controlling code. The public, grossly ignorant of evolutionary laws in the formation of social organisms, could not comprehend the non-existence of this code. Adventurers supplied the demand from their knowledge of the ruling policy. But like the Liber Trium Impostorum we may regard the Monita Secreta of the Jesuits as an ex post facto fabrication.
There is no need to trace the further history of the Jesuits. Their part in the Counter-Reformation has rather been exaggerated than insufficiently recognized. Though it was incontestably considerable, we cannot now concede, as Macaulay in his random way conceded to this Company, the spolia opima of down-beaten Protestantism. Without the ecclesiastical reform which originated in the Tridentine Council; without the gold and sword of Spain; without the stakes and prisons of the Inquisition; without the warfare against thought conducted by the Congregation of the Index; the Jesuits alone could not have masterfully governed the Catholic revival. That revival was a movement of world-historical importance, in which they participated. It was their fortune to find forces in the world which they partially understood; it was their merit to know how to manipulate those forces; it was their misfortune and their demerit that they proved themselves incapable of diverting those forces to any wholesome end. In Italy a succession of worldly Popes, Paul III., Julius III., Pius IV., and Gregory XIII., heaped favors and showered wealth upon the order. The Jesuits incarnated the political spirit of the Papacy at this epoch; they lent it a potency for good and evil which the decrepit but still vigorous institution arrogated to itself. They adapted its anachronisms with singular adroitness to the needs of modern society. They transfused their throbbing blood into its flaccid veins, until it became doubtful whether the Papacy had been absorbed into the Jesuits, or whether the Jesuits had remodeled the Papacy for contemporary uses. But this tendency in the aspiring order to identify itself with Rome, this ambition to command the prestige of Rome as leverage for carrying out its own designs, stirred the resentment of haughty and intransigeant Pontiffs. The Jesuits were not beloved by Paul IV., Pius V., and Sixtus V.
It remains, however, to inquire in what the originality, the effective operation, and the modifying influence of the Jesuit Society consisted during the period with which we are concerned. It was their object to gain control over Europe by preaching, education, the direction of souls, and the management of public affairs. In each of these departments their immediate success was startling; for they labored with zeal, and they adapted their methods to the requirements of the age. Yet, in the long run, art, science, literature, religion, morality and politics, all suffered from their interference. By preferring artifice to reality, affectation to sincerity, shams and subterfuges to plain principle and candor, they confused the conscience and enfeebled the intellect of Catholic Europe. When we speak of the Jesuit style in architecture, rhetoric and poetry, of Jesuit learning and scholarship, of Jesuit casuistry and of Jesuit diplomacy, it is either with languid contempt for bad taste and insipidity, or with the burning indignation which systematic falsehood and corruption inspire in honorable minds.
In education, the Jesuits, if they did not precisely innovate, improved upon the methods of the grammarians which had persisted from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance. They spared no pains in training a large and competent body of professors, men of extensive culture, formed upon one uniform pattern, and exercised in the art of popularizing knowledge. These teachers were distributed over the Jesuit colleges; and in every country their system was the same. New catechisms, grammars, primers, manuals of history, enabled their pupils to learn with facility in a few months what it had cost years of painful labor to acquire under pompous pedants of the old régime. The mental and physical aptitudes of youths committed to their charge were carefully observed; and classes were adapted to various ages and degrees of capacity. Hours of recreation alternated with hours of study, so that the effort of learning should be neither irksome nor injurious to health. Nor was religious education neglected. Attendance upon daily Mass, monthly confession, and instruction in the articles of the faith, formed an indispensable part of the system. When we remember that these advantages were offered gratuitously to the public, it is not surprising that people of all ranks and conditions should have sent their boys to the Jesuit colleges. Even Protestants availed themselves of what appeared so excellent a method; and the Jesuits obtained the reputation of being the best instructors of youth.[172] It soon became the mark of a good Catholic to have frequented Jesuit schools; and in after life a pupil who had studied creditably in their colleges, found himself everywhere at home. Yet the Society took but little interest in elementary or popular education. Their object was to gain possession of the nobility, gentry, and upper middle class. The proletariat might remain ignorant; it was the destiny of such folk to be passive instruments in the hands of spiritual and temporal rulers. Nor were they always scrupulous in the means employed for taking hold on young men of distinction. One instance of the animosity they aroused, even in Italy, at an early period of their activity, will suffice. Tuscany was thrown into commotion by the discovery of their designs upon the boys they undertook to teach.
'They were so madly bent,' says Galluzzi, 'upon filling the ranks of their Company with individuals of wealth and birth, that in 1584, in the single city of Siena, under the pretense of devotion, they seduced thirty youths of the noblest and richest houses, not without great injury to their families and grief to their parents. The most notorious of these cases Was that of two sons of Pandolfo Petrucci, whose name indicates his high position in the aristocracy of Siena. These young men they got into their power by inducing them to commit a theft, and then compelled them to pledge fealty to the Society. Escaping by night in the direction of Rome, the lads were arrested by the city guards, and confessed that they had agreed to meet two Jesuits, who were waiting to conduct them on their journey.'[173]
It was, indeed, not the propagation of sound principles or liberal learning, but the aggrandizement of the order and the enforcement of Catholic usages, at which the Jesuits aimed in their scheme of education. This was noticeable in their attitude toward literature and science. Michelet has described their method in a brilliant and exact metaphor, as the attempt to counteract the poison of free thought and stimulative studies by means of vaccination. They taught the classics in expurgated editions, history in drugged epitomes, science in popular lectures. Instead of banning what M. Renan is wont to style études fortes, they undertook to emasculate these and render them innocuous. While Bruno was burned by the Inquisition for proclaiming what the Copernican discovery involved for faith and metaphysics, Father Koster at Cologne vulgarized it into something pretty and agreeable. While Scaliger and Casaubon used the humanities as a propaedeutic of the virile reason, the Jesuits contrived to sterilize and mechanize their influences by insipid rhetoric. Everywhere through Europe, by the side of stalwart thinkers, crept plausible Jesuit professors, following the light of learning like its shadow, mimicking the accent of the gods like parrots, and mocking their gestures like apes. Their adroit admixture of falsehood with truth in all departments of knowledge, their substitution of veneer for solid timber, and of pinchbeck for sterling metal, was more profitable to the end they had in view than the torture-chamber of the Inquisition or the quarantine of the Index. Mediocrities and respectabilities of every description—that is to say, the majority of the influential classes—were delighted with their method. What could be better than to see sons growing up, good Catholics in all external observances, devoted to the order of society and Mother Church, and at the same time showy Latinists, furnished with a cyclopaedia of current knowledge, glib at speechifying, ingenious in the construction of an epigram or compliment? If some of the more sensible sort grumbled that Jesuit learning was shallow, and Jesuit morality of base alloy, the reply, like that of an Italian draper selling palpable shoddy for broadcloth, came easily and cynically to the surface: Imita bene! The stuff is a good match enough! What more do you want? To produce plausible imitations, to save appearances, to amuse the mind with tricks, was the last resort of Catholicism in its warfare against rationalism. And such is the banality of human nature as a whole, that the Jesuits, those monopolists of Brummagem manufactures, achieved eminent success. Their hideous churches, daubed with plaster painted to resemble costly marbles, encrusted with stucco polished to deceive the eye, loaded with gewgaws and tinsel and superfluous ornament and frescoes, turning flat surfaces into cupolas and arcades, passed for masterpieces of architectonic beauty. The conceits of their pulpit oratory, its artificial cadences and flowery verbiage, its theatrical appeals to gross sensations, wrought miracles and converted thousands. Their sickly Ciceronian style, their sentimental books of piety, 'the worse for being warm,' the execrable taste of their poetry, their flimsy philosophy and disingenuous history, infected the taste of Catholic Europe like a slow seductive poison, flattering and accelerating the diseases of mental decadence. Sound learning died down beneath the tyranny of the Inquisition, the Index, the Council of Trent, Spain and the Papacy. A rank growth of unwholesome culture arose and flourished on its tomb under the forcing-frames of Jesuitry. But if we peruse the records of literature and science during the last three centuries, few indeed are the eminences even of a second order which can be claimed by the Company of Jesus.
The same critique applies to Jesuit morality. It was the Company's aim to control the conscience by direction and confession, and especially the conscience of princes, women, youths in high position. To do so by plain speaking and honest dealing was clearly dangerous. The world had had enough of Dominican austerity and dogmatism. To do so by open toleration and avowed cynicism did not suit the temper of the time. A reform of the monastic orders and the regular clergy had been undertaken by the Church. Pardoners, palmers, indulgence-mongers, jolly Franciscan confessors, and such-like folk were out of date. But the Jesuits were equal to the exigencies of the moment. We have seen how Ignatius recommended fishers of souls to humor queasy consciences. His successors expanded and applied the hint.—You must not begin by talking about spiritual things to people immersed in worldly interests. That is as simple as trying to fish without bait. On the contrary, you must insinuate yourself into their confidence by studying their habits, and spying out their propensities. You must appear to notice little at the first, and show yourself a good companion. When you become acquainted with the bosom sins and pleasant vices of folk in high position, you can lead them on the path of virtue at your pleasure. You must certainly tell them then that indulgence in sensuality, falsehood, fraud, violence, covetousness, and tyrannical oppression, is unconditionally wrong. Make no show of compromise with evil in the gross; but refine away the evil by distinctions, reservations, hypothetical conditions, until it disappears. Explain how hard it is to know whether a sin be venial or mortal, and how many chances there are against its being in any strict sense a sin at all. Do not leave folk to their own blunt sense of right and wrong, but let them admire the finer edge of your scalpel, while you shred up evil into morsels they can hardly see. A ready way may thus be opened for the satisfaction of every human desire without falling into theological faults. The advantages are manifest. You will be able to absolve with a clear conscience. Your penitent will abound in gratitude and open out his heart to you. You will fulfill your function as confessor and counselor. He will be secured for the sacred ends of our Society, and will contribute to the greater glory of God.—It was thus that the Jesuit labyrinth of casuistry, with its windings, turnings, secret chambers, whispering galleries, blind alleys, issues of evasion, came into existence; the whole vicious and monstrous edifice being crowned with the saving virtue of obedience, and the theory of ends justifying means. After the irony of Pascal, the condensed rage of La Chalotais, and the grave verdict of the Parlement of Paris (1762), it is not necessary now to refute the errors or to expose the abominations of this casuistry in detail.[174] Yet it cannot be wholly passed in silence here; for its application materially favored the influence of Jesuits in modern Europe.
The working of the Company, as we have seen, depended upon a skillful manipulation of apparently hard-and-fast principles. The Declarations explained away the Constitutions; and an infinite number of minute exceptions and distinctions volatilized vows and obligations into ether. Transferring the same method to the sphere of ethics, they so wrought upon the precepts of the moral law, whether expressed in holy writ, in the ecclesiastical decrees, or in civil jurisprudence, as to deprive them of their binding force. The subtlest elasticity had been gained for the machinery of the order by casuistical interpretation. A like elasticity was secured for the control and government of souls by an identical process. It was no wonder that the Jesuits became rapidly fashionable as confessors. The plainest prohibitions were as wax in their hands. The Decalogue laid down as rules for conduct: 'Thou shalt not steal;' 'Thou shalt not kill;' 'Thou shalt not commit adultery.' Christ spiritualized these rules into their essence: 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself;' 'Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath committed adultery already with her in his heart.' It is manifest that both the old and the new covenant upon which modern Christianity is supposed to rest, suffered no transactions in matters so clear to the human conscience. Jesus himself refined upon the legality of the Mosaic code by defining sin as egotism or concupiscence. But the Company of Jesus took pains in their casuistry to provide attenuating circumstances for every sin in detail. By their doctrines of the invincible erroneous conscience, of occult compensation, of equivocation, of mental reservation, of probabilism, and of philosophical sin, they afforded loopholes for the gratification of every passion, and for the commission of every crime. Instead of maintaining that any injury done to a neighbor is wrong, they multiplied instances in which a neighbor may be injured. Instead of holding firm to Christ's verdict that sexual vice is implicit in licentious desire, they analyzed the sensual modes of crude voluptuousness, taxed each in turn at arbitrary values, and provided plausible excuses for indulgence. Instead of laying it down as a broad principle that men must keep their word, they taught them how to lie with spiritual impunity and with credit to their reputation as sons of the Church. Thus the inventive genius of the casuist, bent on dissecting immorality and reducing it to classes; the interrogative ingenuity of the confessor, pruriently inquisitive into private experience; the apologetic subtlety of the director, eager to supply his penitent with salves and anodynes; were all alike and all together applied to anti-social con tamination in matters of lubricity, and to anti-social corruption in matters of dishonesty, fraud, falsehood, illegality and violence. The single doctrine of probabilism, as Pascal abundantly proved, facilitates the commission of crime; for there is no perverse act which some casuist of note has not plausibly excused.