A Candid History of the Jesuits

by Joseph McCabe

THE ORIGIN OF THE SOCIETY

In the early summer of the year 1521, some months after Martin Luther had burned the Pope's bull at Wittenberg and lit the fire of the Reformation, a young Basque soldier lay abed in his father's castle at the foot of the Pyrenees, contemplating the wreck of his ambition. Iñigo of Loyola was the youngest son in a large family of ancient lineage and little wealth. He had lost his mother at an early date, and had been placed by a wealthy aunt at court, where he learned to love the flash of swords, the smile of princes, the softness of silk and of women's eyes, and all the hard deeds and rich rewards of the knight's career. From the court he had gone to the camp, and had set himself sternly to the task of cutting an honourable path back to court. Fearless in war, skilful in sport and in martial exercises, refined in person, cheerful in temper, and ardent in love, the young noble had seen before him a long avenue of knightly adventure and gracious recompense. He was, in 1521, in his thirtieth year of age, or near it—his birth-year is variously given as 1491 or 1493; a clean-built, sinewy little man, with dark lustrous eyes flashing in his olive-tinted face, and thick black hair crowning his lofty forehead. And a French ball at the siege of Pampeluna had, at one stroke, broken his leg and shattered his ambition.

It took some time to realise the ruin of his ambition. The chivalrous conquerors at Pampeluna had treated their brave opponent with distinction, and had, after dressing his wounds, sent him to the Loyola castle in the Basque provinces, where his elder brother had brought the surgeons to make him fit for the field once more. The bone, they found, had been badly set; it must be broken again and re-set. He bore their operations without a moan, and then lay for weeks in pain and fever. He still trusted to return to the camp and win the favour of a certain great lady—probably the daughter of the Dowager-Queen of Naples—whose memory he secretly cherished. Indeed, on the feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul, he spoke of it with confidence; he told his brother that the elder apostle had entered the dark chamber and healed him on the eve of the festival. Unhappily he found, when the fever had gone, that the second setting of his leg had been so ill done that a piece of bone projected below the knee, and the right leg was shorter than the left. Again he summoned the mediæval surgeons and their appalling armoury, and they sawed off the protruding piece of bone and stretched his leg on a rack they used for such purposes; and not a cry or curse came from the tense lips. But the right leg still refused to meet its fellow, and shades gathered about Iñigo's glorious prospect of life. A young man who limps can hardly hope to reach a place of honour in the camp, or the gardens of the palace, or the hearts of women. Talleyrand, later, would set out on his career with a limp; and Talleyrand would become a diplomatist.

Iñigo lay in the stout square castle of rugged stone, which is now reverently enclosed, like a jewel, in a vast home of the Jesuits. It then stood alone in a beautiful valley, just at the foot of the last southern slopes of the Pyrenees, about a mile from the little town of Azpeitia. The mind of the young Basque heaved with confused and feverish dreams as he lay there, in the summer heat, beside the wreck of his ambition. He called for books of knight-errantry, to while away the dreary days, but there were none in the Loyola castle, and someone—a pious sister, perhaps—brought him a Life of Christ and a Flowers of the Saints. For lack of anything better he read them: at first fingering the leaves with the nearest approach to disdain that a Christian soldier dare admit, then starting with interest, at length flushing with enthusiasm. What was this but another form of chivalry? Nay, when you reflected, it was the only chivalry worth so fierce a devotion as his. Here was a way of winning a fair lady, the Queen of Heaven, whose glances were worth more than the caresses of all the dames in Castile: here was a monarch to serve, whose court outshone the courts of France and Spain as the sun outshines the stars: here were adventures that called for a higher spirit than the bravado of the soldier.

The young Basque began to look upon a new world from the narrow windows of the old castle. Down the valley was Azpeitia, and even there one could find monsters and evil knights to slay in the cause of Mary. Southward were the broad provinces of Spain, full of half-converted Moors and Jews and ever-flourishing vices. Across the hills and the seas were other kingdoms, calling just as loudly for a new champion of God and Mary. One field, far away at the edge of the world, summoned him with peremptory voice; after all the Crusades the sites in the Holy Land were still trodden by the feet of blaspheming Turks. The blood began to course once more in the veins of the soldier.

During the winter that followed his friends noticed that he was making a wonderful chronicle of the lives of Christ and His saints. He was skilled in all courtly accomplishments—they did not include learning—and could write, and illuminate very prettily, sonnets to the secret lady of his inner shrine. Now he used his art to make a pious chronicle, with the words and deeds of Christ in vermilion and gold, the life of Mary in blue, and the stories of the saints in the less royal colours of the rainbow, and his dark pale face was lit by a strange light. There were times when this new light flickered or faded, and the fleshly queen of his heart seemed to place white arms about him, and the sunny earth fought with the faint vision of a far-off heaven. Then he prayed, and scourged himself, and vowed that he would be the knight of Christ and Mary; and—so he told his followers long afterwards—the heavy stone castle shook and rumbled with the angry passing of the demon. He told them also that he had at the time a notion of burying himself in the Carthusian monastery at Seville, and sent one to inquire concerning its way of life; but such a design is so little in accord with his knight-errant mood that we cannot think he seriously entertained it.

By the spring the struggle had ended and Ignatius—he exchanged his worldly name for that of a saint-model—set out in quest of spiritual adventure. The "sudden revolution," as Crétineau-Joly calls his conversion, had occupied about nine months. Indeed, friends and foes of the Jesuits have conspired to obscure the development of his feelings: the friends in order that they may recognise a miracle in the conversion, the foes in order that they may make it out to have been no conversion at all, but a transfer of selfish ambition from the camp to the Church. Whatever be the truth about Iñigo's earlier morals, he had certainly received a careful religious education in boyhood, and he would just as certainly not learn scepticism at the court set up by Ferdinand and Isabella. His belief that he had a vision of St. Peter, a few weeks after receiving his wound and before he read the pious books, shows that he had kept a vivid religious faith in the camp. Some looseness of conduct would not be inconsistent with this, especially in Spain, but the darker descriptions of his adolescent ways which some writers give are not justified. "He was prone to quarrels and amatory folly," is all that the most candid of his biographers says. Let us grant the hot Basque blood a quick sense of honour and a few love-affairs. On the whole, Iñigo seems to have been an officer of the stricter sort, and a thorough Catholic. Hence we can understand that, as earth grows dark and cheerless for him, and the casual reading brings before him in vivid colouring the vision of faith, his fervent imagination is gradually won, and he sincerely devotes his arms to the service of Christ and Mary.

Piously deceiving his brother as to his destination, he set out on a mule in the month of March. He would go to the shrine of Our Lady at Montserrat, to ask a blessing on his enterprise, and then cross the sea to convert the Mohammedans in Palestine. His temper is seen in an adventure by the way. He fell in with one of the Moors who had put on a thin mantle of Christian profession in order that they might be allowed to remain in Spain, and talked to him of Our Lady of Montserrat. Being far from the town and the ears of Inquisitors, the Moor spoke lightly of the Mother of Christ, and, when the convert showed heat, fled at a gallop. Ignatius wondered, with his hand on his sword, whether or no his new ideal demanded that he should follow and slay the man. He left the point to God, or to his mule, and was taken on the road to Montserrat.