A Candid History of the Jesuits

by Joseph McCabe

At last he came to the steep mountain, with saw-like peaks, which rises out of the plain some twenty miles to the north-west of Barcelona, with the famous shrine of the Virgin on its flank. In the little town of Iguelada, at the foot of the mountain, he bought the rough outfit of a pilgrim—a tunic of sackcloth, a rope-girdle, a pair of rough sandals, a staff, and a gourd—and made his way up the wild slopes, among the sober cypresses, to the Benedictine monastery which guarded the shrine. For three days he knelt at the feet of one of the holiest of the monks, telling, with many tears, the story of his worldly life. Then he went again to the town, took aside a poor-clad beggar, as Francis of Assisi had done in his chronicle, and exchanged garments with him, putting the sackcloth tunic over his rags. It was the eve of the great festival of Mary, the Annunciation (March 25th), and he spent the night kneeling before the altar, as he had read of good knights doing before they took the field. In the morning he hung his sword in the shrine and set forth. From that moment we shall do well to forget that Ignatius had been a soldier, and seek some other clue to his conduct.

The next step in his journey toward Rome is described at great length in lives of the saint, yet it is not wholly intelligible. Instead of going to Barcelona, where one took ship, he went to Manresa, and his pilgrimage was postponed for nearly a year. He did not take the high road to Barcelona, says his biographer, lest he should meet the people coming to the shrine: a theory which would not only require another theory to explain it, but which gives no explanation of the year's delay. Others think that he heard there was plague in the port; though the plague would not last a year, and one may question if Ignatius would flee it. The truth seems to be that the idea of spending his life in the East was already yielding in his mind to another design: the plan of forming a Society was dimly breaking on him. He had studied the monastic life in the Benedictine monastery at Montserrat, and had brought away with him a book, written by one of their abbots, over which he would brood to some purpose. He had a vague feeling that the appointed field of adventure might be Europe.

However that may be, he took a road that led away from Barcelona, and as he limped and suffered, for he had discarded the mule and would make his pilgrimage afoot, he asked where he could find a hospital (in those days a mixture of hostel and hospital). He was taken to Manresa, a picturesque little town in one of the valleys of the district, where he lodged in the hospital for a few days, and then, instead of going to Barcelona, found an apartment and became a local celebrity. The beggar to whom he had given his clothes had, naturally, been arrested, and Ignatius was forced to tell his strange story, in order to clear the man and himself. The story grew as it passed from mouth to mouth, and it was presently understood that the dirty, barefoot, ill-clad beggar, who asked a little coarse bread at the doors, and retired to pray and scourge himself, was one of the richest grandees of the eastern provinces. Children followed "Father Sackcloth" about the streets; men sneered at his uncut nails and his long, wild black locks and thin face; women wept, and asked his prayers.

After a few months he found a cavern outside the town, at the foot of the hills, and entered upon the period of endless prayer and wild austerity in which he wrote his book, the Spiritual Exercises. He scourged himself, until the blood came, three times a day: he ate so little, and lived so intense a life, that he was sometimes found unconscious on the floor of the cave, and had to be removed and nursed; his deep black eyes seemed to gleam from the face of a corpse. Thus he lived for six months, and wrote his famous book. I need not analyse that passionate guide to the spiritual life, or consider the legend of its miraculous origin. We know from Benedictine writers that Ignatius had received at Montserrat a copy of the Exercitatorium of their abbot Cisneros, and anyone familiar with Catholic life will know that similar series of "meditations" are, and always have been, very common. There is an original plan in Ignatius's book, and the period during which the mind must successively brood over sin and hell, virtue and heaven, Christ and the devil, is boldly extended to four weeks. These are technicalities;[1] the deeply original thing in the work is its intensity, and for the source of this we need only regard those six months of fierce inner life in the cave near Manresa.

In later years Ignatius claimed that the general design of his Society, and even the chief features of its constitution, were revealed to him in that cavern. "I saw it thus at Manresa," he used to say when he was asked why such or such a feature was included. In this he is clearly wrong. His Society was, in essence and details, a regiment enlisted to fight Protestantism, and Ignatius certainly knew nothing of Protestantism as a formidable menace to the Pope's rule in 1522; one may doubt if he was yet aware of the existence of Luther. We may conclude again that he had in mind a vague alternative to his mission to the Mohammedans. Those who are disposed to believe that the Society of Jesus was in any definite sense projected by him at Manresa will find it hard to explain why for five years afterwards he still insisted that his mission was to the Turks.

In January 1523 he set out for Barcelona, trimming his nails, combing and clipping his hair, and exchanging his sack for clothes of coarse grey stuff. He did not wish to attract too much attention, he said. He was detained a few weeks at Barcelona, and begged his bread, and served the poor and the sick, in the way which was to become characteristic of the early Jesuits. On Palm Sunday he entered Rome, lost in a crowd of other pilgrims and beggars, and from there he walked on foot to Venice, whence he sailed in July. Within six months he was back in Venice. The Franciscan monks who controlled the Christian colony at Jerusalem had sent him home very quickly, fearing that his indiscreet fervour would lead to trouble with the Turks. The whole expedition was Quixotic, if it was really meant to be more than a pilgrimage, as Ignatius knew not a word of any language but Basque and Castilian. He returned to Venice in a thin ragged coat, his legs showing flagrantly through his tattered trousers, and in this guise he crossed on foot to Genoa, in hard wintry weather. By the end of February he was again in Barcelona.

For several years yet Ignatius will continue to speak of the conversion of the Turks as his chief mission, but his actions suggest that the alternative in his mind was growing larger. The year's experience had taught him that the knight of the Lord needed education, and he sat among the boys at Barcelona learning the Latin grammar and startling them by rising into literal ecstasies over the conjugation of the verb "to love." He now dressed in neat plain clothes, but begged his bread on the way to school and took every occasion to preach the gospel. Once, when he had converted a loose community of nuns, the fast young men of Barcelona, who were angry at this interference with their pleasures, sent their servants to waylay him. They nearly killed him with their staves. Many jeered at him as a hypocrite or a fanatic: many revered him, and a few youths became his first disciples. With three of these he went, after two years' study in Barcelona, to the University of Alcalà, and began his higher studies. But he was so eager to make an end of this intellectual preparation, and so busy with saving souls and gaining proselytes, that he tried to take simultaneously the successive parts of the stately mediæval curriculum, and learned very little.

His first attempt to found a Society also ended in disastrous failure. Opinion in Alcalà was divided about "the sackcloth men." Some picturesque figures were known in the religious life of Spain, but no one had yet seen such a thing as this little band of youths, led by a pale and worn man of thirty-two, who went barefoot from house to house, begging their bread, and passed from the schools in the evening to the hospitals or the homes of the poor, or stood boldly in the public squares and told sinners to repent. It was an outrage on the dignity of ecclesiastical life, and so they were denounced to the Inquisition, and two learned priests were sent from Seville to examine them. Mystics were hardly less obnoxious to the Inquisition than secret Jews and Moors, and then there was this new device of Satan which was said to be spreading in Germany. Ignatius and his grey-coated young preachers were arrested and brought before the terrible tribunal. Their doctrine was found to be sound, but they were forbidden to wear a uniform dress and were ordered to put shoes on their feet. They dyed their coats different colours, and returned to their work; as Jesuits have often done since.

Four months afterwards, the officers of the Inquisition fell on them again and put them in prison. Among the women who sought the spiritual guidance of Ignatius were some ladies of wealth, who wished to follow his example. It is said that he did not consent, and they set out, against his will, to beg their bread and tend the sick. This was too much for respectable folk in Alcalà, and Ignatius was closely examined to see whether he was not a secret Jew, since Christians did not do these things. The inquiry ended in the companions being ordered to dress as other students did, and to forbear preaching for four years. It is important to notice how from the first Ignatius, relying on his inner visions, will not bend to any authority if he can help it. He and his youths walked to Salamanca, and resumed their ways, but the eye of the Inquisition was on them, and they were imprisoned again. The authorities now fastened on them a restriction which may puzzle a layman: they were forbidden to attempt to distinguish between mortal and venial sin until their theological studies were completed. It meant, in practice, that they must not disturb the gay sinners of Spain with threats of hell, and for the time it entirely destroyed the design of Ignatius. His disciples fell away, and Ignatius fled to a land where there were no Inquisitors. He crossed the Pyrenees and went the whole length of France on foot.

The seven years which he spent at Paris were of the greatest importance in the life of Ignatius. Of his studies little need be said. He now took the university courses in proper succession, and won his degree in 1534. But these studies were only a means to an end, and he never became a scholar. He discarded books, wrote a very poor Latin, and took long to master Italian. For secular knowledge he had a pious disdain. His followers were to be learned just in so far as it was needed to capture and retain the control of youth and promote the authority of the Pope. The chief interest of the long stay in Paris is that he there founded his Society, and the manner of its foundation is of great importance.