FOOTNOTES:
[ [1] A good study of the controversy as to the indebtedness of Ignatius to the Benedictines, and even the Mohammedans, from the point of view of an outsider, will be found in H. Müller's Les origines de la Compagnie de Jésus (1898).
THE FIRST JESUITS
From this account of the influences which shaped the character of the Society of Jesus before and during its birth we may derive our first clue to the singular history of the Jesuits. They might not implausibly make a proud boast of the fact that they have always borne the intense hostility of heretics and unbelievers, but the very reason they assign for this—their effective service to the Church—prevents them from explaining why they have, from their foundation, incurred an almost equal enmity on the part of a very large proportion of the monks, priests, and laymen of their own Church. "Jealousy," they whisper; but since no other body in the Church, however learned or active, has experienced this peculiar critical concentration of its neighbours, we are bound to seek a deeper explanation. There are distinctive features of the Jesuit Society which irritate alike the pious and the impious, the Catholic and the non-Catholic.
We begin to perceive these features at the very birth of the Society. Its founder has the temper of a monk, but the times will not permit the establishment of a monastic order of the old type; a new regiment of soldiers of the Church must engage in active foreign service, not degenerate into fatness in domestic barracks. The success of Ignatius was due to the fact that he had other qualities than those of the monk, and he met the new conditions with remarkable shrewdness. It seems to me a mistake to conceive him as a soldier above all things. He was pre-eminently a diplomatist. He infused into the Society the energy and fearlessness of the soldier, but he also equipped it with the weapons of the diplomatist, or, one might say, of the secret-service man. He was a most sincerely and unselfishly religious man, but he used, and taught others to use, devices which the profoundly religious man commonly disdains. The Jesuits were Jesuits from the start. It is a truism, a fulfilment of the known command of Ignatius, that they sought the favour of the rich and powerful; it is a fact lying on the very surface of their history, as written by themselves, that they accommodated their ideals to circumstances as no other religious order had ever done in the first decades of its life; it is the boast of their admirers that they used "holy wiles" in the attainment of their ends. This stamp was impressed on them by inheritance from their sire and the pressure of their surroundings. These things were consecrated by the undoubted sincerity of the early Jesuit ideal; they wanted power only for the service of Christ and the salvation of men. What happened later was that the inner fire, the glow of which sanctified these worldly manœuvres in the mind of the first Jesuits, grew dim and languid, and the traditional policy was developed until even crime and vice and hypocrisy were held to be lawful if they contributed to the power of the Jesuits.
An examination of the rules and the activity of the early Jesuits will make this clear. The Constitutions of the Society were not completed by Ignatius until several years after the establishment, and they were afterwards modified and augmented by Lainez, a less religious man than Ignatius, but it will be useful to consider at once their distinctive and most important features. In the main they follow the usual lines of monastic regulations, and many points which are ascribed to the soldier Ignatius and usually held to be distinctive of his Society are ancient doctrines of the monastic world; such are, the duties of blind obedience, of detachment from family and country, and of surrendering one's personality. The famous maxim, that a Jesuit must have no more will than a corpse, is familiar in every monastic body, and is even found in the rules of Mohammedan brotherhoods. Some writers have conjectured that Ignatius borrowed much from the Moorish fraternities, but it is difficult to see how he could have any knowledge of them, and the parallels are not important. In any case, the story of the Society will very quickly show us that this grim theory of blind obedience and self-suppression was not carried out in practice; even the earliest Jesuits were by no means will-less corpses and men who sacrificed their affections and individuality.
Omitting points of small technical interest, I should say that the most significant features of the Jesuit Constitutions are: the establishment of a large body of priests (Spiritual Coadjutors) between the novices and the professed members, the extraordinary provisions by which a superior gets an intimate knowledge of his subjects, the stress on the duty of teaching, the distinction between a "house" and a "college," the deliberate recommendation to prefer youths of wealthy or distinguished families (cæteris paribus) to poor youths, the despotic power and lifelong appointment of the General, the fallacious and imposing vow of direct obedience to the Pope, and the absence of "choir." These primitive and fundamental features of the Society, taken in conjunction with the special privileges which the Society gradually wheedled from the Popes, go far toward explaining its great material success and its moral deterioration. Some of these points need no explanation, or have already been explained, and a few words will suffice to show the effect of the others.