SECTION 4. THE COMPANY OF JESUS
If the Counter-reformation was in part a pure reaction to medievalism it was in part also a religious revival. If this was stimulated by the Protestant {397} example, it was also the outcome of the rising tide of Catholic pietism in the fifteenth century. Still more was it the answer to a demand on the part of the church for an instrument with which to combat the dangers of heresy and to conquer spiritually the new worlds of heathenism.
Great crises in the church have frequently produced new revivals of monasticism. From Benedict to Bernard, from Bernard to Francis and Dominic, from the friars to the Jesuits, there is an evolution in the adaptation of the monastic life to the needs of Latin Christianity. Several new orders, [Sidenote: New monastic orders] all with more or less in common, started in the first half of the sixteenth century. Under Leo X there assembled at Rome a number of men united by the wish to renew their spiritual lives by religious exercises. From this Oratory of Divine Love, as it was called, under the inspiration of Gaetano di Tiene and John Peter Caraffa, arose the order of Theatines, [Sidenote: 1524] a body of devoted priests, dressing not in a special garb but in ordinary priest's robes, who soon attained a prominent position in the Catholic reformation. Their especial task was to educate the clergy.
The order of the Capuchins [Sidenote: c. 1526] was an offshoot of the Franciscans. It restored the relaxed discipline of the early friars and its members went about teaching the poor. Notwithstanding the blow to it when its third vicar Bernardino Ochino became a Calvinist, it flourished and turned its energies especially against the heretics.
Of the other orders founded at this time, the Barnabites (1530), the Somascians (1532), the Brothers of Mercy (1540), the Ursulines (1537), only the common characteristics can be pointed out. It is notable that they were all animated by a social ideal; not only the salvation of the individual soul but also the {398} amelioration of humanity was now their purpose. Some of the orders devoted themselves to the education of children, some to home missions or foreign missions, some to nursing the sick, some to the rescue of fallen women. The evolution of monasticism had already pointed the way to these tasks; its apogee was reached with the organization of the Company of Jesus.
[Sidenote: Typical Jesuit]
The Jesuit has become one of those typical figures, like the Puritan and the buccaneer. Though less exploited in fiction than he was in the days of Dumas, Eugene Sue and Zola, the mention of his name calls to the imagination the picture of a tall, spare man, handsome, courteous, obliging, but subtle, deceitful, dangerous, capable of nursing the blackest thoughts and of sanctioning the worst actions for the advancement of his cause. The Lettres Provinciales of Pascal first stamped on public opinion the idea that the Jesuit was necessarily immoral and venomous; the implacable hatred of Michelet and Symonds has brought them as criminals before the bar of history. On the other hand they have had their apologists and friends even outside their own order. Let us neither praise nor blame, but seek to understand them.
[Sidenote: Loyola, c. 1493-1556]
In that memorable hour when Luther said his ever-lasting nay at Worms one of his auditors was—or might have been for she was undoubtedly present in the city—Germaine de Foix, the wife of the Margrave John of Brandenburg. The beautiful and frivolous young woman had been by a former marriage the second wife of Ferdinand the Catholic and at his court she had been known and worshipped by a young page of good family, Iñigo de Loyola. Like the romantic Spaniard that he was he had taken, as he told later, for his lady "no duchess nor countess but one far higher" and to her he paid court in the genuine spirit of old chivalry. Not that this prevented him from addressing {399} less disinterested attentions to other ladies, for, if something of a Don Quixote he was also something of a Don Juan. Indeed, at the carnival of 1515, his "enormous misdemeanors" had caused him to be tried before a court of justice and little did his plea of benefit of clergy avail him, for the judge failed to find a tonsure on his head "even as large as a seal on a papal bull," and he was probably punished severely.
Loyola was a Basque, and a soldier to his fingertips. When the French army invaded Spain he was given command of the fortress of Pampeluna. Defending it bravely against desperate odds he was wounded [Sidenote: May 23, 1521] in the leg with a cannon ball and forced to yield. The leg was badly set and the bone knit crooked. With indomitable courage he had it broken and reset, stretched on racks and the protruding bone sawed off, but all the torture, in the age before anaesthetics, was in vain. The young man of about twenty-eight—the exact year of his birth is unknown—found himself a cripple for life.