The Footprints of the Jesuits

by Richard W. Thompson

The acute and penetrating intellect of Loyola enabled him to foresee that, unless some new method of counteracting the effects of the Reformation should be discovered, the disintegration of the Church, already begun, could not be arrested. The difficulties surrounding this problem were increased by the fact that the papacy had been unable to put a stop to its own decline; and accordingly he taxed his inventive faculties, not to reform doctrine—for that was not needed beyond the points interpolated upon the primitive faith by the ambitious popes—but to prevent the decay of papal and ecclesiastical power. Undoubtedly it was his purpose that whatsoever plan he might adopt should supersede the old methods to which the Church had been long accustomed, and which had the sanction of numerous popes and many centuries of time. He intended to enter upon an experiment, the chief recommendation of which was, that it required new paths to be marked out in preference to those which had acquired the approval of antiquity. But he was careful to see, at every step he took, that whatsoever was done should inure to his own credit in the accomplishment of such ends as were suggested by the burning ardor and ambition of a soldier; in other words, that if good results ensued, they should be attributed to himself, and neither to the pope, nor to the Church, nor to the ancient monastic orders. Assuming, as he manifestly did, that all these combined had failed to check the advancing corruptions of the clergy, which had grown up under their protracted auspices, his inventive and ambitious mind was animated by the hope of bringing the world to realize that he alone could give to the organized authority of Church and State the vigor and efficiency necessary to keep society in obedience. Having a mind thoroughly indoctrinated with the principle of absolute monarchism, he did not regard it as possible or desirable to accomplish this in any other mode than by making that the central and controlling feature of whatsoever plan should be adopted. Accordingly, in the constitution of the society of Jesuits, which was the product of his reflections, he provided for consolidating in his own hands, as superior or general, such absolute authority as would subject all its members to his individual will, so as to hold them, at all times and under all possible circumstances, in perfect and uninquiring obedience, surrendering their right to think as completely as if they had never possessed it. By this method he designed to annihilate all personal independence, so that freedom of thought should not, by any possibility, exist in the society. He meant to convert all who were brought within the circle of his influence, from thoughtful and reflecting men into mere human automatons, and so to mold and fashion them that each one should be reduced to a universal and common level of humiliating submission and obedience. Thus he hoped to arrest the further development of popular intelligence, so that those who had been lifted out of the old grooves of despotism might be plunged into them again, and such as had not should be held there in ignorance and superstition. This he supposed would defeat the Reformation, in which event he and his society, as the originator and executors of the plan, would enjoy the glory of the achievement. If he had ever exhibited any evidences of great sanctity of life, this presumption of selfish ambition might have been rebutted; but he was known only as an aspiring soldier, whose early life had been characterized by such follies and irregularities as prevailed about the courts of royalty at that time. He had done nothing to raise him above the character of an adventurer.

There was nothing in the original Jesuit constitution necessary to Christian faith or to the established doctrines of the Roman Church. It provided for the organization of a select body of men, united together professedly to maintain what Loyola chose to call the greater glory of God—"ad majorem Dei gloriam"—by such undefined methods as might be, from time to time, made known to them by their general, and without fixing any limitation or restraint upon either his discretion or authority. There was no pretense of adding to or taking from the settled doctrines or dogmas of the Church; for that could have been done only by the pope, or by a General Council, or by the two powers acting conjointly—in unity. It would have been a direct censure of the Church to have assumed the necessity of this, or to have solicited authority to undertake it—equivalent to saying that it had failed to provide the necessary means of maintaining the true faith after many centuries of unlimited power. It was the duty of Loyola, as a faithful son of the Church, no less than it was the duty of those who were less pretentious, to have regarded its faith and doctrines as already perfect. To have done otherwise would have given aid and comfort to Luther and the Reformation. Hence his pretense of the necessity for the organization of a new society or order, with special methods of its own hitherto unknown, clearly indicated a desire to act apart from and independently of the existing methods and authorities of the Church.

No matter, however, what pretenses were made by Loyola, or what his secretly cherished designs were, there is not the least ground for doubt that his method of establishing and organizing a new society had no relations whatsoever to the principles of Christian faith—in other words, that the existing methods were competent for all practicable and necessary purposes without it. It was, consequently, temporal merely; that is, it had reference exclusively to the management of men, so as to reduce them to uninquiring obedience to such authority as was set over them. There was nothing besides this which the Church and the ancient monastic orders did not already possess the power to accomplish. The "exercises" he prescribed were, it is true, spiritual in character—such as penance and mortification of the flesh—but the Church had already provided these, and they were rigidly observed by the monastic orders. The pledge to employ them, made by the members of the Jesuit society so as to promote their own spiritual welfare, was merely incidental to the duty they already owed to the Church. Consequently, while these "exercises" conformed to the existing obligations imposed by the Church, the new society projected by Loyola was intended to furnish the machinery necessary for exacting obedience—for training and disciplining all who could be influenced by it for that single purpose. And in order to accomplish effectually this obedience to himself and his new society, leaving out entirely both the Church and the pope, he originally designed that the members of the society should be responsible alone to their general, from whom all the laws and regulations for their government should emanate. The pope, as the head of the Church, had not the least authority over these members conferred upon him by the original constitution; nor was it intended that they should obey any other authority than that of their general, because he, and he alone, was recognized as the sole representative of God upon earth. There was nothing spiritual in all this, in the sense in which the Church had defined spiritual things and the Christian world understood them; but it made the society, as Loyola planned it, temporal merely—a mere police corps, drilled and disciplined to obedience alone, without the right either to inquire or decide whether the commands of their superior were right or wrong. It should surprise no intelligent man, therefore, at learning the fact that the pope hesitated about giving the society his approval, when Loyola first requested his pontifical ratification of its constitution.

That Loyola's original intention was that his new society should exact from its members a pledge of fidelity alone to himself and those who should succeed him in its government, and not to the Church or to the pope, is plainly to be seen in the fact that when he found a few sympathizing friends to unite with him, he did not submit the plan of organization to the pope for approval, so as to make it a religious order like the Dominican, Franciscan, and other ancient orders, but sought only from him permission for himself and friends to go as missionaries to the Holy Land, to labor for the conversion of the infidel Turks to Christianity. That he then contemplated acting, in so far as the movements and operations of his society were concerned, independently of the Church and the pope, is evidenced by the most undoubted authority. The author of the "Lives of the Saints," a work which has the highest indorsement, says: "In 1534, on the Feast of the Assumption of our Lady, St. Ignatius and his six companions, of whom Francis [Xavier] was one, made a vow at Montmartre to visit the Holy Land, and unite their labors for the conversion of the infidels; or, if this should be found not practicable, to cast themselves at the feet of the pope, and offer their services wherever he thought fit to employ them."[9]

It will be seen, therefore, that it was entirely conditional whether or no Loyola would make known to the pope his new society and the plan of its organization, and ask his pontifical approval. He had already formed the primary organization, and obtained from Xavier and his five other associates the necessary vow of obedience, by which they had placed themselves entirely under his dominion and control. If it should prove "practicable" for him to plant his new and independent society in the Holy Land, which presented a large and tempting field of operations, it was undoubtedly his secretly-cherished purpose to do so, without making his constitution known to the pope, and thus to establish in Asia an organization independent of the pope, and submissive only to himself. But if found to be "not practicable," then, and only then, he and his companions would "cast themselves at the feet of the pope, and offer their services" to him and to the Church. His military ambition, not yet extinguished, was manifestly kindled afresh by the hope that a whole continent would be opened before him, where he would find the Oriental methods of obedience strictly consistent with those he desired to introduce, and where he could create, unmolested, such influences as, being introduced into Europe, might counteract those already produced by the Reformation. But not until he found that he was balked in this, did he intend to devote himself and his companions to the immediate work of attempting to arrest the progress of the Reformation in Europe, where the existing methods of resisting it were not under his control. It was worthy of the founder of the Jesuits to solicit the pope's approval of this great missionary scheme, and to conceal from him, at the same time, his secret purpose to act in the name of a new society, adverse to the ancient monastic orders and submissive to himself alone. That this concealment was studied and premeditated, there can be no reasonable doubt; and as it was the first step taken by Loyola in the execution of his plan, he thereby practiced such duplicity and deceit toward the Church and the pope, that these qualities may well be considered as fundamental in the society of Jesuits. And there is ample proof in the strange and eventful history of this society that it has been, from that time till the present, consistently faithful to this example of its founder.

His first successes were, doubtless, flattering to the pride, as well as encouraging to the hopes, of Loyola. Having succeeded in obtaining the consent of the pope that he and his companions should become missionaries to the Holy Land, without having revealed the existence or character of his society, they were all ordained as priests for that purpose, as none of them had been previously admitted to the priesthood. Thus equipped, they took their departure for Palestine, with the plan and principles of their organization locked up in their own minds, and the ultimate design of their ambitious leader known, probably, to himself alone. They must have commenced their journey with joyful hearts and rapturous hopes, which soon, however, became chilled by what Loyola must have considered a sad misfortune, probably the first he had encountered since he had received the wound at the battle of Pampeluna, which disfigured his person so that he could share no longer in the gay festivities of the royal court. They were prevented from reaching Palestine by the war then in progress between the Emperor Charles V and the Turks, and, after an absence of about a year, were compelled to return to Europe disheartened, as may well be supposed, by their failure. This put a new aspect upon the fortunes of Loyola. His first advance towards independence and the acquisition of power had accomplished nothing favorable to his ambition, and, consequently, it became necessary for him to discover some more promising field of operations, where no such mishap as he had encountered would be likely to occur again. There was abundant room in Europe for missionary labor; but he was now, for the first time, confronted by the fact that his society could not engage in this work, in the presence of numerous religious orders already in existence, without obtaining for it the express approval of the pope, so that, by this means, it might be also stamped with a religious character, in so far as that approval would confer it. He, manifestly, had not calculated upon a crisis which would make it necessary to submit the provisions of his constitution to the pope, or to make them known to any others besides those who were to become members of his society, and were willing to yield up their manhood so completely as to vow uninquiring obedience and submission to him and his successors as the only representatives and vicegerents of God upon earth. It can not be supposed that a man of so much sagacity as he undoubtedly possessed, would not have foreseen the difficulty in obtaining the approval of the pope to a constitution which humiliated him by assigning higher authority to the general of a new society than the Church had confided to him. But he had gone too far to retreat, and had too much courage to attempt it; for his courage was never doubted, either upon the battle-field or elsewhere; and when he found it absolutely necessary to visit Rome in order to obtain the pope's sanction, he did so, accompanied by Lefevre and Laynez, two of his companions. Before their departure, however, from Vicenza in Austrian Italy, where they were assembled, Loyola deemed it important to announce to his followers, probably for the first time, the name he had decided to give his society. He thus instructed them: "To those who ask what we are, we will reply, we are the Soldiers of the Holy Church, and we form 'The Society of Jesus.'"[10] This was evidently suggested by the necessities which then confronted him. He had not found it expedient to adopt such a designation, or to announce that they were "Soldiers of the Holy Church," until their attempt to obtain an independent position in Palestine had failed. Therefore, these avowals, made before going to Rome, are justly to be considered as mere expedients, suggested by the necessity of obtaining the pope's approval. The existing religious orders had taken their names from their founders; but Loyola's profane use of the sacred name of the Son of God, clearly indicated that he intended to set up for his society a claim for holiness superior to all others. Or it was assumed as a cover for practices, contemplated by him, that would not bear inspection in the light. That it was intended as a reflection upon the ancient monastic orders then existing, and to express superiority over them, can not be doubted. In any view, to say the least, it was impudent and presumptuous, and was generally offensive to the Christian world.

At the time of Loyola's visit to Rome, Paul III was pope. When his approval of the new society was solicited, he deemed it indispensable, as a measure of precaution, that the question should be investigated with the greatest care; for until then no opportunity had been afforded him of knowing the ultimate purposes of Loyola, or the machinery he had constructed for executing them. Whether the pope suspected him of concealment or not, it is impossible now to tell; but that he had reason to do so is evident from the most favorable accounts given of the original official interview between them. Then it was that the pope was apprised, for the first time, that the constitution under which the society of Jesuits had been organized, required a solemn vow, by which all the members were pledged to "implicit and unquestioning obedience to their superior,"[11] without the possibility of equivocation or mental reservation; that is, to Loyola himself as the first general, and to his successors from time to time thereafter. It required but little deliberation upon the part of the pope to realize that neither the Church nor the papacy could derive any advantage from this, but rather injury; for the reason that it would create a society under the protection of both, and, at the same time, absolutely independent of both. He therefore hesitated, evidently supposing that his approval under those circumstances would drag him into deep waters from which it would not be easy to escape, and referred the question to a committee of cardinals for thorough and scrutinizing investigation, so that his final action should be based upon full information.

Loyola was too sagacious not to have anticipated this difficulty; but he manifestly hoped to escape it in some way, either by evading or bridging it over, or he would not have asked the pope to approve the original constitution which contained it. He certainly did not desire or contemplate any change in his original constitution or plan; and therefore, when Paul III hesitated and appointed a committee of cardinals to scrutinize them, he must have felt a degree of perplexity to which his proud and ambitious military spirit had not been hitherto accustomed to submit unresistingly. He could not avoid seeing, however, that if the pope's final decision should be adverse to him, it would necessarily be the death of his society, upon which he had, with inordinate ambition, fixed his hopes. The occasion constituted the most serious crisis in his personal fortunes he had ever encountered. Success promised him a long list of triumphs; defeat, nothing but obscurity. He had no such intellectual resources as fitted him for rencounter with those who had, not having attended school until after he had reached the years of manhood, and not having then shown any special aptness for learning. Whatsoever capacity he possessed, tended in the direction of governing men, his faculty for which was developed during his service in the army; and he must therefore have experienced the consciousness that if he failed to obtain the sanction of the pope, his career would be seriously, if not entirely, checked. The future of the papacy depended upon the successful training of men to obedience; and Loyola, understanding this, could have had no difficulty in persuading the pope that a society like his, contrived especially to suspend the power of human reasoning and reduce its members to mere unthinking machines, would more assuredly produce that result than had been done by the very worst forms of absolute despotism which had, for so many centuries, held the Oriental world in subjugation.

But Loyola's embarrassment did not amount to discomfiture. He may never have held personal intercourse with Paul III before; but he understood the papacy, its wants and necessities, and had ample opportunity to study the character and penetrate the motives of the pope. For this he was specially fitted—few men have lived who excelled him in this respect—and, having constructed his society upon the theory that men were of no value unless persuaded to surrender up their personality to superiors, the occasion served him to address such arguments to the pope as would convince him that the obedience to authority he had introduced in his society was just what the existing exigencies of the papacy required to save it from overthrow. It may easily be seen now—although the pope may not have then employed penetration enough to discover it—that he did not intend to deal unequivocally and in entire frankness with the pope, so long as there remained a prospect of obtaining his end otherwise. He evidently had an accurate conception of what is meant by the terms confession and avoidance, in the sense of seeming to consent while not consenting. Thus, in order to remove the objection of the pope and secure his approval, he suggested another and new obligation to be inserted in the constitution of his society, providing that the members should also take a vow "of obedience to the Holy See and to the pope pro tempore, with the express obligation of going, without remuneration, to whatsoever part of the world it shall please the pope to send them."[12] These words must be read critically in order that their meaning as intended by Loyola, and always since interpreted by the Jesuits, may not be misconceived. Their true import is, that whilst the members of the society were to pay obedience to the pope as well as to their general, it was qualified as to the former, and absolute as to the latter; that is, that as they were nominally to have two heads, the authority of both should, for all practical purposes, center in one. In point of fact, as amply demonstrated by subsequent experience, this new provision did not change the nature or limit the extent of the obligation of unquestioning obedience to the Jesuit general. Its most essential feature was that which required the members to go wheresoever ordered by the pope, without compensation; but with regard to this and all other duties, and the manner of discharging them, they were required to obey their general. They could receive no instructions except those which came from him, all of which they were required to obey as coming directly from God. This amendment created no special relations—or, indeed, any whatsoever—between the pope and the society; for he held no direct intercourse with it. And it only created such relations between the pope and the general as obliged the latter to send the members wheresoever the former desired, without remuneration. They remained the slaves of the general, and not the slaves of the pope. They obeyed the general, and not the pope, unless ordered to do so by the general, in which case they paid obedience only to the latter. But Paul III did not detect the well-concealed purposes of Loyola, and may not even have suspected them, in view of his anxiety to arrest the disintegration of the Church and the threatened decay of the papacy. Howsoever this may have been, the cunningly-contrived concession made to him by Loyola was satisfactory to him, notwithstanding the opposition of one of the committee of cardinals, and he issued his pontifical bull approving the society of Jesuits as a religious order. This pledge of fidelity to the pope, however, has been kept or evaded accordingly as the interests of the society have from time to time demanded. Its history shows prominent instances when the decisions of the popes have been denounced and resisted, and when the popes themselves have been treated with contempt and defiance. When the Jesuits have found shelter and protection under the authority of the popes, they have exalted them to absolute equality with God; when otherwise, they have disobeyed and traduced them.