Ignatius spent nearly a year at Manresa. He had accomplished his object—to find himself at peace with God. It remained to fulfil his vow of pilgrimage. He laid aside his hermit’s garb, and with it his ascetic practices; but he believed it to be his duty to renounce all property and live absolutely poor. He left all the money he possessed upon a bench and walked to Barcelona, supporting himself by begging. There he was given a passage to Venice, and thence he sailed for the Holy Land. His enthusiasm, and above all his project for beginning a mission among the Turks, alarmed the chief of the Franciscans in Jerusalem, who insisted on shipping him back to Italy. He reached Barcelona determined to pursue such studies as would enable him to know theology. He had never learned Latin, the gateway to all theological learning, and the man of thirty entered school, and seated himself on the bench with boys. Thence he went to Alcala and to Salamanca, and attended classes in these towns. Before he had quitted Manresa he had begun to speak to others about his visions, and to persuade them to submit themselves to the spiritual drill of his Exercises. Some ladies in Barcelona had become his devoted disciples. At Alcala and Salamanca he had tried to make converts to his system. The ecclesiastical authorities of the districts, fearing that this was a new kind of dangerous Mysticism, seized him, and he was twice incarcerated in the episcopal Inquisition. It would probably have fared ill with him had it not been for the intercession of some of the distinguished ladies who had been his disciples. His imprisonment in both cases was short, but he was forbidden to discriminate between mortal and venial sins (a thing essential if he acted as a spiritual director) until he had studied theology for four years.
§ 2. Ignatius at Paris.
With prompt military obedience Ignatius decided to study at Paris. He reached the city in the beginning of 1528, driving an ass laden with his books and clothes. He went naturally to the College Montaigu, which under its Principal, Noël Béda, was the most orthodox in Paris; but with his well known determination to see and judge everything for himself, he soon afterwards obtained leave to reside in the College Ste. Barbe, one of the most liberal, in which George Buchanan was then a Regent.[670]
His sojourn in Paris could not fail to make a deep impression on the middle-aged Spaniard, consumed with zeal to maintain in its minutest details the old religion, and to destroy heresy and disobedience. Two passions possessed him, both eminently Spanish. He could say with St. Teresa that he suffered so much to see the Lutherans, whose baptism had rendered them members of the Church, lose themselves unhappily, that had he several lives he would willingly give them to deliver only one of them from the horrible torments which awaited them; but he also believed that it was for God a point of honour to avenge Himself on those who despised His word, and that it belonged to all the faithful to be instruments of the vengeance of the Almighty.
His keen practical nature grasped the religious situation in Paris (City and University), and suggested his lifework. He saw the strength of the Roman Catholic democracy face to face with the Reformation, and to what power it might grow if it were only organised and subjected to a more than military discipline. Ignatius was in Paris during the years when partisan feelings ran riot.
Francis I. was by taste and training a man of the Renaissance. It pleased him to be called and to imagine himself to be the patron of men of letters. He was as devoted as his selfish, sensual nature permitted him to be, to his sister Marguerite d’Angoulême, and for her sake countenanced such Reformers as Lefèvre and the “group of Meaux.” He had a grudge against the Sorbonne and the Parlement of Paris for their attempts to baffle the Concordat of 1516; while he recognised the power which these two formidable associations possessed. He was an anti-Sorbonnist, who feared the Sorbonne (the great theological faculty of the University of Paris), and could not help displaying his dread. He had long dreamed of instituting a Collége de France, a free association of learned teachers, men who could introduce the New Learning and form a counterpoise to the Sorbonne which dominated the University. The project took many forms, and never came to full fruition until long after the days of Francis; but the beginnings were sufficient to encourage Reformers and to irritate to fury the supporters of the Sorbonne. The theological faculty of the University was then ruled by Noël Béda, a man of no great intellectual capacity, who hated everything which seemed to menace mediævalism. Béda, by his dogged courage, by his unflinching determination, by his intense conviction that he was in the right, was able to wage a pitiless warfare against the New Learning and every appearance of religious reform. He was able to thwart the King repeatedly, and more than once to attack him through Marguerite, his sister. His whole attitude and activity made him a forerunner of the Romanist League of two generations later, and, like the Leaguers, he based his power on organising the Romanist fanaticism lying in the populace of Paris and among the students of the Sorbonne. All this Loyola saw under his eyes during his stay in Paris. He heard the students of the Sorbonne singing their ferocious song:
“Prions tons le Roi de gloire
Qu’il confonde ces chiens mauldicts,
Afin qu’il n’en soit plus mémoire,
Non plus que de vielz os pourris.
Au feu, au feu! c’est leur repére
Fais-en justice! Dieu l’a permys”;
and the defiant answer:
“La Sorbonne, la bigotte,
La Sorbonne se taira!
Son grand hoste, l’Aristote,
De la bande s’ostera!
Et son escot, quoi qu’il coste,
Jamais ne la soûlera!
La Sorbonne, la bigotte,
La Sorbonne se taira!