In this Constitution the Society of Jesus was revealed as an elaborate hierarchy rising from Novices through Scholastics, Coadjutors, Professed of Four Vows, with the General at its head, an autocrat, controlling every part, even the minutest, of the great machine. Nominally, he was bound by the Constitution, but the inner principle of this elaborate system of laws was apparent fixity of type qualified by the utmost laxity in practice. The most stable principles of the Constitution were explained or explained away in the Directorium, and by such an elaborate labyrinth of exceptions that it proved no barrier to the will of the General. He stood with his hand on the lever, and could do as he pleased with the vast machine, which responded in all its parts to his slightest touch. He had almost unlimited power of “dispensing with formalities, freeing from obligations, shortening and lengthening the periods of initiation, retarding or advancing a member in his career.” Every member of the Society was bound to obey his immediate superiors as if they stood for him in the place of Christ, and that to the extent of doing what he considered wrong, of believing that black was white if the General so willed it. The General resided at Rome, holding all the threads of the complicated affairs of the Society in his hands, receiving minute reports of the secret and personal history of every one of its members, dealing as he pleased with the highest as well as the lowest of his subordinates.
“Yet the General of the Jesuits, like the Doge of Venice, had his hands tied by subtly powerful though almost invisible fetters. He was subjected at every hour of the day and night to the surveillance of five sworn spies, especially appointed to prevent him from altering the type or neglecting the concerns of the Order. The first of these functionaries, named the Administrator, who was frequently also the confessor of the General, exhorted him to obedience, and reminded him that he must do all things for the glory of God. Obedience and the glory of God, in Jesuit phraseology, meant the maintenance of the Company. The other four were styled Assistants. They had under their charge the affairs of the chief provinces; one overseeing the Indies, another Portugal and Spain, a third France and Germany, a fourth Italy and Sicily. Together with the Administrator, the Assistants were nominated by the General Congregation (an assembly of the Professed of the Four Vows), and could not be removed or replaced without its sanction. It was their duty to regulate the daily life of the General, to control his private expenditure on the scale which they determined, to prescribe what he should eat and drink, to appoint his hours for sleep, and religious exercises, and the transaction of public business.... The Company of Jesus was thus based upon a system of mutual and pervasive espionage. The novice on entering had all his acts, habits, and personal qualities registered. As he advanced in his career, he was surrounded by jealous brethren, who felt it their duty to report his slightest weakness to a superior. The superiors were watched by one another and by their inferiors. Masses of secret information poured into the secret cabinet of the General; and the General himself ate, slept, prayed, worked, and moved beneath the fixed gaze of ten vigilant eyes.”[691]
Historians have not been slow to point out the evils which this Society has wrought in the world, its purely political aims, the worldliness which deadened its spiritual life, and its degradation of morals, which had so much to do with sapping the ethical life of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is frequently said that the cool-headed Lainez is responsible for most of the evil, and that a change may be dated from his Generalship. There seems to be a wide gulf fixed between the Mystic of Manresa, the revival preacher of Vicenza, the genuine home mission work in Rome, and the astute, ruthless worldly political work of the Society. Yet almost all the changes may be traced back to one root, the conception which Ignatius held of what was meant by true religion. It was for him, from first to last, an unreasoning, blind obedience to the dictates of the catholic hierarchic Church. It was this which poisoned the very virtues which gave Loyola’s intentions their strength, and introduced an inhuman element from the start.
He set out with the noble thought that he would work for the good of his fellow-men; but his idea of religion narrowed his horizon. His idea of “neighbour” never went beyond the thought of one who owed entire obedience to the Roman Pontiff—all others were as much outside the sphere of the brotherhood of mankind as the followers of Mahomet were for the earliest Crusaders. Godfrey of Bouillon was both devout and tender-hearted, yet when he rode, a conqueror, into Jerusalem up the street filled with the corpses of slaughtered Moslems, he saw a babe wriggling on the breast of its dead mother, and, stooping in his saddle, he seized it by the ankle and dashed its head against the wall. For Ignatius, as for Godfrey, all outside the catholic and hierarchic Church were not men, but wolves.
He was filled with the heroic conception that his Company was to aid their fellow-men in every department of earthly life, and the political drove out all other considerations; for it contained the spheres within which the whole human life is lived. Thus, while he preferred for himself the society of learned and devout men, his acute Basque brain soon perceived their limitations, and the Jesuit historian Orlandino tells us that Ignatius selected the members of his Company from men who knew the world, and were of good social position. He forbade very rightly the follies of ascetic piety, when the discipline of the Exercises had been accomplished; it was only repeated when energies flagged or symptoms of insubordination appeared. Then the General ordered a second course, as a physician sends a patient to the cure at some watering-place. The Constitution directs that novices were to be sought among those who had a comely presence, with good memories, manageable tempers, quick observation, and free from all indiscreet devotion. The Society formed to fight the Renaissance as well as Protestantism, borrowed from its enemy the thought of general culture, training every part of the mind and body, and rendering the possessor a man of the world.
No one can read the letters of Ignatius without seeing the fund of native tenderness that there was in the stern Spanish soldier. That it was no mere sentiment appears in many ways, and in none more so than in his infinite pity for the crowds of fallen women in Rome, and in his wise methods of rescue work. It was this tenderness which led him to his greatest mistake. He held that no one could be saved who was not brought to a state of abject obedience to the hierarchic Church; that such obedience was the only soil in which true virtues could be planted and grow. He believed, moreover, that the way in which the “common man” could be thoroughly broken to this obedience was through the confessional and the directorate, and therefore that no one should be scared from confession or from trust in his director by undue severity. In his eagerness to secure these inestimable benefits for the largest number of men, he over and over again enjoined the members of his Society to be very cautious in coming to the conclusion that any of their penitents was guilty of a mortal sin. Such was the almost innocent beginning of that Jesuit casuistry which in the end almost wiped out the possibility of anyone who professed obedience committing a mortal sin, and occasioned the profane description of Father Bauny, the famous French director—“Bauny qui tollit peccata mundi per definitionem.”
The Society thus organised became powerful almost at once. It made rapid progress in Italy. Lainez was sent to Venice, and fought the slumbering Protestantism there, at Brescia, and in the Val Tellina. Jay was sent to Ferrara to counteract the influence of Renée of France, its Duchess. Salmeron went to Naples and Sicily. The chief Italian towns welcomed the members of the new Order. Noble and devout ladies gave their aid. Colleges were opened; schools, where the education was not merely free, but superior to what was usually given, were soon crowded with pupils. Rome remained the centre and stronghold of the Company.
Portugal was won at once. Xavier and Rodriguez were sent there. They won over King John, and he speedily became their obedient pupil. He delivered into their hands his new University at Coimbra, and the Humanist teachers, George Buchanan among them, were persecuted and dispersed, and replaced by Jesuit professors.
Spain was more difficult to win. The land was the stronghold of the Dominicans, and had been so for generations; and they were unwilling to admit any intruders. But the new Order soon gained ground. It was native to the soil. It had its roots in that Mysticism which pervaded the whole Peninsula. Ignatius gained one distinguished convert, Francis Borgia, Duke of Candia and Viceroy of Catalonia. He placed the University he had founded in their hands. He joined the Order, and became the third General. His influence counterbalanced the suspicions of Charles V., who had no liking for sworn bondmen of the Vatican, and they soon laid firm hold on the people.
In France their progress was slow. The University and the Parlement of Paris opposed them, and the Sorbonne made solemn pronouncement against their doctrine. Still they were able to found Colleges at St. Omer, Douai, and Rheims.