. . . . . .
About a hundred years after the founding of the Society of Jesus, a young Frenchman, Blaise Pascal, wrote a series of Letters which have focused all the distrust and misconception aroused by the aggressive Body, and from whose subtle blows it never has recovered. Les Lettres d’un Provincial is a great literary work. A man of genius, spokesman of his race, exposes the presence in his land of an organism monstrously alien to the spirit and rhythm of France. His intuitions are metaphysically deeper than his logic. Pascal does not know that the Society of Jesus is a formulation of the will of Spain: his points often are departures from false premises as in his invidious handling of the Jesuit doctrine of probabilism or of the famous Jesuit sentence: “The end justifies the means.” Small matter: Pascal wrote a brilliant laughing prose whose beauty has not faded; and more, almost unwittingly he defended France against the invasion of an alien will. Although his arguments were often false, although his irony was unscrupulous, Pascal from his vantage-point was right.
The will of France has been adverse to that of Spain: France has worked from a social sense to the creation of a personal conscience. She has moved from the group-mystical to the personal-rational; from the Gothic church to the modern realistic; from social vision to the individual; from Substance to Essence; from France herself to man. Blaise Pascal is an exemplar of this pattern of his people’s progress. He and the Jansenists reveal the effort of the conservative French to transform the old Catholicism into an individualistic faith that shall be consonant with France’s future. Pascal’s sense of Grace as a determined individual gift of personality places his conflict with the Jesuits on its fairest ground: it is the will of social France for personal autonomy, at odds with this invasion of personalized Spain whose will is to create a social spirit.[21] Pascal, Racine, Descartes are the last great minds of France to believe in the persistence of their nation’s progress within the Church. Calvin, greatest of the Protestant thinkers and a true Frenchman, marks the break. France accepts a destiny outside of Rome which, in this logical people, swiftly leads to a destiny outside the whole structure of Christian revelation. Pascal and Racine within the Church, Calvin in a church of his own, Montaigne the skeptic, begin not by accepting man—but by the desire to create him. The social body exists: the individual soul does not. All French classic literature converges in this effort to establish it ... converges, indeed, upon Romanticism (Diderot, Rousseau, Stendhal). In Germany, the same trend passes from Luther to Goethe, Schopenhauer, Novalis, Nietzsche. The French problem of creating the personal conscience above the accepted group marries with the will of northern Europe to break up the social synthesis of medieval Rome by the creating of individual souls that shall be atomic, anarchic, but once more creative. The antistrophe is the tragic will of Spain, and the heroic Jesuit effort, to revive a Body that was doomed.
In the domain of education, the Society of Jesus does not swerve far from Spain. And the will of Spain accepts man as he is found. Isabel creates her empire by use of her countrymen’s frailties and lusts. The Jesuit proceeds in the same spirit. He will work, not from the departure of an ideal concept of what man should be: he will work with man, with this miserable, forkèd, naked son of sin—and build from him the City of his God. Man in his weakness, man in his vice and blindness, will be a note in the cosmic Song: his muddy heart will be strong as marble. There is a magic to enact this. Its name is Faith. There is a philosophy to enact this. It is the traditional sense, in Spanish thought, of God’s immanence and of earth as the immediate pattern of God’s will. The Jesuits are not pantheists: but their tolerance and their practical acceptance of the fact are the unconscious fruits of five centuries of pantheistic feeling. The Jesuits are not Evangelists. But in their attitude toward Faith as a universal magic, they are close to the Apostles. They take the Christian mystery as a present truth. The age of miracle is eternal. God is here and everywhere: the assertion of a magic Word—as in the Kabbala—transfigures immanence to revelation. The doctrine of Grace, as an inborn personal trait to be achieved (if at all) only by spiritual acts, is too hierarchic. It is the doctrine of peoples tending toward individualism. (In the East, it becomes the doctrine of Caste.) Moreover, in accepting man as he is, the Jesuit cannot place the magic virtue in any of his inherent traits. The divine virtue must be at once impersonal and social. Man is frail and corrupt: his will is frail and corrupt. His life is only in God, even as God’s life through Christ is eternally in man. There is no work to be done, beside the assertion that the work is done. If grace depended upon man’s efforts, we should all be damned. If reason or will or any personal trait had been sufficient, why was Christ crucified? No: the commonest human stone is holy, when it becomes a stone of the House of God. Likewise, man’s corruptions, however vile, can be architected by faith into the Church where they are sanctified and transfigured.
The philosophy of the Jesuits explains their methods. Does the builder of a house consult the stones? What can the stone do but put itself into the hands of the builder? The builder must be aggressive, dominant, ruthless. But the Jesuit is more than an architect: he is a soldier. When he sets aside the sword for the word, the cause is strategy. His tactics remain warlike. War is pragmatic. Subtlety, surprise, mobility, deceit are warlike arms.
The world stands at a crisis. The grandiose structure of medieval Rome—the highest spiritual Form ever achieved by Europe—crumbles and sags. Spain strips to save it.
d. The Jurist
At Salamanca a Dominican monk teaches theology. His name is Fray Francisco de Vitoria. Salamanca, fostered by the Catholic King, becomes the leading university of Spain. Spain becomes Austria, Artois, the Netherlands, Franche-Comté, North and South Italy, Sicily, the Balearic and Canary Islands, Africa from Ceuta to Oran, the Moluccas, the Philippines and the Americas from Florida to Tierra del Fuego. Carlos, son of the mad daughter of the Catholic Kings, becomes head of an empire like the dream of Isabel. He, too, is a creature of her will. The vastness of his realm has blotted out his sense of time and space. His religious fervor blurs his vision of mortal values. He will ride Spain as he might ride a horse in battle. He has inherited Spain as a weapon to be wielded. Spain is his, in order that the world be Christ’s.
The Dominican monk at Salamanca moves within the will of Carlos and of Spain. The blood of Isabel’s empire is justice. Justice nourishes and cleanses. Carlos must be ruthless, but he must not be wrong. He will do what he desires: it must be proven right. The Americas make new challenges of conscience. Vitoria in Salamanca meets the king’s need: and modern International Law is ready for the world.
A full century before the Dutchman Grotius (Huig van Groot), Vitoria lays down a rationale of justice for existing Powers, a structure in diapason between their economic needs and their inherited morale. He works for a modern state whose ideal is a theodicy of medieval Rome. The ideal has become more abstractly ethical, more economic. But Woodrow Wilson and the statesmen of the League of Nations are exact heirs of a Dominican monk.