and the defiant answer:
Amidst this seething crowd of warring students and teachers, Ignatius went, silent, watchful, observing everything. He cared little for theological speculation, being a true and typical Spaniard. The doctrines of the mediæval theology were simply military commands to his disciplined mind; things to be submitted to whether understood or not. Heresy was mutiny in the ranks. He had a marvellous natural capacity for penetrating the souls of others, and had cultivated and strengthened it by his habits of daily introspection and of writing down whatever, good or bad, passed through his own soul. It is told of him that in company he talked little, but quietly noted what others said, and that he had infinite genius for observing and storing details.[672] He sought to learn the conditions of life and thought outside Paris and France, and made journeys to the Low Countries and to England, saying little, thinking much, observing more. All the time he was winning the confidence of fellow-students, and taking infinite pains to do so—weighing and testing their character and gifts. He played billiards with some, paid the college expenses of others, and was slowly, patiently making his selection of the young men whom he thought fit to be the confidants of his plans for the regeneration of Christendom, and to be associates with him in the discipline which the Exercises gave to his own soul.[673]
He finally chose a little band of nine disciples—Peter Faber, Diego Lainez, Francis Xavier, Alonzo Salmeron, Nicholas Boabdilla, Simon Rodriguez, Paul Broet, Claude Jay, and Jean Codure. Codure died early. Faber, the first selected, was a Savoyard, the son of a poor peasant, with the unbending will and fervent spiritual imagination of a highlander. No one of the band was more devoted to his leader. Francis Xavier belonged, like Loyola himself, to an ancient Basque family; none was harder to win than this proud young Spaniard. Lainez and Salmeron were Castilians, who had been fellow-students with Ignatius at Alcala. Lainez had always been a prodigy of learning, “a young man with the brain of an ancient sage.” He, too, had been hard to win, for his was not a nature to kindle easily; but once subdued he was the most important member of the band. Salmeron, his early companion, was as impetuous and fiery as Lainez was cool and logical. He was the eloquent preacher of the company. Boabdilla, also a Spaniard, was a man of restless energy, who needed the strictest discipline to make him keep touch with his brothers. Rodriguez, a Portuguese, and Jay, from Geneva, were young men of insinuating manners, and were the destined diplomatists of the little company. Broet, a phlegmatic Netherlander among these fiery southerners, endeared himself to all of them by his sweet purity of soul.
Such were the men whom Ignatius gathered together on the Feast of the Ascension of Mary in 1534 in the Church of St. Mary of Montmartre, then outside the walls of Paris. There they vowed that if no insuperable difficulty prevented, they would go together to Palestine to work for the good of mankind. If this became impossible, they would ask the Pope to absolve them from their vow and betake themselves to whatever work for the good of souls His Holiness directed them to do. No Order was founded; no vows of poverty and obedience were taken; the young men were a band of students who looked on each other as brothers, and who promised to leave family and friends, and, “without superfluous money,” work together for a regeneration of the Church. Faber, already in priest’s orders, celebrated Mass; the company dined together at St. Denys. Such was the quiet beginning of what grew to be the Society of Jesus.
The companions parted for a season to meet again at Venice.
All the nine associates had submitted themselves to the spiritual guidance of Ignatius, and had all been subjected to the training contained in the Exercitia Spiritualia. It is probable that this manual of military drill for the soul had not been perfected at the date of the meeting at Montmartre (1534), for we know that Loyola worked at it from 1522 on to 1548, when it was approved by Pope Paul III.; but it may be well at this stage to give some account of this marvellous book, which was destined to have such important results for the Counter-Reformation.[674]
The thought that the spiritual senses and faculties might be strengthened and stimulated by the continuous repetition of a prescribed course of prayer and meditation, was not a new one. The German Mystics of the fourteenth century, to name no others, had put their converts through such a discipline, and the practice was not unusual among the Dominicans. It is most likely that a book of this kind, the Exercitatorio dela vida spirital of Garcia de Cisneros, Abbot of the Monastery of Montserrat (1500), had been studied by Ignatius while he was at Manresa. But this detracts nothing from the striking and unique originality of the Exercitia Spiritualia, they stand alone in plan, contents, and intended result.[675] They were the outcome of Loyola’s protracted spiritual struggles, and of his cool introspection of his own soul during these months of doubt and anguish. Their evident intention is to guide the soul through the long series of experiences which Loyola had endured unaided, and to lead it to the peace which he had found.
It is universally admitted that Ignatius had always before him the conception of military drill. He wished to discipline the soul as the drill-sergeant moulds the body. The Exercises are not closet-rules for solitary believers seeking to rise to communion with God by a ladder of meditation. A guide was indispensable, the Master of the Exercises, who had himself conquered all the intricacies of the method, and who, besides, must have as intimate a knowledge as it was possible to acquire of the details of the spiritual strength and weakness of his pupil. It was the easier to have this knowledge, as the disciple must be more than half won before he is invited to pass through the drill. He must have submitted to one of the fathers in confession; he must be made to understand the absolute necessity of abandoning himself to the exercises with his whole heart and soul; he must promise absolute submission to the orders of the director; he must by frequent confession reveal the recesses of his soul, and describe the most trivial thoughts which flit through it; above all, he must enter on his prolonged task in a state of the liveliest expectation of the benefits to be derived from his faithful performance of the prescribed exercises.[676] A large, though strictly limited, discretion is permitted to the Master of the Exercises in the details of the training he insists upon.
The course of drill extends over four weeks[677] (twenty-five days). It includes prolonged and detailed meditations on four great subjects:—sin and conscience; the earthly Kingdom of Christ; the Passion of Jesus; and the Love of God with the Glory of the Risen Lord.[678] During all this time the pupil must live in absolute solitude. Neither sight nor sound from the world of life and action must be allowed to enter and disturb him. He is exhorted to purge his mind of every thought but the meditation on which he is engaged; to exert all his strength to make his introspection vivid and his converse with the Deity unimpeded.
True meditation, according to Ignatius, ought to include four things—a preparatory prayer; præludia, or the ways of attuning the mind and sense in order to bring methodically and vividly some past historical scene or embodiment of doctrine before the soul of the pupil; puncta, or definite heads of each meditation on which the thoughts are to be concentrated, and on which memory, intellect, and will are to be individually exercised; colloquia, or ecstatic converse with God, without which no meditation is supposed to be complete, and in which the pupil, having placed the crucifix before him, talks to God and hears His voice answering him.
When the soul’s progress on the long spiritual journey in which it is led during these meditations is studied, one can scarcely fail to note the crass materialism which envelops it at every step. The pupil is required to see in the mirror of his imagination the boundless flames of hell, and souls encased in burning bodies; to hear the shrieks, howlings, and blasphemies; to smell the sulphur and intolerable stench; to taste the saltness of the tears, and to feel the scorching touch of the flames.[679] When the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane is the subject of meditation, he must have in the camera obscura of his imagination a garden, large or small, see its enclosing walls, gaze and gaze till he discerns where Christ is, where the Apostles sleep, perceive the drops of sweat, touch the clothes of our Lord.[680] When he thinks of the Nativity, he must conjure up the figures of Joseph, Mary, the Child, and a maid-servant, hear their homely family talk, see them going about their ordinary work.[681] The same crass materialism envelops the meditations about doctrinal mysteries. Thinking upon the Incarnation is almost childishly limited to picturing the Three Persons of the Trinity contemplating the broad surface of the earth and men hurrying to destruction, then resolving that the Second is to descend to save; and to the interview between the angel Gabriel and the Virgin.[682]
A second characteristic of this scheme of meditation is the extremely limited extent of its sphere. The attention is confined to a few scenes in the life of our Lord and of the Virgin. No lessons from the Old Testament are admitted. All theological speculation is strictly excluded. What is aimed at is to produce an intense and concentrated impression which can never be effaced while life lasts. The soul is alternately torn by terror and soothed by the vision of heavenly delights. “The designed effect was to produce a vivid and varied hypnotic dream of twenty-five days, from the influence of which a man should never wholly free himself.”[683]
The outstanding feature, however, of the Exercises and of the Directory is the minute knowledge they display of the bodily conditions and accompaniments of states of spiritual ecstasy, and the continuous, not to say unscrupulous, use they make of physical means to create spiritual abandon. They master the soul by manipulating the body. Not that self-examination, honest and careful recognition of sins and weaknesses in presence of temptation, have no place in the prolonged course of discipline. This is inculcated with instructions which serve to make it detailed, intense, almost scientific. The pupil is ordered to examine himself twice a day, in the afternoon and in the evening, and to make clear to himself every sin and failure that has marked his day’s life. He is taught to enter them all, day by day, in a register, which will show him and his confessor his moral condition with arithmetical accuracy. But during his own period of spiritual struggle and depression at Manresa, Ignatius, in spite of the mental anguish which tore his soul, had been noting the bodily accompaniments of his spiritual states; and he pursued the same course of introspection when rejoicing in the later visions of God and of His grace. The Exercises and the Directory are full of minute directions about the physical conditions which Ignatius had found by experience to be the most suitable for the different subjects of meditation. The old Buddhist devotee was instructed to set himself in a spiritual trance by the simple hypnotic process of gazing at his own navel; the Ignatian directions are much more complex. The glare of day, the uncertainty of twilight, the darkness of night are all pressed into service; some subjects are to be pondered standing upright motionless, others while walking to and fro in the cell, when seated, when kneeling, when stretched prone on the floor; some ought to be meditated upon while the body is weak with fasting, others soon after meals; special hours, the morning, the evening, the middle of the night, are noted as the most profitable times for different meditations, and these vary with the age and sex of the disciple. Ignatius recognises the infinite variety that there is in man, and says expressly that general rules will not fit every case. The Master of Exercises is therefore enjoined to study the various idiosyncrasies of his patients, and vary his discipline to suit their mental and physical conditions.
It is due chiefly to this use of the conditions of the body acting upon the mind that Ignatius was able to promise to his followers that the ecstasies which had been hitherto the peculiar privilege of a few favoured saints should become theirs. The Reformation had made the world democratic; and the Counter-Reformation invited the mob to share the raptures and the visions of a St. Catherine or a St. Teresa.
The combination of a clear recognition of the fact that physical condition may account for much in so-called spiritual moods with the use made of it to create or stimulate these moods, cannot fail to suggest questions. It is easy to understand the Mystic, who, ignorant of the mysterious ways in which the soul is acted upon by the body, may rejoice in ecstasies and trances which have been stimulated by sleepless nights and a prolonged course of fasting. It is not difficult to understand the man who, when he has been taught, casts aside with disdain all this juggling with the soul through the body. But it is hard to see how anyone who perceived with fatal clearness the working of the machinery should ever come to think that real piety could be created in such mechanical ways. To believe with some that the object Ignatius had was simply to enslave mankind, to conquer their souls as a great military leader might master their lives, is both impossible and intolerable. No one can read the correspondence of Loyola without seeing that the man was a devout and earnest-minded Christian, and that he longed to bring about a real moral reformation among his contemporaries. Perhaps the key to the difficulty is given when it is remembered that Ignatius never thought that the raptures and the terrors his course of exercises produced were an end in themselves, as did the earlier Mystics. They were only a means to what followed. Ignatius believed with heart and soul that the essence of all true religion was the blindest submission to what he called the “true Spouse of Christ and our Holy Mother, which is the orthodox, catholic, and hierarchical Church.” We have heard him during his time of anguish at Manresa exclaim, “Show me, O Lord, where I can find Thee; I will follow like a dog, if I only learn the way of salvation!” He fulfilled his vow to the letter. He never entered into the meaning of our Lord’s saying, “Henceforth I call you not servants ... but friends”; he had no understanding of what St. Paul calls “reasonable service” (λογικη λατρεια). The only obedience he knew was unreasoning submission, the obedience of a dog. His most imperative duty, he believed, lay in the resignation of his intelligence and will to ecclesiastical guidance in blind obedience to the Church. It is sometimes forgotten how far Ignatius carried this. It is not that he lays upon all Christians the duty of upholding every portion of the mediæval creed, of mediæval customs, institutions, and superstitions; or that the philosophy of St. Thomas of Bonaventura, of the Master of the Sentences, and of “other recent theologians,” is to be held as authoritative as that of Holy Writ;[684] but “if the Church pronounces a thing which seems to us white to be black, we must immediately say that it is black.”[685] This was for him the end of all perfection; and he found no better instrument to produce it than the prolonged hypnotic trance which the Exercises caused.
In the beginning of 1537 the ten associates found themselves together at Venice. A war between that Republic and the Turks made it difficult for them to think of embarking for Palestine; and they remained, finding solace in intercourse with men who were longing for a moral regeneration of the Church. Contarini did much for them; Vittoria Colonna had the greatest sympathy with their projects; Caraffa only looked at them coldly. The mind of Ignatius was then full of schemes for improving the moral tone of society and of the Church—daily prayer in the village churches, games of chance forbidden by law; priests’ concubines forbidden to dress as honest women did, etc.;—all of which things Contarini and Vittoria had at heart.
After a brief stay in Venice, Ignatius, Lainez, and Faber travelled to Rome, and were joined there by the others in Easter week (1538). No Pontiff was so accessible as Paul III., and the three had an audience, in which they explained their missionary projects. But this journey through Italy had evidently given Ignatius and his companions new ideas. The pilgrimage to Palestine was definitely abandoned, the money which had been collected for the voyage was returned to the donors, and the associates took possession of a deserted convent near Vicenza to talk over their future. This conference may be called the second stage in the formation of the Order. They all agreed to adopt a few simple rules of life—they were to support themselves by begging; they were to go two by two, and one was always to act as the servant for the time being of the other; they were to lodge in public hospitals in order to be ready to care for the sick; and they pledged themselves that their chief work would be to preach to those who did not go to church, and to teach the young.
The Italian towns speedily saw in their midst a new kind of preachers, who had caught the habits of the well-known popular improvisatori. They stood on the kerb-stones at the corners of streets; they waved their hats; they called aloud to the passers-by. When a small crowd was gathered they began their sermons. They did not preach theology. They spoke of the simple commands of God set forth in the Ten Commandments, and insisted that all sins were followed by punishment here or hereafter. They set forth the prescriptions of the Church. They described the pains of hell and the joys of heaven. The crowds who gathered could only partially understand the quaint mixture of Italian and Spanish which they heard. But throughout the Middle Ages the Italian populace had always been easily affected by impassioned religious appeals, and the companions created something like a revival among the masses of the towns.
It was this experience which made Ignatius decide upon founding a Company of Jesus. It was the age of military companies in Italy, and the mind of Ignatius always responded to anything which suggested a soldier’s life, Other Orders might take the names of their founders; he resolved that his personality should be absorbed in that of his Crucified Lord. The thought of a new Order commended itself to his nine companions. They left their preaching, journeyed by various paths to Rome, each of them meditating on the Constitution which was to be drafted and presented to the Pope.
The associates speedily settled the outlines of their Constitution. Cardinal Contarini, ever the friend of Loyola, formally introduced them to the Pope. In audience, Ignatius explained his projects, presented the draft Constitution of the proposed new Order, showed how it was to be a militia vowed to perpetual warfare against all the enemies of the Papacy, and that one of the vows to be taken was: “That the members will consecrate their lives to the continual service of Christ and of the Popes, will fight under the banner of the Cross, and will serve the Lord and the Roman Pontiff as God’s Vicar upon earth, in such wise that they shall be bound to execute immediately and without hesitation or excuse all that the reigning Pontiff or his successors may enjoin upon them for the profit of souls or for the propagation of the faith, and shall do so in all provinces whithersoever he may send them, among Turks or any other infidels, to the farthest Ind, as well as in the region of heretics, schismatics, or unbelievers of any kind.” Paul III. was impressed with the support that the proposed Order would bring to the Papacy in its time of stress. He is reported to have said that he recognised the Spirit of God in the proposals laid before him, and he knew that the associates were popular all over Italy and among the people of Rome. But all such schemes had to be referred to a commission of three Cardinals to report before formal sanction could be given.
Then Loyola’s troubles began. The astute politicians who guided the counsels of the Vatican were suspicious of the movement. They had no great liking for Spanish Mysticism organised as a fighting force; they disliked the enormous powers to be placed in the hands of the General of the “Company”; they believed that the Church had suffered from the multiplication of Orders; eight months elapsed before all these difficulties were got rid of. Ignatius has placed on record that they were the hardest months in his life.
During their prolonged audience Paul III. had recognised the splendid erudition of Lainez and Faber. He engaged them, and somewhat later Salmeron, as teachers of theology in the Roman University, where they won golden opinions. Ignatius meanwhile busied himself in perfecting his Exercises, in explaining them to influential persons, and in inducing many to try their effect upon their own souls. Contarini begged for and received a MS. copy. Dr. Ortiz, the Ambassador of Charles V. at Rome, submitted himself to the discipline, and became an enthusiastic supporter. “It was then,” says Ignatius, “that I first won the favour and respect of learned and influential men.” But the opposition was strong. The old accusations of heresy were revived. Ignatius demanded and was admitted to a private audience of the Pope. He has described the interview in one of his letters.[686] He spoke with His Holiness for more than an hour in his private room; he explained the views and intentions of himself and of his companions; he told how he had been accused of heresy several times in Spain and at Paris, how he had even been imprisoned at Alcala and Salamanca, and that in each case careful inquiry had established his innocence; he said he knew that men who wished to preach incurred a great responsibility before God and man, and that they must be free from every taint of erroneous doctrine; and he besought the Pope to examine and test him thoroughly.[687] On Sept. 27th, 1540, the Bull Regimini militantis ecclesiæ was published, and the Company of Jesus was founded. The student band of Montmartre, the association of revivalist preachers of Vicenza, became a new Order, a holy militia pledged to fight for the Papacy against all its assailants everywhere and at all costs. In the Bull the members of the Company were limited to sixty, whether as a concession to opponents or in accordance with the wishes of Ignatius, is unknown. It might have been from the latter cause. In times of its greatest popularity the number of members of full standing has never been very large—not more than one per cent of those who bear the name.[688] The limitation, from whatever motive it was inserted, was removed in a second Bull, Injunctum nobis, dated March 14th, 1543.
On April 4th, 1541, six out of the ten original members of the Order (four were absent from Rome) met to elect their General; three of those at a distance sent their votes in writing; Ignatius was chosen unanimously. He declined the honour, and was again elected on April 7th. He gave way, and on April 22nd (1541) he received the vows of his associates in the church of San Paolo fuori le mura.
The new Order became famous at once; numbers sought to join it; and Ignatius found himself compelled to admit more members than he liked. He felt that the more his Society increased in numbers and the wider its sphere of activity, the greater the need for a strict system of laws to govern it. All other Orders of monks had their rules, which stated the duties of the members, the mode of their living together, and expressed the common sentiment which bound them to each other. The Company of Jesus, which from the first was intended to have a strict military discipline, and whose members were meant to be simply dependent units in a great machine moved by the man chosen to be their General, required such rules even more than any other. Ignatius therefore set himself to work on a Constitution. All we know of the first Constitution presented by the ten original members when they had their audience with Pope Paul III., is contained in the Bull of Foundation, and it is evident that it was somewhat vague. It did contain, however, four features, perhaps five, if the fourth vow of special obedience to the Pope be included, which were new. The Company was to be a fighting Order, a holy militia; it was to work for the propagation of the faith, especially by the education of the young; the members were not to wear any special or distinctive dress; and the power placed in the hands of the General was much greater than that permitted to the heads of any other of the monastic Orders. At the same time, constitutional limitations, resembling those in other Orders, were placed on the power of the General. There was to be a council, consisting of a majority of the members, whom the General was ordered to consult on all important occasions; and in less weighty matters he was bound to take the advice of the brethren near him. Proposed changes tending to free the General from these limitations were given effect to in the Bulls, Licet debitum pastoralis officii (Oct. 18th, 1549) and Exposcit pastoralis officii (July 21st, 1550); but the Bulls themselves make it clear that the Constitution had not taken final form even then. It is probable that the completed Constitution drafted by Ignatius was not given to the Society until after his death.
The way in which he went to work was characteristic of the man, at once sternly practical and wildly visionary. He first busied himself with arrangements for starting the educational work which the Company had undertaken to do; he assorted the members of his Society into various classes;[689] and then he turned to the Constitution. He asked four of his original companions, Lainez, Salmeron, Broet, and Jay, all of whom were in Rome, to go carefully over all the promises which had been made to the Pope, or what might be implied in them, and from this material to form a draft Constitution. He gave them one direction only to guide them in their work: they were to see that nothing was set down which might imply that it was a deadly sin to alter the rules of the Company in time to come. The fundamental aim of his Company was different from that of all other Orders. It was not to consist of societies of men who lived out of the world to save their own souls, as did the Benedictines; nor was it established merely to be a preaching association, like the Dominicans; it was more than a fraternity of love, like the Franciscans. It was destined to aid fellow-men in every way possible; and by fellow-men Ignatius meant the obedient children of the catholic hierarchical Church. It was to fight the enemies of God’s Vicar upon earth with every weapon available. The rules of other Orders could not help him much. He had to think all out for himself. During these months and years Ignatius kept a diary, in which he entered as in a ledger his moods of mind, the thoughts that passed through it, the visions he saw, and the hours at which they came to him.[690] Every possible problem connected with the Constitution of his Company was pondered painfully. It took him a month’s meditation ere he saw how to define the relation of the Society to property. Every solution came to him in a flash with the effect of a revelation, usually in the short hour before Mass. Once, he records, it took place “on the street as I returned from Cardinal Carpi.” It was in this way that the Constitution grew under his hands, and he believed that both it and the Exercises were founded on direct revelations from God.
This was the Constitution which was presented by Lainez to the assembly which elected him the successor of Loyola (July 2nd, 1558). The new General added a commentary or Directorium of his own, which was also accepted. It received papal sanction under Pius IV.
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.
Ignatius had his eye on Germany from the first. He longed to combat heresy in the land of its birth. Boabdilla, Faber, and Jay were sent there at once. Boabdilla won the confidence of William, Duke of Bavaria; Jay insinuated himself into the counsels of Ferdinand of Austria, and Faber did the most important work of the three by winning for the Society, Petrus Canisius. He was the son of a patrician of Nymwegen, trained in Humanist lore, drawn by inner sympathy to the Christian Mysticism of Tauler, and yet steadfast in his adherence to the theology of the mediæval Church. Faber soon became conscious of his own deficiencies for the work to be done in Germany. His first appearance was at the Religious Conference at Worms, where he found himself face to face with Calvin and Melanchthon, and where his colleagues, Eck and Cochlæus, were rather ashamed of him. The enthusiastic Savoyard lacked almost everything for the position into which, at the bidding of his General, he had thrust himself. Since then he had been wandering through those portions of Germany which had remained faithful to Rome, seeking individual converts to the principles of the Society, and above all some one who had the gifts for the work Ignatius hoped to do in that country. It is somewhat interesting to note that almost all the German Roman Catholics who were attracted by him to the new Order were men who had leanings towards the fourteenth century Mystics—men like Gerard Hammond, Prior of the Carthusians of Köln. Faber caught Canisius by means of his Mysticism. He met him at Mainz, explained the Exercitia Spiritualia to him, induced the young man to undergo the course of discipline which they prescribed, and won him for Loyola and the Company. “He is the man,” wrote Faber to Ignatius, “whom I have been seeking—if he is a man, and not rather an angel of the Lord.”
Ignatius speedily recognised the value of the new recruit. He saw that he was not a man to be kept long in the lower ranks of the Company, and gave him more liberty of action than he allowed to his oldest associates. Faber had sent him grievous reports about the condition of affairs in Germany. “It is not misinterpretation of Scripture,” he wrote, “not specious arguments, not the Lutherans with their preaching and persuasions, that have lost so many provinces and towns to the Roman Church, but the scandalous lives of the ministers of religion.” He felt his helplessness. He was a foreigner, and the Germans did not like strangers. He could not speak their language, and his Latin gave him a very limited audience. People and priests looked on him as a spy sent to report their weaknesses to Rome. When he discoursed about the Exercitia, and endeavoured to induce men to try them, he was accused of urging a “new religion.” When he attempted to form student associations in connection with the Company, it was said that he was urging the formation of “conventicles” outside the Church’s ordinances. But the adhesion of Canisius changed all that. He was a German, one of themselves; his orthodoxy was undisputed; he was an eminent scholar, the most distinguished of the young masters of the University of Köln, a leader among its most promising students. Under his guidance the student associations grew strong; after his example young men offered themselves for the discipline of the Exercises. Loyola saw that he had gained a powerful assistant. He longed to see him personally at Rome; but he was so convinced of his practical wisdom that he left it to himself either to come to Italy or to remain in Germany. Canisius decided to remain. Affairs at Köln were then in a critical state. The Archbishop-Elector, Hermann von Wied, favoured the Reformation. He had thoughts of secularising his Electorate, and if lie succeeded in his design his example might be followed in another ecclesiastical Electorate, with the result that the next Emperor would be a Protestant. Canisius organised the people, the clergy, the University authorities against this, and succeeded in defeating the designs of the Archbishop. When his work at Köln was done, he went to Vienna. There he became the confessor and private adviser of Ferdinand of Austria, administered the affairs of the diocese of Vienna during a long episcopal interregnum, helped to found its Jesuit College, and another at Ingolstadt. These Colleges became the centres of Jesuit influence in Germany, and helped to spread the power of the Society. But with all this activity it can scarcely be said that the Company was very powerful in that country until years after the Council of Trent.
The foreign mission activity of the Jesuits has been often described, and much of the early progress of the Company has been attributed to the admiration created by the work of Francis Xavier and his companions. This was undoubtedly true; but in the earliest times it was the home mission successes that drew most attention and sympathy; and these have been too often left unmentioned.
Nothing lay nearer the hearts of devout persons who refused to accept the Reformation than the condition of the great proportion of the Roman Catholic priests in all countries, and the depravity of morals among laity and clergy alike. Ignatius was deeply affected by both scandals, and had resolved from the first to do his best to cure them. It was this resolve and the accompanying strenuous endeavours which won Ignatius the respect and sympathy of all those in Italy who were sighing for a reform in the moral life of people and clergy, and brought the Company of Jesus into line with Italian Reformers like Contarini, Ghiberti, and Vittoria Colonna. His system of Colleges and the whole use he made of education could have only one result—to give an educated clergy to the Roman Church. It was a democratic extension of the work of Caraffa and Gaetano da Thiene. Ignatius had also clear views about the way to produce a reformation of morals in Rome. Like Luther, he insisted that it must begin in the individual life, and could not be produced by stringent legislation; “it must start in the individual, spread to the family, and then permeate the metropolis.” But meanwhile something might be done to heal the worst running sores of society. Like Luther, Ignatius fastened on three—the waste of child life, the plague of begging, and what is called the “social evil”; if his measure of success in dealing with the evils fell far short of Luther’s, the more corrupted condition of Italy had something to do with his failure.
His first measure of social reform was to gather Roman children, either orphans or deserted by their parents. They were gratuitously housed, fed, and taught in a simple fashion, and were instructed in the various mechanical arts which could enable them to earn a living. In a brief time, Ignatius had over two hundred boys and girls in his two industrial schools.
How to cure the plague of beggars which infested all Roman Catholic countries, a curse for which the teaching of the mediæval Church was largely responsible,[692] had been a problem studied by Ignatius ever since his brief visit to his native place in 1535. There he had attempted to get the town council of Azpeitia to forbid begging within the bounds of the city, and to support the deserving and helpless poor at the town’s cost. He urged the same policy on the chief men in Rome. When he failed in his large and public schemes, he attempted to work them out by means of charitable associations connected with and fostered by his Society.
Nothing, however, excited the sympathy of Loyola so much as the numbers and condition of fallen women in all the larger Italian towns. He was first struck with it in Venice, where he declared that he would willingly give his life to hinder a day’s sin of one of these unfortunates. The magnitude of the evil in Rome appalled him. He felt that it was too great for him to meddle with as a whole. Something, however, he could attempt, and did. In Rome, which swarmed with men vowed to celibacy simply because they had something to do with the Church, prostitution was frequently concealed under the cloak of marriage. Husbands lived by the sinful life of their wives. Deserted wives also swelled the ranks of unfortunates. Loyola provided homes for any such as might wish to leave their degrading life. At first they were simply taken into families whom Ignatius persuaded to receive them. The numbers of the rescued grew so rapidly that special houses were needed. Ignatius called them “Martha-Houses.” They were in no sense convents. There was, of course, oversight, but the idea was to provide a bright home where these women could earn their own living or the greater part of it. The scheme spread to many of the large Italian towns, and many ladies were enlisted in the plans to help their fallen sisters.
Loyola’s associations to provide ransom for Christian captives among the Moslems, his attempts to discredit duelling, his institutions for loans to the poor, can only be alluded to. It was these works of Christian charity which undoubtedly gained the immediate sympathy for the Company which awaited it in most lands south of the Alps.
Almost all earlier monastic Orders provided a place for women among their organisation. An Order of Nuns corresponded to the Order of Monks. Few founders of monastic Orders have owed so much to women as Ignatius did. A few ladies of Barcelona were his earliest disciples, were the first to undergo the discipline of the Exercises, then in an imperfect shape, and encouraged him when he needed it most by their faith in him and his plans.[693] One of them, Isabella Roser (Rosel, Rosell), a noble matron, wife of Juan Roser, heard Ignatius deliver one of his first sermons, and was so impressed by it, that she and her husband invited him to stay in their house, which he did. She paid all his expenses while he went to school and college in Spain. She and her friends sent him large sums of money when he was in Paris. Ignatius could never have carried out his plans but for her sympathy and assistance. In spite of all this, Ignatius came early to the conclusion that his Company should have as little as possible to do with the direction of women’s souls (it took so much time, he complained); that women were too emotional to endure the whole discipline of the Exercises; and that there must never be Jesuit nuns. The work he meant his Company to do demanded such constant and strained activity—a Jesuit must stand with only one foot on the ground, he said, the other must be raised ready to start wherever he was despatched—that women were unfit for it. That was his firm resolve, and he was to suffer for it.
In 1539 he had written to Isabella Roser that he hoped God would forget him if he ever forgot all that she had done for him; and it is probable that some sentences (unintentional on the part of the writer) had made the lady, now a widow, believe that she was destined to play the part of Clara to this Francis. At all events (1543) she came to Rome, accompanied by two friends bringing with them a large sum of money, sorely needed by Ignatius to erect his house in Rome for the Professed of the Four Vows. In return, they asked him to give some time to advise them in spiritual things. This Ignatius did, but not with the minuteness nor at the length expected. He declared that the guidance of the souls of the three ladies for three days cost him more than the oversight of his whole Society for a month. Then it appeared that Isabella Roser wanted more. She was a woman of noble gifts, no weak sentimental enthusiast. She had studied theology widely and profoundly. Her learning and abilities impressed the Cardinals whom she met and with whom she talked. She desired Ignatius to create an Order of Jesuit nuns of whom she should be the head. When he refused there was a great quarrel. She demanded back the money she had given; and when this was refused, she raised an action in the Roman courts. She lost her case, and returned indignant to Spain.[694] Poor Isabella Roser—she was not a derelict, and so less interesting to a physician of souls; but she needed comforting like other people. She forgave her old friend, and their correspondence was renewed. She died the year before Ignatius.
When the Society of Jesus was at the height of its power in the seventeenth century, another and equally unsuccessful attempt was made to introduce an Order of Jesuit nuns.
Ignatius died at the age of sixty-five, thirty-five years after his conversion, and sixteen after his Order had received the apostolic benediction. His Company had become the most powerful force within the reanimated Roman Church; it had largely moulded the theology of Trent; and it seemed to be winning back Germany. It had spread in the swiftest fashion. Ignatius had seen established twelve Provinces—Portugal, Castile, Aragon, Andalusia, Italy (Lombardy and Tuscany), Naples, Sicily, Germany, Flanders, France, Brazil, and the East Indies.
The General Council, the subject of many negotiations between the Emperor and the Pope, was at last finally fixed to meet at Trent in 1545.[696] The city was the capital of a small episcopal principality, its secular overlord was the Count of the Tyrol, whose deputy resided in the town. It was a frontier place with about a thousand houses, including four or five fine buildings and a large palace of the Prince Bishop. It contained several churches, one of which, Santa Maria Maggiore, was reserved for the meetings of the Council.[697] Its inhabitants were partly Italian and partly German—the two nationalities living in separate quarters and retaining their distinctive customs and dress. It was a small place for such an assembly, and could not furnish adequate accommodation for the crowd of visitors a General Council always involved.
The Papal Legates entered Trent in state on the 13th of March (1545). Heavy showers of rain marred the impressive display. They were received by the local clergy with enthusiasm, and by the populace with an absolute indifference. Months passed before the Council was opened. Few delegates were present when the papal Legates arrived. The representatives of the Emperor and those of Venice came early; Bishops arrived in straggling groups during April and May and the months that followed. The necessary papal Brief did not reach the town till the 11th of December, and the Council was formally opened on the 13th. The long leisurely opening was symptomatic of the history of the Council. Its proceedings were spread over a period of eighteen years:—under Pope Paul III., 1545-47, including Sessions i. to x.; under Pope Julius III., 1551-52, including Sessions xi. to xvi.; under Pope Pius IV., 1562-1563, including Sessions xvii. to xxv.[698]
The Papal Legates were Gian Maria Giocchi, Cardinal del Monte, a Tuscan who had early entered the service of the Roman Curia, a profound jurist and a choleric man of fifty-seven (first President); Marcello Cervini, Cardinal da Santa Croce; and Cardinal Reginald Pole, the Englishman. The three represented the three tendencies which were apparent in ecclesiastical Italy. The first belonged to the party which stood by the old unreformed Curia, and wished no change. Cervini represented the growing section of the Church, which regarded Cardinal Caraffa as their leader. They sought eagerly and earnestly a reform in life and character, especially among the clergy; but refused to make any concessions in doctrines, ceremonies, or institutions to the Protestants. They differed from the more reforming Spanish and French ecclesiastical leaders in their dislike of secular interference, and believed that the Popes should have more rather than less power. Reginald Pole was one of those liberal Roman Catholics of whom Cardinal Contarini was the distinguished leader. He was made a Legate probably to conciliate his associates. He was a man whom most people liked and nobody feared—a harmless, pliant tool in the hands of a diplomatist like Cervini. The new Society of Jesus was represented by Lainez and Salmeron, who went to the Council with the dignity of papal theologians—a title which gave them a special standing and influence.
According to the arrangement come to between the Emperor and the Pope, the Bull summoning the Council declared that it was called for the three purposes of overcoming the religious schism; of reforming the Church; and of calling a united Christendom to a crusade against unbelievers. By general consent the work of the Council was limited to the first two objects. They were stated in terms vague enough to cover real diversity of opinion about the work the Council was expected to do.
Almost all believed that the questions of reforming the Church and dealing with the religious revolt were inseparably connected; but the differences at once emerged when the method of treating the schism was discussed.
Many pious Roman Catholics believed that the Lutheran movement was a divine punishment for the sins of the Church, and that it would disappear if the Church was thoroughly reformed in life and morals. They differed about the agency to be employed to effect the reformation. The Italian party, who followed Cardinal Caraffa, maintained that full powers should be in the hands of the Pope; non-Italians, especially the Spaniards, thought it vain to look for any such reformation so long as the Curia, itself the seat of the greatest corruption, remained unreformed, and contended that the secular authority ought to be allowed more power to put down ecclesiastical scandals.
The Emperor, Charles V., had come to believe that there were no insuperable differences of doctrine between the Lutherans and the Roman Catholics, and that mutual explanations and a real desire to give and take, combined with the removal of scandals which all alike deplored, would heal the schism. He had never seen the gulf which the Lutheran principle of the spiritual priesthood of all believers had created between the Protestants and mediæval doctrines and ceremonies.[699] He persisted in this belief long after the proceedings at Trent had left him hopeless of seeing the reconciliation he had expected brought about by the Council he had done so much to get summoned. The Augsburg Interim (1548) shows what he thought might have been done.[700] He was badly seconded at Trent. The only Bishop who supported his views heartily was Madruzzo, the Prince Bishop of Trent; his representative, Diego de Mendoza, fell ill shortly after the opening of the Council, and his substitute, Francisco de Toledo, did not reach Trent until March 1546.
Tho ablest of the three Legates, Cervini, had a definite plan of procedure before him. He knew thoroughly the need for drastic reforms in the life and morals of the clergy and for purifying the Roman Curia; but, with the memories of Basel and Constance before him, he dreaded above all things a conflict between the Pope and the Council, and he believed that such a quarrel was imminent if the Council itself undertook to reform the Curia. His idea was that the Council ought to employ itself in the useful, even necessary task of codifying the doctrines of the Church, so that all men might discern easily what was the true Catholic faith. While this was being done, opportunity would be given to the Pope himself to reform the Curia—a task which would be rendered easier by the consciousness that he had the sympathy of the Council behind him. He scarcely concealed his opinion that such codification should make no concessions to the Protestants, but would rather show them to be in hopeless antagonism to the Catholic faith. He did not propose any general condemnation of what he thought to be Lutheran errors; but he wished the separate points of doctrine which the Lutherans had raised—Justification, the authority of Holy Scripture, the Sacraments—to be examined carefully and authoritatively defined. In this way heretics would be taught the error of their ways without mentioning names, and without the specific condemnation of individuals. He expounded his plan of procedure to the Council.
His suggestions were by no means universally well received by the delegates. The proposal to leave reforms to the Pope provoked many speeches from the Spanish Bishops, full of bitter reproaches against the Curia; and his conception of codifying the doctrines of the Church with the avowed intention of irrevocably excluding the Lutherans was by no means liked by many.
A great debate took place on Jan. 18th, which revealed to the Legate that probably the majority of the delegates did not favour his proposed course of procedure. Madruzzo, the eloquent Prince Bishop of Trent, and a Cardinal, made a long speech, in which he asserted that the Council should not rashly take for granted that the Lutherans were irreconcilable. They ought to acknowledge frankly that the corrupt morals of the mediæval clergy had done much to cause dissatisfaction and to justify revolt. Let them therefore assume that these evils for which the Church was responsible had produced the schism. Let them invite the Protestants to come among them as brethren. Let them show to those men, who had no doubt erred in doctrine, that the Catholic Church was sincerely anxious to reform the abounding evils in life and morals, and, with this fraternal bond between them, let them reason amicably together about the doctrinal differences which now separated them. The eloquent and large-minded Cardinal condensed the recommendations in his speech in one sentence: “Cum corrupti mores ecclesiasticorum dederint occasionem Lutheranis confingendi falsa dogmata, sublata causa, facilius tolletur effectus; subdens optimum fore, si protestantes ipsos amicabiliter et fraterne literis invitaremus, ut ipsi quoque ad synodum venirent, et se etiam reformari paterentur.”[701] We are told that this speech raised great enthusiasm among the delegates, and that the Legates had some difficulty in preventing its proposal from being universally accepted. At the most they were able to prevent any definite conclusion being come to about the procedure at the close of the sitting. Cervini saw that he could not get his way adopted. He agreed that proposals for reform and for the codification of doctrine should be discussed simultaneously, his knowledge of theological nature telling him that if he once got so many divines engaged in doctrinal discussions two things would surely follow: their eagerness would make them neglect everything else, and their polemical instincts would carry them beyond the point where a conciliation of the Protestants required them to come to a halt. So it happened. The Council found itself committed to a codification and definition of Catholic doctrine. The suggestion of the Bishop of Feltre (Thomas Campeggio) was adopted, that the discussion of doctrines and the proposals for reform should be discussed by two separate Commissions, whose reports should come before the Synod alternately. The Legates obtained a large majority for this course, and the protest of Madruzzo was unavailing.
The decision to attack the question of reform was very unacceptable to the Pope. He went so far as to ask the Legates to get it rescinded; but that was impossible, and he had to content himself with the assurances of Cervini that no real harm would come of it.