It was the vision of their founder that made the Jesuits so formidable an instrument in the service of the Pope. Already in The Spiritual Exercises of 1522—nearly two decades before the Society’s official formation—Ignatius demonstrated the inner paradox that would shape the Jesuits for centuries. In the first instance, the Exercises is a mystical text, intended to elevate readers above their worldly surroundings and bring them to an ecstatic union with God. The history of the medieval Church is rife with charismatic mystics who, like Ignatius, had visions of Christ and the Virgin and who ascended to a higher, and even divine, plane of existence. In their writing, mystics such as Joachim of Fiore and Catherine of Siena attempted to share something of their experience with their followers, and in that regard Ignatius’s tract was quite typical.
But the Exercises is something else as well: a carefully detailed practical manual on how to achieve union with God. The prescribed course of meditation is divided into four “weeks,” though they need not correspond precisely to seven days. Each week’s meditations have a different focus, from the nature of sin and the torments of hell in the first week to the sufferings of Christ and the Resurrection in the fourth. The “exercitant” must follow these directions precisely, with an open heart and a will to renounce selfishness and accept God’s proffered grace. The road to God, as mapped out in the Exercises, is not a single mysterious leap from our fallen world to godly heavens, explainable only through divine grace. It is, rather, a long and arduous journey requiring discipline, dedication, unquestioning trust in the guidance of one’s superiors, and strict obedience to their directions.
The tension between ecstatic mysticism and rigorous discipline, the core of the Exercises, makes it profoundly different from other mystical texts, which focus on the glory of union with God but offer no road map for how to achieve it. And it is precisely this paradox that animated the Society of Jesus and made it the powerful and effective tool that it was in the hands of the Papacy. For the Jesuits were unequivocally mystics: each novice entering the Society went through the course of The Spiritual Exercises and experienced the blissful union with God that is its culmination. Thereafter he would act with the unquestioning confidence that is the province of those who encountered God and knew what He wanted of them. But whereas traditional mystics were led to a life of solitude and inner contemplation, the Jesuits projected their inner confidence onto the world, proceeding with discipline, order, and endurance. The result was that the Jesuits presented a unique combination of traits that made them into one of the most effective organizations, religious and otherwise, in the history of the world: the zeal and certainty of the mystic, and the rigid organization and focused purpose of an elite military unit.
In addition to establishing the order’s guiding principles, Ignatius also put in place the mechanisms that would turn those principles into reality. The greatest challenge, he recognized, was to create a body of men who would be unquestioningly committed to the Society and its goals, and willing to dedicate their entire lives to both. Even a brilliant and highly moral individual might be rejected if the selection committee determined that he was overly individualistic and therefore unsuited to life in a disciplined collective. Once admitted, a young man was separated from his former life and underwent a two-year novitiate in which he was inculcated with the Society’s ideals of poverty and service. He would practice the complete sequence of The Spiritual Exercises and serve in the Society’s far-flung missions, colleges, and residences. Above all, he was required to accept without question the authority of his superiors, and to follow their directions in things large and small.
At the end of the two years, the novices took the monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. For those who were not expected to be ordained as priests, this was the end of their formal training. They would become “approved coadjutors” and, years later, “formed coadjutors,” serving perhaps as administrators, cooks, or gardeners, full members of the Society but of a lower grade than their ordained brethren. Novices destined for the priesthood, however, would become “scholastics,” undertaking years of advanced studies in Jesuit institutions. Along the way, they would be ordained as priests, and would also take several years off from their studies to teach incoming students. Once they completed their studies, the scholastics would go through another year of “spiritual formation,” at the end of which they would pronounce their final vows. Some would once again pronounce the three traditional vows and become “spiritual coadjutors.” But those judged the most outstanding in both learning and character would add a fourth vow, unique to the Jesuits, professing absolute personal obedience to the Pope. These men were known as the “professed,” and formed the order’s unchallenged elite. Overall, this long process, lasting between eight and fourteen years, produced the kind of individuals Ignatius had envisioned: intelligent, energetic, and disciplined. Together they were a tight-knit brotherhood, bound by deep identification with the goals of the Society, a strong sense of camaraderie, and pride in belonging to an elite corps in the service of Christ and the Church.
The Jesuits, however, were not just a brotherhood of affection and solidarity; they were also a strictly organized top-down hierarchy, built to operate as smoothly and efficiently as a modern military unit. At the apex was the superior general, invariably a professed member, elected for life by the order’s general congregation. His powers within the order were unlimited, and he was free to appoint or dismiss any Jesuit from any position within the order. Below him were the provincial superiors, responsible for the Society’s work in large territorial “provinces,” such as the upper and lower Rhine in Germany, or Brazil in the New World; and below them were the local superiors, responsible for particular regions or cities, right down to individual colleges and residences. Unlike other religious orders, where local communities enjoyed considerable autonomy and could pick their own leaders, power among the Jesuits flowed strictly from top to bottom: it was the superior general in Rome, not the local members, who appointed the provincial superiors, and they in turn, in close consultation with Rome, appointed the local superiors. The members of each local community were expected to accept these decisions whether they liked them or not, and with very rare exceptions, they did.
The willingness of local Jesuits to submit to the edicts of faraway superiors requires some explanation. After all, the superior general in Rome, capable and dedicated though he was, was often quite ignorant of local conditions, and his directives could be misguided, and even disastrous. Such, for example, was the experience of the French Jesuits in 1594, when they were required to swear allegiance to Henri IV, the new king of France, who had recently converted to Catholicism. The superior general Claudio Acquaviva strictly forbade the Jesuits from taking such an oath, a decision that resulted in their expulsion from Paris and very nearly the end of their activities in France. But even in such extreme situations, when they knew full well that the directions from Rome were misguided and based on a flawed understanding of local conditions, and even when they themselves had to pay the price for their superiors’ blunders, the Jesuits obeyed.
The reason was that, for the Jesuits, the principle of “obedience” was not just a practical concession to the requirements of efficient action, but a religious ideal of the highest order. “With all judgment of our own put aside, we ought … to be obedient to the true Spouse of Christ our Lord, which is our Holy Mother the hierarchical Church,” wrote Ignatius in The Spiritual Exercises. This obedience extends not only to actions, but also to opinions and even sense perceptions. “To keep ourselves right in all things,” Ignatius wrote, “we ought to hold fast to this principle: What I see as white I will believe to be black if the hierarchical Church thus determines it.”
Modern readers might understandably associate such absolute obedience to a ruling hierarchy with the totalitarian regimes that have darkened the history of the twentieth century. Indeed, the requirement that one see white as black if so ordered brings to mind George Orwell�
��s 1984, in which Winston is required to see four fingers as five in order to prove his loyalty to Big Brother. But there is an important difference: Winston, in 1984, is being tortured, and is forced to accept Big Brother’s supremacy against his will. To the Jesuits, obedience was a high ideal, and its attainment entirely voluntary. Obeying a superior’s order, Ignatius wrote, was not an act of abject submission, but a positive reaffirmation of the Society’s mission and one’s role within it. It followed that although disciplinary measures such as reprimands and even expulsion did exist in the Society of Jesus, they were rarely used in practice. Those who had undergone the rigorous training regimen to become formed Jesuits rarely required such measures to remind them of the value of obedience. Ultimately, Ignatius wrote, “all authority is derived from God,” and consequently, obeying the commands of a superior should be immediate and willing, “as if it were coming from Christ our Savior.”
In the broadest sense, imposing order on chaos was the Society’s core mission, both in its internal arrangements and in its engagement with the world. This was already in evidence in The Spiritual Exercises, which transforms an ineffable mystical experience into something like an orderly course of study. It is evident also in Ignatius’s Constitutions, which provides detailed systematic directions for the running of the Society, and ultimately in the Ratio studiorum, the document that outlined in fine detail what must be taught in Jesuit colleges, how, and by whom. Even in their personal lives the Jesuits held to a code of strict orderliness: “Whoever has studied the Jesuits’ regimen must be struck by the frequent emphasis on tidiness and order,” noted one early twentieth-century historian of the Jesuits. Neatness, cleanliness, and order in both personal quarters and the communal household were “an absolute requirement.” Most of all it was expressed in the clear hierarchy of the Society, in which each member was assigned a precise and uncontested place. It was this ability to impose order on chaos that made the Society such an effective instrument in the fight to defeat Protestantism and reestablish the power and prestige of the Church hierarchy.
THE JESUITS STRIKE BACK
Highly educated and fanatically devoted to the cause of the Church and the Pope, the Jesuits were a spiritual army such as Europe had never seen. For the popes, they were a weapon without equal in the former’s struggle to impose the authority and the teachings of the Church upon a turbulent and skeptical world, and the popes did not hesitate to make good use of that weapon. From the beginning, the Jesuits were sent on the road to shore up the faith in regions where it was under attack. Pierre Favre, Ignatius’s early companion from Paris, was the first Jesuit to work in Germany. The best hope for the Roman Church, Favre surmised, was to strengthen the people’s attachment to the traditional holy rites and services: “If the heretics should see in the churches the practice of frequent Communion, with the faithful receiving their Strength and their Life … not one of them would dare to preach the Zwinglian doctrine of the Holy Eucharist.” He traveled the country, visiting parishes, preaching to large gatherings, and reviving the old communal traditions of the Church.
Favre died in 1546, but two other outstanding Jesuits stepped into the breach: first the Spaniard Jerónimo Nadal, and then Peter Canisius, the “second apostle” of Germany. From the 1540s to the 1560s, Canisius logged approximately twenty thousand miles on the roads of Austria, Bohemia, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. Going beyond preaching and the organizational work of reviving parish life, he issued a steady stream of popular books instructing both priests and their flock in correct Catholic doctrines and practices. The results that he and other Jesuits achieved were nothing short of dramatic: The priests at the Jesuit church in Vienna, for example, heard seven hundred confessions in Easter of 1560, but nine years later, the number had grown to three thousand. Similarly in Cologne, in 1576, fifteen thousand worshippers received Holy Communion at the Jesuit chapel, but only five years later the number had tripled, to forty-five thousand. Here was proof of the Jesuits’ prowess at reviving Catholic life in lands that were poised for a Protestant takeover.
Jesuits served as the engines of the Catholic revival in other capacities. Some, such as Francisco Suárez, were outstanding formal theologians, who set down the doctrines of the Church and could more than hold their own in debate with their Protestant critics. Others, such as Diego Laynez and Antonio Possevino, served as personal emissaries of the Pope on important diplomatic missions, and still others, such as Robert Bellarmine, combined the two roles as papal theologians and counselors. Some, such as François de la Chaise, personal confessor of Louis XIV and namesake of the famous Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, provided moral guidance and spiritual solace to European royalty. Others yet, such as the Englishman Edmund Campion, were sent on secret missions to their Protestant homelands to nurture the flame of Catholicism, at enormous risk to themselves. In all these roles the Jesuits proved themselves outstanding religious warriors: learned and often brilliant, skilled, energetic, and zealously devoted to the cause of Church and Pope.
AN EMPIRE OF LEARNING
But while the Jesuits were successful in all these endeavors, it was in one area in particular that they were truly without peer: education. Significantly, apart from training new members, Ignatius did not initially consider education to be a primary focus of his Society. His vision saw the Jesuits as itinerant priests, ready to pack up at a moment’s notice and travel to the four corners of the earth at the behest of the Pope or their superiors, and consequently unsuitable to run schools. But when Francis Borgia founded the first Jesuit college, in Gandia, Spain, in 1545, the leading citizens of the town besieged him with requests to allow their sons to be educated there. Borgia turned to Ignatius, who, sensing an opportunity to further the cause of Catholic revival, gave his consent. By 1548 the college of Gandia had opened up to the town’s youth.
The experience in Gandia set the trend for other institutions. The year 1548 also saw the opening of the college of Messina, in Sicily, the first Jesuit institution devoted primarily to educating secular students. To oversee its founding, Ignatius dispatched a number of his most trusted subordinates, including Nadal and Canisius, who made Messina into a model for future colleges. Following Ignatius’s instructions, the curriculum included an intensive course in Latin, the classical authors, and philosophy guided by the writings of Aristotle. At the top of the hierarchy of learning was theology, the “Queen of the sciences,” which had final say on all matters of true knowledge. The faculty at Messina, led by Nadal, worked to make this broad program of instruction into a systematic and orderly curriculum and issued several proposals for an “order of studies,” or, in its more familiar Latin form, ratio studiorum. After undergoing many revisions and several drafts, the Ratio studiorum was formally approved in 1599 by the Society’s general congregation and became the blueprint for Jesuit teaching everywhere.
Following these early successes, demand for Jesuit colleges exploded across Catholic Europe. In towns and cities large and small, ruling princes, local bishops, and prominent citizens appealed to the Society to found colleges in their communities. Recognizing the value of education for spreading the teachings of the Church, Ignatius chose to embrace this new Jesuit mission, and called for the establishment of Jesuit institutions across Europe. By the time of his death in 1556, there were already 33 Jesuit colleges, and the demand only kept growing: 144 colleges in 1579, 444 colleges plus 100 seminaries and schools in 1626, and 669 colleges plus 176 seminaries and schools in 1749. Most were in Europe, but not all. Jesuit colleges could be found as far east as Nagasaki, Japan, and as far west as Lima, Peru. It was truly a world-encompassing educational system, on a scale the world had never seen before, or has, for that matter, since.
At the center of this great educational network was the Roman College, known universally as the Collegio Romano. Founded in 1551, it was initially housed in various modest locations around Rome. Pope Gregory XIII (1572–85), an admirer and supporter of the Jesuits, decided to give their flagship
institution a more fitting home. He expropriated two city blocks near the main thoroughfare of the Via del Corso and commissioned the renowned architect Bartolommeo Ammannati to design a suitable headquarters for the Jesuit educational system. The result was a large and impressive, though hardly ostentatious, palazzo that reflected the power and prestige of the Society of Jesus but also the seriousness of its mission and down-to-earth pragmatism. The College moved into its new home in 1584, and it was there, nearly half a century later, that the Revisors General met to rule on the fate of infinitesimals. It would remain there, in the Piazza del Collegio Romano, almost continuously for the next three centuries.
The simple name of the Roman College, no different from a Jesuit college in any other city, suggests that it was meant to serve the young men of Rome just as, say, the “Cologne College” was created to educate the youth of that city. But this is misleading. Although educating the Roman elite was indeed part of the college’s mission, it was also, from its inception, a model and intellectual beacon for the other colleges in the system. Only the most accomplished Jesuit scholars were summoned to Rome to serve as professors at the Collegio, which brought together under one roof the greatest luminaries of the order. Mathematicians Christopher Clavius and Christoph Grienberger, natural philosophers Athanasius Kircher and Roger Boscovich, theologians Francisco Suárez and Robert Bellarmine, and many others—nearly all, in fact, of the leading Jesuit intellectuals—taught at the Collegio Romano. In keeping with the Society’s hierarchical practices, the Roman faculty had the authority to set the curriculum of the provincial colleges and determine what would and would not be taught in Jesuit schools. Just as the order’s superior general ruled over each and every individual Jesuit, so the Roman College ruled over all the hundreds of Jesuit colleges worldwide.
Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World Page 5