The Jesuits

by S. W. J. O'Malley

  By attending once again to his inner inspiration, he began to find guidance. He greatly tempered his austerities and found that as a result his serenity of mind returned and he was more capable of helping others who came to him to “speak about the things of God,” as he put it. He had reached a critical moment in his spiritual life that later had profound repercussions on the spirituality of the Society. He turned away from the model of sanctity that prevailed up to that time, which assumed that the more severely the body was punished, the better the soul would flourish. It assumed that the greater the withdrawal from “the world,” the holier one would be.

  Only in the light of this change at Manresa can we understand why Ignatius, as he returned from his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, decided to enter a university “the better to help souls.” Only in the light of Manresa can we understand why, unlike all religious orders up to that time, the Constitutions professedly abstained from prescribing penances or austerities for the Jesuits and, indeed, went on to insist that “a proper care to preserve one’s health and strength of body for God’s service is praiseworthy and should be exercised by all” (#292). Only in the light of this change at Manresa can we understand how in the Constitutions, Ignatius could prescribe that, along with prayer and other spiritual means, Jesuits make use in their ministries of natural means: “Therefore the human or acquired means ought to be sought with diligence, especially well-grounded and solid learning … and the art of dealing and conversing with others” (#814). Not monastic silence was the ideal but cultivation of the art of conversation. A significant moment had been reached in the history of Catholic piety.

  With his serenity returned, Ignatius began to receive great consolations of soul and internal enlightenment, which sometimes took the form of visions. In all this he became convinced God was gently teaching him and leading him along the right path. He made notes about what was transpiring in his own soul and what he observed taking place in others who came to speak with him. These notes contained some of the essential elements from which the Spiritual Exercises eventually emerged. The book was, thus, not a product of theory but of lived experience. Although Ignatius continued to revise the notes over the next twenty years, he had much of it fundamentally in hand when he left Manresa to complete his pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

  The result was a book unlike any other up to that time, a manual of “exercises” and reflections to help individuals get in touch with themselves and with the action of God within them. As the text says, the goal was to create a situation where “the Creator deals directly with the creature, and the creature directly with his Creator and Lord” (#15). The Exercises are not, then, a book to be read but to be used so as gently to lead an individual along a spiritual path consonant with the person’s gifts and personality.

  Ignatius wrote the book while still a layman, and he intended it for anybody intent on a deeper spiritual life. Yet the book came to play a determining role in the ethos of the Jesuits themselves. In the Constitutions Ignatius prescribed that every novice entering the Society spend a full month making the Exercises (#65). The novice, it was hoped, would begin to develop a life of prayer that went far beyond rote recitation of prayers and formal observance of regulations and that brought him to a sense of intimacy with God. His commitment to the life he had chosen would be heartfelt, deep, and lifelong, no matter how difficult the circumstances in which he later found himself. At the time no other religious order had a program for its novices that was anything like it.

  The Spiritual Exercises also delivered into the hands of the Jesuits a new ministry, which came to be called the “retreat.” Of course, retirement from one’s ordinary duties for prayer and reflection is older than Christianity itself, but the Exercises for the first time provided a structured yet flexible program for doing so. The Jesuits set to work putting this ministry into practice, and in 1553, for instance, they built at their college at Alcalá outside Madrid a building specifically intended for housing men making the Exercises, the first of their many “retreat houses” around the world. More broadly, the Exercises helped the Jesuits see all their ministries as spiritual, ultimately aimed at leading others on a spiritual journey beyond routine of rite and ritual.

  In the sixteenth century, the Exercises had severe critics who saw in them a dangerous form of mysticism that minimized or made irrelevant the sacraments and other usages of the church in favor of God’s direct communication with the individual. Ignatius repeatedly had to defend their orthodoxy before the Inquisition in various cities until he finally arrived in Rome. Even after they were published in 1548 with the approbation of Pope Paul III, they were not immune from criticism and suspicion.

  Important though the Exercises were in creating the identity of the Jesuits, they were not Ignatius’s only service to the Society. He possessed a remarkable gift for leadership. Once he became superior general, the gift manifested itself especially in three ways. First, he displayed remarkable acuity in choosing two men to assist him in forming the Society. Their talents complemented his own and help account for the stability and esprit de corps remarkable for such a rapidly expanding and geographically sprawling enterprise as the Society of Jesus early became.

  In choosing Juan Alfonso de Polanco as his secretary, he found a person of broad culture who at the same time showed a genius for organizing how the central office of the order could keep effectively in touch with members spread far and wide. In choosing Jerónimo Nadal as his “agent in the field,” he found a man of extraordinary energy and persuasive powers who traveled across Europe visiting Jesuit communities, interviewing each member, and then explaining and exemplifying what it meant to be a Jesuit. The collaboration among these three men accounts for the cohesion and stability (amid much confusion!) that the new order enjoyed from the beginning.

  Secondly, Ignatius, with the aid of Polanco, composed the Jesuit Constitutions, which broke new ground for the genre. Unlike the correlative documents of other orders, the Constitutions were not a simple collection of ordinances and regulations but a coherent presentation of ideals and goals. The originality of the Constitutions was nowhere more striking than in the developmental design according to which they followed the Jesuit from entrance into the Society through his training and commissioning for ministry. The final part of the Constitutions describes the qualities required in the superior general, which amounts to a portrait of the ideal Jesuit. It was a book, therefore, with beginning, middle, and end.

  Like the Exercises, the Constitutions were based on a presupposition that psychological or spiritual growth will take place, and they provided for it by prescribing certain things as appropriate for beginners and suggesting others as appropriate for more seasoned members. In so doing the Constitutions evince a judicious mix of firmness and flexibility that allowed the Society to adapt to changing circumstances and still retain its identity. Undergirding it was an implicit theological assumption of the compatibility of Christianity with the best of secular culture, according to the axiom of Thomas Aquinas, the theologian the Constitutions prescribe for the order, that grace perfects nature. The Jesuit adoption of the axiom suggests, once again, the ongoing impact of Ignatius’s “turn to the world” at Manresa.

  Thirdly, Ignatius decided, after the Society had been in existence less than a decade, to commit it to the staffing and management of schools for young laymen, a bold new undertaking for a religious order. Leadership, though a gift difficult to analyze, certainly consists in large measure in vision, in the ability to see how at a given juncture change is more consistent with one’s scope than staying the course. That is the quality Ignatius displayed at this juncture. The decision to found, staff, and operate schools meant that the Jesuits, while retaining their identity as missionaries, now also had an identity as resident schoolmasters. It was an identity not only not foreseen in the Formula but seemingly inconsistent with it. Somehow the Jesuits managed to hold the two ideals together.

  The Jesuits now had a ministry that made them di
stinctive. They threw themselves into it unreservedly. By the time Ignatius died more than thirty schools were in operation, principally in Italy but also in other countries. Ten years later there were thirty in Italy alone but others in France, Germany, and elsewhere. Two, for instance, had just opened in Poland. Besides offering instruction, the schools served as excellent bases for other ministries. Moreover, the Jesuits discovered that the schools gave them access to a population, such as the parents of their students, that might not be attracted to their churches. The schools, some of which grew to physically imposing structures, developed into important civic institutions. They also immediately began to be a source of vocations to the Society and in that regard are among the principal factors in accounting for the Society’s rapid growth and the high quality of the young men who entered it.

  What moved Ignatius to this momentous decision? Many factors, surely. He came more and more to recognize the long-range advantages of ministry with a fixed base. He and his colleagues were, as university graduates, almost by definition committed to the “war against ignorance and superstition” that in the sixteenth century engaged both Protestants and Catholics. Moreover, he recognized that at Paris the first Jesuits had learned certain pedagogical techniques that made them particularly effective teachers.

  The list of reasons could go on, but surely determinative for Ignatius was the philosophy of education that underlay the humanistic schools of the era. That philosophy, derived from classical antiquity but now revived and given a Christian cast by Renaissance theorists such as Erasmus, was radically student-centered. It promised to produce men of integrity, dedicated to the common good of church and society, and skilled in persuading others to similar dedication. That scope, Ignatius saw, coincided with the scope of the Society, and the schools provided a fine matrix for integrating the two.

  Ignatius’s decision inaugurated a new era in Roman Catholicism for formal education. If the Jesuits were the first religious order to undertake as a primary and self-standing ministry the operation of full-fledged schools for any students, lay or clerical, who chose to come to them, they were in time followed by many other orders, both male and female. Such schools became a hallmark of modern Catholicism in every part of the world. Their religious and cultural influence is beyond calculation.

  Ignatius’s decision had a transforming impact on the Society itself. Even in the early years the schools were comparatively large and complex institutions that required the best talent for their staffing, which meant that talent was not available for other ministries. The schools led the Jesuits into becoming major property owners. With their classrooms, theaters, courtyards, and astronomical observatories, they were often huge establishments, to which were attached a church and a Jesuit residence. In some places they became one of the most impressive monuments in the city. Then as now schools ate up money with seemingly insatiable appetites, which meant they were perpetually in debt and drove the Jesuits into undertaking a most mundane occupation, money raising. They thus in some quarters gained a reputation for being avid for gold.

  Money raising was imperative because, as Ignatius told the Jesuits at Perugia in 1552, the schools were for “everybody, poor and rich.”1 They therefore charged no tuition. Since there was no income from the students, Jesuits had to look for funds elsewhere. As a result of sad experience, Ignatius began to insist that no school be opened unless its funding had been secured beforehand by endowment or some other means. Even when endowed, schools continued to need funds for operating expenses.

  Although the program offered by the Jesuit schools held little appeal for many students from the lower social classes, the free tuition meant that in fact the schools attracted students from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds. In the Jesuit school in Munich between 1601 and 1776, for instance, about 5 percent of the students came from noble families, about another 12 percent from families of civic office holders. Some 83 percent, therefore, came from the rest of society. Of the 1,500 students in the school at Billom in France, 7 percent were of the nobility, 9 percent from the bourgeoisie, 24 percent of minor officials’ class, and the rest from lower classes. These figures are typical, except of course for the relatively few “Colleges of Nobles” that the Jesuits ran in some places.

  From the beginning most of the Jesuit schools were “colleges,” that is, schools that taught the so-called lower disciplines of literature, history, drama, and related subjects. Boys entered when they were about eight or ten years old and remained for seven or eight years. Once a boy had completed the program, at about age eighteen, his formal schooling ended. The colleges were not, therefore, preparation for further studies at a university, although of course if a young man now wanted to pursue the professional training in law, medicine, philosophy, or theology that universities offered, he was well prepared for it.

  However, some Jesuit schools also taught the higher disciplines of philosophy and theology, and thus they themselves qualified as universities. Within a few years after opening in 1551, for example, the Roman College began teaching philosophy (principally the works of Aristotle) and theology and, despite its name, became a university and was empowered to offer university degrees. Only a few Jesuit universities taught law and medicine, the other two disciplines offered by universities.

  Perhaps the most important change the schools wrought within the Society was, as mentioned, the new kind and degree of its members’ engagement with secular culture. The Jesuits in their own training and in the training of others moved beyond the traditional clerical subjects of philosophy and theology. Central to the humanistic curriculum they taught in their colleges was literature as found in the pagan classics of ancient Greece and Rome. Homer and Virgil, Sophocles and Terrence, Thucydides and Livy, Demosthenes and Cicero—virtually every Jesuit taught these non-clerical texts at some point in his career. Literature included drama, which led the Jesuits into writing and staging plays, unheard of for a religious order until that time.

  The plays often entailed music, which led the Jesuits to engage for the students a maestro di cappella, sometimes a musician as distinguished as Palestrina or, much later, Charpentier. The plays almost as often entailed dance, which meant engaging a maestro di ballo. In 1688 the French Jesuit Claude-François Menestrier, sometimes considered the first historian of ballet, published his important Des ballets anciens et modernes. The Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris became famous for its dance performances, which were attended by Louis XIV and the French aristocracy but were a scandal of worldliness for the Jesuits’ enemies and critics.

  Textbooks were needed at prices students could afford. In the last year of his life, Ignatius for that purpose had a printing press installed in the Roman College. One of the first books it produced was a Jesuit’s edition of a pagan classic, Martial’s Epigrams. By 1564 the press had acquired Arabic characters and by 1577, Hebrew. The Jesuits installed presses in other colleges, not without worry that they might seem to be running a business for profit. Although of modest dimensions, these presses performed important services for the Jesuits and their clients. In 1563, for instance, Nadal arranged for the press at the college in Vienna to print fifteen hundred copies of the Spiritual Exercises. In 1556 the Jesuits introduced printing in Goa. By means of it, the first book ever printed in India was Xavier’s catechism.

  Over the course of the centuries Jesuits produced an immense quantity of books on a wide variety of subjects, a phenomenon that became part of their corporate identity. As “ministers of the word,” they like other Catholic priests wrote books on religious and theological subjects. But by force of their vocation as teachers of the humanities and “natural philosophy” (the forerunner of modern science), the Jesuits wrote extensively and most characteristically on those subjects as well, and they thereby developed a profile that, in comparison with other orders, looked decidedly secular.

  THEIR MINISTRIES

  The importance for the Society of the Formula that the original ten members composed in 1539 and th
at was approved by the papacy in 1540 can hardly be exaggerated. It was then and is now the charter allowing the Jesuits to operate within the Catholic Church. As long as the Society adheres to the basic principles of the Formula, it is, at least theoretically, free to make its own decisions. A slightly revised version was solemnly approved by Pope Julius III in 1550 and is the version still in force today.

  Among its remarkable features is the clear definition of the purpose of the Society, “the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine and the propagation of the faith.” The “progress of souls” meant doing ministry and “propagation of the faith” meant being missionaries. In other words, the Society was founded for ministry, especially in a missionary mode. Obvious though this might seem to us today, it was not obvious to all those who wanted to join the Society in its early years. Nadal, the first great rhetorician of the Jesuit ethos, was forced to repeat again and again in his exhortations to fledgling Jesuit communities across Europe, “We are not monks!”

  The Formula was typically precise in listing the ministries the Jesuits would exercise, a list that was expanded in 1550. “Ministry of the word of God” held pride of place, a reflection of the fact that since the founding of the mendicant orders in the thirteenth century, preaching had experienced an astounding revival that continued unabated into the sixteenth. The Jesuits understood this ministry in the broadest possible sense. First of all, of course, they engaged in preaching, not only in churches but on street corners and wherever they might be able to gather a crowd.