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Home , Society of Jesus

CHAPTER THREE

THE SOCIETY OF 1

The , a of men within the church, officially came into on September 27, 1540, with the bull of Paul III, Regimini militantis ecclesiae. The bull approved the “plan of life” (formula vivendi) drawn by ten young , mostly Iberians, who had met as students some years earlier at the of . , a Basque nobleman and unofficial leader of the group, there inspired the others through the book of Spiritual Exercises he had already almost completed while still a layman. The group included (1506–1565), who would later become the great to and , and Diego Laínez, who would be an important theologian at the and succeed Ignatius as general of the order. The group determined to travel to Palestine to work for the conversion of the Muslims, but when they could not secure passage, they decided to stay together and form a new order. Within a few years of the founding, the members began to be known as Jesuits, a name that has stuck with them ever since. The Jesuita appeared in fifteenth-century texts and originally meant a good Christian, a follower of Jesus, but later also began to connote a religious hypocrite. The Jesuits made the best of the situation, gradually accepted the term as a shorthand for the official name of the organization, and understood it of course in its positive sense. Ignatius was especially insistent on the inclu- sion of Jesus in the official name, even though it provoked persistent criti- cisms within the church for sounding arrogant, as if all Christians were not members of the society of Jesus. The Jesuits were only one of a number of new religious orders of men and women founded in the , but by reason of their size, the influence of their schools and other ministries, their missionary activity, and their ventures into almost every aspect of culture they are the best known and the most controversial. Until recently the historiography of the order fell into two rather distinct camps, reflected in the ambiguity

1 Originally published in A Companion to the World, ed. R. Po-chia Hsia (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 223–36. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

54 chapter three of the word Jesuita itself: the first depicted the Jesuits as exemplary follow- ers of Jesus, as and savants, the second as the religious hypocrites Jesuita sometimes implied; almost all European languages have the equiv- alent of “jesuitical” to mean crafty and devious. This latter historiography derived in large part from Protestant polemic but also from the Jesuits’ many enemies within Catholicism itself, who ultimately achieved the worldwide suppression of the order by Pope Cle­ ment XIV in 1773. The primary Catholic font for this dark interpretation was the published anonymously in Cracow in 1614. It ran through twenty-two editions in seven languages by the end of the century, and, though often exposed as a crude forgery, continued to be reprinted and cited well into the twentieth century. Supposedly a collection of secret instructions from the head of the order, it firmly established the myth of the Jesuits as devils in a soutane, whose fundamental objective was to control the world through the systematic compiling of compromis- ing secrets about friends, enemies—and each other. Serious historians of course never bought either extreme, and in the past few years especially in and North America, they have turned to the Jesuits in record numbers to explore with less prejudice almost every aspect of the Jesuits’ manifold activities. They have successfully challenged interpretations of the order that had long been taken for granted by friend and foe alike. They have shown, for instance, that the order was not founded to oppose the Reformation or even to “reform the ” but had a much broader, primarily pastoral scope. They have shown that, despite the military imagery in the of 1540, the order was not grounded on a military model but on the more traditional model of a brotherhood or of “reformed priests.” They have shown that the Jesuits’ famous “” was not an oath of Counter-Reformation loyalty to the pope but a vow of mobility expressive of their desire to be in imitation of the evangelizing St. Paul. By showing how much the order changed even within the first several decades of its life, they have subverted the common assumption that all was clear to the founders from the beginning, and they have especially demonstrated how profoundly the Jesuits’ decision to undertake the run- ning of schools changed their scope. They have broken the Eurocentric focus of most writings on the Jesuits by some fascinating studies of the various patterns of Jesuit encounters with “the Other” in Latin America, , the , India, Japan, and . The order grew rapidly. By the time Loyola died in 1556 it numbered about 1,000 members, already divided into twelve administrative units