Saints Or Devils Incarnate? Jesuit Studies

Saints or Devils Incarnate? Jesuit Studies

Modernity through the Prism of Jesuit History

Edited by Robert A. Maryks Boston College

Editorial Board James Bernauer S.J., Boston College Louis Caruana S.J., Heythrop College Emanuele Colombo, DePaul University Paul Grendler, University of Toronto, emeritus Yasmin Haskell, University of Western Australia Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, Pennsylvania State University Jeffrey Klaiber S.J., Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú Thomas McCoog S.J., Fordham University Mia Mochizuki, Jesuit School of Theology, Santa Clara University Sabina Pavone, Università degli Studi di Macerata Pilar Ryan, United States Military Academy Moshe Sluhovsky, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Jeffrey Chipps Smith, The University of Texas at Austin Jonathan Wright, Durham University

VOLUME 1

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/js Saints or Devils Incarnate?

Studies in Jesuit History

By John W. O’Malley

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2013 Cover illustration: Peter Paul Rubens, Ignatius Presents the Students of the Collegio Germanico to Pope Julius III. Ink on paper, c.1603. Sketch for folio 64 of the Vita beati P. Ignatii Loiolae Societatis Iesu fundatoris (Rome, 1609).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

O’Malley, John W. Saints or devils incarnate? : studies in Jesuit history / by John W. O’Malley. pages cm. -- (Jesuit studies - modernity through the prism of Jesuit history, ISSN 2214-3289 ; VOLUME 1) Includes index. ISBN 978-90-04-25534-0 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-25737-5 (e-book) 1. Jesuits-- History. I. Title.

BX3706.3.O43 2013 271’.53--dc23

2013024395

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ISSN 2214-3289 ISBN 978-90-04-25534-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-25737-5 (e-book)

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This book is printed on acid-free paper.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ��vii List of Abbreviations ��ix Foreword by Robert A. Maryks ��xi

1. The Historiography of the Society of Jesus: Where Does It Stand Today? ��1

2. The Pastoral, Social, Ecclesiastical, Civic, and Cultural Mission of the Society of Jesus �� 37

3. The Society of Jesus �� 53

4. Was Ignatius of Loyola a Church Reformer? How to Look at Early Modern Catholicism �� 71

5. The Ministry to Outsiders: The Jesuits �� 89

6. Ignatius of Loyola (c.1491–1556) �� 99

7. Ignatius’s Special “Way of Proceeding” ��117

8. Early Jesuit Spirituality: Spain and Italy ��121

9. To Travel to Any Part of the World: Jerónimo Nadal and the Jesuit Vocation ��147

10. Some Distinctive Characteristics of Jesuit Spirituality in the Sixteenth Century ��165

11. Renaissance Humanism and the Religious Culture of the First Jesuits ��181

12. How the First Jesuits Became Involved in Education ��199

13. Mission and the Early Jesuits ��217

vi contents

14. Saint Ignatius and the Cultural Mission of the Society of Jesus ��225

15. The Many Lives of Ignatius of Loyola: Future Saint ��257

Index ��299

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1. Title-page of one of several editions of the Monita secreta published in the United States in the nineteenth century ��9 1.2. Title-page of the Imago primi saeculi, Antwerp, 1640, published to celebrate the first centenary of the Jesuits �� 11 1.3–4. Illustrations from Le cabinet jésuitique, a collection of anti-Jesuit pieces first published in Cologne in 1674 ��13, 14 1.5. Frontispiece from Les jésuites, a history of the Society by M.A. Arnould published in Paris in 1846 ��16 14.1. Anonymous. The First Companions of Saint Ignatius. Red chalk, 10.2 x 6.8 inches. ��226 14.2. Jacopine del Conte, Ignatius of Loyola. Oil on panel, 17.9 x 13.7 inches ��227 14.3. Anonymous, Paul III Approves the Society of Jesus. Oil on canvas, 91.7 x 109.6 inches. ��228 14.4. Papal Bull Regimini Militantis Ecclesiae of Pope Paul III; first formal approval of the Society ��231 14.5. Manuscript page of the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus (Textus B), Rome, ARSI, 1b, fol. 38v–39v ��232 14.6. Anonymous, Mexican (Tepotzotlán), Saint Ignatius Loyola and Saint Francisco de Borja. Late 17th century. Oil on canvas, 30 x 48 inches ��233 14.7. Societatis Missiones Indicae, from Imago primi saeculi Societatis Iesu (Antwerp: Plantin Press, 1640), 326. Special Collections, Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia ��235 14.8. Mundus in maligno positus, Special Collections, Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia ��242 14.9. Christoph Clavius, S.J.F. Villamena, Ritratto di Cristoforo Clavio nel suo studio, incisione, Rome, 1606, Archivio Storico della Compagnia di Gesù, Rome. ��247 14.10. Athanasius Kircher, S.J. Georgius de Sepibus, Romani collegi Societatus (sic) Jesu musaeum celeberrimum. ��248 14.11. Nativity, from Jerónimo Nadal, Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia (Antwerp, 1607 edition), plate 4. ��254 15.1. Jean-Baptiste Barbé and Peter Paul Rubens (?). Engraving 80, in Vita beati patris Ignatii Loiolae, 1622 edition ��258

viii list of illustrations

15.2. Peter Paul Rubens, St. Ignatius of Loyola, c.1608. Oil on canvas. 88.2 x 53.1 inches ��262 15.3. Peter Paul Rubens, St. Francis Xavier, c.1608. Oil on canvas. 88.6 x 53.1 inches ��263 15.4. Jean-Baptiste Barbé and Peter Paul Rubens (?). Engraving 39, in Vita beati patris Ignatii Loiolae, 1622 edition ��288 15.5. Jean-Baptiste Barbé and Peter Paul Rubens (?). Engraving 41, in Vita beati patris Ignatii Loiolae, 1622 edition ��290 15.6. Jean-Baptiste Barbé and Peter Paul Rubens (?). Engraving 17, in Vita beati patris Ignatii Loiolae, 1622 edition �� 291 15.7–8. Jean-Baptiste Barbé and Peter Paul Rubens (?). Title page (front and back), in Vita beati patris Ignatii Loiolae, 1622 edition ��293, 294

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AHSI Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu Chron. Vita Ignatii Loiolae et rerum Societatis Jesu historia auctore Joanne Alphonso de Polanco ejusdem Societatis sacerdote (MHSI 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11), 6 vols. Constitutions Sancti Ignatii de Loyola Constitutiones Societatis Jesu (MHSI 63–65), 3 vols. Epp. Ign. Sancti Ignatii de Loyola Societatis Jesu fundatoris epistolae et instructiones (MHSI 22, 26, 28, 29, 31, 33, 34, 36, 39, 40, 42), 12 vols. Fontes narr. Fontes narrativi de S. Ignatio de Loyola et de Societatis Iesu initiis (MHSI) IHSI Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu MHSI Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu Nadal Epistolae P. Hieronymi Nadal Societatis Jesu ab anno 1546 ad 1577 (MHSI 13, 15, 21, 27, 90), 5 vols. Padberg 1994 John W. Padberg, Martin D. O’Keefe, and John L. McCarthy, For Matters of Greater Moment. The First Thirty Jesuit General Congregations. A Brief History and a Translation of the Decrees. St. Louis, Missouri: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1994. Salmerón Epistolae P. Alphonsi Salmeronis Societatis Jesu (MHSI 30, 32), 2 vols. Sommervogel 1–12 Carlos Sommervogel, Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus, vols. 12. Brussels: Schepens/Paris, Picard/ Toulouse, Chez l’Auteur, 1890–1932.

FOREWORD

Robert A. Maryks

Almost from the moment of its founding in 1540 by Ignatius of Loyola and his companions, the Society of Jesus suffered from misunderstanding, some positive, much of it negative. Myth and misinformation abounded— were the Jesuits a society of saints or of devils incarnate? Not until the mid-twentieth century did historians begin to dispel some of the myths of early modern Catholicism, but only with John O’Malley’s The First Jesuits (Harvard University Press, 1993), which has been translated into ten languages, did a new era open in the study of the Society of Jesus. From that moment the Jesuits have attracted growing attention from scholars of all disciplines on an international basis. Since 1993, O’Malley himself has continued to write about the Society’s founder, Ignatius of Loyola, and the subsequent history of the Jesuits. This volume contains a selection of studies that he published both before and after The First Jesuits and gives easier access to this unparalleled contribution to the field. Five of the fifteen articles contained herein had been written before the publication of his groundbreaking book. They highlight the important directions that led O’Malley to offer, by 1993, a new framework for interpreting Jesuit history. This reinterpretation was part of the broader project of redefining early modern Catholicism that O’Malley eventually offered in Trent and All That (Harvard University Press, 2000). Chapter 4 in the current collection examines the figure of Ignatius within the context of sixteenth-century reform movements; Chapter 8 studies some features of Jesuit spirituality in the historical context of early modern Spain and Italy; Chapter 9 analyzes apostolic mobility as a crucial element of Jesuit spirituality and its impact on the Society’s ministries; Chapter 10 defines other distinctive characteristics of Jesuit spirituality; and Chapter 11 shows the link between the Renaissance and the culture of early Jesuits. The remaining ten chapters were published after the appearance of The First Jesuits. The first two (Chapters 1 and 2) are introductions to the two Boston College conference volumes dedicated to Jesuit arts and sciences, collections that O’Malley co-edited. The conferences and the edited collections that followed showed the broad and deep impact the Jesuits had on early modern culture, and they further sparked global interest in,

xii foreword and research on, the Jesuits. Chapter 3 is a succinct description of what the Society of Jesus was about; Chapter 5 describes important features of Jesuit ministries; Chapters 6, 7, 14, and 15 are historical portrayals of Ignatius Loyola, scrutinized from different angles; Chapter 12 traces the history of Jesuit engagement with education; and Chapter 13 discusses the central role of mission in Jesuit spirituality and ministries. Obviously, the hermeneutics of all these articles stem from O’Malley’s pioneering book, yet they offer an interesting glimpse into some new touches in his post-1993 scholarship, including, among others, the recognition of the converso background of Polanco and Ribadeneyra. Inevitably, there are more than a few repetitions in the present selection of articles. The repetitions result from the fact that these articles address different audiences, from scholars to students to general public, and should be taken as a rhetorical strategy for producing emphasis and clarity. Assembled together, all fifteen articles present a fuller picture of O’Malley’s contributions to scholarship on Jesuit history and highlight those historiographical aspects of it that are particularly important to him. One of these aspects is the still deeply and pervasively rooted myth that the Society of Jesus was founded to provide blindly obedient papal troops to fight the Protestant Reformation. Interestingly enough, some of the influential early Jesuits, such as Jerónimo Nadal and Pedro de Ribadeneyra, were themselves responsible for retrospectively creating this long-standing historical distortion after the death of Ignatius in 1556. This militaristic anti-Lutheran portrayal of the Society was soon picked up by Protestant anti-Jesuit writers, such as Martin Chemnitz, yet—as O’Malley eloquently put it—the eyes of the first companions gathered at the University of Paris were directed to Jerusalem, not to Wittenberg. The Jesuits’ famous fourth vow was not a vow of loyalty to the papacy but to be ready to be sent on mission by the pope, Christ’s vicar on earth, just as the apostles went forth on the command of Jesus. Even though some of the first Jesuits (but not Ignatius) employed a militaristic language to describe their mission, their spirituality—and especially their obedience—had nothing to do with military discipline, as the Spiritual Exercises and the Constitutions testify. Indeed, the young Ignatius was wounded at Pamplona not as a professional soldier, as myth had it, but a typical Spanish gentilhombre at a service of his lord. For most of his pre-conversion life, Ignatius had been a page at the court of the Spanish treasurer. True, opposing the spread of Protestantism became later an impor tant part of Jesuit activities, but even then it was not the Society’s major concern. Neither was Loyola involved with the deliberations of the

foreword xiii

Council of Trent, although some leading Jesuits took part in it, including Laínez, Favre, Polanco, Nadal, Salmerón, and Canisius. O’Malley’s careful and fresh reading of primary sources that have been published since the late nineteenth century shows that the Jesuits were founded primarily as a body of missionaries to “heretics and schismatics” and that most of their ministries, or apostolic activities, were aimed at consoling the faithful through preaching, lecturing, hearing confessions, visiting the sick, and other works of mercy, not all of which were exclusively sacerdotal. Jesuit spirituality, rooted in Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises and Constitutions but expanded by Nadal and Polanco, was a backbone of Jesuit ministries and devotion. It should therefore be inseparable from studying their activities, something that many scholars of Jesuit history still seem not to fully grasp. Nadal and Polanco played indeed a crucial role in interpreting and defining the Jesuit charisma and thus eclipsed the earlier vision of Ignatius’s Parisian peers. The impact of the Renaissance thought on their formation seems to have been stronger than on the other original companions of Loyola. Nadal and Polanco impregnated Jesuit ministerial spirituality with concepts, such as common good, humanitas, urbanitas, civiltà, and magnanimity that were very dear to Erasmus and other Renaissance thinkers. The Renaissance was their link to Antiquity, reserv- ing a special place for the rhetoric of accommodation to specific circumstances of places and people, to which almost every page of the Jesuit Constitutions testifies. Once the Jesuits were invited to open their first school in Messina, Sicily, in 1548, the Renaissance also became their link to the Greco-Roman literature they adopted as means to form engaged citizens. Thus, the year 1548 radically changed the identity of the Society of Jesus, as it had been just defined in its foundational documents. While the original ministries remained at the core of Jesuit identity, the new ministry of education quickly transformed the Society into the first teaching religious order. This decision compelled the Society to engage with secular culture in ways new for a religious order, which resulted in its important contributions to the formation of Modernity not only through arts and sciences but also through philosophy, political theory, and law. O’Malley’s collection of essays is the first volume of a new Brill series specifically dedicated to Jesuit studies, associated with the newly founded Journal of Jesuit Studies. Thus we want to acknowledge and pay homage to John W. O’Malley’s crucial role in the field, which goes back beyond the turning point of The First Jesuits twenty years ago to 1968, when Brill published his first book, Giles of Viterbo on Church and Reform. A Study in Renaissance Thought.

CHAPTER ONE

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE SOCIETY OF JESUS: WHERE DOES IT STAND TODAY? 1

From their earliest days the Jesuits were reviled as devils and dissemblers, revered as saints and savants.2 These traditions persisted for centuries in popular media. They persisted in more subtle forms among the learned, continuing in academic circles even after the discipline of history assumed its modern form in the nineteenth century. Scholars have moved beyond such crude dichotomies, but until quite recently professional historians who were themselves Jesuits showed little interest in researching Jesuit history.3 This was but an aspect a more general lack of interest in early modern Catholicism, except as a foil for better understanding the Prote stant Reformation. Interpretations of the Jesuits moved in almost all cases along familiar and predictable lines. Since the middle of the century, however, there have been a large number of studies that, whether written by Jesuits or by others, have been exemplary in method and also innocent of both apology and polemic. More recently, in the past dozen years, even more scholars from diverse disciplines have turned to the Jesuits, and, as this volume testifies, some of them have approached the Jesuits with new methods and perspectives.

1 Originally published in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley, et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 3–37. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. 2 For a listing of anti-Jesuit works, as well as Jesuit responses, for the period 1540–1773, see Sommervogel 10:1510–1520, 11:1–210 (nos 1–1517). See also e.g. Bernhard Duhr, Jesuiten- fabeln: Ein Beitrag zur Culturgeschichte, 3rd ed. (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1899); Alexandre Brou, Les jésuites de la légende, 2 vols. (Paris: Petaux, 1906–7); Arnold Pritchard, Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 175–191; Michel Leroy, Le mythe jésuite: De Beranger à Michelet (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992); Geoffrey Cubitt, The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy, Theory and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Jean Lacouture, The Jesuits: A Multibiography, trans. Jeremy Leggatt (Washington: Counterpoint, 1995), 348–377. 3 See Ludwig Koch, “Geschichte des G.I., Werke über den Jesuitenorden,” in his Jesuiten- Lexikon: Die Gesellschaft Jesu einst und jetzt, 2 vols. (Paderborn: Verlag Bonifacius-Druckerei, 1934), 1:683–684, and John Patrick Donnelly, “Religious Orders of Men, Especially the Society of Jesus,” in Catholicism in Early Modern History: A Guide to Research, ed. John W. O’Malley (St. Louis: Center for Reformation Research, 1988), 147–162.

2 chapter one

Luce Giard has recently described the phenomenon for the history of science, which can be taken as broadly emblematic for other disciplines as well.4 This change indicates that the historiography of the Society of Jesus has arrived at a new moment, signaling in turn the need to re-examine old frameworks of interpretation and perhaps refashion them. What in fact are those old frameworks, and how did they develop? What has been the course of historiography on the Society of Jesus, and where does it now stand? The articles by Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Marc Fumaroli, and Rivka Feldhay in this first part of our volume directly address aspects of these questions, and others later in the volume deal with them in passing. I will try to provide a broad and more comprehensive purview, tentative and highly selective. I will do so first by review- ing briefly the historiographical traditions within the Society of Jesus, which of course must at least touch upon anti-Jesuit polemic as its oft-times correlate. These traditions still await systematic and comprehensive study.5

4 Luce Giard, “Le devoir d’intelligence ou l’insertion des jésuites dans le monde du savoir,” in his Les Jésuites à la Renaissance: Système éducatif et production du savoir (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), xi-lxxix. 5 See, however, Donnelly, “New Religious Orders of Men”; Koch, “Geschichte der G.J.”; Eduard Fueter, Geschichte der neueren Historiographie, 3rd ed. (1936; repr. Zurich: Orell Füssli, 1985), 278–288; Hugh Trevor-Roper, “Twice Martyred: The English Jesuits and Their Historians,” in his Historical Essays (London: Macmillan, 1957), 113–118; Ignacio Iparraguirre, “La figura de San Ignacio a traves los siglos,” in Ignatius of Loyola, Obras completas, ed. Ignacio Iparraguirre and Cándido de Dalmases, 4th ed. (Madrid: Biblioteca de autores cristianos, 1982), 3–38; Ursula König-Nordhoff, Ignatius von Loyola: Studien zur Entwicklung einer neuen Heiligen-Ikonographie im Rahmen einer Kanonisationskampagne um 1600 (Berlin: Mann, 1982); Michel de Certeau, “Le mythe des origines,” in his La faiblesse de croire, ed. Luce Giard (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 53–74, and his “La réforme de l’intérieur au temps d’Aquaviva” and “Le XVIIe siècle français,” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité: ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire, ed. Marcel Viller et al. (Paris: G. Beauchesne et ses fils, 1932), 8:985–1016; Steven Harris, Jesuit Ideology & Jesuit Science: Scientific Activity in the Society of Jesus 1540–1773 (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1988, 1989), preface; Ricardo García Villoslada, San Ignacio de Loyola: Nueva biografía (Madrid: La Editorial Católica, 1986), 3–20; Terence O’Reilly, “Ignatius of Loyola and the Counter Reformation: The Hagiographic Tradition,” Heythrop Journal 31 (1990): 439–470; François Durand, “La première historiographie ignatienne,” in Ignacio de Loyola y su tiempo, ed. Juan Plazaola (Bilbao: Ediciones Mensajero, [c.1992]), 23–36; Jos E. Vercruysse, “L’historiographie ignatienne aux XVI-XVIII siècles,” ibid., 37–54; Rafael Olaechea, “Historiografía ignaciana del siglo XVIII,” ibid., 55–105; Thomas M. McCoog, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1541–1588: “Our Way of Proceeding”? (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 1–9; Alois Schmid, “Die Vita Petri Canisii des P. Matthäus Rader, S.J.,” in Petrus Canisius-Reformer der Kirche: Festschrift zum 400. Todestag des zweiten Apostels Deutschlands, ed. Julius Oswald and Peter Rummel (Augsburg: Sankt Ulrich Verlag, 1996), 223–243; and Sibylle Appuhn-Radtke, “Petrus Canisius im Bild—Entwicklungsstadien einer Heiligenikonographie,” ibid., 244–274.

the historiography of the society of jesus 3

I will then review the larger frameworks of interpretation for the early modern period into which the Jesuits have for about a hundred years often been placed. That means taking a look especially at the standard categories of Catholic Reformation and Counter Reformation that began to be current in our historical vocabulary about a century ago. Are the Jesuits most appropriately described, that is to say, as agents of a Catholic Reformation or Counter Reformation, or both? If not, how better to approach them? Finally, I will make a few observations about the present situation, especially as it is reflected in this volume.

I. Jesuit Historiographical Traditions

The historiographical traditions within the Society enjoyed a remarkably sound foundation from almost the first hour, for which Ignatius of Loyola, Juan Alfonso de Polanco, and Jerónimo Nadal were especially responsible.6 As is well known, Ignatius provided the conditions for it by insisting on frequent written communication within the Society. Polanco had hardly become his secretary in 1547 before he asked Diego Laínez to compose an account of how the Society had come to be,7 and then he set about establishing a careful archive of all incoming and outgoing correspondence of the superior general.8 Of the almost 7,000 letters still extant in the correspondence of Ignatius, for instance, fewer than two hundred antedate 1547. After Ignatius died nine years later, Polanco continued as secretary for the next two generals and showed for the preservation of their correspondence the same diligence. He seemingly set an example for other Jesuits and reflected a corporate concern for accurate documentation, as the many dozens of volumes of the Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu for the founding period testify. In sheer quantity this mass dwarfs the combined documentation for similar periods in all orders up to that time. He and Nadal, moreover, repeatedly urged Ignatius to bequeath to the Society a testament about its origins. Ignatius eventually complied, telling at the very end of his life an account up to the year 1538 that is

6 On the crucial roles played by Polanco and Nadal in the early Society, see O’Malley, First Jesuits, 10–14 and passim, and most articles in the present collection. 7 See Ganss, Constitutions, 292–293 (#673–676). 8 See now Antonio Albuquerque, Diego Laínez SJ: First Biographer of Saint Ignatius of Loyola: His Life, the Biography, and Polanco’s Narrative (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2010).

4 chapter one sometimes called his autobiography.9 The account was not put into print but circulated in manuscript within the Society. In it, Ignatius depicted himself as a person moved to action for “the help of souls” by a series of profound religious experiences. The account is remarkable in several ways. Ignatius expressed his fasci- nation with Jerusalem as a place where he especially desired to help souls, thereby presaging the fundamentally missionary character of the Society. He also early came to the realization that he would be a more effective helper if he had a university education, an adumbration of the Society’s special relationship to learning. This realization eventually resulted in his spending seven years at the University of Paris, 1528–1535, at a moment of bitter controversy there over “Lutheranism,” of which Ignatius hardly made mention. Throughout the account, moreover, the “help of souls,” which is his leitmotif, was unspecified as to the form it might take, but “conversation about the things of God” in fact emerges as an underlying pattern. That pattern is reflected even as the mode in which he led persons through his Spiritual Exercises, the text of which was already substantially complete by this time. It is curious that Ignatius did not carry his story a little further, for he ended it just at the moment when he and his companions began seriously to discuss the possibility of constructing a more permanent commitment to one another, that is, several years before the official approval of the Society by Pope Paul III in 1540. Nadal, Ignatius’s peripatetic and plenipotentiary agent to Jesuit communities across Europe, used this account for almost twenty years to tell Jesuits what it meant to be a Jesuit. Ignatius was the paradigm for every member of the Society. The image that Ignatius provided of himself is without question the basis for the image Nadal constructed and infused into the traditions of the Society, but Nadal went beyond it in several ways. Portraying Ignatius as a man guided by the direct inspiration of God, he saw him in this regard as the modern equivalent of founders of great religious orders like St. Dominic and St. Francis of Assisi. In doing so, Nadal slighted the role played in the founding by the companions who joined Ignatius at Paris, and his neglect of their contribution resulted in a tendency strongly operative even today to attribute to Ignatius all the

9 The work is found in Fontes narr. 1:354–507. On it, see e.g. Durand, “Premiere historiographie,” and Louis Marin, “Le Récit: Réflexion sur un testament,” in Luce Giard and Louis de Vaucelles, Les jésuites à l’Age baroque: 1540–1640 (Grenoble: J. Millon, 1996), 61–76. A recent interpretation is by Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Loyola’s Acts: The Rhetoric of Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

the historiography of the society of jesus 5

important features discernible in the early formation of the Society’s character. This has meant a more monolithic image of the Society’s origin and development than the documentation warrants. Especially after Ignatius’s death, Nadal modified the image to present Ignatius as a great David raised up by God to put down Luther, the Goliath.10 This new feature would only gain prominence both inside and outside the Society as the decades and centuries moved on. It was the immediate result of Nadal’s dismay at the German situation, which began in earnest with his first visit there in 1555 and intensified in subsequent years. While Ignatius was always antipathetic to Lutheranism, had a hor- ror of heresy, and especially in his last years took steps to hail the progress of the Reformation whenever he could, he never narrowed the scope of the Society to turn it principally in the direction of anti-Protestantism. But it would be Nadal’s image of Ignatius, made more vivid by Protestant interpreters like Martin Chemnitz (1522–1586), the first Protestant to take any serious notice of the Jesuits, that would often prevail over the one Ignatius provided of himself.11 Nadal was, moreover, one of the most important architects of the network of schools the Society began to establish after 1548, and he enthusiastically promoted this ministry to the extent that by 1560 Polanco assumed it was in a class by itself the ministry among all the others. Yet Nadal in his statements to Jesuits about Ignatius and about the Society never seemed to realize how radically important were the changes in the Society’s character wrought by this development. The schools seriously qualified the ideal of itinerant ministry that had animated the early companions, and changed, in fact if not in theory, the style of poverty that at first had been envisaged. More pertinent to this volume, the schools gave the Society, as indeed the first “teaching order” in the Catholic church, a relationship to culture and learning that was uniquely systemic among religious orders. Failure to take account of how this ministry effected changes in the Society that undertook it is broadly symptomatic of the substantialism, to use R.G. Collingwood’s term,12 that has marked most

10 See O’Malley, First Jesuits, 272–283, and O’Reilly, “Ignatius,” especially 441–448. 11 Martin Chemnitz, “Theologiae Jesuitarum brevis ac nervosa descriptio et delinatio,” in Loci theologici (Frankfurt and Wittenberg, 1690), first published in 1560. See J. Carlos Coupeau, “Los diálogos de Nadal: Un ejemplo de adaptación retórica del ministerio de la palabra según la espiritualidad ignaciana” (S.T.L. thesis, Weston Jesuit School of Theology, Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 1–28. 12 See R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 42–45.

6 chapter one

Jesuit historiography, that is, the tendency to see the Society or “Jesuitism” as an unchanging substance unaffected by the “Other” it encountered. According to Collingwood, substantialism was endemic to the classical tradition of historiography, revived in the Renaissance, which was precisely the tradition the Jesuits appropriated. In his oblivion about the schools Nadal was in concert with the most basic and prescriptive documentation regarding the Society, especially the Jesuit Constitutions and even the Formula of the Institute of 1550, which were out of date on the schools before their ink had dried. This is a won- derful example of how fallacious official documentation can be when not integrated with the lived experience of a person or group. In any case, subsequent historiography, while often noting Jesuit engagement with learning and the arts, rarely indicated how essentially that engagement resulted from the unexpected decision in about 1550 to commit the Society to formal schooling on a massive scale. If that decision had not been taken, the Jesuits might well have become one more pastoral body, without strong profile, among the many in the Catholic church. The basic foundations for the future historiography of the origins of the Society had, in any case, been laid within the first twenty-five years. At this point Francisco de Borja, the third general, decided that a real biography of Ignatius was needed, and he commissioned Pedro de Ribadeneyra to write it.13 Borja’s action adumbrated a pattern of official promotion within the Society of study and presentation of its history that would be characteristic of the Jesuits and persist through the centuries. In 1572, Ribadeneyra produced the book, the life of a saintly founder of a religious order. He was much influenced by the canons of classical rhetoric revived in the Renaissance that were appropriate for the writing of history and biography/hagiography. These canons were derived principally from epideictic or demonstrative rhetoric, that is, from the art of panegyric, but they included philological and other criteria for dealing critically with historical documents. Ribadeneyra later went on to write somewhat similar lives of the next two generals, Laínez and Borja,

13 See Durand, “Première historiographie”; Iparraguirre, “La figura,” 5–10; Fueter, Geschichte, 278–288; O’Reilly, “Ignatius”; David J. Collins, “Life after Death: A Rhetorical Analysis of Pedro de Ribadeneira’s Vida del padre Ignacio de Loyola, Fundador de la Compañía de Jesús” (S.T.L. thesis, Weston Jesuit School of Theology, Cambridge, Mass., 1998); and Jodi Bilinkoff, “The Many ‘Lives’ of Pedro de Ribadeneyra,” Renaissance Quarterly 52/1 (1999): 180–196. For the text and commentary, see Pedro de Ribaneneyra, Historias de la Contrarreforma, ed. Eusebio Rey (Madrid, 1950), 6–428.

the historiography of the society of jesus 7

published finally in 1594 after many difficulties with Jesuit censors.14 It was his biography of Ignatius, however, that, as the first, had paradigmatic impact.15 For reasons that are still not altogether clear, Borja, even as he commissioned Ribadeneyra, ordered that Ignatius’s own account be withdrawn from circulation. Not all Jesuits were satisfied with Ribadeneyra, and Everard Mercurian, Borja’s successor, commissioned yet another biography of Ignatius from an Italian Jesuit, Giampietro Maffei, though it contained some new information and represented a less personal, more official approach, offered basically the same portrait.16 At the urging of Nadal and Polanco, Maffei had already published a Latin translation of letters from Jesuit missionaries.17 Soon thereafter Niccolò Orlandini and Francesco Sacchini searched the Jesuit archives in Rome for their history of the Society and their biographies of other Jesuits.18 Even at this early period Jesuits maintained they would make no statement of fact unless it could be documented—nihil nisi testatissimum.19 A great Jesuit historical enterprise, the Bollandists’ Acta sanctorum, begun in Antwerp some decades later, strikingly evinced the critical attitude towards historical sources suggested by that axiom through a massive re-examination of information about every saint mentioned in the martyrology. In 1598, Claudio Acquaviva, Mercurian’s successor as general, wrote to all the provincials in the order telling them to make sure the histories of their provinces were written. These histories were to be edifying, giving due attention to the good deeds and devout lives of the deceased members of the respective provinces.20 From this time until the suppression of the Society, Jesuits also produced a large number of historical works not dealing with the Society, a few of which, like Juan de Mariana’s Historia

14 See Ribadeneyra, Historias, 433–892. 15 See König-Nordhoff, Ignatius, 42–55. 16 Giampietro Maffei, De vita et moribus Ignatii Loiolae (Rome: Apud Franciscum Zannettum, 1585). See König-Nordhoff, Ignatius, 51–53. 17 Giampietro Maffei, Rerum a Societate Jesu in Oriente gestarum (Dillingen: Apud Sebaldum Mayer, 1571). 18 Orlandini wrote a Historia Societatis Jesu up to the death of Ignatius, which was continued by Sacchini up to 1590, and then continued by still others up to 1632, 8 vols. (Rome, Cologne, Antwerp, 1615–1750). Sacchini wrote biographies of Stanisław Kostka (1609), Peter Canisius (1616), and Luigi Gonzaga (1630). 19 Quoted by Schmid, “Vita Canisii,” 230. 20 See McCoog, Society of Jesus, 3.

8 chapter one general de España, the first Latin edition of which appeared in 1592, were significant achievements.21 At almost the same moment an eminent French jurist, Etienne Pasquier, published the most effective and influential piece of anti-Jesuit propaganda up to this point, Le catéchisme des jésuites, in which he depicted members of the Society as hypocrites and full of bombast.22 In 1593, was published the Historia jesuitici ordinis, an exposé by an embittered ex- novice, Elias Hasenmüller.23 Much more long-lived in its influence was the infamous Monita secreta, a collection of allegedly secret instructions from Acquaviva to provincials and rectors. Written by Hieronim Zahorowski, a Jesuit dismissed from the Society in 1613, it was published in Cracow the next year. It had run through twenty-two editions in seven languages by the end of the century, and, though often exposed as a crude forgery, it continued to be reprinted and cited into the twentieth century. No book more firmly established the myth of the Jesuits as devils in a soutane; no book inimical to them was more widely diffused over a longer period of time or more influential. It contained in nucleus all the sinister traits that defamers would in the future utilize and elaborate upon. From the relatively few pages of the Monita the Jesuits emerge as religious hypocrites with an insatiable hun- ger for power and money, whose fundamental objective is to control the world through the systematic compiling of compromising secrets about friends, enemies—and each other (fig. 1.1).24 A sharper contrast to the Monita can hardly be imagined than the Imago primi saeculi, published in 1640 by the Flemish-Belgian province to celebrate the first centenary of the Society. Not a work of history as such, it was nevertheless an important document of self-representation of the Society, or, as its critics said, self-congratulation. In celebrating the great works of the Society the volume really celebrated God, maintained the editors, for it was God who had accomplished them. Since Jesus is the

21 Juan de Mariana, Historiae de rebus Hispaniae libri XXV (Toledo, 1592). See e.g. Koch, “Geschichtscreibung und Geschichtsforschung,” in his Jesuiten-Lexikon, 2:684–687; Bernhard Duhr, “Die alten deutschen Jesuiten als Historiker,” Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 13 (1889): 57–89; Martin P. Harney, “Jesuit Writers of History,” Catholic Historical Review 26 (1940–1): 433–446. 22 Etienne Pasquier, Le catéchisme des jésuites, ed. Claude Sutto (Sherbrooke: Université de Sherbrooke, [c. 1982]), first published in 1592. 23 Elias Hasenmüller, Historia jesuitici ordinis, ed. Polycarp Leyser (Frankfurt: Johannes Spies, 1593). On Hasenmüller, see Koch, Jesuiten-Lexikon, 1:772, and Brou, Légende, 1:37–45. 24 See Sabina Pavone, The Wily Jesuits and the Monita Secreta: The Forged Secret Instructions of the Jesuits: Myth and Reality (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2005).

the historiography of the society of jesus 9

Fig. 1.1. Title-page of one of several editions of the Monita secreta published in the United States in the nineteenth century. The work was at that time more popular than ever on both sides of the Atlantic. Photo courtesy of the Burns Library, Boston College.

10 chapter one head of the Society, the five phases of his life, culminating in his glorifica- tion, served as the major divisions of this volume about the Jesuits. In the fifth part, the editors made clear that, despite the Society’s great diffusion and many activities, its real glory lay in its saints and martyrs. They gave ample space to the Society outside Europe. In answer to the question of why God had called the Society, like other religious orders, into being, the editors provided three reasons: first, to lead people to virtue; second, to add to the rich variety of ways of life in the church; finally, to defeat heretics, as Francis and Dominic, those “noble athletes,” had defeated the Albigensians (fig. 1.2).25 Daniello Bartoli, the great Italian stylist of the mid-seventeenth century, published his biography of Ignatius ten years later, in 1650.26 The book was a resounding success as a work of literature and hagiography, translated into a number of languages and reprinted time and again well into the nineteenth century, and it came to supplant the earlier lives. It was in effect the first part of a larger history of the Society that Bartoli only partly completed. Even incomplete, the history was still a great achievement, important especially for its coverage of Jesuit missions.27 It anticipated the great histories of Japan, Paraguay, and New France a century later by the missionary-explorer-editor Pierre François-Xavier de Charlevoix (1682–1761).28 These works are indications that Jesuit historians of this earlier period were perhaps more global in their scope than their counterparts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Bartoli’s writings, composed in the wake of the canonizations of Ignatius and Francis Xavier in 1622 and drawn directly from archival sources, the story was a story of the triumph of the designs of Providence

25 Imago primi saeculi Societatis Jesu (Antwerp: Moretus, 1640), 53–57. On the work, see Alfred Poncelet, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus dans les anciens Pays-Bas (Brussels: Marcel Hayez, 1926), pt. 2, 544–549; G. Richard Dimler, “The Imago primi saeculi: Jesuit Emblems and the Secular Tradition,” Thought 56 (1981): 433–47; and especially Marc Fumaroli, “Baroque et classicisme: L’Imago primi saeculi Societatis Jesu (1640) et ses adversaires,” in Marc Fumaroli, L’École du silence: Le sentiment des images au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 343–365. Pascal makes satirical mention of it at the beginning of letter 5, Provincial Letters, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin, 1967), 74. 26 Daniello Bartoli, Della vita e dell’Istituto di S. Ignazio, fondatore della Compagnia di Gesù (Rome: Manelfi, 1650). 27 The volume on Asia appeared in 1653, on Japan in 1660, on China in 1663, on England in 1667, on Italy in 1673. See Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960-) 6:563–71, and Vercruysse, “L’historiographie ignatienne,” 43–8. 28 Pierre François-Xavier de Charlevoix, Histoire … du christianisme dans l’empire du Japon, 3 vols. (Paris, 1715); Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France, 3 vols. (Rouen: Boullenger, 1744); Histoire du Paraguay, 3 vols. (Paris: Didot, 1756).

the historiography of the society of jesus 11

Fig. 1.2. Title-page of the Imago primi saeculi, Antwerp, 1640, published to celebrate the first centenary of the Jesuits. The Society, depicted here as a woman with the Jesuit seal on her breast, utters the words “Not to us, not to us, but to thy name be glory” (Ps. 115:1). Photo courtesy of the Burns Library, Boston College.

12 chapter one over the enemies of God and the Society. Enemies of the Society there indeed were. Lutheran historians continued their tradition of seeing Ignatius and the Jesuits as nothing more than anti-Protestant agents of the papacy, unschooled in the Gospel and distorters of it. The better among them, like Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff (1626–1692), did their homework and tried to stick to the facts. Seckendorff studied the biographies of Ignatius by Ribadeneyra, Maffei, and Bartoli, which led him to represent Ignatius in an unfavorable light in comparison with the more learned and clearer-sighted Luther, and he consulted other authors and texts as well. In criticizing the strategy of accommodation employed by the Jesuits in China, he cited their Catholic enemies against them.29 Those Catholic enemies believed the Jesuits were subversives within the fold. Pascal, a younger contemporary of Bartoli, wielded his satirical pen to great effect in his Provincial Letters, giving casuistry as a system of moral reasoning a bad name that has persisted until today, but an ava- lanche of Jansenist vitriol now began to crash down upon the Jesuits. As Marc Fumaroli has brilliantly shown, even in the controversy over literary style two cultures, two visions of Catholicism waged war (figs 1.3, 1.4).30 In the souring politico-ecclesiastical climate in Catholic countries during the next century, anti-Jesuit polemic—vicious, fired by the Enlight enment, and in deadly earnest—gradually overwhelmed whatever defenses the Jesuits were able to mount.31 Depicting them as fanatics, regicides, obscurantists, hoarders of gold, and through their casuistry devious cor- rupters of morals, it carried the day and brought about the order’s suppression. Portugal acted first, in 1759, and was followed by France, Spain, Naples, and Parma. Finally, in 1773, Pope Clement XIV, unable to resist pressure from the Bourbon courts or from bitterly anti-Jesuit ecclesiastics in Rome, suppressed the Society throughout the world.32 Shortly before the suppression in Spain, Andrés Marco Burriel conceived the idea of an academy whose object would be to publish all the pertinent Jesuit documents from the first generation, an adumbration of

29 See Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff, Commentarius historicus et apologeticus de Lutheranismo, 3 vols. (Frankfurt and Leipzig: Gleditsch, 1692), 3:314–348, especially 326–330. See Vercruysse, “L’historiographie ignatienne,” 48–51. 30 Fumaroli, “Baroque et classicism.” 31 See n2 above, as well as Fumaroli, “Baroque et classicism” and Olaechea, “Historiografía ignaciana,” especially 63–90. For background, see William V. Bangert, A History of the Society of Jesus (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1972), 273–362. On Voltaire and the Jesuits, see Marc Fumaroli, “Arts of Persuasion: The Lasting Influence of the Jesuits on Voltaire’s Style and Thought,” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4791 (27 January 1995), 14–16. 32 See Bangert, History, 363–430.

the historiography of the society of jesus 13

Fig. 1.3. Frontispiece of Le cabinet jésuitique, a collection of anti-Jesuit pieces first published in Cologne in 1674. The main Jesuit figure lords it over the king who kneels at his feet because the Jesuit is blackmailing him with secreta regum, incriminating secrets learned by foul means. Note that one of the Jesuit’s feet is a devil’s hoof. Photo courtesy of the Burns Library, Boston College.

14 chapter one

Fig. 1.4. Another illustration from Le cabinet jésuitique. The Jesuit presides at a book-burning with the stately façade of a Jesuit college in the background. Photo courtesy of the Burns Library, Boston College.

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the later Monumenta, but because of the worsening situation he was never able to initiate it.33 In 1804, however, Roque Menchaca, a Spaniard of the now defunct Society living in exile in Bologna, published there for the first time a collection of Ignatius’s letters, Epistulae Sancti Ignatii Loialae.34 After Pope Pius VII restored the Society in 1814, the Jesuits were for two generations too engaged in reconstructing their enterprise to produce much of significance regarding their own history. Nonetheless, in 1829, hardly a decade after the restoration, the Twenty-first General Congregation decreed that documents pertaining to the Society’s history continue as before to be collected and compiled.35 Nineteenth-century politicians, historians, and litterateurs in Europe were hostile to the Society. Sinister versions of the Jesuit legend flourished as never before in what has been called “the golden age of literary Jesuitphobia.”36 The French Revolution may have scotched the ancien régime, but it had not killed it. After Napoleon’s defeat the restorations began. On 7 August 1814, just a month before the opening of the Congress of Vienna, which would restore the ancient political order across Europe, the Jesuits were restored by a newly restored papacy. In this climate they assumed a political stance ever more conservative and an ecclesiology ever more ultramontane. They did so just as, in reaction to the political solutions of 1814–15, progressive-liberal ideologies were growing in acceptance and appeal.37 Nonetheless, the violent storms of hatred and panic unleashed against them bore little proportion to their now meager influence and their often- unexceptional views. Throughout the century they suffered confiscation of property, suppression, and exile in one European country after another—Spain, Italy, France, Belgium, Germany—to be allowed back, usually, after a few decades or less. Bismarck’s banishment of them from Germany, however, originally part of the Kulturkampf, lasted for forty years, from 1873 until 1913. In Latin America, they suffered similar persecu- tions, trudging in exile from one country to find welcome in another, and often only having to reverse course some years later (fig. 1.5). At the end of the century a group of Spanish Jesuits under the leadership of José María Vélez, who won the support of Father General Anton

33 See Dionisio Fernández Zapico and Pedro Leturia, “Cincuentenario de Monumenta Historica S.I,” AHSI 13 (1944): 1–61, especially 2–6. 34 Ibid., 3–4, and Olaechea, “Historiografía ignaciana,” 93–94. 35 See Padberg 1994, 442 (decree 21). See also ibid., 477 (decree 47). 36 Lacouture, Jesuits, 364. On the term jésuitophobie, see Leroy, Mythe jésuite, 21. 37 See Harris, Jesuit Ideology.

16 chapter one

Fig. 1.5. Frontispiece from Les jésuites, a history of the Society by M.A. Arnould published in Paris in 1846. The Jesuit, sinister as can be, makes a striking contrast with the simple layman on his prie-dieu, whom the Jesuit is doubtless duping. Photo courtesy of the Burns Library, Boston College.

Maria Anderledy and then of his successor, Luis Martín, set about publishing the full correspondence of Ignatius and some related documents.38 This was the modest beginning of the Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu. The first fascicle rolled off the press in Madrid in 1894. Polanco’s foresight in the careful keeping of records was thus about to issue into an actualiza- tion of which he could never have dreamt. Although the inspiration for what eventuated in the Monumenta reached back to the eighteenth century, its accomplishment required, among other things, the faith in primary sources and the methods for utilizing them later made normative by Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886). The late nineteenth century was precisely the moment when the publication of critical editions of historical documents was becoming an international industry, signaled especially by the inauguration of the Weimar Ausgabe of Luther’s works occasioned in 1883 by the four-hundredth anniversary of

38 See Fernández Zapico, “Cincuentenario,” 6–16.

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his birth. That edition probably further encouraged the Jesuits to undertake the Monumenta, although their interest in such a project clearly antedated it.39 It is easy to infer that the Jesuits, sharing the nineteenth-century belief that documents speak for themselves, thought that publication of Jesuit sources would be the best means to refute the calumnies hurled at the Society. Meanwhile Jesuits elsewhere began and carried forward great projects that rode the same crest of historical faith, such as the critical edition by Otto Braunsberger of the correspondence of Peter Canisius,40 Michael Pachtler’s edition of the Ratio studiorum and related documents,41 and the bibliography of Jesuit writers constructed by Carlos Sommervogel and others.42 In this same last decade of the nineteenth century, Reuben Gold Thwaites, the only one of these editors who was not a Jesuit, inaugurated publication of the seventy-three volumes of Jesuit documents from New France, the famous Relations.43 In 1929, the Monumenta enterprise moved from Spain to the Jesuit Curia in Rome, where the next year the editors became officially a “college of writers.” Beginning in 1931, moreover, the archives of the Fathers General, which since 1893 had been stored in the Netherlands to prevent their possible seizure by the Italian government, began to be returned to Rome, a process completed in 1939. Meanwhile, in 1932 the “college” published the first volume of the Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu. Three years later, in 1935, the “college” was renamed the Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu. The Institute, theoretically international in its personnel, continued for decades to draw many of its members from Spain.44 At the Institute, the writing of the history of the Society of Jesus was assumed to be an undertaking to be carried forward by Jesuits. Scholarship at large, especially by German historians, who still set the pace in the field, was in fact

39 See ibid., 8. See also decree 21 of the Twenty-fourth General Congregation, 1892, in Padberg 1994, 487. 40 Petrus Canisius, Epistulae et acta, ed. Otto Braunsberger (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1896). 41 G.M. Pachtler, Ratio studiorum et institutiones scholasticae Societatis Jesu, per Germaniam olim vigentes (Berlin: A. Hofmann, 1887–1894). 42 Sommervogel 1–12, which relied heavily on the still earlier work by Augustin and Aloys De Backer, Bibliothèque des écrivains de la Compagnie de Jésus, 7 vols. (Liège: L. Grandmont-Donders, 1853–1861). 43 Reuben Gold Thwaites, The Jesuit relations and allied documents: travels and explorations of the Jesuit missionaries in New France, 1610–1791, 73 vols. (Cleveland: Burrows Bros. Co, 1896–1901). 44 Padberg 1994, 607 (decree 35).

18 chapter one dominated by the Reformation, and showed a concomitant disdain for its dull and retrograde Catholic stepsister. Thwaites was a stunning exception to this rule, as were a few others whom I will mention below, but two writers on the Jesuits deserve special mention at this point because their books were translated into several languages and in their influence reached audiences beyond academia. Heinrich Böhmer, an important Luther scholar, published in 1904 a “sketch” of the history of the Society until its suppression.45 Fair-minded, even appreciative, he presented Ignatius and his legacy as propagating a Pelagian self-control and as, in the final analysis, opposing the modern world for which Protestantism stood. More ambitious and much more widely read was Macht und Geheimnis der Jesuiten by the Hungarian journalist René Fülöp-Miller. First published in 1929, The Power and Secret of the Jesuits became almost an international best-seller.46 Written with verve, this brilliant tour de force of “cultural history” covering four hundred years refuted many of the traditional calumnies against the Jesuits, and was all the more impressive as coming from a non-believer.47 Fülöp Miller sought to discover the essence of “Jesuitism,” the secret behind the Jesuits’ powerful achievements, and he believed he found it in a blind obedience to tasks imposed from above combined with individual initiative as to how to accomplish them. Not absent from “Jesuitism” was the use of worldly means to accomplish a spiritual end. Fülöp-Miller sought, in other words, to discover what was distinctive about the Jesuits’ “way of proceeding.” The book was remarkable for its attention to the arts and other cultural phenomena, without recourse to any overarching categories like Counter Reformation to describe how the Society fit into the modern era. In 1892, just as the Monumenta project was getting under way, the Twenty-fourth General Congregation met in Spain, and in its twenty-first decree recommended to the newly elected general that the writing of the history of the Society, widely desired by Jesuits throughout the order,

45 Heinrich Böhmer, Die Jesuiten: Eine historische Skizze (Leipzig: Teubner, 1904), with several revised editions, including one reworked by Hans Leube and Kurt Dietrich Schmidt published at Stuttgart in 1957. 46 René Fülöp-Miller, Macht und Geheimnis der Jesuiten: Kulturhistorische Monographie (Leipzig and Zurich: Grethlein, 1929). The English translation by F.S. Flint and D.F. Tait, The Power and Secret of the Jesuits, appeared the next year in both an English and an American edition; it was reprinted in 1957, and again in New York as late as 1963 with a more sober title, The Jesuits: A History of the Society of Jesus. 47 See the reviews by Ludwig Koch, Stimmen der Zeit 118 (1929–30): 338–348, and by Yves de La Briere, Études 214 (1933): 721–726.

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be pursued.48 We must infer that Father General Martín took vigorous action, for shortly thereafter historians, many of whom were trained in the new methods, began ransacking local archives and writing histories of their respective assistancies or provinces. The best known among such projects are Bernard Duhr’s for Germany,49 Antonio Astrain’s for Spain,50 and Pietro Tacchi Venturi’s for Italy,51 but some fifty such volumes were published under that impulse within three decades and others have continued to appear until the present.52 They cover most of Western Europe

48 See Padberg 1994, 487 (decree 21): “The wish of certain provinces that writing the history of the Society should be resumed was expressed to the assembled fathers. The congregation replied that this is among the desires of us all and is something to be recommended to our Father General.” 49 Bernhard Duhr, Geschichte der Jesuiten in den Ländern deutscher Zunge, 4 vols. in 6 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1907–1913, and Munich-Regensburg: Manz, 1921–1928). 50 Antonio Astrain, Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en la asistencia de España, 7 vols. (Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1902–1925). 51 Pietro Tacchi Venturi, Storia della Compagnia di Gesù in Italia, 2 vols. in 4 (Rome: Civiltà Cattolica, 1910–1951). 52 Besides the three series mentioned in the previous notes, they include Poncelet, Les Pays-Bas; Francisco Rodrigues, Historia da Companhia de Jesus na assistencia de Portugal, 4 vols. in 7 (Porto: Livraria Apostolado da Imprensa, 1931–1950); Henri Fouqueray, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus en France, 1528–1762, 5 vols. (Paris: A. Picard et Fils, 1910–1925); Joseph Burnichon, La Compagnie de Jesús en France, 1814–1914, 4 vols. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1914–1922); Lesmes Frías, Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en su asistencia moderna de España (Madrid: Administración de Razón y fe, 1923); Manuel Revuelta González, La Compañía de Jesús en la España contemporánea, 2 vols. (Madrid: Universidad Pontificia Comillas, 1984–1991); Otto Pfülf, Die Anfänge der deutschen Ordensprovinz der neuerstan- denen Gesellschaft Jesu, 1805–1847 (Frankfurt and St. Louis, 1922); [Adone Aldegheri], Breve storia della provincia veneta della Compagnia di Gesù dalle sue origini fino ai nostri giorni, 1874–1914 (Venice: Sorteni e Vidotti, 1914); Pietro Galetti, Memorie storiche intorno alla provincia romana della Compagnia di Gesù, 1814–1914 (Rome: Tipogr. agostiniana, 1914); Antonio Leanza, La Compagnia di Gesù in Sicilia e il primo secolo del suo rinascimento (Palermo: F. Lugaro, 1914); Michele Volpe, I gesuiti nel Napoletano, 3 vols. (Naples: M. d’Auria, 1914–1915); Alessandro Monti, La Compagnia di Gesù nel territorio della provincia torinese, 5 vols. (Chieri: M. Ghirardi, 1914–1920); Giovanni Barrella, I gesuiti nel Salentino, 1574–1767 (Lecce, 1918); László Velics, Vázlatok a magyar jezsuiták multjából, 2 vols. (Budapest: Szent-István-Társulat, 1912–1914); Alois Kroess, Geschichte der böhmischen Provinz der Gesellschaft Jesu, 2 vols. (Vienna: Opitz, 1910–1938); Stanisław Załęski, Jezuici w Polsce, 5 vols. (Cracow: W.L. Anczyc, 1900–1906); Thomas Hughes, History of the Society of Jesus in North America, 2 vols. (London and New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907–1917); Gilbert Garraghan, The Jesuits of the Middle United States, 3 vols. (New York: America Press, 1938); Serafim Leite, Historia da Companhia de Jesus no Brasil, 10 vols. (Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon: Livraria Portugalia, 1938–1950); Gerardo Decorme, Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en la República Mexicana durante el siglo XIX, 3 vols. (Guadalajara and Chihuahua: Tip. El Regional, 1914–1959); Juan Manuel-Pacheco, Los jesuitas en Colombia, 3 vols. (Bogota: San Juan Endes, 1959–1989); Rubén Vargas Ugarte, Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en el Peru, 4 vols. (Burgos: Impr. de Aldecoa, 1963–1965); Manuel Aguirre Elorriaga, La Compañía de Jesús en Venezuela (Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1941); Horacio De la Costa, The Jesuits in the Philippines, 1581–1768 (Cambridge: Harvard University

20 chapter one and significant parts of North and South America but, until relatively recently, nothing outside the Western Hemisphere. Except for the most recent among them, they are affected by apologetic concerns, yet they are nonetheless sober and reliable narratives, often indispensable to the researcher. As they subscribed to the new faith in historical objectivity promulgated especially by the great German masters of the nineteenth century, and as they adopted the methods that supposedly guaranteed it, they effected a corporate break with the rhetorical traditions of the Renaissance that up to this point had characterized Jesuit writing of history and biography. Meanwhile, with Paul Dudon’s biography of Ignatius53 and James Brodrick’s biographies of Robert Bellarmine and Peter Canisius,54 Jesuit hagiography itself showed the impact of the new methods, which finally sent the still popular works by Bartoli into oblivion. The histories themselves, in conformity with the nineteenth-century model of institutional historiography, generally take little account of the arts, as William J. Summers observes for the Philippines,55 and, besides sometimes listing a few Jesuits who were scientists and mathematicians, they have little to say about Jesuit science and mathematics. They almost totally abstain from dealing with the history of Jesuit devotion or spirituality. In that area scholars like Pedro de Leturia,56 Ignacio Iparraguirre,57

Press, 1961); Mario Scaduto, L’epoca di Giacomo Lainez, 1556–1565, 2 vols. (Rome: Dante Alighieri di Albrighi, Segati, 1964–1974), and L’opera di Francesco Borgia, 1565–1572 (Rome: “La Civiltà Cattolica,” 1992), continuations of Tacchi Venturi; McCoog, Society of Jesus. To this list might be added collections of documents, such as Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en la provincia de Paraguay, ed. Pablo Pastells and F. Mateos, 8 vols. in 9 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1912–1949), and modern editions of pre-suppression works, such as Francisco Javier Alegre, Historia de la provincia de la Compañía de Jesús de Nueva España, ed. Ernest J. Burrus and Félix Zubillaga (Rome: Institutum Historicum S.I., 1956–1959), and anonymous, Historia general de la Compañía de Jesús en la provincia del Peru, ed. F. Mateos, 2 vols. (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1944). See e.g. Dauril Alden, “Serafim Leite, S.J., Premier Historian of Colonial Brazil: An Overdue Appreciation,” in Jesuit Encounters in the New World: Jesuit Chroniclers, Geographers, Educators, and Missionaries in the Americas, 1549–1767, ed. Joseph A. Gagliano and Charles E. Ronan (Rome: Institutum Historicum S.I., 1997), 21–35, and W. Michael Mathes, “Jesuit Chroniclers and Chronicles of Northwestern New Spain,” ibid., 37–80. 53 Paul Dudon, Saint Ignace de Loyola (Paris: Beauchesne, 1934); English translation, St. Ignatius of Loyola, trans. William J. Young (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1949). 54 James Brodrick, The Life and Works of Blessed Robert Francis Cardinal Bellarmine, 2 vols. (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1928); Saint Peter Canisius, S.J., 1521–1597 (London: Sheed and Ward, 1935). 55 William J. Summers, “The Jesuits in Manila, 1581–1621: the role of music in rite, ritual, and spectacle,” in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, ed. O’Malley, et al., 659–679. 56 See e.g. Pedro Leturia, Estudios ignacianos, ed. Ignacio Iparraguirre, 2 vols. (Rome: IHSI, 1957). 57 See e.g. Ignacio Iparraguirre, Historia de la práctica de los Ejercicios Espirituales de San Ignacio de Loyola, 3 vols. under slightly different titles (Rome: IHSI, 1946–1973).

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Hugo Rahner,58 and Joseph de Guibert, one of the founders in 1937 of the Dictionnaire de spiritualité published under Jesuit auspices,59 were by mid-century producing pioneering studies to make up for this lapse. Even to this day, however, this aspect of Jesuit history is rarely integrated into the larger picture. The province and assistancy histories are perhaps weakest in their failure to deal effectively with the great historical movements that were the context for their stories, except perhaps by implying that such phenomena were recurring manifestations of the perennial struggle between good and evil, truth and falsehood. In other words, true to their historiographical heritage, they do not pursue with sophistication the larger frameworks of interpretation into which the history of the Society of Jesus might most appropriately be placed.60 This defect has not been confined to the historians of the provinces, for it has affected others who have written about the Society of Jesus, sometimes even when they have approached the subject well trained and without animus.

II. Categories of Interpretation of Catholicism

That brings me to my second theme, the history of the construction of such frameworks. At the very time these Jesuits were writing, other scholars were debating precisely such categories of interpretation for the period that concerns us, utilizing terminology that for the most part had been devised by Lutheran historians in the nineteenth century. The two major categories of interpretation of Catholicism in the early modern period that by the middle of the twentieth century had emerged from the debate were, as I said earlier, Catholic Reform and Counter Reformation. How were these categories devised, and how did they come to be applied to the Society of Jesus? This is a complex story, but in it Hubert Jedin and the style of history he represented is pivotal and broadly symptomatic. Just a little over fifty years ago he published his famous essay Katholische Reformation oder Gegenreformation?, part of whose subtitle

58 See e.g. Hugo Rahner, Ignatius von Loyola und das geschichtlicher Werden seiner Frommigkeit (Graz: A. Pustet, 1947); English translation, The Spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola: An Account of Its Historical Development, trans. Francis John Smith (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1953). 59 See e.g. Joseph de Guibert, La spiritualité de la Compagnie de Jésus: Esquisse historique (Rome: IHSI, 1953); English translation, The Jesuits, Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice: A Historical Study, trans. William J. Young (Chicago: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1964). 60 This would not be true of more recent volumes. See e.g. McCoog, Society of Jesus, 1–9.

22 chapter one was “an essay towards the clarification of the concepts.”61 Jedin was forty- six at the time, on his way to becoming perhaps the most important historian of the Catholic church in the twentieth century and about to publish the first volume of the great project of his life, the standard history of the Council of Trent. What Jedin tried to do in his essay was lay to rest the confusion and controversy that up to that point had reigned in historiography over what to call the “Catholic side” in the early modern period. His essay was the first really systematic analysis of the issue, and it has remained the classic point of reference for all subsequent discussion.62 Even though the solution he adopted continues to have considerable influence, it did not put an end to the debate. In his essay, Jedin first reviewed the history of the terms or concepts for designating the Catholic side of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Here are the highlights of that history. Until the late eighteenth century, no term existed to indicate the Catholic side in the way “Reformation” a century earlier had come to indicate the Protestant.63 In the 1760s, Johann Stephan Pütter, a German Lutheran jurist, coined the term Gegen reformationen to mean the forced return to the practice of Catholicism in areas once Lutheran.64 Whether Pütter used the word in the plural or in the singular, as he sometimes did, he meant to indicate a series of unconnected actions. He also gave the word a quite precise and narrow definition. Counter Reformation meant exactly what the word says, Anti- Reformation. It meant, more specifically, the military, political, and diplomatic measures Catholics in certain localities marshaled against German Lutherans roughly between the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 and the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.

61 Hubert Jedin, Katholische Reformation oder Gegenreformation? Ein Versuch zur Klärung der Begriffe nebst einer Jubiläumsbetrachtung über das Trienter Konzil (Lucerne: Josef Stocker, 1946). 62 See Pier Giorgio Camaiani, “Interpretazioni della Riforma cattolica e della Controriforma,” in Grande antologia filosofica, ed. Umberto Antonio Padovani et al. (Milan: C. Marzorati, 1964-), 6:329–490, and Ricardo García-Villoslada, “La Contrarreforma: Su nombre y su concepto histórico,” in Saggi storici intorno al papato, Miscellanea Historiae Pontificiae 21 (Rome: Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1959), 189–242. See also volume 6 (1980) of Annali dell’Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico in Trento; practically all the contributions concern Jedin, and many touch on this issue. 63 See Eike Wolgast, “Reform, Reformation,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner et al., 8 vols. (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1972–1997), 5:513–560, especially 521–535. 64 See Albert Elkan, “Entstehung und Entwicklung des Begriffs ‘Gegenreformation,’” Historische Zeitschrift 112 (1914): 473–493.

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Leopold von Ranke mediated the word into the historiographical mainstream. In 1843, he ended his Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation with the pregnant sentence, “After the era of the Reformation [1517–1555] came the era of the Counter Reformations.”65 He continued to use the term in the plural but prepared the way for the singular by postu- lating a certain unity in Catholic efforts against Protestantism that, propelled by the Catholic princes, sprang from three major sources—the Council of Trent, the Jesuits, and the papacy. When von Ranke linked the Jesuits to Trent, he gave voice to a connection that henceforth would largely be taken for granted.66 He moreover promoted a tendency to use the term Counter Reformation as almost a synonym for Catholicism in the early modern period. By the end of the nineteenth century the term had wended its way into other languages, taking on connotations and prejudices consonant with these different cultures—such as Controriforma in Italy, for example, where the battles of the Risorgimento were being fought and, then, vividly remembered. Francesco De Sanctis (1817–1883) and, in the twentieth century, Benedetto Croce (1860–1952) interpreted the term to signify opposition of the church not so much to Protestantism as to the freedom of the human spirit, which caused Italy to fall from its cultural pre-eminence into the “variations on ugliness” that was the Baroque Era, that is, the Controriforma.67 In Germany in the late nineteenth century, Wilhelm Maurenbrecher (1838–1892) and then Eberhard Gothein (1853–1923), Lutherans, took up von Ranke’s thesis that the Catholic phenomenon was propelled in part by religious forces, and in 1880, Maurenbrecher coined the new term katolische Reformation, the first broadly influential historian to give the Reformation a Catholic counterpart.68 Many Lutherans were enraged by the suggestion of such a parallel, and others, when they utilized the term, saw Catholic Reform as antedating 1517, a weak and imperfect fore shadowing of the real Reformation to come. Some Catholics welcomed

65 Leopold von Ranke, Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation, 6 vols. (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1842–1847), 5:501. 66 See Leopold von Ranke, The History of the Popes, trans. E. Foster, 3 vols. (London: G. Bell and sons, 1853–1856), 1: 135–178, especially 149–154. 67 See Benedetto Croce, Storia dell’età barocca in Italia: Pensiero, poesia e letteratura, vita morale (Bari: Laterza, 1929), especially 3–51. See also H.G. Koenigsberger, “Decadence or Shift? Changes in the Civilization of Italy and Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 10 (1960): 1–18. 68 Wilhelm Maurenbrecher, Geschichte der katholischen Reformation (Nördlingen: Beck, 1880).

24 chapter one

Maurenbrecher’s term, others were suspicious of its Lutheran origin, and still others disliked Reformation as a description of either side. Gothein, who refused to recognize Catholic Reformation as a legitimate category, focused the spotlight on Ignatius and the Jesuits as the instruments through which Spain had saved the Catholic church by opposing the creative ideas of the Renaissance and Reformation and imposing the reactionary formalities of the Middle Ages.69 In the early twentieth century, Ludwig von Pastor (1854–1928), the first Catholic of influence to enter the naming game, used a variety of terms, including Catholic Reformation, but he eschewed Counter Reformation because of its negative connotations.70 In France early in the century, the Catholic Pierre Imbart de la Tour (1860–1925) wrote about the religious impulses before the Reformation and introduced the term évangélisme to indicate them, an early sign of the independent path much French scholarship would follow.71 In English-language historiography, Counter Refor mation began to predominate, especially after John H. Pollen gave it a reluctant imprimatur in 1908 in The Catholic Encyclopedia. Pollen, an Eng lish Jesuit, in effect redefined Counter Reformation to transform it into a strictly spiritual renewal, inspired by saints like Ignatius of Loyola, whom he called its “pioneer.” He made no mention of inquisitions or the banning of books. Other terms like “Catholic Restoration” and “Catholic Renaissance” were also in circulation by the middle of the twentieth century. Augustin Renaudet (1880–1958) and others in France coined Préréforme to indicate more or less what Maurenbrecher meant by Catholic Reform. In 1921, with his Der Barock als Kunst der Gegenreformation, Werner Weisbach made it easy for others, such as Croce, to identify what was becoming known as the Counter-Reformation Era as the “Baroque Era.” Weisbach said of Ignatius of Loyola, “One must begin with him in order to understand the temper of the Counter Reformation.72

69 Eberhard Gothein, Ignatius von Loyola und die Gegenreformation (Halle: Niemeyer, 1895). 70 See Jedin, Katholische Reformation, 17–21, and Camaiani, “Interpretazioni,” 350–354. 71 Pierre Imbart de la Tour, L’évangelisme (1521–1538) (Paris: Hachette, 1914). See Marc Venard, “Réforme, Réformation, Préréforme, Contre-réforme: Etude de vocabulaire chez les historiens récents de langue fransçaise,” in Historiographie de la Réforme, ed. Philippe Joutard (Paris: Delachaux & Niestlé, 1977), 352–365. 72 Werner Weisbach, Der Barock als Kunst der Gegenreformation (Berlin: P. Cassirer, 1921), 12. See also Garvin Alexander Bailey, “‘Le style jésuite n’existe pas’: Jesuit corporate culture and the visual arts,” in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, ed. by O’Malley et al., 38–89.

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As these terms arose in particular situations and reflected the assumptions and prejudices of the scholars who created or used them, they obviously were not mere pointers. In shorthand form, they defined the subject and implicitly evaluated it. They were categories of interpretation, boldly expressed. They influenced interpretation even when dismissed as not meaning what they seemed to say (as so often would be true of historians using Counter Reformation), for they focused attention on certain issues while distracting it from others. They arose, moreover, in answer to a single question: What was the relationship of the Catholic church to the Reformation? They thus silently redefined Catholicism as essentially constituted in all its particulars by that relationship. Jedin was a diligent student of these historiographical developments and wanted to set interpretation straight by creating order out of the con- fusing proliferation of names. His solution was to adopt from the many options both Catholic Reformation and Counter Reformation and give them his own definitions. Catholic Reform indicated the impulses towards reform of the church that began in the late Middle Ages and continued into the modern era, as expressed especially in the disciplinary decrees of Council of Trent. Counter Reformation meant the defense of itself that the Catholic church had to mount against the Protestant attack, reflected in the doctrinal decrees of Trent. You will note that in designating Counter Reformation a “defense,” Jedin redefined the term, almost in defiance of what the words originally meant. For Jedin, the correct designation for the Catholic side was “Catholic-Reformation-and-Counter-Reformation.” Jedin concluded his essay with a resounding affirmation of the importance of the Council of Trent that allowed him at least implicitly to introduce and justify a shorter designation for his long-winded “Catholic- Reformation-and-Counter-Reformation.” That designation was “the Tri dentine Era.” With Jedin Trent held center stage for whatever happened subsequently in Catholicism. He singled out three agents of this process— Trent, the Jesuits, and the papacy. Nevertheless, Trent set the agenda that the popes implemented by using the Jesuits as their instruments. Jedin was one of the truly great scholars of our times, and I do him a disservice by presenting his ideas in such a schematic and unqualified way. To read his essay of 1946 today is to be struck again by his erudition and careful scholarship, but also to realize not only how much more we know about so many aspects of the sixteenth century than did Jedin and his generation but also how the very practice of history has changed in the past fifty years. It must be noted, moreover, that, while he assigned the Jesuits such a pivotal role, he never did any research on them himself. His

26 chapter one essay is badly out of date—yet we still often use the terminology he inherited, reinterpreted, and, along with many others, transmitted to us. We continue, at least implicitly, to apply it to the Society of Jesus. In any case, Jedin’s solution did not lay the problem to rest. The debate over the traditional terms has continued, with Paolo Simoncelli in 1988, for instance, rejecting Jedin’s distinction between Catholic Reform and Counter Reformation as a deceitful euphemism, on the ground that it hides the intrinsic relationship between repression and so-called Catholic Reform.73 Even Paolo Prodi, one of Jedin’s disciples, has questioned the usefulness of Jedin’s categories and distinctions.74 Moreover, new designations and approaches have been in the making. In 1958, Ernst Walter Zeeden, a Catholic historian at Tübingen, introduced Konfessionsbildung (“the formation of confessions”) into our historiographical vocabulary to denote similar structural developments in Germany after 1555 in the Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic churches, so that for that period “the confessional age” should replace Counter Reformation.75 Later Wolfgang Reinhard took Zeeden’s insight further with his elaboration of criteria for what he called “confessionalization” (Konfessionalisierung) and along with Heinz Schilling brought it to new theoretical sophistication. They describe confessionalization as “the intellectual and organizational hardening” of the diverging Christian confessions, each with its own religious and moral styles but conforming to similar patterns of action and organization that are decidedly modern.76

73 Paolo Simoncelli, “Inquisizione romana e riforma in Italia,” Rivista storica italiana 100 (1988): 1–125. For a recent review of Italian historiography on the issue, see William V. Hudon, “Religion and Society in Early Modern Italy—Old Questions, New Insights,” American Historical Review 101 (1996): 783–804. 74 Paolo Prodi, “II binomio jediniano ‘riforma cattolica e controriforma’” e la storiografia italiana,” Annali dell'Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento (1980): 85–98, and especially his “Controriforma e/o Riforma cattolica: Superamento di vecchi dilemmi nei nuovi pan- orami storiografici,” Romische historische Mitteilungen 31 (1989): 227–37. 75 Ernst Walter Zeeden, “Grundlagen und Wege der Konfessionsbildung in Deutschland im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe,” Historische Zeitschrift 185 (1958): 249–299. 76 See e.g. Wolfgang Reinhard, “Zwang zur Konfessionalisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 10 (1983): 257–277; idem, “Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the Early Modern State: A Reappraisal,” Catholic Historical Review 75 (1989): 383–404; idem, “Disciplinamento sociale, confessionalizzazione, modernizzazione: Un discorso storiografico,” in Disciplina dell’anima, disciplina del corpo, e disciplina della società tra medioevo ed età moderna, ed. Paolo Prodi and Carla Penuti (Bologna: il Mulino, 1994), 101–123; and idem, with Heinz Schilling, eds, Die katholische Konfessionalisierung: Wissenschaftliches Symposion der Gesellschaft zur Her ausgabe des Corpus Catholicorum und des Vereins for Reformationsgeschichte, 1993 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1995). See also Robert Bireley, “Early Modern Germany,” in Catholicism in Early Modern History, ed. O’Malley, 11–30.

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With this approach the churches are seen more clearly as expressions, active and passive, of wider developments of the early modern period. Moreover, these and other scholars, including Prodi, are making increasing use of “social disciplining,” a term of analysis originally derived from Max Weber (1864–1920) and Gerhard Oestreich (1910–1978) but later sometimes colored by ideas of Michel Foucault (1926–1984), to substitute for “reform” and almost to obliterate it. Characteristic of practically all historians mentioned so far, beginning with von Rank himself, has been their focus on the institutions that traditionally have occupied historians of the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century, the church and the state—and by “church” I mean the official and public institutions of the confession in question, for example, bishops, pastors of parishes, elders, tribunals, and, of course, diets, synods, and councils. Altogether different, of course, has been the approach represented by the Annales school and its kin. This approach, first formulated in the 1920s by Lucien Febvre (1878– 1956), Marc Bloch (1886–1944), and others, differed in almost every respect from what until then had been practically unquestioned.77 What we see clearly in retrospect is that the movement set out to dethrone politics- centered, event-centered, great-men-centered history by “politics” must also be understood ecclesiastical politics. In 1929, Febvre published one of the most famous articles ever written about historical approaches to the Reformation and its Catholic counterpart, the famous “question mal posée.”78 This passionate article dismissed as ridiculous the standard thesis that revulsion at ecclesiastical abuses caused the Reformation. The Reformation was spiritually too powerful to have been caused simply by a reaction to a bad state of affairs. We must set aside our preoccupation with such institutional factors and turn to the thoughts, aspirations, and desires

77 The development of this “school” has been described many times. See e.g. Guy Bourde and Herve Martin, Les écoles historiques (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989), 215–270; Geoffrey Barraclough, Main Trends in History, expanded and updated by Michael Burns (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1991), 34–45; and Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–89 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). See also Carla Russo, “Studi recenti di storia sociale e religiosa in Francia: Problemi e metodi,” Rivista storica italiana 84 (1972): 625–82. For a recent collection of studies from the “school,” see Histories: French Constructions of the Past, ed. Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, trans. Arthur Goldhammer et al. (New York: New Press, 1995). Michel de Certeau, S.J., combined Jesuit historiography with French “histoire des mentalities” in, for example, his long introduction to Pierre Favre, Memorial, ed. Michel de Certeau (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1960), 7–95. 78 Lucien Febvre, “The Origins of the French Reformation: A Badly-Put Question?” in A New Kind of History and Other Essays, ed. Peter Burke, trans. K. Folca (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 44–89.

28 chapter one of the men and women of the time, for the Reformation “was the outward sign and the work of a profound revolution in religious sentiment.”79 We must, therefore, study religion, not churches, if we hope to understand the sixteenth century. Of all the points scored by Febvre in his article, one stands out especially for Jedin’s essay and our subject: “abuses” do not explain what happened. Febvre did not deny that abuses existed, or that both Trent and Luther tried to deal with them, but he displaced them from their unquestioned centrality. If what he postulated was true, then the concept and term “reform,” which implies nothing other than a response to abuses, needs reassessment, although Febvre did not explicitly draw this conclusion. If not “reform”—for instance, Catholic Reform—then what? In 1970, Jean Delumeau entitled his book Le catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire— “Catholicism,” not Catholic Reformation, not Counter Reformation, not even Catholic church. (Unfortunately, the editors of the English translation found it necessary to add a clarifying subtitle: “A New View of the Counter Reformation”!). In 1985, John Bossy, influenced by what we might call the French approach, entitled his book Christianity in the West, 1400– 1700, and in it, he stated that he deliberately avoids terms like reform and reformation. What he sees is not so much reform (replacing a bad form with some idealized good form) as a movement from more natural, spontaneous, fraternal realities to things more rationalized, impersonal, indi- vidualistic, and bureaucratic. Religion did not of itself cause this movement but was, as both agent and patient, one of its many manifestations. In line with this approach the recent Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation contains an important entry by Benjamin Westervelt entitled “Roman Catholicism” along with one under the more traditional category of “Catholic Reformation.” Especially as a result of my research when writing The First Jesuits, I have suggested “Early Modern Catholicism” as an appropriate name for the phenomenon in question.80 It has, I believe, many advantages. For instance, as an umbrella term it promotes further differentiation. It thus implicitly includes Catholic Reform, Tridentine Reform, and Counter Reformation as indispensable sub-categories when they are precisely defined, and it welcomes further categories like confessionalization and

79 Ibid., 59. 80 John W. O’Malley, “Was Ignatius Loyola a Church Reformer? How to Look at Early Modern Catholicism,” Catholic Historical Review 77 (1991): 177–193. This article is also part of the present collection (see Chapter 4).

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social disciplining. It seems more open to the results of history from below, and it is thus less focused on hierarchical institutions. Though still Eurocentric, it is better able to take account of European encounter with “the Other” in Asia and the Americas. It suggests that religious history cannot be understood apart from general history. Whether the term achieves all I claim for it is for others to judge, but simply arguing for it as I have just done makes manifest certain realities of the present historiographical moment. Fifty years ago, Hubert Jedin thought he had solved the problem of naming the Catholic side of early modern history. But, the debate about naming continued, and research into virtually every aspect of the Catholic side has increased almost expo- nentially. We know a lot more than Jedin and his generation did, and we are much more aware of the richness and complexity of early modern Catholicism. We know more about the Jesuits, and, as the contributions to the volume The Jesuits: cultures, sciences, and the arts, 1540–1773 make clear, we must view with suspicion any interpretation that reduces them to a formula.

III. Early Modern Catholicism and the Jesuits

In any case, through the debate over naming, we have arrived at a point quite different from where we were fifty years ago when Jedin summarized the historiographical situation. Here are a few elements of our new situation, as I see it, with special reference to the Jesuits. 1. The basic question has changed. The question historians of all persuasions asked fifty years ago was “What caused the Reformation?” This meant for our subject, “What in the Catholic church caused the Reformation?” and then “What impact did the Reformation have on the Catholic church?” This line of questioning resulted in a focus on the church, on “abuses” and on their remedies, that is, on “reform.” The new question many historians are asking is quite different and might be put in several forms, such as “What was Catholicism like?” or even “What was Catholic life like?” This new question puts the subject on a new footing, releasing it from the constrictions of “Catholic Reformation,” “Counter Reformation,” and “Tridentine Reformation,” which inextricably tied it to some reform impulse. For the historiography of the Society of Jesus this shift allows a less predetermined examination of what the Jesuits were about and of how they conceived of themselves. The first question about them, therefore, should

30 chapter one not be “How was the Society of Jesus an agent of the Counter Reformation?” but “What was the Society of Jesus like?” or “What were Jesuits like?” This is not to deny that Counter Reformation is a valuable category for interpreting the Jesuits. I believe, in fact, that it is essential for understanding them. I am suggesting, however, that the term does not fully capture them. Even after 1555, though anti-Protestantism its way to becoming an intrinsic part of their corporate culture and sometimes took fiercely aggressive forms, the degree to which it was operative varied from place to place, from period to period, and from ministry to ministry. For anti- Protestantism, England can perhaps be considered the center of density in a series of concentric circles, with Poland, France, the Low Countries, and Germany in the next circle, and so on until we finally reach India, Japan, and China in the outermost, least dense circle, where opposition to the Reformation played no role in Jesuit activities. 2. The basic focus has thus to some extent changed. The traditional focus was “the church,” understood as the institution comprising papacy, episcopacy, synods, and inquisitions—often seen as working hand in glove with the state. Among these institutions, Trent held a position of unquestioned dominance, for it undertook “the reform of the church.” Although this focus persists in much historiography, it has been broad- ened to include “religion,” as our ongoing attempts at naming have indicated—“popular religion,” “folk religion,” “civic religion,” “elitist religion,” “lay piety.” What this means for the Jesuits is that it allows us to look at them less as ecclesiastical persons and agents, more as practitioners and promoters of what John Van Engen has called Christianitas, the practice of traditional practices of the Christian religion.81 It allows us to detach them somewhat from the stereotype of agents of Trent and, hence, of the “Tridentine Reformation” or “Catholic Reformation.” The Jesuits were surely involved in “Catholic Reform” in their eagerness to cooperate with bishops and princes in seeing to the implementation of the Tridentine decrees de reformatione, and they were intermittently engaged in such activity at certain times in certain places. But, this was only one among many of their concerns and hardly the uppermost in many parts of the world. 3. A shift has taken place from a European to a multicultural perspective. Catholic missionary activity outside Europe began in earnest in the

81 John Van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 519–552.

the historiography of the society of jesus 31

early sixteenth century with the Portuguese and Spanish explorations and conquests and then continued with immense fervor and expenditure through the seventeenth. Few things are more distinctive of Catholicism in the early modern period, for which there is no Protestant “missionary” counterpart. Trent made no mention of foreign missions, and historiography on the “Catholic Reformation” and “Counter Reformation” generally followed suit. Today, however, the interaction between Europeans and the Other, as a reciprocal process, must be part of any study of “what Catholicism was like.” The importance of this perspective for the study of the Jesuits is so obvious that it requires no further comment. 4. Fundamental shifts have occurred in our ideas about the agents, the process, and the rate of change (and likewise about continuity). For Jedin the papacy with its Jesuit agents successfully established the Catholic Reformation as proposed by Trent. Today, scholars are more aware of resistance to any kind of “reform” imposed by “the church” and to “social disciplining” attempted by a social, religious, or intellectual elite. “Negotiation” took place, it seems on all levels—of bishops with Rome, of pastors with bishops on the one hand and with their flocks on the other, of accused with inquisitors, and so forth—with even illiterate villagers emerging as effective negotiators when their interests were at stake. The boundaries between so-called popular and elite cultures are now seen as permeable.82 At the same time, we have become more aware, especially within Catholi cism, of “la longue durée” of institutions, slowing down and conditioning whatever change takes place. For study of the Jesuits, this has meant a new perception of the interactive character of whatever they undertook. Nicolas Standaert has inci- sively described that interaction for the China mission.83 And the interactive character is perhaps nowhere more patent than in studies of so-called Jesuit architecture, which in almost every instance has been shown to be the product of negotiation between Jesuits and their patrons. But, as is clear especially from the studies dealing with Asia and the Americas, the reality of reciprocity between Jesuits and those with and for whom they ministered was even more profound. 5. These shifts of course point to basic shifts in methodology. From traditional “church history” based on a political model and from doctrinal

82 See e.g. Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 124–135. 83 Nicholas Standaert, “Jesuit corporate culture as shaped by the Chinese,” in The Jesuits: cultures, sciences, and the arts, 1540–1773, ed. by O’Malley et al., 352–363.

32 chapter one history as a form of the history of ideas, scholarship has moved ever more towards social history in its various forms and manifestations, towards taking some account of cultural anthropology, and towards a growing awareness of the contribution of art history and the history of science and technology. Scholars have finally begun to study the economic aspects of the Jesuit enterprise, badly neglected until quite recently—Dauril Alden’s book, important in so many regards, deserves special commendation for the attention it pays to finances.84 Such broadening of methodological base, far from being peculiar to studies of the Jesuits, has of course occurred in the study of all historical subjects, so that scholars in our so- called postmodern times realize they must reckon with, or be bewildered by, a rich multiplicity of perspectives. Jesuits in the early modern period were, almost by definition, poly- maths, so a multi-perspectival approach to them seems especially appropriate. Special in its interdisciplinary approach to the Jesuits, the recent studies on the Jesuits also signal the new historiographical situation in that most of the contributions are by scholars who are not Jesuits and not Roman Catholics. What especially needs to be pursued now is comparison of the Jesuits with their counterparts in other religious orders and then, when feasible, with their Protestant counterparts.85 Even from where we are at this moment, the phenomenon of “inflated differences,” to which Standaert calls attention, seems to have been broadly operative in this area. With the hindsight of three or four hundred years, these groups strike us more forcefully by their similarities than by their differences. Even so, the Jesuits, as we see them in recent studies, resist reduction to insignificant variations on an essence shared with others, difficult though it may be to define what it is that gives them a character of their own. They insisted they had a “way of proceeding” that both expressed their identity and helped form it. True, the expression often meant not much more than routines regarding external deportment, but it sometimes suggested something deeper. In fact, they had three things related to their “style” or “way of proceeding” that no other group possessed. The first was, the Spiritual Exercises, a guide through a set of inner experiences that every Jesuit underwent. This, they sometimes said or implied, provided them with the most basic elements of their way of proceeding.86

84 Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540–1750 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). 85 See Donnelly, “Religious Orders of Men,” 156–158. 86 See e.g. Michel de Certeau, “L’espace du desir,” Christus 20 (1973): 118–128.

the historiography of the society of jesus 33

The study of this crucially important facet of the Jesuit “way” has been copiously but not always judiciously developed by scholars who are Jesuits, and practically ignored by everybody else.87 Currently, in danger of being lost sight of is precisely the religious dimension of the Jesuit enterprise, a problem to which both Luce Giard and Michael J. Buckley have called attention. Hagiography is out. Yet a devout life is the aim of the Exercises and is what the Jesuits from Nadal forward understood themselves and their “way of proceeding” to be ultimately concerned with. The hermeneutics of suspicion must be applied, of course, to any such self-presentation, but it must be accompanied by an effort to enter the Jesuits’ world on their terms, to study “religious sentiment” as religious and not as by definition reducible to a disguised play for power. Though modern scholars show little interest in the vast corpus of Jesuit writing on godly living, Karl Josef Höltgen’s sensitive treatment of emblem books, a genre as characteristic of the Jesuits and important to them as it has been unstudied, more than suggests the insight such devout literature provides into the Jesuit “way.”88 James F. Keenan’s article indicates that Jesuit literature on the devout life had an impact beyond Catholic circles, in ways for which it has so far not been given credit.89 Several scholars pointed out the importance of visual imagination in the Exercises and correctly relate it to Nadal’s Adnotationes et meditationes, which was both occasion and symptom of Jesuit cultivation of the visual arts—emblem books, painting, sculpture. Other religious orders also cultivated these forms,90 but, as suggested especially in the articles by Gauvin Alexander Bailey on India and Jeffrey Chipps Smith on Bavaria,91 neither so aggressively nor so self-consciously. Second, the Jesuits had their Constitutions, which, for all that it borrowed from similar documents, was different and precociously modern.

87 The bibliography is immense. One can best begin with Paul Begheyn, “A Bibliography on St. Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises,” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 13/2 (1981), and László Polgár, Bibliographie sur l’histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus: 1901–1980, 3 vols. in 6 (Rome: IHSI, 1981), 1:265–373. 88 Karl Josef Höltgen, “Henry Hawkins: a Jesuit writer and emblematist in Stuart England,” in The Jesuits: cultures, sciences, and the arts, 1540–1773, edited by O’Malley et al., 600–626. 89 James F. Keenan, “Jesuit casuistry or Jesuit spirituality? The roots of seventeenth- century British Puritan practical divinity,” in ibid., 627–635. 90 See e.g. Kulturgeschichte der christlichen Orden, ed. Peter Dinzelbacher and James Lester Hogg (Stuttgart: A. Kröner Verlag, 1997). 91 Gauvin Alexander Bailey, “The Truth-Showing Mirror: Jesuit Catechism and the Arts in Mughal India,” in The Jesuits: cultures, sciences, and the arts, 1540–1773, 380–401 and Jeffrey Chipps Smith, “The art of salvation in Bavaria,” in ibid., 568–599.

34 chapter one

Those documents were invariably compilations of ordinances. The Constitutions, obviously influenced through Polanco by principles of Humanist rhetoric that infused a unity and coherence new in such instruments, broke with older models in the psychological development of its design and structure, in its attention to motivation, in being undergirded by theological principles, and in its insistence on flexibility in the implementation even of its own prescriptions. That last quality reflects the similar flexibility insisted upon in the Exercises and that, say what you will, recurs as a theme in Jesuit documents. By definition, the Constitutions were a way of proceeding. Only a few scholars, almost all Jesuits, have studied them.92 Finally, there were the schools, which led the Jesuits into rhetoric, science, theatre, music, and dance in ways shared by no other religious order or comparable group. What were those “school ways” that therefore must be distinctive of the Jesuit “way”? First, the schools were part of an immense global network—there were some 800 by the middle of the eighteenth century, surely the largest and most far-flung system of its kind under a single aegis the world has ever known. Through this network, as Rivka Feldhay and Steven J. Harris have shown for mathematics and the sciences,93 the Jesuits carried on regular discourse with one another across hundreds or many thousands of miles a “cultural ecosystem,” as Buckley calls it. Second, the schools gave the Jesuits a relationship to these disciplines and arts that was systemic. That is, Jesuits cultivated the disciplines and arts not as individuals who might have some special talent or interest in the subject but as part of a program incumbent upon all. As future teachers they were, as a group, professionals in pursuing them. Moreover, although religious goals always remained fundamental with them, their pursuit of “the common good” through the schools imbued many of them with some sense of cultural mission as well.

92 The most reliable studies are by Antonio M. de Aldama, e.g. An Introductory Commentary on the Constitutions, trans. Aloysius J. Owen (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1989), The Formula of the Institute: Notes for a Commentary, trans. Ignacio Echániz (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1990), and Jesuit Religious Life, trans. Ignacio Echániz (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1995); but see also Luce Giard, “Relire les ‘Constitutions,’” in Giard Les jésuites à l’Age baroque, 37–59. One might consult the collection of essays entitled Constitutions of the Society of Jesus: Incorporation of a Spirit (Rome: Secretariatus Spiritualitatis Ignatianae, 1993). 93 Rivka Feldhay, “The cultural field of Jesuit science,” in The Jesuits: cultures, sciences, and the arts, 1540–1773, 107–130 and Steven J. Harris, “Mapping Jesuit science: the role of travel in the geography of knowledge,” in ibid., 212–240.

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The schools gave the Jesuits an entry into local culture and civic life that churches alone could not provide. They were stable arenas where the Jesuits learned, as Louise Rice shows,94 to orchestrate poetry, oratory, philosophy, theology, wit, music, and the other arts into a single cultural experience. In the localities where the Jesuits were able to establish them, they became the base and center for all the other ministries in which the Jesuits engaged. By the eighteenth century other religious orders of men and women were running primary and secondary schools that bear some comparison with Jesuit institutions on that level. We must never forget, however, that no other religious order had an institution of higher learning in any way comparable to the Roman College, the Collegio Romano, which rightly receives so much attention. The impulse to found and staff and then over the course of more than two centuries to sustain and promote such an institution says volumes about the character of the group that, with no model to emulate, behaved in this way. It implies a vision, however unar- ticulated in words, about ways of relating to culture shared by no other large, complex, and internationally diversified body on such a corporate scale. The Collegio Romano, for all its importance in the Jesuit system, was not an isolated showpiece, but, especially by the mid-seventeenth century, only one such institution among a number run by the Jesuits that dotted the European and Latin American landscape. The Collège-Louis-le-Grand in Paris, for instance, betrays in its personnel and cultural activities the same corporate values and behaviors. I believe that within these three factors lurk important elements of a Jesuit way of proceeding, but the quarry is ever elusive. The contributions to the volume The Jesuits: cultures, sciences, and the arts, 1540–1773 stand as collective witness to the complexity of all historical inquiry as well as to the complexity of the Jesuit case. No neat, easily packaged answer about the Jesuit way emerges from these pages. If it had, we could rightly suspect the authors of having deviated from history into some kind of essentialist philosophy. Nonetheless, the images of the Jesuit enterprise depicted here are in notable regards different from those proposed between the time of Jerónimo Nadal in the sixteenth century and that of Hubert Jedin in the mid-twentieth. This is our best evidence that we stand at a new historiographical moment regarding the Society of Jesus, 1540–1773.

94 Louise Rice, “Jesuit thesis prints and the festive academic defence at the Collegio Romano,” in ibid., 148–169.

CHAPTER TWO

THE PASTORAL, SOCIAL, ECCLESIASTICAL, CIVIC, AND CULTURAL MISSION OF THE SOCIETY OF JESUS1

The foundational document of the Society of Jesus is the papal bull of 27 September 1540, Regimini militantis ecclesiae, issued over the signature of Pope Paul III. The bull essentially incorporated into itself a slightly revised version of a document drawn up in the spring of 1539 by the original ten companions of Paris, informally headed by Ignatius of Loyola, to indicate to the papal curia what they hoped for from their new organization and how they planned to achieve it. That document, known as the “Five Chapters,” might well be called the five (long) paragraphs because it is only about five pages long. The bull in the revised and somewhat expanded form of Exposcit debitum, approved by Pope Julius III on 21 July 1550, remains to this day the license officially allowing the Jesuits to operate within the Catholic church. It is the charter of the Society, never superseded. As a charter, it specifies, among other things, the purposes for which the order was founded and the means it will use to accomplish them. The Jesuits are free to make whatever changes in their Constitutions and “way of proceeding” they deem appropriate, as long as the changes do not run counter to any major provisions of the bull. Should a proposed change run counter to the bull, the Jesuits must, even now, appeal to the Holy See for explicit permission to make the change. Officially known as the “Formula of the Institute,” the bull could not be more sacrosanct. It is the equivalent of “the Rule” in other religious orders. It is the first place to look on the level of official documentation to discover what the Society of Jesus is all about. A brief revisiting of the provisions of the Formula that deal directly with Jesuit ministries will provide, I believe, a helpful framing for what follows in our volume.2 For the readers’ convenience, I have appended to this introduction the text of those

1 Originally published in The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley, et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), xxiii–xxxvi. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. 2 See Antonio M. de Aldama, The Formula of the Institute: Notes for a Commentary, trans. Ignacio Echániz (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1990).

38 chapter two provisions, with indications in italics type of changes introduced in 1540 and 1550 into this section of the “Five Chapters.” It might be helpful to take a glance at that appendix before reading further. The bull faithfully reproduced the purpose the ten founders set forth in the “Chapters.” The new order was to be “a Society founded chiefly for this purpose: to strive especially for the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine and for the propagation of the faith.” The purpose seems generic and bland, but it deserves some explanation. “Christian life and doctrine” can best be read as “Christian life and Christian Doctrine,” so as to make clear that doctrine here refers to Christian Doctrine in the sense of basic truths to be lived and practiced. In the sixteenth century, Christian Doctrine was a synonym for catechism. “Christian doctrine” in the Formula, therefore, is not an allusion to the advanced education in philosophy and theology the companions received at Paris; it does not pres- age the Jesuits’ later formal cultivation of those disciplines in a number of different forms; far less is it a manifesto of orthodoxy in a Reformation context. It implies, rather, a practice-related context. It points to a directly pastoral concern, the imparting of basic teachings as a means of spiritual progress. It is therefore intimately related to “Christian life” because catechism, whether done by preaching, lecturing, or some other means, was conceived as an introduction to Christian living, to the ordinary obligations incumbent upon every believer, even the humblest. This meant teaching prayers, especially the Lord’s Prayer. It meant teaching the Decalogue, especially as preparation for sacramental confession. It meant teaching the Apostles’ Creed, usually in the form of stories about the life of Jesus. It meant, almost invariably, teaching the seven spiritual and corporal works of mercy as the expressions of what it meant to live as a Christian. “Christian life and doctrine” meant precisely what John Van Engen has so helpfully encapsulated with the term Christianitas—basic beliefs and practices shared by Christians of all social classes.3 The second purpose was “propagation of the faith.” Today we can hardly speak of Christianity without using the word mission, yet in the sixteenth century mission was just coming into usage in its contemporary sense of evangelization of people not yet Christian.4 The emergence of this usage

3 See John Van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 519–552. 4 See John W. O’Malley, “Mission and the Early Jesuits,” The Way, Supplement 79 (Spring 1994): 3–10. This article is also part of the present collection (Chapter 13).

the missions of the society of jesus 39

coincided with the founding of the Society, and the word in fact occurs, somewhat precociously, in other places in the Formula. The Jesuits in relatively short order would be largely responsible for its gaining currency and gradually replacing the older term, even though as late as 1622 the Roman congregation founded to deal with the overseas missions of the Catholic church was called the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (De propaganda fide). In 1540, surely, “propagation of the faith” (or “journeying to the infidel”) was still the technical term for the enterprise, so we should not be surprised that the companions used it here to express the fundamental missionary character of the order they were founding. They had originally banded together, after all, to travel to Palestine as “missionaries,” even though the term missionary did not yet exist. As a result of their deliberations in 1539, they specified farther on in the Formula that they wanted to be bound by a special vow to obey the pope “for missions,” circa missiones. In their vocabulary, as time went on, “missions” became for a while an almost distinctively Jesuit word. It recurs frequently, for instance, in Part VII of the Constitutions, entitled “The Distribution of Members in the Vineyard of the Lord.” Besides pointing to overseas evangelization, the word points to the basically itinerant style of ministry the companions envisaged for themselves. Indeed, the section of Part VII dealing with missions received from the pope in fulfillment of the special vow implies that these missions would generally be of short duration, about three months. The members of the order originally saw themselves as most characteristically being on the road, with lots of comings and goings.5 Instead of simply “the propagation of the faith,” the Formula was modified in the 1550 version to read “the defense and propagation of the faith.” As has often been noted, the addition of “defense” took account of the growing awareness among the Jesuits of the role they increasingly felt called upon to assume in confrontation with Protestantism. Although the Society was not founded to confute the Reformation, as so often asserted, it soon began to take up that cause, and in certain parts of Europe, especially in Germany and England, it would become identified almost exclusively as an anti-Protestant force. In other parts of the world, such as Latin America and Asia, the Reformation entered relatively little into the Jesuits’ self-understanding and practice. Unlike the other modifications,

5 See Mario Scaduto, “La strada e i prirni gesuiti,” AHSI 40 (1971): 335–390, now available in an abridged translation, “The Early Jesuits and the Road,” The Way 42 (2003): 71–84.

40 chapter two

Exposcit debitum made in the original bull and in the “Five Chapters,” this one was not an elaboration or specification of something already present but was something new—which points to the obvious fact that the Society was an ongoing enterprise that did not assume its full identity in 1540. The “defense of the faith,” which in the sixteenth century often came down to defenses of papal primacy, does relate to the opening statement of the “Five Chapters,” which immediately precedes the section we have been discussing: “Whoever wishes to serve as a soldier of God beneath the banner of the cross in our Society, which we desire to be designated by the name of Jesus, and to serve the Lord alone and his vicar on earth, should, after a solemn vow of perpetual chastity, keep what follows in mind. He is a member […].” The bull of 1540 almost verbatim repeats this mention of the pope, but the 1550 bull modifies it with mention of the church itself: “[…] to serve the Lord alone and the church, his spouse, under the Roman pontiff, the vicar of Christ on earth […].” “Soldier of God” suggests the stereotype of the Jesuit as a militant, a stereotype suggested even by the title of the bull—“Militantis ecclesiae.” Many Jesuits subsequently appropriated military imagery to describe themselves and the mode of the Society. But, in the foundational documents such imagery is much less prevalent than, for instance, in the early writings of Erasmus, that great enemy of militant Christianity. It was traditional religious language. As Antonio de Aldama reminded us, moreover, in his authoritative commentary on the Formula, “‘To serve as a soldier of God’ (militare Deo) is a medieval expression meaning religious life. In the prologue to his Rule, St. Benedict addresses the novice who is ‘about to join battle for Christ the true King.’” De Aldama goes on to suggest that in the words “under the banner of the cross” we hear an echo of the Meditation on Two Standards in the Spiritual Exercises.6 “To serve […] his vicar on earth” indicates a connection with the papacy that is, for example, much less prominent even in the Rule of St. Francis and completely absent in the Rule of St. Benedict. In the “Chapters,” however, I think the mention of the pope must be related to the pope’s pastoral role, as the companions understood it, that is, the role they hoped to see him play in sending them on mission. It should not be understood in the context of Reformation controversies about the papacy and, hence, as a soft way of indicating an obligation to “defend” the institution. In 1550, the wording was changed, as noted earlier, to read “to serve the church […] under the Roman pontiff, the vicar of Christ on earth.” In this

6 De Aldama, Formula, 38.

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shift, the connection of papacy with the vow to be missionaries seems less operative, and with the appearance of the word “church,” the Jesuits imply a greater awareness of their role in the larger ecclesiastical scene. They now were explicitly claiming for themselves an ecclesiastical mission. They did so, however, according to their own “way of proceeding.” They refused, for instance, to assume any office in the hierarchical structure, and they refused to undertake the staffing of parishes, the ecclesiastical unit under the supervision of a bishop. It is instructive to note, moreover, that in Ignatius’s huge correspondence of over 7,000 letters—the largest extant collection of any sixteenth-century figure—the expression “to serve the church” never occurs. What appears on almost every page is, instead, “the help of souls.” I call attention to the two adverbs in the Formula’s description of purpose—“chiefly” (potissimum) and “especially” (praecipue). They occur in the “Five Chapters” and are repeated in the two papal bulls. They are qualifiers, and therefore leave the door slightly ajar. I see in them an antic- ipation of a characteristic of Jesuit “way of proceeding” and style that finds consistent expression in the Constitutions. Almost every provision in that remarkable document is accompanied by qualifications. Such and such is to be done, “unless something else seems better in the circumstances.” It is, thus, a document filled with escape-clauses.7 The same can be said of the directives Ignatius offered to individual Jesuits in his correspondence. As John Bossy observed many years ago, “Few religious superiors can have told members of their order so firmly to forget the rules and do what they thought best.”8 Flexibility and adjustment to circumstances were thus inculcated from the very beginning. They were principles explicit in the text of the Spiritual Exercises regarding the way in which individuals were to be guided in them. The Jesuits were surely not the only group in the sixteenth century to advocate and practice flexibility in their endeavors. Indeed, flexibility was a quality commended by the humanistic tradition for persons in authority. There can be no doubt, however, that it was notably present in the Jesuit ethos even though sometimes in tension with countervailing tendencies.

7 The best recent study, which is essentially a study of the language and rhetoric of the Constitutions, is J. Carlos Coupeau, From Inspiration to Invention: Rhetoric in the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2010). 8 John Bossy, “Postscript” to H. Outram Evennett, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation, ed. Bossy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 130.

42 chapter two

By what means did the first Jesuits intend to further their goal of progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine and the propagation of the faith? In the “Five Chapters,” they succinctly listed ministry of the Word, Spiritual Exercises, works of charity, and, “specifically,” the teaching of catechism to “children and unlettered persons.” The bull Regimini echoed this list but with the addition of striving for “the spiritual consolation of Christ’s faithful through the hearing of confessions,” a sacramental dimension missing in the original draft. The subsequent bull, Exposcit, expanded that last provision to include “the administration of other sacraments” and then indicated further works of charity, beyond teaching catechism, that had emerged in the ensuing decade as noteworthy—“reconciling the estranged […] devoutly assisting and serving those […] found in prisons or hospitals, and indeed performing any other works of charity, according to what will seem expedient for the glory of God and the common good.” The primacy the first Jesuits assigned to “ministries of the Word,” as well as its correlate, the hearing of confessions, indicates how neatly in that regard they fit into the pattern of ministry set by the great mendicant orders of the Middle Ages, especially the Dominicans and Franciscans. The list begins to diverge from the pattern with the mention of the Exercises, a form of ministry created by Ignatius with no precedent in the other orders. That ministry invited people to an inward journey and provided various road maps for making it, including in its most elaborate form a withdrawal for a month from the distractions of life. Although the practice of retiring from one’s ordinary circumstances for reflection and meditation is older than Christianity itself, the Exercises was the first book to organize and codify procedures in a practical, organized, yet flexible way. In effect, it created a new ministry in Christianity, the spiritual “retreat,” and the promotion of that ministry helped contribute to the Jesuits’ self- definition and style. What the Jesuits meant by “works of charity” was the seven spiritual and seven corporal works of mercy, which were in large part elaborated out of the famous Last Judgment scenario in Matthew 25. One of the spiritual works was “teaching the ignorant.” The first “work of charity” the Jesuits specified for themselves was precisely that, “the education of children and unlettered persons in Christianity,” the teaching of catechism, that is, Christian Doctrine, which sends us back to the statement of purpose, “the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine.” There is therefore circular- ity and considerable cohesion in these few lines of the Formula. The original grounding of the Society in simple catechesis helps explain how later, for all the Jesuits who moved in high circles, many others continued to be

the missions of the society of jesus 43

engaged with more humble folk in more humble pastoral enterprises. In the version of 1550, two further specifications of works of charity were added, in recognition of activities in which members had been particularly prominent in the Society’s first decade: reconciling the estranged (“peacemaking”) and serving prisoners in jail and the sick in hospitals. The section of the Formula we have been considering clearly established the fundamentally pastoral and missionary character of the order. As I indicated, broadly speaking the Jesuits in that regard would be doing what the Dominicans and Franciscans were doing. These two orders were active in the mission fields, for instance, long before the Jesuits arrived on the scene. But, as I also indicated, a significant difference in pastoral activity was the giving of the Exercises. Another, less obvious, was the explicit articulation of the pastoral and missionary character, the more explicit intentionality. The difference points to the character of the founders, to the kind of training they had received, and thus to a different cultural context. It thereby hints at further traits that would become part of the Jesuits’ “way of proceeding,” their style. The style would favor a reflective and fully articulated approach to problems and their resolutions. There was still another difference. The Formula established a commitment to works of social assistance of various kinds. In 1540, the year of the founding, Ignatius was instrumental in the creation of an orphanage in Rome and shortly thereafter of the Casa Santa Marta, a refuge for prostitutes who wanted to put their situation behind them. Although the mendicants, as well as the monks, engaged in various works of charity, for charity was intrinsic to being Christian, peculiar to the Jesuits was the explicit articulation of it as an essential element of what they were about. They were not only preachers of the Word and administrators of the sacraments, they were also, and professedly, agents engaged in the construction of institutions of social assistance. This commitment from the very earliest years would lead them into varied and intense relationships with confraternities, the institutions that by the sixteenth century undertook most of the ongoing commitments to the poor, the sick, and other groups on the margins of society such as prostitutes. In the 1550 version, the list of ministries ends by commending anything that contributes to “the common good.” Up to that point, the vocabulary of the section of the Formula we have been considering has been directly or indirectly derived from the Bible or from traditional Christian usage. “Common good” derives not from those sources but from philosophy. It appears for the first time in 1550, after ten years of experience and after Juan Alfonso de Polanco became Ignatius’s confidant and aide in

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formulating the official documents of the Society. The expression implies an openness regarding what might be included in the future in “works of charity.” More important, it suggests, I believe, a concern for this world and its betterment, a shift away from strictly evangelical goals—the common good. The older orders doubtless had this concern and expressed it in various ways, as their histories make clear, but the up-front commitment to it in the Formula is what deserves our attention. I mention Polanco because I believe he would be more likely to think in philosophical terms than Ignatius would, and because of the letter he wrote to Antonio de Araoz in Ignatius’s name on 1 December 1551.9 That is just a year after the publication of the revised version of the Formula, in the wording of which he played an important role. In the letter, Polanco proffers fifteen goals the Society hopes to achieve through its schools. The last six are various benefits for the cities or towns in which the schools are located, and the penultimate one reads as follows: “Jesuits will encourage and help in the establishment of hospitals, houses of convertidas [prostitutes seeking to change their lives], and similar institutions.” In the mind of Ignatius and the others, therefore, there was a correlation between the schools and works of social assistance, with a clear awareness of benefits for the city. The last reason is even more comprehensive in that regard: “Those who are now only students will grow up to be pastors, civic officials, administrators of justice, and will fill other important posts to everybody’s profit and advantage.” That goal could have been written by Erasmus, Pierpaolo Vergerio the Elder, or any of the other theorists about the program of studies promoted by Renaissance humanists. The achievement of that goal is precisely what the humanists promised by their educational program. That fifteenth reason shows how profoundly the early Jesuits had appropriated the literature on the subject, and how easily they correlated it with the evolving mission of the Society. I say “evolving mission” because, like all social realities, the Society would continue to change in a number of ways. There was one change, however, that was of absolutely primary importance and that was already under way in 1550, when Exposcit debitum was published. It was the momentous impact on the Society of the decision to undertake schooling as a formal ministry, a decision first grounded in the opening of the collegio in Messina in 1548. The decision in very short order affected almost every aspect of the Jesuits’ self-understanding up to that moment,

9 Epp. Ign., 4:5–9.

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and gave the Society an enlargement of its purpose or mission that was at best only potential at the beginning. In 1550, this change, though under way, was still too inchoate to make its way into Exposcit debitum. At this point, therefore, we must abandon the Formula. Absolutely crucial though the Formula is for understanding the foundations of the Society, it fails to mention the ministry that would come almost to define the Society, and that in ways big and small had a transforming effect on all the other ministries and on almost every aspect of Jesuit procedure. With slight qualification, the Constitutions suffer the same major defect. They were composed at approximately the same time as the Formula of 1550 and were never adequately revised regarding the schools before their official approbation by the First General Congregation, 1558, two years after the death of Ignatius. This is a dramatic instance of how limited and misleading official and normative documentation can be for understanding a social reality. As the Jesuits had recourse to the Formula, they would get no guidance for the role the Society had in fact assumed as “the first teaching order in the Catholic church,” and they would do only slightly better with the Constitutions. In the correspondence from the Jesuit curia even during the lifetime of Ignatius, it is clear how massive the commitment to “the colleges” had become in just a few years, but the correspondence would not be readily available to scholars or Jesuit superiors until its publication in the twentieth century. The very momentum of the commitment carried the enterprise forward without much questioning, at least at the beginning, as to whether running schools was an authentic pursuit for Jesuits. But the evangelical vocabulary of the Formula does not seem easily reconcilable with teaching horsemanship or with writing books on rhetoric or, for sure, on dance! What we have here is a radical redefinition that was never fully articulated in official documentation and at best was only suggested in most other writings by Jesuits. What did that redefinition entail? In the first and most obvious way, it entailed a shift from the Jesuits’ being essentially a group of itinerant preachers and missionaries to their becoming resi dent schoolmasters. For the schools, moreover, the Jesuits acquired huge properties. Despite their almost Franciscan avoidance of money transactions in the beginning, they became, in order to sustain the schools, “the first professional fundraisers,” as Olwen Hufton has argued.10 More

10 Olwen Hufton, “Every tub on its own bottom: funding a Jesuit college in early modern Europe,” in The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, edited by John W. O’Malley et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 5–23.

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profoundly, they initiated for themselves a new relationship to learning and the arts in the wake of their commitment especially to the humanistic program. What kind of schools were these schoolmasters operating, therefore, and for whom? Although some of the schools had the full course of studies eventually prescribed in the Ratio studiorum, 1599, which culminated in the “higher disciplines” of philosophy and theology, they all taught the “lower disciplines” of the humanistic program—grammar, rhetoric, history, drama, and so forth. They taught the program not as a preparation for theology, the traditional clerical rationale, but as a program complete in itself, with its own proper goals, that would provide laymen with the learning and skills they needed to make their way in this world. And to make their way so as to be a help to others and a benefit to the communities in which they lived. That at least was the ideal. I believe that up to now we have not taken seriously enough how this reality entailed a redefinition of what the order was really about. Or, perhaps better, how it entailed a significant enlargement and enrichment of the mission of the order. The religious mission remained fundamental, and the other missions had to be integrated into it and even subordinated to it. As an ideal, this mission remained steady through the centuries. But, because of the schools the Jesuits had a commitment to culture, to urban- ity, to civiltà; to conversazione, and to the honneste homme in the world that was new for a religious order. That commitment is one of the great themes to emerge clearly in the two volumes dealing with the Jesuits’ relationship to “cultures, sciences, and the arts.” We still tend to look upon the Jesuit schools as church schools, as confessional schools, even as Counter-Reformation schools. That indeed they were. But what happens if we turn the picture around to look upon them as civic institutions—usually requested by the city, in some form paid for by the city, established to serve the families of the city, which service entailed listening to the expectations of those families and, when feasible, making adjustments to accommodate them? They were often the leading cultural institution, especially in the smaller cities and towns. They provided library resources in an age before public libraries, and they provided public entertainment. As especially Judi Loach and Giovanna Zanlonghi have shown,11 the cultural mission sometimes burst the walls of the

11 Judi Loach, “Revolutionary pedagogues? How Jesuits used education to change society,” in The Jesuits II, 66–85 and Giovanna Zanlonghi, “The Jesuit Stage and Theatre in Milan during the Eighteenth Century,” ibid., 530–549.

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classroom to affect an even more pronounced civic presence. Coordinated with this social reality, moreover, was the educational theory of the studia humanitatis, affirming that those studia were the apt instrument for producing men dedicated to the public weal, to “the common good.” It was this commitment to the studia humanitatis that distinguished the Jesuits culturally from the mendicant orders. Those orders, too, as their various programs of study unmistakably reveal, had serious commitment to “learned ministry,” as grounded in the institutions of learning they established for their own members. But, these orders were founded before the Renaissance, and their programs were already fixed before the humanists’ propaganda had reintroduced the studia in an organized and self- conscious way into the Western world. The studia were not part of the system of the Dominicans and Franciscans, though individual Dominicans or Franciscans might be proficient in them. But, they were part of the Jesuit system, the first studies every member of the order undertook and the subjects that almost every member taught professionally at some stage of his career. The Jesuit commitment to the studia was thorough and systemic. There had to be repercussions. A text that every Jesuit was familiar with and that many of them taught year after year was Cicero’s De officiis—“On Duties,” which I translate as “On Public Responsibility.” Here is a well- known passage: “We are not born for ourselves alone […]. Everything that the earth produces is created for our use, and we, too, as human beings are born for the sake of other human beings that we might be able mutually to help one another; we ought therefore to take Nature as our guide and contribute to the common good of humankind by reciprocal acts of kindness, by giving and receiving from one another, and thus by our skill, our industry and our talents work to bring human society together in peace and harmony” (1.7.22; my translation). Jesuits, I opine, would easily have correlated this passage with the section opening the Spiritual Exercises entitled “Principle and Foundation,” which affirms that we were created for the praise, reverence, and service of God. In the Christian context, that praise, reverence, and service, the Jesuits knew well could not be divorced from concern for one’s neighbor. Yet, the passage from Cicero is directed to the betterment of this world rather than to one’s eternal salvation. I suggest that the Jesuits saw this text as an amplification of the message of the “Principle and Foundation” rather than as a contradiction of it. As an amplification, it gave the “Principle and Foundation” an important new modality. It is not insignificant that the term “common good” occurs in it.

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We must remember, these “pagan” texts were taught not simply as models of style but as sources of ethical inspiration. If Erasmus could invoke “St. Socrates,” I think some Jesuits, if they let themselves go, could have invoked “St. Cicero.”12 I do not know of any who did, but Cornelius à Lapide, the Jesuit exegete, said of a passage from Epictetus, “O wonder, these words ring of the gospel, not just moral philosophy.”13 The tradition of character-formation for the good of the city goes back all the way to Isocrates and is at the heart of the paideia that the Renaissance humanists worked so hard—and, ultimately, so successfully—to revive. I find it almost impossible to believe that teaching, day after day and year after year, the classical authors such as Cicero who inculcated this ideal did not have an impact on the Jesuits’ sense of the mission of the Society and thus on their sense even of their own vocations. Did this not give them an anchor in this world and a concern for it that, for their times and particularly in the early years, was special for clerics? Partly as a result of the two Boston conferences, I have been moving towards an affirmative answer. In making this point, I am not trying to exalt the quantity and quality of the Jesuits’ civic and cultural accomplishments in comparison with those of other religious orders. The cultural benefits the Benedictines have conferred upon Western civilization are incalculable. The Jesuits produced no artist of the caliber of the Dominicans’ Fra Angelico. For all the importance of the Gesù in Rome, the church never had the civic significance of the Franciscans’ Santa Croce in Florence. I am not, therefore, trying to say that the Jesuits did more or did it better. I am saying, rather, that with the Jesuits their civic and cultural accomplishments assumed a new mode and were undertaken with a new rationale and a more explicit intentionality. I am saying that with the schools the Jesuits produced civic and cultural institutions that were new for a religious order and that had a more professedly this-worldly orientation in large measure because they sprang out of persuasions originating in the classical world, not the Christian world, even though they were now revived for the Christian world. I am saying that the mode of Jesuit engagement with culture in a civic context was different in that it was centered in humanistic schools. This meant that most Jesuits spent most of their day in a secular space, not in the

12 Erasmus, Convivium religiosum (“The Godly Feast”), in Opera omnia, vol. 1/3 (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1972), 254. 13 Quoted in Francois de Dainville, La naissance de l’humanisme moderne (Paris: Beauchesne, 1940), 223.

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pulpit or the cloister. This meant that they taught secular subjects— indeed, pagan literature, as well as mathematics, physics, and astronomy, sometimes botany and natural history. This meant that they taught secular students, not clerics or members of religious orders. This meant that, especially in teaching the classical dramatists, they were drawn into music and dance in ways new for clergy. “Ecco, i preti delle commedie!”14 This meant that by such engagement with “the sciences and the arts” they shocked most notably the Jansenists, with some of the dire consequences Marc Fumaroli has indicated.15 If I am correct in assigning to the Society a cultural and civic mission, it means we must re-examine that most sensitive and telling aspect of the Jesuits’ reality, their spirituality. At its deepest level, Jesuit spirituality derived from the Spiritual Exercises. As a spiritual classic, the Exercises is a plastic text, open to a range of interpretations, including the highly moral- izing interpretations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There can be little doubt, however, that the concluding meditation on the love of God promotes a positive appreciation of all created reality. It is a longer version of St. Ignatius’s exhortation to Jesuits in the Constitutions to “find God in all things” (no. 288). Ignatius further exhorts them not to be afraid in their ministries to make use of “natural” means as well as “supernatural” (no. 814). Jesuit spirituality, as has often been remarked, has a decidedly activist, even this-worldly cast to it. I believe that this cast provided a potential that contact with the humanistic tradition activated in a cultural and civic direction. The tradition was mediated to Ignatius in the early years by Polanco and by Jerónimo Nadal, but it then worked its way into the very fabric of Jesuit conscious- ness by the sheer repetition year after year of the teaching of classical texts about civic virtue in institutions geared to the welfare of the city and its citizens. I propose that we can begin to speak of Jesuit spirituality as a civic and culturally aware spirituality. Alternatively, we can at least say that in many Jesuits their spirituality had a civic and culturally aware dimension. This was a dimension that for the most part was more implicit than explicit. It would be manifested much more by actions than by words, by what we can infer than by what we can directly verify. This dimension, almost

14 See O’Malley, First Jesuits, 224. 15 Marc Fumaroli, “Between the rigorist hammer and the deist anvil: the fate of the Jesuits in Eighteenth-Century France,” in The Jesuits II, 682–690.

50 chapter two negated by the normative documents, can be retrieved only by the kinds of studies contained in the two Boston conference volumes, studies repre- sentative of the exciting turn taken in Jesuit historiography in the past ten or fifteen years, studies that have moved away from the normative to the actual. This dimension was, moreover, too much contrary to the conven- tions of writing and thinking about “spirituality” to be conceivable until we had a more capacious understanding of what spirituality might mean even in a religious-ecclesiastical context. If by spirituality we mean something like the deep wellsprings of our motivation and the impulses within us that prompt us to make certain decisions and not others, especially as the decisions express dedication and self-transcendence, then we are here dealing with a reality absolutely critical for understanding Jesuit style, critical for understanding the Jesuit “way of proceeding.” We are dealing with a reality altogether critical for understanding the Jesuits’ relationships to “cultures, sciences, and the arts.”

Appendix: The Purposes and Ministries of the Society of Jesus According to the Official Documents, 1539–1550

I. The Five Chapters, 1539 “Whoever desires to serve as a soldier of God beneath the banner of the cross in our Society, which we desire to be designated by the name of Jesus, and to serve the Lord alone and his vicar on earth, should, after a solemn vow of perpetual chastity, keep what follows in mind. He is a member of a Society founded chiefly for this purpose: to strive especially for the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine and for the propagation of the faith – by ministry of the word, – by Spiritual Exercises, – by works of charity, and specifically, – by the education of children and unlettered persons in Christianity.”

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II. The Formula of the Institute, 1540, Regimini militantis ecclesiae “Whoever desires to serve as a soldier of God beneath the banner of the cross in our Society, which we desire to be designated by the name of Jesus, and to serve the Lord alone and the Roman pontiff, his vicar on earth, should, after a solemn vow of perpetual chastity, keep what follows in mind. He is a member of a Society founded chiefly for this purpose: to strive especially for the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine and for the propagation of the faith – by public preaching and ministry of the word of God, – by Spiritual Exercises, – by works of charity, and specifically, – by the education of children and unlettered persons in Christianity, – and particularly by the spiritual consolation of Christ’s faithful through the hearing of confessions.”

III. The Formula of the Institute, 1550, Exposcit debitum “Whoever desires to serve as a soldier of God beneath the banner of the cross in our Society, which we desire to be designated by the name of Jesus, and to serve the Lord alone and the church, his spouse, under the Roman pontiff, the vicar of Christ on earth, should, after a solemn vow of perpetual chastity, poverty, and obedience, keep what follows in mind. He is a member of a Society founded chiefly for this purpose: to strive especially for the defense and propagation of the faith and for the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine, – by public preaching, lectures, and any other ministries whatsoever of the word of God, and further, – by Spiritual Exercises, and – by the education of children and unlettered persons in Christianity, – and particularly by the spiritual consolation of Christ’s faithful through the hearing of confessions and – by the administration of other sacraments.

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Moreover, this Society should show itself no less useful – in reconciling the estranged, – in devoutly assisting and serving those who are found in prisons or hospitals, and indeed, – in performing any other works of charity, according to what will seem expedient for the glory of God and the common good.”

CHAPTER THREE

THE SOCIETY OF JESUS 1

The Society of Jesus, a religious order of men within the Catholic church, officially came into being on September 27, 1540, with the bull of Pope Paul III, Regimini militantis ecclesiae. The bull approved the “plan of life” (formula vivendi) drawn up by ten young priests, mostly Iberians, who had met as students some years earlier at the University of Paris. Ignatius of Loyola, 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 Francis Xavier (1506–1565), who would later become the great missionary to India and Japan, and Diego Laínez, who would be an important theologian at the Council of Trent and succeed Ignatius as superior 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 Latin 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 criticisms 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 early modern period, 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 Reformation 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 followers of Jesus, as saints and savants, the second as the religious hypocrites Jesuita sometimes implied; almost all European languages have the equivalent 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 Monita secreta 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 compromising secrets about friends, enemies—and each other. Serious historians of course never bought either extreme, and in the past few years especially in France 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 Catholic church” but had a much broader, primarily pastoral scope. They have shown that, despite the military imagery in the papal bull of 1540, the order was not grounded on a military model but on the more traditional model of a brotherhood or confraternity of “reformed priests.” They have shown that the Jesuits’ famous “Fourth Vow” was not an oath of Counter-Reformation loyalty to the pope but a vow of mobility expressive of their desire to be missionaries 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 running 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, New France, the Philippines, India, Japan, and China. The order grew rapidly. By the time Loyola died in 1556 it numbered about 1,000 members, already divided into twelve administrative units

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called provinces. The distribution of members among the provinces was, however, very uneven. In the earliest years, the largest and most prosper- ous province was the Portuguese, due in part to the support of King John III, but soon Spain and then Italy began to catch up and even overtake it. Within about a decade there were only slightly over a dozen Jesuits in Paris, but twenty-five in Brazil and thirty in India. The single greatest con- centration of members was in Rome, where for several decades some ten to fifteen percent of all Jesuits lived. By 1565, the order numbered about 3,500 and 13,000 by 1615, and it continued to grow. In the middle of the eighteenth century, there were some 3,000 Jesuits in France operating, besides their other institutions, eighty- nine “colleges” (secondary schools) and thirty-two seminaries. In Italy at about the same time, they ran, besides the prestigious Roman College, 132 other colleges and twenty-two seminaries. Their institutions were typically located in the center of large cities, but, as the very numbers indicate, many more were situated in towns of quite modest size, where their buildings were often among the most imposing in the environs. How can we account for the growth of the Jesuits especially in their early years, when in comparison with other orders founded at about the same time they expanded incomparably faster and on a more international basis? Many factors helped them in this regard, not least of which were the great gifts of leadership possessed by Loyola and the fact that he lived long enough to give guidance and coherence through the first decade and a half. He also had a special talent for choosing men to assist him whose aptitudes complemented his own. Outstanding in this regard would be his secretary, Juan Alfonso de Polanco, and his plenipotentiary agent- in-the field, Jerónimo Nadal. Ignatius also bequeathed to the order his Exercises, which moved the members to a deeply interiorized sense of purpose and religious devotion. No other group had a book like it. The Jesuit Constitutions were drawn up principally by Ignatius and Polanco beginning in 1547. This understudied document is strikingly different from correlative documents of other orders, which are simply collections of ordinances. The Constitutions, under the influence of the humanist tradition, broke new ground in the rationalized structure of their organization, in the psychological undergirding of their development from part to part, in their attention to motivation and general principles, in having an implicit but detectable theological grounding, in conveying a sense of overall direction, and, perhaps most important, in their insistence in particular and in general on flexible implementation even of their own prescriptions. Cluttered and overly detailed though they

56 chapter three are, they served the Jesuits well and helped save them from the internal schisms so many other orders suffered. Moreover, the group was not only international in its composition from the beginning but also determined to move “anywhere in the world where there was hope of God’s greater glory and the good of souls.” The other new orders were made up almost exclusively of one nationality and lacked the venturesome zeal for travel with which the Jesuits were imbued. The order had not yet been approved by Paul III when Xavier was already on his way to India. Xavier’s letters back to Europe describing his missionary activity helped the Jesuits recruit new members, as would the letters of other Jesuit missionaries for the next two centuries. The Jesuits had, in other words, a modern sense of propaganda. Moreover, in their original “plan of life” they articulated briefly yet more lucidly than any order up to that time their full commitment to a life of ministry. Symbolic of that commitment was their insistence that they not be bound to celebrate the canonical hours in common, so that they might be free at every hour of the day for preaching, teaching catechism, hearing confession, guiding persons through the Exercises, tending the sick, and performing other works of mercy. They mentioned these ministries specifically by name. Experience would soon lead them to expand the list. Last but not least, the original members were all university- trained, which not only lent the group considerable prestige but set a pattern of cultural and intellectual excellence that attracted many young men. It was the academic training of the original members that enabled them to understand how the running of schools could be a new and important ministry, with the result that the Jesuits became the first teaching order in the Catholic church. This ministry, unique to the Jesuits for some decades, made them special, palpably different from any of the other orders, and hence attractive to potential recruits. When in 1539 the members drew up their “plan of life” for approval by Pope Paul III, they envisaged themselves fundamentally as itinerant preachers modeled on Jesus’ disciples and on St. Paul. They interpreted preaching in a broad sense to include formal sermons in church but also street preaching; it included lecturing on books of the Bible for the benefit of both clergy and laity, an early experiment in what we today call adult education; it included lessons in the catechism to children and adults, and even informal conversation with individuals or small groups. In these endeavors, the early Jesuits built upon traditions established by the Franciscans, Dominicans, and other religious orders in the Middle Ages, but they often took them a step further. In their teaching of catechism,

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for instance, they exported almost around the world the Spanish tradition of setting the text to simple tunes so that questions and answers could be sung responsorially. The Jesuits’ pursuit of ministries like these was special because of the influence upon them of the Spiritual Exercises. One of the world’s most famous books, it is one of the least read and understood. It was in fact never meant to be read in the conventional way because it was to be used as a handbook designed to help somebody guide another through a program of reflections and meditations that would lead to a deeper sense of purpose in life and to a deeper commitment to the ideals of Jesus. It is amazingly flexible in how it might be used and in just how a person or group might follow its suggestions. The book in effect created for the Jesuits the new ministry of the “retreat,” days or weeks spent apart in prayer, but it also imbued their other ministries with certain emphases, like the fostering of greater inwardness that paradoxically issued in a commitment to greater service in the world. Like the Dominicans and others, the Jesuits saw preaching closely con- nected with the reception of the sacraments of penance (“confession”) and the Eucharist. One of the purposes of preaching was to motivate listeners to receive these two sacraments, and the Jesuits, unlike many Catholic clergy, advocated “frequent” reception, viz., every week. This was a break with the medieval tradition that Christians were not worthy to receive so often. Their advocacy of frequent reception brought the Jesuits under suspicion in some circles in the sixteenth century and was one of the factors leading in the next century to their bitter conflicts with the Jansenists in France that brought Pascal’s wrath upon their head. The Jesuits also had by then adopted a form of moral reasoning called “probabilism” that struck the austere Pascal as lax and unprincipled. If the Monita secreta has acted through the centuries as primal source for anti-Jesuit myths, the viciously clever satire of Pascal’s Provincial Letters dealt the order a heavy blow that made its suppression easier a hundred years later. The Jesuits who founded the order saw compassion for the poor and oppressed as the most genuine expression of Christian sentiment, and they tried to practice and urge others to practice the so-called spiritual and corporal works of mercy such as feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting prisoners, and instructing the ignorant. In such endeavors, they called upon confraternities, those voluntary associations for pious purposes that flourished in the late Middle Ages, to carry on these ministries and give them a solid financial and organizational basis. They eventually developed their own form of such confraternities known as Marian Congregations or Sodalities of Our Lady.

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In Venice, the founding members saw the work of Girolamo Miani (or Emiliani) (1486–1537), who seems to have been the first person to establish refuges for homeless boys and girls, as distinct from abandoned infants, and thus create the first real orphanages. As early as 1541, Ignatius helped found in Rome a confraternity to carry on the work of two new orphanages, one for boys and one for girls. Others followed quickly in other cities. More impressive perhaps were their early efforts to establish what we would call halfway houses for courtesans and prostitutes who wanted to move to a better life. The latter often plied their trade in miser- able conditions and out of sheer desperation. Ignatius founded the House of St. Martha in Rome in 1543 and promptly organized a confraternity to administer and financially support it. Such houses allowed the women some months of seclusion where they could break with their past and then provided them with dowries so that they could either marry or enter a convent. All through their history the Jesuits founded or inspired others to found works of social assistance along the same patterns as the orphanages and women’s asylums. The administration and finances of these institutions were almost invariably in the hands of laymen and laywomen organized into confraternities for the purpose, which assured stability. The orphanage for boys founded by Ignatius in Rome, for instance, is still in existence in its original location, near the Pantheon in the very heart of the city. The ministries and activities mentioned so far, for all that the Jesuits might have modified them, were pursued by members of other orders and some of them even by various lay groups. No other organization, however, undertook formal schooling in the organized and systematic way the Jesuits did, as a result of a decision taken in 1548 to open a school in Messina, Sicily, that turned out to be a great success. With that decision the Jesuits entered a dramatically new phase that entailed almost a new self-definition as they modified their understanding of themselves as primarily missionaries and itinerant preachers to combine it with being resident schoolmasters. Until that time they had, despite the advanced academic degrees many of them possessed, avoided permanent teaching assignments and even eschewed teaching their own younger members, but with the success of Messina and other schools like it designed in accordance with the principles of Renaissance humanism they recognized such institutions by 1560 as their primary ministry. The decision also meant for the Jesuits a new relationship with culture, for they now had to learn many basically secular subjects so as to become skilled professionals in teaching them. This development largely explains why and how the Society began

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to earn its reputation for learning. Other orders had teachers and erudite members, but in the Jesuits learning based to a large extent on subjects outside the traditional clerical curriculum became systematic in ways and to a degree different from the others. The Jesuits interpreted the humanistic program to entail theater in which the students played the parts, which in turn often entailed singing and dancing, at least in the intervals between the acts. This was but one reason why the Jesuits were drawn into a notably close relationship with the arts. Like so many of their Catholic contemporaries, they also used the visual arts for instruction and evangelization, and to that end established in Japan in 1583, for instance, an “academy” to produce devotional art that would satisfy Japanese aesthetic tastes. The Roman College, opened in 1551, soon developed into a university, though at first a very modest one indeed. It grew in prestige and complexity, as Jesuit faculty were recruited for it from around the Society, so that within several decades its reputation far exceeded that of its rival, the University of Rome. This situation persisted at least through the seventeenth century. Other Jesuit institutions developed in the same way, as for example the school founded by them in 1585 in Macau off the coast of Imperial China. Most of the schools the Jesuits ran, however, were what we would call secondary, though of a particularly advanced and rigorous kind. They, as well as other schools founded on the humanist ideals, were the forerunners and models for what developed into the Latin Schools, lycées, and Gymnasia of later times. In them the Jesuits simply appropriated the goals and basic curriculum established by Italian humanists in the fifteenth century that by the time the Jesuits were founded were already widely diffused in Europe and utilized by Protestants and Catholics alike. Why did the Jesuit schools, then, achieve so rapidly such success and begin to be considered superior to many of the others? Three special qualities must be singled out in this regard. First, the Jesuits did not charge any tuition and were open to any students who could pass the courses and would obey the rules. Second, they brought to these schools an organization and discipline that many of them had learned in Paris, the so-called “Parisian style,” that were unknown in most other places. Most of the elements of the Parisian style proved so useful that we can hardly imagine schools without them: for instance, students were divided into classes, so that they progressed from one class to a higher one, from simpler skills to more complex; students were drilled in the subject matter and prompted to become active learners by doing homework, composing and delivering speeches, memorizing, and reciting poetry. Students not only read great dramas, they took the parts of the characters in plays produced for the purpose.

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The third feature was the development of a real faculty. Until the middle of the sixteenth century, many “schools” had but one teacher, sometimes assisted by one or two of the older students. This had begun to change before the Jesuits arrived on the scene, but even with the first school in Messina, the Jesuits enlisted a faculty of five, which in actual fact almost immediately became a faculty of ten. Within a few years Ignatius insisted that no school should be opened without a Jesuit presence of at least twelve Jesuits, half of whom would be practically full-time in the school. This meant a much larger number of students could be accommodated. In 1556, enrollment ranged from a mere sixty in Venice to 800 in Billom, France. That same year there were 120 in Bologna, 280 in Palermo, and 300 in Córdoba. Soon the faculties in many schools became even larger, with a consequent increase in the number of students enrolled. Why did the Jesuits take this dramatic turn? How did formal schooling fit with their scope? Contrary to what is often said, they did not undertake them primarily, at least in most parts of the world, to counteract the Reformation. Rather, they adopted the view of the humanists that “good literature” inspired noble sentiments and thus helped form upright character in the young men who studied them. The great public figures of the past who dedicated themselves to the public weal would inspire others to do the same, whether that be in the offices of church or state. Moreover, the development of powers of persuasion, of eloquence, would provide the skills to enable these public servants to sway others to similar dedication and to make the right choices in matters of the common good. This was the ancient ideal elaborated by classical authors like Cicero and Quintilian but now proposed in a Christian context. The Jesuits hoped to accomplish many things through their schools. They were frank in seeing them as places where they might attract young men to join the Society. They saw them as providing them with an insertion into the life of a town or city quite different from what a church provided. They saw them as providing a base for their many other ministries, especially since each school had a church, sometimes a very large church, attached to it. In certain parts of the world, the Jesuits, by taking the long view, saw the schools as acting as a bulwark against Protestantism: the best way to combat Protestantism was through an educated and articulate laity. But, most fundamental in the decision was the faith that the schools would produce Christian leaders for the benefit of all concerned. If the Jesuits became enthusiastic promoters of humanistic education in their “colleges,” they were just as dedicated to the scholastic philosophy and theology taught in the medieval and early modern universities. All Jesuits were required

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after their humanistic training to go on to philosophy and theology, “the higher disciplines,” and in many of the colleges they went beyond the usual humanistic curriculum by offering to their students courses in “philosophy,” which usually meant logic, ethics, and “natural philosophy,” the rough equivalent of what we today consider the physical sciences. Indeed, although full programs of philosophy in Jesuit universities made ample room for metaphysics and similar disciplines, they gave even more attention to the three just mentioned. This explains how so many of the Jesuit schools boasted astronomical observatories and why the Jesuits wrote so many books on mathematics and the sciences. It is thus all the more ironic that a Jesuit, Robert Bellarmine, played the important role he did in the papal condemnations of Galileo in the early seventeenth century, for many of his fellow Jesuits were convinced Galileo was correct and, even after the condemnation, tried to find ways to teach a heliocentric astronomy. The training in theology the original group received at Paris virtually assured that scholastic theology would play a major role in the theological education they provided for their own members and for others, even though they were critical of it for being too cerebral. During the lifetime of Ignatius they adopted Thomas Aquinas as their official master in theology, a decision that helped promote the revival of interest in Thomas characteristic of Catholicism in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Dominicans had much earlier accorded Thomas the same similar position in their order, but they differed from the Jesuits in many points of interpretation, which exacerbated the rivalry between the two groups that began to take on serious form around the turn of the century with disputes about grace. The Dominicans accused the Jesuits of being Pelagians, that is, of attributing too much to human effort in the process of salvation and not enough to grace, whereas the Jesuits accused the Dominicans of being Calvinists in holding just the opposite emphasis. This was the famous De auxiliis controversy that in 1607 evoked from Pope Paul V a decree stating that neither side could be justly accused of holding the heretical positions they attributed to each other. The issue still simmered beneath the surface, and, as mentioned, erupted again in the Jesuits’ controversy with the Jansenists. In Leuven as early as 1570, both Leonard Lessius and Bellarmine had found themselves at odds with the teaching of Michel de Bay (1513–1589), the forerunner of Jansenism. The Jesuits in general held a more optimistic view of human potential than did many of their Catholic or Protestant contemporaries. By the latter decades of the sixteenth century, the Jesuits had eclipsed the other orders in producing leading Catholic theologians—men like

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Bellarmine, Francisco de Toledo, Luis de Molina, and Francisco Suárez. Jesuits also published important works in other areas of learning, like José de Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590) based on his reflections on his experience in Peru, and Juan de Mariana’s Historia general de España (1601) and his controversial De rege et regis institutione (1599), in which he allowed regicide under certain conditions. Suárez, who taught in Rome at the Roman College as well as in universities in Spain and Portugal, published many works on philosophical and theological topics, none more important than his Disputationes metaphysicae (1597), which exercised considerable influence even on contemporary Protestant philosophers because of its new method of not following the sequence of Aristotle’s thought so as to develop an independent systematic treatment adapted to the needs of thinkers in his own day. Ignatius several times early in his life had to appear before various inquisitions to answer charges that his Exercises or some of his other activities were unorthodox, and in Alcalá in 1527, he actually spent time in jail. While he was a student in Paris, the city and the university suffered considerable agitation over the infiltration of “Lutheranism,” but he and his companions seem to have been relatively detached from it. They were intent on traveling to the Holy Land to live where Jesus lived and to work for the conversion of the Muslims. Although they certainly had no sympathy for “the Lutherans,” they also had no intention of traveling to Wittenberg. Nonetheless, as early as 1540, one of them, Pierre Favre, was invited to travel to Germany as part of a diplomatic entourage to the religious colloquies being held at Worms and Regensburg. He was the first Jesuit to see first-hand what the religious situation was like, and he conveyed to his brethren back in Italy how appalling he found the condition of the Catholic church. He did not speak German, however, and was otherwise ill equipped to deal effectively with the situation. His most lasting achievement was in 1543 winning to the Society a young Dutch student of theology, Peter Canisius, who would turn out to be the single most important Catholic figure in the empire in the second half of the sixteenth century. Bit by bit in the first decade Jesuit leadership in Rome became more concerned with the Reformation and in particular with Germany, and in 1550 they officially added “defense of the faith” to the stated purposes of the order. In Spain, Portugal, and Italy they supported the many ecclesias tical tribunals dealing with persons accused of heresy, although they in principle preferred to use directly pastoral remedies whenever possible. In 1549, Canisius, after a sojourn of a few years in Italy, returned to the empire, where he would remain until his death in 1597, active almost until

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the end. In 1555, Nadal made his first trip there and, horrified at what he found, sounded the alarm. From that time forward countering the Reformation would in many parts of Europe become an essential constit- uent of Jesuit self-definition. In his many travels around Europe after Ignatius died in 1556, Nadal loved to contrast him with Luther and to portray him as the David dealing mortal blows to the Goliath. He thus originated a diptych that later became standard for historians of every persuasion. In the 1550s and 1560s, their most concerted efforts to deal with the impact of Protestantism took place in German-speaking lands, where they were warmly supported by rulers like Emperor Ferdinand I (r. 1558–1564) and Duke Albert V of Bavaria (r. 1550–1579). In 1551–1552, the Jesuits opened a college in Vienna, and in 1555, they settled with Albert for one in Ingolstadt, by which time there were about fifty Jesuits in the empire, led by Canisius. These schools accepted boys who were Lutherans or Hussites and made some concessions to them regarding the religious program—a truly unusual feature for the age. Just a year after the opening of the Roman College, Ignatius, prompted and assisted by Cardinal Giovanni Morone, opened in Rome the German College, whose purpose was to provide training as diocesan priests for young men from Germany and other areas of northern Europe “infected with heresy” such as Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary. In 1555, at the Roman College the Jesuits initiated a course in a new branch of theology—“controversialist theology”—that, as the name implies, taught students how to respond to Protestant teachings and refute them. By 1600, the number of Jesuit schools in the empire had grown to forty. The enrollments were often large, between 700 and 1,000 students, and the physical size of these establishments grew accordingly. Besides teaching in their own institutions, Jesuits soon came to hold positions in theological faculties of universities like Cologne, Trier, and Mainz. By the later decades of the sixteenth century, the German College began finally to bear fruit, and from the alumni came a number of especially well-trained pastors and theologians. The Jesuits were the single most important agent for the consolidation and restoration of Catholicism in Austria, Bavaria, and the Rhineland. By the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, the Jesuits held powerful positions in society at large and in the Wittelsbach and Habsburg courts. Wilhelm Lamormaini, confessor to Emperor Ferdinand II, used his position to promote a hard line against concessions to Protestants and thus exacerbated the situation. Jesuits in similar situations in other parts of Europe were consistently admonished by their superiors, including the

64 chapter three superior general, not to meddle in politics. Most of them did their best to comply, though the line between religion and politics was often thin. Nonetheless, the image of Jesuits manipulating policy behind the scenes provided good ammunition for their enemies. In the 1570s and 1580s, the Jesuit Antonio Possevino led a bold, important, but ultimately unsuccessful venture in high-level conversion in Sweden and Russia. The Jesuits entered the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1564 at a critical moment in the religious struggle there. Within ten years, they were operating five schools and were able to establish a province, in which many of the most effective Jesuits came from Protestant families. Piotr Skarga’s Lives of the Saints from the Old and New Testaments (1579) and Jakób Wujek’s translation of the Bible (1593–1559) were powerful instruments for the Catholic cause that became classics of Polish literature. Many factors account for Poland’s being won for Catholicism, but the Jesuits’ importance can hardly be underestimated. In 1580, Robert Parsons and Edmund Campion entered England. The latter was hanged, drawn, and quartered within a year. Under Elizabeth, ten other Jesuits were executed, including the poet Robert Southwell. The English mission became embroiled in tactical and political disputes with other Catholics. Parsons contributed perhaps most effectively to the Catholic cause by founding at the end of the century the college of St.-Omer in Flanders for the sons of recusants. In 1623, the English province was established with 213 members. Eleven years later, in 1634, three English Jesuits accompanied Leonard Calvert in the founding of the colony of Maryland as a haven in the New World for persecuted Catholics. They were the first Catholic priests to establish a permanent Catholic presence along the eastern seaboard of the English colonies. Waves of anti-Catholic animus battered Maryland periodically until the American Revolution, but the Jesuits stayed on. In 1789, one of them, John Carroll, founder of Georgetown College, became the first Catholic bishop in the new United States. In England, meanwhile, the Jesuits became especially anathema to the Protestant population after being effectively but falsely accused of involvement in the Titus Oates Plot to overthrow King Charles II (r. 1649–1685), and they were also resented even by other Catholic clergy. The Jesuit strategy in dealing with Protestantism took many forms. In it, the schools proved in the long run to be the most effective. The Jesuits, like most of their Catholic counterparts, did not at first grasp the full potential of the printing press in this regard, but once they did so, apologetic and polemical works began to flow from their pens. A few Jesuits from even the first generation had a fairly precise

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and wide-ranging knowledge of Protestant authors, but they read them with polemical intent. As they attempted to refute the Protestants, they perforce gave a new emphasis to certain Catholic teachings that con tributed to the imbalance in confessional statements of faith typical of the era. The founding Jesuits were graduates of the University of Paris and held their alma mater in the highest esteem. They were especially shocked when in 1554 the Faculty of Theology declared their Society “a danger to the faith, a disturber of the peace of the church, destructive of monastic life, and destined to cause havoc rather than edification.” They weathered this potentially mortal blow, but it presaged the resistance their efforts met in many sectors of French society through the rest of the sixteenth century. In 1603, King Henry IV lifted the exile from Paris imposed upon them in 1594, and a new era opened in which the Society was able to carry on its usual activities, including establishing the great network of schools mentioned earlier. The seventeenth century is the grand siècle for France, and the Jesuits shared in some of its splendor. The schools developed into some of the most prestigious in the whole Society and numbered among their graduates Descartes, Molière, and, much later, Voltaire. Almost unique to France was the almost simultaneous creation of networks of schools for girls undertaken by various compagnies of women, many of which were encouraged or at least inspired by the Jesuits. But, in France the Jesuits were particularly often embroiled in controversy with other Catholics, partly because of their close ties with the papacy, which offended Gallic sentiments, partly because of the increasing assertiveness of Jansenism, partly out of jealousy over the Jesuits’ cultural prominence and the favor they seemed to enjoy with Louis XIV and Louis XV. François de la Chaize was confessor to the former for thirty-four years. In 1632, French Jesuits arrived at the colonial city of Quebec, and three years later, they opened a college. A few years later, they welcomed an Ursuline nun, Marie de l’Incarnation, who at their invitation had come to join their mission among the Hurons. Shortly thereafter Marie founded at Quebec the first school for the education of women in North America. The efforts the Jesuits made to convert the Hurons suffered from every conceivable obstacle, including the incommensurability of the two cultures and the consequent mutual incomprehension, even when the two parties thought they understood each other. Nonetheless, the Jesuits, along later with other missionaries, established among the French settlers a solidly Catholic society in the environs of Quebec and other settlements. Legendary about the Jesuits was the depth of their penetration into the

66 chapter three interior of North America through the Great Lakes to beyond Lake Superior. In 1673, Jacques Marquette, companion to Louis Jolliet and others, sailed down the Mississippi in a journey of nearly 1,700 miles. The Jesuits in great detail reported their activities back to their superiors in France to produce the so-called Relations, the most extensive account available of life in the wilderness and of the habits of the Amerindians. The Jesuit institutions in New France seem almost threadbare compared with those in Brazil, Peru, and New Spain. With the encouragement of King John III, six Portuguese Jesuits under the leadership of the talented and energetic nobleman Manuel da Nóbrega landed in Brazil in 1549, where they immediately set to work with the European colonists and then with the natives. Their activities soon fell into two parts. Along the sea- coast, they founded schools of various kinds, some of which soon flourished. As early as 1572, for instance, the college at Bahia introduced philosophy into its curriculum, and in 1575 conferred its first master’s degree. Among the natives of the forests, the objective of the Jesuits was to settle them in fixed communities, aldeias, where they hoped they could be weaned from cannibalism, strong drink, and superstitions. In Spain, King Philip II was ambivalent about the Jesuits, in contrast to the enthusiasm with which John III of Portugal received them, but bit by bit he became more comfortable at least with certain individuals among them. Besides their many schools, perhaps the most important aspect of the Jesuits’ activities in Spain in the sixteenth century was the part they played in the great revival of scholastic philosophy and theology that had begun early in the century under the impetus at Salamanca of the great Dominican Francisco de Vitoria (c.1492–1546). The Jesuits were thus latecomers in an enterprise long under way, but they as a group and through individuals like Suárez and Molina helped the enterprise achieve respect outside Iberia and even in Protestant centers of learning. Philip’s ambivalence toward the Jesuits explains why the Spanish Jesuits did not arrive in the New World until 1566, seventeen years behind their Portuguese brethren. Within six years, they entered three major areas— Florida, Mexico, and Peru. The mission to Florida failed, but the others flourished. Typical of the Jesuit approach to the native peoples here and elsewhere was the work of Alonso Tarzana, who beginning in Peru in 1569 produced a grammar, a lexicon, and a prayer book in five Indian dialects. Diego de Torres Rubio meanwhile wrote the basic works for the study of Peruvian dialects. This attentiveness to what they saw and heard achieved a kind of culmination in Acosta’s Historia natural (1590). Once again, however, the more enduring influence exercised by the Jesuits was through

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their schools, especially the college of San Pablo, founded in Lima in 1568, the first Jesuit school in Spanish America. San Pablo acted as a channel for intellectual exchange between Europe and Peru, as a center for Jesuit administration in the viceroyalty, and as a kind of research laboratory in medicine. In Spanish America, the most famous, distinctive, and controversial institution established by the Jesuits was the “Paraguayan Reductions.” Helped by earlier Franciscan experiments along the same lines, the Jesuits established these settlements especially for the Guaraní because they felt they could not evangelize them in a truly effective way until they somehow got them to a more orderly way of life, and also because they could thus protect them against the predations of Spanish and Portuguese slave- traders. Whatever the merits or demerits of the Reductions, they almost from the beginning earned the Jesuits involved the distrust of many Spanish and Portuguese authorities because they sided with the Indians on contested issues. The breaking point came when the Jesuits resolutely defended the Indians against the incredible hardships visited upon them by the Boundary Treaty of 1750 between Spain and Portugal. Enemies of the Society especially in Portugal conducted a campaign of discredit that in 1759 helped lead to the royal edict expelling the Jesuits from Portugal, the first step in the general suppression of the order that followed two decades later. The Jesuit missions in India, China, and Japan are treated in detail in other chapters of A Companion to the Reformation World (see chapters 21, 22, and 23). For the larger history of the Society, the only point that needs to be underscored here is the controversy within Catholicism over how radically the Jesuits in China had accommodated to Chinese ways, and especially over how tolerant they showed themselves toward certain Confucian rites, like the worship of ancestors and the veneration of Confucius. On the official level, the controversy over “Chinese Rites” was definitively settled by the papal bull Ex illa die (1715) condemning the Jesuit approach and forbidding its continuance. The Jesuits’ enemies, who saw them as subversives within the fold, kept the issue alive as providing another reason why the Society should be disbanded. By the eighteenth century, therefore, the Jesuits had managed to arouse the envy, distrust, and antagonism of powerful forces within Catholic Europe, especially in the courts of the Bourbon monarchs and in the Roman Curia. Given the preeminence of their institutions, it was easy to blame them for many ills and to sow suspicion about them, though in most parts of the world they remained much esteemed and even beloved by the

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population who knew them best. Their own missteps, their tendency particularly with the Jansenists to overplay their hand, and sometimes a naive complacency about their secure status contributed to the catastro- phe that in 1773 befell them. Without warning, many of them were literally cast into the streets, packed into awaiting vessels with little more than the clothes on their backs, and sent into the open sea, destination undetermined. The grand sweep of the story that ended in 1773 can create the false impression that the only problems the Jesuits faced came from outside the order. The older historiography that saw them as soldiers under marching orders contributed to this impression and masked the internal tensions the order had to face. Serious crises occurred early on. The most dangerous took place after the death of Loyola over the approval by the order of the Constitutions he had written and over the election of his successor. Two of the original band, now aided and abetted by Pope Paul IV, who had never fully trusted Ignatius and what he was about, threatened to throw the proceedings into disarray. Underneath the personal resent- ments lay disagreement over the degree of authority Ignatius had assumed as general and over the degree of regulation the Society, now a complex institution, needed to function. Because the pope lost interest in the affair, the proceedings eventually took a smooth course, but the incident early highlighted the inevitable tensions in a social body that on one level spoke to its members in the language of brotherhood, but on another had to operate as an institution with a mission, or many missions, to accomplish. The most dramatic crisis in leadership occurred under Claudio Acquaviva, elected superior general in 1581. During his long term of office, membership in the Society almost tripled to 13,000, and the number of schools rose from 144 to 372. He was an extraordinarily talented Italian aristocrat, who, probably correctly, saw that further standardization of procedures had to be imposed on this rapidly growing and sprawling institution. In 1599, for instance, he achieved success with the publication of the definitive edition of a Ratio Studiorum, “Plan of Studies,” for the schools of the order. This document had been in the making almost from the opening of the first school but reached a culmination with an experimental and fully fledged “plan” in circulation since 1586, revised in 1591. The commission appointed to finalize the project consulted widely with Jesuits in the field and, with Acquaviva insisting on closure, produced a document that, for all the limitations obvious today, excited for many generations admiration

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and emulation even among Protestant educators. In its practical effects within the Society, the Ratio brought with it the advantage of articulating standards and the disadvantage of discouraging further experimentation. It was under the Ratio, in any case, that the Jesuit schools achieved in the seventeenth century their greatest renown. The very achievements of the order’s central authority suggest the issue that burned beneath the surface among a small but powerful percentage of the membership, especially in Spain. Those Jesuits, encouraged by Philip II’s resentment of any foreign interference in ecclesiastical affairs, wanted to change the Constitutions by denying the general the power to appoint superiors and to vest that power in local chapters of the order. By their propaganda in Spain, this group aroused the suspicions of the Inquisition concerning the state of the Society and by a series of “memorials” sent to Rome stirred up uneasi- ness about the order in the minds of two successive popes, Sixtus V and Clement VIII. The “memorialists,” as they came to be known, convinced Pope Clement VIII that the unrest among the Spanish Jesuits was due to the worldliness of superiors and the vast powers invested in the general, and that the remedy was a general congregation of the Society to deal with the issues. The memorialists intended the congregation in effect to impeach the general and to change the Constitutions more to their own liking. In this, they felt they had the support of their king. As it turned out, the Jesuits elected to the congregation backed the general almost unanimously, so that the memorialists utterly failed to achieve their goals but not without causing tense moments within the Society and badly strained relations between the Society and the Holy See. The crisis passed, but it serves as a reminder that there were serious disagreements in the order over serious issues, although this internal history has not received much attention from historians. In recent years historians have, on the contrary, shown a new and intense interest in the Jesuits’ relationship to the arts and to the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge. It is now widely recognized that, because of the schools, the order began to have a cultural as well as religious mission. The Jesuits’ patronage of great artists like Bernini and Rubens has long been recognized, but the pervasiveness of the arts in all their activities around the world is now being assiduously studied. Special about their contribution to the sciences was the worldwide communication of scientific information from periphery to center and then back to periphery.

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Further Reading

Alden, D., The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, its Empire, and Beyond, 1540–1750. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996. Bailey, G.A., Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Bangert, W.V., A History of the Society of Jesus. St. Louis, Mo.: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1972. Bireley, R.L., Religion and Politics in the Age of the Counterreformation: Emperor Ferdinand II, William Lamormaini, S.J., and the Formation of Imperial Policy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. Brodrick, J., Saint Peter Canisius. London: Sheed & Ward, 1935. Burgaleta, C.M., José de Acosta, S.J. (1540–1600): His Life and Thought. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1999. Cohen, T.M., The Fire of Tongues: António Vieira and the Missionary Church in Brazil and Portugal. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998. Cordara, G.C., On the Suppression of the Society of Jesus: A Contemporary Account, trans. John P. Murphy. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1999. Gagliano, J.A. and Ronan, C.E., eds., Jesuit Encounters in the New World: Jesuit Chroniclers, Geographers, Educators, and Missionaries in the Americas, 1549–1767. Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1997. Godman, P., The Saint as Censor: Robert Bellarmine Between Inquisition and Index. Leiden: Brill, 2000. Lacouture, J., Jesuits: A Multibiography, trans. Jeremy Leggatt. Washington, DC: Counter point, 1995. Lucas, T.M., Landmarking: City, Church, and Jesuit Urban Strategy, Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1997. McCoog, T.M., The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England 1541–1588: “Our Way of Proceeding?” Leiden: Brill, 1996. Martin, A.L., The Jesuit Mind: The Mentality of an Elite in Early Modern France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Martin, L., The Intellectual Conquest of Peru: The Jesuit College of San Pablo, 1568–1767. New York: Fordham University Press, 1968. O’Malley, J.W., The First Jesuits. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. O’Malley, J.W. et al., eds., The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Scaglione, A., The Liberal Arts and the Jesuit College System. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1986. The Society of Jesus, Catalogue 1226. London: Bernard Quaritch, 1996. Wittkower, R. and Jaffe, I.B., eds., Baroque Art: The Jesuit Contribution. New York: Fordham University Press, 1972.

CHAPTER FOUR

WAS IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA A CHURCH REFORMER? HOW TO LOOK AT EARLY MODERN CATHOLICISM1

Almost fifty years ago, Hubert Jedin published his highly influential essay entitled Katholische Reformation oder Gegenreformation?2 In it, he reviewed in masterful fashion the tangled historiography concerning the Catho licism of the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries and especially the efforts of historians to invent designations that would adequately indicate its character. When I recently reread the essay, I was again impressed with the subtlety, sensitivity, and breadth of information of surely one of the greatest historians of the Catholic church in this century, then still a relatively young man with thirty-four of his most productive years still ahead of him. To reduce the essay to a few generalities distorts it badly, but to provide a mise en scene for what I have to say in relatively few pages about Saint Ignatius and its implications for Jedin’s thesis I am compelled to do precisely that. Although Jedin recognized some validity in terms like “Catholic Res toration” and even “Catholic Renaissance,” he ultimately rejected them. He rejected “Counter-Reformation” even more emphatically, because it implied that whatever of importance happened in Catholicism during the period postdated the Protestant Reformation, was reactive to it, and consisted to a large extent in efforts to repress it through force and intimida- tion. His solution to the problem is well known and has today become normative among historians of almost every persuasion. It is enshrined in textbooks around the world, sometimes in ways that do not do full justice to Jedin. In any case, Jedin answered the question he posed in the title of the essay by substituting an “and” for the “or” (oder), so that according to him the proper way to designate the phenomenon was “Catholic Reform and

1 Originally published in The Catholic Historical Review 77 (1991): 177–193. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. John W. O’Malley read this paper as his presidential address at a luncheon held in the Sheraton Centre Hotel in New York on December 29, 1990, during the seventy-first annual meeting of the American Catholic Historical Association. 2 (Lucerne, 1946).

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Counter-Reformation.” He thus recognized the valid elements in the latter term, but emphasized by the former an earlier, originally independent, and continuing reality, for which he gave many examples. Subsequent historians have greatly amplified these examples, with the result that there can be no possible doubt about the existence of “Catholic Reform” as Jedin described it. In fact, historians today confirm this aspect of Jedin’s thesis by inclining to see both the Protestant Reformation and its Catholic counterpart as two different expressions of the same reforming impulses that antedate 1517. Sometimes in fact they designate every aspect of the Catholic phenomenon simply as “Catholic Reformation.” Despite its widespread acceptance, however, Jedin’s thesis has not been without its critics, sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit. In the former category, for instance, is Gottfried Maron, who argues that Jedin failed to take account of the repressive impulses in “Counter-Reformation” that after about 1542 gave even “Catholic Reform” its character.3 Among the latter we might place Jean Delumeau, as indicated by the title of his Le Catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire, in which he eschews both “Catholic Reform” and “Counter-Reformation” and extends forward the chronological limits beyond what Jedin seems to suggest as valid.4 In his more recent books, Delumeau again implicitly challenges Jedin’s chronology by dealing with the thirteenth to the eighteenth century as a cohesive unit.5 Wolfgang Reinhard, following the lead of Ernst Walter Zeeden, has taken a different tack for the period after about 1550 by insisting on the similarities between Catholicism and Protestantism in what he calls the “confessional age.”6 In that age, Reinhard sees the churches as expressions of the “modern world” and of forces within it toward what he calls Mod ernisierung. It must be mentioned that Jedin himself intimates the possibility of such an interpretation, for he sees the age of “Catholic Reform and Counter-Reformation” as essentially transitional, already manifesting

3 Gottfried Maron, “Das Schicksal der katholischen Reform im 16. Jahrhundert,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 88 (1977): 218–229. 4 Jean Delumeau, Le Catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1971). The subtitle, A New View of the Counter-Reformation, was added to the English-language edition (London: Burns & Oates, 1977). 5 See, e.g., La peur en Occident, XIVe-XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Fayard, 1978), and Le peche et la peur: La culpabilisation en Occident, XIIIe-XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Fayard, 1983). 6 See, e.g., “Zwang zur Konfessionalisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 10 (1983): 257–277; “Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the Early Modern State,” The Catholic History Review 75 (1989): 383–404; and the discussion by Robert Bireley, “Germany,” in Catholicism in Early Modern History: A Guide to Research, ed., John W. O’Malley (St. Louis: Center for Reformation Research, 1988), especially 11–13.

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some of the characteristics of the “modern church.”7 It must also be mentioned that Reinhard sees the Jesuits as manifesting aspects of Modernity.8 What these examples and the many others that could be adduced indicate is that, whereas nobody questions the aptness of the designation “Reformation” for the phenomena that began with Martin Luther in 1517, despite the great diversity among them, some historians still find themselves uncomfortable with Jedin’s designations, even while they recognize that they captured something important and basic.9 It is at this point that I should like to introduce Saint Ignatius and with him the early Society of Jesus. Jedin mentions the official founding of the Society in 1540 as among the first events of the Counter-Reformation, and at another point describes the spirit of battle with which Ignatius, the former soldier, imbued the Society especially through the Spiritual Exercises.10 He correctly cautions, however, that Ignatius and the Society must also be seen as part of Catholic Reform, reminding us that our categories of interpretation convey a neatness that does not perfectly correspond to the complexity of historical reality.11 His treatment thus indicates that Ignatius and the early Jesuits are best understood as some combination of Catholic Reform and Counter-Reformation. Jedin’s analysis is confirmed by the treatment other historians accord the early Society. It is exemplified, for instance, by the entry under “Jesuits” of the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2nd edition), which specifies the purpose of the order as “to foster reform within the church, especially in the face of the acute problems posed by the Reformation.” The diptych is familiar: on the Protestant panel is Lucas Cranach’s portrait of Luther and on the Catholic is Jacopino del Conte’s portrait of Ignatius. An immense amount has been written about Luther’s evolution that finally brought him in 1520 to publish his “Appeal to the German Nobility,” the document that more than any other signaled he was ready to assume leadership in a program of disciplinary, ritual, and structural changes in the church that, while based ultimately on his doctrinal positions, had ecclesial and ecclesiastical repercussions certainly not foreseen by him or

7 Katholische Reformation, 44–49. 8 “Reformation, Counter-Reformation,” 386–389. 9 See, e.g., Eric Cochrane, “Counter-Reformation or Tridentine Reformation? Italy in the Age of Carlo Borromeo,” in San Carlo Borromeo: Catholic Reform and Ecclesiastical Politics in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century, ed. John M. Headley and John B. Tomaro (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1988), 31–46. 10 Katholische Reformation, 33, 34, 35–36. 11 Ibid., 37.

74 chapter four others in 1517. With the “Appeal,” he dramatically entered center stage to begin his career as among the two or three most influential church reformers of all tunes. Few historical personages have been subjected to more searching and systematic scrutiny than Luther or undergone more revi- sionist interpretations, yet no scholar has ever challenged that Luther was a reformer of the church or that at a certain point he claimed that role for himself. Ignatius Loyola has not benefited—or suffered—from the same quantity and quality of historical analysis. This situation is part and parcel of the stagnant condition in which scholarship on his side of the situation languished until quite recently. For the past two decades, French and Italian historians have been turning their attention to this field with new zeal and new methods, but have applied curiously little of their zeal and methods to the Jesuits and their founder. True, reliable and helpful works on the subject appear with regularity, but they tend to be long on information, short on analysis; they concentrate on leaders like Ignatius, Francis Xavier, Diego Laínez, and Peter Canisius; they tend to interpret these figures and the Society in familiar categories without giving them the more precise definitions that contemporary scholarship makes possible and demands. Among these familiar categories for Ignatius is “reformer of the church.” I do not know precisely when or how historians first began to speak of Ignatius and the Jesuits of his generation as concerned with that issue. One thing is certain: the expression appears with surprising infrequency in the immense amount of documentation that has come down to us from those Jesuits and, as far as I know, never do they apply the term to themselves, certainly not in the way it was understood in the sixteenth century. That fact should itself give us pause. How was the expression understood? The sixteenth century was heir to ideas about the reform of the church first articulated during the Investiture Controversy of the eleventh and twelfth centuries that centered on the disciplinary and moral reform of the episcopacy by means of a thorough- going implementation of the ancient canons, authentic and forged. Once formulated, these ideas took on a powerful life of their own, contributing greatly to the bitter controversy among lay and clerical leaders of the church that marked the high and late Middle Ages. By a curious historical twist in the fifteenth century, they were turned against the papacy, which had originally created them, so that reform of the church sometimes meant first and foremost reform of the papacy and papal curia. From that reform would follow the reform of the rest of the episcopacy, from which would follow reform of the pastors of parishes and parochial ministry.

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You will note that reform of the church centered on offices in the church—papacy, episcopate, and pastorates—and hoped to accomplish its moral and pastoral goals principally through canonical discipline. This understanding of the term is attested to by the legislation of the councils of Constance and Basel, by the numerous other synods of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and most obviously and forcefully by the massive legislation of Trent de reformatione. This definition of reform already suggests why Saint Ignatius and his fellow Jesuits used the term so infrequently. They did, however, occasionally employ it. In Ignatius’s correspondence, it recurs with unaccustomed frequency at the time of the election of Pope Marcellus II in 1555. As Cardinal Marcello Cervini, that pope had showed himself friendly to the Jesuits in many circumstances. Ignatius and his collaborators knew him well, and therefore their hopes for “reform of the church” were high. The issue seems to have come up in informal conversations at the Jesuit casa professa after the election. Ignatius is reported to have said that the pope should reform himself, the papal “household” or curia, and the cardinals of Rome; if he does that, everything else will fall into place.12 The sentiment was hardly original, but it indicates a significant strand of thinking in the Society about reform of the church not confined to Ignatius. When Marcellus after a pontificate of less than a month was succeeded by Paul IV, the Jesuits tried to look on the bright side of that volatile fanatic, which was the zeal for the reform of the church for which he had been known for decades. The new pope initiated a flurry of activities to reform the Roman curia. In private correspondence the next year, Juan Alfonso de Polanco, Ignatius’s talented secretary and alter ego, showed himself realistic: “They are beginning to deal with reform [of the curia], and it seems in earnest, even if the procrastinations of the past prove that we should not easily believe these things until we see them accomplished.”13 Despite the concern that these statements indicate, they are more remarkable as exceptions in Jesuit documentation from the period. The reasons are clear. The Jesuits deliberately forswore for themselves the very offices with which reform was concerned—papacy, episcopacy, and pas- torate. Such reform did not concern them directly or touch the way they wanted to live their lives or do their ministries. Moreover, the “humility” that they saw as distinguishing their vocation made them loathe to program juridical changes for these venerable offices. More basically, such reform was not what they were about.

12 Fontes narr., 1:719. 13 Epp. Ign., 11:245; 10:665.

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What were they about? Although the first Jesuits rarely indeed spoke about reform of the church, they with some regularity used the term reformatio. By it they meant two things. Sometimes it referred to their work in helping convents elect better superiors and otherwise deal with their morale and religious observance. Much more often, it referred to the change of heart effected in individuals through the Spiritual Exercises and the other ministries in which the Jesuits were engaged. It meant conviction. It was thus closer to the biblical and patristic sense than that of church reformers since the eleventh century.14 It was at the heart of the Exercises and therefore of their mission. Another term that comes close to encapsulating that mission is Christianismum or Christianitas, the object of Jesuit catechesis as specified in the papal bull approving the new order, September 27, 1540. Christianitas was a term in wide usage and of immense significance in the Middle Ages, as John Van Engen showed in his brilliant article in the American Historical Review in 1986.15 What it means is the making of a Christian, and that is certainly, what the Jesuits hoped to accomplish by teaching catechism. Christianitas did not consist in memorizing abstract orthodoxies but in introducing the individual to the essential and traditional practices of the Christian religion and to the social responsibilities and opportunities of the believer especially through the spiritual and corporal works of mercy. It was a patristic and medieval idea. Although not quite the same thing as reformatio, Christianitas is related to it as its framework. The more I study the first Jesuits the clearer it becomes to me how the teaching of catechism was emblematic of all their ministries and why they attached such importance to it. To some extent, the Humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were simply updating the term Christianitas when they spoke of pietas as the object of their educational program. While that program insisted on the acquisition of information and skills, its true object was what the Germans call Bildung—the formation of character—in this case the formation of Christian character. True, pietas had important classical resonances that Christianitas did not, but these ideas resembled each other in the importance they attached to the appropriation of right sentiments and the necessity of living according to them. I believe that this correlation was probably the principal

14 See Gerhart B. Ladner, The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959). 15 “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 519–552.

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reason the first Jesuits so easily made the humanistic program of education their own. The Jesuit schools were not, of course, merely schools of catechism—far from it!—but Christianitas in the broad sense was what they wanted them to accomplish in their students. In 1551, Polanco wrote an important letter to Antonio Araoz, the provincial of Spain. He encouraged him to open colleges similar to the ones just beginning in Italy. He also listed fifteen “benefits” to be derived from the enterprise—a list as important for what it does not say as for what it does. Nowhere, for instance, is the problem of the Reformation alluded to. In general, the “benefits” do not admit interpretation related to reform, as we generally understand the term. The last one comes closest to it when it states: “Those who are now only students will grow up to be pastors, civic officials, administrators of justice, and to fill other important posts to everyone’s profit and advantage.”16 In a broad way this benefit can be taken as an aspect of “Catholic Reform.” The Jesuits occasionally referred to it as reformatio, but understood the term as an articulation of what the Humanists hoped to accomplish by their educational program, more or less independent of the agitated religious issues of the day. The Jesuits seem to have understood the “benefit” as one of the ways they could work toward the medieval goal of the “common good,” as the bull of papal approval enjoined upon them, and as an effective way “to help souls” through what they saw as this means that had exponential effects. In my opinion the expression that best captures the self-definition of the first Jesuits was, in fact, “the help of souls.” It is only a slight exaggeration to say that it or its equivalent occurs on almost every page of the volu- minous correspondence they left behind. It occurs with telling frequency in Ignatius’s so-called Autobiography, importuned from him by his colleagues toward the end of his life as a kind of testament or “mirror” in which they would discover the true meaning of their vocation. Curious about the Autobiography from our viewpoint is that, even as late as 1555, when Ignatius finished dictating the text, the year before his death, he scarcely mentions the Reformation, although he had ample opportunity to do so. As he looks back and interprets his life at this late date, moreover, nowhere does he speak about reform or suggest that he or the Society has anything to do with it. The text is remarkable, in fact, for its detachment from all the urgent issues facing the church, more than suggesting that they had little or nothing to do with his vocation. The military imagery so often

16 Epp. Ign., 4:7–9.

78 chapter four attributed to the founder of the Society is almost entirely absent. It occurs, of course, at several key points in the Exercises, but, pace Jedin, is less pervasive, for instance, than in Erasmus’s Handbook of the Christian Soldier. The Autobiography, of course, does not tell all. In the Empire after about 1550 and then in other localities especially in northern Europe, the Society took up the struggle against the Reformation with special earnestness, and it did this with Ignatius’s blessing.17 Even before that date Ignatius and his colleagues showed themselves eager to stop the advance of “Lutheranism” in Italy and elsewhere. Ignatius supported the establishment of the Roman Inquisition in 1542 and founded the German College in Rome a decade later. In 1554, through Peter Canisius he urged King Ferdinand to repressive measures against “the heretics” in his domains.18 Ignatius and his fellow Jesuits came to believe, furthermore, that some of their ideals and practices could be powerful stimuli to needed changes in Catholic ministry. Their adamant refusal to accept alms for the hearing of confessions, for instance, surely helped banish in certain localities the persuasion that a confession was not valid unless one “paid” for it. They knew well the power of example in effecting change. In religious practice their advocacy of more frequent Communion grew out of their conviction that such was the way of the “primitive church.” When all is said and done, therefore, did not the pursuit of personal reformatio, of Christianitas, of pietas, of “the help of souls” by Ignatius and the first Jesuits contribute enormously to the betterment of Catholicism and therefore to its reform, making them church reformers after all? Have we not merely been splitting hairs, engaging in a lis verborum, and making distinctions of no real import if the result was the same in any case? I reply that if we wish to make reform synonymous with renewal, religious revival, “great awakening,” “new flowering,” and a host of similar terms, that may well be true, but I think we generally want to denote something different when we speak of reform. What is in a name, you still urge, for a reform by any other name would smell as sweet? In response, I would simply quote Alfred North Whitehead: “[…] definition—though in form they remain the mere assignment of names—are at once seen to be the most important part of the subject. The act of assigning names is in fact the act of choosing the various

17 See my “Attitudes of the Early Jesuits towards Misbelievers,” The Way, Supplement 68 (1990): 62–73. 18 Epp. Ign., 7:398–404.

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complex ideas, which are to be the special object of study. The whole subject depends on such a choice.”19 My contention is that our habitual way of naming what happened in Catholicism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is often inexact and therefore obscures what we otherwise know to be true. It has derived to a large extent from German—and, more broadly, northern European— historiography. Thus, the Reformation and Catholic efforts to counter it have rendered other aspects of the story secondary. The Society of Jesus, we must realize, was more strongly based in Italy and the Iberian Peninsula, and directed much of its attention to India, Japan, and Brazil. True, we cannot understand what happened in all those territories apart from the controversies aroused by the Reformation, but we need to look at it with other lenses as well. For instance, the intense study of the Renaissance in the past thirty years has taught us that, unlike what earlier scholars assumed, “Renais sance” and “Humanism” are not interchangeable terms, even though neither can be understood without the other. We need to apply some what the same kind of rigorous analysis to what I choose to call Early Modern Catholicism, on the one hand, and “Catholic Reform and Counter- Reformation” on the other. As in the example, I adduced, they cannot be understood without each other, but they are not precisely the same thing. The first is broader, and helps us take account of important elements that only with difficulty can be forced under the umbrella of the latter. The latter does not capture the full reality and, indeed, in significant measure sometimes distorts it. It forces us despite ourselves into a somewhat narrowly conceived ecclesiastical history and inclines us to slight considerations of the more general shifts in culture that affected religion. I believe that Saint Ignatius and the Society of Jesus are most appropriately placed under the former rubric, and only then should they be related, as they must be, to “Catholic Reform and Counter-Reformation,” but, they are not thus unique phenomena. Two others are outstanding. For the future of Catholicism, first of all, few enterprises in the fifteenth and sixteenth century had greater ultimate impact than the missions in newly discovered lands. The motivation of the explorers, missioners, and their patrons was complex, and in some cases not devoid of eschato- logical dreams of an end-time of “one flock under one shepherd” or of

19 The Axioms of Projective Geometry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1906), 2, as quoted in Ladner, The Idea of Reform, 427–428.

80 chapter four relationship to the cataclysmic politico-religious situation in Europe.20 Nonetheless, this enterprise would have gone forward pretty much as we know it, independent of such motivation—even when it existed. It seems, in any case, to have played practically no role with the Jesuits in their ventures overseas. We must recall, moreover, that the missionary activities of the period are not even mentioned in all the decrees of Trent, and, almost as a consequence, not mentioned in any significant way in Jedin’s essay.21 The papacy provides the second example. While “reform of the papacy” was a crucial issue, well treated by Jedin in his volumes on Trent, that reform never eventuated in ways that were generally desired and foreseen, as is more than suggested in Barbara Hallman’s book.22 Paolo Prodi argues, however, that the institution underwent significant changes in the functioning and understanding of papal political authority and that these changes were due not to “Catholic Reform” but to other forces operative in the great shift in culture from the Middle Ages into what we call early modern Europe.23 One might question, moreover, just how closely “reform” was related to the Thomistic revival, to the development of casuistry, to the development of social ethics, and to similar phenomena of the era.24 While there undoubtedly was such a thing as what is called “Counter-Reformation art,” there was also much religious art done under Catholic patronage that does not fit what that category would seem to designate. To what degree and in what precise ways, for example, were Caravaggio and Bernini “Counter-Reformation (or Catholic Reform) artists”? Taking my cue, therefore, from Erwin Panofsky and other historians who have tried to analyze what distinguishes those historical phenomena we properly designate as “renaissances” from other cultural peaks that we

20 See Pauline Moffitt Watts, “Prophecy and Discovery: On the Spiritual Origins of Christopher Columbus’s ‘Enterprise of the Indies,’” in American Historical Review 90 (1985), 73–102, and my “The Discovery of America and Reform Thought at the Papal Court in the Early Cinquecento,” in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, ed. Fredi Chiappelli et al., 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 1, and 185–200. 21 See the passing observations, Katholische Reformation, 72–73. 22 Italian Cardinals, Reform, and the Church as Property, 1492–1563 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 23 The Papal Prince: One Body and Two Souls: The Papal Monarchy in Early Modern Europe, trans. Susan Haskins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 24 See, e.g., Jared Wicks, “Doctrine and Theology,” in Catholicism in Early Modern History, especially 237–241.

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do not,25 I would say that for “reform” some intentionality is required, some self-conscious intention not merely to reanimate existing institutions but to reorganize them according to some clear pattern or to dis- place them with new ones. As I have been suggesting, such intentionality was not absent from Saint Ignatius and his disciples, especially in certain particulars and with the passing of the years, but it was neither their starting point nor their center. Of course, if we wish to apply the term “reformer” to every religious figure of great intensity who had social or cultural impact, it applies to Ignatius (and to Philip Neri, Jeanne Françoise de Chantal, Joseph Calasanctius)—just as it would apply to Saint Benedict and Saint Francis. In a somewhat different way, it would apply to Thomas Aquinas and the whole enterprise of Scholastic theology—rarely has such a revolution been effected in the traditional pattern of thinking and behaving, which resulted in the creation of a new institution, the university. But, we do not generally apply “reformer” or “reform” to these figures or movements because they never declared reform as their intention. Changes like these, even changes supposedly for the better, are not the same thing as reform. Such changes are quite different from Reformation and from “Catholic Reform and Counter-Reformation”—from Luther and Calvin, from Gasparo Contarini, from Marcello Cervini, from Pope Paul IV, from Carlo Borromeo. They are to some extent different from Teresa of Ávila, for she was a late expression of the observantist reform movement of the mendicant orders. Although it is different from the Capuchins, their motivations for a reformed observance were strongly influenced by the “spiritualist” movement in the Franciscan order that had roots back almost to the beginning of the order.26 What I am trying to say can perhaps be clarified by an example that has nothing to do with the church. Perhaps no one in history has had greater impact on the rehabilitation of alcoholics than Bill Wilson and “Doctor Bob,” the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. Nonetheless, we do not generally speak of them as reformers in that field because they never set out on such a crusade or conceived of themselves in such a role. Their object was “to help souls,” in this case drunken souls. Alcoholics Anonymous, of

25 Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York: Harper & Row, 1960). 26 Thaddeus MacVicar, The Franciscan Spirituals and the Capuchin Reform, ed. Charles McCarron (St. Bonaventure: Franciscan Institute, St. Bonaventure University, 1986).

82 chapter four course, became incorporated into the institutional treatment of those suffering from the dread disease, but it did so without losing its independence or its original intention, philosophy, and methods. I suggest that “reformer” came to be applied to Saint Ignatius largely through osmosis. Since so many leading figures of the age defined their principal concern as reform, he must have done the same. But, he did not. Since he lived in an age of aberrant or lax religious practice and of the loose morals of the Renaissance (so the argument goes), he must have been aware of this situation and set out to rectify it. But, historians of our generation question this assessment of the religious situation, and, in any case, Ignatius manifests little awareness in the main that he lived in a particularly irreligious or immoral age. Since he lived in the Tridentine age, he might even be described as a Tridentine reformer. But, he—and the vast majority of his colleagues—seem remarkably detached from the doings of the Council. That assertion needs amplification and analysis. A pervasive but unexamined assumption in much that is written about sixteenth-century Catholicism is that the Council of Trent set the agenda and that all fervent Catholics, including the Jesuits, fell to in implementing it. I have even heard the Jesuits described as essentially agents for the implementation of Trent. While they undoubtedly supported the Council and a few of them were directly involved in it, they had an agenda of their own, generically related to the agenda of the Council but specifically independent of it and different from it. Within the framework of personal reformatio, Christianitas, and so forth, the Jesuits’ agenda consisted in their ministries. If we examine those ministries, those efforts “to help souls,” the discrepancies with Trent emerge. Trent was concerned with providing the traditional rhythm of Word and Sacrament by the pastor to the faithful in their parishes on Sundays and holydays, reinforced by canonical penalties. Jesuits ministered to the faithful by Word and Sacrament, but relied on persuasion and operated outside the parochial structure. Moreover, they had an array of other ministries that Trent altogether ignores or at best barely mentions—elaborate programs of adult education in Scripture and motel issues through their so-called “sacred lectures”; preaching programs in the streets, shipyards, hospitals, and barracks; engaging volunteer corps of adults and children in the teaching of Christianitas; fostering confraternities under lay management for the spiritual and corporal works of mercy; promoting so-called “ministries of interiority” like retreats and spiritual direction; evangelization of the heretic, schismatic, infidel, and

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pagan; the schools.27 They had an altogether special relationship to Renaissance Humanism.28 Perhaps the best indication of how the early Society related to the Council comes from Ignatius himself in the instruction he sent in early 1546 to Laínez, Alfonso Salmerón, and Claude Jay as to how they should deport themselves in Trent.29 Divided into three parts, the document (once again!) is as important for what it does not say as for what it does. The first part counsels that they should be modest in presenting their opinions, listen with respect to the viewpoint of others, always present and consider both sides of any disputed point. The second instructs them to carry on the usual ministries of the Society-preaching, catechism, the Exercises, visiting the sick and poor, “even bringing them a little gift, if possible.” Contrary to what we might expect, Ignatius designates these ministries as the principal reason he allowed the Jesuits to be sent to Trent, and, hence, this must be considered the most important part of the instruction. The third part concerns their life-style and regimen. What is missing, of course, is any word concerning the great issues facing the Council. Ignatius obviously assumes that, whatever those issues are, the Jesuits will have something helpful to say when occasion requires. He looks upon them, however, more as mediators than as proponents of specific agenda. Polanco’s account of the Jesuits’ contribution to this first period of the Council manifests the same detachment from specific issues under debate. But he adds the significant detail that, since in Ignatius’s opinion the Council in 1546 was moving at such a snail’s pace, he considered recalling Laínez and assigning him to Florence.30 In the early summer of 1546, Ignatius had in actual fact written to the three Jesuits asking whether it might not be to God’s greater glory for them to withdraw from the Council and engage in the consueta ministeria of the Society elsewhere. Salmerón replied that they were of the unanimous opinion they should remain at Trent, and Ignatius acquiesced.31 Just before the troubled adjournment of

27 See my “Priesthood, Ministry, and Religious Life: Some Historical and Historio graphical Considerations,” Theological Studies 49 (1988): 223–257, especially 237–248. 28 See my “Renaissance Humanism and the Religious Culture of the First Jesuits,” in Heythrop Journal 31 (1990): 471–487. This article is also part of the present collection (Chapter 11). 29 Epp. Ign., 1:386–389. 30 Chron. 1:177–183. 31 Salmerón 1:16.

84 chapter four the Council in 1547, nonetheless, he assigned day to Ferrara, seemingly without second thought that the Council at that critical moment in its history ought to have priority.32 The attitude Ignatius here manifests was, as best I can tell, by and large typical of the vast majority of Jesuits at the time. What the Council hoped to accomplish was, of course, important to them, but it was not exactly their business. Convinced of their own orthodoxy, they did not need to take special note of the doctrinal decrees. The disciplinary decrees were pertinent to bishops and pastors of parishes, not directly to them. In fact, like members of the mendicant orders, they feared the consequences for themselves of one of the principal aims of the council, viz., an emphasis on the jurisdiction of bishops that might result in restriction of their ministries and curtailment of their many pastoral “privileges.” From the experience many of us have had of Vatican Council II, we easily imagine Jesuits of the sixteenth century pouring over the documents of Trent and rushing around the world with them in their hands. That is not how it was. Few of them probably ever saw the decrees. There were, of course, notable and well-known exceptions. Laínez and Salmerón were present for all three periods of Trent over its eighteen-year history, a distinction enjoyed by few other participants in the Council. For them the Council accounts for important years of their lives as Jesuits, and they knew its documents well and contributed to their formulation. Jerónimo Nadal, the person after Ignatius most responsible for the cohesion in the early Society, obviously studied and assimilated the great decrees on Original Sin and Justification. In 1565, Peter Canisius by special request of Pope Pius IV carried the corpus of Tridentine legislation with him back to the German bishops after the completion in Rome of the Jesuits’ Second General Congregation, and, because of the peculiar situation in which he found himself in the Empire, was subsequently much concerned with that corpus. But, to judge the rest of the Society by these examples is to engage in unabashed history “from above.” Helpful to the process of osmosis by which Ignatius and the Society began to be designated as focused on the reform of the church would be a superficial recognition by roles in relationship to Trent played by a few leading Jesuits. If one examines the evidence in its entirety, however, one sees how the Society was in fact riding a trajectory independent of the direct concerns of the Council. In the great bulk of correspondence from

32 Chron. 1:225.

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Jesuits working in the ministries of the Society, it is amazing how seldom the Council is even mentioned. In the broadest possible perspective, of course, the Jesuits were in perfect tandem with Trent in so far as it represented opposition to the Reformation. It was in this regard that the early Jesuits themselves made statements that would promote the osmosis. Nadal made his first trip to the Empire in 1555 and was appalled at what he found. Although opposition to the Reformation is only implicit in such foundational Jesuit documents as the Exercises and the Constitutions, Nadal after 1555 became a strong voice in the Society for assigning a high priority to the German situation. His reflections after that date on Jesuit origins began to see retrospectively a providential relationship to Protestantism. Once Ignatius died in 1556, Nadal found the temptation to compare and contrast him with Luther too great to resist. The very next year Nadal suggested the comparison in an exhortation to the Jesuits at the Roman College.33 In his Second Dialogue some five years later, he portrayed Ignatius as the new David pitted against Luther, the Goliath.34 In 1567, he reminded the Jesuits at Cologne, with some confusion of dates, that the year Luther was called by the Devil Ignatius heard the call from God.35 Sometime later Pedro Ribadeneyra paralleled the two figures in a passage in his biography of Ignatius, the first ever published and probably the most influential. Luther and his followers were destroying the faith; Ignatius and his were raised up by God to confirm and defend it.36 Other Jesuits took up the theme and its variations, as place and occasion suggested it was appropriate. The facile diptych that has helped create the confusion and further the process of osmosis first derived from the Jesuits themselves. Even as the Jesuits painted it, however, they did not speak of Ignatius as a reformer. Moreover, while the idea was rhetorically effective, it did not for that reason represent the full reality of Jesuit activity everywhere in the world even at that kite date. Was, then, the great saint of the Counter-Reformation a Counter- Reformation saint? Strong in him was his opposition to the Reformation, without doubt, but in his early years his eyes were set on Jerusalem, not Wittenberg. Even in his later years his self-understanding and his understanding of the Society he founded did not primarily define themselves in

33 Fontes narr., 2:5. 34 Nadal, 5:607. 35 Ibid., 780. 36 “Vida del Bienaventurado Padre San Ignacio de Loyola,” in Historias de la Contrar reforma, ed. Eusebio Rey (Madrid: Editorial Católica, 1945), 140–152.

86 chapter four relationship to that problem, perhaps even less in relationship to “Catholic Reform” as his age understood it. In retrospect, some of his disciples eulo- gized him by comparing and contrasting him with Luther, but these were rare flights into metahistory generally in the course of more factual accounts. This hasty review of Ignatius and the first Jesuits can serve as a sort of test-case for Jedin’s categories. Although it has vindicated their utility, it has also shown how they fail to take account of certain features that are important. They were a great step forward in our analysis of the Catholi cism of that troubled period and helped give impetus to almost fifty years of scholarship that have intervened since it was published. This scholarship has, in the meantime, allowed us to see things from a somewhat different perspective. It has, moreover, allowed us to see the limitations under which Jedin worked. What are some of those limitations? I will mention two. First of all, Jedin’s focus was the Council of Trent and, therefore, the abuses in what we have come to call the “institutional church” in the sense of its hierarchy and official leadership. Crucial problems, surely, and often scandalous, but not the whole picture. In that framework, “reform” was the burning issue, and it was easy to latch onto the term and to sweep all changes and religious enthusiasm under its label. Secondly, even though Jedin was properly critical, he was mightily influenced by Burckhardt, Huizinga, and Pastor in his assessment of the general religious situation and in his understanding of the Renaissance and late Middle Ages. His judgment, like theirs, was largely negative. Social historians in the past several decades have shown how lively religious practice was among most of the faithful, carried on in large measure in confraternities and other institutions that fell outside strictly parochial confines. Misguided that practice perhaps may have been in some ways, but not for that reason is it summarily to be dismissed as in every way unhealthy or as crying for reform. Moreover, not all historians would agree that the changes that de facto occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a result of “Catholic Reform” or other causes were in every instance for the better—in melius. Renaissance historians have discovered the religious and moral issues that the Humanists tried to address, and they evaluate them positively. They have dismissed from the scene the category of “pagan Humanists” of whose existence earlier generations were so thoroughly convinced. They do not, of course, fail to see deficiencies in the humanistic enterprise, but

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they have radically revised many of the assumptions and conclusions of Burckhardt, Huizinga, and Pastor. From these limitations flow in some measure the limitations of “Catholic Reform and Counter-Reformation” as an adequate category to capture the complexity of the phenomenon under discussion. Just as Jedin objected to “Counter-Reformation” as an adequate category because it took the Reformation as its point of reference, so might we object that “Catholic Reform” in a more subtle way does the same. Wherever Protes tantism penetrated, there Reformation was the definition of the game. Not every place where Catholicism extended did “Catholic Reform,” “Counter-Reformation,” or the combination of the two always define the reality, even where religious enthusiasm was heightened. Catholicism, with its sluggish continuities as well as its new realities, was bigger than “Catholic Reform and Counter-Reformation.” I propose that “Early Modern Catholicism” is a better designation. It suggests both change and continuity and leaves the chronological question open at both ends. It implicitly includes Catholic Reform, Counter- Reformation, and even Catholic Restoration as indispensable categories of analysis, while surrendering the attempt to draw too firm a line of demarcation among them. It does not silently deliver Renaissance Humanism to an early grave. It is open to “confessionalization” when and where that becomes operative. It seems more welcoming to the results of history “from below” than “Catholic Reform” and “Counter-Reformation,” which indicate more directly concerns of religious officialdom. Most important, it suggests that important influences on religious institutions and “mentalities” were at work in “early modern society” that had little to do with religion or “reform” as such, and it is thus more sensitive to the theses like those about “modernization” proposed by Reinhard and Prodi. It accounts, in brief, for more of the data. Our categories of historical analysis do not easily yield their hold on our imaginations, and, even though “Catholic Reform and Counter- Reformation” is a mouthful, its otherwise obvious merits make it deserv- ing of special respect. For reasons I have adduced, I think it might well be replaced by “Early Modern Catholicism,” bland and all-too-neutral though such an alternative might sound for that contentious age. I conclude, in any case, not so much with a plea to do so as with the more modest and perhaps more realistic request that we exercise caution in applying Jedin’s construct to the sprawling and complex reality he designated by it. That would be a tribute worthy of him.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE MINISTRY TO OUTSIDERS: THE JESUITS1

Historians have so often depicted Jesuits as reformers, intellectuals, controversialists, schoolmasters, and political connivers that they have obscured the fundamental fact that the Society of Jesus was founded “to help souls,” that is, for ministry. If we are to understand the Jesuits, we must look upon them first and foremost as ministers, for that is how they conceived themselves. Moreover, the Jesuits’ pursuit of ministry had a number of special characteristics that make a study of it particularly fruitful for ministry today, partly because the Jesuits challenge on several levels the model of parochial “care of souls” now prevalent in all mainline churches. When the order was founded in 1540 by ten graduates of the University of Paris led by Ignatius of Loyola, it fitted naturally into the pattern of ministry created by the Dominicans, Franciscans, and similar orders of friars in the thirteenth century. With those orders of friars, several corps of ministers had come into being with ecclesiastical (i.e. papal) approval, which were neither in theory nor in fact under the jurisdiction of bishops and which were distinct from the local or diocesan clergy. (Monks like the Benedictines were not, according to canon law, supposed to engage in ministry outside their monasteries.) The ministry of the local clergy in parishes or their equivalent consisted for the most part in the conduct of local worship and the ministry of the sacraments, following rituals and rites according to a set calendar. The ministers might be “local boys,” usually and often inadequately “trained” locally by being “apprenticed” to a local priest. They might get their “living from a local magnate, or the town council, or from the bishop. They ministered to a predetermined local congregation. The friars, in contrast, transcended diocesan boundaries, were moved about from place to place by their own elected superiors, developed elaborate systems of formal education for themselves, eschewed the parish as the locus of their ministry and, most important, saw preaching as their

1 Originally published in A History of Pastoral Care, ed. G.R. Evans (London: Cassell, 2000), 252–261. Reprinted with permission of the publisher (Bloomsbury Publishing Plc).

90 chapter five primary ministry—performed often in the open air and intended often to reach “the sinner” who was an outcast or outsider, not the person already safely in the pews. This led them by the early years of the sixteenth century to becoming the missionaries to the newly discovered lands. The early Jesuits built on these traditions and articulated them even more forcefully. While they of course worked with the faithful in Europe and elsewhere, from the beginning they took “the other” as their special concern. As Jerónimo Nadal, one of their most influential spokesmen, said, “The Society has the care of those souls for whom either there is nobody to care or, if somebody ought to care, for whom the care is negligent. This is the reason for the founding of the Society. This is its dignity in the church.” This orientation had a number of significant manifestations. First, the Jesuits foreswore the parish as a place where they would minister. By virtue of canon law, the parish belonged to the local clergy, but, more fundamentally, by tradition it ministered to people already in its pews on the presumption that they were satisfied with what it offered. Second, by moving outside the standard rhythm of Word and sacrament as practiced in the parish, the Jesuits were almost forced to devise new ministries or new forms of old ministries as they met people on new ground. Third, they began to devise a new vocabulary to describe what they were about. They seem, for instance, to have given us the term “mission” in our contemporary sense of being sent out (like the apostles) to do ministry. We use mission and missionary so easily today that it is difficult to imagine a time when it was not part of the Christian vocabulary, yet until the sixteenth century even the “foreign missions” were spoken of as “propagation of the faith” or “journeying to the infidel.” The word is important, for it suggests an ideal of ministry based not on the pattern of resident bishops and pastors like Ignatius of Antioch, Irenaeus of Lyons, and Augustine of Hippo, but upon the itinerant Paul or, more fundamentally, the itinerant Jesus. The Jesuits were explicit, in fact, that Paul and the Jesus of itinerant preaching were their primary models for ministry. Another of their special words about ministry is “accommodation.” If the Jesuits were to operate outside the traditional rhythms of the parish and deal especially with “the other”—whether pagan, heretic, sinner, or the particularly fervent Catholic, the standard forms of ministry could not apply. What was needed was adaptation to time, places, circumstances, and persons. The idea that ministries needed to be adapted to circumstances was of course not new in the sixteenth century or peculiar to the early Jesuits. Indeed, it pervaded the mediaeval tradition of moral reasoning known as

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casuistry, and it was a fundamental principle in the classical tradition of rhetoric on which much of the ministry of preaching had long been based. Nonetheless, special to the Jesuits’ recourse to “accommodation” was its pervasiveness, the frequency with which it was inculcated and promoted, and its appearance at almost every conceivable juncture of action and reflection. The Jesuit Constitutions, authored by Loyola and filled with escape-clauses, are symptomatic—do such and such, unless under the circumstances something else seems better. The significance of this emphasis becomes clearer when it is compared with the reform of ministry undertaken by the Council of Trent, where not “accommodation” but “discipline” was the operative word—the minister (i.e. the pastor of the parish) was to ensure that the discipline of regular attendance at Mass and proper reception of the sacraments be observed. This ideal was based on abstract norms and derived from them. Jesuits espoused the discipline of regular observance of the sacraments, but their situation led them to some striking “accommodations” within that framework. Among the natives of Brazil, for example, they resorted, much to the dismay of the bishop, to the use of women interpreters in order to hear confessions. As one of them wrote back to Lisbon about one of the women, “I have to admit, she’s a better confessor than I am.” The most striking instance of the application of the principle of accommodation was in the mission to China, where by the early seventeenth century the Jesuits were wearing Mandarin dress and trying to show how certain Confucian rites and beliefs were compatible with Christianity. The Jesuits fit, then, in the tradition of non-diocesan corps of ministers first created in the thirteenth century, and they developed the implications of that tradition further. Through the Spiritual Exercises of Loyola, they were also alive to the importance of another mediaeval tradition, the cultivation of religious experience, and the process of articulation of it, as useful for others. They tried to integrate this tradition into their ideal and practice of ministry. The persuasion that the truly effective minister was a virtuous minister was almost axiomatic among the devout by the sixteenth century, codified for instance in the mediaeval handbooks for preachers, the Artes praedicandi. The good example set by the preacher’s life was his most powerful word. In the Constitutions, Ignatius taught that the minister was effective to the degree he was united to God and thus able to be an instrument in God’s hands. But there was more to it than that. It is crucial to remember that Ignatius did not take up ministry as a consequence of his ordination but

92 chapter five did so decades earlier as the immediate result of his great conversion experiences as a layman, in 1521–1523, and that he engaged in “helping souls” for another fifteen years before he was ordained. The origin of this turning to ministry was his personal spiritual experience, and this fact would greatly influence the ideal of ministry he proposed. What he attained as a result of his inner experiences and struggles was a sense of divine presence as manifested in comfort, joy, and serenity, which he generally described as “consolation.” He set as the ultimate goal for persons being led through the Spiritual Exercises that God be able to communicate directly with them and they with God, from which consolation would sooner or later result. Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, helping individuals reach this situation, with the resultant spiritual relish, became a goal in all the ministries the Jesuits engaged in. While the Jesuits were not the only persons in the sixteenth century to espouse this goal for their ministries, they had the unique advantage as a group of having a handbook, the Exercises, to give them guidance in pursuing it. Their goal, in other words, was not simply to ensure proper performance of religious duties, which is a fair statement of the goals of the Council of Trent, but to help individuals to a deeper religious intimacy. Another mediaeval tradition that the Jesuits adopted and modified and that gave some of their ministries a special modality was that of the confraternities, those voluntary associations of men and women, which were the forum in many cities of Europe where most people learned and practiced their religion. In Venice by 1500, for instance, there were some 120, ranging from a few large and rich scuole (schools) to much more humble institutions, which were ever more consistently turning their concern to what we would today call “social ministries,” such as care for the poor and orphans. The Jesuits, who had themselves begun as a confraternity, immediately enlisted other confraternities as partners in ministry or as agents to continue ministries already begun. In 1543, for instance, Ignatius, in cooperation with some aristocratic matrons, founded in Rome the House of Saint Martha as a kind of halfway house for courtesans and prostitutes who sought a new start in life. The women entered the house for about six months to break with their past. Meanwhile, dowries were collected for them, so that they might marry, which most wanted to do, or enter a convent. Within a few years, the Jesuits turned the whole operation over to a confraternity. The Jesuits used confraternities in some Italian cities to maintain the peace in the face of the frightful and bloody vendettas that raged in many localities. They also often found in them the source or a ready team of catechists.

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The Jesuits wove into their ideal of ministry formal schooling according to the newly revived ideal of the Renaissance. They were the first large organized body of ministers explicitly and professedly to undertake as ministry the staffing and administration of schools. That in itself is a remarkable development in ministry, in effect the creation of a new ministry. The Jesuits’ action is intelligible only when we understand that in the Renaissance the humanistic ideal of schooling saw the educational process as formative of character, as a process geared to produce virtuous and upright Christians, who had been trained for a life of service in church, state or local community. The Renaissance borrowed the ideal from Greek and Roman antiquity, but thinkers like Erasmus had reformulated it to give it a specifically Christian interpretation. When the Jesuits decided in 1548 to reverse their original intention of not undertaking any permanent teaching positions, and indeed to open a humanistic school in the Sicilian city of Messina, they could not have foreseen that within a few years such schools would become their primary ministry in most parts of the world. Neither could they have foreseen the immense and fundamentally determining impact the schools would have on them. I will mention only three aspects of that impact pertinent to the Jesuits’ ministries. First, the Jesuits conducted this ministry in what was essentially a secular space—or, if that is too strong, they were ministers who spent most of their time ministering outside the physical confines of a church or presbytery. The schools, though run under Jesuit auspices, were institutions of civic import that gave the Jesuits an access to civic life that their churches alone could never have provided. Second, the Jesuits taught for the most part secular subjects the literary classics or pagan antiquity and Greek scientific texts. Many Christians and many other Christian ministers did this, of course, but what was special about the Jesuits was that as a body they were trained not only in ecclesiastical subjects but also in secular subjects, and so trained with a view not merely to appropriating secular subjects but to a Christian ministry or teaching them. They were confident that when students properly studied these subjects, they would become more useful members of society and the church. Third, the schools set the Jesuits in a systemic relationship to the arts— especially music, dance, and theatre that they surely would not have had had they not conducted schools. With the schools came the large collegiate church, needed for the student body but opened to their par ents and to others, which meant a systemic relationship to painting and

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architecture. This development further promoted and institutionally grounded in the Jesuits a remarkable use of the arts, especially music, as a means to success in many of their other ministries—a use of the arts that is worthy of note today when it is in most churches so restricted and unimaginative. Early on, for instance, the Jesuits adopted on a world-wide basis the practice learned in certain parts of Spain of setting the catechism to local tunes, so that children would enjoy learning it and enjoy teaching it to other children. Convinced of the power of pictures to move the soul, they established a painting academy in Japan in the sixteenth century. I have described certain modalities of Jesuit ministry that made them somewhat different from the ministry in parishes that we tend to take as the norm. But, the difference in modalities helped generate something that went further. It helped generate new ministries. One must be careful here, for in the Christian tradition some precedent can be found for almost everything that claims to be new. Nonetheless, I think that, with due qualification, “new” is a word that can safely be used for some of the Jesuits’ ministries in the sixteenth century. I have already mentioned the most obvious and important one: formal schooling. This had of course Protestant counterparts, derived from the same origins, though I would question whether those counterparts were as consistently and professedly viewed as ministry on a corporate basis as they were with the Jesuits. Quite another, spectacular, phenomenon would be the impact the Jesuits’ example had on women’s orders in France in the seventeenth century, where humanistic schools for girls sprang up in numbers that dwarfed what the Jesuits and now others were doing for boys. By the end of the century, the Ursulines alone conducted over 300 such schools, and they were only one order among dozens. For the Jesuits the schools became a great base out of which to operate a number of other ministries. The school vacations provided an occasion to allow the development of a new pastoral strategy that came to be known as “missions,” for it consisted in sending out—“missioning”—a team of Jesuits to a given area for a week or many weeks of intense preaching and other ministry. The Jesuits seem to have been the first to develop this strategy, a forerunner of the “revival” of later centuries. Eventually these missions consisted in a carefully designed program of preaching, catechesis, lecturing on the Bible, processions and other elaborate public rituals, hearing of confessions, and the establishment of confraternities to continue the work the missioners had begun. What made these missions into a new ministry was the marshaling of traditional ministries into an organized strategy of team ministry with clearly defined

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objectives. Originally directed to hamlets in the countryside, which was presumed to be pastorally the most needy area, by the beginning of the seventeenth century the missions began to target urban parishes or other districts within the cities. Another ministry was “lecturing.” The Jesuits, like many of their contemporaries, made a distinction between preaching and lecturing that has sometimes been lost sight of in subsequent generations. Preaching was roughly what we mean today by preaching, but “lecturing” corresponded to what we would call adult education. The Jesuits considered this a distinct ministry, for it had its own goals, its own times and places. It consisted in a series of lectures on a given subject, usually a book of the Bible, that extended over the course of many weeks or months. Lectures would be given, for example, on the Letter to the Romans, verse by verse or section by section, several mornings or afternoons per week. Their primary purpose was instruction. The instruction was not, however, academic as in a university classroom but geared somehow to the practice of the Chris tian life. While these lectures were usually delivered in church, they were not delivered from the pulpit. The lecturer usually sat in a chair somewhere in the body of the church and the listeners sat on benches near him, often with pen and paper in hand. Lecturers wore no liturgical vestments, whereas preachers always wore surplice and, when it was the local custom, a stole. Probably because when Jesuits preached in the pulpit they did so on passages from the four Gospels according to the liturgical texts of the Mass, they tended to choose other parts of the Bible for their lectures, showing a special preference for the Pauline epistles. The Jesuits gave such lectures an extraordinary prominence in their repertory of ministries, so that wherever they “preached” they lectured almost more often. The last “new” ministry developed by the Jesuits is what came to be known as the “retreat.” Although the practice of withdrawing from one’s ordinary duties to spend time in reflection and contemplation is older than Christianity itself, there existed no widely recognized codification of it until the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. The book not merely contained some of his more important ideas on the spiritual life but also provided a clear yet adaptable framework in which to consider one’s situation and draw nearer to God. For their ministry the Jesuits possessed no more distinctive instrument than the Exercises. No other group had a book like it. One of the world’s most famous books, it is also one of the most misunderstood, partly because its most famous part, the “Rules for Thinking with the Church,”

96 chapter five appear at the end of it, as if the purpose and culmination of the Exercises was to inculcate “ecclesiastically correct” thinking. Those Rules are, in fact, an appendix, added years after the book was substantially finished, and they were little commented on by Jesuits in the sixteenth century. The real goal of the book was to help individuals get in touch with God’s action in their lives, so that they turn their lives over to God’s love and care, which is operative in all life’s circumstances. The Jesuit who helps individuals during the retreat through conversation and instruction is instructed to do everything “to permit the Creator to deal directly with the creature and the creature directly with his Creator and Lord” (Annotation 15). The Exercises can be looked upon as a distillation of spiritual wisdom to help towards conversion to a more devout life. The basic principle of the book was that it be adapted—“accommo dated”—to different times, circumstances, and purposes, as stated in the opening pages. This flexibility applied to its specific axioms and to the program as a whole. In its fullness, the Exercises were meant to be done apart from all one’s normal duties for about a month, in conversation with a spiritual guide. This program began with considerations of one’s status as a forgiven sinner, then progressed through meditations on the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, and culminated in a final contemplation on the love of God. Thus in a generic way the Exercises done in their fullness led individuals through the three traditional stages of the spiritual life—purgative, illuminative, unitive. But, the Exercises were from the beginning put into practice in a number of different ways. Frequently only the early parts on sin, forgiveness, and conversion were used. Very early, they began to be given to more than one person at a time, in groups of ten or fifteen, where the opportunities for private conversation with the Jesuit guide would obviously be reduce. Sometimes people continued in their regular occupations, but came to the Jesuits for guidance through the parts of the book over a period of many months. The program of the Exercises was modified and adapted in a number of other ways. To provide a situation where more seclusion was possible, the Jesuits in 1553 constructed at Alcalá in Spain their first “retreat house” for that purpose. They later built similar houses elsewhere. One of the unintended results of this new ministry of retreats was a new prominence for the ancient ministry of spiritual counseling. The Exercises presupposed that individuals needed somebody with whom to converse about what was going on in their souls as they engaged in such an intense spiritual experience. This person soon came to be known as “the director” and his function even outside the retreat as “spiritual direction.”

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To a large extent because of the important role attributed to the “director” in the Exercises, the role of “spiritual director” (or counselor) developed in Catholic Europe with a new sophistication and became recognized as a distinctive ministry in its own right, consisting in a formalized and continuing relationship between the two persons involved. Of course, the Jesuits were in this regard symptomatic of a larger movement, promoted for instance by the writings of Teresa of Ávila. Nonetheless, for the codification and intellectual refinement of this ministry, as it reached a new plateau in the seventeenth century, the Jesuits’ role was crucial. In 1599, for instance, the head of the order, Claudio Acquaviva, published an instruction on the formation of spiritual directors within the Society, and the next year he published a small treatise on the matter that, while fundamentally based on the teaching from the ancient masters, combined it with some corporate wisdom derived from Jesuits acting as directors in the Exercises. The sixteenth-century Jesuits were both special and symptomatic of their time. They had much success, and they had some spectacular fail- ures. Above all, they were pragmatic, ready to try just about anything if it promised “to help souls.” Perhaps we can still learn something from their efforts.

Bibliography

Bailey, Gauvin Alexander. Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1999. Ignatius of Loyola. Ignatius of Loyola: The Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works, ed. George E. Ganss, New York: Paulist Press, 1991. Lucas, Thomas M. Landmarking: City, Church & Jesuit Urban Strategy. Chicago: Loyola Press, 1997. O’Malley, John W., The First Jesuits, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. ——, The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

CHAPTER SIX

IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA (c.1491–1556)1

Ignatius of Loyola a theologian? On what grounds? The only book that he wrote entirely on his own was the Spiritual Exercises, hardly a work of “theology.” His correspondence, though the largest of any single person from the sixteenth century, presents problems with trying to discover in it a theology. The correspondence mainly consists of practical directives and suggestions to members of the newly founded Society of Jesus as to how they might deport themselves in the diverse and sometimes exotic situations in which they found themselves, whether in Paris, Vienna, Lisbon, Brazil, or India, whether as itinerant preachers to peasants in obscure hamlets or as founders of schools in large urban centers. Moreover, most of the extant correspondence of almost 7,000 letters dates after 1547, when Juan Alfonso de Polanco became Ignatius’s secretary.2 The collaboration between Ignatius and Polanco was so close that it is often difficult to know just what to attribute to Ignatius, what to Polanco. Almost the same can be said of the Jesuit Constitutions, which Ignatius agreed to draft when elected superior general of the Society a few months after its formal approval as a religious order by Pope Paul III in September 1540. Although the traditional interpretation that Ignatius himself was the principal inspiration behind the Constitutions still stands, much of the wording, arrangement, and many of the details must be attributed to Polanco. Everything was submitted to Ignatius for approval and revision, but, as in any case of such close collaboration, the problem of authorship cannot be solved by facilely assigning contents to Ignatius and form to Polanco. In any case, the Constitutions are hardly a work of theology in the conventional sense of that term.

1 Originally published in The Reformation Theologians, ed., Carter Lindberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 298–310. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. The numbers given in square brackets refer to the standard paragraph/section numbers used in modern editions of the Jesuit Constitutions, the Spiritual Exercises, and Ignatius’s narrative of his early life, which I will call Autobiography. Full details are given in the Bibliography. 2 On Polanco see Clara Englander, Ignatius von Loyola und Johannes von Polanco; der Ordensstifter und sein Sekretär (Regensburg: F. Pustet, 1956) and now José García de Castro Valdés, Polanco: el humanismo de los Jesuitas (1517–1576) (Santander: Sal Terrae, 2012).

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Unlike so many Protestant leaders of the era, Ignatius did not emerge to prominence from an academic career. He was a Spanish noble, an hidalgo, who had the chivalric and academically sparse education of his class.3 As a youth he learned how to dance and duel but not how to parse a Latin verb. He began to study Latin only when he was about thirty-three, in 1524, and was forced to sit in grammar classes with boys young enough to be his sons. By that time, three years after the beginning of his religious conversion, he had become convinced that he needed more formal education, even a university degree, in order, as he said, “better to help souls.” Thus, like so many second-career students in divinity schools today, he had his heart set not on academic but on pastoral goals. In that regard, though not in some others, the education that he received at the universities of Alcalá de Henares and Paris would not change him. He matriculated at the University of Paris in 1527 and received the Bachelor of Arts degree in 1533, the Master of Arts degree in 1535. During his last two years at Paris, 1533–1535, he audited courses in theology at the studia of the Dominicans and Franciscans. That was the extent of his formal training in theology. He took no degree in it. By 1534, he had gathered around himself six other students at the university, each of whom he accompanied through a month-long experience of the Spiritual Exercises. In that year, they as a group determined they would travel to the Holy Land “to help souls,” thus presaging the missionary character of the order they would later found. The next year, Ignatius left Paris, with the intention of meeting the others within a few months in Venice, whence they would embark on their missionary journey. His departure from Paris marked the end of his academic training. He then and later showed little intrinsic interest in the theological issues that buffeted his age. He never had any sympathy for “Lutheranism,” but there is no evidence that his dislike derived from reading the Reformers, except possibly in the most cursory manner. The famous, or infamous, “Rules for Thinking with the Church,” a kind of appendix to the Spiritual Exercises composed for the most part while he was still at Paris, the last piece added to the book, reflect that antipathy, but they for the most part are guidelines to pastoral

3 The most detailed biography is by Ricardo García-Villoslada, San Ignacio de Loyola: Nueva biografía (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1986). See also André Ravier, Ignatius of Loyola and the Founding of the Society of Jesus, trans. Maura Daly, Joan Daly, and Carson Daly (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987). Valuable for its factual precision is Cándido de Dalmases, Ignatius of Loyola: Founder of the Jesuits, trans. Jerome Aixalá (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1985). We await a truly critical biography.

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practice, hardly theses for theological debate.4 Later commentators, Catholic and Protestant alike, have extolled or excoriated them as a specimen of hyper-orthodoxy when in fact they would have been accepted by most sixteenth-century Catholics as mainline.5 To put them in perspective it helps to recall that although the third rule said “long prayers whether in church or outside” should be praised, Ignatius adamantly opposed such prayers within the Society of Jesus, despite much pressure to the contrary.6 As superior general of the order, he encouraged other Jesuits like Diego Laínez and Peter Canisius to refute Lutheran errors, but he never attempted the same himself, surely realizing on some level that he was ill equipped to do so. Perhaps more surprising, he manifested little interest in the great doctrinal debates that took place at the Council of Trent in 1545–1547 and 1551–1552. When three members of the nascent Society Jesus were early on appointed official theologians of the Council, Ignatius, though he was in no way responsible for their appointments, was immensely pleased. It was a significant recognition of the Society Jesus just five years after its founding. In early 1546, he wrote to these official theologians with advice as to how they should deport themselves. The letter is as important for what it does not say as for what it does say. In it, Ignatius exhorted the Jesuits to present their opinions modestly, to carry on their usual preaching, catechizing, and visiting of the sick and poor, and to reflect together each evening as to how their work at Trent was proceeding.7 Entirely missing from the letter was any word concerning the issues facing the Council. He looked upon the Jesuits more as mediators among the various factions present there than as proponents of any specific agenda—on either doctrine or reform of the church. Even more surprising, he wrote them a few months later asking whether it might not be to God’s greater glory for them to withdraw from the Council and take up some pastoral duties elsewhere. The next year, before the Council adjourned, he actually assigned one of them, Claude Jay, to another post.

4 Spiritual Exercises [352–370]. 5 For a judicious counter-statement to this tradition, see Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, “Angels Black and White: Loyola’s Spiritual Discernment in Historical Perspective,” Theological Studies 44 (1983): 241–257. 6 Spiritual Exercises [355]. 7 Epp. Ign. 1:386–389; English translation in Letters of St. Ignatius of Loyola, trans. William J. Young (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1959), 93–96.

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Ignatius’s most heartfelt interests, we must conclude, lay elsewhere. Although in the last few years of his life he began to raise the religious situation in Germany to a high priority in the Society, “Lutheranism” and many of the issues it entailed were even then only one among many of his concerns. In this, he was not unique among Catholics but, I think, broadly symptomatic. Catholicism early on produced its controversialists like Eck and Emser and, much later, Bellarmine and others. But, the matter of the controversies was ground chosen and defined by the enemy. It did not seize the imagination and heart of many talented Catholics, whose sights were directed elsewhere. Moreover, in Spain, Portugal, and Italy Protestantism, while perceived as a mortal danger by many churchmen, was in fact a geographically distant reality that directly touched relatively few people. Many of the most talented and devout Catholics directed their gifts to other enterprises and, even on the theological level, often dealt with issues of little concern to either Protestant theologians or Catholic controversialists. I am thinking, for instance, of missionaries like Bartolomé de las Casas and his defense of Amerindian rights, and of Alessandro Valignano and his wrestling with the relationship between (Europeanized) Christianity and cultures as ancient and refined as those of Japan and China. Even Catholic academic theologians like Francisco de Vitoria, Juan de Mariana, Luis de Molina, Francisco de Toledo, and Leonard Lessius moved on ground defined for the most part by Catholic concerns and, hence, they fell off the screen of modern historiography, defined as it has been by the Reformation. Today even specialists in sixteenth-century theology do not recognize their names. Ignatius is in that regard broadly indicative of the great bias that has distorted the approach practically all historians have taken to Catholicism in the sixteenth century.8 That approach wittingly or unwittingly defined Catholicism in relationship to the Reformation and judged it according to criteria that the long, lively, and methodologically sophisticated historiography of the Reformation had established. Instead of asking what Catholicism was like, that approach perforce asked how Catholicism resisted, resembled, caused, reacted to, was affected by and otherwise related to Luther and Calvin. Only recently, have there been signs of change, at least in North American historical writing. The point I am

8 See John W. O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

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trying to make is that to understand Ignatius, as well as many other Catholics of the early modern era, great effort is required. Many received assumptions and prejudices must be shed if we wish to enter the sixteenth- century Catholic situation on its own terms. Luther and Loyola—they have been paired for centuries but, we cannot enter the one through the door of the other. At Luther’s center, for instance, reigned the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Luther was a theology professor, an academician, and we should not be surprised that a doctrine, that is, an idea, was what brought him the freedom and the comfort he had so long sought. He drew the idea from what is in effect a theological treatise, the Epistle to the Romans. Rather than of a doctrine, Ignatius spoke of ways—ways of praying, ways of discerning God’s will, ways of proceeding in ministry. He spoke of life in the Society of Jesus as “a way to God.” The base texts for him were the synoptic Gospels, narratives where the ministry of Jesus was described— precisely the texts that figured among the least in Luther’s “canon.” To a large extent, Ignatius’s “ways” were a refashioning of the medieval imitatio Christi, but now qualified through the radical interiority called for by the Spiritual Exercises. By the time he wrote the Constitutions those “ways” were further refashioned by certain theological and doctrinal assumptions with which he was able to buttress his delineation of the Jesuit “way to God.” These assumptions remain for the most part implicit, however, never appearing at center stage. Is there, then, any justification for including Ignatius of Loyola in a collection of studies about “theologians”? Everything hinges, of course, on how “theologian” is defined.9 Ignatius is perhaps best understood as a religious activist, but an activist who reflected on his own experiences and tried to communicate them so that they might be of help to others. It is in that sense that Jerónimo Nadal, the contemporary who perhaps best understood him, called him “a theologian.” The passage is worth quoting:

Here, then, you see the necessity for the course of studies in the Society: to be able to preach and become skilled in those ministries that the church deems ordered for the help of our neighbor. […] Here is our father, the theologian. His desires were always to seek how he might better employ himself in the service of God.10

9 See Avery Dulles, “Saint Ignatius and the Jesuit Theological Tradition,” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 14/2 (1982): 1–3. 10 Jerónimo Nadal, Monumenta Nadal, Commentarii de Instituto Societatis Iesu (Rome: IHSI, 1962), 282–285.

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In effect, Nadal was describing a “theology” whose scope was the practice of ministry. We might therefore call that theology pastoral, that is, providing a theological horizon or a religious vision, more or less coherent, that gave shape and a certain distinctiveness to practices of ministry. Ignatius was interested, therefore, in what used to be called practical divinity. Although “Ignatius the theologian” can perhaps be studied from other perspectives, he will here be studied from this one.11 In the Spiritual Exercises Ignatius created a road map based on his own interior journey from conventional religious practice to a wholehearted commitment to follow the “way” of Christ, a way culminated in a total surrender to God’s love and will. It is important to remember, however, that he kept modifying the text over a twenty-year period, up to 1540, in the light of his experience of guiding others through the four “weeks.” The text reflects, therefore, not only Ignatius’s experience in exploring his own interiority but also his experience in helping others do the same. It is also important to recognize that the Exercises themselves became an instrument of ministry for the Jesuits and in effect created a new ministry, the spiritual “retreat.” Ignatius made no significant changes in the Exercises after about 1540, which was just the time he and the others were founding the new Society of Jesus. For him more so than for the others, the founding marked the end of his days as a “pilgrim,” which is how he liked to describe himself up to that point, and it moved him to a position of great responsibility for the ministries of the new order. Through his insistence on frequent correspondence from the members of the order about their ministries, he made himself into an extraordinary recipient of information from widely divergent cultural and religious situations. He seems to have listened well. In his office as superior general, he showed many gifts of leadership, but one was outstanding: he recognized and utilized in others talents that complemented his own. When he chose Polanco as his secretary in 1547, he could hardly have made a better choice. Among Polanco’s outstanding qualifications was a fine education in both the studia humanitatis and Thomistic theology. At about the same time he began to confide more and more responsibility for directing operations in the field to Nadal. By the beginning of the next decade, this young Majorcan had become Ignatius’s itinerant trou- bleshooter to Jesuit communities throughout Europe and his interpreter

11 For a quite different approach, see Juan Luis Segundo, The Christ of the Ignatian Exercises, ed. and trans. John Drury (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1987).

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to them of his pastoral vision.12 He said of Nadal what he never said of any of his companions from Paris: “he altogether knows my mind.”13 Nadal, like Polanco, also had an excellent education, which included a licentiate in theology from Paris and a doctorate from Avignon. Among the many decisions that were taken by Ignatius in the early years of the order, none was more dramatic or had a more profound impact than the decision that gradually evolved between about 1547 and 1550 to take the staffing and management of schools as the Jesuit primary ministry. Under it lay a reconciliation with “the world” and with human culture that had long been evolving in him but that for its articulation required the vocabulary and theological justification that Polanco and Nadal could provide. I cannot imagine that Ignatius would have seized so enthusiastically upon the religious potential of the humanistic ideals of education had he not been schooled in them by Polanco and Nadal. These two, I believe, would have had to point out to him how the pietas of the humanistic educational scheme correlated with the inculcation of Christianitas that was the aim of Jesuit ministry.14 It was through interaction with these two men that Ignatius completed his theological education, done in the heat of such practical decisions. Indeed, while it is easy on many levels to differentiate these three voices from each other, on profounder levels they speak almost as one. Polanco and Nadal in fact considered themselves to be nothing more than interpreters of Ignatius, sometimes clarifying, sometimes amplifying on his thoughts and sentiments. I will here feel free to use them occasionally in that way. What the above implies, of course, is the obvious truth: Ignatius continued to change, as he grew older. That truth needs to be stated, however, because it is contrary to the usual image of him, which tends to be static and which, correlatively, takes the Spiritual Exercises as the almost unique source against which to test how he is to be understood. But, the static image flies not only in the face of common sense but even runs contrary to

12 On Nadal, see especially William V. Bangert, Jerome Nadal (1507–1580): Tracking the First Generation of Jesuits, ed. Thomas M. McCoog (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1992) and Miguel Nicolau, Jerónimo Nadal, S.I. (1507–1580): Sus obras v doctrinas espirituales (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1949). 13 Nadal 1:144. 14 On pietas, see John W. O’Malley, “Introduction” in Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 66: ix–xxxix. On Christianitas, see John Van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 519–52.

106 chapter six what Ignatius himself implies in his autobiographical account. Here he indicates how God, like a teacher or parent dealing with a little child, helped him, step by step, in the early years of his conversion to ever more profound understanding of what was happening and to behavior consonant with such enlightenment.”15 There is no reason to believe that the process ended when he became general of the Society. Indeed, few figures from the sixteenth century manifest even on the most superficial level so many shifts in what we might blandly term life- style. At age thirteen, he left Loyola for Arévalo to be trained as a courtier in the household of Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar, chief treasurer of King Ferdinand. When he was about twenty-six, in 1517, he moved to another court to become gentilhombre to the duke of Nájera, a position that sometimes required taking up arms and participating in military expeditions. (Only in this occasional way can the “soldier saint” be called a soldier!) During one of these expeditions four years later, he was wounded in battle at Pamplona. For the next two years, until 1523, he became almost a hermit at Loyola and Manresa as his conversion experiences began and continued. Then for a year, he was quite literally a “pilgrim,” begging his way from Barcelona until he reached his goal, Jerusalem. Upon his return he became a student for the next nine years, at Barcelona, Alcalá, Salamanca, and, finally, Paris. From 1535 until 1540 he along with his companions from Paris, who during this period were ordained priests, labored essentially as itinerant preachers or evangelists in northern and central Italy while they awaited passage to the Holy Land. In 1541, he became the chief administrator of the new order, a post at which he remained for the next fifteen years until his death in 1556, never leaving Rome or its near environs ever again. As modern jargon would have it: he invented himself many times. How unlikely, therefore, that he would not change considerably through the radically diverse situations and cultures in which he found himself: the feudal culture of his early years, the scholastic culture of his time at Paris, the more humanistic culture of Renaissance Italy, the increasingly Counter-Reformation culture of Rome during his last years. Before we look at how Ignatius changed, however, we need to be aware of two fundamental continuities that underlie his development. The first, as I already suggested, was his desire from the very beginning of his conversion to be of “help to souls.” Even as he lay on his sickbed at Loyola

15 Autobiography [27].

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in 1521 when his conversion experiences were beginning, he sought out members of the household to speak with them “about the things of God […] and thus brought much profit to their souls,” as he later described it.16 Even during his most eremitical period at Manresa the next year, he similarly “spent time in helping other souls.”17 With the passing of the years, “the help of souls” became his leitmotif. The expression or its equivalent appears on practically every page of the twelve huge volumes of his correspondence. This constitutes, without doubt, his theological horizon. The second was his profound conviction that God was active within his soul, guiding, teaching, and comforting him, and that acting in accord with this reality was the key to happiness in this life and the next. The fundamental principle upon which the Spiritual Exercises rest is buried away in the Fifteenth Annotation at the beginning of the book: what it is all about is that “the Creator deal directly with the creature, and the creature directly with his Creator and Lord.”18 How does this divine impulse from Creator to creature manifest itself, how is it detected and assessed? In the Exercises, Ignatius gives “rules” to help in this delicate process of discernment.19 The “rules” derived in the first instance from his own experiences that began in the castle of Loyola when he noted within himself certain “motions” of consolation and desolation, depending on the alternative kinds of future he imagined for himself. The point I want to make is that for him—in his own life, in the whole process of the Exercises meant for others, and then later in his life as general of the Society—the ideal for ministers was to act out of their interiority, as tested against what the circumstances seemed to require, not to act out of some rigid adherence to external prescriptions for “what is best.” As general of the Society, he wrote hundreds upon hundreds of letters offering advice as to how Jesuits might deal with the sometimes perplex- ing pastoral situations in which they found themselves, but he consistently qualified the advice with, equivalently, “unless some other course seems better to you.” Even more impressive, the Constitutions, which lay down the general principles according to which the Society was to be governed, are riddled with similar escape-clauses. Nadal caught the profound implications of this stance when he said the ministries of the Jesuits were to be done spiritu, corde, practice, that is, out of a sense of the Spirit’s

16 Ibid. [11]. 17 Ibid. [26]. 18 Spiritual Exercises [15]. 19 Ibid. [313–336].

108 chapter six inner presence and direction (spiritu), from the heart and to the hearts of others (corde), with a view to what truly is helpful in a given situation (practice).20 If these are two big continuities, what are the discontinuities, the changes? To some extent, they consist in making more explicit, more pervasively operative, and more determinative realities present in his life from the early years of his conversion. He was concerned with “helping souls” on his sickbed at Loyola, as I indicated, but that was an aspect of the experience that he singled out for mention many years after the event, when he had already been superior general of the Society for over a decade. In the Spiritual Exercises, which after the “First Week” consists in three other “weeks” that are for the most part contemplations on the life of Christ, he does not often call attention explicitly to Jesus’ ministry. It is true that in the meditation on the banner of Christ, he depicts Christ as choosing disciples to send them throughout the world to spread his sacred message and then recommending to them the “ways” (poverty, humility, etc.) in which this enterprise is to be carried out.21 It can thus be said that the Exercises have a bias toward active ministry. But, the bias is muted. In Ignatius’s correspondence, however, most of which dates after 1547, and in the Constitutions, substantially composed between 1547 and 1550, ministry is the overriding issue. It is the text and the subtext. The Consti tutions are all about “the help of souls.” This emphasis is of course due in part to the audience to whom these documents are addressed, exclusively Jesuit for the Constitutions and largely Jesuit for the correspondence. Nonetheless, the accent has become newly insistent. The Jesuits liked to emphasize how they differed from the mendicant orders that preceded them. The fact is that they resembled them in a number of ways, to a large extent even in the kinds of ministries in which they engaged, especially in their earliest years before they undertook the schools. Among the ways they differed from them, however, was in the more explicit, forthright, and self-aware statements in their official and unofficial documents that ministry was what they were all about. Yes, they had become members of the Society in the hope of saving their own souls by following their call, but their salvation was worked out precisely through the practice of ministry, through “the help of souls.”

20 Nadal, Commentarii, 227–231. See Nicolau, Nadal, 305–313. 21 Spiritual Exercises [143–148].

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Ignatius began with them to forge a new vocabulary for the special approach to ministry they were taking. The most striking instance of this vocabulary was “mission.” It comes as a surprise to learn that this term, without which we can today hardly speak about Christianity, was not current in our contemporary sense until the mid-sixteenth century.22 Instead of missions and missionaries, the traditional expressions were “propagation of the faith” and “journeying to the infidel.” Despite the Vulgate’s employment of various forms of mittere in connection with the early disciples of Jesus, medieval authors used that verb and its derivatives almost exclusively for the “missions” internal to the Trinity. The Jesuits were among the first to inaugurate the new usage and were the group initially responsible for its spread. In the papal bull that founded the order, substantially written by the Jesuits themselves, both the older “propagation of the faith” and then “mission” are used to designate travel for the sake of ministry. By the time of the Constitutions, “mission” has displaced the older terms, and it dominates the Seventh Part, the section devoted to “the distribution of members in the vineyard of the Lord,” which some commentators consider the heart of the document.23 Talk of the vita apostolica had circulated in Western Europe since at least the twelfth century, indicating different things to different people depending on just how the life of the early disciples was imagined. Ignatius and companions related it directly to ministry. They were about an “apostolic” ministry, by which they meant a ministry that entailed being sent or being on a journey for the ministry. This is a specification and sharper formulation of the ideal, which Nadal succinctly formulated in his summary of the stories of Jesus’ original band: Our vocation is similar to the vocation and training of the apostles; first, we come to know the Society, and then we follow; we are instructed; we receive our commission to be sent [on ministry]; we are sent; we exercise our ministry; we are prepared to die for Christ in fulfilling those ministries.24 Among the “apostles,” Nadal further specified Paul as the one who best exemplified the Jesuit vocation.25 He meant to suggest the intense zeal of Paul that knew no limits in the hardship it was willing to undergo, but it

22 See John W. O’Malley, “Mission and the Early Jesuits,” The Way, Supplement 79 (1994): 3–10. This article is also part of the present collection (Chapter 13). 23 Constitutions [603–632]. 24 Jerónimo Nadal, Orationis observationes, ed. Miguel Nicolau (Rome: IHSI, 1964), no. 379. 25 Ibid., no. 414.

110 chapter six also meant going forth and seeking the lost sheep, not waiting for them on the doorstep of a church. It meant being missionaries. Nothing was more fundamental to Ignatius’s original vision of ministry. The special “Fourth Vow” that he and the early companions created for Jesuits, often erroneously described as a vow of “loyalty to the pope,” was actually a vow “about missions,” as the formula of the vow itself clearly states.26 It was a vow to be a missionary, even though the word “missionary” had in effect not yet been coined. It was a vow that radically distinguished Jesuit ministry from the legislation on ministry enacted at the Council of Trent, which dealt exclusively with keeping local ministers (bishops and priests) in the local situations to minister to Christians in their local parishes. “The world is our house.” This bold statement, drummed into Jesuits again and again by Nadal, captures the radicality of the vision. That house is altogether the most ample place and reaches as far as the globe itself. For wherever they can be sent in ministry to bring help to souls, that is the most glorious and longed-for house for these theologians […]. They consider that they are in their most peaceful and pleasant house when they are constantly on the move, when they travel throughout the earth, when they have no place to call their own […]. Only let them strive in some small way to imitate Christ Jesus, who had nowhere on which to lay his head and who spent all his years of preaching in journey.27 It was in relationship to this ideal that Ignatius elaborated for the Jesuit minister a style of life, a “way,” that was a notable break with the traditions that immediately preceded it even for members of religious orders. The symbol for this break was the Jesuits’ well-known insistence that, unlike members of all other religious orders, they not sing or recite the Liturgical Hours in common, which, by requiring them to be present in their houses at stated times during the day, would hinder their freedom to minister as need arose. Although that was a decision arrived at by all ten of the founders and cannot be attributed solely to Ignatius, he nonetheless had deeply interiorized it and resisted even popes when he thought it was threatened. That was only one aspect of his delineation of what we might term a new asceticism for ministers, preachers of the Word, that broke with the

26 Constitutions [527]. 27 See John W, O’Malley, “To Travel to Any Part of the World: Jerónimo Nadal and the Jesuit Vocation,” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 16/2 (1984). This article is also part of the present collection (Chapter 9).

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implicit or explicit model of the half-starved John the Baptist that pervaded the previous tradition. It in effect qualified as well even the image of the evangelizing Paul as totally spent in ministry and yearning for a martyr’s death. There were two stages in his development here. The first began during his days at Manresa, where in the early months he engaged in a fierce battle against his body and his sensuality by depriving himself of food, drink, and sleep, by allowing his fingernails and hair to grow, by going about in rags. Bit by bit he gave up these practices, suggesting in one place that he did so in part because they hindered him in the help of souls.28 By the time he completed the Exercises he had included “Rules with regard to eating,” in which he laid down some rather anal-retentive suggestions about how to avoid overindulgence yet be assured of sufficient intake to preserve one’s strength.29 The accent on such matters in the Constitutions is different. While a certain self-discipline is always assumed for Jesuits, self-care emerges even more strongly as a virtue peculiarly appropriate for them so that they might more effectively minister to others. The essence of the message, repeated again and again, was that, although an “excessive preoccupation with the needs of the body is blameworthy, a proper concern for the preservation of one’s health and bodily strength is praiseworthy, and all should exercise it.30 This is not the language or the practice of late medieval preachers like Bernardine of Siena or Vincent Ferrer, this is not the practice of a later bishop like Carlo Borromeo of Milan, who by his fasts practically starved himself to death at age forty-two. Diego Laínez, Ignatius’s successor as general, quoted him to the effect that until individuals surrendered to God they took delight in penances and dealing roughly with their bodies, but once that point was past, they treated their bodies with reverence as gifts from God.31 Discretion and moderation in labors and in all other practical matters had become for him the ideal. Ignatius learned a hard lesson from the toll the austerities he practiced in his early days took on him, but he found justification for the quite different approach of his later years in the Thomistic-Aristotelian synthesis that either he learned at Paris or that Polanco taught him in Rome. Virtus in media stat—virtue, the mean between two extremes, the central principle of Aristotle’s and later

28 Autobiography [29]. 29 Spiritual Exercises [210–217]. 30 Constitutions [292]. 31 See Cándido de Dalmases, “Le esortazioni del P. Laínez sull’ ‘Examen Constitutionum,’” AHSI 35 (1966): 149–150.

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Aquinas’s moral teaching, was fully appropriated by Ignatius. Mediocridad was the Spanish word that caught this ideal. Ignatius transformed it into a hermeneutical principle for the interpretation of the Constitutions themselves, which “do not lean to extremes of either rigor or laxity.”32 What I see in Ignatius is an ever more profound reconciliation with “the world.” No “theology of the cross” here, in Luther’s sense! This reconciliation was adumbrated in the Exercises with the final contemplation “On Divine Love”33 but it received practical implementation in the Constitutions with the advocacy of the use of “human means” in ministry, such as the study of the pagan classics for acquiring the eloquence needed in a preacher.34 It also received a theological foundation that runs quietly as a leitmotif through the Constitutions. That foundation was the scholastic, especially Thomistic axiom, that grace perfects nature. The Jesuit Constitutions are not, certainly, a theological document in the conventional sense. Their originality in their own genre of religious literature, however, has never been appreciated. A product of the collaboration between Ignatius and Polanco, the Constitutions differed radically from foundational documents of similar groups, which were little more than collections of ordinances. The Constitutions, by contrast, enjoyed a rationalized structure in their organization. This structure was based on the assumption of emotional and psychological development of the Jesuit from the time he entered until he reached full maturity; it manifested a new attention to motivation and general principles; insisted in particular and in general on flexible implementation of their prescriptions; conveyed an all-pervasive orientation toward ministry; and, especially, had an implicit but detectable theological leitmotif. Despite the medieval clutter of details that mark them, they are in the features just mentioned a strikingly modern document. An important aspect of Ignatius’s reconciliation with the world was his increasing faith in stable institutions as effective means for helping souls. This is exemplified most dramatically in his work in founding the Society of Jesus and in saying goodbye to what he called his “pilgrim years” to become the chief administrator in that institution for fifteen years until his death. From 1521 until 1540, he was either on the road or leading the rootless life of a student. The founding of the Society, even though there is evidence that he had entertained the idea for some time, can be taken as

32 Constitutions [822]. 33 Spiritual Exercises [230–237]. 34 Constitutions [814].

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symptom of a psychological development that prepared the way for the Jesuits undertaking formal schooling as their primary ministry. In that regard, we must keep two facts clearly in mind. First, the ten Jesuits who founded the Society had conceived of an organization consisting primarily of itinerant preachers of the Word, who almost by definition would not remain anywhere very long. They envisaged a pastoral blitz of a few days or weeks as the preferred pattern of ministry. The Constitutions indicate that even the “missions” entailed by the Fourth Vow should ordi- narily not be longer than three months.35 That vow can indeed be understood as a vow to travel, the polar opposite of the monk’s vow of stability. In the early years, to be on the road was the quintessence of what it meant to be a member of the Society.36 Second, graduates of the University of Paris though all ten of the original founders were, they not only did not foresee themselves as schoolteachers but expressly precluded for themselves even teaching the younger members of the Society themselves. Circumstances soon led them to offering some instruction to younger Jesuits, and soon other circumstances led to the founding of the first real Jesuit school in Messina in 1547. The radical change this decision implied was promoted by Ignatius, who within a year or so became enthusiastic over the potential for good that such schools offered, realizing fully the long-term commitment of personnel that they implied. Ignatius thus drastically qualified the original commitment to “mission” with the reality of resident schoolmasters. Though by no means a humanist himself, he became convinced, probably through Polanco and Nadal, of all that the humanists promised to be accomplished for church and society by means of institutions run according to the pietas that was their ideal. What about Ignatius’s relationship to the most long-lived institution of his day, the Catholic church? Is there anything further to say in this matter, since it is obvious that he was an unquestioning believer in the apostolic authenticity of the papacy and of what he called “the hierarchical church,” that is, pope and bishops? On the conscious level he was in these matters altogether in accord with the thinking of mainline canon lawyers, and he surely understood that a task of the Society was to defend the institutions of papacy and episcopacy against Protestant attacks. But, was there a deeper aspect of his belief-system that somewhat

35 Constitutions [615]. 36 See Mario Scaduto, “La strada e i primi gesuiti,” AHSI 40 (1971): 323–390, now available in an abridged translation, “The Early Jesuits and the Road,” The Way 42 (2003): 71–84.

114 chapter six transcended these conventional categories, at least as we today tend to read them back into the sixteenth century? Polemicists and apologists alike interpret the Fourth Vow as proof positive of Ignatius taking the papacy as the center of his ecclesiological vision. What they fail to take into account is that the idea for it came out of discussions carried on by all ten of the original founders, with no particular indication that Ignatius was its instigator. While he gives it primacy of place in the Seventh Part of the Constitutions, he makes it clear that the general enjoys the same authority as the pope to send members on “missions.” In his immense correspondence, he almost never refers to the papal aspect of the vow, and he speaks of kings like John III of Portugal as having almost the same moral authority as the pope to deploy Jesuits “in the vineyard of the Lord.” In comparison with the claims that have been made about how much the papacy meant to him, he speaks of it surprisingly sparingly. He speaks even of “the church” with the same sparseness. Although the papal bull of 1550 that confirmed the earlier (1540) approval of the Society defined the order as an institution to “serve the church,” Ignatius himself practically never uses the expression.37 Not serving the church but serving, i.e., “helping” souls is what he and the Society of Jesus are about. They do this “in the vineyard of the Lord,” an ecclesiological image that is fuzzy at the edges, for that vineyard extends to where there are not yet any Christians—and certainly no bishops or pope. Was this heritage partly responsible for the reluctance of the Jesuits, who arrived in Japan in 1549, to see a bishop installed there—which did not happen until a half-century had elapsed?38

Bibliography

Primary Sources Ignatius of Loyola, Monumenta Ignatiana (four series within the Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu), 23 vols., Madrid and Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1903–1977.

37 See Gabriel Côté, “The ‘Helping’ Church: An Operative Ecclesiology in the ‘Help of Souls’ of the Early Society of Jesus” (thesis, Weston Jesuit School of Theology, 1996). 38 M. Antoni Üçerler, “Sacred Historiography and its Rhetoric in Sixteenth-Century Japan: An Intertextual Study and Partial Critical Edition of Principio y progresso de la religión christiana en Jappón […] (1601–1603) by Alessandro Valignano,” 2 vols. (D. Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, 1998), esp. 1:86–88.

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——, The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus. trans. George E. Ganss. St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1970. ——, Ignatius of Loyola: The Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works, ed. George E. Ganss, New York: Paulist Press, 1991.

Secondary Sources Aldama, Antonio M. de, An Introductory Commentary on the Constitutions, trans. Aloysius J. Owen, St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1989. ——, The Formula of the Institute: Notes for a Commentary, trans. Ignacio Echániz, St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1990. Dulles, Avery, “Saint Ignatius and the Jesuit Theological Tradition,” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 14/2 (1982). O’Malley, John W., The First Jesuits, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Raihner, Hugo, Ignatius the Theologian, trans. Michael Barry, New York: Herder & Herder, 1968. Segundo, Juan Luis, “Ignatius Loyola: Trial or Project?” in his Signs of the Times, ed. Alfred T. Hennelly, trans. Robert R. Barr, Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1993, 149–175.

CHAPTER SEVEN

IGNATIUS’S SPECIAL “WAY OF PROCEEDING”1

Every culture tends to harbor stereotypes of what a saint is supposed to be like and tends to fit the individual into a mold that may be misleading or one-sided. We see what we want to see, or what we think we are supposed to see, and thus are blinded to what may be unconventional about the saint in question. Luís Gonçalves da Câmara, for instance, left behind a kind of diary, written over the span of about six months in 1555, in which he jotted down his observations about Ignatius, with whom he had almost daily contact. The text has recently been published in an excellent English edition with the title Remembering Iñigo. From da Câmara’s admiring pages emerges an image of a typical medieval saint and religious superior—a person of deep prayer and of almost inscrutable spiritual wisdom. This Ignatius was much concerned with the discipline of the community and with testing the virtue of those who would profit by the trials he imposed. He was so spiritual that he ate his meals almost as if not eating them and the like. Although Remembering Iñigo opens our eyes to aspects of Ignatius not everyone will find appealing, there is nothing surprising here for a reader of medieval hagiography. Da Câmara’s is, of course, a valuable historical document, and though we might sometimes question the interpretation he puts on his experience of Ignatius, there is no reason to doubt the basic accuracy of his account. What he misses, however, is perhaps more important than what he sees. He misses what did not fit the mold. Looked at from a distance of four and half centuries, Ignatius in many regards seems more significantly to have defied the received image of sanctity than confirmed it. What da Câmara missed, in other words, is perhaps what makes Ignatius most relevant today. Ignatius redefined the traditional basis of saintliness, that is, “contempt of the world.” Is it too far amiss to describe him as a worldly saint? In our day few pursuits seem more worldly than orchestrating public relations, yet Ignatius was an adept practitioner of public relations.

1 Originally published in America (July 31, 2006), 10–12. Reprinted with permission of the publisher (America Press).

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He instructed Jesuits not to be shy about their accomplishments when they wrote to him. He told missionaries in distant lands to write back not only about their ministries but also about quite secular topics like “how long the days of summer and winter are,” about “plants and animals” and about “anything that seems extraordinary.” He wanted to show these letters around to win interest in his Society and good will for it. Ignatius needed to project an image of the order that would counter slanders circulating in high places. Once Jesuits began to run schools, the good will thus generated served another purpose. It helped open the doors of potential benefactors. Ignatius himself knocked on those doors, becoming in effect what we today euphemistically call a director of development or advancement. He validated a pattern in the Society that has led Olwen Hufton, a British historian, to write about the Jesuits of Ignatius’s era as “the first professional fund raisers.”2 Toward the end of Ignatius’s life, with the Jesuits more solidly established in Rome, he began looking for benefactors to build for the Society a church in the center of the city. He did not envisage a modest project. Rather, he saw and approved plans for an immense structure and presumably was pleased when in 1554 it seemed Michelangelo might become the architect. Although the project got nowhere until a few years after his death, when Cardinal Alessandro Farnese built for the Jesuits (and for the glory of his own family) the Gesù, one of the most important church buildings in the modern era, we have reason to think Ignatius would have been pleased with the grand church. He needed money, too, to buy property so that the Jesuits in Rome might have a villa to which they could repair on occasion for rest and rec- reation. A villa! A “house in the country”! St. Charles Borromeo, a younger (and much wealthier) contemporary of Ignatius, would never have indulged his disciples with such a luxury. The purchase flew in the face of the traditional otherworldliness of the saints. It also flew in the face of their traditionally harsh treatment of their bodies. (Borromeo was merci- less with his.) At the beginning of his conversion, Ignatius indulged in severe penances, but over time he moved ever further away from them and finally,

2 See Dame O. Hufton, “Faith, Hope and Money: the Jesuits and the Genesis of Fundraising for Education, 1550–1650,” Historical Research 81 (2008): 585–609 and Id., “Every tub on its own bottom: funding a Jesuit college in early modern Europe,” in John W. O’Malley, The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 5–23.

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in the Jesuit Constitutions, enjoined love and care for one’s body. He instructed heads of Jesuit institutions to retain on an annual contract a physician for the students and for the Jesuit faculty. The extremes of “holy folly” were the medieval ideal of sanctity. But in the Constitutions Ignatius enjoined not a holy folly but moderation—in food, in drink, in sleep, in labors undertaken, in care for one’s health and even in the amount of time devoted to prayer. He prescribed it, in fact, as a norm for the interpretation of the Constitutions themselves, so as to steer a middle path between “rigor and laxity.” Especially remarkable about Ignatius was the way he so easily seems to have adopted and subscribed to all the components of the humanistic education that the schools he founded entailed. This meant, among other things, that most Jesuits would spend most of their time not in the confessional or pulpit but in the secular space that is a classroom. Moreover, in those classrooms most of them would teach not the Bible or the fathers of the church but pagan literature, that is, the classics of Greek and Rome. They would teach these subjects not simply as models of eloquence but as embodying, it was believed, a moral and spiritual message. Indeed, they were supposed to find a message compatible with Christianity in texts written by men who had never heard the name of Christ. The educational program was geared, of course, to turn out good Christians, but to do so in a somewhat oblique way. In 1551, Ignatius had his secretary Juan Alfonso de Polanco write a letter explaining to Jesuits what the schools were supposed to accomplish. Polanco’s list of fifteen reasons why Jesuits should give themselves to this enterprise contains not a word about serving the church or reforming the church but concentrates instead on such benefits for this world as providing a base for promoting works of social assistance like hospitals and orphanages and on being a way of relieving parents of some of the burdens of educating their sons. More pointedly, it vaunts education for its ability to produce individuals who will grow up to be, yes, “good pastors” but “civic officials” as well “administrators of justice,” who will “fill other important offices to everybody’s profit and advantage.” This was a way of implementing dedication to “the common good” that Ignatius claimed for the Society in the charter of the order he in 1550 submitted for papal approval. In his sanctity Ignatius was of course fundamentally continuous with the Christian tradition, but he carved out for himself and for his followers a special “way of proceeding,” to use his expression, that resulted in something distinctive within it. God is marvelous in his saints. Each one of them, each one of us, is unique and works out the gifts of God’s grace in

120 chapter seven conformity with that uniqueness. None of them, none of us, can be reduced to a formula. The confluence of these unique workings of grace constitutes a large part of the richness of Catholicism, which is thus more than a catechism of teachings and more than a moral code. That is why we celebrate the saints, and why we are solemnly observing this 450th anniversary of the death of Ignatius Loyola.

CHAPTER EIGHT

EARLY JESUIT SPIRITUALITY: SPAIN AND ITALY1

The history of Ignatius of Loyola is well known and only a brief resumé of it need be provided here. Born into a noble family at the castle of Loyola in northern Spain in about 1491, he had the sparse and chivalric education of his class. His military career ended in 1521 with a severe wound in his right leg received during the siege of Pamplona. During his convalescence, he underwent a profound religious conversion while reading two medieval works—Ludolph of Saxony’s Life of Christ and Jacopo da Voragine’s lives of the saints entitled the Golden Legend. He then spent a year in prayer and mortification at Manresa (1522–1523), where he experienced temptations and desolation of spirit, but also deep and refreshing mystical insights. He probably composed the substance of his Spiritual Exercises at this time, a sort of objectified recording of his own religious journey for the help of others. The desire to engage in some form of spiritual ministry soon convinced him that he needed a formal education in theology. After studying in several cities in Spain from 1524 to 1528, he finally arrived at the University of Paris, where he remained for seven years (1528–1535). During all these years of study, he guided a number of devout students through the course of his Spiritual Exercises. In Paris, finally, he gathered around himself a group of companions who would form the nucleus of the new order he soon founded. In 1537, Loyola and his companions went to Italy, and in 1540, Pope Paul III recognized them as a religious order, the Society of Jesus, with Ignatius as the first superior general. The Exercises were approved by the same pope in 1548, thus establishing the text as it had by then evolved as the definitive edition. Meanwhile, Ignatius began to compose the Constitutions of his order, the most thorough and systematically designed such instrument known up to that time. Toward the end of his life he was persuaded to tell his “story” to one of his companions, Luís Gonçalves da Câmara, but he got no farther than the events of 1538. Brief and jejune in details, the account nonetheless provides considerable

1 Originally published in Christian Spirituality: Post-Reformation and Modern, ed. Louis Dupré and Don E. Saliers = vol. 3 of Christian Spirituality (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 3–27. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

122 chapter eight information about “the pilgrim,” as Ignatius referred to himself, and especially about his motivations and mystical experiences. These documents, along with segments of his spiritual diary and the over 7,000 letters that comprise his correspondence, are the principal basis upon which we reconstruct his religious message. He died in Rome on 31 July 1556. Like the founders of other religious orders within the Roman Catholic church, Loyola left an indelible imprint on the spiritual traditions of the Society of Jesus, and thence upon modern Catholicism. Loyola’s imprint was intensified, however, beyond that of many other founders. While he was in Paris as a student, he had, in effect, already set the development of the Jesuit order in motion by persuading each of his companions to go through the Spiritual Exercises for a month or more under his guidance. This same experience was prescribed for all those who subsequently entered the order. Ignatius obviously hoped to induce in others a conversion and religious experience similar to his own during the early years of his religious quest. As H. Outram Evennett observed: “[The Exercises] were in a sense the systematized, de-mysticized quintessence of the process of Ignatius’s own conversion and purposeful change of life, and they were intended to work a similar change in others.”2 The book of the Exercises, intended as a manual for the person guiding others through the program it outlines, is divided into four “weeks” or major parts. The first week presents considerations about the purpose of life, the heinousness of sin, and the necessity and sweetness of repentance. The second week begins with a meditation on “the kingdom of Christ,” which is followed by a series of meditations on Christ’s incarnation and life up to his last days. The third week is dedicated to his suffering and death, and the final week to the apparitions of the risen Savior and related events. Besides these and other meditations, the book contains a number of directives for the director and the retreatant, some guidelines on fasting, alms-giving, and similar matters, and a number of other considerations. The book is not, in the first place, an exposition of a spiritual doctrine but a detailed program, in outline form, for a month or more of reflection on one’s life and on central mysteries of the Christian religion. It has been called with some accuracy “a recipe for conversion.”3 Among the more important appendixes to the book are several sets of “rules.” One of them is for “the discernment of spirits” (313–336), in which the saint

2 H. Outram Evennett, The Spirit of the Counter Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 45. 3 Ibid., 65.

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gives directives concerning the movement of spiritual consolation and desolation. This set of subtle directives has been the object of a number of studies and is generally considered to be one of the most perceptive parts of the book. It is here that we catch some slight glimpse of the author’s own spiritual journey and the temptations and confirmations in spiritual growth that he underwent. Moreover, the role of “consolation” in Jesuit spirituality and as a goal in the Jesuits’ ministry can hardly be overesti- mated. Another of these appendixes is a set of rules for “thinking with the church” (352–370). Almost certainly inspired by Loyola’s antipathy to certain ideas of Erasmus and of the Protestant reformers, it sets the Exercises firmly within an ecclesiological context. Here we see that for Loyola genuine spirituality had to be founded on a recognition of one’s membership in a larger religious community and of the need to test one’s inspirations against the objectified traditions of that community. Though often interpreted in a narrowly Roman Catholic sense, these “rules” are susceptible of a less rigoristic reading. In its concepts, images, and directives, the book of the Exercises stands squarely within the Christian spiritual tradition, so much so that the search for its sources has consistently been frustrated by the very commonplace nature of its ideas. Most commentators are agreed, however, upon some direct relationship to the devotio moderna, and Ignatius in fact had a special fondness for the principal document of that late-medieval tradition, The Imitation of Christ. Aside from the text of the Gospels, the Imitation is the only book specifically recommended to the person following the course of the Exercises (100). Despite the commonplace sources upon which the Exercises draws, two features of the book give it special force and have made it one of the most important documents in the history of Christian spirituality. The first such feature is its clear design, aimed at carrying out its stated purpose: “to conquer oneself and to order one’s life without being influenced in one’s decision by any inordinate affection” (21). That clarity of purpose provided the book with a psychological dynamism that, under an experienced director, proved to be extraordinarily powerful. Though the purpose as stated by Ignatius sounds stoic and rationalistic, it is promoted less by logic than by an activation of the affections, especially through the key meditations and considerations. Of special importance here are the meditation on the “Two Standards” (136–148)—that of Christ and that of Satan—and the reflections on “three classes of persons” (149–157) and on the “three kinds of humility” (165–168). In these exercises, the aspirations of the retreatant to generosity and to a sense of noblesse oblige are

124 chapter eight particularly appealed to. Loyola’s genius lay, therefore, in his sense of psychological organization. With a laconic, understated style and with a mass of seemingly disparate elements, he constructed a course in which generations have found themselves prepared to respond in a new way to an inner call for intimacy with the divine. But, what is especially remarkable about the course Loyola provides is its non-prescriptive character. This is the second feature of the book that deserves special attention. No line in it better expresses what Loyola expected to happen during the Exercises than his advice to the director to “permit the Creator to deal directly with the creature, and the creature directly with his Creator and Lord” (15). The saint had a profound confidence in the direct inspiration of God, which he felt he had himself experienced from the first moment of his conversion. The chief purpose of the Exercises was to facilitate the reception of such inspiration and make it effective for the future direction of the retreatant’s life. Though Loyola’s own experience was formally paradigmatic for the structure of the Exercises, he insisted that there was no greater error than to believe that God led all along the same path, and he tried to make ample room for such liberty of spirit in his rubrics and directives in the book. In summary, I would stress that the book, and with it Jesuit spirituality, while being rationalistic in its language and arguments, is more profoundly concerned with right affectivity; while being logical in the organization of its parts, it is more profoundly psychological in its movement and design; and while being methodical in the aids it provides to prayer and spiritual discernment, it is more profoundly non prescriptive in the outcome it foresees for the direct divine intervention that is its basic premise. The book is, nonetheless, clear in the goal toward which it points: an “election,” an ordering of life “for the greater service and praise” of God. Thus emerges another essential component in Ignatian spirituality. The single word that best expresses this fundamental element is “service.” In the key meditation on “the kingdom of Christ” (91–99), the exercitant is urged to “distinguish himself in whatever concerns the service of the eternal king and Lord of all.” The knightly imagery and context in which this meditation is enshrined do not essentially diminish the transcultural nature of its appeal. It is this consideration that led Joseph de Guibert to describe the Ignatian way as essentially a “spirituality of service,” a phrase upon which it would be difficult to improve.4

4 Joseph de Guibert, The Jesuits: Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1964), 176–181.

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From the first moment of his conversion, Loyola was attracted by the great deeds of saints like Dominic and Francis. “If they could so distinguish themselves in the service of the Lord, why cannot I?” was the question he repeatedly asked himself. Especially after the year of retreat at Manresa, Loyola specified the “great deeds” in some form of ministry of the Word for the help of others. At first, this ministry of the Word was nothing more than informal conversation with devout persons about “the things of God.” He soon began to preach to small groups that gathered around him and then he began to guide individuals through his Exercises. The spiritual doctrine of the Jesuits was thereby from its origins intimately related to ministry, and to a certain extent even subordinated to it. With Ignatius, we find one of the first strong expressions of this relationship in the history of Christian spirituality, and he provides us in his correspondence and legislation for the order with numerous practical interpretations of it. It is difficult for us, and perhaps it was difficult even for him, fully to realize what a dramatic break he affected with the monastic traditions of the early church and the Middle Ages. A significant influence on his new way of conceiving of religious life may have been that he had no experience of cloister or established monastic practice until he and his companions decided to found their own order. The most dramatic symbol of what was involved was his adamant refusal to allow the Jesuits to chant the Divine Office in choir. In his day, this practice was considered so central to life in a religious order that many considered that the Jesuits could not be a religious order without it. Eager though Ignatius was to conform himself and his followers to the Catholic tradition in the smallest detail, eager though he was for papal approval of the new order, he would not surrender his point. He doubtless saw it as symptomatic of his whole vision of how his spirituality was “ordered.” It was ordered to “service,” to ministry, and anything that inter- fered with that ordering, like the obligation to be present in choir several times a day, had to be excluded. In several important instructions about the training of the younger members of the order, Ignatius insisted that their time for prayer and their ascetical practices be carefully moder- ated, so that these not interfere with their direct training for ministry. What he envisioned was a correlation of ministry and spirituality so that one was inconceivable for members of the order without the other. His most telling expression of this vision was in his exhortation (Constitutions 288) that Jesuits should “find God in all things”—not just in prayer, not only in the disciplined quiet of their houses, not simply in the solitude of their rooms.

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Of all his disciples, Jerónimo Nadal (1507–1580) is the one who gave most powerful articulation of this idea with his celebrated phrase “contemplative in action.”5 Nadal’s idea, genuinely reflecting Loyola’s, implies the contemporaneity or at least reciprocity of contemplation and ministry. One of Nadal’s effective illustrations of his point is his description of the habitation of the members of the order. Their “most perfect dwelling-place is in travel and pilgrimage from place to place, by which they seek to gain for Christ those lost sheep that are perishing.”6 There could hardly be a more dramatic contrast with the typically monastic vow of stability, by which the monk promised to spend his whole life within the confines of the monastery he had entered. This commentary by Nadal gives force to Ignatius’s requirement in the Constitutions (588) that the members of his order be ready to travel from place to place for the sake of their ministry. The Imitation of Christ, Loyola’s favorite book, warned that the person who traveled much could not expect to attain holiness. Ignatius turned this axiom around by insisting that it was only by engaging in the pilgrimage implied in ministry that the Jesuit could hope to attain the sanctification proper to his vocation. Once again, it is the ideal of service that underlay this provision. Put in other terms, it was an ideal of avail- ability for the needs of others. This ideal was institutionalized in the Society of Jesus by the famous “Fourth Vow” of obedience to the pope that professed members pronounced. As universal pastor, the pope had, in Loyola’s understanding, the large vision of where the greatest pastoral needs prevailed. The Jesuits wanted to put themselves at his disposition to meet these needs. This was clearly the purpose of the vow as the original members of the order conceived it, and it fits perfectly with the ministerial intentionality with which Ignatian spirituality is imbued. In commenting on this vow, Nadal insists that the Jesuits are to be sent to minister where there are no ministers, where no one else wants to minister, and they are to do this without regard for their personal convenience or preference.7 Thus a new asceticism begins to emerge that is not dependent for its practice on self-imposed austerities to curb one’s own disordered tendencies, but on the rigors and hardship imposed by total dedication to an ideal of ministry in the world of ordinary people, with their often undisciplined needs and demands. This brings us to the “world-affirming” quality of Ignatian piety. The expression is dangerous, for it can be interpreted as suggesting a

5 Nadal 4:651 and 5:162, “simul in actione contemplativus.” 6 Ibid., 5:153–154. 7 Ibid.

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compromise with the transcendent or a surrender to its opposite. That interpretation would utterly contradict everything that Loyola had experienced of the divine action within himself and that he hoped for in others. Nonetheless, the term does highlight an engagement with human reality, with all its contingencies, and a positive appreciation for human values that was characteristic of him and his piety. It is, indeed, possible to trace a gradual evolution in Loyola’s thinking on this issue from the days at Manresa, where a rigorous asceticism, a desire for eremitical seclusion, and a distaste for anything that might ingratiate him with his fellows— even cleanliness and a neat appearance—prevailed. This is quite different from the later Ignatius, who heartily recommended to his disciples that, while giving a preeminence to the “supernatural” means of serving God like prayer, they employ all the “natural” means that time and circumstances offered for the advancement of their ministry. This reconciliation of the natural and the supernatural perhaps found its theological grounding in Loyola’s study of Aquinas at Paris, for the great scholastic subscribed to the principle that “grace builds on nature” and fully articulated it in his system. Its true origins, however, relate to his earlier mystical experiences. Be that as it may, Loyola’s most sublime expression of this sense of reconciliation was in his “Contemplation for Obtaining Divine Love” at the end of the “fourth week” of the Exercises (230–237). Here the exercitant sees “all things as creatures of the goodness of God and reflections of it.” He is urged to relish this profound religious truth. Ignatius thus moves the Christian tradition of asceticism away from the ideal of the contemptus mundi that characterized much of the spirituality of the Middle Ages and was found in a marked degree even in the devotio moderna, from which he originally drew some of his own inspiration. Although this theological insight can be correlated with the medieval system of Aquinas, it also corresponded in a general way with one aspect of the religious culture of the Italian Renaissance in which the early Jesuits moved. Especially at the papal court in the sixteenth century, a group of preachers influenced by the humanistic movement formulated a similar style of piety of “service” for persons whose lives were lived outside the cloister in the public life of church and state. This piety, too, was remarkably world-affirming. I have elaborated on this important development elsewhere,8 but have discovered no clear evidence of influence one way or another between it and the first Jesuits. I call attention to the parallel here,

8 John W. O’Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979).

128 chapter eight however, because it provides further substantiation for the break with medieval spirituality that the Ignatian system, for all its medieval roots, suggests, and it also intimates why that system proved attractive to so many persons in the early years of the Society. It was attuned to the times. Another correlation of Ignatian spirituality with the religious culture of the sixteenth century is possible; this time a line of influence can be unmistakably detected. The Lutheran doctrine of “justification by faith alone” caused Catholics to search their tradition on this issue more carefully than before. By the time the Council of Trent dealt with the matter in Session IV in 1547, Catholic theologians were aware of the dangers of Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism that the Lutherans accused Catholics of teaching. The Council tried to avoid any formulations that might seem to support the save-yourself tenets traditionally ascribed to the Pelagians, but at the same time, it insisted on the necessity of human cooperation in the process of justification. As interpreted in a popular way, this meant an insistence on the role of “free will” in attaining salvation, while still main- taining the prevenient and constitutive role of grace. Loyola raises this issue in the book of the Exercises where he counsels that grace should be spoken of only in such a way that “works and free will” are not slighted (369). The early Jesuits were involved in discussion on this issue within the Council of Trent and in polemics on it outside the Council. Since Lutherans “denied free will,” the Jesuits especially emphasized it. There is a direct relationship between this Jesuit emphasis in the controversies with the Protestants in the sixteenth century and their position vis-à-vis the Dominicans over many of the same problems in the so-called De Auxiliis controversies a century later. What this means for Jesuit spirituality is that it tended to have a decidedly activist character and helped promote the activist piety that Evennett found characteristic of the Counter-Reformation in general. Evennett’s summary is worth quoting: “The spirituality of the Counter Reformation sprang from a triple alliance, as it were, between the Tridentine clarifica- tions of the orthodox teaching on Grace and Justification, the practical urge of the day towards active works, and certain new developments in ascetical teaching and practice which promoted this outlook.”9 That last element—the “new developments”—was particularly characteristic of the spirituality developed by Loyola. This activist character manifested itself in the varied and energetic ministries the early Jesuits undertook—in

9 Evennett, The Spirit of the Counter Reformation, 32.

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their works of mercy directed toward orphans, prostitutes, prisoners in jails, the sick in hospitals, and especially in their schools and their preaching. For all of Trent’s emphasis on sacramental ministry and the Jesuits’ promotion of it, especially the frequent reception of the Eucharist and penance that Jesuit preachers urged from the beginning, their real contribution lay, as I mentioned earlier, in some form of “ministry of the Word.” This was typical of most Protestant ministry at the time and is generally recognized as such. It is not so clearly recognized how typical it was of the early Jesuits. The motivations for this general interest are complex and relate inextricably with the personal histories of the great leaders like Loyola, Luther, Calvin, and others, but certainly part of the impetus derives from the invention of printing, from the humanists’ new concern with the recovery of ancient texts, and from their new interest in rhetoric and in other disciplines related to verbal communication in classroom, pulpit, and other public forums. The word—printed and oral, human and divine—emerged as a new focus for the intellectual and spiritual life of the day. For the Jesuits the ministry of the Word took a number of forms, especially the most traditional one of preaching. But, even in this form their ministry showed an energy and an imagination that were notable if not altogether original. They not only preached from the pulpit of churches but also sought listeners in hospitals, piazzas, prisons, and even inns. Ignatius insisted that his men undertake this ministry wherever they went, and he followed their efforts with keen interest. Both Juan Ramírez and Francisco de Borja—Jesuit contemporaries of Ignatius—composed treatises on how to preach. Jerónimo Nadal left an important exhortation on this ministry of the Word in its various forms.10 Peculiar to the Jesuits was the emphasis that Ignatius and Nadal placed on informal conversation, with individuals or groups, about “the things of God.” In his exhortation, Nadal gives sensible directives about how this practice could be made most effective. We do not have as clear information as we would like about the content of the formal sermons the Jesuits preached. Loyola wanted “the errors of the heretics” to be refuted when occasion demanded it, but he tempered this advice with the warning that charity and good example would be more forceful means to winning them over than confrontation and controversy. His frequent instructions to the members of the Society were that they preach both by their words and by their example. This cou- pling of word and deed, almost a truism in the Christian tradition, was notably revived in the sixteenth century by the humanists. But it seems to

10 Nadal 5:820–865.

130 chapter eight have had a special significance for Ignatius in that he so consistently joined the two as almost to equate them. “Example” is a message to the affections and noble aspirations of persons rather than directly to their minds, as the humanists never tired of saying, and it looks to behavior as well. This is what concerned Loyola all his life, and this is the orientation that he expected all “ministry of the Word” to have. The point I am making is that in an age so agitated by dogmatic differences that, on one level, controversy was its distinguishing intellectual characteristic, Loyola showed himself in practice singularly detached from that controversy. His interest, quite simply, lay elsewhere, and he conceived “doctrine” in a different way than did many other leading figures of his time. For him “Christian doctrine” dealt in the first place with virtue, prayer, repentance, and conversion, and then “consolation”—with reform of life. Luther proposed that right thinking and preaching about justification were essentially what the world needed. For Loyola the central issue was right living and loving, based on a general spirituality in which certain affectivities were fostered and sustained. This position coincides perfectly with the basic character and emphasis of the Spiritual Exercises, whose stated purpose was “the ordering of one’s life” (21). The most distinctive form of this Jesuit ministry of the Word was in fact the guiding of devout persons through the Spiritual Exercises. This task implied constant recourse to the text of Scripture, for most of the meditations in the book deal with some aspect of the life of Christ. In these meditations, the retreatant confronted the deeds of the Savior and was then asked to respond in kind, for he did “all this for me” (116). The retreatant is urged “not to be deaf to His call, but prompt and diligent to accomplish His holy will” (91). What is induced is a sense of companionship with Christ in ministry suffering, and, finally, glory—a companionship intimated by the name Loyola insisted on for his order, “Compagnia di Gesù.” Further questions are put to the retreatant: “What have I done for Christ, what am I doing, what ought I to do?” (53). These questions once again point inexorably to the activist, even dynamic, nature of Ignatian spirituality. This dynamism, a contrast with the repose of monastic contemplation, is indicated by Loyola in a number of ways, but particularly by his favorite expression, “the greater glory of God.” The phrase occurs countless times in the Constitutions of the order. The comparative form—“greater”—suggests a questing, a restlessness, almost an insatiability. This is the Ignatian “más,” “magis,” or “more” that commentators have often noted. For Ignatius, this “more” was meant to translate itself most directly into an ever greater and more generous oblation to the divine will and

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divine grace. The prayer he composed for the retreatant at the end of the “Contemplation for Obtaining Divine Love” in the Spiritual Exercises encapsulates this deep yearning of the saint:

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all that I have and possess. Thou hast given all to me. To Thee, O Lord, I return it. Dispose of it wholly according to Thy will. Give me Thy love and Thy grace, for this is sufficient for me [234]. Loyola himself achieved this surrender to the divine in an eminent degree. Throughout his adult life, he experienced a deep sense of the divine presence that often produced tears of consolation and joy. His perception of God was specified by the Christian doctrine of the three divine persons of the Trinity, with a strong sense of their individuality—Father, Son, Spirit. The Trinitarian aspect of his personal mysticism has been the subject of a number of studies. But what must be emphasized here is that in Ignatius the dynamism of his spirituality found its source in the divine action within his own being. It was not the result of a self-induced compulsion or of a drive for some merely extrinsic behavior modification. He was a saint, and he was revered even during his lifetime for a union with God that seemed to manifest itself clearly to those who had to deal with him. Unfortunately, the same cannot always be said of the spirituality that the order fostered. The early companions of Ignatius were close enough to him to have understood the spirit of his directives. When Ignatius observed in the Exercises that “love ought to manifest itself in deeds” (230), they knew that this was not meant in some pedestrian sense. Nonetheless, the insistence on the practice of the virtues, the importance attached to sacramental confession of sins and the “reform of life,” and the insistence in Ignatius’s writings to his fellow Jesuits on the practice of obedience could easily lead, in less expansive minds, to a moralism and a behavioralism that were far from the true intent of the saint. A graphic illustration of an eclectic and superficial grasp of the spirituality of the order is the book published in 1609 by the Spanish Jesuit Alonso Rodríguez (1526–1616) entitled Ejercicio de perfección y virtutes cristianas. (This author is not to be confused with the Jesuit lay brother St. Alfonso Rodríguez [1531–1617].) Rodríguez had been for a number of years master of novices, responsible for the first training in spirituality of new recruits to the order. The audience he originally had in mind for his ideas must be noted for an understanding of his book, but he in fact composed it out of a number of exhortations that he gave to Jesuit communities in various cities of Spain. Divided into three parts, each containing three treatises,

132 chapter eight the book follows no systematic plan. It draws on the mainstream of Christian asceticism in a presentation of virtues and in practical recom- mendations about prayer, mortification, silence, and similar matters. Rodríguez illustrates his points with numerous anecdotes and exempla drawn from John Cassian, the Vitae patrum, and the lives of the saints. Often quaint, sometimes amusing, these illustrations betray the author’s preoccupation with reducing spirituality to conventional practicality. The book’s success was immediate and enormous, probably because of the simplicity of its presentation, its avoidance of controversial matters, and its comprehensiveness. Like Alice’s medicine, there were so many good things in it that there was something to suit everybody’s needs. Joseph de Guibert commends also the “robust realism” of the book and finds in that quality another reason for its success.11 It is quite true that the book is filled with precise and concrete counsels, though these are sometimes irreconcilable with each other and are never related to any clearly distinguishable theological foundation. By 1626, in any case, there were seven Spanish editions as well as translations into English (partial, 1612), French (1617), Italian (1617), Latin (1621), German (1623), and Dutch (1626). The book continued to be popular well into the present century and has run through over three hundred editions in twenty-three languages. Is this book an authentic reflection of early Jesuit spirituality? Its favorable reception in the order immediately upon its publication and the continued commendation it received from Jesuit authorities through the centuries would seem to indicate that it is. There can be no doubt that it caught one important aspect of the spiritual message of St. Ignatius and the early Jesuits. While appreciative of the higher forms of prayer, it insists that every interior inspiration be tested against the deeds it produces. If the deeds are virtuous, the inspiration is holy. Even the highest gifts of prayer are suspect, ultimately unacceptable, if they fail in this regard. The avoidance of sin, the observance of the duties of one’s state in life, adherence to the traditions of the church and respect for its authority— these were the Jesuit touchstones for authenticity from the very beginning. Rodríguez never lets his reader forget them. Viewed in this perspective, Rodríguez’s book has an authentically Jesuit character. Loyola, moreover, doubtless considered these qualities to be perennially valid foundations for a solid spiritual edifice. Yet, there were historical circumstances of his era that gave them a particular incisiveness

11 Guibert, The Jesuits, 264.

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and led some of his followers in the order like Rodríguez to exaggerate them, especially toward the end of the sixteenth century. These circumstances were not so much the presumed dangers of Protestantism, as we might first suspect, but rather the spiritualism of the indigenous mystical tradition in Spain whose adherents came to be known as the Alumbrados. Originating in the late fifteenth century, this movement was perceived by ecclesiastical authorities as a danger because it attributed an undue importance to visions, revelations, raptures, and similar phenomena. Loyola himself was charged at Salamanca in 1527 with being tainted by the movement, and he was careful for the rest of his life to make clear his distance from it. Moreover, he fought within the order a tendency, especially in Spain and Portugal, to subordinate ministry to contemplation and to multiply the hours spent each day in prayer. These problems reached a point of crisis under the fourth general of the order, Everard Mercurian (1573–1581). Mercurian took a number of measures to meet the crisis. In his opinion he was not reforming a spirituality gone astray so much as forming one that was still in its infancy. He imposed a greater regimentation in prayer and religious observance within the order, but especially emphasized the practical, non-Illuminist character of the spirituality of the Jesuits. Somewhat forgetting the other styles of prayer allowed or suggested in the Exercises, he put great emphasis on examination of conscience and on the form of “meditation” described by Ignatius in the section of the book entitled “Three Methods of Prayer.” Sober and methodical consideration of such matters as the Commandments, the duties of one’s office, various virtues and vices— even if the purported subject matter of the prayer was the text of Scripture—seems to have been his ideal. He even forbade the reading, without special permission, of medieval mystics like John Tauler, Jan van Ruysbroeck, Henry Suso, and others. Mercurian’s measures against two Spanish Jesuits—Antonio Cordeses (1518–1601) and Balthasar Álvarez (1534–1580), confessor for six years to Teresa of Ávila—indicate the narrowness with which he conceived the spirituality of the order and his misunderstanding of some of the central teachings of the saint who founded it. He forbade Cordeses to promote “affective prayer,” and he judged Álvarez’s style too contemplative. Álvarez is particularly important. Although he published nothing in his lifetime, his Jesuit disciple, Venerable Luis de la Puente, wrote a remarkable biography of him (1615), admired even today for its comprehensive design, the accuracy of its narrative, and the grace of its style. The biography ranks as one of the great works of spiritual biography produced in Spain in

134 chapter eight its Golden Age. Most important of all, La Puente summarized the teachings of Álvarez and thereby transmitted them to his contemporaries and to subsequent generations. The biography in effect vindicated Álvarez and allowed him to influence masters like the English Benedictine Augustine Baker (1588–1685), the Jesuit Louis Lallemant (1587–1635), and, later, St. Alfonso Liguori (1696–1787). This recognition of him as one of the leading figures in Spanish spirituality in the sixteenth century eventually led to the publication in modern editions of his exhortations, meditations, letters, and treatises. Álvarez advocated a prayer of quiet and silence, into which he himself had moved about 1567 from a more discursive style and after a long period of aridity. His descriptions of this form of prayer are surely influenced by St. Teresa, John of Ávila, Francisco de Osuna, and other contemporaries. The prayer consists essentially in placing oneself in the presence of God and of keeping oneself in a state of repose before him. In Álvarez, it resulted in an interior sense of the corporal presence of the humanity of Christ. This experiential and mystical sense of Christ’s presence within was at the heart of his teaching. Throughout his life Álvarez held positions of high responsibility in the Society of Jesus. He was, for instance, several times rector and master of novices and, at the very end of his life (1580), he was named superior of the province of Aragon of the Society. Nonetheless, from about 1573 on he was subjected to repeated scrutiny by his superiors in the Society because his teaching on prayer was suspected of fostering illusions and of deviating from the teaching of the Exercises, as interpreted by Mercurian and others. His explanations failed to give satisfaction, and in late 1577, he submitted to the decision against his teaching. Mercurian’s motivations were sincere. He wanted to consolidate a spirituality that still lacked a large corpus of literature to sustain it, and he wanted to preserve it from influences that would lead it back into an essentially monastic mode. Within the order, especially in the Iberian Peninsula, there flourished a strongly contemplative tendency, a desire in some cases for eremitical withdrawal from the saeculum and sometimes a cultivation of the suspect phenomena associated with the Alumbrados. All this forms a background for understanding the success of an author like Rodríguez and the approbation he enjoyed. Mercurian’s vision, fortunately, did not altogether prevail even during his generalate, and his successor, Claudio Acquaviva (1581–1606), was a person of larger spirit, who encouraged a less rigid and narrow interpretation of the charism of the order. As early as 1582, he delivered an important exhortation in Rome on the gifts of the Holy Spirit—traditional in its doctrine, but indicative of

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a spirituality irreducible to moralism and external discipline. At about the same time in Rome and Naples, Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), a respected theologian and later a cardinal and canonized saint of the order, delivered a series of exhortations on the same subject and, more important, a series on “liberty of spirit.” There were, then, at least two general strains to “Jesuit spirituality” by the beginning of the seventeenth century. One was cautious and soberly ascetical, favorable almost exclusively to a methodical and even moralistic style of prayer, suspicious of contemplation and other higher forms of prayer as inimical to the active ministry to which the order was committed. It ran the danger of reducing Loyola to a small-minded master of hackneyed precepts. The other strain was more expansive, more syncretis- tic within the broad tradition of Christian spirituality, and intent on developing the implications of the affective and even mystical elements in the life of the founder of the order. It bordered at times on the Illuminism that Loyola had so emphatically eschewed and wanted to exclude among his followers. Most Jesuit writers on spirituality whose books were actually published during these decades tended to strike a balance between extreme expressions of these two tendencies and were able more or less to perpetuate the synthesis that Loyola represented. Among the early associates of the saint, none had done this better than Jerónimo Nadal (1507–1580), already mentioned several times. Born at Palma de Majorca, he pursued courses of study at Alcalá and Paris and was present in the latter city while Loyola was there gathering his first companions. At that time he refused to have anything to do with the group and in 1537 went to Avignon, where he was eventually ordained a priest and promoted to doctor of theology. Sometime after his return to Majorca, he felt an attraction to the new order, now confirmed by the Holy See, and in 1545, he journeyed to Rome to join it. He immediately won the special confidence of Ignatius and soon was constituted by him as his special envoy to promulgate and explain the Constitutions of the order in various parts of the Society. In the judgment of Juan Alfonso de Polanco, Loyola’s secretary, Nadal grasped Ignatius’s ideas better than any other,12 and therefore came to be considered an authentic interpreter of them. In his many writings-dialogues, letters, and especially the exhortations and instructions to Jesuit communities—we have a secure elaboration of the central themes of early Jesuit spirituality. Moreover, most Jesuits of his day, especially in Spain during his three official visits there, actually heard

12 See Epp. Ign., 5:109.

136 chapter eight him speak about the Society and its spirit. His impact was, therefore, direct and enormous. Most characteristic of Nadal is the evident theological and biblical basis on which he constructed his interpretation, and he has been described as “the theologian of Ignatian spirituality.”13 He clearly depended on a theological tradition represented by Aquinas and Bonaventure. Distinctive of him was the doctrine of “contemplative in action.” This was, as I have indicated, simply a fuller articulation of Loyola’s exhortation to his followers “to find God in all things.” God was the goodness active in the world from which all other good descended. God was the author of both nature and grace, who impressed his own good on all reality. Here is the source of the world-affirming spirituality that would continue to mark the spiritual vision of many Jesuits through the centuries and that helps explain how some Jesuit missioners like Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) in China and Roberto de Nobili (1577–1656) in India could so easily affirm the values of the indigenous cultures in which they labored. Any study of early Jesuit spirituality that ignores the enterprises and cultural magnanimity of missioners like these misses a central element of the tradition. Nadal’s rhetoric on issues like these is even bolder than Loyola’s. On a number of occasions, he affirmed straightforwardly that for the members of the order “the world” was their “house.” Although he of course recognized that for many Jesuits the houses of the professed members of the order would be the place from which they would normally exercise their ministry, he returned again and again to the idea that the Society was essentially a group “on mission,” ready at any moment to travel to any point where there was need for its ministry. In Nadal’s writings, we find the most emphatic statements in the early history of the Jesuits of their break with the more monastic tradition. Nadal’s balance is evident in the way he encouraged and exemplified affective and even mystical prayer while at the same time insisting on its correlation with ministry and with the necessity of a balanced asceticism. He cautioned against the excesses of the Alumbrados and at the same time rejected a frigid moralism and intellectualism which he also saw as dangers. One of Nadal’s most innovative teachings concerned the “grace of vocation” especially within the context of a religious order of the Catholic church. According to him, the “grace” of each institute within the church was specific, somewhat like the specific grace conferred by each of the

13 Miguel Nicolau, “Nadal,” in Dict. Sp., 11, col. 13.

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sacraments. The grace proper to each institute was articulated in the life and gifts of the founder and was meant to be transmitted to each member of the order. In his exhortations, Nadal made extensive use of Ignatius’s Autobiography, compiled by da Câmara, as encapsulating the grace of the Jesuit vocation. Thus, the teachings of Loyola were for Jesuits something more than the teachings of a holy man whom all revered. Nadal imbued them with an exemplarity that required their appropriation by all members of the order. These teachings were articulated in the Spiritual Exercises and the Constitutions of the order, which spelled out the ideal of “contemplative in action” in a way that made it, according to Nadal, accessible to all Jesuits. For this ideal, Nadal seems to have seen the biblical base clearly as Pauline. In a suggestive statement in 1557, he indicated that “Paul signifies the ministry of our Society.”14 Cryptic though this statement is in itself, Nadal expands on its implications in his other writings. In them, “the ministry of the Word”—in a wide variety of forms—has preeminence over all others. The Pauline ideal of evangelization—of “becoming all things to all men,” of intimate and mystical identification with the Christ, and of total expenditure of oneself “to gain all” for Christ—is spelled out by Nadal in detail. This same affinity with the doctrine and ministry of the “Apostle to the Gentiles” is discernible, in fact, in Ignatius himself. Here we see another correlation of Jesuit spirituality with a more general phenomenon of the sixteenth century, a renewed interest in St. Paul. There is evidence of this revived interest in the humanistic tradition that preceded Luther, but without doubt, Luther’s affirmation of the Pauline doctrine of “justification by faith alone” is its most powerful and best known expression. Luther extracted from Paul a theological or doctrinal maxim; Loyola and his followers saw in Paul a pattern for ministry and an exemplar for loving identification with the Savior. These positions may not be quite so distant from each other as they at first seem. It is important, however, to note the differences between them and also to recall that neither of the parties involved seemed to be aware of any affinity with the other. Nadal’s writings were not published in any coherent form until their critical editions in this century. Indeed, as I mentioned, the spirituality of the Society of Jesus had no corpus of published writings to support it except those of Ignatius himself until toward the end of the sixteenth century, and this fact makes Mercurian’s apprehensions about its being dis- sipated through the assimilation of other traditions more comprehensible.

14 Orationis Observationes, ed. Miguel Nicolau (Rome: IHSI, 1964), 151.

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Nonetheless, the teachings of masters like Cordeses and Balthasar Álvarez, despite Mercurian’s misgivings, began to have effect, at least in a modified form. In 1608, Jacobo (Diego) Álvarez de Paz (1560–1620) published his De vita spirituali ejusque perfectione. Rodríguez’s Ejercicio was published the next year, but the two works were quite different in their approach. Álvarez de Paz was a theologian and a contemplative. His book, though dense in its details rests on a coherent theological base and emphasizes affective prayer. Its most distinctive characteristic is the elaborate discussion of “infused contemplation,” a technical category to describe an advanced form of prayer that transcends methodical meditation. For our purposes, the book is important for its clear validation of an ideal like this sort of contemplation within the larger Jesuit tradition. Perhaps the most important Jesuit author in this regard is another Spanish Jesuit, Luis de la Puente (1554–1624), the disciple of Balthasar Álvarez. He was beatified by Pope Clement III in 1759. Besides several important works published posthumously, he saw into print five major treatises during his lifetime: two volumes of Meditaciones de los mysterios de nuestra sancta fe (1605); Guía espiritual (1609); four volumes of De la perfección del christiano en todos sus estados (1612–1616); Vida del Padre Baltasar Álvarez (1615); and Expositio moralis et mystica in Canticum canticorum (1622). The volume of Meditaciones was his best known work, frequently republished, translated, summarized, and adapted. The sources on which La Puente draws are the Scriptures, the fathers, Aquinas, and the Exercises of Loyola, from which he continually takes his inspiration. With his discussion of infused contemplation, he obviously sees higher forms of prayer as part of the Jesuit tradition, and his subsequent beatification eventually gave official, even if indirect, ratification of this interpretation of Jesuit spirituality. Moreover, his preoccupation with grounding his teaching on theological doctrine is a good exemplification of the docta pietas that Ignatius tried to instill in the order with his insistence on a long and exacting course of studies for those who joined the Society. La Puente nowhere showed himself a more faithful disciple of the founder of the order, however, than in his De la perfección del christiano en todos sus estados. This seems to be the first work of such breadth in the history of Christian spirituality that applies that spirituality to the different states of Christian life, including the laity. The very conception of the work reflects Loyola’s own conviction that genuine piety was not restricted to the cloister and further articulates Loyola’s efforts to make such piety available to all through the course of the Spiritual Exercises.

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During the first half-century of the order there were in Italy no masters of spirituality of the same stature as these Spaniards. But, some of the works of the Spaniards were originally written in Latin and others were soon translated into Latin or Italian; thus, the writings were made available to brethren in that part of the world. Robert Bellarmine, already mentioned, was important, but his major interest lay more strictly in the fields of exegesis and in speculative and controversial theology. Italy was, in fact, less agitated by controversies and extremes in these matters than was Spain. Symptomatic of this fact was the volume by Bernardino Rossignoli (1547–1613), rector of the Roman College, De disciplina christianae perfectionis, published at Ingolstadt in 1600. Rossignoli dedicated the book to the general of the order, Claudio Acquaviva, whose moderate views were in fact well exemplified in it. Acquaviva’s tenure as general was not altogether untroubled, however, by the issues that were so live for his predecessor, Mercurian. Achille Gagliardi (1537–1607), a Jesuit born in Padua, undertook in 1584 the spiritual direction of Elisabetta Berinzaga, a visionary and mystic in Milan. He soon helped write and edit several works inspired by Berinzaga. Gagliardi almost immediately found himself embroiled in controversies that eventually required the intervention of Acquaviva and even of Pope Clement VIII. The details of this complicated affair need not detain us, much less an attempt to do justice to all the parties involved. But it is important to note that Gagliardi was subjected to the now standard accusation of trying to introduce a monastic spirit within the Society. Certainly, the influence of the Rhineland mystics, whose reading was prohibited by Mercurian, is evident in the writings for which he was at least partly responsible, especially the most widely circulated of them, the Breve compendio intorno alla perfezione cristiana, first published in French translation in Paris in 1596 and in Italian in Brescia in 1611. Influenced by Gagliardi was Giuseppe Biondo in his Essercitii spirituali di P. Ignazio, published in Milan in 1587. The work was variously received in Jesuit circles, but eventually the attacks on it became so violent that Acquaviva “for the sake of peace” ordered it retracted from circulation in 1589. In France, it probably had, nonetheless, an influence on Pierre de Berulle (1575–1629) and through him on others in the seventeenth century. It is certain, in any case, that Berulle knew and esteemed the Breve compendio, of which his own first published work, Bref discours de l’abnégation interieure, is an adaptation. The development of French spirituality in the late sixteenth and the seventeenth century, including that of the Society of Jesus, is treated in chapter 3 of Christian Spirituality: Post-Reformation and Modern. The instruments the Jesuits

140 chapter eight devised or characteristically promoted to inculcate their spiritual doctrines and to assist people in appropriating them are perhaps as important for understanding Jesuit spirituality as the doctrines themselves. Here we find a significant reciprocity of form and content, the one influencing and being influenced by the other. The first such instrument developed by the Jesuits was the “retreat.” Although the practice of spending a period of time alone in contemplation is older than Christianity itself, there existed no widely recognized codification of it until the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. The book not merely contained some of the saint’s most important ideas but also provided a new framework in which to spend a limited period of time in prayer and reflection. Structure, progression, rubrics, “methods,” and clear purpose were harmonized in such a way that these “forms” influenced the shape of the spirituality that emerged, as I indicated above. A Jesuit who was asked to direct someone in retreat knew what was expected of him, and he had a ready-made plan to follow. Thus was inaugurated a new era in Christian spirituality in which a periodic retreat became a regular feature in the pattern of piety followed by many religiously minded persons. To aid the Jesuit in guiding someone through the Exercises, moreover, the Jesuits composed a Directorium, first published in Rome in 1599. Although this official document relied on some preliminary versions, it was in effect the first book of its kind—an official set of instructions on how to lead people, under the inspiration of God, through a set of considerations leading to “reform of life.” In substance, the Directory does little more than paraphrase, expand, specify, and put into better order instructions that Loyola indicated in the book of the Exercises itself. A clear humanity characterizes the Directory, as when it states that the person who is to direct the Exercises should be “of sweet rather than of stern disposition” (V.2). The same care is operative as in the Exercises that “God be allowed to dispose of His own creature, according to the good pleasure of His divine Goodness” (V.5). In prayer, however, the safe and sure “Three Methods” receive the most explanation and commendation, although “other methods are [not] excluded, such as the Holy Ghost is wont to teach” (XXXVII.13). More significant, the Directory explicitly related the “weeks” of the Exercises to the three traditional “ways” of Christian spirituality—purgative, illuminative, and unitive. The Directory thereby suggests that the Exercises are more than a “recipe for conversion”; they are a recipe for ongoing conversion that leads to higher prayer and an ever more interiorized spirituality (XXXIX). It thus reflects the viewpoint of Claudio Acquaviva, the superior general of the Jesuits who authorized its publication.

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“Spiritual direction” is a second instrument that the early Jesuits developed to a high degree. This practice is, again, older than Christianity itself. But there is no doubt that it emerged with a new prominence in Catholic Europe in the sixteenth and especially in the seventeenth century— and precisely as a formalized and continuing relationship between the two persons involved. The book of the Exercises and, with it, the later Directory was the most important factors in promoting this development. Furthermore, the Constitutions of the Society insisted on the practice of spiritual direction for members of the order; thus, it easily became normative for those to whom the Jesuits ministered. Acquaviva published an important instruction in 1599 on the formation of spiritual directors in the Society, and in the next year he composed a small treatise on the subject that deftly combines experience with traditional teaching. We should not be surprised, therefore, that Rossignoli also insists on the indispensability of a magister idoneus. Álvarez de Paz, Luis de la Puente, and others do the same. Spiritual direction had by now become an essential component of Jesuit doctrine and practice. Some times given in the sacrament of penance, sometimes outside it, the practice of direction by the early Jesuits had a number of aims. It was meant to give comfort in time of temptation and to advise in cases of doubt. As we might expect in this period, it was also seen as a way to safeguard against illusion and against the suspect mysticism of the Alumbrados and their kind. But it was especially aimed at helping the individual “discern” hat “movements” were taking place within him and whence they came. All this was directed in the Jesuit system to greater intimacy with “the divine Goodness,” which in turn was somehow to be expressed in greater “service” of that same Goodness. The third instrument that the Jesuits adopted, modified, and then widely propagated was confraternities of various kinds, which they sometimes called sodalities. These associations had been an important part of late medieval life, so there were models available for Jesuits to use. In Italian cities like Florence, such confraternities seem particula1rly to have flourished in the fifteenth century; their members sometimes dedicated themselves to specific works of mercy like burying the dead or nursing the sick, and they met regularly for prayers and sermons. Many confraternities also sponsored banquets, festivals, and similar activities for their members, which played a part in the development of local culture. In Rome in 1563, a young Belgian Jesuit, Jan Leunis, founded the first such sodality for attending the Roman College, the original Jesuit educational institution in the city, later known as the Gregorian University. About two decades later Pope Gregory XIII recognized this organization

142 chapter eight and empowered its Roman headquarters to affiliate other sodalities willing to adhere to the rules approved by the Holy See. Sodalities quickly sprang up in Jesuit schools, where they became almost an integral part of the education offered there. An impressive body of spiritual literature was produced for the members of this organization who were principally young men of good families. This development was consonant with what the Jesuits were doing outside their schools. As early as 1547, Loyola had formed a group of devout and charitable men in Rome whom he brought together regularly and encouraged to engage in works of mercy. In Parma, the “Company of the Most Holy Name of Jesus” traced its beginnings back to the Jesuit Pierre Favre’s stay in the city in 1540. We still possess the program drawn up by Favre for these laymen: daily meditation, daily examination of conscience, daily Mass, weekly reception of the Eucharist, and regular engagement in works of mercy. This is roughly equivalent to what was later prescribed for sodalists in the schools. As sodalities spread outside schools in the seventeenth century, they generally drew their members from homogeneous groups, so that we find sodalities of students, of artisans, of nobles, of busi- nessmen, of sailors, of clergy, and on occasion of doctors, of lawyers, of judges—and even of prisoners in jails! Continuous though the Jesuits’ confraternities and sodalities were with their medieval paradigms, they also manifested some noteworthy differences. In general, the later institutions were more exclusively religious in character, more codified in their practices of devotion and of works of mercy, more likely to be based in some larger institution like a school, more securely placed under the direction of a priest. These were changes that were self-consciously introduced, not changes that spontaneously happened. Were they, however, changes for the better, as they were certainly meant to be? This question leads into the historiographical problem of how to fit early Jesuit spirituality into the larger context of the Counter-Reformation and how to see it as both reflection of that period in the history of Roman Catholicism and an agent within it. And that contex- tualization leads, in its turn, into the problem of how to evaluate early Jesuit spirituality. The problem is too complex to deal with here except in the broadest way. Some historians, in brief, judge that the Counter-Reformation tended to force religion into ever more codified and institutionalized forms that were deviations from an earlier, healthier tradition. These historians would see the strength of the older medieval confraternities, for instance, in their close relationship to family and local culture, whereas the new

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confraternities including the Jesuits’ sodalities, made piety more formalized and removed it from the context in which people actually lived their lives. The confraternities are for these historians, however, only one aspect of this larger pattern of institutionalization and centralization that began to dominate the religious practice of the Catholic church in the last years of the sixteenth century, after the close of the Council of Trent. In this viewpoint, the Counter-Reformation, for all its vitality and creativity, had finally a deleterious effect on religion and, therefore, on spirituality. Insofar as this criticism is justified and applied to the early Jesuits, it means that their efforts to create a spirituality that would enable persons to “find God in all things” became so structured, so institutionalized, and so transformed that it made those same persons strangers to their own culture and “natural kinships.” The problem raised by such criticisms of the Counter-Reformation is real, although we must recognize that most of the criticism has been directed against changes in popular forms of piety, especially among the rural poor, rather than against the more intellectualized, urban patterns of spiritual doctrine and practice that have been the subject of this chapter. Moreover, it is quite possible to admit that early Jesuit spirituality was susceptible of some of the bad effects attributed to the religious forms promoted by the Counter-Reformation without at the same time denying the many positive achievements of that spirituality. In fact, the formalizing elements in the spirituality of the Counter-Reformation simply reflected these same tendencies in society at large in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It was an age fascinated with “method”—in science, politics, and philosophy. We should not wonder that spiritual writings and practices felt these same pressures and evinced these same tendencies. Most important of all for assessing early Jesuit spirituality, however, is the fact that its primordial and most authoritative sources—the writings of Loyola and of his best interpreter, Nadal—do not give first rank to these formalistic tendencies. These two authors proposed, in fact, a spirituality that in its aims as well as in the strategies it proposed to achieve those aims tried to assure “liberty of spirit” and to foster in individuals an adaptation of divine inspiration to every condition of life. If Jesuit spirituality later in the century fell into more stylized modes of thought and presentation, this change was rather a product of the later culture in which it was immersed than an inevitable development of Ignatius of Loyola’s original legacy.

144 chapter eight

Bibliography

Sources All the texts of Loyola are published in the MHSJ. The correspondence and some of the other documents relating to his first companions are also published in that series, but other important texts are published elsewhere; some still await publication. On these editions, as well as translations into languages other than the original, see L. Polgar, Bibliographie.

Studies The following series and journals regularly present studies relating to Jesuit spirituality: Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu (AHSI), Christus, Geist und Leben, Manresa, Review for Religious, Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits (St. Louis), The Way.

Bangert, William V. A History of the Society of Jesus. St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1972. Brodrick, James. Saint Ignatius Loyola: The Pilgrim Years. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Cudahy, 1956. ——. The Origin of the Jesuits. London: Longmans, Green, 1940. ——. The Progress of the Jesuits. London: Longmans, Green, 1947. Conwell, Joseph F. Contemplation in Action: A Study of Ignatian Prayer. Spokane, WA: Gonzaga University Press, 1957. Donnelly, John Patrick. “Alonso Rodríguez’ Ejercicio: A Neglected Classic.” The Sixteenth Century Joumal 11/2 (1980): 16–24. Dudon, Paul. St. Ignatius Loyola. Translated by William J. Young. Milwaukee: Bruce, 1949. Egan, Harvey D. The Spiritual Exercises and the Ignatian Mystical Horizon. St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1976. Evennett, H. Outram. The Spirit of the Counter Reformation. Edited by John Bossy. Cambridge: University Press, 1968. Fessard, Gaston. La dialectique des Exercises Spirituels de Saint Ignace de Loyola. 2 vols. Paris: Julliard, 1956, 1966. Gilmour, Jean-François. Les écrits spirituels des premiers jésuites: Inventaire commenté. Rome: IHSI, 1961. Guibert, Joseph de. The Jesuits: Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice. Translated by William J. Young. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1964. Guichard, Alain. Les Jésuites: spiritualité et activités. Paris: B. Grasset, 1974. Iparraguirre, Ignacio. Orientaciones bibliográficas sobre San Ignacio de Loyola. Rome: IHSI, 1957. ——. Contemporary Trends in Studies on the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus. Translated by Daniel F.X. Meenan. St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1974. ——. Répertoire de spiritualité ignatienne (1556–1615). Rome: IHSI, 1961. Nicolau, Miguel. “Espiritualidad de la Compañía de Jesús en la España del siglo XVI,” Manresa 29 (1957): 217–236. ——. Jerónimo Nadal, S.I. (1507–1580): Sus obras y doctrinas espirituales. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1949. O’Malley, John W. “De Guibert and Jesuit Authenticity.” Woodstock Letters 95 (1966): 103–110. —— . “The Fourth Vow in Its Ignatian Context: A Historical Study,” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 15/1 (1983).

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—— . “The Jesuits, St. Ignatius, and the Counter Reformation: Some Recent Studies and Their Implications for Today,” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 14/1 (1982). —— . “To Travel to Any Part of the World: Jerome Nadal and the Jesuit Vocation,” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 15/5 (1983). Polgár, László. Bibliographie sur Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus. Vol. 1. Rome: IHSI, 1981. Rahner, Hugo. Ignatius the Theologian. Translated by Michael Barry. New York: Herder & Herder, 1968. ——. The Spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola. Translated by F.J. Smith. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1953. Ravier, André. Ignace de Loyola fonde la Compagnie de Jésus. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1973. Ruiz Jurado, Manuel. “La espiritualidad de la Compañía de Jesús en sus Congregaciones Generales,” AHSI 45 (1976): 233–290. Scaduto, Mario. L’epoca di Giacomo Lainez. 2 vols. Rome: IHSI, 1964, 1974. —— . “Il governo di san Francesco Borgia 1565–1572,” AHSI 41 (1972): 136–175. Schneider, Burkhart. “Die Kirchlichkeit des heiligen Ignatius von Loyola,” in Sentire Ecclesiam, 268–300. Edited by Jean Daniélou and Herbert Vorgrimler. Freiburg i/Br.: Herder, 1961. Toner, Jules. A Commentary on St. Ignatius’ Rules for the Discernment of Spirits. St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1982. Wulf, Friedrich, ed. Ignatius of Loyola: His Personality and Spiritual Heritage, 1556–1956. St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1977.

CHAPTER NINE

TO TRAVEL TO ANY PART OF THE WORLD: JERÓNIMO NADAL AND THE JESUIT VOCATION1

―Those who travel much seldom achieve holiness. Qui multum peregrinantur raro sanctificantur. The Imitation of Christ, I, 23, c.1418. ―It is according to our vocation to travel to any part of the world where there is hope of God’s greater service and the help of souls. Nostrae vocationis est diversa loca peragrare et vitam agere in quavis mundi plaga ubi maius Dei obsequium et animarum auxilium speratur. Rule 3, Summary of the Constitutions, 1590, excerpted from the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus [304]. ―They consider that they are in their most peaceful and pleasant house when they are constantly on the move, when they travel throughout the earth, when they have no place to call their own. Illam reputant esse quietissimam atque amoenissimam habitationem, si perpetuo peregrinari, orbem terrarum circumire, nullibi in suo habitare. Jerónimo Nadal, c.1565, Dialogus II [188], in Nadal 5:744.

Introduction

Historians agree that St. Ignatius inaugurated a new era in the history of religious orders in the Roman Catholic church when he founded the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits would be less monastic and more active than even the Dominicans and the Franciscans. They would not be bound by choir or by a distinctive religious garb, and they would set no limits on the place or circumstances of their ministries, so long as these were ordered to the greater glory of God. It is well known that other orders founded at about the same time as the Society had anticipated the Jesuits on some of these issues, although Ignatius seems to have been clearly aware of where the discrepancies between his order and these others lay. In any case, because of the

1 Originally published in Studies in Jesuit Spirituality 16/2 (1984) (St. Louis: Seminar on Jesuit Spirituality, 1984, n. 30). Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

148 chapter nine immense success the Society had in recruiting members, it gained the reputation for opening the new era of active orders in the church. In this article, I hope to adduce some new arguments to show why this reputation is deserved. I will draw upon the writings of Jerónimo Nadal and call attention to some of the strikingly bold statements he made about mobility in ministry and evangelization that until now have practically escaped notice and commentary.2 I intend to do nothing more than point the way to a source of inspiration that we have only begun to tap and that throws light on the Jesuit vocation. But, before we turn to Nadal’s writings, some background will be helpful. No matter how important Nadal may have been in confirming and promoting an orientation in the Society, Ignatius founded the order, and he founded it with active ministry as its goal. Ignatius not only governed the order in its earliest years and inspired it by his example, but he also actually articulated in his writings the new ideal of a religious order whose piety was unambiguously correlated with ministry. The founders of the Theatines, Barnabites, Somaschi, and Capuchins—the other major groups founded about the same time as the Society—have left us relatively little written documentation in comparison with the quantity and precision of the Constitutions and the twelve volumes of Ignatius’s correspondence. The ideal of a coordination of the salvation and perfection of oneself and of one’s neighbor underlies these Ignatian writings and is spelled out in hundreds of ways. Students of Ignatius have had little difficulty, moreover, in correlating the Constitutions with the Spiritual Exercises and in seeing the former as a specification and institutionalization of certain aspects of the latter. The exhortation in the Constitutions―to find God in all things, for instance, corresponds in a generic way with the― Contemplation for Obtaining Divine Love in the Exercises, as has been often pointed out. In other words, besides founding a new religious order, Ignatius was able to articulate his ideals and also his vision as to how those ideals could be translated into action. The church and the Society owe him an immense debt of gratitude for this accomplishment. For all that, there is a problem. Although Ignatius put his ideas down on paper, sometimes with considerable help from others, his style of writing is particularly his own. It is generally terse, matter-of-fact, understated

2 The fullest commentary on these texts of which I am aware is in Bertrand de Margerie, “El cuarto voto de la Compañía de Jesús, según Nadal,” Manresa 42 (1970): 359–376. My own conclusions from these texts regarding the object of the fourth vow differ from his, and his focus in the article is not the same as mine here.

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rather than overstated, and often his ideas, though clear, are only sparsely developed. If some of those ideas mark such a break with previous traditions of spirituality and religious life, as we believe, it is difficult to imagine that the writings of Ignatius alone could have mediated them effectively to his contemporaries. Those writings lack the rhetorical force needed to accomplish that task for a generation schooled to view spirituality in a different way. The problem would be acute for the Society too, of course. The members of the order who lived in Rome had direct contact with Ignatius, and his ideas and ideals could be impressed upon them in informal conversation and by the force of his personality. But for the members received into the Society in other parts of the world—there were about a thousand Jesuits by the time Ignatius died—the only medium would be the texts of the Formula of the Institute (1540), various sets of rules, the Exercises (printed in 1548), and, quite late in his life, the Constitutions (printed only in 1558).

The Role of Nadal

At this point Jerónimo Nadal (1507–1580) enters the picture.3 Born at Palma de Mallorca in 1507, he pursued courses of study at Alcalá and Paris, and was present in the latter city while St. Ignatius was there gathering his first companions. He refused at that time to have anything to do with the group and in 1537 went to Avignon, where he was eventually ordained a priest and promoted to doctor of theology. Sometime after his return to Mallorca, he felt an attraction to the new order, and in 1545, he journeyed to Rome to join it. He almost immediately won the special confidence of Ignatius, who soon confided to him the experimental promulgation of the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus. Nadal traveled throughout the nascent Society explaining the document, commenting on it, and answering questions concerning how it was to be interpreted. In an order without tradition, he contextualized and

3 The most thorough study of Nadal is by Miguel Nicolau, Jerónimo Nadal, S.I. (1507–1580): Sus obras y doctrinas espirituales (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1949). Nicolau summarized and updated his conclusions, with full bibliography, in his article on Nadal (1981) in the Dictionnaire de spiritualité 11:3–15. Easily accessible in English are the pertinent pages of Joseph de Guibert, The Jesuits: Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice, ed. George E. Ganss, trans. William J. Young (Chicago: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1964). The limitations of de Guibert’s approach, to which Nicolau’s is similar, will be pointed out later in this study.

150 chapter nine interpreted a text that otherwise had no firm hermeneutical principles for rendering it viable. He mediated Ignatius to all those members of the Society who had never met Ignatius and, we must assume, had some unclear ideas about the organization they had joined. His importance in the history of the order is, therefore, extraordinary. The documents he left us—exhortations, commentaries, reflections, instructions, meditations, dialogues, and letters—testify to the meaning of the Jesuit vocation as it was understood by a contemporary and trusted confidant of the founder. That is, in general, his significance. If we descend to details, that significance emerges as even more telling. First of all, he was known and recognized as an authentic interpreter of Ignatius’s mind. The assessment of his relationship to Ignatius made in 1553 by Juan Alfonso de Polanco, the saint’s personal secretary, is often cited: “He knows our father, Master Ignatius, well because he had many dealings with him, and he seems to have understood his spirit and comprehended our Institute as well as any- one I know in the Society.”4 In sending Nadal to propagate the Constitutions, Ignatius himself stated that―he altogether knows my mind and enjoys the same authority as myself.5 The saint could hardly have supported him more absolutely. Secondly, Nadal went about his assigned task with an energy and enthusiasm that carried him to an astounding number of Jesuit communities spread across Western Europe. A few years ago, a complete chronology of his life and travels was finally assembled and published.6 This chronology establishes with dramatic detail the generalizations about his travels and impact of which we have long been aware. In the spring of 1552, for instance, Ignatius handed him the task of pro- mulgating the Constitutions. To this end, Nadal set out almost immediately for Messina and Palermo in Sicily. The next year he returned to Rome to confer with Ignatius and receive further instructions, and then he left for Spain and Portugal. Lisbon, Évora, Coímbra, Córdoba, Alcalá, and Salamanca were some of the cities he visited—some of them several times within a year—to carry out his assignment. He was back in Rome by October, 1554. The next year he was off to Germany, but by midsummer

4 Epp. Ign. 5:109 (7 June 1553): “Tiene mucho conocimiento de N.P. Mtro. Ignatio, porque le ha tratado mucho, y pareze tiene entendido su spiritu, y penetrando, quanto otro que yo sepa en la Compania, el instituto della.” 5 Nadal 1:144 (10 April 1553): “qui mentem nostram omnino noverit, et nostra auctori- tate fungitur.” 6 Manuel Ruiz Jurado, “Cronología de la vida del P. Jerónimo Nadal S.I. (1507–1580),” AHSI 48 (1979): 248–276.

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returned to Italy where he continued his presentation of the Constitutions in Padua, Venice, Ferrara, Bologna, Florence, and other cities. The next year again he arrived in Spain. He returned to Rome on December 2, 1556, six months after the death of Ignatius. During the remaining fourteen years of his life, he continued to be regarded as an authority on the interpretation of the Constitutions, and he held important offices in the Society. In 1560, for example, Laínez sent him as visitor with full powers to the provinces of Spain, France, Germany, and Italy. An assignment like this again gave him direct contact with a huge number of Jesuits and provided him with ample occasion to speak about and interpret for his brethren the Institute of the Society. In brief, Nadal’s was a unique career in the Society that consistently placed him in positions to influence directly the way other Jesuits thought about themselves, their vocation, and the order they had joined. The third reason for Nadal’s significance is the style and content of his message of the Society. He was regarded by his contemporaries and by subsequent generations as a faithful interpreter of Ignatius, but he was, after all, an interpreter. This means that there are features in his works that we do not find in Ignatius, even if these features are nothing more than further developments of ideas found in more embryonic state in the saint. Here, as always, style and content are inextricably intertwined. In general, Nadal’s style is fuller, less reserved, more rhetorical than that of Ignatius. This evaluation is especially verified in his exhortations, a literary form that promotes the qualities I have described. Moreover, Nadal has some literary pretensions, as exemplified in the two long “dialogues” or “colloquies” he composed about the Society between 1562 and 1565.7 These pieces purport to be three-way conversations among a Jesuit, a Lutheran, and a neutral party, fashioned after the structure made famous in the Renaissance by Erasmus and other humanists. His Scholia in Constitutiones Societatis Jesu are sober and technical, whereas his spiritual reflections recently published in a volume entitled Orationis Observationes are quite personal and even disjointed. In other words, his writings evince a variety of literary forms, many of which favor a freedom of expression and provide occasion for the elaboration of ideas that are lacking in the works of Ignatius himself. These factors, plus the solid grounding in Aquinas and Bonaventure upon which his ideas were based, have won for him the title of “the theologian of Ignatian spirituality.”8

7 Nadal 5:526–774. 8 Nicolau, “Nadal,” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité 11:13.

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Nadal’s Teaching

What doctrines does this theologian advance that are distinctive and significant? What is the content of his theology that particularly merits our attention? Scholars have singled out two ideas within his generally traditional teaching on the spiritual life, which are rich and suggestive. The first of these is his doctrine of “contemplative in action.” The relationship of this now famous idea to the “Contemplation for Obtaining Divine Love” in the Exercises and to Ignatius’s exhortation “to find God in all things” in the Constitutions has been amply demonstrated. The second doctrine can claim no source in Ignatius’s teaching, although Nadal’s application of it had Ignatius principally in mind. This is the doctrine concerning “the grace of vocation” or “the grace of the founder.” In brief, the call to each religious institute has a specificity to it that is exemplified in the life and spiritual gifts of the founder. The founder thus exerts an exemplary causality upon the order that is considerably more than a proposal of a way of life. Something deeper, almost mystical, is involved. This idea surely strengthened Nadal’s hand as he moved about the Society interpreting Ignatius’s mind and spirit to the early Jesuits, and it deserves the attention it has received.9 My intention is not to dwell on these two doctrines, however, but on the “apostolic mobility” I mentioned earlier. There are a number of features of this doctrine of “apostolic mobility” that make it distinctively Nadal’s, but he always relates it to aspects of the Jesuit vocation clearly found in the Constitutions. That is to say, there is a solid Ignatian foundation for the ideas that Nadal expresses so boldly, and he generally presents them while discussing the three kinds of “houses” provided for in the Constitutions— houses of probation, colleges, professed houses—and indicates as well a relationship to that peculiarly Jesuit institution, the “fourth vow” of special obedience to the pope.

Some Pertinent Texts

The best way to enter into Nadal’s thinking on this matter is to consider in translation some of the more important texts. A summary of his teaching occurs, for instance, in one of his exhortations to the Spanish Jesuits, 1554:

9 On these two teachings, see the work by Nicolau and de Guibert cited above. The most thorough treatment in English is by Joseph F. Conwell, Contemplation in Action: A Study of Ignatian Prayer (Spokane: Gonzaga University, 1957).

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“It must be noted that in the Society there are different kinds of houses or dwellings. These are: the house of probation, the college, the professed house, and the journey—and by this last the whole world becomes our house.”10 This statement is for the sixteenth century so unconventional in its formulation of mobility for ministry that one can only wonder why students of Ignatian spirituality have not called more attention to it. Nadal has added a fourth type of “house” to the three found in the Constitutions, and he then equates that house with “the world.” This formulation cannot be dismissed as a momentary lapse into hyperbole, for Nadal returns to the idea on a number of occasions with even greater insistence and elaboration. Any ambiguity that might be attached to the Latin “habitatio” is dismissed when in various Spanish texts he equates the term with “casa.” In an exhortation at Alcalá in 1561, he states, for instance, after the usual listing of houses of probation, colleges, and professed houses: “There are missions, which are for the whole word, which is our house. Wherever there is need or greater utility for our ministries, there is our house.”11 In the Spanish text the word “missions” appears as the equivalent for the Latin “peregrinationes.” Both words are difficult to translate into English with all the nuance they should convey. “Journey” is the rendering for which as a rule I reluctantly settle, but that rendering must be understood as bearing with it the idea of pilgrimage, with its hardships, depriva- tions, and spiritual goals, and the idea of mission or being commissioned, with ministry as its purpose. Thus “journey,” “pilgrimage,” and “mission” become, in practice, synonyms. Moreover, an element has appeared in this statement that was missing in the first: the need for our ministries. It is that element that prompts Nadal to link the idea to the fourth vow, as he almost invariably does. He develops these relationships in his “Annotations to the General Examen,” 1557. Nadal does not use the terms “Apostles” and “apostolic” in a casual sense simply to indicate ministries, but with the understanding that in his day the Society was recovering an aspect of the primitive church that was especially its own, as I will attempt to show. For the moment,

10 Nadal 5:54: “Notandum diversa esse in Societate mansionum seu habitationum genera. Est enim domus probationis, collegium, domus professorum, peregrinatio; et hac ultima totus mundus nostra fit habitatio.” 11 Ibid., 469–470: “Ay missiones, que es por todo el mundo, y es nuestra casa. Donde ay necessidad o más utilidad de nuestros ministerios, aí es nuestra casa.”

154 chapter nine however, let us consider other texts in which these powerful ideas are expressed. For instance, in another exhortation at Alcalá, 1561, he says: There are the houses of the professed, where the ministries of the Society for the help of souls are exercised. Is there more? Yes, the best: the “missions” on which the pope or superior sends us, so that for the Society the whole world will become its house; and thus it will be with the divine grace.12 There is a sober statement of the same idea in his commentary on the Constitutions (VII.1 [603]): “When they are dispersed to any part of Christ’s vineyard.” This dispersion of the professed and coadjutors will indeed take place in the founding of the professed houses, and also of colleges and houses of probation, in important cities as well as in large and populated towns. But we must always look to and strive for that great goal of the Society, which is not only that Ours live in our houses and from them come to the aid of the city or town or even the nearby countryside, but that the professed and coadjutors be engaged in journeys that are undertaken by a commission either from the supreme pontiff or from our superiors. They do this so that help might be brought to souls wherever they are found—wherever and whenever there is need for spiritual aid, whether we are sent to idolaters, to Mohammedans, to heretics, or to Christians who are perishing or in danger because of a lack of ministers or because of their neglect.13 The idea returns in this second dialogue (1562–1565): These are the places: houses of probation, where the novices are trained and tested; the colleges, where the humanities are studied; the professed house, where the professed along with the spiritual and temporal coadjutors live and from which they engage in all the ministries of the professed Society and direct all their energies to the salvation and perfection of souls. But the

12 Ibid., 364–365: “Ay cassas de professos, donde se exercitan los ministerios donde de la Compañía para el ayuda de las almas. ¿Queda más? Sí, lo mejor, las missiones a do embía el Papa o el superior; que a la Compañía todo el mundo le a de ser casa, y así será con la gracia divina.” 13 Scholia in Constitutiones S. I., ed. Manuel Ruiz Jurado (Granada: Facultad de Teología, 1976), 175: “DUM DIVIDUNTUR PER CHRISTI VINEAM. Haec distributio professorum, et coadiutorum fiet quidem ad domos professorum fundandas, vel etiam collegia vel probationum domos in primariis civitatibus, vel etiam magnis et frequentibus oppidis, tamen ad finem illum magnum Societatis semper spectandum, et contendendum erit, qui non tantum est, ut nostri in domibus habitent, et inde civitatem vel oppidum, vel etiam finiti- mos pagos iuvent, sed ut peregrinationibus professi, et coadiutores exerceantur, quae ex missione, vel Summi Pontificis vel Superiorum nostrorum suscipiuntur, ut subsidium animabus feratur ubiubi, quacumque occasione, quacumque causa auxilio spiritus opus erit, sive ad ido [lo] latras mittamur, sive ad Mahometanos, vel haereticos, sive ad Christianos, qui penuria pastorum, vel negligentia pereant, vel periclitentur.”

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final place is the most glorious and ample, for these men are not called that they might help souls only from their houses; their special intent and goal is to seek out everywhere in the world those whom they might gain for Christ. Therefore, they ought always to be engaged in journeyings and missions, to whatever places either the supreme pontiff or their general might send them for the sake of ministry.14 Perhaps Nadal’s most eloquent and effective statement of this ideal occurs, emphatically, at the conclusion of that same dialogue: That is altogether the most ample place and reaches as far as the globe itself. For wherever they can be sent in ministry to bring aid to souls, that is the most glorious and longed-for “house” for these theologians. For they know the goal set before them: to procure the salvation and perfection of all men. They understand that they are to that end bound by that fourth vow to the supreme pontiff: that they might go on these universal missions for the good of souls by his command, which by divine decree extends throughout the whole church. They realize that they cannot build or acquire enough houses to be able from nearby to run out to the combat. Since that is the case, they consider that they are in their most peaceful and pleasant house when they are constantly on the move, when they travel throughout the earth, when they have no place to call their own, when they are always in need, always in want—only let them strive in some small way to imitate Christ Jesus, who had nowhere on which to lay his head and spent all his years of preaching in journey.15

14 Nadal 5:673: “Loca autem sic sunt: domus probationum, ubi novitii instituuntur ac probantur. Collegia, ubi de studiis literarum praecipue agitur. Domus professa, ubi professi et coadiutores spirituales cum suis temporalibus habitent, unde exerceant omnia Societatis professae ministeria et omnem suam operam conferant ad salutem animarum et perfectionem. Reliquus est locus ille praeclarissimus atque amplissimus; non enim sunt hi homines vocati, ut tantum ex domibus animas iuvent, sed est praecipua eorum animi intentio ac finis, ut ubique terrarum quaerant quos Christo lucrifaciant; itaque perpetuo esse debent in peregrinationibus et missionibus, quocumque illos miserit vel Summus Pontifex vel eorum Praepositus in ministerium.” 15 Ibid., 773–774: “Ille est locus longe amplissimus et tam late patens quam orbis univer- sus; quocumque enim in ministerium ad opem animabus ferendam mitti possunt, haec est horum theologorum habitatio praestantissima adque optatissima; sciunt enim esse sibi finem praestitutum, ut salutem omnim animarum procurent et perfectionem. Intelligunt proterea se voto illo quarto Pontifici Maximo esse obstrictos, ut universales missiones in animarum subsidium obeant ex illius imperio, quod est divinitus in universam Ecclesiam constitutum. Vident se tot domus vel aedificare vel obtinere non posse, ut ex propinquo excurrere ad pugnam possint. Haec quum ita sint, illam reputant esse quietissimam atque amoenissimam habitationem, si perpetuo peregrinare, orbem terrarium circumire, nullibi in suo habitare, semper esse egenos, semper mendicos, modo minima aliqua ex parte enitantur Christum Iesum imitari, qui non habebat ubi caput reclinaret, et totum tempus suae praedicationis in peregrinationibus exegit.” See also the important statements, 5:442–444, and 4:178–180.

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A Brief Commentary

These texts can stand on their own as inspiring statements of the zeal for ministry that should animate the members of the Society. Implied in them is the supposition that the security and spiritual comfort that fixed dwellings provide, important though these features were in Nadal’s mind, must be subordinated to a call to ministry that in its urgency will carry Jesuits to any place or any situation, no matter what the danger or hardship, where human beings of whatever religion or condition are in spiritual need. Although these statements find a firm foundation in the orientation Ignatius gave to the Society, they surpass in the boldness of their articulation anything Ignatius said in this regard of which we have record. There are other elements explicitly or implicitly contained in them, however, that require further elaboration. First of all, they place the fourth vow of special obedience to the pope firmly in the context of “mission for ministry.” Other documents from the early Society do the same, as I pointed out in an earlier number of these Studies, but none do this with greater zest than these statements from Nadal.16 The pope is viewed as “universal pastor” of the “universal church,” who has as his pastoral ministry the care of all souls, especially those who have no one else to care for them. In his second dialogue, Nadal actually designates the pope as “the bishop of the universal church.”17 It is this aspect of the “Petrine ministry”

16 See my “The Fourth Vow in Its Ignatian Context: A Historical Study,” Studies in the Spirituality of the Jesuits 15/1 (1983). In that number of Studies, I comment upon several articles by J.M. García de Madariaga relating to the fourth vow. Father Madariaga has meanwhile published a new article on this subject that has a section dealing specifically with Nadal, “La extensión objectiva del 4. voto en las bulas del tiempo de San Ignacio,” Manresa 55 (1983): 15–40, esp. 34–36. He does not cite or utilize the texts to which I call attention here. In the light of them, especially, I am afraid that I still remain unconvinced by Father Madariaga’s line of argumentation. John Sheets, too, in “The Fourth Vow of the Jesuits,” Review for Religious 42 (1983): 518–529, has taken issue with the position which was proposed in Studies for January, 1983. His criticisms are not convincing, in my opinion, nor is the alternative clear that he advances. (He rather inaccurately represents my position on some crucial point, I might add, especially 520–522.) Father Sheets’s concern to assign to the vow as much spiritual relevance as possible is appropriate, but I have to disagree with him on what he seems to propose as the content of that relevance. In his article, moreover, Father Sheets relies heavily on assertion, and he takes terms out of their historical context; while holding my methodology “suspect” (522), he never clarifies or justifies his own. In any case, I believe that this present number of Studies on Nadal, which was already at the publishers several months before Father Sheets’s article appeared, confirms and further articulates the interpretation of the vow that I originally argued. 17 Nadal 5:755: “Universalis enim Ecclesiae cum summus Pontifex sit divina institutione Episcopus.”

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that Jesuits want to share by means of their special vow. That vow is not a generic expression of “loyalty to the pope,” as is sometimes stated or implied, but an expression of dedication to a worldwide and uncondi- tioned ministry. To interpret the vow in the former sense eventually leads to rendering the restriction “circa missiones” superfluous by in effect evis- cerating it of any restrictive meaning.18 The fourth vow thus emerges as a contrast to the monastic vow of stability. Whatever order St. Ignatius founded, it was not a monastic one. His adamant refusal to obligate Jesuits to office in choir seems to have been for him a strong negative symbol of what he had in mind. The fourth vow is a positive expression of the same ideal: a commitment to ministry and an indication of the “universal vineyard” in which that ministry was to be exercised. The Constitutions provide, in [603], for situations in which Jesuits would themselves discover where a greater need for their ministry might arise. But Jesuits were to have enough abnegation of their own wills and judgment to subordinate them to the larger vision of the needs of the church that their general or the pope might have. In this fact, it seems to me, we find the intrinsic correlation among the three purposes of the fourth vow mentioned in the bull Exposcit debitum: “our greater devotion in obedience to the Apostolic See, greater abnegation of our own wills, and surer direction of the Holy Spirit.” Although these three purposes may not be quite synonymous, they represent three component parts of a single process that leads to the most effective choice of ministries. When St. Ignatius spoke of the fourth vow as “nuestro principio y principal fundamento,”19 he could hardly have been referring to some general esteem for the papacy, which he surely had, but to something that was more obviously operative at the center of the Jesuit vocation. He was referring, it would seem, to that commitment to ministry that appears on practically every page of the twelve volumes of his correspondence. Our “first principle and foundation” is not loyalty to the papacy, but a commitment to ministry any place in the world where there is hope of God’s greater service; a mission from the pope, the “universal pastor,” is the most dramatic and peremptory expression of that commitment. Nadal’s commentary on the houses of the Society and their relationship to the vow confirm this interpretation of Exposcit debitum as well as of the Ignatian texts.

18 This is the direction in which de Margerie’s line on arguments seems to lead, “El cuarto voto,” esp. 369–373. 19 Constitutions [162].

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Secondly, the documents from Nadal provide a wider context in which to understand his doctrine of “contemplative in action.” There is here a specification of “action” as restless journey and seeking. The “contemplative” that is the Jesuit must learn to sustain his union with God not only in the distractions that might trouble him even in the regulated discipline of a religious house, but also in those situations that almost by definition are synonymous with distraction and dissipation of spirit—in travel and journey. Nadal never meant to deny, of course, that many Jesuits would spend all their lives in the regular houses of the Society, or that community would be the place for rest and spiritual reflection even for those “on mission.”20 He speaks in fact at great length of the discipline of our houses and assumes that they will be the regular base for ministry. Nonetheless, in travels and journeys, paradoxically, the Jesuits according to him find “their most peaceful house.” St. Ignatius was fondly attached to The Imitation of Christ, which was in circulation for almost a century before he was born. It is the only book besides the Gospel that he specifically recommended for persons making the Spiritual Exercises.21 His style of piety, however, especially as interpreted by Nadal, marks a distinctive break with the more privatized and retiring spirituality characteristic of that great work. The Imitation used the word “to travel” (peregrinari) in a pejorative sense, as incompatible with a deep interior life. “Those who travel much seldom achieve holiness” (I.23). Nadal rejoices in the word, and finds in it an expression of what is most germane to the Jesuit vocation. The word “peregrinari” has, of course, deep roots in the tradition of the Society. Ignatius in his Autobiography consistently refers to himself as “the pilgrim.” The word aptly expresses the course his life took from the time of his conversion until he was finally established as general of the Society in Rome, as the article by John Olin several years ago reminded us.22 The story of the first Jesuits is filled with accounts of their many journeys. We now possess an excellent study of this aspect of their lives in the article by Mario Scaduto, “La strada e i primi Gesuiti.”23 Scaduto confirms that for these men the words “journey,” “pilgrimage,” and “mission” meant

20 See, e.g., Nadal 5:470. 21 See Spiritual Exercises [100]. 22 “The Idea of Pilgrimage in the Experience of Ignatius Loyola,” Church History 48 (1979): 387–397. 23 AHSI 40 (1971): 323–390.

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practically the same thing;24 this fact throws considerable light on the meaning of the fourth vow, which specifically “concerns missions.” Nadal collaborated with Polanco in formulating the Regulae peregrinantium, published by Laínez when he was superior general.25 In this context, the pilgrimage that Ignatius prescribed for the novices in the Constitutions emerges as more than just one “test” among many that might have been chosen; it symbolizes a central feature of the Jesuit life. Thirdly, the apostolic journeys by Jesuits are especially directed to the benefit of those who have no others to help them. The emphasis that Nadal gives this group is consistent in him and characteristic. True, Ignatius stated in a declaration ([622a]) in Part VII of the Constitutions that “that part of the vineyard ought to be chosen that has greater need,” but Nadal subtly modifies this norm and then endows it with a prominence that is lacking in Ignatius. Nadal’s boldest formulation occurs in the personal reflections he wrote for himself in Rome shortly after the death of Ignatius: “The Society has the care of those souls for whom either there is nobody to care or, if somebody ought to care, for whom the care is negligent. This is the reason for the founding of the Society. This is its strength. This is its dignity in the church.”26 Finally, Nadal had an especially sharp and historically defined sense of the “apostolic” character of Jesuit ministry. Terms like “apostle,” “apostolic,” and “apostolate” are used so frequently and broadly today, usually as synonyms for “minister” or “ministry,” that they are almost banal. We only with difficulty recover the freshness of their connotation for Nadal. For him they relate directly to his understanding of the “primitive church” and to his vision of how the Society images that church in the dynamism of its ministries and zeal for evangelization. The attempt to imitate the “vita apostolica” has a long history in Christianity, but took on new significance from about the twelfth century onwards as different individuals and groups began to break with the monastic ideal of Christian perfection exemplified in great systems like Cluny. Ideas about what the “life of the Apostles” was like varied considerably, due in large measure to the unsophisticated historical sense that the Middle Ages possessed. The “Spiritual Franciscans” in the fourteenth

24 Ibid., 327. 25 Ibid. 26 Nadal, Orationis Observationes, ed. Miguel Nicolau in MHSJ (Rome: IHSI, 1964), 126 [316]: “Societas curam habet earum animarum de quibus vel nullus est qui curet vel, si quis debat curare, is negligenter curat. Haec est ratio institutionis Societatis, haec virtus, haec dignitas in Ecclesia.” See also Nadal 4:696.

160 chapter nine century, for instance, said that apostolic life consisted essentially in absolute poverty. Giles of Viterbo, general of the order of Hermits of Saint Augustine from 1507 until 1518, envisioned the Apostles as living like hermits, since that was supposedly the ancient pattern of life followed by the members of his own order.27 By the middle of the sixteenth century a somewhat more objective picture of the early church had been acquired. Moreover, the discovery of the New World, the urgency of the Turkish threat to Europe, and the defection into Protestantism of much of northern Europe awakened a new awareness of the need for evangelization. All these factors seem to have had an impact on Nadal, so that he in effect defines “apostle” as one sent on mission. When he sees the Society as “apostolic,” he has that specific understanding of apostolicity in mind. There are several passages in which he discusses the “apostolic” nature of the Society. Like so many of his contemporaries, he seems to have had a sense that the primitive church was in some way being reborn in his own day.28 In any case, he succinctly conveys the essence of his thinking on the matter in a reflection composed, again, in Rome within a year after the death of Ignatius: Our vocation is similar to the vocation and training of the Apostles: first, we come to know the Society, and then we follow; we are instructed; we receive our commission to be sent; we are sent; we exercise our ministry; we are prepared to die for Christ in fulfilling those ministries.29 A Pauline paradigm often seems to underlie Nadal’s thinking about the “apostolic” character of the Society. For Nadal, Paul was the Apostle par excellence, and his journeyings seem to have been the pattern Nadal had in mind when he spoke about them in the Society. He wrote his most direct and suggestive statement in this regard in Rome at about the same time as the one quoted above about the apostolic nature of the Society: “Peter signifies firmness and direction in our Society, and Paul signifies for us its ministry; and both of them, as the princes of the church, profit us.”30

27 See my Giles of Viterbo on Church and Reform (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 143–146. 28 See, e.g., the variant reading, Nadal 5:264. 29 Orationis Observationes, 138 [379]: “Vocationi et institutioni Apostolorum nostra vocatio similis; cognoscimus primum Societatem; deinde sequimur; 3o, docemur; 4o, accip- imus facultatem ut mittamur; 5o, mittamur; 6o, sumus in ministerio; 7o, pro Christo mori parati in obeundis ministeriis.” See also Nadal 5:126. 30 Orationis Observationes, 151 [41]: “Petrus firmitatem et directionem, Paulus nobis minsterium in Societate nostra significat, et adiuvat uterque ut ecclesiae Princeps.”

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There is more to what “Paul signifies for us,” however, than simply a ministry on the move. Surely suggested in Nadal’s writings in the intense zeal of Paul that knew no limits in the suffering and hardships it was willing to undergo “to gain souls for Christ.” Just as important, furthermore, is the mode of ministry that Nadal sees as preeminently proper to the Society. The ministry of the Society is, first and foremost, a “ministry of the word.” Nadal has left us a long exhortation from late in his life on the ministries of the Society in which he develops with considerable detail his ideas on the forms that ministry might take.31 He did not conceive the ministry of the word as restricted to sermons in church, but extended it to spiritual conversation, writing, teaching school, teaching catechism, lecturing on both sacred and profane subjects, directing persons in the Spiritual Exercises, and comforting prisoners and the dying. He even extends this ministry to the sacrament of penance, in which the confessor “softens the heart of the sinner and moves it by the word of God.”32 Thus, he would subsume this aspect of sacramental or liturgical ministry under a more inclusive heading and indicate that more is involved in it for the Jesuit than a ritual routine. In the Christian tradition, Paul is the Apostle who by his doctrine and example most conspicuously exemplifies the ideal of total dedication to the ministry of the word. Although the starting point for Nadal’s reflections on this form of Jesuit ministry is almost invariably the prominent statement on it is the bull Exposcit Debitum of Pope Julius III, he places that statement in a context that is notably “apostolic,” and imbues it with Pauline overtones. Enthusiasm in the sixteenth century for a recovery of “the authentic Paul” was not restricted to Protestantism, as we are sometimes led to believe. That enthusiasm was also operative, though with a different focus and appreciation, in Roman Catholicism, as Nadal’s writings show.

Conclusion

This brief excursus into the woks of Jerónimo Nadal validates with new evidence the conventional judgment of historians that the Society opened

31 Nadal 5:820–865. See also ibid., 125–126, 341–343, 665–666, 786–788. 32 Ibid., 5:787: “Tertium, audire confessionem et emollire cor peccatoris atque movere per verbum Dei.” See also ibid., 343.

162 chapter nine a new era of religious orders. I propose that further studies of this “theologian of Ignatian spirituality” will uncover other aspects of his teaching about the Jesuit vocation that will be as enlightening and challenging as I believe are the ones I have discussed and presented in these pages. Nadal’s importance for the Society can hardly be exaggerated, but he is not insignificant in an even broader context. Nadal, in his teaching on the “houses” of the Society, effected a distinctive break with the monastic tradition that had dominated thinking about religious life for at least a millennium. Insertion in the world rather than withdrawal from it is his ideal. “The world is our house.” He repeats that startling axiom with insistence. Moreover, Nadal’s emphasis on ministry of the word indicates a dis- tancing from the model of ministry and priesthood located almost exclusively in sacrament and liturgy that characterized the monastic tradition, though in this he simply represents a culmination of a development that began several centuries earlier. I know of no other writings in the history of Christian spirituality that so effectively highlight the ministerial dimen- sions of that spirituality and liken it so effectively to the “apostolic” nature of early Christianity. There is considerable discussion today in the church and in the Society about the meaning of priesthood. My own perception is that these discussions are often, probably unwittingly, operative on a model of priesthood reminiscent of the monastic tradition, that is, primarily sacramental and liturgical. After all, it might be argued, the difference between ordained and non-ordained is most obviously seen in that the former can celebrate the Eucharistic liturgy, whereas the latter may not. This is not the place to enter into this complex issue. But I think it is worth knowing that in the early Society priestly ministry was conceived more dynamically and much more broadly—with a leadership role that had as its precondition mobility to move into new and critical areas and an ability to articulate for all conceivable categories of persons what Christianity is all about. The ideal of service to those in need, wherever they are found and whoever they may be, emerges as the criterion of ministry for these new “apostles.” This is that ministry on the move, that ministry of the word, that ministry to all peoples that Nadal saw as the heart of the Jesuit vocation. One final question remains: Why is it that the texts I have adduced have remained practically unnoticed, as far as I can tell, for 400 years? Several responses suggest themselves. The first is that many of the documents from which I drew many of these texts were not critically edited until the

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past twenty years. That is an excuse that is also somewhat of an indict- ment; our interest in our history is not as fervent and searching as it might be. But I think there is another reason. Historians cannot find in historical documents what they have been trained to exclude from consideration. The history of the historiography of Christian spirituality has yet to be written. It seems clear, nonetheless, that that historiography has generally been controlled by questions restricted to “spiritual” subjects—prayer, silence, mortification, ascetical practices, spiritual direction, and the like. Effective though Nadal’s correlation of spirituality with ministry may have been in the early Society, a more monastic tradition reasserted itself. This meant that a “monastic” tradition has often been operative in the search through even Jesuit sources, so that answers to only “monastic” questions emerge. Joseph de Guibert’s book on the history of Jesuit spirituality, for all its merits, is an example of this approach.33 In the pages, he devotes to Nadal, one searches in vain for any suggestion of the ideas to which I call attention here. It is a book on Jesuit spirituality that never mentions the names of Matteo Ricci or Roberto de Nobili. Nor does it mention the Reductions in Paraguay. De Guibert died over forty years ago, and we have made much progress since then, due in part to his labors. But we still must be on our guard to prevent scholarship from falling into the fallacy that would treat the spirituality of the Society of Jesus independent of its commitment to ministry. Scholarship, like all human endeavors, will of course always have its limitations and blind spots. In an organization like the Society, however, there is another factor that can sometimes act as a supplement and corrective to it. That factor is the understanding we derive from our own experience of the Society—the ideals we receive from older Jesuits when we enter the order, the words and deeds of our companions through the years, and our knowledge of how the Society de facto operates and the basis on which it makes decisions. This “living tradition” has its own problems and limitations, but it is a considerable help in pointing the way to what our spiritual heritage means.

33 See my “De Guibert and Jesuit Authenticity,” Woodstock letters 95 (1966): 103–110, now reprinted in my Rome and the Renaissance: studies in culture and religion (London: Variorum Reprints, 1981), chapter xiv. On a related issue, see Marjorie O‘Rourke Boyle, “Angels Black and White: Loyola’s Spiritual Discernment in Historical Perspective,” Theological Studies 44 (1983): 241–257.

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A unique feature of the 32nd General Congregation, 1974–1975, was that it tried to capture and formulate something of that living tradition in its document Jesuits Today, as the very title indicates. After I had read Nadal and practically finished this article, I thought I recalled some lines from Jesuits Today that sounded similar to his ideas. When I picked up the document, this is what I found [14]: “A Jesuit, therefore, is essentially a man on a mission: a mission that he receives immediately from the Holy Father or from his own religious superiors, but ultimately from Christ himself, the one sent by the Father. It is by being sent that the Jesuit becomes a companion of Jesus.” Since the above essay was first written, the 33rd General Congregation has met and taken up the same theme in its one major document, entitled “Companions of Jesus Sent into Today’s World” (Socii Iesu in Mundum Hodiernum Missi). Both these Congregations faithfully, though unwittingly, echo Nadal’s teaching on what it means to be a Jesuit. The tradition has remained vital through the centuries.

CHAPTER TEN

SOME DISTINCTIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF JESUIT SPIRITUALITY IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY1

We often hear that Saint Ignatius and his companions were attuned to their times, and that that is the reason for the growth that the Society of Jesus attained in comparison with similar groups like the Barnabites and the Theatines founded just a few years earlier. When we examine the Society against other spiritualities current in the sixteenth century, what first strikes us, in fact, is the many points that it had in common with them, even appropriated from them, as I hope to show. What were the reasons, then, that almost immediately propelled the spirituality of the Society on a course that was distinctive and, for the most part, more widely received? We must first of all take account of certain factors that were extrinsic to Jesuit spirituality, and only then can we leave them behind. I mean things like the international character and experience of the original seven companions—Iberians, by and large, who studied in Paris and then settled with Rome as their headquarters. I mean the degrees from the University of Paris that they all held and which gave them a status of which they were proud. I mean the fact that their leader, Saint Ignatius, lived for almost a generation after the Society was founded and was able to give it direction during those crucial years. I mean the mix of social classes represented by the original band. I mean the entré that Ignatius’s social position gave him to members of the house of Hapsburg, related by marriage to the pope, Paul III, who first approved the Society in 1540. These were important factors in the beginning, but they do not get to the heart of the matter. The Jesuits had something more intrinsic, something distinctive, as my title indicates, that accounts for their success. Difficult though it is to do so in such a complex matter, I shall try to put my finger on some characteristics of that distinctiveness. It will come as no surprise that the first and most basic source and symbol of Jesuit distinctiveness was a book, the Spiritual Exercises. The Exercises was not only a

1 Originally published in Jesuit Spirituality: A Now and Future Resource, edited by John W. O’Malley, John W. Padberg, and Vincent T. O’Keefe (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1990), 1–20. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

166 chapter ten book that contained spiritual teaching, but it also contained in embryo the basic design for Jesuit spirituality and ministry. Although there were some vague earlier precedents, the Exercises founded one of Catholicism’s most fundamental instruments of ministry, the retreat. That in itself was no mean accomplishment, but the importance of the Exercises reaches much further. Before I elaborate on that matter, however, I must insist that Jesuit spirituality in the sixteenth century cannot be reduced to the Exercises, even though grounded in them. It was also expressed in the vast quantity of writings that the first Jesuits produced-first of all the seemingly limitless amount of their correspondence (the extant correspondence of Ignatius alone exceeds that of any other sixteenth-century figure), the Constitutions and Ignatius’s so-called Autobiography, the many exhortations and other documents for internal consumption produced by Jerónimo Nadal, the memoranda, chronicles, and pastoral aids of Juan Alfonso de Polanco, the works on piety and ministry by more obscure figures like Gaspar Loarte and Cristóbal de Madrid, the catechisms by Canisius, and other works by other authors. The fact that very little of this literature was published until almost four centuries after the death of the authors accounts for the sometimes confused, sometimes erroneous, ideas we have inherited about the early spirituality of the Society. Moreover, unless one is, like myself, addicted to such materials, most of it is not exactly scintillating reading. This explains why most of what has been written in recent years about Jesuit spirituality is based almost exclusively on the Exercises, with an occasional sideways glance at the Constitutions. The almost overwhelming mass of this documentation discourages all but the most intrepid and makes it difficult to discover a coherent pattern. I let myself be guided by certain words or phrases that recur so insistently as to indicate something of great concern. We are used to the idea, for instance, that “the greater glory of God” is one of these. Since it is so familiar, I will not dwell on it but call your attention to three others that are less grandiloquent but perhaps even more prevalent. They are, in order of ascending frequency, “our way of proceeding,” “consolation,” and “helping souls.” Each of these terms, like the Exercises themselves, are condensed symbols of elements central to Jesuit spirituality in the sixteenth century. It would be only a slight exaggeration to state that the last two occur explicitly or implicitly on almost every page of the early documents. Just the listing of the three of them together suggests the intimate and intrinsic

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relationship, absolutely basic, between Jesuit spirituality and the practice of ministry. We perhaps get our best idea of what these terms encapsulate by first looking at other spiritualities that were prevalent in the sixteenth century, indicating actual or possible influences on the first Jesuits or, when that is not possible, parallels and divergences, and then, finally, returning to the particular synthesis or mix that the early Jesuits created. The danger in such a procedure is that we might seem to discount the most important factor of all, the religious experience of Ignatius himself. One cannot insist enough that that experience is the touchstone for all subsequent Jesuit spirituality, codified in a demysticized way in the Exercises. Let it be said once and for all: the respect Ignatius had for his own experience imparted to him respect for the religious experience of others. In some ways, it seems to me, this is the hallmark of Jesuit spirituality and ministry. Nonetheless, Ignatius’s experience was filtered to him through the categories that his age and culture offered him and was further articulated through the spiritual and pastoral instruments that were at hand that provided elements out of which to construct a new synthesis. Without any doubt the Devotio Moderna was the movement that in general and particular had the most influence on Ignatius and the first companions. Perhaps better said, that is the influence that can be most clearly and specifically identified. As we know, that amorphous movement began in the Low Countries in the late fourteenth century, flourished there in the fifteenth, and from there it had spread by the beginning of the sixteenth to certain devout circles elsewhere in Europe. Ignatius first encountered it in a significant way with the Benedictine monks of Montserrat and at the same time or shortly thereafter at Manresa in the most widely circulated document of the movement, the Imitation of Christ. Whether he and his companions realized it or not, they further encountered it at the University of Paris in the discipline of the Collège de Montaigu, where Ignatius first studied, and even in the so-called modus parisiensis, that peculiar blend of content and pedagogical methods that the Jesuits adopted and adapted for their educational enterprise. The modus parisiensis, despite what the term implies, fundamentally originated not in Paris but in the Low Countries with the Devotio. (Those early Jesuits who had already studied at Alcalá would have encountered the modus parisiensis there as well.) We know for certain one thing that Ignatius learned at Montserrat— the general confession of devotion, i.e., that moral inventory that does not look so much to absolution from sin, which presumably has been accomplished in other confessions, as to deeper sorrow so as to begin a new way

168 chapter ten of life. The origins of this devout exercise are extremely obscure. It probably originated in the late fifteenth century with the Devotio, to which Abbot Cisneros was deeply indebted for his reform of the monastery of Montserrat just a short while before Ignatius’s arrival there. The Abbot obliged the novices to spend almost two weeks preparing for that confession before they made their profession. Ignatius, guest of the monastery in 1522, did a modified version of it in three days. At present, we know of no other place besides Montserrat where it was practiced. Ignatius and the first Jesuits popularized the idea, and, as we know, it is the culmination of the first conversion that the Exercises envision before they move onto the further conversion prompted by the Second Week and confirmed by the last two. Conversion of heart was, of course, not exactly a new idea in Christianity. What the general confession did, however, was to provide a mode in which it could be articulated, ritualized, and blessed. It gave it a “way of proceeding.” In their ministry and spirituality, the first Jesuits were mad with the graces that the sacrament of Penance offered, but they almost inevitably became entangled in the juridical and casuistical morass of late-medieval speculation about it. Some few scholars today are beginning to recognize the positive side of medieval and Counter-Reformation casuistry. There can be no doubt, however, that the juridical model underlying much speculation about the sacrament could engender in both confessor and penitent the anxiety and guilt that the sacrament was, in fact, supposed to relieve and could blunt or destroy the consolation that the Jesuits (and others) insisted was the principal fruit of the sacrament. Under normal circumstances, the general confession bypassed those speculations and let both confessor and penitent deal more freely with the movements of the heart, with consolations and desolations. Its important place in early Jesuit ministry gives us insight into the kind of conversion and the mode of sealing it that was the foundation of their spirituality for themselves and others. It is significant that the first book on the spiritual life written by a Jesuit, Gaspar Loarte’s Esercitio della vita spirituale, published in 1557, begins with a chapter on this kind of general confession. The book was intended not for the elite but for lowly folk, even for the illiterate, to whom, Loarte suggests, it could be read by a more fortunate neighbor. Probably at Montserrat, surely from the Imitation at Manresa, Ignatius learned the benefits of frequent communion. Frequent communion had been proposed by leading theologians like Jean Gerson in the early fifteenth century. To say the least, it had not caught on even in most

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convents and monasteries, where generally five or six times a year was considered a safe norm. Reception of communion as often as once a week or more became distinctive of Jesuit spirituality and ministry, for which they suffered, as we all know, a great deal of grief from the very earliest days. Others at about the same time were taking up the cause, but none with such insistence and notoriety as the Jesuits. The Jesuits for the most part had nothing new to say about the benefits to be derived from receiving the Eucharist. If you want to know what they thought, read the pertinent chapters from the fourth book of the Imitation. Their distinctiveness lay, rather, in two other areas. First, they insisted that these benefits be frequently received as nourishment for one’s ongoing spiritual pilgrimage. That is obvious. The second is more subtle but perhaps more important. In order to promote frequent communion, they had to overcome the “worthiness- unworthiness” arguments that medieval spirituality and theology had produced concerning reception of the Eucharist. It is not too much to say that these arguments at least flirted with Pelagianism and Semi- Pelagianism and also with some curious views, in particular, about human sexuality. As you know, some theologians proposed that even married persons could not receive the Eucharist if they had had intercourse the night, or even the week, before. The basic Jesuit response to the unworthiness line was simplicity itself: you come to the Eucharist not because you are sated but because you are hungry, not because you are warm but because you are cold, not because you are worthy (no one is) but because you are unworthy. We are familiar today with such reasoning. What we must remember about it, especially in the context of the sixteenth century, is its anti- Pelagian core. The first Jesuits were restrained in speaking about sexual issues. By and large, they seem to have accepted the received wisdom on it, but at least one of them strove to dispel some taboos. I must quote for you an outspoken passage from the outspoken Nicolás Bobadilla, 1551: “Some theologians give another reason for abstaining from the Eucharist, that is, nocturnal pollution—about which they philosophize with a thousand distinctions. Well, my opinion is that neither noctural nor diurnal pollution, neither while asleep nor while awake, neither in legitimate matri- mony nor in lust outside it, neither anything mortally sinful nor venially is an obstacle to communion, provided the person has repented any sin and confessed it. Forgiveness for sin does not, indeed, happen over a period of time but is instantaneous.”

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In that same work, a broadside against worthiness doctrines, Bobadilla insists on the right of the faithful to receive communion as often as they want. He was specifically asked if a pastor might legitimately refuse communion to lay persons who wanted to receive daily. For the sixteenth century, and perhaps even more for our own, his response was daring. Nobody, no pastor, no bishop, no pope could deprive the faithful of the “liberty to communicate”—libertatem communicandi. As you can see, the issue of frequent communion had ramifications for spirituality that might at first escape us. The “freedom of the Christian” was Luther’s special theme, but the Jesuits too had a version of it. The Devotio Moderna also provided the elements for the methods of “contemplation” and application of the senses that we find in the Exercises, and it promoted daily examination of conscience. Thus, we see that it promoted method or procedure in the spiritual life, descending to concrete details of “how-to.” If we view it large, moreover, it had other elements that correlate with early Jesuit spirituality, even if we cannot be certain about the degree of direct impact. Although the Devotio emphasized external discipline and tended to an arid and almost stoic moralism at times, as did some of the Jesuits, it more basically tried to foster what is known as “inwardness.” That often meant valuing the movements of the heart over the thoughts of the head. God speaking within was the center, which of course resonated with Ignatius’s experience while he recuperated at Loyola and while he led a hermit’s life at Manresa. What did the Devotio lack that the Jesuits had? First of all, that fundamental commitment to “helping souls.” The spirituality of the Devotio was to that extent self-enclosed, a mere variation of the fundamental themes of monastic spirituality. Therefore, although it fostered method, it never applied it in a consistent way to ministry. It was basically elitist, for even the Imitation postulates the conditions of the cloister for the silence and recollection it commends. It lacked a clear articulation of the basic design of the spiritual life that the Exercises at least implicitly contains and which the first Jesuits saw when they interpreted the design as the traditional path from purification to enlightenment to union—“the three ways.” Although the Devotio was not anti-intellectual, despite accusations against it to that effect, it was anti-scholastic in some of its authors. It offered, however, no clear alternatives to scholastic theology. It lacked, therefore, especially in the Imitation, a firm theological base that would save it from the pitfalls of its moralism, of a monastic and stoic “contempt of the world,” of a pervasive “worthiness” doctrine, even of subtle or bla- tant Pelagianism or Semi-Pelagianism.

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That brings us to the intellectual and theological experience of the companions at the University of Paris. It is astounding how little— practically nothing—Ignatius has to say about it in the Autobiography. The others tell us little more. They were there, moreover, when the University was not in one of its better periods. They had a basically eclectic education, and they spent most of their time not on theology but on “philosophy” in the Arts faculty—learning a curious mixture of Aristotelian science and medieval logic and dialectics. The university had, nonetheless, great influence on them, for they thereafter expressed themselves most facilely in formal situations in scholastic patterns of argument— although, for different reasons, that generalization applies less to Ignatius and Nadal than to the rest of them. Did it have an impact in any other ways? I will mention two. The first is certain, the second conjectural. There is no doubt that, proud as they were of their alma mater, even after the condemnation of the Society by the theological faculty of Paris in 1554, they either in practice forswore or in theory explicitly repudiated the purely academic bias with which theology was taught at Paris. That might come as somewhat of a surprise to you, but it was already suggested in the passage earlier quoted from Bobadilla. Nadal was at times even fiercer and more forthright. Limitations of time force me to reduce their criticism to the bare bones of saying that the theologians of Paris lived in their heads, not their hearts, and they practiced their discipline for the sake of their colleagues not for the Lord’s flock. In other words, they divorced theology from both spirituality and from the practice of ministry. Others had earlier pointed out these two divorces, for the Devotio had implicitly given voice to the first, and Erasmus and other humanists explicitly to both. They had all as a result repudiated scholastic theology, whereas the Jesuits hoped to reshape it, at least for themselves. Nadal in a famous passage from an exhortation at Alcalá in 1561 referred to Ignatius as “our father, the theologian.” He probably does not lack here some polemical intent, for the condemnation of the Society had not been retracted and the sting of Melchior Cano’s rabid attacks was still being felt. In context, it is clear in any case that this is a theologian in a new key, a theologian who relates study to ministry, without which study made no sense for members of the Society. In the eleventh of the Rules for Thinking with the Church, Ignatius commends both the “positive doctors” (i.e., the Fathers of the Church) and the “scholastics” [363]. While in further Jesuit documentation from this early period one hears more about Aristotle and Aquinas, the positive

172 chapter ten doctors supplied part of the corrective to the scholastics that the Jesuits thought was needed—as that rule states, the power “to rouse the affections, so that we are moved to love and serve God our Lord in all things.” The Jesuits stood for a learned ministry and, to that degree, a learned spirituality. But it was a learning that had to conform to “our way of proceeding.” The second way that the University of Paris had an impact is, as I said, conjectural, at least for Ignatius. As far as I know, H. Outram Evennett was the first to suggest it in his little classic, The Spirit of the Counter- Reformation. Evennett believed that at Paris Ignatius found, especially in Saint Thomas, the intellectual and theological basis for his reconciliation with the world that had begun at Manresa when he surrendered his excessive mortifications. This makes sense, for the Ignatian documents beyond the Exercises breathe even more clearly the conviction that grace builds on nature. Among the scholastics, Aquinas was in the forefront in basing his system on that principle, and he is, of course, specified in the Constitutions as the theological authority for the order [464]. Polanco surely studied Aquinas at the University of Padua and seems to have grasped the essentials of his system. Perhaps to Polanco as much as to Ignatius, we owe the firm weaving into the fabric of the Constitutions the principle that grace and nature somehow correlate. In the many writings of Nadal, however, we find the most explicit and unswerving adherence to the idea that nature and grace are reconcilable, along with insistence on the preeminence and prevenient character of the latter that saved the system within a Catholic framework from Pelagianism and Semi-Pelagianism. He is the person who in his exhortations to practically every Jesuit community in Europe taught the Society its spirituality and provided explicit theological undergirdings for it, basically a theology of reconciliation and of a world “charged with the grandeur of God.” I fear that not all the early Jesuits avoided the pitfalls of the Semi- Pelagianism of which they have been so often accused. Some passages of Polanco are at best ambiguous, as are some even of Ignatius. With the latter, however, the Suscipe prayer, as the culmination of Ignatian spirituality, provides the best key to interpreting him [234]. In that prayer, there is no question of saving or sanctifying oneself but of total submission to the movements of grace. Somewhere, moreover, Nadal picked up the idea that there was lots of grace around. This allowed him a “Christian optimism” about spirituality and ministry that was surely not found in everybody in the often dour sixteenth century. To be anti-Pelagian and optimistic—that was his feat, for which he was indebted in large part to Aquinas and Bonaventure.

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Although Nadal was faithful to the teaching of the Third Week and saw in Jesuits men “who were crucified to the world,” he and others were able to give this teaching an interpretation that saved it from world-hate and led them to “find God in all things” (Const. 288). It further led Nadal to his astounding statement about members of the Society, repeated by him often in his exhortations: “The world is our house” or “The world is our home.” The corollary of this statement is that Jesuit ministry, and, hence, Jesuit spirituality is intended for every category of person in the world, no matter what their spiritual or religious situation, no matter what their “state in life.” Only those in special need have special claim. Otherwise, it is about as non-elitist and non-discriminatory as one can imagine. With the first Jesuits, this was not only their theory but also their invariable practice, no matter what course the future history of the Society took. As the Jesuits were ministers themselves, they tried to engage others to help them and to continue ministries they had begun. This is graphically illustrated in their training of lay catechists, even young boys, and in the many confraternities, they founded long before the “Marian Congregation” or Sodality was founded at the Roman College in 1563. Although some of the first Jesuits would have met and begun to appropriate elements of Renaissance Humanism at Alcalá, they were more deeply exposed to it at Paris. From the very beginning and at the core of the humanist movement was spiritual and moral reform, even though these features might at times have become obscured. The movement eventually developed a rather coherent spirituality that achieved its apex in the writings of Erasmus. For centuries that aspect of Erasmus was scorned rather than studied, and only in the past two decades have we begun to discover the depths of his spirituality—and, I might add, its many similarities with the spirituality of the first Jesuits, unaware though most Jesuits seem to have been of these similarities. Erasmus, too, sought a more inward spirituality—based on the Bible and the Fathers. He objected to the aridity of much of the theological speculation of his day, and therefore tried to reconcile theology with piety through recourse to the patristic tradition. He hoped, in fact, to give contours to a spirituality appropriate for persons living outside the cloister, especially married women and men. In his many writings, he tried not only to jettison some of the claptrap and mechanical techniques of the pastoral practices of his day but also to provide an alternative ideal that, as I said, in some particulars resembles the Jesuits’. My hunch is that he had more influence, at least indirect, on the early Jesuits than we have been led to believe. Polanco, for instance, studied

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Erasmus’s groundbreaking treatise on preaching while he was at the University of Padua. Nonetheless, the first Jesuits, including Ignatius, became cautious about him, although the degree of their caution has been exaggerated by Jesuit historians, and the reasons for it sometimes distorted. They, in any case, disliked the sarcasm of his criticism of pious practices and were wary of his historico-critical approach to the texts of the Bible and the Fathers. Their failure to appreciate the historico-critical aspect of the humanist movement had, in my opinion, some truly unhappy results. Nonetheless, for all the good things that can be said about Erasmus’s writings on spirituality and ministry, they are deficient in comparison with the Jesuits in at least one important regard: they lack the detail of how-to. Erasmus wrote beautifully on prayer, but even his treatise entitled “How to Pray to God” does not exactly tell you how to do it in the concrete ways the Exercises does. The same deficiency can be found in his treatises related to ministry, even the treatise on preaching. In that, he differed immensely from the Jesuits as well as from certain aspects of the Devotio Moderna. One thing all the Jesuits learned at Paris from the humanist tradition in general, Nadal better than the others, was to speak and write Latin in a humanist style. In one way, that is an altogether superficial appropriation of the humanist tradition, but in other ways most profound. Changes in style, after all, imply changes in forma mentis. The style is the man, and all that. The humanists believed that their style of discourse allowed them the best entrance into their interlocutor’s humanity and deepest aspirations. Freed of professional jargon, it facilitated meaningful converse with anybody on the major questions about human life and destiny. That, of course, was the ideal, for not too deep under the surface was a good dose of snob- bishness, which, however, could be left behind by those who wished to. The early Jesuits assiduously cultivated “spiritual conversation.” An ancient tradition that, but the humanists also cultivated conversation apart of their opposition to dialectical debate, and Erasmus left behind a sublime example of “spiritual conversation” in his colloquy entitled “The Godly Feast.” Jesuit spiritual conversation correlated with this development. Nadal, who tells us most about it among the early Jesuits, himself composed two long “dialogues” or “colloquies,” which, if not directly modeled on Erasmus himself, certainly are modeled on those of lesser known humanists. The humanists’ style was, of course, related to their cultivation of rhetoric, the art of speaking and writing persuasively. The Jesuits eagerly seized

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this aspect of the humanist tradition. What does that have to do with ministry and spirituality? Just about everything. Rhetoric, in the basic sense, is the art of public speaking, and public speaking is successful to the extent that the speaker is in touch with the feelings of the audience. It is to them that he accommodates what he has to say. When the Jesuits tried to “help souls,” they were admonished again and again to do so in a way that took account of time, place, and circumstance and especially the spiritual condition of those to whom they ministered. Ignatius and the first Jesuits did not discover this idea for the first time in the humanist tradition, but that tradition gave them further grounding for it and classic articulation. It was a key element in their “way of proceeding.” In other words, despite all the rules, annotations, and suggestions in the Exercises, the cardinal principle was accommodation to the person making them. Basic to “our way of proceeding” was that, within limits, you could throw it out if it did not seem to be working. As the art of public speaking, rhetoric looked to public lives, to life in the world. The spirituality developed by some of the humanists in Renaissance Rome had precisely this dimension to it; it was intended for persons outside the cloister. I suggest that the more intense cultivation of rhetoric by the second generation of Jesuits helped confirm the outside—the cloister aspect of Jesuit spirituality that was present in the life of Ignatius the pilgrim from the beginning. Ah, the cloister! One of the most powerful spiritual movements of the fifteenth century was the so-called observantist reforms among the older religious orders, of which the reform of Carmel by Teresa and John of the Cross would be sixteenth-century manifestations. The basic idea was that the spiritual objectives of religious life would be best secured by an exact observance of the Rule and its authentic customaries down to the last detail. As is obvious, Jesuit spirituality for members of the Society could not in the beginning subscribe to such a spirituality, for they had no Rule to observe besides the papal bulls of 1540 and 1550 until the Constitutions were known and promulgated—which was not done officially until after the death of Ignatius. Moreover, the well known attitude of Ignatius and the companions towards choir indicates that at least at the beginning they were far removed from an “observantist” mentality. It was not in the observance of the Rule, as that expression was generally understood, that spiritual perfection lay, but in living out according to God’s will the call to ‘‘help souls” heard in the meditations on the Kingdom and the Two Standards.

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Even during Ignatius’s lifetime, however, rules began to multiply in the Society, and Nadal, my hero, produced them at a great rate. They func- tioned at first principally as what we would today call “job-descriptions,” and were desperately needed. But one already begins to detect a shift in perspective about how “perfection” was achieved toward exact observance of “the rules.” The observantist movement had its impact, and the genera- lates of Francisco Borja and Everard Mercurian seem to have provided it with more support than it had under Ignatius and Laínez. Nonetheless, a wider vision also operated, made possible to some extent by the new rhetoric, which by definition liked to look to big issues. Nadal became skilled in that rhetoric and was thus able to articulate Jesuit spirituality with a force and vision that even Ignatius could not muster. This led him to speak about Jesuit spirituality, first of all for Jesuits themselves and then for others, in ways that defied the idea that perfection lay in the cloister. Let me quote again a passage I called to your attention in an issue of Studies. Nadal has been speaking about the three types of houses (or “cloisters”) mentioned in the Constitutions—novitiates, colleges, professed houses. Then he adds his own—the journeys, pilgrimages, or “missions,” as they are called in the fourth vow. He calls the journey our “fourth kind of house.”

That [fourth house] is altogether the most ample place and reaches as far as the globe itself. For wherever they can be sent in ministry to help souls, that is the most glorious and longed-for “house” for those theologians. For they know the goal set before them: to procure the salvation and perfection of all women and men. They understand that they are to that end bound by that fourth vow to the supreme pontiff: that they are to go on these universal journeys for the help of souls by his command, which by divine decree extends throughout the whole Church. They realize that they cannot build or acquire enough houses to be able from nearby to run out to the combat. Since that is the case, they consider that they are in their most peaceful and pleasant house when they are constantly on the move, when they travel throughout the earth, when they have no place to call their own, when they are always in need, always in want—only let them strive in some small way to imitate Christ Jesus, who had nowhere on which to lay his head and who spent all his years of preaching in journey. Two models underlie the vision of the pastoral spirituality of the Society, as the above citation suggests: the itinerant preaching of Jesus and his disciples and the evangelizing journeys of Paul. About the latter Nadal says explicitly: Paul is our model for ministry. Paul, the theologian of the gratuity of grace, was central to Luther’s spirituality. He meant the same for Nadal, but he and other early Jesuits further insisted on the

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Pauline mystical identification with Christ and especially on Paul the tire- less evangelizer. That last was particularly muted in Luther. This romp through sixteenth-century spiritualities that I have been leading might leave you with the impression that what was distinctive of Jesuit spirituality was that it adopted and adapted all that was best in the age and left the dross behind. That would be nonsense, of course. If we did not know it already, we need read only a few sources to realize that the early Jesuits were just human beings—energetic, committed, agile of mind, intensely devout, willing to learn from their mistakes—but, like us, creatures of their own time and place. We do them and ourselves a disservice if we invest them with an omniscience and inerrancy they did not possess. I have not here dwelt on their sixteenth-century limitations but on elements that transcend them and have positive application for today. Despite their limitations, the achievements of the first Jesuits were astounding. Among them was the forging of a distinctive spirituality. The Magna Carta of that spirituality was unquestionably the Exercises. In order to fully understand Jesuit spirituality in the sixteenth century, however, we cannot rest satisfied simply with the text of the Exercises, for we must go beyond it to see how the Jesuits, including Ignatius himself, elaborated from it and interpreted it, to compare it with other spiritualities, to set it in its historical context. Having attempted to sketch that context, even in such a rapid and superficial way, let me just list some of the factors that, taken together as part of a mix or synthesis, contributed to a distinctive spirituality:

1. The early Jesuits had a book, recognized by all as the normative and quintessential expression of what they were ultimately about— conversion of heart from sin and then conversion to discipleship in poverty and service. In Roman Catholicism in the sixteenth century, no other group had such a document, such a clear focus. 2. The early Jesuits inculcated a number of devout practices—frequent confession and communion, daily examination of conscience, regular spiritual direction, and so forth. Not these but conversion of heart from sin and conversion to discipleship were, however, the center of their spirituality. Devout practices were to be employed in the way and to the degree they sustained and advanced conversion. 3. In the Exercises the Jesuits found a general design for the spiritual journey, which they articulated in classic terms as a movement from purgation to enlightenment to union of their wills with the divine will. This was their ultimate design for their ministry as well as their lives.

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Their spirituality did not, therefore, consist in a program of practices that assumed the spiritual life was static or circular. 4. In the Exercises they found, as well, an agreed-upon criterion for judging the authenticity of every step of the journey—consolation. While the movements of the good and evil spirits cannot, of course, be reduced to emotions or feelings, they are in the first instance regis- tered there. Thus, the early Jesuits paid much attention to dispositions of the heart in the making of choices, to the dismay of persons like Melchior Cano, who attacked them on this ground. 5. The wayfarer was not to be left without directives, so they elaborated, as did the Exercises, practical suggestions down to minute detail according to which he or she might proceed. They themselves had a number of “ways of proceeding” that they considered peculiarly their own. 6. Nonetheless, accommodation to the concrete circumstances of the individual was the principle underlying all the “ways of proceeding.” This lent their spirituality and ministry a decidedly “rhetorical” character. Just as the orator must be in touch with the feelings and expectations of his audience, so must the minister be in touch with the needs, problems, and aspirations of those unto whom he ministers. Thus, Jesuit spirituality and ministry evince a certain flexibility. 7. Since their spirituality could be accommodated to persons in all conditions and states of life, it could be applied both inside and outside the cloister. For themselves, the most dramatic expression of this feature of their spirituality was the fourth vow pronounced by the professed but seen as an ideal for all. “The world is our house.” 8. Applicable to all states of life, their spirituality implicitly recognized the validity of all vocations. The elections in the Exercises were to be done in “Christian liberty.” The Jesuits were, in fact, heavily criticized because they taught “indifference” even regarding the life of the three vows. 9. Although their way of expressing themselves opened them and those unto whom they ministered to the dangers of a stoical and even Semi-Pelagian interpretation of the spiritual life, their best and more fundamental statements insisted on the primacy of grace and the necessity of utter commitment of oneself to its movements. 10. The underlying Thomistic framework of the Constitutions, the exhortations of Nadal, and other primary documents at least implied that nature and grace, while somehow discontinuous with each other, were also reconcilable. This provided the Jesuits’ religious vision with

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more optimism about the world and human nature than we find in many other movements of the sixteenth century. Their spirituality assumed an engagement with culture, not withdrawal from it. 11. Their starting point, as is perlucidly clear from Ignatius’s Autobio graphy, was the desire to “help souls.” They interpreted this term broadly to mean souls and bodies, and, hence, their commitment to the corporal works of mercy as well as to every form of spiritual ministry. As de Guibert said so well years ago, “service” is at the core of Jesuit spirituality. 12. Theirs was, then, a pastoral or ministerial spirituality. To understand it we must look as much to the history of ministry as we do to the history of spirituality—faltering though our efforts have been along this line up to the present. Their synonym for “helping souls” was ministry— ministerium, ministeria, words preeminently proper to the Society of Jesus and not “borrowed from Protestants,” as we sometimes hear tell.

I will conclude by returning to the three terms I mentioned at the beginning. First, “our way of proceeding.” The first Jesuits used this expression to mean many things, referring it most obviously to the primary documents of the Society—the papal bulls of approbation and confirmation, the Constitutions, the General Examen, etc. They also referred it to the various rules, customs, ways of governing and behaving. More generally, it meant a certain style—simple, direct, unpretentious, unostentatious, unforbidding—familiaris is the word they often used to capture it. It meant for Jesuit ministry and spirituality that it descended to specific details of “how-to.” “Our way of proceeding” was geared to “helping souls” and bodies— helping souls and bodies as they here and now are, not as they ought to be according to somebody’s ideal. This meant that the details of “our way of proceeding” had to yield to the ultimate principle of accommodation to the needs of the people in front of them—and often enough this meant the unchurched, the outcast, and the unbeliever. Central to “our way of proceeding to help souls” was to go out to persons in such need, on long and painful journeys if necessary, not to wait at the doorsteps of the first three kinds of houses. (I do not recall them ever saying they were “saving” souls—the modesty implicit in simply “helping” is also part of “our way of proceeding.”) “Consolation,” if this occurred in the person unto whom Jesuits ministered, was the surest sign that all was well. Nadal, Polanco, and others had learned from the Exercises what this meant and how central it was.

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They had, in fact, learned it so well that I am tempted to dub their ministry a “ministry of consolation” and their spirituality a “spirituality of consolation.” Their way of proceeding in the help of souls was to listen intently to the movements of consolation and desolation in those they sought out to help and to instill in those persons the discretion and courage to follow what “the Creator and Lord in person communicates to the devout soul in quest of the divine will,” as the fifteenth annotation of the Exercises has it. So much more could be said about consolation, but let me turn the subject over to Nadal and to Peter Faber. Nadal is commenting on the ministries of the Society listed in the Formula of the Institute, i.e., in the bull Exposcit debitum of Julius III, 1550. He has already spoken about preaching, the Exercises, and the teaching of catechism. When he comes to the words “especially the spiritual consolation of Christ’s faithful through the hearing of confessions,” he says: These words—“especially spiritual consolation”—refer to all the primary ministries of the Society. They at the same time mean that we are not to be content in those ministries only with what is necessary for salvation but pursue beyond it the perfection and consolation of our neighbor. For spiritual consolation is the best index of a person’s spiritual progress. The word especially means that there are other ends we must pursue, but this one in the first place, as our primary intention and goal. If we do not have time and resources for both this and the others, we should omit doing them, apply all our energies to this one. And, finally, an excerpt from Favre’s spiritual journal, the Memoriale: With great devotion and new depth of feeling, I also hoped and begged for this, that it finally be given me to be the servant and minister of Christ the consoler, the minister of Christ the helper, the minister of Christ the redeemer, the minister of Christ the healer, the liberator, the enricher, the strengthener. Thus it would happen that even I might be able through him to help many—to console, liberate, and give them courage; to bring to them light not only for their spirit but also (if one may presume in the Lord) for their bodies, and bring as well other helps to the soul and body of each and every one of my neighbors whomsoever.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

RENAISSANCE HUMANISM AND THE RELIGIOUS CULTURE OF THE FIRST JESUITS1

The historiography of the relationship between Renaissance Humanism and the first generation of Jesuits emits conflicting signals. Most studies of Ignatius Loyola affirm that he embraced for his new religious order that aspect of Renaissance culture known as Humanism, sometimes seeming to imply he was himself a learned exponent of it. We know, however, that his own and his early companions’ education and culture were basically eclectic and late medieval. Many Jesuit historians have called attention, moreover, to a story about how Ignatius’s religious devotion was cooled early in life by reading Erasmus’s Handbook of the Christian Soldier and that he therefore later in life issued a blanket prohibition for the Society of Jesus of the works of the Prince of the Humanists.2 In any case, all serious studies of the Society of Jesus recognize its special and important relationship to Renaissance Humanism in the secondary schools that the Jesuits began to operate after 1548, but the precise impact that Humanism had on the ministries, theology, spirituality and self-understanding of the Society is practically never detailed. One is left with the impression that it was superficial and even peripheral. The problem is vast and enormously complicated. All that I can hope to do in these few pages is sketch its basic contours. My thesis is simple: Renaissance Humanism, despite reservations some of the Jesuits entertained about certain aspects of it, had a profound and determinative impact on the Society by the time Ignatius died in 1556, and we shall never understand the subsequent history of the Society unless we take that impact into account. I believe that the first Jesuits, including Ignatius, were not always fully aware of the consequences of their attitudes and decisions regarding Humanism, but that fact does not mitigate the immensity of its influence henceforth on the Society.

1 Originally published in The Heythrop Journal 31/4 (1990): 471–487. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. 2 See John C. Olin, “Erasmus and St. Ignatius Loyola,” in his Six Essays on Erasmus (New York: Fordham University Press, 1979), 75–92.

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Perhaps the most fundamental reason for the confusion in the historiography of the Society in this regard stems from a confused historiography about Renaissance Humanism itself. By the time Ignatius and his companions arrived in Rome in 1537, Humanism had been the most exciting and dominant cultural phenomenon there for at least a century. Nonetheless, with the outbreak of the Reformation, suspicions became rampant that when Humanism attempted to deal with religious questions, especially theological questions, it overstepped its bounds. Criticism focused particularly on Erasmus, the most widely read and the most articulate spokesman for the Humanist cause who, as the contemporary slogan put it, “laid the egg that Luther hatched.”3 When the opera omnia of Erasmus were listed in 1559 on the first papal Index of Prohibited Books and in that same year on the similar Spanish Index, the fury reached its climax. Its long aftermath would taint all subsequent historical writing by Catholics. The stylistic elegance that Humanism advocated would continue to be much appreciated, but direct relationship to theological method would be viewed with caution—at least in certain highly-placed circles. After Luther’s dramatic repudiation of Erasmus in 1525, a similar, but less viru- lent, antipathy generally held sway in historians from the Protestant churches. Only in the past thirty years have we acquired a comprehensive understanding of what Humanism was all about and been able to dismiss the misconception that in some of its advocates, it represented a thinly disguised neo-paganism and that its more properly theological aspects were unorthdox.4 Studies of Erasmus in particular have vindicated him on almost every theological and religious issue, showing him to have been more orthodox, Catholic, and farsighted than his adversaries. The customary portrait of him in both Protestant and Catholic historiography as a weak and vacillating theological dilettante has been replaced by an ever deepening appreciation of him as one of the towering religious thinkers in the whole of the Christian tradition.5

3 See Silvana Seidel-Menchi, Erasmo in Italia 1520–1580 (Turin: Bollati Boringhiere, 1987), and Erika Rummel, Erasmus and His Catholic Critics, II: 1523–1536 (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf Publishers, 1989). 4 See Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Paganism and Christianity,” in his Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955), 70–91, and now Albert Rabil, Jr. (ed.), Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms and Legacy, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988). 5 See my “Introduction,” in Spiritualia, Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 66 (Toronto University of Toronto Press, 1988).

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This recovery of the religious aspects of Humanism, especially in Erasmus, has been, however, part and parcel of a more general enterprise of Renaissance scholars that has enabled us to define with much greater precision than heretofore the general contours of the phenomenon and trace its history more accurately.6 I need to say a word about that enterprise, for unless one is a specialist in the Renaissance one still might suc- cumb to the confusions that the term Humanism engenders. Today “Humanism” is sometimes used to signify an ideology that would exclude God from consideration—so-called “secular Humanism.” Such Humanism bears little, if any, relationship to its Renaissance counterpart. The contemporary antithesis of “secular Humanism” is so-called “Christian Humanism,” an expansive designation that would include figures as different as Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas and Mother Theresa. This “Humanism,” which at times seems to indicate nothing more than a benign attitude towards nature and other human beings, also has little relationship to the much more specific and definable phenomenon with which we are concerned. What, then, was Renaissance Humanism? In its beginnings in Italy in the mid-fourteenth century, it was primarily a literary movement that believed that the style and content of the ancient Latin authors like Cicero and Virgil held the key for a cultural revival in which good literature and good morals would go hand in hand. Francesco Petrarca was the most influential spokesman for this conviction, and he proposed it as an anti- dote to the barbarous style of his own day, exemplified most tellingly in the jargon-ridden prose of scholastic lawyers, philosophers, and theologians. As a contemporary scholar has noted, when Petrarch besought his contemporaries to close their Aristotle and open their Cicero, the Renaissance had properly begun.7 In Petrarch’s view and that of his followers, good literature was essentially didactic, so that an ethical component was inherent in Humanism from its very origins.8 Moreover, the movement clearly specified good literature as the Latin classics, and implied a certain disdain for Greek metaphysics and natural science. In the two hundred years between the Petrarchan call to arms and the founding of the Society of Jesus in 1540, the Humanist movement remained

6 See Rabil, Renaissance Humanism. 7 R.R. Bolger, The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries: From the Carolingian Age to the End of the Renaissance (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 255. 8 See Craig R. Thompson, “Better Teachers than Scotus or Aquinas,” in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. John L. Lievsay (Durham: The University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 114–145.

184 chapter eleven remarkably faithful to its original inspiration, but had undergone some significant developments, only the most important of which can I even barely suggest here. First of all, the corpus of approved literature had been expanded to include the literary and historical classics of ancient Greece, as well as the Latin and Greek Fathers of the church, whose appealing style of presentation of the truths of Christianity differed so remarkably from the crabbed style and impenetrable technical terminology of “the modern theologians”—Scholastics like Thomas, Scotus, and Ockham. The Fathers were theologians who could be read with profit by all literate persons, and their style, presumably, would enkindle one’s heart with a desire for a more godly life—the ultimate purpose, according to the Humanists, of all genuine theology. Secondly, beginning in the early fifteenth century the movement had centered on classical rhetoric as its primary discipline, now understood not simply as good epistolary style but as the art of oratory, and therefore the proper training for lawyers and statesmen.9 Almost immediately in Italy this art began to be applied to preaching, in the hope of displacing the medieval and scholastic styles so favored since the thirteenth century.10 The movement thus began to have implications for Christian ministry. This development reached a water- shed in 1535 with the publication of Erasmus’s Ecclesiastes, after which no new treatises advocating the scholastic style were ever published.11 Thirdly, the movement found an institutional embodiment in primary and secondary schools where the Latin and Greek classics were the center of the curriculum.12 With oratory as their central discipline, the schools aimed at producing graduates who would take the active life of the polis as their goal, whether as churchmen or statesmen. Moreover, the ethical concerns inherent in the movement from the beginning expressed themselves in the conviction that the true aim of education was not learning for its own sake but the formation of character, which is what the study of the best literature would produce.

9 See John M. McManamon, “Innovation in Early Humanist Rhetoric: The Oratory of Pier Paolo Vergerio (the Elder),” Rinascimento, n.s. 22 (1982): 3–32, and his Funeral Oratory and the Cultural Ideals of Italian Humanism (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989). 10 See my Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, c.1450–1521 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1979). 11 See my “Erasmus and the History of Sacred Rhetoric: The Ecclesiastes of 1535,” Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 5 (1985): 1–29. 12 See Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

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Upright lawyers, governors, bureaucrats, statesmen, bishops, and pastors—and thus an ethically renewed society—would be the result. The curriculum, the relationship between teachers and students, and everything else in the school would be geared towards teaching the most profound art, the ars bene beateque vivendi—the art of living a happy and socially productive life for the benefit of oneself and others. It is easy today to smile at the almost utopian optimism of this conviction and to question the adequacy of the methods employed to achieve these high goals, yet one cannot gainsay the force or long-lived appeal of the ideal.13 Finally, the Humanist movement early began to develop a more technical side. From the beginning it had been interested in texts—first of all in recovering the complete corpus of ancient Latin and Greek classics, and then in establishing the most reliable text among the many manuscripts thus recovered. This led to the beginnings of the science of textual criticism, which reached a certain culmination in the early sixteenth century with Erasmus’s first critical editions of the Greek New Testament and of the Greek and Latin Fathers of the Church.14 This monumental achievement was acclaimed by some, but decried and greeted with alarm by others because it challenged the hallowed status of the Vulgate and especially because it practically coincided with the outbreak of the Reformation. In any case, it supported the conviction of Erasmus and others that the whole theological enterprise had to be re-thought, so that it be based on a more historical, less proof-text reading of the sources and be modeled more on the rhetorical style of the Fathers, which would thereby overcome the divorce between theology, spirituality, and ministry that scholastic theology had, in their opinion, brought about. This broad description of the nature and course of Renaissance Humanism until the founding of the Society of Jesus will have to suffice for our purposes. It will at least serve to distinguish Renaissance Humanism from the late twentieth-century phenomena that have appropriated the name, and will provide us with the basic tools we need to understand its relationship to Ignatius and the other Jesuits of the first generation. What I have to say on that relationship I will divide into two parts: I will first

13 For a discussion of the limitations of the pedagogy, see Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), especially 1–28. 14 See, e.g., Erika Rummel, Erasmus’ Annotations on the New Testament: From Philologist to Theologian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), and John C. Olin, “Erasmus and the Church Fathers,” in his Six Essays, 33–47.

186 chapter eleven speak in more general terms about the relationship of Humanism to the style of spirituality, ministry, and theology that the Jesuits espoused, and then I will speak more specifically about the impact on the Society of the decision to operate secondary schools according to the Humanist model. Let me begin with a word about the misgivings about Humanism some Jesuits held. They were wary of the displacement of the Vulgate and of the doctrinal implications of certain emendations. Even Jerónimo Nadal, who among the inner circle most thoroughly appropriated Humanist ideals, betrayed some caution. Probably while he was at Paris, he learned how the Humanists were stigmatized as mere “grammarians” when they intruded themselves into the realm of theology.15 When Nadal urged the necessity of scholastic theology because otherwise one “stuttered and stammered” over the grave issues of doctrine, he almost certainly assigned that failing to the Humanists.16 Nonetheless, he and his colleagues recognized the necessity of knowledge of the biblical languages and, within limits, the legitimacy of textual criticism. At one point Ignatius went so far as to state that the study of languages was to be used to defend the Vulgate on every point—defender en todo. Diego Laínez and Alfonso Salmerón, his trusted advisers who had been present at Trent and understood how qualified the Council itself had been in its approbation of that text, rushed to change Ignatius’s obvious intent by interpreting him to mean “everything that with reason and honesty can be defended.”17 While more open-minded on this issue than many of their contemporaries, therefore, the Jesuits still opted for a notably cautious course. The new editions of the Bible gave impetus to new vernacular translations, whose wide diffusion the invention of the printing press made possible. Erasmus and his colleagues centered much of the piety they advocated on a devout reading of the sacred text, thus giving added impetus to this traditional practice. Early Jesuit sources, except for the Spiritual Exercises, are subdued in this regard. They never condemn the practice, but only occasionally commend it, perhaps rendered cautious by the suspicions and antagonisms about it that antedated the Reformation but that were much exacerbated by it. From the very nature of the Exercises with their many meditations on the life of Christ, however, we almost have to

15 See Pláticas espirituales del P. Jerónimo Nadal, S.I., en Coímbra (1561), ed. Miguel Nicolau (Granada: Facultad teológica de la Compañía de Jesús, 1945), 133. 16 Nadal 5:829. 17 Constitutions 1:191, 393–394.

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infer that the Jesuits were more favorably inclined towards this practice than their silence might otherwise suggest. No Humanist wrote more about the godly or devout life than Erasmus did; none was more widely read. By 1550, however, the furious and fanati- cal vendetta against everything he wrote crested into a violent rage in certain ecclesiastical circles in Rome and elsewhere. During the first few decades of the Society, the Jesuits for the most part stood aloof from this bitter campaign, hardly taking notice of Erasmus’s many works on the spiritual life. Their neutrality, or perhaps silent antagonism, prevented them from discovering how much in that perspicacious genius was conge- nial to their own pietas and to the peculiar emphases in theology that they advocated. We are almost certainly justified in regarding the story about Ignatius and the Handbook as a fabrication.18 There is in fact no evidence that Ignatius had firsthand knowledge of anything Erasmus wrote. Had he read works like the Praise of Folly or some of the Colloquies, he surely would have been distressed by their caustic and sardonic criticism of abuses, venality, and superstition in the church, but we have no clear statement from him on the issue. Ignatius did on several occasions try to limit the use of Erasmus’s works as textbooks in the Jesuits schools, explaining simply, “Since the author is put in favor, it is not appropriate for students to get to like his books.”19 But he never altogether prohibited them, as Laínez in 1557 reassured Jesuits at Ingolstadt and Padua to quiet their scruples.20 Even after the Index of 1559, some Jesuit schools continued for a while to use Erasmian texts. A great deal more could be said about the hesitations and ambivalences of the first Jesuits concerning Humanism, but more important was their enthusiasm for much that it proffered. Perhaps the best entry into this complex problem is the eleventh rule in the “Rules for Thinking with the Church,” a kind of appendix to the Spiritual Exercises that was most probably composed by Ignatius about 1535 at the end of his seven years as a student at the University of Paris. In that rule, Ignatius commends both scholastic and patristic theology—the first for its clarity and precision and the latter because by it we are “moved to love and serve God our Lord in all things.”

18 See Olin, “Erasmus and Ignatius.” 19 Epp. Ign., 9:721–722. 20 Laínez 2:304.

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The rule suggests several important things about Ignatius. First, he was aware of the basic distinction between the two styles of theology. Secondly, in his usual detached and even-handed manner, he puts the best interpretation on both of them, refusing to enter into the contemporary controversy. Thirdly, he adumbrates the subsequent cultural history of the order he would found, in which both styles would be considered reconcilable with each other and each of them would have an important role to play.21 If we now try to place this important statement in the larger context of Ignatius’s life and vision, does he in fact seem to favor one above the other for the theological enterprise of his Society? The most obviously strong case can be made for Scholasticism. Although he and his companions would have been exposed to some aspects of Renaissance Humanism at both Alcalá and Paris, the philosophy and theology they studied was professedly scholastic. Moreover, the Constitutions of the Society, for which Ignatius was ultimately responsible, determined that Thomas Aquinas was to be the principal theological authority prescribed for the order.22 That would seem to answer the question. Precisely what led to the Jesuits’ choice of Aquinas among the scholastic theologians is not altogether clear, but his unquestioned orthodoxy would surely be among them. The clear organization and comprehensiveness of the Summa Theologiae would be another. Moreover, for decades before the Jesuits arrived in Rome, Aquinas had enjoyed special favor there, and this phenomenon could not have gone unnoticed by them.23 We might conjecture about more intrinsic reasons. Chief among them would be the basic assumption in the Thomistic system of the compatibility between “nature and grace,” which surely coincided with Ignatius’s own conviction, born of his personal experience, that in ministry one should not only rely on God’s grace but also make use of all human means, as the Constitutions prescribed. Despite this and other convergences in basic viewpoint, on one crucial issue the first Jesuits surely differed from Thomas. In the opening question of the Summa, Thomas states unequivo- cally that theology is principally a “conteplative” discipline, i.e., academic or, to use the Jesuits’ term for it, “speculative.”24 The Summa as a totality

21 See Marc Fumaroli, “Définition et description: Scholastique et rhétorique chez les jésuites des XVIe et XVIle siécles,” Travaux de linguistique el de littérature 18 (1980): 37–48. 22 Constitutions [464]. 23 See my “The Feast of Thomas Aquinas in Renaissance Rome: A Neglected Document and Its Import,” Rivista di Storia della Chiesa in Italia 35 (1981): 1–27. 24 Summa Theologiae, 1.1.4.

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provides convincing substance to the integrity with which Thomas carried out that basic presupposition. The highly intellectualized character of that speculation meant that it was addressed to the head, not the heart, as Humanist adversaries of Scholasticism never failed to point out. A strong case can be mounted for the opinion that the most pervasive aim of Ignatius’s life after his conversion was his desire to move others “to and serve God our Lord in all things,” which is precisely how he described patristic theology and which could equally well be applied to the theological reform advocated by Erasmus and others. It was also the most fundamental aim of the Spiritual Exercises, and it was an aim directed at the affections, at the human heart. It was the aim of his ministry. When Jerónimo Nadal, his disciple and most reliable interpreter, referred to Ignatius as “the theologian,” he said: “Here then you see the necessity for the course of studies in the Society: to be able to preach and to become skilled in those ministries that the church deems ordered for the help of our neighbor. Here is our father, the theologian.”25 Theology for Ignatius, as Nadal presents it, was not the abstract and speculative discipline practiced by the Scholastics of his day, but was an instrument for the help of souls, and, if we take the Exercises as the basic paradigm for all Jesuit ministry, that help was centered on the right ordering of the affections. These orientations obviously looked to a conjoining of theology, ministry, and spirituality. It was no accident, therefore, that some of the first Jesuits inveighed bitterly against reducing theology to “speculation alone,” often directing their criticism specifically against the Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris, where so many of them had studied. Nadal excoriated those theologians for not going out into the cities and towns to announce the kingdom of Heaven according to the example of Christ and the Apostles, and for being “only speculative theologians and treating all disciplines in only a speculative fashion.”26 The words could have been spoken by Erasmus. What Nadal and Juan Alfonso de Polanco, Ignatius’s secretary and alter ego, would substitute for such speculation was what they called “mystical theology.” By mystical they did not mean the transports and ecstasies usually connoted by the term, but an inner understanding and relish of the truth that is then translated into the way one lives. There is no need to underscore how closely this understanding of theology correlates with the

25 Nadal 5:282–284. See also my “The Fourth Vow in Its Ignatian Context: A Historical Study,” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 15/1 (January, 1983), especially 8–14. 26 Fontes narr., 2nd ed., 236.

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Spirirual Exercises. We must observe, however, that it also bears a close affinity to the way the Humanists conceived the scope of the theological enterprise. Aside from this theological affinity on the most general level, there were in my opinion three quite specific ways in which Humanism had a clearly palpable impact on how Jesuits went about their ministry. All three of these ways are directly related to rhetoric, the art of oratory or persuasion. The first of them, as one might expect, is their preaching. Polanco, who had carefully studied Erasmus’s Ecclesiastes, while he was a student of theology at the University of Padua, is probably responsible for the provision in the Jesuit Constitutions that members of the Society are not to preach in “the scholastic manner.”27 What that had to mean in the concrete was that they were to preach according to what Humanists were advocating as substitutes either a revival of the patristic homily or some adaptation of the principles of classical rhetoric to the Christian pulpit. All the first Jesuits, including Ignatius, spoke with one voice when they repeated again and again that preaching was directed to “arousing the affections” and thereby to moving listeners to a more godly life. They would have imbibed this conviction from many sources, but, once again, it coincides with what the Humanists proposed, for it coincides with the basic assumptions of classical rhetoric.28 But here we have more than coincidence. Ignatius himself advocated the use of Cicero and other classical orators for the training in preaching of recruits to the Society and implicitly built those orators into the curriculum for them laid out in the Constitutions. Nadal, like some others of his day, looked forward to a time when a “properly Christian” art of oratory might be composed, but even such an art would according to him have to draw on classical rhetoric, most especially on the parts that deal with “moving the affections.”29 He also argued that whereas in the “primitive church” an artless style was required so that it be clear that the power of the Gospel was not due to human persuasion, now it was appropriate that what was founded on divine foundation be extolled with every human art.30

27 Constitutions [401]. See Angelo Martini, “Gli studi teologici di Giovanni de Polanco alle origini della legislazione scolastica della Compagnia di Gesù,” AHSI 21 (1952), especially 254–266. 28 See Hanna Holborn Gray, “Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence,” Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963): 497–514. 29 Nadal 5:828, as well as 4:645, and 5:824–830; Nadal, Scholia in Constitutiones S.I., ed. Manuel Ruiz Jurado (Granada: Facultad de Teología, 1976), 386–387. 30 Nadal 4:831–833.

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In 1565, Pedro Perpinyá, a distinguished teacher of rhetoric at the Jesuits’ Roman College, argued in a memorandum intended for Jesuit leadership in Rome that, if unadorned truth excited love for it, how much more would the feelings be aroused when the language in which the truth was expressed was more commensurate with the sublimity of the subject.31 This typically Humanist argument would have fallen on willing ears. Although the first Jesuits do not seem explicitly to have made the connection, the practice of rhetoric, i.e., oratory, coincided with their “way of proceeding” on another profound and pervasive level. Essential to the orator’s success was his ability to be in touch with the feelings and needs of his audience and to adapt himself and his speech accordingly. Beginning with the Exercises themselves, the Jesuits were constantly advised by Ignatius to adapt in all their ministries what they said and did to time, circumstances, and persons. If we may judge from Ignatius’s Autobiography, he derived this principle from his personal experience of ministry in the early years of his conversion. It was deepened, surely, by his experience as superior general of an order that from the beginning had to learn to operate in the very different cultures of sixteenth-century Europe, as well as in exotic places like India, Japan, and Brazil. Nonetheless, it found confirmation and rationalization in the precepts of rhetoric that either directly or indirectly he had come to know. The “rhetorical” dimension of Jesuit ministry in this sense transcended the preaching and lecturing in which they were so assiduously engaged and fanned out to become characteristic of all the activities in which they were engaged. That brings me to the third way in which classical rhetoric influenced them, perhaps unawares. While it is true that in his Autobiography Ignatius depicted himself as engaging primarily in various “ministries of the word of God” and that such ministries held pride of place in the fundamental documents of the Society, such ministries found their center and culmination in the Sacrament of Penance. For everybody to whom the Jesuits ministered, Ignatius heartily recommended frequent, i.e., weekly or monthly, confession as a way of remaining in the way of the Lord and making progress in it. This meant that the Jesuits were consistently called upon to deal with a wide variety of cases of conscience in all their complexity. This meant that they had to become skilled in the then developing art of casuistry, i.e., the art of applying

31 Mon. paed. 2:661–663.

192 chapter eleven general rules of morality to specific instances, in which the morality of the case was largely determined by particulars of time, places, persons, and other circumstances. To help his fellow Jesuits ply this art, Ignatius ordered Polanco to write a book on it. Polanco set about the task, and in 1554, he published his Breve directorium on the subject, the first book on ministry by a Jesuit.32 That book helped set the Society on a course in which its members’ skill in casuistical art would become part of their tradition, making them in the next century an easy target for Pascal’s ridicule in his Provincial Letters. The flexibility in dealing with diverse penitents that casuistry advocated was certainly open to abuse, whose dangers would be increased when the Jesuits much later subscribed to Probabilism, but its fundamental insight was sound. It echoed, in any case, the kind of advice that Ignatius gave the director of retreats in the Spiritual Exercises and his more general and insistently repeated advice to Jesuits in his correspondence to adapt to time, places, and circumstances. We have been schooled to believe that casuistry developed out of medieval Scholasticism, which it most immediately did. But, as the recent book by Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulman has shown, classical rhetoric provided in its injunctions to the orator to adapt to circumstances the remote and fundamental elements upon which casuistry drew.33 Jonsen and Toulman put the matter well: “Rhetoric and casuistry were mutual allies. It is not surprising to find the Jesuits, who were dedicated to teaching classical rhetoric in their colleges, become the leading exponents of casuistry.”34 That quotation brings me nicely to the second part of what I have to say about the relationship of Renaissance Humanism to the early Society of Jesus. It brings me to the schools. I hope that I have at least been able to suggest thus far that Humanism had an impact on Ignatius and the Society even apart from what was effected by the schools, Humanism’s most characteristic institution—soon to become the most characteristic institution of the Society of Jesus. Nonetheless, the impact of the decision to operate secondary schools according to the Humanist model would be, if possible, even more determinative of the subsequent character of the Society.

32 Breve directorium ad confessarii et confitentis munus rite obeundum concinnatum (Rome: Ant. Blado, 1554). 33 The Abuses of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). See also John Mahoney, The Making of Moral Theology: A Study of the Roman Catholic Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1987. 34 Jonsen and Toulman, Abuses, 88.

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With the benefit of hindsight, we can see how Ignatius and his early associates might have been susceptible to the idea of undertaking schools as a ministry. They were educated men, and from their earliest arrival in Rome, some of them had been engaged in temporary teaching assignments at the Universities of Rome, Ingolstadt, and elsewhere. Nonetheless, they considered permanent positions in such institutions contrary to the humble and largely itinerant nature of their vocation. When Ignatius agreed to open in Messina in 1548 what was in effect the first Jesuit school, he was motivated principally by the hope that it would provide funding for the education of young Jesuits, while at the same time providing classes for other students. From the first moment, however, the latter reality overpowered the former. Under the leadership of Nadal, the venture at Messina became an immediate and resounding success. It not only offered hope of the formation of the laity in piety, character and good letters three aspects of the same reality in the Humanists’ viewpoint—but also provided a marvelous base for the other ministries of the Society. Although relatively few of Nadal’s letters from this period survive, they had to help convince Ignatius to move with bold, even precipitous, speed along a path where previously he had taken only a few tentative steps. Within a month after the Collegio di San Nicolò opened in Messina, thirty members of the Senate at Palermo petitioned Ignatius for a similar school in their city, and Ignatius acceded. Word reached distant Cologne of what had happened in Messina and Palermo, and on 4 October 1549 Leonard Kessel wrote to Ignatius register- ing his surprise but also his enthusiasm: “If it has come to the point that the brethren have begun to teach publicly,” he said, then it would be a splendid idea to do so in Cologne, where there is hope of “gaining all youth to Christ.”35 The college at Cologne would have to wait for a future date, but within two years Polanco wrote in Ignatius’s name to the provincials of Spain and Portugal urging them to undertake colleges like the ones in Italy that by then had been begun in Messina, Palermo, Ferrara, Florence, Rome, Naples, Bologna, and elsewhere.36 The Society had taken a dramatic turn in its road. By the time Ignatius died in 1556, it was operating at his insistent urging well over thirty schools, eighteen of them in Italy, with negotiations under way in places as distant as Warsaw and Mexico.

35 Litt. quad., 1:172. 36 Epp. Ign., 43–49, 11–12.

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Why must this turn be considered so dramatic? The reasons are many. First of all, no religious order had ever taken on formal schooling as an explicit ministry. Surely, among the reasons that impelled Ignatius and the first Jesuits to this decision was the Humanists’ propaganda that linked their style of education so intimately with piety, good morals, and the formation of character. For the Jesuits, moreover, the schools soon became not one ministry among many, but the ministry that enjoyed a certain preeminence over all the others. On 10 August 1560, Polanco wrote in the general’s name an important letter to all superiors of the Society. He said: Generally speaking, there are [in the Society] two ways of helping our neighbors: one in the colleges through the education of youth in letters, learning and Christian life, and the second in every place to help every kind of person through sermons, confessions and the other means that accord with our customary way of proceeding.37 The Jesuits’ decision opened a new era in the way ministry would be conceived in the Catholic church, as the history of so many orders of women and men founded subsequently has shown. That much is obvious and has generally been acknowledged. But we must look at the repercussions of the decision on the very character of the Society itself—repercussions that could hardly have been foreseen in the beginning. The decision helped determine, for instance, to which classes of society the Jesuits would tend to minister. As Paul Grendler has shown, two major types of schools existed in Italy by the mid-sixteenth century: the Latin (or Humanist) School and the Vernacular School.38 The former appealed to the upper classes of society, whereas the other, a more “practical” form of education, appealed to those of the lower classes who desired the basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Humanists like Erasmus believed that a Humanist education was appropriate and desirable for all, but the fact was that it simply did not appeal to all. Ignatius and the first Jesuits were adamant in their conviction that their ministries should be offered gratis to anybody who desired them, regardless of their sex, race, socio-economic class and, to some extent, even their religion. True, in the Constitutions Ignatius laid down as one of the norms for “the distribution of members of the Society in the vineyard of the Lord” that “spiritual aid given to important

37 Mon. paed., 3:305–306. 38 Schooling in Renaissance Italy.

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and public persons ought to be regarded as more important” because such persons had great influence for better or worse on others.39 Nonetheless, what strikes one when reading the reports Jesuits wrote back to Ignatius about their ministries is how marvelously indiscriminate they were in the choice of people to whom they ministered, although they had a special concern for those in dire spiritual or physical need. That same desire not to restrict their ministry to any particular class animated them in the operation of their colleges. They insisted that the schools accept indiscriminately the poor and the rich, that they accept, as Polanco wrote to the Jesuits opening a new college at Ingolstadt in 1556, “every kind of person […] in order to animate and console them.”40 In Lisbon in 1555, “a great friend of the Society” made known his opinion that the Jesuits should not teach Latin grammar to boys from the lower social classes, for if those classes got a taste for study there would be no artisans or craftsmen left. The opinion displeased the Jesuits immensely, as they reported to Ignatius, and they refused to conform to it.41 The fact is, however, that this determination had to do battle with the dynamics intrinsic to the Latin School itself, so that with time the Jesuits’ ministry of education was directed towards the middle and upper classes to an extent that seems not to have been foreseen in the original decision, and some schools were explicitly founded for that purpose. Historians have in fact sometimes exaggerated this shift in clientele. It has been reckoned, for instance, that well into the eighteenth century, sixty to sixty-five per cent of the students in Jesuit schools in France were from the “working classes,” and that the “overall enrolments showed a remarkable closeness to the broadest social representation one could expect.”42 Nonetheless, a significant shift did take place over time—not so much because of a deliberate decision in that regard but because of a prior decision whose ultimate implications were not fully understood. The decision to take the operation of schools as a primary ministry profoundly affected even the way the Jesuits would conceive of themselves. There can be little doubt that in the beginning and for the first ten years the ultimate model for ministry that the Jesuits held up for themselves was an itinerant preacher of the Gospel as described in chapter 10 of Matthew’s

39 Constitutions [622, e]. 40 Mon. paed., 1:485. 41 Chron., 5:562. 42 See Aldo Scaglione, The Liberal Arts and the Jesuit College System (Amsterdam: John Benjamin Publishing Company, 1986), 118.

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Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles through the story of the evangelizing Paul. Especially the fully professed members of the Society were to hold themselves in readiness to travel anywhere in the world for ministry at a moment’s notice.43 Long-term residence in the houses of the Society for those members who had finished their education seems to have been almost precluded by the itinerant nature of the Jesuit vocation. Whereas Benedict saw the monk as constituted by his vow of stability, the Constitutions of the Society stipulated that “the first characteristic of our Institute” was to travel to various parts of the world.44 Once the schools were founded, however, this ideal had to compete with the reality of being resident schoolmasters. Early in the 1550s, Ignatius discovered that chaos resulted from moving Jesuits too frequently from the schools to which they were assigned, and complaints from both students and parents poured into Jesuit headquarters when a popular teacher was transferred. Ignatius adapted accordingly. Few stronger indications of the esteem in which he held the schools exist than his willingness to modify in practice this original and basic understanding of how Jesuits were to operate and conceive of themselves. Ignatius had likewise to modify another of his most cherished proposals for the Society. From the first days of his conversion, he had been attracted to Francis of Assisi and to the ideal of religious poverty to which the Franciscans aspired. One recalls the pivotal role that “actual and spiritual poverty” plays in the Spiritual Exercises. Learning from the troubled history of the Franciscan order, Ignatius realized how difficult it was to translate that ideal into a form that would be viable for an institution like the Society. Learning also from his own experience as a student at the University of Paris, he determined in the Constitutions that the students in the Society could live in houses (called “colleges”) that enjoyed an endow- ment, thus freeing them to concentrate on their studies without worry about where the next meal was coming from. Those members of the Society who had finished their education, however, would live strictly off alms—hand-to-mouth, one might say—in so-called “professed houses.” The colleges would presumably be few, since in this original formula tion the only ones the Society would operate would be for its own members. The professed houses would be many—and would be the norm.

43 See my “To Travel to Any Part of the World: Jerónimo Nadal and the Jesuit Vocation,” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 16/2 (March, 1984). This article is also part of the present collection (Chapter 9). 44 Constitutions [626]. See also ibid., [82], [92], [304], [308], [588], [603], [605].

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Hardly had the ink dried on those parts of the Constitutions that deal with this matter before the reality outstripped the theory. In the last five years of Ignatius’s life, schools were founded at breakneck pace, so that it had to become apparent that most members of the Society would live in endowed institutions. The most astounding aspect of this development is that it happened not despite Ignatius but with his blessing. In the last years of his life, he for the most part would not accept an invitation for Jesuits to establish themselves in a given location if it meant not a school but a professed house. As Polanco wrote to a superior in 1555, a year before Ignatius’s death: “Our father’s intention is that, especially in these initial stages, the schools must multiply rather than the houses.”45 This “intention” turned out to be the blueprint for the future. Finally, the decision to operate schools in the Humanist mode profoundly affected the relationship of the Jesuits to learning and culture. Ignatius and his companions, graduates of the University of Paris, were well educated according to the standards of their day. As Ignatius stated several times in his Autobiography, he early determined to pursue further studies in order to help his ministry. The idea was widespread in his day, ardently promoted by the Humanists, that a better educated clergy was one of the most urgent needs of the church. We have every reason to believe that, even if he had not made the momentous decision to take schooling as a ministry for his order, he would have prescribed for its members a rigorous education. That decision had, nonetheless, a peculiarly determinative influence. In the first several years of the Society, for instance, some members were convinced that the writing and publishing of books was something alien to their itinerant and pastoral vocation.46 As evidenced by Polanco’s Directorium, this persuasion did not last long. What seem to have especially commended themselves to them were works on ministry like the Directorium or works to “refute the heretics.”47 Jesuits indeed began to produce books along these lines, but once the schools were opened they discovered, like so many teachers before and since, that the textbooks available were not to their liking. They soon began to publish, therefore, works on Latin grammar and rhetoric and their own editions of the classics appropriate to the classroom. In a word, they began an engagement—modest enough at first—with secular

45 Epp. Ign., 9:82. 46 Salmerón 1:46–47. 47 Nadal 5:665–666.

198 chapter eleven culture that would become one of their trademarks. This engagement, we must observe, was more than a propensity; it was intrinsically interwoven with the very fabric of their understanding of their ministry. Moreover, one of the basic premises of the Humanist tradition was that religious and moral inspiration could be found even in pagan authors. No Jesuit, as far as I know, went so far as to echo Erasmus’s famous prayer, “Saint Socrates, pray for us,” but some of them came close.48 One recalls the words of the distinguished Jesuit exegete, Cornelius a Lapide, in the late sixteenth century commenting on a passage from the philosopher Epictetus: “O wonder! These words ring of the Gospel, not pagan philosophy.”49 In the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus inspired by Ignatius, the conviction runs deep that grace builds on nature—a conviction born of Ignatius’s personal experience and reinforced by the teaching of scholastic theologians like Aquinas whom he commended to his order. One aspect of that conviction was that transcendent religion and human culture mysteriously interpenetrate and are reconcilable. That conviction was also fundamental to the religious thought of Renaissance Humanism. When Ignatius committed his Society to the ministry of formal education and thus approved the Humanist curriculum of classical authors, he gave the conviction an institutional articulation in the legislation of the Society. It is not implausible to postulate that this conviction helped incline later Jesuits like Matteo Ricci and John de Britto towards their notably benign attitudes towards the ancient cultures of China and India. The nascent Society of Jesus had its basic charter in the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, later supplemented by his Autobiography and then the Constitutions. There can be no doubt that these three documents provided and reveal the foundational elements of the character of the Society. More specific delineations of that character resulted, however, from decisions made along the way and from cultural forces acting upon it in ways not altogether foreseen. Renaissance Humanism was one of those forces. I hope I have shown, within the modest limits of a brief article, that the impact of Humanism on Ignatius and the Society was manifold, profound and of lasting significance.

48 Spoken by Nephalius in “The Godly Feast” (Convivium religiosum), in Opera omnia (Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company, 1972), 1/3:254. See Ten Colloquies of Erasmus, ed. Craig R. Thompson (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957), 158. 49 Quoted in François de Dainville, La Naissance de l’humanisme moderne (Paris: Beauchesne, 1940), 223.

CHAPTER TWELVE

HOW THE FIRST JESUITS BECAME INVOLVED IN EDUCATION1

In 1548, just a little over 450 years ago, ten members of the recently founded Society of Jesus opened the first Jesuit school in Messina in Sicily. That event would have immense repercussions on the character of the Society of Jesus, giving it a new and quite special relationship to culture; but it was also a crucial event in the history of schooling within the Catholic church and in Western civilization.2 Within a few years the Jesuits had opened some thirty more primary/secondary schools, but also the so-called Roman College, which would soon develop into the first real Jesuit university (Gregorian University). In 1585, they opened in East Asia a school in Macau that also soon developed into a university, and about the same time they founded in Japan a remarkable art school and workshop in which local painters were introduced to Western techniques. In Rome, they hired Palestrina as the music teacher and chapel master or their students, and later in Paris, they did the same for Chapentrier. They were the teachers of Descartes, Moliere, and, yes, Voltaire. In Latin America, they had constructed magnificent schools of stone and brick, with huge libraries, before any serious school of any kind had been founded in the British colonies. By 1773, the year the Society of Jesus was suppressed by papal edict, the Jesuits were in charge of some 800 educational institutions around the globe. The system was almost wiped out by the stroke of a pen, but after the Society was restored in the early nineteenth century, the Jesuits with considerable success especially in North America, revived their tradition. Just as important as the work the Jesuits themselves accomplished in education has been their role, as the first teaching order within the Catholic church, in inspiring other religious orders to do the same. The seventeenth century saw an outburst of such foundations, as did the

1 Originally published in The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum: 400th Anniversary Perspectives, ed. Vincent J. Duminuco (New York: Fordham UP, 2000), 56–74. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. 2 For general background, see Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). For specific background, see John W. O’Malley The First Jesuits (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), esp. 200–242.

200 chapter twelve nineteenth. Most spectacular within the panorama, perhaps, is the model the Jesuits provided for women’s orders, beginning in seventeenth- century France. The Ursulines are only the best known among the many such institutions that had such an impressive impact upon Catholicism and upon women’s roles in society—an impact about which we were almost without clue until the recent outpouring of writings on it from a feminist perspective. I refer you especially to Elizabeth Rapley’s book on the subject.3 A word of explanation may be in order. What is meant by the expression “the first teaching order within the Catholic church”? What about the monasteries of the Benedictines in the Middle Ages, and what about the great Dominican and Franciscan teachers at the medieval universities? The Jesuits differed from these and similar prototypes in three significant ways. First, after a certain point, they formally and professedly designated the staffing and management of schools a true ministry of the order, indeed its primary ministry, whereas in the prototypes it never achieved such a status. Second, they actually set about to create such institutions and assumed responsibility for their continuance. Third, these institutions were not primarily intended for the training of the clergy but for boys and young men who envisaged a worldly career. No group in the church, or in society at large, had ever undertaken an enterprise on such a grand scale in which these three factors coalesced. But here I want to deal more directly with how the Jesuit involvement in formal schooling originated, not about its impact. I do so because I believe there is something stabilizing, even invigorating, about being part of a long-standing tradition, if of course one understands both its achievements and its limitations and is therefore free to take from it what is life-giving and helpful and leave the rest. Like all traditions, the Jesuit tradition has, to be sure, its dark side. Its embodiment up to 1773 has been criticized for being elitist, paternalistic, backward-looking, religiously bigoted. In its restored form from the nineteenth century forward, it has been criticized for being reactionary and repressive, ghetto-enclosed.4 Such criticisms are too persistent not to deserve attention. I merely call attention to them here so that you know

3 Elizabeth Rapley, The Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990). 4 See John W. O’Malley, “The Historiography of the Society of Jesus: Where Does It Stand Today?” in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley, et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 3–37. This article is also part of the present collection (Chapter 1).

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I am keenly aware of them. But this afternoon I do not stand before you to criticize the Jesuit tradition or to praise it. I am here to sketch with very broad strokes how it began, what it was trying to accomplish, and how it developed especially in the foundational years. I begin by describing for you two contexts for the founding of the school at Messina in 1548—the state of formal schooling in Europe at that moment and the state of the nascent Society of Jesus. First of all, the state of formal schooling. Two institutions were confronting and trying to accommodate each other—the university, a medieval foundation, and the humanistic primary and secondary schools, which began to take shape in fifteenth-century Italy with great Renaissance educators like Vittorino da Feltre and Guarino da Verona.5 These two institutions were based on fundamentally different, almost opposed, philosophies of education. The universities, as you know well, sprang up in the late twelfth and thirteen centuries largely in response to the recovery in the West of Aristotle’s works on logic and what we today would call the sciences— biology, zoology, astronomy, physics, and so forth. The universities almost overnight became highly sophisticated institution with structures, procedures, personnel, and offices that have persisted, with strikingly little change down to the present. They professionalized learning, something the ancient world had never really known, and that professionalization was most evident in the creation of what we today call graduate or professional schools like medicine and law. Their goal, even in what we might call the “undergraduate college” (the Arts Faculty), was the pursuit of truth. Their problem was how to reconcile Christian truth, that is, the Bible, with pagan scientific (or “philosophical”) truth, that is, Aristotle. Great theologians like Aquinas believed they had achieved a genuine reconciliation, which meant recognizing the limitations and errors of “philosophy” in relationship to Revelation. The second institution was the humanistic schools first created in Renaissance Italy in the fifteenth century, created to some extent as a counter-statement to the university system. The humanistic schools took not ancient scientific texts but ancient works of literature as the basis for their curriculum, the so-called studia humanitatis.6 These works of poetry,

5 Besides Grendler’s Schooling mentioned above, the best entrance into this world is still William Harrison Woodward, Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators (1897; reprint New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1964). 6 See the insightful article by Craig Ringwalt Thompson, “Better Teachers Than Scotus or Aquinas,” in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. John L. Lievsay (Durham: Durham University Press, 1968), 114–145.

202 chapter twelve drama, oratory, and history were assumed not only to produce eloquence in those studying them but were also assumed to inspire noble and uplifting ideals. They would, if properly taught, render the student a better human being, imbued especially with an ideal of service to the common good, in imitation of the great heroes of antiquity—an ideal certainly befitting the Christian. The purpose of this schooling was not so much the pursuit of abstract or speculative truth, which is what the universities pursued, as the character formation of the student, an ideal the humanists encapsulated in the word pietas—not to be translated as piety, though it included it, but as upright character. This education, unlike that of the university that could be protracted until the student was in his thirties or forties, was concluded in one’s late teens. At that point, the student could enter the active life that was to be his future. By the early decades of the sixteenth century these secondary schools had begun to spread outside Italy to many other countries of Western Europe. When we think of the sixteenth century, we automatically think of the religious controversies unleashed by Luther and of the great voyages of discovery and conquest. What we also need to realize is that it was an age mad for education, when support for it and belief in its therapeutic power for the good of society reached an almost unprecedented peak. That is the first context that I need to set. Now let us turn to the second, the founding of the Society of Jesus. As you know well, this began with the association together of six, then ten, students at the university of Paris in the early 1530s. Ignatius Loyola, a layman, was the leader of the group, their spiritual guide, who brought them all, one by one, to deeper religious conversion through the Spiritual Exercises he had already composed. These tell eventually decided they wanted to be mission aries to the Holy Land; but when that plan fell through, they went to Rome to place themselves at the disposition of the pope, and then in 1539–1540 decided on their own initiative to stay together to found a new religious order. The basic impulse behind the new order was missionary. They formulated for themselves a special “fourth” vow that obliged them to travel anywhere in the world where there was hope of God’s greater service and the good of souls—a vow often misunderstood as a kind of loyalty oath to the pope, whereas it is really a vow to be a missionary. Even as the order was receiving papal approval in 1540, St. Francis Xavier was on his way to India, thence to Japan, and almost to China before he died in 1552.

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The missionary impulse would continue to define the order down to the present. From the Spiritual Exercises, however, the order had another important impulse, and that was to interiority, that is, to heartfelt acceptance of God’s action in one’s life through cultivation of prayer and reception of personalized forms of guidance in matters pertaining to one’s progress in spiritual motivation and in purity of conscience. Derived from the Exercises, this impulse was a kind of recapitulation of the early religious experience of Ignatius. This call to interiority was one of many alternatives in the sixteenth century to the almost arithmetic and highly ritualized forms of religious practice that were in great vogue. It is important to note that the Jesuits did not begin because of some mandate from above or even because the wanted to deal with institutional issues besetting sixteenth-century Christianity, but because each of them sought peace of soul and more deeply interiorized sense of purpose that they hoped to share with others. The impulse to interiority manifested itself even in the way the Jesuits went about the teaching of catechism to adults and children, one of the first ministries they undertook. Catechism meant teaching the rudiments of Christian belief and practice with a view to living a devout life. The contents of the teaching was the Apostles Creed, the Ten Commandments, and basic prayers, but also included the so-called spiritual and corporal works of mercy—feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, welcoming the stranger. These were ultimately derived from the 25th chapter of Matthew’s gospel, where Jesus said that to do these things for the needy was to do them to Him. The motivation was powerful. In the sixteenth century the practice of these works, this art of Christian living, was called Christianitas—and in my opinion was what the Jesuits were fundamentally all about once they began to work together, that is, persuading and teaching others how to be Christians in the fullest sense, with a special awareness of social responsibility.7 Three aspects of the spiritual development that Ignatius Loyola himself underwent are pertinent here. The first I would call the primacy of personal spiritual experience. While Ignatius underwent his great conversion at the castle of Loyola in 1521 when recovering from his battle wounds and

7 For a description of Christianitas and its importance in the Middle Ages, see the brilliant article by John Van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” The American Historical Review 91 (1996): 519–552.

204 chapter twelve especially when immediately thereafter spending months in prayer and contemplation at the little town of Manresa outside Barcelona, he became convinced that he was being taught by God alone—taught through his experience of joy and sadness, of hope and despair, of desire and revulsion, of enlightenment and confusion. Through all this God was trying to communicate with him, in a personal and direct way, so as to guide him in his life and choices. It was on this conviction that the Spiritual Exercises were based, for this action of God was somehow operative or wanted to be operative in every human life. An important conclusion follows from this premise that had—or at least ought to have had—some importance for the Jesuit tradition of education. That is, it is of the utmost importance for every human being to attain personal, inward freedom, so as to be able to follow the movements toward light and life that God puts within us, or, if you prefer a less religious formulation, to allow us to live our lives in ways that satisfy the deepest yearnings of our hearts. The second aspect, also related to Ignatius’s personal evolution into spiritual maturity, we can call his “reconciliation with the world.” At the beginning of his conversion at Loyola in 1521 and the early months at Manresa, he gave himself over to severe fasting, other penances, let his hair, and his fingernails grow, dressed himself in rags. But as his spiritual enlightenments continued, he began to modify this behavior and then give it up altogether, as he grew to love and see as a gift of God the things he earlier feared. He changed from being a disheveled and repulsive- looking hermit to a man determined to pursue his education in the most prestigious academic institution of his day, the University of Paris. He was on the way toward developing what might be called a world-friendly spirituality. While at the University, he, at least in some limited way, studied the theology of Aquinas, in which he would have found justification for this change, for of all Christian theologians Thomas was the most positive in his appreciation of this world—intent, as I indicated, on reconciling nature and grace, reconciling Aristotle and the Bible, reconciling human culture and religion, so that they are appreciated not in competition with each other but in cooperation, both coming from God and leading to God. Ignatius must have found in Aquinas confirmation for the last and culminating meditation in the Exercises, the meditation on the love of God, for it contains insight along this line. The conclusion Ignatius drew from these insights was that God could be found in all things in this world, for they were created good, found in all circumstances (except of course in one’s

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personal sin). The Jesuit Constitutions would later specify Aquinas as the special theologian to be cultivated in the order.8 As Saint Ignatius evoked in his own life from being a hermit to being reconciled with the world, he simultaneously developed the third aspect of his spirituality that is pertinent for our topic. He ever more explicitly and fully saw the Christian life as a call to be of help to others. This desire appeared in the earliest days of his conversion at Loyola, but became even stronger and more pervasive. No expression appears more often in his correspondence—on practically every page—than “the help of souls.” That is what he wanted the Society of Jesus to be all about. As the years wore on, he also evolved into a believer in social institutions as especially powerful means for “the help of souls.” This is exemplified most dramatically in his work in founding the Society of Jesus and in saying goodbye to what he called his “pilgrim years” to become the chief administrator in that institution from 1541 until his death in 1556. This change in Ignatius has been little emphasized by historians, but it is obvious and of paramount importance. From 1521, the year of his conversion, until practically 1540, he was either on the road or leading the rootless life of a student. That ended with the founding of the Society, and it can be taken as a symptom in him of a deeper psychological shift. This evolution prepared the way for the Jesuits undertaking formal schooling as their primary ministry. The road to that decision, however, was not easy or straight. The original ten founding members of the Society were, “cumulatively,” an extraordinarily learned group, all graduates of the University of Paris, which was still the most prestigious academic institution in Europe. As they envisaged the Society in the foundational documents of the earliest years, they not only did not foresee Jesuits as schoolteachers, but they expressly excluded it as a possibility for themselves. In fact, they decided that they would not even teach the younger members of the order but send them to already established universities. Nonetheless, they gradually began to offer some instruction to younger Jesuits, and from this humble beginning, the idea began to arise in the Society and to some extent outside the Society that members might do some formal teaching—on a restricted basis and in extraordinary

8 See John W. O’Malley, “Early Jesuit Spirituality: Spain and Italy,” in Christian Spirituality: Post-Reformation and Modern, ed. Louis Dupré and Don E. Saliers = vol. 3 of Christian Spirituality (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 3–27. This article is also part of the present collection (Chapter 8).

206 chapter twelve circumstances. This gentle but momentous shift of perspective took place within a three- or four-year period, leading up to 1547. By that year, the Society of Jesus had several hundred members, many of them with humanistic secondary education and many of them located in Italy. Those who had been trained outside Italy, especially in Paris, realized that they had learned some pedagogical principles practically unknown in Italy and that allowed students to make fast progress. This was the so-called “Parisian method,” about which Fr. Codina, the international expert on the subject, has so well informed us. Most of the elements have persisted in schools up to this day to the point we cannot imagine education without students being divided into classes, with progress from one class to a higher one in a graduated system. We also at least pay lip service to the idea that the best way to acquire skill in writing and speaking is not simply to read good authors but to be an active learner by being forced to compose speeches and deliver them in the classroom and elsewhere. Particularly important for the Jesuit system was the specification that it was not enough to read great drama; students should act in them, and such “acting” often had to include singing and dancing. This Parisian style of pedagogy would give the Jesuits an edge in Italy that made their schools more attractive than the alternatives. Thus, the stage was set for the Jesuits to enter the world of formal education. In place was an educational theory compatible with their self-definition, that is, the pietas of the humanists correlated with the inculcation of Christianitas that was their mission. Moreover, schools were a ready-made institution in which to perform one of the works of mercy—instructing the ignorant. When St. Ignatius poke of the schools, he in fact described them as a work of charity, a contribution to what he called the “common good” of Society at large. The schools were a way of “helping.” He and other Jesuits also saw that the schools gave them a special entree into the life of the city and into the lives of parents of their students. Finally, the Jesuit had techniques and pedagogical principles that would make them especially successful teachers. In other words, it was something that by talent, background, and training they were highly qualified to do. Yes, the stage was set, but there was no guarantee the play would be performed. The Jesuits could very easily have stuck to their original resolve and not become involved in offering instruction on any regular basis. There is no indication from these early years that Ignatius was guiding the Society in this direction or that he entertained any thoughts that formal schooling might be a venture the Society might explore. Why should he?

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No religious order had ever undertaken such an enterprise. The Jesuits, I think we have to admit, got into education almost by the back door. In 1547, some citizens of the city of Messina, prompted by a Jesuit named Doménech, who had been working in Sicily for some time, asked Ignatius to send some Jesuits to open what we would call a secondary school in the humanist mode to educate their sons. Somehow, in the minds of Doménech and other influential Jesuits, this idea had been ger- minating. Negotiations opened, with the citizen of Messina offering to supply food, clothing, and lodging not only for the five Jesuit teachers but also for as many as five young Jesuits who might also study there. Ignatius accepted the invitation, surely in part because he saw it as an opportunity to get funding for the education of Jesuits themselves; but he must also have sensed something more profound, though we have no information as to what was passing through his mind at the time. In any case, he gathered for the venture ten of the most talented Jesuits in Rome. The school opened the next year, and, despite many tribulations, it was in the main a resounding success. A few months later, the senators of the city of Palermo petitioned for a similar institution in their city, and Ignatius acquiesced— with similarly happy results. With that enthusiasm for this new ministry—new to the Jesuit and new to the Catholic church—seized Jesuit leadership, and school after school was opened, including the Roman College in 1552, which as I said would develop into the first real Jesuit university. It seems that once they made the decision to create schools of their own, they easily accepted the idea that some of these might be universities where the so-called “higher disciplines” like theology and philosophy would be taught. By 1560, a letter from Jesuit headquarters in Rome acknowledged that the schools had become the primary ministry of the Society, the primary base for most of the other ministries.9 The order had in effect redefined itself. From a group imaging itself as a corps of itinerant preachers and missionaries, without ever renouncing that ideal, now reframed it with a commitment to permanent educational institutions. By 1773, the Jesuit network of some 800 educational institutions had become the most immense operating under a single aegis on an international basis that the world had ever seen. What did the Jesuits hope to accomplish by these schools? Why did they do it? It is often said that in them the Jesuits wanted to oppose

9 See O’Malley, First Jesuits, 200.

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Protestantism and promote the reform of the Catholic church. Certainly these reasons came to play a role, and in certain parts of Europe the defense of Catholics against Protestantism and then a counterattack played a large role in Jesuit self-understanding and mission, especially by the end of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth. But these reasons were not at the core of their motivation, especially when they worked in territories where Protestantism was not seen as a threat, which are the territories in fact where most Jesuits lived and worked. Their real goals for their secondary schools were those I have already suggested, borrowed more or less from the humanists themselves. Pedro Ribadeneyra, one of the important early Jesuits, explained the purpose of Jesuit schools in a letter to King Philip II of Spain by saying institutio puero- rum, reformatio mundi—I will tone him down a little bit by translating it as “the proper education of youth will mean improvement for the whole world.”10 Ribadeneyra was simply echoing the principal article in the humanists’ creed—for their faith in their style of education was ardent and their expectations high, exaggerated though those claims might sound today, even ridiculous, like any great faith they had a certain self-fulfilling dynamism. Don’t you agree: an educator who has no faith in the high potential of the enterprise, no matter how defined, is hardly an educator at all? Other early Jesuits were more modest and down to earth than Ribade neyra in what they expected, while still believing firmly in the value of the schools for society at large. In this regard they rode the enthusiasm of their times, Juan Alfonso de Polanco, executive secretary of the Society from 1547 until 1573, at one point drew up for his fellow Jesuits a quasi-official list of fifteen reasons for the schools, in which, it is interesting to note, opposing Protestantism and reforming the Catholic church are not even hinted at. Among Polanco’s reasons are that poor boys, who could not possibly pay for teachers, much less for private tutors, will make progress in learning and that their parents will be able to satisfy their obligation to educate their children. The final reason he gives is the most encompassing and reveals the social dimension of the whole undertaking: “Those who are now only students will grow up to be pastors, civic officials, administrators of justice, and will fill other important posts to everybody’s profit and advantage.”11

10 Ibid., 209. 11 Ibid., 212–213.

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The schools, in other words, were, as I said earlier, undertaken as a contribution to the common good of society at large. This was true as well for the Jesuit universities, where the cultivation of the sciences would be especially noteworthy, for, we need to remind ourselves, “philosophy,” that central plank in the “undergraduate” curriculum, meant for the most part “natural philosophy,” that is, the sciences. Moreover, the basic design for the universities, in accordance with the tradition of the University of Paris, put theology as the preeminent “graduate school,” the culmination of the system. In the religiously turbulent sixteenth century, the Jesuits realized the importance of well-trained theologians. The Jesuits were a Roman Catholic religious order, and they of course retained their religious aims. But, especially with the schools, they began to have an altogether special relationship to culture and to have a more alert eye for what they called “the common good.” In other words, the “help of souls” was not just help in getting people to heaven, but it included in a noteworthy way concern for the well-being of the earthly city. It was thus less exclusively “churchy” than we have sometimes been led to believe, partly because, I am convinced, of their spiritual vision of the world as “charged with the grandeur of God.” One of the special features of the Jesuit schools was that they were open to students from every social class. This was made possible by Ignatius’s insistence that, in some fashion or other, the schools be endowed, so that tuition would not be necessary. In their ministries, he wanted the Jesuits to minister to anybody in need, regardless of social status or socioeconomic class. Regarding the schools, he specifically enjoined that they be open “to rich and poor alike, without distinction.”12 Jesuit schools even in the beginning are usually described as catering to the rich, and there is no doubt that over the course of the years and then of the centuries most of the schools tended to move in that direction. But this was far, far from the original intention, never actualized in the degree usually attributed to it, and insofar as it occurred was the result not so much of deliberate choices as of the special nature of the humanistic curriculum. That curriculum postulated the Latin and Greek classics as its principal subject matter, with appreciation for literature and eloquence as its primary focus. Such an education simply did not appeal to many parents and potential students, who preferred a more “practical” education in the trades or in commercial skills. The same could be said a fortiori

12 Ibid., 211.

210 chapter twelve for the kind of training the universities offered. In any case, while the Jesuits of course had no idea of what we call today “upward social mobility,” the schools in fact acted in some instances as an opportunity for precisely that. The Jesuits were aware of this reality and in a few instances had to defend themselves against critics who thought the prospect corro- sive of the stability of society. Were the Jesuit schools, then, identical in every way with other schools? Did the Jesuits simply do what others were doing, but with the considerable advantage that students did not have to pay tuition? No, I think that is a simplistic reading of what happened. It is true that in their secondary schools, as well as in the few universities they ran, they in the main con- formed to the consensus of their age about what constituted a good education. This is a fact often overlooked when people today ask what a “Jesuit education” is. But there were some features that were special, if not quite unique, to them that began to give a special character to what they did, so that we no longer speak of them as following the Parisian style in the education but as developing their own Jesuit style. I will describe only one of those features. Unlike some of their contemporaries, they did not oppose humanistic education to scholastic (university or professional) education, as if these were two incompatible systems or cultures. They saw them, rather, as complementary. They esteemed the intellectual rigor of the scholastic system and the power of the detached analysis it provided, and they believed in its goal of training highly skilled graduates in the sciences and in the professions of law, medicine, and theology. They saw this graduate training as especially appropriate in theology for their own members and even for a few select students for the diocesan clergy. In this instance, they saw it as a help to a more “professionally” reliable ministry, for they shared the goal of both Protestant and Catholic leaders to produce a literate, more learned clergy. They at the same time esteemed in the humanist system (primary and secondary education) the potential of poetry, oratory, and drama to elicit and foster noble sentiments and ideals, especially in younger boys: they believed in its potential to foster pietas—that is, good character. Moreover, this system taught eloquence, for rhetoric was at the center of the curriculum; that is, it taught oratory, the power to move others to action—action in a good cause. Furthermore, from both these systems of education they appropriated the conviction that human culture and religion were not competing but complementary values, each enriching and challenging the other. Both systems taught in fact that philosophical, ethical, and to some extent even

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religious truths, were available outside Christianity, and that these truths had to be respected. They were both thus reconciliatory in their ultimate dynamism. In the philosopher Aristotle, the scholastic Aquinas found truths about the universe and human morality. In Virgil and Cicero, the humanists found truths about human nature and its destiny. I do not know of any Jesuit going so far as the humanist Erasmus did in his famous prayer, “O, St. Socrates, pray for us,” but some of them came close. I am not the only scholar to suggest that the benign attitude Jesuit missioners like Matteo Ricci took toward Confucianism in China and Roberto de Nobili toward Hinduism in India related in some way especially to the humanist education that the Jesuits cultivated for their own members to a degree no other order ever did—they had to, for practically every Jesuit was called upon at some point to teach “the humanities,” that is, the Latin and Greek literary classics. My impression is that the Jesuits, for all that, saw the boundaries between these two educational philosophies, unlike the blur that occurs in North America today where the undergraduate college both is the direct heir of the humanistic system and at the same time, by being part of the university, partakes of the technical or even vocational training reserved to “professionals.” What is education for? It is for many things, according to one’s philosophy, but it is difficult to be successful in it if it is seen to be for many things competing at the same time for the same person. The Jesuits, I believe, wanted to preserve the best of two great educational ideals, the intellectual rigor and professionalism of the scholastic system and the more personalist, societal, and even practical goals of the humanists. I am not trying to say they were successful—or unsuccessful— in doing so. Indeed, I wonder if a final resolution of such disparate goals is possible within any educational vision and, unless we clearly opt for one of the two alternatives, if we are not perpetually condemned to some compromise rather than synthesis. Already in the sixteenth century, a certain ambivalence about the purpose even of university education was introduced by the Jesuits and others, and that ambivalence persists even today, though the terms in which it manifests itself are of course quite different. By 1599, in any case, the Jesuits had had enough experience in education to try to codify their methods and ideals, and they did so by producing the famous Ratio Studiorum, or plan of studies. They had tried to produce it earlier but were not able to bring it about. The Ratio would serve them as a guide throughout the world, really down to the nineteenth century. Basically a codification of curricular, administrative, and pedagogical principles, it had all the advantages and the many disadvantages of any

212 chapter twelve such codification. It provided a firm structure and assured a certain level of quality control. It ran the danger of dampening initiative and inhibiting needed changes as the decades and then the centuries rolled on. At a certain point, it desperately needed revision, but revision was resisted. Perhaps most important, it failed to highlight the larger vision and deeper assumptions that had originally animated the Jesuit educational undertaken—partly because it took them for granted, partly because they were half-forgotten. Much scholarly commentary on Jesuit education has taken the Ratio as almost the only document studied, with the result that what I consider most important in Jesuit education has been slighted or even altogether missed. There are two further aspects of the Jesuit enterprise that the Ratio and most scholarship has missed and that I think are crucially important, I have become increasing aware of these in recent years, and especially during the international conference that I helped organize two years ago at Boston College, entitled “The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773.” Most of the papers from the conference—some thirty-five of them—have just been published in a volume from the University of Toronto Press.13 The first aspect of which the conference made me increasingly aware is the attention, the Jesuits gave to the arts. Official Jesuit legislation and directives in this regard are generally quite deceptive, for they are few, and those few tend to be cautious and restrictive. The importance of Jesuit theater has long been recognized, but it has been little recognized in the American scholarship and generally treated as a subject in itself, not integrated into the educational enterprise as such. In any case, the more I study the history of Jesuit education, the more integral to the program of the schools the arts seem to be, many of them consequences of the early Jesuit commitment to theater—which of course was itself part of the Parisian style, which the Jesuits interpreted to mean that the plays of Terence should not simply be read but be performed. The plays, besides inevitably entailing music and dance, sometimes required elaborate sets and other paraphernalia of dramatic productions. The arts took the form of what we would today call extra-curriculars, but they were done in many of the schools in a way that fitted them into a clear program—and often carried out with great expense. The great collegiate churches attached to Jesuit schools often employed architects, painters,

13 O’Malley, The Jesuits. See also Gauvin A. Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).

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and sculptors of the highest local standing for their construction and decoration—but not only of local standing, for the Jesuits employed in the early seventeenth century the most celebrated artist of the day, Rubens, and after Rubens’s death, the subsequently most celebrated Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Thus, education took place outside the often narrow confines of the classroom. Louise Rice wrote in the Toronto volume on the celebrations that took place at the Roman College in the seventeenth century on the occasion of academic disputations or degree defenses of the lay students.14 These were great public affairs, with distinguished guest who were entertained with instrumental and vocal music at various moments in the program, with the hall sometimes elaborately decorated according to the design of a local artist. An unexamined field in the history of architecture, it seems to me, is the development of formal school buildings as almost a new genre. The Jesuits sparked this development. At least in Italy before the Jesuits opened their schools, no such buildings existed for primary or secondary education, for “schools” were such informal institutions, usually meeting in the house of the schoolmaster. One of the great changes that the Jesuits helped promote was the development of teams of teachers—a real faculty—for such schools, which might range from five or six teachers up to thirty or forty. A faculty of such size required many classrooms, and hence required a building specially constructed for that scope. A second aspect called to my attention by the Boston conference is the working of the very network itself, that is, the working of the communication of Jesuit schools with one another; or, even more impressive, communication with Jesuits working “in the field” in newly discovered lands. Steve Harris has published, again in the Toronto volume, an article on this subject, which he calls the Jesuit “geography of knowledge.” Harris is a historian of science, and his specialty is Jesuit science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a subject now experiencing an upgraded evaluation among many such historians. Jesuits were committed to the university program in place at Paris and elsewhere, whose lower college was that of the arts, that is, of philosophy, that is, as I said, of natural philosophy or science. It is this curricular fact that accounts for the many Jesuit astronomical observatories and laboratories in their larger schools and for a certain Jesuit preeminence in this domain.

14 Louise Rice, “Jesuit Thesis Prints and the Festive Academic Defence at the Collegio Romano,” in The Jesuits, ed. O’Malley et al., 148–169.

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But one advantage the Jesuits had over others was the reports from the overseas fields of their brethren, who also had had good training “in philosophy” as astronomers, geographers, and naturalists. These reports often took the form of the “edifying letters” the Jesuits sent to broad audiences to win support for their work abroad. In Harris’s opinion, it was not only the quantity and frequency of this correspondence that gave some Jesuit centers a privileged access to new information about the natural world. It was also the quality of the observation and the depend- ability of remote agents in executing requests from the Jesuit scientists back home for measurements, descriptions, and the sending back to Europe of natural objects, which could be examined and then put on display. The Jesuits shared this information with colleagues who did not share their own confessional allegiance. As Harris says, at least within the history of science, Jesuit letters can be found in the correspondence of every major figure from Tycho Brahe in the sixteenth century to Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz in the seventeenth and to similarly distinguished figures in the eighteenth. When the Jesuits opened their first school in Messina, Europe was not only in the throes of the great religious turmoil in the wake of the Reformation but also at one of the great turning points in the history of formal schooling. The fifteenth-century humanists in Italy had set in motion a movement that bit by bit was creating a brand new institution— the primary/secondary school pretty much as we know it today. This new institution was of course derived from principles enunciated in ancient Greece and Rome, but it was being put into a systematic form that Cicero and Quintilian did not know. The Jesuits arrived on the scene at just the right moment to capitalize on what was happening, and they played important role in the development of the new system. They were far from being alone in such development, but because of the way they were organized, because of the special backgrounds, they came from and then devised for themselves, their role was special. I have tried to indicate a few ways in which this was true. These schools must of course be placed in the context of what we can call the confessionalization of Europe, for they became confessional schools, intent on establishing for their students clear Roman Catholic identity. But they had other aspects to them that were broader in their scope, as I hope I have suggested, that helped lift them out of the special context of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Jesuits also appropriated the older institution of learning—the university. This too gave them a special role in European culture, of which

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science was a particularly important and perhaps somewhat surprising manifestation. By the seventeenth century, the universities began to undergo important changes, as science moved away from the text of Aristotle to more experimental modes, in which individual Jesuits took part even as the Jesuit educational institution tended to remain fixed in the more text-bound mode. I exaggerate when I say that the Jesuits got into formal schooling almost by a series of historical accidents, but there is at least a grain of truth in it. I find that they were not always clear in explaining to themselves or others why they remained in it or what they hoped to accomplish—sometimes repeating what sound suspiciously like bromides. But let me put words in their mouths. First, they were convinced that formal schooling was a good thing for society at large. They were content through their schools to contribute to the common good. Second, they believed that ethical and religious formation should not be confined to the pulpit, for it was a concern much too broad for such a boundary. Third, they were not fundamentalists, for, though not uncritical, they saw culture and education not as enemies but as friends. They derived this last conviction from the basically reconciliatory dynamics of the Thomistic system of Scholasticism and from the reconciliatory dynamics of the humanists’ attitude toward good literature. They derived it as well from the founder of their order who, a few years after his conversion, decided that he needed a university education in order, as he said, “better to help souls.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

MISSION AND THE EARLY JESUITS1

The word “mission” is popular today. Schools, humanitarian institutions and sometimes even businesses use it to designate what they are about. They have a “mission.” They issue “mission statements,” and they ask their clientele to judge them (and contribute funds) according to their success in living up to them. This secular usage derives ultimately from the ecclesiastical, where the term is of more venerable vintage. The apostles spread the gospel on their “missionary” journeys. Through the centuries, “missionaries” established “missions.” Until quite recently preachers preached “missions.” Today “missioning” ceremonies send ministers on their way— even if sometimes not much farther than across the street. We can hardly speak of Christianity without using the word. It comes as a surprise, therefore, to learn that the term was generally not used in our contemporary sense until the sixteenth century.2 Instead of missions and missionaries, the traditional expressions were “propagating the faith” or “journeying to the infidel.” Despite the Vulgate’s employment of various forms like missus and missio in connection with the apostles and other early disciples of Jesus, during the Middle Ages those forms were used almost exclusively for the “missions” internal to the Blessed Trinity. They were not applied to efforts at evangelization. The Jesuits were among the first to inaugurate the new usage and were the group initially perhaps most responsible for its widespread propagation. In the first official document of the order, submitted to Pope Paul III and incorporated by him in the bull of approval Regimini militantis ecclesiae of 1540, the first Jesuits spoke of this aspect of their goals as “propagation of the faith,” but later in the document used “missions” in that same regard. In subsequent years in their correspondence among themselves,

1 Originally published in The Way, Supplement 79 (1994): 3–10. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. 2 See F. Bourdeau, “Le vocabulaire de la mission,” in Parole et mission 3 (1960): 9–27, and Adriano Prosperi, “L’Europa cristiana e il mondo: alle origini dell’idea di missione,” Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica 2 (1992): 189–220.

218 chapter thirteen they employed “mission,” “journey,” and “pilgrimage” almost as synonyms to designate travel for the sake of ministry.3 The Jesuit Constitutions were substantially completed by Ignatius with the help of his secretary Juan Alfonso de Polanco about a decade after Paul III’s bull of approbation. Part Seven concerned “the distribution of members in the vineyard of the Lord.” In this Part, “missioned” (being sent) emerged with prominence, and referred both to the pope or to the superior general of the order. The term was about the same time further codified in the formula for the famous “Fourth Vow” that the fully professed pronounced, which was specified as being “about missions” (circa missiones). It was by now well on its way within the Society of Jesus to acquiring its contemporary meaning. What accounts for this shift in vocabulary in the sixteenth century? Such shifts in ways of speaking usually indicate deeper shifts in culture, deeper shifts in awareness and sensibilities, and they therefore do not admit facile or fully satisfactory explanations. Historians can simply point to certain congruencies, nothing more. In this case, the great voyages of discovery of the late fifteenth century form the backdrop, but they do not principally account for the change. We do better, I believe, to look at the transformation of the ideal of the “apostolic life” (vita apostolica) that already had such a long history in Christianity. The ideal had taken on new significance from about the twelfth century onwards as different individuals and groups began to break with the monastic ideal of Christian perfection. Ideas about what “the life of the apostles” was like varied considerably, due in large measure to the unsophisticated historical sense that operated in the Middle Ages. By the fourteenth century the “Spiritual Franciscans,” for instance, thought that the apostolic life consisted essentially in absolute poverty, and they felt the wrath of the Holy See for their obstinacy in that conviction. In the opening decade of the sixteenth century Giles of Viterbo, Prior General of the order of Hermits of St. Augustine, envisioned the apostles as living like hermits, since that was supposedly the ancient pattern of life followed by members of his order. But at the very time, Giles lived and wrote the textual and philological labors of scholars like Erasmus and other humanists enabled the discovery

3 See Mario Scaduto, “La strada e i primi gesuiti,” in AHSI 40 (1971): 323–390, now available in an abridged translation, “The Early Jesuits and the Road,” The Way 42 (2003): 71–84, and John Olin, “The idea of pilgrimage in the experience of Ignatius Loyola,” in Church History 48 (1979): 387–397.

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of a historically more objective picture of the early church and engen- dered a greater sensitivity to the vocabulary of the New Testament. The word “apostolic” continued to be variously interpreted, as for instance a pipeline of authority from the original Twelve to later bishops and popes. But now when people of some education wanted to be “apostolic” by imitating the apostles, they almost perforce had to reckon with “being sent” to do ministry. Like so many Christians of their generation, the early Jesuits were inspired by a sense of the immediacy of the New Testament and by the direct relevance of biblical realities and events for their own lives and their age. In this appreciation, the Spiritual Exercises schooled them in an especially vivid way. Ignatius began to engage in ministry within a few months after his conversion in 1521, and he inspired his later disciples with a similar desire “to help souls.” More to the point, he early set out on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where he in fact wanted to remain in order “to help souls,” as he recalled in his Autobiography. When at Paris in 1534 he and his companions vowed to head for ministry to the same city, they were “journeying to the infidel.” They thus took a vow to be missionaries, although the word itself was not in their vocabulary at that time. Within a few years, however, they had begun to use missio to describe this aspect of their lives, influenced in that regard certainly by their keen desire to be faithful disciples of Jesus as indicated in the meditations in the Exercises on the Kingdom of Christ and the Two Standards, but probably also by the humanistic re-appropriation of the vocabulary of the New Testament. Early on, they became quite specific about how their ministry was modeled on the “apostolic” pattern. They saw it fundamentally outlined at Jesus’ commissioning of the Twelve in the tenth chapter of Matthew and the ninth chapter of Luke: “And he called the twelve together […] and sent them out to preach the kingdom of God and to heal. And he said to them, ‘Take nothing for your journey.’” For the Jesuits the pattern indicated in those passages consisted of four essential components: first, seeking out persons in need, by being sent for this task in at least some general way by their superiors; second, preaching the Good News by word and deed; third, healing the soul through confession and other means but also alleviating physical and material ills, as indicated by the so-called corporal works of mercy; fourth, doing all these things without seeking financial recompense.4

4 See my The First Jesuits (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), especially 84–90.

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In 1552, Ignatius commissioned Jerónimo Nadal to promulgate and explain the recently completed Constitutions to Jesuit communities in Sicily and then in Spain and Portugal. This was the first of Nadal’s many journeys throughout Europe to tell Jesuits about the organization they had joined and to inform them about the nature of their vocation. Ignatius could hardly have made a better choice, for Nadal was not only a faithful communicator of his ideas about the Society but also had gifts of eloquence and imagination that Ignatius lacked. Nadal saw the “apostolic” pattern as the essential definition of what it meant to be a Jesuit, in which “being sent” (being “missioned”) or “being on journey or pilgrimage for ministry” was the key component. He put the matter succinctly in a passage in his spiritual journal: Our vocation is similar to the vocation and training of the apostles: first, we come to know the Society, and then we follow; we are instructed; we receive our commission to be sent [on ministry]; we are sent; we exercise our ministry; we are prepared to die for Christ in fulfilling those ministries.5 “Apostolic”—once again we come back to words. Today Catholics use “apostolic” and “apostolate” as simple synonyms for ministry. “She is a very apostolic person” means that the person is fervent in ministry. This watered-down usage makes it difficult for us to recover the freshness, the dynamism, and the sense of venture and adventure that Nadal and other early Jesuits felt when they identified their task with the apostles’ and saw themselves as similarly “sent out” from safe havens—sent out either physically or in some metaphorical sense by beginning new and untried enterprises. For them “apostolic” of course meant ministry, but not just any ministry. After Jesus himself, Paul was their ultimate model. As Nadal said, “Paul signifies for us our ministry.”6 Suggested in that identification was the intense zeal of Paul that knew no limits in the hardship and suffering it was willing to undergo, but there was more to it than that. It also meant going forth and seeking the lost sheep, not waiting for them on the doorsteps of the church. It meant being missionaries. Nothing was more fundamental to the original inspiration of the Society of Jesus. As we know, however, in less than a decade the Jesuits began to found and staff schools, so that this essentially missionary organization soon became in fact also the first “teaching order” in the history of the Catholic

5 See Jerónimo Nadal, Orationis observationes, ed. Miguel Nicolau (Rome, 1964), no 379. 6 Ibid. no 414.

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church. Schools drastically curtailed the mobility of many members of the Society, for Ignatius and other superiors soon learned that, if these institutions were to succeed, they had to have a certain stability in the teachers and administrators assigned to them. To some extent, the ordinary pattern of life originally envisioned for the Jesuit seems to have been a continuing series of short-term “missionary” assignments, but with the schools, that pattern suffered for most Jesuits a mortal blow. But the broader ideal survived in at least two ways. First, the schools became an instrument of ministry that the Jesuits carried with them as they set out to new places either in Europe or elsewhere, and in that way the geographic sense of “mission” continued to be fulfilled. Second, the schools were themselves a great innovation for a religious order, and hence can be understood as going out to meet a challenge rather than sitting passively on the sidelines. Constitutive of the idea of “mission” was “seeking out,” as Paul had done. The schools were simply one more instance of the inventive proliferation of new ministries in the sixteenth century that the Jesuits promoted and exemplified—signaling a great break with the highly formalized and ritualized service offered by the local clergy. This was all part of being “apostolic.” This is of course a more metaphorical interpretation of the Jesuits’ missionary and apostolic character, but it is not far-fetched. There were in the sixteenth century two groups whom the Jesuits superficially resembled but whom they knew they differed from in important ways. The first was “monks” who, although they pronounced vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience like the Jesuits, were bound by a vow of stability. Even the mendicant friars were bound to a certain place many times a day by the obligation of communal recitation of the liturgical hours. The second group was the diocesan clergy. These priests were also “local” like the monks, even if they had no vow of stability. Moreover, although they of course performed works of ministry according to the office they held, it was not “apostolic” ministry. That is to say, it was ministry in the local situation according to established patterns and for an established “clientele.” Theirs was not to seek out but to care for those already in the fold, and to do so after the time-honored rhythms of ritual and sacrament.7 There were many reasons why the Jesuits needed to make clear that they were not ministers of this kind, not least of which were the benefices

7 See my “Priesthood, ministry and religious life: some historical and historiographical considerations,” in Theological Studies 149 (1988): 223–257.

222 chapter thirteen invariably attached to these offices. But surely among the most important was the different style of ministry they considered proper to themselves— an “apostolic” ministry, a “missionary” ministry. This was a ministry “on the move” not only physically and geographically but also in the other sense I have described. As by now should be clear, no treatment of “mission and the early Jesuits” would be complete without some comment on the “Fourth Vow.” The formula, as given in the Constitutions, runs as follows: I, [name], make profession, and I promise to Almighty God poverty, chastity, and obedience; […] I further promise a special obedience to the sovereign pontiff in regard to missions, according to the same apostolic letters and the Constitutions.8 Seldom in the history of religious life has something so central to an order’s identity been so badly misunderstood. The vow is often referred to as the Jesuits’ “vow to the pope.” This elliptical manner of speaking is misleading in the extreme for it seems to indicate that the vow is made not to God but to a human being. “Vow to obey the pope” is in that regard an improvement, but in every other way misses the point by misconstruing what the vow is all about. The vow does not concern the pope; it concerns “missions,” as the formula clearly states. The pope of course figures in the vow, but, as these “missions” were interpreted in the Jesuit Constitutions, the superior general of the Society also had a similar authority “to send” members.9 Ignatius once referred to the vow as the “beginning and principal foundation” of the Society.10 It was the “beginning” because he and his companions had pronounced its equivalent in Paris in 1534 as the fallback alternative to their vow to go to Jerusalem. It was the “principal foundation” because it concerned what was utterly central to the Jesuit calling— “apostolic” ministry. At the time when Ignatius, Nadal, and others were trying to explain to new members of the Society and to outsiders what this vow meant, the vocabulary that would have best hit the nail on the head was in only an inchoate stage of development. The word they needed was “missionary,” for it was essentially a vow to be a missionary, a vow to travel for the sake of ministry. If the vow of stability made the man a monk, then this vow of

8 Constitutions [527]. See my “The fourth vow in its Ignatian context: a historical study,” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 15/1 (January 1983). 9 See Constitutions nos 618–632. 10 See my The First Jesuits, 298–301.

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mobility—a vow of readiness to travel anywhere in the world for “the help of souls”—made the man a Jesuit. It was thus a most powerful symbol of the essence of the Jesuit vocation and of how that vocation broke with the monastic tradition. The irony that pronouncing it came to be restricted to only the solemnly professed members could hardly be greater. Nadal provided the clearest and most eloquent articulations of what the vow symbolized, in which the evangelizing Jesus and, at least implicitly, the evangelizing Paul acted as the ultimate models. As I pointed out earlier, for Nadal as for his confreres, “missions” and “journeying for ministry” and sometimes even “pilgrimage” were synonymous. In his exhortations to Jesuit communities he described such missions and journeys as “the principal and most characteristic ‘dwelling’” for the Jesuit, as their “most glorious and longed-for ‘house.’” One of his rhetorically most powerful statements is the following: [Journey] is altogether the most ample “place” and reaches as far as the globe itself. For wherever they can be sent in ministry to bring help to souls, that is the most glorious and longed-for “house” for these theologians. For they know the goal set before them: to procure the salvation and perfection of all women and men. They understand that they are to that end bound by that Fourth Vow to the supreme pontiff: that they might go on these universal missions for the good of souls by his command, which by divine decree extends throughout the whole church. They realize that they cannot build or acquire enough houses to be able from nearby to run out to the combat. Since this is the case, they consider that they are in their most peaceful and pleasant house when they are constantly on the move, when they travel throughout the earth, when they have no place to call their own, when they are always in need, always in want—only let them strive in some small way to imitate Christ Jesus, who had nowhere on which to lay his head and who spent all his years of preaching in journey.11 Even if the vow is about ministry (indeed, a certain kind of ministry!), the pope is prominent in it. This raises the question of the ecclesiological framework of the early Jesuits’ idea of mission, an obviously crucial aspect of it. It is an extremely complex and relatively unstudied subject, and most of what has been written about it has been methodologically narrow. There is no denying the fact, however, that the early Jesuits tended to ascribe to the papacy greater authority in certain areas than some of their Catholic contemporaries. This has led to the incorrect impression that

11 See my “To travel to any part of the world: Jerónimo Nadal and the Jesuit vocation,” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 16.2 (March 1984), especially 6–8. This article is also part of the present collection (Chapter 9).

224 chapter thirteen they operated out of a basically “institutional,” even hierarchical, model of the church. Those elements surely were present in their understanding, but did not dominate it. Their most pervasive metaphor for where their “missions” were exercised was “the vineyard of the Lord.” The metaphor is richly suggestive. In the first place, it indicates a fundamentally pastoral ecclesiology. It indicates an outgoing ecclesiology. Even more intriguing, it indicates fuzzy lines of demarcation, for surely included in the “vineyard” were infidels, heretics, schismatics and pagans—for it was often to these people that the Jesuits were sent. Being missioned for the vineyard of the Lord did not necessarily mean being sent to the people already in the pews! Moreover, “being missioned” always needs to be understood in its wider meaning of journey (physical or metaphorical) for ministry—whether one is explicitly acting under commission or not. Ignatian and Jesuit spirituality are often described as apostolic. In this article, I have tried to explore this apostolic character by an examination of mission, an inseparably related reality. I have tried to portray how vivid these realities were for the early Jesuits, as indicated by their freshness in the Jesuits’ vocabulary. The words themselves suggested venture and openness to whatever exists “out there”—in the vast vineyard of the Lord.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

SAINT IGNATIUS AND THE CULTURAL MISSION OF THE SOCIETY OF JESUS1

Ignatius of Loyola and nine other students became friends while they were together at the University of Paris (Figures 14.1 and 14.2). In 1534– 1535, while still at the university, they formed themselves into a missionary band for ministry in the Holy Land, where they hoped to work for at least a few years for the conversion of the Muslims. After failing to obtain passage there because of the unsettled political situation in the Mediterranean, in 1539 they found themselves in Rome. They had to make a decision about their future, and they agreed to meet every evening for several months to consider the matter. By this time, they had all been ordained priests, but, as already an international group, they were attached to no particular diocese. The central question before them was whether they should commit themselves to each other for the rest of their lives and form a new religious order. They decided in the affirmative. They drew up a short description of what they had in mind and submitted it to the Holy See for official approbation. They called the document their Formula vivendi, the equivalent of the Rule in other orders. After overcom- ing a number of objections to their plan from members of the Roman Curia, they saw their Formula, now slightly revised, incorporated into the papal bull Regimini militantis ecclesiae, September 27, 1540 (Figure 14.3). That bull ratified the Formula, and officially created the Society of Jesus. Ten years later, in 1550, with papal approbation they updated and somewhat expanded the Formula, without changing any essential features. It has remained the basic charter of the order. Even at its founding moment, the Society of Jesus had features, specified in the Formula, that set it apart with regard to certain long-established patterns for religious orders. The Jesuits, for instance, would not wear a distinctive habit, nor would they have any ascetical or penitential practices imposed upon them by rule. Besides the three customary vows of

1 Originally published in The Jesuits and the Arts, ed. John W. O’Malley and Gauvin Alexander Bailey (Philadelphia: St. Joseph’s University Press, 2005), 3–26. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

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Figure. 14.1. Anonymous. The First Companions of Saint Ignatius. Red chalk, 10.2 x 6.8 inches, late 16th century, Rome, ARSI, Armadio 12. This delicate drawing in red chalk is traditionally believed to be the earliest representation of Saint Ignatius’s early companions, including Diego Laínez, Francis Xavier, Pierre Favre, Nicolás de Bobadilla, Simão Rodrigues, Alfonso Salmerón, Paschase Broët, Jean Codure, Claude Jay, and Diego de Hoces, a slightly later recruit.

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Figure 14.2. Jacopine del Conte, Ignatius of Loyola. Oil on panel, 17.9 x 13.7 inches, 1556, Rome, General Curia of the Society of Jesus, superior general’s study. One of the earliest portraits of Ignatius, this work was executed shortly after his death by the Florentine painter Jacopino del Conte (1510-1598), who used the death mask as his model.

poverty, chastity, and obedience, the professed members would pronounce a special vow to God to obey the pope “concerning missions.” This was essentially a vow to be missionaries, to be on the move, the polar opposite of the monks’ vow of stability. Most troublesome to their critics, the members would not be bound to chant the Liturgical Hours in choir or even to recite them in common. The reason the founders gave in their Formula for this strange provision was the members’ need to be free for their ministries at every hour of the day and night. Objections in the papal curia to this unprecedented departure from what many considered the very essence of life in a religious

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Figure 14.3. Anonymous, Paul III Approves the Society of Jesus. Oil on canvas, 91.7 x 109.6 inches, mid-17th century, Rome, church of the Gesù, ante-sacristy. This painting commemorates the founding of the order by Pope Paul III Farnese in 1540, and includes standing portrait of his grandson Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520–1589), the man who would finance the building of the Gesù in Rome. order were overcome in 1540, though the Jesuits later would occasionally have to muster their forces to avoid having “choir” imposed upon them by the papacy. Despite features like these that distinguished them from older religious orders, the Jesuits in their first few years fit essentially into patterns set by the Dominicans, Franciscans, and other medieval orders engaged in active ministry. In their Formula the Jesuits were more explicit in describing their purpose as “the help of souls” and in articulating their mobility as missionaries, but the ministries they listed as their means to those ends were fundamentally those the mendicants had been developing since the thirteenth century. Preaching, with a view especially to reception of the sacraments of Penance and the Eucharist, had pride of place. Conforming to the new enthusiasm for catechetical instruction “of the ignorant” that had been sweeping Europe for several decades, the Jesuits listed such instruction as a special concern. They tended, however, to look upon it as another form of “ministry of the Word.”

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Nothing in the Formula or in the behavior of the Jesuits at the time of the founding suggested any particular engagement with culture and the arts. True, the ten original members were all graduates of the University of Paris, a fact noted in the papal bull of approbation. That meant that as a collectivity they were exceptionally well educated for their day. It is also true that in their deliberations leading up to the Formula they already were making provisions for the best possible education for the young men they hoped would join the new order. For the professed members of the Society, the founding fathers set a high intellectual standard. The education they themselves had received at Paris and the education they had in mind for their student members was, however, the typically clerical program that the mendicant orders had been following for several centuries. It had two major parts. The first was pursued in the Arts faculty of the university. Based largely on texts of Aristotle, especially his “natural philosophy” or science, it also consisted in some admixture of the trivium and quadrivium. The second part, pursued in the Theology faculty or its equivalent, consisted in the texts of Peter Lombard (c.1096–1164) and other scholastic writers such as Aquinas (1225–1274). It was a strictly academic program, altogether cerebral. It had no place for literature or, despite the name, for the arts. Music was one of the four parts of the qua drivium, but it was studied as if it were simply a branch of mathematics. There was nothing in the program that would as such have predisposed the Jesuits to the massive cultural engagement that became one of their hallmarks. In fact, in the original version of their Formula the Jesuits distanced themselves from the cultivation of music that had been incumbent upon all the orders up to that time simply because the members of those orders were obliged to sing liturgies and chant the Liturgical Hours. After stating that the Jesuits would not do the Hours “in choir,” the text of the Formula read: They should use neither organs nor singing in their masses and other religious ceremonies. Although these laudably enhance the divine worship of other clerics and religious and have been found to arouse and move souls by bringing them into harmony with the hymns and rites, we have experienced them to be a considerable hindrance to us because of the nature of our vocation. Cardinal Girolamo Ghinucci (1480–1541) objected to this passage because he thought it would give comfort to the Lutherans in their criticisms of Catholic worship. It was therefore omitted in the official bull of approbation, Regimini, but its basic orientation recurs in the Constitutions of the

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Society composed later by Ignatius and his secretary, Juan Alfonso de Polanco (Figures 14.4 and 14.5). According to the Constitutions, even if for some special reason or occasion the Jesuits thought it would be helpful to their ministries to chant the office in their church, they should use the simple plain tone, nothing more elaborate. Ignatius approved of musical instruments in Jesuit houses, although a paragraph of the Constitutions forbidding them to novices would sometimes be interpreted as if the prohibition applied to all houses of the Society. These official documents seem to be turning the Jesuits away from the arts rather than toward them. Moreover, in their correspondence in those early years, which survives in great abundance, the Jesuits made scarce mention of the great artistic monuments recently accomplished in Rome or in course of accomplishment, not even of the new basilica of Saint Peter. Somewhat like Luther in his famous visit to Rome in 1511–1512, the first Jesuits seemed oblivious to the transformation of the city at which Renaissance artists and architects had been laboring for almost a century. But other evidence suggests they were not as insensitive to the arts as these sources seem to indicate. Those entering the Jesuits from the upper strata of society, of which there were a good number, would bring with them some skill in music and dance. The most prestigious personage to enter the Society during the lifetime of Ignatius was the Duke of Gandía, Francisco de Borja, a descendant of Pope Alexander VI and eventually the third superior general of the Society (1565–1572) (Figure 14.6). Borja was an accomplished musician who before his entrance had composed music that was performed in churches in Spain. One of these was a mass that later Orlando di Lasso (1532–1594), after some modest revision, published under his own name. In any case, practice almost immediately began to modify theory. The Jesuits were pastoral pragmatists, none more so than Ignatius himself. Despite Ignatius’s reputation in most history books as the stern “soldier saint” who imposed “blind obedience” on his followers, he was one of the most flexible of leaders, especially concerning what was effective in “helping souls.” In his extensive correspondence with members of the Society, the largest extant correspondence of any sixteenth-century figure, his proposals for procedures were almost invariably qualified with the phrase “unless you think some other course would be more effective.” Even in the Constitutions, he hedged almost every principle with words like “as will seem best according to places, persons, and circumstances.” “The help of souls” is the leitmotif of his correspondence and of the

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Figure 14.4. Papal Bull Regimini Militantis Ecclesiae of Pope Paul III; first formal approval of the Society.

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Figure 14.5. Manuscript page of the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus (Textus B), Rome, ARSI, 1b, fol. 38v-39v.

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Figure 14.6. Anonymous, Mexican (Tepotzotlán), Saint Ignatius Loyola and Saint Francisco de Borja. Late 17th century. Oil on canvas, 30 x 48 inches. Saint Joseph’s University Collection, Philadelphia. This double portrait depicts Ignatius together with Francisco de Borja (1510–1572), a member of the first generation of Jesuits and the Society’s third superior general. The depiction of Ignatius here recalls the rendering of the saint (c.1620-1622) by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) in the Norton Simon Art Foundation, Pasadena, California. It is likely that this pairing of Loyola and Borja is based on a set of engravings of Jesuit saints in prayer by the Flemish engraver Schelte à Bolswert (1586-1659). Ignatius is shown wearing Mass vestments: an elegant baroque Roman-style chasuble ornamented with gold embroidery and orphrey. He holds his usual attribute of an open book with the motto of the Jesuits, Ad maiorem Dei gloriam, “To the greater glory of God,” written on it. Borja wears a black cassock of the Jesuits. He holds a skull and underneath it is a piece of paper with the words Ex morte vita, “from death, life.” These attributes allude to Francis’s conversion precipitated by the sudden death of the Empress Isabel of Spain (1539).

Constitutions. On that principle, he was constant, but as to how the help of souls was to be accomplished, he relied for the most part on the experience and inventiveness of his men in the field. In his spiritual message, moreover, he espoused in practical ways the compatibility between Christianity and human culture propounded so effectively by Thomas Aquinas, whom he had studied in Paris and whom

234 chapter fourteen he chose as the principal theological guide for the Society. According to Aquinas, “grace perfects nature,” does not act contrary to it. In his correspondence and in the Constitutions Ignatius insisted that, while prayer and personal intimacy with God were the first means by which Jesuits were to accomplish their goals, “human means,” especially learning and eloquence, were also to be cultivated. In an age, for instance, when some clerics still nursed suspicions about preachers honing their skills by emu- lating secular patterns of oratory, Ignatius prescribed that as future preachers the younger members of the Society were to study the classical treatises on rhetoric and assimilate the patterns of persuasive speech found in Cicero and other great pagan Latin authors. It is not altogether surprising, therefore, that very early things started to change. The wall seemingly erected against music began to crumble almost immediately. The pressure for the change came from several sources. Jesuits in Spain adopted the practice, promoted by Saint Juan of Ávila (1500–1569), of setting the catechism to popular tunes, and they exported it to other places. It became one of the Jesuits’ hallmarks. Typical is a report from Gandía in 1554: a Jesuit accompanied by two boys walked through the streets ringing a little bell as the boys sang parts of the catechism “in a sweet melody.” As children gathered behind the three leaders, they were guided to a church, where classes were taught and tunes learned. The tunes and lyrics became so popular, the report exag- geratedly states, that “day and night in the whole town nothing else was sung by both adults and children.” Questions were raised about this practice in the First General Congregation of the Society, 1558, convoked to elect a successor to Ignatius and to deal with other important issues. The Congregation referred the matter to the newly elected general, Diego Laínez (1512–1565), who approved the practice for whenever it seemed fruitful. Misgivings soon disappeared, as is clear from the book on how to teach catechism, Modo per insegnar la dottrina christiana, published in 1573 by Diego de Ledesma (1519–1575), in which, as T. Frank Kennedy has shown, almost a third of the thirty-three chapters is devoted to music. Francis Xavier himself, who arrived in India in 1542 and in Japan in 1549, had taught catechism that way. In Asia, dancing and singing seemed indispensable for celebrations of any solemnity, as noted for Easter in Goa in 1563. In Cochin in 1569, boys dressed as angels danced and sang as participants in an Easter procession under Jesuit supervision. It was in the missions, indeed, that the most dramatic changes in Jesuit attitudes and practices first took place (Figure 14.7). The Jesuits had hardly arrived in Brazil in 1549 when they discovered the natives’ talent and

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Figure 14.7. Societatis Missiones Indicae, from Imago primi saeculi Societatis Iesu (Antwerp: Plantin Press, 1640), 326. Special Collections, Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia. The lavishly illustrated picture and emblem book Imago primi saeculi was published to celebrate in 1640 the centennial of the Jesuits. This book’s creative and erudite interpretation of the Jesuits’ worldwide enterprise repro- duces the kind of triumphant baroque empyrean celebrated in Andrea Pozzo’s glorious ceiling of the Jesuit church of Sant’Ignazio in Rome. The emblem Societatis Missiones Indicae, “The Missions of the Society to the Indies,” proclaims the worldwide scope of the Jesuits’ missionary ministry.

enthusiasm for music. The Brazilians delighted in hearing the Jesuits sing and play musical instruments—indication that music was alive and well among the members of the Society. The Jesuits, some Portuguese orphans who assisted them, and the natives themselves soon joined together to launch an impressive musical tradition. At São Vicente, by 1553 the Jesuits were teaching native children not only how to read and write but also how to sing in the European style and play the flute, a venture that developed into what has been termed “the first school of music in the Western Hemisphere.” A few years later the provincial superior reported that at

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Bahia three different choirs were in operation for Vespers on Sundays and feast days—one accompanied by organ, another by clavichord, and the third by flutes. Ignatius raised no objection. These early developments presaged the extraordinarily sophisticated musical tradition that would later develop in the so-called Jesuit Reductions in Paraguay. In Europe Ignatius tried to be more stringent. As late as 1556, the year of his death, he was angry with the Jesuits in Vienna for singing high masses in their church, and he forbade continuation of the practice. The first two general congregations, the supreme authority in the Society, tried to restrict permissions for such masses on a regular basis, but exceptions were already beginning to overwhelm the rule. By that time sung Vespers on Sundays and feast days was fast becoming the norm in Jesuit churches attended by a sufficiently large community of faithful. As a Jesuit provincial reported in 1556, there was no hope of doing otherwise, “so great is the people’s attachment” to sung liturgies. Just a few years later in Goa, at the opening of the academic year, the Jesuits celebrated a solemn mass that was not only sung but accompanied instrumentally by violins, shawns, trumpets, flutes, and kettledrums. Although in these situations the Jesuits themselves were only rarely the singers or instrumentalists, they were sometimes the teachers of music and invariably the sponsors and promoters of it. Official misgivings, restrictions, and even prohibitions regarding liturgical music continued off and on for many decades, but the opposing tide would prove stronger. The great turning point in the Jesuits’ engagement with culture and the arts came, however, in 1548, with the opening in Messina in Sicily of what was, in effect, the first Jesuit school. It is impossible to exaggerate the significance of this event for the future of the order and for its very self-definition. The Society, originally conceived as a band of itinerant preachers of the Gospel after the pattern of the apostles and especially of the evangelizing Paul, now in effect redefined itself as composed largely of resident schoolmasters attached to stable institutions. As general of the order, Ignatius of Loyola, brought about this implicit redefinition and by his enthusiasm for the schools became its chief promoter. The vast majority of the schools would be secondary institutions following the literary and rhetorical program reinvented by the Italian humanists of the fifteenth century according to the patterns laid down by Cicero and Quintilian. These schools took not texts of ancient Greek logic and science as the basis for instruction, as did the universities, but the so-called studia humanitatis—works of poetry, drama, oratory, and history. These essentially literary works were presumed not only to produce

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eloquence in those studying them but also, though written by non- Christians, to inspire noble and uplifting ideals. They would, if properly taught, render the student a better human being, imbued especially with an ideal of service to the common good, in imitation of the great heroes of Antiquity. One line from Cicero’s De officiis often quoted by the Jesuits sums up this aspect of the educational ideal: Non nobis solum nati sumus, “We are not born for ourselves alone” (I.7.22). Cicero is eloquent on how much the individual might have to sacrifice of his own time, money, and even life to live up to this ideal. The purpose of this schooling accordingly was not so much the pursuit of abstract or speculative truth, which is what the universities pursued, as the character formation of the student, an ideal the humanists encapsulated in the word pietas. Pietas meant not so much religious piety, though in a Christian context that piety was included, but upright character. This education, moreover, unlike that of the universities, which could be protracted until the student was thirty or forty years old, was completed before the student was twenty, after which he could enter immediately into the life of society. If the university program was geared to the vita contemplativa of study and teaching within the cloister of academe, the humanist program was geared to the vita activa of making one’s way as a leader in the world. In retrospect, it is clear why becoming involved with this style of education might have appealed to the early Jesuits. The pietas of the humanists, which means the inner appropriation of virtues of public service, correlated nicely with conversion of heart emphasized in the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. The activist modality of the educational program correlated with the Jesuits’ radical bending of their every effort to “the help of souls,” even if that meant breaking with certain of the traditions of religious orders up to that time. The self-sacrifice proposed by the ideal was certainly befitting the Christian. The long years the ten original members had spent at the university made them extraordinarily sensitive to the benefits to be reaped from education. In the beginning they not only did not foresee themselves as teaching but expressly excluded teaching as a possibility. They were determined in 1540 not even to teach younger members of the Society but instead to send them to already established universities. Lectureships and professorships, they believed in the earliest years, were contrary to their radically pastoral orientation. Nonetheless, for practical reasons, bit by bit, they began to offer some instruction to younger Jesuits, and from this humble beginning, the idea

238 chapter fourteen took form in the Society, and to some extent outside the Society, that members might do some formal teaching—on a restricted basis and in extraordinary circumstances. Accordingly, in Gandía in 1546, at the request of the duke, Francisco de Borja, they began to teach not only younger Jesuits but also some other students. This gentle but momentous shift of perspective took place in the three or four years before 1547, the year Ignatius acceded to the request of some leading citizens of Messina to open a school there to educate their sons. By that year, the Society of Jesus had several hundred members, many of them with a humanistic secondary education and many of them located in Italy. Those who had been trained outside Italy, especially in Paris, realized they had learned some pedagogical principles virtually unknown in Italy that allowed students to make rapid progress. This was the so-called modus parisiensis, “Parisian method,” that the Jesuits imported into Italy and then elsewhere as their network of schools grew. Most of the elements of the method have persisted in schools up to this day to the point where we cannot imagine education without students being divided into classes, for instance, with progress from one class to a higher one in a graduated system. For our subject one particularly important aspect of the Parisian method was the principle that the best way to acquire skill in writing and speaking was not simply to read good authors but to learn actively by composing speeches and delivering them in the classroom and elsewhere. Even more important for our subject was the application of this principle to drama. It was not enough to read Terence and other great dramatists of ancient Rome: the plays needed to be produced with students acting in them; such productions would perforce entail singing and dancing, skills that in any case were indispensable for the gentleman. The stage was thus set for the Jesuits to enter the world of formal education. They had the proper background. They also had pedagogical techniques and principles of proven effectiveness that were unknown in most of the localities in which they would establish themselves. Once it became recognized that the Jesuits had a great deal to offer, they were in demand, especially by lay magnates and other leading citizens concerned about the education of their sons. When Ignatius saw that the venture in Messina was successful, and when that success was confirmed by a similar success in the school in Palermo, which opened the next year, he threw his wholehearted support behind the schools. The Jesuits thus became “the first teaching order,” that is, the first group to undertake the staffing and full management of educational institutions

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for young men not destined for the priesthood. Although a few of their schools would teach the “higher subjects” of philosophy and theology, subjects proper to clerics, all would teach the studia humanitatis, essentially “pagan” literature, and they would do so not to future priests but to young men who presumably would assume responsible positions in the world at large. The Jesuits’ schools, moreover, though funded in different ways by different benefactors of the Society, became civic institutions of the first magnitude, and they gave the Jesuits a kind of entrée into civic life that operating churches alone could never have provided. The self-sacrificing virtue extolled by Cicero and the other ancients was, after all, fundamentally civic virtue, service to the commonwealth. The schools aroused expectations for the cultural life of the city, to which the Jesuits felt obliged to respond and which in time they took for granted. The schools gave the Jesuits an engagement with general culture and the arts utterly different from that of any religious order up to that time. In most towns and smaller cities the Jesuit schools, with their theaters and other public programs, became the major cultural institution of the locality. Even in the largest cities, they were cultural institutions to be reckoned with, as were Louis-le-Grand in Paris, the Collegio di Brera in Milan, and the Collegio Romano in Rome. By the seventeenth century, moreover, the Collegio Romano had outstripped its rival, the University of Rome, La Sapienza, in prestige and visibility. In subtle fashion, the schools thus imbued the Society with a cultural mission. For the Jesuits their religious mission of course remained primary, but this other mission in fact became part of their self-definition. The Jesuits never fully articulated this mission for themselves, however, and indeed such a mission might seem difficult to reconcile with the Formula. Yet it must be noted that the revised version of the Formula, 1550, concluded its list of activities proper to the Society with the all-inclusive phrase “and to perform whatever other works of charity are expedient for the common good.” The common good—a philosophical not a biblical concept—seems to betray a societal concern that goes beyond sacristy and pulpit and that launches the Jesuits into waters normally not sailed in a corporate way by a religious order. In other words, even in the Formula the seed was planted for a larger vision. No doubt, the Jesuits considered their schools bulwarks against the incursions of Protestantism, and in certain parts of Europe, that consideration served as the primary reason for undertaking a school. But it was not their original motivation, nor did it ever become, for the whole Society, the

240 chapter fourteen principal one. In 1551, upon commission from Ignatius, Polanco wrote a letter to the Jesuit provincial of Spain listing fifteen benefits conferred by the schools without mentioning Protestantism or concern for religious orthodoxy. Most of the benefits can be summed up as ways of promoting the “common good.” Indeed, Polanco concludes with the words: “Those who are now only students will grow up to be pastors, civic officials, administrators of justice, and will fill other important posts to everybody’s profit and advantage.” Nonetheless, the Jesuits as a corporation failed to grasp fully the import of what had happened to them. This failure to make the implications explicit for themselves caused painful soul-searching and confusion later on, as sometimes the directly pastoral ministries were exalted as the true and authentic Jesuit ideal and the schools devalued as deviations from it. Easily forgotten, it seems, was Ignatius’s great enthusiasm for the schools once the first ones had proved so successful. Certainly Ignatius did not see all the ramifications of his decision, in effect, to make the schools the primary ministry of the Society, but he had no hesitation about having his men spend their days teaching the pagan classics and, even during his lifetime, producing plays and engaging in other activities thought improper for clerics. In 1558, a Jesuit in Bologna made precisely that objection to the general and complained that children in the streets ridiculed the Jesuits with the cry, Ecco li preti delle comedie!, “Here come the comedy priests!” The rector of the Jesuit school in Siracusa insisted in 1556 that plays were produced “to encourage love of literature in the students, not as spectacles for the public,” and he refused a request of some leading citizens of a nearby town to let the boys perform a play for them. This opinion did not prevail. By the 1560s, elements of such productions were given in the vernacular to accommodate the wider audience, and on some occasions, a whole play was produced in the vernacular. In Munich in 1561, two years after the Jesuits opened their college, they produced a play that was first performed for the general public and then in private for the Duke of Bavaria and his court. Two years later in Innsbruck, a Jesuit play was first staged in the Rathaus and then in the imperial court before the Emperor and Empress. Ten years earlier, such enterprises would have been unthinkable for the Society. Jesuit authorities at times tried without much success to impose certain regulations on the plays and on rare occasions discouraged them altogether. But the general enthusiasm among both Jesuits and students was too high for these warnings to have much effect. Jesuits justified the plays with standard arguments about their pedagogical value but when pressed

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also maintained that their spiritual impact could be the equivalent of a good sermon. Besides, who could afford to turn down an invitation from the Duke of Bavaria or from the Emperor himself? Within a short while two, three, or even more plays per year came to be the norm for many of the schools. As early as 1558, two years after it was founded, the school in Billom reported mounting no fewer than ten dramatic productions—five in French, four in Latin, and one in Greek. Thus, Jesuit presence in a locality implied a cultural commitment that extended far beyond the classroom and that would play an extraordinary role in civic life. The fact that admission to school productions was free meant that persons from every social strata could attend. In some locations, these “entertainments” did attract persons from a broad socioeconomic spectrum. The Jesuits wrote their own plays and produced those written by others both ancients and contemporaries (Figure 14.8). In Vienna, for instance, in 1556 and 1566, they produced an adaptation of Terence’s Adelphi, and in 1565 an adaptation of Plautus’s Aulularis. In Rome in 1557, the students at the Collegio Romano produced Terence’s Heautontimorumenos. Twenty- five plays written between 1550 and 1572 by the Spanish Jesuit Pedro Acevedo still survive. At Messina in 1562, the Italian Jesuit Stefano Tuccio wrote and produced Nabuchodonosor, and then went on to write Goliath and Judith. In Lisbon and Córdoba in 1555, the Jesuits presented Acolatus by the Dutch humanist Gnaphaeus (1493–1568). Euripus: Tragedia Christiana (1548) by the Franciscan Levin Brecht was especially popular in German schools. From this modest beginning was launched an impressive program in Europe and elsewhere that would only grow stronger with the passing of the years. The aesthetic limitations of “school drama” are well known. For instance, as suggested above, the Jesuits subscribed to the humanist belief that all good literature, including drama, had an uplifting and morally didactic purpose. Moreover, the actors were young students, not professionals. But to put this enterprise into full perspective we need to recall that Lope de Vega (1562–1635), Calderón (1600–1681), Andreas Gryphius (1616–1664), Jacob Bidermann (1578–1627), Corneille (1606– 1684), and Molière (1622–1673) received their first training in theater in Jesuit schools. During the academic year in Jesuit institutions other productions were mounted that were more modest in scope. Recitals of various kinds were interspersed throughout the calendar, a phenomenon that began almost the moment the first schools opened their doors. The centerpiece was

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Figure 14.8. Mundus in maligno positus, Special Collections, Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia. The second of three published collections of theater pieces written by Franz Neumayr, S.J. (1697–1765) and produced at the Jesuit college in Munich where Neumayr was professor of Humanities and Rhetoric. The Mundus contains three plays staged in the Marian Congregation (Sodality) 1748– 1750 with music by the important composer Placidus von Camerloher, who later composed seventeen Fastenmeditationen for the Congregation.

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often an “oration.” At Bologna in 1555, for instance, a student, age eleven, at the opening of the academic year, delivered a Latin oration on the topic “The Boy Jesus,” another did the same at Christmas on “The Birth of Jesus,” and others at Pentecost on “Christ’s Ascension,” “The Descent of the Holy Spirit,” and similar topics. Such displays of the students’ talents as part of their academic training were practically unknown in Italy before the advent of the Jesuits, who soon perceived that, besides the benefit to students, they were good advertising for the schools. To lighten the occasion, music and poetry began to be incorporated in the program. By 1556, instrumental music was being routinely mentioned as part of school productions of various kinds. From the very first, however, music had had a place in the Jesuit system. The statutes for the school in Coímbra from 1548 prescribe that students with aptitude be taught singing for two hours every Sunday and feast day. Their assuming in 1564 the management of the Seminario Romano occasioned a further step in the Jesuits’ venture into professional music. The previous year, the Council of Trent had mandated the erection of a seminary in every diocese. The bishop of Rome, wanting to set a good example, asked the Jesuits to undertake the seminary, which would largely be a residence hall since students would follow their courses at the Collegio Romano. Later, as priests of Rome, these students would be expected to sing masses and sing or chant the Liturgical Hours. For such students the Jesuits knew that training in music was essential. Two years after the Seminario opened, they hired for it as maestro di cappella no less a person than Palestrina (c.1526–1594), who held the position for five years. At the German College in Rome, which the Jesuits founded in 1552 in the hope of training future diocesan priests for northern Europe, they similarly believed the students needed training in liturgical music and took steps that led eventually to an extremely elaborate music program there. In 1571, Borja permitted the nomination of Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548–1611) as maestro di cappella, a post he retained even when two years later he also became the maestro at the Seminario. In the colleges not restricted to clerical students—the vast, vast majority of the colleges—music at least in some elementary form had to be taught as part of the theater program. Thus, bit by bit, music began to play an extraordinarily important role in Jesuit secondary education, a development never adequately reflected in the official documentation of the order. The teachers, such as Palestrina and Victoria, were sometimes musicians of considerable accomplishment—for instance, Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643–1704) at the Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris in the

244 chapter fourteen seventeenth century, and Domenico Zipoli (1688–1726) at the Jesuit college in Córdoba in present-day Argentina in the eighteenth. Zipoli, himself a Jesuit, was a composer and occasional organist at the Gesù in Rome before he entered the Society. Little is known about dance in Jesuit theater in the early years except that from the beginning it was often part of the productions, usually performed during the intervals between acts of a play. One of the first recorded instances of dance, however, was in a quasi-liturgical setting. In 1557 in Córdoba, Spain, on the feast of Corpus Christi, students danced in the presence of the exposed Sacrament. The next year in the college at Ocaña, we are told, students danced during the performance of a play about Joseph, the Old Testament patriarch, and from that time forward dance is often mentioned as an accepted part of theatrical productions. In Munich in 1568, students portraying the nine Muses with Apollo danced for Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria during the intermissions of Samson. Although we do not know the precise stages of development of Jesuit dance, that development bore fruit in the highly sophisticated and widely celebrated Jesuit ballet at the Collège Louis-le-Grand in the seventeenth century. Of the ten French books on the history and theory of dance published between 1658 and 1760, five were by Jesuits, and four of the other five were reviewed in the Jesuits’ influential journal Les mémoires de Trévoux (founded in 1701). A Jesuit reviewer of one of those four books enthusiastically recommended it, saying it would make readers “feel something of the gaiety and playfulness that even the idea of dance brings with it.” Claude-François Menestrier (1631–1705), one of the Jesuit dance theore- ticians, before being assigned to the school at Lyons had organized celebrations, tournaments, and theatrical displays at the Court of Savoy. Although such displays were mounted independently of the schools, they would have been unthinkable as regular activities for members of a religious order had not the Jesuits made their fateful decision after the success of Messina. As Giovanna Zanlonghi has shown, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century the Jesuits at the Collegio di Brera in Milan were expected to design and orchestrate the elaborate spectacles that made visible the significance of great civic occasions such as the death of an archbishop or a sovereign, or the arrival in the city of an important personage. The civic significance of the schools was nowhere more manifest than in these displays, which were intended for the whole population, the great and the lowly. In the schools, music was used from the beginning in academic assem- blies of various kinds, especially for the awarding of prizes and degrees.

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From Coímbra in 1558 we have a complete description of the solemn distribution of prizes that year in the theater of the school. The professor of rhetoric handed the names of the winners to one of the students, richly dressed for the occasion, who acted as a herald for the assembly. As winners were announced and accepted their prizes, they were greeted by “a great blasting of trumpets and kettledrums that seemed to engulf the college.” Where the higher subjects of philosophy and theology were taught, completion of the course and the awarding of his degree was an especially important event in the life of the student and called for fitting pomp and celebration. As early as 1556, the awarding of degrees at the Collegio Romano had begun to emulate ceremonies in other universities, though the Jesuits tried to keep down the costs for the students, which in many places had become exorbitant. Early on, a regulation prohibited the hiring of outside musicians without the rector’s permission, and similar regulations dealt with similarly expensive measures meant to enhance the occasion. It proved difficult, however, to stem the tide, and Jesuit schools became known for the elegance and display especially of the ceremonies surrounding the public defense by a student on the occasion of the grant- ing of his degree. As Louise Rice has shown, by the seventeenth century these ceremonies at the Collegio Romano were sometimes elaborate in the extreme, beginning with the decoration of the great hall with garlands and flowers and the hanging of tapestries and damasks from top to bottom of the walls. Fanfares were played at certain key moments, and sometimes up to eight separate choirs would perform madrigals and motets under the direction of the composer, usually the maestro di cappella of the college. Included in the philosophy curriculum at universities in the sixteenth century was some form of the ancient quadrivium—geometry, astronomy, arithmetic, and music—so Jesuit universities, which had begun to take form even during Ignatius’s lifetime, perforce included those subjects in the curriculum. But they were also included even in the more fundamentally literary curriculum of the colleges inspired by the humanistic ideal. To that extent, there was an overlap in curriculum between the two types of institution, which meant that for the Jesuits engagement with those subjects became systemic once they began to operate schools. Thus, the Jesuits as a corporate body entered another realm of culture that by the middle of the sixteenth century was fast asserting its independence from philosophical and theological systems. Jerónimo Nadal, a Majorcan who knew Ignatius and his companions when they were all students together at the University of Paris, entered the

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Society of Jesus in Rome in 1545. He immediately won the confidence of Ignatius, who entrusted him with important and delicate tasks. One of Nadal’s first appointments was as a member of the team that founded the Jesuit college in Messina, where Nadal became the first rector (1548–1552) and the designer of the curriculum. He was a person of extraordinary importance for the early shaping of the Society, and served among other things as one of the principal architects of the program of studies in the Jesuit schools. Nadal had studied mathematics at Paris, and at Messina he taught the subject with seemingly great success. The Order of Studies he wrote in 1552 surely influenced the sections of the Constitutions dealing with education, which included provision for mathematics. The Collegio Romano opened its doors in 1551 as a “School of Grammar, Humanity, and Christian Doctrine,” but two years later it added under the rubric of “philosophy” a chair of mathematics, understood to include geometry and astronomy. The first holder of the chair, until his death in 1561, was Balthasar Torres, who had entered the Society just a few months earlier. A respected mathematician in Palermo, he had also been the personal physician of Juan de Vega, the Viceroy of Sicily. From the research of Antonella Romano it is now clear that Torres, called to the chair by Ignatius himself, was an excellent choice. Fully abreast of the latest developments in his field and an outstanding pedagogue, he laid the firm foundations upon which his successor in the chair, Christoph Clavius, would build. Ignatius also entrusted to him the organization of a small pharmacy for the teachers and students of the Collegio in an adjacent building called la Torre rossa. The Torre adumbrated similar institutions the Jesuits would later operate around the globe. In 1565, Clavius assumed the chair of mathematics. His influence was decisive for the important role mathematics, and with it astronomy, would play in the culture of the Jesuits from that time forward (Figures 14.9 and 14.10). By force of his writings and the prestige he enjoyed among his peers he launched a tradition that would continue strong among the Jesuits until the suppression of the order in 1773. An important consultant for Pope Gregory XIII on the reform of the calendar, he was also a teacher of Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit missionary in China who introduced there some astronomical instruments designed by Clavius. Although Clavius had friendly relations with Galileo and supported some of his findings, he continued to hold to a basically Ptolemaic system. Between 1548 and 1773, the Jesuits founded about a hundred educational institutions in Italy. Of these, eighteen would have chairs of mathematics,

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Figure 14.9. Christoph Clavius, S.J. F. Villamena, Ritratto di Cristoforo Clavio nel suo studio, incisione, Rome, 1606, Archivio Storico della Compagnia di Gesù, Rome. Christoph Clavius, (1538–1612), a mathematician at the Collegio Romano, gave early impetus to Jesuit interest in mathematics and astronomy.

understood in the broad sense to include geometry, algebra, optics, astronomy, and similarly related subjects. Mathematics was particularly strong in Jesuit schools in Italy because of the more direct influence there of the Collegio Romano, but in time, it flourished in other parts of Europe, particularly in France and German-speaking lands. Its role in establishing the Jesuits in the imperial court in Beijing is well known. In 1644, the Jesuits began their control there of the presidency of the Imperial Astrono mical Bureau, a control that lasted for a while after the Society was suppressed in Europe in 1773. In 1685, six French Jesuits journeyed to Siam at the behest of the Académie Royale des Sciences to conduct astronomical observations so as to provide more accurate measurements of longitude,

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Figure 14.10. Athanasius Kircher, S.J. Georgius de Sepibus, Romani collegi Societatus (sic) Jesu musaeum celeberrimum. Amsterdam, 1678. Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) was a Jesuit polymath and author who operated a famous museum in Rome. Although his theories are generally considered pseudoscien- tific, he won wide respect in his day and has fascinated scholars ever since. and they thereby assumed membership in that august body. The next year the French Jesuit astronomer at Avignon, Jean Bonfa, proposed that the Jesuits, with their scientific skills and their spread of houses almost around the globe, were ideally positioned to map the earth and the skies in a comprehensive way. “No one can do it more conveniently and at less expense,” he argued. Nothing came of Bonfa’s proposal, but from the beginning, the Jesuits’ missionary ventures added a special dimension to their scientific investi- gations. Francis Xavier’s Letter from India, first published in 1545, was not only one of the earliest publications by a Jesuit but also the first letter from the East ever to be printed in Europe. It aroused immense interest. Although it only touched on geographical and ethnographical matters,

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it marked the beginning of extensive Jesuit reporting on flora, fauna, climate, and native customs that captured the European imagination and that, in its more studied forms, provided data for natural philosophers inside and outside the Jesuit order. Although Ignatius was probably less interested in the scientific value of the reports than in their potential for enhancing the prestige of the Society, he promoted the enterprise in strong terms in a letter to India of February 24, 1554. He described the eagerness of some leading personages in Rome to read letters from India, and he urged his fellow Jesuits to write concerning “how long the days of summer and winter are, when summer begins, whether the shadows move to the left or to the right. Finally,” he went on, “if there are things that seem extraordinary, let them be noted, for instance details about animals and plants that are either not known at all, or not of such a size, etc.” Missionaries from other orders of course wrote descriptions of the lands in which they found themselves, but the Jesuits’ educational commitments gave them a keener eye as well as a network of institutions in which the information and artifacts could be systematically collected, maintained, and reflected upon. Although José de Acosta intended his firsthand description of the lands and people of Peru and Mexico, Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590), as an aid to missionaries, in fact he composed a work of considerable scientific import. Within just a few years of publication it had gone through four editions in Spanish, three in Latin, two each in Dutch, French, and German, and one in English. Acosta’s Historia was more widely disseminated than many similar Jesuit accounts that followed, but it was nonetheless symptomatic of a tradition that established a network of scientific exchange linking the Jesuit missionaries with the Jesuits’ schools, observatories, museums, and botanical gardens back in Europe. In geography and natural history alone, the Jesuits before 1773 published nearly 800 titles, a number that according to Steven J. Harris still represents only one-seventh of the entire Jesuit scientific corpus. Saint Ignatius was not directly responsible for either the large number of Jesuit scientific publications or the efficient circulation of “curious” information from the missions. He nonetheless had established the condition for both in that he so vigorously promoted the schools and insisted on the free flow of information not only from periphery to center but throughout the Society. In the Constitutions (821) he insisted that a crucial means of preserving and advancing the Society was exercise of the “bond of charity and love” the members have for one another, “which is strengthened by their gathering information and news from one another and

250 chapter fourteen having much intercommunication.” Ever practical, he established procedures for the editing and circulation of newsletters within the Society “through which each region can learn from the others whatever promotes mutual consolation and edification in our Lord” (Constitutions, 673). The rapid growth of the Society from ten members at its foundation to a thousand when Ignatius died and three times that number ten years later, and their dispersion throughout many countries in Western Europe as well as in India, Japan, Brazil, and other exotic places, made such communication ever more imperative. It also involved the Jesuits in architecture. In what kind of houses would they live? What would their schools and churches look like? What “style” should they adopt for these edifices? During Ignatius’s lifetime, the Jesuits did not address these questions in a systematic way. They proceeded pragmatically, but they nonetheless began implicitly to evolve some policies. In the concluding lines of the Constitutions, for instance, Ignatius prescribed that the members take appropriate care of their health and that to that end the houses and schools be built “in healthy locations” (826–827). The First General Congregation, which met in 1558 to elect his successor, elaborated (decree 113): As far as is in our power, we should impose norms for our houses and colleges so that besides other inappropriate developments they may not become at some point palaces befitting the nobility; they must be sound buildings, sturdy and well built, suited to be our residences and places from which we can discharge our duties. The decree went on to observe that this provision did not apply to the churches of the Society, about which no decision was reached because “the entire matter seemed to call for further consideration.” Except for the churches, these bits of legislation point in the direction of practicality with a certain bias toward austerity, but they are quite general. With the expression “as far as is in our power,” the Congregation betrayed that even at this early date the Jesuits were aware that their building programs depended in large part on the wishes and designs of their benefactors, a factor that recent scholarship on “Jesuit style” has shown to have been decisive in many instances. This factor plus the inde- terminacy of this early legislation left the field open for a rich variety of “Jesuit styles” to develop, notwithstanding the long-held though now dis- credited view that identified the Society exclusively with the Baroque. One thing is clear: the Jesuits did not approach the issue in a small-minded way. Pietro Codacio (d. 1549), a chamberlain at the papal court, joined the Jesuits and shortly thereafter was responsible for the transfer to the Society of the church of Santa Maria della Strada in the center of Rome, the first

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church ever held by the Jesuits and the site of the future Gesù. As early as 1548, Polanco revealed in a letter that Codacio had ready plans for a “very big house” and “sumptuous” plans for a church, appropriate to the grandeur of the site and the Jesuits’ hopes for it, but that the Jesuits did not have funds to carry out the plans. Ignatius and the rest of the Jesuit leadership in Rome seemed to have no objections in principle to this gran- diose project. That inference is confirmed by the fact that for a short period in June of 1554, while Ignatius was still general, the Jesuits engaged Michelangelo as the architect for the new church they wanted to build. Construction of the church finally began in 1568 under the patronage and at the expense of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese and under the architectural direction of Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola (1507–1573). It would be among the most important and influential church buildings of the modern era. The location of the church in the center of the city, near the Campidoglio, which Michelangelo had magnificently redesigned shortly before, helps account for its great size and majesty, which in a general way seem to have been envisaged from the very beginning—a prospect with which the Jesuits apparently were comfortable. The Jesuits’ concerns for the new church were, in any case, more practical than stylistic, and thus typical of their approach. They were generally concerned about acoustics, about avoiding long delays in construction, and about building their churches in urban centers, where they would attract large numbers of people. The fact that the Jesuits did not chant the office had architectural repercussions, for it automatically eliminated the “choir” in the sanctuary. It was principally with a view to these practical matters that the Jesuits early on appointed an official architect for the order whose job was to advise the general on building projects and review plans for them. The first person to hold the office was Giovanni Tristano, a widower who entered the Society in Rome in 1556 as a lay brother. He came from a family of successful architects in Ferrara, and almost immediately upon entrance, and with the help of his brother Lorenzo, who had entered the Society a few years earlier, began to apply his skills to the many Jesuit building projects around the globe. He was not particularly inspired or original, but his influence was considerable in ensuring that some of the practical concerns were attended to. He was also a painter of some talent. The two Tristanos inaugurated a tradition of highly skilled lay brother architects and painters in the Society who were responsible over time for an immense number of Jesuit edifices around the world. The most celebrated are Daniel Seghers (1590–1661) and Andrea Pozzo (1642–1709).

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But lesser-known Jesuits had great impact on particular localities and sometimes transported themselves and their skills to distant places. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann has shown, for instance, the remarkable achievements in sculpture and architecture of Jesuits from Central Europe both in their native lands and in Latin America. Bartolomé de Bustamante, already a priest, entered the Society of Jesus in Alcalá in 1552. A polymath who earlier had held a number of responsible ecclesiastical positions, he held similar ones in the Society until his death in 1570. He was an accomplished architect; much influenced by Juan de Herrera (1530–1597), and was the designer of many Jesuit churches and schools in major cities of Spain that had considerable impact. In these edifices, simplicity of line and austerity of decoration prevailed, typical of this severe phase of the period right after Trent, before the advent of the Baroque. As a new order that had no churches or other buildings at its disposal, the Jesuits perforce undertook extensive building programs almost everywhere they went, and they inevitably adopted and promoted more contemporary styles and artistic tastes than did older orders already well supplied with edifices from earlier eras. In some places, their building program was aggressive. In Germany, for instance, as Jeffrey Chipps Smith has noted, between about 1580 and 1650 they built twenty-four new churches, including the great Michaelskirche in Munich, and they reno- vated at least nine existing churches, to say nothing of the many chapels they built or restored there. These buildings required decoration. Gauvin Alexander Bailey has shown how massive the Jesuits’ patronage of artists in Rome was beginning at about the time of Borja’s death, 1565. By demon- strating that for their more prominent monuments the Jesuits hired from among the best artists of the day, Bailey has effectively demolished the old axiom that Jesuits hired only second-rate artists. Nonetheless, Jesuit patronage was exceedingly modest until about 1565 because the Jesuits had so few buildings to decorate and because their financial situation was so strained. In mission territories, however, they immediately recognized the pastoral potential of images. Saint Francis Xavier, one of the founders with Ignatius of the Society and its most famous missionary, took with him on his voyage to India in 1542 engravings, paintings, and statuettes of Jesus and the Virgin Mary to use in preaching and evangelization, and he carried similar items with him on his entry into Japan in 1549. He wrote an instruction to his fellow Jesuits on the importance of using images to communicate with the Japanese. There is no stronger indication of how seriously

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the Jesuits took the use of images for proselytization than their establishing in Japan in 1583 an “academy” or “seminary” of painters, just five years after the creation of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, in order to train locals in the techniques of Western painting as well as in the mechanics of printing and engraving. Much earlier, in 1556, the Jesuits had introduced printing into India by installing a press in their college in Goa. That same year, Ignatius after much effort had installed in the Collegio Romano a good-quality press, which by 1564, besides Greek characters, could print Arabic. The idea was to supply textbooks morally suitable for the students and at prices they could afford. It is not insignificant that among the first books published under Jesuit auspices was a pagan classic, Martial’s Epigrams. The Jesuits were soon installing presses in some of their other colleges to aid them in their ministries and to benefit their students. Without the schools, it is necessary to insist once again, it is doubtful the Jesuits would so soon and so enthusiastically have begun to run printing presses, and they surely would not have been printing works of pagan literature. Presses could print pictures as well as words. Along with the other items, Xavier brought with him into Japan an illustrated Bible. The Jesuits’ most impressive venture into this field was the Evangelicae historiae imag ines, composed by Jerónimo Nadal in the early 1570s and finally published in Antwerp in 1593. This was followed by publication of Nadal’s Adno tationes et meditationes in Evangelia in 1595 (a second edition followed the same year, and a third edition in 1607) (Figure 14.11). The magnificent series of 153 copperplate illustrations engraved by the Wierix brothers and others that accompany the text is the earliest such series of the four gospels of any size or importance. The text identified persons, places, and things in the illustrations and then used them as material for contemplation. Jesuits carried the text with them almost around the globe. There is evidence that Ignatius himself commissioned the work or at least encouraged Nadal in it. If so, he acted consonantly with the extraordinary emphasis he placed in his Spiritual Exercises on the use of the imagination. Again and again Ignatius urges the individual who is about to enter into contemplation to conjure up a “mental representation” of some scene from the gospels, as when in the meditation on the Annunciation he specifies that the exercitant seek “to see the house and room of our Lady in the city of Nazareth in the province of Galilee,” or in the meditation on the birth of Christ “to see in the imagination the way from Nazareth to Bethlehem. Observe also,” he directs, “the place or cave where Christ is born: whether big or little; whether high or low; and how it is arranged.”

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Figure 14.11. Nativity, from Jerónimo Nadal, Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia (Antwerp, 1607 edition), plate 4. Woodstock Theological Library (Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.) The result of a decades-long project begun by Livio Agresti (c.1508–1579) and Giovanni Battista Fiammeri (1550–1617), this was the most extensively illustrated of the printed Gospels of its day. It had an extraordinary impact on Jesuit art projects around the world.

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Ignatius borrowed this tradition from late-medieval sources. It did not originate with him. In the Exercises, however, he gave it a powerfully codified form and sent it on its way into modern Catholicism. By means of it, one can argue, he predisposed the members of the Society to an appreciation of the power of images, to which the broad and long tradition of Catholicism regarding images would already have made them sensitive. Although the members favored a certain austerity in the furnishing of their residences, Nadal, for instance, doubtless reflecting what he understood to be Ignatius’s intention, insisted with his brethren that on the four walls of the refectory paintings of the highest quality—optimae picturae—were to be hung. The Jesuits had a fine education, and for the most part came from families of sophisticated taste. This is far from saying that in their early years they had aesthetic ambitions. It is far from saying that they had the money to accomplish what such ambitions presuppose. Yet when over time and with the help of powerful patrons, their fortunes changed, they were ready to respond. Toward the end of the Constitutions, Ignatius described the qualities that should be possessed by the general of the order, and in so doing, he painted a portrait of the ideal Jesuit. Prominent among the requisite qualities was magnanimity, whereby the general might “initiate great undertak- ings in the service of God our Lord and persevere in them with constancy when it is called for” (728). What has never been noticed is that this whole passage of the Constitutions is based on a paragraph in Cicero’s De officiis (I.20.66), in which he insists that the person committed to the common good of society be ready to risk life and all worldly goods in pursuit of that cause. Besides courage and constancy, breadth of vision is implicitly called for in both texts. Ignatius certainly showed such breadth of vision when he changed the course of the Society’s history by throwing the full weight of his authority behind the schools. He could not have foreseen all the consequences of that decision. He surely did not foresee that he would thereby imbue the Society with a cultural mission that, in the best of circumstances, would be integrated with its religious mission, but that, in any case, would have a force all its own. It was a force propelled along by magnanimity, by a breadth of vision ready to accept and exploit all the cultural consequences the schools brought with them. It is significant for our topic that Ignatius found the best expression of this breadth of vision, which he wanted to be characteristic of every member of the Society, not in the Bible but in Cicero.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE MANY LIVES OF IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA: FUTURE SAINT1

In 1609, Ignatius of Loyola was declared “blessed,” the preliminary step to canonization. To celebrate the event, the Jesuits that year published the Vita beati patris Ignatii Loiolae [The Life of Blessed Father Ignatius Loyola]. They republished it in 1622, the year Ignatius was canonized, adding to it another engraving depicting the ceremony (Figure 15.1). The road to Ignatius’s beatification and canonization had been long and difficult, but by 1609, one goal had been achieved and the other was within sight. The Jesuits hoped the Vita would inspire popular devotion to Ignatius and move forward the process of his canonization. The Vita was certainly not the first illustrated saint’s life—or, in this case, future saint’s life. In Rome in 1584, for instance, there appeared a life of Saint Francis of Paola illustrated with thirty-eight engravings by Ambrosius Brambilla.2 In 1603, there appeared in Antwerp a life of Saint Catherine of Siena engraved by Philips Galle,3 and around the same time a life of John the Baptist engraved by Jacques de Weert was published there that consisted in a title-page and twenty-one plates.4 In 1608, the year before the publication of the Vita, there appeared in Rome a life of Saint Francis of Assisi designed and engraved by Philippe Thomassin, which consisted in a title-page and fifty-one plates.5 The Vita Ignatii of 1609 with its eighty-one copper plate engravings—seventy-nine biographical scenes, plus title-page and frontispiece—took its place in this young genre as its most elaborate exemplar. The Vita, whose production was encouraged by Claudio Acquaviva, the superior general of the Society of Jesus, was just one element in the Jesuits’

1 Originally published in Constructing a Saint through Images: The 1609 Illustrated Biography of Ignatius of Loyola (Philadelphia: St. Joseph’s UP, 2008), 1–36. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. I am grateful to David Collins, Simon Ditchfield, and Walter Melion for their suggestions and criticisms on early drafts of this introduction. 2 Vita et miracula Sancti Francisci de Paula (Rome: s.n., 1584). 3 D. Catharinae Senesis virginis ss.mae ord. Praedicatorum vita ac miracula selectiora for- mis aeneis expressa (Antwerp: Philips Galle, 1603). 4 Vita s. Ioannis Baptistae graphice descripta (Antwerp: Collaert, n.d.). 5 Vita et miracula seraphici patris s. Francisci de Assisio (Rome, 1608).

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Figure 15.1. Jean-Baptiste Barbé and Peter Paul Rubens (?). Engraving 80, in Vita beati patris Ignatii Loiolae, 1622 edition. Used with permission of the John J. Burns Library, Boston College. Caption: By the customary rite and ceremony of the Catholic church, he is enrolled among the saints by the Supreme Pontiff Gregory XV, on the twelfth day of March in the year 1622.

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strategy for making Ignatius known and for showing how his holiness fit the pattern of the saints who preceded him. Planning for it got underway in 1605–1606. Pope Paul V, elected in 1605, had that very year allowed the process for Ignatius’s beatification/canonization to begin, the first concrete indication that the Jesuits’ hopes for their founder might be fulfilled. Paul’s action gave impetus to the decision to produce the Vita. Although first published on the occasion of the beatification, it was from the beginning ultimately directed to the crowning step—the canonization engraving published in 1622 was already in proofs at the same time as those for the engravings published in 1609.6 The book was characteristically Jesuit in that it was a collaborative effort on an international scale. Of the two Jesuits who in Rome principally coordinated the project, one was a Pole, Nicolas Lancicius (Mikołaj Łęczycki) and the other an Italian, Filippo Rinaldi. Nothing is known about Rinaldi except that at the time he worked on the Vita, he was rector of the German College in Rome. About Lancicius, however, who most likely composed the captions, we know a great deal. He was born in 1574 in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth near Vilnius, and at an early age converted to Catholicism from Calvinism. He entered the Jesuits in Cracow in 1592 and was sent almost immediately to Rome for his training. Beginning in 1601, he assisted Niccolò Orlandini in his important Historia Societatis Iesu. Orlandini died in 1606, having finished only the pars prima, sive Ignatius, which was a year-by-year account of the history of the Society of Jesus from 1540, the year the order was founded, until 1556, the year Ignatius died. In 1603, Francesco Sacchini also began helping Orlandini, after whose death he revised the manuscript and brought it to publication finally in 1614.7 Lancicius was therefore well qualified for undertaking the Vita. He later held responsible positions in the Society. He was, for instance, rector of the Jesuit college in Cracow, 1621–1631, and provincial superior of the Lithuanian Province, 1631–1635. Besides other writings of ascetical and devotional nature, he left behind a small corpus of occasional pieces about Ignatius. In 1622, on the occasion of Ignatius’s canonization, he published in Cracow, anonymously, a small work entitled Gloria S. Ignatii [The Glory of St. Ignatius], which was several times reprinted.8

6 See Ursula König-Nordhoff, “Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Vita beati P. Ignatii Loiolae Societatis Iesu Fundatoris Romae 1609 und 1622,” AHSI 45 (1976): 306–317, at 312. 7 Niccolò Orlandini and Francesco Sacchini, Historiae Societatis Iesu, prima pars sive Ignatius (Rome: apud B. Zannettum, 1614). 8 See Fontes narr. 3:639–721, as well as ibid., 420–439. See also the entry “Łęczycki” in DHCJ 3:2317. His unpublished writings about Ignatius are collected in Fontes narr.

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Even more important in the production of the book were, of course, the artists and the engraver Rinaldi and Lancicius enlisted. Ursula König- Nordhoff, who has studied the Vita in meticulous detail, has convincingly argued that all the work on the book was done in Rome. The Roman prov- enance strengthens the thesis that the young Peter Paul Rubens, who arrived in Rome in late 1605, was involved in the project. Jean-Baptiste Barbé, another Fleming who was in Rome at the time, was the chief designer of most or all of the images. He consulted a number of visual sources and then revised or adapted drawings he had solicited from a small group of masters.9 Barbé, born in Antwerp in 1578, was a disciple of the noted engraver Philips Galle.10 As a young man, he spent some years in Rome, where he came to the attention of Rinaldi and Lancicius. While in Rome, he met Rubens and produced with him a beautiful engraving of the Holy Family.11 Shortly after the publication of the Vita he returned to Antwerp, where he married the daughter of Hieronymus Wierix, who was a member of the team that produced for the Jesuits the magnificent 153 engravings of the Annotationes et meditationes in evangelia, first published in 1595 and based on the text of Jerónimo Nadal, the peripatetic agent-in-the field of Saint Ignatius.12 Wierix was also the engraver for a twelve-plate depiction of miracles and supernal interventions in Ignatius’s life, published in Antwerp at an unknown date but probably before 1609.13 Barbé was thus firmly incorporated into the brilliant network of Antwerp engravers and into the Jesuits’ relationship to it. Rubens’s name has long been associated with the Vita. König-Nordhoff, while showing the problems that tradition entails, nonetheless concludes

3:639–721. On his spiritual teaching, see Joseph de Guibert, The Jesuits, Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice: A Historical Study, trans. William J. Young (Chicago: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1964), 338–339. On the Gloria S. Ignatii, see Fontes narr. 3:696–698. 9 See Ursula König-Nordhoff, Ignatius von Loyola: Studien zur Entwicklung einer neuen Heiligen-Ikonographie im Rahmen einer Kanonisationskampagne um 1600 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1982), 118–121, 277–324, especially 304–305. Lancicius in a short document “Memo rabilia de S. Ignatio,” 1634, says that he and Rinaldi were the editors of the book (Fontes narr. 3:701–715, at 707). König-Nordhoff, “Entstehungsgeschichte,” corrected errors in Julius S. Held, “Rubens and the Vita Beati P. Ignatii Loiolae of 1609,” in Rubens before 1620, ed. John Rupert Martin (Princeton: Art Museum, Princeton University, 1972), 93–134. 10 König-Nordhoff, Ignatius, provides, passim, the fullest account of Barbé’s career and oeuvre. 11 See ibid., 305 and n. 62. 12 See Jerome Nadal, Annotations and Meditations on the Gospels, trans. Frederick A. Homann, S.J., introductions by Walter Melion, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2003). 13 See ibid., 257–259.

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that Rubens is a likely candidate for the drawings Barbé turned into the best engravings.14 It is certain, moreover, that Rubens during his Roman sojourn began his association with the Jesuits that he would continue on close terms for the rest of his life. In 1605, for instance, he executed a Circumcision of Christ for the high altar of the Jesuit church in Genoa. A few years later, he created for the Jesuits a pair of oil paintings repre- senting Ignatius and Francis Xavier, with the former clad not in a simple cassock but in a chasuble, that is, in a vestment that specified him as a priest (Figures 15.2 and 15.3). This is the first painting in which Ignatius was thus depicted, a half-century after his death.15 This pair, and Rubens’s later versions of it, set a standard for Jesuit iconography of the two saints from this time forward. It promoted the practice in Jesuit churches around the world of dedicating an altar to Ignatius to the left of the main altar and one to Xavier to the right. In Antwerp, Rubens produced for the Jesuits’ new church an astounding cycle of paintings, which unfortunately were later destroyed by fire.16 His association with the Jesuits was not simply professional: at their church in Antwerp he was an active member of the Marian Congregation or Sodality of Our Lady, the Jesuits equivalent of a lay confraternity. Thus the Vita is important for several reasons—the number and exqui- site quality of the engravings, the role Rubens almost certainly played in the undertaking, the occasion for which it was produced, the influence it had on subsequent Jesuit iconography, and the place it holds in the Jesuit campaign for Ignatius’s canonization. Because of the many copies that survive, we can infer that the book had a large print-run. For what audience was it intended? Since the book was published not only without indication of author or publisher but also without a preface, the question can be answered only by inference. A parent or catechist who knew the general outline of Ignatius’s life could certainly have used the Vita to instruct and inspire children, but the authors obviously aimed much higher. The quality of the engravings and the sophisticated Latin of the captions point to an adult, refined, and well-educated public.

14 See ibid., 301–305. 15 See ibid., 80–87. 16 See John Rupert Martin, The Ceiling Paintings for the Jesuit Church in Antwerp, 2 vols. (London: Phaidon, 1968), and now Anna C. Knaap, “Meditation, Ministry, and Visual Rhetoric in Peter Paul Rubens’s Program for the Jesuit Church in Antwerp,” in The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley, et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 157–181.

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Figure 15.2. Peter Paul Rubens, St. Ignatius of Loyola, c.1608. Oil on canvas. 88.2 x 53.1 inches. Samuel von Brukenthal Collection, inv. 995. The National Brukenthal Museum, Sibiu, Romania.

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Figure 15.3. Peter Paul Rubens, St. Francis Xavier, c.1608. Oil on canvas. 88.6 x 53.1 inches. Samuel von Brukenthal Collection, inv. 996. The National Brukenthal Museum, Sibiu, Romania.

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The Early Accounts

The history leading up to the Vita begins some seventy-five years earlier at the University of Paris. There, in the early 1530s, Ignatius and nine other students decided to travel together to the Holy Land to live at least for a while where Jesus lived and, presumably, to work there for the conversion of the Muslims. Among these, there was Francis Xavier, the famous future missionary to the Far East. By 1537, they had all gathered in Venice to await passage, but because of the treacherous political situation in the Mediterranean created by the conflict of the Republic with the Ottomans, they were unable to accomplish their goal. Two years later they were in Rome, where they decided to stay together for good and to form a new religious order. They were already calling their group “the brotherhood of Jesus” (Compagnia di Gesù), and they agreed to keep that name, should their new order be approved. Its Latin form was Societas Iesu. On September 27, 1540, Pope Paul III approved the order, making it a formally recognized institution within the Catholic church. The papal bull listed as founding members the ten former students, by now priests, but, significantly, it listed Ignatius first. Although at this stage these “friends in the Lord,” as they referred to themselves, were technically equals, they recognized that it was Ignatius who had brought them together, had led most of them through his Spiritual Exercises, and was the almost inevitable choice for superior general. Sure enough, on April 19 the following year, they elected Ignatius by a unanimous vote except for Ignatius’s own. They could not have done better. They rightly revered him for his spiritual and religious gifts, but they also saw in him a leader who could guide the order with an unusual combination of prudence and boldness. Ignatius, fifty years old when elected, set about his task with vigor, which he needed for holding together the rapidly expanding Society that numbered about a thousand members by the time he died fifteen years later. The Society attracted to itself men of extraordinary talent, such as Francisco de Borja (Borgia), the former Duke of Gandía, and Peter Canisius, the person singly most responsible for rallying German Catholics in the second part of the century. Although men like these help explain the success of Ignatius’s generalship, they did not regularly reside in Rome so as to have a hand in the central government of the order. Ignatius nowhere showed his gifts of leadership more brilliantly than in his choice of two men to aid him directly in that task. The first was Juan

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Alfonso de Polanco, a talented and well-educated Spanish priest from a wealthy, “New Christian” family of Burgos, who joined the order the year after it was founded. Six years later Ignatius named him secretary, a post he continued to fill for the next two generals. The second was the Majorcan, Jerónimo Nadal, who entered in 1545. He became Ignatius’s agent in the field, traveling throughout Europe explaining to members what it meant to be a Jesuit and then reporting back to headquarters. These three together formed a powerful team, which eclipsed the influence of the original companions of Paris. This phenomenon led to the growing persuasion inside and outside the order that Ignatius alone was the founder, just as Saints Dominic and Francis had been founders of theirs. Polanco had hardly become secretary of the Society when in 1547 he asked Diego Laínez to write an account “for our edification” of how the order came to be. Laínez, one of the original band, did as requested.17 His text seems to have had fairly wide circulation in manuscript among Jesuits. The next year, Polanco complemented Laínez’s narrative with information he received from elsewhere and composed a longer “summary” of the basic story.18 From the beginning, therefore, the Jesuits showed a concern for the history of their order, at the center of whose origins was Ignatius.19 Both Laínez and Polanco devoted the first part of their accounts exclusively to the life of Ignatius up to his arrival at Paris, after which he became the major figure in a larger story. They both open their narratives with

17 Fontes narr., 1:54–145. See also Antonio Albuquerque, Diego Lainez SJ: First Biographer of Saint Ignatius of Loyola: His Life, the Biography, and Polanco’s Narrative (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2010). 18 Ibid., 1:146–298. 19 See Cándido de Dalmases, “Prolegomena,” Fontes narr., 4:3–54 See also Françoise Durand, “La première historiographie ignatienne,” in Ignacio de Loyola y su tiempo: Congreso internacional de historia, ed. Juan Plazaola (Bilbao: Universidad de Deusto, c.1992), 23–36; Jos E. Vercruysse, “L’historiographie ignatienne aux XVI-XVIII siècles,” ibid., 37–54; Rafael Olaechea, “Historiografía ignaciana del siglo XVIII,” ibid., 55–105; John W. O’Malley, “The Historiography of the Society of Jesus: Where Does It Stand Today?” in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley, et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 3–37 (this article is also part of the present collection—[Chapter 1]); Franco Motta, “Alle origini della Compagnia di Gesù: La Compagine sacra, Elementi di un mito delle origini nella storiografia sulla Compagnia di Gesù,” Rivista Storica Italiana 117 (2005): 5–25; and Motta, “Il serpente e il fiore del frassino: L’identità della Compagnia di Gesù come processo di autolegittimazione,” in Nunc alia tempora, alii mores: Storici e storia in età postridentina, ed. Massimo Firpo (Florence: Olschki, 2005), 189–210. Guido Mongoni’s conspiratorial insinuations weaken rather than strengthen his argument in his “Censura e identità nella prima storiografia gesuitica (1547–1572),” also in Firpo, Nunc alia tempora, 169–188. For anti-Jesuit literature in the modern era, see, e.g., Geoffrey Cubitt, The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), and Róisin Healy, The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2003).

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Ignatius’s wounding in the battle of Pamplona, 1521, the point at which his spiritual conversion began. Laínez ends his account about the time of the founding, 1540, but Polanco goes a little longer. Both of them knew a great deal about Ignatius’s life from Pamplona forward, most of which had to come directly or indirectly from Ignatius himself. In their accounts, they presented him as a man of singular holiness. According to them, Ignatius received from God extraordinary illuminations about the mysteries of the Christian faith and on occasion, he was able to foresee future events; his prayers were powerful with God for the healing of the sick. Neither Laínez nor Polanco, however, mentions any visions of Christ or the saints, which would play such a big role in the account of his life Ignatius subsequently told Luís Gonçalves da Câmara. Polanco, many years later, in 1574, after he had been relieved of his position as secretary, returned to the subject. Whereas in his “summary” of 1548 he was more concerned with the origins of the Society than with a proper biography of Ignatius, he now professedly wrote a vita. At that time he had at his disposal the biography of Ignatius published in Latin by Pedro de Ribadeneyra two years earlier, to say nothing of the account from Ignatius himself, the “autobiography.” Although Polanco’s vita repeated some of the errors from his “summary,” it added important information that he gathered from his long and particularly close association with Ignatius.20 This time, moreover, Polanco recounts Ignatius’s visions of Christ and the saints.21 The Jesuits were almost indefatigable writers of memoranda and letters, and in them during the first two generations of the order, they often touched on matters relating to Ignatius and the earliest years of the order. In the twentieth century, such materials were collected and published as the Fontes narrativi in the series Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu. They fill four large volumes, three of which run to over 800 pages. Jesuits’ interest in origins was more than a nostalgic glance backwards. The Society, while in a general way conforming to the patterns of religious life established by the mendicant orders of the thirteenth century like the Domini cans and Franciscans, had features that were distinctive. How to convey those features to recruits to the order in places where they had no chance of meeting Loyola or any of the other “founders”? How to establish a corporate identity and make it credible and transmissible? How to defend the order against those who attacked it as a betrayal of the traditions of

20 Fontes narr., 2:506–597. For a list of Polanco’s mistakes, see ibid., 508. 21 See ibid., e.g., 517, 519, 536.

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religious life?22 The Jesuits had no body of literature to call their own that they could hand to friends, enemies, or potential recruits to explain who they were and what they were about. Accounts of how they came to be could help remedy the situation. What was missing was an account directly from Ignatius, who resisted efforts to provide it. His reticence is surprising because earlier he seems to have spoken rather freely about his life, as the narratives by Laínez and Polanco indicate. Polanco and especially Nadal tried to persuade him.23 What they wanted was more than a simple chronicle. They wanted him to give them an account of how God had guided him from the time of his spiritual conversion until the present. The work would be a “testament” for members of the Society. As motivation, they told Ignatius that founders of other religious orders had bequeathed such documents to their followers and that it behooved Ignatius to do the same. They probably had in mind Francis of Assisi’s “Testament,” which more than suggests they were already equating Ignatius with saintly founders. Nadal broached the matter to Ignatius in 1551. Ignatius brushed him off, saying that he had neither the inclination nor the time for it. The next year, after Nadal returned to Rome from Sicily, he asked him again, and did the same when he returned much later from a long sojourn in Spain. Ignatius finally acquiesced and, toward the end of August 1553, began dictating his story to a young Portuguese Jesuit Luís Gonçalves da Câmara.24 Ignatius interrupted his narration after a few weeks and did not resume it until seventeen months later, on March 9, 1555. After another few weeks, he again interrupted it and did not bring it to conclusion until the autumn. This account, sometimes called Ignatius’s autobiography, is in fact without title. Nadal called it simply “The Acts of Father Ignatius,” or Acta. Ignatius throughout his narrative refers to himself in the third person as “the pilgrim,” and therefore the work is sometimes called “the pilgrim’s story.” It begins only in 1521 with the battle of Pamplona, which, as mentioned, is where Laínez and Polanco begin their accounts. This has to be the point where Ignatius habitually began to talk about his life. He would

22 See John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 287–296. 23 See Nadal’s “Praefatio,” at the bottom of the pages, Fontes narr., 1:354–363. 24 On him see the “Introduction” to Luís Gonçalves da Câmara, Remembering Iñigo: Glimpses of the Life of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, The Memoriale of Luís Gonçalves da Câmara, trans. and ed. Alexander Eaglestone and Joseph A. Munitiz (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2004).

268 chapter fifteen have been about thirty years old at the time of the battle, which leaves many years unaccounted for. The Acta abounds in critical problems. Gonçalves da Câmara listened as Ignatius dictated. He then went to his room and jotted down some notes. Some time later—days or weeks?—he elaborated upon the notes and for the first two segments dictated the results to a Spanish scribe. He dictated the last segment, from the fall of 1555, to an Italian scribe, which means that segment was in Italian. Though credited with a superb memory, he surely has not transmitted to posterity a verbatim. Moreover, Ignatius, a Spaniard, told his story to a Portuguese auditor, who in turn dictated the results of his notes first to a Spaniard, and then to an Italian. Many steps intervened, therefore, between what Ignatius actually said and what ended up on paper. More basically, the account suffers from all the problems endemic to a personal memoir, in which the author self-selects from events that happened decades earlier. In this case, furthermore, Ignatius spoke from memory without referring to notes or documentation. The final product was translated into Latin by a French Jesuit, Annibal du Coudret, sometime between 1559 and 1561. Although never printed, the document circulated in manuscript among members of the Society until 1567. Pedro de Ribadeneyra, who wrote the first published biography of Ignatius and who knew Ignatius extremely well, criticized the Acta for inaccuracies, alleging that at times Gonçalves da Câmara’s memory failed him.25 Ribadeneyra granted, however, that in essentials “the pilgrim’s story,” as we have it, was reliable. The basic story-line can for the most part be corroborated by other sources already mentioned, as well as by a much later recollection of what happened in the 1530s from another of the original band, Simão Rodrigues.26 The result was that even before Ignatius died the Jesuits had considerable biographical information on a major part of his life. Ignatius brought his Acta up only to 1538, the year before he and the other nine companions of Paris decided to form a religious order. He lived until 1556, the year after he finished telling his story. That leaves eigh teen more years unaccounted for, during fifteen of which he was the superior general. As Ignatius tells his story in the Acta, he does not point it

25 Ribadeneyra, letter to Nadal, October 24, 1567, Nadal 3:540. 26 Fontes narr., 5:135, now in English as A Brief and Exact Account: The Recollections of Simâo Rodrigues on the Origin and Progress of the Society of Jesus, trans. Joseph F. Conwell (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2004).

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toward the founding. The story is “the story of a soul,” that is, the story of his relationship with God and, more particularly, how God guided him from a superficial grasp of what the relationship entailed to something far deeper. It is a story that includes depression, internal illuminations, supernatural visions, and suspicions about his orthodoxy on the part of ecclesiastical authorities, which in every instance eventually declared him innocent. It is the story of a man who was during these years a sometimes soldier, then in succession an ascetical solitary, a mendicant pilgrim, a mid-life university student, and, finally, an itinerant preacher. After those careers, he became the chief executive officer of a nascent world-wide organization. By the time he died, Jesuits were present in every country in Western Europe, as well as in Brazil, India, and Japan. The foundational importance of the Acta is corroborated by how faithfully the first part of the Vita of 1609 follows it. The Vita nonetheless tam- pers with the story in one important way. It tells of miracles Ignatius worked during this period of his life, which are altogether absent in the original story, and it sometimes otherwise embellishes what we find in Ignatius’s account. A half-century had intervened, during which the Jesuits shaped and reshaped their founder’s life to adapt it to the different audiences they hoped to reach, not least of which, especially by about 1588, was the Congregation of Rites and the pope himself. Meanwhile, Nadal had seized upon the pilgrim’s story as the basis for many of his exhortations to Jesuit communities throughout Europe, using it to reveal to Jesuits what their vocation meant. According to Nadal, Ignatius’s story was their story, the story of the ideal Jesuit whose virtues and life-choices they were called to emulate. In telling the story, Nadal took it beyond the Acta to narrate the founding of the order so as to present Ignatius as the founder, minimizing the role Ignatius’s companions played in the years before the official papal approbation of the Society. In presenting Ignatius to his fellow Jesuits, Nadal therefore implicitly equated Ignatius with saintly founders like Dominic and Francis. He at the same time made Ignatius into a Counter-Reformation figure by portraying him as the David raised up by divine providence to slay Luther, the new Goliath, enemy of God’s people. In 1555, the year before Ignatius died, Nadal had made his first trip to Germany, where he was shocked by the desperate situation of the church, and he began vigorously to propagate the view that the Society had a providential responsibility for remedying the situation.27 Although Ignatius never felt the slightest sympathy for the

27 See O’Malley, First Jesuits, 272–283.

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Reformation, he gave it only peripheral attention until toward the end of his life, and he scarcely mentioned it in the Acta.28 Through Nadal, however, the myth that the Jesuits were founded to oppose the Reformation entered the historiographical tradition, where it sank roots so deep that scholarship seems powerless to eradicate it.

Ribadeneyra’s Biography

From Nadal, most Jesuits became familiar with the basic story, at least in outline form. Many of them wanted a more complete account, something they could hold in their hands and read. As early as 1546, while Ignatius was still alive and vigorous, Ribadeneyra had already proposed the idea of a biography to Diego de Eguía (c.1488–1556), Ignatius’s confessor. Eguía put him off by saying there was no need because the four evangelists had already written it.29 Ignatius, a Christ-figure! The issue did not go away. In 1558, two years after Ignatius’s death, a talented young Spanish Jesuit, Pedro Juan Perpinyá, wanted to write a biography of Ignatius, a project Nadal encouraged, but Perpinyá died before being able to pursue it. Meanwhile requests came to Laínez, who in 1558 succeeded Ignatius as superior general, for a “well written life of our father Ignatius.” Laínez replied in one instance that “action will be taken at the appropriate time,” but, perhaps because he was relying on Perpinyá’s initiative, he in fact did nothing. In 1565, Francisco de Borja succeeded Laínez as general. The next year, 1567, Borja commissioned Ribadeneyra to write a proper biography.30 He then asked all the houses and provinces of the Society to send him whatever materials they possessed that related to the project, including copies of the Acta. He put this material at Ribadeneyra’s disposal. In calling in these materials, he removed the Acta (and correlative documents like Laínez’s letter of 1547) from circulation, which meant “the pilgrim’s story”

28 See ibid., 278–279. 29 See the “Memoriale Romanum,” in Fontes narr., 3:722–743, at 737: “[…] la vita de M. Ignatio està escripta ya per li quatro evangeliste et per la Sacra Scriptura, perchè non cè che una vita, sicut unus Christus, una fides, unum baptisma.” See Ephesians 4:5. 30 On Perpinyá, Laínez, and Borja, see Cándido de Dalmases’s “Prolegomena,” Fontes narr. 4:4–12. On Ribadeneyra, see DHCJ 4:3345–3346; Jodi Bilinkoff, “The Many ‘Lives’ of Pedro de Ribadeneyra,” Renaissance Quarterly 52 (1999): 180–196; and David J. Collins, “Life After Death: A Rhetorical Analysis of Pedro de Ribadeneyra’s Vida del padre Ignacio de Loyola, Fundador de la Compañía de Jesus” (STL Thesis, Weston Jesuit School of Theology, Cambridge, MA, 1998).

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lay almost unknown until printed for the first time in the early twentieth century. Borja seems to have envisaged a biography that would be definitive, making other accounts, even the Acta, superfluous, and ensuring that misinformation not circulate. Borja, Ribadeneyra, and other leading Jesuits were intent on presenting to members of the Society and eventually to the world at large a literary portrait of Ignatius that would be as free of factual error as humanly possible. This does not mean, of course, that they wanted a dispassionate account, for they clearly wanted one that portrayed Ignatius and with him the Society as positively as possible. Such an account would, besides showing forth Ignatius as the saintly person they held him to be, vindicate against the Society’s enemies its legitimacy in the church. Ribadeneyra was an obvious choice, and not simply because he had years earlier raised the issue. He was an excellent stylist in both Latin and Spanish, which professionally qualified him for the task because until the nineteenth century, the discipline that trained historians was rhetoric. Borja’s decision was vindicated by Ribadeneyra’s subsequent career as a writer. By the end of his life, Ribadeneyra had produced a long list of publications, mostly of a historical and biographical nature, that were successes, indeed, sometimes extraordinary successes in the marketplace. He had, moreover, been on especially close terms with Ignatius since his youth. Born in 1526 into a wealthy and well-placed “New Christian” family of Toledo, he was commended in the spring of 1539 by his mother to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520–1589), the grandson of the then reigning Pope Paul III, who was in Spain for the obsequies of the Empress Isabella (1503–1539), wife of Charles V (1500–1558). The cardinal brought the boy to Rome as a page in his household. Much later in life, Ribadeneyra described himself at that stage as “restless, naughty and impetuous, free- spirited and spoiled.”31 For reasons he never fully explained but that probably had to do with some prank or altercations with other young members of the cardinal’s retinue, he ran away and through his uncle, Doctor Pedro Ortiz, a friend of the Jesuits, ended up in the Jesuit residence. In September of 1540, Ignatius received him into the Society, ten days before Paul III officially approved the order. Ribadeneyra was thirteen years old. He died only in 1611, after an astounding seventy-one years in the Society of Jesus during which he at only one point wavered in the commitment he

31 As quoted in Bilinkoff, “Many ‘Lives,’” 190.

272 chapter fifteen made when he had barely entered his teens. The depth of the commitment was surely due in large part to the extraordinarily close bond he formed with Ignatius from the first moment. He revered Ignatius, knew him well, and felt deep affection for him. Ignatius responded in kind, almost as if Ribadeneyra were the son he never had. Many decades later, Ribadeneyra in a moving prayer thanked God, who “gave me as a father and guide the blessed Ignatius […] and […] infused him with such an extraordinary and concerned love for me […] and […] from the very first time I met and talked to him, gave me a reciprocal love for him.”32 After Ribadeneyra had spent two years in the same house with Ignatius and other Jesuits in Rome, Ignatius sent him to Paris to study, and, when the political situation there grew too hot for Spaniards, he sent him to Leuven and then in 1545 to the University of Padua. Just a few years later, Ribadeneyra began holding important offices in the Society, especially in the Low Countries and Italy, where he was suc- cessively provincial of Tuscany and then of Sicily. In 1574, he returned to Spain for the first time since his childhood. He remained there for the rest of his life. His return was ostensibly for reasons of health, but it fitted into the anti-Spanish sentiments of the General Congregation of 1573 that elected the first non-Spanish superior general, the Belgian Everard Mercurian (1514–1580), and that resulted in departures of Spaniards from the Jesuit curia and from Italy more broadly. A few years earlier, in 1569, while Borja was still general, Ribadeneyra brought his finished Latin manuscript to Rome. As he stated in the prologue, while writing the book he decided to make a conspectus of the history of the order until the death of Ignatius part of it. The manuscript was subjected to a searching examination by a number of Jesuits who also knew Ignatius personally, including Peter Canisius and Ignatius’s cousin, Antonio de Araoz (1515–1573).33 It is not clear how many changes Ribadeneyra made in his text as a result of these consultations or censu- rae, as they were called. Canisius, for instance, wanted greater scope given to the role played by some of the original companions of Paris, yet he was enthusiastic about what Ribadeneyra had accomplished: “The work cannot be praised too highly.”34 Ribadeneyra’s admiration for Ignatius was unbounded and uncritical. The care he and his “censors” took to render the Vita as factually accurate

32 As quoted ibid., 180. 33 For these “censures,” see Fontes narr., 4:933–998. 34 Ibid., 4:944–952, at 951.

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as possible is important, but the book is hagiography, pure and simple, and it reinforced an earlier tendency to interpret every aspect of Ignatius’s life in the most glowing terms. Nicolás Bobadilla (c.1509–1590), who, though one of the original companions, had an intermittently difficult relationship with Ignatius, complained to Pope Paul IV in 1557 that Laínez, Nadal, and Polanco “want to treat everything Father Master Ignatius did or said as if it were a revelation of the Holy Spirit.”35 Bobadilla was, however, a lonely voice. In a print-run of 500 copies, Ribadeneyra’s Vita Ignatii Loiolae, Societatis Iesu Fundatoris was published in Naples in 1572. Circulation was restricted to Jesuits, again, it seems, to allow Jesuits to examine it before making it available to the world at large. Borja himself, however, did not strictly observe the restriction but gave copies as gifts to a few friends of the Society. Among the Jesuits, satisfaction with the book seems to have been general. The care with which it was reviewed should have ensured its acceptance as standard. When Borja died later that year, the book was read at table during the General Congregation that elected his successor. What greater success could Ribadeneyra have hoped for! Yet, a year later, the newly elected Mercurian prohibited its further publication and distribution, and he commissioned an Italian Jesuit, Giampietro Maffei (1533– 1603), to write another biography of Ignatius. As Borja had done earlier, Mercurian put all the relative materials at Maffei’s disposal. Maffei had qualifications for his commission in that he had taught rhetoric and had translated into Latin from Portuguese the first history of Jesuit missions in Asia, written by Manuel da Costa (1541–1604). But he entered the Society only in 1565, nine years after Ignatius’s death.36 What was going on? Although the general anti-Spanish sentiment in many parts of the Society probably had something to do with it, it can hardly have been the principal motive at work. The decision is best explained by putting it into the context of the maneuvers of some Spanish Jesuits to achieve more independence from Roman central government. The maneuvers or machinations, potentially schismatic, were an attack on the high degree of authority wielded by the general. Rumors spread that Ribadeneyra was deeply involved in the agitation, and Mercurian seems to

35 Nadal 4:733, “[…] vogliano che tutte le cose del P. M. Ignatio siano come revellatione dello Spirito Sancto.” See O’Malley, First Jesuits, 308–309. 36 See DHCJ 3:2466–2467.

274 chapter fifteen have believed them.37 Only after some years did Mercurian become persuaded of Ribadeneyra’s innocence. Maffei, who had his own troubles with Mercurian, had completed his biography in 1579, but in a trip through Spain, he discovered new material and asked Mercurian to defer publication. When Mercurian died the next year, Maffei’s book was therefore still unpublished. Meanwhile, Ribadeneyra had revised his book, amplified it somewhat, and translated it into Spanish. He again sent it to Rome for the new general to review. By this time Claudio Acquaviva (1543–1615), a young, talented, energetic Neapolitan nobleman, had succeeded Mercurian. Acquaviva gave Ribadeneyra’s Spanish text strong support, which led to its publication in 1583. When Maffei finally published his version of Ignatius’s life in 1585, Acquaviva wrote an introductory letter for it, showing that he was ready to tolerate multiple interpretations, though it is clear he preferred Ribad eneyra’s. Maffei’s work, in Latin, was published almost simultaneously in Rome, Venice, and Cologne and went through a number of subsequent printings into the middle of the eighteenth century, but was never translated into a vernacular.38 It was Ribadeneyra’s biography that became canonical, due in large part to the popular demand for it. The book was almost instantaneously an international best-seller. During Ribadeneyra’s lifetime, the Spanish text was republished six more times beginning in 1584, the year after it first appeared. Ribadeneyra’s own Latin translation of it was published in 1586 in Madrid, republished in Antwerp in 1587, in Rome in 1589, in Ingolstadt in 1590, in Lyons in 1595, in Cologne in 1602. In 1586, an Italian translation from the Spanish was published in Venice, which was reprinted the following year. A German translation appeared at Ingolstadt in 1590, a French at Lyons in 1599, and an English by Michael Walpole at St. Omer’s in 1616. The book was frequently republished in all these languages. Without directly advertising itself as a “saint’s life,” that is precisely what it was. By the time it was published, the genre had been in crisis in certain parts of Europe for over a half-century. Erasmus and others mocked veneration of relics and saints as it had been traditionally practiced. When in 1523, for instance, Pope Adrian VI canonized Benno,

37 See Francisco de Borja Medina, “Everard Mercurian and Spain: Some Burning Issues,” in The Mercurian Project: Forming Jesuit Culture, 1573–1580, ed. Thomas M. McCoog (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuits Sources, and Rome: IHSI, 2004), 945–966, at 950. 38 For the strange story of the interaction of these two authors, see Fontes narr., 3:208–236. See also König-Nordhoff, Ignatius, 48–53.

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an eleventh-century bishop of Meissen in Saxony, the event was celebrated there with a procession in which horse’s bones were mockingly venerated as relics.39 Luther wrote a pamphlet “Against the New Idol and the Old Devil About to Be Set up at Meissen.” In time Protestants’ disdain for holy people made exception especially for their own martyrs, with the result that Protestant traditions of hagiography, different yet also similar to Catholic, soon sprang up.40 Widespread among the cultural elites in the sixteenth century, no matter where they fell on the confessional scale, was a new concern for verify- ing assertions through examination of original documents. This concern was a species within the genus of the Renaissance humanists’ cry for a “return to the sources,” ad fontes. In fifteenth-century Italy, writers like Flavio Biondo (1392–1463) and Leonardo Bruni (c.1370–1444) seized upon historians from classical antiquity as their models. A more elegant Latin style was the most obvious way such writers differed from their medieval counterparts, but this shift in style was accompanied by shifts in purpose and even method. More attention was paid, for instance, to human motivation and less to supernatural causes. For the humanists a history, whether secular or sacred, was moral philosophy teaching by example. According to them, it was full of ethical and political lessons applicable to contemporary circumstances. In that regard, therefore, the new historiography was consonant with traditional hagiography, which held up the saints as examples for imitation, as role models. Alison Frazier has conclusively shown that the humanists of fifteenth- century Italy produced hundreds of lives of saints and that this production marked not so much a break with the medieval tradition as an intensified and, in some instances, a more self-critical continuation of it. The phenomenon was so wide-ranging in literary forms, authorial intent, and approach to sources to defy generalization, except that proper style was now a paramount concern. The rhetorician was the historian, and the result was “a literary Renaissance” for the saints.41 David Collins has documented a similar Renaissance in Germany for roughly the same period.42

39 See Peter Burke, “How to be a Counter-Reformation Saint,” in the collection of his articles, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 48–62, at 49–50; and David J. Collins, Reforming Saints: Saints’ Lives and Their Authors in Germany 1470–1530 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3–6. 40 See, e.g., Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 41 See Alison Knowles Frazier, Possible Lives: Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 317. 42 See Collins, Reforming Saints.

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Erasmus’s life of Jerome is the best known of those produced by humanists in the sixteenth century.43 This vita was not meant to be a free- standing piece but to serve as the introduction to Erasmus’s monumental edition of Jerome’s works. Erasmus intended it as an entry-way into appreciation of Jerome’s achievement as a scholar. As detached from that context, the life has been hailed as a break-through in hagiography because of the critical way Erasmus used his sources, his almost infallible instinct for dissociating fact from fiction, and his sober presentation. In Erasmus’s life of Jerome, there were no miracles. The integrity of Jerome’s life was proof enough of his sanctity. Contained in the first volume of Erasmus’s edition of Jerome’s works, the vita was published in 1516, on the eve of the Reformation. It, along with Erasmus’s well known satirical writings about the veneration of saints such as his colloquy “A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake,” acted as a prod and prelude to the reactions against the saints that broke out with the Reformation, and it helped create new perils facing authors who worked in the hagiographical genre. Although critical examination of sources by hagiographers did not begin in the Renaissance, it rose to a higher level and deviations from it were less well tolerated—at least for a while and in certain circles. These developments had even institutional impact, as suggested by the fact that for a period of sixty-five years, from 1523 until 1588, the popes canonized not a single saint. In a hastily composed decree, the Council of Trent affirmed in one of its very last acts, 1563, the legitimacy, praiseworthiness, and spiritual advantages of veneration of the saints.44 During that same Twenty-Fifth Session, it called for a revision of sacred texts, including the breviary, to correct errors and make sure of their orthodoxy.45 For saints’ feasts, the breviary contained in the “lessons” of the second nocturn of matins short biographies of the saint of the day, many of which did not measure up to the critical standards that were emerging. When Pope Sixtus V reorganized the Roman Curia in 1587–1588, he created the Congregation of Sacred Rites and Ceremonies. Although the revision of the Roman Missal and breviary had been under way since the council concluded and work on the

43 See David J. Collins, “A Life Reconstituted: Jacobus de Voragine, Erasmus of Rotterdam, and Their Lives of St. Jerome,” Medievalia et Humanistica: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture 25 (1998): 31–51. 44 See Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 2:774–776. 45 See ibid., 2:797.

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former completed under Pius V, the new Congregation continued to revise the breviary, including the second nocturns. The Oratorian priest, Antonio Gallonio (1556–1605), a colleague of the much better known Cesare Baronio (1538–1607), left behind copious manuscripts that indicate the role he played in writing and revising lessons and prayers for the breviary for the Congregation, even though he was not an official member of it.46 Evident in his notes is a concern for establishing an accurate chronology and for seeking out the oldest available manuscript sources for verifications. Like Ribadeneyra with his Vida of Ignatius, Gallonio is best known for writing the first life of Philip Neri (1515–1595), who would be canonized the same day as Ignatius.47 He published the book only in 1601, long after Ribadeneyra’s work, but in genre and concern for historical accuracy, it was comparable to his. Ribadeneyra divided his Vida of 1583 into five books. The first told Ignatius’s story up to his arrival at the University of Paris in 1528, the second the story up to Pope Paul III’s official approval of the new order in 1540. He construed the approval as a sign that “our Lord […] had sent Father Ignatius into the world so that as a faithful minister he might serve the church and provide it with sons and soldiers to defend and protect it.”48 The third book begins with Ignatius’s election as general in 1541 and takes the narrative up to about 1550, paying more attention to the general history of the order than to Ignatius himself, which is true for the most part also for book four, which ends with Ignatius’s death. In shifting the emphasis in books three and four to the order, Ribadeneyra set the pattern for future lives of Ignatius. The shift was almost inevitable. Once Ignatius became superior general, he virtually never stirred from Rome, and spent his days at his desk administering the order, which gave biographers little to work with. The years of action were over for Ignatius but just beginning for the Society. The fifth book consisted of thirteen chapters, twelve of which deal with Ignatius’s virtues. In the preface, Ribadeneyra made clear that he was writing for Jesuits, and he presented Ignatius as perfectly fulfilling the high standards of virtue that the Ninth Part of the Jesuit Constitutions set for the general. The first chapter was about Ignatius’s “gift of prayer and

46 See Simon Ditchfield, “‘Historia Magistra Sanctitatis’? The Relationship between Historiography and Hagiography in Italy after the Council of Trent (1561–1742 ca.),” in Firpo, Nunc alia tempora, 3–23. 47 Antonio Gallonio, Vita del beato padre Filippo Neri fiorentino (Rome: Luigi Zannetti, 1601). 48 Fontes narr., 4:310–311.

278 chapter fifteen familiarity with God,” the second about “his charity towards others,” the third about “his humility,” and so forth. The thirteenth was about his “miracles,” which for Ribadeneyra are the testimony of his holy life and the great accomplishments God has worked through the Society. Those were miracle enough.49

Moving Toward Canonization

Ribadeneyra’s argument for Ignatius’s sanctity is similar to Erasmus’s for Jerome. But in fact, Ribadeneyra was constrained to argue the way he did because at the time he wrote no miracles worked through Ignatius’s intercession were known. The situation took on urgency just a few years after the Vida was first published. In 1588, Pope Sixtus V canonized Diego (Didacus) of Alcalá, thus ending the sixty-five-year hiatus. Canonizations were again possible. They were not, however, going to be a daily—or even an annual—occurrence. In the thirty-four years that elapsed between the canonization of Diego and the canonization of Ignatius in 1622, the popes bestowed the honor of universal cult, which is what canonization autho- rizes, on only five individuals. During the next thirty-seven years, 1622– 1658, only two saints would be canonized.50 In the very year Sixtus canonized Diego, moreover, he drastically reorganized the Roman Curia, which included, as mentioned, a new Congregation of Rites that had the supervision of canonization procedures. His action can be understood as a response to criticism, not only by Protestants, about the cult of the saints and about how individuals officially achieved the status of sainthood. Miracles, it was clear, would be required. The pressure was on. In 1591, Acquaviva wrote to Ribadeneyra that Ignatius’s cause had not been able to go forward because the signs failed that God provided to ensure that his saints would be remembered. The “signs that failed” could only mean miracles.51 There were other problems. Clement VIII, who in 1592 succeeded Sixtus, was not particularly sympathetic toward the Society, and he happened to have a relatively long

49 Fontes narr. 4:900–931. 50 Simon Ditchfield generously allowed me to read and make use of his paper before being published. See now “‘Coping with the beati moderni’: Canonization Procedure in the Aftermath of the Council of Trent,” in Ite Infiammate Omnia: Selected Historical Papers from Conferences Held at Loyola and Rome in 2006, ed. by T.M. McCoog (Rome: IHSI, 2010), 413–439. 51 See König-Nordhoff, Ignatius, 38. For detailed discussion of the measures taken by the Jesuits to promote Ignatius and of the problems they encountered, see ibid., 33–42.

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reign of thirteen years, until 1605. Besides, there was competition. In 1595, Philip Neri, the founder of the Oratorians, died. Though born in Florence, he spent most of his long life in Rome, where he was well-known to persons of every class of society, including the popes, and much beloved. The Oratorians were as keen to have Philip canonized as the Jesuits were to have Ignatius.52 If it came to a showdown between the two men, there was no doubt Philip would win. In Rome by the early seventeenth century, Ignatius was, except among the Jesuits, at best a distant memory and, besides, he was a Spaniard. Philip, on the contrary, was still vividly remembered and native-grown. Gallonio, Philip’s biographer, was also the procuratore of the Oratorians for Philip, the person in the order responsible for promoting the cause. There was even competition within the Jesuit order itself. In 1552, Francis Xavier died off the coast of China after a short but spectacular career in India, Japan, and parts of present-day Indonesia. He was in the East at the behest of King John III of Portugal, who gave Xavier unstinting support during his whole missionary career. Xavier had electrified readers in Europe with his letters describing his activities. The first to be published was a long letter from India, January 15, 1544, of which both French and German translations appeared the next year.53 Xavier was therefore much better known to a much wider public than Ignatius was. When King John heard of Xavier’s death, he immediately ordered his viceroy in India to gather testimony in view of a future canonization. Between 1556–1557, thirty-six eye-witness testimonies were taken in Goa alone. Xavier’s corpse, exhumed months after his burial, was found perfectly fresh and incorrupt, though he had been buried with a large quantity of lime. Here was a striking and traditional indication of sanctity.54 For most Jesuits, proud as they were of Xavier, it would be unbecoming for him to be canonized before the founder. In their minds, however, the two men were closely linked, as is clear from a decree of the Jesuits’ Fifth General Congregation, held in the winter of 1593–1594, mandating Acquaviva, the general, to petition for the canonization of them both. The Sixth General Congregation, 1608, passed a similar decree.55 Two years

52 See A.D. Wright, “‘A Race to the Altar’: Philip Neri and Ignatius Loyola,” in Symbol and Image in Iberian Arts, ed. Margaret A. Rees (Leeds: Trinity and All Saints College, 1994), 151–160. 53 For the letter, see The Letters and Instructions of Francis Xavier, trans. M. Joseph Costelloe (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1992), 63–74. 54 See ibid., xxiii-xxiv. 55 See Padberg 1994, 212, decree 71; ibid., 218, decree 3.

280 chapter fifteen later, Orazio Torsellino published in Rome a life of Xavier and a collection of his letters.56 The volume was published that same year in Antwerp and within a short time translated into all the major European languages (English in 1632), as well as into Flemish and Hungarian. As it turned out, Xavier, though canonized the same day as Ignatius in 1622, was not declared a blessed until ten years after Ignatius, in 1619. At the beginning of the century, the prospects for Ignatius’s canonization had taken a turn for the better. In 1605, the new pope, Paul V, allowed the title of blessed to two youthful members of the Society, Luigi Gonzaga (1568–1591) and Stanisław Kostka (1550–1568), which occurred just as the concept of beatification as distinct from canonization was more clearly emerging. This was an encouraging sign, though some Jesuits might have feared it as threatening to preempt Ignatius’s canonization. Relations between the Oratorian cardinal, Cesare Baronio, and the Jesuit cardinal, Robert Bellarmine, were cordial, which helped diffuse the Philip-Ignatius rivalry. On the first anniversary of Philip’s death, 1596, the Oratorians held a celebration at his tomb. The following year they held an even more elaborate one, in which the important cardinal of Milan, Federico Borromeo (1564–1631), who was in Rome on business, participated. This was a dangerous game for the Oratorians to play, because they could be accused of promoting public cult before having ecclesiastical approval. After a particularly splendid celebration in 1602, Pope Clement, still reigning, was furious, and the Oratorians knew they had overstepped the mark. Nonetheless, their example seems to have encouraged the Jesuits to similar, though more cautious, actions. A paradox was at work here. While promoting public cult was forbidden, spontaneous cult was considered a sign of sanctity. Until 1599, Acquaviva had not allowed any ornamentation on Ignatius’s tomb. That year, however, on the morning of July 31, the anniversary of Ignatius’s death, Cardinal Bellarmine (1542–1621) along with Cardinal Baronio appeared at the recently completed church of the Gesù. They both knelt in prayer before the tomb. Baronio kissed the floor in front of it and then climbed a ladder to affix a portrait of Ignatius above it. Then Bellarmine preached a sermon in praise of Ignatius. Their visit made a strong impression, of course, on people present in the church, who

56 Horatius Torsellinus [Orazio Torsellino, Torsellini], De vita Francisci Xaverii […] quibus accesserunt eiusdem Xaverii epistolarum libri quatuor (Rome: Luigi Zannetti, 1596). The same year with the same publisher he brought forth separately a Latin translation of the letters.

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implicitly were invited to follow suite. The next day, the Duchess of Sessa, wife of the Spanish ambassador, sent three man-sized lamps to be installed at the tomb. From that point on, a certain momentum began to build. On February 12 the next year, for instance, Baronio delivered a sermon that attracted a lot of attention in which he praised the Society of Jesus. Later that year, on July 31, he repeated in the Gesù what he had done the year before. That an Oratorian like Baronio would so publically promote the cause of the founder of the Jesuits called favorable attention to Ignatius in a way that no Jesuit could. Moreover, Baronio was a member of the Congregation of Rites, which meant that he was a voice for the cause from within the system.57 Engraving 77 in our Vita depicts a meeting between the two holy men, Philip and Ignatius. The caption says Philip often saw Ignatius’s face resplendent with light, an indication of his sanctity. The relationship between the saints, who were probably little more than casual acquain- tances, was expanded into a much closer relationship through pious leg- ends. Nonetheless, that Philip said something about Ignatius close to what the caption indicates is well-founded. The Jesuits would, moreover, have been foolish to put the story forward so soon after Philip’s death, when so many were alive who knew him, if it were not plausible.58 This depiction of the two men in our Vita is meant to honor both, and it further suggests that the Oratorians and the Jesuits were now making common cause. At this point Ribadeneyra once again came to Ignatius’s rescue. In 1599, he published the first volume of a two-volume work of the lives of the saints, Flos sanctorum. Despite the title, the work was written in Spanish. At the end of the second volume, published two years later, he attached a much shorter, but still substantial version of his life of Ignatius. The impli- cation was clear: Ignatius deserved to be in the same company as officially recognized saints. But this shorter biography was especially important because Ribadeneyra inserted into it the miracles that had previously been lacking and for which he now had the sworn testimonies collected for the process of his canonization. He was frank: “And because [without miracles] no saint is canonized and proposed by the Apostolic See to the whole church to be invoked and venerated, […] I must here relate

57 See Wright, “‘Race,’” 153–155, and König-Nordhoff, Ignatius, 41–42. 58 See Fontes narr., 3:428, as well as Louis Ponnelle and Louis Bordet, St. Philip Neri and the Roman Society of His Times (1515–95), trans. Ralph Francis Kerr (London: Sheed and Ward, 1932), 99–105, especially 101.

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[for Ignatius] some miracles and extraordinary happenings such as we observe in the lives of other saints.”59 In an edition of his Vida published after the Flos sanctorum, he at the end refers the reader to it. After again justifying his apologia for Ignatius’s saintliness based on his holy life and the achievements of the Society he founded, Ribadeneyra added that after he wrote the Vida it pleased the Lord to make Ignatius’s greatness known through “great and splendid” miracles (in the conventional sense). He felt obliged therefore to recount them in the biography he wrote for the Flos.60 In that new biography, he followed the same pattern as before—first a narration of Ignatius’s life from Pamplona until his death, then a presentation of his great virtues, and finally the miracles, but now the miracles get expansive treatment. He adhered even here, however, to his principle of basing his account on solid evidence. For several decades, sworn testimonies about Ignatius had been gathered as part of the process looking to his canonization, and many of these testimonies were about miracles performed through his intercession. It was from these documents—informa- ciones auténticas—that Ribadeneyra drew to make his case.61 In a short passage in the Flos, he extended a helping hand to the Oratorians by describing Philip Neri as “holy” and a man of “known sanctity” who founded the Oratory “of those venerable priests who have done so much good in Rome.” Ribadeneyra, however, went way beyond the facts in saying that Philip was a “most devout child” of Ignatius and came to him for help “in all his doubts and troubles.”62 The Flos sanctorum was organized according to saints’ feast days in a calendar that began with January 1. After Ignatius was canonized, his entry was moved from being an add-on at the end of the second volume to July 31, his feast day. The book, which in a modern edition would run to well over 1,000 pages, was a spectacular publishing success, outstripping the Vida.63 It appeared again in Madrid in 1604, in 1610, and in 1616, and it continued to be republished in Spanish into the eighteenth century. It hit the international market with translations into other vernaculars,

59 Pedro de Ribadeneyra, Flos sanctorum, o Libro de las vidas de los Santos, 2 vols. (Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1599–1601), 2:872, my translation. 60 See Fontes narr., 4:931. 61 See Flos sanctorum, 2:846. 62 See ibid., 2:843. 63 Javier Azpeitia ventures a much larger pagination estimate in a modern edition of a few selections from the Flor sanctorum: Pedro de Ribadeneyra, Vidas de santos; Antología del Flos sanctorum, eds. Olalla Aguirre and Javier Azpetia (Madrid: Ediciones Lengua de Trapo, 2000), xxxii.

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including a translation into English as early as 1616, many times reprinted. It was almost immediately translated into French, and in that language had perhaps its biggest success. A Latin translation was published in 1630 and even earlier, a Japanese. Excerpted and augmented with contributions by other hagiographers, it was truly a best-seller published over and over again, with a renewed efflorescence in the nineteenth century.64

Visual Representations of Ignatius Before The Vita

The authors of our Vita beati Ignatii Loiolae were not the first to put Ignatius’s story into visual form. If the Jesuits were from the beginning keen on committing the story to writing, they were just as keen in exploit- ing it for other media. Shortly after Ignatius’s died, for instance, they had a death mask made and commissioned a portrait of him by the prominent Italian artist, Jacopo del Conte. These actions were just the beginning of the quest for a “true portrait” of the founder.65 Under the supervision of Ribadeneyra himself around the year 1600, Juan de Mesa painted a cycle of large oils for the Jesuit novitiate in Madrid. The paintings were not in this form available to a wide public, but later fourteen of the scenes were with a few changes in detail engraved in copper in Antwerp by Cornelis, Jan, and Théodore Galle, Jan Collaert, and Karel van Mallery. The engravings appeared in 1610, the year after the Vita, and had wide circulation.66 Probably slightly earlier, the life had appeared with the twelve scenes engraved by Hieronymus Wierix, mentioned above. An even earlier, much smaller, but still important depiction of Ignatius’s story appeared in a copper engraving by famous portraitist Thomas de Leu, printed for the Jesuits in Paris in 1590.67 In the center is a profile of Ignatius praying before a crucifix. He is surrounded by fifteen framed events from his life, with captions, most of which deal with his role as

64 For the printing history, see Sommervogel 6:1738–1754. 65 The most extensive account of this quest and related matters is of course König- Nordhoff, Ignatius. See also, however, Alfonso Rodríguez Gutiérrez de Ceballos, “La icono- grafía de San Ignacio de Loyola y los ciclos pintados de su vida en España e Hispanoamérica,” in Plazaola, Ignacio y su tiempo, 107–128; Heinrich Pfeiffer, “The Iconography of the Society of Jesus,” in The Jesuits and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley and Gauvin Alexander Bailey (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2003), 201–228, at 206–211; and Pierre- Antoine Fabre, “Les voies d’une canonisation: Écriture, portrait et récit de vie dans l’invention flamande de saint Ignace de Loyola,” in Confessional Sanctity (c.1500-c.1800), ed. Jürgen Beyer, et al. (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2003), 133–148. 66 See König-Nordhoff, Ignatius, 261–265. 67 See ibid., 109–114.

284 chapter fifteen founder and superior of the order and thus include his gathering of the companions in Paris, his sending Xavier to India, and the approval of the order by Paul III. They also include, however, his healing at Loyola by Saint Peter, visions of Christ and Mary, his vision of Hoces, an early companion, in heaven. There are no miracles. The caption under his portrait reads: “Ignatius of Loyola. In the year of our Lord’s Incarnation, 1540, he by a singular disposition of providence founded the religious order of the Society of Jesus at the time when Luther raged against the church. For the greater glory of God.” Far bolder was the copper engraving by another distinguished artist, Francesco Villamena, Rome, 1600. Ignatius kneels in an oval frame in the center, while behind his head irradiates a heavenly light, and similar streams of light descend upon him from a cloud and strike his breast. The caption underneath the portrait reads, “Blessed Ignatius, Founder of the Society of Jesus.” In small oval frames surrounding the larger one are twenty-nine scenes, including miracles worked by Ignatius during his life and after his death. Each has a caption describing the action. Villamena presents Ignatius as a recipient of visions from on high and as a miracle worker. The scenes, detached from time and place, follow no logical or chronological order. They hardly relate Ignatius to the Society of Jesus, and, if the caption under his portrait were removed, he could be almost any visionary and thaumaturge at any time. The person depicted in the scenes had, however, an essential requirement for having his sanctity recognized, miracles. It is astounding that such a work intended for a wide public and so bla- tantly portraying Ignatius as a saint would be produced during the reign of Clement VIII, a pope notably sensitive about organized promotion of a cult before ecclesiastical approval had been granted and not particularly well disposed toward the Jesuits. The dating, however, is certain, which means it appeared a year before Ribadeneyra’s account of Ignatius’s miracles in the second volume of the Flos sanctorum. Unfortunately, nothing is known about who sponsored the work or about the circumstances that gave rise to it except that Villamena dedicated it to Wilhelm V, Duke of Bavaria.68 Wilhelm, who had abdicated in 1598, was the great patron of the Jesuits who built for them in Munich their magnificent Michaelskirche.69

68 See ibid., 101–109, as well as Michael Bury, The Print in Italy 1550–1620 (London: British Museum Press, 2001), 131. I am indebted to Simon Ditchfield for the reference to Bury. 69 On Wilhelm and the Jesuits, see Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), especially 57–75.

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Clement VIII did indeed react but relatively mildly. Acquaviva, in a letter of June 6, 1601, to Bernardo Confalonieri, provincial of the Roman province, said that the pope had ordered that no more copies of images of Ignatius with miracles be printed without his permission. Clement allowed those already printed, however, to continue to be sold in Rome. It fell to Confalonieri to see to it that the pope’s order was carried out.70

Vita Beati Patris Ignatii Loiolae

By 1605, therefore, Lancicius and Rinaldi did not lack resources for constructing their Vita. They had at their disposal the biographies by Ribadeneyra and Maffei, the Flos sanctorum, and the engraving by Villamena. They had access to Orlandini’s manuscript on the history of the Society during Ignatius’s lifetime and to the source upon which it was principally dependent, the massive Chronicon of those same years compiled by Juan Alfonso de Polanco, Ignatius’s secretary.71 Orlandini’s and Polanco’s works, more concerned with the larger Jesuit story than with Ignatius, would have provided the editors with little information about him not available to them in the published books. Whether Lancicius and Rinaldi had access to other early, unpublished accounts, such as Ignatius’s Acta or, if they did, whether they bothered to consult them, we do not know. Although it is impossible to sort out what they took directly from which source, the fact is that all but a handful of the seventy-nine scenes are found in some form in either Ribadeneyra’s Vida or his Flos sanctorum. The editors needed to look no further, nor for the most part do we. The foremost problem Lancicius and Rinaldi faced amid their embar- rassment of riches was to decide the kind of story they would tell. That decision would determine their choice of events for the engravings. They had three basic options. The first was simply to tell the story of a holy man, a man whose life was resplendent with virtues and filled with special visi- tations from on high—basically the line taken by Ribadeneyra and Maffei in their biographies, which was consonant with the Acta. The second was

70 König-Nordhoff has transcribed the letter, Ignatius, 189, n. 806. 71 The Chronicon, originally intended for Mercurian to help him in his governance of the Society, was not published until the late nineteenth century: Juan Alfonso de Polanco, Vita Ignatii Loiolae et rerum Societatis Iesu historia, 6 vols. (Madrid: Typographorum Societas [vol. 1] and Avrial [vols. 2–6], 1894–98). Polanco’s principal source was the incoming correspondence of the Jesuit curia for those years.

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Ignatius as miracle-worker, and here the Flos and the Villamena engraving would come to their aid. The third would be the story of the founder of the order, which would emphasize the events beginning with the gathering of the companions in Paris in the 1530s and provide images of such things as the approval of the order by Paul III and the sending of Xavier to India. What they came up with was a combination of all three, but with the first predominating and providing the chronological framework for the other two. The first fifty-five images illustrate for the most part events Ignatius himself relates in his Acta, the story of conversion and spiritual growth. The very first image, however, deviates from the Acta, from the other early unpublished sources, from the biographies by Ribadeneyra and Maffei, and from the Flos. It depicts Ignatius’s birth in a stable outside the castle of Loyola. His mother, the caption tells us, had ordered the servants to take her there. The image is meant to convey the deep piety of the family into which Ignatius was born, a standard topos in hagiography, but it does much more by likening the situation of Ignatius’s birth to that of Jesus himself. Some of the authentic stories are embellished or sanitized. Ignatius in the Acta frankly tells how as a student he was imprisoned in Alcalá and Salamanca under suspicion of heresy and in the former city interrogated by the Inquisition. The caption for image 30, which depicts Ignatius behind bars, states simply that in both places he “suffered calumnies for the sake of Christ” and was put in jail. That was the truth but not the whole truth. Image 61, however, accurately depicts, almost precisely as he describes it in the Acta, how a decade later in Rome he was absolved of charges. Another incident developed into a miracle. Laínez’s letter of 1547, Polanco’s “commentary,” Ignatius’s Acta, Ribadeneyra’s Vida, and our Vita all recount how Simão Rodrigues, one of the companions from Paris, recovered from a life-threatening illness in 1537 when Ignatius, though sick himself, made, with Pierre Favre, another of the original companions, the day-long journey on foot from Vicenza to Bassano to visit him. Laínez in his letter of 1547 says that during the journey Ignatius became aware Simon would return to health, and when he arrived at Bassano, he pre- dicted to Simon that he was not going to die.72 In his “summary” the following year, Polanco does not mention the prediction, but says that from the moment Ignatius and Favre arrived at where Simon was staying,

72 Fontes narr., 1:136–138.

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Simon began to improve, which meant God heard the prayers his servants had poured out to him.73 A few years later when Ignatius dictated the Acta, he said that along the way to Bassano God gave him the assurance that Simon would not die, which he revealed to his companion Favre, and that when the two arrived on the scene Simon was consoled and quickly recovered.74 In the Vida, Ribadeneyra justifies his account of the incident by saying that he heard about it from Laínez, to whom Favre told the story shortly after it happened, yet Ribadeneyra’s account goes beyond what Laínez reported in 1547. Ribadeneyra says that Ignatius reassured Favre about Rodrigues and that when the two of them arrived at the scene they found Simão still gravely ill. Ignatius then embraced him, told him not to fear, and assured him he would recover. “And thus he got up and was well” (y assí se levantó y estuvo bueno).75 In the concluding chapter of the book, however, he says straightforwardly that “he healed Father Simon from his dangerous illness” (aver sanado al padre Simón de su peligrosa enfermedad).76 Image 50 of the Vita carries the healing a small step further. On a table in the sickroom stand a cross, lighted candle, and a small cruet presumably holding sacred oil, indicating that Simão, who lies with eyes closed on the bed, has received the last rites. Ignatius is shown embracing him. Favre stands behind Ignatius with hands folded in prayer. Through a window off to the left, Ignatius is seen on his knees with a ray of light descending toward him, the divine inspiration that assured him of Simão’s recovery. The caption reads: “His companion Simão Rodrigues was close to death, but, though he himself was suffering from a fever, he quickly hastens to make a journey of eighteen Roman miles and heals him with an embrace.” The miracle is not a story introduced from non-canonical sources but the result of a gradual refashioning of authentic accounts. It would be tedious to review here the engravings to show how faithful or unfaithful they are to the sources, but the above examples give an indication of how slippage occurred between the verbal and the visual and even between different verbal versions of the same event. In such a scrutiny, allowance must of course be made for the simplification that a brief caption and the visual medium require. Figure 15.4 depicts

73 Ibid., 1:194. 74 Ibid., 1:496–497 [95]. 75 Ibid., 4:260–261. 76 Ibid., 4:925.

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Figure 15.4. Jean-Baptiste Barbé and Peter Paul Rubens (?). Engraving 39, in Vita beati patris Ignatii Loiolae, 1622 edition. Used with permission of the John J. Burns Library, Boston College. Caption: He chooses nine young men from the University of Paris and makes them companions in his plans.

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Ignatius gathering the nine companions at Paris who would be the nucleus of the new Society of Jesus, and figure 15.5 depicts the ten of them in 1534 pronouncing their vow to go to Jerusalem together, which was the crucial step that in 1539 led to their decision to stay together and found a new religious order. In fact, as Ribadeneyra makes clear in the Vida, Ignatius gathered only six companions and with him only, six pronounced the vow in 1534. The other three—Claude Jay, Paschase Broët, and Jean Codure— joined the group only after Ignatius left Paris, but then all ten were reunited in Italy in 1537 to become founders. This is a story that can be told through pictures only by simplifying it. A different kind of adjustment occurs in figure 15.6. In the Acta, Ignatius tells how at mass in the Dominican church in Manresa he saw “with his inward eye” rays of light coming from the sacred host at the moment of elevation, and how he saw “with his understanding” (entendimiento) how Christ was present in the sacrament.77 In his Vida, Ribadeneyra accurately reports the event (con los ojos del alma).78 What Ignatius experienced was an internal illumination, an insight, not a vision. But how portray in visual form an intellectual experience? The artist for image 17 had little choice but to turn it into a vision. The caption then takes the depiction literally, “[…] in the sacred host he saw Christ the Lord with his eyes.” (A large oil painting, attributed to Andrea Commodi, probably sometime between 1605 and 1608, produced for the Farnese Chapel in the Gesù, did the same.79) Nonetheless, despite the occasional retouching, the events depicted in the Vita, if we accept the miracles, are fundamentally faithful to the earliest sources and to the portrait drawn by Ribadeneyra in the Vida of 1583. Fundamentally faithful, yes, but would the retouching have been tolerated earlier? Beginning in 1547 with Polanco’s request to Laínez for an account of the origins of the Society, the Jesuits showed an almost obsessive concern for accuracy of detail about Ignatius’s life, a concern that prompted the meticulous review in 1572 by his fellow Jesuits of Ribadeneyra’s Latin text. Would they have tolerated the first image, Ignatius’s birth in a stable, which is a later fabrication? The Jesuits, in any case, never shared the skepticism of Erasmus, the Protestant Reformers, and others about miracles, visions, and transports. The Vita is replete with supernal interventions of various kinds. At least

77 Ibid., 1:402–403 [29]. 78 Ibid., 4:125. 79 See O’Malley and Bailey, Jesuits and the Arts, 46–47.

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Figure 15.5. Jean-Baptiste Barbé and Peter Paul Rubens (?). Engraving 41, in Vita beati patris Ignatii Loiolae, 1622 edition. Used with permission of the John J. Burns Library, Boston College. Caption: In a shrine of the Blessed Virgin on the outskirts of the city, he and his companions bind themselves by a firm vow to further the glory of God and the salvation of souls everywhere, especially by a journey to Jerusalem, and thus zealously to attain the martyr’s palm—a vow they renew on the same date every year.

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Figure 15.6. Jean-Baptiste Barbé and Peter Paul Rubens (?). Engraving 17, in Vita beati patris Ignatii Loiolae, 1622 edition. Used with permission of the John J. Burns Library, Boston College. Caption: In the same church, while he is present at the sacrifice of the mass, in the most sacred Host he beholds Christ our Lord with his own eyes.

292 chapter fifteen fourteen of the images portray Ignatius seeing visions—of Christ, the saints, or the devil. He is the object of the special protection of Providence. He has a gift of prophesy and of levitation; he receives special internal illuminations from on high; and he successfully performs exorcisms. All these are happenings beyond normal human experience, but they are not miracles as such. Many of them have at least a foundation in the Acta. Only seven images clearly portray Ignatius as a wonder-worker, that is, as himself affecting some occurrence for the better that transcends what are sometimes called the laws of nature. In one of them, he appears in a vision to a Jesuit in Cologne. In the remaining six he restores somebody to health, or somebody is restored to health through a relic, in this instance through a piece of his clothing taken from his body before burial. If seven depict him as miracle-worker, a slightly larger number directly show Ignatius as the founder of the Society. Small though that number is, they succeed in integrating the story of him as founder into the story of the holy man and the wonder-worker. He gathers, as mentioned, the nine companions in Paris, and they pronounce the vow to go to Jerusalem. In 1540, Paul III approves their proposal for the new order. Ignatius sends Xavier to “the Indies.” After Ignatius was elected superior in 1541, the companions pronounce their vows as Jesuits. Xavier with affection and reverence writes to Ignatius from the Indies. At the urging of Ignatius, Pope Julius III founds the German College. Ignatius writes the Jesuit Constitutions. The first two of these events were important and uncontested facts, and the remaining six were matter of public record. If allowance is made for the simplification that brief captions and the visual medium required, these eight stand up well to scrutiny against the sources. The depiction of the founding of the German College is a good instance of the shorthand. Ignatius, not Pope Julius III, has to be reckoned as the real founder of the German College, though he did not go ahead with it until Pope Julius approved and promised financial assistance. On one level, it is curious that the founding of the German College is commemorated while its parent institution, the incomparably more important Roman College, gets no notice. But on another, it is understandable. Singling out the German College allowed the editors to insinuate the Jesuits’ campaign against the Reformation while still focusing attention on Ignatius’s life in Rome. It is, however, the title page (figure 15.7 and 15.8) that most effectively presents Ignatius as founder, as a holy father of holy sons. The iconographic program is superimposed on a sturdy architectural structure decorated with a number of medallions or cartouches on which are portraits

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Figure 15.7. Jean-Baptiste Barbé and Peter Paul Rubens (?). Title page (front), in Vita beati patris Ignatii Loiolae, 1622 edition. Used with permission of the John J. Burns Library, Boston College.

of Jesuits, all but four of whom—Ignatius, Xavier, Gonzaga, and Kostka— died violent deaths and hence were reckoned martyrs. In the middle of the structure hangs a curtain on which is inscribed the official monogram of the Society, IHS (Jesus). Under the monogram, the title reads, “The Life of Blessed Father Ignatius of Loyola, Founder of the Society of Jesus. Rome.

294 chapter fifteen

Figure 15.8. Jean-Baptiste Barbé and Peter Paul Rubens (?). Title page (back), in Vita beati patris Ignatii Loiolae, 1622 edition. Used with permission of the John J. Burns Library, Boston College.

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1609.” At the top of the page, above the architecture, is a small semi-profile portrait of Ignatius, who is not explicitly identified except that he is the only figure with a halo. On either side of him two reclining putti hold a scroll with the words “Neither roses nor lilies are lacking among his flowers” (Floribus eius nec rosae nec lilia desunt). The words can be less literally and more pointedly translated as “In his garden both roses and lilies grow in abundance”—symbols of love and purity, respectively. Immediately under Ignatius is a medallion with a semi-profile portrait of “Blessed Francis Xavier,” by far the best known of all the Jesuits, for whose canonization, as mentioned, the momentum had begun as soon as news of his death reached Europe a half-century earlier. In the Vida, Ribadeneyra of course devotes a long passage to him.80 On either side of Xavier are medallions with Luigi Gonzaga and Stanisław Kostka, whom Paul V had just beatified. Luigi, as the eldest son of the Marquis Ferrante Gonzaga, a cousin of the duke of Mantua, was destined to bear the title Marchese Imperiale di Castiglione, which he renounced when in 1585 he entered the Jesuits. He died after only six years in the Society, before ordination, from the lingering effects of illness contracted while nursing plague victims. Stanisław, from a noble and wealthy Polish family, died as a novice in Rome in 1568, at the age of eighteen, after being in the order less than a year. Although neither of them would be canonized until the eighteenth century, they were from this point forward ubiquitous staples of Jesuit iconographic self-presentation, invariably paired. Then under Xavier appear three figures identified as “Blessed Rodolfo Acquaviva and companions.” Acquaviva, missionary to India, was a son of the Duke of Atri and a nephew of Claudio Acquaviva, the superior general. He was in charge of the first Jesuit mission to the Mughal emperor Akbar. After three years at Akbar’s court, he returned to Goa, the Portuguese capi- tal in India. That same year, in the village of Cuncolim in the Salsette peninsula, he, four other Jesuits, and some Portuguese laymen, were attacked by a Portuguese-hating (and therefore Christian-hating) mob and killed. In the Vida, Ribadeneyra holds him up as among the holy martyrs who give proof of the miracle of the Society.81 At the center of the base of the structure are depicted two ships and several figures in the water, under which is inscribed, “Forty Martyrs.” The

80 Fontes narr., 4:636–659. 81 See ibid., 4:356–358. See also the entry, “Acquaviva, Rodolfo,” in DHCJ 1:12–13, and Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 112–118.

296 chapter fifteen allusion is to the most tragic loss of life the Jesuits suffered in the sixteenth century. In 1570, forty of them sailing to Brazil as missionaries under the leadership of the Portuguese nobleman, Ignacio de Azevedo, were inter- cepted by the Huguenot corsair, Jacques Sourie (Soria, Sore). When Sourie discovered who they were, he ordered them executed and their bodies cast into the sea. As soon as word of their fate reached Catholic Europe, they were celebrated as martyrs, as of course does Ribadeneyra in the Vida. (Though Azevedo was of noble blood, he was illegitimate, the son of a priest and a Benedictine nun.82) To the left under the column is a medallion with three figures hanging on crosses with the inscription “in Japan.” At Nagasaki on February 5, 1597, the war lord Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–1598) ordered the execution of a Japanese Jesuit, “Paulo” Miki, and two Japanese lay helpers of the Jesuits. This brutal event, at which six Franciscans and their lay helpers were also executed, presaged the massive persecution a few decades later, the end of “the Christian century” in Japan, when between 1617 and 1622 thirty-four Jesuits were executed. In the corresponding medallion on the right over the inscription “in Florida” stands a group of Jesuits holding martyrs’ palms. In 1566, the Jesuits first arrived in Florida. That very year, Pedro Martínez, leader of a group of three, was killed by the Amerindians somewhere near St. Johns River in Florida.83 The other two escaped. Four years later, a group of eight Jesuits in an ill-fated mission led by Juan Bautista de Segura returned to “Florida,” sailed into the Chesapeake Bay, and disembarked near College Creek, Virginia. Within less than five months, on February 4 and 9, 1571, they too all died at the hands of the natives. Ribadeneyra of course cele- brates them.84 Three pairs of medallions hang alongside the outer columns of the structure. In the first pair is a portrait on the left of Antonio Criminali, who was killed at Vedalai, India, in an attack on a Portuguese garrison by Badagas troops as he tried to aid the Christian women and children. The incident took place in June, 1549. The early date meant Criminali was looked upon as the first martyr, the “proto-martyr,” of the Society, which is

82 See Fontes narr., 4:358–359. See also the entry, “Azevedo (Acevedo), Ignacio de,” in DHCJ 1:313. 83 See the entry, “Martínez, Pedro,” ibid., 3:2524. 84 See Fontes narr., 4:356–357. See also the entry, “Segura, Juan Bautista de,” in DHCJ 4:3549–3550, and Clifford M. Lewis and Albert J. Loomie, The Spanish Jesuit Mission in Virginia, 1570–1572 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953).

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how Ribadeneyra in the Vida describes him.85 On the opposite side is Edmund Campion, the English Jesuit, a convert from the Anglican church in which he had been ordained a deacon, who was executed under Elizabeth in London in 1581. Ribadeneyra mentions him along with Thomas Cottam, executed the following year.86 Beneath on the left is a profile of Abraham Francisco de Georgiis. Born in Syria into a Maronite family, he entered the Society after studying at the Roman College. A missionary, he was beheaded by the Muslim governor of Eritrea in 1595. On the right are the profiles of two French Jesuits, Jacques Salès and Guillaume Saultemouche, who in 1593 were arrested by Huguenots at Aubenas (Ardèche) and after exchanges with them principally about the Eucharist, were executed.87 The title page thus presents Ignatius as the progenitor of saints and martyrs. They were all figures from the half-century just passed, and a number of them had died within recent memory. The program for the title page could not have been grounded more solidly in the contemporary reality of Catholicism or suggest more vividly its universal mission and its vitality in the midst of tribulations. In it, as nowhere else in this little volume, Ribadeneyra’s consistent refrain that the founding of the Society of Jesus was Ignatius’s real miracle found effective visual expression. The next page contains a bust-portrait of Ignatius in an oval frame under the IHS monogram. The inscription under the portrait, a conflation from Ecclesiasticus and Isaiah, gives verbal utterance to the visual message of the frontispiece: “In every work he gave witness to the Holy One, and from the ends of the earth he brought his brothers as a gift to the Lord.

85 See Fontes narr., 4:356–357, and 480–483. See also the entry, “Criminali (Criminale, Criminal), Antonio (Pietro Antonio),” in DHCJ 2:1000. 86 See Fontes narr., 4:358–359. See also the entries, “Campion, Edmundo,” in DHCJ 1:617– 618, and “Cottam, Thomas,” ibid., 2:984; more generally, see Thomas M. McCoog, The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits, 2nd rev. ed. (Rome: IHSI, 2007). 87 See the entry, “Salès, Jacques,” in DHCJ 4:3472.

INDEX

Page numbers in bold indicate that a topic is dealt with in more detail. abuses, ecclesiastical 27–28, 86 Álvarez de Paz, Jacobo 138, 141 Académie Royale des Sciences Anderledy, Anton Maria 15–16 (Paris) 247–248 apostle/“apostolic” Accademia di San Luca (Rome) 253 term 159, 219, 220 accommodation strategy 12, 90–91, 96, 107, apostolic life/mobility 152, 159–160, 175, 178, 179, 230. See also “ways of 218–219, 221. See also missions proceeding” Appeal to the German Nobility (Martin Acevedo, Pedro 241 Luther) 73–74 Acosta, José de 62, 66, 249 Araoz, Antonio de 44, 77, 272 Acquaviva, Claudio 8 architecture 250–252 on canonization of Ignatius 278, 279 Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 17 leadership 68–69, 134–135, 139 Aristotle 62, 111, 171, 183, 201, 204, 211, promoting historiography and 215, 229 biographies 7, 140, 257, 274, 278 Artes praedicandi 91 on public cult 280, 285 arts 18, 80, 229 on spiritual directors 97, 141 engagement with 6, 49, 59, 69, 93–94, Acquaviva, Rodolfo 293ill., 295 212–213, 230 Acta (“autobiography” of Ignatius) 3–4, in schools 34–35, 93–94, 236 166, 198, 266, 267–269, 285 asceticism 111–112, 118–119, 126, 127, 132, 225 accommodation in 191 Asia 31, 39, 199, 234, 273 “grace of vocation” in 136–137 assistancies 19, 21 “help of souls” in 179, 219 Astrain, Antonio 19 images in 286 astronomy 49, 61, 245, 246, 247 ministry in 191, 197 Augustine of Hippo 90 miracles/healings in 292 “autobiography” of Ignatius. See Acta pilgrimage in 158 De Auxiliis controversies 61, 128 recovery of Simão Rodrigues in 286 Azevedo, Ignacio 296 reform in 77–78 withdrawal from circulation 7, 270–271 Bahia (Brazil) 66, 236 Acta sanctorum (Bollandists) 7 Bailey, Gauvin Alexander 2, 33, 252 adaptation to circumstances 12, 90–91, 96, Baker, Augustine 134 107, 175, 178, 179, 230 ballet 244 Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia Barbé, Jean-Baptiste 260, 261 (Jerónimo Nadal) 33, 253, 254ill., 260 work for Society 258ill., 261, 262ill., Adrian VI 274–275 288ill., 290ill., 291ill., 293ill., 294ill. Akbar (Mughal emperor) 295 Barnabites 148, 165 Albert V (Duke of Bavaria) 63 Der Barock als Kunst der Gegenreformation Alcalá (Spain) 62, 96, 173, 188, 286 (Werner Weisbach) 24 exhortation of Nadal at 153, 154, 171 Baronio, Cesare 277, 280, 281 university of 100, 167 Bartoli, Daniello 10, 12, 20 Aldama, Antonio de 40 Bay, Michel de 61 Alden, Dauril 32 beatification of Ignatius 257, 259 Alexander VI 230 Beijing 247 Alumbrados (Spanish mystical Bellarmine, Robert 20, 61, 62, 102, 135, tradition) 133, 134, 136, 141 139, 280 Álvarez, Balthasar 133–134, 138 Benedict, Saint 81

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Benedictines 48, 89, 200 of Francis Xavier 10, 279–280 benefactors 118, 239, 250 of Ignatius of Loyola 10, 257, 258ill., 259, Berinzaga, Elisabetta 139 278, 279–280, 281 Bernardine of Siena 111 of Philip Neri 279, 281 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 69, 80, 213 Capuchins 81, 148 Berulle, Pierre de 139 Carroll, John 64 Bidermann, Jacob 241 casuistry (mediaeval tradition of moral Billom (France) 60, 241 reasoning) 12, 80, 91, 168, 191–192 Biondo, Flavio 275 catechesis 38, 42, 56–57, 76–77, 228 Biondo, Giuseppe 139 music to support 94, 234 Bloch, Marc 27 catechism 38, 83, 203 Bobadilla, Nicolás 169–170, 171, 226ill., 273 Le catéchisme des jésuites (Etienne body care 111, 119 Pasquier) 8 Böhmer, Heinrich 18 Catherine of Siena 257 Bologna 60, 243 Catholic Reform 77. See also Counter Bolswert, Schelte A. 233 Reformation Bonaventure, Saint 136, 151, 172 Counter Reformation versus 3, 26, Bonfa, Jean 248 71–72, 79, 87 Borromeo, Carlo 81, 111, 118 definition/term 23–24, 25, 28, 79 Borromeo, Federico 280 Jesuits as agent of 3, 30, 31, 73, 78, 79 Bossy, John 28, 41 Catholic Renaissance 24, 71 Brahe, Tycho 214 Catholic Restoration 24, 71, 87 Brambilla, Ambrosius 257 Catholicism Braunsberger, Otto 17 missionary activities 30–31 Brazil 66, 91, 250 relation with Reformation 102 missions to 296 similarities with Protestantism 72 musical tradition in 234–236 Le catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire number of Jesuits in 55 (Jean Delumeau) 28, 72 schools in 66, 236 The Catholic Encyclopedia (John H. Breve compendio intorno alla perfezione Pollen) 24 cristiana 139 Cervini, Marcello 75, 81 Breve directorium (Juan Alfonso de Chantal, Jeanne Françoise de 81 Polanco) 192, 197 chanting in choir 110, 125, 147, 148, 157, 175, breviary 276–277 227–228, 229, 251 Britto, John de 198 charity, works of 42–44 Brodrick, James 20 Charles II (King of England) 64 Broët, Paschase 226ill. Charlevoix, Pierre François-Xavier de 10 Bruni, Leonardo 275 Charpentrier, Marc-Antoine 199, 243 Buckley, Michael J. 33, 34 charter. See Formula of the Institute buildings/building programs 55, 118, 213, Chemnitz, Martin 5 250–252 China 30, 102, 202, 246 Burckhardt, Jacob 86, 87 strategy of accommodation in 12, 67, 91, Burriel, Andrés Marco 12, 15 136, 198, 211 Bustamante, Bartolomé de 252 choir, chanting office in 110, 125, 147, 148, 157, 175, 227–228, 229, 251 Le cabinet jésuitique 13–14ill. choirs 236 Calasanctius, Joseph 81 Christian Humanism 183 Caldéron de la Barca, Pedro 241 Christian Life (term) 38 Calvert, Leonard 64 Christian Spirituality: Post Reformation and Camerloher, Placidus von 242 Modern 139 Campion, Edmund 64, 293ill., 297 Christian Doctrine (term) 38 Canisius, Peter 17, 20, 62–63, 78, 84, 101, Christianitas (Christian life and doc- 166, 264, 272 trine) 30, 38, 76–77, 78, 82, 203, 206 Cano, Melchior 171, 178 Christianity in the West (John Bossy) 28 canonization 278 Chronicon (Juan Alfonso de Polanco) 285

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church buildings 118, 250–252, 284 hearing of confessions 42, 51, 78, 91, 180 “church” in papal bull 40–41 Konfessionsbildung 26 church reform confraternities 57, 92, 141–143, 173 definition 74–75 Confucianism 211 Ignatius as church reformer 73–74, 81 Congregation of Sacred Rites and Cicero 183, 211, 214, 236 Ceremonies 276–277, 278 on serving “common good” 47–48, 60, consolation (term) 166, 179–180 237, 239 Constitutions 68, 112, 232ill. use in schools 190, 234, 236, 255 accommodation/adaptation strategy Cisneros, Abbot 168 in 41, 91, 107, 230 civic mission and accomplish- authorship/interpretation 99, 151 ments 46–47, 48, 49–50, 239, 244 changes to 37, 69 Clavius, Christophe 246, 247ill. education in 6, 45 Clement III 138 on exchanging information 249–250 Clement VIII 69, 139, 278, 280, 284, 285 “Fourth Vow” in 54, 110, 113, 114, 126, 152, Clement XIV 12, 54 202, 218, 222 clergy 49, 197, 210, 221 grace building on nature in 172, 178, 198, cloisters 125, 138, 170, 175, 176, 178. See also 234 monastic traditions “help of souls” in 108, 205, 209, 231, 233 Cochin (India) 234 “houses” of Society in 152, 153, 154–155, Codacio, Pietro 250, 251 157, 158, 178, 196–197 Codina, Fr. 206 ministry in 91, 108, 112 Codure, Jean 226ill. mission in 39, 109, 113, 126, 218 Coímbra (Portugal) 243, 245 music in 229–230 Collaert, Jan 283 norms for buildings in 250 College of St. Omer (Flanders) 64 preaching in 190 Collège-Louis-le-Grand (Paris) 35, 239, promulgation of 150–151 243–244 self-/body care in 111, 119 colleges (type of “house” in sources of inspiration 178–179, 188, 205 Constitutions) 152, 153, 154, 156, 176 spiritual direction in 141 Collegio di Brera (Milan) 239, 244 style of 33–34, 55–56 Collegio di San Nicolò (Messina) 93, 113, Conte, Jacopino (Jacopo) del 73, 283 193 “contemplative in action” doctrine 126, Collegio Romano. See Roman College 136, 137, 152, 158 Collingwood, R.G. 5–6 controversies 15, 67–68, 102 Collins, David 275 De auxiliis controversy 61, 128 Colloquies (Erasmus) 187 internal 68–69, 133, 135, 139, 272, 273 Commentarius historicus et apologeticus de with Protestants 54, 62, 78, 128, 130, 202 Lutheranismo (Veit Ludwig von with Spanish and Portuguese Seckendorff) 12 authorities 67 communion. See Eucharist within Catholicism 12, 40, 54, 57, 61, 65, Companions of Jesus Sent into Today’s World 67, 78, 128 (33rd General Congregation) 164 conversion of heart from sin 168, 177 Company of the Most Holy Name of conversion to discipleship 177 Jesus 142 Cordeses, Antonio 133, 138 condemnation. See also suppression Córdoba (Spain) 241, 244 by University of Paris 65, 171 Corneille 241 of Galileo 61 correspondence 3, 41, 77, 83–84, 99, 104, Confalonieri, Bernardo 285 166, 230, 266 confession 78, 167–168, 219 Costa, Manuel da 273 confessional age 72 Cottam, Thomas 297 confessionalization 26, 28, 87, 214 Council of Trent 22, 23, 25, 30, 75 connection with preaching 57 contribution of Jesuits to 82, 83, 84, 101 female confessors 91 on ecclesiastical abuses 28, 86 frequent 177, 191 on justification by faith 128

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on ministry 82, 91, 110, 129 “Early Modern Catholicism” 28–29, 79, 87 on seminaries 243 Ecclesiastes (Erasmus) 184, 190 on veneration of saints 276 Eck, Johann 102 Counter Reformation 21–23, 71, 85–86, 128, education 202, 229. See also schools 142–143. See also Catholic Reform pedagogical techniques 206 Catholic Reform versus 3, 26, 71–72, 79, role in formal 206–207, 214, 215 87 scholastic versus humanistic 210–211, “Counter Reformation Arts” 80 229 definition/term 22, 24, 25, 28, 79 Society as teaching order 5, 45, 56, Jesuits as agent of 3, 30, 54, 63, 73, 79, 270 199–200, 220, 239 courtesans 58, 92 Eguía, Diego de 270 Cracow 8, 54, 259 Ejercicio de perfección y virtutes cristianas Cranach, Lucas 73 (Alonso Rodríguez) 131–133, 138 Criminali, Antonio 293ill., 296–297 Emser, Jerome 102 Croce, Benedetto 23, 24 enemies of Society. See controversies; Cuéllar, Juan Velázquez de 106 persecution; suppression cultural mission and accomplish- England 30, 39, 64, 297 ments 46–50, 65, 229, 236, 255. See also engravings 253, 283, 287 arts of Ignatius of Loyola 283–284 curia in Vita of Ignatius 285–286 reform of 74, 75, 276–277, 278 Epigrams (Martial) 253 Epistulae Sancti Ignatii Loiolae (Roque DaCosta Kaufmann, Thomas 252 Menchaca) 15 dance 34, 49, 59, 93, 230, 234, 238, 244 Erasmus, Desiderius 181, 182, 184, 211 “defense of the faith” 39–40, 62 censorship of writings 182, 187 Delumeau, Jean 28, 72 critical editions/vernacular transla- Descartes, René 65, 199, 214 tions 185, 186–187 Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der on education 194 Reformation (Leopold von Ranke) 23 Ignatius versus 123, 187 Devotio Moderna movement 123, 167 on Jerome 276, 278 on communion 169 on miracles 289 on contemplation 170 on sanctity 274 Society versus 170 as source of inspiration 174, 198 theological base 171 theological base 171, 173–174, 182, 185, Dictionnaire de spiritualité 21 189, 198 Diego of Alcalá 278 Esercitio della vita spirituale (Gaspar Directorium (guide through Spiritual Loarte) 168 Exercises) 140, 141 Essercitii spirituali di P. Ignazio (Giuseppe De disciplina christianae perfectionis Biondo) 139 (Bernardino Rossignoli) 139 Eucharist 57, 169, 228 discipline versus accommodation 91 abstaining from 169 Disputationes metaphysicae (Francisco frequency of communion 168–169, Suárez) 62 170 documentation 3–4, 16, 17, 18–19 Evangelicae historiae imagines (Jerónimo Doménech 207 Nadal) 253 Dominicans 42, 43, 47, 56, 61, 147, 228 Evennett, H. Outram 122, 128, 172 controversy with 61, 128 Ex illa die (papal bull 1715) 67 ministry 89 Exposcit debitum (revised papal bull, 21 on preaching 57 July 1550) 37, 40, 44–45, 51, 114, sources of inspiration 61 157, 161. See also Formula of the drama 59, 206, 210, 212, 238, 241 Institute Du Coudret, Annibal 268 Expositio moralis et mystica in Dudon, Paul 20 Canticum cantoricum (Luis de la Duhr, Bernhard 19 Puente) 138

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Faber, Peter. See Favre, Pierre Gagliardi, Achille 139 faith Galileo 61, 214, 246 defense of 39–40 Galle, Cornelis 283 justification by 103, 128, 137 Galle, Jan 283 propagation of 38–39, 109 Galle, Philips 257, 260 Farnese, Alessandro 118, 251, 271 Galle, Théodore 283 Favre, Pierre 62, 142, 180, 226ill., 286, 287 Gallonio, Antonio 277, 279 Febvre, Lucien 27–28 Gandía (Spain) 234, 238 Feldhay, Rivka 2, 34 General Congregations Feltre, Vittorino da 201 First (1558) 45, 234, 236, 250 Ferdinand I (Holy Roman Second (1565) 84, 236 Emperor) 63 Third (1573) 272, 273 Ferdinand II (Holy Roman Emperor) 63 Fifth (1593–1594) 279 Ferrer, Vincent 111 Sixth (1608) 279 “Five Chapters” (1539) 37, 38, 40, 41, 50 Twenty-first (1829) 15 Florida 66, 296 Twenty-fourth (1892) 18 Flos sanctorum (Pedro de Thirty-second (1974–1975) 164 Ribadeneyra) 281–283, 284, 285 Thirty-third (1983) 164 Fontes narrativi 266 geometry 245, 246, 247 Formula of the Institute (Formula vivendi, Georglis, Abraham Francisco de 293ill., 1550) 6, 37–38, 41, 149, 225 297 on chant in choir 227 German College (Rome) 63, 78, 243, “church” in 40–41 259, 292 “common good” in 43, 119, 239 Germany “defense of faith” in 39–40 banishment from 15 education in 45 church in 252, 284 “Fourth Vow” in 222 historiography 19 “mission” in 109 Reformation in 23, 26, 39, 62–63, music in 229 102, 269 “propagation of faith” in 39, 109 Renaissance in 275 purposes and ministries in 51, 56 schools in 63, 195, 241 works of charity in 42–44 Gerson, Jean 168 works of social assistance in 43–44 Gesù, Church of the (Rome) 118, 244, 251, Foucault, Michel 27 280, 281 “Fourth Vow” 54, 110, 114, 126, 152, 202, Ghinucci, Girolamo 229 222–223, 227, 290ill. Giard, Luce 2, 33 link to missions 153, 156–157, Giles of Viterbo 160, 218 159, 218 girls’ schools 65, 94 purpose of 157 Gloria S. Ignatii (Nicolas Lancicius) 259 vow of stability versus 113, 222–223 Gnaphaeus 241 France 12, 15, 24, 55, 65, 297 Goa 234, 236, 253, 295 schools in 55, 60, 65, 94, 195, 200, Golden Legend (Jacopo da Voragine) 121 241, 247 Gonçalves da Câmara, Luis 117, 121, Francis of Assisi 81, 183, 196, 257 137, 266 Francis of Paola 257 Gonzaga, Ferrante 295 Franciscans 42, 43, 47, 48, 56, 89, 147, Gonzaga, Luigi 280, 293, 293ill., 295 228, 296 Gothein, Eberhard 23, 24 “Spiritual Franciscans” 159–160, 218 grace Francisco de Borja 6–7, 129, 176, 230, building on nature 127, 172, 188, 198 233ill., 238, 243, 264, 270–271, 273 disputes about 61 Frazier, Alison 275 “grace of vocation” doctrine 136–137, 152 “free will” 128 Gregorian University 141, 199. See also Fülöp-Miller, René 18 Roman College Fumaroli, Marc 2, 12, 49 Gregory XIII 141–142, 246

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Grendler, Paul 194 on historiography 275 Gryphius, Andreas 241 style of discourse 174 Guarani people (South America) 67 Huron people (North America) 65 Guía expiritual (Luis de la Puente) 138 Guibert, Joseph de 21, 124, 132, 163, 179 iconography 261, 295 Ignatius of Antioch 90 Hallman, Barbara 80 Ignatius of Loyola 3, 53, 68, 74, 112, 119, 202, Handbook of the Christian Soldier 249, 295. See also Acta; Constitutions; (Erasmus) 181 Spiritual Exercises; Vita beati patris Harris, Steven J. 34, 213, 214, 249 Ignatii Loiolae Hasenmüller, Elias 8 biographies 6–7, 8, 10, 12, 20, 265, 270, healings by Ignatius 286–287, 292 273, 282 “help of souls” 4, 41, 77, 78, 89, 90, 92, 100, birth 286, 289 106–107, 114, 166, 170, 175, 179, 205, 209, canonization 257, 258ill., 259, 278, 219, 228, 230, 233. See also missions; 279–280, 281 “propagation of faith” Catholic church and 75, 83, 113–114 Hermits of Saint Augustine 160, 218 change/development of 106–108, 118, Herrera, Juan de 252 127, 204, 205 Hideyoshi, Toyotomi 296 as church reformer 16, 74, 75, 81, 82, 84, Hieronymi Stridonensis Vita (Erasmus) 276 85–86 Hinduism 211 conversion 100, 106, 118, 121, 196, Historia general de España (Juan de 203–204, 266 Mariana) 7–8, 62 correspondence 3, 15, 16, 41, 99, 108, 148, Historia jesuitici ordinis (Elias 230 Hasenmüller) 8 death 54, 122, 280, 283, 293 Historia natural y moral de las Indias (José doctrine 103, 108, 130, 131 de Acosta) 62, 66, 249 on education 186, 194–195, 196 Historia Societatis Iesu (Niccolò educational background 4, 100, 105, 106, Orlandini) 259 121, 171, 181, 197, 204 historiography 5–6, 54, 265 family background 100, 121 frameworks of interpretation 2, 21, “help of souls” leitmotif 4, 41, 77, 89, 90, 29–32 92, 100, 106–107, 114, 166, 170, 175, 179, methodology 19, 20, 31–32 205, 209, 219, 228, 230, 233 Hoces, Diego de 226ill., 284 image of 4–5, 103, 105–106, 117, 128, 130, Höltgen, Karl Josef 33 230, 269–270, 297 House of St. Martha (Rome) 58, 92 images of 227ill., 233ill., 261, 262ill., houses of probation (type of “house” in 283–285, 293ill., 294ill. Constitutions) 152, 153, 154, 176 inquisitions/charges against 62, 133, “houses” of Society 152, 153, 154–155, 157, 286 158, 196–197 leadership 55, 68, 104, 230, 264 “world as house” 110, 136, 153, 158, 162, Luther versus 100–101, 102, 103 173, 176, 178 military career 106, 121, 266 Hufton, Olwen 45, 118 miracles 278, 281–282, 284, 286, 287, 292 Huizinga, Johan 86, 87 personal spiritual experience of 167, Humanism 79. See also Renaissance 203–204 Humanism pilgrim years 104, 106, 112, 158, 205, 219 corpus of approved literature 183, 184 on preaching 129–130, 234 definition 183 retreat at Manresa 111, 121, 125, 127, 170, developments in 183–184 172, 204 ethical component of 183, 184 sources of inspiration 125, 167, 181 religious aspects of 183, 186 as theologian 99–100, 103–104, 105, humanistic education 105, 201–202, 171, 189 210–211, 237 on theology 187–188, 189 humanists tomb 280

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visions 289, 292 Jesuits Today 164 as (worldly) saint 117, 118, 127–128, John of Ávila 134, 234 131, 278 John the Baptist 258 image of Society 8, 10, 39, 54, 118, 200–201 John Cassian 132 images John of the Cross 175 use of 252–255 John III (King of Portugal) 55, 66, 114, 279 Imago primi saeculi 8, 10, 11ill. Jolliet, Louis 66 Imbart de la Tour, Pierre 24 Jonsen, Albert 192 The Imitation of Christ 123, 126, 158, 167, journeys. See missions 168, 169, 170. See also Devotio Moderna Julius III 161, 292 Imperial Astronomical Bureau 247 justification by faith alone 103, 128, 137 India 54, 67, 79, 250, 296 accommodation strategy in 136, 198, 211 Katholische Reformation oder missions to 53, 56, 67, 202, 234, Gegenreformation? (Hubert 248–249, 252, 295 Jedin) 21–22, 25, 71 number of Jesuits in 55 Keenan, James F. 33 persecution in 295, 296 Kennedy, T. Frank 234 printing in 253 Kessel, Leonard 193 schools in 253 Kircher, Athanasius 248ill. Indians 66, 67 Konfessionalisierung 26 Ingolstadt 139, 187, 274 Konfessionsbildung 26 school in 63, 193, 195 König-Nordhoff, Ursula 260–261 Institutum Historicum Societatis Kostka, Stanislaw 280, 293, 293ill., 295 Iesu 17–18 international expansion 55, 56 La Chaize, François de 65 Investiture Controversy 74 La Puente, Luis de 133–134, 138, 141 Iparraguirre, Ignacio 20 Laínez, Diego 3, 6, 111, 151, 159, 176, 187, Irenaeus of Lyons 90 226ill. Italy at Council of Trent 53, 83, 84, 101, 186 Controriforma 23 on Ignatius 265–266, 267, 270, 273 controversies in 139 on music 234 historiography 19 on recovery of Simão Rodrigues 286, members in 55, 79, 206, 238 287 schools in 55, 58, 60, 78, 93, 113, 193, 199, Lallemant, Louis 134 201, 207, 213, 214, 236, 238, 240, 243, Lamormaini, Wilhelm 63 246–247 Lancicius, Nicolas 259, 285 itinerant preaching 90, 176, 195 Lapide, Cornelius à 48, 198 Las Casas, Bartolomé de 102 Jansenists 49, 57, 61, 65 Lasso, Orlando di 230 Japan 30, 54, 79, 250, 269 Latin America 39, 252 missions to 10, 53, 67, 102, 114, 202, 234, persecution in 15 252–253, 279 schools in 67, 199 persecution in 296 leadership 68, 69, 104, 264 schools in 59, 94, 199, 253 Ledesma, Diego de 234 Jay, Claude 83, 101, 226ill. Lefevre, Pierre. See Favre, Pierre Jedin, Hubert 21–22, 25–26, 28, 29, 31, Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 214 71–73, 80, 86, 87 Lessius, Leonard 61, 102 Jerusalem 4, 62, 85, 106, 219, 222, 289, Letter from India (Francis Xavier) 248 290, 292 Leturia, Pedro de 20 Jesuit Reductions (Paraguay) 236 Leu, Thomas de 283 Les jésuites (M.A. Arnould) 16ill. Leunis, Jan 141 The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, Life of Christ (Ludolph of Saxony) 121 1540–1773 35, 212 Liguori, Alfonso 134 Jesuits (name) 53–54, 73 Lisbon 195, 241

200034 200034 306 index lives of saints 257, 275 Mercurian, Everard 7, 133, 134, 137–138, Lives of the Saints from the Old and New 139, 176, 272, 273–274 Testaments (Piotr Skarga) 64 Mesa, Juan de 283 Loach, Judi 46 Messina 93, 113, 193, 199, 201, 207, 214, Loarte, Gaspar 166, 168 236, 238, 246 Lope de Vega, Félix 241 Mexico 66, 193, 249 Louis XIV (King of France) 65 Miani, Girolamo 58 Louis XV (King of France) 65 Michaelskirche (Munich) 252, 284 Luther, Martin 16, 63, 73–74, 81, 182, 230 Michelangelo 118, 251 doctrine 103, 128, 130, 137, 170, 176–177, Miki, “Paulo” 296 275 Milan 239, 244 educational background 103 military imagery 40, 54, 77–78 Ignatius versus 5, 12, 63, 85–86, ministry 148, 173. See also “help of souls”; 103, 269 missions; retreat; schools; Spiritual Lutheranism 78, 100–101, 102 Exercises Lutherans 22, 23–24, 62, 229 accommodation strategy in 90–91 “apostolic” character of 153, 159–160, Macau 59, 199 221–222 Madrid, Cristóbal de 166 commitment to 56, 89 Maffei, Giampietro 7, 273, 274, 285 contemplation versus 133 Mallery, Karel van 283 “Fourth Vow” and 153 Manresa 111, 121, 125, 127, 170, 172 of friars 89–90 Marcellus II 75 goal of 92, 123 Marian Congregation (Roman impact of Renaissance Humanism College) 173 on 184, 190 Mariana, Juan de 62, 102 of local clergy 89 Marie de l’Incarnation 65 reform of 91 Maron, Gottfried 72 rhetorical dimension of 191 Marquette, Jacques 66 sacramental 129, 161, 168 Martín, Luis 16, 19 Trent on Jesuit 82 Martinez, Pedro 296 of the “Word” 125, 129, 130, 137, 161, 162, martyrs 293, 293ill., 295–297 225, 228 Maryland 64 miracles by Ignatius 269, 278, 281–282, mathematics 20, 34, 61, 229, 246–248 284, 286–287, 292 Maurenbrecher, Wilhelm 23–24 missions 43, 79–80, 94–95, 154, 195–196. Meditaciones de los mysterios de nuestra See also “Fourth Vow” sancta fe (Luis de la Puente) 138 Catholic 30–31 members 7, 39, 41, 148, 227, 229 changing Jesuit attitudes and education of 56, 234, 237–238 practices 234–235 founding members 113, 121, 165, 172, 181, as fourth “house” 176 205, 225, 226ill., 229, 237, 264, 286, impact of schools on 196, 220–221, 288–289, 288ill., 290ill. 236 housing of 196–197, 255 missionaries 136, 222–223 number and geographical spread 17, persecution during 15, 295–297 53–54, 55, 64, 68, 149, 206, 238, term 38–39, 90, 109, 153, 158–159, 250, 264 217–218, 219, 223 teaching by 56, 58, 61, 113, 205, 206, 238 to Brazil 296 works of charity by 43, 141, 142 to Florida 66, 296 Les mémoires de Trévoux (Jesuit to India 53, 56, 67, 202, 234, 248–249, journal) 244 252, 295 Memoriale (Pierre Favre) 180 to Japan 10, 53, 67, 102, 114, 202, 234, memorialists 69 252–253, 279, 296 Menchaca, Roque 15 to Jerusalem 4, 62, 85, 106, 219, Menestrier, Claude-François 244 222, 289, 290, 292

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Modo per insegnar la dottrina christiana sources of inspiration 136, 137, 151, 172 (Diego de Ledesma) 234 on theology 189 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) 65, travels 150–151 199, 241 writings and teachings 151, 152–155, Molina, Luis de 62, 66, 102 157–158, 161, 162–163, 253 monastic traditions 134, 136, 139, 159, 162, nature 170, 175, 221, 225 grace building on 127, 172, 188, 198 asceticism 127, 136 Neri, Philip 81, 277, 282 chanting in choir 125, 147, 157 canonization 279, 281 vow of stability 126, 196 Neumayr, Franz 242 Monita secreta (Hieronim Zahorowski) 8, New France 10, 17, 54, 66 9ill., 54, 57 Newton, Isaac 214 monogram of Society 293ill., 294ill. Nobili, Roberto de 136, 163, 211 Montserrat, monastery of 167, 168 Nóbrega, Manuel da 66 Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu 3, 12, North America 65, 66, 199, 211 16–17, 18, 266 moral reasoning 12, 80, 91, 168, 191–192 observantists 173, 176 Mundus in maligno positus (Franz Ocaña (Spain) 244 Neumayr) 242ill. Oestrich, Gerhard 27 Munich 240, 242, 244, 252, 284 De officiis (Cicero) 47, 237, 255 music Olin, John 158 liturgical 236, 243 Orationis Observationes (Jerónimo in schools 243 Nadal) 151 study of 229 orations 243 to support catechetical Oratorians 279, 280, 281, 282 instruction 234–236 oratory 184, 190, 191, 234 Muslims 53, 62, 225, 264, 289 Order of Studies (Jerómino Nadal) 246 mystical theology 189 Orlandini, Niccolò 7, 259, 285 orphanages 58–59 Nadal, Jerónimo 3, 49, 55, 84, 176, Ortiz, Pedro 271 220, 265 Osuna, Francisco de 134 on “apostolic mobility” 152, 159–160, 220 Oxford Encyclopedia of the Christian on consolation 179–180 Church 73 on “contemplative in action” 152, 158 Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation 28 doctrine 136, 152, 158 educational background 105, 135, 171, Pachtler, Michael 17 193, 246 pagan literature 48, 49, 93, 112, 119, 198, on “Fourth Vow” 126, 223 234, 239, 240, 253 in Germany 63, 85, 269 Palermo 60, 150, 193, 207, 238 on grace 136–137, 172, 220 Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da 199, 243 on “help of souls” 90 Pamplona, Battle of 266, 267–268 on “houses” of Society 153, 154–155, 157, Panofsky, Erwin 80 158, 162, 176 papacy on Humanism 186 reform of 74, 75, 80 on Ignatius 4–5, 63, 85, 103–104, 171, 189, role of 40 269, 270 ties with 65 as interpreter of Ignatius 104–105, papal bull 4, 37, 231ill.. See also Formula of 135–136, 149–150 the Institute involvement in setting up schools 5–6, papal reform 74, 75, 80 246 Paraguay 10, 236 on ministry 109, 126, 153, 161, 162 “Paraguayan Reductions” (Jesuit settle- on preaching 129, 190 ments, Spanish America) 67, 163, 236 on St. Paul 176–177, 220 Paris. See also University of Paris significance to Society 150, 151 school in 35, 243–244

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“Parisien” method (pedagogical Poquelin, Jean-Baptiste (Molière) 65, 199, method) 167, 206, 211, 238 241 Parsons, Robert 64 Portugal 55, 102, 133 Pascal, Blaise 12, 57, 192 missions to 150, 220 Pasquier, Etienne 8 schools in 193, 195, 241, 243, 245 Pastor, Ludwig von 24, 86, 87 suppression in and banishment patristic theology 187–188, 189 from 12, 67 Paul, Saint 109–110, 137, 160–161, Possevino, Antonio 64 176, 220 The Power and Secret of the Jesuits (René Paul III 37, 56, 99, 121, 165, 217, 228ill., Fülöp-Miller) 18 264, 271, 292 Pozzo, Andrea 251 Paul IV 68, 75, 81, 273 Praise of Folly (Erasmus) 187 Paul V 61, 259, 280, 295 preaching 56, 57, 90, 129, 190, 228, 234 Pelagianism 128, 169, 170, 172 priesthood 162 penance, sacrament of 161, 168, 228 prisoners 43, 57, 129, 142, 161 De la perfección del christiano en todos sus Prodi, Paolo 80, 87 estados (Luis de la Puente) 138 professed houses (type of “house” in Perpinyá, Pedro 191, 270 Constitutions) 152, 153, 154, 176, 196, 197 persecution 15, 68, 295–297 propaganda, anti-Jesuit 8, 12 Peru 62, 66–67, 249 “propagation of faith” 38–39, 217. See also Peter Lombard 229 missions Petrarca, Francesco 183 prostitutes 43, 44, 58, 92, 129 Philip II (King of Spain) 66, 69, 208 Protestantism 87, 102 Philippines 20, 54 similarities with Catholicism 72 philosophy 38, 43, 46, 60–61, 66, 171, 239, provinces 21, 55 245, 246, 301 Provincial letters (Blaise Pascal) 12, 57, 192 natural 61, 209, 213 public cult 280, 281, 284 scholastic 61, 66 public relations 117–118 pilgrimage. See missions public responsibility 47–48 Pius V 277 publishing 7, 12, 64–65, 197, 244, 249 Pius VII 15 Pütter, Johann Stephan 22 plays 240–241, 242ill. poetry 59, 201, 210, 236, 243 Quebec 65 Polanco, Juan Alfonso de 34, 43–44, 49, Quintilian 60, 214, 236 55, 99 attribution of correspondence to 99 Rahner, Hugo 21 on consolation 179–180 Ramírez, Juan 129 on Council of Trent 83 Ranke, Leopold von 16, 23, 27 educational background 104 Rapley, Elizabeth 200 on Ignatius 265–266 Ratio studiorum (Plan of Studies) 46, as interpreter of Ignatius 105 68–69, 211–212 on Jerónimo Nadal 150 Ratio studiorum (Plan of Studies, ed. keeping records of Society 3, 16, 285 Michael Pachtler) 17 on papal reform 75 reform. See also Catholic Reform on recovery of Simão Rodrigues 286 concept and term 28, 75, 78–79, 81 on schools 77, 119, 194, 197, 208, 240 of curia 74, 75 on theology 189 Ignatius as church reformer 73–74, on Thomas Aquinas 172 82, 84 writings 192, 197, 285 interpretation of and involvement Poland 30, 63, 64, 193 in 75–76 politics 27, 63–64 papal 74, 75 Pollen, John H. 24 resistance to 31 pope reformatio 76, 77, 78, 82 loyalty to 54, 110, 114, 126, 157, 202 Reformation 22, 25, 62, 87

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cause of 27–28, 29 Rubens, Peter Paul 69, 213, 233, 260–261 term 73 work for Society 213, 258ill., 261, 262ill., De rege et regis institutione (Juan de 288ill., 290ill., 291ill., 293ill., 294ill. Mariana) 62 Rule of Saint Benedict 40 Regensburg 62 Rule of Saint Francis 40 Regimini militantis ecclesiae (papal bull, 27 “Rules” in Spiritual Excercises 95–96, 100, September 1540) 37, 40, 42, 51, 53, 217, 111, 122–123, 187–188 225, 231ill. See also Formula of the Russia 64 Institute Ruysbroeck, Jan van 133 Regulae peregrinantium 159 Reinhard, Wolfgang 26, 72, 73, 87 Sacchini, Francesco 7, 259 Relations 17, 66 sacrament of penance 161, 168, 228 Remembering Iñigo (Luis Gonçalves da Salamanca 286 Câmara) 117 Salès, Jacques 297 Renaissance Humanism 83, 184 Salméron, Alfonso 83, 84, 186, 226ill. definition 183, 185 San Pablo College 67 historiography of 182 Sanctis, Francesco de 23 impact on Christian ministry 184 sanctity 117, 119, 278 impact on schools 181, 184–185, 192, 194 Santa Croce Church (Florence) 48 relationship with Jesuits 173, 174, 181, Santa Maria della Strada church 185–186, 192, 197, 198 (Rome) 250–251 textual criticism as science 185, 186 São Vicente 235 Renaissance (term) 79 Saultemouche, Guillaume 297 Renaudet, Augustin 24 Scaduto, Mario 158–159 retreat 42, 57, 95–96, 140, 166 Schilling, Heinz 26 rhetoric 129, 175, 176, 184, 190, 191, 192, 234 scholastic education 210–211, 237 Ribadeneyra, Pedro de 6–7, 85, 208, 266, scholastic theology 186, 187–188 270–274, 277, 285 Scholia in Constitutiones Societatis Jesu background 271 (Jerónimo Nadal) 151 educational background 272 schools 5–6, 45, 56. See also universities on foundation of Society 289 arts in 34–35, 59, 93–94, 212–213 on miracles/healings 287 in Brazil 66, 236 relation with Ignatius 271–272 confraternities attached to 44, 142 role in Society 272 cultural and civic mission 34–35, 44, Ricci, Matteo 136, 163, 198, 211, 246 46–47, 48–49, 58–59, 69, 93–94, 199, Rice, Louise 35, 213, 245 209, 212–213, 239, 244 Rinaldi, Filippo 259, 285 curriculae/programs 46, 49, 58–59, rites 67, 91 60–61, 93, 119, 207, 210, 211–212, 213, Rodrigues, Simão 226ill., 268, 286 236, 239, 243 Rodríguez, Alonso 131–133, 138 in France 60, 65, 195, 241 Roman College 35, 63, 199, 207, 243, 292 funding 118, 207, 239 ceremonies 213, 245 in Germany 63, 195, 241 curriculum 246, 247 girls’ 65, 200 plays at 241 goals 44, 207–209, 239–240 prestige of 55, 59, 239 Humanist model in Jesuits 59, 186, 187, printing in 253 197, 210–211, 236, 237 sodalities/confraternities 141, 173 humanistic 201–202 teachers/staff 139, 191 impact on missions 196, 220–221, 236 Roman Inquisition 78 impact of Renaissance Humanism 181, Romano, Antonella 246 184–185, 192, 194 Rome in India 236, 253 confraternities in 141–142 in Italy 55, 58, 60, 78, 93, 113, 193, 199, schools in. See Roman College 201, 207, 213, 214, 236, 238, 240, 243, Rossignoli, Bernardino 139, 141 246–247

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in Japan 59, 94, 199, 253 founding members 113, 121, 165, 172, 181, learning materials 197–198, 199, 253 205, 225, 226ill., 229, 237, 264, 286, in Macau 59, 199 288–289, 288ill., 290ill. in Mexico 193 (international) expansion 54–55, 165, music in 93, 94, 199, 235, 243, 244–245 250, 268 network and communication 34, mission and purpose 38–41, 50–52, 54, 207, 213 76, 148 in North America 65, 199 monogram 293ill., 294ill. number of 34, 68, 199, 207 self-definition 8, 10, 58, 63, 77, 89, 206, “Parisian method” 206, 212, 238 236, 239 in Poland 193 similarities/differences with other in Portugal 193, 195, 241, 243, 245 orders 32–35, 43, 47, 48, 56, 58, 108, as primary ministry 194, 195–196 147–148, 165, 169, 170, 200, 221–222, Ratio Studiorum (plan of studies) 17, 46, 228, 266–267 68–69, 211–212 sources of inspiration 167, 171–172, 173, religious mission 34, 46, 60, 64, 69, 174, 176. See also Thomas Aquinas 76–77, 214, 239–240 sodalities 141–143. See also confraternities school buildings 199, 213 “Soldier of God” (term) 40 secondary 201–202 Somaschi 148 secular aspects 48–49, 58, 93, 119, 193, Sommervogel, Carlos 17 197–198, 200, 239, 245, 253 Sourie, Jacques 296 in Spain 62, 66, 77, 193, 240, 241, Southwell, Robert 64 244, 252 Spain 17, 55, 62, 66, 69, 96, 133, 234 staffing and management 58, 60, 93, controversies in 139 105, 199, 200, 205–206, 213, 221, historiography 19 237–238 missions to 150, 151, 267 students/graduates 60, 65, 193, 194–195, schools in 62, 66, 77, 193, 240, 241, 244, 200, 209, 238–239 252 success factors 59–60 suppression and exile 12, 15 theater in 59, 240–241, 243 Spanish America 67 tuition 59, 209, 210 The Spirit of the Counter Reformation 172 Seckendorff, Veit Ludwig von 12 spiritual conversation 174 secular Humanism 183 spiritual counseling 96–97 Seghers, Daniel 251 spiritual directors 97, 141 Segura, Juan Bautista de 296 Spiritual Exercises (Ignatius of Semi-Pelagianism 128, 169, 170, 172 Loyola) 32–33, 40, 55, 57, 73, 177–179, Seminario Romano 243 198. See also ministry sexuality 169 accommodation/adaptation strategy Siam 247–248 in 34, 41, 96, 124 Simoncelli, Paolo 26 “Contemplation for Obtaining Divine singing 59, 236, 243 Love” 127, 131, 148, 152 Siracusa 240 devotia moderna versus 123, 127 Sixtus V 69, 276, 278 Directorium 140, 141 Skarga, Piotr 64 four “weeks” program in 104, 108, 122, Smith, Jeffrey Chipps 33, 252 127, 140, 168, 173 social assistance, works of 43–44, 119, 205 grace in 128 social disciplining 27, 29, 31 as guide for new order entrants 53, Society of Jesus. See also Constitutions; 122, 130 Formula of the Institute; Ignatius of “help of souls” in 4, 92 Loyola; members; ministry; Spiritual Imitation of Christ versus 170 Exercises inquisitions against 62 approval 4, 37, 53, 56, 121, 202, 217, “On Divine Love” 112 228ill., 292 organization and style 123–124 foundation 53, 73, 89, 202, 225, 264, 289 “Principle and Foundation” 47

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purpose of 33, 42, 104, 123, 130, 166, 189 travel. See missions reconciliation with the “world” in 112, Tridentine Reform 28 127 Tristano, Giovanni 251 retreat/interiority in 95–96, 103, 104, Tristano, Lorenzo 251 123, 140, 166 Tuccio, Stefano 241 “Rules for the discernment of spirits” 122–123 universities 199, 207, 211, 214–215 “Rules with regard to eating” 111 curricula/programs 209, 245 “Rules for Thinking with the philosophy of education 201, 202 church” 95–96, 100, 123, 171, 187–188 University of Alcalá 100, 167 “service” in 124 University of Paris. See also “Parisien” sources of inspiration 123, 127, 203–204 method spiritual journey of Ignatius 104, 121, 123 condemnation of Society 65, 171 “Three Methods of Prayer” 133, 140 Ignatius and founding members at 4, 65, “three ways” to purification, enlighten- 100, 121, 165, 167, 171–172, 197, 204, 209 ment, union 170 impact on Society 171–172, 209 on vernacular translations 186–187 Ursulines 94, 200 “Spiritual Franciscans” 159–160, 218 spontaneous cult 280 Valignano, Alessandro 102 Standaert, Nicolas 31, 32 Van Engen, John 30, 38, 76 studia humanitatis 47, 236, 239 Vega, Juan de 246 Suárez, Francisco 62, 66 Vélez, José Maria 15 Summa Theologiae (Thomas Venice 92 Aquinas) 188–189 vernacular language 186–187, 240, 274, 282 Summers, William J. 20 Verona, Guarino da 201 suppression 12, 15, 54, 68, 199, 248 Victoria, Tomás Luis de 243 Suscipe prayer 172 Vida del Padre Balthasar Álvarez (Luis de la Suso, Henry 133 Puente) 138 Sweden 64 Vida Ignatii Loiolae, Societatis Iesu Fundatoris (Pedro de Ribadeneyra) 273, Tacchi Venturi, Pietro 19 277–278 Tarzana, Alonso 66 editions and translations 274 Tauler, John 133 on foundation of Society 289 Teresa of Ávila 81, 97, 134, 175 on martyrs 296, 297 textual criticism 185, 186 on recovery of Simão Rodrigues 286, 287 theater 59, 212, 238, 239, 240–241, 243, 244 Vienna 63, 236, 241 Theatines 148, 165 Vignola, Giacomo Barozzi da 251 theologians, Jesuit 61–62, 63 Villamena, Francesco 284, 285 theology 60–61, 229, 239 Virgil 183, 211 Thomas Aquinas 81, 183, 184, 229 visions 289, 292 on Christian versus pagan scientific Vita beati patris Ignatii Loiolae 257–259, truth 201 258ill., 285 on grace perfecting nature 112, 127, 234 engravings in 257, 259, 285–286 sources of inspiration 211 on miracles 269, 286 as theological authority for Society 61, title page 293, 293ill., 294ill., 295 136, 178–179, 188–189, 198, 204, 233–234 De vita spirituali ejusque perfectione Thomassin, Philippe 257 (Jacobo Álvarez de Paz) 138 Thwaites, Reuben Gold 17, 18 Vitae patrum 132 Titus Oates Plot 64 Vitoria, Francisco de 66, 102 Toledo, Francisco de 62, 102 vocation 136–137, 152 Torres, Balthasar 246 Voltaire 65, 199 Torres Rubio, Diego de 66 vow of mobility. See “Fourth Vow” Torsellino, Orazio 280 vow of stability 113, 126, 157, 196, 221, Toulman, Stephen 192 222, 227

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Walpole, Michael 274 works of social assistance 43–44, 119, 205 “ways of proceeding” 103, 108, 119, 166, 178. world as “house” 110, 136, 153, 158, 162, 173, See also accommodation strategy 176, 178 term 179 Worms 62 Weber, Max 27 Wujek, Jakób 64 Weert, Jacques de 257 Weisbach, Werner 24 Xavier, Francis 10, 53, 202, 234 Westervelt, Benjamin 28 canonization 279–280, 295 Whitehead, Alfred North 78–79 correspondence by 279, 292 Wierix, Hieronymus 260, 283 death 279, 293, 295 Wierix brothers 253 images of 226ill., 261, 263ill, 293ill., 295 Wilhelm V (Duke of Bavaria) 244, 284 missions 56, 248–249, 252–253, 264, 279 Wittenberg 62, 85 Vita 280 women’s asylums 58 “Word”, ministry of the 125, 129, 130, 137, Zahorowski, Hieronim 8 161, 162, 228 Zanlonghi, Giovanna 46, 244 works of charity 42–44 Zeeden, Ernst Walter 26, 72 works of mercy 57, 129, 142 Zipoli, Domenico 244

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