V.-PHILOSOPHY AMONG THE JESUITS. By FRANCIS WINTEETON. IN the plan of the Order founded by Don Inigo de Loyola, philosophical instruction occupies only a secondary place; •still it underwent developments and took directions, in the Downloaded from •course of the Society's career, that are worth a close study. I will at present try only to sketch out rapidly the rnain stages of the history, from the constitution of the Order -about 1540 till its dissolution in 1773. "What is the fundamental idea that underlies the whole of Jesuit philosophy ? To answer this question, we must first http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/ -of all ask the previous one : What is a Jesuit ? A Jesuit may be defined as ' a Roman Catholic profoundly and practically convinced that all things in this world (science and philosophy of course included) are but means for him to work out the salvation of his soul '.* A Roman Catholic starts from the assumption, regarded by him as indubitably sure, that his Church is in possession of absolute truth, and is accordingly the very best means of salvation in the world. This once admitted, the greater the number of souls saved by any man, the surer that man is of his own salvation; at Russian Archive on November 16, 2013 and the more zealously he upholds the Catholic Church, the greater number of souls he is sure to save. It follows logically that every effort of the Jesuit ought to tend towards upholding his Church ; that every possession, every talent, every affection, even life itself, ought to be consecrated to that end alone. Every force, every influence, every tendency in the world antagonistic to the Church, must be unswerv- ingly resisted : the Church cannot do wrong. Any specula- tive doctrine, any philosophical system, any scientific hypothesis hostile to the Church, must be relentlessly opposed : the Church cannot be wrong. St. Ignatius had nothing whatever of the speculative philosopher in his nature; he was, on the contrary, intensely and overwhelmingly practical. Those who paint him with the romantic colours of chivalry, and make of the first Jesuit a sort of Christian Don Quixote, only caricature one side of his many-sided character. His dreams, visions and ecstasies never interfered with his knowing what he wanted and 1 See the Exerdtia Spiritualia ; Principium et Fundamentwm. 17* PHILOSOPHY AMONG THE JESUITS. 255 how he was to attain his purpose in the outside world. If anyone takes the trouble to read his Exerdtia Spiritualia through, he will not be repaid by five lines of pure specula- tion, except perhaps in the Contemplatio ad Amorem, in the last ' Week ' ; and even that contemplation, as may easily be seen, works towards an end—towards the one end of the whole book. This allusion to the ExereUia is by no means irrelevant; we are at the very springhead of Jesuit philo- sophy. The book in question contains the whole idea of St. Ignatius, already worked out and matured in the solitary Downloaded from grotto of Manreza, at the very beginning of his conversion ; and the whole subsequent life of this man, together with the whole history of his Order, is but the systematic evolution of the principles contained in this book. It is studied in silence and solitude, during one week every year, by each member of the Order. It is studied in the same absolute http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/ seclusion during the three probations: a week during the first, a month during the second, and a month again during the third. From its contents the subject of the daily hour of meditation of every Jesuit is selected. It is the theme of every retreat preached by a member of the Order; and it would be hard to find a single book, a single sermon, com- posed by a Jesuit, in which some idea taken from the Exer- eitia does not occur. Now in this book, after the first fundamental idea of salvation, from corollaries to corollaries, the author comes at last to the problem: By what means can at Russian Archive on November 16, 2013 the interests of the Church be best promoted intellectually ? And the answer is given in the Rtgvlce ad rede sentiendum cum Ecclesia. Not that, in raising this question, St. Ignatius means altogether to throw aside the free exercise of his reason. True, reason is for him a " means unto salvation," and nothing more ; but, if not exercised freely, it is no longer . reason. The Church, being true, needs no reasonings for itself, but only for its children; and the fewer they need, the more meritorious their faith is. " Blessed is he that hath not seen, and yet hath believed." Still, one must be practical, and it is a fact that the better and stronger the arguments given in favour of the Church, the more easy a task it is to believe Therefore it only remains to look out the best arguments and the best system of philosophy whereby to defend the Church. In the RtguUe, Loyola begins thus : " I must be ready to believe that what I see to be black is white, should the Church declare it to be so ". This seems a rather astounding position for a man in his right senses to take up ; and how any philosophy can be possible in such a state of mind is at 256 P. WINTEBTOH : first sight hard to conceive. It would appear to destroy all the certitude of science, since we may suppose the Church stepping in at every moment, and denying the veracity of scientific experiments: ' This is not an explosion; that is not a gas ; your analyses are not well made ; your syntheses have led you into error'. Reason itself is overthrown by faith, since faith is in the right when it contradicts reason. And lastly, even religion, left without the basis of rational thought, is utterly annihilated, and nothing is left but an abject superstition, whose formula is : I believe—because I Downloaded from believe. If we look a little closer, however, we shall see that things are not quite what they seem. St. Ignatius does not take a contradiction of faith with reason as his example, but a contradiction of the senses versus faith. He does not say, for instance, that supposing 2 + 2 = 5 were to be decided by a Council, he would have http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/ to believe it. Nor is this contradiction of the senses an absolute one. It would be so, if he said : You must believe that what is black is white, if the Church tells you it is ; or: You must believe that what you see to be black you see to be white, if the Church decrees it. He does not affirm either of these two contradictions, but only says that what we see to be black may be white ; that is, may not be in itself what it is subjectively as perceived. It may be objected that this is to go quite far enough. So it is; and indeed I do at Russian Archive on November 16, 2013 not see how anyone can go farther without falling into a palpable absurdity. Let it also be remembered that, in the time of St. Ignatius, it must have seemed much more contrary to reason than it really is. We all know now that such a defect as colour-blindness not only may but really does exist, and that there are many instances of a man taking, e.g., red for gray, which means that what he sees to be gray is red. But in the time of St. Ignatius this phenomenon was completely unknown, and the fact seems to render the boldness of his ' rule ' still less excusable. He ought not, however, to be condemned without our noticing one plea in favour of His doctrine—viz., that it is thoroughly consistent and logical. No Catholic can, without contradicting his own principles, say one word against Loyola's manner of proceeding: he but formulates clearly and explicitly what every believer in the Romish Church implicitly submits to. His rule is to believe against the evidence of the senses and, whilst admitting their subjective, to deny their objective infallibility, when their testimony clashes with faith. All Catholics believe in one omni- present God, present, not partially but in totality, in every PHILOSOPHY AMONG THfc JESUITS. 257 part of space ; yet their senses cry aloud that nothing can be undividedly present in several separate places. They believe that one unchangeable Person, the Word of God, was born, suffered and died; yet their senses affirm that all such processes imply variation and change. They believe that the appearances of bread and of wine conceal the body and the blood of Jesus Christ; and yet their senses warn them that what appears to be bread w bread, that what seems wine is wine in very deed. At every step there is a conflict between the ideas and judgments which the senses tend to produce, and Downloaded from the ideas and judgments that are evolved under the influence of faith. I here purposely abstain from passing judgment upon the principles from which St. Ignatius started; I merely notice that he was consistent with himself and strictly logical all along. http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/ The standpoint from which he views everything having thus been indicated, it will hardly appear surprising that he arrived at the conclusion that Scholastic Philosophy was to be made much of.1 It is a well-known fact that no system of philosophy is so little at variance with the dogmas of the Church of Eome as the doctrine of Aristotle.