CHAPTER II THE FIRST JESUITS

FROM this account of the influences which shaped the character of the Society of Jesus before and during its birth we may derive our first clue to the singular history of the Jesuits. They might not implausibly make a proud boast of the fact that they have always borne the intense hostility of heretics and unbelievers, but the very reason they assign for this their effective service to the Church prevents them from explaining why they have, from their foundation, incurred an almost equal enmity on the part of a very large proportion of the monks, priests, and laymen of their own Church. “Jealousy,” they whisper; but since no other body in the Church, however learned or active, has experienced this peculiar critical concentration of its neighbours, we are bound to seek a deeper explanation. There are distinctive features of the Jesuit Society which irritate alike the pious and the impious, the Catholic and the non-Catholic.

We begin to perceive these features at the very birth of the Society. Its founder has the temper of a monk, but the times will not permit the establishment of a monastic order of the old type; a new regiment of soldiers of the Church must engage in active foreign service, not degenerate into fatness in domestic barracks. The success of Ignatius was due to the fact that he had other qualities than those of the monk, and he met the new conditions with remarkable shrewdness. It seems to me a mistake to conceive him as a soldier above all things. He was preeminently a diplomatist. He infused into the Society the energy and fearlessness of the soldier, but he also equipped it with the weapons of the diplomatist, or, one might say, of the secret-service man. He was a most sincerely and unselfishly religious man, but he used, and taught others to use, devices which the profoundly religious man commonly disdains. The Jesuits were Jesuits from the start. It is a truism, a fulfilment of the known command of Ignatius, that they sought the favour of the rich and powerful; it is a fact lying on the very surface of their history, as written by themselves, that they accommodated their ideals to circumstances as no other religious order had ever done in the first decades of its life; it is the boast of their admirers that they used “holy wiles” in the attainment of their ends. This stamp was impressed on them by inheritance from their sire and the pressure of their surroundings. These things were consecrated by the undoubted sincerity of the early Jesuit ideal; they wanted power only for the service of Christ and the salvation of men. What happened later was that the inner fire, the glow of which sanctified these worldly maneuvers in the mind of the first Jesuits, grew dim and languid, and the traditional policy was developed until even crime and vice and hypocrisy were held to be lawful if they contributed to the power of the Jesuits.

An examination of the rules and the activity of the early Jesuits will make this clear. The Constitutions of the Society were not completed by Ignatius until several years after the establishment, and they were afterwards modified and augmented by Lainez, a less religious man than Ignatius, but it will be useful to consider at once their distinctive and most important features. In the main they follow the usual lines of monastic regulations, and many points which are ascribed to the soldier Ignatius and usually held to be distinctive of his Society are ancient doctrines of the monastic world; such are, the duties of blind obedience, of detachment from family and country, and of surrendering one’s personality. The famous maxim, that a Jesuit must have no more will than a corpse, is familiar in every monastic body, and is even found in the rules of Mohammedan brotherhoods. Some writers have conjectured that Ignatius borrowed much from the Moorish fraternities, but it is difficult to see how he could have any knowledge of them, and the parallels are not important In any case, the story of the Society will very quickly show us that this grim theory of blind obedience and self-suppression was not carried out in practice; even the earliest Jesuits were by no means will-less corpses and men who sacrificed their affections and individuality.

Omitting points of small technical interest, I should say that the most significant features of the Jesuit Constitutions are: the establishment of a large body of priests (Spiritual Coadjutors) between the novices and the professed members, the extraordinary provisions by which a superior gets an intimate knowledge of his subjects, the stress on the duty of teaching, the distinction between a “house” and a “college,” the deliberate recommendation to prefer youths of wealthy or distinguished families (caeteris paribus] to poor youths, the despotic power and lifelong appointment of the General, the fallacious and imposing vow of direct obedience to the Pope, and the absence of “choir.” These primitive and fundamental features of the Society, taken in conjunction with the special privileges which the Society gradually wheedled from the Popes, go far toward explaining its great material success and its moral deterioration. Some of these points need no explanation, or have already been explained, and a few words will suffice to show the effect of the others.

First as to the Spiritual Coadjutors. One who aspires to enter the Society passes two years of trial as a “novice” then takes “simple” (or dissolvable) vows and becomes a “scholastic” (student). In the other monastic bodies, which now have simple vows, the aspirant takes his “solemn” (or indissoluble) vows three years afterwards, before he becomes a priest. The peculiarity of the Jesuits is that they defer the taking of the “solemn” vows for a considerable number of years, and they thus have a large body of priests who are not rigidly bound to the Society and cannot hold important office in it. This gives the General, who has a despotic power of dismissing these Spiritual Coadjutors, a very lengthy period for learning the intimate character of men before they are admitted to the secrets of the Society.

Then there is the remarkable scheme of spying, tale-bearing, and registering by which this knowledge of men is secured. The aspirant must make a general confession of his life to the superior, or some priest appointed by him, when he enters the Society. He is from that day closely observed and subjected to extra-ordinary tests, and a strict obligation is laid on each to tell the faults and most private remarks of his neighbour. The local superiors then send periodical full reports on each man to the headquarters at Rome, where there must be a bureau not unlike the criminal intelligence department of a great police-centre: except that the good and the mediocre are as fully registered as the suspects.

The important place assigned to teaching in the programme of the Society also leads to serious modifications of the monastic ideal. Every order has some device or other by which it escapes the practical inconveniences of its vow of poverty, but the Jesuits have gone beyond all others. They have drawn a casuistic distinction between a “college” and a “house of the professed” and have declared that the ownership of the former is not inconsistent with their vow of poverty. The result is that they may heap up indefinite wealth in the shape of colleges and their revenues, yet boast of their vow of poverty. The various devices of the monastic bodies to, at the same time, retain and disclaim the ownership of their property are many and curious. This is the one instance of a monastic body boldly saying that its vow is consistent with the ownership of great wealth. Hence the mercantile spirit which will at once spread in the Society.

The deliberate counsel to prefer rich or noble youths to poor, when their other qualifications are equal, is a further obvious source of material strength and moral weakness; we shall soon find them making wealth, or social standing, or talent, the first qualification. The exemption from “choir” (or chanting the psalms in choir for several hours a day) falls in the same category. When we add to these elements of their Constitutions the extraordinary privileges they secured from the Popes in the course of a decade or two, we have the preliminary clues to the story of the rise and fall of the Society. They were allowed to grant degrees in their colleges (and so ruin and displace universities); they were declared exempt from the jurisdiction of the local authorities, spiritual or secular; they might encroach on the sphere of any existing monastery; and they received many other powers which enabled them to pose as unique representatives of the Papacy.

The tendency which we thus detect in the legislation of the Society is equally visible in much of the personal conduct of its founder, and soon shows its dangers in the lives of his less fervent followers. We have seen how the sanction of the Society was secured, and we must note that Ignatius was not more ingenuous in obtaining control of it. The conventional account of his appointment to the office of General is edifying. About Easter 1541 he summoned to Rome, for the purpose of electing a General, the nine fathers who had taken the solemn vows. Four were unable to come, but they sent, or had left at Rome, written votes, and Ignatius was unanimously elected. He protested, however, that he was unworthy to hold the office, and compelled them to hold a second ballot. At this ballot he received two-thirds of the votes, three being cast for Favre. He then consulted his confessor, and was told to accept the office; and for several days afterwards he washed the dishes and discharged the humblest offices.

Orlandini naively confesses, however, that at the election Ignatius gave a blank vote, and we can hardly suppose that he was so far lost in contemplation as to be unaware that a blank vote was a vote for himself. Further, the result of the second ballot plainly suggests that, if Ignatius had again refused to accept the office, Favre would have been appointed. It is difficult to doubt that he intended from the first to hold the office of General, and indeed it would have been ludicrous for them to appoint any other. But Ignatius knew his young followers, and he seems to have acted in this way in order that they might place the authority in his hands in the most emphatic manner. They are described in the chronicles as little less than angelic, but we shall presently find that some of them were very human, especially in the matter of obedience, and that at the
death of Ignatius they quarrel like petty princes for the succession. Ignatius was piously diplomatic. He would use his power unreservedly in the cause of Christ and the Pope, but it is important to note how from the start the founder of the Society employs casuistry or diplomacy in getting power.

During the next fifteen years Ignatius remained at Rome, making only three short and relatively unimportant missions Into Italy. They had moved from the house in the Piazza Margana to the foot of the Capitoline Hill, where the famous church of the Gesu now is. The old church of Sta Maria della Strada had been given to them, and Codacio (who had joined the Society and given his wealth to it) had built a house beside it for them. When Sta Maria proved too small, they proposed to build a larger church, and nearly secured the services of Michael Angelo; but the actual Gesu was begun in 1568 by Cardinal Alexander Farnese.

From their house beside the old church the keen eyes of the General followed the travels of his subjects to the ends of the earth and kept watch on Rome. He was now approaching his fiftieth year: a bald, worn man, with piercing black eyes in his shallow face, concealing an immense energy and power of intrigue under his humble appearance. Under his eye the novices were trained, and it was characteristic that he used to protest, when others urged him to expel an unruly brother, that to put it in modern phrase he liked a little “devil” in his novices. One of the first was young Ribadeneira, a cardinal’s page, a noble by birth. He had come to their house one day when he was playing truant, and had been caught by the romance of the life. He was only fourteen years old, yet Ignatius received him and bore his fits of temper and rebellion until he became a useful and obedient member. Between the fiery Spanish boy and the aged and simple Codacio, the former papal official, there was every shade of character to be studied and humoured. The younger novices they went down to the age of eleven were encouraged to laugh and play, and come to the General’s room to have fruit peeled for them; perhaps on the very day on which he was stirring the Pope to set up an Inquisition on the Spanish model at Rome or in Portugal. He loved the flowers of their garden, and tender ladies had no more sympathetic confidant. Great austerities, of the Manresa type, he rigorously forbade. The Jesuit was to be neat, clean, cheerful, strong, industrious, guarded in speech and obedient. When it was necessary to strike, he struck at once. One night, when the prefect of the house came to make his report, it appeared that one of the novices (a young nobleman) had ridiculed the excessive zeal of another. Brother Zapata was at once summoned from bed and put out of doors.

His personal life was simple, to the eye. A Bible, a breviary, and an Imitation of Christ were the only books in his poor chamber, which is still shown to the visitor; and of these the breviary was not used, as he wept so much in reading the office that he endangered his sight, and the Pope excused him from reading it. He spent the first four hours of his early day in meditation and the saying of Mass, then worked until noon, when all dined together, in silence, and afterwards spent an hour in conversation under his observant eye. Then he returned to his desk, or took his stick and his sombrero, and limped to the hospital, or to the houses of the very poor or the rich, or to the chambers of cardinals or papal officials. Many a jeer and curse followed him as he walked, in neat black cloak, with downcast eyes and grave smile, courteous to every beggar or noble who addressed him. Rome was rich with monuments of his philanthropy schools, orphanages, rescue-homes, etc.; but the fierce hostility never died, and at times it rose to the pitch of a gale. After his round of visits he limped back, grave and humble, to the house for the silent evening meal. When the novices were abed, the prefect came to give him a minute account of the day’s life in the house, and, when the prefect was abed, the large eyes still flashed in the worn, olive-tinted face. He slept only four hours a night.

But all these pages of the written biography of Ignatius are of less interest than the unwritten. To understand his real life during those fifteen years of twenty-hour workdays you have to study the adventures of his colleagues far away: to mark how the hostility of bishops and doctors and princes is disarmed by a papal privilege or a papal recommendation, how the Protestant plague cannot break out anywhere but a Jesuit appears, how the most nicely fitted man is sent for each special mission, how the man disappears when there is, rightly or wrongly, a cry of scandal, how the long white arms of Ignatius Loyola seem to stretch over the planet from Sta Maria della Strada, near the Pope’s palace. This vast and obscure activity of the General will be best gathered from a short survey of the fortunes of the Jesuits during his reign.

The first mission of interest to us, though not quite the first in point of time, was the sending of two Jesuits to the British Isles. It seemed that England was lost, and all that could be done was to resist Henry’s attempt to stamp out the old faith in Ireland and persuade James v. to follow his profitable example in Scotland. The mission was perilous, for, on the word of these Jesuits of the time, nearly every chief in Ireland had gone over to Protestantism, and in Scotland the nobles and officials were looking with moist lips at the fat revenues of the monasteries. The Archbishop of Armagh, who had fled to Rome, asked the Pope to send two Jesuits to his country, and Codure ana Salmeron were appointed. Codure died, however, during the negotiations, and Paschase Brouet was named in his place. As usual, Ignatius chose his men with shrewdness. Brouet, the “angel of the Society,” was the counterpart of Salmeron’s vigour and learning. They were granted the privileges of Nuncii by the Pope, though Ignatius directed them to mention these privileges only when the success of the mission required. In fact, he gave them a written paper of instructions as to their personal behaviour when, on 10th September 1541, they left for Paris and Edinburgh. They were to travel as poor Jesuits but the wealthy young noble Zapata was permitted to accompany and care for them.

What the precise aim of this mission was we do not know, but it was from every point of view a complete failure. It is, of course, represented as a success, and its purpose is said to have been merely to hearten the suffering Irish people in their resistance and convey to them indulgences and absolutions. But from the circumstances of the time and the duration of the mission we may be sure that the two Jesuits learned very little English, and less or no Gaelic, so that the idea seems absurd. In Scotland, certainly, their mission was political. They saw James at Stirling Castle, and easily got from him an assurance that he would resist the allurements of Henry VIII. What they trusted to do in Ireland we are not informed, and it seems most reasonable to suppose that they were to see the chiefs and stiffen them in their opposition to England. This they wholly failed to do, for the leading men would have nothing to do with them. The customary Catholic version of the enterprise is that they happily accomplished their mission, traversed “the whole of Ireland ” (as even Francis Thompson says), consoling and absolving, and went home to report success. One fears that this account may be typical of these early Jesuit reports of missions. To learn Gaelic and traverse the whole of Ireland, or any large part of it, in thirty-four days (Orlandini), in the sixteenth century, and in circumstances which compelled them to travel with the greatest prudence, would assuredly be a miracle, especially when we are told that for some time even the common folk shrank from them, and it is hinted that the scattered Irish priests were unfriendly.

Apparently they travelled a little in disguise, or hid in the farms here and there, for a few weeks, granting indulgences and dispensations, probably through some Gaelic interpreter, until the English officials heard of their presence and put a price on their heads. The Jesuit narrative credits them with the bold idea of going to London and bearding the wicked Henry in his palace. Their behaviour was singularly prudent for men with such exalted ideas. Leaving Ireland, possibly at the entreaty of the Irish, as soon as the search for them grew hot, they returned to Scotland, and finding that country also aflame, they went on at once to Paris. There they received orders to return to Scotland and discharge a secret mission similar to that they had had in Ireland. They “hesitated and informed the Pope of the state of things in Scotland,” says the Jesuit historian; in fact, they remained in Paris until the Pope allowed them to return to Rome. If any be disposed to criticise their conduct, he may be reminded that Brouet and Salmeron had spent several weeks in Ireland at the risk of their lives. However, it is plain that we have to look closely into these early Jesuit accounts of missions which covered the infant Society with glory. A prudent examination of them discovers features which have been carefully eliminated from later Jesuit, or pro-Jesuit, works on the subject

As Henry VIII. died in 1547, and Edward VI. in 1553, it may seem singular that Ignatius did not, when the Catholic Mary acceded to the throne, at once dispatch a band of his priests to help in restoring the old faith. Neither Orlandini nor his discreet follower, Cretineau-Joly, throws any light on the mystery, but a few important hints may be gathered from the more candid early Jesuit historian Polanco, a close associate of Ignatius, and the full solution is indicated in Burnet’s History of the Reformation (ii. 526, in the Oxford edition). This rare discovery of an independent document suggests that the early story might read somewhat differently in many particulars if we were not forced to rely almost entirely on Jesuit authorities.

From the brief statements scattered over the various volumes of Polanco’s Historia Societatis it appears that from 1553 until his death Ignatius made the most strenuous efforts to secure admission into England. Cardinal Pole, it seems, asked the prayers of Ignatius for his success when he was summoned to England, and, when Ignatius died and Lainez again approached Pole, the cardinal pointedly replied that the only way in which the Jesuits could aid him was by their prayers. In the meantime (1554) Ignatius pressed Father Araoz, who was in great favour at the Spanish court, to urge Philip, and induce ladies of the court to urge him, to take Jesuits to England. In 1556 he sent Father Ribadeneira, a courtly priest, to join Philip in Belgium and press the request, but the reply was always that Pole was opposed to admitting the Jesuits, Polanco makes it quite clear that Pole resisted all the efforts of Ignatius from 1554 to 1556.

Burnet supplies the solution of the mystery. A friend of his discovered a manuscript at Venice, from which it appears that Ignatius had overreached himself and aroused the hostility of the cardinal. He had written to Pole that, as Queen Mary was restoring such monastic property as had fallen to the throne, it would be advisable to entrust this to the Jesuits, since the monks were in such bad odor in England; and he added that the Jesuits would soon find a way to make other possessors of monastic property disgorge. Pole refused their co-operation and left the Jesuits angry and disappointed. The historian cannot regard an anonymous manuscript as in itself deserving of credence, but the statement very plausibly illumines the situation. I may add that in 1558 Father Ribadeneira was actually smuggled into England in the suite of Count Gomez de Figueroa, who had gone to console the ailing Queen.¹ The count was a warm patron of the Jesuits, but Queen Mary died soon after his arrival, and the last hope of the Jesuits was extinguished.

We cannot examine with equal freedom all the chronicles of early Jesuit activity, and must be content to cull from the pages of the Historia Societatis Jesu, the first section of which is written by Father Orlandini, such facts as may enable us to form a balanced judgment of the Society under Ignatius. Italy was, naturally, the first and chief theatre of their labours, and in the course of a few years they spread from the turbulent cities of Sicily to the foot of the Alps. I have already described the work of Ignatius at Rome, and need add only that, as Orlandini tells us, he was one of the most urge at in pressing the reluctant Pope to “reform” the Roman Inquisition, or to equip it with the dread powers of the Spanish tribunal. At the very time when he was devising pleas for toleration in Protestant and pagan lands, he was urging that in Italy and Portugal there should be set up the most inhuman instrument of intolerance that civilisation has ever known. The psychology of his attitude is simple; he was convinced that he was asking tolerance for truth and intolerance for untruth. The liberal-minded Romans were not persuaded of the justice of his distinction, and the opposition to the Society increased. The hostility, which at times went the length of breaking Jesuit windows, is ascribed by his biographers chiefly to his zeal for the conversion of prostitutes. He founded a large home for these women, and would often follow them to their haunts in the piazze and lead them himself to St. Martha’s House. On the whole, his great philanthropic services and personal austerity secured respect for his Society at Rome, and it prospered there until his later years.

¹See Ribadeneira’s Historia Ecdesiastica del Stisma del Reyno de Inglaterra (1588), L, ii. ch. xxii.

In the south of Italy the Society met little opposition in the early years. Bobadilla had done some good work in troubled Calabria before the Society was founded, and within the next ten years colleges were opened at Messina (1548), Palermo (1549), and Naples (1551). The poet Tasso was one of the first students of the Naples college. It was in the north that the more arduous work had to be done. The seeds of the Reformation were wafted over the Alps and found a fertile soil in the cities of the Renaissance. Hardly anywhere else were monks and clergy so corrupt and ignorant, and nowhere was there so much familiarity with the immorality of the Vatican system. Rome itself lived on this corruption and regarded it with indulgence, but in the university towns of the north educated men, and even women, who almost remembered the lives of Sixtus iv., Innocent viii., Alexander vi., Julius ii., and Leo x., were but provoked to smile when they were exhorted to cling to the “Vicar of Christ”

(To be continued? Maybe.)

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