The Jesuits (2 page)

In the spring of 1539 they gathered in Rome. Over the course of three months they met almost daily to deliberate about their future. Not only did they quickly decide to stay together and found a new order, but as the weeks unfolded they were able to sketch the contours of the order in sufficient detail to submit their plan to the Holy See for approval. They called the document their
Formula vivendi,
their “plan of life.” The Holy See, after raising
questions, hesitating, and then making small modifications, accepted the
Formula
and incorporated it into the bull of approval signed by Pope Paul III,
Regimini militantis ecclesiae.
With the bull's publication on September 27, 1540, the Society of Jesus officially came into existence.

On April 19 the next year, the members elected Ignatius their first superior general, an office he held until his death in 1556. Even before the election was settled, Francisco Xavier was, at the behest of King John III of Portugal, already on his way to Lisbon to prepare for his departure as a missionary in India. He arrived at his overseas destination two years later to become the most famous missionary in modern times. While Xavier traveled beyond India to evangelize other parts of southeast Asia, Ignatius, by contrast, sat at his desk in Rome guiding the new Society, a task that included writing
Constitutions,
in which structures and procedures were spelled out in much greater detail than in the
Formula.

From ten members in 1540, the Society grew at almost breathtaking speed to a thousand by the time Ignatius died sixteen years later. Except for the British Isles and Scandinavia, it had established itself in virtually every country of western Europe, in most of which it opened schools, already the Jesuits' trademark ministry. It had also established itself overseas. Of the thousand members in 1556, some fifty-five were in Goa in India and twenty-five in Brazil, where they had arrived in 1547. Two years later Xavier entered Japan, where he laid the groundwork for the Jesuits' most successful mission in the Far East. He died in 1552 on the verge of entering mainland China.

The Society of Jesus was only one of several new religious orders founded at about the same time, but it grew and achieved a status that far exceeded the others. The Theatines, founded in
1524, had by mid-century only thirty members, all of them in Italy. The Barnabites and Somascans had comparably small numbers, who also were all in Italy. How to explain this discrepancy?

When the ten founders drew up the
Formula,
they seemed to envisage the Society as an updated version of the so-called mendicant orders such as the Dominicans and Franciscans founded in the thirteenth century. They described themselves as engaging primarily in the same ministries of preaching and hearing confessions. They, like the Dominicans and Franciscans, saw these ministries as almost by definition itinerant and without geographical limits, which thus implicitly entailed overseas missions. They in fact conceived the Society as essentially a missionary order. In the
Formula
the founders made explicit their dedication to “missions anywhere in the world” by a special vow that obliged them to be ready to travel “among the Turks, or to the New World, or to the Lutherans, or to any others whether infidels or faithful.” (Because this vow was in addition to the customary three of poverty, chastity, and obedience, it is commonly referred to as the Fourth Vow.) Although they specified the pope as the one who would send them on these missions, they soon realized this provision was impracticable, and in their
Constitutions
they invested the superior general with the primary responsibility in this regard. Nonetheless, the Jesuits and others came to interpret the vow as giving the Society a special relationship to the papacy. It was not, however, as it is often erroneously described, a vow of “loyalty to the pope.” It was a vow to be missionaries.

Although the founders were all priests, within a few years the Jesuits, like the mendicants, made provision for nonordained members. At times in the history of the Society these “lay brothers” (or, better, temporal coadjutors, which is the Jesuits' official term for them) constituted about a third of the membership. They served the Society as cooks, buyers, and treasurers and in other practical tasks. Some were highly skilled professionals—architects, for instance, and artisans of various types. Among the more famous was the painter Andrea Pozzo (1642–1709), but there were others of extraordinary talent.

Even within the parameters of the
Formula,
the Jesuits made adjustments that set them off from their mendicant model, some of which shocked contemporaries and made the Jesuits suspect in their eyes. The Jesuits would not wear a distinctive religious habit, for instance, and they retained their family names. Instead of a set term of, say, three or six years, they elected their superior general for life and accorded him much more authority than did the mendicants. The name they insisted upon for themselves, the Society of Jesus, struck others as arrogant and self-serving.

Most controversial, however, was the provision in the
Formula
that the members not recite or chant the Liturgical Hours such as matins and vespers in choir, which up to that point was considered almost the definition of a religious order. By forgoing that traditional practice, which required members of the community to assemble for prayer several times a day, the founders argued that they had greater flexibility to meet the needs of ministry at whatever hour of day or night they occurred.

Such provisions, important though they were in the eyes of contemporaries, do not adequately explain why the Jesuits grew so rapidly and achieved such a distinctive culture. Other factors
were more important, such as the international and cosmopolitan background of the original ten members and the prestige of their Paris degrees. Determinative, however, was the person of Ignatius, who influenced the Society in a number of ways, but perhaps nowhere more profoundly than as author of the
Spiritual Exercises.

Born probably in 1491, Iñigo/Ignatius followed the usual course for a younger son in a family of his social class. When he was probably about seven, he left the family castle at Loyola to serve first as page and then as courtier in the household at Arévalo of Juan Velásquez de Cuéllar, chief treasurer of Castile. He remained there about ten years. At Arévalo he learned to dance, sing, duel, read and write Spanish, and get into brawls.

When Velásquez died in 1517, Ignatius entered the service of Don Antonio Manrique de Lara, duke of Nájera and viceroy of Navarre. When French forces invaded Navarre in 1521 and advanced on Pamplona, Ignatius was there to defend it. During the crucial battle, a cannonball shattered his right leg and damaged the left. The wound was serious, and despite several excruciatingly painful operations, it left him with a limp for the rest of his life.

He recuperated at his early home, the castle of Loyola. His religious conversion took place during those long months. He found at the castle none of the tales of chivalrous knights and their ladies that he loved to read and that might now relieve his boredom. In some desperation he turned to the only literature at hand—the
Life of Christ
by Ludolf of Saxony and excerpts from
The Golden Legend,
a medieval collection of lives of the saints. The latter led him to speculate about the possibility of fashioning his own life after the saints and of imitating their deeds.

In his imagination, however, he debated for a long time the alternatives of continuing according to his former path as courtier
and soldier, even with his limp, or of turning completely from it to the patterns exemplified especially by Saint Dominic and Saint Francis of Assisi. He found that when he entertained the first alternative he was afterward left dry and agitated in spirit, whereas the second brought him serenity and comfort. By consulting his inner experience in this way, he gradually came to the conviction that God was speaking to him through it, and he finally resolved to begin an entirely new life. This process of self-examination by which he arrived at his decision became a distinctive feature of the way he would continue to govern himself and became a paradigm of what he would teach others.

Once his physical strength was sufficiently restored, he set out from Loyola on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. On the way he planned to spend a few days at the small town of Manresa outside Barcelona to reflect upon his experience up to that point. For various reasons, including originally the outbreak of the plague, he prolonged his stay there for almost a year. He gave himself up to a severe regimen—long hours of prayer, fasting, self-flagellation, and other austerities that were extreme even for the sixteenth century. However, this program sent him into such a deep spiritual and psychological crisis that at one point he was tempted to suicide.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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