Loyola and the Educational System of the Jesuits. Hughes Thomas
arrest for setting people beside themselves, for moving them to give up all they had in behalf of piety, or charity, and inducing them to go and live on alms themselves; nay, perhaps throw in their lives, talents and acquirements, to serve others gratis. The founder of the Jesuits, himself the first of an Order which has the reputation of being the staunchest upholder, as well of authority in every rank of society, as of the truths taught by the Catholic Church, was put in chains, or arraigned by the ecclesiastical authorities almost wherever he appeared, though always acquitted as blameless.
In a letter written at a subsequent period of his life to King John III of Portugal, Ignatius sums up his experiences, as including two imprisonments, at Alcalà and Salamanca; three judicial investigations, at Alcalà, Salamanca, and Paris; later on, another process at Paris; then one at Venice; finally another at Rome; – eight investigations about this one man in Spain, France, and Italy.10 Wherever he came, in after life, it passed as a proverb among the Fathers, that his appearance was the sure harbinger of a storm, soon to break out against them somewhere, in the social or religious world. He braved all this fury in his own manner, weighing as deliberately every word he spoke, and measuring every step he took, as when he had stood in the breach of the ramparts at Pampeluna. But his personal experience made him commit to the sacred keeping of the "Spiritual Exercises" an important principle of liberal and humane prudence. It is couched in the first words of his little book, to guide teacher and learner alike. He says: —
"In the first place, it is to be supposed that every pious Christian man should be more ready to interpret any obscure proposition of another in a good rather than a bad sense. If, however, he cannot defend the proposition in any way, let him inquire of the speaker himself; and, if then the speaker is found to be mistaken in sentiment or understanding, let him correct the same kindly. If this is not enough, let him employ all available means to render him sound in principle and secure from error."
How far the personal experiences of its founder attached by a law of heritage to his Order, I can hardly undertake to describe. But, just for the sake of completing the family picture, I will mention the heads of a doleful list, which an historian of the Society catalogues. He enumerates, as objects of attack and misrepresentation, the founder himself, the name of the Society of Jesus, the dress, rules, manners, books, doctrine, schools, sermons; the poverty, obedience, gratuitous service of the Jesuits; that they affected a kind of literary empire, under the spur of an intolerable ambition; that they were lightly tinctured, and had just sipped of many things, of which they had nothing solid to offer; yes, that they wanted to have it believed there was no sanctuary of the Muses, no shrine of sacred or human wisdom in existence, outside of their own colleges; that, from these offices of theirs, all arts and sciences came forth, done up in the best style. "In fine, whatever they do or don't do, granted that there are many false charges which their enemies concoct against them, – things too extreme to be believed, – granted that they are acquitted of many vices laid to their account, never certainly will they escape the suspicion, at least, which these charges excite."11 We believe it. There is a good homely English proverb which expresses the very same idea – about the happy adhesiveness of a clayey compound when cleverly thrown.
This retrospect of history was taken, exactly one hundred years after the foundation of the Order. The story had begun some thirteen years before it was founded. When Ignatius became a responsible leader with associates, he had recourse more than once to the process of justice, to clear his reputation in full form. But, beyond the cases which rendered such defence prudent and necessary, his practical policy was expressed in a practical maxim, which after him his successor, James Laynez, had often in his mouth: Deus faxit ne unquam male loquantur et vera dicant! "God grant they never talk ill of me and be saying the truth!" Indeed, as there is no use in trying to change men, for they will never be born anew, Ignatius looked rather in another direction for the solution of difficulties; expecting that troubles, which defied other treatment, might still not survive their authors. Speaking of a powerful adversary, who was raising a great storm at Toledo and Alcalà, and whom it took the royal council and then a brief from the Pope to quell, Ignatius said of him to Ribadeneira: "He is old, the Society is young; naturally the Society will live longer than he will." The same dignitary, suppressed though he was, rose again in violent opposition. Whereupon Jouvancy makes the apt remark: "So difficult is it for even the most eminent men, and so rare a thing, when once they have conceived a notion, to get it out of their heads again!"12 No, men are not born anew.
It is time now to contemplate Ignatius of Loyola at Paris, where some of the most precious elements in his educational experience are to be acquired.
CHAPTER III
THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS. ROME
Voluntary poverty, the austerest manner of life, the ungrateful labor of studies, and the perpetual self-discipline of a mind like his, ever bent on lofty thoughts and endeavoring to dominate the very first movements of his soul, all these conditions, added to the climate and the nature of the situation in which Ignatius found himself at Paris, brought such a strain to bear on his broken-down constitution, that, to keep up his course at all, he had to interrupt it awhile, and give some relief to his overtaxed body, or, as he held it to be, his "beast of burden."
And what about the studies themselves? If they had been a brilliant success thus far, they could scarcely have outlived such conditions of existence. As it was, they were as good as if they had never begun; or somewhat worse. He had gone about them the wrong way. Whatever solidity of learning he had kept objectively in view, something else, equally important with solidity, had been unwittingly omitted. That was a good method. Logic, Philosophy, and Theology, all taken up together, and with such compendious haste, now went together in his mind like a machine out of joint; and his speed was nil! The Latin language itself, the indispensable vehicle of all learning, was just so far possessed by him as to show him that, to be of any real use, it had better be commenced all over again.
Here his character asserted itself. And in no particular of his life is he more like himself, more thorough, more of a brave cavalier, "governing himself, in great things and small, by reasons most high," than when, having little facility for such pursuits, and less inclination, he makes up his mind, after a short breathing spell, to sit down again at the age of thirty-seven years, and resume his Latin declensions! In the college of Montague, he spends about two years acquiring this tongue. Meanwhile, he tries various plans to find wherewithal to live.
I need not dwell on the nature of this great centre into which Ignatius had penetrated, an unknown stranger, just one of its tens of thousands of scholars. It had more than two scores of colleges. To this, the queen of universities, though she was going to be no kind alma mater to him and his Order, still the recollections of Loyola in his future legislation would always turn back with reverence. His first Professors for the Roman College, the typical institution of the Society, would be taken from those of his men who were Doctors of this university. And, whatever might be the moral condition and the religious lassitude of the university men, as compared with this penniless stranger, in 1529, occasions were to come in after times, when they showed themselves not unworthy of the enemy whom they fought to the death. When the plague of 1580 made a desert about them, the university men and the Jesuits, otherwise never seen together, save in the lists and face to face, now were everywhere, and fell fast, side by side on the field of Christian charity.
For the understanding of the Jesuit system, in its origin and its form, attention must always be paid, in the first place, to the kinship subsisting between it and the Paris University. There are, besides, many other degrees of relationship, which do not go unacknowledged, in the formation of the Ratio Studiorum. The system of the English universities may be recognized in the line of ancestry. Whatever was best anywhere enters the pedigree; as Lord Bacon takes note, when delivering himself like a good philosopher, but also like a good Protestant, he eulogizes and stigmatizes in the same breath: "The ancient wisdom of the best times," he says, "did always make a just complaint, that states were too busy with their laws, and too negligent in point of education; which excellent part of the ancient discipline hath been in some sort revived, of late times, by the colleges of the Jesuits; of whom, although in regard of their superstition I may say, 'quo meliores, eo
Genelli, Life of St. Ignatius Loyola, p. 351.
Imago Primi Sæculi, lib. iv, cap. ix, pp. 521-2; De Calumniis.
Jouvancy, Epitome Hist. S. J., p. 168, ad annum 1551.