Part 30 (1/2)
[Sidenote: April 1547]
Ignatius was chosen first general of the order. The pope then cancelled the previous limitation of the number of Jesuits to 60 [Sidenote: 1544]
and later issued a large charter of privileges for them. [Sidenote: 1549] They were exempted from taxes and episcopal jurisdiction; no member was to be allowed to accept any dignity without the general's consent, nor could any member be a.s.signed to the spiritual direction of women. Among many other grants was one to the effect that the faithful might confess to them and receive communion without permission of their parish priests. A confirmation of all privileges and a grant of others was made in a bull of July 21, 1550.
[Sidenote: Organization of the Society of Jesus, 1550]
The express end of the order being the world-domination of the church, its const.i.tution provided a marvellously apt organization for this purpose. Everything was to be subordinate to efficiency. Detachment from the world went only so far as necessary for the completer conquest of the world. Asceticism, fasting, self-discipline were to be moderate so as not to interfere with health. No special dress was prescribed, for it might be a hindrance rather than a help. The purpose being to win over the cla.s.ses rather than the ma.s.ses, the Jesuits were particular to select as members only robust men of agreeable appearance, calm minds and {404} eloquence. That an aspirant to the order should also be rich and of good family was not requisite but was considered desirable. Men of bad reputation, intractible, choleric, or men who had ever been tainted with heresy, were excluded. No women were recruited.
After selection, the neophyte was put on a probation of two years. He was then a.s.signed to the cla.s.s of scholars for further discipline. He was later placed either as a temporal coadjutor, a sort of lay brother charged with inferior duties, or as a spiritual coadjutor, who took the three irrevocable vows. Finally, there was a cla.s.s, to which admission was gained after long experience, the Professed of Four Vows, the fourth being one of special obedience to the pope. A small number of secret Jesuits who might be considered as another cla.s.s, were charged with dangerous missions and with spying.
[Sidenote: General]
Over the order was placed a General who was practically, though not theoretically, absolute. On paper he was limited by the possibility of being deposed and by the election, independently of his influence, of an ”admonitor” and some a.s.sistants. In practice the only limitations of his power were the physical ones inherent in the difficulties of administering provinces thousands of miles away. From every province, however, he received confidential reports from a mult.i.tude of spies.
The spirit of the order was that of absolute, unquestioning, blind obedience. The member must obey his superior ”like a corpse which can be turned this way or that, or a rod that follows every impulse, or a ball of wax that might be moulded in any form.” The ideal was an old one; the famous _perinde ac cadaver_ itself dates back to Francis of a.s.sisi, but nowhere had the ideal been so completely realized as by the companions of Ignatius. In fact, in this as in other respects, the {405} Jesuits were but a natural culmination of the evolution of monasticism. More and more had the orders tended to become highly disciplined, unified bodies, apt to be used for the service of the church and of the pope.
[Sidenote: Growth]
The growth of the society was extraordinarily rapid. By 1544 they had nine establishments, two each in Italy, Spain and Portugal and one each in France, Germany and the Netherlands. When Loyola [Sidenote: July 31, 1556] died Jesuits could be found in j.a.pan and Brazil, in Abyssinia and on the Congo; in Europe they were in almost every country and included doctors at the largest universities and papal nuncios to Poland and Ireland. There were in all twelve provinces, about 65 residences and 1500 members.
Their work was as broad as their field, but it was dedicated especially to three several tasks: education, war against the heretic, and foreign missions. Neither of the first two was particularly contemplated by the founders of the order in their earliest period. At that time they were rather like the friars, popular preachers, catechists, confessors and charitable workers. But the exigencies of the time called them to supply other needs. The education of the young was the natural result of their desire to dominate the intellectual cla.s.s. Their seminaries, at first adapted only to their own uses, soon became famous.
[Sidenote: Combating heresy]
In the task of combating heresy they were also the most successful of the papal cohorts. Though not the primary purpose of the order, it soon came to be regarded as their special field. The bull canonizing Loyola [Sidenote: 1623] speaks of him as an instrument raised up by divine providence especially to combat that ”foulest of monsters” Martin Luther.
Beginning in Italy the Jesuits revived the nearly extinct popular piety.
Going among the poor as missionaries they found many who knew no prayers, many who had not confessed for {406} thirty or forty years, and a host of priests as blind as their flocks.
In most other Catholic countries they had to fight for the right to exist. In France the Parlement of Paris was against them, and even after the king had granted them permission to settle in the country in 1553, the Parlement accused them of jeoparding the faith, destroying the peace of the church, supplanting the old orders and tearing down more than they built up. Nevertheless they won their way to a place of great power, until, sitting at the counsels of the monarch, they were able to crush their Catholic opponents, the Jansenists, as completely as their Protestant enemies were crushed by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
In the Netherlands the Jesuits were welcomed as allies of the Spanish power. The people were impressed by their zeal, piety, and disinterestedness, and in the Southern provinces they were able to bear away a victory after a fierce fight with Calvinism.
In England, where they showed the most devotion, they met with the least success. The blood of their martyrs did not sow the ground with Catholic seed, and they were expelled by statute under Elizabeth.
[Sidenote: Jesuit victories]
The most striking victories of the Jesuits were won in Central Europe.
When the first of their company, Peter Faber, entered Germany in 1540, he found nearly the whole country Lutheran. The Wittelsbachs of Bavaria were almost the only reigning family that never compromised with the Reformers and in them the Jesuits found their starting point and their most constant ally. Called to the universities of Ingolstadt and Vienna their success was great and from these foci they radiated in all directions, to Poland, to Hungary, to the Rhine. One of their most eminent missionaries was Peter Canisius, whose catechism, published in 1555 in three forms, short, long and middle, and in two {407} languages, German and Latin, became the chief spiritual text-book of the Catholics.
The idea and selection of material was borrowed from Luther and he was imitated also in the omission of all overt polemic material. This last feature was, of course, one of the strongest.
[Sidenote: Missions to heathens]
But the conquests of the Company of Jesus were as notable in lands beyond Europe as they were in the heart of civilization. They were not, indeed, pioneers in the field of foreign missions. The Catholic church showed itself from an early period solicitous for the salvation of the natives of America and of the Far East. The bull of Alexander VI stated that his motive in dividing the newly discovered lands between Spain and Portugal was chiefly to a.s.sist in the propagation of the faith. That the Protestants at first developed no activity in the conversion of the heathen was partly because their energies were fully employed in securing their own position, and still more, perhaps, because, in the sixteenth century, Spain and Portugal had a practical monopoly of the transoceanic trade and thus the only opportunities of coming into contact with the natives.
Very early Dominican and Franciscan friars went to America. Though some of them exemplified Christian virtues that might well have impressed the natives, the greater number relied on the puissant support of the Toledo sword. Though the natives, as heathen born in invincible ignorance, were exempt from the jurisdiction of the inquisitor, they were driven by terror if not by fire, into embracing the religion of their conquerors.
If some steadfast chiefs told the missionaries that they would rather go to h.e.l.l after death than live for ever with the cruel Christians, the tribes as a whole, seeing their dreaded idols overthrown and their temples uprooted, embraced the religion of the stronger G.o.d, as they quailed before his {408} votaries. Little could they understand of the mysteries of the faith, and in some places long continued to wors.h.i.+p Christ and Mary with the ritual and attributes of older deities. But nominally a million of them were converted by 1532, and when the Jesuits arrived a still more successful effort was made to win over the red man.
The important mission in Brazil, served by brave and devoted brothers of Ignatius, achieved remarkable results, whereas in Paraguay the Jesuits founded a state completely under their own tutelage.
In the Far East the path of the missionary was broken by the trader. At Goa the first amba.s.sadors of Christ were friars, and here they erected a cathedral, a convent, and schools for training native priests. But the greatest of the missionaries to this region was Francis Xavier, [Sidenote: Xavier, 1506-52] the companion of Loyola. Not forgetting the vow which he, together with all the first members of the society, had taken, [Sidenote: April 1541] he sailed from Lisbon, clothed with extraordinary powers. The pope made him his vicar for all the lands bathed by the Indian Ocean, [Sidenote: May, 1542] and the king of Portugal gave him official sanction and support. Arriving at Goa he put himself in touch with the earlier missionaries and began an earnest fight against the immorality of the port, both Christian and native. His motto ”Amplius” led him soon to virgin fields, among the natives of the coast and of Ceylon. In 1545 he went to Cochin-China, thence to the Moluccas and to j.a.pan, preaching in every place and baptizing by the thousand and ten thousand.