Transcriber's note: Superscripts are indicated by the caret character,
as in "XVII^e" and "1^o". Italic text is indicated by _underscores_;
boldface text is indicated by =equals signs=.
LOYOLA.
The Great Educators
EDITED BY NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER
LOYOLA
AND
THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM OF
THE JESUITS
BY
THE REVEREND THOMAS HUGHES
OF THE SOCIETY OF JESUS
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1892
COPYRIGHT, 1892, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.
PREFACE.
In the following work on the Educational System of the Jesuits, I
have endeavored to present a critical statement of the principles and
method adopted in the Society of Jesus. The effort to explain the
sources, process of development, and present influence of the system
within and without the Order, has made of the first part a biographical
and historical sketch, having for its chief subject the person of
the Founder; while the details and the pedagogical significance of
the various elements in the method appear, in the second part, as a
critical analysis of the _Ratio Studiorum_.
The educational literature which treats of this system is very
extensive. Various estimates and conclusions have been arrived at,
on the merits of documents frequently referred to, for an exposition
of the meaning and philosophy of the system. Hence, with the view of
facilitating a clear and comprehensive judgment on the subject, I have
thought it not inadvisable to quote accurately from such documents,
omitting none which bore upon the matter, if only they were within
reach. It so happens that, at present, a large number of the sources,
regulations, and commentaries, heretofore rare and altogether out of
reach, have been rendered easy of access, being embodied in the great
work, _Monumenta Germaniæ Pædagogica_, which is already beyond its
tenth volume. Three of the volumes so far issued are upon the Jesuit
System; they have been compiled by the late Rev. G. M. Pachtler, S. J.
If the three or four volumes, which still remain to be issued by the
Rev. Bernard Duhr, S. J., had been available, they too could have been
laid under contribution for examples and illustrations. But perhaps the
theme will appear sufficiently illustrated as it is.
Besides the original documents, I have used no less authentic an
exponent than that which the maxim of law approves: _Consuetudo, optima
legis interpres_, "Custom, which is the best interpreter of law."
While all that is oldest and most authentic has thus been made use of
in explaining the _Ratio Studiorum_, the actual condition of pedagogics
to-day is new, and so is the state of the question involved. Hence, to
satisfy the requirements of the present, reference has been made not
exclusively either to the customs or the learned documents of a former
age.
In a word, the object aimed at has been to indicate the chief traits
which are characteristic of the system, and which may be suggestive in
the development of pedagogical science. Whether such an object has been
attained, so as to meet many questions which may possibly arise, and
to satisfy the desire which actually exists, it will be for others to
decide.
THOMAS HUGHES, S. J.
ST. LOUIS UNIVERSITY.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
PREFACE v
PART I.
EDUCATIONAL HISTORY OF THE ORDER.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION 3
CHAPTER II.
KNIGHT, PILGRIM, AND SCHOLAR 19
CHAPTER III.
THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS. ROME 30
CHAPTER IV.
COLLEGES AS PROPOSED IN THE JESUIT CONSTITUTION 52
CHAPTER V.
COLLEGES FOUNDED AND ENDOWED 68
CHAPTER VI.
THE INTELLECTUAL SCOPE AND METHOD PROPOSED 82
CHAPTER VII.
THE MORAL SCOPE PROPOSED 98
CHAPTER VIII.
IGNATIUS ADMINISTERING THE COLLEGIATE SYSTEM. HIS DEATH 109
CHAPTER IX.
SUBSEQUENT ADMINISTRATIONS 124
PART II.
ANALYSIS OF THE SYSTEM OF STUDIES.
CHAPTER X.
AQUAVIVA. THE RATIO STUDIORUM 141
CHAPTER XI.
_Formation of the Master._ HIS COURSES OF LITERATURE AND
PHILOSOPHY 156
CHAPTER XII.
YOUTHFUL MASTERS 175
CHAPTER XIII.
THE COURSES OF DIVINITY AND ALLIED SCIENCES. PRIVATE STUDY.
REPETITION 191
CHAPTER XIV.
DISPUTATION. DICTATION 208
CHAPTER XV.
_Formation of the Scholar._ SYMMETRY OF THE COURSES. THE
PRELECTION. BOOKS 225
CHAPTER XVI.
THE CLASSICAL LITERATURES. SCHOOL MANAGEMENT AND CONTROL 248
CHAPTER XVII.
EXAMINATIONS AND GRADUATION. SCHEDULE OF GRADES AND COURSES 259
CHAPTER XVIII.
CONCLUSION 285
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX 297
PART I.
EDUCATIONAL HISTORY OF THE ORDER
LOYOLA AND THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM OF THE JESUITS
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.
A learned and elegant work, which narrates the rise and progress of
Christian Schools, from the sixtieth year of the Christian era onwards,
ends its long journey at the date of the Reformation, and takes leave
of its varied subject, and of its lines of Christian Scholars, in these
words: "We leave them at the moment when the episcopacy was recovering
its ancient jurisdiction over the ecclesiastical seminaries, and when
a vast majority of the secular schools of Catholic Christendom were
passing into the hands of a great Religious Order, raised up, as it
would seem, with the special design of consolidating anew a system of
Christian education."[1]
Two centuries and a half later, when the Society of Jesus had run a
long course, from the date of the Reformation which had seen it rise,
up to the eve of the Revolution which beheld it extinct, a General of
the Order, Ignatius Visconti, addressing the Provincial Superiors over
the world, takes note of a new stage in the process of educational
development: "The taste for letters now," he says, "is more keen and
exquisite, and the number of literary schools has increased so much,
that ours may no longer appear so necessary. For I may mention the fact
that, besides our schools of polite letters, there were, for a long
while, either none or very few. So that parents were forced to send
their children to us, even if otherwise they did not want it."[2]
This refers in a quiet way to what Leopold von Ranke states with more
emphasis. Speaking of Grammar classes, the German historian says: "Here
also the Jesuits succeeded to admiration. It was found that young
people gained more with them in six months, than with other teachers
in two years. Even Protestants removed their children from distant
gymnasia to confide them to the care of the Jesuits."[3] Ranke narrates
in the same place how it was "toward the universities above all that
the efforts of the Jesuits were directed." And he describes what the
results were in Germany.
D'Alembert writes of their progress in France: "Hardly had the Company
of Jesus begun to show itself in France, than it met with difficulties
without number, in the endeavor to establish itself. The universities
especially made the greatest efforts to keep the new-comers out. It
is difficult to decide whether this opposition is a praise or a
condemnation of the Jesuits who stood it. They announced gratuitous
teaching; they counted among their number celebrated and learned men,
superior perhaps to those whom the universities could boast of," etc.[4]
Speaking of the Protestants in the Netherlands, a chronicle, which
reviews the first century of the Order's existence, records that "the
Jesuit schools were expressly interdicted, under severe penalties,
to all members of the Protestant communities. Even in a twelve-year
truce which the Order partially enjoyed, a monthly fine of one hundred
florins was still imposed upon all delinquents, or on their parents,
who persisted in patronizing the Jesuit schools. To escape the fine,
parents sent their children under an assumed name.[5]
In every country, the same drama of struggle and contest evolved itself
through two and a half centuries, till a momentous scene was witnessed.
It was a scene of such a kind as seldom has occurred in history; and
never certainly was any similar event thrown into such relief by the
sequel. The event which I refer to was a universal and instantaneous
suppression of the Order; with consequences following thereupon which
were exceptional, both in the world that witnessed it, and in the
subject-body that suffered it.
The sequel in the world at large was that, a few years later, at the
close of the eighteenth century, there broke out the great Revolution
under the leadership of men, of whom scarcely one had been more than
seven years of age at the date of the Jesuits' expulsion.[6] They
represented in France the first generation which had not been educated
by the Society. The remote causes which overwhelmed the Order were
the same that ushered in the Revolution. But, among the immediate
causes, assigned by historians to account for the precise form which
the great convulsion assumed, and for the date at which it occurred,
is placed the dissolution of this Order. According to the Count de
Maistre, who speaks of the political sentiment of his own times, all
observers agreed that the revolution of Europe, still called the
French Revolution, was impossible without the preliminary destruction
of the Jesuits. And, in keeping with this, it was equally a subject
of observation, as being a palpable historical fact, that during two
centuries the Jesuits had formed in their College at Paris, the élite
of the French nobility; and that, only a few years after the expulsion
of the Jesuit Masters, the same college turned out the Robespierres,
Camille Desmoulins, Tallien, Noël, Fréron, Chénier, and other such
demagogues. This College of Clermont, or Louis-le-Grand, from which the
Jesuits were expelled in 1762, had been immediately occupied by the
University of Paris. The Revolution broke out twenty-seven years later.
Another sequel, not heard of before in history, affected the Society
itself. Europe, having gone through the violent commotions which
changed the old order of things into the new, reached the beginning
of this nineteenth century, and found the Society alive again. This
was in defiance of a political maxim, which we may admit with Baron
von Hübner, that in politics, in the affairs of states, in the life of
all great social institutions, when once death supervenes, there is no
resurrection.
And now, at the end of the nineteenth century, the same forces of
repulsion and attraction, of devoted love on the part of friends,
of intense hatred on the part of enemies, have been seen operating
as always before. It has become a commonplace in the philosophy of
history,--this hatred which has been sworn against the Order of Jesus,
and the multitude of enemies whom it has made. One explanation suggests
itself to the Viscount de Bonald,--the presence in it, he thinks, of
something good; of that good which, as it alone is the object of the
most ardent love, can alone become the object of the intensest hate;
and therefore has always made persecutors and martyrs.
The purpose of this book is to give an historical sketch, with a
proportionate analysis, of the educational development effected through
the Society of Jesus. Others have taken different fields of Jesuit
history to survey, either general and comprehending all the paths of
external and internal activity, or particular and comprising only parts
of the history. Some of these particular views, especially in later
years, are in the line of studies, and are most valuable contributions
to the history of pedagogic development. None of them, however,
happens to coincide with the scope, purpose, and form which have been
designated for this; as the Series to which it belongs, the Editor in
charge, and the country for which it is intended, sufficiently indicate.
The subject then is the educational system of the Jesuits, that system
which technically is called the _Ratio Studiorum_. It requires no
literary nor historical ingenuity to centre all that has to be said
about it in the personality and character of St. Ignatius of Loyola.
I shall draw upon Jesuit sources of information, except when it
will be necessary to state results, or give estimates, which imply
commendation. Then I shall quote freely from sources outside of the
Order. Otherwise, for the purpose of explaining and analyzing domestic
matters, these extraneous references would be imperfect indeed.
The situation, which met the military view of the cavalier, lately
the knightly captain of Loyola, was a new one, on an old field of
battle. The demand, which it seemed to make upon tactical resources,
was as intense as the political and religious crisis which created the
situation. From the year 1522 till 1540, while Ignatius was prospecting
the scene in Europe, and preparing to take an active part in it, he
had time and the opportunities for observing, what precisely, at
that epoch, were the accumulated results of all the Christian ages
gone before; and why the results just then were only what they were.
The issue appeared fatally determined by social conditions around,
which more than neutralized the Christianity visible. Education, in
particular, was laboring under the action of causes, which had begun
to operate several centuries earlier, and which were then evidently
working themselves out to one final effort. That was the undermining of
Christian education.
In this respect, it was the same question which had confronted the
Augustines, the Basils, and Jeromes, of one thousand years before. But
it was a different state of the question. Augustine, the brilliant
youth of Hippo Regius in Africa, will serve as an instance of what
the issue then had been. He had made himself master of the very best
results, which the public schools of the time were able to accomplish
in the most gifted of minds. But he had lost his virtue. He lived to
complain with bitterness, that it was accounted a grievous error to
pronounce _homo_ "a man," without the "h," but it was no error at all
to hate a man, signified by the word, _homo_. The consequence with him
was that, when he became a Bishop of the Church, he met the need of
providing a Christian education, by instituting in his own house a kind
of school, for the moral and spiritual education of his clergy.
Thus arose the cathedral or canonical school. So too, the cloistral
schools came to flourish in the abbeys and the monasteries. And,
even if these two kinds of educational centres had not also been, as
they really were, in the Middle Ages, the preordained means for the
salvation of learning in Europe, they would still have had reason
enough for their existence, in the paramount necessity of continuing,
for the tender age of youth, the ministry of a virtuous education.
Events took a new turn with the rise and progress of the university
system. At first, the universities were mostly annexed to cathedral
churches. As they developed, the cloistral influence waned. And again,
as they developed still more, they presented phenomena which originated
the subsequent system of the Jesuits.
From the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, as many as sixty-six of
these universities were in existence; sixteen of them are credited
to Germany; about as many to France; and the rest to Italy, Spain,
and other nations. It is not within my province to describe their
formation, or the order of their foundation. They received their
charters from the Popes, who used their power thus, and showed it
under a form, which no age will be apt to depreciate; least of all,
our own. Addressing these habitations of "General Studies" with the
appellative, _Universitas Vestra_, the Sovereign Pontiffs sent them
on their course, and encouraged them in every line of Theology, Law,
or Medicine; whether all these lines were followed in each centre, or
respectively some here, some there. Orleans, Bourges, Bologna, Modena
professed Law, either as their specialty, or as their distinguishing
faculty; Montpellier, Salerno, Medicine; Padua, the Liberal Arts;
Toledo, Mathematics; Salamanca, and, above all, Paris, general culture,
Philosophy, and Theology.
These universities became such well-springs of learning, that for
Theology the Bishops' seminaries practically ceased to exist; and, to
acquire the general culture of the times, the children of the faithful
no longer turned to the monastic schools. Nay, in quite a contrary
sense, the clergy and the monks themselves, in pursuit of the best
learning that the age could give, left their cloisters for a while, and
betook themselves to the universities. They followed up that step by
settling down there. Paris beheld the great old orders of Augustinians,
Benedictines, Carthusians, the Carmelites, the Bernardines, all
establishing monasteries or colleges; no otherwise than the newest
order of Trinitarians, which was chiefly made up of university men. Two
institutes arose, those of the Dominicans and Franciscans; who with
men at their head, like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure, placed
themselves right in the heart of these intellectual centres; and they
became bulwarks of sound learning, as opposed to the inanities of a
false scholasticism. They kept the leaven of religion and virtue in
the midst of what was not quite a perverse generation, but was most
certainly, from whatever side we view it, a very dubious multitude,
belonging, it is true, to a Christian generation. Consider the 10,000
at Bologna, which was the centre for Law studies; the 30,000 at Oxford;
or the 40,000, all at one time studying, or reckoned to be studying, in
Paris, the acknowledged centre for Theology.
An indiscriminate mass of humanity like this, pressed, thronged, and
crowded together, stimulated with all the ardor, and alive with all the
passions of youth, could not fail to be little better than a nursery
for indiscriminate license. Whatever might be the vigilance of the
Church, or however strenuous the exercise of legitimate authority,
nothing in the usual course of human society could prevent its
becoming a prolific soil for the propagation of every species of error.
And, as during three hundred years the intellectual and educational
powers of Europe followed this course, the law of evolution asserted
itself in many directions.
On the one side, those tens of thousands of Christian youths, who
were aiming at all the posts of influence in Church and State, and
who, entering their native university, or journeying to foreign ones,
began life there at as early an age as twelve or fourteen years, to
remain in this environment some nine or twelve years more, became, as
was natural, the living, swarming members of a state of society so
dissolute, that successive occupants of the Papal See depicted the
condition of things as one of moral contagion. In the manner of thought
and mind which prevailed, no form of theoretic error was wanting.
In philosophy, there was scepticism; in theology, heresy; while, in
politics, Cæsarism and absolutism became rife. Then, at the end of
the fifteenth century, the Renaissance came; and one of the first
things, which it expressly and formally did, was to renew in life,
art, and politics, the same old paganism, upon the ruins of which, so
many centuries before, Christianity had begun its upward and laborious
ascent. Newly fashioning then much of what was old, Christianity had
augmented all this with so much which was new, that in a thousand
years it had made a Renaissance possible. And now the form of this
Renaissance threatened its own ascendancy in morals and in life.
On the other hand, the old spirit of conservatism in religion, and of
preservation in the matter of morals, maintained itself for a time,
through those bodies of religious men and clergymen, who had left
the cloister or the seminary, to take up their abode in the secular
seats of learning. It was this spirit which originated the latest and
best development of the universities, that of the "college" system,
established in their midst. Salamanca had twenty colleges; Louvain,
forty; Paris, fifty. Still, in the final issue, there was now scarcely
any reserve force of cloistral or episcopal learning behind the
universities, and outside of them. And the religious and the clergy
themselves, who at best were not a little out of their element from the
moment they migrated into the secular environment, conformed insensibly
to the conditions in which they found themselves, and so far ceased to
be the power they had been.
Witness, in the time of Ignatius, the Paris University, as described
by contemporary records. "It was fallen from its ancient splendor. The
bonds of discipline had been gradually relaxed; studies were abandoned;
and with masters, as with scholars, all love of letters, and respect
for the rule, had given place to sombre passions, to political hate, to
religious fanaticism and dissolute habits."[7]
Here then we have two elements in the educational condition of Europe,
which explain the rise of the Jesuit system. One was the positive,
concrete fact, embodied in that great developed system of university
learning. The other was a negative element, the decline therein of the
essential moral life. These two factors are not mere antecedents in
the order of time, as being only prior to the method of Loyola. One of
them, the university system, supplied the very material out of which
his method and matter were taken; yes, and the men themselves, the
Jesuits who applied the principles of reform to education. The other
factor, which I have called negative, that decline of the essential
moral life, was the adequate occasion, which prompted Ignatius to
approach the question of education at all. For we may say with
confidence that, if the universities of the sixteenth century were
still doing the work which originally they had been chartered to do,
the founder of the Society of Jesus would not only have omitted to
draw out his system as a substitute for them, and as an improvement
upon them, but he would have done, what he always did with anything
good in existence; he would have used what he found, and have turned
his attention to other things more urgent. He did use these university
centres for his own young men, until he had better educational
institutions, and a better method of his own in progress.
Hence the educational problem, when it falls under the notice of
Ignatius, presents itself as the identical one of old, that of moral
regeneration. But it is a different state of the same question. In
circumstances rendered acutely critical by the agitations of the epoch,
social, moral, and religious, it was a favorite contemplation of
his to look with compassion on men living like the blind, dying, and
sinking into eternal depths; on men talking, blaspheming, reviling one
another; on their assaulting, wounding, slaying one another; and all
together going to eternal perdition.[8] It was from this moral point of
view that he descended into the arena of education.
But before he can teach men, or mould teachers of men, or even conceive
the first idea of legislating for the intellectual world, he must
himself first learn. There are two fundamental lessons which he does
learn, and they go to form him. One is that, among all pursuits, the
study of virtue is supreme; the other, that, supreme as virtue is,
yet, without secular learning, the highest virtue goes unarmed, and
at best is profitable to oneself alone. He learns these two lessons,
not only in theory, but in practice. To accomplish the purpose of the
latter, he takes his seat upon the scholars' bench, and begins to learn
with little children. Though he may not meet with brilliant success in
the art of learning, still in the art of understanding what learning
is, and in the lessons of experience, he becomes a finished scholar.
He remains even then too much of a chevalier to give up a cherished
idea of his about a spiritual crusade in the East. And it is only when
thwarted in this project that, like a true knight, he simply turns
to another side of the field. He stays in the West. He is still the
Captain of a Company. But he becomes also a legislator among doctors;
and, amid his other works, he effects an educational reform.
In his whole campaign, we may discern two characteristics in the
spirit of his movements. One is that of defence, the other that of
advance. His method of defence showed itself in the reassertion of old
principles, in the conservatism of morals,--a plan of campaign, which
determines the whole frame of mind, and the social construction of the
Company. It rests on the principle of upholding what is, and not moving
the ancient landmarks. On the other hand, his advance is towards the
solution of the highest questions which can interest mankind. These
formed part of the very object and direction of the Order's march. And
so it came to pass, that his Company drew to itself that class of minds
which are most powerfully arrested by the prospect of solving such
questions, especially when times are agitated. His times were agitated,
if any ever were, more so than our own, when the same questions still
must dominate. His were times of wars with Turks in the East, and
with Christians at home; of battles lost and won, with their effects
reaching into every household; of royal and imperial administrations
confused and overthrown; of new opinions without number; of the Church
losing ground along the whole line of the frontier, and withal new
worlds looming over an horizon, where from the beginning of time the
unknown had brooded in absolute darkness. At such a moment, "Defence
and Advance," or as the Papal authority expressed it in the solemn
instrument which chartered his Institute, _Defensio ac propagatio
fidei_, were stirring watchwords to men of parts, who felt restive
under the inactivity and inefficiency of older methods, on older lines.
I will not pause to say, that the personal poverty and exact obedience,
required in the new service, presented no obstacles to the minds
and characters which were otherwise attracted to his standard. The
antecedents of all antiquity seem to show that such conditions, to
such minds, are rather an inducement than a check. And if one takes
notice that to this was added, in the Order of Jesus, an absolute
equality, whereby every formed member binds himself to accept no
dignity within or without, or, at least, to affect no dignity at
home or abroad, which will prejudice his full franchise as a member,
then, perhaps, the attractiveness of such a life, the conservatism
and intense concentration of the Order, as well as the alacrity and
endurance manifested in the service, will not appear inexplicable to
the minds of this age, in which, under a very different form, the same
equality is called liberty, is made to construct republics, to bring
down monarchies, and develop some of the most potent agencies for
unfolding the energies of men. Yet the liberty of this latter equality
reflects but faintly, and as from a broken surface, the freedom of him,
who having liberated himself from the shackles of the world, and from
all solicitude as to his movements, office, and place, finds in turn,
as the German historian expresses it, "his own personal development
imposed upon him";[9] and, in the firm companionship of one aim,
formation, and life, enjoys the manifold support and ready sympathy of
individualities as developed as his own.
I shall narrate, in the first part, the facts of Ignatius' career,
so far as to indicate the stages of that magisterial art, by which he
himself was formed, and which then he reformed in the Jesuit _Ratio
Studiorum_. In the second part, I shall sketch briefly the history of
the _Ratio_ itself, and analyze the System as a theory and practice of
education.
CHAPTER II.
KNIGHT, PILGRIM, AND SCHOLAR.
The story of the cavalier wounded on the ramparts of Pampeluna has
often been told. Loyola was not at the moment governor of the city,
nor in any responsible charge. But official responsibility was not
necessary for him to see the path of duty and follow it. As one bound
to the service of his sovereign by the title of honor and nobility,
he retired to the citadel, when the town surrendered; and then, when
the ramparts began to give way under the cannonading, he stood in the
breach. A ball shattering the rock laid him low, maimed in both his
limbs. At once the defence collapsed. Cared for chivalrously by those
whose arms had struck him down in battle, he was transported with every
delicate attention to his castle of Loyola. It was found that one of
his limbs had been ill set. He had it broken again, to be set aright.
Meanwhile, instinct with all the ambition of a knight, belonging to
a chivalrous nation in an age of chivalry, he was not insensible to
the charms of society and affection. And, out of a sensitive care for
his personal appearance, he must needs have a protruding bone, which
still threatened to mar his figure, sawed off while he looked on. In
the loneliness and tedium of a sick-room, he whiled away the hours by
dreaming of his ambitions and his aspirations, and he sought to feed
them with suitable nourishment. He wanted a romance to read. There was
none to be had. So, instead of the novel which was not forthcoming, he
took what they gave him, the Life of Christ, and the Lives of some who
had served Christ faithfully. The soldier of the field and of blood
felt the objects of his ambition change; he became a soldier of the
spirit and eternal life. And, after the experiences of his bed of pain,
and the protracted communings with another world, he arose another man;
he went forth a knight as ever, but not on an expedition terminating as
before. An evening and night spent in the sanctuary of Montserrat, as
once before he had passed a vigil of arms, when dubbed a chevalier by
the King of Navarre; a morning begun with the Holy Sacrifice attended
and Holy Communion received, opened to him a new era; and he went
forth, bound now by a new oath of fealty to the service of the King of
Heaven.
At the side of the altar in this sanctuary of Montserrat, the Abbot of
the monastery, eighty-one years later, committed to a marble tablet the
record of this event, for the perpetual memory of the future: "Blessed
Ignatius of Loyola here, with many prayers and tears, devoted himself
to God and the Virgin. Here, as with spiritual arms, he fortified
himself in sack-cloth, and spent the vigil of the night. Hence he went
forth to found the Society of Jesus, in the year MDXXII."
He first looked about him to find a retreat, and immerse himself in
the contemplation of time and eternity. It was a Saturday. John
Sacrista Pascual tells us that his mother, a devout lady of Manresa,
was in the church that morning; and, accompanied by two young men and
three women, she was at her devotions in the chapel of the Apostles.
A young stranger came up and accosted them. His clothing was of very
common serge; for Ignatius had given away his knightly robes to a poor
man. The youth looked like a pilgrim. He was not tall; he was fair
in complexion and ruddy in cheek. His bare head was somewhat bald.
Altogether he was of a fine and grave presence, and most reserved in
look. He scarcely raised his eyes from the ground. Coming up, he asked
if there were a hospital anywhere which might serve him for shelter.
Regarding his noble and fair features, the lady, as became a Christian
woman, offered her services; if he would follow her company, she would
provide for him, in the best way possible. Courteously and thankfully
he accepted her offer, and followed the party as they left the
sanctuary. They proceeded slowly; for they noticed that he was lame.
However much they urged him, they could not induce him to ride upon the
ass. Three leagues away from Montserrat, they arrived at the little
town of Manresa; and he took up his residence in the common hospital
for the poor and pilgrims. Whatever alms or food was henceforth sent
him first went to others, whom, in these matters, up to the end of his
life, he always considered to be more in need than himself.
He now entered on his probation of Christian virtue. In the mind of
the Catholic Church, the degree of virtue which he practised is that
accounted heroic. As it is not for me to dwell on it here, I will pass
it over with one remark. That which is accounted ordinary Christian
virtue, resting as it does on faith and hope, on principles not barely
natural but supernatural, is not very intelligible to the world at
large. Still less the heroic degree of the same. Both however claim
to be estimated by their own proper motives and principles. When they
enter into the very subject, which the biographer means to treat, it
appertains to his art not to ignore the objective motives and reasons
of things, as they operated in his subject. In the shortest monograph,
like the present, we cannot separate from the work, which he did,
the man who did it. And the man is made by his motives. It were bad
literary art to describe feats, which are confessedly great, and not to
find motives which are proportionate.
Ignatius, after a year more or less spent at Manresa, took his
pilgrim's staff and journeyed on foot to Italy, and thence to the Holy
Land. It was in the spirit of the old Crusaders, whose chivalry had
a charm for him up to the day many years later, when, with his first
associates of the Company, he endeavored once more to cross over from
Italy to Palestine. Had he succeeded on this later occasion, he would
most probably never have known the others who attached themselves to
him; nor might history have busied itself with him or with them.
At the date of his return from the Holy Land, we find that he has
advanced already to the second lesson in the development of his future.
It is, that mature in years as he is, and full of desires for doing
good to his neighbors, yet neither does mere piety place in his hands
the instruments for such work; nor, if study alone can give the means
of apostolic zeal, can he consider himself exempt from the law, that
he must labor to acquire what are only the results of labor. He was
thirty-one years of age, when he betook himself, after his night's
vigil, to the cave of Manresa. He is two years older now. So, at the
age of thirty-three, he sits down on the school-bench at Barcelona, and
begins his Latin declensions.
Begrudging his studies the time which they demand exclusively, he
mistakes the situation, and allows himself the exercises of an
apostolic life. At his age, even supposing his earlier pursuits to have
been more in harmony with his present life of letters, he is not an apt
pupil. However, he labors conscientiously. After two years spent at
Grammar, he is judged by his teacher, who takes a lenient view of the
case, to be competent for approaching his higher studies.
He himself was dubious. His friends recommended him to ascend. He
still hesitated. But, receiving the same favorable opinion from a
theologian whom he consulted, Ignatius acquiesced, in accordance with
his unvarying rule, to follow competent direction. How unfortunate this
step was for the happy progress of his studies, but how advantageous
for his experience as a future legislator, I shall proceed to show.
Leaving Barcelona for Alcalà, he meant to enjoy the best advantages
which a great university could afford. He lived on alms as ever; and
others lived on the alms which he received. It was the year 1626. He
entered upon the study of Logic, using the Summa of Di Soto; also the
Physics of Aristotle; and he pursued besides the Master of Sentences.
He had stayed only a year and a half in this rich variety of pursuits,
scholastic as well as apostolic, when the novelties apparent in his
manner of life ended by making him a suspected character to the
ecclesiastical authorities. To a few, among the population of the
city, his fruitful zeal made him distinctly odious. The result was
a juridical process against him, which issued in a complimentary
verdict, the Vicar of the diocese pronouncing him and his companions
quite blameless. But restrictions were imposed regarding his future
ministrations, since Ignatius was not yet in holy orders. During a
term of four years he was not to preach. After that time, his progress
in studies would enable him to honor that important ministry, without
giving offence. This was a deathblow to the aspirations of the student.
He made up his mind to go elsewhere, to the famous university of
Salamanca; and he turned his back on Alcalà.
The time was soon to come for a pleasant revenge; and apparently he
knew of it long before it came. Just six years after the foundation of
his Order, when he sent Francis Villanova to open a house at Alcalà,
not only did he find men of the university embracing his Institute,
but, two years after that, the whilom persecuted pilgrim received, in
a single twelvemonth, thirty-four Doctors into the Society, all from
that one seat of learning. The mere passing by of Francis Borgia, Duke
of Gandia, who had become an humble follower of Ignatius, made the
choicest spirits flock to his standard; and, all over Spain, colleges
sprang up as if from the soil.
In Salamanca, where likewise he and his were to figure in the future,
the personal history of Ignatius is briefly told. In ten or twelve
days after his arrival, he was thrown into chains. He spent twenty-two
days in prison. When released, with the same commendation for himself
and his doctrine as he had received at Alcalà, but with a similar
restriction on his action, he thought it was not worth his while to
repeat the same experiences at the same cost. So, in spite of all the
eloquence of dissuasion brought to bear on him by friends, he took a
new departure, which seemed plausible to him, and therefore feasible.
He would try his fortunes in another land, and continue his studies in
the greatest philosophical and theological centre of the world, the
University of Paris.
To any one who judged of things by an ordinary standard, the project
was not feasible. War was raging between Spain and France; the roads
were infested with hostile soldiery; many murders and robberies,
committed on the persons of travellers, were recently reported. But
these and other considerations of the kind had no weight with Loyola,
to stay him in a course once deliberately adopted. Accepting some alms
from friends at Barcelona, to obtain on the way the necessaries of
life, he accomplished on foot the whole journey from Barcelona to the
French capital; where he arrived at the beginning of February, A.D.
1528.
He has now had experience of prisons and chains, on the charge of
teaching error, or of being a dangerous enthusiast. One of the calmest
and coolest of men, who never acted, but he first calculated, and who
never allowed himself to approach a conclusion, without first freeing
himself from all bias and impulse, he had suffered repeated 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 deteriores_'; yet in regard of this, and some other
points concerning human learning and moral matters, I may say, as
Agesilaus said to his enemy Pharnabaus, '_Talis quum sis, utinam noster
esses_.'"[13]
In the University of Paris, then, as his real alma mater, Ignatius
commenced his course of Philosophy in the year 1529. He finished
it by standing successfully the severe examination, called _examen
lapideum_, "the rocky test," considered the most searching of all in
the Paris Academy. He thus became a Master of Arts, after Easter, A.D.
1534; having become Licentiate in the previous year. Particulars about
his four examiners in the "rocky test," his graduation, the degrees
of his companions, with the dates, as found in the Paris records, are
given by the Bollandists.[14]
He now entered on his theological studies. It was evident that the
obstructions, which had thwarted so many of his efforts heretofore,
were disappearing one by one. And more than that; the means were
being placed in his hands for the great work before him. These means
were a company of men. He was in the midst of a devoted little band,
each one of whom he had won individually. They were Peter Lefèvre and
Francis Xavier; James Lainez and Alphonsus Salmeron, both of them mere
youths; there were Claude Le Jay, John Coduri, Nicholas Bobadilla,
Simon Rodriguez; and lastly, the only one who at this time was a Priest
among their number, Pasquier Brouet. Among these, never at their head
though considered a father by all, never leading the way, though on
that account showing himself the more effectively a leader, Ignatius
was all in all to each one of them. He had previously acquired some
valuable experience in selecting and forming companions. But such as
had gathered round him in Spain were no longer with him. Each one of
his present party was a picked man.
When six of them were sufficiently advanced, he and they held a
solemnity, which was the real birthday of the Society of Jesus. On
the fifteenth day of August, 1534, they took a vow, in the church of
the Blessed Virgin, at Montmartre in Paris. They bound themselves to
renounce all their goods by a given date, and betake themselves to
the Holy Land; failing in that, they would throw themselves at the
feet of the Sovereign Pontiff, and offer him their absolute service.
Meanwhile they pursued their studies; and, as each of the two following
years brought round the fifteenth day of August, it found them in the
same place, and with the same solemnity, and with an enlarged number,
renewing this vow. The legal birthday of the Order came only with the
Papal charter on September 27, 1540.
I shall pass over the movements of Loyola, when bidden to go and
recuperate in his native climate. He returned to Spain, in 1535,
leaving his companions to study till 1537; and he settled the affairs
of his young Spanish associates at their homes. All, when the time
came, disposed of their goods in a summary way. They gave to the poor,
reserving nothing, except what would pay their way to Venice, and
thence to the East. Their principle was, _Dispersit, dedit pauperibus_,
"He hath distributed, he hath given to the poor." Besides this, Xavier,
at the date appointed, gave up the last stage of his theological
studies, and resigned the glory of receiving the Doctor's cap in Paris;
the brilliant young Professor sacrificed the one thing which had
appealed most powerfully to his ambition and imagination. Laynez was
recuperating from a severe illness, and could do scarcely more than
move. Nevertheless they are all in Venice, when the early spring of
1537 arrives.
Ignatius himself, meeting them there, has accomplished the work which
faced him thirteen years before, and which he had taken in hand with
his Latin grammar. He is now forty-six years of age.
There are three lines of activity, in which the ability and energy of
Ignatius Loyola stand out before the world. One is the capacity he
showed as a governor or leader of men; another is a similar competency
to direct souls in the spiritual life; the third is that, which we are
considering at present, his legislative genius in the intellectual
order. Admitting the innate talent which must have been the basis and
foundation of his gift for governing, we may affirm of all the rest,
that the best part of his sagacity and tact had been acquired by
personal experience. He learnt how to act by suffering. He perfected
his natural gift of guiding and commanding by first submitting to all
the contingencies of human life.
We may develop the meaning of this in the present matter, pedagogy;
and the meaning of it will help to unfold the subject. In quest of
the necessaries of life, he spent intervals of his studious career
in travelling from Paris to a great distance. He found himself
returning each year to Belgium, always on foot: he visited Rouen, and
even reached London, to address the Spanish merchants there. It does
not seem to have been parsimony on their side that kept him in such
straitened circumstances. It was his principles which were not all in
keeping with his conditions of life. He was endeavoring to combine
the life of a student with absolute poverty; and he aggravated the
inconveniences of such a state of dependence by placing no limits to
the exercise of his charity. It was his deliberate choice; for he fed
his mind continuously upon the life and example of the King, to whom
he had sworn his service, Christ poor and in labor from his youth. He
spoke afterwards from the wisdom of experience, when he said, that in
absolute penury the pursuit of science cannot easily subsist, and the
culture of the mind is impeded by the duties of providing for the body.
Hence he legislated that, though poverty was to be the basis of his
Institute, still the members, as long as they were engaged in studies,
should be set free from all care of seeking the means of subsistence.
He had endeavored to combine a life of apostolic ministrations, though
not yet a Priest, with that requisite absorption of mind, which alone
can warrant scholastic success. And he saw what it had come to. The
very esteem and love, which he entertained for the exercises of the
higher spiritual life, interrupted with intrusive thoughts that
application to study, which was the duty in hand. In order that no such
intrusion of even the most sacred pursuits should obstruct the onward
progress of the members in learning, he defined by rule the measure of
such occupations, as long as study was the main duty.
Diseases weakened him. Therefore he took the greatest pains to protect
the health of the members. While he lived, he did this with a personal
and paternal solicitude. In his Institute, he provided the same for the
future.
On commencing his studies, he embraced many branches at the same
time; and he had suffered all the consequences of disorder. Grasping
at too many things, he lost all; and he had then to retrieve all with
loss of time. To obviate any recurrence of such costly experiences, he
provided that the courses followed in the Society should have nothing
disordered in them, nothing mutilated or curtailed; everything was to
be in method and system; until, system and method having been carried
out in every line, and the special good of each department having been
secured sufficiently for the general plan, specialized perfection
should be consulted, after all that; and this was to be the appointed
life of individuals, while a rounded and complete education remained
the culture of all.
Once in later years he let fall these words, relative to his early
experience: "He would very much question whether another but himself,
having to struggle with so many difficulties and obstacles in the
course of his studies, would have given so long a time to the
acquisition of the sciences."[15] Thus then was he oppressed with
poverty, without the satisfaction of acting under orders; suffering so
many diseases, and yet looking neither to honor, dignity, nor other
human reward, such as is wont to draw men on, and animate them under
fatigue; finding no pleasure nor satisfaction in the life of studies,
an inducement which is so great an alleviation to mortals in the work
before them. And, in all these respects, he was quite unlike the very
men whom he singled out, and enlisted in the new service of devotion;
unlike Francis Xavier, who had seen with perfect indifference all
his brothers take to their ancestral profession of arms, or to a
courtier's life, while he himself, with the whole force of an ambitious
soul, ran on successfully and brilliantly in his chosen career, as a
Professor; unlike Laynez and Salmeron, whose extraordinary gifts had
made them Doctors of Philosophy and Divinity, while still, in age,
little more than mere youths; very unlike by nature to the gentle
make of Lefèvre, who began life as a shepherd boy, and ever retained
a pastoral sweetness of character. Unlike all of them, Loyola, a
soldier born and bred, and still true to his profession, discarded
every consideration of taste, comfort, and convenience, in view of one
objective point to be reached: through thirteen years he struggled
towards it; and, when that time of probation was over, he was a marked
man. According to the law, that like attracts like, and like begets
like, he was surrounded by a company of marked men, few if you count
their number, many if you consider the type. His name was widely known,
and favorably so. When he had been paying five times over the price of
his daily bread, by travelling to Belgium, to Rouen, and London, and
collecting there some Spanish florins, the event seemed to show that
he had been but opening the door, here and there and everywhere, for
his colleges and universities in the future; albeit, if they came,
adversaries came too, in proportion. But clouds and storms purify the
air. When they come again, they will still leave the air the clearer
for their coming. If the laws of human conduct are consistent in one
way, they are consistent in another. The disturbance comes, but it does
its work and goes.
M. Cretineau-Joly, the popular French historian in our own times,
speaking of events at a later juncture in the life of Loyola, makes
the following observation: "Loyola," he says, "could apply to himself
admirably well that proverb which says, 'When a Spaniard is driving a
nail into the wall, and his hammer breaks, the Spaniard will drive the
nail in with his head!'" Loyola would have his idea go through at any
cost.
We shall now follow him to Italy and Rome.
In the year 1537, Rome was not quite the luxurious capital which had
fallen under the sword of the Constable of Bourbon. The eternal city,
whose Papal Sovereigns have left it on record from time immemorial,
that in no part of the world were they less recognized as lords than
in their own city, had undergone a purification, which differed, not
substantially, but only in its consequences, from what was called
for, over half the countries of Europe. The riches, the luxury, the
idleness, which elsewhere resulted in a complete change of religious
history for many of the northern nations, had here brought about a
catastrophe which sobered minds. And no longer an exclusive absorption
in elaborate sloth prevented a large portion of the influential element
here from doing honor to the Queen of European civilization, by doing
good to the world.
All roads still led to Rome. Thence too all roads diverged. It was
still true, that whatever commanded this centre could reach out, if
only by the force of prestige, to the uttermost limits of the civilized
domain. Whatever this venerable source of authority chartered to go
on its way, in strength and benediction, had reason to behold, in the
privilege so bestowed, the auspicious opening of a useful career,
intellectual or moral. It is so to-day, though not in a temporal sense.
The charter, or confirmation, or bull, which conveys the recognition
of the Church's Head to a project, a cause, or an institute, bestows
thereupon a moral power which naturally transcends every franchise
in the gift of the most powerful governments. Compared with it, they
are local. And, standing no comparison with it, under a moral aspect,
they do not pretend to such a power as touches the inner conscience of
nations.
When therefore Ignatius turned to the great Rome, he was like the
skilful commander whom he describes in a certain place; he was
possessing himself of the vantage-ground, taking the citadel. It would
be more correct to say, as all history avers, that he meant to defend
that citadel, the See of Rome. He had waited nearly a year at Venice,
to carry out his project of voyaging to Jerusalem. War made that
impossible. Now, in accordance with the express proviso in their vow,
he and his companions repaired to Rome, and offered their services to
the spiritual head of Christendom.
To win approbation for a new religious institute was no easy matter;
then less than ever. The recent occurrences in the North had been due
to this, among other moral causes, that the later history of certain
religious orders, which centuries before had begun one way, latterly
had taken a novel and fatal turn. Still, in spite of criticism and
hostility, chiefly in the high places, Ignatius received at length the
approving word of the Pope; and his Institute was chartered with a bull
of confirmation. Henceforth, the evolution of events belongs to general
history. What concerns us, in this chartering of the plan and Institute
of Ignatius Loyola, is the new character it gave to education, and the
epoch it made in the intellectual history of the world. To explain
this matter, we may follow briefly the deliberations which the Fathers
held, and in the course of which, among other conclusions, they came to
decide upon reëstablishing education.
It was the fourth of May, 1539, a year and a half before their services
were finally accepted by the Pope. Such of the ten members as were then
in Rome occupied themselves, after the labors of the day, in nightly
deliberations, which were protracted during three months. They decreed,
among other things, that they should teach boys and uncultured persons
the necessary points of Christian doctrine, at least once a year, and
for a definite time. This decree obviously is not about that secondary
and superior education of youth, which is our subject; neither does it
concern primary education, of which there is nowhere question in the
Institute of the Jesuits. But, as the Constitution subsequently drawn
up says, "this work of charity, in the Divine service, is more likely
to be consigned to oblivion, and to pass into disuse, than other duties
more specious in their character, as preaching," etc.[16]
Teaching Christian doctrine pertains to the duty of those who have
the ordinary care of souls. No duty of this kind, as belonging to
the ordinary sphere of the Church's clergy, would Ignatius assume
as characteristic of his own Institute, except this one. He was,
indeed, more than ready to throw in his contribution of personal zeal
and charity, for the furtherance of all kinds of benevolence and
beneficence. Personally, at the cost of untiring activity, he sowed,
as Genelli well observes, the first seeds of those ameliorations in
social life, and of those humane institutions, which are so marked a
feature of later ages.[17] He was an original benefactor of humanity
at the turning-point of modern history, which has since become an era
of social organized beneficence. Urban VIII solemnly testifies, that
Ignatius organized homes for orphans, for catechumens, for unprovided
women; that the poor and the sick, that children and the ignorant and
prisoners, were all objects of his personal solicitude.[18] These works
of zeal and charity became, in subsequent years, the specific reasons
of existence for various other communities, which rose in order and in
number. But he did not adopt them as specific in his Institute; nor
did he assume as characteristic anything within the province of the
ordinary parochial clergy, except the teaching of Christian doctrine
to boys and uncultured persons. The rest he attended to, while not
provided for; ready to drop them, when provision should be made for
them.
But he did assume five works, which were outside of the ordinary
lines; and, among them, is the subject of our study, the Education of
Youth.[19] As the selection of all these specialties for his Institute
reveal the commander's eye resting on a field, where many issues were
being fought out, so, in particular, his selection of education as a
specialty betrayed the same masterly thought, in the institutions he
projected, in the scope he proposed, and, above all, in the formation
of his teachers.
There had been, among the Fathers deliberating, a difference of
opinion, with respect to Christian doctrine. Bobadilla had dissented
from making that work the subject of a special vow; and the others
deferred to him. But there was unanimity with regard to every other
topic of deliberation, including this one, "the education of youth,
having colleges in universities."[20]
As defined by Jesuit authors, the education of youth means the
gratuitous teaching of Letters and Science, from almost the first
beginnings of Grammar up to the culminating science of Sacred Theology,
and that for boys and students of every kind, in schools open to
all.[21] Evidently these university men, who were engaged in drawing
up the Institute, considered that, if the greatest Professor's talents
are well spent in the exposition of the gravest doctrines in Theology,
Philosophy, and Science, neither he, nor any one else, is too great
to be a schoolmaster, a tutor, and a father, to the boy passing from
childhood on to the state of manhood,--that boyhood which, as Clement
of Alexandria says, furnishes the very milk of age, and from which the
constitution of the man receives its temper and complexion.
It is requisite here to observe, that there was no such thing in
existence, as State Education. Two reasons may briefly be mentioned for
this, one of them intrinsic to the question, the other an historical
fact. The intrinsic and essential reason was the sacred character of
education, as being an original function, belonging to the primary
relations of parents and child. States, or organized commonwealths,
come only in the third or fourth degree of human society. It was much
later, in that short interval between the extinction of the Society
of Jesus and the outburst of the French Revolution, that new theories
came to be proclaimed, as La Chalotais did openly proclaim them, of
a bald and blank deism in social life, and therefore of secularizing
education. Between deism and secularization the connection was
reasonable. For, if the rights of God went by the board, there was no
reason why the rights of parents and children should remain. All alike,
the persons and "souls of men,"[22] fell back into the condition in
which Christianity had found them; they became chattels of the state,
mannikins of a bureau in peace, "food for powder" in war.
The other reason was an historical fact. For all the purposes of
charity, mercy, and philanthropy, there were powers in existence,
as part of the normal religious life of general Christian society.
They were the same powers that had made Christendom, and had carried
it on so far as the Christian world, the same to which we owe the
civilization of to-day. More than that. As there is not a single work
of charity or mercy, say St. Thomas Aquinas, which may not be made the
object of an institution, religious men or women devoting their lives
as a service to God, in a special service towards their neighbors;
so, in point of fact, there were very few such objects which had not
originated some service of religious self-consecration in their behalf.
Now, as operating on education in particular, the powers in the world
were, as they had been, almost entirely clerical or religious. In
the universities, there were clergymen and Religious. All the great
institutions had the religious cast about them. The old ones have it
still. Traces of it hang about Oxford and Cambridge. The Church founded
them and supervised them. Kings protected them. And the highest outcome
of their schools was Divinity in its widest sense; that is to say, the
triple knowledge of God, and of man as signed with the light of God's
countenance, and of nature as bearing the impress of God's footstep. As
it was in the universities, so, outside too, all pedagogic influence
had rested with religious men.
But no one of all these religious powers was bound by its constitution
to this labor of education, which Loyola now, formally and expressly,
assumed as part of his work. It is at this stage of history, that
education enters into the fundamental plan of a Religious Order. This
is a fact, and an epoch, of prime importance in Pedagogics.
For, inasmuch as education entered thus into the plan of a Religious
Order, it became the vocation of a moral body, which, while
incorporated like other bodies, did not confine itself, like single
universities, to limited circumstances of place; it was a body
diffusive. And so with regard to conditions of time; though all
corporations give an assurance of perpetuity, a diffusive body like
this does more; it multiplies the assurance, in proportion to its own
diffusiveness.
And again, inasmuch as the body which undertook the work of education
was a religious one, bound to poverty, it guaranteed that the
members would endow the work, at their own cost, with that which is
the first, the essential, and most expensive endowment, among all
others,--the labors, the attainments, and the lives of competent men,
all gratuitously given. This endowment, which is so substantial, is
besides so far-reaching, that no other temporal foundation would be
needed, were it not that the necessaries of life, and the apparatus for
their work, are still necessary to living men, even though they live in
personal poverty.
Thus then it was that Ignatius took in charge the secondary and
superior education of the Christian world, as far as his services
should be called for: he threw into the work the endowment of a
Religious Order. This, as the sequel proved, meant the whole revival of
learning. Lord Bacon bears witness to it in a few words, when he says,
that the Jesuits "partly in themselves, and partly by the emulation and
provocation of their example, have much quickened and strengthened the
state of learning."[23] Father Daniel gives some of the details in a
summary way. He says: "The exclusively University régime of the late
centuries replaced, for a notable portion of students, by a scholastic
discipline much more complete; Scholastic Philosophy and Theology
renovated, through the care applied to prevent young men from throwing
themselves too early into the disputes of the schools; in fine,
Literature and Grammar resuming the place they had lost in the twelfth
century, and, over and above that, enjoying the new resources created
for their use by the Renaissance; all this I call a capital fact in the
history of the human mind, and even in the history of the Church."[24]
After the time of Ignatius, other religious congregations, fortified
with their own special means for respective departments of activity,
entered upon the same general field of work. They were the Oratorians,
the Barnabites, the Fathers of the Pious Schools, the Brothers of the
Christian Schools, and others whose names may occur in the course of
this essay. And, for the education of women, inferior and superior
alike, congregations of devoted religious women came into being, and
opened their convents to supply the best and highest culture.
For fear that, in the execution of this plan, and in their other
enterprises of devotion and zeal, any secondary intentions or results,
with regard to power and office, might mar the purity of the work
and defeat the main object, the same men, whose future under the
generalship of such a leader was about to open as one of transcendent
influence in the civilized world, bound themselves by vow never to
accept any dignity or office in the Church. Naturally they should keep
aloof from affairs of state. In fact, it would be incompatible with
their own purposes of literary and scientific competence, to leave
themselves at the mercy of other men's views, and be drafted into posts
outside of the Institute, and be placed in an impossible situation for
working out the specific end intended. It would be suicidal too. Just
when a man was capable of continuing his kind, he would be lost to the
body, and be rendered incapable thereby of propagating his own type
of eminence. Besides, without touching upon the inner reasons of the
spiritual life, which made this resignation of all honors desirable,
it is a fact standing out in clear relief, as history sketches the
marvellous fecundity of an Order requiring such a high level of
attainments, that many of the choicest souls have felt specially
attracted to a kind of life, which at one and the same time satisfied
their ideas of Christian perfection, and cut them off from all the
paths of worldly glory.
And now, to mention in the last place another point, which is equally
important for understanding the educational history of the Order, and
to the general mind is equally obscure with some of those mentioned
already, there was introduced the principle of religious obedience. It
was sanctioned by a unanimous vote.[25] The Fathers had concluded the
first deliberation, whether they should form a society at all; and
they had decided in the affirmative sense.[26] Then the question took
this phase. If they were to found a closely-knitted society, they could
do so only by assuming a strict bond. That was none other than a strict
obedience.
On this head, as on all others that came in order, they began the
deliberation by reasoning, one day, in an adverse sense, all having
prepared their minds to emphasize every objection which they could find
against it. The day following, they argued in a positive sense. The
motives in favor of strict obedience won their unanimous assent. They
were such as these:--
If this congregation undertook the charge of affairs, and the members
were not under orders, no one could be held responsible for an exact
administration of the charge. If the body were not bound together
by obedience, it could not long persevere; yet this was their first
intention, to remain associated in a permanent body. Whence they
concluded that scattered as they would be, and already had been, in
assiduous and diverse labors, they must be united by a strict principle
of subordination, if they were to remain such a body. Another argued
thus: Obedience begets heroism of virtue; since the truly obedient
man is most prompt to execute whatever duty is assigned him by one,
whom, as by a religious act, he regards as being in the place of God,
and signifying to him God's will: wherefore obedience and heroism go
together.
This reasoning seems to be enforced by the history of all great
nations, in the crises of their military and other public affairs. But,
as is clear, the principles of religious obedience are of a different
order; they are on a higher plane; and they reach much farther in time
and eternity, than those of obedience elsewhere.
Here then we discern, sufficiently for present purposes, the meaning
and historical location of this Institute. The members have cut
themselves off from the possession of all private property, by the
voluntary engagement to poverty, and thereby they have prepared the
endowment, on which education will chiefly rest,--that is to say, the
endowment consisting of the men to teach, and their services tendered
gratis. Position and dignity are alike rendered inaccessible by an
express vow of the members professed. Obedience keeps the organization
mobile as a company of trained soldiers. And, if any observant mind,
well acquainted with the course of human affairs, detects in these
principles some reasons for success, normal, habitual, and regular,
in the face of unnumbered obstacles, and of unremitting hostility,
his view will be singularly corroborated when he rises to a plane
higher, and regards the same principles as "religious," carrying with
them the sanction of divine worship; which I should be loath to call
"enthusiasm," much less "fanaticism." These sentiments are never very
prudent, nor enlightened, nor cool; they are either very natural or
are short-lived. A mild fever of fanaticism can scarcely produce
high results; and a high fever of the same can scarcely last three
hundred and fifty years, with perpetuity still threatening. But I
would call this phenomenon, in its origin, religious devotion; in its
consequences, a supernatural efficiency; and, taking it all in all,
that which is called a grace of vocation.
On the 27th day of September, 1540, the Society of Jesus received
from the See of Rome its bull of confirmation, by which it became a
chartered body of the Church. While these pages were being penned, the
27th day of September came by, 1890. It was the anniversary of that
foundation, three hundred and fifty years ago.
CHAPTER IV.
COLLEGES AS PROPOSED IN THE JESUIT CONSTITUTION.
The written rule about the system of education is found in a double
stage of development. The first is that in which Loyola left it: it
gives us the outline. The second is that in which Aquaviva completed
it: this presents us with the finished picture. Likewise in the
historical course of administration out in the world, the development
is twofold. It runs its first course from Loyola to Aquaviva, while
experience was still tentative. Its second course was subsequent to
Aquaviva, when experience, having gathered in its results, had only
to apply the approved form. This was subject thenceforth to none
but incidental changes, as times and places change. And, for these
contingencies, the application remained expressly and always pliable.
Hence, whatever was embodied in the _Ratio Studiorum_, as completed,
had been the result of the most varied experience before legislating,
an experience in the life of the Order extending over fifty-nine years.
Whatever this universal experience had not yielded as a positive
result, or as applicable to all places, was not embodied. Teachers
are different; national customs vary; vernacular tongues are not the
same. With regard to these mutable elements, the maxim of the Order
in studies, in teaching, in conducting colleges, was the same as that
which it proposed to itself in the various other functions of practical
life. An exponent of the Institute states the maxim thus: "One should
have a most exact knowledge of the country, nation, city, manner of
government, manners of the people, states of life, inclinations,
etc.; and this from histories, from intercourse, etc."[27] General
indications alone are given with regard to these variable factors. The
same is done with respect to new sciences, which from the time of the
Renaissance were felt to be approaching and developing. Subsequent
legislation arises to meet them as they come.
While the Fathers were carrying on the same deliberations to which I
referred in the preceding chapter, a resolution was taken to leave the
drafting of a Constitution in the hands of those who should remain in
Italy. Circumscribing the task still more, they decided to appoint
a committee of two, who should address themselves to this work, and
report to the rest. The general assembly when convened would issue the
final decree. Whatever that should be, such of those present as might
then be absent hereby endorsed it beforehand.
Their small number of ten was already reduced to six members present,
the other four being scattered in divers countries. They designated as
a commission Fathers Ignatius and John Coduri. Soon afterwards Coduri
died, and the rest were distributed through the countries of Europe,
Africa, and the far East. During the following years, Laynez, who
was for some time Provincial of Italy, remained more regularly than
the rest within the reach of Ignatius. For this reason, therefore,
besides several others, we may understand why Ignatius paid such a
high tribute to this eminent man, when he said, as Ribadeneira tells
us, that "to no one of the first Fathers did the Society owe more
than to Laynez." Whereupon the historian Sacchini observes: "This, I
believe, he said of Laynez, not only on account of the other eminent
merits of so great a man, and, in particular, for devising or arranging
the system of Colleges; but most especially because the foundations,
on which this Order largely rests, were new, and therefore likely to
excite astonishment; and Laynez, having at command the resources of a
vast erudition, was the person to confirm and commend them to public
opinion. And that this praise was deserved by Laynez will appear less
dubious to any one who considers that other period also, during which
he was himself General; if one reckons how many points, as yet unshaped
and inceptive, in the management of the Society, were reduced to form
and perfected by Laynez; how widely it was propagated and defended by
him."[28]
But to return to Ignatius. After ten years of government, he gathered
together in Rome such of the first Fathers as could be had, besides
representatives from all the Provinces. Forty-seven members were
present. He submitted to them, in general assembly, the Constitution
as now drawn up, and as acted upon in practical life, during those ten
years. The Jesuits present did not exhaust the number of those whose
express opinions were desired. That not a single one of the principal
Fathers might be omitted in the deliberation, he sent copies of the
proposed code of laws to such as were absent. With the suggestions and
approbations received from all these representative men he was not yet
content. Two more years had elapsed when, having embodied the practical
results of an ever-widening experience, he undertook to promulgate
the Constitution, by virtue of the authority vested in him for that
purpose. But he only promulgated the rule; he did not yet exercise his
authority to the full, and impose it as binding. He desired that daily
use might bring out still farther, how it felt under the test of being
tried, amid so many races and nations. Thus 1553 came and went; and he
waited, until the whole matter should be revised and approved once more
by the entire Society in conclave. His death intervened in 1556.
Two years later, representatives from the twelve provinces of the
Order met together, and elected James Laynez as successor to Father
Ignatius. Examining once more this Constitution in all its parts,
receiving the whole of it just as it stood with absolute unanimity,
and with a degree of veneration, they exercised the supreme authority
of the Order, and confirmed this as the written Constitution of the
Society of Jesus. By this act nothing was wanting to it, even from the
side of Papal authority. Yet, that every plenitude of solemnity might
be added to it, they presented it to the Sovereign Pontiff, Paul IV,
who committed the code to four Cardinals for accurate revision. The
commission returned it, without having altered a word, From that time,
whatever general legislation has been added, has entered into the
_corpus juris_, or "Institute" at large, as supplementing or explaining
the "Constitution," which remains the fundamental instrument of the
Institute.
In the Constitution there are ten parts. The fourth is on studies.
In length, this fourth part alone fills up some twenty-eight out of
one hundred and eleven quarto pages in all, as it stands printed in
the latest Roman edition. The legislation about studies is thus seen
to be one-fourth of the whole. It has seventeen chapters. In one of
them, on the Method and Order to be observed in treating the Sciences,
the founder observes that a number of points "will be treated of
separately, in some document approved by the General Superior." This
is the express warrant, contained in the Constitution, for the future
_Ratio Studiorum_, or System of Studies in the Society of Jesus. In
the meantime, he legislates in a more general way. And he begins with
a subject pre-eminently dear to him, the duty of gratitude. Since
corporations are notoriously forgetful, and therefore ungrateful, he
lays down in the first place the permanent duty of the Order towards
benefactors: then he continues with other topics. They stand thus:--
The Founders of Colleges; and Benefactors. The Temporalities of
Colleges. The Students or Scholastics, belonging to the Society.
The Care to be taken of them, during the time of their Studies. The
Learning they are to acquire. The Assistance to be rendered them
in various ways, to ensure their success in studies. The Schools
attached to the Colleges of the Society, i.e. for external Students
not belonging to the Order. The Advancement of Scholastics, belonging
to the Order, in the Various Arts which can make them useful to their
Neighbor. The Withdrawal of them from Studies. The Government of
Colleges. On Admitting the Control of Universities into the Society.
The Sciences to be taught in Universities of the Society. The Method
and Order to be observed in treating the foregoing Sciences. The Books
to be selected as Standards. Courses and Degrees. What concerns Good
Morals. The Officials and Assistants in Universities.
Reserving the pedagogic explanation for the next part of this essay, I
shall here sketch some of the more general ideas running through the
whole legislation of Ignatius of Loyola; and, first, in the present
chapter, I shall begin with his idea of Colleges.
Choosing personal poverty as the basis on which to rest this vast
enterprise of education, he did not therefore mean to carry on
expensive works of zeal, without the means of meeting the expense.
Obviously, it is one thing not to have means, as a personal property,
and therefore not to consume them on self; it is quite another, to have
them and to use them for the good of others. The most self-denying men
can use funds for the benefit of others; and can do so the better, the
more they deny themselves. It was in this sense that, later on in the
century, Cardinal Allen recognized the labors and needs of the English
Jesuit, Robert Parsons, who was the superior and companion of Edmund
Campian, the former a leading star of Oxford, the latter, also an
Oxford man, and, as Lord Burghley called him, "a diamond" of England.
Since Queen Elizabeth was not benign enough to lend the Jesuits a
little building-room on English soil, but preferred to lend them a
halter at Tyburn, Parsons was engaged in founding English houses of
higher studies in France and Spain, at Valladolid, Seville, Lisbon, Eu,
and St. Omer. Cardinal Allen sent a contribution to the constructive
Jesuit, writing, as he did so: "Apostolic men should not only despise
money; they should also have it." And just in this sense was Ignatius
himself a philosopher of no utopian school. So we may examine, with
profit, the material and temporal conditions required in his Institute,
for the establishment of public schools and universities. I shall
endeavor to put these principles together and in order.[29]
First, there should be a location provided with buildings and revenues,
not merely sufficient for the present, but having reference to needful
development.
Secondly, these material conditions include a reference to the
maintenance of the faculty. The means must be provided to meet the
daily necessities of the actual Professors, with adequate assistance of
lay brothers belonging to the Order; also to support several substitute
Professors; besides, to carry on the formation of men, who will take
the places of the present Professors, and so maintain the faculty as
perpetual; moreover, to "provide for some more Scholastic Students of
the Order, seeing that there are so many occupied in the service and
promotion of the common weal." These conditions also include "a church
for conducting spiritual ministrations in the service of others."[30]
Carrying out this idea, Laynez, in 1564, promulgated a rule or "Form
regarding the acceptance of Colleges." He laid down the conditions,
on which alone the Society would take in charge either a Latin
School, requiring a foundation for twenty Jesuits; or a Lyceum, with
fifty persons; or a University, with seventy.[31] Twenty-four years
later, Father Aquaviva drew up a more complete and a final "Form,"
distributing colleges into the three classes, the lowest, the medium,
and the highest. The lowest must have provision made for professing
in the departments of Grammar, Humanities, Rhetoric, Languages, and a
course of Moral Theology;--fifty Jesuits to be supported. The medium
class of colleges consists of those whose founders desire, in addition
to all the foregoing departments, a triennial course of Philosophy,
which begins each year anew; eighty persons to be supported. The
highest class is that of the Studium Generale, or University, in which,
besides the above, there are professed Scholastic Theology, Sacred
Scripture, Hebrew; one hundred and twenty persons to be provided for.
However, the countries of the Indies, as well as the northern countries
of Europe, were not, for the present, brought under this ordinance.[32]
Thirdly, the locality is to be such that, in the ordinary course of
events, there should be no prospective likelihood of a deficiency in
the concourse of students, and those of the right kind. As, on the
side of the Jesuit Province, its educational forces are kept at least
equal to the posts which it has undertaken to fill, so, on the side of
the population, the prospect should correspond to this undertaking,
and give assurance of filling the courses. Hence it was only in larger
cities or towns that Ignatius contemplated the foundation of colleges;
as the distich has it, contrasting the different fields of activity
chosen by different orders in the Church:--
Bernardus valles, montes Benedictus amabat,
Oppida Franciscus, magnas Ignatius urbes.
That is to say, "The monks of Clairvaux loved their valleys; the
Benedictines their mountain-tops; the Franciscans the rural towns;
Ignatius the great cities."
This was the more obviously his idea, as we find him reluctantly
granting permission for ministerial excursions through a country, if
thereby the Fathers' influence in a great city be likely to suffer.
He writes to Father Kessel, the Rector at Cologne, where as yet the
Society had no college of its own, that "under the circumstances he
approves of Kessel's making a short excursion through the province,
provided he and his companions are not long absent from the city, and
do not sacrifice the main thing to what is accessory; but he does not
give them permission to fix their abode out of the town, because places
of less importance afford fewer occasions of gathering the desired
fruit: and, besides, they must not leave so famous a university; their
exertions will be more useful for the good of religion, in forming
scholars to become priests and officers of the State, than all the
pains they may bestow on the small towns and villages."[33] Again,
when in 1547 he had accepted the donation of a church, buildings, and
gardens at Tivoli from Louis Mendosa, he found the place not suited
to the convenience of scholars; it was too near Rome, and yet too
far; subsequently, the institution had to be transferred within the
city."[34]
Fourthly, in addition to these material and local conditions for the
normal conduct of colleges, it is supposed that the external relations
of political society are so far favorable, as at least to tolerate
freedom of action on the part of this educational Institute. Such
toleration was, as a general rule, not only the least that could be
asked for, but the most that was enjoyed.
These are the chief conditions, material and temporal, which Ignatius
requires. They give him a footing to commence his work, and allow the
animating principles of his Institute to come into play. The animating
principles, to which I refer, may be reduced to three brief heads:
First, an intellectual and moral scope, clearly defined, as I shall
explain in the following chapters. Secondly, the distinct intention
to promote rather the interests of public and universal order and
enlightenment, than a mere local good of any city, country, province.
Thirdly, a tendency in the intellectual institution itself to become
rather a great one than a small one, with more degrees of instruction,
more and more eminent Professors, a greater number of the right kind of
scholars.[35]
As to the forces available for all this, and the proportion of colleges
to be manned in perpetuity, the mind of Ignatius was most express,
and became more fixed from day to day. "Cut your cloak according to
your cloth," he said to Oliver Manare, when the latter, on going to
establish a college at Loretto, asked how he should distribute his
men. Ignatius preferred to refuse Princes and Bishops their requests,
excusing himself on the score of limited resources, than compromise the
reputation of the Society, by an ill-advised assent.[36] And he said,
as Polanco his secretary tells us, that "if anything ought to make him
wish to live a longer time, it was that he might be severe in admitting
men into the Order."[37] He did not want to have many members in the
Society; still less, too many engagements.
Having stated thus briefly the material conditions required by
Ignatius, and the animating principles or motives which determined
him, we are in a position to discern more distinctly the central
object of his attention, that for which the material conditions were
provided, that by which the ultimate objects were to be attained. It
was the teaching body, the faculty, the "College," properly so called.
The "College" was the body of educators who were sent to a place.
For them the material conditions did but supply a local habitation,
subsistence, books, apparatus. The very first decree quoted by
Pachtler, from the first general assembly, uses the term "College" in
this sense: "No college is to be _sent_ to any place," etc.[38]
It is only by derivation from this meaning that the term is applied to
the buildings and appointments. It is the body of men that makes the
institution. It is this also which makes the institution perpetual;
and therefore must itself be so; and must have the material conditions
provided for continuing itself, by means of a constant stream of
younger men under formation, who will perpetuate the same work.
Now it would be an ideal conception of practical life to be looking for
virtuous and erudite men, _viri boni simul et eruditi_, as Ignatius
calls them, ever pouring into the Order, straight from the chairs of
universities, from benefices, and posts of leisured ease; and, armed
already with the full equipment of intellectual and moral endowments,
presenting themselves and their services thenceforth, under the title
of absolute poverty, to cities, provinces, and countries, which never
had anything to do with their formation. "These men," says Ignatius,
"are found to be few in number, and of these few the majority would
prefer to rest, after so many labors already undergone. We apprehend
that it will be difficult for this Society to grow, on the mere
strength of those who are already both good and accomplished, _boni
simul ac literati_; and this for two reasons, the great labors which
this manner of life imposes, and the great self-abnegation needed.
Therefore, ... another way has seemed good to adopt, that of admitting
young men, who, by their good lives and their talents afford us
ground to hope that they will grow up into virtuous and learned men,
_in probos simul ac doctos viros_; of admitting also colleges, on
those conditions which are expressed in the Apostolic briefs, whether
these colleges be within universities, or independent: and, if within
universities, whether these institutions themselves are committed to
the care of the Society, or not.... Wherefore, we shall first speak of
the colleges; then of the universities," etc.[39]
There were never wanting men of the former kind, already accomplished
and of tried virtue, who offered themselves for this service of a
lifetime. A noteworthy testimony to their numbers may be found in a
dispute with Philip II of Spain, who objected to any moneys leaving the
Jesuit Provinces of his realm, for the service and maintenance of the
great central college in Rome; and this, notwithstanding the fact that
Spanish members were being maintained and formed there. The general
assembly, gathered in Rome, 1565, discussed the difficulty; and one
of the circumstances mentioned was this: "The Provinces of Spain did
not need the assistance of the Roman College as much as others; since
many entered the Society, already mature in age and accomplished in
learning, so that they could be employed at once in public positions;
nor had they to be taught, but they were able to teach others.... It
was finally recommended that, to lessen the burden of expense on the
Roman College, and in order that fewer scholastics need be called to
Rome, each Province, as soon as convenient, should organize a general
university; especially as there was already a sufficiency of students
(members of the Order) and, besides, of Professors."[40] This was only
twenty-six years after the foundation of the Society.
But, even with all the advantages accruing from these large contingents
of learned men already formed, the idea of Ignatius, to train young men
within the Order, was more practical for the formation of faculties;
and it carried the general efficiency much further. Powerful and
effective as the most pronounced personalities may be, when each
striking character goes forward into the open field of battle and leads
the way, they are not more powerful than when also qualified to move in
the steady and regular march of the trained forces. Father Montmorency,
referring to the strength which comes of uniformity, sociability, and
harmony, said, _Homo unus, homo nullus_, "A man alone is as good as no
man at all."
Ignatius then, having perpetuity and development in view, and therefore
the steady and trained development of talented and virtuous young
men, would not accept foundations, except on the basis of endowment,
just described. He had not learned in vain the lessons of Barcelona,
Alcalà, Salamanca, and Paris. How wisely he acted is shown by the
troubles, which later legislation reveals, upon this very point of
inadequately endowed colleges. The questions of ill-endowed colleges,
small colleges, too many colleges for the forces of a Province, are
all excellently discussed and settled in the general assembly, which,
in 1565, elected Francis Borgia to succeed Laynez. And "on the same
day," says Sacchini, "the Fathers set the example of observing the
decree which they had just made, with the same degree of severity
with which they had made it; for, the letters of several Bishops and
municipalities being read, in which foundations for five colleges were
offered, they decided that no one of them should be admitted; and,
besides, they gave the new General full authority to dissolve certain
colleges already existing."[41] In a similar vein, this was the theme
of an elegant apology delivered before King Stephen by Father Campano,
Provincial of Poland, who requested the King to desist from urging on
the Society the multiplication of its institutions.[42]
A tuition-fee paid by the scholar to the Professor, or to the
institution, was nowhere contemplated. At Dijon, where Bossuet was
afterwards a pupil, the magistrates when offering a college, in 1603,
desired to supplement an inadequate endowment, by requiring a fee
from the students. In the name of the Order, Father Coton, the King's
confessor, remonstrated; and Henri IV himself wrote to the Parliament
of Bourgogne, desiring another arrangement to be made; which was
accordingly done.[43] The foundation was always to be received as a
gratuitous donation, for which the Order owed permanent gratitude.
In turn, thenceforward, it gave gratuitously, and allowed of no
recompense. "No obligations or conditions are to be admitted that would
impair the integrity of our principle, which is: To give gratuitously,
what we have received gratis."[44]
Thus then the faculty, a competent and a permanent one, is installed.
It is not one conspicuous for leisured ease. Professors and Scholastics
alike are working for a purpose. They are a "college," in the sense
of the Society of Jesus. Yet, if there is not leisured ease, but a
life of work and self-denial, the system has been found to result in
all the consequences which may be looked for in literary "ease with
dignity"; and perhaps in more, since no one does more, than he who,
in his own line, has as much as he can well do, and do well. System
and method, the great means for making time manifold, become so
absolutely necessary; and the singleness of intention in a religious
life intensifies results. Then, after the general formation has been
bestowed, in the consecutive higher studies of seven or nine years
within the Order, the plan of Ignatius leaves open to individual
talents the whole field of specialties, in Science and Literature.
Hence, to speak of our own day, Secchi or Perry devotes himself to
astronomy, Garucci to archæology, Strassmeyer to Oriental inscriptions,
the De Backers and Sommervogel to bibliography, others to philology,
mathematics, and the natural sciences; while five hundred and more
writers follow the lines of their own inclinations, either for some
directly useful purpose, or because their pursuit is in itself liberal.
CHAPTER V.
COLLEGES FOUNDED AND ENDOWED.
What was the response of the Christian world, when it had become alive
to the nature of this new power in its midst, and to the proposal
which the new power made? What did the answer come to, in the way of
providing temporalities, necessary and sufficient? Strange enough!
Loyola's own short official lifetime of fifteen years does not appear
to have been too short, for the purpose of awakening the world with his
idea; which, like a two-edged sword of his own make, not only aroused
the keenest opposition at every thrust, and at his every onward step,
but opened numberless resources in the apostolic, the charitable, and
educational reserves of human nature.
This man, who had inserted in the authentic formula and charter of his
Institute that watchword of his movements, "Defence and Advance"; who
had taken the whole world for the field of his operations, in defending
and advancing; this cavalier of a new military type, who had only to
show himself upon the field to gather around him the flower of youth as
well as mature age, from college and university, from doctor's chair
and prince's throne, left behind him, as the work of fifteen years from
the foundation of the Order, about one hundred colleges and houses,
distributed into twelve Provinces. The territorial divisions were
named, after their chief centres, the Provinces of Portugal, Castile,
Andalusia, Aragon, Italy, Naples, Sicily, Upper Germany, Lower Germany,
France, Brazil, and the East Indies. Individuals under his orders had
overrun Ireland, penetrated into Scotland, into Congo, Abyssinia, and
Ethiopia. The East Indies, first traversed by Francis Xavier either
on foot, or in unseaworthy vessels, signified the whole stretch of
countries from Goa and Ceylon on the West, to Malacca, Japan, and the
coast of China on the East. Some of this activity might be credited to
apostolic zeal alone, were it not that, wherever the leaders advanced
into the heart of a new country, it was always with the purpose, and
generally with the result, that the country was to be occupied with
educational institutions. De Backer notes this in another connection,
when, in the preface to his great work of bibliography, "The Library
of Writers of the Company of Jesus," he says: "Wherever a Jesuit set
his foot, wherever there was founded a house, a college, a mission,
there too arose apostles of another class, who labored, who taught, who
wrote."[45]
What this means, with regard to its strategic value, there is no need
of our being told. The Duke of Parma, writing, in 1580, from the seat
of war in the Netherlands to Philip II of Spain, said: "Your Majesty
desired that I should build a citadel in Maestricht; I thought that a
college of the Jesuits would be a fortress more likely to protect the
inhabitants against the enemies of the Altar and the Throne. I have
built it."[46]
Sixty years later, after the long generalship of Aquaviva, who during
34 years governed the Order with the ability of another Ignatius, the
number of colleges was 372. Well might his immediate successor, Mutius
Vitelleschi, writing to the whole Society about the Education of Youth,
speak of the "beautiful and precious mass of gold, which we have in our
hands to form and finish."[47]
One hundred and fifty years after the death of Ignatius, the collegiate
and university houses of education numbered 769. Two hundred years
after the same date, when the Order was on the verge of universal
suppression, under the action of University men, Parliamentarians,
Jansenists, Philosophers, and of that new movement which was preparing
the Revolution, the Jesuit educational institutions stood at the
figure, 728. The colleges covered almost the whole world, distributed
into 39 Provinces, besides 172 Missions in the less organized regions
of the globe.[48]
If we look at these 700 institutions of secondary and superior
education, under the aspect of their constitution, that is to say,
of their scope, their system, the supreme legislative and executive
power which characterized them, we find that they were not so much a
plurality of institutions, as a single one. Take the 92 colleges of
France alone.[49] In one sense, these may be considered as less united
than the 50 colleges of the Paris University, for the Paris University
was in one quarter of a city, which offers a material unity; these,
on the contrary, were spread over the whole of France, presenting the
characteristics of "national" education; just as the 700 were over
the whole world, a cosmopolitan system. But, regarded in their formal
and essential bond, they were vastly more of a unit, as an identical
educational power, than any faculty existing. No faculty, whether
at Paris or Salamanca, Rome or Oxford, ever possessed that control
over its 50, 20, or even 8 colleges, which each Provincial Superior
exercised over his 10, 20, or 30, and the General over more than 700,
with 22,126 members in the Order. In the one General lay the power
of an active headship; from him the facultative power of conferring
degrees emanated; and he had one system of studies and discipline in
his charge to administer, with a latitude of discretion according to
times, places, and circumstances.
As to the numbers of students, and the general estimate to be formed
of them, I will record such data as fall under the eye, while passing
rapidly over the literature of the subject.
In Rome, the 20 colleges attending the classes of the Roman College
numbered, in 1584, 2108 students. Father Argento, in his apology to
the States at Klausenburg, in 1607, mentions that the schools in
Transylvania were frequented by the flower of the nobility; and, in
his "History of the Affairs in Poland," dedicated to Sigismund III, he
attests that from 8000 to 10,000 youths, chiefly of the nobility and
gentry, frequented the gymnasia of the Order in Poland. At Rouen, in
France, there were regularly 2000. At La Flèche there were 1700 during
a century; 300 being boarders, the other 1400 finding accommodation
in the village, but always remaining under the supervision of the
faculty. Throughout the seventeenth century, the numbers at the
College of Louis-le-Grand, in Paris, varied between 2000, 1827, and
3000; including, in the latter number, 550 boarders. In 1627, only a
few years after the restoration of the Society by Henri IV, the one
Province of Paris had, in its 14 colleges, 13,195 students; which
would give an average of nearly 1000 to a college. Cologne almost
began with 800 students,--its roll in 1558. Dilingen in 1607 had 760;
in its _convictus_, 110 of the boarders were Religious, besides other
Ecclesiastics; the next year, out of 250 _convictores_ or boarders,
118 were Religious of various Orders, the secular Priesthood being
represented among the students generally. At Utrecht, during the first
century of the Order's existence, there were 1000 scholars; at Antwerp
and Brussels each, 600; in most of the Belgian colleges, 300. As to
Spain and Italy, which first saw the Society rise in their midst, and
expand with immense vigor all over them, I consider it superfluous to
dwell particularly upon them.
In many of the capitals and important centres throughout Europe, there
were separate colleges for nobles. Elsewhere the nobility were mixed
with the rest; thus 400 nobles and more were attending the Jesuit
schools in Paris. It was studiously aimed at by the Order to eliminate,
in matters of education, all distinguishing marks or privileges. Thus
Father Buys endeavors, in 1610, to reduce the practice at Dilingen to
the custom of the other colleges in the upper German Province.[50]
Most of the Papal Seminaries founded by Gregory XIII, at Vienna,
Dilingen, Fulda, Prague, Gratz, Olmütz, Wilna, as well as in Japan and
other countries, were put under the direction of the Society; as Pius
IV did with his Roman Seminary; and St. Charles Borromeo with that of
Milan.
Not knowing what the absolute average really was in these 700
institutions, we may still form some idea of what the sum total of
students must have been at its lowest figure. For this purpose, we can
take an average which seems about the lowest possible. I have not met
with any distinct mention of a college having less than 300 scholars.
There are indeed frequent complaints in the general assemblies,
regarding what are denounced as "small" colleges. However, it seems
clear from numerous indications, as, for instance, from the Encyclical
letter of the General Paul Oliva,[51] that these colleges were called
small, not primarily on account of an insufficient number of students,
but because of insufficient foundations, which did not support the
Professors actually employed. A document for the Rectors notes
that "thus far almost all the colleges, even such as have received
endowments, suffer want regularly, and have frequently to borrow
money."[52]
Hence we may be allowed to take, as a tentative average, 300 students
to a college. At once, we rise to a sum total of more than 200,000
students in these collegiate and university grades, all being formed
at a given date under one system of studies and of government,
intellectual and moral.
If statistics, in that nicely tabulated form which delights modern
bureaus, have failed us as we run over the whole world to decipher
the indications, there is yet another view which we may catch of the
same subject, and one that is equally valuable. It is the multitude
of nations into which this educational growth ramified. At Goa, in
Hindustan, the seminary, which was inferior to none in Europe, had for
its students, Brahmins, Persians, Arabians, Ethiopians, Armenians,
Chaldeans, Malabari, Cananorii, Guzarates, Dacanii, and others from the
countries beyond the Ganges. Japan had its colleges at Funai, Arima,
Anzuchzana, and Nangasaki. China had a college at Macao; and later
on many more, reaching into the interior, where the Fathers became
the highest mandarins in the service of the Emperor, and built his
observatory. Towards the close of the eighteenth century a large number
of colleges were flourishing in Central and South America. All of these
disappeared, when the Order was suppressed. The youth, who could
afford to obtain the education needed, went over to Europe, whence they
returned, a generation quite different from what had been known of
before. They returned with the principles of the Revolution. And the
whole history of Central and South America has changed, from that date
onwards, into a series of revolutions, which are the standing marvel of
political scientists to our day.
To consult a graphic representation of how this educational Order
looked on the map of the world, one may glance into the ninth volume
of the _Monumenta Germaniæ Pædagogica_. There Father Pachtler, as in
his other volumes of the series, sketches only the German "Assistency"
of the Society of Jesus. The five Assistencies of the Order served
the purposes of government, by grouping many Provinces together
into larger divisions. In 1725, the German Assistency comprised
nine out of thirty-two Provinces. The nine in question are those of
Flandro-Belgium, French Belgium, the Lower Rhine, the Upper Rhine,
Upper Germany, Bohemia, Austria, Poland, Lithuania. The map at the end
of Father Pachtler's volume represents all this country, with the towns
marked differently, according as they contained either universities of
the Order, or colleges, or _convictus_, that is, boarding-colleges, or
seminaries, or residences. The chronological order of their rise is
presented in a table at the beginning of the same volume, with a note
to indicate more in particular the grade or amplitude of each, as being
a _Studium Generale_, otherwise called University or Academy, a College
or a Gymnasium, as well as the annexes of each, in the shape of one or
more _convictus_, one or more Episcopal or Papal Seminaries, a college
of nobles, a _convictus_ for poor scholars. By means of this map, a
graphic presentation is afforded of one Assistency, from which, by a
proper extension, the whole world may be portrayed to the imagination.
In 1750, within the limits of this map, there were 217 colleges, 55
seminaries, 73 residences, 24 novitiates, 160 missions, 6 professed
houses.[53]
The universities here spoken of, otherwise called _Studia Generalia_,
or Academies, are quite typical, a special Jesuit development of the
mediæval style. An exact and official form, drawn up for the University
of Gratz, may be found in the same _Monumenta_.[54] As Father Pachtler
remarks, it shows at a glance the inner working of a Jesuit university,
and the general system prevailing over the whole Society. He entitles
the document: "_Ordnung einer ausschlieschlich von Jesuiten geleiteten
Universität_," or "_Einer selbständige Universität, 1658_." The Latin
title is: "_Forma et Ratio Gubernandi Academias et Studia Generalia S.
J._" It was the compilation of Father John Argento.
Upon this basis of the amount of work done, as well as its intrinsic
character, shown by the results, I was going to draw some inferences
with regard to the amount of the temporal endowments, which must have
been required to support such a vast organization, and must have been
vested in the Order by the Christian world. One might compare the
work done with what Oxford accomplishes; and, seeing that the latter
university supplies the facilities for higher education, and that far
from gratuitously, to only a couple of thousands among the nobility
and gentry, then, since it spends upon this an annual revenue of
$2,500,000, how much would be required to conduct the education of a
quarter of a million of students? Our arithmetic would feel oppressed
by the calculation.
But the calculation is not necessary. It is quite evident that
religious poverty gave the key to the situation,--poverty,
self-abnegation, the resignation of all temporal considerations in
life, by men who had no families to provide for, no station to acquire;
who had themselves given up every station, from that of the clerical
benefice, or the liberal and martial careers, to ducal coronets,
princedoms, and even royalty; men therefore, who were bestowing with
themselves, and in themselves, the essential endowment of education
upon the world, and who needed only to have that supplemented with
the few temporal necessities still remaining. And the conclusion to
be drawn seems to be this. The Christian world, whether ruler or
people, republic or municipality, was making a safe and lucrative
investment, whether at home or abroad, in the midst of civilization
or of barbarism, when it consigned the absolute use of sufficient
temporalities to a world-wide faculty, inspired by the sentiment of
religious devotion.
For what is the object of any religious society whatsoever? It is to
complete in each of its members the duties of the man, the citizen
and the Christian, with other duties called "religious," which,
correlative with the former, are nevertheless distinct from them. They
are duties which presuppose the moral virtues, the civil and Christian
virtues, and tend to complete them with the highest qualities to which
perfect Christianity aspires, those of self-devotion and religious
self-consecration.
Hence the experiences, making a drama and a tragedy, when the Society
abruptly disappeared. Supposing even that enough of competent men, with
all personal requirements, could have been found to fill the void, what
of their salaries and support? Take an instance. The revenues, which
at Bourges had been enough for the support of thirty Jesuits, were
found, after the Suppression of the Order, not to afford an adequate
compensation for ten secular Professors.[55] Frederic II of Prussia,
sending an agent to negotiate with Pius VI about retaining the Order in
his States, expresses himself thus in a letter to Voltaire: "The surest
means (to perpetuate a series of Professors) is to preserve a seminary
of men destined to teach. In studying the sciences, they fit themselves
for the office of instructing. It would be no easy task to fill
instantaneously a vacancy left by a skilful professor. If the education
of ordinary citizens be necessary, the training up of instructors must
be no less so." And then, coming to the point before us, the King
continues: "Besides, there are reasons of economy for preferring such
a body of men to mere secular individuals. The professor taken from
the latter class will cost more, because he has a greater number of
wants. It is needless to remark that the property of the Jesuits would
not be sufficient to remunerate their successors; and that revenues,
which pass over to the administration of the government, always suffer
diminution."[56] Speaking of Ganganelli, Pope Clement XIII, who was
under pressure from various quarters to make him suppress the Order,
Frederic writes to Voltaire in 1770: "For my own part, I have no
reason to complain of him; he leaves me my dear Jesuits, whom they are
persecuting everywhere. I will save the precious seed, to give some of
it, one day, to those who should wish to cultivate a plant so rare."[57]
The testimony of documents is uniform upon the poverty of these men,
whom Protestant historians like Grotius, Robertson, and others marvel
at, for the authority they possessed in the world, for the purity of
their lives, their success in teaching, and their art of commanding
with wisdom as they themselves obeyed with fidelity. Their life was
one of straitened circumstances and self-abnegation. We may see it
illustrated in Dilingen.[58] Or again, at the great royal college,
founded by Henri IV at La Flèche, where three hundred boarders were
supposed to be paying their own expenses, as _pensionnaires_, we
find Louis XIII issuing a royal decree that his magistrates are to
prosecute "les rétardataires et les récalcitrants par toutes les voyes
raisonnables," persons who did not pay the expenses of their own
children, but left that interesting occupation to the college. With
all that, says Rochemonteix, nothing came of it, neither of the royal
injunctions, nor of judicial suits; things went on the same way, "the
parents paying badly, and the treasurers lamenting."[59]
I will close this chapter with one case, because it serves to emphasize
a particular sequel of the Suppression; that is, the revival of a
tuition-fee. A recent author, writing in 1890, tells the history of
the College of Saint-Yves at Vannes, in Brittany. He sums up its
revenues at 6000 livres. Placed in the hands of the Order, this
college, in 1636, that is, seven years after the Society had assumed
charge, directed 400 students; later on, 900; and then 1200. In 1762,
the faculty consisted of thirteen members, besides the four Fathers
engaged in the adjoining house of retreats. All rendered various
services, as is usual in a college of Jesuit instructors. To these
we must add the requisite complement of the faculty, at least half
as many more lay assistants, belonging to the Order, and to the same
local community. Here then are twenty-two at the least, subsisting
on 6000 livres a year; and meanwhile providing their house, their
library, their physical cabinet, which was fully fitted up with all
necessary instruments, and their observatory.[60] "The moment after
the Suppression," he goes on to say, "it was quite another affair! Ten
secular professors cost 11,000 livres for their salaries alone!" The
author gives the list of their salaries. "To reëstablish equilibrium,
one of the first acts of the parliament was to exact from each scholar
a tuition-fee of twelve livres; and yet they complained, they could not
make ends meet."
Observe, a tuition-fee! On the day after the Suppression, they begin
to undo the very work, which, two hundred and thirty years before, the
Order had begun to do at its birth, spreading education gratuitously,
without drawing on pupils, or drawing on the public treasury.
Well might the General Vincent Caraffa say, in the time of the Thirty
Years' War, "We abound rather in men than in revenues." And he says
so, in the same breath and in the same sentence, in which he is asking
Priests to offer themselves for life to the work of teaching the lower
branches, a work which he calls laborious, in times which he specifies
as disastrous, and in circumstances which he describes as having no
provision made for the means of living.[61]
This brief sketch will go to show how the Christian world did, indeed,
meet the proposal of the Order, and found seven hundred colleges.
But it also shows how the Order endowed the world, and had even to
make good, with its personal heroism, the defects in many of the
foundations.
CHAPTER VI.
THE INTELLECTUAL SCOPE AND METHOD PROPOSED.
As the second part of this book is intended to be a pedagogic analysis
of the mental culture imparted, I need not sketch here, save in a
general way, the intellectual scope proposed by Ignatius of Loyola, and
the method which he originated. Both scope and method vary somewhat,
according as the students contemplated are respectively external to the
Order, or members of it. The latter are to be qualified for becoming
future Professors, even though, in point of fact, only a certain
proportion of them become so.
Studious youth in general, including Ecclesiastics and Religious of
the various Orders, are considered by Ignatius as distributed amid two
kinds of educational institutions. One of these he calls the Public
School; the other, a University. The first is that which extends, in
its courses, from the rudiments of literature up to the lower level
of university education. He says: "Where it can conveniently be done,
let Public Schools be opened, at least in the departments of Humane
Letters."[62] In a note, he explains that Moral Theology may be treated
in a gymnasium of this kind. Father Aquaviva, in 1588, puts this
kind of school down as the lowest of three ranks of colleges; and
sums up the courses as being those of Grammar, Humanities, Rhetoric,
Languages, and Moral Theology.[63] He also explains why the lowest
Jesuit curriculum must fill these requirements, "in order that the
Society be not defrauded of the end it has in view, which is, to carry
the students on at least as far as mediocrity in learning, so that they
may go forth into their respective vocations, Ecclesiastics to their
ministry, lay students to their own work in life, qualified in some
degree with a sufficiency of literary culture."[64] This curriculum
served also the purpose of those, who, while members of the Order,
were for some reason dispensed from the full course of studies.[65] If
any grades are wanting in a college, it must be the lower ones which
are omitted, the higher being retained.[66] Ignatius goes on to limit
the courses in a gymnasium of this kind: "Let not higher sciences be
treated here; but, to pursue them, the students who have made due
progress in literature are to be sent from these colleges to the
universities.[67]
Passing on to universities of the Order, he defines for their scope,
first, in behalf of those who are to be Ecclesiastics, Scholastic
Theology, Holy Scripture, and Positive Theology; secondly, for all
students, Humane Letters, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and other such
languages as Chaldaic, Arabic, and Indian, subject to the demands of
necessity or utility; moreover, Logic, Physics, Metaphysics, Moral
Philosophy, and Mathematics. All these departments are to be provided
for by Professors of the Order. If the departments of Civil Law and
Medicine are added, they will be conducted by Professors not of the
Society.[68]
As to the Scholastic members of the Society, their mental culture in
the Order begins, of course, where their collegiate curriculum had
closed, that is, at the end of their classical course. Their studies
henceforth are defined by two objects; one, that of professing, as
formed Jesuits in the future, what they are studying now; the other,
that of being differentiated, according to talent and circumstance,
into preachers, writers, directors of consciences, or managers of
affairs.
In view of this two-fold object, all the examinations, arranged for
members of the Order in the advanced courses, are regulated by one
standard, that the Jesuit Scholastics must be found competent, at each
stage, to teach the course in which they are being tested. Accordingly,
they review their previous literary acquirements, in all the lines
which the Society regularly professes; then, during three years, they
apply exclusively to Philosophy and Natural Sciences; and, four years
more, to Divinity and allied Sciences.[69]
This protracted course, therefore, as given more in detail by the
subsequent _Ratio_, consists of Poetry, Rhetoric, and Literature;
Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry; Logic, Ontology, Cosmology,
Psychology, and Natural Theology; Ethics, Natural, Social and Public
Right, Moral Theology, Canon Law, Ecclesiastical History, Scholastic
Theology, Hebrew, Sacred Scripture. The courses are to be pursued
either in the same classes which external students attend, or, in their
own university classes, when a general house of studies is formed as a
"Scholasticate." In both cases, they have Seminary exercises of their
own, beyond what is required in the most condensed university courses.
Those whom health and excellence have approved at every step are
ordinarily to be withdrawn from studies, "when the course of Arts has
been finished, and when four years have been spent on Theology."[70]
Specialties are to be cultivated.[71] Subsequent legislation places
these specialties in the interval between the Arts and Theology; and,
again, after the latter.
This, in brief, is the practical idea of the Professorial Seminaries,
philological, philosophical, scientific, and theological, through
which the stream of future Professors is continually passing. Each
one is subject, at every stage, to examination tests which include
the most distinct reference to professorial capacity. The technical
standard in the examinations is that of "surpassing mediocrity," which
term is accurately defined, as we shall see later, when analyzing the
_Ratio_.[72]
While the depleted ranks of the professorial body are thus regularly
supplied, it is clear that more services remain available in the
Order at large, than the single purpose of education would at any time
require. But this only serves the wider scope which the Society has in
view, much wider than education taken alone. And Ignatius makes mention
of this expressly when he says, that the Scholastic students "may never
come to profess the learning which they have acquired"; still "they are
to consider that labor of studies as a work of great merit in the sight
of God."[73]
So much for the widest and highest intellectual objects aimed at in
these studies. Looking down now to its lowest limit, we perceive that
education, as imparted by the Society to the external world, is to
begin not below "the rudiments of grammar, in which boys must already
be versed; they must know how to read and write; nor is any allowance
to be made in favor of any one, whatever be his condition of life;
but those who press these petitions upon us are to be answered, that
we are not permitted" to teach the elements. This is the ordinance
of Aquaviva, in 1592, and he simply refers to the Constitution.[74]
He also notes, in the same document, that the new _Ratio Studiorum_
elevates every grade, as it stood at that date, one year higher than
it had been before. The document is from the German archives. Pachtler
observes that most of the Latin schools, particularly in Protestant
Germany, took children up from the alphabet.[75] The effect of the
Jesuit system was that of a constant upward trend to what was higher,
more systematic, and complete.
This brings us to the question of method. Here a number of elements
occur, some of them essential, many of them subordinate. These latter,
at least, were the products of ingenuity and industry on the part of
the teaching body, and were productive of industry and life on the
part of scholars. To illustrate the whole matter, I will refer to
authors who were addressing the world, soon after the Society had taken
its stand as an educational power, and when its institutions were
conspicuous to the eyes of all.
First comes classification, which was an essential feature of the
Jesuit system. Ribadeneira, the intimate friend of Ignatius, when
writing the life of Loyola, in the year 1584, and describing the work
of the Order, now forty-fours years old, observes: "Elsewhere one
Professor has many grades of scholars before him; he addresses himself
at one and the same time to scholars who are at the bottom, midway, and
at the top; and he can scarcely meet the demands of each. But, in the
Society, we distinguish one rank of scholars from another, dividing
them into their own classes and orders; and separate Professors are
placed over each."[76]
The division of classes, a thing so natural to us, was in those times
a novelty. There were practically only two degrees of teaching; one
superior, embracing Theology, Law, and Medicine; the other preparatory.
The preparatory instruction had already been tending towards the
later system of grading; the term "class" was an expression of the
Renaissance. Father Rochemonteix, speaking of the Paris University,
notes that the first authentic act, in which the term is used, dates
from 1539.[77] From 1535, the division of studies, by means of classes,
was already being accomplished. Still there was no definite number
of grades. The study of literary models was defective. Grammar was
beclouded with the subtleties of dialectics, to the great prejudice
of written composition, as well as of the reading and imitation of
models.[78]
Now it will be observed that Ignatius was studying in the University of
Paris from 1528 to 1535; and his companions remained till 1536. By the
time he published the Constitution as a rule of guidance, he had become
surrounded by men, who were not merely graduates of universities, but
had been Doctors, Professors, and Rectors in Portugal, Spain, France,
Italy, Belgium, Germany. One consequence was that Ignatius, from the
very beginning, formulated a complete system of graded classes. He
relegated dialectics to its proper field, Philosophy and Theology. And,
bringing into prominence the reading of authors, and the practice of
style in imitation of the best models, he defined a method. This, after
being elaborated during forty years, was then found to be not only new,
but complete, and good for centuries to come. It arranged courses in a
series, having reference to one another; it coördinated definite stages
of the courses with definite matter to be seen; and, in the lower
branches it distributed the students, with their respective portions
of the matter, into five grades, classifying precepts, authors, and
exercises, as proportioned to each successive grade. Nothing more
familiar to ourselves now; nothing newer to the world then! This was
the _Ratio Studiorum_.
The grades of the gymnasium may include several divisions, according
to the number of students; but the grading itself remains fixed, and
leaves no element, either of actual culture, or of future developments,
unprovided for, or without a location. Nor do these grades mean five
years. They mean a work to be done in each grade, before the next
is taken up. On this, the mind of Ignatius was most explicit. As an
almost universal rule, they never mean less than five years. And, for
one of them, the grade of Rhetoric, in which all literary perfection
is to be acquired, the system contemplates two and even three years.
In this point, too, we may note a characteristic view of Ignatius.
It is that the longer term, whenever provided, whenever prescribed,
urged, and insisted upon, is always for the talented student, the one
who is to become eminent. To use his own words, when laying down the
rules in this matter for the Rector of a University, his full idea
will be carried out, when "those who are of the proper age, and have
the aptitude of genius, endeavor to succeed in every branch and to be
_conspicuous therein_."[79]
To enumerate now some of the subordinate elements in the Jesuit method,
I will quote from the same author, Ribadeneira. He says, speaking of
young scholars: "Many means are devised, and exercises employed, to
stimulate the minds of the young--assiduous disputation, various trials
of genius, prizes offered for excellence in talent and industry. These
prerogatives and testimonies of virtue vehemently arouse the minds of
students, awake them even when sleeping, and, when they are aroused and
are running on with a good will, impel them and spur them on faster.
For, as penalty and disgrace bridle the will and check it from pursuing
evil, so honor and praise quicken the sense wonderfully, to attain the
dignity and glory of virtue." He quotes Cicero and Quintilian to the
same effect.[80]
This was not to develop a false self-love in young hearts; which
would have been little to the purpose with religious teachers. "Let
them root out from themselves, in every possible way, self-love and
the craving for vain glory," says the oldest code of school rules
in the Society, probably from the pen of Father Peter Canisius
himself.[81] What is appealed to, is the spirit of emulation, and
that by a world of industries; which, disguising the aridity of
the work to be gone through, spurs young students on to excellence
in whatever they undertake, and rewards the development of natural
energies with the natural luxury of confessedly doing well. In the
dry course of virtue and learning, satisfaction of this kind is not
excited in the young, without a sign, a token, a badge, a prize. Then
they feel happy in having done well, however little they enjoyed the
labor before. Honorable distinctions well managed, sometimes a share
in the unimportant direction of the class, brilliancy of success in
single combat on the field of knowledge, of memory, or of intellectual
self-reliance, the ordered discrimination of habitual merit, all
these means and many others keep the little army in a condition of
mental activity, and sometimes of suspense; "and if not all are
victorious, all at least have traversed the strengthening probation of
struggle."[82]
In all the courses of Belles-lettres, Rhetoric, Philosophy, and
Theology, the institutions called "Academies" gather into select
bodies the most talented and exemplary of the students. The young
_littérateurs_, or philosophers, having their own officials, special
reunions, and archives, hold their public sessions in presence of the
other students, the Masters, and illustrious personages invited for the
occasion. In their poems, speeches, dialogues, they discuss, declaim,
and rise to great thoughts, and to the conception of great deeds.
Civil discords are not the subject of their debates, but the glories
of their native country, its success in arms, all that is congenial
to the young mind and fosters the sentiment of love of country. Among
the students of Rhetoric, forensic debates and judicial trials are
organized; "and when the advocates of both sides have pleaded their
cause in one or two sessions of the court, then," says a document I
am quoting from, dated 1580, "the judge, who has been elected for the
purpose, will pronounce his judgment in an oration of his own; this
will be the brilliant performance; and, to hear it, friends will be
invited, and the Doctors of the University and all the students will be
in attendance."[83] In the programme for the distribution of rewards,
there is described an interesting element, _puer lepidus_, "a bright
young lad," and what he is to do and how he is to bring out the name of
the victor, "whereupon the music will strike up a sweet symphony."[84]
At another time, a set of published theses are defended against all
comers by some philosopher or theologian. And, while games and manly
exercises outside develop physical strength, gentility of demeanor and
elegance of deportment have the stage at their service inside, for the
exhibition of refined manners.
In all this, princes and nobles, future men of letters and of action,
are mingling in daily life, in contest and emulation, with sons of
the simplest burghers. Descartes[85] notes these points sagaciously,
when he recommends to a friend the College of La Flèche: "Young people
are there," he says, "from all parts of France; there is a mingling
of characters; their mutual intercourse effects almost the same good
results as if they were actually travelling; and, in fine, the equality
which the Jesuits establish among all, by treating just in the same
way those who are most illustrious and those who are not so, is an
extremely good invention."[86]
As the new sciences came into vogue, they received at once the freedom
of this city of intellect; and here they received it first. It has
been said, indeed, that the Society of Jesus, "obstinately bound to
its formalism, refused to admit anything modern, real, and actual,
and that the national languages and literatures, as well as the new
developing sciences, fared ill at its hands." This statement, as far
as it concerns France, is examined by Father Charles Daniel, who to
other valuable works of his own has added the neat little essay called,
_Les Jésuites Instituteurs de la Jeunesse Française, au XVII^e et au
XVIII^e siècle_.[87] As to Germany, we shall see indications enough
on all these subjects in the _Monumenta Germaniæ Pædagogica_. For all
countries there is a sufficiency of information, in the mere text of
the _Ratio Studiorum_, in Jouvancy's classic commentary thereupon, _De
Ratione Discendi et Docendi_, and other authentic documents, besides
the actual practice visible in the colleges. But the whole question
about the vernacular tongues, as if they were kept out of the colleges
by Latin and Greek, is so far an anachronism for the dates and epochs,
regarding which some moderns have agitated the question, that I shall
tell a little anecdote, which will not be so much of a digression, but
that it will place us back just where we are at present.
In 1605, Lord Bacon published his two books on the Advancement of
Learning. The work is considered the first part of his "Novum Organum."
He undertakes to "make a small Globe," as he says, "of the Intellectual
World, as truly and faithfully as he can discover.[88] His subject
is identical, as far as it goes, with the much more extensive and
exhaustive work of Father Anthony Possevino, a famous Jesuit, who had
published, twelve years before, the results of twenty years' travel and
observation, while fulfilling, in many countries, the important duties
of Apostolic Legate, Preacher, Professor. I have two editions of his
great tomes before me. The first is that of Rome, 1593; the other that
of Venice, 1603; this latter is called "the most recent edition."[89]
The only indication which I discern of Bacon's not having profited by
Possevino is this, that he says: "No man hath propounded to himself
the general state of learning to be described and represented from age
to age."[90] Now, as this is saying too much, for it just indicates
what Possevino's labors had been showing to the world during twelve
years, I must conclude that there is no assurance whatever, but that
Bacon profited by Possevino: he seems merely to have gone over the same
ground in English, and done justice to the subject, in his own peculiar
way. Accordingly, he did it what justice he could, in English. Three
years later he writes to Dr. Playfer, Margaret Professor of Divinity
in the University of Cambridge, requesting that the Doctor would be
pleased to translate the work into Latin; and his lordship promises
eternal gratitude. What reasons does the noble author urge for this
request? Two reasons, of which the first is very noteworthy for our
purpose:--"the privateness of the language, wherein it is written,
excluding so many readers!" And the second is almost as worthy of
note:--"the obscurity of the argument, in many parts of it, excluding
many others!"[91] Here we have our domestic classic author, in the year
1608, endeavoring to get out of his narrow cell, the "privateness of
the English language," into the broad world of the literary public,
where the Jesuit with his tomes was enjoying to the full his literary
franchise. This does not look as if the colleges, at that time, kept
the languages down, but rather that they had in their gift the full
freedom of the literary world, and sent students forth to walk abroad
at their ease there, where Bacon humbly sued for admission!
I was going to quote from Possevino, describing in a graphic way the
daily intellectual life of the great Roman College, with its two
thousand and more students, besides the great body of Professors. But
my limits forbid me to do more than refer to it.[92]
There are two views which may be taken of a coin, and its stamp. One is
taken direct, looking at it in itself; the other is indirect, observing
the impression it leaves in the mould. It leaves a defined vacancy
there. What kind of vacancy was left in the intellectual culture of
Europe, when this intellectual system was suddenly swept away? Before
the Suppression of the Society, some of the institutions, which had
thriven at all, had been inspired by a healthful rivalry. They found,
when the Society was gone, that part of their life decayed. And, while
they themselves began to languish, the place of the Jesuits they could
not fill. Of some others, who lived a life barely discernible, we are
given to understand, that their vitality consisted in the effort to
keep the Jesuits out. I will take an instance from Bayonne.
A work has just been published on the municipal college of Bayonne, by
the Censor of Studies, in the Lyceum of Agen.[93] In seventy pages,
which concern transactions with the Jesuits,[94] the author, in no
friendly tone, narrates the entire history from the documents of the
Jansenist party. I will imitate this example of his so far as to
narrate the following entirely in his own words.
Beginning his last chapter, entitled "Reform and Conclusion," he says
in a tone somewhat subdued, but not more so than his subject:[95] "This
then was the College of Bayonne, which, for a few years more, prolonged
an existence ever more and more precarious; and it was finally closed
in 1792, in spite of several generous efforts at restoring it.
"But already," he continues, "for thirty years, a great literary
event had been accomplished in secondary education. A decree of the
Parliament of Paris, dated the 16th of August, 1762, had pronounced
the expulsion of the 'ci-devant soi-disants Jésuites'; which decree
was this time definitively executed. Now the Jesuits, in their five
Provinces of France, possessed then nearly a hundred colleges. Judge
of the immense void which was suddenly created in the secondary
instruction of the Province, ill prepared for so abrupt a departure!
There was a general confusion, and a concert, as it were, of complaints
and recriminations. Where get the new masters?... The disciplinary and
financial administration of the colleges, left vacant by the Jesuits,
was confided to the bureaus, that is to say, assemblies composed of
the Archbishop or Bishop, the Lieutenant General, the King's Proctor,
and the senior Alderman.... Every one soon felt the inconveniences
of this system. The municipal officers of the cities, the bureaus
themselves hastened to petition the King, that their colleges might be
confided to religious communities. Thus it was that the greater part
of the old Jesuit colleges fell into the hands of the Benedictines and
Bernardines, of the Carmelites and Minims, of Jacobins and Cordeliers,
of Capuchins and Recollects, of Doctrinaires and Barnabites, and above
all, of the Oratorians. But all these Religious, except the Oratorians,
fell far short of the Jesuits. The greater part had not even any idea
of teaching, etc." Then the author devotes a heavy page to the novel
systems which were introduced. He closes the paragraph sadly: "All this
agitation," he says, "was unfortunately sterile; and, as I have just
said, secondary instruction, on the eve of the French Revolution, had
not taken a step forward during fifty years."
CHAPTER VII.
THE MORAL SCOPE PROPOSED.
Sweet is the holiness of youth, says Chaucer. Nor less grateful to the
eye are those gentle manners of youth, which another bard portrays as
impersonated in his "celestial lights," who say:--
We all
Are ready at thy pleasure, well disposed
To do thee gentle service.[96]
Christian morals and Christian manners make the perfect gentleman.
Plato had put it down that "he who hath a good soul is good"; and he
insisted that no youth, who has had a personal acquaintance with evil,
can have a good soul. He did not mean that a youth must be ignorant
of what temptation is. There is no hot-house raising in this world
which will keep off that blast. Every child, while keeping on the
royal road of innocence, has enough in himself, and in the choicest
of surroundings, to know the realities of life and its warfare. But
Plato refers to a personal experience of the by-ways, which are not
virtue, and which it is not necessary to travel by, in order to know
enough about them. The educational means, the industry, the vigilance,
which have for a result the preservation of youth in the freshness of
innocence, signify a medium of respiration which is kept pure, and a
moral nutriment which is good and is kept constantly supplied, until
tender virtue has risen steadily into a well-knit rectitude, and is
able thenceforth to brave manfully the incidental storms of life.
For this moral strengthening of character, no less than for the
invigorating of mental energies, the system of Ignatius Loyola
prescribes an education which is public,--public, as being that of many
students together, public as opposed to private tutorism, public, in
fine, as requiring a sufficiency of the open, fearless exercise both
of practical morality and of religion. Since the time of Ignatius,
Dupanloup has observed on this subject:--
"I have heard a man of great sense utter this remarkable word. 'If
a usurping and able government wanted to get rid of great races in
the country, and root them out, it need only come down to this, that
it require of them, out of respect for themselves, to bring up their
children at home, alone, far from their equals, shut up in the narrow
horizon of a private education and a private tutor.'"[97]
The youthful material, on which the Jesuit system had to work, may be
described from two points of view. There were home conditions; and
there were conditions too of the educational system, which was commonly
prevalent in those centuries.
As to the circumstances of polite society at the boys' homes, Charles
Lenormant, speaking of those times, tells us that "it was the privilege
of a gentleman to have from his infancy the responsibility of his own
actions. The fathers of families were the first to launch their sons
into the midst of the perils of the world, even before the age of
discernment had begun."[98] Even when boys' homes effect no positive
harm, still, only too often, they answer this description, that they
undo the best of what the school training is endeavoring to effect, by
the discipline of subordination and the practice of obedience.
It was this state of things which made the German Jesuits, in spite
of themselves, petition for the requisite authorization to open
boarding colleges in the north, as had already been done in Portugal
and elsewhere. Reluctantly the authorization was given by the general
assembly.[99] These _convictus_, or _pensionnats_, were known to
make great inroads on the time of the Fathers, on their study, their
religious retirement, and especially on that immunity of theirs
from financial transactions, which they enjoyed as Religious. The
Constitution of Ignatius offers no more than a bare foothold for the
introduction of these colleges.[100] Yet they have proved to be the
most prolific nurseries of the eminent men, whom the Society has sent
forth into all the walks of life.
Not at home alone were effeminacy and dissoluteness to be feared.
There were conditions of life in the university system of the sixteenth
century, which seemed considerably worse than those already described
in the first chapter of this book. Possevino, who had spent ten years
in the midst of the religious turmoils of France, and ten more in Papal
legations to Germany, Poland, Hungary, Transylvania, Russia, Muscovy,
Sweden, and Gothia, and, after that, four more years in visiting the
universities throughout Europe, notices that there were five ways,
whereby a general corruption of society had come about. First, he
mentions the dissemination of bad books. Secondly, "the omission of
lectures; or, when lectures were held, such disturbances during them,
with noise and yells, that there scarce remained an appearance of
human, let alone of Christian, society. Thirdly, factions. Fourthly,
sensuality, to which cause must be referred that atrocious kind of
iniquity, whereby the very walls of the schools were defiled with
writing and the vilest pictures;[101] so that the tender age, which
had come innocent, must go away more polluted with crime, than imbued
with learning, becoming hateful to God himself. Fifthly, an aversion
for Divine worship, inasmuch as disputations and graduating festivities
and lectures have constantly been transferred to those days and those
hours, when by Divine precept public worship is due."[102]
The means organized by Ignatius into a method of moral education I
will sketch in the words of his contemporaries. Ribadeneira, his
biographer, says: "Those means are employed by our Masters, whereby
virtue is conceived in the hearts of the pupils, is preserved and
augmented. They are morning prayer, for obtaining grace from God not
to fall into sin; night prayer and a diligent reflection on all the
thoughts, words, and actions of the day, to do away by contrition of
heart with all the faults committed; the attentive and devout hearing
of Mass every day; frequent and humble confession of sins to a Priest;
and if they are old enough, and great devotion recommends it, and their
confessor approves of it, the reverent and pious reception of the Body
of our Lord Jesus Christ; teaching and explaining the rudiments of
the Christian faith, whereby the boys are animated to live well and
happily. Besides, great pains are taken to know and root out the vices
of boyhood, especially such as are somehow inborn and native to that
age."[103]
Here, by the way, the reader may advert to the fact that the
confessional, of which mention is made, never comes in as part of
the external means of moral development; nor is a superior ever the
confessor of those under his charge, except when desired to be so
by the free choice of the subordinate himself. A general law of the
Catholic Church ordains it thus.
Loyola's biographer goes on to the various means, whereby, in such
a multitude of young persons, the bad element, which unfortunately
will never die, is either suppressed and kept at its lowest stage of
a struggling vitality, or else, if it happens to shoot up, is weeded
out. The garden will be none the poorer for that.
Nil dabit inde minus!
There are, moreover, the division of students into categories and
ranks, with their own officers from among the boys themselves; the
degrees of honor and preëminence assigned to good conduct and virtue;
especially the pious societies or Sodalities, into which none are
admitted save the most studious and virtuous among the youths; and that
with a discrimination in favor of superior merit, even among such as
answer the general description. The Sodalities of the Society of Jesus,
as the subject of a study upon the management of youth, and indeed upon
the cultivation of all ranks in Christian society, from Peer and Field
Marshal and Viceroy, down to the little boy beginning his career at
school, would deserve a special discourse for themselves.
I will continue now from Possevino, describing the Roman College, which
was an object of daily observation to the capital of the Christian
world.[104] "Here," he says, "you have two thousand youths, among whom
reigns a deep silence; there is no commotion. In the classes there is
no reading of profane author or poet, who might inoculate the mind with
defilement." I may remark that Ignatius had, from the very first, begun
the method of expurgating authors, a task which was then carried on
with diligence by the literary men of the Society. Our author resumes:
"A hundred daily occasions of sin and idleness are precluded; a
continuous series is going on of lectures, repetitions, disputations,
conferences." Then he portrays, as visible there in every-day life,
many of the features which Ribadeneira has mentioned.
While idleness was under a ban, vacation was not debarred. Its
principles, however, were defined on new lines. There was a sufficiency
of rest to be provided; but then no new intermissions were to be
granted. The "sufficiency" would appear spare luxury to our looser
times.[105] "One week of doing nothing," say the Fathers of Upper
Germany to the General Aquaviva, "is more hurtful to students, than
four weeks in which some literary exercise is kept up"; and "parents
take very much amiss this state of idleness, if the boys remain on our
hands."[106]
In all this, there was no question of making religious men of the
students. It was a question only of Religious making men of them.
Father George Bader, Provincial of Upper Germany in 1585, left it in
his instructions for the management of the convictus, at Dilingen,
that "the Prefects were not to despair or despond, if they did not see
at once, or in all, the improvement desired; nor were they to require
the perfection of Religious from them, nor introduce among them such
practices of life, as elsewhere the students could not keep up in their
calling; but the directors should be content with having a manner of
life followed, which was ordinary, virtuous, and pious."[107]
According to this idea, the religious teacher being a man, a
citizen, and an ecclesiastic, his educational industry has produced
its effect, when it has made accomplished men, worthy citizens,
competent Ecclesiastics, or Religious; "when in the school," says
Ribadeneira, "as in an arena, the students, foreshadowing the future,
practise already, in their own way, those same virtues and duties,
which in maturer years they will exhibit, in the management of the
republic."[108] The rich material of the youthful mind and soul
receives the manifold influence which the teacher's mind and heart
possess; and receives it after the manner of the recipient, according
to his future vocation.
What the Jesuit professors, in fact, were like, those who in after
years showed themselves but little friendly to the Order did not
omit to testify. "During the seven years," says Voltaire, "that I
lived in the house of the Jesuits, what did I see among them? The
most laborious, frugal, and regular life, all their hours divided
between the care they spent on us and the exercises of their austere
profession. I attest the same as thousands of others brought up by
them, like myself; not one will be found to contradict me. Hence I
never cease wondering how any one can accuse them of teaching corrupt
morality.... Let any one place side by side the 'Provincial Letters'
and the Sermons of Father Bourdaloue; he will learn in the former
the art of raillery, the art of presenting things, indifferent in
themselves, under aspects which make them appear criminal, the art of
insulting with eloquence; he will learn from Father Bourdaloue, that of
being severe to oneself, and indulgent toward others."[109]
History is uniform in bearing witness that the general effects of their
teaching corresponded to the example of these Professors, in spite
of the fact, as Cretineau-Joly puts it, that even from the hands of
religious men the impious can still come forth, as, in the school of
the wise, dunces and dolts may still be found.[110] Man is still and
always free. However, if it follows thence, that not only a positive,
but a negative result may always be expected; such a double result may
be set off by two consoling reflections, which I will mention, in order
to complete the picture of this education in practice.
The first is, that since, from the school of virtue and religiousness,
vice can still issue forth, and, as the General Vitelleschi says, a
good education, though almost omnipotent, may, like the morning dew,
evaporate and be lost in the first heat of manhood's passions,[111]
what would be the results of the system, if it had less piety to
enlighten, or less of an organized practice of virtue to confirm, the
minds and hearts of the young?
Another reflection is this: that human nature, however erratic by
defect of will, still remains beautiful, thanks to the original
gift of God. Whence it comes, that impiety is found beautifully
inconsistent; and, in its lucid intervals, it makes the due
acknowledgment, as he did, who once said:--
O thou, that with surpassing glory crowned,
Look'st from thy sole dominion ...
To thee I call....
To tell thee how I hate thy beams,
That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell.[112]
The Society of Jesus has many a time been elegantly blessed and cursed
by the same eloquent lips and pens.
The secret of this magisterial ascendency, as Ignatius of Loyola
projected it, was to be found in the Masters' intellectual attainments,
which naturally impressed youthful minds; and also in a paternal
affection which, of course, won youthful hearts. Does anything more
seem necessary for the full idea of authority? The committee appointed
by the canton of Fribourg, for restoring the Fathers to their old
college in 1818, mention as one reason for having done so, that "the
will cannot be chained; it will not submit to restraint. You can
win it, but not subjugate it." And they speak of that "most lively
attachment" ever abiding in the hearts of students towards members of
the Order, which they have known as the cradle of their youth.[113] The
same Father Bader, whom I have quoted before, defines where authority
lies, when he says: "Let not the Prefects consider their authority
to consist in this, that the students are on hand in obedience to
their nod, their every word, or their very look; but in this, that the
boys love them, approach with confidence, and make their difficulties
known." Speaking of penalties, he goes on: "The pupils should be led to
understand that such reprehensions are necessary and are prompted by
affection; and let it be the most grievous rebuke or penalty for them
to know that they have offended their Prefect."[114]
Thus, in the education of the sixteenth century, there came into play
a gradual reaction against the harshness and brusquer manners of
earlier times. Speaking of conversation with the students, the General
Vitelleschi, in 1639, gives characteristic directions: "It will be very
useful if from time to time the Professors treat with their auditors,
and converse with them, not about vain rumors and other affairs that
are not to the purpose, but about those which appertain most to their
well-being and education; going down to particulars that seem most to
meet their wants; and showing them, in a familiar way, how they ought
to conduct themselves in studies and piety. Let the Professors be
persuaded that a single talk in private, animated with true zeal and
prudence on their part, will penetrate the heart more and work more
powerfully, than many lectures and sermons given in common."[115]
Here then I have touched on the secrets of success, those principles
which commanded esteem, and shed about the Order an unmistakable halo
of educational prestige.
CHAPTER VIII.
IGNATIUS ADMINISTERING THE COLLEGIATE SYSTEM. HIS DEATH.
The first two colleges were established in the same year, 1542,--one
of them in the royal university at Coimbra in Portugal, the other at
Goa in Hindustan. Though they were organized at an early date, only
two years after the foundation of the Order, when as yet no system had
been formally adopted, nevertheless these two first colleges, a good
many thousands of miles apart, were found to have been established in
precisely the same way. Francis Xavier, having been assigned to the
apostolic ministry in the East, began a university there, in which
all the sciences and branches were professed, just as in the European
colleges. This became the base of operations for Japan, China, Persia,
Ethiopia, and the other nations of the East. Forty years later, there
were as many as one hundred and twenty Jesuits in the college.
In 1542, Ignatius had a select body of fifteen or sixteen young men
studying in Paris; others he had placed in Padua or elsewhere. He
availed himself of the actual universities until such time as he should
have his own. War breaking out between the Emperor Charles V and the
French King Francis, all Spaniards and Belgians were ordered out of
France. Such as were Italians remaining in Paris, the other young
Jesuits crossed the frontier to Louvain, under the charge of Father
Jerome Domenech. There the Latin oratory of the youth, Francis Strada,
whom Lefèvre, on his way through Belgium, supplied with matter for his
orations,[116] helped to build up the Order rapidly with two kinds of
men, talented youths, who were captivated by the things they saw and
heard, and men already eminent, who were equally attracted by the scope
of the new Institute. In the young Strada preaching and the eminent
Lefèvre going out of his way to subsidize him with matter, we catch a
family glimpse of that intensified force which can be developed in a
closely bound organization.
Conspicuously wanting in gifts of presence and of learning, Francis
Villanova, sent by Ignatius to the university seat of Alcalà, won
such an ascendency there by his other qualities as a Priest, that a
commodious and flourishing college was soon founded. Father Jerome
Domenech endowed one in his native city of Valentia, 1543. Lefèvre and
Araoz, following awhile by royal request in the suite of the Princess
Mary, daughter of the Portuguese King, and queen of the Spanish King,
founded a college at Valladolid. In Gandia, his own duchy, Francis
Borgia erected and richly equipped a university, which was the first
placed in the hands of the Society.
Colleges at Barcelona, Bologna, Saragossa, arose within the next two
or three years; also at Messina, Palermo, Venice, and Tivoli. It is
evident that Ignatius had a world of administration already on his
hands. As early as March 16, 1540, he had excused himself from granting
an application, because of "much pains he was taking in sending some
to the Indies, others to Ireland and to parts of Italy." Now, though
his forces were increasing, yet he was husbanding them; and even so,
while refusing many applications, he seemed to be everywhere. But this
need not be so much a matter of wonder, if we consider that it is the
right place, and the right move at the proper time, that commands other
places, movements, and times.
At the death of Lefèvre, in 1546, the onward movement of these select
men, coming in contact, either friendly or adverse, with every actual
power in Europe, was so impressive for its strategic completeness, and
so far-reaching in its results, that, as an historian remarks, "These
ten men, so ably chosen, had accomplished to their entire satisfaction,
in less than six years, what the most absolute monarch would not have
ventured to exact of the most blind devotedness."[117]
Hardly had Lefèvre departed this life, when his place was taken by the
last man whom he had dealt with, Francis Borgia, Duke of Gandia, the
friend and cousin of the Emperor Charles V. Still wearing his ducal
robes, until his temporal affairs could be settled, he came to Rome in
1550. He founds the Roman College, which is the centre and type of all
Jesuit colleges.
It was begun on February 18th, 1551, at the foot of the Capitol, with
fourteen members of the Order, and Father John Peltier, a Frenchman,
at their head. Doubling this number in the following September, the
College moved to a larger building. The Professors taught Rhetoric,
and three languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. In 1553, the entire
course of Philosophy and Theology was added. The number of Jesuit
students among the auditory amounted, in this year, to sixty, and,
in the following year, to one hundred. A few years later, Vittoria
Toffia, niece of Paul IV, and wife of Camillo Orsini, provided the
institution with a splendid property. Thenceforth, the number of Jesuit
students alone was as high as 220, brought together from sixteen or
more different nations, most of them familiar with many languages, all
speaking by rule the tongue of the country in which they were residing,
and all competent to speak and teach in the one universal and learned
language of the time, the Latin tongue.
Of students not belonging to the Order, nearly twenty colleges are
enumerated, at some periods, as following the courses of this central
Roman College. They included the colleges of the English, the Greeks,
the Scotch, the Maronites, the Irish, and the Neophytes; the Colleges
named Capranica, Fuccioli, Mattei, Pamfili, Salviati, Ghislieri; the
German College and the College Gymnasio; also the Roman Seminary. Of
the 2107 students counted, as following the courses at a given time,
300 were in theology. The most eminent professors filled the chairs,
in successive generations; theologians like Suarez and Vasquez,
commentators like Cornelius a Lapide and Maldonado, founders or leaders
in the schools of national history like Mariana and Pallavicini;
Clavius, reformer of the Gregorian calendar; Kircher, universal in all
exact sciences; and so of the rest; while the cycle of colleges over
the world remained provided with their requisite forces, and maintained
their own prestige.[118]
The emblem of this institution was Theology, enthroned, as it were, in
a temple of imposing proportions. At her right and left two Maids of
Honor stand; they are the Natural Sciences. One of them, representing
Mathematics, is placing the celestial sphere under the feet of the
august goddess seated; the other, representing Physics, is subjecting,
in like manner, the orb of the earth. The legend attached reads: _Leges
impone subactis_.
In forty or fifty years such an investment of talent, character, and
virtue, had been made, by management within the Order, and by that
power to which Ignatius always appealed, Divine Providence, that Rome
had seen pass through this house the most distinguished men of the
age, in every line of intellectual life, of moral eminence, and of all
that could elevate the thoughts of noble and generous minds. For the
young, in particular, three characters came, figures that were to fill
the niches and terminate the aisles of contemplation, as the ideal
choice of the bloom of youth--Stanislaus Kostka, a young Polish noble
of seventeen, Aloysius Gonzaga, an Italian prince of twenty-three, and
John Berchmans, a Flemish burgher of twenty-two. Being what they were,
and leaving this life at such an age, they have appropriated in the
Catholic Church the honors of the young.
With regard to Germany, it is with a classic touch, as of Cæsar's
style, that an historian introduces the subject thus: _Germania,
quo gravius laboravit, hoc studiosius adjuta est; Ignatio nulla
regio commendatior_.[119] Nor will the association be considered
far-fetched, if, substituting for Cæsar's pen and Cæsar's sword,
Loyola's legislation for letters and his strategic tactics, one catches
a suggestive idea, on the present topic, from that statue of the same
Roman General, which represents him as holding in one hand a sword, and
in the other a pen, with the words inscribed underneath, _Ex utroque
Cæsar_.
Of the services of those nine men, with whom he founded the Order, he
spent a large part upon Germany. Lefèvre was there, Le Jay, Bobadilla,
Salmeron, Laynez; not to mention the great Canisius (de Hondt), a young
man already in the field, who was to stay there for half a century.
It is of these men and their work that Ranke writes: "Of what country
were these, the first of their Order amongst us? They were natives of
Spain, Italy, the Netherlands. For a long time, even the name of their
Society was unknown, and they were styled the Spanish Priests. They
filled the chairs of the universities, and there met with disciples
willing to embrace their faith. Germany has no part in them; their
doctrine, their constitution, had been completed and reduced to form,
before they appeared in our midst. We may then regard the progress of
their Institute here, as a new participation of Latin Europe in German
Europe. They have defeated us upon our own soil, and wrested from us a
share of our fatherland."[120]
In concert with the Duke of Bavaria and the Emperor Ferdinand,
Ingolstadt and Vienna became the two first centres of operations.
Ingolstadt was indeed destined to become soon one of the most
representative universities of the Company, and the German centre of
what has been called the "Counter-Reformation."[121] But Ignatius would
not accept it, without the clearest enunciation of some fundamental
principles in the educational work of his Institute. I will mention
them.
First, the condition of all higher studies, and of lower studies
as well, was such, that, as Ignatius said, it was useless to begin
with the top, which without a good foundation will never stand. The
disappointment of individual hopes and of general expectation would be
the only result, with demoralization for the future. Let Literature,
he said, and Philosophy be gone through satisfactorily; then Theology
may be approached. Literature must come first of all. Hence Polanco,
the secretary of Ignatius, writes to the Duke of Bavaria, in 1551,
that the "Jesuits must begin by undertaking preparatory teaching, with
Professors capable of inspiring their young students, little by little,
with a taste for Theology."[122]
Secondly, we may recall to mind what was mentioned before,[123] that
Ignatius provides for Law and Medicine in his universities, but the
professors of these departments are to be taken from without the Order.
Now, quite as a counterpart to this, we find him declaring to the Duke
of Bavaria, that it is at variance with his plan to lend any Professors
or Lecturers of the Order for work outside of Jesuit institutions.
Therefore a college must be founded for them, or the Duke cannot have
them.
The reason for this reserve is not hard to discern. In an organization
like his, there are no men at large to lend. And, were the most
eminent men assigned for work outside of the Jesuit colleges and
universities, the younger generation of the Order would practically
be debarred from the influence of their type of eminence. And again,
if there were eminent men laboring in a country, without the stable
abode of a Jesuit college in the same place, there would be no
propagating the distinctive work of the Order itself, by means of
the men of that country. Yet, as he projected a native clergy for
Germany, so he intended native Jesuits for the Germans. Besides, it
does not seem possible to accept of a chair outside, except on the
basis of some pecuniary consideration for the individual Professor.
Now this is a situation which he does not accept. A Professed Father
is not to sacrifice his religious life and independence, bound to
a work outside of the Order's own houses, and that for a valuable
consideration. Ignatius accepts of no obligations to fill chairs, save
as accepting universities, which contain those chairs.[124] And, as
to pecuniary considerations, his principle is, _Gratis accepistis,
gratis date_; "Give freely what you have freely received." To this
cardinal principle the statutes of so many universities, if not of all,
in which a Jesuit College conducted any of the faculties, distinctly
refer, as the ground for exempting Religious of the Society from all
pecuniary charges, incidental to university affairs.[125] No ingenious
compromise was admitted which tended to relax this principle, regarding
a pecuniary consideration.[126] On the contrary, the most legitimate
and ample revenues offered were not accepted as a recommendation for a
university, if there were any conditions whatever not in keeping with
the Institute.[127]
The German College in Rome was founded by Ignatius, to form German
ecclesiastics for the Germans. At that time benefices and parochial
cures, in the German Emperor's dominions, were generally vacant for
want of Priests. It soon came to pass that Priests were found to be in
waiting, for want of benefices. It was not merely for the ordinary cure
of souls that this college received so much attention from Loyola. True
to himself, ever contemplating something eminent,--_rarum et eximium
facinus_, as he said once to the Scholastics of Coimbra, "that rare
and excellent achievement; which is worth more than six hundred common
ones,"--he was founding a seminary for preachers, professors, prelates.
If the students sent from Germany, to be admitted and supported on
this foundation, are not noblemen, "at all events," writes Ignatius in
1552, "let nobility of soul not be wanting to them."[128] This is the
institution which caused so much vexation to non-Catholic Germany. It
renovated the priesthood.
Thus, then, in a short official career of sixteen years, Ignatius
had the gratification of seeing a new and vast educational policy
crowned with success. In spite of the active opposition which powerful
interests in Rome led against him--and a vigorous siege from the side
of the schoolmasters was not to be despised, nor should it fail to be
recorded,--in spite of the desperate hostility of the Sorbonne, which
was but beginning its war upon the Society in France, with storms at
Toledo and Saragossa flanking his movements in Spain; in spite of the
open war with heresy in Protestant Germany, where acrimony, distilled
to its last degree of concentration, was to embitter history, till the
days of Ranke and Janssen should come, and begin to vindicate the truth
of history; thanks to the labors of Ignatius, the monopoly of education
was being broken down; the old universities were no longer either the
sole depositories of superior instruction, or the arbiters of the
intellectual life of Europe; and all the best learning, which the most
accomplished men could impart, was now being given gratuitously, and
in as many centres of educational activity as the Society was allowed
to create. And, whereas it is put down to the credit of Germany, that
sixteen of the old universities had arisen on its soil, now, in the
German Assistency of the Society, there arose more than sixteen Jesuit
universities, besides two hundred colleges. And, in virtue of Papal
charters, it was already an accomplished fact, that all the powers
of universities, with regard to the degrees of Bachelor, Master,
Licentiate, and Doctor, were vested in the head of the Order, who could
delegate the same to subordinate Superiors.[129]
No wonder all the faculties of Christendom considered the Order an
intruder and an aggressor. It might be considered so to-day. Free and
universal education was at the doors of all. We, men of the nineteenth
century, may flatter ourselves that it was the spirit of our age which
breathed upon the Order of Jesus, three centuries before the time.
Perhaps so. But we shall have to wait a few centuries more, even
beyond the nineteenth century, before we come to such education given
universally and given gratuitously. For it is one of the most palpable
characteristics of all educational and other philanthropy which we know
of, that it is an extremely expensive thing.
Let us now close our sketch of the great educator, Saint Ignatius
of Loyola. All the particulars of his death have been preserved for
us by those who were with him at the last. They were not his first
companions. Of these, the few who survived at the present date,
sixteen years after the foundation of the Society, were scattered in
various climes. The members with him were John Polanco, his polished
secretary, André Frusis, a Frenchman, one of the most gifted of
linguists and of _littérateurs_, Christopher Madrizi, a university
Doctor of Alcalà, and Jerome Nadal, whom in Paris, long before,
Ignatius had endeavored to enlist in the service of his Institute;
but Nadal had rejected all overtures, pointing to the Bible under his
arm, and saying he wanted no other institute save that. He was a man
of the first quality in judgment and the governing cast of mind. Later
on, when the exploits of Saint Francis Xavier in India and Japan had
become the talk and admiration of Europe, Nadal entered the Order, so
cautiously that one might say he did it reluctantly; yet he did it. His
subsequent career showed that he had made a mistake, when he missed a
place in the very first ranks.
Others were close by. Laynez lay in a sick-room; as was thought, on his
death-bed; Mendoza too, and Martin Olave. The latter, some thirty years
before, was a boy whom Ignatius met, when as a poor pilgrim he reached
Alcalà from Barcelona, to take up his university studies. The boy gave
him an alms, the first received by Ignatius in that city. Time had
passed since then. The boy had become a Master of Arts, and, in 1543, a
Doctor of the Paris University, remarkable in many ways for virtue and
learning. Now, a man of mature age and great authority, he had embraced
the Institute of Ignatius. He alone of the invalids died immediately
after his master in religion.
The latter, on July the 30th, told them he was about to die. But,
diseases having preyed upon him for years, the physicians did not
confirm what he said; and Father Ignatius made no more statements on
the subject. He spent the evening in his usual manner, transacted some
business with perfect serenity of mind, and then was left alone till
the morrow.
The morrow is just dawning, when they find him breathing his last. He
declines to accept any potion. Joining his hands together, with his
eyes fixed heavenward, and pronouncing the name of "Jesus," the founder
of the Society of Jesus passes away from this life, in the Professed
House at Rome.
It was the thirty-first day of July, 1556. He was sixty-five years of
age. Thirty-five years had passed, since the Knight of the King of
Navarre had, with such solemnity, changed his garb, hung up his sword
and poniard in the sanctuary of Montserrat, and vowed himself to be a
Knight in the Kingdom of Christ.
All the time since then he had spent in extreme poverty, in the
practice of austerity, in the laborious travels of a pilgrim, in the
more laborious pursuit of letters, under the stress of persecution,
prisons, and chains, and under the relentless fatigue of a universal
foresight, vigilance, and administration. He had proved himself a
leader and commander of men, as nature had made him to be, and as
history shows that he was.
In an especial manner, he is famous for his prudence. Approaching
every enterprise with the most varied and exhaustive deliberation,
spending forty days of meditation on determining a single point of
the Constitution, throwing upon his premises every kind of light
from consultation and advice, and having habitually in his room, for
reference, only two books, the New Testament, and the Imitation of
Christ, he thought out every plan to the last degree of definiteness
and consistency. Having once reached such a definite conclusion, he
was not easy to move thenceforth out of the direction taken. Quite
otherwise. With the utmost vigilance, he applied himself and he
applied all the means, whether they were persons available or measures
necessary, to the execution of his purpose. Even when, as often seemed
to be the case, he was starting from principles other than those of
ordinary human foresight, apparently from a pure trust in Divine
Providence, he did not exempt himself from applying, with the same
circumspection and diligence as ever, the means adequate to execute
what he had begun. Waiting fourteen hours, and fasting withal, in the
ante-chamber of a prince, lest the propitious occasion should slip,
writing out the same letter twice, thrice, and oftener, lest the right
thing should not be said in the right way, and sending out thirty
letters in one night, he exhibited, in the administration of great
things and small, what had marked all his previous deliberation, the
highest degree of consummate prudence and of practical perfection.
If, in all this, there are many eminent qualities to admire, there is a
resultant fact more marvellous still. He did his work so that it went
on without him. And hence, if, whenever he happened to be anywhere on
the field of action, account had to be taken of such a man, it will
not perhaps appear singular that his Order too, even when ostracized
and expatriated, is taken into account, if it is anywhere visible on
the social horizon. While I am writing this, three hundred and fifty
years after his time, the Bundesrath, on closing the Kulturkampf, and
admitting all the exiled Orders of the Catholic Church back into the
Empire of Germany, makes an exception of the Jesuits. It bans the Order
of Jesus, and gives no reason, beyond the palpable fact that the Order
is what it is. Evidently, Ignatius of Loyola did his work so as to make
it go on without him; and go on just as he made it.
CHAPTER IX.
SUBSEQUENT ADMINISTRATIONS.
According to a contemporary chronicle for the year 1556, the first
announcement of the death of Ignatius caused such a profound sentiment
of grief in all members of the Order, that a degree of stupor seemed
for the moment to possess them. But this was only temporary. It was
followed by a marked alacrity of spirit appearing everywhere. The
Society was beginning its course.[130]
In the first general assembly, Father James Laynez was elected to
succeed the founder, in the office of General Superior. The matters
which concerned the assembly in its legislation, and the new General in
his administration, were the proper temporal foundation of colleges,
the admission of _convictus_ or boarding-colleges, and other questions,
which may be noted in the _Monumenta Germaniæ Pædagogica_.[131] Laynez
governed the Order during nine years, till 1565.
Father Francis Borgia, who had resigned his dukedom, and by this
example led Charles V to seek repose in the monastery of St. Yuste,
was elected third General. His virtues and his presence, wherever he
appeared, exercised such a magic influence that, when he had merely
passed through Spain, colleges had sprung up as from the soil. Three
Provinces had been formed in that country alone, within thirteen
years from the foundation of the Society. But this multiplication of
colleges, often not sufficiently endowed for their future development,
was already seen to be one of the threatened weaknesses of the
Company. The special legislation passed at the time of his election
regarded the proper establishment, in every Province, of philological,
philosophical, and theological seminaries, for the formation of
Professors.[132] Instead of the proportionate number of Jesuit students
being supported on each collegiate foundation, this legislation, and
much more that followed later, ordained a system of concentration in
seminaries of humane letters, philosophy, science, and divinity, which
were conducted respectively by corps of eminent Professors selected for
the purpose, and were maintained either on some munificent foundation
specially made for this object, or by a due proportion of the other
collegiate foundations. At this date it was that colleges for the
formation of diocesan clergy, or "Bishops' Seminaries," as they are
commonly called, were coming into existence, in accordance with the
decrees of the Council of Trent. The manner of admitting them, as
annexed to colleges of the Society, and thereby availing themselves
of the Jesuit courses, was regulated by this assembly. In no case
were they to be provided with a corps of Professors distinct from the
faculty of the college.
In 1573 Father Everard Mercurian, a Belgian, was elected to succeed
Saint Francis Borgia. He was sixty-eight years old at the time of his
election, and lived eight years after. He drew out of the Constitution
various summaries of rules for the guidance of the chief officers in
the Society. Those which concern studies are given in a few pages of
the Monumenta.[133]
At his death, a young man thirty-seven years old, who had entered the
Order only about twelve years before, was elected to succeed him. This
was Claudius Aquaviva, son of Prince John Aquaviva, Duke of Atri. He
was a man who, for his superior executive abilities and his services
rendered to the Order in times most critical, has been regarded as
a second founder. As to what his administration saw effected in the
matter of education, the _Ratio Studiorum_ bears witness. He governed
the Society during thirty-four years.
Mutius Vitelleschi, one of the mildest and gentlest of men, but not on
that account ineffective in his government, succeeded Aquaviva, filling
a term of thirty-one years, from 1615 to 1646. Various pedagogic
interests occupied the attention of the general assembly, by which
he was elected; in particular, the promotion of Humane Letters, the
means of supplying Professors, and the searching character of the
examinations ordained, at every step in their studies, for the members
of the Society.
The farther the Society advanced in history, the less there was of new
legislation. The tension grew on the side of administration; and the
urgency shown by general assemblies evinces this. The philological
seminary was developed for the junior scholastics; and a classic form
drawn up for it by Jouvancy. As distinguished talents for preaching
and governing were treated with the special favor of being allowed to
compensate for some deficiencies, in the qualifications requisite for
the degree of Profession in the Order, so special legislation provided
for similar eminence in literature, in Oriental languages, in Greek and
Hebrew.
Mathematics had, from the first, been a department of activity native
to the energies of the Company. The schools of Geography and History
developed in the seventeenth and at the beginning of the eighteenth
centuries. The school of modern Physics then asserting itself, and
running so close upon the field of Metaphysics, was subjected to
regulations in the assemblies of 1730 and 1751.
After the restoration of the Order, social and educational
circumstances being so immensely altered, the whole ground had to be
surveyed again, with a view to adaptation; the curriculum had to be
expanded, and, where necessary, prolonged to meet the growing demands
of the exact sciences; and an indefinite number of specialties to
be provided for, by the selection and fostering of special talents.
These special lines are, in the terms of the latest general assembly,
"Ancient Languages, Philology, Ethnology, Archæology, History, Higher
Mathematics, and all the Natural Sciences." We are thus brought down,
in the history of general legislation, to the very recent date, 1883,
less than ten years ago.
Meanwhile the Generals, on whom rested the burden of supervising all
this, discharged the functions of administration. Father Vincent
Caraffa promoted and urged on the pursuit of Belles Lettres, and
defined positions in Mathematics. Father Francis Piccolomini, in a
general ordinance for all the higher studies, defined the stand to
be taken by Professors, as representing the Society itself in their
chairs; so, too, Father Goswin Nickel, with reference to certain new
issues. Both he and his successor, Paul Oliva, had to face the new
contingencies which arose from the charges of the Jansenists against
what they called the loose moral teachings of the Jesuits. Father
Oliva stimulated the pursuit of excellence in Humane Letters, in the
Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldaic languages. Positions of Descartes,
Leibnitz, as well as of certain others in Philosophy and Theology,
were animadverted upon by the Generals Tamburini and Retz. Father
Ignatius Visconti urged again the pursuit of perfection in literary
matters, and in the manner of conducting the schools of literature.
And the General Aloysius Centurione, shortly before the Suppression,
laid down the clearest principles with respect to the study of Moral
Theology, and the examinations therein. Since the restoration of the
Order, Fathers Roothaan, Beckx, and the actual General, Anthony M.
Anderledy, have devoted their own attention and directed that of the
Society to the ways of accepting, with undiminished energy, the altered
and unfavorable situation, in which the present century has placed the
Order, and hampers the revived Institute.
For this immense organization had been almost entirely destroyed by the
stroke of a pen--the signature of Clement XIV given in pencil. They
dispute whether he gave it at all; or, at least, whether he meant it.
Howsoever that be, the Order, which had been erected on the principle
of obedience, received the word and disappeared. The rock on which it
had set its foot became the altar of a sacrifice; and that a sacrifice
offered without a struggle or a remonstrance, to betray any change in
the spirit, with which Ignatius, two hundred and thirty-three years
before, had vowed obedience to the Vicar of Christ. An epigram had
been written, on the occasion of the first centenary, under a picture
of Archimedes and his lever; Archimedes is getting a foothold for his
lever to move the world; and beneath is the epigram:--
Fac pedem figat, et terram movebit.
Its footing was now taken away, and it vanished from the world.
While the Catholic Bourbon courts were thus successful in accomplishing
a manoeuvre, which at fitful intervals they had essayed heretofore,
the schismatical Empress, Catherine II of Russia, denounced it and
endeavored to counteract it. She wrote to the Pope in 1783, "that she
was resolved to maintain these Priests against any power, whatsoever it
was"; and she was good to her word; the Society remained unsuppressed
in White Russia. The Protestant King of Prussia, Frederick the Great,
without exhibiting all the temper of the irascible lady, manipulated
things as best he could to preserve the Society.
To sum up the Order's experiences, it may well be said that in public
life there is no resurrection; and the State which dies is dead
forever. From infancy on through maturity it goes its way decrepit to
the grave. Yet Balmez observes, "the Society of Jesus did not follow
the common course of others, either in its foundation, its development,
or its fall; that Order, of which it is truly and correctly said, that
it had neither infancy nor old age."[134] It rose again; and the flag
of the Knight of Loyola, though worn and torn, was none the less fair
for that:--
Jam se ipso formosius est.
For neither the violence of endurance, nor the vehemence of energy,
although begetting intensest fatigue, is to be confounded with decay.
It was not decay, a century ago, when expropriation and exile were the
confessed policy of the courts in Europe; when, as an American writer
states it, in Portugal "Pombal cut the Gordian knot.... He commenced by
the expulsion of the Jesuits and the expropriation of their property."
Nor is it decay in the Order, when a liberal confederation in
Switzerland, on obtaining the political ascendency in 1848, suppresses
the Jesuit University at Fribourg, and provides in this wise, as an
American writer records: "No religious society shall be allowed to
teach; and persons hereafter educated by the Jesuits, or by any of the
Orders affiliated to the Jesuits, shall be incapable of holding office
in Church or State."[135] Policy like this, whether in the countries
"expurgated," or in countries thereunto "affiliated," proves no decay
in the Order.
But where decay may come in has been clearly pointed out by one of
its Generals. Speaking of the Education of Youth and the Promotion of
Humane Letters, Mutius Vitelleschi wrote, in 1639, "If ever the Society
were to decline from that lofty position which it holds with so many
provinces and peoples, such an event could come about in no other way
than by failing to walk in the same steps, by which, with the Divine
Grace, it has acquired that high esteem."[136]
Those steps had been taken in various paths, of which only two have
concerned us here. For its men of action were largely identified with
the general history of Europe; and its men of the word, who toiled in
apostolic work, at home or abroad, have entwined their memories in the
history of souls, often ungrateful, yet always worthy of the toil. But
its men of the school did a work which we have sketched in a general
way, and which we shall analyze in the second part of this essay; while
its men of the pen deserve a passing word of notice here.
They concern us from a pedagogic point of view, in many ways. They
wrote text-books, many of which are the basis of manuals in almost
every line of education to-day, sometimes without the change of a
word, and generally without acknowledgment. Besides that, their
literary productions were, as a rule, the offspring of their labors
in the schools. It might not be safe to estimate their standing as
_littérateurs_, by the process which a Scotch Professor uses, who,
in the course of forty-seven elegant lectures on Rhetoric and Belles
Lettres, sees little occasion to recognize the existence of this Jesuit
school of literature, except when he goes out of his way to salute Père
Rapin in a somewhat questionable manner.[137] Many of those whom the
Scottish Professor himself does honor to, in his pages, were Jesuit
scholars,--Bossuet, Corneille, Molière, Tasso, Fontenelle, Didérot,
Voltaire, Bourdaloue, himself a Jesuit. It would be safer then to
determine the standing of these Professors, who were in control of a
great literary age, by looking at the golden age itself, that of Louis
XIV. The majority of the brilliant figures, whom Dr. Blair names as
illustrating the epoch,[138] were all Jesuit scholars. Naturally, then,
the fifty Professors of the Jesuit College at Paris were, as Cardinal
Maury affirmed, a permanent tribunal of literature for all men of
letters, a high court of judicature, a focus of public attention from
which radiated the public opinion of the capital; in short, as Piron
had emphatically said, "the Star-chamber of literary reputations."[139]
Devoted as they were to an austere profession, we may say of many among
them, that they were not themselves romancers of a lively fancy or
great poets; and so far agree with Voltaire, who made this very remark
about his old Professor, Père Porée. Yet also, without inconsistency
I believe, we may agree with the spirit of Père Porée's rejoiner, when
the remark was reported to him, that "he was not one of the great
poets." The Jesuit replied, "At least you may grant that I have been
able to make some of them."
And, should results be gauged on a wider basis than mere poetry, not
a few of the most prominent men in European history would seem to
have been the outcome of this system, men, too, who represented every
possible school and tendency, in their subsequent literary and public
life. A few names show this. There are those of Descartes, Buffon,
Justus Lipsius, Muratori, Calderon, Vico, the jurisconsult, founder
of the philosophical school of history. There are Richelieu, Tilly,
Malesherbes, Don John of Austria, Luxembourg, Esterhazy, Choiseul,
with those of Saint Francis de Sales, founder of a religious Order,
Lambertini, afterwards the most learned of Popes, under the name of
Benedict XIV, and the present Pontiff, Leo XIII, also most erudite.
These certainly represent many schools and tendencies, and they come,
with many others, from the same schools.[140]
As authors of every kind, and in departments even far remote from
the regular courses of the schools, Jesuit writers were, at the very
least, so far related to Jesuit teachers, that, as we see in the
bibliographical dictionary of the Society, all had been Professors,
with scarcely an exception; and almost all had professed Humanities,
Belles Lettres, Rhetoric.
When Father Nathaniel Southwell of Norfolk endeavored, in 1676,
to compile a dictionary of these authors, he recorded those whose
works had the qualification of a respectable bulk to recommend them.
He entered the names and works of 2240 authors who answered this
description. This was 136 years after the foundation of the Order. The
enterprise was repeatedly taken in hand afterwards. The possibility of
ever accomplishing it was much jeopardized by the Suppression. But at
length the two Fathers De Backer published a series of seven quarto
volumes, in the years 1853-1861; and this first step they followed up,
in the years 1869-1876, with a new edition, in three immense folios,
containing the names of 11,100 authors. This number does not include
the supplements, with the names of writers in the present century,
and of the anonymous and pseudonymous authors. Of this last category,
Father Sommervogel's researches, up to 1884, enabled him to publish a
catalogue, which fills a full octavo volume of 600 pages, with double
columns. The writers of this century, whom the De Backers catalogued
in their supplement, fill 647 columns, folio, very small print.
Altogether, the three folios contain 7086 columns, compressed with
every art of typographical condensation.
Suarez of course is to be seen there, and Cornelius à Lapide, Petau,
and the Bollandists. A single name, like that of Zaccaria, has 117
works recorded under it, whereof the 116th is in 13 volumes quarto, and
the 117th in 22 volumes octavo. The Catechism of Canisius fills nearly
11 columns with the notices of its principal editions, translations,
abridgments; the commentaries upon it, and critiques. Rossignol has 66
works to his name. The list of productions about Edmund Campian, for or
against him, chiefly in English, fills, in De Backers' folio, two and a
half columns of minutest print. Bellarmine, in Father Sommervogel's new
edition, fills 50 pages, double column.[141]
Under each work are recorded the editions, translations, sometimes
made into every language, including Arabic, Chinese, Indian; also the
critiques, and the works published in refutation--a controversial
enterprise which largely built up the Protestant theological literature
of the times, and, in Bellarmine's case alone, meant the theological
Protestant literature for 40 or 50 years afterwards. Oxford founded
an anti-Bellarmine chair. The editions of one of this great man's
works are catalogued by Sommervogel under the distinct heads of 54
languages.[142]
In the methodical or synoptic table, at the end of the De Backers'
work, not only are the subjects well-nigh innumerable, which have their
catalogues of authors' names attached to them, but such subjects too
are here as might not be expected. Thus "Military Art" has 32 authors'
names under it; "Agriculture" 11; "Navy" 12; "Music" 45; "Medicine" 28.
To conclude then our History of this Educational Order, we have one
synoptical view of it in these twelve or thirteen thousand authors,
all of one family. We have much more. This one work "attesting," as
De Backer says in his preface, "at one and the same time a prodigious
activity and often an indisputable merit," whereof three and a half
centuries have been the course in time, and the whole world the place
and theatre, is a general record of religion, letters, science, and
education, in every country, civilized or barbarous, where the Society
of Jesus labored and travelled. And where has it not done so? In many
parts of the world it was the first to occupy the field with literary
men, who then sent communications to their superiors, or to learned
societies, about the manners of different countries, the state of
religion there, of letters, science, and education, including reports
of their own observations in geography, meteorology, botany, astronomy,
mineralogy, etc. Original sources, from which later history in North,
South, and Central America is drawing materials, are seen described
here as they appeared; so too with regard to Japan, China, Thibet, the
Philippine Islands, Hindustan, Syria, as also to-day with respect to
the native tongues of the North American Indians. Here the record of
published literature, described and catalogued according to date, marks
the stages of mathematical and physical science, from the end of the
sixteenth century onwards, and of magnetic and electrical researches
all through last century; as well as the relationship between the books
of Jesuit authors and similar or kindred ones, by persons outside the
Society, in different countries and of divers religions.
In short, works composed in most of the tongues of the world exhibit
the chief periods in universal culture, and the developments elaborated
in the civilization of mankind.[143]
PART II.
ANALYSIS OF THE SYSTEM OF STUDIES