Hughes Thomas
Loyola and the Educational System of the Jesuits
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
