Hughes Thomas
Loyola and the Educational System of the Jesuits
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 manœuvre, 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
