The First Jesuits

John W. O'Malley

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1995
• Print ISBN: 9780674303133, 9780674303126
• eBook ISBN: 9780674251946
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

John W. O'Malley gives us the most comprehensive account ever written of the Society of Jesus in its founding years, one that heightens and transforms our understanding of the Jesuits in history and today. Following the Society from 1540 through 1565, O'Malley shows how this sense of mission evolved. He looks at everything—the Jesuits' teaching, their preaching, their casuistry, their work with orphans and prostitutes, their attitudes toward Jews and "New Christians," and their relationship to the Reformation. All are taken in by the sweep of O'Malley's story as he details the Society's manifold activities in Europe, Brazil, and India.

1

Foundations before the Founding

THE STORY OF THE first Jesuits does not begin, properly speaking, until the Society of Jesus officially came into existence with the papal bull of 27 September 1540. The history of the order is unintelligible, however, when viewed apart from the life of Ignatius up to that point and apart from the Spiritual Exercises, substantially completed by him years earlier.

Ignatius and the First Companions

Iñigo López de Loyola was born, the last of his father’s many children, most probably in 1491 at the castle of Loyola in the Basque territory of northern Spain, near Azpetia in the province of Guipuzcoa.¹ He received the chivalric and academically sparse education of his class. When he was about thirteen, he was sent by his father to the household at Arévalo of Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar, chief treasurer of King Ferdinand of Aragon, where he was trained in the manners and the skills appropriate for a courtier. He remained at Arévalo for a number of years. In a visit to Loyola in 1515, Iñigo was cited in court for brawling; at that time he claimed he had been tonsured and hence had benefit of clergy. This incident and his admission much later in life that he had been indiscreet in his relationships with women—“satis liber in mulierum amore”—indicate that his clerical status, acquired we know not when, functioned for him only as a legal convenience.²

When Velázquez died in 1517, Iñigo entered military service under Don Antonio Marique de Lara, duke of Nájera and viceroy of Navarre. In 1521 King Francis I of France opened the first phase of his long contest with the newly elected emperor, Charles of Habsburg, who since 1516 had also been king of Spain. When French troops entered Spain and advanced on Pamplona, Iñigo was there to defend it, and on 20 May he suffered a blow from a cannonball that shattered his right leg and badly wounded his left. Despite several painful operations, the doctors were unable to save him from a lifelong limp.

While recuperating at the castle of Loyola, he found none of the tales of chivalry that he loved to read. In some desperation he turned to the only literature at hand—the lives of the saints in The Golden Legend by Jacopo da Voragine and the Life of Christ by Ludolph of Saxony, both translated into Castilian. The former led him to speculate about the possibility of fashioning his own life after the saints and of imitating their deeds, cast by him into the mode of the chivalric heroes with whom he was so familiar. It was thus that Iñigo’s conversion began.

In his imagination, however, he debated for a long time the alternatives of continuing according to his former path, even with his limp, or of turning completely from it to the patterns exemplified especially by Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Dominic. He found that when he entertained the first alternative he was afterward left dry and agitated in spirit, whereas the second brought him serenity and comfort. By thus consulting his inner experience, he gradually came to the conviction that God was speaking to him through it, and he resolved to begin an entirely new life. This process by which he arrived at his decision became a distinctive feature of the way he would continue to govern himself and became a paradigm of what he would teach others.

Once his physical strength was sufficiently restored, he set out from Loyola for the Benedictine monastery of Montserrat in Catalonia, which he planned as the first step in a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. At Montserrat, after spending an entire night in vigil before the famous statue there of the Black Madonna, he laid down his sword and dagger and took up in their stead a pilgrim’s staff and beggar’s clothing. Early in the century Abbot García Jiménez de Cisneros had reformed the monastery and introduced, among other things, the practice of having the novices, prior to their investiture with the Benedictine habit, spend ten or more days preparing for a confession of their sins up to that time.³ Iñigo, under the direction of the master of novices, followed a modified version of that practice by taking three days to write down his own sins before making a similar confession. These actions at Montserrat ritualized the definitive closing of the door on his past.

The precise direction that his new life would take, however, remained unclear, except that for the moment Jerusalem was his goal. When he left Montserrat, he planned to spend a few days at the small town of Manresa, near Barcelona, in order to reflect upon his experience up to that point. For various reasons, including originally an outbreak of the plague, he prolonged his sojourn there to almost a year. According to Pedro de Ribadeneira, he later designated this period his “primitive church,” probably meaning to suggest the simplicity and evangelical authenticity that the term had connoted to reformers since the eleventh century.⁴

At Manresa, Iñigo meditated on the life of Christ and discovered The Imitation of Christ, a book to which he remained devoted all his life. At the same time he gave himself up to a regimen of prayer, fasting, self-flagellation, and other austerities that were extreme even for the sixteenth century. He surrendered all care for his appearance and, in defiance of convention, let his hair and fingernails grow. Shortly after his arrival at Manresa, moreover, he began to experience an excruciating aridity of soul, obsessive doubts about the integrity of his sacramental confessions, and even temptations of suicide. He sought remedy for these afflictions by consulting priests whom he knew, but to no avail.

By attending once again to his inner inspiration, he began to find guidance. He greatly tempered his austerities, resolved his doubts about his confessions, and gradually experienced a return of serenity along with some great internal enlightenments, which sometimes took the form of visions that he believed were from God. He later described one of these enlightenments as being so powerful that he would believe what it contained “even if there were no Scriptures” that taught the same thing.⁵ This description indicates his own conviction, as he forcefully expressed it, that he was directly “taught by God.”⁶

During this time he began to use his religious experiences to help others, and he made notes with that end in view. After a certain point, scholars are now agreed, the essential elements of the Spiritual Exercises emerged and began to take form.⁷ The book was a kind of simplified distillation of his own experience framed in such a way as to be useful to others. Although Iñigo continued to revise the book over the next twenty years, he had much of it fundamentally in hand when he left Manresa to complete his pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

After many frustrations he finally arrived there from Venice in the autumn of 1523. He enjoyed a fortnight visiting the places revered by Christians, where he began to hope to spend the rest of his days. Given the situation with their Turkish overlords, the Franciscans who looked after pilgrims in the Holy Land knew that they could not underwrite such a plan, and their superior told Iñigo that he would have to leave. His reluctance was so great that the Franciscan threatened to levy an excommunication against him unless he obeyed promptly, which he did.

Posthumous portrait of Ignatius of Loyola, by Jacopino del Conte, 1556. The painting is in the Curia Generalizia of the Society of Jesus, Borgo Santo Spirito 5, Rome.

Iñigo did not reveal to the Franciscans that one of his reasons for wanting to stay in the Holy Land was to “help souls,” whatever that meant to him at the time. Once he realized that his plan was at least for the moment not attainable and that he had to return to Europe, he tells us that he “felt inclined toward spending some time in studies” as a means to that same end.⁸ Just how he came to see a relationship between learning and the ministry in which he now hoped to engage he does not tell, nor does he say here or elsewhere in his Autobiography that he saw these studies as leading to ordination to the priesthood, but the decision to study would in any case determine his future course.

By the autumn of 1524 he found himself in classes at Barcelona, trying to learn Latin grammar with children less than half his age. In the meantime he begged for his food and then in the evenings shared what he had acquired with vagrants he sought out on the streets. After two years he felt himself sufficiently grounded to venture into the lecture halls of the recently founded University of Alcalá, where the program of studies was strongly influenced by both the University of Paris and certain aspects of the humanist movement of Renaissance Italy. At this time Alcalá was also a center in Spain of enthusiasm for the writings of Erasmus, and Iñigo was befriended there by Miguel de Eguia, printer of the original Latin of Erasmus’s Handbook of the Christian Soldier (1525) and of its translation into Castilian (1526).

Still wearing his pilgrim’s garb, Iñigo attended, without much guidance or plan, lectures on dialectics, Aristotle’s Physics, and Peter Lombard’s Sentences. In his free hours he continued to beg for his sustenance and also began to guide a few people with the Exercises and to teach catechism to “the great number of people” who assembled, presumably in the streets, to hear him.⁹ He was joined by several other men who dressed similarly and followed the same style of life, which included the suspect practice of receiving Communion every week.

Rumors soon spread that these “sack wearers” were in fact alumbrados. The “enlightened ones,” adherents to a movement especially widespread in Castile that extolled the seeking of spiritual perfection through internal illumination, were pursued by fearful authorities as pseudo-mystics who belittled more traditional expressions of piety.¹⁰ The rumors about Iñigo and his friends thus brought them several times to the attention of the Inquisition of Toledo, which eventually led to Iñigo’s spending forty-two days in prison while he awaited a verdict. Although they were found innocent, he and his companions were admonished to dress like the other students and not to speak in public on religious matters until they had completed four more years of study.

The verdict on Iñigo was correct, for he was not an alumbrado. He had friendly relationships, however, with persons associated with the movement, and in a few important respects his teaching resembled theirs.¹¹ He and the early Jesuits had to spend much time and effort trying to clarify how they differed from the alumbrados, especially when “Lutherans” “Erasmians,” and “enlightened ones” were sometimes thought to be simply different names for the same contemptible group.

Somewhat bewildered as to where the restrictions on his pastoral activities left him, Iñigo was soon confirmed by the friendly counsel of Alfonso de Fonseca y Acebedo, archbishop of Toledo, in his inclination to discontinue his studies in Alcalá and go to the most distinguished of the older Spanish universities, Salamanca. He and four companions had hardly arrived there in midsummer of 1527, however, when they fell under the suspicion of the Dominicans at the prestigious convent of San Esteban, at least some of whom saw the world as filled with the errors of Erasmus and misbelievers. Within two weeks Iñigo was again in prison. This time four judges interrogated him, all of whom had examined a manuscript copy of the Spiritual Exercises and paid special attention to the part dealing with “discernment of spirits,” in which the movements in the soul of consolation and desolation and their role in finding and following the will of God are discussed.

The judges again acquitted him, this time allowing him to continue teaching catechism, but with the stricture that in so doing he not discuss the difference between mortal and venial sins until he had completed more years of study. Despite Iñigo’s acquittal, the experience convinced him that he should not stay in Salamanca. He determined to pursue in Paris the studies that now seemed imperative, even though friends warned him that the political and military designs of the French king made the city dangerous for subjects of Charles of Habsburg. After a journey of almost seven hundred miles, on 2 February 1528 he arrived alone in Paris, where he was destined to stay, with brief interruptions, for seven years—until April 1535.

The brevity of the account of the Parisian years in his Autobiography belies their importance for the future Society of Jesus, and those few pages are remarkable more for what they do not recount than for what they do. They for the most part deal with Iñigos attempts to beg for his living in Paris and elsewhere, which carried him for short visits to Flanders and England; they also provide some details about his communication with his former companions in Spain and give only the barest hints about the program of studies that led to his Master of Arts degree in 1535. They do not tell us, for instance, that while in Paris he attended lectures on Aquinas by the Dominicans at the convent of Saint-Jacques, or that he also probably studied under the Franciscans nearby. They say nothing about the tense political situation concerning which his friends had warned him and, more surprising, they do not mention a word about Lutheranism in Paris, even though in 1533–34 the university and the kingdo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Foundations before the Founding
• 2 Taking Shape for Ministry
• 3 Ministries of the Word of God
• 4 Sacraments, Worship, Prayer
• 5 Works of Mercy
• 6 The Schools
• 7 Religious and Theological Culture
• 8 The Jesuits and the Church at Large
• 9 Prescriptions for the Future
• Conclusion
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index