The Jesuits

A History

Markus Friedrich, John Noël Dillon

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780691226194
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Christian Denominations

The most comprehensive and up-to-date exploration of one of the most important religious orders in the modern world Since its founding by Ignatius of Loyola in 1540, the Society of Jesus—more commonly known as the Jesuits—has played a critical role in the events of modern history. From the Counter-Reformation to the ascent of Francis I as the first Jesuit pope, The Jesuits presents an intimate look at one of the most important religious orders not only in the Catholic Church, but also the world. Markus Friedrich describes an organization that has deftly walked a tightrope between sacred and secular involvement and experienced difficulties during changing times, all while shaping cultural developments from pastoral care and spirituality to art, education, and science.Examining the Jesuits in the context of social, cultural, and world history, Friedrich sheds light on how the order shaped the culture of the Counter-Reformation and participated in the establishment of European empires, including missionary activity throughout Asia and in many parts of Africa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He also explores the place of Jesuits in the New World and addresses the issue of Jesuit slaveholders. The Jesuits often tangled with the Roman Curia and the pope, resulting in their suppression in 1773, but the order returned in 1814 to rise again to a powerful position of influence. Friedrich demonstrates that the Jesuit fathers were not a monolithic group and he considers the distinctive spiritual legacy inherited by Pope Francis.With its global scope and meticulous attention to archival sources and previous scholarship, The Jesuits illustrates the heterogeneous, varied, and contradictory perspectives of this famed religious organization.

1

The Inner Life and Structure of the Society

THE JESUITS were proud of their order—proud of its members, its special qualities, and its unconventional features. They were also proud of how quickly their order spread and how prominent it soon became in the world. The Society of Jesus indeed grew rapidly after 1540, and not a few Jesuits seemed so confident of victory that this self-certainty became part of the Jesuit mentality.¹ That is the impression one gets, for example, when opening the Imago primi saeculi of 1640, an opulent, folio-sized luxury volume set in crisp type and illustrated with numerous fine etchings. The Imago was a celebratory text commissioned by the Jesuits of Antwerp on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Society, and it unmistakably reflects its authors’ confident pride. The Imago is second to none as a document of the Jesuits’ confidence in success—and it was also criticized outside and even inside the order for its lavishness. Be that as it may, it accurately reflects the mentality of many Jesuits after long years of virtually unabated success.²

Ignatius of Loyola himself laid the groundwork for the growth of his order very carefully in his sixteen years as superior general. He had set out to establish detailed, binding rules to govern the Society of Jesus in both spiritual and organizational terms. In the process, and in collaboration with his two most important associates, Juan de Polanco and Jerónimo Nadal, he ensured that his unique personal charisma translated into a viable structure. The Spiritual Exercises and the Constitutions served as authoritative foundational texts that described both the spiritual and organizational sides of the Society in detail. Ignatius did everything conceivable to guarantee the continuity of the order. Some turbulence occurred after his death, from 1556 until the conclusion of the First General Congregation in 1558, but these two years did not cause any lasting breaks. In contrast to many other religious orders, for the Society of Jesus the loss of the charismatic founder ultimately proved to be only a moderate crisis. The rapid success of the new order continued virtually unbroken after 1556 and even accelerated.

The first section of this chapter gives a succinct overview of the most important stages and regions in which the Society of Jesus spread across Europe. On the one hand, it is intended to illustrate the enormous geographic extent of the Jesuits’ presence. On the other, it should become clear that the nature and special identity of the Society were by no means universally embraced. Many contemporaries harbored reservations and harshly criticized the methods of the new order.

The second section introduces the men who joined the Society: Who were they, and what were their motives? And, fundamentally: How did one become a Jesuit? The third section then gives an overview of Jesuit religious life and the pillars of Jesuit spirituality. Here we will see the spiritual compass that a Jesuit lived by, and what religious values shaped his conception of self and the world. We also will encounter the Jesuits’ claim that there actually was something like “our way of proceeding”—the Imago primi saeculi itself sang the praises of this “typically Jesuit” way over several hundred pages.

After spirituality, our view will shift to the structure and constitution of the Society—precisely the aspects that are traditionally regarded as the keys to the enormous success of the Society of Jesus. No other order in the history of Western Christendom gave so much thought and dedicated so much energy to regulating its internal administration. The Jesuit order became a bureaucratic machine—at least that is how its enemies saw it, and that is what many leading Jesuits seem to have intended. It is not for nothing that Superior General Claudio Acquaviva himself once declared that the Society should function like “clockwork.”³ In practice, everyday operations usually fell far short of this ideal, but there was no shortage of efforts to optimize the internal procedures of the Jesuit order.

Historians normally set their sights only on the successful and loyal members of the Jesuit order. But, as the final section of this chapter shows, controversy constantly simmered beneath the surface of the Society of Jesus. In no way did every young man who joined the Society thrive there. And by no means did every Jesuit who was admitted meet his superiors’ expectations. Hence, the history of the Society is also a history of disappointment, dismissal, and disillusionment. A study of the inner life of this religious order would be incomplete without discussing the dissatisfaction and dejection, the turpitude and abject indecency of some of its members and their associates. With several thousand members and hundreds of communities, it is no wonder that disputes constantly broke out in the Society of Jesus.

Growth in Europe

When the Jesuit order was founded in 1540, it had ten members. By Ignatius’s death in 1556, that number had grown to a thousand.⁴ But it was the founder’s successors who witnessed and guided the massive expansion of the Society. The first of these was Diego Laínez (r. 1558–65), an adept theologian and one of Ignatius’s closest confidants. Laínez was the only one of Ignatius’s first companions to become superior general. After Laínez’s death in 1565, Francisco de Borja (r. 1565–72) was elected at the Second General Congregation. Borja came from the highest echelon of the Spanish nobility, and he had already lent the Jesuits his energetic support as Duke of Gandía. He was arguably the Jesuit superior general who was inclined the most toward mysticism and devotional introspection; accordingly, he always paid particularly close attention to the spiritual side of the Society’s development. Under Laínez and Borja, the number of Jesuits quadrupled.

The order thus grew rapidly from the very start. But this growth was neither consciously planned nor completely even. The lifetime of the founder was by no means the period that witnessed the greatest numbers of new members; while Ignatius led the Society, it grew by approximately 62 Jesuits per year. The order’s most significant growth occurred, instead, under Claudio Acquaviva (r. 1581–1615), when it gained up to 309 men annually. By 1600, there consequently were already 8,519 Jesuits. It was Acquaviva who obviously maximized the attractiveness of the order. And it was by this point in time, at the latest, that the rapid developments of the past sixty years had led to an erosion of clear guidelines. A generation after Ignatius’s death, the incredible vitality that could be observed everywhere had to be brought under stricter control.

Acquaviva governed the Society of Jesus for thirty-four years and consolidated the order over this long period. The final form of many Jesuit projects can be traced back to his term in office. He helped the Society find its pedagogical identity with the universal educational program set forth in the Ratio studiorum of 1599; he approved an obligatory guide to the Spiritual Exercises in the form of an official handbook (also published in 1599). Acquaviva’s name is further associated with numerous administrative rules and literary projects. Not least, during his long term as superior general, he ensured that his vision of a rigorously organized, worldly, proselytizing, focused, and centralized Society of Jesus became reality, despite internal resistance.

Not all Jesuits were on board with Acquaviva’s vision. He was harshly criticized in some quarters. Spanish adversaries in particular railed against his allegedly “tyrannical” leadership. At the Fifth General Congregation in 1593, they tried to pass constitutional amendments that would have dramatically changed the Society, but the superior general from the family of the Dukes of Atri in southern Italy successfully asserted his policy. In his peculiar way, he made sure that the many initiatives of the stormy early years remained coherent despite their ferocious individual dynamics. The Society of Jesus that Acquaviva erected on the foundation laid by Ignatius and his immediate successors went on to shape Europe for the next 150 years.

Under Acquaviva’s cautious successor, Muzio Vitelleschi (r. 1615–45), less turbulent times followed, despite the Thirty Years’ War. After the Society survived a succession of three superiors general in just six years between 1646 and 1652, Goswin Nickel (r. 1652–64), Gianpaolo Oliva (r. 1664–81), and Charles de Noyelle (r. 1682–86) presided over a period of slower growth. Now the annual number of new recruits was only 40 to 50 Jesuits, so that by 1679 the Society had a total of 17,655 members. The late seventeenth century is often considered a period of growing problems for the order, which even experienced crises in certain areas. Andalusia, for example, registered a precipitous drop in numbers.⁵ Within the Society, the generalate of Tirso González (r. 1687–1705) was marred by fierce infighting over his unusual theological positions and his authoritarian leadership style. The overall situation did not improve until after 1700. Michaelangelo Tamburini (r. 1706–30) and Franz Retz (r. 1730–50) led the Society in its final phase of expansion. The first half of the century that gave birth to the Enlightenment was a phase in which the attractiveness of the Society increased yet again—the order grew on average by 95 Jesuits per year. In 1750, the Society reached its absolute peak membership with 22,589 Jesuits. Thereafter, membership collapsed: by 1758, only 17,879 members remained. Growing hostility toward the order in Portugal, France, Spain, and soon all across Europe made itself felt. The appeal of the Society of Jesus was rapidly dwindling at the end of the early modern period.

All these Jesuits had to live and work somewhere, and so the proliferation of Jesuit houses was no less rapid. In 1540, the Society still lacked permanent quarters; at the time of Ignatius’s death, it had 79 houses. That number soon exploded to several hundred—at the Society’s greatest geographic extent in 1710, there were no fewer than 612 colleges worldwide and approximately 500 other communities, excluding temporary missions. A network of significantly over 1,100 more or less permanent, more or less elaborate Jesuit outposts and communities spanned the globe. At Ignatius’s death, the order had divided the world into 12 provinces; in 1616, there were 32; and prior to 1773, that number had risen to a grand total of 37.

Behind these numbers—people, provinces, houses—lie the fates of countless individuals and unique local developments. The lives of the Jesuits in Europe varied greatly throughout the early modern period.⁶ Until approximately 1750, for example, Portugal was very fertile ground for the Jesuits.⁷ King João III became the first major patron of the young order. As early as 1539, even before the Society had been formally founded, João had instructed his ambassador in Rome to ask Loyola to send Jesuits. It was in Portugal in 1552 that a Jesuit—Diego Miró—first became court confessor. And it was in the service of the king of Portugal that the first Jesuit missionaries set out for Asia (Francis Xavier) and Brazil (Manuel da Nóbrega).

In Portugal, it was Simão Rodrigues—like Francis Xavier, one of Ignatius’s earliest companions—who was initially of paramount importance. But he and Ignatius soon clashed, ultimately resulting in Rodrigues’s demotion and almost in his expulsion from the Society. It was not until decades later, under the fourth superior general, Everard Mercurian (r. 1573–80), that a kind of reconciliation with the headquarters in Rome was reached. In early 1542, Rodrigues received the old monastery of Santo Antão in Lisbon in exchange for other properties that the king had transferred to him. Ten years later, this site became the Jesuit college in the capital. Almost simultaneously, in 1541, the Jesuits established a house in the university city of Coimbra, and in 1555 the Society took over the royal university there (the Real Collegio). The Jesuits also founded a new university under the aegis of Cardinal Henrique, the king’s brother, in Évora in 1551. The influx of new members in Portugal was initially immense. By 1579, the small country with its 550 Jesuits had twice as many members as the German provinces combined.

Over the long term, however, developments in Portugal took an ambivalent turn for the Jesuits. When King Sebastião, João’s grandson, fell in battle against the Muslims at Alcácer Quibir, Morocco, in 1578, the Jesuits were blamed for the youthful ambition of the idealistic ruler they had largely educated. Sixty years of Spanish rule in Portugal followed until 1640, a period in which the Jesuits enjoyed much less influence. Only two new establishments—a professed house in Vila Viçosa (1601) and the college of Santarém—were founded during this phase. The number of new members declined, and two of the three novitiates closed (Évora and Coimbra; only Lisbon survived).

The Jesuits were sympathetic observers of the upheaval of 1640, when the Portuguese dynasty of the Braganças ended Spanish rule, but they did not participate directly. Over the following decades, members of the Society again came into close proximity to the king of Portugal. The Jesuits supported the new dynasty as best they could. Besides sermons, celebrations, and other activities, it is the propagandistic pamphlet Restauração de Portugal prodigiosa (1643) penned by ...