The Jesuits
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Such figures are approximate because of the variety of institutions sometimes designated as colleges and because at a rate difficult to track schools opened and others closed. They in any case reveal how massive the Jesuits’ commitment to education was and how well established the Society had become in urban centers even outside Europe. Both the school and the church attached to a college nurtured the development of Marian congregations serving students and various groupings of adults. These congregations, also known as sodalities, were the Jesuit adaptation of lay brotherhoods or confraternities so popular in Catholic Europe since the late Middle Ages. Their purpose was, in the first place, to sustain the members’ religious devotion, but the congregations also often engaged in works of social assistance to the needy and in sponsoring cultural events such as concerts and oratorios. The Jesuits founded them in every place they labored.
Vitelleschi, the sixth superior general, held the office for thirty years, from 1615 until 1645. Early in his generalate he presided over an extraordinarily happy occasion, the canonization in 1622 of Ignatius and Xavier, and over the great celebrations of the event throughout the Society. The celebration in the Roman College, though particularly splendid, is emblematic of others and, indeed, of the Jesuits’ engagement with the arts to which their schools had committed them.
The entire inner space of the College was redesigned for the occasion for a celebration extending over several days. At one point a group of fifty-four students, wearing crowns, classical garb, and medals of Saint Ignatius, danced and sang a dithyramb, the lyrics of which could be read on a banner hanging on the walls. The central part of the celebration was entrusted to three theatrical performances, which succeeded one another in the ceremonial hall and required continual change in the enormous scenographic apparatus constructed for the occasion.
Theater had by then become a distinguishing mark of Jesuit schools and was considered by the Jesuits an essential component in their educational program. It taught poise and put eloquence, the mark of a leader in society, into practice. It sparked enthusiasm in the students and rescued them at least for a while from the drudgery of the classroom. Even schools of modest size generally produced two or three plays annually, which further anchored the institution as an essential element in the cultural life of the city. The limitations of “school drama” are well known, but to put it into perspective we need to recall that Lope de Vega, Calderón, Andreas Gryphius, Jacob Bidermann, Corneille, and Molière received their first training in theater in Jesuit schools.
Despite their concentration on literary genres as the core of the curriculum, many of the schools included a strong program in mathematics. Two years after the Roman College opened its doors, it added under the rubric of philosophy a chair of mathematics, understood to include geometry, optics, and astronomy. A major turning point occurred when in 1563 the German Jesuit Christoph Clavius assumed the chair, which he held until his death in 1612.
Clavius by force of his writings and the prestige he enjoyed among his peers launched a tradition that continued strong among the Jesuits until the suppression in 1773. An important consultant for Pope Gregory XIII on the reform of the calendar, he was also a teacher of Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit missionary in China, who used the mathematical skills he learned at the Roman College to win favor in the imperial court. Although Clavius had friendly relations with Galileo and supported some of his findings, he continued to hold to a basically Ptolemaic system.
The teaching of natural philosophy in Jesuit schools suffered from the condemnation of Galileo, but the discipline managed to survive and, though it for a while lagged behind in this rapidly developing field, it caught up. By the middle of the eighteenth century, physics taught in the Jesuits’ colleges had largely assumed the characteristics of physics taught in other European schools. It by then was vastly different from what it had been when Clavius laid the groundwork. With the exception of Roger Boscovich (1711–1787), the Jesuits produced no scientist of first rank, but they kept abreast of what was going on and incorporated new developments into their teaching and writing.
Their vocation as missionaries provided them with opportunities for creating knowledge in geography, cartography, anthropology, and botany that were extraordinary. The reports the missionaries sent back became available to the larger academic community for two reasons special to the Jesuits. First, members of the Society were encouraged to keep up a steady correspondence among themselves. Second, what they wrote, especially about “curious” phenomena, was produced by men who were or had been teachers, and it got fed into a network of Jesuit teachers who knew how to exploit this information and release it into the public domain. In their classrooms all across Europe, for instance, Jesuits taught the geography they learned from the missionaries’ maps.
José de Acosta’s firsthand description of the lands and peoples of Peru and Mexico, Historia natural y moral de las Indias, is among the more important and famous of such Jesuit publications. First appearing in 1590, it within two decades went through four editions in Spanish, two in Dutch, two in French, three in Latin, two in German, and one in English. Meanwhile, dozens upon dozens of botanizing Jesuits described and gathered plant specimens from as far away as China, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Paraguay, and Canada and sent them back home. This phenomenon enabled Jesuit teachers in Europe to assemble cabinets, create botanical gardens, and publish multivolume compendiums on natural history. The Jesuits opened pharmacies in which they distributed natural remedies such as quinine (known as “Jesuit bark”) that their confreres had sent them from the missions.
The Jesuit educational and cultural enterprises display a coherence surprising for an organization made up of men from such different national and socioeconomic backgrounds stationed almost around the world. The coherence was due, most basically, to a shared European culture and then to Ignatius and his close collaborators, Polanco and Nadal, who produced a template of procedures that emphasized reflection, consultation, and clear articulation of goals and means. An outstanding product of that tradition relating to education is the Ratio Studiorum or “Plan of Studies” issued in 1599 by Vitelleschi’s predecessor as general, Claudio Aquaviva.
The Ratio was the result, typical of the Jesuits of this period, of widespread consultation and discussion within the Society. Its purpose was to ensure high standards and uniform practices in Jesuit schools in different parts of the world. In 1584 Aquaviva delegated a committee of six Jesuits to consolidate earlier documents addressing the subject. He then sent the results to the provinces for criticism, which poured into the Jesuit curia in Rome in great abundance. In 1591 he sent a new document for a three-year trial, which received a less negative response than the first. The results enabled him in 1599 to promulgate the definitive edition.
The Ratio consists essentially in a series of job descriptions for officials and teachers. It laid down the goals for each stage of the students’ development and the pedagogical exercises that would ensure the goals were met. It reflected and codified assumptions about education common in the era, and therefore it assumed but did not articulate what those assumptions were. Only through inference can they be discovered. The Ratio without doubt stabilized practice in the Jesuit schools and set a high standard for them, which were huge benefits. But times change. The Ratio eventually began to impede the Jesuits’ ability to respond to new circumstances, except when they decided virtually to ignore it or interpret it in the most generous way.
THE SOCIETY IN EUROPE
Jesuits exercised their ministries in many different countries and contexts. The history of the order, despite much that transcended specific situations, reflects this fact. In Italy during this period, for instance, they suffered only one major setback. When Pope Paul V in 1606 placed the Republic of Venice under interdict, the Jesuits, along with the Capuchins and Theatines, sided with the pope and were therefore expelled. Although the pope lifted the interdict the next year, the Republic did not readmit the Jesuits until fifty years later. T
he Society had already become identified as an agent of a foreign power, a problem that often made its situation precarious elsewhere as well.
In Italy the Jesuits otherwise enjoyed relative freedom and prosperity, largely due to the prestige that their schools brought them. The smashing success of the Roman College shed luster on all their educational institutions. The superiors general brought to its classrooms from everywhere in Europe the order’s most gifted teachers, such as Clavius from Germany, Francisco Suárez from Spain, Pierre Perpinien from France, and Roberto Bellarmino from the Roman province itself.
Adding to the luster of that province and to Italy in general were two youths of noble blood who entered the Society and died young in Rome with a reputation for sanctity—the Pole Stanilaus Kostka and the Italian Aloysius Gonzaga. In 1605 Pope Paul V allowed them the title of “blessed,” which was four years before he allowed the same for Ignatius. The Jesuits immediately held them up as models for the boys in their schools, and their portraits soon were to be found in every Jesuit church.
After the hostile pontificate of Paul IV, the popes generally took a favorable or neutral attitude toward the Society. Gregory XIII (1572–1585) was particularly friendly and showed special generosity toward the Roman College. Although Clement VIII (1592–1605) was not hostile to the Jesuits, he was certainly not particularly favorable. During his pontificate occurred the Society’s first major internal crisis since the death of Ignatius. Its point of origin was Spain.
In a small but influential group of Spanish Jesuits, which included José de Acosta, smoldered resentment of Aquaviva for what they believed were his high-handed methods. But along with an animus against Aquaviva, they advocated that rectors and provincials be elected on the local level instead of being appointed by the general in Rome. Such a change in the Constitutions would be radical.
Through reports sent to Rome, these Jesuits aroused the concern, first, of Pope Sixtus V and then of his successor, Clement. Aquaviva was able to dissuade the former from taking action, but when the problem recurred under the latter, he was much less successful. Clement, conscientious but easily intimidated, ordered Aquaviva to convoke a General Congregation of the order, which perforce would be a challenge to Aquaviva personally but also to fundamental principles in the Constitutions. (In the Society a General Congregation was the equivalent of a General Chapter in other orders and had supreme authority in the Society.) Sixty-three delegates were duly elected in the Jesuit provinces around the world and came to Rome, where on November 3, 1593, they opened the Fifth General Congregation. The Congregation lasted two and half months. It overwhelmingly rejected the idea that the mode of governance stipulated in the Constitutions be changed in any way, and it rejected as unfounded the criticisms of Aquaviva. The critics had overplayed their hand. Their coup failed.
At just about the same time, both Aquaviva and Clement faced another problem that also arose in Spain. The Council of Trent in its Sixth Session, 1547, issued a long decree in response to Luther’s teaching of “justification by faith alone.” In its decree the council affirmed that both free will and grace were operative in the soul, but it did not try to explain just how that relationship worked, which left the question open to theologians. In 1588 the Spanish Jesuit Luis de Molina published his Concordance of Free Will with the Gifts of Grace, in which according to his major critic, Domingo Bañez, a distinguished Dominican theologian, he attributed so much to free will as to fall into the heresy known as Pelagianism.
A major battle broke out. All at once the Spanish Jesuits and the Spanish Dominicans seemed to be fighting a contest unto death, in which the Jesuits accused the Dominicans of being Calvinists, and the Dominicans accused the Jesuits of being Pelagians. The controversy escalated to such a degree that in 1594 Pope Clement ordered the affair be brought to Rome for adjudication. There for more than ten years the debate raged, with Clement reaching no decision. Finally in 1607 the new pope, Paul V, ordered a cease-fire and forbade both the Jesuits and Dominicans from ever denouncing the doctrine of the other as dangerous or heretical. For the Jesuits the controversy brought to the surface and helped crystallize a bias toward free agency that became typical of them.
These two problems that arose in Spain while Aquaviva was general obscure how well the Society was prospering there. The schools enjoyed great prestige, Jesuit confessors were sought after by high and low, and Jesuit preachers drew large crowds. The colleges and residences became hubs from which during vacation periods teams of Jesuits radiated to the countryside, moving from hamlet to hamlet among the humblest strata of society in intensive programs in preaching, teaching catechism, and working to quell vendettas. In central Europe, the Jesuits of the German assistancy profited from the leadership that Peter Canisius provided for almost a half century. Like much of the rest of the Society, they continued to grow in numbers and public esteem. They without doubt were Catholicism’s strongest bulwark against the Reformation and were uncompromising in their opposition to it. In Protestant eyes the Jesuits became the very embodiment of the dreaded Counter-Reformation.
In the early seventeenth century, the political and religious situation took an especially ugly and destructive turn with the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, 1618–1648. Originally a contest between Catholic and Lutheran forces “in German lands,” it escalated to an international power struggle. On one side stood Catholic Austria, Bavaria, and Spain, and on the other Catholic France. The battles were fought almost exclusively on German soil and left many areas utterly devastated.
Vitelleschi’s thirty-year tenure as general, 1615–1645, corresponded almost precisely with the dates of the war. Among the other problems he faced because of the war was that Jesuits were the confessors of the monarchs of all four of the great Catholic powers. He again and again forbade them to use their role in any way to influence political policy, but that was a distinction more easily drawn in theory than in practice. Wilhelm Lamormaini became Emperor Ferdinand II’s confessor in 1624 and worked to convince him that his destiny was the restoration of Catholicism in all the Habsburg lands.
During his time as Ferdinand’s confessor, Lamormaini had a particularly high profile and soon became regarded, with considerable justification, as the power behind the throne. His opposition to any compromise with Protestants won him enemies near and far, and it resulted in a sharp rise in anti-Jesuit feeling even among Catholics. Vitelleschi felt helpless as long as Lamormaini enjoyed the emperor’s favor. The notoriety surrounding Lamormaini and the well-known fact that Jesuits were confessors to other monarchs gained for them the reputation of political meddlers and international schemers.
In 1614, just before the Thirty Years War began, the anonymous and scurrilous Monita Secreta appeared in Kraków to become almost immediately one of the most influential sources of the “black legend” about the Jesuits. It was a small book that had a big impact and was published and republished in all the major vernaculars into the twentieth century. A crude forgery, it purported to be secret instructions from the superior general of the Society telling select members how to fleece widows of their fortunes, how to use confessional secrets to blackmail rulers, and how by these and other despicable means to climb to the pinnacle of political power. Refuted and denounced as soon as published, no other book, except possibly Pascal’s Provincial Letters, so effectively poisoned opinion against the Jesuits.
At about the same time in Poland, where Calvinism had won the minds and hearts of the nobility, the Jesuits found support for their efforts in King Sigismund III, who reigned in the crucial years 1587–1632. The alliance of the Jesuits with the monarchy won them enemies among the nobility and helped foster an atmosphere where the Monita seemed credible. Important though royal support was, the Jesuits could not have been as well received as they generally were had it not been for their own merits. The schools, attended by many students whose parents were not Catholic, were, again, a crucial factor. In 1626 there were twenty-eight in the vast Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
But the schools are not the whole story. The Jesuits found a particularly warm response to their preaching. To listen to a Jesuit sermon became a fashionable pastime even for Protestants. Careful to master the Ruthenian and Lithuanian languages, the preachers by constant use helped keep these tongues alive. Piotr Skarga’s Lives of the Saints, 1579, and Jakub Wujek’s elegant translation of the Bible, 1599, were widely read and contributed to the development of the Polish language. In time the Jesuits were accepted, therefore, as true Poles.
However, the suspicion that the Jesuits were foreigners dogged them in France almost from the beginning and added to the difficulties that the Faculty of Theology’s condemnation in 1554 continued to cause them. The Jesuits did their best to carry on as they did elsewhere, despite the immense problems thrust upon them with the outbreak in 1562 of almost thirty years of religious conflict between Catholics and Huguenots that tore the country apart. Even in this difficult situation, there were in 1575 more than three hundred men divided into two provinces, and by 1580 they were conducting fifteen colleges.
In contrast to the welcome Jesuits received in some parts of the country, in Paris the university and Parlement kept up a barrage of accusations and denunciation. The Jesuits, supported by the crown, got caught in the cross fire between the monarchy and its enemies. Matters only got worse. The assassination of King Henry III in 1589 brought to the throne the Huguenot Henry of Navarre. Although Navarre converted to Catholicism, the Jesuits were forbidden by Aquaviva to take the required oath of loyalty until the papacy lifted Henry’s excommunication. The Jesuits’ abstention from the oath put them in a compromised position and added to the persuasion that they were not true Frenchmen.