The Jesuits, 1534-1921

"In India, there were nineteen colleges and two seminaries; in Mexico, fourteen colleges and two seminaries; in Brazil, thirteen colleges and two seminaries; in Paraguay, seven colleges," and the authors might have added, there was a college in Quebec, which antedated the famous Puritan establishment of Harvard in New England, and which was erected not "out of the profits of the fur trade," as Renaudot says in the Margry Collection, but out of the inheritance of a Jesuit scholastic.

After furnishing their readers with this splendid list of houses of education, the question is asked: "How can we explain this incredible success of the Order as a teaching body? If we are to believe the sworn enemies of the Jesuits, it is because they taught gratuitously, and thus starved out the legitimate successors of the Humanists. That might explain it somewhat, they say, especially in southern Italy, where the nobleman is always next door to the lazzarone, but it will by no means explain how so many princes and municipalities made such enormous outlays to support those schools; for there were other orders in Catholic countries as rigidly orthodox as the Jesuits. No; the great reason of their success must be attributed to the superiority of their methods. Read the pedagogical directions of Ignatius, the great scholastic ordinances of Aquaviva, and the testimony of contemporaries, and you will recognize the glory of Loyola as an educator. The expansion is truly amazing; from a modest association of students to a world-wide power which ended by becoming as universal as the Church for which it fought; but superior to it in cohesion and rapidity of action – a world power whose influence made itself felt not only throughout Europe, but in the New World, in India, China, Japan; a world power on whose service one sees at work, actuated by the same spirit, representatives of all races and all nations: Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, French, Germans, English, Poles and Greeks, Arabians, Chinamen and Japanese and even red Indians; a world power which is something such as the world has never seen."

Another explanation is found in the vast wealth which "from the beginning was the most important means employed by the Order." We are assured that the Jesuits have observed on this point such an absolute reserve that it is still impossible to write a history or draw up an inventory of their possessions. But, perhaps it might be answered that if an attempt were also made to penetrate "the absolute reserve" of those who have robbed the Jesuits of all their splendid colleges and libraries and churches and residences which may be seen in every city of Europe and Spanish America, with the I.H.S. of the Society still on their portals, some progress might be made in at least drawing up an inventory of their possessions.

As a matter of fact the Jesuits have laid before the public the inventories of their possessions and those plain and undisguised statements could easily be found if there was any sincere desire to get at the truth. Thus Foley has published in his "Records of the English Province" (Introd., 139) an exact statement of the annual revenues of the various houses for one hundred and twenty years. Dühr in the "Jesuiten-fabeln" (606 sqq.) gives many figures of the same kind for Germany. Indeed the Society has been busy from the beginning trying to lay this financial ghost. Thus a demand for the books was made as early as 1594 by Antoine Arnauld who maintained that the French Jesuits enjoyed an annual revenue of 1,200,000 livres, which in our day would amount to $1,800,000. Possibly some of the reverend Fathers nourished the hope that he might be half right, but an official scrutiny of the accounts revealed the sad fact that their twenty-five colleges and churches with a staff of from 400 to 500 persons could only draw on 60,000 livres; which meant at our values $90,000 a year – a lamentably inadequate capital for the gigantic work which had been undertaken. Arnaulds under different names have been appearing ever since.

How this "vast wealth" is accumulated, might also possibly be learned by a visit to the dwelling-quarters of any Jesuit establishment, so as to see at close range the method of its domestic economy. Every member of the Society, no matter how distinguished he is or may have been, occupies a very small, uncarpeted room whose only furniture is a desk, a bed, a wash-stand, a clothes-press, a prie-dieu, and a couple of chairs. On the whitewashed wall there is probably a cheap print of a pious picture which suggests rather than inspires devotion. This room has to be swept and cared for by the occupant, even when he is advanced in age or has been conspicuous in the Society, "unless for health's sake or for reasons of greater moment he may need help." The clothing each one wears is cheap and sometimes does service for years; there is a common table; no one has any money of his own, and he has to ask even for carfare if he needs it. If he falls sick he is generally sent to an hospital where, according to present arrangements, the sisters nurse him for charity, and he is buried in the cheapest of coffins, and an inexpensive slab is placed over his remains.

Now it happens that this method of living admits of an enormous saving, and it explains how the 17,000 Jesuits who are at present in the Society are able not only to build splendid establishments for outside students, but to support a vast number of young men of the Order who are pursuing their studies of literature, science, philosophy, and theology, and who are consequently bringing in nothing whatever to the Society for a period of eleven years, during which time they are clothed, fed, cared for when sick, given the use of magnificent libraries, scientific apparatus, the help of distinguished professors, travel, and even the luxuries of villas in the mountains or by the sea during the heats of summer. It will, perhaps, be a cause of astonishment to many people to hear that this particular section of the Order, thanks to common life and economic arrangements, could be maintained year after year when conditions were normal at the amazingly small outlay of $300 or $400 a man. Of course, some of the Jesuit houses have been founded, and devoted friends have frequently come to their rescue by generous donations, but it is on record that in the famous royal foundation of La Flèche, established by Henry IV, where one would have expected to find plenty of money, the Fathers who were making a reputation in France by their ability as professors and preachers and scientific men were often compelled to borrow each other's coats to go out in public. Such is the source of Jesuit wealth. "They coin their blood for drachmas."

Failing to explain the Jesuits' pedagogical success by their wealth, it has been suggested that their popularity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries arose from the fact that it was considered to be "good form" to send one's boys to schools which were frequented by princes and nobles; but that would not explain how they were, relatively, just as much favored in India and Peru as in Germany or France. Indeed there was an intense opposition to them in France, particularly on the part of the great educational centres of the country, the universities: first, because the Jesuits gave their services for nothing, and secondly because the teaching was better, but chiefly, according to Boissier, who cites the authority of three distinguished German pedagogues of the sixteenth century – Baduel, Sturm, and Cordier – "because to the disorder of the university they opposed the discipline of their colleges, and at the end of three or four years of higher studies, regularly graduated classes of upright, well-trained men." (Revue des Deux Mondes, Dec., 1882, pp. 596, 610).

Compayré, who once figured extensively in the field of pedagogical literature, finds this moral control an objection. He says it was making education subsidiary to a "religious propaganda." If this implies that the Society considers that the supreme object of education is to make good Christian men out of their pupils, it accepts the reproach with pleasure; and, there is not a Jesuit in the world who would not walk out of his class to-morrow, if he were told that he had nothing to do with the spiritual formation of those committed to his charge. Assuredly, to ask a young man in all the ardor of his youth to sacrifice every worldly ambition and happiness to devote himself to teaching boys grammar and mathematics, to be with them in their sports, to watch over them in their sleep, to be annoyed by their thoughtlessness and unwillingness to learn; to be, in a word, their servant at every hour of the day and night, for years, is not calculated to inflame the heart with enthusiasm. The Society knows human nature better, and from the beginning, its only object has been to develop a strong Christian spirit in its pupils and to fit them for their various positions in life. It is precisely because of this motive that it has incurred so much hatred, and there can be no doubt that if it relinquished this object in its schools, it would immediately enjoy a perfect peace in every part of the world.

Nor can their educational method be charged with being an insinuating despotism, as Compayré insists, which robs the student of the most precious thing in life, personal liberty; nor, as Herr describes it, "a sweet enthrallment and a deformation of character by an unfelt and continuous pressure" (Revue universitaire, I, 312). "The Jesuit," he says, "teaches his pupils only one thing, namely to obey," which we are told, "is, as M. Aulard profoundly remarks, the same thing as to please" (Enquête sur l'enseignement secondaire, I, 460). In the hands of the Jesuit, Gabriel Hanotaux tells us, the child soon becomes a mechanism, an automaton, apt for many things, well-informed, polite, self-restrained, brilliant, a doctor at fifteen, and a fool ever after. They become excellent children, delightful children, who think well, obey well, recite well, and dance well, but they remain children all their lives. Two centuries of scholars were taught by the Jesuits, and learned the lessons of Jesuits, the morality of the Jesuits, and that explains the decadence of character after the great sixteenth century. If there had not been something in our human nature, a singular resource and things that can not be killed, it was all up with France, where the Order was especially prosperous.

As an offset to this ridiculous charge, the names of a few of "this army of incompetents," these men marked by "decadence of character," might be cited. On the registers of Jesuit schools are the names of Popes, Cardinals, bishops, soldiers, magistrates, statesmen, jurists, philosophers, theologians, poets and saints. Thus we have Popes Gregory XIII, Benedict XIV, Pius VII, Leo XIII, St. Francis of Sales, Cardinal de Bérulle, Bossuet, Belzunce, Cardinal de Fleury, Cardinal Frederico Borromeo, Fléchier, Cassini, Séquier, Montesquieu, Malesherbes, Tasso, Galileo, Corneille, Descartes, Molière, J. B. Rousseau, Goldoni, Tournefort, Fontenelle, Muratori, Buffon, Gresset, Canova, Tilly, Wallenstein, Condé, the Emperors Ferdinand and Maximilian, and many of the princes of Savoy, Nemours and Bavaria. Even the American Revolutionary hero, Baron Steuben, was a pupil of theirs in Prussia, and omitting many others, nearly all the great men of the golden age of French literature received their early training in the schools of the Jesuits.

It is usual when these illustrious names are referred to, for someone to say: "Yes, but you educated Voltaire." The implied reproach is quite unwarranted, for although François Arouet, later known as Voltaire, was a pupil at Louis-le-Grand, his teachers were not at all responsible for the attitude of mind which afterwards made him so famous or infamous. That was the result of his home training from his earliest infancy. In the first place, his mother was the intimate friend of the shameless and scoffing courtesan of the period, Ninon de l'Enclos, and his god-father was Chateauneuf, one of the dissolute abbés of those days, whose only claim to their ecclesiastical title was that, thanks to their family connections, they were able to live on the revenues of some ecclesiastical establishment. This disreputable god-father had the additional distinction of being one of Ninoñ's numerous lovers. It was he who had his fileul named in her will, and he deliberately and systematically taught him to scoff at religion, long before the unfortunate child entered the portals of Louis-le-Grand. Indeed, Voltaire's mockery of the miracles of the Bible was nothing but a reminiscence of the poem known as the "Moïsade" which had been put in his hands by Chateauneuf and which he knew by heart. The wonder is that the Jesuits kept the poor boy decent at all while he was under their tutelage. Immorality and unbelief were in his home training and blood.

Another objection frequently urged is that the Jesuits were really incapable of teaching Latin, Greek, mathematics or philosophy, and that in the last mentioned study they remorselessly crushed all originality.

To prove the charge about Latin, Gazier, a doctor of the Sorbonne, exhibited a "Conversation latine, par Mathurin Codier, Jésuite." Unfortunately for the accuser, however, it was found out that Codier not only was not a Jesuit, but was one of the first Calvinists of France. Greek was taught in the lowest classes; and in the earliest days the Society had eminent Hellenists who attracted the attention of the learned world, such as: Gretser, Viger, Jouvancy, Rapin, Brumoy, Grou, Fronton du Duc, Pétau, Sirmond, Garnier and Labbe. The last mentioned was the author of eighty works and his "Tirocinium linguæ græcæ" went through thirteen or fourteen editions. At Louis-le-Grand there were verses and discourses in Greek at the closing of the academic year. Bernis says he used to dream in Greek. There were thirty-two editions of Gretser's "Rudimenta linguæ græcæ," and seventy-five of his "Institutiones." Huot, when very young, began a work on Origen, and Bossuet, when still at college, became an excellent Greek scholar. They were both Jesuit students.

"The Jesuits were also responsible for the collapse of scientific studies," says Compayré (193,197). The answer to this calumny is easily found in the "Monumenta pedagogica Societatis Jesu" (71-78), which insists that "First of all, teachers of mathematics should be chosen who are beyond the ordinary, and who are known for their erudition and authority." This whole passage in the "Monumenta," was written by the celebrated Clavius. Surely it would be difficult to get a man who knew more about mathematics than Clavius. It will be sufficient to quote the words of Lalande, one of the greatest astronomers of France, who, it may be noted incidentally, was a pupil of the Jesuits. In 1800 he wrote as follows: "Among the most absurd calumnies which the rage of Protestants and Jansenists exhale against the Jesuits, I found that of La Chalotais, who carried his ignorance and blindness to such a point as to say that the Jesuits had never produced any mathematicians. I happened to be just then writing my book on 'Astronomy,' and I had concluded my article on 'Jesuit Astronomers,' whose numbers astonished me. I took occasion to see La Chalotais, at Saintes, on July 20, 1773, and reproached him with his injustice, and he admitted it."

"As for history," says Compayré, "it was expressly enjoined by the 'Ratio' that its teaching should be superficial." And his assertion, because of his assumed authority, is generally accepted as true, especially as he adduces the very text of the injunction which says: "Historicus celerius excurrendus," namely "let historians be run through more rapidly." Unfortunately, however, the direction did not apply to the study of history at all, but to the study of Latin, and meant that authors like Livy, Tacitus, and Cæsar were to be gone through more expeditiously than the works of Cicero, for example, who was to be studied chiefly for his exquisite style. In brief, the charge has no other basis than a misreading, intentional or otherwise, of a school regulation.

The same kind of tactics are employed to prove that no philosophy was taught in those colleges, in spite of the fact that it was a common thing for princes and nobles and statesmen to come not only to listen to philosophical disputations in the colleges, in which they themselves had been trained, but to take part in them. That was one of Condé's pleasures; and the Intendant of Canada, the illustrious Talon, was fond of urging his syllogisms against the defenders in the philosophical tournaments of the little college of Quebec. Nor were those pupils merely made to commit to memory the farrago of nonsense which every foolish philosopher of every age and country had uttered, as is now the method followed in non-Catholic colleges. The Jesuit student is compelled not only to state but to prove his thesis, to refute objections against it, to retort on his opponents, to uncover sophisms and so on. In brief, philosophy for him is not a matter of memory but of intelligence. As for independence of thought, a glance at their history will show that perhaps no religious teachers have been so frequently cited before the Inquisition on that score, and none to whom so many theological and philosophical errors have been imputed by their enemies, but whose orthodoxy is their glory and consolation.

Their failure to produce anything in the way of painting or sculpture has also afforded infinite amusement to the critics, although it is like a charge against an Academy of Medicine for not having produced any eminent lawyers, or vice versa. It is true that Brother Seghers had something to do with his friend Rubens, and that a Spanish coadjutor was a sculptor of distinction, and that a third knew something about decorating churches, and that two were painters in ordinary for the Emperor of China, but whose masterpieces however have happily not been preserved. Hüber, an unfriendly author, writing about the Jesuits, names Courtois, known as Borgognone, by the Italians, who was a friend of Guido Reni; Dandini, Latri, Valeriani d'Aquila and Castiglione, none of whom, however, has ever been heard of by the average Jesuit. An eminent scholar once suggested that possibly the elaborate churches of the Compañía, which are found everywhere in the Spanish-American possessions, may have been the work of the lay-brothers of the Society. But a careful search in the menologies of the Spanish assistancy has failed to reveal that such was the case. That, however, may be a piece of good fortune, for otherwise the Society might have to bear the responsibility of those overwrought constructions, in addition to the burden which is on it already of having perpetrated what is known as the "Jesuit Style" of architecture. From the latter accusation, however, a distinguished curator of the great New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke, in an address to an assembly of artists and architects, completely exonerated the Society. "The Jesuit Style," he said, "was in existence before their time, and," he was good enough to add, "being gentlemen, they did not debase it, but on the contrary elevated and ennobled it and made it worthy of artistic consideration."

So, too, the Order has not been conspicuous for its poets. One of them, however, Robert Southwell, was a martyr, and wore a crown that was prized far more by his brethren than the laurels of a bard. He was born at Norfolk on February 21, 1561, and entered the Society at Rome in 1578. Singularly enough, the first verses that bubbled up from his heart, at least of those that are known, were evoked by his grief at not being admitted to the novitiate. He was too young to be received, for he was only seventeen, and conditions in England did not allow it; but his merit as a poet may be inferred from an expression of Ben Jonson that he would have given many of his works to have written Southwell's "Burning Babe," and, according to the "Cambridge History of Literature" (IV, 129), "though Southwell may never have read Shakespeare, it is certain that Shakespeare read Southwell." Of course, his poems are not numerous, for though he may have meditated on the Muse while he was hiding in out of the way places during the persecutions, he was scarcely in a mood to do so when he was flung into a filthy dungeon, or when he was stretched on the rack thirteen different times as a prelude to being hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn.

Eleven years after that tragedy, Jacob Balde was born in the imperial free town of Ensisheim in Alsace. He studied the classics and rhetoric in the Jesuit college of that place, and philosophy and law at Ingolstadt, where he became a Jesuit on July 1, 1624. To amuse himself, when professor of rhetoric, he wrote his mock-heroic of the battle of the frogs and mice, "Batrachomyomachia." His mastery of classical Latin and the consummate ease with which he handled the ancient verse made him the wonder of the day. "His patriotic accents," says Herder, "made him a German poet for all time." The tragedies of the Thirty Years War urged him to strive to awaken the old national spirit in the hearts of the people. He was chiefly a lyrist, and was hailed as the German Horace, but he was at home in epic, drama, elegy, pastoral poetry and satire. Of course, he wrote in Latin, which was the language of the cultured classes, for German was then too crude and unwieldy to be employed as a vehicle for poetry. His works fill eight volumes.

No less a personage than Isaac Watts, the English hymnologist, makes Mathias Sarbiewski (Sarbievius), the Pole, another Horace, though his poetry was mostly Pindaric. Grotius puts him above Horace (Brucker, 505). He was a court preacher, a companion of the king in his travels, a musician and an artist. He wrote four books of lyrics, a volume of epodes, another of epigrams, and there is a posthumous work of his called "Silviludia." His muse was both religious and patriotic, and because of the former, he was called by the Pope to help in the revision of the hymns of the Breviary; and for that work he was crowned by King Wladislaw. His prose works run into eight volumes. There are twenty-two translations of his poems in Polish, and there are others in German, Italian, Flemish, Bohemian, English and French.

Gosse in his "Seventeenth Century Studies" says that Famian Strada who wrote "The Nightingale" was not professedly a poet but a lecturer on rhetoric. "The Nightingale" was first published in Rome in 1617 in a volume of "Prolusiones" on rhetoric and poetry, and occurs in the sixth lecture of the second course. "This Jesuit Rhetorician," Gosse informs us, "had been trying to familiarize his pupils with the style of the great Classic poets, by reciting to them passages in imitation of Ovid, Lucretius, Lucian and others. 'This,' he told them 'is an imitation of the style of Claudian,' and so he gives us the lines which have become so famous. That a single fragment in a schoolbook should so suddenly take root and blossom in European literature, when all else that its voluminous author wrote and said was promptly forgotten, is very curious but not unprecedented." In England, the first to adopt the poem was John Ford in his play of "The Lover's Melancholy" in 1629; Crashaw came next with his "Music's Duel," Ambrose Philips essayed it a century later; and in our own days, François Coppée introduced it with charming effect in his "Luthier de Crémone."

The French Jesuit Sautel was a contemporary of Strada and Balde. He was considered the Ovid of his time, and was as remarkable for the holiness of his life as for his unusual poetical ability.

About this time, there was a German Jesuit, named Jacob Masen or Masenius, who was a professor of rhetoric in Cologne, and died in 1681. Among his manuscripts found after his death were three volumes, the first of which was a treatise on general literature, the second a collection of lyrics, epics, elegies etc., and the third a number of dramas. In the second manuscript was an epic entitled "Sarcotis." The world would never have known anything about "Sarcotis" had not a Scotchman, named Lauder, succeeded in finding it, somewhere, about 1753, i. e. seventy-two years after Masen's death. He ran it through the press immediately, to prove that Milton had copied it in his "Paradise Lost." Whereupon all England rose in its wrath to defend its idol. Lauder was convicted of having intercalated in the "Sarcotis," a Latin translation of some of the lines of "Paradise Lost," and had to hide himself in some foreign land to expiate his crime against the national infatuation. Four years later (1757), Abbé Denouart published a translation of the genuine text of "Sarcotis." The poem was found to be an excellent piece of work, and like "Paradise Lost," its theme was the disobedience of Adam and Eve, their expulsion from Paradise, the disasters consequent upon this sin of pride. Whether Milton ever read "Sarcotis" is not stated.