The Jesuits, 1534-1921

The tongues of most of the North and South American Indians are represented; the dictionaries of the South American Indians were all written by the Fathers of the old Society.

The books devoted to the study of eloquence are appalling in their number. They are in all languages and on all sorts of subjects, sacred and profane. There are panegyrics, funeral orations, coronation speeches, eulogies, episcopal consecrations, royal progresses, patriotic discourses, but only occasionally does the eye catch a modern date in the formidable list of sixty-three folio pages.

Latin poetry claims fifty-seven pages for the titles of compositions or studies. Poetry in the modern languages is much more modest and requires only as many columns as the ancients demanded pages. The English list is very brief; the Italian very long; and while the ancient Jesuits seemed to have little fear of breaking forth into verse, the modern worshippers of the Muse, except when they utter their thoughts in Malgache, or Chouana or Tagale or Japanese, are very cautious.

Pious people perhaps may be scandalized to hear that the Jesuits of the old Society wrote a great deal for the theatres; it was not, however, for the theatres of the world, but for the theatres of their colleges. Hence in the chapter entitled "Theatre," after a number of treatises on "The Restriction of Comedies," "Théatre des Grecs," "Liturgical Drama," "Reflections on the Danger of Shows," "The mind of St. Paul, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis de Sales on Plays;" etc., we come face to face with the titles of plays that crowd and blacken by their close print no less than ten huge folio pages. They are contributed by the Jesuits of all countries. Germany especially was very prolific in this kind of literature, claiming as many as four pages of titles; England furnishes only seven dramas in all, three of which are modern. Three of the ancient plays had for their author no less a personage than the Blessed Edmund Campion. They were entitled "The Sacrifice of Isaac," "The Tragedy of King Saul," while Southwell credits him with "Nectar et Ambrosia," which was acted before the emperor. All these were written in 1575, when he was professor of rhetoric in Bohemia.

Belgium has a long list to its credit, and among the dramatists appears the very eminent Ignace Carbonelle, but only as the author of the text of a Cantata for the jubilee of Pius IX in 1877. In France occurs the name of Arsène Cahours, who wrote many tragedies and even a vaudeville, which he called "L'enterrement du Père Simon, le brocanteur." Longhaye's well-known college plays are on the list.

There are many oratorios, but it is feared that the timid will be scandalized to hear that an entire column is required for the names of the authors of ballets. One of the writers is no less a personage than the distinguished historian Jouvancy. The ballets are interludes; there was no impropriety in these dances, however, for no female characters appeared, and the college boys for whom they were written had to do all the dancing themselves.

"Many of these dramas," says Father Schwickerath quoting Janssen, "were exhibited with all possible splendor, as for instance those given at La Flèche in 1614 before Louis XIII and his court. But it seems that nowhere was greater pomp displayed than at Munich where the court liberally contributed to make the performances especially brilliant. In 1574 the tragedy 'Constantine' was played on two successive days, and the whole city was beautifully decorated. More than one thousand actors took part in the play. Constantine entered the city in a triumphal chariot surrounded by four hundred horsemen in glittering armor. At the performance of 'Esther' in 1577, the most splendid costumes and gems were furnished from the treasury of the Duke; and at the banquet of King Assuerus one hundred precious dishes of gold and silver were used."

Those old Jesuits seemed to be carrying out the famous order of La Mancha's Knight when the ordinary stage was too small: "Then build a house or act it on the plain;" or as a recent writer declares "Like Richard Wagner in our days, the Jesuits aimed at and succeeded in uniting all the arts within the compass of the drama. The effect of such plays was like those of the Oberammergau Passion Play, ravishing, overpowering. Even people ignorant of the Latin tongue were captivated by these representations and the concourse of people was usually very great. In 1565 'Judith' was acted before the court in Munich and then repeated in the public square. Even the surrounding walls and roofs of the houses were covered with eager spectators. In 1560 the comedy 'Euripus' was given in the courtyard of the college at Prague before a crowd of more than eight thousand people. It had to be repeated three times and was asked for again and again."

The early German parsons denounced these dramas as devices for propagating idolatry, but on the other hand a very capable critic Karl von Reinhardstottner says: "In the first century of their history the Jesuits did great work in this line. They performed dramas full of power and grandeur, and though their dramatic productions did not equal the fine lyrics of the Jesuit poets Balde and Sarbiewski, still in the dramas of Fabricius, Agricola and others, there is unmistakable poetic spirit and noble seriousness. How could the enormous success of their performances be otherwise explained? And who could doubt for a moment that by their dramas they rendered great service to their century; that they advanced culture, and preserved taste for the theatre and its subsidiary arts? It would be sheer ingratitude to undervalue what they effected by their dramas."

Goethe was present at a play given in 1786 at Ratisbon. It was during the Suppression, but happily the Jesuit traditions had been maintained in the college. He has left his impressions in writing: "This public performance has convinced me anew of the cleverness of the Jesuits. They rejected nothing that could be of any conceivable service to them, and they knew how to wield their weapons with devotion and dexterity. This is not cleverness of the merely abstract order; it is a real fruition of the thing itself; an absorbing interest which springs from the practical uses of life. Just as this great spiritual society had its organ-builders, its sculptors, its gilders so there seem to be some who by nature and inclination take to the drama; and as their churches are distinguished by a pleasing pomp, so these prudent men have seized on the sensibility of the world by a decent theatre." (Italien Reise, Goethe Werke, Cotta's Ed. 1840 XXIII p. 3-4.)

Tiraboschi began his literary work when a young professor in Modena by editing the Latin-Italian dictionary of Monza, but he made so many corrections that it was practically a new work. Subsequently he was appointed librarian at Milan, and by means of the documents he discovered, wrote a "History of the Humiliati," which filled up a gap in the annals of the Church. While librarian in the ducal library at Modena, he began his monumental work on the "Storia della letteratura italiana." This history extends from Etruscan times to 1700, and required eleven years of constant labor to complete it.

Hurter tells us "Michael Cosmas Petrus Denis was a most celebrated bibliographer, whose almost innumerable works must be placed in the category of humanistic literature." He entered the Society in Upper Austria on October 17, 1747, and taught rhetoric for twelve years in the Theresian College for Nobles, where he won some renown by his poetry. At the time of the Suppression of the Society, to which he ever remained grateful and attached, he was given charge of the Garelli Library and devoted himself to the study of literature and bibliography. His public lectures attracted immense throngs from far and near. He was promoted to be royal counsellor by Emperor Leopold and was made custodian of the Imperial Library. By that time he was a European celebrity. De Backer in his "Bibliotheca" mentions ninety-three of his publications. Hurter classifies as the most important the "Denkmale der christlichen Glauben-und Sittenlehre." His poems which he signed "Sined," which was Denis spelled backward, won him the name of Bard of the Danube, and helped considerably to promote the study of German in Austria. He was one of a group of poets whose chief aim was to arouse German patriotism. Ossian was their ideal and inspiration, and Denis translated the Gaelic poet into German (1768-69), and in addition he published two volumes of poems just one year before the Suppression. Naturally these patriotic effusions in verse by a Jesuit attracted considerable attention. Denis died in Vienna on 20 September, 1800.

Father Baumgartner has won a high place in the domain of letters by his large work entitled "History of the Literature of the Entire World." Besides this he has to his credit three volumes on "Goethe," another on "Longfellow;" a fifth on "Vondel," a sixth entitled "Ausflüge in das Land der Seein" and a seventh called "Island und die Faröer."

Of Father Faustino Arévalo, the distinguished hymnographer and patrologist, we have spoken above.

Geographical themes appealed to many writers both of the old and the new Society, and also to those of the intervening period. The subjects relate to every part of the world. There is, for instance, "The German Tyrol" by the Italian Bresciani; "The Longitude of Milan" by Lagrange; "The Geography of the Archipelago" by F. X. Liechtlé. This archipelago was the West Indies. His brother Ignatius executed a similar work on the Grecian Islands. He went to Naxos in 1754, and died there in 1795. "Chota-Nagpur" is described in 1883, "Abyssinia" in 1896, and the "Belgian Congo" in 1897. Veiga writes of the "Orinoco" in 1789, and Armand Jean of the "Polynesians" in 1867. There is no end of maps such as "Turkestan and Dzoungaria," "China and Tatary," "The Land of Chanaan," "Paraguay," "Lake Superior," "The Land between the Napo and the Amazons." The famous maps of Mexico by Father Kino have been reproduced by Hubert Bancroft in his "Native Races."

Joseph de Mayoria de Mailla's great work called "Toung-Kian-Kang-mou," which is an abstract of the Chinese annals, was sent to France in 1737, but was not published until 1785. He was the first European to give the world a knowledge of the classic historical works of the Chinese. His work is of great value for the reason that it provides the most important foundation for a connected history of China. He sent along with it many very valuable maps and charts – the result of his work in making a cartographical survey of the country; the part assigned to him including the provinces of Ho-nan, Kiang-hinan, Tshe-Kiang, Fo-Kien and the Island of Formosa. As a reward for his labor the emperor made him a mandarin, and when he died at the age of seventy-nine very elaborate obsequies were ordered by imperial decree.

Father Joseph Fischer, a professor at Feldskirch, is known in all the learned societies of the world for his "Die Entdeckungen der Normannen in America" and also for his "Cosmographiæ introductio" of Martin Waldseemüller, on whose map the name "America" first appeared. The maps and studies of old Huronia by Father Jones have been published by the Canadian Government.

John Baptist Belot, who died in 1904, won a reputation as an Orientalist, as did his associate Father Cheiko by his "Chrestomathia Arabica," in five volumes, and also by his Arabic Lexicon. Their fellow-worker Father Lammens is now a professor in the Biblical Institute in Rome. As they lived a considerable time in Syria they have a distinct advantage over other Europeans in this particular study.

Andrew Zottoli is an authority as a sinologist. The misfortune of being exiled from Italy in 1848 gave him the advantage, which he would not otherwise have had, of becoming proficient in Chinese, for he lived fifty-four years in Kiang-nan. Besides his Chinese catechism and grammar, he has published a complete course of Chinese literature in five volumes, and a universal dictionary of the Chinese language in twelve.

To this list may be added what a recent critic called the monumental work of the illustrious Father Beccari, known as "Scriptores rerum ægyptiacarum." It consists of sixteen volumes, and includes the entire period of Egyptian history from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. In this category, Father Strassmaier represents the Society by his works on Assyriology and cuneiform inscriptions. With him is Father Dahlman whose "Das Mahabharata als Epos und Rechtbuch," "Nirvana," "Buddha," and "Mahabharata Studien" have won universal applause.

Luigi Lanzi, the Italian archæologist, was born at Olmo near Macerata in 1732, and entered the Society in 1749. At its Suppression, the Grand Duke of Tuscany made him the assistant director of the Florentine Museum. He devoted himself to the study of ancient and modern literature, and was made a member of the Arcadians. The deciphering of monuments, chiefly Etruscan, was one of his favorite occupations and resulted in his writing his "Saggio di lingua etrusca" in 1789. Four years later he produced his noted "History of Painting in Italy." His other works included a critical commentary on Hesiod's "Works and Days," with a Latin and an Italian translation in verse; three books of "Inscriptiones et carmina," translations of Catullus, Theocritus and others, besides two ascetic works on St. Joseph and the Sacred Heart respectively. He died in 1810 four years before the Restoration.

Angelo Mai is one of the very attractive figures at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He had studied at the seminary of Bergamo and had as professor, Father Mozzi, a member of the suppressed Society. When the saintly Pignatelli opened the novitiate at Parma in 1799, Mozzi joined him and young Angelo who was then seventeen years old went there as a novice. He was sent to Naples in 1804 to teach humanities, but was obliged to leave when the French occupied the city. He was then summoned to Rome, and ordained a priest. While there, he met two exiled Jesuits from Spain: Monero and Monacho, who besides teaching him Hebrew and Greek, gave him his first instructions in paleography, showing him how to manipulate and decipher palimpsests. In 1813 he was compelled by the order of the duke to return to his native country, and was appointed custodian of the Ambrosian Library at Milan. There he made his first great discoveries of a number of precious manuscripts, which alone sufficed to give him an important place in the learned world. In 1819 at the suggestion of Cardinals Consalvi and Litta, the staunchest friends of the Society, Pius VII appointed him librarian of the Vatican, with the consent of the General.

From all this it is very hard to understand how Mai is generally set down as having left the Society. Albers says so in his "Liber sæcularis," Hurter in his "Nomenclator," as does Sommervogel in his "Bibliotheca," and his name does not appear in Terrien's list of those who died in the Society. In spite of all this, however, the expression "left the Society" seems a somewhat cruel term to apply to one who was evidently without reproach and who was asked for by the Sovereign Pontiff. He was made a cardinal by Gregory XVI, a promotion which his old novice master Father Pignatelli had foretold when Angelo was summoned to be librarian at Milan. He continued his work in the Vatican and gave to the world the unpublished pages of three hundred and fifty ancient authors which he had discovered.

Father Hugo Hurter calls Francesco Zaccaria of the old Society the most industrious worker in the history of literature. This praise might well be applied to himself if it were only for his wonderful "Nomenclator literarius theologiæ catholicæ." It is a catalogue of the names and works of all Catholic theological writers from the year 1564 up to the year 1894. Nor is it merely a list of names for it gives an epitome of the lives of the authors and an appreciation of their work and their relative merit in the special subject to which they devoted themselves; it thus covers the whole domain of scholastic, positive and moral theology, as well as of patrology, ecclesiastical history and the cognate sciences such as epigraphy, archæology and liturgy. It consists of five volumes with two closely printed columns on each page. The last column in the second volume is numbered 1846. After that come fifty-three pages of indexes and a single page of corrigenda in that volume alone. It is worth while noting that there are only six errors in all this bewildering mass of matter; there are, besides, three additions, not to the text, but to the index, from which the names of three writers were accidentally omitted.

So condensed is the letterpress that only a dash separates one subject from another. Nevertheless, thanks to the ingenious indexes, both of persons and subjects, the subject sought for can be found immediately. Finally, between the text and the indexes are two marvellous chronological charts. By means of the first, the student can follow year by year the growth of the various branches of theology and know the names of all the authors in each. The second chart takes the different countries of Europe – Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, Germany, England, Poland and Hungary – and as you travel down the years in the succeeding centuries you can see what studies were most in favor in different parts of the world and the different stages of their history. Not only that, but a style of type, varying from a large black print, down to a very pale and small impression, gives you the relative prominence of every one of the vast multitude of authors. Such a work will last to the end of time and never lose its value, and how Father Hurter, who was the beloved spiritual father of the University of Innsbruck, whose theological faculty he entered in 1858, and who, besides publishing his unusually attractive theology and editing fifty-eight volumes of the Fathers of the Church, could find time and strength to produce his encyclopedic "Nomenclator" is almost inconceivable.

In the year 1907, the scheme of a Catholic Encyclopedia was launched in New York. The editors chosen were Dr. Charles Herbermann, for more than fifty years professor of Latin and the most distinguished member of the College of the City of New York; Mgr. Thomas Shahan, the rector of the Catholic University at Washington, and later raised to the episcopal dignity; Dr. Edward A. Pace, professor of philosophy in the same university; Dr. Condé Benoist Pallen, a well-known Catholic publicist, and Father John J. Wynne of the Society of Jesus.

The scope of the work is unlike that of other Catholic encyclopedias. It is not exclusively ecclesiastical, for it records all that Catholics have done not only in behalf of charity or morals, but also in the intellectual, and artistic development of mankind. Hence, while covering the whole domain of dogmatic and moral theology, ecclesiastical history and liturgy, it has succeeded in giving its readers information on art, architecture, archæology, literature, history, travel, language, ethnology, etc., such as cannot be found in any other encyclopedia in the English language. Only the most eminent writers have been asked to contribute to it, and hence its articles can be cited as the most recent exposition of the matters discussed. It appeared with amazing rapidity, the whole series of sixteen volumes being completed in nine years. To it is added an extra volume entitled "The Catholic Encyclopedia and its Makers," which consists of photographs and biographical sketches of all the contributors.

The encyclopedia has proved to be an immense boon to the Church in America. The chief credit of the publication is generally accorded to Father John Wynne, who is a native of New York. It was he who conceived it, secured the board of editors, and, as his distinguished associate, Bishop Shahan, declared with almost affectionate eagerness at a public session of the faculty and students of the ecclesiastical seminary of New York: "it was he who encouraged and sustained the editors by his buoyant optimism in the perilous stages of its elaboration." This information may be helpful abroad to show that the Society in America is doing something for the glory of God and the salvation of souls. The apostolic character of the work is further enhanced by the fact that funds are being established in various dioceses to enable each seminarian to become the personal owner of the entire set from the very first moment he begins his studies. The effect of such an arrangement on the ecclesiastical mind of the century is inestimable. It is also being placed by the Knights of Columbus and by rich Catholics in battleships and the United States' military posts, as well as in civic libraries and club houses.

The first catalogue of Jesuit writers was drawn up by Father Ribadeneira in 1602-1608. Schott and Alegambe continued the work in 1643, and Nathaniel Bacon or Southwell, or Sotwel, as he was called on the Continent, published a third in 1676. Nothing more, however, was done in that line by the old Society, and it was not until the twenty-first congregation, at which Father Roothaan presided, that a postulatum was presented asking for the resumption of this valuable work. Something prevented this from being done for the time being, and it was not until 1853 that the work was undertaken by the two Belgians, Augustine and Aloys de Backer.

Up to 1861 a series of seven issues appeared, but as by that time the number of names had increased to ten thousand, a new arrangement had to be made, and in 1869 the work appeared in three large folios. In 1885, on the death of Augustine de Backer, Charles Sommervogel took up the work. Providentially he was well equipped for the task, for although he had been continually employed at other tasks, sometimes merely as a surveillant in a French college, he had contrived to publish in 1884 a "Dictionnaire des ouvrages anonymeset pseudonymes des religieux de la Compagnie de Jésus." He began by recasting all that his predecessors had done, and it was only after four years that he had published the first volume. Others, however, followed in quick succession, and in 1900 the ninth volume appeared. The tenth volume, an index, was unfinished at the time of his death, but has since been completed by Father Bliard. Besides his articles in the "Etudes," he had also put into press a "Table méthodique des Mémoires de Trévoux," in three volumes, a "Bibliotheca Mariana S. J." and a "Moniteur bibliographique de la Compagnie de Jésus." He had intended to publish a revised edition of Carayon's, "Bibliographie historique," but was prevented by death.

As far back as 1658, Pope Alexander VIII did not hesitate to declare that "no literary work had ever been undertaken that was more useful or more glorious" than the "Acta Sanctorum" of Father Bollandus and his associates, nor did the learned Protestants of those days refrain from extolling the scientific spirit in which the work was being conducted. The "Acta," which began in the middle of the seventeenth century and which is still going on, reads like a romance. The account of it by De Smedt tells us how the first writers had only a garret for a library, and were forced to pile their books on the floor; how Cardinal Bellarmine denounced the work as chimerical; how the Carmelites were in a rage because Papebroch denied that Elias was the founder of their order; how the Spanish Inquisition denounced the work and condemned the thirty volumes as heretical, and how finally it reached its present status.

The Bollandists did not immediately feel the blow that struck the rest of the Society of Jesus in 1773. Indeed, the commissioners announced that the government was satisfied with the labors of the Bollandists and was disposed to exercise special consideration in their behalf. In 1778 they removed to the Abbey of Caudenberg in Brussels, and the writers received a small pension. In 1788 three new volumes were published. Meantime Joseph II had succeeded Maria Theresa, and the sky began to darken. On October 16, 1788, the government decided to stop the pension of the writers, and their books and manuscripts which the official inspectors denounced as "trash" were ordered to be sold. After a year, the Fathers made an offer to the Premonstratensian Abbot of Tongerloo to buy the books and manuscripts for what would be equivalent now to about $4,353; the money, however, was to be paid to the Austrian government and not to the owners of the library. Happily the writers found shelter in the monastery with their books and, though the Brabantine Revolution disturbed them for a time, they continued at their work unmolested until 1794, when they issued another volume.