THE EARLY FRANCISCANS & JESUITS
STUDIES IN CHURCH HISTORY
THE EARLY FRANCISCANS & JESUITS
A STUDY IN CONTRASTS
BY
ARTHUR S. B. FREER, M.A.
VICAR OF GUSSAGE ALL SAINTS
BOSTON COLLEGE L!r CHLSTNUT HILL. Mfl
LONDON SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE
NEW YORK AND TORONTO: THE MAC.MILLAN CO. 1922
nO
^
TO
FRANCIS B. SOWTER
CANON OF HIGHWORTH IN SALISBURY CATHEDRAL
THESE STUDIES OF ECCLESIASTICAL LIFE
ARE DEDICATED
IN GRATEFUL APPRECIATION
OF A LONG AND INSPIRING FRIENDSHIP
CONTENTS
Preface I. St. Francis of Assisi . II. The Early Franciscans in Italy
III. The Early Franciscans in England
IV. Ignatius Loyola
V. The Foreign Missions of the Jesuits VI. The Jesuits in Europe
Bibliography .
Index
PAGE
vii
23
46
67
93 117
139
142
VI
PREFACE
The Franciscan lectures in this volume were delivered in Salisbury Cathedral during the war ; those on the Jesuits at various centres of study in the diocese. They are now presented to a larger public, in the hope of deepening the interest of the average reader in the religious enthusiasms of the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries.
It has long been the conviction of the writer that the study of ecclesiastical history in this country is pursued in too insular a spirit and that it would be a great gain to the Anglican student to investigate those wider movements which swept like an incoming tide over every part of Western Europe.
The Franciscan and Jesuit Orders present two very different attitudes of mind within the Church ; the former tending to freedom, the latter to the exaltation of external authority. They both have lessons to teach us, but there can be little doubt which of the two is nearer to the spirit of Christ. St. Francis, the most romantic figure of the Middle Ages, presents a type of mind well worth the consideration of a democratic age. The friend of all men, free from the trammels of conventionality, he incarnated the spirit of humility and brotherly love without which all our doings are little worth. Loyola, on the other hand, is admirable in his fervent search for truth, but he deteriorated under the hardening impact of autocracy
vii
viii Preface
and success. Determined at all costs to save a falling Church, he combined the narrow outlook of a mili- tant Churchman with the unscrupulous methods of Machiavellian statesmanship. Born and bred in a country where the Church had been for centuries at war with alien beliefs, his motto on all doctrinal issues was no compromise ; yet his morality was elastic in the extreme when the end to be gained was the acquisition of power. Had he been succeeded, as was his intention, by Francis Xavier, the fortunes of his society might have been strangely different and nearer to the ethos of Gospel perfection ; but in the hands of Lainez and Aquaviva it assumed a more worldly tone, with the sinister results familiar to the student of history.
Dogma and organisation have dominated many ecclesiastical histories ; in these brief studies the stress has been laid elsewhere — on the Christian character and temper.
My sincere thanks are due to the Very Rev. Dr. Burn, Dean of Salisbury, for reading through the lectures, and for advice and encouragement.
THE EARLY
rnAMPTCPAMC ^7 TP^T TTT.^
ERRATA.
On page 5 line 6, for "just," read " first "
On page 5 line 26, for " looks," read "locks "
On page 38 line 19, for "even," read "ever"
On page 38 line 32, for " He," read " it "
On page 138, line 9, for "disingenuously," read "ingenuously"
The Early Franciscans.
science in Roger Bacon. It was the century of great personalities and great movements, of St. Louis, Innocent III, and Frederick II, of chivalry, rising nationality, and of a great struggle for civic freedom. At no period of history was the Church more powerful, yet more seriously menaced by hostile forces which daily gathered momentum. The towns, increasing rapidly in wealth and independence, were violently anti-feudal and anti-clerical. That they possessed the religious spirit is proved by the cathedrals which they built, but they were at the same time hotbeds of religious and social discontent. The influence of the
viii Preface
and success. Determined at all costs to save a falling Church, he combined the narrow outlook of a mili- tant Churchman with the unscrupulous methods of Machiavellian statesmanship. Born and bred in a country where the Church had been for centuries at war with alien beliefs, his motto on all doctrinal issues was no compromise ; yet his morality was elastic in the extreme whpn +hp pnri +^ v.^ ««;rn«i
THE EARLY FRANCISCANS & JESUITS
ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI
The century of St. Francis is the most creative of the Middle Ages. It gave us the Gothic cathedrals of Northern Europe, the sculpture of Pisano, the paint- ing of Giotto, the poetry of Dante. It gave us Magna Charta, Parliamentary Institutions, and the Italian Republics. It witnessed the foundation of seventy new Universities, the culmination of scholastic theology in St. Thomas Aquinas, the beginnings of modern science in Roger Bacon. It was the century of great personalities and great movements, of St. Louis, Innocent III, and Frederick II, of chivalry, rising nationality, and of a great struggle for civic freedom. At no period of history was the Church more powerful, yet more seriously menaced by hostile forces which daily gathered momentum. The towns, increasing rapidly in wealth and independence, were violently anti-feudal and anti-clerical. That they possessed the religious spirit is proved by the cathedrals which they built, but they were at the same time hotbeds of religious and social discontent. The influence of the
2 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
monasteries was mainly confined to the country ; the secular clergy in the towns, few in number, were corrupt and out of touch with the spirit of the age. It was customary for the Bishops alone to preach, and as many of these lived in baronial splendour, careless of their spiritual responsibilities, the Church in the cities was left to perish from neglect.
Never, therefore, was there a greater need for a man of faith and spiritual power to direct and elevate the forces of a new age.
Such a man appeared, at the beginning of the century, in Francis of Assisi. Inspired by the Christ of the Gospels, in sympathy with the poor, overflowing with the love of God, Nature and his fellow-men, he breathed a new spirit into Church and State and was the Saviour of his time. " European society," says Bishop Creighton, " was on the verge of a complete collapse, when Francis stepped in and saved it."
Francis was born at Assisi in 1182. The town has altered little in seven centuries. Then, as now, the massive houses of rosy-tinted stone clambered along the steep sides of Monte Subasio, peering " like children on tiptoe " into the valley beneath. Francis was born during the absence of his father, a wealthy cloth mer- chant, in France ; from which country he derived not only his name, but a love of French poetry which never forsook him. The ballads of the Troubadours, the legends of King Arthur's Round Table, and the story of the Holy Grail were among the formative influences of his life. Francis learned, too, a little Latin from the priest of St. Giorgio, but not much else. Writing was an art in which he never excelled and his only extant autograph shows extreme awkwardness. But the very paucity of his education saved Francis from
St. Francis of Assisi 3
the pedantry of the schools, leaving unimpaired that perfect simplicity and spontaneity which constitute the chief charm of his character.
As a child his days were spent in the sunny squares of Assisi. As he grew up he associated on terms of equality with the gentry of his native city and shared with them a brief imprisonment at Perugia, during a compaign against the nobles of that place. Up to the age of twenty-two Francis lived an idle and ex- travagant life, popular with all classes on account of his courtesy and high spirits, but with no aim beyond that of social enjoyment. Yet, though Francis lived carelessly, we have the testimony of his earliest biographer to show that he maintained " great rever- ence for the mysteries of life."
In his twenty-third year a serious illness brought Francis to death's door. On gaining convalescence he made his way with the help of a stick to the hill- side above the town. Before him in the bright sun- shine stood the cloudlike hills of Umbria, below him the clustering farms of his native valley. But the beauty of Nature only increased his disquietude, making him realise the emptiness of a purposeless life, filling him with self-disgust and depression. From this time Francis lived more alone, taking long rambles among the hills and learning in a lonely cave the meaning and solace of prayer. At banquets he was sometimes so abstracted that he became a puzzle to his friends. Rushing out one night into the street these uproarious companions missed Francis. When they discovered him, he was holding in his hand his sceptre as King of Misrule, but plunged in a deep reverie. " What is the matter with you ? " they cried. " Don't you see he is thinking of taking a
4 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
wife ? ' said one. " Yes," replied Francis smiling, "I am thinking of taking a wife, richer, purer and more beautiful than you could imagine." It was his first dream of Poverty, the bride whom Giotto has pictured as his lifelong spouse upon the walls of the Church of Assisi ; about whose feet are briars, blossom- ing into roses about her head. In the ages of chivalry every knight dedicated himself to the service of some fair lady. Francis, by a stroke of religious genius, chose Poverty for his fair lady and dedicated his life to her faithful service.
Shortly after this time, Francis was riding on horseback when, at a sudden turn of the road, he came unexpectedly on a leper. The sight of these poor outcasts filled him at all times with a deep sense of loathing. Instinctively he turned his horse's head and rode off in the opposite direction. But he had not gone far before he began to reproach himself with great bitterness. To be a Knight of Christ and to turn his back at the first check was intolerable. Re- tracing his steps, therefore, he sprang from his horse, bestowed on the sufferer all his money, then stooped and kissed his hand reverently and departed. This schooling of himself to do what was naturally repug- nant to his sensitive nature proved a turning-point in his career, and is thus commemorated in his will : " See in what manner God gave it to me, Brother Francis, to begin to do penitence : when I lived in sin, it was very painful to me to see lepers, but God Himself led me into their midst and I remained there a little while. When I left them, that which had seemed to me bitter had become sweet and easy."
One of the signs of the Church's decay at this time was the ruinous state of many of her sanctuaries.
St. Francis of Assisi 5
Among these the little Church of St. Damien was a favourite haunt of Francis. The interior was entirely unfurnished save for a plain stone altar and a large Byzantine crucifix. It was while kneeling before this crucifix, in dejection and bewilderment, that Francis just lost himself in the Divine Presence and felt himself encircled by the Divine Love. " Great and glorious God, and Thou Lord Jesus, I pray you shed abroad your light in the darkness of my mind. Be found of me, Lord, so that in all things I may act only in accordance with Thy holy will." " Thus," says Sabatier, " he prayed and was aware of a voice speaking to him an ineffable language. Jesus accepted his oblation, Jesus desired his labour, his life, his whole being ; and the heart of the poor solitary was already bathed in light and strength."
Hard upon this inward vision followed the outward crisis. Francis, desiring to restore St. Damien and to keep a light always burning before the Crucifix, un- warrantably sells some of his father's goods ; and the poor priest refusing the money, Francis flings it down on a window-sill of the church. Soon after as he passes through the streets of Assisi with pale face and tattered clothes, the children call out after him, " Madman, madman." Bernardone, seeing his son in this plight and hearing of the theft, is furious, looks him up in his cellar and applies to the Bishop for his disinheritance. The Bishop advises Francis to restore his father's money. The young man's rejoinder was startling and dramatic and opens a new chapter of mediaeval history. After a minute's retirement he emerges stark naked, holding in his hand a packet into which he has rolled his clothes. This, with his father's money, he lays down at the Bishop's feet
6 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
with these words : " Listen all of you and understand it well : until this time I have called Pietro Bernardone my father, but now I desire to serve God. This is why I return to him this money for which he has given himself so much trouble : from this time I desire to say nothing else than Our Father which art in heaven." Struck dumb with amazement, his father hastily gathers up his property and departs ; while the Bishop covers the naked body of Francis with his mantle.
Now what is the inner meaning of this extravagant action ? " It would seem," says Bishop Creighton, " that by this strange proceeding Francis felt that he had at last worked his way to freedom ; but he knew that freedom had to be paid for. If he desired to detach himself from the world and rise above it, he knew that he must demand nothing of the world. Poverty therefore was of the essence of the position of Francis. It seemed impossible for him to express himself under the ordinary conditions of life ; to obtain that power of self-expression he must first free himself of the ordinary conditions of life ; and, if he was to do that, it must not be on his own terms. If he showed himself willing to give up father and mother and all family obligations, then he must be prepared to give up everything else. From all this, therefore, Francis became conscious that he had purchased for himself spiritual freedom ; the liberty to live his own life according to the conditions of his inner soul without interference on the part of society or of the world even in its highest forms."
It is evident at any rate that from this time the mind of Francis was filled with an unspeakable joy, a joy which he was able to communicate to thousands
CHI
St. Francis of Assist J
of his fellow-creatures, a joy which thrills his century as with a new Evangel. Leaving the city by the nearest gate, Francis made his way into the forest, inhaling the fresh odours of the spring, and singing with all his might one of the songs of French chivalry.
On his return, he devoted himself to the care of lepers, and the restoration of ruined churches with his own hands. Day by day he would stand in the squares of Assisi, and after singing a few hymns, would ask the help of those present in rebuilding St. Damien, promising them in return his grateful prayers. Not to burden the poor priest who gave him hospitality, he begged his food from door to door. The first time he sat down to eat the scraps so collected, he felt an uncontrollable disgust ; but, remembering in Whose service he was now engaged and Who gives to each their daily bread, he overcame his repugnance.
From St. Damien he descended the hill of Assisi to restore the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, com- monly called the Portiuncula. Here, without any seeking on his part, came disciples from Assisi and the neighbourhood. Nothing, indeed, could be more informal than the tie which held together the early Franciscans. It was simply personal devotion to Our Lord, and personal affection for St. Francis. When the need for a Rule presented itself, Francis entered the nearest church and, opening the Gospels three times out of reverence for the Blessed Trinity, read out three texts to his followers as their commission. " If thou wilt be perfect, sell all thou hast and give to the poor." " Take nothing for your journey." " If any man will come after Me, let him take up his Cross and follow Me."
8 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
Thomas of Celano has left us a contemporary description of St. Francis. " He was of middle stature, with an oval face, and full but low forehead, his eyes dark and clear, his voice soft yet keen and fiery, his lips modest yet subtle, his beard black but not thickly grown, his hands thin with long fingers ; roughly clothed, sleeping little, his hand ever open in charity."
The dress of the early Franciscans did not differ much from that still worn by the shepherds of the Apennines, being of a brown shade known among Italians as " beast colour." Francis sent them out two and two, for his conception of the Gospel was the following of Christ in absolute literalness, the bringing in of men from the highways and hedges, the realisation of the Pauline maxim " as poor, yet making many rich ; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things." " Go," he said to these first disciples, " proclaim peace to men, preach repentance for the remission of sin?. Be patient in tribulation, watchful in prayer, strong in labour, moderate in speech, grave in conversation, thankful for benefits." Adding to each brother separately the injunction, " Cast thy care upon the Lord, and He will sustain thee."
The freshness, informality, and ardour of these early days remind us vividly of the Galilaean revival thirteen centuries before. It was essentially the proclamation of the Gospel to the Poor, the practical assurance that the life is more than meat, and the body than raiment.
These early disciples, twelve in number, made their first missionary journeys among the villages of eastern and central Italy. Their welcome was general^ of a cordial character, for they did not go as mendicants but worked their way from village to village, helping
St. Francis of Assist g
the peasants make their hay or hoe their roots, sleeping with the field hands in some barn, or in the porch of the nearest church. They showed the greatest reverence for all priests and churches and carried with them everywhere a contagious spirit of good humour and cheerfulness. Their lightheartedness constituted one of their chief charms and contributed materially to their rapid success. Francis had, in truth, more than a doctrine to preach ; he had a Life to communicate, a life which made the good tidings of great joy a reality to all those who yielded themselves to its fascination. When asked, in later years, how amid so many dis- tractions he preserved his serenity, he replied : " Sometimes my sins are very bitter to me, some- times the devil attempts to fill me with a sadness which leads to indifference and sleep, for my joy is a vexation to him and he is jealous of the blessings I receive from God. But when I am tempted to sadness or slothful- ness, I look at the cheerful air of my companion, and, seeing his spiritual joy, I shake off the temptation and the idle sorrow and am full of joy within and gaiety without."
It was in the towns, where the failure of the Church had been most conspicuous, that the early Franciscans gained their greatest successes. St. Francis was a lover of civil and religious freedom and in complete sympathy with the poor. The very name which he chose for his followers the Brothers Minor, was the term applied to the poor of a city in contrast with the wealthy or Majores. At Assisi, he himself succeeded in reconciling nobles and townsmen and, in like manner, throughout the towns of Western Europe his followers preached peace and goodwill and were the heralds of a better time.
io The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
The Friars came, in the first place, not as ecclesiastics but as men. They chose by preference the more squalid quarters of the towns, where they ministered to the sick and poor and especially to the lepers. Their chief house in London was in " Stinking Lane," close to the shambles of Newgate. " If the Gospel net," says Professor Brewer, " woven out of purple and fine linen, had hitherto rather scared than caught the fish it was intended to enclose, the founder of the mendicant orders took care that it should be as coarse and homespun as poverty itself could make it."
The preaching of the Friars was graphic, homely and direct, inspired by sympathy, and commended by the life. At the street corners where all could hear, in the common tongue which all could under- stand, Francis pleaded the claims of the Divine Redeemer and His care for those who had no care for themselves.
His practical instincts were directed to the human side of Our Lord's life and teaching ; to His fulfilment of social relationships, His generosity, truth and self- sacrifice. Nor is it a matter of surprise that the Friars, appalled by the immorality of the towns, dwelt with increasing devotion on the purity of the Virgin Mother and upon her sympathy with the sorrows of woman- hood. The celibacy of the clergy had not acted beneficially on the lives of the people, consequently the Friars laboured to restore to marriage its true dignity and honour. The sympathy of the Friar with young lovers is finely portrayed by Shakespeare in " Romeo and Juliet," where the Friar's love of Nature and knowledge of medicine is also suggested. Chaucer, too, though as a Wyclifite he was prejudiced against
St. Francis of Assist n
the Friars, speaks in his Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales " of their encouragement of marriage :
" A frere ther was, a wantoun and a merye, A lymitour a ful solempne man. In alle the ordres foure is noon that can So moche of daliaunce and fair langage. He hadde i-made many a fair mariage Of yonge wymmen, at his owne cost. At yeddynges he bar utturly the prys."
In many ways the Friars fought the deadly Manichaeism of their age and sought to establish the health of the body as well as that of the soul. We owe to them the mitigation if not extinction of leprosy in Western Europe and the direction of men's minds to medical science and natural philosophy. The strictest injunc- tions were given by St. Francis to his followers to qualify themselves for service in the leper hospitals ; and thus the scientific study of the human body and of the healing properties of herbs and minerals naturally grew out of the social ministrations of the Friars.
We must now return to the year 1210, when Francis sought the Pope's permission for his lay brothers to preach. The sun was setting on the palace of the Lateran when Francis arrived in Rome and was ushered into the presence of Innocent III. In twelve years this austere prelate had raised the Papacy to the greatest height it ever attained and from which it was so soon to fall. Yet the poor man of Assisi was to accomplish by love what this supreme statesman was unable to accomplish by sagacity and the power of the keys, a real revival of the spiritual life throughout Western Christendom.
Innocent received the Friars kindly, but his answer
12 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
to their request was bitterly disappointing. " My dear children," he said, " your life appears to me too severe : I see indeed that your fervour is too great for any doubt of you to be possible ; but I ought to consider those who come after you, lest your mode of life should be beyond their strength." St. Francis, thus dismissed, took refuge in prayer and the following morning returned with a parable closing with these sarcastic words : " the King of kings has told me that He will provide for all the sons that He may have of me ; for if He sustains bastards, how much more legitimate sons ? " These pointed words were not without their effect on the Pope, especially when he found their cause warmly supported by Cardinal Colonna. " If we hold," said the Cardinal, " that to imitate Gospel perfection and make profession of it is an irrational and impossible innovation, are we not convicted of blasphemy against Christ the author of the Gospel ? " This unanswerable argument turned the scale ; authority to preach was given to the Friars, through Francis, who was formally recognised as their responsible head.
The next few years were spent by Francis in the evangelisation of Italy. The following stories illustrate the spirit in which the work was undertaken, and help to explain the secret of its success.
When asked one day by Brother Masseo why such crowds followed him, seeing that he was neither hand- some, learned, nor high-born. Francis replied : "It is because the Most High has not found among sinners any smaller man, anyone more insufficient, more sinful ; therefore He has chosen me to accomplish this marvel- lous work."
Once, when Francis was too ill to walk, his com-
St. Francis of Assist 13
panion borrowed for him an ass, confiding to the peasant for whom it was borrowed. After leading the animal a little way the peasant said, " Is it true that you are Brother Francis of Assisi ? " and on receiving a reply in the affirmative, " Very well, apply yourself to be as good as folk say you are that they may not be deceived in their expectation of you, that is my advice." Francis immediately dismounted, prostrated himself before the peasant, thanking him with great warmth for his counsel.
On another occasion he entered the courtyard of Montefeltro Castle when a fete was being held for the reception of a new knight. Francis at once began to speak, taking as his text two lines of Italian, " the happiness that I expect is so great that all pain is joyful to me." His words so moved his hearers that Count Orlando of Chiusi drawing Francis aside, said to him, " Father, I desire much to converse with you about the salvation of my soul." " Very willingly," replied Francis, " but for this morning, go, do honour to your friends, and after that we will converse as much as you please." Francis reckoned courtesy one of the chief characteristics of God.
In the eyes of St. Francis, the world of his day was afflicted by two grievous evils, " the arrogance of wealth and the arrogance of academic learning."
Yet, unlike many of the mediaeval heretics, he did not abuse the rich but he sprinkled ashes over his food and would not allow his followers even to touch money except in trust for the sick. If this peculiarity is to be regarded as a species of madness, it is, as a modern writer has said, " a kind of madness of which one need not fear the contagion."
In the inflexible maintenance of Evangelical poverty,
14 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
Francis found no more whole-hearted supporter than Santa Clara, who became the founder of the Second Order of St. Francis known as the poor Clares. This young girl, moved by his exhortations in Assisi Cathedral, surrendered wealth and position to follow the Franciscan ideal and, despite severe persecution from her parents, was soon followed by her two sisters. Francis installed them at St. Damien, where they prayed, worked embroidery for the Church and nursed the sick. Clara through a long life observed the Franciscan rule in all its severity and, only two days before her death, succeeded in getting it sanc- tioned by a Papal Bull. When Cardinal Ugolino endeavoured to persuade her that it was necessary that she should possess certain properties, adding, " if it is your vows which prevent you, we will release you from them," Clara replied, " Holy Father, absolve me from my sins, but I have no desire for a dispensation from following Christ." No one rendered to Francis wiser or more loyal service than this indomitable woman. " In those dark hours of discouragement," says Sabatier, " which so often and so profoundly disturb the noblest souls and sterilise the grandest efforts, she was beside him to show him the way. When he doubted his mission and thought of fleeing to the heights of repose and solitary prayer, it was she who showed him the ripening harvest with no reapers to gather it in, men going astray with no shepherd to lead them, and drew him once again into the train of the Galilaean, into the number of those who give their lives a ransom for many."
St. Francis was one of the very few Churchmen of the Middle Ages who desired to convert Moslems not by the sword, but by love and service. When
St. Francis of Assisi 15
expostulated with by the Cardinal Ugolino for thus exposing his brethren to starvation and violence, he replied : "Do you think that God raised up the brethren for the sake of this country alone ? Verily I say unto you, God raised them up for the awakening and salvation of all men and they shall win souls in the very midst of the infidels." In 1219 St. Francis him- self visited Egypt and Palestine, and preached before the Soldan. Jacques de Vitry, an eye-witness, thus alludes to his missionary labours in Egypt : " the master of these brothers is named Brother Francis, he is so lovable that he is venerated by everyone. Having come into our army, he has not been afraid in his zeal for the faith to go to that of our enemies. For days together he announced the word of God to the Saracens, but with little success."
No failure, however, daunted the followers of St. Francis in their missionary labours. In Germany the first Friars appear to have known nothing of the language except the word " Ja." When asked if they wanted food, they replied " Ja," when asked if they were heretics, they again replied " Ja," with the most disastrous results. Many were stripped and cruelly beaten by the peasants. After their first failure, there- fore, Francis would not order any more Friars to go to Germany but asked if any would volunteer. There- upon ninety at once offered themselves, and were rewarded with a far larger measure of success.
The return of St. Francis from the East marks an important crisis in his Order, and the beginning of the tragedy of his later life. During his absence property began to be acquired by the Friars and learning to be patronised. These changes, unwelcome to Francis, were favoured by Rome, while the persecution of some
1 6 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
of his Friars as heretics made it imperative for him to obtain Apostolic credentials for his Order.
It was at this time that Francis dreamed of the little black hen, who in spite of her efforts was unable to spread her wings over the whole of her brood. It was a true parable of his increasing powerlessness to control his widespread family. After much painful self- questioning, Francis sought for a Protector of the Order in Cardinal Ugolino, afterwards Pope Gregory IX. This step, though inevitable in the interests of dis- cipline and efficiency, marked the parting of the ways. It meant the end of the reign of Love and Freedom, the beginning of Law and the assimilation of Francis' ideal to that of the Papacy. The change was followed by a Papal Bull of Honorius III insisting on a year's noviciate for new members of the Order and by St. Francis' resignation of the post of Minister-General. His place was taken by Elias of Cortona, the ablest representative of those Franciscans who wished for property, learning and power. Thus Francis saw the rapid fading of his ideal into the light of common day, and his spiritual family metamorphosed into an official order.
Francis was no less bitterly opposed to the inroads of academic study. " There are so many in our days," he said, " who want to seek wisdom and learning ; happy is he who, out of love for the Lord our God, makes himself ignorant and unlearned." When told with pride that a learned Parisian doctor had been received as a Franciscan, he replied : " Such doctors, my sons, will be the destruction of my vineyard. A man has no more knowledge than he works and he is a wise man only in the degree in which he loves God and his neighbour." One day, as he sat by the fire, a
St. Francis of Assist 17
novice requested of him leave to possess a Psalter. "When," replied Francis with a gleam of humour, " you have got a Psalter, then you'll want a Breviary and, when you've got a Breviary, you will sit in your chair as great as a lord and you will say to your brother, ' Friar, fetch me my Breviary.' "
It was at this time, worn by excessive labour, half blind and saddened by fears regarding the future of his flock, that Francis retired with Brother Leo to the hermitage of Vernia. Soothed by the quiet of Nature, he sought solitude in prayer and meditation, request- ing that he might not be disturbed by any intrusion on his privacy. Into the mysterious struggles of those days it is not possible to enter. They were the Geth- semane of a holy and sensitive life, of a wounded and suffering soul. One thing we know. The Passion of Christ, realised with an absorbing literalness and fervour, was the subject of his constant meditation. It was while thus employed that he received, accord- ing to the unanimous witness of his companions, the stigmata, or marks of Our Lord's Passion, in his hands and side. The fact is physically possible, and has been accepted as such by critical historians. " His companion, Brother Leo, who was present when they washed his body before burial, told me," says Fra Salimbene, " that he looked precisely like a man taken down from the cross."
But as in Nature calm follows storm, so the mysteri- ous sufferings of Vernia were followed by more tranquil days in the life of St. Francis. All his life he had been in intimate sympathy with Nature. His conception of a redeemed world extended beyond men to the creatures. " He could not doubt that where God had put life He had also put the consciousness of Himself." This side
1 8 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
of the saint's life, to which there is no parallel in the Middle Ages, is illustrated by his sermon to the birds. " It was on one of the happy days of his life. He was walking to Bevagna, when he sighted some flocks of birds at a little distance from the road. Turning aside to reach them, they flew around him, as if to bid him welcome to their society. ' Brother birds,' said he, ' you ought to love and praise your Creator very much. He has given you feathers for clothing, wings for flying and all that is needful for you. He has made you the noblest of His creatures, He permits you to live in the pure air, you have neither to sow nor reap and yet He takes care of you, watches over you and guides you.' As he closed this brief discourse, the birds fluttered sympathetically round him as though to thank him, and after stroking them, he dismissed them with his blessing." It was during a period of almost total blindness, in a house overrun by rats and mice, but under the care of Santa Clara, that he composed his famous Canticle of the Creatures. It was the profound expression of his gratitude for Life and Love, the out- come of his deep sympathy with all the creatures of God. " A single sunbeam," he was wont to say, " is enough to drive away many shadows." The story of the composition of an additional verse to the Canticle is eminently characteristic. Finding the Bishop and Podesta of Assisi in open feud, Francis asked them to meet him on the Piazza del Vescovado. On their arrival he caused his Canticle of the Creatures to be sung by two Friars with this additional verse :
" Praised be Thou, O Lord, for those who give pardon for Thy Love, And endure infirmity and tribulation : Blessed be those who endure in peace, Who will be, Most High, crowned by Thee."
St. Francis of Assist 19
At the conclusion of the song, the Podesta cast himself down at the Bishop's feet and said : " Out of love to Our Lord Jesus Christ and to His servant Francis, I forgive you from my heart, and am ready to do your will as it may seem good to you." On this the Bishop embraced the Podesta and said : "On account of my office, I should be humble and peaceful, but I am by nature inclined to anger and thou must therefore be indulgent to me."
With failing powers St. Francis continued from this time to concentrate himself " with a certain haste " upon the completion of his work. Whenever well enough he journeyed along the byways of the March of Ancona, preaching sometimes five times a day. His eyes were operated upon according to the bar- barous surgery of the time, but without effect. As he drew near Assisi he raised himself upon the stretcher on which he was being carried and blessed his native place. Arrived at Santa Maria degli Angeli, he sum- moned the brethren, and delivered to them his last Will and Testament.
Declaring his devotion to the Church, his deep reverence for the Sacraments, his desire for the con- tinued devotion of his followers to the service of the sick, he charged his brethren never to ask for any favour from the Roman Court and ever to be true to their ideal of Evangelical poverty.
Finally, he thanked God that he had himself been enabled to keep faith with his Lady Poverty and that, having been freed from every burden, he was now able to go to Christ. He blessed not only the brethren present and those absent, but all those who should hereafter enter the Order. " I bless them," said he, " as much as I can and more than I can." " He went
20 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
to meet Death," says Thomas of Celano, "singing." Waking early on Friday morning, and, thinking it to be Thursday, he asked for the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of St. John to be read to him. After listening to the chapter, he chanted feebly the 142nd Psalm ; as he reached the closing words, " Bring my soul out of prison, that I may praise Thy Name," he passed
" to where, beyond these voices, there is peace."
" Next to Christianity," says Renan, " the Fran- ciscan movement is the greatest popular work recorded in history." Yet how is it possible to summarise in a few sentences the character of the Franciscan Gospel ?
It was a direct return to Christ, the Christ of the Gospels, the Christ of the Sermon on the Mount, the Christ of Calvary, with nothing altered or explained away. St. Francis held that " the world groaned, because it forgot that it had been redeemed, and that there was a good chance for it yet." The rich, overweighted with possessions, " forgot that all men were brothers and lost the joy of friendship." The learned, overweighted with knowledge, forgot that " the bird soars higher than the snail which drags its shell after it."
Francis asserted the sufficiency of Christ, " the capacity of simple humanity for the higher joys of life," the Reality, the Inspiration and the Rest of the Fatherhood of God.
St. Francis was himself the embodiment of his own Gospel of the " fulness of life." He proved that a man could literally " have nothing " and yet " possess all things " that were worth possessing. His life deepened
St. Francis of Assisi 21
the possibilities of individuality ; linked men together in a brotherhood of active service for the amelioration of the world ; turned the prose of crabbed theology and worldly churchmanship into the poetry of Christian self-sacrifice and Christian love. Francis made all men see in one another the lineaments of Christ and breathed into them the one passion of his own life, the desire to be like Christ. " No revolution," says Bishop Creighton, " no war, no Declaration of Rights, advanced the cause of freedom so much as did the life and example of Francis of Assisi."
Nor can we forget that the richness and poetry of this poor man's character gave to European Art, Poetry and Learning the profoundest impulse. Francis, at one with Nature and with God, inspired the genius of Giotto, the poetry of Dante, the philanthropic science of Roger Bacon.
Yet though we owe to Francis of Assisi a new inter- pretation of Christ and of Nature, it would be absurd to deny his limitations. Francis did not sufficiently emphasise the God of Providence, of Civilisation, of Law. He practised a too severe asceticism, depre- ciated the lawful claims of the body, did not make sufficient allowance for the manysidedness of the human mind. He underrated the importance of national life and national feeling. In condemning Learning, too, Francis condemned intellectual truth ; in casting out the demon of avarice he overlooked the great and generous uses to which money may be put. In short, he did not recognise the complexity of human life and civilisation.
We cannot, therefore, say with Renan that " Francis was the only perfect Christian since Jesus " ; but we do assert this, that by his loving service of the leper,
22 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
the outcast and the poor he brought men back from the worship of Mammon to the worship of God, from lives of active or passive selfishness to the lowliness of adoration and the humility of true service.
II
THE EARLY FRANCISCANS IN ITALY
My object in these pages is not primarily to trace the growth of the Franciscan Order, but to tell the story of the early Franciscans. It is the personal element which I propose to emphasise, using the expansion of the Order only as a broad highway upon which we may view the followers of Francis passing and repassing.
When Francis died in the October of 1226, Elias of Cortona had been for five years his Vicar-General. At the celebrated Chapter of Pentecost held at the Portiuncula in 1221, Elias had presided. Francis sat humbly at his feet and, when he wished to interpolate a remark, plucked his Vicar by the tunic. Then Elias would bend down and listen, afterwards rising up and saying, " Brethren, thus saith Brother Francis." Yet upon this man, who was to play the leading part in the Franciscan drama for some years, the mantle of St. Francis had by no means fallen. He represented the ambitious ideals of the mediaeval ecclesiastic rather than the simplicity of his master.
Elias Bombarone was born about 11 80, the son of a mattress-maker ; he added to his father's profession that of a schoolmaster at Assisi. He was a serious and studious youth with an eye for real greatness and quickly fell under the fascination of Francis. Of his thoroughness and capacity there was never any
23
24 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
doubt ; in 12 19 he was appointed Provincial Minister in Syria, having two years previously headed a band of missionaries to the Holy Land. When Francis re- turned to Italy Elias accompanied him. On their arrival at Bologna Elias received an object lesson on the uncompromising narrowness of his master's aims. A certain Peter Stacia had founded a house of study for the Friars Minor in this University city. Francis at once ordered all the brothers to quit, even one who was sick and laid Peter Stacia under a curse. At Bologna Elias met Cardinal Ugolino, and it is certain that these two men, who saw of what value the Order might be to the Papacy if the rigours of Francis' rule could be mitigated, worked together with this end in view.
On the death of Francis, Elias took over the manage- ment of everything. He arranged for his burial, his canonisation within two years, his memorial in the magnificent Church of Assisi, the translation of his remains to the new sanctuary. As the part he played in these transactions completed the rift between the old ideal of the Order and the new and is of importance in the history of mediaeval Art, we must relate it with some detail.
Elias procured a glorious site for the new church on the brow of a hill outside the city, known as the Colle dell' Inferno on account of its being the burial place of criminals. Francis had himself chosen the spot as his place of interment. Appointed Master of the Works, Elias selected an unknown architect familiar with the Gothic churches of southern France, and pressed on the building with all speed. " Assisi awoke to a sense of her importance. Under the vigilant eye of Elias, armies of masons and labourers
The Early Franciscans in Italy 25
worked as unremittingly as ants at a nest, while processions of carts drawn by white oxen went ever to and fro upon the road leading to the quarries, bringing creamy white, rose and golden blocks of Subasian stone." In less than two years the Lower Church was completed, six years later the Upper Church, to which was soon added one of the most beautiful peals of bells to be heard in Italy. But all this labour was not to be procured without money, and Elias with unflagging zeal pressed his appeals in every direction. Finally he caused to be placed outside his majestic church a marble vase for the offerings of the faithful.
Now this marble vase was like a match applied to a heap of highly inflammable material. The inner circle of St. Francis' personal friends, Leo his secretary, Giles and Bernard his first follower had from the beginning viewed this visible apotheosis of their master with violent indignation. They recalled his words bearing on this very matter of church building and they were these : " Also cause small churches to be built, they ought not to raise great churches for the sake of preaching to the people, for they will show greater humility by going to preach in other churches ; little cells and small churches will be better sermons and cause greater edification than many words."
When, therefore, they saw the marble vase of Elias for the offerings of the faithful their indignation knew no bounds ; and Leo, Francis' " little lamb of God," gentle and unworldly but stubborn to the last degree of stubbornness, smashed it into a thousand atoms. We may imagine the wrath of Elias ; Leo was scourged, and expelled from Assisi, but the rift in the Order was now complete.
Nor was Leo, though so gentle, without resources ;
26 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
he could wield the pen. It was at this time that he wrote such part of the Speculum Perfectionis as owes its authorship to him ; depicting the life of St. Francis known to him with such intimacy and flashing forth his indignant scorn upon those who travesty his ideal of Evangelical Poverty. This manifesto and that known as the Sacrum Commerciiim, or mystical marriage of St. Francis with Poverty by Giovanni Parenti, created a profound impression and reaction. At the Chapter General of 1227 Giovanni Parenti was elected Minister-General, in place of Elias.
Elias, however, was not a man to take an unex- pected reverse without hitting back. Probably through his initiative, but at the bidding of his friend Ugolino, now Gregory IX, Thomas of Celano was commissioned to write his first life of St. Francis, in which Elias is made to figure very impressively and to receive a special blessing at the hands of the founder. His second move was less tactful. The translation of the remains of St. Francis to the new church had been fixed to take place on May 25, when there would be a gathering of the annual Chapter under Giovanni Parenti. Elias, however, determined to anticipate this, and by the connivance of the secular authorities effected the translation to his new basilica, with great secrecy, three nights before. Great as was the indig- nation excited by this unscrupulous manoeuvre, Elias weathered the storm and soon after played his trump card. By the Papal Bull " Quo elongati," the Testa- ment of St. Francis himself was waived aside, as not binding on the brethren ; while buildings and sites of value were allowed to be purchased, and held in trust for the Order, by Papal nominees. This last move disheartened the party of Brother
The Early Franciscans in Italy 27
Leo, now known as the " Zealots " or " Spirituals," and caused Giovanni Parenti to resign his office.
By a kind of coup d'etat Elias was elected in his place, and for the next seven years ruled with a rod of iron. It is not to be denied that under his rule the Order made rapid strides and became a power of the first rank. The Provinces in Europe were re- organised and reinforced, missions to the Moslems were pressed forward, Chairs of Theology were founded in the Universities ; Paris and Oxford especially becoming centres of Franciscan influence. Yet it was the Universities who were the ultimate causes of the fall of Elias. The Visitors he appointed were officious and exacting and, notably in England, were regarded as extortioners and spies, even by the moderate party.
At the Chapter General of 1239 and in the presence of Pope Gregory, the English Friars, headed by Aymon of Faversham, impeached Elias for extrava- gance and tyranny. At first the Pope was not in- clined to listen to Aymon, but an English Cardinal said, " Hear him, he is a good man and not tedious." Aymon declared that Elias had spent too much money on himself and lived delicately. If his physical in- firmities obliged him to ride, he need not at least be so choice in the trappings of his steed or in the livery of his servants. He had heaped up treasure not only for his Church but for himself. This was more than Elias could stand. " You lie," he shouted, and at this his supporters raised a great tumult. Gregory, how- ever, silenced him. This was not the manner in which an assembly of the Religious could be conducted. Would it not be better for Elias to put himself in the hands of the Pope ? This Elias refused to do ; conse- quently he was deposed. The Pope declared that he
28 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
had appointed him, thinking that a man of such ability would be acceptable to the brethren. As he was not, let them elect a successor. Albert of Pisa, the leader of the English mission, was at once elected by acclamation. The brothers again breathed freely ; the cause of Francis and of simplicity was saved.
The human interest of Elias is, however, so great that we will briefly relate his end. He speedily revenged himself on the Pope by siding with his bitterest enemy, Frederick II, to whom he rendered valuable diplomatic service. He was consequently excommunicated and expelled from the Order. Elias, nevertheless, refused to be unfrocked. On the death of the Emperor he returned to his native Cortona and, in a convent built by himself, passed his latter days among his own people. Up to the last he retained a true and tender affection for the memory of St. Francis and, when death approached, made confession of his delinquencies and died with the sacraments of the Church. He was buried in the Franciscan habit in 1253, but a later guardian of the monastery flung his ashes out of the church. His memory, however, is immortalised by the glorious basilica of Assisi, at once his sincere tribute to his Master and the witness of that difference of the spirit which has so often separated men of impetuous and lofty aims, who once " walked in the house of God as friends."
The church erected to the memory of St. Francis by Brother Elias is the earliest Gothic building in Italy, and it gave the first great impulse to Italian mediaeval art. Its walls are covered with frescoes by the earliest Italian painters. Here, in his youth, Giotto painted the Passion of Christ, and here, in the prime of manhood, he told the story of St. Francis
The Early Franciscans in Italy 29
in a series of nearly thirty frescoes. " Here," says Mr. Symonds, " he learned the secret of giving the sem- blance of flesh and blood reality to Christian thought. His work was a Bible, a compendium of grave divinity and human history, a book embracing all things needful for the spiritual and the civil life of man. He spoke to men who could not read, for whom there were no printed pages, but whose heart received his teaching through the eye. For painting was not then what it is now, a mere decoration of existence, but a powerful and efficient agent in the education of the race."
The debt of Italian Art to Elias is immense, but his obstinacy brought discredit upon the Franciscan Order. It also discounted the official life of its founder by Thomas of Celano. A request was therefore put forward in Chapter General asking those who had known Francis personally to put their information at the disposal of the Minister. This request led in the first place to the " Legend of the Three Companions " by Brothers Leo, Rufino and Angelo ; and in the second place to the utilisation of this first-hand infor- mation by Thomas of Celano in his second life. In these works the Gospel of Evangelical Poverty was again set forth with uncompromising directness.
If we want to understand the soul of St. Francis it is to Brother Leo that we must turn, for he was the chosen intimate of the Saint, the antithesis of Brother Elias. Leo occupies with regard to St. Francis much the same position as that which we suppose St. John to have occupied in relation to Our Lord. He was the disciple whom St. Francis loved, the companion of his most intimate moments, the passive mirror of his most spiritual ideas. Like St. John, too, he lives by his writings and lingered to an extreme old age, sur-
30 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
viving his master by forty-five years. From the time of his retirement at Vernia, St. Francis chose Leo as the most " simple and pure " of his followers to care for and wait upon him. It was his hand which wrote down at Francis' dictation the Song of the Creatures. For Leo St. Francis wrote his only extant autograph, the blessing of Moses the man of God, signed with the Cross, in order that, after he had passed away, his sorrowing disciple might still possess some visible reminder of his tenderness and friendship. Thus Leo, living on into a new generation, became the rallying point of the " Spirituels " of the Order ; while he is still for us, by virtue of the Legend, and the Speculum Perfectionis, the faithful and true witness of what Francis really was.
It is Leo who records Francis' saying in abhorrence of money, " Let us take heed, who have given up all, lest for so slight a thing we lose the Kingdom of Heaven." It is Leo who tells us that " he carried a broom to sweep out unclean churches, for the holy father grieved much when he saw any church not so clean as he wished " : and who records the answer of the dying Francis to Brother Elias, when the latter remonstrated with him for singing so incessantly to the scandal of passers-by : " Suffer me, brother," replied St. Francis with great fervour, " to rejoice in the Lord, both in His praises and in my infirmities, since by the grace of the Holy Spirit, I am so united to my Lord that I may well rejoice in the most High."
With Brother Leo we must associate as early com- panions and " Spirituels," Rufino, Angelo, Giles and Santa Clara. These loved to describe themselves by the phrase, "Nos qui cum eo fuimus," "We who were with him."
The Early Franciscans in Italy 31
The following story, in Jorgensen's words, sums up graphically their point of view : "An English Fran- ciscan who was a Doctor of Theology stood in the pulpit of St. Damien and gave a sermon which, with all its learning, seems to have been very different from the words which used to be heard from this place out of the mouth of Francis. All felt it and suddenly Brother Giles raised his voice and called out, ' Be still, Master, and I will preach ! ' The English Doctor stopped and Giles began ' in the heat of the spirit of God.' When he had had his say, the English Friar returned and concluded his discourse. But Clara, we are told, rejoiced over this more than if she had seen the dead brought to life again ; ' for this was what our most holy father Francis wanted, that a Doctor of Theology should have enough humility to be silent when a lay brother wished to speak in his stead.' "
Brother Giles was certainly an uncomfortable person to encounter. His caustic wit was far-famed, and dignitaries of the Church knew what it was to wince under it. When Giles, for example, in his old age was placed before the learned Bonaventura, General of the Order, he asked him the following question : " Father, can we unlearned and ignorant men be saved ? ' " Certainly," replied St. Bonaventura kindly. " Can one who is not book-learned love God as much as one who is ? " asked Giles again. " An old woman," replied the General, "is in a condition to love God more than a master in theology." Then Giles went to the garden wall, and shouted out at the top of his voice, " Hear this, all of you, an old woman who has never learned anything and cannot read, can love God more than Brother Bonaventura."
32 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
But the following instances of the sarcasm of Brother Giles will suffice to show the uncompromising character of the Zealot party. On one occasion two Cardinals visited Giles and asked for a place in his prayers. " It is surely not necessary that I should pray for you, my Lords," replied the Saint, " for it is evident that you have more faith and hope than I have ! " " How is that ? " asked the Cardinals. "Because," replied Giles, " you, who have so much of power and honour and the glory of this world, hope to be saved while I, who live so poorly and wretchedly, fear, in spite of all, that I shall be damned."
It will be obvious from the foregoing that the spirit of humility which characterised St. Francis was in danger of being lost by both sections of his followers. That it did not cease to be operative altogether will be equally clear to those who study the career of John of Parma, seventh General of the Order.
John of Parma was a scholar, statesman, musician, man of business and saint. Before becoming Minister- General he had occupied the highest positions in the Universities of Paris, Bologna and Naples. Yet though versatile and learned he combined the humility of a true Franciscan with the enthusiasm of a visionary and the common sense of a man of the world. Above all, he was a man of peace, rising above all party spirit and restoring to the Order the heroic temper of its earliest days.
" Welcome, Father," said Giles to him, " but oh, you come late ! "
John of Parma's ideal was to come into touch with every single member of the Family of St. Francis and he is said in ten years to have visited every friary and hermitage of the Order in Europe. Dressed like the
The Early Franciscans in Italy 33
poorest of his brethren, he travelled on foot from town to town. Admitted " for the love of God " into the friaries, it was often several days before it was dis- covered by the brethren that they were entertaining in their midst the General of the Order. Salimbene relates how, when asked by St. Louis of France to sit by the King's side, he refused, preferring the society of the poor and unnoticed at the lowest table. " Many," he says, " were edified thereby ; for consider that God hath not placed all the lights of heaven in one part alone but hath distributed them in divers parts and sundry manners for the greater beauty and utility of the heavens." If good wine was poured out for him he distributed it to the poor brethren seated beside him, to the great annoyance of his hosts ; and if he found himself more than once seated between the wittiest and more polished of his brethren he changed his place, that he might make the acquaintance of the dull and stupid.
Seventy-two " Zealots " who had been exiled by his predecessor, he recalled ; " scattered by the wolf," says the chronicler, " they were gathered again by the shepherd and brought back to the fold." He desired to listen and to sympathise with all men, and, so far as might be possible, restore the Kingdom of God on earth.
Like our own Henry II, he was a man so indefatig- able in business as to be obliged frequently to change his secretaries, who would otherwise have been worn-out before their time.
In 1247 he attended a Chapter at Oxford and was delighted with the English brothers : "Oh, that such a Province," he cried, " were in the middle of the world that it might be a pattern to all the Churches ! "
34 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
Salimbene describes him as a man " above the middle height, finely made in all his limbs, well knit, sound, able for all fatigues of the road, or the study. His face was that of an angel, and ever cheerful."
Mindful of the Apostolic maxim, " if any would not work neither should he eat," he earned his own living by copying manuscripts, in addition to his multi- farious labours on behalf of his Order. He was em- ployed by Innocent IV on a mission of reconciliation with the Greek Church, but, although he made a most favourable impression, he was unable to heal the wound of so many centuries.
His beneficent rule was, however, brought pre- maturely to a close. The writings of Joachim of Flora, the Calabiian mystic, who held that the ages of the Father and the Son were now passing into the age of the Spirit, had been set forth in a mutilated and heretical form at Paris, by an injudicious Franciscan, under the title of " The Everlasting Gospel." The University of Paris, always jealous of the Friars, obtained the condemnation of the book, and the imprisonment of its author. John of Parma was a friend of the writer and was, moreover, known to be in sympathy with the Joachimite mysticism ; he was therefore denounced to the Pope who suggested his resignation. Unlike Elias, John immediately resigned. He lived, however, for forty years longer at Greccio, in a retired hermitage, the friend of all men, the counsellor of all in trouble and perplexity until, in his eightieth year, on his way to Greece upon a Papal mission, he died. " Zeal for God," says Ubertino, "had eaten away all thought of self in John of Parma."
With characteristic magnanimity John nominated as his successor St. Bonaventura, at once his friend
The Early Franciscans in Italy 35
and opponent. Bonaventura was a man of peace, and with his immense prestige as a saint and scholar was well calculated to compose the differences of the Order. A true Franciscan in the simplicity of his life, his love of learning tended to link him with the more pro- gressive and liberal section of the Order. Tall of stature, handsome in feature, gracious and gentle in manner, he was essentially a popular and sympathetic personality. As General, he followed the via media. The chief counts against him are that he deprived Roger Bacon of his books and forbade him to lecture and that he wrote a life of St. Francis in which he toned down the vagaries of the saint, robbing him in the process of his daring originality. Yet this com- position was received with such favour by the second generation of Franciscans that a Chapter-General ordered all previous lives of the saint to be destroyed. It is the only life of St. Francis with which Dante seems to have been acquainted.
St. Bonayentura, known as the " Seraphic Doctor," occupies a high place among the mediaeval schoolmen, those ponderous theologians who begin with St. Anselm in the eleventh century, and end with Wyclif in the fourteenth. These men tried to " unify the Christian consciousness " and to build up the Christian faith into an encyclopedic philosophy of life. To scoff at their labours is equally easy and superficial. They worked out the pure laws of thought, and endeavoured to justify the truths of revealed religion to the reason. Their logic was unanswerable. Once grant their premisses and their conclusion follows inevitably. But instead of confining their arguments to the funda- mental doctrines of Christianity, they took for granted the whole theological system of the mediaeval Church.
36 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
The excessive deference, too, paid by the schoolmen to logic diverted their minds from the consideration due to the fact of human experience.
St. Bonaventura did something to remedy this defect and to make theology less a matter of pure dialectics, more a matter of devotion and personal experience. With him, the way to God is the way of the Mystic, by purification, illumination and perfection. He main- tained the primacy of willing over knowing and held that man attained to Divine knowledge through prayer, contemplation, virtue and love. " The first necessity of the spiritual life," he said, " is to feel highly, devoutly and holily about God." " If," says a recent American writer, " the philosophy of Bona- ventura has little pragmatic value for us, it had a great deal for him and enabled him to walk through difficult places and to keep himself unspotted from the world."
We will now turn to an entirely different phase of the Franciscan movement, its religious poetry. St. Francis was instinctively a poet by virtue of his love of God and Nature. " What else," he said, " are the servants of God than His singers whose duty it is to lift up the hearts of men and move them to spiritual joy ? " He turned with especial delight to all that was glad and joyous and beautiful in his surroundings, to the jocund fire, the pure running water, to birds and flowers. Renan calls his Canticle of the Creatures " the finest religious poem since the Gospels." Dean Milman says of him : " His ordinary speech was more poetical than poetry, and when dying he said with exquisite sim- plicity, ' welcome, Sister Death.' "
But not only was Francis a poet, he awoke the poetic fire in his disciples. The two noblest hymns of the Middle Ages are both by Franciscans, the "Dies Irae"
The Early Franciscans in Italy 37
by Thomas of Celano, the " Stabat Mater " of Jacopone da Todi.
When Sir Walter Scott lay dying at Abbotsford in 1832, " we very often heard," says Lockhart, " the cadence of the ' Dies Irae ' ; and I think the very last stanza that we could make out was the first of a still greater favourite,
' Stabat mater dolorosa Juxta crucem lachrymosa Dum pendebat filius.' "
Even in English, how haunting is the melody, and how profound the appeal to the heart, of these moving stanzas !
" Who on Christ's dear Mother gazing, Pierced by anguish so amazing,
Born of woman, would not weep ? Who on Christ's dear Mother thinking, Such a cup of sorrow drinking,
Would not share her sorrows deep ? Jesu, may her deep devotion Stir in me the same emotion,
Fount of love, Redeemer kind, That my heart fresh ardour gaining, And a purer love attaining,
May with Thee acceptance find."
The amazing story of Jacopone da Todi, the reputed author of these very human stanzas and the greatest of Franciscan poets, is briefly as follows.
Jacopone was a lawyer and lived at Bologna, where was the greatest school of jurisprudence in mediaeval times. His youth was wild and extravagant and his gambling habits kept him always short of money. He married Vanna, a lady of noble birth, whom he truly loved but who also brought him a large dowry. One
38 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
day decked out in her finest clothes, in which her husband took the greatest pleasure, she went to a great fete at Todi, and sat with others on a high raised platform. Suddenly it collapsed. When the body of Vanna was extricated, she was still breathing, and was found to be wearing under her gay clothing a hair shirt, from the knowledge of which she had always kept her husband. Soon after she died, and her loss unhinged the mind of Jacopone, while at the same time it opened his heart to the spiritual meaning of the world. He at once distributed all his goods to the poor and, in a hermit's frock, wandered from place to place. Now one of the secrets which Francis had discovered about human nature was this, that its weakest point lies in its fear of ridicule. Man is so proud that he cannot bear to be laughed at. Therefore, if he wishes to be saved, he must become literally a fool for Christ's sake. No one, even Brother Juniper, even exemplified this Franciscan principle more thoroughly than Jacopone. Lady Folly was to him the surest and safest guide to real wisdom. For example, when a wedding was about to take place in the family, his brother wrote inviting him, but begging him with some trepidation to be on his best behaviour. Jacopone 's reply was to appear at the dance, " tarred and feathered from top to toe ! " the childishness of the Franciscan temperament reaches its climax in this nonsensical performance.
Yet this religious fanatic was also a citizen of the world, capable of forming the shrewdest judgments of men, adored by the common people and the creator of the purest vernacular poetry of the age. He was ten years before he judged himself worthy of joining the Franciscan Order and in the meantime lived the life of
The Early Franciscans in Italy 39
a spiritual vagabond, singing the praises of God, Nature and Poverty.
" God does not lodge in narrow heart, Love claims the whole and spurns the part, Greathearted one, where'er thou art, Thou shelterest Deity."
As years passed over his head, however, Jacopone feared that his soul was suffering from want of discipline and joined the Order of St. Francis, excelling even the " Zealots " in self-denial and austerity.
His contempt for learning and for all selfish views of salvation is uncompromisingly set forth in the following stanzas : —
" Plato and Socrates may contend And all the breath in their bodies spend, Arguing without an end ;
What's it all to me ? Only a pure and simple mind Straight to heaven its way doth find ; Greets the King — while far behind
Lags the world's philosophy. Lord of my heart, give me to know Thy will and how to do it, show. That done, what care I, whether or no,
Damned or saved I be."
We owe to Jacopone exquisite pictures of Nature thoroughly Franciscan in their freshness, purity and joyousness ; and charming carols of the Nativity conceived less as a past event than as a present joy.
" The little angels join their hands And dance in holy ring. Love songs they're whispering, The little angel bands.
Good men and bad they call and greet :
High Glory doffs its crown,
And has come down,
Low lies there at your feet.
40 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
Now, shamefaced boors, why keep Ye back ? Show courtesie. Hasten and ye will see The little Jesus sleep.
The earth and all the skiey space Break into flowery smiles. So draws and so beguiles The sweetness of His face."
Jacopone has also left us severely mystical poems descriptive of the merging of the human soul in God. Fra Angelico's pictures of the Saints dancing in the green meadows of Paradise are anticipated in his poems, which sometimes soar to an audacity of freedom nigh to blasphemy.
But the real significance of Jacopone lies in his intense sympathy with the " spirituels " of his Order, his democratic fervour, his detestation of worldliness and tyranny. When that grasping Pontiff Boniface VIII, after causing the deposition of his predecessor the saintly Celestine, ascended the Papal throne, Jacopone assailed him with vigorous lampoons and accurately forecasted the character and termination of his rule. " He has entered the fold as a fox, he will reign like a lion and go out like a dog." Boniface naturally retaliated by bestowing on the poet a term of severe imprisonment and feeding him with the bread of affliction. All this Jacopone endured manfully, only pleading for the Pope's absolution, which was per- sistently refused. After the tragic overthrow of Boniface at Anagni in 1303, Jacopone now in his seventy-eighth year was released.
Three years later he was taken ill. On Christmas Eve the brethren wished to give him the last sacraments, but he said, " I will wait, perad venture my friend John
The Early Franciscans in Italy 41
of Alverna will come." " John will not come," they said. Nevertheless, Jacopone waited, beguiling the time with canticles and songs. Hardly had he con- cluded when his friend arrived.
" The joy of meeting," says his biographer, " was surpassing great. John gave him the sacraments. The dying man sang once more a song of love and triumph and his spirit passed. It was believed by those stand- ing near that he died not so much conquered by his malady, though that was grave, as from an extra- ordinary excess of love." " I weep," he once said, " because Love is not loved." Francis had no more thoroughgoing disciple.
The last of the early Franciscans whom it is our purpose to describe here is Fra Salimbene, one of the most vivacious and brilliant chroniclers of the Middle Ages.
Salimbene, who was of good family, was born at Parma in 1221. At the age of sixteen he witnessed a sensational religious revival in what was known as the year of Alleluia. Religious processions of all classes swept through the towns and villages of Italy carrying banners, branches of trees and lighted candles. There was preaching in the streets and squares morning, noon and night, conversions, much excitement, and, no doubt, varied moral results. But to the youthful Salimbene it seemed altogether a coming of the King- dom of God upon earth. " Men lifted their hands," he says, " to God, to praise and bless Him for ever. Nor could they cease, so drunk were they with love divine. There was no wrath among them, or disquiet, or rancour. Everything was peaceful and benign. I saw it with my eyes."
The year following Salimbene joined the Franciscans
D
42 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
and was received by Brother Elias. His parents, however, were furious and moved heaven and earth to get him back. They even applied to the Emperor for assistance, with the result that the father was per- mitted to visit his son, to try to win him back. " Lord Guido," said the Minister-General, " We sympathise with your distress. Behold, here is your son, he is old enough, let him speak for himself. Ask him, if he wishes to go with you, let him in God's name ; if not, we cannot force him." But Salimbene was firm. When his father asked him whether he was willing to accompany him or not, he replied : " No, because the Lord says, ' No one putting his hand to the plough and looking back is fit for the Kingdom of God.' " Beside himself with anger, his father demanded to see him alone, and the request was granted. " Then my father said to me, ' Dear son, don't believe those filthy tunics who have deceived you, but come with me, and I will give you all I have.' " His son, however, proving obstinate, his father took leave of him with these words : "I give thee to a thousand devils, cursed son, thee and thy brother here who has deceived thee. My curse be on you for ever and may it commend you to the spirits of hell." Salimbene, nevertheless, re- mained quite, unmoved by the parental malediction and a dream which he had seemed to him to set the Divine approval upon his disinterested conduct.
" The Blessed Virgin rewarded me that very night. For it seemed to me that I was lying prostrate in prayer before her altar, as the brothers are wont when they rise for matins ; and I heard the voice of the Blessed Virgin calling me. Lifting my face, I saw her sitting above the altar in that place where is set the Host. She had her little boy in her lap and she held
The Early Franciscans in Italy 43
Him out to me, saying, ' Approach without fear and kiss my son, whom yesterday thou didst confess before men.' And when I was afraid, I saw that the little boy gladly stretched out His arms. Trusting His innocence and the graciousness of His Mother I drew near, embraced, and kissed Him ; and the benign Mother gave Him to me for a long while. And when I could not have enough of it, the Blessed Virgin blessed me and said, ' Go, beloved son, and lie down, lest the brothers rising from matins find thee here with us.' I obeyed and the vision disappeared, but unspeak- able sweetness remained in my heart. Never in the world have I had such bliss."
Yet, as Salimbene grew older, he hardly maintained this high level. The inner vision never quite failed him, but his interest in the outer world quickened and his insatiable curiosity made of him an incurable humanist.
Salimbene 's chronicle teems with wars and rumours of wars, crimes, famines and horrors of every kind. Yet it also contains some finely drawn portraits of great men. Take, for example, his description of St. Louis whom he saw at Auxerre, in 1248, at a Chapter of the Provincial General. " The King was slender and graceful, rather lean, of fair height, with an angelic look and gracious face. And he came to the church of the Brothers Minor, not in regal pomp, but on foot, in the habit of a pilgrim with wallet and staff. Nor did the King care as much for the society of nobles as for the prayers and suffrages of the poor. Indeed he was one to be held a monarch, both on the score of devotion and for his knightly deeds of arms. The following day he resumed his journey, and I followed him. It was easy to find him as he frequently turned aside to go to the hermitages of the brothers
44 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
to gain their prayers. And this he kept up con- tinually until he reached the sea and took ship for the Holy Land."
Yet with this genuine appreciation of saintliness, there was an equal appreciation of the good fare provided by the King for the Brothers Minor and we can imagine the horror with which St. Francis would have regarded his sympathetic description of the royal repast. " On that day first we had cherries and then the very whitest bread ; there was wine in abundance and of the very best, as befitted the royal magnificence. After that we had fresh beans cooked in milk, fish and crabs, eel pies, rice with milk of almonds and powdered cinnamon, broiled eels with excellent sauce, and plenty of cakes, herbs and fruits. Everything was well served and the service at table excellent."
Nevertheless, Salimbene, though his stories are not always very refined, hated vice and drunkenness, and though fond of good living, reconciled himself on ordinary occasions to the cabbages which formed the staple of Franciscan fare. He was not ambitious nor had he any desire to leave the Order, only he liked to travel and see as much of the world as was possible. When his liberties in this respect were curtailed, he settled down with reasonable resignation to the humdrum life of an Italian brother. Nor was he ever idle ; he knew his Bible far better than most moderns, and as a student, scribe, preacher and con- fessor acquitted himself with credit. Yet, though he knew the purest and best of the early Franciscans, Bernard and Leo, the radiant figure of Francis rarely crosses his pages and we feel that the salt of the true Franciscan had already begun to lose its savour.
The Early Franciscans in Italy 45
It is, indeed, a far cry from the spiritual passion and self-effacing abandonment of St. Francis, walking literally in the footsteps of Jesus of Nazareth, healing the sick, nursing the leper and preaching the Gospel to the poor to this self-satisfied and gossiping chronicler, making the best of both possible worlds and serving, without serious qualms of conscience, both God and Mammon.
But Salimbene is more typical of the later Fran- ciscans with whom love had grown cold, than of the second generation to which he belonged. And a severe critic of the Order, Mr. Coulton, has declared that " the Friars were still, until some time after Salim- bene's death, the most real intellectual and moral force in Christendom." For there were many still who, with Jacopone and Angelo Clareno, found the Cross of Christ stronger in attraction than all the pleasures of the world and who possessed the Kingdom of God within them.
" Nay, see, the Cross with flowers is ablow ; Decked with its silken pansies I go. Nought of its wounding, its burning, I know ; It useth me tenderly."
Note. — The translations of Jacopone's poems given above are by Anne Macdonell.
Ill
THE EARLY FRANCISCANS IN ENGLAND
The Grey Friars arrived in England in 1224, nine years after the signing of Magna Charta and at the very moment when the walls of Salisbury Cathedral were rising above the ground. To understand the immense stimulus which they gave to spiritual, intellectual and constitutional freedom, it is necessary to take a bird's-eye view of the state of the country, at the time of their arrival.
King John had been dead only eight years. During his lifetime he had outraged national sentiment by his political tyranny ; but on his death arbitrary power passed into the hands of the Pope. There has never been a time when the Pope exercised so great an influence on English affairs, or taxed the country so heavily. According to Grosseteste he drew from this country 70,000 marks annually, a sum equal to more than a million pounds of our present currency. The Friars, therefore, landed in England at a critical moment. The feudal system was breaking up, and the issues between arbitrary government and con- stitutional freedom were being fiercely debated. Into this struggle the Friars threw themselves with charac- teristic energy. As Bishop Creighton has pointed out, the life of St. Francis was based on the idea of in- dividual freedom, and this involved civic freedom and
46
The Early Franciscans in England 47
led up to it. Thus, in England the Friars were not only Mission preachers but also constitutional re- formers, preaching a Social Gospel, and entering, sometimes with undue violence, into political con- troversy. Their ideas found ultimate expression in the Baron's war, and many of them accorded to Simon de Montfort, after his death, the honours of a Saint.
Bishop Stubbs has called the thirteenth century the " golden age of English Churchmanship," yet the conditions of ecclesiastical life at this epoch were far from ideal. There were few Bishops in the country. The diocese of Lincoln stretched from the Humber to the Thames, and during the interdict of John's reign only three bishops remained in the country. Episcopal visitations of the modern kind do not appear to have been held until the time of Grosseteste ; the villages were largely served by non-resident monks, many of them not even in priest's orders ; the towns were understaffed by secular clergy ; and until the coming of the Friars preaching in the vernacular was unknown. Above all, the suburbs of the towns were crowded by a poor labouring population, living in squalor and degradation and utterly neglected by every spiritual authority.
The thirteenth century was, however, " the golden age " of English Monasticism. When the Friars landed in England there were 560 monasteries in the country, 430 of which had been founded during the preceding century and a half.
The monks had, in their way, been great bene- factors. Their moral tone was high, their mental culture considerable. They were, at one and the same time, scholars, architects, builders, chroniclers, pioneers of enlightened farming, just and generous
48 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
landlords, entertainers of travellers, succourers of the poor, as well as public remembrances of God by their continual services of prayer and praise.
But the monks were aristocratic in tone, opposed to moral enthusiasm and confined to the country. The poor of the towns did not come within the range of their influence.
A great gap then in the Church's system waited to be filled, and it was the followers of Francis who filled it. They descended into the insanitary slums outside the city walls and there not only preached the Gospel to the poor in their native tongue, but acted as nurses and physicians to the infirm. But the Friars were not only Medical Missionaries bringing physical and spiritual health to the cities ; they were also mis- sionaries of a broader culture to the Universities. For as Dr. Jessopp has said, " St. Francis' hatred of book learning was the one sentiment that he was never able to inspire among his followers : they could not bring themselves to believe that culture and holiness were incompatible or that nearness to God was possible only to those who were ignorant and uninstructed." But if they acquired knowledge, it was always with a practical aim in view. "To the Franciscan," says Professor Maurice, " doctrines presented themselves as precious for the sake of the wayfarer." Their coming to the Universities, at this particular crisis, was a matter of national importance. For the Universities were a new force of vital signifi- cance in the thirteenth century. They represented the superiority of mental culture to mere brute force. They were the strongest antidote to the narrow class influences of feudalism, and the aristocratic tendencies of monasticism. In J. R. Green's words, " the smallest
The Early Franciscans in England 49
University was European, not local," while the con- stitution on which they were based was purely demo- cratic. At Oxford, in the Middle Ages, the son of the nobleman and the son of the trader were on exactly the same footing. For " knowledge made the Master," and those who did not know, had to sit humbly at the feet of those who did.
We have arrived then at this point. In 1224 there were two main forces making for social freedom in England, the towns and the Universities ; but what sort of freedom ? The answer to this question was largely determined by the Friars. It was not to be only political freedom, as the towns might have answered, nor only intellectual freedom, as the Uni- versities might have decreed, but moral and spiritual freedom, the freedom wherewith Christ claimed to set men free. " What gave St. Francis and his Friars their vast influence in the thirteenth century," says Father Cuthbert, " was just this fact, that in them the new world spirit was wedded to the deepest religious spirit of the period ; the spirit of democratic freedom to a fervent devotion to the person of the earthly Christ as the rule of their life." Thus they were a social power, claiming England, not in sections but as a whole, for the Kingdom of God.
The story of the coming of the Friars to England is told us by the Franciscan Thomas of Eccleston in a plain unvarnished narrative. His work only covers the first thirty years of their labours, while they were still living in great poverty and simplicity and breaks off before the time when the Order had attained intellectual distinction through its distinguished school- men. Eccleston was a contemporary of the events he records and, if his narrative lacks the lightness and
50 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
charm of the " Fioretti," it is far more accurate. It shows us in homely phrase how the followers of St. Francis managed to retain their joyousness and good humour, in the colder climate and under the more leaden skies of England.
The Friars, nine in number, landed at Dover on September ioth, 1224, under the leadership of Agnellus of Pisa, who had been selected for the post by St. Francis himself. The company consisted of four clerics and five laymen. Of the clerics three were English, the fourth an Italian. After resting for two days at the Priory of the Holy Trinity at Canterbury, four of the party set out for London. The rest were assigned a small room at the back of a schoolhouse, where they remained shut up for the greater part of the day. In the evening, when the scholars had retired, they ventured forth into the schoolroom, where they sat round the fire, and partook of their simple refection. " Sometimes," says Eccleston, " they would put on the fire a small pot, in which were the dregs of beer, and would dip a cup into the pot, and drink in turn ; each speaking meanwhile some word of edification." In London, they rented a small house in Cornhill. At Oxford, they obtained a house in the parish of St. Ebbe, and " there," says Eccleston, " was sown the grain of mustard seed which was afterwards to become greatest amongst herbs." Within thirty-two yeais the Franciscans were able to count forty-nine houses of their Order in England, with 1242 brethren. The country was speedily mapped out into custodies, each custody being remarkable for some special note of sanctity. At London, it was " the spirit of fervour, reverence and devotion in the reciting of the daily office." Oxford was noted for its learning, York for
The Early Franciscans in England 51
its poverty, while the custody of Salisbury was con- spicuous for brotherly love.
It was not the custom of the brothers, in these early days, to use pillows, or wear sandals, unless they were sick or delicate and then only with per- mission.
" It once happened," says Eccleston, " that brother Water de Madeley of happy memory found a pair of sandals and put them on when he went to Matins. And while he stood at Matins it seemed to him that he was more comfortable than he was wont to be. But afterwards when he went to bed and had fallen asleep, he dreamed that he was passing along a certain dan- gerous road between Oxford and Bagley, where robbers were often found : he had come down into a deep valley, when robbers came running out on either side, crying with a loud voice, ' Kill him, Kill him.' Much frightened, Brother Walter told them that he was a Friar Minor ; but they replied, ' Thou dost lie, for thou goest not unshod.' And he, be- lieving himself to be as usual barefooted, said, ' Nay, but I am unshod,' and thereupon confidently raised a foot. But in the robber's presence he found him- self shod in the aforesaid sandals. In great trouble of mind he then awoke, and taking the sandals, threw them out into the garden."
Eccleston tells us of the humility with which the Friars confessed their sins to one another. " Were anyone accused by his superior or companion he at once replied, ' Mea culpa,' and frequently prostrated. Whereupon Brother Jordan of happy memory has related how the Devil once appeared to him and said that this ' mea culpa ' snatched from his grasp whatever hope he had of getting the Friars Minor,
52 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
since, whenever one offended against another, he always acknowledged his fault."
The homely wit of the Friars is pleasantly illus- trated in the following parable, related by Albert of Pisa, on account of a novice who was too wise in his own eyes and a busybody in other men's matters.
" A certain countryman enamoured of the rest and joys of Paradise, reached the gate of Heaven, and asked St. Peter to admit him. St. Peter assented on condition of his keeping the Rules. When he asked what they were, St. Peter told him that he had nothing else to do except hold his tongue. Having gladly assented to the condition, the countryman was ad- mitted. But as he was walking through Paradise, he saw a man ploughing with two oxen, a lean and a fat one, and he allowed the fat ox to go as he would, but kept whipping the lean one. And, running up to him, the countryman rebuked him. Then St. Peter appeared and warned him. Forthwith the countryman saw a man carrying a long beam with which he wanted to enter a house, but he always turned the beam across the door ; and, running up to him, the countryman told him to turn one end of the beam forward. Again St. Peter appeared and warned him. Then the country- man saw a man lopping trees in a wood and he spared all the old and rotten trunks but cut down all the straightest, tallest and greenest. And, running up, he rebuked him. Then St. Peter appeared and inconti- nently expelled him."
Another characteristic of the Friars is exemplified in the following : " An English Friar who was ill saw his Guardian Angel enter the room and seat himself by his bedside. After him came two devils, who accused the Friar of all the things which he had
The Early Franciscans in England 53
done amiss in his life. At last one of the devils said to the other, ' Besides, he is so frivolous, he laughs and makes jokes and cuts all manner of capers.' Then the Guardian Angel rose up and said to the devils, ' Be gone ; so far you have spoken the truth, but now you find fault with his cheerfulness and if you make out religion to be a sad and gloomy thing, you will drive his soul into the recklessness of despair and strangle his spiritual life,' and so saying, the Guardian Angel drove the fiends forth."
Another parable of Brother Albert's, rebuking the presumption of young men, is worth recording.
" There was a young bull who diverted himself in the meadows just as he liked. One day, about Prime, he turned aside to see the ploughing and beheld the senior bulls pacing leisurely along the furrow and doing but little work. So he rebuked them and told them that he would do as much as they at a start and they begged that he would come and help them. So, placing his neck in the yoke, he ran with great speed to the middle of the furrow and being weary and out of breath he looked round and said, ' What ! is it not all done ? ' And the old bulls answered, ' No,' and laughed at him. Then the young bull said that he could not go any further. ' Thereupon,' said they, ' we advance with moderation because we have to work continually and not for a time only.' "
The simplicity, kindliness and homely wit of the Friars procured them a hearty welcome wherever they went, especially with the middle classes and the poor. Their style of preaching was unlike anything that preceded it. It was crude, full of lucid denun- ciations of sin and illustrated by anecdotes and stories of a popular character. But whatever its defects it
54 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
was racy and of the soil ; moreover it was commended by the life. Wherever to-day in our cities we stumble upon streets with the time-honoured names of " Friar Lane," " Friar Gate," " Grey Friars," there we know the disciples of Francis once nursed the sick and cleansed the leper and preached the Gospel of Divine Love to the poor in the mother tongue.
We must now turn to a very different page of their history, to their work at Oxford where, for a generation at least, they produced the most brilliant scholars and thinkers in Europe. The fact that Robert Grosseteste, first Chancellor of the University and afterwards Bishop of Lincoln, became lecturer to the Order gave the Franciscans an admirable start at Oxford. A man of great moral earnestness, encyclopaedic knowledge and reforming zeal, Grosseteste 's strong and fearless character impressed itself on the leaders of the Fran- ciscan movement, while his intellectual enthusiasm acted as a powerful stimulus on the minds of his pupils.
The Friars came to Oxford with two main aims in view : to gain such a knowledge of Theology as would enable them to cope successfully with the heresy and unbelief of their day ; and to acquire such a knowledge of physical science as would assist them in their philanthropic labours. Thus the distinguishing feature of the Oxford Franciscans was their practicality. " Before all," wrote Roger Bacon, " the utility of everything must be considered, for this utility is the end for which the thing exists."
The Oxford course for a Franciscan was no light and airy matter in the thirteenth century. In the first place, he was thoroughly grounded in the Bible. Grosseteste insisted on the Old and New Testaments as the only sure foundations of teaching and caused
The Early Franciscans in England 55
them to be made the subject of all morning lectures. Learned Friars lectured at the University on ethics and practical theology, Biblical exegesis and physics. Each Friary sent up its most promising scholars who had already accomplished eight years' study in Arts. After six years' study at Oxford, each scholar was presented to the Chancellor and Proctors and an enquiry made concerning his morals and mental efficiency. If he satisfied his examiners, he was admitted " to oppose in theology " and two years later could become a respondent. This meant that he was allowed to take part in public theological disputa- tions, an admirable training for those who had to brush up against the sharp-witted burghers of the towns, given as these were to argument and destructive criticism. Had it not been for the Friars the Middle Classes would not only have been lost to the Church but would have become its most active assailants. Owing, however, to their training in dialectics, their practical genius and ready sympathy, the Friars found in men of trade and commerce their warmest supporters. They received more legacies from trades- men than from any other class.
The Friars were supported at Oxford by a system of Exhibitions inaugurated by Grosseteste.
The usual Exhibition amounted to £5 a year, which, we assume, covered the ordinary expenses of living at this period. Masters and lecturers were supported by the Friary in which they lectured, for from Oxford and, to a smaller degree, from Cambridge went out a small army of trained teachers to the provinces. Continental Universities frequently filled their professorial chairs with Oxford Friars, while Franciscans from every country in the West migrated to the city on the Isis.
56 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
Under the influence of Grosseteste and the Friars, Oxford became the headquarters of constitutional opposition to Royal and Papal oppression and the Propagandist of the New Learning. Richard of Bury says of the libraries of the Mendicant Orders at the English Universities, " there we found heaped up, amidst the utmost poverty, the utmost riches of wisdom." The English language itself owes a great debt to the Friars. Though classical scholars, they preached and taught in the vernacular ; and it was because they did so that the century which first saw English poetry attain to self-consciousness in Chaucer, also saw English prose first express itself in the clear and vigorous tracts of John Wyclif.
The two greatest Friars of the first generation in England were Adam Marsh and Roger Bacon.
Adam Marsh, known as Doctor illustris, was educated at Oxford, and after holding a cure of souls near Wear- mouth joined the Friars Minor and was their first lecturer. Among his pupils were the three most illustrious schoolmen of the Order, Bacon, Duns Scotus and Occam. Of his own writings, only his letters, 247 in number, have survived. These written to corre- spondents of all classes show how the followers of St. Francis " became all things to all men ' and explain why the early Friars were as deeply loved in England as their successors in the time of Chaucer and Piers Ploughman were distrusted and despised.
Adam Marsh was a man whose counsel and sym- pathy everyone sought and upon whose energies almost superhuman demands were made. He was literally here, there and everywhere. At one moment advising the Archbishop, at another preaching a Crusade, now at Rome with St. Anthony of Padua opposing Brother
The Early Franciscans in England 57
Elias, now with Grosseteste at the Council of Lyons, now at Oxford endeavouring to keep the peace among three thousand unruly students, who were attacking the Jews, having frays with the townsmen, or assaulting the foreign cook of the Papal Legate. But wherever he is, Adam Marsh is a Peacemaker. He pours oil on the troubled waters, he rebukes or soothes the angry, he encourages the unhappy and unfortunate. At one time he is interceding for a penitent thief, at another he is helping a poor woman at Reading overwhelmed by the quibbles and delays of the lawyers, or asking Grosse- teste to aid some deserving scholar, or protecting Juliana, a poor widow, from oppression. To Simon de Montfort he writes with the greatest intimacy and freedom. He tells him that " his only hope of safety against the dangers of his enemies, the plots of deceitful friends and the reverses of the world was in reliance upon Him who sits on the throne of Justice and Judg- ment ; if the Earl would be careful of preserving in his own person, his soldiers and servants, and in all belonging to his Government, devotion to God, un- broken loyalty, friendship with one another, charity towards all." He warns him frankly against his besetting sins : " better is a patient man than a strong man, and he who can rule his own temper than he who rules a city." He encourages him in his desperate and thankless task of bringing Gascony into a state of peace and order.
Creighton says that " it is not too much to say that it was the influence of Grosseteste and Adam Marsh which converted Simon from a wild and reckless adventurer into an English patriot."
To the Countess of Leicester Adam writes with equal freedom, reproves her for failures of temper, warns her
£
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against extravagance in dress, congratulates her on the birth of a child, thanks her for concern about his health, impresses on her that God's goodness to her merits a proportionate gratitude.
Perhaps the noblest action of Adam Marsh was his interference on behalf of the Jews. In 1255 a boy, Hugh of Lincoln, was supposed to have been murdered by the Jews and it was alleged that he had been scourged and crucified in imitation of Our Lord. The whole charge was probably as baseless as a similar accusation made and disproved in Russia, shortly before the Great War. The Jews, however, as a consequence of the supposed crime, were exposed to an explosion of popular fury and many were put to death. Adam Marsh and the Franciscans alone opposed the arguments of the accusers, and Adam, defying the royal authority, forbade the execution of the accused. The result of this fearless conduct was that for some time after the Friars were regarded with disfavour and refused alms by the people. The whole story proves that if the Friars stood as a rule high in popular favour, they were at any rate not charlatans.
Amidst all his multifarious occupations, Adam
Marsh pursued his intellectual studies and was
solicitous about the careful transmission of books.
When at Lyons he sent for a copy of St. Gregory and
other volumes, adding, " and you may pack the books
neatly in a waxed cloth, taking off the wooden covers."
Professor Brewer applies to him Chaucer's lively
description of the Oxford scholar :
" Of study, took he most care and heed, Not one word spake he, more than was need. All that he spake, it was of high prudence, And short and quick and full of great sentence, Tending to moral virtue was his speech And gladly would he learn and gladly teach."
The Early Franciscans in England 59
But, above all, Adam Marsh laboured for the reformation of the Church, by resisting the claims of King and Barons to appoint unfit persons to sacred offices. On one occasion he incurred the grave dis- pleasure of the King by a too outspoken discourse at Court ; but the monarch was afterwards placated, continuing to consult him and calling him his father. Grosseteste left his books to the University of Oxford, " out of love for Adam Marsh," whose character he summed up in the following words : "a true friend and faithful counsellor, respecting truth not vanity, a wise man and prudent and fervent in zeal for the salvation of souls."
When at last, worn-out by his labours, he fell seriously ill, he begged St. Bonaventura to send him John of Stamford, " by whom, through God's blessing, I may be directed through things transitory and my thoughts raised to things eternal." He died at Lincoln and was laid to rest in the Cathedral by the side of Bishop Grosseteste, " that," says the chronicler, " as they were lovely and amiable in their lives, so in their death they should not be divided."
If Adam Marsh was regarded by his contemporaries as a typical Friar, this was far from being the case with Roger Bacon. Bacon was born near Ilchester in 12 14 and died in 1294. Of good family, he was educated at Oxford under Marsh and Grosseteste. At Paris, where he was known as Doctor Mirabilis, he spent several years in experiment and research. " Through the 20 years," he says, " in which I laboured specially in the study of wisdom, careless of the crowd's opinion, I spent more than £2000 on occult books and various experiments, languages, instruments, tables and other things." He acquired a first-hand knowledge of
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Arabic, which enabled him to acquaint himself with the best writings of the age on natural science. Yet though Bacon is one of the earliest prophets of science, it would be a mistake to imagine him free from the trammels and superstitions of his age. He saw, how- ever, and expressed with great clearness the import- ance of experiment and observation and fumbled after a true conception of natural law. " There are two modes," he says, " of arriving at knowledge, to wit argument and experiment. Argument draws a con- clusion and forces us to concede it, but does not make it certain or remove doubt unless the mind finds truth by way of experience." He illustrates this con- tention by saying that you can never convince a man by mere argument that fire burns, but experience soon sets the matter at rest.
Bacon was really quite orthodox, even in the mediaeval sense, but unfortunately for himself he had not the conciliatory manner so necessary to a preacher of new truth and attacked his opponents with bitter- ness and exaggeration. The result was that he soon found himself deprived of all scientific apparatus and restricted to a diet of bread and water. Seething with enthusiasm and brimful of new matter and know- ledge, he raged like a caged lion in his narrow confine- ment at Paris. Then suddenly a great light illuminated his prison cell. Pope Clement IV bade him write the results of his discoveries, " notwithstanding the prohi- bition of any prelate or any constitution of thy Order." Bacon was excited and overjoyed beyond measure and expressed his gratitude in language which is truly pathetic. " The Saviour's vicar, the Ruler of the Orb, has deigned to solicit me who am scarcely to be named among the particles of the world. Yet, while my
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weakness is oppressed with the glory of this mandate, I am raised above my own powers, I feel a fervour of spirit, I rise up in strength. And, indeed, I ought to overflow with gratitude, since your Beatitude com- mands what I have desired, what I have worked out with sweat and gleaned through great expenditures."
Unfortunately, Bacon was penniless, enjoined to secrecy and the Pope far too busy to think of sending him any money ; worst of all, the works required of him were not yet written. Yet by a stupendous mental effort Bacon finished within eighteen months the four great works by which he is still remembered, the Opus Majus, the Opus Minus, the Opus Tertium and the Vatican fragment. Of their immediate fate we know nothing. Clement IV died the following year. Bacon was again imprisoned, shortly afterwards released, and after composing a final work, the Compendium of Theology, died, in his eightieth year.
The works of Roger Bacon are so numerous but so scattered that they have been compared to the Sybilline leaves. Many of them still lie in manuscript in British and French libraries.
Bacon insisted on the importance of geometry and mathematics, and showed how these sciences could be applied to the solution of such problems as the light of the stars and the ebb and flow of the tide. He described the anatomy of the eye from first-hand knowledge, discussed the laws of reflection and refraction, the construction of mirrors, lenses and even the telescope, though the latter must have been of a very elementary character. His work on optics is his most original contribution to the science of his time and his investiga- tion into the nature and cause of the rainbow is said by experts " to be a fine specimen of inductive research."
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Modern criticism, however, allows to Bacon very little in the way of mechanical discovery. What is really notable about him is the extent to which he transcended the scientific ignorance of his times and anticipated the direction of future discovery. In his own age he was " a voice crying in the wilderness," a seer gazing into the Promised Land of science into which he himself was not allowed to enter. In this connection it is interesting to note that his admirable treatise of geography was used by Columbus in his discovery of America and that he foretold the invention of flying machines, though he did not like Leonardo da Vinci actually construct one. Professor Maurice, after remarking that the dramatists of Queen Elizabeth's days had an instinctive sense that " in seeking for the secrets of Nature Bacon had been a witness for the freedom of man," adds, " our own conviction is that the moral and metaphysical student is not under less obligations to him than the physical and that he helped to teach theologians the worth of their own maxim, that the greatest rewards are for those who walk by faith and not by sight."
To pass from the story of individual English Fran- ciscans to their general relation to their times leads us to ask in what ways they anticipated or influenced the Wyclifites ? Professor Brewer says, " Wyclif is the genuine descendant of the Friars, turning their wisdom against themselves and carrying out the principles he had learned from them to their legitimate political con- clusions."
Certainly Wyclif had much in common with the Friars, especially on points of ecclesiastical policy. Like them he opposed Papal exactions and held that the State had the right, under certain circumstances,
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to interfere with the temporalities of the Church. But when Wyclif attacked the mediaeval doctrine of the Mass the Friars were up in arms, and Wyclif 's later years were spent in bitter polemics against their theo- logical position. It argues well for the Friars that though Wyclif charges them with lack of spirituality, he finds it difficult to levy against them any definite charges of a grave or immoral nature.
The English Franciscan who most vigorously attacked the Papal system, showing " the long- concealed antagonism between the theories of Hilde- brand and Francis of Assisi," was William of Occam, who died in 1349. He can hardly be called an early Franciscan, but inasmuch as he stated in memorable language the real difference between the ideal of St. Francis and the Papacy and forecasted the trend of ecclesiastical opinion in this country, his position may be suitably summarised. " Occam," says Creighton, " is opposed to the Papal claims to temporal monarchy and spiritual infallibility ; for the Head of the Church is Christ and by her union with Him the Church has unity." Again, " The Pope may err, a General Council may err, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church are not entirely exempt from error. Only Holy Scripture, and the beliefs of the Universal Church, are of absolute validity."
Occam groped after the eternal elements in the faith of the Church, endeavoured to mark them off from what was of purely human authority, and above all from the worldly and temporary expedients of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
Nothing has as yet been said about the Third Order of St. Francis. Although the whole subject is involved in profound obscurity, it is unquestionable that Francis
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recognised a class of married people, living in the world, as affiliated to his spiritual family. This institution did as much to break down the wall of partition between the religious Orders and good people living in the world but not of it, as the Friars themselves did to break down the hard-and-fast line between cleric and layman. The members of the Third Order were bound to have no debts, to make their wills, so that there should be no disputes about succession to their property, to visit the sick and needy, to live lives of purity and soberness and in all reasonable ways to serve God in spirit and in truth. Through this Third Order Christian influences passed into innumerable English households, for there were few households which were not in one way or another connected with a tertiary of the Order of St. Francis.
Our story of the Early Franciscans now draws to its close. We have watched the light of the Dawn rising over the hills of Umbria, touching the valleys of Italy with its rays, and illuminating even the crowded slums of our English cities. With the gold of the Franciscan movement there was no doubt much dross inter- mingled, as the fourteenth century was soon to prove ; but that the result of the movement for some time to come was one for the uplifting of humanity there can be no reasonable doubt. For in the words of Dr. Jessopp : " The Saint and the Prophet do not live in vain. They send a thrill of noble emotion through the heart of their generation and the divine tremor does not soon subside ; they gather round them the pure and generous, the lofty souls which are not all of the earth, earthy."
But St. Francis did far more than this ; he gathered into the Gospel net the poor, the outcast and the
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sinner ; the men whom no one loved and for whom no one cared. He opened a fount of faith and love issuing in perpetual service of the Incarnate Christ which can never die. And with his spirit of love came freedom : freedom in Church and State, freedom of will and conscience, freedom in our conceptions of knowledge, human, scientific and divine.
And of all lands our own lies most heavily in his debt. " Nowhere," says Mr. Stevenson, " has the Franciscan Order done so much as in England for the advancement and dissemination of knowledge ; no- where has it furnished so long a list of distinguished names ; nowhere has it presented so clear and clean a record of useful work."
The Court, the Parliament, the Universities, the towns, the villages, all owed something to the followers of St. Francis ; for he left to a world in which selfish- ness and grasping avarice predominated the image of the divine life which is hid with Christ in God ; a life which asserts with every impulse of its being the transcendent truth that " where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."
Note. — The internal history of the Franciscan Order is a stormy one. The " Spirituals " were few, but bitter, their influence always greatly in excess of their numbers. The party of relaxation were worldly and their corruption is severely satirised in the literature of the fourteenth century. The majority of Franciscans, however, belonged to a third party, " the Moderates," whose more conciliatory policy, and deeper spirituality, is typified by St. Bona- ventura. In 1370 arose a reforming branch of the Order, " the Observants," who upheld learning but adhered to poverty and simplicity of life. The leader of this move- ment was St. Bernardino, of Siena, whose life has been ably
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written by Mr. Ferrers Howell (Methuen). Leo X divided the Order into " Conventuals," who accepted the Papal dispensations in regard to poverty, and " the Observants," who held to their Founder's Testament ; the latter are to-day by far the most numerous and influential. The Order has always been the largest in the Church. At the time of the Reformation it numbered nearly 100,000 brothers ; to-day it has about 26,000, including " the Capuchins," founded in 1525, and allied in spirit to " the Observants." The Franciscans, largely recruited from the poor, have been, on the whole, the consistent friends of the poor ; they have also a notable record in missionary work amongst Moslems.
In support of the statement on page 48 that monastic influence was confined to the country, see Professor Brewer's Monumenta Franciscana, Preface, page xi, el seq. : " Monasteries had provided for the spiritual rule and welfare of the country; for the towns there was no such provision." The Friars were as a rule bitterly opposed by the monks. Their religious ideal was a novel one, they were " to all intents and purposes laymen, bound by certain religious vows " (Brewer, page xxxv), while their social teaching was revolutionary.
IV
IGNATIUS LOYOLA
One of the chief attractions of history lies in its revelation of human character. The Monastic Orders in the West were a great school of originality. The same can hardly be said of the Jesuits. Yet their founder was a man of profound originality, and developed in his Society a new type of eccle- siastic.
The Company of Jesus was an attempt to blend together several irreconcilable ideas, the Sermon on the Mount, the whole scheme of doctrine and morals current at the close of the Middle Ages, and a new theory of the relation of the Church to the State. But the originality of the Company of Jesus lies less in the body of doctrine which it formulated than in the methods which it employed. Loyola's successors soon perceived the impossibility of reconciling the world of the sixteenth century to more than a nominal accept- ance of Christian morality ; and, since to regain the world for the Church was the main object of the Jesuit, the principle of compromise became the salient characteristic of the Society, a cause both of its brilliant successes and of its irremediable failure.
The main characteristics of Loyola's foundation may be briefly summarised as follows : —
In the first place, it concentrated its energies on
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principalities and powers, it minded " high things," not condescending to " men of low estate."
In the second place, its motto, Ad major em Dei gloriam, to the greater glory of God, was taken to imply the principle that the end both determines and justifies the means.
In the third place, the Jesuit held a purely secular theory of the State which rendered it absolutely subject to the control of the Church, the theory of modern Ultramontanism. The Jesuit was taught to maintain that the people were the only true sovereign and consequently possessed the right to remove their Ruler at will, the theory, at a later date, of Rousseau and the French Revolution. Assassination of Pro- testant Rulers was justified by Jesuit writers like Mariana, the way being thus prepared by the society for the theories of Modern Anarchism.
A fourth characteristic of the Society was the absolute devotion demanded of its members to the aims of the corporate body and to the despotic rule of its General. This devotion, though it led to heroic acts of self-sacrifice, led also to the idealisation of an external authority, willing, on occasion, to dispense with the canons of normal morality.
Fifthly, the Jesuits reasserted the freedom of the will and, armed with an invincible optimism, believed in the possibility of universal salvation, though always within the Church. This belief stimulated the en- deavours of the Society both to win over men of fashion and influence by their suavity and social gifts and also to their heroic attempts to evangelise the heathen. While we in England, with our sleepy conservatism and narrow insularity of outlook, were still disputing over the rubrics of Edward VI's Prayer Books, Xavier
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was preaching in Japan to a " people governed by reason," and dying alone and unbefriended on the lonely shores of China.
Now from such a Society all who admire the heroic spirit, even when tainted by ambition, cannot with- hold a measure of admiration.
The founder of the Jesuits (though that name, first employed by Calvin and the Parliament of Paris, was only given them by their enemies) was Ignatius, eighth son of Don Bertram, hidalgo of Loyola. The castle in which Ignatius was born was situated in the most purely Basque province of Spain under the shadow of the Pyrenees. His birth took place in 1491, the year before the discovery of America. Ignatius was trained as a page at the court of Ferdinand the Catholic. From his earliest years, he shared in the passion for renown which characterised the Spaniards of that stirring epoch. Without real education, he. devoured with eagerness the flowery romances popular in his day, but soon to fall into contempt through the satire of Cervantes. A bold knight, vain of his personal appearance, Ignatius led at first a life of considerable irregularity. He said of himself that, up to his twenty-sixth year, he was entirely given up to the vanities of the world.
When, in the spring of 1521, the French laid siege to Pampeluna, the garrison was prepared to surrender at once but Ignatius persuaded the commander to continue the defence, fighting himself with supreme courage until the citadel was taken. Ignatius' right leg was broken by a cannon ball, while a splinter injured his left. His enemies, admiring his bravery, sent him back in a litter to the castle of Loyola. On his arrival it was found that the bone had been so
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clumsily set that it was necessary to break it again, an operation which the patient endured unmoved. Even then a bone protruded unduly, but this was removed at the injured man's request. On the con- clusion of the whole business, one leg was found to be shorter than the other and Ignatius remained lame for life.
During this long illness Loyola sought for recreation in reading. He asked first for the Romances of Chivalry, but, none of these being procurable, he was given a life of Christ, and The Flowers of the Saints. He found a special fascination in the stories of St. Dominic and St. Francis. " What," he said to himself, " if I did this thing which blessed Francis did, what if I copied Dominic in this ? " At the same time he was equally desirous of winning the approval of a certain high- born lady, and would ponder what services he might yet perform to win her praise and goodwill.
Thus the early years of Ignatius present us with two salient characteristics of his later life. At Pam- peluna he was for no surrender ; at Loyola, he aspired to outrival Francis and Dominic in their spiritual feats. The raw material of an aspiring character was in him from the first ; but it required the rude buffet- ings of an adventurous career, the discipline of edu- cation and the unifying force of a single dominating aim to complete the transformation of his strong and masterful intellect.
It will indeed be generally found that the men who have most powerfully moulded the religious temper of their times have themselves survived an unusually stormy apprenticeship ; having fought their way to light and conviction unaided by friends and counsellors.
As it was with Francis and Luther, so it was with
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Loyola. He has himself left it on record that he sought in all directions for someone " to understand and help him, but found none." Thus, when he at last attained to peace and self-mastery, it was natural that " spiritual direction " should figure as an im- portant item on his programme for humanity ; that he tried to compress into a single month for others those " spiritual exercises " which, in his own case, had spread themselves over the agony and conflict of many years.
The naive and almost childish efforts of Loyola to understand the will of God, during these early years, explain also an important principle of Jesuit teaching. Two men may be equally good but for want of spiritual knowledge one may be condemned to a life of practical uselessness, while the other will become a force making for reason and human well-being. Thus Loyola's most cherished aim in these uninstructed days was to prove his earnestness by going on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It was a hackneyed and time-wasting project, but it seemed something to be willing to endure cold and heat, hunger and thirst ; and it might " satisfy the hatred he had conceived against himself." Thus with stern resolution he set his face eastwards in search of light, in the very same year in which Luther in the solitude of the Wartburg was translating the Scriptures. Each was to come by his own at last, Luther in Freedom, Loyola in Authority, but by what throes and pains of travail ! For the errors of many generations had made Truth difficult of access, impossible almost of individual appreciation. Strange enough, too, both ended in tyranny ; Luther's theories in the absolutism of the State, coupled with spiritual anarchy ; Loyola's theories in spiritual absolutism.
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It was in 1522 that Loyola set out on pilgrimage to Our Lady of Montserrat, scourging himself daily on the journey. With his head full of Amadis of Gaul, he spent a whole night before the altar of Our Lady, kneeling or standing until dawn broke. He was now, in his own sight, a knight of Holy Church. He next made a written confession of his own sins, which took him three days, during his Retreat at the Benedictine Convent. Here he became acquainted with the Exercises of Father Garcia de Cisneros, a fact of much importance to him, for they became the basis of his own Spiritual Exercises. One characteristic difference, however, distinguishes the spiritual exercises of the Jesuits from those of the Benedictines. The Bene- dictine used them in solitude for his individual benefit ; the Jesuit was given them by his spiritual Director who intervened between his soul and God. Loyola carried this invaluable work with him when he left Montserrat ; and for years to come it formed the subject-matter of his daily meditations.
Unable to sail for Palestine, on account of the plague, Loyola now turned aside to the little town of Manresa, where he daily begged his bread from door to door. During his sojourn in this place he practised the utmost austerities, denying himself food and sleep, torturing himself with every conceivable scruple and wondering whether he should be able to sustain his spiritual conflict to the end.
Finding himself unable in his emaciated condition to enjoy the fruits of devotion, he was harassed by an inner voice saying to him, " How canst thou possibly endure such a life as this through the fifty years yet before thee ? " " Canst thou, O wretched creature," he replied, " promise me even one hour of
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life ? " The discipline of Manresa, nevertheless, did great things for Ignatius ; it convinced him of the folly of extreme asceticism, it led him to recognise that the body as well as the soul is an instrument of the Divine Will, and that, for the sake of efficiency, both must be cared for if the work of life is to be success- fully performed. Much more difficult did he find it to quiet his purely spiritual scruples. Reflecting on his written confession, it seemed to him that he had omitted first this point and then that ; thus he was tormented with an agony of unrest. From such mor- bidity Luther found an escape through his doctrine of " justification by faith," and by his maxim " sin boldly " : Loyola had yet to secure his peace by his theory of the end which justifies the means ; a prin- ciple which distracts the mind from petty scruples by fixing it on great and ultimate purposes. For the present, however, Loyola's Dominican confessor did not afford him much comfort. He told him not again to confess any of his past sins, unless they seemed to him very heinous. Since, however, to Loyola's morbid mind all offences seemed equal, this solution by no means ended his despair.
A characteristic prayer which escaped him at this time shows the deep waters through which he was passing on his way to the firmer mind of later years.
' Make haste to help me, O Lord ; for there is no help in man, neither in any creature do I find relief ! Ah ! if I knew where I might find it, no labour would seem great or hard ; Lord, show me where it is hid. As for me, had I to go to a dog's whelp and take my cure from him, I should do it." Perhaps if we re- membered oftener that it is by such steep paths that the heroes of the Church scaled the sublime heights of
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perfection we should possess more of that Christian charity which " thinketh no evil."
Ignatius was delivered from the madness of his morbid fancies by his departure from Manresa for the East. Travel brings a man into contact with the vast spaces and silences of Nature, presenting an objective so engrossing as to deliver the most morbid from the barren agonies of introspection. Passing through Italy on foot, the pilgrim deepened his know- ledge of men, missing nothing of importance but ob- serving all around him with his searching vision. It was his custom, when at table, never to speak except very briefly, but to listen closely to all he heard, registering mentally any remark which would enable him to lead the conversation to the subject of God when the meal was over.
Owing to the unsettled state of the country, Loyola was not allowed to remain long in Palestine ; on his return to Italy he experienced some inconvenience owing to his spiritual scruples. Having to pass through armed camps, it seemed to him wrong to call the officers before whom he was brought " Lord " or " Master," since the Gospel restricted the application of such titles to Christ alone. The result, however, did not prove as serious as might have been expected. " The fellow is mad," replied the Governor before whom he was brought ; " give him his belongings, and send him away."
Loyola returned to Barcelona in the Lent of 1524, resolved to devote himself to study. At first he found the necessary concentration of his intellectual faculties a severe and difficult matter, but his iion will stood him in good stead, and with a humility which it is impossible not to admire, he was content at the
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age of thirty-three to sit with mere boys upon the benches of the University.
After spending two years in mastering the School- men, Loyola passed to the University of Alcala, where he employed his spare time in giving the Spiritual Exercises to his disciples, thus arousing the suspicions of the Holy Office. The reign of Terror inspired by the Spanish Inquisition lies outside our subject, but it should not be forgotten that, during the first 139 years of its working, this institution is said to have banished or exterminated three millions of human beings. Yet Loyola, though he disapproved of its methods and suffered from its intolerance, afterwards came to uphold the whole scheme of Papal doctrine and discipline enforced by the Inquisition and Index. The authors of the Inquisition were the Dominicans, whose methods differed widely from those of the Jesuits. The latter were in favour of argument, persuasion and even tactful concession, the former were the servants of a theory of brute force.
The Dominicans were, indeed, responsible for the departure of Loyola from his native land. They threw him into prison for forty-two days, chaining him and his companions together by the feet. After a second imprisonment at Salamanca, being forbidden to preach until he had studied for four years longer, he decided to proceed to Paris ; unable, as he said, to see the justice of the verdict which had been imposed upon him, " since though he had spoken no evil, they had closed his mouth."
With Loyola's departure for Paris, where he spent the next seven years, a more cosmopolitan stage of his activity opens ; for there he gathered about him the first members of the Company of Jesus, while his
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own education proceeded upon more philosophical lines. Believing that he had passed too hastily to the higher branches of study, he now went back to the humanities ; sitting again with mere youths on the benches of undergraduates. His expenses at this time were defrayed by the alms of devout women at Barcelona, but he was ever ready to deny himself that he might enable others to prosecute their studies more efficiently. The heroic unselfishness of Loyola at Paris was, indeed, the predisposing cause of his success. " He gained," says a severe critic, " the affections of his companions in a hundred ways, by kindness, by precept, by patience, by persuasion, by attention to their physical and spiritual needs, by words of warmth and wisdom, by the direction of their conscience, by profound and intense sympathy with souls struggling after the higher life."
To one fellow-countryman he lent money which was never returned. On hearing, however, that this man had fallen seriously ill at Rouen, Loyola walked bare- foot to that city, nursed him through his illness and on his recovery placed him on board ship with letters of recommendation to his friends in Spain.
On another occasion, having fruitlessly remonstrated with a Spaniard who was paying court to another man's wife, he adopted a mode of appeal which, if extravagant, was at least supremely noble.
" Ascertaining," says Mr. Stewart Rose, " that on his way to visit the object of his guilty passion, his friend had to cross a bridge over the Lake of Gentilly, Ignatius repaired to the spot in the dusk of the evening and, taking off his clothes, stationed himself in the water up to his neck, awaiting the moment when the infatuated man should pass over. It was winter, and
Ignatius Loyola yy
the water icy cold ; the saint passed the time praying God to have mercy on this madman who had no mercy on his own soul. Absorbed in the thought of his criminal purpose the adulterer neared the bridge, where he was startled by a voice from the water which was vehement in its earnestness. " Go," it said, " and enjoy your odious pleasures at the peril of your life and of your immortal soul. I, meanwhile, will do penance for your sin. Here you will find me when you return ; and here every evening till God, whom I shall never cease imploring, shall bring your crimes or my life to an end." At these words and still more at the sight he beheld the man stood abashed and confounded ; he abandoned his guilty purpose and changed his whole course of life.
Incidents like this explain the power which Ignatius exercised over his friends and make us understand why a man of the best blood in Spain, like Francis Xavier, always wrote his letters to Loyola on bended knee. With his appalling earnestness and supreme unselfishness Loyola united a versatility and shrewd- ness seldom found in the same character. Desirous of moving to shame a hard-hearted priest, he chose him as his confessor, retailing to him the story of his past life with such unfeigned agony and remorse that the heart of the priest was touched by seeing a man so vastly superior to himself moved to such profound depths at the thought of his own shortcomings.
On another occasion, Loyola challenged an enthu- siastic billiard player to a contest at his own pastime on the condition that the loser should serve the winner for a month in whatever way the latter should demand. Loyola made use of his success by consigning to his adversary the performance of the Spiritual Exercises,
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which formed the initial discipline of all his fol- lowers.
Thus, like the Apostle, Loyola became " all things to all men " that he might " by all means save some." For patiently as he waited and closely as he observed the mental characteristics of men, he always meant to bring them ultimately under the yoke of his spiritual discipline.
For this purpose, he directed his attention primarily to the able, the well-born and the influential. No one was admitted into the Company of Jesus in its earliest days unless endowed with good health, mental talent, moral earnestness, good manners and attractive person. The Society /was to be a kind of spiritual elite, to win back those who lived in high places and directed the destinies of mankind. Of these early disciples one was of outstanding merit and possessed perhaps the most original mind ever employed in the service of the Society, Francis Xavier. Physically no one could be less like his master. Loyola was of middle height, with swarthy complexion, dark glowing eyes, bald head, and limping gait. Xavier, though dwarfish in stature — he was under five feet — had clear blue eyes, fair hair, finely chiselled features and a buoyant step. He was, moreover, of a cheerful and even hilarious temperament and found much food for amusement and satire in the sordid clothing and solemn bearing of his future chief. Nevertheless, the two gradually drew together, and in the end the elder drew the younger into the wake of his stronger purpose. When Xavier's lectures on philosophy began to lose their popularity Loyola exerted all his influence in beating up fresh pupils. When Xavier's purse was empty Loyola replenished it, giving him the alms which he himself
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had begged. He entered, too, with keen sympathy into all Xavier's interests and ambitions ; only at the close of their conversations, he would quote in terms of unforgettable solemnity, the words of Christ : " What shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul ; or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul ? " These oft-repeated words, resented at first by Xavier, began as time went on to fasten themselves upon his conscience and imagination. From despising the sordid dress and unconventional manners of his friend, he learned by degrees to admire the versatility, the patience and, above all, the im- movable purpose of Ignatius. So that with Peter Faber, he was the first to enter the Company of Jesus. At dawn, on the Feast of the Assumption, 1534, he took the vows of poverty and chastity and received the Communion with his friends in the Church of Our Lady at Montmartre.
Of what character were the Spiritual Exercises em- ployed by Loyola to break in his followers to his way of life ? They were a carefully graduated series of meditations, based on a religious theory of the End of Man. " I come from God, I belong to God, I am destined for God : that is to say, God is my first principle, my sovereign master, my last end."
The Exercises, used under the direction of a superior, are extended over four weeks, during which the disciple remains entirely excluded from the sights and sounds of the outer world. He is to pass through a discipline so vivid and searching that its impression can never be effaced by any subsequent experience.
During the first week, he is to examine his conscience. Every period of his life is to be thoroughly searched, every infirmity of deed or thought to be brought to
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light, until his own self-contempt is thoroughly established and he is made to feel like a convicted criminal before the bar of an offended judge. Having realised his life as an outrage against the Divine Clemency, he is led on during the second week to contemplate the life and rule of his Redeemer, to enrol himself among his faithful followers, choosing a plan of life suitable to his own gifts and character. The third week leads him to the Love and Mystery of Our Lord's Passion, sensibly realised, while the concluding week is given up to an equally sensible realisation of Christ's Ascended Glory.
The novelty of Loyola's training lay chiefly in two points. Intense concentration on a few main principles of doctrine and life and the vigorous employment of the five senses. The neophyte of the Company of Jesus sees, touches and handles spiritual things. He lives again through the supreme vicissitudes of the Gospel story, he realises with a vivid and unforgettable horror the shortness of life, the physical humiliations of the grave, the terrors of judgment, the penalty and sufferings of the lost. Everything is clear, definite, precise. More, it is practical. After one of the most awful passages ever penned on the future state of the sinner, comes the quiet question, " What led them to this ? ' " The way which you perhaps have followed until this day ; the way of self-love, of sensuality, of lukewarmness."
To men who believed in the supernatural in a vivid and definite manner, without any of the reserves and evasions of the modern thinker, these meditations were full of meaning and of power.
When the imagination was too sluggish, flagellation might be ordered, or other penances ; but these
Ignatius Loyola 81
austerities all vanished on the close of the Retreat. Loyola's idea was to pass his disciples as quickly as possible through this searching and effective initiation. When it was once over, asceticism might be discarded for ever ; " agreeable manners, a cheerful temper and ability for worldly business " were henceforth to be cultivated with a like assiduity.
Judged by results the Spiritual Exercises must be pronounced wonderfully effective. They enabled many earnest souls to find a definite object for their life, to attain self-knowledge, to quiet their consciences for the past by a full confession ; above all to realise the presence of an Omnipotent Ruler, Redeemer and Judge. No Jesuit who had passed through these Exercises with belief and earnestness, could ever forget the place of purpose and effort in the life of the soul. Nor had the followers of Ignatius that humane culture which is repelled by the crude dogmas of his pitiless eschatology.
Loyola's seven years in Paris were the greatest of his life and exhale a kind of meridian splendour. The rest of his story is soon told. On revisiting his native country, he proposed to give instruction to children daily ; when assured by his brother that none would come, he replied, " One is enough for me."
The last sixteen years of his life were spent at Rome, perfecting the organisation of the Society. His out- look on life became severer and more uncompromising, as he beheld the tide of innovation rising, intellectual freedom gaining ground and whole nations lost to the Catholic faith as he interpreted it. It was indeed a forlorn hope which he led, but with set resolution and ? in conquerable persistence he was determined to yield
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no inch of ground, but rather to take his enemies' strongest positions by a vigorous offensive.
The last phase of Ignatius is mirrored for us in an episode related by Mr. Rose. " He was now past sixty years old, infirm and broken in health ; yet he often said that at a sign from the Pope, he would take his staff and go on foot into Spain, or embark in the first vessel he found at Ostia, without oars, sails, or pro- visions, not only willingly but with joy. A nobleman who heard this, said in surprise, ' But where would be the prudence of doing this ? ' ' Prudence, my lord,' replied Ignatius, ' is the virtue of those who com- mand, not of those who obey.' "
In this uncompromising spirit, he passed away, on the 30th of July, 1556.
What were the aims and what has been the influence of the Society which he founded ?
The name of the " Company of Jesus " was chosen with distinct reference to the military companies of adventure which played so important a role in the Middle Ages. Loyola's conception was that of a mobile force, a spiritual light horse, at the disposal of their General and the Pope ; in contrast with the older Orders which resembled infantry guarding a definite position and bound by vows of stability.
That the name of Our Lord was chosen, instead of that of the founder, was another fresh departure, but one which no amount of pressure from Rome could induce Lo}^ola to alter. His idea was that of a direct return to the Sermon on the Mount, though with a very flexible mind he so adapted his teachings to the exigencies of his age that the simplicity of the dove was soon lost sight of in the subtlety if not the wisdom of the serpent. Men were to be brought into the
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Church, even if their citizenship could only be procured by the surrender of Christian principle. But this was the work of his followers rather than of Loyola himself.
Another characteristic of the Society was that it entirely reversed the existing views of the Religious Orders with regard to the supremacy of the inward over the outward life. In place of retirement, the Jesuit lived avowedly in the world.
It was the supreme object of every member of the Company of Jesus to influence society by freely ming- ling with its members, gaining their confidence and directing their energies. They were instructed even to lay aside the clerical habit, the more completely to set at rest any scruples of the lay mind as to the advisability of being confidential with men of priestly caste.
Allied to this diplomatic complaisance with the world was the esoteric character of Jesuit teaching. The Constitutions of the Society as drawn up by Loyola, with the glosses of his successors known as the Declarations, were, until modern times, inaccessible to the outsider.
Again, while in the Benedictine Order everything relating to discipline was discussed openly at the daily gathering of the Chapter, in the Company of Jesus a system of universal espionage prevailed, every member from the General downwards being dogged by prying eyes, every motion being reported to the supreme tribunal which struck effectively and without warning.
Again, every previous Order had been founded on democratic principles, but the Company of Jesus was commanded, like the Salvation Army in modern times, by a General of absolutely despotic power from whom there was no appeal.
In the Company of Jesus, the Society was every-
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thing, the individual nothing, a mere instrument in the hand of the General, a pawn to be moved here or there as the great Intelligence behind the board directed. This Obedience was pressed to a point never before reached ; the obedience of a slave to his master, or of a dog to his human lord. Loyola's maxims do not leave us in any doubt upon this point. In his famous letter to the Portuguese Jesuits in 1553, he says : " I ought not to be my own, but His Who created me ; and his, too, through whom God governs me. I ought to be like a corpse, which has neither will nor understanding ; like a crucifix that is turned about by him who holds it ; like the staff in the hands of an old man who uses it at will." Again, " A sin, whether venial or mortal, must be committed, if it is commanded by the Superior, in the Name of Our Lord, or in virtue of obedience."
Thus, in the words of Dr. Figgis, " the history of the Society of Jesus affords in its constitution the com- pletest exposition of Machiavelli's doctrine, which is, that the individual conscience is to be sacrificed to the community ; while its most characteristic moral principle extends into private life the same destruction of moral responsibility which the ordinary follower of Machiavelli would leave intact." Nor is Jesuit morality very far removed from that of Treitschke and Bern- hardi, except that the latter substituted the State for the Church, and the German Army for the Society of Jesus.
Jesuit Divines have, indeed, plausibly argued that the maxims which we have quoted refer to extreme and obviously exceptional cases and that the moral record of the Society, which is a conspicuously high one, proves that they are not ordinary injunctions. Never- theless, as to play with fire is a dangerous pastime, so to manipulate human obedience without restraint,
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even for great aims, is a perilous and, in the long run, a fatal course. Jesuit morality, as a matter of fact, rapidly deteriorated under this moral despotism which stifled the promptings of the unsophisticated conscience. Evasion and hypocrisy crept into the Order ; while the love of truth, without which human ethics are involved in inextricable confusion, ceased to be a characteristic of a great Christian society.
It is true that the actual freedom enjoyed by the average Jesuit was far greater in practice than in theory, for no society possessed greater elasticity in working. Except when the credit of the Society was concerned, the individual Jesuit was treated with indulgence by his Superior. It was a special aim of Loyola's to give free scope to each man's natural abilities, so that every Jesuit possessed two of the strongest motives to labour, the development of his own intellectual powers upon congenial lines and the honour belonging to a renowned society working, with intensified sagacity, for great religious ends.
Nor was this all. The Jesuit was hampered by no fixed hours for public devotion, no tedious round of study, he had no special fasts to keep or dress to wear. He was always welcomed by the best society, being not only permitted but encouraged to become a man of the world ; provided only that the aims of the Society were never lost sight of, and this the haunting memory of the Spiritual Exercises was likely to secure.
The famous motto of the Society, ad majorem Dei gloriam, covered, as we have said, in Loyola's view the principle that the end determines and justifies the means. The glory of God, too, was identified, not with the Catholic Church in the widest interpretation of the term, but with the distinctly Roman Church of
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the sixteenth century, with all its abuses of practice, anachronisms of doctrine and perversions of morality, ineffaceably stamped as Divine.
At the Council of Trent, three Jesuits acted as theological advisers to the Pope, and, if their influence in the decisions of the Council has been sometimes exaggerated, it is indisputable that the Jesuits did far more than any other body to popularise its teaching and enforce its dogmas.
The machinery of the Society was constructed with superb ingenuity. The novice, separated from his family, was placed for two years under the care of a superior, who gave him partial instruction in the Jesuit constitutions and prepared him for future work according to the bent of his character and talents. At the end of this period vows were taken and the novice was drafted either into the secular or spiritual service. The Temporal Coadjutors managed the property of the Society, distributed alms, nursed the sick, acted as gardeners, porters and cooks. The more intellectual, classified as scholastics, entered the colleges of the Order to study languages, science and theology for five years. Afterwards they taught in schools for a similar period, received Priest's Orders and became Spiritual Coadjutors. From their body were drawn the professors, confessors and preachers of the Society. There were still, however, two further stages to be reached, the stage of the three and of the four vows. The latter group formed the core of the Society, and not more than 2 per cent ever reached this exalted position. Thus the esoteric character of the Society was preserved, the reins of government confined to a few experienced hands and secrecy of movement and policy made possible and easy.
Ignatius Loyola 87
Education was revolutionised by the Jesuits, who substituted new methods for those employed by the old grammarians, and acquired great popularity by their persuasiveness and tact. They did not, it is true, interest themselves in popular education, but expended immense pains in the instruction of the higher and middle classes. Even Protestants sent their children to be taught by them, partly because they believed in the excellence of their methods and partly because the Jesuits made no charge for tuition. New catechisms, primers and manuals of history, skilfully composed and graduated to the age of the pupil, made learning easy and agreeable. Fond parents were amazed by the rapidity of their children's progress, at their fluency and versatility which contrasted favourably with the pedantry and dullness of their own education. The Jesuits, too, made free use of recreation ; while they were entirely free from that stiffness and formality which erects a barrier between the teacher and the taught. Philology and mathematics, dialectics and rhetoric were favourite studies, dexterity in argument being the main aim pursued. History was taught from their own point of view, while experimental science was discouraged. The Jesuits produced excellent Latin scholars, but Greek was neglected because the Hellenic spirit did not harmonise with the spirit of the Society. It is the general opinion that the Jesuits were more successful in imparting information than in forming character, while the whole tendency of their system was to discourage original research. A more serious charge still was that of Sarpi, that they withdrew their pupil's allegiance from the Nation, the Government and the Family, in order to concentrate it upon themselves.
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As Preachers, the Jesuits were clear, simple and direct, and to them the Anglican Church owes, in modern times, the Good Friday devotion of the Three Hours. A less healthy growth, in the form of books of sickly and sentimental devotion, is also due to the Society, though in this department they by no means possessed a monopoly. It was, however, in the Mission Field that the Jesuits won their noblest laurels, and showed themselves to the greatest advantage. Their missionaries in China and India, in Japan, Mexico and Paraguay won for the Society an honourable renown and sustained its reputation for holiness, when its political intrigues nearer home had begun to shed a sinister light upon its maxims and practices. In these countries they were the genuine pioneers of Christian civilisation, while their protection of the slave, by the Codes which they drew up for his social and religious amelioration, is in striking contrast with the methods of contemporary Protestantism. As Sir Harry Johnston has recently shown, the lot of the Spanish slave was far preferable to that of the English or Dutch slave in the New World. Yet even in the Mission Field, deteriora- tion soon set in under the fatal concessions of com- promise and the desire for short cuts to ephemeral renown. At a Council held at Lima it was decreed inexpedient to impose any act of Christian devotion except Baptism on the South American converts, without the greatest precautions, "on the ground of intellectual difficulties."
When we turn from Jesuit triumphs in education and missionary enterprise to their casuistry, we are forced to handle a thorny and much-controverted subject.
One of Loyola's main objects was the spiritual
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direction of Conscience. We have already seen with what difficulty and after what painful struggles he had himself arrived at what he supposed to be the Light. It was natural that he should wish to guide others to the same goal by a more direct path. At the same time it was not to pure religion that he led them. Unconscious as he was of it, his whole world view was narrow and distorted, his views of morality warped and unsound. Doctrine was more than practice, prudence better than sympathy, power more valuable than truth. Probabilism, equivocation, mental reserve, directing the intention, undue allowance of extenuating circumstances, justification of doubtful means were dangerous weapons in the hands of a worthy confessor ; in the case of an unscrupulous adviser, they were certain to lead to wickedness and its palliation.
Thus arose what Mr. Symonds has called " the Jesuit labyrinth of casuistry, with its windings, turnings, secret chambers, blind alleys and issues of evasion " : the system against which Pascal launched the bolts of his indignant eloquence and inimitable raillery in his Provincial Letters. Yet it is unfair to empty the vials of our superiority on Jesuit casuistry, as though it stood by itself in the history of the Church. Casuistry arises from the complications of competing social claims and partly, also from the too great deference of the indi- vidual conscience to external authority, especially in ages of imperfect enlightenment.
The Reformation emphasised the Divine Education of the individual conscience, modern psychology has overthrown the barren science of abstract deduction, but it would have been impossible for Loyola either to have accepted the former or to have anticipated the latter.
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If he is to be blamed, it is for unduly weakening the moral fibres of humanity by enunciating principles unsound in themselves and absolutely fatal to human nature with its inherent tendencies to evil. His condemnation is that of all opportunists who take short cuts to what seems to them great and desirable ends.
Jesuit casuistry was, however, far less responsible for the failure of the Society than the political views of Loyola's successors.
The Jesuit theory of Politics was a simple one. The Ecclesiastical Power was by Divine Right the Supreme Power. The Church was the Soul of humanity, the State only its vile body. Since, then, the Soul should direct the Body and even punish it in time, for its eternal welfare, the people who owned allegiance to the Church might lawfully expel, remove (or, according to Mariana, assassinate) their nominal but heretical sovereign. From the time, therefore, that Aquaviva (Fifth General, 1581 to 1615) enunciated and Parsons with his followers put into practice this maxim, the Society became anathema to those in authority. A Jesuit seemed to lurk behind every con- spiracy, to foment every rebellion, to hasten the advent of every war. It was obvious that no society could have been universally expelled from European civilisation unless it had nourished the seeds of social disloyalty and thus justly deserved the penalty of social ostracism.
Nor can it be denied that such social disloyalty, though accentuated by his successors, was a logical consequence of the principles of Loyola in his later years ; for he was the implacable foe of individual, national and religious freedom. Nevertheless, as Dean
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Church has pointed out, the original aims of Loyola were far loftier and more spiritual than those which he came to adopt as his own, in the face of continuous and successful opposition.
" Ignatius did not begin with intending to found the Jesuits. He began with something at once humbler and greater. He began, as Luther began, with a violent and indignant reaction against the blindness and dullness of a firmly settled Catholicism, which had lost eyes and heart for the primary simple realities of its own overwhelming creed. ... To realise in imagination and conscience the actual truth of the example and words of Christ and to subdue his own will to a thorough and unqualified compliance with them, was the first great thought of Ignatius. . . . And to make others feel like him, his second. But the inherent love of power, the influence of Paris and Rome, the hatred of freedom and the worship of success led to a fatal blindness to truth, a fatal unscrupulousness of method, a fatal loss of simplicity and Christian charity, only too faithfully embodied in his famous foundation."
At the present crisis of the world's history we can perhaps appreciate with a deepened intensity the fatal character of Loyola's mistakes. The world during the last decade has been suffering from precisely the same errors as those which he encouraged and the Company of Jesus continued to propagate ; absolutism, servile obedience to authority and political immorality. The Future lies with those who will sacrifice themselves, with no less devotion, to a nobler ideal, to freedom, to conscience and to social truth. For righteousness alone exalteth a nation.
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Note. — The Company of Jesus was suppressed by Pope Clement XIV in 1773, under pressure from the sovereigns of Europe. The chief reasons given were : the Jesuits' defiance of their own constitution which forbade them to meddle with politics ; their condescension to heathen usages in the East ; the disturbances which they had stirred up even in Catholic countries ; the ruin caused to souls by their quarrels with local ordinal ies and the other religious Orders.
But though suppressed, the Society soon rose again with renewed power and influence. In 1811 it was revived and reconstituted by Pius VII, and under Pius IX played a dominant part in the triumph of modern ultramon- tanism. The proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, in 1854 ; the Syllabus of 1864, which made the Pope sole judge of what was true in science, history and criticism ; the dogma of Papal Infallibility, in 1870 ; all these were the work of the Jesuits, favoured, promoted and abetted by the Supreme Pontiff.
To the Jesuits, therefore, more than to any other body, we may fairly attribute the irreconcilable antagonism of the modern Papacy to the modern State, and also to modern thought and science.
THE FOREIGN MISSIONS OF THE JESUITS
The noblest pages of Jesuit history are those which relate to their foreign missions. The real heroes of the Society are not the men who influenced the decisions of the Council of Trent, or planned the over- throw of Protestant sovereigns in Europe, but Francis Xavier and Isaac Jogues, who sacrificed every earthly comfort to preach Christ to the heathen.
" The Jesuit," says Parkman, " is no dreamer, he is emphatically a man of action ; action is the end of his existence." These words form an appropriate intro- duction to the career of Xavier, whose brief life of forty-seven years was animated by a missionary energy only exceeded by St. Paul.
Like Loyola, Xavier came from a Basque province of Northern Spain, and was nurtured among the Pyrenees. His father held high office under the King of Aragon, while his mother, from whom he derived the name Xavier, was the sole heiress of two ancient houses. Of Xavier's University life at Paris and of his early friendship with Loyola we have already spoken. When Loyola left Paris, Xavier took up his residence in the Hospital for Incurables at Venice, but soon after became Loyola's secretary at Rome. A year later came his call to the mission field.
It was on the 14th of March, 1540, that Ignatius
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summoned him to his room and told him to leave Rome for Portugal the following day. Xavier accepted the commission by stooping to kiss the feet of his former companion ; afterwards returning to his room to mend his tattered cassock and to prepare for his long journey to India. On passing through the Pyrenees, he sighted in the distance the towers of his ancient home, but, mindful of Our Lord's injunction " to salute no man by the way," he avoided a parting scene with his mother and pressed on to Lisbon. ~£ _ lv^^^^^A
There a disappointment awaited him. King John refused to allow the distinguished Jesuit who was to have accompanied him to leave and he was assigned two very inferior substitutes, Father Paul of Camerino and Francias Mancias, the latter a deacon of such dull intellect that it was doubtful whether it would even be possible to admit him to Priests' Orders. The King obtained for Xavier, however, Papal briefs, constitut- ing him Apostolic Nuncio in the East, while he besought Xavier to write to him frequently, giving him exact accounts of his progress and requirements. Finally, he charged the Purveyor-General of the Fleet to supply him with every comfort on the voyage. Francis, however, refused to accept anything except some warm clothing and a few books of devotion. He insisted, too, on cooking his own food and washing his own clothes. " So long," he said, " as God gave him the use of hands and feet, no one should wait on him but himself and there was no occupation so lowly that he would not glory in it."
On the 7th of April, 1541, on his thirty-fifth birthday, he sailed for India.
Sir James Stephen has graphically described his spiritual exhilaration during the voyage. " He was
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going to convert nations of which he knew neither the language nor even the names, but his soul was oppressed with no misgivings. Worn by incessant sickness, with the refuse food of the lowest seaman for his diet and the cordage of the ship for his couch, he rendered to the diseased services too revolting to be described and lived among the dying and profligate, the unwearied minister of consolation and peace. In the midst of that floating throng, he knew both how to create for himself a sacred solitude and how to mix in all their pursuits in the free spirit of a man of the world, a gentleman and a scholar. With the Viceroy and his officers he talked of war, politics and navigation. To restrain the common soldiers from gambling he invented for their amusement less dangerous pastimes, or held the stakes for which they played, that by his presence and gay discourse he might at least check the excesses which he could not entirely prevent."
On the 6th of May, 1542, he arrived at Goa, the capital of Portuguese India. There he found a convent of Franciscans, a fine cathedral and a large number of Christian churches. A closer acquaintance with the colony revealed to him its seamy side. The Bishop though a venerable old man was lethargic. The Portuguese settlers, removed from the restraint of public opinion and living in an enervating climate, were corrupt, their morality differing little from that of the surrounding heathen. Xavier lost no time in opening a campaign of aggressive missionary effort. Swinging a heavy bell in his hand, he passed along the streets of the city, calling out to the astonished crowds, " Faith- ful Christians, for the love which you bear to Christ, send your children and your servants to the Christian doctrine." Xavier also frequented the haunts of vice
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that he might by his kindness convince men of the Divine Love which overshadowed them, while, by pungent jests, he sought to show the contemptibleness and folly of a life of dissipation. Starched and pompous Pharisees were not wanting at Goa to carp at his unconventional methods, but he loved the title of " Friend of Sinners " too well to be deterred from his errands of mercy. " I care little," he said, " for the judgment of men and least of all for their judgment who decide before they hear and before they under- stand." " You, my friends," he said to a group of soldiers who hid their cards at his approach, " belong to no religious order, nor can you pass your whole days in devotion. Amuse yourselves. To you it is not forbidden, if you neither cheat, quarrel, nor swear when you play." Then, sitting down in their midst, he proceeded to challenge one of them to a game of chess. After five months at Goa, Xavier set out on a mission to the Paravas, a degraded caste who acted as divers in the pearl fishery of Manaar. The occupation of these men was hard and perilous, yet they derived no benefit from it, for the profits of their industry were seized by the Moslems who treated them as slaves. Ten years before Xavier's arrival they had appealed to the Portuguese for protection, which was given them on condition of their accepting the Catholic faith. Thankful for such easy terms, the Paravas were baptised wholesale, but the Portuguese never took any further trouble to turn their nominal faith into a reality. Xavier resolved to devote himself to their spiritual welfare and, taking two interpreters with him, he lived in their miserable huts, sharing their diet of rice and contenting himself with three hours' sleep out of the twenty-four. In four months' time he succeeded in
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translating the Catechism into the Malabar tongue, and having committed it to memory, he summoned the inhabitants twice daily for Christian instruction. On Sundays he caused the whole population to repeat after him the Creed, the Decalogue, the Ave Maria and the Lord's Prayer ; afterwards discoursing to them upon the meaning and obligations of the Christian religion. Xavier also set the Catechism to simple music, so that the sound of Christian melody might often be heard on this barren coast.
The charm of his personality no doubt helped him to win the goodwill of the natives and contributed towards his amazing success. " As to the numbers who become Christians," he wrote in 1543, " you may understand from this ; that it often happens to me to be hardly able to use my hands from the fatigue of baptising ; often in a single day I have baptised whole villages. Sometimes I have lost my voice altogether with repeating again and again the Credo and other forms. Doubtless Xavier, like all the Jesuits, laid too exclusive stress on the sacrament of baptism, while much of his work was superficial and hasty, yet he seems con- sistently to have emphasised the obligations of Christian morality, inspired by a burning devotion to the Incarnate Christ.
The use Xavier made of children was original and certainly daring. "Their hatred for idolatry," he writes, " is marvellous. They get into feuds with the heathen about it ; and wherever their own parents practise it, they reproach them and come off to tell me at once. Wherever I hear of an act of idolatrous worship, I go to the place, with a large band of these children, who very soon load the devil with a greater amount of insult and abuse than he has lately received
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of honour and worship from their parents and acquaint- ances." There is indeed something delightfully naive about the religious exploits of these juvenile evangelists. Finding it impossible to visit all the sick himself, " I send round the children," he says, " whom I can trust, in my place. They went to the sick persons, assembled their families and neighbours, recited the Creed with them and encouraged the sufferers to conceive a well- founded confidence of their restoration. Then, after all this, they recited the prayers of the Church."
He goes on to deplore the fact that the learned Doctors of Paris University do not lay aside their studies to become teachers of the heathen ; adding characteristically that " many thousands of infidels might be made Christians without trouble, if we only had men who would seek not their own advantage but the things of Jesus Christ."
Of the Brahmins, Xavier did not form a high opinion. "The Brahmins are liars and cheats to the backbone. Their whole study is how to deceive most cunningly the simplicity of the people. They give out publicly that the gods command certain offerings to be made to their temples, which offerings are simply the things which the Brahmins themselves wish for. . . . They eat sumptuous meals to the sound of drums and make the ignorant believe that the gods are banqueting."
When Xavier asked them what their gods enjoined them in order to obtain the life of the blessed, theii reply was, to abstain from killing cows, and to show kindness to the Brahmins who were their worshippers.
The Paravas themselves were most anxious to know what colour Xavier himself imagined the Deity to be. " The Indians, being black themselves, believe that the gods are black. On this account the great majority
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of their idols are black as black can be, and, moreover, are generally so rubbed over with oil as to smell detestably and seem to be as dirty as they are ugly and horrible to look at." Such was heathendom as it presented itself to the mind of a Jesuit father, in the year of grace 1543.
Let us now take a glimpse into the heart of Xavier as, alone on this solitary shore, he endeavours to atone for the neglect of his fellow-Christians in Europe. It is afforded us by a prayer, dating from the year above- named. " O Lord, I beseech Thee, overwhelm me not now, in this life, with so much delight : or at least, since in Thy boundless goodness Thou dost so over- whelm me, take me away to the abode of the blessed. For anyone who has once known what it is to taste in his soul Thy ineffable sweetness, must of necessity think it very bitter to live any longer without seeing Thee face to face."
Much of our knowledge of Xavier 's labours in Asia comes to us from his copious letters to the Society at home ; letters which convey an impression of his affectionateness, buoyancy and common sense. To his dull and depressed companion Francias Mancias he writes with considerate sympathy for his loneliness and ill-success. " Beware of growing weary of your work and don't let any kind of disgust weaken you, or relax your patience. I entreat you to show con- tinual marks of very great love to the whole of the people you are among. The consequences will most certainly be that they will love you in return ; and if you once get to that, the ministry by which you are trying to lead them to the knowledge and worship of God will find its course more easy and its fruit more abundant."
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It is impossible to describe even superficially the numerous missions undertaken by Xavier in the East. He is said to have founded thirty churches in the neighbourhood of Cape Comorin, forty-five settle- ments in Travancore, to have spent four months in Ceylon, another four months in Malacca, besides visiting the islands of the Malay Archipelago and spending many months among the cannibals of the Moluccas.
During his sojourn at Amboyna there arrived a hostile fleet of Spanish corsairs. Xavier at once boarded the vessels, which he found infected with the plague. Day and night he nursed these unfortunate pirates who, experiencing so great kindness at his hands, sailed away without molesting the islanders.
The most important enterprise of Xavier was his attempted conversion of Japan. Japan had only been discovered by Europeans seven years before, but Xavier had encountered in Malacca a Japanese gentle- man, Yajiro or Angero by name, whom he converted to the faith and admitted into the Company of Jesus.
" I asked this Angero whether he thought, in case I accompanied him to Japan, the inhabitants would become Christians. He replied that his countrymen would not assent instantly to everything they heard but would be sure to ask a great many questions as to the religion I was introducing and that, above all, they would consider whether my actions agreed with my words. If I could satisfy them by a consistent statement, and give them no cause for finding fault with the goodness of my life, then, when the matter had been fully examined, they would certainly join the flock of Christ, for theirs is a nation which follows the guidance of reason."
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After drawing up his famous code of instruction for the conduct of missionaries in the East, Xavier started for Japan in company with Angero.
At Cangoxima they laboured with such effect that, two hundred years after, when Christianity had been extirpated in Japan by persecution, communities of Japanese were found in this neighbourhood who still preserved with reverence the Christian formularies.
Amid the snows of winter, Xavier, carrying only the vessels necessary for the celebration of Mass, made his way through dense forests and over steep mountains to Meaco, the capital of the country ; but, finding the city in a state of siege, was obliged to retrace his steps. No disappointments, howTever, dulled his en- thusiasm, or shook his confidence in the Japanese character. " The Japanese surpass in goodness any of the nations lately discovered. They are of a kindly disposition, and not at all given to cheating. Honour with them is placed above everything else. There are a great many poor among them, but poverty is not considered a disgrace. They are sparing and frugal in eating, but not in drink. They abhor dice and gaming and seldom swrear. Most of them can read and this is a great help to them in the understanding of our prayers. They have not more than one wife. They are wonderfully inclined to all that is good and honest and have an extreme eagerness to learn." As in India he was displeased with the native priests and says of them with some amusement, " that though they take money from everybody by way of alms, they themselves never give anything to any one."
Xavier's early experiences in Japan and his desire to convert its Rulers led him to make the most of his position as an accredited representative of the King of
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Portugal. Magnificently arrayed in ecclesiastical vestments and accompanied by Portuguese sailors and merchants, he visited the Court of the King of Bungo. This sovereign at once manifested his good will and conversions among his subjects speedily followed, the Japanese eagerly anticipating commercial advantages from their change of faith. But the Bonzes, or native priests, proved a stumbling-block in the way of success.
One of these, Fucarandono by name, asked Xavier whether he remembered seeing him before. " Cer- tainly not," replied Xavier, " for I have never seen you before." Fucarandono expressed surprise and asked whether it was possible that he could have forgotten selling him fifty picos of silk at Frenojamo 1500 years previously. That Xavier should have forgotten this incident, told heavily against him, for the Japanese, believing in the transmigration of souls, held that it was a reward of virtue to remember what had passed in a previous state of existence and a mark of wicked- ness to forget it. Public feeling now ran high against Xavier, and had it not been for the chivalrous support rendered him by the Portuguese sailors and merchants he would probably have attained the crown of martyr- dom. The Japanese, however, came to the conclusion that there must really be something in a religion which could prompt " rich men of the world to risk their property and lives " in the service of their spiritual father.
Nevertheless, Xavier found it expedient to leave Japan within a few days, exhorting the King on his departure to remember the shortness of life, the certainty of Judgment and the greatness of the grace of God.
The last enterprise of Xavier was his attempted
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conversion of China. His friend Angero had already been martyred in China, and Xavier, proceeding in a pirate ship to the island of San Chan, at the mouth of the Canton River, there laid down his own life.
' Stretched on the naked beach," says Sir James Stephen, " with the cold blasts of a Chinese winter aggravating his pains, he contended alone with the agonies of a fever which wasted his vital powers. In the cold collapse of death, his features were for a few moments irradiated as with the first beams of approaching glory. He raised himself on his crucifix, and exclaiming, ' In Thee, O Lord, have I trusted, let me never be confounded,' he bowed his head and died."
Ignatius had already nominated him as his successor, but the letter announcing his appointment never reached him.
" An ascetic and mystic," says Mr. Jayne, " to whom things spiritual were more real than the visible world, Xavier had the strong common sense which distinguished the Spanish Mystics, St. Theresa and Raymond Lull." As an organiser he was supreme ; and though the claim of Jesuit chroniclers that he converted 700,000 persons to the faith may be dis- missed as absurd, he may fairly be regarded as the most effective missionary since St. Paul. He in- augurated missionary enterprise from India to Japan, and wherever he preached he left behind him an organised Christian community. His personality was so attractive that he endeared himself even to the pirates and bravos with whom on his voyages he was forced to consort. It cannot be denied that, despite his humanity, he sanctioned the persecution of Nestorians and Jews, misunderstood Oriental religions
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and was disastrously successful in converting the Portuguese Government at Goa into a proselytising agency. His interference with politics was an evil precedent, fraught with penal consequences for his successors ; while his knowledge of Oriental languages was so imperfect as to render much of his labour nugatory.
The character of Xavier has rarely been surpassed in the annals of Christian history for its daring and humility, its sweetness and its strength. Even after four centuries we are compelled to think of him as among
" the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence : live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn For miserable aims that end with self, In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge man's search To vaster issues."
Though Jesuit figures are rarely to be trusted, there is no doubt that after Xavier's death Christianity in Japan made enormous strides, obtaining the support of the highest civil power. Professor Kikuchi states that in 1595 there were 137 Jesuits in the country, with 300,000 converts, among them seventeen feudal chiefs and even a few of the native priests. But through the indiscreet meddling of the Jesuits and Franciscans with commerce and politics, Hideyoshi, the powerful Ruler of Japan, became incensed against all Christians and, after a fierce persecution endured by the fathers with immense heroism, they were expelled from the country. In India, a field at first less promising, the work of Xavier was far more
The Foreign Missions of the Jesuits 105
lasting. By 1565 there were 300,000 new converts between Goa and Cape Comorin ; and Jerome Xavier, a nephew of Francis, held a post of importance at the Court of Akbar, three princes of this great Mogul sovereign's house receiving Christian baptism. In 1621, a Jesuit College was founded at Agra and a station at Patna. Xavier's followers made too great con- cessions to Hindoo belief and practice, adopting Brahmin costume and recognising the social principle of caste. In this evil precedent they were soon followed by some of the Protestant missionaries, who assembled their native converts for worship in separate establish- ments. Thus in India, as in Europe, the fatal Jesuit weakness for compromise made itself felt and, while it helps to account for a striking temporary success, it laid the seeds of inevitable decadence and deterioration. We must now turn our qjqs from the East to the West, from the ancient civilisations of India to the untutored tribes of North America. In the early days of the seventeenth century the French nation had embarked on a career of conquest and civilisation amongst the Indians of Canada. With them religion and commerce went hand in hand, with the consequence that the Jesuit Fathers entered the country with the backing and support of the civil authority. When Champlain, the French Governor of Quebec, intro- duced the followers of Loyola to the Indians of the Huron he did so in these words : " These are our fathers. We love them more than we love ourselves. The whole French nation honours them. They do not go among you for your furs. They have left their friends and their country to show you the way to heaven. If you love the French, as you say you love them, then love and honour these our fathers."
H
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The Jesuits proved themselves worthy of this introduction. With incredible devotion and silent endurance, they watered Canada with their blood, laying down their lives, not for their friends, but for a cruel and ungrateful race. The Indians among whom the Jesuit fathers lived were not the Indians of Long- fellow's Hiawatha. They were wild and superstitious savages. Their religion consisted of fetish worship, or of gods no better than themselves. Their belief in the Great Spirit only appeared after long contact with white men ; even then it was generally materialised and but thinly connected with morality. Only men of tender heart and iron will, and the Jesuits were both, would have persevered with the task of Indian Evangelisation for a period of almost forty years.
The first Jesuit station in Canada was that of Notre Dame des Anges at Quebec. The founder was Paul le Jeune, who left France for the New World in April, 1632. The six fathers who formed this mission- ary station lived in a one-storied building on the banks of the St. Charles. Their house was built of planks plastered with mud and thatched with long grass. Their furniture was primitive and their chapel only ornamented by a sheet, upon which were glued some coarse religious engravings. Above the altar was the image of a Dove, representing the presence of the Holy Spirit with their undertaking, portraits of Loyola and Xavier and images of the Virgin. Yet within these rude walls was nourished an enthusiasm which does credit to human nature and a faith which refused to accept defeat. The workmen employed by the fathers were forced to hear Mass daily and an exhortation on Sunday. The Jesuits themselves preached, catechised, heard confessions at the Fort,
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worked with the spade and struggled with the problem of native languages. The difficulty of acquiring the latter correctly soon drove Father le Jeune into the wilderness. He came rapidly to the conclusion that the only sure way to become proficient in the Algon- quin tongue was to accompany the Indians on their winter hunting expeditions. The Indians on their part, thinking to benefit by the provisions which the Christian father would bring with him, asked him to accompany them, and in the latter part of October he set out.
As they marched through the forests, Le Jeune found the black trunks of the pine trees spattered with snow, the waters frozen and the woods silent as the grave. During the day the Indians hunted the beaver and porcupine, or chased the moose and caribou. At night nineteen human beings besides animals crowded and jostled one another in the tiny wigwam. Le Jeune sums up the inconvenience of their lodging under the heads of cold, heat, smoke and dogs. Some- times he would escape from this filthy den to read his Breviary in peace by the light of the freezing moon.
One of the Indians who acted as his tutor palmed off on him the foulest words of the language as the equivalent of spiritual terms. Consequently, when he sought to explain to his assembled hearers the doctrines of the Christian faith, he was interrupted by peals of laughter from irreverent children and squaws.
At other times they would tell him that his head was like a pumpkin and his beard like a rabbit's. Sometimes their banter was so brutal and savage that, afraid of exasperating them beyond endurance, he would pass whole days without uttering a word. The whole party suffered from insufficient food and
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were sometimes on the verge of starvation. On Christmas Eve his diary contains the following entry : " The Lord gave us for our supper a large porcupine, and also a rabbit. It was not much, it is true, for nineteen persons : but the Holy Virgin and St. Joseph her glorious spouse were not so well treated on this very day in the stable of Bethlehem."
At the beginning of April the party returned to Quebec, and at three in the morning the Fathers of Notre Dame des Anges, springing hastily from their beds, embraced their Superior with words of welcome and of thankfulness.
Le Jeune's expedition with the Algonquin Indians led to a revolution in the Jesuit plan of campaign. Le Jeune saw that it was waste of energy to spend time on the conversion of wandering tribes ; and that it would be far more profitable to go further "West, to the stationary tribe of the Hurons, near the great lake of that name.
The father who undertook the hazardous mission, which involved travelling 900 miles by canoe, was Jean de Brebeuf. A tall, powerful man of splendid physique, Brebeuf was the descendant of a distin- guished Norman family and one of the ablest mis- sionaries of the Society. He was, too, a master of the Huron language, and it is largely from his missionary reports that our information of this phase of Canadian history is derived. With two companions, he set out for Lake Huron in company with a band of Indians returning from their annual pilgrimage to Quebec, where they exchanged their furs and tobacco for European commodities. After a tiring and adventurous journey, in which the priests got temporarily separated from one another, they arrived at their destination
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and were given a hospitable reception. The Indians built them a house and here they received enquirers and expounded the Christian faith. Their clock greatly excited the curiosity of the Hurons and they would sit in expectant silence for long periods waiting for it to strike. They wanted to know what it ate, and what it said when it struck. " When he strikes twelve times," replied Brebeuf, "he says, 'put on the kettle ' ; when he strikes four times, he says ' get up, and go home.' " Profiting by this instruction the Hurons came daily to share the father's tea at noon, but always left promptly at four o'clock. In this way, and by teaching the Hurons to build more scientific forts, the Jesuits gained the confidence of the natives, but, even with these helps, they found Evangelisation a difficult matter. When the fathers drew vivid pictures of heaven and hell and asked the Hurons which they preferred, they gave the disconcerting- answer, " I wish to go where my relations and ancestors have gone ; heaven is a good place for Frenchmen, but I wish to be among Indians." When they asked Brebeuf whether there was hunting in heaven or war, and he replied in the negative, they concluded it to be a most undesirable place of residence, saying, "It is not good to be lazy." Again the Indians found the spiritual requirements of the fathers too exacting. Monogamy, the abandonment of superstitious feasts and the observance of the Ten Commandments seemed an alarming price to pay for a doubtful future and a present robbed of its customary enjoyments.
Further difficulties were caused by a humpbacked sorcerer and by a terrible outbreak of smallpox. The latter calamity, it is true, afforded a golden opportunity to the fathers to commend their religious
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teachings by their efforts to relieve bodily distress. No house was left unvisited and in the depth of winter the fathers tramped from village to village, adminis- tering simple preparations of senna, speaking kind words to groups of dejected Indians sitting silent around their fires, and baptising, wherever possible, the infants and the dying. Once they nearly lost their lives, a midnight council of chiefs attributing the cause of the disease to their Christian incantations ; but they lived this down and, in the course of the next few years, made considerable progress amongst the Hurons. Fifteen years after their arrival, however, a terrible disaster led to the destruction of the whole mission.
In 1649, a thousand Iroquois Indians suddenly took the warpath and, descending upon the more timid Hurons, devasted their settlements, torturing and slaying them with the utmost barbarity. Brebeuf himself was bound to a stake, but his composure remained unruffled, and he continued to exhort his fellow captives to patience and endurance. After mutilating him, they hung round his neck a collar made of red-hot hatchets, and poured boiling water over him, sajing, " We baptise you, that you may be happy in heaven, for nobody can be saved without a good baptism." Others cut strips from his flesh, ex- claiming, " You told us that the more one suffers on earth, the happier he is in heaven." Finally they drank the blood of the heroic father that, by so doing, they might inherit a portion of his indomitable courage. They could have paid him no higher compliment. Thus died Jean de Brebeuf, the founder of the Huron Mission.
The story of one other Jesuit father must be told, for Christian history has few nobler episodes than the
The Foreign Missions of the Jesuits in
life of Isaac Jogues. Jogues was born in Orleans in 1607, and joined the Canadian Mission at the age of thirty-two. The delicate mould of his features indicated a refined and thoughtful nature. Constitutionally timid, with a sensitive conscience, " he knew, when acting under orders, neither hesitation nor fear." An accomplished scholar, he might have seemed out of place as a pioneer missionary among savage tribes ; yet as an athlete he could outrun the Indians, while his spiritual fire and endurance seem to have known no limits. His story is briefly as follows : —
He was sent by his Superior as missionary to the tobacco nation. Two years later he passed on to Lake Superior, where he preached to the O jib ways and Algonquins. A year later, the mission being short of clothing and other necessaries, he returned eastward for supplies. Suddenly his party was fiercely attacked by Iroquois Indians. Jogues sprang into the bul- rushes, and could have escaped, but, seeing his friend Goupil and some of his converts captured, he came out of his hiding-place and gave himself up. When his companion was attacked, Jogues threw himself upon his neck, but was dragged away and beaten with clubs. Later, he was made to march every day with his conquerors, being subject to every indignity on the road. His left thumb was cut off, and in one town he was suspended by his wrists for two hours from two poles, until, on the point of swooning, his cords were cut by a compassionate Indian. At this town four Huron prisoners were brought in, and Jogues, despite his pain and exhaustion, undertook their conversion. An ear of green corn being flung to him for food, he discovered on its husks a few drops of dew, and with these baptised his converts. Everywhere on the
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journey he baptised dying infants, while his friend Goupil taught children to make the sign of the Cross. Soon after Goupil was slain by the hatchet of an Indian and Jogues, in daily expectation of death, was marched from place to place, through gloomy forests, the ground covered with snow and the rocks with icicles. Yet he spent hours in silent prayer and carved the name of Jesus on the trees under which they halted.
At last deliverance came. Reaching a trading station on the Hudson, he was kindly treated by the Dutch merchants, who offered him a free passage to Bordeaux. Jogues thanked them, but, to their surprise, asked for a night's delay to consider the matter and lay it before God in prayer. He was fearful lest self-love might, at this crisis of his fate, beguile him from his duty. After considering the matter, however, in all its bearings, he decided to leave ; his French companions being now all dead. On January 5th, 1644, he reached the Jesuit College at Rennes. The Jesuit letters from Canada were at this time the favourite reading of religious society in France, from the Court downwards. When, therefore, Jogues knocked at the door of the Breton College, the Rector, though putting on his vestments to say Mass, post- poned service in order to hear the latest news from Canada. Ignorant of the character of his visitor, the Rector began to question him about the affairs of the mission and ended by asking him if he knew Father Jogues ? "I know him very well," was the reply. " The Iroquois have taken him," pursued the Rector, "is he dead ? Have they murdered him ? " " No," answered Jogues, " he is alive and at liberty, and I am he." And he fell on his knees to ask his Superior's
The Foreign Missions of the Jesuits 113
blessing. " That night," says the historian, " was a night of jubilation and thanksgiving in the College of Rennes."
But Jogues' witness to the faith was not yet com- plete. The following spring he sailed again for Canada and was sent on a special mission to the Mohawk Indians. He went in a twofold capacity : as an ambassador on behalf of the French Government, to hold the Mohawks to a Treaty of Peace which they had made, and as a simple priest to found the mission of the martyrs among the Mohawk tribe. The Mohawks were disposed to peace, but the fierce Algonquins were determined on war. After discharging his diplomatic duties, and reporting the results at Montreal, Jogues resumed his missionary labours among the Indians. Soon afterwards he was surrounded by a savage crowd who cut strips of flesh from his back and arms, exclaim- ing, " let us see if this white flesh is the flesh of a spirit " (oki). " I am a man like yourselves," replied Jogues, " but I do not fear death or torture." In the evening it was the 18th of October, Jogues was sitting in a lodge, when an Indian entered and summoned him to a feast. To have refused would have been considered discourteous. Following the Indian, there- fore, he entered the lodge of the Bear chief. As he stooped to pass in through the low entrance an Indian concealed within struck him with a hatchet. Another Indian tried to save him by holding out his arm to ward off the attack, but at a second blow Jogues fell dead at his feet.
The death of Jogues was the beginning of the end of the Jesuit mission in Canada. The causes of failure were not internal, " the guns and tomahawks of the Indians were the ruin of their hopes." Could the
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Jesuits but have tamed these barbarous savages they would have taught them agriculture, arrested their decrease of population, imparted to them their own self-sacrificing faith and have powerfully assisted in the consolidation of the French Empire in Northern America. They would also have been the champions of absolutism in Church and State and the march of liberty and freedom would have been delayed. Their failure facilitated the triumph of English institutions and hastened the dawn of a less romantic but saner civilisation.
In the words of Parkman, " The Providence of God seemed in their eyes dark and inexplicable ; but from the standpoint of liberty that Providence is clear as the sun at noon. Meanwhile, let those who have prevailed yield due honour to the defeated. Their virtues shine amidst the rubble of error, like diamonds and gold in the gravel of the torrent."
" The best history," says Walter Bagehot, " is like the art of Rembrandt, it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest ; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen." It is in the endeavour to follow this maxim that we have made no attempt to cover the vast field of Jesuit missionary enterprise, but have confined our attention to the labours of Xavier in the East, and the Jesuits in Canada. A few statements in regard to Jesuit activities in China and Paraguay must conclude our imperfect survey of this great subject.
In China the Jesuits pursued an entirely different policy to that which they had employed in Japan. The Apostle of China, Matteo Ricci, was an Italian Jesuit of great talent, nor are there many European names better known than his to Chinese scholars of to-day.
The Foreign Missions of the Jesuits 115
Ricci arrived in China in 1582 and at once recognised the literary character of Chinese civilisation. He and his companions adopted the dress of the Chinese literati and acquired the manners of Chinese gentle- men. Professing great respect for the teaching of Confucius, this worthy father won by his prudence and courtesy the goodwill of the Chinese people and especially of the ruling classes. The Jesuits excited the curiosity of the learned by their globes, maps and clocks ; and of Ricci it has been said that " he usually began with mathematics and ended with religion ; his scientific endowments procuring respect for his religious doctrines." Ricci's published writings in Chinese cover a wide selection of subjects, while his knowledge of the Chinese language and character seems to have been profound. The attacks made on him at a later period by his co-religionists in Europe were chiefly owing to the fact that, while he attacked Buddhism, he treated Confucianism with such sympathy that his concessions seemed to disintegrate the foundations of the Christian faith. Ricci was a man of fine character, and his death in 1610 was caused by his unsparing labours, coupled with the fatigues incident to the elaborate customs of Chinese hospitality. Many Mandarins were converted by the Jesuits ; a fraternity of the Blessed Virgin founded at Pekin in 1605 was followed by a Church in Nankin ; while in 1616 churches with large congregations were in existence in five provinces of the Chinese Empire.
Even more important was Jesuit propaganda in South America. The missions of the Society in Paraguay won the admiration not only of the religious but of philosophers and men of the world. The plan of the fathers in this country was to separate
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the natives from the Spaniards, whose influence was hostile to Christian morality and to form an impcrium in imperio. They taught the natives " to sow and reap, to plant trees and build houses, to read and sing." They charmed them by their gorgeous ritual and by the sentimentality of their theology. They taught them songs about the crucified Son of God, " Whose head droops like the stalk of yellow corn." Yet, though the Jesuit community in Paraguay was one of the chief glories of the Society, though it refined and elevated the native Indian, as well as making him childishly happy and content ; yet it failed to make him either a full-grown man or a moral and consistent Christian. Thus it was easily swept away by the intolerance of the Spanish Government, which resented its champion- ship of the rights of the slave and its paternal interest in the happiness of a subject race.
The ultimate failure of the Jesuits in Paraguay was, therefore, a failure in the cause of justice and righteous- ness, and proves that, even when unsuccessful, the Society was animated in its missionary labours by a spirit of Christian benevolence and disinterested humanity.
If the Jesuits could not achieve success, they at least deserved it, and their failures in distant lands are far more creditable to the character of the Society than their noisier triumphs in European countries.
" Hopes have precarious life ; But faithfulness can feed on suffering And knows no disappointment."
VI
THE JESUITS IN EUROPE
Unlike Islam, the Christian Religion is based upon a separation between the secular and spiritual authority ; though it involves the slow permeation of the secular by the spiritual, " a little leaven leavening the whole lump."
Our Lord Himself laid down the principle governing the mutual relations of Church and State when He said : " Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's ; and unto God the things which are God's " ; and, when the martyrs refused to offer sacrifices to Caesar, they laid the foundation of the modern conception of spiritual freedom.
But the Western Church which through the earlier Middle Ages contended boldly for spiritual independ- ence became in time thoroughly secularised. We can trace this process of secularisation quite clearly, through Innocent III and Boniface VIII to Leo X and the Popes of the Renaissance. By the time of Loyola it was complete.
" Time was," said a speaker at the Council of Basle, " when I thought it well that the secular should be completely separated from the spiritual power. But I have since been taught that virtue apart from power is ridiculous ; and that the Pope, without the Church's patrimony, presents to us nothing but a servant of
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kings and princes." The Popes of the Renaissance were pre-eminently secular princes, consequently they lost their spiritual hold upon the conscience of Christen- dom while, on the other hand, they were incapable of maintaining their position as temporal monarchs. " At the time," says Creighton, " when the security of the Papacy seemed greatest, when it had its roots most firmly in material interests, it was suddenly called upon to justify its immemorial position."
At the Council of Constance (1414 to 1418) the Church endeavoured to reform herself from within. This attempt broke down because when the question arose as to whether the Council should carry out the needed reforms first, or elect the Pope first, it decided on the latter course and no sooner was Martin V elected than he dismissed the assembly. The absolutist theory of Church Government thus triumphed over the Consti- tutional, but was followed only a century later by disunion and disruption.
By the time of Loyola, the demand for a General Council had again revived and was ultimately forced upon the Popes, greatly against their will, by the Emperor Charles V. It was clear to that monarch that something must be done at once to conciliate moderate opinion and to avert a universal revolt of the northern nations from Catholicism. It was no longer possible to blink the situation, the political consequences of Papal corruption compelled a decision. Reuchlin and Erasmus had opened to thoughtful men the true text of the Holy Scriptures, the criticism of Filelfo had exposed the False Decretals upon which the Papal pretensions were based, while the universal rise of the national spirit made men refuse subservience to a Church which trampled upon their legitimate
The Jesuits in Europe 1 19
aspirations and fought the world with its own weapons.
Yet it was not until the Pontificate of Paul III (1534 to 1549) tnat tne Roman Curia realised the vital seriousness of the situation ; and from Paul's occupa- tion of the Papal see must we date the Catholic Reaction in which the Jesuits took so prominent a part. It was Paul III who promoted the Catholic Reformers Contarini, Pole, Morone and Caraffa to the Cardinalate, approved the organisation of the Company of Jesus in 1540, introduced the Inquisition into Italy in 1542, established the Index in 1543 and opened the Council of Trent in 1545.
The Council of Trent (1545 to 1563) marks a new phase of Papal development and is one of the out- standing landmarks of ecclesiastical history. It sanctioned departures from Catholic practice as vital and as revolutionary as those introduced by Luther and Melancthon ; it dealt a death-blow to Episcopal authority and established the Jesuits as the inspired interpreters of Papal policy, thus inaugurating an era of ecclesiastical tyranny, subterfuge and persecution.
It is not to be denied that the Council of Trent initiated also spiritual reforms of great and lasting value. Under the influence of Carlo Borromeo, the saintly Archbishop of Milan, it reformed many abuses and drew up the famous Tridentine Catechism ; but it also crystallised into actual dogma many questionable and hitherto unauthorised beliefs of the Mediaeval Church .
From a purely constitutional point of view, the Council was a sham from beginning to end. The Popes packed the Council with innumerable Italian bishops, voting exactly as they were instructed to vote by the
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supreme pontiff, who made the best terms he could for himself with each European sovereign separately by secret diplomacy. Thus it was said by Father Sarpi that, at the Council of Trent, "the Holy Ghost had a way of arriving in the Spanish Ambassador's mail bag."
The Jesuit who acted as chief Papal adviser at the Council was Diego Lainez, who succeeded Loyola as General in 1558. He supported the Pope in his diplo- matic methods of settling disputes and, in order to destroy the efforts of the reforming cardinals to find a via media on Luther's doctrine of justification by faith only, threw over the predestinarian theology of St. Augustine with which it was associated and pro- claimed the doctrine of human free will.
The influence of Lainez on the Society of Jesus resembled that of Brother Elias on the Order of St. Francis. He introduced a still more despotic element of government, altering the original con- stitutions of Loyola ; he also adopted a more worldly tone. He refused to make choir offices and daily services obligatory on members of the Society, while he extended its educational activities and increased its hold on those in high places. He was also far less scrupulous than Loyola, a type of the second generation of Jesuits whose conduct lends an element of justification to the term " Jesuitical," as synonymous with subtle and underhand methods of dealing. He made the welfare of humanity subsidiary to the aims and interests of the Society ; but his energy was such that when he died, in 1564, the Company of Jesus had increased to eighteen provinces, and possessed no less than 130 colleges.
But it was under the Neapolitan, Claude Aquaviva, 5th General, 1581 to 1615, that the Society reached its
The Jesuits in Europe 12 1
maximum of influence and began at the same time to acquire a sinister reputation for its interference with questions of politics and government. In this matter exaggeration is to be deprecated. The majority of the Jesuits were exclusively devoted to education and the spiritual life, but the exceptions were numerous and they counted among them the leaders of the Society. English readers are familiar with this phase of Jesuit activity, not only from the biassed pages of West- ward Ho ! ; but from the more sympathetic pre- sentation of it in Esmond and John Inglesant. In England, the Jesuits plotted against Queen Elizabeth and in France against Henri IV; the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes is also to be attributed to their machinations. The Regent of the Jesuit College at Treves gave his blessing to Balthasar Gerard, the assassin of William the Silent ; in Venice they were expelled for plotting against the independence of the Republic. Even Carlo Borromeo and S. Theresa distrusted them ; Sarpi declared that the sure sign of being right was to be in contradiction to a Jesuit ; and that St. Peter, directed by a Jesuit confessor, might have arrived at denying Christ without sin.
The best commentary on the political bias of the Jesuits is perhaps to be found in our own country, in the career of that robust arch-plotter, Robert Parsons, 1546 to 1610.
Robert Parsons was born at Nether Stowey in Somerset, of good yeoman stock. Educated at Oxford, he became at an early age Bursar of Balliol College, where he showed a leaning towards Calvinistic theology. During a tour in Belgium he came under the influence of a Jesuit father and, passing through the Spiritual
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Exercises at Louvain, was received into the Company of Jesus. In 1579, when it was decided to found a Jesuit mission in England, Parsons, on account of his versa- tility and indomitable will, was appointed its first Superior.
He was accompanied by the saintly Edward Campion, a man of great spirituality and thoroughly loyal to his native country. Unfortunately for him, the English Government regarded all Jesuits as agents of Philip II of Spain and consequently as traitors, subject to torture and the gallows. Campion was betrayed by a spy, who afterwards asked for and received his forgiveness ; and suffered for his faith at Tyburn. Parsons the real plotter, after a temporary residence with the Shelley family in Sussex, took flight to the Continent.
From this time until his death, all Parsons' energies were devoted to the overthrow of Elizabeth and the establishment of a Spanish dynasty in England. The average Roman Catholic in this country was perfectly loyal to the Crown, but Parsons persistently represented to the Pope that they were not and did his utmost to prevent the loyal monastic Orders from obtaining any influence in England. He even obtained the appoint- ment of an Archpriest, who should exercise authority over the Roman Clergy in England in the interests of the Jesuits.
Cardinal Bellarmine, the ablest of Jesuit theologians, maintained, in opposition to Elizabeth's claim to be " Supreme Governor," that the Pope had the right of changing the Government. This theory Parsons consistently adopted, and stoutly maintained. When, in 1587, Sir William Stanley, commanding the English troops in Holland, betrayed the city of
The Jesuits in Europe 123
Deventer to the Spaniards, Parsons wrote a treatise justifying this abominable treason and maintaining that all English Catholics were " bound, upon pain of damnation, to do the like." Parsons, indeed, com- pletely identified himself with the Spanish Govern- ment's political designs upon England. He founded numerous Jesuit seminaries in Spain to further these designs and used his powers as Rector of the English College at Rome with the same object in view. In the words of Mr. Taunton, " The one hope of regaining England was, in Parsons' eyes, not the patient toil and blood of missionaries but the armed intervention of Spain."
Two of his pamphlets had an immense but also a most curious success. In The book of the Succession he appealed to the people, asserting that they had the right to dethrone their sovereign whose religion was of more importance than his hereditary claims. By Act of Parliament it was made treasonable to possess a copy of this pamphlet ; but, by one of the ironies of history, it was afterwards used by the Puritans to justify the execution of Charles I. Parsons also published a work entitled A Memorial for the Refor- mation in England, in which he demanded the restora- tion of the confiscated abbey lands and urged the setting up of the Inquisition in England, though the name Inquisition was carefully avoided. This pamphlet exercised great influence on the mind of James II and determined the direction of his eccle- siastical policy in Great Britain.
Yet Parsons lived to see all his grandiose schemes for the conversion of England fail. They failed because of the inherent loyalty of Englishmen to the Crown and because they distrusted a religion which
124 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
came to them disfigured in the garb of politics and through a man devoid of every honest scruple. Even the Pope at last threw Parsons over, for he found that in his dealings with him Parsons was no more to be trusted than in his dealings with heretics. He was particularly enraged with him for throwing dust into his eyes by misrepresenting the majority of English Catholics as disloyal to the throne, for this statement had led him to pursue a policy hopeless from the first.
Those who wish to understand Parsons should study his portrait, for his is a face which tells its own story. Big, burly and dark, his piercing eye gives the impression of subtlety. His smile is said to have been attractive, but in moments of anger his whole counten- ance was terrible and alarming. His mouth indicates a grim humour which could easily turn to biting sarcasm. His massive chin suggests great tenacity of purpose, while his powerful forehead marks him out as a man of high mental attainments and a born leader of men. Indefatigable, astute and thorough in all that he undertook, his energy was worthy of a better cause and his patience of a greater success. His favourite text is said to have been, " Let us not be weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap if we faint not."
We have seen that Parsons was not the only type of English Jesuit that the Society comprised men of purely spiritual aims, like Edward Campion, ready to pour out their blood to save England from apostasy. Half-way between these two types stands Henry Garnett, notorious for his connection with Gunpowder Plot. Henry Garnett, the son of a Nottingham schoolmaster, was educated at Winchester and studied law in London. He became afterwards the intimate
The Jesuits in Europe 125
friend of Cardinal Bellarmine and acquired a great reputation for his varied learning. The celebrated lawyer Coke described him as a " man grave, discreet, wise, and learned and of excellent ornament both of nature and art ; and one that, if he will, may do His Majesty as much good service as any subject I know of in England." If the service which Garnett afterwards rendered was not such as Coke hoped for, at any rate his brain and pen were never idle. He supervised the Jesuit Mission for eighteen years with such success that its members increased from three to forty during his rule. His work was attended by many dangers and carried on under many aliases and disguises. He ministered to his fellow religionists in scattered country houses and visited and consoled them in prison. His name, however, is chiefly connected with his theory of equivocation and with the attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament.
The Act of the English Government which led to Gunpowder Plot was a declaration issued in February, 1604, which permitted lay Catholics to remain in England, but banished all priests. A month later, Catesby and Winter, both friends of Garnett, as also was Guy Fawkes, originated the treason. In June, Catesby propounded to Garnett the following question of conscience : " Is it lawful to kill innocent persons together with the guilty ? " The case was supposed to be that of a siege and Garnett declared it to be lawful. Later, Father Green way revealed to Garnett the details of the plot. After this, Garnett, now an accessory, withdrew in part from Catesby 's conspiracy, but took no steps to acquaint the Govern- ment with the treason. Knowing that it was the intention of the conspirators to blow up Parliament,
126 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
he left London for a pilgrimage to the well of St. Winifred, " for his health, and to shake off this business about London." When Catesby's servant brought him news of the failure of the plot, he wrote to the Government, proclaiming his innocence, " with the most solemn oaths " and " as one who hopeth for everlasting salvation." After being hidden in close confinement at Hindlip Hall, near Worcester, he eventually gave himself up and was imprisoned in London. He was well treated and, by the King's express orders, not allowed to be tortured.
Of the value of his evidence we can judge from the following : He denied having been at certain houses, having held conversations with a certain Oldcorne and having written a certain letter to Father Green- way ; protesting on his salvation and priesthood that what he said was true. But, when all these points had been proved against him, he freely admitted them, saying, " that he might lawfully deny it as he did till they were able to prove it, for no man is bound to charge himself till he is convicted." Plausible as is this excuse, it is obvious that it was impossible to place confidence in a man who made truth a matter of expediency ; and to whom solemn oaths and attestations were mere " scraps of paper," unless the contrary to them could be proved. There is a clear reference to the case of Garnett, under his well-known alias of Farmer, and to his equivocation in the second act of " Macbeth." When the porter hears a knocking at the gate of the Castle, he calls out, " Who's there, in the name of Beelzebub ? Here's a farmer that hanged himself in the expectation of plenty. . . . Knock, knock ! Who's there ? Faith, here's an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against
The Jesuits in Europe 127
either scale ; who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven." On his trial Garnett said : " We teach not that equivocation may be used promiscuously ; but we think it lawful when we are pressed to questions that are harmful to ourselves or others to answer ; or urged upon examina- tion to answer to one whom we do not hold to be a competent judge." Even the Roman Catholic historian Dr. Lingard declares that " by seeking shelter under equivocation, Garnett deprived himself of the pro- tection which the truth might have afforded him ; nor could he in such circumstances reasonably com- plain if the King refused credit to his assertions of innocence and permitted the law to take its course." Garnett met his sentence with composure and died with the dignity which became him. " I acknowledge myself," he said, " not to die a victorious martyr but as a penitent thief." He was executed on a scaffold in St. Paul's Churchyard and his head set up afterwards on London Bridge. As he was being led out of his cell he said to one of the cooks : " Farewell, good friend Tom, this day I will save thee the labour to provide my dinner."
The heyday of the Jesuits in England was during the reign of the last two Stuart princes. In 1669, Father Lobb the Provincial, converted James, Duke of York, the heir to the throne ; while Charles II at a secret conference also declared himself a Catholic. By the secret treaty of Dover in 1670, Charles obtained the promise of Louis XIV to support him with an army and a handsome subsidy, in the event of an attempt to win England to the Papal cause. It was, however, provided in the treaty that Charles should openly announce his conversion and this he shrank
128 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
from doing. Nevertheless, " in a moment of drunken confidence," he revealed his secret conversion to Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftsbury, and from this moment Shaftesbury became his bitter enemy and assisted in the engineering of the infamous Titus Oates' plot. Although Oates' was a rogue and his evidence untrustworthy, the supposed revelations of the plot, coupled with the real danger in which the country stood from Papal designs, raised a blaze of Protestant fury throughout the length and breadth of the land. But when Charles died, in 1685, the hopes of the Jesuits were realised, and in James II England saw for the last time a Roman Catholic upon the throne. The Jesuit father, Edward Petre, was made Clerk of the Closet and became the real power behind the King, as another Jesuit, Pere La Chaise, was behind Louis XIV. Father Parsons' Memorial for the Reformation of England was now presented to James II and became the programme of that monarch in his ultramontane designs upon the liberties of the country. Attempts were made to dominate the Universities ; six Jesuits were sent to take over Trinity College, Dublin, and Roman professors were forced on the University of Oxford. In 1687 James suspended the oaths of supremacy and allegiance and in the interest of Roman Catholics made his Declara- tion of liberty of Conscience. The imprisonment of the Seven Bishops for refusing to publish the Declara- tion from their pulpits was probably suggested by Father Petre, but it was a fatal mistake. The laity of the country were in no mood to be governed by Jesuits who, we are told by an impartial contem- porary, were more hated in England than Moham- medans. Soon after, the King fled the country and
The Jesuits in Europe 129
Father Petre followed suit. This worthy father was not a man of great ability and of very poor judgment. He forced the King to extremes without a thought to their probable consequences and ruined the cause of the Society in England for ever.
He is sarcastically described by Dryden, in his " Fable of the Swallows " :
" With these the Martin readily concurred, A Church-begot, and Church believing bird : Of little body, but of lofty mind, Round bellied, for a dignity designed : And much a dunce, as Martins are by kind : Yet often quoted Canon laws and Code And Fathers which he never understood j1 But little learning needs — in noble blood."
Thus the Jesuits' great opportunity for showing their skill at statecraft passed away. The only results of their labours were to establish the Protestant suc- cession firmly upon the throne and to destroy their friends.
To pass from England to the affairs of the Society in France, is to pass from the circumference of their influence to very near its centre. Basking in the sunshine of royal approval, under Louis XIV, the Society endeavoured to win the world of fashion for the Church by its insinuating manners and lax casuistry. In opposition to the right of private judgment set up by the Huguenots, the Jesuits sought to bring the whole of a man's life under the direction of his con- fessor. But to do this in a corrupt society, indisposed to reform its ways, involved immense concessions. If the confessor was to know everything which a man did in private, he must compensate his penitent by making the terms of salvation as easy as possible,
130 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
accepting imperfect repentance as an equivalent for contrition and amendment, substituting orthodoxy and spiritual direction for uprightness in word and deed. The Jesuits also saved their clients from the responsibility of spiritual thought, they undertook the direction of their conscience alike in small things and great. Luther is said to have asked a certain charcoal burner, who said he believed what the Church believed, what the Church did believe ? to which he replied that he had not the slightest idea. Nor was it at all necessary that he should. God and obedience to the Church were synonymous terms with the Jesuit and, provided a man came to confession with regularity, his confessor undertook to settle his spiritual affairs on easy terms with the Supreme Director of Con- sciences !
Yet, even in the France of Louis XIV, such a travesty of religion was not suffered to go unchallenged, and in the Jansenists there arose within the fold of the Catholic Church an energetic protest in favour of personal religion and the severer principles of the Gospel. In the opinion of Cornelius Jansen, Bishop of Ypres, the founder of this new movement, the Church had sacrificed conscience and human feeling to mere logic and opportunism. He insisted on the need of spiritual conversion and declared that no amount of Churchgoing, or regular confession, could save the soul. Not that he sympathised with Luther or Calvin, for he held that the process of justification by faith must be continuous within the fold of the Roman Church. A climax was reached when, in 1643, the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld published his famous pamphlet on Frequent Communion, in which he violently attacked the spiritual laxity of the Jesuits,
The Jesuits in Europe 131
arousing a storm of orthodox protest which led to the formal condemnation of the whole Jansenist move- ment by the Pope and the Sorbonne.
It was under these circumstances that Pascal, the friend of Arnauld and Port Royal the stronghold of the Jansenists, launched his Provincial Letters, which appeared anonymously in 1656-7, and were eagerly devoured, especially in the higher circles of society. In these letters Pascal first laughs at and then de- nounces with scathing though delicate irony the Jesuit attitude towards religion ; exposing their cynical methods of tampering with evil in the interests of their Society and the Church. The letters were written with such rapidity that the author was naturally asked whether he had read all the voluminous works of Jesuit casuistry from which he had quoted, to which he replied that " if he had done so, he would have spent the greater part of his life in the company of very unwholesome books." He claimed, however, to have verified his references ; and the substantial accuracy of his charges against the Jesuits has never been disproved.
Only two criticisms of unfairness on his part must be conceded. Firstly, he selected the wildest moral aberrations of Jesuit confessors and treated them as examples of their normal methods. Secondly, he visited all the spiritual errors of the Roman Church on the Jesuits alone, a charge which does not bear the test of a candid examination. The scope of this work does not admit of many quotations, but the following passage illustrates clearly enough the nature and method of Pascal's attack. " Do not run away with the impression that the Jesuits want to deprave the world ; their great fault is that they do not strain
132 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
every nerve to improve it. That would be bad policy. They have so high an opinion of themselves that they think that religion could not prosper, unless their influence was felt on all sides and everyone's conscience was in their keeping. As the severity of the Gospel suits a few, they apply it strictly to those few ; as it does not suit the many, they leave it out of account in dealing with the mass of mankind. Thanks to what Father Petau calls this easy and obliging conduct, they can hold out a helping hand to all. If a man comes to them firmly determined to restore illgotten goods, do not think that they will dissuade him ; on the contrary, they will encourage so pious a resolve. But if another man wants to be absolved without making restitution, his case must be hard indeed if they cannot find some loophole. Thus they keep all their friends and have an answer for their enemies. If one throws extreme indulgence in their teeth, they at once produce their austere Directors and some books which they have written on the severity of the law of Christ ; and simple souls, who only look at the outside of things, ask for no further proof."
Pascal attacks in succession all the dubious moral stratagems of the Jesuits, probabilism, directing the intention, mental reserve and so on. He talks to Jesuits, who, out of their tomes of casuistry, find justification for lying, theft, gluttony and even murder. Take, for example, the question of keeping one's word, it is a Jesuit who is speaking : " Listen to the general rule laid down by Escobar. ' Promises are not binding when the person in making them had no intention to bind himself.' Now it seldom happens that any have such intention, unless when they confirm their promises by an oath or contract ; so that when one simply
The Jesuits in Europe 133
says, ' I will do it,' he means he will do it if he does not change his mind ; for he does not wish by saying that to deprive himself of his liberty. ' My dear Father,' I observed, ' I had no idea that the direction of the intention possessed the power of rendering promises null and void.' "
Or take the case of probabilism, which is thus defined by a Jesuit. " A person may do what he con- siders allowable, according to a probable opinion, though the contrary may be a safer one. The opinion of a single grave doctor is all that is requisite." " Well, reverend Father," said I, " you have given us sinners ample room at all events ! Thanks to your probable opinions, we have liberty of conscience with a witness ! Only think of being able to say ' Yes ' or ' No,' just as you please ! It is impossible to prize such a privilege too highly." Pascal wants, however, to know whether a probable opinion, when it is obviously an unsound one, will be upheld in the confessional ? " How hasty you are," replies the Jesuit, " listen to what follows : ' To refuse absolution to a penitent who acts according to a probable opinion, is a sin which is, in its nature, mortal' "
The climax of the Provincial Letters is reached when the Jesuit, after excusing murder on the flimsiest pretext, goes on to prove that, since the Gospel, even to love God is not necessary in order to obtain absolution. Then Pascal throws off all reserve, and passes from polite irony to burning indignation.
" Oh, Father ! " I burst forth, patience herself could listen no longer, " was it not enough to allow men forbidden pleasures without number under cover of your special pleading ? Must you go further and hold them out a bribe to commit crimes which even you
134 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
cannot excuse, by promising them an easy absolution without change of life or sign of repentance, beyond promises a hundred times broken ? But even here your Fathers have not stayed their hand. From tampering with the holiest rules of Christian practice they have gone on to an entire subversion of the law of Christ. They set at naught the Great Command- ment, on which hang all the Law and the Prophets. They say that it is not necessary to love God, nay that release from this irksome duty was the boon which Jesus Christ brought into the world. Before the Incarnation it was necessary to love Him but since He so loved the world that He gave His only- begotten Son, the world has been dispensed from loving Him in return. Open your eyes, my dear Father, and, if the other aberrations of your casuists have failed to move you, take warning from these last. May God, in His Mercy, teach your Fathers how false were the lights that led them on to these rocks. May He fill their hearts with that love of Himself from which they have ventured to dispense mankind."
Though the immediate effect of the Provincial Letters was considerable, Pascal neither succeeded in converting the Jesuits nor in saving the Jansenists from bitter persecution ; but he did not write in vain. The moral indignation and intellectual force of the Letters co-operated with the political errors of the Fathers to alienate from the Society the good opinions of the world. Between 1606 and 1764 the Company of Jesus was expelled from nearly every country in Europe, and, as we have already stated, was suppressed by the Pope in 1773. The doctrine of probabilism was powerfully opposed by Bossuet, and when it was again revived by the Redemptorist
The Jesuits in Europe 135
Alfonso Liguori, in the middle of the eighteenth century, it was in a much modified and more innocuous form. According to Liguori, the more indulgent opinion may be followed whenever its authorities are " nearly as good " as those on the other side. Even this solution, aimed as it was at gaining worldly society for the Church, was an unsatisfactory moral compromise and would have been far from satisfying the upright and fearless conscience of Pascal.
Nevertheless, on the broad issue upon which he fought, Pascal triumphed in the long run ; and his words of prophecy justified themselves in the subse- quent course of ecclesiastical history. " You think that force is on your side ; I think that truth and justice are on mine. Strange and tedious is the war between these two : not that victory hangs in the balance. Violence has only a certain course to run, marked out by Providential Ordering. Truth will endure for ever, sure of its triumph at the last ; for it is eternal and almighty like God."
The services rendered by the Society of Jesus, in its earliest days, were services which it is impossible to deny and would be ungenerous to minimise. It aroused the consciences of thousands of Catholics to a sense of moral responsibility and to a reawakened devotion to their Divine Redeemer.
It enlarged the mental horizon of Southern Christen- dom and gave a stimulus to missionary work in foreign lands which restored an heroic tone to the Church and left an example of unselfish service powerful in its effects to the present day. In Europe, the honours of the Catholic Reaction, such as they are, belong to them ; and without their energy, enthusiasm and self- sacrifice, the tide of religious innovation would have
136 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
swept far farther afield and have left intact much less of the mediaeval system of the Church. On the other hand, the Jesuits were, as they still are, the party of remorseless reaction. They opposed liberty of thought with every faculty at their disposal ; and fond as they were of moral compromise, they were adamantine in their maintenance of Papal authority and eagerly anxious to strengthen and increase it. In the severe but balanced judgment of Dean Church, they were " an engine for maintaining at any cost the spiritual supremacy of an unreformed theocracy, with all its insolence, all its accumulated abuses and all its false- hoods."
Living in a time of fierce controversy, they revelled in religious and political disputation and thoroughly enjoyed the heat and conflict of the fray. " The Jesuits felt," says a modern writer, " that they were the new men, the men of the time ; so with a perfect confidence in themselves, they went out to set the Church to rights."
Yet with all their self-confidence they failed ; for, unlike the Franciscans, their spirit was not the spirit of the coming ages.
Again, unlike the older orders of the Church, they produced few minds of a really high or independent character. The Jesuits can boast " no Aquinas, no Anselm, no Roger Bacon." Loyola and Xavier were founders, but after their time no genius appeared in the ranks of their Society. Able organisers like Lainez and Aquaviva, respectable commentators like Cornelius a Lapide, industrious scholars like the Bollandists were fairly numerous, but these were men of talent only and of little originality. An exception might perhaps be made in the case of Denys Petau,
The Jesuits in Europe 137
the French Jesuit of the seventeenth century, whose unfinished treatise De theologicis dogmatibus was the first systematic attempt to trace the evolution of Christian doctrine from the historical point of view ; and a work which, in later days, suggested to Cardinal Newman his Development of Christian Doctrine.
The Jesuit process of " scooping out the will " robbed the Society of robust and independent minds, and when such appeared, they soon left its narrow ranks to become in some cases its severest critics.
The whole Jesuit system of education tended to a stereotyped mediocrity. The Ratio Studiorum devised by Aquaviva, and still obligatory on the Society, is incompatible with all breadth and progress in educa- tion. Novel opinions may not even be discussed and nothing may be taught which in any way contradicts the prevalent opinion of Jesuit Fathers. The Vulgate is always to be defended as the orthodox version of the Bible, and in philosophy, the authority of Aristotle, even when stultified by the actual experiments of a Galileo, is never to be departed from. The results of such a training, pursued for three centuries, has been to make of the loyal Jesuit a master of cultivated commonplace, wholly out of touch with the ever- changing aspects of modern thought and therefore without influence on the more scientific and alert minds of the modern world. Nor are Jesuit laymen allowed more scope or liberty than their clerical confreres.
Enough has perhaps already been said of the Jesuits' disloyalty to the State, which they regarded as " some- thing accidental and its form variable," while " the Church, as the supreme power, alone was eternal." They were " the stormy petrels of politics " and their hands were seen to the greatest disadvantage in such
138 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
developments as the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the Thirty Years' War.
Finally, it may be said, that the Jesuits, true to their maxim, that the end justifies the means, sacrificed truth to expediency ; and any society, whether political or religious, which does this, is bound sooner or later to come to grief.
For the future of the world belongs to those nations which, accepting disingenuously the faith of Christ and His Church, accept also the responsibilities of the individual conscience, enlightened according to promise by the spirit of Truth.
For the voice of Divine inspiration is never silent ; it speaks afresh to every generation, bringing forth out of the variegated wisdom of God " things new and old."
" The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world."
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The revived interest in Franciscan study owes its original impulse to the Vie de S. Frangois d 'Assise, by Paul Sabatier, published in November, 1893 (English translation, Hodder and Stoughton), and those who wish to form a close acquaintance with the early Franciscan writers cannot do better than read the critical study of the early authorities which precedes this biography. All the early lives of the Saint are now accessible in English. The two lives by Thomas of Celano have been published by Methuen. In Dent's Temple Classics we have The Mirror of Perfection, The Legend of the Three Companions, The Sacrum Com- mercium, and The Little Flowers of St. Francis. Of the latter, Sabatier says : " Avec les Fioretti nous entrons defmitivement dans le domaine de la legende. Ce bijou litteraire raconte la vie de Francois, de ses compagnons et de ses disciples telle qu'elle apparaissait au commencement du quatorzieme siecle, a l'imagination populaire. Nous n'avons pas a nous arreter a la valeur litteraire de ce document, une des productions les plus exquises du moyen age religieux, mais on peut bien dire qu'au point de vue historique, il ne merite pas l'injuste oubli oii on l'a laisse. . . . Ce qui donne a ces recits un prix inestimable, c'est ce qu'on pourrait appeler, faute de mieux, leur atmosphere. . . . Mieux qu'aucune autre biographie, les Fioretti nous transportent la-bas en Ombrie, et au milieu des montagnes de la Marche d'Ancone, pour nous en faire voir les ermitages et nous meler a. la vie moitie puerile et moitie angelique, qui etait celle de leurs habitants." The most recent biographies of value are Johannes Jorgensen's Saint Francis of Assist, 1906,
139
140 The Early Franciscans and Jesuits
translated from the Danish by Dr. Sloane (Longman's), and Father Cuthbert's Life. Estimates of value are to be found in Renan's Essays in Religious History, Westcott's Social Aspects of Christianity, Creighton's Essays, and Mr. H. W. Sedgewick's Italy in the Thirteenth Century. A book of value and original research is Anne Macdonell's Sons of Francis (Dent), which also contains an excellent bibliography of early Franciscan literature. Fra Salimbene's Chronicle is condensed in Mr. G. G. Coulton's From St. Francis to Dante. The story of the Franciscans in England is told at length with the original documents in the Monumenta Franciscana Brewer and Howlett in the Rolls series. Eccleston's De adventu fratrum Minor um in Angliam has been translated, with a preface by Father Cuthbert, O.S.F.C. (Sands). Much light is thrown on the scholastic side of the English Fran- ciscans by Mr. A. G. Little in his Grey Friars in Oxford (Oxford Historical Society), and by Mr. Stevenson's Life of Grosseteste. Mr. Taylor has a study of Roger Bacon in the second volume of The Medieval Mind (Macmillan). The story of the early Jesuits begins with The Testament of Ignatius Loyola, to which Father Tyrrell has written a preface (Sands), and with the Spiritual Exercises (Burns and Oates). Mr. Stewart Rose's elaborate work, Loyola and the Early Jesuits, is full of interesting information, but uncritical in its estimate of Loyola, and too hagiographical in tendency. The Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier, by H. J. Coleridge S.J., and Parkman's Jesuits in North A merica, are indispensable for a knowledge of the missionary activities of the Society ; as is Ethelred Taunton's History of the Jesuits in England (Methuen) for the story of Parsons and Garnett. Other easily accessible works on different aspects of Jesuit life are Figgis' From Gerson to Grotius, Ranke's History of the Popes, J. A. Symonds' Catholic Reaction, the Provincial Letters of Blaise Pascal, Pascal, by Viscount St. Cyres, and Sir James Stephens' Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography. An admirable critique of Loyola
Bibliography 141
will be found in the first volume of Dean Church's Occasional Papers. In support of the statements on pages 136-7 with regard to the Ratio Studiorum and its influence on Jesuit mentality, see article on the Jesuits by the late R. F. Littledale, and Rev. Ethelred Taunton, S.J., in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, nth Edition, Vol. 15, to which I am much indebted; as also to the article on Ultra- montanism by Carl Mirbt in Vol. 27.
The opinions expressed in this volume have been reached after an extensive course of reading, and considerable reflection extending over several years. Readers who desire to pursue further the fascinating story of Jesuit enterprise, and to acquaint themselves with the Jesuit defence against their opponents, can do so by consulting the following voluminous works : Institutum Societatis Jesu, 7 vols., Avignon, 1830-8 ; Backer, Bibliotheque des ecrivains de la Compagnie de Jesus, 7 vols., Paris, 1853-61 ; Cretineau Joly, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jesus, 6 vols., Paris, 1844 ; R. G. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, 73 vols., Cleveland, 1896-1901.
INDEX
Agnellus of Pisa, 50 Albert of Pisa, 52-3 Aquaviva, Claude, 90, 120-1,
136 Assisi, Basilica of, 24-5, 28
Bacon, Roger, 35, 56, 59-62 Bernardino of Siena, 65-6 Bonaventura, St., 31, 34-6 Boniface VIII, 40, 117
Campion, Edward, 122, 124 Canticle of the Creatures, 18, 36 Clara, Santa, 13-14, 18, 31 Company of Jesus, 67-9, 75, 78- 9, 82-6, 135-8
De Brebeuf, Jean, 108-10 De Montfort, Simon, 47, 57
Elias of Cortona, 16, 23-9, 120
Franciscan Gospel, 20-22 Franciscan Missions to Moham- medans, 14-15, 66
Garnett, Henry, 124-7
Giles, Brother, 30-32
Gregory IX, Cardinal Ugolino,
14, 16, 26-7 Grosseteste, Robert, 47, 54-7, 59
Innocent III, 11-12, 117 Inquisition, Spanish, 75
Jacopone da Todi, 36-41, 45 Jesuit Casuistry, 88-90, 129-35 Jesuit Education, 87, 137 Jesuit Missions, 88, 93-116 Jesuit Politics, 83, 90-2, 104-5, 120-9, 134. 1 37-8
Joachim of Flora, 34 Jogues, Isaac, 1 10-13 John of Parma, 32-5
Lainez, Diego, 120
Le Jeune, Paul, 106-8
Leo, Brother, 17, 25-6, 29-30, 44
Louis IX, 43-4
Manresa, 72-4 Marsh, Adam, 56-9 Montserrat, 72
Oxford Friars, 50, 54-6
Parenti, Giovanni, 26-7 Pascal, Blaise, 89, 131-5 Parsons, Robert, 90, 12 1-4, 128 Paul III, 119 Petre, Edward, 128-9 Probabilism, 89, 132-3, 134-5
Ricci, Matteo, 11 4-1 5
Salimbene of Parma, 17, 33, 41-5 Sarpi, Paolo, 87, 120-1 Spiritual Exercises, 72, 75, 77-8, 79-81
Third Order of St. Francis, 63-4 Thomas of Celano, 8, 19-20, 26,
29. 36-7 Thomas of Eccleston, 49-50 Trent, Council of, 1 19-120
William of Occam, 63 Wyclif, John, 56, 62-3
Xavier, Francis, 68-9, 78-9, 93-
104 Xavier, Jerome, 105
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