Читать книгу Loyola and the Educational System of the Jesuits - Hughes Thomas - Страница 4

Voluntary poverty, the austerest manner of life, the ungrateful labor of studies, and the perpetual self-discipline of a mind like his, ever bent on lofty thoughts and endeavoring to dominate the very first movements of his soul, all these conditions, added to the climate and the nature of the situation in which Ignatius found himself at Paris, brought such a strain to bear on his broken-down constitution, that, to keep up his course at all, he had to interrupt it awhile, and give some relief to his overtaxed body, or, as he held it to be, his "beast of burden."

And what about the studies themselves? If they had been a brilliant success thus far, they could scarcely have outlived such conditions of existence. As it was, they were as good as if they had never begun; or somewhat worse. He had gone about them the wrong way. Whatever solidity of learning he had kept objectively in view, something else, equally important with solidity, had been unwittingly omitted. That was a good method. Logic, Philosophy, and Theology, all taken up together, and with such compendious haste, now went together in his mind like a machine out of joint; and his speed was nil! The Latin language itself, the indispensable vehicle of all learning, was just so far possessed by him as to show him that, to be of any real use, it had better be commenced all over again.

Here his character asserted itself. And in no particular of his life is he more like himself, more thorough, more of a brave cavalier, "governing himself, in great things and small, by reasons most high," than when, having little facility for such pursuits, and less inclination, he makes up his mind, after a short breathing spell, to sit down again at the age of thirty-seven years, and resume his Latin declensions! In the college of Montague, he spends about two years acquiring this tongue. Meanwhile, he tries various plans to find wherewithal to live.

I need not dwell on the nature of this great centre into which Ignatius had penetrated, an unknown stranger, just one of its tens of thousands of scholars. It had more than two scores of colleges. To this, the queen of universities, though she was going to be no kind alma mater to him and his Order, still the recollections of Loyola in his future legislation would always turn back with reverence. His first Professors for the Roman College, the typical institution of the Society, would be taken from those of his men who were Doctors of this university. And, whatever might be the moral condition and the religious lassitude of the university men, as compared with this penniless stranger, in 1529, occasions were to come in after times, when they showed themselves not unworthy of the enemy whom they fought to the death. When the plague of 1580 made a desert about them, the university men and the Jesuits, otherwise never seen together, save in the lists and face to face, now were everywhere, and fell fast, side by side on the field of Christian charity.

For the understanding of the Jesuit system, in its origin and its form, attention must always be paid, in the first place, to the kinship subsisting between it and the Paris University. There are, besides, many other degrees of relationship, which do not go unacknowledged, in the formation of the Ratio Studiorum. The system of the English universities may be recognized in the line of ancestry. Whatever was best anywhere enters the pedigree; as Lord Bacon takes note, when delivering himself like a good philosopher, but also like a good Protestant, he eulogizes and stigmatizes in the same breath: "The ancient wisdom of the best times," he says, "did always make a just complaint, that states were too busy with their laws, and too negligent in point of education; which excellent part of the ancient discipline hath been in some sort revived, of late times, by the colleges of the Jesuits; of whom, although in regard of their superstition I may say, 'quo meliores, eo deteriores'; yet in regard of this, and some other points concerning human learning and moral matters, I may say, as Agesilaus said to his enemy Pharnabaus, 'Talis quum sis, utinam noster esses.'"13

In the University of Paris, then, as his real alma mater, Ignatius commenced his course of Philosophy in the year 1529. He finished it by standing successfully the severe examination, called examen lapideum, "the rocky test," considered the most searching of all in the Paris Academy. He thus became a Master of Arts, after Easter, A.D. 1534; having become Licentiate in the previous year. Particulars about his four examiners in the "rocky test," his graduation, the degrees of his companions, with the dates, as found in the Paris records, are given by the Bollandists.14

He now entered on his theological studies. It was evident that the obstructions, which had thwarted so many of his efforts heretofore, were disappearing one by one. And more than that; the means were being placed in his hands for the great work before him. These means were a company of men. He was in the midst of a devoted little band, each one of whom he had won individually. They were Peter Lefèvre and Francis Xavier; James Lainez and Alphonsus Salmeron, both of them mere youths; there were Claude Le Jay, John Coduri, Nicholas Bobadilla, Simon Rodriguez; and lastly, the only one who at this time was a Priest among their number, Pasquier Brouet. Among these, never at their head though considered a father by all, never leading the way, though on that account showing himself the more effectively a leader, Ignatius was all in all to each one of them. He had previously acquired some valuable experience in selecting and forming companions. But such as had gathered round him in Spain were no longer with him. Each one of his present party was a picked man.

When six of them were sufficiently advanced, he and they held a solemnity, which was the real birthday of the Society of Jesus. On the fifteenth day of August, 1534, they took a vow, in the church of the Blessed Virgin, at Montmartre in Paris. They bound themselves to renounce all their goods by a given date, and betake themselves to the Holy Land; failing in that, they would throw themselves at the feet of the Sovereign Pontiff, and offer him their absolute service. Meanwhile they pursued their studies; and, as each of the two following years brought round the fifteenth day of August, it found them in the same place, and with the same solemnity, and with an enlarged number, renewing this vow. The legal birthday of the Order came only with the Papal charter on September 27, 1540.

I shall pass over the movements of Loyola, when bidden to go and recuperate in his native climate. He returned to Spain, in 1535, leaving his companions to study till 1537; and he settled the affairs of his young Spanish associates at their homes. All, when the time came, disposed of their goods in a summary way. They gave to the poor, reserving nothing, except what would pay their way to Venice, and thence to the East. Their principle was, Dispersit, dedit pauperibus, "He hath distributed, he hath given to the poor." Besides this, Xavier, at the date appointed, gave up the last stage of his theological studies, and resigned the glory of receiving the Doctor's cap in Paris; the brilliant young Professor sacrificed the one thing which had appealed most powerfully to his ambition and imagination. Laynez was recuperating from a severe illness, and could do scarcely more than move. Nevertheless they are all in Venice, when the early spring of 1537 arrives.

Ignatius himself, meeting them there, has accomplished the work which faced him thirteen years before, and which he had taken in hand with his Latin grammar. He is now forty-six years of age.

There are three lines of activity, in which the ability and energy of Ignatius Loyola stand out before the world. One is the capacity he showed as a governor or leader of men; another is a similar competency to direct souls in the spiritual life; the third is that, which we are considering at present, his legislative genius in the intellectual order. Admitting the innate talent which must have been the basis and foundation of his gift for governing, we may affirm of all the rest, that the best part of his sagacity and tact had been acquired by personal experience. He learnt how to act by suffering. He perfected his natural gift of guiding and commanding by first submitting to all the contingencies of human life.

We may develop the meaning of this in the present matter, pedagogy; and the meaning of it will help to unfold the subject. In quest of the necessaries of life, he spent intervals of his studious career in travelling from Paris to a great distance. He found himself returning each year to Belgium, always on foot: he visited Rouen, and even reached London, to address the Spanish merchants there. It does not seem to have been parsimony on their side that kept him in such straitened circumstances. It was his principles which were not all in keeping with his conditions of life. He was endeavoring to combine the life of a student with absolute poverty; and he aggravated the inconveniences of such a state of dependence by placing no limits to the exercise of his charity. It was his deliberate choice; for he fed his mind continuously upon the life and example of the King, to whom he had sworn his service, Christ poor and in labor from his youth. He spoke afterwards from the wisdom of experience, when he said, that in absolute penury the pursuit of science cannot easily subsist, and the culture of the mind is impeded by the duties of providing for the body. Hence he legislated that, though poverty was to be the basis of his Institute, still the members, as long as they were engaged in studies, should be set free from all care of seeking the means of subsistence.

He had endeavored to combine a life of apostolic ministrations, though not yet a Priest, with that requisite absorption of mind, which alone can warrant scholastic success. And he saw what it had come to. The very esteem and love, which he entertained for the exercises of the higher spiritual life, interrupted with intrusive thoughts that application to study, which was the duty in hand. In order that no such intrusion of even the most sacred pursuits should obstruct the onward progress of the members in learning, he defined by rule the measure of such occupations, as long as study was the main duty.

Diseases weakened him. Therefore he took the greatest pains to protect the health of the members. While he lived, he did this with a personal and paternal solicitude. In his Institute, he provided the same for the future.

On commencing his studies, he embraced many branches at the same time; and he had suffered all the consequences of disorder. Grasping at too many things, he lost all; and he had then to retrieve all with loss of time. To obviate any recurrence of such costly experiences, he provided that the courses followed in the Society should have nothing disordered in them, nothing mutilated or curtailed; everything was to be in method and system; until, system and method having been carried out in every line, and the special good of each department having been secured sufficiently for the general plan, specialized perfection should be consulted, after all that; and this was to be the appointed life of individuals, while a rounded and complete education remained the culture of all.

Once in later years he let fall these words, relative to his early experience: "He would very much question whether another but himself, having to struggle with so many difficulties and obstacles in the course of his studies, would have given so long a time to the acquisition of the sciences."15 Thus then was he oppressed with poverty, without the satisfaction of acting under orders; suffering so many diseases, and yet looking neither to honor, dignity, nor other human reward, such as is wont to draw men on, and animate them under fatigue; finding no pleasure nor satisfaction in the life of studies, an inducement which is so great an alleviation to mortals in the work before them. And, in all these respects, he was quite unlike the very men whom he singled out, and enlisted in the new service of devotion; unlike Francis Xavier, who had seen with perfect indifference all his brothers take to their ancestral profession of arms, or to a courtier's life, while he himself, with the whole force of an ambitious soul, ran on successfully and brilliantly in his chosen career, as a Professor; unlike Laynez and Salmeron, whose extraordinary gifts had made them Doctors of Philosophy and Divinity, while still, in age, little more than mere youths; very unlike by nature to the gentle make of Lefèvre, who began life as a shepherd boy, and ever retained a pastoral sweetness of character. Unlike all of them, Loyola, a soldier born and bred, and still true to his profession, discarded every consideration of taste, comfort, and convenience, in view of one objective point to be reached: through thirteen years he struggled towards it; and, when that time of probation was over, he was a marked man. According to the law, that like attracts like, and like begets like, he was surrounded by a company of marked men, few if you count their number, many if you consider the type. His name was widely known, and favorably so. When he had been paying five times over the price of his daily bread, by travelling to Belgium, to Rouen, and London, and collecting there some Spanish florins, the event seemed to show that he had been but opening the door, here and there and everywhere, for his colleges and universities in the future; albeit, if they came, adversaries came too, in proportion. But clouds and storms purify the air. When they come again, they will still leave the air the clearer for their coming. If the laws of human conduct are consistent in one way, they are consistent in another. The disturbance comes, but it does its work and goes.

M. Cretineau-Joly, the popular French historian in our own times, speaking of events at a later juncture in the life of Loyola, makes the following observation: "Loyola," he says, "could apply to himself admirably well that proverb which says, 'When a Spaniard is driving a nail into the wall, and his hammer breaks, the Spaniard will drive the nail in with his head!'" Loyola would have his idea go through at any cost.

We shall now follow him to Italy and Rome.

In the year 1537, Rome was not quite the luxurious capital which had fallen under the sword of the Constable of Bourbon. The eternal city, whose Papal Sovereigns have left it on record from time immemorial, that in no part of the world were they less recognized as lords than in their own city, had undergone a purification, which differed, not substantially, but only in its consequences, from what was called for, over half the countries of Europe. The riches, the luxury, the idleness, which elsewhere resulted in a complete change of religious history for many of the northern nations, had here brought about a catastrophe which sobered minds. And no longer an exclusive absorption in elaborate sloth prevented a large portion of the influential element here from doing honor to the Queen of European civilization, by doing good to the world.

All roads still led to Rome. Thence too all roads diverged. It was still true, that whatever commanded this centre could reach out, if only by the force of prestige, to the uttermost limits of the civilized domain. Whatever this venerable source of authority chartered to go on its way, in strength and benediction, had reason to behold, in the privilege so bestowed, the auspicious opening of a useful career, intellectual or moral. It is so to-day, though not in a temporal sense. The charter, or confirmation, or bull, which conveys the recognition of the Church's Head to a project, a cause, or an institute, bestows thereupon a moral power which naturally transcends every franchise in the gift of the most powerful governments. Compared with it, they are local. And, standing no comparison with it, under a moral aspect, they do not pretend to such a power as touches the inner conscience of nations.

When therefore Ignatius turned to the great Rome, he was like the skilful commander whom he describes in a certain place; he was possessing himself of the vantage-ground, taking the citadel. It would be more correct to say, as all history avers, that he meant to defend that citadel, the See of Rome. He had waited nearly a year at Venice, to carry out his project of voyaging to Jerusalem. War made that impossible. Now, in accordance with the express proviso in their vow, he and his companions repaired to Rome, and offered their services to the spiritual head of Christendom.

To win approbation for a new religious institute was no easy matter; then less than ever. The recent occurrences in the North had been due to this, among other moral causes, that the later history of certain religious orders, which centuries before had begun one way, latterly had taken a novel and fatal turn. Still, in spite of criticism and hostility, chiefly in the high places, Ignatius received at length the approving word of the Pope; and his Institute was chartered with a bull of confirmation. Henceforth, the evolution of events belongs to general history. What concerns us, in this chartering of the plan and Institute of Ignatius Loyola, is the new character it gave to education, and the epoch it made in the intellectual history of the world. To explain this matter, we may follow briefly the deliberations which the Fathers held, and in the course of which, among other conclusions, they came to decide upon reëstablishing education.

It was the fourth of May, 1539, a year and a half before their services were finally accepted by the Pope. Such of the ten members as were then in Rome occupied themselves, after the labors of the day, in nightly deliberations, which were protracted during three months. They decreed, among other things, that they should teach boys and uncultured persons the necessary points of Christian doctrine, at least once a year, and for a definite time. This decree obviously is not about that secondary and superior education of youth, which is our subject; neither does it concern primary education, of which there is nowhere question in the Institute of the Jesuits. But, as the Constitution subsequently drawn up says, "this work of charity, in the Divine service, is more likely to be consigned to oblivion, and to pass into disuse, than other duties more specious in their character, as preaching," etc.16

Teaching Christian doctrine pertains to the duty of those who have the ordinary care of souls. No duty of this kind, as belonging to the ordinary sphere of the Church's clergy, would Ignatius assume as characteristic of his own Institute, except this one. He was, indeed, more than ready to throw in his contribution of personal zeal and charity, for the furtherance of all kinds of benevolence and beneficence. Personally, at the cost of untiring activity, he sowed, as Genelli well observes, the first seeds of those ameliorations in social life, and of those humane institutions, which are so marked a feature of later ages.17 He was an original benefactor of humanity at the turning-point of modern history, which has since become an era of social organized beneficence. Urban VIII solemnly testifies, that Ignatius organized homes for orphans, for catechumens, for unprovided women; that the poor and the sick, that children and the ignorant and prisoners, were all objects of his personal solicitude.18 These works of zeal and charity became, in subsequent years, the specific reasons of existence for various other communities, which rose in order and in number. But he did not adopt them as specific in his Institute; nor did he assume as characteristic anything within the province of the ordinary parochial clergy, except the teaching of Christian doctrine to boys and uncultured persons. The rest he attended to, while not provided for; ready to drop them, when provision should be made for them.

But he did assume five works, which were outside of the ordinary lines; and, among them, is the subject of our study, the Education of Youth.19 As the selection of all these specialties for his Institute reveal the commander's eye resting on a field, where many issues were being fought out, so, in particular, his selection of education as a specialty betrayed the same masterly thought, in the institutions he projected, in the scope he proposed, and, above all, in the formation of his teachers.

There had been, among the Fathers deliberating, a difference of opinion, with respect to Christian doctrine. Bobadilla had dissented from making that work the subject of a special vow; and the others deferred to him. But there was unanimity with regard to every other topic of deliberation, including this one, "the education of youth, having colleges in universities."20

As defined by Jesuit authors, the education of youth means the gratuitous teaching of Letters and Science, from almost the first beginnings of Grammar up to the culminating science of Sacred Theology, and that for boys and students of every kind, in schools open to all.21 Evidently these university men, who were engaged in drawing up the Institute, considered that, if the greatest Professor's talents are well spent in the exposition of the gravest doctrines in Theology, Philosophy, and Science, neither he, nor any one else, is too great to be a schoolmaster, a tutor, and a father, to the boy passing from childhood on to the state of manhood, – that boyhood which, as Clement of Alexandria says, furnishes the very milk of age, and from which the constitution of the man receives its temper and complexion.

It is requisite here to observe, that there was no such thing in existence, as State Education. Two reasons may briefly be mentioned for this, one of them intrinsic to the question, the other an historical fact. The intrinsic and essential reason was the sacred character of education, as being an original function, belonging to the primary relations of parents and child. States, or organized commonwealths, come only in the third or fourth degree of human society. It was much later, in that short interval between the extinction of the Society of Jesus and the outburst of the French Revolution, that new theories came to be proclaimed, as La Chalotais did openly proclaim them, of a bald and blank deism in social life, and therefore of secularizing education. Between deism and secularization the connection was reasonable. For, if the rights of God went by the board, there was no reason why the rights of parents and children should remain. All alike, the persons and "souls of men,"22 fell back into the condition in which Christianity had found them; they became chattels of the state, mannikins of a bureau in peace, "food for powder" in war.

The other reason was an historical fact. For all the purposes of charity, mercy, and philanthropy, there were powers in existence, as part of the normal religious life of general Christian society. They were the same powers that had made Christendom, and had carried it on so far as the Christian world, the same to which we owe the civilization of to-day. More than that. As there is not a single work of charity or mercy, say St. Thomas Aquinas, which may not be made the object of an institution, religious men or women devoting their lives as a service to God, in a special service towards their neighbors; so, in point of fact, there were very few such objects which had not originated some service of religious self-consecration in their behalf.

Now, as operating on education in particular, the powers in the world were, as they had been, almost entirely clerical or religious. In the universities, there were clergymen and Religious. All the great institutions had the religious cast about them. The old ones have it still. Traces of it hang about Oxford and Cambridge. The Church founded them and supervised them. Kings protected them. And the highest outcome of their schools was Divinity in its widest sense; that is to say, the triple knowledge of God, and of man as signed with the light of God's countenance, and of nature as bearing the impress of God's footstep. As it was in the universities, so, outside too, all pedagogic influence had rested with religious men.

But no one of all these religious powers was bound by its constitution to this labor of education, which Loyola now, formally and expressly, assumed as part of his work. It is at this stage of history, that education enters into the fundamental plan of a Religious Order. This is a fact, and an epoch, of prime importance in Pedagogics.

For, inasmuch as education entered thus into the plan of a Religious Order, it became the vocation of a moral body, which, while incorporated like other bodies, did not confine itself, like single universities, to limited circumstances of place; it was a body diffusive. And so with regard to conditions of time; though all corporations give an assurance of perpetuity, a diffusive body like this does more; it multiplies the assurance, in proportion to its own diffusiveness.

And again, inasmuch as the body which undertook the work of education was a religious one, bound to poverty, it guaranteed that the members would endow the work, at their own cost, with that which is the first, the essential, and most expensive endowment, among all others, – the labors, the attainments, and the lives of competent men, all gratuitously given. This endowment, which is so substantial, is besides so far-reaching, that no other temporal foundation would be needed, were it not that the necessaries of life, and the apparatus for their work, are still necessary to living men, even though they live in personal poverty.

Thus then it was that Ignatius took in charge the secondary and superior education of the Christian world, as far as his services should be called for: he threw into the work the endowment of a Religious Order. This, as the sequel proved, meant the whole revival of learning. Lord Bacon bears witness to it in a few words, when he says, that the Jesuits "partly in themselves, and partly by the emulation and provocation of their example, have much quickened and strengthened the state of learning."23 Father Daniel gives some of the details in a summary way. He says: "The exclusively University régime of the late centuries replaced, for a notable portion of students, by a scholastic discipline much more complete; Scholastic Philosophy and Theology renovated, through the care applied to prevent young men from throwing themselves too early into the disputes of the schools; in fine, Literature and Grammar resuming the place they had lost in the twelfth century, and, over and above that, enjoying the new resources created for their use by the Renaissance; all this I call a capital fact in the history of the human mind, and even in the history of the Church."24

After the time of Ignatius, other religious congregations, fortified with their own special means for respective departments of activity, entered upon the same general field of work. They were the Oratorians, the Barnabites, the Fathers of the Pious Schools, the Brothers of the Christian Schools, and others whose names may occur in the course of this essay. And, for the education of women, inferior and superior alike, congregations of devoted religious women came into being, and opened their convents to supply the best and highest culture.

For fear that, in the execution of this plan, and in their other enterprises of devotion and zeal, any secondary intentions or results, with regard to power and office, might mar the purity of the work and defeat the main object, the same men, whose future under the generalship of such a leader was about to open as one of transcendent influence in the civilized world, bound themselves by vow never to accept any dignity or office in the Church. Naturally they should keep aloof from affairs of state. In fact, it would be incompatible with their own purposes of literary and scientific competence, to leave themselves at the mercy of other men's views, and be drafted into posts outside of the Institute, and be placed in an impossible situation for working out the specific end intended. It would be suicidal too. Just when a man was capable of continuing his kind, he would be lost to the body, and be rendered incapable thereby of propagating his own type of eminence. Besides, without touching upon the inner reasons of the spiritual life, which made this resignation of all honors desirable, it is a fact standing out in clear relief, as history sketches the marvellous fecundity of an Order requiring such a high level of attainments, that many of the choicest souls have felt specially attracted to a kind of life, which at one and the same time satisfied their ideas of Christian perfection, and cut them off from all the paths of worldly glory.

And now, to mention in the last place another point, which is equally important for understanding the educational history of the Order, and to the general mind is equally obscure with some of those mentioned already, there was introduced the principle of religious obedience. It was sanctioned by a unanimous vote.25 The Fathers had concluded the first deliberation, whether they should form a society at all; and they had decided in the affirmative sense.26 Then the question took this phase. If they were to found a closely-knitted society, they could do so only by assuming a strict bond. That was none other than a strict obedience.

On this head, as on all others that came in order, they began the deliberation by reasoning, one day, in an adverse sense, all having prepared their minds to emphasize every objection which they could find against it. The day following, they argued in a positive sense. The motives in favor of strict obedience won their unanimous assent. They were such as these: —

If this congregation undertook the charge of affairs, and the members were not under orders, no one could be held responsible for an exact administration of the charge. If the body were not bound together by obedience, it could not long persevere; yet this was their first intention, to remain associated in a permanent body. Whence they concluded that scattered as they would be, and already had been, in assiduous and diverse labors, they must be united by a strict principle of subordination, if they were to remain such a body. Another argued thus: Obedience begets heroism of virtue; since the truly obedient man is most prompt to execute whatever duty is assigned him by one, whom, as by a religious act, he regards as being in the place of God, and signifying to him God's will: wherefore obedience and heroism go together.

This reasoning seems to be enforced by the history of all great nations, in the crises of their military and other public affairs. But, as is clear, the principles of religious obedience are of a different order; they are on a higher plane; and they reach much farther in time and eternity, than those of obedience elsewhere.

Here then we discern, sufficiently for present purposes, the meaning and historical location of this Institute. The members have cut themselves off from the possession of all private property, by the voluntary engagement to poverty, and thereby they have prepared the endowment, on which education will chiefly rest, – that is to say, the endowment consisting of the men to teach, and their services tendered gratis. Position and dignity are alike rendered inaccessible by an express vow of the members professed. Obedience keeps the organization mobile as a company of trained soldiers. And, if any observant mind, well acquainted with the course of human affairs, detects in these principles some reasons for success, normal, habitual, and regular, in the face of unnumbered obstacles, and of unremitting hostility, his view will be singularly corroborated when he rises to a plane higher, and regards the same principles as "religious," carrying with them the sanction of divine worship; which I should be loath to call "enthusiasm," much less "fanaticism." These sentiments are never very prudent, nor enlightened, nor cool; they are either very natural or are short-lived. A mild fever of fanaticism can scarcely produce high results; and a high fever of the same can scarcely last three hundred and fifty years, with perpetuity still threatening. But I would call this phenomenon, in its origin, religious devotion; in its consequences, a supernatural efficiency; and, taking it all in all, that which is called a grace of vocation.

On the 27th day of September, 1540, the Society of Jesus received from the See of Rome its bull of confirmation, by which it became a chartered body of the Church. While these pages were being penned, the 27th day of September came by, 1890. It was the anniversary of that foundation, three hundred and fifty years ago.