ST. IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA.*

BY WILLIAM BARRY, D D.

ISTORY, like traveling, when pursued in a serious. temper, has one great advantage-it compels us to view things in a fresh light, putting off the old and encrusted ideas by which we may have measured the world too rigorously. In the reading of the present paper, this contemplation of facts from an unusual centre will, perhaps, mean for some no slight effort of imagination. How shall we make it a success ? I think in this way. Let us forget that we are English and Northern, nearly four hundred years distant from the persons and the incidents which we desire to study. Throwing ourselves into the situation as though it were a play, let us imagine that we are Spaniards of the period between those world-marking events, the conquest of Granada, discovery of America, uprise of Luther and Protestantism, on one side, and the Council of Trent, revolt of the Netherlands, execution of Mary Stuart, and defeat of the Armada, on the other. From 1492 until 1588 gives a setting or framework to our canvas. It is the most momentous of all the centuries since Rome fell. On its two great hinges of gold and iron, the Renaissance and the Reformation, history has been turning down to this day; nor do we perceive any new principles that are likely to absorb those which were then set in motion. The Renaissance, which aimed at a true knowledge of man and man's works; the Reformation, which was a reading of God's will upon lines. interpreted by the individual judgment. What is the relation between these methods and what the outcome? That is one problem. A second, no less formidable, should inquire the relation between both of these movements and the Tradition of the Church, or the Middle Age, or Catholicism-in a single word, Rome. Were those questions resolved, we should know what modern history signifies.

*Lecture delivered August 19, 1905, in Examination Schools, Oxford, by request of the University Delegates for Summer-Session.

We approach them here from the Catholic point of sight. And we choose a hero round about whose flag the battle has raged without ceasing; whose name is a byword to his enemies, while it has been canonized in his Church; and whose achievement, the Company of Jesus, stands pre-eminent among the religious orders which the last six hundred years have brought forth. St. Ignatius of Loyola founded the Jesuits. How much is contained in that one sentence. It was an enterprise not less daring nor, in many respects, less novel than Luther attempted when he broke with medieval Christendcm, or Calvin when he became the father of Protestant theology. Ignatius, too, has profoundly influenced the government of his Church, her schools, missions, clergy, literature, divinity, and external action. He has been the chief Catholic leader, almost without a second, since the Fathers of Trent recognized his Militia of the Holy War. Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Ignatius tower above the sixteenth century as types, singular each one of them and characteristic, but summing up tendencies that had long been active in the nations of the West and in these representatives were embodied. Their biography thus turns out to be the history of their own times Let us, then, consider Ignatius as the figure-head and motive-power of what has been described in English and German writings as the Catholic Reaction.

Don Iñigo Lopez de Recalde was, it appears, the youngest son in a family of thirteen, and was born at the Castle of Loyola, in a beautiful Pyrenean district, Guipuzcon, during the year 1491. The race to which he belonged was not merely Spanish; in its veins ran the ancient blood of the Basques, independent from time beyond reckoning; and these hills were the retreat of Christians when the rest of Spain had been seized by the Moors. Three times had the Berbers from across the Straits conquered that unhappy land. The question whether Europe should acknowledge Jesus or Mohammed was decided over the mountains between Toulouse and Tours by Charles of the Hammer, in 732; but it had taken seven hundred and eighty years to roll back the tide of Islam-to plant the cross on Toledo, Seville, Cordova, Granada; to unite the petty Christian kingdoms into Aragon and Castile, to create a sense of national unity. Religion had of necessity grown to be a perpetual crusade. Monks were soldiers, and soldiers were monks.

The military orders, Santiago of Compostella, Calatrava, Alcantara, founded on the pattern of Templars or Hospitallers, took their solemn vows derived from the cloister, had a blessing given them by St. Bernard or St. Dominic, and went out to conquer for Christ's crown and kingdom. After the Albigensian struggles, the Inquisition was set up (about 1233) at Barcelona; in 1481 at Seville. It bore hard upon heretics, secret Judaizers, Moorish pretended converts, whom the people detested as not only traitors to the faith, but as a standing danger to the public interest. Spain, it should be remembered, was always in a state of siege. Our free and open maxims of trade and intercourse would have been as little comprehended by its rulers or their subjects as we understand the never-sleeping suspicion that centuries of guerilla warfare had made an instinct with all who lived by it-Moor and Catholic, Jew and Gypsy, soldier, citizen, merchant, hidalgo, priest. Suspicion in peace, heroism in war! The kings of Aragon fight desperately; but they are politic and wary in negotiation; the kings of Castile are the "Catholic" and the "Wise"; Eastern courage, Eastern cunning, learned from their very foes, and the Arab reserve, touch with colors not familiar to us a fine nature, brilliant, chivalrous, hardy, temperate, yet headlong and cruel, in which poetry turns to action, and life is a knightly adventure, a religious quest.

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Such were the ancestors to whom Ignatius owed his remarkable qualities, making him singular among the French at Paris where he studied, and a puzzle to the downright but sober Englishman. He could not choose but be a knight-errant, a soldier in any case, if not also monk or priest. One more feature should be added. The longing to recover Jerusalem, which governments of the sixteenth was yet an inspiration for youthful French-English wars, to Wars of the valries, the Grand Turk was triumphant by sea and land— galleys manned by Christian slaves infested the Mediterranean; a buccaneer like Barbarossa could defeat Charles V. and winter in Toulon Harbor; Otranto and Salerno were captured by the Moslems; and Pius V. did not break the maritime forces of Islam at Lepanto till fifteen years after Ignatius had quitted the scene, in 1571.

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A page at the Court of Ferdinand, practised in arms, arts,

and good manners, but no great scholar, campaigning we know not where, devoted to some royal lady, the youth hears of wonderful discoveries over sea, of Columbus and Cortes, while Spain is the foremost power in Christendom. His sovereign, Charles V., is Roman Emperor, holds Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, will by and by take Francis I. prisoner at Pavia, but is always marching to fight these French who cannot be put down. Battles and sieges are the order of the day. In the campaign of 1521, where a lad named Francis Xavier is on the French side skirmishing, Ignatius does notable deeds at Pampeluna, but on May 20 gets wounded in both legs, undergoes frightful operations, is lamed for life, carried in a litter to his father's castle at Loyola, and rises from his bed of sickness a changed man. He had been given to read during convalescence the Life of Christ, by Ludolph the Saxon-a devout and beautiful work-and the Legends of the Saints, written in romance. They kindled in him a violent enthusiasm. St. Francis and St. Dominic, the Fathers of the Desert, seemed to challenge his great spirit; "These and those did such amazing acts for their Lord; why not I?" Amid his pious thoughts were mingled reminiscences from Amadis de Gaul and the other tales of chivalry. The crusader in Ignatius awoke. He dreamt of conquering a kingdom for Christ. But he was only an ignorant soldier. He must begin by conquering himself. So he set out on his memorable journey to Monserrat near Barcelona, wearing his rich attire. On the eve of the Annunciation, March 24, 1522, he exchanged his knightly raiment with a beggar; put on a sackcloth gown; suspended sword and dagger beside our Lady's shrine, and after keeping watch that night, as for a heavenly dedication, proceeded next morning to Manresa, which from his abode there was to acquire lasting fame.

Almost a whole year, until February, 1523, Ignatius passed in the cave which he had found amid these rocks, alone, subject to frightful austerities, temptations, faintings, changes of light and dark. He was caught up in the spirit and saw visions, the fruit of which was an immense enlargement of intellect, a more determined plan, and the volume known to all Catholics as the Spiritual Exercises. This book, written in the solitude of Manresa, lays no claim to be a literary production. Its name, but hardly its substance, reminds scholars

of another work, the Exercise of the Spiritual Life, by Cisneros, the Benedictine Abbot of Monserrat. My copy is dated 1555; but the Tractate of 1500 had probably fallen under the eyes of Ignatius, and may have suggested his title. There can be no doubt that the governing ideas to which he gives expression in a way most original, had long been present in his mind-the conquest of self for God, and of our fellowmen to Jesus. Those meditations, called by him the Two Standards of the Kingdom of Christ, contain all that Ignatius proposed to do and the motives upon which he acted till his dying hour. There is nothing which exactly resembles them in previous ascetical literature. The Exercises are not simply to be read. They must be "given" by a director, and "taken" by the recruit, under conditions of retirement, silence, prayer, and self-denial; and in view of resolutions to be founded on Christian good sense with supernatural aid. In their pages we learn the secret of the Ignatian system. It has no other. Loyola (as strangers call him) lived and died by this Rule. Every member of his Company is drilled every year in it, from the novice to the general. It is the text on which missions and retreats are conducted; guidance along the paths of religion follows it as a road-book; it was the first (in a Latin version) of the innumerable volumes printed by Jesuit authors; and it has never been superseded in its own kind. The Constitutions of the Society do but put its principles to the touch by Laws answering to them. Take away the Exercises and the Company of Jesus would be annihilated by the same stroke.

Hence all attempts to explain the life of the Founder himself, or the chequered story of his Institution, which leave out the Exercises, or subordinate them to alleged Monita_Secreta,* or imply that his successors in the generalship, especially Acquaviva, brought a policy forward which amounted to revolution, must certainly fail. It may be questioned if any Order has kept more closely than the Jesuits to the idea from which they started; and that idea, whole and entire, was consigned

* Dr. William Moeller, formerly Professor of Church History at Kiel (a Lutheran), writes: The Monita Privata, Soc. J., which appeared in 1612 (called Monita Secreta in a later recension), is a satire on the Order, written by the ex-Jesuit, Hieron-Zaorowski'' (III., 233, E. Tr.) An account of it is given by Reusch in Vol. II. of his great German work on the Index. All scholars have agreed in the view stated by Moëller; but the pamphlet has been extensively translated and reprinted, as though a genuine Rule of the Society.