Jesuits: A Multibiography 1887178058, 9781887178051

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JESUITS A MULTIBIOGRAPHY

ALSO BY JEAN LACOUTURE

De Gaulle: The Rebel 1890-1944 De Gaulle: The Ruler 1945-1970 Pierre Mendès-France François Mauriac Léon Blum André Malraux Nasser The Demigods: Charismatic Leadership in the Third World Ho Chi Minh

JESUITS A MULTIBIOGRAPHY

Jean Lacouture TRANSLATED

BY

JEREMY

LEGGATT

COUNTERPOINT WASHINGTON,

D.C.

English translation by Jeremy Leggatt and editing copyright © 1995 by Counterpoint First published in French in 1991 and 1992 by Éditions du Seuil *

under the title Jésuites: Une Multibiographie

Copyright © October 1991 and October 1992, Éditions du Seuil

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of brief quotations

embodied in critical articles and reviews. We gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint from A Pilgrim’s

Journey: The Autobiography of Ignatius ofLoyola, translated by Joseph N.

Tydenda, S.J., copyright © 1991 by The Order of St. Benedict, Inc.

Published by The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lacouture, Jean. [Jésuites. English]

Jesuits: a multibiography / Jean Lacouture; translated from the French by Jeremy Leggatt.

“A Cornelia and Michael Bessie book.” Includes bibliographical references. 1. Jesuits—History. 2. Jesuits—Biography. I. Title.

BX3706.2.L33

1995

27i’.53—dc20

95-34002

ISBN 1-887178-05-8 (alk. paper)

FIRST PRINTING

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute

Z39-48 Standard

Editorial Consultant: Norman MacAfee Designer: David Bullen A CORNELIA AND MICHAEL BESSIE BOOK

COUNTERPOINT

P.O. Box 65793 Washington, D.C. 20035-5793 Distributed by Publishers Group West

CONTENTS

Preface

vii

i.

The Vagabond and the Inquisitor

3

li.

The Scholars from Montmartre

35

in. “Perinde ac Cadaver”

75

IV.

Francis Xavier, Orientalist

98

V.

No Women Need Apply

136

vi.

The Jews and the Jesuits

161

vu.

Li Mateou, the Clock, and the Master of Heaven

177

vin.

Utopia and the Guarani Republic

227

ix.

“Expelled Like Dogs”

261

X.

Wandering in the Desert

298

xi.

The Second Company

328

Xu.

The Black Legend

348

Xin.

Incidents at Vichy

378

XIV.

Obedience and Teilhard

404

XV.

The Exorcist and the Vatican

438

XVI.

Justice and Pedro Arrupe

459

XVII.

The Third Company?

480

Chronology

499

Notes

510

Elements of a Bibliography

523

Index

531

PRepAce

This book, condensed from the two-volume work published in France in 1991 and 1992 under the collective title Jésuites: Une Multibiographie (the first volume was called Les Conquérants [The Conquerors] and the second Les Revenants [The Return] ), makes no attempt to present a history of the Company of Jesus; it aims instead to tell the story of certain individual Jesuits, arbitrarily chosen by the author. Since some chapters were relevant only to the French experience, the American publisher (my friend Michael Bessie) and I agreed that some exci­ sions and a certain amount of reshuffling would better meet the expectations of English-speaking readers. Having reached this decision, we realized that readers of this leaner version might regret the absence of certain developments explored in the French origi­ nal—in particular, the significant role played in French history by the Jesuit confessors of France’s kings. Hearing the confession of an all-powerful mon­ arch was a terrifying task. It was France’s Henry IV—a Protestant converted for political reasons to Catholicism (his adherence to the Reformed faith had dis­ qualified him from the throne) who became an ardent Catholic (although not a champion of virtue or conjugal fidelity)—who first requested a Jesuit as spiri­ tual director. Because he knew a Jesuit would turn a deaf ear to his escapades? No. His confessor was lavish with reproaches, but the royal contrition was in­ variably short-lived. Equally fleeting was the remorse of Henry’s great-grandson Louis XIV, as pi­ ous as he was addicted to extra-conjugal liaisons. This raised a problem every year when Easter Communion came around: for the King (like his subjects) could not receive the Host unless unburdened of his sins by confession. There­ fore, the King would send his current favorite “to the country,” swearing never to see her again; then, his religious duty done, he bid the fair one to return. A cynical strategy, which three successive Jesuit fathers winked at, believing that vii

excommunicating the Sun King would have provoked a schism along English lines. Indeed it poses a tantalizing historical enigma: In what ways would Euro­ pean history have changed if Louis XIV had followed Henry VIlFs example? Given the private lives led by the various kings who bore the name Louis, we must acknowledge that the conduct of their Jesuit confessors between 1603 and 1776 was of a reprehensible opportunism. But from a political point of view we cannot accept the charges that have given birth to the “Black Legend” of a calcu­ lating, Machiavellian Jesuitry. It is fairly clear, for example, that Père de La Chaize, the best known of Louis XTV’s confessors, was not involved in plotting that huge crime against the French state, the revocation in 1695 of the Edict of Nantes (which had extended protection of French law to Protestants). Revoca­ tion was foolish—stripping France of many of her best scientists, sailors, and soldiers. In fact, Père de La Chaize advised against the step. And if the Jesuits have been more or less linked to the physical liquidation of the Jansenist faction (friends of the austere Blaise Pascal and foes of the “soft” faith of the Jesuits), it was not their influence that led to the royal repression: It was Louis XTV’s con­ viction that these severe, intractable men were in spirit “Republican,” the French equivalent of Oliver Cromwell’s Puritans. Many French historians, influenced by Protestantism or Jansenism, or swayed by the anti-Jesuit writings of the great nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet, attribute to the Jesuits—whether as confessors of kings or as teachers of Europe’s ruling classes—all the misdeeds of conservatism and coun­ terrevolution. As we shall see, the charge has been fed more by legend than by fact. But twists of fate, rather than deliberate strategy, have often tied the Com­ pany to the most reactionary policies and the most conservative social groups in every country in Europe. The Jesuits thus betrayed the calling of a Society whose objective, set by its founder, had been to amass learning and discover the world “for the greater Glory of God.” In other words, to further the Enlighten­ ment. They saw themselves as pioneers, as trailblazers; and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (and again in the twentieth) they often were these things. But circumstances beyond their control, thirst for power, and attacks showered on them by “liberals” (who might have been their natural allies) sometimes made of them not the engines but the brakes of history, particularly in nine­ teenth-century Europe. The four-hundred-year evolution of the Society of Jesus, which with 25,000 members scattered around the world is now Christendom’s most powerful reli­ gious order, teaches us that in the order of human events (the only order we are concerned with here), intentions do not always shape the acts they engender or viii

PREFACE

the results that ensue—but that in God’s eyes man himself is responsible for what Christians call salvation. Because, in the final analysis, he is free.

Why did the author spend so many months resurrecting this extraordinary company of priests? Because he saw in them discoverers of worlds, of peoples, of diverse civilizations. Because he saw them as culture-gobblers, passionate enough about the human animal in all its contradictions to make of themselves “all things to all men.” Because he saw in them defeated conquerors caught in the net of a dialogue without an end, if not without finality. Man—seen in a cer­ tain light—is perhaps more than the sum of his acts. But whoever attempts, for better or worse, to harvest the most significant characteristics of the history of this Company must acknowledge the overpowering part played by initiative and striving in an enterprise that the Jesuits—ad majorent Dei gloriam—stamped upon the raw, intractable clay of life. As for the relevance of those labors to our own day, the author has observed that they update themselves spontaneously. If we agree that two of the most ur­ gent problems facing the world today are rooted first in relations between a wealthy “North” and a “South” apparently doomed to famine and anarchy; and second in the linkage of politics to religion, in the growing dominance of hu­ man affairs by priestly hierarchies, then we can safely say that the Company Ig­ natius of Loyola founded in 1540 still has much to tell us. For it has often raised its voice in both areas, justly and unjustly, at the right and the wrong times. And it has paid dearly, in Japan, China, Paraguay, Rome, Paris, and San Salvador, for monumental mistakes or for transformative acts of daring. The purpose of this book is not to seek lessons for our time from the passing centuries, from the Japan of the daimyos to the dissensions arising from rigid Jesuit obedience to the Vatican. Nevertheless, lessons have surfaced in the course of the author’s research, lessons of benefit to himself, if not necessarily to his readers. Lessons about the contribution of the Jesuits—perennially ready to acknowledge the manifold validity of diverse cultures (if not faiths)—to the art of human relations. Lessons springing from the part they played not only in the extension of spiritual freedom but also in the liquidation of tjiat most totalitar­ ian of Catholic axioms: “No salvation outside the Church.” The author will rightly be faulted for not addressing certain themes, people, and events central to the Jesuit story—such as Roberto de Nobili’s work in In­ dia, that of the Fathers in Quebec, and of Jacques Marquette on the Mississippi. Or their contribution to the blossoming of baroque art, their part in our ac­ knowledgment of Muslim spirituality, their actions in the Slavic world after 1820, their participation in attempts at reform in the Philippines, and above all their contribution to the great adventure of the worker-priests following the PREFACE

ix

Second World War. The author’s only excuse for these failings is the dispropor­ tion between his means and the vastness of his task As for the thanks traditionally offered at such tipies, the author believes he owes too much to men sworn to humility to differentiate between one and an­ other, between the novice in Avignon and the “General” in Rome. Along the way he will have confirmed that, while the Jesuits do not shrink from ostentation, as the proud façades of their churches and most of their colleges proclaim, their concern to serve the greater glory of God does not allow them to hide the darker side of their history—any more than it impels them to veil that history’s lumi­ nous passages. Jean Lacouture

jes ci ns ä cnuLriBioGRÄptJy

Tfre vägäbonö ÄNÖ Tïje IMQUISITOR A World Bursting Its Seams • In the Cannon's Mouth • A Mule Points the Way • A Cave in Manresa • The Spiritual Exercises •

Expulsion from Jerusalem • Burning to Study • The Alumbrado of Alcalá • Paris, Cradle of the Arts

himself along the banks of the Llobregat River, on the camino real from Manresa to Barcelona in northeastern Spain. He was alone. Behind him loomed the jagged organ-pipe formations of the Montserrat range, their sandstone columns rising toward heaven like so many severed stumps. Small and horribly thin, he wore a skimpy sackcloth tunic as rough as a hairshirt. One of his frail hands gripped a weighty staff. Across his shoulder hung a leather satchel. On his right foot was a rope-soled sandal. His left was bare and bloody. A strange face. A ship’s prow of a nose, sharp cheekbones, a broad forehead fringed with fiery red curls. * The eyes burned as fiercely as a forge in their deep sockets. The face, bony, lopsided, scorched-looking, was framed in a russet beard—a flint giving off wild sparks. John the Baptist splashing through the shallows of the Jordan must have aroused the same astonishment in the Hebrews as this vagabond stirred in the good folk of Catalonia whose path he crossed—much as the startled citizens of Arles, centuries later, must have watched Van Gogh shamble sun-struck and lame man pulled

■♦Traditional iconography gives him dark brown hair, but descriptions of the young Loyola at the

court of Castile speak of his “fair locks.” 3

crazed toward Saint-Rémy. Was this wild redheaded man possessed? It was a time when the wanderer, the vagabond, and the solitary wayfarer could still be

taken for the Devil. ** Iñigo López de Loyola, lame Iñigo, was hobbling to Jerusalem. In his cast-off habit, his manner borrowed from the Christianity of the Crusades, he was em­ barked on the most uncertain of journeys, bound for the Holy Sepulcher in Je­ rusalem. But his true rendezvous lay far beyond, with a humankind from which no man was excluded and in which no man was cursed, with a boundless world, and with a created being that would no longer see itself as the Creator’s mistake but as a daring project whose fulfillment would also be his own lifework—man. In short, as he limped toward what we now know as humanism, our gaunt sackcloth-clad pilgrim was leaving the Middle Ages and entering the new world of the Renaissance.

Nothing is more futile than attempting to draw a frontier between two ages. The fourteenth century had crackled with pre-Renaissance signals. The sixteenth would ring with echoes of medieval civilization. And the last decade of the fif­ teenth century, with almost everything either in exuberant flux or coming hesi­ tantly into bloom, could credibly be said to mark a threshold between the two ages. In those ten years the world grew vast, and humanity stepped to center stage. For more than ten centuries that world had been identified with Christianity, with European Christendom. Beyond were infidels, barbarians, Turks, wild beasts. Suddenly frontiers faded, swept away by the winds that drove the Span­ ish caravels westward and the Portuguese galleons south and east. Nor was it only Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and Magellan who opened up space for the denizens of the planet—Copernicus was already revealing to them that they were but passengers aboard one vessel in a numberless armada. When Iñigo de Loyola came into the world in 1491, Erasmus was twenty-five, Machiavelli twenty-two, Copernicus eighteen, Michelangelo sixteen, Thomas More eleven, and Luther had just turned seven. The very next year, along with the gold and limitless prospects of America, Columbus presented the keys of the world to the Catholic sovereigns of Spain. And perhaps the clearest signal that an era was over went up in Florence: There, the medieval execution of Savonarola at the stake closed one century but opened the way for the New Man, second chancery secretary Niccoló Machiavelli—while Erasmus, casting off his monk’s habit, settled in a Paris where Guillaume Budé was struggling to introduce the teaching of Greek. The inventors of the future were now in place. It was against this shifting backcloth that the son of the lords of Loyola now en­ tered the lists. Throughout Loyola’s life, the forces of modernity would sporad­ 4

JESUITS: A MULTIBIOGRAPHY

ically but steadily push back medieval tradition. Everything binding him to the Middle Ages—aristocratic truculence, feudal tribalism, belief based on fear— would gradually give way before the thrust of inner and outer forces, the quest for knowledge, the awareness of freedom. The urge to seize the world in both hands. And at the end of it all (but not without reservations and setbacks) the worldwide triumph of humanism. Seen in that light, this seminal life falls into exactly equal halves. The break does not coincide with the 1521 “conversion” of squire-courtier Iñigo, shattered by a war that first of all saw him limping in the footsteps of his Basque forebears and the Crusaders, launching himself into the frenzied asceticism of Catalonia and pilgrimage to Palestine. No, the break occurs on his return in 1524 from the Holy Land, when he decided, near Venice, to “study.” It was then that the un­ kempt wanderer was transformed into the student who would soon be accused of Erasmianism. It was then that the extreme acts of mortification of the vision­ ary of Manresa turned into long nights of study, into the systematic conquest of learning. It was then that God’s beggar became first a man in search of human structures and then a master of the art of the possible. Thus it was that in 1524 “his” Middle Ages were receding before the com­ bined forces of knowledge and of new social norms. Fascinated by humanism, in which he thought he had found a way of reaching “souls,” Iñigo López de Oñaz y Loyola became, perhaps despite himself, a precursor of modern times. He was thirty-three. Europe was in a fever, as if unhinged by the realization that it was no longer alone in the world but was surrounded by infinite space, by half-glimpsed empires. In this dizzying perspective it looked vainly for guid­ ance. For the Habsburg kings, through inheritance, marriage, musket-play, and colonial conquest, now saw themselves in a position to restore the Holy Roman Empire—and to their own advantage. This was of course unacceptable to the Tudors, the Valois, and the Pope (not to mention the German Protestant princes and the Turks). Once Charles V, Henry VIII, Francis I, and Julius II were all enthroned, permanent warfare ensued. It would lay the whole of Europe waste. All except for Spain, where a golden age (both figuratively and literally) now dawned. Isabella and Ferdinand presided (at least in Castile) over an order un­ rivaled in the rest of Europe. Their powerful state machinery was underwritten by the “gold of the Indies,” which filled the chests of the sovereign at Valladolid, paid his armies, manned his fleets. Victors over the Moors, conquerors of America, masters of the Low Countries, with firm footholds in Italy and Cen­ tral Europe, Their Most Catholic Majesties were on the verge of consolidating world hegemony. THE VAGABOND AND THE INQUISITOR

5

But however powerful, however wealthy, Spain * in the early sixteenth cen­ tury had its problems. Castile’s population was dwindling, and the surrounding provinces or kingdoms, Aragon, Catalonia, and Galicia, were turbulent, unsafe, and plagued by bandoleros, gangs of pillagers against whom pilgrims and travel­

ing merchants were virtually defenseless. As for Navarre and Guipúzcoa—the womb that produced the first two Jesuit saints, Loyola and Francis Xavier—they were crippled by violent inter-clan ri­ valries, while externally they were pawns in intractable feuds between the kings north and south of the Pyrenees. In those quarrels the Loyolas and the Xaviers asserted their rights and sometimes clashed by sword, with legal writ, and through seizure of Church property. Throughout this period the Catholic Church—ruled successively by a Bor­ gia (Alexander VI), a Medici (Leo X), and a Farnese (Paul III)—was a morass of iniquity. No one knew this better than the Medici Lorenzo the Magnificent of Florence, who arranged his son’s marriage to the Pope’s daughter and who (a notable expert on the matter) saw Rome as the “den of all vices.” From his jour­ ney there in 1510, Martin Luther had drawn his own well-known conclusions. And from the palaces of Rome the ecclesiastical free-for-all had radiated out to the poorest parishes of Navarre, where church positions were up for grabs, and people would kill to get one. But Spain was spared this leprosy, or at least sought its cure: not that those “Catholic” sovereigns Isabella and Ferdinand crowned their administrative achievements with an overarching sanctity. Far from it... But Spanish Cathol­ icism possessed a dignity that could not be wholly tarnished by the horrors of an Inquisition at that time bent on hunting down converts from Judaism. It might seem surprising that Spain, all innovation and native reform, did not remain the seat and springboard of the purifying mission that this youngest of the lords of Loyola was contemplating. But no! It was the Roman institu­ tion—shamelessly manipulated by simoniac pontiffs festooned with quarrel­ some bastards, greedy mistresses, and twelve-year-old cardinals—that catalyzed the energy and faith of the dozen or so adventurers who were to found the Soci­ ety of Jesus. An enigma that “men of little faith” are still trying to unravel. To dedicate yourself to the magnification of Christ’s glory was doubtless a noble endeavor. But to do so in a Rome teeming with the bullyboys and procur­ esses of the Borgias and the Medicis, and—in a sort of explosion of papalist ex­ altation—to place “the honor of God” in the hands of the purveyors of vice, to do this was to set a mysterious, baroque, almost defiant seal on the origins of this vast undertaking. *A term of convenience. “The I\vo Spains”—Aragon in the east, Castile in the west—would be

more accurate. 6

JESUITS.1 A MULTIBIOGRAPHY

But paradox has been seen time and again to lie at the very heart of the Jesuit enterprise. And Ignatius and his first companions—men ablaze like torches— sought freedom through the most provocative kind of obedience, at a time when the Protestants were placing their own rebellion at the service of predestination. The Autobiography, dictated by the founder thirty years later to Luis Gonçalvez da Cámara and written in the third person, is regally terse on the subject of his stormy youth: “Up to his twenty-sixth year * he was a man given to worldly van­ ities, and having a vain and overpowering desire to gain renown, he found spe­ cial delight in the exercise of arms.”1 Since then, historians, storytellers, and biographers have elaborated on the childhood, teens, and early manhood of the young lord of Loyola, before he became the vagabond in sackcloth limping to­ ward Jerusalem. At the end of the fifteenth century, Azpeitia—five or six leagues from Donostia (San Sebastián) and the Bidassoa River—was just a hamlet huddled at the foot of a Basque mountain, Izarraftz, overlooking the Urola Valley, a swollen stream lined with walnut, apple, and chestnut trees. A backwater, but a charm­ ing one. Here the Loyolas (whether they went by that name or the clan name of Oñaz) ruled over a small peasant population. Petty squires? No. Rather, lords of the manor, parientes mayores who—-particularly since the thirteenth century— had brilliantly and not unprofitably served the crown of Castile, weaving strong ties between Valladolid, the seat of power, and this region of Guipúzcoa, already a byword for turbulence, if not outright dissidence. The clan’s culture was Basque, its ways were unruly, its traditions violent—and its collective piety most bountiful. The last male heir and thirteenth child of Beltrán and Marina de Loyolaf was given the Basque name Eneko, which translates into Spanish as Iñigo.í It was only forty-three years later, in Paris, when he was aoout to be named bach­ elor of arts, that the youngest Loyola chose the Christian name Ignatius. His birth date has given rise to endless argument, since there were no Azpeitia par­ ish registers before 1537. In his Autobiography, he situates his “conversion”— which occurred, beyond any possible doubt, in 1521—in his twenty-sixth year. Which would indicate that he was born in 1495. But the youngest Loyola’s nurse gave the date of 1491 to emissaries of the Company, who questioned her after the founder’s death. That date is confirmed by the fact that Iñigo was able to sign *For more on this figure, see below. fThere were also apparently two or three illegitimate offspring, who were raised with their half­ brothers and sisters. tThe Basque language does not use the tilde, which, in Castilian, caps the n in Inigo.

THE VAGABOND AND THE INQUISITOR

7

legal documents at the time of his father’s death in 1507—which would have been forbidden if he had been under sixteen. By faithfully serving the crown of Castile (four of Beltrán’s sons had fought for Catholic monarchs under far-flung skies, from the Lowlands to Naples— where two of them died—to the Americas), the Loyolas had also served Ignatius well. Their self-sacrifice and loyalty earned them the royal favor. On his father’s death, Iñigo was summoned by a person of considerable substance, the Contado Mayor, or Finance Minister, of Queen Isabella. He was Don Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar, who resided in Arévalo, a small Castilian city between Valladolid, the political capital, and Salamanca, the cultural metropolis. The Velázquez family was, in fact, related on the female side to the Loyolas. By taking Iñigo under his wing, Don Juan offered an unhoped-for opportu­ nity, in the innermost corridors of power (he was the executor of Queen Isabella’s will), to a youngest son penned in by the mists of his remote native mountains. As a small child, Iñigo had been tonsured, and thereby promised to a life in the Church—like his brother Pedro, the family ne’er-do-well, who had been assured the parish of Azpeitia. The best ecclesiastical place being thus spo­ ken for and the youngest son’s vocation being highly uncertain, his mother had decided to “give” him to Velázquez, in other words to the government. A bound­ less future! Iñigo was sixteen. He was slender and short and walked with chest thrust forward. His fair locks tumbled to his shoulders. A bold gaze, a firm waist, and muscular Basque calves hardened by stalking the Pyrenean chamois. All in all, a young man destined for a great career, sword in hand, in the service of the man who controlled the regime’s exchequer. Was he already a D’Artagnan? Was he a page, as is widely believed? Sixteen was precisely the age when youthful court­ iers were dubbed “page,” a subordinate rank calling for decidedly assiduous pursuit of the ladies of the court. Could he have been a squire? It was perhaps more likely that he served as a secretary, at least during the second phase of his ten-year stay at Arévalo. And it was probably the performance of these func­ tions that gave him the calligraphic talents he would boast of to his dying day, and which would play a part in his spiritual life. Page, squire, or secretary—in any case, he was what used to be called a gay blade. Two of his closest confidants, his successor Diego Lafnez and his secretary Juan de Polanco, have left us an eloquent glimpse of those early days. “Although attached to his faith,” wrote Polanco, “he did not live his life in conformity with it, nor did he avoid sin; he was particularly given to gambling and to female mat­ ters, as well as to brawling and the exercise of arms.” And Lainez, more forth­ right, said: “He was tempted and overcome by the pitfalls of the flesh.” Swashbuckler, gambler, skirt-chaser? This russet-locked Iñigo certainly seems 8

JESUITS: A MULTIBIOGRAPHY

to have been a most disreputable character. Whenever he returned to his birth­ place from Arévalo, he “scandalized the good folk of Azpeitia with his unruly ways.” Ways that at least once took criminal form: In 1515 (when he was twentyfour), Iñigo de Loyola was charged with crimes pronounced “muy enormes... cometido... de noche y de proposito ... sobre asechanza y alevosamente” (most monstrous crimes, committed by night and by premeditation, through ambush and treachery). From the few documents available to historians, it does not seem that the court sought Inigo’s death. Was it a moral scandal, perhaps an abduction? The offense occurred during carnival. Was it a brawl over the Azpeitia position, from which his brother Pedro was impatient to expel the incumbent, a certain Juan de Anchieta? The abduction of an ecclesiastic for blackmail purposes? In any case, a “muy enorme” crime. Having received the tonsure at an early age, and conñdent in the multiple safeguards the feudal system afforded the well-born, Iñigo de Loyola fled to Pamplona, escaping the civil courts and giving himself up to Church justice— which, despite the protests of the royal authorities, released him after a short prison term. Few men have undergone such intense self-mortification as Saint Ignatius. But many others would have paid much more dearly than he did for that obscure misdeed in Azpeitia. At that point, our Iñigo may have been far from heaven, but he was close in spirit to the heroes of chivalry. In one of his confidential footnotes, the man who took down Loyola’s dictated Autobiography shows us Iñigo dreaming of the ex­ ploits he might accomplish “in the service of a certain lady [who] was byno means of the lesser nobility: neither countess nor duchess, but of even higher estate.”2 But despite what has often been written, perhaps under the influence of the Romantic movement, we must abandon the notion that the Queen herself was the object of this passion. Germaine de Foix, King Ferdinand’s second wife, was (says the chronicle) “obese and given to drink.” Iñigo’s fair lady was more prob­ ably Princess Catalina, or Catherine, sister of Charles V, whom their mother Joan the Mad (Juana la Loca) kept sequestered with her at Tordesillas. King Fer­ dinand, accompanied by Juan Velázquez and his household (to which the Loy­ ola boy belonged), often called on her. How could Iñigo not have dreamed of the captive Infante, her charms the more moving for being so rarely glimpsed? And Doña Catalina was to play a more substantial part in the life of the youngest Loyola: From the very beginning, as wife of King John III of Portugal, she would be one of the staunchest supporters of the Company of Jesus. Further proof that the ways of the Lord are inscrutable, and that worldly vanities may also serve the ends of the founders of orders.

* * * THE VAGABOND AND THE INQUISITOR

9

But everything suddenly collapsed in 1516, when Ferdinand s death stripped the all-powerful Contado Mayor of royal favor. Ferdinand’s grandson Charles, the future Emperor Charles V, did not simply replace tjie grand treasurer—he also planned to remove his Arévalo fief and give it to the late kind’s widow. Refusing to bend, his great vassal made an angry but futile attempt at rebellion. In 1517 Don Juan died, leaving his followers destitute. But his widow, Doña Maria, offered one last proof of her attachment to Iñigo, entrusting him to her cousin Don Antonio Manrique de Lara, Duke of Najéra, Viceroy of Navarre, and ac­ knowledged suzerain of the Oñaz clan. This sudden reversal of fortune must have made the strongest of impressions on the young man who, at twenty-six, was now obliged to leave Arévalo. But Iñigo apparently kept happy memories of those ten years in Castile, where he had acquired a taste for music that never faded and where he had dabbled in verse. It was also in Castile that this son of Azpeitia bumpkins had acquired “manners”—which, when he was Padre Maestro Ignacio in Rome, led a visitor to remember him as “the most courteous and the politest of men” and which gave him “a dignity eminently worthy of the court.”3 So here he was, secretary-turned-squire, in Pamplona, capital of Navarre. The refinements of courtly love, of the viola da gamba, of silk doublet and hose, were gone. Blessed or cursed with unruly subjects, the Viceroy of Navarre first and foremost required swordsmanship from his followers. Navarre had been attached to Castile only nine years earlier, and perhaps it longed for the freedom it had once enjoyed as an overlooked corner of France’s sphere of influence. In this particular year its new status suddenly came under threat. Scarcely was the future Emperor Charles V crowned King of Castile than the citizens, jealous of their local prerogatives, rose against him. Francis I of France needed no further excuse to try to undermine his Spanish rival. On May 12, 1521, thirteen thousand Franco-Navarrese troops marched up from Bidassoa and pitched camp under the battlements of Pamplona. Ordered by the Viceroy to hold the city, the garrison commander had scarcely a thou­ sand fighting men, among them Iñigo. Deciding he could not hold off his at­ tackers, he left the stronghold, followed by the eldest Loyola, Martin, who had meanwhile arrived from his village. Iñigo, ashamed at “appearing to run away,”4 took refuge in the citadel beside its commander, the alcaide (governor) Miguel de Herrera—while the townsfolk, reluctant to be caught in the crossfire be­ tween besiegers and besieged, were swearing fealty to the invading side. Herrera then proposed parleying with the French. But Iñigo de Loyola pointed out that the Viceroy might soon send reinforcements and that in any case the conditions imposed by the attackers—surrender followed by the garrison’s disciplined withdrawal—were demeaning: His advice was to fight. 10

JESUITS: A MULTIBIOGRAPHY

So the courtier-secretary-diplomat now played the role of diehard defender, a man resolved not to give an inch. He was fully aware that the struggle was hopeless: The attackers enjoyed overwhelming superiority in men and in artil­ lery pieces. But we could not mention this crucial episode in Iñigo’s life without quoting his own vivid version of the event: Thus he was in a fortress under attack by the French, and while every­ one else clearly saw that they could not defend themselves and thought that they should surrender to save their lives, he offered so many reasons to the fortress’s commander that he talked them into defending it. Though this was contrary to the opinion of all the other knights, still each drew encouragement from his firmness and fear­ lessness. When the day of the expected assault came he made his con­ fession to one of his comrades in arms and after the attack had lasted a good while, * a cannonball hit him in a leg, shattering it completely, and since the ball passed between both legs, the other one was like­ wise severely wounded.5 With his right tibia splintered and his left calf carried away, Iñigo de Loyola was supine on the battlements when the attackers entered the fortress. Perhaps because of his birth, he was shown “courtesy and kindness” by the victors. Hav­ ing cared for him on the spot as best they could for two weeks, “they trans­ ported him on a litter to his home country.”6 It is something like thirty miles from Pamplona to Azpeitia. The litter bearers took more than ten days to cover the distance, moving from pathway to pathway on steep mountainsides. Iñigo must have died a thousand deaths,t but his agony was only just beginning. When they reached the Casa y Solar he was put to bed in a big corner room on the third floor,$ where he was visited by every surgeon in the district, including his fellow Azpeitian, Martin de Iztiola. The latter was forced to conclude that despite their “courtesy,” the victors had not operated very skillfully on the wounded man—unless the hardships of the trek had spoiled their handiwork It was “agreed that the leg should be broken again and the bones reset,” Iñigo recalled, and the “butchery was repeated.”7 The word he used was carnicería, the crudest term he could find to describe the operation at a time when anesthesia was unknown. And proud of his stoicism, he added, “As in other such operations that he had undergone before and would later undergo, he never uttered a word nor did he show any sign of pain other than clenching his fists.”8 A few days later he was at death’s door. After the last rites were administered on the feast of Saint Peter, he prayed for the founding apostle’s intervention— *Six hours, it is believed. tThere is a statue commemorating the episode, and a copy outside the Casa y Solar in Azpeitia.

|Now carefully restored. THE VAGABOND AND THE INQUISITOR

11

and then attributed to the saint his sudden recovery.- But all heaven’s saints were unable to dissuade him from a further ordeal in which their role was slight in­ deed: Once his bones were reset, he realized that çne of them overlapped the other so obviously “that it made an unsightly bump. Because he was determined to make a way for himself in the world he could not tolerate such ugliness and thought it marred his appearance.” Unable to accept that he had been rendered thus “unsightly,’’unable to wear a “close-fitting and elegant boot” (as his first biographer Pedro de Ribadeneira reported), he asked his surgeons if they could not “remove it, if possible.” They told him that it could certainly be sawn away, but the pain would be greater than any he had suffered up to now, since the leg had healed and it would take some time to remove the bump. Never­ theless, he was determined to endure this martyrdom to satisfy his personal taste. His older brother was horrified and said that he him­ self would not dare undergo such pain, but the wounded man suffered it with his accustomed patience.9 The grisly operation was a success, * but his right leg remained inches shorter than the left. He would limp until the day when, in Rome, he began to wear a higher right heel. The convalescent was ordered to stay in bed. What to do? He asked his step­ sister Magdalena to find him chivalrous tales like the ones he used to read at Arévalo, such as the popular romance Amadis de Gaula. But the lords of Loyola had little taste for literature: All that could be unearthed were edifying books, a Life of Christ written by a Carthusian father, Ludolph of Saxony, and the Flos Sanctorum, or Anthology of the Saints, also known as the Golden Legend, by Jacopo da Vorágine. These works were not too far distant from the knightly extravaganzas the courtier of Arévalo had delighted in. Through the eyes of Ludolph the monk or the Italian bishop, Christ and Saint Francis, Pilate and the hermits of Sinai be­ came vivid heroes of romance embodying good and evil—the ancestors of to­ day’s comic-book heroes. Iñigo found what he sought. Cripple that he was (or as he now saw himself), what chance had he of emulating Amadis or approach­ ing Catherine? Not that he had given up dreaming of the little Castilian Infanta. The passage of the Autobiography devoted to this episode suggests that “a certain lady” con­ tinued to haunt the stricken knight, who was still so “enraptured with these thoughts of his that he never considered how impossible it was for him to ac­ complish them.” But at this point a psychic and affective shift took place—a change that his*Martin de Iztiola’s fee was thirteen ducats; but Iñigo’s eldest brother refused to pay him more than ten. 12

JESUITS: A MULTIBIOGRAPHY

torian Alain Guillermou has very rightly called a metanoia, or spiritual conver­ sion. It opened the way to the crucial Ignatian notion of “discernment of spir­ its.” From that “certain lady,” from his reading about Amadis and the apostles and Saint Dominic, a new direction, a turnabout, came over Iñigo. But heroism, prowess, spirit, growth (here of glory or honor), the wellspring of his life, re­ mained at the core of this intense interior fusion. Was this progress? Transfor­ mation? We must leave the description of this decisive journey to Iñigo himself: Thus in his thoughts he dwelt on many good deeds, always suggesting to himself great and difficult ones, but as soon as he considered doing them, they all appeared easy of performance. Throughout these thoughts he used to say to himself: “Saint Dominic did this, so I have to do it too. Saint Francis did this, so I have to do it too.” These thoughts lasted a long time, but [then] worldly ones returned to him and he dwelt on them for quite some length. This succession of such diverse thoughts—of worldly exploits that he desired to accomplish, or those of God that came to his imagination—stayed with him for a long time as he turned them over in his mind, and when he grew weary of them he set them aside to think of other matters. There was this difference, however. When he thought of worldly matters he found much delight, but after growing weary and dismiss­ ing them he found that he was dry and unhappy. But when he thought of going barefoot to Jerusalem and of eating nothing but vegetables and of imitating the saints in all the austerities they per­ formed, he not only found consolation in these thoughts but even af­ ter they had left him he remained happy and joyful. He did not consider nor did he stop to examine this difference until one day his eyes were partially opened and he began to wonder at this difference and to reflect upon it. From experience he knew that some thoughts left him sad while others made him happy, and little by little he came to perceive the different spirits that were moving him; one coming from the devil, the other coming from God.10 It all seems to be there, and said with stunning simplicity: If among these “spirits” he discerned on the one hand those born of Satan, and on the other those bom of God, it was because his musings on the hazañas mundanas left him “weary,” “dry,” “unhappy,” while thoughts of the hazañas de Dios left him “joyful” and “happy.” Whence it seems that Iñigo de Loyola, the future barefoot pilgrim, the future beggar of God, the future author of The Spiritual Exercises, turned toward the hazañas de Dios because he felt more at ease in them, more “joyful” (and the Castilian for joy, alegría, is a powerful word! ) than when he let himself dream about Princess Catherine. THE VAGABOND AND THE INQUISITOR

13

And thus we slip from the theme of pleasure in God to that of giving pleasure to God, to penance, to pain—and here the episode of the leg operation comes again to mind: "he was determined to endure this ipartyrdom to satisfy his per­ sonal taste.” Was this masochism or hedonism? We must be circumspect in our handling of such terms and such ideas. The sick man in the Casa y Solar now reached a decision around which his whole life would be built: He would journey to Jerusalem, forcing himself to “observe the fasts and to practice the discipline as any generous soul on fire with

God is accustomed to do.” On fire with God? How could he any longer doubt it, now that he saw him­ self granted a “spiritual visitation” of decisive consequences: One night, as he lay sleepless, he clearly saw the likeness of Our Lady with the Holy Child Jesus, and because of this vision he enjoyed an excess of consolation for a remarkably long time. He felt so great a loathesomeness for all his past life, especially for the deeds of the flesh [cosas de carne], that it seemed to him that all the images that had been previously imprinted on his mind were now erased. Thus from that hour until August 1553, when this is being written, he never again consented, not even in the least matter, to the motions of the flesh.11 Is this a vision to be viewed with suspicion, exacerbating as it does the hatred of self he had conceived? This is certainly not the last time we will be asking this kind of question, although we should note that—in describing a “spiritual visi­ tation” that kindled an “excess of consolation” in him—Iñigo himself had healthy doubts about the origin of the phenomenon. Was it “God’s doing”? One might think so, he soberly adds, given the “effect in him.” But he refrained from proclaiming a miracle. Simply an “interior change.” He longed to leave, to decamp for Jerusalem. But he was still too weak, his leg still too badly scarred. He therefore spent several months, proud of his calligra­ pher’s talents, copying out fragments of his readings—in which, according to Ludolph and Vorágine, Christ or the Virgin spoke—covering great quarto parchment sheets with his beautiful hand: three hundred pages, he tells us, with Jesus’words written in red and Mary’s in blue. At nightfall he contemplated sky and stars, from which he drew his “greatest consolation.” A consolation so powerful that it finally spurred him to depart, his right leg still heavily bandaged. When his brother Martin tried to prevent him from leav­ ing, to deter his younger brother from his obvious obsession with worldly re­ nunciation, he was able, as he recalls, “without departing from the truth, for he was by now very scrupulous about that, [to answer] in a way that enabled him to slip away from his brother.” Thus, as February 1522 came to an end, Iñigo said farewell to the Casa y Solar where he had so cruelly suffered and where, for 14

JESUITS: A MULTIBIOGRAPHY

Strong but still equivocal reasons, he had elected to exchange one order of chiv­ alry for another, to exchange courtly love for love of God, to exchange the am­ ple benefits of the feudal condition for poverty on the road to Jerusalem. A convert, no two ways about it. But from what to what? The courtier of Arévalo was no longer either the roustabout fleeing justice or the Infanta’s knight-errant or the lord of Najera’s squire or the indomitable defender of Pamplona. He was about to proclaim himself a pilgrim, to become first a vaga­ bond and then a hermit visionary. He had slipped his moorings and was head­ ing toward an elsewhere that he situated among “las cosas de Dios” and summed up in the single obsessive, haunting word: Jerusalem. As he rode his mule from Rioja toward Aragón he was overtaken by a Moor, also on muleback, one of those Moors who had chosen to convert in order to escape the proscriptions of 1492. He was enough of a convert to fall into conversation and hold his own on the burning question of Mary’s virginity. This “New Chris­ tian” was of an accommodating bent. He was perfectly willing to admit that the Virgin had conceived without the aid of man or the stain of sin. What stuck in his throat was the notion that having given birth she remained a virgin. You did not have to be a Moor and a brand-new Christian to find the idea puzzling. But Iñigo saw deliberate ill-will. He argued with growing vehemence, so much so that the dark-skinned skeptic took fright: Could this skeletal rider with the burning gaze, harsh voice, and imperious tones be somehow con­ nected to the Inquisition? The Moor abruptly spurred his mule forward, anx­ ious to put a healthy distance between this stormy believer and his own doubts. Iñigo was left alone to mull darkly over the dispute as his mule plodded on­ ward. He became “disturbed in soul.” How could he have allowed this infidel to doubt Our Lady’s virtue? How could he, a knight of Loyola, have permitted Mary’s honor to be thus questioned? He would have to fight for that “honor,” he decided, smite the unbeliever “with his dagger.” And he was in a position to do so, for the Moor had immediately confided his destination—a township close to the camino real, the main road that led away from the route he was taking. But could he thus—as in the past—surrender to violence? Tired of trying to figure out what would be the good thing to do, and unable to come to any definite decision, he determined on the follow­ ing, namely, to give the mule free rein and to let it go by itself to the point where the roads met. If the mule took the road to the village, he would then search out the Moor and use his dagger on him; if the mule took the highway and not the village road, he would then let the Moor go scot-free. And he did just as he decided. Our Lord brought it about that though the village was little more than twenty THE VAGABOND AND THE INQUISITOR

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or thirty paces away and the road leading to it was quite wide and in good condition, the mule chose the highway and disregarded the village road.12 K, That admirable mule, its wisdom the instrument of divine wisdom, thus saved the life of a poor Moor as inept at perceiving the virginity of Our Lord’s Mother as any run-of-the-mill Archbishop of Canterbury or rabble of Lutheran divines. And what a strange convert—to throw himself upon his mount’s judg­ ment (just as good in its way as the Holy Office’s ordeal by fire) ! Iñigo had merely exchanged one Lady for another, taking up arms for the Virgin Mary rather than the little Infanta: He was still the Basque younger son, elder brother of Cyrano’s Gascon cadets, burning with “vain and overpowering desire to gain renown.” But what strikes so deep is not so much what this story tells us about the pil­ grim of 1522. It is what it reveals of the grizzled leader who—thirty-two years later, in all his glory as confessor to the world, as “General” of both hemispheres of the planet, as the “Black Pope”—was able to tell this barbaric and delectable fable, tell of the spluttering fury of the future pilgrim, tell of the mule’s conse­ cration as God’s interpreter. If the knight of Pedrola was still a strange Chris­ tian, the General of 1555 was still a simple man. It was now, before reaching Montserrat, that he pulled on his sackcloth tunic. “It was,”he said, “of a loose weave and bristly to the touch.”Da Cámara adds that he then purchased rope-soled shoes, “of which he took just one; and this not for style but because he had one leg all tied up with a bandage and somewhat ne­ glected.” Remounting his mule, he scaled the heights of Montserrat to the Bene­ dictine monastery where the Virgen Morena, the Black Madonna, was venerated. There, shut in a cell for three days, he drew up his general confession, deliv­ ered in the strictest secrecy (as regarded his name and origins) to a French monk, Jean de Chanon, to whom he then confided his plans: abstinence, abso­ lute poverty, vow of chastity, pilgrimage to the Holy Land. And then, on March 24,1552, came the ceremony most closely attuned to the ethical and esthetic spirit of the day—the act of solemn rupture between the knight and the “vainglory” he had already denounced but continued to pursue. It was an act not of investiture but of divestiture, performed at the altar of the Black Virgin, a ceremony in which he stripped himself of all his feudal attri­ butes, hanging his remaining weapons on the chapel railings, drawing on his sackcloth tunic, and kneeling down to pray all night long, a new man. A splendid poem by Bartolomé Leonardo, “A colgar San Ignacio las armas en Montserrat,” evokes the grandeur of his gesture: Like a trophy in the temple Ignatius hung his arms Beseeching the One who so fired his blood To replace them with weapons of His own. 16

JESUITS: A MULTIBIOGRAPHY

Even so did the young Hebrew shepherd Set aside his royal trappings—for which act of loyalty He was granted the pristine stones to cast At the Philistine's haughty brow.13 Here then he stood in his primitive garb, ready for the great journey. He had intended to stop first at Barcelona. But it was not to be. Iñigo’s halting steps took him not to the port where Columbus’s caravel now slumbers but to “a town called Manresa.” There “he decided he would remain for several days in a hospi­ tal,” in order to restore vigor to his exhausted body and to care for the leg that had swollen continuously over the 190 miles he had covered between Azpeitia and Montserrat. He also wanted to “jot down a few items in the book that he guardedly carried with him and that offered him much consolation.” Strange, his sudden reference to this book. Could he have meant a notebook containing The Spiritual Exercises in embryonic form? Or a book Jean de Chanon might have given him, the Exercitario de la Vida Spiritual by the abbey’s prior, Garcia de Cisneros? This last possibility is an attractive hypothe­ sis. Of course, it calls into question the “revolutionary” originality of the founder of the Jesuits. But what inventor does not draw inspiration from some genius who has gone before? The fact is that what Iñigo had originally foreseen as a simple halt in Manresa would turn into ten long months, months that would represent an incandescent high point in his spiritual adventure, his inner revolution. Manresa was a psy­ chic upheaval for him, a journey through the flames, the womb of “Ignatianism.”He called Manresa his “Early Church.” So far we have focused consistently on Iñigo’s beginnings in the Basque squirearchy, on his ten years of subsequent growth at the court of Castile, and his later cultivation of the knightly virtues in Navarre. So far, through youthful escapades, favors received, and his own self­ imposed ordeals, Iñigo has been merely an inheritor more or less visited by grace. But at Manresa he plunged into another world, one of fury, blinding light, turmoil. There was no escape from it except in sanctity or in madness. He would be either freed from or captive of a power that called clearly to him—but from where? From now on—until the final reconquest of self—-immoderation, excess, even the “suprarational” would be his daily diet. Here is his own description of the life he now led, the life of a street dweller assailed by hallucinations: He begged alms every day. He ate no meat, nor did he drink wine, though both were offered him. On Sundays he did not fast, and if someone gave him wine, he drank it. And because he had been quite meticulous in caring for his hair, which was according to the fashion THE VAGABOND AND THE INQUISITOR

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of the day—and he had a good crop of hair—rhe decided to let it grow naturally without combing, cutting, or covering it with anything ei­ ther during the day or night. For the same, reason he let the nails of his feet and hands grow since he had also been overly neat with regard

to them. His first shelter was a cave on the banks of the Cardoner, a stream that flows through Manresa. His confessor, a Dominican, wanted him to lodge in the Do­ minican monastery or else sleep at the dingy hospital in Santa Lucia. But nei­ ther there nor elsewhere did he feel at peace: While living in this hospital it many times happened that in full day­ light he saw a form in the air near him and this form gave him much consolation because it was exceedingly beautiful. He did not under­ stand what it really was, but it somehow seemed to have the shape of a serpent and had many things that shone like eyes, but were not eyes. He received much delight and consolation from gazing upon this ob­ ject ... but when the object vanished he became disconsolate. It would be several months before he detected in this “exceedingly beautiful” thing, in this alluring many-eyed serpent, a manifestation of the “evil spirit,” which he drove away with his pilgrim’s staff “as a mark of his disdain.” In Manresa at that time was an old woman whose reputation for piety was so great that King Ferdinand had once summoned her to visit him. During his stay, Iñigo met her. “May it please my Lord Jesus Christ to appear one day before you!” she said to him. “And why should Jesus Christ appear to me?” he asked in alarm. For the ten months of his stay in Manresa, he lived through a hurricane of moral doubt, of thirst for confession, of hunger for mortification. He spent his nights in uninterrupted prayer, almost killing himself in the process. He was visited by suicidal urges which tempted him to “throw himself into a deep hole in his room which was near the place where he used to pray.” Then he would go for a whole week without eating or drinking, even though his confessor warned him against such follies. “During this time,” he later recalled, “God was dealing with him in the same way a schoolteacher deals with a child while instructing him.” A violent teacher, a harsh school, a mad child! But of these drastic times, when his mind almost foundered and his health was permanently ruined, he was willing only to retain the moments of illumination. In later years he discouraged those of his disciples bent on following him along the path of systematic mortification. The author of the Autobiography has left us full descriptions of the phenom­ ena that now assailed him from all sides. In examining those phenomena, skep­ tics will not be the only ones to ask whether they might be hallucinations brought on by self-inflicted pain and starvation. 18

JESUITS: A MULTIBIOGRAPHY

One day, as he was saying the hours of Our Lady on the monastery’s steps, his understanding was raised on high, so as to see the Most Holy Trinity under the aspect of three keys of a musical instrument, and as a result he shed many tears and sobbed so strongly that he could not control himself.... One day it was granted him to under­ stand, with great spiritual joy, the way in which God had created the world. He seemed to see a bright object with rays stemming from it, from which God made light. He neither knew how to explain these things nor did he fully remember the spiritual lights that God had then imprinted on his soul. During prayer he often, and for an extended period of time, saw with inward eyes the humanity of Christ, whose form appeared to him as a white body, neither very large nor very small; nor did he see any differentiation of members. He often saw this in Manresa; and if he were to say twenty times or forty times, he would not presume to say that he was lying.... He also saw Our Lady in similar form, with­ out differentiation of members. These things that he saw at that time fortified him and gave such great support to his faith that many times he thought to himself: if there were no Scriptures to teach us these matters of faith, he would still resolve to die for them on the basis of what he had seen.14 To die on the basis of what he had seen ... Seen? That last word of course raises many questions. Was it internal vision or external projection? And do such questions make the slightest sense? What else could these vague, shapeless, almost routine “visions” have been if not the “great support to his faith” vouch­ safed to him in his cave, a support that was then more decisive for him than the Scriptures? It was to yet another experience—this one wholly internalized—that Iñigo would attach the greatest importance: the one his biographers know as “the Cardoner revelation,” for it was on banks of this stream that the pilgrim experi­ enced his most blinding “illumination” so far. That day at the beginning of 1523—it was near the end of his time at Manresa and he had adopted a more moderate way of life, no longer wearing his sack­ cloth but “two brown-colored jackets, made of very coarse cloth, and a beret of the same material as a cap”—he decided to go and pray in the church of Saint Paul, which overlooked the Cardoner: The road followed the path of the river and he was taken up with his devotions; he sat down for a while facing the river flowing far below him. As he sat there the eyes of his understanding were opened and though he saw no vision | no que viese alguna visión] he understood THE VAGABOND AND THE INQUISITOR

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and perceived many things, numerous spiritual things as well as mat­ ters touching on faith and learning, and this was an elucidation so bright that all these things seemed new to him. He cannot expound in detail what he then understood, for they were many things, but he can state that he received such a lucidity in understanding that during the course of his entire life—now having passed his sixty-second year—if he were to gather all the helps he received from God and everything he knew, and add them together, he does not think they would add up to all that he received on that one occasion.15 Here, as we have seen, the word “lucidity” takes on strictly intellectual color­ ing. Not only because this enlightenment was tied to “no vision” but because it was as much involved with secular “learning” as with things spiritual. We are dealing here with the “intellect”—Newton watching the apple fall, Champollion deciphering the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta stone for the first time. And the foot­ note later tacked on in the Autobiography by Gonçalves da Cámara is even more explicit: “Ignatius now understood these truths with such a clarity that even though he had reflected on them in the past they were as totally new to him.” Who could fail to see here a key to the future conduct of the founder of the Company, given that this decisive moment was not simply one of “spiritual ec­ stasy” but of “intellectual understanding,” and that it fused the sacred with the profane? “Everything he knew.” The old man in Rome, near death, who indeed “knew” many things—about the century and men and God—gave most of the credit to this illumination of his “intellect.” Knowledge first—then “under­ standing.” From the storm of moral doubts, of “scruples,” to that exquisite dawn on the banks of the Cardoner, Iñigo had lived for several months more or less alone in spiritual turmoil, jostled, harried, provoked by quasi-psychiatric “shocks” and “stimuli,” prey to “motions” amounting to violent creative impulsions. The fruit of this journey through the flames was The Spiritual Exercises, his central work, the work through which, for four and a half centuries, he has participated in the lives of countless people seeking asceticism and contact with the divine. The Exercises, first written in rough Latin—the kind of Latin a minor Basque nobleman lightly brushed with the manners of the Castilian court at the turn of the sixteenth century might essay—were not the fruit of a single season. Per­ haps sketched in note form at the end of his stay at the Casa y Solar and written out in full in the last six months of the pilgrim’s pitiful sojourn in Manresa, they would be continually revised and augmented by the Padre Maestro of Rome until the end of the 1540s. The most reliable authority on the subject, Loyola’s first successor, Diego Lainez, would stress that the “substance” of the Exercises dated from Manresa. 20

JESUITS: A MULTIBIOGRAPHY

Inigo’s relationship to the Exercises was not that of an author to “his” work. He saw them as revealed, handed down by the Lord, as a prophet would. And above all, he would never propose them for “reading” but for “performing.” Neither were they a book or a “diary” or a treatise on spirituality like Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ or the rule of an order, but a practical manual. Once again, the wording is all-important. A term like “exercise”* explains a lot, as does “perform.” Everything is dedicated to action, to disciplining both behavior and intellect, and is aimed at great numbers of “exercisers.” We should note too that while in practice the founder of the Society of Jesus offered his Exercises to strangers, since he considered the manual to be self-contained, he also judged it healthier for an adviser to act as intermediary between exerciser and manual, an adviser concerned with adapting the method to individual tem­ perament and spirituality. This again was a typical way of going about things: adaptation, adjustment, the case-by-case approach. If the hermit of the Cardoner believed that his method had been inspired to him, dictated by a higher will, he also knew that it was part and parcel of him­ self, of his flesh, the reflection of his own harrowing experience. There was nothing in it that had not been first lived through, that had not first been exer­ cised upon himself. The four-week action retreat that he urged upon his neigh­ bor was something he himself had lived for nearly eleven months, and those first months had been a long and painful hallucination. There has been interminable speculation about the influences that inspired Iñigo’s method. Two are obvious: The Imitation (at that time attributed not to Thomas à Kempis but to Jean Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris) and above all the Exercitario of Garcia de Cisneros. But the latter was intended for a specific community, the Benedictines at Montserrat, and the former did not aspire to such concrete results. Nevertheless, both works underlay the thinking of our scruffy pilgrim preparing, perhaps unconsciously, to turn into the highly judicious maestro of Rome. Yes, Rome already... What is striking, among the thousand facets of this strange instrument of power that contributed so much to Loyola’s image as a “dictator of souls”—a view shared by one of his best biographers, Léon Marcuse16—was the docility, or at least the loyalty, he professed for the visible Church. Not even the cynical bacchanalia of Rome (of which he would one day be a most alert witness) could induce him to challenge the papacy—which for him remained the landmark reference, the intangible pole around which “the service of God in the vast world” must revolve.

*The Spanish word for “exercise” is ejercicio, and for “army,” ejército.

THE VAGABOND AND THE INQUISITOR

21

But Jerusalem remained his primary goal. In March 1523, having survived a painful illness that gave proof of the attachment certain residents of Manresa (such as the Ferraras and several ladies “of the first rank”) felt for him, he left the banks of the Cardoner and headed for Barcelona' There he sought sea passage,

first of all for Italy, to seek the Pope’s permission and blessing in Rome. He spoke no Italian, hardly any Latin, no Arabic. He knew two things only: that he would leave alone, and that he would embark sin bianco, without a penny, even when offered as alms, in order “to have only God as his refuge.” At length he found a captain willing to take him on board for nothing, but on con­ dition that he bring his own supply of biscuits, for otherwise the crew might fear that he would beg provisions from them. He initially refused (“so much for trust in God!”), but his confessor urged him to accept. He yielded, but only af­ ter leaving his few remaining donated coins on a bench by the sea; then he said farewell to the friends he had made during his brief stop in the great Catalan port, Inès Pascual, Isabel Rosell, and their families (we shall meet them all again), and on March 20,1523, set sail for Gaeta. We will pass rapidly over his Italian tribulations, the risks of plague, and the attempted rape (foiled by Iñigo’s lusty shouts of alarm) of two traveling com­ panions that marked his visit to Rome—a visit that drew from him only a terse mention of the blessing bestowed by Pope Adrian VI—his overland trek, village by village, to Venice, sleeping in doorways, begging ducats, and shortly thereaf­ ter giving them away. He spent one night in a field in Padua (where “Christ ap­ peared to him in the way that He usually appeared to him,” as he noted with an entirely new brand of nonchalance), and finally arrived in Venice, where he was accosted and taken home by a rich Spaniard who, not content with sheltering this visionary vagabond, introduced him to the doge, Andrea Gritti. The master of the Most Serene Republic may have been surprised at the sight of the wan­ derer, but he obtained passage for Iñigo aboard the Negrona, the “governor’s ship,” which plied the waters between the city of the Doges and Cyprus, then a Venetian colony. The day before embarking, the pilgrim fell ill. They purged him. He strug­ gled to get back on his feet. Could he leave for the Holy Land? Yes, answered the physician—“to be buried there.” But, once hauled aboard, he recovered his spir­ its, enough in any case to observe that “openly lewd and obscene behavior” took place on board: He condemned it so vehemently that the crew “considered de­ positing him on some island or another.” Nevertheless he arrived in Cyprus, where the “pilgrim ship” was waiting at dockside; once again he took aboard with him nothing “except his confidence in God.” That confidence was repaid in the course of the crossing by new apparitions, including “a large round object, as though it were of gold.” 22

JESUITS: A MULTIBIOGRAPHY

In Jaffa, the inwardly absorbed Iñigo had not a word to say about the cultural shock he must assuredly have felt. Nor had he much to say about his first sight of Jerusalem: “When the Pilgrim did see the city, he experienced great consola­ tion, and — a joy that did not seem natural.” Once again, only abstract words, “consolation,” “joy.” Did he possess eyes for seeing these overwhelming won­ ders? Did his “external” eyes really see nothing of the city’s honey-colored cren­ elated battlements, seemingly designed less for war than for framing and tempering the light of Jerusalem? Nothing of the lovely Romanesque façade of Saint Anne’s, nothing of Mount Carmel? Nor was he more forthcoming about the Turkish masters of Palestine—ra­ pacious and menacing, indeed unbear