Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World (6 page)

They never made it to Jerusalem. In 1534 they gathered in Venice to wait for a ship to the Holy Land, but were stranded due to a lack of funds and the war between Charles V and the Ottoman sultan. As they waited, Ignatius’s band spent their time preaching the word of God and serving the poor, sick, and dying in Venice and nearby towns. By 1539, with hopes for the journey fading, they decided to formalize their association by establishing a new religious order, one dedicated to serving the Church and the Pope in any corner of the world. The Society, as Ignatius announced in his petition to the Pope, would be open to “whoever desires to serve as a soldier of God beneath the banner of the cross.” It would be the Pope’s own army.

THE CHILDREN OF IGNATIUS

It took almost a year, but Paul III did ultimately approve the Society of Jesus. Showing his doubts, he limited the number of the new order to a mere sixty, but the restriction was soon repealed as the order grew and prospered. Indeed, the early growth of the Society of Jesus was nothing less than spectacular. Only ten men, all close intimates, elected Ignatius as the Society’s first general in 1540. But by the time of the founder’s death in 1556, the ranks of the order had grown a hundredfold, to one thousand. A decade later the Society comprised thirty-five hundred members, and at the death of General Acquaviva in 1615, no fewer than thirteen thousand men had taken Jesuit orders. Thereafter, the Society’s growth was still impressive, if somewhat slower, reaching twenty thousand at the turn of the eighteenth century. Through it all, the Society never compromised on the quality of the new recruits in order to expand its numbers. From the beginning, Ignatius had insisted that all candidates be rigorously screened before being accepted as novices in the Society. For those accepted, the road from novice to full membership was long and arduous, lasting years and sometimes even decades. The Jesuits never relaxed these standards, even though no other religious order required anything remotely as demanding. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the Jesuits never lacked for volunteers of the highest social and intellectual caliber.

Many of the Society’s early leaders came from ancient and noble families, as had Ignatius himself and his companion from the Sorbonne Francis Xavier (1506–52). The order’s third general, Francis Borgia (1510–72) had been Duke of Gandia in Castile before taking orders (as well as great-grandson of the notorious “Borgia Pope,” Alexander VI), and Claudio Acquaviva was the son of the Duke of Arti in the Kingdom of Naples. Other Jesuits came from humbler origins, but distinguished themselves as the outstanding intellectuals of the age. Such, for example, were the Spanish theologians Francisco de Toledo (1532–96) and Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), and the Venetian Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621). Christopher Clavius (1538–1612), Gregory St. Vincent (1584–1667), and André Tacquet (1612–60) were leading mathematicians; Christoph Grienberger (1561–1636) and Christoph Scheiner (1573–1650), prominent astronomers; and Athanasius Kircher (1601–80) and Roger Boscovich (1711–87), trendsetting natural philosophers. And no list of prominent Jesuits can leave out the brilliant Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), who traveled to China to spread the word of God and became a leading scholar and exponent of Western learning at the Ming imperial court. This is only a small sample, but it is enough to justify the assessment of the French philosopher and essayist Michel de Montaigne, who visited the Jesuits in their Roman headquarters in 1581. He called the order “a nursery of great men.”

The Jesuits, however, were far more than an association of impressive individuals. They were a highly trained and disciplined collective, honed into a powerful instrument in a single-minded quest: to spread the teachings of the Catholic Church, expand its reach, and bolster its authority. This was the case from the beginning, when Ignatius and his band of followers first offered to serve the Pope in any corner of the world, imagining themselves preaching the word of God to Muslims in the Holy Land. Although that mission never materialized, it was not long before the Jesuits distinguished themselves with outstanding missionary work on four continents. Already in 1541, Francis Xavier set out from Portugal on a mission that would take him to Goa in India, Java, the Moluccas, and Japan, preaching the Gospel and setting up missions wherever he went. He died in 1552 while awaiting transport to China, where he hoped to convert the most populous nation in the world to the Roman faith. Other Jesuits, meanwhile, traveled to Mexico, Peru, and Brazil, where they joined with Dominican and Franciscan friars in their efforts to Christianize the New World. They worked zealously and efficiently, established residences and missions, cared for the souls of the new settlers, and worked tirelessly to convert the native people of the Americas.

Nevertheless, the crucial impact of the Jesuits lay in dealing with heathens much closer to home. For, in the turbulent years of the Reformation, when the very survival of the old Church hung in the balance, the Jesuits became the elite vanguard of Roman Catholicism, dedicated to holding the line against a Protestant tide that appeared to carry all before it. With remarkable skill, dedication, and an energetic, enterprising spirit, they led a stunning Catholic resurgence that not only halted the spread of the Reformation but won back for the Pope many territories that had seemed lost forever. They were just as Ignatius had imagined them: God’s own army battling His enemies, leading a movement of Catholic revival that became known as the Counter-Reformation.

It was the vision of their founder that made the Jesuits so formidable an instrument in the service of the Pope. Already in
The Spiritual Exercises
of 1522—nearly two decades before the Society’s official formation—Ignatius demonstrated the inner paradox that would shape the Jesuits for centuries. In the first instance, the
Exercises
is a mystical text, intended to elevate readers above their worldly surroundings and bring them to an ecstatic union with God. The history of the medieval Church is rife with charismatic mystics who, like Ignatius, had visions of Christ and the Virgin and who ascended to a higher, and even divine, plane of existence. In their writing, mystics such as Joachim of Fiore and Catherine of Siena attempted to share something of their experience with their followers, and in that regard Ignatius’s tract was quite typical.

But the
Exercises
is something else as well: a carefully detailed practical manual on how to achieve union with God. The prescribed course of meditation is divided into four “weeks,” though they need not correspond precisely to seven days. Each week’s meditations have a different focus, from the nature of sin and the torments of hell in the first week to the sufferings of Christ and the Resurrection in the fourth. The “exercitant” must follow these directions precisely, with an open heart and a will to renounce selfishness and accept God’s proffered grace. The road to God, as mapped out in the
Exercises
, is not a single mysterious leap from our fallen world to godly heavens, explainable only through divine grace. It is, rather, a long and arduous journey requiring discipline, dedication, unquestioning trust in the guidance of one’s superiors, and strict obedience to their directions.

The tension between ecstatic mysticism and rigorous discipline, the core of the
Exercises
, makes it profoundly different from other mystical texts, which focus on the glory of union with God but offer no road map for how to achieve it. And it is precisely this paradox that animated the Society of Jesus and made it the powerful and effective tool that it was in the hands of the Papacy. For the Jesuits were unequivocally mystics: each novice entering the Society went through the course of
The Spiritual Exercises
and experienced the blissful union with God that is its culmination. Thereafter he would act with the unquestioning confidence that is the province of those who encountered God and knew what He wanted of them. But whereas traditional mystics were led to a life of solitude and inner contemplation, the Jesuits projected their inner confidence onto the world, proceeding with discipline, order, and endurance. The result was that the Jesuits presented a unique combination of traits that made them into one of the most effective organizations, religious and otherwise, in the history of the world: the zeal and certainty of the mystic, and the rigid organization and focused purpose of an elite military unit.

In addition to establishing the order’s guiding principles, Ignatius also put in place the mechanisms that would turn those principles into reality. The greatest challenge, he recognized, was to create a body of men who would be unquestioningly committed to the Society and its goals, and willing to dedicate their entire lives to both. Even a brilliant and highly moral individual might be rejected if the selection committee determined that he was overly individualistic and therefore unsuited to life in a disciplined collective. Once admitted, a young man was separated from his former life and underwent a two-year novitiate in which he was inculcated with the Society’s ideals of poverty and service. He would practice the complete sequence of
The Spiritual Exercises
and serve in the Society’s far-flung missions, colleges, and residences. Above all, he was required to accept without question the authority of his superiors, and to follow their directions in things large and small.

At the end of the two years, the novices took the monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. For those who were not expected to be ordained as priests, this was the end of their formal training. They would become “approved coadjutors” and, years later, “formed coadjutors,” serving perhaps as administrators, cooks, or gardeners, full members of the Society but of a lower grade than their ordained brethren. Novices destined for the priesthood, however, would become “scholastics,” undertaking years of advanced studies in Jesuit institutions. Along the way, they would be ordained as priests, and would also take several years off from their studies to teach incoming students. Once they completed their studies, the scholastics would go through another year of “spiritual formation,” at the end of which they would pronounce their final vows. Some would once again pronounce the three traditional vows and become “spiritual coadjutors.” But those judged the most outstanding in both learning and character would add a fourth vow, unique to the Jesuits, professing absolute personal obedience to the Pope. These men were known as the “professed,” and formed the order’s unchallenged elite. Overall, this long process, lasting between eight and fourteen years, produced the kind of individuals Ignatius had envisioned: intelligent, energetic, and disciplined. Together they were a tight-knit brotherhood, bound by deep identification with the goals of the Society, a strong sense of camaraderie, and pride in belonging to an elite corps in the service of Christ and the Church.

The Jesuits, however, were not just a brotherhood of affection and solidarity; they were also a strictly organized top-down hierarchy, built to operate as smoothly and efficiently as a modern military unit. At the apex was the superior general, invariably a professed member, elected for life by the order’s general congregation. His powers within the order were unlimited, and he was free to appoint or dismiss any Jesuit from any position within the order. Below him were the provincial superiors, responsible for the Society’s work in large territorial “provinces,” such as the upper and lower Rhine in Germany, or Brazil in the New World; and below them were the local superiors, responsible for particular regions or cities, right down to individual colleges and residences. Unlike other religious orders, where local communities enjoyed considerable autonomy and could pick their own leaders, power among the Jesuits flowed strictly from top to bottom: it was the superior general in Rome, not the local members, who appointed the provincial superiors, and they in turn, in close consultation with Rome, appointed the local superiors. The members of each local community were expected to accept these decisions whether they liked them or not, and with very rare exceptions, they did.

The willingness of local Jesuits to submit to the edicts of faraway superiors requires some explanation. After all, the superior general in Rome, capable and dedicated though he was, was often quite ignorant of local conditions, and his directives could be misguided, and even disastrous. Such, for example, was the experience of the French Jesuits in 1594, when they were required to swear allegiance to Henri IV, the new king of France, who had recently converted to Catholicism. The superior general Claudio Acquaviva strictly forbade the Jesuits from taking such an oath, a decision that resulted in their expulsion from Paris and very nearly the end of their activities in France. But even in such extreme situations, when they knew full well that the directions from Rome were misguided and based on a flawed understanding of local conditions, and even when they themselves had to pay the price for their superiors’ blunders, the Jesuits obeyed.

The reason was that, for the Jesuits, the principle of “obedience” was not just a practical concession to the requirements of efficient action, but a religious ideal of the highest order. “With all judgment of our own put aside, we ought … to be obedient to the true Spouse of Christ our Lord, which is our Holy Mother the hierarchical Church,” wrote Ignatius in
The Spiritual Exercises
. This obedience extends not only to actions, but also to opinions and even sense perceptions. “To keep ourselves right in all things,” Ignatius wrote, “we ought to hold fast to this principle: What I see as white I will believe to be black if the hierarchical Church thus determines it.”

Modern readers might understandably associate such absolute obedience to a ruling hierarchy with the totalitarian regimes that have darkened the history of the twentieth century. Indeed, the requirement that one see white as black if so ordered brings to mind George Orwell’s
1984
, in which Winston is required to see four fingers as five in order to prove his loyalty to Big Brother. But there is an important difference: Winston, in
1984
, is being tortured, and is forced to accept Big Brother’s supremacy against his will. To the Jesuits, obedience was a high ideal, and its attainment entirely voluntary. Obeying a superior’s order, Ignatius wrote, was not an act of abject submission, but a positive reaffirmation of the Society’s mission and one’s role within it. It followed that although disciplinary measures such as reprimands and even expulsion did exist in the Society of Jesus, they were rarely used in practice. Those who had undergone the rigorous training regimen to become formed Jesuits rarely required such measures to remind them of the value of obedience. Ultimately, Ignatius wrote, “all authority is derived from God,” and consequently, obeying the commands of a superior should be immediate and willing, “as if it were coming from Christ our Savior.”