Saint Ignatius Loyola

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Chapter I

THE Founder of a mighty religious force which has poured its peaceful soldiery into every part of the world was a Basque. He was one of that strange and mysterious little people nestled under the shoulders of the Pyrenees, which seems to be among the most primitive peoples of Europe ; with other blood in its veins than that of the conquering Goth, the conquering Roman, or even (it may be) the conquered Iberian. " La Santa Casa" : House of Loyola

But Ignatius — probably the youngest of a family of eight sons and four daughters — was not' baptized Ignatius. He was named Enico or Inigo, after the canonised Abbot of Ona, near Burgos ; and himself in after years took the name Ignatius, out of homage to the martyred Bishop of Antioch. The room wherein Jesuitism and he were born is in the still standing Castle of Loyola, near the little town of Azpeitia. The year of his birth was 1491. I A

There is nothing to be told of the boy Ignatius. He had a pious mother, early dead (one surmises), for he was soon sent to a no less pious aunt, Dona Maria de Guevara, at Castilian Arevalo. Yet whatever devotional influence these two women exerted on him remained dormant ; the effective influence of those early years was that of his father. Don Beltran, indeed, is said to have taken the lad every year to the shrine of Santiago de Compostella; but, apart from a certain religiosity traditional among the Spanish nobles, he was severe and injudicious in his training of his children, and a fosterer of secular rather than religious ambitions. These had their gratification when the youth was sent to the Court of Ferdinand, where his kinsman, the Duke of Najera, Don Antonio Manriquez, took charge of his education. With that begins the story of Ignatius as we definitely know it.

It was a great, a brilliant, a corrupt epoch, fraught with possibilities of glory and peril to a youth of Spain. The old order was yielding. Throughout Europe the nations were loud with the falling ruins of feudalism, and the consolidation of absolute monarchies was ushering in the new political creation. In a mighty dust of war and revolt Christendom itself was vanishing, leaving in its stead an adjustment of States on a secular basis, to be known as " the balance of European Power.''

In the year after little Loyola's birth Columbus sailed to begin the New World. When the boy passed to the Court the day of Ferdinand and Isabella was done ; Charles V. was waiting to ascend the Spanish throne. Before he began the campaign which ended in the breach of Pamplona,

Charles had inherited the sceptre of Spain and been elected to the Empire of Germany. The great captain, Gonsalvo de Cordova, was dead ; Francis I. was King in France, singing " Souvent femme varie^^ and preparing to tilt with Charles for the supremacy of Europe. English Harry was still bluff Hal, no gospel light yet dawned from Boleyn's eyes, and many an English Queen, little dreaming that perilous dignity to come, still bore her head on her shoulders. But a thick-necked young German friar, with the Reformation in his cowl, was about to cut the tow-rope between the Teuton nations and the boat of Peter There was a Constable Bourbon who should presently halloo those revolting Teutons to the sack of Rome ; there was Cellini, a goldsmith, who should brag to have killed him there : a young Gaston de Foix was to flame athwart Italy, and leave like a modern Epaminondas — the victors weeping at Ravenna : a Bayard, last of chivalry in an unchivalric age, was to leave a name sans peur et sans reproche. And there was a young Loyola : what of him ? Why, before Cervantes came to laugh Spain's chivalry away, should he not be a Spanish Bayard, a Spanish Gaston de Foix, or indeed both in one }

Truly, why not } No man seemed better fitted for such a two-fold and exalted ambition. His youthful portraits are not contemporaneous, and must, one supposes, have been done conjecturally from his appearance in later years ; yet they impress one as being a likeness, and, aided by description, may give us some idea of the soldier who fell in the breach of Pamplona. Short, but well-knit and active, an expert in knightly exercise, with dark and glossy clustering hair and lofty

THE CHURCH OF LOYOLA forehead, he has in those portraits something of a Napoleonic countenance, but with an Augustan dehcacy of chin that fits ill with the general massiveness of the face. This trait appears in the later and more trustworthy portraits, which show also more unmistakably the considerable aquilinity of the nose. The compelling power of his eyes was memorable ; and, like Napoleon, as a youth he was a swayer of men. Trained to war, he snuffed the battle afar off ; war was his inspiration, his ambition : but no mere soldier he. The ideal of these Spaniards was like the ideal of our own Elizabethans — of all great Englishmen, till the Georges put their illiterate stamp on our public life. The hand which wielded the sword or directed the State must likewise guide the pen : to be soldier, statesman, and man of letters was held but needful equipment by the energies of that age. His uncle trained Ignatius to write as he trained him to the tourney and the camp : here was a man who would carry a town sword in hand ; and, having washed off the dust of battle, might sit down to pen a lovesonnet or a religious poem. For he wrote both, this Ignatius : a man framed for the Court or the field, for my lady's bower or my lord's council-chamber. Such a man might well, perhaps in secret, aspire to rival the great Captain and the knightly Bayard ; to drive the French from Italy, or rule as Viceroy the great dependencies of Spain. All this might seem forewritten in his destiny. The one thing no man could foresee was that he should be the fated protagonist of that Augustinian friar in turbulent Germany, a warrior against that world he found so fair and loved so well. Least of all could young Inigo himself foresee that fate.

Next to war, his ambition was for love. And he seemed made for one as for the other. The olive-

Santa Casa, Loyola, the Birthplace of Ignatius

skinned youth was not altogether as the staid, reserved Saint: that expressive countenance, the mobihty of which to the last baffled its painters, was in those days the witness of a hvely temper, swift to mirth, and accomplished, no douht, in the courtly commerce of speech. Modest of tongue, he yet stood upon the "point of honour," so dear ^o Spain, and was keen in resentment of insult, like Mercutio ; though not among the light quarrelers at whom Mercutio girded. He was no stickler for place and precedence. Generous, quick to forgive as to resent a slight, he appeased mutinies in the field at his personal risk, and was loved by his men. Like Quixote (a typical Spaniard, when all is said), he pored over chivalric romances, especially delighted by " Amadis de Gaul," and was pleased that his handsome person should go handsomely clothed. Inigo's tailor was not the least of his devotions. His was a nature not easy to be subdued to sanctity. We said advisedly that he " ambitioned " love. That " last infirmity of noble minds " is, we think, the key to Ignatius's nature. Ambition, the master-passion, had as much to do with his choice of a lady-love as any amorous sentiment, and perhaps more. She was neither countess nor duchess, but higher than either, he said in after years ; and it seems likely that she was Juana, daughter of the Queen-Dowager of Naples, who was then living at the Court of her uncle, Ferdinand of Spain. For her it was that Inigo wrote love-poems, besides those occasional religious poems, one of which has come down to us ; for her he showed his skill in joust, his fine garments and fine horsemanship ; for her, doubtless, he used that tolerable accomplishment with the brush which he is said to have possessed. For her he led armies to war. She was poetry, she was chivalry, above all, she was his ambition visible, and his ambition visible was she.

He began brilliantly. Perhaps he fought in Italy under the great captain Gonsalvo ; perhaps in Navarre under his kinsman and protector. But

Pamplona with the death of Ferdinand, the dispossessed King of Navarre poured into his domains at the head of French troops, and the War of the Comuneros began. Inigo's uncle, now Viceroy of Navarre, reinforced by the Regent (Cardinal Ximenes), marched against the French, drove them out, razed the Navarrese castles, and began fortifying Pamplona. Ifiigo marched with him, and soon had work of his own. Castilian towns were in arms, and he was detached to suppress the

9 * revolt. He stormed little Najera, on the Biscayan frontier, and entered sword in hand at the head of his forces ; with chivalrous disdain rejecting any share of the spoils his personal valour had won.

Then things grew worse. Ximenes gave place to Cardinal Adrian, and the French reinvaded Navarre. In the spring of 1521 they advanced on Pamplona, where Inigo was. The fortifications were unfinished ; the garrison was weak and its artillery weak ; the town was for surrender and the officers were for retreat. Not Inigo : he urged defence till the Duke could reinforce them. " I do not think even JEnezs worthy of admiration," cried he, " when I see him escaping from the flames that consumed his city, for to shun the common peril is the nature of cowards ; to perish in the universal ruin is the mischance of brave men. I should deem him worthy of immortal glory if he had died of his fidelity.'*

It was the temper of old heroic Spain ; but the officers probably were not imbued with " Amadis de Gaul,** and saw no profit in being a holocaust. liiigo was not in command, so they retreated, and he withdrew himself into the citadel. The commandant was more amenable to his exhortations, especially since the French pressed humiliating conditions ; and the citadel stood at bay. Inigo confessed to a brother-in-arms by whose side he had often fought, harangued the garrison in right chivalric fashion, and was the soul of a fierce fight, standing on the ramparts where the fire of the French guns concentrated. But a stone dislodged by a shot struck his left leg, the rebounding cannonball shattered the right ; and Inigo and Pamplona fell.

THK LIFE OF ST. IGNATIUS

It was May 20th, 1521 — Whit-Monday ; and the French marched into the citadel.

That was the last time he should draw the sword, though he knew it not. The French tended him with all honour for some fifteen days, and then, his wounds proving very severe, freed him without ransom. He presented to them all he had — his helmet, sword, and shield ; and was borne in a

Pamplona

litter by his brave enemies to the Castle of Loyola. There his brother, Don Martin Garcia, was lord in place of their dead father. The first thing the surgeons told him was that, to avoid a deformity, the bones must be broken again. He bore the operation with no sign save the clenched hands to show his suffering ; but fever set in, and he received the last Sacrament. On the eve of SS. Peter and Paul he declared that St. Peter (to whom he had already shown his devotion by writing a poem in his honour), appeared and promised him recovery. He grew better, the wounds healed. Then it was found that the right leg was shorter than the left, while a part of the bone protruded below the knee, which promised him a permanent limp and II a lifelong deformity. The limp was incurable, but it was possible to reopen the wound and saw off the deforming protrusion. The man of iron nerve bade them go about it at once. There was the serious consideration that he could not otherwise wear the fashionable trunk-hose ! Yet he bore the pain with his invincible fortitude. Not even then had the scientific torturers done with him. To lengthen the limb they forcibly extended it by an iron machine ; and this rack also he endured, and endured for weeks, in the cause of chivalry and ladies' love.

That was a will potent for great matters, if truly directed ; and the direction was at hand. The world is aware of the story. Wearying on his painful bed, man of action as he was (for all that poetic side which made him the Raleigh among the Saints), he asked for a chivalrous romance. There was none such in the stern Basque castle ; so they brought him a couple of pious books— the *' Life of Christ,'' by Ludolph, a monk of Saxony, and a treatise on the " Lives of the Saints." Ludolph, by the way, was a Carthusian ; and this seems to have given Ignatius a bias which caused a lasting friendship with that contemplative Order. Little such provender liked him ; but sick men and prisoners read anything, and much faithful introspection has come of being shut up with one compulsory book. So it was with young Inigo. Beginning listlessly, this new world slowly laid on him its surprise, no less than that Pacific on '' stout Cortez " in the not too accurate imagination of Keats. The contrast between his own self-seeking — with all its lofty trappings — and the God-seeking of these men, amazed and disquieted

I 2 him. With amaze grew curiosity, with curiosity interest ; and last suggested itself the leading question, pat to the ambitious nature of the man : " Why should not I do as this one or that ? *' The aspiring soldier had found his true banner, under " that sweet Captain, Jesus Christ.'* The hallowed poison did not work all at once, or unhindered. To such questioning came reactions of earthlyamatory day-dreams. He thought of his loftyplaced lady-love ; planned their next meeting, the high fantastic terms in which he would woo her, or, maybe, a lovers' private jargon, a kind of chivalric " little language," such as that of Swift and Stella.

But the delight of these imaginings left him agitated and unblessed ; while the diviner reverie ,left comfort behind. He noted the contrast, and it opened his understanding to the great test which proves whether communication and emotion be heavenly or unhcavenly. Introspection set in upon him ; the example of the Saints more and more engrossed him ; he began to account his life misspent ; and with divine enlightenment came the resolve to imitate the Saints indeed.

With such a man there could be no halting measures. It was to be a change of flags. Still a man of practical externalities, like the young Teresa he saw nothing for it but violent penance, a barefoot pilgriinagc to Jerusalem, and then a burying of himself in the Carthusian monastery of Seville. He began to keep vigils of prayer ; and, at last, in one ot these nightly watches, before an image of the Virgin, he offered himself as her Son's servant for the rest of his life. A shock seemed to quake the castle in the moment of that decisive resolution ; and, a few nights later, he beheld in a vision the Blessed Mother with her Child in her arms.

Hesitancy was past ; he had made the " grand refusal," which was equally the grand acceptance, and the whole trend of his affections changed with a swift completion possible only to a soul at once so eager and decisive. The adamantine volition which singly had nerved the faltering garrison of Pamplona, which had cut its way into rebel Najera, which had elected the fracturing bar, the saw, the rack of the surgeons, was now set Godward, and it made no stay. He cared no longer for aught without a relish of Divinity. Till he was convalescent, he occupied himself in ornately transcribing the acts of Christ and the Saints ; and this volume, in gold and vermilion and blue, was henceforth his beloved companion.

So soon as he could travel, though one foot was still Unhealed, he began his escape. His good brother doubted his purpose, and invited his confidence ; imploring him not to falsify the family's hope of him, the career before him which need not prevent personal holiness ; yet promising not to thwart his wishes, be they what they might. Ignatius (the gallant Inigo no more) perhaps distrusted the scope of this assurance, knowing the extreme nature of his plans ; at any rate, he made a reticent answer, pleading his necessity, now that he had recovered, to pay his respects to the Duke of Najero ; and his brother reluctantly allowed his departure, foreboding somewhat of the issue, though not the whole amazing sequence. This man was to illustrate the family name indeed.

With another brother and two servants, Ignatius

H

RUINS OF THK ANCIKNT CHURCH AND CLOISTERS, MON TSERRAT journeyed first towards his sister, halting for a night of prayer at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Aranzazu — " returning the visit which his heavenly Mistress had paid to him," says Mariani with Italian simplicity of sweetness. From his sister at Onate he went on to the Duke at Navarrette. There he parted from the brother and the servants, riding on alone to the shrine of Our Lady of Montserrat, perched on a Pyrenean height with a great Benedictine monastery by it. His mule was presently overtaken by another mule, bearing one of the forcibly converted Moors. The Moor, learning whither he went, began an argument in disrespect of Mary, until Ignatius, still a cavalier by instinct, as to the last he was profoundly influenced by soldatesque ideals, remained uncertain whether he ought not to ride on after that infidel, in pure knightly devoir to the Madonna. But reaching a point where the road parted, a broad and easy way leading after the Moor, while a narrow, steep and rugged path led up the hill, he threw rein and the decision on the neck of the mule. It was no fair odds against the Moor ; but the animal, like Balaam's ass, wiser than its rider, took the narrow path which led to Ignatius's — and the Moor's — salvation.

In a little town at the foot of Montserrat he bought a long sackcloth gown, a hempen girdle, and a grass sandal for his wounded foot ; with which before him on the saddle he reached the monastery. There his first business was a general confession to the hermit of St. Damas, one Juan Chanones, a Frenchman of noted sanctity. So minute was he, that it lasted three days. He disclosed also his intended method of life, and received

i6 counsel. His next procedure was no less characteristic than the fit of zeal from which the Moor so hardly escaped. With " Amadis de Gaul *' still in

Hermitage of San Damas, Montserrat

his head, he resolved to "watch his arms" at the Church of Our Lady of Montserrat. Here, then, on the eve of the Annunciation, 1522, you have our Ignatius seeking a beggar on whom he bestows his fine clothes ; then, girding himself in the sackcloth gown which symbolised his armour of poverty, he hangs up sword and dagger by Our Lady's statue, 17 c and watches through the night before the altar — now kneeling, now from much weakness leaning on his staff. Never Religious Order had such chivalric birth. For on that night, one may say, was born (though yet its Founder dreamed not of it) the Company of Jesus, the Free-Lances of the Church.

Next day, after communicating, he set forth afoot towards little Manresa. Happily for him, he met a pious lady. Dona Ines, who directed him to the Hospital of St. Lucy in Manresa, of which a widowed friend was Superior ; and thither sent him food from her own table. Not for the last time with him, as with St. Francis, did the beneficence of women play a conspicuous part. His rank was revealed to her by an emissary who overtook him from the monastery, with tidings that the unlucky beggar was arrested for stealing the clothes given him by Ignatius. *' Disguise, I see, thou art a wickedness ! '* the penitent Saint might have exclaimed with Viola ; as indeed something like it he did exclaim. At Manresa he stayed some months, tending the sick in the hospital, praying, and practising rigid austerities — a hair-shirt next his skin, an iron chain or a girdle woven of a prickly plant round his waist. Then he removed to the cave on the hill-side which has become famous as the Cave of Manresa.

Therein he went through his real interior preparation, with intervals when illness forced a temporary return to the town, that he might be tempted back to health. From the spiritual warfare of this cavern issued the memorable " Spiritual Exercises '* ; the weapon which here he forged for himself and his Society. His experience in this

i8 solitude was an epitome of the psychology of the Saints ; and it smote him all the more hardly, and came home to him the more intimately, because he was utterly without foreknowledge of the spiritual life, and fought out his fight alone, like

Cross of Tort, Manresa, with Montserrat in the Background.

Time of Ignatius

the first Fathers of the Desert. Everything was a surprise, joyful or more often terrible. He began, as begin all the Saints, with sweetness and ardent alacrity of divine service. Then came that grievous amaze which no less comes to all:

" Ah, God, alas.

How soon it came to pass

The sweetness melted from Thy barbid hook Which I so simply took ; And I lay bleeding on the bitter land. Afraid to stir against Thy least command. Yet losing all my pleasant life-blood, whence Force should have been heart's frailty to withstand." •

Coventry Patmorc.

So it was with Ignatius. As he prayed one day in the church of Villadordis, the thought came to him whether he could bear this manner of Hfe for forty years ; and though instantly repelled, it was as the toll of the alarm-bell which announced the real onset of the enemy, to which all he had yet known had been mere preparatory skirmishing. Sudden glooms now fell upon him, profound sadnesses, utter aridity; joy returned with like abruptness, again to be swallowed up in darkness. These violent oscillations took him with a dreadful amaze ; it was like the putting off of one garment and the putting on of another, he said. And the accomplished soldier, courtier, handler of the pen and the brush, was rude as a boy in matters of the spirit; each fresh phase found him unprescient, struck him as a ship is stricken and shaken by a bursting shell. He was then such a 'prentice in the spiritual life that he — the author of the " Exercises *' — for a time knew nothing but vocal prayer, and heard Mass by reading the story of the Passion — simple " spiritual reading,'' but the spiritual reading of a Saint. In these accesses of desolation all relish of prayer went from him, he had no confidence in what he had already done, and future effort seemed futile; he appeared to himself God-abandoned, like his Master on Olivet. He might have cried, in the words of the poet already quoted :

" Life is not life at all without delight, Nor has it any might ;

And better than the insentient heart and brain Is sharpest pain.**

That, too, was in store for him. His austerities brought on a swoon so persistent that he was carried from the church of Villadordis, in which he prayed, to the Dominican convent, where he lay ill. He was dying, he thought ; and, beginning to examine his conscience, the idea came to him that what he had already accomplished was enough to warrant him of Paradise. .^^ ..^~ ,^ Throughout his illness he fought these presumptuous impulses with-^J mental agony, and when he recovered he recovered to a percep-' tion of the spiritual danger through which he had come. But it

did not end with that Church of Villadordis, nb\r

illness. This new temp- ^^^^^'^

tation of spiritual pride was an intermittent but

enduring torment for two years.

Throughout his long Manresan preparation his interior sufferings were so mingled with the bodily breakdown induced by his iron self-maceration, that it is not possible to say how far they were sharpened by the very weapons he used to combat them. That, in some such form, they must needs have come, we know from the plentiful precedent of other Saints ; and from the study of physical psychology we know that they may sometimes have been intensified by physical and nervous weakness. That he learned to condemn the indiscretion of his young and inexpert ardour we also know, but the condemnation was rather because of the 'njury to his body as a beast of burden in the service of the Church and his neighbour. But be this as it may, with the end of that cruel two years, to Ignatius pale and worn, no longer the handsome

2 I cavalier, came the deadliest struggle of all. It might have been foretold : that subtle and eager intellect, turned inward on itself, could not ultimately escape the searing ordeal of scrupulosity. To minds active yet indecisive it perhaps comes early ; but even to his resolute will, when intellect so acute was conjoined with warm imagination, it must needs come at last. He had escaped (it should seem) some of the trials which beset other natures : it is noteworthy, as bearing upon our observation that his love was perhaps more ambitious and imaginative than really amative, that he does not appear to have endured those assaults which drove the tenderhearted and seraphic Assisian to his " bride of snow.'* Love is the moving force of all the Saints ; but there was perhaps more of the cherub than the seraph in Ignatius, and more yet of the sworded Michael. For him, therefore, as final and most dread test, the hot ploughshares of scrupulosity !

Advised by his confessor to write down his sins, once and for all, and there make an end, he found the vile ingenuity of the disease throve upon the remedy. After its diabolically subtle manner, it made him long that his confessor should forbid further reference to past sins (the one effective course when the sufferer's real sincerity is plain), and then taunted him with that longing as a proof of his insincerity. What use to tell the anguished Saint, " Accuse yourself only of what you clearly know to be sins," when all clear self-knowledge was helplessly befouled ? As the painter, closeporing over his picture, loses all justness of values and perspective, till subordinate colour and detail starts into distorted prominence, intense and panic-stricken self-scrutiny so forced nothings into faults,

CO

W faults into sins, slight sins into heinous sins. He communicated, and communicated with the doubt that he was eating to his own damnation. In its final effect this hideous plague brings the mind into a mere incapacity of decision, arrests all advance, perhaps drives to despair. The remedy, says Ignatius himself, is to pursue a course exactly opposite to that on which you see you are being driven. But with palsied decision this, so easy to advise, is most hard to do. Even a mind so robust, a volition so powerful as his own, could not save Ignatius from nearing the brink of despair. For the strongest will cannot act — that is the evil — if the mind cannot decide.

Again his body failed : the crisis came and the end. Again he was nursed in the Dominican convent : the scrupulous malady came upon him with paroxysmal terror, and he cried on God for relief. Instead, his eyes fell on a deep hole in his cell, and he was urged to cast himself down. There lay relief. But he cried out in immediate recoil, and resolved to lay the demon by a prolonged fast, after the example of the Fathers of the Desert. His confessor wisely interrupted the fast ; but after a period of respite the torment returned, and weary disgust impelled him to give up the contest and his ascetic life together. Once more he summoned his strength to repel the temptation and persevere. And behold, beyond hope or expectation, the battle was won, the war was ended. The thick fog of scrupulosity drew off as suddenly as it had come, and with it went his miseries. He had conquered simply by clinging and resisting to the last ; and relief had finally come, the relief of " the rhythm of life,'' not through any wisdom of

IN'n-KfOR OV rHK CHURCH AT MANRKSA, WHERK IGNATIUS PRAYKD ON ARRI\'IN(; IN THAT TOWN his own or others. It was the close of the agonising probation, the searching preparation, which had lasted for ten months in the lonely Cav^e of Manresa. Now he could deliver himself to the contemplations which came as water in a land long waterless, and meditate the going forth about his Father*s business.