The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [169]
These innovations flowed from the Jesuit emphasis on learning, the importance of which Ignatius understood from his own life, and ingenuity. Added to this was the Jesuit “indifference” to incidentals and their desire to try something new.
Ingenuity also means flexibility and adaptability: what works well in one place may not in another. Ignatius grew his hair long as a way of trying to be more ascetical. When he saw that this had little to do with his spiritual progress, he cut it. Ricci, on the other hand, realized that in order to be accepted at all, he would have to grow his hair. Ignatian flexibility can be a component for success in the modern workplace, too.
But of all the stories of Jesuit ingenuity, the one that delights me most is the largely forgotten history of Jesuit theater.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Jesuit priests and brothers were well known throughout all of Europe for their expertise in producing immensely popular plays, mainly through their schools, which in many towns were the leading civic and cultural institutions. The Catholic Encyclopedia, for example, estimates that between 1650 and 1700 roughly one hundred thousand productions of Jesuit plays took place, some often staged for royal visits. In 1574 one play performed in Munich transformed almost the entire town into an elaborate backdrop, with one thousand actors taking part. At a performance in seventeenth-century Vienna, the audience was so vast that police from neighboring towns had to be called to keep the surging crowds in check.
What distinguished the Jesuit theatrical productions was their ingenuity: the creative use of scenery and staging, including intricately designed backdrops, realistic props, and complicated mechanical devices. René Fülöp-Miller in The Power and Secret of the Jesuits, writes:
On every conceivable occasion, the Jesuit producers made divinities appear in the clouds, ghosts rise up and eagles fly over the heavens, and the effect of these stage tricks was further enhanced by machines producing thunder and the noise of winds. They even found ways and means of reproducing with a high degree of technical perfection the crossing of the Red Sea by the Israelites, storms at sea, and similar difficult scenes.
For added measure, Jesuits either invented or perfected the screen known as the scrim, a modern-day theatrical mainstay, as well as the trap door. (The next time you see someone disappear through a trap door, remember Jesuit ingenuity!)
Lowney’s third quality of heroic leadership is love. “Leaders face the world with a confident, healthy sense of themselves as endowed with talent, dignity, and the potential to lead. They find exactly these same attributes in others and passionately commit to honoring and unlocking the potential they find in themselves and in others. They create environments bound and energized by loyalty, affection, and mutual support.” Lowney contrasts the way of Ignatius with that of his near contemporary, Niccolò Machiavelli, who counseled that “to be feared is safer than to be loved.”
The clearest indication of this comes from Ignatius’s instructions for the director of novices, often called the most important man in the province. The person must be not simply a man who can give young Jesuits “loving admonition,” but—most striking—someone whom all the novices “may love” and to whom they may “open themselves in confidence.” At the very beginning of Jesuit training, Ignatius wishes to instill a sense of love to engender the confidence needed to help young men progress.
How different this was from my own experience in the working world. Occasionally it seemed that it was precisely the angry, mean-spirited, and foul-mouthed people who rose to the top. (My workplace was by no means normative: most people in the working world