The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [6]
For Iñigo this was a time of learning about the spiritual life. In a touching analogy, he wrote, “God treated him at the time as a schoolmaster treats a child whom he is teaching.”
One day, walking on the banks of the nearby Cardoner River, deep in prayer, Iñigo experienced a mystical sense of union with God. The passage in his autobiography describing this pivotal experience deserves to be quoted in full.
As he went along, occupied with his devotions, he sat down for a little while with his face toward the river which was running deep. While he was seated there, the eyes of his understanding began to be opened; though he did not see any vision, he understood and knew many things, both spiritual things and matters of faith and of learning, and this was with so great an enlightenment that everything seemed new to him.
The details that he understood then, though there were many, he cannot set forth, except that he experienced a great clarity in his understanding. This was such that in the whole course of his life, through sixty-two years, even if he gathered up all the many helps he had had from God and all the many things he knew and added them together, he does not think they would amount to as much as he received at that one time.
The time in Manresa formed him anew. It also helped to form the ideas that would one day be collected in The Spiritual Exercises. He began to “note some things in his book; this he carried along carefully, and he was greatly consoled by it.”
After several false starts, including a pilgrimage to the Holy Land (where he found it impossible to receive official permission to work), Iñigo decided that he could best serve the church with an education and by being an ordained priest. So the proud swashbuckler recommenced his education at two Spanish universities, after dutifully enrolling in lower-level classes with young boys, studying remedial Latin. Eventually, he made his way to the University of Paris, where he begged alms to support himself.
While in Paris he gathered around him several new friends who would become the original “companions,” or first Jesuits. These included men like Francisco Javier, later known as the great missionary St. Francis Xavier. In 1534 Iñigo and six friends bound themselves together with a communal vow of poverty and chastity.
In time, Ignatius (as he now called himself, mistakenly thinking that Iñigo was a variant of this Latin name) decided that his little group could do more good if they received approval from the pope. Already they were showing their “detachment.” They would do whatever the pope felt was best, since he presumably had a better idea of where they could do the most good.
Ultimately, Ignatius and his companions asked the pope for formal approval to start a new religious order, the Compañia de Jesús, or the Society of Jesus. They had a tough time winning approval. As early as 1526, when Ignatius was studying in the Spanish town of Alcalá, his new ideas on prayer attracted suspicion, and he was thrown in jail by the Inquisition. “He was in prison for seventeen days without being examined or knowing the reason for it,” he wrote.
The notion of being “contemplatives in action” also struck many in the Vatican as nearly heretical. Some prominent clerics believed that members of religious orders should be cloistered behind monastery walls, like the Cistercians or Carmelites, or at least lead a life removed from the “follies of the world,” like the Franciscans. That a member of a religious order would be “in the world,” without gathering for prayer every few hours, was shocking. But Ignatius stood firm: his men were to be contemplatives in action, leading others to find God in all things.
Some found even their name arrogant. Who were these unknown men to claim that they were the Society of Jesus? The name “Jesuit” was initially applied derisively soon after the founding of the Order, but it was eventually taken up as a badge of honor.