History of the Society of Jesus

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St. Ignatius Loyola

Taken from " The jesuits"

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 By Reverend Alban Goodier S.J.

Archbishop of Hierapolis

In the midst of the age of transition and adventure, in 1491, was born

Inigo Loyola, the youngest son of a noble family of Guipuzcoa, in the

Basque provinces of the kingdom of Castile. His father, Don Bertran Yafiez

de Ofiez y Loyola, was like other nobles of his time, a master in his own

domain; as he was within striking distance of Navarre, the quarrels

connected with that province could not but have affected him. There was a

large family of thirteen children; the brothers of Inigo, eight in number,

all followed the career of arms. At first it seems to have been thought

that the youngest, according to a custom not too uncommon, might find for

himself a career in the Church. But he soon rebelled; and instead was

entrusted to the care of Juan Velasquez de Cuellar, a friend of the Loyola

family, and an official of the Royal Treasury under Ferdinand and Isabella.

This friend had undertaken to make a career for the boy; obviously

therefore it was not for military affairs but affairs of state that from

the first he was destined and trained.

Inigo lived with this patron, partly at Arevalo, partly at court, until he

was twenty-six years of age. During all this time we are expressly told

that there was nothing to distinguish him from other young nobles of his

age; that being so, we may guess, and not without evidence, the kind of

life he lived. There was chivalry in abundance; he seems to have worshipped

at the shrine of a lady far above him, the thought of whom seems to have

had upon him an effect not unlike that of Beatrice on Dante. There was much

talk of the ever-growing splendor of Ferdinand and Isabella, pride in the

conquests of Spain at home and abroad, ambition beyond limit of greatness;

alongside, a moral that hung loose in word and deed, with a literature to

correspond. Such was the fashion of the times, and Inigo was nothing if not a

man of fashion. In the well-known Autobiography the whole of this period

of his life is summed up in the single sentence: "Until he was twenty-six years

of age he was given up to the vanities of his age; he took special delight in the

use of arms, urged on as he was by a great and vain craving for worldly renown."

In 1518, two years after the death of Ferdinand, when the boy Charles was

now secure on the throne, Inigo's patron died, and the young man was left

to make for himself a career of his own. It would almost seem, from his own

account, that he was nothing loth to be freed from the desk and the

counting-house; now at last he was able to follow his own inclination. He

took service under the viceroy of Navarre, Antonio Manrique de Lara, Duke

of Najera, and remained with him as a soldier for three years. In 1521 a

rebellion in Castile called out all the forces of Navarre, except a few to

guard the fortresses. Francis I of France seized the occasion to attempt a

conquest of the province, to which he had some claim; he knew, besides,

that there were nobles in the country who would welcome and assist him.

Loyola was with the troops in Pampeluna, the capital of Navarre, when the

French army of ten thousand men appeared before its walls. The governor of

the castle, having only a handful of men, saw the futility of attempting to

resist and offered to surrender. Loyola, by what authority is by no means

clear, intervened; persuaded the defenders, it would seem by his mere

personality, to resist; in the resistance he fell, wounded in both legs by

a cannon-ball, and the French took the place. But they honored the bravery

of the man who had resisted them. In accordance with the chivalry of the

time they set him free, and sent him home to Loyola. Here Don Garcia, his

eldest brother, received him; and here, after cruel operations, Inigo

remained during the period of his convalescence. He was thirty years of

age. It will help our historical imagination to remember that it was in the

year that our own Henry VIII appealed to the Emperor and the Elector

Palatine to exterminate Luther, and his doctrines from their dominions,

wrote his Defense of the Seven Sacraments, and earned from the Pope,

Leo X, the title of "Defender of the Faith."

Naturally the weeks passed slowly for the cavalier while his wounds were

healing; the man, no longer young, who had hitherto lived his life much as

he wished, found the time hang heavy on his hands. He asked for books of

romance and adventure; there were none to be found in the house. Instead he

was given what there was at hand; a volume of stories of the saints, and

Ludolph the Carthusian's Life of Christ. The latter, as we may see from his

own later work, Inigo learnt to know well; the former set him thinking,

making him compare his own wasted and aimless life with lives at once of

heroism and profit. He had taken it for granted, because it was the fashion

to do so, that the life he had hitherto led, was the life most worthy of a

nobleman, and therefore of a man; yet how much more noble, and how much

more manly, were the lives he discovered! He had prided himself on his

uprightness of character, his chivalry, his personal bravery; yet what was

this compared with the selfless truth, the romantic innocence, the bravery

of these men! He had been inspired by, and devoted to, the service of a

monarch who had set his country free, of another whose kingdom spread

across the greater part of Europe; yet what was this kingdom compared with

that for which these men had endured so much! As to the good that was to

come of his living, he had scarcely given it a thought; these men, what

untold good they had done! Civilization itself had been made by them;

without them what would Europe have been!

Greatness, genius, and talent do not always go together; but if greatness

is the capacity to see a great goal and to make for it through every

obstacle, and at whatever cost, then whether genius or not, Inigo Loyola

was great. Hitherto he had been devoted to a kingdom that included half

Europe, but even that had not been enough to awaken the whole man within

him. Now he saw a kingdom that embraced all the world, and come what might he would take service in it. Hitherto he had been content to take life as

he found it, winning reputation when opportunity came in his way, but

making little enough of the fruit of his life on those around him. Now he

saw that there was a greater honor than any he had so far known; not in the

mere ruling of them, but in the making of them according to this new ideal.

Hitherto he had fashioned himself on the standard of men about him; now he

knew that there was a nobler standard than that, in the making himself to

be and to do whatever might best serve the new -ideal. And to see was to

determine. Hitherto he had lived for nothing; now he had something to live

for. Where this determination was to lead him he did not know; but he rose

from his bed another man, with a definite goal before him, to make himself

and to make others like himself champions of the King of the Universal

Kingdom, and he pursued that goal unflinching to the end. The end was the

foundation of the Society of Jesus.

At the beginning of 1522 he set out on his adventure. Two definite plans he

had first in mind; to do penance for the past, and to begin again where his

new Master had begun, even on the very spot in the Holy Land. These two

primary resolutions mark at once two characteristics of the man which are

to be found in everything he did or wrote; an extreme thoroughness of

purpose and an extreme simplicity, the mind of a child with the will of an

unconquerable man. Constantly when one reads the later letters of the saint

one is brought up against illustrations of the former; simple solutions of

all kinds of problems by keeping his eye on the one end in view, simple

repetition of phrases, and even of whole passages, once he has found what

he wished to say; lessons and instructions on better ways of life which

appall one by their simplicity; while for the will to do, his whole life

bears eloquent witness.

He set out in 1522. For a year we find him at Manresa, beating himself into

subjection. In 1523 he is on his way to the Holy Land, in spite of the

danger from the Turks at sea. He is back in Venice in 1524, and thence once

more to Spain. But not to his home at Loyola; since to do the good he would

do he must make up for the time he has lost, we find him pursuing his

studies for four years, a man of from thirty-three to thirty-seven, in the

schools of Barcelona, Alcala and Salamanca. In 1528 he is in the University

of Paris; and he does not leave it till 1535, when he is forty-four years

of age. Fourteen years he had thus filled with these beginnings and

preparations; fourteen years, with nothing external to shew for them, and

those the best years of his life.

During this period, it is true, he had tried to gather men around him who

would accept and follow him in his ideals. Twice he failed; his followers

deserted him and, for the most part, vanished from his sight altogether.

Only at the last he succeeded. In Paris he won to him seven men, all

brilliant students of the University; when these men in the chapel of St.

Denys on Montmartre, on August 15, 1534, vowed with him that they would

lead lives of poverty and chastity, that they would go as pilgrims to the

Holy Land, and that the rest of their days should be spent in apostolic

labor, the Society of Jesus, as yet without a name, was born. To what that

decision might lead none of them clearly knew, but that was of little

moment. They had taken service under the King of kings, and He should use

them as He would; in that whole-hearted, uncalculating surrender we see

again the simplicity of the Founder, caught now and made their own by all

the rest.