Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564
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One day, being in orison, it was granted me to perceive in one
instant how all things are seen and contained in God.... It is one
of the most signal of all graces that the Lord has granted me....
Our Lord has made me comprehend in what way it is that one God can
be in three persons. He made me see it so clearly that I remained as
extremely surprised as I was comforted.... And now, when I think of
the Holy Trinity... I experience an unspeakable happiness. `063822
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Teresa's sister nuns interpreted her visions as delusions and morbid
fits. `063823 Her confessors inclined to the same view, and told her
sternly, "The Devil has deceived your senses." The townspeople thought
her possessed by demons, called upon the Inquisition to examine her,
and proposed that a priest should drive out her devils by exorcism.
A friend advised her to send the Inquisition an account of her life
and visions; now she wrote her classic Vida. The inquisitors
scrutinized it, and pronounced it a holy document which would
strengthen the faith of all who should read it.
Her position fortified by this verdict, Teresa, now fifty-seven,
determined to reform the order of the Carmelite nuns. Instead of
attempting to restore the old ascetic discipline in the cloister of
the Incarnation, she decided to open a separate convent, to which
she invited such nuns and novices as would accept a regimen of
absolute poverty. The original Carmelites had worn coarse sackcloth,
had gone always barefoot, had eaten frugally and fasted frequently.
Teresa required of her Discalced (shoeless) Carmelites approximately
the same austere rule, not as an end in itself, but as a symbol of
humility and rejection of this tempting world. A thousand obstacles
were raised; the townsmen of Avila denounced the plan as threatening
to end all communication between nuns and relatives. The provincial of
the order refused permission for a new convent. Teresa appealed to
Pope Pius V, and won his consent. She found four nuns to join her, and
the new convent of St. Joseph was consecrated in 1562 on a narrow
street in Avila. The sisters wore sandals of rope, slept on straw, ate
no meat, and remained strictly within their house.
The 180 nuns of the older establishment were not pleased by this
simple exposure of their easy ways. The prioress, holding that
Teresa was bound to her by the vow of obedience, commanded her to
resume her former white robe, put on shoes, and return to the
convent of the Incarnation. Teresa obeyed. She was adjudged guilty
of arrogance, and was confined to her cell. The town council voted
to close St. Joseph's Convent, and sent four strong men to evict its
now leaderless nuns. But the sandaled maidens said, "God wants us to
stay, and so we shall stay"; and the hardened officers of the law
dared not force them. Teresa frightened the Carmelite provincial by
suggesting that in frustrating her plans he was offending the Holy
Ghost; he ordered her freed. Four nuns left with her, and the five
women walked through the snow to their new home. The four original
members greeted Teresa happily as Madre. To nearly all Spain she now
became Teresa de Jesu, the intimate of God.
Her rule was loving, cheerful, and firm. The house was closed to the
world; no visitors were allowed; the windows were covered with
cloth; the tiled floor served as beds, tables, and chairs. A revolving
disk was built into the wall; whatever food was placed by the people
on its outer half was gratefully accepted, but the nuns were not
permitted to beg. They eked out their sustenance by spinning and
needlework; the products were placed outside the convent gate; any
buyer might take what he liked and leave whatever he liked in
return. Despite these austerities new members came, and one of them
was the most beautiful and courted woman in Avila. The general of
the Carmelites, visiting the little cloister, was so deeply
impressed that he asked Teresa to found similar houses elsewhere in
Spain. In 1567, taking a few nuns with her, she traveled in a rude
cart over seventy miles of rough roads to establish a Discalced
Carmelite nunnery at Medina del Campo. The only house offered her
was an abandoned and dilapidated building with crumbling walls and
leaking roof; but when the townspeople saw the nuns trying to live
in it, carpenters and roofers came, unasked and unpaid, to make
repairs and simple furniture.
The prior of the Carmelite monastery at Medina, wishing to reform
his relaxed monks, came to Teresa and asked for her rules of
discipline. The prior was tall, but was accompanied by a youth so
short and frail that Teresa, with the humor that brightened her
austerities, exclaimed, as they left: "Blessed be the Lord, for I have
a friar and a half for the foundation of my new monastery." `063824
The diminutive friar, Juan de Yepis y Alvarez, was destined to be
San Juan de la Cruz, St. John of the Cross, the soul and glory of
the Discalced Carmelite monks.
Teresa's difficulties were not ended. The provincial of the
Carmelites, perhaps to test her rule and courage, appointed her
prioress of the Incarnation Convent. The nuns there hated her, and
feared that now, in revenge, she would subject them to every
humiliation. But she behaved with such modesty and kindness that one
by one they were won over, and gradually the new and stricter
regimen replaced the old laxity. From this victory Teresa advanced
to found a new cloister in Seville.
The friars of the mitigated rule resolved to stop the extension of
the reform. Some of them smuggled an agent, as a discalced nun, into
the Seville convent. Soon this woman proclaimed to Spain that Teresa
flogged her nuns and heard confessions as if she were a priest. The
Inquisition was again called upon to investigate her. She was summoned
before the fearful tribunal; it heard her testimony, and gave its
verdict: "You are acquitted of all charges.... Go and continue your
work." `063825 But a papal nuncio was won over to her enemies. He
denounced Teresa as "a disobedient, contumacious woman who promulgates
pernicious doctrines under the pretense of devotion, who left her
cloister against the orders of her superiors, who is ambitious, and
teaches theology as though she were a doctor of the Church, in
contempt of St. Paul, who forbade women to teach." He commanded her to
retire to confinement in a nunnery at Toledo (1575).
Hardly knowing where to turn in this new vicissitude, Teresa wrote
to the King. Philip II had read and loved her Life. He sent a
special courier to invite her to an audience; he heard her, and was
convinced of her saintliness. The nuncio, royally reproved, withdrew
his order of restraint on Teresa, and announced that he had been
misinformed.
Amid her travels and tribulations she wrote famous manuals of
mystical devotion: El camino de la perfeccion ( The Way of
Perfection, 1567), and El castillo interior ( The Interior Castle,
1577). In the latter she revealed the return of her physical ailments.
"It seems as though many swollen rivers were rushing, within my brain,
over a precipice; and then again, drowned by the noise of the water,
are voices of birds singing and whistling. I weary my brain and
increase my headaches." `063826 Heart attacks recurred, and her
stomach found it hard to retain food. Even so she passed painfully
from one to another of the many nunneries she had founded,
examining, improving, inspiring. At Malaga she was seized with a
paralytic fit; she recovered, went on to Toledo, and had another
seizure; she recovered, went on to Segovia, Valladolid, Palencia,
Burgos, Alva. There a hemorrhage of the lungs forced her to stop.
She accepted death cheerfully, confident that she was leaving a
world of pain and evil for the everlasting companionship of Christ.
After a shameful competition, and successive kidnapings of her
corpse by Alva and Avila, she was buried in the town of her birth.
Pious worshipers claimed that her body never decayed, and many
miracles were reported at her tomb. In 1593 the order of Discalced
Carmelites received papal sanction. Famous Spaniards like Cervantes
and Lope de Vega joined in an appeal to the Pope to at least beatify
her. It was done (1614), and eight years later Teresa was
pronounced, along with the Apostle James, one of the two patron saints
of Spain.
Meanwhile a greater than Teresa had come out of Spain to reform
the Church and move the world.
IV. IGNATIUS LOYOLA
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Don Inigo de Onez y Loyola was born in the castle of Loyola in the
Basque province of Guipuzcoa in 1491. He was one of eight sons and
five daughters begotten by Don Beltran de Onez y Loyola, a member of
the higher Spanish nobility. Brought up to be a soldier, Inigo
received little schooling, and showed no interest in religion. His
reading was confined to Amadis of Gaul and like romances of
chivalry. At seven he was sent to serve as a page to Don Juan
Velasquez de Cuellar, through whom he had some access to the royal
court. At fourteen he fell in love with Ferdinand the Catholic's new
queen, Germaine de Foix; and when, in due course, he was knighted,
he chose her as his "Queen of Hearts," wore her colors, and dreamed of
winning a lace handkerchief from her hand as prize in a
tournament. `063827 This did not prevent him from engaging in the
casual amours and brawls that were half a soldier's life. In the
simple and honest autobiography that he dictated in 1553-56, he made
no effort to conceal these natural escapades.
His carefree youth came to an end when he was assigned to active
military service at Pamplona, capital of Navarre. Four years he
spent there, dreaming of glory and waking to routine. A chance came to
distinguish himself: the French attacked Pamplona, Inigo heartened the
defense with his bravery; the enemy captured the citadel nevertheless,
and Inigo's right leg was fractured by a cannon ball (May 20, 1521).
The victors treated him kindly, set his bones, and sent him on a
stretcher to his ancestral castle. But the bones had been wrongly set;
they had to be rebroken and reset. The second operation proved more
incompetent than the first, for a stump of bone stuck out from the
leg; a third operation set the bones straight, but the leg was now too
short; and for weeks Inigo bore the torture of an orthopedic stretcher
that kept him helpless and weak and in constant pain.
During the weary months of convalescence he asked for books,
preferably for some exciting tale of knighthood and imperiled
princesses. But the castle library was composed of two books only:
Ludolfus's Life of Christ, and Flos sanctorum, recounting the
lives of the saints. At first the soldier was bored by these
volumes; then the figures of Christ and Mary grew upon him, and the
legends of the saints proved as wonderful as the epics of courtly love
and war; these cavaliers of Christ were every bit as heroic as the
caballeros of Castile. Gradually the thought formed in his mind that
the noblest war of all was that of Christianity against Islam. In him,
as in Dominic, the intensity of Spanish faith made religion no quiet
devotion as in Thomas a Kempis, but a passion of conflict, a holy war.
He resolved to go to Jerusalem and free the sacred places from infidel
control. One night he had a vision of the Virgin and her Child;
thereafter (he later told Father Gonzalez) no temptation to
concupiscence ever assailed him. `063828 He rose from his bed,
knelt, and vowed to be a soldier of Christ and Mary till his death.
He had read that the Holy Grail had once been hidden in a castle
at Montserrat in the province of Barcelona. There, said the most
famous of all romances, Amadis had kept a full night's vigil before an
image of the Virgin to prepare himself for knighthood. As soon as
Inigo could travel he mounted a mule, and set out for the distant
shrine. For a while he still thought of himself as a soldier
accoutered for physical combat. But the saints he had read about had
had no weapons, no armor, only the poorest clothes and the firmest
faith. Arrived in Montserrat, he cleansed his soul with three days
of confession and penance; he gave his costly raiment to a beggar, and
donned a pilgrim's robe of coarse cloth. All the night of March 24-25,
1522, he spent alone in the chapel of a Benedictine monastery,
kneeling or standing before the altar of the Mother of God. He pledged
himself to perpetual chastity and poverty. The next morning he
received the Eucharist, gave his mule to the monks, and set out on
limping foot for Jerusalem.
The nearest port was Barcelona. On the way he stopped at the
hamlet of Manresa. An old woman directed him to a cave for shelter.
For some days he made this his home; and there, eager to surpass the
saints in asceticism, he practiced austerities that brought him
close to death. Repenting the proud care that he had once taken of his
appearance, he ceased to cleanse, cut, or comb his hair- which soon
fell out; he would not trim his nails or bathe his body or wash his
hands or face or feet; `063829 he lived on such food as he could
beg, but never meat; he fasted for days at a time; he scourged himself
thrice daily, and each day spent hours in prayer. A pious woman,
fearful that his austerities would kill him, had him taken to her
home, where she nursed him back to health. But when he was removed
to a cell in a Dominican monastery at Manresa he resumed his
self-flagellation. His remembrance of past sins terrified him; he
waged war against his body as the agent of his sins; he was resolved
to beat all thought of sin out of his flesh. At times the struggle
seemed hopeless, and he thought of suicide. Then visions came and
strengthened him; at communion he believed that he saw not a wafer
of bread but the living Christ; at another time Christ and His
Mother appeared to him; once he saw the Trinity, and understood by a
flash of insight, beyond words or reason, the mystery of three persons
in one God; and "at another time," he tells us, "God permitted him
to understand how He had created the world." `063830 These visions
healed the spiritual conflict that had produced them; he put behind
him all worry about his youthful follies; he relaxed his asceticism;
and having conquered his body he could now cleanse it without
vanity. From the experience of this struggle, almost a year long, he
designed the Spiritual Exercises by which the heathen flesh could be
subdued to the Christian will. Now he might present himself before the
sacred shrines at Jerusalem.
He set sail from Barcelona in February 1523. En route he stayed
two weeks in Rome, escaping before its pagan spirit could bend him
from sanctity. On July 14 he took ship from Venice for Jaffa. He
suffered a host of calamities before reaching Palestine, but his
continuing visions sustained him. Jerusalem itself was a
tribulation: the Turks who controlled it allowed Christian visitors,
but no proselytizing; and when Inigo proposed to convert the Moslems
nevertheless, the Franciscan provincial who had been charged by the
Pope to keep the peace bade the saint return to Europe. In March 1524,
he was back in Barcelona.
Perhaps he felt now that though he was master of his body he was
subject to his imaginations. He determined to chasten his mind with
education. Though now thirty-three, he joined schoolboys in studying
Latin. But the itch to teach is stronger than the will to learn.
Soon Ignatius, as he was scholastically called, began to preach to a
circle of pious but charming women. Their lovers denounced him as a
spoil-sport, and beat him brutally. He moved to Alcala (1526), and
took up philosophy and theology. Here too he taught a little private
group, chiefly of poor women, some of them prostitutes hungering for
redemption. He tried to exorcise their sinful propensities by
spiritual exercises, but some of his pupils fell into fits or trances,
and the Inquisition summoned him. He was imprisoned for two
months, `063831 but he finally convinced the inquisitors of his
orthodoxy, and was released; however, he was forbidden to teach. He
passed on to Salamanca (1527), and went through a similar sequence
of teaching, trial before the Inquisition, imprisonment, acquittal,
and prohibition of further teaching. Disappointed with Spain, he set
out for Paris, always on foot and in pilgrim garb, but now driving
before him a donkey loaded with books.
At Paris he lived in the poorhouse, and begged in the streets for
his food and tuition. He entered the College de Montaigu, where his
sallow, haggard face, starved body, unkempt beard, and aged clothing
made him a cynosure of unsympathetic eyes; but he pursued his purposes
with such absorbed intensity that some students began to reverence him
as a saint. Under his lead they engaged in spiritual exercises of
prayer, penance, and contemplation. In 1529 he transferred to the
College Ste.-Barbe, and there too he gathered disciples. His two
roommates came by different routes to believe in his sanctity.
Pierre Favre- Peter Faber- as a shepherd in the Savoyard Alps, had
suffered deeply from fears superstitious or real, and under their
influence he had vowed perpetual chastity. Now, aged twenty, he
concealed under his disciplined manners a soul struggling feverishly
against temptations of the flesh. Ignatius, though making no
pretensions to intellect, had the power of sensing the interior life
of others through the intensity of his own. He surmised the problem of
his younger friend, and assured him that the impulses of the body
could be controlled by a trained will. How train the will? By
spiritual exercises, answered Ignatius. Together they practiced them.
The other roommate, Francis Xavier, came from Pamplona, where Loyola
had soldiered. He had a long line of distinguished ancestors; he was
handsome, rich, proud, a gay blade who knew the taverns of Paris and
their girls. `063832 He laughed at the two ascetics, and boasted of
his successes with women. Yet he was clever in his studies; he already
had the master's degree, and was aiming at a doctorate. One day he saw
a man whose face was pocked with syphilis; it gave him pause. Once,
when he was expounding his ambition to shine in the world, Ignatius
quietly quoted the Gospel to him: "What is a man profited if he gain
the whole world and lose his own soul?" Xavier resented the query, but
he could not forget it. He began to join Loyola and Faber in their
spiritual exercises; perhaps his pride stirred him to equal the
other two in power to bear deprivation, cold, and pain. They
scourged themselves, fasted, slept in thin shirts on the floor of an
unheated room; they stood barefoot and almost naked in the snow, to
harden and yet subdue their bodies.
The spiritual exercises that had first taken shape at Manresa now
reached a more definite form. Ignatius modeled them on the
Exercitatorio de la vida espiritual (1500) of Don Garcia de
Cisneros, Benedictine abbot at Montserrat; `063833 but he poured
into that mold a fervor of feeling and imagination that made his
little book a moving force in modern history. Loyola took as his
starting point the infallibility of the Bible and the Church;
individual judgment in religion, he held, was the vain and
chaos-breeding pretense of proud, weak minds. "We ought always to be
ready to believe that what seems to us white is black if the
hierarchical Church so defines it. `063834 To avoid damnation we
must train ourselves to be unquestioning servants of God, and of God's
vicar on earth, the Church.
As the first spiritual exercise we should recall our many sins,
and consider how much punishment they deserve. Lucifer was condemned
to hell for one sin; and is not our every sin a like rebellion against
God? Let us keep a daily count of our sins by marks on lines that
represent the days, and let us strive each day to reduce the marks.
Kneeling in our darkened room or cell, let us picture hell to
ourselves as vividly as we can; we must conjure up all the horrors
of that undying fire; we must vision the torments of the damned,
hear their shrieks of pain and their cries of despair; we must smell
the stinking fumes of burning sulfur and flesh; we must try to feel
those tongues of flame scorching our own bodies; and then we must
ask ourselves, How can we escape that everlasting agony? Only
through the redeeming sacrifice which God Himself, as Christ,
offered on the cross. *06073 Let us then contemplate the life of
Christ, and in every detail; we must make ourselves present in
imagination at those profoundest events in the history of the world.
We must in fancy kneel before the holy figures in that divine epic,
and kiss the hem of their garments. After two weeks of such
meditations we must accompany Christ through every step in His
Passion, every station of the cross; we must pray with Him in
Gethsemane, feel ourselves scourged with Him, spat upon, nailed to the
cross; we must suffer every moment of His agony, must die with Him,
lie with Him in the tomb. And in the fourth week we must picture
ourselves rising triumphantly from the grave, rising at last with
Him into heaven. Strengthened by that blessed vision, we shall be
ready to join as dedicated soldiers in the battle to defeat Satan
and win men to Christ; and in that holy war we shall gladly bear every
hardship and joyfully spend our lives.
This call to lifelong devotion found nine students at Paris ready to
accept it. Earnest young men feeling for the first time the
unintelligibility of the world, and longing for some anchor of
belief and hope in a sea of doubts and fears, may have been moved,
by the very extent of the demands made upon them, to put their fate,
their lives and salvation, in Loyola's plan. He proposed that in due
time they should go together to Palestine, and live there a life as
nearly as possible like Christ's. On August 15, 1534, Loyola, Faber,
Xavier, Diego Laynez, Alonso Salmeron, Nicolas Bobadilla, Simon
Rodriguez, Claude Le Jay, Jean Codure, and Paschase Broet, in a little
chapel in Montmartre, took the vows of chastity and poverty, and
pledged themselves, after two years of further study, to go and live
in the Holy Land. They had as yet no apparent notion of combating
Protestantism; Islam seemed to them the greater challenge. They had no
interest in theological disputes; their aim was sanctity; their
movement was rooted in Spanish mysticism rather than in the
intellectual conflicts of the time. The best argument would be a
holy life.
In the winter of 1536-37 they walked through France, over the
Alps, and across Italy to Venice, where they hoped to find passage
to Jaffa. But Venice was at war with the Turks; the trip was
impossible. During the delay Ignatius met Caraffa, and for a time
joined the Theatines. His experience with these devoted priests had
some influence in changing his plan from life in Palestine to
service of the Church in Europe. He and his disciples agreed that
if, after a year of waiting, Palestine should still be closed to them,
they would offer themselves to the Pope for any service that he
might assign to them. Faber secured permission for all of them to be
ordained priests.
By this time Loyola was forty-six. He was bald, and still limped
slightly from his wound. His five feet and two inches would have
left him quite unimpressive had it not been for an aristocratic
refinement of features, the sharp nose and chin, the somber, deep-set,
piercing black eyes, the grave, intent countenance; he was already the
absorbed and almost humorless saint. He was no persecutor; though he
approved of the Inquisition, `063835 he was rather its victim than its
agent. He was stern but kind; he willingly served the sick in
hospitals and plague. His dream was to win converts not by the pyre or