Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World (7 page)

In the broadest sense, imposing order on chaos was the Society’s core mission, both in its internal arrangements and in its engagement with the world. This was already in evidence in
The Spiritual Exercises
, which transforms an ineffable mystical experience into something like an orderly course of study. It is evident also in Ignatius’s
Constitutions
, which provides detailed systematic directions for the running of the Society, and ultimately in the
Ratio studiorum
, the document that outlined in fine detail what must be taught in Jesuit colleges, how, and by whom. Even in their personal lives the Jesuits held to a code of strict orderliness: “Whoever has studied the Jesuits’ regimen must be struck by the frequent emphasis on tidiness and order,” noted one early twentieth-century historian of the Jesuits. Neatness, cleanliness, and order in both personal quarters and the communal household were “an absolute requirement.” Most of all it was expressed in the clear hierarchy of the Society, in which each member was assigned a precise and uncontested place. It was this ability to impose order on chaos that made the Society such an effective instrument in the fight to defeat Protestantism and reestablish the power and prestige of the Church hierarchy.

THE JESUITS STRIKE BACK

Highly educated and fanatically devoted to the cause of the Church and the Pope, the Jesuits were a spiritual army such as Europe had never seen. For the popes, they were a weapon without equal in the former’s struggle to impose the authority and the teachings of the Church upon a turbulent and skeptical world, and the popes did not hesitate to make good use of that weapon. From the beginning, the Jesuits were sent on the road to shore up the faith in regions where it was under attack. Pierre Favre, Ignatius’s early companion from Paris, was the first Jesuit to work in Germany. The best hope for the Roman Church, Favre surmised, was to strengthen the people’s attachment to the traditional holy rites and services: “If the heretics should see in the churches the practice of frequent Communion, with the faithful receiving their Strength and their Life … not one of them would dare to preach the Zwinglian doctrine of the Holy Eucharist.” He traveled the country, visiting parishes, preaching to large gatherings, and reviving the old communal traditions of the Church.

Favre died in 1546, but two other outstanding Jesuits stepped into the breach: first the Spaniard Jerónimo Nadal, and then Peter Canisius, the “second apostle” of Germany. From the 1540s to the 1560s, Canisius logged approximately twenty thousand miles on the roads of Austria, Bohemia, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. Going beyond preaching and the organizational work of reviving parish life, he issued a steady stream of popular books instructing both priests and their flock in correct Catholic doctrines and practices. The results that he and other Jesuits achieved were nothing short of dramatic: The priests at the Jesuit church in Vienna, for example, heard seven hundred confessions in Easter of 1560, but nine years later, the number had grown to three thousand. Similarly in Cologne, in 1576, fifteen thousand worshippers received Holy Communion at the Jesuit chapel, but only five years later the number had tripled, to forty-five thousand. Here was proof of the Jesuits’ prowess at reviving Catholic life in lands that were poised for a Protestant takeover.

Jesuits served as the engines of the Catholic revival in other capacities. Some, such as Francisco Suárez, were outstanding formal theologians, who set down the doctrines of the Church and could more than hold their own in debate with their Protestant critics. Others, such as Diego Laynez and Antonio Possevino, served as personal emissaries of the Pope on important diplomatic missions, and still others, such as Robert Bellarmine, combined the two roles as papal theologians and counselors. Some, such as François de la Chaise, personal confessor of Louis XIV and namesake of the famous Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, provided moral guidance and spiritual solace to European royalty. Others yet, such as the Englishman Edmund Campion, were sent on secret missions to their Protestant homelands to nurture the flame of Catholicism, at enormous risk to themselves. In all these roles the Jesuits proved themselves outstanding religious warriors: learned and often brilliant, skilled, energetic, and zealously devoted to the cause of Church and Pope.

AN EMPIRE OF LEARNING

But while the Jesuits were successful in all these endeavors, it was in one area in particular that they were truly without peer: education. Significantly, apart from training new members, Ignatius did not initially consider education to be a primary focus of his Society. His vision saw the Jesuits as itinerant priests, ready to pack up at a moment’s notice and travel to the four corners of the earth at the behest of the Pope or their superiors, and consequently unsuitable to run schools. But when Francis Borgia founded the first Jesuit college, in Gandia, Spain, in 1545, the leading citizens of the town besieged him with requests to allow their sons to be educated there. Borgia turned to Ignatius, who, sensing an opportunity to further the cause of Catholic revival, gave his consent. By 1548 the college of Gandia had opened up to the town’s youth.

The experience in Gandia set the trend for other institutions. The year 1548 also saw the opening of the college of Messina, in Sicily, the first Jesuit institution devoted primarily to educating secular students. To oversee its founding, Ignatius dispatched a number of his most trusted subordinates, including Nadal and Canisius, who made Messina into a model for future colleges. Following Ignatius’s instructions, the curriculum included an intensive course in Latin, the classical authors, and philosophy guided by the writings of Aristotle. At the top of the hierarchy of learning was theology, the “Queen of the sciences,” which had final say on all matters of true knowledge. The faculty at Messina, led by Nadal, worked to make this broad program of instruction into a systematic and orderly curriculum and issued several proposals for an “order of studies,” or, in its more familiar Latin form,
ratio studiorum
. After undergoing many revisions and several drafts, the
Ratio studiorum
was formally approved in 1599 by the Society’s general congregation and became the blueprint for Jesuit teaching everywhere.

Following these early successes, demand for Jesuit colleges exploded across Catholic Europe. In towns and cities large and small, ruling princes, local bishops, and prominent citizens appealed to the Society to found colleges in their communities. Recognizing the value of education for spreading the teachings of the Church, Ignatius chose to embrace this new Jesuit mission, and called for the establishment of Jesuit institutions across Europe. By the time of his death in 1556, there were already 33 Jesuit colleges, and the demand only kept growing: 144 colleges in 1579, 444 colleges plus 100 seminaries and schools in 1626, and 669 colleges plus 176 seminaries and schools in 1749. Most were in Europe, but not all. Jesuit colleges could be found as far east as Nagasaki, Japan, and as far west as Lima, Peru. It was truly a world-encompassing educational system, on a scale the world had never seen before, or has, for that matter, since.

At the center of this great educational network was the Roman College, known universally as the Collegio Romano. Founded in 1551, it was initially housed in various modest locations around Rome. Pope Gregory XIII (1572–85), an admirer and supporter of the Jesuits, decided to give their flagship institution a more fitting home. He expropriated two city blocks near the main thoroughfare of the Via del Corso and commissioned the renowned architect Bartolommeo Ammannati to design a suitable headquarters for the Jesuit educational system. The result was a large and impressive, though hardly ostentatious, palazzo that reflected the power and prestige of the Society of Jesus but also the seriousness of its mission and down-to-earth pragmatism. The College moved into its new home in 1584, and it was there, nearly half a century later, that the Revisors General met to rule on the fate of infinitesimals. It would remain there, in the Piazza del Collegio Romano, almost continuously for the next three centuries.

The simple name of the Roman College, no different from a Jesuit college in any other city, suggests that it was meant to serve the young men of Rome just as, say, the “Cologne College” was created to educate the youth of that city. But this is misleading. Although educating the Roman elite was indeed part of the college’s mission, it was also, from its inception, a model and intellectual beacon for the other colleges in the system. Only the most accomplished Jesuit scholars were summoned to Rome to serve as professors at the Collegio, which brought together under one roof the greatest luminaries of the order. Mathematicians Christopher Clavius and Christoph Grienberger, natural philosophers Athanasius Kircher and Roger Boscovich, theologians Francisco Suárez and Robert Bellarmine, and many others—nearly all, in fact, of the leading Jesuit intellectuals—taught at the Collegio Romano. In keeping with the Society’s hierarchical practices, the Roman faculty had the authority to set the curriculum of the provincial colleges and determine what would and would not be taught in Jesuit schools. Just as the order’s superior general ruled over each and every individual Jesuit, so the Roman College ruled over all the hundreds of Jesuit colleges worldwide.

It is not difficult to see why aristocrats and wealthy commoners across Catholic Europe clamored for the establishment of Jesuit colleges in their towns. Traditional parochial schools were of dubious quality, and student life at the great universities was reputedly dissolute and immoral, and little concerned with actual studies. The Jesuits offered something else altogether: a rigorous and demanding curriculum taught by highly qualified teachers and regularly updated by the luminaries of the Collegio Romano. And whereas university students were free to indulge in a life of drunken debauchery, the students in the Jesuit colleges were closely supervised and filled their days with study and prayer. An aristocrat or merchant who sent his son to a Jesuit school was confident that the boy would be immeasurably bettered, both intellectually and morally.

The Collegio Romano, designed by Bartolommeo Ammannati, as it appears today. The building currently houses a public high school.
(Alinari / Art Resource, NY)

The long list of distinguished alumni of Jesuit colleges fully bears out this assessment. In addition to the leading Jesuits themselves, graduates include royalty such as Emperor Ferdinand II (1620–37), statesmen such as Cardinal Richelieu, humanists such as Justus Lipsius, and philosophers and scientists such as René Descartes and Marin Mersenne. Jesuit education, as even enemies of the Society acknowledged, was simply the best available in all Christendom. Even Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England, and no friend of the Jesuits, ruefully remarked, “Talis quus sis, utinam noster esses” (“you are so good, would that you were ours”).

Bacon had good reason to rue the Jesuits’ educational excellence. For, of all the services the Society of Jesus offered the Papacy in its struggle against Protestantism, none proved more powerful or more effective than the colleges. Wherever one was established, it became a center of Catholic life and a living demonstration of what the Roman Church could accomplish. Rare was the Lutheran or Calvinist school that could match the Jesuits for sheer educational quality, or compete with them in attracting the sons of the lay elite. Once they had them in their care, the Jesuits spent years imparting Catholic teachings to their charges, complete with learned and authoritative refutations of Protestant doctrines. Inevitably the students became imbued with the Jesuit devotion to the Papacy, and with the Jesuit spirit of dedication and sacrifice for the cause of the Church and its hierarchy. With hundreds of such colleges across Europe, and with hundreds and sometimes thousands of students enrolled in each one, the Jesuit educational system turned out generations of well-educated and devoted Catholics who would ultimately take up leadership positions in their communities. In effect, as the chief educators of the Catholic elite, the Jesuits ensured the survival, as well as the revival, of the Roman Church in large parts of Europe.

The impact of the Jesuit colleges was unmistakable. The first Jesuit college in the Holy Roman Empire was founded in Cologne in 1556, at a time when the empire appeared on the verge of succumbing to the Lutheran surge. But with the college in place, Cologne became a Catholic stronghold, and a base for future expansion of Jesuit activities. In the following decades, with strong support from the ruling Wittelsbach and Habsburg families, the Jesuits founded dozens of colleges in Bavaria and Austria, and took over the administration of existing universities. They even went so far as to found a special school in Rome dedicated to training the promising young Germans for positions as high Church officials. Upon completing their studies, the graduates of this “Collegium Germanicum” returned home, where they became bishops and archbishops, and the backbone of the Catholic revival in Germany. In the Low Countries, too, the Jesuits were exceedingly active: when the northern provinces turned to Protestantism and took up arms against their Habsburg sovereign, the Jesuits helped make the southern provinces into a Catholic bastion. Thanks in great part to their efforts, the region was saved for the Catholic Church, acquired its own separate identity, and ultimately gained independence as the modern state of Belgium.