THIS is not a history of the Society of Jesus, although it contains story. Its aim is to present the Jesuits through a series of vignettes of individual members and their works - whence its interesting subtitle, "A Multibiography". The approach emphasises the enterprising individualism found in the Society as well as the astonishing variety of religious styles which have flourished under the flag of Ignatius.
"Men astutely trained in letters and in fortitude", was how an American author described this religious grouping with its profound commitment to the mundane and to modernity, to new methods and new ways, to being religious in an expanding world growing increasingly secular in its style.
Leaving the cloister behind and the habit and the divine office in choir, these new religious took obedience as their cloister and, in a Europe of competing nation states and the cataclysmic religious upheaval of the Reformation, chose to focus that obedience ultimately on a loyalty to the questioned authority of the see of Rome.
This is, perhaps, the greatest irony in their story and it is described in a chapter entitled "Expelled like Dogs". The Catholic powers of Europe - Portugal, Spain, France and the Bourbon kingdom of Naples - forced a weak and vacillating Pope, Clement XIV, to disband the Society. The papacy, whose cause they had championed in the turbulence of the 16th century with its wars of religion, betrayed and suppressed them in the Age of Enlightenment.
They had made too many enemies - the nation states of modern Europe; in France, the powerful Jansenists, always their implacable enemies; the philosophers, such as D'Alembert and Diderot. Or perhaps it was just that they had become too successful at what they did.
Strangest irony of all, they survived in Protestant Prussia, Orthodox Russia the countries of Frederick and of Catherine the Great, a story told movingly in the chapter "Wandering in the Desert". The restoration of the Society by Pius VII in 1814 saw the Jesuits take a position on the right of the political and ecclesiastical spectrum which they maintained through the long pontificate of Pius IX and effectively throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The chapter headed "The Black Legend" is the most fascinating in the book. It grapples with the problem of why so many people (including, perhaps strangely, the most pious and devout) have displayed such an aversion to the Company of Jesus. The fantasies on which this hatred feeds are truly astonishing, and the deliberate calumnies that often accompany them and grow from them are masterpieces of invented social myth. Even the word "Jesuit" itself has sinister connotations small wonder since it owes its origin as a term applied to members of the Society by German Lutherans, who were among the Society's first enemies and opponents in the conflicts of the Reform.
Sneered at by Rabelais, praised by Montaigne, execrated by Pascal, reviled by Racine and publicly defended by Corneille, the Jesuits obviously meant many things to many people from very early on. Attacked by the Encyclopedists, their missions in the Paraguayan Reductions were admired by Voltaire. Rousseau gave them credit for the hardships they endured, while to Balzac they were monuments of genius and virtue.
The account of the various works attacking the Jesuits, from Pasquier's Jesuit Catechism, published 1594, through Pascal's classic The Provincial Letters of 1656, to ex Jesuit Zahorowski's Monita Secreta, Paris, 1661, shows clearly the venom with which the Society was attacked. D'Alembert's hostile article in the Encyclopedie, which continues the same strain in the mid to late 18th century, is not merely vicious, but tendentious, "a compendium of hoary anti Jesuit myths".
The original Jesuit mission to Ireland, planned and executed while Ignatius was still alive, is described in the book as an effort to proselytise among the Irish. This is a strange word to describe an effort to assist a Catholic people fighting to survive. Ignatius himself seems to have understood the situation somewhat better than the author, or translator, of this book, for in his instructions to his two Jesuits before their departure for Ireland, he tells them: "Deploy all your skills to avoid being captured by the agents of the King"
This mission failed. By the mid 17th century, however, the Jesuits were entrenched in Ireland and felt the full force of the Puritan assault on the native religion, leaving us written reports of the atrocities perpetrated by the Cromwellian armies. It is a pity the book does not include a chapter on these events. This would have made it an even more complete reflection of the many sided order which Ignatius began.