Loyola’s Childhood

Finding the man behind the saint was the ambition of the modernist Spanish historian Enrique García Hernán, a specialist in the Society of Jesus, for the first major biography of Ignatius of Loyola written by a non-Jesuit author. Thanks to the French translation by another great specialist in the Ignatian Order, Pierre Antoine Fabre, French-speaking readers can now follow the Basque’s eclectic itinerary. Inigo became, in 1622, Saint Ignatius of Loyola.

The Castilian edition was born within the project ” Eminent Spanish people » (“eminent Spaniards”) supported by the Juan March Foundation. This project, which aims to fill the Iberian historiographical void relating to biographical studies, makes available to a wide readership, which is not necessarily limited to the academic world, a series of works on several major figures in the history of Spain. The objective is to “recover the perspective of theethos personal in the historical explanation, while moving away from the old political, diplomatic or military narration, made of genealogies, treaties between princes and battles” (p. 6, author’s translation).

If this methodology, breaking with a structuralist history, is not new in the field of historical studies, it innovates by its object: Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus.

This regular Order, approved by Paul III in 1540, was distinguished by its fundamentally missionary character, on the apostolic model. Through the study of Ignatius’ journey, it is also the gestation of this new religious institution, responding to the demands of spiritual renewal of the Catholic reform, which is examined.

This work of biographical – or even historiographical – reconstruction runs along the 9 chapters of the book in chronological order, from the first entitled “The Basque of Loyola” to the last devoted to his “Successes and Failures”. In the epilogue (“The Eminence of Ignatius”), the author underlines the great fragility of the young Company at the death of its founder in 1556. It was then prey to internal dissensions and the target of external attacks, which inaugurated a period of new challenges for the religious institution.

To carry out his project, the historian benefited from the work of his predecessors – presented in the bibliography at the end of the book – and relied on a wide range of sources. In addition to the internal documentation of the Society of Jesus, Enrique García Hernán examined several archival collections, the vast majority of which were Spanish, in order to better understand the historical depth of his subject. The kaleidoscopic narration of certain periods sometimes disconcerts the reader, particularly that of the first chapter, which returns to the training of Ignatius, a young nobleman and courtier, and where the portraits of the many protagonists follow one another and intertwine against a backdrop of noble rivalries and dynastic struggle. Nevertheless, in addition to a dynamic and well-conducted narrative, this erudite abundance allows us to precisely situate the crucial stages of the young man’s journey Inigoand to understand how his multiple experiences and relationships made the institution of the Society of Jesus possible.

Beyond the portrait of the saint

During the 1990s, a opening up of the history of the Society of Jesus: investigations into the Ignatian Order were carried out by secular historians – and no longer solely Jesuits – who did not set out to understand the history of the Society via an institutional approach than the history of modernity via that of the Company. However, the figure of the founder was until now the great forgotten of this scientific revival.

The first “official” biography of Ignatius was composed by the Spanish Jesuit polygraph Pedro de Ribadeneyra (1526-1611) at the request of the Prepossessing General Francis Borgia (1565-1572): published in Naples in Latin in 1572, it was translated into Castilian by its author in 1583 and republished several times during his lifetime. The literary portraits of Ignatius of Loyola then multiplied, even multiplied. Many Lives embraced the hagiographic genre and responded to one of the great enterprises of the Society of Jesus which sought, through the elevation to the altars of its Father founder, to establish his position on the religious chessboard of the time. Others resorted to the polemical genre, within the framework of the long tradition of anti-Jesuitism which arose from the beginnings of the Order. The first harsh criticisms came largely from Dominican monks who reproached the new Company, and its founder, for their “heterodox” tendencies: deviations from Thomism, practice of Spiritual Exercises assimilated to a direct communication with God without mediation by the authorities of the Church, specificities of the Jesuit institute vis-à-vis other regular Orders (General Presidency elected for life, absence of choir and rule in matters of penance, diversity of vows, and therefore of grades within the Order, duration of the novitiate), etc. The figure of Ignatius has been reduced to a model to follow (as a counter-reformist saint) or to combat (as a heretic).

Breaking with the “paradigmatic model of a life that is perfect in every way, a life of heroic and public exemplarity, of which all the evidence could be provided”, without “anything secret, nothing false, nothing obscure” (p. 23), Enrique García Hernán did not seek to “undress a saint” (p. 34) but to understand Who Ignatius of Loyola was and how he was able to found and make the Society of Jesus prosper. As the author recalls:

What we know of him is that he was not a man of war, soldier though he was, nor a nobleman of great notoriety, although he knew some; that he had no exceptional gifts for study and writing, although his Spiritual exercises have been edited many times and translated into almost every language. He was not very imposing and was constantly ill. In these pages I would like to try to understand how the Society of Jesus was possible in these difficult conditions. (p. 23)

It is because “the saint has fallen into the public domain” (p. 9), as Pierre Antoine Fabre indicates in his presentation, that the Spanish historian was able to highlight what constituted the specificity of Ignatius of Loyola: his exceptional qualities as a mediator. The translator rightly emphasizes that:

This book has, for the first time I believe, the decisive merit for the understanding of the Ignatian enigma of unfolding in its most intimate progressions this charismatic mutation, and it could only do so by re-immersing “Saint Ignatius” in the inextricable skein of a life of relationships in which the mystery of this never ceases to be accomplished before our eyes: he is always in the middle of them. (p. 11)

Ignatius appears throughout the pages of Enrique García Hernán’s biography as a brilliant strategist capable “of conceiving from the 1530s the development of an apostolate on a global scale as there response of the “Roman Church” to the fracture of the christianitas medieval” (p. 14). He travels through the Europe of his time, then in full religious and political restructuring following the advances of the Protestant Reformation.Inigo – his Basque baptismal name – at Ignatius – Latinized version of his first name – then to Saint Ignatiusthe author set out to untangle the intertwining of these multiple relationships and, therefore, to reweave the links between the different dimensions of the same protagonist: noble, soldier, pilgrim, founder of a religious Order, Father spiritual and model of every Jesuit, herald of the Counter-Reformation, but also heterodox and even heretical, and at the same time Basque, Spanish or Roman.

A look back at the youth of a future saint

One of the achievements of this work is the meticulous reconstruction of Ignatius’ early years. Jesuit hagiographers had concentrated on the period after the conversion of Father founder, which occurred during his convalescence after being seriously injured while defending the fortress of Pamplona against the French in 1521. This change of life, now dedicated to the service of God, being understood as a event – in the sense of what induces a rupture and creates a new order – in an obvious concern for memorial construction, the period of formation of the future founder was passed over in silence. On the contrary, Enrique García Hernán places the young Iñigo de Loyola in his family, courtier, political, religious and spiritual environment in order to grasp the figure of the future saint in all his historical dimension. Ignatius is no longer presented as an abstract model of the “universal Christian”, but as a concrete man grappling with the problems of theSpain – and Europe – from the first XVI^e century.

With this approach, the author reintegrates the conversion of Ignatius of Loyola into the religious and spiritual panorama of the time. He dwells at length on Iñigo’s close relations with thealumbradismo (“illuminism”). This spiritual movement, influenced by the Modern Devotion Northern European, then by Erasmism, favored a direct relationship between the believer and God to the detriment of the mediation of ecclesiastical institutions. It therefore did not fail to provoke strong inquisitorial repression. If the “historical problem” of “heterodox” influences on Ignatian spirituality still awaits a detailed analysis, the work has the merit of highlighting some historiographical “knots” concerning the ancient Society of Jesus. An example is the famous “Vow of Montmartre”, pronounced in Paris in 1534 by Ignatius and his first 7 companions. If the first Jesuit historiography makes it the founding event of the Order, we do not know what was actually agreed between the first fathers: this episode, about which later testimonies diverge, is impossible to document.

The work finally gains in clarity and rigor in its French edition. Pierre Antoine Fabre not only offers a careful translation that makes this biography very accessible to a reader who is not a specialist in the history of modern Spain. He also reestablishes the author’s original system of notes as well as many passages that had been deleted in the Spanish edition. Finally, this version is enriched with new contributions, both from the author and the translator, which add to its quality.