Chapter 4
MORAL
CODE OF THE JESUITS—PROBABILISM, ETC.
The Jesuit cut off from Country—from
Family—from Property—from the Pope even—The End Sanctifies
the Means—The First Great Commandment and Jesuit Morality—When
may a Man Love God?— Second Great Commandment—Doctrine of Probabilism—The
Jesuit Casuists—Pascal—The Direction of the Intention—Illustrative
Cases furnished by Jesuit Doctors—Marvellous Virtue of the Doctrine—A
Pious Assassination!
WE have not yet surveyed the full
and perfect equipment of those troops which Loyola sent forth to prosecute
the war against Protestantism. Nothing was left unthought of and unprovided
for which might assist them in covering their opponents with defeat, and
crowning themselves with victory. They were set free from every obligation,
whether imposed by the natural or the Divine law. Every stratagem, artifice,
and disguise were lawful to men in whose favor all distinction between
right and wrong had been abolished. They might assume as many shapes as
Proteus, and exhibit as many colors as the chameleon. They stood apart
and alone among the human race. First of all, they were cut off from country.
Their vow bound them to go to whatever land their General might send them,
and to remain there as long as he might appoint. Their country was the
society. They were cut off from family and friends. Their vow taught them
to forget their father’s house, and to esteem themselves holy only
when every affection and desire which nature had planted in their breasts
had been plucked up by the roots. They were cut off from property and
wealth. For although the society was immensely rich, its individual members
possessed nothing. Nor could they cherish the hope of ever becoming personally
wealthy, seeing they had taken a vow of perpetual poverty. If it chanced
that a rich relative died, and left them as heirs, the General relieved
them of their vow, and sent them back into the world, for so long a time
as might enable them to take possession of the wealth of which they had
been named the heirs; but this done, they returned laden with their booty,
and, resuming their vow as Jesuits, laid every penny of their newly-acquired
riches at the feet of the General.
They were cut off, moreover, from
the State. They were discharged from all civil and national relationships
and duties. They were under a higher code than the national one—the
Institutions namely, which Loyola had edited, and the Spirit of God had
inspired; and they were the subjects of a higher monarch than the sovereign
of the nation—their own General. Nay, more, the Jesuits were cut
off even from the Pope. For if their General "held the place of the
Omnipotent God," much more did he hold the place of "his Vicar."
And so was it in fact; for soon the members of the Society of Jesus came
to recognize no laws but their own, and though at their first formation
they professed to have no end but the defense and glory of the Papal See,
it came to pass when they grew to be strong that, instead of serving the
tiara, they compelled the tiara to serve the society, and made their own
wealth, power, and dominion the one grand object of their existence. They
were a Papacy within the Papacy—a Papacy whose organization was more
perfect, whose instincts were more cruel, whose workings were more mysterious,
and whose dominion was more destructive than that of the old Papacy.
So stood the Society of Jesus. A deep
and wide gulf separated it from all other communities and interests. Set
free from the love of family, from the ties of kindred, from the claims
of country, and from the rule of law, careless of the happiness they might
destroy, and the misery and pain and woe they might inflict, the members
were at liberty, without control or challenge, to pursue their terrible
end, which was the dethronement of every other power, the extinction of
every other interest but their own, and the reduction of mankind into
abject slavery, that on the ruins of the liberty, the virtue, and the
happiness of the world they might raise themselves to supreme, unlimited
dominion. But we have not yet detailed all the appliances with which the
Jesuits were careful to furnish themselves for the execution of their
unspeakably audacious and diabolical design. In the midst of these abysses
there opens to our eye a yet profounder abyss. To enjoy exemption from
all human authority and from every earthly law was to them a small matter;
nothing would satisfy their lust for license save the entire abrogation
of the moral law, and nothing would appease their pride save to trample
under foot the majesty of heaven. We now come to speak of the moral code
of the Jesuits.
The key-note of their ethical code
is the famous maxim that the end sanctifies the means. Before that maxim
the eternal distinction of right and wrong vanishes. Not only do the stringency
and sanctions of human law dissolve and disappear, but the authority and
majesty of the Decalogue are overthrown. There are no conceivable crime,
villainy, and atrocity which this maxim will not justify. Nay, such become
dutiful and holy, provided they be done for "the greater glory of
God," by which the Jesuit means the honor, interest, and advancement
of His society. In short, the Jesuit may do whatever he has a mind to
do, all human and Divine laws notwithstanding. This is a very grave charge,
but the evidence of its truth is, unhappily, too abundant, and the difficulty
lies in making a selection.
What the Popes have
attempted to do by the plenitude of their power, namely, to make sin to
be no sin, the Jesuit doctors have done by their casuistry. "The
first and great commandment in the law," said the same Divine Person
who proclaimed it from Sinai, "is to love the Lord thy God."
The Jesuit casuists have set men free from the obligation to love God.
Escobar 1 collects
the different sentiments of the famous divines of the Society of Jesus
upon the question, When is a man obliged to have actually an affection
for God? The following are some of these:—Suarez says, "It is
sufficient a man love him before he dies, not assigning any particular
time. Vasquez, that it is sufficient even at the point of death. Others,
when a man receives his baptism: others, when he is obliged to be contrite:
others, upon holidays. But our Father Castro-Palao 2 disputes
all these opinions, and that justly. Hurtado de Mendoza pretends that
a man is obliged to do it once every year. Our Father Coninck believes
a man to be obliged once in three or four years. Henriquez, once in five
years. But Filiutius affirms it to be probable that in rigor a man is
not obliged every five years. When then? He leaves the point to the wise."
"We are not," says Father Sirmond, "so much commanded to
love him as not to hate him,"3 Thus
do the Jesuit theologians make void "the first; and great commandment
in the law."
The second commandment
in the law is, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." This
second great commandment meets with no more respect at the hands of the
Jesuits than the first. Their morality dashes both tables of the law in
pieces; charity to man it makes void equally with the love of God. The
methods by which this may be done are innumerable.4
The first of these
is termed probabilism. This is a device which enables a man to commit
any act, be it ever so manifest a breach of the moral and Divine law,
without the least restraint of conscience, remorse of mind, or guilt before
God. What is probabilism? By way of answer we shall suppose that a man
has a great mind to do a certain act, of the lawfulness of which he is
in doubt. He finds that there are two opinions upon the point: the one
probably true, to the effect that the act is lawful; the other more probably
true, to the effect that the act is sinful. Under the Jesuit regimen the
man is at liberty to act upon the probable opinion. The act is probably
right, but more probably wrong, nevertheless he is safe in doing it, in
virtue of the doctrine of probabalism. It is important to ask, what makes
all opinion probable? To make an opinion probable a Jesuit finds easy
indeed. If a single doctor has pronounced in its favor, though a score
of doctors may have condemned it, or if the man can imagine in his own
mind something like a tolerable reason for doing the act, the opinion
that it is lawful becomes probable. It will be hard to name an act for
which a Jesuit authority may not be produced, and harder still to find
a man whose invention is so poor as not to furnish him with what he deems
a good reason for doing what he is inclined to, and therefore it may be
pronounced impossible to instance a deed, however manifestly opposed to
the light of nature and the law of God, which may not be committed under
the shield of the monstrous dogma of probabilism.5
We are neither indulging in satire
nor incurring the charge of false-witness-bearing in this picture of Jesuit
theology. "A person may do what he considers allowable," says
Emmanuel Sa, of the Society of Jesus, "according to a probable opinion,
although the contrary may be the more probable one. The opinion of a single
grave doctor is all that is requisite." A yet greater doctor, Filiutius,
of Rome, confirms him in this. "It is allowable," says he, "to
follow the less probable opinion, even though it be the less safe one.
That is the common judgment of modern authors." "Of two contrary
opinions," says Paul Laymann, "touching the legality or illegality of any human action,
every one may follow in practice or in action that which he should prefer,
although it may appear to the agent himself less probable in theory."
he adds: "A learned person may give contrary advice to different
persons according to contrary probable opinions, whilst he still preserves
discretion and prudence." We may say with Pascal, "These Jesuit
casuists give us elbow-room at all events!"6
It is and it is not is the motto of
this theology. It is the true Lesbian rule which shapes itself according
to that which we wish to measure by it. Would we have any action to be
sinful, the Jesuit moralist turns this side of the code to us; would we
have it to be lawful, he turns the other side. Right and wrong are put
thus in our own power; we can make the same action a sin or a duty as
we please, or as we deem it expedient. To steal the property, slander
the character, violate the chastity, or spill the blood of a fellow-creature,
is most probably wrong, but let us imagine some good to be got by it,
and it is probably right. The Jesuit workers, for the sake of those who
are dull of understanding and slow to apprehend the freedom they bring
them, have gone into particulars and compiled lists of actions, esteemed
sinful, unnatural, and abominable by the moral sense of all nations hitherto,
but which, in virtue of this new morality, are no longer so, and they
have explained how these actions may be safely done, with a minuteness
of detail and a luxuriance of illustration, in which it were tedious in
some cases, immodest in others, to follow them.
One would think that this was license
enough. What more can the Jesuit need, or what more can he possibly have,
seeing by a little effort, of invention he can overleap every human and
Divine barrier, and commit the most horrible crimes, on the mightiest
possible scale, and neither feel remorse of conscience nor fear of punishment?
But this unbounded liberty of wickedness did not content the sons of Loyola.
They panted for a liberty, if possible, yet more boundless; they wished
to be released from the easy condition of imagining some good end for
the wickedness they wished to perpetrate, and to be free to sin without
the trouble of assigning even to themselves any end at all. This they
have accomplished by the method of directing the intention.
This is a new ethical science, unknown
to those ages which were not privileged to bask in the illuminating rays
of the Society of Jesus, and it is as simple as convenient. It is the soul, they argue,
that does the act, so far as it is moral or immoral. As regards the body’s
share in it, neither virtue nor vice can be predicated of it. If, therefore,
while the hand is shedding blood, or the tongue is calumniating character,
or uttering a falsehood, the soul can so abstract itself from what the
body is doing as to occupy itself the while with some holy theme, or fix
its meditation upon some benefit or advantage likely to arise from the
deed, which it knows, or at least suspects, the body is at that moment
engaged in doing, the soul contracts neither guilt nor stain, and the
man runs no risk of ever being called to account for the murder, or theft,
or calumny, by God, or of incurring his displeasure on that ground. We
are not satirizing; we are simply stating the morality of the Jesuits.
"We never," says the Father Jesuit in Pascal’s Letters,
"suffer such a thing as the formal intention to sin with the sole
design of sinning; and if any person whatever should persist in having
no other end but evil in the evil that he does, we break with him at once—
such conduct is diabolical. This holds true, without exception, of age,
sex, or rank. But when the person is not of such a wretched disposition
as this, we try to put in practice our method of directing the intention,
which simply consists in his proposing to himself, as the end of his actions,
some allowable object. Not that we do not endeavor, as far as we can,
to dissuade men from doing things forbidden; but when we cannot prevent
the action, we at least, purify the motive, and thus correct the viciousness
of the means by the goodness of the end. Such is the way in which our
Fathers [of the society] have contrived to permit those acts of violence
to which men usually resort in vindication of their honor. They have no
more to do than to turn off the intention from the desire of vengeance,
which is criminal, and to direct it to a desire to defend their honor,
which, according to us, is quite warrantable. And in this way our doctors
discharge all their duty towards God and towards man. By permitting the
action they gratify the world; and by purifying the intention they give
satisfaction to the Gospel. This is a secret, sir, which was entirely
unknown to the ancients; the world is indebted for the discovery entirely
to our doctors. You understand it now, I hope.7
Let us take a few
illustrative cases, but only such as Jesuit casuists themselves have furnished.
"A military man," says Reginald,"8 "may
demand satisfaction on the spot from the person who has injured him, not
indeed with the intention of rendering evil for evil, but with that of
preserving his honor. Lessius 9 observes
that if a man has received a blow on the face, he must on no account have
an intention to avenge himself; but he may lawfully have an intention
to avert infamy, and may, with that view, repel the insult immediately,
even at the point of the sword. "If your enemy is disposed to injure
you," says Escobar, "you have no right to wish his death by
a movement of hatred, though you may to save yourself from harm."
And says Hurtado de Mendoza 10
"We may pray God to visit with
speedy death those who are bent on persecuting us, if there is no other
way of escaping from it." "An incumbent," says Gaspar de
Hurtado 11 "may without any mortal sin
desire the decease of a life-renter on his benefice, and a son that of
a father, and rejoice when it happens, provided always it is for the sake
of the profit that is to accrue from the event, and not from personal
aversion." Sanchez teaches that it is lawful to kill our adversary
in a duel, or even privately, when he intends to deprive us of our honor
or property unjustly in a law-suit, or by chicanery, and when there is
no other way of preserving them.12
It is equally right to kill in a
private way a false accuser, and his witness, and even the judge who has
been bribed to favor them. "A most pious assassination!" exclaims
Pascal.
Footnotes
1 Father Antoine Escobar, of Mendoza. He is said by
his friends to have been a good man, and a laborious student. He compiled
a work in six volumes, entitled Exposition of Uncontroverted Opinions
in Moral Theology. It afforded a rich field for the satire of Pascal.
Its characteristic absurdity is that its questions uniformly exhibit two
faces—an affirmative and a negative—so that escobarderie became
a synonym in France for duplicity.
2 Ferdinand de Castro-Palao was a Jesuit of Spain,
and author of a work on
Virtues and Vices,
published in 1621.
3 Escobar. tr. 1, ex. 2, n. 21; and tr. 5, ex. 4, n.
8. Sirmond, Def. Virt., tr. 2,
sec. 1.
4 It is of no avail to object that these are the sentiments
of individual Jesuits, and that it is not fair to impute them to the society.
It was a particular rule in the Company of Jesus, "that nothing should
be published by any of its members without the approbation of their superiors."
An express order was made obliging them to this in France by Henry III.,
1583, confirmed by Henry IV., 1603, and by Louis XIII., 1612. So that
the whole fraternity became responsible for all the doctrines taught in
the books of its individual members, unless they were expressly condemned.
5 Probabilism will be denied, but it has not been renounced.
In a late publication a member of the society has actually attempted to
vindicate it. See De l’Existence et de l’Institute des Jesuites.
Par le R, P. de Ravignan, de la Compagnie de Jesus. Paris, 1845. Page
83.
6 Pascal. Provincial Letters, p. 70; Edin., 1847.
7 The Provincial Letters. Letter 8, p. 96; Edin., 1847.
8 In Praxi, livr. 21, num. 62.
9 De Just., livr. 2, c. 9, d. 12, n. 79.
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