In the past few months IgNation has presented three sets of Jesuit portraits. Jesuits were viewed through the lens of fiction, through the filter of biography, and through the written equivalent of “selfies” – short autobiographical reflections by contemporary Jesuits.

Today, in the second of three articles, IgNation contributor, Kevin Burns, looks through this collection of biographical portraits to identify some of the recurring themes and images. This is what he learned about being a Jesuit from a somewhat random and eclectic set of biographies in a search that began at the Ottawa Public Library.

            Long before he became famous as the Hollywood Jesuit, Daniel Lord SJ wrote: “The best way to know Jesuits is literally to know them.” That was in 1928 shortly before he moved to California to work with the film industry when it was under great pressure to censor its more scandal-creating productions. To fend off government-imposed censorship, producers came up with their own business-driven compromise: self-regulation. This took the form of the 1930 Production Code, or Hays Code – a list of “Dos and Don’ts” that could or could not appear on the screen. Daniel Lord SJ was its invisible author. He drafted the Code though his name did not appear on it.

This three-part series was my attempt “to know Jesuits” – imagined, real, and contemporary. In this second overview I have extracted some of the recurring themes in the six biographies that surfaced in my search at my local public library. I have used the words to the Jesuit in question rather than their biographers and these quotations are taken directly from the biographies.   

1)The biographical Jesuit engages in contemporary and often controversial issues:

In 1583, Matteo Ricci arrived in China with a clear sense of mission and transformation – as well as an understanding that “[t]he time at which we now find ourselves in China is not yet that of the harvest, nor even of the sowing, but rather of opening up the wild woods and fighting with the wild beasts and poisonous snakes that lurk within.”  

In the 1930s, Daniel Lord SJ worked (briefly) with the film industry to try and influence it, but without being harmed by it: “I came to Hollywood with great curiosity and zest. I left it with infinite relief. It burned up human life too fast.”

In the first decades of the 17th Century and at a time when Galileo was still under suspicion for his astronomical investigations, Athanasius Kircher SJ pursued linkages between mathematics and theology: “There must be no doubt that within numbers lies hidden a certain proximity to divine nature.”

In the 1940s, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ, paleontologist, anthropologist, and speculative theologian faced criticism from both Vatican and his Jesuit superiors. He wrote that his work was “an attempt to find a solution for the doubts that beset my action – because I love the universe, its energies, its secrets, and its hopes, and because at the same time I am dedicated to God, the Origin, the only Issue and the only Term.”  And: “The life of Christ mingles with the life-blood of evolution.”

During the same period that de Chardin’s work was being suppressed, Bernard Lonergan SJ was engaged in nothing less than assembling a single, comprehensive philosophy: “…there is an answer and the answer has to be found out.” 

2) As with their predecessors, the biographical Jesuit is also an autobiographical Jesuit – it is important for a Jesuit to leave some kind of record (a Relation of some kind? )

“[T]he whole point of writing something down is that your voice will then carry for thousands of miles, whereas in direct conversation it fades at a hundred paces.”

Matteo Ricci SJ

3) The biographical Jesuit is a missionary Jesuit

“Since once again, Lord … in the steppes of Asia – I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure majesty of the real self; I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labors and sufferings of the world.”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ

“The time at which we now find ourselves in China is not yet that of the harvest, nor even of the sowing, but rather of opening up the wild woods and fighting with the wild beasts and poisonous snakes that lurk within.”

Matteo Ricci SJ

4) The biographical Jesuit is a discerning Jesuit

“…bowed down by my seventy-seven years of age, I give my time to nothing besides spiritual exercises, nor do I occupy myself with other studies … I am fully occupied in penetrating the science of the Saints, which is to be found in Christ crucified, so that when death comes it will not find me occupied in empty studies.”

Athanasius Kircher SJ

“ …so prolonged has been my search, so much of it has been a dark struggle with my own flight from understanding, so many have been the half-lights and detours in my slow development.”

Bernard Lonergan SJ

5) The biographical Jesuit is an obedient Jesuit.

“I have no need to say, you may count on me. I am too surely convinced – and more so day by day – that the world can only be fulfilled in Christ, and that Christ can only be found through an interior submission to the Church.”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

I should add that I am substantially a Jesuit with no difficulties about obedience… . Naturally, I think this is my work, but I know more luminously than anything else that I have nothing that I have not received, that I know nothing in philosophy that I have not received from the society. I do not say that I am a Stoic or that I don’t care… . I do care enormously about the good of the church but I also know that what I do not do through obedience will be done better by some one else. God can raise up from stones children to Abraham. To produce philosophers is simply a matter of the natural order.

Bernard Lonergan SJ

6) The biographical Jesuit is a discerning Jesuit who “Exercises” in the footsteps of the founder

“The Spiritual Exercises are all the best that I have been able to think out, experience, and understand in this life, both for helping somebody to make the most of themselves, as also for being able to bring advantage, help and profit to many others.”

St Ignatius of Loyola

“…I think it will be best if I give you some account of the process of my feelings, as if I were examining my soul for myself, for the greater glory of God. … . ‘How do I know what God Our Lord wants me to do?’  …  when I began the normal meditations, I could feel those fears vanishing, I continued with this petition on several occasions, occasionally feeling fear, and occasionally the opposite.  …[O]n the third day, I felt during the normal meditation, and ever since constantly, that my mind was quite made up and that I was decided – in a way that was gentle and left me feeling quite free….”

St Ignatius of Loyola

Finally, with a directness that runs through all of his published work, Daniel Lord SJ, reminds me, as a reader of Jesuit biographies, that Jesuits are – remarkably – just as human as the rest of us:

“I just want to say that, if I have fallen and fall short of what a Jesuit ought to be, there is only one person to blame, myself. …If I have approached but little the beautiful ideal held up to me as a Jesuit, that is because I have been selfish, spiritually cowardly, tolerably lazy – in other words, just a little too human in the weak and miserable sense of the word.”

Daniel Lord SJ

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

These are the six books that were featured in IgNation’s “Keyword: Jesuit, Genre: Biography” series:

The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci by Jonathan D. Spence was first published by Viking Penguin US in 1984.

Played by Ear – The Autobiography of Daniel A. Lord S.J. was published by Loyola University Press in 1956.

Personal Writings: Reminiscences, Spiritual Diary, Select Letters and The Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius of Loyola, translated by Joseph A. Munitz and Philip Endean, published by Penguin in 1996.

A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change by John Glassie is published by Riverhead Books, a division of the Penguin Group, 2012. 

The Jesuit and the Skull – Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search for the Peking Man, by Amir D. Aczel, is published by Riverhead, a division of Penguin Books, in 2007. 

Bernard Lonergan: His Life and Leading Ideas, Pierrot Lambert and Philip McShane was published in 2010 by Axial Publishing of Vancouver.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Editorial note: How interesting that four of the six titles in this series were/are published by Penguin. Is this proof that there was/is an Ignatian influence in Penguin’s editorial office? A more likely explanation is that this points to concentration within a multinational and increasingly monolithic publishing business. When Daniel Lord SJ was first published in the 1920s, there were literally hundreds of viable Catholic presses in North America. Today, only a few feisty independent stalwarts remain.  And we salute them.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Next week, in his final piece in this 3-part series, Kevin Burns will look  at some of the recurring characteristics of Jesuit life as identified by contemporary Jesuits in the recent IgNation series, “Keyword Jesuit, Genre: Autobiography.”