They rage against us — the hostile heretics — with most contumelious writings and words, because we are called either “Society of JESUS” or “Jesuits” — we, who are from the Society of JESUS, [and] are [such] by the grace of JESUS himself. And the same [thing] some Catholics too bore at first with some vexation, before our Institute was sufficiently known — as Melchior Canus (book 4 Loci, ch. 2), Papyrius Massonus (in the life of Paul IV), [and] others in Thuanus (book 35 of the History). But in a few [words] I say these four [things].
First. All Christians could be called either “of the Society of JESUS,” or “Iesuani,” or “Iesuitae.” 1. because the Saviour is of all [belongs to all], [and] JESUS is of all. 2. from the same [reasoning] — [for] according to his other name, which is CHRIST, they [Christians] were of old called (Acts 11, v. 26), and even today are called, Christians. Therefore also from him they could be called Iesuani or Iesuitae. 3. The name of someone [belonging] to a multitude can be sought [applied] in various ways — e.g., if that one be its author and Parent, if teacher, if head. But the author and parent of all Christians is JESUS, by whose grace we are regenerated in the sacred laver of baptism. He is the Teacher, because he teaches us the way of salvation, the secrets of God, true modesty, meekness, humility, and all the virtues. He is the Head of men and Angels, whom he aggregated by the force of his merits, into whom he assiduously infuses spiritual life in a certain vital manner, and governs them, [and] heaps them with heavenly goods. Why, then, should not all Christians be Iesuani and Iesuitae? For to them all pertains that [word] of St. Paul (1 Corinthians 1, v. 9): “God is faithful, by whom you were called into the society of his Son JESUS CHRIST.” And when certain men are called by God “divine,” nothing prevents [that] some be called from JESUS “Iesuitae.” Nay, in the kingdom of Cathay, [that] all Christians are so called, the Turkish narrator teaches (in the historical relation of the East Indies, p. 171 — not so long ago published here at Mainz, in the year 1601) — taking, however, that “Cathay” kingdom for those lands of the Tartars which border China to the north. Otherwise, [that] this very kingdom of China is rather “Cathay,” and its royal city is “Pachinum” [Beijing], [namely] that famous “Cambala” [Khanbaliq] — our P. Jacobus Patagua teaches, who from that city was writing in the year 1602.
The second. Rightly can certain men, out of the whole multitude of Christians, receive that common denomination. For what is common to all, some rightly take — if no injury be inflicted on others, and [if] those who have the care of the community forbid [it] not (how much more, if these themselves approve?). For the nature of common goods is such, that anyone can rightly use and enjoy them, provided the cautions already laid down be applied — as is clear in the daily use of air, water, [and] roads; and if any city have common pastures and market-places, likewise. But the appellation “Society of JESUS” and “Jesuits,” our assembly [order] so bears [it], that [as] Christians
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…[so that, as Christians,] it keeps no others from that same paronymy [name-derivation], if indeed they wish it, and [so that] what, in the fruit of a common field, can belong to anyone, it leaves most freely to him. And neither the Pontiff, nor the Emperor, nor any of the legitimate magistrates of the whole Church rebukes this our appellation. Nay indeed, they themselves have approved [it], and praised [it] most amply. Witnesses [are] so many diplomas and privileges; witnesses [are] so many domiciles raised for this least Society in so many Provinces and Cities. But, in place of all, let there be the most clear voice of the Council of Trent (session 25, ch. 16): “By these [decrees] the holy Synod does not intend to innovate or prohibit anything, but that the religious [order] of the Clerks of the Society of JESUS may, according to their pious institute approved by the holy Apostolic See, be able to serve the Lord and his Church.” And Gregory XIV (on June 27, in the year 1591, in the Constitution which begins “Ecclesiae Catholicae”) thus says: “We ordain [that] the name of the Society of JESUS — by which this laudable order, [at its] birth, was named by the Apostolic See, and hitherto has been distinguished — is to be retained in it for perpetual future times.” But are there not also many other congregations of many [men], which are named from common things too? Two hundred and sixty years ago there began to flourish in Spanish Baetica the order of the “soldiers of CHRIST,” and it was approved by John XXII. Three hundred years ago the order of the SS. Trinity [Holy Trinity] was likewise admitted by Innocent III, about which its General Guaguinus [writes], book 6; and today at Rome most noble is the Fraternity of the same Holy Trinity; and likewise another most ancient [one], of the Saviour. But at Ravenna [there is] a College “of the brothers of good JESUS,” [named] from St. Margaret, whose ennobled virtue, [attested] by miracles, [was] erected [into a College] — Paulo Morigea [being] witness, in the book on the origins of religious [orders]. What of the order of the Iesuati? Was it not, two hundred years ago, reckoned by Urban V and other Pontiffs, and enrolled among the other orders? The jurisconsult Antonius Corsetus relates the whole matter (book 30, question…, in praise of that order). What [of], in Gaul now, the most illustrious flower of the most noble and most generous Knights, which is called “the order of the Holy Spirit”? What [of], in England once, [that which was] Catholic, now heretical, “Christ’s College”? What too in proper [personal] names? Are not some called “Magni” [the Great], “Clementes,” “Pii,” “Probi” [the Upright]? And yet in very many others [there] is greatness — and there ought to be in all, clemency, piety, [and] uprightness. Were not the Princes of the Saxons and of the Anhalt[iners], in these very years, called “Christiani”? Or, by that very [fact], did they boast themselves alone [to be] Christians, and deprive others of the name and profession of Christianity? Certainly God himself [is] the God of all; and yet St. Paul names him as if his own proper [God] (1 Corinthians 1, v. 4): “I give thanks to my God always.” And therefore that which hitherto I have said about the use of common [either] names or things, [this] both acknowledges and writes into that place [i.e. agrees with], even [one] from today’s heretics — Wolfgang Musculus (fol. 8): “By no injury,” he says, “are the rest of the pious affected, as though God were not theirs, since it is permitted to use him too with the same charity, confidence, and familiarity. To his brethren he prescribes nothing, nor takes away the confidence which is of sons toward the father — [namely] that they call [their] common father their father.” Dionysius the Areopagite (epistle 10, to St. John), about those who, out of divine love, cherish the peace of all honors, and in the present life begin the future [one]: [they are] “angel-like, being conversant in the midst of men, with all impassibility and God-likeness, and with goodness, and with the other [good things].” Where Maximus
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and Pachymeres, in almost the same words, say: “to name [him] always in the name of God, doing all things … or from God, being named from Christ.” But Maximus adds: “and [they] themselves being called gods.” How much more [may they be called] “Iesuanus” or “Jesuit”? And therefore — as [he is] most lying, so [he is] most inept — the heretic Powell, cited before (question 14), when he says [that] the Catholic Church sins against the second article of the Symbol [Creed], “while it tolerates and approves the Loyolan Monks (for I set down his own cursing words) vaunting themselves, with blasphemous mouth and insolent audacity, [to be] associates of the Lord JESUS CHRIST.” When [certain persons], grown stale with various matters — and especially with the cabbage of calumnies about that name (about which Thuanus relates, book 36 of the History) — were re-cooking [rehashing them] in the year of the Lord 1603, some at Paris, the King himself undertook the patronage of truth and innocence; and to them, in the Louvre palace, in that year, on the eve of the Nativity of Salvation [Christmas Eve], with an altogether royal wisdom and brevity, he responded in this manner: “But this name of Jesuits displeases you? Why then do not those displease [you] who call themselves religious of the TRINITY? And if you do not approve these [either], as [you do not] the Jesuits, why do you not likewise disapprove your [own] daughters, who at Paris are called DAUGHTERS OF GOD? Nay, why do you not boast yourselves to be no less of the order of the HOLY SPIRIT than these my Knights are of this [order]? Truly I would rather be called a Jesuit than religious by another name.” This [is] that great oracle of the Royal mouth, which defends and vindicates the name of his Society of JESUS much more than [did] that Delphic Loxias [Apollo] of old [vindicate] for Socrates the name and title of “Wise.”
Yet I say, thirdly and lastly: our family [order] indeed chose to be named “Society of JESUS,” but the common people made customary the appellation “Jesuits.” The cause of this — truly the best and most modest — is handed down by R. P. Ribadeneira (book 2 on the life of our Blessed Father N. Ignatius, ch. 11), and, on the same argument, Maffeius (book 2, ch. 5). But the common people looked to [aimed at] — as they do everywhere in other appellations too — brevity, and a compendium of speech. Hence, indeed, [come] throughout all Germany and Gaul the curtailings of proper names. See in our Delrio more about this name (book 2 Magical Disquisitions, q. 10), where, together with others, he rebukes both the Abbot [Trithemius], Fumus, and Scardeonius, because they confound the names of the Iseati [?] and of the Jesuits. But there was, in the year 1583, in Thuringia, I know not what Preacher, who — a little book having been published — asserted that his Lutherans were the true “Jesuits,” and were so to be called. But by whom [was he] not derided? And because Calvin and Beza (1 Corinthians 1) preferred to render, “God is faithful, by whom you were called into the communion of his Son JESUS CHRIST,” they do not have that little word “Society,” which those [Jesuits] drew out of that passage of Scripture; [and so] the followers of these [men] have nothing to complain of — unless they betake themselves to the old “hetaeries” [associations] of the Christians, about which Pliny (book 10, epistle to Trajan). Other [things] may be read in Tertullian (Apology, ch. 3), Turrianus (against Boquinus, ch. 1, 3, and 6, where [he treats] of the Nazaraei, and ch. 15 or last); in Franciscus Montanus (in the apology against Arnald, ch. 66 and 67); and in the Amphitheatre of Honor (book 1, ch. 1; book 3, ch. 2); in Gretser against Lermaeus (ch. 1 and 2) — where indeed the heretic says [that] “Jesuits” are found in the sacred letters, namely Numbers 26, v. 44. But he wrongly added [that] they are written with just as many letters and syllables [i.e. spelled identically].
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…be written. For those [names] are only to be read proüllábōs, as Nebrissensis warned (ch. 48), since that middle [letter] has the force of a consonant, as is understood from the Hebrew.
Fourthly. Those who take the appellation from JESUS — it is most fair [that] they strive with all zeal and labor to satisfy [live up to] so great a name. “Of names,” says St. Chrysostom (homily 21 to the people), “one ought to know the dignity”; and names — as will be recited a little later from the Emperor Alexander — are burdensome; nor (as the cited Chrysostom says on Acts, homily 52) “are all who are called John, John.” “I,” said the boy Diadumenus, when he had been endowed with both empire and the name of Antoninus, “will labor, lest I fall short of the name of the Antonines. For I know [that] I have taken up the name of Pius, of Marcus, of Verus — whom to satisfy is very difficult.” Commended in Vopiscus by the Emperor Valentinian was Probus, afterwards himself Emperor too, “because he was a youth, and a man of his own name [i.e. an upright man].” Clotharius [is praised] by Gregory of Tours (book 10, ch. 28), “because he was the executor of this his name”; by St. Gregory Nazianzen (in the oration [on] St. Meletius), “because he was in very deed what he was hearing by name — his morals, I say, and [his] name, he had [as] honeyed [sweet]”; by St. Ambrose (book On Virgins), St. Agnes, “because in her, on account of chastity and purity, [there] had been not the name of a human, but the oracle of a martyr.” St. Jerome (on Amos ch. 1), speaking to his Pammachius: “From the interpretation,” he says, “of thy name, by a certain prophecy of the future, thou showest [thyself] to war, with all the art of fighting, against the devil and the contrary powers.” To the younger soldier, who was named Alexander, Alexander the Great himself said, in the storming of Tyre: “Courageously, O fellow-soldier! Make the deed which thou doest worthy of the name.” It is the opinion of all, namely, that good and great names are to be satisfied [lived up to]. And enough will be done to the name JESUS:
I. If we always profess ourselves servants, clients, soldiers, [and] disciples of this JESUS himself — most bound to him by every kind of duty, of all observance, piety, and religion. For so also from him we are called CHRISTIANS.
II. If — that we may be saved, and at last blessed, through JESUS — we eagerly and strenuously embrace whatever [things] he gave, prescribed, and demonstrated to us for salvation. These are the most holy merits of his life and Passion, the sacraments of his new law, the precepts and counsels of the most holy Gospel. For whoever shall have done these, through his grace, shall be saved: as, about faith, [it is] said (Matthew 9:21, Mark 5:39, ch. 10:52, Luke 7:30, ch. 17:19, 1 Corinthians [1?]:21); about perseverance (Matthew 10:22); about poverty (Matthew 19:25); about the contempt of human things and the tolerance of miseries (Matthew 16:25, Mark 3:4); about the worship and invocation [of God] (Acts 2:21, Romans 10:13). St. Ambrose (ch. 9, book 6, Hexaemeron): “A certain image of the mind speaks in the face — the base of faith, on which daily the name of the Lord is inscribed and held.” “Let him depart,” says the Apostle (2 Timothy 2:19), “from iniquity, everyone who names the name of the Lord” — especially, indeed, from that [iniquity], while he names or surnames himself [as of Jesus] — as, [against] the Innovators, Joshua [i.e. Josua the commentator] explains that passage,
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[so] Bertramus (Lucubrationes Frankenthalenses, ch. 1).
III. If we imitate his life and morals — to which St. Augustine exhorts (tract 5 on the epistle of John): “How,” he says, “dost thou glory to be a Christian? Thou hast the name, and hast not the deeds. If the work shall have followed the name, let each one call thee a Pagan. Thou, show thyself a Christian [Jesuit] by [thy] deeds. For if by [thy] deeds thou dost not show thyself a Christian [Jesuit], [though] all call thee a Christian [Jesuit], what does the name profit, where the thing is not found?”
“Genealogies,” says Juvenal (Satire 8), “what do they effect? For who would call this man well-born, who [is]
unworthy of [his] birth, and notable only in an illustrious name? A dwarf we call ‘Atlas,’ an Ethiopian a ‘swan.’ Therefore thou wilt beware, and fear, lest — thou! — thou be [called] a ‘Creticus’ or a ‘Camerinus.’”
“A name,” says Salvian (book 4 On Providence), “without act and office, is nothing.” Alexander [Severus], son of Mammaea, the Emperor, was indeed called “Alexander,” because he was born on the festal day of Alexander the Great’s death, and in his temple. But when — [as he was] now ruling well and happily — [it] was offered [to him] that he take the surname “Magnus” [the Great], he refused. “For what great [thing],” he said, “have I done? — since Alexander received it after great deeds, [and] Pompey after great triumphs.” And again, when the Senate wished to adorn him with the name of Antoninus: “Nay,” he said, “Conscript Fathers, [bring me] not to this necessity of the name, that I be compelled to satisfy so great a name. These illustrious names are burdensome. For who would call Cicero mute? Who [would call] Varro unlearned? Who [would call] Metellus impious? If I take the name of Antoninus, I can [take] also [that] of Trajan, Titus, Vespasian.” And so he triumphed [carried the point]. “For much more illustrious was he laughed at [admired] for the alien names not received, than if he had received [them],” says Lampridius, from whom [comes] this — who reports [that] it was acclaimed to him by the Senate: “Take the sacred name, [thou] the sacred one; let the chaste one take the chaste name.”
IV. If we defile the name with no cowardice, or crime, or vice whatsoever. About certain [men] the Apostle said (Romans 2:24): “The name of God, through you, is blasphemed among the nations.” Cyril of Jerusalem (catechesis 10): “Thou art called a Christian [Jesuit]. Spare this name, lest, through thee, our Lord JESUS CHRIST, the Son of God, be blasphemed.” Salvian (toward the end of book 3 On Providence): “The more we are [made] by a most sacred name, [the more guilty we are] because we depart [are out of tune] from the most sacred name.” About the Emperor Commodus, the Emperor Alexander (praised before) [said]: “Of Commodus,” he said, “I do not wish to remember — who by this very [fact] was the worse, that with those morals (foul, namely, and vicious) he obtained the name of Antoninus.” And again: “Lately, certainly, Fathers, you remember, when that one (Heliogabalus) — the filthiest not only of bipeds, but even of quadrupeds — bore the name of Antoninus, and in foulness and luxury conquered the Neros, the Vitelliuses, and the Commoduses — [he] who was the groan of all — [that], when by one voice [there] were [decreed] the crowns of the peoples and of the honorable [men], this one [was] not rightly called only ‘Antoninus,’ and [that] through this pest the name was violated.” And hence that acclamation again: “The name of the Antonines, do thou purify. What that one defamed, do thou purify. Restore to integrity the name of the Antonines.” He [Alexander] used to quote, from Plutarch, in [the life of] Artaxerxes, [what] Artagerses [said]: “O most beautiful name among the Persians — [O] lord …” Worthy indeed,
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…[Worthy indeed that the whole of it be set down here at once:] the opinion of St. Chrysostom (homily 18 on John). “By this appellation,” he says, “let us be more vehemently roused than all others, and made readier to embrace virtue, and let us attempt to do nothing unworthy of it — we who are called by the same name by which CHRIST [is called], as Paul witnesses, whose excellence it behooves us to understand. But if he who has borne the name of some Prince, or of another illustrious man — when he hears it — is puffed up, and is proud, and reckons it to himself for great glory, and strives to preserve that man’s authority with [all his] powers, what is to be done by us, who are deemed worthy to be called by the name — not of a Prince, not of some earthly power, not of an Angel, not of an Archangel, but of the King of all himself? Shall we not so order our soul, that it be affected with no infamy — [we] whom he has honored with so great an honor?”
V. If we ourselves too strive to be, indeed, JESUSES — that is, Saviours. Here [the heretic] will roar, here he will make an uproar; the heretic will strike his brow and his thigh, and will cry out: “O the pride! O the insolence! You Jesuits wish to be Saviours? Is there any other Saviour besides JESUS?” But good [words], I pray; grant a very little bit of silence. I show [that] some of men can be called Saviours. And 1. indeed, throughout the whole book of Judges, the Judges — most of all in the Hebrew and Greek text — are said “to save,” and are named “Saviours,” as ch. 2, v. 16, and thereafter (as is said into that book). 2. St. Paul wishes to make some of his own to be saved (Romans 11:14); but whoever makes some to be saved is certainly their Saviour. And (1 Corinthians 9:22): “I became all things to all, that I might make all to be saved.” And by the same author, the husband can be the saviour of the wife, and the wife the saviouress of the husband (1 Corinthians 7:16): “Whence knowest thou, woman, whether thou shalt save the husband? or whence knowest thou, man, whether thou shalt save the wife?” St. James (ch. 5:20): “He who shall make the sinner to be converted from the error of his way, shall save his soul from death” [sōsei psychēn ek thanatou]. The Preacher, too — and teacher of his hearers and disciples (nay, even of himself) — can, with the Apostle [as] judge, be a Saviour (1 Timothy 4:16): “Attend to thyself, and to doctrine; continue in them. For, doing this, thou shalt save both thyself and those who hear thee” [sautòn sōseis, kaì toùs akoúontás sou]. What [of] St. Jude the Apostle? “Those,” he says (v. 23), “save, snatching [them] from the fire.” 3. Salvian, certainly (book 1 On Providence), calls certain men “wholesome” and “salvation-bearing”; (book 7) “procurers of human salvation.” When he had cited from John ch. 10, on Hosea ch. 1, Rupert [explains] that [word], “I said, You are gods”: “Therefore,” he says, “they are gods — the Prophets — since these are they to whom the word of God was made [addressed]. But if they are rightly called Gods, are they not also, nonetheless, rightly surnamed Saviours? If Scripture called those [men] Saviours through whom God wrought the temporal salvation of Israel — for example’s sake, ‘And the sons of Israel cried out to the Lord, who raised up for them a Saviour, and freed them: Othoniel, namely, the son of Kenez’; and likewise, ‘And they cried to the Lord, who raised up for them a Saviour, Aod [Ehud]’ — if, therefore, Scripture called those Saviours through whom God temporally freed Israel, how much more rightly are those called Saviours whose labor cooperated with our Saviour God for our eternal salvation?” 4. But that Aesculapii, Hercules, Jupiter, and other Gods — who (as Demosthenes relates in the proem On the False Legation, and Strabo, book 17) [were called] “saviors” [sōtēres] by the Gentiles, for whom the true Saviour [is] JESUS CHRIST,
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unheard-of, are called [saviours] — I will omit, [along with] their very selves, on account of whose importunity and petulance all this argument, now taken up, [is enough]. The heretics affect [taint] certain mortals with the same name [of Saviour]. For the begetter and parent of all those [heretics], Luther (in the book On Sending Boys to School), says [that] a good Preacher is, in the kingdom of CHRIST, a “Saviour”; likewise a good Jurisconsult, in the kingdom of Caesar. But Chytraeus, in the funeral oration on Dorothea (p. 108): “Bogislaus,” he says, “Prince of Pomerania, [was] truly a sōtēr [saviour].” Therefore that some of men be, and be called, Saviours, is altogether lawful. But, without doubt, [it is] by a far other reasoning, and by a much inferior degree, than [that by which] our JESUS — alone and one — claims this august name for himself by right. “The Christ,” says St. Chrysostom (in the homily on the [Epistle] to the Hebrews), [are the men called] “saviours”; “but the angels, as servants” — [while these men are] much more earthly, vile, and mortal “men” [ánthrōpoi]. Let us act, therefore, and with great and keen zeal let us strive — first, indeed, that we ourselves, each one, be Saviours, from the precept of the Apostle cited a little above (1 Timothy 4:16). For charity begins from itself; and “what does it profit a man, if he gain the whole world,” says the Saviour, “but suffer the detriment of his own soul?” (Matthew 16). The Princes of the Priests, the Scribes and Pharisees, mocked CHRIST the Lord crucified, saying: “He saved others, himself he cannot save” (Matthew 27:42, Mark 15:31). But they spoke only about the salvation of the body, and lied impiously and basely. For he could, if indeed he had wished, save himself; he could descend from the cross safe and unharmed; he could, by a mere nod, scatter, root out, and blast [with lightning] his mockers and torturers. But he was unwilling — so that thus, as to soul and body, he might make us saved unto all eternity. But certainly [it is right that] all the mockers truly and deservedly reproach any of us, as to our souls — even the Jews, and the impious: “He makes others saved; himself he is unwilling to make [saved].” “He is unwilling,” I say — [we,] through the grace of God, “who wills all men to be saved” (1 Timothy 2:4) — [that] he can [be saved] most of all, and much more, and with a greater disgrace, and with our highest [disgrace] (which God avert), and with a discommodity and grief, at the last judgment they will cry out: “He made others saved; himself he was unwilling to make saved.” Far be this from us, far [be it]! Because he who is a JESUS [Jesuit] — on this let him first and chiefly bestow care: that he himself, through the true and highest Saviour, exist [as] a Saviour, and not think [applicable] to himself this word of the crucifiers, but of the crucified: “Save thyself” (Matthew 27:40). “For who,” says Horace (book 1, epistle 20), “toils to save the unwilling?” Never [is it] not in his [our] ears — that clang of the Apostolic trumpet: “Attend to thyself, and to doctrine.” Note the order. First, look to thyself; [have] care for thyself; attend to thyself. Then, indeed, convert charity, and thy labor, to others: instruct others, teach others. “Continue in them” — in the two [things], namely, which have been said both about thee and about others; “in these abide”; in these constantly, unto the last breath, persevere. For this — [that] which [I said] about instancy and perseverance, in that double attention and in its order, [namely] that first thou attend to thyself, but afterward to the teaching of others — I said, I say, [that] doing this, “thou shalt save both thyself, and those who hear thee.” And this is the other [thing], in which all our contention and industry ought to be engaged,
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…[and this is the other thing, in which all our contention and industry ought to be engaged: that we make others too to be saved.] For too narrow is the charity that is content with its own salvation alone; nor does it savor of the fullness of him who came that he might save not himself only — [he] who needed no saving — but all. So the Apostle (1 Timothy 1:15): “Faithful [is] the saying, and worthy of all acceptance, that CHRIST JESUS came into the world to save sinners” — of whom he straightway subjoins that he himself is the first. This therefore let us also do: by teaching, by warning, by preaching, by praying, by every good example and labor, let us strive to draw as many as we can, together with ourselves, unto eternal salvation — [we] who bear the name of the Saviour;
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…[and let us commend both ourselves and them] with assiduous prayers to the divine Majesty. AMEN. AMEN.