The Jesuits

Saint Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, had a vision, while praying on the banks of the Cardoner River in Eastern Spain, of God’s abiding presence in all of creation. He later had a second vision of Christ carrying a cross for the salvation of the world. Putting the two visions together, he developed a series of meditations and contemplations called The Spiritual Exercises, in which, a person is guided to enter the vision of God’s presence in and love for the world. From there, one moves to a deeper realization of where and how God might be calling that person to serve.

The Jesuit order itself was founded on August 15, 1534 at Montmartre in Paris. Pope Paul III approved their constitutions in 1540. With the Jesuits, a third type of order comes onto the scene. The Jesuits were to have no special clothing and did not pray the Liturgy of the Hours in common. Their lifestyle and daily order was to focus on what one Jesuit writer called “a mysticism of service.”

From their beginning, Jesuits have been involved in education, scholarship and the foreign missions. Early Jesuits were colleagues of Galileo and over 30 lunar formations bear Jesuit names. Athanasius Kircher (d.1680) was a major link between medieval and modern science. Jirí Kamel, a Czech Jesuit (d.1706), sent drawings and specimens of insects and plants from Manila to the Royal Society of London. He recognized strychnine in a type of bean and camellia tea is named after him. Christopher Clavius (d.1612) designed the Gregorian calendar and introduced the decimal point to mathematics. The Jesuits introduced geometry and Western astronomical instruments to China in the seventeenth century.

Teihard de Chardin (d. 1955) was a French Jesuit paleontologist. He was concerned with the split between his spirituality and what his fellow scientists were saying about the universe’s evolution towards entropy. He developed a schema wherein he saw the possibility that the universe was rather evolving towards a deeper spiritual unification.

Gerard Manly Hopkins (d.1889), was an English Jesuit poet and artist. He was acutely aware of the beauties of creation and coined the word “inscape” for what he saw as the unique and particular quality of each object in nature. The experience of the particular, of the “deep-down” beauty, leads to an experience of the transcendent. He had a Wordsworthian feeling for nature coupled with a sense of nature as an expression of God. The squalor of industrial towns and the oppression of the working class horrified him. His sonnet, “God’s Grandeur,” begins with the lines; “The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; it gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil crushed.” He then goes on to describe how the Industrial Revolution has damaged the earth. But he ends the poem by saying, “And, for all this, nature is never spent. There lives the dearest freshness deep down things. And though the last lights off the black West went – Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs – Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.” He poetically expresses the heart of Jesuit spirituality.

Today, Jesuit John Surette is co-founder of Spiritearth in Arlington, Massachusetts. The educational center is built on the principal that an openness and reverence before the universe allows community to form and justice to flourish. They would like to see humanity enter an ecozoic era. Another Jesuit, Al Fritsch trained as a chemist, worked for Ralph Nader’s Center for the Study of Responsive Law and then founded Appalachia Science in the Public Interest in Mt. Vernon, Kentucky. The center is devoted to the notion of sustainability and has developed solar energy applications, organic gardens, artificial wetlands and dry composting toilets. They are helping to develop ginseng as an alternative crop to tobacco and extensive lumbering in Appalachia. The center has done over 200 assessments in 34 states and consulted in Haiti, Peru, and the Dominican Republic. Fritsch would like to see a 12-step program addressing people’s addiction to material things.

The Jesuits have assisted 60 religious groups in ecological improvements to their property. Jesuits also teach ecology, sustainability and eco-spirituality in their many educational institutions.

			Maryknoll
			The Dominicans
			Religious Orders and Ecology
			Franciscan Reverence of Creation Resources
			OFM JPIC Home Page

 

Copyright, Bron Taylor and Jeffrey Kaplan, The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (London: Continuum, forthcoming 2004).