The Principles of Jesuit Education

Rev. Joseph Rossi, S.J.,
Henry J. Knott Sr. Professor of Theology

In the seventeenth century, the Metaphysical poet Abraham Cowley quipped:

Teach a Jesuit to Lye?
Teach fire to burne
And winds to b l o w .

Not a flattering portrait; and over the centuries Cowley has not stood alone in his opprobrium for the Society of Jesus. The Oxford English Dictionary lists at least fifteen entries in the general category "Jesuit": most of them uncomplimentary. Most of them were, I also would contend, partisan and myopic.

I would like to give you some appreciation of Saint Ignatius Loyola, of the religious and educational phenomenon he created, and of the foundations on which Jesuit education and Loyola College in Maryland are built. Our journey at times will take us far from Evergreen, but I will begin there, just outside Cohn Hall, where we sit this morning.

This is a Jesuit school. Loyola is, in other words, an educational institution established by the Catholic religious order founded by Inigo de Loyola, a sixteenth-century saint of the Catholic Reformation, whose great desire was to impart one central message to the world: through the continuous action of God in the soul of a person could be rid of all disordered affections, and then, seeking God's will, order life according to Christ. The word Jesuit, in fact, comes from the Latin name Jesu: that is Jesus. Things Jesuit were, thus, things of Jesus; and, in all this, the humanity of Jesus was medial.

If you study the College's sign on the corner of Cold Spring Lane and Charles Street, you will see that the word "Jesuit" is not mentioned. Also not mentioned is the official name of the religious community founded by Saint Ignatius: that is, the Society of Jesus. On that sign that identifies the institution, however, there are four letters above the college title: A.M.D.G. These stand for Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, which translated means "For the Greater Glory of God." It is the motto of the Jesuits. These letters and that motto have everything to do with Jesus, with the Jesuits, and with Jesuit education. They are our story.

When Portuguese Jesuits came to Brazil in the sixteenth century they constructed a city on a beautiful hill with a magnificent view of the Atlantic Ocean. They first erected their school to educate youth about God, and only later their chapel, at the top of that hill. They named the town Olinda, which means something like "Wow, isn't this beautiful!" With this epithet, they celebrated God's creation.

More than four hundred years later, in the 1980s, at the Catholic University in San Salvador, some Jesuit academics looked beyond their campus to see the political and social panorama of their nation. What they saw was the plight of the vast majority of the people of El Salvador: poverty, military repression, malnutrition, and inequality. Their response was, "Isn't this shameful? Let's do something about it." In 1989 six of those Jesuits were pulled from their beds early one morning and executed by a right-wing death squad. In reply to these murders more than one hundred Jesuits from around the world volunteered to replace their six slain brothers. "Isn't this shameful! Let's do something about it."

The Jesuits of Olinda saw the beauty of the world; the Jesuits of El Salvador saw the horror. Both said, "God is here. God must be shown to be here." Their reaction was incarnational. God's reaction to the plight of humanity was incarnational, as well. Christ enfleshed; Christ human. Christ doing something about it!

For Ignatius Loyola the world was not innately evil; material things were not intrinsically bad. Indeed, there was evil in the world, caused by sin, and there was suffering caused by any number of things, some inexplicable. But human life and human effort, human thought and human insight, created and sustained by God, were estimable. With regard to human effort, however, there was one caution. It had to have its proper focus, and that focus was God.

Before Ignatius was Saint Ignatius he had been a Basque knight at the court of the Duke of Nagera, a grandee of Spain. Loyola had committed himself to the cause of his liege, no matter what that cause might be, moral or immoral. Ignatius was also committed to being physically attractive. He liked the ladies and the ladies liked him. But during the siege of Pampeluna in 1521 his leg was shattered by a cannon ball. For Loyola the courtly lover, this was a catastrophe of the first magnitude. His physical beauty had been mutilated. Then the calamity was compounded by the attending physicians. They set his leg improperly, and when it healed it was deformed. This he could not abide. He had the doctors break the leg again, so that it would mend without protruding. Remember, Ignatius was religiously concerned about being handsome. During his second convalescence, however, he was shattered once again, this time by a spiritual cannon ball. He read the Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century primer by Jacobus de Voragine, containing legends of the saints. Reading of Francis of Assisi and Saint Dominic, Ignatius envisioned them as spiritual knights of the one true king: Christ the Lord. At that point Loyola altered his allegiance: all his humanity, all his labors, would now attend the standard of Christ the King.

In this new service, Ignatius would not reject or ignore his talents and experience, his intelligence and love for the world, his thirst for the things that the world offered. Instead, he would use them for God. Why not? God gave them to him.

Furthermore, when Christ saved the world he didn't relinquish his human gifts, and he certainly didn't save them for heaven. Jesus applied his mind, his body, his humanity, and his respect for material things and for material beings for the sake of their own reclamation. He interacted with the world in which he lived. He saw the good and the evil, ignoring neither one. Christ used his humanity and his divinity to transform the world and to bring it back to God. In his life Christ taught us how to deal with our own humanity. Ignatius's spiritual genius discerned this.

At the end of the Spiritual Exercises, the soul of the Ignatian vision, there is a statement, which in Latin is called the Suscipe. Suscipe means "take", but this is not a self-indulgent declaration.

Take, Lord, receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all that I have and possess. You have given all to me. To you, Lord, I return it. All is yours, dispose of it wholly, according to Your will. Give me your love and your grace, for this is sufficient for me.

For Ignatius there was no other way to minister to God and to humanity than to serve "without counting the cost." Nothing else made sense.

From the beginning the Jesuits offered their schools as excellent places to follow Christ and to change the world in his image. They do today. There is beauty in the world: art, literature, science, the humanities, etc. What can we say about them? OLINDA!! There is suffering in the world too, an abundance of it. What can we affirm in the face of so much suffering, so much oppression, imposed or self-inflicted? We can do something about it. Christ did. There are disagreements in the world: persons shrieking at one another, differing violently. Again, what can we do? Peacefully, amicably, non-violently, with intelligence and faith, with respect and with conviction, we can-we must-encourage and heal through Christ, through Jesuit education.

And how do we do this? Well, how did Ignatius do it?

He made his schools centers for the study of all that is in the world. He made them colleges of the liberal arts and humanities. Institutions of learning-high schools and universities-that offered intellectual development in an integrated program of languages modern and ancient, literature contemporary and classical, science natural and social, mathematics, history, and the arts; of philosophy, the study of human thought, and of theology, the study of God.

For Ignatius one studies the works of humankind because humankind is a worthwhile study. Its efforts are instructive, both its successes and failures; they are valuable because humans are created of God, loved by God; and they are transcendent, because God saves the world, working through persons and societies for the good of all.

Christ's was a life for others. Saint Ignatius took this as his standard-he was a man for others. The goal of a Jesuit education is to educate the human person for others. Concern for self is not sufficient. Wealth, security, advancement are not enough; they can never be the focus. If they are, Ignatius believed, then truly one can be said to be uneducated.

Jesuit education must proclaim this message beyond the campus, and do so in ways that are diverse, Christian, and collegial. We live in a culture of variety and diversity. Olinda! Let us address it in various ways. Let us address it in Ignatius's words. Remember the Suscipe.

Take, Lord, receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all that I have and possess. You have given all to me. To you, Lord, I return it.

The Jesuit college aspires to develop the "all" of the human person, so that each will return to God and brings God's creation with them. As we know from the Gospels, from the life of Christ, giving oneself to God means giving means giving oneself to others, completely. Imagine what our sad, self-centered world could be if it was consecrated to such a principle? If even a critical mass of the peoples of the world, of a country, of a community, or even of a college, were so dedicated?

Loyola College is no longer the small insular Catholic college of years ago, when most of the students, faculty, staff, and administrators were Baltimore Catholics. For instance, in this group of 1993 new faculty, there are both Catholics and non-Catholics. It is a fair question to ask, therefore, can everyone integrate the educational tradition of Loyola into their lives and professions, or must one who is not Catholic live a dichotomous life?

Christ and, consequently, Ignatius, taught radical service for others, all others. Professors, therefore, who are committed to their students inside and outside the classroom, who are devoted to research in their disciplines and generous in their service to Loyola and the community beyond, who are engaged in integrating the Ignatian mission of education, and who have an astute and thoughtful appreciation of it, are not merely to be tolerated at Evergreen, but highly esteemed.

I began my talk with two expressions of the philosophy of the Jesuits, one from Brazil and one from El Salvador. I would like to conclude this talk by returning to Brazil.

One of the innovative methods the early Jesuits used to communicate the message of Christ was through art and architecture. The Society of Jesus devised a school of interior and exterior ecclesiastical design called the Baroque. It is ornate and embellished. In churches it was devised to catch the eye and draw the attention toward the altar-in other words toward God, the highest truth-but by means of the material world.

Some Baroque churches are too elaborate. I recall one in the city of Salvador in Brazil, the whole interior of which, with few exceptions, is plated with gold. You do not know where to look first; the eye is not focused on anything; everything is equivalently dazzling.

Another church in that city, however, the Church of Sao Ignacio, successfully illustrates the best of Baroque architecture, and, thereby, the best of Ignatius and his educative methods. Like the first structure, it too is elaborate, but in Sao Ignacio, all details guide one's eyes to the high altar, and then to the painting above the altar. In that painting, just one of many in existence entitled The Apotheosis of Saint Ignatius, the saint has died and gone to heaven. But he has not gone alone. With him are representatives of all the nations of the world to which he had sent his Jesuits as missionaries and catechists. As he is greeted by God and the heavenly court, he is not directing their attention to himself. Instead, he is introducing Asians, Africans, North and South Americans, persons of all races, persons to whom he sent his company of Jesuits, to God.

Some of these representatives are proudly carrying a banner that contains four familiar letters, A.M.D.G.: Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam; "For the Greater Glory of God." It is the motto of Loyola College in Maryland.

In the mid-years of this decade of the 1990s our college is grappling with what it means to be a Jesuit educational institution: a struggle we share with all other Jesuit colleges and universities in the nation. We are far from the end of that struggle. We have, in truth, just begun. Labels, even ones as profound as A.M.D.G., like bumper stickers, say only so much. If this college is to identify itself honorably, accurately, as Jesuit, then we must begin at the same point as Ignatius: with a true respect for the nature, the sovereignty, and the promise of humanity. We must acknowledge, then weigh, and finally explain to all, that for Ignatius Loyola, one could do no better than the teachings and examples of Christ.