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PHILOSOPHY AMONG THE JESUITS. 259 guess. The new organisation of which he was the founder had to struggle between the rival forces of the Thomist Dominicans and the Scotist children of St. Francis. He could not possibly keep to his leading idea the best means of defending the Church and at the same time embrace the doctrines of Duns Scotus ; whereas, if he showed that the Society was absolutely and unreservedly Thomist, it would have set the Franciscans bitterly against him, and hardly conciliated the Dominicans, unless by a display of obsequious subserviency fatal to the independence necessary to any Order. Besides, he had in the example of the two Orders just mentioned a fatal instance of the results attained by party spirit in speculative things. I shall touch upon this again further on, but now merely point out that no enemies of Scholasticism could have done it more harm than its adherents did by their wranglings. Again, if we may attribute any personal feelings to a man so utterly absorbed in the realisation of his plans, St. Ignatius could not have easily forgotten that he had everywhere met with opposition from the Dominicans, who had twice thrust him into prison, for preaching before he was ordained a priest. Shall we add to these causes a vague and perhaps unconscious hope that some day there would arise a member of the nascent Society, whose writings might be deemed worthy to take the place of Aquinas, at least in the schools of the future Order ? It may be ; but that hope, if ever it existed, was doomed to disappointment. No one author among the Jesuits has the honour of being openly commented in its schools as an authority. We may now pass to consider the first movements of the Jesuits in the philosophical line, and sum them up as a mere reaction against Protestantism. At the outset of the Refor- mation, one great question was raised, which is not yet set at rest. The problem of free-will finds Protestants far from unanimous at the present day ; but at the beginning it was otherwise. Luther and Calvin, the two main pillars of the Reformation, had written the De Servo Arbitrio, and the Institutio Christiance Religionis, each embodying their doctrine on this point. Everywhere Jesuit missionaries were engaged in fierce conflict with the Reformers, and everywhere they were met, if not with the absolute negation of free-will, at least with the negation of that amount of it which is necessary for the dogmas of their Church. This fact may perhaps throw additional light on the reserve with which St. Thomas is spoken of in the Constitutions, and the innuendo that he is not sufficiently " actual ". The Summa