KATE O'BRIEN

St. Francis Xavier

WHEN I WAS A SCHOOLGIRL certain classfellows had leather-bound books, called "Confession Albums", in which they constrained one to set down in writing one's favourite colour, flower, historical character, fictional character, pet abomination, favourite quality in a man, favourite quality in a woman-in fact, to make two whole pagefuls of extremely difficult and arbitrary statements.

I did not take to those "Confession Albums", but when, seeking to please, I filled in their questionnaires, I usually ran into trouble with my peers, bent inquisitively over my shoulder. I suppose their single virtue, those silly albums, was in that they made silly schoolgirls argue about ideas of excellency. But as to "Your Favourite Quality in a Man"-when, invariably, I wrote the word "Generosity", and opposite the next question: ". . . In a Woman", wrote "Ditto", I was, invariably, pounced upon. "What about justice?" some prig would say. "What about honesty?" another. "What about courage, what about modesty? What about intellectual curiosity?" And usually some ass would bleat that she did not see how a woman could be generous, anyway.

Well, we would toss all the noble qualities about, failing totally to understand each other or ourselves. And when I argued that I chose generosity because I did not see what it was unless it was compounded of justice, honesty, courage, and modesty, I believe that I did not know very clearly what I meant. But I have learnt why it is the most complicated of the great virtues--and a rich source for discovery of its many-sidedness is the life, the personality of Francis Xavier.

Inherent in the character of the Society of Jesus is the total subjection of its members to its whole. The history of the order is an unbroken demonstration of that first principle which the Spiritual Exercises were designed to establish, i.e., the surrender, final and unquestioning, of personality to a foreordained plan imposed from without, infallible, and immutable. The Jesuit is asked at the outset of his career for nothing less than this, and he gives nothing less. All that he is, all that he brings to his vocation will be used by the Society, but under a strictly impersonal discipline, and with only such remote and utilitarian reference to his individuality as will advance the organisation and the purpose to which he offers himself. And throughout four hundred amazingly filled and fighting years-ad majorem Deigloriam-the sons of Ignatius have undoubtedly held to that hard, central exaction--have taken it, imposed it and handed it on as an ever-increasing strength in their far-flung and multiplying generations. The society's absolute fidelity to this cold principle of abnegation has given it its unique history and its extraordinary success; and paradoxically, out of its proud and heroic refusal to its separate, human members of their rights over their personalities, it has created, recognisably to all the world, the personality of the Jesuit.

Qualities and virtues of a high order are needed to fit a man for the kind of self-subjection we are now discussing, and the Society has always picked its aspirants with great care; and in the exceptionally long and hard training which, as novices and as scholastics, these young men must undergo before they are admitted to the priesthood, an especial kind of intelligence, at once clear and generous, will be needed, an intelligence which will be able to see steadily beyond the particular to the general, able to forgive, or rather, welcome all that must be undergone of humiliation, of pettifogging, of suppression, monotony, and frigidity throughout the long years wherein the young ego learns to die, giving place to the mature, the perfectly pruned Jesuit.

The system is clear cut and fundamentally changeless. It is all based in the Spiritual Exercises, and it works as Ignatius prayed and knew it would; and, as has been said, it attracts for the most part only men of especial intelligence, who can see the wood as well as the immediate prickly trees. Such men are usually of higher than average intellectual endowment--and their brains and talents are cultivated with infinite skill and liberality. If it is necessary to train them out of relation to the individual who is their source, and into the vast, unchanging, collective design of the Society, that is a part of what the Jesuit accepts, and gives to his vocation. Once he is of the Society he understands that his intellectual gifts are no more his than are his shoes or his soutane. They are, all these things, the property of the order, under Christ, and he will use them or not as his superiors may direct. The surrender is unqualified and very generous, and it creates, as we have said, the paradox of Jesuit personality.

One consequence of this is that the amazing and stormy history of the Society of Jesus presents itself as the unified, solid story of an institution rather than as that of a long line of remarkable men. Its annals are heavy indeed with names distinguished in sanctity, in learning, in statesmanship, in apostolic gift, in all and any of the high qualifications necessary to its establishment, survival, and increase. Yet that which is truly renowned is the Society-not this or that talent, triumph, or glory won for it by this or that individual life or gift, but simply the Society, behind the tranquil facade of which the centuries have assembled hosts and treasuries of effort in a sustained anonymity of service. Yet, if this is so it is so- another paradox?-because two of the most remarkably individualistic Spaniards of the sixteenth century, two men who in their beginnings at least could be described as almost willfully self-expressive, were, together and apart, and in a span of years that were not many, to lay the plans and set once and for all the foundations of a citadel which was to withstand every conceivable shock and assault from without, and wherein the garrison would forever and in all circumstances do its duty, without comment and without reward.

Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier, both aristocrats of northern Spain, were superficially dissimilar in temperament, and we know that for more than the first year of their acquaintance in Paris the young man, Xavier, actively disliked and was puzzled by the grave, mature ax-soldier who, under God, was to be the inspiration and ideal of the rest of his short and brilliantly zealous life, and of whom he was to write--in the first of his letters which remain to us, from Paris in 1535--"he is, in fact, most thoroughly acquainted with my heart."

Francis Xavier was the slowest, the most reluctant, of the famous six young "elected" in Paris to accept Loyola's dream and plan of the Society, and he was the last of the six to submit himself to the test of the Spiritual Exercises. Loyola had indeed to devote years of tactful and gentle friendship to the winning of this apostle; and it must be conceded that he knew what he was doing. He was capturing for the Jesuits at once their greatest missionary and most attractive saint.

Like Ignatius, Francis Xavier was a Basque. He was born in I506 in the kingdom of Navarre, on the northern border of Aragon. His father, Don Juan de Jassu, a grave and learned man, a Doctor of Laws of Bologna, was chancellor of Navarre, and married to Dona Maria de Azpilcueta y Xavier, a wealthy lady, descended from two proud Basque families, and said to have been very beautiful. Francis, the youngest of their six children, was born late of this marriage, and when his brothers and sisters were already grown up. For this reason he seems to have been particularly loved, and to have enjoyed a happy, sunny childhood in the old fortified castle of Xavier which stood on the slope of a fertile, wooded mountain and overlooking the Aragon river. In those years his father was much occupied by court affairs at Pampeluna, his two brothers had already departed to military careers, one sister was a nun and the other two married, so that he lived as an only child, and was very much the darling of his mother and of a saintly, indulgent aunt, "Tia Violanta". The tradition is that he was a child of singular grace, charm, and intellectual promise, and that it pleased his father that his bent was, like his own, toward learning rather than for the soldier-life of his two brothers.

But in I515, when Francis was nine, the fortunes of the family deteriorated, never to recover their old ease. In that year Don Juan de Jassu died, and in that year also Ferdinand of Aragon invaded the kingdom of Navarre, beginning a war which was to bring loss and poverty to the Castle of Xavier, as to many other Basque estates. For ten years Dona Maria's two elder sons were engaged in fierce fighting all over Navarre, from the Pyrenees to the Aragon border; meantime Francis grew up in the increasingly dilapidated and impoverished castle, but pursuing his studies there and in Pampeluna with gaiety and zest, until 1525 when, as he desired to enter the Church, it was decided that he must go to the University of Paris, celebrated above all European schools for its faculty of theology in the College de la Sorbonne.

Paris in the heyday of Francis I must have been a stimulating town, and to an educated, aristocratic, but country-bred boy from the Basque country a strange and promising mise-en-scene. The imperialistic rivalry between the King of France and Charles V of Austria, now also most inconveniently King of Spain, was in full tide. France was on a mounting wave, with the enlivening airs of the Renaissance blowing into her spread sails, and captained by a prince young, cultivated, courageous, and of absolutist spirit. Against her pride rode well-matched menaces--the cautious, dangerous Emperor, the willful King of England, the Turk, the Venetians, the eternal, cunning papacy. Italy was the great prize, never in fact to be won; and Protestantism and the new learning were gathering up on the horizons of a reign and of a century that were to bring immeasurable troubles, glories, and developments to Europe, but to leave France at its close much weakened, much the worse for wear. Still, in 1525 her king, Francis I, sat easily to his destiny and felt himself to be its happy and sole master.

Paris was expanding, by his will. North of the Town and east of the Cite he breached her walls and had begun to build the Palace of the Louvre; the new architectural style was a delight, and in such new suburbs as the Faubourg St. Germain the nobility was encouraged to express its high spirits in lordly modern hotels. The University, long since great and crowded, and having provided the model for such places of learning as Oxford and Cambridge, was now withdrawn from Notre Dame and La Cite and had crammed its forty colleges on to the Left Bank of the river, about Sainte Genevieve and Saint Germain des Pres. In its four chief faculties, theology, canon law, medicine and arts, it was justly renowned; but greatest of all was its school of theology, and the fount and centre of this was the College de la Sorbonne. The these sorbonnique had come to be regarded, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as a supreme scholastic test, and the fame of the doctors and teachers of the Sorbonne was consistently so high that it grew above its many sister colleges to be the focal and chief school of the university. (This accidental distinction was such that when in 1808 and after the Revolution the University of France was reconstituted the Sorbonne was made its seat.)

To this crowded, brilliant city then, centre of all that was most cultivated, promising and avant-garde, came Francis Xavier in I525, a student-pilgrim aged nineteen, a Spaniard and poor. (His brothers and his mother had only with difficulty been able to arrange for him to study in Paris; and all through his student days he was troubled about money.)

The students of the University were classified loosely under a heading of "nations", and although Xavier was registered as a student of France, this "nation" included Spaniards and Portuguese, who were chiefly housed in the colleges of Sainte Barbe and Navarre. He was enrolled in Sainte Barbe, where his roommate was a young Savoyard called Peter Faber.

Although he was poor, Xavier appears to have had control of his small patrimony, and to have lived in college as a "camerist", that is, paying his tutors, and also for his food and room, as well as employing a "burger" student to act as his servant in some measure.

He studied impetuously and with unaltering success. Before he was twenty-four he was a Master of Arts and took his licentiate in philosophy. Appointed then as lecturer in Aristotelian logic, metaphysics and physics in the College de Beauvais of the University, he was able to turn his attention to that which he had come seeking-theology in the College de la Sorbonne.

In the critical, jealous world of the Left Bank he was regarded as very able; an intellectual to watch. And he was being watched.

In the spring term of I528 another Spaniard had made a pilgrimage, from Salamanca to Paris. This man was not of student age; he was thirty-seven; he was shabby and fragile, with a bad limp, and his earthly possessions were easily borne for him on a donkey's back. It is said that on the evening when he reached the end of his journey and was seeking lodging in the Rue St. Jacques he was observed by two Spanish students of the College de Navarre, and one, Lainez, said to the other, Salmeron: "That, I think, might be the man they turned out of the University of Alcala." He was that man, who had more recently been ordered by his professors to remove himself from Salamanca, and who, before suffering either of these dismissals and having painfully made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem had been ordered off that territory also, by the Franciscan fathers, who considered themselves the owners then of the Holy Places. He was, in fact, this tired man with the donkey, Ignatius Loyola; and he entered himself as a student of grammar in the College Montaigu, on the roll of which institution there was also at that time, as it happened, the name of a nineteen-year-old student called Calvin. But for his philosophic studies Loyola was registered in the College de Sainte Barbel And the tutors there directed one of their most gifted graduates, Peter Faber, to help the elderly neophyte catch up on his texts. Faber recommended that his pupil attend some lectures then being given by a fellow countryman of his, Francis Xavier, in the College de Saint Remy. So it was that the three first members of the Society of Jesus came together, with two of their immediate colleagues commenting, as it were, on the sidewalk of the Rue St. Jacques.

But Xavier was not easily to be interested in Peter Faber's elderly protege'. He was very busy, and was tasting success and reclame. Since he was passionately attached to his work it is probable that he liked well the rigours of university life. Bells ringing at four, candles lighted and lecture rooms crowded at five. Mass at six, and then some rolls of hot bread to eat. Thereafter the real work, the important lectures, and at eleven o'clock dinner in college. Rest, for the lecturers at least, after dinner, until three, but then, until five o'clock, more classes, followed by tutorial work. Supper, night prayers in college, and curfew at nine. But candles might be lighted and study pursued until midnight. Feast days and days of religious obligation broke this routine, and there were long vacations, and the quiet freedom of Su'nday, and of appointed days of recreation. Francis, who was aware of his powers now and very ambitious, clearly had his work cut out, if he was to hold his reputation as a lecturer in philosophy and also pursue eminence in the school oftheology, the most exacting faculty in Paris. He had no time to give to an ascetic who had come to the schools too late to be whipped into scholastic training. Moreover, he did not like his fellow countryman, and it is recorded that he mocked at the humility and asceticism of Ignatius, which he may have considered an embarrassing affectation. This contempt of Francis for the selfdenying manner of life of another is difficult to understand, and may indeed be no more than a legend born of his actual resistance to the assault which Loyola made on his ambition and his intellectual pride; because whereas it does seem to be true that Francis was impatient at first against Ignatius, and even repelled by him, it also seems to be established that his own life in Paris was entirely that of a scholar, and by reason of his natural disposition always ascetic and celibate. It may be that being born to live cerebrally, if not through the spirit, he was unable in his singularly blessed, cold self-assurance, to understand what Ignatius Loyola was making for. On all the evidence, Xavier was not a man like other men; he did not have to meet their troubles. As a boy he lived innocently, happily, by some great favour of God or nature; as a young man in Paris, he lived cerebrally and afterward, quite simply he lived on, by, and through his love of God-and because of God, on his amazing, tender love of God's children. Cynics, reading of his charm, his good looks, his easy success wherever he bent his mind, may doubt this sustained, happy indifference to those disturbances of the senses which have made a plague of life for the common run of us. But I refer them to the evidence: the proof is in his letters.

I believe that Xavier, inexperienced in life and indifferent to all of it which did not come under logical or philosophic definition on his rostrum, found Loyola a somewhat eccentric character, whom he was glad to leave to the benevolent direction of young Peter Faber. His own intention was, eschewing all excess, to become a learned man, a doctor of the Sorbonne, to take Orders, and from a chair to direct the thought and doctrine of churchmen. Indeed had anyone told him then, in his proud and busy Sorbonne days, that soon, much sooner than he could dream, his greatest delight would be to hear little dark-skinned children singing the "Hail Mary" in an Asiatic dialect which he-accurate scholar of Greek and Latin had feverishly skimmed and scamped on their behalf-had any prophet brought him that news, could he, one wonders, would he have believed it?

His life was to be short-its whole span forty-six years. Nineteen of those he spent in the random happiness of childhood and boyhood at home; eleven were passed, proudly, successfully, in the University of Paris. That left only sixteen for his life work. And we dawdle in reaching it. But so did he. He was, at first, a reluctant Jesuit.

However, since theology was his subject and since the Roman curia often submitted the knottier questions of the hour to the doctors of the Sorbonne, he was not unaware of the winds that were blowing through the Church. "Reform! Reform!" was everywhere in Christianity the cry that dominated, and must be answered. Whether it rang from Wittenberg or Zurich or came in a more deprecatory form from the gentle Erasmus, it was the necessary word of the time, the irrepressible word, and it was as much the word of Loyola as of any other priest then at work. The student Calvin heard it in the College de Montaigu, and so did the young doctor Xavier, lecturing in the College de Saint Remy.

Xavier's roommate, Peter Faber, was from his first meeting with Loyola his unquestioning disciple. This Savoyard, Xavier's age, and distinguished like him in the University for his brilliance in philosophical studies, seems to have possessed, for all his intellectual gifts, a curiously innocent sweetness very different in its outward expression from the proud Spanish charm of Francis. A born student, he has left it on record that when he was eighteen he foresaw no difficulty in secretly vowing himself to chastity in the service of God, as he cared only for learning. But as he grew into manhood in Paris, he was tortured by assaults on the virtue he had chosen to be especially his, tortured by scruples and--very touchingly--made unhappy and humiliated by his love of good food. However, he was so fortunate as to win the friendship, profound and never to alter, of his experienced, middle-aged pupil, Ignatius Loyola. Indomitable under all the rebuffs his high intention had suffered through the years since, dedicated to it, he had left the Cave of Manresa; indomitable, and with his Spiritual Exercises worked out and awaiting trial, Loyola was in Paris to look for men who should be as nearly perfect for his purpose as might on earth be hoped for. He must have been encouraged by his so speedy discovery of Peter Faber. He worked for him with all possible strength of will, intellect, and spirit, and Peter Faber accepted delightedly all he brought to him. But it was only after four years of testing friendship and discussion that Loyola allowed his disciple to attempt to submit himself to the Exercises. Finally these were undergone during an extremely cold winter in Paris in 1533, and the physical mortifications of the ordeal, increased by the weather, are said to have corrected forever Peter Faber's weakness for good food. In the summer of 1534, Ignatius, not yet in Holy Orders himself, allowed Faber to seek ordination-thereby making him the first consecrated priest of his still hypothetical Society of Jesus. He must indeed, that severe perfectionist, have thought well of Peter Faber. For he was to spend a whole further year himself before accepting the powers and responsibilities of priesthood. And when on the Feast of the Assumption, August I5, 1534, the Jesuit Order was, informally, inaugurated, at Mass in the Church of Our Lady of Montmartre--when on that morning Ignatius Loyola and his six friends from the University of Paris, receiving Holy Communion, took their final vows of poverty and chastity and pledged themselves to the way of life outlined by the Spiritual Exercises, the celebrant of that historic Mass was Peter Faber, and he was on that date the only one of the seven who was a priest. But six of the seven had by then undergone the discipline of the Exercises. Six men famous in Church history: Loyola, Peter Faber, Lainez, Salmeron, Rodriguez, Bobadilla. Only one of them, taking his vows as gladly as them all, eager and holy, and already very precious and dear to Ignatius, and almost certainly marked down by him for great achievements-only this one, Francis Xavier, was still on that Isth of August separated from his brothers; he had not yet been allowed the exacting discipline. His spirit was willing, and there is every evidence that he was all his life in contemptuous command of his flesh. But may we suspect, from Ignatius' extreme caution with him, that Xavier's menace in those Paris days was intellectual, and that his future General desired to force nothing, but to give the potentially great priest every possible freedom to turn right or left?

Within a very brief essay it is not possible to discuss the Spiritual Exercises. But our readers will know something of the book, will have read it, perhaps-even if in increasing despair, as they advanced through it. For it is, I think, for the layman very hard and alarming. That it is a key work, and one of Europe's most influential texts is well known; furthermore, it was written by a great and relentless mystic. But this latter fact is, I submit with all reverence, an accident. Ignatius Loyola was a mystic, but in relation to his time and his sense of duty he was primarily a man of action, an apostle, and a friend of his fellow men-in fact he was very much more, on the evidence, a man with a conscience than a man with a dream. So it is true-though hard to catch in words-that his very difficult mystic's handbook is also a soldier's handbook. It is founded, rooted deep in the ineffable, in passionate acceptance of God, the Lord and Redeemer of us all; but it is, nevertheless, a kind of field manual-the most remarkable and ruthless ever conceived. Merely to read, it is a very exacting and amazing work. As an instructional text, under which to go into training for life-service, there can surely be no half measures about it. A man must either believe completely in what the Exercises exact, or speed away forever out of reach of their relentless question.

Francis Xavier was intellectually equipped to confront the Exercises and decide for or against all that they meant. He submitted himself to their ordeal when Ignatius allowed him to do so; and thereafter, with all his wits and talents about him, with all his heart, with all his soul, he was Loyola's man, he was a Jesuit.

Since we must in this brief essay skip a great deal, we shall skip Francis' departure from Paris, his pilgrimage through Venice and Bologna to Rome, and his journey back across Spain to Lisbon. We shall skip also all the negotiations which at Rome and at the Pope's pleasure changed Ignatius and his gifted young men from being a few formidable soldiers of the Church into the Society of Jesus which was to direct the Council of Trent, make history and trouble everywhere, and take the dangerous gospel of Jesus Christ to Travancore and Japan, to Paraguay and Peru.

Accidentally Francis Xavier took the gospel to the East. John III of Portugal, troubled (and with reason) about the advancement of the life of the spirit in his rich Indian territories (discovered and annexed for his family in 1497 by Vasco da Gama) had been importuning the Pope for missions to Asia. The newly founded order of the Society of Jesus, including in its small membership one Portuguese aristocrat, Simon Rodriguez, interested the monarch, and he asked Paul III to command six Jesuits to proceed to Lisbon in time to set sail with the new Viceroy of Goa in I54I. Ignatius, having only ten men in his order then, could not spare six, but told the Pope he would allow two, Rodriguez and Bobadilla, to the Goa expedition. At the last minute Bobadilla was sick with a severe fever, and Ignatius--uneasily, reluctantly, one gathers-asked Francis Xavier if he would take his place.

The ships sailed for the East, round the Cape of Good Hope, only once a year. If a man could not go on a given convoy, then a vast period of time must be wasted. And Ignatius was an impatient man and a great apostle. Nevertheless, one gathers from the documents that he was exasperated at having to offer the gifted intellectual, Xavier, in place of Bobadilla. Nor can the instruction to proceed to Lisbon and thence, under escort of the Portuguese governor, to Goa, have greatly pleased Xavier. However, so it was that the great saint came to India- and to that fame and vocation which were to seem to dismiss all that he had trained himself to be-but which were to seek and find in him the springs of perfect generosity.

The voyage from Lisbon to Goa normally, in the sixteenth century, took six months, but Xavier set sail, in the galleon of the Governor of Portuguese India, in April 1541 and did not reach his destination until May 1542. Five of these thirteen months were indeed spent in sheltering from bad weather on the island of Mozambique; but it must have been for the eager servant of God an extremely tedious and lonely expedition, and not alleviated by his discovery that he was a very bad sailor. However, he was to get used to seasickness, and to all the discomforts of sixteenth century sea-going, in the Bay of Bengal and the China Sea. But on this first long journey he began to exercise, of set purpose as it were, that personal charm and social grace which were to be his great missionary weapon. By the device of what he gaily called "apostolical conversation" he quite simply won the trust of every creature--all nine hundred of them--on the crowded and uncomfortable galleon. He learnt as he travelled toward Goa how, in wisdom and goodness, to be all things to all men; he began to see what must be his way of manipulating human nature toward God's purposes. To charm, to relax, to gain access to men's secret hearts--and then, God willing, to win them to his Faith. In the conditions of that ship, and in a situation where he was much more than literally at sea and at a disadvantage, it cannot have been easy for him to take such constant trouble to woo and please so many disconcerting specimens of the human race. It is not difficult to imagine the kind of person who would normally be sailing from Lisbon to Goa in IS4I-and assuredly in any shipload of such there could only be one Francis Xavier. And he-granted the exaggerated generosity of his pilgrim life in Venice and Bologna and Rome, had nevertheless been companioned hitherto either by his own gentle, aristocratic relations, by University scholars, or by Ignatius and his handpicked men. Now, save for two not very brilliant missionary assistants, Father Paul of Camerino and the Portuguese deacon, Mancias, he found himself associated only with the adventurous and licentious riff-raff of the world; high or low, grand or miserable, they were all uneasy and illiterate chance-takers on the make, and entirely given over to "taking care of Number One". Indeed, reading the letters and records of the time, one gets the impression that Xavier's fellow travellers in 1541-42 were representative of what is to be found in large ships anywhere, first, tourist, or steerage class, in any century. Yet, half regretfully-and forgetting of course his great purpose-one has to record that this graceful, good-looking and highly cultivated Spanish priest was the life of that long-drawn-out party, that terrible "pleasure cruise" which lasted thirteen months.

Indeed, throughout his short life his social gift, which he turned into a weapon in God's service, was to be questioned. Pious people, having heard of the great missionary, were disedified sometimes at first encounter, because they might meet him playing cards with half drunk fishermen on a quayside of Travancore, or maybe dining in luxury between some Muslim prince and his favourite concubine, or sitting to talk with a prostitute on her doorstep in a back street of Goal But, like his great Exemplar, who had frequented publicans and sinners, and who advised us all, so vainly, against throwing the first stone, Francis desired to know his fellow creatures, their motives, their needs, and their hopes. Moreover, he was travelling into what was for him a very dark continent, its spirit, history, and idioms as dark to him as the varying skins of its people. To be of any practical use he must adapt himself to new habits of life, and as rapidly as possible must get on working terms with some of the languages of the Indian peninsula. Fortunately he was not merely a good grammarian-linguist, but that much more useful and quick kind of person, an instinctive, irrepressible picker-up of new idioms. This was a talent which Ignatius could not have foreseen in him, but which was to be priceless. Xavier appears to have had that gift-which I have seen, with envy, in certain of my own friends-for getting a working grip on a new language in an amazingly short period. In the various depositions for his canonisation many claims were made for his having been granted by the Holy Spirit the gift of tongues, and for his being able to speak, miraculously, in languages of India which he could not have studied.

Now, in this brief essay I refuse outright to face the question of Francis Xavier's miracles. That it is tedious to say "there are more things in heaven and earth", etc., is not Shakespeare's fault, but ours, that we find it so necessary to repeat him. Still, I am in no position to discuss events and actions which while appearing incredible to me have yet been weighed, considered, and accepted as likely by Colleges of Cardinals. (I shall mention only one of Xavier's deposed miracles-and that because it has the faultless, delicious beauty of a fairy tale.) However, he did himself say some very sensible things in his letters about how the legend of miracle can grow in a simple community out of any fortunate set of circumstances. But, leaving the question of the gift of miracles aside, we must remember that Francis Xavier was a man much in earnest when he set out from Lisbon, that he was exceptionally well educated and had informed himself in his long months in Lisbon and Coimbra of where and into what conditions he was going. And apart from whatever searches and investigations he may have made whilst in Portugal, Francis had thirteen hard preparatory months on the sea, in association with sailors and adventurers, many of them natives of the South Indian coast, and most of them familiar with it. It is certain, therefore, that before he saw Goa, this very intelligent man had acquainted his mind with the forms of life and thought he must look for there, and had at least got a working familiarity with one or two of its chief languages. And thence I believe any real linguist would tell us that the power to handle various dialects in the expression of simple ideas need not be explained by visitation of the Paraclete. Any way, Francis himself always resented talk of his miracles, and always worked hard and fast for that rudimentary control of Indian dialects which was essential to his work. So--he landed in the harbour of Goa in May 1542.

He found a beautiful stretch of coast, shelving up, pearly and gentle, under the blue shadows of the Ghat mountains. He found tropical richness, stillness, and mist, and a graceful, mannerly, dark-skinned race-sailors, fishermen, hawkerwomen, children, on the foreshore. But in Goa itself, the King of Portugal's town, he found wealth, gaiety, European architecture, churches, palaces, banks, convents, strolling monks and prelates, angelus bells, dance music, and money-fortunes of money. He found in fact European corruption, loose and proud. He saw that he could not yet, not without vast preparatory, and reparatory, work preach the God of these shameless and greedy colonists to the innocent people whom they were everywhere exploiting, up and down the conquered coast.

It is improbable that Francis Xavier ever met or saw Luis de Camoens in the year he spent in Lisbon before he left Europe forever. The poet would only have been eighteen then, and an obscure student in Coimbra. Yet it is conceivable that the two who of all Europeans were most lavishly to serve southern India and the Indian islands did brush and elbow against each other in the hilly streets of Lisbon in 1541. And it may be that when de Camoens came to Goa in 1553 he was in time for the exuberant home-bringing and obsequies of the greatly loved Father Francis. Certainly he would have come fresh to the legend of the missionary, and been shown his newly sealed sepulchre in the chapel of the college of Santa Fe, around which miracles were being recorded every day of that autumn and winter. But it may be as well for literature that de Camoens having rounded the Cape of Good Hope with his epic theme already a long time set and sounding in his breast, already since youth determined on poetic celebration of Os Lusiadas (The Portuguese), did not meet the formidable Spanish Jesuit who gave his burning life to salvage what Vasco da Gama's men had outraged. We cannot guess what Francis would have said to the poet, or how much he would have affected him. But it is worth noting that within a very close-clipped time Goa and the Indian seas created for Europe two of her glories, the Lusiads and the apostolic work of Francis Xavier.

The tangle of faiths and myths which Francis found all along the conquered Portuguese Indian coast, and in Ceylon and Bengal and the Moluccas is not to be unravelled here. Hindus, Mohammedans, and simple back-of-the-hills heathens had had, confusedly mixed in through all their faiths and legends and for nearly fifteen hundred years, some remote suggestions and echoes of Christian teaching, left amongst them, it was thought, by St. Thomas the Apostle, Thomas "of little faith", who, tradition says, reached India with the gospel of Galilee and Calvary.

Marco Polo had found Nestorian Christians in Malabar, and when Vasco da Gama conquered the coast in 1498, the sect was loosely reckoned at about two hundred thousand souls. But its practices were ruthlessly stamped out and anathematised by the Portuguese authority, which imperiously and pitilessly imposed upon all the queer flotsam of metaphysical conceptions abounding in their new territory the fixed and sweeping dogmatism, the formal, take-it-or-leave-it theology, and the impressive, attractive ritualism of the Roman Church in all its fifteenth-century and fin de siecle glory.

The confusion can only have been measureless. At least, this reader of the local history and memoirs of the time stares aghast at the spectacle of ethical, moral, and mystical chaos into which Francis Xavier walked when he landed at Goal.

He was tired and lonely at the end of the long journey; and in a very few days he was, as nearly as he could ever be, disheartened. He had gladly obeyed Father Ignatius and accepted instead of the scholar's life the simple one of the apostle. He had prepared himself for that, rigorously-and long before he saw his dark-skinned, waiting flocks he loved them. He would bring them the simple rules of the catechism, and the chief injunctions of the Sermon on the Mount. On the long sea voyage, playing cards with sailors of Goa and of the Travancore coast, he studied their dialects, and in his cabin slaved to get the rudiments of what he had to say to St. Thomas' children into words that would be theirs.

In Goa, he found between him and this pure mission a whole great city of voluptuousness, snobbery, intrigue, and graft. He found Europeans at their worst, rapacious, imperialistic, and morally and physically defeated by the climate. He found jacks-in-office and jobbery, and churches and monasteries and chiming bells and wealthy priests-the facade, representing only pomp and circumstance, of imperialism. Nowhere did these conquerors seem to have troubled to meet, study, or understand the people they were ruling and savagely exploiting.

He was one young Spaniard, a very poor priest, with only two inexperienced lieutenants. True, he had the valedictions of the pious king, John III of Portugal, and throughout their long voyage he had made fast the friendship of the King's Viceroy in Goa, de Sousa. Nevertheless, he came with his truth, passion, and loving kindness into a society where he saw at once that all of these, unless disguised-for there was plenty of religious hypocrisy-would be blocked at every turn. He might have decided to play in awhile with the socialites and find his way; he might have decided to lead through what the world calls "strength". He looked round him, and decided, one must suppose, that the only way to deal, to his purpose, with the shocking worldliness of the ruling Catholics, was to ignore them and to present Christ's idea--in their despite. So he began as he was to go on for the too-short, packed ten years of his earthly work--he lodged himself as an assistant nurse in the chief hospital, and when he was not helping or washing or amusing the sick, he walked in the streets and acquainted himself with the speech of the people of Goa, with the mingling of faiths and races in the region, and with the relation to the local life of the self-indulgent, greedy habits of his fellow Europeans. And very quickly he saw that there was no way through the thickets of metaphysical and moral confusion in which he found the city save that of simple action. So he took a bell, and he went through the streets ringing it; and children and idlers and old men went after him and when he had enough of them round him he would pause, and in his rehearsed few words of their language he would say, and repeat, whatever he judged to be nearest to their understanding of God's law.

He was always very shabby looking, they tell us. His soutane was a dusty, rusty garment, and his wide pilgrim's hat was battered. But he was a very handsome, slight man, and he was so aristocratic in manner and in thought that it was impossible for his advisers to prove to him that more respectability of appearance would be helpful; because wherever he went, ringing his incontinent bell, he got the young ones and the children following him. And then he would stop, and stammeringly, in their dialect-during his apostolate he made himself apprentice of more than twenty Indian languages-he would tell them of Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Calvary, and of the Ten Commandments, and of the general idea of God's love of man. He set the words of the "Our Father" and "Hail Mary" to simple local tunes, and taught the children to sing them, and also to sing a very simple catechism he had composed, in Malabar dialect.

On this direct method he founded his work. He invented, and indeed in his own example and success, he can be said to have perfected the Jesuit apostolic system, which is, first that the missionary get to know those to whom he comes as a stranger, next that he seek and win their friendship, and thereafter with the understanding so far won, he adapt the news he brings not only to their idiom but as far as possible to their whole field of tradition-rather than seek to startle or surprise them with stories and admonitions which they cannot relate to that which they already know and are.

This obviously intelligent and gentle way of going to work has been traditionally criticised and sneered at by enemies of the Society of Jesus, but it succeeded in its first few weeks of trial in the slums of Goa, it has succeeded since then throughout the world; and, whether they notice the flattery they offer or not, it is the method which has been sedulously copied by all kinds of Protestant missionary bodies, including some within which the word "Jesuit" still sounds with the effect of a blasphemy or an obscenity.

Another basic rule of Francis' mission was: take it first, always, to the children. The sung "Hail Marys", the little, brief catechism, the short stories of Bethlehem and Cana and Bethany and Cavalry. Do not trouble the proud and the busy with it at first, seemed his idea. Ignore them, in this essential; tell the news to the very young, and with them, if they will gather round too--and the bell and the attractive foreign voice drew them into the street-corner groups-to the very poor, the down-and-out, the overworked, and to the sick, and the people in the prisons. Get their attention and confidence first, and while doing so live amongst them, and truly in their way, whilst also as nearly as possible in the way of him whose story they are hearing for the first time.

That was the basic missionary principle of Francis Xavier, and he insisted on it-wrote it, preached it, begged it, commended it of all his lieutenants all over the Indian seas and islands for all the ten years of his stormy, exhausting, and incomparably successful apostolate.

And whilst he was establishing this simple but physically exacting form of itinerant preaching, he had, as may be supposed, a huge burden upon him of administrative, diplomatic, and investigatory work. He had been sent to this confused and confusing great territory as the appointed Envoy of the Holy See and of King John III of Portugal; also he came as the first representative outside Europe of the newly constituted and already renowned Society of Jesus. He could not therefore ignore the rulers of Church or state, of mosque or pagoda, and simply go about in his shabby hat, ringing his bell and singing with the children. He had, as well, to establish his high office, spiritual and temporal; he had to examine conditions, religious, political, social, and economic in Portuguese India; he must range over all its territories, reporting, revising, planning, preaching.

He had undertaken no sinecure. It is difficult to guess when he slept, especially in his first months in Goal During that time perforce he must frequent the Viceroy, consult with the Bishop, become acquainted with all religious and educational institutions in the city, dine with the rich colonists and with the leaders of the Muslim and Hindu groups, while never failing to visit the lepers, the madhouses, the dancing houses, the market places, or to walk and talk and sing with his little ragged neophytes of the slums. He had indeed to be all things to all men and to be utterly self-forgetting.

Goa, dizzily wealthy and corrupt, as has been said, and in all its crammed and overflowing life and beauty a truly shocking testimony of man's inhumanity to man, did indeed appall him. But it was its colonisers, its "civilisers", whom he had to contemplate in astonished horror. And although at first he felt and wrote that he could do little or nothing for Christianity in India unless he could Christianise the Portuguese, I believe it is just to say that he was wrong in this, for his work was given almost entirely to the native peoples, and there is little evidence that Portuguese Goan society was perceptibly influenced by the great saint's presence or example, or that it ever came to be regarded as honourable among colonial societies. Francis grew to realise this as he worked among the oppressed and exploited races, and again and again in his letters spoke with forthright wrath and bitterness against the evil things he witnessed.

There is here a power, which I may call irresistible, to thrust men headlong into the abyss . . . Robbery is so public and common that it hurts no one's character and is hardly counted a fault; people scarcely hesitate to think that what is done with impunity it cannot be bad to do.... I never cease wondering at the number of new inflexions which, in addition to all the usual forms, have been added, in this new lingo of avarice, to the conjugation of that ill-omened verb "to rob"....

Constantly in his letters he rages and mocks at the European standard of morality as presented to the helpless East. But if he saw it as a power which he called "irresistible to thrust men headlong into the abyss", there was moving through it, past it, and wherever it went, this evil thing, another kind of power, his own, and it too was irresistible; if it could not sweep away the first-and how could it?-it could with assurance stand against it, act, live, and speak against it, and let men judge between two ways of life. And for millions who witnessed it this second way of life was irresistible. Imperturbably Francis "went about doing good". On the one hand, oppressed and handicapped by the forces of wealth, graft, voluptuousness, and demoralising climate, on the other, exposed almost wherever he went to several kinds of physical threat and danger, and living always in extreme privation, as the poorest among pilgrims and with no care at all for the morrow, he succeeded within ten years in taking Christianity all over Southern India, from Goa to Cape Comorin and Karthal, across the Manaar Strait of Ceylon, across the Sea of Bengal to the Moluccas, to Malacca, to the Spice Islands, and up through the China Sea to Japan. And in all these dangerous journeyings the Christianity which he preached, whether to proud Brahmin, heathen pearl fisher, or cold, sophisticated Bonze, was identically, in word as in example the same which was manifested by the Lake of Galilee, at the roadside well of Samaria, and in Terusalem among the money changers.

He became a legend wherever he passed, and the stories of his miracles, of healings, or railings from the dead, linguistic miracles, miracles of prophecy and of bi-location, grew into a truly extraordinary saga. Yet he as he went on, always working harder and harder, changed only to become more himself, or perhaps more to resemble the Galilean whom he served.

His wonderful, lively, eager letters give him to us vividly through all the missionary years. And as we read him at first we are simply exhilarated by his warmth and goodness, by his fine impatience and his wonderful power to get things done, against crazy odds. But, as we go on through the letters, and relate them to authenticated biographical records, and the memoirs of reliable contemporaries, a more solemn feeling comes to us.

Those of us who were brought up as Catholics, those of us especially who, or whose brothers, went to Jesuit schools, were always, as we thought, familiar with the great St. Francis Xavier. We heard wonderful stories of him, we knew his portrait in the Jesuit church, and we could have answered any reasonable question about him, from school chaplain or from bishop, with assurance. We may even have thought--and forgivably--that he was an unusually attractive looking saint, and that perhaps after all it was a pity that he was so indubitably saintly. For the young can, averagely, think only the silly thoughts of youth--as Francis Xavier knew.

But if, grown-up, grown old, grown in general doubtful about missionaries and their merits, grown in any case entirely confused about saints and miracles, we come by chance to read, what we never did in our early, pious days, the letter of Francis Xavier and his life, then, as I have said, we may be visited by a solemn feeling, a solemn awareness of a great parallel.

So far as I know, the fast-thinking, desperately searching world, in its best and most civilised exemplars at least, has not been able-whatever it may have found to say against any of the forms of Christianity-to remove from his isolated place in history the modest, the lonely Son of Man. He is unimpeached, for all time. The crimes, atrocities, fatuities, follies, and monstrosities that have flourished and will forever flourish under his name-ah, we all know some history, and each of us, according to our run of bigotry or ignorance, will take and thrash his favourite error. But Christ stands, in four short Gospels. In his sharp outline against the world he was to redeem, he must often seem--may he forgive me the word!--pathetic. Yet he stands; no matter what has gone wrong with all of us, he stands, and no civilised person can be unaware of what that awful permanence of one personality means.

Having read all the extant letters of Francis Xavier, and having read his chief biographers one moves, as I have said, from great admiration to a very solemn feeling-and a solemn conclusion.

I began in this essay by speaking of generosity as the greatest, because the most complicated and most tentacled of human attributes. And Francis Xavier's life, once he said goodbye to personal, intellectual ambition, was-and only the more so because of the hesitancy of that goodbye-a sustained expression of generosity. One cannot prove so vast a claim, in a few thousand words. All one can do is indicate it, and suggest that whoever cares to read of human excellence study the letters of Xavier. One could quote from them-but it is difficult to quote briefly from Xavier. He is neither epigrammatic nor lyrical in his letters; neither is he especially witty. What he is in them is in earnest, busy, informative, friendly, zealous, instructive; and, in his letters home-to Father Ignatius in Rome-desperately lonely, desperately hungry for news of his "beloved Father" and all the dear brethren, the dear Society. His loneliness must have been hardly bearable. He cries out against it constantly. Mail shipped at Genoa or Lisbon for Goa was officially supposed to reach its destination in six months, but almost certainly would make a year of the journey, and frequently was lost. "It is four years since we sailed from Portugal," writes Francis to Ignatius, "and during this interval I have received from you one letter and no more . . . I do not doubt that you write to me every year, as I do to you...."

To an impatient twentieth-century mind the idea of one letter in four years from the person who had directed one's destiny and was its master is hardly to be taken in, so bitterly lonely is it. Only Shaw's Methuselah group could live on such small help, we feel. But Francis Xavier died when he was forty-six. "The least and most lonely of your brothers", he signs a letter from Cochin in 1545. Always when he writes to Rome, to Ignatius, he begs like a child for news, for letters. Always he protests his loneliness. He is nothing if not human, tender, and dependent upon his fellowmen, naturally and spontaneously so. And although he had to be severe and reprimanding at times to some serving under his wide-flung command, he was always considerate, in exhaustive detail, for the essentials of their welfare, and often playfully coaxing and paternal--as, for instance, in his messages to the young catechist Matthew in his letters to Father Mancias in Travancore. In the stories of his miracles too there rings an echo of the natural boyishness, sweetness he brought into human life.

For example, what of this "playful wonder", as it is called by one of his biographers, Father Henry Coleridge, SJ.? It is narrated that once when Francis and some companions were sailing to Baramua in the Malay Archipelago, they were caught in a great storm. The saint took a little crucifix ("one finger long") from his neck and, leaning over the boat's side, dipped it into the sea, which was instantly calmed. But greatly to Francis' grief, the little crucifix slipped from his hand in the water and was lost. However, the boat reached Baramua on the morrow of the storm, and Francis and his companions landed and began to walk along the shore toward the town of Tamalin.

And when they had walked half a mile, behold a sea-crab runs out of the sea on to the shore with the aforesaid crucifix, holding it in his claws on either side, and so ran to Xavier and stopped in his sight. And Xavier flung himself on his knees, and the crab waited until he had taken the crucifix from its claws, and then ran back again into the sea whence it had come.

It is indeed enough to say of this narration that it is a "playful wonder", and that he must have been a wonderful and strangely charming man of whom it could be written down some years after his death by one of the Filipino friends who had walked with him on the shore of Baramua.

Yet, though it makes us smile, that lovely story, it brings us back to our solemn conclusion. It is "a playful wonder", but Francis was, in matters not playful at all, a wonder-worker. So, when we have followed him through his ten unresting, lonely years of passionate service, when we have watched him in every word and action of his life exemplify Loyola's great cry in the Exercises--"Take Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all that I have and possess"--and as we wait with him on the Japanese island of Sancian for that ship which will not indeed take him on to his last earthly desire, to preach Christ's word in China, but instead will bear him in his shroud to Travancore and Goa, as we see him close his eyes-"In Te, Domine, speravi"--we recognise with awe that in this man's life every major admonition of Jesus Christ was carried out, in such pure and natural fidelity as almost to deceive us into believing that the perfect achievement had come easy to the saint.

That would indeed be self-deception; and we know that if a man could live on earth in such a manner that Christ's expressed human ideal was in all he said and did implicit and explicit, the spectacle of such a life could only transcend mortal power of admiration and comment. Yet such a man was Francis Xavier, on all the evidence-one who lived always, sustainedly, at the highest imaginable level of moral beauty. And this is what it means to be the living embodiment of generosity, to be possessed, as it were, by the most complicated of all human or heavenly excellences.