Beginning to Be a Jesuit: Instructions for the Paris Novitiate circa 1685 (review)

The seventeenth century was a period of remarkable growth and influence for the Society of Jesus, and yet it also was a time of growing hostility to the Jesuits from various groups—Jansenists in particular. This book offers a close-up view not of Jesuits in tension with their opponents, but of how Jesuit recruits were trained in their first two years of religious life. Patricia Ranum translates a manuscript found in the Bibliothèque Mazarine, a manuscript that is a fascinating set of instructions dated c. 1685 for the Jesuit novitiate in Paris. On facing pages she includes the original French text and her English translation along with helpful explanatory footnotes.

The daily life of a Jesuit novice was prescribed in great detail, from rising at 4 a.m. on ordinary days to set times for such things as spiritual reading, physical exercise, examination of one’s conscience, and bedtime at 9 p.m. There appears to have been as much emphasis on civility and good manners as on more specifically religious matters such as prayer. Thus incivility and bad manners—for example, the taking of salt with one’s fingers—were to be rooted out with no small zeal. The fork, a relatively recent addition to table accoutrements in that era, appears in these instructions as a kind of civilizing instrument. But “excessive daintiness” (p. 111), as in removing the crust from one’s bread, is condemned. At the same time, these instructions exhort novices not to think too much about food while at table; rather, they should eat in silence while listening to some historical or devotional text read aloud, or they should think about all the “wretched meals” (p. 115) that Jesus ate in Nazareth and during his itinerant ministry. How French Jesuits know about Jesus in his alimentary and gustatory suffering remains unexplained. Do they think that the Virgin Mary was a bad cook? Rather than ask such questions, Jesuit novices are to pray the rosary daily and to wear it at the cincture, “so that everyone can see it” (p. 141). At recreation times, they are expected to engage in agreeable and edifying conversations with each other, as a “sort of apprenticeship and practice for . . . conversations with people outside” (p. 133).

Dedicated to St. Francis Xavier, the Jesuit novitiate prepared Jesuits not for an enclosed monastic life, but indeed for a life “outside” and in the world. The first of Jesuit missionaries, Xavier had gone to India and elsewhere in Asia, and died while seeking entrance to China. He and other saints are proposed to the novices as role models of “heroic virtues” (p. 95) and of endurance in the face of hardships. The instructions prescribe for novices the daily recitation of litanies of the saints and of the Holy Name of Jesus. Any novices inclined to complain about excessive heat or cold are exhorted to consider that uncomfortable extremes of weather are a penance sent by God for sin and that the Jesuit missionaries in Canada must accustom themselves to everything.

The only issue in an otherwise superlative translation is Ranum’s use of “take” Communion for communie or communier (pp. 55, 67); “receive” Communion would seem more apt, at least for a Roman Catholic rendering of this French verb. But this is a small point, and Ranum’s overall accomplishment is large. This book will be very useful to a broad range of scholars and students, including historians of French history, cultural historians, historians of daily life, and church historians.