Free Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World by Amir Alexander Page B

in a clear hierarchy, The Miracles of St. Ignatius puts this entire narrative into visual form. At the top is the realm of divine light and truth; at the bottom are the tormented and confused people. In between are Ignatius and his men: disciplined, calm, and commanding, they expel the demons of strife and confer the light of truth upon the people. Thanks to the Jesuits, peace will prevail.

    Peter Paul Rubens, The Miracles of St. Ignatius , 1617. (Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY)

 
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    Mathematical Order
     
    TEACHING ORDER
    Ignatius of Loyola, founding father of the Society of Jesus, was not enamored of mathematics. As an aristocratic courtier and dashing cavalier in his early life, he learned to despise the pedantries of scholars and mathematicians. The ecstatic revelations of his later years led him, if anything, even farther away from the cold, logical world of numbers and figures, and his university studies in Barcelona, Alcalá, Salamanca, and Paris did not apparently include any mathematics. By 1553, when under his leadership the Jesuits were in the process of launching a worldwide network of colleges, Ignatius came to see the value of some mathematical education, writing that the colleges should teach “the parts of mathematics that a theologian should know.” And that, it should be admitted, was not much.
    The low standing of mathematics in the early days of the Jesuit educational system is not, in truth, surprising. The Jesuit colleges, after all, had a very specific and urgent goal, very different from the aims of their modern successors: to stop the spread of Protestantism and reestablish the prestige and authority of the Catholic Church. As Ignatius’s lieutenant, Juan de Polanco, explained in a 1655 letter, in the Society’s colleges “men of those nations” where the true faith is threatened “are taught with example and sound doctrine … to keep what remains, and restore what was lost, of the Christian religion.” A remote and abstract subject such as mathematics had little to contribute to this mission.
    The goal of reversing the progress of the Reformation, however, did not mean that the Jesuit colleges focused their curriculum exclusively on religious teachings. Ignatius firmly believed that proper religious instruction must be grounded in broader teachings in philosophy, grammar, classical languages, and other humanistic fields, and it was also essential that the colleges live up to their promise of providing broad and up-to-date education. Otherwise, the local elites would turn elsewhere for the education of their sons, which would spell disaster for the order’s spiritual mission. As Jerónimo Nadal put it in 1567, “For us lessons and scholarly exercises are a sort of hook with which we fish for souls.”
    The “hook” that Ignatius recommended included the languages that might be required in order to read the ancient masters: Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, but also, in some colleges, Chaldee, Arabic, and Hindi. In philosophy, he ruled that the colleges would follow the teachings of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, by far the most influential philosopher in the West ever since his writings had been translated into Latin in the twelfth century. His corpus of writings, covering fields as diverse as logic, biology, ethics, politics, physics, and astronomy, was the most comprehensive then known, and was accepted as authoritative by the majority of European scholars. It was therefore easy for Ignatius, who had studied Aristotle at the universities, to rely on him in setting the curriculum for the Society’s colleges. In theology, Ignatius decreed, the Society would follow St. Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century Dominican who reconciled the teachings of Aristotle and the Church. “The Angelic Doctor,” as Aquinas was known, became after his death the most authoritative theologian in the West, and Ignatius regarded him as well-nigh infallible. Since Thomism (as Aquinas’s theology