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The point of this brief soliloquy on our conceptual frailty is not to challenge van Huyssteen's claim that an experience interpreted to have religious meaning cannot be so interpreted, or that the religious interpretation cannot be compelling to the individual. It is not even to deny that a religious interpretation that is compelling can be justified, at least under certain conditions. The point is that justification is a complicated business-it is a dense forest in which directions are hard to fix, and many and divergent paths appear all around us. And the import of this point here is not to challenge van Huyssteen's account of the justification of religious belief, but to question his confidence in the relationship of theology and science.

Van Huyssteen seems persuaded of their compatibility. Regarding the relationship of theology and other disciplines including science, he says the transversality of these inquiries allows us to see them as "equally legitimate ways of looking at, or interpreting an issue.... [Their] dialogue... can thus be seen to be on convergent paths moving toward an imagined, vanishing point: [their] different voices are therefore not in contradiction... but are dynamically interactive with one another" (79). "[T]heological and scientific modes of inquiry," he claims, " . . . offer alternative interpretations . . . Alternative, however, not in the sense of competing or conflicting interpretations, but of complementary interpretations of the manifold dimensions of our experience" (70).

There is not a lot in van Huyssteen's paper about the conflict of interpretations and the criteria by which such conflicts are to be settled. That may be because van Huyssteen tends too quickly to see differences as mutually enriching visions rather than mutually exclusive options, as the "duet" of different voices rather than the "duel" of incorrigible foes. But the absence of criteria and adjudication talk in his paper may also stem from van Huyssteen's consistent postfoundational sensibility. Without universal foundations, the criteria or procedures for adjudicating particular differences cannot be spelled out in advance. Therefore, how can we expect them of van Huyssteen?

If, however, van Huyssteen's postfoundationalist view is correct, as I believe it is, then how can we know in advance that science and theology will be comfortable partners in interdisciplinary inquiry? Surely not simply because science is now dethroned. The fallible character of our all inquiries, including science, does not mean their equal credibility or their mutual acceptance as worthy partners. Nor does the "shared rationality" of science and theology, so nicely delineated by van Huyssteen, guarantee their complementarity. That both science and theology grapple with what is perceived to be the real (68), that both relate to the world "through the mediation of interpreted experience" (71), that both employ traditioned models or heuristic structures (71, 72f), etc., etc., are very important observations. And they do demonstrate significant similarities between science and theology. These similarities, however, may also be accompanied by crucial differences-such as different procedures for evaluation, different criteria of adequacy-and these differences may turn out to be, in any instance, mutually exclusive.

Here my earlier observations about the conflictual and elusive dimensions of interpreted experience, and the clumsy, poor-fitting character of our interpretive models are, I think, apropos. It may well be that the incompatibilities are really there in what we, whether scientists or theologians, perceive to be the real. Or it may be that they are not, that "the real" is finally unitary and thus subject to compatible theological and scientific accounts, but that our models will always be too crude to produce them. Or it may be that "the real" is unitary, but an antitheological scientific account is the better one ... or vice versa! Deciding this is difficult. More important, no decision is other than tentative and provisional.

The point is simply that in a postfoundationalist worldview, where truth-claims and claims about the criteria by which truth-claims are to be adjudicated are always to be addressed contextually, judgments about the complementarity of science and theology would have to be proffered and warranted on a case by case basis, not by an analysis of these disciplinary rationalities as such. Further, given the crudeness of our model-making and the ambiguity of experience, even these judgments must be tentative. If so, van Huyssteen's confidence in the compatibility of science and theology, generally, could never be warranted.

None of this-and now I turn to my third point-none of this, however, is to disagree with van Huyssteen's argument in this paper that theology as he describes it is, or at least can be, a public inquiry. "Public" here means that theology's values and norms are regional or transversal and thus that theology is open to critique and enrichment from other inquiries as well as a potential critic and resource for them. Van Huyssteen's defense of "transversality"-against the claims that criteria are universal, on the one hand, and incommensurable, on the other-is a view that I share. And I share, too, his judgment that the theology he elucidates is "public" in character. Finally, I appreciate and agree with his account of public theology in the final section of his paper. His discussion of Christian theology as an enterprise that is fallible but committed, traditioned but open, critical but tolerant, with warrants and not proofs, is, I think, unexceptionable. And this characterization might also be applicable to the theological undertakings of other religious communities. As van Huyssteen argues, theologies of this sort are, indeed, legitimate and valuable contributors to public discourse-they are "public theologies."

III. The Norms and Style of an Academic Theology

Van Huyssteen also claims, however, that a public theology is an appropriate inquiry in the secular university (82).4 I believe a public theology can also be an academic theology, but only if two requirements, not necessarily binding upon a public theology, are met. The first is that any theological inquiry that is properly academic, in the sense of being discourse appropriate for the secular academy, must be governed by secular academic norms.

How one comes down on this issue depends in part on how one understands the secular university. One possibility is to understand the secular university as the "public square," the place where all interpretations of life and all recommendations for action are to be voiced and vetted. If the university is the public square then, of course, a theology that is public in van Huyssteen's sense is an appropriate university discipline. I suggest, however, that this view of the university is a postmodern transmutation of the modernist longing for universals. In modernism, the university was the seat of universal knowledge. Postmodernism transmutes this claim in order to retain at least the ghost of universality: If the university cannot be the house of universal knowledge, because there is no universal knowledge, let it then be the house of all particular knowledges, the place where they all meet and compete.

This view that the secular university is the public square neither sheds the presumption of superiority inherent in the modernist view, nor does it reflect adequately the particularity of the secular academy within western culture. The university-by which, again, I mean the secular university (without religious affiliation, for example)-is but one subculture within the broader corporate life. It is not the public square; it is one member of the public square. The university has its own varied traditions of research with their proximate and tentative agreements on practices such as proposing judgments of fact and the criteria whereby they are to be evaluated and alternatives adjudicated. In these general respects, it is like traditions of business or sport or religion. The discourse of the university is not automatically open to all comers simply by virtue of their membership in the larger corporate life. All claims, methods, and criteria are not accorded an equal hearing in the university. Only those are given a place that can establish their credibility in terms of criteria that are established within its investigative traditions, or are shown to be at least plausible alternatives to established criteria.

The university is "public," one might say, in the very limited sense that none of its claims is immune to critique from any quarter, and in principle at least that no one is prevented from participating in its critical and constructive processes. There are no conditions of membership except the knowledge of applicable procedures and criteria and the capacity to use them to extend, revise, or replace them. Its claims and criteria are open to change, but to introduce change one must either show one's claims to be warranted in relation to current criteria, or taking these criteria into account show how they can be revised or replaced. Since critiques, to be successful, must be mounted in relation to its own canonical process of evidence and argumentation, the secular university is a particular tradition, one dynamic and internally plural tradition among others, not the gathering place for all.

Theology, on this view, is appropriate in the university only if it operates within the complex criteriological tradition of the secular academy. Its presence in the university is not justified by the demise of modernist illusions of objectivity and universality. The fact that all inquiries are contextual and interested does not entail that all contextual and interested inquiries belong in the university. The fall of modernism not only undercuts our universalistic pretensions, it also heightens our awareness of the importance of particular traditions, their values and their goals. This is the point where postmodernism, or, as van Huyssteen prefers, postfoundationalism is relevant for understanding the university. The university is but one of many fallible, partial and dynamic traditions; it is not the pretentious inclusion of them all. Theology is an appropriate inquiry in the university, therefore, not simply when it is public, as important as that may be, but when it chooses to be responsible to the norms advocated by one voice to be found in the public square, namely, the norms of the secular university.5

An academic theology is committed to the norms and procedures defensible within the university, not to the norms and procedures of inquiry operative and accepted in particular religious traditions (except as these might be consistent with those of the university). This is one difference between an academic theology and a religious theology. There can be, and I think should be, another difference, namely what one might refer to as "style."

The style of a particular religious theology, Christian or otherwise, is partisan. By that I mean that the theologian is speaking out of, or at least assuming, a sense of the full adequacy of a particular form of Christian belief and practice. Therefore, she is assuming from the outset that this mode of life deserves to be understood, strengthened, and sustained. The Christian theologian does not thereby cease to be scholarly, or open to criticisms from within or without, but she does begin with the assumption that these objections can be adequately met, either by counter argument or by change authored from within. It is her aim to give her perspective its strongest possible statement. The partisan theologian is not necessarily incorrigible; she can be persuaded out of her view, but she does not undertake her investigation at any point thinking "maybe yes, maybe no." She begins, like we all do on many matters, fairly sure where things are going, candid about that assumption, and unwilling to attempt to bracket it. Her task from the start is to "make the case."

The academic theologian will not be without personal views about this or that theological position, Christian or otherwise, and certainly she is not without bias. Further, she may be no more "objective" than the partisan theologian. The difference is that the chosen role-the vocation, if you will-of the academic theologian is to make every attempt to set aside those views and biases and, in so far as possible, to endeavor to give all relevant alternatives an equally open hearing. This attempt to be non-partisan derives in part at least from criteria operative in the academy, in particular the obligations to examine all possible relevant evidence, to do so thoroughly and openly, and without prejudice as to outcome. But in many cases this effort will also be motivated by a more personal conviction, namely, the judgment that one of the ways of contributing helpfully to the social process is to try to stand aside from one's own theological identity in order to give all of the options under study their due.

The distinction between partisan and non-partisan is not meant to indicate a difference of value. In other areas of our social life both are present and both are deemed to be important. The attorney functions as a partisan advocate for his client; the jury and the judge are to try to set aside whatever biases and prejudgments they might bring to the case and attend to all sides of the evidence equally. Both judge and jury, however, are passive. A better illustration is the difference between a columnist who self-consciously writes from a particular political perspective, and a columnist who seeks to be critical in his analysis but even-handedly, fair to all sides. To charge that the political perspective of the first columnist determines his conclusions is not a telling criticism; to claim this of the second political analyst is to claim that he has failed, in this case at least, to live up to his stated vocational goals.

The style of the academic theologian is characterized by attempted analytical fairness, but that does not preclude evaluation. The evaluation, however, is hypothetical about theological options rather than advocative: "This pattern of action seems to have these consequences and these consequences in turn seem to be or not to be compatible with these values, if these are one's values." Or "This conceptual formation does not appear to measure up to this criterion, so if consistency is a value either the formation or the criterion or both should be reconsidered." Or "If the value you want to affirm is X, have you considered whether it might be more fully affirmed by employing this resource in your tradition rather than that?" Or "Have you considered the possibility that your tradition is incapable of providing resources for X, and if so, what consequences follow from that?" Or "If the value you wish to defend and support is Y, then here are some reasons for and against your adopting this conceptual position, institutional affiliation, or lifestyle in support of Y." Of course these are artificial formulations; the give and take of a vigorous academic environment is not likely to tolerate such cut and dried conceptual moves. But they do convey the logic underlying the evaluative approach of an academic theologian.6

Almost certainly every theologian is at some points partisan and at others non-partisan. For the religious theologian the move to nonpartisanship is a matter of strategy, conceivably driven by any number of good or not-so-good motivations. For the academic theologian the partisan mode is a lapse in style, a departure from her vocational role. There may be good reason for acknowledging a lapse when it occurs, but not always for regret. Occasional partisanship may be a helpful reminder to the student that dispassionate and balanced consideration is not the whole of life, and an indication that the academic theologian is aware of and comfortable with that reality. No one's vocation is the only valuable practice of life, and no one is simply her vocation, even in the classroom. But for the academic theologian a lapse in style is just that, a departure from her vocational style. "Style" rather than "standpoint" is the appropriate term here, it seems to me. Standpoint suggests a place where one has arrived, or a position that one can take and hold. Style is more fluid and more tenuous. No performer ever maintains perfectly the style appropriate to the practice of his art.

Perhaps a more important problem for the academic theologian is our inability to be sure that we are fulfilling the obligations of our vocation, or when we are and when we are not. Every analytical ideal-- consistency, clarity, comprehensiveness, etc.-is just that, an ideal. So, too, with the non-partisanship that is the aim of the academic theologian. We know enough about our ideals to be able to pursue them, and enough about our performance in that pursuit to realize that we sometimes are fairly successful and sometimes fail. But we also know enough to know that we cannot always be sure when we are which. Disciplinary training is an important aid in our pursuit of any of these ideals, but it is not a guarantee. The greatest assurance available to the scholar in the secular academy-theologian, historian, philosopher or anthropologist-that our work adequately reflects the norms and style appropriate to the university is the tentative assurance that may emerge from the constant review and critique provided by our peers.

Notes:
1 Numbers inserted in this text refer to pages in van Huyssteen's essay in this issue.

2 I have taken the same position in Boundaries of Our Habitations: Tradition and Theological Construction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), Sf.

3 See, e.g, Bernard Meland, Higher Education and the Human Spirit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 48-61; The Future of Empirical Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 283-305; and Fallible Forms and Symbols (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), 42-49. For a discussion of this, see Tyron L. Inbody, The Constructive Theology of Bernard Meland Postliberal Empirical Realism (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1955), 51-55.

4 should acknowledge here that van Huyssteen quotes me in support of this claim, and that he quotes me correctly. See Brown, Boundaries of Our Habitations, 146f. My comments in this essay represent a significant qualification (and amplification) of the statement that he quotes.

5 I argue for this understanding of academic theology, which might be characterized as the "(new) ethnography of belief" elsewhere, including: "Academic Theology in the University, or Why an Ex-Queen's Heir Should be Made a Subject," in Shifting Paradigms: Theology, Religious Studies and the University, eds. Linen E. Cady and Delwin Brown (Albany: State University of New York Press, forthcoming); "Refashioning Self and Other: Theology, Academy and the New Ethnography," in Converging on Culture: Theologians in Dialogue with Cultural Analysis and Criticism, eds. Delwin Brown, Sheila Greeve Davaney, and Kathryn Tanner (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming); "Academic Theology and Religious Studies," Council of Societies for the Study of Religion Bulletin 26 (1997): 64-66; and "Believing Traditions and the Task of the Academic Theologian," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 62 (1994): 1167-1179.

6 This kind of evaluation, I think, would emerge in what James Clifford calls the "dialogic" and "polyphonic" phases of the "new ethnography." See Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 21-54; and cf. Brown, "Refashioning Self and Others."

Delwin Brown / Iliff School of Theology. Delwin Brown is the Harvey H. Potthoff Professor of Christian Theology at Iliff School of Theology, Denver, Colorado.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.-volver índice-

Michael L Raposa. Pragmatism, Budo, and the spiritual exercises: The moral equivalent of war. -volver índice-
American Journal of Theology & Philosophy, West Lafayette, May 1999
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Volume: 20, Issue: 2, Pagination: 105-121, ISSN: 01943448

Subject Terms: Pacifism // Morality // Philosophers // War

Personal Names: James, William (1842-1910) // Ueshiba, Morihei // Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556)


Abstract:
Raposa discusses musings on pacifism by William James, Morihei Ueshiba and Ignatius of Loyola. The spiritual combat they discussed requires of its warriors the cultivation of some martial virtues that are then transformed.
Copyright American Journal of Theology & Philosophy May 1999

Full Text:
I.
In his 1910 essay on "The Moral Equivalent of War," William James argued that a successful pacifism would reject the typical goals and methods of human warfare while nevertheless seeking to incorporate and adapt certain martial virtues and disciplines. Several of his contemporaries had already supplied extended philosophical meditations on some of the key virtues that James identified, most notably, Josiah Royce on loyalty and Charles Peirce on selfcontrol.1

In 1938, the Japanese mystic and martial artist, Morihei Ueshiba, produced a treatise on "Budo" or traditional martial discipline. Ueshiba conceived of Budo as "aikido," a way of peace, embodying Shinto and Buddhist principles of meditation in physical forms of action and interaction. While cultivating the virtues of courage, loyalty and self-discipline, the practice of aikido was intended as a peaceful exercise, one grounded in a "sincere love" of all living beings.

Like Ueshiba and the American pragmatists (but centuries earlier), Ignatius of Loyola had sought to extend martial categories metaphorically in order to portray the struggles that a Christian devotee would be likely to endure in the ongoing practice of meditation.2 Ignatius's youthful experiences as a soldier clearly influenced his mature thinking about the spiritual life. In his Spiritual Exercises, for example, Ignatius made considerable use of martial imagery. Moreover, characteristically martial virtues, such as obedience, selfdiscipline, and courage, were extolled by Ignatius in the process of his adapting them to the purposes of a thoroughly spiritual form of combat.

The "battleground" to which James, Ueshiba, and Ignatius summoned their readers is co-extensive with but not limited to an internal terrain, that is, an individual's thoughts, feelings, and volitions. In addition, it must be perceived as embracing the social and political realms. Individuals must be prepared (in the sense of being both committed and properly "trained") to resist the forces of moral evil wherever they might be encountered, in all conceivable situations. This type of spiritual combat requires of its warriors the cultivation of certain distinctively martial virtues; but these are transformed, sometimes even inverted, by the special nature of such combat, by the peculiar strategies of resistance that it demands.

II.
The notion that war is "good for nothing" is one that William James rejected as naive and unperceptive. His concern (at least in the materials that I am considering) was not with an assessment of the sort of rationale or objectives typically established for military campaigns, that is, not with an evaluation of those moral conditions under which some war could be judged a "just war." Rather, his interest was in the pragmatic effects of military training and combat on those individuals who participate in such activities. These effects, while not entirely epiphenomenal, would rarely be identified as the primary purpose for engaging in an actual conflict. Nevertheless, they are essential ingredients of the "aesthetical and ethical point of view" articulated by "reflective apologists" for war-in-general, those proponents who claim that the waging of war, whatever its risks and potential destructiveness, is an activity vital to the health of human individuals and societies.

James took such apologists seriously precisely because of the value he attached to those virtues, capacities, and qualities that contribute to success in combat. These included, on his reckoning, fidelity, tenacity, intrepidity, heroism, conscience, inventiveness, physical health and vigor, and the surrender of private interest.3 Not only do they lead to success in combat, moreover, these capacities are tested, exercised, and so enhanced by the conflict itself. The challenge for pacifists, then, is to propose an effective "substitute for war's disciplinary function," as James conceived of it, "a moral equivalent of war."4

James sketched such a proposal in the latter part of his essay, calling for the conscription of an "army enlisted against Nature."5 However infelicitous this talk about "human warfare with nature" may seem to his contemporary readers, the basic idea that inspired such talk is nonetheless worthy of consideration. If war among human beings were "the only force that can discipline a whole community," James concluded, then "war must have its way." But James envisioned the possibility of an "equivalent discipline."

The martial type of character can be bred without war. Strenuous honor and disinterestedness abound elsewhere. Priests and medical men are in a fashion educated to it, and we should all feel some degree of it imperative if we were conscious of our work as an obligatory service to the state. We should be owned, as soldiers are by the army, and our pride would rise accordingly. We could be poor, then, without humiliation, as army officers now are. The only thing needed henceforward is to inflame the civic temper as past history has inflamed the military temper.6

James's pacifism was rooted in this conviction that the martial character can be bred "without war." Toward this end, and somewhat ironically, he conceived and advocated another type of warfare. A new breed of soldier would be enlisted to combat and subdue a very different kind of enemy, here, the hostile forces of "nature." These "soldiers" would be summoned to "coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers."7 Their service would be temporary, but as a consequence of it they would "come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas."

James recognized that the fear of some hostile "other" can indeed be a spur to the development of certain distinctive virtues, an impetus to selfdiscipline. At the same time, he cautioned that it is an error to regard this sort of fear as "the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men's spiritual energy."8 Whatever the stimulus, this process of "awakening" was the primary focus of James's concern. As a pragmatist, his interest was in the effects of combat, but most especially in this instance, its self-transformative effects. These are changes wrought within individuals, the combatants themselves, changes identified here as the development in youth of a sense of loyalty and devotion to ideals, a strengthening of the will, the breeding of civic-mindedness, and a spirit of disinterestedness. It is possible to obtain those effects while simultaneously eliminating the hatefulness, destructiveness, and cruelty of war. The potential consequences for human social life are equally positive and desirable. That is to say, it is possible to banish "the gory nurse that trained societies to cohesiveness," and yet still continue to build cohesive societies.

In an essay written only a few years earlier, James had concluded that "compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake."9 There, already, he was struck by "examples of how war will wake a man up," releasing energies hitherto untapped and unobserved. It will do so because the "excitement" and emotions that are aroused by war are powerful "inciters of the will." Unfortunately, once removed from the excitement of combat, "the shallower levels of life tend to close in and shut us off."10 Consequently, it has become necessary to develop a "methodical ascetical discipline" to keep these deeper levels of freedom and power of will "constantly in reach." The Hindu practice of yoga was briefly discussed in that essay as the primary example of such a discipline. But James also suspected that Ignatius Loyola's spiritual exercises must have produced this result in innumerable devotees.

The example of Ignatius's exercises is noteworthy here, in the first place, because they are identified as an alternative to the excitement of war as a means of awakening human energies, of strengthening volition. Yet Ignatius understood his exercitants to be engaged in the preparation for a very real combat with exceedingly dark and threatening spiritual forces. So at the very same time that he seemed to have identified an alternative to war, James anticipated his later discussion, proposing also an "equivalent" for war.

These considerations blend with his discussion of the power that certain ideas have to "naturally awaken the energies of loyalty, courage, endurance, or devotion."" If an ascetic discipline can be conceived not simply as an alternative to military training, but rather, as itself constituting a form of military preparation, then its power to excite emotions and motivate the will is enhanced. Here, what is added to the ascetic practice is the "idea" of war; on this view, spiritual practice is always already a martial discipline. At the same time, the idea of war is itself transformed, as the concept of enemy and the strategies of resistance must be reformulated. Recognizing this transformation allows one to account for the somewhat paradoxical nature of James's pacifism, as well as of Ueshiba's: the martial arts can and ought to be understood as arts of peace.

III.
Morihei Ueshiba's pacifism was clearly shaped by the trauma of events during and surrounding the second world war.12 It was also informed by his religious beliefs, rooted in the traditional Shinto and Buddhism of his native Japan, but blended with ideas drawn from his long association with the Japanese new religion, Omoto-kyo. Trained at a very early age in budo, the various arts of war, Ueshiba was a soldier in the Japanese army during the conflict with Russia that broke out in February of 1904. Both during and after his military tour of duty, he studied martial arts in a number of prominent dojos, acquiring a master's proficiency with the sword and the spear, as well as in various classical styles of jujutsu.

Ueshiba drew upon these experiences in order to create and develop aikido, a martial art grounded in traditional budo, but conceived as a means of producing harmony, both within the self and among conflicting selves. Eventually, he came to conceive and to talk about aikido as a "way of love." In 1942, Ueshiba wrote:

The way of the warrior has been misunderstood as a means to kill and destroy others. Those who seek competition are making a grave mistake. To smash, injure, or destroy is the worst sin a human being can commit. The real way of a warrior is to prevent slaughter-it is the art of peace, the power of love.13

Despite the apparent oddness of this characterization of the art of the warrior as a practice of love, Ueshiba insisted that his perspective faithfully represented the essence of traditional budo. This essence, he contended, is typically obscured and corrupted by the ignorant, often self-serving behavior of many contemporary teachers and practitioners. Ueshiba intended his aikido to be a recovery and a rejuvenation of the authentic spirit of the martial arts.

In true budo, there are no enemies. True budo is a function of love. It is not for killing or fighting but to foster all things and bring them to fruition. Love protects and nourishes life. Without love nothing can be accomplished. Aikido is the manifestation of love.14

Not content simply to articulate the philosophy of aikido as a set of abstract principles, Ueshiba struggled to embody those principles in the actual practice of the art. Toward this end, in the post-world war period, he significantly edited the vast syllabus of martial techniques inherited from the various forms of classical Japanese jujutsu in which he was accomplished. This editing process resulted in a dramatic simplification of technique, the elimination of those considered to be excessively violent and destructive, even lethal. In this modified practice an emphasis was placed on relatively "soft" techniques, the art of blending with an attacker's aggressive energy ("ki"), redirecting that energy in order to harmonize with it and so render it harmless.15 The strategy was to "enter deeply into an attack and neutralize it as you draw that misdirected attack into your own sphere."

Ueshiba's assertion that there are no enemies in genuine budo is potentially misleading. Like James, he recognized the importance of confrontation with some enemy for the purpose of awakening the human spirit from its slumber, strengthening and focusing it. "At the instant a warrior faces an enemy," he observed, "all things serve to make the teachings more focused."16 The encounter with some hostile other ideally serves as a stimulus, totally engaging the self, bringing it to a state of heightened awareness. But unlike James, Ueshiba pointed toward human nature rather than to "Nature" writ large in order to locate the enemy. The most dangerous enemy, the only enemy that must be defeated, is "the mind of contention that we harbor within."

The penetrating brilliance of swords wielded by followers of the Way strikes at the evil enemy lurking deep within their own souls and bodies. The art of peace is not easy. It is a fight to the finish, the slaying of evil desires and all falsehood within. On occasion the voice of peace resounds like thunder, jolting human beings out of their stupor.17

The "voice of peace" may be embodied, paradoxically, in hostile or aggressive acts and gestures, but it is itself a summons to respond with love, in a spirit of reconciliation. "Opponents confront us continually, but actually there is no opponent there."18 Rather than being a naive denial of the existence of potential enemies, Ueshiba's perspective called for a transformation of one's typical pattern of response to such aggressors. Jesus' challenging admonition to his disciples that they should "love their enemies" is a moral teaching that Ueshiba strenuously endorsed. With regard to Jesus' advice that one should "turn the other cheek" when struck by another person, Ueshiba altered the strategy for students of aikido, recommending that they anticipate the blow and turn before being struck (a reference to the circular, turning, or "tenkan" techniques so typical of aikido practice).

If Ueshiba perceived aikido as the "manifestation of love," this love was not to be understood, in sentimental terms, as pure emotion or a simple feeling response. It is a powerful disposition both shaping and shaped by human volition, one that can be developed gradually through practice (and this is not easy). Learning to love one's enemies requires more than a change in the way that one feels about them. It marks a transformation of one's whole way of being in the world, a new way of being in relation to others.

To follow the path that Ueshiba sketched in his teachings also requires the cultivation of many of those martial virtues that James held in such high esteem.

Loyalty and devotion lead to bravery. Bravery leads to the spirit of self-sacrifice. The spirit of self-sacrifice creates trust in the power of love.19

Moreover, this rigorous training is not limited in scope to the task of "polishing the spirit." It is also necessary to "toughen the body," not as a completely separate enterprise, but as a means of facilitating spiritual progress. Physical endurance and vigor remain important, as James had also observed, even when the primary goal is no longer to conquer some dangerous human opponent. In Ueshiba's view, it is necessary for warriors to understand the body as a "vehicle to train the mind, calm the spirit, and find goodness and beauty."20

The most immediate effect of diligent aikido practice is a powerful self-transformation; but this effect can have important social and political consequences. The "calm spirit" is one poised to bring peace into the world, to restore harmony to relationships now poisoned by discord.

IV.
Like Ueshiba, the young Ignatius of Loyola was carefully trained in the various arts of war, and his early manhood was similarly marked by the traumatic experiences of a soldier in combat. The cannon ball that destroyed his leg in battle also helped to precipitate the spiritual crisis that led to his conversion. The wounded soldier moved from one battlefield to another; embodied in Ignatius's decision to pursue the religious life was his discovery of an "equivalent discipline" for war.21

It is my will to conquer the whole world and all my enemies, and thus to enter into the glory of my Father. Therefore, whoever wishes to join me in this must be willing to labor with me, that by following me in suffering, he may follow me in glory.22

In his meditation on "The Kingdom of Christ," proposed for the end of the first week of the spiritual exercises, Ignatius asked devotees to imagine Christ delivering such a discourse. The martial imagery that characterizes the discourse is commonplace at this point in Ignatius's text. His "Introductory Observations" included a considerable body of practical advice for thwarting the "enemy," the evil one who works constantly to undermine the practice of meditation. For example, he encouraged each exercitant, during those times when he is besieged by distractions and temptations, to continue in prayer for "a little more than the full hour" set aside for that purpose. "Thus he will accustom himself not only to resist the enemy, but even to overthrow him."23 Additional strategies of this sort were appended to the end of the text, in the "Rules for the Discernment of Spirits."

Ignatius's enemy was frighteningly real and threatening. Nevertheless, this threat was not manifested primarily in the encounter with some hostile, external force. More typically, the evil spirit wages war on a landscape interior to the self, frequently causing an individual to endure intense feelings of "desolation." Ignatius understood desolation as a darkness of soul, turmoil of spirit, inclination to what is low and earthly, restlessness rising from many disturbances and temptations which lead to want of faith, want of hope, want of love. The soul is wholly slothful, tepid, sad, and separated, as it were, from its Creator and Lord.24

Such feelings of desolation were to be endured with the same courage and perseverance that would be required of a soldier in the heat of a most violent battle. The soldier's failure could result in serious injury or death, for himself or his comrades. The consequences of a failure of nerve on the part of the religious devotee are potentially even more dangerous, a spiritual death, the loss of eternal life.

If one begins to be afraid and lose courage in temptations, no wild animal on earth can be more fierce than the enemy of our human nature. He will carry out his perverse intentions with consummate malice.25

So malicious is the enemy that it can attack the human psyche even with feelings of consolation or joyfulness, creating in it a sense of complacency and false pride, causing a corresponding weakness of the will. Moreover, feelings of desolation may not be the work of the devil at all; they could be the result of God's "trying" or testing the individual, a military exercise so to speak, rather than an actual encounter with the evil one.26 In either case, such assaults are to be patiently endured, but the key to distinguishing between cases is the cultivation of a certain power of discernment. The source of that power is a profound spirit of indifference, the "first principle and foundation" of the spiritual exercises. This "indiferencia" (exercised as a resistance to the hegemony of one's personal preferences and inclinations) is manifested as a readiness to meet the enemy anywhere, a constant readiness to discern and then submit to the will of God.27

Meditations like the one on "The Kingdom of Christ" in the first week and on the "Two Standards" in the second week explicitly invoke the idea of war and lean heavily on the use of martial imagery. Clearly Ignatius's purpose was to arouse in devotees the sort of powerful emotions that are typically linked to such concepts and images. This seems especially true of the meditation on the "Two Standards" where the exercitant is asked to form a mental representation of the army of Christ, arrayed on a vast plain near Jerusalem beneath the banner of their "Commander-in-Chief. "28 Opposed to them is the equally massive army of Satan, mobilized on a plain near Babylon, their chief "seated on a great throne of fire and smoke." The images presented here are of real armies of soldiers organized in identifiable geographical places. But the strategy delineated for each army makes clear the nature of the combat in which they are about to engage. Satan's hordes will use, first riches, then honor, then pride to attack the followers of Christ. "From these three steps, the evil one leads to all other vices." In response, Christians must embrace poverty, a desire for contempt, and humility. From these three steps, let them lead men to all other virtues.

Ignatius's soldier is the member of a powerful army and no solitary figure or mercenary. To be sure, this battle is one fought over individual souls, the fall into vice representing defeat, the cultivation of virtue an important victory. Nevertheless, the virtuous life is one lived "for the greater glory of God." Such a life is meaningless as a private phenomenon; it necessarily has a public, communal dimension. Prayer and meditation are the work of preparation for the apostolate. The interior battle with Satan is to be waged as part of a military campaign that involves leading others to Christ. Such is the earthly mission of Christ's Church. Moreover, ecclesiastical authority represented for Ignatius a kind of military chain of command. This helps to explain his emphasis within the Spiritual Exercises on the virtue of obedience, as well as the presence there of a set of "Rules for Thinking with the Church."29

V.
Almost a decade before he published his 1910 essay on "moral war," ames had briefly addressed the same topic in his Gifford Lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience:

One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war; something heroic that will speak to men as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible.30

The context for these remarks was one of his lectures on "The Value of Saintliness." That context suggests (despite the peculiar shape taken by the later essay in its call for a "war against nature") that the roots of this idea of an equivalent for war can be traced to James's deliberations concerning specifically religious topics. Indeed, here it was linked to a discussion of ascetic practices, to a pragmatic assessment of their contemporary significance. Despite the "uselessness of some of the particular acts" that can be associated with asceticism, James felt that its "general good intention" was of sufficient value that we "ought to rehabilitate it in our esteem."

For in its spiritual meaning asceticism stands for nothing less than for the essence of the twice-born philosophy. It symbolizes . . . the belief that there is an element of real wrongness in this world, which is neither to be ignored or evaded, but which must be squarely met and overcome by an appeal to the soul's heroic resources, and neutralized and cleansed away by suffering.31

This reference to "the twice-born philosophy" recalled James's earlier lecture on the religious perspective of the "sick soul," its contrast with the "healthy-minded" philosophy. In the latter, peace is conceived as something "reached by the simple addition of pluses and the elimination of minuses from life." But for the sick soul, every natural good is false "in its very being":

Canceled as it all is by death if not by earlier enemies, it gives no final balance, and can never be the thing intended for our lasting worship. It keeps us from our real good, rather; and renunciation and despair of it are our first step in the direction of the truth. There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.32

Interestingly enough, James appears to have endorsed an Ignatian perspective when he speculated about how this "first step" toward the truth might best be taken. It called for the abandonment of the "fear of poverty," indeed, a positive embracing of poverty, much as soldiers can be poor "without humiliation." Yet James's reflections on this matter make it clear that a somewhat special notion of "poverty" was being employed here, something akin to what the theologians understood as "poverty of spirit."33 It is a cultivated disposition toward natural goods and possessions rather than a simple lack of possessions, a "having all things as though one did not have them" (to echo St. Paul). The essence of such poverty is a "liberation from material attachments," a "manlier indifference." To be thus disposed is to be in "the moral fighting shape."34

This "moral fighting" differs from war in the ordinary sense, not least of all because the former is rational and requires of its warriors a supreme selfcontrol, whereas the latter is the "wholesale organization of irrationality," an activity primarily aimed at savagery and destruction.35 An indifference to personal welfare, an indifference even to life and death, constitutes one of the key martial virtues. That virtue must be maintained but transmuted in this new context, adapted for the purposes of this equivalent spiritual discipline. It is no longer a harsh or a cold indifference that is being prescribed, but rather, a loving indifference. In fact, for both Ignatius and Ueshiba, a certain kind of indifference or detachment was love's essential precondition. "Those who are possessed by nothing possess everything," Ueshiba insisted. In Ignatius's view, the true love of God required that one should be like a "balance at equilibrium," free of any "inordinate attachment."36

Courage in the face of the enemy is another important martial virtue. To reject the need for killing and destruction, as both James and Ueshiba appear to have done, is not the same thing as to deny the existence of real enemies or to reject the belief that there is an element of real wrongness in the world. Nor is it to deny that enemies must be resisted and overcome. Yet the strategies of resistance appropriate for the type of "moral" combat that both men portrayed can take peculiar shapes. For example, Ueshiba took pains to observe (much as Gandhi did) that nonresistance can be a curiously effective means of resistance, that yielding, blending, and self-control are the best tools for controlling aggression. Ignatius, also, perceived self-control as the primary and most promising strategy for controlling the enemy. One defeats the enemy by preparing and strengthening the self, reducing or altering the significance of any effects within the self that the enemy might struggle to achieve.

It is possible to read James's philosophy in such a way that the pragmatic meaning of "enemy" is supplied precisely in terms of effects wrought within the self. If one's response to enemies is a loving response, then enemies effectively cease to be enemies; as Ueshiba suggested, there are opponents everywhere, "but actually there is no opponent there." This does not mean that courage is any less required; one might need a tremendous amount of courage in order to maintain a spirit of reconciliation in the face of hostility. Moreover, the self-control that is prerequisite for such a loving response might be maintained only with great fortitude: control over one's powerful feelings of anger, one's pride, one's own lust to dominate or to humiliate another, might be achieved only with a fierce determination.

It is a complicated matter to determine "where" the battle is being waged in the case of war's spiritual or moral equivalent. Since the pragmatic meaning of"enemy" might be shaped by one's own patterns of response, the question of "who" or "where" is the enemy? can be equally problematic. Ignatius and Ueshiba tended to locate the primary battleground within the self. (This was also true for James, at least in those cases where he directed his attention not to the human warfare with nature, but to the martial character of ascetic practices.) For Ignatius, the enemy might be perceived as an evil force arrayed against the self, but its onslaught was most powerfully experienced and resisted within the depths of conscience and character. For Ueshiba too, conflicts between selves tended to be symptomatic of deeper conflicts within the self. The slaying of "falsehood within" was an act of war that sustains and perfects the art of peace.

One must consider the potential of spiritual practices to become privatistic and self-absorbed. Yet no one was more concerned than William James was with both the personal and public "fruits" of asceticism.37 Moreover, to conceive of religious discipline as a martial activity could be interpreted as a way to reduce the risk of spiritual solipsism. The sort of martial virtues that James celebrated, while they might be inculcated in individuals, all had an important social and civic utility. It was not simply a matter, for James, of pretending that there are enemies to fight and then playing at make-believe war in order to discipline the character and the will of private persons. Rather, he was convinced that there are real problems in the world, real evils, "neither to be ignored or evaded," and only properly disciplined persons will be capable of meeting the challenge that they present.

It is also hard to see how the spiritual life conceived as a form of combat could represent a shrinking from public concerns and moral responsibility when such a conception emphasizes (as it surely did in each of the three cases explored here) a heroic detachment from private interests and personal inclinations. The power of war is such that it can both require and inspire that type of disinterestedness, even "unto death." In a complex variety of senses, war is all about death-the death of each person, the death of each moment that passes in time, the dying to self, the sacrificial dying for another. The spectre of death haunted James's "sick soul," as the ultimate threat to the meaning of life, surpassing all "earlier enemies," yet making the spiritual life possible. One must stare death right in the face, Ueshiba warned, in order to illumine the Path.

Just as the drowsy person is jolted to full consciousness by the sound of gunfire or the rumble of an earthquake, the confrontation with death in spiritual practice can precipitate an awakening. That awakening can be either sudden or gradual, can take the form of deeper self-awareness, but can also manifest itself as a power to discern and to touch the joy and suffering of others. Struggled for, even fought for, the fruits of that awakening can nevertheless appear as a gift, perhaps a gift that one might then struggle to protect, most certainly a gift (on all accounts surveyed here) that ought to be shared.

Notes:
1. Among the pragmatists, my attention in this essay is focused on William James. The relationship between Royce's conception of a social self, his ethics of loyalty, and Japanese bushido has been delineated with great insight by Steven Odin in The Social Selfin Zen and American Pragmatism (Albany: SUNY Press,1996), especially 163ff I have explored the connections between some of Peirce's ideas and various traditions of spirituality (including Zen and Ignatian perspectives) in Boredom and the Religious Imagination (University Press of Virginia, forthcoming, 1999).

2. To engage in talk about the "literal" and the "metaphorical" usages of a term is, in many instances, a tricky business. On the assumption that "war" most literally refers to the actual armed conflict between groups of human beings, it seems correct to describe the sort of phenomena with which this essay is concerned as "warfare" in a metaphorical sense. James appears to make such an assumption about the literal meaning of the word; his "moral equivalent of war" is only a "war" metaphorically speaking. But my suspicion is that both Ueshiba and Ignatius might regard the spiritual combat to which they summon their followers as the most primordial form of struggle or conflict in which human beings can participate. On this interpretation of their perspectives, a conflict between human combatants would represent "warfare" only in a derivative sense; the primary struggle with evil occurs elsewhere.

3 William James, "The Moral Equivalent of War," in Essays on Faith and Morals, ed. Ralph Barton Perry (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1962). These items are culled from lists that appear in James's essay on pages 319 and 323.

4. Ibid., 321.

5 Ibid., 325. 6. Ibid., 326. 7.Ibid., 325. 8. Ibid., 328.

9 James, "The Energies of Men," in Essays on Faith and Morals, 221.

10 Ibid., 229

11 Ibid., 232.

12 The most detailed account in English of Ueshiba's life is supplied by John Stevens in Abundant Peace: The Biography of Morihei Ueshiba (Boston & London: Shambhala Publications, 1987).

13 Morihei Ueshiba, The Art of Peace: Teachings of the Founder of Aikido, trans. John Stevens (Boston & London: Shambhala Publications, 1992), 8.

14. Quoted in Stevens's Abundant Peace, 112.

15. Is Observers and scholars of the martial arts have noted similarities between the soft, circular blending techniques of aikido and those of tai chi chuan and pakua, two Chinese martial arts rooted in ancient Taoist philosophy.

16.There is some speculation that Ueshiba might even have been exposed to these Chinese disciplines during his two sojourns in Manchuria, the first as a soldier early in the century, the second as part of an ill-fated Omoto-kyo mission in 1924. (This is a possibility that Stevens, in his biography, seems rather too quick to deny; see Abundant Peace, 71).

17.Morihei Ueshiba, Budo, trans. John Stevens (Tokyo, New York, & London: Kodansha International, 1991), 31.

18.Ueshiba, The Art of Peace, 34-35. See also, his Budo, 29. Is Ueshiba, The Art of Peace, 99.

19 Ibid., 43.

20 Ueshiba, Budo, 32.

21.This experience of conversion and the degree to which it was shaped by Ignatius's self-image as a warrior have been explored by W.W. Meissner, S.J., in his brilliant biography, Ignatius of Loyola: The Psychology of a Saint (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), see especially 18-5.

22 Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, trans. Louis J. Puhl, S.J. (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1951), 44.

23. Ibid., 5. 24. Ibid., 142.

25.Ibid., 145. 26. Ibid., 144.

27. Spiritual Exercises, "First Principle and Foundation," 12. In this regard, consider also the culminating "Contemplation to Obtain the Love of God," 101-103.

28 Ibid., 60-63. 29. Ibid., 157-61.

30. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin Books,1982), 367. See, also, similar remarks earlier in the book, in his "Circumscription of the Topic," 45-46.

31. Ibid., 362.

32 Ibid., 166-67. 33 Ibid., 315-25.

34 Ibid., 368; see also, 361-62.

35 Ibid., 367. For Charles Peirce, an activity was to be deemed rational precisely insofar as it was self-controlled; on this view, reasoning is itself a type of ascetic discipline. Moreover, Peirce's reflections on this topic were (much like James's) connected to certain religious deliberations. Peirce portrayed self control (i.e., reasonableness) as necessarily involving a "love of what is good for all on the whole." He identified it with the "essence of Christianity" and described it as "perfect freedom," indeed, as "the only freedom of which man has any reason to be proud." Consult Peirce's Collected Papers, Vol. 5, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), paragraph 339, p. 210, note 1.

36 Ueshiba, The Art of Peace, 16. Ignatius, Spirtual Exercises, 75.

37 James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: consider, for examply, the assessment provided on 369-78.

Michael L. Raposa /Lehigh University. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.-volver índice-

Harro M Hopfl. Ordered passions: Commitment and Hierarchy in the organizational ideas of the jesuit founders. -volver índice-

Management Learning, Thousand Oaks, Sep 2000

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Volume:31, Issue: 3, Pagination: 313-329, ISSN: 13505076.

Subject Terms: Studies // Hierarchies // Management styles // Religious organizations // Commitments.

Abstract:

This article explores hierarchy, commitment, order and cognate ideas in the context of one of the most successful religious enterprises of all, the Society of Jesus. It concentrates on its management style and its distinctive understanding of religious life, in which obedience occupies a pre-eminent place. Hierarchy and obedience were however by no means intended as a substitute for commitment, prudence or operational autonomy on the part of those subject to it. These unfamiliar ways of understanding motivation and organization suggest insights into the way in which contemporary organizations have sought to institute quasi-virtues such as ethics, care and compassion in order to regulate and control behavior and performance.

Copyright Sage Publications, Inc. Sep 2000

Full Text:

Abstract This article explores hierarchy, commitment, order and cognate ideas in the context of one of the most successful religious enterprises of all, the Society of Jesus. It concentrates on its management style and its distinctive understanding of the religious life, in which obedience occupies a pre-eminent place. Hierarchy and obedience were however by no means intended as a substitute for commitment, prudence or operational autonomy on the part of those subject to it. These unfamiliar ways of understanding motivation and organization suggest insights into the way in which contemporary organizations have sought to institute quasi-virtues such as ethics, care and compassion, in order to regulate and control behaviour and performance.

This article examines the management methods and style pioneered by the early Jesuits, in order to draw attention to certain salient features of the notions of 'order' and 'ordering'. In the context of management learning this provides insights into some possible relationships between organizational structure and authority and the pursuit of corporate objectives. In particular, the essay attempts to elucidate the meaning of 'hierarchy' in the context of a religious 'Order', the Society of Jesus, and its broader and ambivalent associations with the idea of order per se. It examines the simultaneity of structure and authority in the organization of order. In this context, attention is drawn to some early Jesuit practices which find remarkable parallels in modern management, such as the use of what would now be termed efficiency audits and the (human resource management) significance attached to careful selection, with a view to continuity of commitment and vocation. Further, the Society is seen as prototypically 'bureaucratic', with all the attendant contemporary parallels that implies. The manner in which the Society managed an 'empire' and its use of what might now be termed `management by objectives' are commented on. Particular attention is drawn to the paradoxical and subtle relationship between the Society's stress on obedience, submission and self-discipline on the one hand, and operational autonomy, selfreliance and the indispensability of prudence on the other.

In sum, this discussion of the early Jesuits suggests some striking comparisons with the functioning of contemporary organizations. However, historical parallels are all too often facile and, so far from illuminating what is being compared, conduce to a misunderstanding of both terms of the comparison. The examination that follows attempts something less problematic. It seeks to provide an understanding of the management thought and practice of the Jesuit Founders, and thereby to gain a distinctive purchase on certain contemporary issues in management such as authority, order and compliance. There is no suggestion here that the study of the Jesuits should provide a model of good management practice, or that contemporary organizations should go to the past for lessons. Rather, contemporary organizations face problems, issues and, indeed, suggestions about how to resolve them which are in some respects by no means unprecedented. Fundamentally, however, the basis for commitment to the Jesuit Order was radically different from that required by, or possible in, the modern organization, as will become apparent.

Organization and Management

The study of organization cannot escape a fascination with models and metaphors. Indeed, on any but the most colloquial understanding of what metaphor is, it is hard to know where the 'literal' (so to speak) ends and the metaphorical begins in this 'area'. Perhaps the metaphors which originally inhered in the constitutive concepts 'organization', 'management', 'structure' no longer do much work. Even though household (menage) and more remotely hand and handling (manus, maneggiare) are the etymological source of 'management', it is now entirely unclear which of household or enterprise management is the metaphor for the other, if indeed either is; and `hands-on management' is no pleonasm. As for `organization', little more than a century ago Herbert Spencer (1884/1969: 195-233) was still able to trade extensively on the association between 'organization' and 'organism'; 'organization' had made the transition from a technical biological term meaning `equipped with organs' to a metaphor for the ordering of societies barely a century before his time. The same biological analogy explains the association between 'structure' and 'function'. Again, the metaphor implicit in 'structure' is clearly not inert even now: the concept positively demands elucidation by resort to spatial metaphors and gestures. And any interpretative vocabulary richer than the mere designatives 'organization' and 'management' will have to be nourished by a metaphoric, as is clear from the vocabularies explored by Morgan (1986). Analogously, Oakeshott has shown that the metaphor of some sort of 'enterprise', with its 'executive' and 'management', has served to sustain an entire tradition of thinking about the modern state (see Oakeshott, 1975: section 2; and generally Berlin, 1969).

Metaphors, then, as Chia has rightly argued (1996), are not dispensable aids to understanding organization. This does not however mean that scholarship is doomed merely to change fashions in models whimsically, like the rag trade. One way of attaining the requisite distance that permits self-consciousness is to consider unfamiliar organizational concepts, models and beliefs. This essay explores one such organizational vocabulary, with a view to attaining a point of vantage, a purchase on our own. But there is also a bridge, in that its absolutely focal concept of hierarchy still retains something of its centrality.

Hierarchy and Structure.

Both the provenance and the connotational range of hierarchy in its current usage are as unclear as those of various other concepts which will also oand 'service'. Thethe partiality of ccupy us, notably 'commitment', 'meaning', 'mission' provenance may be military, given organizational discourseobjectives, leadership, chains of command, campaign, communication to military metaphors (strategy, and so forth). But a less banal provenance, namelyreligious one, is supported by the no doubt forgotten etymology of a 'hierarchy':arkhe, rule (hence sacredrule). Military and religious hiereus, priest and hieros, what is holy, and or priestly provenances are far from mutuallythese vocabularies have been mutually permeable time out of exclusive in any case, since mind, and long before intifada, 'crusade' or `fighting thefight'. good

Like 'hierarchy', religion is one of the more durable obsessions of organizational thought and of its parent discipline sociology, as is evident enough in Comte and Durkheim. The current concern in organizational enquiry with meaning and symbolism does not escape the penumbra of religion either. Many observers (see Gowler and Legge, 1996) have been struck by the popularity since the 1980s of quasi-religious motifs, symbolism and rhetoric with companies seeking from their employees a certain kind and measure of dedication to the objectives and 'spirit' (or 'ethos') of the organization. The terminology of 'commitment', 'service' and 'mission' is redolent of religious connotations. And although this vocabulary will perhaps prove ephemeral, it is safe to predict that whatever replaces it will bear a family resemblance. Religion is the perfection of organization, just as organization is the sine qua non of religion, and religion and organization are as much producers, stabilizers and consumers of 'meaning' as any other province of human activity or any human purpose under heaven, only more so.

Hierarchy and Religious Order .

The association of hierarchy, religion and organization is evidently most intimate, and the metaphors are least likely to generate incongruity, when the subject is a religious 'organization'. The Society of Jesus Jesuits), the subject of this paper, illustrates all the themes adumbrated so far to a nicety. Here is easily the most successful of the host of religious associations established in the Catholic Church since the Reformation, the object of admiration and envy even to its legions of detractors, of whom Comte, Marx and Lenin are more recent exemplars. Strikingly, the organization ('order') characteristic of the Society from its foundation combined a uniquely rigorous espousal of hierarchy with a reliance on the self-motivation and operational autonomy of its members. This combination, which runs counter to a good many post-modern as well as modern commonplaces about the nature and implications of hierarchy, religion and organization alike, is a further inducement to attentiveness.

There are extensive records about the early Society, thanks to the intensely bureaucratic character which was one of its distinctive features. Thus in 1539 the founding associates held sustained discussions about giving themselves a permanent and well-ordered collective existence, an 'order'. The principal founder, the Basque Ignatius of Loyola, attached to a (still extant) contemporary record of these deliberations the title `The manner in which [our] association (compania) is to be ordered, so as to give obedience to one of its members' (MonIg, Constitutiones I).1 The founders set about these deliberations methodically, presenting considerations for and against any proposal and then coming to a conclusion, in the manner of the scholastic dialectics of their common alma mater, the University of Paris. They even debated whether it was expedient to exchange the informal comradeship they had hitherto enjoyed for a formal and permanent manner of association: `reducing ourselves to one body'. Ignatius's formulation of the Society's purposes, manner of life and organization in effect became the papal bull which in 1540 officially established the Society, Regimini Militantis Ecclesiae which encompassed its Formula and Institute (or manner of life). Also relevant are the Constitutions of the Society which were largely Ignatius's own work, his various Letters to the Society, as well as The Spiritual Exercises and the appended Rules to be Kept, so that We May Be of One Mind with the Orthodox Church Thinking with the Church.

Structure and Authority

The distinctive character of an association is conventionally understood to be a function both of its structure, i.e. the formal array and dovetailing of tasks, responsibilities, powers and prerogatives formalized in authoritative regulations and procedures (the 'constitution'), and of its animating principle (Montesquieu) or spirit, its 'culture': in other words the standard motivations, tradition (custom and practice) and shared beliefs which inform and animate the structure and make its parts 'move' (marcher), to use Montesquieu's term.

The structure ('order') of the Society, articulated in Ignatius's own lifetime, was explicitly an extreme version of the hierarchical principle in its most monarchical form; Ignatius's title for the resume mentioned earlier already makes this clear. The Society aroused much unfavourable comment for the self-consciously innovative character of both its 'organization' and its 'culture' (to use anachronisms); private associations were certainly not ordinarily organized like this, and all innovation was in any case profoundly suspect at this time.

Thus the Society is headed by a 'General' (more precisely a `Superior General') elected for life by the Society's highest-ranking members, and not by the membership as a whole. He has free disposition over all appointments and dismissals throughout the Society, as well as over its policy and its administrative rules, though not over the Constitutions of the Society, its `fundamental laws'. These themselves however give enormous discretion to him, and to all other superiors, each according to his degree. Individual members of the Society (all full members being priests, unlike the custom of the older religious orders) are members of a province of the Society, but they could be (and were) freely transferred between as well as within provinces, at the discretion of their superiors and the Roman headquarters of the Society. Each province, each individual Jesuit community (mostly the Society's 'colleges' and its missionary establishments), in fact each functioning unit with any degree of permanence had its own superior, who enjoyed with respect to his 'subjects' an authority and discretion limited only by his own accountability and that of all superiors to the Superior General, who in turn is subject only to the Pope and the Constitutions. The latter make no provision for any regular general assembly to limit the General, unlike the older orders: General Congregations, the Society's 'parliaments', may be summoned at his discretion, but otherwise meet only after a General's death in order to elect a successor, and at that time may also attend to policy and any alteration in the Constitutions. All offices within the Society apart from that of General were appointive, not elective. And it should perhaps be noted at this point that this extreme of monarchical authority is in no sense a simple entailment of the idea of a hierarchy. The latter irresistibly suggested the image of a pyramid made up of various gradations or levels, and the level below the apex could easily be understood to limit the authority of the apex: kings had regularly had problems with their peers (from pares, equals in the sense of sharing the same rank) or barons (from varones, literally [the king's] men), and popes with archbishops and bishops. In fact Protestants had rejected the image of the celestial hierarchy of archangels and angels, not only as unscriptural but also because it seemed to limit the absolute omnipotence of God.

Bureaucracy, Efficiency Auditing, and Recruitment and Selection Procedures.

The Society, again, was in some respects prototypically bureaucratic. It insisted on the keeping of written records on everything and everyone. Indeed, there was the equivalent of an annual `efficiency audit' requiring each provincial to submit each year a full report of the activities and 'fortunes' of his province to the General, divided into a public section (the famous Annual Letters) which the Society published for the edification of the whole Society and the public at large, and a restricted section for the General. In addition, provinces were subject to visitations by commissioners from the General, and provincials were expected to keep in regular (ideally monthly) contact with the General.

Furthermore, the Society from the beginning proliferated rules and regulations governing the conduct of every member and every office. There were rules for generals, for their secretariat (established in the 1540s), for provincials, for rectors of colleges, for full members of various ranks (for the Society's complex distinctions of rank see O'Malley, 1993: 345ff; Lukacs, 1968), for probationers, for cooks and porters, and in due course for teachers and confessors of princes. There was even a mandatory international curriculum for the Society's colleges and universities, once the Society in Ignatius's own lifetime espoused secondary and tertiary education as one of its principal missions. This is the famed ratio studiorum (method of studies) finalized after much experimentation with teaching at established universities and founding new ones (Hengst, 1981). Particular attention was paid by the Society's rules to matters of recruitment, down to specifying the qualities of presentability and background requisite in candidates. Strictly applied, the rules would have excluded both Ignatius himself and the successorgeneral Lainez. Questions of promotion and personnel management also received detailed attention. The Jesuits seem even to have pioneered the use of questionnaires to explore why individuals sought admission and why a good many left the Society (O'Malley, 1993: 55). For this association was intended to be a corps d'elite. There must indeed be a diversity of gifts and ministries (I Corinthians 12: 4-5) as in any association, but each member must have some gifts. Only adult candidates were admitted; Ignatius even expressed a preference for mature men with experience of the world. No one was to become a full member without a period of probation, training and study that had no precedent in the older orders, or without testing, assessment and oral and written evaluations. The reality of course fell well short of the ideal; given the endemic shortage of personnel as compared to the infinite demands made on it, the Society often had to make do with what it could get.

But all these rules, however detailed and seemingly peremptory, expressly allow for a great deal of flexibility and discretion on the part of the superiors. For Jesuits there was no substitute for prudent and experienced superiors, and prudence as is well known can be learnt and discerned but not taught; or as a wit has more subtly put it, it can be taught but not learnt.

Management of an Empire.

The authoritative foundational documents specify in very great detail its `organization', and the qualities required in its members, amongst which the sine qua non is a disposition to obedience. But they were not much concerned with specifying aims and objectives. Those ends, aims, purposes or projects the original documents did specify, for example catechizing boys and unlettered persons, were often not what the Society eventually concentrated on. Conversely, nothing in these documents suggested those specialisms the Society subsequently did excel at, notably the management of an empire of institutions of secondary and tertiary education, and the attendant publishing enterprise of an entire library on morality, theology, piety and politics, and the provision of spiritual directors, confessors, and preachers for all and sundry, especially spiritual and temporal princes, in which capacity Jesuits often acted as ecclesiastico-political consultants. What was envisaged originally was an association unconditionally at the service of the papacy, devoted to fire-fighting and search-and-rescue operations of various kinds, itinerant and mingling with the world, missionary not parochial, and financed by alms. None of this suggested a Society which came to be largely sedentary and financed by endowments. The founders in fact did not even take a view about the appropriate future size of the Society; they saw no problem in the limitation to 60 imposed by the papacy (a limitation abolished four years later), and did not expect the escalating ecruitment that soon occurred.

Objectives.

And yet for all the changes in size, objectives and specialization even in the lifetime of the Founder, the Society's organization remained essentially unchanged. And given the recent fashion for formalized 'objectives', `mission statements', 'charters' etc. as the prerequisites of organizational success, it may perhaps surprise that the Society managed exceedingly well without anything of the sort. The so-called Formula of the Institute of the Society (De Aldama, 1990: 1) merely specified its `ultimate end' as saving the souls of its members and of their neighbours, `the advancement of souls in Christian life and doctrine and the propagation of the Faith by means of the Ministry of the Word, spiritual exercises and works of charity'. This was no more than a summary of the duties of any Christian, plus those peculiar to priests.

The organization of the Society was thus plainly not a matter of devising apt means to predetermined objectives. Its extremely open-ended objectives provided no basis whatever for even the most conditional inferences or conclusions about an appropriate form of organization. And whatever pragmatic advantages might be claimed for the organization the Society in fact adopted, equally strong pragmatic arguments could be (and were) adduced for an entirely different manner of organization. Thus for example a less hierarchical ordering had many points in its favour: popes and princes as well as many Jesuits disliked the form of the generalate in particular. A less hierarchical order might also have allowed better adaptability and speed of response, the capacity to exploit local knowledge and the prudence which the Society valued and cultivated and greater scope for individual initiative and civic spirit which a more participative arrangement fosters, in the view of some then and now.

Innovation and New Structures

The organizational principles and practice of the older religious orders do not explain the Society's organization either. Obviously the contemplative or enclosed orders could not provide any pattern. But Jesuits also firmly rejected a central practice of all religious orders, the `offices" of collective daily and nightly worship, at fixed times. Given the record of the Dominicans and Franciscans, the claim sometimes made that the manner of life of the older orders did not square with the capacity to move in the world that Jesuits wanted is absurd. Their spirituality was however not that of the Jesuits, and their organization-loose confederations of relatively independent houses, with an elective head, subject to a time-limited general and some general assembly-had no attraction for the Jesuit Founders either. In fact one of their principal worries about constituting themselves into a formal , officially authorized association was precisely that (as the 1539 record puts it) `we might perhaps be compelled by the Holy Father to live under some rule that is ready-made and established'. They also noted the unpopularity in Europe at large of 'monks' and the monastic ideal. Where then did they draw their organizational ideas?

The Military Model

A familiar suggestion, explicitly made by some Jesuits themselves not long after Ignatius's death, is that the Society's organizational model was a military one.

Ignatius's own armigerous past lends it credibility, and a military model would explain the strict order of ranks, the 'absolute' authority of the General, the system of appointments from above, the detailed rules for the conduct of the other ranks, and the military metaphors employed by Ignatius. But talk about enrollment in order to `fight under the banner of the Cross of Christ' (Aldama, 1990: 1) was then an utterly conventional description of how any Christian was to live, and its point here was not to elucidate the Society's organizational characteristics, but rather to explain the kind of commitment expected of its members. Again, the title 'General' for the head of the Society was not a military metaphor, but merely a short form for praepositus generalis, i.e. general superior, to distinguish him from the multiplicity of the Society's other superiors; in any case other orders too had their 'generals'. And if the organization of the Society in some ways resembles that of an army, this is merely because in the general view of the time all well-ordered associations shared certain features. Other characteristics of the Society (such as its intensely bureaucratic character) are not to be explained in this way at all.

In fact the most plausible models for the Society's organization are the Catholic Church itself, as the most extreme papalists interpreted its ideal form, and absolute monarchies, not as they were but as they aspired to be. But of course the Society was a voluntary association of extremely carefully selected individuals, and in that respect bore no resemblance to the Church or secular monarchy. Nevertheless these could provide a model for the Society-and Jesuits were quite explicit that they did-because they embodied what Jesuits regarded as the essential form of the well-ordered association as such.

On Corporations

The Society's ordering principles are identifiable from the language the founders themselves used. For them, the business in hand was not to set up and then 'manage', and if necessary 'restructure' or 'rationalize' an 'organization', for these concepts had not been invented; rather it was to 'institute', or 'order' (a particularly pregnant concept), and then to 'govern' and if necessary to 'reform' an association which they designated a compania, compagnie (originally from: those who share bread) or congregacion, in German Gesellschaft or sometimes Gemeinschaft (or societat, in Dutch societeyt, in English society, all merely the Latin term societal thinly vernacularized): all these names had identical connotations, except that the vernaculars retain suggestions of the fraternity and informality of the original association, whereas societal is the Roman law term for a formal, legally constituted association.

Identifying itself as a compania (rather than a religio, a religious order) automatically intimated a flock of beliefs implicit in the medieval idea of a 'corporation', universitas or sodality. Any such corporate association was understood as a corpus (whence 'corporation'), a `body mystical', whether it be a guild, fraternity, city council, university, company of soldiers (then often free-enterprise contractors) or a company of merchants, or a commonwealth or the Church as a whole. The body analogy (for its political uses see Greenleaf, 1964: ch. 2) in turn connotes 'members', 'head', and (more reconditely) 'constitution', conspiratio, 'conjunction', 'concord'.

Again, corporations were understood to comprise (at least) some charter or articles of association, a common enterprise or purpose, and particularly some kind of executive or 'offices': any 'body' must have a 'head', to which the 'members' are subordinated. Such subordination is the 'bond' or 'sinews' which maintain unity within the corporation. But just as a body corporate is not literally a body, so the headship which any collectivity must have need not be monarchical, still less an absolute monarchy. The idea of collective headship was familiar enough to the sophisticated medieval and early modern thinking about corporations. Nevertheless it was axiomatic to the original associates that the headship of the order would be monarchical and a monarchy of a peculiarly absolute kind.

Obedience

Furthermore, although it was a commonplace of the time that no human association can dispense with obedience, this again says nothing about whom this obedience is owed: it might equally well be a Rule, laws, a collective headship, conscience, or the will of God. All the authoritative Jesuit documents insist that the obedience demanded in this association would be particularly stringent, exacting and unconditional. The Society always prided itself on excelling all others in its cultivation of the virtue of obedience, the keystone of the edifice of the religious life and the distinctive virtue of Christ himself (Philippians 3.8, Romans 5.19, John 15.10). And this obedience was to be owed to specific superiors, each of them in any particular context the inferior's monarch, so to say, `standing in the place of Christ'. Thus the Constitutions say: `It is expedient unto perfection (sc. of life) and highly necessary, that all should devote themselves to perfect obedience [my italics], recognizing their superior, whoever he might be, as standing in the place of Christ our Lord.' (Ganss, 1970: s.284, p.164; see also generally pp. 254ff). And the resume of the original deliberation records the associates' view that `obedience makes men ready for continuous heroic actions and virtues. The man who truly lives under obedience is very prompt to carry out whatever he is enjoined to do, even if it presents great difficulties or gives rise to humiliation . . . before the world' (Constitutiones I: 6-7). Furthermore, merely `carrying out what is commanded [by a superior] does not deserve the name of obedience'; the status of a virtue is attained only when `one makes the superior's will one's own, in such a way that there is not merely effectual execution of the command, but an interior conformity in willing or not willing the thing done . . .'. The optimum to be aimed at is `an entire resignation [or surrender, resignation] of the will', so that the Jesuit `thinks and feels (tener un sentir mesmo)' in the same way as his superior (Young, 1959: 290; see also Ganss, 1970: s.550). This perfect `obedience of the understanding' is what Ignatius demanded; he notoriously described it as `blind obedience', although he had not invented that phrase.

The Functionality of Obedience

For the Founders, and the Society at large as it developed, organizational considerations were in fact all subordinate to the cultivation of the virtue of obedience (but see O'Gorman, 1971, for another interpretation). As incurable rationalists, who habitually construed everything human in terms of ends and efficacious, prudent means to those ends (which makes the absence of a foundational `mission statement' all the more striking), Jesuits naturally tended to give presentational priority to the functionality of obedience, its value and beneficial consequences in terms of the ends of the Society and the Church, especially when they were defending the organization of the Society either against recalcitrant members or against hostile outsiders. The decisive functional argument adduced in favour of hierarchy and obedience by Ignatius and by all his successor theorists was explicitly drawn from political theory and experience, and referred in one of Ignatius's typical formulations to: the universal example given to us by every people that live in ... some established order (policia): not only kingdoms and cities, but even private communities (congregationes) and houses. It is usual to reduce government to unity [i.e. monarchy], in order to avoid confusion and disorder, and for the good governance of the many. And those things about which men of judgement agree, ought to be considered by us as most certain, most natural, fit and proper. (Young, 1959: 141)

Again, `since there is nothing which more conduces to the preservation of any congregatio whatsoever than obedience, we think that we [too] stand in need of it'. And generally: `No multitude whatever can preserve itself as one body, unless it is united; nor can it be united without an order (order); and it cannot have an order if there is no head to which the others are subordinated as members, by means of obedience' (Young, 1959: 144). Again (elsewhere): `Union cannot be maintained without order, nor order without the proper bond of obedience of inferiors to superiors; the whole of the natural universe teaches this, and so do the hierarchies of angels and well ruled human polities, which are united, preserved and ruled by subordination' (Young, 1959:159-60).

Hierarchy.

Ignatius's famous Letter on Obedience of 1553 (Young, 1959: 289ff) added a development necessary once the Society was no longer a single 'congregation' but a multiplicity of communities and provinces. Order here demands a strict hierarchy amongst superiors themselves:

It is necessary that there should be an order (orden) wherever there is any multitude, so that confusion may be avoided. And even among a multitude of superiors (praepositos) there must be an order of superiority and subjection; and so, with subordination, the unity of all must be maintained, and with it the existence and good government of the Society. (Young, 1959: 295)

However, such generic arguments could not support the distinctive order and obedience of the Society of Jesus: good order in human collectivities need not be that particular order. Here quite different considerations were necessary, and these are to be found in the spirituality of the Society. No rigid separation between Jesuit organizational thought and spirituality is defensible. Many of the most obviously 'political' Jesuits, such as the famous polemicist, organizer and activist Robert Persons (the paradigmatic 'Iesuite Polititian' of the Elizabethans and early Stuarts), were celebrated in their own day for their spiritual writings. Conversely, spiritual writings invariably contain overtly 'political' references or analogies.

Outram Evennett (1970) has discerned in Jesuit spirituality a distinctive `individualism', in virtue of the emphasis placed by Ignatius and the Society as a whole on individual conscience, commitment, self-discipline, and relationship with God. Hence the rooted antipathy to the communal offices of the older orders, the devotion to auricular confession and frequent (private) examination of conscience, and the individuation of even collective acts of worship like the mass, where the individual's meditations are to be as if he or she were alone with God. The same is true of the entire literature of devotion and piety which forms far and away the bulk of Jesuit publication (apart from textbooks) in the 16th century. Such a preoccupation with the individual may seem utterly remote from the corporate solidarity and whole-hearted submission to the Church and to superiors which the Society demanded of Christians generally and of Jesuits eximiously. It is on the contrary their historical and psychological presupposition.

The Individual and Self-Direction.

The mainstay and crystallization of Jesuit piety is without question Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises, the practice of 'retreats' and also Ignatius's manual of guidance for spiritual directors administering them (referred to below as Spiritual Exercises, in italics). And here we find explicated the view of the human personality, the good life and good order which the organization of the Society of Jesus presupposed.

The Spiritual Exercises, which are infinitely adaptable to individual needs, capacities and circumstances, concern themselves with the fundamentals of the human condition: one's life, character, free will and what to do with them. Their piety is not that of observances, contemplation, austerities and rituals, though all of these have their place; nor is this a particularly ecclesiastically focused piety. Rather the exercitant's meditations centre on his or her direct relationship with `Christus Dominus noster', although the Church's agency and authority are of course taken for granted. The point is to achieve a combination of the intellectual faculties of memory, understanding and will with the senses and the whole range of the passions into a durable commitment to the glory of God, a formula that reverberates throughout the Exercises and which is of course the motto of the Society: ad maiorem Dei gloriam. The glory of God, with which the salvation of one's own soul is continually paired, is the end, the principium et fundamentum, of the Christian life. The diurnal practices of the religious life have the same end: the Spiritual Exercises are simply their concentrated, distilled essence. However, a concurrence of senses, passions and intellect in the service of God is difficult to attain. What counteracts it is not the passions as such, for fear, love, grief, disgust, ambition, shame, devotion, confusion are merely affective states and as such morally neutral, good or bad according to their objects, and the Spiritual Exercises enlist them all in the ultimate commitment. Ignatius did not even reject a 'servile' (slavish) fear of God's punishments as a serviceable motive, at least as a steppingstone to something better. The Spiritual Exercises everywhere enlist the most powerful passion of all, namely self-love, in the form of a concern for the wellbeing of one's own soul.

Self-love and Ordered Passions .

Jesuit moral psychology regards it as obviously natural and legitimate that a man should love himself: this is presupposed even by Christ's command to `love your neighbour as yourself', and the entire Exercises make no bones about appealing to self-love in that sense. Self-love is only reprehensible, a disorder (desordinacion) in the soul, when our passions are not subordinated to the desire to serve God. This is pride (self-will), the essence of disorder, the original sin of the angels, of Adam, of all of us. It is only such a 'disordered' love of self and `disordered passions' which stand in the way of service to God. Any passion, desire, habit, consideration or contemplation that abases pride is to that extent welcome, and the Spiritual Exercises call up a whole battery of such motives in a systematic assault upon the self- (i.e. pride-) generated habits of insubmission to God. And although the contrasting term `ordered passions' does not occur in the Spiritual Exercises, nonetheless that is what they aim at: passions harnessed and ordered to the overriding end of the service of God.

Humility, on the contrary, is the essence of an ordered soul. But for Ignatius there is no virtue whatever in a 'humility' that is merely spinelessness and lack of character, what Milton in Aeraeopagitica described as a `cloistered virtue'. Humility and submission are only valuable if they are themselves the product of will, the result of a deliberate surrender of the will and judgement to God. So far from meaning a lack of will, humility (and par excellence the humility of a Jesuit) demands an iron and inflexible will, however suaviter in modo and modest in his bearing towards his fellow-men the Jesuit is expected to be, and however submissive to his superiors. Ignatian humility has a heroic quality: it springs from a self-conquest , self-denial or more precisely `self-oblation', an offering up of one's self as a sacrifice. All of which presupposes that there is a self to be denied, conquered and offered up in the first place. The highest form of humility is to void ourselves of any desire other than that of doing whatever God calls us to do, even if it involves poverty, chastity and obedience. Riches, marriage and independence are not evils per se, for properly used they are goods, but sacrificing them at God's invitation is better: `In offering up one's own judgement and will and liberty, which are the principal [attributes] of man, one offers up as much as it is possible to offer.' And the practice of humility in a life of obedience to superiors is 'a kind of martyrdom which continually decapitates one's own judgement and will' (Young, 1959: 143).

On Submission

Now the Spiritual Exercises mention obedience to human superiors only in passing, and ignore the possibility of conflicts between superiors (especially between civil and ecclesiastical superiors) or wrongful commands altogether. But how humility and obedience to God are to be squared with submission to merely human superiors is indicated by (18) Rules To Be Kept, So That We May Be Of One Mind With The Orthodox Church, appended to all the printed versions of the Spiritual Exercises. Composed by Ignatius in 1539-41, they are an admirably compact statement of the spirit of militant Tridentine Catholicism long before the conclusion of the Council of Trent; they are quite unlike the Spiritual Exercises themselves which Ignatius had been administering by then for almost 20 years, and which are not denominational (identifying themselves by some Other which they deny and oppose) at all.

A subordinate clause in Rule 1: `First, surrendering every opinion of our own shows that Ignatius was here appropriating the hard-line Romanist diagnosis of Renaissance humanism and the Reformers as motivated by pride and self-will. The Spiritual Exercises by contrast make precisely the suppression of pride the very essence of the Christian life, and demand submission of the mind and heart to the Church, so that `we be wholly at one and in conformity with this same Church'. The contentious issue of the time was of course the identity of `the Church' which (all agreed) was entitled to such submission. The critical and only identifying feature of the Church which Ignatius mentioned in the Rules (and the Spiritual Exercises) was 'hierarchica'; in other words, the only possible referent of this 'Church' to whom Christians owe obedience is the Church of Rome, warts and all. Rule 10 demanded explicit endorsement of `the decrees, commands, traditions, rites and customs' of our `fathers or superiors' [also described as `princes and pastors', and thus explicitly including secular rulers], because whatever their moral and spiritual failings, public `vilification of superiors serves rather to cause harm and scandal than to bring about any improvement or anything useful'; people merely grow accustomed to abusing their superiors, when the heart of the matter is that they should obey them.

The capstone of the edifice of obedience and alienation of private judgement is Rule 13: `In order that we may be wholly of one mind and in conformity with this same Catholic Church, if something appears to our eyes to be white, and the Church has defined it to be black, we must declare the same to be black.' And in the documents which unlike the Rules and the Spiritual Exercises are specifically concerned with the obedience expected of Jesuits, that obedience is (notoriously) described as 'blind', as `corpse-like', as like a blind man's staff (e.g. Ganss, 1970: s.547). And hierarchy is of course the optimal organizational form for the cultivation of this kind of obedience, since in the Jesuit hierarchy everyone is ,under obedience'.

Obscuring Differences

Now for all the Jesuit stress on the functionality of obedience, this conception of obedience was plainly not devised to suit the organizational needs of the Society of Jesus; if anything the Society of Jesus was designed to give it maximal scope. Nonetheless it was eminently 'functional'. A permanent, complex international organization like the Society of Jesus must reliably reconcile its imperative need for rules, discipline and routine with the equally compelling desiderata of initiative, discretion and adaptability. Equally, any organization must have some way of harmonizing its requirements with the ambitions and interests of its members, especially a voluntary association predicated, as the Society of Jesus was, on the moral equality of all its members. For all its hierarchical character, the Society allowed no member to hold ecclesiastical or civil dignities of any kind, except on the express command of the papacy; all its full members were priests, all wore the same dress, and the only title apart from academic titles they employed for each other was 'Father'-the Founder's servant addressed him as 'Inigo' (the Basque form of 'Ignatius'). All in short were free and equal participants in a common enterprise, to which they had obligated themselves individually by a free undertaking which could be terminated by either side.

Willed Obedience

The conception of willed obedience mostly meets these requirements. The Society of Jesus could demand 'total' commitment and obedience even unto death of its members, because the reward it could hold out as the quid pro quo was the highest reward of all. And in as much as members had voluntarily and knowingly incurred their obligations, after perusal prior to final admission of a detailed account of the commitment expected of them (Ganss, 1970: 75-118), they could not complain (though of course they did): volenti non fit iniuria.

Nonetheless, not even the Society could square all the circles here. Only obedience to God can be unconditional. But as we have seen, the Jesuits unhesitatingly attached the duty and virtue of obedience to the commands of merely human superiors, and also to rules. We have noted the Society's addiction to rules, both for itself and (in its casuistry) for almost every circumstance of every Christian's life.

All the same, rules are not the ultimate object of obedience. Rules as such cannot be self-sufficient: they require making and interpretation, both of which can only be done by persons. Again, the need for rule-making and for exempting from rules is inherently unpredictable and this too requires the exercise of discretion by a superior. Rules, furthermore, cannot by themselves provide adequate guidance for conduct: there is need for direction, instruction, exhortation, reprimand, reward and punishment, all of which require that rules be supplemented by direct commands. Jesuits were in any case habituated to dealing with ignorant laypeople, recalcitrant students, rebellious members, stubborn heretics, intransigent heathens, imperious rulers and implacable enemies, all of whom needed to be dealt with in person.

The immediate object of obedience is therefore neither God nor rules but human superiors. The end of obedience in the Society was of course not to maximize the power of superiors, although it is pointless to have superiors without power; its point ultimately was to allow the will of God to prevail in the world. And a hierarchy tapering to a single 'absolute' authority was tolerable because there remained always the still higher visible authority of the papacy, and beyond that, in the last analysis, the conscience interpreting the will of God. Superiors are still only human, and liable to the same errors and vices as their inferiors, and so they too must be subjected in their turn to higher commanders, and all including the highest must ultimately be subject to the will of God.

Submission to an Anterior Authority .

But here the 'protestant' potential for insubmission to any human superior or any rule or law, on the ground or pretext of a higher duty to God, once again opens up. We have already noted that Jesuits emphasized deliberation, intelligence, will and self-conscious choice and commitment. A Jesuit therefore had to be scrupulous about whom and what he obeyed. Even the `black is white' extravagance continues: `the God who once gave the Ten Commandments is the same God who now teaches and governs the hierarchical Church'. And the Constitutions explicitly say that only commands in conformity with the will of God can demand obedience. Thus not even an association which could and did send men to their deaths could in fact demand 'total' submission or 'blind' obedience.

 Again, hierarchy certainly curbs the pride of subjects, and therefore the pride of 'superiors' who are themselves subjects in their turn. But all those of the same rank are 'peers' (equals), and owe each other no kind of obedience; it is their common subjection which eliminates the possibilities for conflict and division. But this of course cannot prevent, say, the superior of a province uniting with his subordinates in common revolt against the General.

Other defects of Jesuit hierarchy are equally apparent. In the first place there is the ever-present risk of immobility, buck-passing, and sticking to well-trodden paths, contrary to the Society's raison d'etre, and the galaxy of unconventional talents that first gained it its place in the world. The safest course in a hierarchy is to do nothing without a direct command. Nevertheless, for all the stridencies about `blind obedience', the Society's emphasis on the operational autonomy of Jesuits going about their tasks and on the need for prudence was if anything liable to generate excessive initiative and independence. Ignatius himself relied on making good choices of personnel and then letting them get on with it. But some later generals, especially Aquaviva, apparently preferred to have nothing done at all, rather than something that went against their will. A great deal inevitably depended on the character of the General, whom the Society's Constitutions made virtually irremovable except by death or the Pope, and uncontrollable except by obstruction from within the Society. Indeed all the evils whose perpetration by inferiors hierarchy is designed to avoid can be perpetrated by the Superior General, with devastating effects on the whole body. The point did not escape anyone. Mere obedience to superiors is therefore not nearly enough, and the Superior General ought to be the servant of his servants. The only remedy available within the Society for his failings, however, is disobedience by the 'subjects', and in this sense `blind obedience' was a profoundly inappropriate term.

Concluding Remarks .

In sum, hierarchy understood as Jesuits understood it is not principally a matter of power, control, discipline or surveillance, although it obviously entails all of these. Contrary to a now fashionable commonplace, the point of hierarchy here is not to serve as an Ersatz for unreliable motivation and defective intelligence on the part of the `subjects'; it is not an alternative to their free commitment, nor does it aim to supplant their initiative and independence; nor is it the antithesis to equality of respect within the organization; nor is it a sort of proto-Benthamite, still less Taylorist, machine for generating reliable individual responses to 'orders' by means of a system of sanctions and incentives (rewards and punishments), where sanctions are understood to be more effective than incentives and both must be 'administered' from without and above if successful co-ordination is to be attained. For Jesuits, what does not come from within a person is worthless. The only meritorious subjection is an intelligent one, melding passion and understanding in an ideally perfect identification with the purposes of the 'order', to which superiors are just as 'subordinate' as their subjects. All this of course has to be learn: the modern idea that 'socialization' into an order is somehow morally suspect (Pascale, 1985) and therefore needs somehow to be cloaked or mystified would have been regarded as perverse.

The fundamental postulate of such a perfect hierarchy is that the purpose of the 'body' must encompass the highest aspirations of the individual 'members'; it must be or draw on the ultimate source of meaning in their lives. The inherent relation between meaning and religion has already been referred to. And this perhaps explains our sense of disproportion and incongruity when religious ritual, symbolism and vocabulary are exploited for the integration of individuals into enterprises which serve lesser gods, or even idols. In seeking to secure commitment via the manipulation of the emotions, a sense of belonging and the inculcation of the need for personal sacrifice, organizations have imitated many of the practices of the religious orders. But even activities which are in themselves perfectly legitimate become idolatry when more commitment and devotion are demanded in their service than they intrinsically warrant. This, of course, raises important issues about the manipulation of meaning in organizations and the apparent rewards they offer. Such issues are indeed well aired in the literature, but perhaps when set against their historical antecedents, where different motivations and commitments regulate behaviour, the meaning and purpose of such practices in modern organizations is thrown into relief. Not the least significant consideration in all this is the matter of self-moved conduct and the pursuit of corporate objectives.

Note

1. The originals of the documents referred to in this paper are reproduced in the series Monumenta Historica Societatis Jesu: Monumenta Ignatiana. Sancti Ignatii de Loyola Constitutiones, Rome, 1934-8; Exercitia Spiritualia, Rome, 1969; Sancti Ignatii ... Epistolae et Instructiones, Madrid, 1903-11. Although all the translations above are my own, reliable translations are to be found in: De Aldama, 1990; Ganss, 1970 (this also includes the Formula of the Institute and the Examen and an excellent commentary and bibliography); Gauss, 1991; Young, 1959. The resume of the founders' discussions in 1539 (Deliberatio Primorum Patrum, MonIg, Vol. 63, Constitutiones I: 2ff) is not available in translation.

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Harro M. Hopfl, Lancaster University, UK. Contact Address Harro M. Hopfl, Department of Politics and International Relations, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YL. [e-mail: [email protected]]

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