Luther Jesuit the Progressive Implications

Luther Jesuit

The Progressive Implications of Lutheran Protest

The Jesuit ideology raised by St. Ignatius of Loyola denotes a particular commitment to the institution of the church, and praised this as a highest context for the performance of faith and observance. To my personal preference, this is the aspect of the Jesuit denomination which is most alienating. Particularly, the stringent connection drawn between a code of morality for the observing Christian and the degree to which this Christian performs to this code before the eyes of his clergy is unappealing. However, it formulates nothing less than the second of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. Accordingly, our research quotes Loyola as declaring it necessary for the observant Christian "to praise confession to a Priest, and the reception of the most Holy Sacrament of the Altar once in the year, and much more each month, and much better from week to week, with the conditions required and due."

While this may offer an opportunity for the individual making confession to experience consultation and a cathartic release from one's misdeeds, I find this a disquieting way of achieving ethical balance which seems both to promote some voyeuristic tendencies in the authority of the church and to obscure a true path to personal redemption. It seems that this is a view which Martin Luther held as well, for in his own 95 Theses, the reformer declared that "when our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, 'Repent' (Mt 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance. This word cannot be understood as referring to the sacrament of penance, that is, confession and satisfaction, as administered by the clergy."

I find myself instinctually inclined to agree with this view, primarily because it acknowledges the human fallibility that must be seen as one of the core shortcomings of the Church. To Luther, the authority of the Church was underscored by a declared irreproachability that his theses would condemn as unrealistic. Indeed, he makes direct reference to the danger of a priesthood with this degree of moral entitlement -- a disposition contrasting the ethical frailty of the establishment in certain contexts. With particular respect to the political power of the Church, Luther took exception to the unneeded cruelty of the institution in its wielding of authority. Luther would declare with respect to the condemnation and punishment of purgatory said to be imposed upon the dead to be both ethically questionable and out of step with the rational limitations of human authority in matters of the divine. Luther would contend that "those priests act ignorantly and wickedly who, in the case of the dying, reserve canonical penalties for purgatory. Those tares of changing the canonical penalty of purgatory were evidently sown while the bishops slept. In former times canonical penalties were imposed, not after, but before absolution, as true tests of contrition."

Again, here is a cause for the resonance of Luther's ideas over that of Loyola. They strike a cord of rebellion against the perceived misdeeds of the Church. And most assuredly, this misdeeds are both visible and offensive in the proportions that affiliated it with the affluence and excess of the European monarchy. Luther takes the perspective that the leaders of the church have largely taken up a greater interest in serving to these material ends then reflecting the convictions of God. It is thus that he illustrates the irony of making the public beholden to their allegedly special relationship with the divine. Quite rationally and to this point, Luther declares that the very idea that any human being up to and including the pope might be capable of channeling us forgiveness for our sins by way of confession is disingenuous. Luther determines that "those indulgence preachers are in error who say that a man is absolved from every penalty and saved by papal indulgences. As a matter of fact, the pope remits to souls in purgatory no penalty which, according to canon law, they should have paid in this life."

This points to a distinct departure from Loyola's intensely rigid and almost counter-humanist understanding of the faith. To his perspective, internalizing of faith factored very little into a discussion far more preceded by the importance association of commerce, kingship and the Church. Loyola reveals himself to be of an order distinguished by its elite social status, great affluence and imposing religious piety, making him an ideal reflection of the feudalist dependency on the church for its own substantiation. Thus, Loyola tends to conflate spiritual exercises with commands designed to restrain the behaviors of the peasantry. Accordingly, his Fifth Rule, for instance, reports that it is necessary "to praise vows of Religion, of obedience, of poverty, of chastity and of other perfections of supererogation. And it is to be noted that as the vow is about the things which approach to Evangelical perfection, a vow ought not to be made in the things which withdraw from it, such as to be a merchant, or to be married, etc."