In the time of Ignatius, the University of Paris consisted of some thirty colleges. Ignatius registered at the Collège de Montaigu in February 1528. The Montaigu was located on what is now known as the rue Laplace, near the Panthéon. This college was popular with Spaniards and Portuguese and ran courses in Latin grammar, composition, and literature. It also catered to teenage boys. Ignatius, by contrast, was thirty-seven years old at this stage!
One of Ignatius’s later companions, Diego Laínez, said that Ignatius studied without aiming for honours or high positions or any human reward at all. His studies offered him no enticement to pleasure. In fact, he shrank from study, because of his own natural disposition and because of his mature age, which was less suited to formal academic work.36
The Collège de Montaigu may have been popular with some students but certainly not with all. Its regime and discipline were very severe. The classes began at five o’clock in the morning and ended in the evening at seven. Two former students of the Montaigu, the Frenchman Rabelais and the Dutchman Erasmus, had horrendous memories of the place. Rabelais branded the college “a squalid hole where the students lived on rotten eggs, and if they chanced not to die, they emerged as fools or invalids for life.” Erasmus, in one of his Colloquia, speaks of leaving the college with “nothing except an infected body and a vast array of lice.”37 The reformer John Calvin left the Montaigu about the time Ignatius arrived.38
When Ignatius first arrived in Paris, he had received the gift of a sum of money from some Spanish benefactors. He gave the money to a fellow boarder in the hope that this student would keep it safely for him. Instead, the student spent the money on himself and was not able to pay it back later. Ignatius was so needy that he was forced to stay in the hospice of Saint-Jacques-aux-Espagnols in the rue Saint-Denis. The hospice had been founded for pilgrims who were on their way to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. For the first eighteen months of his stay in Paris, until September 1529, Ignatius remained an external student or martinet at the Collège de Montaigu.
During Lent 1529, Ignatius interrupted his studies at the Montaigu to make his first begging visit to Flanders. He had been advised to go there by a member of a religious order. During the two months he spent there, he went around begging for his expenses from the well-to-do Spanish merchants in the region. In Bruges, he may have lodged with a Gonzalo de Aguilera and his wife. Gonzalo was a Castilian merchant living in the rue Espagnole, near other compatriots.
With the money received from Flanders and further assistance from his friends in Barcelona, Ignatius moved into quarters of his own in Paris. This made it possible for him to give the Spiritual Exercises during May and June to three Spanish students resident in the university—a Basque, Amador de Elduayen; Pedro de Peralta, already a master of arts; and Juan Castro from Burgos, who was teaching at the Sorbonne University. Having made the Spiritual Exercises, they all made fundamental changes in their lives: they gave their possessions, including their books, to the poor, took to begging in the streets, and left their colleges to live in the hospice of St. Jacques.
None of the three remained permanently with Ignatius, however. Castro entered the Carthusian Order in Spain, and Peraltra made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and later became a canon of Toledo. Amador does not reappear in Ignatius’s story.
On 1 October 1529, Ignatius moved to the Collège Sainte-Barbe, across from the Montaigu, to begin his three-and-a-half-year course in arts and philosophy. During the vacation of 1530, he made his second begging visit to Flanders, from where he travelled to England in 1531. He writes of this visit, “Once he even crossed to England and returned with more alms than he usually did in other years.”39 He doubtless looked for both lodging and funds from the Spanish community living close to the Thames on Old Broad Street in London.
Even though Ignatius was engaged in his studies, he so inspired some outstanding young men in the university that they resolved to renounce their material wealth.40 Some Spanish noblemen who were connected by bonds of friendship with these new disciples took their decision very badly. Ignatius was considered to be the instigator of these troubles, and so he fell into disfavour with many influential people. Among them was the renowned scholar Pedro Ortiz, who had Ignatius’s teaching examined. An accusation against Ignatius was lodged with the Inquisitor, Dominican Matthieu Ory. Ory quickly assured Ignatius that there was no substance in the allegation and that he need not fear.
Having learned from his problems in Alcalà and Salamanca, Ignatius was now determined to make a success of his studies. On one occasion, he promised his teacher, Master Juan de Peña, a Spaniard who was teaching philosophy at Sainte-Barbe, that he would never miss a lecture as long as he had no need to go begging. He also decided to refrain from giving the Spiritual Exercises and similar activities during term time, so that he would not be distracted by other people’s affairs and lose sight of his need to study.41
Two very different students, in personality at least, shared quarters with Ignatius at Sainte-Barbe. They were Pierre Favre and Francis Xavier. They had a room in a high tower that everyone referred to as “The Paradise.” Pierre Favre, a young man of fine intellect, was of peasant stock from Savoy in south-eastern France. He was tortured by scruples and was reluctant to receive holy orders. For two years, Ignatius, who formed a special bond with him, nursed him through these difficulties. Ignatius, for his part, profited greatly from Favre’s help in his philosophy studies.42 To his dying day, Pierre Favre never ceased to thank God for so arranging things that he should teach Ignatius about Aristotle while Ignatius taught him about God:
May it please the divine clemency to give me the grace of clearly remembering and pondering the benefits which the Lord conferred on me in those days through that man. Firstly, he gave me an understanding of my conscience and of the temptations and scruples I had for so long without either understanding them or seeing the way by which I would be able to get peace.43
Francis Xavier was the youngest son of a noble Navarese family, impoverished after King Ferdinand annexed the province in 1515. When he was twelve years old, he watched the towers of the family castle being torn down. As the youngest in the family, Xavier chose a career in the Church for himself, but from no lofty motives, for he had the promise of a good benefice. By nature, Xavier was ambitious, full of charm, and a good sportsman. Initially, he despised Ignatius for his impoverished way of living. On 15 March 1530, Xavier received his licentiate in philosophy and, in the following year, began teaching. His contract was for three-and-a-half years, during which time he was to study theology. Ignatius knew Xavier’s worth, however. When lecturers were competing for students, Ignatius broadcast Xavier’s abilities, attended his lectures, and increased his reputation. Ignatius famously said of Xavier, “He was the hardest dough I ever kneaded.” In the end, Xavier succumbed to his spiritual influence.
Others, too, became Ignatius’s friends: Simão Rodriguez, from Portugal, and three Spaniards, Diego Laínez, Alfonso Salmerón, and Nicolás Bobadilla. Twenty-one-year-old Laínez and eighteen-year-old Salmerón had both been studying in Alcalà, where they had heard about Ignatius. Providentially, Ignatius was the first person Laínez encountered when he arrived at Sainte-Barbe. Bobadilla already had degrees from Alcalà and Valladolid when he arrived in Paris. Rodrigues had one of the scholarships given by King John III of Portugal to support Portuguese students. He had been living at Sainte-Barbe since 1527 but had no direct dealings with Ignatius until 1533. As an old man in 1577, Rodrigues recalled that it was he himself who took the initiative, attracted as he was by the sanctity of this older student, who was already in his forties.
Ignatius’s only aim at this stage was to inspire these men with his own ideals. Several other students, whose names are not known, were also influenced by him, resolving to confess and communicate regularly. Others entered religious life and persevered in their vocation, some with the Franciscans, some with the Dominicans, and others with the Carthusians.
Ignatius received his bachelor’s degree in January 1532 and, a little more than a year later, on 13 March 1533, gained a licentiate in philosophy. He was marked thirtieth in a class of one hundred students.44
It may seem very naïve to us today, but all of these early companions of Ignatius had resolved to go to Jerusalem on completion of their studies and work there for the conversion of the Muslims as well as in the service of Christians. They also had deep desire to walk the roads where Jesus himself had walked. Ignatius, Laínez, and Favre sometimes fantasised about living the rest of their lives in Palestine, giving themselves totally to the service of the Christians and the conversion of the Muslims, whom they referred to as “infidels.”
Ignatius gave the full Spiritual Exercises to Pierre Favre in 1534.45 Favre was ordained priest and said his first Mass on 22 July 1534. Around this time, after much discussion among themselves, these early companions decided to lead a life of poverty in imitation of Jesus in the Gospels. Both this decision and their resolve to go to Jerusalem were promises relating to the future, effective from the day they would complete their studies.
On the Feast of the Assumption, 15 August 1534, all seven companions went to the chapel of St. Denis in Montmartre, then on the outskirts of Paris, where they pronounced their vows at a Mass celebrated by Pierre Favre. They bound themselves “to renounce all things (apart from travel provisions), to care for the spiritual welfare of their neighbours, and to sail for Jerusalem.”46 They made one important proviso, however: if their projected pilgrimage to Jerusalem proved impossible, they would offer themselves to the pope in Rome for him to send them where he thought best.
In the next two years, they renewed their vows on the Feast of the Assumption. Ignatius was absent from both meetings, but in his absence three more companions had joined the group: Claude Jay, a schoolfellow of Pierre Favre’s from Savoy and already a priest, and two other Frenchmen, Jean Codure and Paschase Broët, who had been ordained in 1524.
In the autumn of 1534, Ignatius’s health worsened. His previous excessive penances at Manresa had done permanent damage to his health. Nevertheless, he struggled on and received his master’s degree on 14 March 1535. In accordance with the thinking of the time, his physicians advised him to return to his native air of Azpeitia. Before that could happen, however, he was again reported to the Inquisition, charged with giving spiritual exercises and receiving communion along with his companions every week at a Carthusian monastery. Receiving communion with such frequency was considered to be presumptuous. This time Ignatius sought out the Inquisitor himself, who assured him again that he had no cause for concern.
While in Paris, Ignatius was constantly revising the notebook that contained his Spiritual Exercises. It was at this time that he added the important meditations on the Two Standards, the Three Kinds of Humility, and a number of other important sections.
Ignatius had taken note of his physicians’ advice that his health would greatly benefit from exposure to his native air. So, in early April 1535, he bade farewell to his companions. They were to continue with their studies in Paris until January 1537. Then, in the spring of 1537, they were to meet up with Ignatius in Venice, when together they would fulfill their vow of going to the Holy Land. Poor as these companions were, they presented Ignatius with a donkey for the journey home because of his extreme frailty.