Jesuits: A Multibiography.

Jesuites: Une Multibiographie flew up the bestseller lists in France three years ago when it was published there in two volumes, Les Conquerants and Les Revenants. This fine translation is an abridgment, subtracting some European material that was felt to be too parochial for a wider readership, but offering still a fascinating history of the Society of Jesus through the biographies of its more eminent members.

Lacouture begins, of course, with Inigo de Loyola, a hot-headed squire in the Spanish court who was the factotum to a viceroy when his right leg was shattered by a cannon ball in the French siege of Pamplona. While hospitalized in the family mansion, and hovering not far from death, Inigo fell upon a book of saints and found a fresh perspective on the sins and vanities of his life. A hermit year in Manresa, where he was graced with the theological illuminations that would inspire his Spiritual Exercises, was followed by a forestalled pilgrimage to Jerusalem after which he recognized the need for higher education if he was to preach and minister to others.

So he went to the University of Paris where, by guiding fellow humanities students through his spiritual exercises, he gathered six other "friends in the Lord" who laid the foundation for the religious congregation by taking vows on August 15, 1534, at the chapel of Our Lady at Montmartre. Inigo was by then Ignatius and a master of arts; in three years he was ordained, and four years after that, in Rome, he was elected the first superior general of the new society, the only vote against him being his own. In spite of his hankering to go back to Jerusalem, Ignatius would stay in Rome for the final fifteen years of his life, founding colleges, handling administrative tasks, and composing more than seven thousand letters to the scattered Jesuits he'd offered in faithful service to the pope.

Conquering the new world for Christ was the mission then. In 1540, one of the company's foremost protectors, John III, King of Portugal, requested a missionary to go east with his fleet and carry the gospel to Asia. Although it was precisely the kind of evangelizing office that Ignatius formerly sought for himself, he instead sent his good friend, Francis Xavier.

At first a fervent and inexhaustible "Christian Ulysses" whose only concern in India was to convert a Hindu population he thought of as "the most perverse in the world," Xavier gradually came to realize that he was "being used as a respected and acquiescent accomplice in the fearful piracy that was Portuguese colonization. And, going deeper still, [he saw] the utter incompatibility between the gospel and European conquest." Sailing farther east to Japan, a far different Xavier discovered "a humankind whose civilization was no longer to be denied but to be explored, through active exchange and mutual fertilization. It was a first glimpse of the anthropological approach that would become the Jesuits' glory, from Matteo Ricci and Roberto de Nobili in China and India to the Latin American trailblazers and to Pierre Charles in Africa."

In 1603 in South America, Jesuits began founding "reductions," or self-supporting parishes, with the hope of forming utopian communities for the Guarani Indians, but the fact that "each of these colonies was slotted into the hierarchical machinery managed from Madrid and Rome" finally doomed them. The film The Mission fairly portrays how the heads of state in Portugal and Spain combined to destroy the Guarani Republic and slaughter or deport to Europe the Jesuit fathers who fought their efforts at hunting gold and exploiting the native people.

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That was just the first of what would become a full-blown assault on the Company of Jesus as the monarchies and parliaments of the Enlightenment sought to rid their countries of Jesuits who were seen as interfering, half-monk Papalists and foreign agents, "as a kind of Renaissance `fifth column.' " The offensive began in Portugal where, in 1759, four hundred Jesuits were expelled from their country, and it found support from the Jansenists and philosophes of France who presented "the Society of Jesus as a war machine, a cunning instrument of oppression, a tool in the hands of a foreign potentate." Spain and Italy followed suit. "It was on July 21, 1773--233 years after the company's solemn investiture by Pope Paul III--that another pope, Clement XIV, jostled, harassed, and threatened by the four Most Christian sovereigns of Lisbon, Paris, Madrid, and Naples--all shrines of Jesuitism--abolished Ignatius's Company."

Centuries earlier, in a letter to the Portuguese Jesuits, Ignatius had stressed the importance of holy obedience in their rule by saying each member of the company ought to be perinde ac cadaver (like a corpse) when given an order or instruction by a superior. That abolition of will and perfect meekness and indifference to one's own thoughts and impulses were never more apparent than in the company's stunning submission to the papal brief Dominus ac redemptor which ordered its suppression. The frankness, courage, and fierce devotion to their apostolates that had garnered such hatred for them from governments were nowhere in evidence as a great religious order softly and silently fell prostrate before an unholy annihilation.

But the Machiavellian Protestant monarchs Catherine of Russia and Frederick of Prussia were in need of the Jesuits as educators and were only too happy to publicly disobey the Roman pontiff, and so the company managed to stay alive in those northern countries, and in associations such as the Society of the Heart of Jesus elsewhere, until it was formally reinstated by Pope Pius VII on August 7, 1814.

Lacouture calls these Jesuits of the nineteenth-century restoration revenants, ghosts, for though the fathers had earlier pioneered in Western humanism and invented egalitarian cultural exchange and respect for others, "here they were transformed into bloodhounds of Bourbon and Roman conservatism, into militants for the alliance of Cross and Crown, into propagandists for the restoration of kings, into guardians of the European order established at the Congress of Vienna."

The company found itself again in the worker-priest movement, the anti-Fascist underground of World War II, and theologians like Henri de Lubac, Teilhard de Chardin, and Jean Danielou, and the rebirth of a critical Catholic intelligence. "But it was not so much the renewal of theological research that gave the Jesuit thinking of the day its originality. It was rather its methodical study of the origins of Christianity--origins that these young researchers readily sought in Judaism."

The finest chapter in the book is Lacouture's profile of the famous scientist-theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the priest he refers to as "Jesuitissimus," whose fairly cautious evolutionary theories and humanistic concerns caused him to be silenced by the Holy See, his masterpiece, The Phenomenon of Man, finding publication only after his death on Easter Sunday, 1955. And there are first-rate studies, too, of the failed experiment of forming female Jesuits, of the order's spotty relations with the Jews, of Jesuitphobia throughout history, and of Superior General Pedro Arrupe and the recent heightened emphasis on faith and justice.

Jean Lacouture is a former foreign correspondent for Le Monde and France-Soir and the author of thirty books, including biographies of Charles De Gaulle, Ho Chi Minh, Andre Malraux, and Francois Mauriac. Even with the omission of a great deal of parochial material, fully one quarter of the book seems located in France, which only seems a failing when one realizes that Lacouture has simultaneously neglected Edmund Campion and other English Jesuits, Italians who are not prelates, Pierre Marquette and the North American martyrs, Miguel Pro and the persecution of the Mexican church in the twenties, and a host of other saints that no history would normally be without.

But the book succeeds because it is full of passion, opinions, and apt quotations. Jesuits: A Multibiography is finally a pleasure to read, the spirited, craftily researched work of a confident and entertaining writer who's wholly in love with his story.