The First Jesuits; By John W. O'Malley; Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1993. 457 pp. $35.00

Abstract

460 Theology Today possessed of nuclear weapons. Against those who await a foreordained assize, O'Leary quotes Franz Kafka's remark that the Day of Judgment is "in reality . . . a summary court in perpetual session" and calls for a renewed appreciation of the comic dimensions of the Apocalypse-that is, those aspects stressing the open-endedness of the future and the power of human agency to effect change. The author is surely correct in warning of the dangers of fatalistic millennialism, but it is unclear that people can live with complete open-endedness or with a "summary court in perpetual session." The notion of an End to time answers a fundamental human longing, and it would be truly sad if Christian theologians allowed themselves to be scared off from responding to that need by the pathetic misuses of eschatology by the Hal Lindseys and televangelists. In assessing how a meaningful word of ultimate hope is to be addressed to the current age, serious Christian thinkers will find O'Leary's provocative and often brilliant book "must" reading.

The Intellectual Pedigree of the Virtue of Magnanimity in the Jesuit Constitutions

“…Some sections later, he addresses his son directly and claims that all that is morally right (quod est honestum) flows from one of four sources: theoretical consideration of truth; the conservation of organized society in which every individual is rendered his or her due and obligations are carried out faithfully; the greatness and strength of a noble and invincible spirit; or, finally, the orderliness that consists in temperance and self control (i, 15). In expanding on the third of four sources of the good, Cicero argues that the largeness and nobility of soul (animi excellentia magnitudoque) is revealed not in the accumulation of resources and expansion of personal advantage (i, 17), but in contributing to the common good (i, 22).15 Furthermore, in Cicero's political thinking, one's country claims a share of one's being , and citizens have a responsibility to contribute "to the general good by an interchange of acts of kindness, by giving and receiving, and thus by our skill, our industry, and our talents to cement human society more closely together, man to man" (i, 22).…”

“…In his initial attempts to educate himself, Ignatius was exposed to classical Latin as well as ancient works such as Aristotle's Physics. 22 Later, as he continued to improve his Latin while studying at Paris, Ignatius encountered the work of Livy, Caesar, Pliny, Virgil, Ovid, and Horace in addition to Cicero.23 As he progressed in studies at Paris, he became immersed in the Aristotelian inspired theology of Thomas. Particularly influential was Thomas's moral theology of the pars secunda of the Summa.…”