Theos-Talk Archives (April 1997 Message tl00163)

Doss,

>From my $0.50 tour of history: the Jesuits came into being through Ignatius
Loyola and were part of the Catholic Church's attempt at self-reform in the
face of Protestantism. They were famed for their educational programs which
added classical and Renaissance subjects to Catholic studies and which were
intended to form a young, militant, elite vanguard fiercely loyal to the pope.

When you try to sort out religious movements, you find a tangle of
contradictions, but it seems to me they were one of the attempts to reconcile
a growing independent scientific movement with spiritual intuitions seemingly
at odds with the findings of science. They had a kind of schizophrenic fear of
and intrigue with science. Evidently their inner experience was not strong
enough to squash their gnawing fear, hence their leaning on Catholic
authority.

(The "nothing but" attitude of science, which offers explanations of
everything such as why birds sing and how the universe is just a machine, in
some respects does fly in the face of intuition and emotional common
sense. Until we gain greater consciousness to know what we intuit, we on
occasion have to live in a state of tension, saying, "OK, but presently
observed facts are not the whole story." Anyway, I digress ...)