Priests of Paradox : MEN ASTUTELY TRAINED: A History of the Jesuits in the American Century, <i> By Peter McDonough (The Free Press: $24.95; 600 pp.)</i>

The headquarters of the Society of Jesus is located on the Borgo Santo Spirito in Rome. The story goes that in the entrance foyer of the large building is a statue of founder St. Ignatius Loyola, and that on the pedestal of the statue are the Latin words, “Go, set the world on fire!” The story concludes with the detail that attached to the wall beside the statue with its dramatic command is a fire extinguisher.

It is an anecdote that self-mocking Jesuits used to love to tell each other, and that Peter McDonough relates in a footnote to illustrate the Jesuit knack for what he calls “the holding in suspension of opposites.” The Jesuits are a bundle of paradoxes, and McDonough’s history unwraps it wonderfully, laying bare an abundance of tension, drama, absurdity and tragedy in a way that makes perfectly clear why the order has been and remains a treasure of the Catholic Church.

Through the society’s numerous high schools and colleges, many Americans have had direct experience of the Jesuits, but even those whose impressions are less focused may know that most assertions commonly made about these men are also commonly contradicted. The Jesuits are associated, for example, with moral equivocation--as in the adjective “Jesuitical”--but also with the kind of moral complexity that implies true wisdom. Their work as educators has at its center a reverence for knowledge, but their mission as priests is first concerned with virtue. “The tension between virtue and knowledge,” McDonough argues, “has fueled the dynamism of the order.”

Outside the hierarchy, the Jesuits are the most public figures in Roman Catholicism. (Americans of several generations think of Leonard Feeney, John Courtney Murray, Daniel Berrigan, John MacLaughlin, Robert Drinan.) But their numbers are vast, most members work anonymously, and “the power exerted by Jesuits has been largely indirect.” There is a particular Jesuit style that combines a macho aggressiveness with compassion, or, in McDonough’s apt phrase, values of “the Church militant and the Church maternal.” That style has enabled countless schoolboys to hold in tension ideals of masculinity and piety both. Jesuits take a vow of loyalty to the Pope, but they are noted for outreach to secular and political realms that Popes instinctively distrust.

Jesuits get into trouble with the world (Berrigan was hunted by the state, but centuries ago so was Campion), and they get into trouble with the Church (Murray was silenced, so was Feeney; Karl Rahner, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and others who laid the groundwork for the Second Vatican Council were cruelly badgered by the Roman Curia; liberation theologians like Fernando Cardenal still are). Yet the Society of Jesus epitomizes the institutional Establishment of the Catholic Church and its leaders still don’t hesitate to squash men who raise the wrong questions, as happened when Los Angeles Jesuit Terrance Sweeney was forced out of the order a few years ago after he conducted an unauthorized poll of U. S. Catholic bishops’ attitudes toward married priests (a surprising one-fourth of bishops who responded to the poll agreed with the idea). “An enduring paradox of the Society of Jesus,” McDonough writes, “is the coexistence of its volatility and longevity.”

It is one of the many strengths of Peter McDonough’s book that he shows how paradox goes to the essence of Jesuit life, and how, when paradox ceases to exist, the very identity of the order becomes threatened:

“These tensions are patterned, structuring principles. The contradictions underlying Jesuit life are overarching polarities and animating countercurrents. It is when such antinomies become less compelling, when the inherited categories of behavior and meaning give way, as happened with the age-old division between male dominance and female subservience around the time of Vatican II, that the dynamism of the hierarchy faltered and Jesuits became disoriented.”

“Men Astutely Trained” is less concerned with this disorientation, however, than with the trends in 20th-Century American and Catholic life that caused it. The starting point of McDonough’s story is a pivotal meeting of Jesuits that took place in 1943 in a seminary in West Baden, Ind. In terms of numbers, influence in the United States and influence in the Roman Catholic Church, the American Jesuits were about to come into their own.

The end-point of McDonough’s story is the liberalizing Second Vatican Council and its immediate aftermath. McDonough invokes Wallace Stevens to describe what happened: “ . . . to see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds. It was their annihilation, not ours, and yet it left us feeling that in a measure, we, too, had been annihilated.”

At one point, McDonough says that the Jesuit order “has become, in effect, its admirers.” I am one of them. I attended a Jesuit college, as my father did; my faith as a Christian has been shaped by Jesuit scholars and theologians; and even my identity as an American of the left has been influenced by the activist Jesuits who so compellingly embraced the peace and civil-rights movements. But finally the effect of these Jesuit influences has been to help me leave the narrow world of strict Catholic conservatism behind.

It is not clear whether, separated from that world, “the hold the Society of Jesus has exercised over the moral and social imagination of Catholics” can survive. McDonough points to the sad irony that the very success of the Jesuits in educating people like me has been to make us and our children need them less. Jesuit alumni have moved into new, less authoritarian, less male-dominated, less bishop-ridden relationships to the Church. “But Jesuits themselves,” McDonough says, “have been left behind.”

Or so it seems. The vitality of the American wing of this order has been such that we would be foolish to assume it is not even now undergoing a major renewal; indeed the current shift of power to Third World Jesuits may spark it. The “disorientation” that has resulted in drastic declines in numbers, in the self-questioning of Jesuit colleges and universities, and in the collapse of morale among the members who remain may yet prove to be a precondition of rebirth.

The entire Catholic church is in a crisis of transition; all of Christianity is. How could the Jesuits not be? It will be a long time, perhaps, before new forms of practice emerge and before the new meaning of belief is fully understood.

In the meantime, the faith at the center of the Catholic religion holds, and one can hope for as much for the Jesuit order. No one can read “Men Astutely Trained” without a powerful sense of the Jesuits’ transcendent motive. They believe in God. They believe that God’s existence matters for people. They believe that God has come to us and remains with us in the Person for whom their society is named.

Everyone who owes a debt of gratitude to the Jesuits, or who would not be surprised to see in the Jesuits renewed images of a humane, holy and intelligent Catholicism, should read this critical, yet deeply respectful and, finally, moving book.