This book explains not who the Jesuits were, but how their awareness of having become Jesuits was constructed.
It does so on the basis of a collection of documents which have often been referred to as ‘autobiographies’, in fact individual members’ accounts of how they received their calling. Each Jesuit had to describe in writing how the divine call had come to him, what signs had preceded it and how he had broken away from his ‘fleshly’ family to become a member of the Company. Their acute awareness of the definitive nature of the close pact they had established with God by becoming members of the army of the Lord, made the Jesuits new, unusual figures, unprecedented in the history of Christian religious orders: men trained to carry out arduous missions into the most distant countries of the world, in contact with unknown cultures, without any weakening of their ties with the Company; a classic case is Matteo Ricci. Accepting their calling meant adopting a special life, characterized by a modern form of asceticism: a total break with the past and their families, a readiness to go wherever they were sent, as new apostles.