Jesuit vow of obedience

The Jesuit vow of obedience is invoked as the missing link in Casaubon’s conjecture about how the Jesuits might have learned of the Templar Plan. He imagines that Guillaume Postel, on joining Ignatius Loyola in Rome, would have disclosed his supposed mission under the obligation of obedience “perinde ac cadaver”—a phrase that makes the vow sound like the surrender of independent judgment. The conjecture is seductive, but its own chronology leaves a gap that Jacopo Belbo immediately identifies.

The Vow as an Obligation

Casaubon’s account begins with Postel’s brief association with the Jesuits in 1554. Postel, drawn by mystical fervor and the desire for spiritual regeneration, joined Ignatius in Rome. Yet his cabalism, ecumenicalism, and other convictions proved unacceptable to the order, especially his insistence that the King of the World was the king of France. The imagined vow enters after this rupture: although Postel either left the Jesuits or was expelled, Casaubon reasons that his brief membership meant he had sworn obedience to Ignatius.

That obligation becomes more than a rule of conduct in Casaubon’s reconstruction. He makes it the means by which knowledge passes from one person and institution to another: Postel must, he supposes, have revealed his mission to Ignatius. The vow thus supplies a narrative bridge between Postel’s alleged role as an unworthy French representative of the Templar Plan and the Jesuits’ supposed possession of its secret.

An Imagined Disclosure

Casaubon dramatizes the inferred disclosure as a speech to Ignatius. In his invented address, Postel would have said that receiving him also meant receiving the secret of the Templar Plan, and would have linked the secret to the anticipated third-centenary meeting in 1584. The passage is explicitly conjectural: Casaubon says what Postel “must have said,” turning an absent historical transmission into a scene of imagined speech.

The phrase “perinde ac cadaver” gives that scene its logic. If the vow requires obedience as complete as that of a corpse, Casaubon can treat Postel’s allegiance as grounds for believing he would have surrendered his secret. But the vow does not itself establish that such a confession occurred. Its evidentiary force comes from Casaubon’s interpretation, not from a witnessed exchange.

The Explanatory Gap

Casaubon extends the theory beyond Ignatius. After Ignatius’s death, he imagines that Jesuit successors kept watch on Postel, hoping to discover whom he would meet in 1584. Postel died before the meeting, and the presence of an unknown Jesuit at his deathbed, mentioned by one of Casaubon’s sources, does not reveal the identity of his successor. The order’s supposed knowledge therefore remains incomplete.

Belbo identifies the decisive problem: even if the Jesuits learned the secret from Postel, Casaubon has not explained how they could know that the anticipated meeting failed to take place in 1584. The vow can serve Casaubon’s story as a device for transmitting the secret, but it cannot fill the later gap in what the Jesuits supposedly knew. The objection distinguishes a plausible-sounding link from a complete account.

Narrative Function

The episode shows how a formal obligation can be made to carry more explanatory weight than the evidence warrants. Casaubon turns the Jesuit vow into a mechanism for connecting Postel, Ignatius, and the Templar Plan; Belbo’s intervention tests that construction against its chronology. The result is not confirmation of the secret’s transmission but a demonstration of the Plan’s characteristic method: an imagined connection initially makes the pattern feel complete, until a missing fact reveals how much remains assumed.