SOURCE: Evennett, H. Outram. “St. Ignatius and the Spiritual Exercises.” In The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation: The Birkbeck Lectures in Ecclesiastical History Given in the University of Cambridge in May 1951, edited by John Bossy, pp. 43-66. London: Cambridge University Press, 1968.

[In the following essay, originally presented as a lecture in May 1951, Evennett analyzes the Spiritual Exercises St. Ignatius had developed as a technique for conversion and describes their influence.]

I attempted in my last lecture the somewhat formidable task of trying to convey what seem to me to be the main characteristics which marked the reinvigoration of Catholic spiritual life during the Counter-Reformation: the main traits of that teaching in regard to spirituality which gradually prevailed in the formation of new generations of parochial clergy in the Tridentine seminaries, in the pastoral activities of religious orders and new congregations of priests, and which was passed down to the laity in multiple ways throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to the general moral reform of the Church in head and members. Among these agents of spiritual renewal, for both clergy and laity, the Society of Jesus was of outstanding and, in the true sense of the word, peculiar importance; and its teaching and influence in the spiritual sphere show almost all the characteristic counter-reformation marks to the highest degree. The Tridentine decree on Justification had shut out the Augustinian, or if you like, semi-Lutheran tendencies evinced by Contarini, Seripando, Pole, Gropper and others: the Jesuits developed a theological school concerning the relations of free will with Grace which, with the great controversy with the Dominicans over Molina's work, brought upon them the reproach of swinging to the near verge of Pelagianism. Bound up with this was their constant stress on activity of all kinds; the active use of the mind and intellect, with all their powers, in prayer, and especially in pictorial meditation, as against contemplative trends; their doctrine of the insufficiency of purely passive resistance to temptation with its corollary of the necessary counter-attack, the principle of agendo contra; the development of their casuistry in a humane and accommodating direction; their respect for each individual and his ‘special case’, seen in the flexibility of their general spiritual direction; their reaction from excessive corporal mortifications, either for themselves or their penitents. Active struggle against self; activity on behalf of others; frequent recourse to the sacraments; prayer found in work and action in the world rather than in eremetical retirement from it: these were some hallmarks.

Within the Counter-Reformation, however, the Jesuits were themselves a ‘special case’ in that, while breathing the same general spiritual atmosphere as others in the movement, they nevertheless depended immediately, for their formation, on a personality and a teaching about both of which there was something of the unique, and as a result of which the Society of Jesus, while generating and retaining its own peculiar exclusiveness of spirit, nevertheless became the most powerful, active, modernising, humanistic, and flexible force in the Counter-Reformation, impressing, in the long run, so much of its outlook and even to some extent the principles of its structural form on the life and organisation of Catholicism as a whole.

The small international society of the first nine—‘Haec minima congregatio’—which was approved by the papacy in 1540 and which took up its headquarters in Rome, putting itself at the special disposition of the papacy because of its international character, had as its object the salvation and perfection not only of its own members, but equally those of other men. It was a society of reformed and apostolic priests. It had two special and outstanding assets, apart from the high qualities of all its original members: they were the remarkable history and gifts of its founder, Ignatius of Loyola; and the Spiritual Exercises which he had constructed and worked out as a technique for conversion. Applied first to his own original companions, they were soon to reach a much wider public, and to become the foundation of Jesuit pastoral activity, in preaching, missions, retreats, personal direction and otherwise. Not every point in the formation and early history of the Society, and the place of the Exercises in it, is by any means historically crystal-clear; but that the Exercises are inextricably linked up with St Ignatius's personality and evolution and with the foundation and development of the Society is hardly open to question.

Let us look then, first, at these ‘Exercises’—the full title, in English, is: Spiritual Exercises whereby to conquer oneself and order one's life without being influenced in one's decision by any inordinate affection. The text of the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius does not constitute a continuous book intended to be read through as such and used by the individual who hopes to profit by them. The work is not a literary treatise on the spiritual life, or even a special didactic treatise on meditation, to be consulted at her own fireside, as it were, by the fervent soul seeking light on the amendment of life and the approach to God. The Spiritual Exercises are a special experience to be undergone, a shock-tactic spiritual gymnastic to be undertaken and performed under guidance, at some particular moment—perhaps of inward crisis—when new decisions and resolutions in life are called for or held to be desirable. But the written text is not—so to speak—a work in the Teach Yourself Series: it is the gymnastic instructor's handbook—the manual of direction for the spiritual guide who ‘gives’ the Exercises to him who performs them. The individual performing the Exercises not only need not but, in the early days before the text was available publicly, did not and probably could not himself have access to it. This is a point of great importance. The Jesuits ‘gave’ the Exercises: they did not give them to be read. This was from the start, even the false starts—if the expression be permitted—at Alcalá and Salamanca, the technique of St Ignatius himself; and the Exercises not only formed the instrument by which he first achieved the conversion, and then assured the life-long co-operation, of his first companions who formed the original Society of Jesus, but they remained—some would perhaps prefer to say, eventually became—the main permanent spiritual inspiration in the Society in perpetuity. They were in a sense the systematised, de-mysticised quintessence of the process of Ignatius's own conversion and purposeful change of life, and they were intended to work a similar change in others. Conversion, and the consequent taking of new and appropriate resolutions for the future: these are the simple, straight-forward evangelical purposes of the Spiritual Exercises. There is nothing in them, says an Anglican commentator, ‘which goes beyond the simplest and most fundamental truths of the Gospel’.¹ Their remarkable efficacy, their undoubted power, proved many times over, to ‘change’ men permanently, sprang from the extraordinary way in which they combined, by the instinct of spiritual genius, the accumulated spiritual wisdom of the past Christian centuries with the direct lessons learned by the saint himself in his own, in so many ways exceptional, spiritual experiences. The Exercises, as eventually made use of by the Society of Jesus in its wide general apostolate, and especially the development of retreats, spelt the formation of a new high-powered spiritual weapon capable of being applied with almost explosive results to men at all levels of spiritual need. For the ‘conversion’ and consequent ‘election’ of a new manner of life by the exercitant might operate—so to say—anywhere along the line of spiritual advance. It might work a change from indifference to regular Christian life; or from regular but tepid Christian life to a new purposeful fervour; or from fervour in the lay state to the embracing of the regular life in some religious order; or, indeed, again, from a normal regular observance within a religious order to a higher pitch of fervour and determination. The Exercises were—or at any rate soon became in the hands of experienced directors—infinitely flexible, capable of being modified according to the patient's character, or intellectual capacity, or his social condition of life, or the diagnosis of his inward condition by the discretion of the spiritual doctor. The medicine could be given in larger or smaller, in stronger or weaker, doses as required. But it was a medicine containing, like Alice's, so many good things that some mixture or other of it was always applicable. Here indeed was a weapon of unprecedented power: St Ignatius himself in tabloid form.

I do not think that this is the language of exaggeration. The pastoral efficiency of the Jesuits has had an enormously wide range and has comprised a great variety of approaches. But the principles arising out of the Exercises have underlain all. Though there are some obscurities in the early story, I think myself that the history of St Ignatius and of the early society does in fact point to the central importance of the Exercises from the start both for the spiritual formation of the Jesuits themselves—at any rate in Italy—and for their influence on others.² Recent Jesuit work, especially that of Padre Iparraguirre,³ strengthens the evidence for this. It was not only that frequently through the Exercises, as was perhaps their original historical purpose, men became Jesuits: some, like Nadal—whose name despite his very great importance never gets into the textbooks—only at long last after refusing the ordeal for many years.⁴ But men in all walks of life, in high and low places, laymen and ecclesiastics, were found amenable to them; and many not only found their own lives changed permanently but became themselves thenceforward, sometimes from doubters, enthusiastic supporters of the society. Such, for example, were Contarini, Tolomeo Gallio, Ortiz, three men of high influence in Rome, to whom the society owed much in the facilitation of its recognition by Paul III in 1540, in circumstances of considerable difficulty and delicacy.

In analysing what the Exercises demand and involve, two elements can be picked out as central: first, the examination of conscience, which is stressed most of all at the beginning; and secondly, the method of meditation and the practical fruits to be culled from it, which runs throughout the whole and forms the core of the method. The systematic examination of conscience is done in two forms, first, the general examination and then the particular examination; this is a special and continuous technique, to be continued as long as necessary, in which the attack on special besetting sins is remorselessly pursued. It is interesting to compare the energy, vitality and pithiness of this famous technique of the particular examination—examining oneself two or three times daily—with the somewhat cumbrous recommendations characteristic of the medieval manuals for penitents. Here St Ignatius is concerned not so much with the classification of sins, for use in the confessional, but with the psychology of eradicating them. In the Ignatian meditations the whole developing tradition of the fifteenth-century teachers comes to a powerful climax. Meditation is not just a vague devotional ‘thinking about’ some biblical scene or religious consideration. It is the systematic concentration upon it of the whole attention of the mind. A certain preparation is each time necessary, with preludes in the form of prayers and recollection of purpose. Then comes the formation of the mental picture, followed by the application of the senses, the affections, and the will, point by point; and, finally, what St Ignatius calls the colloquy—the free prayer in converse with God, after the meditation proper, as each individual finds it comes to him to do, in order to concentrate and harvest the result in the taking of some definite determination. Every effort, in effect, must be made to bring every detail of an imagined scene vividly to one's mind, as if one were present, and then to draw fruit and grace in prayer and new resolutions. No stylised presentation, for example, of the Passion but the stark realities are to be imagined, with each sense.

The four weeks into which the Spiritual Exercises are divided are fixed and equal periods only by courtesy, like the days of creation. Each ‘week’ represents a stage—a true week being the optimum duration. But each week can be prolonged or shortened, and some of them even omitted, according to the decision of the director. The first week, purgative in nature, deals with the examination of conscience, confession and eradication of faults, the start of the struggle against self: the meditations concern sin and hell; and in this first week a preliminary election or choice of God, as against sin, is in fact tacitly made. But it is the second week that brings the climax of the specific election, or choice, with the famous opening meditations on the kingdom of Christ and the choice of standards, followed, before the election itself, by a series of meditations on the main events of our Lord's life from the Nativity to Palm Sunday. The election itself is a determination not merely to avoid sin—that has already been done in the first week—but actively to promote the kingdom of Christ in the state of life to which one is called, or to which one now decides that the call comes. The third week, illuminative we may say, following the traditional threefold conception of the stages of spiritual advance, strengthens the resolves already taken by a series of further meditations, mainly on the Passion. The fourth week, unitive in spirit, is based on meditations on the risen Lord, his glory, his love, which we are called upon to share. The complete series of meditations, after the preliminary ones in the first week on sin and hell and the opening one of the second week on the kingdom of Christ, cover the gospel story from the Nativity to the Resurrection; it has often been commented upon that neither here nor in the appended list of supplementary meditations is the divine history carried on further to the Ascension or to Pentecost.

In addition to the four groups of meditations proper, each with its accompanying outcome of personal resolve, the text of the Exercises contains in pithy, carefully phrased terms a number of other elements upon which the director can draw from time to time to assist his exercitant as may seem advisable, according to his character, his progress or his lack of progress, or the exact number of ‘weeks’ which are being undertaken. For it is possible—and indeed common—to do the Exercises only in part, though the election at the end of the second week is usually vital. The list of these other elements is quite long. First, the twenty annotations, or rules for the director, which open the text; secondly, the famous section known as the Principle or Foundation, a short but masterly summary of the end of man, his proper use of created beings, and his attainment of indifference to worldly conditions. This is placed at the beginning of the first week and is a nodal point in the whole scheme. Then there are special considerations to be made use of, to be brought to the notice of the exercitant, during the crucial second week, on different states of life, different classes of men, different degrees of humility. Then, coming after the end of the fourth week's meditations and fruits to be garnered, are, first, an additional series of mysteries of the life of our Lord, divided into points for meditation according to the plan of the four weeks; then twenty ‘rules for the discernment of spirits’, that is, tests for the genuineness of religious claims or emotions, again according to the way in which they may be useful during the experiences of the weeks; four rules for the distribution of alms; six observations concerning scruples; the famous eighteen rules for ‘Thinking with the Church’—safeguards, that is, of orthodoxy—and lastly seventeen additional notes applicable to various points throughout the text. This curious literary form, in which the main expositions of the meditations and fruits to be sought in the four weeks are accompanied and followed up by a rich variety of running comments, as it were, in the way of rules for guidance, observations, considerations, analyses and so forth, shows clearly the nature of the whole; that it is designed for the director giving the Exercises, and not as a continuous text to be read by the exercitant. And, as if all this were not enough to ensure sufficient guidance and flexibility, there came into existence, first drawn up by St Ignatius and perfected later in the century under Acquaviva (1581-1615), forty further chapters of detailed advice to givers of the Exercises, known as the Directory.⁵ Flexibility, indeed, was to be the main concern of the giver, who was to adapt the technique and the general plan to the particular needs, state, psychology, character, intelligence, stamina, of each individual concerned, without, however, altering the actual method of making what meditations were included: the composition of the mental scene, the application of the senses, the subsequent prayer and resolution. This recognition of the separateness and difference of each individual person is surely a high tribute to the perceptive humanity of St Ignatius. It runs not only through the Exercises, but also, despite the stress on implicit obedience, in the constitutions of his society as well.

Those who wish for a closer acquaintance with the Exercises may be referred, from among a multitude of works, to the definitive edition of the text—or more accurately, the texts—made by the Spanish editors of the Monumenta Historica Societatis Jesu,⁶ to the various, and all masterly, recent works of Père de la Boullaye, S.J.,⁷ and to the useful and understanding English edition by the late Rev. W. H. Longridge of the Anglican Society of St John the Evangelist.⁸ Here, I pass on to ask how it was that St Ignatius came to contrive this instrument, this finely adaptable spiritual mangle, through which men were passed to be brought out new.

Much has been written and continues to be written on the history of the Exercises and the problem of their genesis and sources. It seems clear that in the main they originate from and are in fact a synthesised, as it were dehydrated, form of at least parts of St Ignatius's own experiences of conversion and subsequent development, from the first conversion on his sick-bed, through the formative stages of the pilgrimage to Montserrat, the vital experiences of Manresa, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the subsequent periods at Barcelona, Alcalá and Salamanca, right up, indeed, to the important time at Paris. The main substance of the Exercises, with practically all the most important elements and meditations, would seem to date from the end of the time at Manresa—1522-3. Some first retouches were no doubt made in the experimental period when, as a student at Barcelona, Alcalá and Salamanca, St Ignatius began to attract and teach followers and was obliged to submit his text to the Inquisitorial authorities. In this period, 1524-8, or perhaps even later, at Paris, the important section known as the Principle or Foundation was probably added. Then at Paris, where St Ignatius first began seriously to study philosophy and theology, and to attract as his disciples men who were also students, the Exercises seem to have undergone general revision. Various additions and annotations were added which show traces of the new intellectual environment, of an awareness of scholasticism, and of the wider ranges of human types who now came into the saint's purview; possibly also, for the first time, of an awareness of Protestantism. It was at Paris, apparently, that the famous rules for orthodoxy were formulated, also the well-known sections on the degrees of humility and on the three classes of men. At Paris, too, there seems to have been a recasting of the rules for the discernment of spirits—so important in an age of novelties and uncertainties and new claims—and a certain revision of the central point of the election, or choice of a state of life.

While, therefore, the main substance and structure of the Exercises were firmly laid down at a very early stage after, or even during, the experiences at Manresa—there are those who cull some satisfaction from reflecting that they may well have been written in a cell in the Dominican priory there!—they nevertheless underwent expansion and adaptation during the next dozen years or so until reaching their final form. I follow here Père Pinard de la Boullaye's brilliant little book Les étapes de rédaction des Exercices de S. Ignace⁹ which, together with Padre Leturia's similar conclusions, would seem definitive. Behind this question, however, there lies a further important issue. How much did the teaching and influence of St Ignatius derive directly and independently from his own extraordinary experiences, mainly those undergone at Manresa in 1522-3, and how much from the spiritual traditions which surrounded him on all sides: the spiritual literature then influential in Spain, and Paris, the various external influences which came upon him in the course of his evolution—in a word, the whole historical, literary and spiritual atmosphere of the day which his Exercises, their method, spirit and purpose, seem to have caught up and so brilliantly synthesised and focused? There is indeed a sense in which St Ignatius may be seen as the St Paul of the Counter-Reformation, and the problem of his influence upon it as similar to the analogous Pauline problem. Here was a man subject to a more or less sudden conversion, to special privileged illuminations (no historian, I think, could wholly discount Ignatius's own story of an extraordinary illumination on the banks of the River Cardoner at Manresa—to mention no other incidents), and destined to give new definition, impetus and modernity to the religious movement with which he was associated, and to carry it far and wide across the earth. Yet, on the other hand, as those of his followers are not slow to claim who emphasise most strongly the extent of his dependence on God's own direct private dealings with him, St Ignatius in no wise invented a new religion—any more, shall we say, than did St Paul?—and his spirituality, though conveyed through the Exercises in a practical technique that was brilliantly new and brilliantly successful, was nevertheless in full accord, when properly seen, with the dominant Catholic tendencies of his day and therefore drew undeniably upon a legacy from predecessors.

There is first of all a purely literary problem. Can any direct literary dependence on earlier texts be detected in the Exercises? In 1919 the able Spanish Jesuits who edited the texts of the Exercises in the Monumenta Historica¹⁰ went very fully into this question in their introduction, referring learnedly to a large preceding literature. They concluded that no direct borrowing of phrases could be traced from the three books which so much influenced Ignatius in his earliest stages of conversion: the Flos Sanctorum (or Golden Legend), the Vita Christi of Ludolph the Carthusian, the Imitation of Christ, though they conceded that the author must have made considerable use of the multitudinous notes that he is known to have made on these works. In regard to a possible influence of Abbot Cisneros's Ejercitatorio de la Vida Espiritual, which may have become known to St Ignatius during his short time at Montserrat, they concluded that here too there is no single instance of textual reproduction. In the actual Exercises themselves, as distinct from the various additions, they admit only seven or eight passages of real resemblance, all of which, however, are passages that might just as well derive from Ludolph or à Kempis. Furthermore, they point out, and the point has cogency, that the form and object of the Exercises is quite different from that of the Ejercitatorio. The latter is a work for the general deepening of the spiritual life of monks; it is based upon, and assumes, the monastic horarium of liturgical prayer throughout the year. The Exercises, on the other hand, are, as we have seen, a special ‘occasional’ technique aimed primarily at effecting a change of life and possibly also a change of state of life. Commentators who have tried to find direct literary sources for the Exercises in a number of various quarters—the works of St Bernard, St Anselm, Gerard of Zutphen, Raymond Lull, Abbot Werner, Savonarola, Jan Mombaer, even Erasmus's Enchiridion—are similarly dealt with by the editors of the Monumenta. Possible parallels and resemblances turn out to be largely on points which, however important, are in fact commonplaces that might have one or more of any number of various inspirations; the textual similarities are never so close as to be completely convincing; moreover, St Ignatius could not, at the early time of the first writing of the Exercises, have read at all widely in patristic and medieval spiritual literature. He was still for all practical purposes a layman—and his early movement of apostolate, a lay one.

The findings of these editors in regard to direct literary dependence, though expressed in terms of perhaps undue asperity, are to my mind, on the whole, convincing, and would seem to have been very generally accepted. From a literary point of view, the Exercises are not just a patchwork from earlier writers—they are as original in expression as in general concept and design. And yet this is not the end of the problem. It is only the beginning of another, more difficult one. Granted that in detailed form, in elaboration of technique, in clarity and unity of purpose, the Ignatian Exercises are sui generis, different somehow from all the ‘Exercises’ and ‘Scalae’ and didactic treatises on meditation of the previous hundred and fifty years—in that everything in them is drawn up, as it were, in masterly battle-array under a skilled commander—yet it remains that their author lived in a certain historical setting; that he was part and parcel of an age; and that the expression of his perhaps unique spiritual gifts and perceptions and wisdoms was necessarily in the mode of his time. For all his uncovenanted privileges of special insight and understanding, which I for one would certainly not wish to question, St Ignatius was not, and could not be, a stained-glass figure abstracted from his environment and its influences. In recent decades, in fact, the history of St Ignatius, of his personal evolution and of his work has been much illuminated—not to say modernised—by able Jesuit scholars such as Padre Leturia, Père Pinard de la Boullaye, Père Watrigant, Père de Grandmaison, Père Dudon,¹¹ and others, who have understood and met this problem of envisaging St Ignatius in his historical setting, and who have had the enormous volume of materials in the Monumenta Historica Societatis Jesu, first published in Madrid, now being continued from Rome, from which to quarry. If so many critics have thought to find the ‘origin’ of various of the main ideas of the Exercises in previous writers it is because these ideas, however acquired by St Ignatius, are not in themselves, intrinsically and separately, new. Take the meditation on the kingdom of Christ, the famous choice of standards and the resolve to follow the standard of Christ rather than of his enemy—dramatic opening and climax, as it were, of the second week of the Exercises; all this is not just the colourful imagery of an old soldier turned evangelist, it is an age-old traditional concept of the spiritual writers, closely paralleled indeed in so un-Ignatian a book as Erasmus's Enchiridion Militis Christiani: paralleled there so closely that even Jesuits like Padre Leturia, Père Watrigant, and Père de Grandmaison will not follow the editors of the Monumenta in ruling it out utterly as a possible direct influence—whether Ignatius actually finished reading this work of Erasmus or no!¹² And indeed what else, at bottom, is the concept of the choice of standards than the classic one of the two allegiances, two communities, two cities—of the righteous and unrighteous—of God and the devil—Babylon and Jerusalem—what you will—which we find not only in St Augustine but in a host of other writers. Similarly, precedents can be found in plenty for the Ignatian doctrine of the three powers of the soul—memory, understanding, will; for some points in the method of meditation, of imagining ourselves actually present with each sense in turn at the scenes of our Lord's life and passion (made easier in St Ignatius's own case by his having actually visited Jerusalem); for the whole question of spiritual discernment, as well as for other less central points such as the regulation of the appetite in eating and drinking, the use of sleep etc. The Exercises, in fact, are at one and the same time uniquely new as a whole and in their method of activating men—but full of traditional spirituality in their particular points. The old wine in a new bottle—and brought to a new ferment. How did this come about? How did St Ignatius receive this deep understanding, practical wisdom, and succinct expressive power on paper, before he was either a wide reader of spiritual books or a scholar in the universities? Was it all infused at Manresa? Or did St Ignatius in fact undergo something which we could in the normal sense call a ‘spiritual formation’ at the hands of men?

That before his wound and conversion in 1521 Ignatius, though not an enthusiast in religious matters, had had close contact with them would seem evident from the fact that he was originally destined by his family for the Church, and indeed was a tonsured cleric of the diocese of Pamplona from early years. But it would appear that he must have turned away to the pursuit of the knightly and courtly life, with all its romantic self-indulgences; that he had made a deliberate ‘election’ of a state of life, as it were, but one turning away from God's service to that of an earthly prince. If this be so, there must always have been the recollection of it at the bottom of his mind. As a young page and then a knight at Tordesillas and at Arévalo contrasting examples of sin and piety would come his way plentifully: the easy relations of sensual people on the one hand; the atmosphere of official court piety on the other. On one side, duels, women, gaming; on the other, the ideals of chivalry, devotion, obedience, discipline in the service of a Lord. Doubtless Ignatius was no better than he should have been. But Arévalo was at this time one of the centres of the reviving Franciscanism in Spain so much promoted by Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros. The influence of the Franciscan Ambrosio Montesino, whose translation of Ludolph's Vita Christi Ignatius later read on his sick-bed, was at work at Arévalo, where Ignatius may well have read his Itinerario de la Cruz dedicated to the Duchess of Nájera, wife of Ignatius's patron. There is reason, too, to suppose that he read at this time the Triunfo de los Apóstoles by the Franciscan poet Juan de Padilla, with its references to the Charterhouse of Seville, to which (and not to the nearer Charterhouse of Miraflores at Burgos) the saint at a later time once expressed a wish to retire. Add to all this early impressions of piety derived from the family circle, and it is clear that from a spiritual point of view Ignatius could not have been a complete tabula rasa when, on his sick-bed after Pamplona, the romances gave out and he was fain to turn to Montesino's translation of Ludolph and the lives of the saints. But at this period of what we may call his first ‘conversion’ these books of Germanic piety seem to have been the only religious books that he had by him and which inspired or at least accompanied his change of life. Under their aegis Ignatius made a new ‘election’; the resolve to change his state of life from a knight of the world to that of a knight of Christ; to become a humble, poorly clad, penniless pilgrim. And it was as a preparation for a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to set his eyes upon the exact sites of our Lord's life and sufferings, that he set out, when healed, across the north of Spain for the famous pilgrimage-shrine of our Lady of Montserrat, there to do vigil before the Madonna, to take, as it were, his new vows, and to exchange the rich garb of a knight for the coarse sackcloth of a pilgrim.

What really happened to Ignatius at Montserrat? It would be most interesting to know for certain! Was it simply a matter of three days of high generous religious emotion, marked by the—dare one suggest it?—slight exhibitionism of the famous vigil and discarding of knightly costume as well as by the more searching ordeal of a three days' general Confession? Or did St Ignatius at Montserrat, through his confessor the French monk Dom Chanones, come into touch, unexpectedly, with a powerful force of organised spirituality that was to supply him with the groundwork of something the need for which he had not previously understood but which he now saw that he must acquire—a solid spiritual formation at the hands of experienced guides? That this is in fact what occurred is the broad thesis of Dom Anselmo Albareda's extremely ingenious book Sant Ignasi a Montserrat (written, regrettably, in Catalan).¹³ Dom Albareda, a monk of Montserrat, now librarian at the Vatican Library, maintains that it was this realisation of the need of formation which deflected Ignatius from his original purpose of proceeding immediately to Jerusalem (not any question of practical difficulties—plague in Barcelona, robbers on the road) and which sent him instead into unpremeditated retirement at the neighbouring town of Manresa where the Hospice of Santa Lucía could house him. Furthermore, Dom Albareda maintains that Ignatius did not stay merely three days on the holy mountain but that he lived there for some weeks as a penitent in a cave higher up than the monastery, receiving alms and spiritual advice; and that even when he finally betook himself to Manresa he came back frequently for conferences with Dom Chanones and others. This whole thesis has been severely criticised on every point by Jesuit authors, and I must confess that it seems to me very difficult to maintain in its entirety. The theory of the prolonged stay on the mountain and the frequent revisits rests only on the traditions of the monastery, and on late and circumstantial evidence, some of it hearsay and given by very old men at the beatification enquiries in the 1590s; moreover—and this seems to me extremely significant—St Ignatius himself gives no ground for it in the autobiography of his spiritual evolution which in his later years he dictated to Father Luis Cámara.¹⁴ It is admitted on all hands that the claims of some seventeenth-century and even of certain more modern Benedictine writers, who maintained that St Ignatius owed everything to the Benedictines and that the Exercises flow directly from Abbot Cisneros's Ejercitatorio, cannot possibly be maintained; that such an extreme thesis is riddled with major misconceptions and critical impossibilities. Yet, despite the difficulties in maintaining Dom Albareda's less drastic thesis to the full, it seems to me nonetheless highly probable that Montserrat may have been a real turning-point and a step forward in the saint's spiritual evolution, bringing him into contact with a new force in organised religion and the realisation of how much he had to learn. It is highly plausible, to my mind, to suggest that this realisation turned him aside from the project of an immediate pilgrimage to Jerusalem, in order to retire, for the purpose of an intenser spiritual cultivation now seen to be necessary, to Manresa nearby. The possibility of this having happened, it seems to me, is underestimated by Dom Albareda's critics. Later relations of St Ignatius and the Jesuits with Benedictines were always especially cordial, so much so as even to suggest some kind of acknowledged debt.

But then what happened at Manresa? Normal formative influences were no doubt present—and, on his own admission, sought by the saint: the local Dominicans where he lodged for a time, a nearby Cistercian, certain pious women; he does not in his spiritual autobiography mention Montserrat or the Benedictines again. But all these now become secondary: indeed he records in his spiritual autobiography that no one could now give him any help in the extraordinary crisis of experiences which came upon him and out of which he emerged a new man (not this time by his own but by God's election) rich with mystical knowledge of God, mature in spirit after passing in a few weeks through a whole gamut of spiritual experiences which with others have been the spun-out story of a lifetime. It was now that he first read the Imitation of Christ, which he declared made every other spiritual work seem superfluous; now that he put down on paper the main points of the Exercises, before, the ordeals and enlightenments over, he set out, via Barcelona, for Jerusalem—now at last prepared for the deferred pilgrimage. Now he was, as it were, the mystic; illuminated, and in an interior sense changed and formed; but he was also the incipient apostle, beginning to sense that his call was not to the Carthusian cloister at Seville, nor to the reform of some lax order, not indeed to retirement, but to apostolic work for the greater glory of God and the good of souls; that, in a sense, he must hand on to others the fruits of the cleaning fires through which he had himself just passed. The Society of Jesus, not yet in his mind as such—not to take definite shape there for about another fifteen years or so—was nonetheless in principle conceived.

Jerusalem was a further climax; but one which served still further to clarify the future. His experiences in the Holy Land finally taught Ignatius that he was not destined to be an obscure hermit, either there or in his native land. With his return from Palestine there may be said to end the early ecstatic—mystic—stage of his religious evolution; the stage comparable with St Philip Neri's early quasi-Franciscan life in the catacombs and ruins of Rome, before he learnt that he must in the end give order and outward respectability to his way of life. The emotions and the will were now in harness. There remained the intellect. Education was required for the coming apostolate to be fruitful. Now well over thirty years old, Ignatius sat with mocking boys on hard benches in the lecture rooms at Barcelona, Alcalá and Salamanca successively, acquiring the rudiments of Latin. But always the pull was in two ways: to study, the immediate necessity; to the apostolate, the long-term basic urge. Early disciples gathered around; the Exercises began to be given, the Inquisition to be aroused. Was this strange errant cleric without Holy Orders an impostor? Another alumbrado, claiming direct light and ready to ignore the authorities of the Church—in contact perhaps with suspect circles? The Inquisitors saw that he was not; but they declared that he must not guide souls nor teach the difference between mortal and venial sin without further study. No doubt a sensible and salutary decision; one, certainly, which contributed to the saint's decision to leave Spain and go straight to the recognised fountain-head of traditional European scholastic learning, whither so many Spaniards had preceded him. In 1528 he was in Paris.

The effect upon St Ignatius of his years in Paris was profound. Here, in more ways than one, his whole outlook was widened and made more practical. A growing scholasticism of action, if we may use the phrase, accompanied the studies of scholastic philosophy and theology. A deeper sense of prudence and caution, of the practical, made themselves manifest, both in his dealings with men and in the additions and modifications to the Exercises which he now made, no doubt with new types of convert in mind. It was in Paris too that, if ever, he came into direct touch with the influence of the devotio moderna, for the whole religious atmosphere of the Collège de Montaigu at which he spent his first year had been formed by Mombaer and Standonck, and many monastic and other reforms had been attempted in Paris by representatives of the religious fervour from the Low Countries. Other influences in plenty, of course, were at work in Paris: spiritual, intellectual and humanist; the new biblical ardour of a Lefèvre as well as the strong conservatism of a Noël Beda. Paris was a centre of powerful forces and ideas such as Ignatius had not known before. Did all this pass him by in his campaign of choosing new disciples for his future work from among his fellow university students? Did he become here more aware of Protestantism and events in Germany and Switzerland? It can hardly have been otherwise. The vows on Montmartre—nearly contemporary with the placards—mark a further step in the evolution towards the foundation of the Society of Jesus. Ignatius is becoming a churchman as well as an apostle; the practical common sense, the genius for reality, the matter-of-factness of the future society are rising upon the basic spiritual foundations. If the nine—drawn from several nations—cannot visit Jerusalem together, they will put themselves at once at the disposition of the Pope. Six years more, after mission work in Italy, and the frustration of a joint pilgrimage to Jerusalem, would see the society established in Rome.

How insufficient, in view of all this history, it is to regard St Ignatius as simply an ardent Spaniard who brought medieval ideals of chivalry and a military outlook into his band of followers! The word compañía has no more necessarily military connotation than when applied in the Italian ten years earlier to St Angela's first group of pious lady-helpers. Translated into Latin, it is societas, not, for example, cohors.¹⁵ In fact, St Ignatius and his Society of Jesus are the richest amalgams, formed by the successive influences which operated upon him in Spain, France and Italy, as well as being based upon his personal sanctity and the secrets of his direct knowledge of God.

The problem of the forces acting upon the origins of the society is in one aspect only part of a larger problem—that of foreign religious influences in the Spain of the early sixteenth century. The notion of a spiritually and intellectually isolated Spain at this period is a misconception formed by the casting-back of later views of Spain as a land impermeable to foreign influences. The new Spain of 1450 to 1550, which was so closely related, politically, to Italy, and subsequently to the Netherlands and to England; which was creating for herself a new empire in strange lands beyond the Atlantic, and which bore within herself the rich strains of Arab and Jew, Castilian and Basque, Catalan and Aragonese, could hardly form a solid watertight cultural entity. Today, specialists are perhaps more concerned to vindicate Spanish originality, or at least to disentangle the different strands of influence. I have already spoken of the Dominican influences passing between Italy and Iberia; and of what Fr Beltrán de Heredia has called the Savonarolian invasion of Spain, indicated by both direct and circumstantial evidence; though in respect of the Dominicans one must remember at the same time that the Castilian Preachers, for all their traditional intellectual contacts with Italy and Paris, had never succumbed to the all-powerful nominalism of the fifteenth century, and that the rise of the Thomist school of San Esteban at Salamanca, clinched though it was by the work of Vitoria after his return from Paris, was nonetheless largely indigenous. While Boehmer in his books on Ignatius studied the possibility of German mystical influences having played, in the ultimate analysis, a prominent part in his formation,¹⁶ Altamira contended that all Spanish counter-reformation mysticism could be regarded as an importation from Germany and the Netherlands at the time of the Reformation.¹⁷ Similarly, while a German called Muller could write a book trying to show that Ignatius copied the form and structure of his society from the example of certain Moslem societies,¹⁸ it could also be asserted by others that Spanish medieval mysticism was rooted in Moslem philosophy.¹⁹ Whatever we may think of this from the purely spiritual point of view, it is surely not absurd from the intellectual or literary standpoint. When Moslem influence has been detected by Asín and others in even Dante,²⁰ can any branch of Spanish thought or literature claim, a priori, to be exempt? Thinking of Erasmus's wide popularity in Spain up to the suppression of his works there, a popularity wider than he ever had in Italy, and studied in so masterly a way in Bataillon's big book, we remember that Erasmus is himself but one form of a Netherlandish influence coming south—an ex-Canon Regular of Windesheim; while any reader of the valuable and interesting work on Erasmus's early period by Paul Mestwerdt, a young German scholar killed in the first World War, will not underestimate the influence of the devotio moderna upon him.²¹

More research needs to be done, perhaps, before the real nature and extent of Germanic influence on the sixteenth-century Spanish mystics can be adequately gauged; Groult's book on the subject is inconclusive²² and I have not yet been able to see a recent general work on this point, by a Spanish Franciscan.²³ But it is noteworthy that the late Padre Crisógono, O.D.C., an outstanding Carmelite scholar who died all too young, wrote of St John of the Cross and Tauler that ‘the history of mysticism knows of no two mystics who resemble one another more closely’,²⁴ and very recently another Spanish Carmelite scholar has seen a probable literary influence on St John in Ruysbroeck. Professor Allison Peers, though not subscribing to all Padre Crisógono's views on St John, is nevertheless concerned to indicate adequately the foreign influences in Spanish mysticism—especially Tauler, Ruysbroeck and Gerson. But in estimating the real originality of St Teresa and St John, who quote so little from other writers, we are up against the same sort of problem as we are in regard to the originality of St Ignatius. Behind all three lie centuries of tradition, and influences both Latin and Germanic. All are creative in a real sense, in that they fashion out of their materials—their experiences and their literary sources—something new. But it is undeniable that Germanic mysticism, like the Germanic devotio moderna with its large contribution to the systematised meditation of the Ignatian Exercises, like, again, the Germanic devout humanism of an Erasmus, were among the many influences present in renaissance and counter-reformation Spain.

Let me here, in conclusion, enter this caveat. In suggesting the existence of similar problems of derivation or influences undergone, in respect of the Spanish mystics and of St Ignatius's Exercises, I must not be taken as implying that I equate the two. Mystic, in a real sense, St Ignatius himself undoubtedly was; favoured, at Manresa principally, and then again later in life while composing the constitutions of his society in 1544-5, with special illuminations, special understandings, special and no doubt lasting intimacies with God. But despite the comparisons which can be and have specifically been made, recently again by Padre Larrañaga, between Ignatius's experiences of 1544-5 as recorded in his Spiritual Diary and the autobiography and other works of St Teresa,²⁵ it is surely plain that it must be difficult, by and large, to fit St Ignatius's case into the normal ‘main-line’ framework of Catholic mysticism and the development of contemplative prayer as we see it in the Spanish Carmelites, St Teresa, St John of the Cross, and other sixteenth-century Spanish mystics. Moreover, however this may be, it remains the fact that the Spiritual Exercises, this recipe for conversion, written substantially at Manresa itself, is not a work of mysticism or contemplation in the technical sense—despite St Ignatius's employment of the word ‘contemplation’ to denote a certain mode of imaginative discursive meditation. Indeed, nothing is so astonishing as the outcome of the raptures and visions of Manresa in this very unmystical, almost matter-of-fact, technique of the Spiritual Exercises. There is, of course, nothing in the Exercises either to suggest or to discourage the idea of the converted man being able eventually to reach the attainment of contemplative prayer as Grace develops in him, a prayer rising above vocal utterances, mental images or discourse of reason; and there are those who have maintained that in the meditations of the fourth week there are direct preliminaries, if not invitations, to the contemplative state. The Exercises, remember, are not a general philosophy of prayer or the spiritual life as a whole. They are a way of conversion—usually a première, not Lallemant's deuxième conversion. But in fact, whether this happened according to the mind of St Ignatius or not, there developed in the society, especially under the generalships of Mercurian and Acquaviva, a view that contemplation proper was an inappropriate form of prayer for members of an institute whose life was devoted to activity.²⁶ There have, of course, been true Jesuit contemplatives in the normally accepted sense of the word—Balthasar de Álvarez, confessor of St Teresa (who was commanded, however, by Mercurian to return to the methods of the Exercises), Álvarez da Paz, Provincial of Peru, Lallemant and Surin in early seventeenth-century France, and others. Yet on the whole, in the society's own life and therefore also in its pastoral activities it has not promoted this higher way of prayer even in those who feel called to it—this prayer which doubtless St Ignatius knew and experienced, but which he did not deal with in the Spiritual Exercises. The mystic and the active man merged naturally in St Ignatius himself. They were not encouraged to do so in the society. What difficult theological problems in regard to Grace and the nature of prayer are involved herein, I cannot here discuss.

Notes

1. W. H. Longridge (ed.), The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, translated from the Spanish with a commentary and a translation of the Directorium in Exercitia (London, 1930; 1st ed. 1919), p. xxxiv.

2. The opposite view was maintained by Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux, VIII (1928), 185 f., where he argued for a ‘réaction ascéticiste’ and a ‘crise des Exercices’ around 1580; note the attack on Watrigant, pp. 186, 229, and cf. J. de Guibert, La spiritualité de la Compagnie de Jésus (Rome, 1953), p. 3.

3. I. Iparraguirre, Historia de la práctica de los Ejercicios espirituales de San Ignacio de Loyola: I, Práctica de los Ejercicios … en vida de su autor (1522-56) (Bilbao/Rome, 1946), with fine bibliography.

4. See M. Nicolau, Jerónimo Nadal (1507-80), sus obras y doctrinas espirituales (Madrid, 1949).

5. I. Iparraguirre (ed.), Directoria exercitiorum spiritualium, 1540-99 (Monumenta historica Societatis Jesu: Monumenta Ignatiana, series II, nova editio, vol. II, Rome, 1955): a new edition of the relevant part of the next reference.

6. Exercitia spiritualia Sancti Ignatii de Loyola et eorum directoria (Monumenta Ignatiana, series II, Madrid, 1919).

7. H. Pinard de la Boullaye, Saint Ignace de Loyola, directeur d'âmes (Paris, 1947); La spiritualité ignatienne: textes choisis et présentés par H.P. (Paris, 1949); Les étapes de rédaction des Exercices de S. Ignace (Paris, 1950). None of these works is in the British Museum.

8. See above, n. 1.

9. See above, n. 7; P. Leturia, ‘Génesis de los ejercicios de San Ignacio y su influjo en la fundación de la Compañía de Jesús (1521-40)’, Archivum historicum Societatis Jesu, X (1941), 16-59, repr. in Leturia, Estudios ignacianos, ed. and rev. I. Iparraguirre (2 vols., Rome, 1957), II, 3-55.

10. See above, n. 6.

11. See above, n. 7, n. 9; P. Dudon, Saint Ignace de Loyola (Paris, 1934). I do not know which work of Père de Grandmaison is referred to.

12. Leturia, on page 23 of his article cited in n. 9, refers the matter to Watrigant, La méditation fondamentale avant S. Ignace (Enghien, 1907), p. 71, and R. García Villoslada, ‘San Ignacio de Loyola y Erasmo de Rotterdam’, Estudios eclesiásticos, XVI (1942), 244-8. Gonzáles de Cámara says that humanist friends at Alcalá suggested that Ignatius should read it, and that he refused; Ribadeneira, that it was at Barcelona, and that he read but did not finish it because it ‘lui faisait perdre sa dévotion’ (Guibert, Spiritualité de la Compagnie de Jésus, p. 155).

13. Monestir de Montserrat, 1935.

14. Leturia, ‘¿Hizo San Ignacio en Montserrat o en Manresa vida solitaria?’, in Estudios ignacianos, I, 113-78, especially 175-8.

15. Cf. the remarks to a similar effect in G. R. Elton, Reformation Europe, 1517-1559 (London, 1963), p. 203; O. Chadwick, The Reformation (Pelican History of the Church, III, Harmondsworth, 1964), p. 259; A. Guillermou, Saint Ignace de Loyola et la Compagnie de Jésus (Coll. Maîtres Spirituels, Paris, 1960), p. 50.

16. H. Boehmer, Loyola und die deutsche Mystik (Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Klasse, Bd. XXIII, Heft 1, Leipzig, 1921), p. 21, etc.

17. I have not found the reference. In Historia de España y de la civilización española, III (3rd ed., Barcelona, 1913), 554, Altamira describes the mystics as being ‘sí influídos por los alemanes contemporáneos [sic], diferentes de ellos por su ortodoxia y su repulsión a las extravagancias …’

18. Herrmann (sic) Muller (presumably pseud.), Les origines de la Compagnie de Jésus: Ignace et Lainez (Paris, 1898).

19. Altamira, Historia de España, I, (2nd ed., 1909), 570, à propos of Ramón Lull.

20. M. Asín Palacios, La escatología musulmana en la Divina Comedia (Madrid, 1919): see U. Cosmo, A handbook to Dante studies (Oxford, 1950), p. 149.

21. Die Anfänge des Erasmus: Humanismus und ‘Devotio Moderna’ (Leipzig, 1917).

22. P. Groult, Les mystiques des Pays-Bas et la littérature espagnole du seizieme siècle (Louvain, 1927).

23. J. Sanchís Alventosa, La escuela mística alemana y sus relaciones con nuestros místicos del Siglo de Oro (Madrid, 1946): no. 2005 of bibliography in E. Allison Peers, Studies of the Spanish mystics, III (London, 1960).

24. Quoted, with dissent, by Allison Peers, St John of the Cross and other lectures and addresses (London, 1946), p. 41, from Crisógono de Jesús Sacramentado, San Juan de la Cruz (2 vols., Madrid, 1929), I, 51. I do not know who the ‘other Carmelite scholar’ is.

25. V. Larrañaga, La espiritualidad de S. Ignacio comparada con la de S. Teresa de Jesús (Madrid, 1944). Larrañaga is the author of the introduction to the Obras completas de San Ignacio de Loyola in the Biblioteca de autores cristianos, LXXXVI (Madrid, 1952). Neither of these is in the British Museum.

26. Bremond, Histoire littéraire, VIII, 228 f.; J. de Guibert, ‘Le généralat de Claude Aquaviva (1581-1615): sa place dans l'histoire de la spiritualité de la Compagnie de Jésus’, Archivum historicum Societatis Jesu, X (1941), 59-93, and La spiritualité de la Compagnie de Jésus, pp. 219-270; Allison Peers, Studies of the Spanish mystics, III, 181.

Works Cited

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Asín Palacios, M. La escatología musulmana en la Divina Comedia. Madrid, 1919.

Beltrán de Heredia, V. Historia de la reforma de la Provincia [O.P.] de España. ?Madrid, 1939.

———. Las corrientes de espiritualidad entre los Domínicos de Castilla durante la primera mitad del siglo XVI. Salamanca, 1941.

Boehmer, H. Loyola und die deutsche Mystik. Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Klasse, Bd. XXIII, Heft 1, Leipzig, 1921.

Bremond, H. Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France depuis la fin des guerres de religion jusqu'à nos jours. 12 vols., Paris, 1916-36.

———. A literary history of religious thought in France. English translation of first 3 vols. of above, London, 1928-36.

Chadwick, O. The Reformation. Pelican History of the Church, III, Harmondsworth, 1964.

Dudon, P. Saint Ignace de Loyola. Paris, 1934.

Elton, G. R. Reformation Europe, 1517-59. London, 1963.

García Villoslada, R. ‘San Ignacio de Loyola y Erasmo de Rotterdam’, Estudios eclesiásticos, XVI (1942), 244 ff.

Groult, P. Les mystiques des Pays-Bas et la littérature espagnole du seizième siècle. Louvain, 1927.

Guibert, J. de La spiritualité de la Compagnie de Jésus. Rome, 1953.

Guillermou, A. Saint Ignace de Loyola et la Compagnie de Jésus. Collection Maîtres Spirituels, Paris, 1960.

Ignatius of Loyola, St. Obras completas de S. Ignacio de Loyola. Ed. V. Larrañaga, Biblioteca de autores cristianos, LXXXVI, Madrid, 1952.

———. Spiritual Exercises. See Longridge; Monumenta Historica Societatis Jesu. Iparraguirre, I. Historia de la práctica de los Ejercicios espirituales de San Ignacio: I, Práctica de los Ejercicios … en vida de su autor, 1522-56. Bilbao/Rome, 1946.

Larrañaga, V. La espiritualidad de S. Ignacio comparada con la de S. Teresa de Jesús. Madrid, 1944.

Leturia, P. ‘Génesis de los ejercicios de San Ignacio y su influjo en la fundación de la Compañía de Jesús (1521-40)’, Archivum historicum Societatis Jesus, x (1941), 16 ff.

Longridge, W. H. (ed.) The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, translated from the Spanish with a commentary and a translation of the Directorium in Exercitia. London, 1919; Everyman's Library, 1930.

Mestwerdt, P. Die Anfänge des Erasmus: Humanismus und Devotio Moderna. Leipzig, 1917.

Monumenta Historica Societatis Jesu. Exercitia spiritualia Sancti Ignatii de Loyola et eorum directoria. Monumenta Ignatiana, series II, Madrid, 1919.

———. Directoria exercitiorum spiritualium, 1540-99. Ed. I. Iparraguirre, Monument Ignatiana, series II, nova editio, vol. II, Rome, 1955.

Muller, H. (?pseud.) Les origines de la Compagnie de Jésus: Ignace et Lainez. Paris, 1898.

Nicolau, M. Jerónimo Nadal (1507-80), sus obras y doctrinas espirituales. Madrid, 1949.

Peers, E. Allison Studies of the Spanish mystics. 3 vols., London, 1927-60. St John of the Cross and other lectures and addresses. London, 1946.

Pinard de la Boullaye, H. Saint Ignace de Loyola, directeur d'âmes. Paris, 1947.

———. (ed.) La spiritualité ignatienne: textes choisis et présentés par H.P. Paris, 1949.

———. Les étapes de rédaction des Exercices de S. Ignace. Paris, 1950.

Sanchís Alventosa, J. La escuela mística alemana y sus relaciones con nuestros místicos del Siglo de Oro. Madrid, 1946.

Watrigant, H. La méditation fondamentale avant S. Ignace. Enghien, 1907.