If the only Jesuit you ever met was the subject of biography in a library collection, what would this individual tell you about Jesuit life?
In this series, IgNation blogger Kevin Burns, who is not a Jesuit, takes a look at some of the works that come up in a large urban public library he entered the search term “Jesuit” and filtered it through the genre of “Biography”. The books that popped up include some familiar names and some not so familiar but still very real Jesuits.
And who else on the eve of the Jesuit feast day but Saint Ignatius (1491 – 1556) himself? This piece uses the Penguin edition of Personal Writings: Reminiscences, Spiritual Diary, Select Letters and The Spiritual Exercises, translated by Joseph A. Munitz and Philip Endean, and first published by Penguin in 1996.
The book presents a portrait of Ignatius filtered through his contemporaries, Jerónimo Nadal SJ and Gonçalves da Câmara SJ. If there is a theme to these Reminiscences it is, perhaps, procrastination. Asked many times to give an account of “all that had passed through his soul,” Ignatius constantly deflects them. An exasperated da Câmara explains: “Father was always excusing himself with various illnesses and with different matters of business that would arise, saying to me, ‘When such and such a business is finished. Remind me about it’. And when that business was finished, I would remind him about it and he would say, ‘Now we’re in the middle of this other matter, when it’s finished, remind me about it’.” (p. 6) Notes are taken, eventually, and they assembled their “biography” in 1553-55.
They jump straight to his adult experience: “Until the age of twenty-six he was a man given up to the vanities of the world, and his chief delight used to be in the exercise of arms, with a great and vain desire to gain honour.” (p. 13)
Recuperating from painful surgery to save his leg damaged in military action, he ponders on his future and “from some thoughts he would be left sad and from others happy, and little by little coming to know the difference in kind of spirits that were stirring: the one from the devil, and the other from God.” (p. 15)
The idea of pilgrimage surfaces. “All he wanted to do, once he was better, was the journey to Jerusalem … with all the acts of discipline and all the acts of self-denial that a generous spirit, fired with God, generally wants to do.” (p. 16) He begins in Spain, and as often happens on a pilgrimage, as the journey progresses new insights emerge. “And on this journey something happened to him which it will be good to have written, so that people can understand how Our Lord used to deal with his soul: a soul that was still blind, though with great desires to serve his as far as its knowledge went.” (p. 18)
This journey becomes a penitential process and he is caught between moments where “he found no savour either in praying or in hearing mass or in any other prayer he made, and at other times something coming over him pulling him toward so much the opposite, and so suddenly that it seemed someone had taken away the sadness and the desolation form him like a person taking a cape from someone’s shoulders.” (p. 22)
Ignatius emerges from a state of profound desolation, “like something unravelling itself … there came to him some feelings of disgust for the life he was leading, and some impulses to cease from it; and with the this the Lord willed that he woke up as if from sleep.” (p. 24) During this period of deep-redefinition “God was dealing with him in the same way as a school teacher deals with a child, teaching him.” (p. 25) And it works. “As he was seated there [in prayer in a chapel] the eyes of his understanding and knowing many things, spiritual things, just as much as matters of faith and learning, and this with an enlightenment so strong that all things seemed new to him.” (p. 27)
In 1523 he begins a perilous journey to Jerusalem. “His firm intention was to remain in Jerusalem, forever visiting those holy places. And, as well as this matter of devotion, he also had the intention of helping souls.” (p. 34) He doesn’t stay, but returns the following year and starts developing the text of the Spiritual Exercises. He is hampered as “new insights into spiritual things would occur to him, and new enjoyments… And so, thinking often about this, he said to himself, ‘Not even when I set myself to prayer and when I am at mass do these insights which are so vivid come to me’; and thus little by little he came to recognize that it was a temptation.” (p. 39)
The church authorities are suspicious of this non-ordained outsider who has written the Spiritual Exercises. “[T]hey laid much stress on one single point at the beginning of them: that of when a thought is a venial sin and when it is a mortal one. This was because he was defining that without being learned. His line of reply was, ‘You decide from there whether this is true or not; if it’s not, condemn it’. In the end they left without condemning anything.” (p 47)
“So he decided to go to Paris to study.” (p. 48) Another step in a journey of discernment: “his whole question was whether, after he had studied, he should enter a religious order or continue to wander around the world.” (p. 48)
He finds university life distracting, despite the support of his companions who will eventually become the first members of the Society of Jesus. “[E]very time he attended a lecture, he could not remain attentive with the many spiritual things occurring to him.” (p. 53) If he is not always attentive, the Inquisition certainly is. He faces, once again, imprisonment after his studies in Paris. “The inquisitor said that it was true there was an accusation, but that he didn’t see any matter of importance in it. He just wanted to look at his writings on the Exercises. On seeing them, he was very complimentary about them, and asked the pilgrim to leave the copy of them with him. So he did.” (p. 55)
“The nine companions came to Venice at the beginning of 1537.” (p. 59) This is the year of his ordination, but wherever he goes controversy and fear of further imprisonment follow him – until he meets Pope Paul III. “The Pilgrim went to talk to him at Frascati and represented some arguments to him. The Pope was persuaded, and commanded that a verdict be given, which was given in favour.” (p. 61-2)
In 1540 the Society of Jesus is formally established and Ignatius finally begins to dictate his Reminiscences fifteen turbulent years later.
Da Câmara takes up the story:
The same day before he had supper he called me, with a look of a person who was more recollected than normal, and he made a sort of formal declaration to me. The gist of which was to demonstrate the intention and simplicity with which he had narrated these things, saying that he had committed many offences against Our Lord after he had begun to serve him, but that he had never given consent to a mortal sin: on the contrary, always growing in devotion, i.e. in facility of finding God, and now more than ever in his whole life. And every time and hour he wanted to find God, he found him. (p. 63)
The core of Ignatian spirituality is in those letters. “The Spiritual Exercises are all the best that I have been able to think out, experience, and understand in this life, both for helping somebody to make the most of themselves, as also for being able to bring advantage, help and profit to many others.” (Letter 10, p. 139)
When, in 1552, his fellow Jesuit, Francis Borgia (who will eventually become General of the Society) is offered a cardinalship, Ignatius struggles with it and concludes it’s a bad idea. He outlines discernment in action in his letter to Borgia:
…I think it will be best if I give you some account of the process of my feelings, as if I were examining my soul for myself, for the greater glory of God. …I gave an order in our house that all priests should celebrate mass, and the laymen say prayers, during three days, asking that I might be guided in all things for the greater glory of God. During this period of three days, there were times, as I turned over the matter in my mind and debated it, when I felt some sort of fear and I lost that freedom of spirit to speak out and prevent the business. ‘How do I know what God Our Lord wants me to do?’ I thought, and I could not feel sure about preventing it. But at other times, when I began the normal meditations, I could feel those fears vanishing, I continued with this petition on several occasions, occasionally feeling fear, and occasionally the opposite.
…[O]n the third day, I felt during the normal meditation, and ever since constantly, that my mind was quite made up and that I was decided – in a way
that was gentle and left me feeling quite free – to impede the nomination to the best of my ability before Pope and cardinals. If I did not act thus, I would be (and indeed am) quite certain in myself that I would not give a good account of myself before God Our Lord, rather a wholly bad one. (Letter 2652, p. 245-6)
Ignatius of Loyola died on July 31, 1556, was beatified in 1609, and canonized by Pope Gregory XV in 1622 on the same day as his fellow Jesuit, Francis Xavier. Incidentally, 1622 was an important year for founders of religious orders as that year Gregory also canonized Philip Neri, founder of the Oratorians, and Theresa of Avila, founder of the Discalced Carmelites.
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Personal Writings: Reminiscences, Spiritual Diary, Select Letters and The Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius of Loyola, translated by Joseph A. Munitz and Philip Endean, and was published by Penguin in 1996.
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Next in this series: a man who knew everything. Athanasius Kircher SJ (1601 – 1680) as depicted by John Glassie in A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change.