4712

THE WAY
a review of Christian spirituality published by the British Jesuits
Jan/April 2008 Volume 47, Numbers 1 and 2
WHAT MAKES
IGNATIAN SPIRITUALITY
DISTINCTIVE?
THE WAY Jan/April 2008
Foreword 7–8
What Is Specific to an Ignatian Model of Spiritual 9–28

Direction?
Brian O’Leary
Many traditions of spiritual direction are practised today, within and
outside the Christian faith. What are the specific characteristics of the
Ignatian tradition, and what is the relationship between continuing
Ignatian spiritual direction and the ministry of the Spiritual Exercises?
The Beatitudes and ‘Poverty of Spirit’ in the Ignatian 29–46

Exercises
Brendan Byrne
The colloquies of the Second Week of the Spiritual Exercises and the
Beatitudes in Mark’s and Luke’s Gospels share a parallel concern both
with ‘poverty of spirit’ and with material poverty. But what is ‘poverty of
spirit’, and how does its use by Ignatius relate to the gospel beatitudes?
On Poverty with Christ Poor 47–66

Philip Endean
What does it mean to choose, with Ignatius, ‘poverty with Christ poor’?
How are we to make sense of the desire for poverty and make of it a
testimony to God’s self-gift to the world?
Ignatian Spirituality as a Spirituality of Incarnation 67–80

Emmanuel da Silva e Araújo
Two prominent heresies in the early Church, Docetism and
Nestorianism, denied the fully human and incarnate character of Jesus
Christ. It is vitally important today that we acknowledge the incarnation
of our own faith, in our experience of the Spiritual Exercises and in every
aspect of our lives.
Recommendations for Giving the First Week of the 81–96

Spiritual Exercises
Francisco J. Ruiz Pérez
The text of the Spiritual Exercises is always to be supplemented by the
director, who applies it to the situation of the particular exercitant. This
application needs to be carefully nuanced, especially in dealing with
difficult areas such as sin. Here suggestions are offered for how this might
best be done in the context of the First Week.
Ignatius’ Meditations on Sin: From Guilt to Gratitude 97–113

Eduardo López Azpitarte
Some aspects of the Spiritual Exercises are at odds not merely with a
contemporary outlook, but with the content of Revelation itself, as it is
currently understood. Applying this principle to the meditations of the
First Week makes it possible to single out those elements which can be
most fruitfully applied today.
Saved, Called and Commissioned 115–124

Nathan Stone
The nature and focus of an Ignatian retreat has varied a good deal over
time. This article explores what the Spiritual Exercises have meant to
Jesuits and others at different times in their history, and how they relate
to the modern preoccupation with the self.
The Discernment of Spirits: When Do the Second Week 125–142

Rules Apply?
Timothy M. Gallagher
The Second Week Rules for discernment are applied to a wide variety of
situations, but when is it truly appropriate to use them? Ignatius specifies
the kind of person who should use the Rules and the precise
circumstances when they should be applied, but how far can they also be
used by analogy in other situations?
Discerning Joy: The Ignatian Way 143–153

Paul Legavre
The Spiritual Exercises help us to come to God through Christ and to
choose God in the ordering of our lives. This process, the growth of a
relationship with God, is also a source of great joy.
Spiritual Accompaniment and Discernment 155–164

Dermot Mansfield
We are called to discernment throughout our lives. Central to a life of
discernment is our image of Christ and our ability to hear and distinguish
his personal call to each of us. How do we remain open to that call and to
all that it implies?
An Ignatian Way of Preaching the Gospel 165–174

Étienne Grieu
The Ignatian characteristics and values that may be drawn from the
Spiritual Exercises offer a distinctive and valuable contribution to the
preaching of the gospel, and through it to the future of today’s Churches.
The Clearness Process: A Way Opens 175–184

Alan Kolp
In the Ignatian tradition we are familiar with the process of discernment.
But for Quakers discerning what God desires for us, the way that is
opening up for us, occurs through the clearness process—which has
much in common with discernment, although there are also some
significant differences.
The Spiritual Exercises as Biography 185–199

Franz Meures
Those working with the Spiritual Exercises today are likely to spend
considerable time looking back over their own life-stories. Is this
procedure true to what Ignatius had in mind? A close analysis of the
position of biography in the text of the Spiritual Exercises concludes that
there is a place for it; nevertheless, it should be treated with caution.
The Spiritual Exercises and Sexuality 201–210

Andrew Walker
The relationship between sexuality and spirituality has been problematic
throughout the history of the Church. How can we incorporate this
inalienable part of human experience into what we learn from making
the Spiritual Exercises, and into what we become as a result?
‘What I Ought to Say to the Eternal Word’: The Four 210–224

Authors of the Spiritual Exercises
Peter-Hans Kolvenbach
Making the Spiritual Exercises is something wholly different from simply
reading the text that Ignatius wrote. In practice, the Exercises are a
collaboration between four authors: Ignatius, the ones giving and
receiving the Exercises, and the will of God.
Imitating Christ our Lord with the Senses: Sensing and 225–241
Feeling in the Exercises
Antonio Guillén
The senses have an important role to play, alongside the emotions and
the understanding, in the feeling and perceptiveness that are crucial to
the process of the Spiritual Exercises and to making an election.
The Cardoner Imperative 243–259

Gill K. Goulding
At the time of St Ignatius’ spiritual formation at Manresa, he had a
mystical experience of revelation as he rested by the river Cardoner. This
experience of being taught by God influenced him for the rest of his life,
and left its mark on the Spiritual Exercises, which were written at this
time.
Book Reviews
J. Patrick Hornbeck II on a Companion to the Jesuits
Terence O’Reilly on translations of Ignatius’ letters
Janet Ruffing RSM on the New Catholic Feminism
Ian Randall on spirituality and the charismatic tradition
Gerard J. Hughes SJ on the problem of evil
Richard Lennan on the Church today

Brian O’Leary SJ on a new French study of Pierre Favre
Edward Howells on a new translation of Isaac of Stella
Catherine Cowley RA on Dominican contributions to social ethics
Lewis Berry Cong. Orat. on John Henry Newman
FOR AUTHORS
The Way warmly invites readers to submit articles with a view to publication. They should normally be
about 4,000 words long, and be in keeping with the journal’s aims. The Editor is always ready to discuss
possible ideas. Further details can be found on The Way’s website, www.theway.org.uk.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Emmanuel da Silva e Araújo’s article first appeared in Itaici; the articles by Francisco J. Ruiz Pérez, Eduardo
López Azpitarte and Antonio Guillén first appeared in Manresa; those by Paul Legavre and Étienne Grieu
first appeared in Christus; the article by Franz Meures first appeared in Spiritualität der Exerzitien; and that by
Peter-Hans Kolvenbach first appeared in Geist und Leben. We are grateful to the editors and authors for
permission to reproduce this material. We are also grateful to Austen Ivereigh, Joseph A. Munitiz SJ, Anne
Carr, Philip Endean SJ, Patricia Harriss CJ, and Gerard J. Hughes SJ for translating these articles. The
scripture quotations herein are generally from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989
by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, and
are used by permission. All rights reserved.
The Way is an international journal of contemporary Christian spirituality, published quarterly

by the British Jesuits. Through writing informed by critical and creative scholarship, it aims to
provide a forum in which thoughtful Christians, from different walks of life and different
traditions, can reflect on God’s continuing action in human experience. Among particular
concerns of The Way are:
• the role of spirituality in the struggle for justice
• the spiritual issues raised by intercultural and interreligious dialogue
• the interactions between spirituality, politics and culture
• the fostering and development of the Ignatian spiritual tradition
FOREWORD
T HE SUBTITLE OF THE WAY is ‘a review of Christian spirituality

published by the British Jesuits’. The Jesuits find their roots in the
spirituality of their founder, Ignatius of Loyola. As is well known, this
spirituality underwent a large-scale rediscovery in the 1960s and 1970s,
and The Way, founded in 1961, played a role in that rediscovery. Yet the
journal has never confined itself to any individual spiritual outlook. It
has always reflected a variety of what Ignatius called ‘pathways to God’.
This double issue is unusual, then, in concentrating on the
specifically Ignatian pathway. It invites the reader to consider the
question of what marks out one spirituality from another, and in
particular how this one is to be differentiated from its neighbours. On a
personal note, I am delighted that this is the theme of the first issue of
the journal for which I take responsibility as editor. A decade ago I
wrote an article for The Way entitled ‘Has Christ Been Parcelled Out?’
It touched on this same topic, which remains an important one.
Historically, spiritualities often grew up in relative isolation, each
having as its guarantor a particular religious order (Benedictine,
Franciscan), Christian denomination (Quaker, Baptist), or social
concern (feminism, liberation). But a side-effect of the explosion of
interest in questions of ‘Mind, Body, Spirit’ in the last decade or so has
been to bring these different amalgams of understanding and practice
into much closer association. Quaker silence meets Ignatian
imagination, Benedictine lectio divina provides an impetus to the
struggle for political liberation, feminists ask themselves what Francis
(and Clare) might have to say to them. And those who are seeking to
know God better feel no need at all to confine themselves to any single
outlook.
Does it make any sense, then, to try to preserve a sense of a
particular and distinctive spirituality? Indeed, after all the cross-
fertilisation that has recently taken place, is it even possible to do so?
The articles in this issue make a cumulative case for answering both
questions affirmatively. The Spiritual Exercises, and the spirituality
which flows from them, are, as Pope Benedict has said:
The Way, 47/1–2 (Jan/April 2008), 7–8

8 Foreword
… a gift that the Spirit of the Lord has made to the entire Church
… a valuable and effective means for the spiritual growth of souls,
for their initiation to prayer, to meditation, in this secularised world
where God seems to be absent … a particularly precious means and
method with which to seek and find God within us, around us, and
1
in all things, to know his will and to put it into practice.
How the Spirit of God works with this gift to achieve these effects is the
central concern which these articles address.
In my work as director of novices I sometimes encounter young men
who consider any insight that pre-dates 1990 to be hopelessly outdated,
and who expect that it will have nothing to offer to contemporary
questioning. By contrast others in the Church believe that its present
situation is a lamentable result of having abandoned practices
sanctioned by centuries of use. Jesus speaks of the good scribe as being
one ‘who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old’
(Matthew 13:52). This issue of The Way bears witness to the freshness
even now inherent in a spirituality that dates back nearly five centuries.
Ignatius still has something to say to issues as diverse as sexuality, global
poverty, psychological guilt, and spiritual accompaniment, even as they
exist in a world vastly different from the one with which he was familiar.
Paul Nicholson SJ
Editor
1
Taken from the address of Pope Benedict XVI to the 35th General Congregation of the Society of
Jesus, 21 February 2008. See Decrees and Documents of the 35th General Congregation (Oxford: Way
Books, 2008), 146–147.
WHAT IS SPECIFIC TO AN
IGNATIAN MODEL OF
SPIRITUAL DIRECTION?
Brian O’Leary
T HE MOTTO OF SPIRITUAL DIRECTORS INTERNATIONAL is ‘Tending

the holy around the world and across traditions’. The existence of
such an organization, whose membership spans the main Christian
denominations as well as other faiths, reminds us that no one tradition
has a monopoly on spiritual direction. The need ‘to tend the holy’ is
universal, and this need has been met in a variety of ways throughout
human history. The result has been an accumulation of wisdom and
practice of which we are only now becoming more fully aware. The SDI
journal, Presence, regularly contains articles that expand our knowledge
and stimulate our imagination in ways that are ever ancient, ever new.
Once we recognise that there is a variety of traditions of spiritual
direction, the issue of the identity of one’s own tradition inevitably
arises. Some spiritual directors embrace a wholly eclectic approach, but
they are a minority. Most see themselves as working within a particular
historical tradition. This gives them a sense of being well grounded, but
it does not exclude an openness to learning from other traditions and
even to adapting their practices. Ignatian spiritual direction is
generically Christian, evolving out of teachings and practices that go
back to the Desert Mothers and Fathers. But what can we claim is
specific to this tradition, that might make it recognisably different from,
let us say, Carmelite or Salesian spiritual direction?
My purpose is not to undertake a comparative study of a range of
traditions. This would be beyond the limits of a single paper. My search for
what is specific to an Ignatian model of spiritual direction will focus
instead on a collection of presuppositions, values, characteristics and
emphases without which the term ‘Ignatian’ would not be appropriate.
These will be fundamental to an Ignatian model and will be recognisably
present in any exercise of Ignatian spiritual direction. This does not mean
The Way, 47/1–2 (Jan/April 2008), 9–28

10 Brian O’Leary
that they will always be explicitly present, but that reflection on what the
director is doing will discover them to be at work.1
Many of my reflections will inevitably concern the relationship
between spiritual direction and Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises. In light of
this I need to make clear a working presupposition of my own: that giving
the Exercises is not the same as engaging in ongoing spiritual direction.
They are distinct, although by no means totally separate, ministries.2 A
person who is trained to give the Exercises is not automatically equipped
to offer ongoing spiritual direction; and a person trained in ongoing
spiritual direction is not necessarily prepared to give the Exercises.
However, I do not think that Ignatius and the early Jesuits would
have recognised this distinction as clearly as we do today. My
impression is that these men (I am thinking particularly of Pierre Favre)
moved fluidly from spiritual conversation to offering the Exercises in
some form—frequently what became known as ‘light exercises’ or
applications of Annotation 18. In the sixteenth century, the ministry of
spiritual direction did not exist with the resolution and definition that it
has acquired in recent times. There is no evidence of special training, of
contracts between directors and directees, of regular meetings, of fifty-
minute sessions, of codes of ethics, still less of payment. These have all
been creations of the late twentieth century. The professional nature of
the ministry was unheard of five centuries ago and might well have
been abhorrent to Ignatius and to the first generations of Jesuits. They
would certainly have balked at payment.3 Therefore, our core question
about what is specific to Ignatian spiritual direction cannot be answered
simply by historical enquiry into the attitudes and practice of the
sixteenth century. We need to take as our starting-point spiritual
direction as it exists today, professionalised as it has become.
1
Such reflection takes place, for example, during supervision.
2
As Philip Sheldrake has written, ‘I would suggest, however, that we must be very careful about
uncritically removing certain items from the text of the Spiritual Exercises in order to construct a model
for spiritual direction in the widest sense’. See ‘St Ignatius of Loyola and Spiritual Guidance’, in
Traditions of Spiritual Guidance, edited by Lavinia Byrne (Collegeville, Mn: Liturgical Press, 1990), 99.
3
Ignatius was insistent on gratuity of ministries as a core expression of religious poverty in the Society
of Jesus. This norm was to apply especially to spiritual ministries. See, inter alia, Formula of the Institute,
3 [1] and Constitutions VI. 2. 7. [565].
An Ignatian Model of Spiritual Direction 11
© LMU
Contemporary spiritual direction: a retreat at the Center for Spirituality and Values in
Business, Loyola Marymount University
A Contemporary Model of Spiritual Direction

According to William A. Barry’s and William J. Connolly’s classic
account,4 three participants are involved in the dynamic of spiritual
direction: director, directee and God. The relationship between the
directee and God exists prior to the relationship between the directee
and the director, and is independent of it. Hence the director does not
initiate the relationship between the directee and God but facilitates it
and fosters an already existing reality. The directee-God interaction is
always more important than the directee-director interaction. The
latter can only play an instrumental or mediating role.
The directee’s relationship with God is not confined to any one part
of his or her life but is all-pervasive, all-embracing. Therefore, nothing
can be excluded a priori from the raw material of direction.
Nevertheless, a person’s prayer can be expected to focus that
4
William A. Barry and William J. Connolly, The Practice of Spiritual Direction (New York: Seabury
Press, 1982).
12 Brian O’Leary
relationship, to be the place where it is experienced (at least at times) in

a more explicit, a more transparent or a more intense way. Hence no
conversation can lay claim to be spiritual direction which does not
include discussion of what is happening in the person’s prayer.
This approach is built on the supposition that the person’s prayer is
real—a supposition which must always be tested, especially in the early
stages of the spiritual direction relationship. Self-deception is a constant
possibility. Prayer can be used as an escape from reality. Instead of being a
focus for a person’s experiences of God and of life, it can become a way for
the person to try to escape in an unhealthy and unhelpful manner from
the demands, stresses, pain and confusion of these experiences. Because
he or she is not being real, God cannot be real for him or her.
When a person first approaches a spiritual director the latter will be
interested in one key question: ‘Does this person want a real
relationship with God?’ Any other goal or motivation will not permit
the specific kind of relationship with the director that is spiritual
direction. The person may be seeking help for psychological problems,
Does this or have been sent by someone in authority, or be lonely, or be
person want a looking for self-fulfilment, and so on. Such motivations may
real relationship prompt the director to refer the person to some other kind of
with God? helper (for example a psychotherapist or a counsellor). On the
other hand, the director may intuit that the person could be
helped to move beyond these current motivations towards the more
specifically spiritual motivation of desiring a relationship with God.
The relationship between director and directee has clear
presuppositions, specific aims, and a corresponding methodology; it is not
something casual, sporadic or vague. It requires clear boundaries and so
needs to be governed by a code of ethics. All this must be clarified with
the directee at the beginning of the relationship. When this is done and
the directee knows what is involved, the director can then enter into a
working alliance with the directee, or, in more precise terms, a working
alliance with the directee’s desire to deepen his or her relationship with God.5
5
This working alliance is different from friendship, although it requires friendliness. Unlike that of
friendship, the purpose of the relationship does not lie within the relationship itself, but in that other
relationship between the directee and God. In other words, the director and directee do not meet to
foster their relationship. Friendship is entered into for its own sake and does not require any other
justification. Spiritual direction, on the other hand, is an instrumental relationship, one whose purpose
lies beyond itself.
An Ignatian Paradigm?
This contemporary model of spiritual direction would, I believe, be broadly
accepted in Christian circles today. This is not to claim that it is definitive,
but it stands as representative of a new thinking and new approaches that
have become commonplace. It is a model that can be called generically
Christian and can be adapted to the emphases of different traditions. This
is one of its strengths. But would it be accurate to call it Ignatian?
I would want to suggest that this model, while coming from an
Ignatian background and drawing on certain key Ignatian principles, is
so generic as not to be specifically Ignatian. Yet this model, or
something similar to it, is what many directors who call themselves
Ignatian use in practice. So do directors who see themselves as
Benedictine or Franciscan.
It is time to begin searching for what is needed to make this
understanding of spiritual direction specifically Ignatian. My starting
point will be the Church and my conviction that all spiritual direction,
but especially Ignatian spiritual direction, is an ecclesial ministry.
An Ecclesial Ministry 6
The primary, though not exclusive, locus for the working out of the
Trinitarian plan for humankind is the Church. Every element of that
Trinitarian plan is somehow embedded in the Church’s life. Hence all
human activity that is a response to the Spirit’s initiative, that attempts
to foster the Spirit’s involvement in our lives, that offers itself as an
apprenticeship to the Creative Spirit, becomes an ecclesial ministry.
Spiritual direction is only one such ministry. In practice it holds a
relatively modest place (if only because it is available in its strict, and
nowadays professional, sense to a very small proportion of believers).
Prior ministries, both chronologically and in importance, include
liturgy, preaching, catechesis and the sacrament of reconciliation. Each
of these, however, includes elements of spiritual direction (for example
teaching, formation and healing), and spiritual direction never replaces
our need for the other ministries.
In the past it might not have been so necessary to stress the
ecclesial nature of Christian spiritual direction. However, today there can
6
See my article, ‘Spiritual Direction Today’, Religious Life Review, 39/202 (2000), 162–167.
14 Brian O’Leary
be a tendency, at least
in the West, to regard
spiritual direction as
almost independent of
the life of the Church,
especially in its insti-
tutional dimension. It
can appear to operate
in parallel with the
sacramental and other
ministries of the
Church, and in some
cases to replace them.
This phenomenon is
linked with that of
people becoming inte-
The Church as the Bride of Christ rested in spirituality
while turning away
from organized religion. It can be an expression of an exaggerated
individualism in which people seek truth and meaning exclusively in the
realm of inner experience.
Any full portrait of Ignatius shows that he was a man of the Church.
Even without invoking the Rules for Thinking, Judging and Feeling with
the Church (Exx 352–370),7 his attitude of reverence towards the Church
and its ministers manifested itself throughout his life. In his earlier years
one could regard this attitude as cultural as much as religious. However, his
mystical experiences at Manresa, and subsequently his studies in theology,
only confirmed his inherited sense of reverence for the Church, and the
Rules give added sharpness to this aspect of Ignatius’ convictions.
In the context of the Exercises, in which so much emphasis is placed
on how God deals directly with the soul (Exx 15), the Rules remind us
that this inner illumination is not the only way in which God acts.
Between Christ our Lord, the Bridegroom, and the Church, his
Bride, there is the same Spirit which governs and directs us for the
7
See a contemporary discussion of these Rules by Avery Dulles, ‘The Ignatian sentire cum ecclesia
Today’, Review of Ignatian Spirituality, 76 (1994), 19–35.
salvation of our souls. Because by the same Spirit and our Lord Who
gave the ten Commandments, our holy Mother the Church is
directed and governed. (Exx 365)
The ‘same Spirit’ leads and guides in different ways. Even during the
Exercises the Church plays a role. The exercitant enjoys a relationship
with Christ because of receiving the Spirit at baptism and being initiated
into the community of the Church. Making the Exercises involves deeper
insertion into the life of the Church, not moving outside it. The presence
of the Rules for Thinking, Judging and Feeling with the Church in the
book of the Spiritual Exercises is not accidental, nor are they to be ignored
because of their difficulty or their controversial nature.8
Moreover the substance of these Rules is equally important outside
the Exercises. They point to the context of our Christian life in general,
and that of the ministry of spiritual direction in particular. They provide
part of the director’s frame of reference, and if the director does not
appreciate their significance the directee is not likely to do so either. If
the director is alienated from the Church the directee will pick this up
and possibly be drawn into a similar sense of alienation. It is not so
much a question of the director presenting the text of the Rules as of
the director being, like Ignatius, a man or woman of the Church.
Spiritual Direction and Theology

The Rules for Thinking, Judging and Feeling with the Church present a
theology of the Church based on the role of the Spirit in its life. All the
practical issues raised in the Rules, even those that are not historically
conditioned, are less important here than Ignatius’ central theological
vision of the Church as Spirit-filled and Spirit-guided.
The under-use of these Rules today, within and outside the
Exercises, is due to many causes. The Church has fallen victim to the
widespread distrust and suspicion of all organizations, and of all
authorities outside the self. This has led to the tendentious distinction
that many make between spirituality and religion. A worrying number
8
It is true that we need to get behind the Rules’ sixteenth-century premises, and present their core
message in contemporary terms. This is feasible so long as those who give the Exercises are convinced
of its necessity.
16 Brian O’Leary
of self-described Christians prefer to pursue their spiritual journey on

their own, without allegiance to any formal body of believers.
Much spirituality today tends towards the non-intellectual, if not the
anti-intellectual. People, including some directors, are still in reaction
against an overly cerebral and moralistic approach to spirituality from the
early twentieth century. Sometimes they are trapped by the even older
division between theology and spirituality.9 I would argue, however, not
Theology needs only that there is a necessary theological dimension to the
to permeate Exercises, but also that this dimension must be an integral part of
spirituality ongoing Ignatian spiritual direction. The Rules for Thinking,
Judging and Feeling with the Church provide just one example of
how theology needs to permeate spirituality. We can empathize with
Teresa of Avila’s preference that her directors be learned rather than
pious. She writes of the need for a director to possess prudence (good
judgment), experience and learning.10 She is not looking for high-powered
academic theologians, but for people who are at least theologically
literate, and who allow theology to enrich their own lives. John of the
Cross places learning first in his triad of qualities needed in a director (the
other two being discretion and experience).11 Of course theological
competence cannot compensate for a lack of other skills that we now take
for granted, such as non-judgmental acceptance, active listening,
empathy, adeptness in giving accurate feedback, ability to confront, and
so on. However, without theological competence these skills risk being
applied in a spiritual vacuum.12
9
Much has been written in recent times about the relationship between theology and spirituality. See, for
example, Sandra M. Schneiders, ‘Theology and Spirituality: Strangers, Rivals, or Partners?’ Horizons, 13
(Fall 1986), 253–274; ‘The Discipline of Christian Spirituality and Catholic Theology’, in Exploring Christian
Spirituality: Essays in Honor of Sandra M. Schneiders, edited by Bruce H. Lescher and Elizabeth Liebert (New
York and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2006). For a critique of Schneiders’ position see Philip Endean,
‘Spirituality and Theology’, in The New SCM Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, edited by Philip Sheldrake
(London: SCM Press, 2005), 74–79; and, at greater length, ‘Christian Spirituality and the Theology of the
Human Person’, in The Blackwell Companion to Christian Spirituality, edited by Arthur Holder (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2005), 223–238, at 228–231. My view is closer to that of Endean.
10
Teresa discusses the importance of learning in a spiritual master/director in The Book of Her Life,
chapter 13, 16–21, in The Collected Works of St Teresa of Avila, volume 1, translated by Kieran
Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, revised second edition (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite
Studies, 1987), 130–132.
11
See the long discussion of spiritual direction in John of the Cross, The Living Flame of Love, stanza 3,
27–67 in The Collected Works of St John of the Cross, translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio
Rodriguez, revised edition (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1991), 683–701.
12
A further general question concerns the kind of theology from which it is most appropriate for an
Ignatian spiritual director to work. A brief answer would point to any theology that incorporates the
And theology is not just a prerequisite in the spiritual director. The

growth of directees cannot be confined to the affective and conative
dimensions of their being but must also embrace the understanding.
The key Ignatian word sentir means ‘to have a felt understanding’. The
directee needs to be encouraged to broaden this understanding, to read
and reflect theologically as well as to pray and to act according to gospel
values. The fostering of theological competence in the directee is part
of the Ignatian director’s remit—without becoming a teacher. The
director’s part is to stimulate, to interest, to indicate links between the
directee’s experience of life and possible theological interpretations.13
The Relationship between Director and Directee

When we come to the relationship between director and directee, a
person working in the Ignatian tradition might well identify with what I
am calling the generic model. This is partly because of the common
heritage that all Christian spiritual directors share, and partly because
of the influence of psychology on this ministry today. Any Ignatian
training programme would teach what we commonly call counselling
skills, such as those referred to already; and stress would be put on
issues such as boundaries, confidentiality, transference and counter-
transference. Professional ethics would be at the heart of the ministry.
Nevertheless, even in the case of elements that are almost universally
shared, the Annotations and Presupposition at the beginning of the
Exercises are a resource that incorporates important Ignatian emphases
(Exx 1–20, 22).14
It is clear that Ignatius expects a basic respect and trust to exist
between the two people. The director is to be a good listener, allowing
exercitants or directees to tell their stories in their own way without the
insights represented by the key meditations in the Spiritual Exercises: the Foundation, the Call of the
King, the Incarnation, the Two Standards, and the Contemplation to Attain Love. Such a theology
would be optimistic in the sense of being world-affirming, but also acutely aware of the pervasive
problem of evil, at the same time contemplative and service-orientated. For a wide-ranging discussion
of the contribution of theology to any kind of spiritual direction see Dermot Mansfield, ‘The Place and
Value of Theology’, in The Way Supplement, 91 (1989), 123–135.
13
We might recall the passage in the Paraclesis where Erasmus, a near-contemporary of Ignatius,
excoriates the professional theologians. But rather than denigrating theology itself he goes on to say,
‘Only a few can be learned, but all can be Christian, all can be devout, and (I shall boldly add) all can
be theologians’ (Christian Humanism and the Reformation: Selected Writings of Erasmus, translated and
edited by John J. Olin [New York: Fordham UP, 1987], 97–108, here 104).
14
See n. 1.
18 Brian O’Leary
© The Leaven
intrusion of the director’s own experiences or ideas. Even when offering
material for prayer the director is to exercise restraint, ‘going over the
Points with only a short or summary development’ (Exx 2). The focus
must be kept on the exercitant’s relationship with the Lord. While this
is required throughout the Exercises, it becomes even more important
at the time of election or decision-making.
In the Spiritual Exercises, when seeking the Divine Will, it is more

fitting and much better, that the Creator and Lord Himself should
communicate Himself to His devout soul, inflaming it with His love
and praise, and disposing it for the way in which it will be better able
to serve Him in future. So, the one who is giving the Exercises
should not turn or incline to one side or the other, but standing in
the centre like a balance, leave the Creator to act immediately with
the creature, and the creature with its Creator and Lord. (Exx 15)
When basic respect and trust exist between the two people the director
is free to respond appropriately to the exercitant or directee. This
appropriateness will depend on what is happening in that person’s inner
life. For example, Ignatius writes:
If the one who is giving the Exercises sees that the one who is
receiving them is in desolation and tempted, let them not be hard or
dissatisfied with them, but gentle and indulgent. (Exx 7)
At other times, however, the appropriate response may be confrontation:
When the one who is giving the Exercises sees that no spiritual
movements, such as consolations or desolations, come to the soul of
the one who is exercising, and that they are not being moved by
different spirits, the one giving ought to inquire carefully of the one
receiving about the Exercises, whether they are does them at their
appointed times, and how. So too of the Additions, whether they
are observing them with diligence. (Exx 6)
A person may not always welcome such a challenge. If the relationship

is not already well grounded the confrontation may cause it to fracture.
But given the requisite respect and trust the exercitant will accept the
director’s intervention as necessary to assist his or her forward
movement into the dynamic of the Exercises.15
Such confrontation may be easier during the Exercises than in
ongoing spiritual direction. Both the one who gives the Exercises and
the one who is making them are quite clear on the commitments that
have been made regarding the amount of prayer, and even the times of
prayer. The Additional Directives referred to in Annotation 6 add
further clarity to what is required.16 So the exercitant will not be
surprised if the one giving the Exercises seeks to discover whether these
commitments are being fulfilled.17
15
This absence of spiritual motions is often due to unconscious resistance that needs to be brought to light.
16
‘Additions for making the Exercises better and for finding more readily what one desires’, Exx 73. Ignatius
supplies Additions or Additional Directives for each of the Four Weeks. ‘The additions represent the
distillation of much experience and the text of the Exercises itself leaves no doubt about the importance
Ignatius attached to careful observance of them (cf. Exx 6, 90, 130, 160).’ (Michael Ivens, Understanding the
Spiritual Exercises: Text and Commentary [Leominster: Gracewing, 1998], 64. See also Brian Grogan, ‘To
Make the Exercises Better: The Additional Directions’, The Way Supplement 27 (1976), 15–26.
17
Before beginning the Exercises, Ignatius used to give Annotations 1, 20, 5 and 4 to the exercitant,
and, after the Foundation, Annotations 3, 11, 1 and 13. Directory Dictated to Father Juan Alonso de
20 Brian O’Leary
In ongoing spiritual direction a similar, but adapted, set of

commitments should be in place. This is what is meant by an initial
contract or covenant. At their first meeting, or at least before the director
formally accepts the other person for spiritual direction, a contract should
be agreed that is acceptable to both parties. This will cover issues such as
the frequency and length of meetings, and in some cases the question of
appropriate remuneration. But it should also include, again by mutual
agreement, a commitment on the directee’s part to a specified amount of
prayer and possibly a commitment to keeping a journal or notes as well.
The importance of this contract, from an Ignatian perspective, is that the
director is now free to challenge the directee, if necessary, on whether he
or she has been keeping the contract.
Flexibility in the Director

Growing out of this model of the direction relationship is a flexibility of
approach, which the Annotations also encourage. How the Exercises
are to be given is not decided a priori, but depends on the unique
personality and life history of the person involved. So we read:
The Spiritual Exercises have to be adapted to the dispositions of the

persons who wish to receive them, that is, to their age, education or
ability …. Again, that should be given to each one by which,
according to their wish to dispose themselves, he may be better able
to help themselves and to profit. (Exx 18)
Such flexibility is not confined to initial decisions about what a

person is able to undertake, but is an essential part of the director’s
approach throughout. During every single meeting, the one who gives
the Exercises cannot know beforehand what he or she will say or
suggest. Everything depends on the exercitant’s experience. The
director needs to be thoroughly familiar with the text of the Spiritual
Exercises, yet free to depart from that text should the needs of the
exercitant require it. The agenda is being set, under God’s guidance, by
the exercitant and not by the one who gives the Exercises. This level of
Vitoria, [21] 10, [24] 13, in On Giving the Spiritual Exercises: The Early Jesuit Manuscript Directories and
the Official Directory of 1599, translated and edited by Martin E. Palmer (St Louis: Institute of Jesuit
Sources, 1996), 21–22.
flexibility is integral to the giving of the Exercises, and it is readily

transferable to ongoing spiritual direction.18
Indeed flexibility is even more necessary in ongoing direction. The
one who gives the Exercises pays careful attention to the narrative
being presented and adapts to it, but nevertheless he or she is also
monitoring the dynamic of the Four Weeks. The person giving the
exercises has a framework within which to work, as well as exercises and
other suggestions of Ignatius on which to draw. There is a constant
interaction between the exercitant’s experience and the text, however
flexibly this may be applied. But in ongoing spiritual direction there is
no such text, and no such clear dynamic to guide the director. An
Ignatian director still draws on the Exercises, and on his or her own
experience of making and giving them. However, this happens in a
much more indirect way and is often more a matter of the overall
wisdom of the Exercises than any specific parts or teachings.
Furthermore, the prayer of a person in ongoing direction frequently
lacks focus, intentionality and intensity compared with prayer during
the Exercises. Especially in the Twentieth Annotation Exercises, the
daily meeting with an exercitant mostly concentrates on periods of
prayer during the previous 24 hours, as well as on what was going on in
between. This is relatively straightforward for an experienced director.
However, in ongoing direction, with monthly meetings, there is far
more to talk about in the person’s life, and their prayer is often very
diffuse. Formal prayer may no longer be central to the narrative and a
director may want to explore more how the directee is finding God in
the events of life. For this there is no specific framework.
18
The thinking of Ignatius is well illustrated in the Directory he dictated to Vitoria, [30] 19. ‘In
observing the rules or ten Additions which are given for making the Exercises well, care should be
taken to have them observed very exactly, as is directed, seeing to it that there is neither excess nor too
much laxity. The exercitants’ characters also need to be taken into account. Melancholic persons
should not be pressed too hard but given free rein with most of them; the same is true of persons who
are delicate and not much used to such things. But careful thought must be given to what will be most
helpful. I myself have employed leniency in these rules with some persons and it did them good; with
other I used considerable strictness, but as gently as possible, and I observed that by the Lord’s grace
this did them good also.’ This passage is substantially reproduced in the Official Directory of 1599,
chapter 15, [133] 9 (Palmer, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises, 23, and 316–317).
22 Brian O’Leary
Theological, Cultural and Other Differences

In today’s world the possibility that a director and a directee come from
very different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, or from different
Christian denominations, or that they hold different theological views
(especially on moral issues) can increase the difficulty of listening well
to one another. Such differences create both emotional and intellectual
challenges for both parties. Sitting opposite someone whose image of
God, or view of the Church, or sexual orientation, or cultural premises,
or political persuasion is radically different from one’s own can raise
strong and conflicting emotions. These emotions may impede a trusting
sharing of experience by the directee and an appropriate response by
the director. There are also the more familiar differences of gender, age
and economic class. All these differences, and their corresponding
difficulties, need to be bought to the surface, acknowledged and faced
rather than denied or covered over.19
Ignatius has wise words to say about such situations—perhaps because
he had been suspected of illuminism himself, or because he was aware of
the theological differences underlying the Protestant Reformation, or
simply because he understood human nature well. He wrote:
In order that both the one who is giving the Spiritual Exercises, and
the one who is receiving them, may more help and benefit themselves,
let it be presupposed that every good Christian is to be more ready to
save their neighbour’s proposition than to condemn it. If they cannot
save it, let them inquire how the other means it; and if they mean it
badly, let the one giving correct them with charity. If that is not
enough, let the one giving seek all the suitable means to bring the
other to mean it well, and save themselves. (Exx 22)
Ignatius is saying that without a genuine openness and a willingness to

enter the other’s frame of reference, no helpful conversation can take
place. Indeed, our desire must be to ‘save’, or justify, what the other
person is saying. In contemporary terms, he is asking that a hermeneutic
of generosity be brought to the encounter. He stresses the mutuality of
influence when such generosity is present. Commenting on the phrase,
‘to help and benefit each other’, Michael Ivens writes,
19
See the wide-ranging discussion of cross-cultural spiritual direction in Common Journey, Different
Paths, edited by Susan Rakoczy (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1992).
Though often referred to in the Directories in master-disciple terms,

the relationship is here described as one of co-operation. Director
and exercitant have a common project: that the exercitant find God
through the Spiritual Exercises. In working together towards this,
the one who gives and the one who receives are required to ‘help’
20
each other. The help is two-way.
Of course, Ignatius could not foresee all the complexities of today’s

world and his Presupposition does not solve, or even address, every
difficulty. In particular, he makes no explicit reference to the presence
in such encounters of those deep and turbulent emotions that make it
difficult to think or respond rationally, and which may need to be
brought to supervision. He writes as though the differences in question
simply existed on the level of ideas. Nevertheless, his succinct
comments are helpful in pointing us towards the attitude of mind and
heart that we need to bring to this increasingly common situation.
© Jesuit Retreat House, Cleveland, Oh
Different backgrounds: Men’s Homeless Retreat Programme, Cleveland, Ohio
20
Ivens, Understanding the Spiritual Exercises, 25.
24 Brian O’Leary
Fostering Desires 21
It is often said that to understand the purpose and get to the heart of an
Ignatian exercise one need only look to the grace being asked for and the
colloquy. In fact, the colloquy may be seen as an elaboration of the initial
prayer for the grace. The naming of the grace, the articulation of desire,
occurs towards the beginning of each period of prayer. ‘The Second
Prelude is to ask God our Lord for what I want and desire.’ 22 Every
Ignatian exercise is built on that ‘what I want and desire’ and grows out of
it. Desire is the basis of the dynamic that drives the Spiritual Exercises. It
ignites exercitants’ prayer, focuses their intentionality, sustains them in
times of desolation, reveals where their prayer is moving, and becomes
central to the narrative that they share with the director. Desire is
especially pivotal in the process of election or decision-making.
Once we grasp the centrality and the dynamic of desire in the
Exercises it becomes obvious how applicable it will be to ongoing spiritual
direction. Desires, however, are ambivalent and much discernment will be
needed. Especially in affluent societies, with their consumerist culture,
deeply human desires can be smothered or suffocated. Spiritual desires are
even more at risk. Both the deeply human and the spiritual are frequently
replaced by superficial desires for goods that are transitory and of no
lasting value. It is these superficial desires that then dominate our
consciousness. It is extraordinary how difficult many people find the
question: ‘What do you really want?’ No matter how intelligent and
articulate we may be, we are finding it increasingly difficult to get in touch
with our deepest and most authentic desires. A primary aim of Ignatian
spiritual direction is to draw people into their own centre, their own heart,
where these authentic desires lie.
As in the Exercises, desires fuel movement in ongoing direction.
The Ignatian director does not simply want to know ‘what is going on’,
but ‘what is going forward’. He or she will be attempting to tune in to
the movement of the Spirit in the directee, realising that desires can
21
On the role of desires in Ignatian spirituality, see E. Edward Kinerk, ‘Eliciting Great Desires: Their
Place in the Spirituality of the Society of Jesus’, Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits, 16/5 (November
1984), 1–29; Michael Ivens, ‘Desire and Discernment’, The Way Supplement, 95 (Summer 1999), 31–43;
Philip Endean, ‘To Reflect and Draw Profit’, The Way Supplement, 82 (Spring 1995), 84–95. For a more
general discussion of desires in spirituality, see Philip Sheldrake, Befriending Our Desires (London:
Darton, Longman and Todd, second revised edition, 2002).
22
Exx 48 and passim.
indicate the Spirit’s presence and the direction in which the Spirit is
urging the directee to travel. Without this ‘going forward’ the directee’s
inner life will be stalled, becalmed. As in Annotation 6, if this is so the
director may need to explore this absence and intervene accordingly.
Rules For Discernment 23

Probably the greatest resource that the Exercises offer to the ministry of
ongoing spiritual direction is the understanding contained in the Rules
for Discernment (Exx 313–336). A director who has internalised these
rules will apply them spontaneously in every encounter with a directee.
Although they may rarely be quoted verbatim, their influence will be
implicit in each response, query, clarification, suggestion or challenge
that is made to the directee’s narrative. The Rules will have the same
purpose as that given in the text of the Spiritual Exercises:
Rules for perceiving and knowing in some manner the different

movements which are caused in the soul the good, to receive them,
and the bad to reject them. And they are more proper for the first
week. (Exx 313)
Such help is invaluable for those who desire to seek and find God in the
complexities of their own psyches, their relationships, their
responsibilities and their evolving self-identity.24
Less frequently, but at key moments in life, a person will have to
face serious decisions. Here again, by combining the Rules for
Discernment with the wisdom and method that Ignatius offers in the
election process of the Exercises (Exx 169–189), a director can give
precious support to a directee at what is often a turbulent period. No
other Christian tradition has such clear and incisive guidelines for
decision-making as those found in the Spiritual Exercises. In a way,
Ignatian spiritual directors come into their own with a directee who
needs to make a decision. The director knows that Spirit-based
23
Within the large amount of writing on this topic, see two recent books by Timothy M. Gallagher, The
Discernment of Spirits: An Ignatian Guide for Everyday Living (New York: Crossroad, 2005) and Spiritual
Consolation: An Ignatian Guide for the Greater Discernment of Spirits (New York: Crossroad, 2007).
24
One might here point to the value of the Consciousness Examen as a daily exercise in discernment.
See Timothy M. Gallagher, The Examen Prayer: Ignatian Wisdom for Our Lives Today (New York:
Crossroad, 2006).
26 Brian O’Leary
© Lazy boi
decision-making is close to the very heart of what is specific to the
Ignatian charism.
Spirituality and Psychology

A fruitful dialogue has been taking place over the past half-century
between spiritual direction and the human sciences that have grown
out of the pioneering work of Freud, Jung and Adler, among others.
Training programmes for spiritual directors now have to include both
psychological theories and their application through various
psychotherapies and counselling techniques. Discussions take place
about the similarities and differences between spiritual direction and
these human sciences.25 From the 1970s onwards psychology has had a
strong influence on spiritual direction, as its insights and skills have
been incorporated into the older tradition. More recently, psychological
and counselling practitioners have begun to show a reciprocal interest
in learning from the spiritual tradition.
The influence of psychology on the ministry of spiritual direction
has in the main been positive. But some directors have allowed
psychology not to enrich, but to replace, the traditional understanding
of spiritual direction. The therapeutic model takes control, and the
focus is no longer on seeking the will of God so as to grow in union with
25
See Maureen Conroy, Growing in Love and Freedom: Personal Experiences of Counselling and Spiritual
Direction (Denville, NJ: Dimension Books, 1987).
God, but on the directee’s psychological integration. The prophetic

dimension, the cutting edge of the gospel challenge, is no longer
present and the religious orientation of spiritual direction has been lost.
Directors in the Ignatian tradition are less likely than some to
succumb in this way to the seduction of psychology. It remains a
component in their ongoing training and practice, but it will not take
over. This is because they remain rooted in the experience of the
Spiritual Exercises. Nobody can accuse Ignatius, or the text of the
Exercises, of simply advocating psychological wholeness. The entire
dynamic of the Exercises is geared to searching for and finding the will
of God in the concrete circumstances of a person’s life. They are totally
theocentric, having God our Creator and Lord at their centre, not the
creature—the exercitant. The Exercises are an experience of being
drawn more deeply into the Christian mystery. If psychological healing
takes place through the Exercises it will be welcomed as a gift from God,
but many people seek and find God, and serve him faithfully, in the
midst of their own continuing brokenness. Ignatian practitioners bring
the same convictions and the same wisdom to their ministry of ongoing
spiritual direction.
Different Spiritualities
As an Ignatian director, there is a significant difference between
working with a directee who shares the Ignatian tradition, and with a
person from a different tradition. For example, when I am faced with a
directee whose fundamental orientation is monastic, I see my role as
helping this person to live the monastic charism more authentically. It
would be unethical for me to attempt to draw the directee into the
Ignatian fold. Therefore, while I will inevitably call on my experience of
the Ignatian tradition (for that is what has made me who I am), I will
also be obliged to make use of whatever familiarity I have with the
monastic tradition. There will be emphases and nuances in the Ignatian
tradition that I will not raise: I cannot encourage involvement with the
world in a person whose vocation is withdrawal from the world. This
can be quite difficult for a director who is steeped in the Ignatian
tradition. I may need to restrain some of my spontaneous reactions to
what I am hearing and try to imagine myself into the monastic way of
living and praying. In a sense I will be working more out of the generic
model of spiritual direction than out of a specifically Ignatian model.
28 Brian O’Leary
The situation is different when the directee is already living out of

Ignatian spirituality, or even when a person is a so-called beginner
without any particular spiritual background. Here I can afford to be
more upfront with an Ignatian approach, fostering an apostolic
spirituality and emphasizing the process of becoming a contemplative in
the midst of action. I keep mission in mind as much as formal prayer,
the world and the universe as much as the person’s soul, growth in
freedom as much as liturgical worship. In this scenario there is a
oneness of vision, a coherence between director and directee that in
theory should make spiritual direction easier. In practice this may not
always be so.26
I have attempted to discuss specifically Ignatian spiritual direction
in the context of the renewal of this ministry within the Christian
community today. I have suggested that there exists a generic model to
which most practitioners adhere. However, different historical
traditions of spiritual direction modify or amplify this model in light of
their own inherited wisdom. Ignatian directors will carry an awareness
of the ecclesial nature of this ministry and will want to insist on its
theological dimension. From the Spiritual Exercises they will bring a
conviction of the central role of desire in the spiritual life, as well as
applying appropriately the Rules for Discernment. In the midst of the
multiplicity of approaches being practised today Ignatian directors can
be confident of the richness of their own tradition and its specificity.
But it is obvious that this should never make them self-sufficient or
arrogant. No one approach to spiritual direction has all the answers.
Brian O’Leary SJ, an Irish Jesuit, has spent the first half of his ordained ministry
on the team at Manresa Retreat House in Dublin, and the second half lecturing in
spirituality at the Milltown Institute, also in Dublin. He has recently retired and
works freelance in retreat-giving, lecturing and writing.
26
These issues are well addressed by Paul Nicholson in ‘Has Christ Been Parcelled Out?’ The Way
Supplement, 91 (Spring 1998), 101–111, at 108–109. The whole article raises similar questions to those
posed in this paper.
THE BEATITUDES AND
‘POVERTY OF SPIRIT’ IN
THE IGNATIAN
EXERCISES
Brendan Byrne
A RETREATANT ENTERING THE SECOND WEEK of Ignatius’ Spiritual

Exercises encounters a challenging set of petitions in the
colloquies characteristic of that week. Beginning with the Kingdom of
Christ meditation, he or she is urged to protest that ‘I want and desire,
and it is my deliberate determination … to imitate [Jesus] in bearing all
injuries and all abuse and all poverty of spirit’, so long as the Divine
Majesty is pleased ‘to choose and receive me to such life and state’ (Exx
98). In the meditation on the Two Standards, the retreatant prays to
Our Lady, in the first of three colloquies,
… that she may get me grace from Her Son and Lord that I may be
received under His standard; and first in the highest spiritual
poverty, and—if His Divine Majesty would be served and would
want to choose and receive me—not less in actual poverty; second,
in suffering contumely and injuries, to imitate Him more in them
(Exx 147).
The same triple colloquy is to be repeated in the meditation on the

Three Classes (see Exx 156). The prayers for the grace of desiring
contempt rather than honour come to a climax in the third of the
Degrees of Humility (Exx 168) that are to be considered immediately
before the Election concerning States of Life.
For the moment I should like to set aside the desire for contempt
and insult rather than honour, and concentrate simply upon poverty. I
have long been fascinated by the parallel between the Ignatian duality
of ‘poverty of spirit’ and ‘actual poverty’ and a similar duality appearing
in the first of the beatitudes recorded in Matthew’s (5:3–11) and Luke’s
The Way, 47/1–2 (Jan/April 2008), 29–46

30 Brendan Byrne
(6:20–23) Gospels. Where Matthew has Jesus begin ‘Blessed are the
poor in spirit’ (5:3a), the Lucan formulation is more simple and blunt:
‘Blessed are you who are poor’ (6:20b). If the Lucan reference is, as I
would argue, to the economically poor, then the Ignatian petition that
moves from ‘the highest spiritual poverty’ to ‘actual poverty’ (Exx 147)
seems to correspond to what one finds when moving from Matthew to
Luke. The formulation in the Spiritual Exercises suggests that Ignatius
considered ‘actual’ poverty (that is, economic poverty) a more radical
commitment than poverty of spirit—or at least that the latter, as an
interior disposition, might find its highest expression in the embrace of
actual poverty.1
But what did Ignatius mean by ‘poverty of spirit?’ And how does the
Ignatian phrase relate to the first beatitude in Matthew? Can some light
be shed on the challenging petition that Ignatius is placing before the
retreatant, in its movement from poverty of spirit to actual poverty, by
considering the formulations regarding the poor in the gospel
beatitudes? My thesis is that, whereas the four beatitudes in Luke
simply refer to people in four situations of disadvantage over which they
have no control, the Matthean formulations introduce an aspect of
choice regarding such situations. In this way they provide something of
a scriptural precedent for the ‘desire’ that Ignatius places before the
retreatant in the meditations of the Second Week. They locate that
desire firmly within the saving mission of Christ, continued in the life of
believers, to break the grip of dehumanising forces in the world and
reclaim human beings for the rule of God.
The Ignatian Petition

As we have seen, the formula ‘to be received … in the highest spiritual
poverty, and—if His Divine Majesty would be served and would want to
choose and receive me—not less in actual poverty’ (Exx 147), suggests
that Ignatius saw actual poverty as the higher state of life for the
1
The intensification seems to flow from the placement in Exx 147 (cf. also Exx 98 and Exx 168) of the
conditional clause (‘if His Divine Majesty would be served …’) before the reference to actual poverty—
in Spanish: ‘y primero en suma pobreza espiritual, y si su Divina Maiestad fuere servido y me quisiere elegir
y recibir, no ménos en la pobreza actual’ (italics mine). David L. Fleming provides a contemporary
reading of this as ‘following him in the highest spiritual poverty, and should God be pleased thereby and
want to choose and accept me, even [italics mine] in actual poverty’ (Draw Me into Your Friendship: A
Literal Translation and a Contemporary Reading of the Spiritual Exercises [St Louis: Institute of Jesuit
Sources, 1996], 89).
The Beatitudes and ‘Poverty of Spirit’ 31
Jesus Preaching, by Rembrandt
Christian—the situation envisaged in the Lucan beatitude. The

proviso, that Ignatius never fails to insert, shows that for him voluntary
poverty was something that presupposed divine choice and calling.
With the Election particularly in view, Ignatius explores the disposition
that could make someone ready to embrace actual poverty, encouraging
the retreatant towards it in order to make him or her more free to hear
and respond to the divine call, should such a call be issued.
The Jesuit patristic scholar Brian E. Daley has devoted a substantial
study to the background of this area of the Spiritual Exercises,
specifically the Three Degrees of Humility.2 Daley traces the Christian
notion of humility through the tradition: from its biblical roots, through
the patristic and medieval period up to the time of Ignatius. In some
tension with the ideal of ‘magnanimity’ (an honest and realistic
appreciation of one’s qualities and strengths) stemming from the Greek
philosophical tradition, this specifically Christian notion consists in
2
Brian E. Daley, ‘ “To Be More like Christ”: The Background and Implications of “Three Kinds of
Humility” ’, Studies in Jesuit Spirituality, 27/1 (January 1995), 1–39.
32 Brendan Byrne
recognising one’s creaturely dependence upon God and imitating

Christ’s self-emptying embrace of the human condition to the extreme
of the cross. Coming to the Third Degree of Humility, Daley writes:
The tendency of the Second Week … to see humility as the central

characteristic of the saving history of the Incarnation here reaches a
kind of climax in the direct appeal to let a desire for this same
humility—expressed, as always, primarily in terms of poverty and
lack of honour or social status—be the guiding affective element in
the retreatant’s decision on how to shape his or her own saving
history, how to realise his or her own ‘incarnation’ as Jesus’ disciple
3
and companion.
Daley also notes that the kind of humility presented here ‘is more a
question of desires, of preferences, and even prejudices than it is of
behaviour’.4 However,
… in cases where poverty and lack of personal honour seem not to

limit the effectiveness of my efforts to make God better known and
loved … I will prefer them for myself, simply as a way of being more
5
closely and concretely conformed to the model of Jesus.
In this way choosing humility was, for Ignatius, clearly a way of speaking
about love: a desire for the most intimate union with Christ and a
personal sharing in his love that ‘surpasses knowledge’ (Ephesians
3:19).6 It also represents a desire to enter into and allow one’s life to be
absorbed by the divine economy of salvation, in which Christ set aside
his divine glory and embraced the depths of the human condition,
becoming obedient unto death, for the salvation of the world.7
There are difficulties that can be urged against this Ignatian
aspiration towards poverty, insult, injury—against the whole complex
indicated as the Third Degree of Humility—on the psychological,
theological and even ethical levels.8 But I do not propose to enter into
3
Daley, ‘ “To Be More like Christ” ’, 28.
4
Daley, ‘ “To Be More like Christ” ’, 28–29.
5
Daley, ‘ “To Be More like Christ” ’, 30.
6
Daley, ‘ “To Be More like Christ” ’, 33; cf. also Michael Ivens, Understanding the Spiritual Exercises:
Text and Commentary (Leominster: Gracewing, 1998), 126.
7
Cf. Daley, ‘ “To Be More like Christ” ’, 33. Daley acknowledges here his debt to the great theologian
of the Exercises Erich Przywara.
8
In ‘On Poverty with Christ Poor’ (below, 47–66), Philip Endean frankly confronts what he sees as
serious psychological and ethical problems raised by this feature of the Second Week, where the
these questions here. What I should like to do is to turn to the biblical

material and attempt to situate this Ignatian aspiration in relation to
the beatitudes and to the Matthean Sermon on the Mount.
The Beatitudes
The literary form recognised as ‘beatitude’ (Greek makarismos) occurs
in both classical and biblical (Old Testament) literature as a declaration
pronouncing someone ‘happy’ on the basis of some good fortune. This
good fortune can be simply success in an everyday or worldly sense
(deliverance from danger, military victory, abundance of food or wealth,
large posterity, etc.). But in the biblical literature, especially in the
Psalms and Wisdom books, it is most frequently a moral quality (Psalm
1) or a particular blessing from God (Psalm 32). In this sense the
declaration begins to move towards commendation of a particular way
of life, and so becomes something of an exhortation.9
Towards the close of the Old Testament period there was an
increasing tendency to cast religious thought in apocalyptic mode, with
a distinctive eschatology involving a sharp distinction between the
present unhappy situation of the faithful and the blessings of the age to
come. This brought a new type of beatitude into play. Now those
pronounced blessed are people presently in distress. Their blessedness
consists solely in hope for the future.10 Where the earlier form of the
beatitude tended towards exhortation, now the accent is rather upon
consolation, reassurance and encouragement for those presently
suffering. As Jan Lambrecht puts it,
… a future salvific state is indicated, but the possession of this hope

can cause happiness now in the midst of misfortune. Certainly, the
suffering does not disappear, but it is illuminated and transformed
retreatant is urged to pray for and desire poverty, insult and injury—issues that he believes have been
largely ignored or inadequately dealt with in recent study of the Exercises. I am grateful to Fr Endean for
making available the text of his paper in advance of publication—and also to his reminder concerning
the work of Brian Daley.
9
Cf. Robert A. Guelich, The Sermon on the Mount: A Foundation for Understanding (Waco: Word
Books, 1982), 63–66. The section of this book devoted to the beatitudes (62–118) offers one of the
most comprehensive and lucid discussions of the topic in English. See also Dennis Hamm, The
Beatitudes in Context: What Luke and Matthew Meant (Wilmington, De: Glazier, 1990), 7–12.
10
See Daniel 12: 12, ‘Happy are those who persevere and attain the thousand three hundred thirty-five
days’; and Isaiah 30: 18, ‘For the LORD is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for him’.
34 Brendan Byrne
because one knows the outcome. Consequently, one is rightly

11
exhorted to rejoice now with a visible, religious, eschatological joy.
It is important to keep this distinction between two forms of

beatitude—the wisdom type, orientated towards the present, and the
apocalyptic type, pronouncing a blessing on the present in view of the
future—clearly in mind as we consider the gospel beatitudes. At first
sight it is easy to see the Matthean list as conforming to the wisdom
form, in which exhortation is primary, and the Lucan one conforming to
the apocalyptic form, with its stress on encouragement. But closer
investigation reveals the matter to be somewhat more complex.12
The Lucan Beatitudes

In Luke’s Gospel those called ‘blessed’ are not in situations in which
they have any choice. In a stark second-person address, Jesus declares:
Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed
are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when
people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame
you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for
joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven. (Luke 6:20–23)
Here we clearly have to do with the apocalyptic beatitude in its pure

form. Those in highly disadvantaged situations are deemed blessed,
even ‘now’ in their misery, because of the certainty, in God’s
faithfulness, that the situation will be reversed.
To declare blessed those who are destitute, hungry, weeping and
persecuted is highly provocative. From the world’s perspective it makes
no sense at all. Jesus is not endorsing these predicaments as something
desirable: in themselves they are material evils that all right-minded
11
Jan Lambrecht, The Sermon on the Mount: Proclamation and Exhortation (Wilmington, De: Glazier,
1985), 54; cf. also Guelich, Sermon on the Mount, 64–65.
12
While the third person address of the Matthean beatitudes, by contrast with the more direct,
second-person address of the Lucan ones, adheres more closely to the traditional biblical form, it is
generally agreed that the first three, at least, of the Lucan set (blessing the poor, the hungry and the
presently weeping) reflect the context of Jesus’ ministry; cf. John Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the
Historical Jesus, volume 2, Mentor, Message, and Miracles (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 334–336. It is
not inconceivable that Jesus expressed a warning of persecution to come (Matthew 5: 10 and Luke
6: 22), but the origin of this beatitude is normally seen as lying in the experience of the early Church.
people should strive to

eradicate or at least to
combat. To call people in
these situations ‘blessed’
only makes sense if the
God who has been
portrayed, from the
beginning of biblical
revelation, as taking the
side of the poor and
the disadvantaged will
do so again.13 We find
here a sense of reversal
that rings through much
of Luke’s Gospel: in
Mary’s Magnificat (1:46–
55, especially vv.51–53);
in the parable of the
Rich Man and Lazarus
(16:19–31); and in the
advice to take the
lowest place at banquets
(14:7–14).14
In its Lucan form,
there is nothing to The Sermon on the Mount, from a fifteenth-century
suggest that the first German missal
beatitude, ‘Blessed are
you who are poor’, does anything other than declaring blessed those
who are economically poor. There is no need to ‘spiritualise’ this
beatitude, any more than there is a need to spiritualise the other
three—or, a fortiori, the corresponding ‘Woes’.15 Those Luke has in
mind—in direct line with the tradition stemming from Jesus—are the
13
See Exodus 22: 21–23; Deuteronomy 10: 17–19; Jeremiah 7: 5–7; Amos 2: 6–7; Psalm 146: 9; etc.
14
Cf. Brendan Byrne, The Hospitality of God: A Reading of Luke’s Gospel (Collegeville, Mn: Liturgical,
2000), 26, 123, 134, 136–137.
15
Cf. Jacques Dupont, Les béatitudes, volume 3, Les évangelistes (Paris: J. Gabalda, 1973), 43, 47, 205–
206; Lambrecht, Sermon on the Mount, 71; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I–IX (New
York: Doubleday, 1981), 631.
36 Brendan Byrne
actual poor. The Greek word ptôchos is a strong term meaning people
who are destitute and have to rely totally on the support of others to
survive.16 These others may include God, but this does not necessarily
import a religious tone into the concept of the ‘poor’ itself.17 Luke’s
concern for the poor and his insistence that attachment to riches
obstructs our response to the Kingdom are well recognised.18 God will
reverse the circumstances of the poor, not because they are virtuous or
particularly devout but simply because, in line with the long biblical
tradition, God has taken on their cause. If the disciples find themselves
poor, hungry, weeping and reviled because of their adherence to the
gospel, then they should rejoice because God has their cause in hand.
The Matthean Beatitudes

Before considering the beatitudes in Matthew, it is important to take
careful note of the context in which they occur. The traditional
division of the Gospel, that begins a fresh chapter (chapter 5) at the
point when Jesus ascends the mountain, sits down and starts to speak
after his disciples have approached him (vv.1–2), can make us fail to
notice the wider audience of the sermon, mentioned at the close of
chapter 4 (vv.23–25). This audience consists of great crowds of
afflicted people who have come from all over Palestine, from the
Dekapolis (the Greek-speaking cities ranging in an arc around the
north of Galilee), and from across the Jordan. The Gospel lingers at
length upon the descriptions of the ailments of these people, who
become the objects of Jesus’ power to heal.
Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and

proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease
and every sickness among the people …. and they brought to him
all the sick, those who were afflicted with various diseases and pains,
16
Cf. Guelich, Sermon on the Mount, 68; Walter Bauer, A Greek–English Lexicon of the New Testament
and Other Early Christian Literature, edited and revised by Frederick William Danker, third edition
(Chicago: Chicago UP, 2000), 896.
17
This is to disagree here with Hamm (Beatitudes, 11), who in the end finds little difference between
the Matthean and the Lucan formulation; cf. also W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, Matthew: A
Critical and Exegetical Commentary (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1988–97), volume 1, 444.
18
See Byrne, Hospitality of God, 114–115.
demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics, and he cured them.

19
(Matthew 4:23–24)
It is in fact in view of this afflicted crowd that Jesus ascends the

mountain to deliver the sermon to his more immediate disciples: ‘When
Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain …’ (5:1). The disciples
are, then, to hear the sermon like ordinands addressed in front of a
congregation. They are going to be told who they must be and how they
must live in order to benefit the afflicted mass of people down below,
who are allowed to ‘overhear’ the instruction that Jesus is about to give.
This sense that Jesus’ words, and more particularly the beatitudes,
are intended to teach the disciples to be something for other people is
reinforced in Matthew’s account by the two images that immediately
follow the beatitudes. The disciples are told that they are ‘the salt of the
earth’ that must not lose its savour (v.13) and ‘the light of the world’
that must not be hidden (vv.14–15). By living in the way that Jesus
commends, the disciples will not only be blessed themselves, but will
also be a blessing to an afflicted world that sorely needs help.
Christ Healing the Sick, by Mathieu Ignace van Bree
19
Matthew’s Gospel places great stress upon Jesus as healer; cf. Brendan Byrne, Lifting the Burden:
Reading Matthew’s Gospel in the Church Today (Collegeville, Mn: Liturgical, 2004), 49–50, 78–79.
38 Brendan Byrne
Matthew has a set of nine beatitudes, unlike Luke, who has only four,
complemented by corresponding ‘Woes’ (6:24–26). The ninth (vv.11–12)
is really a rather prolix and formless repetition of the eighth (v.10); its
inclusion may reflect Matthew’s predilection for presenting material in
sets of three or multiples of three. Apart from this final beatitude, the
remainder form two sets of four, each set concluding with a reference to
the key Matthean notion of ‘righteousness’. Four of the Matthean
beatitudes (‘the poor in spirit’ [1]; ‘those who mourn’ [2]; ‘those who
hunger and thirst for righteousness’ [4]; ‘those who are persecuted for
righteousness’ sake’ [8]) have matches in the Lucan set of four (‘you who
are poor’; ‘you who weep’; ‘you who are hungry’; ‘when people hate you’),
which suggests that they follow an original tradition more closely.
Matthew, then, or the tradition to which he was specifically indebted,
would have expanded the original four with considerable input from the
Psalms. The third beatitude, ‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit
the earth’, is a virtual quotation from Psalm 37:11, while a phrase from the
messianic prophetic text Isaiah 61:2 (‘… to comfort all who mourn’)
seems to provide the language of the second beatitude, ‘Blessed are those
who mourn, for they will be comforted’.20
The beatitudes—and indeed the sermon as a whole—only really
make sense in relation to a distinctive vision of God (the Father) that
Jesus presupposes throughout. To be meek rather than grasping (5:5);
to disarm violence with generosity rather than retaliation
To live in (5:38–42); to love enemies rather than hate them (5:43–47):
this vulnerable this amounts to a life of great vulnerability in the world’s terms.
way only It is, however, to be ‘perfect’ as the ‘Heavenly Father is perfect’
makes sense in (5:48).21 This life reflects the nature of the God who stands
relation to God behind Jesus’ humble, burden-bearing mission to redeem the
world. To live in this vulnerable way only makes sense in
relation to God, and to God’s fidelity, which will fulfil what is promised
in the second half of each beatitude.
In this way the Matthean beatitudes display features of both forms
of the beatitude that emanate from the biblical and later traditions.
20
Guelich sees the influence of Isaiah 61 as pervasive in the Matthean beatitudes: see Sermon on the
Mount, 71–75. Meier, Marginal Jew, volume 2, 380 n. 124, is less convinced; so also Davies and Allison,
Matthew, volume 1, 445. It is noteworthy that, unlike Luke (see 4: 16–21), Matthew makes no explicit
citation of the Isaian text (pace 11: 5).
21
In this statement, the stress falls upon the little word ‘as’; cf. Byrne, Lifting the Burden, 62.
They conform to the older wisdom type in having an ethical-

exhortatory aspect, commending attitudes and behaviour that a person
can freely choose. And they conform to the apocalyptic type in
promising vindication and reward to those who adopt the vulnerable
pattern of life being commended.22
Matthew’s ‘Poor in Spirit’

Focusing now more directly upon the first Matthean beatitude, what are
we to make of the formulation ‘blessed are the poor in spirit’? What does
the phrase ‘in spirit’ add? Is this a ‘spiritualisation’ of an original, starker
beatitude understood in a purely economic sense? Does a reference to
actual poverty still remain? The matter is highly controversial.23 This first
beatitude appears in an extended list, each member of which refers
primarily to a subjective disposition rather than an objective situation of
disadvantage. The context, then, would suggest such a spiritualisation.
Moreover, parallel phrases elsewhere, in the psalms and other biblical
literature, also suggest that in the phrase ‘poor in spirit’ the stress lies upon
‘spirit’, so that the phrase would refer to those whose ‘spirits’ are ‘poor’ in
the sense of humble.24 By far the most prevalent interpretation, from
patristic times onwards, is one in which ‘poor’ is interpreted
metaphorically so that the phrase becomes virtually a synonym for ‘the
humble’, with no reference to actual poverty.25
Not all are convinced, however, that a connection with actual,
material poverty is lacking in the Matthean formulation.26 Virtually
22
Mark Alan Powell, ‘Matthew’s Beatitudes: Reversals and Rewards of the Kingdom’, Catholic Biblical
Quarterly, 58/3 (1996), 460–479, sees the first four Matthean beatitudes as conforming to the apocalyptic
form, the second four to the wisdom form. The discussion is helpful but the neat division seems forced in
some respects; cf. Ulrich Luz, Matthew 1–7: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 193 n. 77.
23
Dupont provides a critical survey of views, ancient (patristic) and modern, in his magisterial work: see Les
béatitudes, volume 3, 385–471; also helpful is the succinct survey given by Luz, Matthew 1–7, 190–193.
24
Cf. Dupont, Les béatitudes, volume 3, 386–399; Guelich, Sermon on the Mount, 72–73. This
interpretation received a considerable boost from the Dead Sea Scrolls with the appearance in the War
Scroll of a Hebrew phrase ‘anwy-ruah (1QM 14: 7) that seemed to correspond exactly to the Greek
ptôchoi en pneumati in this sense; see Dupont, Les béatitudes, volume 3, 389–391, 462–465. The context
of the fragmentary Qumran text makes equally likely, however, a reference to a crushed spirit (that
God has strengthened), rather than a disposition towards humility.
25
So especially Dupont, Les béatitudes, volume 3, 457–471, at the conclusion of his survey, by far the
most thorough undertaken by exegetes.
26
I leave aside here a view that sees in the Greek phrase ‘poor in spirit’ a reference to the ‘people of the
land’, the ‘little people’ despised by the religious leaders in the Palestine of Jesus’ day; likewise the more
‘psychological’ view that sees a reference to those aware of their ‘spiritual misery’; for a critique see
Dupont, Les béatitudes, volume 3, 429–450.
40 Brendan Byrne
everyone would accept that Matthew, in line with his overall

presentation of the beatitudes, has broadened the concept of poverty to
embrace an interior disposition. The issue is whether that interior
disposition simply refers to humility, or whether it relates to the
embrace or acceptance of actual poverty. Interpretations along the
latter lines run mainly in two directions. There are those who see the
phrase ‘in spirit’ as connoting a spirit of detachment from riches,
whether a person actually possesses wealth or not. Secondly, there is the
view that sees a reference to actual poverty voluntarily embraced. Each
of these views occurs in both ancient and modern interpretation.27
Among more recent interpreters, Jacques Dupont notes that the idea of
an interior detachment from wealth, while enjoying considerable favour
amongst spiritual writers generally,28 has found less favour with
exegetes.29 The interpretation in terms of a voluntary embrace of actual
poverty has been defended in recent times most vigorously by Ernst
Lohmeyer (1890–1946),30 in whose view the phrase ‘in spirit’ (en
pneumati) does not spiritualise the concept of poverty but rather
suggests that the Spirit gives people the inner capacity to ‘sell all and
give to the poor’. For Lohmeyer it is this connotation of an inner,
spiritual capacity that the Matthean formulation brings to the sense of
actual poverty in the Lucan beatitude.31
The idea of voluntarily embracing poverty under the influence of
the Spirit has clear resonances with the Ignatian formula. Yet, in terms
27
With regard to interior detachment Dupont cites Clement of Alexandria, Severus of Antioch,
Simeon the New Theologian and, to some degree, Augustine and Leo the Great, while with regard to
the voluntary embrace of material poverty he cites Basil of Caesarea, Chromatius of Aquila and
Gregory of Nyssa (Les béatitudes, volume 3, 411–418).
28
Dupont, Les béatitudes, volume 3, 455.
29
Two exegetes who do endorse the view are Alfred Durand, Évangile selon Saint Matthieu (Paris:
Beauchesne, 1929), 67–68 and Joseph Bonsirven, Le Regne de Dieu (Paris: Aubier, 1957), 92–92; cf.
Dupont, Les béatitudes, volume 3, 455.
30
Ernst Lohmeyer was deprived of his professorship by the Nazis for defending Jewish colleagues. He
was arrested and executed by the Soviet secret police during the post-war occupation of Germany on
19 September 1946. In German academic circles he is regarded as a ‘martyr theologian’ who gave his
life for the values he drew from the New Testament.
31
Ernst Lohmeyer, Das Evangelium nach Matthäus, edited by Werner Schmauch (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1967), 83. For this view Dupont also cites (and critiques) Herman
Ridderbos, André Feuillet, Georg Eicholz, I. Herrmann (Les béatitudes, volume 3, 420). The Austrian
scholar Karl Schubert also adopted this view on the basis of what he believed to be a similar embrace of
voluntary poverty in the quasi-monastic community of Qumran; see ‘The Sermon on the Mount and
the Qumran Texts’, in The Scrolls and the New Testament, edited by Krister Stendahl (New York:
Harper, 1957), 118–128. Such a ‘monastic’ view of the community behind the Dead Sea Scrolls is
largely discredited today; cf. Dupont, Les béatitudes, volume 3, 425–426.
Jesus Teaches about Wealth
of strict exegesis, such an interpretation of the Matthean ‘poor in spirit’

presents difficulty from a linguistic point of view. Dupont points to the
fact that the parallel beatitudes in Matthew are clearly to be understood
metaphorically: ‘hunger and thirst’ (v.6) do not imply physical hunger
and thirst; and ‘pure in heart’ (v.8) cannot be restricted to a desire for
bodily purity alone.32
Nonetheless, it seems too simplistic to read ‘poor in spirit’ as a bare
reference to humility without any connotation of actual poverty.33
Robert A. Guelich, for example, draws a parallel with the eighth
beatitude (v.10): ‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for
righteousness’ sake’. Persecution is an objective condition rather than a
subjective attitude. At the risk of being over-subtle, I would like to
32
Dupont, Les béatitudes, volume 3, 425, 428–429; cf. also Davies and Allison, Matthew, volume 1, 444.
33
Lambrecht, for example, considers that Dupont relies too heavily upon the Hebrew background:
‘One may not assume that Matthew and his readers understood the Greek phrase in the Hebrew sense’
(Sermon on the Mount, 65).
42 Brendan Byrne
suggest that the Matthean ‘poor in spirit’ can mean something in

between the alternatives mentioned above: the interior attitude of
detachment and the voluntary embrace of actual poverty. Within a
wider attitude of detachment from wealth, it would include a bias
towards actual poverty, a desire for actual poverty, whether or not the
person were already living in a state of actual poverty.
The Matthean Beatitudes: The Vulnerable Way of the Kingdom

As I have already indicated, the Matthean beatitudes, broadly speaking,
do not address situations in which people find themselves willy-nilly.
Rather, they pronounce a blessing on those who have rendered
themselves vulnerable or disadvantaged in some way.
The second beatitude, ‘Blessed are those who mourn’ (v.4), could
seem to be an exception, in that ‘mourning’ would not seem to be a
matter of choice. It is significant, however, that Matthew has selected—
or received from his tradition—the Greek word penthountes, translated
as mourn, rather than weep (klaiontes) as in Luke (6:21b). Whereas
‘weep’ would simply indicate a response to the personal experience of
pain, loss or deprivation, ‘mourn’ evokes a sense of sorrow and
sympathy for distress on a wider scale.34 Those who ‘mourn’ in this sense
are people who, whatever their own personal circumstances, are
sensitive to the pain of others.
The third beatitude, ‘Blessed are the meek’ (v.5; and cf. Psalm 37:11),
is particularly open to misunderstanding if the adjective is taken in its
common English sense. The Greek word praus denotes a gentleness
proceeding from inner strength—the opposite of being grasping, wanting
to ‘have it all now’ at the expense of others. The meek in this sense do not
see life as a competition; they can choose to step back and let others go
forward. The Matthean Jesus chooses this term to describe himself: ‘Take
my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in
heart, and you will find rest for your souls’ (11:29).
In the fourth beatitude (v.6), ‘those who hunger and thirst for
righteousness’ (dikaiosynê), it is tempting to give the Greek word its
traditional Catholic translation of justice. Then one can find here a
blessing upon those who dedicate themselves to the pursuit of social
34
Cf. Davies and Allison, Matthew, volume 1, 448.
justice. ‘Righteousness’ is, however, a technical term in Matthew. It

describes living or aspiring to live according to the correct norm in view of
one’s covenant relationship with God and with fellow human beings.35 In
Matthew’s Jewish frame of reference that norm is essentially expressed in
observance of the Law of Moses (Torah). For Matthew, however, this
observance is authoritatively reinterpreted by Jesus, for whom the
demands of justice and mercy are paramount. Righteousness consists in
doing what God wants, as illustrated and enacted above all in the life of
Jesus.36 To ‘hunger and thirst for righteousness’, then, can be understood
in both a passive and an active sense. It can mean longing that God’s will
be done, that God’s rule come in the sense of the second petition of the
Lord’s Prayer (6:10); it can also, more actively, have the sense of longing
that one’s life be taken up into and become part of the entire economy of
salvation pursued by the Son of God. Since the fulfilment of justice in the
world is an essential element of that economy, in a roundabout kind of
way, ‘to hunger and thirst for righteousness’ is indeed to dedicate one’s life
to the promotion of justice in the world.37
The remaining beatitudes all connote a similar acceptance of
vulnerability for the sake of others. To be ‘merciful’ (v.7) is to choose
understanding, compassion and forgiveness, where in strict justice one
could take a harder line. In this connection the
Matthean Jesus appeals twice to Hosea 6:6 to indicate Acceptance of
that mercy is what God wants (9:13; 12:7; cf. the parable vulnerability for
of the Unforgiving Servant, 18:23–35; also ‘the weightier the sake of others
matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith’, 23:23).
‘Pure of heart’ (v.8) reflects language taken from the pilgrim psalm,
Psalm 24 [LXX 23], v.4, v.6), where the context suggests those who can
stand in complete honesty and integrity before God.38 Such persons do
not try to surround themselves with the false protection afforded by
pretence or deceit. While the reference is primarily to openness before
God, such persons also present a similar vulnerable openness before
human beings. ‘Peacemakers’ (v.9) undertake a (usually costly)
commitment to bringing about harmony and reconciliation as opposed
to conflict, violence and war.
35
Cf. Luz, Matthew 1–7, 195–196; Guelich, Sermon on the Mount, 84–87.
36
See Byrne, Lifting the Burden, 39–40.
37
Cf. Guelich, Sermon on the Mount, 103.
38
Cf. Guelich, Sermon on the Mount, 90.
44 Brendan Byrne
The two closing beatitudes (v.10 and v.11) address, with some
variation in terminology, the experience of persecution. In both cases the
persecuted find themselves in such a situation because of a prior choice:
to adhere to righteousness, in the Matthean sense of commitment to
the path traced out by Jesus (v.10), or simply to affirm their personal
union with him (v.11).39 Once again, and climactically, the blessing falls
upon those who have freely chosen to adhere closely to Jesus and his
saving mission on behalf of the afflicted mass of the world.
In reviewing the Matthean beatitudes, I have not so far
considered the second part of each one: the eschatological vindication
or reward promised to those who have been commended. In this
respect the Matthean
beatitudes adhere to
the apocalyptic form.
The central series of
beatitudes, from the
second to the seventh,
express this future
vindication in language
suggestive of conven-
tional Jewish hopes for
the messianic age.40 But
in the first and eighth
beatitudes the formu-
lation ‘theirs is the
Kingdom of Heaven’
(v.3, v.10) is expressed
in the present tense,
reflecting the idea that
the Rule of God is at
once a present gift and
a future destination.41
The Sermon on the Mount, from the Prayerbook of It is, here and now, a
Hildegard of Bingen free offer of renewed
39
Cf. Powell, ‘Matthew’s Beatitudes’, 474.
40
Cf. Byrne, Lifting the Burden, 56.
41
Byrne, Lifting the Burden, 35–37, 48; Guelich, Sermon on the Mount, 76–79.
relationship with God; and it will be the promised consummation when,

with the reign of evil finally overcome, the faithful will enjoy life with
God and the transformed existence that was always the Creator’s
intention for human beings. The resurrection of Jesus, as the
vindication of the One who became ‘obedient to the point of death’
(Philippians 2:8) to set the world free from the grip of evil, is the ‘first
fruits’ (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:20) of the triumph of God’s rule. In the
power of the Spirit, believers see that saving event as the manifestation
of the Father’s fidelity to the Son who made himself vulnerable to evil
for the rescue of the world. They can hope that the God who remained
faithful to the Son will remain faithful to them when, in imitation of
him and union with him, they too make themselves vulnerable to evil as
part of the same mission.
Clearly, I have moved here beyond anything explicit in the
Matthean beatitudes. I do not believe, however, that there is any good
reason for excluding a christological implication. The path of ‘righteous-
ness’ that Jesus is commending in the beatitudes and in the Sermon as a
whole is simply the path that he himself has followed. All dispositions
and situations in the beatitudes apply par excellence and exemplarily to
him.42 If we recall how the beatitudes are ‘framed’ by the vision of the
afflicted crowd (4:21–23) and by the images of ‘salt’ and ‘light’ (5:13–16),
we can see that in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus was commending to
his immediate disciples a way of living that will build their lives into his
‘righteousness’ and hence into the sweep of his saving mission for the
world. It is, like his own, a vulnerable way of life in terms of this world’s
values and expectations —specifically in its preference for the vulnera-
bility of actual poverty over the protection of wealth. But it is a ‘blessed’
way of life, both because of the fidelity of the Father and also because
those who become vulnerable in union with Jesus can be a blessing for
the afflicted. It is the vulnerable who make life safe for humanity—or,
to express the matter more appropriately—who humanise the world
under the grace of God.
42
Cf. Jesus’ self-description in Matthew 11:28–30; also his fulfilment of the ‘burden-bearing’ role of the
Servant in 8: 16–17 and 12: 15–21.
46 Brendan Byrne
The Matthean Beatitudes and Ignatius

What I have been attempting to suggest here is that the desire that
Ignatius commends in the petitions of the Second Week, leading up to
the Third Degree of Humility, is essentially one with that which Jesus
was commending to his disciples in the Matthean beatitudes. When
Ignatius wrote of being received ‘in the highest spiritual poverty … and
… not less in actual poverty’ he was truly in line with the Matthean
formulation as understood in the light of current biblical scholarship.
Ignatius, as a person and a Christian of his time, may have been
innocent of the more critical findings of that scholarship but his insight
is fully in accord with it. When directors explain these
demanding exercises today it may help for them to know (and perhaps
to place before those they are guiding) that what retreatants are
pondering and being invited to desire is nothing more nor less than
living according to the beatitudes, in deep personal union with Christ
and commitment to his saving mission.43
Brendan Byrne SJ, teaches New Testament at the Jesuit Theological College,
Parkville (Melbourne), Australia. He was a member of the Pontifical Biblical
Commission from 1990 to 1996 and is editor of the theological journal Pacifica.
43
This sense of involvement in Christ’s saving mission may go some way to meet the charge launched
against the petition in the colloquies of the Second Week by J. L. Segundo (The Christ of the Ignatian
Exercises, edited and translated by John Drury [Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987]), who complains (54–61,
100–101) of a ‘christological vacuum’ and a sense that the retreatant is being placed in a situation of
personal ascetical ‘test’ rather than co-opted for a way of life that may truly address the situation of the
world.
ON POVERTY WITH
CHRIST POOR
Philip Endean
I encourages us to relate to Christ in a quite distinctive way., The

N THE SECOND WEEK OF THE SPIRITUAL EXERCISES Ignatius
key
exercises—the Kingdom, the Two Standards and the Three Classes—
end with similar, complex petitions.1 The culminating expression comes
in the third of the Three Kinds of Humility. After the first humility, of
keeping the law of God and avoiding mortal sin, and the second, of
perfect Ignatian indifference, we read:
The third is most perfect humility; namely, when—including the

first and second, and the praise and glory of the Divine Majesty
being equal—in order to imitate and be more actually like Christ
our Lord, I want and choose poverty with Christ poor rather than
riches, opprobrium with Christ replete with it rather than honours;
and to desire to be rated as worthless and a fool for Christ, who first
2
was held as such, rather than wise or prudent in this world. (Exx 167)
Alongside such passages from Spiritual Exercises, there is also a key

section in the Examen, a document about admitting new candidates to
the Society of Jesus, where this grace of the Second Week, in a yet more
complex articulation, appears as an ideal:
Likewise one should very much draw the attention of those being
examined (cherishing it and pondering it before our Creator and
Lord) to how great a degree it helps and profits in the spiritual life to
1
These exercises of course have rather different functions—on this the relevant sections of Michael
Ivens, Understanding the Spiritual Exercises: Text and Commentary (Leominster: Gracewing, 1998) are
masterly.
2
Translations from Spiritual Exercises are based on the literal translation of Elder Mullan, reproduced
in David L. Fleming, Draw Me Into Your Friendship: The Spiritual Exercises: A Literal Translation and a
Contemporary Reading (St Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996). Other translations are my own
unless otherwise stated.
The Way, 47/1–2 (Jan/April 2008), 47–66

48 Philip Endean
abominate, completely and not in part, whatever the world loves

and embraces; and to allow and desire with all possible force
whatever Christ our Lord has loved and embraced. Just as worldly
people who follow the world love and seek with such diligence
honours, reputation and the esteem of a big name on earth, as the
world teaches them—so those who are moving in the Spirit and are
truly following Christ our Lord love and desire intensely the
complete opposite: i.e. to dress in the same clothing and livery as
their Lord because of due love and reverence. So much so that,
where there would be no offence to his Divine Majesty, nor any sin
imputed to the neighbour, they would desire to suffer injuries, false
witnesses, affronts, and to be held and esteemed as crazy (not
themselves giving any cause for it), as a way of desiring to resemble
and imitate in some way our Creator and Lord Jesus Christ—dressing
themselves in his clothing and livery …. (Examen 4.44 [101])
Clearly, Ignatius is expressing something dear to his heart. According

to Joseph de Guibert, writing around 1940, all reliable interpreters see here
the quintessence of Ignatius’ thought.3 But just what is Ignatius saying
here? What can it amount to for those who live out of the Exercises
today? Is it a teaching which we can honestly affirm and live by?
Ignatius’ Demands
There are five key features in this text that any sensible interpretation
needs somehow to respect.
Desiring the Negative
First and foremost, Ignatius is encouraging us actively to desire poverty,
humiliations and insults, to love and desire them ‘intensely’, indeed to
be ‘fired up’ (encendido) with them (Examen 4.45 [102]). In the
consideration of the Kingdom, we are encouraged to pray:
I want and desire and it is my deliberate determination … to imitate

you in bearing injuries and all abuse and all poverty of spirit, and
actual poverty. (Exx 98)
This is strong language, appealing to the head as well as to the heart.

Perhaps resistance to such a prayer is part of the experience of the
3
Joseph de Guibert, The Jesuits: Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice, translated by William J. Young
and edited by George E. Ganss (St Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1986 [1942]), 175.
On Poverty with Christ Poor 49
Christ Carrying the Cross, by Hieronymus Bosch
Second Week; Jesus’ disciples alone provide ample precedent. But the
intensity of desire encouraged here is undeniable: like the tall nun in
Hopkins’ ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, we are being encouraged to
call Christ’s cross to us, and christen our ‘wild-worst best’.
A Proviso
Secondly, this real desire for the negative is nevertheless qualified. In the
quotation from the colloquy at the end of the Kingdom consideration, as
given immediately above, important things were cut. This wish, this
desire, this deliberate determination is to become real ‘only if it be your
greater service and praise’; I am to desire ‘actual poverty’ only ‘if Your
Most Holy Majesty wants to choose and receive me to such a life and
state’. Provisos of this kind, sometimes tortuously expressed, occur every
time Ignatius mentions his desire for the negative.
50 Philip Endean
A Second Week Grace

Thirdly, this way of identifying with Christ crucified represents a specific
devotion proper to the Second Week. Christian tradition contains a wide
range of responses to the suffering Christ, and, as Michael Ivens has
noted, there are really three spiritualities of the cross in the Exercises. The
First Week confronts us with the wonderful exchange: the Christ who, in
love unknown, takes the destructive effects of our sinfulness onto himself,
so that we can walk forward in his righteousness (Exx 53). The Third
Week is somehow quieter, more unitive and contemplative: anguish with
Christ in anguish, shatteredness with Christ shattered (quebranto con
Cristo quebrantado—Exx 203).4
However, the concern here in the Second Week is more with how
the following of Christ leads us to make particular choices. To put the
matter biblically: how are we to respond to Luke’s Jesus, as he tells us
take up our cross every day
and follow him (Luke 9:23)?
Death here is merely a
horizon, in the indefinite
future: the concern is about
what we do between now
and our death, how we let
the mystery of death and
resurrection shape the
choices we make regarding
the particular form of our
discipleship and guide us
through the complexities of
our motivations. It is not
enough for a Christian
morality and spirituality
simply to assert that life
comes from death. We also
need to know how we are to
live out that conviction.
The Risen Christ, by Michelangelo We need some procedure
4
Ivens, Understanding the Spiritual Exercises, 149 n. 6. Perhaps there is even a Fourth Week devotion
to the cross latent in Ignatius’ talk of how the risen Christ consoles us (Exx 224).
for negotiating between alternative, even conflicting, accounts of how

Christians cope with the choices to be made here and now. It is in this
Second Week context that Ignatius suggests to us his complex petitions.
A Moral Problem
Fourthly, the desire for the negative is problematic, logically (after all,
what you desire is, as such, a positive), morally and psychologically. The
pious imagination easily skips over the point, because devotion to the
crucified Christ is such a rooted tradition in Christian spirituality.
Nevertheless, to understand Ignatius’ petitions properly, we need some
account of why and how the invitation to enter into suffering with
Christ is distinguishable from irrational masochism. On what basis can
we invoke a relationship with Christ as a licence for abandoning
common sense?
There are also subtler problems. How can we distinguish the
authentic selflessness to which Ignatius is challenging us from a mere
mirage masking a deeper egoism, from the ressentiment with which
Nietzsche classically reproached Christianity? In his discussion of
Ignatius’ asceticism, the Jesuit psychiatrist W. W. Meissner warns:
… the effort to resolve pride by resorting to humility may only drive

… narcissistic impulses underground, so that they find equivalent
satisfaction in the exercise of a humility that can make one feel
unconsciously superior to the rest of men—who have not achieved
5
such a high degree of humility!
In the opening chapter of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Dorothea

Brooke, the chief heroine, is sharing out her late mother’s jewels with
her more straightforward younger sister Celia, and rather overbearingly
insists that Celia take a particularly fine necklace. In the second
chapter, Celia, recalling the incident, makes a teasing remark: ‘she likes
giving things up’. Dorothea’s retort, though in context priggish, at once
names a necessary distinction—‘if that were true, Celia, my giving-up
would be self-indulgence, not self-mortification’—while also insisting
that an important value remains, one that Christians need to be able to
articulate: ‘there may be good reasons for choosing not to do what is
very agreeable’.
5
W. W. Meissner, Ignatius of Loyola: The Psychology of a Saint (London: Yale UP, 1992), 104.
52 Philip Endean
Impossible Scenarios
Finally, and perhaps controversially, I would argue that the situation
which Ignatius indicates in his various provisos seems to be one that
could never occur. The ‘opprobria and injuries’, for which we ask in
order ‘to imitate him (Christ) more in them’, are meant to come ‘if only
I can suffer them without the sin of any person, or displeasure of His
Divine Majesty’ (Exx 147). How can this condition possibly be fulfilled?
On any conventional reading of the New Testament, sin had much to
do with Jesus’ own humiliation. In envisaging situations of creaturely
poverty and humiliation that do not thereby involve sin or dishonour to
God, Ignatius’ texts seem to imply a contradiction, at least in normal
cases.6 Any positive interpretation is likely therefore to involve some
creativity in inquiring how Ignatius means what he says, and some
corrective reformulation to salvage his proposition (Exx 22).
In what follows, I offer a selective survey how contemporary authors
deal with this petition, before suggesting a way in which the best
elements in these interpretations can be brought together.
Avoidance
Modern literature on the Exercises often deals with this material by
avoiding it; when Ignatius’ Second Week formula is mentioned at all,
important elements are frequently neglected.
In 1995, the US Jesuit patristic scholar Brian Daley published an
important article on the Third Mode of Humility.7 It began with a
personal reminiscence from 1966, when he met his first spiritual
director after the novitiate, who asked him what he thought was most
important in Ignatian spirituality. ‘The Third Degree of Humility, I
suppose’, was the pious reply: ‘he nodded, and didn’t seem to disagree’.
But the conversation did not continue.
Perhaps in the reticence here there is already a hint of unreality, of
avoidance of issues; after all, as US Jesuits in the mid-twentieth century,
both Daley and his director were members of a group that had
6
Marion Morgan, ‘Now I Am Retired …’, The Way, 45/1 (January 2006), 105–108, writes movingly
(108) of how Ignatius’ teaching helps her in caring for an abusive person whose mental health
difficulties preclude any easy talk of sin.
7
Brian E. Daley, ‘ “To Be More Like Christ”: The Background and Implications of “Three Kinds of
Humility” ’, Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits, 27/1 (January 1995), 1–39, here 1–2.
dedicated itself, sometimes heroically, to the upward social mobility

through education of those whom it was serving, and thereby inevitably
of its own members.8 But more significant is Daley’s undeniable
observation on the Ignatian renewal that has taken place subsequently:
Despite the enormous amount of study and publication that has

accompanied the renewal of our practice in making and directing the
Exercises since 1965, little or nothing has been written specifically
about the place of this text in the rhythm of the wider process … I
know of nothing specifically written on the subject since Vatican II.
We stress the apostolic rather than ascetical; we focus on the ‘good news of
freedom and justice’, and find it difficult to see where humility might fit in.9
Daley’s observations on the reflective literature seem well made.10
Whether because of its spiritual demands or the difficulties in its
interpretation, the Second Week’s theology of the cross appears largely
to have vanished from public Ignatian discourse. Even Joseph Veale, for
whom this strand in Ignatius’ thought was clearly key—in his collected
essays he keeps on coming back to it—never articulated fully just why
he thought it important, and how the ethical and psychological issues
raised by Ignatius’ formulations could be addressed.11
Sometimes interpreters fill the space of Ignatius’ Second Week
petitions with their own theology of the cross. Given the difficulty, even
possible incoherence, of Ignatius’ formulae, they draw on other, often
rich and sensible, accounts of how Jesus’ suffering should inform
Christian spirituality and ethics. Carl Gustav Jung, for example, saw in
8
Note Daley’s own observation that Jesuits ‘expect our institutions and works to strive for excellence
in every possible way … so much so that … a deeply felt desire for obscurity, poverty, and a negative
reputation … may seem to many … a hypocritical pose, even a contradiction of our central spiritual
identity’ ( ‘ “To Be More Like Christ” ’, 3). The idiom of Daley’s essay reflects the intended Jesuit
readership of the journal in which he was publishing, but the substantive points can easily be
transposed to the wider group of those who make the Exercises.
9
Daley, ‘ “To Be More Like Christ” ’, 2–3.
10
Since Daley wrote, a book-length study has appeared: Stefan Kiechle, Kreuzesnachfolge: eine
theologisch-anthropologische Studie zur ignatianischen Spiritualität (Würzburg: Echter, 1996), presented
more briefly in ‘Zum kreuztragenden Herrn gestellt: Aspekte eines Kreuzestheologie bei Ignatius von
Loyola’, in Zur größeren Ehre Gottes: Ignatius von Loyola neu entdeckt für die Theologie der Gegenwart,
edited by Thomas Gertler, Stephan Ch. Kessler and Willi Lambert (Freiburg: Herder, 2006), 110–125.
See below. Daley’s conjecture that the academic silence is reflected by a widespread failure actually to
give the Three Kinds of Humility (‘ “To Be More Like Christ” ’, 4) is worth discussion and possibly
empirical research.
11
Joseph Veale, Manifold Gifts: Ignatian Essays on Spirituality (Oxford: Way Books, 2006), for example
51–56.
54 Philip Endean
the Second Week a pedagogy for integrating the shadow, the repressed
energies within the self.12 Karl Rahner’s retreat conferences on the topic
seem simply to twist Ignatius’ text into Rahner’s own rich account of
how all of us, as individuals, are pointed by the Spirit towards particular
options; purely objective considerations give way to the ‘underivable
13
Humility does disposing’ of God’s love. A more recent feminist text on the
not ultimately Exercises, treating the ‘Three Ways of Being Humble’ very
depend on briefly, tells us that humility has its pitfalls, but nevertheless
personal effort that Ignatius’ text can open us to ‘greater generosity, deeper
self-knowledge’. For these authors, Ignatius teaches us that
humility does not ultimately depend on personal effort but on openness
to God’s power, and invites us to make a radical choice ‘to give over all
of one’s life to be with Jesus no matter what the consequence’. His
concern is to foster ‘a growing capacity for love, freedom and
magnanimity rather than subservience’.14 Important and true things are
being said in such writing. But, implicitly, Ignatius’ own formulations
are being treated simply as inept and outdated ciphers for something
better put in other terms. If indeed Ignatius’ text contains
contradictions, a limited strategy of this kind may be necessary. But
such reformulations should be as gentle as possible.
A Radical Critic
Few commentators on the Exercises are prepared directly to criticize such
a central feature as the Second Week petition. There is a recent
exception, however: the Uruguayan Jesuit liberation theologian, Juan Luis
Segundo. Segundo sees Ignatius’ text as advocating a mere abstraction of
humility, hopelessly detached from the historical reality of Jesus’ Kingdom
preaching. Such wisdom as there is in the Exercises will be mined only if
we radically correct this aspect of Ignatius’ thought. Jesus,
… was not the model of poverty in the society of his own day, as is
evident from the way he is compared unfavourably to John the
Baptist (Matthew 11: 18–19). And summing up his life as a series of
12
Kenneth L. Becker, Unlikely Companions: C. G. Jung on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola
(Leominster: Gracewing, 2001), 245–260; see also Becker’s ‘Beyond Survival: The Two Standards and
the Way of Love’, The Way, 42/3 (July 2003), 125–136.
13
See Philip Endean, Karl Rahner and Ignatian Spirituality (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), 121–123.
14
Katherine Dyckman, Mary Garvin and Elizabeth Liebert, The Spiritual Exercises Reclaimed:
Uncovering Liberating Possibilities for Women (New York: Paulist, 2001), 202–204.
insults from adversaries who regard him as a fool is either a plain

mistake or a false perspective due to focusing solely on his passion.
Jesus’s life was more uncomfortable than poor … and more conflict-
ridden than ignominious. Moreover, both features are framed within
15
a purpose or project, as are the pain and suffering of his passion.
Segundo speaks of a ‘huge christological vacuum in this kind of

humility, which seems to succumb to a predilection for suffering or
masochism’, originating in a ‘failure to notice that in the real life of
Jesus there is not the slightest indication that suffering was valued for
its own sake’. Jesus’ death ‘is the price for his determination to bring
happiness to the poor, sinners and the marginalised members of
society’. For Segundo, we need to stop focusing on the person of Jesus
exclusively, and focus our energy and affectivity on the reality of the
Kingdom which Jesus proclaimed. Such a perspective is omitted from
Ignatius’ formula ‘inexcusably’. If we want to interpret Ignatius
positively, we must nevertheless somehow answer the challenge in
these angry paragraphs, which perhaps amount to a biblical and
liberationist elaboration of the ‘moral problem’ already noted.
Unitive Love
A more mainstream and positive account of the matter is offered by
John English, who interprets the three humilities by considering ‘how
they would operate in the relationship between a husband and a wife’:
In the third mode of humility, they relate to each other in this way:
‘I will feel with you, I will suffer with you in your sufferings, I will be
joyful with you in your joy’. … Ignatius proposes suffering as a test of
love. … A married couple in love may want each other to be
successful and recognised at work for each other’s sake. Yet, they
might consider it a greater love to remain with their spouse and
support each other in times of failure. In love’s paradoxical view, a
couple might even desire this situation if only to show their love by
16
staying together in time of insults and disregard.
15
Juan Luis Segundo, The Christ of the Ignatian Exercises, translated by John Drury (London: Sheed and
Ward, 1982), 100–101.
16
John J. English, Spiritual Freedom: From an Experience of the Ignatian Exercises to the Art of Spiritual
Guidance, second edition (Chicago: Loyola UP, 1995 [1973]), 170–171.
56 Philip Endean
As Pascal put it, le coeur a ses raisons

que la raison ne connaît pas—love
has its reasons of which reason is
unaware. The third humility is about
this level of love.
Love of Christ clearly motivates
the Second Week colloquies, and
the idea which English evokes is
certainly Ignatian: simple unitive
closeness to the suffering Christ. But
the location of this motif in the
Exercises is the Third Week.17 In the
Second Week, the closeness to
Christ sought is hedged round with
complex qualifications, arising from
concerns about how love is realised
in active service. What English and
others write in this vein needs at least to be extended; on what we have
above, it is hard to see how such love could admit of proviso. But the
knowledge and love of Christ fostered in the Second Week are bound
up with following him (Exx 104), in a mission that often involves the
relief of suffering. ‘Just being there’ is an appropriate response to
suffering only once the possibilities for relief are exhausted. The Second
Week petition surely needs to be linked to the motivational ambiguities
likely to arise in a life of active service.
Agere Contra
Another interpretation of the third ‘most perfect’ humility is neatly
summarised in W. W. Meissner’s psychological biography of Ignatius:
‘the Ignatian principle of agere contra, fundamental to Ignatian
asceticism and spirituality, here reaches its apogee’.18
In the Sixteenth Annotation, Ignatius envisages a situation where
our disordered affections are interfering with our discernment. He
17
English admits this quite frankly: ‘Quite often people fully grasp the third mode of humility only in
the Third Week when they are praying on the Passion. Still, Ignatius places it in the Second Week’
(Spiritual Freedom, 173).
18
Meissner, Ignatius of Loyola, 103.
advises us to mobilise our spiritual energy against those unworthy

impulses in the hope that we might arrive at perfect indifference,
perfect disponibility:
… that the Creator and Lord may work more surely in His
creature—it is very expedient, if it happens that the soul is attached
or inclined to a thing inordinately, that a person should move
themselves, putting forth all their strength, to come to the contrary
of what they are wrongly drawn to. Thus if they incline to seeking
and possessing an office or benefice, not for the honour and glory of
God our Lord, nor for the spiritual well-being of souls, but for their
own temporal advantage and interests, they ought to excite their
feelings to the contrary, being instant in prayers and other spiritual
exercises, and asking God our Lord for the contrary, namely, not to
want such office or benefice, or any other thing. (Exx 16)
In a note following the Three Classes meditation, Ignatius seems to be

interpreting his central petition in the light of this principle:
It is to be noted that when we feel a tendency or repugnance against

actual poverty, when we are not indifferent to poverty or riches, it is
very helpful, in order to extinguish such a disordered tendency, to
ask in the Colloquies (although it be against the flesh) that the Lord
should choose one in actual poverty; and that the person want, ask
and beg [for it], if only it be the service and praise of His Divine
Goodness. (Exx 157)
A vocations promotion pamphlet circulated in the 1970s by what

was then the English Jesuit province spoke of Ignatius fostering ‘a
trained bias for taking the rough with the smooth’. In this spirit, Jules
Toner writes of the Third Humility:
It safeguards the indifference to all but God’s will and God’s glory,
which is essential for a trustworthy discernment. Being more
inclined to poverty and humility with Christ poor and humiliated …
is a powerful counteractive to any selfish tendencies .… It frees one
to hear and follow God’s call, even if that call should conflict with
19
these tendencies.
19
Jules Toner, Discerning God’s Will: Ignatius of Loyola’s Teaching on Christian Decision Making (St
Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1991), 93–94.
58 Philip Endean
In Stefan Kiechle’s words, we are cultivating an attitude here, and the

attitude itself is an ‘exercise’, with the aim that we should become
indifferent. We take up the exercise for a short time in preparing for the
election, and then set it aside—Ignatius warns us repeatedly against
overdoing such things.20
The strengths and weaknesses of this more cerebral approach are
the reverse of those we noted in connection with English on love. Here
we have a link with the Second Week business of election; here too, the
proviso in the Ignatian formulation is being given full weight. But if we
read the Second Week petition as only an illustration of the Ignatian
To desire agere contra, we are surely marginalising ideas which for
intensely to be Ignatius are spiritually and rhetorically central, especially in the
with Christ poor version found in the Examen. Ignatius’ concern surely goes
beyond getting us to accept that life in discipleship of Jesus will
sometimes be hard, and offering us a devotional help for getting
through difficult periods. He wants us to desire intensely to be with
Christ poor, insulted and injured. The conditionality on which this
interpretation centres needs somehow to be transfused with passionate
love.
The Approach through Narrative

A further approach to the question was pioneered by the Canadian
Jesuit Roger Cantin, writing in celebration of the 1956 Ignatian jubilee,
and developed by Brian Daley.21 Granted the framework within which I
have presented the issue, Cantin’s key suggestion is that the sense of
contradiction in the Ignatian formulae is less marked than at first
appears. ‘Praise and glory of the Divine Majesty’ needs to be understood
as the fruit of Ignatian service and ministry.22 The Second Week petition
is encouraging a personal identification with the poor and humble
Christ, tempered by considerations of what will make Christian witness
attractive to others. When other commentators read ‘divine glory’ in
the abstract, as a pious label attachable to just any worthwhile action,
Ignatius seems to be saying something very odd: closer imitation of
20
Kiechle, ‘Zum kreuztragenden Herrn gestellt’, 121, invoking Exx 83, 86.
21
Roger Cantin, ‘Le troisième degré d’humilité et la gloire de Dieu selon saint Ignace de Loyola’,
Sciences ecclésiastiques, 8 (1956), 237–266. Cantin’s article opens with a helpful survey of older
approaches.
22
Cantin, ‘Le troisième degré’, 246–253.
Christ can somehow be a lesser good. Cantin and Daley insist on

Ignatius’ own usage:
… the question of how the ‘glory and praise of the Divine Majesty’
is ‘served’ is … normally a practical apostolic one, not a question of
the metaphysics of spiritual perfection: How can God be better
23
known and loved, in the present concrete historical context?
The title given to the three humilities by two of Ignatius’ own

retreatants, the Ortiz brothers, now appears significant: ‘three kinds or
degrees of the love of God and of the desire to obey and imitate and
serve His Divine Majesty’: ‘humility’ in Ignatius’ language indicates a
complex attitude involving love, imitation and service.24
So it is that the loving desire to imitate the suffering Christ can be
moderated in order not to undermine ministerial credibility. Cantin
quotes a saying of Ignatius to Pedro de Ribadeneira regarding the
accusations of heresy made against him that neatly expresses the point:
When I was alone (he said), I did not bother about these calumnies
and murmurings; but now that I have companions, I prize greatly
their reputation and good name, on account of how this touches the
25
honour of God.
Hence, when we are faced with a choice, the love of Christ should lead
us to prefer the more ascetical and unobtrusive option. At the same
time, we are prepared to override this preference for the sake of a more
fruitful ministry, a greater divine service.
Cantin and Daley are offering what Ignatius called ‘positive
theology’, and setting gently to one side the issues which worry a more
‘scholastic’ frame of mind. They develop their positions by articulating
a wider narrative. Cantin draws richly and convincingly on the sources
to present Ignatius the convert first being swept away by the holy folly
of love for the crucified Christ, and then learning to temper this
23
Daley, ‘To Be More Like Christ’, 29; compare Cantin, ‘Le troisième degré’, 246–247.
24
MHSJ MI Exx (1969), 635; see Daley, ‘To Be More Like Christ’, 32.
25
MHSJ MI FN 4, 219; Cantin, ‘Le troisième degré’, 260. In Cantin’s version, which may have gone
through several intermediaries, the text has become fuller: ‘As long as I was alone, I scorned my
enemies’ calumnies; far from inspiring fear in me, they were doing me an honour. But I am no longer
my own master … I have companions destined like me to work for the service of souls; their honour
and mine are no longer ours, but belong to God, to whose service we are engaged.’
60 Philip Endean
enthusiasm with more pragmatic considerations about apostolic

credibility. Daley, addressing a readership more likely to raise critical
questions than Cantin’s, places this Ignatian story within a broader
narrrative of Christianity’s complex relationship with the Greek
philosophical tradition, written in an attractive style that smoothes
over the awkward questions about revelation and reason. Such
theology does its job by encouraging and persuading, rather than by
making sharp distinctions; its aim is ‘to move the heart to love and
serve God our Lord in everything’ (Exx 363). Questions of logic can be
pressed too far, and distract people from the love and service that really
matter; some things simply have to be taken on faith.26
Perhaps we should leave matters here. Cantin’s claims are richly
supported by Ignatius’ biography, and we know, after all, that Ignatius
preferred the ‘positive doctors’ to the scholastics. Nevertheless, at least
some of his followers may need ‘scholastic’ concerns to be addressed
more fully. Moreover, the version of life according to Ignatius’ Second
Week grace that we find still seems in some ways unsatisfactory. Here is
Cantin’s account of how the Second Week grace might be lived out:
If we understand the glory of God in the sense of God’s Kingdom
being realised on earth, or of spiritual fruit being produced within
souls, then every day there are thousands of occasions when the
Third Degree of Humility can be practised without any harm being
done to God’s glory. Is there not a just measure of corporal penance,
variable according to individuals and circumstances, which can be
taken on without its diminishing, or for that matter increasing, our
apostolic dedication? And can we not say the same for a certain
practice of material poverty, for depriving ourselves of some
material comfort, even for some humiliations and attacks on our
27
reputation that we endure in silence?
Even allowing for the passage of time and cultural differences, some
questions still press here. Why should love of Christ be expressed
through asceticism and renunciation at all? When Daley speaks of ‘the
tension’ in Jesuit tradition between ‘the humiliated Christ as saviour of
the world’ and the need to preach Christ ‘in an effective and humanly
attractive way’, we need some basis for distinguishing between ‘tension’
26
So Cantin, ‘Le troisième degré’, 264; Daley, ‘To Be More Like Christ’, 20.
27
Cantin, ‘Le troisième degré’, 262–263, translated idiomatically rather than literally. Compare the
more muted version of this position in Daley, ‘To Be More Like Christ’, 29–30.
and contradiction: a theology that establishes a link between Ignatian

love for Christ poor and the commitment to human betterment that
Ignatian service involves.28 Can even Cantin’s version of ‘bearing
insults’ occur without sin playing a role? Can we hope to engage in the
practices that Cantin describes with the passionate commitment
associated by Ignatius with the Second Week grace? Can an interior
spiritual desire remain alive and real over the long haul if serious
ministerial commitments lead us habitually to restrain that desire? Is
there not a disjunction between private identity and ministerial role
implicit in Cantin’s description that is neither psychologically realistic
nor spiritually desirable?
A Proposal
Perhaps, then, there is room for a further interpretation. Let me begin
by stating a principle. If the gospel is true, then Christ has revealed
potentials in the human condition for bringing good out of evil. In
terms of the Easter Vigil’s Exsultet, our culpa can become felix. In Christ,
sin can become a good thing. Moreover, only out of this sin and
degradation can the full greatness of the redeemer be displayed.29 It
follows that stories of human baseness and degradation provoke a
complex reaction. In no way do we want to condone the evil involved.
At the same time we can admire, rejoice in, and desire to share the
human dispositions, definitively manifested in Christ, through which
grace is at work even there. It is this Christ whom we want to know and
love, and whom we are invited to follow.
We venerate Christ crucified, not because we make a cult of suffering
in itself, but because in him, mysteriously, life came from death: even
when hidden within poverty, insults and death, his divinity remains active
and transformative, untouched by the suffering (Exx 223).30 When we
venerate our martyrs, we do not glory in the wickedness which caused
them to die; we venerate their living out a reality of grace and faith
28
Daley, ‘ “To Be More Like Christ” ’, 37.
29
Cantin, ‘Le troisième degré’, 264, already speaks of the ‘new wisdom’ emerging from the Son’s
mission in the world ‘which undoubtedly would not have had its place in the state of original justice
and which appears as something marvellously adapted to our condition as fallen beings’.
30
One underlying issue here is the nature of salvation. Kiechle, ‘Zum kreuztragenden Herrn gestellt’,
123, notes the need to exorcize the image of a ‘vengeful father-god demanding his Son’s suffering on
the cross as a placatory victim so as to assuage the anger he has on account of sin’.
62 Philip Endean
beyond human evil, and use their memory to nourish our own ongoing
discipleship. The British journalist Mary Craig, writing of how she
coped with bringing up two severely disabled children, quotes a prayer
that was reputedly found wrapped round the body of a dead child in
Ravensbrück, the concentration camp outside Berlin:
O Lord, remember not only the men and women of goodwill, but
also those of ill will. But do not only remember all the suffering they
have inflicted on us. Remember the fruits we have bought, thanks
to this suffering: our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, our
courage, our generosity, the greatness of heart which has come out
of all this; and when they come to the judgment, let all the fruits
31
that we have borne be their forgiveness. Amen.
If we live through suffering in dialogue with God, a ‘greatness of heart’ can

emerge, a fruit which can become a token of forgiveness and healing.
My proposal is that we should read Ignatius’ complex Second Week
petition in the light of this sort of prayer and conviction. At the outset,
it has to be said that such a reading goes beyond the letter of Ignatius’
text. Ignatius invites us to imagine following Christ in being insulted
and humiliated without anyone sinning and without there being
31
The text was first published in Mary Craig, ‘Take Up Your Cross’, The Way, 13/1 (January 1972), 22–
32, here 30, and repeated in her book, Blessings: An Autobiographical Fragment (New York: Bantam,
1979), 135. The prayer cannot be sourced further.
dishonour to God. Here the suggestion is that we imagine following

Christ in being insulted and humiliated in abstraction from the sin and
dishonour to God that such situations cannot but involve. We are to
imagine real situations of Christ and his followers being confronted by
evil, and focus neither on our justifiable reaction of outrage, nor on our
worthy projects for relief, but rather on the dispositions enabling the
victims to make gospel meaning. We cherish and privilege situations of
degradation, not because we perversely link religion with destruction,
but because only there is the full extent of Christian hope manifest.32
Though this reading goes beyond Ignatius, it does so only
moderately; moreover it does so at the point where the plain meaning
of his text, unless we follow Cantin without reserve, is nonsensical, and
where some creative interpretation is necessary. Further, this proposal
can, unlike any of the other readings I have surveyed, accommodate all
the other key elements in the text. The dispositions being commended
are challenging and complex; their realisation may be fragmentary and
mysterious; but they are unquestionably attractive—they are worth,
almost literally, dying for. At the same time, we are keeping our distance
from the inevitably evil context of such dispositions in the way that
Ignatius’ proviso, in its awkwardness, is trying to do.
Furthermore, the links with the Election that the agere contra
approach highlights are preserved, though the role of the Second Week
petition is now also, and more importantly, to remind us of the full range
of Christian hope, as well as counteracting our inordinate attachments.
Ignatius encourages us to consider the three modes of humility
immediately before an election, ‘that a person may get attachment to the
true doctrine of Christ our Lord’ (Exx 164). Before an important Christian
choice we need to have our imaginations and desires stretched to the full
‘breadth and length and height and depth’ (Ephesians 3:14) of divine
love. The recognition that even in the worst possible situations God’s
power is not defeated, and a desire to live in conformity with that
conviction, can, in the context of a challenging life-choice, defuse some
fears and open up possibilities. It is not that we are pushing ourselves
towards the negative; rather we are reminding ourselves that in suffering
32
The idea here owes something to Karl Rahner’s brief 1956 essay, ‘On the Experience of Grace’, in
Theological Investigations, volume 3, translated by K.-H. and B. Kruger (London: Darton, Longman and
Todd, 1966), 86–90; and in Karl Rahner: Spiritual Writings, translated by Philip Endean (Maryknoll:
Orbis, 2005), 75–81.
64 Philip Endean
too, and in an especially revelatory way, the grace of God can be manifest.
There is no place in Christianity for a spirituality of world-denial; rather,
our sense of God’s self-gift to the world should extend to the full range of
human possibility, to the ‘extreme of poverty—summa pobreza’ leading to
the cross, into which Christ is born (Exx 116).33
The Examen Version
At this point is it worth noting some details from the fuller articulation
of the Second Week petition found in the Examen for new Jesuit
candidates (Examen 4.44–46 [101–103]). Here Christ’s poverty and
insults are set in a context of life-giving generosity. It is ‘for our greater
spiritual profit’ that he is dressed in a livery of insults,
… giving us an example so that in all things possible for us, through

his divine grace, we might wish to imitate and follow him, as might
be the way that leads human beings to life.
Moreover, what is at stake is not a general ascetical principle to be

observed in all circumstances, but rather a possibility held open in a
community of graced memory. The language as the passage begins is
significant:
Likewise one should very much draw the attention of those being
examined (cherishing it and pondering it before our Creator and
Lord) ….
It is only in shared prayer and reverence—cherishing it and pondering

it (encareciéndolo y ponderándolo)—that this memory is to be recalled.
Outside such a context, such talk is liable to promote anxiety and guilt
rather than liberation.
We also find here an account of how we can grow into the difficult
desires and dispositions which Ignatius is encouraging:
33
When Stefan Kiechle writes of the Ignatian preference for humility that ‘… one can legitimately
cultivate such a preference only as long as one is not directly engaged with making the Election—for at
that point one is asking oneself which alternative will bring the greater glory of God’ (‘Zum
kreuztragenden Herrn gestellt’, 119, emphasis original), the claim being made is perfectly sensible if we
understand ‘poverty with Christ poor’ as a recommendation always to prefer situations of poverty. But
it is that last condition that I am questioning. The Second Week texts cannot be fruitfully read as
perverse encouragements to prefer the unpleasant; rather, they remind us of the life-giving power of
Christ’s suffering as an education in the nature of divine glory.
Where, through our common human weakness and his own

wretchedness he does not, in our Lord, find himself in such desires,
fired up like this, he should be asked if he finds himself with some
desires to find himself in them. If he responds yes—he does desire to
find himself in such very holy desires—then in order better to reach
them in fact, he should be asked if he finds himself resolved and
ready to let it happen, and to suffer it with patience through divine
grace, whenever such injuries, misrepresentations and insults as are
included in this livery of Christ our Lord (or any others) are done to
him—whether it be from someone inside the house or Society … or
outside it from any persons whatever in this life—not returning
anyone evil for evil, but rather good for evil.
Here, Ignatius calmly admits that Jesuit life will involve injustices, from
inside the house as well as outside it; the disposition he encourages does
not involve any denial of this reality, but rather abstracts from it, rises
above it. And the phrase, ‘find himself in such desires’, shows that the
disposition is not an achievement, but rather a gift that one finds one
has received. One grows into this gift by trying to live according to the
Sermon on the Mount. If you are able to forgive, if you are somehow
able to prevent the evil which will certainly be done to you from
poisoning your relationships,
then you will be growing into the
dispositions—‘so salutary and
fruitful as far as the salvation of
one’s soul is concerned’—that
enable life to come from death.
What begins as tight-lipped
endurance may in time become
passionate love.
***
More surely remains to be
explored in connection with the
Ignatian prayer for poverty and
humiliations. There is a feminist
and liberationist question to be
faced. Ignatius was originally
presenting his Exercises to
comfortable Latin male clerics,
66 Philip Endean
weaning them off the revenues of a benefice and encouraging them to the
help of souls. There have to be questions about how Ignatius’ text works
in a culture where money and vocation are not so closely associated. For
many Catholics in English-speaking countries, real poverty is an evil all
too present in our family memory, an evil from which our liberation is not
yet secure. Moreover, the ideal of renunciation is now widely
acknowledged to be conditioned by gender. Perhaps such factors should
inform our presentation of the enemy’s characteristic strategy in the Two
Standards. It may not be that the way to spiritual disaster for everyone
goes through riches, through the love of honour and pride, to all other
vices (Exx 142).
But once we arrive at the three humilities, the situation seems
simpler. If Christianity is true, then there are supremely desirable
human qualities, definitively demonstrated by Christ, that are only
revealed in situations of sin. Without condoning the sin, we can and
should actively desire and pray for those dispositions that enable us to
bear suffering, in whatever form it occurs, so that life can come forth.
And, especially when preparing to take major decisions, we should
cherish and ponder before the Lord our tradition’s witness that such
transformation is possible.34
Philip Endean SJ is Tutor in Theology at Campion Hall, Oxford, and has been
associated with The Way in various capacities for more than twenty years. He is
currently at work on a new edition of Hopkins’ prose spiritual writings.
34
The ideas in this essay have been shared orally with several groups in recent years, most recently at a
conference on Ignatian spirituality at Regis College, Toronto, in September 2007. I am grateful for
many helpful reactions, particularly to Fr Brendan Byrne SJ for pointing out that I needed to be fairer
to the positions with which I disagreed.
IGNATIAN SPIRITUALITY
AS A SPIRITUALITY OF
INCARNATION
Emmanuel da Silva e Araújo
‘The third love is Jesus Christ, the Eternal King of the Exercises, the
Incarnate Son of God, to whom we all owe a personal love, the key of our
spirituality.’ (Pedro Arrupe)1
A KEY, BASIC ELEMENT of Ignatian spirituality is its incarnational

character. By revisiting two ancient Christological heresies and
the theological responses to them, we can see how these heresies persist
in our spiritual lives today, generating a disembodied faith. This
prompts us to reflect on the relevance and importance of the
Incarnation in Ignatian spirituality as a means of living an authentic
and incarnated faith in the world today.
Affirming Faith in the Incarnation in the Early Church

In the early Church there were neither dogmas nor structures, but
simply a people who experienced the effects of the encounter with the
Risen One. As they came into contact with other peoples and cultures,
the early Christians developed reasons for the faith they lived, in
response to the questions that foreigners put to them. One of the
essential points on which they were challenged was the humanity of
Christ and his relationship with the Divine. Various heresies appeared
which the early Church had to combat: among these, two of the most
important were Docetism and Nestorianism.
In the second century Docetism questioned the humanity of the Son
of God, asserting that the Word did not, in fact, become Flesh, but rather
1
Pedro Arrupe, ‘Fifty Years as a Jesuit’, in Essential Writings, edited by Kevin Burke (Maryknoll: Orbis,
2004), 72.
The Way, 47/1–2 (Jan/April 2008), 67–80

68 Emmanuel da Silva e Araújo
assumed only the appearance of a body. The term Docetism has its roots
in a Greek word which means ‘to seem’ or ‘to show’. Docetists deny the
reality of the Body of Christ. For them, Jesus is a kind of Greek god who
visits mortals disguised as one of them, performing marvellous deeds and
acting as a teacher who communicates secret knowledge—but without
actually becoming human. The Docetists assert that Jesus is God—but
only God; his flesh, and his humanity, are mere appearance.
To speak of flesh, in the sense of St John’s Gospel and of ancient
tradition, means speaking of the totality of human being, in all its
broken, transitory and mortal fragility. To speak, therefore, of
redemption of the flesh is to speak of the redemption of human fragility.
A salvation which does not involve the whole of the human being and
Redemption of history—including the salvation of the body, and the fragile
of the flesh is … reality of humanity—is not Salvation. This is why Christian
the redemption tradition has always firmly defended the Incarnation of the
of human Word: if the Son of God had merely the semblance of a human
fragility condition; if, in other words, he was dehistoricised; and if he
did not take on our flesh, then our flesh would not be saved. In
response to the Docetists, St Irenaeus affirmed that the flesh is the
‘hinge’ or ‘axis’ of Salvation. The Council of Nicaea (AD 325) taught,
with Irenaeus, that ‘Jesus is true God and true Man’.
The second heretical current, Nestorianism, appeared in the fifth
century.2 So anxious are Nestorians to emphasize the transcendence of
the Word in the Incarnation that they end up denying the unity of the
human and the divine in Christ. Alongside the ‘divine subject’ is a ‘human
subject’, which takes upon itself everything relevant to humanity, but in
such a way that its divinity remains untouched. Nestorius’ essential
question was: how do we conceive the person of God, if God really
became Man in Jesus Christ? If God is God, reasoned Nestorius, God
cannot be Man. So in order to explain that Christ can be both human and
divine he affirms that Christ has two distinct natures—one human, one
divine—which are entirely separate from each other.
For the Nestorians, the humanity of Christ is the human face of
God, a kind of mask or fantasy which divinity chooses to adopt but
2
The heresy is named after Nestorius, a fifth-century Patriarch of Constantinople, though it is not
certain that he actually held all the views attributed to him, at least concerning the humanity and
divinity of Christ [editorial note].
Ignatian Spirituality as a Spirituality of Incarnation 69
which does not affect it. In this way in the passion, for example, it is
only human nature which suffers, not divine nature, as if God were a
kind of actor playing a part in a play—not the same as the character
being played, nor affected by what is being represented on stage. In
Jesus, according to the Nestorians, divinity and humanity are both
present, but separate.
The Council of Ephesus (AD 431), however, affirmed the unity of
the two natures. There is only one Christ, one Son, one Lord. Nestorius
had also declared that Mary could not be the Mother of God, because
God, existing before all, could not be born or brought about—could
not, in other words, have a beginning in a woman. The Council
consequently made clear that Mary was Theotokos (Mother of God).
This title for Mary has a profound christological meaning: God has
willingly chosen to undergo the human experience, and has become
human in Jesus Christ. He has a mother, is born, suffers, dies, and so on,
because he really has become flesh and lived out human experiences.
He is not just a transcendent God who remains above the fragilities and
uncertainties of humanity and its history. Thus Nestorianism and
Docetism pose the same challenge: if God did not take on human flesh,
there was no redemption of humanity.
The early Church sought to respond to everything that denied the
reality of the lived experience of faith in Jesus, son of God, Incarnate
Word—who ‘went about doing good’ (Acts 10:38), died, rose again,
and was named Lord and Christ. These became the words of the
Profession of Faith, one of whose central articles is: ‘Conceived by the
power of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary’.
Professing and Living an Incarnate Faith in Today’s World

The Second Vatican Council emphasized the importance of the
Incarnation and spelled out its true meaning, taking what is essential
from the statements of the first Councils and translating them into
today’s terms. God lives humanly in Christ, and is united to every
human being, even those who still do not know God explicitly, in such a
way that the Word lifts our human state, taking it on in his person. In
Gaudium et spes, the council declares:
Since human nature as He assumed it was not annulled, by that

very fact it has been raised up to a divine dignity in our respect too.
For by His incarnation the Son of God has united Himself in some
fashion with every man (22).
But in order to live a faith which is true to these statements, we come up

against a problem which is as old as Christianity itself: the denial, in
practice, of the Incarnation of the Word—not in heretical words, but in
the way we act in our daily lives. Cardinal Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) writes:
At the very moment that we discover the corporality of the human

being with all the fibres of our existence, in such a way that we can
only understand His spirit as incarnate, in such a way that Christ is
body, not has body, people try to save the Christian faith by completely
disembodying it, by taking refuge in a region of ‘mere’ mind, of pure
self-satisfying interpretation, which seems to be immune from criticism
only through its lack of contact with reality. But Christian faith really
means precisely the acknowledgement that God is not the prisoner of
his own eternity, not limited to the solely spiritual; that he is capable of
operating here and now, in the midst of my world, and that he did
operate in it through Jesus, the new Adam, who was born of the Virgin
Mary through the creative power of God, whose spirit hovered over
3
the waters at the very beginning, who created being out of nothing.
Our problem is that we repeatedly profess our faith, but very often
ignore the practical consequences of what we profess. All too many of
us live a disembodied faith. The heresies continue in the very air we
breathe. In the second century Christians faced the temptation of
believing in the Christ-God, forgetting that he is Jesus of Nazareth, a
real flesh-and-blood man. And this Docetist tendency is present in our
practice of our own faith when we seek the miraculous or spectacular in
an all-Divine Christ who is disconnected from human reality. We speak
enthusiastically of his miracles, of his power to cure and to cast out
demons. But we may also treat his temptations as wholly spiritual, and
therefore fail to realise that the Gospels speak of temptations to specific
concrete actions, directed against Jesus as Messiah. These temptations
pay lip service to the mission which his Father gave him, but would
alienate him from a messianism of service in favour of another
messianism, which would makes him a king in the eyes of this world,
using his divine condition for his own benefit.
3
J. Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 278–279.
The Agony in the Garden, by Albrecht Dürer
We find it difficult to accept that Jesus was ever afraid or upset,

that he experienced anguish when confronted with the proximity of
death and questioned himself in the face of the Father’s will. We tend
to speak of his miraculous Resurrection without taking into account
the life choices which led him to the Cross. And we risk treating the
Ascension like a firework display, with thunder and lightning and
angels going up and down, playing trumpets. But this pays no
attention to the words directed at the first Christians—‘Why do you
stand looking up toward heaven?’ (Acts 1:11). These words send them
back to the place of Christ’s Crucifixion in order to begin sowing the
seeds of the Kingdom of God, incarnating themselves in the history of
their own people as their Lord had incarnated himself to the point of
dying on the Cross.
What many of us do, in practice, faced with the Kingdom of God,
is to choose ‘Jesus as God, but without the Kingdom’. Often we are
dressed in mystical clothing, but alienated as Christians because we
refuse to be embodied in the miseries of history. This is to deny the
humanity of the Lord like the Docetists; or, like the Nestorians, to
separate Jesus’ divinity from his humanity. That is why we must not
forget that the humanity of Christ—his way of living, his choices,
attitudes, words, feelings, relationships, the positions he took faced
with real situations, his way of dying—are the revelation of God
among us. ‘And the Word became flesh and lived among us’ (John
1:14), and from that moment ‘He is the image of the invisible God’
(Colossians 1:15).
So professing faith in a God whose Word became incarnate has to lead
us to live a faith embodied in history. Without ever ceasing to cultivate an
intimate relationship with the Lord and living a faith always rooted in the
experience of Jesus Christ, we have to realise that the authentically
Christian interior life is not mere interiority. Our authentic living-out of
the faith must be embodied in history; if it is not, it is heretical. Christian
faith is not an enclosed ghetto of belief, but a radical opening to the world.
The God of Jesus took flesh and lived among us, in this world.
The Christian believes that the world is the revelation of God,
even when God’s presence so often appears hidden and veiled; which
is why the faith of a Christian must be lived embodied in a specific
reality. Our faith is authentic if it leads us to place our feet on the
ground, if it leads us to an encounter with the poor, the humble. It is
not an interior faith, restricted to feelings; it is not an other-worldly
faith, alien to the realities of this world. Faith is only valuable when it
practises love (see 1 Corinthians 13:1–13): ‘For in Christ Jesus neither
circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing that
counts is faith working through love’ (Galatians 5:6). It is a faith of
solidarity which shares both goods and life itself. And it is authentic only
when it takes on a body in history—for the sake of love, which realises
itself in actions.
Ignatian Mysticism and the Incarnation

The great originality and contemporary relevance of Ignatius’ mysticism
lie in his capacity to take us to that concrete incarnation in human
history. He is convinced that the Creator can act directly on the loved
creature in the most intimate way (Exx 15). In Ignatian mysticism, the
subject is the key—his or her personal characteristics and freedom. The
retreatant is going to feel, and to experience greater depths of feeling,
and from these will flow a world of desires inflamed by the question,
‘What must I do for Christ?’ (Exx 53). The contemplations of the life of
Christ are not static but unsettle and move the subject—provoke
motions of the Spirit—to do something for the Kingdom of God. So the
intimate and individual experience of the Exercises does not remain
confined to the internal forum of the retreatant, but opens him or her
up to the reality and weariness of the surrounding world .
In this sense, the experiences of evil and of mercy occur not only in
the conscience of the retreatant. The meditation on sin seeks to show
that the trauma of evil is historical, even if it has
The trauma of
transcendent causes. Evil is tied up with a set of attitudes
evil is historical,
that are egotistical, proud and self-sufficient in each
even if it has
individual. To feel ‘shame and confusion’ (Exx 48) is to
transcendent
become aware of our own participation in the evil of history.
causes
This feeling, at the same time, brings the experience of mercy
which embraces and converts the retreatant, culminating in a sense of
gratitude and generosity at being a loved sinner, making oblation to the
Lord, handing over everything to the One who loves the retreatant and
calls him or her to follow (Exx 98).
At this point comes the key contemplation for our reflection here:
the Incarnation (Exx 109). In the text of the Exercises this comes after
the exercise of the Call of the King (Exx 91–100) and before the second
contemplation, the Nativity (Exx 110–117). In this way, the Incarnation
is a story to be contemplated: it shows us the Trinitarian identity of the
Eternal King and, at the same time, it precedes the contemplation of
His birth in history, which in turn shows us the nature of his rule: his
birth in extreme poverty and his death on the cross after suffering
hunger, thirst, heat, cold, insults and slanders (Exx 116).
The scene of the contemplation of the Incarnation is the world,
which is the destination of the Word in the descending movement of
His incarnation (Philippians 2:6–10). In the first prelude Ignatius
Cestello Annunciation, by Botticelli
suggests imagining the Trinity and the way in which God sees the world,
full of conflicts and discord. Moved by the sufferings of humanity, God
decides to save it through the incarnation of the Son: ‘Let us redeem
humankind’ (Exx 107). In the second prelude retreatants are invited to
contemplate the world and the humanity of which they are a part, with
all its contradictions. In the solitude of the retreat, they are placed in
communion with that history which the Incarnate Word seeks to
transform. Straight away they proceed to the contemplation of the
house at Nazareth where the incarnation is made concrete by the
acceptance and fiat of Mary.
All this movement has its end point in the third prelude: to ask for
‘an internal knowledge of the Lord who became man for me, in order to
love him more and follow him’ (Exx 104). Retreatants seek to know, in
the depths of their hearts, the heart of the Incarnate Word, in order to
be attracted by him,
… who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality
with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking
the form of a slave, being born in human likeness (Philippians 2:6–7).
Therefore, contemplating this mystery, the retreatants place themselves

in the centre of an incarnational movement. Just as Mary, who carries
in her womb the Incarnate Word, goes out to meet Elizabeth, the
retreatants begin a movement of incarnation in history to help, in order
better to love and to serve.
Following this same movement in the group of contemplations of
the life of Jesus, retreatants not only imagine the events, along with
Jesus’ choices and words, but actually live through them with him.
The exercitant should in this Second Week try to become familiar

with the Incarnate Eternal Word, accompanying Him, listening to
Him, serving Him, worshipping Him as Lord, Elder Brother and
4
source of all that is good.
As they contemplate, the retreatants use their imagination to enter the

scene described in the Gospel, always asking for the same grace to have
that internal knowledge which leads to greater love and a more intense
service. The retreatants gaze on Jesus, paying attention to his words,
gestures, feelings and internal dispositions, and to his way of living the
mission received from the Father. They take part in the scene by being
present to the events through imagination and faith. They become
historical personalities, who talk with Jesus, who touch and are touched
by him, and who relate to other characters in each scene. They savour
each scene in their hearts, and try to ‘receive some benefit from each of
these things’ (Exx 108). In other words, they try to become aware of
what effect the contemplation has had on them internally and of what
the encounter with the Lord has impressed on their hearts, and then
they try to apply it concretely to their lives.
That is why Ignatian contemplation is no mere flight of the
imagination, a fantasy which produces pleasant feelings. Rather the
4
Directory of Fr Gil González Dávila, 97, Dir 31.
retreatants, moved by the Spirit, have an intimate experience of a

direct encounter with Jesus, with his life and work, in his passion, death
and resurrection. In their own way the retreatants relive a founding
experience of the first disciples, who are called at first to be with Jesus,
and are sent on mission only later, after living for some time by his side
(see Mark 3:13–19). In the contemplation, therefore, retreatants
experience following Jesus—becoming disciples, in other words—and
are able to move from interior experience to lived experience.
Following Christ is not an emotional experience dissociated from
reality, but something that comes about by confronting difficult
situations and choices. It is a mature choice, made in the depths of the
heart, and in the face of the harshest of realities. Seeking an internal
knowledge of Christ, who became incarnate in the history of all men
and women, retreatants contemplate this story together with the
Trinity, and will apply the contemplation directly to their concrete
existence and to that of the people around them in the service of the
Kingdom of God. In this way, they discover their place in the history of
Salvation, in the concrete unfurling of the Kingdom of God in history.
After the Exercises: Incarnating the Motions of the Spirit in History

In the Exercises, Ignatius brings us to meet Christ, the Incarnate Word,
who is the precondition for our living an incarnate and authentic faith.
Once the Exercises are over, those who have had a real experience of
God will be enabled to find God in all things: in their own lives, in the
lives of others, in Creation, in history. The Contemplation to Attain
Divine Love is the bridge between the lived experience of the Exercises
and daily life. We contemplate the God who acts in us, lovingly
communicating to us all that God has done and can do, in all Creation
and in Redemption, in people and in events, in every time and place. It
is a constant, uninterrupted communication, of which we need to be
aware in order to find God always and in everything (Exx 234).
During the Exercises we experience the gratuitous communication
to us of God’s goodness. We leave grateful and amazed by all the good
things we have received (Exx 233), especially in the form of the central
motion of the Spirit given to us by God, which is the call to concrete
service. The Contemplation to Attain Divine Love throws us back
towards daily life, where we will live out this movement in history, the
plan of life discovered in the Exercises. So this contemplation is never
over, because as soon as the Exercises are finished we are back in the
world, seeking to be united to God in action, looking for and finding
God in everything. Hence the importance of the Examen: giving thanks
for the graces received, recognising constantly all the good things that
come from God, examining the daily movements of the Spirit, seeking
and finding God in all things and all things in God.
This was Ignatius’ own experience. For him, the contemplative in
action, everything and everyone were sacraments of God. So we can
characterize Ignatian spirituality as ‘horizontal’5—the
The world and
mysticism characteristic of an apostolic people. For
history are the
‘horizontal’ mystics, the world and history are the primary
primary places of the
places for the adoration of God—even though they do not
adoration of God
stop having intense moments of intimate and personal
encounter with Love. But rather than being an obstacle to that
encounter, their historical context becomes a necessary mediation of it.
The Contemplation to Attain Divine Love and the Examen
characterize Ignatian spirituality as ‘seeking God in all things’.6 This is
the essence of a spirituality of service, for whoever cultivates intimacy
with God in contemplative prayer discovers that anything or any
situation becomes the place of encounter with Him. Ignatius told Luis
Gonçalves da Câmera that he was:
… always growing in devotion, i.e. in facility in finding God, and

now more than ever in his whole life. And every time and hour he
7
wanted to find God, he found Him.
He felt so united to God that he could give himself over totally to his
work. Nothing could distract him from God, for he managed to find God
in everything he did. For Ignatius, the presence of God and daily service
became synonymous. That is why he became, as Jerónimo Nadal
described him, a ‘contemplative in action’; his mystical prayer does not
lead him to the passive contemplation of eternal truth nor a drunkenness
on God’s love, but rather to the service of God in history—in mission.
5
This is an expression coined by Edward Kinerk, ‘When Jesuits Pray: A Perspective on the Prayer of
Apostolic Persons’, in Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 17/5 (November 1985).
6
A profound study of this expression is that of Josef Stierli, Buscar a Deus em todas as coisas (São
Paulo: Loyola, 1990)
7
Autobiography, 99.
Being contemplatives in action means that when we encounter the

world we must find God in it and love it; and when we lovingly
approach God, we are called to love the whole world in God. The first
motion prevents any attempt on our part to flee into the world, losing
ourselves in a sterile activism; we are called to be contemplatives in
action. The second motion forbids us to flee from the world, losing
ourselves in an alienated interiority: we are called to be contemplatives
in action. So in Ignatian spirituality there is a search for a way of
overcoming the opposition between pure interiority and the world out
there, ensuring that contemplation is something done by the whole
person in all circumstances, and that action is a human practice which
flows from contemplative experience. To be contemplatives in action is
to live in a constant attitude of listening and reverence before God in
the world, asking always: ‘Lord, what do you want me to do?’, and
responding obediently. In this way, intimate experience of God through
prayer and service in daily life are two inseparable poles, each
meaningless without the other.
Ignatian mysticism leads, therefore, to a concrete Incarnation in
human history. To live out that spirituality means to enter—to be
enfleshed in—the world and in reality. It means recognising that there
is no disjunction between God and the world: God is fully present in the
world and it is up to us to make sure that that the world is fully in God.8
We announce the incarnation of God by incarnating ourselves in the
lives of other people, through our presence, service, listening and
sharing. We announce the incarnation by incarnating ourselves in
society, culture, politics, economics, in order to be the salt of the earth
and the light of the world (Matthew 6:13–16).
At their meeting in Aparecida in 2007, the Latin-American bishops
told us that ‘those who live in Christ are expected to give a credible
witness of holiness and commitment’.9 That commitment, they said, leads
to the Incarnation in history of our suffering people because ‘Jesus, the
Good Shepherd, wishes to communicate his life to us and to place us at
the service of life’ (n.353). The great scandals of our age are injustice,
poverty, social exclusion, corruption, and lack of respect for life. The
God revealed in Jesus Christ is the one who makes clear God’s
8
GC 34, d. 4, n. 7.
9
CELAM, Documento conclusivo (Bogotá: CELAM, 2007), n. 352.
preference for the poor

and for the little ones, for
‘truly I tell you, just as you
did it to one of the least of
these who are members of
my family, you did it to
me’ (Matthew 25:40). This
God is revealed as love
and service; kneeling, He
washes our feet (John
13:1–13). This is a God
who is engaged with the
person and with history,
the One who takes the
initiative in going out to
meet us (Mark 5:21–33).
God places Godself at the
service of each of us, and
tells us that if the Master
and Lord, does this, we
too must do the same
(John 13:14–15).
The Christian expe-
rience of God, therefore, is
Christ Washes the Disciples’ Feet,
not distant from reality, it by the Meister des Hausbuchs
is not sentimental ecstasy,
but rather implies an engagement with the building of fraternity in
history. The spiritual experience of Ignatius brings together an ever
more intensely passionate confession of God and the cause of universal
solidarity. To live out Ignatian spirituality means being a friend of the
poor and struggling for the justice of the Kingdom; it means including
the excluded, as Jesus did. It means recognising that ‘the living
conditions of many of those who are abandoned, excluded and passed
over in their misery and pain’ contradict the Father’s loving plan and
challenge us to engage afresh with culture, for ‘the Kingdom of life
which Christ came to bring is incompatible with these inhuman
situations’.10 That is why those who choose to live out Ignatian spirituality
in their life choices—in their professional lives and their relationships, as
well as in their lesser daily decisions—must have at the centre of their
existence the good of the human being rather than financial profit, power,
wealth or the market; ‘and should be a man or woman who makes visible
the merciful love of the Father, especially for the poor and for sinners’.11
In sum, we have seen how Ignatian spirituality brings us to an
experience of the Word being incarnated within us and in history, in such
a way that we are, in turn drawn to the world to practise love in concrete
ways. If we do not enter into that movement, but merely claim that the
Word became flesh in Mary’s womb without living out that incarnation in
the day-to-day, then our faith is not the same as that which was brought
to the world by Jesus of Nazareth. Let us close with the words of St
Ignatius of Antioch (to the Trallians, 9–10) shortly before he was
martyred. The words reveal the clarity with which this man saw the
concrete effects of professing his faith in the incarnate Word of God:
Stop your ears therefore when anyone speaks to you that stands
apart from Jesus Christ, from David's scion and Mary's Son, who was
really born and ate and drank, really persecuted by Pontius Pilate,
really crucified and died while heaven and earth and the
underworld looked on; who also really rose from the dead, since His
Father raised him up, his Father, who will likewise raise us also who
believe in Him through Jesus Christ, apart from whom we have no
real life. But if, as some atheists, that is, unbelievers, say, his
suffering was but a make-believe—when, in reality, they themselves
are make-believes—then why am I in chains? Why do I even pray
that I may fight wild beasts? In vain, then, do I die! My testimony is,
12
after all, but a lie about the Lord!
Emmanuel da Silva e Araújo SJ teaches Fundamental Moral Theology at the

Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, and is director of CEI-Itaici and
the Vila Kostka retreat house.
10
CELAM, Documento conclusivo, n. 358.
11
CELAM, Documento conclusivo, n. 358.
12
St Ignatius of Antioch, epistle to the Trallians, in The Epistles of St Clement of Rome and St Ignatius of
Antioch, translated by James A. Kleist (Westminster, Md: Newman Bookshop, 1946), 77–78.
RECOMMENDATIONS
FOR GIVING
THE FIRST WEEK OF THE
SPIRITUAL EXERCISES
Francisco J. Ruiz Pérez
O NE OF THE MOST RADICAL human challenges is to confront the

shadow side of our moral weakness; and yet such a challenge is an
essential element of being a Christian. This venture into the shadows
occurs when the Spirit allows us to focus to some extent on our own
unreliability. Only then does the need become apparent for metanoia
and, once that need becomes a desire, the way opens for us towards
living the gospel.
Sin, however, is too turbulent an area of experience to get involved
in without precaution. As confirmation of this, we have the
autobiographical account of Ignatius Loyola describing the initial steps
in his own conversion. His painful apprentice experiences shaped the
final form of the reflections that constitute the First Week of his
Spiritual Exercises. But this final form by no means made certain of
everything. Even if Ignatius offers the sketch of a map with his First Set
of ‘Rules for Discernment’, he freed himself from the assumption that
sin demanded exact and sophisticated methods: he called them ‘Rules
by which to perceive and understand to some extent …’ (Exx 313).
Retreatants will have at their disposal only a series of rough guidelines.
Nothing more is possible when dealing with guilt and with indifference
towards the gospel.
The task of someone who accompanies a retreatant in the search
for the grace of the First Week is not an easy one. There is always
something shocking about informing a person that the salvific action of
the First Week has to take the form of ‘personal shame and confusion’
(Exx 48) and ‘mounting and intense sorrow and tears for my sins’ (Exx
55). The First Week leads to the paradoxical grace of ‘happy
The Way, 47/1–2 (Jan/April 2008), 81–96

82 Francisco J. Ruiz Pérez
consternation’. The price can be high, sometimes too high, in so far as

the experience of sin may lead a retreatant into useless byways.
My aim in what follows is to put forward some recommendations for
those who give or accompany the First Week. The form of these
remarks will be that of a Directory,1 which is not intended to be
exhaustive. The only guarantee I can offer, as I sketch out this directory,
is that of my experience gained while accompanying retreatants. My
remarks will touch on and mix together questions of Ignatian method
and other more profound questions, drawing on theology and on the
To be in spiritual pedagogy found in the Exercises. They have in
possession of a common one overarching insight that I share with other
sound … theory retreat-givers: the First Week requires a ‘presupposition’ from
of sin those who give the Exercises. This will be in the same style as
the prototypical ‘presupposition’ that Ignatius put at the start
of his text (Exx 22). Ignatius’ ‘presupposition’ is basically very simple.
Anyone giving the First Week needs to be in possession of a sound
hamartiology, or theory of sin, one that covers both the experiential
understanding and the theology of sin. Only then can the retreat-giver
really accompany the retreatant as the latter tries to deal in Christian
fashion with his or her shadows. All too frequently we have been over-
preoccupied with problems of verbal translation or imagery that occur
in the exercises of the First Week—the fall of the angels, the sin of
Adam and Eve, the eschatological scenario of hell—and have neglected
what is crucial: how to bring home the meaning of those features in a
way that will interlock with the notion of sin current today, so that in
the end the exercitant will experience the reality of sin.
A Limited Capacity to Deal with Their Shadow Side

‘The more light of character he knows them to be, the more he ought to
warn and admonish them.’ (Exx 14)
This directory has to begin by urging careful attention to the identity and
background of those who approach us. It is well known that nowadays the
perception of sin is not at its strongest. Like so many other features of life
1
In the sixteenth century various ‘directories’ appeared for those giving the Spiritual Exercises; these
are conveniently published as On Giving the Spiritual Exercises: The Early Jesuit Manuscript Directories
and the Official Directory of 1599, translated and edited by Martin E. Palmer (St Louis: Institute of Jesuit
Sources, 1996).
Recommendations for Giving the First Week 83
today, it seems to have been undergoing a crisis for a considerable time.

Cries of alarm were raised some years ago. An issue of the review
Concilium was dedicated to the concept in an attempt to uncover the
roots of the cultural crisis of sin. Its analysis was not encouraging:
Philosophers and scientists, particularly since Feuerbach, Marx,

Nietzsche and Freud, believe that they have at last disposed of the
problem of evil and guilt. Attempts continue to be made to reduce the
reality of moral evil and the authenticity of the experience of guilt to a
matter of converging psychopathological motivations within the
context of social evolution, biological behaviour patterns, and so on
…. A relative (in the sense of not absolute) interpretation of the guilt
experience, which has been part of the Christian faith from the
beginning, seems to be spreading. In theology and preaching it is
becoming increasingly difficult to speak intelligibly and convincingly
2
about moral evil and guilt on traditional lines.
This phenomenon has had its impact also on those who believe,
and it has been widely disseminated. Christianity cannot free itself from
a context,
… in which the notion of sin no longer plays a constructive and

vital part. We find ourselves in a world that lacks the words needed
to speak of sin, is bereft of places for the forgiveness of sin, and
3
seems to feel no need for either.
At the risk of unjust generalisation, one can say that the younger a
retreatant is, the more evident will be the effect of the present cultural
crisis on the make-up of his or her religious identity.
This is what gives rise to the ‘light[ness] of character’ of many
retreatants. Those who give the Exercises need to recognise and accept
this fact when introducing the First Week. Only in this way, it seems to
me, can we undertake one of the usual tasks required of those who
accompany during the First Week: the dismantling of those exculpatory
mechanisms that form part, often quite unconsciously, of the mental
constitution of the retreatant. This is a task that needs patience and has
a simple aim: that the person making the Exercises should come to
2
Johannes B. Metz, editorial, Concilium, 6/6, ‘Moral Evil under Challenge’ (June 1970), 7.
3
Gerhard Ebeling, Theologie zwischen reformatorischem Sünderverständnis und heutiger Einstellung zum
Bösen; see also Ebeling, Wort und Glaube, volume 3 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1975), 197.
accept that sin exists. Such a realisation is born only of hard spiritual
labour, but it is essential if a person is to learn how to understand reality
through the eyes of the gospel.
This truth is no longer commonly accepted, and many retreatants
will need help to bring it home. They tend to seek refuge in
rationalisations, many of which are not entirely lacking in truth. Today,
for example, people are more aware of the conditions under which we
have free will. They know the human sciences have argued that the
freedom of the will is not a given but something to be gained; that the
role of determinism and the limitations on autonomy turn out to be
much more influential than was recognised; and that the assumption of
an unconditional freedom underpinned by a clear personal voice is no
more than a projected image of omnipotence. But once free will is
called into question, we can say little about morality. The concept of sin
depends upon the possibility of freedom, and if the latter is diminished,
the ‘bad’ is replaced by the ‘weak’.
Moreover, many retreatants come to make a retreat already
convinced by the criticisms levelled against traditional morality. The
label of sin that was attached to certain forms of conduct has been
removed, as they are no longer treated as matters of responsibility.
Morality is not permitted to interfere in what does not concern it. In
the past, admittedly, some pastoral exhortations tended to promote a
undue sense of guilt. In the process of reforming a proper sense of
morality, much that was called ‘immoral’ must now be regarded as
excluded from that category.
In spite of these changes, the warning given in Annotation 14 has
ever greater force; we who give the Exercises have all the more reason to
‘warn and admonish’ those retreatants who come to us with today’s
baggage. Surely no greater argument is needed than the fundamental
gospel message, one that has to accompany anyone along the complicated
route of the Exercises. As the Gospels insist, there exists a definite inertia
against accepting the Kingdom: ‘Those who are well have no need of a
physician, but those who are sick’ (Matthew 9:12). It is the latter for
whom we should, primarily, be caring. The Gospel of John makes the
situation plain, and offers hope: the world is under the power of sin, but
‘the ruler of this world will be driven out’ (John 12:31). Jesus is the one
who dares to confront evil to generate a new order of things: ‘But if it is by
the finger of God that I cast out the demons, then the kingdom of God has
Descent to Hell, by Duccio di Buoninsegna
come to you’ (Luke 11:20). Jesus, in other words, is the event that opposes
the shadow of history and of the human heart, and the ‘good news’ is that
such opposition spells the end of evil.
The New Sense of Sin

‘Every good Christian is to be more ready to save their neighbour’s
proposition than to condemn it.’ (Exx 22)
Despite what has just been said, retreat-givers need to bear in mind, it
seems to me, that not every aspect of morality is being called in question. In
each historical period there exists a different sensitivity to what is
morally wrong, and that is equally true today. The apparent blindness to
sin today admits of nuances; the present cultural moment has not
wholly turned its back on human unreliability. Our age is seeing the
birth of a new sense of sin, and we would be doing ourselves, and the
majority of our retreatants, an injustice if we fail to acknowledge this

from the start. The sense of sin is evolving, and the retreat-giver must
be conscious of this—and of the consequences.
On the one hand, the crisis over sin particularly affects the notion of
personal sin. Naming sin for what it is has been sacrificed in the interests
of finding a genetic or systemic (social, political, economic) explanation
for moral evil, to the point where people think, ‘Sin does exist, but no one
knows who actually commits it’.4 As already noted, people talk less about
personal sins, and the sense of such sin has been largely lost—perhaps as a
concomitant of an excessive undervaluation of personal choice.
On the other hand, however, there is an increased awareness of
social sin. The diminution of sensitivity in one area seems to go hand in
hand with a complementary increase in another: there is a heightened
feeling for what is wrong at the social level. It has been my experience that
many retreatants undertake the First Week with the conviction that too
much stress has been laid on a person’s intimate conviction of
sinfulness. They are well aware that much evil has been committed in
history, but they tend to locate it not at the level of individual sin but at
the level of contextual circumstances. One author has described the
situation as follows:
People today feel flung into the world and subject to anonymous
powers and structures; their lives take place amid division, gaping
chasms and threats. They experience being overwhelmed by
suffering inflicted by evil, rather than as having themselves some
responsibility for the existence of that evil …. Joined to a growing
sense of evil and a growing pain due to their culpable implication in
such pain there seems to be a corresponding decrease in the sense of
5
personal guilt [before God] ….
The corollary for the pastoral praxis of the Exercises is clear: one
has to be aware of, and receptive to, this new sense of sin. And
fortunately the First Week puts at our disposal means to ensure that we
do not overlook the contemporary awareness of social sin. Some will be
mentioned later, but the most important deserves to be given
prominence now: a meditation on a suprapersonal sin, ‘the sin of the
4
John Paul II, apostolic exhortation, Reconciliation and Penance, 18.
5
Michael Sievernich, Schuld und Sünde in der Theologie der Gegenwart (Frankfurt: Knecht, 1983), 22.
angels’ (Exx 45–54), which Ignatius proposes at the very start of the
exercitant’s courageous path towards confronting the shadows.
The Decisive Role of the Principle and Foundation

‘The better this meditation is made, the better will be the outcome of all the
rest.’ (Dir 109)
I continue this brief ‘Directory’ with a suggestion that takes us back to
the preambles of the Spiritual Exercises. The First Week opens with a
recommendation to reflect adequately on the Principle and
Foundation. It is stating the obvious to stress this point, but, in practice,
both in the past and today, inadequate attention has been paid to it.
Without wishing to spend time on the various commentaries,6 I regard
it as important that we, as retreat-givers, ensure that the Principle and
Foundation plays its proper role as an essential preconsideration before
taking the road of reflection on sin that the First Week requires. It has
this prior position because it contains the first declaration of the grace
to be gained in the Exercises. It provides confirmation of the truth that
a sound hamartiology, a theory of sin, has to begin with a sound treatise
on grace.
Indeed, the Principle and Foundation spells out the grace that is the
goal of the Exercises. As is well known, Ignatius presents this text as a
sort of frame of reference; it is indispensable that the retreatant be in
agreement with it, as it forms an essential way of understanding what it
is to be human. In these paragraphs, the human person is envisaged as
called into existence by and for God, and the consequence for one’s
existential disposition, ‘to make ourselves indifferent to all created
things’ (Exx 23). What is asked of the retreatant is to take on board this
outlook: it is a promise of that to which one is called.
In this way, the first step to be taken by the retreatant is to meditate
on the gift. Only later will the processes begin of clearing the
impediments to this gift (First Week) and of acquiring the chance to
follow Christ (Second, Third and Fourth Weeks), starting from, or in
spite of, those same impediments. The structure of the Exercises
requires the prior presentation of grace, thanks to which desire is
6
See Francisco J. Ruiz Pérez, Teología del camino. Una aproximación antropológico-teológica a Ignacio de
Loyola (Bilbao and Santander: Sal Terrae, 2000), 111–116.
engendered in the retreatant, and in this Ignatius is repeating a schema

found in biblical theology.7
The person giving the Exercises should ensure that the retreatant
does not misinterpret the Principle and Foundation as an accusation,
but understands it as an announcement of future grace. It is there to
arouse enthusiasm and not frustration, and it is only in this way that it
will facilitate, in an evangelical spirit, an approach to one’s sin. Sin will
emerge in contrast to a backdrop showing a reality, that of grace, much
greater and more certain than any evil—and not the other way round.
Within this dynamic process, the role of the preparatory prayer (Exx
46) becomes clear: it serves to reactivate the nucleus of the gift alluded
to in the Principle and Foundation, after which the retreatant can
venture into the arguments concerning sin that form the meditations of
the First Week.
Respect for Ignatian Pedagogy with Regard to Sin

‘All the Exercises should be given in the prescribed sequence to a person
who wishes to derive the maximum benefit from them.’ (Dir 15)
We retreat-givers should encourage one another not to make major
changes to the internal logic of the meditations of the First Week. The
actual words of the text, which at times seem excessively rough-hewn
for present day sensitivity—both personal and theological—should not
be allowed to mislead us into facile omissions or parentheses.
The reason for this respect of the text is two-fold: the First Week
works on the principle that two types of overview are needed, and neither
should be omitted or distorted if the Ignatian pedagogy set in place to
confront one’s shadows is to work.
The first overview concerns how one thinks about sin, one’s
hamartiology. The Exercises are an invitation to traverse every level of
7
Alex Lefrank, in his study of the dynamic process embedded in the Exercises, points out, ‘To a
considerable extent revelation takes place in the Bible in so far as a promise is made to different persons
of a future which surpasses the state in which each happens to be’. Thus, a promise is made to
Abraham of a land and a posterity (Genesis 12); a promise is made of liberation from Egypt which will
consist of the historical development of the people of Israel (Exodus 3); to a people living in exile in
Mesopotamia there comes the nostalgia for a return (Jeremiah 31). Many other examples of such
‘promises for the future’ are to be found in both the Old and the New Testaments: see Alex Lefrank,
‘Begeistert—befreit—gerufen—gesandt. Zum Werden einer Berufung’, Korrespondenz zur Spiritualität
der Exerzitien, 58 (1991), 4–14.
the reality of sin, just

as much the sins
which do not directly
affect the retreatant
(First Meditation), as
those that are fully
proper to him or her
(Second Meditation).
Perhaps one can say
that sin has a sort of
‘holographic’ structure:
any point in sin’s
objective reality relates
to and contains all the
other levels at which it
comes into existence.
Every personal sin,
when properly seen, has
traces of the effects of
social and structural
Hell, from the Last Judgment, by Fra Angelico
sin; and the opposite is
also true, as socially and structurally realised evil reflects individual sins.
The First Week proposes penetrating into the shadow in such a way that
none of the levels is left out. It is necessary to meditate not only on the
protohistory of sin, the ‘first sin, which was that of the angels’ and ‘the sin
of Adam and Eve’ (Exx 50–51), but also on its present reality among
human beings, ‘the particular sin of any one’ (Exx 52). After that has
been done, the retreatant goes on to examine personal sins in the Second
Exercise.
The second overview involves an area that can be called
anthropological. During the First Week the sequence used goes from
meditation (contemplation) to repetition, and then to prayer of the
senses (meditation on hell). This sequence is a prototype for the rest of
the Exercises, though it occurs with some variations. It relies on a
definite anthropological model: the Exercises aim to involve the whole
retreatant in the prayerful confrontation with sin. In other words,
prayer about sin should involve absolutely every level of the human
person, both the powers of the soul (in the first two meditations and the
repetition) and the senses (in the meditation on hell).8 This overview
has to stretch as far as the level of feelings and senses. And the rational
difficulties that many may have with the thinking on the Four Last
Things in the theology of Ignatius’ day need not be a bar to retreat-
givers insisting on a presentation of the meditation on hell, provided it
is brought up to date.
Both of these overviews combine in the ‘colloquy’ that follows the
two repetitions (Exx 63). One can see there how thorough the Ignatian
approach to sin is: the two roads that led us to knowledge of the
shadows of moral weakness unite into one. Evil must be seen in its
historical personal reality (‘inner knowledge of my sins’), but within the
context of suprapersonal evil (‘I will ask for knowledge of the world’);
and evil must be approached not only as the object of ‘inner
knowledge’, but also as the object of personal feeling—so that one not
only rejects evil, but also feel hatred for it.
The modernity of such a way of thinking about sin is truly
astonishing, and consequently it also holds astonishing potential, in the
first instance for the sort of retreatant to whom we have been
accustomed in the past—one who showed no desire to plunge into the
consideration of any sin that was foreign to him, and who felt the First
Exercise to be too laborious prior to immersion in thought about
personal sin. But I feel that the same holds true for the other type of
retreatant, the type that is more common today. Such retreatants are
quick to spot and denounce the social dimension of sin, but find the
Second Exercise, on personal sin, harder to stomach.
The Use of Complementary Means

‘According as is more or less useful for them, he can give them some
spiritual Exercises suited and adapted to the need of such a soul so acted
upon.’ (Exx 17)
There are two suggestions I would like to offer to retreat-givers who
keep to the pedagogy of the First Week. Both have the same aim: to
provide our retreatants with means—‘spiritual activities’ as Ignatius
calls them (Exx 1)—to attain more easily the grace that is being aimed
at in the First Week. Both try to neutralise that insensitivity to personal
8
This point is developed at greater length in Ruiz Pérez, Teología del camino, 61–66.
sin that is so widespread in today’s culture. In both cases, the

theological principles that underlie them can be useful.
Redeeming the Concept of Sins of Omission
In the exercises of the First Week, whenever mention is made of
personal sins—‘how often I was deserving to be condemned forever
because of my so many sins’ (Exx 48)—one is clearly justified in
counting among these the sins of omission. Not infrequently we feel
more culpable when we recognise the good that we could have done
but have failed to do than when we acknowledge the evil we have
actually committed. So it is not surprising that more attention is now
being given in theological reflection and pastoral care to such sins of
omission, and the effect is being felt in the giving of the Exercises. By
calling attention to such sins many find that a door is opened by which
access to the shadow areas of personal sin becomes more direct and
honest, especially in an age when the ego tends to be excessively
indulged. Thus my advice to somebody giving the Exercises is to follow
in the spirit of the ‘particular and daily examen’ (Exx 24–31) and of ‘the
general examen of conscience’ (Exx 32–43), and to introduce
retreatants to the category of sins of omission, since this is an area of
personal moral failing that has to figure in ‘the statement of the sins’
(Exx 56).
Admittedly, such attention to what has not been done goes against
the normal logic of the examination of conscience, even if it opens up
another way of finding ‘shame and confusion at myself’ (Exx 48). Now
the self-accusation comes not from a specific crime or tendency to
crime, but on the contrary from the holding back of a tendency
All times and
to good. The theology behind sins of omission relies ultimately
circumstances are
on an anthropology full of hope. We are all of us, in so far as we
opportunities for
are graced creatures, capable of doing good, so that all times and
salvation
circumstances are opportunities for salvation. As the retreatant
comes to realise the importance of sins of omission, a dislocation
becomes apparent: between the gifts received and the thanks given in
return; and between what is actually possible and what, in fact, is done.
This undermines the retreatant’s sense of self-satisfaction and weakens
the mechanisms of narcissism.
Redeeming Objectivity
My experience with giving the Exercises also encourages me to suggest
to other retreat-givers that they try acquainting retreatants with the
First Way of Prayer (Exx 238–257). Again I am struck by an aspect that
frequently occurs in the mind-set of many who make the Exercises
today: they tend to rely so much on their subjective appraisal of the way
they act that they will not accept any outside evaluation. Their
shadows seize on subjective self-justification as a means of denial.
Thanks to the Exercises, such exercitants can be helped to gain an
appropriate objectivity: the contrast that will allow them to discover,
without evasion, the reality of their evil actions.
Various means exist in the First Week that do good service in this
way: thus in the meditation on personal sin, a step-by-step sequence is
suggested, allowing one to retrace phases of personal biography—‘to
bring to memory all the sins of life, looking from year to year, or from
period to period’ (Exx 56). The retreatant is asked to analyze his or her
sins in the concrete circumstances in which they were committed: ‘to
look at the place and the house where I have lived’; ‘the relations I have
had with others’; ‘the occupation in which I have lived’ (Exx 56).
Likewise, the sudden introduction of the christological theme in the
First Week can serve to rein in the subjective tendency: the retreatant
is asked to imagine ‘Christ our Lord present and placed on the Cross’
(Exx 53). No better way could have been found to bring home the truth
that, in the final analysis, sin brings death.
But, thanks to the First Way of Prayer, Ignatius applies an even
more powerful pedagogical technique with the same aim. A series of
models are placed before the retreatant, who is required to utilise each
in turn without deviation: the ten commandments; the list of seven
deadly sins; the powers of the soul; the five bodily senses (Exx 239, 244,
246, 247). Leaving to one side the anthropological infrastructure which
probably underlies all of them, a few words need to be said on the
pedagogy that the use of the first two involves, and which will continue
to influence how the retreatant acts with regard to the next two.
These models objectify sin because they provide it with names. The
retreatant is helped to unmask sins with precision, by identifying each
with a name. Human weakness shrouds itself in darkness by avoiding
recourse to the word. As long as that is lacking, guilt remains vague and
intangible. Once it is named, a process of change becomes possible. The
The Seven Deadly Sins, by Hieronymus Bosch
beginnings of a cure depend upon this objectification of the evil. That is

why Ignatius suggests that retreatants should allow themselves to be
questioned within the objective evangelical context of the ten
commandments and the deadly sins:
… according as one finds in himself that he stumble more or less on

that Commandment so he ought to detain himself more or less on
the consideration and examination of it. And the same is to be
observed on the Deadly Sins (Exx 242).
This spiritual exercise consists in allowing oneself to be confronted

directly and unambiguously. The First Way of Prayer does not permit
the conscience to indulge in delays; the challenge is to reply
spontaneously with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ when faced with the possible reality
of personal evil, without subterfuge and without any indulging in half-
truths. The not infrequent reaction of retreatants is one of surprise
when they ask themselves, for example, whether there have been
occasions in their lives when they might have broken the
commandment not to kill; or whether they have been guilty of the sins
of gluttony or idleness. In this way, precious time is gained proceder
adelante, to ‘go on in well doing’ (Exx 315).9
The Theology of Creation and Seeing Our Shadow Side.

‘The one who is giving the Exercises should … leave the Creator to act
immediately with the creature, and the creature with its Creator and Lord.’
(Exx 15)
There is no need to recall how insistently the Ignatian Exercises put
before the retreatant the need to be aware of one’s status as a creature.
It is found in the Principle and Foundation (Exx 23) and at the end in
the Contemplation to Attain Love (Exx 230–237). But the same can be
seen elsewhere: in the First Week, in particular, in the second exercise,
the Meditation on Personal Sin (Exx 55–61). This meditation is shot
through with the theology of creation, and it provides proof that for
Ignatius it does one good to pray about sin from the viewpoint of our
being creatures. For example: in the colloquy assigned at the end of the
second exercise, instead of a dialogue with the Crucified, the suggestion
is a prayer of thanksgiving, ‘giving thanks to God our Lord that He has
given me life up to now’ (Exx 61), thus a prayer before God the Creator.
A further remark needs to be made. In the meditation on personal
sin the retreatant is invited to reflect as follows: ‘to look at myself as a
sore and ulcer, from which have sprung so many sins and so many
iniquities and so very vile poison’ (Exx 58). Clearly the exercise is
intended to lead one to see that one’s moral weakness has no excuse.
But the essential point is that Ignatius links this acknowledgement of
moral weakness with an even deeper realisation: that of one’s
creaturehood. This can be read between the lines of points 3, 4 and 5
(Exx 58–60), but most clearly in the final, fifth point: ‘an exclamation
9
Ignatius uses the phrase proceder adelante on several occasions in the Exercises (for example Exx 18,
and see Exx 335). [Translator’s note.]
wonderingly with increased feeling, going through all creatures, how

they have left me in life and preserved me in it’ (Exx 60). The
retreatant is brought to see how sinfulness is something that can put in
danger one’s being as a creature. Sin is revealed in its utter negativity: a
treason to one’s fundamental identity as a creature of God. It is
precisely here that the retreatant becomes most conscious of the
absolutely destructive character of evil. It seems that the creature can
only become aware of the real meaning of evil when standing before the
God who created this creature: ‘to consider what God is, against Whom
I have sinned …’ (Exx 59). We are creatures first, and sinners only later.
Thus it seems to me that the retreat-giver would do well to spend
some time on the theology of creation as a powerful means to help
retreatants to face their personal shadows. In this way the retreatant
would never feel isolated in the experience of sin, which can so easily
become claustrophobic. Those giving the Exercises need to ensure that
retreatants do not become cut off from access to the overwhelming
truth of their creaturehood; the alternative could be an appalling sense
of loneliness when facing personal sin.
Another advantage of such a theology is that it can facilitate a more
complete awareness of the vulnerability of the creature. In the Spiritual
Exercises the creature is full of vulnerability because of the
ambivalence of weakness: ‘my ignorance … my weakness … A more complete
my iniquity … my malice’ (Exx 59). Our vulnerability is so awareness of the
closely linked to our being creatures, and thus can be an vulnerability of
occasion of evil, which can transform it into ‘a sore and ulcer, the creature
from which have sprung so many sins’ (Exx 58). All too often,
an inability to cope with vulnerability can be found at the starting point
for the desperate measures taken by humanity to disown the status of
creatures: the tower of Babel is precisely the dream of human
intransigence in the face of human reality. And yet the Good News can
spring from such vulnerability: when Jesus asks, ‘Can any of you by
worrying add a single hour to your span of life?’ (Matthew 6:27), he is
presenting in more realistic terms what he expresses later as a hope-
filled affirmation of creaturehood: ‘but if God so clothes the grass of the
field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he
not much more clothe you—you of little faith?’ (Matthew 6:30). Being
a creature spells out a grateful—and not simply a resigned—poverty; it
implies a dependence which produces not paralysis, but power.
Consolation
So much for this sketch of a directory. I would like to end with one more
remark that will serve to conclude and encapsulate the genuine
spiritual experience of the First Week. Our retreatants need to be told
that, in the context of the Exercises, the experience of shadow is one of
consolation. Or rather, that it is only within and alongside consolation
that the authentic experience of sin comes about. As retreat-givers we
need to remind ourselves constantly of the variety of contexts in which
Ignatius claims spiritual consolation can arise. Among such varied
occasions a place should be found for the sorrow—surprising in its
newness—at the realisation of one’s own moral deficiency. The First
Week promises the retreatant that ‘sorrow for one’s sins’ will emerge
mysteriously with ‘tears that move to love of its Lord’ (Exx 316). If we
know how to accompany our retreatants so that they become aware of
that grace, then perhaps all that has been said so far can be taken for
granted.
Francisco J. Ruiz Pérez SJ is Jesuit Provincial of Andalusia and the Canary

Islands.
IGNATIUS’ MEDITATIONS
ON SIN
From Guilt to Gratitude
Eduardo López Azpitarte
T HE SPIRITUAL EXERCISES FORM PART of a theological and cultural

framework that differs considerably from those that are familiar to
us today. From this unsurprising truth it does not follow that the
teaching formulated in the time of Ignatius has lost either its interest or
its relevance. However, the deepest truths of Ignatius’ meditations now
come to us in a language and with a frame of reference to which we are
no longer accustomed. This disjunction affects, among others, the
reflections on sin that come in the First Week of the Exercises.
Clearly it would be a pity if we were so distracted by
anachronisms—which are, on the whole, incidental and secondary—
that we were to lose sight of the truly important aspects of the Spiritual
Exercises, or if an insistence on textual fidelity were to prevent us from
discovering the inner richness and validity of Ignatius’ words. In either
case, the experience that Ignatius had of the reality of sin would remain
hidden and we would never arrive at a knowledge of its true value.
In what follows I shall first try to pinpoint those aspects of the
Exercises that are most at variance with today’s outlook, and which
should not be stressed—especially since I would argue that they are also
foreign to the content of Revelation. Next, I shall briefly consider some
other problems that arise today in connection with sin, quite apart from
the Spiritual Exercises. Then I shall underline what I consider the most
fundamental and important lessons that can be drawn from the
meditations on sin. Finally, I will suggest some lines of thought based on
recent theological developments which may offer a positive
contribution when presenting the subject of sin.
The Way, 47/1–2 (Jan/April 2008), 97–113

98 Eduardo López Azpitarte
‘The First Sin, Which Was that of the Angels’ (Exx 50)
Today we are much more wary than earlier generations of religious
teaching that is not to be found in Revelation. While giving an honest
interpretation of such material, we want to avoid introducing elements
into the word of God that are not already there. And we also find it
difficult to partake in opinions that are foreign to our own human
experience; the culture of our historical period can play havoc with
ideas that seemed quite logical and acceptable in another epoch. On
both counts—theological and subjective—problems arise in
connection with the meditations on sin in the Spiritual Exercises.
Any biblical student is well aware that ‘angelology’, the branch of
theology dealing with the angels, is not one that has been growing and
developing over recent years. This fact suggests that scholars feel a
certain reluctance about committing themselves to the study of ‘spirits’.
Much of the available material on the existence, function and
hierarchical position of angels comes from non-scriptural or secular
sources; and similar beings appear both in the most ancient and
The Fall of the Rebel Angels, by Pieter Brueghel the Elder

Ignatius’ Meditations on Sin 99
primitive religious traditions and in the Old and New Testaments.1

Contact with the religious thought of the Babylonians, along with the
Assyrian invasions, undoubtedly greatly influenced Jewish ideas on the
existence of angels—conceived as inferior to God but greatly superior
to humans. But although the biblical authors used a framework of good
and bad spirits common to other cultures, they insisted on a strongly
monotheistic interpretation. They underlined both the transcendence
of God in relation to any other reality, and God’s overall providence for
creation in using spirits to carry out God’s plans and to overcome
obstacles to those plans.
As tends to happen when a phenomenon is not visible, the human
imagination has supplied a whole series of angelic features—not
completely without basis, but with little or no relation to reality. Thus,
given that angels are messengers of God and have to travel from place
to place, they are supposed to possess wings to improve their speed.
Similarly, since they are thought to have varied functions, it is
presumed that some hierarchical differentiation between them must
exist. But these are purely anthropomorphic elaborations, where no
criterion exists to distinguish what should be regarded as dogma from
what is best categorized as myth. In any case, ‘the limited forms of
human expression cause difficulty when one wishes to talk seriously
about the role of angels’.2 This observation should serve as a warning
both against myth-making and against raising exaggerated objections to
talking about angels at all: some recent theological dictionaries omit all
reference to the topic.
But problems of understanding are at their most acute when there is
talk of ‘the sin of the angels’. There is a long tradition in the Church
that ‘devils’ are angels who refused to obey God, and were condemned
to eternal punishment. This theory was an attempt to explain the
existence of evil in the world: given that the origin of evil could not be
found in the will of the Creator, it was thought that the malice of these
1
Compare Henri Cazelle, ‘Fondements bibliques de la théologie des anges’, Revue Thomiste, 90
(1988), 181–193. There is a good commentary on the ‘sin’ meditations of the Spiritual Exercises in
Santiago Arzubialde, Ejercicios espirituales de S. Ignacio: historia y análisis (Santander: Sal Terrae, 1991),
125–170.
2
German Episcopal Conference, Catholic Catechism for Adults (Spanish translation published by
BAC: Madrid, 1988, 115). This text also states: ‘Undoubtedly the Sacred Scriptures are very imprecise
when teaching about angels and use a mythological language in accordance with the mentality
prevalent at that time’ (114–115).
creatures was responsible for human sin. Their most malign influence
lay in the lying seduction by which they separated human beings from
obedience and submission to our origin and foundation. The new
Catechism includes this opinion (§§391–393),3 but it has never had a
firm foundation. It clearly relies on elements from the apocryphal
writings, which vary considerably in content and reflect a diversity of
traditions.4 Any reasonably well-educated person may justifiably feel a
reaction of rejection, if a meditation is offered based on something that
has so little biblical foundation.
‘On the Sin of Adam and Eve’ (Exx 51)

It is well known that the sin of Adam cannot be understood in a literal
way. From the first pages of the book of Genesis, what is envisaged is
God’s plan for the whole of humanity. These ancient tales are not to be
approached from the perspective of scientific and historical fact
concerning the origin and development of human life. The Bible is
neither a scientific treatise nor a historical synthesis; it cannot supply
answers to today’s questions about our beginnings.
The account of creation given in Genesis is a literary exercise which
ties itself to no particular scientific theory, but rather tries to
communicate a theological truth: God is present at the very start of all
history and displays creative kindness so that whatever exists may be
seen to have a relationship with God as its source. This account
requires faith in a creator who is at work in all the multiple
interventions that human beings make in history and that scientists
may discuss.
What the believer adds to such discussion is that, at the dawn of
that first beginning, there is to be found not some simple chance but a
love that wanted to set in motion both the world in which we live and
many other unknown worlds about which we are still ignorant. Such a
belief cannot be negated by any scientific theory; nor does this belief
negate any of the possible hypotheses that science may envisage. It can,
3
However, it is significant that, in the recent synopsis of the Catechism, this account was omitted,
perhaps because of the criticism that greeted its inclusion in the official text, or, at least, because it is
no longer considered of great importance.
4
A full account is given by Mathias Delcor, ‘Le mythe de la chute des anges et de l’origine des géants
comme explication du mal dans le monde, dans l’apocalyptique juive. Histoire des traditions’, Revue de
l’Histoire des Religions, 190 (1976), 3–53.
The Fall of Adam and Eve, by Michelangelo
however, give any explanation greater coherence. ‘In the beginning …

God created the heavens and the earth’ (Genesis 1:1) is the great truth
which recalls the believer to his or her religious roots.
Nevertheless, the troubling question remains: if we have been born
out of an act of love, why is it that life on this earth is so linked to sin?
The early pages of the book of Genesis provide an account which
explains our present human situation as the consequence of one
particular sin. There was a test, and disobedience to a divine law
brought about the punishment of our mortality. We now suffer the
consequences of not having wanted to remain faithful and obedient to
God’s command. Even if God had compassion on our failure, and once
more offered us friendship, it seems as though God does so now with
less generosity than at the moment of creation. It is as if the Creator’s
original dream had been destroyed by human malice, and God had to
accept a change of plan.
The account just given has been prevalent in a great deal of
Christian catechetical teaching, but there is no reason why it should be
presented as the only, nor indeed the most convincing and acceptable,
explanation. Theology today does not accept the biblical teaching on
the earthly paradise as a historical or scientific account of the beginning
of the world and of life.5 These passages have to be treated as an
5
For example, Raymund Schwager, Banished from Eden: Original Sin and Evolutionary Theory in the
Drama of Salvation, translated by James G. Williams (Leominster: Gracewing and Inigo, 2006). (The
German original was published in 1997.)
attempt to understand better in symbolic and mythical language the

existence of human life.
‘The … Particular Sin of Any One’ (Exx 52)

The last point of the meditation—on an individual ‘who for one mortal
sin is gone to Hell’—is nowadays quite incomprehensible. Possibly in
other historical periods this thought was a source of scruples and
tortured imaginings, a constant threat that could hardly be borne. But
today it is simply unthinkable that the ‘Infinite Goodness’, to which
Ignatius refers in this very paragraph, could be waiting for some first
transgression for which to inflict eternal punishment.
It is possible that even when Ignatius was working on the first
version of his Exercises this difficulty was felt. In the first Latin
translation—which may have been made by the saint himself, or at least
had his approval—a ‘perhaps’ (forte) has been added, giving, ‘who
perhaps has gone to Hell’, thus softening the remark. And when André
des Freux (known as ‘Frusius’, the Latin version of his name) produced
the official Vulgata translation he introduced the word forte on two
occasions—though he also changed the reference from a single
individual to ‘perhaps many’.6
But one has to acknowledge that the difficulties in this area do not
arise only because of the text of the Spiritual Exercises. Today’s culture
has become excessively deaf to any talk of sin. Pope Pius XII remarked,
‘The sin of the century is the loss of the sense of sin’, a remark repeated
by John Paul II.7 It is as if the picture of sin had become blurred and
could no longer be recognised. For many, ‘sin’ has become a museum
piece, which evokes past customs but has little to offer to today’s world.
And many of the criticisms of the concept—if sometimes
exaggerated—contain a kernel of truth: some of the more significant
deserve to be briefly presented here.8
6
The version given in MHSJ gives the different translations in parallel columns (281–283). A short
commentary in Gaston Fessard, La dialectique des exercices spirituels de S. Ignace de Loyola, volume 2
(Paris: Aubier 1966), 99–100, n. 1.
7
Pius XII, ‘Address to the Catechetical Congress held in Boston (1946)’, quoted by John Paul II,
apostolic exhortation: Reconciliation and Penance, 18.
8
For a fuller account by the author of this article, see Eduardo López Azpitarte, A vueltas con el
pecado: rsponsabilidad, culpa, conversion (Madrid: PPC, 2003), which has an extended bibliography in
Spanish.
Problems Today with the Notion of ‘Sin’

It is obvious that, over the years, a whole multitude of things have been
categorized as sins, and that this eventually caused a strong backlash
which either entirely rejected their sinfulness or adopted an attitude of
complete indifference. One need only glance at the manuals of moral
ethics published before Vatican II to find evaluations that look
ridiculous today. As John Paul II remarked: ‘From seeing sin
everywhere, nowadays it is not to be found!’—the pendulum has swung,
with a vengeance. At the same time, today’s culture makes much of
personal autonomy and freedom; it rejects any form of authoritarian
pedagogy unless sensible reasons can be given for what is imposed. Any
believer wanting to lead an adult life has the right to ask why some
particular form of action is to be considered as humanly inappropriate,
even if in the past such explanations have been notably lacking in
pastoral practice.
With the acceptance of the role of the unconscious, the idea of
straightforward personal freedom of choice has, with reason, become
more complicated. But in the process we have lost the sense of guilt.
Guilt is now considered to be simply something produced by the
Christian faith. Even if some evil is committed, one is not justified in
accusing or condemning a particular person: he or she is regarded as
suffering from a delusion or as the victim of error or of an unfortunate
accident—brought on by circumstances and interior pressures—but
surely not as guilty. A person is made in a certain way, and cannot
change, or avoid certain actions. The only sin is to persist in the
patterns of thought that produce a bad conscience.
Moreover many people today experience great uncertainty and
insecurity. There is a multiplicity of arguments and justifications to
support any moral position that may happen to appeal to them. In such
a context it is not surprising that many are drawn to scepticism or
indifference. With such a bewildering variety of choices, there is no
strong reason to choose one moral option rather than another, and it is
easy to slide into whichever appears to be the least taxing.
The stress on an individualist concept of sin has also helped to
facilitate the rejection of sin as such. So much effort was formerly
focused on determining the guilt or innocence of the individual that, if
an evil situation continued to exist despite my own innocence, I could
conclude that it was the fault of others who were not living up to
correct moral standards. As someone with a clear conscience myself,

there was no need for me to have any moral preoccupation with things
beyond the limits of my own actions. I could worry about my own
impure thoughts, while remaining completely oblivious to the structural
and collective evil surrounding me. Such a hypocritical view of sin has
become increasingly difficult to accept.
Ignatius makes much of certain feelings—‘shame and confusion’
(Exx 48), ‘intense sorrow and tears’ (Exx 55), ‘hatred’ (Exx 63)—which
make one feel ‘as [if] exiled among brute beasts’ (Exx 47); but these
expressions are not exempt from a certain ambiguity and have more
than one meaning. After all, the hurt one feels about a wrong action
may be linked not to its wrongness but to its painful consequences.
Or there may be a deep
personal dissatisfaction
over the failure to attain
some goal that was
expected both by oneself
and by others. This failure
is felt as shameful, not
because of the harm that
may have been done to
others, but because one’s
own narcissistic self-image
has been shattered, and it
is this that humiliates us
unbearably. Remorse often
plays a part: one wishes
that a fault had not been
committed, that things
had been different, that
one did not have to suffer
for something that cannot
now be changed. There
can be a futile lament, the
lament of someone for
whom all consolation is
useless because he or she
Detail from The Last Judgment, by Michelangelo is faced with what has no
remedy: a cry for help that is doomed to fail because it is made without
hope.
All of this brings home the fact that it is possible for guilt feelings to
exist in the psyche which are without any real basis, as in the case of
someone suffering from scruples. At other times objective sin may evoke
no feeling of guilt, if a person has become insensible and calloused,
deliberately hardened so as not to feel responsible. A sense of sin and guilt
may also be felt even if the roots of the feeling lack maturity and
evangelical justification. At times such feelings are a warning that
unconscious forces are at work within us, affecting us much more than we
realise. When Ignatius places at the heart of the Exercises the soul’s need
‘to rid itself of … disordered tendencies’ (Exx 1) he is trying to throw
spiritual light on such phenomena.
For despite everything that has been said so far, the fundamental
message of the First Week remains intact. If we deny the existence of
sin, nothing is left of the message of God’s revelation. The whole thing
collapses like a building whose foundations have been destroyed with
dynamite.
The Wager of Faith: A Prior Condition

If one admits that God has revealed Godself in history, as both the Old
Testament and the Good News of Jesus of Nazareth show us, then there
is a reason to be sure that Someone is seeking free contact with us as
humans. The awareness that there is a God, who loves us so much as to
reveals Godself in the shadow that hides God’s incomprehensible
immensity, is sufficient to allow one to take the leap of faith. To have
faith is to trust in God’s love and God’s word, and to understand that it
is worth pledging our whole life for this option. In a wager we may risk
all of our money on a throw of the dice. But believers wager their whole
lives, trusting in the promise of God. Inevitably there is an edge of
obscurity which can only be accepted, in the confidence of faith, as a
tribute which the believer is willing to pay to the mystery of God. To
desire the removal of that darkness is to try to slip under the covering
veil of faith. It is no wonder that Jesus had to remind his disciples after
the experience of the resurrection, ‘Blessed are those who have not seen
and yet believe’ (John 20:29).
Faith implies placing God at the centre of our existence, so as to
recognise the subordination of our whole being to God as dependent
creatures (as the Principle and Foundation insists). The one

indispensable condition for such an encounter with God is the
recognition that we are in need of being saved. The essence of being a
Christian is the intimate conviction that one is sustained by the mercy
of God. There is a force beyond our own capacities which has placed us
on a level of being that is radically different from anything to which our
own personal merits would give us a right.
Grace is not the result of our own efforts and merits, but rather a
gift from God, who can only give it to those who acknowledge their
need and their impotence. Any trace of self-sufficiency makes us
impermeable to the experience of the gratuity of grace. Thus, ‘perfect’
individuals make themselves quite incompatible with God; their very
virtues risk creating a barrier to cut them off from God’s free and
merciful love. The prayer of the Pharisee, ‘God, I thank you that I am
not like other people’ (Luke 18:11), wells up in their hearts, sometimes
imperceptibly, blocking any authentic and true justification.
The danger of acting like a Pharisee does not have its source
directly and primarily in religion as such. Its real roots are to be found in
our earliest childhood experiences. As children we learn that obedience
and good behaviour receive the rewards that we desire: the affection of
our parents; esteem from those around us; the joy and peace of a good
conscience. In the same way, many other experiences lead us to
discover that transgression and bad behaviour can bring about
rejection, condemnation and inner remorse. We may grow accustomed
to receive love as a prize for good conduct. This recompense is won by
effort and merit; likewise rejection and condemnation are merited
whenever we fail to maintain the standards required of us. We assume
that a bad person loses all right to feel loved.
Love can be felt not as free gift but as a prize to be won by good
conduct—to the point where an injustice is felt to have been
committed when love is granted to someone whose merits are not seen
to have deserved it. There is a general unconscious tendency to reduce
relationships to the level of commerce: they become matters of what is
justly owed, leaving no space for what is freely given. The good and
obedient may demand what has been won by merit; while for the
wicked and disobedient the only possible outcome is just punishment
and condemnation. Any other outcome would transgress one’s most
primitive sense of objective, legal justice.
Pharisees, detail from Christ accused by the Pharisees, by Duccio di Buoninsegna
It is quite understandable that such experiences, which are so much

a part of our education and have become integrated quite naturally into
our psyches, should intervene in our relationship with God. However,
as long as we remain convinced that we can merit God’s approval and
friendship by our own effort and good works—and conversely that
when we have done wrong the opposite is true, and that God cannot
possibly love us freely without any merit on our side—pharisaism
necessarily follows.
The Purpose of the Meditations: Overcoming Pharisaism

The purpose, therefore, of the meditations on sin is to root out the
pharisaic tendencies deeply embedded in the human psyche. There is
no better way of doing this than to recognise from the start our own
finite nature and our fragility. As I explained above, theology today does
not interpret the biblical teaching on the earthly paradise as a historical
or scientific explanation of how the world and life began. The purpose
of that teaching is to give a theological explanation of the human
situation: its starting-point and final destiny are the love of the Creator.
We were born from the ‘dust of the ground’: this symbolizes that our
existence comes to us from without and that we must return to the
womb of the earth. But the message is, nevertheless, that our final
home will not be there.
Our frailty and our finite nature were in the divine plan from the
beginning. God did not have to adjust his programme to restore order to
the chaos caused by the creature’s fault. From all eternity, God’s dream
was of an imperfect world, where self-salvation was not possible, but
within which Jesus, the great salvific Messiah, would always appear. The
creation that came from God’s hands is imperfect by its very nature.
Thus, although it can be explained in many different ways, what we
call ‘original sin’ is the acknowledgement that human beings are born
into the world incapable of doing good by themselves. Original sin is a
force that enslaves us to such an extent that we cannot free ourselves
from its influence except through the promise of salvation in Christ.
Jesus has come to sow this new seed of freedom in the world. It is
already possible to do good, even if our salvation is not yet complete,
and even if our struggle against evil continues and we are never exempt
from the wounds of our own fragility and cowardice. But we cannot do
good unless God provides us with salvation in Jesus.
It is this reality that Ignatius invites us to discover in the
meditations on the first two sins: the sin of the angels and the sin of
Adam and Eve. Although they may not correspond to concrete facts,
the two accounts reveal what happens when creatures rupture their
relationship with the Creator and attempt to live out their lives
autonomously. When human beings break off communion with God
they find themselves condemned to loneliness and failure: they are
incapable of feeling solidarity with one another and are wounded by
their own wills and desires. Genesis is full of allegorical details intended
to fill out the consequences of sin.
In the meditation we see this overall picture from outside with the
eyes of mere spectators, but it presents itself as a threat from within our
own life histories, when the tragedy that began in others is also present
in our own hearts. This is why the meditation on our own sins is so
important. One of the characteristics of a wrong action is that it tries to
justify itself. Precisely because we are sinners, we fail to have the
lucidity needed to recognise our own personal failings. There is always a
tendency—more or less conscious—to disguise what we do not want to
acknowledge, because it may run counter to our narcissistic leanings.9

St Ignatius invites us to gaze deeply into ourselves so that we may see
clearly the disorder behind our actions. This means bringing to the
surface what we would prefer not to know, what our deepest desires are
seeking to hide from us. It is this that Ignatius wants us insistently to ask
for in the preparatory prayer (Exx 46, 55, 62), so that all our doings may
be set in order and our guilt may not be distorted by other factors.
‘What Ought I to Do for Christ?’ (Exx 53)

In order to make sense of the reality of sin today we have to accept that
we live in a very different cultural climate from that of earlier times.
Many older people have negative memories of the Exercises as
encouraging fear, anguish, terror and disquiet. The image of God as a
Judge who saw and examined all that was done, allowing nothing to
escape His control, provoked an unbearable and destructive obsession
with God’s all-seeing gaze. Like so many other distortions of the
Christian life, this was a far cry from St John’s invitation to live in God’s
presence with full confidence, even ‘on the day of judgment’ (1 John
4:17). The real image that should be constantly before us is that of the
Crucified: then we will never lose sight of his gigantic love. Faced with
such love our only thought can be to reply with the greatest generosity
possible. The question, what ought I to do for Christ? represents the only
desire that we can depend on for the future.
Relying on that fundamental response to Christ, we need not be
afraid to face the truth about ourselves: to feel ‘personal shame and
confusion’ (Exx 48), ‘intense sorrow and tears’ (Exx 55), and
‘abhorrence’ as I ‘feel the disorder in my actions’ (Exx 63). I can even
‘look at myself as though I were a running sore’ (Exx 58), or see myself
‘as if exiled in this valley among brute beasts’ (Exx 47). There is no
room for bitterness or disillusion when, underlying everything, there is
Christ crucified. If someone feels caught up in negative reactions it is
because that person has failed to gather the fruit of the First Week.
With these considerations in mind, a number of recommendations
can be offered when the theme of sin is being presented.
9
See jean-Claude Sagne, ‘L’excuse et l’aveu’, Christus, 210 (2006), 136–147.
The Complexity of Guilt

There is a danger of insisting too much on the inner malice of sin, as if it
was always a gesture of rebellion and perverse rejection by a creature
claiming independence from its Creator. Experience shows, however,
that the majority of sins are
committed, not from some such
attitude of perversity, but on
account of deception. We often
commit sin because of a failure
to discover its true nature,
which is veiled and disguised
under superficial appearances
that may well be more kindly.
Before committing the sin, we
become convinced, in one way
or another, that it will really do
good, or, at least, that such
conduct is not as negative as
has been made out.
The situation is one in
which complete purity of
intention does not exist, nor
does complete clarity of mind,
but neither does open malice.
We can make use of half-truths
and manipulate the facts in our
favour in order to do what we
want without having too bad a
conscience. We may look for
some specious justification which
will allow us to do what we
should not out of a false
conviction that prevents us
from thinking lucidly. A blame-
worthy action requires an initial
self-deception by our own lies,
Christ Saviour of Mankind, school of Lucas rather than wickedness. We
Cranach the Elder want to convince ourselves that
what we are doing is not as bad as we thought it was, even if we cannot

completely silence the reproaches of conscience.10
Under these conditions, ethical judgment is more complex than is
usually thought. The obligation to declare all one’s grievous sins, duly
numbered and tabulated, created an urgent need to evaluate, with
almost mathematical precision, the knowledge and freedom that one
had in committing certain acts. However, a human being nearly always
acts out of a mixture of light and darkness, of cowardice and sincere
effort, of constraints and of freedom: the boundaries are seldom clear.
On such occasions the attitude that keeps most closely to the Gospels is
one that embraces with joy a situation of docta ignorantia, one that is
both humble and sincere. One is not afraid to acknowledge before God
that one does not know where one is. Only God can penetrate our dark
and mysterious world—where good and evil are intertwined in different
proportions depending on different cases and circumstances—which is
nearly always too opaque for our own understanding. An effort is
needed to place ourselves before God in complete sincerity, neither
condemning ourselves excessively nor excusing ourselves too naively. In
the last resort, we do not know what we are. We trust in God’s pardon
and we are open to loving and thanking God. The truth is that we are
all, at the same time, both sinners and saints.
In this way the traditional clarity in the classification of sins
becomes somewhat hazy. It is a problem, not of mathematics, but of a
complex evaluation which does not always result in easy explanations.
The Social Dimension

One final step is to overcome the excessively individualistic approach
to sin. Formerly even the social consequences of an action were
examined from the perspective of individual culpability or innocence.
Questions of scandal, complicity, financial probity, and social and
political responsibility were all judged in relation to subjective
intention. The individual had to know which were his or her
indispensable obligations, the fulfilment of which left one with a clear
conscience. For if our conscience was clear, we had no reason to be
10
For an illuminating explanation of the ‘first sin’, compare Eugen Drewermann, ‘Anguish and guilt in
the Yahvist account of the Fall’, Concilium, 113 (1976), 369–381.
morally preoccupied with the evil around us, because that evil was not a
matter of our own conduct.
It is now becoming increasingly unacceptable to ignore the
importance of the political and social dimension to our morality.
Somehow this too has to be integrated into the individual’s sense of
responsibility. It is not possible to keep one’s hands clean, even if there
are no personal faults, when one lives in a world that is rotten with
injustice and iniquity. To claim innocence—putting the blame on social
structures or on other people—is a defence mechanism designed to
convince us that we are not implicated. But our loyalty to what we have
received from the past, our complicity in the present, and the
compromises we accept with a view to the future make it impossible for
us to feel entirely innocent.
It is not possible here to analyze how deeply we are implicated in
structural sin.11 Responsibility frequently slides into guilt because of our
attitude to such sin. As John Paul II rightly declared:
It is a case of the very personal sins of those who cause or support

evil or who exploit it; of those who are in a position to avoid,
eliminate or at least limit certain social evils but who fail to do so
out of laziness, fear or the conspiracy of silence, through secret
complicity or indifference; of those who take refuge in the supposed
impossibility of changing the world and also of those who sidestep
the effort and sacrifice required, producing specious reasons of
12
higher order. The real responsibility, then, lies with individuals.
This is an invitation to acknowledge our tacit complicity, in so far as we

calmly accept unjust situations or fail to do all that we can to change
them.
The Mystery of God

Ultimately there always remains the mystery of a God whose will it was
to bring this creation into being , in this way, when there were so many
other possibilities. We have no right to expect God to justify his
unfathomable designs. St Paul offers the best response to assuage our
11
Eduardo López Azpitarte, Hacía una nueva vision de la ética cristiana, (Santander: Sal Terrae, 2003),
320–344.
12
Reconciliation and Penance, 16.
disquiet and doubt: ‘but where sin increased, grace abounded all the
more’ (Romans 5:20). He is saying that, in face of sin, decrepitude,
death, pain and failure, there rises up an ever stronger affection,
generosity, love, and utterly gratuitous salvation. For anyone who
experiences this overwhelming God, no other explanation is needed.
Eduardo López Azpitarte SJ is a retired professor of bioethics in the Theology

Faculty of Granada.
A place of peace, prayer and rest
in beautiful North Wales
THREE MONTH IGNATIAN SPIRITUALITY PROGRAMME

January 16—April 9, 2009
Enjoy a time of reflection, discernment and awareness which includes the full Spiritual Exercises.
After the Exercises we look at discernment, social justice and using this Spirituality in many different ways.
RETREAT GIVING & SPIRITUAL DIRECTION

May 5-July 14,2009
Gain experience and competence in giving Individually Guided Retreats, deepen your understanding of Ignatian
Spirituality and discernment. This is an ideal programme if you are involved in religious formation.
We shall be looking at listening skills and practical preparation for retreat giving, the integration of sexuality and
spirituality and the dynamic of the Spiritual Exercises. The course involves supervised retreat giving.
IGNATIAN SPIRITUALITY & PILGRIMAGE TO ITALY AND SPAIN

September 25—December 19, 2009
Enjoy a new and interesting Sabbatical with us. It begins with a 40 day Spiritual Exercises Institute. You will then
fly to beautiful northern Spain in the footsteps of Ignatius Loyola to understand the man and his Spirituality.
The pilgrimage continues to Rome where the mature Ignatius lived and died.
In the final section of programme you will gain a deeper insight into Ignatian Spirituality, through practical
exercises, and working with internationally renowned experts.
The Exercises Institute and the Exercises programme can be taken separately.
RETREATS AND SEMINARS

Individually Guided, silent retreats are offered all year round from a weekend to 10 days
Full Spiritual Exercises: A 30 day individually guided silent retreat: with preparation and reflection time.
2009—February 4—March 11; July 27-August 31; September 25– November 5
Enneagram Workshop led by Myles O’Reilly SJ January 26-30, 2009
Sexuality & Spirituality Seminar for retreat givers led by Revd Andrew Walker May 22-25, 2009
Spiritual Exercises Seminars twice a year: James Hanvey SJ— December 15-18, 2008
Gemma Simmonds—June 23-27 Philip Endean SJ—December 14-17, 2009
Midwinter Birth—Christmas Triduum December 18-22
For our full programme of retreats see www.beunos.com or contact:
The Programme Secretary, St Beuno’s, St Asaph, Denbighshire, LL17 0AS, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1745 583444 info@beunos.com Fax: +44 (0)1745 584151
SAVED, CALLED AND
COMMISSIONED
Nathan Stone
I T IS EASY FOR EXERCISE TO BECOME no more than a routine of empty,

repetitive movements. We pedal madly on fake bicycles or run on
treadmills, getting nowhere in order, appropriately, to maintain a
statically youthful appearance. Real athletes, on the other hand, train
for a specific future event, carefully measuring their progress towards it.
They push themselves, take risks, and move forward.
In the First Annotation, Ignatius of Loyola explains the objective of
the Spiritual Exercises with reference to physical exercise. Just as
‘strolling, walking and running’ (Exx 1) prepare the body for activity, so
too spiritual exercise disposes the soul for the Lord to act in it. We break
faith with the nature of the Exercises when we understand them as a
static ritual. They are intended as a dynamic process that will reveal,
impassion and motivate. We are not meant to spin the wheels and stay
in the same place. We must begin a journey.1
I sometimes feel that there are people who are content to make the
same retreat over and over again. They want no changes, and they
make no progress. They recharge their batteries, perhaps gain some
temporary relief from anxiety, but that is all. Because the modern world
assumes radical individualism, our retreat experiences tend to be
individualistic. But without looking beyond the borders of our own
individuality we cannot genuinely act out of love. Every age, of course,
brings its ideological assumptions to the journey of the Exercises, but
some of these constitute baggage so heavy that the journey cannot be
undertaken at all.
1
In the Autobiography, Ignatius refers to himself in the third person as ‘the pilgrim’.
The Way, 47/1–2 (Jan/April 2008), 115–124

116 Nathan Stone
This essay will explore some contemporary tendencies and

assumptions, in an attempt to rediscover the dynamic process of the
Exercises. It will address in particular the tendency towards what I have
called radical individualism in modern Western cultures. How and why
this tendency arose are beyond the scope of this article; my interest is in
its distorting effect on the experience of the Spiritual Exercises, and
how that effect may be overcome.
The Ignatian assumption is that change is possible, by the grace of
God, and that it is a good thing. You become a different person, with
new priorities, new criteria, and a new way of looking at the world.
Perhaps most importantly, you move from being centred on the self to
being centred on Christ. If this move is unsuccessful, however, the effort
to become Christ-centred may end up focusing on overcoming personal
defects and failings, and there is a danger of this leading to a self-
centred, guilty, ascetic religiosity.
The most important locus of radical change in identity occurs in the
Exercises when the pilgrim moves from the First Week to the Second.
The oblation to the Eternal King (Exx 98), means I no longer live for me,
but for you. This unconditional alliance with lordship is difficult for
modern people to understand, with its imagery of king and court.
Consequently in contemporary retreats the temptation can easily arise
to focus on the individual’s neediness, drawing on a skewed version of
the First Week material, because it is all about the individual self. We
may be tempted to avoid the Second Week experience, or modify it
unrecognisably, because it challenges too many of our assumptions.
A genuine experience of the Ignatian Exercises, however, will
involve recovering some ideas that are unfamiliar to us today. The
Pentecost story (Acts 2:1–14) assumes that the good news can be
understood in any language, at any time, in any place. Even so,
fundamental adjustments and adaptations must often be made. The
treasure is there for all, but the price is everything you have.
How the Exercises Became Modern in the Nineteenth Century

When archaeologists deciphered Mayan writing, they discovered that,
in certain ceremonial places, a few lines were added every so often to
honour a new king or to mark some notable event. But the last few lines
of the inscriptions, the most recent, were gibberish. It seems that the
Saved, Called and Commissioned 117
scribes no longer understood what the

figures meant. They just knew that
they periodically had to add a few.2
The Society of Jesus was
suppressed in 1773, only to be revived
in 1814. The period in between was
long enough to ensure that many
professed members of the old order had
moved on to greater glory by the time
the new one appeared. There would
have been a lack of experienced men to
participate in the formation of a new
generation. One imagines a time of great
hope, a new start, but without any
Father Ignatius to guide youthful
spirits. There was no one to decipher
the ancient inscriptions.
The new Society had little to go
on—some of the founding texts, but
not many. Mostly there were local rule-
books: the hallowed procedures,
schedules and menus of particular
communities.3 It also had a Roman
Catholic world on the defensive, trying
desperately to come to grips with an
increasingly secularised time. Innova-
tion was feared. In the Church of the
nineteenth century, change was
considered, a priori, to be change for
the worse. The Exercises, therefore, as
conceived by the fledgling Jesuits of
1814, consisted of five daily hour-long
sermons. Retreatants listened in silence.
Afterwards, they would be encouraged
2
See Charles C. Mann, 1491 (New York: Knopf, 2005), 24.
3
For a history of this period, see William V. Bangert, A History of the Society of Jesus (St Louis:
Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1986).
118 Nathan Stone
to write proposals on how they might become more virtuous. They

would hear Mass in Latin, confess, eat and sleep. It was a thirty-day
ordeal to be endured, during which little spiritual growth was likely to
take place.4
The routine they called the Exercises would have seemed
unfamiliar to Ignatius. The daily practice, in his time, consisted of brief
sessions of guidance, and five hours of silent personal meditation. One
would listen to the Lord, not to the director. The handbook (called
Spiritual Exercises) states specifically that a director should speak as little
as possible, so as not to interfere with a retreatant’s experience of God,
and that he should in no way give directives that might tip the balance
in a retreatant’s discernment process (Exx 15).
Through recent research and reflection, something closer to the
genuine Ignatian method has now been resurrected. And yet we still see
a tendency to lapse back into long talks and short prayers and a
persistent bias towards individual sins and personal virtues.5 The
postmodern generation, in its search for security, seems to grasp at
unreasoned certainty because if you can reason towards something then
there is a possibility that it may not be so, that your reasoning is
unreliable. The acceptance of authority for its own sake avoids
engaging with postmodernity’s pervasive scepticism.
This assumption, however, makes the discernment process
unthinkable. If the Ignatian Exercises are to be used as a reference for
retreat experiences, then we must be aware of the dynamic nature of
the process they were intended to inspire. The blueprint calls for
personal meditation and discernment, a progression of conversion and
healing that leads onwards to calling, commitment and mission. This is
not because Ignatius said so, but because it is the Christian experience
of discipleship, rooted in the gospel.
Righteousness: The Wrong Word

Most English translations of the Bible render both the Old Testament
zdk cluster, from the Hebrew, and the Greek New Testament concept
4
Many of the older men in the Society today can recall at least their first thirty-day retreat, given in
this fashion, as an ordeal.
5
There are groups that claim to give the ‘authentic Ignatian Exercises’ because they have held on to
the nineteenth-century practice. I think in particular of the Lumen Dei movement.
dikaios, as righteousness.6 A correct theological understanding of

righteousness would be that one has become holy, by the grace of God.
There are problems, however, with some of the connotations that this
word has in English, and a more accurate translation, in some ways,
would be justice. Even then, some accommodation must be made. The
contemporary mind tends to think of justice in terms of the legal or
justice system and the punishment of offenders.7 Biblical justice, on the
other hand, is pardon, clemency and indulgence. It shows no preference
for the powerful, wealthy or well connected. Sinners are saved, even
though they do not deserve it. Debts are paid, and communal balance is
restored. Biblical justice is all about relationships. Righteousness, for
the modern mind, is about the fate of the individual sinner.
The word righteousness is often associated with rightness, or
correctness. This can lead to an equation of salvation with the affirmation
of correct theological statements. And this, in turn, can become a
rationale for self-righteousness: for looking down on others, who are
Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, by Lucas Cranach the Younger
6
In the King James Bible, righteousness appears 302 times, two-thirds of them in the Old Testament.
Justice appears only 28 times, all in the Old Testament. Righteous appears 238 times, three-quarters in
the Old Testament. And just appears only 94 times, three-fifths in the Old Testament.
7
This explains some retreats that do nothing but rehearse catechetical content.
120 Nathan Stone
wrong and, therefore, damned. Right and wrong become confused with
correct and incorrect, and are elevated to objects of religious fervour in
and of themselves, without reference to God.8 This can turn religion
into a contest of apologetics, an ongoing argument about who is right
and who is wrong. Salvation takes on a distinctively Gnostic flavour: we
are redeemed or forsaken not by love, or grace, or good works, but by
what we know and affirm. Even when righteousness remains an ethical
category—doing right or wrong rather being correct or incorrect—
there is a danger of its becoming legalistic or pharisaical.
Why is this important for retreat experiences? If men and women
make retreats to become righteous in a sense that is distorted or
confused in these ways, their experience is in danger of becoming self-
centred, rather than God-centred: personal meditation will be limited,
and they will be less likely to experience the divine presence or form a
bond with the Lord; they will also be less likely to hear a calling to serve
their neighbour. In such cases retreat directors may find themselves
filling a void with words.
First Week Anxiety and Second Week Discipleship

One of the most controversial aspects of Roman Catholicism is the
confessional. Some value it, as a unique opportunity. Others fear it, as
an unfair requirement. Outsiders often consider it an invasion of
privacy, an intrusion upon conscience, or a usurpation of the divine
privilege of clemency. Many consider it medieval, but there is also
something about confession that sits well with today’s individualistic
subject. Continual examination of conscience can feed the obsession of
strivers for personal perfection—and of prisoners of personal guilt.
Sacramental absolution is intended to alleviate anxiety and guilt; and
without it they can continue to smoulder. However, if penitents focus
on the finer points of their personal lives, this can create even more
guilt and greater anxiety.
Ignatius was at one point beset by guilt strong enough for him to
consider suicide. He became so scrupulous that he believed nothing
pleasing to God could ever come out of him. His recovery came about
8
A teetotaller once confronted a Catholic priest in the dining car on a train for having a beer. The
priest responded that Jesus drank wine. The teetotaller, filled with self-righteous fervour, quipped,
‘And I would have liked him a whole lot better if he hadn’t!’.
through a call to action: he put on the colours of Christ, to find a new

identity in a companionship with Jesus. In one sense it would not matter
who he was any more: he had lost himself in his Lord. As Paul said, ‘it is
no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’ (Galatians 2:20). Thus,
ordinary men and women are saved, called, and commissioned by their
Lord and King. They become a part of him. That is discipleship.
Guilt, Honour and Shame
The First Week is focused on the self in relationship to God. It opens up
the heart to the loving grace of God. Conversion means keeping control
over oneself and putting the passions in order. Some would eradicate all
passions; but they are gifts from God, to be domesticated, not eliminated.
It is a matter of priorities.
© Martin Ujlaki
Retreatants meditate on
their lives, remembering,
from year to year and from
place to place, what has
happened, why they are who
they are, and why they do
what they do (Exx 55–60).
They see themselves before
God, deserving a harsh
judgment and receiving a
merciful one. They are then
invited to consider what
they might do for Christ in
return, as a gesture of
thanksgiving (Exx 53). The
stage is being set for
oblation before the Eternal
King (Exx 98).
Among the methods of
the First Week are self-
analysis, self-scrutiny and
self-examination.9 These Confessional in St Nicholas’ Church, Prague
9
In the Additions (Exx 79), a darkened room is recommended for introspection. This is changed in
the Second Week (Exx 130), because light is required to see outside oneself. Introspection is over.
122 Nathan Stone
methods are easily accessible to modern individualistic subjects. But as

the Exercises move forward, it becomes clear that Ignatius emphasizes
not guilt and conscience but honour and shame.10 Sinners are called to
feel shame and confusion, rather than guilt, in the gaze of the loving
God in the First Week (Exx 48, 53), so that they can pour out their lives
to that same God as Lord in the Second Week (Exx 95–98). It is a
question of honour.
Tuning the Ear to Hear the Call
The contemplations of the Second Week are no longer so focused on
the self. The protagonist is a Lord you would follow anywhere, and for
whom you would do anything. In the First Week, one meditates,
looking inward, using memory, reason and desire.11 In the Second Week,
one contemplates, using sight, taste and touch (Exx 121–126). Through
the five senses, the disciple moves outward, into the world of the Other.
In the Incarnation (Exx 101–109), the subject observes the planet from
the point of view of the most Holy Trinity. The motivating force behind
the divine gesture of salvation is compassion. The divine gaze teaches a
retreatant to see and hear the signs of the times. The joys, hopes,
sorrows and anxieties of the world are to be shared by the disciple of
Christ. At the Nativity (Exx 110–117), the retreatant looks at the
tender, vulnerable child in a manger. Look at him, Ignatius says, not at
yourself. The retreatant asks for intimate knowledge of our Lord to love
him better and to follow him more closely.
Ignatius asks you to consider how what you are seeing might affect
you.12 But this is not an examination of conscience, but a call to bonding.
How does this experience alter your identity forever? This process,
however, can be misunderstood. It is possible for today’s retreatants to look
for something to feel guilty about in every scene from the life of Christ.
10
For a thorough treatment, see Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society. edited by J.
G. Peristiany (Chicago, U. of Chicago P, 1974).
11
Elder Mullan translates voluntad here as will (3, 50–52, 176, 234), a much more limited concept that
leads to a Pelagian understanding of the meditation. The Pelagian heresy, condemned in the fifth
century at the Council of Carthage, supposed that on saved oneself by one’s own efforts, that God’s
grace was secondary. Spanish voluntad includes will, but also desire, feeling and emotion. Compare
Robert R. Marsh, ‘Id quod volo: The Erotic Grace of the Second Week’, The Way, 45/4 (October 2006).
12
Reflectir para sacar provecho (Exx 108, 116). Mullan translates as: ‘reflect in order to draw some profit
from each of these things’. This is more than abstract reflective thinking. It means allowing oneself to
be interpellated by the narrative. The Spanish evokes the metaphor of a light shining, which would
solicit a response, or ‘reflection’, in the retreatant.
Service is moved backward into the world of guilt, sin and repentance.
Instead of a vocation, these retreatants hear a scolding voice that accuses
them of omissions. Their solidarity with those in need is a cold, penitential
practice, whose objective is not really to serve others, but to attain ever
higher degrees of personal virtue, which nevertheless always fall short.
There is a very telling error in a standard English translation of the
Second Week consideration of the Three Pairs of Men (Exx 155). The
movement of the piece is towards radical commitment, in order to serve
the Lord in the best possible way. Elder Mullan gives us ‘forcing
[oneself] not to want [a certain benefit] or any other thing, unless only
the service of God our Lord move them . . . .’ The Spanish original says
poniendo fuerza, which more precisely means to make every conceivable
effort. The English notion of forcing oneself evokes coercion, and leads
to Pelagianism. The Spanish supposes that there are limits on what
human endeavour can accomplish, and that other factors come into
play, including, most importantly, the grace of God.
Retreatants who self-righteously force themselves to do things,
perhaps against their natures, callings or better judgment, turn the
spotlight back on to their individual accomplishment. They
become over-achievers to try to earn God’s love. Then, they Discipleship …
attempt to serve the Lord by forcing compliance in others. This is about letting
could explain why a lot of what we call evangelization, at every oneself get
level, looks more like colonisation. Discipleship, on the other carried away
hand, is about letting oneself get carried away. Instead of
controlling the details, it is a matter of giving control to the Lord.13 If
you commit to the project, you become a seed to be sown by the Sower.
Personal achievement ceases to matter. Total availability becomes the
key.
For pilgrims, the criterion is this: be not deaf to the calling, but
rather quick and diligent in response. It is no longer about a thousand
and one sins, but about real unlimited service.14 The objective is no
longer personal perfection or virtue. Those who are saved, called and
commissioned will be more concerned about faithfulness to vocation.
13
See Carlos Cabarrus, ‘La pedagogía del discernimiento: la osadía del dejarse llevar’, Diakonia (Sept 1987).
14
Compare Exx 91–98, 315, 328–336. See also Cabarrus, ‘La pedagogía’. The point of the Examen, for
the disciple, is to allow the Good Spirit to carry him or her away.
124 Nathan Stone
A Pilgrim Church
There can be a temptation for Christians to emphasize the line that divides
the saved from the lost, to the exclusion of everything else. Contemporary
insecurities exacerbate the phenomenon. Retreat experiences, be they
Ignatian or some other variety, can give too much prominence to
individual sins and repentance. It is true that saving grace is urgent, and it
is the precondition for calling and mission. But that is not all there is.
If we only aspire to lives that are ‘not evil’, we cannot consider
ourselves disciples of Christ. Discipleship is more than getting back to
zero. Sincere followers of the saving Lord give of their lives generously.
Goodness and compassion imply calling and mission. Listening to the
Lord requires trust. Discernment of mission requires an open heart.
Fixation on individual sin and personal perfection distorts the good
news of the Kingdom.
Christianity is not static, but dynamic. This pilgrim Church on
earth moves, as a community, in the direction of the Kingdom. A
spirituality that does no more than aspire to holding the line breaks
faith with the gospel. Moreover, such stasis increases the chances that
we will fail and fall back into the mire. Christianity is much more that
an eternal cycle of falling off the wagon and climbing back on.
The retreat experience cannot dwell on sin and perfection. Indeed,
neither can homiletics, catechism or theology. We must move on to
bonding and loss of self, to become available for calling and mission. We
are here for others, not for ourselves. To discover mission, we must
learn to listen; that is the purpose of silent retreat.
Nathan Stone SJ is a native Texan, with degrees from the University of Notre
Dame and the University of Texas. As a teaching volunteer in Chile, and inspired
by the Ignatian model, he became a Jesuit in 1992. A member of the Chilean
province, he studied Theology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, and
he was ordained to the priesthood there in 2000. He has worked in
education, youth and social action ministry in Santiago, Antofagasta and
Montevideo. He has been writing homiletic reflections on the Sunday readings, for
electronic and traditional publication, for the last nine years. His reflections on
spirituality have appeared in several Jesuit publications. He has been giving the
Spiritual Exercises for over ten years. He is currently Director of Campus Ministry
at the Catholic University of the North (Universidad Católica del Norte) in
Antofagasta, Chile.
THE DISCERNMENT
OF SPIRITS
When Do the Second Week Rules Apply?
Timothy M. Gallagher
A NY SURVEY OF THE LITERATURE on Ignatius of Loyola’s Second

Week rules for discernment quickly reveals a wide diversity in the
concrete application of these rules. This diversity is particularly evident
in the examples given to illustrate such applications. Certain
fundamental questions about these rules are consequently unavoidable.
When precisely do these rules apply? Can these eight rules explain such
diverse spiritual experience? How specific is the spiritual experience
that Ignatius contemplates in them? Is it possible to delineate this
experience clearly? Does such precision matter? If so, what is at stake
spiritually?
A Selection of Examples
To clarify the questions raised here, I shall take some representative
examples from different writers of various ways of applying the Second
Week rules.
John English takes the case of an inexperienced retreatant whom
the Enemy deceives with the ‘fantasy’ of ‘going on difficult missions, or
some other extraordinary apostolate’.
The rule that has the most frequent application is the Fourth Rule:
‘It is a mark of the evil spirit to assume the appearance of an angel of
light. He begins by suggesting thoughts that are suited to a devout
soul, and ends by suggesting his own.’ (Exx 332) One sign of the
Enemy is that its good suggestions are often far-fetched, especially
with beginners. For example, some retreatants may start thinking
about going on difficult missions, or some other extraordinary
The Way, 47/1–2 (Jan/April 2008), 125–142

126 Timothy M. Gallagher
apostolate, long before they are purified of mortal sin or deep disordered
1
attachments.
The Enemy is presented as targeting ‘beginners’ and presenting good,

but ‘far-fetched’, suggestions. This deceptive activity of the Enemy
under ‘the appearance of an angel of light’ occurs ‘long before they are
purified of mortal sin or deep disordered attachments’: the Second
Week rules are understood to apply to people who are still struggling
with mortal sin. The retreatant’s ‘fantasy’ would thus pertain to the
Second Week rules: the ultimately distracting quality of such a fantasy
would reveal the deception of the Enemy posing as an ‘angel of light’.
David Lonsdale applies the rules to the problem of discerning
between true spiritual consolation—a genuine call from God—and a
person’s natural psychological inclinations. Here deception arises from
a confusion between genuine spiritual consolation and the ‘natural
enthusiasm’ of a person who responds energetically to challenges in
general:
The experience of a call to be a prophet is one in which people can

in good faith be deceived in the ways described by Ignatius in the
Rules for Discernment of the Second Week. The ‘consolation’ itself,
that is the alleged experience of a call to be a prophet, can be
deceptive (Exx 331) in the sense that natural enthusiasm for a cause in
a person who naturally responds enthusiastically to challenges can
be mistaken, perhaps in the atmosphere of a retreat or a prayer-
2
meeting, for true, spiritual consolation.
Jean Gouvernaire uses the Second Week rules to explain interior

movements associated with objectively evil (even criminal) behaviour:
When the person’s dispositions are bad, then the silence and noise
reverse. James is a university student who has abandoned his former
faith and moral principles. He is tempted by drugs after having
experimented with them; but he has no money. A companion
suggests a way to solve the problem. They will wait near a bank on
their motorcycle. When a woman carrying a purse exits the bank,
they will approach, steal her purse, and ride off. Except for a slight
1
John English, Spiritual Freedom: From an Experiencing of the Ignatian Exercises to the Art of Spiritual
Guidance (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1995), 179.
2
David Lonsdale, ‘The Serpent’s Tail’, The Way Supplement, 52 (1985), 70.
The Discernment of Spirits 127
concern that the attempt may fail, the idea enters James’ heart very
naturally, as if in its own home. It harmonizes with his present way
3
of living.
In this scenario, the person involved ‘has abandoned his former faith
and moral principles’; his ‘dispositions are bad’. Consequently, an
invitation to commit theft enters his heart ‘very naturally, as if in its
own home’. A subsequent stirring of compassion for his victim, on the
other hand, ‘agitates and disturbs him’: it enters his heart, in Ignatius’
words, ‘perceptibly with clatter and noise’ (Exx 335).
Thomas Green, by contrast, applies the Second Week rules to a
‘devout soul’, one who is ‘relatively mature and stable’ in a committed
following of the Lord.
She is no longer the ‘beginner’ of the First Week of the Spiritual

Exercises, whom the evil spirit can hope to turn away from her
commitment by discouragement, fear, anxiety or other forms of
desolation. In order to deceive her now [the Enemy] has to come to
her under the appearance of good. He has to use her very desire for
God and holiness as a means to lead her astray. If she loves to pray,
he will encourage this love (and even reward her with visions and
revelations and other unusual experiences) in order to foster pride
4
or to cause her to neglect her apostolic responsibilities.
This is a person ‘for whom enticements to what is obviously evil would

have little attraction’. This person is no longer ‘the “beginner” of the
First Week’, one whom the Enemy attempts to dishearten through
3
Jean Gouvernaire,‘Un discernment plus subtil: règles de seconde semaine des Exercises Spirituels de
Saint Ignace’, Supplément à vie chrétienne, 339 (1990), 29. (Author’s translation, as are all subsequent
quotations from non-English publications.)
4
Thomas Green, Weeds among the Wheat: Discernment: Where Prayer and Action Meet (Notre Dame,
In: Ave Maria Press, 1986), 135.
desolation. The Enemy now attempts to turn such persons’ spiritual

zeal against them, using their ‘very desire for God and holiness’ as a
means to lead them astray. The Second Week rules assist these
spiritually mature persons in discerning deceptions related to spiritual
zeal.
Daniel Gil focuses on ardent Christians whose hearts stir with love
for the cross of Christ, prayer, poverty, apostolic service and total
belonging to the Lord. The rules assist such people in discerning
between spiritual consolation of the good spirit and spiritual
consolation of the Enemy in these areas of spiritual strength.
That the good spirit consoles the soul has been said from the
beginning (Exx 315, in fine) …. However … the demon can and
effectively does bring spiritual consolations to the soul …. These
consolations are not different in such fashion that they may be
distinguished simply of themselves; nor will a person … sense the
5
difference immediately.
Here discernment according to the Second Week rules is highly refined:

the Enemy, like the good spirit, gives genuine spiritual consolation, such
that only great attentiveness and careful application of the rules permit
accurate discernment.
In Achille Gagliardi’s example, the rules are applied to a generous
person moved by ‘a desire to love and serve God’ to seek good and holy
things. The rules expose the Enemy’s tactic of leading this person by
gradual steps from good beginnings to serious sin. The efficacy of this tactic
5
Daniel Gil, Discernimiento según San Ignacio: Exposición y comentario práctico de las dos series de reglas
de discernimiento de espíritus contenidas en el libro de los Ejercicios Espirituales de San Ignacio de Loyola (EE
313–336) (Rome: Centrum Ignatianum Spiritualitatis, 1971), 309.
derives from its progressive nature: the gradual stages lead to a sinfulness
which, if proposed openly in the beginning, the person would reject.
For example: from a desire to love and serve God, he [the Enemy] will
lead a woman to seek someone who can assist her as guide and teacher
in the spiritual life. He will then work to awaken in her a spiritual and
holy affection towards him under the form of divine inspiration and of
progress in spiritual things. Then frequent conversations between them
follow; then an honest human affection, though not spiritual as before,
and conversations about human things; then, little by little, the honest
affection is transformed into another, tender and strong, which
gradually leads to a focus on superficial things, to idly passing time, and
then to empty and useless conversations; from this derive acts which,
though not obviously bad in themselves, have the power of awakening
concupiscence; these lead to unchaste acts, though still slight, from
which the process continues until they reach the consummation of the
6
sin.
The juxtaposition of these various examples reinforces the

questions raised above. Can the Second Week rules explain such
diverse spiritual experience? Do they apply across the broad spectrum of
the spiritual journey—from the person still immersed in serious sin to
the person lovingly and single-mindedly dedicated to the crucified
Saviour? Did Ignatius understand them to apply so widely?
The Criteria for Applying the Rules

In Annotations 8–10, and in the text of the Second Week rules
themselves, Ignatius supplies criteria for the spiritual experience to
which these rules properly apply. The Enemy is attempting to deceive a
spiritual person in a precise way. The rules assist this spiritual person to
overcome this specific form of deception. The criteria are the following
two: the person—one who is ‘exercising himself in the Illuminative life,
which corresponds to the Exercises of the Second Week’ (Exx 10); and
the form of deception—the enemy is tempting this person ‘under the
appearance of good’ (Exx 10).
6
Achille Gagliardi, S. P. Ignatii. De discretione spirituum regulae explanatae (Naples: Typis Paschalis
Androsii, 1851), 83.
The Person
Ignatius describes the person of the Second Week rules as a ‘devout
soul’, a ‘just soul’ (Rule 4, Exx 332), and a ‘spiritual person’ (Rule 8,
Exx 336). Such people have,
… already experienced the ‘purgative life’ (Exx 10) of the prayer of

the first week in the Spiritual Exercises. With God’s grace, they
have progressed effectively in overcoming sin, and their hearts are
now ready to seek the Redeemer whose love has awakened in them
a desire to respond in love (Exx 53).
These persons actively strive to know more deeply and to follow
more closely the Lord they love (Exx 104). They have assimilated
the spiritual dispositions described in the characteristic exercises of
the second week: ‘The Call of the King’ (Exx 91–98), ‘The Two
Standards’ (Exx 136–147), ‘The Three Classes’ (Exx 149–157) and
‘The Three Degrees of Humility’ (Exx 165–168). As these classic
exercises indicate, such persons deeply desire to embrace God’s will
in their lives. They wish to dedicate themselves actively to Christ’s
saving work in the world and are prepared to relinquish any
attachments that may diminish their freedom to follow Christ’s call.
They are disposed even to partake of Christ’s own life of poverty
7
and humiliation, should God so desire.
The persons of the First Week rules, according to Ignatius, are

‘persons who are going on intensely cleansing their sins and rising from
good to better in the service of God our Lord’ (Exx 315). A higher level
of spiritual growth is clearly presumed in those to whom the Second
Week rules apply.8 Indeed Ignatius explicitly excludes from these rules
any person ‘who has not been versed in spiritual things, and is tempted
7
Timothy Gallagher, Spiritual Consolation: An Ignatian Guide for the Greater Discernment of Spirits
(New York: Crossroad, 2007), 26–27.
8
Gallagher, Spiritual Consolation, 139–140. Compare Luis Teixidor, ‘La primera de las reglas de
discreción de espíritus más propias de la segunda semana’, Manresa, 8 (1932), 30.
grossly and openly’ (Exx 9).9 It seems evident, also, that Ignatius
presupposes significant experience of discernment according to the First
Week rules in those who are properly subjects of the ‘greater
discernment of spirits’ (Exx 328), the more ‘subtle’ and ‘high’ (Exx 9)
discernment typical of the Second Week. If the Enemy now attempts to
deceive such people through spiritual consolation (Rule 3, Exx 331), it is
because they are accustomed to reject his more basic tactic of spiritual
desolation: they are already practised in discernment according to the
First Week rules.
The Form of Deception
The Second Week rules apply, Ignatius says, when people of this kind are
being ‘assaulted and tempted under the appearance of good’ (Exx 10).
The Enemy, disguised as ‘an angel of light’ (Rule 4, Exx 332), attempts to
deceive them through ‘apparent reasons, subtleties and continual
fallacies’ (Rule 1, Exx 329); through spiritual consolation with a preceding
cause (Rule 3, Exx 331); through ‘good and holy thoughts, conformable to
such a just soul’ (Rule 4, Exx 332); or through ‘various resolutions and
opinions which are not given immediately by God our Lord’ in the time
following consolation without preceding cause (Rule 8, Exx 336).10
9
The same would apply to the person described in Annotation 18, a person of ‘little ability or little
natural capacity’, to whom some of the easier exercises only should be given, and who is not to ‘go on
into the matter of the Election, or into any other Exercises that are outside the First Week’. A further
question regards the psychological maturity of the ‘Second Week’ person. The level of spiritual maturity
in such a person is clearly presumed to be higher than that of the ‘First Week’ person. Can the same be
said of this person’s psychological maturity? Is solid psychological maturity a further—almost
necessary—sign that the Second Week rules, with their more subtle and more elevated (Exx 9)
discernment, truly do apply to this person’s spiritual experience?
10
In the Second Week rules, as in those of the First Week, Ignatius is speaking of specifically spiritual
consolation. See Gallagher, Spiritual Consolation, 153, and The Discernment of Spirits: An Ignatian Guide
for Everyday Living (New York: Crossroad, 2005), 48–51.
Ignatius’s brief but clear indications may be summarised as follows:

the Second Week rules properly apply when a spiritual person who has
already intensely (Exx 315) experienced the ‘purgative life’ with
growing freedom from sin; who is practised in discernment according to
the First Week rules (overcoming spiritual desolation); and who
possesses the generous dispositions (readiness to share Christ’s poverty,
humiliation and redemptive mission) requisite for the election in the
Second Week, is now being tempted by the enemy under the appearance
of good through spiritual consolation and related good and holy thoughts.
Deceptions through Energy

The First Week rules essentially concern deception by the Enemy
through a deficit of spiritual energy: through spiritual desolation and its
related misleading thoughts. But the Second Week rules treat of
deception through spiritual energy itself: through spiritual consolation
and its related (deceptive) good and holy thoughts. Which deceptions
through energy belong properly to the Second Week rules? Are there
such deceptions which do not belong to them? If so, does Ignatius
address these elsewhere in his Spiritual Exercises? I shall attempt to
answer these questions through a series of examples.
John is a young, single professional. Since college he has abandoned his

practice of the sacraments and all involvement in the Church. Under the
influence of friends he has adopted, at first hesitantly, then with
increasing willingness, a life of self-indulgence and promiscuity. He also
engages in seriously dishonest dealings in his work. His friends now invite
him to spend a week in the Caribbean. John knows that this will be a
week without moral restraint; he is excited by the possibility and makes
the necessary plans with enthusiasm.
This is clearly a deception through energy—John is ‘excited’ and makes

his plans ‘with enthusiasm’—but, equally clearly, neither the person nor
the form of deception match Ignatius’ criteria for the Second Week rules.
John’s experience is that described in the First Week, Rule 1 (Exx 314):
In the persons who go from mortal sin to mortal sin, the Enemy is
commonly used to propose to them apparent pleasures, making
them imagine sensual delights and pleasures in order to hold them
more and make them grow in their vices and sins.
This spiritual experience is the furthest removed from that of the

‘spiritual person’ to whom the Second Week rules apply.
Martha is making her first directed retreat. The initial days have been a
time of discouragement; prayer has been difficult, God has seemed
distant, and on several occasions she has nearly abandoned the retreat.
But today all that has changed. Prayer has been warm and joyful, the
scriptural texts have come alive, and God has felt close. Now Martha is
certain that her problems are over, that her spiritual struggles are finished,
that heaviness of heart will no longer burden her spiritual life. She
dedicates herself with great energy to prayer as the day continues.
This is truly an experience of spiritual consolation: as she prays, Martha

is filled with spiritual joy. She appears unaware, however, of the pitfall
addressed in the First Week, Rule 10 (Exx 323): ‘Let him who is in
consolation think how he will be in the desolation which will come
after, taking new strength for then’. If she prepares in her time of
spiritual consolation for the eventual return of spiritual desolation,
Martha is less likely to be harmed by that desolation. The danger here is
from naivety and its consequences when spiritual desolation returns;
the need is for wise provision for future desolation.
Clare began daily prayer with Scripture three months ago; each morning
she dedicates half an hour to this prayer. At first, though she was faithful,
she found the prayer dry and difficult. In recent weeks, however, she has
felt God’s closeness and his love in her daily prayer. This awareness of
God’s love gives joy to her heart throughout the occupations of the day.
She is filled with satisfaction that she has achieved so rich an ability to
pray, and is pleased to see herself progressing so surely in her spiritual life.
Once again, this is an experience of spiritual consolation. Clare

perceives this, and ‘is filled with satisfaction that she has achieved so
rich an ability to pray’; she is ‘pleased to see herself progressing so surely
in her spiritual life’. In the First Week, Rule 11 (Exx 324), Ignatius
writes: ‘Let him who is consoled see to humbling himself and lowering
himself as much as he can, thinking how little he is able for in the time
of desolation without such grace or consolation’ (compare also Rule 9,
third cause, Exx 322). The danger here is self-satisfaction: Clare almost
unconsciously ascribes the gift she has received to her own abilities; the
need is for humility. Such humility will bless Clare as her journey of
prayer continues.
Mark is a university student who is easily moved by enthusiasm though,

generally, his enthusiasm does not endure at length. Recently he was invited
by a friend to a retreat. He was struggling with loneliness at the time and
willingly accepted the invitation. Mark was deeply struck by the sense of
community and fraternal love he found among the participants. Now, filled
with joy in the Lord, Mark is certain that he has found his way at last. He
wants to embrace this new life fully, and decides to become a priest; he plans
to interrupt his studies and apply for admission to the local seminary. Mark
enthusiastically shares his decision with the university chaplain.
This too is an experience of spiritual consolation: Mark is ‘filled with

joy in the Lord’. But in Annotation 14, Ignatius writes:
If the one who is giving the Exercises sees that the one who is
receiving them is going on in consolation and with much fervour, he
ought to warn him not to make any inconsiderate and hasty promise
or vow: and the more light of character he knows him to be, the
more he ought to warn and admonish him.
Mark’s decision does indeed appear to have something ‘inconsiderate’

and ‘hasty’ about it, and Annotation 14 appears to apply here.
Andrew is a married man in his thirties who, after years away from the
Church, six months ago embraced his faith with new commitment and
energy. Aware of this, and knowing his business skills, his pastor asked
Andrew to serve on the parish financial council. Andrew was happy to
accept. Now he delights in exercising his ability to handle financial
matters effectively and is increasing his involvement in the financial
council. This additional activity, together with his responsibilities to
family and work, strains his energies.
This too is a deception through energy. Further, it occurs through

involvement in ‘sacred’ things—fostering the life of the parish.
Questions arise, however, regarding whether this experience properly
pertains to the Second Week rules. Is Andrew—a man who ‘after years
away from the Church, six months ago embraced his faith with new
commitment and energy’—truly the spiritually mature person of the
Second Week? Is his experience truly spiritual consolation (from his life
of faith and his relationship with God), or might it be non-spiritual,
psychological consolation deriving from the welcome exercise of his
skill in financial matters? Nothing in the vocabulary clearly indicates a
specifically spiritual experience. And while the Enemy may (and, it
seems clear, does) exploit psychological liabilities in deceiving Second
Week persons under the appearance of good, can we assume that every
time a person is harmed by excessive application to sacred things this
must pertain, by that very fact, to discernment according to the Second
Week rules? If the consolation involved is non-spiritual, do the Second
Week rules properly apply? Is this truly the ‘subtle’ and ‘high’
discernment which, according to Ignatius, requires the application of
these rules?
Ruth is a married woman, deeply dedicated to her marriage and family.

For many years she has lived a faithful and profound spiritual life. Her
prayer has simplified, and she lives in frequent communion with God. In
the midst of busyness at home and at work, she strives to love those whom
God has placed in her life. One Sunday at Mass, the gospel of the sending
of the Twelve to proclaim the Kingdom was read. The words deeply
stirred Ruth’s heart. Gratitude to God for the gift of faith arose within
her, and she felt a longing to bring this gift to others. She found herself
thinking of forming an outreach group in the parish; as she considered
this, Ruth experienced profound joy, and felt God’s love grow strong in
her heart.
Ruth appears to be a Second Week person: she is spiritually mature, a

woman of deep prayer and great fidelity to her vocation, generous in her
service of God. As the Sunday gospel is proclaimed she experiences
spiritual consolation. Good and holy thoughts about an apostolic
initiative arise in this time of consolation—thoughts which bring her
profound joy and a strong sense of God’s love.
Is Ruth’s spiritual consolation a sign that these thoughts are of the
good spirit? How may she know whether God truly desires that she
undertake this initiative? It seems evident that in this situation the
Second Week rules do apply and will be of great assistance. Was the
initial touch (the affective resonance) of the thought regarding the
outreach group like a drop of water entering a sponge or like a drop of
water falling on a stone (Second Week Rules 7, Exx 335)? Are there
indications of the Enemy’s ‘apparent reasons, subtleties and continual
fallacies’ in Ruth’s thoughts as they unfold (Second Week Rules 1, Exx
329)? As the thoughts progress, is there any sign of objective
diminishment (‘something bad, of a distracting tendency, or less good
than what the soul had previously proposed to do’) or subjective
diminishment (that ‘weakens it or disquiets or disturbs the soul, taking
away its peace, tranquillity and quiet, which it had before’) in Ruth’s
spiritual condition (Second Week Rules 5, Exx 333)? If so, can Ruth
learn by reviewing this process of diminishment and so guard more

readily against similar deceptions in the future (Second Week Rules 6,
Exx 334)?
Analogical Applications of the Rules

At this point we may return to our initial inquiry: when precisely do the
Second Week rules apply? As we have seen, these rules properly apply
when a spiritually mature person with Second Week dispositions is
tempted by the Enemy under the appearance of good through spiritual
consolation and its related good and holy thoughts.
Can these rules be applied, then, to a broader spectrum of spiritual
experience? The answer would appear to be that a number of such
applications are analogical: the Second Week rules apply in some
measure. The prime analogue—the situation that Ignatius most directly
envisages in these rules—is that of a person making the Spiritual
Exercises, with Second Week dispositions, in the process of election,
who experiences spiritual consolation and good and holy thoughts with
regard to one or another of the different choices in the election. Other
applications of the rules are, in varying degrees, by way of analogy.
What may be said of such analogical applications of these rules? In
response to this question I shall first present words of caution from
three authors; then I shall suggest principles by which such applications
may be fruitfully made.
Counsels of Caution
A first caution regards every application of these rules outside their original
context—the complete Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. Daniel Gil writes:
These rules [both First and Second Week] were composed to assist
in clarifying carefully specified situations within the distinctive
spiritual process of a retreatant engaged in the full Spiritual
Exercises. When they are applied to other situations we must be
aware that they are being placed outside their context, in such
fashion that their validity will be affected according to whether the
new context is analogous or not to that for which they were written.
11
That this is the case should never be easily presumed.
11
Gil, Discernimiento, 15.
It is beyond doubt that the rules apply in daily life after the experience
of the Exercises, and that they are of great value when so applied.
Nonetheless, as Gil indicates, all such applications are analogical, and
his caution seems very much to the point.
John Veltri describes three situations in which a spiritual director
might wish to apply the Second Week rules: a man in the Nineteenth
Annotation Exercises experiences two days of consolation, expects
continued consolation, and is dismayed when he experiences
desolation; a woman struggles in the Nineteenth Annotation Exercises,
and when, ‘not too aware of her own competitive nature’, she copies
the approach of another retreatant, finds herself in desolation; a man
with good intentions to improve in prayer listens to advice which
awakens doubts in him and leads to desolation. Veltri comments:
In dealing with situations like those above some spiritual guides

might want to apply the Second Set of Discernment Guidelines ….
After all, in each case, the Desolation began with an attempt to do
something good or worthwhile …. A spiritual guide might assess
these movements along the lines of notation (Exx 332) and check
the beginning, middle, and end of the spiritual movement: its
beginning to discover the point of entry of the Deception; its middle
to understand what happened as the Deception developed; its end
to notice the end result. This is good advice and applicable in many
different areas of human experience and behaviour. Thus, a spiritual
guide could use these guidelines here. But if he did so it would be by
12
way of analogy only.
Veltri then evaluates the analogical application of the Second Week

Rules to these directees’ experiences:
You could use the edge of a pair of pliers to bang a nail into soft
wood, or a spoon to eat your salad, though these are not the
intended purposes of the pliers or the spoon. In much the same way,
these three cases do not need the instrumentation of the Second
Set of Guidelines since these cases are adequately covered by the
13
First Set, notably notations (Exx 317, 325 and 327).
12
John Veltri, Orientations: For Those Who Accompany Others on the Inward Journey (Guelph, Ontario:
Guelph Centre of Spirituality, 1998), volume 2, part B, 428–429. Emphasis in the original.
13
Veltri, Orientations, 429–430. Veltri is the only author I have found who explicitly discusses the
analogical application of the Second Week rules to First Week experience.
The application of the Second Week, Rule 4 to such cases is ‘good

advice’, Veltri says, because this counsel is ‘applicable in many different
areas of human experience and behaviour’. But, he continues, this
application is not necessary since these cases are adequately covered by
the First Week rules.14 This caution, too, seems very much to the point.
Finally, Michael Kyne observes that, even for Christians with ‘a
settled aim of a generous service to God’—even for religious and
priests,
… discernment is, so often, no more than that exercised by

beginners in the Christian life—according to the rules set out in the
first week of the Exercises. Many do not, in fact, manifest, in their
impulses, mature choice of an aim …. So often the problem which
faces us is not one of fine discernment, but of human maturity,
15
religious education and motivation.
14
Such applications of the Second Week rules also risk weakening the true sense of these rules. When
they are applied to situations which ‘do not need’ their application because they ‘are adequately
covered by the First Set’, one may more easily lose sight of their proper application—and thus be less
prepared to apply them when they are truly vital for discernment.
15
Michael Kyne, ‘Discernment of Spirits and Christian Growth’, The Way Supplement, 6 (1968), 20–
26, here 23.
This caution regards the person whose spiritual experience is to be

discerned. Kyne’s observations invite us, before applying the Second
Week rules, to consider carefully whether the person in question is truly
the spiritually mature person of the Second Week.
Principles of Analogical Application
There is wide agreement that Ignatius’ rules for discernment apply in
daily life outside the formal Spiritual Exercises: Ignatius’ own practice, a
review of Ignatian literature and the experience of countless people
confirm this judgment. If this is so, then the answer to the question, ‘Is
it proper to apply the Second Week rules analogically?’ must be
fundamentally affirmative.
The basic principle which guides such applications would seem to
be that the closer to the prime analogue the experience is, the more
confident the application may be; and the farther from the prime
analogue, the more cautious the application must be. A comparison of
two experiences will illustrate this principle:
The pastor of a thriving suburban parish, a man of prayer, a dynamic

preacher and a dedicated shepherd, under whose leadership the parish has
been revitalised and through whose ministry the parishioners find vital
spiritual nourishment, experiences a growing attraction in prayer towards
serving the poor in an inner-city parish. His heart rejoices in the thought
of serving Christ in the marginalised people of such a parish. He considers
asking the bishop for a transfer, confident that the spiritual joy he feels
confirms that God is asking this of him.16
A busy married woman who attends Sunday Mass regularly is asked to

lead the singing for Holy Week in her parish. She loves to sing and rarely
finds an opportunity to do so in a public setting. She accepts the request
enthusiastically, and pours her energies into preparing and directing the
singing. As she does so, she grows increasingly tired and is unable to
attend properly to her children and her other responsibilities.
The application of the Second Week rules to either of these

situations will be analogical (outside the original context of the rules in
16
Gallagher, Spiritual Consolation, 2.
the Spiritual Exercises). It is clear, however, that such application may

be made more confidently in the first situation than in the second. The
first situation closely approximates the prime analogue: the pastor is
very likely to be the spiritually mature ‘Second Week’ person who is
properly the subject of these rules; and he is experiencing spiritual
consolation with good and holy thoughts towards the choice of a good
and holy thing.
In the second situation, it is less clear that the woman is truly the
spiritually mature person presumed by these rules; it is likewise less clear
that she experiences spiritual consolation: her enthusiasm may be
simply the non-spiritual, psychological consolation evoked by the
opportunity to exercise a natural talent. Finally, can we affirm that this
is the ‘subtle’ and ‘high’ discernment that Ignatius describes in the
Second Week rules? Is not the light of reason already sufficient when
the choice lies between voluntary activity, good though it may be, and
responsibilities inherent in one’s vocation?
Ignatius indicates that to speak of the Second Week rules to one in
the exercises of the First Week, ‘if he is a person who has not been
versed in spiritual things, and is tempted grossly and openly … will be
harmful to him, as being matter too subtle and too high for him to
understand’ (Exx 9). Consequently, any analogical application of the
Second Week rules must carefully avoid the possibility of harm to such
persons.
As John Veltri indicates, to apply the Second Week, Rule 4 to
experience properly subject to the First Week rules—to counsel the
person to ‘check the beginning, middle, and end of the spiritual
movement’—is ‘good advice’. Though such an application is not
necessary, there seems little risk of harm in it. Any application,
however, which might lead a person in the First Week situation to
doubt the work of the good spirit in time of spiritual consolation is,
according to Ignatius, potentially harmful to that person. In the First
Week situation, the good spirit guides and counsels through spiritual
consolation and the thoughts that arise from it (First Week, Rule 5);
these are the ‘good movements’ which the person is to ‘receive’ (Exx
313) and so be spiritually strengthened. Only in the Second Week
situation must the person discern whether the Enemy might be
tempting under the appearance of good through spiritual consolation.
It would appear, as a logical consequence, that appropriate

analogical applications of the First Week rules will be more common
than those of the Second Week rules. As Ignatius indicates in
Annotations 9–10, the deception (through spiritual desolation) treated
in the First Week rules is the more basic. Experience in spiritual
direction confirms this.
Finally, analogical applications of the Second Week rules may be
fruitful in a less defined but very real way. My sense is that for many
people, knowledge of these rules awakens a general awareness of the
possibility of deception in their energy for good things, regardless of
whether the specific spiritual situation properly demands the Second
Week rules or not. Knowledge of these rules is likely to alert them more
quickly to deceptions in their spiritual strength and in the human
capabilities which underpin it. Ignatius’ Second Week rules are one of
the clearest—perhaps the clearest—statements of the need for
vigilance with respect to our energy in spiritual things. Such analogical
applications of these rules may prove a great blessing on the spiritual
journey.
Timothy M. Gallagher OMV was ordained in 1979 as a member of the Oblates of

the Virgin Mary, a religious community dedicated to retreats and spiritual
formation according to the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius. He obtained his
doctorate in 1983 from the Gregorian University. He has taught (St John’s
Seminary, Brighton, Massachusetts, USA and Our Lady of Grace Seminary
Residence, Boston, Massachusetts, USA); assisted in formation work for twelve
years; and served two terms as provincial in his own community. He has dedicated
many years to an extensive ministry of retreats, spiritual direction and teaching
about the spiritual life. He has published five books on Ignatian spirituality,
including The Discernment of Spirits, The Examen Prayer, and Spiritual Consolation
(Crossroad, 2005, 2006, 2007).
DISCERNING JOY
The Ignatian Way
Paul Legavre
These pages were originally written in honour of the anniversary

celebrations in 2006 for Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier and Pierre
Favre. They concern the ‘modo de proceder’ 1 called ‘Ignatian
spirituality’: how best to approach it for the first time, and how best to
savour its richness and exceptional strength once again having already
begun to live as a disciple of Jesus under its influence. The starting point
will be the Spiritual Exercises, which invite one to welcome the joy that
comes from God, as one receives the gift of God’s ever greater love, at the
heart of the world created by God.
T HE TEST OF AUTHENTICITY for any particular spirituality within the

Christian tradition is that it should lead one through the Son to
the Father. Ignatian spirituality is no exception to this rule. Its value
stems from its gospel roots, and its distinctive character is revealed in
the way it establishes a relationship between us and Christ.
The Call of Christ

The aim of the Spiritual Exercises is to help us in our resolve to live for
God by contemplating Christ in the Gospels. But how do the Exercises
go about achieving that aim? Initially, they encourage us to experience
the call addressed by Christ to everyone. The Lord addresses each of us
individually, and tenderly calls us ‘his servants and friends’ (Exx 146).
He wants us to share in the great enterprise of the world’s salvation, the
aim of the life, death and resurrection of Christ (Exx 95). From their
1
Literally, ‘way of proceeding’.
The Way, 47/1–2 (Jan/April 2008), 143–153

144 Paul Legavre
very beginning the Spiritual Exercises form a sort of sounding box for the
call made by Christ to the disciples in the Gospels.
As part of this process, Ignatius requires retreatants to speak to
Christ on the cross in a long colloquy.2 In a daring move, he brings the
imagination of the retreatant into play. He or she should recall that
moment of the passion:
Imagining Christ our Lord present before me and nailed to the

cross, make a colloquy asking how it came about that the Creator
made himself a human being and from eternal life came to temporal
death, and thus to die for my sins (Exx 53).
Is this a fixation on suffering, an obsession with sin, a self-indulgent

grieving over the wounds of the Crucified? Clearly such are not the
intentions of Ignatius, who advises the retreatant to follow up
immediately this imagining with a resolute self-examination:
Then, turning to myself, I will ask, ‘What have I done for Christ?
What am I doing for Christ? What ought I to do for Christ?’ Finally,
seeing him in that state hanging on the cross, go over whatever
comes to mind. (Exx 53)
God’s love is displayed by means of the cross, and that love is an urgent
call, an invitation to turn again to our innermost hearts in order to
place them completely at the service of Christ. God is speaking in a
direct way to our personal freedom.
At the next stage, the Spiritual Exercises urge that same freedom to
pay greater attention to hearing and welcoming the will of the Father.
To enable us to envisage how Christ wishes to establish his reign on
earth, Ignatius makes use of the parable of the Earthly King, who calls
his subjects to war. He suggests that the retreatant should,
… ask for the grace I want. Here it will be to beg our Lord for grace
not to be deaf to his call, but alert to fulfil his most holy will to the
best of my ability (Exx 91).
2
The term, usually standing for a ‘chat’ or personal conversation, introduces what is essentially an
affectionate way of communicating with God.
Discerning Joy 145
This response is rooted in a deep personal attachment to the person of

Christ; it springs and develops from the contemplation of the Son of
God: ‘to ask for inner knowledge of the Lord who became human for
me so that I might the better love and follow him’ (Exx 104).
Obedience to God’s will eventually leads to the desire to help all of
humanity to join with Christ in the enterprise of bringing salvation to
the world; it begins with self-giving and the self-giving leads to God.
The words of Hugo Rahner are appropriate here: Ignatian spirituality is
a ‘mysticism of service’.
A Mysticism of Service
The one who calls is also the one whom we serve. However, if a person
agrees to serve, as Christ did in washing his disciples’ feet, does this
mean that Ignatian spirituality is directed towards action in preference
to contemplation? In fact, to live and work apostolically at the heart of
the world does not entail a neglect of contemplation. The engagement
in service—for God and for the building up of the Kingdom, becomes
the locus for seeking and achieving true union with God in the fullness
of human life. Ignatius’ Spiritual Diary reveals the mystical heights, but
also how this man of action searched for God’s will in concrete
circumstances, here and now,
on behalf of his brethren, in
a world seen as the place of
the greatest possible union
between human beings and
the Trinitarian God.
Ignatius underwent a
decisive experience in the
Chapel of La Storta, not far
from Rome. As the saint was
on his way to place himself
at the service of the Pope,
he had a vision of Christ
carrying his cross, and of the
Father close to him saying, ‘I
want you to take this person
into your service’. Then
Jesus accepted Ignatius and
146 Paul Legavre
said, ‘I want you to serve us’. In this way Ignatius understood that ‘God
our Lord was putting him with Christ his Son’.3 His service would take
the form of a life lived according to the pattern of the Gospels, ‘under
the standard of the cross … in the highest spiritual poverty’, and ‘in
suffering humiliations and insults so as to imitate … more closely’,
Christ on the cross (Exx 147).
But how can each one of us receive the revelation of our own
specific way of serving God?
Choosing God, Chosen by God

‘The human person is created to praise, reverence and serve God our
Lord’ (Exx 23). This is God’s plan for his creatures. But the plan does
not work out unless each of us looks within ourselves to understand
where the call to serve is leading. At issue is ‘inner knowledge of the
Lord’ or ‘inner knowledge of all the good received’. Ignatius often uses
phrases of this type: ‘I will reflect within myself to draw some profit’
(Exx 114). It is necessary to look into oneself; to reflect the light issuing
from the Word onto oneself; to taste the words of God, weighing them
up and trusting in what they do within us; gradually to understand and
desire what God wants.
One does not fulfil the will of God simply by joining a Christian
society with devotions and duties whose accomplishment would
guarantee one’s personal salvation. In our secularised society, which
distances itself from matters of religion, Christian faith no longer finds
support in the social order. Both as individuals and as a Church we have
reached a decisive turning-point: either our faith dissolves and
disappears, or it finds a new dynamism through an increasingly personal
relationship with Christ. The act of faith has acquired a crucial
existential dimension. It is no longer enough to say that one is saved; to
believe it, one must experience it.
This, then, is the ‘task’ to which the liberating path traced by
Ignatius is leading. By means of the Exercises he invites us to experience
what it is to choose God in the ordering of our lives. This choice takes
flesh in a life with Christ for the salvation of all, motivated by the desire
3
Ignatius himself gives a brief account of this vision: see Autobiography, 96. A slightly fuller account,
also used here, was written by Laínez, MHSJ FN, 2, 133.
Discerning Joy 147
‘to be of benefit to souls’ (ayudar las almas).4 The tenderness and the
call of Christ will reveal to anyone searching for God that we exercise
our ability to choose when we consent to be chosen by God. The
Ignatian ‘way’ invites us to bring together this radical giving of
ourselves to God with the search for the true mediating We exercise our
role of the Church. There is a delicate tension between one ability to choose
set of rules aimed at facilitating a personal discernment of when we consent
spirits, and another set which enables us to live at the to be chosen by
service of ‘the hierarchical Church’ (a phrase dear to God
Ignatius) in the here and now.5 Personal conversion will not
take place unless we live our lives within the Church; but the reform of
the Church takes place, and will only ever take place, through the
reform of hearts. The conversion of the institution can never dispense
with an interior transformation.
The choice made by God consists primarily for Ignatius in the
decision of the Incarnation:
How the Three Divine Persons were looking down upon the face
and circuit of the world, filled with people, and how on seeing that
all were going down into Hell, they decreed in their eternity that
the Second Person would become human to save the human race.
Thus when ‘the fullness of time’ came they sent the angel Gabriel to
our Lady. (Exx 102)
And the Spiritual Exercises strongly emphasizes what the Divine Persons
are seeing:
… to see in turn the various persons: first, those on the face of the
earth, in all their diversity of dress and appearance, some white and
some black, some in peace and others at war, some weeping and
others laughing, some healthy, others sick, some being born and
others dying, etc. (Exx 102)
The point is that one should share in the gaze of God upon God’s
creation:
4
The phrase occurs in the Autobiography, 54.
5
Rules for the Discernment of Spirits (Exx 313–336) and Rules for Thinking with the Church (Exx
352–370): among the latter the First Rule refers to ‘our holy mother the Church hierarchical’ (Exx
353).
148 Paul Legavre
… see and consider the three Divine Persons … how they look
down upon the face and circuit of the world and on all its people,
living in blindness, going to their death and descending into Hell.
(Exx 106)
It is from this vision—shared between ourselves and the Trinity—

that the desire to work with the Trinity for the salvation of mankind is
born. But this close attention to ‘the diversity of persons on the face of
the earth’ brings about a further development. We become sensitive to
the fundamental importance of factors such as language and culture to
humanity. Piety and devotion are not enough: the Christian message
has to be based on reason and culture. For the sake of this vision of
faith, but also to ensure some success in the work of salvation, the love
of God needs to be proclaimed in the languages and the cultures of our
contemporaries. God is to be found and loved at the heart of a world
The Holy Trinity, by Botticelli

Discerning Joy 149
created by God but cultivated by human beings. God is not outside this
world, nor alongside it, but at its heart, where God has always been
from the beginning.
Above all what we have to do is to make our world more human. In
a world disfigured by evil and suffering, the desire to serve God leads all
who have set out on the Ignatian path to be very sensitive to the
struggle for justice and to the preferential option for the poor, who have
no choices themselves. On this point no exceptions are possible. One
has to fight for what is human. The struggle for justice puts one
uncompromisingly on the side of Christ, the one who is poor and the
friend of the poor, against all injustice.
Joy at the Heart of All

It is in joy that one discovers and knows the will of God. This was
Ignatius’ fundamental conviction, because of what he experienced in
his own person. But do we appreciate how daring he was?
Today our cultures are very sensitive to the world of emotions,
feelings and affectivity in all their forms—to a confusing degree. But
what is at stake in the Spiritual Exercises is an understanding of the way
in which the true God gives Godself to the disciples of the Son and
communicates with them. Ignatian spirituality invites each of us to
discover by means of what is happening interiorly how to interpret the
will of God. Joy and consolation provide us with a compass. The
experience of a joy that comes from the Other, a joy sent by God, helps
us to test the soundness and truth of the choices before us. And the
contrary experience helps us to recognise what is false and inauthentic.
Thus we can learn to read the tracks that God leaves in our lives.
We can only welcome this joy that comes from God as we should if
we pay careful attention to the various interior movements of joy and
sorrow that make themselves felt in daily reality. True joy signifies the
gift of the Spirit of the Risen Christ. Those who live in the spirit of
Ignatius learn to let themselves be guided by the gentle will of God in
their innermost acts. They dare to trust the intelligence of the heart,
listening interiorly to what the Spirit is suggesting in the feelings that
come and go. Anyone who fails to see the importance of this principle
deprives the work of Ignatius of its greatest value. Without the
guidance of the Spirit, all that has been said about the call of Christ,
and the love of Christ, about the service of humanity and the Church,
150 Paul Legavre
and about the choice of God fades into nothing. As Maurice Giuliani
has pointed out in his magisterial article on ‘motions of the Spirit’, the
guidance of the Spirit is essential: what is needed is to ‘feel interiorly,
discern the meaning, and seek confirmation’.6 Only in this way can we
choose between two options, both of which are good, but one of which
will lead to a better life and a greater capacity to love.
The joy that comes from God is not easy to delineate or define, and
frequently arises in unexpected ways. Such joy may be of many different
sorts: from a bodily sense of vibrant wellbeing to the most delicate
touch within the soul. This becomes clear from the relative concision of
the official Latin version of the Spiritual Exercises:
One recognises that there is really spiritual consolation when, by

some interior movement, the soul burns with love for her Creator
and can no longer love any creature except because of Him. Again,
when one sheds tears that provoke this love, whether they come
from sorrow for sins or from meditation on the passion of Christ, or
from some other cause which is rightly ordered to the service and
honour of God. Finally, one may also call ‘consolation’ any growth
in faith, hope and charity; and also any happiness which usually
urges the soul to meditate on heavenly things, to feel zeal for one’s
7
salvation, to remain resting in peace with the Lord. (Exx 316)
It is because ‘love consists in mutual communication’ (Exx 231),

and because ‘it is the Lord’s wish, as far as he is able, to give me himself’
(Exx 234), that God communicates by means of joy and lets us know
God’s sweet will in this way.
In All Things to Search for the Thrice-Holy God

I have compared joy to a compass that helps us to understand God’s
actions and to choose the right direction when we are looking for God.
We must learn to search for and to find God in this way in all things and
in every place, not just in obedience to the commandments—
6
Maurice Giuliani, ‘Les motions de l’Esprit’, Christus, 153 (February 1992), 83–92 (reprinted in
Maurice Giuliani, L'accueil du temps qui vient [Paris: Bayard, 2003], 57–71).
7
This is a translation from the French of the Vulgata version made by André des Freux, a competent
Latin specialist, in 1546 when the Spiritual Exercises were due to be presented for approbation to the
Pope, Paul III. No complete English translation of this seems to be available. For the Latin text, cf.
MHSJ, volume 100 (Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute, 1969). The Vulgata tends to shorten the original
Spanish.
Discerning Joy 151
important though they are for living a moral life—nor in receiving the
sacraments—despite their necessity for maintaining ecclesial
communion and personal holiness. A ‘right intention’ is the impetus for
this search:
All should strive to keep their intention right, not only in regard to
their state of life but also in all particular details. In which they
should aim always at serving and pleasing the Divine Goodness for
its own sake and because of the incomparable love and benefits with
which God has anticipated us rather than for fear of punishments or
hope of rewards, although they ought to draw help from these also.
They should often be exhorted to seek God our Lord in all things,
removing from themselves as far as possible the love of all creatures,
in order to place it in the Creator of them, loving Him in all
creatures and all creatures in Him, in conformity with His holy and
8
divine will.
What is said here specifically for Jesuits in studies can readily be

applied, without reservation, to all who are baptized. To love God in all
creatures, and to love all creatures in God: such is the path of life,
whether in deprivation or in superabundance, on which the disciples of
Christ dare to venture in the freedom of the Spirit.
During the course of a lifetime, we all have the chance to
experience, deep down, what will lead us most surely to a fuller life.
What makes such a life possible is to know how, at certain moments, to
choose between life and death. We are urged by God so often in Choices that
the Bible to choose life and to refuse death; and Ignatius’ ‘way make the world
of proceeding’ keeps very closely to this divine ordinance. It more human
allows us to bring our whole existence together and creates
order in our lives, despite the emotional confusion and disorder that
surround us, despite the short-sightedness of developed societies and
the frenzy of consumerism. It helps us to welcome the promise of a life
that takes flesh—in the Church—in choices that make the world more
human.
Moreover, this spirituality can lead to another way of giving unity to
one’s life: through Trinitarian prayer. I have mentioned Ignatius’ focus
on Christ. However, shortly after his conversion, he had an
overwhelming experience of God’s most holy Trinity while taking part
8
Constitutions, III. 1. 26. [288].
152 Paul Legavre
in a liturgical procession. This experience took a musical form: three

notes making a single chord.9 From then on, his life would turn more
and more towards the divine Trinity, and become more and more
immersed in it.
We too are called to live in the harmony of the Holy Trinity.
focusing intently on the joys, sorrows, disquiet and attractions that
spring from the intercourse of the Three Persons. This Trinitarian
dimension was decisive for Ignatius. The Spirit of the resurrected Christ
turns towards the Father and at the end of the Exercises makes us ask
for the grace: ‘for interior knowledge of all the good I have received so
that acknowledging this with gratitude, I may be able to love and serve
His Divine Majesty in everything’ (Exx 233). This loving
acknowledgement allows one to offer oneself to the Lord in order to
labour in his Creation: ‘Give me the grace to love you, that grace is
enough for me’.10 The One who has loved us is the Father, from whom
all comes, and in whom all converge. He joins us to the mission of
Christ and to Christ’s offering in the dynamism of the Spirit of life. Such
is the reality of the Trinity for St Ignatius and for the First Companions,
notably Pierre Favre.
But this does not take place without training in spiritual
discernment in order to offer ourselves for God’s work. We need to be
schooled in feeling and tasting interiorly, and this cannot be achieved
alone. We need the help of someone else—either the person who gives
us the Exercises or someone who is a companion in our daily life. By
trusting obedience to this other, the journey towards God can be
brought to completion. The word is at the heart of this journey: the
Word of God, which we listen to and which allows us—once it has
worked upon us profoundly—to find in turn the words to speak to God;
and the words spoken to our spiritual companion, describing our
struggles and joys. Such is the matrix of the ‘spiritual conversation’
which spreads outwards from this experience.
The spirituality of Ignatius, precisely because it deals with joy, leads
naturally to a profound Eucharistic devotion. Because I acknowledge all
that God is doing for me and for others, the act of thanksgiving comes
9
An account of this event is given in the Autobiography, 28.
10
Legavre gives a shortened version here of the prayer in the Contemplation to Obtain Love; the more
usual translation is, ‘give me your love and grace—that is enough for me’ (Exx 234).
Discerning Joy 153
automatically, linking me to the offering that Christ made of his life.

The Eucharist becomes the place where we each testify to the joyful
offering of our lives for the Church and for the world. Communion in
the body and blood of Jesus within the ecclesial community sets us free
from our own subjectivity and enables us to open ourselves to the
universal body of Christ.
***
For several years now, the Ignatian family—Jesuits, sisters in various
religious communities, members of Christian Life Communities, and
the many people who take part in Ignatian retreats—has taken as its
own the narrative of the Autobiography, the Reminiscences. Thus,
fortunately, the image of Ignatius the ‘soldier’ has been replaced by that
of the ‘pilgrim’, as he liked to call himself. We have learned to give
greater importance to his search for God, which took him on the
journey to Jerusalem, Salamanca, Paris and Rome. However, we
undoubtedly need courage to face up to the Spiritual Diary, that short
notebook which opens up the mystical life of the saint. One of the
challenges is to free ourselves from a sort of poorly assimilated Ignatian
‘grammar’ which is excessively mechanistic and restrictive. The
Spiritual Diary has the virtue of helping us to appreciate how Ignatius
prepared himself for the encounter with God. It teaches us how to let
ourselves be led whither we do not know, to see there what we do not
wish to see, by the One who desires passionately to be joined to God’s
creation. There is an element of joyous uncertainty in the pursuit of
that Other, who is God. Ignatius, lovingly seized by God, discovered this
truth. Like St Paul after his conversion, Ignatius sought to take hold of
Christ, just as Christ had taken hold of him, on the road of death and
resurrection that leads to the almighty God and to God’s glory.
Paul Legavre SJ is the national assistant for Communauté Vie Chrétienne. He has
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chief of Christus.
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from the Secretary.
SPIRITUAL
ACCOMPANIMENT AND
DISCERNMENT
Dermot Mansfield
I Although this statement may seem toto discernment

T SEEMS TO ME THAT WE ARE CALLED all our life long.
be a truism, I find that it is
always new and important for me, even after some thirty years involved
in spiritual accompaniment, in the giving of the Spiritual Exercises, and
in the work of training or formation in these fields. As Newman often
emphasized long ago, we are called to be ‘watchful’, to look out for, to
attend to, the signs of the Lord’s coming—not just at the end of our
lives, but always and every day.1 Implicit in this watching, this living by
faith, is the requirement to sift, to distinguish, to discern. Opinions and
impressions are everywhere in conflict, and can pull us in very different
directions. How can I evaluate what is good and right for me? Who or
what will guide my understanding? How am I called? To what am I
called? What is God’s wish for me, God’s way for me? And what is not
God’s way—not the true way, but a direction of illusion and untruth?
Our Own Stories

My first experience of giving the Spiritual Exercises was in Canada,
during the summer of 1977, at Mississauga, outside Toronto, under the
tutelage of the late Sister Olga Warnke IBVM. Over the years since, the
application of the Ignatian Rules for Discernment has been central to
me in continuing to give the Exercises. Moreover, I feel that my
individual gifts have lain in the immensely varied work of
accompanying people in their day-to-day and year-to-year living,
especially when the challenge of discernment has been to the fore. In
1
John Henry Newman, ‘Watching’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons, volume 4 (London: Longmans,
Green and Co., 1896), 319–333.
The Way, 47/1–2 (Jan/April 2008), 155–164

156 Dermot Mansfield
the realm of the training and formation in spiritual guidance, too, the
focus on discernment has been a strong one. My own journey over that
time, I hope, has been a process of discovery—of learning the kinds of
things that cannot be learned in books or on courses, but only through
the living of life itself.
Clearly, each of our own stories is important for understanding
discernment. The story of Ignatius of Loyola was particularly so. But
your story and mine are just as relevant—in so far as we have truly
entered into life, have desired to cultivate our faith, and have
endeavoured to learn from many different people and sources.
Discernment and understanding are crucial in the one and only life that
belongs to you or me, given by the God who has called us by name. And
this is all the more so in its interweaving with the lives of others, and
when we listen to their stories and attend to them. I should like to
identify some of the things that seem to me central for a life of
discernment and for helping others in their discernment, however
simplistic this may seem, and elaborate a little on them.
The Way We Live

I often say that what is important for us today is to live with humanity
and faith. This is self-evident, and yet for all sorts of reasons, in today’s
world, I feel that our humanity and our living by faith can be under
severe pressure. We need to treasure our gifts of humanity: our
naturalness, our compassion, our capacity to understand, and so on. As
I write this, I think of the parish of Chiswick in London, where I supply
for a few weeks each summer, and where there is a great sense of
humanity and community. Such an environment is an appealing one;
people are attracted to come to the parish and be helped and supported.
And obviously the quality of faith found there is attractive also: it is
meaningful, and sustains people in their lives and in facing the
challenges of life’s mystery.
Humanity and faith: these qualities interact with each other, enrich
each other, fulfil each other. ‘You are the light of the world’, we are told
(Matthew 5:14). In today’s world the simple but profound living of our
lives is a light which can shine brightly. Modern living, and work, and
travel can have much of the impersonal about them, which leads us to
loneliness and lack of meaning. There is the temptation to compensate
by withdrawing into ‘virtual reality’ in its various forms—which can
Spiritual Accompaniment and Discernment 157
deprive people of the challenges and supports offered by engaging more

with life itself. Then there is the pressure of expectations, in religious
and church circles as well as elsewhere, which I believe can prevent
some individuals from being their true selves and acting accordingly.
We can find ourselves playing roles and cutting ourselves off from real
human interaction and need. And if in these or other ways our
humanity is constrained or suppressed, we need to search actively for it
and reclaim it as best we can. We are always called to emerge from the
unreal and to go where life is lived more truthfully and richly—and
therefore journey to where the living God most surely awaits us. All of
which is important here, because you cannot authentically discern, or
have the light to see, apart from a courageous care for the human.
Looking to Christ in the Gospels

For Christians love for the Gospels and appreciation of them will always
play a pivotal role in how we live and act. And for Ignatius, in the
Spiritual Exercises, it is especially the figure of Christ that elicits our love.
We are drawn, we are attracted to the person of Jesus: to look towards
him, have him before us, and know that his gaze is always upon us.
‘Look to him, and be radiant’ (Psalm 34:5). ‘All of us’, St Paul writes,
‘with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in
a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of
glory to another’ (2 Corinthians 3:18). As we contemplate Jesus we are
transformed into his likeness.
Crucial to the process of discernment in the Exercises are the
continual contemplations of Christ: whoever makes them is absorbed in
the very atmosphere of the gospel mysteries. But while ordinary
Christian living may not require anything like the intensity usually
experienced in making the Exercises, still the touchstones of the
Ignatian text remain valid for us. As disciples, we are always centred on
Christ, on his living presence before and with us. We are always in some
sense looking at the Gospels. We are also, I believe, drawn into
relationship with all the people who inhabit the gospel scenes, in their
various roles, with their many needs and their different outlooks. They
too, with Jesus, are not just historical entities but are mysteriously
present and real, here and now. And in turn they are intertwined with
all the people and situations that we ourselves encounter in life today—
and with the issues which require evaluation and decision for us.
The Gathering of God’s People

Something else that needs to be considered here is the Church: the
ecclesia, the calling together, the gathering of the Lord’s varied disciples.
The community of the Church must be involved in the life of discernment
alongside the more personal consciousness of the Gospels and of Christ’s
presence. In the panorama of Christian life today, however, the ecclesial
dimension must be understood in a broader sense than that envisaged by
Ignatius when he set out his guidelines for having a right attitude within
the Church (Exx 352–370), and when he intended those guidelines to be
included among the criteria for discernment. I would understand the
Church to incorporate all of Christ’s disciples, all lovers of the Gospels, all
who value the Eucharist and who have allowed their own lives to become
eucharistic in some meaningful sense—blessed, broken and shared out. So
in discernment I listen to the Church in this sense, and try to hear what
the Lord is saying today among his people.
The Calling of Andrew and Simon Peter, by Giusto de Menabuoi

Called by Name
We are disciples, followers, as we journey along the path of our life.
Therefore, it seems to me, we are constantly being called anew into
discipleship, into following, into being with Jesus (Mark 3:14) and into
walking as he walked (1 John 2:6). We walk with one another, and we
follow Christ’s way, which is the way and path of our own lives. So
discernment and spiritual guidance have to do with questions such as:
‘What is my calling? In what way am I being called? What is being said
to me in the present circumstances of my life? What am I to do?’ And
here my desire comes into play. For the quality of my spiritual
accompaniment and discernment will be determined by the desire
within me, by the authenticity of that desire as God’s gift. It is the
human desire for what is right and good. It is the deep longing of my
innermost self for God, and also the desire for God’s way in Christ as
the guiding principle of my life.
Right at the heart of it all, at the heart of any understanding of
calling, is something which can often be overlooked. It is that, first of
all, I am ‘called by name’ (Isaiah 43:1), by my own name. I have been
called into being with love, and now I am called to be who I truly am.
Surely that is the primordial and most personal meaning of calling!
That is the word addressed to me above all: to be myself, to be in that
hallowed space where my true self is brought forth in the gaze and
love of Christ. Within that reality, as beloved disciple, I cannot but
desire to respond positively to whatever it is right and good for me to
do.
It is vital for any spirituality, or way of prayer, or process of spiritual
accompaniment to attend to that primordial experience, when I know that
I have been called into existence to be uniquely who I am and to be
sustained by that look of love. Certainly I have felt this to be so, both in
trying to help others and in wishing to see the truth of my own life and
journey.2
2
When helping in the formation of spiritual guides, I have often recommended two addresses on
‘Vocation’ by Rowan Williams, as well as another piece entitled ‘Knowing and Loving’. See Open to
Judgement (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1995). He says these things much better there than I
am able to.
The Voice of the Shepherd

Life, of course, involves struggle—so that when we face situations
which require decision, we find ourselves pulled in different directions.
Some of those directions, while they are in conflict, may still be
generally good in themselves. Yet, if we look more deeply, we can
perceive opposite sources of influence at work. Thus when we truly
desire the very best, there are somehow destructive forces active, trying
to undo what would be right and worthwhile. Discernment traditionally
has to do with distinguishing the influences working upon us,
pinpointing their source, and sifting what is true from what is false and
illusory. This we know. And we follow then what has been so well
taught by Ignatius concerning the affective states of spiritual
consolation and spiritual desolation within us.
But in the midst of any process of evaluation and discernment I
have found it helpful to focus on
the primordial experience of
calling. The image of Christ as
the Good Shepherd, who calls each
by name and guides us along the right
way, is a particular source of light and
strength (Psalm 23; John 10:11–16, 27–
28). I have often found myself suggesting
to someone to listen out intently for this
voice, and to single it out from other
voices which pretend to be interested in
our welfare.
Why do I take this approach? It is
easy to find ourselves listening to
destructive voices within, such as negative
messages from childhood, which can still
have force to ruin our lives and paralyze us.
I sometimes call these ‘accusing voices’,
and think of the ‘accuser’ mentioned in
the Book of Revelation (12:10). Whatever
its real source, I certainly believe that
there is an accusing voice, a desolating voice,
which can play havoc within us. And therefore it
can be vitally important to be conscious of
another voice that is constantly there, in great and consoling

contrast—the true voice which speaks to any person’s heart, and which
belongs to the Good Shepherd. Listening to that voice, which can
speak through good people as well as through prayer and through
circumstances, will enable any of us to find the right way forward in life.
Care for the World

Although the image of the Good Shepherd I have described is personal
and intimate, nevertheless it opens up vistas for us. Jesus speaks of himself
repeatedly as the ‘shepherd’, who ‘lays down his life for the sheep’ (John
10:11, 15, 17, 18); such is his care for each and all. So in looking towards
him and listening to his voice, we are drawn to perceive how he embodies
the ecstasis of God, that ecstatic reaching out in love which is the whole
way of God in the world. ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only
Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have
eternal life.’ (John 3:16) The horizons opened up are endless. Think of the
Contemplation on the Incarnation in the Spiritual Exercises (Exx 101–
109), in which we are invited to look at the great movement of Trinitarian
love reaching down into the world’s predicament and need through the
personal response of Mary in Nazareth.
In taking this wide outlook—which is part of what it is to be a
Christian, and shows itself in all sorts of ways—we cannot remain simply
as onlookers, but find ourselves drawn into the action and the momentum
of that Trinitarian love. We therefore find ourselves looking with the eyes
of the Trinity, having their perspective on the world. We are also involved
in what they are doing, through their ecstasis of love, which issues in the
kenosis, the self-emptying love of the Second Person (Philippians 2:5–11)
directed towards healing the broken world. This is what happened in
Mary, through her response to the angel (Luke 1:38). It came about in the
life of Ignatius too, in the vision at La Storta, where he saw himself placed
with Christ. And something of that grace can become present in every
Christian, to a greater or a lesser degree. In the midst of ordinary and
perhaps hidden lives, in answer to the primordial call of God, there is
elicited a response like Mary’s, a ‘yes’ to God’s mysterious and loving
purposes. It is a ‘yes’ uttered not once, but many times and in many ways,
through the varying circumstances and challenges encountered over a
lifetime. It will shape the course of a whole life, with real blessings for
other people, known and unknown.
This wider theological perspective forms a background to the

simple human reality of listening to and accompanying a person seeking
direction. It underpins the process of spiritual accompaniment, and
provides encouragement. The image of the Good Shepherd is an
immediately relevant and personal one which helps us to distinguish
the voices or influences operating in our human consciousness.
For the large picture, of the incarnation and of the outpouring of
the life and love of God for the world, does indeed come down to the
simple and human realities which encompass all of our lives. Take the
early scene in Mark’s Gospel (Mark 1:40–42) when a leper comes to Jesus
and asks for cleansing. The Greek word denoting Jesus’ response,
splagcnisqei.j, often rather poorly translated into English, indicates that
Jesus was utterly moved in his innermost being, in a maternal way; I think
it is best translated as ‘being filled with tenderness’.3 He was so moved that
he immediately stretched out his hand to touch the leper and make
him clean and well again. It is an extraordinary scene, but characteristic
of how Jesus responds to people’s needs. The whole momentum of Trini-
tarian love is here, as when Jesus came to Jairus’ daughter and ‘took her
by the hand’ (Mark
5:41), or when he lifted
up the woman who had
been bent and crippled
for eighteen years (Luke
13:10–13). We see
something here of the
deepest reality in God,
the ecstasis, the out-
pouring of divine love.
This is also the deepest
thing in everyday life
wherever we witness it,
or whenever we can
reach out to others
ourselves or find that
Jesus heals a leper, from Petrus Comestor’s Biblia we are the recipients of
Historiale
such care. All of this is
3
See The RSV Interlinear Greek–English New Testament (London: Samuel Bagster and Sons, 1968).
at the heart of spiritual accompaniment, and points to its lived

outcome, in how we go forward and find ourselves in relation to others
and to our world today.
All that Is Good, and the Quest For Justice

Sometimes I find a familiar exhortation in Paul coming to mind:
Finally, my friends, whatever is true, or honourable, whatever is just,

or pure, whatever is lovely, or worthy of admiration, if there is
anything good and to be praised, think of these things … and the
God of peace will be with you. (Philippians 4:8–9; my translation)
His words here are valuable for anything to do with discernment and
spiritual guidance. Paul, I believe, is here referring in some way to the
great transcendentals of Greek philosophy: the true, the good and the
beautiful. They are always worthy of our consideration. And the search
for them, and openness to them—to what is truthful, and good and
beautiful—seems to me to be at the centre of human life and vital to
the art of discernment. For there is no merit in remaining within narrow
religious, ecclesiastical or spiritual perspectives, even if at one time it
seemed right and worthy to do so. Rather I would like, for myself and
for anyone who comes to me for guidance, to look to a wider spirit of
openness to life, according to our differing gifts and interests and
concerns.
And to the things that Paul proposes for our consideration, one
ought today to add the quest for justice, the stand for what is right and
equitable. That is vitally important too, and especially for discernment.
So many people, in all sorts of situations, are being treated dismissively
and are looked down upon. Again, the Gospels are full of examples, and
our world today no less so. So do I care for and stand for what is right?
When I come across something inherently unjust, whether personal or
institutional, can I summon the courage to stand against it, and stand
alongside whoever struggles for what is right? Do I also have a concern
for the truth, and would I look for it in every person’s situation—or
might I avert my gaze and not look too deeply? Might I be too afraid of
opposition, of the dismissiveness of those in authority, who often have
ways of closing ranks and preventing the truth coming to light? These
are real and living questions. And again there is much in the gospel
which is of great relevance here—much to be learned from

contemplating the stance and outlook and words of Jesus.
For many years now I have helped with part of the summer training
programme in spiritual direction at St Beuno’s in North Wales, and part
of my brief has been to open up the topic of injustice. It has been quite
an experience each year, as people from different parts of the world
have shared experiences of the situations they have known. We have
often been left with a sense of helplessness at the overwhelming realities
of injustice portrayed. Yet we have had no doubt about the relevance of
what we share and reflect on for the field of spiritual direction.
And Once Again God’s People

In conclusion, it is worth saying something obvious: that in the midst of
all we could say about discernment, we learn best from the
extraordinary lives of ordinary people. Spiritual guides, although they
sometimes offer something special in terms of listening and wisdom, are
always receiving and learning. None of us lives anywhere else but
among God’s people—in that gathering, that communion of persons.
And, although we need time apart and prayer, the simple sharing in one
another’s lives, in humanity and faith, is among the greatest gifts of all
under God. That sharing, whatever form it takes, provides the proper
realism and rootedness for authentic discernment. And I happen to
believe that it is the place where the authentic voice of the Shepherd is
most heard today, calling by name, and calling lovingly into truth.
Dermot Mansfield SJ joined the Jesuit novitiate in 1963, and was ordained priest
in 1976. His work has mostly been in the field of retreat direction and spiritual
guidance, and in helping to evolve training programmes connected with them.
Since 1981 much of his time has been spent at the Manresa House spirituality
centre in Dublin. His first contribution to The Way was in 1985.
AN IGNATIAN WAY OF
PREACHING THE GOSPEL
Étienne Grieu
I S THERE A PECULIARLY IGNATIAN APPROACH to preaching the Good

News? If so, does it have something valuable to say to us? These
questions are timely since, for some decades now, all the Churches have
been exploring the paths of ‘a new evangelization’. Does the Ignatian
tradition have a specific contribution to make to this process?
An Original Theme
Throughout history, many ways of proclaiming the gospel have been
employed, depending on the period and the context. There is, for
example, preaching at large (Acts shows Paul haranguing crowds; and
in the thirteenth century the mendicant orders brought back this style
in force); there is also instruction addressed to the Christian
community, aimed at strengthening it in the faith, so that it can in turn
spread the gospel to others (Paul’s letters are beautiful examples, as are
the texts of the Fathers of the Church). To these obvious examples one
should add another: an exposition of faith as a systematic whole,
presenting different arguments and demonstrating the strength of
Christian thought when confronted with objections. Alongside these
ways of preaching the gospel in words, we should not forget the mode of
preaching by action—for example, by a change of life (the Desert
Fathers were the first to proclaim the gospel in this way, followed by the
entire monastic tradition); or by the transmission and teaching of
simple gestures which instil a faith-based approach to life (which is how
the gospel has been passed on within families throughout the
centuries); and of course there is the call to change our relationships
with one another (demonstrated by initiatives of solidarity with the
weakest among us, of which there have been innumerable examples in
the history of the Church; the Franciscan tradition has made it the
cornerstone of its approach to preaching the Good News).
The Way, 47/1–2 (Jan/April 2008), 165–174

166 Étienne Grieu
Clearly, each of these ways is a part of the richness of the Christian

Churches, and it would be absurd to try to rely on one or another
exclusively. It is noteworthy that at different periods, one form or
another may have been favoured or left aside.
The Art of Spiritual Conversation
Did Ignatius have a preferred way of preaching the gospel? If I had to
name a typical element in his way of doing things, something that
reveals his personality, I would immediately suggest the art of spiritual
conversation. The pleasure and ease with which he initiated
conversations with those he met are mentioned from the very
beginning of his conversion. When he was convalescing at Loyola and
had experienced different spirits, and after the vision of Our Lady with
which he was graced one night, we find in his Autobiography, in an
aside:
He, not troubling himself with anything, was persevering in his

reading and his good intentions, and the whole time he spoke with
those in the house he used to spend on things of God, with which he
did their souls good (11).
Later in his Autobiography, we find the Pilgrim frequently talking to

those he met, either to glean something for his own benefit and
edification, or in order to share what he himself had experienced (see
Autobiography, 26, 34, 37 and 42). It seems Ignatius had a knack for
this: it can be recognised as one of his principal gifts. In this we can see,
not so much the Ignatian way of preaching the gospel (he and his first
companions resorted to almost all the kinds of preaching that we have
already mentioned), but rather a particular style, a contribution that he
made to the missionary tradition of the Church. This was in fact a
revival of a practice that was typical of the Church from the beginning.
One has only to think of examples in the New Testament, such as the
way the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman is
reported; the story of the disciples of Emmaus; or the meeting between
the eunuch and Philip.
It seems to me that, for Ignatius and for the first Fathers of the
Company, the art of spiritual conversation colours their approach to the
An Ignatian Way of Preaching the Gospel 167
work of evangelization.1
After all, the Spiritual
Exercises could be seen
as a form of ‘organized
spiritual conversation’
(structured differently,
of course, from spon-
taneous exchanges, but
having an essential
interactive aspect). This
brings us to the point
that spiritual conversa-
tion itself is an event
with three participants:
it involves not only the two interlocutors, but is based on the awareness
of a third actor, invisible but present—the Spirit. In the Exercises, this
third reality is named from the outset, the exercitant being invited to
give most attention to this axis of dialogue.
So how does this approach contribute to evangelization? It assumes
the consent and, even more, the commitment of each of the
participants. The starting point of their journey is set by the questions
that they begin to consider together. Progress obviously depends on
their willingness to go forward. In this sense, the work of evangelization
is shared from the outset. It is not left simply to the one preaching; it
takes place in the context of a relationship. It assumes that both are
listening to the Spirit for guidance. This occurs particularly by paying
attention to desires which may be revealed, and also by daring to name
them and bring them before God.
So this is a way of understanding evangelization that involves
exchange of words, commitment in freedom, and the awakening of
desire and discernment, in order to understand what is calling on God
from our own depths, and to recognise those places where God is
already at work. There are two other aspects which should be added,
which are very relevant for my theme.
1
Compare John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (1540–1565) (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard UP, 1993).
168 Étienne Grieu
The Radical Nature of the Struggle and the Call to Liberty

Ignatius is a radical. When he enters into conversation with someone,
he wants his interlocutor to go to the furthest point, where his whole
life comes under God’s gaze. We know of course that we resist this very
strongly. Receive God? Certainly, in a place that is worthy of God—the
parlour, perhaps. But do not let God intrude into the cellar or the attic,
or into all the rooms full of disorder, and let God not bring me back to
places that make me afraid. In spiritual conversation, however, Ignatius
does not rest until God has been given access to every part of the
person. So he uses practical methods to encourage all doors to be
opened up to God.
We can see this clearly in the Exercises. From the Principle and
Foundation onwards, he invites the retreatant to imagine all sorts of
situations—riches and poverty, health and sickness, honour and
dishonour, short life or long life—so that he can recognise through his
imagination that God will remain with him, whatever direction his life
takes. This is the most important point.
During the First Week and in the meditations on sin, he encourages
exercitants to descend to the depths, where they will see themselves as
‘a sore and ulcer, from which have sprung so many sins’. He does this in
order that the exercitants may see themselves accepted as such by God
with ‘an exclamation wonderingly with increased feeling’ (Exx 60). In
Exercitants the colloquies of the Second Week, when exercitants have
are invited to discovered Christ as their saviour, he suggests that they tell
make a radical God of their desire to follow the Lord even in insults and
surrender of poverty. In the course of the Third Week, Ignatius suggests that
themselves the grace asked for be that of ‘grief, feeling and confusion
because for my sins the Lord is going to the passion’ (Exx 193).
Finally, in the Contemplation to Attain Divine Love that closes the
Exercises as a whole the exercitants are invited to make a radical
surrender of themselves: ‘all that I have and possess. You gave it to me:
to you, Lord, I return it; it is all yours; dispose it entirely to your will.’
(Exx 234)
The Ignatian path is clearly not a little stroll for the good of one’s
health. It is a journey involving risk—a combat—and Ignatius invites
the exercitant to surrender at the intensest moment of the battle. There
is nothing easy-going about this undertaking. Believers leave safety and
security behind and put themselves on trial in the most radical way, not
to remain in that situation, but to be able to receive the restoration that

comes from God: to know themselves to be loved to the uttermost, and
to respond to that love.
But is there really no manipulation in all this? Was not Ignatius a bit
of a guru? This is where another very important aspect of his spirituality
comes into play: trust in God and in the liberty which God gives.
Ignatius was aware of the pressures that can be exerted, more or less
consciously, during spiritual direction. In Annotation 15 of the
Exercises, he clearly invites the director to avoid seeking to influence
the decisions that a retreatant may take:
The one who is giving the Exercises ought not to influence the one
who is receiving them more to poverty or to a promise, than to their
opposites, nor more to one state or way of life than to another ….
So, the one who is giving the Exercises should not turn or incline to
one side or the other, but standing in the centre like a balance, leave
the Creator to act immediately with the creature, and the creature
with its Creator and Lord. (Exx 15)
This proceeds from respect for God’s action and from the
conviction that God can act in the one who seeks God. This is what
contributes a third element in the description of an ‘Ignatian way of
preaching the gospel’: proclamation of the Good News will never fight
against or short-circuit the capacity of any person, as if the one
preaching could take the place of the believer and know what he or she
should reply. The believer’s own capacity to listen and to choose God is
never dulled or muted, but rather stimulated and strengthened.
Thus when these three elements are highlighted and taken
together—the art of spiritual conversation, radicalism, and respect for
personal liberty—they could point towards an ‘Ignatian way of
preaching the gospel’. Having initiated an exchange, it would allow
others to be touched interiorly, and would invite them to take the risk
of presenting their entire life to God, while continuing to take account
of their capacities to hear God’s call and respond to it.
None of the three elements can be neglected: if the radicality of the
Ignatian approach is forgotten, spiritual conversation can turn into a
comfortable discussion in which nothing significant occurs; if one is not
careful to respect the believer’s liberty, one starts to manipulate; and if
one never initiates such an exchange at all, the primary charism of
170 Étienne Grieu
Ignatius is betrayed and a person is deprived of the opportunity to let

the gospel speak to our darkest places.
What Does This Offer to the Church?

What relevance does this Ignatian way of preaching the gospel still
have today, and what does it have to offer the Church? To answer this, I
will first offer a very schematized review of the present situation. What
we have to beware of is a collapse of the broad Church (the
‘multitudinist’ Church, in the schema used by the sociologist of religion
Troeltsch)—which would lead to a confrontation between what I shall
call ‘spiritual travellers’ on the one hand and ‘conversion Christianities’
on the other. The Ignatian tradition may be able to contribute
something to the avoidance of such major confrontations.
‘Spiritual Travellers’ and ‘Conversion Christianities’
By ‘spiritual travellers’ I mean people who are driven by a true spiritual
quest, but who scarcely feel the need to state a definite religious
affiliation. They lack the opportunity to discuss their spirituality, and so
they often do not have the words to express their exploration and
discoveries. They frequently have little confidence in the large
institutions that have traditionally been expected to give direction,
which are seen, rightly or wrongly, as giving replies without listening to
the questions. To ‘spiritual travellers’ they are large organisations which
pay scant attention to the particularity of people’s journeys and respond
to them by reflex. The personal quest of such travellers often remains
vague and inchoate, particularly when it is not backed up by a tradition
through which to express itself.
On the other hand, we have seen in recent decades a powerful
surge—especially in the Protestant Churches, but also in the heart of
the Catholic Church—of what sociologists have called ‘conversion
Christianity’.
This Christian mentality has four characteristics:
1. Willingness to make a clear statement which communicates

directly, with no concern for what is ‘religiously correct’;
2. The ability to speak to everyone individually and allow them
to experience immediately what would change for them if they
believed (this reflects a contemporary attitude which attaches

great importance to experience);
3. Promotion of a way of living which cuts itself off from present-
day lifestyles;
4. Concern to accentuate the transcendence of God, and not to
blur the distance between us and God (in the Catholic Church,
this is chiefly expressed in the liturgical sphere, for example, by
insistence on respect for the sacred). In general, this also
involves a way of living out faith which creates links between
believers (not just in fraternal communities, but in the form of
networks—the internet is used extensively for this).
Is the Larger Church Fading into the Background?

Between these two groups, the larger Churches often seem irrelevant.
Their classic structures, particularly a parish life managed by priests or
ministers and centred on regular observances, have been severely
tested. Alternative forms have been slow to emerge—and with reason.
As long as we cling to the ‘parish culture’, creativity remains limited. At
the same time, I am convinced that parishes and local organizations
have a great reserve of energy and creativity, which is somewhat
neglected at the moment. When other ways of ‘doing Church’ have
been put in place those energies have been discovered.
If our Churches do not find within their own tradition the way to
renew themselves, it is not completely inconceivable that they will
slowly become insignificant (that is, ‘unable to be a sign’); or they will
© Ange Soleil
172 Étienne Grieu
seek to remodel their life on that of conversion Christianity. I would see

considerable problems associated with either scenario.
In fact, the larger Churches have many treasures, such as an
experience of the passage of time, giving them the ability to transmit a
message beyond the impact of current fashion and to stand fast in
difficult periods; a certain wisdom; the ability to welcome all comers;
and finally the capacity to communicate the Good News in different
languages, for example, in the social or cultural spheres. Their
institutional weight and the great variety of their activities open up the
ability to express themselves in the public domain.
If the larger Churches were to disappear, we would be faced with a
sort of confrontation between the ‘spiritual travellers’ and ‘conversion
Christianity’. This would be alarming. These two ways of believing have
a strong repellent effect on each other: ‘travellers’ have a horror of
ready-made truths; they do not feel respected in their personal journeys
when people claim to offer them the keys to ultimate questions. On the
other hand, those who call to conversion often tend to write off
‘spiritual travellers’ as people who have ‘lost their way’. Feeling that
they have arrived at a safe harbour, they find it difficult to imagine that
anyone might want to continue the journey indefinitely.
A Contribution from the Ignatian Tradition
The Ignatian way of preaching the gospel, as I have sketched it, has
many points of difference from the usual ways of doing things: it does
not easily express itself in clear and hard-hitting messages; it prefers to
work on the deeper level, which always needs patience and, often, a
certain amount of silence; it moves forward slowly, and rarely puts on a
show. We can safely to assume that this spiritual tradition will not be at
the top of the bill in the coming decades—and it is questionable
whether this is the appropriate place for it. Nonetheless, it may well
have something to contribute.
The Ignatian approach may be able to prevent a direct
confrontation between ‘spiritual travelling’ and ‘conversion
Christianity’. As we have seen, it combines respect for subjectivity
and care for individuality (a key element for ‘travellers’) with a
radical call to conversion (the cornerstone of ‘conversion
Christianity’); and it makes use of the art of spiritual conversation,
that is, speech. It can therefore help travellers to find a path in which
they are respected and which takes them some distance; and it can
help ‘conversion Christians’ to root their attachment to Christ in the

depths of their humanity—their personal history and their place in
society. In this way it demonstrates that the clash between these two
mentalities is not inevitable, and suggests a possible mediation—not
arising out of compromise, but by transcending attitudes that could
prove to be sterile. This mediation would come about specifically as a
result of invoking the third ‘participant’ in the conversation—the
Spirit.2
These reflections, based on the Ignatian tradition, also point to
something to which the wider Churches need to pay attention—the
need to provide a place where views can be exchanged (not just heard).
Without such a place travellers may end up enclosed in a silent and
solitary quest that could lead to despair; and converts could believe
themselves to have ‘arrived’. The Churches still desperately lack such
places of listening and sharing, where believers can accompany each
other in their discipleship of Christ.3 Providing such places would mean,
among other things, that parish life would have to develop beyond the
Sunday congregation (which is hardly a meeting conducive to spiritual
conversation), so that Christians could come together in smaller groups
to read the Bible, pray, ask questions, strengthen each other in faith,
exchange news, talk about their daily life, and seek together how to
respond to God’s call.
Our times call for the art of spiritual conversation to be expanded,
to the point where it occurs at the community level (not just between
individuals), and characterizes how communities organize themselves.
For example, how do they receive newcomers, or respond to
those who ask for a sacrament? The art of spiritual Our times call
conversation could help a Christian community or local for the art of
Church develop a whole new relationship with those around spiritual
it. If such communities begin to listen and express conversation to
themselves, certain questions will arise for them: what are be expanded
the calls, the spiritual longings, the paths of promise that
they can discern, based on what is happening in their neighbourhood,
their town or their region? How do they identify and receive these
2
The success of spiritual initiatives in the dioceses indicates in any case that this is what practising
Christians are asking for.
3
Compare Philippe Bacq and Odile Ribadeau-Dumas, A Taste of Gospel: Mark, a Pastoral Account
(Brussels: Lumen Vitae, 2006), 289–313.
174 Étienne Grieu
questions? Are Christians in these communities able to risk saying what

they believe, pointing to the star that they are following?
Of course, spiritual conversation is not to be seen as the whole life
of the Church: it is just one aspect of it. But our times invite us not to
ignore it.
Etienne Grieu SJ is a French Jesuit and teaches theology at Centre Sèvres, the
Jesuit faculty of theology and philosophy in Paris. He was a delegate at GC35. His
most recent publication is Chemins de croyants, passage du Christ (Lethielleux,
2007).

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religious community library
THE CLEARNESS PROCESS
A Way Opens
Alan Kolp
‘W HERE THERE’S A WILL, THERE’S A WAY.’ How often one hears

this idiomatic phrase and feels pressure rather than hope. Or
else one simply thinks, ‘No way’! These seem like words for the
courageous rather than the faint-hearted, and they are often meant to
summon will-power. But what if our issue is not solely a matter of will?
This is where one might turn to the clearness process in order to
discover how a way opens.
Long a part of how Quakers discern, the clearness process offers
contemporary people a compelling model for discovering, discerning
and deciding a course of action. Predictably, in our lives there are those
junctures when we know a new, or maybe just different, course of action
is needed. But we do not know the way; and it is not simply a matter of
will-power. The clearness process does not give us the solution, but it
does provide a viable model for arriving at a solution. It offers a proven
means to engage a life crisis or simply approach one’s desire to live or
work differently.
Parker Palmer has written helpfully about this process, especially
in the form of clearness committees.1 Since the Quakers originated
and developed as a religious body without ordained clergy, some kind
of structure was needed to assist members of the community, and
those beyond the community, in dealing with life problems and
choices of direction in life. The ‘clearness committee’ is a group of
people who agree to gather in a spirit of worship and seeking to sit
with the ‘focus person’. The goal is simply to help him or her discern
God’s desire, either for a particular concern or for a general direction
1
Parker J. Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life (San Francisco: Jossey-
Bass, 2004), see especially chapter 8.
The Way, 47/1–2 (Jan/April 2008), 175–184

176 Alan Kolp
in life. So one simple way of understanding the clearness committee

is that it functions much as a priest, pastor or spiritual director
would.
Palmer explains how such committees are formed and work, and
affirms that the clearness process ‘is less about problem-solving than
about drawing close to true self’.2 Authentic living is possible only when
one lives from one’s true self. David Lonsdale, writing on contemporary
Ignatian spirituality, makes a similar observation:
Today we are more ready than we have been in the past to

acknowledge that being a Christian is more of a search for genuine
truth and love than a secure position of certainty from which to
3
survey the world and pass judgment.
There is much in common between the Ignatian and Quaker

perspectives on discernment. And yet for all their commonality, there
remains a distinct ‘style’ that characterizes each one.
In true Jesuit fashion Lonsdale describes the quest for authentic
living as a quest for truth. Being a Christian, he says,
… means seeking honestly for the most authentic truth; not just the
knowledge that can be learned but makes little difference how we
live, but also the deeper gospel truth that makes little sense in fact
4
until it becomes the truth which governs our lives.
Lonsdale’s words have powerful resonances for Quakers, particularly

the idea that the spiritual quest is to change lives, not change minds. So
many modern men and women know that they are not living
authentically, because they are either not in touch with their true self,
or are not able to live and work from this true centre.
This is not the place to develop an essay on our true self. Suffice it
to say, most of us know it as our ‘heart’ or ‘soul’. Richard Rohr puts it
graphically in the opening words of his book Everything Belongs. He says
that, ‘We are a circumference people, with little access to the centre’.5
This vocabulary is a familiar one for Quakers. The classic words of
2
Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness, 138.
3
David Lonsdale, Eyes to See, Ears to Hear: An Introduction to Ignatian Spirituality (Maryknoll: Orbis,
2000), 89.
4
Lonsdale, Eyes to See, 89.
5
Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (New York: Crossroad, 1999), 15.
The Clearness Process 177
Thomas Kelly say it best. Early in his book A Testament of Devotion,

Kelly acknowledges that, ‘Deep within us all there is an amazing inner
sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Centre, a speaking Voice,
to which we may continuously return’.6 Using these poignant
metaphors, Kelly points to that reality each of us has and which we can
access. This is the metaphorical place from which clarity will come—
clarity about who we are and what we should do. It is to this place the
clearness process is designed to lead. It is a spiritual place; We would like
and there is no indispensible religious roadmap to lead us to to be engaged
it. Too many of us modern people ‘know about’ the soul in soul work,
without ‘knowing’ our souls. We would like to be engaged in but often do not
‘soul work’, but often do not know how. And ‘soul work’ know how
might be an apt way to describe the Spiritual Exercises of St
Ignatius. The words that Ignatius uses in the First Week are well
known, when he declares that humans have been ‘created to praise,
reverence and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save [their]
soul’ (Exx 23). Obviously, many humans choose not to live lives of
praise, reverence, and service. But what if humans wanted to change
their lives? Ignatian spirituality offers a way. The clearness process is
also a way to get started. Both spiritualities hear and follow the words of
Ignatius: ‘… desiring and choosing only what is most conducive for us
to the end for which we were created’ (Exx 23).
In describing the clearness process, I shall use six characteristics. In
some sense these characteristics form a circle: there is no real beginning
point, but rather the six are simultaneously in play as the process
unfolds. At any particular time, one or two characteristics might be
emphasized, but that does not mean they are more important. But we
must begin with one characteristic, so we begin with trust.
To enter the clearness process—a process of discovery, discerning,
and deciding—is to trust the process. Some people seem naturally or
easily to trust. Others of us find it difficult. Trust is faith. It is the
opposite of control or manipulation. The clearness process is designed
to bring us to a place that we cannot know ahead of time. Control does
not lead; rather, it tends to force, sometimes coercively. To those willing
to trust the process of being led to clearness, the words of Anne Morrow
Lindbergh in her classic book, Gift from the Sea, are appropriate:
6
Thomas R. Kelly, A Testament of Devotion (New York: Harper and Row, 1941), 29.
178 Alan Kolp
© Ezu
‘Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and
faith.’7
‘Patience’ is a difficult word for those of us in a hurry. But if we feel
compelled to make a decision—and, often, to make it fast—then we are
unlikely to make that decision from the clarity of our true self. It is more
likely that it will be motivated by the ego. Or it will be made for us by
someone else. But clearness demands some time and necessitates that
we trust the process.
Even though Quaker and Ignatian spiritualities do differ in
emphasis, there is agreement that the processes of clearness and of
discernment bring us to a place of experience, which is a kind of
knowing. Hence, one of the reasons we need both time and trust is
our need to become aware of our assumptions. Assumptions are the
second characteristic of the clearness process. Doubtless, there are
many assumptions we bring to the clearness process. Here we should
deal with two central assumptions which are at the core of that
process.
First, we assume that there is a God and that God has a desire for
us. We use the language of ‘desire’ here rather than God’s ‘will’. For
many of us, there is no difference in the two terms. However, for some
others, the language of ‘will’ seems harsh and often conjures up images
of a controller or manipulator. We do not imagine God’s nature and
7
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea (New York: Vantage Books, 1978), 17.
action that way. And hence, we prefer the image of God desiring
something for us.
The second assumption builds on the first one. Not only does God
have a desire for us, but also that desire is knowable. And this is
precisely what the clearness process is about: coming to know God’s
desire for myself. If I already know it, there is no need for a clearness
process. However, often we simply do not know who God now intends
for us to be or what God next desires for us to do. This does call for
some kind of process of discovery and discerning.
We focus on these two assumptions as characteristic of the
clearness process because these assumptions differentiate this process
from other ways of making a decision. For example, one could simply
turn to another person and ask for advice. Or, in the military—and in
some businesses—one is given an order! But a clearness process delivers
neither advice nor orders. Instead, one trustingly enters a process in
order that one might discern God’s desire.
And it will be the discerning of that divine desire which inevitably
leads one to the true self for a decision. For it is only in one’s true self
that the divine desire and human desire meet. This then will become
the cradle of authenticity. And in this place we find an identity with
meaning. From this place emerges our work in the world, work which
has purpose. This anticipates the third characteristic of the clearness
process, namely, intentionality.
As we engage in the process of clearness, we need to bring to it
intentionality. I have cited Lindbergh’s caution that patience is usually
required; but patience is not passivity. One aspect of our intentionality
is to be quite active in the clearness process. To simplify, I suggest that
there are two related intentionalities we bring to the process. The first,
key intentionality is to be open. This is one reason why we need to be
aware of our assumptions. Often our assumptions block true openness,
for example, by making us focus too narrowly. If we can open ourselves
to the process of clearness and all that might happen within it, then we
give ourselves the best chance for real clarity about who we are to be
and/or what we can do.
The related facet of intentionality is that we are open in order that
we might ‘see’. To be open is preparatory: seeing is the result.
Sometimes, seeing comes with the immediacy of an ‘Aha!’ Or it may
come more like the dawning of a new day: gradually, the light
180 Alan Kolp
increases—through information, understanding, perhaps, revelation—

enabling us finally to say, ‘I see’.
This focus on intentionality parallels what one finds in Ignatian
spirituality. Near the end of the Second Week of the Spiritual Exercises
Ignatius says
In every good election, as far as depends upon us, the eye of our
intention ought to be simple, only looking at what we are created
for, namely, the praise of God our Lord and the salvation of our soul
(Exx 169).
Ignatius is correct; the pure and simple eye is directional. We do see

where we want to go.
It may well be that ‘seeing is believing’, but seeing is not yet doing.
Just because we come to clarity does not yet mean that we have done
anything. This neatly brings us to the fourth characteristic of the
clearness process, our responsibility.
Our responsibility in the clearness process entails two aspects,
which can be labelled the temporal and the terminal aspects. The
temporal aspect of responsibility is that we pay attention. How many
times do we find ourselves in a conversation and suddenly realise we
have no real idea what is going on, because we have not been paying
attention! It is like driving down the motorway and realising that you
have gone fifty miles, with no recollection of having done so. It is
crucial in the clearness process that we pay attention. It is necessary to
listen to what is said—and to what might not be said.
Gerald May offers a very helpful description of what paying attention
does for the individual. Paying attention, he says, is focused awareness:
©Fllbeecee
Attention … requires a certain—usually rather high—level of

alertness and a limitation or restriction of the range of awareness, a
8
shutting out of so-called distractions.
Essentially, the clearness process is an exercise in paying attention.

Everyone involved brings to it an intention of paying attention—to one
another and, especially, to where and how God self-discloses. And the
intentionality is linked to responsibility.
The terminal aspect of our responsibility is finally to act. Assuming
clearness does come to a person, at that point the clearness process has
finished. Now the question is whether the person will act on the clarity
which has come. In classical Christian terms the issue is no longer
discernment, but now becomes obedience. And we all know that ‘Yes’ is
not always our response. Obviously, one can become clear about
something and choose not to do anything about it.
Lonsdale understands this by acknowledging that discernment and
discipleship must be integral. He says,
… discernment is at the heart of discipleship, because when we

walk a disciple’s path we are constantly faced with changing
situations in which we have to discover how to be faithful to the
9
gospel and the leading of the Spirit, and true to ourselves.
This is why I call this particular characteristic of the clearness process a

responsibility and not a requirement. Coming to clarity does not
automatically lead to action. But discipleship calls for action, not simply
knowledge.
The fifth characteristic of the clearness process is the communal.
Far too many modern people try to figure out problems or solve
dilemmas all by themselves. We assume that we are bright enough,
will be lucky enough, might somehow receive some insight—or
something. The clearness process is designed to get the individual
into a communal context so as to benefit from that experience. It is
not too bold to say, indeed to insist, that this is always better than
going it alone.
8
Gerald R. May, Will and Spirit: A Contemplative Psychology (New York: HarperCollins, 1987), 47.
9
182 Alan Kolp
The communal aspect of the clearness process should provide two

invaluable benefits. The first is the wisdom to be gained from having
others present to focus on the person and the issue in question. But this
wisdom should not come in the form of advice. Normally, a question
has more power to open someone to his or her true self than any piece
of advice. Beginning to be opened to my inner truth does not mean
immediately understanding it. But being open does bring me to the
doorway of discernment.
This is where each of us needs others. Palmer gives three good
reasons:
The journey towards inner truth is too taxing to be made solo .…

The path is too deeply hidden to be travelled without company ….
10
The destination is too daunting to be achieved alone.
Each of us walks our own spiritual path, but we do not have to do it

alone. Many eyes are better than one eye; the same goes for ears. The
dominant metaphors for the destination of our Christian journey are
communal, too: kingdom, banquet, city.
The second benefit of undertaking the clearness process in a
communal setting is the gift of other people’s good will. How many
places in the world can we go and presume that there is a select group of
people whose only commitment for a period of time is to us, and that all
their good will is directed solely towards our welfare? The communal
clearness process creates such a place.
However, the clearness committee is not simply a group of good
women and men who wish the focus person well. In fact, there is an
implicit ecclesiastical presupposition underlying the communal
gathering, namely that in that place at that time people gather with the
expectation that God’s Spirit is present in their midst. Furthermore, the
gathered group is confident that the desire of God is discernible and will
lead the focus person to clarity. The specifics of this discerning process
may well be distinctively Quaker, but the process itself not uniquely so.
Lonsdale describes,
10
Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness, 26.
… one of the central features of Ignatius’ approach to discipleship:

the process of discernment of spirits as a means of having the mind
11
and heart of Christ in the circumstances of everyday life.
A Quaker might say, ‘wanting to do in everyday life what God desires

me to do’. But the convergence between the two is striking.
The final characteristic of the clearness process is hope. People
who participate in the process have every reason to be hopeful that
good things can happen. This is not to say they will happen; hope is
not a guarantee; and the process is based on trust and not control. It
is also important to note that we can be hopeful about the
Clearness works,
process itself. There always is a double trust. First, we trust
but not always in
that God does have a desire for us and it is knowable. And
the way we
secondly, we trust the process of clearness as the discerning
expected it to
means of knowing that divine desire. Clearness works; but
it does not always work the way we expect it to. That is one of the
great lessons learned by participating in this process. Taking the time
to listen for our inner teacher, hearing the questions of our
communal partners, sitting in periods of silence when we are not
always filling the space with our own words—all this is designed to
release us to be present and attentive to the inner teacher which
each of us has. To hope that we will come to know is a powerful and
legitimate hope.
Obviously, there is a relationship between our hope and all the
other characteristics of the clearness process. These six characteristics
form a circle, which is the process. Our assumptions often focus our
hopes. Hope certainly relates to intentionality. And that implicates our
responsibility. And all these relationships are affected by participating
communally in the process.
The process of clearness brings a person to clarity, yes. But more
importantly, clarity typically emerges as a leading, what Kelly calls
‘persuasions’. This means that clarity comes as something different from
a purely rationalistic solution to a problem. And this leading sets us up
for the vital next step. As Kelly eloquently puts it,
11
184 Alan Kolp
Yielding to these persuasions, gladly committing ourselves in body

and soul, utterly and completely, to the Light Within, is the
12
beginning of true life.
At this point, perhaps we are finally in a place to know and say, ‘where
there’s a will, there’s a way’.
Alan Kolp is Moll Chair in Faith and Life and Professor of Religion at Baldwin-
Wallace College in Berea, Ohio. His books include Fresh Winds of the Spirit
(Friends United Press, 2007), Canopy of Light and Love (Friends United Press,
1993), and Integrity is a Growth Market: Character-Based Leadership (with Peter
Rea; Atomic Dog Publishing, 2005). He is active in the Society for the Study of
Christian Spirituality. He is a lifelong Quaker and a Benedictine oblate. He was
recently a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College (Oxford) while on sabbatical.
12
Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, 29.
THE SPIRITUAL EXERCISES
AS BIOGRAPHY
Franz Meures
‘And he set out on his journey.’ (Autobiography, 17)
I N THE LIGHT OF CHANGING PRACTICE in giving the Spiritual Exercises

during the last forty years, the Exercises before Vatican II seem to us
today to be characterized by a one-sidedly ascetic and moral approach,
and by an excess of theology. What will a later generation think of our
own practice of the Exercises? Perhaps they will note that it was carried
out with a strongly psychological approach, and also that work on the
exercitant’s autobiography played too large a part.
Some reflections will be presented here on the significance that
Ignatius gave to work on the individual’s life-history during the
Exercises, with constant reference to what I shall call the ‘biographical
method’. It is difficult to find a single definition of this new discipline
among the human sciences. In sociology and the historical fields it
concerns the reconstruction of social and historical realities with the
help of autobiographical texts or accounts. In the healing and
counselling disciplines gaining insight into one’s own identity with the
help of autobiographical memories is central. Something like a
‘narrative identity’ is built up, which is informative about the main
developments and crises in a life, and about how an individual comes to
terms with them; to this extent the biographical method also leads to
questions about the meaning and purpose of life. Here I shall be
concerned chiefly with this last aspect, although questions of historical
verification will also be touched on occasionally.
The Way, 47/1–2 (Jan/April 2008), 185–199

186 Franz Meures
The Biographical Method in the Text of the Spiritual Exercises

In this first step we shall simply go through the text of the Spiritual
Exercises—as if with a computer search-engine—to see where, in what
context and for what purpose, Ignatius envisages working with one’s
autobiography, listing and briefly commenting on the places in
question.
The Fundamental Concerns of the Exercises
In overview, the Exercises appear as a means to ‘regulate one’s life’,
‘preparing and disposing the soul to rid itself of all … disordered
tendencies’; ‘to seek and find the Divine Will as to the disposition of
one’s life’ (see Exx 1, 21). So what is in question is a basic reorientation
of one’s entire life. In general, one might say that what occurs in the
Exercises is a dialogue with one’s own life. Seeking God’s will for one’s
life, it is presupposed that ‘the Creator and Lord Himself should
communicate Himself to His devout soul’ (Exx 15): thus the
reorientation of one’s life is under the influence of God’s action.
The Principle and Foundation (Exx 23) specifies the basic
theological and anthropological principles for the wider process of life-
orientation: that human beings, as created by God, live ‘to praise,
reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save their
soul’. They are to evaluate all the things of this world according to
whether or not they help towards this goal. The exercitant repeats this
basic concern in the introductory prayer to each meditation in the
course of the Exercises (see Exx 46, 49).
Biographical Reflections Aiming at Conversion
The First Week of the Exercises contains numerous and striking
pointers towards a practice which corresponds closely to our
‘biographical method’. Even before Ignatius sets out to give the first
meditations for the Exercises themselves, he writes a long chapter on
how to examine one’s own sins and deal with this aspect of one’s past
life (Exx 24–44). These Examens are regular practices in prayer in
everyday life, whether in the ‘Particular and Daily Examen’ concerning
definite faults or vices (Exx 24–31) or in the ‘General Examen of
Conscience to Purify Oneself and to Make One’s Confession Better’
(Exx 32–43). The most comprehensive instrument for coming to grips
with one’s past life is the ‘General Confession with Communion’ (Exx
The Spiritual Exercises as Biography 187
‘On the End of Man’, from Antonius Sucquet, Via vitae aeternae,
engraving by Boetius Adams Bolswert
44), which is, so to speak, a fundamental re-examination of life. In

practising the General Examen (Exx 43), exercitants are first of all to
call to mind God’s blessings in their own lives, before praying for
knowledge of their sins and then, ‘from the hour that we rose up to the
present Examen, hour by hour, or period by period’, examining all their
thoughts, words and deeds. This is a scrutiny of their lives in intentions
(thoughts), communication (words) and actions (deeds).
188 Franz Meures
The exercises of the First Week proper (Exx 45–72) involve a very
thorough examination of the exercitant’s life, which is to lead to a
complete conversion. The first exercise (Exx 45–54) accomplishes this
first of all by looking at the sins of others (of angels, of the first human
beings, of a single person). Each time this look at another is followed by
a recollection of myself, of how much more I should have deserved to be
damned for ever. This confrontation with the whole previous life-
history takes place with the ‘Three Powers’; the whole spiritual
repertoire which (according to the anthropological view of that time)
intrinsic human powers might employ—memory, understanding and
will—is used. The climax of this exercise is a dialogue with Christ on
the cross, in which each exercitant acknowledges all that Christ has
done for him or her, and expresses ‘what I have done for Christ, what I
am doing for Christ, what I ought to do for Christ’. This means that
insight into the exercitant’s previous way of life and the intention of
fundamental change come about in the presence of God as Saviour.
In the second to fifth exercises (Exx 55–72) this process is
radicalised in the form of detailed reflection, working through the
whole of the past life. In going through my life, ‘from year to year, or
from period to period’, I should first remember exactly where I was at
those times, and reflect on my dealings with other people and my duties
Detailed (Exx 56). This whole process of looking into myself unsparingly
reflection in the sight of God leads to an ever-growing astonishment that,
working through in spite of everything, God has supported and led me so far, and
the whole of the to a colloquy of gratitude for God’s endless mercy (Exx 60–61).
past life The meditation on hell is a threatening visualisation of where
my previous way of life could finally lead me (Exx 65–71), and
ends with a prayer of relief that Christ has hitherto preserved me from
this dreadful fate and ‘that to this moment he has always shown himself
so loving and merciful to me’ (Exx 71). This radical form of work on
one’s autobiography ends with reconciliation in the form of the general
confession (Exx 44), in which conversion, penitence, reconciliation
and a new sense of direction come to fruition.
So the specific character of the biographical method in the First
Week is that it enables exercitants to look at the dangers and errors of
their past lives face to face with the gracious and forgiving God, so that
they may then be converted and consent to be led once more by God’s
commandments.
The Biographical Method and the Person of Christ

With the beginning of the Second Week of the Exercises (Exx 91–189)
Ignatius invites us to a change of perspective, which leaves the First
Week’s use of biographical method behind. Exercitants do not dwell any
longer on critical inspection of their former lives, but their whole
attention is directed to ‘Christ the Eternal King’, in order to take up his
call and prepare to carry out his will. And this focus remains in the
three following Weeks of the Exercises—in contemplation of the life,
passion and resurrection of Christ. One might say that with the
beginning of the Second Week use of the ‘biographical method’ begins
on the person of Jesus Christ, so as to find inner familiarity with him, to
love him more, and to follow him more closely (Exx 104). Each point
for meditation, that is, each look at the ‘Mysteries of the Life of Our
Lord’, ends with the recommendation: ‘And then I shall reflect on
myself, to draw some profit from each of these things’ (see Exx 106, 107,
108, etc.). There is also so much participation in Jesus’ life and destiny
that it is almost as though I am trying out which role I myself could take
in the salvation of the world: ‘I will make myself a poor little unworthy
slave ….’ (Exx 114). That it is time for exercitants to look away from
their own lives is reinforced by the recommendation that, from the
Second Week onwards, it will be useful to read books about the imitatio
Christi and the lives of the saints (Exx 100). The ‘Mysteries of the Life
of Our Lord’ (Exx 262–312) will not be discussed further here
I do not consider it appropriate to call the spiritual process of a life-
decision—Ignatius calls it an ‘election’—a use of ‘biographical method’,
because usually work with autobiography is concerned with the past,
not with impending decisions. Nevertheless, in the instructions and
exercises for this process there are some points that once again contain
elements of biographical method. In the meditation on the Two
Standards (Exx 136–147) and the following exercises, once again
exercitants examine the whole repertoire of motives determining their
actions: are these motives located more in a dynamic suggestive of the
enemy of human nature (riches, honour, pride) or in the kenotic way of
Jesus (poverty, ignominy, humility)? Above all, the concern is to know
the real motives, and not to be blinded by apparent ones (‘to ask for a
knowledge of the deceits of the rebel chief and help to guard myself
against them’, Exx 139). Ultimately, the question is: might I be fooling
myself with my noble motives? This ought to be one of the key
190 Franz Meures
‘Emissio spiritus’, from Jerónimo Nadal, Evangelicae historiae imagines
questions in any work on autobiography. What image of my life, my

values and motives, develops from looking at the way I have come so
far? Does this image suffer from fine colouring (my good reputation,
‘honour’), or is it characterized by sober honesty (‘humility’)?
Decisions Consonant with One’s Own Life and with Christ’s
In the concrete instructions for the choice of a way of life (Exx 169–
189) four points stand out concerning how to deal with the previous
life-history. First, Ignatius indicates that there are decisions in life on
which nobody can go back (‘unchangeable choice’, Exx 172). Contrary
to the view customary today—that every decision can be changed—it is
clear for him that many commitments cannot be dissolved (for example
priestly vocation and marriage). Secondly, in reflecting on the choice he

recommends an imaginative exercise in which I am to try to move out
of my own self-awareness and into another person’s. Since everyone has
blind spots in looking at the self, exercitants are to take on the
deliberations of someone else facing a similar decision (Exx 185). This
change from self-consciousness to a foreign consciousness is an
important element in serious use of the biographical method. Thirdly,
during these reflections, he recommends exercitants to place
themselves at the point of their death and to evaluate an impending
decision from that standpoint (Exx 186). This change of perspective
abandons deliberation in the here and now and seeks for a judgment of
the impending life-decision—and thereby of life as a whole—from the
perspective of the hour of death. And fourthly, seeing the decision in
the perspective of Judgment Day is recommended (Exx 187). What will
be the ‘Last Judgment’ on my life? Clearly I shall not pronounce the last
judgment myself, nor will any human being: Christ will pronounce it. So
here there is a change of perspective from a human view to God’s view.
This is an eschatological approach to autobiography. Ignatius makes the
last three recommendations again, in exactly the same form, when it is
a question of distributing one’s property for the sake of imitating Christ
(Exx 339–341).
In the Third and Fourth Weeks of the Exercises anything like
biographical method recedes completely into the background. Here the
point is no longer to clarify anything about one’s self and one’s own life-
story; the exercitant strives to take part as intensively as possible in the
paschal mystery, in suffering with Christ’s suffering, sharing in the joy of
the resurrection, and receiving the consolation that the risen Christ
gives.
In the ‘Contemplation to Attain the Love of God’ (Exx 230–237) a
perspective recurs whereby exercitants should look at their whole lives.
To be able to respond to God’s love with their whole hearts, they should
call to mind all the gifts they have ever received from God, so as then to
give a loving response with all the powers available to free beings (Exx
234). This is an astonishingly grateful use of biographical method to
attain a generous self-dedication.
Rules for the Discernment of Spirits: A Basic Biographical Model
The two groups of Rules for the Discernment of Spirits (Exx 313–327
and 328–336) essentially deepen what was said before under the
192 Franz Meures
heading ‘clarification of motives’. By which spirit do I allow myself to be

directed? The first two rules in the first group (Exx 314–315) deserve to
be emphasized in the context of biographical method. Here Ignatius
explains that spontaneous emotional evaluation of the conduct of one’s
own life is strongly influenced at the time by the fundamental direction
that life has already taken. Those who lead depraved lives take pleasure
in them and see themselves justified by the resulting positive affects.
Those who want to direct their lives more and more towards God find
consolation and confidence in that. This shows that the fundamental
models of biography incline towards the affective strengthening of the
self, and that critical self-examination is a laborious task. Self-
evaluation is a sensitive business, and a serious biographical method
makes every effort to cope with this.
The affective strengthening of self-evaluation is especially
complicated when someone is tempted ‘under the appearance of good’
(Exx 10), that is, when well-meant motives are mixed with motives of
quite another kind, without the person concerned being aware of them.
This can—biographically speaking—lead to very long-lasting
confusion. Therefore in the second group of rules Ignatius recommends
that ‘We must carefully observe the whole course of our thoughts’ (Exx
333), that is,
… consider the series of good thoughts, how they arose, how the
evil one gradually attempted to make him step down from the state
of spiritual delight and joy in which he was, till finally he drew him
to his wicked designs (Exx 334).
Here real work on the autobiography is done: through a long-term

analysis of personal motives and the experiences following from them it
should become clear what was reliable in the end and what turned out
to be ‘beautiful seeming’ .
Opportunities and Limitations

The foregoing survey gives an inescapable demonstration of how deeply
the process of the Exercises probes in a debate with the past life, and
what fundamental changes Ignatius expects from this. At the same time
practice of the Exercises shows that there are also certain dangers,
limitations and snares in such a proceeding. I should like to treat the
opportunities and the limitations under four headings.
Finding Oneself and Ordering One’s Life

Days of recollection or retreats offer many people for the first time an
opportunity and a procedure for engaging with every stage of their past
life as a whole, so as to ‘put it into order’. The Second Vatican Council’s
pronounced opening up to a theology of salvation history and teaching
on revelation, and the resulting ecclesiology of ‘Church on a journey’
and anthropology of ‘human being as pilgrim’, have made Look at the road you
drastic changes in the way the Exercises are given. In have already
catechetical work with confirmation groups and religious travelled
days for school classes it has already become almost standard
practice to look into the individual life journey. In this the implicit or
explicit assumption is: ‘Look at the road that you have already travelled
and you will understand where you are’. All in all, this change to prayer
with autobiography is a very important new orientation.
At the same time, however, it is notable that spiritual work on their
life-history has led not a few people into perpetual crises about
themselves and into a tireless digging up of more and more new
autobiographical details. Through this activity many people want to
understand, at last, what the matter with them is. The search for God
in the Exercises has turned into a search for identity. Our astonishment
at how a major psychoanalysis can stretch to 300–500 hours of therapy
can equally extend to the many exercitants who never want to stop
bringing to light more and more new things from their life-histories, so
as to reach clarity about themselves. Wanting to ‘put one’s life in order’
can lead to a turn towards the self in autobiographical retrospection,
and finally into constant navel-gazing. The individual ego becomes
massively large and important. Self-fixation is certainly not the putting
in order that Ignatius intends in the Exercises. Perhaps this is all a
temptation for the ‘narcissistic generation’, just as earlier crises of
anxiety and scrupulosity about the self might be considered
symptomatic of obsessive or neurotic generations.
If the liberating gaze at the Saviour and the liberating dialogue with
the Crucified One ‘as with a friend’, do not take a prominent place in
all the exercises, it becomes difficult to escape from such biographical
imprisonment in the self.
194 Franz Meures
Anxious and Careless Characters and Periods

It was Ignatius’ experience with those making the Exercises that the
whole range and variety of characters was exposed as they looked at
their own lives. So he warns insistently that unstable people—who can
easily become enthusiastic about something—are inclined to make life-
decisions that are weak and not thought through (Exx 14). He develops
his insight into the different characters in greatest detail in the notes on
scruples (Exx 345–351), which speak of delicate and lax consciences.
This is a matter of completely different characters, which become
apparent especially in the exercises of the First Week, when exercitants
examine their consciences and weigh up their sins.
The enemy considers carefully whether one has a lax or a delicate

conscience. If one has a delicate conscience, the evil one seeks to
make it excessively sensitive …. If one has a lax conscience, the
enemy endeavours to make it more so …. (Exx 349)
The Enemy leads the one with the delicate conscience to discover a sin
in the smallest detail, and he tells the one with the lax conscience still
more soothingly that massive faults were not really so bad.
When the biographical method is used in the Exercises, such
differences of character may be taken into account—and many other
types of character can be identified. What comes out in spiritual work
on one’s autobiography often depends not so much on how the exercise
is introduced and guided, but predominantly on exercitants’ own
characters. These offer the background against which they look at their
own lives and judge them. They each have their own filters, colouring
the way they look at their own existences.
Something similar is probably true of historical periods. A period
with strict morals, with extremely high expectations of complete self-
discipline, and for which ‘mortification’ is a byword, might form guilty
and anxious characters. In such a period fear of damnation because of
one’s many personal sins would be a ‘normal’ phenomenon among
devout people. A period such as our own, however, characterized by a
high degree of permissiveness, by a plurality of values and of ways of
understanding life, and in which autonomous self-determination has
become almost the highest principle in life, makes it very difficult even
to understand what might be meant by sin. Perhaps the constant search
for what gives more and more pleasure is a strategy of the enemy of
‘Put Thy Trust in God Only’ from Antonius Sucquet, Via vitae
aeternae, engraving by Boetius Adams Bolswert
human nature to make the lax consciences of a culture still laxer. Work
on the autobiography in the Exercises can—in the sense of what we
have called the ‘affective strengthening’ of the self—lead to the loss of
critical distance from the contemporary age’s temptations. When,
however, a person has lived through several different periods,
autobiographical work in the Exercises can lead to a ‘clash’ between
different phases of life. Autobiographical work and spiritual conversion
to God are always also work on the paradigm-shifts between periods,
196 Franz Meures
'Without Him Thou Canst Do Nothing', from Antonius Sucquet, Via vitae
aeternae, engraving by Boetius Adams Bolswert
and thereby on paradigm-shifts in one’s own life. Chasms yawn between

asceticism of will and well-being.
From Reflection to Contemplation
The change of perspective from reflection to contemplation between
the First and Second Weeks is decisive for the question of how
important the biographical method in the process of the Exercises is. In

the First Week exercitants are to put their lives in order, so as to become
free to contemplate the Mysteries of Christ’s Life, to allow themselves
to be called by Christ to imitate him, and to make life-decisions
accordingly. This change of perspective implies also a change of method
in spiritual practice.
The exercises of the First Week have a strongly reflective and
discursive character: the great movements of human history as a
consequence of the Fall are gone through, the whole of one’s own life is
intensively reflected on, and key consequences are drawn from it as to
where it all might lead. A human being’s whole spiritual potential is
engaged with memory, understanding and will, to comprehend the
dramatic threat in one’s own life and to induce an about-turn.
With the real first exercise of the Second Week, the contemplation
on the Incarnation (Exx 101–109), there is a change not only in the
direction of view, but also in its nature. Penetrating meditation material
is replaced by the ‘gaze’ at the mysteries of salvation: a peaceful,
lingering wonder; being there; willingness to be moved, to be brought
into the event; finding inner familiarity with Christ and the other actors
in the scene.
The gaze is also freed from the self. Work on one’s autobiography is
important, but not the most important thing. Looking on Christ ‘with
all possible homage and reverence’ (Exx 114) gradually allows what is
really important to appear. People do not remain trapped in the
magnetic fields of their own history, but fall more and more into the
magnetic field of God’s salvation history. Being redeemed, they may free
themselves from themselves and become capable of the gift of
themselves. This new vision leads to a new selflessness, perhaps never
known before.
‘Finding God in All Things’
When people have prepared themselves in this vision to take part in the
paschal mystery, they and their lives move into a new light. A union
with God opens up, a loving community of giving and receiving, which
takes note of God’s presence in all created things. This vision also
shows how God in all things works for the sake of human beings, and
how everything good in them comes down from above (Exx 230 ff.). A
dimension of presence opens up by which, in mystical, attentive
contemplation, one already begins to share in the everlasting vision of
198 Franz Meures
God. True, the ‘beatific vision’ as yet takes place through a veil but, all
the same, it has already begun. As regards biographical method, it may
be said that the whole of life already radiates in God’s light.
The fundamental Ignatian expression ‘finding God in all things’ is
located at this point on the spiritual journey. And at this point—as in
the Easter experiences of the disciples—the whole previous life-journey
can really be illuminated by the light of the Risen One. This is the goal
of the Exercises towards which Ignatius’ spiritual journey is always
directed, beginning with the exercitant’s first practices in prayer—as,
for example, the examination of conscience or the application of the
senses. All the same, a degree of caution is recommended in presenting
this fundamental expression to a beginner. It can lead to distortions in
spiritual life, and bring about the exact opposite of what is really meant.
Not for nothing does Ignatius stress before the beginning of the
Exercises that exercitants are ‘to know nothing of’ what is to come to
them in later exercises (Exx 11).
This warning seems to me particularly important for people of our
own day. The autobiographies of many people have become ‘handwork
biographies’: pieces are put together that really do not fit at all. The
great plurality of values and experiments in life allows things apparently
to coexist which are really quite incompatible. An open and tolerant
syncretism of religious convictions has spread, in which clear limits no
longer seem to be possible. In this context the identity of many people is
no longer comprehensible, because it is a mere patchwork. And in this
context spiritual autobiographical work becomes almost impossible,
because the concern ‘to put one’s life in order’ falls to pieces at the very
beginning.
For people with this intellectual history and spiritual situation the
basic expression ‘finding God in all things’ can easily become sweet
poison. It can suggest that the completely orderless plurality of a
‘patchwork identity’ need not be at all worrying, because God allows
Godself to be found in all things. So Ignatius’ fundamental expression
becomes a tranquilliser, reassuring one that the basic work of clearance
on one’s own life is not really necessary. God will show Godself, after all,
in everything that is part of one’s life.
When it comes to this—and it really happens this way at times—
everything is turned upside down. The fundamental starting-point of
the Principle and Foundation, that all created things are to be tested, as
to whether they lead to the real service and praise of God or not, is
emptied of meaning. Or to put it more strongly: the catechumen’s
profession of faith at the font on Easter Night (‘I renounce’ and ‘I
believe’) is no longer taken seriously. The Exsultet, sung earlier in the
radiance of this most holy night, which ‘separates all who believe in
Christ from the malice of the world’, has lost its meaning: a ‘separation’
from many aspects of the former life is not in fact desired. ‘Anything
goes’—so I do not need to renounce anything.
‘Finding God in all things’ is a gift of grace to people ‘who go on
earnestly striving to cleanse their souls from sin and who seek to rise in
the service of God to greater perfection’ (Exx 315). That means people
who in the First Week have looked at their autobiography and gone
through a foundation-laying process of conversion. Then, in the
Second to Fourth Weeks, they have turned from their own preferences
and sought what more resembles Christ’s way of life, thus opening them
to a genuine effort to know God’s will. From this perspective I consider
it no accident that in the first four hundred years of Ignatian tradition
the key expression ‘finding God in all things’ is seldom to be found as a
heading for Ignatian spirituality. This has happened only in the last
thirty to forty years. This expression points out very well the goal of the
spiritual way, but, precisely because it fits so well with our time, it can be
poison for beginners.
Franz Meures SJ was born in the Hunsrück, near Trier. He entered the Society of
Jesus after he left school, and studied in Munich, Frankfurt and Rome. He was
active for many years in pastoral work with young people, having taken specialist
training in pastoral psychology. He was for nine years novice master and for six
years Provincial of the North German Province of the Society. He has published
extensively on questions concerning the discernment of spirits, the Exercises, and
spiritual processes in groups. He has been Rector of the German and Hungarian
College in Rome since January 2005.
THE SPIRITUAL EXERCISES
AND SEXUALITY
Andrew Walker
T HE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE SACRED and the sexual in the West

can be approached in two contrasting ways. First, they may be
identified with each other: Paul Ricoeur suggests that there was once a
time when sexuality and spirituality were closely connected, and when
the erotic was incorporated into religious myth and ritual.1 We see
clearly from the Song of Songs, the lived prophecies of Hosea, and the
experience of some of the great medieval and later mystics—not least
from the famous ‘transverberations’ of Teresa of Avila2—that this
approach is a part of the Jewish and Christian tradition.
But there is also a kind of dualism that rigorously divides the two:
the sacred is perceived as something transcendent and separate.
Sexuality is demythologized and confined to procreation within the
institution of marriage; its power is restrained, disciplined and feared.
The Christian Context

In the early Church sexuality was associated with the fallen world.3 The
material world was believed to be coming to an end; and sexuality was
bracketed with procreation and the family, so there seemed little point
in the last earthly generations valuing it. Jesus, assumed to be single,
was taken as the preferred sign of the coming Kingdom; Paul’s letters
1
See James Nelson, The Intimate Connection (London: SPCK, 1992), 31, citing Paul Ricoeur,
‘Wonder, Eroticism and Enigma’, in Sexuality and Identity, edited by Henrik Ruitenbeek (New York:
Pilgrim Press, 1970), 13–24.
2
‘Teresa is celebrated for the miracle of the Transverberation—the physical piercing of her heart by
one thrust of an angel’s flame-tipped lance. … a recurrent dream experience in which the angelic lance
penetrated her body’ (Victoria Lincoln, Teresa, a Woman: A Biography of Teresa of Avila [New York:
SUNY, 1985], xxxviii).
3
I am indebted for much of the material for this section to the lectures of Philip Sheldrake and the
writing of Peter Brown. For the former see his Befriending our Desires (London: Darton, Longman and
Todd, 2001), for the latter, Body and Society (New York: Columbia UP, 1989).
The Way, 47/1–2 (Jan/April 2008), 201–210

202 Andrew Walker
show us the new forms of relationship that were considered appropriate

to the end times (see, for example, 1 Corinthians 7:38).
The Church was also influenced by its cultural milieu—in
particular by the Stoic Roman belief that the virtuous state was
achieved by overcoming the passions and pleasure. So Gregory
Nazianzen could say that the fall of humanity was caused by Eve being
tempted by pleasure.4 Virtuous—dispassionate—masculinity was the
measure of what it meant to be human, and virginity became the ideal.
There were of course exceptions to all this—Aquinas had a more
positive theology of the body but this was untypical of the age and a
part of his thought that was not much taken up.5
A separation developed in Christianity between eros (love that is
passionate and particular) and agape (love that is universal and
disinterested)—by contrast with the Jewish tradition, which continued
to entwine the two. Hebrew, unlike Greek, has only one word for love.
For Christians the erotic developed the meaning that it has in modern
English, a meaning narrowly associated with physical experience, and
spirituality tended to become disembodied. The underlying assumption
seemed to be that the earthly body, and with it physical intimacy, were
subject to decay and therefore unreliable.6 The sacred, by contrast, had
to be eternal and imperishable; and therefore, perhaps, it had to be kept
at a distance from the physical to preserve its purity. This was reflected
over time in the liturgy and in church practices: sanctuary screens were
introduced very early on; the exchange of the peace was limited to the
clergy before the end of the first millennium; and offertory processions
were dropped during the Middle Ages. This all served to protect the
sacred and distance it from contact with the bodily and the profane, but
in the process the sacred was also isolated and circumscribed.
In the post-Reformation period Luther could write of ‘a natural,
ardent desire for woman’ as ‘God’s law and doing’,7 but choosing
4
See St Gregory Nazianzen, oration 18, in Funeral Orations by Saint Gregory Nazianzen and Saint
Ambrose, translated by Leo P. McCauley (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press,
1953).
5
See, for example, Summa Theologiae II-II, 25. 5.
6
Bryan Turner writes: ‘The frailty and eventual decay of the human body and the inevitable physical
finitude of human beings provided an obvious metaphor for original sin and natural depravity’ (The
Body and Society [Oxford: Blackwell, 1984], 67).
7
Martin Luther, Letters of Spiritual Counsel, edited and translated by T. G. Tappert (Vancouver:
Regent College Publishing, 2003), 273.
The Spiritual Exercises and Sexuality 203
celibacy was still privileged.8

Within the Anglican and other
Protestant traditions clergy
were permitted to marry, but
marriage itself continued to
make no accommodation for
passion. Married chastity was
interpreted, under the influence
of St Augustine, as requiring the
elimination of sexual desire.
The Counter-Reformation
only reinforced the structures of
separation within Christianity:
between the sacred and the
bodily, between spirituality and
sexuality, and between celibate
clergy and sinful laity. This led
to division between those who
dominate, control and dispense
spirituality, and those who
receive it. And there was little
attempt in any tradition to
explore or express how marriage
and sexuality might actually
nourish a Christian vocation,
lay or ordained, until after
Vatican II.9
Other forces were, of course,
at work in the history that I
have sketched very briefly here,
but it would seem that the
exclusion of the erotic element
has played an important part in
a growing separation between Eve, by Lucas Cranach the Elder
8
See Mark Jordan, The Ethics of Sex (Oxford: Blackwell 2001), 58–62.
9
Benedict XVI’s recent encyclical Deus caritas est has importantly addressed many of the issues raised
here.
204 Andrew Walker
the sacred and the spiritual, and the rest of human experience. Today
our spiritual journeys need to be reconnected with the rest of our lives.
They must come to involve seeking and finding God in the whole of
human experience—risky, vulnerable and changing as it is—and in all
our relationships, including sexual ones. And our handling of the
Spiritual Exercises as directors should respond to the challenge of
integration presented by this history.
Ways Forward with the Spiritual Exercises?

We have inherited from the past, above all from the Enlightenment and
from Descartes, a concept of the self that sees its basis as a pure state of
mind—something rational, interior, disembodied and desexualised.
The exploration of the self—not only what has been but what might
be our experience—seems to me to be at the heart of the Spiritual
Exercises. And that exploration both requires and gives rise to an
understanding of the self in its relationship with God which is different,
more integrated, and more complete than the one we have inherited.
The exploration of the self is facilitated in several ways as we make the
Spiritual Exercises. As we reflect on the word of God and on our lives and
actions in the light of it, so we engage with an unfolding and
An unfolding developing encounter with the risen Lord in a journey of prayer.
and developing We benefit from the guidance and example of the spiritual
encounter with director as we make this journey—sometimes the director may be
the risen Lord in a step ahead, or sometimes one behind, but the freedom with
a journey of which he or she exercises the role is a model for the freedom that
prayer we ourselves are invited into, and inspires our capacity to
respond. The director may also need to respond to an invitation
to greater freedom: an invitation to go against the assumptions, the
conditioning or the limitations of personal experience. Finally we find a
deepening experience of God, objective as well as subjective. A more
grounded spirituality goes hand in hand with a fuller and more mature
theology, of a God involved with and informing all human reality.
An effect of this exploration in making the Exercises should be to
reunite eros (seen as the narrowly sexual) with agape (a love that has
become, on its own, detached and narrowly religious), thereby
expanding and enriching our understanding of both, in life and in faith.
We can see from observing the human societies around us that sex
without the sacred produces lives without connection, and ultimately a
crisis of meaning and purpose, where the individual is confronted by the

emptiness of self-gratification. While the sacred without sex loses its
grounding in messy reality and leaves us with a purely intellectual God
to whom it is easier to offer obedience than love. Religion is reduced to
moral values and dutiful ritual, and ultimately confronts a crisis of
duality, in which Church and society, faith and life, can seem to have
little in common for the individual.
Our call, then, is to resacralise the erotic and to eroticize the
sacred—releasing transformative passion back into our faith and
selflessness back into our relationships, and opening up the real
possibility of taking our place as co-creators with God.
In her book Holy Listening, Margaret Guenther explores the task or
role of the spiritual director by using three more everyday images: the
welcomer, the teacher and the midwife. I would like to use these images
as a focus for what I want to say about the director, sexuality and the
Exercises, relating them loosely to different Weeks or phases, although
in fact the qualities I shall be talking about can appear throughout the
whole process and journey of the Exercises.
The Principle and Foundation: The Welcomer
Guenther begins her account of welcoming by citing Genesis 18:2–8, in
which Abraham welcomes the Lord and two companions as guests. In
terms of spiritual direction, she associates welcoming with providing
others with a safe space, listening to their stories and identifying their
needs, greeting them with openness and vulnerability, helping them to
deal with any darker material in their experience and bringing the
encounter to a close as and when it is appropriate.
So what might this mean to us with the perspective of sexuality and
the Exercises? To welcome is to offer hospitality. All too often spiritual
direction is a matter of two disembodied heads talking, and the body and
sexuality are seldom discussed. For a director the question is: how far are
you willing to offer hospitality to the person sitting opposite? Many of us
are tired of the disproportionate amount of attention that the Church and
modern societies seem to give to sexuality. But this frustration may
communicate a message of exclusion to the directee. As Robert
Marsh has observed, the least hint that you are receptive to hearing
206 Andrew Walker
this sort of material openly will be

greeted with relief.10 On the other
hand, even the slightest shift in body
language can shut the line of
communication down again.
Like every other aspect of human
life, sexuality needs to be related to
the centre and goal of life: the reign
of God. If it is left at the door of the
retreat house or the direction room
it will remain unconverted. If
discussion of it is delayed or left
until the First Week, the old
message that identifies sex with sin
and the body with the fallen world is
likely to be reinforced. Sexuality,
therefore, deserves a place in the
affirming world view of the Principal
and Foundation.
In the Song of Solomon,
‘sexuality is treated with restraint
and affirmed without coyness or
apology … the resulting love is seen
as a communion of souls’.11 Would
then that the Song of Songs could be
our model for approaching sexuality
in spiritual direction; and would that
we acknowledged all the myriad
For He Had Great Possessions, by
George Frederick Watts
ways that sexuality is present in
many, if not all, areas of life. Would
that we could fully rejoice in a renewed sense of sexuality’s spiritual power.
Robert Marsh points out that the Hebrew word yada covers both knowing
and sex, because both invite relationship and both demand
10
Robert R. Marsh, ‘Id quod volo: The Erotic Grace of the Second Week’, The Way, 45/4 (October
2006), 7–19.
11
Michael V. Fox, ‘The Song of Solomon: Introduction’, in The HarperCollins Study Bible: New Revised
Standard Version (London: HarperCollins, 1993), 1001.
transformation. How can we afford not openly to include sexuality in the

whole journey of the Exercises?
The First Week: The Teacher
Here Guenther cites Mark 10:17–22, the story of the rich man who
wanted to follow Jesus. In this passage Jesus is addressed repeatedly as
‘Teacher’, and Guenther associates this role with encouraging play,
identifying limits, hopefulness, providing information, asking questions,
offering challenges, and being willing to learn as well as teach. So again
what might this mean to us here?
Mary Rose Bumpus and Rebecca Bradburn Langer12 offer a list of
questions for spiritual directors to ask themselves about sexuality, some
of which I list, slightly paraphrased:
Which of your current directees do you find most attractive and why?
Is there anyone—or any specific group—you would not be open to
serving as a spiritual director?
How might you deal with that if the issue only emerged after
beginning the thirty-day journey together?
When was the last time you were enmeshed in transference or
counter-transference with a directee? What helped you retrieve the
situation?
What makes you happy, or unhappy, about being a woman or a man?
Where and in what situations do you experience the most pleasure
with your body?
When have you experienced yourself as being most desirable to God?
What part does passion play in your relationship with God?
Directors who are monitoring their own practice with questions like
these will more easily exercise the role of ‘Teacher’ as Guenther
identifies it. In this way they are more likely to avoid the dangers that
arise from the separation of sexuality and spirituality. Because of this
separation, the holy longing that draws us into intimacy can easily
12
Supervision of Spiritual Directors: Engaging in Holy Mystery (Bellevue: Spiritual Directors International
2005).
208 Andrew Walker
Jesus and Nicodemus
become diverted into collusion or personal gratification. In a

commentary on the Qur’ān, Abdullah Yusuf Ali wrote:
… sex, which governs so much of our physical life, and has so much
influence on our emotional and our higher nature, deserves—not
our fear or our contempt or our amused indulgence but our
13
reverence in the highest sense of the term.
This reverence for sexuality is critical for both director and directee, I
would suggest, as the power and the danger of the erotic become
apparent in the First Week. It is best safeguarded by the kind of
discernment that the director’s constant self-questioning prompts.
13
Yusuf Ali, The Meaning of the Holy Qur’ān (Beltsville: Amana, 1999), 183.
The Second Week: The Midwife

Guenther cites John 3:2–4, the gospel passage in which Jesus discusses
rebirth with Nicodemus; and she links to the figure of the midwife the
attributes of patience, offering presence and support, helping directees
deal with uncertainty, focused activity at the time of most need, and,
finally, celebration.
In 1964 a church report entitled ‘Towards a Quaker View of Sex’
commented that,
… we need a release of love, warmth and generosity into the world,

in the everyday contacts of life, a positive force that will weaken our
fear of one another and our tendencies towards aggression and
power-seeking. We need to recognise fearlessly and thankfully the
14
sexual origin of this force.
As we explore the role of the Trinity and the person of Jesus, the
erotic force for connection and creativity that empowers the divine love
is difficult to resist, and at its heart lies the journey of intimacy. John
Futrell talks of God being so carried away with love for the world that
the incarnation becomes inevitable; it is the risks of love and the
exploration of our personal fears that we explore in the early part of this
Second Week, particularly in the key meditations.
Sexuality, Spirituality and Ignatius

In his magisterial Ignatius Loyola: Psychology of a Saint, W. W. Meissner
has discussed Ignatius’ own sexual identity fairly extensively: the effect
on him of the early death of his mother, the macho culture of his day,
his early promiscuity and later libidinal struggles.
But Meissner also attests to Ignatius’ largely successful repression,
on the one hand, and sublimation, on the other, of his sexuality.
Perceptions have now changed of what is desirable and appropriate
with regard to repression and sublimation, but it remains true that
sexuality needs to be faced directly during our journey inwards. We may
feel we need permission for its presence to be identified and its
ramifications explored, but at some point that raw experience needs to
be transmuted, given boundaries and transformed as part of the process
14
Alistair Heron, Towards a Quaker View of Sex (London: Friends Home Service, 1963).
210 Andrew Walker
of crafting an apostle, of discovering Christ within oneself and oneself

in Christ. The full spectrum of responses, from repression through
sublimation to open expression, is available as we engage in the journey
of transmutation, transformation and choice.
While Ignatius eschewed sexual activity in his maturity, the erotic
dimension continued to fuel his prayer, his ministry and his apostleship.
It has been said that Christianity does not understand sexual passion in
the same way that the world does not understand chastity. The
Exercises are one of the ways that understanding of both can come, and
through understanding we can achieve growth and maturity as children
of God.
For once sexual passion and chastity, eros and agape, are reunited in
a focused and appropriate experience of human and divine desire so
ecstasy comes and so the potential for union comes. The movement
from election through the Third and Fourth Weeks to the vision of the
contemplation surely mirrors this journey.
Andrew Walker is Rector of St Mary Woolnoth in the City of London, and

Director of the newly established London Centre for Spirituality, based at St
Edmund’s Church. He is a Psychosynthesis counsellor, as well as acting as a
supervisor and co-director of the Ignatian Spirituality Course offered in London.
He is the author of a book of Easter meditations, Journey into Joy (London: SPCK,
2001).
‘WHAT I OUGHT TO SAY
TO THE ETERNAL WORD’
The Four Authors of the Spiritual Exercises
Peter-Hans Kolvenbach
W HEN WE ARE LISTENING OR READING, God is speaking to us: when

we are praying we are speaking to God.1 Christian prayer is
expressed in words; it is a dialogue, an act of love mutually shared. Our
conversation with God in the Exercises is personal and rests upon a
process of communication involving several partners. A tourist who
admires the beautiful buildings of a famous city easily forgets that all
this magnificence would not be there were it not for the bricks and the
mortar which binds them together, unshaken subsoil and strong
foundations. The aim of the present contribution is to remind ourselves
of the foundation stones and the master-builders of the edifice of the
Exercises. In so doing we wish to express our thanks for the experience
of prayer in the Spiritual Exercises, by trying to rediscover their
fundamental structure—their infrastructure—which transmits this
experience to us even after more than four hundred years.
The Text of Ignatius

The basis for this study is primarily to be found in the little book
containing the text of the Spiritual Exercises. Even leafing through the
pages is enough to make it clear that we are not dealing with just any
old book. One cannot simply read the text as one might read the life of
a saint or a book on spirituality. With all the remarks on method, the
preparations for meditation, the rules and annotations, this little book
comes across as a complex and many-sided document. It is not that
1
Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos, 85. 7, ‘oratio tua locutio est ad Deum; quando legis, Deus tibi
loquitur; quando oras, Deo loqueris’ (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina volume 39 [Turnhout:
Brepols, 1956], 1182).
The Way, 47/1–2 (Jan/April 2008), 211–224

212 Peter-Hans Kolvenbach
the plethora of prayers and

instructions reflects any lack of
organization: quite the contrary,
it imposes a strong and very
precise division into days and
weeks, exercises and contemp-
lations. It is not a text simply to
be skimmed through, nor was it
assembled and put together to
be read. It is a text to be
experienced and, with the
assistance of the person giving
the Exercises, acted upon.
Indeed, Ignatius’ intention was
that the text should vanish
behind the person who is giving
The title-page of the first print edition of the the Exercises and allowing them
Spiritual Exercises
be acted upon. For this reason,
Ignatius did not want his book to appear on any bookseller’s shelves. In
fact, when the book left the press of the printer Antonio Bladio in
Rome on 11 September 1548, it was not put on sale. Ignatius wanted the
text to be entrusted only to Jesuits who had themselves made the
Exercises, and whose personal experience enabled them to give the
Exercises to others.
The Exercises can never be based simply on a reading of the little
book—on the text and the reader—but on the living encounter
between the person giving the Exercises and the person receiving them
(Exx 15). Thanks to the long chain of people who have experienced the
Exercises down the centuries, problems about presenting them in an
up-to-date and inculturated manner should not arise, since each person
receives them from a contemporary.
Ignatius wishes to keep the person making the Exercises away from
any contact with the text. The Eleventh Annotation presupposes that
exercitants do not have the book available while they are in the First
Week: ‘… it will be helpful not to know anything of what is to be done
in the Second Week’ (Exx 11). In line with the Second Annotation, the
person giving the Exercises should content him- or herself with a brief
and summary explanation, without any elaboration of the history. This
‘What I Ought to Say to the Eternal Word’ 213
remark is especially necessary for the Second Week, when the Exercises
reach the time of the election. In a letter of 18 July 1556, Ignatius
himself writes,
To give them in full form, one needs to find subjects who are capable
and suitable for helping after being helped themselves; otherwise
2
one should not go beyond the First Week.
It is also significant that Ignatius encourages us to read the Bible,

the Following of Christ or lives of the saints during the Exercises (Exx 79,
127, 100), but never recommends reading his own little book. Even
more significant is the fact that Ignatius does not prescribe any one of
the four existing versions of the text of the Spiritual Exercises. In order to
have them accepted by the Holy See he presented two by no means
identical Latin translations of the Spiritual Exercises for approval. One of
these texts gives a word-for-word translation of the Spanish original in a
fairly stiff and awkward Latin, while the other has—particularly
through its more nuanced choice of words—aimed at a more cultured
and elegant Latin.
The author of the Exercises seems to make no effort to check the
accuracy of these translations: he puts his trust much more in a spiritual
adventure communicated by one person to another, and not in a
definitive version of his Exercises. This relative distance of Ignatius from
his own text underlines and endorses his wish to make every effort to
allow our Creator and Lord to work directly (inmediate)—not through
any intermediary—with his creation (Exx 79, 127).3 The person giving
the Exercises is by no means superfluous when it comes to achieving
this immediacy; nevertheless he or she must withdraw at the crucial
moment, since, as Ignatius writes, ‘the more our soul finds itself alone
and isolated, the more apt it makes itself to approach and to reach its
Creator and Lord’ (Exx 20).
This discretion can be seen also in the language which Ignatius
chose to use. Castilian Spanish—the Spanish of Ignatius’ time—is used
in all and only those places where specific things need to be expressed
2
Ignatius of Loyola, letter to Fulvio Androzzi, in Letters and Instructions (St Louis: Institute of Jesuit
Sources, 2006), 694. (MHSJ ME 12, no. 6692, 141–143.)
3
‘So, the one who is giving the Exercises should not turn or incline to one side or the other, but
standing in the centre like a balance, leave the Creator to act immediately with the creature (inmediate
obrar al Criador con la criatura), and the creature with its Creator and Lord.’ (Exx 15)
as unambiguously, crisply and precisely as possible. Many mystics—and

Ignatius himself was a mystic—have employed the beautiful language of
poetry and literature to express their experience of God. Teresa of Avila
and John of the Cross did just that. But the preface to the 1548 edition
leaves us under no illusion that the text of the Spiritual Exercises might
be savoured as literature. The very first line makes it clear that it is not
intended to be read but put into practice—non tantum lecturi sed facturi.
The style is laconic: it is characterized by brevity, sobriety and
power. In a few images and striking words it presents the great mysteries
of our faith and introduces the decisions which will affect the rest of our
lives. Hardly concerned to write well or beautifully, Ignatius
nonetheless always considers what he says and gives every word its
proper weight. According to Pedro Ribadaneira’s account, Ignatius took
a great deal of time to go over what he had written; he reread letters
which he had just written and then reread them again, checking every
word and scoring out or correcting whatever he thought necessary.4
If in editing the Spiritual Exercises not a single word came
spontaneously from Ignatius’ pen and everything was carefully
considered, several questions suggest themselves. Ignatius reveals
himself as a man of few words, each of them carefully chosen. The text
of the Exercises is well ordered, crisp and succinct, giving us the
impression that it does not contain a single superfluous word. What
then are we to make of more than four hundred places in which the
author places one word alongside another almost as if he uses two words
to express just one idea? Everyone who has made the Exercises is
familiar with the phrases ‘Principle and Foundation’ (Exx 23) and ‘love
and serve’. Ignatius is certainly not influenced by considerations of style
or rhetoric; rather these doublets are the result of his desire to express
himself with precision. If, for example, one considers the phrase
‘Principle and Foundation’ it will immediately become clear that in the
Exercises the word ‘principle’ always has a temporal sense; that is to say,
it always means ‘beginning’.5 Ignatius does not regard his text as an
explanation of ‘first principles’. In using the phrase ‘Principle and
Foundation’ he makes it clear that the beginning of the Exercises is
more than just a starting point; it is also their spiritual foundation. Not
4
Pedro Ribadaneira, Dicta et facta sancti Ignatii, 5, 83, in MHSJ FN 2, 494.
5
See Exx 105, 239, 333 and 334.
many translators allow themselves the freedom to translate the phrase

as ‘Beginning and Foundation’, and so fail to point out that from its
Latin root it can mean not only ‘norm’ but also ‘origin’.
In two places Ignatius uses the phrase amor y servir, ‘love and serve’.
Exx 233: ‘to ask for what I want. It will be here to ask for knowledge
from within of such great good received, so that recognising this
entirely, I may be able in all to love and serve His Divine Majesty ….’ 6
And Exx 363, ‘to move the heart to love and serve God our Lord in
everything’.7 One might think of this pair, ‘loving’ and The impossibility of
‘serving’, as two parallel activities, two realities. But linking truly loving unless
them semantically suggests another interpretation. Ignatius that love is
is only too well aware that the word ‘love’, is ambiguous, and incarnated
so he might give the impression of calling for nothing more
than beautiful words and pleasant feelings. So he employs it rarely and
with great care. Has he not made it sufficiently clear that ‘love ought to
be put more in deeds than in words’ (Exx 230)? In combining ‘love and
serve’ into a linguistic unity, he is underlining the impossibility of truly
loving unless that love is incarnated and brought down to earth.
This is also true of the pair ‘love and follow’, which he uses to
capture the longing ‘ that I may more love and follow Him’ (Exx 104).8
The person who does not follow does not love. On the other occasions
when he uses the word ‘to love’, Ignatius emphasizes how valuable it is
when someone loves ‘no created thing on the face of the earth in itself,
but in the Creator of them all’ (Exx 316), and that the longing for God’s
will must shine forth in our manner of loving (Exx 338). In all other
cases, Ignatius does not use ‘love’ but prefers ‘serve’ and ‘follow’. No
doubt these are matters of detail. Still they show how carefully Ignatius
has polished his book of the Exercises, in order to make his spiritual
adventure comprehensible to us.
There is a notable accumulation of these two-word phrases in a key
passage where even the title contains two pairs: ‘To Amend and Reform
one’s own Life and State’ (Exx 189). Ignatius does not content himself
simply with urging an alteration in one’s lifestyle—emendar—but insists
that this must involve as a follow-up a genuine reform of our habits and
6
From the Contemplation to Attain Love.
7
Rules for Thinking with the Church, no. 11.
8
Meditation on the Incarnation.
ways of behaving, which is why he calls it emendar y reformar. The same

precision can be understood in the expression ‘one’s own life and state’.
Doubtless one’s style of life must be changed, but in accordance with
the demands of one’s station in life, which can be that of a lay-person or
of a religious or priest. The election leads to a reform of our manner of
life but always in accord with the particular circumstances of our
station.
Through the quantity of such semantic pairings—there are more
than four hundred of them—Ignatius expresses a kind of passion to miss
no opportunity to remove every spiritual unclarity in order to avoid his
text being misunderstood. With his word-pairs, doublets—and
sometimes triplets—he wants to support the person giving the Exercises
in trying to make each instruction in the Exercises concrete. The
spiritual goal of Ignatius is a project without limits—a magis (‘more’)—
which could easily take refuge in what is undefined and vague; and that
is exactly why precise clarification is needed.
The Text of the One Who Gives the Exercises

Ignatius’ text does not remain the only text. What we mostly hear and
receive is a ‘second’ text, namely, the text of the person who is giving us
the Exercises and who, through these Exercises, creates his or her own
text (see Exx 5–15). What is written in the book of the Exercises can be
extended or shortened, softened or strengthened by the person giving
the Exercises, who can select one thing and leave out another, using
personal experience to make it accessible to others. In this way, he or
she can present a text which has been modified specifically with regard
to the person making the Exercises. There can hardly be any doubt that
the knowledge of theology and biblical exegesis which has developed
since Vatican II—to say nothing of our knowledge of the human
sciences—enormously enriches the ministry which the giver of the
Exercises can offer.
But then, how is it possible to be sure of remaining faithful to
Ignatius and to his text, if a literal fidelity is not intended by the author
himself? To be sure, the task of the person giving the Exercises is by no
means an easy one. Should he or she keep strictly to the Annotations,
Directives, Additions, Instructions and detailed Rules on which the
Exercises rely? If someone by and large stays strictly within the Ignatian
boundaries, will this not stifle the Spirit and hence also the surprises
and unforeseen moves which the Spirit produces and which does not so
much call us to order as to develop our human freedom? Must the
person giving the Exercises not first submit to being grasped by the
freedom of the Spirit, who alone makes it possible to experience and
inwardly taste the things of God (Exx 2), and so meet the Lord in
person? Only in this way can that person help the devout soul to set out
on the way on which he or she can better serve God in future (see Exx 15).
The recommendations of the Twelfth Annotation show that
Ignatius was conscious of this tension between keeping to the letter
and the reception of the
Spirit.9 The person giving
the Exercises must be
quite clear in his or her
own mind that it is
possible to say too much
and in so doing deprive
the exercitant of the
opportunity to discover
anything. Even the most
competent guides must
limit themselves to a short
and summary presentation
which leaves the exer-
citant the greatest freedom
to discover the true
meaning of the history
which is proposed for
meditation. A balance has
to be found here. Juan
Polanco, in the Direc-
torium of 1599, requires
that the Exercises should
not be given in too short A page from Ignatius’ manuscript of the
and schematic a manner. Spiritual Exercises
9
See Exx 12: ‘As the one who is receiving the Exercises is to give an hour to each of the five Exercises
or Contemplations which will be made every day, the one who is giving the Exercises has to warn them
carefully to always see that their soul remains content in the consciousness of having been a full hour in
the Exercise, and rather more than less.’
Of course the way to God should be opened, obstacles removed, and

experiences deepened. But this dynamic gets impeded by too many
detailed suggestions.
Ignatius’ text itself bears witness to this paradoxical clash. The
person giving the Exercises must definitely require a precise adherence
to the details—how the exercitant is to pray, eat, sleep and meditate on
the Scriptures, for example. But equally, he or she must open the
horizon wide, constantly urging the greatest possible openness to God,
and providing inspiring hints on how to make sure that the way to
travel towards and with God is not predetermined or restricted. If one
looks at the text of the Spiritual Exercises as a whole, approximately a
third of it suggests a perspective of the widest possible openness—as for
instance ‘offerings of greater value and greater importance’ to the call of
the King (Exx 97), or to join the Holy Trinity in looking down upon the
whole globe of the Earth (Exx 102), or to offer one’s whole freedom and
entire self to the Lord (Exx 234). Two thirds appear to take the concern
for detail to extremes—as, for instance, the mathematical method for
the quicker eradication of some sin or fault (Exx 27), or the division of
the Exercises into weeks, days and hours, or the mysteries of the life of
Christ into ‘three points’.10
Nonetheless there is a link between the all-embracing standpoint—
the word todo (‘all’, ‘whole’) occurs frequently and throughout the
text—and attention to the tiniest details. The task of the person giving
the Exercises does not consist in choosing between a free and a literal
interpretation, but in taking care that the exercitant remains with the
tension between the experience of the wider universality of God, on the
one hand, and the smallest, concrete details on the other. This was the
inspiration for the celebrated inscription on Ignatius’ tombstone: ‘Not
to be constrained by the largest, but yet to be immersed in the smallest
thing—that is the characteristic of God’.11
Ignatius has no time for any kind of ‘Teach yourself spirituality’
technique, still less will he lend any support to a dreamy religiosity.
Given that he relies throughout the Exercises on God’s entire plan of
salvation, he cannot pass over the fact that God’s salvific will must be
10
See the Mysteries of the Life of Christ, Exx 261–312.
11
‘Non coerceri maximo, contineri tamen a minimo divinum est.’ See Hugo Rahner, Ignatius: The Man
and the Priest (Rome: Centrum Ignatianum Spiritualitatis, 1977), 124.
incarnated in the concrete reality of everyday life. He allows himself to

be guided by the Incarnation in all its mysterious character and its
completely human realism. The methodical development which
Ignatius outlines in order to dispose us to work for the greater glory of
God is immediately linked to the daily routine of our existence and to
the structure of human beings, with our memory, understanding and
will (Exx 50–52, 206 and 334).
None of the elements in this totality is static. Everything is subject
to the impulse of the Holy Spirit or moved by the various ‘spirits’
(motiones spirituales). Although everything ought to be in movement
from here towards God, Ignatius prefers to use emphatic comparatives
like más and mejór (‘yet more’ and ‘even better’). In the open-
endedness of the comparative, what is characteristic of God is expressed
better than by a static superlative.
It is enough to collect all the passages in which Ignatius uses the
word mudar (‘change’) to demonstrate this his ‘system’ is not
unalterable. If the exercitant has not found any answer in the Lord, the
person giving the Exercises must help, bringing him or her to change
the way of meditating or sleeping, doing penance or fasting. This is not a
matter of a practical or
technical alteration, but
of allowing ourselves to
be taught by the Lord
whatever will most help
us to become one with
him. For God ‘knows our
nature infinitely better,
often in such changes He
gives each one to per-
ceive what is suitable for
him’ (Exx 89).
Ignatius does not say
that that is unimportant
whether someone prays
sitting or standing, or
lying on the ground, or
on their knees, or with
their gaze fixed upwards
(Exx 76); rather it is essential to learn from experience which bodily

position is the one that the Lord has selected for me, in which I can best
find out that which I desire. The success of the Exercises is not due to
an efficiency which is peculiar to their means and methods; far more
important is that these things are chosen for us by God who knows us
better than we believe we can know ourselves.
A superficial reading of the text might give the impression that
Ignatius is forcing us into a narrow tunnel of Additions and Rules. True,
Ignatius does erect barriers in places where he is aware that there are
dead ends, for he knows from his own experience that the exercitant
without discipline is simply dreaming of God rather than actually
encountering God. This wisdom Ignatius expresses in the
contemplations of the Second Week, where he says that their number
can be increased or lessened ‘according to the time each one wants to
spend, or according as he gets profit’ (Exx 162).
From this we may conclude that the responsibility of the person
giving the Exercises is to maintain an attitude of readiness, so as to
choose from the suggestions Ignatius offers in the text only what the
Lord would wish to choose for the person making the Exercises, and
indeed to do so in such a way that the choice is of what is both most
down-to-earth and most spiritual. Consequently the
What is both most director must be sure that the exercitant is following the
down-to-earth path that Ignatius has provided. So he or she must
and most carefully inquire about the exercitant’s style of prayer and
spiritual observance of the appointed times (Exx 6); and on the
other hand when the exercitant experiences spiritual
movements, the person giving the Exercises ‘should not turn or incline
to one side or the other’ (Exx 15), so that the Lord can take the
initiative and the exercitant ‘but standing in the centre like a balance’,
ready to follow that direction which he or she senses would be more to
the glory and praise of God our Lord’ (see Exx 15 and 179). The
director should not differentiate, but should remain ‘indifferent’, so that
the Lord himself can make the difference and settle the matter.
This way of handing on the Exercises depends upon the
development of a strong personal relationship between the person
giving the Exercises and the person making them. It is also the reason
why Ignatius never speaks of someone ‘preaching’ a retreat, nor of a
‘leader’ or a ‘master’, but always uses a subordinate clause ‘the one who
gives the Exercises’; what that person has to offer is not a sermon, nor
advice, nor a simple sympathetic presence. Ignatius expects such people
in the Exercises to make themselves, with all their experience of God,
available in such a way that God can in full freedom work directly with
the creature.
Since here we are concerned with the foundation stones that bear
the weight of the edifice of the Exercises, the question arises whether
there is any structure to be discovered in the activity of the person who
gives the Exercises. The text of the Spiritual Exercises consists largely of
leading the exercitant into a way of asking questions, an interplay of
questions and answers (colloquium). Ignatius is not much concerned
with discovering the being and essence of God, but much more with
discovering the will of God for a human life. It is not a question of
seeking a vision of God (visio); he is looking for a sign from God which
will enable someone to know whether a chosen path really is God’s
path. This corresponds to the attitude described in Psalm 123:
As the eyes of servants look to the hand of their master, as the eyes
of a maid to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the LORD
our God, until he has mercy upon us.
We must therefore ask questions, and it is with the help of the person
who gives the Exercises that the right questions need to be put to the
Lord so that, in an attitude of readiness, we can receive a sign from
God: God’s answer. There is no lack of explicit questions to ask. The
most familiar questions are those which bear upon ‘what I have done
for Christ, what I am doing for Christ, what I ought to do for Christ?’
(Exx 53). The great majority of questions are, however, implicit in this:
‘to ask God our Lord for what I want and desire’ (Exx 48), ‘to consider
that all those who have judgment and reason will offer their entire
selves to the labour’ (Exx 96).
Everything is open to question, and the crucial question is the one
which enables my individual freedom to be united to the will of God,
not just in the abstract, as a kind of pious wish, but in the concrete
circumstances of my life through a spiritual choice (electio), a decision
which has to be made—priesthood or marriage (see Exx 135), to accept
a sum of money or to dispose of it (Exx 150). It is impossible to pose
these questions without bringing oneself into question, so that God may
truly answer. Of course, a question that is accurately put is already on
the way to receiving a decisive answer from God. Because the Ignatian
mystic is orientated towards ever greater service for the greater glory of
God, the question posed by the Exercises is not so much ‘Who is God
for me?’ but more ‘What is it that God wills for a human life which in
the loving eyes of God should have a calling and a mission; and that not
just because God loves such a life, but also because He wills to make use
of what is His own?’
The Text of the Person Who Receives the Exercises

In everything that has been said so far about the person giving the
Exercises, the person to whom they are given has been included as well.
Ignatius avoids using the word ‘exercitant’ and instead always uses ‘the
one who receives them’. This ‘receives’ seems intended to keep
exercitants locked up in themselves. To describe them, Ignatius uses a
large number of reflexive verbs, which denote an activity which subjects
perform on themselves: ‘he who is exercising himself’ (Exx 130), ‘to see
myself …’ (Exx 151), ‘let him perfect himself’ (Exx 173). An even
stronger version is to be found in ‘looking at myself’ (Exx 53), ‘to reflect
on myself’ (Exx 114) and, more strongly still, when Ignatius explains
that this work of God’s is truly for our salvation: the Lord was born ‘for
me’ (Exx 116), dies upon the cross ‘for my sins’ (Exx 53), and ‘desires to
give me Himself as much as He can’ (Exx 234).
The Text of the One Who Instructs the Understanding and Urges on
the Will 12
Here once again we encounter the realism of the Exercises which
confronts us with ourselves ‘to conquer oneself’ (Exx 21), as well as with
the spiritual fulfilment to which this experience leads us: a personal
participation in salvation history in handing oneself over to the will of God.
Here we encounter the fourth ‘author’ of the Exercises—the Lord himself.
This deepest of all personal events flows into a trusting dialogue, even
when our part of the conversation is words whereas God’s reply consists of
non-verbal signs which God communicates to us in the conversation.
Even the very silence of God is in and of itself a sign. This is not surprising,
because we too can reply with silence and with signs. In the Old
12
Exx 180, and more widely ‘Three Times of Election’, Exx 175–188.
Testament the silence

of God is an integral
part of God’s dialogue
with God’s people: it
indicates that God is
not content with them.
In the New Testament,
Christ’s silence before
Herod speaks eloquently.
If we reflect more
closely on all this, we will
see that even in its words
our speech encloses a
dimension of silence, as
when we wish to express
in words what in our
faith is ineffable. When,
in the Fifteenth Annota-
tion, Ignatius attempts
to express to us what
God’s love is like, he uses expressions which human beings use to
express affection—speaking of being embraced and clasped by God—or
uses the image of fire, as when he to speaks of being or becoming
inflamed: ‘the Creator and Lord Himself should communicate Himself
to His devout soul, inflaming it with His love and praise’ (Exx 15).
We can do no more than stammer—trying to find more or less
suitable images and metaphors. Even when we talk of God speaking, we
are well aware that we are unable to say anything about the reality which
God has indicated to us. God has such respect for our freedom that
through speech God will neither overwhelm us nor force Godself upon us
like a clap of thunder. When God revealed Godself to the prophet Elijah,
it seemed ‘like a still, small voice’ (1 Kings 19:12, King James version).13
Only in such speech, which Ignatius calls a ‘colloquy’, can it happen
that the Word of God replies to our helpless words by producing spiritual
movements in our souls: reactions of joy or pain, consolation or
desolation. When these come from the Holy Spirit, they become a true
13
NRSV: ‘a sound of sheer silence’.
sign which causes us to be consumed in the fire of the Love of our

Creator and Lord (Exx 316) and shows us the way we must follow and
the choice we must make in order to do so. Ignatius explicitly indicates
how these signs from God are to be interpreted and how this speech of
God is to be translated into our words and our human decisions.
The conversation between human beings and God is therefore a
true colloquy, and not a soliloquy—certainly not just talking to oneself.
In an intimate conversation God’s reply is no empty silence of absence,
which is wordless. It is the divine reply which we can discover in
consolation and in desolation since—as Ignatius says—‘consider the
office of consoling which Christ our Lord bears, and comparing how
friends are accustomed to console friends’ (Exx 224).
In order that we might experience and understand something of the
signs of God in the various movements of consolation and desolation,
Ignatius gives us a hint from his own experience: it is the Lord alone
who can come in to us and leave us, in order to move us in such a way
as to draw us into his love. In this conversation, the Lord is the fourth
author of the Spiritual Exercises.
Four Authors—a Single Ensemble

We wished to uncover the foundation stones which underlie the edifice of
the Exercises, and have come across four agents—master builders—each
of whom constructs his or her own Exercises: the Lord, who is at work in
all things (Exx 236); Ignatius, who goes through his own experience point
by point; the person who gives the exercises; and the one who receives
them—four authors who bind themselves together for the greater praise
and glory of his Divine Majesty (Exx 369). Perhaps we can now, with
Ignatius, better reflect on ‘what I ought to say to the Eternal Word’:
Thinking what I ought to say to the Three Divine Persons, or to the

Eternal Word incarnate, or to our Mother and Lady, asking
according to what I feel in me, in order more to follow and imitate
Our Lord, so lately incarnate. I will say an Our Father. (Exx 109)
Peter-Hans Kolvenbach SJ is former Superior General of the Society of Jesus.

IMITATING CHRIST OUR
LORD WITH THE SENSES
Sensing and Feeling in the Exercises
Antonio Guillén
‘Whoever wishes to imitate Christ Our Lord in the use of the senses …’
(Exx 248)
T
HE ‘METHOD AND ORDER’—modo y orden—of the whole process of
the Exercises is firmly grounded on what Ignatius calls ‘sensing and
tasting things interiorly’—el sentir y gustar de las cosas internamente (Exx 2).
Ignatius is quite explicit (Exx 3) in demanding ‘greater reverence’ in
what he calls ‘the activity of the will’, involving the affectivity (afecto)
than in ‘the activity of the understanding’, involving reason (discurso).
These presuppositions inform the way he constructs the whole network
of petitions, colloquies, repetitions and recapitulations throughout the
four Weeks. Everything falls into place and makes sense when one
recognises that the affective will is central to the approach offered us by
Ignatius to the making of choices—choices enabling us to ‘order our
lives’ (Exx 21).
But there is more to be said. Ignatius is also aware that many human
commitments are all too subject to whim and inconstancy when they
depend solely on the emotional energy supporting them at any one
time. He knew—and perhaps today we are even more aware of this
than he was—that human decisions are indeed fundamentally
sustained by our affective will. But the affective will on its own cannot
ensure that the decisions are lived out consistently into the future. The
will and the affections provide vital and central motivation at the
beginning, but later, when, despite our sincere wishes and desires,
resistances or even oppositions to our original decision surface, their
The Way, 47/1–2 (Jan/April 2008), 225–241

226 Antonio Guillén
strength evaporates. Confirmation of this in everyday life is all too easy

to find.
Familiar as he was with the mysteries of the human condition,
Ignatius had the intuition that a person’s commitment to a decision
would become stable only if their spontaneous feelings and sensibility
were brought into play. We can love and desire something on a long-
term basis only if we are really attracted to it, and we can truly reject
something only if it has come to be really repugnant to us. To put the
point in another way: it is dangerous to let our spontaneous senses and
feelings float free, and become vulnerable to siren voices that may be
calling us in directions quite contrary to what both the willed affections
and the reason have decided.
The point, then, is not that we should allow free rein to our
spontaneous and superficial reactions. Rather, Ignatius would have us
educate our senses and feelings ‘so that one’s sensual nature may be
obedient to reason, and all the lower parts of the self may become more
submissive to the higher’ (Exx 87). If we are to live freely, and not find
our freedom betrayed, we need to train our senses and feelings in ways
that match the orientations we have given to our minds and hearts.
The term ‘feeling’ (sentir), which is so fundamental in Ignatius,
covers a combination of the bodily senses, the affectivity, and the
understanding. No one can claim to be really free and happy if these
three components that make up the person become critically out of
step. As Javier Melloni succinctly puts it:
Very often the ordinary state of a person is that the senses are
seeking satisfaction in one direction, the affections in another, and
the mind in yet another. The result of this dislocation is that none of
these three faculties is fully satisfied. However, in so far as all three
can be brought together in a person’s interior world then peace,
1
growth and transformation take place.
It is for this reason that the process of the Exercises must also address
spontaneous senses and feelings. As one follows Ignatius’ various
proposals, one can see emerging through them all an attempt to
educate a person’s senses and feelings, as a necessary means towards
1
Javier Melloni, ‘Sentir’, in Diccionario de espiritualidad ignaciana (Bilbao and Santander: Mensajero-
Sal Terrae, 2007), 1634.
Imitating Christ Our Lord with the Senses 227
rendering the retreatant’s decisions—which in themselves emerge

primarily from the mind and heart—permanent and lasting.
Behind the ‘interior knowledge’ that Ignatius is always urging the
retreatant to ask for (Exx 65, 104, 139, 233) lies just this prayer for a
new way of feeling, one different from the feeling informed by A prayer for
one’s egoism: a prayer for Jesus’ way of sensing and feeling. Jesus' way of
This gift is rightly described 2 as ‘the high point of the sensing and
knowledge’ that one is asking for throughout the Exercises; it feeling
also guarantees one’s freedom. How we act flows
spontaneously from how we see things. And we have a sound instinct
that, if our senses and feelings can operate as Jesus’ did, our habitual
ways of acting—which are meant to be the fruit of our Election of how
‘to love and serve him more’ (Exx 104)—will always be on the right
lines.
To educate our senses and feelings according to the pattern of Jesus
is a matter of becoming imbued with his way of being and feeling, of
resonating with everything that made him resonate, of abhorring
everything that he abhorred, of reacting to things and to people as he
used to react. The Exercises are there as ‘an apprenticeship and
deepening in this way of spontaneously feeling with Jesus, and a
discernment of what it is’.3 The real objective is the desire to have
always present, as St Paul expresses it, ‘the same mind that was in Christ
Jesus’ (Philippians 2:5), whom the retreatant desires ‘to imitate and
follow’ in everything (Exx 109).
In the parable of the Two Standards (Exx 136–147) a clear picture
emerges of the conflict between two styles, two logical systems, two
‘ways of seeing things’: that of Jesus and that of one’s own egoism. And
later, in the process of Election, Ignatius suggests (as part of the Fourth
Day of the Second Week) that retreatants should work directly on the
way they sense reality, to the point of wanting ‘to imitate Christ our
Lord and be actually more like him … with poverty … and
humiliations’ (Exx 167). If they can integrate the way their senses
operate into their decision to follow Jesus in all things, the
2
Adolfo M. Chércoles, La afectividad y los deseos [Affectivity and desires] (Barcelona: Escola Ignasiana
d’Espiritualitat, 1995), 12–19, 23–24. Downloadable from www.fespinal.com. See also an unpublished
graduate thesis by Juan Antonio Guerrero, written in 1994: ‘Práctica del discernimiento y
conocimiento de Dios en la Autobiografía y en los EE. de San Ignacio’, 132–149.
3
Javier Melloni, ‘Sentir’, 1634.
commitments to discipleship that exercitants make will become really

stable and lasting.
‘The Gates of the Senses’

This striking image is Ignatius’ own. It indicates how the senses and
feelings are involved in a two-way movement.4 Our senses receive
stimuli from the outside, and pass them on into our inner world; our
spontaneous reactions display outwardly, and very expressively, how the
inward heart has stored what it has perceived.
When I speak of ‘educating the senses and feelings’, it is this latter
point that I have primarily in mind: how our spontaneous feelings are a
mirror, so to speak, of what there is within us. Human senses do not see,
hear, smell, taste and touch; that much can be simply mechanical.
There is something else involved, something humane, something which
‘comes from within’ (Mark 7:21). This allows the five senses to do
something more: they can learn to look, listen, savour, relish and kiss.
We are born with eyes, but not with the power to look. We indeed
have ears, but we often end up failing to listen. We can smell and taste
things, but we are not always able to enjoy and savour life. We touch
others, and even hug them, but so often this contact fails to become a
true embrace.
We are quite justified in using the expression ‘spiritual senses’ when
the humane element is present, because it is genuinely spiritual. It is
therefore hardly surprising that the Exercises, which are conceived as a
way of teaching us to ‘sense’ (sentir) God, should include within their
objectives the spiritual development of our bodily senses.5 And Ignatius
can find no better means to this end than to imitate Christ Our Lord,
and Our Lady, in the use of the senses:
Whoever wants in the use of their senses to imitate Christ Our Lord
should in the preparatory prayer recommend themselves to His
Divine Majesty; and after making consideration about each
4
Constitutions III.1.4 [250]: ‘All should take special care to guard with great diligence the gates of their
senses (especially the eyes, ears and tongue) from all disorder, to preserve themselves in peace and true
humility of their souls, and to give an indication of it by silence when it should be kept, and, when they
must speak, by the discretion and edification of their words, the modesty of their countenance, the
maturity of their walk, and all their movements, without giving any sign of impatience or pride.’
5
Jean Laplace, El camino espiritual a la luz de los Ejercicios ignacianos [The Spiritual Way in the Light of
the Ignatian Exercises—French original] (Santander: Sal Terrae, 1988), 89–91.
individual sense, they should say a Hail Mary or an Our Father. And
whoever wants in the use of the senses to imitate Our Lady should
in the preparatory prayer recommend themselves to her, that she
may obtain for them grace from Her Son and Lord for it; and after
making consideration about each individual sense, they should say a
Hail Mary. (Exx 248)
Indeed, it is precisely this that is the major question when the

retreatant comes to contemplate the ‘Mysteries of the Life of Christ our
Lord’ (Exx 261). How would Jesus be directing his gaze? How would
Jesus be listening? How would Jesus be talking? (Exx 214) Through our
senses we imagine Jesus’s world, so that it becomes intimately present to
us; through our senses, too, we respond to this new world’s reality. As
we seek and desire to be identified with Jesus, our senses can learn from
him how to fondle, how to gaze, how to listen, and how to savour.
As one commentator
rightly says, ‘for the one who
makes the Exercises, it is not
reality that changes, but the
way one looks at reality’.6 A
retreatant desiring to imitate
Jesus—a Jesus who was often
deeply grieved for the poor
and the lost—and to imitate
him even in the use of the
senses, will be learning, as
Jesus learnt, ‘to live with
compassion’.7 But when, by
contrast, our encounter with
Jesus, and with God through
him, does not extend to the
senses, our senses are left in
benighted disorientation, wan-
dering vacantly all over the
place.8 Christ as Man of Sorrows, by Dürer
6
Benjamín González Buelta, ‘Ver o perecer’: Mística de ojos abiertos (Santander: Sal Terrae, 2006), 180.
7
This expression is used by José Antonio Pagola to describe the most fundamental characteristic of
Jesus in his exceptional and controversial work, Jesús: Aproximación histórica (Madrid: PPC, 2007),
127–151, 465–467.
Any method, therefore, aimed at helping us take decisions that will be

lasting must address the senses and feelings directly. For it is they which
determine how we see and react to things. Certainly the Exercises given
us by Ignatius for ‘making an election’ (Exx 169) and ‘to reform one’s
life and state’ (Exx 343) do not neglect to do this.
The First Week: Abhorrence for Evil

In each section or ‘Week’ of the Exercises, there are elements which
Ignatius dedicates to this ‘education of the senses and feelings’. If we
can identify and highlight these, this might help us understand the role
he attributes to the senses in the overall process.
The aim of the First Week is to experience and sense (sentir) the
goodness and mercy of God. The five exercises that make up a typical
day of this Week fit together as follows:
• The first two (Exx 45–61) are initially discursive: ‘to bring the
memory to bear’, ‘to reason over’, ‘to recall and to comprehend’.
But they immediately open up to the affections, through the
‘colloquy’, and the instruction ‘to arouse the affections of the heart
with the will’. At no moment are these two exercises limited to acts
of the understanding.
• The third exercise, reinforced by the fourth (Exx 62–64),
concentrates on the affective; the colloquy is now a triple colloquy.
But now words like ‘abhorrence’ and ‘abhorring’ indicate something
more direct, more sensory. The moment I ask that ‘I may amend my
life and put order into it’ Ignatius can think of no better way of
supporting me than by urging me to ask for a well-educated
sensibility, a sensibility in keeping with the Lord’s sensibility, so that
I can abhor what he abhors and reject what he rejects. Only in this
way—so Ignatius thinks—will we manage later really to act, in all
things, as he acts.
• In the fifth exercise, ‘On Hell’ (Exx 65–71), which is so frequently
misinterpreted, the central focus is on opening our five bodily
senses to that reality which we should ‘abhor’: that neglect and
ingratitude towards the God who deserved just the opposite ‘for His
8
González Buelta, ‘Ver o perecer’, 67.
constant and loving kindness and mercy towards me right up to the

present moment’. The imagination is brought into play using the
five senses, so that my ‘interior sense’ of gratitude to God for His
fidelity may be strengthened and made firm, along with ‘shame and
confusion’ over my own conduct. And the clear raison d’être for this
exercise of the senses is the need to give stability to any decision
that may be in danger of becoming culpably inconstant: ‘if through
my faults I should ever forget the love of the eternal Lord’ (Exx 65).
The exercise is not intended to instil fear.
The entire First Week is aimed at dismantling one way of seeing
things in order to construct a quite different alternative, one in keeping
with the commitments that the understanding and the will have taken on.
The emotive terms and images—‘the corruption and foulness’, ‘a running
sore’, ‘great flames and bodies of fire’, ‘wailings, howls, and cries’,
‘sulphur’, ‘bitter things’, ‘burning fires’—are not intended to replace the
ideas here, or simply to instil fear (which is how they have so often been
used). Rather, once our minds
and wills have been set to rights,
our senses and feelings should
be informed and conformed
accordingly.
The key term in this task
of reforming sensibility is
‘abhorrence’. One element in
this concept is the experience
of having illusions unmasked:
what I used to look at as
something positive now has its
falsehood uncovered: ‘my sins’,
‘the disorder in my actions’, ‘all
worldly things and vanities’.
But it also involves the senses
and the feelings. Only when our
ways of seeing things are being
reconfigured so that they are
like that of Jesus, only when our
repugnances can be identified
with his, does our change in Hell, by Hans Memling
behaviour become real and effective. Only if our ways of perceiving

things resemble Jesus’ will the authenticity of our conversion be
ensured.9
The Second Week Onwards: The ‘Application of the Senses’

In the Exercises the key element in the education of the sensibility is
the so-called ‘Application of the Senses’. Ignatius suggests that it should
be made every day at nightfall once the Second Week has begun (Exx
121, 129, 133, 134, 159, 204, 208, 227).
However, the Spanish term ‘aplicación de los sentidos’ does not
appear as such in the Ignatian text; it is a translation from the ‘Vulgate’,
the official Latin version of the Exercises, and it puts into noun form a
concept that is always expressed by a verbal phrase in the Autograph
Spanish: ‘to draw the senses’, ‘to pass the five senses over’ (traer los
sentidos, pasar los cinco sentidos, Exx 121). Something similar has
occurred with other supposedly Ignatian terms that Ignatius never
formulated in noun form: ‘indifference’, when Ignatius writes ‘to make
ourselves indifferent’ (Exx 23); ‘petition’ in place of ‘to ask for what I
want’ (Exx 48, 55, 91, 104, etc.); ‘reflection on prayer’ in place of ‘while
I see how things have gone for me during the contemplation or
meditation’ (Exx 77); and even the title ‘director’ or ‘guide’ for the
whole experience, when Ignatius never uses any expression except ‘the
one who gives the Exercises’ (Exx 6, 7, 8, etc.). In the present case of
the ‘Application of the Senses’, as in all the others, there is much to be
gained from attending to Ignatius’ own expression, if one wishes to
grasp his thought.
In the Second Week, Ignatius’ own words clearly show that he
envisages a sequence of five daily exercises similar to that in the First
Week. After two contemplations and two repetitions, there should
come a ‘fifth contemplation’ which consists in ‘bringing the five senses
to bear’ on what has been previously contemplated (Exx 121–126).
One has to bear in mind that any ‘contemplation’ already has an
element of feeling that is much more prominent than in a ‘meditation’.
Whenever we take to ourselves a gospel text in such a way that we feel
ourselves to be present at an event that is occurring before our eyes,
9
Chércoles, La afectividad y los deseos, 18–19, 23–24.
‘seeing the persons, hearing what they say and watching what they are
doing’ (e.g. Exx 194), then the text becomes alive, so much so that we
hear a word and see a gesture as if it affected us personally.10 It is
through our senses that we feel the ‘touch’ within the heart (Exx 335),
and then the heart expands in feelings of happiness, peace and serenity,
and in a renewal of spiritual strength, along with desires to ‘move
forward’ (Exx 315, 329).
For that matter, the exercise of ‘repetition’ is also a matter primarily
of feeling. Ignatius, when he proposes it, does not intend the retreatant
to enter more deeply into rational consideration of a theme; his aim is
to allow the contemplation to reach the heart of a retreatant, so that we
can truly ‘sense and taste’ (Exx 2) the reality being contemplated. The
exercise of repetition helps us to avoid a merely superficial To allow the
appreciation of things, which is a danger in the early stages. contemplation to
Once we no longer stay with the ideas and have gone beyond a reach the heart of
merely intellectual grasp, then we can feel truly in the presence the retreatant
of the person of Jesus; then we can recognise him at the
personal level. Repetition aims to go beyond ‘having to say things’;
instead we can enjoy ‘much relish and consolation’ (Exx 254), and let
him permeate our whole being.11
The end of the day, in Ignatius’ view, is when it is easiest to
approach the inner person of Jesus with the senses and feelings. At the
start of the day, the petition suggested for the first exercise of the
morning—and intended to be constantly requested—has been ‘to ask
for inner knowledge of the Lord’, with great affection ‘so that I might
the better love and follow him’ (Exx 104). But in the evening this
request becomes more a matter of the senses and feelings, and thereby
emotionally more constant.
The characteristic of the Fifth Contemplation is the more explicit
and comprehensive use of ‘the five senses of the imagination’ to revisit
the previous contemplations. Now it is no longer a matter merely of
seeing and listening to the scene with the imaginative senses of sight
and hearing. At this stage, all the other bodily senses come into play in
one’s imagination: ‘to smell and taste with the senses of smell and taste
10
Compare Jean-Claude Dhôtel, La espiritualidad ignaciana: Claves de referencia [Ignatian Spirituality:
Key concepts, French original] (Santander: Sal Terrae, 1991), 70; David Lonsdale, Eyes to See, Ears to
Hear: An Introduction to Ignatian Spirituality (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1990), 89.
11
There is an excellent account of this process in Laplace, El camino espiritual, 56–59.
the infinite gentleness and sweetness’, so that one touches with the
sense of touch, ‘embracing and kissing the place where these persons
tread and sit’ (Exx 124–125).
Though Ignatius always avoids presenting intimacy with Jesus in
sensual terms, there remains some ambiguity of meaning in his talk of
using the senses ‘to smell and taste’ something so intangible as ‘the
infinite gentleness and sweetness of the divinity12 of the soul and of its
virtues’ (Exx 124). Not surprisingly, some controversy broke out after
his death about whether the five senses in this exercise were to be
understood in an ‘imaginative’ or ‘spiritual’ sense: as ‘ascetical’ or
‘mystical’.13
The most obvious upshot of that discussion is that we must not
forget a clarification added in the Latin Vulgate translation of Spiritual
Exercises concerning the ‘Application of the Senses’ in the Fourth
Week: ‘before supper should be the prayer of the senses to impress more
strongly upon the soul the three exercises of the day’ (Exx 227, addition
italicized). Thus the purpose of the ‘Application of the Senses’ is ‘a more
intimate assimilation of what has been contemplated, a sort of
impregnation, the spirit’s soaking up what has already been felt’.14 This
can easily happen when we contemplate the same scene a number of
times.
It is not difficult to understand how this exercise should work: in
the process of ‘passing the five senses over’ a contemplation, the mind’s
discursive activity tends to diminish and the affective element to
increase. Thus as we pray, we allow the mystery of the life of Christ,
which has become connatural with us and present during the day, to
take over and engulf us. No one would deny that this exercise—
something at the intuitive and not cognitive level—impregnates the
soul and establishes firmly that ‘inner knowledge of the Lord’ (Exx 104)
which has become possible thanks to the previous contemplations. For
now the senses and feelings have taken on the same orientation as the
12
Editions and translations differ on whether a comma should be placed after ‘divinity’. (Editor’s note.)
13
For a full account of this controversy, see Philip Endean, ‘Aplicación de sentidos’, in Diccionario de
espiritualidad ignaciana, 184–192, which updates ‘The Ignatian Prayer of the Senses’, Heythrop Journal,
31 (1990), 391–418. The matter is also discussed in Manuel Alarcón, ‘Aplicación de sentidos’, Manresa,
65 (1993), 33–46. On the mystical, as opposed to the allegorical, interpretation of the senses, see Javier
Melloni, La mistagogía de los Ejercicios [The Mystagogy of the Exercises] (Bilbao and Santander:
Mensajero-Sal Terrae, 2001), 85–89. See also Guerrero, ‘Práctica del discernimiento’, 133–139.
14
Alarcón, ‘Aplicación de sentidos’, 36, 45.
reason and the affective will—‘that I might the better love and follow
him’ (Exx 104)—a desire and a prayer that has been with the retreatant
all day.
The Third Week: Attuning the Bodily Senses More Finely

It is in the Third Week that we see the transformation of sensibility at
its clearest and most striking. For now, the reason and the affective will
together work deliberately to develop our senses and feelings to the
point that these latter lose their fear of suffering and of the darkness of
God.
Just like the Evangelists, Ignatius in recalling the passion avoids
any self-indulgent fixation on pain and blood, on the lashes and the
tortures. He is convinced that the true importance of the passion does
not lie in the emotive impact caused by the presence of blood, and so
he wastes no time over those elements. In place of that, he
concentrates on the love and fidelity of Jesus on the day of his death,
and on what his message
in those circumstances
reveals about the Father.
For precisely this
purpose, Ignatius aims
that ‘one’s sensual nature
may be obedient to
reason’ (Exx 87), and
should not react to
stimuli that do not
proceed from reason. So
he asks the retreatant
‘to consider what Christ
our Lord suffers in his
human nature, or wants
to suffer’ (Exx 195), why
Christ went up to
celebrate the Passover in
Jerusalem even though
he was well aware of
what was being plotted Head of Christ Crowned with Thorns, by Lucas
there against him, and Cranach the Elder
why he did not accept from the Father ‘more than twelve legions of
angels’ to free him from his arrest (Matthew 26:53).
By mentioning small details, Ignatius underlines the deliberate will
and self-oblation of Jesus despite the quite different feelings and
sensibility of those who surrounded him: ‘the Lord went to the Mount
of Olives with his disciples, who were full of fear’ (Exx 290); ‘he allowed
himself to be kissed by Judas and arrested like a thief’ (Exx 291); ‘he did
not reply anything at all to Herod, even though the scribes and priests
were constantly accusing him’ (Exx 294). The reactions of Jesus mirror
the great mystery of the Father, who is also an object of consideration in
these contemplations: how ‘Christ as divine’, and therefore as one with
the Father, ‘does not destroy his enemies, although he could do so, but
allows himself’, the Son of the Father, ‘to suffer most cruelly’ (Exx 196).
This Jesus was the Divine Person handed over, from the moment of the
incarnation, ‘to save the human race’ (Exx 102). At the end of each
day, Ignatius asks the retreatant to ‘pass the senses over’ each
contemplation so as to become imbued with the sensibility of Jesus.
The matter for contemplation in these ‘mysteries of the life of
Christ’ is simply and solely the love of Jesus. It is only that love—both of
Jesus and of the Father—which can humanise and redeem. No suffering
on its own, not even that of Jesus, can save us, because the Father did
not, and never will, ask for that sort of tribute. But it is when love shows
itself at its greatest and strongest, that endurance—as was shown visibly
in the manner of Jesus’ death—becomes capable of taking away for ever
from suffering its power to terrify. Not without reason one can describe
the effect that Ignatius is hoping to produce in this Third Week as an
‘education of the senses and feelings’.
Consistent with this, Ignatius asks the retreatant, as he or she
‘considers’ such great love on the part of Jesus, to raise the question:
‘what I myself ought to do and suffer for him’ (Exx 197). Once the
feelings have been educated by reason and by affection—both elements
convinced and desirous to imitate Jesus—then sense-inspired fears can
no longer dominate as before. At this stage it is not unusual for the
retreatant ‘to ask for grief with Christ in grief … tears and interior
suffering on account of the real suffering that Christ endured for me’
(Exx 203). Now it has become clear that the transformation of one’s
sensibility is not due to any masochism or neurosis, but is simply out of
love for him, and the desire to be identified with him.
In a very revealing move, it is at this moment of the Third Week

that Ignatius presents the ‘Rules for the future ordering of one’s life as
regards eating’ (Exx 210–217). They complement the Election and are
intended to help when the discernment of a desire is particularly
difficult.15 These Rules too are focused on the ‘education of the
sensibility’; their purpose is that the Election already made should be
appropriated with greater stability and consistency. These Rules try to
strengthen and maintain the retreatant’s freedom by proposing that
‘one should be in control of oneself, both in the manner of eating and in
the quantity eaten’ (Exx 216); to attain this, they suggest that,
While eating, one should imagine that one is seeing Christ our Lord
at table with his apostles, and consider the way he eats and drinks,
the way he looks about, the way he talks (Exx 214).
The first call to the following of the King had already included an
imitation appealing to the senses: ‘all who wish to come with me must be
content with the same food as I have, the same drink, the same clothing
The Supper at Emmaus, by Tintoretto
15
For a more developed account of this aspect, see my ‘Reglas “ordernarse en el comer” ’, in
Diccionario de espiritualidad ignaciana, 1553–1555.
etc.’ (Exx 93). Now Ignatius repeats even more strongly the call to imitate
Jesus in the use of all our senses and feelings, so the retreatant can respond
freely at every level: ‘and so one attains a more perfect harmony and order
in the way one should behave and conduct oneself’ (Exx 214).
The Fourth Week and Beyond: Looking Afresh

Though the daily hours of prayer in the Fourth Week are reduced in
number, the exercise of the five senses ‘on the three exercises of the day’
(Exx 226, 227) keeps its place in the evening. The Additions are also
modified so that the message appropriate for the senses can be received,
making use ‘of the light and the pleasures of the seasons’ (Exx 229),
according to what the retreatant ‘thinks or conjectures’ might help him
or her to feel joy in the Resurrection (Exx 229).
The Resurrected One, ‘who now appears and reveals himself so
miraculously’ (Exx 223), confirms ‘in his office of consoler’ the closeness
of God. He confirms too both the strength of love—consoling in ‘the way
friends are accustomed to console one another’ (Exx 224)—and the
meaning of suffering—when God only ‘seemed to go into hiding’ (Exx
223). The teaching given to the retreatant’s sensibility is thus complete.
From this moment the fresh gaze granted to the retreatant enables
that person to ‘find God in all things’ (Exx 236). This new sensitivity
allows the person to perceive how God reaches down to us, to look at how
God ‘works’, to listen to God’s silent calls, to relish the effort of working
along with God for a more human world, to embrace whomsoever God
sends to us, to embrace the continuous gifts God makes to us.16 This new
perception of reality is included in what Jerónimo Nadal, one of the first
Jesuits, called being ‘a contemplative in action’.
However, this new way of seeing is only possible when the change
that has taken place in the retreatant has reached down and
transformed the retreatant’s sensibility.17 It is not enough to know the
path; we have to feel it and relish it, emotionally and even viscerally,
with grateful affection coupled to a sensibility that has been educated
by that affection. Until this new sensibility begins to come into play, our
following of Jesus, which is at once ascetical and mystical, lacks solidity.
16
González Buelta, ‘Ver o perecer’, 85; see also his article, ‘Dios trabaja’, Manresa, 79 (2007), 213–225.
17
González Buelta, ‘Ver o perecer’, 114, 186.
The deepest levels of the personality, the very foundations—the

sensibility—have to be involved in the choice that has been made.
All too frequently the question is asked: why have the Exercises not
changed us? The reply is disconcerting, but obvious. The Exercises do not
really change us if our decision to follow Jesus has not gone deeper than
our understanding and our desire, if our senses and have not taken on
board the message of identification with Jesus in following him, if our ways
of feeling have not been really worked upon. If that is the case, it is hardly
surprising that they fail to react as they should. Very often, it is in the
senses and feelings that our self-love takes refuge, and from there it can
counteract what reason and affection are trying vainly to tell it.
Later in life, Ignatius recalled his experience at the Cardoner, when
he ‘began to see everything with new eyes’,18 by describing it as the
greatest gift given to him by God in all his life. For this reason he
wanted to enable the retreatant to relive the same experience. That
explains why he prepared not only for the Fourth Week, but also for
later, another form of prayer ‘over the five bodily senses’ (Exx 247–
248). If the ‘contemplative in action’ is the person who should look at
all things ‘with the same eyes as those of Jesus or Our Lady’ (Exx 248),
then that person should frequently practise looking, listening,
savouring, relishing, and kissing as they would. And therefore, ‘whoever
wishes to imitate them’ should first ‘commend themselves to them’ and
think about how to imitate them ‘considering each sense’ (Exx 248).
Placed in the presence of Jesus or of Our Lady we have to focus the
imagination so that it should, ‘carefully and without digressing’ (Exx
64), range over what the Evangelists tell us about the way Jesus, during
his life, looked at the events and people in front of him. How did How did Jesus
he react to success and failure, to praise and blame, to rest and react to success
to threats? Do the Evangelists note anything about the way he and failure, to
gazed at friends and enemies, at followers and opponents, at praise and blame?
the sincere and the insincere, at the marginalised and the
powerful, at the so-called ‘sinners’ and the respectable? What message
could different people read in his eyes that were fixed on them? Was his
gaze the same when he spoke peacefully to the crowds from a boat at
the edge of the lake, and when on his final day he looked out in
18
The phrase comes in the account given by Laínez in a letter to Juan de Polanco (1547) of
experiences that Ignatius had recounted to him; see MHSJ FN 1, 80.
suffering from the cross? And how was he looking at them as he spoke
of the Father?
Similarly, consider how Jesus would listen to those whom nobody
else had ever listened to. What would be the feelings of those who went
away after speaking to Jesus at length about the sufferings of a sick
relative? How could Jesus have found out about the call of Zacchaeus,
who had said nothing from the branches of the tree into which he had
climbed (Luke 19:2–4)? What did Jesus really hear from Peter when at
the Last Supper he showed himself before everyone so confident and so
sure of himself?
Consider also how Jesus found relish in life, despite the short space of
time given him by the Father; how he was able to transmit to others the
way to embrace and to caress. Consider the interest he aroused, the
closeness of those around him, those who touched and were touched.
His own certainly felt that his presence among them had been that of a
heart full of mercy: ‘how he went about doing good’, as Peter summed
him up (Acts 10:38).
Consider finally the gentleness of a personality without harsh edges,
a Jesus devoid of self-love and also of paralyzing fears, both when he
stood up to preach in the Temple and when he replied to the tribunal
which had power to execute him. There are no traces of rancour
towards the Pharisees because of their criticisms, nor to the Sadducees
because of their quibbling. He is not hurt by the human weaknesses of
Peter, or Philip, or of his close relatives (John 13:38; 14:9). His disciples
heard him speak constantly of the Father and proclaim his Kingdom
without any self-seeking (Luke 9:50).
We see that the sensibility of Jesus in his day-to-day way of living
differs in many ways from our own. Ignatius had the insight to
understand the educative power of this ‘prayer of the senses’ so that we
may ‘find God in all things’ and ‘divest ourselves of self-love, self-will,
and self-interest’ (Exx 189). Quite often, this exercise becomes the
central petition of a praying person’s life. There is no other gift from
God that can have such practical consequences in its ordinary effect.
No other gift will be more transformative; and therefore no other prayer
can be more central.
Pedro Arrupe (1907–1991), superior general of the Jesuits, lived out
this petition right till the end of his life, and formulated it in a way that
cannot be bettered:
Above all, give me that sensus Christi (1 Corinthians 2:16) about

which St Paul speaks: that I may feel with your feelings, with the
sentiments of your heart, which basically are love for your Father
and love for humanity. …
Teach me your way of relating to disciples, to sinners, to children, to
Pharisees, Pilates and Herods … teach me how you deal with your
disciples … How delicately you treat them on Lake Tiberias, even
preparing breakfast for them! How you washed their feet!
May I learn from you and from your ways, as St Ignatius did: how to
eat and drink; how to attend banquets; how to act when hungry or
thirsty, when tired from the ministry, when in need of rest or sleep.
Teach me how to be compassionate to the suffering, to the poor, the
blind, the lame and the lepers. …
Teach me your way of looking at people: as you glanced at Peter
after his denial, as you penetrated the heart of the rich young man
and the hearts of your disciples. …
We have to learn from you the secret of … a close bond or union
with God: in the more trivial, everyday actions, with that total
dedication to loving the Father and all humanity. …
Give me that grace, that sensus Christi, your very heartbeat, that I
may live all my life, interiorly and exteriorly, proceeding and
discerning with your spirit, exactly as you did during your mortal
19
life.
Antonio Guillén SJ, a native of Valencia, entered the Society of Jesus in 1962. He
has taught business studies, and worked for many years in Jesuit administration.
He is currently director of the retreat house in Alaquás, and superior of the Jesuit
community in Valencia.
19
Pedro Arrupe, ‘A Prayer to Jesus Christ Our Model: Conclusion to the Address “Our Way of
Proceeding” ’(1979), in In Him Alone Is Our Hope, edited by Jerome Aixalá (St Louis: Institute of Jesuit
Sources, 1984), 58–63; also in Acta Romana Societatis Iesu, 17 (1980), 719–722.
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THE CARDONER
IMPERATIVE
Gill K. Goulding
JEurope are facing a decline in the number ofinJesuits

ESUIT INSTITUTIONS OF HIGHER EDUCATION North America and
teaching. More
and more lay faculty are being recruited—and bringing with them their
own distinctive gifts and talents. This significant shift in faculty
membership, however, raises the question of how it is possible for
teaching staff to share the Ignatian theological vision that lies at the
heart of a Jesuit institution. And this question leads to a more
fundamental one: is there such a vision? If so, what is it, and how does it
inform Ignatian pedagogy? 1
A good place to start looking for a distinctively Ignatian theology
might be the river Cardoner. Ignatius’ Autobiography recounts that, as
he walked towards a church in the locality where he had determined to
pray, Ignatius sat down to rest on the river bank. And, as he rested, the
Lord began to open his eyes.
One time [Ignatius] was going out of his devotion to a church a

little more than a mile from Manresa; I believe it was called St
Paul’s. The road ran next to the river. As he went along occupied
with his devotions, he sat down for a little while with his face
towards the river which was running deep. While he was seated
there, the eyes of his understanding began to be opened; though he
did not see any vision, he understood and knew many things both
spiritual and matters of faith and of learning, and this was with so
great an enlightenment that everything seemed new to him.
Though there were many he cannot set forth the details that he
understood then, except that he experienced a great clarity in his
1
This article is the first of two dealing with this issue. The second will deal with the practical
possibilities for how this Ignatian vision might inform Ignatian pedagogy.
The Way, 47/1–2 (Jan/April 2008), 243–259

244 Gill K. Goulding
understanding. This was such that in the whole course of his life,
through sixty-two years, even if he gathered up all the many helps
he had had from God and all the many things he knew and added
them together, he does not think they would amount to as much as
2
he had received at that one time.
The context of this extraordinary revelation was the period of

Ignatius’ spiritual formation at Manresa. Here, he later insisted, the
Lord took him by the hand and taught him as a teacher teaches a child.
He had come to Manresa fresh from his conversion during his
convalescence at Loyola. That time of physical suffering and
recuperation was a prelude to the intense spiritual preparation he now
underwent. The sojourn at Manresa was not part of Ignatius’ original
plan. He had envisaged spending only a few days there, but when it
became apparent to him that the Lord was working profoundly with
him, the days extended to weeks and then to months. He lived for ten
months outside the town, spending hours each day in prayer and also
working in a hospice. It was while he was here that the ideas for what
Ignatius’ vision at the Cardoner
2
Autobiography, 30.
The Cardoner Imperative 245
are now known as the Spiritual Exercises began to take shape. In

particular he received significant illuminations concerning the Trinity.
So significant were these experiences that Ignatius maintained a
lifelong devotion to the Trinity.3
The experience beside the Cardoner was the pinnacle of all the
mystical graces that Ignatius received at Manresa. Though the details in
the Autobiography are sparse, there is an indication of the scale of the
organic insight which enabled Ignatius to see all the truths he had
previously learned in a new and integrated light. From this time onward
he adopted the principle of contemplative discernment as crucial for all
action. The Cardoner experience formed a touchstone for his whole
life, and for the writing of the Spiritual Exercises and the later
Constitutions of the Society of Jesus.
This event also contributes, I suggest, to the distinctive ‘way of
proceeding’ of subsequent generations formed in the Exercises. In our
contemporary context, an ongoing appreciation of the imperative
quality of this experience can cultivate a certain disposition that
influences behaviour: renew and refine our practice of contemplative
discernment; inspire apostolic commitment and deepen theological
vision, as we recall the divine initiative made known in Christ for the
reconciliation of all creation—and especially of humanity—into the life
of the Trinity. Thus I am using the phrase ‘Cardoner imperative’ to
mean something derived from the initial experience of Ignatius,
something that demands attention and action, and something that
cultivates a certain disposition which influences behaviour. The
substance of this ‘something’ forms the content of this article.
One person’s mystical experiences cannot, of course, be transmitted
to followers. What can be transmitted, however, is a certain perspective
on the Christian life, a perspective which is capable of engendering in
reflective minds a distinctive type of theology. It is important to recall
here that Ignatius himself was not a professional theologian. But as Karl
Rahner has written:
The theology hidden in the simple words of the Exercises belongs to

the most important fundamentals of contemporary Western
3
Autobiography, 28
Christianity. In fact, it has yet to be fully assimilated by the Church’s

4
academic theology.
This theological perspective involves a Christological focus, a clear

Trinitarian understanding, an expansive theological anthropology, and
a rooted ecclesiology.
I should like to start by giving brief consideration to the possible
nature of Ignatius’ vision itself. I shall then go on to explore how the
Spiritual Exercises flow from the Cardoner understanding. This is not a
new insight: Hugo Rahner emphasizes that ‘the primary effect of the
vision was the shaping of the Spiritual Exercises’.5 Finally I shall
indicate something of the importance of the ‘Cardoner imperative’ for
our contemporary situation.
The Nature of the Experience

Speculation by successive generations concerning Ignatius’ Cardoner
revelation has produced a consensus that it was an encounter with God
focused primarily in the intellect. It was didactic—the acme of Ignatius’
experience of being taught by the Lord, unifying heart and mind in a
single orientation. Ignatius only hints at what he learned. The
important thing was that God had been instructing him, and that when
he reflected many years later he realised that this single experience had
taught him more than all the other experiences of his life put together.
As a letter from Laínez was concerned to stress, Ignatius did not say
that the illumination at Cardoner enabled him to understand ‘all
things’, but rather that the many things he already understood were so
transformed that they all appeared new to him. He was able to reflect
upon what he knew from a new perspective—the perspective of
contemplative discernment—that made them look new. Ignatius began
to understand the principle of discernment in relation to his whole
experience during this period. ‘Cardoner was an insight into and
confirmation of all that he had been learning in the light of the
4
Karl Rahner, foreword to Ignatius von Loyola: Geistliche Ubungen, edited by Alois Haas (Freiburg:
Herder, 1967), translated in Karl Rahner, foreword to Harvey Egan, The Spiritual Exercises and the
Ignatian Spiritual Horizon (St Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1976), xiii.
5
Hugo Rahner, The Spirituality of St Ignatius Loyola: An Account of Its Historical Development,
translated by Francis John Smith (Westminster, Md: Newman Press, 1953), 52.
principle which unified all his experiences into a meaningful whole.’ 6

He began to discern the spirits with greater assurance and awareness
than he had at Loyola. And he also began his lifelong practice of
reflective living as he came to a deeper perception of his vocation to
apostolic service.
Before Cardoner, Ignatius had considered himself ignorant of the
ways of God. Afterwards he had a vital guide for his actions and,
… a norm to distinguish between means and ends, accidental from the

essential, a principle which involved a definitive conception of
Christian perfection; and from which would evolve a definitive method
for the attainment of this perfection which from then on meant doing
7
the will of God for him.
This insight, this gift from God—donum sapientiae et intellectus—was a

grace that motivated Ignatius for the rest of his life as he endeavoured
to search for the will of God in all his actions. He became the living
exemplar of the grace that he had received, devoting, his life to this
search for the divine will, both for himself and for those whom the Lord
called to ‘the same manner of service in the Church’.8
Leonard Silos argues that there were three elements to the
Cardoner experience.9 First, Ignatius became aware of the principle of
discernment that brought coherence to his earlier experiences and with
it a new perspective on spiritual matters. Secondly, this Seeking the will
principle gave him a fundamental awareness that human of God for each
existence is, by nature, a vocation. Thirdly, he understood that individual
the ‘method’ of the Spiritual Exercises is ‘an itinerary whose personally
goal is a response to one’s vocation without prejudice to a
person’s liberty and God’s design for the individual’.10 The goal of the
Spiritual Exercises became seeking the will of God for each individual
personally, so that each person should be open to the mystery of the
work of God the Father revealed in Christ, who continues his
6
Leonardo R. Silos, ‘Cardoner in the Life of St Ignatius Loyola’, Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu,
33 (1964), 3–43, here 20.
7
Silos, ‘Cardoner in the Life of St Ignatius Loyola’, 27.
8
9
10
redemptive work within the Church through the gift of the Holy Spirit.
At the heart of the Cardoner illumination, therefore, lies an awareness
of the Trinity dynamically at work within the world.
Cardoner and the Exercises

Most scholars believe that the illumination at Cardoner occurred
before the final version of the Spiritual Exercises was composed. If so,
such an unprecedented illumination must have had a significant impact
on the writing of the Exercises. Ignatius only began to study theology
after his time at Manresa; and in the time before Manresa he
considered himself ignorant of the spiritual life. During this period of
spiritual preparation, however, he was certain that the Lord was leading
him—an experience that culminated in the illumination beside the
Cardoner. It is in the context of this experience that he derived the
schema of the Spiritual Exercises:
That is to say, of exercises more circumscribed with regard to

duration, more or less of a month; more articulated with regard to
their matter, through the practices of perfect purgation and the
concentration of all perfection in the knowledge and love of the
Word made flesh; more conscious and ordered in the end for which
they are to be made, to overcome disordered affections which
hinder the perfect finding and fulfilment of the divine will in one’s
life; more illuminated and sure finally, in the direction of that
supernatural light by which Ignatius now felt himself guided, like a
pupil by his teacher, in discernment of spirits and in all the steps of
11
the spiritual life.
According to Ignatius’ early companion Juan Polanco, in the

Spiritual Exercises Ignatius sought to indicate first a method for purifying
the soul by contrition and confession, and then meditations on the life
of Christ, culminating in ‘a right election of a state of life and of all
other things, … progressing in everything which tended to inflame the
soul more and more with love of God’.12 Both the structure of the
11
Ignacio Iparraguire, Historia de la práctica de los ejercicios espirituales de San Ignacio, volume 1, Práctica
de los ejercicios espirituales de San Ignacio de Loyola en vida de su autor (1522–1556) (Rome: Institutum
Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1946), 36–37 (translated by Timothy M. Gallagher).
12
Rahner, The Spirituality of St Ignatius Loyola, 53.
Spiritual Exercises and the key meditations suggest an illuminated,

organic apprehension of the relationship of all things to the Trinity; of
the outworking of the divine initiative in Christ; of the struggle
between contending spirits within the heart of the individual; and of
the centrality of the Church in any understanding of human vocation.13
The Content of the Exercises

In the initial consideration of the Principle and Foundation, Ignatius
provides the exercitant with a preliminary ‘mind set’ for what follows. It
is a clear statement of the relationship between human beings and God
which flows from the illumination that Ignatius had experienced. The
first word of the Spiritual Exercises is Homo, and it is used to recall the
human person to the purpose of human creation. All human An appreciation of
beings are created to ‘praise reverence and serve’ God our the mystery of the
Lord. So the first characteristic of the theological vision of the Trinity lies at the
Exercises is a sense of the holiness and majesty of God: human heart of the
beings are called to realise their historical vocation in the Ignatian vision
reverence and service of the Triune God. This creates the need
for ‘indifference’, so that every expression of desire in choice should
accord with the end for which we were created. At the end of the
Exercises, in the Contemplatio, this disposition towards reverence and
service is taken as an indication of the maturity of the soul.14 Indeed an
appreciation of the mystery of the Trinity lies at the heart of the
Ignatian vision, fuelled by the Cardoner experience.15
The praise, reverence and service to which the exercitant is called,
however, are made possible by the work of the Trinity throughout
creation. The greatest of these works is the creation of the human
person, and in it God praises, reverences and serves the human creature
13
It is also important to stress at this stage the essential biblical foundation of the theological
perspective at the heart of the Spiritual Exercises. The meditations and contemplations employ the key
themes of biblical theology drawing from the Old and New Testaments in an understanding of
salvation history. It is against this backdrop that the individual exercitant is drawn to appreciate the
depths of their own historical existence.
14
It is perhaps interesting to note that in the Constitutions—the enfleshment of the Exercises—the
phrase majestas et bonitas occurs more frequently than any other single expression.
15
The testimony of Nadal on this point proves eloquent when he said of Ignatius: ‘He received from
God as singular grace freely to engage himself in and rest upon the bosom of the Holy Trinity.’ MHSJ
MN , 4, 591.
in turn, in creating and sustaining life. It is this reality which allows

human beings to fulfil their own vocations. The illumination Ignatius
received enabled him to see that God acts, and that God’s actions can
be mighty deeds, but also quiet, gentle ones that pass largely unnoticed.
In the Contemplatio Ignatius speaks of the God who labours in all things.
All the works of salvation flow from the three Divine persons; and the
one who embraces Ignatian spirituality is called to be a fellow worker
with God in the works of God.
In order to be an effective co-worker, it is necessary to find and to
follow the will of God—voluntas Dei. The search for God’s will for the
individual is the goal of the Exercises (Exx 1). But this idea, as Ignatius
framed it, is more subtle and comprehensive than a focus solely on the
particular will of God for that individual. Rather it involves seeking the
will of God as expressed in the whole unfolding of the divine plan, and
then the particular historical vocation of the individual within that
unfolding plan. It is this mutual inherence of the historicity of the
individual and the sweep of salvation history that I suggest was part of
the Cardoner illumination.
Pivotal to an understanding of sacred history is the incarnation.
With the appearance of Christ the Kingdom of God is established. For
Ignatius the free recognition of the sovereignty and holiness of God by
human beings is the glory of God. It is through the mysteries of Christ’s
life that God is glorified; the purpose of all history is attained; and the
world is reconciled to God. These are the mysteries of the Second,
Third and Fourth Weeks of the Exercises. Ignatius’ understanding,
enlightened by the illumination at Cardoner, saw the mysteries of
Christ as not merely realities of the past but living and eternal realities.
The risen Christ continues to accomplish his reconciling work through
all generations. All history is sacred history and Christ’s mission of
reconciliation is always contemporary. It is in the historicity of each
individual life that Christ invites souls that are open and generous to
cooperate. History is thus sacred and Christocentric, and, finally, a
dramatic history of conflict.16
16
Here the Theo-drama of Hans Urs von Balthasar (translated by Graham Harrison [San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 1990–96]), is particularly helpful.
For, in contrast to the work of God in history, Ignatius also clearly

saw ‘the enemy of our human nature’ fashioning a diabolical world. He
saw struggle and conflict at the heart of human history: a struggle about
human beings and the very destiny of human life. The diabolical
element is the antihuman, everything that is destructive of the human.
Ignatius’ sense of this cosmic struggle retrieves the scriptural
understanding of the conflict which Paul so eloquently described (see,
for example, Ephesians 6).17 Christ engages the enemy of our human
nature and calls disciples
to contend with him.
This struggle is reflected
in the personal history of
sin which Ignatius asks
the exercitant to contem-
plate in the First Week
meditations.
The graphic depiction
of the Two Standards—
which is falling out of
vogue in some contem-
porary readings of the
Exercises—continues this
dynamic, focusing on
Christ and on the apos-
tolic service of sharing in
his redemptive mission.18
It indicates the manner of
the dramatic conflict that
Ignatius describes, and
the reality of spiritual The Two Standards
17
Ephesians 6 gives Paul’s description of the ‘spiritual armour’ necessary for the battle.
18
‘[God] moved [Ignatius] to devote himself entirely to the service of God and the salvation of souls.
He revealed to him this purpose, especially and in the most signal manner, in the meditation on the
Kingdom of Christ and the Two Standards. Iñigo saw in this his life-aim, the goal to which he must give
himself wholly and which he must ever keep before his mind in all his undertakings …. This life-aim is
the same as that which the Society of Jesus still professes at this present time.’ (Jerónimo Nadal,
‘Sermon of Father Nadal at Salamanca, 1554’, Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 98, cited in Rahner,
The Spirituality of St Ignatius Loyola, 53–54)
captivity. Ignatius sees that only Christ can liberate the human person.
The central insight that freedom is dependent upon closeness to Christ,
and that it shows itself in an availability to others in service, underpins
the Triple Colloquy.19 This insight is integral to the meditation and
encapsulates the grace for which the exercitant is asking. The freedom
to be ‘for God’ is not possible unless we can give a positive personal
value to poverty and humiliation. Riches, honour and pride are lures
with which the enemy of our human nature attempts to entrap us.
In the Second Week, the Two Standards, the Three Classes and the
Three Degrees of Humility are central to contemplating the life of
Christ and to assisting in the election. Here it is clear that any election
is to be made within the context of the Church:
The Kingdom of Christ is the Church and in her all the other
mysteries coalesce … at the election, Ignatius points to the
‘hierarchical Church, our holy Mother’ as the supreme criterion for
20
the discernment of spirits (Exx 170).
Michael Buckley21 argues that the Church has a vital function in the
radical encounter with God during the Exercises—indeed that the
Church possesses a profound importance in the internal structure of the
Exercises as a whole. He emphasizes the crucial importance of the
Church at the time of the Election because ‘the election is to the
Exercises what missions are to the Constitutions: their focal purpose’.
In the course of his transformation at Manresa, which culminated
in the illumination of Cardoner, Ignatius progressed from a focus on
severe penances and thoughts of becoming a Carthusian to realising
that the mission entrusted to him by the Lord was that of ‘saving souls’,
in particular (there were other ways) by means of spiritual direction
19
‘One Colloquy to Our Lady, that she may get me grace from Her Son and Lord that I may be received
under His standard; and first in the highest spiritual poverty, and—if His Divine Majesty would be served
and would want to choose and receive me—not less in actual poverty; second, in suffering contumely and
injuries, to imitate Him more in them, if only I can suffer them without the sin of any person, or displeasure
of His Divine Majesty; and with that a Hail Mary. Second Colloquy. I will ask the same of the Son, that He
may get it for me of the Father; and with that say the Soul of Christ. Third Colloquy. I will ask the same of
the Father, that He may grant it to me; and say an Our Father.’ (Exx 147)
20
‘The Church herself is the touchstone for every genuine and ‘true sentiment which we ought to have
in the Church militant’ (Exx 352).
21
Michael Buckley, ‘Ecclesial Mysticism in the Spiritual Exercises’, Theological Studies 56 (1995), 441–461.
within the Church.22 There is a movement from a personal insight to an

ecclesial reality—ultimately to the founding of the Society of Jesus.
This new dynamic in his life is reflected in the meditation on the Call of
Christ the King, The Two Standards, the Three Classes of Person and
the Three Degrees of Humility. Thereafter for Ignatius the authenticity
of any individual choice is legitimated by the manner in which it draws
the individual into participation in the struggle that engages the whole
Church. The Exercises make no provision for the ecclesially indifferent
or the ecclesially hostile.23
The Third Week contemplations on the passion and death of the
Lord look towards a confirmation of the election within the
individual—a deepening of union with the Lord. These
contemplations foster a sense of companionship with Christ in the
most difficult circumstances of life. Then, in the Fourth Week
contemplations of the resurrection, there is a call to joy in Christ’s joy
in being fully alive, in having conquered sin and death and opened
the way to eternal life.
At the end of the Exercises stands the Contemplatio, which may be
seen a reappropriation of the Principle and Foundation, enfleshed
through the contemplations of the life of Christ and deepened by the
other key meditations of the Exercises. The thrust of the Contemplatio is
outward, turning pragmatically towards the exercitant’s own life.
The whole dynamic of the Spiritual Exercises may be traced back,
albeit speculatively, to Ignatius’ illumination at Cardoner. What they
crucially share is the awareness of a Trinitarian initiative which lies at
the heart of all things and which never ceases to work on behalf of
human beings, drawing individuals into an ever deeper faith and
inviting them to a share in the redemptive mission of Christ.
22
‘When he had begun to be consoled by God and when he noticed the great fruits which he gained in
souls by spiritual direction, he stopped practising those immoderate penances he had formerly indulged
in; he began again to cut his fingernails and hair.’ (Autobiography, 29)
23
‘Ignatius frames the subject matter for any election within two criteria: first such subjects must be
either indifferent or good in themselves; and second, such subjects must also “militate within holy
mother, the hierarchical Church”. To further emphasize these characteristics as essential prerequisites
for a Christian choice of a state of life, Ignatius restates these same criteria negatively: the subjects for
an election should not be evil (as opposed to good or indifferent) nor should they be ‘in opposition to
her [the Church]’. (Buckley, ‘Ecclesial Mysticism in the Spiritual Exercises’, 444)
Beyond the Exercises

In today’s world, and particularly in Jesuit institutions I would argue, an
appreciation of the Cardoner imperative continues to assist in the ongoing
refinement of apostolic contemplation and discernment for action.
Ignatius’ experience seems to have offered him a glimpsed vision of the
coherence of the divine dynamic active in the world. This divine initiative
is an organic whole, including the unfolding of salvation history and its
culmination in the eschaton. The perception of this unity and order
requires an understanding of the nature and internal harmony of the parts
that make up the whole, and of the whole created from the parts.
The profound unity of the whole is centred in the Trinity.
Openness to the Trinitarian vision is vital, as the spirit of God leads us
further into the understanding of divine truth. This comes about
through an ever-
deepening relationship
with the person of
Christ and an entrus-
ting of self to Christ
and through him to
the Father. This is the
work of the Spirit. It is
as though we were
making our way through
unknown territory with
one eye on the distant
horizon (the Trinity)
and one eye fixed on
the ground before us
(our immediate situa-
tion). Ignatian prayer is
in this way contex-
tualised both in the
Trinitarian action of
God in the world and in
the individual’s living
out of a vocation.
I would argue that
The Trinity in Glory, by Titian
the tension involved in
keeping this double context in view lies at the heart of the Cardoner
imperative. Far from needing to be resolved, this tension is a source of
creativity. Its openness to the Trinity disposes us to receive the divine
initiative. At the same time it helps the individual to discover God at
work in and through all things, and thus it energizes the work of the
apostolate. The importance of this tension is clearly linked to Ignatius’
fundamental vision of struggle and conflict at the heart of human
history.
The Cardoner imperative is the basis for a ‘way of proceeding’
rooted in faith and confidence in the work of the Trinity within the
world. It emboldens individuals for the risky enterprise of apostolic
service. Serene in their awareness of the divine gift of peace, these
individuals become bearers of that peace to others. Their outlook
towards others is grounded in Ignatius’ understanding of all human
beings as created in the image of God and thus worthy of reverence.
This is the basis of what we might call Ignatius’ theological
anthropology. It forms an attitude summarised in the Presupposition of
the Exercises—that the ‘other’ with whom we are relating is trying to
say something that is good (Exx 22).
Accordingly, our stance towards the other will always be positive, as
we endeavour to understand the good that the other is trying to
express. Such a disposition helps us to relate to those who espouse very
different or even totally opposed views to our own without acrimony
and with the possibility of an open exchange. This disposition is neither
vague nor unprincipled. It is humble, authentic and reverential,
focusing upon the work of the Spirit of God within the other. With such
a disposition there are no obstacles of egotism or fear to block the work
of the Spirit within and between people. In our twenty-first-century
world, fraught with fear and violence, a disposition of peaceful
reverence towards others stands as a beacon of hope amid darkness and
gloom.
Simultaneously rooted in a living relationship with God and
committed to temporal history, the Cardoner imperative also
importantly offers a renewed appreciation of the place of the Church in
the world. It is clear that after the Cardoner illumination Ignatius saw
the Church, in Hugo Rahner’s words, ‘as the rule for measuring
enthusiasm’.24 The Church is the place of apostolic service, and it would
be inconceivable to make any election about a matter that was contrary
to Church teaching. For Ignatius a truly authentic election involves
coming to a deeper union both with Christ and with the Church which
struggles against all that is antihuman.
Many years after the illumination at Cardoner Ignatius wrote to Sr
Teresa Rejadella: ‘Every internal experience that comes directly from
God must be in humble harmony with the prescriptions of the Church
and with obedience’.25 It was this conviction, clarified in his experience
by the Cardoner, that caused Ignatius to include at the end of the
Spiritual Exercises his Rules for Thinking with the Church. He was
convinced that the Spirit of God promised by Christ to the disciples and
to the early Church was still operative within the Church of his own
time, and throughout all time. Love of the Church was for Ignatius an
extension of his love for Christ.26
Ignatius’s use of the terms ‘spouse’ and ‘mother’ suggests a very
special kind of love, which is the spirit of God at work.27 Thus there is
one fundamental, intimate and immediate communion of love in Christ
by which the human person is configured to Christ and, through
Christ’s relationship with the Church, is also brought to union with the
Church. The great commission given to the first apostles was to be
fulfilled from the community of the Church—a community that was
commissioned to be exemplary in its witness to the world. Ignatius had
few illusions about the way in which the Church had failed to live up to
its calling. The difficulties of the twenty-first century are not a novel
24
Rahner, The Spirituality of St Ignatius Loyola, 58.
25
Ignatius Loyola, letter to Sr Teresa Rejadella, 18 June 1536, cited in Rahner, The Spirituality of St
Ignatius Loyola, 58.
26
‘Between Christ our Lord, the Bridegroom, and the Church, His Bride, there is the same Spirit
which governs and directs us for the salvation of our souls. Because by the same Spirit and our Lord
Who gave the ten Commandments, our holy Mother the Church is directed and governed.’ (Exx 365)
27
To bring into play a Rahnerian distinction, the Spirit governs through the hierarchical authorities,
the prophets, preachers, confessors, and teachers in the Church, through commandments and
precepts, through sacraments and Scripture and Tradition, through all of those external means which
build up the Body of Christ. Transcendentally, the Spirit guides and governs by the change in human
subjectivity, especially through the charity or love of friendship that draws and transforms into unity all
human affectivity …. It is the greater love that puts order into the lesser loves. And this is itself the
effect of the Spirit of God within the human person.
phenomenon. Ignatius was contending with abuses in his own time.

And the early Church too had its problems, as the letters ascribed to St
Paul clearly indicate. These problems arise because the Church is
composed of fallible human beings—like ourselves.
Nevertheless, a vital relationship with the Church is integral to the
Cardoner imperative. Amid the scandals of the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries such a commitment to the Church is seen by
many outside it, and some within, as questionable, particularly when it
is associated with an unappealing understanding of obedience. But here
we see another dimension of the Cardoner imperative’s creative
tension: between the freedom of the Spirit operating both in the
individual and in the authoritative voice of the Church.
For Ignatius, this tension could not be understood as a conflict: he
saw all human beings as individuals in relation to the Church. This
understanding was reaffirmed by Vatican II, in Lumen gentium.28 All
people are in relationship to the Church by the very fact of a common
human creation, whether they are members of a Christian
denomination, members of other religious faiths, agnostics or even
atheists. Thus all have a relationship with the body of Christ.
It is within this understanding of the human person as both a
unique individual open to the spirit of God at work and a member of
the body that the tension between the individual and the value Obedience has an
of obedience is located. Twenty-first-century Western culture honourable
does not greatly prize obedience. There is a deep distrust of any Christian heritage
commitment which calls for an attitude of obedience; for many
the term evokes the spectre of fundamentalism. However, I would
suggest that obedience has an honourable Christian heritage, which
originates in the obedience of Christ to the Father—a disposition of
obedience at the heart of the Trinity.29
Obedience, seen in this light, is clearly an active endeavour rather
than merely the result of passivity. Christ was obedient to his own
mission; and human beings are called to be obedient to the call and
mission of Christ and so drawn in to God’s redemptive work.
Obedience is a response of love to the invitation of God; it is only true
28
Lumen gentium, 10.
29
Compare Gill Goulding, Holy Intimacy: A Trinitarian Dynamic (forthcoming).
obedience when undertaken out of love in a joyful response to the

divine initiative. Love alone prevents obedience from becoming
oppressive; love engenders life-giving energy and permanent
commitment. It is love that forms our obedience as a member of the
Church, Christ’s body on earth.
In this context any individual discernment will be subject to the
discernment and ratification of the whole body—the Church. Thus the
formation of the individual does not lead to individualism, but to the
fulfilment of that person’s human potential to contribute to the
community’s flourishing. This way of proceeding values both the
individual and the community and prevents the body from being
wounded by extremism. In the reality of the Church, which is both holy
and always in need of conversion, we touch once more the mystery of
God’s working with his people. We re-engage with the illumination of
Cardoner, an experience in which Ignatius was privileged to glimpse
God’s creative and redemptive loving desire for human beings. In
conclusion I return to my original question. Is there an Ignatian
theological vision that might distinguish a Jesuit institution? I affirm
that there is, and would root it in what I have termed the Cardoner
imperative. It involves a recognition of the centrality of a relationship
with the Trinity at the heart of the mission of any such institution. It
promotes a practice of prayer centred on Christ that will assist this
relationship. It espouses a theological anthropology that promotes a
reverential disposition in relationships within Jesuit institutions. Lastly
it promotes an attitude of dynamic loving obedience to the Church.
Here perhaps the decrees of the 35th General Congregation of the
Society of Jesus might assist—in particular the sections dealing with the
Society’s identity and charism, the relationship with the Holy Father,
and the decree on obedience. For these decrees, unlike previous such
documents, are not analytical and precise; rather they use the language
of affect—not merely of the emotions but involving the deepest place of
the spirit—and call for an engagement from the heart of the reader.
They use terms such as ‘fervour’ and ‘zeal’ and ‘fidelity’, words that
were prevalent in the vocabulary of Ignatius, and they call for a
prayerful pondering of their meaning. If we engage with lay faculty at
this level of contemplative interaction then the Ignatian theological

vision may be shared, promoted and presented for future generations.30
The Triple Colloquy of the Two Standards encapsulates what I
have called the ‘Cardoner imperative’. It sets the Ignatian ‘magis’ in the
context of commitment to Christ and service. It disturbs any
complacency. It calls for ongoing discernment, conversion and real
humility. It asks that we be drawn closer into the experience of Jesus. It
challenges individuals to live the radical graces that the colloquy
requests. It indicates the way of discreta caritas.31 It shows the need, in
our contemporary world, for ‘a theological work which aims without
ambiguity to build up the Lord’s Church with an openness to the Spirit
which always leads to the whole truth’.32 The Cardoner imperative
involves that graced Trinitarian understanding made known to us by
the Lord and the apostolic directive by which we are called to share in
the redemptive work of Christ for the life of the world.
Gill K. Goulding CJ is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Spirituality

at Regis College, the Jesuit Graduate School of Theology at the University of
Toronto.
30
See Decrees and Documents of the 35th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus (Oxford: Way
Books, 2008).
31
‘Discerning love is essentially response to God’s world-loving. It demands mature acceptance of
mission and sound judgment as to means. Its conscience is delicate in all circumstances and cultures. It
releases spontaneity: it repudiates impetuosity. It thrives on relationships. For it sees all as God given
each one coming from him, going to him. Each person is a blessing for the sake of the other. Discerning
love leads to God, leads the self to God. Discerning love sees as Christ sees, acts as Christ acts. Seeks as
Christ seeks … union with the Father. It translates human impulses and reactions, desires and
aspirations, into those of Christ himself. And yet it is not calculated. It partakes of Christ’s liberty. “I
am free to lay down my life, I am free to take it again.” Discerning love leads me to lay it at his feet. The
power he shares with me assures me that he will give it back to me. Discerning love assures me that he
is already returning it to me.’ (James Walsh, unpublished prose poem, 1982.)
32
Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, ‘Pietas et Eruditio’, Review of Ignatian Spirituality, 115 (2007).
RECENT BOOKS
The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, edited by Thomas Worcester

(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008). 978 0 521 85731, pp. 374, £17.99.
A volume on the Jesuits is a long-overdue addition to the trusty series of

Cambridge Companions: after all, if the American preacher Jonathan
Edwards deserves his own volume (published in 2007), then does not the
largest order of Catholic male religious, whose wide-ranging influence in
the Church, politics, architecture and the sciences is here so amply
documented by Thomas Worcester and his collaborators? The Cambridge
Companion to the Jesuits serves up an engaging and diverse fare of essays
covering topics ranging from the religious environment of Ignatius of
Loyola’s adolescence to Jesuit works in Europe, Asia and Latin America,
internal Jesuit controversies about ethnic minority members of the Society,
and contemporary Jesuit theology. Short introductory and conclusory essays
by Worcester sketch the terrain of the volume and discuss the Society of
Jesus today.
The collection is arranged in five sections, the first four of which deal
with the Jesuits before their suppression in 1773. Worcester explains his
focus on the early modern period by noting that, compared to the wide
range of knowledge about the early Society, ‘there are relatively few good
studies of the Jesuits since 1814—in any part of the world’ (pp.7–8). It is not
to detract from the quality of the essays that do appear here either to lament
the absence of those which do not, or to wonder whether a volume such as
this might have begun to rectify the lack of research into the post-
restoration Society.
The first section, on Ignatius himself, contains essays on the religious
and ecclesiastical climate in which Ignatius came of age; the ‘personae’ of
Ignatius as he evolved from Iñigo the Basque soldier and pilgrim into Father
Ignatius the Superior General and ‘Loyola’ the propagandist of ‘Counter-
Reformation’; and on the Spiritual Exercises. A second section, entitled
‘European Foundations of the Jesuits’, contains surveys of the Jesuit
presence in Rome and Italy, the Atlantic Isles, France, and Poland and
eastern Europe. There is also an especially fascinating essay on the quest of
some women, from the sixteenth century to the present, either to join the
Society of Jesus outright or to organize themselves into religious orders
under the Ignatian Constitutions. Thirdly, the volume turns to the first Jesuit
Recent Books 261
missions, with essays on Japan, China and New France, as well as a

revealing discussion of early modern Jesuits’ views on the admission of non-
European men and men of Jewish ancestry. The short fourth section deals
with Jesuit influences on colonial Latin American architecture and ‘quiet’
Jesuit contributions to the scientific revolution. Essays in the fifth and final
section discuss the (highly contingent) political causes of the suppression
and restoration, Jesuit education in the United States, and Jesuit theology
in the post-conciliar era. One important theme that runs through the
volume, from Stanislaw Obirek’s essay on Poland and eastern Europe
through Nicolas Standaert’s on China and Worcester’s on the
contemporary Society, is the Jesuit practice of inculturation: articulating the
principles of Christian faith to non-European peoples in culturally sensitive
ways.
This all too brief survey of the Companion’s contents reveals that there
are few topics, in the history of the early Society in particular, which do not
receive some mention. For general readers interested in learning more
about the Jesuits, this volume provides a lucid and thorough introduction;
in this regard, Philip Endean’s essay on the Spiritual Exercises and Mary Ann
Hinsdale’s on the many dimensions of contemporary Jesuit theology are
especially helpful. Endean’s formulation that for Christianity (and, by
implication, for the Exercises), ‘its proper mode of expression is question and
exclamation rather than statement; it bespeaks a mystery beckoning our
committed participation, rather than a state of affairs that we can neutrally
describe’, captures powerfully and succinctly one of the key insights of
Ignatian spirituality (p.58).
For specialists, a number of chapters repay careful reading. Lu Ann
Homza’s description of the ‘unexpectedly flexible’ religious climate of late
fifteenth-century Spain, in which the standardisation attempted by the
Inquisition could coexist with the rather individualised devotional attitudes
of such churchmen as Cardinal Francisco de Cisneros, offers an important
context for the development of Ignatius’ religious sensibilities (p.13).
Gemma Simmonds’ essay, ‘Women Jesuits?’, analyzes in detail Mary Ward’s
attempt to found ‘a Jesuit-style congregation for women’, among other
female appropriations of Ignatian principles (p.123). This reader was
particularly impressed with Thomas M. Cohen’s description of Jesuit
attitudes on limpieza de sangre (the ‘purity of blood’ which, in some early
members’ minds, limited membership of the Society to those not of Jewish
descent), as well as his frank discussion of conflicts over the admission of
Asians, Africans and native Americans. And while it is difficult to single
out a few essays for particular praise, Louis Caruana’s chapter on the
strategies that Jesuit scientists used at once to satisfy the demands of
262 Recent Books
obedience and to advance the cause of the Copernican revolution is as

insightful as it is engaging.
Though the Companion achieves a degree of coherence remarkable for a
collection of this scope, the tone of the essays nevertheless occasionally
oscillates between the historical and the hagiographical. In an academic
text, it is perhaps unfortunate to find passages implicitly laden with value
judgments:
Gradually, however, through the example of the Jesuits’ courage and energetic
ability, and the attractiveness of Brébeuf’s commonsense personality and
supernatural wisdom, the faith began to make progress . … As Jesuits they sought
the magis, that is, to do ever more and more for Jesus Christ. (pp. 188, 190)
Along similar lines, it might be argued that Worcester’s concluding essay,

which acknowledges that ‘Jesuits today live with several tensions’ (p.325)
but does not discuss in detail declining Jesuit vocations in the northern
hemisphere, disputes about mission in Jesuit universities, discussions about
homosexuality in formation and community life, and the recent disciplining
of a number of Jesuit theologians by the Vatican, paints a rather sanguine
picture.
These small criticisms aside, this Companion admirably accomplishes its
goals, providing a general audience with an attractive starting point for
further reading about the Society and specialists with much to ponder. We
are in Worcester’s and his collaborators’ debt.
J. Patrick Hornbeck II
Ignatius of Loyola: Letters and Instructions, edited by Martin E. Palmer,

John S. Padberg and John L. McCarthy (St Louis: Institute of Jesuit
Sources, 2006). 978 1 880810 68 2, pp. xxxii + 732, $30.50.
Nearly a century has passed since the letters of Ignatius Loyola were
published in the Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu (1903–11), where they
fill twelve large volumes. Not all the letters were composed directly by
Ignatius himself: after his election as the first General of the Society of Jesus
in 1541 he was assisted by a series of secretaries, the most effective of whom,
Juan de Polanco, took charge of correspondence during the last nine years
of Ignatius’ life. Often, and increasingly, the secretaries wrote letters on
Ignatius’ behalf and in conformity with his instructions; but even in such
cases the letters give expression to his personality and mindset, and to the
spiritual values that guided all he did.
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Because the letters are so numerous (nearly 7,000 have survived), it is

not surprising, perhaps, that only a small percentage has been translated
into English. This new collection of translations, prepared by the Institute
of Jesuit Sources, is the largest ever published. Almost all of the letters it
contains (369 in total) were selected by Martin Palmer, who made a draft
version of each one before his death in 1997. The drafts were subsequently
checked and revised by John Padberg, the Director of the Institute, who
added some additional letters, translated by himself. The completed text
was then edited by Padberg with the help of John McCarthy, who supplied a
detailed index. The result of their collaborative effort is impressive: a
scholarly volume, easy to consult, which will become a standard work of
reference in the English-speaking world.
Readers of The Way will wish to compare this book with the much
smaller collection of 77 letters selected by Michael Ivens and translated by
Joseph Munitiz, which came out in 1995 (40 of the letters were later
included in Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Personal Writings [London: Penguin,
1996]). In the case of the letters Ignatius himself composed in Spanish, it is
striking how faithful Palmer and Padberg manage to be to the syntax and
diction of the originals. So faithful are they, indeed, that their versions may
often be read alongside the Spanish as parallel texts. And fidelity has not
been attained at the cost of clarity: their translations are intelligible, as well
as pleasing to read. Munitiz (who was assisted in the Spanish letters by
Philip Endean) is freer: he occasionally reformulates the syntax and
paraphrases the literal sense in order to convey the concepts that inform the
words. Sometimes this approach brings to light a possible interpretation of
the text that Palmer and Padberg ignore—a reminder that the precise
meaning of Ignatius’ Spanish is never easy to pin down. Both versions are
based squarely on the Monumenta Historica edition, as one would expect,
and to compare the two translations is not to rank them: they may both be
consulted with profit when their selections overlap.
Terence O’Reilly
The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits and Ignatius of Loyola: Letters and Instructions
are available from The Way Ignatian Book Service. Please contact the editorial office at The
Way, Campion Hall, Oxford OX1 1QS or go to www.theway.org.uk to order.
264 Recent Books
Tina Beattie, New Catholic Feminism: Theology and Theory (London:

Routledge, 2006). 978 0 415 30148 0, pp. xi + 396, £22.99.
This is an important and disturbing book for both men and women in the
Catholic Church, wherever they stand on the theological, liturgical and
psychological issues arising from gender. Beattie is addressing two sets of
European readers. Firstly, she is writing for secular feminists who might be
persuaded to see theology as a source for feminist reflection that is more
subtle than a purely secular analysis. Second, she is writing for readers who
are believers. For this second group, Beattie’s reading of Hans Urs von
Balthasar and of the official Roman documents written under his influence
will reveal a profoundly distressing underside to their sexual symbolism,
though she ends by suggesting some ways out of the present impasse
through a constructive reading of von Balthasar.
Beattie sees modern Catholic feminists as trapped within a version of
feminist theory that is concerned simply with an ethics of justice. Such
theory leaves no real space for a worshipping, prayerful relationship to a
transcendent God, or for the sheer otherness of the divine presence in
human lives. Nor can it recognise the irrational factors—perhaps
explicable only in psychoanalytic terms—that lead to the exclusion of
women from sacred space. She breaks important new ground by engaging
with von Balthasar and also with official papal teaching, arguing that both
John Paul II’s and Benedict XVI’s use of gender imagery and discussion of
sexual difference seek to render women permanently unable to represent
Christ liturgically.
The book has three main parts. In the first, Beattie presents the work
of a group of ‘New Catholic Feminists’, including Michele Schumacher,
Prudence Allen, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Beatriz Vollmer Coles,
showing how they understand their relationship with other feminist
writers, and bringing out their theological dependence on von Balthasar.
Beattie, for her part, shares their desire to preserve a sense of faith, prayer
and devotion that is specific to Catholic women. But Beattie also shows
that this group reads other feminist theologians in a highly selective and
even anti-feminist way. In particular, she argues, they fail to recognise and
analyze the unconscious fear of women and sexuality, and the sacrificial
violence, embedded in von Balthasar’s theology. Read uncritically, this
theology’s presentation of the Catholic faith encodes within it phobic
masculine fantasies of the feminine and a rhetoric that denigrates women.
The second part focuses on von Balthasar himself, drawing on the
French feminist writers Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, and on the
linguistic and psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. Here she focuses
Recent Books 265
on the construction of masculinity as well as of femininity within this

theology, to reveal the deep misogyny in dark undercurrents of symbolism
and thought, going well beyond von Balthasar, in which ‘man’ plays all
the roles.
If only a male (Jesus) can represent God the Father, only a male can
therefore be a priest. But because the Church and all of humanity are also
gendered as female—as the ‘bride’ of both Father and son—if the male
priest is to represent humanity to God, he needs to play both roles. The
Church (itself gendered as female) requires a construction of masculinity
that is fluid, versatile and multiple to maintain an exclusively male
priesthood as sacramental symbol. At the same time, its construction of
femininity is rigid and allows for no such versatility: the female body is not
made in the image of God.
Beattie shows how this theology uses the nuptial theme of sexual
complementarity—man and woman, husband and wife, having distinct and
different ‘complementary’ roles—to defend the refusal to create a
sacramental theology that includes both male and female body-persons as
appropriate images of Christ. But if males can play both masculine and
feminine roles indiscriminately or conveniently, there is no real
complementarity, because there is nothing in the Church and theology that
only a female can do or represent, and that a male cannot.
The deeper theological problem here, Beattie suggests, is the paradoxical
absence of masculinity from the Catholic understanding of the created
order. Masculinity is so closely identified with transcendence, divinity and
reason that creation, humanity and the body all become feminine:
ultimately ‘the only “man” in creation is the priest who vicariously
represents the masculine divinity of Christ, while all other men are in fact
“women” and “brides” in their humanity’.
The third movement of Beattie’s argument proposes to read von
Balthasar ‘against the grain’, opening up alternative ways of
understanding his work that redeem fatherhood, motherhood, language
and sacramentality. This final third of the book does offer some sense of
redemption and hope, but is only partly successful because Beattie stays
confined within the symbolism of a Mother Church and a Father God. It
seems to me that so long as God is treated as exclusively masculine, our
understanding of women’s embodiment remains at an impasse. The bride,
the maternal Church, even the mother of God, are always less than God.
In the words of Susan Ross, ‘Can God be a Bride?’ 1 Until the image of the
Bride as well as the Bridegroom can represent God, we cannot overcome
1
America (1 November 2004).
266 Recent Books
the power dynamics encoded in sexual difference, nor fully reveal the
luminous sacrament of God that women are, embodied as women.
In the reformed liturgy and in the protestant Churches, women have
already invaded the symbolically forbidden space, and the people of God are
already beginning to experience the maternal, sisterly, grandmotherly
presence of women as altera Christa, despite official teaching to the contrary.
And in their mystical experience, feminist consciousness opens up more
ways of encountering the spousal and sexual symbolism of the Divine Lover
than Beattie acknowledges in her section on redeeming sacramentality and
apophatic mystical experience.
Beattie wonders whether her feminist readers have felt assailed by the
experience of reading her extensive citations from von Balthasar:
Far from being a healing experience, to read Balthasar as a woman informed by
feminist consciousness, is to experience a form of rhetorical sexual abuse that
has profound consequences for the ways in which a woman as body might situate
herself in the story of salvation (p. 182).
Von Balthasar’s sexual rhetoric refuses to stay on the page or remain

contained in rational analysis, but confronts one’s deepest feelings; and
Beattie has done feminists a great service by her careful analysis. Her work
provides the basis for further discussion and for the construction of a
sacramental symbolism that can honour both the personhood and
embodied difference of gender.
Having read Beverly Lanzetta’s Radical Wisdom: A Feminist Mystical
Theology (Fortress, 2005) before Beattie’s volume, I cannot help but note
that Lanzetta complements Beattie’s approach with a more thorough
appropriation of the mystical tradition. Lanzetta calls for a contemplative
feminism as a way out of the same impasse described by Beattie. She
identifies the dark night of the feminine divine playing out in women’s
souls, in a friendlier reading of Grace Jantzen than Beattie accepts.
Lanzetta uncovers a soul wound inflicted on women in patriarchy for
which they have no words. But Beattie offers words, terrible words
describing the ugly and covert process by which those wounds are created
in women who persist in trying to encounter God and serve the Catholic
faith in the present exclusionary sacramental system.
Janet K. Ruffing RSM
Recent Books 267
Philip Sheldrake, A Brief History of Spirituality (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).

1 4051 1770 2, pp. xiv + 251, £14.99.
Mark J. Cartledge, Encountering the Spirit: The Charismatic Tradition

(London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2006). 978 1570756887, pp. 144,
£9.95.
A Brief History of Spirituality is a fascinating volume in the ‘Brief Histories of

Religion’ series. Philip Sheldrake, William Leech Professorial Fellow in
Applied Theology at the University of Durham, has contributed
enormously in the last few years to the reshaping of the study of Christian
spirituality. In this volume we are again greatly in his debt. He explores here
the development of spirituality in the Christian tradition from the early days
of the New Testament and the early Church to the present day.
On this journey we are taken through the classic periods of the Church
Fathers, in which there is an examination of the spiritualities of well-known
figures—Origen, the Cappadocians and Augustine—as well as some who
tend to receive less attention, such as Evagrius and Pseudo-Dionysius. We
then follow the monastic and ascetic stories, as they developed in various
ways, particularly in Syria and Egypt. The Wisdom of the Desert is helpfully
explored, as is the hugely influential Benedictine movement.
We visit Ireland to find out about early Celtic spirituality. As a Scot I
would have liked to see a little more about Scotland, but Columba does
appear. This section also deals with later medieval traditions, notably the
that of the Cistercians. Throughout, Sheldrake offers highly readable
descriptions and stimulating comments. Illuminating comparisons are made
between the different trajectories of Eastern and Western Christianity.
The chapter ‘Spirituality in the City’ looks in more detail at the Middle
Ages—including Gregorian renewal and the urban revival which produced
the great cathedrals and saw the emergence of the universities as ‘sacred
space’. There are fine introductions to the Dominicans and Franciscans, the
Beguines and the fourteenth-century mystics such as Julian of Norwich. In
the following chapter we meet the major figures of the Age of Reformations,
and it is good to see less well-known groups such as the Anabaptists
included. The splendid series which Sheldrake has edited, ‘Traditions of
Christian Spirituality’, means that there is now a wealth of up-to-date
writing on different traditions from which to draw.
The period 1700–1900 is entitled ‘Spirituality in an Age of Reason’,
although it includes movements which probably owe more to the Romantic
Age than to the Age of Reason. However, it is a commendable, wide-
ranging survey. The final chapter moves from modernity to postmodernity,
268 Recent Books
and once more we are introduced to the contours of the period. Sheldrake
points out that institutional religion has declined in Europe but that there
has been a reawakening of interest in various types of applied spirituality
such as feminism and eco-spirituality, and in the engagement between
spirituality and creativity. He points out the tensions that can exist between
spirituality and the frontiers of science, genetic research and cyberspace.
This is in my view the best overview available on this important subject.
It packs an immense amount into just over 200 pages of text. Although
relatively brief, it is never superficial. And there is a challenge within it to
engage, re-engage or engage more closely with the depths of spiritual
experience that have characterized the story of the Christian faith.
Sheldrake concludes that contemporary life needs to be informed by a
contemplative dimension. ‘Contemplation and mysticism are key elements
of the contemporary quest for spirituality and here the Christian tradition
has exceptional riches to offer.’ I very warmly commend this book not only
as a source of information but as a resource in seeking to apply the Christian
faith to the contemporary world.
Mark Cartledge’s Encountering the Spirit is an excellent introduction to
the charismatic tradition by a Senior Lecturer in Pentecostal and
Charismatic Theology at the University of Birmingham. The book is part of
the Darton, Longman and Todd ‘Traditions of Christian Spirituality’ series
which over the past few years has opened up the study of the major streams
of Christian spirituality to the general reader.
Having commented on ‘encountering the Spirit’ as an encapsulation of
charismatic spirituality, Cartledge traces the remarkable story of the
Pentecostal movement from the beginning of the twentieth century. The
roots are found in Charles Fox Parham and the Bethel Bible School, Kansas,
founded in 1900, where Parham and some students sought the gift of
tongues as evidence of an encounter with the Spirit. Agnes N. Ozman
received the baptism of the Spirit and it was reported that she spoke a
Chinese language she had never learned. Parham concluded from this that
missionaries had no need to learn the languages of the countries to which
they were going, but Pentecostals later modified this view! Cartledge
describes the meetings in Azusa Street, Los Angeles, under William
Seymour, where the revival continued for three and a half years.
The theological context which Cartledge proposes for understanding
Pentecostal and charismatic spirituality—he sees the charismatic
movement as a descendant or off-shoot of Pentecostalism—is a process
which involves search, encounter and transformation. This is expressed in
narrative, symbols and praxis. I found this a very helpful interpretative
framework. It is good to think of charismatic spirituality as ‘a journey of
Recent Books 269
discovery’. As someone who has had involvement with charismatic renewal

over several decades I warm to this, and also to the comment that ‘the Spirit
can and does “enliven” all things within the Kingdom of God’. The praxis is
seen to include an enthusiasm for prayer with others.
There is a useful chapter giving an overview of charismatic spirituality
throughout the history of the Christian Church. There are then chapters on
praise and worship, inspired speech, the sanctified life, empowered
Kingdom witness and the community of interpreters. In each chapter there
is an examination of biblical material, the major features of
Pentecostal/charismatic experience in this area, and possible fresh
approaches.
The book is evaluative as well as descriptive, looking at the effects of
charismatic spirituality and asking in what ways experiences that are
affirmed within charismatic communities lead to members living sanctified
life, engaging in effective witness, and using scripture in healthy ways. It is
difficult to think of a better introduction to the topic for those seeking to
understand this stream of spirituality and to be aware of its strengths and
weaknesses.
This is a well-documented, balanced and positive critique of the
charismatic tradition, by an Anglican theologian who is also a participant
and who wishes to commend the movement. It ends with a beautiful prayer
from Symeon the New Theologian, an important figure in the Eastern
Church of the tenth and eleventh centuries, entreating the Spirit to come.
Amen!
Ian Randall
John Swinton, Raging with Compassion: Pastoral Responses to the Problem

of Evil (Grand Rapids, Mi: Eerdmans, 2008). 978 0 8028 2997 9, pp. vii +
264, £12.99.
The bulk of this book consists of exactly what its title promises—pastoral
responses to the problem of evil, worked out in considerable detail and with
an enormously humane and realistic compassion. John Swinton, a
Presbyterian minister, is Professor of Practical Theology and Pastoral Care
in the University of Aberdeen. He has worked as a psychiatric nurse and as
a community health chaplain. He has a particular interest in the theology
and spirituality of health and disability. The fruits of this experience are
evident throughout the book. He defines ‘evil’ in the following way:
270 Recent Books
Evil occurs when human beings or systems created and controlled by human
beings carry out actions that deliberately or consequentially engender forms of
suffering, misery, and death which are marked by the absence of hope that there is
meaning and order in the world or a God who exercises providential care (p. 59).
The guiding feature of this view is that evil is precisely this loss of hope
and that the ‘problem’ of evil is primarily a pastoral problem: how to enable
people not to lose hope in the meaning and order of our world, which is
God’s creation and under God’s providence. The practical solution consists
in the Christian community learning or relearning ways of making this aim
more achievable—what Swinton calls ‘practical faithfulness’. The key
elements in this are four: the practice of listening in patience and silence to
the suffering of others, without trying to offer intellectual answers; a revival
of the practice of lamentation as embodied in many of the psalms, as a
realistic response to a God who seems to have abandoned us; forgiveness—
which may have to be achieved only gradually—through which the
perpetrators of evil are commended to the justice of God rather than the
retribution of humans; and thoughtfulness, a reflection on the question
‘What are human beings for?’, which will crucially touch on the unborn, the
disabled and the terminally ill. These features will characterize a Christian
community of hope, and lead to a truly evangelical understanding of the
command to love one another. The elaboration of these aims includes many
historical examples which give the book a rootedness and a realism which
are often very moving.
Some readers, like myself, will perhaps have problems, not indeed with
this very helpful practical advice, but with the framework in which it is
developed. Swinton flatly rejects what he describes as the Enlightenment
way of regarding evil—reason and a neglect of God’s revelation:
Post-Enlightenment western culture is liberal in its epistemology, assumptions
and expectations. Liberalism emphasizes the importance of reason, rationality,
independence, and self-advocacy. Because liberalism has no particular telos or
goal apart from the personal happiness of the individual, goods, both material and
social, tend to take on an instrumental, almost eschatological quality. (p. 160)
In this post-Enlightenment view the ‘problem of evil’ is transformed,

moving away from the Christian tradition in which it is a problem of
threatened loss of hope, into an intellectual puzzle about the consistency of
the attributes of the Enlightenment God—omniscience, omnipotence,
omni-benevolence—with the evils of the world. The ‘solution’ to this puzzle
is to be found in providing theodicies: ways of showing that God is, in one
way or another, justified in creating a world containing so many evils. Such
theodicies are, Swinton argues, not merely unnecessary, but also conducive
Recent Books 271
to a theology which fosters an immoral picture of God; and in pastoral

practice they will do much more harm than good.
On this last point I believe Swinton to be largely right: though I am left
wondering exactly how he would deal with the many biblical passages which
seem to offer just such ways of justifying God to men. I do think theodicies
are unhelpful in the ways that he describes. But I do not believe that
Enlightenment ideals can be jettisoned en bloc, nor indeed that the project
of ‘faith seeking understanding’ exhibits an un-Christian rationalism which
is contrary to the gospel. This aim of Christian theology long antedates the
Enlightenment. For better or for worse, no doubt, we live in a post-
Enlightenment culture. Consequently, and this is a more important point, I
think that the appeal to evangelical faith, while leaving the Enlightenment
problem quite unaddressed, will seem to us intellectually suspect in a way
which undermines faith and is pastorally at least as unhelpful as full-blown
theodicies. I think it is possible, not indeed to ‘solve’ the problems which are
alleged to make any form of theism unintelligible, but to show that the force
of those genuine difficulties has been considerably exaggerated. If that can
be done, then evangelical faith can be embraced as intellectually honest,
without any need to argue in ways which Swinton would rightly regard as
glib, implicitly immoral, pastorally crass, and potentially damaging.
Gerard J. Hughes SJ
The Many Marks of the Church, edited by William Madges and Michael J.
Daley (New London, Ct: Twenty-Third Publications, 2006). 978
1585955893, pp. 240, £15.99.
Gerard Mannion, Ecclesiology and Postmodernity: Questions for the Church

in Our Time (Collegeville, Mn: Michael Glazier, 2007). 978 0814652237,
pp. 249, £20.99.
Thomas Rausch, Being Catholic in a Culture of Choice (Collegeville, Mn:

Michael Glazier, 2006). 978 0814659847, pp. 144, £11.99.
These three books witness to the vitality of interest in the life of the
Church. More specifically, they indicate that the future of the Roman
Catholic Church, including the vexed issue of ‘Catholic identity’, is
inseparable from the questions and challenges that contemporary culture
addresses to the Church.
272 Recent Books
The Many Marks of the Church takes an innovative approach to a classic

theme of ecclesiology. Conventionally, the ‘marks’ of the Church are
expressed by the four adjectives in the creed: ‘one, holy, catholic and
apostolic’. While addressing those old themes, this book explores other
‘marks’ that are no less valid, even if not included in the creed. What results
is an appealing list of more than thirty such ‘marks’, ranging from
‘ecological’, ‘conciliar’ and ‘nonviolent’ to ‘mystagogical’, ‘humorous’ and
‘immigrant’.
Most of the authors are well known for their contributions to theology,
commentary on ecclesial life, or involvement in pastoral ministry. In the
space of three or four pages, each of them addresses a particular ‘mark’.
While the majority of authors are Catholics, other expressions of ecclesial
life are represented. In addition, the new marks reflect that ‘the Church is
marked by its relationship to Judaism’ and that it is ‘world-embracing’. In
short, the focus is on the Church as ‘dialogical’—indeed, as ‘catholic’!
The results are generally engaging and thought-provoking—what, for
example, are the implications of the internet for monastic solitude? In fact,
each chapter could form the basis for personal reflection on the place of the
Church in the life of faith or serve as an exercise in continuing formation for
parish pastoral councils or similar groups. Taken together, the chapters
highlight what is a common theme of the three books under review: that
the Church is ‘a work-in-progress’; perhaps that too is a ‘mark’ worth some
analysis.
The unfinished nature of the Church is likewise prominent in another
recent book in the field, Gerard Mannion’s Ecclesiology and Postmodernity:
Questions for the Church in Our Time. Mannion’s book deserves a warm
welcome from ecclesiologists, not only for the quality and scope of his
argument, but also for the material in his references, which reflect the
highest levels of scholarship. What is most impressive about Mannion’s
work is his ability to move from a discussion of the primary features of the
postmodern world-view, through a detailed review of trends in ecclesiology,
especially the emphases of papal and curial documents, to suggestions for
forms of ecclesial thought and action that would constitute the Church as a
source of hope in the multi-faith world.
Although the progress of ideas is not always seamless—the material on
the Trinity in chapter eight, for example, could flow more smoothly—the
creativity of Mannion’s approach rewards a close reading. Particularly
impressive is his application to ecclesiology of Alasdair MacIntyre’s ‘virtues’
approach to ethics.
Mannion is committed to an ‘open’ Church, a notion derived from Karl
Rahner’s insistence that the Church must allow itself to be addressed by
Recent Books 273
new questions, rather than retreating behind its battlements. The book is
itself an exemplar of that openness: it promotes the tradition’s engagement
with history, rather than seeking to define the ideal Church. In that same
spirit of openness, Mannion acknowledges that the range of opinions in the
contemporary Church means that not everyone would endorse either his
criticisms or his proposals. Nonetheless, he does not shrink from his
insistence on either the urgency of the issues facing the Church or the need
for creativity rather than ‘business as usual’.
A similar focus on the magnitude of the contemporary challenges
characterizes Thomas Rausch’s Being Catholic in a Culture of Choice. While
Mannion shapes his arguments via the top shelf of theological arguments,
Rausch, himself a professor of theology, combines relevant theological and
sociological literature with a more observational approach—the objects of
his observations being the students of Catholic universities in the USA.
Although this focus means that Rausch’s book will not be entirely relevant
to other cultural contexts, he does address questions that will resonate
beyond the United States.
Rausch’s emphasis is on ‘Catholic identity’, particularly on its
possibilities in a secularised world and a divided Church, in which the
culture that formerly nurtured the ‘Catholic imagination’ has evaporated.
Rausch’s interest in what shapes the worldview of his students is illustrated
well by his chapter on The Da Vinci Code; here, his concern is both to
debunk that book as a credible historical and theological ‘source’, but also
to ponder on the reasons why so many people regard the book as ‘gospel’.
Rausch’s reflections on the state of ‘Catholic identity’ in Catholic
universities in the USA are also worthy of consideration even for readers
unfamiliar with that milieu.
The book avoids a polemic approach to its theme. Indeed, Rausch is
sympathetic to the reasons why young people might find ‘old-fashioned’
apologetics and traditional forms of piety attractive. Nonetheless, he
remains, like Mannion, committed to an ‘open’ Church, which alone can do
justice to the gift and challenge of the Incarnation.
Rausch emphasizes the need for communal experiences to nurture the
‘Catholic imagination’, particularly its appreciation of sacramentality. In this
regard, he appeals for a recovery of ways of praying and acting that fed his
own development in faith, particularly within his family. The difficulty,
however, is that, by Rausch’s own analysis, many aspects of the cultural and
ecclesial landscape that enabled that development no longer exist. What is
worth considering, then, is whether Mannion’s ‘virtues ecclesiology’ might
offer possibilities for a renewed and invigorated Catholic imagination,
274 Recent Books
possibilities that might shape a Church both more united and more able to
address today’s world with the hope of the gospel.
Taken together, these three books indicate a healthy state for
ecclesiology in today’s Catholic Church. They suggest too that the
challenging presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church continues to seek the
creativity of all of the baptized in addressing the questions that the culture
raises for the Church.
Richard Lennan
Dominique Bertrand, Pierre Favre: un portrait (Brussels: Lessius, 2007).

978 2 87299 156 3, pp. 365, €28.00.
Pierre Favre, born in what is now Haute-Savoie, was the first companion of
Ignatius of Loyola at the University of Paris; the first priest ordained from
that early group around Ignatius; and later, as a Jesuit, he was an
indefatigable itinerant worker in the turbulent Europe of the sixteenth
century. His memory has mostly been overshadowed by the more imposing
figures of Ignatius and Francis Xavier. Two modern French Jesuits, both
polymaths, have endeavoured to bring Favre out of obscurity and to
establish him as a person worthy of study in his own right. In 1960 the late
Michel de Certeau published a French translation of Favre’s spiritual
journal (known as the Memoriale), accompanied by a long and brilliant
introduction. In 2007 Dominique Bertrand has contributed an equally
brilliant study or ‘portrait’ of the gentle Savoyard.
Bertrand’s work is not a straightforward biography; for that one may turn
to Mary Purcell’s The Quiet Companion (referred to a number of times by
the author—mostly favourably). Favre’s life (1506–1546) is indeed covered
comprehensively, but it is intricately woven into the political, intellectual
and religious context of the period. Bertrand has a superb grasp of history
and historiography and is committed to what he himself refers to as une
approche rigoureuse. Apart from his Introduction and Conclusion the author
divides his book into two parts, one entitled ‘La force des choses’, the other
‘L’intelligence des choses. Les écrits’. This enables him, as he says, to approach
Favre first ‘from without’ before attempting to approach him ‘from within’.
This distinction is perhaps somewhat porous but it sets up a structure that
serves Bertrand’s thought well.
The second half of the twentieth century saw the rehabilitation of
Erasmus, not only as an orthodox theologian, but as a spiritual writer of
great significance. Erasmus plays an important role in Bertrand’s
Recent Books 275
interpretation of Favre and the first companions of Ignatius. Even before

Favre’s arrival at the University of Paris, Bertrand sees him as absorbing
Erasmian humanism while studying under his admirable teacher, Pierre
Velliard, at La Roche. This background enabled him to adapt readily to the
humanist orientation of the Ste Barbe, the Parisian college where he studied
alongside Ignatius and Francis Xavier. It was this evangelical humanism
which enthused the companions and which they saw as the most effective
response to the teaching of the Reformers, whether it be Luther in Germany
or Calvin in Geneva. Bertrand follows through with this interpretation as
he presents the Deliberation of the First Fathers (1539) and the founding of
the Society of Jesus (1540) as providing the means to put evangelical
humanism at the service of the Church and the world.
In dealing with Favre’s writings Bertrand divides them into: (a)
correspondence that relates in one way or another to mission, (b) the
spiritual journal or Memoriale, and (c) longer letters that equate to minor
(petits) spiritual treatises. Most people who have some knowledge of Pierre
Favre have received it from reading the Memoriale. As an intimate record,
not just of his travels and works, but of the inner movements in his sensitive
soul, it is a privileged resource. Bertrand, however, has examined his other
writings with thoroughness, sensitivity and great profit. He sees the
correspondence related to mission as cementing the companionship of the
founding Fathers of the Society of Jesus, which was now being extended to a
goodly number of new members. He also regards this correspondence as
playing a crucial role in the obedience of Favre for mission, obedience
difficult to live in his itinerant ministry. There is no doubt that the portrait
of Favre that emerges from the Memoriale is filled out and enhanced by the
attention that Bertrand gives to these letters.
Dealing explicitly with the Memoriale Bertrand offers us the shortest of
all his chapters (45 pages). This is surprising even though he has, of course,
quoted from the Memoriale throughout the book. To an extent this chapter
is structured around a debate into which he enters with three previous
writers on the Memoriale: Carlos Plaza, Michel de Certeau (mentioned
above), and this reviewer. He critiques their work and, while acknowledging
its value, seeks to supplement it with insights of his own. These mostly
concern the influence that he detects in Favre of the early monastic and
patristic teaching on discernment (especially on the ‘three kinds of
thoughts’ that appear in Spiritual Exercises, p.32). He argues that this
influence was not sufficiently recognised by the earlier authors. This
chapter is dense and challenging, becoming in itself, not just an elucidation
of the Memoriale, but an essay on Ignatian discernment—le sens de Dieu en
toutes choses.
276 Recent Books
The final chapter, on what Bertrand calls Favre’s minor spiritual

treatises, has a totally different format from the earlier ones. He chooses ten
of the twelve extant treatises and presents them in full in French
translation. Each is preceded by a relatively brief introduction that situates
it in its context and alerts us to the importance of the teaching it contains.
The topics with which Favre deals, and the recipients of his wisdom, vary
widely. They range chronologically from the rule of life that he left to a
confraternity that he had revived in Parma (1540) to his response to the
request from Diego Laínez for advice on how to deal with heretics in
northern Europe (1546). These writings, therefore, span the whole period of
Favre’s apostolic ministry. What gives them a unity, as Bertrand felicitously
suggests, is that they are all a propaedeutic to the Spiritual Exercises, and
come close to the genre of spiritual direction.
This thorough, learned and empathetic portrait of Pierre Favre may well
become a classic in the study of spirituality.
Brian O’Leary SJ
Dániel Deme, The Selected Works of Isaac of Stella: A Cistercian Voice

from the Twelfth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 978 0 7546 5366 0,
pp. 240, £50.00
This is a new translation of two letters and twenty-five sermons by an early

Cistercian abbot, Isaac of Stella. Isaac of Stella is less well known than his
contemporaries Bernard of Clairvaux, William of St Thierry and Aelred of
Rievaulx, but he belongs to a similar context and shares much of their
remarkable spiritual programme. Born in England, he went as a young cleric
to study in France, where he came into contact with the new learning of the
schools of St Victor in Paris and of Chartres. The speculative approach of
the schools, to themes of the soul and the order of the cosmos (microcosm
and macrocosm) suffuses his work. But in 1140, aged about thirty, he left
behind academic success and ecclesiastical advancement to become a
Cistercian, probably swept up by Bernard of Clairvaux’s preaching. It is as
abbot of Stella, near Poitiers, that he wrote the sermons and letters
collected here. His concerns are for the moral and spiritual growth of his
monks, for their renewal in the patterns of Christ-like love and
contemplation of God. Isaac remained abbot until his death in about 1178,
with a brief period of exile apparently brought about by his support for the
pro-Becket party in Thomas Becket’s deadly dispute with Henry II of
England over the rights of the Church.
Recent Books 277
Isaac’s thought belongs to the common early Cistercian vision of

reformed monasticism, centred on the spiritual renewal of individuals
through a shared interior journey to God. The monk begins by ‘going
within’, to find the divine pattern of the cosmos reflected in the ‘image of
God’ in the soul. The discovery of the ‘image of God’ within is an affective
enkindling of desire for God, like that of the prodigal who finds himself in a
far country and longs for home (Sermon 2.13). The journey to God is
through increasing self-knowledge in this image, in a growing discernment
of the source of one’s whole being in God and a focusing of desire on God.
In a typically Cistercian way, Isaac maps out the journey as an anthropology,
a set of steps through the soul, through different kinds of knowledge and
love. He is unusual, though, in the detail that he gives to the
epistemological steps of the journey, making careful distinctions between
the operations of the various faculties, such as the bodily senses, the fantasy
and reason, and how they help us to rise to God. Christ, who is first met as
the moral teacher and judge calling us to repentance, is finally discovered as
the one who, by the gift of the Holy Spirit, unites the soul with God and is
present in all things as ‘the whole Christ’.
One can only stand in awe at the ambition of Isaac’s spiritual teaching,
as it seeks to bring together the sharp end of twelfth-century speculation, on
the soul, the cosmos and God, with a spare monastic focus on inner growth
and neighbourly virtue. The thought-world is alien and hard to penetrate at
times, but the endeavour still has much to teach us. Isaac draws in the huge
themes of the cosmos, psychology, knowledge, the Church and spiritual
growth, and does so with erudition and rigour. Such a programme is
practically unthinkable today, when these spheres have split apart and are
treated in separate disciplines and places. Can we follow where great
teachers like Isaac have led, to find a vision of all things—not a vision of
‘mission statements’ and policy documents, but a vision ‘possessing its
possessor easily and joyously’, as Isaac says (Sermon 3.5)? The value of his
teaching lies in his attempt to integrate what we know of the world and of
ourselves with the kind of joyful knowledge and love that can possess us.
The purpose of this collection of Isaac of Stella’s writings is not quite clear.
Only 10 of the 25 sermons and one of the two letters are previously
unavailable in English translation, and no reasons are given for translating
these particular texts or for providing new translations of the others. The two
introductions, to ‘Isaac of Stella in Context’ by Bernard McGinn (the premier
scholar of Isaac), and to Isaac’s theology, by the editor and translator Dániel
Deme, are excellent, however, giving just the necessary orientation to make
the writings comprehensible and interesting. Some of the editorial tasks seem
to have been neglected: there is no list of the abbreviations used in the
278 Recent Books
footnotes, so they are hard to decipher; the footnotes in the introductions cite
translations of Isaac’s works other than the ones given in the book itself,
making them difficult to look up; there are mistakes in the cross-referencing,
and too many minor typographical errors in the main text. But given that
Isaac of Stella is not well known and deserves to be, another edition is
welcome. This is a good selection with fine introductions, which enlarges
one’s sense of the riches of the Christian spiritual tradition.
Edward Howells
Preaching Justice: Dominican Contributions to Social Ethics in the

Twentieth Century, edited by Francesco Compagnoni and Helen Alford
(Dublin: Dominican Publications, 2007). 9 781905 604067, pp. 512,
€30.00
The scope of this book can only be described as monumental. The main
objective was to draw together a collection of studies on important
Dominican thinkers in the field of social ethics and Catholic social teaching
from a wide range of geographical and cultural contexts. By presenting the
figures as far as possible in a chronological way, it enables the reader to track
how their thinking changes through the twentieth century. Each author was
asked to document and to synthesize the different contributions, but they
have employed a multiplicity of literary styles within the framework that
they were given. This variety gives a lighter feel to the book than would
have been the case if they had all kept to the same style.
Some of the chapters contain biographies which are only a few lines
long; others weave together the biographical details and the intellectual
journey by which these friars developed their ideas. They are all friars; the
contribution of Dominican sisters will be the subject of another book. The
intention had been to include all the important Dominican thinkers.
Unfortunately, the contributions on M.-D. Chenu, the French worker
priests and Thomas Joseph Delos never arrived. Although the editors give a
brief presentation of these friars in the ‘Introduction’, the gap is an
unfortunate one, given the significance of their contributions.
This collection has both clarity and insight. The character of Dominican
spirituality comes across plainly in the descriptions and syntheses of the
lives of these friars. There is, as one would expect, a passion for the truth,
but also a marked spirituality of mercy which carries with it a yearning for
social change. This is embodied in the passage from compassion towards the
struggle in solidarity. There is an optimism based not only on a Thomistic
Recent Books 279
vision, which sees the human person called to ever greater happiness
according to the plan of God, but also on the conviction that the gospel is a
revolutionary force that can help all Christians to engage and to be effective
actors for change.
Being Dominicans, it is not just, or even principally, about the
generation of ideas. It is above all about the communication of those ideas.
There is a deep relationship between the Dominican vocation to preach
and a passion for justice, because the preached word does not merely
communicate an abstract truth; it can refashion lives and societies. So we
read of the creation of educational and social structures which would enable
these ideas to be implemented and refined.
The risk for a book of historical essays is that one goes to it simply in order
to understand the past better and so see more clearly why the present is the
way it is. For that purpose, this book is very good. However, it is much more
than that. Many, if not all, of the issues facing these Dominicans are still
with us: war and peace, economics, development, the human person and so
on. Often the thinking of these men was ahead of its time so that their
analyses, if not always their detailed proposals, continue to have relevance
for the future. The elements in the patrimony of Dominican thinking
presented here which seem particularly relevant for today include
reflections on the universal destination of goods, on natural rights, on the
common good and on truth in general. The constant reference to the truth
in the Dominican tradition, even if it is something attained only with the
greatest difficulty, is a clear option for philosophical realism. On a social
level this is transformed into the possibility of giving social change a
direction and of standing up for real justice. The traditional values of
Dominican social thought can orientate multiculturalism towards a
common good, while respecting the freedom and dignity of the person and
the rightful autonomy of modern methods for discovering the truth in
various fields of research and practical action.
It is likely that only a reviewer will read the book straight through. What
might be missed by a selective dipping into the chapters is the extraordinary
cross-fertilisation of ideas and influences that these friars provided. One
example is Louis Joseph Lebret and his work on economic humanism. His
foundational work was in Europe, but he then went to Latin America and
eventually to Africa and Asia. In these places, as other chapters make clear,
his influence on what became Liberation Theology was immense. He was
called on as an expert advisor to the Second Vatican Council, in particular
to Dom Helder Camera. He participated in the drafting of texts including
Gaudium et spes. He also provided the foundation for Populorum progressio,
including writing the first draft, and is quoted directly in the final version
280 Recent Books
(n.14). Another particular example of influence is the important debt owed

to Dominicans for the emergence of the discipline of bioethics.
Social ethics in the Roman Catholic tradition is broader and deeper
than just official Catholic social teaching. Until comparatively recently, the
term ‘Magisterium’ was one which included theologians and teachers.
Reading this book one can see why.
Catherine Cowley RA
Roderick Strange, John Henry Newman: A Mind Alive (London: Darton,

Longman and Todd, 2008). 978 0232527230, pp. 264, £10.95.
Roderick Strange has been reading Newman for a long time. This book—
coming in the run-up to the theologian’s beatification—sets out to sketch
Newman’s thought and life, and to show his influence on the author
himself. It is drawn in part from previous talks or notes, which can make it
rather repetitive, but it is readable all the same. There are some good
chapters: on Providence, on The Dream of Gerontius, and also a strong one
on Newman’s preaching. Other chapters leave one slightly dissatisfied: the
whole chapter on infallibility passes without a quotation from Newman’s
famous defence of the doctrine in his Apologia pro vita sua; and on the laity,
Newman’s important emphasis on ‘consulting’ the faithful needs to be
balanced by his fear that Catholicism itself was subject to secularisation
(‘those flocks may be in great danger . . . under the influence of the
prevailing epidemic’). The book is—intentionally—very personal, and
includes many references to Strange’s life and experience. Those with an
interest in both the author and his subject will find it an enjoyable read.
Lewis Berry Cong. Orat.

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THE WAY

a review of Christian spirituality published by the British Jesuits

Jan/April 2008 Volume 47, Numbers 1 and 2

What Is Specific to an Ignatian Model of Spiritual 9–28

The Beatitudes and ‘Poverty of Spirit’ in the Ignatian 29–46

On Poverty with Christ Poor 47–66

Ignatian Spirituality as a Spirituality of Incarnation 67–80

Recommendations for Giving the First Week of the 81–96

Ignatius’ Meditations on Sin: From Guilt to Gratitude 97–113

Saved, Called and Commissioned 115–124

The Discernment of Spirits: When Do the Second Week 125–142

Discerning Joy: The Ignatian Way 143–153

Spiritual Accompaniment and Discernment 155–164

An Ignatian Way of Preaching the Gospel 165–174

The Clearness Process: A Way Opens 175–184

The Spiritual Exercises as Biography 185–199

The Spiritual Exercises and Sexuality 201–210

‘What I Ought to Say to the Eternal Word’: The Four 210–224

The Cardoner Imperative 243–259

Richard Lennan on the Church today

The Way is an international journal of contemporary Christian spirituality, published quarterly

T HE SUBTITLE OF THE WAY is ‘a review of Christian spirituality

The Way, 47/1–2 (Jan/April 2008), 7–8

T HE MOTTO OF SPIRITUAL DIRECTORS INTERNATIONAL is ‘Tending

The Way, 47/1–2 (Jan/April 2008), 9–28

A Contemporary Model of Spiritual Direction

relationship, to be the place where it is experienced (at least at times) in

Spiritual Direction and Theology

of self-described Christians prefer to pursue their spiritual journey on

And theology is not just a prerequisite in the spiritual director. The

The Relationship between Director and Directee

In the Spiritual Exercises, when seeking the Divine Will, it is more

At other times, however, the appropriate response may be confrontation:

A person may not always welcome such a challenge. If the relationship

In ongoing spiritual direction a similar, but adapted, set of

Flexibility in the Director

The Spiritual Exercises have to be adapted to the dispositions of the

Such flexibility is not confined to initial decisions about what a

flexibility is integral to the giving of the Exercises, and it is readily

Theological, Cultural and Other Differences

Ignatius is saying that without a genuine openness and a willingness to

Though often referred to in the Directories in master-disciple terms,

Of course, Ignatius could not foresee all the complexities of today’s

© Jesuit Retreat House, Cleveland, Oh

Different backgrounds: Men’s Homeless Retreat Programme, Cleveland, Ohio

Rules For Discernment 23

Rules for perceiving and knowing in some manner the different

Spirituality and Psychology

God, but on the directee’s psychological integration. The prophetic

The situation is different when the directee is already living out of

A RETREATANT ENTERING THE SECOND WEEK of Ignatius’ Spiritual

The same triple colloquy is to be repeated in the meditation on the

The Way, 47/1–2 (Jan/April 2008), 29–46

The Ignatian Petition

Jesus Preaching, by Rembrandt

Christian—the situation envisaged in the Lucan beatitude. The

recognising one’s creaturely dependence upon God and imitating

The tendency of the Second Week … to see humility as the central

… in cases where poverty and lack of personal honour seem not to

these questions here. What I should like to do is to turn to the biblical

… a future salvific state is indicated, but the possession of this hope

because one knows the outcome. Consequently, one is rightly

It is important to keep this distinction between two forms of

The Lucan Beatitudes