I knew about the cannonball, and I knew about his reading the lives of the saints. I knew there were some ecstatic visions. I knew that at some point he wrote the Exercises, found some companions and went to the Holy Land (though I had no clear idea of the order for these events). I even knew he once seriously considered stabbing a Muslim man who he felt might have insulted Mary.
That’s about it, as far as Ignatius of Loyola goes. Which, to be fair, is more than I know about the lives of most saints. But still, I felt as the Jesuit Media Lab fellow it was probably time to get to know him a bit more intimately. On various retreats over the years, I’ve gone through a few of the Spiritual Exercises, but never the whole thing. I know they are best done with a guide, so I’m (hopefully) going to work my way up to that.
Somewhere along the line I picked up a copy of the Classics of Western Spirituality volume on Ignatius of Loyola, so I pulled that off the shelf and was pleasantly surprised to see that his autobiography was only about 45 pages; I decided to start there. I’m not always a “read the scholarly introduction” first kind of reader — I’ve had too many books spoiled by an academic who assumes you’re approaching the classic text already knowing what happens — but I read this one (by George E. Ganss, SJ) because I wasn’t particularly worried about the book being spoiled, and I knew there must be a great deal of scholarship on a foundational text like this. I figured getting a crash course in it would be a good thing.
I’m glad I started there, since I definitely needed the editor’s guidance to help me recognize the significance of a few moments in the text. For instance, Ganss draws our attention to a moment where, at “a small wayside chapel at La Storta on the outskirts of Rome Ignatius was favored with a mystical vision. It was an experience as important for this period of his life as was that beside the Cardoner at Manresa.” I had heard, vaguely, of his spiritual experiences at Manresa, but not of La Storta, and I had no idea that this “vision at La Storta had a profound and confirming effect on the foundation of the Society and the shape it took. … the ideas [that sprang from this vision] would later be expressed at the very beginning of the Formula of the Institute of the new Society.”
In the “Autobiography” itself (which was narrated by Ignatius to his secretary and is related in the third person), this foundational vision gets exactly one line: “One day, a few miles before reaching Rome, he was at prayer in a church and experienced such a change in his soul and saw so clearly that God the Father placed him with Christ his Son that he would not dare doubt it — that God the Father had placed him with his Son.”
Without the editor’s guidance I would likely have moved past this moment without even noting it, and I definitely would not have recognized its significance in Ignatius’ life, or in the foundation of the Jesuit order. Life is often like this — we don’t always know what truly matters. And when we do have these incredible, life-changing moments, we cannot adequately capture them in words.
Throughout the “Autobiography,” Ignatius relates a few seminal experiences (the cannonball moment and its aftermath, this vision, and the one at Manresa[1]) but much of his life story, at least as he tells it here, is full of organizational and bureaucratic details. I went into the text expecting to read about “finding God in all things,” but instead the emphasis is on how he gets from one place to another, where his funding comes from, what and where he studies, who helped him, and who alerted the Inquisition to his work. Logistics play a much larger role in the “Autobiography” than I expected!
But perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. By the end of his life, when he’s relating all of this to his secretary, he’s been superior of the Society for many years. Anyone who has spent time in a position of authority knows that focusing on these kinds of details is foundational for a functional administration. And in a very real way, for Ignatius, his life story — or at least this version of it — is about what happened, not what it meant to him.
There are a few places, though, where he does emphasize the more personal dimension. One anecdote that stood out to me was his evocative description of walking to Bologna along a path above a river, which “became ever more narrow the farther he went along it. It got so narrow that he could no longer go forward or turn back. So he began to crawl along and in this way, he covered a great distance in great fear, because each time he moved he thought he would fall into the river. This was the greatest physical stress and strain that he ever experienced, but he finally got through.”
This was wild to me, since the “Autobiography” starts with him getting his leg completely shattered by a cannonball, and then having it rebroken and reset, and then — not liking how it looked after it healed — having part of the bone cut away so it wouldn’t look quite so bad. Personally, each step of this experience sounds much worse than crawling along a narrow path above a river!
I honestly don’t know if this is meant to be a metaphor of sorts — for the unexpected obstacles on the journey and the need to persevere through great trials — or if it’s just a personal experience that stuck in his mind in ways that don’t fully translate to someone else (akin, in some ways, to his mystical experiences). But I do know that, probably for the rest of my life, any time I’m out hiking along a path above a river I will think of Ignatius crawling along in great fear, and it’s never a bad thing to be able to align one’s experiences with those of a saint.
One other place in the text where I know his experiences will inform my own, in very practical ways, is the way he writes about the temptation to distraction. There are two times when he writes about how, when he’s supposed to be hard at work in his studies, he finds himself having profound spiritual insights. He wants to stop studying so he can focus on them — which makes sense, since he’s dedicating his life to God, and gaining these sorts of spiritual insights into God’s ways would seem to be the most important thing in the world.
Ignatius, and the many saints from the early days of the Jesuit order, come down to us, at this point, as mythic heroes of the past. But actually reading his words helped me to see him, and his friends, as a very small group of relatively normal people going about their lives, trying earnestly to do God’s will as they understood it.
The first is early on in his studies: “When he started memorizing, as one needs to do in the beginnings of grammar, there came to him new insights into spiritual matters and fresh delights, to such an extent that he could not memorize, nor could he drive them away no matter how much he resisted. So, thinking often about this, he said to himself, ‘Not even when I engage in prayer and am at Mass do such vivid insights come to me.’”
But the next line is “little by little, he came to realize that this was a temptation.” He needs to progress in his studies so that he can be qualified to teach others. He is not dedicating himself to God for his own personal fame or salvation; he is doing it for God’s glory, and to help others, and he needs to finish his schooling in order to accomplish what he has set out to do. So he makes a vow to his school master: “saying: ‘I promise you never to fail to listen to you these two years, so long as I can find bread and water in Barcelona with which I might support myself.’ As he made this promise with great determination, he never again had those temptations.”
But this isn’t entirely accurate, since 12 pages (and a few years and schools) later, he tells us:
“As he began attending the lectures of the course, the same temptations began to come to him that had come when he studied grammar in Barcelona. Whenever he was at a lecture, he could not pay attention because of the many spiritual thoughts that came to him. Realizing that in this way he made little progress in study, he went to his master and promised he would never fail to follow the whole course, so long as he could find bread and water for his sustenance. After making this promise, all that devotion which came to him out of time left him, and he went on quietly with his studies.”
I cannot claim to be easily distracted by profound spiritual insights, but I do know what it feels like to have one project in front of me and to feel the pull of inspiration for something new and different (and surely better!) than what I’m supposed to be working on. Ignatius’ experience here resonated with me because it reminds me to do the thing in front of me, and to not get distracted by the next exciting thing. Accomplishing anything of true worth takes commitment, discipline and a proper orientation toward what ultimately matters.
This work is still ongoing, 500 years later, and we too are able to participate in it, and do our own part for the Glory of God.
The final thing that reading the “Autobiography” reinforced for me is the truth of the famous Margaret Mead quote: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Ignatius, and the many saints from the early days of the Jesuit order, come down to us, at this point, as mythic heroes of the past. But actually reading his words helped me to see him, and his friends, as a very small group of relatively normal people going about their lives, trying earnestly to do God’s will as they understood it. I didn’t recognize the names of most of the people in this book; Ignatius provides the names of many of his early followers and friends and his supporters, both in the Church and in the governments of the various countries in which he lived and worked, and although they were unfamiliar to me, it’s clear they all played their part in getting this important work off the ground.
This work is still ongoing, 500 years later, and we too are able to participate in it, and do our own part for the Glory of God.
I find this both humbling and encouraging. At this very moment, our world clearly needs powerful witnesses who will speak out against injustice and who will work to spread God’s mercy and grace. The scale of the problems right now feels, frankly, overwhelming. But I find some solace in thinking about how a small group of people, dedicated to doing God’s will, were able to set the world on fire. May we, too, with God’s grace (and Ignatius’ intercession) persevere through all difficulties and commit ourselves to the work in front us.
[1] This vision is not described in much more detail than the La Storta one, though he does emphasize for us how much it matters to him: “The details that he understood then, though there were many, cannot be stated, but only that he experienced a great clarity in his understanding. This was such that in the whole course of his life, after completing sixty-two years, even if he gathered up all the various helps he may have had from God and all the various things he has known, even adding them all together, he does not think he had got as much as at that one time.”