THE WAY OF IGNAZIO DI LOYOLA
A spiritual portrait of "dialectical oppositions"

Maurice Giuliani from "La Civiltà Cattolica": Quaderno 4045 - pag. 71 - 83 - Year 2019 - Volume I

Ignazio was born in 1491:
Spain, still with a chivalrous mentality, is completing the "reconquest" of her territories and at the same time ensuring her unity and the triumph of her faith; the kings (and Christopher Columbus himself) consider themselves invested with a divine mission.

He dies in 1556,
in the full thrust of a Renaissance that managed to impose a new conception of man and his relationship with God.

Between these two dates, there is the slow evolution of a person who progressively discovers towards which form of life he is "gently" led: he has a strength, coming from above, which makes him pass from the service of a king to the service of God , from Jerusalem to Rome, from particular interests to universal tasks.

Ignatius himself reveals the secret of this inner strength: the name of "Jesus Savior of men", expressed with the three letters IHS.

Ignatius's personality is made up of contrasts, the unity of which is achieved thanks to the balance of action.

Rigor of reason and taste for "great things";

firmness and tenderness; "Fixed and immutable determination like a vigorously driven nail" ed

extreme flexibility in front of situations and people;

gaze always directed towards what is most universal, e

almost scrupulous passion for the apparently lowest detail.

The Jesuit theologian Hugo Rahner affirmed that "we can never speak correctly of Ignatius except through dialectical oppositions" [1].

Trust in the present time

However, some more important traits seem to impose themselves which mark the unity of Ignatius's life.

They contain a message that our time is particularly capable of understanding.

After his conversion, during the long months of convalescence [2] in the paternal house of Loyola, Ignatius discovers "the diversity of the spirits that agitate him".

He seeks its meaning and draws conclusions for the reform of his life and, above all, for the definitive commitment to the service of God alone. Then he gradually learns not only to practice the virtues, but also "the discernment to regulate and measure them".

Considering events, situations and people, he is increasingly sensitive to "circumstances", that is to everything that explains the birth of freedoms, their evolutions, their conflicts, and at the same time he perceives, in the reaction of his whole being, the fidelity to which he is called.

Ignatius's gaze continually internalizes the event that he experiences: in what way, under what "spirit", with what alternations did the events take place?

When, in 1539, he wanted to give a title to the document that accounts for the common research which led to the decision of the first group of companions gathered around him to take the vow of obedience and thus to seal the birth of a new religious Order, Ignatius uses a word that is customary to him: "the way the Society was established".

The important thing is not that the Company is founded, but that it was founded in such a way that we can now be sure that it is an authentic fruit of the Spirit.

It is, so to speak, a second reading of the event, to recognize its stability and now be able to trust it in all its consequences.

The importance of the "way" is evident above all in the fragments of his Diary that we have left.

Ignatius never tried to write a "spiritual diary"; however, he wants, every day and almost every hour, to notice the "motions" that agitate him, in one sense or another, until he discovers with certainty how God leads him.

He continually tries to recognize the "motion", up to that lowest and not very visible motion that prepares the clearer or more complex one.

This refinement of analysis certainly involves a limit, and Ignatius at times lets himself be drawn into a search that seems obsessive.

This too is a trait of his temperament, led towards the interiority of everything, and towards silence, more than towards expression.

But this is the secret of his strength: where the action of the Spirit has been recognized, human action can be carried out with certainty and, according to a formula that the Saint often uses, he "would not have the audacity to doubt it" .

To facilitate clear and stable decisions, welcoming the grace of God that works in the heart of man, Ignatius proposes his Exercises. The word does not belong to him: he borrows it from a spiritual tradition that goes back to the origins of monasticism, to the Fathers of the desert and to Greek culture; but the pedagogy that gives value to the exercise belongs completely to him.

The exercise, clearly free during the day, determines a beginning and an end; it makes appear, gradually and more and more, the way in which the conscience is moved, agitated, oriented; it creates the inner time, generator of motions, cycles, alternations.

The external time, which supports the exercise, certainly continues to exist, but opens to the time of consciousness which, through a progressive internalization, allows us to bring to light what was darkness, to formulate the unspoken, to welcome forces. strangers who build a new being.

With the exercise, the inner times appear in their succession, in their insistence, in their alternation.

Each moment is situated in a story, which is made up of "passages" from one spiritual situation to another, from a "consolation" to a "desolation" or, on the contrary, from a certainty that is born, vanishes and is reborn into a certainty that in the end it imposes itself and opens itself to a decision completely fixed "in God".

Exercise leads to a fullness of life, because, with the accepted and recognized experience of these interior movements and their alternations, everything becomes unified and becomes strength.

Thus Ignatius comes very close to the movement that crosses his time.

The Renaissance brought about a revolution, introducing time into domestic life itself, and multiplying the technical means to measure it, putting them at the service of sailors, with devices that made them more independent from the stars.

Ignatius applies this revolution to man's listening to God.

In fact, his reference is not the monastic succession of canonical hours, which marked the rhythm of nature and the cosmos, but the succession of interior moments in the history of a conscience.

The way of exercise not only does not distance you from concrete and immediate existence, but supposes that you enter it completely, with an ardent confidence in the present time that is to be received and lived.

This confidence in the present time is one of the clearest forces in Ignatius's temperament.

He "looks" at the world and men with attention, usually in silence, without judging, but trying to go beyond what is said and what appears.

Mirar is the Spanish word that Ignatius uses by preference.

Look at the present, and in the present perceive the possible future:

to look, but with the nuance that the etymology of the word suggests and that fills the eye with a controlled "admiration".

For him, looking is perceiving what is presented, but it is also reflecting, evaluating, letting oneself be questioned; it is, even more, to pray.

The word returns above all when it comes to preparing for a decision, to evaluate the pros and cons, to discern the times and the "steps" that we have indicated.

Looking at reality without fear, but also without illusion:

look at him as God does, but also, and at the same time, as men look at him.

This is why Ignatius is fully open to life and the adaptations it imposes.

In the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus (Const), he continually repeats that it is more "convenient", more "useful", more "appropriate" to do one thing, unless circumstances lead to prefer another thing:

the decision remains open to accept every urgency and every new appeal, on condition that the heart is free from every "disorder" and every "attachment" that does not have God's exclusive love as its rule and measure.

This full openness to life is marked, in Ignatius, by an experience that gives it extraordinary depth:

the experience of death.

In Loyola, while doctors and surgeons treat his wounds, Ignatius, as he will later confide, found himself very close to that moment when he "could be considered dead."

He also tells how several times, during a storm or during a "very serious illness", he was on the verge of dying.

«In that moment - he recalls -, thinking of death, he felt so much joy and so much spiritual consolation for the fact of having to die that he melted into tears.

And this was repeated so frequently that he often gave up thinking about death, so as not to feel that consolation so abundantly "(Autobiography [A], n. 33).

Death is not an experience of rupture or a shadow cast on daily existence, but a light that illuminates the present moment and helps to give it a kind of absolute.

"To consider, as if I were on the day of judgment, the way of proceeding and the norm that I would then like to have followed in the way of making the present election" (Spiritual Exercises [ES], n. 187).

Let's examine each of these words well:

"Way to proceed",

"Norm",

"Manner".

At this level of truth, death is the companion of life, as the creator of the movement with which freedom is committed within the human choices to be made or confirmed.

We are therefore not surprised that, in the gaze that Ignatius turns to events and people, there is a welcome and at the same time a distance, a communion and a detachment at the same time.

He is present, but he is far away.

When he speaks, it is not certain that he has said everything, nor that he has said the essential.

Sometimes he looks for the word to write; he finds it, but immediately deletes it.

He knows he is being listened to, but in what he says there is always the unspoken, which will give rise to another discourse, and which already, at the very moment, arouses in those who listen to him the feeling that "the Father" is out. scope.

The experience of death is then continuous.

Not physical death; or rather this physical death, but insofar as it is already present in its permanent sign which is "mortification":

- rejection of everything that, in order, is still disorder;

- mastery of all the senses;

- constantly renewed offer for the "more" which ensures the continuation of the momentum towards the best.

Ignatius lives by this "continuous mortification", which must be practiced "in all possible things", to the point of "loving God in all creatures and loving all creatures in God", "moving away from oneself, as far as possible, the love of all created things to put it in their Creator "(Const. 288).

It is this gesture of "distancing" that gives Ignatius his true physiognomy:

love for God does not diminish love for created things, but purifies it from all human satisfaction, but purifies it from all human satisfaction;

death makes life appear continuously, in every decision, in every gift of self, in every word as in every silence.

Unity

God and creatures: will the heart thus remain divided between two calls, between two loves?

Ignatius's response is dazzling: God alone, but all things in God.

Love for God does not admit any compromise, but does not abolish "other things on the face of the earth":

integrates them into the movement of love that comes from God and returns to God.

This is the attitude - writes Ignatius - of those who "are not divided, and keep their eyes fixed on the sky", at the very moment in which they are engaged in human works that require all their strength.

"It is our duty towards him who is our ultimate goal and supreme and infinite goodness, to address all our love to him alone and to love him in all creatures" [3].

The essential message that Ignatius addresses to our time is perhaps found in the union between "creatures" and "he alone".

"Creatures" are the whole created universe, in its complexity and in its power of seduction; but "he alone" is an absolute, who "does not accept that we rob him of part of ourselves" [4].

We know that this is the path followed by Ignatius in the course of his life. Father Gerolamo Nadal, a close collaborator and companion of the Saint, gave testimony to us with a formula which, although not by Ignatius, definitely expresses his ideal:

"In all things, actions and conversations, he experienced and contemplated the presence of God, and had a refined sensitivity to spiritual realities, being a contemplative in his own action.

[simul in actione contemplativus].

His favorite way of expressing this was: one must find God in all things about him "[5].

But this spiritual life was evidently the expression of a temperament.

Ignatius, who was inclined to extremes, could not love God except absolutely, but was inclined towards "great things", towards "conversation" with people, towards relationships with others (which he calls tratar).

It was confirmed in this way by the experience he had in Manresa, when he was still looking for his own inner journey, after many months of prayer and suffering.

We read in his Autobiography, dictated to Luís Gonçalves da Câmara [6]:

«And while he was walking so absorbed in his devotions, he sat down for a while with his face turned to the stream that flowed below.

As he sat, his mind's eyes began to open:

it is not that he had a vision, but he understood and knew many things, both spiritual things and those concerning faith and letters, and this with such great illumination that all things appeared to him as new "(A 30).

A marginal note, added later by p. Louis Gonçalves, states that he "seemed to him to be like another man and to have another intellect, different from the one he had before him".

The light that then opens his eyes produces various effects, on which the testimony of Ignatius and those of his family members return in a significant way.

First of all, it allows him to unify his previous experiences. The "great will to go forward in the service of God" is no longer blind: Ignatius abandons the "excesses" he did before him;

instead of being frightened by the "alternations" through which he must pass, he makes them a path of openness to the Spirit who acts in him.

All the variety of past events is being transported into a new current.

This enlightenment transforms a man who is passionate about God, but violent and lost, into a "modest and humble" servant.

Nadal, who is very close to him, says: «Since then I don't know what alacrity and what light has started to shine in his face. Since then he has acquired a remarkable experience of spiritual things and the discernment of spirits, an habitual familiarity with God, with Christ, with the Virgin Mary and the saints ”.

Nadal expresses even more insistently a second effect of the grace received that day:

"In this light, he understood and contemplated the mysteries of faith and spiritual things, as well as those relating to the sciences (ciencias), and the truth of everything seemed presented to him as new and clearly understood."

The light received extends to all human knowledge, in a vision that Nadal defines with a strange but suggestive term:

"As if he had then received everything from the Lord, in a kind of architectural spirit of wisdom."

This vision that constructs and organizes the world starting from causes is similar to that which Ignatius places in the "Principle and Foundation" of the Exercises:

knowledge of things in their source, in their origin, in their exact value, with a faith that recognizes the divine order in every human reality.

Finally, it is from here that Ignatius resolutely begins "to communicate the things of the Lord to his neighbor [...] as he received them from God".

This, not because of a more or less abrupt decision, but "finding by experience that, when he communicated to his neighbor the things that God gave him, they did not diminish in him, but grew even more".

Fundamental discovery.

The "apostolic" vocation of Ignatius imposes itself on him with the very strength of an interior thrust that has in itself the proof of him:

communicating "the things of God" to one's neighbor means opening oneself even more to God himself.

Ignatius has now found what he is.

He is a man of action, whose strong dynamism is firmly unified by the fact that love and works are one: love manifests itself through works, and works incessantly arouse a purification that increases the love.

In this regard, Nadal speaks of a "circle" between action and prayer. Ignatius says more simply, with a beautiful word that is now devalued but to which we can restore his value, that "he always grew in devotion" or, as he explains, in the "ease of finding God".

Human action is no longer an obstacle, but has become the means to progress in fidelity to the Spirit of God, which leads every moment to a precise choice, which is inseparably the choice to be made according to God and which takes into account the whole human situation. .

First we tried to distinguish, in Ignatius's gaze, a welcome but a distance, a communion but a detachment.

Now we must add that this is the fruit of a double depth.

Every "created thing" is grasped at the same time in itself and in its cause, in its full immediate truth and in the divine strength that its being confers on it.

After the illumination of Manresa and the awareness that it provoked in him, Ignatius thus grasps with a single glance the God who is the source of all good and the world that comes out of his creative hands.

Over the years, he progresses in this unifying vision, contemplating "how all our eternal good is in all created things".

The same experience of faith makes him love God, radically and uniquely, and at the same time, that is, with the same love, the world in which the glory of God is present and acts.

Of the grace received from Ignatius to "find God in all things", Nadal says: "We felt I do not know what flow of this grace spread to us".

It is true that the Society founded by Ignatius carries within itself, even in its fundamental structure, the sign of this grace;

the work to be carried out at the service of men in it is seen directly as the end that is proposed to us, and it is this same work that ensures the "glory of God".

But, much more widely, Ignatius has opened a spiritual path in which not only every Christian can commit himself, but every man who has within himself the desire to make sense of the world in which he lives, without risking to take away his truth from him.

The Church, the universal

Nadal himself adds that Ignatius received in Manresa "a great knowledge and very lively feelings of the divine mysteries and of the Church".

Hugo Rahner emphasized Ignatius’s transfiguration in his behavior:

«Iñigo, therefore, from a purely interior man becomes an apostolic man. [...]

The imitation of Jesus [...] is transformed into a "following" of Christ present in the militant Church.

The Kingdom of Christ is the Church, in which all the other mysteries are gathered "[7].

Christ becomes for him "the living and active King, who has not yet completed the mission entrusted to him by the Father to conquer the whole world".

But even though he then received a better understanding of the mystery of the Church, Ignatius does not discover the reality of the Church.

He has known her, so to speak, forever.

For his birth, for his education, for the convictions that are expressed in his social and political environment, Ignatius belongs to the Church, Catholic and Roman, established in an institutional way.

He does not question its hierarchical character, with the obedience that derives from it, nor the temporal power it exercises in front of kings and princes, often in competition with them.

He can affirm without contradicting himself that every choice of life or state is placed "within the limits approved by the Church".

Why did Ignatius and his companions, on the occasion of the vows of Montmartre in 1534, decide to defer to the Pope to decide on their apostolic mission, in the event that events prevent them from carrying out their projects?

No document informs us precisely about the reasons for this appeal to the Pope's authority, all the more surprising in those years in which the papacy, compromised in many deceptions and scandals and still weakened by the recent sack of Rome, did not enjoy great credit.

But we know that in 1538, when Ignatius and his companions, in order to fulfill the vows pronounced in Montmartre, actually made the "oblation" of themselves to the Pope, they clearly indicate the reason behind them:

the Pope is "the master of all the harvest of Christ",

and it is he who has "the best knowledge of what is appropriate for the Christian universe"

The "universe":

this is the decisive word.

Ignatius, in his faith, reaches God's plan, who wants "to save the human race".

The Church is for him the spiritual place in which the universal Kingdom of Jesus Christ is progressively realized, and she alone can define and guarantee a mission that escapes particular interests.

The meeting of the "comrades" itself is a living sign that expresses and confirms Ignatius’s desire to go "to every country in the world".

The comrades form an international group due to their origins and their cultures: even if the Spaniards are the most numerous - and they will still be for a long time -, a desire for agreement in difference and openness prevails beyond all borders, as the sign of the Spirit who leads them.

If they gradually specify their will to make a vow that binds them to the Pope, it is first of all to be faithful to this universal desire which, through each particular task, keeps the common passion for the universal Kingdom of God alive and operative in them. , which occurs in the human realms.

In this permanent vision of the universal, which the new worlds offered to explorers widen from year to year, Ignatius is perfectly at ease.

His ancient dream of a "pilgrim" to Jerusalem, but also to all the roads of Europe, is realized through the work he is driven to accomplish.

With his will to firmly preserve this universal character of the Society, which he founded and directs, Ignatius affirms the originality of the service he intends to render to the Church.

No task is excluded, except that which would limit the effort, reducing its scope to local or particular interests.

But he opens himself more and more to the privileged task which is the human, spiritual and doctrinal formation of those who will subsequently have to work for the reform of the Church.

The "enlightenment" of Manresa continues here to illuminate his path.

"Faith and letters" are thus welcomed in a single glance and, in the orientations he gives to his nascent Order, their unity is preserved more than ever:

preaching the word of God, theological teaching, but also the integration of the disciplines which then formed the basis of a healthy human culture.

When he obtains, shortly before his death and after years of continuous solicitations, that the Roman College he founded can confer the academic titles of philosophy and theology, and that philosophy and theology, and that it is therefore assimilated to universities, or when supports the project of creating a printing house in this Roman College, Ignatius has not at all abandoned his love for the Kingdom of God, but always keeps the world of men in mind: no value of the spirit can be alien to him.

The most radical change made by Ignatius

The Society of Jesus was born in a period in which strong currents of internal reform of the Church are affirmed, which are concretized with the creation of new religious Orders, around men who impose themselves for their moral authority and for their capacity for achievement.

Gaetano da Thiene and Gian Pietro Carafa founded the Theatines, Matteo da Bascio the Capuchins, Antonio Maria Zaccaria the Barnabites, Girolamo Miani the Somascans, Filippo Neri the Oratory.

The list is not finished.

All are animated by the same desire to reform a Church of which Carafa strongly analyzes the causes of the decline, in 1532, in his memoir on the religious state of Venice.

Everyone hopes for the reform of the Church starting from personal conversion, the restoration of religious institutes in decline, the service of the poor and the sick, fidelity to preaching, the renewal of sacramental life.

These initiatives arise independently of the thrust produced by the Protestant crisis and without relation to it.

The Society of Jesus is vitally inserted in this current, which leads to the creation of associations of regular clerics or reformed priests.

It is the fruit of its time and participates in the same effort of spiritual renewal of the Church.

But Ignatius makes a more radical change, which the founders of these new Institutes did not dare to make. He introduces for his religious a form of life that breaks with a secular tradition, eliminating any observance of monastic origin:

- permanent residence around an "abbot",

- community life marked by the choral office,

- penances as a rule,

- particular dress.

The Company, of which Ignatius firmly lays the institutional foundations in 1539, is an Order of priests, not of monks, nor of friars;

his "parish" is the world,

as Fr. Nadal; the outward form of life is indistinguishable from that of other priests;

the choice of activities at the service of others is determined by the various criteria of universality and urgency that the Constitutions set out at length.

This ideal of a religious consecration out of any monastic form creates amazement and oppositions, which moreover still manifest themselves after Ignatius, and of which traces can also be found in our time.

But Ignatius never took a step back on this point which, in his opinion, could not be touched without destroying the Company, and he was able to understand how fruitful his founding intuition was.

The Company, established for the "propagation of the faith", spontaneously expands its action, in the face of the advance of Lutheran ideas, in "defense of the faith".

The urgency of the training and education tasks led to the creation of colleges, the idea of ​​which had not been foreseen.

The expeditions of the explorers and navigators open unknown fields, towards which those who are anxious to carry the faith to the ends of the world depart.

Alongside the monastic forms of the "work of God" takes place a "missionary" form, which affirms itself in the Church as a means to open oneself fully to the world, in the very movement with which one seeks to consecrate oneself to God alone.

A community of comrades

Finally, in Ignatius's life a presence is continually perceived which, without being confused with his own, closely accompanies him and helps him to assert himself in his work: "companions", intimately associated with his enterprise.

The first companions of Ignatius said:

“We all had the same mind, the same will, that is: to seek the will and the good pleasure of God with perfection, as our vocation requires […].

We must not break this union and community willed by God; on the contrary, we must keep it steady and strengthen it, embracing ourselves in a single body "[8].

Without them and without the bond that unites them in the common experience of God for the universal mission, Ignatius would not have realized his plan.

Ignatius is indisputably the one who "generates" his companions in the life of the Spirit.

"My only father in the bowels of Christ", Xavier will write to him.

"We have come to have only one desire and only one will," confides Pietro Favre in his Memorial, to recall his relationship with the Saint since the time of Paris.

But Ignatius, in turn, respects the originality of each one:

for each of "those who signed" he has an attention that is a true obedience to the Holy Spirit.

Beyond the group of "founders", all his companions become for him "friends in the Lord", to whom he wants to entrust himself with full confidence.

This is an essential characteristic, to the point that in all things, even in the drafting of the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, Ignatius leaves it to others to carry out the initiative he has taken.

This incompleteness is also one of the characteristics of Ignatius.

The work that he does always seems to him incomplete, and he wants it to remain so, to avoid that, when completed, it will break the movement that gave birth to it.

There is a bit of irony, but also a lot of truth, in these words which, according to his first biographers, Ignatius often repeated:

«Those who have to come after the first companions will be better and will do more.

As for us, we did what we could ».

[1]. H. Rahner, «Die Grabschrift des Loyola», in Stimmen der Zeit 72 (1947) 335. Cf. Id., How the Exercises were born. The spiritual journey of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Rome, AdP, 2004.

[2]. Ignatius had been wounded by a bomb in the battle fought in Pamplona, ​​in 1521, between the Spanish army and that of the Kingdom of Navarre, supported by France.

[3]. Ignatius of Loyola, s., "Letter to Emmanuele Sanches", Rome, May 18, 1547, in Id., The writings, Rome, AdP, 2007,

[4]. Ibid.

[5]. I. Nadal, "In Examen annotationes", in Id., Commentarii de Instituto, Rome, MHSI, 1962, 162.

[6]. Luís Gonçalves da Câmara (1519-75) was the Jesuit that Ignatius chose to dictate his Autobiography, for his gifts of precision and memory.

[7]. H. Rahner, How the Exercises were born…, cit., 81 s.

[8]. «Deliberazione dei primi Padri», in Sant’Ignazio di Loyola, Gli Scritti, cit.483

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