Ignatian spirituality in a secular age

SR SUPPLEMENTS Volume 15

Ignatian Spirituality in a Secular Age edited by George P. Schner

Published for the Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion/Corporation Canadienne des Sciences Religieuses by Wilfrid Laurier University Press

1984

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: Ignatian spirituality in a secular age (SR supplements ; 15) Papers presented at a symposium, organized by Regis College and held March 20-21, 1981. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-88920-170-6 1. Ignatius, of Loyola, Saint, 1491-1556. Exercitia spiritualia - Congresses. 2. Spirituality - Congresses. I. Schner, George P., 1946II. Series. BX2179.L8I35 1984

248.3

C84-099027-8

© 1984 Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion/ Corporation Canadienne des Sciences Religieuses

84 85 86 87 4 3 2 1 No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, microfiche, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. Cover design by Michael Baldwin, MSIAD Order from: Wilfrid Laurier University Press Wilfrid Laurier University Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5

TABLE OF CONTENTS Contributors

v

Preface

vii

Introduction George P. Schner, S.J

1

Spiritual Life in a Secular Age Louis Duprl

14

Contemporary Gospel-Criticism and "The Mysteries of the Life of Our Lord" in the Spiritual Exercises David M. Stanley, S.J

26

Franciscan Roots of Ignatian Meditation Ewert H. Cousins

51

Freedom, Election and Self-Transcendence: Some Reflections upon the Ignatian Development of a Life of Ministry Michael J. Buckley, S.J

65

Jesus at Table: The Ignatian Rules and Human Hunger Today Thomas E. Clarke, S.J

91

For the Greater Glory of God: Worship, Devotion, Churches in a Harmonious Church Michael A. Fahey, S.J

113

THE CONTRIBUTORS

Michael J. Buckley, S.J., is Associate Professor of Theology at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley. His current research and writing on the subject of spirituality and atheism in modern and contemporary theology and philosophy continue the scholarly work begun in his book Motion and Motion's God. Thomas E. Clarke, S.J., has been Professor of Systematic Theology at Woodstock College, New York, and is currently a research fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University. He is known throughout North America as a lecturer in theology and spirituality. Ewert Cousins is Professor of Theology at Fordham University, teaching courses on the Trinity, Christology, and ecumenism. He has specialized in medieval and contemporary theology, especially Bonaventure, Teilhard de Chardin, and Whiteheadian process theology. Louis Dupre* is T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Yale University, Director of the Modern Studies Program at Yale, and an internationally known lecturer and author. Among his numerous books and articles are The Other Dimension, Transcendent Selfhood, and The Rediscovery of the Inner Life. Michael A. Fahey, S.J., is Professor of Ecclesiology and Systematic Theology at Concordia University, Montreal. Since 1970 he has been consultant theologian for the bilateral Orthodox/Roman Catholic consultation in the United States. He is the author of Cyprian and the Bible and co-author with John Meyendorff of Trinitarian Theology East and West. George P. Schner, S.J., is Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Regis College, and Director of its Basic Degree Program. He is a member of the Issues Research Group of the Association of Theological Schools, continuing his research in foundational issues in theology. David M. Stanley, S.J., is Professor Emeritus of New Testament at Regis College, and a widely published scholar in biblical studies. He has written and lectured extensively on the relation of the Christian scriptures to the text of the Spiritual Exercises.

PREFACE

In celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, Regis College chose the subject of spirituality in a secular age as the topic for a symposium of scholars held March 20-21, 1981. Those assembled addressed the general issue from within the areas of their expertise by particular attention to the writings of Ignatius of Loyola, whose life and works inspire the tradition of Jesuit scholarship and spirituality of which Regis College is a part. In the course of the discussion during those two days and in answer to questions raised by the audience in attendance, several themes bound the papers together in a manner additional to the logic that gives order to their presentation here in this volume. I wish to explain briefly the interconnection of the essays and allude to additional themes that emerged. While the major textual focus is the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola and the tradition and institutions associated with Ignatian spirituality, the two essays dealing specifically with this subject matter are preceded by essays intended to locate the discussion within philosophical and historical perspectives. The paper by Louis Dupre offers reflections on the contemporary search for spiritual life, analyzing the necessity for an interior foundation for belief. In the comments upon both his paper and a second delivered by Placide Gaboury of the University of Sudbury, the importance of the development of interior life as a condition of survival for contemporary believers was clarified with reference to the cultural situation that demands it and to the difficulties the experience of the absence of God presents. The question of the relation of the contemporary believer to past events emerged as a theme which continued in the presentation by David Michael Stanley, S.J. on the relation of the Spiritual Exercises to the Gospels. Given the general problematic established by Dupre, the next set of papers attempts a rereading of the Spiritural Exercises in the light of contemporary scholarship. Ewart Cousins ended the day's discussion by relating Ignatius' text to the Franciscan tradition, focussing on the manner in which the humanity of God in Christ is essential to Christian tradition. This was yet another aspect of the theme that had emerged, namely, the question of whether and how the events of Christ's life can be made present and normative. I attempt to discuss these questions in the introduction to this collection. The second day of the symposium began with Michael Buckley, S.J., presenting the major question of his paper: is there in the orientation and

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development of Ignatius a progressive evolution into a life of ministry? His analysis of not only the Spiritual Exercises but also of the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus focusses on the notion of freedom contained in them. The second of the two textual studies, by Thomas Clarke, S.J., analyzed the "Rules for Eating" contained in the Spiritual Exercises in order to give an interpretation of them that makes the particularities of spirituality consonant with a ministry with a true social concern. The relation of ministry and spirituality continued as a theme in the final two papers. Carolyn Gratton gave an exposition of her programme at Duquesne University for direction in common, which has subsequently been published elsewhere as Trusting: A Way for Human Hearts (Crossroads, 1982). It constitutes an alternate set of "exercises" informed by contemporary psychology with which the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius can be compared. The interdisciplinary character of the symposium was completed by the theological discussion which Michael Fahey, S.J., initiated by relating Ignatian spirituality to worship in the Christian Church. We hope that the discussion this collection of papers fosters among its readers will be as lively and productive as that of the participants at the symposium. The gratitude of Regis College, its students and faculty, is offered first of all to the scholars presented in this volume. Second, thanks are offered to all who aided in the preparation and management of the symposium, especially Ms. Anne Farraway, whose conscientious and insightful attention to detail was invaluable. Financial support was graciously donated through the Spiritual Exercises Endowment Fund of the Jesuit Fathers of Upper Canada, then under the direction of John J. English, S.J. These essays are presented with the hope that the tradition of academic excellence inspired by Ignatius of Loyola will bring many more scholars to Regis College in its second half-century and to the Toronto School of Theology of which it is a part.

INTRODUCTION George P. Schner, S.J. The task of "making present" the reality of divine intervention into the world, such as that put forward by Christians in the person and work of Christ and recorded in the New Testament, creates a twofold problem. First, as with any historical event, what is to be now present is also the past. A process, even a technique, is required to bring about the new presences of the same past. In fact, the question may be posed, what does the term "same" refer to here? The recent work of Edward Schillebeeckx, for example, demands that the "same" single message of the Gospels be readdressed to each age, yet it must remain faithful to its true content. In the essays of this volume and during the discussion which took place at the time of their presentation, as well as in the work of Schillebeeckx, questions about how this is possible arise. To propose a solution requires attention to fundamental choices among religious and philosophical concepts. Second, the representation of a past event bearing religious significance, presents the problem of whether and how the event is revelatory of the transcendent. In addressing both problems, further issues arise: verification of the newly created presence, and the discrimination of features or material added to the presumably unique and irreformable past material. Questions of knowing and being are inextricable in this matter. What the religious person claims to know is doubly remote in a secular age: it is past and it is transcendent. What is sought after is doubly suspect to the age: it is achieved through imaginative work, and yet it is acknowledged as the most eminently true and real. What is required to give coherent expression to the complex human activity here discussed is a language provided by a philosophy of religion which is able to encompass all the questions arising. I suggest that a few passages from the classical texts of Hegel are instructive and capable of addressing these problems. The distance between Ignatius of Loyola, a Spanish spiritual writer of the sixteenth century, and Georg W. F. Hegel, a German philosopher of the nineteenth century, might seem to preclude the application of Hegel's thought to the Spiritual Exercises with the intent to illuminate the question of "making present"—past revelatory events, though others have attempted a rapprochement. The rather abstract philosophical considerations of a discussion of Hegel

seem ill-suited to the bare and clipped sentences of the Spiritual

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Ignatian Spirituality in a Secular Age

Exercises, a manual of techniques and rules. Such a book of practical activities raises, however, precisely this kind of question. Ignatius proceeds to advise and prescribe "exercises" for the individual, and the continual use of them provides a kind of experimental verification of their effectiveness. However, not unlike the art and practice of psychotherapy, whose techniques—no matter how experimentally effective—require the companion "verification" of a sound theory of psychological operations, so a manual of religious practices must be scrutinized and considered for underlying theoretical structures. Its claims to knowledge require attention to its foundation in an anthropology, an ontology, and in a theory of language. Specifically, the locus of investigation is the imagination—not in the activity of fanciful "imaginings," but in the operations of creative construction in a new time and space on what is given in sensible intuition and restructured and made one's own through a personal exercise. The kind of religious interaction Ignatius requires in the performance of the Spiritual Exercises makes it clear that articulation is essential to the process. Contemporaries of all kinds acted upon this, and, as Louis Martz has shown, not least of all the English poets o of the seventeenth century. Martz emphasizes the structure of the technique, and attention to his observations will lay the groundwork for posing in detail the theoretical problems mentioned above. In a discussion of the contents of Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises, Martz details the methodical character of them, particularly the use of the three powers of the soul: memory, understanding, and will. In order to meditate on the imaginatively invented scene, whether of Christ's life or of a non-historical setting, a procedure is followed that first elaborates the material in a free constructive imagining, representing, remembering; second, analyzes this material for its structure, its conceptual content, its insights; and finally, conducts a "colloquy" of direct discourse, in which the affections are articulated. In terms of types of language, the first is descriptive, empirical directly or indirectly; the second conceptual and theoretical; and the third emotive, evocative, the language of direct discourse, and even possibly imperative. Martz finds both direct and indirect evidence that such poets as Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan knew of and used such methodical meditation techniques as aides to poetic inspiration and even constructed poems to 3 articulate the work of each of the three steps. He concludes that not only do these techniques constitute a "fundamental organizing impulse deep within the poetry" but they were occasions for the activation of a deep structure of human operations:

Introduction

3

the enormous popularity of methodical mediation in this era may be attributed to the fact that it satisfied and developed a natural, fundamental tendency of the human mind—a tendency to work from a particular situation, through analysis of that situation, and finally to some sort of resolution of the problems which the situation has presented.4 It should be noted that the order of the activation of the three powers of the soul is not strictly linear or one-directional: there is a free flow back and forth among them, an interpenetration of one another, and the three activities might be said to occur at once, on different levels. A certain freedom of the inquiring and emoting self is necessary, and Ignatius himself, through his suggestion of the repetition of the same subject matter in subsequent periods of prayer according to how the activities resulted in consolation or desolation, incorporates such freedom in what could otherwise become the tyranny of yet another technique or method to be followed regardless of effectiveness, as an end in itself. The exercises performed are to issue in the transformation of the self, a formation rooted within a tradition that is given factual presence and formative power by means of the very exercises themselves. Martz gives an important clue to the association of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. He observes that what D. H. Lawrence sought in the "act of pure attention," what Wallace Stevens sought in the "thrice concentered self," and what Coleridge drew together in the all-important power of "imagination" are components or aspects of the same art and discipline of meditation which underlie the poetry of the seventeenth century and are explicit in a religious text such as the Spiritual Exercises. 5 The preoccupation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the discovery and description of the poetic self has a focal point quite different from the effort and aim of religious meditation, f* though a case can be made for a certain continuity of result. An analysis of the two distinct enterprises would take this essay far afield into a discussion of the preoccupation with subjectivity, with the responsibility of the self for the creation of meaning, and the demise of the "dogmatic" religious knowledge, which Enlightenment critiques brought about. The agenda of the two centuries, in both their poetry and religious works, may appear very much at odds. The alliance between the two is found in that both the religious and the poetic rely upon the work of the imagination. An imaginative construal as basis for religious language and thought may not give clear and distinct ideas, but it does accomplish for the believer the kind of knowledge that has the characteristics essential for the Christian. The imaginative construal is not the free development out of undifferentiated feeling

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or intuition of just any set of images. In both cases the inherently social and contextual character of religious thought and language would be lost. What is necessary are foundational narratives: for Christianity these are principally the narratives of the Gospels. They can, of course, be conceptualized, construed as to content, made atemporal, rationally clear. Such efforts, however, follow upon the narrative and are dependent upon it. Whether at the level of conceptualization or imaginative development, unlike the poet, it seems, the believer is bound in the effort to make present what is past. If the gesta Dei are not merely free creations of the human mind, projections in story form of the deepest of desires, neither are they simply concepts. An old-fashioned apologetic attempted to give a rational justification of miraculous events, of the resurrection, for example, curiously blind to the roots of such things in the narrative. Because of the necessary abstraction from the narrative in such an effort, it was inherently futile. It sought to solve the problems of verification and discrimination within the confines of a rationality, often an explicitly Kantian conception of rationality, barely attentive to the role n of the imagination. If understood as the work of fides quaerens intellectum, of course, such an enterprise might be acceptable. Only in the more naive efforts of protagonists of Enlightenment reason, which argue with the rejection of religion as possibily rational, is there a capitulation to the standards of Enlightenment rationality in an apologetic that believes itself to prove anything. Q What the apologetic effort shows is the need for a redefinition of rationality. The role of the imagination in other disciplines is increasingly discussed. No longer is it the province solely of art and literature, but its function in scientific discovery and the social sciences is acknowledged. The sudden rise in essays on the religious use of imagination indicates its rediscovery in scholarly work on religion. A contemporary rereading of classical texts gives evidence that the matter was never entirely neglected, and that a gradual increase in preoccupation with the imaginative work of the believer reaches a point of great importance in the nineteenth century. While it may be the case for the poet that the use of the imagination is appropriate and necessary for the construction of the work of art, it was not always evident in the theological writing, to the modern era, that the imagination is the proper activity for the religious believer in the effort to make present the past. The reluctance to accredit the imagination with a central role may be the result of the notion of truth developed in the modern period, beginning with Descartes' search for the clear and distinct idea, for truth as certainty. Once taken over, the notion of truth as clarity causes theology to

Introduction

5

inherit a variety of new urgent searches—either for "religious experience" when it is faced with positivist rejection of religious language and thought as nonsensical—or for "relevance" and "social meaningfulness" when it is faced with the existentialist rejection of God in order to make possible the exercise of full responsibility on the part of human beings for the creation of their world. Authors like Martin Heidegger have attempted to suggest that existentialist or even positivist emphasis on taking full responsibility need not obviate or make impossible the discussion of another dimension to reality. Through an understanding of the work of the poet we can discover how the search for the measure by which we can know how to build and dwell, how to construct a world of meaning, requires a contemplative form of attention. In sum, Heidegger, among others, suggests a reconception of the nature of rationality. For the present essay, it is his discussion of the poet, of the evocative character of language, that is au point. That the poet seems to occupy the role of the religious prophet or seer is yet another indication of the affinity of the two in their ability to construct new patterns of meaning. Heidegger goes so far as to call the work of the poet "most dangerous." What results may not be a rational concept, but the search for the meaning of human existence is rather more like the search for the meaning of a whole poem, something that cannot be stated in rational concepts connected by a logic of argumentation, nor even expressed by any one image alone, but that can only be expressed by the entire movement of the poem and is, in effect, unspoken, held in reserve. This line of thought requires a tempering, nonetheless, by a restatement of the role of critique. While the history of modern philosophy may show a championing of rational clarity and a loss of the transcendent dimension of human life through the development of the subject-object dichotomy, still what may be justifiably criticized is an undue emphasis on the poetic to the detriment of the ordinary use of language, or a resolution into wordless consciousness to the detriment of the discursive character of life. To repeat: a choice between two opposing forms must be replaced by a reappropriation of the dialectical character of religious language and thought. Hegel has alluded to this dialectic between image and concept when he states the importance of the representation (Vorstellung) to thought: When we begin to occupy ourselves with pure thought-determinations (Gedankenbestimmungen), and not with Vorstellung, it may be the mind does not feel satisfied, is not at home, in these and asks what this pure thoughtdetermination signifies . . . What is asked for in such a case is a Vorstellung of the thought determination ... an example of the content, which has as yet only been given in thought.9

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And again, he states, "there is a movement back and forth . . . from Vorstellung to concept and from concept to Vorstellung." 1° The conviction that this dialectic was constitutive of thought—and of the larger role of religion, art, and philosophy in interrelation—did not easily take its place in Hegel's thought. Though it is in place, effectively, from his earliest published work, the unpublished early writings give evidence of the struggle with the Enlightenment notion of positivity and its corresponding definition of rationality. For example, in his early theological writings Hegel is able to define a positive sect as one that regards the national imagination of the 11 people with suspicion "as sinful, and therefore to be guarded against." His initial view of Jesus' own teaching and its development by the disciples into a positive sect is as a movement essentially opposed to the public religion of a people—and therefore as opposed to the manifestation of its cultural imagination in narratives of all sorts. This rejection and the substitution with the Old Testament (the imaginative work of only one nation) was problematic for Hegel, since the driving force, the transformative power of Christianity, had to be in its alliance with the national spirit of a people, from within their efforts at Bildung. Unlike Kant, who in Critique of Pure Reason objects to the representation of the ideal in a romance-like fiction, Hegel allows for the ideal to be particularized and sees that the problem is to make some sense out of how it is possible. In a much later work, the Introduction to the theological text of H. Fr. W. Hinrichs,12 Hegel notes the danger of attaching eternal significance to something transient but resolves the issue, not by abandoning the effort of thinking the unity of infinite and finite, of creature and creator, but rather by re-fashioning his philosophical thought in response to the religious conviction of that unity which Christianity represents. In effect, he takes up the task I have alluded to, that is, the redefinition of rationality. 13 The objective factual presence of the person and work of Christ must be reconciled, held together, with their eternal element, so that access to the element beyond the merely historical (though the historical is hardly inessential for Hegel) is possible. The process is one of Erinnerung ("inwardization"), of recollection, of collection in a creative fashion of the experience of the "others"—and not an other that is somehow outside or beyond the possibilities of human cognition. Rather, the philosophical effort at a reflective grasp of the nature and development of human thought is the discovery of the infinite everpresent in the finite: "The consciousness of this union with the divine is given in Christ. What is important, then, is that man come to grips with this consciousness and that it be constantly awakened in him." 14

Introduction

7

In the third volume of the Encyclopedia, in the passages that detail the movement from sensation through intuition and imagination to language, Hegel provides a specification of the process of "inwardization." The movement is not a withdrawl from the world or an entrance into the realm of the subject in rejection of the world, or in flight from the world. Hegel rejects as false religion the Englightenment notion of pure insight. The kind of knowledge that comes about in this process is determined by the world, is historical, and issues in a return, making an exterior the self through language. While human knowledge, as opposed to mere awareness, begins with the apparent opposition of subject and object, and with the mere givenness of what is intuited from the world, the activity of mind is far from passive. It is essentially a creative activity through which the supposed oppositions are overcome. The movement is from a natural form of consciousness, that is to say, a consciousness which has not yet become aware of its own internal dynamic and stages of development, to an "educated" consciousness. For example, the first stage of sensation and feeling prevents an indifference of attention which might mark both the jaded aesthete and the untutored mind in order to take on a focussing of attention which is termed "intuition." Hegel uses the example of attentiveness to a poem, through which the reader is able to form a clear picture of feelings which are oppressive, whether they be joyful or sorrowful. Knowledge begins in an immersion in the external world to the apparent loss of self, or even dominance of self by the other; but, by the movement of the mind towards knowledge in its fullness, the person gains freedom and fuller self-realization because what is merely present is "known" in its content, and that content is a unity of subjective and objective. Nonetheless, qua knowledge, it is an inward moment, a moment of the subject. As is always the case for Hegel, each successive stage of growth involves a movement toward a fuller manifestation of both sides of the relationship. Thus, in the moment of recollection, I come to understand myself more fully in the act of being attentive to what is, seemingly, not I. With specific reference to space and time, Hegel notes that the giving of a new space and time to what is intuited, namely the space and time of the knower, is not to give something new to what is intuited, but primarily to honour "the determinations of sensation" by maintaining them in their essential characteristics. What is occurring in knowledge at this stage is the makingone's-own of what is intuited not by changing its content but by assimilating it to my own world. Hegel ends the section on intuition by referring directly to the

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temporal character of the "inwardized" awareness, noting that by the process what is past is made present. In representation, mind has intuition; the latter is ideally present in mind, it has not vanished or merely passed away. Therefore, when speaking of an intuition that has been raised to a representation, language is quite correct in saying: I have seen this. By this is expressed no mere past, but also in fact presence; here the past is purely relative and exists only in the comparison of immediate intuition with what we now have in representation.^ The passage concludes with a reference to this grasp of the preservation of the past in the "inwardization" of knowledge as a sign of the "modern mind." While there is little doubt that the inward turn is characteristic of the modern mind, the operation is constitutive of knowledge and given a particular thematic emphasis in the present age. The conceptual difficulty is to remain aware of the anchorage of the intuition in the other-than-self. It is not a matter of the consultation of the self with the self: as in the example given above about discovering the meaning of feelings that seem to overpower one, there is discovery, and a gaining of freedom for the self, in the encounter with and determination by the so-called external world. What Hegel is after is the ultimate unity of the two, and that unity cannot be at the risk of a collapse of one into the other. The history of philosophy subsequent to Hegel gives evidence of the modern mind's tendency to abandon the difficulty of this unity for the seeming security of a one-sided emphasis on subject or object to the neglect of the other element in the dialectic of knowledge. It is in the next section of the Encyclopedia on representation, with its three moments of recollection, imagination, and memory, that the juxtaposition of conformity to intuition and the freedom of thought is most evident. Hegel notes that the movement to full knowledge requires that the interiorized intuition be divested of its "subjectivity," its being just mine. Thus, while prior stages emphasized making one's own the time and space of the intuited world, this stage is creative in its unification and modification of the image with the particularities of the individual. It is the realm of art where the truth appears in the sensuous existence of the image. The work of the creative imagination is precisely to take the "mine-like pit" full of images, as well as the immediately intuited, and through the very work we call knowing create that complex world of meaning composed of past, present, and future, of feelings and images that have been stored up and now become associated and seen in and through what is immediately present to us, and containing also our wishes and desires. This is the very stuff of daily life, and only in moments of reflection and analysis can the condensation of elements

Introduction

9

be sorted out. Such reflection is not a reading into what seems the ordinary fare of human knowing, but a reading out what has been synthesized in a very personal manner. Moreover, the effort at gathering together what is disparate temporally and specially is the effort at knowing the universal, such that Hegel can call the imagination already, incipiently, reason, inasmuch as it is truth that a person seeks in and through the image. By showing the movement to memory as the final stage of this development, Hegel points to the effort of what is yet "subjective" to become externalized again. What began in intuition has been made one's own through the process of interiorizing and creative imagining. Through the work of memory the complex of image and idea, and of the specificity of denotation and the richness of connotation is retained and recalled in a single symbol, in a word. Hegel locates the work of language building in memory with a twofold role. As the culmination of the movement of the human "psychology," it preserves prior stages while making it possible for the mind to return, through words and their grammatical connections, to the world. Language becomes the set of symbols by which the once external, now internal, becomes "objective" again. Hegel calls i fi the word "an inward externality." This characterization of the role of memory as the learning of language ensures that language is given a necessary and systematic place in the development of intelligence. Language is not just one among many operations of the human person: it is essential to the fulfilment of the drive to intelligibility. In this conviction Hegel foreshadows the explicit concern with language as the locus of philosophical investigation that developed in the twentieth century. Particularly in relation to the knowledge of the transcendent as the ultimate truth, Hegel hastens to confront the very issue that troubled him in his earliest thinking: can truth as a universal be found in the particular, or, to put it in the terms used at the outset of this essay, can such truth be verified? He replies emphatically: it is also ridiculous to regard as a defect of thought and a misfortune, the fact that it is tied to a word; for although the common opinion is that it is just the ineffable that is the most excellent, yet this opinion, cherished by conceit, is unfounded, since what is ineffable is, in truth, only something obscure, fermenting, something which gains clarity only when it is able to put itself into words.I? What is presupposed at root is, of course, a fundamental unity of world, self, and God that is unfolded through the medium of language and thought. Intelligence requires language in order to recognize itself whether it speaks the world, itself, or the transcendent. Memory is the operation whereby

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it first grasps words and retains them. In doing so, it follows the same process of interiorizing that intuition and feeling underwent. Once the words are made mine, they also cease to be particular but are universalized in my own interior being, and, through the second function of memory, reproduction, can be made available again in other times and places to say and name. As such reproduction becomes habitual, memory becomes mechanical. The bodily form of language itself Hegel has dealt with in the section of the Encyclopedia where he discusses the movement of human beings beyond inarticulate animal sounds to articulate speech. In this section we are considering, rather, the logic of the human use of symbols and our concrete experience of always finding ourselves within a functioning language system that we must learn—first by retaining words and phrases and then by reproducing them at will. Finally, we become proficient in language use when we use the words and their grammar with no attention to the deep structures but with all our attention on the conveying of meaning, precisely what words are in their reality. Hegel does not presume this movement to language to be a flawlessly progressive development. In fact, within the very final stage of memory, the mechanical, which makes true language use possible, lies the possibility of language's undoing. Intelligence, qua mechanical memory, can become the mere repeater of words in idle talk: In this way the profusion of remembered words can, so to speak, switch round to become the extreme alienation of intelligence. The more familiar I become with the meaning of the word, the more, therefore, that this becomes united with my inwardness, the more can the objectivity, and hence the definiteness, of meaning, vanish and consequently the more can memory itself, and with it also the words, become bereft of mind.^ The possibility that language can go astray, or, more precisely, that the creative work of the imagination can result in an interaction with and formation of the world in an inauthentic manner, necessitates the hermeneutic of suspicion and ideology critique that has characterized much of Western philosophical writing since Hegel. This, I would suggest, is but another indication of the need for the kind of reflective awareness that spirituality exercises, especially in a secular age. It might be noted that all major philosophic trends of the past century—Marxism, positivism, Thomism of various sorts, language philosophies, whether Wittgensteinian or Heideggerian—seem to agree: language could possibly run amuck; and there exists a need for a critique of language use, for a therapy of sorts. Each substantiates its position by an appeal to what might be called a "faith" stance, which includes a definition of rationality, a conviction about the

Introduction

11

reality of the transcendent, and the demands of human social and personal integrity. The search for authenticity in speaking, in the creation of symbol systems of all kinds—and in the resulting creation of "culture"—is part of the new awareness of the responsibility that the human spirit has for the creation of its own world of meaning. The purpose of this collection of essays is to consider how the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola carries out such a task. The techniques of prayer and reflection contained in Spiritual Exercises can be understood in the terms of Hegel's analysis of the process of interiorizing, and it is particularly the development of a new time and space for the content of the intuition, in addition to the change and reconstruction of the content by its insertion into the context of the individual in a free creative imagining, that is of importance for the questions underlying this essay. The past is made present through the dynamic of human psychology, such that content is still determined by sense, by a physical relation to the world. In the case of the Spiritual Exercises we are dealing with texts that are themselves the product of a subject's interaction with past events and that, while preserving the rootedness in history, have themselves been fashioned into a new time and space and given added meaning by the author. This refashioning, this adding of meaning, this past in a new time and place, might constitute the reality of the Gospel narratives. What is important in a rereading of the stories is not the isolation of concepts or the evocation of an event that is in some way "miraculous." Rather, it is the activation of a very human set of operations—with the recognition that the texts are, likewise, the result of such human operations. Nonetheless, that does not deny or set aside the fundamental faith stance in which such a reading of texts takes place. The verification of the narrative and its authorization for use as "rational" or "good" cannot be accomplished without reference to the creativity, the imaginative function of the author and of each person who rereads the texts. However, the imaginative function must remain "honest" to the text. Hegel insists that there is a continuum of development from sensation to language; he further insists that our efforts at creating a new "text" in words, symbols, culture, while they are in our own time and space, while they are integrated with our own content-filled consciousness, are not unmoored from their anchorage in the truth of the events of the past and in real persons and happenings. The positivists' narrow understanding of the movement from sensation to knowledge, with its elimination of the interpretive powers of the individual, requires that we advert to the hidden presupposition of the nature of rationality and the need to confront that presupposition with other dimensions of experience and language.

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Hegel has given us an example of such a confrontation with the Enlightenment notions that, though honest, are an inadequate treatment of the reality and presence of the infinite in the finite. The post-modern believer, therefore, need not abandon the narrative of the Gospels or the text of the Spiritual Exercises as normative because of the impossibility of verifying the narrative in some narrow sense. Making the narrative present through the integration of it by the work of creative imagination into "my" time and space perpetuates the story's life. The language and grammar of such efforts require both nomativity and freedom in their operation. My Hegelian philosophical analysis is not meant to justify the use of such texts, but to give a vocabulary of concepts whereby the use can be elucidated. Christianity does not need external reasons to establish such a use; rather, it has reasons internally coherent to it that account for the rejection of mindless fanaticism, voluntarism, or irrationality on the one hand, and abstract conceptualization and ideology on the other. Such reasons establish the preference for image-filled narratives such as the Gospel stories or the stories presented by the Spiritual Exercises. What is guaranteed is the dominance of a human perspective, of humaneness, rather than the uncompromising dominance of soul-less ideas or values, without context or history. What is essential to the Spiritual Exercises is not their authorship by Ignatius, but rather their formative relationships with habits of thought and speech essential to Christianity. They are exercises that make possible the imaginative representation of the past events that constitute the gesta Dei. They are formative of the self, and thus they relate the values and ideas of Christianity to the exigencies of the present age, provided of course that the self so engaged is not unaware of the traps and barriers that prevent the appropriation of this or any other determinative set of truths. The essays in this volume are presented for the investigation and questioning of the spirituality of Ignatius of Loyola and specifically of his Spiritual Exercises. The essays intend to locate and explicate this tradition for the present age and, in so doing, to continue the scholarly academic tradition of the school whose fiftieth anniversary they celebrate.

Introduction

13 Notes

1.

Cf. Gaston Fessard, La dialectique des Exercises Spirituels de Saint Ignace de Loyola (Paris: Aubier, 1956).

2.

Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (London, New Haven: University Press, 1954).

3.

Ibid., 25-70.

4.

Ibid., 39.

5.

Ibid., 67ff.

6.

Cf. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1971).

7.

By saying barely attentive, I do not mean that Kant does not afford imagination a pivotal role in his theory of knowledge, but rather that, for him, imagination is "a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are scarcely ever conscious." On the problematic place of imagination, cf. Edward S. Casey, Imagining; A Phenomenologieal Study (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1976), 1-20.

8.

Cf. Kenneth Schmitz, "Philosophy of Religion and the Redefinition of Philosophy," Man and World 11 (1970), 54-81.

9.

As quoted in James Yerkes, The Christology of Hegel (Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1978), 112-13.

10.

Ibid., 94-95, my own translation.

11.

G. W. F. Hegel, On Christianity; Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox (Glouster, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1970), 74.

12.

This text can be found in F. G. Weiss, ed., Beyond Epistemology (The Hague: Martinus Nijoff, 1974), 227-44.

13.

This point has been developed at length by Quentin Lauer, S.J., Hegel's Concept of God (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982).

14.

Ibid., 15.

15.

G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 201.

16.

Ibid., 221.

17.

Ibid.

18.

Ibid.

Yale

SPIRITUAL LIFE IN A SECULAR AGE Louis Dupre

In the eighteenth century the idea of God ceased to be a vital concern for our intellectual culture. Almost without transition, deism merged into a practical atheism. In the nineteenth century this secularized consciousness, no longer satisfied with a de facto absence of any meaningful transcendence, attempted to convert this attitude into a de jure, justified, one. Thus originated the virulent anti-theisms of scientific positivism, of sociological structuralism, and of axiological humanism. These anti-theist trends have survived into our own day, yet they no longer dominate the present religious situation. Today's atheism by and large considers its position sufficiently secure to feel no need for defining itself by a negative relation to faith. Nor does it exclude the range of religious experience. Indeed, it has extended its territory to include the significant, previously neglected area of spiritual phenomena. It certainly has abandoned the nineteenth-century dream of a purely scientific humanism. As a rule it no longer expects an integral world view from science, and it is even beginning to abandon the previous identification of science with human progress. In short, contemporary humanism is less polemical, more comprehensive, but also more thoroughly immanent, than that of the recent past. Strangely enough this humanism beyond atheism was prepared by the three men we most commonly associate with modern atheism, Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche. These "prophets of suspicion," though leaving no doubt about their personal atheism, nevertheless felt that the future would move beyond this polemical attitude. Freud conceded that the neurotic character of faith, which he was satisfied to have scientifically established, did not per se preclude the possibility of an objective truth. However, to search the foundations of such a negative possibility after an exhaustive positive interpretation had already been given of all religion's features did not appear to him to be a very useful enterprise. As he tolerantly informs the reader: "Just as no one can be forced to believe, so no one can be forced to disbelieve. But do not let us be satisfied with deceiving ourselves that arguments like these take us along the road of correct thinking. If ever there was a case of a lame excuse we have it here. Ignorance is ignorance; no right to believe anything can be derived from it." What can be more polemically atheistic than Marxism, both in its actual policies and in the very words of Marx upon which these policies are founded?

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Yet even a superficial acquaintance with Marx's mature theory suffices to convince one of the humanist trend of his thought. To be sure, Marx set out as a belligerent anti-theist. With Feuerbach he saw in religion man's projection of his own nature into an ideal sphere that alienated him from his own positive attributes. But as Marx detected in this projection a more fundamental estrangement between the individual and his social-terrestrial world, he felt less and less induced to fight the enchanting shadow image instead of the harsh reality that caused it. Atheism as a denial of this unreality [of God], is no longer meaningful, for atheism is a negation of God and seeks to assert by this negation the existence of man. Socialism no longer requires such a roundabout method; it begins from the theoretical and practical sense preception of man and nature as essential beings. It is positive human self-consciousness; no longer a self-consciousness attained through the negation of religion.2 Atheism is itself no more than an ideology, an idle and ill-directed theoretical attitude that only drains much needed energy away from the battle for a true humanization. The communist attitude rejects both theism and atheism: "Communism begins where atheism begins, but atheism is at the outset still far from being communism; indeed it is still for the most part an abstraction. The philanthropy of atheism is at first only a philosophical philanthropy, whereas that o of communism is at once real and oriented action." Axiological humanism has basically followed the same evolutionary path since Nietzsche so boldly declared genuine freedom to be incompatible with the idea of a value-creating God. I know that Nietzsche and most of his followers as late as Sartre formulated this thesis in anti-theistic polemical phrases. But what they advocated went well beyond these polemics: a totally self-sufficient humanism. Maurice Merleau-Ponty articulated the new attitude when he refused 4 to be called an atheist, because atheism is still "an inverted act of faith." The humanist must start not with the denial of God, but with the affirmation of man, the sole source of meaning. In sum, scientific, Marxist, and axiological humanisms all have abandoned their anti-religious stand for an attitude of all-comprehensive openness that, instead of fighting the values traditionally represented by religion, attempts to incorporate them into more accommodating syntheses. To the extent that these attempts have succeeded, they have changed the perspective of our culture and have replaced religion in what used to be its unique function of integrating all of life. For many of our contemporaries, religion has been reduced to an experience, one among others, occasionally powerful but not sufficiently so, to draw the rest of their existence into its orbit.

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Of course, the distinction between the sacred areas of existence and the more profane ones occurred very early in our culture. Nor do I doubt that the increasing complexity of our lives will make such a distinction ever more necessary. Yet nowhere before have profane matters become secular, that is, entirely independent of what once was their life source. In our own age, science, social structures, and morality have virtually lost all need for the public support of religion. They themselves have developed into full, albeit purely immanent, forms of humanism. Our contemporaries, particularly the ones most susceptible to cultural change, the young and the educated, have, to a large extent, resigned themselves to a fragmented world view. The old battles between science and faith marked the final attempts toward a unified vision in which either the religious or the secular had to prevail. Most of us now regard the old controversies as dated. Believers as well as unbelievers now admit that faith may not even be able to reconcile all its claims with the other, partial "world" views by which they live. Today the famed earthquake of Lisbon would hardly cause a ripple among the faithful—not because it creates no problems, but because they have given up looking for theological solutions in all domains of life. It is in that far more fundamental sense that I call our age atheistic and that the question of a genuine spiritual life presents itself in a new light. The integrating synthesis of values—so essential to the religion attitude—appears to be left to the individual, who may or may not use for this purpose the religious institutions to which he or his ancestors traditionally belonged. A religious attitude today, more than ever before, requires the believer's personal decision, not only in general, but also for the acceptance of specific beliefs and norms. Once the believer has made this decision, a total integration of life in all its aspects becomes possible again, even though in the present situation it is rooted foremost in a personal act rather than in surrounding cultural and social structures. Religion has become what it never was before: a private affair. In a secularized society the religious person has nowhere to turn but inward. There, and for the most part there alone, must he seek support for his religious attitude. But what the believer encounters in himself is in the first place the silence of absence—a silence in which God's word no longer resounds and in which creatures have ceased to speak the sacred language. The believer has no choice but to enter into that silence. In the confrontation with this, his own atheism, accepting the emptiness in his own heart, he acquires that sacred "sense of absence" of which Simone Weil wrote. To her the degradation of the

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concentration camps, the slovenliness of routine work, man's subjection to an indifferent universe ruled by mechanistic laws, all turned into a powerful cry for the One who is not there. It is the contradiction of a simultaneous presence and absence. "I am quite sure that there is a God in the sense that I am quite sure my love is not illusory. I am quite sure that there is not a God in the sense that I am quite sure nothing real can be anything like what I am able to conceive when I pronounce this word." Here the very godlessness of the world is invested with religious meaning and another dimension opens up on this negative encounter with a world that has lost its divine presence. Thus the believer learns that God is entirely beyond his reach, that he is not an object but an absolute demand, that to accept him is not to accept a "given," but a Giving. As in the night of St. John of the Cross, the night of absence, intensively experienced and accepted, becomes the meeting place between the soul and divine transcendence, a transcendence not sensed as the source of all beings removed from their space and time yet permanently present in the heart of man, but the transcendence of a God who has "emptied himself into the world, transformed his substance in the blind mechanism of the world, a God who dies in the inconsolable pits of human affliction."5 Of course, the religious consciousness of absence is not without precedent in the spiritual tradition. The intensive encounter with God has always summoned man to take leave of the familiar words and concepts and to venture out into a desert of unlimited and unexplored horizons. The oldest and purest Buddhist doctrine proposed no other ideal than the attainment of total emptiness. Of "God" there is no question; emptiness itself becomes the space of transcendence. The monk must remain silent, yet silently he thanks the nameless source. Nor does the Samkhya Hindu feel the need for an idea of God to carry his awareness of what can have no name. Christianity, the religion of the Word, of God's manifestation, has no room for an atheist piety as such. (The atheism of some recent theologians is intrinsically bound to remain an heterodox, marginal phenomenon.) But even in the religion of manifestation those who engage upon a serious spiritual journey invariably begin their pilgrimage by leaving the creatures behind. Though religious mysticism always entails an intensive awareness of God's presence in creation, Christian mystics invariably commence their journey by emphasizing the difference (and hence the absence) between God and the creature. Their negative attitude must not be attributed only to practical wisdom but, first and foremost, to an immediate awareness that the creature as such is totally unlike God. For years Newman attempted to explain how through

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the phenomena of the visible world we gain "an image of God." But more and more he became convinced that only a previous awareness of God's inner presence—in conscience—would enable man to detect a divine presence in the world at all. In contrast to this "definite" presence in conscience, "the phenomena are as if pictures, but at the same time they give us no exact c measure or character of the unknown things beyond them." Man lacks the power to derive an image of God from the cause and system of the world. "What strikes the mind so forcibly and so painfully, is His absence (if I may so speak) from His own world. It is a silence that speaks. It is as if others had got possession of His work. Why does not He, our Maker and Ruler, give us some 7 immediate knowledge of Himself?" In the moving sermon "Waiting for Christ" this alienation appears even more strongly. When He came in the flesh 'He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not.' Nor did He strive nor cry, nor lift up His voice in the streets. So it is now. He still is here, He still whispers to us, He still makes signs to us. But His voice is too low, and the world's din is so loud, and His signs are so covert, and the world is so restless, that it is difficult to determine when He addresses us, and what He says. Religious men cannot but feel, in various ways, that His providence is guiding them and blessing them personally on the whole; yet when they attempt to put their finger upon the times and places, the traces of His presence disappear.8 Once again the inner presence must mediate the visible world with its Creator. Whatever divine clarity radiates from the creature is reflected back from the mind's internal light. In this light "things which come before our eyes, in such wise take the form of types and omens of things moral or future, that the spirit within us cannot but reach forward and presage what it is not told from what it g sees." The ambiguous signs of the visible world must await the interpretation of the inner voice. God remains "hidden" in a world that does not allow him "to display his glory openly." Like Pascal, Newman concludes that without the "eyes of faith" the mind is unable to recognize God in his creation. Nor is this inner light derived from the mind's reflective powers. Even the voice of conscience becomes the voice of God only to him who knows how to listen to it as to a message originating beyond the self. We are reminded of Augustine's entreaty to move beyond memory and beyond the self. The more the awareness of God's presence increases, the more the idea of a similarity between God and the creature recedes. The spiritual soul does not look for "God-resembling" creatures. It embraces all beings with equal fervour: the high and the lowly, the good and the bad. For none are more "like" God than others.

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Since the third century the mystical tradition of Christianity has recognized a theology in which all language is reduced to silence. In his Mystical Theology, Pseudo-Dionysius, the sixth-century Syrian monk, teaches that all striving for spiritual perfection must abandon all experience, all concepts and all objects, to be united with what lies beyond all cognition: "Into this Dark beyond all light, we pray to come and, unseeing and unknowing to see and to know Him that is beyond seeing and beyond knowing precisely by not seeing, by not knowing." 10 This mysticism of negation culminated in fourteenth-century Rhineland. Thus Eckhart writes about the place where the soul meets with God: "When I existed in the core, the soil, the river, the source of the Godhead, no one asked me where I was going or what I was doing. There was no one there to ask me, but the moment I emerged, the world of creatures began to shout: 'God'. . . Thus creatures speak of god—but why do they not mention the Godhead? Because there is only unity in the Godhead and there is nothing to talk about."11 Clearly a negation such as Eckhart's or of the Cloud of Unknowing did not emerge from a weakened religious consciousness, but, quite the opposite, from a more intensive religious awareness, which is missing in our contemporaries. Yet my point is not to compare two entirely different mentalities. My point is to show that if the believer, who shares in fact, if not in principle, the practical atheism of his entire culture, is left no other choice but to vitalize this negative experience and to confront his feeling of God's absence, he may find himself on the very road walked by spiritual pilgrims in more propitious times. What was once the arduous route travelled only by a religious elite is now in many instances the only one still open to us. To be sure, not all believers of our age are spiritual men or women, nor need they be, but only to those who are, will religion continue to be an integrating power of life. The desert of modern atheism provides the only space in which most of us are forced to encounter the transcendent. It is that, in prayerful attention, may be converted into the solitude of contemplation—solitude of which Thomas Merton wrote that it is not something outside us, not an absence of men or of sound, but an abyss opening up in the centre of the soul, an abyss created by a hunger and thirst and sorrow and poverty and desire. 12 Our age has created an emptiness that in the serious God-seeker attains a religious significance. The mysticism of negation provides him with an ideal model. The affirmation of God is rarely still the centre of our search for transcendence. A tradition that so strongly emphasized the intrinsic value of the finite as Christianity does, could not allow a theology to remain purely negative.

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Christian mystics have commonly admitted some kind of theological negation, but somehow all of them succeeded in moving beyond it. The dialectic seems to have developed somewhat in the following way. Having first found the finite incommensurate with the infinite, they subsequently felt compelled to abandon also their own finite negation by which they had separated the finite from the infinite, and to consider their union in the divine creative act. In this perspective, transcendence, rather than constituting the opposition between finite and infinite, reveals the divine essence of the finite and, with it, the emanationist quality of God's being. The final word then about God is not otherness but identity. God is the ultimate dimension of the real. Thus, Ignatius of Loyola at the end of his Spiritual Exercises invites the exercitant, who has previously renounced the creaturely world, now to consider "how God dwells in all creatures." Similarly John of the Cross, after having first denied any proportion between God and the creatures, reasserts their equality. Even Eckhart's negation of analogy between God and the creatures results in a new analogy based not on similarity but on partial identity. At present we are merely concerned with the question of how this complex movement of reaffirmation can still be achieved in an age that has lost the very idea of God. Clearly, to answer the question, it does not suffice to embrace the finite as if it were infinite. Abolishing the distinction between one and the other can result merely in an aesthetic pantheism incompatible with the transcendence so essential to all genuine religion. What actually happens appears to be this: the spiritual person comes to view the world in a different perspective. Underneath ordinary reality he recognizes another dimension. At the very core of each creature the contemplative finds an otherness that compels him to allow it to be itself and to abstain from the conquering, objectifying attitude that we commonly adopt. This does not reveal a new idea of God—it merely allows reality to reveal itself. But that is a decisive break with the approach to reality in terms of power that lies at the root of our present loss of genuine transcendence. Transcendence is more than a concept that can be made and unmade at random. It expresses a fundamental attitude. Once it disintegrates it cannot be replaced by a readily available equivalent, as we do when replacing an inadequate concept by a more adequate one. It has to be rebuilt from the bottom up. The first task here is not the one of creating a more viable system (if that were sufficient, process theology would have solved our problems long ago), but of a different outlook on the real. A description of what does not exist is bound to be inadequate. But I can think of no better characterization than the one contained in the Roman pietas, an

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obedient attention to possible messages, or, as Simone Weil has appropriately defined it, a waiting in expectation. At first blush this may not appear to differ much from the openminded, considerate attitude of any civilized person of our age. Yet far beyond ordinary open-mindedness, the spiritual man of the present must be willing to suspend even apparently unquestionable assumptions. His respect for others consists not in benign tolerance, but in an active search for the well-being of others and in a submission to it on their own terms. Even with respect to nature it is not sufficient to move beyond scientific control and practical utilization; we also have to avoid turning nature into a narcissistic mirror of subjective feelings. As John Fowles observes: "We shall never fully understand nature (or ourselves) and certainly never respect it, until we dissociate the wild from the notion of usability—however innocent and harmless the use." 13 In adopting this selfless approach we merely remove the principal obstacle to the perception of the transcendent dimension of the real. We must not expect to come up with a new name for the emerging transcendent, but only to acquire a new perceptiveness for detecting it. Hence we overcome the negative theology only in this limited sense that we once again turn towards the finite for a revelation of the infinite. We no longer know the infinte itself, nor do we know the nature of its revelation. The direct perception of the sacred has largely vanished—even in spiritual men and women. Consequently, we can hardly distinguish the specifically religious realm of experience as the "sacred" was in the past. In the direct experience hardly any "object" appears more sacred than any other. The worldliness of contemporary experience tends to erase the traditional distinction between the sacred and the profane. But if the distinction largely vanishes, does not traditional religion likewise disappear? What happens to the "positive" elements of Christian faith, to revelation, sacraments, Church? In advocating a new attitude are we, in fact, not proposing a new religion? Is any room left for those specific elements that make a particular faith Christian or Jewish? Or must we admit that these declining faiths are in fact doomed to total extinction, even among spiritual men and women? The objections are to be considered seriously, all the more so since there seems to be no alternative to what I would call the inevitably "worldly" character of our spiritual life. Yet they do not appear to be peremptory. For the attitude here described is the very same one proposed by the religious models of our tradition. Specifically with respect to Christianity, the obedience to a higher calling, the submission to a law that surpasses the person, and the search for the transcendent core of all selfhood are the very essence of Christ's life.

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Nor is the Christ here taken as a mere moral model, remembered from the past only for his exemplary features. To the modern Christian he remains a living presence that reveals the fullness of the obedient attitude and, at the same time, provides the very means for establishing the union. Here one might object that to accept this model as unique and the sacramental link with it as efficacious, one must already be a "believer," and how can anyone be a religious believer without a preliminary commitment to a distinctly perceived transcendent reality. Yes, to be a Christian one must be a believer, but not a blind one. Therefore we may say that Christ must first be discovered as a viable model for his approach to a secular world before the modern believer can accept him as a transcendent sanctifier himself. It has become quite futile to establish first the divinity of Christ before admitting the significance of his message—as was customary in fundamental theology. For the very notion of divinity is what is most under question. The existential significance—by no means sufficient, as Rudolf Bultmann appeared to think— must become evident before any dogmatic concepts can be established. Our thesis differs from the strange and oft-refuted argument of nineteenth-century apologetics that Christ was so significant that he must have been God. Apart from its obvious logical flaw, that argument begs the most crucial issue in the modern problematic—whether the idea of God has any meaning left. Faith will, more than ever, remain what it always was: a leap beyond experience. But contrary to what the theologians of the leap of faith usually claim, that leap was never blind. It always led from partial insight to total acceptance. The same structure is maintained today when the "believer," dissatisfied with the shallowness of a closed, secular world, abandons the conquering, grasping attitude for a more receptive one. It would be incorrect to assume that the community loses its role in the highly personal spiritual religion of the present. The contrary is the case. As soon as the believer adopts a model such as Christ (and the entire culture that has been shaped by it induces him to prefer this model over others), he joins a community, that is, he becomes a member of a group of like-minded individuals in the present. In this link, however loose, with a mystical body the believer becomes actually united with his model. It ceases to be a mere ideal; the community makes it into a present reality. By providing him with sacraments, scriptures, and a whole system of representations, the religious community enables the individual to incorporate his attitude into a living union with his model.

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Since much of the traditional nomenclature is preserved in the new attitude, one might well wonder whether the current changes, decisive as they appear to us, are in fact more than a theological adjustment to different circumstances. I think, however, that the present shift is not theological at all. Theology articulates a particular vision of the transcendent. The articulation may be challenged, but the vision is not. In the present situation, however, the very reality of the transcendent, not a specific conceptualization of it, is at stake. It is the possibility itself of a relation to the transcendent in the modern world order that is under fire. Theology assumes some experience for the sacred. This assumption can no longer be taken for granted. Those who do not have it will start their reflection from a presumption of atheism that refuses to reserve an irreducible area of human experience for the sacred. The religious attitude, then, has largely become what it never was before, a matter of existential choice. The choice is usually not made on the basis of a relatively clear experience, but on the basis of an accumulation of experiences inviting reflection and confronting man with possibilities, one of which his decision must then convert into existential certainty. Thence, the joining of a religious community, the reception of sacraments, even the acceptance of an established doctrine, have an essentially different meaning for us than they did for our ancestors. For symbolic gestures and doctrinal representations accepted by deliberate decision rather than conveyed by direct experience turn into empty shells unless they are constantly replenished by a rather intensive and deliberate spiritual awareness. This reason justifies our considering the search for a deeper spiritual life more than a passing phenomenon on today's religious scene. It is, in fact, a movement for religious survival, because without the support of a sustained personal decision, a religion that remains unassisted by the surrounding culture and is constantly under attack in the believer's own heart is doomed to die. It is a mistake, however, and one frequently made by those who undertake this spiritual journey, that the solutions to all our problems lie buried in old masters and ancient monasteries. The doctrines, life styles, and methods of a previous age were conceived within the reach of a direct experience of the sacred. This has for the most part ceased to exist. The language of past mystics, those of the eighteenth as well as those of the fourteenth century, strikes the modern reader as antiquated in a manner in which that of philosophic and literary classics does not, because the very experience that is being articulated is no longer present even in that minimal way in which virtually everyone in past ages shared it. A

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confrontation with the past may be necessary, but the shape of spiritual life in the future will be entirely our own. Spiritual life in the future will be characterized, I suspect, by almost total absence of any unambiguous experience of sacredness.

Indeed, the very

distinction between sacred and profane has ceased to be a determining one. In some way all existence will be at once self-sufficient and yet mysteriously inviting further exploration. It will be all attitude and little representational content. Nevertheless, at least in our culture it will clearly mark its difference from any purely negative theology. Far from withdrawing its spiritual claim from creation, it will be radically world—and persons—oriented.

CONTEMPORARY GOSPEL-CRITICISM AND "THE MYSTERIES OF THE LIFE OF OUR LORD" IN THE SPIRITUAL EXERCISES

David Stanley, S.J. The thesis I wish to suggest for discussion in this symposium on Ignatian spirituality is simply stated, that is, that certain assured results of twentiethcentury biblical criticism applied to the four Gospels can assist those directing or making the spiritual exercises. The delicate task of updating the presentation of the Spiritual Exercises is, to be sure, not new; still, history indicates that the tensions arising out of concern for fidelity to the aims of St. Ignatius and the ever-present need for their adaptation, in each new age and in varying cultures, will never be totally (or perhaps even satisfactorily) resolved. And yet Ignatius himself constantly draws attention, in the text of his book, to the desirability of allowing scope for manoeuvering on the part of director or exercitant in the annotations (4, 18, 19, 20) and in various notes (72, 76, 133, 162, 209). Possibly one of the most striking illustrations of this Ignatian bias in favour of "mobility" appears in the double listing of contemplations for the second week. The section of the text devoted to this week provides matter for prayer during twelve days— in great part, passages from the Gospels, which thus form a sort of "canon within the canon" (91-161), while, in "The Mysteries of the Life of our Lord" (261-88) are found additional pericopes to be used if desired. Since the present communication will be chiefly limited to episodes from Jesus' public ministry, we shall have occasion to return to this twofold form of the Ignatian "gospel." The Goal of the Spiritual Exercises and Ignatius' Image of Jesus The contemplation of Jesus' earthly history, extended to include the Incarnation as well as the post-Resurrection appearances through to the Ascension, constitutes the principal means to the goal set forth in the Spiritual Exercises, that is, the "seeking and finding the will of God in the disposition of 2 our life for the salvation of our soul." This remains true whether one regards 3 the Election as the pivotal point of the entire four weeks, or whether, with Louis Lallemant, Louis Peeters, and William A.M. Peters, the Spiritual Exercises A be considered as fundamentally "a school of prayer." While the history of the composition of Ignatius' little book remains shrouded in obscurity on many points, it seems clear that already, from what

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may be called its preparatory stage, Ignatius' conversion at Loyola, which accompanied his reading (in Spanish) of Ludolph's Life of Christ and the Flos Sanctorum by Jacobus de Voragine, we can date a first sketch of what later appeared in the text of the Spiritual Exercises as "The Mysteries of the Life of our Lord," together with certain inchoative insights into "The Call of the King" and the meditation on "Two Standards." And when, at Manresa, between August 1522 and the start of 1523, the initial adumbration of Ignatius' book occurred as the consequence of his well-known experiences (a profound purification of soul and singular mystical illuminations, especially that near the river Cardoner), the characteristically Ignatian image of Christ had been formed and delineated. Hugo Rahner has well described this image of Christ that came to be expressed through the pages of the Spiritual Exercises in order to assist the exercitant to have, with the help of grace, an experience analogous to that of c Ignatius himself. When Ignatius left Loyola he brought with him the two basic elements, i.e. his presentiment of the struggle of spirits and the contemplation of the life of Christ—though they were still totally disconnected; but later, in the light of mystical grace, they became joined together as the opposite poles between which the Exercises oscillate: the two contemplations of the Call of the King and the Two Standards, each of them intimately bound up with the Church . . . Whereas earlier Ignatius had lovingly contemplated this life [of Christ] as a model for generous imitation he now saw Christ as a King who lives and is constantly at work in the world here and now, who has not yet completed the mission he received to restore the whole world to his Father, and who therefore continues his fight against Satan in the Church here and now by calling magnanimous souls to battle at his side . . . But there was something deeper underlying this allembracing vision of the mysteries [at Manresa] . . . everything begins and ends with Christ's cross as the one and only gateway to heavenly glory, as the decisive moment of victory against Satan, against which the labouring Church must do battle in this world.7 We have cited at some length this sketch of the Ignatian Christ by the late, distinguished German authority in Jesuit spirituality, because of its supreme importance in any discussion of the necessary adjustment to the needs and concerns of the present-day Christian of "The Mysteries of the Life of our Lord" in the Spiritual Exercises. It is surely abundantly clear that, if any adjustments are to be made in the Ignatian presentation of Jesus' earthly history, these must respect and preserve in its integrity the Saint's image of Jesus and the paramount role he was to play in the Spiritual Exercises. Here I should like to recommend a recent (and in my judgment highly successful) transposition of the Ignatian retreat in the light of certain newer approaches to Christology by J. Q Peter Schineller, S.J. This instructive monograph deserves attention particularly because it attempts to integrate spirituality with contemporary theology, which (as we shall see) lost contact with each other at the close of the

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Middle Ages. The great merit of the essay is to provide a much-needed historical grounding of the following of Jesus by highlighting his humanness and so avoiding a largely mythologized picture of our Lord. There is obviously a danger, in such an enterprise, of an archeologizing piety, which Avery Dulles has o aptly termed "romantic primitivism." The corrective is to be found in the consistent attitude displayed by our four evangelists, who display no nostalgia for "the good old days" of Jesus' earthly life. There is also the peril of portraying a Jesus made in our own image and likeness, as the ill-fated Liberal Protestant quest for "the historical Jesus" demonstrated in the nineteenth-century. The Mysteria Vitae Christi; A Medieval Literary Form To return to St. Ignatius—I assume as valid the view that, although he lived during the Renaissance, he was and remained a medieval man. In order to evaluate and effectively adjust for a modern excercitant the Ignatian presentation of the contemplations of the second week, it is helpful to be aware, as recent studies have shown, that there was a specific form of devotional religious literature current in the late Middle Ages, examples of which were often entitled Mysteria Vitae Christi. 10 These devotional treatises divided the various scenes in the Gospels into sections with the aim of teaching the art of meditation, a purpose that distinguishes the genre from theological treatises. For example, St. Thomas Aquinas included in the Christological part of his Sum ma Theologica a series of articles on the principal events of the life of Christ, 11 which subsequent developments in Christological treatises were to ignore. This divorce between dogmatic theology and devotional works led, towards the end of the Middle Ages, to an impoverishment of both kinds of literature. The widely read Lignum Vitae of St. Bonaventure is regarded as one of the most influential sources for the form of religious writing we are considering. Another is the series of liturgical sermons by St. Bernard, exhibiting the approach to Christ that came to characterize Cistercian spirituality, which on 12 many points anticipated that of St. Ignatius. The unknown author of a book attributed to St. Bonaventure, Meditationes Vitae Christi, describes in his prologue the manner in which the Christian is to pray over the Gospel-scenes, by hearing Jesus' words, seeing his actions, and thus becoming present to him in prayer. "If you desire to profit from these meditations, make yourself present to the words and actions of the Lord Jesus herein described, as if you were hearing him with your ears and seeing

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him with your eyes, with complete concentration of your mind, with loving 13 diligence, and for a considerable length of time." The book which was to influence Ignatius Loyola during the months of his recuperation from the wound received at Pampelona, Vita Jesu Christi e quatuor Evangeliis et scriptoribus orthodoxis concinnata, by the Carthusian, Ludolph of Saxony, appears to have been one of the most popular examples of this medieval literary form, to judge by the translations of it into Spanish, French, Italian, German. Its influence in fifteenth-century England may be discerned in the writings of Nicholas Love (ca. 1421) and Walter Kennedy (ca. 1460). 14 Dom Andre Watrigant lauded Ludolph's work as "one of the finest and most erudite books, which come to us from the Middle Ages." 15 Born ca. 1300, Ludolph first joined the Dominicans, where he became a master of sacred theology (Doctor in sacra pagina). He entered the Charterhouse of Strasbourg in 1340. His celebrated Vita Jesu Christi was written between 1348 and 1368. He died at Strasbourg ca. 1378. This voluminous work is not simply a series of meditations drawn from the Gospels, but is also a compendium of patristic writings. The method of prayer he proposed aims at the believer's involvement with the persons depicted by the evangelists, centering in our Lord as they describe him "in actu et moribus." These events from the past are to be imagined as happening before one's eyes, so that one becomes present to Jesus in these mysteries. He is set forth as the great examplar of holiness, and his entire life is presented as teaching. Ludolph follows the ancient tradition (since Tatian) of harmonizing divergent Gospel accounts; he did not entirely succeed in eliminating certain legendary accretions with which the piety of centuries had surrounded the sacred narratives. The influence of Ludolph on the Spiritual Exercises has been noted by scholars: the many non-scriptural details, the tendency to gloss over contradictions in the varying interpretations by the four evangelists, the realigning of the sequence of events as reported in the Gospels. A few samples must suffice. Ludolph located the creation of Adam "in the Damascene field near the valley of Hebron," after an ancient patristic tradition. This appears in the Puhl version of 16 the Spiritual Exercises (51) as "the Plain of Damascus." In the Ignatian contemplation of the cleansing of the Temple area, Jesus is described as speaking "kindly" to "the poor vendors of doves" (277). When the apostles are 17 sent out by Jesus to preach, they are called "his beloved disciples" (281). Judas seems to have participated at the Last Supper in "the most holy sacrifice of the 18 Eucharist" (289). To reduce the irreconcilable Infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke to a unified sequence, the presentation of the child Jesus (268) is

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intercalated between the visit of the Magi (267: "the three kings") and the flight into Egypt (269). To illustrate the two states of life St. Ignatius has inverted the Lucan order in the conclusion of that Infancy narrative (271: Luke 2:51-52; 272: Luke 2:41-50). Likewise he has extracted from the Matthean Passion narrative the contemplation, "The supper at Bethany" (286: Matthew 26:6-13), conflated it with two details from the story at John 12:1-8, the presence of Lazarus (John 12:2) and of Mary of Bethany (John 12:3), whom he calls Magdalene, and, under the influence of the Fourth Gospel, follows it with Matthew's version (for the most part)19 of "Palm Sunday" (287: Matthew 21:111). All these discrepancies, assuredly of minor importance, exemplify the medieval approach to the Gospels, and so indicate the need of adjusting the Spiritual Exercises for retreatants who are more sensitive to the individual character of each of the four Gospels. The "Gospel" of St. Ignatius in the Spiritual Exercises What is the specific character of "the gospel" St. Ignatius has created in the Spiritual Exercises? Attention is confined here to the contemplations of the Gospel-narratives St. Ignatius chose for the second week, since he omitted almost nothing from the Passion accounts and the stories concerned with the post-resurrection appearances. Indeed, he has supplemented the latter with two non-scriptural accounts, popular in the Middle Ages: the appearance to our Lady 20 (218- 25), which serves to underline the unity of the paschal mystery, and the apocryphal appearance to Joseph of Arimathea (210). It would, I believe, not be an oversimplification to say that the Spiritual Exercises presents a spirituality of vocation, that is, of a universal call to the Christian gospel. In fact, as Hugo Rahner has pointed out, the directive given in Annotation 18 indicates that the exercises of the first week can be "considered as an independent piece of spiritual formation."21 From the start of the second week, St. Ignatius repeatedly directs attention to the good news value of the invitation to follow Jesus on his journey through this world to the Cross, as the unique way to salvation. Like the four evangelists, but particularly Mark, Ignatius sees the entire earthly life of Jesus, from its beginning in the Incarnation, being carried by God's design to the Cross, with the result that he insists that every authentically Christian life must be lived in the light of Calvary. This is what he means by the "following" or "imitation" of Christ. This call to live the gospel in faith Ignatius terms "election," understood in the biblical sense, in which emphasis falls upon the divine initiative and the

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totally untrammeled freedom of Christ's (and the Father's) loving choice of each individual. To be sure, the Election devoted in the Spiritual Exercises to the selection of a state of life is a dramatic instance of this call to follow Jesus, yet it is but one instance of what is in reality a daily occurrence—a point already made by St. Benedict in his Regula Monachorum. 22 Indeed, the celebrated Ignatian technique for "finding God in all things," presented in the Contemplatio ad amorem (230-37), is based upon the assumption that the Christian's life-long task is to respond at each moment of existence to this daily call by God in Christ. This conviction also underlies St. Ignatius' insistence that the heightening of the exercitant's sensitivity to this call be achieved through the discernment of "spirits," while contemplating Jesus' earthly history. 23 It is very important that one keep one's eyes firmly fixed upon Jesus in his "mysteries," and yet note various personal reactions (consolation and desolation) to our Lord as he reveals himself in one's prayer. In this way the danger that discernment become "navel-gazing" is avoided. Finally, for St. Ignatius, this call is always a call to service, whether in a heroic or more ordinary manner. In the Spiritual Exercises and in his other writings, he repeatedly insists upon "the service of the eternal King and the Lord of all" (97). Joseph de Guibert has described Ignatius' mysticism as "a mysticism of service because of love."24 Which episodes in the Gospels has St. Ignatius chosen as essential for the contemplation of the second week? It has already been noted that he presents two series of these: the first, fundamental to his purpose, is spread over the twelve days of the week (101-61); the second set, in part a duplication of the first, is left to the exercitant's free choice (262-88). The foundational consideration, the fruit of the Manresa experiences, is "The Kingdom of Christ" (91-99), in which the exercitant is bid pray "that I may not be deaf to his call" (91). This is the invitation by the exalted Christ, now dynamically "present to the whole world," to join him in his "enterprise" by sharing with him in labor and gloria (95). The contemplation on the Incarnation (101-09) is notable for its orientation to the redemption, that is, the cross, and for its existential view that Christ "has just become man for me" (109). That on the nativity (110-17) underscores the unity of Jesus' entire earthly career: "that our Lord might be born in extreme poverty, and that after many labours, after hunger, thirst, heat, and cold, after insults and outrages, he might die on the cross, and all this for me" (116). The second day is devoted to the presentation in the temple (268) and the flight into Egypt (269), with the accent upon the self-emptying of the incarnate Son in his redemptive enterprise. The third day, by an inversion of the Lucan sequence, the hidden life—exemplifying a life of obedience to the

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commandments—and the finding in the temple (271, 272)—where the child Jesus is a model for the living of the evangelical counsels—put squarely before the exercitant the decision to follow Jesus, who is seen "to devote himself exclusively to the service of his heavenly Father." Since, however, this "election" depends primarily upon the initiative of God, it is necessary "to begin to investigate and ask in what kind of life or in what state his divine Majesty wishes to make use of us" (135). The fourth day concentrates first of all on two standards (136-47), an Ignatian meditation without any express scriptural references, based on the mystical experiences of Manresa. Its aim is to impress the exercitant with the truth that Jesus' entire life was a struggle against evil culminating in the cross. Henceforth, moreover, the contemplation of that life is to be accompanied by discernment. The second consideration, three classes of men (140-56), an addition made by Ignatius in Paris, has "as its sole purpose . . . to test the exercitant's indifference to all created things." 25 The fifth day is spent in contemplating "the journey of Christ our Lord from Nazareth to the river Jordan and his baptism" (158, 273). Ignatius places a certain emphasis here on Jesus' leave-taking of Nazareth and his mother (a nonbiblical suggestion taken from Ludolph) because of its significance for choosing, or at least desiring, the third kind of humility (167), a preference to stand before the world with Jesus as a nonentity. Jesus' sojourn in the desert and his confrontation with Satan (in the triple form developed in Matthew 4:1-11; Luke 4:1-13) occupy the whole of the sixth day. It is a kind of repetition of "Two Standards" through the use of the relevant Gospel-texts, to urge the exercitant to respond through service to Christ. The seventh day exemplifies the response to the call of the gospel through various vocation-stories related in the four Gospels. Despite the typically medieval naivete of his approach to the varying ways in which the evangelists have redacted the traditions of Jesus' call of certain disciples, St. Ignatius has (275) intuited the totally unmerited nature of the apostolic vocation, a variation on the evangelical principle that man is justified by faith alone. The eighth day is unique in the list as a contemplation of Jesus the teacher through three topics from the Sermon on the Mount (278). The ninth day is one of two devoted to a miracle-story, Jesus' walk on the Lake of Galilee (280); and here, interestingly, what is regarded by a contemporary redaction critic as the salient 9fi feature of the narrative is picked out by St. Ignatius. The laconic notice in Luke 19:47-48 on Jesus' preaching in the Temple's precincts towards the close of his public ministry constitutes, surprisingly, the theme for the tenth day.

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However, St. Ignatius, with the help of some legendary source, indicates that the rejection of Jesus is his paramount concern: "After his teaching, since there was no one in Jerusalem who would receive him, he returned to Bethany" (288). The dramatic story (John 11:1-45) of the raising of Lazarus is contemplated on the eleventh day. It is strange that the textual reference is not extended to include the fourth evangelist's linking of this incident with Jesus' death (John 11:46-53). The final day in the second week is assigned to the contemplation of Matthew's version of Palm Sunday (287), a deliberate re-arrangement of the sequence in that Gospel, as has been noted earlier. Having touched on the "basic gospel" presented in the second week, it is necessary to list briefly the narratives which were considered less essential for his purpose by St. Ignatius. These are the Visitation (263), the return from Egypt (270), the Johannine narratives of Cana (276: John 2:1-11) and the cleansing by Jesus of the Temple precincts (277: John 2:13-22), Matthew's storm on the lake (297: Matthew 8:23-27), and the Galilean mission of the apostles (281: Matthew 10:1-16), the Lucan story of the anonymous sinner, misnamed "the conversion of Magdalene" (282: Luke 7:36-50), and finally three Matthean narratives: the feeding of the five thousand (283: Matthew 14:13- 21), the Transfiguration (284: Matthew 17:1-9), and the supper at Bethany (286: Matthew 26:6- 10). Some Notable Omissions in the Ignatian "Gospel" Anyone cognizant of the principal emphases and interests of present-day Gospel criticism will doubtless have missed certain salient features of Jesus' public ministry in the contemplations proposed in the Spiritual Exercises for the second week. In the first place, the unique features of Jesus' teaching are omitted: his parables, his instructions on prayer, his novel ethical teaching. St. Ignatius has substituted parables of his own composition (91-94; 136-48; 149-57) and other comparisons (325, 326, 327). The question about "the greatest command" (Mark 12:28-34) finds no place; nor, in the Last Supper (289), is there mention of "the new commandment." In the Spiritual Exercises Jesus teaches more by what he does than by what he says—possibly an application of the principle enunciated in 230, "in deeds rather than in words." 27 It is curious how frequently in his text St. Ignatius calls attention to the movements of Jesus from one locale to another. Also missing, understandably perhaps, is any attention to those mysterious attitudes of Jesus, expressed in his words or actions, in which the modern critic discerns an "implicit Christology." The medieval devotion to the

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humanity of Jesus, evinced by St. Ignatius, did not include concern about Jesus' self-understanding. Thus, little account is made in the Ignatian "gospel" of Jesus' table-fellowship with sinners, his forgiving of sinners, his compassion for the marginalized (the leper, the victim of "unclean spirits," the tax-collector, the Samaritan). This is simply to state the obvious: for Ignatius "the solid foundation of the facts" (Annotation 2) meant something very different from what it signifies in the context of the "new search for the historical Jesus." Medieval to Modern: the Vicissitudes of Spirituality The effectiveness of any spirituality may be gauged by its relevance to the needs of the believer in his historical and cultural ambience and its fidelity to the Christian tradition, its orthodoxy. The criterion may be expressed by a simple question: does this spirituality assist the Christian to fall more deeply in love with Jesus? In the Middle Ages, the form of religious literature called Mysteria vitae Jesu Christi did articulate a spirituality that achieved these results. Even if one allows for the exceptional graces given to Ignatius Loyola through his reading of Ludolph of Saxony's book, one may cite his conversion and, to a degree, the creation of the Spiritual Exercises, as striking instances of its relevance. And it will be remembered that Ludolph's work was a vast compendium of reflections upon the texts of the Gospels and the richly endowed heritage from patristic theology. This type of devotional literature was protected against triviality and bizarre aberrations by a Christology that was concrete (because scriptural) as well as orthodox (because patristic). In the course of the medieval period, however, scholastic theology became increasingly concerned with ontological questions arising from the Christological pronouncements of Nicaea and other early ecumenical councils and, under Anselmian influence, with problems regarding Jesus' redemptive death. This pre- occupation with the Incarnation and the Redemption diverted attention from theological reflection upon the other events in the earthly life of Jesus; these continued, however, to occupy a central place in the devotional life of the faithful, who were for the most part incapable of absorbing abstruse speculation. To the subsequent detriment of both piety and theology, each went its separate way. Without the safeguards of solid doctrine, devotional literature tended to distort the evangelical image of Jesus by psychologizing and moralizing. A further polarization occurred as a result of the Aufklarung through the rise of biblical criticism, and a seemingly unbridgeable chasm was created

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between the "Jesus of history" and the "Christ of faith." A theologically uninformed pietism took refuge in biblical fundamentalism to protect its beliefs against the onslaughts of biblical criticism and historical positivism. During the late nineteenth century, liberal Protestantism embarked on the ill-fated quest for the "historical Jesus." Had it succeeded, it is remotely possible that the rift between devotion and theology might have been healed. The original questers, however, were inadequately provided for in their approach to the Gospels, possessing only the tools of textual and source criticism. And they were beguiled into assuming the validity of historical positivism and what came to be known as "the Marcan hypothesis." This latter hypothesis rested on the naive assumption that Mark's Gospel, as the first of its kind, presented a simple, "historical" picture of Jesus, not yet contaminated by the theological overlay perceptible especially in the fourth Gospel. Accordingly, the quest only managed to disinter a Liberal Protestant Jesus, soon to be buried with dispatch by William Wrede's annihilation of the Marcan hypothesis—followed by the requiem of Albert Schweitzer's Von Reimarus zu Wrede. The decline of Kulturoptimismus after "the Great War" completed the disenchantment of German New Testament critics with source criticism as an heuristic technique. They ceased to focus their sights on the historical Jesus, to concentrate instead upon the development of the pre-Gospel traditions in the earliest Christian communities. This new hermeneutical technique was named die Formgeschichtliche Methode, which Vincent Taylor called in English "Form Criticism." 28 The aim was to discern and categorize the various forms assumed by narratives about Jesus and by his remembered utterances, and, ultimately, to study the evolution in their formulation before their insertion into the written Gospels. One positive result of all this was to reawaken amongst Protestant scholars a sense of the value of tradition lost at the time of the Reformation. On the Catholic side, it led eventually to an epoch-making decree by the Pontifical Biblical Commission, April 21, 1964, "On the historical truth of the 29 Gospels," which in turn influenced the chapter on the New Testament in Dei 30 Verbum of Vatican II. The document from the Biblical Commission traces the three stages through which the traditions of what Jesus said and did have come down to the Church: the public ministry of Jesus himself; the creative period after Jesus' resurrection, when the earliest Christians preserved much of what he said and did, selecting and interpreting these in the light of the Easter faith, applying them to their living of the gospel; and a final stage, when these traditions,

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passed on in oral or written form, were edited by the four evangelists and incorporated into their books. We may note in passing how helpful an appreciation of these three levels of meaning can be for prayer based on Gospel texts. The realization that these passages put us in touch with Jesus in his earthly life, with the evangelists, and with the first or second generation of Christians who had fed their faith on these traditions, provides a new perspective and depth of contemplation. One instance must suffice here. Jesus' parables, as he had originally employed them, were intended as a commentary upon his own public ministry; hence they give us many insights into his profound faith and confidence in God, his optimism in the face of adversity and opposition, his absorption in the will of his Father, and his freedom in co-operating with God's plan for the Kingdom. As applied to problems in primitive Christian communities, the parables, set in a new context, develop a changed meaning (see Mark 4:13-20; Matthew 13:18-23), determined by the liturgical, apologetic, ethical, historical interests of these ancient communities. The evangelists' insertion of these stories into their Gospels, with the various modifications introduced in them (as so often with Luke particularly), help us see how the writers understood the function of the parable. For Mark, it becomes an act of judgment, discriminating between those who accept and those who reject the gospel. The originators of Form Criticism, Martin Dibelius and Rudolf Bultmann, rightly insisted that the Gospels were not biographies of Jesus, and indeed, the newly discovered discipline demonstrated the impossibility of writing a life of Jesus. Curiously enough, however, each of these scholars, followed by a number of Form critics, succumbed to an irresistible urge to write books about the historical Jesus . I suggest that the explanation of this phenomenon lies ultimately in the fascination exercised by Jesus upon these New Testament critics, even though they can find only a bare minimum of his authentic sayings, and a pitifully small historical nucleus in the reported events of his life. A final turn of events must be noted in this brief survey of the interaction between the devotional and critical approaches to Jesus: the appearance of what James M. Robinson has called "a new quest of the historical Jesus,"31 and the development by the post-Bultmannians of 32 Redaktionsgeschichte. Robinson asserts, "The purpose of a new quest of the historical Jesus would be to test the validity of the kerygma's identification of its understanding of existence with Jesus' existence."33 Rudolf Bultmann had minimized, if not eliminated, any link between the kerygma and Jesus' earthly life; several of his most distinguished pupils reacted against the dangers in this

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gnosticizing neglect of the historical. Gunther Bornkamm, with his Jesus of Nazareth, provided the first delineation of the Jesus discovered by the new quest. It is of special interest here because this book can be said to signal a new rapprochement between critical scholarly research and the intended (but so frequently unrealized) aims of devotional literature. "This book," he states in a foreword, "is intended to inform not only professional theologians on such questions, uncertainties and findings of historical research, but also the laymen who wish, so far as possible, to arrive at an historical understanding of the tradition about Jesus and are not content with edifying or romantic portrayals."34 For Bornkamm, the Gospels present in a striking manner the personal, unparalleled authority of the words and actions of Jesus, an authority deriving not from faith, but from the historical Jesus. A point should be made here about Redaction criticism. The early Form critics considered the Gospels as mosaics constructed of discrete units (narratives or sayings quarried from the evangelical traditions), and dismissed the framework created by the evangelist as worthless (hence, the inspired writer was not a literary author, his work had value only as transmitting the tradition). On the other hand, the Redaction critic, who builds upon Form criticism while correcting some of its exaggerations, is interested in the individual Gospel as a literary and theological work. He sees two realities presiding over its construction: the individual image of Jesus, personal to each author, and the needs and interests of the specific Christian community for which the Gospel was composed. This approach to the Gospels is thus sensitive to the innovative way in which the evangelist has reacted to the tradition, then reworked and reformulated it. The history of Jesus transmitted to us appears as a mediated history: we see Jesus, so to speak, through four pairs of privileged eyes. Redaction criticism provides new insights into the sacred text that can be of real help in contemplating the Gospel mysteries. One is made privy to the individual religious experience of each evangelist as one becomes more fully aware of how each evangelist, in his own way, has reacted to the Jesus-tradition, which he had received from all those anonymous predecessors in the faith who constructed and adjusted that tradition by which they had lived their Christian lives. There is an analogy here with the way in which St. Ignatius seeks to bring the exercitant to the love and following of that Jesus who confronted Ignatius at Loyola and Manresa. One can learn how to apply the Gospel narratives to one's own situation from observing how Mark, for example, for whom Jesus is the Teacher par excellence, has adapted the tradition to the needs of his community. Tt was, it

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seems, a group of believers facing imminent persecution, disturbed, moreover, by the gloomy forebodings of apocalyptic preachers announcing the imminent and terrifying end of history. Mark is also on the alert to correct any tendency on the part pf his Greek-speaking congregation to confuse Jesus with those wonder-workers, who in the Hellenistic world of the time were known as "divine men." Jesus had indeed performed miracles, as Mark well knew: in fact, the evangelist recounts more of these than other Gospel-writers. But, as Mark is careful to point out, it was not for the sake of publicity, not to evoke mere wonder and enthusiasm. For this inspired author, Jesus' miracles are to be seen as invitations to believe not only in God, but in himself; they were, besides, part of Jesus' campaign to overthrow Satan, the evil power that held mankind in fee. In Mark's eyes, Jesus was the Teacher because of what he did, more than what he said. By his struggle to carry out his God-given mission in his public ministry, but much more by his death (which, in the course of that ministry, Jesus came to see was an integral part of his efforts to inaugurate God's kingly rule in history), Jesus taught those who freely followed him the only way to true discipleship. This was the way of obscurity, adversity, suffering, even the acceptance of the Cross. This Marcan image of Jesus has been sketched for two reasons. First, it displays a noteworthy affinity to the Ignatian "Christ our Creator and Lord" presented in the Spiritual Exercises, and so gives some indication of how the Marcan Gospel might be employed in giving them. Second, it serves as an example of the relevance of contemporary Gospel-criticism to the giving of the Spiritual Exercises. As the brief survey of developments within the history of Christology from medieval to modern times has attempted to suggest, the various scholarly approaches to the earthly history of Jesus through the centuries have a bearing on spirituality. In particular, our review indicates the need of some adjustment in the presentation of the second week, if the medieval form of devotional literature that has left its mark on the Spiritual Exercises is to bring the contemporary Christian to love and follow our Lord. The values inherent in the insistence upon personal involvement in the mysteries of our Lord's life, so dear to Ludolph and Ignatius, ought to retain their effectiveness today. To this end, the traditional practice of melding together narratives or texts, so often given a sharply different significance by each evangelist, must be abandoned, as must those legendary accretions with which medieval piety surrounded the sacred text. Nor is it anything but a distraction to prayer at the present time for a director to embellish the "points" for contemplation with topographical or sociological details of Palestine which so stimulated the medieval imagination.

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In my view, "the solid foundation of the facts" (Annotation 2) is to be discovered in an informative exposition of the text of the Gospels. The Problem of Being Present to "The Mysteries" These last remarks raise questions which are as significant for today's exercitant as they were for medieval devotion. How is it possible to be present to Jesus in the contemplation of, let us say, the mysteries of the second week? Can one, for example, sincerely, realistically pray, in contemplating the Incarnation, to "our Lord, who has just become man for me" (109)? Can I, as a Christian whose faith assures me that Jesus is risen and exalted in glory—and this, even as I contemplate the Passion—actually "ask for sorrow, compassion, and shame because the Lord is going to his suffering for my sins" (193)? Is this to be accomplished merely through the imagination, with which medieval man was so plentifully endowed? Any informed Catholic, I am sure, is aware of the absurdity of the seventeenth-century devotion to Jesus as "the lonely prisoner in the tabernacle." In other words, is it not a fact that the past as past has ceased to exist, and so cannot have any influence upon the present? The great figures, the momentous happenings of history can exercise their power and attractiveness today only by being mythicized. For example, Socrates is dead, yet if he can be said to "be alive," he lives to exert influence still through the literary genius of his pupil, Plato. Can this be said of the Jesus of our Gospels? If so, those disciples are truly greater than their master. While the ultimate answer lies, of course, in the central event of Christian faith, Jesus' resurrection, it may be helpful first to reflect a moment on some preliminary questions. First, in what does the authority of our Gospels consist? 35 Our Gospels do indeed tell us faithfully what Jesus did and taught; that they are firmly anchored in history is beyond cavil. In what does their normative value for the following of Christ ultimately consist? How can they provide an existential encounter with Jesus of Nazareth? What gave the evangelical tradition, which the Gospel-writers incorporated into their books, its sacral character? These values do not stem from the perceptiveness of "the original eyewitnesses" (Luke 1:2), nor from the retentiveness and accuracy of the memories of the first disciples, nor from their dependability in transmitting exact data about Jesus' words and deeds. What in fact did empower the inaugurators of the Christian tradition (and subsequently the evangelists) with the capacity to evoke faith in Jesus as Son of God was the privileged experience of the dynamic action of the risen Lord through his Spirit. It is because our Gospel-narratives are "Spirit-

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filled" that they can enable the believer to be present to Jesus in the mysteries of his earthly life. The fourth evangelist describes this formative experience of the earliest followers of Jesus as "remembering." Recall his comment upon Jesus' mysterious utterance, "Destroy this sanctuary and within three days I will raise it up again" (John 2:19). "When therefore he had been raised from the dead, his disciples remembered what he had said, and they believed the Scriptures [Psalm 69:9 cited at v. 17] and the word Jesus had spoken" (John 2:22). Note also his gloss upon the story of the final entry of Jesus into Jerusalem: "At the time his disciples did not understand, but after Jesus had been glorified, they remembered that what had been written about him had happened to him" (John 12:16). In his discourse after the Last Supper, John indicates the source of this experience, distinguishing it from any mere human, historical recollection. "I have told you all this while I am still here with you; but the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and make you remember all that I have told you" (John 14:25-26). In the second place, a remarkable feature of the evangelists' attitude toward Jesus' earthly ministry demands attentive consideration. None gives any slightest hint that it was a vanished golden age to which one should or could desire to return. While each devoted the greater part of his book to this period, when Jesus' disciples enjoyed such singular familiarity with him, no Gospelwriter looks back to its termination with regret. Mark's little book has made its fortune by what William Wrede was pleased to call "the messianic secret." Mark himself and John even more explicitly (John 12:37-43) consider Jesus' public ministry a failure. Indeed, John the evangelist has Jesus pronounce a final beatitude upon those believers who have not had personal experience of Jesus' earthly history: "Happy are those who have come to the faith without having seen" (John 20:29). Norman Perrin has accurately summed up this ambivalent attitude on the part of the evangelists. "It ought to be described as a situation in which the distinction between past, present, and future tended to be lost as the present experience of Jesus as risen led to a new understanding of the future and of the past. The key was the present experience, without which the future would have oc appeared barren and the past would have been soon forgotten." Still, the issue we are discussing is not yet finally resolved. Why, if Mark (and his colleagues) wished to transmit a message of the contemporary, risen Jesus, did he (and they) choose to wrap it in the winding-sheet of Jesus' past? Why not, like Paul, write letters (real letters, to real people, with real problems)? Why not, in the manner of the seer of Patmos, create, from one's own

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mystical experience of the exalted Lord, a theology of history as a message of consolation? The only fully satisfactory answer to all this can be found in recalling that in addition to being a transmitter of the evangelical tradition (Form criticism) and creative interpreter of that tradition for a particular Christian community (Redaction criticism), each evangelist is above all a witness to Jesus' resurrection. He does this by writing his Gospel out of the conviction that he is narrating Jesus' earthly history, not merely as a collection of memories of the past, but as actual happenings in which he seeks to involve his readers. For him, what he tells is somehow a contemporary, abiding reality that can and must exert an impact upon the life of his Christian reader. Therefore, it is of supreme importance to see that our Gospels are not "history" or biography (as we understand those terms), but something infinitely more valuable. "These things have been written down," the fourth evangelist declares, "in order that you may deepen your faith . . . and possess eternal life" (John 20:30-31). This author may be said to have anticipated what Vatican II asserted, namely, the kind of truth we are to seek in the Scriptures is not scientific, or even "historical" truth, but "that truth which God has put upon the sacred page for the sake of our salvation."37 We have seen that both the Carthusian Ludolph and St. Ignatius display great concern that the Christian, in praying to our Lord, become present to him in "the Mysteries" of his earthly life. One might, however, receive the impression from these medieval authors that this is to be accomplished by the use of one's imagination. If, however, we examine what the evangelists and Paul assert or imply about the resurrection of Jesus, we discover a deeper basis for this involvement. The new Testament attests to three aspects of Jesus' resurrection, which must be considered here briefly. First, Jesus' resurrection is by implication at least presented as a unique event, unparalleled in history. This can be inferred from the fact that nowhere does any inspired writer attempt to depict the actual event: it is not to be imagined as the resuscitation of a corpse, as in certain apocryphal "gospels." Indeed, the evangelists do in fact describe Jesus's resuscitation of the dead daughter of Jairus (Mark 5:35-42), of the widow's son at Nairn (Luke 7:1-17), and of Lazarus (John 11:8-44). By the most striking act of his divine power, Jesus brought these back again to our present, earthly existence. Yet these people did not escape the necessity of facing death once more. St. Paul declares that Jesus' resurrection is of a totally different kind. "You know that Christ raised from death can no longer die, death has no more power over him. The death he died was a death once for all to sin: the life he now leads is one lived unto God"

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(Romans 6:9-10). Thus Jesus has been raised to a completely new, unprecedented existence. Moreover, the evangelists all manifest a deep sensitivity to the dangers inherent in any attempt to narrate the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus. Mark appears to have declined to compose any such narrative, concluding his Gospel with the dramatic visit by the women to the empty tomb (Mark 16:1-8). It was a hand other than Mark's that added verses 9-20, which contain what is only a list of such appearances. Another such list is given by Paul in 1 Corinthians 5-8. The present consensus among scholars is that these lists represent the earliest traditions attesting these momentous confrontations by the risen Lord with his disciples. The stories found in Matthew, Luke, and John appear to be imaginative creations by these evangelists, or by a later tradition. Yet even so, it is significant that each of these writers, in his own way, draws attention to the fact that the old familiarity with the earthly Jesus—a notable feature of the Gospel scenes from the public ministry—was never felt by the disciples in their meetings with the risen Christ. These men remain prey to doubts and fears; they are silent with embarrassment, too inhibited to ask "Who are you?" (John 21:12); Luke remarks by way of extenuation, "They doubted for joy" (Luke 24:41); "Some doubted," reports Matthew of the scene on the mountain in Galilee (Matthew 28:17b). By contrast with such human reactions, the risen Jesus is seen as the unique, totally liberated human being. No evangelist explains how the risen One came to his disciples, or how he took leave of them. There are possibly two exceptions to this latter point: in the recognition scene describing the two Emmaus disciples, Luke observes eerily, "He vanished into thin air" (Luke 24:31), and in his imaginative presentation of the ascension, he says, "A cloud snatched him from their sight" (Acts 1:9). Actually, it seems the evangelists' chief aim in the post-resurrection narratives involving the men, as in those with the women, is to portray the birth of Christian faith in the hearts of these first followers of Jesus. Luke and John suggest that, until they were endowed with the new paschal faith through contact with the risen Lord, they could not recognize him: Magdalene mistakes him for a gardener (John 20:15); and Luke's two disciples take him for an ignorant stranger unaware of the tragic events of Good Friday (Luke 24:16). The well-known observation of St. Thomas Aquinas deserves to be recalled here: "After his resurrection the disciples saw the living Christ, whom they knew to have died, with the eyes of faith [oculata fide]." 38 Mere human natural vision is

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not adequate for beholding the glorified Jesus. Any attempt to return to the dear, dead past, as Jesus warns Magdalene, is a barrier to the insight of genuine faith: "Do not go on clinging to Me" (John 20:17). Second, the evangelists emphasize, as Paul had done in 1 Corinthians 15, the truth that Jesus is indeed bodily risen. The living One is no ghost, even though his bodily appearance has undergone a transformation. Luke can even picture Jesus risen as taking food (Luke 24:37-45; Acts 1:4); John declares, "He showed them his hands and his side; and the disciples rejoiced at seeing the Lord" (John 20:20). This same belief in Jesus' bodily resurrection underlies Paul's original presentation of the Corinthian community as "Christ's body" (1 Corinthians 12:27), members of the body of the risen Lord. This would make little sense (except as a remote analogy), if Paul were not convinced that belief in Jesus' bodily glorification was essential to Christian faith. Observe his answer to the questions, "How can the dead rise? What kind of body will they have when they came back?" (1 Corinthians 15:35). From his somewhat impatient reply to the objection, it is clear that he means a bodily resurrection: "You foolish man, the very seed you sow never comes back to life without first dying; and when you sow it, it has not the body it is going to have, but is a naked kernel, perhaps of wheat or something else; and God gives it just such a body as he pleases, so that each kind of seed has a body of its own" (1 Corinthians 15:36-37). Third, complete acceptance of all the scriptural data regarding Jesus' resurrection includes the very good news that the Son of God has chosen to remain human forever in his glorified existence. One of the most primitive credal formulas of faith, "Jesus is Lord," cited frequently by Paul (Philippians 2:11; 1 Corinthians 8:6, 12:3; 2 Corinthians 4:5; Romans 10:9), draws attention to the continuity between "Jesus" (the name that designates him in his earthly condition) and "the Lord" (the post-resurrection title). Paul testifies to his conviction that the Lord who speaks is the Jesus who spoke, by his habitual reference to the sayings of Jesus as "sayings of the Lord" (1 Thessalonians 4:2,15; 1 Corinthians 7:10, 9:14; Roman 14:14). In common with the earliest Church, Paul believes it was "Jesus" who "rose" (1 Thessalonians 4:14). This aspect of New Testament faith in the resurrection is of considerable moment as the foundation for the possibility of our becoming present to Jesus in his mysteries. If Jesus is acknowledged as having gone forward to new life with God, carrying with him his humanness in its totality, then he has taken also into glory his very "historicity." The transformation in Jesus wrought by God's raising him has not only glorified the material aspect of his personality; it has also profoundly transformed all those human

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experiences that went into the making of what we call Jesus' earthly life. This history, as a consequence of Jesus' resurrection, no longer belongs merely to the past, for his human life has made him by act of God the kind of Lord he eternally remains. "Jesus Christ, yesterday and today the same—and so forever" (Hebrews 13:8). The Lord of history declares to the seer of Patmos, "I was dead; but remember, I am alive for evermore" (Apocalypse 1:18). In fact, this last-cited author dramatizes this truth in his reported vision of heaven. Through his tears of frustration at his failure to find one "worthy to open the scroll and read it," the inspired visionary sees "in the midst of the throne and of the four living creatures and of the ancients, one standing like a lamb with the marks of his slaying still upon him" (Apocalypse 5:1-6). By this symbolism the seer portrays the risen Jesus who, as Master of history, bears in glory the badges of his Passions. Paul's spirited polemic against the gnostic "enthusiasts" at Corinth rests its case upon the focal point of his kerygma as proclaiming solely "Jesus Christ, and him as having been [and so remaining] crucified" (1 Corinthians 2:2). The justification for this translation lies in the force of the Greek perfect participle which Paul here employs. St. Ignatius Loyola appears to have shared this Pauline insight that the resurrection of Jesus has not "papered over" the Passion; for him "Christ our creator and Lord" remains always "the crucified majesty of God" (to use Hugo Rahner's phrase). You will recall that in the celebrated colloquy of the first week, the high point in fact of those exercises, and a reflection of Ignatius' Manresa experience, Ignatius bids the exercitant, "Imagine Christ our lord present before you upon the cross, and begin to speak with him, asking how it is t h a t . . . he has stooped to become man and to pass from eternal life to death here in time, that thus he might die for our sins" (53). Surely this Christ with whom the exercitant is to speak is the risen Lord—who remains just as truly the Crucified. A deeper appreciation of this precious truth, that the mysteries of his earthly life abide perpetually in the risen Jesus, resolves a difficulty that arises from the fundamental significance of Christian faith as an interpersonal relationship with Christ. Indeed, if to believe involves an ever-deepening, loving surrender of oneself to the risen Lord, how can this actually be possible? The New Testament tells us that, in his new life with God, Jesus now remains beyond reach, even of our imagination. Which of us has ever seen him whom God has raised from death to never-ending Life? The answer to these questions is found in Paul and also in the evangelists' aim in creating the Gospels. It can be seen, moreover—by implication at least—to function in the work of Ludolph and in the Spiritual Exercises. It may be stated simply: I can only relate to the risen

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Christ, "our Creator and Lord"—otherwise now beyond my human reach—through the contemplation of the mysteries of his earthly career. This, incidentally, also provides the real answer to a question raised earlier: why, if the evangelists display no nostalgia for Jesus' earthly life, do they devote almost the whole of their Gospels to it? I venture to suggest that it is because they were deeply impregnated with the happy truth that Jesus is precisely the kind of Lord he is at present, in virtue of his earthly history. They equivalently tell their readers: the kind of Lord who imperiously demands your faith and love is a Lord who still carries the marks of the nails in his risen flesh, a Lord who consorted with sinners, even in table-fellowship, to make credible, visible, lovable, the compassion of God. He is in truth a Lord who took pity on the pariahs, the ostracized, the alienated. He accepted women as well as men for disciples, displayed a loving concern for children, regarded as "nothings" in the ancient world, introduced slaves into his parables as persons endowed with human rights. He is a Lord who put sight into the eyes of a man born blind, rehabilitated by a command the crippled, cured those suffering from "unclean spirits." He is a Lord who courageously crossed the lines of racial and religious prejudice, broke existing conventions by speaking to a woman in public—and she was a Samaritan. These are some examples of the important insight evinced by our Gospel-writers; the incidents the evangelists narrate from Jesus' public life provide many different avenues by which their readers may approach the glorified Lord Jesus. John, we have seen, states this conviction expressly when he defends his selection of relatively few episodes from Jesus' earthly life. "Many other signs indeed Jesus also performed in the presence of the disciples, which have not been written into this book. These, however, have been written down in order that you may grow in your faith that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have Life through his person" (John 20:3031). St. Ignatius Loyola, for all he says about using one's imagination, possessed this insight of faith that guided the writers of the four Gospels. At the same time, he was, of course, a man of his time, a medieval. "Ignatius himself . . . remained a man of the Middle Ages. Assuredly he was very intelligently alert, and very much aware of the needs and tendencies of his times. But for his own interior life he borrowed nothing . . . from the humanistic environment in which he lived."39 This informed judgment by Joseph de Guibert may serve as a reminder of the journey we have made together from the consideration of that characteristically medieval form of devotional literature, "the Mysteries of the

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life of Christ," to our own times. The techniques of Gospel-criticism provide much assistance in adjusting the perennially valid Ignatian approach to him who stands at the heart of our Christian living of the gospel. One hopes that the journey has also shown some of the compelling reasons for the ever-present need of updating the Spiritual Exercises, if these are to continue to exercise their beneficent influence on the contemporary Christian.

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Notes 1.

All references to the text of the Spiritual Exercises, including the enumeration, are to the English translation by Louis J. Puhl, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1951).This version from the Spanish "autograph" is adequate for this paper, despite the fact that the Vulgata Versio, rendered into Latin by Andre des Freux "under the eyes of Ignatius himself" in 1546-47, is the text officially approved by the Church: see Joseph de Guibert, S.J., The Jesuits; Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice, A Historical Study, trans. William J. Young (Chicago: 1964), 113.

2.

Hugo Rahner, Ignatius the Theologian, trans. Michael Barry (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), 54f., asserts, "Whatever else they may be, the Exercises are certainly a meditative concentration on the life of Christ."

3.

Ibid., 55f.: "The Exercises are never simply a series of meditations, nor even a summary of the spiritual life. Their meaning emerges only in the light of their ultimate purpose: to present the exercitant with a choice which transforms his life and in which he must find in peace the will of God for him by conforming himself, as far as he possibly can in his particular situation, to the law of life laid down by Christ . . . . Thus the very structure of the Exercises reveals that the prayerful contemplation of the life of Christ is vitally shaped by the Call of the King."

4.

Louis Lallement (1587-1635), a celebrated tertian master and uncle of St. Gabriel Lallemant, wrote nothing for publication; his famous Spiritual Doctrine was published in 1694 by Pierre Champion from notes made by one of his tertians, Jean Rigoleuc. Louis Peeters indicated his view of the main thrust of the Spiritual Exercises in his book, Vers I'union divine par les Exercies de S. Ignace (Louvain; Museum Lessianum, 1931). The study of William A. M. Peters, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius; Exposition and Interpretation (Jersey City: Program to Adapt the Spiritual Exercises, 1968) asserts that the Spiritual Exercises "are first and foremost a school of prayer" (p. x).

5.

According to Ignacio Iparraguirre, it was at Manresa that the Benedictine confessor of St. Ignatius introduced him to the Ejercitatorio of Garcia de Cisneros, teaching him to meditate on themes of the via purgativa, from which resulted the exercises of the first week. From this period also date, at least in embryonic form, the Rules for Discernment, the ways of making the Election, the third degree of humility. At Manresa, Ignatius began to read the Imitation of Christ, and so was introduced to the Devotio moderna. See the illuminating essay of Ignacio Iparraguirre, which introduces the text of the Spiritual Exercises in Obras completes de San Ignacio de Loyola (Madrid: La Editorial Catolica, 1963), 162-87, particularly "Genesis de la composicion del libro," 179-85. See also the discriminating discussion on the origin of the Spiritual Exercises by Gilles Cusson, S.J., "La Transcendence du mysfere de Dieu," in Pedagogie de I'expeVience spirituelle personelle (Paris, Montreal: Bruges, 1968), 17-62.

6.

R.A.F. MacKenzie remarks in Exercises," in Robert Harvanek, and the Spiritual Exercises of University, 1963), 68f.: "In the

"Biblical Theology and the Spiritual ed., Institute on Contemporary Thought St. Ignatius Loyola, (Chicago: Loyola mind of St. Ignatius, the Exercises, to

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Ignatian Spirituality in a Secular Age which suitable candidates were invited to devote a whole month, were intended to reproduce for them the Saint's own experience of conversion to God. They propose, in universalized form, a sequence of acts similar to those through which God guided Ignatius himself, in the castle at Loyola, at Manresa, at Monserrat, and, for that matter, at the University of Paris. It is the Saint's purpose to make available to his neighbour . . . the opportunity at least of receiving the same great graces God had bestowed on him."

7.

Rahner, Ignatius the Theologian, 57f.

8.

J. Peter Schineller, S.J., "The Newer Approaches to Christology and their Use in the Spiritual Exercises," Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 12 (September-October, 1980).

9.

Avery Dulles, "Contemporary Approaches to Christology: Reflections," Living Light 13 (1976), 137.

10.

See the historical and theological studies by Hermann Josef Sieben and Walter Baier, "Mysteres de la vie du Christ," in Dictionnaire de Spiritualite, vol. 10: 1874-86.

11.

Sum ma Theologica, Ilia pars, articles 35-57.

12.

For a synthesis of St. Bernard's doctrine, see Etienne Gilson, The Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard, trans. A. H. C. Downes (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1940).

13.

Sieben and Baier, "Mysteres de la vie du Christ," 1897.

14.

Walter Baier, "Ludolphe de Saxe," in Dictonnaire de Spiritualite*, vol. 9: 1130-38.

15.

Andre Watrigant, O.S.B., "Le grand poeme bonaventurien sur les sept paroles du Christ en croix," Revue Benedictine 47 (1935), 268f.: "II n'est pas exagere de dire que c'est 1'un des plus beaux et savants ouvrages qui nous viennent du moyen age."

16.

See the interesting discussion in Rahner, Ignatius the Theologian, 47-49.

17.

Joseph A. Fitzmyer, "The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius and Recent Gospel Study," Woodstock Letters 91 (1962), 258.

18.

Cusson, Pedagogie, 266.

19.

Matthew 21:7, alone of the four accounts, mentions "the ass and its foal"; the detail "the people came forth to meet Jesus" is based on John 12:13.

20.

It will be recalled that the First Prelude of the contemplation on Jesus' appearance to his mother (219) repeats substantially the consideration recommended for the seventh day of the third week (208). This reveals St. Ignatius' insight into the truth, which St. Paul insists upon, viz., that the Passion and Resurrection constitute simply two facets of one indissoluble event of salvation.

Analysis and

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21.

Rahner, Ignatius the Theologian, 93.

22.

See the Proemium: "Et apertis oculis nostris ad deificum lumen, atonitis auribus audiamus divina cotidie clamans quid nos admoneat vox."

23.

Rahner, Ignatius the Theologian, lOOf., remarks: "It would, indeed, be well to point out again the insistence with which Ignatius and his best commentators are always emphasizing that the Election (together with the indispensable Discernment of Spirits) should be made only through continuous contemplation of the mysteries of the life of Christ." The idea is also found in Ludolph of Saxony in a less developed way.

24.

De Guibert, The Jesuits, 50.

25.

Rahner, Ignatius the Theologian, 129.

26.

See ninth day (161), where St. Ignatius describes the narrative: "Christ our Lord appears to his disciples on the waves of the sea." While in 280 the points are taken from Matthew 14:22-23, with its addition of Peter's attempt to imitate Jesus, it is the aspect of Christophany that is still central. Rudolf Schnackenburg, The Gospel according to St. Mark, trans. W. Kruppa, (New York: Herder <5c Herder, 1971), 1: 115, comments on the Marcan version of the story (Mark 6:45-52): "After the Messianic revelation of Jesus before the people at the great meal, he now reveals himself to his disciples immediately in his superhuman greatness, in an epiphany which discloses the mystery of his divine essence." And he adds, "Any brooding over the historical event is just as futile as pondering over the apparitions of the risen Lord. Only he who believes in the resurrection of Christ can accept the fact of this numinous happening, this epiphany of the divine in the earthly sphere."

27.

St. Ignatius could take for granted in his day both the knowledge and acceptance of the content of sacra dpctrina (145) and "the love of the true doctrine of Christ our Lord" (164). This derived not only from the Scriptures but also from the Fathers of the Church. Accordingly, there was not the same need to help the exercitant to assimilate the teaching of Jesus presented in the New Testament as there sometimes is today.

28.

It will be noted that the German term speaks of the history of the various forms. The title of Rudolf Bultmann's basic work is History of the Synoptic Tradition, trans. John Marsh (New York: Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963). See also Edgar V. McKnight, What is Form Criticism? (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969).

29.

See a brilliant commentary on this Instructio de historica evangeliorum veritate by Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., "The Biblical Commission's Instruction on the Historical Truth of the Gospels," Theological Studies 25 (1964), 386-408; also a more popular article, "The Gospel Truth," American 110, 25(1964), 844-46.

30.

This is the conciliar Constitution on Divine Revelation.

31.

See James M. Robinson, A New Quest of the Historical Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1959). Ernst Kasemann appears to have inspired this new search with an article "Das Problem des historischen Jesu," Zeitschrift fiir Theologie und Kirche 51 (1954), 125-53. See the sympathetic comments on

50

32.

Ignatian Spirituality in a Secular Age the new quest by Raymond E. Brown, S.S., "After Bultmann, What?—An Introduction to the Post-Bultmannians," Catholic Biblical Quarterly 26 (1964), 1-30. See the helpful discussion of this methodology in Norman Perrin, What is Redaction Criticism? (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969); also my own study," 'Go tell John what you hear and see': Jesus' self-understanding in the light of his earthly history," Proceedings of the Theology Institute of Villanova University 12 (1980).

33.

Robinson, A New Quest, 94.

34.

Gunther Bornkamm, Jesus of Nazareth, trans. Irene and Fraser McLuskey with James M. Robinson (New York: Harper and Brothers i960), 10. Another significant contribution by a Catholic critic is Bruce Vawter, C.M., This Man Jesus; An Essay toward a New Testament Christology (New York: Doubleday, I973T

35.

David Stanley, "The Supreme Rule," The Way; Supplement 36 (1979), 18-44.

36.

Perrin, What is Redaction Criticism?, 76-77.

37.

Constitution on Divine Revelation, par. 11.

38.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica III, 55, 2, ad 1.

39.

De Guibert, The Jesuits, 166.

FRANCISCAN ROOTS OF IGNATIAN MEDITATION Ewert H. Cousins

To claim Franciscan roots for Ignatian meditation may seem surprising. The personalities of Francis of Assisi and Ignatius of Loyola stand at the opposite ends of a spectrum. Francis was a free spirit, a poet and singer of songs like the troubadors, a spontaneous leader who inspired thousands of followers but who left the organization and administration of his Order to others. In fact, in his spontaneity he produced a movement that seemed to defy institutionalization. Ignatius, on the other hand, was an able administrator, an organizer par excellence, a long-range strategist who could put his master plan into practice even in minute detail. His military experience shaped his natural gifts, which he placed at the service of spiritual goals. He had a genius for method, for orienting means to ends—for developing an institution, for spiritual discipline, and for meditation. The calculated methodology of Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises and the spontaneity of Francis' Hymn of Brother Sun mirror in literary form the differences in their lives and personalities. The religious orders that these two saints founded reflect, at least in the popular mind, this same diversity. The Franciscans strive to imitate the simplicity of their founder, while the Jesuits have acquired a reputation for worldly sophistication, for crafty pragmatism, and for intellectual cultivation. The Franciscans place a primacy on poverty, the Jesuits on obedience. The Franciscans value love over intellect; the Jesuits esteem intellect highly, placing it at the service of the glory of God. Throughout the world the Jesuits are known for their intellectual achievement, for their colleges and universities, for their scholars who reach eminence not only in philosophy and theology but in secular fields as well. As we will see, this polarity is not completely accurate, since from the beginning the Franciscans developed a great intellectual tradition, which flourishes in this century in the high quality of their historical, critical research. Granted the differences above, Franciscans and Jesuits share a common ground that provides the very foundation of their spiritualities. By reason of this common ground, Franciscans and Jesuits stand closer together than either group does to the Dominicans. This common ground is devotion to the humanity of Christ, which in each case flowered in meditation on the life of Christ. Both groups developed a Christocentric spirituality that looked back to the historical

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events of Christ's life as its point of departure. In this perspective, the Jesuits can be seen to be heirs of a tradition that was originally developed by the Franciscans in the thirteenth century, which was transmitted to subsequent centuries largely through Franciscan channels. Although Franciscan in origin and transmission, this tradition so permeated the religious sensibility of Western Christianity that it became a dominant feature of European culture as a whole. In this essay, I will explore this common ground of devotion to the humanity of Christ. After a sketch of the historical background, I will show how this devotion emerged in Francis and the early Franciscan movement. Next I will show how it was developed into a method of meditating on the life of Christ by Bonaventure in his Tree of Life. Already in the thirteenth century this method contained all the basic elements of Ignatius' meditation on the life of Christ in the Spiritual Exercises, but without his self-conscious method. From Bonaventure's and Ignatius' texts I will draw out the essential element of this meditation, which I call the mysticism of the historical event. By this I mean a distinct form of contemplative mystical consciousness whereby one attempts to enter into a significant event of the past in order to tap its spiritual energies. I claim that this is a specific form of mystical consciousness, meriting a place in any comprehensive typology of mysticism. In the next section of the paper, I will examine how Bonaventure situated this mysticism of the historical event within the mainstream of Christian theology and spirituality. This can be illustrated by comparing his Tree of Life with his Soul's Journey into God. Finally, I will raise a question concerning Ignatius and his Spiritual Exercises; did Ignatius have a Bonaventure as Francis did? Francis did not integrate the devotion to the humanity of Christ, which he evoked, into the traditional theology of the Trinity, creation, the incarnation, and redemption. This task was performed by Bonaventure. Most importantly for our focus, Bonaventure integrated the mysticism of the historical event into the other modes of experiencing the mystery of Christ, chiefly through the fourfold interpretation of Scripture. Has there been, within the Jesuit tradition, an effort to link the Ignatian meditation on the life of Christ with other dimensions of the mystery of Christ and to situate the perspective of the Spiritual Exercises within a comprehensive theological and spiritual framework? Although my title suggests a historical study, my approach will involve other elements. My concerns are historical but not exclusively so; they are historical, psychological, spiritual, and theological. I will begin with historical data, especially the analysis of texts from the past. Although I am concerned

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with the historical influence of the Franciscans on Ignatius, I am more concerned with the forms of consciousness they cultivated. In this sense, I have a psychological interest, which could best be described as typological phenomenology. By this I mean that through the method of phenomenological analysis I strive to clarify the distinct structure and dynamics of the type of consciousness expressed in a text. I am concerned with the psychological not for its own sake but for its relation to spirituality: how does this specific form of consciousness contribute to growth in the life of the Spirit? Finally, I ask how all of these elements can be encompassed within a theological vision that is rooted in the tradition and open to the future. Thus, in keeping with the mysticism of the historical event, I am studying history here as a resource for spirituality in the present and future. Devotion to the Humanity of Christ During the Middle Ages there occurred in western Europe a remarkable transformation of religious sensibility that affected the very core of Christian spirituality and decisively changed its direction for subsequent centuries. I am speaking of the emergence of devotion to the humanity of Christ, with its focus on the historical events of Christ's life, its desire to imagine and re-enact these events and to imitate Christ in the concrete details of his earthly life. 1 This transformation of sensibility was so deep and pervasive that it is difficult—even now, centuries later—to reconstruct what Christian spirituality was like before it occurred. The emergence of devotion to the humanity of Christ, then, is a watershed that divides Western Christianity from its Eastern counterpart, and Western Christianity itself into two millenia. Although interest in the historical events of Christ's life is as ancient as the Synoptic Gospels, during its first thousand years Christian spirituality tended to focus on the Risen Lord rather than on the Jesus of history. Of course, this statement must be elaborated in any extensive historical survey; for my present purposes, however, I am merely painting a general picture, sketching the outlines of a trend, realizing full well that in a more detailed study I would have to take into account exceptions and make necessary qualifications. The focus on the Risen Christ was set by Paul himself, who did not know the historical Jesus and who protested against restricting the apostolic privilege to those who had known Christ in his earthly life: "Even if we did once know Christ, that is not how we 2 know him now" (2 Corinthians 4:16). For Paul, the Christian spiritual life does

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not focus on the Jesus of history but on the Risen Lord in the fullness of his Paschal Mystery, present to the faithful here and now. In the Greek world, attention was directed to Christ as Logos—in his pre-existence in the Trinity, as the Pantocrator through whom creation was achieved, as the Bridegroom of the soul and of the Church, and as Risen Lord through whom the process of divinization is accomplished in the return of all things to the Father. This emphasis is seen especially in the Alexandrian school, in Clement and Origen, in Athanasius and the Cappodocians. Although the Antiocene school turned to the humanity of Jesus, its emphasis did not produce in the East anything comparable to the western medieval devotion to Christ's humanity. Among the Latin Fathers, the historical humanity of Christ did not play a central role. For example, Augustine discovered Christ through his presence as Logos in the soul. This led him to a painstaking analysis of the soul as image of the Trinity and not to a meditation on the historical events of Christ's life. In Benedictine monasticism and its derivatives, which dominated western spirituality in the early Middle Ages, once again the focus was on the Risen Lord rather than on the historical Jesus. The paschal mystery was celebrated each day in the conventual Mass and throughout the year in the liturgical cycle. Another ingredient of monastic spirituality was the chanting of the divine office, which consisted chiefly of the Psalms. These were interpreted allegorically as referring to Christ, not primarily in concrete historical details to be imitated, but in foreshadowing the paschal mystery, in which the monks were participating in their own historical existence. Although the main focus of monastic spirituality was not on the historical Jesus, the roots of meditation on the life of Christ can be traced to the monastic lectio divina. This was a practice of private reading, chiefly of the Scriptures, which was carried out in a 3 very slow and meditative fashion. Although it was not restricted to the events described in the Gospel nor was it elaborated into a formal method, the monks did meditate at length on those passages which present the historical events of Christ's life. The historical roots of meditation on the life of Christ, of course, go deeper than the practice of lectio divina. They are grounded in the fact that Jesus was an historical person, that the early Christians wrote accounts of the events of his life in their sacred books, and that they interpreted these events as having cosmic significance. They are also grounded in the characteristics of the Western psyche and in the development of European culture during the Middle Ages. True to its Roman origins, the Western psyche is primarily concerned with

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the concrete, the pragmatic, the moral, the legal, and the political. All of these concerns tie the Western psyche to the historical event. This Roman attitude can be seen in the Latin Fathers, whose writings by and large are less mystical and cosmic than those of the Greek Fathers. These fundamental Roman attitudes were retained as Europe was transformed by the barbarian invasions. They remained at the wellsprings of the Western psyche as it shaped its early medieval civilization. In the burst of energy that has been called the renaissance of the twelfth century, certain factors intensified this Western interest in the concrete, the historical, and the human. The Provencal poets sang eloquently of human love; monks wrote penetratingly of human friendship. Travel increased, especially to shrines that housed the relics of saints—their bones, their garments, the objects they used in everyday life. Most of all, interest in the Holy Land reached a climax in the success of the First Crusade. Granted the complex economic, political, and social forces involved in the crusades, on the religious level they reflected and intensified the growing devotion to the humanity of Christ. The religious motive for the crusades was to free from Muslim control the places where Jesus was born, preached, and died, so that Christian pilgrims could walk the same streets that he did, touch the stones that he stood upon, kiss the tomb in which he was buried. The crusaders fought to capture and bring back to Europe the relics of Christ's human life: the true cross, the crown of thorns. Through the dramatic cultural event of the crusades, the imagination of western Europe was being intensely directed to the concrete, human, historical details of the life of Christ. Francis to Ignatius In the twelfth century, Bernard of Clairvaux, who was an agent in political events and preached a crusade, was the leading figure directly cultivating devotion to the humanity of Christ. It is true that his major work, Sermons on the Song of Songs, is in the classical tradition of the Risen Lord, drawing from the Origen tradition of allegorical interpretation of Christ as Logos, who is Bridegroom of the soul and the Church. Yet even in these sermons he develops the notion of the "carnal love of Christ." "Notice," he says, "that the love of the heart is, in a certain sense carnal, because our hearts are attracted most toward the humanity of Christ and the things he did or commanded while in the flesh." Bernard advises that we should cultivate this love by imagining Christ in the events of his life: "The soul at prayer should

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have before it a sacred image of the God-man, in his birth or infancy or as he was teaching, or dying, or rising, or ascending." Bernard gives as the principal reason why God became man that "he wanted to recapture the affections of carnal men who were unable to love in any other way, by first drawing them to the salutary love of his own humanity, and then gradually to raise them to a spiritual love."4 In his sermons on the feasts of the liturgical year, Bernard carries out his own advice on imaging the humanity of Christ.

Each feast

provides him with an event upon which he meditates in detail, evoking human emotions to draw us to imitation. Against this background the leading actor in our drama appeared on the stage of the Middle Ages. He was Francis of Assisi, who more than any other saint or spiritual writer transformed religious sensibility in the direction of devotion to the humanity of Christ. Although his role in this process is widely acknowledged, it is not easy to analyze. Unlike Bernard, he did not propound a theory concerning the "carnal love of Christ;" nor do we have extant sermons like Bernard's, which develop a method of meditating on the historical events of Christ's life. Rather, Francis was first and foremost intent on imitating Christ in poverty and on creating a lifestyle based, as he believed, on the essence of the Gospel. He attempted to embody in his own person this lifestyle, even in concrete details. Finally, two years before his death, he received the stigmata, the marks of Christ's passion, in his feet, hands, and side. His followers interpreted this as the ultimate embodiment of his imitation of Christ and the ultimate seal of divine approval. Bonaventure's biography describes how Francis came to the idea of his way of life: "One day when he was devoutly hearing a Mass of the Apostles, the Gospel was read in which Christ sends forth his disciples to preach and explains to them the way of life according to the Gospel: that they should not keep gold or silver or money in their belts, nor have a wallet for their journey, nor two tunics, nor shoes, nor staff" (Matthew 10:9). When he grasped its meaning, he was filled with joy and said: "This is what I want; this is what I long for with all my heart." Bonaventure describes how Francis proceeded to carry out Christ's injunction quite literally: "He immediately took off his shoes from his feet, put aside his staff, cast away his wallet and money as if accursed, was content with one tunic and exchanged his leather belt for a piece of rope." This insight was confirmed later when Francis and his first follower, Bernard of Quintavalle, went to the church of Saint Nicholas to seek God's direction. Francis opened the book of the Gospel three times—the first time to the words: "If you will be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor (Matthew 19:21); the second time to the words: "Take nothing on your journey" (Luke 9:3); and the third time to the words: "If anyone wishes to come

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after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me" (Matthew 16:24). "This is our life and our rule," Francis said, "and the life and rule of all c who wish to join our company." In these Gospel texts, Francis perceived the poverty of Christ's lifestyle and that of his disciples during the years of his public ministry. It was the life of a wandering teacher and preacher who had no permanent home, who went about his ministry unencumbered by physical possessions. This image of the Christ the "Poor Man" Francis strove to imitate with a certain radical literalness. In his approach, we see the essential elements of the emerging devotion to the humanity of Christ: a looking back to the Christ of history—here to his public ministry—a focussing on concrete details, and an imitation of Christ's virtue as embodied in these details. Although the central event here was Christ's public ministry, Francis drew attention also to the poverty of Christ's birth and death. Eventually, these two events became the central themes in the devotion to the humanity of Christ. This is not surprising, not only because of the drama of these events, but because it is precisely birth and death that establish the historicity of the human situation. In 1223, Francis created a creche for the midnight Mass at Greccio. Although these cribs existed before this time, for example, in Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, they did not play the role in Christian devotion that they have subsequently come to play as a result of Franciscan influence. According to Thomas of Celano in his Vita prima, Francis contacted a friend, John of Greccio, and bade him prepare for the midnight Mass in the following way: "If you want us to celebrate the present feast of our Lord at Greccio, go with haste and diligently prepare what I tell you. For I wish to do something that will recall to memory the little Child who was born in Bethlehem and set before our bodily eyes in some way the inconveniences of his infant needs, how he lay in a manger, how, with an ox and an ass standing by, he lay upon the hay where he had been 7 placed." Celano proceeds to give a graphic account of the scene at the Mass. I will quote it at length since the passage indicates how Francis drew the people into the event by reproducing it dramatically: The manger was prepared, the hay had been brought, the ox and ass were led in. There simplicity was honored, poverty was exalted, humility was commended, and Greccio was made, as it were, a new Bethlehem. The night was lighted up like the day, and it delighted men and beasts. The people came and were filled with new joy over the new mystery. The woods rang with the voices of the crowd and the rocks made answer to their jubilation. The brothers sang, paying their debt of praise to the Lord, and the whole night resounded with their rejoicing. The saint of God stood before the manger, uttering sighs, overcome with love, and filled with a wonderful happiness. The solemnities of the Mass were celebrated over the manger and the priest experienced a new consolation.

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The saint of God was clothed with the vestments of the deacon, for he was a deacon, and he sang the holy Gospel in a sonorous voice. And his voice was a strong voice, a sweet voice, a clear voice, a sonorous voice, inviting all to the highest rewards. Then he preached to the people standing about, and he spoke charming words concerning the nativity of the poor King and the little town of Bethlehem. Frequently too, when he wished to call Christ Jesus, he would call him simply the Child of Bethlehem, aglow with overflowing love for him; and speaking the word Bethlehem, his voice was more like the bleating of a sheep. His mouth was filled more with sweet affection than with words. Besides, when he spoke the name Child of Bethlehem or Jesus, his tongue licked his lips, as it were, relishing and savoring with pleased palate the sweetness of the words.8 With his charm, simplicity, and artistic creativity, Francis has made the birth of Christ come alive by transforming Greccio into Bethlehem. Through concrete detail and dramatic action, he has drawn the friars and lay people into becoming actors in the event. Through his choice of details he has highlighted the message of poverty implicit in the scene. It is not surprising, then, that some forty years later Bonaventure, at that time Minister General of the Franciscan Order, composed The Tree of Life, a series of meditations on the life of Christ, which sought to achieve with the imagination what Francis did with a dramatic stage-like setting. After recalling the Gospel account of the birth of Christ, Bonaventure focusses on the concrete details that convey the message of poverty and humility. Then he invites the reader to become an actor in the event, even more intimately than Francis did at Greccio. The following is the entire text of his meditation on the nativity: Under the reign of Caesar Augustus, the quiet silence [Wisd. 18:14] of universal peace had brought such calm to an age which had previously been sorely distressed that through his decree a census of the whole world could be taken. Under the guidance of divine providence, it happened that Joseph, the Virgin's husband, took to the town of Bethlehem the young girl of royal descent who was pregnant. When nine months had passed since his conception, the King of Peace like a bridegroom from his bridal chamber [cf. 1 Par. 22:9; Ps. 18:61, came forth from the virginal womb. He was brought forth into the light without any corruption just as he was conceived without any stain of lust. Although he was great and rich, he became small and poor for us. He chose to be born away from a home in a stable, to be wrapped in swaddling clothes, to be nourished by virginal milk and to lie in a manger between an ox and an ass. Then "there shone upon us a day of new redemption, restoration of the past and eternal happiness. Then throughout the whole world the heavens became honey-sweet." Now, then my soul, embrace that divine manger; press your lips upon and kiss the boy's feet. Then in your mind keep the shepherds' watch, marvel at the assembling host of angels,

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join in the heavenly melody, singing with your voice and heart: Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace 10 to men of good will. This tradition of meditation on the life of Christ flowed into the later Middle Ages chiefly through the Meditationes vitae Christi, at one time attributed to Bonaventure. Material from these meditations was incorporated into the Life of Christ of Ludolph of Saxony, which Ignatius of Loyola read while he was recuperating from the injury he sustained at Pamplona. It is interesting to compare Ignatius' meditation on the nativity in the Spiritual Exercises with Bonaventure's in The Tree of Life. Like Bonaventure, he recalls the history of the event in what he terms the first prelude: "The first prelude is to review the history of the Nativity. How our Lady, almost nine months with child, set out from Nazareth, seated on an ass, as may piously be believed, together with Joseph and a servant girl leading an ox. They are going to Bethlehem to pay the tribute that Caesar has imposed on the whole land." In the second prelude Ignatius becomes much more detailed and bids, "form a mental image of the scene and see in my imagination the road from Nazareth to Bethlehem. I will consider its length and breadth, and whether it is level or winding through valleys and over hills. I will also behold the place of the cave of the Nativity, whether it is large or small, whether high or low, and what it contains." 11 He continues with the points of the contemplation as follows: The first point is to see the persons: our Lady and St. Joseph, the servant girl, and the Child Jesus after his birth. I will become a poor, miserable, and unworthy slave looking upon them, contemplating them, and ministering to their needs, as though I were present there. I will then reflect within myself in order that I may derive some fruit. The second point is to observe, consider, and contemplate what they are saying and to reflect within myself that I may derive some profit. The third point is to observe and consider what they are doing: the journey and suffering which they undergo in order that our Lord might be born in extreme poverty, and after so many labors; after hunger and thirst, heat and cold, insults and injuries, He might die on the ccoss, and all this for me. I will then reflect in order to gain some spiritual profit. Mysticism of the Historical Event How should one assess this form of meditation? Is it a mere exercise of the imagination, to create an interesting, fanciful picture which stimulates a

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devotion that tends to be sentimental? Or is it rooted in deeper levels of the psyche and in the very structure of human existence? I believe that it is rooted in the very historicity of human existence and that it activates that level of the psyche whereby we draw out the spiritual energy from a past event. I have called this elsewhere "the mysticism of the historical event." 13 By that I mean that it constitutes a distinct category of mystical consciousness, comparable to nature mysticism or soul mysticism. It deserves to be called "mystical" since it differs from our everyday forms of waking consciousness, even those in which we simply recall an event from the past. Just as in nature mysticism we feel united to the material world, so in this form of mysticism we feel part of the historical event—as if we were there, as eye-witnesses, participating in the action, absorbing its energy. The mysticism of the historical event has both a secular form and a religious form. For example, if we visit the site of a famous battle, Marathon or Waterloo perhaps, we might feel gripped by the power of the place as the spot where a great event occurred. In our imagination we might glimpse scenes from the battle and feel present to the event as if we were actually immersed in its action, drawing on its energies as a decisive event in our own cultural history. We may experience this exclusively on the secular level; or, in the case of the life of Christ, we move through the event into various levels of religious meaning. During the Middle Ages, the mysticism of the historical event was directed chiefly to the moral meaning of the event, as can be seen in the attitude of Francis, Bonaventure, and Ignatius toward the nativity scene. The setting, with the ox and the ass, revealed the humility and poverty that Christ was presenting to us for imitation. In terms of the fourfold sense of Scripture, which was widely explored in the Middle Ages, the mysticism of the historical event focussed on the literal sense by recalling the narrative, then moved to the moral sense by drawing out an example of a virtue to be imitated. This would lead to the two deeper senses: the allegorical and the anagogic. Technically, the allergorical sense deals with the way an event in the Old Testament foreshadows Christ and his work of redemption. This refers to the fullness of the paschal mystery, involving the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ as effecting a cosmic transformation. Finally, the anagogic sense refers to the union of the soul with God in mystical union in this life or in eschatological fulfilment in eternity. Since events in the life of Christ have meaning on all these levels, they should draw us beyond the mere moral level into the allegorical and anagogical.

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In this way, the mysticism of the historical event reaches its fullness, for it becomes a gateway into other modes of mystical consciousness. It is freed from the problems of superficiality and sentimentality that are inherent in it. Because it deals with human emotions—tenderness for the infant at Bethlehem or compassion for the suffering Saviour on the cross—it might remain merely emotional and not open up to the deeper religious affectivity on the allegorical and anagogical levels. In order to bring the mysticism of the historical event to its fullness, there is need to situate it within the various levels of mystical consciousness and within a theological vision that can clarify and sustain these forms of consciousness in an organic synthesis. In the case of Francis, Bonaventure provided such a spiritual and theological context. His Soul's Journey into God can be seen as a companion piece to The Tree of Life, for it presents various forms of mystical or contemplative consciousness in the pattern of an ascent or journey towards union with God. In his prologue, Bonaventure tells us that he took his inspiration from the vision that Francis had on Mount La Verna in 1224, when he received the stigmata: the vision of a six-winged Seraph in the form of the Crucified. He says: "The six wings of the Seraph, therefore, symbolize the six steps of illumination that begin with creatures and lead up to God, whom no one rightly enters except through the Crucified."14 In each of the succeeding chapters, he explores one of these forms of contemplation. He contemplates God's presence first in the material universe, then in our act of sensation, in the faculties of the soul, in these same faculties reformed by grace, in God as Being, and in God as the Good. Although there are six stages, they form a pattern of three major types: nature mysticism, soul mysticism, and God mysticism. In each of these, there is a distinct way of experiencing the mystery of Christ. In nature mysticism, he is experienced as the cosmic Christ, through whom the universe has been created. All creatures—from the earthworm to the sunreflect the eternal Word as their Exemplar. In soul mysticism, Christ is the Bridegroom of the soul, more intimate to me than I am to myself. In God mysticism, he is the eternal Word, the Image of the Father who is generated from the Father's fountain-fullness. Throughout the soul's journey, Christ is the vehicle of passage into the various forms of mystical consciousness, both as the God-man and as the crucified Redeemer. The crucified Christ is for Bonaventure the vehicle of the passage into mystical union because he is the vehicle of cosmic transformation in his incarnation death, and resurrection. It is into this larger framework of contemplation that the mysticism of the historical event in The Tree of Life should be placed. In this way the humanity of Christ is

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not limited to its historicity but opens up to the fullness of the mystery of Christ. It is here that the types of contemplation correspond to the fourfold sense of Scripture: The Tree of Life explores the literal and moral senses; the Soul's Journey Into God explores the allegorical and anagogic. The Soul's Journey Into God contains a comprehensive theological vision, which Bonaventure developed extensively in his other works. This vision is founded on a dynamic Trinitarian theology in which the Father is seen as the fountain-fulness of the divinity, who expresses himself in his perfect Image and Word. Bonaventure sees this eternal self-diffusion as realization of the fullness of the principle that the Good must be self-diffusive. 15 In generating the Son, the Father produces in the Son the archetypes of all he can make ad extra, so that when he freely creates, the realm of creatures reflects the divine Word and is oriented to the Word as its final goal. This exemplaristic metaphysics is the way in which Bonaventure provides a theoretical structure for Francis' seeing God's reflection in all creatures. Because the Son is the Exemplar of the cosmos and the light of Truth shining in the soul, he becomes incarnate in order to illumine human beings and lead them back to the Father. In his final theological synthesis, the Collations on the Hexaemeron, Bonaventure presented a theological vision with Christ as the centre. In his eternal generation he is the centre of the Trinity; in his incarnation he is the centre of the cosmos; in his death and resurrection he is the centre of the process of cosmic transformation; and in his ascension and return to the Father he is the centre drawing all things to their fulfilment. This rich theological vision is the appropriate setting for the mysticism of the historical event that Bonaventure developed in The Tree of Life. Conclusion This study suggests further questions concerning the Spiritual Exercises in the light of the history of devotion to the humanity of Christ and the Franciscan phase of this development. Francis, who gave a dramatic impetus to this devotion, had Bonaventure to develop his imitation of Christ into a form of meditation remarkably similar to the Ignatian method. But Bonaventure did much more. He integrated the mysticism of the historical event into the spirituality of the previous millenium—the spirituality of the Risen Christ, the Pantocrator, the Bridegroom of the soul; and he situated this multi-dimensional spirituality within a highly developed theological vision, based on the doctrine of the Trinity and Christocentricity. Did Ignatius have a Bonaventure? In his era

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and the subsequent history, how was his mysticism of the historical event subsumed into the larger spiritual tradition and into comprehensive theological visions? Is there reason to think that Bonaventure himself could play that role also for Ignatius? For example, his Soul's Journey Into God could well be used to supplement Ignatius' "Contemplation to Attain Divine Love." Its theological vision could provide a compatible context for the Christocentricity of the Spiritual Exercises. In the twentieth century, it may well be that Karl Rahner has played Bonaventure's role. His own theological vision, which is very similar to Bonaventure's, provides an appropriate framework for the spirituality of the Spiritual Exercises. Whether the theologian be Bonaventure or Rahner, the focus on the historical Jesus of both Francis and Ignatius calls for a guide to lead one according to the principle that Bernard of Clairvaux articulated at the very emergence of this devotion: the carnal love for Christ should lead us into spiritual love—ultimately into the fullness of the mystery of Christ.

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Notes 1.

Cf. Robert McNally, The Unreformed Church (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1965), 148-86; Francois Vandenbroucke, The Spirituality of the Middle Ages, trans, the Benedictines of Holme Eden Abbey, Carlisle (New York: Desclee, 1968), 243-50; Gabriel Braso, Liturgy and Spirituality (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press , 1960), 30-55.

2.

Cf. the commentary in The Jerusalem Bible (Garden City: 1966), 315.

3.

Cf. Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1974), 88-90.

4.

Bernard of Clairvaux, In Cant. 20.6, trans. Kilian Walsh, Songs of Songs I (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1979), 152.

5.

Bonaventure, Legenda maior. III. 1, trans. Ewert Cousins, The Soul's Journey into God, The Tree of Life, The Life of St. Francis (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 199. Cf. also Thomas of Celano, Vita prima, 22.

6.

Ibid. Ill, 3; Cousins, 201.

7.

Thomas of Celano, Vita prima. 84, trans. Placid Hermann, St. Francis of Assisi: First and Second Life of St. Francis (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1963), 76.

8.

Ibid., 85-86, trans., 76-77.

9.

Brevarium Romanum, Officium nativitatis Domini, noc. 1, resp. 2.

10.

Bonaventure, Lignum vitae, 4, trans., 128-29.

11.

Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, trans. Anthony Mattola, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius (Garden" City; Image Book, 1964),70-71.

12.

Ibid., trans, 71.

13.

Ewert Cousins, "Francis of Assisi: Christian Mysticism at the Crossroads," in Mysticism and Religious Traditions, ed. Steven T. Katz, (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

14.

Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum. prol., 3, trans., 55.

15.

Ibid., VI, 2.

Doubleday,

FREEDOM, ELECTION, AND SELF-TRANSCENDENCE: SOME REFLECTIONS UPON THE IGNATIAN DEVELOPMENT OF A LIFE OF MINISTRY

Michael J. Buckley, S. J. Preface Any conference on "Ignatian spirituality and ministry in the Church" must find itself confronted with questions whose complications no single lecture or series of lectures can resolve. Each of the terms is systematically ambiguous. Is "ministry" to be identified with any service, however conceived or undertaken in the Christian community, or, to preserve the integrity of its own meaning, is it to designate only those functions or offices to which a person is officially "sent" to represent and embody the care of the Church? Is the "Church" in which "ministry" is to be exercised to comprise those defined by a commonly acknowledged Lordship of Christ—a Church of churches—or to be narrowed by more hierarchical specifications or to be widened to include all the people of God and, consequently, all the human race? Is "spirituality" to designate the concrete pattern of religious events and choices, experiences and practices, by which a person is united with God, or is it to designate the reflective discipline that studies this praxis under the general participative inquiry into religious experience precisely as religious? Is "Ignatian" to be confined to the canonical texts of the Spiritual Exercises, the Constitutions, the Autobiography, the Letters, etc., or is it to denote a living tradition whose embodiment continues into documents like the great definitional and ministry decrees of the ThirtySecond General Congregation and into the letters and exhortations of the present General? This paper makes no attempt to resolve these issues nor does it presuppose that they are resolved. Within the context of so broad a problematic, it addresses the following questions: Are there certain elements within the Spiritual Exercises and Constitutions whose bearing upon the problem of ministry within the Church has not been sufficiently noted and which could illumine, perhaps significantly, the contemporary ecclesial reconsiderations of the meaning of ministry and the development of the minister? More precisely: (1) Is there something indispensable about the distinctive understanding of "freedom" and "liberality" in the Spiritual Exercises that would yield foundational insights into ecclesial ministry? (2) Is there some way in which the radical, self-

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determining human choice for a life of ministry can be probed for the religious experiences out of which it emerges and for the soundness of its formulation? (3) With such depth in liberality and in the election for ministry within the Society of Jesus, does Ignatius provide a basic pedagogy through which this election can develop into a life of Christian ministry? This paper hopes to establish a developmental continuity within Ignatian spirituality through an analysis of three elements proper to that spirituality: (1) the meaning of "freedom" and its relation to liberality and election within the Spiritual Exercises; (2) the process of appropriation and evaluation of a decision for Jesuit ministerial life as outlined by the General Examen and as mandated by the Constitutions; (3) the structure of the six experiments or experiences that are to constitute the heart of the novitiate and the tertianship. These reflections are made within the Jesuit tradition and upon documents originative and normative within that tradition, texts that objectify its original and perduring spirit. As Friedrich Schlegel has observed, one returns again and again to such works because their meaning and their bearing upon succeeding generations is never exhausted: "A classical work of literature can never be completely understood. But those who are educated and educating 1 themselves must always desire to learn more from it." With Gadamer, I recognize that the bringing of the questions and concerns of this century to these texts inevitably introduces a preconception (Vorgriff) that alters the very subject-matter I am attempting to study, and that any such inquiry is a "fusion of horizons" by which the past is continually made present and constituted a partner of a new or ongoing discussion. But it is in continual dialogue with succeeding questions that any tradition and the documents in which it is objectified lives, and the issues or conceptual structures of our age can perhaps draw from these classical works virtualities whose inherent powers other centuries with other 2 problems may have passed over.

Parti Karl Rahner has suggested that there are possibilities that contemporary culture might find in the Ignatian understanding of freedom: "It is with quite different eyes and new astonishment that we find in Ignatius' wellknown prayer Suspice Domine, freedom put before the three powers of the soul. For now, in the age of the existential philosophies freedom signifies more than 3 one of the ways in which one of the various powers of the soul can react." What is noted in this highly suggestive remark is the priority given to human freedom

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before any of the specific abilities that characterize the human subject as such, as if this liberty were central and even somewhat distinct from anything else. In the Suspice, it is freedom that is first offered, not, for example, one's deeds, 4 though "love is shown more in deeds than in words." Deeds are not mentioned but freedom is. The issue which Rahner raises is rendered more puzzling when one recognizes further that this final prayer, with which the Spiritual Exercises closes, is also the direction with which it began. The Suscipe Domine is little more in its content than the Fifth Annotation, and Ignatius directed that the Fifth Annotation was to be given to the exercitant before either the Principle and Foundation or the Particular Examen. This was to be done on the night that begins the Exercises, when the Exercitant "has nothing else to do other than 5 prepare and dispose himself by prayer to make the said Exercises perfectly." Thus: Before the Foundation is given to him, after he [the one giving the Exercises] has carefully looked over those twenty rules which are placed at the beginning of the Exercises for the instruction of the one who gives them, he [the one giving] will narrate to the Exercitant four of the rules which are there in this order: first, the first [rule] which begins, "the first annotation is ... "; second, the twentieth, complete, or that part which seems more fitting; third, the fifth, which begins, "The fifth is, how admirable ... "; fourth, the fourth [rule], "That although in the Exercises."" When a young man would come to a Jesuit house to make the full Exercises, given to very few and individually directed, the purpose of the Exercises would be explained to him—the solitude in which they are to be made, the fundamental attitude with which he should enter into the practice and prayer of these days, and finally their length. What is interesting is this Fifth Annotation, concerning the interior dispositions: "to enter into them with great magnanimity and liberality [ con grande animo y liberalidad ], towards his Creator and Lord, offering him all his desire and liberty [ todo su querer y libertad ]—so that the divine majesty may make use of his person and of all that he has according to His own most holy 7 will." What Ignatius presupposes is that the person making the Exercises already possesses his freedom and that he is to enter the Exercises in a very similar frame of mind with which he is to leave them. The offering of one's freedom stands at the beginning and at the end of the thirty days. Whatever one says about "freedom" in Ignatius, one cannot say in any simple way that it is the achievement or purpose of the Exercises as Ignatius used that term. Freedom constitutes a presupposition of the Exercises, the condition for their possibility, more than their product. The question, then, which Rahner raises becomes more

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perplexing when the anthropological priority of freedom over other human characteristics is paralleled by its priority as a basic condition for engagement in the Exercises. What is this that is prior to everything else? "Libertad" occurs seven times in the Spiritual Exercises, but at junctures that are critically suggestive of the peculiar meaning that it possesses for Ignatius. The Fifth Annotation, already cited, makes it foundational in a triple structure, which embodies the dynamic of the whole Exercises. "Desire and freedom" are acknowledged as absolutely primordial. They are those things which a person has and with which one comes to make the Exercises. They can be offered to God—not destroyed, but given over to God in some as yet unspecified way. This movement of extending to God all of one's "desire and freedom" is called liberality and magnanimity, and it forms the second state of this annotation. The actualization of human desire and freedom is liberality, dealing magnanimously with God. We have become used to this statement, but it remains an extraordinary one: the creature can deal con grande animo with his or her Creator. I know of no spirituality—whether Benedictine or Carmelite—that encourages a person at the beginning of the journey to deal with the infinite Q mystery of God magnanimously. The effect of this liberality with God is a peculiar providence, the third stage of the annotation: God can accept the liberty and desires that have been offered, and this acceptance means that he can enter, dispose, employ, and pattern that life as he wishes. To offer God one's desires and liberty is in some way the equivalent of offering him "all his person and all that he has." The annotation moves through three stages in its progressive development: freedom—liberality—providence, and the equation suggests that desire and liberty for Ignatius comprehend in some way the person and all his possessions. The first method of prayer which the Spiritual Exercises describes is the manner for making an examination of conscience. It demands that one profoundly appropriate one's own interiority, thus, among other factors, one's own thoughts. The problem then arises that one must distinguish those that are radically one's own. The criterion by which Ignatius makes the discrimination is strikingly at odds with a good deal of current popular psychology. Much contemporary psychological analysis might discount conscious choice as a superficial indicator of the self; the function of depth analysis is to move beneath this surface to the unconscious or preconscious that is far more profoundly constitutive of the self. Ignatius' criterion is almost exactly the opposite: "I presuppose that there are three kinds of thoughts in me: i.e. one which is my own, that kind which arises out of my sheer freedom and desire

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[ libertad y querer ]; and the two others which come from without—one that Q comes from the good spirit and the other from the evil." Prescinding the very complicated question of "spirits" in Ignatius, I wish to underline that what makes something—anything—my own [ proprio mio ] is that it issues from my freedom. In the anthropology suggested here, there are many things within a human being: what is instinctive and conditioned, unconscious and unfaced, may give rise to thoughts that dominate consciousness and whose peculiar constellation is as yet unknown. These underlying and causative factors are to be probed when one deals with disordered affectivity. But these are not "my own," they are other— and other because they do not issue from my freedom. In the Fifth Annotation, Ignatius indicated that freedom comprises what is most profoundly personal— anything belonging to the personal self. In the "Examination of Conscience," this general anthropology is extended in an application to intentional consciousness: only those thoughts are my own which "sale de my mera libertad y querer," issue out of my sheer liberty and desire. By liberty and choice a person incorporates into the self what is to constitute its definition. The events that come out of liberty and desire gradually make a person what he or she is; they form the progressive constitution of one's life. Why this is the case is indicated by the great "Principle and Foundation": "It is necessary that we resign ourselves totally into the hands of God our Lord, for which [reason] you should give good consideration to this Foundation."10 Here it is that freedom becomes the freedom of "libre albedrio," free choice: "It is necessary to make ourselves indifferent in regard to all created things—in all that is left to the liberty of our free choice and is not forbidden it." 11 The freedom that unites with desire and underlies determination is that of free choice. It is the decision about things that we also choose our own destiny, as we appropriate whatever we possess and the thoughts that are properly ours. "The freedom of our free choice" mediates everything into our world, selects from among the manifold that constitutes the human situation, those life-forces which shall constitute this human life. In the "Principle and Foundation," human freedom is seen as a question, as ambivalent potentiality, as an openness to various possible events and even contradictory final meanings. This understanding of human freedom as the potentiality for selfdetermination must be sharply distinguished from other meanings which this word has enjoyed in the history of Western thought. Liberty, for example, in Locke and in Hume is not located in choice, but in the unimpeded power to execute choice—it is the absence of external hindrance and impediments and "is universally allowed to belong to everyone who is not a prisoner or in chains." 12

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More negatively, Hobbes would specify it as the "absence of Opposition: (by Opposition, I mean external Impediments of motion) and may be applied no less to Irrational and Inanimate creatures, than to Rational." 13 This is not the Ignatian use of the word, even when these hindrances are internal and the result of disordered affectivity. Freedom is not absence; libertad is not simply identified with being desembaracando. 14 But neither is it fullness; the Spiritual Exercises do not use "freedom" as Augustine would distinguish libertas from liberum arbitrium. The latter was free choice, the potentiality of self-determination; the former was completion, the freedom that is realized in perfect act and utter fulfilment. For Ignatius, libertad is the libertad de nuestro libre albedrio, and it is this free choice between absence and fullness that constituted the person in his radical self and assimilated everything else as his own. Freedom in the Spiritual Exercises is neither the liberation from external compulsions and internal hindrances nor the liberty of completion. It is a reflexive potency with a double object: the things chosen, which could be all created things, and the personal self, which is constituted through this choice as one makes himself indifferent and appropriates these thoughts as his own. In offering his freedom, he offers his entire person and all that he has. Freedom for Ignatius is the person as potential, as question—the question before one's world, before the self, and thus the question before God. The fulfilment of its human ambiguity, its completion, is not freedom but liberality; that is, giving of oneself to another. The fulfilment of freedom is not freedom itself; it is interpersonal liberality. Freedom as the ambivalent potentiality for self-determination is profoundly operative in the first meditation of the Exercises, in the very first point: the sin of the angels. This is possibly Ignatius' most fundamental meditation on evil because sin is found without a prior context of evil, without history or body or passion; it is evil as it enters into grace. "Having been created in grace, and not wishing to help themselves with their freedom [ con su libertad ] to pay reverence and obedience to their creator and Lord, coming to pride, they were changed from grace to malice." 15 What is critically important here is that grace does not absolve the person from the question of freedom. Even those created in grace still faced the question that was their freedom, and they became the answer that was given with its use. "They were changed from grace into malice." The sin of the angels is the sin of the profoundly graced, the sin of those whose freedom does not affirm their grace nor assume the directions that grace empowers. In the dynamic movement toward salvation, grace does not substitute for freedom. Freedom is still a question even when it stands within

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grace. The urgency of this religious insight underlies the admonition of the "Rules for Thinking in the Church" that "we ought not to speak at so much length, insisting so much upon grace that there be engendered the poisonous error whereby freedom is taken away [ para guitar la libertad ] ... as that works andi /> free choice [ libero arbitrio ] receive any prejudice or be held for ——————*—«_ nothing." 16 While the historical dynamic behind this direction was certainly the "catastrofe dogmatica de su epoca" of which Pedro Leturia speaks, it would be misdirected to see in this simply Ignatius' attempt to deal with the challenges of Protestantism. 17 The meditation upon the sin of the angels, upon the origins of personal malice, disclosed much earlier that grace still confronts free choice— and that this freedom is not removed even by creation in grace, let alone by subsequent conferral. To remove free choice is to remove the radical selfhood that accepts or rejects the movement of God; it is to destroy the human person under the guise of exalting the action of God. This, as shall be seen, is essentially diabolical. Both the "Principle and Foundation" and the "Sin of the Angels" indicate what for Ignatius constituted the radical religious issue, the contingent which remained even within grace: what are you going to do with your freedom? Another way of phrasing the same issue which brings out its reflexivity would be: what are you going to do with yourself? The Exercises come out of the appreciation of that issue, because the human person is fundamentally conditioned by a paradox: freedom is a question about yourself. It is not a question which the person has; it is a question which I am and with which I constitute what I am to become. To suppress this question is to destroy one's own humanity, for even the unfaced decisions of life—the choices that are made-progressively determine what the answer to this question is. Let us turn to the Suscipe again for a movement of confirmation. The prayer is introduced within a particular context: "Considering with much reason and justice what I ought on my part to offer and give to His Divine 18 Majesty, to wit, all of my possessions and myself with them." Note, then, how the prayer answers the outline of this consideration. All of my possessions are given with the "all that I have or possess." All of my powers are offered in memory, intellect, and will. But mi mismo, of which such a point is made in the initial context? This is the burden of toda mi libertad. There is a surprising but important corollary of this understanding of the person as constituted by the question that is human freedom. In this sense, it would be inaccurate to say that "freedom" was the purpose of the Spiritual Exercises. Freedom for Ignatius was potential, was question. To say that the

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purpose of the human person was the attainment of freedom would be equivalent to saying that the purpose of a "genius for friendship" was the sensibility itself. The fulfilment of a "genius for friendship" is a friendship, not the potentiality for forming them. Similarly, the fulfilment of personal freedom was not individual liberty. Liberty is what the person is and by which he appropriates all things. The purpose of personal liberty is interpersonal liberality. Freedom is not the end of the Exercises; it is its prerequisite and its increasingly heightened reality as one faces choice; it is the question out of which the Exercises issue. Freedom is not for itself; it is for something else—liberality. Why? Liberality is the embodiment of that interchange which concretizes and constitutes mutual love. The structure of personal love involves two critical and developing insights in the Spiritual Exercises, insights that Ignatius frames as a preface the "Contemplation for Attaining Love," but that govern the understanding of love throughout the entire work. First, there is of necessity an integrity between love and life, an integrity in which love manifests itself through its objectification in deeds or in historical events much more than in words or declaration. Secondly, though the closeness of this sequence is not often recognized, the deeds in which love is manifested are mutual liberality. This is a giving and sharing that is termed "communicacion de las dos partes," a mutual communion: "Love consists in a mutual communion on both sides, i.e. the lover gives and shares with the beloved that which one has or can attain and also the beloved with the lover." 19 Liberality in Ignatius is neither (as is sometimes preached a noblesse oblige nor simply the love of gratitude; it is the donation) and sharing of one's freedom with God as "He himself has given himself to me to the very limits of his power according to his divine ordinances." The liberality of the person is then the response to the divine liberality, because this interchange consists of love. Liberality is the conjunction of grace and human freedom, and it is the direction given to the manifold possibilities that a person is. This in its turn casts some light on the providence promised in the Fifth' Annotation: the person is his freedom. From the time of birth, but especially now during the Exercises, this freedom will be touched by grace: God will communicate himself to the anima devota, "embracing her to His love and prayer and disposing her for the way in which she can better serve Him."20 This communication of God empowers and evokes a responsive communication of the person, a liberality in which the freedom and desires of the person are offered entirely to God. The "most holy will of God," his concrete providence, is now something that they share: God disposes the soul, "working more surely with his

Freedom, Election and Self-Transcendence: 73 Some Reflections upon the Ignatian Development of a Life of Ministry 21 creature . . . and bringing into harmony [ ordenando ] her desires"; the soul in discerns and gives herself over to these movements within as they emerge into consciousness and compose the materials of the Election. The mutual communication that constitutes the objectification of their love is God's drawing of soul and the soul's liberality with God. The mutual providence that is their life together is God's disposing of the person and all that is possessed, and the soul's election in accepting and following this disposition. Freedom is oriented beyond itself to its fulfilment in liberality; liberality is objectified and reaches its culmination in the Election, "in the finding of God's will in the disposition of one's life." 22 To take away freedom would be to destroy the person. This is the office of Satan, whom Ignatius calls with extraordinary insight the anti-human, "enemigo de natura humana"—the 93 enemy of human nature. Grace transposes and permeates this freedom as God "se comunique a la su anima devota," drawing her into the interchanges which realize love. The conjunction of grace and freedom is liberality, a greatness of soul with God which grows throughout the Spiritual Exercises and reaches its focus and fulfilment in an Election that is the concrete historical realization of providence. Since this is the meaning of "freedom" in the Spiritual Exercises, is there anything that corresponds to the plurality which this word has enjoyed in other intellectual traditions? The Locke-Hume-Hobbes understanding of unhindered movement is found as an adjective or an adverb in the Spiritual Exercises: in the third time of an Election, for example, one looks for a time of calm when the soul is not agitated by diverse spirits and uses its natural powers 24 "freely [ libera ] and calmly," without the compulsions that bear upon the mind from thoughts, called elsewhere "from without." There is an absence of external or internal hindrance, and, like water when the rocks and obstacles are removed, memory and intellect and choice can move unhindered. Again, the value of solitude is that one can use "the natural powers more freely [ libremente ] in order to search diligently for that which he or she much desires." 25 Solitude, the withdrawal into silence, removes other voices and other claims for attention; the person is left alone with God; the abilities and the desires that go with being human are allowed to move unimpeded. If the unhindered movement of human potentiality constitutes the abverbial use of the word, is there anything in Ignatius that corresponds to the Augustinian distinction liberum arbitrium and libertas, between potentiality and its fulfilment? To answer this question, it is important to note that Ignatius saw everything human in terms of developing processes: his three major works, the Autobiography, the Spiritual Exercises, and the Constitutions—virtually a

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pilgrim's progress through the Society—are all conceived as developing movements. The same is true here: the distinction is not a simple one, but a complex series of developmental steps, freedom—liberality—election, the increasing depth at which one finds the divine will (providence) in the disposition of one's life. The completion of freedom is the election of this will in prayer and the living with it in life. For union with God was a union with a God who was not simply the source of all things, nor present in all things, but who "trabaja y labora por my en todas cosas criadas sobre la haz de la tierra," the God who 2fi labours in all things, struggles in all things, drawing them to himself. It was the presence of the struggling God, one who immanently works out the salvation of all human beings and whose highest instantiation was the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ, who calls out to Ignatius—God drawing him into the formulation of his providence. The finding of the divine will was by a process of election in which the providence of God and the choice of the person became one. The election was the total desposition of oneself. Thus the fundamental movement toward ministry for Ignatian spirituality develops gradually from freedom through liberality into an election in which the providence of God is embodied in the choice and the subsequent life of a human being—a mutual communication that constitutes love. Part H

The critical question that opened any discussion of ministerial commitment, specifically here, for someone whose vocation would lead him into the Society of Jesus—though far more general in its application to vastly divergent calls to service within the Church—was whether such an election had been made. To determine this, Ignatius elaborated another document and another series of practices, which are now almost ignored in the contemporary Society: the General Examen. Ignatius began its composition shortly after the approbation of the Formula of the Institute in 1540. The initial handwritten sketch dates between 1540 and 1543, and the final version was completed before the second confirmation of the Formula of the Institute, amended for the third and last time, in the Bull Exposcit Debitum, July 7, 1550. The Jesuiten Lexikon comments that the General Examen was "a complete innovation at that time, demonstrating the great importance which the founder of the order attached to the selection of candidates."27 What is the General Examen? There are two things which it is not. It is not a handbook which is to be used in the four examinations that precede

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admission into the Society in any form. Neither is it a condensed version of the Constitutions—there are things in the General Examen which the Constitutions either do not repeat or treat very briefly. The General Examen involves a process, very much like the Exercises, conducted with the same care for withdrawal, direction, and discernment, lasting over a period of "twelve to twenty days or longer if it seems good to the superior," in which an applicant for the Society of Jesus is able in solitude to sound out the depths or the solidity of his election of this way of life. 28 The General Examen is correlative to the Exercises in this one respect: the Exercises help one to move towards an election in the disposition of one's entire life; the General Examen is a progressive testing whether the election for the Society of Jesus has been made, what the quality of its information and freedom has been, and whether one recognizes the cost of such discipleship. The Spiritual Exercises allows one to come to a sense of his vocation; the General Examen allows both the applicant and the Society to test the validity and the soundness of this choice. This examination of an election for the Society is to be carried on with a carefulness which Ignatius prescribed also for the Exercises. The applicant is not to be admitted into the novitiate, but into a special house set apart from the other residences or colleges of the Society precisely for this examination. This "house of first probation" calls for a solitude similar to that of the Exercises, that those who are so received "may have less occasion to converse with the 29 others except those whom the superior appoints." Who are those who should be admitted to this General Examen? Those who have already made an election of the Society, that is, only those who have resolved that God is calling them into the Society of Jesus: "Ordinarily no one who lacks that determination should be admitted to the first probation."30 If an exception is made, the candidate may be admitted only as a guest and not for more than three days. The purpose of this solitude is so that the applicant "may with greater freedom [mas libremente] deliberate with himself and with God our Lord, about his vacation and intention to serve His Divine and Supreme Majesty in this Society."31 The process envisaged is a gradual and progressive one: on the first day he is admitted and gets accustomed to the house and the solitude in which these weeks are to be lived. The purpose: "ut liberius secum et cum Deo perpendat 32 vocationem suam." Only on the second or third day after his entrance into this solitude does the examination of his election begin, and the pattern for this examination constitutes the structure of the General Examen. Like the Spiritual Exercises, the General Examen has a fourfold division, and there is an incremental development of interiority and intensity as

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the examination advances. The initial chapter speaks about the Society of Jesus itself, more particularly about the ways in which the Society is different from other forms of religious life with which the candidate might be acquainted: its finality, the character of its poverty and obedience, the vow to the Holy Father regarding missions, the ordinary manner of living, the grades of admission into the Society, and the purpose of the two years of novitiate. The second chapter takes up those things in the candidate whose presence would make it impossible to live this kind of life with this kind of mission, primarily impediments that are matters of fact rather than matters of attitude or intention. The first stage, thus, deals with basic information about the Society of Jesus; the second stage deals with basic information about the candidate. If the answers about the first are acceptable to the candidate and the answers about the second are acceptable to the Society, the examination moves into the third chapter to discover whether or not an actual election has been made. Here the progression is from the things that are most exterior and situational to those that are most interior and autobiographical. It begins with questions about age and national region, about family background and situation, about personal obligations or debts. It moves to issues of education and personal skills, the state of health, and the presence of any religious commitments or vows. It is at this point that the examination asks the candidate to appropriate in some reflexive way the manner in which prayer and the Eucharist have functioned and developed in his life. How does he pray, how often, with what sense of spiritual consolation and religious experiences? How is this complex of conscious union with God supported by sermons, spiritual reading, conversations and meditations? 33 This reflection attempts to disclose the uniquely personal experience that characterizes the candidate's affective relationship with God. As the correlative of this spiritual life, he is asked about the theological opinions in which this religious experience may be articulated and about the struggles and scruples that move through his religious autobiography.34 Very gradually the General Examen raises to the level of reflective consciousness what has constituted the religious situation and the religious experiences of the candidate, a situation perhaps so much taken for granted and experiences which have been so intimate that they may have remained at the preconceptual level of selfawareness. The candidate is asked to take what has existed so "subjectively" and give it a new "objectivity"—an objectivity that is obtained as one explains or attempts to explain to another what has perhaps up to this time only been inarticulately present to oneself. This new "objective" mode of existence makes this situation and these experiences present to the candidate in a new way and

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gives both him and his director the opportunity to judge whether the charism of his life indicates a movement into the Society of Jesus. This new mode of personal existence is, consequently, a new mode in which he possesses his own freedom. Only after this has been done is the candidate ready to consider very gradually the matter of his election of the Society of Jesus. First, has he determined upon a life of the counsels? What has been the history of this decision once it was formulated? What were the "signs or motives" through which this vocation to religious life was recognized? This appropriation of "signs and motives" is obviously to be neither exhaustive nor superficial. The question bears upon the ability of the candidate to interiorize values at some depth rather than to move toward objectives from motives of pleasure/pain or group identifications. It is neither a matter of months of psychoanalysis nor of an afternoon's reflection. Only when the examiner is satisfied that an adequate reflection upon these "signs and motives" has been made, does the mutual meditation upon the previous election proceed. Has this decision for religious life particularized itself in "a deliberate determination to live and die in the Lord with and in this Society of Jesus?" 35 How has the candidate come to this decision? What is the quality of freedom involved? If, at this point, it should become evident that he was moved to this decision through some member of the Society of Jesus, the General Examen calls a halt to the process, to give him "some time in order that by reflecting on the matter, he may commend himself completely to his Creator and Lord as if no member of the Society had moved him, so that he may be able to proceed with greater spiritual energies Icon mayores fuercas spirituales] OC toward greater service and glory of the Divine Majesty." Only after the examiner is convinced that the candidate has made such an election, that it emerges from such a depth of freedom and grace, and that this election expresses itself in a petition to be admitted into the Society, can the General Examen proceed. 37 In the Spiritual Exercises, the one who gives the Exercises is not to move the exercitant toward one decision rather than another; in the General Examen, the one who gives the General Examen is to ascertain whether such interference has factually taken place. In the Exercises, the election can only come out of the freedom of the exercitant as a particularization of his liberality with God; in the General Examen, the procedures towards admission can only continue if this kind of election has been assured as deeply as possible in this reflective solitude. In the Spiritual Exercises the election is followed by the third and fourth week, the cost and glory of discipleship; in the General Examen, this confirmation that an election has beenmade is followed by one of the most

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profound descriptions of this cost ever written by Ignatius, the great fourth chapter of the General Examen. In both the Exercises and the Examen, this is the moment in which the disciple hears and lives with the words, "If anyone will come after me." If the preceding analysis is correct, the elimination of the house of first probation and the consequent absence of the steady appropriation of autobiographical religious experience, which the process of the General Examen envisaged for those entering the Society, is a loss of capital importance. Ignatius himself considered this progressive examination of personal experience and, in particular, of the freedom and solidity of the election of the Society "of great importance in order that His Divine and Supreme Majesty may make use of 38 this least Society." Its absence has led to a number of correlative displacements. Men are admitted into the common life of the novitiate, into an atmosphere in which Jesuit life is taken for granted and a group allegiance is beginning to be formed, before they have had the opportunity to reflect in much greater depth, and in that kind of freedom which solitude fosters, whether the charism of their lives indicates that this is the company and communion in which their ministry should take place. Ignatius was extremely careful about admitting to the common life of the Society men whose decision was yet unformed and whose determinations, therefore, could be open to the manifold influences which would naturally surround them in such an atmosphere. Further, the novitiates of the Society, instead of building toward lives of such ministry within the Society, with the consequent development of the charism of a man's life, must now often incorporate a retreat of election, a prolonged preparation for an engagement in the Exercises, and some experiments that are both to acquaint the Society with the candidate and the candidate with the Society. These two years ought to help a man develop the "greater abnegation and continual mortification in all things possible" and that kind of affective growth in which one learns to turn his "love upon the Creator of them, by loving Him in all creatures and all of them in Him"—the kind of human transcendence which Ignatius posited as the purpose of the novitiate and of the tertianship. Instead, these first two years are as often as not a time in which a candidate comes to decide whether he even wishes to 39 live a life that proposes these values. Further, the great emphasis upon freedom, upon religious history, and upon the unique personal religious experience of each candidate is lost. There is the possibility that he enters into the Society with a group of others without having taken very seriously the profound and personalized grace that has brought him there. The results can be paradoxical.

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Over the past fifteen years, the Society has begun to retrieve the Spiritual Exercises as the events in solitude and with personalized direction that enable freedom to move from liberality into election. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of this recovery of the fundamental dynamics of the Exercises, after literally centuries of usages in which the Annotations were systematically explained away or made impossible by the lengthy conferences, the large groups, and the kind of persons who were "making the Exercises." Correlative to this, it seems to me, and of a similar importance, would be the recovery of the house of first probation and the carefully modulated testing of an election for the Society within the context of the personal appropriation, in solitude and with personalized direction, of the religious history and experiences in grace that have led to this moment, in which someone offers himself to the ministries of the Society. This issue is of critical importance in the contemporary Society, as its loss was responsible for some of the damage done to ministerial formation in the Society before Vatican II. During those decades, perhaps centuries, there was too much emphasis upon the collective, too premature a socialization of the individual personality into the common piety and ministries of the group. Men entered the Society and were taught to pray as if they had never prayed before, as if they had no history peculiar to their own temperament and grace of conscious union with God. The course of studies was common, the languages expected from all, the theses to be defended by all in philosophy and in theology. Spiritual direction was given little emphasis, and the "spiritual father" was often a person of great experience and a long life of fidelity, but of no particular training or native skill for such a delicate reading of souls. The Exercises were those of the preached retreat, and the scholastic or brother was understood to be available for any mission to which he was sent. Since the last decade, much of this has changed. The effort has been at individual direction, at personal assimilation, at the growth of idiosyncratic talents and the fulfilment of personal aspirations for the life of ministry. But has this process become individualistic rather than personal? How are we going to inculcate into men who have had such individualized careers and treatment a sense of corporate responsibility as this bears upon the communities in which they live and the ministries that are chosen? Can the Society of Jesus summon or direct its members to enterprises that are common, that have been judged to be of primary importance for the service of the Church, that exact from individuals the sacrifice of plans tentatively laid and of careers whose alternatives seem so promising? Such a direction to the common task of the Kingdom of God at the heart of Ignatian obedience can only occur gracefully if

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the members of the Society, from the very first period of the probation of the charism of their lives, have found a profoundly ecclesial, personal grasp of their religious experience; it can occur only if they have found that their call lies in this transcending of their own immediate interests, whether in career or in comfort, and that the providence concretized in their election indicates a life within religious obedience. These are not theoretical points to be resolved or theological issues whose evidence and argumentation must be established. It is primarily a question of personal freedom, of religious experience, of the charism of a person's life, of the contours grace has assumed in the candidate's life and of the election with which he has particularized and given shape to his future. Does a man feel himself called to this kind of greater dialectical "abnegation and continual mortification in all things possible"? 40 Has he actually and freely chosen it, so that the good of his life becomes the good of others, so that the same grace with which he moves towards union with God is the grace of ministry to others? Is the grace of his life precisely and essentially ministerial? 41 Only when a candidate understands something of the Society in this mode, when he has recognized whether this understanding corresponds to the attraction and choices within his own life, and when he has appropriated his own religious history and his personal freedom and seen it culminate in this decision for this kind of life, can he find in religious life and ministry under religious obedience neither an experience of mindlessly plugging holes nor the contractual relationship between atomically distinct but interested parties. He can find a community and an enterprise in which the common good is his good. This is what the General Examen probed for—not to make a final decision, but to provide a serious test of interiority and grace, which allows the consecration to ministry within the Church to advance to another stage in its development.

Partm For such a person the next stage was structured by six progressive and repeatable experiences, the prescriptions for a novitiate and for the establishment of a tertianship, which, as de Guibert notes, contained "a great deal of daring and a considerable amount of novelty." 42 The history of these experiences has been well documented, as they constituted a radical departure from the practice of formation in other religious orders at the time as well as from the more enclosed Jesuit novitiates that would emerge in succeeding centuries. These major "testing experiences" could be advanced, postponed, adapted, or replaced by other experiences. 43 As with the Exercises, so with

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these experiments: Ignatius allowed a maximum of discretion in their concrete application and usage.44 What has not been so perceived, however, is that there is a peculiar structure internal to the experiments, that they possess their own organic and evolving pattern, and that at their completion the novice or tertian has moved from an event of the deepest interiority and solitude into the ministerial life of the Society. These six experiments constitute the Ignatian pattern of religious development into ministerial life. Granted the personal integration of freedom, liberality and election, how does one move towards apostolic integration? Initially, as the first experiment, the novice is to make the Exercises for about a month—a profound experience, in Ignatius' description, of accepting the personal forgiveness of sins and of "contemplating the events and mysteries of the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ our Lord."45 This strikes one as very strange until it is recalled that an election of a state in life has already been made and that it has been probed over the extensive period indicated in the General Examen. Entrance into the novitiate presupposes a sound and tested election, and the tertian priest may have lived with his election many years. Why then the Exercises and why, as the first experience which will begin the single process of the six experiments, Devocion? These men should give time "to spiritual things and strive to acquire as much devotion as divine grace imparts to them. Towards this purpose, it will help to give them some of the Spiritual Exercises or all of them to those who have not made them, according to what is judged expedient for them in our Lord."46 The stipulation is an interesting one. Even those novices who have never made the Exercises are to enter into them not precisely in order to elect their vocation, but for the same reason that some may be given others again: to find devotion. Whether one makes or does not make the Exercises in the novitiate and later in the tertianship is dictated not by the strength of a previous established election—the election of the Society is not mentioned in this context—but solely by one criterion: will these Exercises, all or some of them, aid devotion? The English word is a weak instrument to bear the force that this stipulation is giving it, but "devotion" for Ignatius is not the vague sentiment of religious affectivity. Its meaning is both more foundational and more critical for the charism of the Jesuit. "Devotion" is the experience of finding God. In the Autobiography, for example, Ignatius describes the maturing of his religious experience with precisely that term: "anzi sempre crescendo in devotione, id est, in facilita di trovare Iddio; et adesso piu che mai in tutta la vita sua. Et ogni volta et hora che voleva trovare Dio, lo trovava."47 The purpose of the

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Exercises in the novitiate, and precisely as the first and basic experience of the novitiate, was to learn an ease in finding God, such a development of affectivity, intentionality, and purpose that one could move under the direction of God through the discernment of spirits. One "found God" in his affectivity when the signs of the Spirit were experienced in the union of the candidate's sensibility, feelings, and emotional life with God, as one was drawn through desire or sorrow or love into God. One "found God" habitually in his intentionality when the imaginative or conscious horizon of a person's life possessed God as its unthematic context or atmosphere in which all other things were located, understood, and evaluated. One "found God" in purpose through the pure intention to serve him in all things, through the dynamic conferral of unity and orientation to everything else in life as it was integrated into this radical purity of heart and into this drive towards God. Affectivity, intentionality, and purpose all became the subjects of the discernment of spirits, whether that discernment was propaedeutic to the choice of a state in life, to renewal of a life once engaged, or to the constantly developing choices that were responsive to the divine movement in the world. To find God was to possess both this interpersonal unity with God on the levels of affectivity, consciousness, and choice and to read these experiences as a language through which God could guide the person more deeply into his own working in the universe. Discernment of spirits was that ability to read; it was a hermeneutics of religious experience. It made possible a dynamic unity between the person and God, struggling for the salvation of all human beings. Devotion, for Ignatius, was the foundation for any life of ministry. The second experience was in the hospitals, specifically in those massive warehouses where the infected bodies of the incurable were placed. In 1494, Charles VIII had invaded Italy, and his troops had brought syphillis, the dreaded "morbus Gallicus," to the unprotected country. The disease spread rapidly through a populus without the antibodies to counteract its contagion. The hospitals for these plague-striken became paralleled by the hospitals for the incurables, where the refuse and rejects of the cities waited to die. 48 The novices were sent there to serve all, wrote Ignatius, the sick and the well alike. And they were sent for a very specific purpose: to embody in their lives, in their care for these outcasts, that kenosis which is the life of Christ. Humiliations for Ignatius are not embarrassments before a slight or before an act of contempt. They are objective situations of social emptiness; they are the slights and the contempt themselves. Had the novices so learned to find God that a radical change had come in the world, with which they were now identified? Had they

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broken with the "world with its pomp and vanities, [that] they might in everything serve their Creator and Lord, crucified for them." 49 They ministered to Christ in the hospitals; they contacted him in the sick. Ignatius sent the novices into the hospitals for a reason: that they would have a new solidarity with the victims of society in embracing a life of lowliness and humanity. Christ was the source of this solidarity. The "events and mysteries of Christ" were now formed here: understood in this way, the purpose of the second experiment was "humiliations." The third experiment was that of the pilgrimage, which could precede or follow the hospital experiment. The novice was to be sent out without money, begging whenever it was necessary for the food and clothing and lodging he needed. It was to be a profound experience of poverty, for two reasons: (1) "in order to grow accustomed to discomfort in food and lodging," and (2) in this experience of insecurity to abandon whatever support he could find in "money and other created things and with genuine faith and intense love place his reliance entirely in his Creator and Lord." It was within the experience of poverty that the novice was to experience the reality of providence, the practical but unforeseeable care in which God enclosed him.50 Providence for Ignatius is not the abstract "ratio ordinis rerum in finem," as Joseph Wall has pointed out. It is much more what lay Christians understand when they say, "God will provide." It is that intimate concern of God for each person, a care which can catch up in its awareness even the lilies of the field and the sparrows which fall to the ground. The value of liberality in the Exercises is that human beings give themselves over to that care, can admit it into their lives, can discover it within the movements of consolation and desolation, and through the election allow the providence of God to lead into deeper discipleship. Joseph Wall maintains, "The fundamental advice offered by St. Ignatius in the letters is to trust oneself to the guidance of God. His other key ideas ('the service of God,' 'the greater glory of God') are related to and in a sense subordinate to this." 51 The experience of the poverty and insecurity of the pilgrimage was an experience of this care, a placing of one's hope only in God to see what a month's history this abandonment would write. Understood in this way, the purpose of the third experiment was what Ignatius elsewhere calls "to feel some of the effects" of poverty. 52 In an ordinary day within the Exercises, the two initial contemplations are always followed by repetitions—prayer of great simplicity that possesses without discursive thought the points from the previous exercises where God has touched the soul. The repetitions in the Exercises are, in a very genuine sense,

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more important than the initial contemplations. They are prayer, often without images or concepts, in which the exercitant rests within the grace which has found him. The petitions are much deeper—because much more simpleexperiences of interior knowledge. The same deepening is provided for in the experiments: the second and third experiments, which can be interchanged or repeated, are followed by the fourth experiment, which repeats within the residence of the Jesuits the life-meditations that had been previously conducted. For the hidalgo of the sixteenth century, these "lowly and humble offices" included working in the kitchen, cleaning the house, and domestic labour of one kind or another—the work of servants. And the purpose was to confirm once more the general movement towards abnegation and humility in the witness of w one's life. There is significant change with the fifth and sixth experiments, with a period spent in catechetics and then—at the end of the process—the ministry of preaching or hearing confessions, if the participants were priests. And the purpose? No purpose is stated, save the critical one that they have been able to perform this service for others, that they have the charism for the ministerial life of the Society. 54 The six experiments end with precisely that ministry of the word, with which the Formula of the Institute opens its index of Jesuit ministries. The last five experiments are almost this paragraph of the Formula written in reverse order: from the caritatis opera back to in confessionibus and in christianismo institutionem to finally quodcumque Dei verbi ministerium. 55 The novice or the tertian priest is gradually initiated into the ministerial consecration of the Society through this steady incorporation of ministries proper to the Society. These experiments come out of the experience of the primi patres Societatis, which were objectified in the structures of the Society. But there is a more profound pedagogy at work here than simply the inverse comprehension of the initial paragraph of the Formula. These experiments move from devotion, the ability to find God in all things, through experiences which call upon humility, abnegation, and poverty, and to engagement in the ministerial life of the Society. They embody in their structure the same pedagogy which the Two Standards indicated as the critical education in discipleship. They are patterned on the life and ministry of Jesus. There must first be a profound contact with Christ our Lord, one that has been developing within the exercitant since the first events of the Exercises. Within that contact there is the experience of choice, of being sent, of being schooled with the "way 56 Christ calls and wishes for all persons under His standard." And what is this way? First, it is a profound poverty, and second, a desire that one's life, like

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that of Christ, be a life of humiliations, a status that will inevitably invite affront and personal insult. Gradually, one learns the humility with which a person defines the worth of his life, not by his possessions or by a context of prestige and popularity, but by the love and grace with which God holds him. Thus, the Spiritual Exercises; "There are three stages: the first, poverty against riches; the second, reproach or affront against wordly honour; the third, humility against pride, and by these three stages they are to lead human beings on to all the other virtues." 57 These "tres escalones" constitute the interior dynamic of the second, third, and fourth experiments: in one, poverty is more emphasized, in another, humiliations; but they both exist in all three with varying degrees of intensity. The call of Christ into discipleship possesses a pattern that his life embodies. Ignatius sees this pattern in the earliest contemplations of his life, finding in the events leading up to the nativity, for example," that the Lord may be born in extreme poverty, and after those many labors, after hunger, after thirst, after heat and cold, after injuries and insults, may die on a cross, and all this for me." 58 The movement of Jesus into his most profound ministry is through poverty and humiliation. The six experiments retrieve the structure of his life as the development of ministerial consciousness. To the degree that one is no longer dominated by a dependence upon possessions or upon the opinions of others, there emerges a new kind of freedom—not the libertad, which Ignatius identified with the human person, but the indifference that allowed one to seek and to find the divine will. 59 Once ministers of the gospel are no longer dominated by desire for personal gain or for personal applause, they are able to serve others without "making the cause serve them." The evolving movement of the six experiences—experiences which were to be repeated in one form or another for an entire year and then again after the completion of studies—was from a deeply interior religious experience of Christ in the Exercises to find and serve him in poverty and humiliations to enter into the ministerial life of the Church. What are the six experiments attempting to test? First, whether someone can be so grasped by Christ that he can find God in all things—a charism essential to the Society, Nadal maintained; then, whether he has fundamentally achieved an independence from an atmospheric worldliness, whether he has broken definitively with what John's gospel calls the world; third, whether he can enter into a trusting poverty, a reliance upon a peculiar and pervasive providence that extends to the basic details of his life; fourth, whether he can conform and live in such a spirit within the ordinary, humdrum life of a Jesuit; and, finally, whether he can do the ministerial service of the Society, can

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be of genuine assistance to others in catechetics, the sacraments, and the ministry of the word of God. A Word in Summary

The Spiritual Exercises indicates how Ignatius prepares a person for a life which comes out of serious Christian choice: freedom is the question which can be answered only in a Christian way through a magnanimous offering of the self to God, a liberality with God, which would allow a "searching and finding of the divine will in the disposition of one's life." The Exercises reach their climax in an election that realizes the peculiar providence of God within the life of this individual human person. The General Examen provides a gradual process through which this election can be probed through a personal appropriation of the religious history, gifts, and experiences of an applicant to the Society of Jesus. It searches for a choice that comes out of the intersection of a religious history shaped by grace and a Christian liberality founded in personal freedom. The classical six experiments of the formation process form the third stage in the evolution of a ministerial life within the Society of Jesus. They are a pedagogy, an organic series of experiences, a recapitulation of the life of Christ, in which one can move through devotion, poverty, and humiliations to the selftranscending service of God in others that is ministerium.

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Notes 1.

Friedrich Schlegel, Fragmente, Minor 20, quoted by Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), 524n.

2.

For Gadamer's general treatment of these themes, see "Foundations of a Theory of Hermeneutical Experience," in Truth and Method, 235-344. For specific treatment of the classical text, see 253-58. The hermeneutics that Gadamer describes, the dialogue with the text, are particularly valuable in dealing with documents as richly connected with experience as those of Ignatius of Loyola. It is not a process of discovering what Ignatius had elaborated in a self-conscious, even systematic fashion—the "mind of Ignatius." It is much more a process of allowing the questions and conceptual interests of our period to engage these texts in order to bring out something of their depth, of the "excess of meaning," of which the author may or may not have been reflexively aware. This is to bring to consciousness what may well have been quite unreflectively embodied in a classical text.

3.

Karl Rahner, "The Logic of Concrete Individual Knowledge in Ignatius Loyola," in The Dynamic Element in the Church, Quaestiones Disputatae, (New York: Herder & Herder, 1964), 12:84.

4.

Spiritual Exercises, 231. The Spanish text of the Constitutions is that of the Spanish "D" text of 1594 as critically edited in 1936 by Father Arturo Codina, Sancti Ignatii de Loyola Constitutiones Societatis lesu. Tomus Secundus; Textus Hispanus (Rome^ 1936). The English text is The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, trans. George E. Ganss, S.J. (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1970).

5.

"Annotaciones sobre los Exercicios, y la manera que se ha de tener en darlos, sacados del original del P.O. Victoris, ditado de nuestro P. Maestro Ignacio S. tae Mem. Lo mas, o la substancia dello," Monumenta Historica Societatis lesu, Monumenta Ignatiana, series secunda, tomus II, Directoria, edited Ignacio Iparraguirre, S.J., (Rome: 1955), 11:96. [Henceforth cited as Victoria.]

6.

Victoria 21, 100-101.

7.

Spiritual Exercises, 5. When the written text is referred to, "Spiritual Exercises" and "General Examen" will be underlined. When the process described in either text is referred to, the titles will be without italics. The Spanish text of the Spiritual Exercises is the "Autograph" as critically edited by Joseph Calveras and Candidus de Dalmases. Monumenta Historica Societatis lesu, Monumenta Ignatiana, Series Secunda. Exercitia Spiritualia Sancti Ignatii et eorum Directoria, nova editio, tomus I. Exercitia Spiritualia (RomalInstitutum Historicum Societatis lesu, 1969). The English translation is Joseph Rickaby, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, (London: Burns Gates & Washbourne, 1923).

8.

"Offering": In the Spanish Autograph ofreciendole (without the le) was substituted by Ignatius for the prior term, dexando. Dexandole would indicate a resignation into the providence of God—allowing God to take one's liberty and desire; ofreciendole is a more active, positive movement of liberality and magnanimity. Cf. Monumenta Historica Societatis lesu,

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Ignatian Spirituality in a Secular Age Monumenta Ignatiana, Series Secunda, 228. The English words freedom or "liberty" are used interchangeably to translate libertad.

9.

Spiritual Exercises, 32. This distinction underlies Ignatius' differentiation between an erroneous judgment and a scruple. Cf. Spiritual Exercises, 346-47.

10.

Victoria, 21, 101.

11.

Spiritual Exercises, 23.

12.

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 2, chap. 21, par. 8 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), 316. Liberty, in Locke, is not in volition, but in the power to execute volition. "Liberty consisting in a power to act or to forbear acting, and that only," ibid., par. 24, p. 327. So also David Hume: "By liberty then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting according to the determinations of the will; that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may. Now this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to everyone who is not a prisoner or in chains." An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sec. 8, pt. I, (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1955), 104.

13.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. 2, chap. 21 (New York: E. P. Button and Company, 1950), 177.

14.

Spiritual Exercises, 20.

15.

Ibid., 50.

16.

Ibid., 369.

17.

Pedro Leturia, S.I., "Sentido verdadero Gregorianum, (1942), 23:161.

18.

Spiritual Exercises, 254.

19.

Ibid., 231.

20.

Ibid., 15.

21.

Ibid., 16.

22.

Ibid., 1.

23.

Ibid., 7, 10, 135, 136, 325, 326, 327, and 334.

24.

Ibid., 177.

25.

Ibid., 20.

26.

Ibid., 236.

27.

Ludwig Koch, ed., Jesuiten Lexikon die Gesellschaft Jesu einst und jetzt (Paderborn, 1934), 578. Cf. Augustus Coemans, S.J., Introductio in studium Instituti et annotations in Formulam Instituti, (2nd ed., rev.; Brussels, 1937), 63.

en la Iglesia

militante,"

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28.

Constitutions, I, 4, 90. The General Examen indicates both the generic purpose and the flexibility of time. "The first time is when he is in the house of the first probation, where those desiring to enter the Society are customarily received as guests for twelve or fifteen days that they may reflect more carefully upon their whole situation, before they enter a house or college of the Society to live and associate with the others" (General Examen, II, 18). Cf. ibid., 21: "at their first entrance the candidates are kept apart from the rest for twelve or fifteen days, or even as long as twenty, in the house of the first probation, as will be seen Part I of the Constitutions."

29.

Constitutions, I, 4, 191. Cf. General Examen, I, 21.

30.

Ibid., I. 4, 193.

31.

Ibid., I. 4, 197.

32.

Ibid.

33.

General Examen, III, 46.

34.

General Examen, III, 47-49.

35.

Ibid., Ill, 50.

36.

Ibid.

37.

Ibid., Ill, 52.

38.

Constitutions, I. 4, 190.

39.

General Examen, IV, 103; Constitutions, III. 1, 288. Cf. Constitutions, IV, 307 and V, 516.

40.

General Examen, IV, 103.

41.

General Examen, I, 3 and III, 52. Cf. Constitutions, IV, 307; IV. 12, 446; VII. 1, 603; and X, 813.

42.

Joseph De Guibert, The Jesuits; Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice, 2nd ed. (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1972), 103. See also General Examen, IV, 71. Cf. General Examen, I, 16; Constitutions, 1:514; 2:516.

43.

General Examen, IV, 64.

44.

Constitutions, IX, 3, 748.

45.

General Examen, IV, 65.

46.

Constitutions, III, 1, 277.

47.

"Acta Patris Ignatii Scripta a Patre Lud. Gonzales de Camera," Monumenta Historica Societatis lesu, Monumenta Ignatiana, series quarta, tomus 1. Zapico, Dalmases, and Leturia, eds., Fontes Narrativi de Sancto Ignatio de Loyola 99 (Rome, Institutum Historicum Societatis lesu, 1943), 504.

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48.

George Schurhammer, S.J., Francis Xavier, His Life and Times, vol. 1: Europe (Rome: The Jesuit Historical Institute, 1973), 298, 304-309.

49.

General Exam en, IV, 11. For the dangers of this experiment, which could result in contagion and even death, and the consequent discretion employed in its usage, see Pietro Tacchi-Venturi, "La Prova dell'indifferenza e de servizio negli ospedali nel tirocinio ignaziano," Archivum Historicum Societatis lesu (1932), 1: 14-22; see also De Guibert, The Jesuits, 103, and Manuel Ruiz Jurando, S.J., Origenes del noviciado en la compania de Jesus (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis lesu, 1980), 13.

50.

General Examen, IV, 67.

51.

Joseph B. Wall, S.J., The Providence of God in the Letters of Saint Ignatius (San Jose, California, Smith-McKay Printing Co., 1958), iii.

52.

Constitutions, III. 1, 287.

53.

General Examen, IV, 68 and 83; Constitutions, 1, no. 282.

54.

General Examen, IV, 69, 70, 77.

55.

"Formula of the Institute," as in Exposcit Debitum 3, Monumenta Historica Societatis lesu, Monumenta Ignatiana, series tertia, tomus I. Monumenta Constitutionum Praevia (Rome; Institutum Historicum Societatis lesu, 1934), 375-76. Cf. Ganss, Constitutions, 66-67.

56.

Spiritual Exercises, 137.

57.

Ibid., 146.

58.

Ibid., 116.

59.

This is the sense of the word "freedom" frequently used to translate into contemporary English the notion of indifference or detachment. Cf. John J. English, S.J., Spiritual Freedom (Guelph, Ontario: Loyola House, 1974).

JESUS AT TABLE: THE IGNATIAN RULES AND HUMAN HUNGER TODAY

Thomas E. Clarke, S.J. The recent renewal of interest in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, considered both as experience and as text, has not dealt extensively with the "Rules with Regard to Eating." 1 Following the lead, perhaps, of major commentators, most writers and directors today seem to assume that the "Rules" are, if not an irrelevancy, at least one of the minor and dispensable "trimmings" of this remarkable collection of exercises and practical hints. But if one approaches the Spiritual Exercises not from a fundamentalistic but from a hermeneutical perspective, then the "Rules" might very well assume for us a meaning far richer than we have imagined. This will be true particularly if the Spiritual Exercises may validly be seen not merely as a manual for retreat directors but as 1) a text that has transcended itself and become a living symbol entrusted to the community, the Society of Jesus, which it continues to constitute; and 2) as a text which, together with the more basic Christian scriptures and the Constitutions, is the source of that community's understanding of its contemporary mission: the service of faith and the 2 promotion of justice. It might be possible that, in our world of today, the first week contemplation of Jesus hanging on the cross, with the powerful triad of questions that it posed for Ignatius, needs to blend with some other contemplations: Jesus hungry and thirsty during the forty days of his temptation; Jesus feeding the crowd on the mountain; and especially Jesus sitting at table with his poor disciples. What indeed are we to do for Christ? Where are we to find him in this global village of ours, where gluttony and waste have been massively institutionalized, and where the image of God in human beings is daily disfigured by systemic disorder? However prosaic and pedestrian the "Rules" may appear at first glance, they may prove to be both enlightening and confirming as we try to meet our responsibilities. This essay neither represents the fruit of serious research into the "Rules," their text and context, nor, puts forth a specific hermeneutical theory for interpreting the "Rules." It does offer a theological reflection, that suggests a direction in which investigation and interpretation of the Spiritual Exercises today might usefully move, with profit for all our Jesuit ministries. I will begin with some observations on the text of the "Rules." Second, I will reflect on some

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of the ways in which hermeneutical method might be brought to bear on the Spiritual Exercises in general and on these "Rules" in particular. The "Rules" are eight in number, and may be summarized and categorized as follows . The first three have to do with what one eats and drinks, or, more precisely, with what is more appropriate material for abstinence.

Not bread,

says the first rule (Spiritual Exercises 210), since inordinate appetite and temptation are not strong there. Quite the contrary with drink (wine would be especially in view here), adds the second rule (211), and so the principle of tantum quantum should be applied. The third rule (212) has to do with foods (other than bread, but not merely delicacies), which call for greater and more complete abstinence.

This can be practised both by willingness to eat coarse

foods and by being sparing in the use of delicacies. In the fourth rule (213) Ignatius offers a concrete method and two criteria which will help toward the golden mean in eating. Let the retreatant cut back from a "suitable" (we might say "normal" or "ordinary") diet, and use two signals in discerning just where to set limits. The first is more interior in character, and will result from the cutting back. It consists in "interior knowledge [noticias], consolations and divine inspirations," which will guide the retreatant to a discerning judgment of what is in fact the proper mean for him. The other signal, a negative one, is lack of sufficient bodily strength and disposition to continue the Spiritual Exercises. The fifth to seventh rules are directives on how to spend the time of meals. The fifth (214), which with the fourth is undoubtedly central, merits complete quotation: While the person is eating, let him consider as if he saw Christ our Lord eating with his apostles and how he drinks and how he looks and how he speaks; and let him see to imitating him. So that the principal part of the intellect shall occupy itself in the contemplation of Christ our Lord, and the lesser part in the support of the body; because in this way he will get greater system and order as to how he ought to behave and manage himself.'* The sixth rule (215) offers some alternative ways of occupying oneself, namely, pious reflection or reading. Ignatius repeats, as in the fifth rule, the immediate purpose of such exercises during meals, the reduction of preoccupation with the gratification of appetite for food ("menos delectacion y sentimiento").

The

seventh rule (216) repeats the injunction against being engrossed in what one is eating, and adds another signal: rapid eating may be a sign of being carried away by one's appetite ("apresurado por el apetito"). quantity is to be maintained.

Self-mastery in manner and

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Finally, the eighth rule (217) outlines a twofold strategy, aimed at avoiding disorder: the menu for each meal is to be decided by the retreatant at the end of the preceding meal or at some other time when he is not hungry; then, if the retreatant feels tempted to eat more than has been decided on, let him in no case yield, but on the contrary act against the temptation by eating less. The movement of the rules, then, is from 1) designating the material for the exercise of abstinence at meals; to 2) offering a method and double criterion for discerning the golden mean in such exercise; to 3) providing some devout exercises while eating to lessen preoccupation with satisfying one's appetite; and 4) reinforcing such exercises with a simple and stern strategy of choice, in adhering to a menu fixed in advance by the retreatant himself in a moment free from appetite. The limits of the present essay, as well as the obscurity touching several aspects of the "Rules," render it impossible to offer here an extended and assured interpretation of the "Rules" in their original intent. I will limit myself to several observations, which call attention to some of the more striking features of the "Rules" as they reflect the main themes and thrusts of the Spiritual Exercises; then I will attempt to summarize the underlying intentionality of the "Rules," again in the context of the entire Spiritual Exercises. First, what is most striking, for this reader at least, is the theme of order and disorder (expressed also in the term concierto and in the principle of tantum quantum). In each of the rules, with the exception of the sixth, it occurs in some positive or negative expression. Second, the coupling of the notions of inordinate appetite and temptation is also worthy of special note (first, third, and eighth rules), together with the reference in the eighth rule to "the Enemy" (already well known to the retreatant from the exercise on "Two Standards" and the "Rules for the Discernment of Spirits"). Third, the reciprocal relationship in the fourth rule between disposition and "interior knowledge, consolations and divine inspirations" is noteworthy in the context of the entire Spiritual Exercises. By abstaining, the retreatant disposes himself for such graces that in turn direct his search for the appropriate mean in abstinence. In this connection, the occurrence of the key term sentir in the fourth rule confirms that the "Rules" are fully situated within the distinctive 5 dynamic of the Spiritual Exercises. 5 Fourth, the strategy of agere contra, previously encountered in the Spiritual Exercises (12, 13, 157) returns here.

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Fifth, and most important, there is the exercise of imagination in regarding Christ our Lord at table with his apostles, seeing him engaged in c eating, gazing (como mira), and conversing, with a view to imitation. Taking these several points together, the congruity of the "Rules" with the Spiritual Exercises as a whole is manifest. It would be an exaggeration to say that the "Rules" crystallize the entire dynamic of the Spiritual Exercises. But they do point very clearly in the direction of some very central aspects of that dynamic. I have elsewhere suggested, with thanks to Frederick Crowe's studies of the theme of complacency and concern, that a good part of the genius of the Spiritual Exercises lies in the interweaving of pragmatic/rational/decisional elements and, on the other hand, the n contemplation of Christ in his gospel mysteries. Reverence for the person of Christ contemplated in the mysteries and the re-establishment of right order within the retreatant with a view to holy choice are inextricably linked. And the link may aptly be described with the help of three key terms of the Spiritual Exercises found in the fourth rule, disposition (disponiendose), understanding or experience (sentira), and consolation (consolaciones). It is obvious that a thorough interpretation of the "Rules" would require an investigation of the practice of Ignatius and other early directors, within the material, economic, social, and cultural environments in which retreatants took their meals. A number of specific questions would have to be asked. Why are Q the "Rules" placed with the exercises of the third week? For what classes of retreatants (especially with reference to the last three annotations—Spiritual Q Exercises 18-20) were the "Rules" first intended and actually used? Just what was the physical and social setting of meals during the retreat? Did the retreatant eat alone or with others? To what extent was the fare controlled by the retreatant's coming to make the Spirtual Exercises within a Jesuit community? 10 To what extent do the "Rules" seek to help the retreatant during the retreat? To what extent are they offering a practice and a regimen that the retreatant is encouraged to follow in ordinary life? 11 How are the "Rules" related to the tenth Addition, on penance, of the first week, and particularly to the distinction between penance and temperance in eating (Spiritual Exercises 83)? 12 Most important, perhaps, would be the questions touching the origins of the "Rules," and their links with the conversion experience of Ignatius himself.13 In the absence of such a study, the best we can do here is to attend to some important hints, in the Spiritual Exercises and in early directories, which would encourage the following hypothesis: for some retreatants, at least, Ignatius strongly desired that the experience of mealtime should be fully

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integrated with the dynamic of conversion and discerning choice at the heart of the Spiritual Exercises. Early directories make a good deal, for example, of the fact that it is the retreatant who is to choose the appropriate diet. 14 Such an exercise of choice is probably not without significance against the background of the accent on human choice in the Spiritual Exercises as a whole (e.g., "to ask for what I desire," Spiritual Exercises 25, 65, 91). Some of the directories indicate too that the daily dialogue with the director is to include the retreatant's account of what he has been experiencing in the context of meals. 15 The principle of adapting the Exercises to the needs and capacities of each retreatant finds application several times, touching both the kind of person to whom the "Rules" are to be explained, the time of the retreat when they may be brought up (it is possible to do so earlier than the third week), and whether the 1 fi text of the "Rules" in some cases might be given to the retreatant. Out of such suggestions—admittedly a sampling—I would propose the following as a plausible scenario. Ignatius, for whom no circumstance of disposition or environment was insignificant for gaining the maximum fruit of the experience of the Exercises, felt it important to guide both directors and retreatants in making the best of mealtime. This was true at least in the case of some types of retreatants and retreats, and particularly those persons from whose engagement greater apostolic fruit was being sought. Working undoubtedly from his own personal experience in the years of his conversion, his conception went beyond providing a diet adequate for maintaining the health of the retreatant during the arduous journey of the Spiritual Exercises, and even beyond guarding against mealtime as a distraction from the intensive application to God of all the retreatant's resources. For some retreatants, at least, he desired the time of meals, along with the decisions to be made by the retreatant regarding meals, to be true spiritual exercises, the practice of discerning choice, contemplative encounters with Christ the Lord. No less than the designated formal exercises, and in conjunction with them, the partaking of food and drink was to be simultaneously an exercise of right order and an assimilative imitation of Christ the Lord. To what extent this strategy for mealtime was intended by Ignatius to be dispositive for a concrete "election" and to what extent it was integral to a less specific and more basic process of contemplative conversion to be continued after the retreat are not the points of inquiry here. 17 When the Spiritual Exercises are dealt with hermeneutically, this traditional controversy becomes, in my opinion, somewhat relative. It seems probable, moreover, that the placing of the "Rules" at the end of the third week is more than a matter of not finding place and time for them in

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the first two weeks. The proximity to the first contemplation of the third week, together with the deepening and totalizing character which the prayer of the retreatant would be expected to have at this stage of the Exercises, suggest that Ignatius wished to facilitate for the retreatant a contemplative, Christocentric experience at mealtime, which would powerfully carry over to his life in this aspect after the retreat. To the degree that this feature of the Exercises became a significant grace offered and accepted, the time of meals would be an important locus of encounter with Christ, and inseparably an experience of harmony and right order for the Christian transformed by the Spiritual Exercises. 18 In turning now to ask what meaning these "Rules" might have for us Jesuits today, it ought to be obvious that the hermeneutical principles which have led to major insights into Holy Scripture and its meaning for us are appropriate instruments for dealing with the foundational documents of Christian communities, and specifically with the Spiritual Exercises and Constitutions of Ignatius. For, as in the case of Scripture, we are in the presence of primordial texts that have proven their generativity over a long period in the community of disciples, which dates its origins from these texts and from the experiences they mediate. Yet one has the impression that, on the whole, we Jesuits have been slow to interpret our own foundational texts with the help of a conscious hermeneutical method. Specifically, with respect to the Spiritual Exercises, the text is likely to be dealt with in most instances more or less exclusively in its explicit and literal sense. The primary interpretative concern—quite legitimate and necessary in itself—appears to be the one which reigned a few decades ago among Catholic Scripture scholars, that is, fear of "eisegesis," lack of sensitivity to the historical and cultural context within which the Spiritual Exercises originated. The search has been for the mens Ignatii behind the text as expressed to the text, as a fixed point from which adaptations or accommodations are to be made, thus rendering the Exercises viable and effective in our very changed historical and cultural circumstances. The perennial "power of the Exercises" is often conceived to be contingent on such a literal fidelity, allowing, of course, for the fact that Ignatius himself calls for adaptation to various circumstances. Further, one has the impression that a good deal of such interpretation of the Spiritual Exercises has proceeded from a "classical" mentality. This tends to assume an essence (here the essential meaning and purpose, structure and dynamic) of the Spiritual Exercises, fixed once and for all, which admits at most of accidental accommodations to changed circumstances. The risks and uncertainties of venturing onto hermeneutical

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paths, which most of us have accepted with respect to Scripture, appear even today to find us more wary when there is question of the Ignatian "scriptures." There is no intention here of laying out even a broad outline of a scholarly hermeneutical approach to the "Rules." 19 Instead, I will draw upon several widely accepted, though not incontrovertible, hermeneutical insights as basis for some suggestions regarding the meaning and potential influence of the "Rules" today. 2(1 The basic proposition would have it that the meaning of a text is not formally and fully constituted independently of its actual interpretation in the flow of history. This would be true at least of "classical" texts, "that is, those which are so significant in content and beautiful in form that they have perennial value and therefore enjoy a contemporaneity with people of every age." 21 An even more privileged class of such texts would be those that stem with some immediacy from great religious founders, and represent constitutive elements of the communities of discipleship, embodying in time and space the legacy of the founder. Interwoven with non-written elements, such texts acquire an "excess of meaning" within a larger process that is both retrieval of the primordial story and its interpretation out of and back into the experience of the community in successive ages of its history. Through the "hermeneutical circle," the actual meaning of the text undergoes change, as it serves to ground contemporary perceptions and judgments and in turn is newly understood with the help of these perceptions and judgments. The entire hermeneutical exercise—much more complex than can be here represented—is a risky one, the risks being chiefly those of subjectivism and infidelity to the heritage committed to the community once for all. But the alternative, a dead literalism and fundamentalism, actually guarantees infidelity not only to the reality represented in the text but to the basic nature of what it means to be human within history. Nor is the hermeneutical enterprise without its appropriate norms and criteria, even though fidelity to these are ultimately verifiable only through a discerning—and fallible—judgment of faith. While traditional empirical and rational tools of exegesis are indispensable, and provide, among other things, what might be termed negative norms, the ultimate criterion would seem to be a quasi-aesthetic judgment of congruity with respect to the meaning of the text. Such a broad statement of the hermeneutical viewpoint here being assumed might be examined first of all with respect to its contribution to understanding the Christian scriptures. This is more or less what the essay of Schneiders previously cited in note 19 does in succinct fashion. Employing the same approach to the Spiritual Exercises requires an acknowledgment of the

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many differences between the two texts: one inspired by a charismatic founder who wrote no text, the other the creation of the founder himself; one emanating from a wide variety of authors and particular communities in very different historical periods and cultural settings, and the other the work of a single author written within a few decades of his life; one composed of histories, poems, prophetic and apocalyptic utterances, parables, doctrinal summaries, etc., and the other a practical manual (with diverse ingredients) gleaning the fruit of spiritual experiences in order to assist the spiritual experiences of others; one the foundational text for a community divinely founded and assured by divine promise of indefectibility throughout history, and so a text endowed with qualities of divine inspiration and inerrancy, and the other constitutive of a community endowed with no such guarantee; and so forth. In spite of these major differences, however, the comparison would seem useful and the recourse to the same hermeneutical principles would appear valid. If one reflects on the way in which we Jesuits, both informally and in such formal acts of self-definition as General Congregations, express our regard for the Spiritual Exercises, it seems clear that for us this text has achieved the status of a "classical" text, a symbol constitutive and normative for our lived and spoken interpretation of the life that is ours as sons of Ignatius. The "excess of meaning" characteristic of such texts, together with the use, most often spontaneous and unreflective, of the "hermeneutical circle," are existential attributes of the Spiritual Exercises as we seek to live by them. All of this is true even though most Jesuits appear to have little sophisticated acquaintance with the text of the Spiritual Exercises, and many perhaps have recourse to reading them only rarely. Much of the "spirit of the Exercises" is transmitted through our equivalent of oral tradition. The Ignatian retreats that we make annually, and that some of us direct, are intrinsic and central to the integral process by which the immense energies contained in the Ignatian experience are mediated to successive generations of Jesuits. But, precisely because ours is an evangelizing and apostolic community, the exercise of all our ministries makes up our praxis, and is a constitutive element within the hermeneutical circle by which we move back to and out from the Spiritual Exercises. The energy flow is two-directional, and we should never neglect what the quality of our diverse ministries can contribute to the quality of our grasp of the Spiritual Exercises. Need it be said that both infidelity and fidelity mark this human, historical process? If even the Church, endowed with the promise of indefectibility, is subject to infidelity and error in interpreting the Scriptures, this will

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be even more true of us who have no such divine promise. What needs to be said here, however, is that infidelity and fidelity are to be understood with reference to the hermeneutical circle, and to the interdependence present in our grasp of its two poles. To the degree that our grasp of the Spiritual Exercises is loosened, we incapacitate ourselves for reading and responding to the "signs of the times." And to the degree that we are not "prompt and diligent" in the latter exercise, we lose the ability to interpret correctly our foundational texts. One final remark may be added before returning to the "Rules". A basic condition for the successful use of the "hermeneutical circle" is that the interpreters have adequately appropriated the total contemporary standpoint from which they are to interact with the primordial text. For us today this appropriation calls for the employment of careful analysis—which contains many ingredients, but is most comprehensively described as cultural analysis—of our contemporary context (including both structures and consciousness). This analysis must be accompanied by discerning theological reflection, whose principal role is the evaluation of context in the light of the Gospel. Both analysis and reflection are interwoven with personal and communal experience of the cultural context, imposed or freely chosen. It is clear that this essay cannot even begin to analyze this contemporary pole of the total hermeneutical process. 22 Still less can it offer 23 an analysis or reflection on the world food and hunger situation. But o,ne basic assumption needs to be mentioned. It is the conviction, now rapidly infiltrating into theology and spirituality, that the human is not fully constituted or grasped without inclusion of its societal component, that is, the many and varied climates—created by human action and interaction—which in turn profoundly 24 affect the behaviour and attitudes of persons and communities. The import of this assumption for a hermeneutical approach to the Spiritual Exercises consists principally in extending to such climates, to the degree to which they participate in the qualities of persons, the insights, strategies, and so forth, which the Spiritual Exercises offers to the individual retreatant. Such terms, then, as "order," "appetite," "disposition," receive a meaning not confined to the interior qualities of the individual person. The concepts of "societal sin" and "societal grace" are apt expressions of this broad new insight into the human, which is now making its way in spiritual theology. 25 All of this suggests the following conclusion about the "Rules": if we would understand their basic meaning for ourselves today, we need, with a certain simultaneity of presence to the "Rules" and to our world, to place ourselves in the context of that facet of contemporary human reality that

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corresponds to the focus of the "Rules." It seems clear that for Jesuits today a faithful and integral grasp of the meaning of these "Rules" depends on a clear perception of and appropriate response to this precise area of our service of faith and promotion of justice. Reciprocally, it seems clear that we are capable of bringing to our participation in the struggle on behalf of the hungry and starving, as well as of the overfed, some distinctive resources from the special Ignatian heritage represented in the "Rules." It is principally to the latter, not the former, of these two statements that I will now address myself. What are some of the perspectives, insights, accents, suggested by the "Rules" that may be valuable for our engagement in ministry to this central area of human life? Let me try a formulation that points in the direction of the contribution we might make: a distinctive energizing impact toward the restoration of justice as right order in the struggle to humanize the sharing of food and drink in our world today can be made when a deep love for Jesus Christ contemplated at table with his poor disciples becomes the inner form of discerning choice at personal, interpersonal, and societal levels. Let me try to "unpack" this formula in several statements. First, the primary Ignatian passion for order so manifest in the "Rules" makes them highly relevant for dealing with world hunger as massive systemic injustice. Justice is right order, the observance of the debitum in human relationships. Injustice is disorder, confusion. This simple equation provides the hermeneutical link between the "Rules" and today's food and hunger situation. Viewed from the standpoint of the Gospel, the present situation is, in Pauline terms, the reign of principalities and powers. In Ignatian terms, it embodies the horrible vision of "that great field of Babylon," where "the Chief of all the enemy is seated, as in a great chair of fire and smoke, in shape horrible and terrifying" (Spiritual Exercises 140). William Peters is correct, I think, when he says, "The text of the Spiritual Exercises proves that Ignatius is almost obsessed 9fi

with the question of order and harmony." A Jesuit deeply formed by the Spiritual Exercises in general and by the "Rules" in particular will bring to his engagement in the food and hunger situation a special and intense passion for order, and an abhorrence for the profound human degradation contained in the moral disorder that he contemplates there. Second, this passion for order—is it anything different from the virtue of justice?—is, for one who has exercised himself with the help of the "Rules," contemplatively Christocentric in character. Here the many true things that are commonly said of the contemplation of the mysteries of the life of Christ in the 27 Spiritual Exercises need to be recalled. For the most part the Spiritual

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Exercises are a series of exposures of the Christian heart to Christ present in the Gospel mysteries. Their power is primarily in the enlightenment and energizing that take place from this beholding (mirar) of the Lord as he engages in human life and ministry, together with rational reflection (considerar) on the same. The person who is carried by the hermeneutical process from engagement in the world food and hunger situation will be drawn especially to the contemplative exercise of the fifth rule, and to similar exercises in which Jesus appears in the context of food and drink.28 In turn, when such a person returns from the Exercises to engagement in the hermeneutical process, he brings with him a habit of reverent and alert attentiveness to the real, which for the Christian is deeply and totally Christie. 29 The danger of compulsive, guilt-rooted reactions to world hunger can be met in large part through the contemplative/conative rhythm characteristic of the Spiritual Exercises. Though Ignatius does not in the "Rules" make explicit mention of the reflective correspondant ("I will reflect on myself") to the contemplative gaze, the phrase "and then strive to imitate him" (y procure de imitarle) of the fifth rule is clearly indicative of this rhythm. What it suggests for our engagement in the food and hunger struggle is the importance of contemplative exercises for "agents of change." 30 At least where Marx's famous dictum about philosophers investing their energies in interpreting the world instead of changing it has been heeded, such heeding may need to be counterpointed by the conviction that contemplation, too, is a form of action. 31 Third, the Jesuit formed by the Exercises and the "Rules" will return to minister in the food and hunger situation more richly endowed with the links between justice and temperance, injustice and intemperance. When the analysis of food and hunger problems from specialized perspectives becomes atomistic, a kind of myopia can set in that reduces the ethical problem to one of justice. We can forget that the systemic disorder of injustice contains within itself systemic intemperance, and that strategies which omit dealing with institutionalized incentives to gluttony are doomed to failure. The mentality formed by the Spiritual Exercises is one that is attentive not merely to disorder in general but to disordered appetite. The classic theme of scholastic theology, the interconnectedness of all the virtues and all the vices, is highly relevant to what we are discussing. The Spiritual Exercises as directives for spiritual praxis, in such key terms as affecciones desordenadas (172) and el apetito en desordenarse (212), make a good deal of this linkage. When social analysis and theological reflection are formed by such a spirituality, they will more likely attend to this linkage as it operates in our society and culture. Similarly, the strategic discernment needed if we are to invest our ministerial energies at the points of

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maximum darkness and maximum opportunity will find guidance from this aspect of the "Rules." Fourth, what has been said regarding the reciprocal relationship between disposition and "interior knowledge, consolations, and divine inspirations" suggest how we might well approach the dialectic of human effort and trust in divine providence, as this occurs within the tragedy of world hunger. Though there is no space here to elaborate on this suggestion, let me at least try to state it briefly. The classic philosophical and theological debates touching providence/free will and grace/freedom represent theoretical expressions and guidelines for the lived struggle of "acting as if all depended on God, and praying as if all depended on yourself." 32 In the presence of a tragedy as vast and stubborn as world hunger, two opposite temptations occur. One is to some form of despair, often cloaked in sophisticated language, as in some versions of "lifeboat ethics" or "triage" solutions. The other temptation is to frantic, shallow, or disjointed efforts directed toward the more superficial aspects of the problem, or the investment of illusory hope in partial solutions such as "the green revolution" and attacks on overpopulation. The Spiritual Exercises offers no escape from the complexities of the situation, and its reliance on divine grace is not usefully regarded as a substitute for the many operations such as data gathering and complex analysis required for a rational dealing with concrete historical reality. What the Spiritual Exercises does offer, at the religious and ethical levels, is a praxis and a mentality formed by it, which maximize the likelihood of enlightened and free energies flowing in orderly fashion into the struggle. The dialectic of disposition/consolation—to use a short formula—in the praxis suggested by the fourth "Rule" has the effect, negatively, of reducing our sinful waste of human resources by letting them be gathered by God himself acting within the structure and dynamisms of the human agent. This dialectic, which is also represented by Ignatius in the Constitutions, in the concept of instrumentum coniunctum cum Deo, is apt, when made hermeneutically available, for enlightenment and guidance in the struggle with world hunger at its deepest level.33 The insight contained in this aspect of the Spiritual Exercises is that human energies are made fully available (fully disclosed and fully freed) for the work of shaping the world in history in direct, and not inverse, proportion to their being placed at the disposal of God himself acting within the human agent in every moment of freedom.34 In this mentality, developed through engagement in the Exercises, God is earnestly invoked—the petere id quod volo aptly formulates the dialectic of petition—but his grace is not asked to

Jesus at Table: The Ignatian Rules and Human Hunger Today substitute for human initiative in any form.

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sacrament of divine providence in the Ignatian perspective is human prudence finely honed to the sharpness of discernment (discretio). At the same time a semi-Pelagian compulsiveness in attacking massive world problems is discountenanced. The dialectic is a dialectic of hope, in which human responsibility, without being abdicated, is committed to the "far fonder a care" of "him who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think" (Ephesians 3:20). The more the retreatant opens himself to be moved by God, the more richly he experiences the surprise of divine consolation, which in turn creates and deepens the very conditions for its reception. I would suggest that the order on which Ignatius is so deeply intent is not static but dynamic, and finds its central verification in the act of freedom, in which the retreatant is simultaneously disposed for and by_ the "interior knowledge, consolations, and divine inspirations" that are the heart of the divine governance of the world. Though I have not clearly worked out the way in which this powerful dialectic can be made hermeneutically available for the struggle with systemic hunger, I believe that such a working out is methodologically consistent with the approach I am suggesting. What needs principally to be done, perhaps, is to identify the societal forms of the dispositions that are prerequisite to the fuller entry of divine grace into the climates of our culture. Fifth, the contemplation of Jesus at table with his disciples, and related exercises, are important for the healing and liberation of imagination, without which our society will remain locked into sterile and defeatist or else illusory strategies for dealing with world hunger. In social psychology, theology, and spirituality today, the power of imagination is receiving a well-deserved attention. The societal evil here addressed is twofold: 1) the reluctance or inability to imagine radical alternatives to present behaviour and structures; and 2) the abuse of the gift of imagination when it is wasted in escapist fantasy or employed to manipulate people into perpetuation of the ethical status quo. As Walter Brueggemann has brilliantly sketched out, it is characteristic of the prophetic imagination to be at once critical of present oppression and creative of alternative scenarios. 35 When the Exercises, particularly those exercises that take place during the retreatant's meals, become formative of attitudes that make their way beyond personal spiritual praxis to become a priori forms of viewing the world, they are capable of contributing to that systemic multiplication of loaves and fishes so desperately needed by society today.

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Ignatian Spirituality in a Secular Age Sixth, the very last sentence of the "Rules" offers to the Jesuit who

conies to minister in the food and hunger situation a crucial element in his attitude, one that enables him to appreciate the seriousness of the struggle in which he is engaged. As we have seen, this final rule proposes the strategy of agere contra, and does so in the context of pairing of inordinate appetite and temptation. What is symbolically most significant, however, is the identification of the source of temptation—tentacion del enemigo. The presence of "the Enemy" as Ignatius rounds out the "Rules" is deeply meaningful. It evokes a key dimension of the Christology/soteriology of the Spiritual Exercises. Though the person of Christ appears explicitly in the "Rules" only in the cordial setting of a meal shared with his disciples, the underlying presence of Christus victor, Christus rex is clear. The final rule is a call to struggle and to conquer (veneer) every disordered appetite and every temptation of the Enemy. Here is a clear evocation of the spirit of the exercises on the "Kingdom" and on "Two O
Standards," and a summons to a posture of kenotic struggle. In context, the Enemy is the prince of disorder, and Christ our Lord is the warrior king who establishes justice through his victory over the Enemy. The Christology and soteriology of Christus victor is, obviously, not a heritage peculiar to Jesuits. But we do bring to it the experience of a distinctive spiritual praxis, that shapes the broader tradition in a particular way, especially in the link between "the Enemy" and "disordered appetite." This essay has attempted to make clear that this particular version of the Christian tradition of Kingdom conflict is not sacrosanct, but itself needs to undergo revision with the help of hermeneutical insights. One of the ingredients of that revision is the translation of conflict language as found in the Bible and in the Spiritual Exercises, from the mythical to the more rational and analytical, or rather, the establishment of a circular movement between the mythical and the analytical/reflective. The contribution of sociology and anthropology to theology and spirituality in recent years has included the emergence of models of the human in which structures and institutions, symbols and systems, appear as constitutive elements of the human. The theological constructs of societal sin and societal grace, including the enlargement of the Tridentine notion of concupiscence to include societal reality, represent major instances of the reception of these insights by theologians. We are enabled, then, to read the Ignatian texts regarding "the Enemy" with new meaning, and to bring that new meaning to bear on our society through our various ministries. For us "the Enemy," the "principalities and powers," the "cosmocrats" of whom Paul speaks, dwell in every dehumanizing system,

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structure, and institution of our culture, especially as these are realities within human consciousness, shaping it to its own destruction. One advantage of this particular hermeneutical reading of the eighth rule is that it can help us to deal with that blandness and deficiency of passion for struggle that is a special temptation for Roman Catholic social teaching. 37 When Jesuits in particular lean too one-sidedly on the rationality and optimism characteristic of their special tradition, they run the risk of losing contact with the passionate and combative side of the Ignatian heritage. To the degree that this happens, their efforts to promote order in society lack the radicality present in the Spiritual Exercises, because of Ignatius' intuitive and existential blending of a serene theology of right order with a passionate soteriology of struggle and victory. To the degree that the mythic language of "Two Standards," echoed in the eighth rule, is able to penetrate the more rational constructs of social analysis and theological reflection, we ourselves can be energized for the struggle with the demonic injustice of world hunger. The effort of this hermeneutical reflection has been to suggest that Ignatius' "Rules with Regard to Eating," far from being a museum piece, are an important instance of what a hermeneutical recovery of our Ignatian resources might do for us. It is not from oversight that I have not done what most people would expect in an essay on the "Rules," that is, describe how they might or should be utilized in directed Ignatian retreats today. I do hope that the rare occasion of an essay dealing with the "Rules" will stimulate others toward such descriptions. But there is a broader and deeper point to be made. Ultimately, the ministry of directed retreats will fare better if it is not asked to bear all by itself responsibilities that need to be shared with other forms of Jesuit ministry, other kinds of spiritual exercises. In his structuring of the formation of the Jesuits, Ignatius did not put all his attention on only the thirty-day retreat; he wisely provided for a variety of exercises or experimenta, which, appropriately related, would constitute the integral tasting and testing conversion experience for candidates for the Society of Jesus.'38 If the Spiritual Exercises is in fact a "classical text," then it takes on the character and meaning of a basic archetype for every ministry that Jesuits undertake. There will probably never be an end of discussions about just what kind of retreat experience deserves the name of "Spiritual Exercises according to St. Ignatius." Such discussions are not necessarily sterile. But we would be unfaithful to the spirit of the very first Annotation, I believe, if at this juncture we did not take seriously, and indeed with applications beyond Ignatius' own understanding, his assertion that the term "spiritual exercises" is to be

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understood of "todo modo de . . . spirituales operaciones" (Spiritual Exercises 1). Both our heritage and our world call us to search for new ways of exercising ourselves as Christians and Jesuits. The "Rules with Regard to Eating" can help to enlighten that search.

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Notes 1.

The only detailed studies I have seen are almost a half-century old: J. Bover, "Reglas para ordenarse en el comer. For que en la tercera semana?" Manresa 9 (1933), 128-33; J. Serrat, "Platica sobre las reglas para ordenarse en el comer," Manresa 9 (1933), 345-47; E. Hernandez, "De como comia Jesucristo," Manresa 10 (1934), 242-52. See also Edward Pryzwara, Deus Semper Maior. Theologie der Exerzitien, (Vienna, Munich: Herold, 1964), 2:37-40; and William Peters, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius; Exposition and Interpretation (Jersey City, N.J.: The Program to Adapt the Spiritual Exercises, 1968), 139-41. A cursory examination of several of the well-known commentaries (for example, Ponlevoy, Ambruzzi, Roothan, Longridge, Coathalem, Pinard de la Boullaye) bears out the truth of Ignacio Iparraguirre's observation on the lack of any comprehensive study and the superficial treatment given in the general commentaries. Orientaciones Bibliograficas Sobre San Ignacio de Loyola, 2nd ed., (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis lesu, 1965), 118.

2.

Because I am considering the Exercises as a constitutive element of the community of disciples founded by Ignatius, "the retreatant" is here conceived as the Jesuit, prospective or actual. I do not wish, obviously, to neglect the profit of the "Rules" for others, and I would also desire to acknowledge the reality of a larger Jesuit family, including Christian life communities and congregations of women religious whose foundations and rules reflect Ignatian influence. This special focus makes it easier to avoid the awkward "he or she" expressions which might otherwise be in place.

3.

I have made use of the text of the Autograph, as found in Monumenta Historica Societatis lesu, vol. 100 (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis lesu, 1969) and, more conveniently, in Ignacio Iparraguirre, Obras Completas de San Ignacio de Loyola (Madrid: La Editorial Catolica, 1963). Translations for the most part are from the translation of Elder Mullan, S.J., as reproduced by Donald Fleming, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. A Literal Translation and a Contemporary Reading (St. Louis; Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1978).

4.

Autograph: mayor concierta y orden. Mullan's "system" is here possibly influenced by Roothan's "methodum." Some early Latin versions have "formam."

5.

On sentir see Ignacio Iparraguirre, Vacabulario de Ejercicios Espirituales. Ensayo de hermeneutica ignaciana (Rome: Centrum Ignatianum Spiritual! tatis, 1972), 192-97; John Futrell, Making An Apostolic Community of Love; The Role of the Superior according to St. Ignatius Loyola (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1970), 111-16; and John Futrell, "Ignatian Discernment," Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 2:2 (April 1970), 56-57.

6.

The imitation of Christ our Lord and of our Lady can be helped, Ignatius says (Spiritual Exercises 247f.), by using the first method of prayer to consider their use of the senses.

7.

See Frederick Crowe, New Pentecost or New Passion? The Direction of Religious Life Today (Paramus, N.J.: Paulist, 1973), 156-81; the essay

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Ignatian Spirituality in a Secular Age originally appeared as "The Ignatian Exercises: Contemplation and Discernment," Review for Religious 31 (1972). Crowe developed the theme theologically in "Complacency and Concern in the Thought of St. Thomas," Theological Studies 20 (1959), 1-39, 198-230, 343-95, and in its spiritual implications in "Complacency and Concern," Cross and Crown 11 (1959), 180-90. In a recent essay, he deals with a related duality in the Spiritual Exercises, noticeable in the movement from the first and second to the third and fourth weeks, and expressible in a Thornistic distinction between a good to be apprehended and a good to be shared. See Frederick Crowe, "Dialectic and the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises," Science et Esprit 30(1978), 111-27.

8.

The explanations include: 1) the first two weeks contain many other things which the director needs to bring and explain when he visits the retreatant, so that there is more time for these rules in the third week; 2) the "Rules" (especially the fifth) are congruous with the first contemplation of the third week; and 3) by the third week the prayer of the retreatant achieves a depth and totality that make possible a total absorption of the whole person, even during meals. A number of commentators say that the "Rules" may be given earlier in the retreat, according to need. On this see Peters, The Spiritual Exercises, I3f, 139-42. The early directories will be found in Monumenta Historica Societatis lesu, vol. 76 (Rome: 1955). On the present point see 76:292, 321, 559, 732f.

9.

"These rules are primarily meant for the exercitant of the long retreat, and are to be applied at once with a view to the future;" Peters, The Spiritual Exercises, 13. Some of the early directories likewise limit those to whom the "Rules" are to be explained, and connect this with the reformation of one's state of life. See Monumenta Historica Societatis lesu, 76:403f., 436.

10.

Ignacio Iparraguirre, Historia de los Ejercicios de San Ignacio, (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis lesu, 1955), 2:247-51, describes the system of payment, etc., in the sixteenth century. He notes that only one directory, that of Hoffaeus, supposes the practice of serving the retreatant the meals served to the Jesuit community.

11.

Many commentators call attention to "para adelante" in the title of the "Rules" in the Autograph (210). Peters' observation is plausible: "These rules . . . are to to be applied at once with a view to the future;" The Spiritual Exercises, 13.

12.

It is striking that 1) despite the location of the "Rules" in the third week, Ignatius does not speak of penance but of abstinence; 2) both the penance of Spiritual Exercises 83 and the abstinence of the "Rules" are described as taking place by cutting back from the "conveniente"; and 3) temperance, contrasted with penance in Spiritual Exercises 83, is not mentioned in the "Rules," but there is the question of reaching the mean through abstinence (213). For an excellent commentary on Spiritual Exercises 87, where Ignatius speaks of three effects of external penance, see Francois Roustang, "Penitence et liberte," Christus 12 (1956), 487-506.

13.

I know of no special study of this connection. Leo Bakker, Freiheit und Erfahrung. Redaktionsgeschiehtliche Untersuchungen uber die Unterscheidung der Geister bei Ignatius von Loyola (Wurzburg; Echter Verlag, 1970), 88-93, does deal with Ignatius' Manresa vision of food and drink (Autobiography 27), but only in relation to consolation without

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previous cause. Obviously, all of the passages in the Autobiography touching on food and abstinence would be fair game for such a study. Regarding the date at which the "Rules" were included in the text of the Spiritual Exercises; the general introduction to the critical text (Monumenta Historica Societatis lesu, 100:33) points to the period between 1537 and 1539. Previously H. Pinard de la Boullaye, Les Etapes de Redaction des Exercices de S. Ignace (Paris: Beauchesne, 1944), 24, had somewhat diffidently placed them in the Paris period (1528-35). 14.

Monumenta Historica Societatis lesu, 76:70, 71, 79, 87, 93f.

15.

For example, Monumenta Historica Societatis lesu, 76:87.

16.

For example, Monumenta Historica Societatis lesu, 76:320, 187n.

17.

On election vs. contemplative conversion see Peters, The Spiritual Exercises, 7-8, and Bakker, Freiheit und Erfahung, 233-69, with the literature cited there.

18.

Peters, The Spiritual Exercises, 141, is most perceptive when he writes: "The exercitant does not make the Exercises that he might think about order and about ordering his life but that he might achieve these and continue in his daily life."

19.

For this section of the essay I have drawn on Sandra Schneiders, "Faith, Hermeneutics, and the Literal Sense of Scripture," Theological Studies 39 (1978), 718-36; and M. O'Sullivan, "Toward a Social Hermeneutic of the Spiritual Exercises with An Application to the Annotations" (unpublished M.A. Thesis, written in 1979 at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley); Victor Codina, "Claves para una Hermeneutical de los Ejercicios," Manresa 48 (1976), 51-72, 141-50; and John Carroll, "Justice and the Spiritual Exercises," in Ignatian Spirituality; Four Essays (Rome: Centrum Ignatianum Spiritualitatis, 1979), 61-79. While Codina does not draw upon the hermeneutical theory of Gadamer as Schneiders and O'Sullivan do, his essay is open to such an approach. Particularly where he speaks of a "kenotic key," his essay contains a few excellent hints of how the Spiritual Exercises is to be linked to the faith/justice mission and to the "option for the poor;" see especially 145-48. In addition to these studies, which explicitly use the language of hermeneutics, other major studies of the Spiritual Exercises in recent decades have drawn less thematically on the fruit of the hermeneutical approach to Scripture and other Christian texts. The well-known works of Przywara, Fessard, Karl Rahner, Stanley, and Cusson, among others, explicitly or implicitly assume a hermeneutical posture. For a summary presentation of many of these, see Harvey Egan, The Spiritual Exercises and the Ignatian Mystical Horizon (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1976), 8-29.

20.

This summary of assumptions is indebted especially to that which Schneiders outlines, with dependence especially on Gadamer, whom I know only slightly. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley: University of California, 1976), including the long introduction by the editor, David Linge, especially pp. xiv-xxvii, and Gadamer's own essays, pp. 8ff, 28ff, 57f; also Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury, 1975), especially what he has to say about prejudice, the classical, the hermeneutical circle, etc. See also Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972), especially chap.

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Ignatian Spirituality in a Secular Age 7, "Interpretation." Lonergan tnere understands "hermeneutics" as principles of interpretation, and "exegesis" as application of those principles to a given task. It seems clear that the functional specialty of interpretation is only one of several functions involved in what the present essay describes as the total hermeneutical process.

21.

Schneiders, Faith, 730. See also R. A. F. MacKenzie, "The Selfunderstanding of the Exegete," Concilium 70 (1971), 11-19.

22.

In August, 1977, the major superiors of women and men religious in the U.S.A., at an assembly in Cleveland entitled "Convergence," followed a model that designated experience, social analysis, decision, and commitment as phases of a total process. The Center of Concern, which helped to design "Convergence," has developed it in workshops and publications, particularly in Joseph Holland and Peter Henriot, Social Analysis; Linking Faith and Justice (Washington, D. C.: Center of Concern, 1980).

23.

The contemporary pole of our interpretation of the "Rules" is here assumed to be the world food and hunger situation, evangelically and pastorally viewed. I have outlined some of the features of that situation, and of the generally individualistic efforts to deal with it, in an essay written for a Woodstock Theological Center project on human rights: "On the Need to Break Bread Together," in Anthony Hennelly and John Langan eds., Human Rights in the Americas; the Struggle for Consensus (Washington D. C.: Georgetown University Press, 1982), 211-44. My conclusion calls for a shift of emphasis toward the theme of communion as the heart of human consumption of food and drink. Several questions regarding the "Rules" might be raised by this accent, particularly touching the value for human communion of meals eaten in silence and even in solitude. From an extensive and varied literature, the following references may be most helpful in the present context: Edmond Barbotin, "The Meal," The Humanity of Man (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1975), 7; Edmond Barbotin, "The Meal of God," The Humanity of God (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1976), 7; Bruce Birch and Larry Rasmussen, The Predicament of the Prosperous (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978); Larry Brown and Erik Eckholm, By_ Bread Alone (New York: Praeger, 1974); Peter Brown and Henry Shue, eds., Food Policy; The Responsibility of the United States in the Life and Death Choices (New York; Free Press, 1977); "Property and Stewardship," The Catholic World (September-October 1977); Joseph Gremillion, ed., Food/Energy and the Major Faiths (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1978); Monika Hellwig, The Eucharist and the Hungers of the World (New York: Paulist, 1976); Interreligious Task Force on U.S. Food Policy, Identifying a Food Policy. Agenda for the 1980's; A Working Paper (Washington, D.C.: 1980); George Lucas and Thomas Ogletree, eds., Lifeboat Ethics; The Moral Dilemma of World Hunger (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); James McGinnis, Bread and Justice; Toward A New International Economic Order (New York; Paulist, 1979); Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins, Food First; Beyond the Myth of Scarcity (Boston; Houghton Mifflin, 1977); Jack Nelson, Hunger for Justice; The Politics of Food and Faith (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Qrbis7 1980); Robert Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. A Biblical Study (New York: Paulist, 1977); and Arthur Simon, Bread for the World (New York; Paulist, 1975).

24.

In several essays I have developed a triadic model of the human (intrapersonal, interpersonal, societal) that, especially through association with the traditional sin/grace dialectic, can provide spiritual theology and

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spiritual practice with a framework useful for this much-needed deprivatizing. See "Societal Grace: Toward a New Pastoral Strategy," in Surroundings; A Task Force on Social Consciousness and Ignatian Spirituality (Washington, D. C.; Center of Concern, 1974). See also the essays of William Callahan, William Ryan and Peter Henriot there; "Ignatian Spirituality and Societal Consciousness," Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 7, 4 (September 1975) 127-50; "Toward Wholeness in Prayer," in The Wind is Rising; Prayer Ways for Active People (Mt. Rainier, MD: Quixote Center, 1978). The writings of Gregory Baum are an excellent illustration, on a more scholarly level, of how sociology and anthropology are influencing theology and spirituality. On this influence see his paper, "The Impact of Sociology on Catholic Theology," Catholic Theological Society of American Proceedings 30 (1975), 1-47. 25.

Notable and quite useful in this context is Karl Rahner's extension to "the world" or the secular order of the Tridentine notion of concupiscence, designated as sin. See his essay "Reflections on the Theological Problem of Secularization," in Theology of Renewal, ed. Laurence Shook, (New York: Herder & Herder^ 1968), 1:167-82, reproduced in his Theological Investigations, (New York: Herder & Herder, 1973), 10:318-48; see also O'Sullivan, "Toward A Social Hermeneutic." I have also profited by reading an unpublished master's dissertation, "Societal Grace," by James R. Stormes, S.J., in which he investigates the concept in Juan Luis Segundo and Johannes Metz.

26.

Peters, The Spiritual Exercises, 5. He adds: "Disponer is more or less the equivalent of ordinar." And further on he links "dispose" with "composition," a term that he interprets as referring primarily to the selfpositioning of the retreatant. See all three terms in the index of his book. See Bakker for observations on Peter's use of this language to support his view on the goal of the Spiritual Exercises. All three terms do seem to point to Ignatius' deep respect for the place of reason in human receptivity and response to divine grace.

27.

Here it may suffice to recall the names of David Stanley and Karl Rahner.

28.

In this connection see the structural analysis of the first exercise of the third week by P. Remels, "La Cene dans les 'Exercises Spirituels': Essai d'analyse structurelle du recit," Revue d'Histoire de la Spiritualite 51 (1975), 113-36.

29.

The most relevant theological consideration is a certain identity between Christ and each human person. Whatever is to be said about the general absence of the neighbour from what is explicit in the Spiritual Exercises, the biblical and theological renewal of recent decades has provided us with a deepened consciousness of this mystery, for example, the Pauline teaching on the body of Christ. One of the notable supports for the hermeneutical process called for here would be Karl Rahner, "Reflections on the Unity of the Love of Neighbor and the Love of God," Theological Investigations, 6 (Baltimore: Helicon, 1969), 231-49.

30.

On the spiritual needs and dangers of such agents see A. Rammer et al., " 'Burn-Out'—Contemporary Dilemma for the Jesuit Social Activist," Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 10, (January 1978) 1-42.

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31.

See Karl Rahner, Opportunities for Faith: Spirituality (New York: Seabury, 1970), 74f.

Elements of a Modern

32.

See Gaston Fessard, La dialectique des Exercises Spirituels de Saint Ignace de Loyola, 1 (Paris: Aubier, 1956), 305-63.

33.

Constitutions nn. 813-14. See Dominic Maruca, Instruments in the Hands of God; A Study in the Spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola (Rome: Pontificia Universita Gregorianna, 1963).

34.

For Karl Rahner's early statement of this important point of his anthropology, see his "Current Problems in Christology," Theological Investigations, 1 (Baltimore: Helicon, 1961), 162.

35.

Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978). See also Brian McDermott, "Power and Parable in Jesus' Ministry," in Above Every Name. The Lordship of Christ and Social Systems ed. Thomas Clarke (New York: Paulist, 1980), 83-104.

36.

See Codina, "Claves," 145-48.

37.

In this connection see David Hollenbach, Claims in Conflict; Retrieving and Renewing the Catholic Human Rights~Tradition (New York; Paulist, 1979), especially 160-74.

38.

On this see the excellent study of Phillip Endean, "Origins of Apostolic Formation: Jerome Nadal and Novitiate Experiments," The Way; Supplement 39 (Winter 1980), 57-82, in which the author translates and comments at length on Nadal's conferences on the Ignatian experimenta. See also Francois Roustang, "Experience et Conversion," Christus 10, 39 (1963), 335-52. Michael Buckley's penetrating study, presented at the symposium and published in this issue, is a structural analysis of the experimenta.

FOR THE GREATER GLORY OF GOD: WORSHIP, DEVOTION, AND CHURCHES IN A HARMONIOUS CHURCH Michael A. Fahey, S.J.

The ecumenical movement in the twentieth century, the commitment to restoring unity among Christian churches inspired by the prayer of Jesus that "all may be one" (John 17:21), was, as is well-known, originally a movement of Protestant churches that traced its roots to the famous Edinburgh World Missionary Conference in 1910. Somewhat later, Eastern Orthodox and, at the eleventh hour, Roman Catholics added the support of their churches to this cause. Today, few Christians wish to turn their backs on this commitment until there develops a visible expression of Christian unity among the churches. Still, considerable obstacles abound: fears, prejudices, timidity, lack of understanding, lack of creative imagination, and, yes, apathy. Seemingly, ecumenism fails to incite enthusiasm in a wide segment of Christian churches. Some are not even sure of the kind of unity that is sought. Earlier Roman Catholic attitudes toward co-operation among the various churches were chilly. Rome looked askance on dialogue between the churches right from the time of the Reformation (to prescind now from the longer estrangement that reached back at least to the eleventh century with Orthodoxy). Protestants who proposed theological and religious discussions earlier in this century were tagged as "Pan-Christians." Listen to the selfassured voice of Pope Pius XI in his encyclical, Mortalium Animos, published as late as 1928, just one year after the Faith and Order Conference had met for the first time in Lausanne. In the letter Pius XI asserted: It is clear why this Apostolic See has never allowed its subjects to take part in the assemblies of non-Catholics. There is but one way in which the unity of Christians may be fostered, and that is by furthering the return to the one true Church of Christ of those who are separated from it; for from that one true Church of Christ they have in the past fallen away. The one Church of Christ is visible to all, and will remain, according to the will of its Author, exactly the same as He instituted it. The mystical spouse of Christ has never in the course of centuries been contaminated, nor in the future can she ever be.l Following that kind of official teaching, Catholics thought they were obliged in conscience to remain aloof from the ecumenical contacts to protect themselves from indifference, false complacency, even syncretism. But because of the courageous work of certain Christians who often had to bear the brunt of criticism, suspicion, even silencing from officials in the church, eventually the

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Catholic church did become a partner in the modern ecumenical movement. Catholics learned to see other Christians as partners in dialogue, persons with whom they already enjoyed a communion of fellowship but with whom they still needed to achieve full communion. One of the principal voices that prepared for this shift among Roman Catholics was, of course, Yves Congar who published in 1937, while still only thirty-three years old, his pioneering work Chretiens desunis (Divided Christendom), a work that launched what one writer has described as the 2 Catholic rediscovery of Protestantism. By the end of World War II, Catholics and Protestants had assimilated certain common insights. In the New Testament itself they perceived varying, complementary theologies concerning the mission of Jesus Christ, the way that salvation takes place, apostolic ministry, etc.. Historical perspectives helped to bring to light the fact that various stages marked the growth of ecclesiastical institutions, which were often in popular opinion simply retrojected back to the lifetime of the historical Jesus. Some scholars began to suggest that denominational differences among Christians would be seen at least in part as expressions of different currents of spirituality rooted in the New Testament or in specific local, geographical churches. The theological basis for Roman Catholicism's new openness was its belated appreciation that what binds Protestant and Catholic together is far richer that what separates. Both are perceived as bound together by an appreciation of Jesus' ministry, by commitment to share in Christ's worship of God the Father, by baptism, by the desire to celebrate the Lord's Supper, and by a shared aspiration to respond to the challenge of the Sermon on the Mount in our modern society. Some communion or koinonia based on the Holy Spirit's dwelling in the baptized already existed, but this invisible communion needs to 3 become visibly expressed. By 1964, the year that Vatican II published its decree on ecumenism, it was clear to Catholics that the boundaries of the Church of Christ do not begin and end at the borders of the Roman Catholic church. By their sharing in faith and baptism, other churches or ecclesial communities possess with Roman Catholics a real but imperfect communion in the Holy Spirit. Others besides Roman Catholics, to quote Vatican IPs decree on ecumenism, "have a right to be called Christians and with good reason are accepted as brothers [and sisters] by the children of the Catholic Church" (Unitatis redintegratio., no.3). Catholics were now ready to recognize explicitly the charisms, the graces and inspirations, given to individuals in different historical communities

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of Christian faith. They were also able to recognize churches and other communities, which from a Catholic viewpoint might be lacking in elements considered crucial to the fullness of church. True, Catholics might not always feel completely comfortable with the way another church expressed faith concerning, for example, the Eucharist, justification, the force of tradition. But Catholic theologians came to recognize the sincerity and the authentic character of another part of the Christian family. Why? This occurred, in part at least, because the Roman Catholic church now saw itself as a searching, sojourning church in need of reform, a church at times speechless before the mystery of grace and revelation. The Reformers, it was now realized, were not to be judged as disobedient, proud rebels, but persons burning with profound religious fervour to eliminate abuses and ambiguities within specific historical embodiments of the Church Catholic. Time has a maturing effect. In the early days of ecumenism it was often presumed that the goal of church dialogues was creation of a certain sameness, an identifiable oneness that would ultimately eliminate historical, cultural differences among the churches. This would be an application to church denominations of the so-called melting pot principle. Even in its early years, Consultation on Church Union seemed to favour such a view; all the churches in question would be subtly required to adopt a form of episcopal polity even if it had not previously been part of their tradition. Now new emphases on inculturation, conscientization, ethnicity, local church, and a sharper differentiation between unity and uniformity have contributed to the widely accepted view that the churches are not aiming at uniformity. This new awareness of unity amid diversity requires a commitment for harmonizing separate charisms into a symphonic whole. If this be the goal, then it is also important for each tradition to be aware of its distinctiveness, not for isolation but for communicating with and enriching sister churches. Interaction there will most certainly have to be. Nor does retaining one's distinctiveness mean entrenchment in what may be distorted or undesirable according to the best of that tradition. Today the operative principle is not simply ecclesia semper renovanda, but also ecclesiae semper renovandae. Each particular embodiment of the Church of Christ can and must learn to become more and more faithful to its own traditions, cutting through whatever snags and snarls of history may exist. Self-identity does not mean archaism as a goal but tradition enlivened by initiatives. An example of this conviction can even be seen in the theme of the forthcoming Ninth International Congress of Jesuit Ecumenists that

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will meet this August in Montreal: "Initiatives to foster in the Catholic Church and in the Society of Jesus in order to ensure progress towards Church Unity." It is in this particular perspective of autonomy and distinctiveness that I wish to develop the following line of thought. My own conviction is that a particular insight into the Christological nature of worship is part of what can be offered the worldwide communion of churches through the Roman Catholic tradition, at least as it currently exists (as well through the Orthodox and much of the Anglican communion).This insight regarding the function and meaning of worship is close to the vision of the Epistle to the Hebrews. This view, whether it be called mystagogical, liturgical, sacramental, incarnational, is especially, though not exclusively, present in those churches traditionally called "high churches" but which are, I think, better described as sacramentalist churches. I will concentrate here on the Roman Catholic perspective, which is the one that I know best, though clearly these qualities are not the exclusive prerogative of Catholics. Orthodox perspectives on worship would also be highly instructive. When talking about characteristic Catholic insights related to worship, I may cause some to smile or flash a look of wide-eyed disbelief as I suggest further that the Ignatian, Jesuit theory and practice within Catholicism is one special and fruitful expression of that insight into worship which could enrich other churches. Is this not historical revisionism to suggest that Ignatian spirituality has deep roots in a Christological theology of worship and liturgical celebration? Among the many things for which Jesuits have been criticized, their supposedly individualistic, unliturgical piety has been a prime target. The Jesuit historian Joseph de Guibert quotes the objection succinctly when he states " the Society [of Jesus] has contributed more than anyone else toward 4 implanting an antiliturgical and antisocial spirituality in the Church." However widespread this view, it is still a misunderstanding or distortion of the true situation. Historians of spirituality now widely recognize that even in his Spiritual Exercises Ignatius of Loyola intended these exercises of meditation and contemplation to be interwoven with participation in the church's liturgical life through Eucharistic celebrations and through participation in the liturgy of the House, especially Vespers. 5 For example, Ignatius notes in his "Rules for Thinking with the Church" (no.335): "We ought to praise the frequent hearing of Mass, the singing of hymns, psalmody, and long prayers whether in the church or outside; likewise, the hours arranged at fixed times for the whole Divine Office, for every kind of prayer, and for the canonical hours." An antiliturgical, privatized assessment of the Spiritual Exercises makes sense only if we prescind

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from the communal worship of the surrounding church in which the retreatant is participating. Those who have studied attentively the life of Ignatius of Loyola know the importance, as a means of entering into the paschal mystery of Christianity, and even of discovering concretely the "will of God" for an individual, that he attached to Eucharistic celebration in his own life. One should also keep in mind the importance Ignatius attached to weekly (from the year 1528) and daily (from the year 1540) reception of the Eucharist, often to the chagrin of some church c leaders. Ignatius was concerned that his own Compania de Jesus would be bound to a particular monastic expression of liturgical life, which he judged incompatible with the mission of his followers. Yet the biblical, salvationhistorical perspective of the first, second, third and fourth weeks of the Spiritual Exercises, which were meant to nourish the Jesuit or other Christian believer, were clearly influenced by the liturgical calendar of the Catholic church. Before advancing to the proposal that the particular contribution Roman Catholics can share with other Christians is not their perception of the Petrine ministry, nor episcopal collegiality, nor magisterium, but actually a Christological insight into public worship, I wish to clarify some terminology. We need to sort out such similar terms as: giving glory to God, praise, adoration, contemplation in action, and, most especially, worship. The English word worship is part of the Anglo-Saxon heritage of our vocabulary, taken from the words woerth and scripe, literally "worthycondition." It is an act of attributing worth, value, respect to something or someone. Nowadays we normally restrict its use to worship of God or the gods, but this was not always the case. In the 1549 English language ritual for marriage, one spouse promises in the exchange of vows "with my body I thee worship." The Romance languages have preserved the metaphor inherent in the Latin work cultus from colere (to cultivate), as in French culte and Italian culto. The Latin metaphor referred to agriculture, cultivating plants, caring for land or animals. The farmer seeds, tills, waters, feeds, and breeds what is given by nature or by God. The Germans use a more descriptive term for worship, Gottesdienst, "service of God," where there is an ambiguity, perhaps intentional, about whether this is a subjective or objective genitive; is it the human being's service extended toward God, or God's (i.e., Christ's) service of intercession for human beings? Today, worship needs to be sorted out from a host of other terms often used interchangeably, not without confusion. Are the terms all synonyms:

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worship, adoration, praise of God, liturgy, celebration, ritual? Can we worship God in the privacy of our chamber, or must it be in a church building, or at least in a communal setting? The following provisional sorting out may remove some of the confusion. I take the most comprehensive term to be "praising God" or "giving 7 glory to God." This glory or doxa is basically recognition by the human being of his own creatureliness. Such a judgment is an honest assessment of one's dependence as a human being on the transcendent. Rendering glory to God is not necessarily doing anything different, but having a sense of awareness about what is the deepest meaning of life. Paradoxically, giving glory or praise to God is not strictly giving to God but creating within oneself a sense of order and truth. This praise, glory, can be rendered in the laboratory, the home, the holiday camp, the factory, the office. St. Paul is not facetious when he writes: "The fact is that whether you eat or drink, whatever you do, you should do all for the glory of God" (1 Corinthians 10:31). Praise, glory, can be given without uttering a word since it is an interior event, an intentionality. In the words of Ignatius, we can find God in all things. There is no inconsistency in being a contemplative in action, since praise is not restricted to a time or place. Adoration is praise accompanied with some sort of bodily gesture to intensify the praise. In some of the older translations of the New Testament, persons who approached Jesus were said to "adore" him. Newer translations speak rather of showing reverence for or bowing or kneeling. Connected with the notion of adoration is an intense perception of the numinous, the holy. Some cultures show that sense of adoration by prostrating, bowing, genuflecting, covering one's face or head, even removing one's shoes. Worship I take to refer most appropriately to communal worship or o liturgy. Hence the emphasis is not upon a private action but upon what takes place in a community, however small the actual group may be. Though worship can and must have some elements of the spontaneous, it is also ritualized, structured, ordered, regularized, precisely because it is done year after year, week after week, or even more often, not only by one age group but by several. Worship implies bodily action, words, interdynamic interchange; it takes place in a specific place (though not necessarily a "holy" place) and at a specific time. Among Christians, worship is done in a particular, designated place—a parish church, a cathedral, a chapel, possibly even a home—provided certain arrangement are made. Worship takes on definite cyclic characteristics. Thus, Christians reconstruct in their imagination certain events of God's relationship with the people and in particular events from the life of Jesus. Therefore these follow year after year: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Passiontide, Easter,

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g

Ascension, Pentecost. One cannot enter into worship as quickly as one might give utterance to a Hail Mary or pray for an inspiration to St. Christopher on the expressway. It is hard to imagine worship on the subway or in a bus. Worship requires a recollection of self, a certain distancing, stepping aside for a moment in order to enter into a special ambiance. Hence, times for worship are announced in advance. One arrives prepared. One could even prepare for special opportunities by contemplation or meditation using, perhaps, one of the sections of the Spiritual Exercises. The prominent liturgist and theologian James White has noted that in worship we are "called to step back from the world momentarily, deliberately seeking to approach reality at its deepest level by encountering God in and through Jesus Christ and by responding to that awareness." 10 To achieve such ends, worship makes use of symbols, art, rituals: some churches feel more at ease with iconographic elements; some strip the environment to the barest essentials. The basic name for church, ekklesia (literally a calling together, an assembly), suggests that the gathering of the people is precisely for worship. 11 But I wish to emphasize what I judge to be the distinctive characteristic of Christian worship, something it shares with no other religion. The Christian distinctive perception, outlined in detail in the Epistle to the Hebrews, is that worship is not properly something that Christians do alone. It is first and foremost an activity going on continuously by the risen Christ in the heavenly Jerusalem, or, as we also describe it, "at the right hand of the Father." According to the Christian perspective, the community attaches itself, so to speak, to the on-going action of Christ the High Priest. Worship for Christians is a sacramental action in that it is a sign of something important going on invisibly through Christ himself. Thus, in liturgies or in Eucharistic worship, in the sacraments, what is done "re-presents," makes present again symbolically, mystagogically, that reality being achieved by the divine man who is in the closest of contact and communion with God. There is a close parallel between the Christ of the Ignatian colloquies in the Spiritual Exercises, the living, risen divine man of power, the salvation-bringer, and the Christ the High Priest whose intercession for all of humankind is being achieved even before its sacramental re-enactment is given shape. Before further describing this worship that is done by the divine man, the Risen Christ, and reflecting on its meaning for us, it would be helpful to clear up a common misunderstanding about the attitude of the historical Jesus toward worship in Judaism. What did Jesus have to say about ritual, cult, and

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formalized communal worship? Some have hastily concluded that Jesus regarded ritual or the liturgy of the Temple as corrupt and undesirable. Often cited as support for that view is the saying, "go into your chamber, close the door, and pray to the Father in secret" (Matthew 6:6), as though this were supposed to be a sweeping rejection of communal worship. In fact, the opposite is true. In regard to worship Jesus was not innovative. To be sure, he did show a certain freedom toward certain practices of the ancients who had added to the Torah. Especially did he resent the restrictive regulations regarding the Sabbath, ritual purification. But Jesus clearly participated regularly as a pious Jew in Temple worship, feasts of pilgrimage, and in synagogue meetings on the Sabbath.

His desire to make

reforms in some matters was well within the norms of his prophetic ancestors. Just as in moral matters he wanted to recentre the entire Law around the first commandment to love God and the second commandment to love one's neighbour, so too in public worship he reminded his contemporaries of the fundamental meaning of the Temple which he affectionately called his "Father's house." Furthermore, he was not adverse to preaching regularly in the Temple porticoes. Even the possibility that the Temple would be destroyed moved him to tears. In Jesus there is no abrogation of ancient worship but a recall to the radical exigencies of what it symbolized. Both in his historical life as a Jew of the first century and now in his risen existence as Son of God, Jesus is/was a worshipping person. Liturgical worship in the Roman Catholic tradition, despite the legitimate critiques one may make of its de facto execution, has nonetheless made an important contribution to our understanding as Christians of worship as essentially Eucharistic, the human expression of an on-going action by Christ. Even the use of the expression sacrificium (which has given and does give so much misunderstanding to Protestants, who feel that the term in the liturgy threatens our appreciation of the once-for-all character of Jesus' sacrificial death of atonement) is actually an attempt to show that the assembled community wants to participate in the perduring sacrificial dispositions of Christ at the right hand of God.

The curious terms used in the Roman liturgy,

sacrificium vestrum ac nostrum, or the sacrificium ecclesiae, or even the sacrificium laudis, are all intended to stress participation in the once-for-all sacrifices of Christ; they certainly do not imply an addition to that sacrifice, except in the sense that worship allows a human openness to the power of grace ever-present. Humankind's transformation into the life of God, be it called divinization, salvation, redemption, atonement, reconciliation, is a gradual process that takes place in a social setting. No prayer, mystical experience,

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vision, or ecstasy can give as potent an expression to how holiness occurs as does liturgical participation in the intercession of Christ. In worship we experience some share in salvation by our symbolic, sacramental sharing in a Christological activity taking place simultaneously. There is a public profession of faith, expressed by being bodily present and reciting creedal prayers. There is listening to the Word of God in Scripture, which, one hopes, the preacher will further concretize in a homily. There is singing of hymns to achieve a more intense physical participation. There is a sacramental communion in which one enters, as it were, mystically into the world of Christ's intercession. Liturgical worship draws upon some of the most basic of human experiences: birth, puberty, marriage, promotion, leave-taking, homecoming, victory, recovery from illness, death. One could not celebrate liturgy or sacramental worship without understanding what these human experiences are. Even the experience of play (which often gets lost in stolid, staid liturgies) is central to the celebration of worship. Liturgy can be only one aspect of Christian living, however important. At the least it must be integrated into the rest of our human struggle. Liturgical worship implies moments of celebration, a coming together briefly into an assembly for symbolic rites. Liturgy lacks the pace, the dynamism of daily life, including such factors as working to earn one's daily bread, raising a family, helping our neighbour, being involved in the social and political life of the city, taking time out to relax. In liturgical worship, when we eat, it is not to build up proteins within our body; when we sing, it is not to perform a musical chef d'oeuvre; when we pray, it is not to obtain a specific petition. Yet, at the same time, all of life is involved in these ritual symbols: living, loving, sharing, seeing, listening, speaking, eating, drinking. If the human actions that take place in liturgical worship are somewhat removed from ordinary actions—repeating formulas over and over again, folding one's hands in attitudes of prayer, assuming strange bodily positions, taking only small amounts of bread and wine rather than generous helpings—all of this is meant to express a symbolic dimension of what is unseen. The Christological character of liturgical worship was given particular theoretical formulation in the early days of the modern Catholic liturgical movement in France, Belgium, and Germany, especially from the 1930's on. Pius XII's encyclical on liturgy, Mediator Dei (1947), gave further impetus to this awakening. Many of the practical directives of Vatican II's constitution on the

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liturgy, Sacrosanctum consilium (1963), have already been surpassed, so that one could overlook the profound liturgical theology that is summarized especially in sections 7 and 10. The Christological convictions are strongly stated:

"the

liturgy is considered as an exercise of priestly office of Jesus Christ." Further it is stated that, "No other action of the Church can match its Fthe liturgy's] claim to efficacy, nor equal the degree of it." Thus "Christ indeed always associates the Church with himself in the truly great work of giving perfect praise to God and making human beings holy." As is stated in other words in no. 10: "The liturgy is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; at the io same time it is the foundation from which all her power flows." In the Roman Catholicism of the past two decades, however, what seems to have attracted particular attention is not liturgical worship but more personal forms of spirituality: meditation, contemplation, spiritual direction, directed retreats, mystical phenomena. Because of an unfortunate divorce, especially in Western theology, between spirituality and liturgical piety, some have thought that there is such a thing as being a Christian without being a Christian participating in worship. Reuniting these estranged partners will not beeasy. Some encouraging signs have emerged, such as the establishment of the North American Academy of Liturgists and the publications of some major sacramental theologians. 13 Gradually it will become more natural for theology in divinity schools and universities to employ not only Scripture, conciliar documents, historical controversies, theological disputations as loci theologici, but also liturgical texts and sacramental rituals. Thirty-five years ago the brilliant French Jesuit patrologist, Jean Danielou, summed up the perspective we have been describing when he wrote: "The whole of Christian culture consists in grasping the links that exist between Bible and liturgy, Gospel and eschatology, mysticism and liturgy. The application of this method to scripture is called exegesis; applied to liturgy it is called mystagogy. This consists in reading in the rites the mystery of Christ, and in contemplating beneath the symbols the invisible reality." 14 This essay would be incomplete were I to conclude my remarks about the relation of Roman Catholic, even Ignatian, theology and practice to other Christian churches through stress on liturgy as Christological intercession, without at least mentioning some of the very serious practical problems facing liturgical worship in the Roman Catholic churches. The design and execution of liturgies in many Roman Catholic churches is still supervised by a small group of persons who, even if they might possess appropriate theoretical understanding of worship, are unable to give vitality to its execution. Worship is often celebrated

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in a lifeless, haphazard way that is also amateurish, and esthetically displeasing. Some who preside at liturgical worship still operate out of a model of liturgy that sees it as an exercise in private piety. In some places there still exists a baroque mentality that envisages worship as a performance by clerical and artistic professionals before consumers. John Macquarrie has even suggested that some perceive God as a sort of Louis XIV of the heavens before whom one has to perform a ritual. 15 Often the quality of the music is also disturbingly inferior. Hymn singing is seen not as an act of worship but as a pleasing or unpleasant interlude between parts of the essential. I leave to Reformation theologians to interpret Protestantism's special contribution to the worldwide Christian community. I am sure that any such assessment would stress that Protestantism has a high sense of worship but one oriented toward the Word. The model here is less that of the Epistle to the Hebrews than that of Paul's letters, especially Romans. Accordingly, the pneumatological is related less to an epiklesis of the oblations and more to an epiklesis of the spoken word as it touches the heart with faith We hear much today, especially from liberation theologians, about the need to balance orthodoxy and orthopraxy, or the use of orthopraxy to authenticate orthodoxy. My own conviction is that neither orthodoxy nor orthopraxy suffices. Doxology, participating in the liturgical praise of God by Jesus Christ, bridges that possible gap. Preparing to join in Christ's worship by cultivating authentic dispositions and following up the liturgical action with commitment to service of neighbour form a whole. Orthopraxy prepares for doxology, orthopraxy follows from doxology. And, ultimately, orthodoxy becomes a prayer and not a formula.

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Notes 1.

George K.A. Bell, ed., Documents of Christian Unity. Selections from the First and Second Series, 1920-30 (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), 198.

2.

Paul M. Minus, Jr., The Catholic Rediscovery of Protestantism. A History of Roman Catholic Ecumenical Pioneering (New York; Paulist, 1976).

3.

See James Provost, ed., The Church as Communion, Special issue of The Jurist 36(1976) 1-245.

4.

Joseph de Guibert, S.J., The Jesuits; Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice. A Historical Study, trans. William J. Young (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1964), 554-55.

5.

Joseph Gelineau, S.J., "L'esprit liturgique des Exercises," Christus 3 (1956) 225-40; Michel Olphe-Galliard, S.J., "Les Exercises spirituels et la liturgie," Revue d'Ascgtique et Mystique 32 (1956) 225-36; Gerald Ellard, S.J., "Saint Ignatius Loyola and Public Worship," Thought 19 (1944) 649-70; William J. Young, S.J., "St. Ignatius, Priest and Founder," Woodstock Letters 85 (1956) 251-64.

6.

Joseph Duhr, S.J., "Communion frequente (Saint Ignace et la communion frequente)," in Dictionnaire de spiritualitg (1953), 2:1270-71. See also Justo Beguiriztain, The Eucharistic Apostolate of St. Ignatius Loyola, trans. John H. Collins, S.J. (Cambridge, Mass.: Herder, 1955).

7.

See Geoffrey Wainwright, Doxology. The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine and Life; A Systemic Theology (New York; Oxford University Press, 198"OT

8.

On liturgy, see especially the following studies: Cheslyn Jones, Geoffrey Wainwright, and Edward Yarnold, S.J., eds., The Study of Liturgy (London: SPCK, 1978); George S. Worgul, From Magic to Metaphor; A Validation of Christian Sacraments (New York: Paulist, 1980); Cyprian Vagaggini, O.S.B., Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy; A General Treatise on the Theology of the Liturgy, trans. Leonard J. Doyle and W.A. Jurgens (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1976); Romey Marshall and Michael Taylor, Liturgy and Christian Unity (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1965). Several issues of the journal Concilium offer modern overviews on liturgical worship, especially: "The Church and the Liturgy," Concilium 2 (Glen Rock, N.J.: Paulist, 1965); "The Church Worships," Concilium 12 (New York: Paulist, 1966); "The Crisis of Liturgical Reform," Concilium 42 (New York: Paulist, 1969); "Liturgy: Self-Expression of the Church," Concilium 72 (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972); "Liturgical Experience of Faith," Concilium 82 (New York: Herder & Herder, 1973).

9.

On the role of the liturgical calendar, see Robert Taft, S.J., "The Liturgical Year: Studies, Prospects, Reflections," Worship 55 (1981) 2-23.

10.

James F. White, Introduction to Christian Worship (Nashville: Abingdon, 1980), 21.

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11.

For what follows I am especially indebted to the following source: Pierre Grelot et al., Liturgie et vie spirituelle (Paris: Beauchesne, 1977), a reprint of the article: "Liturgie et vie spirituelle," Dictionnaire de spirituality (1976) 9:873-939, especially the contribution of Pierre Grelot, 8-9 877-78.

12.

For a commentary on Vatican IPs constitution on the liturgy, see Josef A. Jungmann, "Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy," in Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967) 1:1-87.

13.

The annual report of the North American Academy of Liturgists, with major addresses from their annual meeting, is published in Worship, usually in the July issue.

14.

Jean Danielou, "Le symbolisme des rites baptismaux," Dieu vivant 1 (1945) 17, cited in Taft, Worship 55 (1981) 23.

15.

John Macquarrie, Thinking about God (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 109, cited in Louis Weil, "Liturgy in a Disintegrating World," Worship 54 (1980) 291-302. See also Mary Collins, "Critical Questions for Liturgical Theology," Worship 53 (1979) 302-17.