Retreat Section


THE SOCIETY OF JESUS AND THE SPIRITUAL LIFE

(i) The Spiritual Exercises -


Reverend Alban Goodier S.J.
Archbishop of Hierapolis

With a definite ideal and goal in view, and laying aside every other,
Ignatius set himself to forge a means by which he might bring men to see as
he saw, and to give themselves to this greatest of all great adventures,
even as he had done himself. 
Long before the idea of the Society of Jesus
was so much as proposed to any- one, he had drawn up his "Spiritual
Exercises" and put them into practice. In these Spiritual Exercises, whose
title has become permanently fixed to his name, he reveals that attitude
to- wards the spiritual life which may be said to be peculiarly his own, if
indeed there is anything in St. Ignatius which is peculiarly his own. He
will teach men to see as he sees, but that he may do so he must first
unteach them; the hindrance for most men is not lack of understanding, but
a blindness and short-sightedness which limits the horizon, shutting off
the greater goal beyond by the lesser things around them. This must first
be corrected; a man must first be lifted out of his surroundings. He must
be taught to get outside himself, to look upon himself as a thing apart; to
set his life in the perspective of the greater whole, not in that of his
own advantage or concern, so putting a new value on himself and on all that
his life contains. Thus he defines the object of the Exercises. They are
"to conquer oneself and regulate one's life, and to avoid coming to a
determination through any inordinate affection"; or, as he puts it in
another place, they are "any method of preparing and disposing the soul to
free itself from all inordinate affections, and after it has freed itself
from them, to seek and find the will of God concerning the ordering of life
for the salvation of one's soul."

Freedom to act, truth of vision and of action; in these two phrases are
contained the essence of the spiritual life according to the mind of St.
Ignatius. The first implies self-conquest; the freedom of a man from
himself, and the bonds that bind him from within, keeping him from being
and doing that which in his heart he knows to be best. Of ourselves, it is
true, we can do nothing; we can only live and grow by the growing of the
life of God within us. But, with His grace, we can prepare ourselves. We
can do what lies in our sphere, and He will do the rest; we can put away
ourselves that He may be allowed to enter. So far as I yield to myself, so
far for myself I live; and so far, therefore, God cannot come in. This is
the first condition on our part of growth in the spiritual life, and by
constant repetition he reminds us that the effort for freedom from oneself
must never cease.

Thus, before a man begins to go through the Exercises he is asked "to enter
upon them with a large heart and with liberality towards his Creator and
Lord, offering all his desires and liberty to Him, in order that His Divine
Majesty may make use of his person, and of all he possesses, according to
His most holy will." Scarcely has he begun than his first conclusion is:
"It is therefore necessary that we should make ourselves independent of all
created things." When he speaks of the beginning of sin in the world, the
evil of it lies in the heart of those who were "not willing to help
themselves by means of their liberty in the work of paying reverence and
obedience to their Creator and Lord." When he becomes more positive, and
begins to build upon the ground that has been cleared, those who wish "to
signalize themselves in every kind of service of their Eternal King and
Universal Lord," will do so expressly, "by acting against their own
sensuality, and their carnal and worldly love." Aim at the highest freedom;
evil is slavery, the unwillingness to use one's freedom; the greatest
freedom is freedom from oneself, one's own bondage to the meannesses of
life. This is chivalry, not military discipline; it is service looked on as
a glory, not as a burden to be borne; the man who fails to rise to it, in
the mind of St. Ignatius, is not a sinner, he is an "unworthy knight," a
phrase which at once reveals to us the nature of the man.

"The Eternal King and Universal Lord." The foundations laid as we have just
seen, he seems then to make the limit of man's self-surrender the gauge of
all else; a man is worth precisely what he is willing to give in the
service and no more. To stimulate this surrender, to test its value, he
puts Jesus Christ before "His friends and servants," exhorting them not
merely to poverty, but to a "desire" of it; not to endure, but "to a desire
of reproaches and contempt." The ideal is the service of the King; there is
no better service than imitation, following, resemblance; the true knight
will be as like to his Prince as possible. Hence that ideal is described in
these terms:

"The better to imitate Christ, and to become actually more like Him, I
desire and choose rather poverty with Christ poor, than riches; contempt
with Christ contemned, than honors; and I desire to be esteemed as useless
and foolish for Christ's sake, who was first held to be such, than to be
counted wise and prudent in this world."

The prospect is clear; it may give one pause; but precisely on that account
it is a test of the worth of a man's devotion to the cause. So sure is he
of his ground, and so confident in man's ultimate victory if he will try,
that should human nature flinch he encourages it by saying:

"It will help much . . . to ask in our prayer, even though it be against
the flesh, that Our Lord should choose us to actual poverty, protesting
that we desire, petition, and ask for it, provided it be to the service and
praise of His Divine Goodness."

Then, having given the ideal, having given the encouragement, he closes
with the summary warning:

"Wherefore let each be convinced that he will make progress in all
spiritual matters in proportion as he shall have divested himself of his
own self-love, his own will, and self-interest."

Other things may be of service, and in their way may serve as signs--
prayer, penance, mortification, zeal for souls and the rest. But to him
they are mainly external; the only sure sign of real greatness is the
extent to which a man is willing to surrender himself, all he has and all
he is.

Having clearly laid down the method for the making of a "Worthy Knight"
in the service of the "Universal Lord," the second care of the Saint is that
there shall be no self-deception, no substitution of sham for truth, not
even of convention for reality. He has known in his lifetime how much of
this there is, precisely among the knighthood of the world; when on his
sickbed after Pampeluna he had his leg broken that it might be set again,
men admired his bravery, but he himself knew that his motive was pride. In
his new knighthood this self-deception must not be; the man as far as
possible must ring true, above all within his own soul. A favorite word
with St. Ignatius is "internal." It occurs in most unexpected places; and
when we ask ourselves what he means by it we can find no better synonym
than "real," "genuine." At the outset he warns the aspirant to great things
that "it is not abundance of knowledge that satisfies the soul, but to feel
and relish it internally." He bids the sinner pray for "an interior
knowledge of his sins" that he may be shamed into repentance; as a
deterrent from future relapse he would have him acquire "an interior sense
of the pains which the lost suffer" in hell. Should a man "desire to have
an interior sorrow for his sins," one way to gain it is by doing penance.
When he puts up Jesus as the model before him, he bids him pray again and
again for "an interior knowledge of Our Lord," not one only of books and
commentaries; when he speaks of the Passion he asks for "tears and interior
pain, for the great pain that Christ has suffered for me." Lastly, as
though to make quite sure that his knight has not been self-deceived in the
making, and to leave him no loophole of escape, he gives a whole meditation
on three types of men, two of whom are not wholly genuine while the third
spares himself in nothing.

The man, then, utterly genuine and sincere, who is prepared to spare
himself in nothing for "the service of God and the universal good," this is
the perfect man as St. Ignatius understands perfection; on that foundation
he proceeds to build. And like a knight of the days of chivalry, he builds
with one material, love. Constantly he repeats the word "desire"; and what
is desire but the crying out of love, as St. Leo said long before him? "To
pray for that which I desire"; so he opens every meditation. He assumes
every time that it is there. He who has no desire, he says, may be sent
away with just a clean conscience; he is not the kind of man of whom much
can be made. But, on the other hand, with one who has desires, with one who
is keen and generous, let the giver of the Exercises be careful not to
interfere too much. "It is better and more fitting that its Creator and
Lord Himself communicate with such a soul, inflaming it to love and praise
Him, and disposing it for that way of life by which it will best serve Him
in the future."

Already from the beginning this weapon of love has been at work. When he
brings the soul to think of its own evil-doing, he assumes that "desire,"
through love, will overflow "in great and intense grief and tears for my
sins"; the soul will "wonder with intense affection" that it has not long
since been destroyed. When he comes to speak of hell, his motive is, not
fear for its own sake, but lest "through my faults I forget the love of the
Eternal Lord." All the time that he excites contrition and amendment he
dwells upon thanksgiving, that one has not been lost, that one has had a
Redeemer such as Jesus Christ, and Him crucified, that one still has time
in which to make all things new; and thanksgiving, as he teaches us
elsewhere, is the sure stepping-stone to love.

But when he has passed this stage his love is more daring. "That which I
desire" becomes a fixed thing, and never again changes. To know his Leader,
Jesus Christ, to love Jesus Christ, to follow Jesus Christ, to become like to
 Jesus Christ, in spirit and even in detail, this is the St. Ignatius we
have already seen, unconsciously revealing himself as he draws an ideal for
others. In this spirit he meditates, "in order to follow and imitate better
Our Lord"; in this spirit he prays- "The colloquy is made properly by
speaking as one friend speaks to another, or as a servant to his master; at
one time asking for some favor, at another blaming oneself for some evil
committed, now informing him of one's affairs, and seeking counsel in
them." When he comes to the crib at Bethlehem he is "tending Our Lady and
St. Joseph and the Infant Jesus in their necessities, as though I were
present there"; St. Bonaventure could not be more simple. When he sets
before himself his Master as a Leader, it is "in a lowly place, in aspect
fair and winning." When he bids a man decide on his state of life: "The
first rule is that the love, which urges and causes me to seek such or such
a thing, descend from on high, from the love of God; so that he who chooses
feel first in himself that the love which he has more or less for the thing
he chooses, is solely for the sake of his Creator and Lord."

Thus from the love of desire St. Ignatius has risen to the love of
friendship. And as love is measured by the capacity of its power to suffer,
as the love of desire is more intense according to the hunger of the
longing, so the love of friendship is gauged by the greatness of its
compassion. When a friend is in sorrow, his friend sorrows with him; and
the closer the friendship the deeper will that sorrow be. So is it in this
case. No sooner has Ignatius established, and brought to the degree of
devoted service the love of friendship between the man and Jesus Christ,
than he tests it by sorrow. Jesus Christ is not only my Leader. He has
suffered; He is my friend; then the sight of His suffering will make me
suffer, too. "To feel sorrow, affliction, and confusion, because for my
sins Our Lord is going to His Passion." "To begin with great effort to
strive to grieve, and bewail, and lament"; "to consider that He suffers all
these things for my sins, and what I ought to do and to suffer for Him";
"sorrow with Christ who is full of sorrow, anguish with Christ in anguish,
tears and interior (i.e. as we have seen, real, genuine,) pain for the
great pain that Christ has suffered for me"; "sorrow, pain and anguish
recalling frequently to mind the troubles, labors and sorrows of Christ Our
Lord, which He has endured from the moment He was born up to the
mystery of the Passion on which I am now engaged"; "the solitude of Our
Lady in such great grief and affliction of spirit";--thus by constant repetition
does he bring home to the mind of his disciple the real thing that love of
friendship means. And during all the time he proposes nothing else.

Then he makes another step. Great as is the love of friendship, there is a
greater love still, and he will not stop till he has opened the way to it.
It is the love of union; when the lover is lost in the beloved, so that the
joys and sorrows of the one, his successes and failures, his very being,
absorb altogether the whole soul of the other. This is the full
consummation of a man, the whole burnt-offering of himself on the fire of
love; and this consummation Ignatius held out as the final height to which
he would draw his disciples. "To be intensely affected and to rejoice in
the exceeding great joy and gladness of Christ Our Lord"; "to be affected
and to rejoice in the exceeding great joy and gladness of Christ Our Lord";
in this he bids a man to reap the fruits of love, and realize the joy of
living. Such a joy, sinking down into the very marrow of his bones, makes
him prepared for anything. Nothing now can separate him from the love of
God, which he has in Christ Jesus Our Lord.

Last of all, as if he would enforce the truth that the one all-absorbing
motive power of his life is love, and absolutely nothing else, he concludes
with an "Exercise" for its acquisition. But first he makes two statements.
"Love," he says, "is an affair of deeds rather than of words." He still has
his eye on the tendency of human nature to deceive itself, to think that it
loves because it can use love's phrases, to think it forgives because it
merely says it. And secondly, "Love consists in mutual interchange on
either side . . . in giving, communicating, sharing . . . so that the one
share all with the other," and vice versa. Given these axioms then he
proves his point. What has God not given to me? What more would He not
give if He could? "Himself so far as He is able." God the Giver; God living in
me, "making me His temple, to the likeness and image of His Divine
Majesty"; God as it were in creation working for me, laboring for me; God
from whom "all good things and all good gifts descend . . . as the rays
descend from the sun, as waters from the spring"; this is the God who loves
me, who wants me, who is my friend, who asks me for my love in return.
Then what can I give Him? Can there be any limit? All my liberty, all that I am,
all that I possess; whatever He may ask He shall have; nothing shall be too great
or too small to give for the greater glory of my God.

This is the secret of the Society of Jesus as St. Ignatius understands and
interprets it; in this way he would lead his followers to see the goal of
life as he sees it, and to bend themselves to its attainment. Has man
discovered anything more inspiring? Has any other ideal produced more
striking results, even in the way of human life? We do not wonder that St.
Francis Xavier, to take but one example, fashioned as he was in this mold,
with no rules to guide him and no constitutions to keep before him his
master's ideal, could call the Society of Jesus "nothing more than a
Society of love," and under that inspiration alone could bring himself,
apparently with such ease, to accomplish all that he accomplished.
[ Jesuit treasury - collected and edited by Hedwig Lewis SJ ] 

ii) The Society of Jesus and Prayer

The account just given of the Book of the Spiritual Exercises should make
it immediately clear that it is anything but a book on prayer. It is a
course of training, in which prayer must take its part, and as such it is
proposed and used; but to measure its author's mind or the mind of the
Society of Jesus on prayer merely by what the book contains is to
misunderstand St. Ignatius and his "school" altogether. St. Ignatius never
wrote a book on prayer. With regard to his own prayer he was always
reticent; with regard to the experiences of others, there was no subject
about which he spoke with greater caution. We must remember that in his
time the air was full of mysticism, true and false, and especially in his
native country; while it was preparing the way for saints like Theresa and
John of the Cross, it was also producing its Clarissa Magdalena and others.
Clarissa deceived bishops, theologians, and all around her for close on
forty years; and we have already seen how keenly the saint dreaded sham of
any kind, but, far above all, sham love and sham devotion.

Still we are not without means of learning what he really held concerning
prayer; we have at least five sources, of which the Book of the Exercises
is only one. 
We learn more from the Constitutions, from his spiritual
leaders, from the few notes on his own prayer that have survived, from the
teaching of those who lived with him, and knew him well. From all these we
discover much; especially of that great liberty of soul which in all things
else was so characteristic of the man, and which could look on the practice
of prayer in no other light. In matter of fact prayer to him was at the
root of everything. By means of prayer he solved his own problems, in it he
sought his consolation and strength; so great an attraction had it for him
that he had to use violence to himself to keep himself away when duty
called.

So was it in regard to others. As we have seen it was by means of prayer,
and meditation, and contemplation that he sought to develop in the man he
formed, the three essentials, self-conquest, interior sincerity, love. When
he had completed his formation, and the fully-trained man was sent out to
do his work, it was assumed that the spirit of prayer would be so alive in
him that he would need no further instruction. When he speaks of such as
these in his Constitutions he simply says that "he assumes for certain that
they will be spiritual men, and that they will have made such progress in
the way of Christ Our Lord that they may run along it"; hence that "in what
concerns prayer and meditation . . . no rule need be prescribed to them
except what discretion and charity may prescribe to each."

But even with those who are not yet fully formed, in other words with every
soul that strives after perfection, the saint is wonderfully free. He
insists, it is true, on mortification; without it he makes little of
prayer. He insists on obedience to one who has knowledge of spiritual
things and has the right guide; from the experience of his own soul, and
from the experience of controlling others, he has learnt too much to allow
a beginner too easily to follow his own bent. But after that is liberty;
the liberty of the children of God. Life to him was prayer, and every thing
in life was to be turned into prayer; this attitude of mind was the first
thing he looked for when he turned his young candidates into the channel of
everyday affairs. Thus we read, in a letter of his secretary, Polanco,
answering enquiries on behalf of his master:

"Students cannot give themselves to long meditations. But they can practice
seeking the presence of God in all things, in conversation, walking, sight,
taste, hearing, understanding, in everything they do. And this method of
prayer, which finds God in everything, is easier than that which compels us
to rise to more abstract ideas concerning Him, when we strain to make them
present to us. This excellent exercise, i£ we are careful to make it with
due preparation, will win for us from our Lord visitations of deep moment;
even though our time of prayer be not long."

Again to another:

"Our Father prefers that we should strive to rise to God in all things
rather than give to prayer overmuch time in succession. . . .Let members of
the Society, if they are able, find no less devotion in a work of charity
or obedience than in prayer or meditation, seeing that everything they do
is done for the love and service of God Our Lord."

In a further letter he sums up all in a sentence:

"If everything is directed towards God, everything is prayer."

So much for the place of prayer in life, as St. Ignatius understood it. As
for its kind, he is no less open-minded. When speaking of the training of
others, he has special words of warning against any effort to lead all
souls by the same way or method. There is no more dangerous mistake.
Even in the Exercises he warns the priest against undue interference with the
intercourse of the soul with God; elsewhere his teaching is of the same
kind. Let every soul find out for itself what is best for it. Let it submit
these experiences to its guide. If they are good, and free from delusion,
let it continue in them. This is well expressed by a Jesuit spiritual
writer, Gagliardi, than whom none more accurately represents the earliest
tradition of his order. Thus he writes:

"Our special method of prayer is to be bound by no fixed rule; a fixed rule
may be well enough for the training of beginners. Each one must discover
for himself what suits him best. If need be let him make alterations,
lessen or increase his prayer, pass from vocal prayer to mental," and so
on.

In confirmation of this, there is the well-known passage, taken from the
letters of St. Francis Borgia. He had been specially trained by St.
Ignatius.

"Give free admittance to all thoughts of God; open wide to them every door
of your soul," the latter had written to him. Given as he was himself to
contemplation, able to spend long hours in prayer without interruption,
inclined to lengthen prayer for others rather than decrease it,
nevertheless, when he in turn became General of the Order, he wrote thus to
a Provincial:

"I hear it said that your Reverence imposes on your subjects the duty of
always making acts of love in their prayer, and wishes to lead them all by
this one way. I praise your Reverence's zeal and good desires, and
certainly the method you encourage is the best and highest form of
spiritual exercise. Nevertheless, I warn you, my dear Father, that not all
souls are suited to it. Not all understand it or can reach it. Our Lord has
given us a guide, the Exercises of the Society. Therefore some continue to
follow this method, others adopt other forms of prayer: alius quidam sic,
alius vero sic; and since all are good, they must be left alone. The
movements of the Holy Spirit are many and different; different also are the
talents and understandings of men."

Lastly, we may quote the statement of Acquaviva, the General of the Order
who, more than any other, may be considered the official spokesman of the
matured Society. He writes:

"Religious who frequently practice meditation, and who, by long experience,
have acquired facility in prayer, have no need that there should be
assigned to them either fixed matter on which to meditate, or any special
method.

The Spirit of the Lord moves on its course with very loose reins
(laxissimis habenis). To enlighten souls, and to draw them closely to it,
it has methods without number. Hence, let us not confine it within any
boundary, let us keep it to no fixed groove. Let us bear in mind the holy
and wise counsel of Fr. Nadal of happy memory: 'It is for us to follow our
Divine Instructor, not to go before him.'"

At the same time, Acquaviva lets us plainly see what an important place he
considers prayer to hold in the life and work of the Society of Jesus. With
it as with every other religious Order it is a first essential; if the
Society has been relieved from the chanting of the daily office, it has by
no means been relieved of the practice of daily prayer. If, he writes,
there is one thing more certain than another

"It is that true and perfect contemplation is more powerful and efficacious
than any other method of prayer to break the pride of man and to extirpate
it, to rouse the indolent to obey their superiors and the lukewarm to labor
with greater zeal for the salvation of souls."

This last remark brings us back to what has already been said. However far
St. Ignatius may encourage his disciples to advance in prayer, even to the
farthest heights of mysticism, nevertheless prayer to him, like all things
else, is a means and not an end. Jesuits are not contemplatives. Many
writers on the spiritual life have risen up among them; many have written
specifically on prayer; probably the largest volume that has ever been
elaborated upon it is by one of them, Alvarez de Paz. St. Francis Borgia,
even when loaded with the burden of the Generalship, could find time, and
could set an example to his subjects, of long hours of prayer, sometimes as
much as ten hours a day. Nevertheless even he had a practical end in view.
If he could be so absorbed in contemplation, he could at the same time
deserve the reputation of being the one who, more than any other, extended
the foreign missions of the Order. So it is with the rest. They are
familiar with the purgative, the illuminative, the contemplative ways.
Saints of prayer may seek their counsel, witness St. Theresa, St. Francis
de Sales, St. Margaret Mary. But always they have in mind the further end,
the perfection and use of the instrument for the greater glory of God and
the greater good of men. If in any way the prayer of the Society of Jesus
differs from any other, it is simply in this, subordination of its practice
to what it conceives to be the greater end in view Says Gagliardi:

"Our prayer is essentially an active prayer, practical, applied to the
acquisition of virtue. In a certain sense it is Martha more than Mary; or
rather it is contemplation made efficacious, that through it a man may grow
in spiritual strength. It is active in so far as it stimulates a man to
acquire virtues, not only by asking for them but by encouraging him to
their practice."

St. Ignatius himself gives the spirit of this interpretation in his
constantly repeated phrase, "ut aliquem fructum capiam," "that I may reap
some fruit"; and in proof of the fact that the same has persisted through
all the Society's history, we may quote one of the most modern writers on
prayer, de Maumigny. This writer does not hesitate to ally himself with St.
Theresa, St. John of the Cross, Louis of Granada, and others. He is bold in
inculcating the principle that every soul must pray, under the guidance of
the Holy Spirit, according to the method which it finds most suited to its
nature. There is no degree of contemplation of union which he does not
know, and towards which, given due safeguards, he is not ready to guide the
soul of prayer. Still he comes back to the same standard and measure; that
prayer as understood by the Society of Jesus is that which renders the man
of prayer a more perfect instrument in the hands of God, and according to
this end he would have it regulated both in quantity and in degree.

[ Jesuit treasury - collected and edited by Hedwig Lewis SJ ] 

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