The Jesuits Read Free

dealing and conversing with others” (#814). Not monastic silence was the ideal but cultivation of the art of conversation. A significant moment had been reached in the history of Catholic piety.
    With his serenity returned, Ignatius began to receive great consolations of soul and internal enlightenment, which sometimes took the form of visions. In all this he became convinced God was gently teaching him and leading him along the right path. He made notes about what was transpiring in his own soul and what he observed taking place in others who came to speak with him. These notes contained some of the essential elements from which the
Spiritual Exercises
eventually emerged. The book was, thus, not a product of theory but of lived experience. Although Ignatius continued to revise the notes over the next twenty years, he hadmuch of it fundamentally in hand when he left Manresa to complete his pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
    The result was a book unlike any other up to that time, a manual of “exercises” and reflections to help individuals get in touch with themselves and with the action of God within them. As the text says, the goal was to create a situation where “the Creator deals directly with the creature, and the creature directly with his Creator and Lord” (#15). The
Exercises
are not, then, a book to be read but to be
used
so as gently to lead an individual along a spiritual path consonant with the person’s gifts and personality.
    Ignatius wrote the book while still a layman, and he intended it for anybody intent on a deeper spiritual life. Yet the book came to play a determining role in the ethos of the Jesuits themselves. In the
Constitutions
Ignatius prescribed that every novice entering the Society spend a full month making the
Exercises
(#65). The novice, it was hoped, would begin to develop a life of prayer that went far beyond rote recitation of prayers and formal observance of regulations and that brought him to a sense of intimacy with God. His commitment to the life he had chosen would be heartfelt, deep, and lifelong, no matter how difficult the circumstances in which he later found himself. At the time no other religious order had a program for its novices that was anything like it.
    The
Spiritual Exercises
also delivered into the hands of the Jesuits a new ministry, which came to be called the “retreat.” Of course, retirement from one’s ordinary duties for prayer and reflection is older than Christianity itself, but the
Exercises
for the first time provided a structured yet flexible program for doing so. The Jesuits set to work putting this ministry into practice, and in 1553, for instance, they built at their college at Alcalá outsideMadrid a building specifically intended for housing men making the
Exercises,
the first of their many “retreat houses” around the world. More broadly, the
Exercises
helped the Jesuits see all their ministries as spiritual, ultimately aimed at leading others on a spiritual journey beyond routine of rite and ritual.
    In the sixteenth century, the
Exercises
had severe critics who saw in them a dangerous form of mysticism that minimized or made irrelevant the sacraments and other usages of the church in favor of God’s direct communication with the individual. Ignatius repeatedly had to defend their orthodoxy before the Inquisition in various cities until he finally arrived in Rome. Even after they were published in 1548 with the approbation of Pope Paul III, they were not immune from criticism and suspicion.
    Important though the
Exercises
were in creating the identity of the Jesuits, they were not Ignatius’s only service to the Society. He possessed a remarkable gift for leadership. Once he became superior general, the gift manifested itself especially in three ways. First, he displayed remarkable acuity in choosing two men to assist him in forming the Society. Their talents complemented his own and help account for the