Strange Educators

2. Ignatius Loyola or Íñigo López de Loyola: Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam

The second of our strange educators: Ignatius Loyola or Íñigo López de Loyola, which is to say, Inigo Lopez of the place Loyola, his family castle, really, situated in the municipality of Azpeitia in today's Gipuzkoa, which is Basque Country, North Eastern Spain. The capital of the province was, maybe is, San Sebastian, on the coast. He was born October 23, 1491 and died on July 31, 1556 at Rome. He becomes Ignatius in Paris, where he finished his studies. It’s the Latinate version of his name but it’s suggested he took it up out of devotion to the early father, St. Ignatius of Antioch, supposedly appointed to the position by Peter himself and who was fed to wild beasts in Rome in about 108. Note that Saint Paul (a strange educator himself) was also born in Antioch, established followers there and set out on his missions from there. It is also the place of the famous incident at Antioch where Paul calls out Peter for some hypocrisy.

What we are interested in most of all is essentially: what is education in the work and thought of Loyola? And in that sense we have spoken of, wherein education is understood in its most extensive sense, being not only the process of a transmission which orients the subject to the way of the world but is the force of a transformation in subjectivity itself, such that the world itself is changed – the world of knowledge, the framework given to us to know the world and that by which the world knows itself is in some way punctured and changed and, most importantly, as noted, subject to a new orientation.

And moreover, this change is not the work of some external or alterior pronouncement or determination – whether transcendental or physical – but comes about via the radicalisation of something within the current form of the dominant knowledge. The phrase I used and will keep using is a Lacanianism (another strange educator): it is a matter of what is in knowledge more than it knows . So to take up what is true of knowledge – which is what knowledge doesn't know – from within this knowledge and thus to radically change what is knowledge as such… This is what we have talked about and so, then, the idea is that this what is in knowledge more than it knows would be what is for all in knowledge, thus what is universal of it, given that knowledge is what frames everything for us already.

At first glance it is difficult to see that Loyola is such a figure or thinker, inscribed as he is and most decisively, even militantly within the Catholic world view – a word which in its Greek etymology already means universal – and by his own convictions in absolute obedience to Papal direction – at one point in the section of the work Spiritual Exercises called, ‘To Have the True Sentiment Which We Ought to Have in the Church Militant’, made up of a series of rules, he says: ‘To arrive at complete certainty, this is the mental attitude we should maintain: I will believe that the white object I see is black if that should be the decision of the hierarchical church…’

But this is because, he goes on, ‘believing that between Christ our Lord, the Bridegroom, and the Church, His Bride, there is the same Spirit which governs and directs us for the salvation of our souls. Because by the same Spirit and our Lord Who gave the ten Commandments, our holy Mother the Church is directed and governed.’

Thus, let’s note, there is some ambiguity here or rather this ambiguity forms the backdrop of Loyola’s mission – which is what he calls it. The ambiguity concerns this relation ultimately between Christ and man. There must be a true accord between them.

The backdrop I am referring to is this very problem: one Luther’s reformation aimed at but which was already a question in Catholic countries at the time of the early 16^th Century, especially in Spain, where there was, prior to Luther’s coming onto the scene, a Catholic reformation. The Catholic Reformation (meaning originally the reformist movement within the unitary pre-1517 Church) was independent of the Protestant Reformation (meaning the reformation led by those who either removed themselves from the Roman communion or were excommunicated from that communion) and was not necessarily directed against it. The most famous of the intellectuals of this movement is Desiderius Erasmus – with whom indeed Loyola will have an ambiguous relationship, intellectually speaking. And note, intellectually speaking, means precisely insofar as intellect coincides with the service of Christ or saving of souls!

But this catholic reformation was embedded in a longer Spanish tradition of autonomy, which had a couple of features: on the one hand some distance between the nobles and clergy – who were often interrelated – and the people. The most evocative aspect of this is that the people reserved for themselves a certain capacity to think through what was presented to them of doctrine and thus in presenting doctrine, the clergy had to presume this capacity and make use of reasoned discourse.

The fact is most of the clergy were not up to it and for various reasons. Many were not concerned too much by the spirit, let’s say, but by more material things: career, political power and influence, money, women etc., and many others didn't have the education necessary to reason nor even the wherewithal to deliver basic things like the sacrament properly. It’s not that the people were educated in the traditional sense either, just that they were not stupid and they were well aware of the political situation in which they lived and in which doctrine was preached, so to speak. Basically, they knew a dodgy priest when they saw one and thus clearly the relation between Christ – the life and teachings of Christ, so as example and lesson – and the Church, the mediator between them and Christ, was not as it might be. And if the church is supposed to be the guarantee of Christ then these failings show it is in need of some form of supplementation. This will be Loyola’s ‘way’ and something critical to the discussion here. Others, of course, and this is especially the case in the 18^th C with the Philosophes, especially Voltaire, will seek to erase the infamy that is the church altogether.

And for all these reasons, really, we should note that rule 13 just cited – believing if told that ‘black was white’ (which is an expression you have probably heard) – is preceded by rule 11: ‘To praise positive and scholastic learning. Because, as it is more proper to the Positive Doctors, as St. Jerome, St. Augustine and St. Gregory, etc., to move the heart to love and serve God our Lord in everything; so it is more proper to the Scholastics, as St. Thomas, St. Bonaventure, and to the Master of the Sentences, [Peter Lombard] etc., to define or explain for our times the things necessary for eternal salvation; and to combat and explain better all errors and all fallacies. For the Scholastic Doctors, as they are more modern, not only help themselves with the true understanding of the Sacred Scripture and of the Positive and holy Doctors, but also, they being enlightened and clarified by the Divine virtue, help themselves by the Councils, Canons and Constitutions of our holy Mother the Church.’

This rule in fact reflects Ignatius’ own education, which came late, as I’ll explain, and was undertaken with the express desire to know enough to support his work for Christ and the Church, for the sake of ‘saving souls’, as he always put it, which he had already undertaken on his own volition. Indeed, as much as he had already come to this decision for an education after returning from an aborted pilgrimage to Jerusalem, it was recommended to him by the Inquisition, by its man Figueroa, who had already investigated his activities in Alcala, such that he didn't screw up his preaching in their eyes. Ever obedient in these days, Loyola went off to study at Paris, and it was there, at 37 years old, that he met six other fellows whom he convinced to his way of things and thus began the Jesuits.

Ok, let’s step back a bit. I’ve put a whole bunch of things in your head at once which we’ll now try to make more elaborate and distinctive with a view only to answering the question of ‘what is education for Ignatius?’… What can we see of education in Ignatius? … How does Ignatius articulate what is invariant to education as we are trying to understand it?

I’ll do a bit more biography because it is in some ways a conversion story. It has an evental aspect to it. Or, perhaps, there is identified in the biography a point at which he makes a turn toward something which he then never goes back on. All of us have turning points but they become something in our lives and maybe beyond them only if we don't give up on what decided us in this direction.

Second, I’ll give a summary of the Jesuits themselves. It is absolutely true to say that what is most lasting and probably ultimately most central to the Society of Jesus is that it becomes an ‘educator’ – it sets up schools everywhere and establishes a method. It was essentially the first teaching order developing a science of education. It didn’t set out to do this. Certainly, in preaching is teaching and this was their stated mission and led them all around the world but becoming an educational institution was not the original intent. But it’s that bit that has lasted and given them a reputation – for good and ill, both. So I’ll talk about this.

Then I want to look explicitly at the Spiritual Exercises in which is contained something of our ‘educational invariants’. I’ll give an overview and then we’ll work through a section to get the full sense of what’s going on. Let me just note, I don't care about god or church etc., except insofar as these mark an orientation and the universalisation it entails. What we have in Ignatius, in the midst of all this ‘knowledge’ is a manifest procedure, let’s call it, of essentially transmission and transformation – which is what education is invariably. It’s not any God that works in Ignatius, despite what he says – it's a conviction or a fidelity, a reason, which is exclusively the invariant capacity of man and the only way to change the world for all. It’s that which is of interest as what is education – the chance and the way to change the world for all. We spoke about this for all in speaking of Sade – not to do something to the all but as what the all can do!

1.

So this will be schematic, following and deploying the work of others (see below).

As a youngster he was a bit of a show off – a youthful courtier, a ‘swaggering caballero’, as one writer puts it, and also a soldier in the service of the Spanish king. He says, ‘Until the age of twenty-six he was a man given over to vanities of the world; with a great and vain desire to win fame he delighted especially in the exercise of arms.’ He joined the forces of the Duke of Nájera, who was then viceroy of Navarre. They were holding territory taken from the French, along the line of Pyrenees in northern Spain. In 1521 the French invaded and occupied the city of Pamplona but the Spanish garrison in the citadel stubbornly held out. Ignatius was a keen defender and indeed tells in the Autobiography that he was the most volatile of all in refusing to surrender, indeed arguing with his superiors on this score. They lost the siege and he was severely wounded on May 20, 1521. Basically, a cannonball passed through both legs, taking a chunk of thigh and breaking one leg severely.  And, by the way, this is where the Autobiography, the work he dictated late in life to his old comrade Luis Gonçalves da Câmara, ostensibly begins – with the manner of his convalescence and conversion.

The French kindly took him home. Clearly, he couldn't do much – indeed heaps of pain, several botched operations and so on, one leaving bone poking out his leg which he then had cut off; also, he was bit vain and didn’t want to be seen like that. True. But anyway, he asked for things to read and was brought some religious texts rather than what he was really into – Chivalric tales of knights errant and so on. It’s important to mention that these tales which have their history in those works of Courtly Love and the troubadours from the 12th and 13^th centuries which took the generic form of peons to the honour and virtue of the Ideal woman. They were essentially non-sexual. Lacan says they invented modern love.

But anyway, this form of ‘courtly’ address is something that Loyola maintains when he himself devotes himself to Mary. In the Autobiography, he tells a story of anguishing over whether to beat up a Moor he met on the road, for questioning Mary’s virginity – basically of defending her honour (there is another story from earlier that he killed a Moor for disrespecting Christ’s divinity). The other thing to note here is how he takes Mary as a matter of the present – someone whose honour as such can be defended. In the Spiritual Exercises it is critical practice, he says, to actively call to presence, to the senses, to remember through the imagination, actual people, events and places in order to think them through. So anyway, instead of the chivalric tales, he reads a couple of religious classics: The Life of Christ by a German Carthusian, Ludolph of Saxony, and a collection of saints' lives known as The Golden Legend, by a thirteenth-century Dominican writer, Jacopo de Voragine.

Ignatius's conversion essentially begins with these readings. He starts to wonder about them in comparison to what he has already read and in particular in terms of how Christ and the Saints, clearly not of that world, so to speak, orient themselves and thus comport themselves in the world they are in. He began to compare this way of life with the one he’d lived and committed to previously: ‘When he was thinking about the things of the world, he took much delight in them, but afterwards, when he was tired and put them aside, he found that he was dry and discontented. But when he thought of going to Jerusalem, barefoot and eating nothing but herbs and undergoing all the other rigours that he saw the saints had endured, not only was he consoled when he had these thoughts, but even after putting them aside, he remained content and happy’. One writer says: ‘The possibility of another way of life and of another kind of achievement than any he had heretofore known or dreamed of now opened up for the convalescent.’  He was torn between two romantic ideals, and he began, as he says, ‘to recognise the difference between the spirits that agitated him.’

And so this is when he decided for Jerusalem; it was ill fated and a bit dumb; he was essentially imitating being an ascetic. He set out on a donkey in early 1522 and went to the shrine of Our Lady at Montserrat in Catalonia and thence to the nearby town of Manresa, where he spent several months.

These were in fact important days in this, the early consequences of his conversion. Here he undergoes some various experiences of the ascetic life, what he calls his ‘primitive church’; he gives away his clothes, sleeps and reads in a cave, all the while, he says, ‘like a schoolboy under instruction from God’. Not only did Loyola put into practice this imitating asceticism but he read some works there which would only have confirmed this direction: At the monastery of Montserrat, was an extensive library … reading among other works Cisneros’s Exercises for the Spiritual Life and Directory of the Canonical Hours. 

Above all, he encountered the book, The Imitation of Christ, a classic product of what is called Devout spirituality, or the Modern Day Devout, going back to the late mediaeval period: ‘throughout his life he kept the Imitation near him, reading one chapter daily’. These texts appear to be the model inspirations for both the Spiritual Exercises and what becomes the Constitution of the Jesuit order but note, these readings take place in the context of actual ascetic practice. For Loyola, the spiritual exercises, as it were, must be lived in the body – or later, in the institution: the spirit must be animate in the matter we could say. But in this way he becomes a new model soldier – for Christ now, whose favour he seeks always to gain.

So he goes off to Jerusalem – to live as the saints did in their place, as it were, via Rome and Venice. I won’t go into detail. Basically, he arrives only to be sent back. Too many pilgrims were being murdered or held for ransom by the Turks and so the Pope had issued a decree allowing the Franciscans who ran things there to send them home if they saw fit. Ignatius was duly sent back and went willingly; always ready to obey the decrees of St Peter.

It’s worth noting, somewhat ironically, that he describes these journeys in a manner reminiscent of Saint Paul (but much more embellished and elaborated), detailing all the travails that confront him on his missions here and there: beatings, storms, robbery, imprisonment, false accusation, the lot. One writer, who is suspicious of the conversion narrative, arguing more for a genealogical development – but who misses the crucial point that all such stories need to have an event despite the ‘facts’ – says that ‘if there is a change in Ignatius it happens here because it is on the basis of this rejection he decides to study.’ The writer argues it in terms of a turn from idealism or fantasy to practicality. I don't know about that but anyway…

But as noted he decides to pursue a formal education, ‘so he would be able to help souls,’ – thus the formal study is still oriented to this universalist project, supposing the capacity of souls to ‘know’ Christ. Study thus becomes part of the practical and consequential matter of deciding that this is what he cannot not do, if you will. The ideal remains integral even if he has been forced to find a new way to go on with it.

Let’s note he is now 33. He begins what will be 10 years of study, with Latin instruction at Barcelona in 1524 and from there, not too well versed in this Latin, to the University of Alacla, which was pretty rigorous. He was still pursuing his efforts at saving souls and acting charitably and so on and was still relying on aspects of the mystical tradition to do so – visions, imitation, reflection and so on and it’s these that got him into trouble, given that they rely on a sort of inner illumination or enlightenment as it were.

This tradition goes back some way in Spain and can be connected up in some sense to what I said above about a certain autonomy of the people vis a vis their spiritual and temporal masters. It was mainly practices by women mystics, who had great followings in some cases. They were called the ‘Enlightened ones’ or alumbrados. ‘Its general tendency was to seek and stress inward religious inspiration to the exclusion oftentimes of an external or formal religious practice.’ Hence it was already suspicious to the church and with Luther’s Reformation, the Inquisition cracked down in the mid-1520s, fearing an affinity with Lutheran ideas. So from Alcala, Ignatius goes to Salamanca for another year and then the University of Paris, and in 1536 got himself the best MA late scholasticism had to offer.

So that will do, I think. I only really want to highlight this idea of conversion and consequence in Ignatius own life given that it is the driving method also of what he sets down in the Exercises. Basically, that something must interrupt the normal run of things such that a real education is possible, which is clearly not that of already known knowledge. Ignatius sets off to find out for himself what this turnabout means and in the process is educated in this very thing. That's the framework. Even if in this case Ignatius is educated in the normal way it is still subject to the conversion and not at all part of something already known to him in terms of its end. Let’s just note that these years were years of exceptional ferment and agitation for Europe and not simply for Ignatius. ‘The impact of overseas discovery and expansion was being fully felt, tension and conflict among the major states were prolonged and acute, the exhilarating challenge and influence of humanism had reached its peak, and the religious crisis precipitated by Luther's protest and rebellion at Wittenberg became even more serious and divisive.’

It is interesting that Ignatius says little about all this but it’s within this world that he operates, nevertheless. He died in Rome and was canonised in 1622 together with Francis Xavier, his comrade. As there is all over the world, there is a school here in Melbourne named after him. You know that entry into the Jesuits was through a vow of poverty, right?  Funny how things turn out, as now entry to Francis Xavier requires avowed wealth. This is the problem of institutionalisation, right there!

Something quick about the Jesuits themselves. I know it's a bit weird to not say much about them given their history of setting up educational institutions everywhere, however this is not history nor is it a question of institutions as such and with the Jesuits too the problem remains of the very relation between the process and its institutionalisation, which is one of the questions we are dealing with.

So it was during his time in Paris that he gathered the companions – this is the right word, originally they wanted to be called the company of Jesus, like a military company – with whom he would form the Society of Jesus or ‘Jesuits’, a term which already had a critical sense to it. ‘The friends found comradeship in the spiritual life and, specifically, the intention they expressed and the vows they took in a chapel on Montmartre on August 15, 1534 (to which Ignatius briefly alludes at the end of Chapter 8), prefigured the Society and prepared the way for its foundation.’ One key thing Ignatius and his friends resolved to do was go to Jerusalem and labour for the conversion of the Turks. But if that didn’t work, and it didn't, they intended to go to Rome and put themselves at the disposal of the pope, ‘so that he might make use of them wherever he thought it would be to the greater glory of God and the service of souls.’

 In 1539 they presented their plans for the order to Pope Paul III, and the order was approved the following year. Ignatius was appointed the first superior-general. They pretty much conceived of themselves as a missionary order and crucially the companions went out all over the place. As I said, they didn't set out to found schools, colleges, and seminaries throughout Europe, as they did, and this was because Ignatius was concerned that these would need funding and would also perhaps make money, too. This compromised the ethos of the society.

Ignatius wrote the Jesuit Constitutions, which were adopted in 1554 and these were based in the Spiritual Exercises and the Exercises acted as the means of initiation as it were.  ‘The overall effect of the program was the fostering of a greater awareness of sin and salvation, continually refreshed through study and confession. United in a devotion to the pope and organized into congregations superintended by a general, the society proved to be a highly effective mission. By the time of Loyola’s death (1556) it had over 1000 members. Dedicated to personal humility and reliant on alms, the Jesuits were renowned for their courage, tenacity, and zeal, as demonstrated particularly in the heroic exploits of Xavier.’

The Society somewhat despite itself became a major force in the Counter Reformation. This was more to do with its commitment to the Pope than in anything it did. Although it had some presence in Germany, it spent most of its time establishing itself in places where the Reformation had little purchase and its pronouncements barely touched on what was going on politically.

However, that it was rapidly becoming a site of educational force makes it inherently political and this did bring it into conflict – especially in France with the Jansenists and later in Portugal and Spain too and in the later 18^th Century the philosophes and especially Volatire, as noted, campaigned against them. Indeed, the philosophes, in their criticism ‘focused on Loyola as the inventor of the method of the Exercises and writer of the Constitutions, as if the Exercises served to train people in discipline and will-power, in order to serve those in control, and the Constitutions were an expression of the Machiavellian form of government that had gained power over European courts and princes.’ The philosophes ‘exaggerated the transcendence of Jesuit obedience’, and basically thought of Loyola as some super spy-trainer intent on infiltrating society.

All this really can be traced to its educational effect, and thus in a real sense to what animated this effect. They were expelled from Portugal and their prominence waned in France and Spain for a time but they insisted as an educational institution most prominently, and indeed one of the most prominent schools in Paris, eductaing many a favourite philosopher and revolutionary too, Louis Le Grande, opened in 1563, is still under Jesuit control. One 19^th C writer remarked of it that it has ‘for a long time been a state nursery, the most fertile in great men’ – and these have been as varied as Georges Pompidou and Max Robespierre, Edgar Degas and Ernst Galois. ‘The Constitution of Ignatius is still the guiding document and from their founding by Papal bull in 1556 until the 1960’s the Jesuits functioned with the same remit from the Pope...’

The society flourishes still today and plays a leading part in modern Roman Catholicism, particularly of course, in its educational aspects. But it is true to say that having taken on a counter-reformation role in Europe – thus from propagation of the faith to defence and propagation– had an effect on its character as an institution. It strikes me as being a bit like when the revolutions of France and Russia had to defend themselves from the rightists inside and out; it changes the internal character of the movement and hence it forces it to become more institutional and in some sense more like a corporation or state in form.

One interesting symptom of this regards the Exercises themselves: It’s clear enough that Ignatius seems to have presupposed that people would make them only once, as a life-changing experience – thus changed in the sense that the Exercises establish in the subject a new orientation to its world. But later, these Exercises become the subject of an annual week long retreat by Jesuits, thus they are performed in the context of the institutionalisation and thus lose their evental power, and are instead ritualised vis a vis the maintenance of the ‘order’. The question of education is always a question of this ‘disparity’.

It is ‘true that Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises shaped the corporate rhetoric of the Jesuits, and served as an important element in their foundational myth, but the text has served these functions only because its interactive character encourages a variety of possible responses.’

Its most suggestive language evokes and stimulates rather than describes or prescribes: as we’ll see, notions like: the first ‘time’ of election or decision (Exx. 175), the ‘prayer of the senses’ with which the Ignatian day culminates (Exx. 121–25), or the idea of a consolation ‘without preceding cause’ (Exx. 330) thus like a grace, are each non-determinative and thus refer us back to what I said above about the capacity of people to think, and once again links Ignatius back to a tradition that he sees as both within the doctrine of Christ Jesus and that is also more true of it, which it is his mission precisely to extend.

So as I said, it’s possible to see Igantius as a figure inscribed within the Lacanian formula of what is in Christianity more than it knows and his mission is to supplement Christian doctrine with this truth of itself and expand it from within and this is the cause of the missionary activity. So the universality he seems to seize on from within Christianity as such – remember he is already a catholic – and from his specific orientation within it are the cause of the missionary activity, which is itself, then, the manifest proof of its inherent universal address.

In looking at the exercises – which is really the critical text of Jesuitis, then and now, even if now they seem to serve the function of corporate bonding – what I want to concentrate on is this drive to universality, the fundamental question of orientation which is really an Idea, and how that works, which is to say, the method which supports and sustains the orientation.

It’s important to stress that for all Ignatius’ education at Paris, he never became a scholastic – he didn't at all believe in the efficacy of their methods for getting at the truth of things but on the other hand, it could certainly be made use of in the training of the modern subject in the rigours necessary to such truths. Scholasticism, as Ignatius saw, is finally a technique and not a truth of the world.

The Exercises are not at all a work of scholasticism but do have a method which is the heart of their discipline and moreover they are a formalisation of something which remains over in Ignatius despite his training in the modern technique and that is the mystical tradition from out of which he comes.

The Exercises are thus a formalisation of the core of this tradition. In essence, it comes down to this: an identification with Christ and or the saints; a felt identification not an intellectual one; this identification then is personal or that's to say, everyone is supposed capable of such an identification with these universal type figures. The transmission of affect, so to speak, is not necessarily literary or through the written text but also oral, so immediate and communal; but its also clearly an internal matter of the subject too, the way they come to this enlightenment in Christ is distinct and self-produced.

You can see that doctrine or rather external direction or determination is not primary for coming to Christ – for being Christian; hence the paradoxical relation this tradition has in the Church, which is supposed to be, after all the guardian of the body of knowledge which is what it is to live in Christ. And clearly, there is the obvious potential for this to lead to all sorts or heresies and free for all’s. This is why, by the way, Ignatius is faithful to the Pope above all, which is to say to Peter, and thus the Jesuits remain somewhat distinct in their organisational form within the greater Church.

But for Ignatius, the core of this mystical or emotionalist approach is important to maintain – given that what one is to find in Christ is a form of freedom – and a freedom from precisely the determinations of this world as such. It’s paradoxical but the idea here, and it’s not at all specific to Christianity, is that by submission to Christ one becomes free. You can see that this paradox is also critically open to all sorts of interpretation and the worst of it is when someone assumes the knowledge of Christ to force a submission.

This is not what Ignatius does. It’s clear that this submission is paramount for Ignatius – it’s right to live in Christ but it is at the point of a decision and by way of a discipline that this is possible; not at the point of a sword, for reasons of gain, or even by education; these make an effect which seems like the thing but are not and finally never it. The idea is that the candidate’s personal history should somehow come into contact with the story of Christ, but always in a way that respects his personal capacities. It reminds me of something crucial to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, stated in the Decision in 16 Points, a founding text:  ‘Let the masses educate themselves in the great revolutionary project. Let them decide for themselves what is just and what is not.’

It supposes that everyone has the capacity to think and that, as such, they will come to this conclusion or this affect!

To put it another way and using some language from the Exercises ‘the underlying issue here is that the conviction of God’s working directly with the creature (Exx. 15) raises at least the logical possibility that what the individual discovers in this way may go beyond what is ecclesiastically sanctioned.’  Ignatius makes this fundamental intention explicit by developing a set of rules ‘in the interests of the true sense that we should have in the Church militant.’ Hence the Creator and Lord Himself should communicate Himself to His devout soul – the creature.’

Clearly, what we have here is the possibility of thinking together the universal and particular; the singular inscribed within the universal or that the singularity of each petitioner is universally prescribed. The Spiritual Exercises is not a normative manual, but the variation of taking it up is built into it. And in this vein it is not for Ignatius, a book to be read. He is quite explicit that the person making the Exercises should not have the full text to hand, and not know what is coming (Exx. 1).

So let’s note the singularity of Ignatius’ method: in the first instance it’s one of imagination and from there, the ways of making what is imagined real in the life of the subject. The Spiritual Exercises are supposed to prepare a person to experience and to discern the affects that accompany the practice of living the ‘memory’ of Christ's life, death, and resurrection. As one writer put’s it: ‘Such ‘memory’ is not the memory of the scriptural scholar, nor of the scientist or historian, nor that of the theologian or church fathers.’ The ‘memory’ in question speaks, as noted, to the the oral or mystical traditions – it’s the memory specific to powers of imagining.  ‘The powers of imagining, for Ignatius, consist in calling on the sensuous imagination with great intensity, exercising the sensuous powers in order to re-enact in ones’s own life the symbolic narratives of the past.’

This is basically Ignatius’ invention, if you like – the formalisation of this orientation to knowledge of Christ. All else seems to come from this, which he came up with while recuperating from the cannonball. And we need to note again that it is this he pursues as a ‘way of life’ but moreover, as a way of life that must be transmitted in order to suggest what I think in education is critical: this turn toward something and this practice of these consequences. And it is this practice, relative to this orientation that guides him through everything else.

We see in everything he does the IDEA of these exercises – their IR-rationality – as being central. Thus, in a way, the problem is how to transmit in reason what is essentially irrational – this decision for Christ based on nothing but the decision itself – as the key to what is education; that this be educational as such. In other words, how does non-knowledge become the real point of a true education? Which is then the basis of all knowledge to come.

Ignatian meditation is not a form of rational (formal logical) analysis, nor does it seek historical and scientific accuracy. It is rather a manner of experiencing – thus calling to mind through imagination – and then discerning, that is, evaluating, ‘the spiritual affects of (what Ignatius called) ‘consolation’ and ‘desolation’, first in the course of these imaginative exercises, then in contemplating the world around that God made, and finally at the heart of daily human living.’ By the correct use of such discernment, one was enabled autonomously to come to those decisions that were ‘for the greater glory of God’ which translates to the saving of souls.

In other words, then, ‘God's will is communicated through reenacting, through making live in one’s own experience, those mysterious memory symbols that spoke of salvation, of the cosmos, and of human history. Such a reenactment was directed in the first place toward feeling the affects that accompanied it, then toward learning to interpret these affects correctly, and then toward making life decisions in accordance with their guidance. Following Ignatius, then, after a suitable spiritual preparation, one started with the Christian memory of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. From these one learned to recognize the true affects of ‘consolation’ and ‘desolation.’ Then, one moved on to the natural and cosmological environment, learning to recognize the same spiritual affects in reenacting the mysteries of nature. And from there, one carried the principles of discernment into daily life.’ This is the radical flavour of the original sense of the Spiritual Exercises which is something Roland Barthes picks up.

For me, though, the essence of the ‘radicality’ is the universality at the core. Again the ascription of this ‘powers of imagining’ suggests that there is a deep fraternal bond among members of the human race, as well as an affective ‘sympathy’ among people, nature, and historical circumstances made alive by ‘memory.’ At the birth of all original newness, such as a new religion, a new science, a new philosophy, a new art or poem, there, the ‘powers of imagining’ are at work exploring and ‘tasting’ some new found ‘memory.’ Like Ignatius, like Plato, such creative persons choose to obey the demands of this inner ‘memory’ rather than the established practices of their times.

I’d prefer to call this memory ‘Idea’, as would Plato, and to mark that it is a power of thought or decision – the decision to think – and not memory per se – given that we make this memory out of nothing as it were and thus it is not ours in the personal sense. It is a thought that everyone is capable of, might be the way to put it. Terms are not finally important as long as we give them an elaboration and don't leave them to common knowledge. What does matter is this notion of a ‘point of orientation’ which ‘is for all’ and then the matter of making this what is for all manifest. Thus it is a matter of the body or of an incorporation, to use Badiou’s term Again, this is what education truly names, that is to say, names as what it is. Anything less than that is clearly reductive and must be shown to be so.

Straight away we note that for Ignatius it is the self-educational aspect that matters: the exercises exist as acts of self-education; the exerciser ‘discovers’ them but not as his alone but as what works beyond himself … and they work for everyone even if through each individuals specificity … so a universal method toward every individual finding their way to live in salvation. He says: ‘For it is not knowing much, but realising and relishing things interiorly, that contents and satisfies the soul.’

Let me do two things here. I will spell out the running order of the method, as it were. There is a way to come to this ‘realising and relishing’ of course and given it’s not through the transmission of known knowledge as such but through practice that true knowledge will come, the order or practices is what matters. ‘He who is giving the Exercises ought not to influence him who is receiving them more to poverty or to a promise, than to their opposites, nor more to one state or way of life than to another…’

Then to finish, we will go through one section to see what’s at work and at stake – the section on the ‘humilities’.

The humilities are exemplary because what we have is essentially a method of education by negation – it’s what has been called Loyola’s Agere contra – ‘contrary method’ – to attack the committing of sin with its opposite, which is not, finally, not doing it but practicing the direct means of making the sin impossible for the subject. This is what I find critical here: we are not reacting to some sin in the education of the subject but affirmatively educating the subject in that which makes sin impossible as such … So this negative approach – making impossible, is actually an affirmation of what it is to live like Christ – as a saint, basically. It's the conditions of possibility for a saintly life or if you are Greek, a good life or if you are me, a true life. 

It makes you wonder what it is our schools and universities are making impossible for our kids or for us today? Clearly, this education by negation might fall under the positivism of curriculum, which always expresses what it will do for us and how, but what will that doing make impossible?

So to conclude all this, we will follow one example of the Exercises, to end with the sense we have talked about of event, orientation, practice, subtraction, universality etc.

But first let me just set the scene of these Exercises – the formal elaboration is practically simple – anyone must be able to take them up and they are progressive in a reductive way, too. That’s to say, you start with the more elaborate form of them in order to then reduce them to their essence – so weeks turn into days and days into hours, in their practice or in the practice of them, such that the exercise itself becomes precisely not a set of practices to be carried out but the subject becomes the very form of the subject itself. In other words, the exercises don’t educate the subject as such, rather the subject is the subject of this very education; only in and by this education does the subject come to exist; from nothing to something.

The Spiritual Exercises, which develop out of Loyola’s diary of his own ‘conversion’ or subjective experience and which are in turn reflected in his Autobiography, begin with 20 annotations which are set out, he says, ‘to give some understanding of the spiritual exercises which follow and to enable him who is to give and him who is to receive them to help themselves’. I’ll come back to them in a second but let me note again the formal elaboration is complex but not complicated, as I said.

The exercises themselves are divided into four weeks but these are not necessarily temporal weeks, as it were, but weeks of practice – a week of exercises might take the exerciser a month, for example. But there are four such weeks; each week is different in terms of their formal set out and what is addressed by the exerciser and what is exercised. That is, what subjective capacity is put to task in the first week is essentially a matter of the principles of the practice, that is the form of the orientation the exerciser will take up and to meditate on what this consists in and demands. The second week is to think or imagine oneself in relation to the key instances of the life of Christ and to orient reflection in this way and it also concerns the subject’s affective orientation to the principle and reflections and importantly form; this to put before itself the form of its election – that is the very subject it can be; that’s to say, the capacity to become this subject of this orientation; the third week is the contemplation of this possible subject, taking notes and the fourth week essentially concerns the effective work or practices of this exercised subject in the world. The work of love, we might say, which includes rules of proceeding in this.

So let’s run through the annotations which give the proper orientation:

…by this name of Spiritual Exercises is meant every way of examining one’s conscience … every way of preparing and disposing the soul to rid itself of all the disordered tendencies… for the salvation of the soul, is called a Spiritual Exercise

… if the person who is making the Contemplation, takes the true groundwork of the narrative, and, discussing and considering for himself, finds something which makes the events a little clearer or brings them a little more home to him – whether this comes through his own reasoning, or because his intellect is enlightened by the Divine power – he will get more spiritual relish and fruit, than if he who is giving the Exercises had much explained and amplified the meaning of the events.

… we use acts of the intellect in reasoning, and acts of the will in movements of the feelings … in the acts of the will … greater reverence is required on our part than when we are using the intellect in understanding

… If he who is giving the Exercises sees that he who is receiving them is in desolation and tempted, let him not be hard or dissatisfied with him, but gentle and indulgent, giving him courage and strength for the future, and laying bare to him the wiles of the enemy of human nature, and getting him to prepare and dispose himself for the consolation coming…

… he may explain to him, as far as he needs them,

… let him who is giving the Exercises not explain to him the Rules of the Second Week for the discernment of spirits.

… It is helpful to him who is receiving the Exercises in the First Week, not to know anything of what he is to do in the Second, but so to labor in the First to attain the object he is seeking as if he did not hope to find in the Second any good

… For the enemy is not a little used to try and make one cut short the hour of such contemplation, meditation or prayer

… as, in the time of consolation, it is easy and not irksome to be in contemplation the full hour, so it is very hard in the time of desolation to fill it out … the person who is exercising himself, in order to act against the desolation and conquer the temptations, ought always to stay somewhat more than the full hour; so as to accustom himself not only to resist the adversary, but even to overthrow him.

… warn him not to make any inconsiderate and hasty promise or vow… one should carefully consider the circumstances and personal qualities of the individual and how much help or hindrance he is likely to find in fulfilling the thing he would want to promise..

… So, he who is giving the Exercises should not turn or incline to one side or the other, but standing in the centre like a balance, leave the Creator to act immediately with the creature, and the creature with its Creator…

… that one should move himself, putting forth all his strength, to come to the contrary of what he is wrongly drawn to… so that the motive for desiring or having one thing or another be only the service, honour, and glory of His Divine Majesty.

… It is very helpful that he who is giving the Exercises, without wanting to ask or know from him who is receiving them his personal thoughts or sins, should be faithfully informed of the various movements and thoughts which the different spirits put in him.

… The Spiritual Exercises have to be adapted to the dispositions of the persons who wish to receive them …

… To him who is more disengaged, and who desires to get all the profit he can, let all the Spiritual Exercises be given in the order in which they follow. In these he will, ordinarily, more benefit himself, the more he separates himself from all friends and acquaintances and from all earthly care, as by changing from the house where he was dwelling, and taking another house or room to live in, in as much privacy as he can, so that it be in his power to go each day to Mass and to Vespers, without fear that his acquaintances will put obstacles in his way…

OK! The thing I want to emphasis here is what I have called the invariant aspect of education, which is always a strange doubling act: an orientation to that which is not by knowledge as it were but which is precisely designated by knowledge as its determined inexistent. So an orientation to what is not knowledge, which is at once, then, a subtraction from all that knowledge designates to exist and simultaneously an affirmation of what is for all: subtractive practice, universal end.

So Loyola essentially invents the form of his own discourse in the Exercises, which are the exercises themselves. There are exercises to be enacted; there is the depiction of the acting; there is the Colloquy which is not quite a summary formation of what has been exercised but the exercises put into the form of an address – given a sort of cogency in terms of this address and the addressee.

So let’s follow one as example.

There are three orientations to take which are then extensively elaborated:

‘1. ‘to bring to memory’…

2. composition (as in music) to contemplate or see the place…

3. to ask for what I want…

First Point: is to see the persons of the Supper, and, reflecting on myself, to see to drawing some profit from them.

Second Point: to hear what they are talking about, and likewise to draw some profit from it.

Third Point: to look at what they are doing, and draw some profit.

Fourth Point: to consider that which Christ our Lord is suffering in His Humanity, or wants to suffer, according to the passage which is being contemplated, and here to commence with much vehemence and to force myself to grieve, be sad and weep, and so to labor through the other points which follow. [TO IMITATE AS ACT]

Fifth Point: to consider how the Divinity hides Itself, that is, how It could destroy Its enemies and does not do it, and how It leaves the most sacred Humanity to suffer so very cruelly.

Sixth Point: to consider how He suffers all this for my sins, etc.; and what I ought to do and suffer for Him.

Colloquy:

I will finish with a Colloquy to Christ our Lord, and, at the end, with an OUR FATHER… …that in the Colloquies I ought to discuss and ask according to the subject matter, that is, according as I find myself tempted or consoled, and according as I desire to have one virtue or another, as I want to dispose of myself in one direction or another, as I want to grieve or rejoice at the thing which I am contemplating; in fine, asking that which I more efficaciously desire as to any particular things.

First Humility: The first manner of Humility is necessary for eternal salvation; namely, that I so lower and so humble myself, as much as is possible to me, that in everything I obey the law of God, so that, even if they made me lord of all the created things in this world, nor for my own temporal life, I would not be in deliberation about breaking a Commandment, whether Divine or human, which binds me under mortal sin.

Second Humility: The second is more perfect Humility than the first; namely, if I find myself at such a stage that I do not want, and feel no inclination to have, riches rather than poverty, to want honor rather than dishonor, to desire a long rather than a short life -- the service of God our Lord and the salvation of my soul being equal; and so not for all creation, nor because they would take away my life, would I be in deliberation about committing a venial sin.’

So basically, the negation or really subtraction that is the very form of the practice, continues with some subtlety –it is in fact very Pauline: the ways of the world, including its ways of rewarding and determining, are themselves less than ‘Good’. Thus it is not to go after what it determines good or resile from what it determines bad as such but rather to orient to the Good of God, which is then to refuse the criteria of the way of the world as such.

This shows that the road to Christianity on earth – which is what is insisted on in real Christian practice, not some far away fantasy land – is not easy, clearly. To refuse the good and bad of this world (both are worse as Stalin reminded us) and insist on the Good of God in this world, this is the radical kernel of what Loyola is doing and it is the mark of what is invariant in education, should we be asking the question ‘what is education?’, that is - which we rarely are.

Thus one humiliates oneself before the goods and bads of the world as in service to the true Good. Thus the humility is a recognition and a practice and the latter brings it home fully embodied, and it's the embodied nature that makes it impossible for the exerciser – such is the aim.

Third Humility. ‘The third is most perfect Humility; namely, when – including the first and second, and the praise and glory of the Divine Majesty being equal – in order to imitate and be more actually like Christ our Lord, I want and choose poverty with Christ poor rather than riches, opprobrium with Christ replete with it rather than honours; and to desire to be rated as worthless and a fool for Christ, Who first was held as such, rather than wise or prudent in this world.’

Here, note, the outcome if you like, of the Second Humility to choose for God’s grace (or chance) over the way of the world and to of course be in the world what you have chosen for. Which is to say that if you can be this way in the world then this way is in the world and as such, the world can come to be this way. This is the crucial aspect.

Now this links up to the power of memory in this: all these are remembering Christ. We did not hang out with him but we can remember him, and to remember him is to imitate him and to imitate him – with all due diligence – is to know him. To know Christ is what this education is about such that to know Christ is the general end of this education – for all. And so, at the end here, all these days, in terms of what is contemplated adds up to the orientation!

In fact, this ‘disjunctive synthesis’ of method and orientation is what Loyola calls ‘election’… essentially the search for the ‘better me’.

‘In every good election, as far as depends on us, the eye of our intention ought to be simple, only looking at what we are created for, namely, the praise of God our Lord and the salvation of our soul. And so I ought to choose whatever I do, that it may help me for the end for which I am created, not ordering or bringing the end to the means, but the means to the end: as it happens that many choose first to marry – which is a means – and secondarily to serve God our Lord in the married life – which service of God is the end. So, too, there are others who first want to have benefices, and then to serve God in them. So that those do not go straight to God, but want God to come straight to their disordered tendencies, and consequently they make a means of the end, and an end of the means. So that what they had to take first, they take last; because first we have to set as our aim the wanting to serve God, – which is the end, – and secondarily, to take a benefice, or to marry, if it is more suitable to us, – which is the means for the end. So, nothing ought to move me to take such means or to deprive myself of them, except only the service and praise of God our Lord and the eternal salvation of my soul.

In essence, Loyola is saying: it is not at the end of some state program! It is what we choose here and now and that choice is for the ends which then everything must be chosen as a means too. Election is basically the means – to the end (the end being what is decided on at the start! The points on election are essentially about ‘holding fast’ – fidelity!

There are two types of choice in election: those unchangeable – so if you marry or become a priest; there are also those which are changeable; then there is the regime for holding fast as such, which is not easy of course.

Then there is the three times or ways for making election:

1. evental – as in Saint Paul.

2. via a knowledge arrived at through trial – via the consolations and desolations and discernments when one has quietly realised what life is for – praise God and save your soul … and desires this, chooses a life that fits this; a quiet as when the soul is not acted on by various spirits, and uses its natural powers freely and tranquilly.

This last has six points of its own – ways that you can come to this ‘choice’!

The sixth is Ignatius’ own way: ‘… such election, or deliberation, made, the person who has made it ought to go with much diligence to prayer before God our Lord and offer Him such election, that His Divine Majesty may be pleased to receive and confirm it, if it is to His greater service and praise for the profit of the chosen end.’

 This Collucation is critical: a chosen end is a beginning.

‘And after thus finishing the whole Passion, he can, another day, do all the Passion together in one Exercise, or in different ones, as it will seem to him that he will be better able to help himself.’

Let me end then with a quote that puts Loyola back into the larger context of the question of education, which aims at the central invariant of it – if we are to answer the question that is:

‘The written simplicity of the Exercises is a testimony to the audial echoes of the tradition. Ignatius does not describe, argue, exhort. He weaves [this is a very Platonic word!] a text to engage memory, and this in turn to engage the imagination. His Exercises is just that, point by point exercises. This simplicity does not come either from ignorance or from knowledge. It comes simply from the technologies he aimed to exercise.’

So note, the technique is the support of the Idea, which is the beginning of the ends. Technology is not an Idea, it’s merely a means and without Idea or orientation it’s pathology.

The quote continues: ‘Cervantes summarised this attitude with his own approach to the classical tradition of music in Don Quijote, II, 26. There the protagonist and the puppeteer give the following advice to the boy whose role it is to accompany the puppet show with a story which he himself has to put into words: "Boy, boy, follow your story in a straight line, and do not tackle curves or transverse lines .... Young man, don't get into elaborations...; follow your plain chant and avoid counterpoints, which, being subtle, break up. . . Young man, be plain: avoid the heights, for all affectation is bad.’

As Plato puts it: this straight line is nevertheless a long detour.

Next time the long detour of J.J. Rousseau.

Resources:

Ignatius of Loyola and the Counter Reformation, Terence O’Reilly, HeyJ, XXXI (1990).

The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, trans. Father Elder MullanS.J.

The Education of Ignatius Loyola, Michael A. Mullet

Saint Ignatius (ofLoyola), John C.Olin

Encyclopedia of the Renaissance and the Reformation, ed. Speake, Jennifer & Bergin, Thomas Goddard.

Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. Edited by John W. O’Malley, S.J., Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris, T. Frank Kennedy, S.J.

Reforming authority, reforming obedience, J. Patrick Hornbeck (2014), Reformation & Renaissance Review, 16:2,