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