A History of the Reformation (Vol. 2 of 2)

by Thomas M. Lindsay

There in the church of Our Lady of Montserrat he resolved to dedicate himself to her service with all the ceremonies prescribed in that masterbook of mediæval chivalry, Amadis of Gaul. He hung his arms on her altar, and throughout the long night, standing or kneeling, he kept his watch, consecrating his knightly service to the Blessed Virgin. At daybreak he donned an anchorite’s dress, gave his knightly robes to the first beggar he met, and, mounted on his ass, betook himself to the Dominican convent of Manresa, no longer Iñigo Recalde de Loyola, but simply Ignatius.

At Manresa he practised the strictest asceticism, hoping to become in heart and soul fitted for the saint life he wished to live. Then began a time of unexpected, sore and prolonged spiritual conflict, not unlike what Luther experienced in the Erfurt convent. Who was he and what had been his past life that he should presumptuously think that God would ever accept him and number him among His saints? He made unwearied use of all the mediæval means of grace; he exhausted the resources of the confessional; he consulted one spiritual guide after another without experiencing any relief to the doubts which were gnawing at his soul. The whole machinery of the Church helped him as little as it had Luther: it could not give peace of conscience. He has placed on record that the only real help he received during this prolonged period of mental agony came from an old woman. Confession, instead of soothing him, rather plunged him into a sea of intolerable doubt. To make his penitence thorough, to know himself as he really was, he wrote out his confession that he might see his sins staring at him from the written page. He fasted till his life was in danger; he prayed seven times and scourged himself thrice daily, but found no peace. He tells us that he often shrieked aloud to God, crying that He must Himself help him, for no creature could bring him comfort. No task would be too great for him, he exclaimed, if he could only see God. “Show me, O Lord, where I can find Thee; I will follow like a dog, if I can only learn the way of salvation.” His anguish prompted him to suicide. More than once, he says, he opened his window with the intention of casting himself down headlong and ending his life then and there; but the fear of his sins and their consequences restrained him. He had read of a saint who had vowed to fast until he had been vouchsafed the Beatific Vision, so he communicated at the altar and fasted for a whole week; but all ended in vanity and vexation of spirit.

Then, with the sudden certainty of a revelation, he resolved to throw himself on the mercy of God, whose long-suffering pity would pardon his sins. This was the crisis. Peace came at last, and his new spiritual life began. He thought no longer about his past; he no longer mentioned former sins in his confessions; the certainty of pardon had begun a new life within him; he could start afresh. It is impossible to read his statements without being struck with the similarity between the spiritual experience of Ignatius and what Luther calls Justification by Faith; the words used by the two great religious leaders were different, but the experience of pardon won by throwing one’s self upon the mercy of God was the same.

This new spiritual life was, as in Luther’s case, one of overflowing gladness. Meditation and introspection, once a source of anguish, became the spring of overpowering joy. Ignatius felt that he was making progress. “God,” he says, “dealt with me as a teacher with a scholar; I cannot doubt that He had always been with me.” Many historical critics from Ranke downwards have been struck with the likeness of the experience gone through by Luther and Ignatius. One great contrast manifested itself at once. The humble-minded and quiet German, when the new life awoke in him, set himself unostentatiously to do the common tasks which daily life brought; the fiery and ambitious Spaniard at once tried to conquer all mysteries, to take them by assault as if they were a beleaguered fortress.

He had his visions as before, but they were no longer temptations of Satan, the source of doubt and torture. He believed that he could actually see with bodily eyes divine mysteries which the intelligence could not comprehend. After lengthened prayer, every faculty concentrated in one prolonged gaze, he felt assured that he could see the mystery of Transubstantiation actually taking place. At the supreme moment he saw Christ in the form of a white ray pass into the consecrated bread and transform it into the Divine Victim (Host). He declared that in moods of exaltation the most impenetrable mysteries of theology, the Incarnation of our Lord, the Holy Trinity, the personality of Satan, were translated into visible symbols which made them plainly understood. These visions so fascinated him, that he began to write them down in simple fashion for his own satisfaction and edification.

In all this the student of the religious life of Spain during the sixteenth century will recognise the mystical devotion which was then characteristic of the people of the Peninsula. The Spanish character, whether we study it in the romances of chivalry which the land produced, or in the writing of her religious guides, was impregnated by enthusiasm. It was passionate, exalted, entirely penetrated and possessed by the emotion which for the time dominated it. In no country were the national and religious sentiment so thoroughly fused and united. The long wars with the Moors, and their successful issue in the conquest of Grenada, had made religion and patriotism one and the same thing. Priests invariably accompanied troops on the march, and went into battle with them. St. James of Compostella was believed to traverse the country to bring continual succour to the soldiers who charged the Moors invoking his name. A victory was celebrated by a solemn procession in honour of God and of the Virgin, who had delivered the enemy into the hands of the faithful. This intensity of the Spanish character, this temperament distinguished by force rather than moderation, easily gave birth to superstition and burning devotion, and both furnished a fruitful soil for the extravagances of Mysticism, which affected every class in society. Statesmen like Ximenes, no less than the common people, were influenced by the exhortations or predictions of the Beatæ,—women who had devoted themselves to a religious life without formally entering into a convent,—and changed their policy in consequence. It was universally believed that such devotees, men and women, could be illuminated divinely, and could attain to a state of familiar intercourse with God, if not to an actual union with Him, by giving themselves to prayer, by abstinence from all worldly thoughts and actions, and by practising the most rigid asceticism. It was held that those who had attained to this state of mystical union received in dreams, trances, and ecstasies, visions of the divine mysteries.

The heads of the Spanish Inquisition viewed this Mysticism, so characteristic of the Peninsula, with grave anxiety. The thought that ardent believers could by any personal process attain direct intercourse, even union with God, apart from the ordinary machinery of the Church, cut at the roots of the mediæval penitential system, which always presupposed that a priestly mediation was required. If God can be met in the silence of the believer’s soul, where is the need for the priest, who, according to mediæval ideas, must always stand between the penitent and God, and by his action take the hand of faith and lay it in the hand of the divine omnipotence? Other dangers appeared. The Mystic professed to draw his knowledge of divine things directly from the same source as the Church, and his revelations had the same authority. It is true that most of the Spanish Mystics, like St. Teresa, had humility enough to place themselves under ecclesiastical direction, but this was not the case with all. Some prophets and prophetesses declared themselves to be independent, and these illuminati, as they were called, spread disaffection and heresy. Hence the attitude of the Inquisition towards Mystics of all kinds was one of suspicious watchfulness. St. Teresa, St. Juan de la Cruz, Ignatius himself, were all objects of distrust, and did not win ecclesiastical approbation until after long series of tribulations.

It is necessary to insist on the fact that Ignatius had a deeply rooted connection with the Spanish Mystics. His visions, his methods, the Spiritual Exercises themselves, cannot be understood apart from their intimate relations to that Mysticism which was characteristic of the religion of his land and of his age.

Ignatius was no ordinary Mystic, however. What seemed the whole or the end to Teresa or Osuna was to him only a part, or the means to something better. While he received and rejoiced in the visions vouchsafed to him, he practised the keenest introspection. He observed and analysed the moods and states of mind in which the visions came most readily or the reverse, and made a note of them all. He noted the postures and gestures of the body which helped or hindered the reception of visions or profitable meditation on what had been revealed. He saw that he could reproduce or at least facilitate the return of his visions by training and mastering his mind and body, and by subjecting them to a spiritual drill which might be compared with the exercises used to train a soldier in the art of war. Out of these visions, introspections, comparisons, experiments experienced in solitude at Manresa, came by long process of gradual growth and elaboration the famous Spiritual Exercises, which may be called the soul of the Counter-Reformation, as Luther’s book on The Liberty of the Christian Man contains the essence of Protestantism.