Justified True Belief

(●) The Basque soldier whose shattered leg turned him into the church’s most practical teacher of prayer, and whose handful of student friends became the Society of Jesus. + In the spring of 1521 a Spanish courtier not yet thirty was standing on the walls of a fortress that everybody but him could see was lost, and a French cannonball went between his legs and broke one of them. He went home on a litter to a stone tower house in the Basque hills and spent the better part of a year on his back. He asked for the adventure novels he loved. The house did not have any. It had a life of Christ and a fat book of saints’ lives, so he read those, and while he was reading he began to notice something about his own daydreams: the ones about knights and ladies were delicious while they lasted and left him flat afterward, and the ones about walking to Jerusalem barefoot left him happy for hours. Nobody had told him this was worth noticing. He noticed anyway, and out of that noticing came a small book of instructions that has been in continuous use for nearly five hundred years. For Christian readers he matters for two reasons. The first is the book. The Spiritual Exercises treats the inner life as something a person can be coached through, with drills, review, and rules for telling one interior movement from another. He was not the first to try it. There were forerunners, among them the Ejercitatorio de la vida espiritual, the “exercise book for the spiritual life,” that García de Cisneros printed at Montserrat in 1500. But no earlier manual of the kind was put to anything like the same use. The second reason is the order. The Society of Jesus, approved by Rome in 1540, became the schoolroom and the mission fleet of the Catholic Reformation, the Roman church’s own century of reform and its answer to the Protestants, and within two generations it had produced Robert Bellarmine and Francisco Suárez, who wrote the works Protestant theologians spent the next century answering, and Matteo Ricci, who learned Chinese well enough to argue theology in it. One fact about him is worth carrying away. Close to seven thousand of his letters survive, more than from any other figure of the sixteenth century, and almost all of them were written from one small set of rooms in Rome, by a man with a limp who barely travelled again after he was fifty, while the men he had recruited were sailing to India, Japan, Ethiopia and Brazil.

(●) 1491 AD: Born the youngest of thirteen in a Basque tower house, and raised for the sword. + He was born Íñigo López de Loyola, in 1491, at the family castle above Azpeitia in Guipúzcoa, in the Basque country of northern Spain. The day of his birth was never recorded; a later tradition assigns it to 23 October. He was the last of thirteen children in a house of minor nobility, and the lower storeys of that house, thick-walled and built for defence, are still standing today inside the church that a later century built around them. At about fifteen he was sent to Arévalo, into the household of Juan Velázquez de Cuéllar, chief treasurer of Castile. What he got there was a courtier’s education: arms, horses, dancing, gambling, the poetry of romantic love, and the habit of caring a great deal what other men thought of him. Dictating his memories as an old man, he described himself in those years as given over to the vanities of the world, and said that what he chiefly enjoyed was the exercise of arms, with a great and vain desire to win honour. It was not all pageantry. In 1515 he and one of his brothers were prosecuted in Azpeitia for offences committed during carnival, serious enough that the record calls them premeditated, and Íñigo claimed the privileges of a clerk in order to be tried by a friendlier court. When his patron died he took service with the Duke of Nájera, viceroy of Navarre, as a gentleman soldier and negotiator.

(●) 1521 AD: A French cannonball at Pamplona ended the only career he had ever wanted. + On 20 May 1521 a French army was outside Pamplona and the small Spanish garrison inside wanted to surrender, which was the sensible view. Íñigo talked them out of it. A cannonball passed between his legs, tore open the left calf and broke the right shin, and the defence collapsed within hours. The French treated him well, cared for him, and had him carried home to Loyola on a litter over rough country. Then came the part he chose. The bone had been set badly and left him with a lump below the knee and one leg shorter than the other, which would have ruined the fit of the tight hose a courtier wore, so he had the leg broken again and reset, had the projecting stump of bone sawn off, and had the limb stretched with weights for days. He was told what it would cost and went ahead. It left him with a limp for the rest of his life. The convalescence is the hinge of the whole story, and it turned on the fact that a country house in Guipúzcoa had the wrong books. He wanted chivalric romances. What he was brought was Ludolph of Saxony’s Life of Christ and Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, a collection of saints’ lives. Reading them, he found himself asking a competitive question, the only kind he knew how to ask: what if I did what Francis did, what if I did what Dominic did. Both men were three centuries dead by then, founders of the great begging orders, and he was reading their lives the way a soldier reads the record of a rival. And then, slowly, he began to compare the two kinds of daydreaming and the different moods they left behind, which is the seed of everything he later taught (T3).

(●) 1522 AD: He hung his sword before the altar at Montserrat, then nearly destroyed himself at Manresa. + In March 1522, walking towards Barcelona and a ship for Jerusalem, he stopped at the Benedictine abbey of Montserrat in the mountains above the city. He made a general confession, going back over his whole life, and took three days to write it out. He gave his mule to the abbey. He gave his fine clothes to a beggar he met on the road and put on a rough pilgrim’s sackcloth. Then, through the night before the feast of the Annunciation, 25 March, he kept a vigil before the altar of Our Lady, standing and kneeling by turns with his staff in his hand, and left his sword and dagger hanging there. Every gesture in that night is a knight’s ceremony performed with the meaning turned inside out. He meant to spend a few days in the nearby town of Manresa. He stayed nearly a year, and it almost broke him. He begged his bread, let his hair and nails grow untended out of contempt for his old vanity, prayed seven hours a day and fasted for days at a stretch. Then the scruples came, and a scruple in the old sense is not a hesitation but a conscience that will not stay settled. Sins he had already confessed rose up again and would not stay confessed, no matter how minutely he went over them or how often he told them to a priest. He wrote later that while tortured by these thoughts he was several times violently tempted to throw himself out of the large window of his room. Two things ended it. He made a flat decision to stop rehearsing the old confessions, and the torment lifted. And beside the river Cardoner, sitting and looking at the water, he was given the illumination he valued above every other experience of his life. He was careful, decades later, about what he claimed for it: not a vision of anything, but the eyes of his understanding opened, so that many things in the faith and in learning became clear at once. He said he had learned more in that hour than in all the rest of his years put together. He also concluded that the austerities had done him real harm, and he spent the rest of his life telling his men to eat and sleep. Meanwhile he was writing down the exercises that had worked on him, on loose sheets he would keep revising for twenty-five years.

(●) 1524 AD: Jerusalem sent him home, so at thirty-two he sat down in a Latin class with schoolboys. + He reached Jerusalem in 1523 by way of Rome, Venice and Cyprus, and lasted about three weeks. He wanted to stay for good and spend his life among Muslims and pilgrims. The Franciscan provincial, the friar who governed his order across a whole region, held papal authority over Latin pilgrims in the Holy Land, and he had watched better-funded enthusiasts get themselves killed or ransomed. So he ordered the Spaniard out, and produced the document that let him excommunicate anyone who refused, which is to say cut a man off from the church and its sacraments. Íñigo, who had defied a French army three years earlier, said yes and went home. Back in Barcelona in 1524 he drew the conclusion that shaped the rest of his life: if he wanted to help souls he had to be educated, and there was no shortcut. So he started where a beginner starts. For two years he sat in a grammar class learning Latin declensions beside boys young enough to be his sons. The next stage went badly twice. At Alcalá from 1526 he studied, dressed like a poor pilgrim, and gave his exercises to laypeople, including a good many women. What he drew was the kind of crowd that made a Spanish church nervous, and the decade was the wrong one for it, because the Inquisition was hunting the alumbrados, the “enlightened ones” who claimed direct interior guidance and had no use for the ordinary machinery of the church. A layman with a following, a private method and no degree looked a good deal like one of them. He was jailed for forty-two days, examined, and cleared, with an order not to speak on matters of faith until he had studied four more years. Then it happened again. He moved to Salamanca in 1527, was questioned by the Dominicans there, and spent three weeks in the common jail chained by the foot to another prisoner. He was cleared again, on the same terms. Francisco de Mendoza, a nobleman who came to see him in the cell, was told: “For the love of Jesus Christ, I gladly would wear all the handcuffs and chains that could be found in Salamanca” (Autobiography, O’Conor translation). The pattern did not stop at the Spanish border. Eight times in his life he was examined for his orthodoxy, three times at Alcalá, once at Salamanca, twice at Paris, and once each at Venice and Rome. And he made a habit of asking for a written verdict rather than a quiet release, because he had learned what an unresolved rumour does to a man’s usefulness.

(●) 1534 AD: Seven friends took vows in a chapel on Montmartre, and the Society had its beginning. + In February 1528 he walked into Paris, the best university in Europe, and began again at the bottom, first at the Collège de Montaigu and then at Sainte-Barbe. He paid for it by begging in Flanders during the summers, and once in London, from Spanish merchants who had money and consciences. It was in Paris that his name began to appear as Ignatius, a form he seems to have taken for a variant of his own and never abandoned. His two room-mates at Sainte-Barbe are the reason the story continues. Pierre Favre was a shepherd’s son from Savoy, scrupulous and gentle, who became the first of them to be ordained. Francis Xavier was a Navarrese nobleman, a champion athlete, ambitious for a career in the church, and thoroughly irritated by the limping older Spaniard whose family had been on the opposite side of the war that ruined his own. Xavier held out for years. Ignatius simply outlasted him, paid his debts, and found him students. By 1534 there were seven of them: Ignatius, Favre and Xavier, with Diego Laínez, Alfonso Salmerón, Nicolás Bobadilla and the Portuguese Simão Rodrigues. On 15 August, in a crypt chapel on the hill of Montmartre outside the city walls, they made their vows: poverty, chastity, and a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, with the provision that if they could not get there within a year of arriving in Venice they would present themselves to the pope and go wherever he sent them. Favre, the only priest among them, said the Mass. There was no order, no rule, no name, and no plan beyond Jerusalem. He did finish what he had come to Paris for. Ignatius took his master’s degree there in his early forties, though the records disagree over whether it was conferred in March 1534 or March 1535.

(●) 1540 AD: Rome approved the company that could not get to Jerusalem, and then made him stay behind a desk. + The ship never sailed. Venice went to war with the Turks, and for the first year in living memory no pilgrim vessel left for the Holy Land. So the escape clause in the Montmartre vow came into force. The companions, who by now called themselves simply the Company of Jesus, a soldier’s word in Spanish that Latin would later turn into Society, went to Rome to put themselves at the pope’s disposal. Ignatius had been ordained priest on 24 June 1537 in Venice, and then waited eighteen months before saying his first Mass, still hoping to say it in Bethlehem. On the road into Rome, at a roadside chapel at La Storta in the autumn of 1537, he had the experience he treasured most and described least: he seemed to see the Father placing him with his Son. Paul III set them to work in Rome, and in 1539 they took the decision that turned a group of friends into an institution. They asked whether to bind themselves together permanently under obedience, and after weeks of prayer and argument they said yes, and drew up a five-chapter sketch of what they meant to be. Pope Paul III approved it on 27 September 1540 in the bull Regimini militantis Ecclesiae, a bull being the most formal letter a pope issues, named after the lead seal, the bulla, that hung from it. The approval capped the membership, at first, at sixty men. They elected Ignatius superior general, the head of the whole order, in April 1541. He refused. They elected him again, and he gave in only when his confessor ordered him to, making his profession, the permanent vows, on 22 April at St Paul’s Outside the Walls. Then the old soldier did the thing nobody would have predicted: he stopped moving. For fifteen years he governed from Rome, writing the Constitutions line by line, answering letters from every quarter of the world, and founding institutions in the city itself, among them the Roman College in 1551 and the German College in 1552, a house for women leaving prostitution, and a home for orphans.

(●) 1556 AD: He died in a Roman July with about a thousand men in the field and no fuss at the end. + He had been unwell for years, and the Roman fevers of high summer finished him. On the evening of 30 July 1556 he told his secretary, Juan de Polanco, to go and ask the pope’s blessing for a dying man. Polanco, who had letters to finish and did not think the case was urgent, went the next morning instead. Ignatius died early on 31 July, before the blessing or the last rites arrived. The man who had built an order on obedience and detachment was given, at the end, a death with nothing arranged about it at all. He left behind roughly a thousand members in about a hundred houses, organised into twelve provinces, which are the regional groupings an order is divided into, and more than thirty schools. Francis Xavier had died four years earlier on an island off the coast of China, still trying to get in. The Constitutions Ignatius had spent a decade on were reviewed and approved by his brethren in 1558, and the Spiritual Exercises had already been in print for eight years. He was beatified in 1609, the first formal step, which allows public honour in one region or one order, and canonised, declared a saint for the whole church, on 12 March 1622, in the same ceremony as Francis Xavier, Teresa of Ávila, Philip Neri and Isidore the Farmer, which is a fair measure of how quickly the church decided what it thought of him.

What He Taught

(T1) A person is made for one thing, and everything else is worth exactly what it does for that. + Think about how you pack a suitcase. You do not ask which of your possessions are best; you ask where you are going, and then the boots come and the good shoes stay, or the other way around, and it is the destination that settles it. Ignatius opens the Spiritual Exercises with a single paragraph that does the same thing to a whole life, and he calls it the Principle and Foundation. A human being exists to praise, reverence and serve God, and so to be saved. Everything else on the face of the earth is luggage: useful exactly as far as it helps, to be put down exactly as far as it hinders. Out of that comes the word his followers use most and outsiders misunderstand most: indifference. It does not mean not caring. A man who does not care would not have had his leg broken twice. It means declining to have your mind made up in advance by your preferences, so that when the moment of choice comes you are free to choose the thing that actually serves the end. Ignatius names the pairs a person is usually not free about, and they are the honest ones: health and sickness, wealth and poverty, honour and dishonour, a long life and a short one. He does not say these are equal. He says you should not have decided between them before you have asked what God is asking. Scripture puts the same point in a kitchen: “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31), and Jesus asks what a man gains if he wins the whole world and forfeits his soul (Matthew 16:26). Read too fast, the Foundation can sound as though the created world were nothing but a box of tools, and Ignatius has sometimes been read that way. His own book answers the charge at the far end, where the last exercise of all is a long look at how much God has given and how thoroughly he is at work inside every created thing (T4).

(Q) "Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul. And the other things on the face of the earth are created for man and that they may help him in prosecuting the end for which he is created." + Source: Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, the Principle and Foundation, paragraph 23 (Elder Mullan translation, 1909, made from the Spanish Autograph). The opening of the retreat itself, given to the retreatant, the person making the retreat, before any meditation begins. The paragraph goes on to draw the conclusion: a person should use created things as much as they help toward that end and be rid of them as far as they hinder, which is why the exercises that follow spend so much time on what a person is holding on to (T1).

(T2) Prayer can be trained the way a body is trained. + Ignatius chose the title of his book on purpose, and he explains it in the very first sentence. Walking, strolling and running are bodily exercises. In the same way, examining your conscience, meditating, contemplating and praying are exercises of the soul, and like the bodily kind they can be prescribed, timed, repeated, and reviewed afterward to see how they went. That makes the Spiritual Exercises an unusual book, and it is worth knowing what sort of thing it is before opening it. It is not a devotional to be read in an armchair. It is a coach’s handbook of three hundred and seventy short numbered paragraphs, most of them addressed to the person giving the exercises rather than to the person doing them, full of practical notes on how long to pray, when to shorten the material for a beginner, and what to do about the room and the light. The full course runs about thirty days in silence, in four stages he calls Weeks, though they stretch or shrink to fit the person: the first on sin and mercy, the second on the life of Christ and the choice a person has to make, the third on the passion, the fourth on the resurrection and on love. Two of his methods travelled further than anything else in the book. The first is what he calls the composition of place: before meditating on a Gospel scene you build it with your imagination, and he means it literally. Considering the nativity, you are told to see the road from Nazareth to Bethlehem and to consider its length and its breadth. The second is the meditation called the Two Standards, a standard being the banner an army marched under and rallied to, and here it is Ignatius the soldier drawing a map. Two armies are camped on two plains, Christ in a field near Jerusalem and Lucifer in a field near Babylon. Lucifer is seated in a chair of fire and smoke, and he sends his agents out through every city and province with instructions to tempt first with riches, then with the honour of the world, and then with pride, from which everything else follows. A person who has seen his own life in that picture is being made ready for the thing the whole book exists for: the Election, a decision about how to live, made deliberately in the presence of God rather than drifted into.

(Q) "For as strolling, walking and running are bodily exercises, so every way of preparing and disposing the soul to rid itself of all the disordered tendencies, and, after it is rid, to seek and find the Divine Will as to the management of one's life for the salvation of the soul, is called a Spiritual Exercise." + Source: Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, First Annotation, paragraph 1 (Elder Mullan translation, 1909). The first words of the book, defining its own title. Two things in the sentence set the programme for everything after it: the disordered tendencies have to go first, and what comes next is not a feeling but a finding, a decision about how a life will be run (T2).

(T3) God moves in the ordinary traffic of the heart, and a person can learn to tell one movement from another. + Everything here goes back to the sickroom at Loyola. Two sets of daydreams, both pleasant while they lasted, and one of them leaving him dry and sad afterward while the other left him glad. What he did next is the whole method in miniature: he did not act on either feeling, he compared the wakes they left behind. He gave the two states names, and the names are now standard. Consolation is any interior movement that warms a person toward God: an increase of faith, hope or love, tears that draw toward God rather than away, a quiet that settles the soul in its Creator. Desolation is the opposite weather: darkness, restlessness, a pull toward low and earthly things, a sense of being cut off, a slack tepid feeling with no confidence in it. Ignatius then gives rules for what to do in each, and the rules are strikingly unromantic. In desolation, never change a decision you made when things were clear; the enemy has a vote in your mood but not in your plans. Bring temptation into the light, because, as he puts it, the enemy behaves like a licentious lover who wants his words kept secret, and hates nothing more than being reported to someone wiser. None of this makes a feeling into a revelation, and Ignatius knew the difference better than most, having watched his own conscience lie to him for months at Manresa. The rules are a test, not a permission. Scripture asks for exactly this sort of testing: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1), and Paul’s instruction to a whole congregation is “but test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). The psalmist asks God himself to do the examining (Psalm 139:23–24). What Ignatius added to all of that was a procedure, and a daily one. He called it the examen, which is simply the old word for an examination, and it runs to five short steps taken at a fixed hour: a person gives thanks for what was received, asks light to see his sins, goes back over the day hour by hour, asks pardon, and resolves to do better tomorrow. It takes a quarter of an hour, and he thought it the one exercise a busy man should never drop.

(Q) "I call it consolation when some interior movement in the soul is caused, through which the soul comes to be inflamed with love of its Creator and Lord; and when it can in consequence love no created thing on the face of the earth in itself, but in the Creator of them all." + Source: Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, Rules for the Discernment of Spirits for the First Week, Third Rule, paragraph 316 (Elder Mullan translation, 1909). Notice the test built into the definition. A feeling counts as consolation not because it is pleasant but because of where it points: toward the Creator, and toward loving created things in him rather than instead of him. The next rule defines desolation as the contrary weather, and the rules after it say what to do about it (T3).

(T4) Love shows itself in deeds, and the end of prayer is to hand everything back. + The last exercise in the book is called the Contemplation to Attain Love, and Ignatius puts two warnings at the top of it before a word of prayer begins. Love is shown in deeds more than in words. And love runs both ways, as an exchange between two parties in which each hands over what he has, so that if one has knowledge he gives it to the one who has none, and the same with honours and with money. Then he asks the retreatant to do four things, and they build. Remember what you have actually been given, creation and redemption and the particular gifts that came to you and nobody else. Look at how God lives inside his creatures, giving being to the elements, growth to plants, feeling to animals, understanding to people, making a temple out of you. Consider that God is not resting in these things but working in them, labouring on your behalf in every field and every furnace. And then let all of it come down from above like light from the sun or water from a spring. The exercise ends with a prayer of handing back, four short lines that Jesuits still call the Suscipe, from the first word of the Latin, which means “take.” This is Ignatius’s answer to anyone who reads his opening page as coldness toward the world (T1). The book begins by telling you that things are instruments and ends by showing you God at work inside every one of them. The same double note runs through his letters, where he keeps telling students and administrators to look for God in the work in front of them rather than only in the chapel. And the point about deeds is not his invention: “Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth” (1 John 3:18).

(Q) "The first is that love ought to be put more in deeds than in words." + Source: Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, Contemplation to Gain Love, Note, paragraph 230 (Elder Mullan translation, 1909). The first of two remarks Ignatius sets before the final exercise. The second is that love consists in an interchange between the two parties, each giving the other what he has, which is why the exercise ends in an act of giving rather than in a resolution to feel something (T4).

(Q) "Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my intellect, and all my will, all that I have and possess. Thou gavest it to me: to Thee, Lord, I return it! All is Thine, dispose of it according to all Thy will. Give me Thy love and grace, for this is enough for me." + Source: Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, Contemplation to Gain Love, First Point, paragraph 234 (Elder Mullan translation, 1909). Mullan prints a dash where the comma stands after "all my will", which the site’s punctuation rule does not use; no word has been changed. Known as the Suscipe, from the first word of the Latin. It is the last thing a person says at the end of thirty days, and it is worth noticing what is being handed over: not property but the faculties a soldier and a courtier would have counted as himself, his freedom, his memory and his mind. What he asks to keep is two things, and he says they are enough.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) He made prayer teachable, and the silent retreat became a fixture of Christian life. + Before Ignatius, a Christian who wanted to go deeper was mostly directed to a monastery or handed a book of devotion. What he produced instead was a portable course with a director, a schedule, and a diagnosis, something an ordinary layman could be taken through in his own city. He was giving it to shopkeepers and students in Alcalá twenty years before it was printed, which is exactly why the Inquisition wanted to look at him. The printed book appeared at Rome in 1548 with the approval of Paul III, and its first readers were the men Ignatius had recruited. Pierre Favre gave the exercises across Germany in the 1540s to bishops, monks and Protestant sympathisers alike, and his own spiritual journal, the Memoriale, shows the method at work in a man’s own hands. Jérónimo Nadal carried Ignatius’s instructions around the provinces to explain what the order was for. The full thirty days remained a rarity; what spread was the shortened form Ignatius himself had provided for people who could not leave their work, and the retreat house grew out of it. The wider debt is a habit of mind. Francis de Sales, who studied under Jesuits in Paris in the 1580s and became a bishop and a spiritual director for laypeople, opens his Introduction to the Devout Life with meditations built on the Ignatian pattern of composing a scene and ending in a resolution, and that book put the method into the hands of readers who had never heard of the Society. By the nineteenth century the annual retreat had become normal for Catholic clergy, and by the twentieth it was normal well beyond them.

(†) His friends became the schoolmasters and the long-distance missionaries of the Catholic Reformation. + Ignatius did not set out to found schools. He was talked into it. The Society opened a college at Messina in Sicily in 1548 that took lay students as well as its own recruits. It worked, and within a few years requests were arriving from cities and princes across Catholic Europe. More than thirty colleges were running by the time he died, and the Roman College he founded in 1551 became a university. That decision is why the order shaped the argument of the next two centuries: it put its most able men in front of teenagers, and it made the study of languages, mathematics and controversy part of the job. The intellectual harvest came quickly. Robert Bellarmine, who entered the Society four years after Ignatius’s death, wrote the Disputations that became the standard Catholic case against the Reformation and the book Protestant divinity faculties assigned in order to answer it. Francisco Suárez produced the metaphysics that Protestant universities went on teaching from long after the confessional split, and the arguments about law and consent in his political writing were still being quoted in the seventeenth century. The other half went overseas. Francis Xavier, the room-mate who had wanted nothing to do with him, sailed for India in 1541, worked in Goa, along the fishery coast, in Malacca and the Moluccas, and reached Japan in 1549, and he died in 1552 on an island within sight of the Chinese mainland. Others followed him: Matteo Ricci learned Chinese, dressed as a scholar and reached Beijing; Jesuits went into Ethiopia, Brazil and Paraguay. The correspondence Ignatius maintained with them from Rome, insisting that they write and write often, is the reason Europe knew what it knew about Asia in the sixteenth century.

(†) Protestants have taken up his tools while answering his question differently. + Ignatius and Martin Luther, born eight years apart, were both wrecked for a time by the same problem: a conscience that would not stay quiet after confession. Their answers went in different directions. Luther concluded that the search itself was the mistake, and that a sinner is accepted on Christ’s account, received by faith, apart from anything he brings, and the whole Reformation flows from that sentence (Romans 3:28; Ephesians 2:8–9). Ignatius simply stopped rehearsing the old sins, put himself under obedience, and spent his life building a method for finding out what God wanted next. The two men would not have agreed about how a person is put right with God, and no honest account should pretend otherwise. What is striking is how much of his equipment Protestants eventually picked up anyway, once the sixteenth-century heat had gone out of the room. The daily examen, the practice of noticing consolation and desolation instead of obeying them, the habit of placing yourself inside a Gospel scene and watching it happen, all of these turn up in twentieth-century Protestant writing on the spiritual disciplines and in retreat programmes across the traditions. Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline, an evangelical bestseller of 1978, teaches imaginative meditation on Scripture and cites the Ignatian tradition by name. There is a reason the borrowing works. The rules for discernment do not depend on the disputed questions. They assume a person who already believes, and they ask what to do with the mixed weather of an ordinary week, which is a question every tradition has to answer and no tradition answers by doctrine alone.

(†) Where the ledger goes against him: he told a retreatant to call white black. + At the back of the Spiritual Exercises sit eighteen short paragraphs called the Rules for Thinking with the Church, written for a moment when educated Catholics were criticising the church freely and some of them were leaving it. Rule thirteen is the one that has never stopped being quoted: to be right in everything, a person should always hold that the white which he sees is black, if the hierarchical church so decides. Let us start with the fairest reading, because there is one. For one thing, Ignatius is talking about the church’s settled teaching and not about any officer’s opinion. For another, he is writing for a retreatant at the end of a month of intense private experience, a man who might easily start trusting his own lights too far. And he was not describing a man with no spine: he had been examined for his orthodoxy eight times without recanting anything. Read as advice against private certainty, the rule has a point that every tradition needs. The trouble is what the sentence does when it is taught as a maxim, and the trouble is not small. It makes obedience the test of truth rather than truth the test of obedience, and a conscience that has agreed in advance to call white black has given away the instrument it would need to notice an error. Scripture keeps the test running in the other direction. Luke praises the Jews of Berea for weighing Paul’s own preaching against the Scriptures: they “received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11). Paul tells a whole congregation to test everything and hold fast what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21), and says that if he himself, or an angel from heaven, preaches a different gospel, the messenger is to be rejected and not the test (Galatians 1:8). The following rules take the same protective line in a different key, warning directors to speak carefully about grace and predestination lest hearers grow slack, which is prudent pastoral advice and also a way of muting a note the New Testament sounds loudly. None of this is an argument against giving the church a hearing, and Christians of every tradition owe her one. It is an argument about which way the test runs, and it is the point where the Reformation and Ignatius genuinely disagree rather than merely differ in temperament.