Ignatius of Loyola

In May 1521 a French cannonball shattered Inigo de Loyola's right leg during the defence of Pamplona. He was thirty, a minor Basque nobleman with a soldier's ambitions, and he spent months in bed at his family castle while the bone was broken and reset twice out of vanity about how the leg would look.

He wanted romances to read. The house had none, only a life of Christ and a collection of saints' lives, so he read those, and then noticed something he later treated as the foundation of everything he taught. When he daydreamed about chivalric exploits he was absorbed at the time and left dry and restless afterwards. When he daydreamed about outdoing Francis and Dominic in austerity he was absorbed at the time and left content and quiet afterwards. The difference was not in the daydreams but in what they left behind, and he concluded that interior movements can be examined and told apart by their aftertaste.

That observation became the discernment of spirits, and everything else grew out of it. He hung up his sword at Montserrat, spent about a year at nearby Manresa in prayer, extreme austerity and a period of scrupulosity so severe he considered suicide, and there had an experience beside the river Cardoner which he said taught him more than everything else in his life together. He began writing notes for others. Those notes became the Spiritual Exercises.

The Spiritual Exercises is not a book to be read. It is a manual for the person giving the retreat, telling him what to propose and when to say nothing, and it is arranged in four weeks: sin and its consequences, the life of Christ, the passion, the resurrection. Its characteristic method is composition of place, in which the retreatant imagines a gospel scene in physical detail and puts himself inside it, and its characteristic instrument is the daily examen, a short structured review of the day's interior movements. Its aim is a decision, arrived at freely, and the director is warned repeatedly not to steer it.

The Society of Jesus, approved in 1540, was designed around the same priority: getting people to where they were needed. Ignatius dispensed with the choral office that anchored older orders to a building, adopted no distinctive habit, and added a fourth vow concerning missions at the pope's disposal, so that a man could be sent anywhere at short notice. Schools were not in the original plan and became the order's principal work within a generation. His phrase for the spirituality behind it is finding God in all things, which is a working instruction rather than a sentiment.

He spent his last years in Rome writing the Constitutions and administering the order, and he was investigated by the Inquisition several times over his life, once imprisoned, on suspicion of the illuminist tendencies then under scrutiny in Spain. He was acquitted each time.