Ignatius of Loyola, Letters and Instructions (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ignatius of Loyola, Letters and Instructions Philip Endean SJ (bio) Ignatius of Loyola, Letters and Instructions. Translated by Martin PalmerJohn Padberg. Edited by John PadbergJohn McCarthy. St. Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2006. Xxx + 732 pp. $30.50 (paper)/$40.95 (cloth). One major problem sooner or later besets any attempt to write a life of Ignatius. The nature of his story changes sharply once he arrives with his first companions in Rome in the late 1530s, and they begin to establish the Society of Jesus. The solitude of his life as a convert pilgrim, and then the intimacy of his small and closely-knit group of companions, give way to a life of intense relationships as he heads what rapidly becomes a major institution of early modern Roman Catholicism. By the time Ignatius dies in 1556, the Society has a thousand members and is operating in more than a dozen countries. The problem is not just that the story becomes more complex; the sources change character, and it becomes hard for any interpreter to trace convincing continuities across the genres between Ignatius the pilgrim and Ignatius the founder. The biographical material degenerates into collections of anecdotes, and we have to depend more on the letters which emerged from his office. More than 6,500 have been preserved, all but a handful from this later period. As John W. Padberg notes in his introduction to this new selection, the number more than the surviving letters of Luther and Calvin combined. Their sheer bulk—twelve volumes of often more than 700 pages—is truly daunting. The Institute of Jesuit Sources here presents us with 369 of these texts—more than any previous collection in English. They have been translated accurately, accessibly and attractively—originally by the late Martin E. Palmer, SJ, known for his previous work in translating the Directories to the Spiritual Exercises. These features alone make this an important volume, indispensable for any serious student [End Page 253] of Ignatian spirituality, and well worth the attention of any thoughtful reader. In translation particularly, the letters are easier to read than many other Ignatian texts, because so many are written for people who are not initiated into Jesuit ways. Admittedly, this edition is not the volume that specialists, aware of the problems in Ignatian historiography, have been waiting for. The criteria for selection are left implicit, and the editorial material is spare. There is no attempt to imply a narrative of how the Jesuit project was developing over the years, of the kinds that have been pioneered by André Ravier and Dominique Bertrand; nor is there any sense of how Ignatius’s office was organized, though clearly the arrival of Juan de Polanco in 1547 was decisive, leading to exponential growths in activity. But it would not be fair to criticize the IJS volume on these scores; such enterprises could only be speculative, and this volume does all that can reasonably and sensibly be done until a major project is undertaken to update the versions we have of the originals. We remain dependent on editorial work that was a fine achievement a century ago, but which now shows its limitations. As the volume stands, these letters, even in a selection which amounts to less than five per cent of the whole, provide an extraordinarily rich sense of how the spirituality developed by the early Jesuits could express itself in dealings with a wide range of people in different kinds of context. Within, for example, one randomly chosen period of seven months (January–July 1556—the last months of Ignatius’s life), we find major instructions to groups of Jesuits undertaking new missions in Prague, Ingolstadt and France; courtly letters of consolation to a bereaved friend, and of gratitude to a mother whose son has joined the Society; letters of government to individual Jesuits exhibiting various combinations of affection, compassion, common sense, tact, and sternness; an individual letter of key importance for interpreting the Spiritual Exercises, suggesting that reason alone can serve as the basis for good discernment when affective consolation is not being given (647); a couple of quite specific pieces of guidance to young Jesuits regarding...